by Paul Kemp
Jaden agreed. Something about the facility felt off. Too secret.
“There has to be a central computing core,” Jaden said. “Let’s find it.”
Continuing through the corridors, they found still more sleeping quarters for laboratory personnel. The lab coats again had names sewn onto the breasts. After seeing a few more the pattern became clear—DR. BROWN, DR. RED, DR. GREEN, DR. GRAY.
“What the kark?” Khedryn asked, holding up another lab coat to read the name—DR. BLUE.
A picture started to develop in Jaden’s mind. “None of them knew the real names of the others. That’s why there are no pictures or holograms in their quarters. Nothing personal, nothing with which one could later identify another.”
Jaden knew that at some top-secret Thrawn-era facilities the participating scientists would be forced to endure surgical alterations of their facial structure while on assignment, changing back to themselves only after their work was completed. None would be able to recognize another afterward. He wondered if that had happened in the facility, and if so, why.
“And no instructions on the walls,” Khedryn said. “Visitors knew nothing. Probably the doctors had the facilities map imprinted into their memory.” He licked his lips nervously and stared at Jaden for a long moment, even his lazy eye fixed straight ahead. “I think we should leave, Jaden. There is something wrong here.”
Jaden agreed, but he could not leave, not yet. “I cannot, Khedryn. But you are not obliged to remain.”
Jaden saw shame and resolve battle in Khedryn’s expression. His fingers opened and closed reflexively over the handle of his blaster. His lazy eye floated off for a time before returning to fix on Jaden’s face.
“I said I was with you and I’m with you. Blast it, if Marr can fly into Harbinger with Relin, I can walk some abandoned halls with you.”
“Thank you,” Jaden said, moved by Khedryn’s loyalty.
“What do you think they were working on here?”
“Something high priority. Top secret.”
“Something dangerous.”
“Yes.”
They continued on, caution slowing their progress. Eventually they passed through a large botanical garden where cold-stiffened, time-browned vegetables and flowers sagged in their pots like desiccated corpses. Sun-lamps hung from the ceiling, eyeballing the death of their charges. The faint smell of soil and organic decay filled the cavernous garden.
They walked through, trying not to smell the death, seeking the central computing core. They passed what Jaden figured to be a barracks: wall-mounted double racks, military-issue blankets, a central table for recreation. Bits of stormtrooper armor lay strewn about here and there. None of the armor exhibited unit identifications. Jaden imagined the troopers had been elite soldiers plucked from various units to serve as security in the facility. They would have been mindwiped after leaving the facility, he imagined.
A weapons locker adjacent to the barracks had only empty racks save for a lonely BlasTech E-11 on one of the rungs, a heavy blaster commonly used by stormtroopers. Jaden and Khedryn left it alone.
They passed through more corridors, more rooms, but Jaden barely saw them. He wanted to reach the central computing core. He would find an answer there, if anywhere, to the question of the facility’s purpose.
“Look at this,” Khedryn said, nodding at the walls.
Jaden came back to himself and saw what had caught Khedryn’s eye. Scorch marks on the walls, lots of them, even a few on the ceiling. Khedryn ran his gloved fingers over them.
“Blasterfire,” Jaden said.
“Looks like quite a battle,” Khedryn said. He turned about, examining the walls, floor, ceiling. There were marks everwhere. “Some wild shots taken here. Desperation fire.”
“Yes,” Jaden said. “Let’s keep moving.”
The signs of a pitched battle grew more pronounced as they continued deeper into the complex. More scorch marks from blasters, entire suits of stormtrooper armor cast in pieces across the floor with holes in the chest or helmets.
“No bodies,” Khedryn said, toeing an empty breastplate. “Pieces look scattered, as if by an animal.” He crouched on his haunches and studied a breastplate. He picked it up, put his finger through a narrow hole that showed only the smallest scorch ring around the entry. “Look at this. What kind of blaster makes that neat of an entry wound?”
