by Troy Denning
“I don’t know.” Luke admitted. He shook his helmet and started up the corridor again. “But I intend to find out.”
A few steps later, the next section of lighting activated and they found themselves facing the curved bulkhead of the station’s central sphere. Their way forward was blocked by a translucent membrane bulging out toward them. Luke touched his gloved fingertips to it, then pressed lightly and felt it yield.
“That’s air pressure,” Ben observed. “It must be an emergency bulkhead seal.”
“Probably,” Luke agreed.
Luke activated his wristlamp and shone it through the center of the membrane. The view beyond was blurry, but he could see enough to find himself struggling to reorient his sense of direction. They seemed to be looking down into a dome-shaped chamber, with themselves and the membrane located near the top and a bit off to one side. A shoulder-high rail ran down the curving wall to the dome’s circular floor, which had a ring of hatches running along its outer edge. Some of the hatches seemed to be open, but it was impossible to see more than that.
Luke reached out with the Force again and felt the Presence somewhere beyond the chamber. It was clear and strong and as large as a cloud, concentrated in the darkness ahead. But it was floating everywhere around them, too, above and below and behind. He felt it snaking up inside him, a growing hunger that longed only for his touch.
A shudder of danger sense raced up his back. Luke deactivated his wristlamp and stepped away from the membrane.
“You feel it, too?” Ben asked.
Luke nodded. “And it feels us.”
“Yeah.” Ben looked away, then activated his headlamp and shone it up an intersecting corridor. “So which way to an air lock?”
Luke was concentrating too hard to smile, but he was glad to hear his son sounding so determined. It didn’t mean Ben was ready to face every demon from his past, but it did suggest he understood the necessity.
When Luke didn’t respond right away, Ben swung his helmet lamp back around and said, “Right. Trust the Force.”
“Always a good idea,” Luke said, “but I had something else in mind.”
He turned his hand vertical and began to push his fingertips against the membrane.
“You think it’s a Killik pressure seal?” Ben asked.
“Something like that.” Luke continued to push, stretching the membrane so far that it swallowed his arm to the elbow. “We know they were here, so it seems likely they would have adapted their own construction techniques from this technology.”
By now Luke had pushed in his arm to the shoulder. He stepped forward, inserting his whole flank. The membrane continued to stretch. A lamp panel activated, flooding the room with white light, but his view of the chamber grew even blurrier. With nothing beneath him except a steep, curving wall, it felt like stepping off a cliff into a fog bank. He grabbed one of the rails he had seen earlier and brought his other foot across.
Luke started to slide down the wall, the membrane slowing his descent as it gathered behind him in a long, hollow tail. He was about halfway down when the tail closed, forming a new seal and bringing him to a sharp halt. He tried to pull free, but where the membrane had come together, it had grown rigid and unyielding. Releasing the rail, he unclipped his lightsaber and twisted around to cut himself free—then nearly fell when the tail of membrane suddenly snapped and sent him spinning.
He danced down the curving wall, fighting to keep his balance as changes in both the apparent gravity and his apparent attitude challenged even his Jedi reflexes. By the time he reached the bottom of the chamber, gravity had increased to about half normal, and he felt like he was standing on the wall he had just slid down.
Ben’s voice came over the suit comm. “Dad, you okay down there?”
“Fine.” Luke raised a hand to wipe his faceplate clear, only to discover that the membrane was dissolving before his eyes. When he did not see anything threatening, he said, “Come on through.”
“Affirmative,” Ben said. “Do I need to do that little dance at the end?”
Luke chuckled and looked up toward the membrane. “I guess that depends on how graceful you are, doesn’t it?”
The membrane bulged inward as Ben began to push through. Luke returned his lightsaber to his belt and, now that the membrane was no longer obscuring his vision, took a moment to examine the chamber more closely. Clearly, it was a primary access point to the station’s central sphere. It resembled a serving bowl that had been stood on its side. The wall to Luke’s right was the interior of the bowl, a deep basin that curved up to the membrane through which he had entered. Three meters above this one was a second membrane, no doubt providing access from another part of the station.
