Riptide

by Paul S. Kemp

  He reached for his blaster as the Umbaran flung a vibroblade at him.

  Used to responding with Force-enhanced reflexes, he found his unenhanced reflexes too slow. The blade struck him in the bicep, slit skin and muscle, and scraped against bone. The pain shocked him, and blood, warm and sticky, poured from the gash.

  The Umbaran kicked Marr in the head, causing the Cerean to go limp, and then bounded at Jaden. Jaden pulled the knife from his bicep and readied himself.

  The Umbaran came at him in a frenzy, all knees and fists, a swirl of motion and gauzy darkness. Jaden sidestepped a punch for his throat and stabbed at the Umbaran with the vibroblade. The blade nicked the Umbaran’s side, but barely, and he spun, locking Jaden’s arm under his armpit and wrenching his wrist. Pain ran the length of Jaden’s forearm and the vibroblade fell from his hand.

  Grunting, the Umbaran threw a reverse elbow and caught Jaden in the cheek. Jaden staggered, but managed to wrest his arm free and loose a wild punch at the Umbaran’s jaw.

  The Umbaran ducked under it and tripped Jaden with a leg sweep. Jaden hit the ground, rolled into a backflip, and regained his feet, then retreated as the Umbaran loosed a flurry of punches and kicks. Jaden backed up, blocking, ducking, counterattacking where he could.

  Blood poured from his arm. He was weakening, slowing, and the Umbaran must have known it. The Umbaran left off his attack and circled, playing for time.

  “I wanted to spill your blood,” he said. “For my sister I wanted that. But now …”

  The Umbaran relaxed, then spoke a phrase in a language Jaden did not understand. He eyed Jaden as if expecting the words to have some effect on him, as if they were a magic incantation. The Umbaran’s eyes widened when Jaden apparently did not respond as he expected.

  “How can—”

  Seeing an opportunity, Jaden charged, leading with a series of spinning kicks that the Umbaran blocked but which allowed Jaden to take the initiative. Unleashing a spinning back punch, he caught the Umbaran on the cheek, staggering him. Jaden ducked under the Umbaran’s wild counterpunch, and launched an uppercut into his midsection. The blow doubled the Umbaran over and Jaden put a knee into his face.

  The Umbaran crumpled to the ground on his backside, but his dazed eyes remained open and he held his hands awkwardly before him in a defensive posture. Jaden did not hesitate. He leapt atop the Umbaran and squirmed around him until he had him straddled from behind. There, he closed his forearms around the Umbaran’s throat and began to squeeze.

  The Umbaran clawed at Jaden’s hands, flailed his legs, but to no avail. He died in seconds.

  Jaden tried to stand, managed to get up on wobbly legs. He looked down. Blood drained from his slit arm, peppered the floor. The room spun. He was going to fall. A blurry form materialized before him, his height. He thought it might be Marr.

  His vision went dark and he fell.

  Marr opened his eyes. He lay flat on his back, his body a slab of meat that felt only pain. When he inhaled he felt as if someone had slipped a knife between his ribs. His head throbbed. Blood pooled under his head, warm and sticky. He inhaled, then winced at the pain it caused.

  Alarms screamed from overhead. Dim emergency lights in the ceiling flashed on and off, a confusing strobe that made it hard to focus. His thoughts coalesced, memories connected, allowing him to think clearly. Something was in his fist, a cold cylinder of hard metal.

  The hilt of his lightsaber.

  Little good it had done him.

  It takes decades to master the weapon, Marr, his Master had told him. But you are making excellent strides.

  He remembered where he was, what had happened. He remembered something hitting him in the back of the head, a kick that staved in his ribs, the Umbaran’s face.

  “Master,” he said.

  Adrenaline fueled by concern for Jaden allowed him to move, to support himself on his elbow.

  Two meters away from him a figure knelt over Jaden. The figure held a lightsaber in his right hand, the red blade bathing Jaden’s still form in crimson.

  Jaden’s voice again sounded in his mind. The point to remember is that wielding the weapon is not a test of your physicality. It is fed by your relationship to the Force.

  When Marr’s eyes focused clearly on the person standing over Jaden, he gasped.

