CHAPTER FIFTEEN
RAN DAN’S FOLLY
Je’daii must know their limits. There are places we should not go, things we should not do, powers we should not seek. The Force has an incredible strength, but a Je’daii’s true strength is in knowing when to use it, and when not.
—Master Shall Mar, “A Life in Balance,” 7,541 TYA
She chases him across Talss, alone, without weapons or supplies or equipment, following his trail where she can find it, doing her best to sense his presence and direction when she cannot, and it is three days before she has an inkling of where he is heading.
Lanoree knows she should not have simply run. She should have waited for Dam-Powl, and now fears what the Je’daii Master will think of her. But she is confident that she will not be a suspect in Skott Yun’s murder. And if she is, the time will come to put things right.
Lanoree is doing what she can to avoid losing her brother forever. Everything feels unreal, nightmarish. Dalien is a murderer! She has been made to grow up, and her world has changed forever.
Talss is a wild, sparsely populated land, and the farther south she goes, the more alien the landscape becomes. It is sometimes called the Dark Continent, and she is beginning to understand why. She descends from the hills onto a wide, endless plain, almost devoid of any plant growth over waist height. She wonders why for a while, and then half a day across the plain the first of the winds strikes. An initial gust steals Lanoree’s breath and knocks her sideways, and she curls into a ball against a low rock as the most powerful wind she had ever known rips across the landscape. The tall, thin grasses that she has come to hate—her lower legs and hands are crisscrossed with cuts from the grasses’ sharp tips and sheer edges—whip around her, lying almost flat across her body and yet weathering the storm. She feels the dribble of blood from fresh grass-cut wounds, and now lying down her face is lacerated as well. She struggles to breathe.
All the time she is trying to make herself as small as possible, and find as much shelter as she can behind the rock, she fears that Dal will continue walking through the storm.
She pushes for him, taking comfort in flowing with the Force. He is somewhere ahead, his mind a riot of confusion. It has been the same since leaving Anil Kesh, and Lanoree is not certain whether it is intentional. He knows her so well, knows how she will try to reach him. Perhaps this is his best defense.
Just before dusk the winds start to ease, and she stands and hurries on. She is thirsty, hungry, and cold. Frost sheens countless blades of grass, hardening them, forming a landscape of glimmering jewels for as far as she can see in every direction. It is beautiful and is like wading through a sea of blades.
Dal, stop, for me, she thinks, pushing the thought as hard as she can ahead of her. There is no telling whether he hears.
She has come to believe that the Old City might be his destination. That’s where the true Tythans lived, he used to say. So little was known of the city and its former inhabitants that she could not argue, and he had built a romanticized view of those tumbled ruins, pyramids, and the unplumbed depths of its caverns and canals. Some say the Gree built the Old City and lived there for tens of millennia. Others postulate that the Gree merely borrowed the place for a while and that its true builders were lost forever to the mists of deep history. It is a mystery. And mysteries of the past are what Dal seeks.
The Old City lies in the southern regions of Talss, a wild, remote place called the Red Desert, frequented only by explorers and those desiring to leave civilization behind. It’s said that blood spites stalk the nights and haunt the underground. It is rumored that they are half plant, half animal, untouchable by Je’daii talents, and that they feed on warm blood. She feels a frisson of fear when she thinks of it.
Once there, what will Dal do? She cannot know. Perhaps he doesn’t know either, and in that doubt might be her one chance to win him back.
But he’s a murderer.
She tries to ignore the thought. She will confront that fully when she finds him, and decide what to do then.
Confused, conflicted, Lanoree finally leaves the plains of slashing grass and chases her brother into the first rolling dunes of the Red Desert.
At dawn the next day, Lanoree shivers awake from a dream.
She is down in the darkness beneath the Red Desert. The weight of the Old City hangs around her, crushing her from all directions with its enigmatic history and a million untold tales. She is in a network of elaborate caverns, all of them illuminated by flickering firelight burning somewhere out of sight. The walls and ceilings are beautifully inlaid with pictograms of the timeless Gree, and though she is certain they tell of long-forgotten histories, she cannot perceive the true stories. It’s as if even with the truth laid out before her, she can never understand what happened here.
