Riptide

by Paul S. Kemp

  Something sharp pressed lightly against the side of his throat.

  “Hello,” said a soft voice that set his heart to racing. “Please do nothing rash. Otherwise, I will have to harm you.”

  Khedryn swallowed and turned his head toward the speaker. The Umbaran took a step back, the loaded crossbow still pointed at Khedryn’s face.

  “Move,” the Umbaran said, and prodded him with the crossbow.

  Khedryn did, and the Umbaran walked him along the corridor until they came to an intersection that had a long safety bar attached to the bulkhead.

  The Umbaran slipped his blade—a vibroblade—through Khedryn’s restraints. Keeping the crossbow aimed at Khedryn all the while, he removed a set of flexcuffs from his cloak.

  “Around your right hand, then around that safety bar on the wall.”

  He tossed the flexcuffs to Khedryn.

  “Do it quickly, or I’ll shoot you in the face.”

  Khedryn wrapped the flexcuffs around his right wrist, then around the safety bar.

  “Tightly,” said the Umbaran, and Khedryn obeyed.

  “Now sit.”

  Khedryn did, and his arm, attached to the safety bar, stuck up over his head. He must have looked like a student with a question.

  Sweat soaked his clothing. Blood seeped out of his wrist from where the clone’s cuffs had cut into his skin. “What do you want with me?”

  “I don’t want you at all,” the Umbaran said, his voice a sibilant whisper. “I’ll be back for you.”

  “Wait! Who are you? Do you work for the Jedi?”

  At that, the Umbaran scoffed and sped off down the corridor. Khedryn marveled at the Umbaran’s ability to move in near silence. By the time the Umbaran was a few meters down the corridor, Khedryn had lost sight of him. He seemed to fade into the shadows.

  WE MUST HURRY,” SEER SAID TO SOLDIER, HER VOICE far away, her distant gaze on the infinite black outside the ship. “Mother wants us home.”

  Soldier looked at her and saw the slight pulsing beneath her skin. He glanced behind him to Hunter, sitting in one of the crew seats. She gazed back at him, her green eyes still slightly dazed. He wondered if she recognized him, if she remembered what she had said to him when they had left the moon. He doubted it.

  He took Seer by the arm. She hissed at his touch, and he felt the movement under her skin.

  “You need meds,” he said. He should have brought more to the cockpit from the cargo bay. He hadn’t thought they would need more so soon.

  “I need to go home,” she said, and grinned.

  Soldier saw madness in the expression.

  “I’m finalizing the course inputs,” he said cautiously, and released her arm. “We are going home, Seer. But you have to have meds. All right?”

  She said nothing, and he chose to interpret her silence as agreement.

  He steered Seer to the copilot’s seat, sat her down, and turned to Hunter.

  “I need you to go back to the cargo bay and bring back the meds.”

  Hunter’s eyes focused on him, more alert than he’d seen them in days. “Where are they?”

  “Forward in the cargo bay. I left the container open. Bring as much as you can carry. Hypos, too. I can mix it here.”

  Hunter nodded, stood.

  He looked around the cockpit for Grace, under the seats, didn’t see her.

  “Where’s Grace?” he asked.

  Hunter shrugged and started to head off.

  “Find her,” he said. “She shouldn’t be wandering the ship. And tell Runner to get back here, too.”

  Soldier would need a copilot. Seer was of no use to him.

  Khedryn sat on the floor, head and heart pounding. He pulled against the restraints on his wrist. He winced as they cut into his flesh, as a seep of warm blood made his hand sticky and ran down his forearm.

  He tried to make sense of what was happening.

  Who was the Umbaran? How had he killed Runner so easily, even deactivating his lightsaber? If he did not work for the Jedi, whom did he work for? And why had he left Khedryn alive?

  Khedryn glanced around the dark corridor, looking for anything he could use to free himself. He saw nothing. He struggled again, but the pain put a stop to things almost right away. He cursed with frustration.

  A sound to his right gave him a start.

  “Who’s there?” he asked.

