Crosscurrent

by Paul Kemp

  Nausea seized him. He sat up, vomited blood, snot, and his last meal onto the deck, where it steamed in the cold. Forgetting the details of his injuries, he steadied himself with a hand on the floor and his broken wrist screamed in protest. The pain from bone grinding against bone almost caused him to pass out. He held on to consciousness through sheer force of will.

  After the room stopped spinning, after the pain in his wrist grew bearable, he used a chair from the sabacc table to help him to his feet. His shattered nose did not allow air to pass, so his breath wheezed through his mouth, left hanging open like a cargo bay door.

  As he rose, he fixed his eyes on a sabacc card that had fallen from the table, staring at the image on it—a grinning clown face in an absurd hat. The Idiot. He almost laughed.

  His body ached from the beating. The adrenaline dump and the aftereffects of the terror he’d felt left him weak, shaking, barely able to stand. He tried to collect his wits, gather his thoughts, endure the pain in his wrist.

  Had the creature been one of the clones? It had seemed a Force-user. He’d felt it slip into his thoughts and command him to be still. The greasy feeling of being mentally violated had been reminiscent of Jaden’s use of the mind trick.

  Why had it left him alive?

  He did not know and did not care. It was enough that he was alive.

  He reached for his comlink, thinking to warn Jaden, and found it gone. The creature had taken it. He looked around the room for his blaster, saw that it, too, was missing.

  The creature seemed concerned only that Khedryn be unarmed and unable to warn Jaden. He had no particular interest in Khedryn, apparently. Khedryn understood the message—Leave and it’s all over. He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It had seemed exactly so since he had first met Jaden Korr.

  “One problem after another,” he murmured.

  Dizziness overcame him. His legs gave way and he sagged gingerly into a chair at the sabacc table, struck with the fact that the last people to sit there were all dead.

  He daubed his nose, wincing at the pain, and slowly drummed his fingers on the table. He thought of Marr, of Relin, of Jaden. All were putting their lives in danger for … what?

  For something bigger than themselves, he decided. For something they believed in.

  What did Khedryn believe in?

  His drumming fingers waited for an answer. He decided they could wait a long time.

  He flashed on his last conversation with Marr. His friend had said that helping the Jedi was the right thing. He’d been certain of it.

  Khedryn stopped drumming his fingers.

  He could not always run.

  “Kriffin’ son of a murglak broke my kriffin’ nose.”

  He stood, fought down the dizziness, and headed back the way he had come. His wrist throbbed with agony. His nose leaked blood and felt as if it had been smashed with a hammer. But he was through running.

  He remembered the way to the lift, but he had a stop to make on the way.

  Jaden felt light-headed as the lift sank into the moon. He grounded himself in the Force while the hum of the lift’s motors proclaimed its rapid descent. By the time it slowed, he figured he had descended a hundred meters or more.

  The doors parted, the aged mechanism squeaking loud enough to make him wince. Air ten degrees warmer than that in the surface installation flowed into the lift compartment. It bore the whiff of things dead a long while.

  He stepped out and into a circular room with an overturned desk and chair near the single door that provided egress. Dried blood, brown and crusted, stained the walls.

  It was not a spray pattern, Jaden realized. Someone had slathered it on the walls as if it were paint. The shapes and patterns made no sense to him, their meaning plain only to the mad.

  The lift doors closed behind him. He activated the comlink.

  “Khedryn, do you read?”

  In the silence, his voice sounded as if he were speaking through a voice amplifier. Water dripped somewhere behind the walls, the rhythm that of the distress beacon.

  The comlink exploded in static.

  “Khedryn, do you read?”

  More static. He was too far underground. He muted the comlink and walked into the room. He realized with horror that he was walking on clumps of hair, lots of it. Human hair. Brown, black, blond, gray. It was scattered all over the room, like fallen snow.

  He knelt down and took some in his palm. Ragged pieces of the root clung to the clumps, little brown bits of dried scalp that made Jaden’s mouth go dry. The hair had been ripped out in handfuls.

