The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  Khedryn worried for Marr.

  And despite himself, he worried for Jaden.

  I do not quit, Jedi. He had said those words. They sounded like self-mockery, like a bad joke. He did quit. He was quitting.

  Unbidden, Relin’s words bubbled up from the soup of his memory, the Jedi wan, haggard, the walking dead—You cannot always run, Khedryn.

  But he always had. Not so much from fear of danger as from fear of standing still.

  He cursed under his breath as he walked, each stride punctuated with a soft expletive. The guilt did not relent and he could not believe what he had come to. He was seriously considering turning around to stand next to a Jedi he’d only just met and possibly face foes against which he could do nothing.

  Maybe he had turned a corner, too.

  And maybe he’d stared out too many viewports while moving through hyperspace and gotten the madness.

  The comlink blurted static, putting his already racing heart in the back of his throat.

  “Stang,” he hissed, his steps already starting to slow. He was still moving in the same direction but only by way of inertia, not propulsion.

  Time to change course.

  Jaden studied the scene, imagining the battle in his head. Security droids, backed by a squad of stormtroopers, had been waiting when the clones came up the lift. Blasterfire and smoke had filled the hall. The clones, deflecting the shots with their lightsabers, had cut their way through both men and machines. When all had gone quiet, one of the medical corps’s doctors had approached the clones, perhaps pleading for mercy or arguing for reason and calm.

  They had decapitated her.

  He suspected no staff had escaped the facility and, for the first time, he seriously considered the possibility that no clones remained on the moon—that they had taken whatever ships had been available to the staff and fled into the Unknown Regions.

  As the dire implications of that settled on him—Jedi–Sith clones roaming space–a burst of static exploded from the comlink. He winced as if it were blasterfire.

  “Say again, Khedryn?”

  More static. Perhaps they were losing contact altogether.

  He picked his way through the aftermath of the battle, feeling as if he were walking through a graveyard, the large pieces of the droids the metallic tombstones. When he reached the doors, he looked down at the corpse. Time had drawn the skin tight over the bones and discolored it to ash. The trousers and lab coat, stuffed with a headless body, struck him as obscene. He read the name on the coat—DR. GRAY.

  He flashed back to the holo-log, the fear he had seen in her eyes when she had recorded the final entry.

  She had been right to fear. A clone had decapitated her, probably while she stood there unarmed.

  Jaden stared at the lift doors and flashed back to the air lock door on Centerpoint Station, the frightened eyes staring at him through the tiny viewport. They had been those of someone who, though armed, was not dangerous.

  He reached for the button to summon the lift, cognizant that the same hand and the same gesture had spaced more than two dozen people on Centerpoint.

  Somewhere behind the walls a mechanism hummed. The lift still functioned. He stood there awaiting it, living for a moment in his past, in his guilt.

  The lift arrived, opened. Dr. Gray’s head lay in the center, the open eyes on the mummified visage staring holes into his soul.

  For a moment his feet remained stuck to the floor, pinioned there by Dr. Gray’s eyes. Random static from the comlink freed him from his paralysis.

  “I am heading down,” he said to Khedryn.

  He entered the lift, turned his back to Dr. Gray, and watched the doors close. He tapped the button on the control panel for the lower level. The lift began to sink, and Jaden with it.

  By the time Khedryn reached the recreation room and its sabacc table, he had resolved to stop.

  “I’m coming back,” he said to Jaden, but feared the static in the connection had disrupted the transmission. On impulse and without looking at them, he took the cards from the single sabacc hand he had left unturned on the table and stuffed them in his pocket. He decided they totaled twenty-three, no matter what they showed. Someone in the facility must have been lucky.

  His comlink coughed more static but he caught the tail end of whatever Jaden said.

  “… down.”

  “Say again, Jaden?”

  A voice spoke in his ear, and breath that smelled of rotting meat warmed his neck.

  “He said he was heading down.”

  Khedryn whirled, bringing up his blaster. Kell seized the human’s right wrist and held the arm out wide while the blaster discharged, putting a smoking hole in the sabacc table. Cards fluttered into the air like freed birds.

