Crosscurrent

by Paul Kemp

  Reaching under a desk against the wall, he found some stray data crystals, frayed power cords, and a single computer that was not obviously damaged. The batteries would be long dead.

  “I need a power cord,” he said over his shoulder.

  “Here,” Khedryn said, grabbing one from the floor near his feet and tossing it to Jaden.

  Jaden held his breath as he plugged one end into the computer, the other into an outlet, and turned on the power.

  He blew out a relieved breath when it hummed to life. He thought Khedryn must surely have heard his heartbeat.

  “There are data crystals under that desk. Grab them. Any that are intact.”

  Khedryn did. There were dozens.

  They tried one after another, quickly finding all of them encrypted or unusable. Jaden’s elation faded. The facility seemed intent on keeping its secrets.

  “Second to last,” Khedryn said. “Holocrystal.”

  He tossed it to Jaden. Jaden snatched it out of the air and shot him a glare for being so careless. Khedryn responded by making bug eyes.

  Jaden inserted the crystal into the functioning computer and tried to extract usable data. As he had with all the others, he moved through a series of files and found most of them corrupted. He executed two or three and the computer’s holoplayer projected only a scrambled image and indecipherable audio.

  Khedryn shook his head and walked away in frustration.

  Toward the end of the file string, Jaden hit on a log of files that appeared less damaged than the others.

  “Here,” he said to Khedryn, and ran the files.

  “What do you have?”

  “Let’s see.”

  The computer holoprojector lit up, and a shaky hologram materialized before them. Dr. Black—they could read the name on his lab coat—a paunchy, graying human with a receding hairline and eyes set too close together, spoke without much inflection.

  “… of us will keep a log. This is mine. Experiment log. Day one. Dr. Gray was finally able to recombine the sample DNA into a usable form. I told him that he’d earned a drink from the whiskey stores. Dr. Green and Red agree on the growth medium. Subjects A through I are born.”

  He gave a tiny smile, nodded slightly as if satisfied, and the log entry faded out.

  “DNA?” Khedryn said. “Clones or a bioweapon, then.”

  “Seems likely,” Jaden said, though he dared not follow the thread of his thoughts to its conclusion. Instead he continued the holo-log. Long portions of it were ruined. They saw still moments captured in time as if frozen by the ice of the moon: Dr. Black’s face motionless in an expression of triumph or defeat, his pronouncement of a single word or phrase that meant little absent context.

  “Jedi and Sith,” Dr. Black said, the words floating alone in the cold space of the ruined data crystal, nothing before or after them to give them meaning.

  Jaden stopped the holo, reset the recording to an earlier point, at the same time rewinding in his head the voices and imagery from his vision.

  “Jedi and Sith,” said Dr. Black.

  Jaden, said Mara Jade Skywalker.

  Jaden played it again.

  “Jedi and Sith,” said Dr. Black. “Jedi and Sith.”

  Jaden, said Master Solusar.

  “There is no more in that bit, Jaden,” Khedryn said. “Keep going.”

  Jaden, said Lassin.

  “Jaden,” Khedryn said, louder, and put a hand over Jaden’s. “Speed it forward.”

  Jaden came back to himself and nodded, his mind spinning, then continued the holo. He felt knots drawing close, puzzle pieces falling into place. Another single word chilled his blood.

  “… Palpatine,” Dr. Black said.

  “I thought this was a Thrawn-era facility,” Khedryn said.

  “It was,” Jaden answered, but said no more.

  “Keep going,” Khedryn said, warming to the mystery.

  Jaden did, and they hit on a longer entry.

  “There,” Khedryn said.

  Jaden replayed it.

  “… thirty-three. The experiment has been an unqualified success. We retarded the maturation process as much as possible to ensure an appropriate rate of growth, but the subjects still grew to maturity much more rapidly than our models predicted. Memory imprinting will begin soon, though the subjects appear to have been born with extant knowledge of their Force sensitivity. All have exhibited mastery of basic and moderately advanced Force techniques. Testing reveals an extraordinarily high midi-chlorian count in all subjects. Grand Admiral Thrawn has been apprised of the results.”