  Dread settled on Jaden like a funeral shroud. The ceiling suddenly seemed too low, the light too dim, the whole of the complex as oppressive as a tomb. Whatever had happened in the facility had been not merely violent, but macabre.

  A large brown stain covered the floor near the desk, as if someone had bled out there. Other than the unsettling scattering of hair, he saw no sign of any bodies.

  Licking his lips, he put his hand on the door control—not a hatch but an ordinary door—and it slid open. The stink of old death—a stale, sickly sweet stench—wafted through, stronger than before. He wondered when he would encounter the bodies. He knew it was only a matter of time.

  A wide, curving corridor stretched in either direction. From the angle of the arc, he surmised that the corridor formed a circle and came back on itself.

  Putting his free hand on his blaster, as tense as a coiled spring, he went left. Blaster marks scored the white duracrete walls here and there. Blood spattered the walls. Together, the scorches and blood looked like some ancient, indecipherable script, pictographs of violence. Again, he found stray pieces of stormtrooper armor, souvenirs of the slaughter that had occurred. Again he found no bodies.

  At intervals he encountered double doors along the inner wall. All were closed and would have required a card reader to pass, but the readers had been destroyed by either blasterfire or lightsaber.

  Wanting to understand the layout of the complex, he delayed opening any of the doors until he walked the entire corridor. As he had suspected, it formed a circle. Each pair of double doors stood opposite another pair. Drawing a line between each would neatly bisect the circle ringed by the corridor, another example of the Imperial fetish for symmetry.

  He walked to the nearest set of the metal double doors. In addition to the destroyed card reader, the doors also had a manual lock and bar. The bar, a rod of titanium alloy, lay on the ground near the doors, bent.

  Whatever was behind those doors, the doctors had not wanted it to get out.

  But it had gotten out, and it had slaughtered everyone in the facility.

  Jaden took a handle in hand, conscious of how cool the metal felt in his palm, and pulled it open.

  A narrow corridor led straight about ten meters before ending at another metal door. Above it was written:

  OBSERVATION DECK

  Hallways and rooms opened along the corridor’s sides, and Jaden noted them in passing—a few offices with chairs and desks overturned, loose flimsies cast over the floor, destroyed computers and data crystals scattered everywhere; a conference room, its chairs toppled, the conference table cut into pieces by a lightsaber. A wall-mounted vid display had a burn hole like a singularity in its exact center. He assumed that there was a laboratory somewhere, but he did not stop to look for it. His feet carried him of their own accord to the door that led to the observation deck.

  A half-full caf pot sat on the floor in the corner of one office, somehow completely unaffected by the chaos. Caf mugs, too, littered the floor here and there, all of it the ruins of ordinary activity and interaction.

  His eyes caught an unexpected shape and he stopped, staring at it.

  Set atop an overturned desk was a single shoe, a woman’s shoe browned with dried blood and still wrapped in an age-yellowed steri-slipper, the kind worn by laboratory techs.

  The scene struck a visceral chord in Jaden, repul
sed him. Someone or something had to have consciously placed the bloody shoe there, as if its presence exactly there were important, as if it were some kind of trophy, as if it made some kind of sense.

  A realization struck him. He was seeing reified madness.

  Dr. Gray’s head, the hair on the floor, the shoe, all of it the acts of deranged minds.

  The clones had gone mad. Perhaps they had been unable to reconcile the two poles of their origin, Jedi and Sith. Perhaps a misstep along the sword-edge a Force-user walked would lead not to a fall into the dark side so much as a descent into madness.

  Jaden’s mind turned to Khedryn, to the stories he’d heard of Outbound Flight’s failure. Master C’baoth had gone mad, and his actions had led to many deaths.

  Jaden feared he was slipping himself; he felt an abyss to either side. Yet he could not stand still. He craved certitude, yearned for it the way a drowning man did air. He unmuted his comlink, and static shouted at him.

