Star Wars 1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1

Darth Karon tipped the control yoke forward to plunge the _Endurance_ nose first into the massive gravity well of the core world, Coralug, the point of no return for some one who wanted to make a hyperspace jump. The sharply tapered prows of Mandilorian blockade ships slipped past like the maw of a massive asteroid worm, coaxing him into its sheltering, cavernous depths while planning to fill with acid and digest him. Karon didn't flinch. He had a mission which he must accomplish, though if he succeeded, the next few years would be a unique trial.

A heavy, exotically accented voice – reminiscent of that of the Duxon settlers' integrated standard—crackled through the ship's speakers.

"This is Mandilorian cruiser _Unyielding_. State your identity and pass code or you will be fired upon."

"_Unyielding_," he replied in a measured tone. Don't mess with a Mandilorian, even if you're a Sith. "This is the shuttle _Endurance_ out bound from the Korriban system, coming on a mission of highest priority, given by the Dark Council. Transmitting codes now."

He smirked at the stunned silence over the COM. The Empire just had too much power. He knew it was blasphemous, but he oft entertained visions of the Republic rising once again, just to imagine the peace and lack of all this suspicion and intrigue. Satisfying these Mandilorians and their protocols was getting rather tiresome.

"You will pass unchallenged," said the thick-sounding lieutenant.

He was almost at bombardment level anyway.

He powered down the engines and let the thrusters coax the lightly-armed craft into a descent vector.

As he reclined away from the transparasteel canopy and into the spacious cockpit, he contemplated the developed world that twinkled before him in huge grids. It so reminded him of that great conquest. The plot had worked so nicely, until…

The gravity alarm chirped from the red-glowing control array, warning him that the_ Endurance_ had reached terminal velocity.

He tapped the pulsing indicator light and toggled a counter-thrust then brought the engine nacelles back to running power and glided nimbly past the first of the soaring structures. Above a puffy cloud, any inexperienced pilot would expect a terrain alarm, but Darth Karon knew better. His experiences on these worlds were more than enough to override such a naïve notion.

He dipped into the cottony whiteness, wisely savouring the peace.

The_ Endurance_ immerged into chaos. A constant stream of multileveled traffic traveling in confusing, perpendicular lines which would be indecipherable were it not for the glowing indicators on the canopy.

As he entered a rapid queue which extended down and right several kilometres ahead, neon-glowing signs flashed by in a whirl of dazzling colour. Casinos, bars, diners and a myriad of cheap flats dropped into Coralug's depths and out of sight—probably out of the liveable biosphere).

He was nearly at the place, flitting through the refugee district… there!

Along the wall of plain, shabby buildings, a large landing pad jutted, unmanned, out of the sea of grey, leading into a narrow alley way.

He started his approach, while at the same time reaching out with his considerable command of the force. Yes, he was there. The council's spies were right.

He let the ship's repulsorlift cells cushion the touchdown and unclipped his loose harness, treading aft toward the landing ramp.

Karon exited the_ Endurance_ with a purposeful stride, his two Sith Assassins flanking him with fingers to their sheathed vibroblades. The Sith Lord had to stifle another smirk at the irony of carrying such useless soldiers.

The beggars lining the alley of the ghetto shrank away even without him sweeping his light cloak aside to reveal the ivory-coloured handle of his lightsaber, carved from the massive clavicle of a Sith War Rhino.

Karon traveled through the lines of shelters and families huddled around plasma-heated batteries and into a cluster of what seemed to be huge, re-enforced industrial box crates, but were filled with residents of the poor refugee sector instead of flash-frozen goods ready to be shipped to far-off systems. They backed away from passers-by and seemed to blend in with the metal interiors of the durasteel containers in their insignificance. Karon could sense him, though.

He was close to the source. Almost there-

"Jia," a stern female voice called from inside a nearby crate. "Come inside. You'll catch cold."

A boy rounded the corner of the box carrying two credit coins. The poor kid had been working, probably slaving away for some Hut slumlord. This was the one, though, and he confided this information to the assassins through the force, who cloaked themselves while Karon stepped forward.

The boy, Jia, turned around. He was a sprightly youth with bright blonde hair which was brushed carelessly to the left and deep blue eyes that took in every nuance of Karon's appearance… which was quite an eyesore with his haunted, yellow eyes and visage scarred from his continuous manipulation of the dark side and occasional use of the deadly Sith lightning.

Jia's jaw worked and his eyes widened, wondering possibly what man could sustain such scars and live. He had no idea.

"Markm, would you go check on Jia and make sure that his shenanigans don't carry on past curfew?"

It was the woman inside again.

As footsteps approached, Jia darted into the shelter. That would only make it worse.

The man named Markm peaked around the frame of the container door, took one look at Koran and said, "blast!"

He gathered the force into his body and channelled it through his open palm and the air rippled with a rhapsodic boom that, to pleasing effect, made the ramshackle buildings rattle and rock.

Hit with the Force Pulse, Markm was thrown off his feet, coughing violently as he hit the ground with two broken ribs.

He turned to face the door and saw the woman, clearly some sort of mother figure to the boy of no more than fourteen, shakily clutching a blaster rifle.

At this offence, the assassins immerged from their cloaked states and drew vibroblades, ready to hack the woman down. Fate wouldn't have it that easy, though. A force wall, uncontrolled but powerful, erupted from the boy and sent the assassins sprawling.

Karon drew his lightsaber and brought it before him in a close stance. He would have to make a ridiculous show of this.

As the first two blasterbolts surged toward him in the ghostly image of his force foresight and hit him in the center of mass, he spun his whirring blade full circle before positioning it to intercept the green bolts. Then, in the next volley, he jumped and sent his body into a fast corkscrew with his lightsaber aligned above his head, deflecting a bolt per spin. He was now close and had showed off enough for one day.

Casually deflecting one more surge, he brought his lightsaber about and cut across the mother's abdomen.

The assassins had recovered by the time the whirring blade hissed back into its handle, and were restraining the child. He was fighting back. That was good. They finally jammed an injector tube into his neck and dosed him with a powerful sedative cocktail which would last for the entire jump.

"Drag him to the ship with a hood," Karon ordered wearily. "I don't wand his identity discovered until we're well clear, understood?"

They bowed stiffly once, then wordlessly shoved Jia's blonde head into a black hood.

In the instant before his face disappeared, Karon felt a sudden, stunning urge to strike him, to kill him now, but it passed and Karon buried the feeling for later examination.

* * *

As the ship made the jump for Korriban, Karon retired to the main hold and let the anger resurface. It seemed like pure, blind fury. An unguarded moment after an adrenaline rush, but it felt more like an intuition.

Maybe it was the right thing to do. To that point, he had a distinct feeling that he could have saved himself a lot of trouble in following that course.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Still in hyperspace. From the interior to the outer rim was a long way, nearly a light week, and nothing to do but sit and think.

He walked around the central computer hub with its slowly revolving, holographic starchart suspended above the large projector and sending even more red light into the interior.

Karon skirted the hub and tapped an icon on the food processor, ordering a Bothan bean tea. It was a good depressant for the weary Sith, as he looked blankly around the room.

The _Endurance_'s main hold was separated from the cockpit, a rare luxury in a shuttle craft, but was small for it. He had removed several crash seats from the center of the room to make space for the huge chart.

He took the tea and sipped it deeply, remembering the day when his life had gone wrong.

Dukufur Kassar, the padawan of Jedi master Rictif Fusac, was himself face-to-face with death itself.

Kasarr's sky burned a deep red, scarred by the terrible happenings on its surface, it seemed. Its mountains were burning swells upon the dying surface, and the oceans boiled, steaming up in huge clouds, yet no blasters rained death from above. It was the force. He knew it. He could feel the pull as the life was sucked from his body. As he lay against the enclave wall in shock and agony, the trees greyed and turned to dust, falling and billowing pathetically.

The council was dead around him, lying in heaps with eyes wide and staring amid the ruined grass. Yet he was still alive. For some cruel reason, he was alive, and they were not. The Miraluka were extinct, the Jedi Order all but lost, and the planet falling to death around his ears.

He had nothing left to do but wait. Wait to be consumed by pain or simply die where he lay.

A ship crashed from the sky, its pilot no doubt dead at the controls, sending a blistering trail of cooling propellant across the flushed sky, then impacted worthlessly in the trees. He saw another ship, then, this time much bigger than before, and he groaned as the wedge-shaped vessel angled downward, directly above him. But it did not plummet as the other had. It just hung in the sky, ponderously surveying the destruction, and moved on through the heavens. Not before a single transport deployed from the belly hold, however, which landed on the dust of the trees, kicking up a cloud of the stuff as its repulsor lifts gleamed and brought the craft to a smooth stop.

A single figure immerged, hooded and slender, with a fantastical grace to its deliberate movements. It approached at a fast pace, seeming not to feel the sucking affects of the force, and knelt at his side. He felt no warmth from the presence of the man, and recognized a Sith from the immense power emanating from him, aggressively observant. He looked into the dark hood, however, and saw something more than anger and lust, but pain. Regret. The same that he felt at seeing the Enclave's destruction. It was remorse for what he was allowing to happen.

For as long as he lived, Dukufur would never forget the surprise, the unexpected shock of seeing that virtue in a Sith, and went on to bear the name of Darth Karon for the rest of his days in the service of the Sith Empire.

Of course, as cruel fate would have it, he had survived, but the Sith had broken Dukufur. He had learned the Dark Side of the Force and become powerful and had learned to kill. The only thing that he was allowed to fear was his master, the only thing he was allowed to love was destruction, the compliance with his masters' bidding, and passion lent an invincible edge to his sword. Torture and cunning were second nature to Karon's enslaved mind when he again saw the face from years before, the face he could never forget, the face that was hidden.

The heavy stone doors slid aside with well-lubricated ease as he marched into the huge, vaulted meditation chamber flanked by two Sith troopers clad in passive black body suits and heavily tinted visors, swaggering with the arrogance gleaned by years in service with the Dark Lord. As if their presence mattered next to a Sith.

He had intended to bow down before the powerful person who sat before him in a raised throne, but he found that his knees buckled of their own accord. This lord was as rude as he was powerful, it seemed.

After this display, Karon though it more than prudent to speak first.

"My Lord… it has been a long time." He did not know what had made him say this, but this one did seem familiar. He supposed it was the magic of the room and its countless uses by the most influential and mighty beings in galactic history.

"I have no recollection of your face, but it has no doubt been contorted by evil. Nevertheless, I do not deny that our paths may have crossed." The amplification and quality of the deep voice suggested force use to make the leader sound more impressive, but Karon humoured the presumptuous man… if one could be called a man after so much power had taken its toll. "I did not summon you for a warm reunion, however. You must be wondering why we are alone."

Now that Karon looked around, he sensed no others in the vicinity.

"It had crossed my mind," he said, still playing along.

"Hm… Brash. A more than common trait in one so youthful… yet so potent!" He was searching him, and Darth Karon didn't like it. What was this all about? What was so special about he, who had taken remedial classes under the cruel Bith who had made him the hard man he was today? The Dark Lord continued. "I summoned you to… enlighten you to certain facts. About your education, and how it will affect your future."

Karon rolled his eyes. "Such lectures are given in our class chambers frequently. I hardly need-"

"This is no ordinary lecture. Have you heard the tale of Naga Sadaw?"

"Of course," he explained earnestly. "Everyone with access to holobooks knows that legend." What was he getting at?

"There was an untold chapter. My chapter."

Now he was interested. What part did this lord play in that story, a story told throughout the galaxy with both fear and awe?

"Tell me," he whispered eagerly.

The Dark Lord began. "When the Dark Lord Marka Ragnos died, Naga Sadaw battled his principal rival Ludo Kressh for the vacant mantle, but the Spectre of Marka Ragnos supposedly intervened. Sadaw was not long deterred, however, and when two siblings, Jori and Gav Daragon, immerged from hyperspace above Korriban, he couldn't resist the opportunity to sit upon the throne, and followed Jori back into Republic space, beginning the Great Hyperspace War. This lead to his demise, but not the end of his life. When he returned, defeated, betrayed by his apprentice, he was driven out of Sith space after killing Ludo Kressh, and fled to the fourth moon of Yavin with many loyal and enslaved Massassi soldiers."

Karon, on edge and absorbed in the words, barely nodded an affirmative to the Dark Lord.

"His work on Sith Alchemy with the Massassi warriors led to more than just the hunting, brutal primitives that you were told about in your lectures. It lead to something more.

"He had discovered technologies that had changed the course of history and were hidden away when he put himself in suspended animation, but nothing like the force power that he had uncovered with those cruel experiments.

"When Freedon Nadd awoke the Dark Lord from the sleep and learned his teachings before killing him and taking his buried flagship, the Battleship Cursair, he had no idea of what he could have gained with patience. He had barely scratched the surface of Naga's potential when he learned to create supernovae with the force-channelling machine aboard the flagship."

_How could this be possible?,_ wondered Karon in disbelief. _What Sith could possess more than that? Hope to possess more power than that?_ "But Lord, that is impossible. Freedon Nadd was portrayed as wise, and could only inherit the throne by killing Naga Sadaw. He studied the holocrons-"

"Nadd was a fool, and a treacherous one. The myth that he would have to kill his master was a shallow con to hide his true nature. No, he held no skill in such high arts.

"You still do not understand, simple boy. I will tell you one day, but you are not ready yet." He seemed to steady himself for a moment, bringing himself from the edge of an outburst, then continued. "You all were wondering why I left the Sith Empire for so long in the hands of the Dark Council? I will answer you when you have proven yourself, my apprentice. But for now let me tell you this. The secrets of Naga Sadaw hold much sway over your destiny."

Addressed thusly, Karon was taken somewhat aback, and almost forgot his reply: "I shall not fail you, my master." He knelt on one knee

The Dark Lord nodded approvingly. "I am sure that together we can discover the secrets in time, with the power that you will soon learn, but there is little time. My days as Dark Lord of the Sith is drawing to a close. I will soon die, and you will be bound to me if you do not learn what you need to know. What you need to survive, because you will find that this is of great importance. As I said, this is no ordinary lecture."

Karon was shocked to hear a dark lord admit this in his own secure citadel, but he wasn't surprised by the fact. A Lord was only a Lord as long as he had followers. A revolution would come lead by some ambitious and youthful Sith and destroy him, but he sensed something else on his mind. Something more set.

"Do you know why you were given a private teacher while the others learned together?"

He blinked in confusion. "I always thought that my skills were remedial." It was true. He had been separated from the masses of eager students, power-hungry and go-getting, and had been placed under the tutelage of his ruthlessly abusive Bith weapons master. He had been heckled and teased by the others for being substandard and untalented, but he had never suspected that he possessed any great power or prowess, though he had been uncannily skilled with the blade and had always defeated his aggressive opponents with flurries of swift blows from his prestigious sword.

"You have powers that none in your generations could hope to have. You are the only one now that is destined to wield Naga's secrets against our enemies. Your private training was not remedial, but rather advanced. Unbeknownst to you, your teacher gave you the tools to use the dark powers once at Sadaw's disposal. But you cannot yet. There are still things yet to be done. First, you must go to the tomb, obtain a lightsaber. You will use it to build a reputation, then you must find an apprentice fit for succession and potent in the dark side. When I see fit, I will summon you once more. Now go." He waved Karon away with a surprisingly delicate Rancor-leather gauntlet and lifted his hold on Karon's calves, allowing him to stagger upright and eye his master's masked visage one last time. "One last order I will give you this day. In this chamber, you will call me Darth Plaguis."

He bowed low. "As you wish, my master."


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 3

"Duke!"

His old name struck him profoundly every time it was uttered, but he had only entrusted it to his wife, Ciffirae Kassar.

She ran from their small hut dwelling on the tropical world of Despyre, an isolated spot, protected from the poisonous plants and savage animals of the dangerous rainforest and occasional raging typhoons to embrace her husband. It was the perfect getaway for the Sith Lord who had so many troubles in his life.

As she threw her tanned arms around him, he realized what rare thing this was. Cif was a constant reminder that the Sith knew love and hate in their lives, but mostly the latter when considering the controversial way of emotion an passion. They were hated for their lack of control over their emotions, not solely their hate.

She kissed him once, then led him to the house by the hand, Karon only resisting minimally as she dragged him into the small enclosure.

"I have missed you, Cif," Karon said as he walked to the middle of the hut, savouring the quaint features and plain ceiling. "I thought that I would never escape the Core long enough to draw breath!"

"Well," she replied, grabbing him playfully around the middle. "You can breathe all you want now." Cif put her small head on his muscular shoulder next to Karon's, his scars barely visible in the presence of his radiant wife. "I suppose you will have to return to your work soon, though. Come," she bade him, and led him into one of the few separate rooms of the cabin. "Come see Philip!"

In the room, a tiny male infant was nestled in a long, padded wicker crib, sucking his diminutive thumb and sleeping peacefully.

"He's grown," Karon remarked, and put an arm around Cif as she leaned on him, both regarding their son with appreciation and love in their eyes. "I hope that Sirvi will grant me leave long enough to spend time with the two of you. Force knows that I deserve it by now," he muttered, referring to his assigned master at the Sith academy, though Cif thought that he was an atmospheric reclamation campaigner traveling to the Inner Rim simply to restore the planets' climates as opposed to kidnapping children.

Ciffrae considered Karon with a small amount of curiosity now, keeping her chin on his straight shoulder and looking into his dark eyes. "What's wrong?" she asked, concerned by a sudden female intuition. Something wasn't at all right, and Cif knew it. "Dukuru, what's wrong? Did something happen on Coralug?"

"No," he lied. He hated this. He had been making up excuses for two years now, and he was growing less and less able to cover up for his devotion to the Dark Lord. It demanded so much of his time, and he knew that he would soon have to tell her, or the intelligent woman would find out, and he did not want that for either of them. "I am truly grateful to be here, it's just… I have a feeling that this is too good to last, that, what with all the instability in the Empire, I will have to fight for you and Phillip. I just don't want to lose you."

The smile he gave her was a little too telling, though, and the corners of her mouth twitched downward. "Duke, honey, tell me it's going to be alright. Tell me you will be here whenever you can, and that there will be peace." A tear trickled down her cheek and she reached up to wipe it away. "I don't want to lose you. I love you."

Damn it, this was the worst thing about being a Sith. Love was the most dangerous thing, because he knew of at least ten different Sith at the Academy who would give their left eye to get their evil hands on such effective leverage. That was one of the reasons that he had chosen to set their home on Despyre. It was remote, secluded, and most of all dangerous. A place where the slightest prick from a poisonous thorn in that huge forest could send you into an endless, immobilizing coma, or cause incapacitating pain for three weeks without treatment wouldn't be at the top of the list for places to search.

He had indeed felt this impulsive protectiveness. Since the beginning of the quest his master had set him, the feeling had grown intensely, and not without reason. If his master were to fall from his thrown, Karon would immediately be prayed upon by his equals and, unprotected by the Dark Lord and his influence throughout the Empire, he would be overpowered and killed.

Even if he were only exiled, the Republic would never take him in. He was truly lost without the Dark Lord.

