CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE DESCENT
Never forget that we were brought here. Tython is a planet rich in the Force, but it is also a place of mystery, unknown to us, existing here for eons before the Tho Yor arrived. Its age is deep, its stories deeper. We are but residents here; our true home is in the Force.
—Master Deela jan Morolla, 3,528 TYA
For Tre, the descent must have been terrifying. The Peacemaker blazed, hull creaking in protest at the incredible forces and terrible heat, flames smearing the windows, acceleration pressing him back against the seat with enough pressure to make his ears and nose bleed and his lekku drain of blood. Lanoree barely noticed these physical effects. The Force was in turmoil, and the closer she came to home, the more lost she felt.
But though she sought Dal and his mad plans, she was not convinced that this storm was connected to him. She sensed it all across Tython, erupting from the deep places of the world and springing from the widest skies. The disturbance was powerful, but the planet still stood solid.
She thought again of that vision in her dream and the strange feeling she’d had flying through the violent space between the inner planets.
Dal is my focus, she thought. Gripping the flight stick she urged the Peacemaker into an even deeper, more dangerous descent. She was forcing the ship past its design constraints and thrusting it into the danger zone. But there was no other way. Every breath she took between now and finding Dal might be one breath too long, and her last.
The Peacemaker burst from the clouds above Talss. She headed west, skimming hilltops, watching scanners confused and disturbed by the ongoing Force Storm, and an urgent chiming marked a partial return of her comm signal.
She immediately sent a signal for Master Dam-Powl. It was answered in moments, and the flustered Master appeared on the Peacemaker’s flatscreen.
“Lanoree,” she said. “I … the worst.”
“Master! Dal gave me the slip, but I know where he’s going, and I know what he has.” Dam-Powl’s image seemed not to be hearing the message. She looked older than before, distracted, and she was not as well presented as usual. Lanoree could not even tell where the Master was transmitting from; the room around her was clean, modern, empty.
“… ship from out of system …” Dam-Powl continued speaking, but Lanoree could not hear. She adjusted some controls, checked transmit levels. But the storm’s effects were insurmountable.
“Master, I’m almost at the Old City. Are there Je’daii there waiting for him?”
“… withdrew, but there are safeguards,” Master Dam-Powl said. She seemed to gather herself and stare at Lanoree from the flatscreen. “He must be stopped. Whatever is happening now … end it all.”
“Master?”
“I sense that everything is about to change,” Dam-Powl said. She went to say something else, but the screen snowed and her voice disappeared into a crackling haze of interference. Lanoree tried one more time, then turned the comm unit off.
What had she meant? A ship from out of system? One of the Sleeper ships returned? Lanoree was more than intrigued, but she was also set on her course, and Master Dam-Powl’s words did nothing to dissuade her.
“Please, just land this thing,” Tre said. “I’ve got nothing else to throw up.”
“Almost there,” Lanoree said. She looked across at Tre, pleased that he seemed a little better. Perhaps whatever had poisoned him on Nox could be treated, given time.
“What’s the plan?” he asked. His lekku were stroking either side of his face as if giving comfort.
“Plan?” she asked.
“Is she always like this?” Tre asked Ironholgs over his shoulder, and Lanoree smiled. The droid issued no reply; some of its circuits were fried, and it was in need of repair. Again, given time.
The ship jolted as a streak of Force lightning arced down and split the sky. Lanoree cringed and jerked the ship to one side. To crash now would be—
A chime from the sensors. She leaned to the left and shielded a scanner from reflected light from outside, and then she saw it. Several kilometers in the distance, and at least thirty kilometers from the first ruins of the Old City.
“What now?” Tre asked.
“Crashed ship.” She tweaked the sensor controls, then sat back and sighed in satisfaction. “Something going for us, at last.”
“His?”
“Yes. Deathblaster. Let’s take a look.”