Luke was standing on what would have been the inner rim of the bowl, a walkway that curved gently upward both in front of him and behind him. To his left, where the bowl’s cover would be, rose a large, disk-shaped wall ringed by the hatches he had glimpsed earlier. About half of them were open, and through one of the doorways he could see the red strobe of a small alarm light.
Luke was just completing his survey when Ben arrived, nearly bowling him over as he came tumbling down the wall and crashed into a closed hatch. Ben cringed with embarrassment, and a long stream of static came over the helmet speaker as he hissed indiscernible curses into his microphone.
Luke glanced down at his son’s membrane-clouded faceplate, then commented, “So much for that remarkable Jedi balance.”
Ben cocked his helmet. “I thought you had to pull free.”
“Me, too.” Luke helped Ben to his feet and spun him in a quick circle, inspecting the vac suit for damage. “Everything looks fine. At least you know how to fall right.”
“Lots of practice,” Ben said. As the last of the membrane dissolved from his faceplate, his gaze dropped to the lightsaber Luke was still holding in his free hand. “Trouble?”
“Maybe.” Luke pointed up toward the hatch with the flashing red glow. “Let’s go have a look.”
Luke returned the lightsaber to his belt, then led the way toward the hatch. As they ascended, the centrifugal force of the spinning station kept them firmly secured to the walkway, so that they always felt as if they were standing at the bottom of the room. The queasiness that had come over Luke when they left the Shadow’s artificial gravity grew a little stronger, and the station seemed even more alien and dangerous than before. This was not a place hospitable to humans.
On the way to their destination, they passed two other hatches, both open. One led to a larger version of the sloping wall by which they had entered their current chamber. The other provided access to a long corridor lined every couple of meters with simple sliding doors. Judging by the rumpled cloth and spare vac suit parts spilling out of many of the open doorways, the cabins beyond had served most recently as private quarters.
As they drew near the hatch with the flashing red glow, Luke began to hear a faint, rhythmic buzzing from inside. He checked his environmental status. The atmosphere in this part of the station appeared to be within survival tolerances, so he opened his helmet’s faceplate—and immediately wished he hadn’t.
The air wasn’t just stale, it was fetid, reeking of a dozen different kinds of decay—a couple of which he had not smelled since the swamps of Dagobah. But there was also a more worrisome stench, an acrid odor that had filled the cockpit of his starfighter all too often: melting circuit boards. And the rhythmic buzzing was, of course, exactly what he had feared: the clamor of an alarm klaxon.
A surprised retch sounded behind Luke, then Ben gasped, “I think my sampler unit is feeding me static. This stuff can’t be breathable.”
“It sure isn’t pleasant,” Luke said. “Feel free to seal back up if you want to.”
“Are you?”
Luke shook his head. “I have a feeling it’s going to take all my senses to sort this out.”
“Then it won’t hurt to have an extra nose sniffing around,” Ben said. “You can s
top being so soft on me. Yoda wouldn’t approve.”
“Yoda would have made you do all the sniffing,” Luke said, stepping through hatchway. “And he would have had you convinced he was just trying to educate your nose.”
Beyond the threshold, they found themselves standing on the observation platform of a large, trilevel room. Outside the front viewport shone a pulsing mass of purple light, lined by crackling veins of static discharge and haloed by tendrils of shooting flame. Luke’s gaze was drawn to the strange radiance so powerfully that he found himself starting into the room without pausing to inspect the interior. He stopped three steps inside the hatch and corrected his mistake.
Each level was packed with tall white equipment cabinets, made of some carbon-metal composite that Luke did not recognize. Arranged in neat rows—one to each level—the cabinets stood about shoulder height, with slanted tops that were identifiable as control panels only because of the red lights blinking on their surfaces. Wisps of blue and yellow smoke were rising through the edge seams of several consoles and gathering up near the ceiling in a multilayered cloud.
Though the floors were littered with cast-off clothes, containers, and a generous layer of well-tracked grime, there was no sign of the corpses their noses had warned them to expect. Luke sent Ben to investigate the front of the room, then descended to the first row and stepped over to the nearest of the white cabinets.
