Star Wars 1. Prologue: T3-M4

**Author's note:** despite that fact that it's obviously its incomplete, KotOR II has always been one of my favourite Star Wars stories. Since I have a few months without much to do, I decided to novelise the game. I'm sticking as close to Legends canon as I can: that means a light-sided female Exile named Meetra Surik. A few alterations to canon can be expected. For instance, the handmaiden, Brianna, will still be travelling aboard the _Ebon Hawk_. I'll also try to include some of the cut content, expanding the story on Korriban and including the droid world. There'll definitely be romance, but don't expect that to factor in for a little while. And as for who'll be pairing with who... _spoilers_. :P

Please read and review! I'd love some feedback.

* * *

**A long time ago**  
**in a galaxy far, far away**

* * *

_It is a perilous time for the galaxy. _  
_A brutal civil war has all but _  
_destroyed the Jedi Order, leaving the _  
_ailing Republic on the verge of collapse. _

_Amid the turmoil, the evil Sith_  
_ have spread across the galaxy  
hunting down __and destroying the  
remaining Jedi Knights. _

_Narrowly escaping a deadly Sith ambush,_  
_the last known Jedi clings to life_  
_aboard a battered freighter near_  
_the ravaged world of Peragus..._

* * *

**DRAMATIS PERSONAE**

Atton Rand, spacer (human male)  
Bao-Dur, technician (Zabrak male)  
Brianna, handmaiden (Echani-human female)  
G0-T0, planning droid  
HK-47, assassin droid  
Kreia, Force adept (human female)  
Canderous Ordo, Mandalore (human male)  
Meetra Surik, exiled Jedi (human female)  
Mical, disciple (human male)  
Mira, bounty hunter (human female)  
T3-M4, utility droid  
Visas Marr, Sith adept (Miralukan female)

* * *

**PROLOGUE  
****T3-M4**

There had been a battle. It had been short and it had been brutal and at some point the ship's hull had been badly compromised.

In the event of catastrophic decompression, T3-M4's programming told him to activate his magnetic footpads and standby for instructions. Almost a full day after the decompression in question, the little utility droid still hadn't received any instructions.

He, for successive owners had addressed him with the masculine pronoun despite his lack of programmed gender, decided to ignore his programming. This, he knew, was a luxury. Not many droids, and especially not utility droids like him, ever got a chance to ignore their programming. Nevertheless, five years of continuous operation without a single memory wipe allowed him the type of personal discretion most droids would find hideously uncomfortable.

Reactivating his systems one by one, running self-diagnostics as he went, he discovered himself in the personnel lounge of a stock freighter. The _Ebon Hawk_, his analytical subroutines told him now that they'd finished warming up.

He'd gone into power conservation mode shortly after decompression, so he was well-charged. He sent a request to the ship's computer asking for an update on functionality. It responded only with an automated distress call.

The lounge was damaged, with a coolant hose leaking and a small fire burning unabated in several burnt out consoles. That the fire had continued to burn suggested that magnetic doors had sealed off this section from the breach. Unfortunately, radiation scatter was obscuring his scanners so he couldn't determine if any of the ship's small organic crew had survived.

Resorting to visual scanning, he found the body of one crewer: an old woman. According to the medical files in his database, given her utter lack of a pulse or brain functions, she was beyond saving. He turned away from her, deciding to scout the cockpit.

The cockpit was as badly damaged as the lounge, and the navicomputer seemed scrambled. This was T3's bailiwick. He was almost pleased to encounter a problem he could solve. Inserting a datalink into the jack below the computer, he discovered that the battle, for there had been a battle, had involved several strikes to the _Ebon Hawk_ from an ion cannon. This had disrupted the ship's electronics, corrupting much of the navicomputer's data.

Lucklly, T3 kept back-ups of most of the data and was happy to slice the corrupted files and replace damaged segments of code. Within minutes, the navicomputer was online.

The _Ebon Hawk_ was adrift in interstellar space, somewhere in the Xappyh sector of the Outer Rim. That was troubling news, but he needed more information before he could figure out what to do next.