Jia Skiph had never been more scared in his life. Before he had gone to sleep, he had seen his mother cut down by some sort of sword. He recalled that clearly now, a solid shaft of light, and a handle of carved bone, probably encasing ancient electronics and a power source. The man with the scarred face had turned to him, and he had felt so exposed under those searching eyes. They were so terrifying that he had frozen. He had not even called out to his dead mother when they had forced the tube into his neck and put him to sleep.

He sat up for the first time since the ordeal three days before and surveyed his unexciting surroundings. Durasteel paneling dominated the small room's walls with a small local communications console mounted three feet above the deck plates.

When Jia moved, he found that he was very stiff from days of unconsciousness, and that the tiny birth upon which he stretched was hard and unyielding. To his left, a thrumming pink forcefield barred the door that led to a main hold. Though his view of that room was heavily distorted by the field, Jia could still see a figure moving beyond, sitting and sipping a beverage pensively. Jia did not know why, but the figure unnerved him. He felt like he was under a bright light, where the interrogator was shrouded in shadow.

"Finally," a voice issued through hidden speakers. It sounded hollow and passionless. "I was beginning to think that they had actually managed to kill you." He made a small _hmph_ noise and continued: "I would not be surprised. Assassins, though trained, can be extremely careless."

He slowly slid his legs to the floor and got up, feeling his rigid vertebrae snap straight and right his posture. "Where am I?"

It was a surprisingly lucid and rational question, given his youthful age and the shock of the earlier episode, and even Jia was surprised.

"We are in an Imperial shuttle, property of the Dark Council and not to be abused, in case you have any escape attempts planned, so don't push your luck with the assassins. Bringing you to the Academy will only push them further down the ranks."

"Academy?" Again, his inquisitiveness intrigued both occupants of the craft, but the voice answered.

"I am bringing you to the Sith Academy to be trained in the use of the Force. You will learn to fight, to survive, and, most likely, to read." The voice took on a distinctly derisive tone at this, and Jia could easily envision a broad, rugged face arching an eyebrow in distaste for his low upbringing. "You were chosen to serve the Sith Empire, and no one else, remember that. It is an honour to be so singled out from all the millions in the galaxy. Treat me with respect and your training will go as planned."

"But the Sith are bad." Jia mentally slapped himself, but he couldn't stop himself from blurting it out. The few travelers and asylum-seekers that came through the refugee sector on Coralug and drank in the local cantina or swoop-racing galleries often swapped tales of the Sith's corruption and cruelty, while others debated that they were the right side to be on, and he couldn't help but side with the Jedi, though they had allegedly abandoned the outer rim systems during the Mandilorian wars. Markm had always said that the Jedi were really kind people, though they had not fought in the wars, and were now all but extinct since the Jedi Civil war.

"That is the answer of a Jedi fool, the Council's lies clouding the minds of the weak. You have much to learn, idiotic boy."

Jia stood defiantly in his cell, as he now realized it to be, and looked around to find a surveillance camera to scowl at, but all he succeeded in doing was giving himself a mild case of whiplash. "What is so great about the Sith?"

The voice sighed, then said: "'What's so great about the Sith' is the difference between them and the Jedi. The Jedi live their lives without emotion, not reaching the full measure of their power. Their cold logic detaches them from passion and fear and love and hate and weakens them. We shall teach you what the Jedi are too frail and cowardly to harness, and you will be able to defend yourself, protect your friends and go back to your life with Markm."

Jia backed away from whatever source the ghostly, matter-of-fact voice and his knees gave way, plunking him on his butt and making him smack the back of his head painfully on the low upper bunk. His eyes still darted around when the black pain receded from his vision.

"Yes," the voice purred. "I know your whole family. Everyone you know, everyone you fear to lose, I've done my research, and I know exactly how to break you, so you can resist, and you will lose everything you hold dear, or you can learn power and obedience, and they will all be spared and you will see them again in a few years."

"Alright," Jia said, defeated. "I'll go."

He expected a reply from the voice, expressing its relief that he had submitted to his fate of going to the academy, but it said nothing. Instead, he saw, out of the corner of his vision, the dark shape shift to an erect standing position and walk to the forcefield. It's arm, for he still could not discern its gender even from this proximity, as it was robed in loose, black garments that hung slack around its arms and torso with a swell at the shoulders indicating a thrown-back hood, extended past his vision to toggle some unseen switch. The forcefield fizzled out, and he clearly saw for the first time the man who had killed his mother and kidnapped him.

He flung himself at the stranger, beating at his muscled torso with futile blows that bruised his adolescent knuckles more than the man's brawny abdomen.

Moments into his fruitless assault, he found himself immobilized, his fists and feet frozen in awkward positions putting him off balance and letting him fall painfully against the edge of the hard birth.

"Witness your future, here in its full glory. A snivelling refugee attempting to fight a destiny that he does not understand. Your eyes are closed so tightly that it muddles your mind and bars your obvious sensitivity to the Force. You are a god among insects, and yet you grovel on the floor like you are still one of them. Still their equal." He spat the last words with distaste, as if what he spoke was sacrilegious profanity of the worst kind that he would rather not utter, but must in order to teach him a lesson. "Get up. Show me how hard you can really punch. Don't hold back. I killed your mother, and Markm will not get medical care for some time. You can do better than that. If you can knock me down, I will let you roam freely throughout the shuttle. I'd wager that you haven't seen the inside of a spacecraft for many years, perhaps never."

It was too true. Now that he knew that he was inside of a spaceship, he desperately wished to escape, and if punching a Sith out in his own ship was how he was going to do it, he wasn't complaining.

The man threw out his lean chest and he cocked back his fist, mustering what adrenaline he had left from his frenzied harassment of the Sith, and punched forward with all the strength in his diminutive biceps.

Though he was weakened from poverty, the blow landed hard and solid, and the force did not shatter any bones or strain any tendons.

"Good," he commented, nodding. "For a start. Try again. This time, stretch your thoughts back. Feel every injustice, every wrong inflicted upon you or your family as keenly as possible. Everything that makes you feel anger. You'll be able to break a man's bones with the proper training, but you don't have nearly the amount of focus on this try."

Jia loathed this man, and this was going to be a painful process. Throughout his life as a refugee, he had been given plenty of unpleasant memories to work with, so it didn't take much to resurrect the images of his unpleasant past. He instantly felt his every nerve being charged with anger and resentment for the Huts and Quarren who had ruled his life since his birth on Coralug. It overflowed into his limbs and made his breath heave and gasp. His fingers curled and shook, and his eyes lit. This man's scarred face with its cruel, sharp features made it so easy. He regretted that he was not permitted to hit his ugly face. But then, he reflected, he could very easily try. Apparently he was force-sensitive, so he had just as much power as this one.

He lowered his shoulder and brought his arm behind his head, winding up for the devastating blow, then let loose.

The mass of hard bone and calloused flesh soared straight for the Sith's left eye. It was perfectly aimed and its speed was like nothing he had seen.

The hit was about to land and Jia could tell that it would be the hit that set him free, when… _WOOSH_!

An unstoppable force put massive amounts of pressure on every part of his body and stopped his fist cold. He was sent backwards to sprawl on the cold durasteel floor.

"Never. Never disobey me. That is your first rule. I will hurt you very badly if you try anything like that without permission again."

Jia certainly understood, but he couldn't imagine anything that he could do to make him hurt more than this. His entire body felt bruised and stiff, and a great welt had been raised on the back of his head that was throbbing annoyingly.

He raised himself to a sitting position. "Am I free to go?"

Jia had expected the Sith to flare up at the impertinent question, but instead he did something very different. His shoulders sagged, and his expression grew dark, all anger drained from him. "You… will never be free. You can leave your room and use these quarters at your leisure. I am Darth Karon, and you are my apprentice."

_Ebon Hawk, _a dynamic-class freighter, was not an overly large or luxurious ship, what with broken-down hyperdrive COMs equipment, burn marks lining her squat hull and a constant atmospheric haze in the interior due to a damper malfunction, and it was made no better by the fact that the freighter and her crew were stranded in deep, interstellar space on the edge of the Unknown Regions.

Kafi Morso, the ship's accepted techie and maintenance officer, sat at a scarred work bench, tinkering with a burned powercell, it's plasteel casing cooked to an unrecognisable blackish colour, such a contrast to it's usual white sheen.

It was their last, and it was needed to power the hyperdrive engine, or at least sustain atmospheric stability for a few more months to continue further repairs to their engine systems.

The _Hawk_ wasn't in her prime, and it pained Kafi to see the old war hero fall so far, crippled by a recent crossfire between a Sith Battleship and a Republic short-range defence cruiser. They had found something in this region, though she could hardly think what, that was of mutual interest, and they had taken the Republic's side. It was almost the last thing that they had ever done, but their pilot, a mysterious youth named Atton, had saved them. He seemed to have a suspiciously detailed knowledge of the Sith ships, but they hadn't complained when he had blasted a tiny, one-metre-wide section of weak armour-plating covering a large reactant tank. The ensuing explosion had crippled them, and they had gone spinning through space, and had to vent small amounts of atmosphere from isolated sections of the ship to slow their reckless speed.

Since then, the crew had been working non-stop to repair the ship.

As she leaned over the broken piece and connected two cables to either side, she heard someone coming from her left and enter the wide garage section with soft footsteps.

It was Atton. He immediately started to speak. "HK's talking to the _Hawk_ to see what's wrong with the left antimatter injector. We can't get close to it without risking damage to the containment field. Seems that it's undergoing some fluctuations, and the tensor field has failed completely. That'll add on to our repair time." He shook his head in disbelief. "This stuff is for a refit station, not five technicians, an assassin, and a utility droid."

Atton, as Kafi had observed from her weeks with him aboard the crippled vessel, was an enigma, to say the least. He had shown up out of nowhere at dock to join the _Hawk_'s command crew, yet had not seemed one bit pleased by the prospect. Nothing seemed to cheer him from his constant rut of cynicism except the idea of flying and killing Sith, which was highly unlikely on this expedition. Of course, this hypothesis had been proven drastically wrong by the recent events, and drove the whole crew, including Kafi, who always endeavoured to be as sensibly optimistic as possible. This cell didn't help either.

He finally noticed that the Rodian was concentrated on the burned powercell, and watched a little more closely over her hunched shoulder. "You know that if the casing is unstable you'll blow the entire thing."

"Yes, I know that it's a gamble, but this could well speed our departure by a month or…" She powered up the small generator connected to the table and… _poof._ An anticlimactic wisp of acrid smoke spiralled up into the disgruntled Rodian's face and made her recoil as her elongated face was painted black instead of its original teal hue.

"Well… at least we can still use it for a cup… if we clean out the burned acid and oxides."

His failed attempt at congeniality went mercifully unnoticed as Kafi flung the piece across the garage where it hit an inbound four-legged T3 droid, chattering its indecipherable beeps and chirps.

"Not now, T3," Kafi implored the droid. "Not now. I'm in mental breakdown mode, and flyboy here isn't helping."

"Hey," Atton snapped, offended. "If it weren't for my supreme display of flying skill back there, we would have been no more than ionized particles on our way to a comfortable orbit somewhere beyond the outer rim." Then, he eyed the droid curiously for the first time that day, and said, "What is that trash-compactor saying, anyway? Never could understand those things."

It was true that even the most skilled technicians and engineers in the Republic's employ could not understand the older droid models' verbalized binary code, but Kafi was one of the few who had taken the time to learn it, even though text translators were commonly used to decipher the mysterious quirks of noise.

"It's saying that debris has caused multiple fractures in the outer hull, and that they need attending to." It was too true, but the droid had been invaluable for the past months in affecting repairs in the sealed sections of the ship. For instance, they were planning an excursion into the cargo bay to see if they could salvage some cargo and parts from destroyed electronics and the few containers they still had floating around in there. "We need you here, T3. There's nothing that we can do about that right now."

_Beepweeeooo brr drr. _

"What are you saying?"

_Brrrit boodoo drrd._

"No, it's too dangerous."

"What, What?" Atton exclaimed, frustrated. "Nobody tells me anything anymore. What is it saying?"

"He's saying that he should go to the outside of the ship and see if there are any undetonated or live torpedoes on the surface and use the energy to directly power the critical systems," She explained, scowling. "But it's too dangerous. We can't lose our droid now. Not with so many things still to do."

_Brrrdeeprrr!_

"Yes, I suppose you're also good company, but that's beside the point. We need you."

"The dragonlady has a point," Atton said resentfully. "It's gonna be rough. And I don't want my job to be any harder just because you have to go be all heroic. It is a good idea, though…"

"Timely statement: I, for one, think that my squat counterpart is right."

The HK-47 had just entered then, and was being tailed by a Sullustan in orange overalls, conversing away in his babbling tongue with HK, who seemed utterly uninterested in the peace-loving co-pilot-turned-droid-repairman.

"Redundant observation: The blackened and utterly ruined projectile that you sent careering my friend's way is unlikely to help us more than another hull breach that could be more easily rectified from the outside of the _Hawk_ while we salvage military-grade parts and a wealth of free-delivered energy from those bumbling Sith. Dispassionate comment: They think almost as if the whole fleet is controlled by an ancient droid-brain." He paused and eyed Atton as meaningfully as a droid's unremarkable photoreceptors would allow. "Additional suggestion: And our knowledgeable pilot friend could prove miraculously useful again and provide us with a detailed verbal schematic of Sith technology to help our astromech droid along the way."

Kafi turned back to the pile of seemingly ruined junk on top of the workbench and, in a resigned voice, said: "Fine, go ahead, and make sure you get a good powercell while you're at it."

Atton and T3 left the room, leaving only Kafi, the Sullustan, and the assassin droid, who then remarked, "Dejected observation: I doubt that there is anything more to do here, nor any desirable organics to kill. Succinct Report: The starboard antimatter injection manifold's field fluctuations are no more than an incompetent computer malfunction. I shall see that Litritch attends to it immediately," referring to their slightly domineering ranking officer who was attending to the computer network.

"Ok." She waved him off. "Be nice."

The Sullustan approached. In only a short time—as short a time as she had been with Atton—Kafi knew Bako to be a hard worker, and a good friend with a conscience of steel, but feelings which were hurt easily (here meaning that he was offended by enemy blasterfire two months prior and took down a squad of Sith troopers with a plaster pistol and a plasma torch. He was fighting for something, or someone, Kafi knew on a gut feeling.

"Banaka kknococodoo." He said in a downtrodden voice. She still wasn't used to the Sullustans' strange and varied dialects and inflections, as she had only worked in close quarters with this one for the past year, but she always got the gist of what he was saying.

"The sensors are repaired. There are no ships in the close vicinity. We can't even be taken prisoner by the Sith."

"Well," the flustered Rodian said sarcastically. "That's good news, Bako. I think that we need to make some sacrifices from the other systems to get the hyperdrive at full, get us to a system that's worth a damn for repair parts."

"I was thinking the same thing. I was actually talking to the troublesome assassin, but he never listens to reasonable Bako. Always boom, boom and action with him. Most un-Sullustan, and very frustrating to work with. I was trying to suggest that we use his power supply as a raw energy source and plug it into the hyperdrive. Maybe that, coupled with whatever the small undertaker finds outside of the hull, will be able to fuel a simple straight jump to a close system. Then at least we can land and not worry about atmosphere for a while."

"You shouldn't mention that to the droid until there is no other alternative," she warned Bako. "You might end up as target practice. It's very bitter, you know, and salvaging it will only make it feel more useless."

The Sullustan sagged against the round doorframe and sighed. "I will be glad to ditch this ship and get on with my life."

Kafi said nothing, just bent a little closer to a singed cable and prodded open a small sliver of synthetic insulation.

Bako left and walked to the bow of the small freighter, saying a quick word of greeting to the other human, Litritch, and his Twi'lek wife, Adma, who was a Jedi, and very apt at her art, if a little complicated and frustrating at times. They were typing away at the main hub's computer console, as entered the small cockpit enclosure.

Atton sat at his usual station in the pilot's seat and was regarding a confusing myriad of characters scrawling across the pulsating blue screen in front of his bloodshot eyes. Sleep deprivation was getting to all of them. Even the droids weren't at the top of their form lately, and T3 was developing an erratic twitch in his upper hydraulic mechanism, causing his memory and sensor disc to tilt every now and then to the right.

"Got anything out of Kafi? Any progress?" Atton immediately asked Bako, not looking away from the data display.

"Not much. I said that we should take out HK's power core and use it to contribute to powering the hyperdrive."

"Hah," Atton laughed shortly. "He won't take that well. He's a forty-seven model. Very proud." He chuckled once again at the amusing image, and missed three lines of data. "Blast."

Bako switched on sensors and did another active pulse scan. Nothing except the echoes of the recent battle.

There was nothing for them in a very empty and unmapped region of space, and they had little more power than the average Coruscanti slots machine, and no engines to put them in any direction. If they couldn't get the engines up and running, it would take a miracle to get them into known space, and he would almost be grateful if they were taken prisoner by the Sith Empire.


	4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

Jia looked out of the windows of the shuttle craft to witness a stunning sight. After entering the atmosphere with an almighty blast of flame streaming past the viewport, the clear transparasteel had revealed something much more beautiful. A desert, baron of vegetation and devoid of life had stretched out for miles around. Korriban, it was called, but he had hardly the brain power to register the name in his brain after taking in such a vast lifelessness. The sun had only just crested the horizon of the region in which they were going to land, and the reflection of heat and light off the desert's reddish sands was stunning.

As they came in closer to the land, he began to see spires and valleys take form against the blank slate of waste and fruitful ages long past. They revealed themselves to be tall, rune-inscribed pillars and towers of sandstone, supported by unseen bedrock but sporting no AA defence turrets or orbital cannons. This struck Jia as most strange, but when he pointed this out to Karon, his only words of explanation were: "The Sith have other means by which they can defend themselves."

They touched down in a deep valley, where they were dropped, then the shuttle moved to a secret location.

"Come," Jia's master bade him, pointing to a path leading up a shear rock face, then switching back and disappearing entirely. "Few know the entrance to the place of learning. Now you shall be graced with that knowledge."

They proceeded across the rocky, broken expanse toward the path, then started the steep climb. It was tough work for the city-dwelling whelp to climb the rock-strewn path after the smooth surfaces of the city's metal floors. He constantly slipped almost as much as he climbed and even turned his ankle once or twice, but he was determined to keep up with his easily striding master. He wanted in.

He settled into a sort of routine. Use the few jagged handholds that the rough-hewn wall had to offer to hoist the weight of his entire body, then feel around for solid ground and gain a solid footing before making the next leap.

At last they reached the top, and Karon turned to him.

"Again, you have proven lazy and sleepy," he said in a gruff tone that was not lacking in cruel amusement. "The next time you decide to torture me with your glacial sluggishness, you will be duly punished."

"Maybe you should clean up your doorstep once in a while," he retorted in frustration.

He was not unfit, but he was not used to these conditions, and the perpetual heat attacked every pore of his thin body.

"You overestimate our vanity. We will not polish the camouflage from our land and reveal our secret academy to the rest of the galaxy simply for our own comfort. We will keep the natural landscape to hide ourselves from unwanted visitors."

Karon put his fingers to the stone, seemed to connect to the very rock, and then walked forward.

Jia blinked. One moment his master had been there, the next he was within the stone. Either that or he had finally evaporated from this wretched heat.

Nevertheless, Jia put his fingers to the stone. It was comfortingly cool in contrast with the blistering background temperature, and he, too, felt himself closing his eyes.

