You’ve come here to find Revan, she thought. There has to be some clue as to where the Sith might have taken him.
“We need to find some kind of archive,” she said out loud. “Something that can tell us more about this world.”
Her voice sounded hollow and washed out, but it was just one more unsettling detail of Nathema that she refused to dwell on.
The lights on T3 blinked rapidly as the astromech quickly scanned his memory circuits. A few seconds later he beeped excitedly and took off down the street.
Meetra followed him, her long legs allowing her to quickly catch up to and keep pace with the droid. The brisk walk made her feel more normal; physical activity seemed to help keep Nathema’s oppressive emptiness at bay.
The droid led her to the entrance of what appeared to be some kind of official government building. On the outside were characters she couldn’t read. In the Republic all government business was conducted in Basic. And while it was likely the inhabitants of Nathema had been familiar with Basic—the lingua franca of interstellar trade was known to virtually every spacefaring species in the galaxy—they had obviously marked their building in a native tongue.
The building was three stories high, with only a handful of windows looking out to the street and a pair of uninviting doors that seemed to be the common fashion of bureaucratic strongholds across every culture of the galaxy.
The doors were locked, but she carved through the security bolt with her lightsaber, trying to ignore the dim and washed-out appearance of the glowing blade.
Focus on the task at hand, she reminded herself. Just find the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible and you can get off this blasted world.
She stepped through, T3 following at her heel. It was dark inside; whatever source had once powered the building had long since fallen into disrepair. Meetra pulled a glow rod from one of the many pockets sewn into the wide fabric belt on her waist and ignited it, illuminating their surroundings with its eerie green glow.
The first things she noticed were the piles of clothes scattered haphazardly about. She realized they must have fallen to the ground when the wearers vanished. It took all her mental discipline to keep her mind from speculating on what kind of event could have caused the bizarre phenomenon.
Exploring the ground floor revealed it to be some type of reception area or lobby. There was a large desk set up to face the door, perfectly positioned for the person behind it to greet visitors. Apart from several uncomfortable-looking chairs arranged in what was probably a central waiting room, there didn’t seem to be much else of interest on the lower level.
There was a lift in the corner leading to the upper floors, but with no power it was of little use. Fortunately, a quick search located a staircase behind an unmarked door near the back of the building.
“Let’s check out the upper floors,” she said, and T3 beeped in agreement.
For some astromech droids stairs could be a problem, but T3 was remarkably versatile. By locking his wheels to keep from rolling backward, he was able to use his front legs to lever himself up the steps one at a time. It took him a little longer to reach the top of the flight than his human companion, but at least Meetra didn’t have to try to carry him.
The second floor was filled with data terminals and cubicles—workstations for the government drones who had once wandered the offices and halls. Unfortunately, without power the computer network had ceased to function, rendering the terminals useless.
“Let’s see if we can find the main data bank on the next floor up,” Meetra suggested.
A few minutes later they were on the third floor. Like the level below, it seemed to consist primarily of offices, cubicles, and workstations. Near the back of the building they found a single durasteel door. On the wall beside it was what appeared to be a security keypad.
“Show me what you’ve got,” Meetra said, pointing to the pad.
T3 rolled up to the wall. A panel on his body slid open to reveal a long, thin electrical probe, which he extended so that it pierced the security pad. There was a brief pause, then the unmistakable zap of a powerful electrical discharge. The keypad lit up and the door slid open.
As Meetra had hoped, the room beyond housed the primary computer data banks.
“Grab anything that looks useful so we can get out of here,” she said.
T3 hustled to oblige, inserting his versatile probe into an interface port so he could slice into the defunct network. As he had done with the door panel, T3 gave the data bank a powerful electric jolt to temporarily reactivate it so he could download the relevant files.
The entire process took less than five minutes, but for Meetra it might as well have been an eternity. She had managed to keep busy up until this point, but while waiting idly by for T3 to finish she began to notice the absence of the Force once more.
She could feel the Void pressing in on her from all sides. At the same time it was pulling on her, trying to rip away the very essence of her existence. Nature abhors a vacuum; the emptiness was trying to fill itself with her energy. For an instant she felt as if she were going to become undone, her physical body discorporating into trillions of subatomic particles that would scatter across the entire surface of Nathema.
No! she screamed in her mind. The Void will not take me! I am more than just a collection of random matter and particles! I am a living being. I am Meetra Surik!
The affirmation of her own existence seemed to push the Void back, at least for the moment. But Meetra knew she couldn’t hold out against it much longer. As much as she tried to ignore what she felt—or, more precisely, didn’t feel—all around her, she knew it was only a matter of time until the horrors of Nathema stripped away her sanity.
She was just about to tell T3 it was time to go when he beeped triumphantly and retracted the probe.
“I need to get back to the ship,” she told him. “You can tell me what you found when we’re off this world.”
