LARIN IGNORED THE SHRIEKING of alarms and the flashing red lights filling her suit’s helmet. The unlucky shot appeared not to have damaged the fuel line to her jet-chute, but its gyros were completely destroyed. If her airfoil had been intact, that would at least have had a stabilizing effect, but it was nothing but tatters now. Kicking and skidding wildly across the sky, she was completely out of control.
She refused to give in. There had to be a way to bring the jet-chute down safely, and her with it.
First thing first: to get manual control of the jet. It was behind her, but by letting out the restraints she could wriggle around so it was thrusting from her chest. The noise was deafening. She darkened her visor so the flashes wouldn’t blind her.
At least she still had her instruments. It was hard to get a sensible altimeter reading, so she didn’t know exactly how much time she had, but the temperature outside was clear: well below the line. Any exposed flesh would freeze solid in just moments. All the better to work quickly, then.
Tugging off her left glove, she used the artificial digits of her prosthetic to pull at the thruster casing. It fell away behind her—up or down, she couldn’t tell. The horizon was turning wildly around her. Just glancing at it made her feel giddy.
She concentrated on the wiring inside the jet-chute casing instead. Steam hissed into the thin, cold air. Luckily, her fingers weren’t affected by heat, either. The jet-chute was an uncomplicated machine, designed to be rugged rather than versatile. There would be all sorts of safeties and overrides, but she didn’t need them. She just wanted the switch that turned the thrust on and off.
A sharp tug on a particular component had the latter effect. Suddenly everything was still and she was weightless. The world below still turned, but at least it wasn’t changing direction three times every second. Now that she had to look at it, she could see how much closer it had come. Perilously so.
That wasn’t what mattered. At the moment, she had to correct her spin. She counted furiously under her breath, judging the correct burn by instinct more than conscious calculation. She shoved her artificial fingers into the hot innards and switched the thrust back on, just for a second.
She jerked across the sky, slewing madly. Too much, too long. She had to be more precise. Counting again, she tried a second time, with more success. She was still tumbling afterward, but not so badly that the thickening air couldn’t get a stabilizing grip on her. She spread her limbs in a star shape until she was falling steadily face-forward.
The complex at the planet’s south pole was coming up at her with frightening speed. She activated the jet-chute and kept it on full, fighting it at every moment to keep it pointing straight down. It was like trying to balance on a pin: the slightest wobble threatened to tip her over and put her back where she started. She gritted her teeth and held on.
Slowly, steadily, her downward plunge began to ease.
She had time to examine where she was landing. It was a broad, flat plain, crisscrossed with deep cracks that looked too straight to be natural. A door was her first thought, leading to something underground. Around it stood a number of cannon emplacements, all aiming for targets elsewhere, fortunately. It was hard enough just coming down straight, let alone dodging. She wanted to look behind her, to see where the others were, but the merest attempt to do so threatened to upset her delicate balance.
Slower and slower she fell, until she was traveling barely more than running speed. The ground was just dozens of meters away. She began to feel relief. Against all odds, she was going to make it!
With a guttering cough, the jet-chute ran out of fuel.
“No!” she yelled.
But words weren’t enough. She was falling again, and rapidly gaining speed. Just seconds lay between her and being squashed like a bug against the hard face of Sebaddon. Nothing could save her now.
Strong limbs wrapped around her chest. With a gasp, she felt herself squeezed tight and pulled backward. She couldn’t see what had happened, but she recognized the gloves gripping together in front of her. They were standard Republic issue. The jet-chute belonging to the owner of those gloves strained and whined, slowing them so they landed with a tumble, not a splat.
Larin couldn’t believe her luck. Clambering to her feet, she helped her savior free of his jet-chute and airfoil harness. His faceplate cleared and she recognized Hetchkee.
“Couldn’t let you go like that,” he said matter-of-factly. “Equipment failure is inexcusable.”
“Thank you,” she said, meaning both syllables with all her heart. “What happened to Jopp?”
“Called me for help. Didn’t you hear him?”
Larin hadn’t, but she didn’t press it. She had been a little busy at the time. The important thing was that she had survived. As long as Jopp stayed out of her way, they need never talk again—about how his hesitance had almost cost her her life.
“Right,” she said, slipping her glove back onto her frost- and heat-blackened hand. “We’ve got some regrouping to do and hexes to kill. Any idea where our squads came down?”