He felt something living within that stone. He felt its intelligence probing his mind, searching for weakness, and he instinctively blocked it, throwing up a minor mental barrier to ward off the probe.

It attacked, this time with more vigour, and broke his concentration on the mysterious foreign power.

Another entered his mind, a slightly more familiar voice, and it spoke.

It was the strangest thing, having two people in your mind at the same time. He was sure that he would have a massive headache after this, but at the moment, he felt very at harmony with them, and the speech… weird. It didn't speak, more inferred intentions, but more complex than what any truth-scanner could detect.

_Open your mind. Let it in, or I shall leave you outside for three days. It must search you for my granted permission before you can enter._

It made perfect sense, of course, but Jia could hardly think why. Now that he thought of it, he couldn't think at all with all this telepathic traffic clogging his reflection of fact and situation.

Both probes receded after what felt like eternity, and he found that he once again had a sense of physical boundaries… and that he was stumbling forwards into a clean, metal-wrapped room with a simple grated floor.

He received a sharp cuffing around the head to go with the dull throbbing that followed the mind-probing.

"Nice work," Karon smirked. "You have once again delayed a very important appointment. I am now late for a meeting with the Dark Lord himself."

_The Dark Lord? They said that they weren't vain. _

The duo marched down the hallway, which, now that Jia scrutinized, was hewn of the very stone of the cliff, not of mere durasteel, as he had thought before. These tunnels must have taken years to build in such detail, he thought in awe as he noticed the ornate carvings along the walls as they briskly proceeded. An aura of power sent tingling burns across his fare flesh in great waves of goose bumps, but the atmosphere was far from the austere, sombre mood that he had detected in Karon.

Children and teens walked past them many times, chatting, only nodding to recognize the Master's presence, then dipped their heads back into the gossip that they shared so openly.

"You have noticed the carvings," Karon remarked more than asked, and his eyes flicked across the images of frozen torture and coercion. "The fabled massassi worked these tunnels by hand. They were brutal and naught but slaves, but they had tempers like nothing you've ever seen." His eyes roved more slowly this time. "They say that their blood and flesh reside in the sculptures."

Jia shivered. He didn't Karon's apt narrations. The stone looked like screams captured in an image of pain, a discipline that needed no stern words or physical beatings.

They turned a last corner, and Karon swivelled to face him. He looked wary.

"Do not," he warned, "under any circumstances speak out of turn when we are inside of this chamber. Do not attempt to flee, and do not resist."

The doors slid apart to reveal once again the vaulted chamber, burning torches and raised throne. The Lord's audience chamber.

They stepped in, and the doors immediately slit shut behind them.

Jia's knees were swept forward and he fell with a soft thud.

Karon knelt more gracefully when he was pushed, and he bowed his head. "You summoned us, master?"

"So I did." The Dark Lord of the Sith's voice sounded

The Dark Lord squinted through the slits in his mask at Jia. Jia could not see his eyes, but he knew that they were on him. He could feel their power and their intensity, and he quailed in fear

"This whelp is the one who you chose as your apprentice, Karon?" The amused question did not hang in the hot air for longer than half a second before being hastily answered by his master: "Yes, master. This is the one. The boy is strong."

"Indeed," the Dark Lord snorted. "We shall see. Are you ready for your training, young one?"

Jia could almost see the sneer playing across evil features, but he was forced to abandon this vision before it solidified as he answered. "Yes, by my reckoning. Everyone starts at the same level."

"So think you."

"Will you allow me to teach the boy what I know and hone his strength so that he may one day become a Sith and carry on our legacy?"

"We will see," he declared condescendingly.

Karon looked over his shoulder and muttered, "Go."

Jia didn't have to be asked twice. He bowed his head once more, then got up and left the room eagerly.

He felt his master's mind again when he had gotten three metres away from the stone entrance: _Wait for me in my study. You'll find you know where to go. _

And Jia turned left and walked.

* * *

"Warning statement: I sincerely hope that my audio collection apparatuses are malfunctioning. Otherwise, I will have to take precautionary and distasteful measures to prevent such an implication of my main systems and indefinite incapacitation."

The usually amusing speech-conditionals did nothing to lighten the mood that day as Kafi and Bako confronted HK-47 about the essential salvage work that was inevitable if they were to get the systems working. The troublesome combat model's defence protocols would not have it, however, and were speaking their displeasure quite plainly.

"Sure likes to hear himself talk, that one," Atton winked as he passed with a lit datapad in one blistering hand and a stylus in the other.

"Listen," Kafi beseeched, twisting the newly-repaired power cable in her hands and stressing it again almost to breaking point. "How much longer do you think you will last without maintenance if you kill us now, eh? Who's going to reach your back and readjust your hydraulic hub? You'll be a babbling piece of rusting durasteel by the end of the week, and you know it."

HK's photoreceptors flickered a warning shade of red for an instant, then he spoke.

"Resignation: Oh, if you must, master. But make it quick, and restrain me. I doubt that my superlative constitution for extreme situations will hold for long during the operation before eroding in a spectacular display of martial arts and marksmanship, preferably involving a heavy blaster carbine, an airborne desk chair, and my overall triumph in the ensuing bloody struggle, and I do not want to see you badly damaged in trusting one such as myself. Proceed."

Kafi turned and rolled her eyes. She had suspected this situation all along and set up a work table by removing two of its legs and letting it sit on a slant. Straps of stretched plasteel stood ready to be welded to the metal structure.

HK lay obediently face down on the table with its arms as close to its sides as its combat-oriented body would allow under the circumstances.

Kafi activated a tiny screw driver and inserted it into the first hole. It rotated, and the first of twenty screws rolled across the garbage-strewn floor to be picked up by Bako and carefully stored in a metal box.

This went on for five torturous minutes, and just as Kafi was about to remove the third-last screw, HK-47 jerked violently in his restraints. The back plate leading to his main torso-cowling wobbled, revealing for a moment the solid framework and fibre-optic wiring within. Kafi got a disorienting image of open surgery, and blanched, before hearing a somewhat unexpected noise.

The lift leading from the outer hull was trundling loudly, carrying the weight of about one and a half utility droids, Kafi guessed.

"Obvious conclusion: I think that my many-footed friend has returned bearing my salvation from this messy salvage, captain Litritch," commented HK, calling into the main hold.

Bako looked to see Atton rushing towards the maintenance lift even as the airlocks opened and closed with loud hisses of venting atmosphere.

T3 was laden with many pieces of blackened junk that he had pulled toward him with tow cables and now looked like odd, metallic parasites sucking on his lubricant-distribution arteries.

"You did it!" Kafi exclaimed, kneeling down to examine a torpedo under a fine eye. "This looks like the real deal."

"Weary reiteration: As I said; obvious conclusion, Ms. Morso. Those look in fine salvaging condition. A perfect replacement for a certain immobilized droid…"

"Sorry," Kafi apologized, rushing back to un-strap the assassin droid from the makeshift operating table.

The droid freed himself with one massive pump of his long arms and the flexible plasteel bounced away in thin strips across the deck plates.

After they had all gathered around the small droid and extracted the parts from the magnetic grapples on T3-M4, they put them all on the workbench, and Bako started to absent-mindedly clean the utility unit, looking hopefully up at Kafi.

All eyes were on her as she inspected a charged torpedo-casing with a large pair of tongs. She turned it over and over, even checked the charge with a set of wires.

She finally spoke in a hoarse voice: "This might work. It might."

The whole room let out breaths they didn't know they had been containing, and went back to their duties, clapping her on the shoulder and wishing her good luck. She went back to her work, taking off a thick glove and whipping her forehead clean of sweat. Temperature malfunctions.

Soon there would be no temperature at all, she thought bitterly, and then they would lose all their heat and freeze to death, even before they had time to suffocate from lack of oxygen, let alone starve, which was the biggest certainty of them all.

Of course, they also had the option of going insane and turning on each other.

She put those dark thoughts out of her head and focussed on the task at hand.

* * *

Adma clutched at her burnt calf with a mixture of barely-suppressed pain and exasperation.

"Adma, are you alright?"

The rhetorical question did nothing to soften Adma's frustration at being spat at by a plasma conduit under a faulty deck plate.

"No she's not karking alright, _captain_." Atton strode over to Adma and lifted her by the shoulders. She was now gasping in pain, feeling the second-degree burns biting into her flesh and sizzling on each screaming nerve-ending.

"Hey, prettyboy, I don't design dynamic-class freighters for a living. Come to that, this can't exactly be classified after all these modifications." Litritch gingerly picked up her legs and together they carried her to a table in the garage.

"Where did you find this piece of bantha dung, anyway? Malachor five?" Atton grunted as he set down Adma's slender body.

Litritch rushed to the side of the room and returned with bandages and a Kolto syringe. "You would know, wouldn't you, Sith?"

"Hey!" Atton turned away from the woman clutching her leg. "You don't know that! I've just got a lot of unexplained skill, and you go and say I'm a Sith?"

"Come on," Litritch sneered. "How else could you know Sith ships inside and out? That's stuff for an archaeologist, and frankly…" he looked Atton up and down. "You don't exactly seem the intellectual type."

"You really don't seem the diplomatic type," Atton retorted, his expression more outraged than ever. "I could suggest a lot of suspicions about you, too, like maybe you're a spy from the Sith yourself." His eyes narrowed. "Or maybe you only married the woman who you're ignoring right now, despite the fact that she needs medical attention, just because she's a Jedi, so you could save your own ass from getting tracked down by the Sith."

Litritch had had enough, it seemed, because he threw a punch at Atton, but he sidestepped and altered the man's lunge by grabbing behind his broad jaw and pulling him into a hard wall.

"That's enough!" Adma protested loudly.

He stood, embarrassed, and glared at the cool pilot standing before him, chest barely heaving from the exchange.

They both looked at Adma, still clutching her leg and breathing through her teeth.

"Better see to that burn," Atton said calmly, and left the garage.


	5. Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Jia was lead to a long hallway with recesses at regular intervals along its walls. In these recesses were sheltered small cots set low to the cold stone and draped with minimal bedding.

"These will be your accommodations for the duration of your stay at the Academy, unless, of course, you are stationed here to teach, in which case you will be given a separate room," the voice of Karon explained, again clearly relishing Jia's defeated look when faced with the sketchy sleeping environment.

This would not be a comfortable night. It was not that the cots were hard and thin—he was used to the floor of a boxcrate—but that there would be so many people who he didn't know and didn't trust just out of sight everywhere around him as he slept, trying to be as small as possible to present as small a target to the children who were obviously being trained to kill.

"This is where I leave you." To Karon's surprise, Jia looked more frightened than ever, but quickly buried the expression, realizing the moment of weakness. "Your robes, evening, and recreational attire are stored at the foot of the bed. You can change here."

The Sith walked back the way he had come, and turned out of sight into the darkness that the candles' light didn't reach.

Jia jumped nimbly onto his bed and curled his legs to his body and rested his chin on his knees, rocking slowly backward and forward to the time of the guttering candles.

"_Hey!"_

The voice was high and feminine, whispering from some point in the recess across from him.

"Hey," Jia tentatively replied.

"Who are you?"

Jia shivered. "Does it really matter in this place?"

The girl laughed a scared, though not unfriendly, laugh. "I think so. We keep our names, and we don't leave our emotions at the door, like the Jedi." She spoke the last word with puzzling distaste, and Jia wondered on it for a moment, but then understood. She must be from a family who supported the Sith and their actions in the Mandilorian wars.

"My name is Jia."

"Cool name," the girl whispered. "Mine's Andrea Seku, from the Alderaan system. Where are you from?"

"Coralug. Refugee sector." Well, that was it. He had finally succumbed to the shame of that old residence. Jia realized that it was probably because he was in a better place now, with order and a guaranteed future. "Is the Alderaan system nice?"

"Of course," said Andrea in reminiscence. "There are so many trees there, but also a lot of tourists. They don't affect the wildlife like on the core worlds."

"Wow." It did sound good. So good after Coralug.

"But it must be easier for you." Jia came to with a start, imagining the wonders of Alderaan.

"What must be?"

"Leaving your home. Of course you didn't like the refugee sector." She sounded matter-of-fact enough to be commenting on the state of the galactic economy.

It was true. He was glad to leave the refugee sector, but… "Yes, but my family was left behind. I don't think that I will get past them for a long time."

Andrea seemed a little put out at this. "Sorry, it's just… I never had any family. I don't know what it's like to have someone who fights for you."

"You're an orphan?" Jia exclaimed before he could stop himself.

"Yeah. Since before I had teeth I was living in an orphanage in Myssa, a small city on the other side of the planet from the capital. It was warm and liveable, and I had lots of friends, but nobody fought when the Empire came for me. Nobody dared."

Jia fell back on his cot, and felt his head hit a jutting piece of framework.

"Ouch!"

The girl giggled across the hall. "I wouldn't do that if I were you. This isn't a Coruscanti corporate penthouse. You may as well be sleeping on the floor."

"Thanks for the warning," he grumbled, rubbing the back of his head which now boasted more bruises than the rest of his body. "What sorts of stuff do you do around here anyway?"

"Well," she began. "For starters, there are a lot of lectures. Mostly on ethics and history. Really interesting stuff, and a lot more interesting than school on any other planet." He could barely see her outline in the dim lighting, but he knew that she shivered visibly before speaking her next words. "Then they take us to the meditation chambers where they sit us down and leave us. Just leave us there in the dark. It's like a whole bunch of voices floating around, telling you that they're going to kill you, do bad things…" she stopped short, and shivered, then curled into the fetal position. He could see no more details. "They say that it helps us to learn emotion, hearing the voices of killers and needlessly wasted lives of others."

"Everyone seems to be normal, though," Jia said, mystified by the brutal practice. "You make it sound like they're torturing you."

"That's not all," Andrea continued on. "They sometimes just stick us up on the surface of the planet and make us pile big rocks or run laps of the track, or stuff like that. It's completely pointless, and they never tell us why we do it." Her voice was growing fierce and indignant, growing louder in the tall hallway.

"Shhhh!" Someone else whispered from another alcove. "We're trying to get to sleep here!"

She shut up immediately, so, to keep the conversation going, Jia said, "What do you do for fun?"

Andrea snorted. "We don't have fun here. The most fun I've had was using a sword on the bigger kids in my class in our fighting classes. I fixed Rupus good day two."

Jia was rather impressed, and hoped that he could accomplish the same thing on his first day. He would have to talk to her in the morning.

"Hey," he said as she leaned back. "You watch my back, I'll watch yours?"

"Yeah," she whispered back. "Deal. See you tomorrow."

Jia turned around to face the back of his space. He found his sleeping clothes in the neat pile of materials at the foot of his cot. Now the only problem he faced was getting undressed in front of a girl.

But she was less modest. It seemed, as she was casually pealing off her clothes sweaty, that she was used to these conditions and did not have a problem.

He decided to follow suit, as it was dark and no one would care, and change. He then settled back into the hard bed and closed his eyes, trying to get past the fact that he had slept for three days prior, and felt wide awake.

* * *

The morning of his first day came, rather abruptly. Jia, having slept dreamlessly for only four hours, woke up with an annoying buzzing in his head. _In his mind!_

He sat up abruptly and stumbled away from his cot. The voice in his head conveyed one intention very clearly and precisely in his thoughts: _Wake up._

He obliged and the noise stopped after five more uncomfortable seconds.

The rest of the—there was no other word for it—dorm was getting up more slowly now, and Andrea was barely stirring in her bed, groaning at the internal voice with fluttering eyes.

Jia quickly took off his PJs and turned to his clothes, only to find that he did not know which outfit to wear.

"Morning," Andrea said from across the room. "Had a good sleep, I trust."

"AH!" Jia spun to face her, and immediately realized that this was a mistake, as her eyes averted in order to preserve some measure of his dignity, but not quick enough to avoid a quick perusal of his body.

"Nice." She tried to sound sarcastic, but it did not mask the awkwardness of the moment. "We wear robes during the day classes and recreation clothes for when we're learning to fight," clarified shortly as Jia started to don underclothes and the pants and tunic.

"They're nice, aren't they?"

Now he thought about it, they were extremely comfortable. The loose, homespun garments hung loose around his fourteen-year-old frame, but still hugged him in a casual sort of way, and the longer robe was just the right weight, with low-hanging sleeves and a hood. "Yes."

When he was fully clothed in the black robes, he turned to catch his first glimpse of Andrea's face.

She had soft, mild features, with almond-shaped, hazel eyes and full lips, and her hair was pulled back into an efficient ponytail high on the back of her head.

She smiled wide at him and stepped into the hallway.

"I'll show you where to go. I think that your master must assume that you will have to rely on the rest of us prisoners."

As they walked down the hall, Andrea explained the daily routine in vague detail.

First, they would eat in the mess hall, where they were headed at that moment, then they would move on to their meditations. They would meditate for four hours in the chambers, then they would be sent to the surface to do their "duties". They would remain on the surface for only two hours, then go back inside to wash, change, eat a short meal, and move on to fighting. This would take up the rest of their formal learning, at least the training organized by the Academy. What happened when he went to eat dinner with Karon, Andrea said, she didn't know. She knew that her master would just talk to her, listen to what she had done all day, and provide an unbiased audience for her troubles.

"I can't show any weakness, or he'll start taunting me, or try to slip poison into my dinner. The masters say that dinner is the time when we are most vulnerable, and that's when they either train us, or try to kill us." She said this in the gravest of seriousness, so grimly that he withdrew slightly over their breakfast of some sort of processed omelette.

"Sounds like a walk in the park," he said, with a brave stab at humour, but Andrea just went back to rolling the omelette over and over, obviously displeased by the food after the typical Alderaani cuisine of rich soups and light salads.

Such thoughts only made his belly ache, though, and so Jia just scarfed down the meal with the usual gusto when faced with actual food. It tasted as good as the best boma cut to the slum-dweller.

"You need to eat," he said knowingly. "Believe me, I know. Rich merchants trash more than that every hour on Coralug." He thought back again, this time with a chuckle. "Hah! Stuff like that used to fall from the sky, when the children on the high-rise schoolhouses drop their lunches over the side for a joke. I got knocked out by a sandwich once." He grinned as he realized how much affection he really held for his old home.

Andrea laughed out loud, then considered the food with a little more fondness. "I guess I could use the energy."

And with that, they trooped out of the mess with the rest of their class with their throats equally plastered with the morning's greasy consumption.

The meditation chambers were no more spectacular than the hallways outside, except that they were round, with domed ceilings and a large, blocky chandelier in the middle, glowing with a deep red light and making the contorted massassi on the walls shimmer and writhe.

A master in black, flowing robes stood just beneath that cylinder, facing away from the crowd of young students filing into the glistening corral. He wore no gloves on his hands, and his feet were fitted with a pair of thin, leather shoes of the most basic type.

A low, rasping voice came from what could only be the man standing on the room: "Kneel before your master, and in the presence of the ghosts of Koriban."

They obeyed. They all fell to their knees simultaneously and averted their eyes from this mysterious figure. No one wanted to attract attention in this class, it seemed, and Jia happily followed suit.

He cast a curious look around him and saw that all of the students' uniforms were different. While he wore a black tunic and his threadbare robe, others wore tighter shirts and some wore capes with no hoods, only a mask strapped to their studded belts.