And then the blood spites appear: soundless, deadly, batlike things the size of her head with clasping tendrils and dripping teeth. She has no hope of fighting them off. They circle her in the confined spaces, darting in and biting chunks from her face, her neck, her waving arms. She feels no pain, but her blood flows. She cries out for help.
Her brother watches from the shadows.
Lanoree sits up and stares at the wide, star-speckled sky. The dream is already fading, as most dreams do, and she recognizes the blood spites from the few times she has read about them and how she imagines them to be. She has never seen any holos or pictures. In her dream they are monsters, but the real beast merely watched.
It’s a chilling sensation. As she rekindles her fire and looks for food and water, using survival skills taught to her by her parents from a young age, the idea of Dal as a monster does not fade. Her dream spills into waking hours. Or perhaps in dreams, she could merely see the truth.
She has only slept for a short time, and she hurries to pick up Dal’s trail again. Trying to recall maps and legends of the Red Desert, she calculates that the Old City might be eighty kilometers farther to the south. And though she has lost Dal’s physical trail, she is now certain that the ruin is his destination.
Lanoree has always been fit, and she starts to run out across the larger dunes and into the Red Desert. She runs for ten hours, pausing now and then in areas of ragged plant growth to dig for water. She overturns rocks and eats bugs and ants, and at one stage she scares some desert wraths from a recent kill. The meat is rich and tough, and she eats it raw.
The Red Desert is beautiful and daunting, barren and silent. It is a place that would inspire poets and madmen, and she does her best to remain inwardly focused as well as outwardly alert. It would be easy to lose oneself out here. Her sense of who she is remains firm, and there is a familiarity that gives her great comfort—the Force, strong in every sun-bleached rock and grain of sand.
Just before dusk, she sees the first ruin. It is a tumbled wall at the base of a gentle slope, little more than a pile of blocks half-buried by shifting desert sands. But it is obviously not a natural formation. And the cold chill the sighting provokes convinces her that she is almost there.
Lanoree climbs the slope, and toward its summit she sees footprints. Pausing, she looks around, but Dal is nowhere in sight. She places her hand, fingers splayed, across one boot print in the sand and closes her eyes. But the sands here are hot and ever moving and imbued with a timeless history the breadth of which startles her upright.
“Dal, we shouldn’t be here.” It is the first time she has spoken aloud since leaving Anil Kesh three days before. Nothing answers.
Reaching the top of the hill she emerges into the last of the day’s sunlight once again. A kilometer to the west, the sun sinking into its ruin as if that place has always been its home, lie the sprawling remains of the Old City.
Wishing desperately that everything could be different, Lanoree walks toward it.
As she enters the shadow of the Old City’s largest pyramid, the first blood spite attacks.
In the Peacemaker, pursuing Dal and his Stargazers past Malterra’s orbit and toward Sunspot, Tre Sana was quieter than Lanoree had ever known him. But she did not question his silence. They had seen terrible things, witnessed a tragedy of shattering proportions. And though she knew of his past as a bad man, Tre’s shock could not be feigned.
The tracker seemed to be working well, and Lanoree had plotted the projected course of Dal’s ship three times. Each time the destination came out the same—Sunspot. And she thought she knew why. The incredible device had been built for the Stargazers by the scientists of Pan Deep, but to charge it with its driving force Dal had to visit Sunspot. The mines there were deep and incredibly dangerous, but the rewards for working there were great. Exotic elements that could be used for fuel or weapons. Crystals that sang with Force power. And perhaps, exposed to the correct technology, a touch of dark matter.
Dal’s ship had an eight-million-kilometer head start. Lanoree had tried plotting a more direct course to Sunspot, but following Dal would be the fastest route. She had pushed her Peacemaker to its greatest speeds, aware that the modifications she had commissioned made it one of the fastest ships in the system. Yet Dal remained out of reach, matching her speed, forging the fastest route to meet Sunspot on its quick orbit of their star, Tythos.
Settled into their route, Lanoree initiated a contact with Master Dam-Powl. It took a while for the signal to be acknowledged, and a while longer for the chime of an incoming connection.