Making use of a backdoor into the ship's mainframe, T3 downloaded as much data as he could about its disposition. A major hull breach had exposed the rear starboard section to hard vacuum. Magnetic doors had sealed off the starboard cargo bay and crew dormitories, saving the rest of the ship. The ship's shields were offline, as were its weapons, sensors and communications array—the distress call the ship's computer was trying to transmit wasn't actually going anywhere. Worse still, the hyperdrive engine was badly damaged.

Once again, T3 was strangely comforted by this piece of information. His crafty subroutines quickly figured out a way to jury-rig it. He might only get one jump out of the broken core, but one was better than nothing.

Most pressingly, though: a lifesign, in the ship's medical bay. T3 recognised that the slumping vital signs of the patient was a bad indicator. Wasting no time, he exited the cockpit and went aft, skirting the old woman's body as he went through the lounge. The _Ebon Hawk_'s tiny, one-bed sickbay was located just to the rear of that section.

T3 discovered that the ship's automatic treatment computer, designed to keep badly injured patients alive for as long as it to get to an actual hospital, was offline. It was the work of a few minutes to reboot the computer and he was gratified to see, moments later, that the badly injured woman in the bed was stabilising. Her heartbeat was thready, but at least it was there.

Bizarrely, the treatment computer had no record of the woman's identity. T3 didn't recognise her. She was a human, blonde-haired and pale-skinned. Her body was lithe and athletic, but according to T3's database her injuries should have been overwhelming even for such a well-maintained body. Curious, but deciding to leave that mystery for later, the little droid went further aft.

As he entered the engine room, he let out a hoot of sadness.

The starboard engine was shattered, completely irreparable. It'd have to be replaced completely. The port engine was functional, but the core that provided power to the engines was leaking radiation, its shell cracked. The ship's shielding was keeping the radiation from poisoning the rest of the vessel for now, but it was only a matter of time before it broke down. If that happened, the woman T3 had just saved would be liquefied by the radioactivity.

T3 scooted forward, his manipulator arms getting to work. First, he used his plasma torch to weld a spare sheet of shielding over the crack in the core. Then he reconnected the core to the port engine, bypassing the damaged connections. Finally, he rebooted the hyperdrive's specialised computer. It was, as he'd predicated, a barely-functioning jury rig, but it would have to be good enough for now.

Loathe to be leaving a job as poorly done as this one, T3 returned to the cockpit and activated the navicomputer. According to its database, the closest habitation was a small mining colony in the Peragus system. The engine would make it there. Just.

As he input the commands, T3 felt the ship shake around him. A quick check confirmed that the Ebon Hawk had made it to lightspeed and was on its way to the Peragus system.

Deciding to check on the status of the patient, T3 returned to the lounge. As he did, he realised a faint knocking was coming from the small cargo hold located just off the lounge. A magnetic door had sealed the hold, no doubt at the same time the rear section had been locked down. T3 realised as he scanned the door someone was bypassing the lockdown.

T3 approached, eager to help, but came up short.

No: not some_one_. His biological scanners were showing no organic matter beyond the door. Some_thing_ inorganic was trying to get into the lounge. His electronic instincts, developed over five years of danger and adventure, told him that whatever it was best left sealed off until they reached Peragus.

He was about to sabotage the controls, sealing the door permanently, when the interloper succeeded. The door groaned open. The droid that exited the chamber had battered, blue-grey durasteel armour, spindly, reinforced limbs and a pair of glowing yellow photoreceptors.

It scanned the room and located T3-M4 instantly; the droid moved faster than T3 could react. The hoot the little utility droid gave would have sounded like something approaching disappointment to a human listener.

Then his systems overloaded and everything went dark.

* * *

With T3-M4 offline and its only living organic passenger comatose, the _Ebon Hawk_ continued its slow approach towards the mining colony in the Peragus system. It arrived almost a day later.

The miners, unused to anything other massive automated fuel tankers arriving once a month, greeted the damaged, bleeding vessel with a mixture of suspicion and compassion. The passenger was taken to sickbay; the body of the old woman was taken to the morgue; the two droids aboard, both offline, were taken to storage. The miners sent a transmission to the Republic asking for assistance.