A boy next to him with black dreadlocks bulled into a tight ponytail sported a handsome cote with a wide, trailing hem that extended from the tight torso to his ankles.

The man began to speak again in his low voice. "This is a popular place for the spirits of the bereft and the tortured, this dark cell on Koriban, planet of the true Sith. It is no slight upon the kindness of the wise people, however. It is to help teach the young and innocent like yourselves to know that your suffering is nothing, that no sacrifice is too great to help bring peace in the galaxy, the peace that the Sith stand for.

"Freedom requires sacrifice, sacrifice requires loyalty. This is what we must learn today. However feeble this must be, I would like you today to open your mind to the spirits that present themselves as having been a casualty of war, taken from a lover or their family. Feel their pain and try to match it with your own experiences. If you have lived a charmed, spoiled life, I simply encourage you to feel as they do, practice pure empathy." Though Jia had a confused and blank face firmly painted onto his face, the instructor said, "Proceed."

He tried to open his mind. He thought of when he had talked to the door at the entrance of the academy, and searched for that feeling of openness, of violation, and tried to bring it to the forefront of his mind.

It would not work.

Frustration and panic ensued. What if the instructor turned to him and said that he was not trying hard enough and punished him in some way? What if he was expelled in his first day for not exhibiting the right talent to become a Sith? After all, the Dark Lord had said "we will see."

Jia forced himself to calm down. He needed to concentrate. Or did he?

A new notion occurred to him. Simply let go of all thought, let his mind travel how it may, and lower his defences.

He attacked this desperately, before realizing his mistake, and burying his fervour.

Immediately his mind drifted to the massassi on the wall, making faces at him and goggling at his pathetic insensitivity with hollow eyes. Then the trail led to Andrea, only feet from him. It was good to hear someone laugh for once. And an addicting laugh it was… _don't focus, Jia. Just don't think of good things._

An image of his mother burst into his mind, now roughly brushing his tousled hair with a maternal sort of frustration, now sprawled dead on the floor of their container, a scorching slash where her stomach once was, mouth agape and eyes vacant.

An unknown man hanging from a power cable in the wreck of a ship, crashed and crumpled in the middle of a muddy field, strewn with other such broken wrecks.

A single hand, reaching for a nearby plaster but now far removed from its body.

A thousand other different images, some of good memories felt for the last time, some of the corpses of friends, all painful and surreal. Jia felt them all, felt all of their pain in a cacophony of soundless screams and moans.

He never noticed his vision blackening, never noticed air rushing past his ears for the fraction of a second it took his head to fall to the stone.

But he did know the oblivion afterwards.

* * *

A sharp, violent gasp wracked his lungs and made his dry throat burn.

Some stimulant cocktail scorched through his veins to spectacular effect as he hyperventilated and writhed on the same stone that he had hit a minute earlier.

His eyes opened, almost perfectly round with surprise, but Jia immediately regretted this action.

A hideous face greeted his new sight, and his eyes bulged yet further in their sockets.

Two yellow eyes were fixed in a perfect scowl, and the face surrounding was a white and black mass of scarred tissue.

An electrocardiography monitor was stamped onto his chest, and the base of his throat was encased in some sort of respiratory collar.

"Fool boy."

If he had not felt the remark in his keen thoughts, he would have heard only a rolling, unidentifiable series of mingling syllables, but he knew that the master was displeased.

Hearing was coming to him also. He caught the next comment fully.

"You must regulate the flow of memories. Once you feel the first, focus on it, and then move on when you can no longer stop the next. Learn control of your own mind before you try to access the memories of others."

Jia sat up, still feeling the stinging effects of the stimulant in his heart.

"I thought that you were all about freedom of emotion, and all that stuff, and what was that for?"

"We are for freedom of emotion, not for lumbering carelessness. If you were my apprentice, you would wish I hadn't done that." He turned away from the class once again, and lifted the heavy hood of his robe. "And that injection was to keep you alive. You were in respiratory arrest."

Jia looked down and noticed the small prick in his chest where his tunic had been ripped asunder.

"Again!"

* * *

The class exited the meditation room sombrely an hour later. Jia had finally managed to focus on a particularly unpleasant memory; the hot, musty smell of a ravenous Boma and the sight of it goring his body.

Andrea approached quickly from his right and fell into step beside him on their way to the surface tunnels.

"Are you alright?" she asked frantically, enclosing his shoulder in an iron grip. "He shouldn't have made you stay. You were hurt, and you could hardly breath, and-"

"I'm fine," Jia assured her, patting her hand, but stumbling slightly as a wave of light-headedness washed over him.

Andrea briefly took his weight before he righted himself, then commented, "That was way worse than usual. We never had to feel others' memories before."

"Great timing, eh?"

Andrea managed a slight smile as they dragged themselves down the upward-sloping corridor.

Jia wasn't sure he liked his new school, but at least it had good food.

Little did he know, the labour on the hot surface of Korriban would evaporate this small advantage, and would permanently set his mind to the fact that he preferred Coralug.


	6. Chapter 6

Chapter 6

The _Ebon Hawk _was extremely noisy that day. Abnormal for the usually sombre crew.

Kafi was in the garage fixing up the power cells from the projectiles on the hull and filling them with the hulls considerable residual charge. They would make serviceable replacements for the hyperdrive's burned and charred ones, and the atmospheric dampers would work for longer, if not indefinitely after the fix.

Atton was running more systems diagnostics as T3 installed the various components into the antimatter injector and main hyperdrive housings, with smiles and a generally uplifting demeanour.

"This is it," he said constantly. "Nar Shada Red Sector, here I come, and good bye stinking cargo-tug."

HK was running through the corridors, fusing conduits and wires and mounting new components left and right, and Adma and Litritch entrenched themselves deep in the circuitry of the COMs equipment, making technical repairs and slowly restoring power.

But Adma still had that sinking feeling that she had had at the start of this dead-end operation.

She stayed in the starboard dormitory, kneeling with her eyes shut and investigating this notion. It was force-related, she knew, but more distressing to her was that she could not discern any clear images or messages from the hurts and eddies surrounding her subconscious.

Bako skittered excitedly into the garage at the very moment Kafi finished welding a durasteel hypercoil cowling to a bracket compatible with the engine's internal parts, and started jabbering immediately. "Captain Litritch says that he speeks to all computer systems except for the NAV computer, and who cares as long as this blessed haze is gone from our breathing air!"

Kafi had only just registered what the man was saying through his excentric dialect when he blundered on.

"According to T3, live, the main systems will, in three standard hours, and we will be free from our drifting and have direction once again. Although repulsor lift systems have yet to rise, the _Hawk_ will go altogether in less than a day, if all goes according to plan."

Kafi sighed and handed the cowling to Bako. "And yet, my optimistic friend, they rarely do with this blasted ship." She looked around fondly. "I mean, I love her and all, but my life would be a lot easer without her, if you get my meaning."

Bako regarded her kindly. "Indeed, I understand. Such was the feeling between Mikrilu and I, may her soul rest easy with the force."

Kafi smiled as Bako's eyes glazed with tender memories of his wife, killed in the Mandilorian wars when the Mass-shadow generator had destroyed Malichore V. She, too, cast around for memories of her old family, and the image of her dead parents brought her back to her days on Telos, when its surface had flourished with dazzling flora and clear skies.

"Attend the connecting of the final functional power-coupling later this day, you should… or will it be night?" He spent a few moments pondering this, then… "I will take this to the hyperdrive. There is no more maintenance required in that area. Might I suggest a new air filter?"

Bako walked off into the ship and left Kafi to her work.

* * *

Hours later, the whole crew assembled in the engine room as Bako wedged the small power-coupling into its socket.

The cylinder sank snugly into its cradle of crystalline circuitry, which glowed with an incandescent vibrancy that dazzled the onlookers. They all shielded their eyes as the dismal darkness that they had grown so accustomed to suddenly glowed with newly-powered lights, twinkling holographics, and a central star chart that slowly rotated on its round projector which bristled with flat command buttons and miscellaneous diagnostic details.

Atton, Kafi, Adma, Litritch, Bako, and even T3 M4 and HK 47 cheered, or at least produced sounds that could be appreciated as rejoicing whoops, as none of them had had cause to celebrate in a long time, and T3 could only beep louder and more annoyingly than usual.

After that bout of noise had subsided, they all cleared their throats and Atton said, "Who wants a few Caluulian cold ones?"

They all looked incredulously in his direction. Bako was the first one to manage to stammer in outrage.

"You possessed alcoholic beverages all this time, and you never thought to tell us?" His puckered Sullustan features broke into a wide smile. "Come in handy when the temperature regulator failed, that would have."

They all shared a hearty laugh, and moved a table into the main hold, where they sat on work stools and crash-seats and raised beers high into the de-hazed air.

"Cheers to T3."

They nodded in agreement and clinked their glasses together and took long, deep drafts from ruined power cell-casings (which had spent some time in a sterilization field before use).

Kafi chuckled, both with content and amusement at the irony.

"So," Atton began congenially, and poured himself another glass of Caluulian beer. "Kafi, Bako. You two got anyone to go to when we're out of this? Or have you two been hiding something?"

He, Litritch, and Adma shared a laugh at their expense, then Kafi answered. "I don't know where my husband is. Last I saw of him, he was telling me that he would pray that he would see me again, and not to wait for him. That's all he could tell me." She sighed sadly. "His name was Hacro."

Atton raised his glass sombrely. "To Hacro."

They all nodded again and raised their cups in unison, then took long swigs and placed them on the table.

"I don't know about you," Litritch said in a somewhat more cheerful voice. "But Adma and I are going to Naboo for a very long time after this."

Bako commented, "That sounds nice. I will most likely go to Dantooine and help rebuild. I know a good friend in the Koonda rural place, and they could use the help of an engineer."

They all sat at the table awhile, regarding the blackened cups and the ship around them, marvelling at their accomplishment.

Circuitry was still exposed, showing rust and neglect, some even with dangerous tears, but the ship would move. And they would return to the known galaxy.

A thunderous, percussive boom knocked the cups from the table and made Atton spill a few millilitres of the bottle from which he had been pouring a third glass of beer.

"What the hell was that?" Was the question popularly asked around the table, but HK had a different contribution to make.

"Offhand comment: This is only speculation, but that sounds remarkably like the sonic Hyperspace signature of a Sith battleship. But their unusual proximity to our position suggests that they did not suspect that a ship would be in the vicinity." The crew made generally dejected and frustrated noises and got to their feet hastily. "Suggestion: We should power down all non-essential systems. A full-on fight with a battleship seems tactically unwise, even to one so inexperienced with naval strategy as I."

"Agreed," Litritch conceded. "Go dark. Shut down everything except life support and external sensors."

Within minutes, power had been cut to the specified systems, and they had all gathered in the cockpit to gaze out of the viewport and into space.

There, with its ragged lines and ugly lateral turret cluster was a Sith Battleship.

She glided ponderously through the emptiness, past their vision, showing glowing windows and gnarled weapons. Kafi saw those windows, and felt exposed, so terribly visible. She felt thousands of eyes panning across the star-strewn vacuum, searching for any abnormality, a dark anomaly that would expose and doom them.

"Sensor ping!" Atton shouted from the pilot console. "Strap yourselves in, people, we're in for a bumpy ride!"

Kafi could almost feel the vibration bouncing off the hull and through the sensor-insulation, detecting life forms and COM activity.

Then she felt another sensation entirely. Without artificial gravity or G-force dampers, she was flung backward through the ship, bouncing off the main hub's holoprojector as the _Hawk_ jumped forward with a burst of thrusters and aft burners.

The evasive manoeuvres followed, with telltale _whoosh_es of sound from the concussion-missiles missing their ship by a hair's breath. She pushed herself up to a crash seat and cinched herself into at tight harness, then held on for dear life, hoping for a miracle.

* * *

Atton wove through the blue reactant streams like a predator through a jungle. Always alert, in touch with the ship, and as aware of her boundaries as those of his own body.

A tricky corkscrewing loop brought them nose not nose with the battleship.

Litritch stared at him from the turret console. "Are you insane? We're within optimum range of her main batteries! You'll get us all killed."

The words that came out of Atton's mouth next were even less welcome than a confession to his being a servant of the Sith, and haunted Litritch to his dying day: "WATCH THIS!"

Atton bulled them into another corkscrew, this time heading straight for the Battleship.

Torpedoes shot from the sides of the battleship and angled for their location, but as they had launched from the sides of the ship, their correction angle was not steep enough to home in on the freighter.

Some missed, and collided and exploded behind them, sending juddering vibrations through their hull, and some headed directly from the aft tubes and crashed into the Siths' hull.

Atton laughed manically, and kept on towards the Battleship at full speed.

Litritch covered his eyes, not daring to look, and turned away from the nose of the cockpit in fright, waiting for the crash that was sure to come of this mad flying.

The _Ebon Hawk_ angled up at the last second and darted over the top of the ship, skimming the surface of the Battleship.

Litritch couldn't believe it.

It was the most genius bit of flying he had ever seen. The pilot had outmanoeuvred seventy or so seeking concussion missiles in about twenty seconds, then flown so close to the Battleship that they couldn't get their bearings.

But it seemed that the Sith were getting impatient, for before they had cleared half of the ship's length, Bako warned; "All dorsal torpedo tubes priming." The Sith were running out of patience. They all knew that they were going to launch their dorsal torpedoes simultaneously, and Bako and Litritch couldn't see any way to get out of it.

Atton narrowed his eyes. "Litritch, drop an ion mine, and don't activate it until I give the order."

A fraction of a second before all of the torpedoes launched, Atton yelled, "Mark," and Litritch activated the dropped mine.

It exploded with a shockwave that set the missiles spreading wide, but then they regrouped and gave chase as the Battleship's main shields fell.

"They're directly on our tale. We'll never make it!"

But Atton wasn't done yet. "Fire on one of those turret clusters as soon as you can. Right behind us!"

He did as ordered, even given his proud nature, and fired.

The effect was instantaneous.

The laser turrets floated out into space, but collided with the concussion missiles. They all exploded in a shower of orange fire, which almost engulfed the _Hawk_, but they escaped any real damage. Their adversary, though, had sustained a deep crater in its hull, a hole of molten metal carved out of the turret decks, completely disabling the dorsal batteries.

Atton angled the ship upwards and away.

"Yes," Litritch whooped. "You did it!"

"We're not out of this yet. Activate the Hyperdrive. That should give us enough time to charge the engines."

Bako stared in incredulity. "But we will need more time to access the navigational computer."

Atton shook his head. "We just need to jump. Do it, Bako. They won't make the same mistakes again. There's nothing more I can do except fire on their vulnerable spots until their shields go back online."

Litritch solemnly gave the command to the ship, watched the charge metre rise to full on the blue display panel, pressed the ignition, watched the stars streak by and send them on a random rimward course into Unknown space.


	7. Chapter 7

Chapter 7

2 days after jump

"Planet in visual range, Litritch," Atton said sombrely.

"Captain," Litritch replied. "I appreciate what you have done for us, but as you can be classified as no higher than a civilian until we have higher access to higher authorities, I am the ranking officer." He turned to the transparasteel and scrutinized the odd landforms on a magnified diagram. "Life-forms?" he asked, drawing his finger across the touch screen to move along the detailed zoom. As blocks materialized into higher resolution, the patterns became evident in the lush forest.

"Nothing apart from the natural rainforest life," Bako jabbered, looking at the same diagrams and speed-reading topological readouts and pulse-scans. "Developed culture, even primitive sentients, are unlikely from what I see here. Good enough to land."

"And what about these landforms?"

Atton looked closer. "Looks like volcanic tubes or very, very old geysers."

Bako brought up seismic readings on the screen. "There seems to be a number of plate-fractures, tectonic faults, if I'm not mistaken, running throughout the continent, above the seismic events of the continental plates. They seem to cleanly separate each bioregion, and are moving erratically. Far faster, even than that of Mustafar, yet the biosphere can sustain life."

"I don't care," Litritch groaned in frustration, "about your fripping observations. Just tell me if we can land on it!"

"Yessir," said Bako. "Absolutely."

The _Hawk_ swooped in and burned through the atmosphere in seconds. The land and its many fractures came into sight, seeming to spread in grids all across its cracked surface, like a blaster mark on a pane of transparasteel.

After only thirty seconds of descent, the _Ebon Hawk_ touched down in a small clearing of trees, near one of the tectonic faults.

Litritch turned around and faced the cockpit crew. "Search parties for food and water, and some camouflage for the _Hawk_. We're grounded until we can figure out the computer and make further repairs.

Atton groaned conspicuously from the pilot's seat, and tipped his head back into the hard heat rest.

"Perhaps you would like to come with the search party, Atton?

He looked the captain's way. "Love to. I've always loved spelunking," he remarked sarcastically.

The party assembled packs and blasters for the expedition, and Atton carried an extra duffel on his back for supplies, to which he stated, "I though I missed my life as a Republic dock rampie. Thanks for the lesson."

Bako, Atton, Litritch and Adma all walked from the ramp and onto solid, earthy ground. Vines and trees of alien origin rose up all around their little haven, and Adma had to lead and part the dense ferns with the Force in order for them to walk at normal speed.

She stopped suddenly, before a particularly large and withered tree.

Atton seemed to deflate in exasperation. "What now. That plasma burn coming back to haunt you?"

She shook her head slowly, back and forth, as if to clear her head and signal a negative to Atton at the same time. Her expression was blank.

"The force… it lives in these woods. I can feel it, as a tight helmet, pressing in. It is unnatural. It does not run wild, as with most powerful planets, but it seems somehow… generated. By beings. There is a huge concentration of energy somewhere on this planet, or in it." She closed her eyes and slowly built up a wall of meditation around her thoughts.

"Let's get going."

The group followed Adma, and moved through the parting trees, trying to listen over the loud rustling of leaves on the wet ground and mossy, dense foliage.

Within three minutes, however, they all burst into another clearing, rather bigger than the one they had landed in.

It looked to be one hundred metres in diameter, and the trees all around it rose as they spread, creating the dizzying effect that they were in a great, mossy bowl. In the middle was a huge green hill, with a pool of water around it for two metres around.

Litritch smiled. "Excellent!" he said, and motioned for Atton to bring the water container forward. He placed a small tube just below the water, and activated the siphon. The duffel slowly started to inflate and bulge with water, and when it was almost full to capacity, he deactivated it and shouldered the load.

"Right, now for the food."

Litritch unwisely lead the way to the trees, and tripped. Keeled face first, to stick a beautiful landing on the soft ground, his front covered with moist organic matter.

Atton giggled, then walked forward. "Up you get!"

He pulled the captain up by the hand, and looked around to the place where his foot had caught.

The faint glint of metal through the green showed, and he covered his eye to block the reflection of the fogged sun.

He knelt down to examine the rusted surface, and whipped away the grime.

A droid stared back at him, very familiar, very unnerving. He recoiled from the face, with oral slits and red, slanted eyes, now burnt out and black. It's hydraulic wires were how corroded and broken, and the upper chassis was barely exposed, the rest of it buried beneath the vegetation that seemed to be so rampant on this planet.

Atton had seen many of these before, had seen many of them destroyed and many more kill among the Sith troopers. Krath war droids.

Adma leaned in, and focussed on it. "This is old. I would say that it was here for a good three hundred and fifty years, at least."

