Star Wars Riptide

RELIEVED AFTER HIS CONFERENCE WITH MASTER SKYWALKER, Jaden walked Junker’s corridors until he reached the cockpit. Khedryn and Marr sat in their accustomed seats running through a series of diagnostics. The cockpit door was propped open with a spare cooling coil, having been damaged by the Sith warriors Marr had fought aboard the freighter. Blaster fire had left black streaks, and bladed weapons had left deep scores in the metal.

Marr had shown considerable mettle fighting the Sith, and the fact only confirmed Jaden’s thinking: Marr was ready for more advanced training.

For a time Jaden lingered in the corridor outside the cockpit, listening to his friends check one system after another. They made an impressive team, speaking little, accomplishing much. Jaden cleared his throat and stepped into the cockpit.

“She’s almost ready,” Khedryn said, checking the instrumentation.

Marr checked one final thing on the comp before looking up at Jaden. “What’s our heading, Jad—I mean, Master?”

Marr’s use of the term “Master” sounded so incongruous that it stunned both Khedryn and Jaden into temporary silence. Jaden supposed he had better get used to it.

“Fhost,” Jaden said.

“From there?” Khedryn asked.

Jaden stared out the transparisteel of the cockpit. A million stars of the Unknown Regions blinked at him.

“I don’t know yet. The Order wants me—wants us,” he corrected, looking at Marr, “to find the escaped clones.”

“Does ‘us’ mean you two, or all three of us?” Khedryn asked.

“All three of us,” Jaden said. “Always.”

His reply seemed to banish some lingering tension that had put lines in Khedryn’s forehead. “They sending help?”

Jaden shook his head. “If there is any, it’ll be long in coming. We’re on our own.”

Khedryn looked around for a cup of caf, saw none, patted his pockets for something, found nothing.

Marr held out a piece of chewstim from the pack he kept in his shirt pocket.

“Thanks,” Khedryn said.

“Of course,” Marr said. He offered Jaden a piece, and Jaden passed with a shake of his head.

“Might be just as well,” Khedryn said around the chew. “No point in the Order sending someone out here to sit on their hands. We don’t know where the clones are and probably won’t ever find out. If they’re smart, they’re long gone.”

Staring out at the stars of the Unknown Regions, Jaden could not help but agree. They’d have a hard time tracking the clones in all that black.

“Their possibilities are limited,” Marr said. “Look.” His fingers worked the instrument panel and called up a star chart of the near sectors of the Unknown Regions. “We know they’re in a cloakshape fighter. And we know the kind of space an ordinary cloakshape hyperdrive can put behind it.”

“Cloakshapes are tinkerers’ ships,” Khedryn said. “All of them are modified, Marr. You saw that one. It had a modular cargo bay tacked on to its belly. Its hyperdrive could have been modified, too. Probably was.”

Marr shook the mountain of his head. “I disagree. Hyperdrives are notoriously difficult to change out in cloakshapes, so I suspect it’s still standard. Maybe even slower than usual, given the cargo bay. And if it is and the clones went deeper into the Unknown Regions rather than into Republic space, then …”

Marr closed his eyes, and Jaden felt him drawing on the Force to perform his calculations. “… they would be somewhere within this radius.”

With his finger on the star map, Marr drew an imaginary circle around a vast expanse of space in the Unknown Regions. He worked at the comp for a moment, then added, “And if we exclude dead systems along the hyperlanes, we’re looking at this.”

He tapped a key, and the semicircle of possible routes segmented into a few large slices radiating out from the known hyperlanes.

“That’s still a lot of space,” Khedryn said.

“It’s a start, though,” Jaden said. “Nicely done, Marr.”

Marr beamed. “Thank you, Master.”

The honorific was easier to hear the second time—for Jaden, at least, if not for Khedryn.

“Good job,” Khedryn said to him awkwardly.

“Did you speak to Grand Master Skywalker?” Marr asked Jaden.

“I did. He approved your training.”

Marr did not smile, merely swallowed and nodded.

“Congratulations,” Khedryn said, the word pulled out of him by common courtesy and nothing else. He turned in his seat and cleared his throat. “Listen, Marr, given this … Jedi thing, I think we need to discuss your role aboard Junker.”

The large expanse of Marr’s forehead creased in a question. “My role?”

Khedryn’s eyes, good and bad, looked off at oblique angles from Marr. “Right. Your role. See, Jaden and I were discussing your training and—”

Marr looked from Khedryn to Jaden, irritation in his eyes. “You two were discussing me?”

Khedryn nodded. “And we think it would be difficult for you to remain first mate while you’re training.”

“You do?” Marr said, eyeing each of them, annoyance creeping into his tone. “The two of you think that?”

