by Paul S. Kemp
“Master—”
Jaden held up a hand. “You have had hours of training, Marr. Your connection to the Force is strong, but your abilities are trivial compared with those of a trained Force user. You call me immediately and we engage them together. That’s an order.”
Marr bowed his head. “Yes, Master.”
Only the faint glow of instrumentation broke the darkness of the scout flyer’s cockpit. Both Syll and Nyss, born under the faint sun and dim skies of Umbara, preferred to keep the cockpit lights turned off. They saw in darkness better than they did in light. In some indefinable way, Nyss had always considered himself kin to darkness, an instrument of the night.
He looked under his feet, through the transparisteel bubble of the scout’s cockpit. Korriban roiled below them, spinning slowly in its shroud of clouds. Nyss appreciated the planet’s austere bleakness, even felt a kinship to it. He watched it churn, an angry black ball of storms and dark-side energy. Of course, he felt none of the energy, not even faintly. He and his sister did not possess whatever connection living things ordinarily had with the Force.
He and Syll were unique in the galaxy, disconnected from it.
Perhaps the disconnect made them dead, he mused with a smile. Or maybe he and Syll were the only two really alive and everyone else labored under the illusion of the interconnectedness of life, a shared falsehood belied by the truth of Syll and Nyss’s existence. He liked that. He was truth. The rest of the galaxy was a lie.
He looked over and watched Syll input data into the navicomp. Her dark hair and pale face made her look like an archaic photographic negative, the opposite of what she resembled, a false image of reality.
He thought her beautiful.
Syll finished plugging Fhost’s coordinates into the navicomp of the scout flyer and Nyss went through the pre-jump checklist.
“Course is set,” Syll said. “Tracking beacon on the cloakshape fighter is active.”
Nyss nodded, set his palm on one of the cortosis-coated vibroblade knives he wore at his belt. The metal felt cool to the touch.
“We could use the Iteration,” Syll said. “Why leave him in stasis?”
In truth, Nyss wanted the clone in stasis because he did not want another’s presence to defile the time he spent with his sister. He preferred her company, and her company alone.
“If he’s conscious, he generates more memories. And the more memories he possesses, the more the Rakatan mindspear must wipe away before making him anew.”
From the fix of her jaw, he could see that his explanation did not fully satisfy his sister.
“If we need him, we’ll get him out,” he said finally. “Suitable?”
“Suitable.”
“This shouldn’t be difficult,” he said. “Smash and grab, as before.”
“Right.”
“Ready?”
She nodded. “Let’s go.”
He held a hand out for his sister. She took his hand in hers, their arms bridging the gap between their seats. Syll activated the light filters on the cockpit bubble. Nyss engaged the hyperdrive and they leapt together into the abyss. The streaks of hyperspace irritated their eyes—and normal space disappeared. They floated alone in the dark warm womb of the cockpit.
Nyss felt most at home while in hyperspace. Probably because it, like him, was separate from the galaxy, not subject to the ordinary rules that governed reality.
Through the dimmed transparisteel of the cockpit bubble, the star lines of hyperspace were grayed out and barely visible, a dark curtain parsecs wide.
He settled in to pass the time.
NYSS FELT A SENSE OF LOSS AS THE SCOUT FLYER CAME out of hyperspace and realspace hit him like cold water to the face. Hyperspace was the hole in the galaxy that mirrored the hole in his being. He enjoyed his time in it, emptiness communing with emptiness.
Syll partially undimmed the cockpit’s transparisteel to reveal the mostly brown sphere of Fhost, backlit by its distant orange star.
Nyss engaged the ion engines and the ship blazed through the system. Planetary authorities did not comm them. Likely the technology on a backwater planet like Fhost could not even detect the scout flyer. Its baffles and cloaked propulsion system made it difficult for even up-to-date tech to get a fix on.
As they closed on Fhost, Nyss activated the tracking system attuned to the beacon the One Sith had placed on the cloakshape fighter. He waited for it to retrieve the signal. It took only moments.