  The little girl from the cockpit crept out of the darkness, as skittish as a fawn. She stared at Khedryn, and at the flexcuffs, her eyes as wide as plates.

  “Where is Runner?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” Khedryn said softly. “What’s your name?”

  “I’m glad he didn’t hurt you,” she said, and started to back away.

  “Wait, don’t go,” he said. “I need your help.”

  He did not know if she heard him. She turned and ran back down the corridor without a second look, her movement almost as furtive and silent as that of the Umbaran.

  Khedryn cursed under his breath. She was gone.

  He sat there, alone with himself, trying hard not to think about what would happen next. His breathing sounded loud in his ears.

  A sound startled him, metal sliding on metal—a utility knife slid toward him along the floor from the right. The girl emerged out of the darkness. Her shy smile gave way to a look of terror as the illness afflicting the clones distorted her features. Her cheeks bulged, roiled. She screamed, reached up to touch her face, and Khedryn saw that the skin of her hands and arms looked the same. It was as if an army of insects was crawling under her flesh. Her terrified eyes met Khedryn’s.

  “Stay there,” he said, stretching for the knife. “I’ll help you.”

  But she did not stay. She turned, already weeping, and ran.

  Khedryn got the knife, slid its blade out, and cut himself free of the cuffs. He massaged his wrist and thought about what to do. He could make a run for an escape pod, hoping the Umbaran and the clones were too occupied with one another to worry about his escape. After all, the Umbaran said he was not after Khedryn.

  But then there was the little girl.

  She’d freed him.

  He could try to find her, maybe take her with him, but to where? Besides, she was sick and he did not know how to treat her.

  Maybe the clones did. He thought of the hypos that littered the floor of the cockpit. They had medicine there.

  To help the girl, he would have to make sure the Umbaran didn’t kill the clones. Or he’d have to at least get some of the meds.

  The idea ran counter to his instincts, and the last time he hadn’t run when he should have, he had ended up with an Anzat assassin sticking a feeding appendage into his braincase.

  But there was the girl to consider.

  And he was nothing if not stubborn.

  He simply could not abandon the little girl. It wasn’t in him. He’d been a vulnerable child once, back in the ruins of the Redoubt. Skywalker and Mara Jade could have abandoned him and the others, but they hadn’t. They had rescued them all. He wouldn’t abandon the girl. Whatever the Umbaran intended for Khedryn, for the clones, it wasn’t good. He’d have been happy to leave the other clones to their fate, but not the little girl.

  Damned Jedi were rubbing off on him.

  Sweat slicked his grip on the utility knife. He tried to control his breathing as he moved as quietly as he could through the ship’s dark corridors. He listened from time to time, but heard nothing. In truth, he did not expect to. The Umbaran moved in silence and melded with the shadows as well as someone in an adaptive suit.

  He needed to get lucky.

  He pulled his last piece of chewstim from his trouser pocket, unwrapped it, and popped it in his mouth.

  He’d been unlucky his whole life.

  He blew a bubble with the chewstim, popped it quietly.

  But he was nothing if not stubborn.

  The medicine had brought Hunter back to herself. She remembered almost nothing since leaving the fr
ozen moon. She’d awakened to herself in the cockpit of another stolen ship, the stars wide and dark and deep.

  Power surged and ebbed in her, like bursts of electrical current. Her emotions vacillated between controlled ecstasy and contained anger. Her connection to the Force felt deeper, more profound than it ever had in the past. She assumed it was the result of her closer connection to Mother. She’d never felt such potential within herself.

  She wished that Alpha had survived, but she understood why he had not—he had failed Mother’s test, had fallen to the Jedi.

  So said Seer, and Seer spoke truth.

  And Seer had said that they would soon meet Mother. Hunter looked forward to that moment.

  She moved through the supply ship’s forward section and took a turbolift down to the belly. The doors opened onto a long corridor lit only by overhead emergency lights. She hit the comlink on the lift and said, “The lighting is out down here.”

  No signal. The comm, too, was out.