She brought the Peacemaker in low, the remaining laser cannons at the ready for any aggression. The Deathblaster might have been a wreck, but that didn’t mean it didn’t have fight left in it. She circled at a distance, scanning for life-forms. There was nothing. If the Stargazers and her brother were still on board, they were dead.
She felt a pang at that, unsure whether it was grief or regret.
“Why not just blast it?” Tre asked. The ship had landed hard, gouging furrows from the soil across a low hillside, and then broken up when it struck a rocky outcropping. There was no sign of fire or explosion.
“Can’t in case the device is still inside,” she said. But that was not the whole reason. “Setting down.”
They landed with barely a jolt, and the Peacemaker seemed to croak and sigh with relief. As she was about to speak, Tre held up one hand.
“Who’s going to look after you if I stay here?”
“I was just going to say you don’t need to come,” Lanoree said. “This was never really your fight.”
Tre’s face darkened and his lekku dipped to communicate anger. “It’s everyone’s fight,” he said. “We just happen to be the only two here.”
“You sound like a bad holo.” Lanoree smiled and opened the hatch. Hand on sword hilt, Force senses fogged by the storms that raged across Tython’s surface, she stepped down onto her home planet one more time.
They split up as they approached the crashed Stargazer ship, and Lanoree’s nervousness grew. She did not want to find her brother dead among the wreckage. Whether that said she was a good person, whether it spoke of an unreasonable sense of forgiveness, she did not know. It simply was. She had always held out hope for him. Even as he turned that blaster on her and she had a split second to partially shield herself with the Force, she had felt so sorry for him.
A fool, perhaps. But a sister for sure. She hoped her parents would be proud.
Lanoree closed on the ship and probed outward with her Force senses. She could not detect anyone inside at all. Tre approached slowly from the other side, and when he hefted a rock and threw it at the hull, she ran forward to tackle anyone who emerged. But all was silent.
She climbed the tilted hull and shone a glow rod through a smashed door. The insides were a mess—crushed paneling, hanging wires and cables, a tumbled seat, and hardened impact-foam formed around the empty shapes of at least four people. She could see two bodies still encased in foam, and the parts exposed were badly mutilated by the crash.
Lanoree signaled for Tre to wait where he was, then climbed inside. Neither body was Dal’s. She breathed a sigh of relief, then jumped at a particularly strong crash of lightning from outside.
There was no sign of the device. And no evidence of a battle or being shot down. The Force Storm had downed this ship, and she wondered at the stroke of luck.
She touched the hull on the way out, then slid down the ship’s back to the engine cowls. They were still almost too hot to touch.
“Thirty kilometers to the Old City, and they’re on foot,” she shouted.
“How long ago?” Tre asked.
“Not long. Still hot. But we need to hurry.” They ran back to the Peacemaker, and Lanoree took off and drifted them quickly across the landscape. Tre sat beside her and kept his eye on the scanners as she steered them through valleys and around rocky summits. She was more than aware of the element of surprise they had on their side once again. Dal thought she was dead.
Approaching the Old City, she experienced flashbacks of the last time she had been here. After finding Dal’s bloodied clothing and believing him dead, she had returned to Anil Kesh to face the repercussions of his final acts. Following the inquest into Skott Yun’s murder—for which blame was laid squarely on Dal—she had been granted a period of leave, during which she had traveled home and told her parents everything that had happened.
They had blamed themselves. And Lanoree had blamed herself. A distance had grown between them, and when the time came to embark upon the rest of her Great Journey—alone this time, a situation she would grow to prefer—she had grabbed at it.
She had never returned to the Old City. Dal was dead and gone, some thing had taken him down, and there was nothing to be gained from visiting that place again.
Besides, there was the sense of fear that had flooded her, which she had attributed to the immense age of the place, the unknown history, the mystery that even the Force could not enlighten. She had never spoken of it. She believed that place should always be left alone.
And now, here she was again.
“Sensors don’t show any life-forms,” she said.
“No Je’daii here? Surely they’d be guarding against him getting past you?”
