by Paul S. Kemp
Khedryn’s voice interrupted his ruminations. “Scans got nothing. The clones are gone. Or they’re so far out, the scanners can’t ping them.”
“I figured as much,” Jaden said, still staring out the viewport, still wrestling with memories. A ship full of genetically modified Force-using clones had fled the moon in a stolen ship. They were alone, too, he supposed. At least in a way.
“Probably better that way,” Khedryn said. “Junker’s in no condition to follow. We’ve got at least a couple more hours of repairs before I’m putting her into hyperspace. Marr vented her altogether and she took a beating from those Sith fighters. Not to mention your flying, which almost tore her apart.” He chuckled. “How’s the hand?”
“It’s all right,” Jaden said, turning to face him.
Seeing him, Khedryn cocked his head in a question. His good eye fixed on Jaden, while his lazy eye stared past Jaden’s shoulder, maybe at his reflection in the viewport.
“You all right?” Khedryn had a mug of caf, and sipped from it.
“Yeah, fine,” Jaden said. “I was just … thinking about my family.”
“Didn’t know you had any.”
“I don’t. Not anymore.”
“Me neither.”
Jaden knew. Khedryn’s parents had been survivors of the crash of Outbound Flight. They’d died long before Grand Master Skywalker and Mara Jade had pulled Khedryn, along with a handful of other survivors, from the asteroid on which the ship had crashed.
Khedryn grinned and hoisted his caf mug. “We’ve got each other now, though, don’t we?”
Jaden smiled. “We do.”
Khedryn had saved Jaden’s life back on the moon.
“Fresh caf in the galley,” Khedryn said. “Pulkay where it always is, in case you want a jolt. Do you some good, Jaden. You look like a man who’s thinking too much and drinking too little.”
Jaden grinned. “Is that right?”
“Damned right, that’s right. Pondering, ruminating, looking for meaning here and there. That’s you. Sometimes things just are what they are.”
“You don’t believe that.”
Khedryn’s face lost its mirth and he looked into his cup, swirled the contents, slammed down what remained. “I surely kriffin’ do not. Not after what happened on the moon. But I don’t like thinking about the meaning of it all too much. Gives me a headache. Let’s get a refill, yeah?”
“Yeah,” Jaden said, and they walked Junker’s corridors toward the galley. Khedryn stopped now and again to examine this or that joint on a bulkhead, a viewport. He’d tap the wall with his mug a few times and nod or frown, apparently deducing something from the sound of metal on metal.
“She’s stressed,” Khedryn said of the ship. “But she hung in there.”
Same was true of all of them, Jaden supposed.
Khedryn patted the bulkhead. “She’ll do what we ask. Won’t you, girl?”
“I have no doubt.”
Khedryn cleared his throat. “So, then, do you have a plan? What do we do about the escaped clones?”
“We find them,” Jaden said.
“Yeah, I figured that. I’m all ears about how.”
“First I need to speak to Grand Master Skywalker.”
Following a Force vision, Jaden had left Coruscant without notifying the Order or filing a flight plan. That had been a mistake. And by now, someone would wonder where he had gone. Besides, he had an obligation to inform the Grand Master about the escaped clones.
“Makes sense,” Khedryn said. He looked down at the floor. “So, uh, Marr tells me that you agreed to train him?”
Jaden felt the sharpness on the edges of Khedryn’s question. He understood it. “I need to discuss that with the Grand Master, too.”
Khedryn ran a hand along Junker’s bulkhead. “If that’s a go, it kinda makes me odd man out, I guess.” He chuckled, but Jaden knew it was forced. Khedryn and Marr had been friends for a long time. “Can’t really be my first mate if he’s training to become a Jedi.”
“It would be difficult,” Jaden acknowledged. “But let’s not go too far down that path just yet.”
“Marr, a Jedi.” Khedryn shook his head. “It’s hard for me to believe it.”
“Things will work out, Khedryn.”
Neither man said anything more as they entered Junker’s galley. The smell of fresh caf, ubiquitous aboard Junker, filled the air. Khedryn refilled his own mug, poured one for Jaden.
“Spike of pulkay?” Khedryn asked.