  Kell’s and Khedryn’s daen nosi whirled around them, the arms of their personal spiral galaxy. Staring into Khedryn’s misaligned eyes, Kell projected, Be still.

  The human showed surprising resistance, swinging an overhand left that caught Kell on the temple. The punch might have knocked a human unconscious, but it only surprised Kell.

  Frowning, he squeezed Khedryn’s wrist hard, felt the bones start to crack.

  Khedryn winced with pain, grunting through the wall of his clenched teeth. He tried to twist his cracking wrist free from the vise of Kell’s grip but did not have the strength. The human punched Kell in the face once, twice, again, again. Kell absorbed the blows, his nose trickling blood, and squeezed as hard as he could.

  The bones of Khedryn’s wrist snapped at last and the human shrieked with agony, spraying saliva. Kell did not release his grip, but instead ground the bone shards against one another, the coarse friction a music of pain under the human’s flesh.

  Khedryn’s scream went on and on, ending only when Kell took him by the throat with his free hand and lifted him from his feet. The human hung in his arms, clawing with his one good hand at Kell’s grip, trying to draw breath, his legs spasming with the effort.

  Kell watched his daen nosi twist around the human’s and overwhelm them, strangling Khedryn’s possible futures just as Kell strangled his body. He looked into Khedryn’s pain-dazed eyes.

  Be still, Kell projected, more forcefully, and Khedryn at last went limp. One of the human’s eyes focused on Kell, the other off to the left, perhaps seeing the end approach.

  Out of habit, Kell opened the slits in his cheeks and his feeders slipped free. The human, lost in his pain and the maze of Kell’s mental command, did not appear to notice them until they began to slide up his nostrils.

  He kicked feebly and shook his head, fighting against Kell’s mental hold. But his struggles proved futile. Kell’s feeders knifed their way through the nasal tissue. Khedryn’s eyes watered. Blood leaked around the feeders, out the human’s nostrils, and into his beard and mouth.

  Only then did Kell realize what he was doing, that he felt nothing, that he was risking revelation by surrendering to his appetite prematurely.

  The possibility of feeding on the human’s soup elicited no longing, no yearning expectation of revelation. He looked at Khedryn’s daen nosi, found them uncomplicated entirely, lines of fate that did nothing more than curl back on themselves forever, leading nowhere, offering nothing.

  Khedryn Faal did not offer revelation. No one did.

  Except Jaden Korr.

  Their lines were connected, Kell’s and Jaden’s. Only Jaden’s lines, once enwrapped by Kell’s, would map out the road to understanding, would scribe characters of revelation for Kell to read. Only then would Kell have what he had sought for centuries.

  Disgusted with himself—and with Khedryn—he pulled back his feeders. They came clear of Khedryn’s face with a wet, slurping sound. A flood of blood and snot poured from Khedryn’s nose. Kell lowered Khedryn to the floor, loosening his grip on the human’s throat.

  Attempting to draw in some air, Khedryn instead aspirated some of the blood and snot and began to cough. When he finished, he looked up into Kell’s f
ace. The human’s eyes watered; a network of popped blood vessels made a circuit board of his eyes; blood and mucus slathered his mustache and beard.

  “What are you?” he asked, his voice as coarse as a rasp.

  Kell almost answered by reflex, I am a ghost, but stopped himself.

  “I am a pilgrim,” he said instead.

  Khedryn’s face screwed into a question and Kell, distracted, drove his fist into the center of it. Khedryn did not make a sound. His nose shattered, blood sprayed, and Kell let him fall on his back to the floor unconscious. He gathered up Khedryn’s blaster, searched him for other weapons, found none, stripped him of his comlink, and left him on the floor.

  He considered slitting Khedryn’s throat with his vibroblade, but realized that he was indifferent to Khedryn Faal. And he would no longer murder with indifference. Perhaps his apathetic butchery had been the reason revelation so long eluded him. He must kill only with his spirit on fire.

  And he was burning for Jaden Korr.