They ran together for the rendezvous point, jumping over two of the deep cracks along the way. They were definitely machined into a ferrocrete-like surface, with some kind of black sealant at the base. If they weren’t the edges of a massive door, then they could have been canals. But for what? Any water lying around would be frozen solid. They could conceivably have been roads for hexes, only none were in sight.
The rendezvous point was a mess of weapons-fire. Republic and Imperial troopers had dug in and were either setting charges or laying covering fire, hoping to take out the cannons in range. Major Cha barked orders over the patchy comms as bombardment rained down from above. Imperial combat droids lumbered in perfectly straight lines across the battlefield, spitting fire at distant targets. Larin hadn’t grasped how large the master factory site truly was. Standing on top of it, she couldn’t see the edges.
“Moxla! Take a squad and put tower number five out of business. I’ll send someone after you once you’re laid in.”
“Yes, sir.” There was no easy way to tell one squad from another, so she picked a sergeant at random and assigned him to the mission. He was an Imperial, but that didn’t matter. On the ground, under enemy fire, troopers were all the same.
Several supply sleds had come down nearby, and she helped herself to all the launchers and charges she could carry. With the sergeant and his squad in tow, she loped across the flat dome, carefully watching the orientation of the cannon emplacement. At some point, they would be noticed.
She crossed another crack and dropped down inside. It was just deep enough for her to crouch out of sight. She followed the crack until they were as close as they needed to be, and there she ordered the squad to stop.
“Get those launchers unloaded and ready to fire. Sergeant, I want three of your best shots to go on ahead to provide distracting fire, another three to go back and do the same. Spread out, and space your rounds. Keep that emplacement busy.”
“Yes, sir.”
The launchers were lightweight and easy to assemble. They were ready in moments. As a broad field of fire converged on the tower, more potent punches attacked it at regular intervals, shrouding its uppermost reaches with thick, black smoke.
Still it fired, though.
“You and you,” Larin said, pointing at two troopers at random, “with me.”
She grabbed a belt of explosive charges and leapt out of the trench. The troopers followed, running hard for the base of the tower. The emplacement was already busy tracking multiple targets. Hopefully three more would escape unnoticed.
Halfway, they were targeted. The trooper on her right went down, blasted up his middle by pulses of purple fire. Larin and her sole companion dodged left, and the next wave went wide. Then it was targeting the grenade launchers again, and they reached the base unharmed.
It was ten meters across and as solid as a mountain.
She gave half the charges to the trooper. “One every two meters, set to blow on my command.”
He nodded and set off, moving around the base in the direction opposite hers. When they met up, they retreated as far as they dared and dropped flat. The emplacement didn’t seem to notice them. It was firing upward, at something she couldn’t see.
She pushed the remote detonation switch, and debris exploded over their heads. The top of the tower leaned, began to fall.
Then a much brighter flash came from behind her, and the ferrocrete ground bucked. Larin glanced back and saw a large mushroom cloud rising from the rendezvous point. It had been hit by heavier munitions than she’d seen in play from the hexes before. Either Xandret’s droids had evolved again, or they’d knocked something from above off-course. Maybe, she thought, that was what the emplacement had been firing at right before she’d destroyed it: bombardment, deflected just enough to hit the invading forces.
It was going to take ages for the dust to settle, but at least the comms had cleared. She got up and put out a call for all officers to report in.
Hetchkee spoke up from the other side of the dome, and one Imperial lieutenant. No others. No Major Cha.
A silver shape flashed through the clouds above, glinting in the sun. “Is that you, Stryver?” she called. “Tell me what you see up there.”
“One of the major subspace sources is right under your feet,” the Mandalorian replied. “Why put it so far from the CI?”
She didn’t know the answer to that question, and the comm dissolved into static again before she could ask him anything else.
She signaled her trooper to follow her back to the trench. The rest of the squad had re-formed and were packing up the launchers, preparatory to moving elsewhere. Larin didn’t know what her next objective should be. Keep taking out towers? Try to find the others? Without Major Cha, it was going to be difficult to coordinate everyone who remained.
As she hastily considered her options, the black surface at the bottom of the trench shifted. She looked down at her feet and saw a ripple pass through the rubbery black material. It shifted again, and a deep subterranean groan surrounded her.