“No, thanks.”
Khedryn started to spike his caf with a shot of the liquor but reconsidered and took the caf straight. “Kinda takes the fun out of it, drinking alone. Flying’s the same way.”
Jaden took his point but said nothing.
As if by unspoken agreement, they did not sit at the table where the three of them and Relin, a Jedi transported from four thousand years in the past, had sat and planned their assault on a Sith dreadnought. Relin had been killed in the assault, and Jaden, Marr, and Khedryn had nearly been killed. Instead, they sat at the counter.
“To Relin,” Khedryn said, and lifted his mug in a toast.
“To Relin,” Jaden answered.
They sipped their caf in silence for a time before Khedryn said, “I’ve been thinking about something.”
Jaden sipped his caf and waited.
“Those clones flew their ship right through that exploded dreadnought. And Relin told us that ship was full of an ore that augmented the power of the Force.”
“Augmented the dark side,” Jaden said.
“Right, right. Well, they flew right through it.” Khedryn looked at the table where they had sat with Relin, then out the viewport. “Makes you wonder what it might have done to them.”
Jaden had been thinking, and worrying, about much the same thing. “That it does.”
Soldier still felt supercharged, alive with power. The doctors at the facility would have named the power “the dark side” of the Force, but Soldier rejected their labels. To him, it was just power, and labels be damned.
They’d all felt it, even the children, as the stolen cloakshape fighter carrying them had blazed away from the frozen moon and through the aftermath of the exploded starship. Between the surface of the moon and the safety of outer space had hung a cloud of flaming debris, superheated gas, and … something more.
Soldier assumed that the exploded starship had been carrying something related to the Force, something powerful, a Sith artifact maybe, and that the vessel’s destruction had diffused whatever it was through the moon’s thin atmosphere, its essence saturating the sky, filling the air with power, with potential.
They’d felt it more strongly as they ascended, first as a prickling on the skin, then as an upsurge of emotion that sent him alternately through moments of glee, rage, terror, and love. Soldier’s emotions had swung pendulously from one to another. The clones had stood around in the makeshift cargo hold of the cloakshape and murmured questions while the children giggled and squirmed.
“What is that?” Maker had asked, his eyes wide. “Seer?”
But Seer had not answered. She’d seemed lost in one of her trances, eyes closed and swaying, in communion with Mother.
The feeling had intensified with each passing moment, a surge at once terrifying and exhilarating. Force lightning had leaked from Soldier’s fingertips, twined around his hands, crackling. He stared at his fingers in wonder, grinning. The emotions of the other clones reached through their community’s shared empathic connection and bombarded him with feeling. He felt their glee, their ecstasy, their anger. His emotions fed on theirs, and theirs on his, a never-ending feedback loop, an ouroboros of emotional energy that made him feel as if he were boiling inside, filling with emotional steam that he could vent only in bestial shouts, in discharges of lightning. The cargo bay was chaotic. Only his concern for the children kept him grounded. He stood over them protectively.
“It is a sign from Mother!” Seer suddenly sho
uted above the tumult. She had her eyes closed and raised her hands above her hairless head toward the ceiling. “She has blessed our exodus!”
The others—Maker, Two-Blade, Hunter, all of them—had echoed her words, their voices slurred from the rush of power.
“It is a gift from Mother. A gift.”
The children had mostly laughed or groaned, their connection to the Force still weak.
“What is it, Soldier?” Grace had asked him in her small voice.
He could not bring himself to mention Mother, so he simply said, “It is power, Grace. Be still now.”
And then the cloakshape had flown through the cloud and the power suffusing the air had bled through the hull and touched them all directly.
It had hit Soldier like an electric shock, torn open some deeper connection to the Force, and sent him to his knees.
“Soldier!” Grace said in alarm.
He waved her away, afraid that he could not control the power boiling in him.
The rest of the Community, too, had shouted aloud as the power entered them. Seer had begun to moan in ecstasy, the children—even Grace—to laugh aloud, a touch of wildness in the sound.
New channels into the Force opened and power rushed to fill the voids. Soldier’s mind spun. Perception widened. His eyes watered and he gripped his head in his hands, as if trying to contain his expanded understanding.