“Lanoree,” Dam-Powl said, and even before the flatscreen snowed in to show her face, Lanoree knew that the Master knew.
“I can’t believe he did it,” Lanoree said, “just to cover his tracks. To make others think he was dead.”
“Perhaps there’s more to it than that,” the Je’daii Master said. She looked tired and drawn, and Lanoree could only imagine the conversations she had been having with the Je’daii Council. The diplomatic fallout with Nox, the efforts to calm a volatile situation … but that was beyond Lanoree. She had to stay focused.
“What more?” she asked.
“He must have shared rare knowledge with Pan Deep for them to make his device. To ensure his uniqueness, he’d have to kill them all.”
“But the whole of Greenwood Station?” Lanoree said. “It’s monstrous.”
“Not everyone died,” Dam-Powl said. “Some transports got away before the final strike.”
“How many were lost?” Lanoree asked quietly.
“So many that the numbers mean little.” The Master sighed heavily, then she seemed to gather herself. “So. What progress have you made?”
“Dal and the Stargazers are traveling to Sunspot, I believe to arm the device. I have a trace on him and I’m following, but I’m hours behind.”
“You can’t get in range to destroy his ship?”
And kill my brother? Lanoree thought, but she could not share that thought. “No, Master. Whoever is funding his madness bought him quite a special ship. I can’t read its signature, but it wouldn’t surprise me to discover it’s Je’daii.”
“Stolen?”
“I can tell you more soon.”
“Sunspot and Malterra approach each other in their orbits,” Dam-Powl said, frowning. “You know what happens once those planets draw close. Magnetic interference, space storms. Any space travel in their region will be impossible.”
“Then he’s timed this to the heartbeat,” Lanoree said. “He’s planned everything in great detail. I’ll have to catch him on Sunspot.”
“Do anything you have to, Lanoree.”
“Of course.”
“Anything.” The Master’s gaze softened.
Lanoree did not reply for a moment, and the silence between them was loaded. Then she thought of that madness of Dal’s that she had barely touched down in Pan Deep, and how all-consuming it had felt.
“Be strong, Lanoree. I know you are. But the responsibility is heavy, the price of failure might be unimaginable. So be strong. Experiences like this, such tragedies, can be what makes a good Je’daii great. May the Force go with you.”
Lanoree nodded and broke the communication. She remained sitting in the cockpit for some time, thinking things through, saddened and afraid. And she surprised herself by finding comfort in Tre’s presence.
Her Twi’lek companion came to sit in the seat beside her. The last time they’d traveled like this there had been a lightness to him, a protective bluster. No more. The silence was heavy, yet neither of them broke it. Lanoree checked the ship’s systems and kept an eye on the scanner, always aware of him sitting silently alongside.
It was a long while after her communication with Dam-Powl that Tre spoke at last.
“I feel sick.”
“As do I,” she said. “Whatever Dal has become I can’t believe he would—”
“No, I mean …” Tre trailed off and then vomited copiously between his feet. Ironholgs crackled in alarm, and Lanoree climbed from her seat and surveyed the mess. The ship’s support systems sprang into overdrive, but the air filters could not work fast enough to swallow the stink.
“Oh,” Lanoree said.
Tre was panting and wiping his mouth, sweating, shivering. “S-sorry.”
“Nox,” she said. “We breathed too much of its atmosphere.”
“You?”
“I feel fine.” Do I? she thought. She assessed herself and found nothing of concern, save her mixed emotions about Dal. But there were still two days’ traveling until they reached Sunspot. If Tre sickened, there was nothing she could do but practice the medical skills she had learned at Mahara Kesh. And if he died, there was the air lock.
But she could not fall ill. She only hoped that Tre’s sickness was a result of Nox’s poisonous atmosphere, not something more insidious he might have caught. If at any point he appeared contagious, she might have to take action.
She looked away from Tre for a moment at the cockpit screens. The signal from Dal’s ship was still on the tracker, still eight million kilometers ahead of them. She could not take any risks.
But she knew she could never throw Tre from the air lock alive.
“Use my cot to rest,” she said. “I’ll clean it up. Drink plenty of water.”