He zeroed in on the location. A hologram of Fhost’s surface appeared above his comp station, the transparent image of the planet turning rapidly as the program pinpointed the location of the beacon.
“It’s twenty kilometers outside of the planet’s largest city,” he said. “Farpoint.”
“What’s there?”
“Nothing,” he said. “They may have ditched it.”
“Then we must hope they’re still on-planet.”
Nyss knew the clones were sick and prone to madness—all clones from Thrawn’s program were. If they were still on Fhost, they’d almost certainly do something to attract the attention of the authorities.
“Monitor the planetary authorities’ frequencies.”
Syll set the comm to scan planetary frequencies originating in Farpoint. Meanwhile, they closed on the planet and burned through its atmosphere. Planetary control still did not comm them.
Tracking the beacon, they flew low and set down in a wood half a kilometer from the clones’ ship. Once on the ground, they donned light-inhibiting goggles that doubled as macrobinoculars, checked their vibroblade knives, and slung their crossbows over their backs. Neither used blasters—too crude a weapon for their work. Their crossbow quarrels killed just as effectively as blaster fire and did so in relative silence.
They departed the ship via the small exit lift and glided through the forest. The goggles shielded them from the annoyance of the sun where the forest canopy did not provide shade. In silence they flitted from shadow to shadow. The sounds of the forest—the songs of native birds, the chirps of insects—did not change. Even the animals failed to note their passage.
In a short while they reached the edge of a large clearing. The cloakshape fighter sat in the center of the clearing, landing skids sunk deeply into the damp ground. The large cargo bay, added at some point in the past to the modular ship, hung from the craft’s middle like a fat belly. The cargo bay door yawned, revealing a dark interior.
Hidden in the tree line, Nyss increased the magnification of his goggles and eyed what he could see of the inside. Bits of machinery and ragged clothing were cast about like flotsam, a toppled stasis chamber. There was also a body, female. She looked dead. He watched for a while longer and saw no movement in the hold.
In the handcant he and Syll had developed as children, he signaled, One body. I’ll go in. You cover.
She nodded, unslung her crossbow, fitted it with one of the razor-tip quarrels they favored, and took sight at the doorway.
Nyss put a vibroblade in each hand, the familiar vibrations of the weapons welcome in his palms. He slipped from the shadows and darted across the clearing. He consciously restrained the Force-suppressing field he could generate around him. If any of the clones were inside, they would be alerted if their connection to the Force were severed.
He could smell the decay before he reached the ship. He lurked at the boarding ramp for a moment, head cocked, listening. Hearing nothing, he signaled back to Syll that he was going in, and then hurried up the ramp.
Inside the cargo bay, the smell hit him more strongly. He noted the bodies. Their clothing consisted of worn layers of Thrawn-era Imperial garb, their hair long, thick, and unkempt. Clones. He noted a male, a female, and two young children, a boy and girl.
The clones had children.
He could tell at a glance that the male was not the Prime—the face was wrong—so he took his time in examining the bodies. The woman had died first, and the burst boils and sores that covered her skin showed
that she had died in pain, no doubt of some illness associated with genetic decoherence. He’d never seen a case so acute. He’d never heard of a case so acute. A long scar ran from the bottom of her throat to her navel, a zipper put there by one of Thrawn’s doctors decades earlier. He put his fingers on the lightsaber hilt still affixed to her belt. The crystal that powered it, connected as it was to the Force, felt like an itch behind his eyes.
He moved to the children, saw no visible wounds on them. He assumed that the decoherence had manifested differently in them, born as they were, rather than grown.
The adult male, on the other hand, had died in combat. His skin was seared on the arms and chest—perhaps from Force lightning, but that had not been his cause of death. Given the hemorrhaging in his eyes, the bruises on his throat, Nyss judged that he’d died of suffocation.
He stood, thinking. The clones from the moon were dying from complications associated with genetic decoherence. For some reason, the decoherence in these clones had resulted in symptoms far more acute than usual. Eleven clones had fled the moon in the cloakshape fighter. Assuming they had not disposed of other bodies en route, four were dead, the Prime not among them.
