by Paul S. Kemp
THE PAST:5,000 YEARS BEFORE THE BATTLE OF YAVIN
Relin and Drev sat in pensive silence as their Infiltrator streaked through the churning blue tunnel of hyperspace. They watched their instrumentation intently, hoping for the telltale beep denoting detection of the hyperspace beacon secreted aboard Harbinger. Lingering silence would mean they'd lost Saes.
"Scanners functioning normally," Drev said. After a sidelong glance at Relin, he began to hum, a free-form, lively tune from his homeworld.
"Must you?" Relin asked, smiling despite himself as he adjusted the instrumentation.
"Yes," said Drev, also smiling, but without looking up from his instruments. "I must."
Relin admired his Padawan's ability to find joy in everything he did, though Relin thought-and taught-that it was more important to maintain emotional evenness. Extremes of emotion could lead to the dark side.
Still, he wondered sometimes if Drev was the only one doing the learning in their relationship. It seemed Relin smiled only when in Drev's presence. Saes's betrayal had cut the mirth out of him as skillfully as a surgeon.
Drev tapped the scanner screen with a thick finger. "Come out, come out, whither you hide."
Presently, the scanner picked up a faint signal. Relin and Drev exhaled as one and leaned forward in their seats.
Drev chuckled and put a finger on the scanner screen. "There. They did it."
Relin let the navicomp digest the scanner's input and cross-referenced the coordinates. "The Phaegon system."
Without waiting for instruction, Drev pulled up the on board computer's information on the system.
"There's nothing there," Drev said, eyeing the readout. "What is he doing?"
"Still looking, maybe," Relin said, and took the controls. "We will know soon enough."
The signal grew in strength as the Infiltrator hurtled through hyperspace.
"He's deep in-system," Relin said. "We emerge ten light-seconds out."
Drev nodded and input the commands into the navicomp. "The system has four planets, each with multiple moons. An asteroid belt divides the third from the fourth."
"Use it as cover until we understand what Saes is doing."
"Deactivating the hyperdrive in five, four… "
"Activating signature scrambler and baffles," Relin said. At the same moment, he used the Force to mask his and Drev's Force signatures, lest Saes perceive their arrival.
"… two, one," Drev said, and deactivated the hyperdrive.
The blue tunnel of hyperspace gave way to the black void of stars, planets, and asteroids.
Instantly a wave of dark side energy, raw and jagged, saturated the ship. Unready for the assault, Relin lost his breath, turned dizzy. Drev groaned, lurched back in his seat as if struck, then vomited down the front of his robes.
"Where is that coming from?" Relin said between gritted teeth.
Drev shook his head, still heaving. He reached for the scanner console.
"Leave it," Relin said, and adjusted the scanners himself.
They showed nothing nearby but the spinning chaos of the asteroid belt, and Phaegon III and its many moons.
Relin took a moment to clear his head, then drew on the Force to shield them from the ambient dark side energy. With his defenses in place, he felt the energy as only a soft, unpleasant pressure in his mind, incessant raindrops thumping against his skull, but it no longer affected his senses.
"All right?" he asked Drev.
Drev cleared his throat, eyed his flight suit and robes in embarrassment. "I am all right. Apologies, Master."
Relin waved away the apology. He had been unprepared, too.
"My meal tasted better the first time," Drev said, smiling, his cheeks bright red.
"Smelled better, too," Relin said, chuckling as he pored over the scanner's output.
"So, it's vomit that looses your sense of humor," Drev said. He stripped off his robe, balled it up, and retook his seat. He took a gulp of a flavored protein drink in a plastic pouch, swished it around his mouth. "I will keep that in mind. Maybe scatological humor will amuse you also?"
Relin only half smiled. His mind was on their situation. What had they stumbled onto? He had never before experienced such a wash of pure dark side energy. Whatever Saes had been searching for, he must have found it in the Phaegon system. Drev must have sensed his seriousness.
"What do you make of it?" Drev asked. "A dark side weapon? A Sith artifact maybe?"
Relin shook his head. The energy was not intense, simply widespread. "We will soon know."