  “Grace,” she called. No response.

  She stepped into the hallway and the lift doors closed behind her. Immediately she felt something amiss, a pressure in the air, a tension. She’d been bred by the doctors to stalk prey and she’d learned to trust her instincts.

  Excitement caused power to crackle on the end of her fingertips. She put the slim, curved hilt of her lightsaber into her palm but did not activate the blade. Quieting her breathing, she listened but heard nothing.

  “Runner?” she called.

  She let her eyes adjust to the darkness, then moved to one side of the corridor, where she could keep a wall on her flank, and started off. She walked in silence, a hunter stalking unknown prey. With each step she took, she felt more certain that something had happened to Runner.

  Did they have a stowaway? Had the Jedi from the moon gotten aboard somehow?

  With her genetically engineered senses, she caught the faint coppery tang of blood in the air. She followed it, moving slowly, alert to any sound other than the ordinary hum of the ship’s engines.

  Ahead, a form lay crumpled in the corridor. She eyed it for several seconds, wary.

  No movement. No sound but her own steady breathing.

  The darkness made it difficult to see, but the body was too big to be Grace. As she neared it, she noted the long ragged cloak favored by Runner, the boots.

  “Runner,” she said in a whisper. The body did not move.

  She made up her mind, darted forward, and knelt beside it.

  Congealing blood covered the floor near Runner, soaked the soles of her boots. She turned his body over. His face was purpled from blows. The hole in his chest had been opened by something sharp and nonenergized, certainly not a lightsaber.

  She ran her hands over Runner’s eyes to close them and stood. An object on the floor caught her eye. She picked it up—a crossbow quarrel with a tip like a razor.

  Running her thumb over it, she glanced down the corridor to her left, then to her right. She licked her lips, feeling exposed. A sound from down the corridor to her right caught her attention, the whisper of a boot on the floor. She could see nothing. The dim overhead lights barely illuminated the corridor, made the hallway a play of shadows.

  A strange feeling struck her. At first she mistook it as the normal ebb and flow of the power within her. She thought that the medicine was diminishing her connection to the Force to prevent the illness from progressing too rapidly. But the feeling did not abate. She felt as if she were circling a drain, falling into a hole, and the rate at which she was falling was accelerating.

  The darkness around her deepened. To her left and right, the light in the corridor dimmed to sparks.

  She backed against the wall and ignited her blade. The familiar red line comforted her, and in its light she sought her foe. She let her anger build, her anxiety, and used it to connect her more deeply to the Force. But the connection felt loose, attenuated, and getting weaker.

  “I know you’re out there,” she said.

  She reached out through the Force as best she could, hoping to feel the presence of her opponent.

  She felt nothing, just another hole, another vacancy in her perception.

  Her calm slipped, replaced by alarm, by burgeoning fear. She bared her teeth and hissed.

  Her eyes fell on Runner and she dropped the quarrel. Her blade began to flicker. Fear put down roots in her stomach and spread to the rest of her. She watched, wide-eyed, as the line of her weapon thinned, sizzled, and went out.

  Darkness.

  She felt entirely separated from the Force, a feeling she had never before experienced, a striking solitude that made her mouth go dry. She was breathing too heavily, betraying her position. She slid along the wall, as quiet as a shadow, her hand sweating around the hilt of her lightsaber, dead metal in her fist.

  She needed to get back to the lift, back to Soldier and Seer and Grace. Feeling the wall with one hand, she slowly made her way back the way she’d come.

  By the time her mind had processed the sound—the hiss of a fired quarrel—a painful, powerful impact in the side of her chest drove the breath from her lungs and knocked her to the floor.

  She wanted to scream from the pain, but she could not seem to fill her burning lungs with air. She climbed to all fours, tried to lift herself up, couldn’t. She saw the shaft of the quarrel sticking out of her rib cage. Blood poured out of her side.

  Two feet appeared on the floor before her.