“That is not a blaster hole,” Jaden said. “It’s from a lightsaber.”
* * *
Marr’s appearance on the swoop drew some of the Massassi’s fire. Blaster shots tore smoking holes in the speeder but Marr drove straight at them, blazing past Relin, the swoop’s engine changing pitch and sputtering from the blaster damage.
Amazement did not paralyze Relin. He augmented his speed with the Force and charged out from cover. The nearest pair of Massassi, aiming at Marr’s back as he passed them by, never saw the Jedi coming. Relin decapitated both of them with a spinning crosscut before they turned around.
The swoop’s engine screamed and Relin turned in time to see Marr roll off its side a moment before it slammed into the loader droid and exploded. Fire, smoke, and a hail of metal parts showered the corridor. The blast wave blew Relin against the wall. Flames engulfed the speeder, droid, and the two Massassi who had sheltered behind it. They staggered down the hall, screaming and burning, making it only three strides before their legs gave out and they fell facedown to the deck.
One of the loader droid’s arms protruded from the flaming amalgam of plastic and metal, waving in slow motion as if in farewell. The stink of burned flesh, blaster discharge, and melted plastic filled the hall.
The unexpectedness of the explosion froze the action for a moment. Even the Massassi’s blasters went temporarily silent. Marr lay in the center of the hall, a dazed look on his face.
The moment passed; violence re-erupted.
The Massassi near Marr recovered first and trained their blasters on him. But before they could fire, Relin drew on the power he had gained from the Lignan to target a Force blast—a telekinetic burst of concussive force—on the two of them.
His raised hand and a violent impulse drove a focused blast into their throats and visibly crushed both of their tracheas. They fell to the floor, clutching at their ruined windpipes. One discharged his blaster into the ceiling as he went down.
“Cover, Marr!” Relin shouted, in a hard, sharp voice that did not sound like his own.
He realized only then that he was smiling. He was outside himself, someone else.
Marr, his face blackened, bleeding from the nose, heeded Relin’s words and scooted against the wall, firing at anything that moved. He hit one Massassi down the hall in the face, another in the leg, then went fully prone in a nearby doorway while blasterfire soaked the air around him.
Relin stepped into the center of the hallway, near the ruins of the swoop and loader droid, his lightsaber blazing, his spirit on fire from the Lignan, his rage the fuel of the conflagration. He laughed aloud, embracing the full power running through his body, drawing on the sea of energy available to him.
The Massassi focused their fire on him, but he deflected it almost casually. Walking down the hall, repelling blaster shots as he went, he moved methodically through the ranks of the security team, crushing throats and shattering chests as he went. The last surviving Massassi threw down his blaster, pulled his lanvarok from the scabbard on his back, snarled, and charged. Relin took mental hold of the Massassi’s throat and drove him to his knees, gasping, two paces away.
Relin stared into his yellow eyes, took in the bared fangs dripping saliva, the piercings of steel and bone that disfigured the Massassi’s face, the map of veins in his straining arms and neck. He drove his lightsaber into the Massassi’s chest and the body fell facedown at his feet.
Around Relin, Harbinger’s alarm wailed, the loader droid offered distorted, slurred beeps, and the few stubborn Massassi gasped away the moments that remained to them. In the privac
y of his mind, Relin heard Drev’s laughter and the irresistible call of his own rage.
The weight of what he had done and how he had done it, what he had become, settled on him. He stood up straight and bore it. He deactivated his lightsaber and Marr’s hand closed over his shoulder.
“We should go,” the Cerean said. “Now. More will be coming. You lead.”
Marr’s touch grounded him. His legs went weak and he sagged, but thought of Drev and did not fall. Turning to face Marr, he saw the blood leaking from the Cerean’s nose. Marr seemed not to notice it. A contusion was purpling on his right cheek.
“Thank you,” Relin said to Marr. “My injuries have … slowed me.”
Marr gestured at the corpses. “What kind of creatures are these?”