  “Khedryn,” he said, knowing it was hopeless but wanting to say something aloud, a human sound to break the funereal silence of a facility that felt like a crypt.

  A metallic clang from somewhere ahead caused him to tense. Moving slowly, he muted his comlink again and approached the door that led to the observation deck. He stood before it for a moment, his lightsaber sizzling in his hand, his other hand on his blaster, but the sound did not repeat. He slid the door open, crouching to reduce his silhouette.

  A large, round chamber opened before him. The lights suspended from the high ceiling had all been shattered, their glass littering the floor like broken ice, so he flashed his glow rod around the room. It had to have been one hundred meters in diameter. Waist-high computer console towers rose here and there from the floor like stalagmites, each one an eerie simulacrum of the communications tower that screamed into space for help.

  He stepped inside, and the feel of the floor immediately struck him oddly. He crouched and shined his glow rod directly at it.

  It was transparisteel, dimmed the way Junker’s cockpit viewport could dim when the ship entered hyperspace. He also noticed a latticework of hair-fine filaments that ran through it, capillaries of unknown purpose. He knelt and looked through the transparisteel; he could just make out the ghosts of shapes in the room below, but nothing distinct.

  On the far side of the room, he saw the dark hole of an open lift shaft, the door only half shut, an eye frozen in the act of closing.

  He rose and walked to one of the computer consoles. The interface was intuitive and controlled the lighting in the room he was in, as well as the lighting, temperature, and noise in the rooms visible through the floor. He turned on the power to the rooms below, expecting the lights to be nonoperational. They functioned, illuminating the equivalent of a fishbowl. He pressed another key to eliminate the dimming effect on the floor.

  The observation deck overlooked a subcomplex of rooms that Jaden assumed to have been the clones’ living quarters. Hallways radiated outward from a central meeting room and attached mess hall. Two dejarik sets sat atop a table in the meeting room, the static-laden holographic creatures facing each other across the battlefield, the games unfinished. The chairs in both rooms had been pushed neatly under the table. Plates and eating utensils sat in orderly stacks atop the serving counter in the mess. Unlike the rest of the facility, everything in the clones’ rooms was in place, tidy, and invariably white, cream, or some shade of gray.

  “Womp rats in a maze,” he murmured.

  Jaden walked the observation chamber, his steps slow, staring at the rooms below his feet, tracing them as if he were walking in them himself. The hallways led to sparsely furnished personal quarters, nine of them. Each contained a bed, a desk, two chairs, some old books in hard copy.

  He had not seen an actual book in a long time and he puzzled over their presence—a single data crystal could hold an entire library of information and take up essentially no space at all—until he remembered Dr. Black’s words from the holo-log.

  The doctors had given the clones hard-copy books so they’d have no datapads from which to scrounge parts. In fact, Jaden realized for the first time that there were no computers of any kind in the clones’ rooms. They’d managed to construct lightsabers anyway.

  He continued his walk, noting little assertions of individuality in each of the personal quarters—a potted plant, long dead, a remarkable clay sculpture of a human hand, a shelf on which sat four green bottles, their color a contrast with the grays and whites of the complex.

  He stopped cold when he stood over the last bedroom, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. Words had been written on the ceiling—Jaden’s floor. They were in Basic and underlined, the jagged letters the dried brown of old blood.

  Stop looking at us!

  Jaden suddenly felt guilty for walking in the footsteps of the doctors. He imagined the clones living in those quarters, day in and day out, the feet of the gods who had made them walking across the ceiling. No privacy, no freedom. Small wonder they had grown so hostile. The thick durasteel walls that encased the clones’ area might as well have been bars. Despite what they had done to the others in the complex, Jaden pitied them.

  He walked to the nearest console and powered down the lights. The rooms below went dark. He thought they should stay that way.

  Somewhere down the lift shaft, a can or metal drum fell, rolled across a hard surface, and rattled itself still.