“Move,” she told the squad. “If this whole thing is a door, then—”
The world fell out from under her before she could finish the sentence. She lunged and barely caught the nearest edge of the trench. The black surface had dissolved as though its molecular structure had suddenly changed from a solid to a liquid. Two troopers fell into blackness, firing at nothing. Their shots ceased after less than a second.
Larin hauled herself out of the suddenly bottomless trench. Another groan shook the air. The opposite walls lurched apart. Ten meters, twenty meters. She was standing with half the squad on the edge of an ever-widening trench. On the other side, the rest of her troopers receded into the distance.
The dome was unfolding, sliding finger-like segments of roof into deep recesses at its edge and releasing a vast upwelling of warmer air. Tendrils of fog sprang into being, mixing with the smoke and creating strange shapes all around her. She looked down, and saw something huge and indistinct stirring. Whatever it was, the hexes must have been building it nonstop, using all the prodigious resources of the metal- and energy-rich world.
“What is that thing?” one of her troopers asked, loud enough to be heard without a comm.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but those look like repulsors—there, around its edge.”
“It’s a ship, shaped like that? Where are its engines?”
A crazy thought occurred to her. “Maybe there aren’t any.”
The troopers looked at her like she was talking gibberish.
The segment of dome they were standing on was nearing the edge of the roof.
“We can’t stay here much longer,” she told what was left of the squad. “I advise you to get ready to jump.”
“Down onto that?” asked one, pointing at the object rising toward them.
“I think it’s a skyhook,” she said, bracing herself, “so we won’t be going down for long.”
SHIGAR STEPPED OUT of his jet-chute harness and stared in horror at the bubbling, bright red lake where his intended landing site had been. He had watched the furious, equator-bound descent of the transport while riding down in its wake. Its impact had sent a shock wave through the complex maze, which buckled and then subsided into the fluid beneath. Everyone on that maze had been swallowed. There were only a few late arrivals left, standing around the edge of the crater like him, staring down into the death of all their hopes.
Master Satele had been in the maze, somewhere, with Eldon Ax. Shigar had tried calling his Master via both the suit and the Force, but received no response to either. All he could see moving were hexes, bobbing and swimming through the red tide, apparently unharmed. Three surviving cannon emplacements fired at anyone in range, to little effect.
Darth Chratis had descended with him and landed not far away.
“Not only must I seek a new apprentice,” said the Sith Lord, red lightsaber standing out at his side like a standard, “but it appears that you are in need of a new Master.”
Shigar’s grief and frustration found a target. “You made this happen,” he said, turning away from the awful view to confront the ancient enemy of the Jedi Order.
“Not I, boy.”
“The Emperor, then, with all his dreams of murder and domination, slaughtering his way across the galaxy.”
“I don’t see the Emperor here, do you?”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Because you deserved to be mocked, boy. You are naïve and sheltered, thanks to the nonsense your Masters have fed you. The true face of the universe frightens you, and you fall back on that nonsense to explain your fear. Only a child closes its eyes when frightened. Look around you and grow up.”
Shigar felt his hackles rising, even though he knew Darth Chratis was trying to get exactly this reaction from him. “You can’t deny that the Sith stole Cinzia Xandret from her mother. That’s what led us here.”
“Lema Xandret was brilliant and mad. She is the one to blame, Shigar. Or Stryver, for not letting the matter rest. Or you.”
“Me? What did I do?”
“It was you who brought the matter to your Master’s attention.”
“Stand back.” Shigar activated his lightsaber. Darth Chratis was getting entirely too close. The red of his blade matched the lava and the sky above. It looked to Shigar like the whole world was turning to blood.
Darth Chratis stopped five paces away, a contemptuously amused expression on his withered face.
“Blame the Emperor for all your troubles, if you must,” he said. “Blame the Empire as a whole. Given the chance, would you explain to all of them how they have been so very wrong? Would you address the Sith, and the ministers, and the troopers, and the spies? I fear they wouldn’t listen to you, not even the people you might imagine to be on your side: the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the dissidents. There are fewer of them than you imagine, you know. And to the rest you are the enemy—you and your Jedi and your Senate. They curse your name just as you curse ours, for the loved ones they’ve lost at your hands, for the goods stolen by your privateers, for the many hardships they’ve endured. You’ll never win them over with your words, with your nonsense, so you’ll be forced to kill them all. How does that sound to you, Padawan? Do you fancy yourself the greatest mass murderer in the history of the galaxy? If not, perhaps you should, for that is the path you are heading down. You and the Emperor—no different at all.”