“Yes,” Khedryn said uncertainly, and looked to Jaden. “Right?”

Jaden crossed his arms over his chest. “The training is difficult, Marr. And—”

“Do you think I don’t know that?”

“No, I presumed you knew that,” Jaden stuttered.

Marr spun in his seat toward Khedryn. “Is there someone else around that you intend to employ as first mate?”

Khedryn recoiled, looked everywhere but at Marr’s face, and ran a hand over his head. “No, not aboard. But I know some people—”

“Who?”

Khedryn’s tone sharpened. “What do you mean ‘who’? People.”

“The hell you do. Listen, I’m first mate and engineer aboard this ship.” He looked at Jaden and Khedryn in turn, challenging them to gainsay him. Neither did. “And if the training requires me to make a change, then I’ll make it then. But it is my decision. Understood?”

Khedryn busied himself on the instrument console, and Jaden thought he looked relieved. “Yeah, sure, fine.”

Jaden smiled. Marr had mettle, indeed. “Are you ready to continue the training?”

Marr looked to Khedryn, who waved him off. “I can handle the rest of the repairs and diagnostics. Go … move an object around with your mind or something. Maybe levitate a cup of caf into the cockpit for me.”

As Jaden and Marr exited, Jaden heard Khedryn mutter, “What the hell’s gotten into him?”

Mindful of Master Skywalker’s point that training could occur anywhere, Jaden led Marr toward Junker’s cargo bay.

“Listen, Marr,” he said as they walked. “You are very old to begin training as a Jedi. Typically, it means that it will be harder for you to overcome old thinking patterns, and that your capabilities will be capped at some point far below that of a Jedi who began training very young. That said, you have some unique talents that we may be able to harness.” He thought of the Grand Master. “And there have been exceptions, but I want you to understand my thinking.”

Marr stared straight ahead. “I understand.”

“Good. Much of your training in the Force will come from your own focus. I’ll guide you, give you tools, and answer questions, but you need to expand on what you already know and use that to learn more, question more, and then to grow more.”

Marr seemed to consider that. “Does it ever stop? The learning?”

Jaden smiled. Marr’s first question was a good one. “No. Your relationship to the Force is dynamic. It changes over time, just as you change over time. I learn new things every day. I learned … a lot on the moon. That is part of what makes this path so rewarding. And so challenging.”

Marr nodded.

“Relin taught you about the mental space you reserve? The central place you hold in your mind?”

“He called it the Keep.”

“Right. Master Katarn—my Master—called it the Sanctum. The name doesn’t matter. The point is to recognize it as the wellspring of your relationship to the Force. Your understanding and perception will expand outward from it. You’ve already begun to do that. But think of the Keep as a place to which you can return to try a lesson anew.”

Jaden tapped the control panel, and the gears of the cargo bay door hummed as the door slid open. A few shipping containers were all that remained in the bay. The rest had been lost in a dogfight with Sith ships.

Jaden had arranged a small shipping container into a makeshift table in the center of the bay. On it sat the hilt of the purple-bladed lightsaber he had built in his youth, the blade he had used to destroy the clone, Alpha. A small metal toolbox sat beside it.

Marr stood in the doorway, not stepping in. Jaden did not push him to enter. Marr had to take the step alone.

“That is your lightsaber,” Marr observed.

“It is,” Jaden said.

Marr stared at it for a moment, then stepped into the bay.

Jaden fell in beside him. “A Jedi typically crafts his own lightsaber. It’s an important milestone. The way in which we come to that point varies for each of us. In my case, I built my first lightsaber, that saber, before I could drive an airspeeder.”

Marr’s eyebrows rose. “An impressive feat of engineering.”

“Not at all, Marr. The Force spoke and I listened. When I think back, I remember it feeling as if I were sleepwalking. It was … strange.”

Marr approached the table, eyeing the weapon.

“That’s all? You listened?”

“Learning to hear the Force is the most important thing you can learn from me. Everything else follows from it. I think you already hear it plainly when you do mathematics.”

Marr nodded slowly, his brow furrowed.

“Pick it up,” Jaden said, gesturing toward the lightsaber.

Marr took Jaden’s lightsaber and turned it over in his hands, examining the hilt from all angles.

“Now take it apart,” Jaden said. He had chosen the lesson because he thought it would be well suited to Marr’s talents as an engineer.

“This is yours, Master, and—”

“Take it apart, Marr. It’s a weapon. It’s made to be durable. You won’t break anything.” Jaden eyed his chrono and set the timer. “You have five minutes.”

Marr’s mouth fixed into a determined line and he sank into one of the chairs.

Jaden liked his apprentice’s response. No complaint, no protest that he could not do it. Marr simply trusted himself and acted.