Tre did not argue. He pushed past her, lay on her cot, and slept almost instantly.
Lanoree looked down at the vomit spread across the cockpit floor. “I wish you had arms,” she said to Ironholgs. The droid grated something that sounded like a chuckle.
Over the next two days Tre did not grow any worse, but neither did he improve. He ate small amounts of food, but more often than not brought it back up. He drank plenty of water. Shivering and sweating in Lanoree’s cot, his sleep was troubled, and his dream mumblings were incoherent and disturbing.
Lanoree spent most of the time in her cockpit seat, keeping track of Dal’s ship and catching brief, uncomfortable naps. Her dreams were vague and unpleasant. She woke more than once with the idea that something was flapping silently about her head, slashing with barbed tendrils and seeking her blood.
And she had one dream where she watched from outside the system as Tython itself, and Tythos, and then every planet and moon that orbited it, was swallowed to nothing. Billions of lives and loves and dreams wiped out almost in the blink of an eye.
As they approached Sunspot at last, she accessed the ship’s computers to remind herself about the damned place. She knew that environmentally it was even more unwelcoming and harsh than Nox. Her research reminded her how much so.
Sunspot was the first planet of the system. Its orbit sometimes took it as close as forty-eight million kilometers from Tythos. It was considered a solid planet, yet much of its surface was in constant turmoil, volcanoes and quakes changing its landscape almost from day to day. Its more settled areas were mainly at the poles, and it was here that the scattered mining communities were located. It was perhaps the harshest inhabited environment in the Tythan system, yet the rewards for the miners were huge. Most only lasted one or two seasons before leaving the planet and vowing never to return. Around 10 percent of those who went to Sunspot seeking their fortunes died there. It was a hungry planet, and though it gave, it also took as much as it could.
It was also a curiosity in the system, because it orbited counter to every other planet. There were those who speculated that it was a rogue planetoid, tumbled into Tythos’s gravity well in the distant past. This raised some startling ramifications, and three thousand years ago there had been a series of exploratory missions visiting the planet, searching for any signs of previous habitation. But none had ever been found: no trace of civilizations, no ruins, no evidence that any sort of life had ever flourished there. Sunspot was a dead planet that breathed the white-hot breath of molten rock, and the rest of the system regarded it merely as a resource.
Even approaching Sunspot’s dark side, the violence of its surface was obvious. It radiated a steady glow from a fine network of volcano ranges and magma lakes and rivers, and the shadows of noxious gas clouds the size of a continent filtered the light, turning it an almost attractive pinkish hue.
“Southern pole,” Lanoree said. Dal’s ship had slowed considerably and was entering the atmosphere, swinging around to approach Sunspot’s south pole from the planet’s dark side. She had already calculated a similar path, and the Peacemaker’s computer was taking them in.
There was a possibility that Lanoree could even close the gap between them and shoot Dal down before he landed. Her customized laser cannons were powerful and accurate, and the Peacemaker carried four drone missiles that were effective at eight hundred thousand kilometers. But if she missed, he would be alerted to her presence.
Yes, that was why she didn’t open fire. The advantage of surprise. She convinced herself of this as she made ready to take to the surface, and Tre watched her every move.
“I wish I could come with you,” he said for the tenth time.
“No, you don’t,” Lanoree said.
“True. I don’t. You take me to the nicest places.”
“Says the Twi’lek who took me to the Pits.”
Tre watched as Lanoree prepared herself. She changed her clothing, and lacking her lost sword, she plucked a spare sword from a cabinet beneath her cot. It was the weapon she had trained with before Master Tem Madog had forged her own. She hefted it in her hands, swung it several times, and remembered its weight. It was a surprising comfort.
“It becomes you,” Tre said.
“It’ll have to do.” She sheathed the sword—the screech lizard sheath remained at her hip—and knelt by the cot again. She removed two blasters from the cabinet and slipped them into her belt. Tre watched, eyebrows raised. Lanoree only shrugged.
A chime from the cockpit signaled that their descent had begun. She felt the familiar shifting in her stomach as they entered the atmosphere and the Peacemaker’s grav units faded out, and she watched Tre, wondering if he’d vomit again. But he held himself together.