  It was Jaden. Or rather, another clone of Jaden. Not the clone from the frozen moon, but another, a perfect simulacrum of Marr’s Master. He wore modern clothing, and his hair and beard were neatly trimmed. For a time, Marr could do nothing but watch, sickly fascinated, his mind moving through various possibilities, trying to figure out how there could be two clones of his Master, one born in a Thrawn-era cloning lab, and one born … somewhere else.

  As Marr watched, the clone took a device, a metal handle with a thin spike attached to it, and plunged it into Jaden’s temple. Jaden’s back arched and his body went rigid. His lips peeled back from his teeth in a grimace of pain. Lines of white blinked along the filaments that composed the base of the spike, similar to the lights in the wall of the station, and in that moment Marr realized that the device, too, was Rakatan in origin.

  “No!” he shouted, and climbed to his feet.

  The Jaden clone turned, eyes hooded. His red blade cut the air, reflecting in his eyes.

  Marr’s heart rate accelerated. He reached for the Force and, to his surprise, felt it all around him. His eyes fell on another form not far from Jaden and barely visible in the dim light—the Umbaran. Jaden must have killed him.

  Jaden screamed, an awful, animal sound so filled with pain and despair that it made Marr’s eyes well. The device, buried to its handle in his skull, blinked ever faster.

  The clone looked down at Jaden, then back at Marr. His eyes—not Jaden’s eyes despite their physical similarity—bored into Marr.

  “Who are you, Cerean?”

  The question, asked in Jaden’s voice, unnerved Marr. He scrambled to his feet, fighting off a bout of dizziness. “I’m his friend.”

  The clone smirked, the expression alien to Marr despite being on what seemed Jaden’s face. “Then I suppose it’s well that I won’t remember that I killed you.”

  The clone strode toward him, blade held low, his expression a promise of violence.

  Marr reached for his blaster with his off hand, drew it, and fired again, again, again. The clone deflected each shot as he closed, his expression one of contempt. Marr backed away, still firing, but the clone closed the distance. His face, like but unlike Jaden’s, wore murderous intent with comfort.

  Marr thumped into the wall. Its pulsing warmth penetrated his cloak. The clone extended a hand and used the Force to pull Marr’s blaster from his hand.

  Behind the clone, Jaden screamed again, louder. His hands curled into claws. A network of veins became visible in his face and forehead. His eyes opened, staring, empty, then closed, and his body fell back.

  “No!” Marr said.

  “Don’t worry,” the clone said, and raised his blade. “He’ll live on. In me. The device takes his memories, his life, and gives them to me.”

  The red line descended for Marr’s head. Marr ignited his blade—Jaden’s blade, the line purple and steady—and parried the clone’s blow.

  The clone’s eyes widened. The crossed blades sizzled.

  “I’m more than just his friend,” Marr said through the X of their blades. “I’m also his apprentice.”

  Marr augmented his strength with the Force and slammed his fist into the clone’s abdomen. The clone staggered back a step, wheezing, and Marr followed up with a decapitating slash.

  The clone’s blade flashed, intercepted Marr’s, twisted, and sent the purple-bladed lightsaber flying across the chamber. The clone looked up, smiling, and Marr saw that he was not wheezing. He was laughing.

  “You aren’t much of an apprentice,” he said.

  Marr took a step back, his confidence rattled. The clone sneered and advanced after him.

  Fear, hungry
and blinding, rose in Marr. His heart accelerated, and for a moment he thought only of running. But over the clone’s shoulder he saw the body of Jaden, the Master who had trained him, who had taught him so much in so short a time.

  Strength comes from your relationship to the Force.

  “And from your relationship to others,” Marr said, and sought the Keep. He found it, inhabited it.

  The clone advanced, blood in his eyes.

  Marr’s fear fell away, replaced by calm.

  The clone raised his blade.

  Marr sank deeper into the Force and held his ground, unarmed but not defenseless.

  The red line of the clone’s blade descended in a glittering arc.

  For Marr, events slowed. The blade moved down toward his head in slow motion. His mind did not so much process as feel the arc of its approach, the speed of its descent, the energy the blade generated—had to generate—in order to stay coherent, all of it numbers, equations, formulae.