  She grabbed at the legs, the movement causing her to hiss with pain, but they stepped out of reach and she skittered on the floor, slick with her own blood, and ended up flat on her stomach. She was dying, alone, separated from the Force, separated from her daughter, her community.

  The feet stood before her again.

  A supreme effort allowed her to heave her body over. She stared at the ceiling, her breath becoming ever shallower, the pain diminishing as she died.

  Her killer took shape in her vision, his silhouette emerging from the darkness as if part of it. Pale hands pulled back a hood to reveal a bald head and a pale face devoid of emotion. His dark eyes looked like holes, the pits into which Hunter’s connection to the Force had drained away.

  She tried to speak, to ask him how he had done what he’d done, who he was, why he had killed her, but she could not draw enough breath to speak. Something heavy seemed to be on her chest, preventing her lungs from working. Sparks started to appear in her vision, motes of orange and red that announced a brain receiving too little oxygen.

  The apparition of death removed something from under his cloak. A crossbow.

  While Hunter fought for breath, for a few more seconds of life, he methodically cocked the crossbow, laid another quarrel atop it, and took aim at her chest. He stared into her face as he pulled the trigger. She felt the impact dully, with no additional pain and then felt nothing more, ever again.

  * * *

  The darkness on the cargo deck made navigating the ship slow work. Khedryn could not remember the way Runner had brought him; stress had erased it from his memory, and his hurried flight from the Umbaran had further foiled his sense of the ship’s layout. He picked his way along as best he could, following the occasional signs painted on walls. He needed to find the turbolifts, he knew that.

  He rounded a corner and froze. Ahead, he saw two bodies. He flattened himself against the wall and watched for a time, listening. He heard nothing.

  He approached the bodies at an oblique angle, cautiously, as he might a dangerous animal. He feared he would see the little girl there, her small form broken and bloody on the deck.

  He sighed with relief when he saw that one of the dead was Runner and the other an adult female. Two of the Umbaran’s crossbow quarrels stuck out of the female’s chest. Blood pooled on the deck.

  The clones’ lightsabers lay near their bodies. With a shrug, he took them and latched them to his belt, even though he had no idea how to operate them. And even if he had, he wouldn’t use it. He’d be mo
re likely to hurt himself with it than an enemy.

  He checked the clones for any mundane weapons but found none.

  The Umbaran had killed at least two of the clones already. The small utility knife Khedryn bore felt entirely inadequate in his hands.

  He rose, looked down the hall. He knew how to get to the turbolifts from here. The Umbaran had probably headed to the cockpit.

  Khedryn looked back the way he had come, wondering if the little girl was still on the cargo level. He hoped so, but he had no way to know. He toyed again with the idea of turning around and finding an escape pod. If he took a lift up to the crew deck, he knew, he’d be committed. He’d either succeed or die.

  He made up his mind and walked the corridors back to the turbolifts. He hit the button and waited for one to come down. Knowing that the door could open to reveal the Umbaran or one of the clones, he stood to one side, coiled, sweaty fingers wrapped around the hilt of his knife.

  The door slid open. The lights were out and he saw movement within. A form emerged and he lunged, the knife held ready for an overhand stab.

  Having eliminated two of the clones, Nyss had only to contend with Soldier, the child, and the other female adult, Seer. He needed to move fast to take them down before they noted the absence of Runner and the female.

  Merged with the darkness, he hurried to one of the turbolift banks and took a lift up to the crew deck. He flattened himself against the wall as the doors slid open. Hearing nothing, he slid out into hallway.

  Ahead maybe fifteen meters was the cockpit. The door stood open. He heard voices within: Soldier; Seer. He heard no alarm in them, so he presumed they had not yet grown concerned about the absence of the other two clones.

  Hugging the wall, he glided forward, a vibroblade in one hand, his mind keeping a tight hold on his suppressive field. He lingered in the corridor outside the cockpit. His gear included two stun grenades. He took one from his satchel, pressed the button to activate it, and readied himself.

  “The course is set, Seer,” said Soldier.

  “Mother is waiting,” replied Seer. “You have done well, Soldier.”