“I think Master Dam-Powl said they withdrew.” She pointed up at the sky. “There’s something else going on. Connected or not, I think we’re on our own.”
“You Je’daii and your mysteries,” Tre said, lekku shrugging. “So where are they?”
“They must have gone down already.”
“Down?”
“There are tunnels beneath the ruins. Caverns. Lakes. Deep places.”
“I’ve had enough of the underground.”
Lanoree looked at him, one eyebrow raised, although this time she did not say, You don’t have to come.
“Let’s make it quick,” Tre said.
“You’re feeling better?”
“Your drugs are keeping it at bay.”
Lanoree landed the ship, and together they approached the Old City.
The landscape seemed overfamiliar, though she had been here only once. Almost as if she had always wished to return. She led them through a shallow valley and past a hill that might once have been a pyramid. They followed the footprints of four people in the long, damp grass. Her heart was beating fast, and a sense of impending dread crushed in around her. They really believe they’re here to start a hypergate! she thought, and the idea was staggering. If everything went wrong, they might doom the system. But if the hypergate was real and the device actually worked, Dal might be building a step to the stars.
What explorer could not feel a thrill of excitement at that?
At last they stood close to an entrance to the Old City’s underground, and Lanoree recognized it as the way she had come before. A sense of déjà vu struck home, hard, and much that had happened since that first fated descent felt like a dream.
“I don’t like this place,” Tre said, snapping her back to reality. “Feels …”
“Strange,” she said.
I sense that everything is about to change, Master Dam-Powl had said.
Once again Lanoree pursued her brother beneath Tython’s surface, not knowing what might lie beneath.
Not long after descending from the light they came across the first of Dam-Powl’s safeguards.
The Cathar Stargazer woman had been sliced into several parts. Her head had rolled down a slight slope and now rested, staring up at them. The rest of her lay scattered across the tunnel floor. The blood was still wet and warm, its smell sickening. Her eyes reflected Lanoree’s glow rod light accusingly, and Lanoree sensed the Force about the trap that had been sprung here. Set into the wall was a series of laser pods, all of them expended now. But they had fulfilled their purpose.
“Only Dal and two others left,” Lanoree said.
“And now they know there are traps.”
“I doubt they’ll fall for the next one.”
“Let’s hope we don’t,” Tre said.
“These are set by my people,” Lanoree said.
“Then there must be something down here worth protecting.”
Lanoree did not reply, because she had thought the same. The Je’daii Council had charged her with stopping her brother, and they had surely assumed that she would have succeeded long before now. This was the final step in his plan, and still he was ahead of her. But they would not have guessed that. These traps were here to prevent anyone from entering the deeps of the Old City. And they had been placed recently.
They continued their descent. Lanoree probed ahead, her senses less befuddled down here. Perhaps the Force Storm on the surface was calming, or maybe the solid bulk of Tython between her and the storm acted as a shield. The Force felt disturbed, but settled. She used it with confidence, and the next trap was obvious.
Dal and the others had also been aware of it. They had filled a robe with rocks and thrown it ahead, and the shredded material and cracked rocks bore the scorch marks of spent laser pods.
“They’re moving quickly,” Lanoree said.
“How can you tell?”
“That’s my brother.” Lanoree drew her sword as they moved on. She recognized some of the caverns and tunnels, the large stepped descents and the strange engravings on some of the walls, but she kept focused. The pursuit, the Je’daii safeguards, they were all that mattered.
If it existed, she had no idea how far down the hypergate might be.
As they crossed a hallway with carved stone pillars and plinths bearing strange, time-worn sculptures, she saw a flash in the distance. It illuminated a high, arched doorway for a moment before fading, then came again. The white-hot scorch of a laser blast.
“Another trap triggered,” Tre said, and Lanoree nodded. They were close. She ran.