  Do not think. Feel.

  At peace and without fear, he felt the Force fill him with more power than he’d experienced before. He overflowed with it, could barely contain it. He funneled all of it, everything in him, into his arm and hand, and as if of its own accord, his arm rose to intercept the blade.

  He did not wince as his fist closed around the angry red gash of the clone’s blade. He felt heat, was distantly cognizant of pain, of his flesh sizzling, peeling under the blade’s onslaught.

  But he also felt the blade in his hand, a thin slit of hate around which he wrapped his fist, channeled his power, and held on for all he was worth.

  The clone’s eyes widened, his mouth opened to speak, but before he could utter a sound, Marr made a knife of his free hand and drove his fingertips into the clone’s exposed throat.

  All at once time and motion returned to normal speed.

  Taken by surprise, the clone dropped his blade and staggered backward, gasping for breath.

  Still deeply connected to the Force, Marr extended a hand and unleashed a blast of energy that threw the clone bodily across the corridor and slammed him into the far wall, where he sagged and slid down, his chin on his chest.

  “I might not be much of an apprentice,” the Cerean said, as much for himself as the clone, “but I’m one hell of a friend.”

  He took mental hold of his lightsaber hilt, used the Force to pull it to his hand, ignited it, and walked across the corridor toward the clone. His wounded hand screamed with pain. He could feel charred ribbons of flesh dangling from his palm, but he ignored the agony.

  The clone did not respond to his approach. Marr stood over him, raised his blade high for the kill, and … thought of Jaden.

  He looked back at his Master, stared at him for a long moment, hoping to see his chest rise with breath.

  Nothing.

  Pushing aside his burgeoning grief, Marr pointed his blade at the clone’s chest, knelt, and checked to see if the clone still lived. He did.

  He’ll live on, the clone had said. In me.

  Marr’s mouth went dry when he thought about the course he was considering. He stared at the clone, his face stripped of its anger by unconsciousness. He looked exactly like Jaden.

  Almost.

  Unwilling to consider it any longer for fear of losing his nerve, Marr simply acted. He tore a strip of cloth from the clone’s clothing and wrapped his wounded hand. He refused to look at it; the pain of wrapping it almost made him pass out. When he was done, he took the clone’s right hand in his own and severed the last three fingers just below the first knuckle. The clone groaned from the pain, but that was all. The heat from the blade cauterized the wounds and stanched the bleeding to a crimson seep.

  Marr rose and walked to Jaden’s body. He reached for his Master’s throat to check for a pulse, just to be sure, but could not at first bring himself to touch him. Swallowing, he did … and felt no pulse.

  Grief threatened to overcome his thinking and he almost reconsidered his course, almost walked away, believing that perhaps he should just leave Jaden at peace, one with the Force.

  But he could not.

  He licked his lips and closed his hand around the handle of the blinking device still buried in Jaden’s head. It felt warm in his hand, alive, like the walls of the station.

  He steeled himself and jerked the device out of Jaden’s head. It came free with a wet sucking sound, and the moment he pulled it loose literally millions of filaments, each a fraction of the diameter of a hair, squirmed in the open air before almost immediately recombining, intertwining to form a single, seemingly solid, spike.

  Marr stared at it a long while. It seemed impossible that Jaden was … in it. Yet that was what the clone’s words had implied. And if any civilization could have mastered consciousness transfer, it would have been the Rakatans.

  His mind made up, he carried the device back to the Jaden clone. He had no idea how to operate it, so he had to hope that it would self-activate, like the station’s docking mechanism. It seemed alive, so that might be possible.

  The clone’s eyes opened, fixed on the device, widened. “It’s not ready,” he said, and reached for Marr’s hands.

  Marr swatted the clone’s hands away, drove a knee into his chest, and took him by the throat.

  “You mean you’re not ready,” he said, and drove the spike into the clone’s temple. It penetrated the skull with almost no resistance, and the handle warmed, then began to vibrate in his hand.

  The clone’s mouth opened wide to match his eyes, but no scream emerged. Tendons corded his neck and his body went rigid. The handle continued to vibrate, and Marr imagined the millions of tendrils squirming into the gray matter of the clone’s brain, wiping out who he had been and replacing him with Jaden.