Jaden could almost see the analysis going on behind Marr’s eyes. The Cerean’s pupils could as well have been spinning gears. After turning the weapon over in his hands a few times, he set it down, opened the small box of precision tools, and got to work.

Marr had the weapon disassembled and laid out on the table in under two minutes. He picked up the striated, violet-colored power crystal and held it between forefinger and thumb.

“I feel … something in the crystal. The Force.”

“Right. All lightsabers are powered by a crystal. The nature of the crystal determines the properties of the blade.”

“Its color,” Marr said, turning the crystal over, studying its facets.

“That, yes, but more. The crystal is not, by itself, the power source of the weapon. Like the Force user, the crystal is attuned to the Force. Without that attunement, the crystal is just a rock. And while a non–Force user could probably ignite and wield a lightsaber, provided the crystal was properly attuned to the Force, all that lightsaber would be for him is a shaft of superheated plasma. But for a Jedi, the lightsaber becomes more: it is a manifestation of a Jedi’s connection to the Force.”

Marr considered, nodded. “I understand. I think.”

“Put it back together, Marr. Then activate it.”

Marr reassembled the weapon with steady hands and activated it. The purple blade slit the air of the cargo bay. Its hum filled the quiet.

“Be careful, but feel the weight in your hand,” Jaden said. “The blade itself weighs nothing. All the weight is in the hilt, in your hand.”

Marr took a few slow practice swings, trying to mimic some of the technique he’d seen Jaden use.

“Now, feel the Force around you. Feel it in you, in the crystal. The weapon is not a thing apart from you. It is an extension of you. Let the Force flow.”

Marr closed his eyes, his face wrinkled in concentration.

“Still your mind, Marr. You cannot think your way to the connection. Feel it. Let your mind expand outward from the Keep, let that expansion encompass all of you, me, the weapon you hold.”

Marr’s face smoothed and his breathing grew deep and regular. Jaden sensed when Marr made the connection, a mental key fitting a lock.

“I feel it,” Marr said.

Jaden smiled. “Good. Let the connection continue and open your eyes.”

Marr did so.

Jaden took the lightsaber hilt from his belt—the lightsaber he’d taken from the clone, Alpha—and activated it. Its sparking red blade sizzled into existence, its thin red line the border between them.

Marr stared at the red blade, at Jaden. Jaden felt the soft, faint pressure of the dark side against his consciousness. The blade’s crystal, attuned to the Force by Alpha, still carried his taint.

“Do you feel it?” Jaden asked Marr.

Marr nodded slowly, his eyes never leaving the blade. “It feels like pressure, like a general sense of unease.”

“That is the dark side,” Jaden said. “The feeling is more acute when the power is greater. What you feel now is just residuum in the crystal of this blade.”

“The intensity of the feeling is a function of the power of the dark-side user and the proximity of that user,” Marr said. With his forefinger, he drew invisible figures in the air. It took a moment for Jaden to realize that Marr was actually plotting a function. When that registered, he thought he saw an avenue he could use to speed Marr’s training.

“Now I’ll teach you some basics of lightsaber combat. As before, feel the Force throughout. Very little about this is physical. Your strength and speed is not in muscle and tendon, but in your relationship to the Force. Let it flow through you, inform your movements. What you’re capable of will surprise you, if you let it.”

Marr inhaled deeply, then took a few more practice cuts and spins, all more graceful than before. Jaden could feel him settling into the Force.

“Excellent, Marr. As we engage, I want you to think about your movements mathematically. Consider the angles at which we hold our blades, the arc of my approach, the line of your blade intersecting mine, your feet moving degrees within a circle. Do you understand?”

Marr nodded without hesitation. “I do.”

“Good. Defend yourself,” Jaden said, and lunged at him.

For the next several hours, Jaden walked Marr through the basics of lightsaber technique. The Cerean was a quick study, his movements controlled and precise. Jaden knew it was unusual, even dangerous, to train a new apprentice with live blades, but he also knew that he, Marr, and Khedryn would be in serious danger if they found the clones. He wanted Marr as prepared as possible.

By the time they’d finished and Jaden deactivated Alpha’s red blade, sweat dripped off the cliff of Marr’s forehead and pasted the ruff of his hair to his pate.

“Tired?” Jaden asked him.

“Not physically tired, Master. But it’s mentally exhausting.”

Jaden thumped him on the shoulder. “That means you’re doing it right. There’s one more thing to learn today.”

Marr waited, eyebrows raised.

“Go to the other side of the bay and activate your weapon.”

Marr did as he was told, and while he did Jaden removed one of the cells from the power pack of his DH-44 and set the blaster to stun. It’d still pack a decent wallop, but a hit would not knock Marr unconscious.