Once she was in motion she felt better, but she could still sense the Void hovering on the fringes of her awareness. It was like being stalked by some nameless, faceless, invisible creature. She felt it lurking around every corner, just waiting for her to let her guard down so it could take her.
She quickened her pace, trusting her droid companion to keep up, too intent on keeping a grip on herself to reply to his indignant chirps.
By the time she reached the Ebon Hawk she was running, though she wasn’t even aware of it. One single thought dominated her conscious mind: Escape!
She strapped herself into the pilot’s chair and fired up the engines just as T3, who had fallen behind, came racing up the boarding ramp.
“Hold on,” she warned as she closed the hatch and punched the engines.
The Ebon Hawk took flight, hurtling itself up toward the sky and beyond. They broke atmosphere, but Meetra didn’t slow the ship down. She kept the engines on full until they were on the very edge of the solar system. Only then, with several million kilometers between her and Nathema, did she feel safe enough to throttle back.
T3 rolled up beside her and let out a worried whistle.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she told him. “But I’m okay now. Just give me a few minutes and we’ll take a look at what you pulled from those data banks.”
IT TOOK LONGER than Meetra expected for T3 to decipher and translate the files from Nathema into something she could scan with the ship’s computer. It was nearly two days before she could begin looking through the files. However, she reminded herself, considering he was processing millions of terabytes of data originally compiled on computers using fundamentally alien technology, the fact that he accomplished anything at all was a small miracle.
During her initial investigations several things quickly became clear. The building they had raided had been some type of archival storage office, a mundane but vital component of any complex government. It contained government documents, historical accounts and transcripts, and, most p
romising of all, detailed census records collected from numerous worlds.
From the census data it became clear that Nathema had once been part of the Sith Empire. Oddly, all the records seemed to predate the Great Hyperspace War. Whatever event had stripped Nathema of all life and left it devoid of the Force must have happened almost a thousand years before.
Because of that, it was impossible to tell if the Sith Empire as described in the records still existed. But given T3’s holorecording of the red-skinned being taking Revan, Meetra was willing to bet it still survived in some form.
Revan had left Bastila behind because he feared the greatest threat to the Republic’s survival was lurking in the Unknown Regions. The reemergence of the Sith Empire certainly qualified.
The theory also fit with what Canderous had told her. The Mandalorian had claimed that Revan asked him to restore the glory and strength of his people so they could stand against the Sith should they ever try to invade the Republic again.
According to the census records, the Sith Empire comprised several dozen planets. The Sith who had taken Revan might have come from any one of those worlds; if she could figure out which was his home, she might be able to narrow her search.
However, as she cross-checked the names and galactic coordinates of the listed worlds, Meetra quickly realized that they were all planets already known to the Republic. Over the last thousand years, the Jedi had systematically purged every planet mentioned in the census of their Sith influence: these were the records of a Sith Empire that was no more.
Refusing to give up, she dug deeper into the datafiles they had gathered, examining records pertaining to Nathema itself. For several days she pored through the archives, stopping neither to eat nor to sleep. Every few hours she refreshed herself with a quick meditation break, drawing on the Force to replenish her fading stores of energy and mental focus so she could continue her work.
There were tens of thousands of government documents and reports collected from over fifty different agencies, but Meetra refused to be daunted by the monumental task. She continued to pore through the archives, and slowly a picture began to emerge.
The people of Nathema had spent their last days in a terrified and desperate state. They had known it was only a matter of time until the Jedi found them, and the ruler of Nathema—a Sith named Lord Vitiate—had preyed upon his people’s fear. Transcripts of Vitiate’s public speeches were filled with graphic warnings of what the Jedi would do once they arrived. Records confirmed that his speeches had been broadcast and transmitted across the whole of the Empire, sowing the seeds of terror among all the Sith worlds. Vitiate had consciously and carefully driven the people into a state of panic, knowing they would blindly follow anyone who offered hope.
Vitiate was quick to fulfill that role, and he put out a call for all the other surviving Dark Lords to join him on Nathema in a ritual that he promised would lead the Sith to salvation.
At the same time he was doing this, Vitiate also had top historians and scientists secretly trying to determine the location of a planet called Dromund Kaas—the long-lost homeworld of the original Sith species.
Meetra discovered this only because of T3’s exceptional slicing skills. The astromech had not only copied and translated all the data from the archives, but also decrypted the pass codes to unlock classified government files, which he had then marked as having top priority to help simplify Meetra’s investigations.
The team Vitiate assigned to search out Dromund Kaas had operated in total secrecy, sequestered day and night in a research lab as they studied the ancient star maps and astrogation charts. Fortunately the leader of the team had been a meticulous record keeper, and every step of the process had been carefully documented—including the moment of triumph when they were finally able to theorize a hyperspace route that would lead them safely back to Dromund Kaas, where the Jedi could never follow.
The final entry in the team leader’s project log detailed her efforts to prepare her findings so they could be presented to Vitiate in person. Lord Vitiate publicly proclaimed the commencement of his great ritual just three days later.