Kafi's eyes widened in shock. "It's a wonder that it's still recognizable."

Atton took out a small blade, and started slashing at the greenery that covered its duranium torso.

Almost immediately, the blade slipped, and went surprisingly beep. He withdrew his arm, and inserted his fingers, pulling the vines asunder, to reveal a tangle of snapped and mangled cables, wires and conduits. They were all covered with a deep orange crust of oxides, and the tendrils of the plants snaked through holes and cracks in the main chassis.

"It's cut in half."

"This was a savage attack," Adma advised, coming yet closer. "This was done by neither lightsaber nor vibroblade. It was a crude sword or axe which parted the metal. The fracture surface is far too ragged." She touched the aged edge of the droid's body, and looked past Atton, at the vast hill, almost like the prow of a sinking ship. "It can't be."

Hey eyes slid out of focus again, this time completely engrossed in some sight that they could not perceive. Unbeknownst to the others, ghosts of a bloody battle writhed and twisted and faded around them, slid in and out of focus, but always intense. Red-skinned primitives chopped with axes, and were felled by rapid blasterbolts and energy grenades, and a crimson blade slashed through skin and muscle and bone. A droid was cut in half by a rusty axe, and fell directly into the image of the present day droid, but the battle raged on. She tore her force-vision-endowed eyes from the scene and focussed on the backdrop.

A ship burned, buried in the ground, bodies ditching the wreck, only to fall, flaming to the ground, doomed before they hit the muddy battlefield. More red-skins joined on the side of the primitives, and the droids and Sith troopers were pushed back to the fire. The Sith died with charred backs and slashed bodies.

Adma blinked. She saw the fresh colour of day, far from the horror of the battle, and she looked to the ship. She now saw the distinctive profile of a Sith Battleship, the same age-old design that they had evaded two days ago on the edge of Known Space.

She ran toward the ship, splashed through the shallow water, and felt for a seam that would outline a hatch or a viewport.

She found one through the moss and vines. An airlock.

Atton followed. "What is it?" he asked in profound confusion. "What do you see?"

Adma blasted the door away from the oxidizing shell of the ship, and Atton let out a sudden "Oooh!" of realization. The inside of the Battleship was almost perfectly preserved, at least on this deck. The monitors were only slightly cracked, and the floors and walls showed minimal vegetation invasion. Litritch stepped in after them and crept close to one of the computer consoles, and tapped the screen.

It lit to a light red hue, data streams rolling across the screen and running routine diagnostics as if it were an everyday start-up.

The numerals stopped, and file icons appeared, glowing outlines ready to be tapped and read. Litritch touched the link labelled _Unknown regions, first officer's log._

A number of files appeared, three text, two holographic.

He started with the first text file, dated the most recently.

**\\start**** file 1/5:**

_When the Captain said that we were going into the Unknown Regions with only one Sith lord with us, I could hardly believe my luck. I've always wanted to come to this place, always wanted to witness its secrets, but we haven't come across any planets that have been deemed "worthy of our attention" in the systems we've been cruising. One may have supported sentient life, and we didn't touch it. What a waste. _

_Lord Creezo demanded that he be able to observe every planet from the command deck. He makes me uneasy. Like he could break us not only in, but with, the blink of an eye. This whole fripping voyage has been a complete waste of my time and energy. _

**\\start**** file 2/5: **

_Finally, a planet landing, and I have to stay on this blasted Battleship, checking pipes! This deal is getting worse all the time. I even had to monitor the fighter escorts. That was the last straw, so I stowed aboard. This is being written on my personal datapad. I got in through the cargo chute, which is thankfully heated during spaceflight._

**\\start**** file 3/5:**

_Post-voyage report, commissioned by… well, does it really matter? I can hardly believe it! Immediately upon landing, there was a group of aliens… some sort of red-skinned humanoids. Tentacle-beards, hair on the tops of their heads pulled into dreadlocks and headdresses on the leaders. They wore little clothing, and handles ceremonial spears. They were expecting us. I can't write any more than this, because I need to follow the party. They're leaving…_

**\\start file 4/5**

For the first time that day, the away team saw the first officer. Baggy eyes and unchecked stubble were the result of constant duty on the bridge and exhausting routine inspections, but that did not hide the handsome, chiselled features and sparklingly white teeth (as holograms go).

"First officer S'krar's hololog. One day after shuttle to surface. The shuttle stayed on the surface. Just my luck, eh? However, I was able to stow aboard one of the fighter escorts and get back aboard the ship without detection. That was the most amazing mission I've never been on! Those red things… Massassi, I think they were called. Classic Sith to keep something like that from us. They already knew of their existence, and it's all classified Academy material. Not fit for the lesser eyes of soldiers. The whole planet… I could feel… I don't know what, but it was as if the whole think were alive. I felt every cell of every living think sensing me, and the Massassi, they have far more technology than I expected, half of it they don't know how to use! In fact, I couldn't understand some of it. I don't think that I was detected, but I was definitely scratched up my fair share. The density of those trees! I couldn't go two inches without getting a new rash. Had to smuggle Kolto out of the medical area to get rid of all of the hives in time for active duty. Anyway, I've safeguarded this file with triple redundancy encryption, and a password that would make Captain Akrish's whitish hair curl!"

**\\start file 5/5: **

"Me again. I think they're on to me! I know it sounds paranoid, but you're a computer, or some computer hacker, so you won't judge me (in the second case, I'm probably dead, so you won't have to worry about judgement). Some orders have been run up to me saying to go down to the engine level for supervision of a plasma leak. Probably very close supervision of a blasterbolt somewhere in the region of my left temple. I don't know how long I have before someone barges in on me, so I'll have to make this brief. The Sith Lords are hiding something down there. Something that the Massassi discovered. I want whoever finds this message to find it first. Poor Massassi bastards aren't going to last very long if they have something useful to the Empire. I'm going to commandeer our fastest, hyperspace-capable ship and bust out of here. If I fail… well, that'll save them the trouble of-"

The hologram looked around at the artificial sound of his door sliding open, then the whirring of a lightsaber made him cower, before there was an ear-splitting crash.

They both fell sideways—or down, as they had just crashed onto the planet's surface, by Adma's reckoning—and the recording went on for another five minutes, involving many screams, and savage battle-cries from outside, before ending automatically.

A slight rustling drew their riveted eyes from where the hologram had once been to the airlock.

"I have a bad feeling about this," Atton muttered, drawing a blaster pistol from his belt. "I think we should leave."

"Right behind you," Litritch agreed, and lifted himself out of the rusted airlock with a grunt of effort.

Adma, Kafi, and Bako followed and drew weapons, flanking the party with cautious motions, eyes darting to see any movement that might signal the coming of some primitive with a hunger for Sullustan flesh.

Atton stopped suddenly, pistol high and ears twitching with concentration. Something had moved, caused a subtle, almost imperceptible rustling of thin branches.

Their adrenal glands were going insane at this point, sending thrills of sensory activity through them and making their eyes sting. Bako dared to speak.

"What?" he muttered chirpily. "What do you hear?"

Atton held up a finger for quiet, lowered his water supply, and crept forward through the thick forest, blaster leading.

A crack and a violent hiss sent him whirling around, followed by the unmistakable sound of energy discharge, then the less familiar noise of deflection as Adma's blue lightsaber whirled through the air to intercept a blasterbolt bound for the back of Atton's skull.

A barrage of other energy bolts pelted through the forest and burned leaf, ground, and trunk, and the whole path lit with red light.

"Run," came Atton's order, which they all obeyed wholeheartedly, and turned tail.

Seeing that Adma was hard-pressed, Atton turned and fired over her shoulder into the dark source of the hailstorm. He heard a pained grunt, a heavy body falling to the mossy ground, and many angry hisses.

The momentary reprieve gave Adma the chance that she needed. She lowered her lightsaber and stretched out her hand to the darkness, channelling force energy to her palm, then released that energy.

It was like watching the air catch fire and compress at the same time. It constricted and warped and pulsed forward, pushing the trees and week, flaccid matter to either side of the path they had cleared. He didn't see what happened from there, but he didn't bother to watch.

They both sprinted after the others, though their progress was somewhat hampered by the fact that Adma was temporarily unable to affectively move the plants out of their way.

They sprang into the clearing where the _Ebon Hawk _squatted on its landing struts, taking stray fire from the closing savages with their stolen blasters and heavy metal weapons.

Litritch, Kafi, and Bako took cover behind the suspension pistons and fired blasters of their own, while HK 47 lugged a heavy tripod turret in his two hands and set fire to tree and flesh with each strafing burst.

Shrieks echoed throughout the forest as they fell, five by five, to HK's menacing lust for blood, and he covered the crews' retreat up the exit ramp and into the outer hallway.

A blasterbolt from the edge of the trees hit HK 47 directly in the center of gravity and knocked off his sturdy feet and onto the mossy ground.

Three massassi took the opportunity, and charged into the clearing, axes held high and mouths bellowing. They were a foot away from HK.

Atton shot each cleanly in the head twice, and they recoiled one by one, splayed out on the ground. He took his only chance, and dashed out and grabbed the droid by the shoulders. He was too heavy.

Atton braced his feet against the ground and pulled, but it did not budge.

Bako was at his side, and they each pulled an arm. HK slid across the ground, carving a sickly rut in the dirt, and onto the ramp. As it retracted, and they were being lifted to safety, however, a last barrage of blasterfire hit them, and Bako was ripped open at the torso and thighs and collapsed to the floor as the scene darkened and they were safely cloistered inside of the _Hawk_'s protective shell.

Kafi skidded into the main hub, and confronted T3.

"Do you have the navigational computer up and running?" she asked, looking over her shoulder into the cockpit module where Atton was priming the engines.

T3 beeped a patient affirmative, and forwarded control to the cockpit where Atton was typing away furiously at the controls to get them off the ground and out of the gravity-well where they would be able to enter hyperspace.

They lifted off with a shudder and burst into the sky, thrusters and engines burning blue in the red sky.

Kafi ran to the medical bay when they were away, and slid on the slick floor. She did not need to look down to lose control of her stomach.

Bako was unrecognizable on the once-white medical bed, now crimson with the alien's dark lifeblood, flowing out with her friend's last dying heartbeats.

After wiping her mouth clean, on all fours, Kafi crawled through the door, got up to a kneeling position, and clasped Bako's hand. His eyes flitted between her black orbs curiously, then darkened. What slack grip was left in that hand now failed, and the utterly useless piece of deadweight flopped nearly to the floor.

Atton punched the hyperspace engines, and the _Ebon Hawk _jumped into the void, bearing Kafi's dear friend and companion home.


	8. Chapter 8

Chapter 8

6 years later

Jia Skiph carelessly twiddled the practice lightsaber between his fingers, his expression impassive, his feet set.

Andrea's red blade sliced in above their heads, and came down on Jia's expert block. She tipped the blade down as Jia jutted his blade forward, and jumped, dodging out of the way as the sabre arced through thin air.

Jia stretched his head back, and Andrea's weapon narrowly missed an incapacitating hit on his jaw.

His devilish sparring partner, however, came back around with her feet fully balanced for a horizontal strike on his back. In turn, Jia inverted his grip and blocked behind his back with a surprisingly solid grasp.

In a stalemate once more, he slid his blade free, re-adjusted his grip, and twirled his lightsaber over Andrea's head, forcing her to contort to also dodge his kicking foot. Having accomplished this, they were now facing each other, Andrea used her superior speed to work her blade into a flurry of measured slashes and swipes that forced Jia to retreat to the edge of the circle.

Then Jia did his trick.

He formed a mental barrier, then, using his supreme command of the Force, drew upon the midiclorians to accelerate his foresight and enhance his ability to block.

Andrea was more insistent this time, bashing her thrumming blade in stronger and faster than before, but Jia saw the pre-emptive ghosts of the strikes, and was able to position his sabre at just the right angles to deflect the blows.

Abruptly, she changed tactics.

Andrea backtracked, then spun, flipping her lightsaber in her hand and striking above, then reversed direction and sliced from his left, always moving, always changing direction in mid-move. Jia's foresight became blurred, and he squinted, failing a block and allowing her to bruise his shin with a particularly fierce gyration.

He stabbed forward, but Andrea was gone before the move had begun.

He stumbled forward, and felt a hot jab in the back.

"Thwarted again," he acknowledged, retracting the glimmering blade of his sabre and straightening up, feeling the newest addition to his collection of duelling bruises tenderly as Andrea, too, lowered her defences.

"I'm sure your victory is nigh, Jia," she said encouragingly, gesturing toward the stone door through which they exited the sparring room. "You will find your skill in one area or another. I am told you have shown surprising resilience to mind-probes, and have shown aptitude in the moving of objects."

Jia smiled appreciatively, and put a hand around his friend's shoulders. "You are far too kind, Andrea. You have not seen Karon speak to me. I am told that I am to begin extended personal lessons with a tutor this week." He shook his head. "I regret that I will not meditate with you for a long time, perhaps ever. But, alas for authority."

They walked for a time, not speeding their stride to arrive early at their next appointments. At last, Andrea turned her head and asked something unexpected.

"When you build a lightsaber, what colour and style will you wield?" she asked, an excited look in her eyes as she waited for his answer.

"I hope to ply a single blade, crimson in colour. And you?" An unremarkable choice, bland of individuality, and a symbol of conformity to the masses, as the tradition was.

"Two short blades. One gold, and one silver. That is my wish, but if it is too extravagant, I will settle for any colour."

Jia beamed. "You always have been a rogue, Andy."

He looked to his left to see Karon approaching, and hastily snatched his arm back, then said, "I must leave you. Until tomorrow, then?"

Andrea nodded, looking slightly bemused, but loathed at the prospect of supping with her master for the evening.

"You, my apprentice, are not early. I am disappointed." His fierce master laughed his cold, derisive laugh, and led Jia into his study.

He knew the place well, as he had entered it every night for the past six years. The plain, bare-necessities look suited his master well. Indeed, he had grown used to the face that he so respected. Karon had aged well, for his part, to the point where the scars on his face hid the wrinkles that creased the corners of his eyes and weary forehead.

Jia knelt at the low table opposite Karon after removing his sword from his belt, and pulled a plate of thawed fruit, vegetables, and flavoured protein cubes towards him. As he ravenously tucked into his master's customary vegetarian meal—he was an avid non-believer in the consumption of meat, for reasons he had never shared with another living being—Karon began to speak.

"How go your lessons, Jia?" he asked in a surprisingly fatherly tone. "I hope I am not interfering by switching you to private teaching. I only mean the best for you."

Jia knew better than to let his surprise betray him, and kept on eating.

"I understand that you have developed quite an attachment to a certain classmate… Andrea, was it?"

Well, that was it. He knew that it would be brought up sooner or later. It was just a matter of what angle Karon would take. "There is no such attachment," he replied. "She is skilled, and a useful aid, nothing more."

Darth Karon smirked. "Touching. You seek to protect her."

The young apprentice focussed yet harder on his plate.

"Come now, Jia. Have I taught you nothing? I need not infiltrate your uncannily resilient mental barriers to sense that you are lying." He popped a cube into his mouth, swallowed, then went back to his preaching. "You may have whatever affair with her that you wish, but know this: be always ready to end the ones you love, because there will come a time when you will betray her. Trust me."

"You once told me that a Sith relied on passion to fuel their powers. Is not love a potent, if rare, figure of passion as well as hate and malevolence?"

Karon sighed. It was the one question that Jia could ask that would trick his master out of his mocking ploy, and there was no way out of it. "It is the most powerful tool of all, Jia. To feel love, love true enough to enable supernatural capabilities in a being, is a great gift, and the rarest experience in the sad life of a Sith." He mutely regarded a lined, worn hand fingering a Kataran Kloth-bean, and finished, "Savour your moments with Andrea well, Jia, for you will commit many evil acts under my command. The life of a Sith is a sad thing. Let yours be the first to truly fulfill its true potential.

They sat in silence, Jia counting the seconds, waiting for his opportunity. It was a slim chance that he would get anything out of the troublesome man, but that was enough for him to try.

Six seconds… that was good enough.

"Master," he began tentatively. No going back now. "Was your life in the Academy like mine? Did you have many friends, people close to your heart?"

The Sith opposite him looked up in alarm. "Do you seek to destroy me, insolent boy? To you want to undermine me and rise above me, take advantage of my cherished ones as leverage? Never ask that question, or answer it, for that matter, if you want to live out your next decade of life." He breathed heavily, and his nails scratched at the stone table with a heart-pounding vigour that truly alarmed Jia, but he sensed an emotion other than rage. Pain. Pure, unbridled pain, ripping at the old man's insides like a great rancor clawing at the walls of a small cave. But then…

"I have an assignment for you."

Jia looked at his master, more startled than ever. "But this is so early. I do not even have a lightsaber!"

Darth Karon smirked. "That is your assignment. You will not merely build a lightsaber, but find a crystal. You will go to Naga Sadaw's tomb, face the trials there, and bring back a crystal. Your sabre will be the most famous in a century, fear not. The extra effort will not be in vain."

"As you wish, my master," Jia said tentatively, his mind buzzing with questions. "I shall not fail you."

* * *

The valley of the Sith Lords. For the last six years, Jia had spent his time on or under the desert surface of Korriban, never seeing a wide view of the landscape. That vivid memory of his arrival on the planet, however, with its waving dunes and sheer, rocky faces, could not compare to this ancient, deep place.

Carved out of the hot rock, clear and un-camouflaged, were swooping, high walls, the divides of which were each marked by the statue of a rearing hississ, a dark-side dragon, with its mighty teeth bared, and the fiery symbol of the ancient Sith order emblazoned upon its crest.

At the end of the valley, where the flat dessert led up to the place, statues of subservient humans stood, tall as the temple walls, huge, featureless faces bowed, in two long lines, creating an unnerving path to the mouth of the dale. Jia felt like a sick god-thing, burned, bloated servants mocking him all the way to his destiny.

The tiny, short-range shuttle glided to a stop at the valley floor, and Jia exited the craft.

It had been long since he had laboured under the beating sun of Korriban, but he had spent precious moments in the open air with Andrea during the spectacular Korribani sunsets during the rare free days they were offered.

He flipped back his long fringe of blond hair and proceeded forward. He knew the way to the tomb, and he would not be distracted.

Also, it was impossible to miss. It was at the end of the valley, and its walls were festooned with two rune-inscribed pillars that stretched nearly twice as high as the door itself.

It took him two minutes to stroll to the door, but to get into it took no more effort than the door of the Sith Academy, and he slipped into the cavernous antechamber without incident.

It was not what he expected. He had expected cruel carvings of pain and justice as in the meditation chambers, but instead, the walls were completely plain and undecorated… except they were glowing red. The light breathed from the living stone like the rasp of a drowsy beast which could be roused by the slightest of sounds.

Jia walked forward. He could not hear anything, for the air was dead and silent, but the door behind him would not open. Not until he had faced the trials to come.

His stride remained solid, but his breath faltered. His nerves were crazed from the stillness, the lack of life. A door at the end of the hallway opened without even a whisper of sound. He immerged into the next chamber. The door opposite was obvious and unobstructed. This disturbed Jia more than it relieved him. This room was meant to surprise him, but he was prepared. That was the trick, wasn't it?