“Don’t try to guess where I’m firing.”

“You’re going to fire?”

Jaden nodded. “You must feel it, not see it. You could do it as well with your eyes closed as open. Angles of approach, Marr. Velocities. Let yourself feel the space around you.”

Though the Cerean’s face remained placid, he could sense Marr’s apprehension.

“Close your eyes and settle your mind in the Keep, Marr.”

Marr closed his eyes, inhaled.

“Now, expand your perception outward. Don’t merely sense the objects and people around you. Sense the energy of the objects, perceive the lines of the Force that connect one thing to another thing, each thing to every other thing.”

Behind him, Jaden felt Khedryn enter the cargo bay. Khedryn said nothing and lingered near the open bay door.

“I feel it!” Marr said. “Interconnection. I see it. It is … vast.”

“Very good. Now, realize that your will and the Force are likewise interconnected. Each gives the other direction, but the causation is not linear. In fact, there is no causation. There is, instead, synchronicity.”

Jaden knew the lack of causation would be difficult for Marr, the logical mathematician, to grasp.

“I … think I understand. Synchronicity.”

“Then use that understanding to deflect this blaster shot back at me.”

Jaden activated Alpha’s lightsaber in his off hand, an awkward gesture given his wounded fingers, and fired his depowered blaster at Marr.

Marr attempted a block too late, and the shot hit him in the chest. He grunted, his breath catching, and staggered back two steps. To his credit, he did not open his eyes or mention the pain. Jaden felt Marr’s determination grow.

“I felt … something,” Marr said.

Khedryn chuckled, but Marr seemed not to hear him. Jaden held up a hand for Khedryn’s silence.

“Fall into the Force,” Jaden said, and fired again.

Again Marr missed the block, and again he grunted with pain, staggered backward.

“Again, Master,” the Cerean said, his tone even.

Five times Jaden put blaster shots into Marr, and four times Marr failed to block them. On the fifth, he interposed the purple line of his blade and sent the blaster bolt careering into the near bulkhead.

Jaden expected him to erupt in happiness, but Marr did nothing of the kind. His eyes still closed, he said, “I think I have it now. Again, Master.”

Jaden fired, more rapidly, and Marr blocked each shot in turn, sending the shots everywhere but back at Jaden.

“The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of deflection,” Jaden said. “You control the angle of incidence.”

He fired again, again, and by the third shot Marr sent the bolts right back at Jaden. Jaden deflected them into the floor with the lightsaber he held in his off hand. He fired more rapidly, moved as he fired, and Marr kept blocking, kept returning the shots at Jaden.

“Enough,” Jaden said, and deactivated his lightsaber. “Excellent, Marr. Well done.”

Marr opened his eyes, nodded, and deactivated his saber. “Thank you, Master.”

Khedryn walked into the cargo bay. “If you two are done dinging up my cargo bay, we can make the jump to Fhost.” He patted the bulkhead. “She’s ready to move.”

“I will help with the pre-jump,” Marr said, and hurried past Jaden. He caught himself, turned, and said, “That is, if we’re done, Master?”

“We are. Go.”

Marr smiled and offered Jaden the hilt of his lightsaber. Jaden stared at it for a long moment. For years, its purple line had been the string that wove together his past and his present. It was time to move away from the past.

“Keep it, Marr. It’s yours until you build your own.”

“But … this is yours, Master. You’ll have no weapon.”

Jaden held up the hilt of Alpha’s weapon. “I have this.”

“That is a Sith weapon.”

“Not for long,” Jaden said, and buckled it to his belt. He looked Marr in the eye. “Today was a good day. You learned a lot. But if things get hot, don’t hesitate to use your blaster.”

“Seconded,” Khedryn said.

“You’re feeling accomplished,” Jaden said. “And you should. But were you to face a trained lightsaber combatant you’d be cut in half before you took a first step. You’ve got a long way to go. Do not forgo good sense in an effort to prove something to me, yourself, or anyone else.”

Marr held his gaze. “I understand.”

Jaden smiled. “Nicely done, Apprentice.”

“Also seconded,” Khedryn said. “You could’ve saved us a lot of grief if you’d learned this a few years ago.”

Marr grinned, slapped Khedryn on the shoulder, and bowed his head to Jaden. Then he and Khedryn headed for the cockpit, chatting about star charts, coordinates, and various components of Junker’s engines. Jaden watched them go, thoughtful.

He was responsible for Marr, and the weight of the responsibility surprised him. He’d have to put Marr in danger. Repeatedly. Just as Master Katarn had done with him.

He thought Marr understood the risks, but he wasn’t sure Marr was ready.

That was the awful burden of taking on an apprentice. One lapse in judgment, and the person who depended on him, the person who trusted him, could die.

