Star Wars Riptide

THE MOMENT SOLDIER OPENED THE DOOR, A BLAST OF dark-side energy blew outward in a gust, as if it had been pent up for centuries. Soldier tucked Grace behind him and leaned into it as he might a strong wind.

“We’re here,” Seer said, quiet awe in her tone.

A large oval chamber stretched out before them, its high ceiling lost in the darkness. Filaments glowed in the walls and floor: white, green, red, and yellow, the lines of color packed so densely that the entire surface seemed aflame. The lines all converged on a cylindrical mound that sat in the center of the chamber. It stood twice as tall as Soldier and expanded and shrank at regular intervals, like a lung. Glowing filaments, these as thick as ropes, coiled around it and sank into the floor. Soldier felt the intelligence in it, and the reality of the situation hit him all at once.

Mother was not a person or thing in the station. Mother was the station. And they were staring at her heart.

“Do you feel her?” Seer said, grinning wildly. “Do you feel her, Soldier?”

Seer’s flesh, her sick, afflicted flesh, pulsed in answer to the heaves of the cylinder. So, too, did Grace’s. Soldier put a protective hand on the girl. He put his other hand on his lightsaber.

Soldier did not feel Mother, but Seer’s ecstatic rush of emotion pushed against his mind, threatening to catch him up in it. He resisted, as much out of habit as will.

Still, he realized that they had made it. After all they had endured, they had made it. Seer had been right. Mother would heal Seer and Grace, would give Soldier purpose. His eyes welled.

“We made it,” he said to Seer.

She looked over at him, smiling, her eyes, too, filled with tears of joy. “We did.”

“Can she … heal us?” he asked.

She touched his cheek, then turned and moved into the chamber. Soldier held his ground with Grace, feeling unworthy to enter.

“What is it, Soldier?” Grace asked.

“It’s Mother,” Soldier answered.

In response to Seer’s approach, the filaments in the walls glowed in organized curtains of red, white, green, and yellow, cascading down the walls and across the floor.

Soldier found them hypnotic.

Grace gasped in wonder. “So pretty.”

Soldier felt Grace’s awe, her wonder, and was pleased he had been able to bring her to Mother. If nothing else, he had done that, and it was of worth.

With each step Seer took, a splash of color formed under feet, so that she walked to Mother on circles of light. The ropelike filaments around the cylinder squirmed like serpents as Seer drew near.

Seer fell to her knees before Mother’s heart and bowed her head.

“We heard your call and traveled far to reach you, Mother.”

The filaments in the walls and floor answered with starbursts of red, green, and yellow. Seer looked around, exaltation in her eyes.

“It’s beautiful, Soldier! Beautiful!”

The flesh of her face formed lumps, appeared to bubble, made her expression a grotesque distortion of a smile.

Grace pulled back from Soldier. “I don’t like this, Soldier,” she said.

“It’s all right,” he said. He could feel her flesh moving under his touch.

Power gathered in the chamber. The lights in the walls flared and flashed wildly.

“Heal them, Mother,” Soldier said. “Please.”

The floor around Seer formed lines and cleaved open. She knelt on a circle of the floor, an island. Thin filaments emerged from the opening that surrounded her. They waved in the air, glowing red and green. Seer looked at them, smiling, rapturous.

Soldier, too, was smiling. The filaments would heal Seer, then Grace.

The filaments extended upward until they towered over Seer, until she was surrounded by them.

“I feel it, Soldier,” she said. “It’s happening!”

All at once the filaments descended toward Seer, covering her in a gentle wave. Lights flashed along their length. Seer laughed, held up her arms. The filaments twisted around her arms, her torso, her legs. Her laughter suddenly took on a questioning tone.

The filaments flared red, twisted tightly around her, snaked up her neck, and covered her face. Her laughtered died.

“Mother!” she said. “Mother!”

In moments, Seer was cocooned in the filaments, her form squirming desperately in their grasp. The filaments turned from red to green to yellow, the light pulsing. Seer’s body spasmed, and Soldier realized that the filaments were pumping something into her. Her body swelled and roiled until it was barely recognizable as human. Pustules formed on her skin, burst, bleeding sparks.

“What is happening?” Grace cried.