The miners went about their lives as they waited for a response. None of them had any idea what was coming.


	2. Chapter One: Meetra Surik

**Author's note:** As always, please read and review.

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**CHAPTER ONE  
****MEETRA SURIK**

_In the silence, she dreamt._

_She dreamt of the cold. Ice, snow stained with blood. She dreamt of a desert, scorched by three suns—bleached bones studding the dunes. She could smell the smoke of burning forests, could taste the ash of ruined cities. She felt the hunger, the first, could taste the fear and adrenalin. She dreamt of wreckage, tumbling in the vacuum. She dreamt of every day of that long, awful war: she dreamt of the final day._

_Far below her, a twisted world crackled with unseen energies, its existence a rank stain on the fabric of the universe. People were dying in their thousands with every second that went by. Great warships were cracked asunder and spilt their crews into space. Down on the surface of the dread planet, great creatures hunted frightened prey. Fear and desperation filled a million warrior hearts._

_Not hers. Hers was a different weight. She felt power in her fingers, in her heart. She felt destiny coming towards her. The choice, she knew, was hers. There was no question what the consequences of this action would be, no doubt in her mind about what would happen to her in the days, weeks and months to come._

_Likewise, there was no doubt about the necessity of what she did next._

_That she was dreaming about the moment was not a surprise; even at the time, it had felt like a dream. She dreamt of a hand on a control. She dreamt of a single word passing her lips: _"Fire."

_The hand twitched, the control was activated. She felt the weapon trigger, felt thousands of lives snuffed out at an instant. She felt the will of her enemies snap like a spine. She felt the war end._

_Then she felt nothing at all._

* * *

_Awaken._

The silence was broken.

Her eyes snapped open. Panic started to rise in her chest. She couldn't see, couldn't move. She thought she would suffocate. Something was clamped over her mouth, and a thick, viscous substance surrounded her, inhibiting her movement. Her heartbeat was all she could hear, and it pounded in her ears like a jackhammer.

_Calm yourself_, said a voice she felt rather than heard. _Just breathe_.

She blinked again, her eyes clearing. As her breathing slowed, she felt the pressure of the liquid around her drop and the cobwebs beginning to clear from her mind. She recognised the sweet, cloying smell of kolto, realised she was suspended in a transparisteel tube.

She was in a medical centre and something had happened to her. Something bad enough to require suspension in kolto, at any rate.

The tank was emptying quickly. It opened, spilling what was left of the kolto and her along with it onto the recessed platform in the middle of the medical bay. The cold metal shocked some sense into her, clearing her mind instantly. Ripping the breathing mask from her face, she took a sharp, deep breath and sat up immediately.

The bay was cold and dark. The technology was simple, maybe a decade or two out of date, but it was all well maintained. Six kolto tanks, identical to the one she'd been in, lined the circular chamber. Two of them were occupied, but all of the indicator lights were dark. She shivered; the two men floating in the occupied tanks were long dead.

She stood, realising for the first time that she was completely naked.

Her modesty, though, was the least of her concerns. Ordinarily, a patient emerging from kolto would be greeted by at least a small medical team. There didn't seem to be anyone around, and aside from the gentle whir of the machinery and the atmospheric recyclers she couldn't hear anything.

Taking a calming breath to centre herself, she took stock of her surroundings. The air had a slightly stale, processed quality to it, suggesting she was in space. There was no sign of the telltale hum of hyperdrive engines or the whine of sublight drives, suggesting she was on a space station rather than a ship. The gravity felt a little light, too.

Her last conscious memory was of being aboard a starship, a Republic cruiser. After that, things got hazy. It could have been days ago, perhaps weeks or months.

Everything else was hazy, too, as if she was emerging from a stupor far deeper than she perhaps suspected. She could barely remember her own name, but no one had called her Meetra Surik for years anyway.

According to the readouts on each kolto tank, a massive amount of sedative had been dumped into the mixture. That, she realised, had killed the other patients and it explained how foggy she was.

Half-forgotten instincts kicked in. She'd learnt all she could here, so she had to keep moving. Making for the round hatch out of the kolto bay, she found herself facing a short corridor. Another hatch sat at the far end, but it looked damaged and she doubt it would open without being forced.