“You lie.” Shigar backed away, even though Darth Chratis had made no physical move. The weight of his words was threat enough.
“That empty litany will not protect you now, boy. Not from yourself.”
“We fight you because you are evil. Because you are slaves to the dark side.”
“All those billions and billions? Would that the Sith were so plentiful.”
“You have seduced them, twisted their thoughts. They obey you because they fear you.”
“Is the Republic so different?”
“We have laws, safeguards against abuses of power—”
“We have laws, too, albeit different ones, and the Emperor is the ultimate safeguard. There can be no miscarriage of justice under his rule, for his word is law. Where is your precious justice on Coruscant? How has the Republic benefited from your leaders’ inept fumbling?”
Something blossomed in Shigar’s mind like a flower: a flower of certainty, growing strong and sure in the darkness of the hour. He felt as though years of history had condensed to this moment: the reappearance of the Empire and the Mandalorians; the sacking of Coruscant and the fragile treaty that restored it to a greatly diminished Republic; the Annexation of Kiffu and the subjugation of his people.
It boiled down to him and Darth Chratis.
“You are the source of every bad thing that’s happened to the galaxy,” he said. “That’s why we have to fight you. War is inevitable, just like people say it is. There can be no lasting peace with the likes of you.”
“You are more like us than you care to admit,” Darth Chratis snarled. “I am offering to save your life, boy. Join me as my apprentice, and I will open your eyes for good. There can be no peace because peace is the lie. Strength comes only from conflict, and for there to be conflict there must be an enemy. That is the truth that lies behind your Masters’ teachings. Acknowledge it, embrace it, and you will understand why you can never serve them.”
Shigar steadied his lightsaber in a tight, two-handed grip.
Darth Chratis’s deep-set eyes glittered. The tip of his lightsaber didn’t move a millimeter.
Shigar watched it closely, waiting for the first blow to fall.
The Sith Lord laughed, a dreadful cackling sound all at odds with their circumstances.
“Do you think I intend to kill you now, boy? You forget: we have a truce. Unless you plan to attack me, and I am forced to defend myself—”
“I ought to attack you. Any kind of alliance with the Sith is flawed at its heart. Master Shan should never have agreed to it.”
“It was her suggestion, remember—and see how it has trapped you? Obey me and the truce holds. Attack me and the truce is broken.” Darth Chratis chuckled. “Which is it to be?”
Shigar wavered on the verge of acting. He could feel the need for it simmering in every muscle, every nerve. The Force was ready. It filled his veins like lava, burning hot.
He thought of Larin saying, You’re thinking too much.
His lightsaber moved as though of its own accord, sweeping forward into Darth Chratis’s reach with an almost delighted hum. Their blades clashed together once, twice, three times, and the Sith edged back a step.
“Yes, excellent—”
Shigar didn’t let him talk, pressing him with another combination of moves, staying light on his feet for the inevitable responses, feeling with every instinct, every breath, what must be done. They danced together along the lip of the crater, in full view of the surviving members of the attack force. No signals went up; no word to disband the alliance; comms were down, so the joint assault of Sebaddon went on.
Darth Chratis rallied with a series of bold, vicious strikes that cost Shigar the ground he had made, and more. He struck back only with his blade, knowing that he would lose if the duel descended into a free-for-all of telekinesis and other Force powers. That was inevitable. His only hope lay in Darth Chratis making an early mistake, giving Shigar an edge. Even then, it was going to be hard. Sith didn’t die easily.
Neither do Jedi, he told himself, even as sweat trickled into his eyes and he tossed his helmet away, the better to fight unhindered.
“You are growing weary,” said the Sith Lord. “Your resolve is weakening. I can feel it. You know that you will never beat me this way. Your only hope is to reach into your heart for the anger that we both know is there.”
“Anger will never rule me.”
“Think of the Grand Master. Think of your homeworld and all who died there. Tell yourself that I killed them, and seek the strength that knowledge brings.”
“You had nothing to do with Kiffu.”
“Didn’t I?”
Shigar fought on, matching Darth Chratis blow for blow. The red blade took three centimeters off his braid. He scored a line across the Sith’s right shoulder.
“You cannot fight without the dark side.”
Shigar silenced his thoughts and feelings. He was only the blade. He was only the Force.
“You cannot win without the dark side.”