The ship had veered wildly—Runner was piloting and he, too, must have been overcome. Everyone shouted as the sudden lurch threw them against the far wall of the cargo bay. Hunter cradled Grace and Blessing—her children—to her chest to protect them from the impact. Soldier, the most clearheaded of them all, had cushioned their impact with the Force, sparing them all broken bones, and the ship had ridden the lurch into a spin, throwing them across the cargo bay once more like so much flotsam, tipping the stasis chambers standing along one side of the bay. The chambers skidded across the floor, the shriek of metal on metal joining the chorus of the clones. Soldier and Scar both raised a hand and used the Force to halt the chambers two meters before they crushed the still-entranced Seer against the bulkhead.
Fighting against the push and pull of the ship’s lurches, Soldier had climbed to his feet and wound through the chaos of the cargo bay to the cockpit. He found Runner in the pilot’s chair, his arms out wide, his head thrown back, eyes closed, drool dripping from a vacant smile. Soldier pushed him to the floor and slammed a fist on the instrument panel to engage the autopilot. He turned and grabbed Runner by the shirt.
“You sit in this seat, you fly the ship!” he said, but Runner, lost in the surge of power, seemed not to hear him.
As the autopilot righted the ship, Soldier followed the sounds of the clones and the children back toward the cargo bay. Before he reached it, the emotional surge changed tenor. Through his connection with the other clones, he felt their fear grow. Then he felt their pain, and the laughter of the children give way to wails, then to shrieks of agony. The exultant exclamations of the clones stepped aside for screams of pain.
All but for Seer, whose voice he could still hear above the rest, praising Mother over the screams.
Soldier closed down the empathic connection as best he could and sprinted through the corridor to the cargo bay. He reached it and stepped into a storm of screams and pain.
Hunter lay in a fetal position, teeth bared in a grimace as she screamed. In her arms she cradled Blessing and Grace. Her eyes were open, vacant, and her breath came so fast between screams that Soldier thought she might hyperventilate. The girls, too, had their eyes open. Grace stared at Soldier, her welling eyes full of pain. Thankfully the children were not screaming. Instead, they lay entirely still, mouths partway open, eyes glassy. To Soldier they looked like corpses who did not yet realize they were dead.
The possibility of the children dying made his legs go weak.
“Grace,” he called. “Blessing.”
Neither moved. Neither seemed to hear him.
What had happened? He’d been gone only minutes.
Maker sat cross-legged on the floor, rocking, his mouth open and uttering guttural howls at intervals. His fingernails had scratched bloody grooves down the length of his forearm and he continued to worry at them even as his blood puddled on the floor. Repulsed, Soldier went to him and grabbed his hands.
“Stop it,” Soldier said to him, but Maker seemed not to hear, and his hands continued to try for his wounds.
Scar’s high-pitched screams pulled Soldier around. She lay on the ground near one of the overturned stasis chambers, writhing, the exposed areas of her blotchy skin visibly pulsing, as if thousands of insects crawled beneath her epidermis and sought exit through her pores.
“Help me!” she cried in a spray of spit, her face distorted by the crawling. “Help me!”
But no one moved to help her. Seer was too lost in her trance, still praising Mother, and the others were too lost in their pain. Soldier recovered himself, ran to Scar, crouched beside her, and pulled her to him. She was thin, her long dark hair lank on her drawn face. He tried to keep the revulsion from his face as her skin shifted and bulged under his touch.
“Help me, Soldier!”
“It’s the sickness,” Soldier said, feeling helpless. “It has to be. The sickness.”
The sickness afflicted all of them—all of them but him—but he’d never seen the symptoms so bad, never seen them come on so quickly. The doctors at the facility had altered the midi-chlorians in their blood, and it seemed their altered blood was responding to the same phenomenon that had given them a surge in power. The sickness was surging, too. Soldier had to get the medicine.
“I’ll be right back,” he said to Scar, and she answered him with a scream. The bulges in her face grew larger, darkened, formed pustules, distorting her expression, then burst in a spray of pink fluid that spattered Soldier’s face and clothes.