  The entry ended, and neither Khedryn nor Jaden said anything.

  Ignoring the feel of Khedryn’s eyes on him, Jaden sped forward through the log, looking for something else coherent, rushing toward whatever catastrophe befell the facility.

  A broken entry sometime later showed a haggard-looking Dr. Black. His entire body drooped, as if borne down by a great weight. A few unidentifiable stains marred his lab coat.

  “He looks like he has lost ten kilos,” Khedryn said.

  Jaden played the hologram. Dr. Black spoke to them from out of the past.

  “Subject H was killed by the other Subjects in an incident of collective … rage. We are unsure what sparked the incident.”

  The holo faded. Jaden sped it forward but encountered nothing for some time. Then Black appeared again, the circles under his eyes dark enough to have been drawn in ink. He licked his lips nervously as he spoke.

  “… appear to have an unusual connection to one another, empathetic certainly. Possibly telepathic. This was unexpected. Dr. Gray believes that …”

  The image faded again and in the next available entry, Dr. Black’s voice audibly quavered. “We discovered today that Subject A had smuggled enough spare parts into his living quarters to build a rudimentary lightsaber. A subsequent search of the other Subjects’ living quarters revealed that all of them had partially constructed lightsabers at one or another stage of development. Security has been …”

  The entry turned black. So did Jaden’s thoughts.

  “Lightsabers?” Khedryn asked, his voice low. “Were they cloning … Jedi?”

  For a moment, Jaden’s mouth refused to form words. In his head he saw Lassin, Kam, Mara, all of them with Force signatures more akin to Sith than Jedi. How could Thrawn have gotten their DNA? Mara would have been easy, but Kam? Lassin? The others?

  “I do not know for certain,” he said, while the words from Dr. Black’s original entry stuck in his brain as if tacked there by a nail: recombine the sample DNA.

  The DNA of whom? Or what?

  Jedi and Sith.

  Palpatine.

  Jaden’s mouth was as dry as a Tatooine desert. He continued through the holo-log, a pit the size of a fist opening in his stomach. He stopped when a human woman in a lab coat appeared before them. She wore her dark hair short and looked younger than Dr. Black. Her left hand twitched as she spoke. Jaden read the name on her coat—DR. GRAY. He wondered what had happened to Dr. Black, then supposed he did not want to know.

  “… their hostility toward their confinement is growing, as is their power. Even the stormtroopers seem frightened by them …”

  A final entry followed. Again, Dr. Gray spoke.

  “… lost control. The lower level is sealed and I have requested of the Grand Admiral that the experiment be terminated along with the Subjects by way of a trihexalon gas protocol. All of the surviving staff members agree with this recommendation.”

  The holo-log stopped, though the frozen image of Dr. Gray hung in the air before them like a ghost. Jaden and Khedryn sat in silence, each alone with the jumble of his thoughts. Jaden spoke first.

  “There is a lower level. There must be a lift.”

  “They had hex here,” Khedryn said, his brow wrinkled with concern. “If they used it, even the residuum could be harmful. I saw a holovid that showed what that stuff can do. We are in deep here, Jaden.”

  Jaden barely
heard him. “We need to find the lift, go down, see if anyone is there.” He pictured the shape of the facility. They had covered most of it already. The lift had to be nearby.

  Khedryn stepped through the image of Dr. Gray to stand before Jaden. “Did you hear me?”

  “Did you hear the holo-log? They had prisoners here.”

  “Subjects,” Khedryn said. “Clones. Lab rats.”

  “They were confined against their will.”

  “From the sound of it, that was the right thing to do. They thought them dangerous enough to gas them with hex, Jaden.”

  Jaden fixed Khedryn with a thousand-kilometer stare. “I need to go down.”

  Khedryn’s good eye followed his lazy one away from Jaden’s face. “They combined Jedi DNA with something else and grew it into clones. Dangerous clones.”

  Jaden inhaled, then dived in, speaking to Khedryn the way he might have to R6, the way he did when confessing a transgression. “I suspect they recombined the DNA of Jedi with the DNA of Sith.”