Soldier had no idea, but it clearly was not what Seer had expected. He activated his lightsaber and advanced toward her. The walls and floor flared angry red, bolts of energy shot from all directions, and a blast of power lifted Soldier from his feet and blew him from the room. He slammed into the wall of the corridor outside, his breath knocked from him in a whoosh. Grace ran to his side, her eyes filled with fear.

“Soldier!” Seer screamed, pawing at the filaments that covered her mouth … that went into her mouth and down her throat. “Soldier!”

More filaments squirmed out of the floor and covered her, wrapped her entirely, except for one eye and her open, screaming mouth. They glowed red, green, yellow, the current of light pulsing as more and more energy poured into her form. They pulled her down into the hole in the floor, and Grace screamed.

Halfway under, Seer reached a hand in Soldier’s direction, terror in her visible eye. Her lips, engorged with power, fumbled over the words, but Soldier recognized them nevertheless.

“Help me! Help!”

He used the Force to pull his lightsaber hilt to his hand and ignited it. Fear for Seer, anger at Mother’s betrayal—both gave him power. The dark side surged in him.

As he stood, the door to Mother’s chamber closed like a curtain, with not even a seam visible. He could hear Seer’s muffled, panicked screams coming from within. He could cut his way through. He took his blade in a two-handed grip.

“Soldier,” Grace said, her tone surprisingly calm.

Her voice cut through his anger, his fear, cut through all the clutter in his mind. He looked at her, his breath coming hard. Her flesh sagged in places, bulged in others. He could barely recognize her. Only her eyes remained unaffected, and they pleaded with him for help.

“I want to go home,” she said.

“We don’t have a home,” he spat, and hated himself for the despair he heard in his voice. He had spent himself, all his hopes, on Seer’s dream. And Seer had been wrong, her faith a lie, his belief in her a fool’s errand.

“Please, Soldier,” Grace said.

Before he could answer, a sound carried from deep in the station, a visceral scream that sent shock waves throughout the floors, walls, and ceiling. The filaments flared so bright he had to cover his eyes. Searing energy seeped from the walls, leaving blackened gashes behind. Touch panels exploded out from the wall and hung loose on dimly glowing filaments that looked like entrails. Smoke leaked into the air. An alarm began to sound and everything went dark.

“Soldier, I’m scared,” Grace said.

Soldier ignited his lightsaber and used its red light to find her. She huddled against one of the walls, her eyes wide, fearful. He knelt, hugged her, decided that he still had at least one purpose. He lifted her to her feet.

“Stay close to me,” he said. “I’m going to take you home.”

A door parted before Khedryn like a curtain of flesh, to reveal a large circular chamber beyond. Holes dotted the floor. Control panels of a kind he’d never seen before stood beside each of the holes. He approached them warily, holstering one blaster and trading it for a glowrod. Shining the beam down one of the holes, he saw that its smooth sides descended as far as he could see, presumably to the planet’s surface. His stomach fluttered at the thought of sliding down one of those tubes for several kilometers. But it appeared he’d have to do exactly that if he was to locate Jaden and Marr or the Umbaran.

“Stang,” he said.

He moved to one of the control panels, having no idea how to operate it. He touched the featureless plastic rectangle and it lit up. Lines of color spread across its surface, presumably communicating some kind of information, though he had no idea what.

A beam of white light shot from the panel and played over his body, raising the hairs on his arms. He flinched, but it did no harm and a silhouette of his body showed up on the screen. The hole at his feet shrank, the sound moist, grotesque, and then was still, a mouth waiting to devour him.

Desperate for something that would allow him to avoid stepping into the shaft, he clicked his comlink, clicked it again, again. Nothing.

“Damned droid,” he said.

He got down on the floor and lowered himself into the shaft. Its walls closed in on his legs, seized him, started pulling him in. He cursed as the shaft pulled him in farther. Claustrophobia threatened as the shaft closed on his stomach, his chest, his neck, his face.

He swore, the sound muffled, as he felt himself pelting down the shaft, cradled in the station’s grip. He fell for time indeterminable, unable to see anything but the lines of light glowing deep in the walls of the station’s malleable walls.

Abruptly the lines flared red, the flash so bright it left him seeing spots. He heard a deep vibration that sounded from somewhere far off, the reverberations causing the shaft to shake.