Perhaps expectation smothered caution. The chase was almost at an end, and her determination to face Dal again before he triggered the device was a hot, driving thing. She probed with her Force senses, detected nothing amiss, and trusted that. She did not take into account that her senses were obscured and that the Force was once again shivering at the storms above.
Whatever the reason, she led the way into danger.
The laser trap had been set across a wide tunnel, and smoke was still rising from the heavy object that had been used to spring it. The rock had been neatly sliced in two, severed parts glowing. They can’t be more than a hundred steps ahead, she thought, and as she concentrated on running quietly, shielding her mind, and readying herself for what was to come, she saw a flurry of movement on her left.
“Lanoree!” Tre shouted behind her, and he pushed her forward. Maybe he tripped, shoving her as he fell. Or perhaps he did so on purpose.
The hail of blaster fire echoed across the tunnel, smashing rock to molten pellets, and the Stargazer had fired five times before Lanoree raised her sword. She deflected two more shots and leaped across the tunnel with barely any effort. She landed beside the man and swung the sword, severing both of his arms just below the elbows. Forearms and blaster fell to the ground. The man gasped quietly, and took two steps back until he was standing against the tunnel wall. He looked down at his gouting stumps, then up at Lanoree, eyes wide.
She swung her sword through his chest, cutting him almost in two. As he dropped dead, she turned around, ready to encourage Tre onward and tell him to be careful, because now Dal and the last Stargazer knew they were close on their tail.
But Tre did not need telling, because he was dead. One blast had struck him high on the side of his neck, scorching across the back of his skull. He had fallen onto his front, arms still outstretched.
“Oh, Tre,” Lanoree whispered, because she didn’t know what else to say. She dashed to his side, ready to snatch up his blaster and run on.
A bubble of blood formed at his nose.
She touched his hand, his wrist, and felt a weak pulse fluttering like a bird in a trap. The wound looked bad, yet he still breathed.
But Lanoree knew there was no time.
“I’m sorry,” she said, and she left Tre in the dark and ran on. Her only comfort was in knowing that, were he conscious, he would understand.
As she had been that first time in the depths of the Old City, she was now alone.
Soon, Dal was alone as well.
Careful now, more attuned than ever to the ebb and flow of the Force through these ancient subterranean rooms, Lanoree sensed the last Stargazer long before he knew she was there. He was hiding on a high step that led up one massive wall, blaster aimed back the way he and Dal had come.
Lanoree climbed higher. She moved quickly and quietly, barely even disturbing the air around her, and every moment she watched for the movement that would show that he had heard or seen her. But she was a shadow. When she was high enough, she moved forward and dropped on the Stargazer from above.
She thought of questioning him about where Dal had gone and how he was armed, but she could not take the chance. She’d seen one of these Stargazers explode suicide belts without a second thought. And, she supposed, there was also anger behind the swing of her sword. The Stargazer’s head bounced down three large steps, and she landed softly on the ground just as it settled beside her. She was already running again. Dal might not know that the last Stargazer was dead, but he would assume that he was on his own now.
Him, and the sister he had shot and left for dead.
“Dal!” Lanoree shouted, surprising even herself. She paused, then smiled. It felt good to call his name. And not because he was her brother and she still held out any hope for him because, at last, she did not. No more hope. She enjoyed calling his name because in her voice she could hear the anger and disgust she was feeling. So many people he had killed to fuel his fantasy. Even his sister.
If their parents were to suddenly appear, he would kill them as well.
“Dal! I’m coming to stop you, now. No pleading! No more chances! Just you and me, and last time down here you spilled your own blood.” Her voice echoed away, filling huge rooms and grand tunnels that might never have heard such language before. She wondered at the Gree tongue and what these places had seen and heard so long ago. She felt the heavy, dense power that filled the place, and did not care. She was tired and enraged. Her balance was unsettled, but she let the anger drive her on. It sharpened her senses.
Deeper, and her glow rod fought harder against the darkness than ever before. Perhaps the farther down she went, the heavier the dark.