Jaden knew that would be hard to bear.

He thought of Relin, who’d begun his descent to the dark side when an ancient Sith had killed his apprentice. The loss had been too much for Relin to carry.

Jaden decided that he would chart a different course—he would not suffer the loss in the first place.

He hefted the hilt of Alpha’s lightsaber, eyed it as he might an enemy.

“You and I have an appointment.”

Jaden returned to the small stateroom that served as his quarters aboard Junker. He sat at the small metal desk in one corner and rapidly disassembled Alpha’s lightsaber. His missing fingers caused him to fumble a bit, but he managed.

He stared at the stumps, pondering the possibility of prosthetics. He’d lost all but the thumb and forefinger on his left hand—so he could still wield his lightsaber in his left. Probably he’d leave his hand as it was, maimed, a constant reminder to him that doubt—doubt over his actions, his relationship to the Force, his role in the Order—was the price he paid, and would always pay, to be who he was.

He left off his musings and returned to the disassembly. He had expected the clone’s lightsaber construction technique to be crude, but instead found it clean and utilitarian, if inelegant.

He laid out the pieces before him. The crystal that powered the weapon, a crimson rhomboid, glittered in the overhead lights. Fine black lines veined the facets, some impurity the clone had not eliminated. Jaden stared at it, transfixed, feeling its connection to the dark side, the way it contained, in microcosm, Alpha’s rage.

Khedryn’s voice over the ship’s comm brought him out of his reverie.

“Jumping into hyperspace in five seconds.”

Jaden ticked off the moments and looked out the viewport as the black turned blue. Junker was under way to Fhost and whatever fate awaited them.

Jaden turned away from the maddening blue churn of hyperspace and toward the maddening crimson of Alpha’s crystal. He focused his mind and fell into the Force. The interconnected network of lines and light took shape in his mind’s eye, marred only by the presence of Alpha’s crystal, a lesion in his perception.

He took the stone in his hands, instantly felt the echo of Alpha’s madness and anger, his hate, emotional pollution that radiated at Jaden from the stone’s facets.

He endured it and covered the crystal in his hands as best he could with his maimed fingers. Focusing his mind, he meditated.

Once he was residing in the calm center of himself, he opened his hands and the crystal floated above his palms, turning slowly, casting red beams about the room. Jaden let his consciousness ride the beams into the crystal, into the crucible of Alpha’s rage. Howls buffeted him, black clouds of anger, lightning bolts of hate. He stood in the midst of the storm, unmoved, and drew it to him. The dark emotions crashed against the rock of his calm, the stillness of his being, and began to dissolve. Alpha’s rage burned around him, buffeted him, but had no effect. Jaden found strength in the example of the Grand Master, of his calm, measured response to the news that one of the escaped clones might have been born of Mara Jade Skywalker’s DNA.

The shrieks in his mind diminished, the roar of Alpha’s anger subsided. He sat in the lines of the Force, centered, at peace.

He opened his eyes. The crystal still hovered above his hands, but he had cleansed it of Alpha’s contamination. It was no longer crimson, but was instead as clear as transparisteel. Ordinarily a cleansing would have taken much longer, days even. Alpha’s attunement of the crystal must have been imperfect.

Jaden eyed the remade stone, thinking it a perfect metaphor for his own spirit, purged as it was of any temptation to the dark side. The light it cast, clean and white, brightened the dingy confines of his quarters.

He allowed himself only a moment to enjoy his triumph before refocusing on the crystal. He had cleansed it of Alpha’s influence and the dark-side taint. Now he needed to attune it to himself and to the light side.

Once more his consciousness rode the beams back into the crystal until he sat in the center of the light. With an effort of will, he aligned the crystal’s structural matrix with himself, made it harmonious with the Force, made it an extension of his will. Throughout, he remained peaceful, calm. He drew the crystal deeper into the Force, attuned it more closely to himself, to the lines that interconnected all things. His mind turned briefly to Relin, to the emotional churn the ancient Jedi had experienced.

For a long while Jaden sat in his chamber, enmeshed in the Force, aligning himself and the crystal with it. In time, the process was complete. When he opened his eyes and came back to himself, he saw that the Force had transformed the crystal from clear to a faint yellow. The black lines were gone, the impurities purged.

Smiling, he took the crystal in eager hands and placed it on the table. Moving rapidly, he reassembled the lightsaber hilt, modifying the grip as best he could with the pieces he had to hand. When it was ready, he seated the crystal into place and activated the blade.

A clean yellow line cut the air of his quarters. The hum of the weapon was musical.