And then the lights went out all around him. His downward motion stopped.

He was stuck somewhere in the shaft, in darkness, gripped by the walls.

The power had gone out.

Panic set his heart to racing, stole his breath, turned his mouth dry. He tried to fight it, holding on to hope that a backup system would activate and allow him to finish his descent, but long seconds turned to a minute and still he was stuck. He could hear his heart pounding in his ears, his breath loud and hot and damp on the walls. He tried to reach for his comlink, managed to elbow out enough space and give it a squeeze.

“Ar-Six?” He disliked the fear he heard in his voice, but he could not dispel it. “Ar-Six.”

Nothing, of course.

He was stuck in the belly of an ancient station. No one knew where he was. And even if they did, how could they get him out?

He let fly with a string of expletives, and the outburst helped steady him. He had managed to elbow out some room to click his comlink. Maybe he could maneuver himself out of the station’s grip and slide the rest of the way down.

But what if he was still a kilometer up? He had no way to know how far he had descended. He’d been going fast, but …

“To hell with it,” he said, and started to squirm. He could not sit idle.

Grunting and straining, he pressed against the walls with his body and they began to loosen. His legs came free, dangling loosely beneath him, and for a moment he almost lost his nerve. But he’d be damned if he’d die in the gullet of some ancient space station. He worked until he got the opening under him wide enough to slip his shoulders through. Awkwardly, he reached for his glowrod and tried to maneuver his body out of his way so that he could look down the length of the shaft and see how much of a fall remained.

He aimed the glowrod down, dropped it, and cursed. His hands lost their purchase and he fell through the hole he’d made.

The sickening plummet into darkness put his stomach in his throat. He screamed as he fell, scrabbling at the smooth walls, unable to find any purchase to slow him, tearing his fingernails from their beds.

He knew he was going to die. He would fall for a kilometer and finally slam into a floor somewhere, pulverizing himself.

Even as he imagined his demise, he hit the ground hard, but after only a few seconds of sliding. The impact sent pain shooting up his feet, ankles, knees. He crumpled. His backside slammed to the ground and his head thumped into the floor. Lights exploded in his sight as everything went dark.

Nyss prowled the corridors of the station, attentive to every sound in his search for the Prime and Jaden. Now and again he saw a corpse, some ancient, mummified remains of this or that species, some of which had not been seen in the galaxy for thousands of years.

Under his vest, he carried one of the unused mindspears. The Iteration, lagging behind him, carried another. Perhaps the Iteration kept his distance because he felt Nyss’s power and it made him uncomfortable.

The lighted filaments in the walls led him onward. Shadows painted the corridors and rooms. He moved in silence, invisible. He left the Iteration farther and farther behind and did not care. He wished to face both the Prime and Jaden alone, to cause both of them pain for what they had done to Syll. Then he would annihilate who they had been and make them into what the One Sith wished.

Nyss halted. Ahead, he caught motion in the dim light of the corridor. He heard the sound of soft voices. He recognized Jaden Korr’s.

Using his comlink, he said to the Iteration, “Remain where you are. I’ve found them.”

He pulled his power close about him, melded with the darkness, and crept forward. All he needed was an opportunity.

The station shook, as if with a distant explosion or impact. The lights blinked out. Darkness like ink shrouded the corridor. The alarms fell silent and quiet settled on the corridor, as if the station were drawing breath for a scream. The dark-side power that suffused the air, the walls, the floor began to recede, the aftereffect of some event Jaden did not understand.

“Master?” Marr asked, and Jaden heard the nervousness in his tone.

“Be calm,” Jaden said softly. “Feel the Force.”

He activated his lightsaber, and its yellow light reared shadows at the edge of his vision. He felt as if he had just made himself a target.

Marr spaced himself a pace from Jaden and activated his blade. Purple joined yellow.

“What just happened?” the Cerean asked in a whisper.

Jaden shook his head. The dark-side power invested in the station had diminished, as if it had moved or concentrated itself somewhere outside of his immediate perception. He fell into the Force and extended his perception beyond the visual.

Immediately he thought he felt … something, but he could not lock his senses on it. It was as if his perception had encountered a hole. He’d never experienced anything like it. It was not one of the clones, but something else.

All at once he remembered Khedryn’s words about the Umbaran’s ability to disconnect the clones from the Force.