He engaged the ion drive and started to take them into the asteroid belt, but thought better of it. He took his hands from the controls.
"Take us in, Drev," he said.
He felt his Padawan's eyes on him. "Into the belt?"
Relin nodded. The Infiltrator's sensor scrambler and the churn of the asteroid belt would foil any Sith scanners.
"Are you certain, Master?"
"Still your mind," he said to his Padawan. "Feel the Force, trust it."
Drev was one of the best raw pilots in the Order. With time and training in the use of the Force, he would become one of the Jedi's finest.
"Take us in," Relin repeated.
Drev stared out of the cockpit, at the ocean of whirling rocks. He paused for a long, calming breath, then took the controls and piloted the Infiltrator into the asteroid belt.
He accelerated without hesitation and the ship darted through the field of slowly spinning rock, diving, ascending, rolling. Pitted stones flashed on the viewscreen for a moment, vanished as Drev cruised under them, over them, around them. One of the Infiltrator's wings caught an oblong asteroid and the ship lurched, started to spin.
"Master-"
"Calm, Drev," Relin said, and his Padawan zagged out of the way of another asteroid as he righted the starfighter.
"Well done, Padawan," Relin said. "Well done."
A smile split Drev's face as he continued through the belt.
Relin monitored the sensors. "There is an asteroid on the edge of the belt, more than ten kilometers in diameter, in a very slow spin."
"I see it."
"Set us down there but stay powered up. Let us see what we see."
Drev maneuvered them over the asteroid and set down the Infiltrator. Phaegon III loomed large in their viewscreen against a backdrop of stars.
Drev was still smiling. Relin chose to ignore his Padawan's emotional high.
"Give me a heads-up display and magnify."
A HUD appeared off center in the cockpit window. Drev input a few commands and magnified the image.
Plumes of smoke spiraled from the charred surface of one of Phaegon III's small moons. Saes's dreadnought and its sister ship hung like carrion birds in low orbit over the moon's corpse. A steady stream of transports moved between the moon's surface and the belly-slung landing bays of the two Sith ships.
Drev lost his smile as he worked the scanners. "That is not-how can-? Master, that moon should be covered in vegetation." He looked up from his scan. "And life."
Relin felt his Padawan's anger over the destruction. He knew where anger led. The young man moved from joy to rage as if his emotions were on a pendulum.
"Stay focused on our task, Drev. The scope of the matter cannot affect your thinking. Do not let anger cloud your mind."
Drev stared at him as if he were something appalling he'd found on the bottom of his boot. "The matter? It is not a mere matter. They incinerated an entire moon! It is an atrocity."
Relin nodded. "The word fits. But you are a Jedi. Master your emotions. Especially now. Especially now, Padawan."
Drev stared at him a moment longer before turning back to the scanners. When he spoke, his voice was stiff. "There are hundreds of mining droids on the moon."
More to himself than Drev, Relin said, "Saes incinerated the crust, then loosed the mining droids." He focused his Force sense on the transports and their cargo. Though he had been ready, the dark side backla
sh elicited a gasp and set him backward in his chair.
"It is the cargo."
"The cargo? What did he pull out of that moon?"
Relin shook his head as he took the controls. "I do not know. An ore of some kind, something attuned to the dark side." Relin knew of such things. "Whatever it is, it is powerful. Maybe powerful enough to determine the outcome of the assault on Kirrek. That's what Saes has been searching for, and that is why Sadow delayed his assault. We cannot allow it to get out of the system."
"You have a plan, I trust," Drev said, not so much a question as an assertion.
"We take those dreadnoughts out of the sky. Or at least keep them here."
Drev licked his lips, no doubt pondering the relative sizes of the Infiltrator and the dreadnoughts, not unlike the relative difference between a bloodfly and a rancor. "How?"
Relin lifted the Infiltrator off the asteroid and flew it into open space. "I'm going aboard. Saes and I should get reacquainted."
He expected at least a chuckle from his Padawan, but Drev did not so much as smile. He stared out the viewscreen at the dead moon, at the Sith ships, his lips fixed in a hard line.