In ancient times—Relin’s times—a yellow blade had signified that its wielder was a Jedi Sentinel, a servant of the light side of the Force who balanced his service between the art of combat and the scholarly study of the Force. It pleased Jaden to see that the Force had gifted him with such a blade. His thought of Relin during the remaking of the crystal must have influenced the crystal’s form. He nodded, satisfied. He had purged the weapon of its dark-side influence and made it his own, at the same time honoring Relin’s memory. It seemed fitting.

He deactivated the blade and hung it from his belt.

He found it somewhat strange, the way he had been able to remake the crystal. It was as though he had wiped away someone’s memory and replaced it with another.

He floated in a place of warmth, quiet. Then … sensation from darkness, something from nothing.

He heard the low, vibratory hum of engaging electronics.

How did he know they were electronics? He seemed to know some things.

His extremities began to tingle, then to itch, then to hurt, pinpricks of pain in his skin.

The whine of a device sounded in his ear. Streaks of color flashed behind his eyelids, smears of green, red, blue. He heard a mechanical voice speaking, the sound dulled, as if spoken from far away or blocked by something.

“His vital signs are normal. He is becoming conscious.”

“Can he hear us?” said another voice.

“I do not know. Possibly.”

“What will he know?”

He heard the slow bubbling of liquid. He had never noticed it before.

“All of the Iterations are implanted with basic knowledge roughly equivalent to that of a human adolescent. Otherwise they would be difficult to deal with when they awakened. It is easily overwritten by the Rakatan mindspear.”

“Very good.”

His body awoke fully to sensation, and he became aware of himself. He was a man. Restraints held his arms and legs immobile. Something was in his mouth—a tube. Adhesive strips kept his eyes closed. He tested his strength against the restraints. There was no give in them.

“Let’s get him out,” said the voice.

“Of course.”

The liquid in which he floated began to drain, gurgling away into some hole near his feet. He felt vulnerable as the level of the liquid decreased, exposing first his head, then his chest, his legs. He imagined it was like being born, moving from warm and safe to cold and exposed. It felt strange to have his feet on the ground, supporting his weight. He was naked, shivering.

Metallic latches released, a hiss sounded, and he heard a hatch or door open right before him. A blast of cold air goose-pimpled his wet skin.

He opened his mouth to speak but gagged on the tube. Something took hold of it.

“Do not resist,” said a mechanical voice, a medical droid.

He didn’t, and the droid pulled the tube from his body. It went all the way to his stomach, and he felt as if the droid was disemboweling him as it pulled the tube up through his esophagus. The moment it cleared his lips he coughed out a bit of liquid and gasped.

The intake of air felt raw on his throat. His lungs burned. The smell of antiseptic filled his nostrils. He tried to speak, but his lips and tongue felt thick, his vocal cords tight. He managed only a grunt.

“You will be able to speak soon,” said a soft, sibilant voice. “You have never used your vocal cords before, or your lungs. Try to remain calm.”

He was still restrained, his eyes still sealed shut. He felt vulnerable.

“You are restrained for your own protection,” said the soft voice. “The implantation process is painful. I don’t want you to damage yourself.”

The word “painful” stuck in his mind. He squirmed against the restraints, but they held him fast.

“You may go, One-Bee-Seven,” said the voice.

“Yes, Master Nyss,” replied the droid.

He heard the whirring servos of a departing droid, the whisk of a door that opened and then closed.

He was alone with Nyss, who had promised him pain. His heart was racing. Despite the cold, he was sweating, clammy. The smell of his own stink filled his nostrils. His breath was coming fast.

“You are afraid,” said the voice. “There is nothing to fear. You won’t remember the pain.”

A hand closed on his jaw and he winced in anticipation of a blow. But a blow did not come. Instead he felt something warm and sharp pressed against his temple. He tried to turn his head away but could not. He grunted, terrified; tried to blink open his eyes against the adhesive but failed.

He felt a brief prick of pain, then pressure in his temple. A trickle of blood, warm like the fluid in which he’d lived for so long, wound down the side of his face. There really was no pain—

Then a shooting stab of agony exploded in his head. He shrieked, a prolonged, bestial wail that went on and on but did nothing to expiate the pain. The agony intensified, spreading from his temple to the rest of his head until it felt as if his skull were filled with molten metal that would burn forever.

His entire body was as rigid as a rail, every muscle contracted. He could not stop screaming. He wanted to cut off his own head, to rip it from his neck and murder himself to end the unending, unendurable pain.

But his hands were bound and he could not move.

There was nothing left to him but to scream and scream and scream.

Horror matched pain when he felt something squirming inside the scalding confines of his skull, writhing tendrils rooting through his brain, scraping against the underside of his braincase. He imagined worms burrowing through tissue, leaving a network of empty tunnels in their wake. He heaved as if to vomit, but his stomach contained nothing.