Instantly a holographic representation of the entire station appeared a few centimeters beneath the cabinet’s surface, then slowly began to spin. Messages began to appear around the perimeter of the schematic, written in a strange, flowing alphabet that Luke suspected even C-3PO would not recognize. When they began to blink and turn colors, he touched his hand to one. The hologram immediately enlarged to show the interior view of a stores hold, so overgrown with gray-green mold that the shelves looked like tall, rectangular trees.
Luke stepped over to another cabinet, this one leaking yellow smoke from a tiny melt-crevice flanked by blinking red lights. Again, a hologram of the station appeared. He touched his hand to one of the blinking lights. The schematic swung around, pointing the end of one of its long cylinders directly at him. A pair of circles, one green and one red, appeared over the cylinder. The green circle was fixed in the heart of the cylinder, while the red hovered a millimeter to the left, flashing and adding its own urgent voice to the clamor of buzzing that filled the room. It seemed clear that something important was out of alignment, but it would have been folly to attempt guessing what.
Luke moved to the next row, where the middlemost cabinet had a long row of lights blinking down one side. This time, the hologram showed nothing but gravity vectors surrounded by words and figures in the strange alphabet. Eventually, he began to recognize the image for what it was—an arrangement of black holes.
As Luke studied the holograph, he had an idea. To check his theory, he traced the route he and Ben had taken to this station, and his heart leapt so high into his throat he thought he might choke. There could be no doubt that he was looking at a chart of the entire Maw cluster.
He touched the binary system where the station was located. This time, the hologram did not zoom in to give him a more detailed view of the immediate area. Instead, the image rotated, swinging the binary system around to the back of an egg-shaped grouping of black holes so thick that he could no longer find it through the tangle of letters and gravity vectors. As Luke studied it, he noticed a crescent-shaped gap adjacent to the binary system where there were no letters or vectors at all. He touched a finger to the top of this area.
Half a dozen sets of gravity vectors began to blink red, outlining a long crack in the otherwise solid shell of black holes. One at a time, a copy of each readout appeared in a corner inset, surrounded by letters and figures he did not have the faintest hope of deciphering. Luke had no idea what any of this meant—and he was beginning to have the sinking feeling that he really didn’t want to.
He was jarred from his thoughts when Ben’s startled voice sounded from the front of the control room. “Ah, kriff—this is bad!”
“What’s bad?” Luke snatched his lightsaber off his belt again, then Force-leapt over three rows of equipment and landed next to Ben in the front of the control room. “Be specific!”
Ben’s gaze swung toward Luke, his face pale and his jaw hanging slack. He raised a hand and pointed out into the darkness between them and the writhing mass of purple light.
“Bodies,” he said. “Lots and lots of bodies.”
WITH THE TEMPLE APEX PLAYING PEEKABOO BEHIND THE FOG AND A cold mist swirling over Fellowship Plaza, Jedi Knight Bazel Warv felt as though he were walking on air. Maybe the wet weather touched a species-memory of the cloud forests that had once covered his native Ramoa. Or maybe he felt light-footed because he had spent two hours that morning watching his favorite little girl, Amelia Solo, and the rest of the day in the company of his friend Yaqeel Saav’etu. And any day spent with Yaqeel was a good one. She was smart and svelte, with silky Bothan fur that resembled spun gold on misty days like this, and she never seemed embarrassed to be seen with a beady-eyed, jade-skinned hulk like Bazel.
But today Yaqeel did not seem entirely at ease. There was a thorny side to her Force aura that usually came just before she growled-down someone for being rude, selfish, or otherwise irritating. Bazel could not imagine that he was the target of her ire—he never had been before. Yet he didn’t think she could still be fuming over the way the lunch waiter had laughed when he tried to order a ten-kilogram basket of robal leaves.