Darth Chratis sent a wave of lightning across the gap between them. Shigar tried to catch it with his lightsaber. The shock coursed up the blade, into the hilt, and from there into his right arm. It burned like acid, much more powerful and insidious than the blast Eldon Ax had hit him with on Hutta. It didn’t just hurt. It ate at his resolve, telling him to fight fire with fire, to use the Sith Lord’s own weapons against him in defiance of his own Master’s advice. If he didn’t, he would surely die.
Shigar fell to his knees, the beginnings of a scream whistling through his clenched teeth.
Why didn’t she warn you? The whisper of doubt in his mind had a voice now. Your Master is famous for seeing the future, so why didn’t she tell you this lay ahead of you?
Because there was nothing she could do about it. That’s why. Her teachings are weaker than those of the Sith, and she knows it. She knows that the Jedi will lose the war that’s inevitably coming. She knows the Emperor will win. By keeping this secret from you, she has killed you.
She lied to you, just as the High Council has lied to you. They don’t care about justice. They are corrupt and weak.
All you have to do is turn your back on them, and you will live.
Darth Chratis’s lightning passed through Shigar’s body and down to his left hand. There it concentrated into a ball, blindingly bright. Waiting to be set free.
Strike me, said the voice, and rise up again, stronger than ever before.
“Die,” said Shigar in a voice that didn’t sound like his own. “Die!”
When he raised his hand, Darth Chratis wasn’t even looking at him. The Sith Lord’s attention had been captured by a shadow that had fallen across them. The thing that had cast it was enormous and bulbous, like a fist as big as a city rising slowly out of the lake. Lava dripped from it like water.
Such was his shock that the Sith lightning concentrated in Shigar’s left hand fizzled out. The rest went with it, along with the pain. Shigar understood then, with piercing clarity, that he had been the source of all of it, ever since Darth Chratis’s initial lightning strike. The voice whispering in his mind—and the doubts it had expressed—had been none other than his own.
His lightsaber lay in blackened pieces at his feet. His suit stank of smoke.
He stood up. The thing from the lake towered over them, no longer rising, just looming, blocking out the sky. The noise it made was deep and resonant, like the song of a deep-sea mammal. It sounded like a summons, offered in the language of worlds.
A small silver dot moved across the sky: Stryver’s scout. Beyond that hung the brilliant constellations of the combined fleets. Flashes of light danced among them, indicating that they were returning fire. Shigar couldn’t tell if they were firing at the hexes or one another.
He looked down at his hands. His gloves were burned right through, but his fingers and palms were undamaged.
This is the path laid down for you, said Master Satele into his mind. They were the same words she had used on Coruscant.
Shigar almost wept with commingled triumph and despair. She was alive, but where did that leave him? Was he tainted by the dark side even though he hadn’t actually struck out at Darth Chratis? Had Master Satele truly known all along that it would come to this, and never warned him?
Again he thought of Larin, telling him that he was lucky for being lifted out of obscurity to train for the Jedi Order. He had even believed her, and found strength in the knowledge that his Master and the High Council would endure. Whatever happens today, you’ll go back to the life you know.
Not anymore.
The galaxy is painted in black and white, he realized, feeling the truth and certainty of it deep in every bone. But from far enough away, it all looks gray.
THICK RED CURRENTS pulled Ax irresistibly downward, tumbling her like a red blood cell in a heart attack. Master Satele gripped her wrist so tightly she feared her bones might break, and she gripped the Jedi back just as hard. She could see nothing but her heads-up display and hear nothing but alarms. The precise specifications of the Republic armored environment suit were unknown to her, but she imagined its cooling systems screaming as they tried to radiate the excess heat, only to be overwhelmed and fail.
She waited, but that didn’t happen. They were tumbling just as violently as before, but she wasn’t getting any hotter.
Instead, a strange feeling came over her, a feeling that was neither entirely physical nor entirely psychic. For all the battering and pummeling going on, she wasn’t in any immediate danger of being crushed or burned. The fluid just looked like lava. She wasn’t being drowned. Tasted, perhaps? Or embraced …?
A powerful urge to swim overcame her, but not to reach the surface. There was something in the lake with them, something that wanted her to come closer. She began to kick and struggle against the current. Master Satele was a deadweight until she divined Ax’s intention and joined in the effort. They wriggled through the thick, red mass, body length by painful body length, occasionally striking solid objects being swept along with the flow. Some clutched at her, but Ax couldn’t tell if they were people or hexes, or an entirely new manifestation of the Sebaddon phenomenon. Instead of stopping, she swam on, following the only compass she had: her gut.