But as he crossed the room, he saw no danger, no illusion, no surprises. Then he knew: This was not designed to surprise him, because with this unoccupied room, a surprise was obvious, and so the Sith who passed here with half a brain would know this, and see that this would be a different sort of trial. Jia relaxed and squared his shoulders for whatever the tomb would throw at him.

A surprising burst of energy, a spout of pure pain within his mind, made him cringe and stumble. Screaming, familiar screaming, deafened his ears, such a shock next to the stillness and quietness of the surrounding atmosphere. He writhed on the floor, head beating a requiem on the cold surface.

Insides squirming, he opened his eyes. Another surprise, a man standing tall above him, frowning at the young man squirming on what to him must have been a ground, because his hair rippled slightly in an unreal breeze.

"You hurt, kid?" he asked, his voice alarmingly stony given the circumstances.

Jia managed to gurgle out two words to the stranger. "Ye think?" He did not know why, but he felt nostalgia seeing this figure from this angle.

"Oh good." The unbelievable words sounded discordant somehow above the scream that was now dulled. "That's the least you deserve after what you did to us."

"But I didn't do anything. What did I do?"

The man scowled now, and reached down with strong hands, grabbed Jia by the shirt, and slammed him against the wall. "Nothing! That's exactly what you did, when the Huts sold your sister, when your father was injured, when the Exchange were torching the whole sector! You never tried to help us."

"But I didn't know! I was taken by the Sith! I couldn't…"

"Oh, please. The Sith are always talking about how uncensored and free they are, so you obviously had access to computers, to the holonet. My god, man, it was all over the broadcast stations!"

Jia quailed under the withering gaze of Griso. Yes, that was the name. The man had been there at his birth, and helped his mother and Markm out of tight spots with Exchange muscle.

"Markm would never stand for this."

Jia looked confused. "'Would?'"

"He's dead."

Griso's grip slackened, and Jia found that he felt no more pain, no more scream. Just an emptiness that took in his entire corporeal being and numbed his mind. He could not be dead. It was not like the world to deal out such injustices to his innocent mind.

"But you are no longer innocent." Griso's lips moved with the words, but it was not his voice. It was his mother's. "You left us, betrayed us, never even looked us up."

Griso's burly frame warped into his mother's slender body, and his face shrank into hers, her eyes wet with tears.

"Why did you join them? Why did you go against my wishes?" Her voice echoed inside his head, not just the words that she spoke now, but her dying shriek came back to him from the distant past, high, terrible.

Tears now flowed freely from the corners of his eyes, and his chest heaved with quick, rattling breaths.

"You've failed me, Ji…"

Her words stopped with a wheeze of pain, and she staggered back, pulling away from the knife that Jia had used. Blood dripped from her mouth as she laughed, a high-pitched yell of mirth that froze his heart where it beat.

She melted into insubstantial vapour, and he fell backward through the next door.

Jia flicked the knife through of the air, but no blood clung to the plain metal. He sheathed it, and attempted to clear his mind for the tasks ahead.

* * *

"Nothing can excuse your behaviour in the time that you we have been apart, young Atton Rand. Your attachment to the Jedi is inexcusable."

Atton knelt in a pool of red light, bowing to the darkened figure on a high pedestal. The familiar chamber arched high into darkness, and the carvings on the walls pointed prosecuting eyes at him, and glowered at his disobedience. "I have only upheld our agreement with faith and honour…"

"There is no agreement." The dark figure spoke with the voice of a god, but hunched, formless, in the chair. "Only orders. That is your second mistake."

Atton bowed his head again. "Yes, master."

The master didn't move, but seemed to emit an approving silence. He continued. "Your next mission should please you, as it brings you closer to your old friend, Adma."

As his mission was detailed, Atton betrayed no emotion, no reaction that could compromise his precarious standing with the troublesome man, but his heart sank at the condemning words, and when he exited the chamber, he averted his eyes from the black-robed, blond man who entered the chamber next. He did not want anyone to see his shame.


	9. Chapter 9

Chapter 9

Jia stumbled through the stone doors to the audience chamber of the Dark Lord of the Sith clutching his prize in his right fist as he walked by a dark-clad man with a bowed head, a glinting cluster of minerals from the depths of Korriban, retrieved for a single purpose; the construction of a Sith lightsaber.

Dust fell from the loose fabrics of his black robes in great clouds as he came to kneel before the Dark Lord, ever on his high mantle of power. The Lord looked down on him, then to his hand.

"You have the crystal?" The question compelled him by no natural force to open his palm and show the colour of the stone.

The colour was black. The majority of its surface was dark as night, but as one studied the object closely, striations of brightest silver ran through the abyss of transparent black. The blade would shine with darkness, a perfect reflection of the wielder's character.

"You chose well, boy. Leave me, and go to your master. Show him your triumph."

Jia left eagerly and set off straight for his master's study.

The door opened into the room, and Karon sat cross-legged in the very middle. The space was cleared of any objects, and his hands rested in a passive position. His eyes fluttered and twitched in a dark trance as Jia approached him, guard up.

Karon cleared the floor with impossible speed and had his crimson lightsaber out in no time, crossed with Jia's suddenly fully-assembled blade. Jia thought that he didn't know, but Karon saw the pieces fly into the crystal to complete the weapon moments before they had engaged.

Karon's blade flew through the air from every angle, and Jia rolled through a tentative series of blocks, then countered with a quick double-thrust. This surprising move caught Darth Karon off guard, and he threw back his hips and stumbled. Jia stuck out his foot, and Karon fell to the ground.

But then he wasn't there.

Jia brought his lightsaber behind him to block the next cunning attack, but Karon was too quick for him. A quick force-pulse sent him flying, and another more precise attack knocked the lightsaber from his hand.

He lay on the floor, blades crossed on his neck, feeling the hot blades licking at the sinews.

Karon deactivated the blades and helped Jia up with an outstretched hand.

"You are good, Jia," he said in an appreciative voice. "But I will always be the one who trained you."

The years had not had the anticipated affect on the master, as Jia had thought that there would be more scars and wrinkles on the wise face, but rather, the man seemed revitalized by his time in the academy. Fewer blemishes dotted his visage—or at least Jia was getting used to them—and he seemed less severe than he had once been. He was glad to see him alive after the tomb, anyways.

"You like the weapon, master?" he asked tentatively as it was turned over in Darth Karon's expert hands.

"It is excellent," he said, handing it back. "Black crystal. Interesting, but not for me. Keep this safe wherever you go. You will never make a blade like this again."

Jia took the lightsaber and nodded. He knew that the crystal was one-of-a-kind, and only grew with such strength in the tomb of Naga Sadaw. He would never enter that place again, he vowed to himself.

"Your time in the academy is complete, my apprentice."

Jia narrowed his eyes and studied his inscrutable master more closely. This could not be. It was hard to imagine his life outside of the rock walls and corridors of his academy. He would be free at last.

"I know your thoughts. Yes, it is quite possible. You compare us too much to the Jedi with their life's devotion to the force. We wield it as an asset. You have learned this skill, and I can teach you no more as a small boy. You must serve the Empire, serve under me, and you will know an opulent life. No more sacrifice."

Jia took back his lightsaber and clipped it to his belt. "Yes master. I will serve you, and the Empire to the best of my ability."

"Good," his master remarked, pleased. "Good. That in mind, I have your first solo mission. Investigation, nothing more. You will be working within the reach of the Sith Empire, so you will be afforded any support, within reason, that you call for. But I urge you to attempt to do this on your own. You must prove yourselfe, not to me but to the Dark Lord himself."

"Yes. What must I do?"

* * *

"Are you sure that the boy is ready? He is powerful, yes, but is he ready for this trial?"

Once again, the vaulted chamber soared above him, driving him to the edge of his nervousness. This time was different. Anticipation ate at his insides like a hungry parasite.

The Dark Lord looked down on him with a smirk and chuckled. "Darth Karon, my apprentice, you have come to care for the boy?"

Karon tried not to shiver in disgust as the Dark Lord kept his laughter over the concept of attachment under control. "He is my apprentice, Master. I raised him to manhood. I have grown attached to him."

Plaguis stopped laughing at this point, and sat forward in his throne. "The boy is likely on his way now, no doubt, so there is nothing to do on the matter." He continued to gaze piercingly at Karon, boring into him like a gem-tipped drill. "As well, I would have thought that you would have grown a little less attached given your situation in your life outside of the Academy, your son, Philip?" A smile curled Darth Plaguis's unseen lips once more as Karon's features contorted in horror. "His age is ripe for recruitment, is it not?"

His lightsaber flashed from his belt as he attempted to stand, but his legs were immobilized on the floor.

"Put it away, my apprentice. It is of no use in my chambers." He did not give Karon the luxury of putting it away voluntarily. His hand was forced to his side, and the blade retreated into its bone casing. "Do not cross me. You know what powers I have, and I do not want to see him become a wraith of the dark side any more than you do."

Karon simmered with rage and let his lightsaber roll away across the floor. "As you wish, my Lord."

"Good. There is something I wish for you to do as well, my apprentice. A task of much importance. In the Unknown Regions, there is a planet. A planet whose core houses a powerful artefact. This crystal is essential to us, and so you must retrieve it."

Karon looked puzzled. "But Master, the Unknown Regions are unmapped. It is not possible to locate any one planet from another without intel which no one has bothered to gather since…"

His master smiled as realization crept into Karon's ugly features. "You learn quickly, my apprentice. You will do well."

"I am to gather the Rakatan Star Map?" Karon was outraged at the unspoken proposal. "First you send Jia, then me? You will lose half of your kingdom to that blasted tomb!"

Karon felt force-bludgeons beat his torso and make him cough and splutter on his hands and knees for his impertinent outburst, but it had to be said.

"You know nothing of that tomb. The men who immerge, immerge in either spirit or revitalized form. Relish the experience."

Karon bowed. "As you wish, my master." Darth Plaguis nodded approvingly, then did something quite unexpected. He simply wavered, insubstantial in the hot air. Red light shone from his robes and he disappeared into thin air, leaving only a small residual glow of force energy.

Darth Karon looked around in dismay, but the surprise was forced to be short-lived as another voice sounded, this one feminine, graceful. He did not know this voice. It spoke to him.

"Darth Karon, I once told you that I would impart my knowledge to you when you were ready. This is your final test. Prove yourself, and you shall know the secrets to limitless power." The voice faded away at the end of the proclamation, and no sound reached his ears in the chamber.

Karon staggered upright and stumbled closer to the throne. A forcefield burned him and flung him backwards onto his back.

He got up again, and looked around. "Who are you? Show yourself!"

"You know who I am, Dukufur. Go to the Unknown Regions."

Karon's mind suddenly emptied of thought. His eyes glazed thoughtlessly and he summoned his lightsaber, then turned, possessed of single-minded determination. He would go to the Unknown Regions, because it was his greatest heart's desire, he would bring back the crystal because it was his master's wish.

"Go my apprentice. Go. This is but a taste of the power you shall possess after your task is complete."

* * *

Andrea heard the steps of light, skilled feet from her space in the hall where she had lived for six years. She stood, recognizing the pattern, a bouncing, happy skip that signalled Jia's coming in the half-light of the evening's low-burning candles.

He rounded the corner into their hallway and pulled off his shirt as he reached his own deep niche, he barely acknowledged Andrea's presence with a smile as he sat down and changed into clean clothes. He seemed too excited to initiate a conversation, so she started.

"Jia, where were you today? I missed you in the sparring room."

He turned his head. "Do you really want to know?"

He sounded solemn and serious, even dour, despite his manner of walking into the situation. She nodded an affirmative and faced him fully.

"The tomb of Naga Sadaw."

Andrea recoiled, confused and scared. Suddenly every shadow, every worry line on Jia's usually soft face seemed to crease even further at the mention of the place. "That can't be. That's in the Valley of the Sith Lords, how would you ever get there?"

Jia yanked on a pair of lose briefs, then wrapped a black tunic around his body, and shrugged. "Karon's orders. I was shuttled there, I went in, and I just walked back."

He drew out a cylindrical object and lobbed it at Andrea, who caught it with razor-sharp reflexes.

"Your lightsaber?"

Jia nodded. "The blade is black. I will need it for what is to come." He summoned the blade into his palm and put it on his belt, then strode away from Andrea. "Do not wait for my return."

* * *

Atton hunched forward in his seat and took a long swig of Juma Juice from a large glass mug. He felt his nerves dull and brain slow, and smiled. The most alcoholic beverage legally sold in the Republic worked fast on the pilot, and he became reckless and slightly sleepy.

"Hey," a voice said from his right along the wide bar. "Flyboy, where'd you come from?" The well-endowed human female was scandalously dressed, nearly spilling over a low neckline, but concealing a knife in a small sheath on her belt.

"The galaxy is my home, gorgeous," he said, lewdly but truthfully. "Got nowhere to go right now, though. I'm in the market at the moment." He took another swig from his foaming mug and swayed slightly. "Wow!"

"You sure do know how to drink Mr…"

Atton leaned in slightly, both to see her clearly and to breathe in her floury perfume. "Atton Rand, at your service, ma'am."

The woman raised her own glass and drank before saying, "Atton. Natassa Vergil."

"You at my service, too, Miss Natassa?" he asked bluntly.

She leaned closer to him as well. "Entirely."

Natassa's apartment building was not a hundred metres away from the cantina when Atton felt something wrong. His stomach churned, his eyes fogged, and his brain went completely numb, but he was aware of the fact that he and Natassa were on a thin, deserted walkway above speeding traffic, and that she was sitting astride him, pinning him with her pelvis and patting him down.

"Couldn't wait, huh?" he asked stupidly as she groped through his clothing for coins or datapads.

She stopped, satisfied that she had found all she could, then said, "Listen, flyboy. You're sexy and all, but you're just too dangerous to live, plus you practically called me a whore back in that cantina, and I'm not one you want to take for granted, so I'm gonna' have to kill you." She unsheathed the knife from the back of her belt, and pressed it to his throat. "Never liked using spice, but business is business. You ready, hotstuff?"

Atton didn't respond. His nervous system was too slow to get the command to his jaw in time. He still felt her soft body, still smelled her perfume, still tasted… spice. She'd drugged him? That was plain dirty, no doubt. He probably wouldn't have been interested in the first place had it not been for the spice that she'd spiked his drink with the moment that he wasn't looking at the drink. She could've reached past him at any time during the exchange, and all he would have been interested in was her cleavage.

But why wasn't she stabbing him and dumping him into the traffic? Now he couldn't feel her there now. She was gone, where he did not know, but all he knew right now was he needed to sleep it off before anyone else came to loot him.

Adma looked down at Atton with utter exasperation as she kicked the girl's vibroblade away and knocked her unconscious by blocking oxygen flow to her higher functions for one second, then put his arm around her and heaved him across the walkway and out of sight.

Adma dragged his limp body to a small lift on the outside of the small apartment building (the very building that Atton had never made it to with Natassa) and dragged him inside before pulling the door shut and pressing the button for the thirty-fifth floor.

The two immerged into a sparsely-furnished room with no branching hallways, one bed, and a table set with two chairs.

"What were you thinking?" Adma started to ramble as soon as she had set Atton down on the edge of the bed and he had lolled back on the sheets. "Do you have no judgement? You could have been killed by a common street whore were it not for me!" Then she saw that he was paying her no heed, and closed her eyes, still standing. "One moment," she said, though she knew that he would not know what she was saying.

As the midiclorians crept into his bloodstream, Atton grappled restlessly with the bed sheets and contracted his eyes to the point of muscle strain. The beings consumed the poison in his veins within seconds, and his breaths came in great heaves of fresh air, though the taste in his mouth remained foul and his innards ached with a protesting vengeance.

He sat bolt upright and looked first at Adma, then at her window, which was alive with the lights of the outside traffic. "When did you get here?" he asked in astonishment. "And when did _we_ get here?!"

Adma pulled up a chair from the dinning set and draped her robe across its back. "This is my apartment, and I got here moments before your throat was slit by that girl… Natassa, was it?"

Atton rubbed his face in obvious frustration, then spoke in a hoarse voice. "Thanks, but I don't need a guardian angel."

"Apparently you do. You were almost killed out there! Are you like this all the time?"

Atton withdrew, offended by the judgement. "I was having a bad day," he said in feeble defence, then rummaged around in his ribbed jacket for his belongings. "That Lagrek even took my datapad!"

Adma procured the stolen items from the pocket of her robes and handed them to Atton. "I hope everything is accounted for," she commented offhandedly.

Atton took the hint. "Thanks, Adma," he said with the slightest of his cheeky smiles. "It's good to see you again."

Satisfied with her persuasion, she dropped the stern act, and pulled Atton into a friendly embrace. "And you too, my old friend." She got up and walked to her small food-preserver, then asked, "So where does business or pleasure take you, flyboy?"

"Oh, just the odd smuggling job," he explained unenthusiastically, accepting the glass of water graciously from Adma. "Got my very own ship, too. The _Summer Harvest_. She's not much, but she gets you there."

"I would report you, but you're Atton." She chuckled and took a sip of her own beverage with a contemplative look out the window into the clear night sky, speckled with star systems beyond count, and distant, unreachable galaxies. The view, backed with darkness stretching into the untamed fathoms of space tantalized her gaze for a time, and the duo sat on either side of the bedpost, frowning into the heavens, until at last…

"So, I don't see the hubby anywhere," remarked Atton pointlessly as he snapped back to reality, dragging Adma with him.

"He's on a combat mission on Foriss. I couldn't go because of my present assignment." She drank deeply from her glass and then, realizing it was only water, stopped and sighed. "I am here on reconnaissance."

Atton gestured deftly to her robes and loose, unmistakably Jedi tunic. "You aren't exactly keeping a low profile."

She waved away the scathing observation. "There are no Imperial assets in this area. This is my home base." She squinted curiously at him. "And speaking of home base, what are you doing here? Smuggling spices, or something?"

"Stress leave. Last blockade I ran nearly blew my tail off, and I've used the proceeds fuelling the _Harvest_." He eyed her sarcastically. "I suppose running into you was counterproductive."

She smiled, then said, "It's good to see you, Atton, but now I must go to sleep." She got up, drained the rest of her bland drink, and placed the glass in a small sink. "You should stay the night. I would say that this is more comfortable than any accommodations that the typical blockade runners have to offer." Adma gestured to the right side of the small bed.

Atton conceded the point, and fell back on the mattress after kicking off his boots and discarding his utility belt. Down to his simple pants and T-shirt, he pulled the light coverings over himself as Adma slid onto the bed on the opposite side, keeping her distance. The lights dimmed, and the world was reduced to the sound of Adma's slow breathing a foot away, and Atton's pure self loathing for what he could not bring himself to do.


	10. Chapter 10

Chapter 10

"I'm looking for a man."

"Good for you, but I'm a bit busy at the moment, and I have a wife."

"A certain man. One who may have passed through here. Atton Rand?"

"Rings a bell. Brown hair, big, dark eyes, right? Sure can take a drink."

"The very same."

"What do you want to know for?"

"It's important."

"'fraid I can't divulge. Don't know who you are, or what you mean to do…"

"You will tell me where he is."

"…but I suppose you look harmless enough. He ran off with that prostitute, didn't he? Natassa, her name is. Regular here, and always in the mood for a drink."

"Where did they go?"