She indicated that he should strap himself in, then sat next to him on the cot.
“You don’t want to land the ship yourself?” he asked.
“I will. Once we’re close to the surface. But Tre”—she squeezed his shoulder—“I’m leaving you in my Peacemaker. My ship. This is my home, and I’m trusting you to treat it well.”
“I’ll guard it,” he said.
“Ironholgs can do that, and the ship has its own defenses. Just … don’t touch anything. Anything!”
“Trust me,” he said, smiling. His eyes were watery and weak, his skin pale, lekku limp.
“I have to,” she said.
The Peacemaker rocked and kicked as it sliced down into Sunspot’s violent atmosphere. Lights glowed, warnings chimed from the control panels, and the screens darkened as heat burned across the hull.
Lanoree climbed into her flight seat, taking control of the ship. She checked the scanner, uploaded a terrain map onto another screen, and accessed the ship’s computer to download as much information as she could find about the area.
Dal and his Stargazers had landed at a small mining outpost called Ran Dan’s Folly. According to her records the mine worked a deep source of petonium and marionium, both elements used to power ships’ drives and that could also be weaponized. The mine had been in existence for almost a hundred years, and there seemed to be nothing spectacular about it that set it aside from any other Sunspot business concern. A tragedy thirty years ago in which a hundred miners lost their lives. A strike eighteen years ago that led to violent riots and an eventual buyout by the workforce and their families off planet. Shipping and trade deals with parties on at least three planets, including Tython. If Ran Dan’s Folly was a source of dark matter, nothing had ever been noticed, and no one knew.
No one but Dal.
Lanoree experienced a brief, chilling fear that her brother had found the tracking device she’d planted on him and placed it on another ship. She’d followed for three days, and all the while he had been heading for Tython. Perhaps he had a supply of dark matter already sourced and waiting to be implanted in the device. Maybe even now he was on Tython, down in the Old City, going deeper than anyone had ever been and readying to activate the hypergate. Any moment now …
“If it’s even there,” she muttered. She was still unsure. In all this, the hypergate’s existence was the one nebulous factor. But whether it existed or not, the danger was just as pressing.
“This is Dal,” she said, watching the scanner as it tracked his ship until it landed. The red spot became blue as it fell motionless, and Lanoree dipped the Peacemaker to the south so that she could approach Ran Dan’s Folly over a blazing rift in the planet’s surface. She needed as much cover as possible.
She also needed a plan.
But time was short. Malterra and Sunspot grew closer. Dal was still one step ahead.
She would have to make this up as she went along.
Lanoree crouched behind a rock, looking at the mine and the haphazard collection of buildings around it, and wondered how anyone could live there. The minehead itself was at the base of a slope of shale and tumbled rocks, encased in a rickety steel structure with two giant lifting cranes protruding through the roof. The surrounding buildings were low, built almost entirely from rock, and connected by chains, presumably for navigation between buildings during the terrible storms that swept the area. There were no windows. Three heavily armored land cruisers were parked close against the buildings’ walls, and the wrecks of several more were scattered around the area, slowly corroding into the sterile ground.
Further along the low valley were three landing pads for whatever freighters and other craft could be used in such an atmosphere. Dal’s ship rested on one of these pads, and Lanoree knew now why she had not been able to run him down. His ship was a Deathblaster, and one that had seen action, perhaps even during the Despot War. A great swath of its left flank was scorched black, and areas of the hull had obviously been replaced and repaired judging by their color and styling differences. It was a mean-looking craft, sister ship to the renowned Deathstalkers, except large enough to carry a payload of bombs, equipment, or passengers. They were even rarer than Deathstalkers now—many had been destroyed during the Despot War; many more dismantled afterward by the Je’daii; and those that survived were usually in the hands of mercenaries, Shikaakwa warlords, or at remote criminal settlements out on some of Mawr’s moons. From the speeds Dal’s ship had attained, there was a good chance that it had been customized.