Her questing fingers found something hard and stable submerged in the lava-like liquid. It was smooth and slightly curved, like the side of a submarine. She and Master Shan explored it, looking for a way in. They found extrusions that might have been antennas, cannons, and sublight drives.
A ship. That was where she was supposed to go. Something inside had brought her here.
Satele Shan pulled her closer, touched faceplates. The red liquid parted just enough for Ax to glimpse the Grand Master’s private universe. Her face was drawn but composed.
“Air lock,” she said. “This way.”
“Do you think it’ll work in this stuff?”
“There’s only one way to find out.”
They pulled apart, and Master Satele guided her hand to the panel she had found. The controls were instantly recognizable. Ax had seen them on thousands of ships. Thousands of Imperial ships.
She pushed the top button: OPEN. A sudden current swept them closer as the empty chamber sucked in fluid. When the door was completely open, they swam inside and fumbled for the interior controls.
The door slid silently shut, leaving the unceasing turbulence of the fluid outside behind them. Ax floated in silence for a moment, grateful for the respite, the chance to think. Where were they? What was she doing? What had brought her here? She should be swimming for the surface, not exploring sunken artifacts while the rest of the mission fought around her.
“Are you going to open the inner door?” asked Master Satele, pressing close again.
Of course she was. She’d come too far to turn back. Her instincts tugged her on, despite her misgivings.
When she touched the CYCLE button, pumps in the walls strained to drain the fluid away. Weight returned, along with light and air. They finally let each other go. Ax wiped her faceplate clear, and she saw Master Satele doing the same. In the midst of such strangeness, she looked as small as Ax herself. She was glad she wasn’t alone.
The inner door opened, revealing a stock-standard ship’s corridor, scuffed and dusty with age. Ax stepped out of the puddle left in the air lock and put her dripping feet gratefully on a dry surface. She checked her HUD. The air was fine. Cracking the seal on her helmet, she swung the faceplate open.
All she smelled was blood.
Master Satele stepped up beside her with her faceplate open, too. “Any idea whose ship this is?”
Ax kept her thoughts to herself for the moment. She walked along the corridor to the first intersection, mentally plotting the layout. If this was a light cruiser, she decided, the command deck would be to the right, holds to the left, crew quarters down the first ladder, and engineering ahead. She chose to go right, and was rewarded with success. The command deck was small, but felt spacious for being so empty. No instrument panels glowed. No holoprojectors projected. The only signs of life were the lights shining down from above.
“Generator’s clearly functional,” said Master Satele, “but the control systems have been disconnected. If you’re thinking of getting off Sebaddon in this thing, you can forget about it.”
The floor shook beneath them, and Ax was reminded that, although the fluid that had engulfed them hadn’t been lava, they were still standing on top of a giant geothermal drilling site, on a world whose skin was about as stable as a water balloon’s.
The ship rattled and creaked around them. The echoing of its many complaints sounded like a voice, gradually fading into silence.
“Comms are blocked by the hull,” Master Satele went on. “That wouldn’t have been part of the ship’s original design.”
“They never intended to go anywhere,” Ax said, “or to talk to anyone. I bet this is Lema Xandret’s ship.”
Master Satele looked around. “No artwork, no personalized touches, no signs of home. How can you tell?”
“There’s a freight air lock aft,” Ax said, avoiding the question. They headed back the way they had come. “Let’s see what’s through there.”
On the way they passed row after row of empty rooms, confirming Ax’s feeling that the ship had been abandoned. Xandret and the other fugitives had stripped everything useful or personal and moved it elsewhere. Maybe the ship reminded them too much of what they had left behind; maybe they had built more comfortable quarters elsewhere. Perhaps they had kept it as a memento mori, as a symbol of their isolation and abandonment, and never intended to use it again. When they had returned to the galaxy, they had used a different ship entirely, one they had built themselves.
Nowhere in Imperial records, Ax realized, was the name of this ship recorded. Unless she found a survivor, or some kind of record, she might never learn it. That hole in her mother’s history bothered her as they walked and climbed through the ship. She knew it meant nothing, really, and that sticking on this point was a kind of self-defense against the much wider holes that might soon be filled in. But she couldn’t help wondering what it had been like to live with the rocksolid reminder of your betrayal constantly at hand. Maddening, probably.