“We are not alone here,” Marr said, perhaps picking up the same thread.

“No,” Jaden said, squinting into the darkness. “We’re not.”

Screams knifed the silence and put Jaden on edge—the alarm reactivating. Overhead emergency lights came on, dim and flickering. The glowing filaments in the wall put on their patterned light show, but it was slower now, as if they’d lost the animus that had powered them previously.

Jaden caught movement at the edge of his field of vision. He spun, blade ready.

Nothing.

“What is it?” Marr asked, his voice a hiss.

“We need to move.”

“Agreed.” Marr spoke into his comlink. “Khedryn, do you copy?”

Still nothing but static.

“He knows how to take care of himself,” Jaden said. “Come on.”

They started down the hall, leading with their blades. Jaden felt as if they were walking down the throat of a beast. The slow flashing of the emergency lights made it impossible for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. Marr tried his comlink again.

“Khedryn, do you copy?”

Still nothing.

As they advanced, the lights grew dimmer. Jaden did not know whether to attribute it to system failure or … something else. The scuff of a boot on the floor turned him around. He saw nothing but darkness alternating with a play of shadows from the flashing lights.

“Against the wall,” he said to Marr, and they backed up.

Before they reached the wall, the darkness around them deepened so that the lights in the ceiling became as faint as distant stars. Jaden could see a few paces, no more.

A feeling started in his stomach, a flutter, as if he were falling from a great height. His connection to the Force slipped from him, drained into some dark hole into which he could not see or reach. He grabbed at it, tried to focus his concentration and hold on to the one certainty of his existence, but it slipped away and left him alone, bereft, hollow.

“What is happening?” Marr asked, his voice an octave higher than usual.

“The Umbaran,” Jaden said.

As one their lightsabers winked out.

Marr felt dizzy, vaguely nauseous. He hadn’t realized how much he’d come to rely on his connection to the Force. Though he’d only recently become aware of the true nature of the connection, it had been there his whole life, and its absence left him profoundly uneasy. His legs felt weak under him. He gripped his deactivated lightsaber in a sweaty palm and reached behind him for the wall, wanting to steady himself.

Something heavy and metallic slammed into the back of his skull. Sparks exploded before his eyes and pain buckled his knees. His vision went black for a beat and he was falling, falling. He tried to shout a warning to Jaden, but his mouth would not work. He regained enough sense to catch himself on his hands before his face slammed into the floor. He crouched there on all fours, head spinning.

Incongruously, he noticed the smooth texture of the floor, its warmth.

A kick from a booted foot slammed into his side, cracked ribs, and drove him over and flat on his back. He stared up at the ceiling, unable to breathe, unable to think, his broken ribs sending a stab of hot pain through his abdomen.

A face appeared above him, pale, hairless—the Umbaran. His dark eyes were holes; his mouth was an angry slash. The darkness clung to him like mist, and Marr could not quite focus on his outline.

He reached for his blaster but his arm seemed to be moving too slowly.

The Umbaran loomed over him. A vibroblade appeared in his hand.

“Master,” Marr tried to say, but it only came out a groan.

Soldier and Grace hurried through the corridors of the station.

“Do you know where we’re going?” Grace asked. Her voice sounded so small.

“Yes,” he said, but the word was a lie. He had been so awed by the station, by what appeared to be the vindication of Seer’s beliefs, that he had not paid close enough attention to the route they had taken to see Mother’s face. He had only a general idea of where they were going.

The dimness of the corridors did not help. The overhead emergency lights blinked on and off, as did the glowing filaments in the walls and floor. Every room and corridor looked the same as every other.

“I’m frightened,” Grace said.

He knew. He could feel it coming off her. Hoping she could not feel his fear, he put his hand on her shoulder as they hurried along, his lightsaber hilt in his hand but not activated.

He looked behind them regularly, terrified that Seer would appear somehow, or that some other manifestation of Mother would come to take him and Grace as it had taken Seer. The floor and walls shook with vibrations from time to time, and they reminded Soldier of Seer’s ecstatic shivers when she communed with Mother. The similarity alarmed him.

“Come on, Grace,” he said, pulling her along. “We have to hurry.”