  Startled, Jaden flashed his glow rod around the room. The beam pierced the darkness but illuminated nothing. His fingers warmed as thin tendrils of blue Force lightning snaked from his fingertips and swirled around the glow rod.

  He stilled his mind, fell into the Force, and calmed himself. He reminded himself that the clones had been prisoners, victims. He reached out through the Force, feeling for another Force-user nearby, but encountered nothing.

  “I am here to help you,” he called, his voice echoing around the large chamber, its own version of the distress beacon.

  Help you, help you, help you …

  No response.

  He moved to the open doors of the lift, lightsaber at the ready. The control panel had been destroyed. A charnel reek drifted up through the doors, fumes from some forgotten hell. Shielding his nose with his forearm, he beamed his glow rod down the shaft. It descended perhaps thirty meters. The lift compartment sat at the bottom, its interior visible through a large rectangular hole in its top. He guessed that a lightsaber had cut the hole.

  He hung over the void for a long while, smelling death, listening to nothing but his own heartbeat. He had to go down. Metal rungs ran the length of the near side of the shaft, but he did not bother with them.

  Drawing on the Force, he picked his spot atop the lift compartment, and leapt. The Force cushioned his impact and he hit the top of the lift in a crouch. Without pausing he lowered himself through the hole in the roof and into the lift proper, lightsaber to hand.

  The smell of death was stronger. He started to call out again, but thought better of it.

  His glow rod lit a long, narrow corridor that sloped downward. The air felt humid, moist with putrescence. Long, thick streaks of dried blood stained the duracrete floor. Jaden followed them as he might a trail of bread crumbs.

  They led to a wide stairway that dropped another ten meters. A large metal hatch waited at the bottom of it. He descended sidelong, his back against one wall. A card reader hung from the wall to one side of the door, its wires and circuitry hanging loose like innards.

  Twenty or thirty stormtrooper helmets lay on the floor to either side of the door, stacked into a rough pyramid. Some of them still had heads in them, for Jaden could see dead eyes behind some of the lenses.

  The scene reminded Jaden of an offering.

  Stenciled on the wall over the doorway:

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT

  Across the hatch, written in an enormous, diagonal scrawl of dried blood, were three words. Jaden felt chilled when he rea
d them.

  Mother is hungry.

  Jaden stared at the hatch a long while, rooted to the last stair. Moving from it seemed a fateful step, a portentous act. Holding his ground, he again reached out through the Force, feeling for the presence of any nearby Force-users.

  Making contact almost instantly, he winced at the bitter recoil caused by the touch of a dark sider—but not a pure dark sider. Jaden felt the dark side as though it were adulterated with … something else, the same way his own signature was that of a light-side user adulterated with … something else.

  Sentience curses us with a desire to categorize.

  He looked down at his hand as if it were a thing apart from him, a piece of him that had betrayed the rest and thereby corrupted the whole. Tiny streamers of Force lightning curled around the glow rod, twisting like things alive.

  The regard of the Force-user on the other side of the hatch fixed on him. The mental touch felt as greasy as the air, just as infected with putrescence.

  He descended the step and opened the hatch.

  The stink hit him first, the reek of old decay. Computer stations lined the walls of the large, rectangular chamber. Blank readout screens dotted the walls here and there. Loose wires hung from everywhere, the entrails of science.

  A hole opened in the center of the room, a perfect circle several meters in diameter, like the gullet of some gargantuan beast. Machinery hung from armatures above the hole. Jaden recognized the apparatus immediately—a Spaarti cloning cylinder.

  “You have come to pay homage to Mother,” said a voice, a dry, rough version of Kam Solusar’s voice.

  A figure stepped from the darkness on the far side of the chamber. Shaggy white hair—the color of Master Solusar’s—hung loose almost to the clone’s waist. Most of his features, too, reminded Jaden of Kam—the high forehead, angled cheeks—but not the eyes. The clone’s eyes were as dark and lifeless as pools of stagnant water.