  He waited, hoping, while the alarms wailed, the lights flickered, and somewhere deep in the station the dark side gave birth to something he did not understand.

  Needing something familiar, desperate for it, he tried his comlink again.

  “Khedryn, do you copy? Khedryn?”

  Static and no hope. He stared down at the Jaden-clone, hoping he was no longer the Jaden-clone.

  If things worked, Marr did not know what he would say to Jaden. Would Jaden remember the clone? Had Jaden even seen the clone? Marr did not know.

  More important, Marr did not know if he had done the right thing. After all, the clone had apparently wanted to do exactly what Marr had, had been willing to kill to do it. Hadn’t Marr done the clone’s work for him? Why had they wanted to … replace Jaden?

  He pushed the thought from his mind and another one took its place.

  What if the device had not worked? What if the mind contained in the body remained that of the clone?

  Then Marr would fight him and die. He looked at his wounded hand, the blood seeping into the cloth. He barely felt the pain. The pain in his heart overwhelmed it.

  He stood, hurried to Jaden’s body, and picked it up. It was limp, already cooling. Trying to keep grief over Jaden’s death at bay with hope for a rebirth, he carried it a ways down the corridor, where he stripped it of its blaster, robes, and lightsaber.

  He returned to Jaden’s new body—he allowed himself to think that way—and felt for a pulse. It was there still, strong. He stripped off the clone’s robe, replaced it with Jaden’s, put Jaden’s lightsaber on the belt. He strapped on the holster with its blaster, took the clone’s blade—he took solace in the fact that its hilt was different from Jaden’s—and cast it aside along with the Rakatan device.

  Then he watched, and waited. Long moments passed. Distant explosions shook the station.

  Growing nervous, he withdrew a bit from Jaden and sank into the shadows on the far side of the room. There he watched, as seconds stretched into eternities.

  After a time, Jaden stirred. His eyes opened and he put a hand to his head, touched the wound that Marr had put there with the Rakatan spike.

  Marr considered calling out, thought better of it, and decide
d to simply watch. As he did, an arm took him from behind, closed around his throat, and choked off his windpipe.

  “Make no sound,” someone said in a whisper. “Or you die.”

  Marr felt the hilt of a lightsaber pressed against his back. His attacker would need only to activate it and the blade would impale him.

  “What did you do to him?” the voice whispered, and the arm let up enough on Marr’s throat to allow him speech.

  “I don’t know,” Marr said. It was the truth. “What do you want?”

  “I don’t know,” the voice breathed, his fetid breath hot on Marr’s cheek. “To leave here.”

  Before them, a mere thirty meters, Jaden stood on wobbly legs. His expression looked dazed.

  “Who are you?” Marr asked. It had to be one of the escaped clones.

  “My name is Soldier.” He reached around Marr’s waist and took his lightsaber.

  Jaden started moving down the corridor, away from Soldier and Marr. After he had moved some distance off, Soldier, still holding Marr about the throat, softly called out, “Grace.”

  A redheaded girl, maybe nine years old, stepped from the shadows. Her sickness deformed her face, the flesh bulging in one cheek, swollen around one eye.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Soldier said to the girl. “We’re getting out of here.”

  “Just let me go,” Marr said. “All I want to do is help Jaden. I won’t even tell him I saw you.”

  “You keep secrets from your Master?” Soldier asked.

  Marr nodded, his eyes going to where he had hidden Jaden’s “old” body. “If necessary,” he said softly.

  “Do you know how to get back to the lifts?” Soldier asked. He squeezed Marr’s throat. “Don’t lie.”

  “Yes,” Marr said. He nodded at Jaden. “He is going in the right direction.”

  “Then we follow him,” Soldier said, and they did, as Jaden stumbled through the hallways of the Rakatan station. Marr watched him from the darkness, wondering if he’d done the right thing.

  Eventually Jaden came to a large doorway. Marr felt the presence behind it, the wash of dark-side energy pouring through the vertical slit of the doorway. Jaden must have felt it, too, for he hesitated, and put his hand on the hilt of his lightsaber.