“Massassi,” Relin answered absently. “Warriors bred by Sith alchemy from original Sith stock.”
Marr nodded. “Something similar occurred with clones in a recent war in this time.” He knelt over one of the dead Massassi and took its blaster, testing its heft in his hand. Seemingly satisfied, he slid it into his thigh holster, keeping his own blaster drawn.
“I do not have much of a charge left in mine,” he explained.
Overhead, the alarm continued its wail.
Marr tried to push Relin along. “You lead.”
Relin stood his ground, shook his head. “No, Marr. Go back.”
“I know what you will say, but I can help you.” He tried again to nudge Relin forward. “There is little time. You are sick, Relin. You cannot make it alone.”
Relin was sick, but not only in the way Marr meant. And he had to do it alone.
“I have lost two Padawans already, Marr. One to darkness and another to fire. I will not be responsible for anyone else.”
Marr stood up straight. “It is my choice to make.”
Relin’s temper flared and he poked a finger into the Cerean’s chest. “It is not. You are to return to Junker and get off this ship. Now.”
Marr looked as if Relin had struck him. His expression fell. “But … what you taught me in the ship, about the Force. I did not … I felt the power of the Lignan. I know this ship needs to be destroyed.”
Relin’s anger leaked over the brim of his control. “You felt nothing, Cerean! Nothing!” He felt a burning in his fingertips, looked down to see blue Force lightning leaking from them, snaking around the hilt of his deactivated lightsaber. He felt himself color with shame. He did not look up when he spoke, though he managed a gentler tone.
“Go, Marr. Please.”
“But I felt the Force …”
“Then let your awakening be my legacy. But I can teach you nothing more. You must go.”
He felt Marr’s eyes on him, studying him, as if Relin were a computation Marr needed to solve. “You do not intend to escape.”
Relin did not deny it. “I am no longer a Jedi, Marr. I am just … a murderer. And there’s yet more murder that I must do.”
Marr kept his face expressionless. “You do not have to do this in this way.”
“Good-bye, Marr. Seal up Junker and go. Things will end as they must.”
Marr hesitated, but finally extended his hand. Relin tucked his lightsaber hilt under his left arm and clasped Marr’s hand.
“May the—” Marr stopped himself, started again. “Good luck, Relin.”
Relin winced over the verbal detour and what it meant. “And you, Marr. Do me a service. Tell Jaden that he was right. And tell him that he was also wrong. There is nothing certain. There’s only the search for it. Things only turn dangerous when you think the search is over. He will know what I mean.”
“I will tell him,” Marr said.
Relin allowed himself that maybe those words, too, could be his legacy.
Without another word, he turned from Marr and headed down a side corridor. The moment he had his back to Marr, the moment that shame no longer reined in rage, he embraced fully what he had become.
Kell trailed the Starhawk by fifty kilometers, well out of visual range given the snowstorm. And the Starhawk’s scanners would never pierce Predator’s sensor baffles. Jaden’s ship showed up clearly on Predator’s scanners, though, and Kell traced its flight as it closed on the source of the Imperial beacon. He knew when they reached it, for the Starhawk slowed, circled. Kell kept Predator as a distance, waiting for Jaden to set down.
He did not have to wait long.
He delayed a quarter hour before piloting Predator in the direction of Jaden’s ship, but stayed high enough to make visual detection difficult.
Below, he saw a building complex, its walls gripped in ice, the spike of the communications tower blinking red through the storm. He snapped photos with his ship’s nose cam, intending to send them to Wyyrlok via subspace when he got back into outer space.
Despite the beacon’s warning, he expected little danger from anything or anyone other than Jaden. He supposed there could be some leftover and still-functioning automated security apparatus, but he could not imagine anything organic surviving for long on the moon.
He set Predator down a kilometer away from the Starhawk and hurried to the hold. The stasis chambers stood empty—he had fed on all his stored meat—but they piqued his hunger for Jaden. His feeders twisted in his cheek sacs.