A door parted before them to reveal a long, dark corridor. From ahead, between the wails of the alarm, Soldier heard a shout, grunts, the sounds of combat. He knelt down and looked Grace in the eyes.

“Stay ten meters behind me and don’t make a sound.”

Eyes wide, she nodded.

Soldier rose and stalked forward.

Jaden heard Marr’s pained groan, saw the Umbaran standing over him with a bare knife. Acting on instinct, he extended a hand, drew on the Force for a blast of power … and cursed. He had no power. It seemed the Umbaran could disrupt all connection to the Force: his own and that of his lightsaber crystal.

He reached for his blaster as the Umbaran flung a vibroblade at him.

Used to responding with Force-enhanced reflexes, he found his unenhanced reflexes too slow. The blade struck him in the bicep, slit skin and muscle, and scraped against bone. The pain shocked him, and blood, warm and sticky, poured from the gash.

The Umbaran kicked Marr in the head, causing the Cerean to go limp, and then bounded at Jaden. Jaden pulled the knife from his bicep and readied himself.

The Umbaran came at him in a frenzy, all knees and fists, a swirl of motion and gauzy darkness. Jaden sidestepped a punch for his throat and stabbed at the Umbaran with the vibroblade. The blade nicked the Umbaran’s side, but barely, and he spun, locking Jaden’s arm under his armpit and wrenching his wrist. Pain ran the length of Jaden’s forearm and the vibroblade fell from his hand.

Grunting, the Umbaran threw a reverse elbow and caught Jaden in the cheek. Jaden staggered, but managed to wrest his arm free and loose a wild punch at the Umbaran’s jaw.

The Umbaran ducked under it and tripped Jaden with a leg sweep. Jaden hit the ground, rolled into a backflip, and regained his feet, then retreated as the Umbaran loosed a flurry of punches and kicks. Jaden backed up, blocking, ducking, counterattacking where he could.

Blood poured from his arm. He was weakening, slowing, and the Umbaran must have known it. The Umbaran left off his attack and circled, playing for time.

“I wanted to spill your blood,” he said. “For my sister I wanted that. But now …”

The Umbaran relaxed, then spoke a phrase in a language Jaden did not understand. He eyed Jaden as if expecting the words to have some effect on him, as if they were a magic incantation. The Umbaran’s eyes widened when Jaden apparently did not respond as he expected.

“How can—”

Seeing an opportunity, Jaden charged, leading with a series of spinning kicks that the Umbaran blocked but which allowed Jaden to take the initiative. Unleashing a spinning back punch, he caught the Umbaran on the cheek, staggering him. Jaden ducked under the Umbaran’s wild counterpunch, and launched an uppercut into his midsection. The blow doubled the Umbaran over and Jaden put a knee into his face.

The Umbaran crumpled to the ground on his backside, but his dazed eyes remained open and he held his hands awkwardly before him in a defensive posture. Jaden did not hesitate. He leapt atop the Umbaran and squirmed around him until he had him straddled from behind. There, he closed his forearms around the Umbaran’s throat and began to squeeze.

The Umbaran clawed at Jaden’s hands, flailed his legs, but to no avail. He died in seconds.

Jaden tried to stand, managed to get up on wobbly legs. He looked down. Blood drained from his slit arm, peppered the floor. The room spun. He was going to fall. A blurry form materialized before him, his height. He thought it might be Marr.

His vision went dark and he fell.

Marr opened his eyes. He lay flat on his back, his body a slab of meat that felt only pain. When he inhaled he felt as if someone had slipped a knife between his ribs. His head throbbed. Blood pooled under his head, warm and sticky. He inhaled, then winced at the pain it caused.

Alarms screamed from overhead. Dim emergency lights in the ceiling flashed on and off, a confusing strobe that made it hard to focus. His thoughts coalesced, memories connected, allowing him to think clearly. Something was in his fist, a cold cylinder of hard metal.

The hilt of his lightsaber.

Little good it had done him.

It takes decades to master the weapon, Marr, his Master had told him. But you are making excellent strides.

He remembered where he was, what had happened. He remembered something hitting him in the back of the head, a kick that staved in his ribs, the Umbaran’s face.

“Master,” he said.

Adrenaline fueled by concern for Jaden allowed him to move, to support himself on his elbow.