She went to the door on her left first, finding a lab. She looked through a pair of plasteel crates and found only medical equipment. Again, the technology was out of date but well maintained. The computer panel required a log-in, so she left it alone, but she managed to find a medtech's suit hanging in an open locker.

Pulling on the blue-and-orange suit, a couple of sizes too big for her, she wondered who it belonged to and where they'd gone. Words were stitched into the shoulder panel of the suit, below an unfamiliar logo. Peragus Mining Facility.

"Peragus," she read, her voice little more than an atrophied croak. Clearing her throat, she tried again. "Peragus."

She didn't recognise the name, but considering how foggy her mind was that didn't mean much.

Having found something to wear, she exited the lab and tried to door across from it. It was undamaged, and she found herself in a cold, grey little chamber. Metal slabs lined the walls. Her breath caught in her throat. This was a morgue.

There were three bodies in here. Two of them were covered by sheets, while the third, an old woman in a rough, homespun robe, was not. Meetra went over to her. Her skin was waxen, very deeply wrinkled, and she was cold. Feeling for her pulse, Meetra confirmed she was dead. Something about her seemed oddly familiar, but Meetra decided to leave that for later.

She went to check the other bodies. One was very badly burned, while the other seemed to have been killed by some kind of high-intensity laser. They both wore uniforms like the one she'd found in the lab. Apparently, no one had had time to examine them: the man who'd been burnt still clutched a heavy-duty plasma torch in his right hand. Realising she could use it to batter open the damaged door cutting her off from the rest of the facility, she tried to wrest it from the man's death grip.

Finally prying his fingers off the metal, she hefted the device, activating it. A blue-green jet of superheated plasma danced from the tip before dying a second later. That would make short work of the door.

She was about to leave when she felt a presence behind her.

"Dind what you were looking for amongst the dead?"

Meetra nearly jumped out of her skin. She spun about, dropping into a defensive posture. She held the plasma torch like a knife. The old woman had sat up, suddenly very much alive.

"You were dead!" Meetra exclaimed. She blinked. "Hang on. Your voice. I recognise it. I heard it while I was in the kolto tank."

The old woman climbed gingerly down from the slab. She seemed arthritic, frail, which wasn't surprising given her age. The cowl of her robe covered her eyes and steel grey hair framed her wizened face. She didn't pose a physical threat, of that Meetra was sure.

"Yes," the crone agreed, though the way she spoke seemed almost off-hand, as if Meetra's presence was parenthetical to the encounter. "I had hoped as much. I slept here too long and could not awaken. I might have reached out unconsciously and your mind must have been a willing one."

Meetra frowned.

"Or," the woman said with the hint of a smile about her cracked lips, "perhaps you have been trained for such things?"

Taken aback, Meetra blinked. "Who _are_ you?"

"I am Kreia and I am your rescuer," she answered. "As you, it seems are mine. Tell me, do you recall what happened?"

"My rescuer, huh?" Meetra echoed, unsure if she should trust this Kreia. Still, there was no one else about, and she was armed while the old woman wasn't. She decided to be honest. "I don't really remember. Last thing I remember is being on a Republic cruiser, the _Harbinger_. Do you know what happened to it?"

"Your ship was attacked. You were the only survivor. A result of your Jedi training, no doubt."

Meetra thought the deck would open up and swallow her. "I haven't been a Jedi for a _long_ time."

"Your stance, your walk suggest otherwise. You carry something that weighs you down."

"That's none of your business," Meetra bristled. She shook her head, casting away bitter memories. "Look, let's deal with the here and now. I know we're somewhere called Peragus. That's about it. Do you have any idea where we are or what's going on?"

Kreia shrugged. "I was removed from the world as I slept. I'm sure our surroundings will yield the answers you seek."

Unnerved by the woman, Meetra surveyed her. Traits she'd judged frail before now seemed… reserved, considered. Calculated. She'd misjudged this Kreia, she realised now. She certainly _spoke_ like a Jedi Master but something about her seemed off. Not hostile and certainly not evil but not entirely trustworthy. Still, she was the only ally Meetra was likely to find for a while.