The aft freight air lock was twice as large as the one they had come through on the port side. It was open, a tubular umbilical leading to spaces unknown. The tube swayed and rocked uncertainly under the influence of the fluid around it.
Ax pressed forward, telling herself there was nothing to fear. She agreed with Stryver. Lema Xandret is already dead. She has been for some time. There was no life in here. The colony had survived long enough to build the hexes, but then it had failed. Either the hexes had killed them, recognizing that the humans had outlived their usefulness, or they had killed themselves. All the evidence Ax expected to find of them was their bodies.
She wasn’t prepared, therefore, for the intimately decorated quarters they had left behind: the pictures, journals, clothes, mobiles, meals, and more that lay scattered throughout the winding corridors of the colony, perfectly preserved in the cool, dry air, as though they had been put aside only an hour ago. There had been children living here. There were memorials to the dead, and to those left behind. Likenesses of the colonists stared out at her from every angle. She recognized her mother’s face in some of the pictures. Lema Xandret had grown older here. Her face was lined, and her hair had turned gray. Her stare was sharp.
“You were right,” said Master Satele with something like admiration in her voice. Concern, too, if Ax’s ears didn’t deceive her.
She hurried on in determined silence. The empty colony was testimony to many things: hopes and fears, bravery and cowardice, the everyday and the profound. Ax wasn’t interested in any of that. She hadn’t come to Sebaddon in search of a museum. She had come because the Dark Council ordered her to, because fate demanded it, and because of Dao Stryver. Maudlin sentimentality was irrelevant to her.
Still, Ax’s pace increased until she was almost running from room to room, seeking something she couldn’t put a name to. Master Satele followed, moving lightly and silently in her wake. The corridors wound deeper and deeper, connecting to larger spaces and more business-like structures, including air and water purifiers and power plants. The pressure steadily increased around them. In several places they saw slow leaks, dripping red into growing puddles.
They came at last to a large, square room that looked more like a warehouse than a laboratory, although clearly it had once been the latter. Droid parts lay scattered in various states of repair alongside tools of all shapes and sizes and arcane instruments of measurement. Holoprojectors displayed rotating designs, revealing several hex variants that Ax hadn’t seen before: versions with ten legs or more, multiple bodies, specialist limbs, and agglomerated into larger machines capable of space travel or mass destruction. Some of them changed as she walked toward them, indicating that the evolutionary algorithms responsible for them were still running. Thick cables ran everywhere through a centimeters-deep layer of red. Some of them led to a tubular glass tank, five times larger than a bacta tank, which stood in one corner of the room. It was full of opaque red fluid, apparently identical to the stuff outside.
Master Satele approached the tank, but Ax hung back. She sensed that this was what had drawn her here, but now that she was standing in front of it, she was nervous. Did she really want to know what her mother’s fate had been?
“It’s warm,” said Master Satele. She had taken off a glove and pressed it against the glass. “Body temperature, or thereabouts.”
“That red stuff,” said Ax. “It’s in all the hexes. It looks like lava, but it’s not. It’s the biological component the Hutts detected.”
“Is it blood?”
“I don’t know.” She shuddered. “I hope not.”
The Grand Master was still standing with her hand touching the glass. She watched Ax closely. “This is what I tap into when I subdue the hexes. It’s alive, but at the same time not alive. It’s incomplete, like a body without a mind.”
“Could the CI be its mind?”
“It could be, but we’ve seen no sign of the CI so far. If it’s in this section of the planet, it’s keeping a very low profile.”
The fluid in the tank stirred, and Master Satele pulled sharply away.
“There’s something else in there,” she said. “I felt it.”
Ax hugged herself without realizing. She wanted to run but couldn’t move. Her feet were frozen to the floor. Her eyes couldn’t look away.
Inside the tank, something white swept against the glass. It vanished almost instantly, back into the red murk, but then returned a moment later, pressing hard.
Ax gasped. It was a human hand. Another appeared beside it, with fingers splayed out wide. The red fluid stirred as the body the hands were attached to steadied itself in the fluid.
Something whirred in the laboratory. A cam turned to stare at Master Satele, then tracked to take in Ax.
“I recognize you.”
The voice came from all around them. Female, breathless, surprised.
“I know you.”
A face loomed closer to the glass wall of the tank, coming slowly into view.
“I am you.”
Ax felt her insides turn to water. The face was her own.