  Khedryn’s lazy eye floated in its socket, fixing on nothing, as if it did not want to see. “Why would they do that? Being a Jedi or a Sith is a choice, isn’t it? It’s not biology.”

  Jaden shook his head. “We didn’t know all there is to know about how biology meshes with Force use. Perhaps they sought to create some kind of breakthrough Force-user, one unbound by the limitations of light and dark.”

  “How is that possible? Light and dark sides are exclusive, aren’t they?”

  Jaden turned off the computer and Dr. Gray disappeared. “The line between light and dark is not as clear as many think.”

  “More reason we should go, Jaden. They created some kind of monsters here and—”

  “Not monsters!” Jaden said, and the harshness of his tone took them both unawares. He hung his head. “I need to go down, Khedryn. If any of them are still alive, I need to … help them.”

  “Help them!” Khedryn exclaimed, then, more softly, “We are not talking about them. And you and I both know it. Jaden, you made a mistake on Centerpoint. An understandable one. Fine. Don’t make another one here. It’s time to go.”

  “I cannot.”

  Khedryn continued, his words like hammerblows. “Subjects A through I. One is dead for certain, but that leaves up to eight clones that could still be alive. I have seen what you can do, but you are one man. Eight, Jaden. And we have reason to suspect they will be hostile.”

  “I know all that.”

  “You are asking me to risk my life so you can save your conscience.”

  “I did not know things would turn out this way, Khedryn,” Jaden said, and meant it. “Go back to Flotsam and wait for me there.”

  “I don’t quit, Jaden. That’s not—”

  Jaden’s thoughts crystallized around the fact that he had asked far too much of Khedryn already. Relin had done the same with Marr. They—the Jedi—were exacting too high a price from those around them. Jaden wanted no more blood on his hands.

  “Listen to me, Khedryn. You are right. This has been and is about me learning something about myself. I … can use light and dark side powers and I do not know what that means for me.”

  The words caused Khedryn to take a half step back, as if Jaden had struck him. His eyes widened. “You can what? Like the clones?”

  Jaden bulled forward without acknowledging the question. “But I think there’s an answer here, in this place. And I do not want you risking anything more than you already have—”

  “I said I do not quit, Jedi.”

  Jaden nodded. “And I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to recognize the fact that you will be able to do nothing for me should I meet the clones. They will be dangerous, too dangerous for you. Go back to the ship. We can stay in contact via comlink. If something happens to me, you can leave, rendezvous with Marr and Relin.”

  Khedryn shook his head, pure stubbornness taking over. “Relin is not coming back. You and I both know that, too. But Marr better.”

  “Go back,” Jaden said. “Go back, Khedryn.”

  Khedryn continued to shake his head, but Jaden saw his resistance crumbling.

  He put his hand on Khedryn’s arm. “Go. Back.”

  “You using that mind trick on me again?”

  Jaden smiled. “Yes, I am. You know why you have no weapons on Junker?”

  “Because I run,” Khedryn said softly, and his lazy eye looked past Jaden and off to the side, no doubt seeing the world askew. He refocused on Jaden. “You are certain?”

  “I am.”

  “I don’t intend to leave without you, though.”

  Jaden knew he had done the right thing. He saw the relief in Khedryn’s body language, his expression. Khedryn seemed to draw a deep breath for the first time since leaving Junker.

  “Understood, Khedryn. Go on.”

  They settled on a comlink frequency and Khedryn headed out, while Jaden studied the schematic that showed the facility’s layout. He put his finger on the drawing of the lift that led to a lower level.

  “There be dragons,” he said.

  Kell slid through the open hatch of the facility, past the guard post, and down the dark hallway. He activated the light-amplifying implants in his eyes and glided through the dim corridors. His mimetic suit rendered him all but invisible against the featureless gray walls. His skill rendered him all but silent.

  For a time, he was easily able to track Jaden and his companion by way of the wet tracks they left behind. When those disappeared, he relied more heavily on his skills. He examined patterns in the dust, depressions in the carpet, noted items—a computer station, a closet door—that appeared recently disturbed. He also kept his keen hearing focused on the way ahead.