Two meters away from him a figure knelt over Jaden. The figure held a lightsaber in his right hand, the red blade bathing Jaden’s still form in crimson.

Jaden’s voice again sounded in his mind. The point to remember is that wielding the weapon is not a test of your physicality. It is fed by your relationship to the Force.

When Marr’s eyes focused clearly on the person standing over Jaden, he gasped.

It was Jaden. Or rather, another clone of Jaden. Not the clone from the frozen moon, but another, a perfect simulacrum of Marr’s Master. He wore modern clothing, and his hair and beard were neatly trimmed. For a time, Marr could do nothing but watch, sickly fascinated, his mind moving through various possibilities, trying to figure out how there could be two clones of his Master, one born in a Thrawn-era cloning lab, and one born … somewhere else.

As Marr watched, the clone took a device, a metal handle with a thin spike attached to it, and plunged it into Jaden’s temple. Jaden’s back arched and his body went rigid. His lips peeled back from his teeth in a grimace of pain. Lines of white blinked along the filaments that composed the base of the spike, similar to the lights in the wall of the station, and in that moment Marr realized that the device, too, was Rakatan in origin.

“No!” he shouted, and climbed to his feet.

The Jaden clone turned, eyes hooded. His red blade cut the air, reflecting in his eyes.

Marr’s heart rate accelerated. He reached for the Force and, to his surprise, felt it all around him. His eyes fell on another form not far from Jaden and barely visible in the dim light—the Umbaran. Jaden must have killed him.

Jaden screamed, an awful, animal sound so filled with pain and despair that it made Marr’s eyes well. The device, buried to its handle in his skull, blinked ever faster.

The clone looked down at Jaden, then back at Marr. His eyes—not Jaden’s eyes despite their physical similarity—bored into Marr.

“Who are you, Cerean?”

The question, asked in Jaden’s voice, unnerved Marr. He scrambled to his feet, fighting off a bout of dizziness. “I’m his friend.”

The clone smirked, the expression alien to Marr despite being on what seemed Jaden’s face. “Then I suppose it’s well that I won’t remember that I killed you.”

The clone strode toward him, blade held low, his expression a promise of violence.

Marr reached for his blaster with his off hand, drew it, and fired again, again, again. The clone deflected each shot as he closed, his expression one of contempt. Marr backed away, still firing, but the clone closed the distance. His face, like but unlike Jaden’s, wore murderous intent with comfort.

Marr thumped into the wall. Its pulsing warmth penetrated his cloak. The clone extended a hand and used the Force to pull Marr’s blaster from his hand.

Behind the clone, Jaden screamed again, louder. His hands curled into claws. A network of veins became visible in his face and forehead. His eyes opened, staring, empty, then closed, and his body fell back.

“No!” Marr said.

“Don’t worry,” the clone said, and raised his blade. “He’ll live on. In me. The device takes his memories, his life, and gives them to me.”

The red line descended for Marr’s head. Marr ignited his blade—Jaden’s blade, the line purple and steady—and parried the clone’s blow.

The clone’s eyes widened. The crossed blades sizzled.

“I’m more than just his friend,” Marr said through the X of their blades. “I’m also his apprentice.”

Marr augmented his strength with the Force and slammed his fist into the clone’s abdomen. The clone staggered back a step, wheezing, and Marr followed up with a decapitating slash.

The clone’s blade flashed, intercepted Marr’s, twisted, and sent the purple-bladed lightsaber flying across the chamber. The clone looked up, smiling, and Marr saw that he was not wheezing. He was laughing.

“You aren’t much of an apprentice,” he said.

Marr took a step back, his confidence rattled. The clone sneered and advanced after him.

Fear, hungry and blinding, rose in Marr. His heart accelerated, and for a moment he thought only of running. But over the clone’s shoulder he saw the body of Jaden, the Master who had trained him, who had taught him so much in so short a time.

Strength comes from your relationship to the Force.

“And from your relationship to others,” Marr said, and sought the Keep. He found it, inhabited it.

The clone advanced, blood in his eyes.

Marr’s fear fell away, replaced by calm.

The clone raised his blade.

Marr sank deeper into the Force and held his ground, unarmed but not defenseless.

The red line of the clone’s blade descended in a glittering arc.