Chronologically, there were no records after the proclamation. Nothing from the research team; nothing from any of the other departments. It was as if every member of Nathema’s sprawling government had simultaneously vanished from existence. Even without any official account of what had happened next, however, it wasn’t hard for Meetra to put the missing pieces together.
The ritual had obviously destroyed Nathema, snuffing out all life on the world. Lord Vitiate had offered his people hope, and instead had brought them a fate worse than death—utter eradication of life, existence, and even the Force.
Meetra was no expert on dark side sorcery, but it was safe to assume Vitiate not only survived the ritual, but emerged more powerful than ever. And with the destruction of everyone on Nathema—including his research team—he alone would have known the location of Dromund Kaas.
The plan was both horrifying and brilliant. In addition to becoming more powerful than Meetra could imagine, Vitiate could blame the extinction of his homeworld on the Jedi, further panicking the remaining Sith worlds. Then he could have offered them a glimmer of hope, promising to lead all those who swore loyalty to him to a place where the Jedi would never find them.
If Vitiate had been as cunning as Meetra imagined him to be, he wouldn’t have led his followers directly to Dromund Kaas. Instead, he would have taken them on a long and trying exodus—during which the Sith would have been forced to turn to him time and again for support and guidance, their dependence on him growing until he went from leader to hero to savior. By the time they finally reached Dromund Kaas, they would likely have worshiped Vitiate as a god—all-powerful and all-knowing.
Fascinating history, to be sure, but Meetra didn’t know how it could help her find Revan. Vitiate’s grand plan had taken place over a thousand years earlier. Surely Vitiate himself was long dead, and even if he had led the Sith to Dromund Kaas, there was no guarantee they were still there.
There were other possibilities to consider, as well. The Sith were an aggressive and war-like species; it was possible that Dromund Kaas was just one of many worlds in the Unknown Regions that had fallen under their control over the last thousand years. It was possible—and even likely—that the red-skinned being who had captured Revan had taken him to an entirely different planet, one she had never even heard of. But at least she had a lead. And no matter how slim the odds of finding her mentor, Meetra wasn’t about to give up. She trusted in the Force; eventually it would lead her to him.
From the census records, it was clear that humans were—or had been—part of the Sith Empire. If Vitiate’s followers had settled on Dromund Kaas, she should be able to pass among them by posing as a mercenary, a role she knew well from the years she had spent living as the Exile in the Outer Rim.
As she punched the hyperspace coordinates from the research team leader’s logbook into the nav computer, T3 came over and chirped inquisitively.
“We’re going to a world called Dromund Kaas,” Meetra said as the Ebon Hawk made the jump to lightspeed. “If Revan’s there, we’ll find him.”
CHAPTER 19
SCOURGE TYPED IN the access code to unlock the door leading to the underground holding cells built beneath Nyriss’s stronghold. He didn’t acknowledge the guards standing watch as he stepped through, and they made no move to stop him. He had passed the checkpoint hundreds of times, and they had stopped bothering with Murtog’s official security protocols long ago.
He descended the stairs to the dimly lit, dead-end hall at the bottom. There were four doors, two on either side. Beside each door was a monitor, showing a holovid of what was happening inside each cell. Three of the cells were empty; the fourth had been occupied by the same prisoner for the past three years.
The image showed Revan seated in a familiar position, his legs crossed and his hands resting palms-up on his thighs. His eyes were closed,
his face calm … though Scourge knew that had as much to do with the medication as the meditation.
The prisoner had not left his cell for even a single moment since his capture. There was a refresher in the corner, a small sink and a bed against one wall. In the beginning they had brought in a chair to strap him to for his interrogation sessions, but after the first few months Scourge convinced Nyriss that torturing Revan was an unproductive waste of both time and resources.
By that time Revan had already told them everything—as much as he could remember, at least. He had revealed that the Jedi had wiped away most of his early memories, including all traces of what had happened to him in the Emperor’s dungeons. He had confessed that he had come to Nathema in the hopes of reclaiming his lost past, following the same trail he had embarked on years before.
He couldn’t tell Nyriss anything about what she really asked. And though she still suspected he had been dominated by and then broken free of the Emperor’s will, the scientists she had brought in to study him had been unable to find anything useful with all their testing and research.
After six months Nyriss had lost interest in her Jedi prisoner. Her attention moved on to other plots and intrigues, though she kept him alive just in case. But while Nyriss ignored Revan, Scourge had become obsessed with him.
The Jedi’s command of and connection to the Force was unlike anything Scourge had sensed in anyone else. Even though Revan was constantly drugged, it was impossible not to sense his strength. After years of studying him, Scourge had come to understand why the Jedi had such a fearsome reputation among the Sith. With men and women like Revan in their ranks, it was easy to see how they had beaten back the Sith invasion a thousand years earlier. And it confirmed what he already suspected: the Emperor’s plan to launch another invasion against the Republic at this point in time was tantamount to suicide.
The Old Republic Series Page 87
