by Paul S. Kemp
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, repulsed 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 non-operational. 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 read 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.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
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.
"Kam Solusar," Jaden said, the words slipping free before he could stop them.
The clone sneered, and in that expression lost any resemblance to Master Solusar, who so often wore a smile.
"I do not know that name," the clone said. "I am Alpha."
Alpha wore mismatched attire: clothing salvaged from the facility, bits of stormtrooper armor on both shoulders, the forearms, and the hands, and a rough, handmade cloak fashioned from the hide of some creature that must have lived under the ice in the moon's seas. In the clone's movements, Jaden caught the suggestion of an imposing physicality, controlled savagery. He looked larger than Kam, more there.
Jaden cleared his throat, stepped forward. He lowered his lightsaber but did not deactivate it. "I have come here to… help you."
The clone held his sneer. "We require no help from you. Only the ship that brought you."
"We?"
"Are you Jedi or Sith?"
Jaden took a half step sideways, as if to avoid the ugly import of the question. He reached the edge of the cloning cylinder and winced when he saw within it.
Bodies lay piled in a grotesque heap, a tangle of decayed limbs, torsos, heads, and tattered clothing-a compost heap of butchery. Empty eye sockets stared up at Jaden. Age-ruined lips showed teeth bared in snarls.
"Beautiful, is it not?" asked the Kamclone. "Mother is where life begins and ends."
The stink caused Jaden's eyes to water. He guessed that almost every person in the facility had ended up inside the cylinder, inside Mother.
Fighting down his disgust, he asked, "How many are you? How many survived?"
"How many of them?" the clone said, and a knowing malice slinked into his dead eyes. "Or us?"
The clone stepped to the edge of Mother and started walking the circumference of the cylinder toward Jaden.
Instinctually, Jaden walked the circumference in the same direction, away from the clone, the two of them pacing the face of a chrono, keeping time under the shadow of the inevitable.
The clone nodded at the cylinder, an insane reverence smoothing his expression. "We return here from time to time to thank Mother for our lives. She can create it from the root of a hair, Dr. Green once told me. You were right, Dr. Green," he said to one of the corpses.
Jaden felt entirely exposed. More of them could appear at any moment. He reached out with the Force. He perceived no one else, but it was possible they could screen their presences.
They continued their circling, the pace quickening. Jaden knew what must come but he delayed it, discontented with the realization that all he had endured, all he had asked others to endure, had resulted in no answers. The clones had showed him nothing. The Kamclone was mad. Perhaps they all were. Perhaps he himself was, too.
"Why do you walk away from me?" the Kamclone said.
"Because it does not have to be this way."
"It does," the clone said, his right hand twitching. "Mother is hungry."
Jaden stopped pacing, and his abrupt stop seemed to take the clone by surprise. "I cannot help you," he said.
"You can," the clone said, also stopping. "And you will. You will give us your ship."
"No."
From under his cloak, the clone drew his lightsaber and activated it. A long, unstable red blade cut the shadows, spitting angry sparks.
The clone's fa?ade ran like candle wax, the heat of his rage melting the calm mask of his expression to reveal the savagery beneath. Eyes narrowed, teeth bared, he snarled… and in the sound Jaden heard the violent nature that had slaughtered hundreds of people and thrown their corpses into a cloning pit turned mass grave.
"Mother is hungry!"
Jaden prepared himself, sank into the calm of the Force.
The clone ran one way around the pit and Jaden ran the opposite. They met after fifteen strides, still on Mother's edge, both lightsabers humming. Jaden ducked low under the clone's decapitating cross-stroke and stabbed at his abdomen.
The clone reverse-backflipped, balancing on the pit's edge, then immediately charged Jaden again. He feinted low and unleashed a vicious overhand blow, then another, and another. Jaden parried each one, but the blows began to numb his arms. He let the Force soothe his muscles and augment his strength, and answered with a flurry of blows of his own.
The clone gave no ground, and Jaden could not penetrate his defenses. They crossed blades at the chest, weapons sizzling, the sparks from the clone's blade searing scorch marks into Jaden's suit. The clone grunted, shoved Jaden two meters backward, and lunged after him.
Jaden leapt over his head, flipping, his blade slashing down as he flew over the clone, but the clone parried. Jaden landed on his feet on the edge of the pit and the clone was upon him, forcing his lightsaber high and landing a Force-augmented kick in his chest. Ribs snapped and Jaden staggered backward.
Following up on the opening, the clone leapt forward and cross-cut Jaden at the knees. Jaden leapt over the slash, used an overcut to drive the clone's blade into the deck, where it threw up a shower of sparks. Jaden spun, and angled a reverse-cross-cut for the clone's head.
The clone lurched backward but the tip of Jaden's blade opened a gash in his throat. Staggered, gasping, the clone swung wildly with his lightsaber while unleashing a telekinetic blast against Jaden's chest.
Jaden used the Force to deaden the blow, but his broken ribs ground against one another and he hissed with pain. By now the clone had recovered enough to charge. He attacked high, low, overhand, cross-cuts, Jaden parried them all while backing off. The clone did not relent, pressing Jaden further, faster. Jaden answered where he could but the clone's blade seemed everywhere. Jaden parried left, right, again, again, until he felt a sharp, stinging sensation and both his lightsaber and three fingers went flying off into the
darkness.
A side kick from the clone ruined his already broken ribs and sent him down into Mother. He fell amid the corpses, swimming in the gore, feeling as if dead hands were clutching at him. Stinking, wet fluid soaked him. Before he could sit up, the clone leapt into the pit after him and landed on his feet with his legs to either side of Jaden. Jaden could not see the Kamclone's face, could see only the sparking line of his red lightsaber held high for a killing stroke. Jaden focused his mind on the blade as it came down. He threw up an arm, grabbed the clone's wrist, and steered the blade wide.
The clone grunted in frustration, knelt, and grabbed Jaden's throat with his free hand.
"Do not resist. You should be honored to provide sustenance to Mother," he said, and began to squeeze.
Desperate, and still holding the clone's right wrist to keep the sizzling red line of his lightsaber at bay, Jaden used his wounded right hand to claw at the clone's grip, trying to dig his remaining fingers under the clone's and pry loose some space for an inhalation. Failing that, he tried to roll aside, to shift his weight and gain some leverage, or free a leg to kick out, but the clone's Force-augmented strength was greater than Jaden's.
Jaden gagged, tried to shake loose by flailing his head, but failed. His lungs forced him to try to draw air. Unable to pull in oxygen, he saw spots. The clone grunted against Jaden's fading grip, his dark eyes wild, saliva dripping from his gritted teeth.
Jaden's arms were deadwood hanging off his shoulders. As he lost strength, the clone's lightsaber moved closer to his throat. The sparks from the unstable blade struck Jaden's face and arm, pock marking his skin with tiny scorch marks, igniting little flashes of pain. His heart banged in his ears. He was failing. He was going to die.
The realization summoned something from deep within the dark crevices of his mind where he kept secrets even from himself. Force lightning exploded from his hand, squeezed out by the exigency of his circumstances. The blue lines spiraled around the clone's hand and lightsaber.