For Marr, events slowed. The blade moved down toward his head in slow motion. His mind did not so much process as feel the arc of its approach, the speed of its descent, the energy the blade generated—had to generate—in order to stay coherent, all of it numbers, equations, formulae.

Do not think. Feel.

At peace and without fear, he felt the Force fill him with more power than he’d experienced before. He overflowed with it, could barely contain it. He funneled all of it, everything in him, into his arm and hand, and as if of its own accord, his arm rose to intercept the blade.

He did not wince as his fist closed around the angry red gash of the clone’s blade. He felt heat, was distantly cognizant of pain, of his flesh sizzling, peeling under the blade’s onslaught.

But he also felt the blade in his hand, a thin slit of hate around which he wrapped his fist, channeled his power, and held on for all he was worth.

The clone’s eyes widened, his mouth opened to speak, but before he could utter a sound, Marr made a knife of his free hand and drove his fingertips into the clone’s exposed throat.

All at once time and motion returned to normal speed.

Taken by surprise, the clone dropped his blade and staggered backward, gasping for breath.

Still deeply connected to the Force, Marr extended a hand and unleashed a blast of energy that threw the clone bodily across the corridor and slammed him into the far wall, where he sagged and slid down, his chin on his chest.

“I might not be much of an apprentice,” the Cerean said, as much for himself as the clone, “but I’m one hell of a friend.”

He took mental hold of his lightsaber hilt, used the Force to pull it to his hand, ignited it, and walked across the corridor toward the clone. His wounded hand screamed with pain. He could feel charred ribbons of flesh dangling from his palm, but he ignored the agony.

The clone did not respond to his approach. Marr stood over him, raised his blade high for the kill, and … thought of Jaden.

He looked back at his Master, stared at him for a long moment, hoping to see his chest rise with breath.

Nothing.

Pushing aside his burgeoning grief, Marr pointed his blade at the clone’s chest, knelt, and checked to see if the clone still lived. He did.

He’ll live on, the clone had said. In me.

Marr’s mouth went dry when he thought about the course he was considering. He stared at the clone, his face stripped of its anger by unconsciousness. He looked exactly like Jaden.

Almost.

Unwilling to consider it any longer for fear of losing his nerve, Marr simply acted. He tore a strip of cloth from the clone’s clothing and wrapped his wounded hand. He refused to look at it; the pain of wrapping it almost made him pass out. When he was done, he took the clone’s right hand in his own and severed the last three fingers just below the first knuckle. The clone groaned from the pain, but that was all. The heat from the blade cauterized the wounds and stanched the bleeding to a crimson seep.

Marr rose and walked to Jaden’s body. He reached for his Master’s throat to check for a pulse, just to be sure, but could not at first bring himself to touch him. Swallowing, he did … and felt no pulse.

Grief threatened to overcome his thinking and he almost reconsidered his course, almost walked away, believing that perhaps he should just leave Jaden at peace, one with the Force.

But he could not.

He licked his lips and closed his hand around the handle of the blinking device still buried in Jaden’s head. It felt warm in his hand, alive, like the walls of the station.

He steeled himself and jerked the device out of Jaden’s head. It came free with a wet sucking sound, and the moment he pulled it loose literally millions of filaments, each a fraction of the diameter of a hair, squirmed in the open air before almost immediately recombining, intertwining to form a single, seemingly solid, spike.

Marr stared at it a long while. It seemed impossible that Jaden was … in it. Yet that was what the clone’s words had implied. And if any civilization could have mastered consciousness transfer, it would have been the Rakatans.

His mind made up, he carried the device back to the Jaden clone. He had no idea how to operate it, so he had to hope that it would self-activate, like the station’s docking mechanism. It seemed alive, so that might be possible.

The clone’s eyes opened, fixed on the device, widened. “It’s not ready,” he said, and reached for Marr’s hands.

Marr swatted the clone’s hands away, drove a knee into his chest, and took him by the throat.

“You mean you’re not ready,” he said, and drove the spike into the clone’s temple. It penetrated the skull with almost no resistance, and the handle warmed, then began to vibrate in his hand.

The clone’s mouth opened wide to match his eyes, but no scream emerged. Tendons corded his neck and his body went rigid. The handle continued to vibrate, and Marr imagined the millions of tendrils squirming into the gray matter of the clone’s brain, wiping out who he had been and replacing him with Jaden.