And then Dal was there, standing in a room that might once have been a bathing place. He’d thrown several glow rods in a rough circle around him, and resting by his feet was the device. He must have been carrying it on his own, and Lanoree was amazed that something so powerful did not bear more weight.
“I think this is far enough,” Dal said.
“I’m not stopping now,” Lanoree said. She slowed, but kept walking toward Dal.
“I don’t mean you. I mean this. Here. It’s far enough.”
“Here?” She looked around. “But where is the—?”
Dal bent down to touch the device.
“Don’t!” She drew a blaster and aimed it at Dal’s head, sheathing her sword. And she knew without any doubt that it would take nothing for her, now, to pull the trigger.
“Not a very graceful weapon for a Je’daii.”
“You stole my sword.”
“Looks like you have another, and you’re not afraid to get it bloody.”
“This one isn’t special.”
“Oh. Right. Yeah, I dumped that other one in deep space.” He was still half crouched, fingers splayed, and she watched his other hand.
I should shoot him right now.
“Come with me,” Dal said.
“You shot me.”
“And yet you’re here. My tough sister.”
“The Force saved me. Ironic, don’t you think? You mock it so much, and yet it’ll be your undoing.”
“It looks like a blaster will be my undoing.”
They stood that way for a while. Lanoree did not relax for a moment—her finger on the trigger, her eyes on Dal, her Force senses ranging and yet never quite fully aware. The storm was abating, but the Force on Tython was still stirred.
“You’re a bad man, Dal.”
“I’m fighting for what I believe in!”
“That doesn’t mean you’re not evil.”
“I won’t stop,” he said. “I won’t give this up, Lanoree. Not after so long. Can’t you feel it? Can’t you sense it? You have no idea—”
“I don’t care,” she said.
Dal stared at her, the older, madder Dal she still did not know. “Can’t you just wonder?” he asked softly. “Aren’t you at least curious about what might be out there?”
She did not reply.
“Where we came from,” he said. “Our origins. Our birth planets. Places where we belong but which we were torn away from. Our heritage in the stars, Lanoree. Doesn’t even a small part of you wonder?”
“Yes,” Lanoree said after a brief pause. “But not at the risk of everything I know and love.”
“Then shoot me.” He reached lower.
Lanoree’s finger tightened on the trigger. And eased again. Instead, she closed her eyes and took the greatest risk of her life.
She pushed a memory of them together. Pushed it with all her might. The Force left her with a clap! and for a while she was actually alive in the memory as it formed in Dal’s mind, as real there as she was in this ancient subterranean bathing place for the Gree.
They walk together beside the river back at Bodhi Temple, young, almost carefree, watching the weave birds nesting in the trees and the river water carrying clumps of roundweed as large as small islands. The young Lanoree laughs in delight and sees Dal do the same. His eyes are wide with surprise. For that moment he is back there with her—and Lanoree saw her brother’s eyes grow wide and wet where he hunched over the device, and she thought, Now!
She shoved again, but this was no mere memory. She gathered every flaming, blazing, wretched image she had witnessed over the past days—the explosions and death across Greenwood Station, the mines deep on Sunspot, those who had died beneath her sword, the violent conflagration in the skies of Tython—and heaved them at Dal. His mind recoiled and for an instant his face was a child’s, displaying shock and anger at her deception.
Then her brother began to scream
He staggered back, crying at the wretchedness, the pain, the suffering she had pushed his way. Lanoree Force-shoved him back. He stumbled, then tripped over his feet and went down.
She moved beside the device, blaster clasped in one hand. I stopped him! she thought, and a great weight vanished from the depths of her chest. She pressed her hand there and felt the heat of her healed wound.
Dal’s scream lessened. He stood, shaking his head, rubbing at his face, and running fingers through his hair. His breathing remained labored, each inhalation shuddering.
Defeated, she expected him to run. And she would have let him. He’d have lost himself down there and died, or maybe he’d have gone farther than Osamael Or and disappeared into the Old City forever.