“What is happening to me?” she screamed.
His mind turned to the children. They were sick, too. He looked over at Grace, Blessing, and Gift, but they looked all right.
Soldier stood, his legs weak under him. He saw the chest they’d used to bring the remaining medicine from the moon. It was near the far wall and Two-Blade stood near it, his eyes feral, his hands on his lightsaber hilts. Two-Blade did not seem to be in pain, at least not yet. He murmured something incomprehensible over the screams and shifted on his feet, as though preparing for a fight.
Soldier headed for the chest of meds, slowly, hands held up to show harmlessness. Two-Blade’s eyes hardened, his muscles a coiled spring. Sweat beaded his brow. His mouth was a hard line in the nest of his beard. His green eyes fixed on Soldier, but he blinked often and seemed not to see clearly. His pupils were fully dilated, black holes that saw something other than the real world. As Soldier watched, slight palpitations under the skin of Two-Blade’s face foretold a fate like Scar’s.
“I need the meds,” Soldier said, nodding at the chest behind Two-Blade.
“Soldier,” Two-Blade hissed.
Soldier tried to step around him but Two-Blade blocked his way. His chest rose and fell like a bellows. Soldier swallowed a flash of irritation. The screams and moans of the surviving clones put him on edge. Seer’s imprecations to Mother were a pebble in the boot of his mind.
“Get out of my way,” Soldier said. He pushed past Two-Blade and knelt before the chest.
The sizzle of igniting lightsabers sounded from behind him and instinct took over. He rolled to his left, bounded to his feet, took his own blade in hand, and ignited it. The red line sparked and hissed, a mirror of his mood. Anger kindled in him and the surge of power affecting them all lit it into a bonfire. Force lightning shot from his fingers, coiled around his hilt, his blade. He reveled in the newfound intensity of his power.
Two-Blade, his reddish-orange blades jutting from the hilts he held in both fists, snarled.
“It always had to end this way, Soldier. You aren’t one of us.”
“You
’re not thinking clearly,” Soldier said, but his heart wasn’t in the protest. He wanted to fight, wanted to kill.
Two-Blade snarled and lunged forward with blades low. Soldier bounded back, slapped both blades aside with his own lightsaber, and raised his blade for a killing strike. Before he did, Two-Blade’s roar of rage turned to a groan of pain and he fell to the floor, grasping his head, writhing, screaming. His blades deactivated and his flesh crawled, bulged, rippled.
Soldier stood over him, blade in hand, violence still fresh in his mind. It would be so easy to cut Two-Blade down, so easy. He raised his lightsaber.…
Scar’s screams of pain reached a crescendo, popped the balloon of his rage, and brought him back to himself. He recalled his purpose. With difficulty, he lowered his blade and deactivated it. He was sweating. The anger boiled in him, simmering—It always had to end this way—but he controlled it.
He took a deep, calming breath and spared a glance back at Scar. He was too late. Open sores on her face and arms leaked fluid, ragged craters erupting pus.
“Soldier,” she mouthed, and raised one of her hands for a moment before it fell slack to her side. Her body twitched once, twice, then lay still. Her vacant, dead eyes, turned bloodred by burst capillaries, stared accusations at Soldier.
Soldier cursed and kicked Two-Blade in the ribs. Soldier did not know why he cared. Except for the children, the rest of the clones cared little for him. But he could not deny that he did have feelings for them.
And so he would do what he always did—take care of them.
He knelt before the case that contained the hypos. Thirty doses of the meds remained. They had expected the doses to last them weeks, maybe longer, but whatever they’d flown through had exacted a price for their increased connection to the Force—it had accelerated their illness. Presumably it would also speed the onset of the madness that inevitably came with the sickness. As bodies failed, so too would minds. Two-Blade was already almost gone. Hunter, too. A Jedi had come to the moon, killed one of the clones, but the rest had escaped to … To what?
While the screams and groans of the sick resounded off the walls, Soldier measured out doses with steady hands. He watched his skin as he worked, afraid that he would see the same crawling mounds he had seen on Scar, but to his relief, he saw nothing. The doctors at the facility had made him well, it seemed.