He waited, hoping, while the alarms wailed, the lights flickered, and somewhere deep in the station the dark side gave birth to something he did not understand.

Needing something familiar, desperate for it, he tried his comlink again.

“Khedryn, do you copy? Khedryn?”

Static and no hope. He stared down at the Jaden-clone, hoping he was no longer the Jaden-clone.

If things worked, Marr did not know what he would say to Jaden. Would Jaden remember the clone? Had Jaden even seen the clone? Marr did not know.

More important, Marr did not know if he had done the right thing. After all, the clone had apparently wanted to do exactly what Marr had, had been willing to kill to do it. Hadn’t Marr done the clone’s work for him? Why had they wanted to … replace Jaden?

He pushed the thought from his mind and another one took its place.

What if the device had not worked? What if the mind contained in the body remained that of the clone?

Then Marr would fight him and die. He looked at his wounded hand, the blood seeping into the cloth. He barely felt the pain. The pain in his heart overwhelmed it.

He stood, hurried to Jaden’s body, and picked it up. It was limp, already cooling. Trying to keep grief over Jaden’s death at bay with hope for a rebirth, he carried it a ways down the corridor, where he stripped it of its blaster, robes, and lightsaber.

He returned to Jaden’s new body—he allowed himself to think that way—and felt for a pulse. It was there still, strong. He stripped off the clone’s robe, replaced it with Jaden’s, put Jaden’s lightsaber on the belt. He strapped on the holster with its blaster, took the clone’s blade—he took solace in the fact that its hilt was different from Jaden’s—and cast it aside along with the Rakatan device.

Then he watched, and waited. Long moments passed. Distant explosions shook the station.

Growing nervous, he withdrew a bit from Jaden and sank into the shadows on the far side of the room. There he watched, as seconds stretched into eternities.

After a time, Jaden stirred. His eyes opened and he put a hand to his head, touched the wound that Marr had put there with the Rakatan spike.

Marr considered calling out, thought better of it, and decided to simply watch. As he did, an arm took him from behind, closed around his throat, and choked off his windpipe.

“Make no sound,” someone said in a whisper. “Or you die.”

Marr felt the hilt of a lightsaber pressed against his back. His attacker would need only to activate it and the blade would impale him.

“What did you do to him?” the voice whispered, and the arm let up enough on Marr’s throat to allow him speech.

“I don’t know,” Marr said. It was the truth. “What do you want?”

“I don’t know,” the voice breathed, his fetid breath hot on Marr’s cheek. “To leave here.”

Before them, a mere thirty meters, Jaden stood on wobbly legs. His expression looked dazed.

“Who are you?” Marr asked. It had to be one of the escaped clones.

“My name is Soldier.” He reached around Marr’s waist and took his lightsaber.

Jaden started moving down the corridor, away from Soldier and Marr. After he had moved some distance off, Soldier, still holding Marr about the throat, softly called out, “Grace.”

A redheaded girl, maybe nine years old, stepped from the shadows. Her sickness deformed her face, the flesh bulging in one cheek, swollen around one eye.

“It’s going to be all right,” Soldier said to the girl. “We’re getting out of here.”

“Just let me go,” Marr said. “All I want to do is help Jaden. I won’t even tell him I saw you.”

“You keep secrets from your Master?” Soldier asked.

Marr nodded, his eyes going to where he had hidden Jaden’s “old” body. “If necessary,” he said softly.

“Do you know how to get back to the lifts?” Soldier asked. He squeezed Marr’s throat. “Don’t lie.”

“Yes,” Marr said. He nodded at Jaden. “He is going in the right direction.”

“Then we follow him,” Soldier said, and they did, as Jaden stumbled through the hallways of the Rakatan station. Marr watched him from the darkness, wondering if he’d done the right thing.

Eventually Jaden came to a large doorway. Marr felt the presence behind it, the wash of dark-side energy pouring through the vertical slit of the doorway. Jaden must have felt it, too, for he hesitated, and put his hand on the hilt of his lightsaber.

“That is Mother,” Soldier said softly. “Talk to him. The Jedi.”

Marr swallowed, then uttered a word that he hoped still applied.

“Jaden.”