  And Jaden had headed down.

  Kell left Khedryn behind and followed after Jaden. His pilgrimage was nearing its end.

  Khedryn swam in pain, drowning, flailing, seeking release …

  He awoke on the cold floor of the recreation room, coughing blood. Each cough drove a spike of pain through his nose and nasal cavity. The metallic taste of blood clung to the roof of his mouth, near the back of his throat. He winced with remembered pain and terror, recalling the pointed appendages that had squirmed from his attacker’s cheeks and wormed up his nose. He’d been unable to breathe, unable to think, violated.

  Nausea seized him. He sat up, vomited blood, snot, and his last meal onto the deck, where it steamed in the cold. Forgetting the details of his injuries, he steadied himself with a hand on the floor and his broken wrist screamed in protest. The pain from bone grinding against bone almost caused him to pass out. He held on to consciousness through sheer force of will.

  After the room stopped spinning, after the pain in his wrist grew bearable, he used a chair from the sabacc table to help him to his feet. His shattered nose did not allow air to pass, so his breath wheezed through his mouth, left hanging open like a cargo bay door.

  As he rose, he fixed his eyes on a sabacc card that had fallen from the table, staring at the image on it—a grinning clown face in an absurd hat. The Idiot. He almost laughed.

  His body ached from the beating. The adrenaline dump and the aftereffects of the terror he’d felt left him weak, shaking, barely able to stand. He tried to collect his wits, gather his thoughts, endure the pain in his wrist.

  Had the creature been one of the clones? It had seemed a Force-user. He’d felt it slip into his thoughts and command him to be still. The greasy feeling of being mentally violated had been reminiscent of Jaden’s use of the mind trick.

  Why had it left him alive?

  He did not know and did not care. It was enough that he was alive.

  He reached for his comlink, thinking to warn Jaden, and found it gone. The creature had taken it. He looked around the room for his blaster, saw that it, too, was missing.

  The creature seemed concerned only that Khedryn be unarmed and unable to warn Jaden. He had no particular interest in Khedryn, apparently. Khedryn understood the message—Leave and it’s all over. He had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  It had seemed exactly so since he had first met Jaden Korr.

  “One problem after another,” he murmured.

  Dizziness overcame him. His legs gave way and he sagged gingerly into a chair at the sabacc table, struck with the fact that the last people to sit there were all dead.

  He daubed his nose, wincing at the pain, and slowly drummed his fingers on the table. He thought of Marr, of Relin, of Jaden. All were putting their lives in danger for … what?

  For something bigger than themselves, he decided. For something they believed in.

  What did Khedryn believe in?

  His drumming fingers waited for an answer. He decided they could wait a long time.

  He flashed on his last conversation with Marr. His friend had said that helping the Jedi was the right thing. He’d been certain of it.

  Khedryn stopped drumming his fingers.

  He could not always run.

  “Kriffin’ son of a murglak broke my kriffin’ nose.”

  He stood, fought down the dizziness, and headed back the way he had come. His wrist throbbed with agony. His nose leaked blood and felt as if it had been smashed with a hammer. But he was through running.

  He remembered the way to the lift, but he had a stop to make on the way.

  Jaden felt light-headed as the lift sank into the moon. He grounded himself in the Force while the hum of the lift’s motors proclaimed its rapid descent. By the time it slowed, he figured he had descended a hundred meters or more.

  The doors parted, the aged mechanism squeaking loud enough to make him wince. Air ten degrees warmer than that in the surface installation flowed into the lift compartment. It bore the whiff of things dead a long while.

  He stepped out and into a circular room with an overturned desk and chair near the single door that provided egress. Dried blood, brown and crusted, stained the walls.

  It was not a spray pattern, Jaden realized. Someone had slathered it on the walls as if it were paint. The shapes and patterns made no sense to him, their meaning plain only to the mad.

  The lift doors closed behind him. He activated the comlink.

  “Khedryn, do you read?”

  In the silence, his voice sounded as if he were speaking through a voice amplifier. Water dripped somewhere behind the walls, the rhythm that of the distress beacon.