He whispered into his comlink. “Four dead inside. I’ll check the rest of the—”
The sizzle and hum of igniting lightsabers pulled him around.
A male clone, well over two meters tall, his long brown hair and thick beard obscuring much of his face, stood in the narrow hatchway that led from the cargo bay toward the cockpit. He was soaked in sweat and swayed on his feet. His glassy eyes fixed on Nyss.
A red lightsaber burned in each of his hands. Both of them sizzled, spitting sparks like a campfire.
“Get away from them,” the clone said, his speech slurred but his intent clear. He took a lurching step toward Nyss.
“I am looking for the rest of your … family,” Nyss said. He readied himself, held his blades under his cloak, shielded from the clone’s view.
The clone took another step toward him, his breathing loud and rapid. He sniffed the air in Nyss’s direction, as if for spoor.
“You want to kill them,” he said. The flesh of his arms shifted and bulged, as if something within him were trying to escape the prison of his skin. He stared wide-eyed at his arms, then his face, too, twisted and swelled, for a moment looking like a reflection in a festival mirror.
“No!” he said, spraying spit.
Nyss had never seen anything like it. “I can help you,” he said, a lie.
The clone shook his head like an animal and roared, and Nyss saw only pain and rage in his wild eyes. He was lost to reason.
Nyss released his hold on his suppressive field, willed it to expand—but he was too late. The clone made a cutting gesture with his hand, and a blast of energy blew Nyss across the cargo bay and into the toppled stasis chamber. The impact sent a shock of pain through him.
Growling like a beast, the clone bounded across the cargo bay, blades held high and spitting sparks. Nyss leapt to his feet and let the clone come.
Rage prevented the clone from sensing when he first entered Nyss’s suppressive field. He stabbed both blades at Nyss’s abdomen, but Nyss flipped backward atop the stasis chamber. The blades sank halfway into the metal, melting a good chunk of it to slag and warming the rest.
“Where are the other clones?” Nyss said calmly. Shadows coalesced around him, as they always did when he used his power.
The clone pulled his blades free and crosscut for Nyss’s legs. Nyss flipped over the blades, over the clone, and landed behind him, all the while intensifying his suppressive field. The darkness in the cargo bay deepened, as if the sun outside had moved behind thick clouds.
The clone spun in a reverse crosscut at Nyss’s neck and Nyss ducked under it; the clone stabbed with his off hand at Nyss’s abdomen and Nyss sidestepped it.
“Where? Tell me where they went.”
The clone roared in frustration and anger, spraying snot and spit. He raised both blades above his head for a killing strike. Nyss realized that he would get nothing from the clone. He sharpened his suppressive field as the clone swung his lightsabers down in arcs intended to cut Nyss in half twice over.
Nyss did not bother to dodge the blows as the weapons descended, merely stared into the face of the clone, whose expression turned from satisfied rage to profound surprise.
Nyss’s intensified field had momentarily severed the connection between the power crystal in the lightsaber and the Force. The clone held only hilts in his hands.
With regret, Nyss thrust one of his vibroblades into the clone’s chest. Warm blood gushed from the wound, soaked the weapon, his hand. The clone, wide-eyed, openmouthed, stared at Nyss until the light went out of his eyes and he fell to the floor of the cargo bay.
Syll, her crossbow at the ready, sprinted up the boarding ramp and took in the scene. Her lower lip curled in distaste when she saw the mess. “You’re all right?” she asked him.
“I’m fine,” he said, staring down at the clone, whose eyes remained open, filled with madness even in death.
“It’s amazing how far the One Sith have improved Thrawn’s cloning technology.” He knelt and wiped his blade on the clone’s coarse cloak. “These are the very best that Thrawn’s scientists could produce.”
Syll stood next to him, looking down at the body of the clone. “The Prime is the best that Thrawn could produce. And he did what Thrawn wanted. Thrawn just didn’t live to activate him.”
“Six more of the clones are unaccounted for,” Nyss said.
“We should search the ship,” she said, but Nyss was already shaking his head.
“A waste of time. They went to Farpoint.”