When Atton woke up, it was to find that Adma was serving herself a hearty helping of Ryloth green salad and drinking a scalding cup of processed tea.

Disoriented, he sat up in bed, and grappled with his utility belt for his holstered blaster pistol. Then he felt a gentle hand on his shoulder, pulling him upright, and a smirking face from feet away.

He dropped the weapon, and rubbed his face with both dry hands very hard to rid himself of the sleep that clogged his eyes.

"Sorry," he said as he stretched his sore back and felt the joints in his shoulders and elbows pop satisfyingly. "All those years of smuggling, you know."

Adma nodded, and finished off the last of her salad. "Understandable. Would you like something to eat?"

Atton shook his head. "No," he said distractedly as he pulled on his equipment and holstered his pistol. "I left my speeder bike at the cantina, and the bartender has my card."

"Ah." She dumped her plate down the dish chute and got up. "Then I guess this is goodbye for now."

He looked at her, and pulled his lopsided grin. "I guess so."

He pulled his hand off the door-controls and stuck it out for her to shake, but she didn't respond. She just looked at him, curiously, almost pleadingly. They stood it that position for a long time, desire in her eyes, trepidation in his, before Atton moved. He extended his hand, stepped forward, and put is fingers tentatively on the quivering lekku that hung from her teal head, causing an almost orgasmic reaction. She leaned her head back, closed her twinkling eyes, and kissed him, ever so gently, as nervous as he was.

The door behind Atton crumpled and fell away. Adma flew from Atton across the room, and flattened her wall-mounted processor with a shower of sparks and metal. He felt a terrible, constricting pain around his Adam's apple, lifting him off his feet and making him gasp for breath, feet flailing at thin air.

"Atton Rand, is it?" a cold voice asked from behind him. It was young, and unchanged by the force, and his grip on his throat was not the seamless hold of an experienced force-user. He was an apprentice, then. "Fancy some spy coming here and stealing my prize. Whose servant are you? Who seeks to deprive me of glory?"

Atton struggled against the Force choke and forced a few words past the blockage.  
"My orders come from the Dark Lord himself…"

"Liar!" The kid's hold became even tighter and more inexpert around his windpipe, threatening to fatally cut off blood and oxygen to his already sluggish brain. "For I, too, have those orders." He paused and looked at Adma. "Ah, but I see that I am far more capable than you in this matter. Perhaps I should just put you down and deal with her myself."

He torsioned his body and pin-wheeled his flailing legs to look Adma in the eyes. She was also in the hold, but did not move. She only stared unblinkingly, sadly.

Atton averted his eyes, now attempting to look at his captor.

"I will do what I must."

Atton noticed a subtle change in the boy's voice to when he had been taunting him, a half-hearted, quivering voice. Atton dropped to the ground and rolled onto his back, massaging his throat and circulating the blood.

"I will let you live, however. Stay out of my way."

He saw the youth for the first time in the encounter now. He had bright blond hair, pure blue eyes, and fair skin. His dark robs and tunic hung loose over his skinny frame and he held the hilt of a lightsaber in his right hand, the left holding Adma in the shimmering air.

"Kid, don't do this," he pleaded, wheezing with every syllable he spoke. "…She's useful to the empire!"

The boy stiffened, and loosened his grip negligibly, while turning his head to face Atton, still lying of the floor. He got up, straightened his jacket, and looked the Sith straight in the eye. "She discovered important info in the Unknown Regions. A planet the Sith have been on, and she's got it all in her noggin." He looked at Adma, trying to convey his sincere remorse while trying to look scathing at the same time. It only served to make his features contort more disgustingly. "If you kill her, you would get your job done, but it would serve both our purposes if she lived just a little bit longer. You can kill her after we've tortured her for the information."

The boy looked wary, and still looked sceptical when he knocked her out with a flick of the wrist and let her fall to the durasteel floor.

"Come with me," he commanded imperiously, kicking aside the ruins of the apartment door. "And carry her. We're going to take my shuttle."

Atton picked Adma up carefully cradled her high enough for him to walk and keep up with the boy's brisk pace. He was led down a side-alley cultivated with dingy stalls selling death-sticks and spice to sketchy and nervous-looking clients. They immerged into what seemed like open space, a hangar so far away from the city's hustle and bustle that no one would ever find it, and it was like being on the edge of the world. Sheer sides of surface structure ended and dropped away into howling darkness that dropped for miles before ending in another metal plateau which extended out to a smoky horizon. Machines, pumps, and refineries, which once worked at full capacity, now lay derelict and lifeless, inhabited by Huts and other gangs, and surrounded by thick, billowing smog. Atton coughed as a disgusting gust of wind blew in from what he knew to be the famed Works of Coruscant.

He was led to a small shuttle whose ramp gaped open. Guards flanked either side of the entrance, silently at attention with force-pikes at their sides.

They walked between these guards and up the ramp, after which they followed and the door sealed, locking them into the craft.

Atton set Adma down on a medical table, where she shook her head blearily, hands twitching experimentally against her stomach. Her eyes looked at Atton accusingly. He stared back, trying to look apologetic. She just looked away, and fixed her eyes on the ceiling.

The shuttle rose up into the sky, traveling through thick clouds of pollutants as they gained the upper atmosphere, then immerged into utter clarity when they breached space.

"You have not finished your mission, Jia."

Jia pressed his forehead to the floor of the chamber, grovelling for forgiveness. "Lord, I thought… the assassin told me…" His innards constricted again, and he fell to the floor again, writhing and grunting in pain.

"I ordered you to kill her, without mercy or hesitation, and yet you stood aside and let yourself be delayed by a scoundrel's ulterior motives," the Dark Lord boomed, shaking the floors and walls. "My orders are not questioned. They are followed."

Jia was released, finally, from his agony, and coughed as his soft organs uncoiled within him. His eyes streamed, but he gathered enough breath to stammer, "Yes, my Lord."

He sat back imperiously in his high throne, gazing down on Jia's piteous form. "Go to Atton, order him to torture the Jedi, and bring me useful information."

Adma screamed, twitching in her metal chair, eyes rolling. An IV protruded from her arm, alternately injecting Tatooine Whipsnake venom and a counteracting agent, keeping her alive, but in a constant state of torture.

Atton halted the process. "What did you see?" he commanded more than asked.

She stayed clam-like before his searching eyes. Her mind was undetectable to Jia, and torture wasn't breaking her. But she would break. She would spill the secrets of her vision in the Unknown Regions in time, and Atton would be once more in the favour of the Dark Lord.


	11. Chapter 11

Chapter 11

Karon stepped over the threshold of the doors and into the Dark Lord's chamber, hardly noticing the force hold that bent his knees and made them buckle in submission. He bowed once, then rummaged in his robes for a small object.

Instead, the Lord raised a hand and summoned the object to him. As his fingers closed on it, it caught the dim light, reflecting off of many facets and edges making it glint dazzlingly. The Rakatan Star Map.

The Dark Lord looked back to his apprentice with unsuppressed glee in his manner, though his features could not be seen. "You have done well, my apprentice," said Lord Plagueis, putting the holoprojector on the arm of his throne. "This step in my journey is nearly complete. I need only wait for your apprentice and my assassin to return with their mutual friend, and we may begin our quest."

Karon looked confused, and voiced his concern with a questioning voice. "Lord Plagueis, my master, I do not—"

"You will understand when the time is right," he said, interrupting Karon with the maddeningly cryptic response, and waving a hand in impatience. "Suffice it to say that it will help us in the war against the Republic. Traya's Purge will pail in comparison, and she will have to submit to me."

Karon opened his mouth, as if to enquire further, but then the door opened, and Karon felt that he could stand steadily again. He understood himself to be dismissed.

Kafi Morso slammed forward into the bulkhead, knocking herself silly and making her snout bleed slightly. She fell back onto her elbows, curled up, and felt her injuries. Not much damage, but a spectacularly yellow bruise, and a lot of pain. Beings ran past her in different directions while she tried to make herself as small and out of the way as possible while waiting out the sudden surge. They were all most likely on their way to assess the latest addition to the Thunder-class Frigate _Sovereign Entity's_ lengthy collection of hits from an unseen battle. She had been working on her datapad at the time the first bolt had struck, and she had spilled her cup of navy-issue, non-depressant-based Juma all over it, shorting it and losing several months' work.

The people finally stopped panicking, and a man grabbed her by the elbow and yanked her upright.

She looked over to thank him, and saw someone she did not expect to see in the flickering, failing light of the lower-deck hallway.

"Litritch!" she exclaimed in nostalgic delight, but she had no time to say anything else as a resounding boom of terbolaser-recoil thundered through the hull.

When it had died away, he spoke in a rushed tone. "We're in a full-broadside exchange," he blustered as he walked along the low, dark corridor with muted overhead lights, hanging from the occasional blown-out conduit or circuit board "taking heavy damage. I'm to debrief you on the situation and give you your orders."

Kafi looked startled. "Can't they have somebody less important tell me this?" she asked, stumbling to keep up with his long, purposeful strides.

"They couldn't spare anyone else. The bridge has taken heavy casualties. These Sith know their stuff." He stopped and pulled Kafi into a niche as more people walked in the opposite direction. "Now listen carefully. Go up to D deck, secure an airlock, suit up for external repairs. A team is already out there, but they need all that they can get. You'll see them." He glanced around as another crashing explosion rumbled through the hull and into his rubberized shoes. "I'd better get back to the bridge. I'll see you after this is done."

With that, he continued in the other direction, leaving Kafi staring.

A ball of fire erupted from his right and enveloped him as she watched, and he was engulfed in the cloud of superheated debris and fire. But she did not rush to him, though a scream involuntarily escaped through her mouth. Air was rushing past her, bringing with it chunks of broken hull, flickering lights, and other such paraphernalia.

She grabbed a hand-railing and clung on for dear life as the heated hull was slowly torn away by the rushing air.

Then, over the massive din of decompression, Kafi registered the all-telling whirr of machinery. The closing of the air-tight hatches to the whole compartment.

She worked her hands along the railing and pressed her feet into the deck plates, willing her straining muscles to move her faster against the tide of atmosphere, for the hatches were fast-working, and once one began to close at this distance, she was doomed.

Kafi was almost a foot away from the door when it began shutting inexorably, sealing her off from freedom, and her legs pumped under her, her head bowed, and her arms worked.

Her head was through, then her shoulders, then her hips. Finally, with one last effort, her foot whipped through the small gap in the doors and they sealed seamlessly, keeping the air back from the temptation of the hull breach.

She caught her breath then ran for the lift.

When she got there, the place was empty. In this section, too, the hatches were closed, and the placed was deserted.

For a moment of panicked claustrophobia, she thought that the lift would be sealed as she got to it and pounded the touch-sensitive up button. When the lift opened up, she could barely claw her way out and into the mass of scrambling bodies in the cramped hallways. She shoved her way to the airlock station where a team of technicians started cinching her into an environment-suit immediately.

"Ma'am," one of them said hurriedly whilst tightening a glove onto her left hand, "a team's already on the surface attempting to fix the leak. They're waiting for your help. Get in, execute the fix with low-heat tools, and get out." They finished by pressurizing her suit, then smacked a hand reassuringly down on the top of her helmet and yelled, "Let's go, let's go! Double-time!"

The techs filed out, closed the hatch, and popped the airlock with a rush of wind. Kafi and her gauntlet of fixers hauled themselves out of the compartment and magnetized the soles of their suits for maximum grip on the hull.

They began their trek along the scarred and ragged surface. She could see the crew that was already out on the horizon of the lit hull, scrambling with non-thermal-based paraphernalia and covering the reactant breach with a sheet of durasteel.

The team stepped in their cumbersome suits, skipping over jagged holes and exposed framework. When Kafi looked up, she saw the Sith Destroyer through the dome of her helmet. It loomed like a dark, ragged entity of shadow, a blot where no stars were. Bristling with guns and tubes, she had enough in her arsenal to overmatch the _Entity _two to one.

And just as she looked back to the scuttling workers on the crest of the hull, the turrets opened up. Soundlessly, the red beams impacted, glaring her visor with a garish red light as it tinted in compensation. The cloud of freezing liquid erupted into superheated flames.

For a moment, it seemed either that everything was under control, or time had frozen, as the clear droplets floated suspended in the airless vacuum, just begging to fuel the inferno just inches away, but Kafi knew that it was only this way because she wanted this moment to last forever.

It could not. The flames, the fuel, and the lasers caused a massive chain reaction in the midst of the fixing crew. Some of them flew, their suits loosing magnetization, and were lost in space or in the ball of expanding heat. The less fortunate developed atmosphere leaks and began to flail in futility as the blaze caught on the reflective skins, using their suits as an ample source of oxygen. They threw their limbs about in agonized desperation until they were nothing more than crisped flesh and plasteel, floating up into limbo.

Kafi and her comrades were knocked backwards and they fought to keep their feet to the metal and continue walking with their load of gear.

As they finally reached the site of the explosion, they found it not too badly damaged, as the fire was sudden and quick, but the metal plate was gone, as was the previous teams' equipment, and so they started their wasted work all over again to contain the precious reactant.

Within minutes the fast-acting permacrete had been applied to the metal, bonding the plate to the hull and sealing the leak, and it was time for them to go.

Kafi and the others got to the airlock and safety, stripped off the suits, and stepped back into the ship. As they leaned against the wall in exhaustion and despair, all they could do now was to wait for their next assignment, wait to be destroyed, or wait to evacuate. Any way it went, they knew how slim their chances of survival were.

The latter came first. Grave-looking attendants ushered the techs and officers down the hall, herding them to the nearest escape pod bay.

Red lights flashed on and off and claxons screemed. The smell of fear hung heavy in the air. Kafi felt herself being pressed into the mass of sweating beings, unable to see or breathe, unaware of her position, weather or not she was close to an escape pod. Weather or not she was going to live.


	12. Chapter 12

Chapter 12

Plagueis stood over the piteous Twi'lek who was whimpering and bleeding from every orifice and cut. Bruises dotted her naked body, and the stump of her amputated left Lekku hung limp by her head.

Atton stood rigid before the shrouded figure and reported: "She has divulged the contents of her vision. We have no further use for her."

The Dark Lord looked to her in disgust as she stirred meekly in her shackles and then shuddered as her many hardened wounds strained and split grotesquely. It was plain to him even without the use of force vision that she had no fight left in her.

He extended his mind forward into her barely-living head. It was tough work. She had an incredible mastery of the force and a strong mind, but it was not long before he found it. He extracted the memory easily enough once he had broken down her defences, and carefully logged it in his memory. He was sure that, had he not ordered her tortured first, he would be unable to break her mind. She was a typical Jedi; headstrong and virtuous.

"I have the memory," Plagueis said calmly to Atton, who had now looked back at the Jedi with an unreadable expression on his face. It was maddening, he thought in exasperation. He had never been able to penetrate this one's mind either. Here stood two of the galaxy's most powerful minds, and he had them together in one room. Madness. Well, at least he was about to dispose of one of them.

He turned away from the scene after shaking himself mentally and putting on a commanding voice. "Kill her."

He walked out of the room, leaving them behind.

Atton just continued to stare at Adma.

She opened her mouth, slowly and deliberately, mustering her mental and physical energy, and spoke: "Is he gone, Atton?"

He started, as if unaware that she was in the room, then leapt forwards to listen more closely. "Yes," he whispered frantically, "yes, he's gone."

She nodded slightly, then continued. "I'm going to die because of you, so don't try to redeem yourself by smuggling me off the planet. You'll be carrying a corpse before you get half way to the _Harvest_." She grimaced just as she said this, but kept relentlessly on. "This is not you. You have been corrupted by the Sith, I can see it. Though you hid it from me before, now it is clear as day. But you can change. Anyone can change. Anyone can fight for the right side. And you… you can find out what it's like to have control."

Atton hadn't the slightest idea of what she was saying, but he nodded as he began to unshackle her. He laid her body on the cold grating and supported her bloody head, then picked up her hand and squeezed, as if it may help her to hold onto life.

"Come closer."

He did as he was told, bending forward until he was almost nose to nose with the Jedi. His vision tunnelled, and he no longer was aware of the hard floor, no longer aware of the breathing body in his arms, but he was flying, without wings or engines, arms outstretched, feeling life flowing to his splayed fingertips. Every life form in the world could feel him, and he them. They were connected; one thing and mind. He laughed with pleasure, but then felt a sudden pressure on his hand and a shuddering breath on his cheek.

The vision stopped. Adma was lying with her eyes closed, relaxed, one hand resting on the back of his head, the other slack in his grasp. She whispered with her last soft breath through blue, parched lips: "Now you can understand. Atton, find the others…"

He was now taking the full weight of her head and arm. Her muscles were limp, and her breathing had stopped.

His sweating forehead fell to the bridge of her slender nose, his eyes screwed up and wet, his shoulders shaking with wracking sobs. He stayed there for a long time before the substance of her flesh melted away in his arms and he was clutching thin air. He relinquished his fruitless hold and sat, staring.

Then, mustering his determination, Atton stood up and strode to the tall locker standing to the side of the room. He found it locked, but he had no trouble in taking a palm-print of the Sith trooper that had closed the cabinet, waving it before the lock, and tricking it. He took out a blue lightsaber, a small ring of some turquoise crystal, and a light, homespun robe. Once he had looted Adma of these few possessions he turned to the place where the blood had pooled on the floor and the midiclorians had died.

"May the force be with you," he said to the pool of red, then turned to the door and left with the trinkets stowed in the pockets of his ribbed jacket.

As he left in the small freighter/smuggler, he glanced at his star map and plugged in Telos' co-ordinates. He knew what she had meant, and he would start looking there and not stop until he found everyone who was on the Ebon Hawk that day, everyone who knew what he did, and the only people who he could trust in the whole galaxy. Right down to HK 47 and T3 M4.

Jia stared into the small, simple room in the Sith Academy on Korriban, not in reverence, contemplating fond memories or childhood stories, but rather as one regards an old orphanage. He had by no means enjoyed the experiences that had suffered within its confines, but it helped him to survive, made him strong, and so had the man kneeling in its center, robed in black, facing away from him. He was staring at a grate that contained a small, golden fire. It might have been a window beyond which set the sun of Korriban in a flurry of blazing colour as it always did, had they not been deep underground, encased in the cool stone.

With an heir of slight apprehension as he felt himself getting steadily paler from lack of exposure to surface atmosphere, he stepped closer to Karon. His master knew he was there, but did not react.

Karon tilted his head backward, exposing his throat to the fire and letting the heat seep through him, fill him with its rage. His short-cropped dark hair bristled, and his hands curled into fists.

Suddenly, without warning, Karon talked in his low, scratchy baritone. "You're free to go."

Jia stopped dead, his face slightly vacant as he absorbed the enormous implications of these four simple words. "What?" he finally stammered. "What did you say?"

"You're free, boy." Karon sounded amused, and twisted around, now in a cross-legged position on his carpet. "The Dark Lord of the Sith has no further use for you, so get out of here!"

Jia could hardly believe it. He just stared, dumb-founded, at his master's lined, smirking face, unable to take it in.

"It's hard to tell when we'll need you back. Might be a few years, might just be a few months, but you don't have to do anything right this second."

Jia finally found his voice again, and croaked, "But what about training?"