Relin put a hand on his Padawan's shoulder and unharnessed himself from his seat.
"You have the controls. The scrambler and baffles will not keep us invisible for long. I just need a little time."
Drev nodded as the Infiltrator sped toward the dreadnoughts. "You will have it. You'll try to board a transport?"
"That is what I am thinking," Relin answered as he moved to the cramped rear compartment of the Infiltrator. Rapidly he peeled off his robes and donned a vac-ready flexsuit, formulating the details of a plan as he went.
The ryon shell of the suit, lined with a flexible, titanium mesh as fine as hair, felt like a second skin. He checked the oxygen supply and the batteries and found them both full. He slipped the power pack harness over his shoulders, around his abdomen, and clipped it in place. The power umbilical fed into the suit's abdominal jack with a satisfying click, and the suit hummed to life. The energy running through the mesh hardened the suit slightly and caused Relin's skin to tingle. He put the hinged helmet in place over his head and an electromagnetic seal fixed it to the neck ring, rendering the zipper and power jack airtight.
The suit ran a diagnostic, and Relin watched the results in the helmet's HUD. His breathing sounded loud in the drum of the transparisteel and plastic helmet. He activated the comlink.
"Testing."
"Clear," said Drev, his voice like a concert inside the helmet.
The diagnostic came back clean.
"Suit is live and sealed," Relin said.
"We remain unnoticed," Drev said, his tone sharp, serious. "For now."
While Relin had been trying to encourage seriousness in his Padawan for months, at the moment he regretted the turn of Drev's mood. He missed his Padawan's mirth in the face of danger. To craft Drev into a Jedi, it seemed that Relin would have to turn him into something other than Drev.
"How close?" Relin said. He slipped a dozen mag-grenades and a variety of other equipment into one of the suit's ample thigh pockets, then strapped a blaster pistol to his belt, beside his lightsaber and its power pack.
"Twenty thousand kilometers and closing fast," Drev said. A hitch in his voice told Relin something was wrong. "That moon. Master, it's a ruin."
"I know," Relin said. "That is what Sith do. They destroy. They take. That is all the dark side can offer. Now focus, Padawan. Match vectors with the nearest transport returning to Harbinger, but only for a moment. I will board it, and that will get me into one of the dreadnought's landing bays." He considered the grenades in his pockets. "From there, I'll see what I can do."
For a time, Drev said nothing, then, "Are you sure this is the way, Master? If you succeed, that takes care of only one of the dreadnoughts."
"That we may not accomplish everything is no reason to do nothing. We cannot let that cargo get to Kirrek. Or at least not all of it. We stop what we can here, doing whatever we must. If I destroy or disable the first ship, we'll figure out a way to do the same to the other."
"Understood."
"Entering the air lock," Relin said. He opened the interior air lock door, stepped inside, and closed it behind him. He disengaged the safety and pressed the button to open the exterior door. A red light flashed for three seconds to indicate the pending evacuation. Relin held the safety bar as the hatch slid open and the air rushed out into space.
"Coming up on the transport now, Master."
Relin moved to the open hatch as Drev eased the Infiltrator over the transport and matched its course and speed as best he could. The awkward transport was a flying storage crate, a gray wedge of a hold with a transparisteel bubble cockpit tacked on to its underside. Like all Sith ships, it still managed to look like a flying blade.
Dark side energy leaked from its cargo hold in palpable waves, making Relin temporarily dizzy.
"Master?"
They would be spotted in moments. He had to move.
"Have you ever gone angling, Drev?" Relin asked.
"Angling?"
"Fishing. You know."
"No, Master. I have not."
Relin tried to smile, failed. At that moment, he would have paid a thousand credits to hear Drev's laugh. "Neither have I."
"May the Force be with you, Master."
Relin picked a spot on the spine of the transport, closed his eyes, felt the Force. His mastery of the telekinetic use of the Force was not advanced enough to pull a moving ship to him, but that was not what he intended to do.
"A scanner has picked up our ship," Drev said, tension in his voice.
"Our usual encrypted channel, Drev. And minimal chatter."