Syll glanced about the cargo bay, at the bodies, the mess. “Why?”
Nyss shrugged. “Supplies, maybe.” His gaze fell on the female clone, dead from decoherence. “They’re sick, very sick. They may not understand what they have. I don’t understand what they have.”
Syll knelt and picked something up off the floor. She held it up for Nyss to see—a used pre-prepped hypo.
“And there’s another,” she said, pointing at a second hypo on the floor. “And another.”
He read the preprinted labels on the hypo. “Perhaps they know what they have after all.”
“They went to Farpoint for medicine,” said Syll.
“Let’s go get them.”
They ran out of the cloakshape fighter, through the woods, and back to the scout flyer.
The relative darkness of the flyer’s cockpit was a welcome respite from the outside glare. Syll monitored local frequencies as Nyss engaged the ship’s thrusters. The ship rose straight up above the forest’s canopy. A 3-D map of Fhost’s surface appeared in Nyss’s HUD, a small red light blinking over Farpoint.
“There’s a landing field west of the city,” he said. “We’ll put down there, see if we can locate the clones.”
Syll held up a finger for silence, listening to something she was hearing on local frequencies.
“Someone has attacked Farpoint’s medical facility,” she said.
Nyss reprogrammed the HUD to show him the medical facility, a ten-story spike driven into the center of Farpoint. It looked like a dart, pinning Farpoint to the surface.
“Reports vary between three and six attackers,” Syll said, still listening.
“It has to be them,” Nyss said. “They’re trying to get the medicine they need.”
He climbed to altitude and engaged the engines. The scout flyer streaked through Fhost’s sky, rapidly closing the distance to Farpoint.
From a distance, the city looked like a ship that had been stretched on its ends until it broke apart, its pieces scattering across a couple of kilometers. The spire of the medical center rose out of the decrepitude, impossible to miss. Nyss noted a landing pad on the roof, its large doors folded open. As he watched, a YT-class freighter streaked in and descended onto the landing pad.
YT-class freighters w
ere as common as desperation in the Outer Rim, but its appearance right there, right then, gave Nyss pause. Syll voiced his thoughts.
“The spacers and Korr flew a YT, according to the Anzat’s reports.”
“Yes,” Nyss agreed.
Perhaps they could hit two targets with one shot.
A few dozen swoops and speeder bikes dotted the sky over Farpoint. Sirens flashed red on several that flew near the medical center. Smoke spiraled into the sky from somewhere else in the city, far from the medical center.
“You take the stick,” Nyss said to Syll. “Take me over the landing pad, but don’t land.”
“What will you do?”
“I’m jumping,” Nyss said. “Be ready. When I have the Prime and Korr, I’ll signal you on our usual channel.”
“Go,” she said.
The medical center loomed large through the cockpit transparisteel. Nyss pulled on his goggles, then hurried into the rear compartment, where they stored equipment. There, he took an antigrav pack, strapped it on, and stepped into the airlock.
“Almost there,” Syll said over her comlink. “Reports have the clones in the stairwells and coming up. That has to be the spacer’s freighter. It’s got a modified ship’s boat instead of an escape pod.”
Nyss took hold of one of the bars bolted to the wall of the airlock and pressed the button to open the hatch. Wind and light and the scream of sirens blazed into the tiny compartment. Still holding the grip, he leaned out and looked down.
The scout flyer was almost upon the medical center. Nyss could see the landing pad ahead. The YT had set down near another ship, a large, cylindrical supply ship of some kind.
“Over in three, two, one. Mark.”
Syll slowed for only a moment, and Nyss did not hesitate. He leapt from the airlock, spread his arms and legs to catch the wind, and fell free toward the building’s landing pad.
The duracrete rectangle sped up to meet him. He waited, waited, then engaged the antigrav pack at the last moment. He fell the final ten meters at walking speed, hit the metal of the landing pad in a roll, bounced to his feet, and sprinted into the shadow of the large ship. There, he stripped off the antigrav pack. The shining star of Pharmstar Industries marked its side: it was a medical supply ship.