"We had to have gotten here somehow," she reasoned. "Maybe there's a ship around here."

"If there is, we should recover it and leave," Kreia agreed.

"So soon?"

"We were attacked once," Kreia said, "and it stands to reason that our attackers will not give up so easily. Without transport, weapons and, most importantly, information, they'll find us easy prey."

"I can't argue with that logic. I'll go look for a ship. And some weapons." Meetra said, before something occurred to her. "There were two other men in the kolto bay with me. A massive amount of sedative was dumped into the kolto mixture, killing them both. Any idea how that could have happened?"

Kreia frowned. "I do not know. How strange that they should spare you."

"They didn't," Meetra said. "I got the same dose."

Inclining her head, Kreia mused "And yet you survived? A Jedi trance could protect one from poisons like that. Perhaps your poisoner knew this. Perhaps you were given so much sedative in order to keep you out of action."

"Okay," Meetra said slowly. "You seem to know a lot about Jedi techniques."

"As do you," Kreia countered. "I'm sure there'll be time to discuss them at length later, but for now we have more pressing concerns—chief amongst them, finding our latest enemy."

Meetra shook her head. "I don't get it. Why me? Why kill those other men just to get to me? What would they want from me?"

"A Jedi is valuable prey," Kreia said with a shrug.

"I told you," Meetra said, irritation mounting. "I'm no Jedi. Not for a long time now."

"Do you think that distinction is as important to others as it is to you?" Kreia snapped, the venom in her tone surprising Meetra.

"Fine," she said, not wanting to waste more time with an argument. "I'll come back to check on you later, make sure you're all right."

Kreia's visage softened and she almost smiled. "I'll leave you to explore this place. My time out of the world has weakened me… I'll stay here, and attempt to centre myself."

Meetra said no more, hefting her plasma cutter and heading for the door. Kreia, meanwhile, adopted a kneeling meditation posture on the floor of the morgue—an odd place to meditate, to be sure, but Meetra didn't want to question it. Everything about this woman was odd.

Closing the morgue door behind her, Meera shook herself.

Kreia had been right; once upon a time, in a whole other life, Meetra Surik had indeed been a Jedi Knight. She'd turned her back on the Order, and on the Force, a long time ago. As the after-effects of the drugs wore off, memories started solidifying. She'd spent years beyond the fringes of known space, an itinerant wanderer and adventurer without a home and without friends. Her name, Meetra Surik, had almost become lost to her. Certainly, no one had called her that since her last day on Coruscant.

How many years had it been? Keeping track of Republic standard dates was difficult on the ragged edges of the galaxy, where the Republic existed only as rumour or legend, was very difficult.

She'd done what she thought was best. She'd booked passage to the furthest outpost she could find and from there had gone off into the unknown, opting to walk in the dust and leaving nary a footprint. Out there, the Jedi were nothing more than myth, almost forgotten and never seen in the flesh. That had been a blessing, especially in the early days of her long exile. Then, after years with no contact from the Republic or anyone from her old life, She'd been contacted by a courier and asked to meet the _Harbinger_.

She'd done as requested, but no one had told her why her return to the Republic was suddenly so urgent that they'd send a cruiser to meet her. Whatever the reason, it more than likely would have been linked to the attack on the _Harbinger_: someone had heard that she was aboard the cruiser and decided to come after it.

How strange that now, so many years later, she was being hunted for an identity she'd long ago surrendered. Stranger still was that, for the first time in a long time, she felt the tingle of the Force. For now, it was just a prickling sensation at the back of her neck, an otherworldly feeling in the corner of her mind. The implications of this development were troubling.

Hell, the whole situation was troubling. Too many questions were going unanswered. Where was she? How had she gotten here? Who was hunting her? Who had attacked the _Harbinger_? Who'd tried to kill her while she was floating in kolto? And, most pressing, just who the hell _was_ Kreia?

"All right," she said to herself, shutting out everything that wasn't vital to her goal. Things were getting stranger by the second, but Kreia had been right about something else.

They needed to get out of here, and they needed to do it soon.


End file.

Star Wars, Adventure, Romance