Between heaves his screams turned desperate; he warred against the restraints, but they simply would not give. He railed, screamed, shrieked, heaved, knew that he must soon pass out or die, and …

The pain vanished.

Sweat soaked him. Every muscle in his body ached. His breath came hard and fast through a throat made ragged. Before he could speak, ask what had happened, a spark shower exploded in his brain and a gout of information poured in, washing away what preexisted it and filling the empty vessel of his mind.

Memories flooded into the crevices of his empty recollection, making him anew, rebirthing him on the spot.

He remembered himself.

He had been born on Coruscant, and his parents had died in an accident when he was young.

A voice was speaking to him from outside himself, but he could not understand it, could not move his attention from the rush of memories, his memories.

After the death of his parents, he had turned inward, had become philosophical even as a child, and that internal focus had triggered his latent Force sensitivity.

The voice continued to speak to him, soft, insistent. But he refused to acknowledge it. Instead he lived in the past, his past, watching faces and events stream by.

Without any training, he’d used his Force sensitivity to make a lightsaber for himself. Soon thereafter, his uncle had enrolled him in the Jedi Academy. He’d met Grand Master Luke Skywalker.

The voice finally penetrated his perception.

“Do you hear me?” it asked.

He felt a hand tapping his cheeks but ignored it in favor of the memories.

He’d fought the spirit of Marka Ragnos on Korriban, trying to redeem Rosh Penin.

“Open your eyes,” the voice said, and tore the adhesive strips from his eyelids.

He hesitated, unwilling to let himself slip from the realm of memory.

“Open them.”

He did, and even the dim light in the small, steel-walled room set them to watering. He blinked, his vision blurred. A figure stood before him, but he could make out little detail.

“I cannot see,” he said.

“Your vision will improve quickly,” the figure said.

He looked around, down, trying to blink away the blurriness. He was in a transparisteel cloning tank. Traces of the pink suspension fluid in which he’d been floating puddled in the base of the tank. He stared at them while his vision cleared.

Cables, hoses, and wires snaked out of the sides of the tank and connected to his body at arms, legs, torso, and head. Conduits connected a computer to the tank. He was surprised to see that he was not restrained, yet he still could not move.

A man stood at the computer station. Not a man—an Umbaran, thin, with skin so pale it looked white. He wore a tailored black cloak complete with a cowl, and the dimness in the room seemed to collect around him, intensify near him. The reflected glow of the comp screen made his dark eyes glow red. He worked the keyboard with one hand. In his other he held a device that looked like a metal hilt or handle engraved with strange grooves and from which extended a spike of rigid filaments, each of them far finer than even the finest hair.

“I cannot move,” he said to the Umbaran, his voice coarse with disuse.

“The programming paralyzes most of your skeleton-muscular system until the … process is complete.”

“I cannot feel the Force,” he said.

The Umbaran nodded. “That is my doing.”

He did not know what to say to that. He did not remember ever being cut off from the Force. His gaze fell to the device the Umbaran held in his hand. The Umbaran noticed and held the device up for him to see.

“It is Rakatan,” the Umbaran said. “We think they used it to store and transfer their consciousnesses. We’ve found caches of them here and there across the galaxy.”

“We?” he asked.

“The One Sith,” the Umbaran replied.

He realized his danger then. He was in the hands of an unknown faction of the Sith. He tried to fall into the Force but felt only emptiness. He was alone, powerless. The Sith had developed some new weapon by which they could separate a Jedi from the Force. He had to escape, report back.

“What do you want from me?”

“What’s your name?”

“You know my name. Jaden Korr.”

The Umbaran smiled. “No. You are the Iteration.”

The word meant nothing to him.

“I’m going to speak a phrase,” the Umbaran said. “And when I do, you’ll know what you are.”

He shook his head. Nothing the Umbaran said made sense, nothing about his situation made sense. How had he gotten here? He remembered very little after his graduation from the Jedi Academy.

The Umbaran smiled, an expression more sinister than mirthful, and started to speak. He did not comprehend the words. He blinked and … knew.

He was a clone of Jaden Korr. He was an agent of the One Sith. He was to infiltrate the Jedi Order and be activated when the One Sith deemed the time right.

“I am … an agent of the One Sith.”

The Umbaran nodded. “Yes.”

“Why did you activate me now? I’m not a member of the Jedi Order.”

“No. But you will be.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will in time. Now, who are you?”

“I am the Iteration.”

The Umbaran nodded, hit a key on the comp panel.

The Iteration was able to move. At the same time, the darkness that seemed to hover around the Umbaran decreased somewhat and the Iteration’s connection to the Force returned in a rush of power that made him gasp.