"Yes, Master. And… don't miss," Drev said, and chuckled.
Smiling, Relin reached out with the Force, took mental hold of the Sith transport, and leapt out of the Infiltrator into open space.
"I am clear," he said, and Drev peeled off.
***
THE PRESENT:41.5 YEARS AFTER THE BATTLE OF YAVIN
The screams from outside Jaden's window turned to laughter as an open-top speeder streaked past. He heard music booming from the speeder's speakers. The sounds faded as it flew away.
It took a moment for him to understand what had occurred.
Adolescents, he realized. Probably on a late-night thrill ride.
"Stang," he whispered, but he did not deactivate his lightsaber. Its hum filled the room, a comforting sound. The images from the vision remained sharp in his mind.
The whir of R6's servos announced the droid's entrance into the room. Seeing Jaden standing in his nightclothes with his lightsaber burning, R6 cut short his beeped greeting to whistle a concerned question. Jaden did not fully understand droidspeak, but he usually got the gist of R6's communications. Or perhaps he assumed R6 said or asked whatever Jaden wished him to say or ask.
"I guess that makes you my confessor," he said to the astromech. "Congratulations."
R6 beeped the question again, and Jaden smiled.
"Nothing. A bad joke. And I am fine. I had an… unusual dream."
But Jaden knew it had not been a dream. It had been a Force vision.
R6 hummed understanding and whistled out the first stanza of a lullaby.
Jaden smiled at the droid, though his mind was still on the vision. He had never before had one so vivid.
What had it meant?
Dead Jedi and Sith resurrected, an icy moon in the Unknown Regions, a rain of evil, and the repeated cry for help. He could not make sense of what he had seen, so he tried to recall what he had felt-the uncomfortably familiar touch of the dark side, his increasingly attenuated connection to the light side, and, bridging the two, his Master's words: the Force is a tool, neither light nor dark.
"How can that be? A tool? Nothing more than that?"
R6 beeped confusion.
Jaden waved a hand distractedly. "It cannot be," he said, answering his
own question. The Force had been Jaden's moral compass for decades. Reducing it to a tool, mere potential, left him… rudderless. He looked at his hand, the hand from which he had discharged Force lightning.
"There be dragons," he muttered, deactivating his lightsaber.
R6 whirred a question.
"I am trying to discern the vision's meaning, but I am… uncertain."
He had been uncertain since the Battle of Centerpoint Station, though he had been struggling with doubt before that. His certainty had been one of the unrecorded casualties of the battle. He had… done things he regretted. The Corellians had simply wanted their independence. In hindsight, Jaden saw the whole affair as a political matter unworthy of Jedi involvement. He had killed over politics. The Jedi Order had killed over politics.
Where did that leave them as an Order? How were they different from the Sith? Hadn't they used the light side to engage in morally questionable acts? And where did that leave Jaden? He felt soiled by his participation in the battle.
"Once, we were guardians of the galaxy," he said to R6, and the droid stayed wisely silent.
Now the Jedi seemed guardians of particular politicians. What principles did they stand for anymore?
The Force is only a tool.
He shook his head as he pulled on his robes. The Force had to be more than that. Otherwise he had lived a lie for decades. His lightsaber was a tool. The Force was… something more. It had to be.
He feared the Jedi had come to think that because they used the light side of the Force, everything they did must therefore be good. Jaden saw that thinking as flawed; even dangerous.
Since the battle for Centerpoint, he had isolated himself from the Order, from Valin, from Kyle. He felt purposeless and unwelcome. He thought his doubt must be plain to them all. He knew he would be transparent to the Masters. He had no one with whom he could share his thoughts.
"No one but you," he said to R6.
His blaster and the small, one-handed hilt of his second lightsaber lay on his side table. He strapped on a holster, put the blaster to bed in it, and hooked his secondary saber to the clip at the small of his back. He did not know why he kept the old lightsaber, holding it close to him like a good-luck charm. He supposed its blade was the purple tether that connected him to a simpler past. He had crafted the blade when the Force had been nothing to him but a word. He had possessed no wisdom, yet he had utilized the Force to build a blade.