  The comlink exploded in static.

  “Khedryn, do you read?”

  More static. He was too far underground. He muted the comlink and walked into the room. He realized with horror that he was walking on clumps of hair, lots of it. Human hair. Brown, black, blond, gray. It was scattered all over the room, like fallen snow.

  He knelt down and took some in his palm. Ragged pieces of the root clung to the clumps, little brown bits of dried scalp that made Jaden’s mouth go dry. The hair had been ripped out in handfuls.

  Dread settled on Jaden like a funeral shroud. The ceiling suddenly seemed too low, the light too dim, the whole of the complex as oppressive as a tomb. Whatever had happened in the facility had been not merely violent, but macabre.

  A large brown stain covered the floor near the desk, as if someone had bled out there. Other than the unsettling scattering of hair, he saw no sign of any bodies.

  Licking his lips, he put his hand on the door control—not a hatch but an ordinary door—and it slid open. The stink of old death—a stale, sickly sweet stench—wafted through, stronger than before. He wondered when he would encounter the bodies. He knew it was only a matter of time.

  A wide, curving corridor stretched in either direction. From the angle of the arc, he surmised that the corridor formed a circle and came back on itself.

  Putting his free hand on his blaster, as tense as a coiled spring, he went left. Blaster marks scored the white duracrete walls here and there. Blood spattered the walls. Together, the scorches and blood looked like some ancient, indecipherable script, pictographs of violence. Again, he found stray pieces of stormtrooper armor, souvenirs of the slaughter that had occurred. Again he found no bodies.

  At intervals he encountered double doors along the inner wall. All were closed and would have required a card reader to pass, but the readers had been destroyed by either blasterfire or lightsaber.

  Wanting to understand the layout of the complex, he delayed opening any of the doors until he walked the entire corridor. As he had suspected, it formed a circle. Each pair of double doors stood opposite another pair. Drawing a line between each would neatly bisect the circle ringed by the corridor, another example of the Imperial fetish for symmetry.

  He walked to the nearest set of the metal double doors. In addition
to the destroyed card reader, the doors also had a manual lock and bar. The bar, a rod of titanium alloy, lay on the ground near the doors, bent.

  Whatever was behind those doors, the doctors had not wanted it to get out.

  But it had gotten out, and it had slaughtered everyone in the facility.

  Jaden took a handle in hand, conscious of how cool the metal felt in his palm, and pulled it open.

  A narrow corridor led straight about ten meters before ending at another metal door. Above it was written:

  OBSERVATION DECK

  Hallways and rooms opened along the corridor’s sides, and Jaden noted them in passing—a few offices with chairs and desks overturned, loose flimsies cast over the floor, destroyed computers and data crystals scattered everywhere; a conference room, its chairs toppled, the conference table cut into pieces by a lightsaber. A wall-mounted vid display had a burn hole like a singularity in its exact center. He assumed that there was a laboratory somewhere, but he did not stop to look for it. His feet carried him of their own accord to the door that led to the observation deck.

  A half-full caf pot sat on the floor in the corner of one office, somehow completely unaffected by the chaos. Caf mugs, too, littered the floor here and there, all of it the ruins of ordinary activity and interaction.

  His eyes caught an unexpected shape and he stopped, staring at it.

  Set atop an overturned desk was a single shoe, a woman’s shoe browned with dried blood and still wrapped in an age-yellowed steri-slipper, the kind worn by laboratory techs.

  The scene struck a visceral chord in Jaden, repulsed him. Someone or something had to have consciously placed the bloody shoe there, as if its presence exactly there were important, as if it were some kind of trophy, as if it made some kind of sense.

  A realization struck him. He was seeing reified madness.

  Dr. Gray’s head, the hair on the floor, the shoe, all of it the acts of deranged minds.

  The clones had gone mad. Perhaps they had been unable to reconcile the two poles of their origin, Jedi and Sith. Perhaps a misstep along the sword-edge a Force-user walked would lead not to a fall into the dark side so much as a descent into madness.