The Iteration took a step, another, ginger on limbs that had never before borne his weight. The cloning tank used electro-impulses to stimulate muscle development and growth, but he knew to take care with his first steps.

Behind the Umbaran, the door to the small chamber slid open and two figures in cowled cloaks strode in. Each towered over the Umbaran, over the Iteration, and both held electro-staffs in their fists. Their red hands featured scales and black claws. The cowls and dim light hid their faces, but the Iteration caught a suggestion of scaled eye ridges above reptilian eyes.

“Syll is awaiting him aboard my ship,” the Umbaran said to them. “Get him aboard and put him in stasis.”

“Yes, my lord,” the two answered, their voices deep and guttural.

“Stasis?” the Iteration said. “But I just …” He struggled for the right word. “… woke up.”

“I needed to make sure you could withstand the shock of the awakening and the first memory transfer.”

“The first? And if I would’ve died?”

The Umbaran shrugged. “I would’ve used another.”

“Another?”

“Get him aboard,” the man said to the guards.

As the guards took him away, he asked over his shoulder, “Why did you awaken me? What am I to do?”

“Nothing, yet. You’re just along for the ride until I need you.”

“Until you need me for what?”

“Until I need you to iterate,” the Umbaran said, and the Iteration imagined the thin line of a smug smile drawn across the Umbaran’s pale face.

Soldier felt an odd sense of separation, a peculiar sense of otherness. A gulf opened in him, growing as the stolen ship blazed ever farther from the moon.

The moon had been his birthplace, the place where he had spent his entire life.

The place he had long ago grown to hate, but that was also his home.

He felt as if his life up to that moment had been the before, and that he had just begun the after. But the after felt uncomfortably vast. Suddenly adrift in infinite space, in infinite possibilities, he felt as he always had when he was floating in one of Dr. Green’s sensory deprivation tanks—alone, unmoored from himself, a tiny ship bobbing across the surface of a limitless ocean.

The frigid, unnamed moon and its cloning facility had been the Community’s home for decades. He and the other clones had been specimens for Imperial scientists, living in cages made of transparisteel, their existences an unending series of tests, questions, needles, training.

It had been awful, but they’d had structure, purpose.

Now they had neither.

The scientists had wanted to clone a unique Force user. And they had succeeded, in a way. But their success had been their undoing. The Community had earned their freedom with murder, killing everyone else in the facility and giving them to Mother.

And now they were riding Seer’s promises into the velvet of space.

And where would they go?

First to Fhost.

Then to Mother.

Perhaps Soldier’s possibilities were not as infinite as he supposed. Perhaps he had had more purpose, more structure, than he realized.

The readout showed the ship to be clear of gravity wells. Soldier took one last look around the system, the distant red star, the gas giants.

Seer entered the cockpit and folded her lithe body into the copilot’s seat. “The universe is large and you feel alone,” she said.

Soldier tried to hide his surprise. Seer had articulated his thoughts plainly.

“You don’t need to be alone, Soldier. You separate yourself from us, from Mother. You needn’t.”

Not for the first time, Soldier wondered if Seer’s empathic sense surpassed that of the rest of the clones.

“I don’t feel alone,” Soldier lied. “I am one of you. I take care of you, protect you all.”

“You do so for the children’s sake. Not the rest of us.”

Once again, Seer had spoken truth. He had no children of his own, but cared for Grace, Gift, and Blessing as if they were his. If the clones had a purpose, the children embodied it. He wanted them to have a life different from the one he and the others had been forced to endure.

Unwilling to discuss it more with Seer, he changed the subject. “The coordinates for Fhost are in the navicomp and we’re clear of gravity wells. I’m winding up the hyperdrive.”

Seer stared at him, but he ignored her as he engaged the pre-jump sequence. He reached to engage the cockpit dimmer. His flight training in the facility’s simulators had taught him that staring at the hyperspace churn too often could lead to madness. Seer caught his hand and did not release it.

“I want to see it,” she said.

Her touch thrilled him, and he imagined she knew it. “All right.”

When the jump indicator showed green, he engaged the hyperdrive. Points of starlight stretched into lines, then the lines vanished into the blue swirl of hyperspace.

Seer gasped, her hand tight around his. “It’s beautiful.”

The swirls and whorls nauseated Soldier, but he said nothing. As he withdrew his hand, Seer seemed not to notice. Her excitement filled the cockpit.

“We’ll reach Fhost soon,” he said.

She nodded, staring wide-eyed at the blue.

“I’ll check on the others,” he said, and rose. Through their shared connection, he could feel the other clones’ emotional state. They were calmed by the medicine, but that would last only a short time. The madness cast a shadow over their minds, the illness a shadow over their failing bodies.

He hoped Seer was right. He hoped Mother would heal them. Especially the children.