He donned his mimetic suit and activated it, holstered his blaster, sheathed his vibroblades. He threw a thick enviro-suit over the whole and climbed into his covered speeder.
Wind buffeted the cargo bay the moment he opened the door. The speeder rocked on its repulsorlifts. Snow and ice blew in, dusting the windscreen. Kell activated Predator’s security system as he drove the speeder out of the bay.
Gliding over the frozen landscape, he downloaded the Starhawk’s location from Predator’s computer and accelerated to full speed, chasing Fate. He stopped the speeder fifty meters from Jaden’s landing site, threw up the hood of his weathercloak, and climbed out.
The wind and cold rifled his cloak, wormed under his insulation, and stabbed at his skin. The faint aroma of sulfur hung in the freezing air, probably due to volcanism.
With an effort of will, he elevated his core body temperature until he felt comfortable. He trudged to the top of a snow dune—the wind tried to pull him from his perch—and glassed the Starhawk’s landing site with a pair of macrobinoculars.
The ship sat on its skids atop a clear field of packed ice, apparently sealed tight. He increased the magnification of the binoculars and confirmed that security screens covered the viewports.
Most likely Jaden had already exited the ship.
Examining the area around the ship, he thought he might have seen indentations in the snow that could have been footprints leading toward the facility, but he’d have to get closer. He glassed the facility itself.
Snow covered all but the communications tower and the rectangular central facility. He noted the single-story steel-and-duracrete construction, the lack of windows, the sealed hatches for doors. The whole place sweated Imperial functionalism, with nothing wasted on aesthetics.
Probably a research facility of some kind, Kell supposed. He imagined a lower level or two belowground. An experiment gone awry would explain the beacon’s message.
Walking sideways down the dune, he returned to the speeder and used its onboard scanners to check the complex for radiation. His body could endure radiation exposure that would kill most other sentients, but he saw no reason in taking chances.
Detecting nothing dangerous, he drove the speeder up to the Starhawk. He stripped off his enviro-suit, exposing the mimetic suit, and pulled up its hood and mask. As he disembarked the speeder, he upped his core temperature still more. The mimetic suit turned him white, even mimed a tumble of blowing snow.
Drawing his blaster, he walked the area around the ship until he found the footprints. They were so deep that the wind and snow had not yet effaced them. Two pairs of boots dug a chain of little pits in the snow in the direction of a large entry hatch in the main complex.
He hurried back to the speeder, parked it out of sight of the Starhawk, and headed for the hatch.
His mimetic suit turned him into just more blowing snow.
He was a ghost.
When Jaden and Khedryn found the central computer room, it had been ransacked. All of the comp stations appeared to be destroyed, some obviously slashed by lightsabers, others simply smashed with something heavy. Ruined display screens, servers, and CPUs dotted the floor. Pieces of shattered data crystals crunched underfoot like caltrops.
“Someone did not like computers,” Khedryn said.
Jaden had hoped to find an answer in the core computing room. Instead he’d found the same ruin that characterized the rest of the complex. He felt pressure building in his chest, at the base of his skull.
For the first time, he began to worry that the complex had nothing to show him.
But how could that be?
He went from table to table, sorting through the debris.
“Anything usable, Khedryn. There has to be something here. Look! Look!”
Khedryn joined him, the two of them sifting the strata of destruction like archaeologists.
Khedryn pulled a water-stained hard-copy schematic from the debris, holding it gently by one corner. “Looks like the layout of this facility.” He studied it for a moment, turned it over, slowly unfolding it.
“Careful,” Jaden said.
Khedryn got it unfolded in one piece and studied it. “It mentions a lower level in the key but does not show it.”
“Good find. Keep looking.”
Jaden needed something more solid, something that would show him where the Force wanted him to go. He could not consult his feelings. They were too clouded with doubt. He wanted facts. He wanted—needed—to understand the facility’s purpose, the reason for all the mystery.