Maybe Yaqeel was upset because they had not yet succeeded in their one assignment for the day: getting inside Tahiri Veila’s residence to determine why she wasn’t returning Jaina Solo’s calls. Unfortunately, they had been under strict orders not to get caught doing anything illegal, and the building’s Toydarian manager had not only resisted Yaqeel’s Force-suggestion efforts, but had taken offense and made it clear he would be keeping a close eye on the apartment all day.
Still, Yaqeel hadn’t seemed particularly disturbed at the time. She’d just shrugged and departed, then told Bazel they would return that night, after the Toydarian grew tired of keeping watch. So that left only one thing.
As they continued through Fellowship Plaza’s famous Walking Garden toward the Temple, Bazel began to growl and grunt in the guttural language of his species. It wasn’t Yaqeel that people had been avoiding all day, he assured her. She was too pretty for that. But between Chief Daala’s press releases and Javis Tyrr’s holoshow, Coruscant’s citizenry had to believe the entire Jedi Order was going insane. When someone saw a pair of Jedi Knights coming down the pedway these days, it was only natural to duck around the nearest corner—especially when one of those Jedi was over a meter wide.
Yaqeel swung her long ears down, pressing them tight to her skull in what Bazel had learned to recognize as an expression of gratitude and affection.
“Thanks, Barv.” She had started calling him Barv when they were hiding inside the Maw with the rest of the Jedi younglings, and the nickname had stuck. “But it’s not the public.”
She flicked an ear tip toward a row of neatly trimmed blartrees that lined the far edge of the broad pedway. “It’s them.”
Bazel didn’t need to look to know who them was, and he ventured the opinion that it was nothing to grow angry about. The Solos were just keeping watch because they were worried that he and Yaqeel might fall ill, the way their friends had.
Yaqeel cocked her head in surprise. “When did you notice them?”
Bazel rubbed his long chin and, because his Ramoan throat didn’t allow him to speak Basic, grunted his reply in his own language. It was difficult to recall whether he had smelled the Solos as he and Yaqeel were entering Tahiri’s building, or as they were leaving. Probably as they were leaving.
Yaqeel punched him in the shoulder, hard. “And you didn’t tell me?”
Bazel hadn’t realized he needed to; wasn’t her nose as large as his? Yaq
eel’s ears shot forward. “Gee, thanks.”
She picked up her pace. Bazel hastened after her, his heavy strides sounding like drumbeats as his big heels pounded the paving slabs. Beings ten meters ahead began to glance over their shoulders and look for convenient places in which to disappear.
Bazel paid them no attention. It wasn’t like Yaqeel to be touchy, so he was afraid he had really hurt her feelings. As he lumbered after her, he kept up a steady refrain of grunts and groans, trying to explain that her nose was really as big as his only in proportion to the size of her face. But Yaqeel wasn’t in any mood for explanations. She continued to move ever faster, until she was almost running.
They reached the end of the pedway, emerging from the Walking Garden into the open vastness of the Temple Court. Yaqeel continued to move at a brisk pace, angling for the south side of the huge pyramid, where there was a subsurface speeder gate that many Jedi employed as an entrance because of its inaccessibility to Javis Tyrr and his fellow holoslugs.
Finally, Bazel caught up to Yaqeel and spun around to block her way. Her eyes were wide and bulging, almost bloodshot, and the tips of her fangs were showing beneath her curled lips. Growing alarmed, he clamped a huge hand on her shoulder and demanded to know why she was suddenly so frightened of him.
Yaqeel’s ears flattened to the sides. “It’s not you, Bazel.”
Yaqeel never called him by his proper name; clearly, something was terribly wrong. He snorted a question, demanding to know what it was.
Yaqeel glanced over her shoulder, back toward the Walking Garden. “Them, of course,” she said. “Can’t you sense the change?” Now Yaqeel was really starting to frighten Bazel. When he asked her what change she meant, his voice broke into a shrill squeal that made passing beings circle around them even more widely.
“Oh, Barv, you’re just so … trusting.” Yaqeel took Bazel by the wrist and started toward the speeder entrance again, this time at a more normal pace. “Don’t let them know we’re on to them. That’s the mistake the others made.”