She checked the area one more time from behind the rock pile, then ran at a crouch toward the Deathblaster. She kept to the shadows, knowing that Dal would have left some of his Stargazers preparing the ship for a rapid escape. Probing out gently, she sensed two minds, their thoughts untroubled. The Stargazers were excited; their plans were coming to fruition. She wondered what Dal would say if he knew how much they had lowered their guard.
The moment begged for action, not diplomacy. And though disabling them would have been her preference, Lanoree could not risk even the slightest chance of these two coming around while she was down in the mine. Before she moved, she sought comfort in the Force for what she was about to do. Desperate measures for desperate times, she thought. And she remembered how so many had died in agony on Nox.
Close to the ship’s still-hot engines, the Iktotchi woman didn’t know what had hit her as Lanoree’s sword parted her head from her shoulders and severed the long, distinctive horns. She darted up the ramp into the ship, where the second Stargazer stood comically motionless, head cocked at the strange sound of steel cleaving flesh he’d heard from outside.
“Don’t—” he said, and Lanoree stabbed him through the heart. He was dead before he slumped to the deck.
She glanced around the ship’s hold. Empty, and now deserted but for the dead. She ran back down the ramp and headed for the mine. The blazing air burned her lungs, and she knew she should have donned a protective suit and breathing apparatus. But she did not want her movement and senses impeded in any way, and soon she would be belowground.
At the main mine building she paused and crouched down, peering inside through cracks in the old, dilapidated structure. There was no movement, and she sensed no one inside.
She heard an explosion in the distance. Startled, she turned and raised her sword. Kilometers away, beyond a low rise to the north, the sky glowed with the huge, pulsing fires of an active volcano. Clouds of smoke and ash billowed kilometers high, lit from within by wild electrical storms. Deadly lava bombs arced through the air. The ground rumbled as if from fear.
Inside the enclosure she approached the two elevators that provided access into the mine. Both were still, shaft doors open, but only one of the cages had descended. If she activated the other, she would alert anyone below.
She looked into the dark, empty elevator shaft. It was a long way to fall.
Sheathing her sword, Lanoree delved into her utility belt and brought out three short lengths of thin, strong rope. She tied two together and formed a harness beneath her arms and around her wrists. Then she clasped the end of the third length tightly in her left hand and, without giving herself time to consider the madness of what she was doing, she leaped, swinging the rope around one of the taut elevator cables, catching the other end, bracing her feet against the steel cable and pulling tight. She shook for a moment as she found her balance, and the air was filled with a gentle hum as the cable vibrated from the impact.
Starting to slide down, she tested the strength of her boots dragging against the cable, only hoping the strong leather would not be burned through by friction in the descent. That would hurt.
She sped up. Darkness whisked by. She probed outward with her Force sense and felt the open space around her, the shaft square and braced at regular intervals with heavy steel props.
Faster than she’d expected the bottom rose toward her, and she pulled at the ropes and pressed her feet hard against the cable to slow down. She misjudged slightly and struck the elevator cage’s roof hard, driving the wind from her lungs and causing a clanging thud that would have been heard by anyone nearby. But there was no reaction, no shout of alarm. After she’d gathered her breath, Lanoree lowered herself down between the elevator car and the shaft’s wall.
At first glance the mine reminded her of the tunnels beneath Greenwood Station’s central tower. There were occasional, flickering lights along the narrow corridor leading in two directions, and the walls and ceiling were roughly formed. But it was hot. Heat simmered from somewhere down below, the floor sizzled her worn boots, and a faint glow seemed to flood into the corridor far away to the left.
She sensed something moving rapidly toward her along the corridor. Holding her old practice sword before her, Lanoree was struck by the gust of hot air and thrown to the ground. She rolled to one side and tried to catch her breath, but the fearsome wind stole it away. The scorching blast—the result of drastic temperature differentials, perhaps—simmered her clothing and stretched her skin. She squeezed her eyes tightly shut.
Sunspot was trying to bake her alive.
The hot wind growled against the walls and then faded away, and Lanoree took a deep breath.
She smelled sweat.
Opening her eyes, trying to stand, she sensed the heavy rock swinging for her head, gathered all her Force talents to deflect the injury, but she was far too late.
A brief pain, and then darkness fell.