But he did not run. And when he looked up she saw a completely different expression on his face.
Rage.
“Stay out of my head!” he roared, and he came at her.
Lanoree raised the blaster, but Dal, somehow, was quicker. His hand flashed out, she saw something flitting through the air between them, and then a cool pain erupted in her hand. She dropped the blaster and staggered back, looking at the slim metal blade stuck through her palm and slicing the heel of her hand in two.
Then Dal was on her, and every second of attention he had paid at Stav Kesh came to the fore.
Startled, Lanoree failed to deflect the first punches and kicks. Dal’s skills had always been in combat, and she reeled from the blows he rained down on her. She held her wounded hand to her side but he aimed for it, one kick catching the blade and slicing deeper, a punch pressing her hand back against her hip and snagging the blade’s end on her clothing. Lanoree cried out in pain. Dal grinned.
He came at her again, but this time she had recovered enough to be ready.
As Dal fought with every martial talent and all the strength he had, so Lanoree drew on her training. Her years as a Ranger. Her closeness with the Force. Everything Dal hated, and she used it all against him.
A punch caught Lanoree across the shoulder and she shoved with her uninjured hand, Force-punching him across the cavern. He struck a column and slid down, struggling to stand again. Lanoree snatched up the blaster and did not hesitate to pull the trigger.
Nothing happened. The dropped blaster must have been damaged.
Dal crouched, picked up a rock, and threw it.
Lanoree deflected it with the Force and it shattered into dust.
Dal drew two short knives from his belt and attacked once again. Lanoree dropped the useless blaster and drew her sword, parrying his knife thrusts. She held the blade one-handed, but even then she knew she had the better of him. She almost felt sorry.
Then he threw a knife at her face, and as she Force-shoved it to one side, he leaped at the device.
Lanoree had no time to think, and if she had she would have done the same. She swung the sword in a high arc, up over her head, down toward where Dal would meet the device.
She closed her eyes at the last moment and felt the sickeningly familiar sensation of sword parting flesh.
Something moved and hit the ground, and Lanoree had to look.
Dal’s right arm lay severed beside the device, fingers still splayed. The blade was buried deep in the side of his head. He slumped down, moving slightly, eyelids flickering. He looked at Lanoree, his body seeming to relax, and for the first time since childhood she truly saw the Dal that had once been. But he no longer knew himself.
Dal’s eyes flooded red, blood ran from his ears and nose, and then he was still.
The sudden inaction and stillness came as a shock, and Lanoree let out one heavy, startled sob of relief and sorrow. She probed out gently, expecting to feel rage and hate, his familiar anger at her touching him with the Force, and his determination to complete what he had begun.
But there was no more Dal. Her brother was gone, and all that was left was this sad, broken body.
She turned her back on Dal while she made sure the device was stable. She thought so. She also thought that the strange power she’d sensed down here nine years before existed now as something like a held breath, matching the shattering potential of the device. The darkness at its heart was horrible. But she was not the one to deal with it.
She had left the sword with Dal. It was not her real sword. And she had no wish to wipe her brother’s blood from its blade.
Soon, she would carry the device back to the surface and into the Peacemaker, and if Tre still lived she would do what she could for him. Poor, brave Tre. She would transport them both to Anil Kesh, the Temple of Science. More talented Je’daii than she would examine and make safe the device, and better healers would give Tre their full attention. She would demand that of them. She would insist.
After that, she would meet the Je’daii Masters who had set her on this mission. She would tell them everything that had happened, and request permission to recover Dal’s body so that she could take him home. She had decided that she would tell her parents everything.
After all that, there was one more journey to take, and some final questions to ask.
Temple Master Lha-Mi would grant everything she asked, because she might have prevented a cataclysm.
What she would not tell the Je’daii Masters, ever, was just how long she sat there next to her brother’s cooling body, staring at his device’s activation panel.
Wondering.
Only wondering.