  From time to time he heard the hiss of distant voices, the squeak of an opening door, the tread of boots on metal.

  The facility was some kind of secret research lab, though its particular purpose was lost on Kell. He spent little time thinking about it. His appetite pulled him forward. He imagined himself casting a line of fate into an ocean of possibilities and hooking Jaden Korr. All he needed to do now was reel him in and feed.

  His hunger grew with each step.

  Marr slammed his palm into the button that closed Junker’s cargo bay door on the dead Massassi, on the ruins of Khedryn’s Searing, on the ruins of Relin.

  There is nothing certain.

  Once the door began its descent, he took one last look down the freight corridor at the corpses and the destruction, then turned and sprinted for the cockpit. He stopped dead when he hit the galley, his chest rising and falling like a forge bellows.

  The caf pot on the table had been toppled, the caf still dripping off the edge, pattering on the floor. He stared at it as if the spill pattern were a deep mystery whose solution promised wisdom.

  The hard landing had spilled it.

  He started to walk, stopped again.

  If that were true, the caf would not still be dripping to the floor.

  Something else had spilled it. Very recently.

  The clang of an opening hatch sounded from somewhere behind him, one of the corridors on the stern side of the galley.

  His heart revved faster than the Searing. For a moment, fear froze him. His thoughts turned chaotic, coming so fast and inchoate that they made no sense.

  They had gotten in the ship from the landing bay side. They must have pried open an exterior hatch, or cut their way in, or something.

  Another hatch sounded, closer. He heard the soft tread of boots on Junker’s metal floors, a ginger footfall trying and failing to move with stealth.

  The proximity of the danger freed him from his paralysis and he bolted from the galley, clutching his blaster in a sweaty hand as he ran. After he’d cleared the galley, reason overcame fear and he realized that pelting through the corridors would both telegraph his position and potentially send him right into the arms of whoever was aboard. He had no idea where they were, what they were.

  He sl
owed, his heart still thumping madly, and ducked into a seldom-used crew quarters. The small room featured nothing but twin, wall-mounted bed racks and a round viewport blocked by the gray steel of a security shield.

  He had to get himself under control, think rationally.

  Recalling what Relin had taught him, he tried to retreat into the keep but found it barred. Fear worked against him. He could not seem to catch his breath.

  Gathering himself, steadying his breathing, he thought of the calculations that proved Vellan’s theorem and tried again.

  He relaxed as he fell into the Force. Its touch comforted him, warmed him, steadied him. The Force crowded out his fear, leaving him clear-headed and calm.

  Marr realized that Relin had been wrong. There was something certain. The Force was certain, as constant as the speed of light.

  He considered his options and realized that all of them led to a single place—the cockpit. But first he needed to get to the storage locker near the forward air lock.

  He put his hand to the cool metal of the hatch, turned it, and pushed it open. Cringing at the squeak, he exited the quarters and moved in fits and starts along Junker’s corridors. Every windowless hatch was an exercise in controlled terror since he had no idea what he would find on the other side. As best he could, he peeked around corners, listened before he moved. From time to time he heard sounds of movement behind him, the soft chatter of a quieted comlink. Whoever was aboard sounded louder now, more careless than before, as if Harbinger’s crew thought the ship empty.

  He reached the air lock, opened the storage locker, and grabbed an oxygen kit and his vac suit. Not quite a hardsuit designed for long-term exposure to the vacuum, this was a flexible mesh-and-plate garment used for short-term space walks. He’d used it to travel between ships on salvage jobs, make quick repairs to Junker’s exterior, and the like.

  He considered donning it then and there but felt too exposed in the corridor. Instead, he slung it over his shoulder, grunting under its weight, and humped it through the corridors.

  Before he had gone ten meters, a guttural voice shouted behind him. He did not understand the language, but he understood the tone.

  He whirled, saw two of the Massassi in black uniforms, and fired a shot with his blaster. It clicked and fizzed, the charge exhausted. He cursed, dropped it, drew the blaster he’d taken from the dead Massassi back in the freight corridor, and fired.