Karon actually laughed. "You really think you need training? You're a better swordsman than half the Academy put together, and better than that in the Force." He stood up, solemn now, and put a hand tentatively on Jia's shoulder, as if unable to express something that was bursting to escape his mind. "You've exceeded my expectations, kid… Jia. I knew that you were a breakthrough when you first nearly knocked me out six years ago. Besides, you've got to go out and experience the world. For instance, you're twenty and you're still a virgin!" He smiled weekly.

As that smile found Karon's face, Jia experienced a thing he didn't think possible. A swelling, fond sadness for the man gripped him, and before he knew what he was doing, before he could master himself in light of his freedom, he had stepped forward and hugged Karon.

To his surprise and great relief, his master responded in kind, squeezing reassuringly. They both let go at roughly the same time, and moved back.

After hastily averting his eyes, deciding that the courtesy was useless after what had just happened, and nodding, Jia turned awkwardly from the room and into the hall. He turned immediately into the corridor leading to the dormitories and soon found Naia sitting cross-legged on her cot and reading off the computer console in the wall.

He strode to his own niche in the wall and started collecting his things into a small duffel.

She looked up from her reading to watch him. "What's up?" she inquired curiously as he threw the strap of the traveling bag over his head.

"I'm going," he replied in delight, pocketing his final item, a small Galactic Banking debit chip. "Away from here. Karon set me free and I'm not wasting any time."

"That's great!" she exclaimed. "You can go and see your family now."

He halted his departure instantly at this, staring at Naia with a shocked, almost offended expression. "Naia, I'm never going back there again. I thought you knew that."

Indeed, he had promised himself not to go back to Corulag's refugee sector, or even think about the place if he could help it.

She suddenly looked as shocked as he did. "I'm sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. I didn't mean-"

"I know." His clipped tone made it clear that he did not wish to pursue the subject any further.

She changed the subject quickly. "I just got off this morning," she said in a somewhat merrier tone. "I don't really know where I'll go, though."

"You could come with me," he offered at once.

She looked at him, gratitude and excitement in her sparkling eyes, and then nodded. He did not know what made him say this. Though she had been his one and only friend in the Academy, he had always imagined himself shipping off in heroic solitude when he parted ways with the other apprentices, but now that all seemed rather foolish. Hitting the thrusters with the sunset to his back and some divine wind whipping his hair seemed a woefully romanticised picture next to the more logical suggestion of a partnership.

Jia smiled, and knew that it was the right thing to do as they grabbed their baggage and jogged down the halls together to the hangar where an orbital shuttle waited.

Jia had been to the hangar many times before, more times than Naia, who for some reason hadn't been given many missions outside of the Academy. It was hewn out of the cliff's stone, as was the whole structure, but slightly more cavernous. The wide, cloaked machion field swept in a distant band across their line of sight like a ribbon of scarlet silk, letting in the ever-beautiful Korribani sunset and shining on their eager faces.

Landing platforms, conveyance racks, and even momentum-arrest chords for older models, lined the floor, glinting in the dim light and casting beads and shards of light across the ceiling.

They boarded the cramped, squat shuttle and cinched into tight harnesses, waiting for the acceleration. It came with a stomach-jolting force that slammed them into their seats. Clearly, this was an archaic model, using only a tensor field to hold the structure of the fuselage in place and no inertial dampers to cushion the gee force.

Jia could feel his lips flapping and his body vibrating as they exited the atmosphere, and could tell that that was the case, as Naia looked across at him and guffawed as best she could as she was in the same predicament.

Then everything went still as they broke free. Beyond the viewing port in the primitive metal wall, Jia saw gasses swirling in their wake, creating a kaleidoscopic tempest of colours as they rocketed towards the hulking transport that would take them to its only stop: Onderon.

Soon, with much grinding of barely-compatible machinery, the airlocks mated, and Jia and Naia unbuckled and stepped into the umbilical. For a few moments, starry space stretched out into infinity around them as they stepped through the transparent tunnel, and then all was durasteel-grey. The door hissed shut behind the pair of humans, and, minutes later, the windowless transport shot into the void of hyperspace.

Time seemed to drag in the last minutes before their jump ended, and Jia and Naia sat in the small eatery of the transport. It had been several days. Three, maybe; neither of them could tell. They had slept in hammocks, eaten in the same area, and dwelled in the same cabin for the whole time, along with about ten other travelers from Korriban. There hadn't been much talking amongst them: just silent nods. Judging by the solemn looks on their faces, which must have been mirrored by Jia and Naias', they must have just left the Academy to make their way as well. It was comforting to know that they shared a purpose, but depressing in that they had no homes, were finally going to make their own ways in the galaxy.

And here they all sat now, not touching their last in-jump meal, kicking the fully-packed bags at their feet, staring at the same unyielding airlock, as if it were going to burst open any minute and space them and their belongings.

The sudden vibrations of electrical machinery straining with the complex physics of pulling back into normal space signalled their imminent stop. Jia stood and gripped a low support strut for balance. The ship lurched, then gained momentum and tilted into a suddenly-existent gravity well. When it had righted, there was once again the grinding of airlocks, and a sharp hiss as air was sucked into an umbilical, this time not transparent.

A weary-looking border guard held up his hand and proffered a small scanner. One by one, they handed over their forged boarding passes, were given a curt nod as their credentials checked out, and moved on. They passed into a slightly more luxurious craft than the one they had taken from Korriban, with cushioned seats, slightly more lenient belts, and seats in groups of four, two facing forward, two facing aft.

It was not hard for Jia and Naia to find a set all to themselves. They watched as the greenish planetscape slid past the viewing port in swaths of pale planes and speckled lakes. The only thing that marred the perfect grasslands was a sizable city, Onderon's sole city: Iziz. It had a very clear boundary which Jia and Naia knew to be defined by a wall which was used to bar beasts from their oasis of civilization. It was not vast or impressive, but dense. Jia thought of his last image of Corulag, except this was in reverse. He was not diving into the city rather than rising. They passed through the atmosphere with hardly a bump and came out into clear blue sky high-altitude avian life flitting past the sleek orbital transport. The structures of the city were coming into even sharper relief now: defence turrets, apartments, raised spaceports, and a multitude of other complexes swarmed before them, and in the distance loomed a massive temple featuring a ramp leading to its titanic façade.

The window of the ridiculously luxurious craft which was now displaying readouts on the city of Iziz now labelled the structure as Queen Talia's palace, and the general area as the Shield District, which lay on the continental shield of Tilon. This apparently provided ample bedrock for the foundations of the tall buildings they saw, which could be seen nowhere else in the city.

They touched down on a large open-are pad with smooth ease and lugged their possessions from the overhead compartments and stepped into the queue for the door.

The whole lot of Sith refugees climbed down the carpeted stairs and into the brilliant sunlight and shielded their eyes as they felt their skin start to burn. They trouped across the ferrocrete plateau to the tower's entrance and stepped through the automatic doors and into the tumult of Tilon Spaceport.

It was an extensive terminal, and a big one, now Jia and Naia considered it. It seemed to be made mire of transparasteel than permacrete or durasteel structuring. The building was cylindrical, and another cylindrical construction rose in the middle with walkways and escalators leading in from the outer floors, giving the impression that it was probably a central turbo-lift hub. The outer floors were filled to bursting with cafes, diners, fast food synthesizers, and gift shops, sporting things like tinted eye lenses and terminals for browsing subscriptions for galactic magazine publications or holodramas. They moved past these and across the open concourse to the gleaming central pylon and keyed the lift. The group waited in the cramped space between transparasteel and doors, people shouldering past them, before a quarter or so of their number spilled into the impressively spacious turbolift. It was all very impressive; Jia was sure that the system would flow nicely if it were not subjected to an entire year of students, and the spotlessly transparent surfaces must have had an army of janitorial droids. Indeed, as they were lowered at a gut-wrenching pace to street level, he saw grey, angular shapes sliding across the cityscape that moved up and down, leaving columns of newly-buffed transparasteel in their wake. And what a cityscape it was. Its white and grey buildings were magnificent, but not in their technological spectacle, but in that they seemed to be very old. Each must be more than a few centuries old, and yet the materials had been preserved, the systems updated, and tasteful additions added in order to preserve the clearly colourful heritage of the architecture. The walls, which had seemed so miniscule from the prospective of the orbital shuttle, now appeared as monumental drop-offs, as if the world ended there.

The show ended abruptly as the turbolift hissed to a halt and the durasteel base-structure came up to meet the horizon of the wide vista.

They got out with their luggage hitting their already-weary legs and filed out of the doors. At this point, the former students turned to one another, looking awkward at the sudden departure from their comfortable mass. Jia nodded stiffly to the others, then looked at Naia.

Her eyes were sparkling with the wonder that he felt. He almost didn't want to take her away from her reverence, but he felt that he must remind her of their purpose in coming here. He took her by the hand, and they began to walk.


	13. Chapter 13

Chapter 13

The planet was spinning in the transparasteel viewport above her head. Kafi's cheek was pressed against the cold surface in zero gravity while the three crewmen compacted into the pod with her tried not to touch any of the dull-lit controls. Her field of vision was limited; she could not see any other craft; she could only wonder blindly and hope.

The green planet grew steadily, a huge body of water glittering blindingly on the edge of its bright side in a burst of sunlight that stung her eyes. She kept looking, however, kept watching the ground growing closer, and no matter how she tried to hope, she couldn't help but think of that ground as doom.

They were being drawn into deteriorating orbit. Even as she watched, their pod picked up speed. The planet was rolling towards them, and atmosphere was burning past, causing the internal temperature and occupants of the pod to jump. The durasteel was rattling, framework bumping against the reinforced fuselage.

To Kafi's horror, but not her surprise, the glass was beginning to crack, to fracture before her burning face.

She withdrew hastily, but they had already entered the atmosphere, and the skin on the side of her teal face was sizzling numbly.

Clouds, sky, air, leaves, thorns, hurt, crushed, dark.

Kafi awoke. Feeling came slowly, but from the first spike of sharp pain that shot up her spine, she knew that something was wrong.

Her legs didn't move properly, and her vision was out of focus. But the most worrying fact was that she was sleepy and disoriented. Evidently, the pod's inertial dampers had worked, or she wouldn't be here, but she still had a concussion.

Kafi knew the others must have suffered the same fate, but she also knew she couldn't save anyone at the moment; she needed help.

She began to crawl rapidly, shaking the disorientation from her head and trying to see clearly.

The trees here were widespread, but the underbrush was a dense, menacing mixture of red and purple leaves, fungi, and thorns.

She pressed herself low to the ground as she hazily made out a collection of angry-looking bleach-white spikes protruding from one shrub, not wanting to test whether or not they were poisonous.

Now, however, the plants were getting thinner, a path opening amongst the deadly-looking plants, and she could see sunlight blazing on green grass there.

She struck out for that light, back screaming by now, head throbbing. She was ripping the grass from the ground in her anxiety to reach that oasis of light.

Kafi was feet away from the place when a small human boy, little over six years old, toddled across the freshly-mown grass, and started pulling it up and gathering it into a neat little pile on the lawn next to him. He looked rather bored.

As she crawled closer, however, he looked up at her, finally registering a foreign presence. His youthful, watery eyes raked the burns on the side of her face, her tattered clothes, and the hands which Kafi had just noticed to be ripped and blistered. The boy got up very swiftly.

But if the boy was here, Kafi thought, there must be someone nearby who could help me!

Her vigour and desperation renewed, she scrambled toward the child with renewed vigour, but stopped suddenly.

Kafi's shaking hands had met an invisible obstruction, a transparasteel or glass barrier of some kind. She groaned as the boy's eyes widened with terror, and he backed up several paces, turning slightly, on the verge of running.

"No!" The word came out as more of a gasp, but any sentient being would have registered it as a cry of distress. The boy, however, seemed not to have heard her, and she doubted that he had even noted the movement of her snout as she had uttered her cry.

She began to sob, pressing herself to the transparent surface helplessly, desperate to get to the boy, to safety, to make herself heard to him, or anyone who might listen better than him!

He turned and ran to a place that Kafi could not see.

"NO!" she screamed again into the muting pane in front of her. She threw herself insanely against it, scrabbling at it with her fingers and pounding it with her forehead in a frenzied attempt to break it. Pain was overtaking her. Her spine was crying out to her to stop, to die, to not feel.

A dark shape swam before her eyes as a heavy, suffocating darkness crept from the back of Kafi`s head, weighing down her senses, her arms, and her very thoughts. Her eyes rolled, and her face lay still against the transparasteel.

Kafi awoke not knowing where she was for the second time that day. She felt very hot, particularly in the small of her back and the base of her neck. She did not immediately open her eyes, not knowing what she was going to see.

An odd, very slight pressing sensation impressed itself upon her skin, and she waved a remarkably functional hand through the air, which was not air, but liquid.

She opened her eyes. The fluid that surrounded her was clear, but nevertheless blurred her vision slightly. As well, she saw a distorted, translucent reflection of herself in what must be more transparasteel or glass. A tank.

Kafi attempted to make out the surroundings outside of her tank, and found that her reflection greatly obstructed her vision. All that she could see were a large number of winking monitors, and a durasteel beyond them.

As she could hear nothing but the ebb of the liquid as she tested the mobility of her limbs, but she felt quite sure that these were monitoring her vital signs.

Kafi looked down to find, sure enough, a number of leads attached to her chest. Upon further inspection, she was completely naked. This did not bother her; it was only logical for her clothes to be removed before immersing her in a tank of liquid, but it allowed her to observe that her body was almost completely healed. She rubbed her hands together, and found them red but otherwise completely unscathed.

A shape approached from her right, blurred by her reflection and the surrounding liquid.

The liquid began to drain. She could tell by the sucking sensation beneath her, and the feeling that she was being pulled into the whirlpool. She did not have to fight this, however, she seemed to be held in place by her neck and lower back, the places that now burned hotter than ever.

Her feet hit the floor, and the feeling in the two points became more obtrusive. A slithering, stinging sense of intrusion was steeling all the way up her backbone, then dulled. She was now standing, completely free, and slightly damp in the tank.

"Sorry about the clothes," came a female voice from somewhere above her. "They weren't doing you any good anyway, and we were in a bit of a rush to get you into the kolto tank."

The sealed front of the tank swung open seamlessly to reveal a pretty human female proffering a white robe and smiling slightly. "You can remove the mask, you know."

Kafi started as she realized that she was indeed breathing through a tightly-moulded mask fitted to her snout and nostrils. She tugged it away hastily and clothed herself in the robe while the woman closed the door of the kolto tank and pressed a command on the nearby control panel to fill it up with water.

Now that Kafi looked into the rapidly filling tank, she saw the two needle-tipped arms which had recently receded from her back.

The female eyed them too before intoning, "Your spine was fractured in several places, causing partial paralysis. As kolto can only do so much, I was forced to resort to more intrusive methods, but it did the trick… hopefully." This last note did not ring too well with Kafi, but her back felt perfectly fine. In fact, she felt distinctly reborn.

"Who are you?" she couldn't help but ask as the human shut down various medical routines within the tank.

"Cifferae," she replied absently as she surveyed the room, making sure that everything was as it should be before she departed. "Cifferae Kassar. A local here on Despayre, and by the looks of things, the only one who doesn't want to eat you alive."

"Wait," began Kafi sluggishly, "aren't we on Horuz?"

"They're the same planet," Cifferae clarified patiently.

"Oh. Right."

They both stood for a moment, Kafi trying to recover her senses, Cifferae wondering at the rodian's survival.

"Come upstairs," Cif bade her, and led the way to a narrow staircase that switched back after several feet, giving the impression of wanting to conserve as much space as possible.

They immerged onto a simple tile landing, furnished with wicker furniture and a bank of counters for preparing food. There sat the small human toddler, manipulating a small figure of a Jedi with a green lightsaber.

"This is Ronal."

The boy looked up, smiling. He showed no sign of what had transpired before.

After staring fixedly at the astonishing child for a few seconds, she surveyed the surroundings more thoroughly, noticing the yellow sun glinting off the surface of the transparent barrier.

Kafi turned questioningly to Cifferae. "No food processor?"

She shook her head. Despayre produces a whole bunch of edible fruit, as well as game. We hardly have to import anything. Our own personal medical center has to be state of the art, because we can't ship off to every time we have a medical emergency, which is an unnerving likelihood."

"What happened to the others?"

Cifferae grimaced sadly. "If there were others, they're dead. No one else has shown up at my house, and there are too many predators and poisons out there to afford any hope of survival."

She looked back at Kafi. "Were they your friends?"

Kafi looked up into the sky, and thought, though it was impossible, that she could see the shadow of the shipwreck where Litritch's body might still be.

"Some of them."


	14. Chapter 14

Chapter 14

**One year after the beginning of the First Jedi Purge**

A spike of rock was all that there was in this part of the galaxy, raised above the turmoil of the gathering force. The planets, shining with life, the nebula of forgotten conflicts, paled in comparison to the coming conflagration, the centre of her of her contemplative meditation. But it was broken.

"So you have come."

The shadow moving just beyond the glow of Malachor V's core could be none other than he. She knew the movements of her own padawan too well to be fooled.

"So I have. You knew that judgement could not be delayed for long, Traya."

She raised her head to see the beacon of the force with blind eyes, black as her robes. "I know many truths."

"You also know many lies."

Traya chuckled, throwing her hood back from her greying, lined face. "Shall you now declare my betrayal to the skies? Ask me why, why Kreia, did you kill all those people? Your didactics irk me as much now as when I taught you as a snivelling student."

A yellow blade ignited and hissed into view, a dazzling bar of light in the darkness of the Trayas Academy. "You should have guessed that I am not on a mission of righteous redemption. I have come to take my former place."

"Ah," Traya sighed. "So you have turned, then."

"I have seen. If you only view this change as a change of the mind, then you are dispensable."

Without warning, a wave of anger assaulted her. Any defence she tried to muster was broken, and any conduit of energy was blocked until she was completely and utterly helpless. Her muscles gave way, memories of betrayal and exile, of the force, of loss, sprang to the surface, and she cried out.

The attack stopped. She was panting, on the floor, a blade of purest energy hovering inches before her wizened neck. It was about to strike her head off!

"Wait!" The blade ceased its approach and withdrew several inches, allowing her to breathe. When she sensed his feelings, they were not of satisfied derision, but of disgust.

"I thought you wise, lord of treachery," he hissed softly. "Now you lie on the floor grovelling for forgiveness? You truly deserve death."

"But I am both a threat, and invaluable. Do not be so quick to deal judgement upon one who could so easily immunize your own empire to your rule." Her chest still heaved, but she could not suppress a smirk as the truth of her words dawned on the Sith lord. "I know your true identity, and hold the armies of your lowly budding empire. If you silence my body, my mind will reveal the truth to all your faithful followers. You will be left with nothing again; you will be back where you started in the Mandilorian Wars."

The lightsaber receded and was deactivated, allowing Traya a more upright position.

"You are pathetic, Traya. You are mine. You shall be allowed to live and to continue your petty crusade. It will not matter once I have carried out my plans." He clipped the glinting metal of his lightsaber to a dark belt and turned to leave. His footsteps echoed a million times through the shaft that led up from the depths of Malachor.

"What is your plan?"

The new Dark Lord of the Sith turned his head to regard her through one hidden, haunted eye. "You will know soon enough."


End file.
