I Dreamt of Malachor
There is no great revelation, no great secret. There is only you.
Chapter One: The Little Death
When she came through the door, he was counting cards.
Switch the face of the +1/-1 card, the totals are nine-ten. Switch the face of the +2/-2 card, the total is eight-eleven, switch...
The blur of the energy cage smeared her outline as she stepped into the detention center, but he could see that her long legs and muscular arms were bare, that she was naked except for a sweat-soaked singlet. He kept counting cards and let the fast-talking Atton, the cheap one, the one nobody could ever take seriously, step forward. He grinned like nothing and nobody. "Are you an angel?"
...the totals are five-seven, switch...
She paused in front of the control panel, one slim hand resting lightly on the shutoff primer. "I need a way off this rock," she said. Her voice was tired but warm, like she had finished laughing hours ago at a joke she was still mulling over. "Can you help me with that, or should I leave you in there? It looks safe, at least."
"Sorry, sorry," he stood stiffly, stretching as much as the cage's crackling barrier allowed. "It's been a while, you know?"
He thought he saw the ghost of a smile through the blur.
"So, can you help me or not?"
"I know the station's systems pretty well," he said. Double the eight, pure Pazaak, shuffle and deal, switch the face of the +1/-2 card... "And if there's anything left on this rock that has legs, besides you, I mean, I can fly it."
She shoved the primer back. The force field died with a falling hum and Atton stepped out, his ears still ringing with days of accumulated white noise. He was tired, thirsty, starving; his head ached with the weight of so much time whiled away on nonsense lists and parlor tricks. He saw her, lean and strong, small breasts, the swell of her hips, and his mind slipped a gear. Just for a moment.
She reacted, a frown creasing her smooth brow.
He slipped as naturally as breathing back behind his walls. "Guess I should've started with my name," he joked, smiling, desperate drive to hide tucked neatly, completely away. "Atton Rand." He held out his hand.
She hesitated before answering, but then the look of worry smoothed away. She returned his smile, brushing her dark hair back behind her ear.
"Meetra Surik."
He knew the name. Everyone knew the name. Malachor had taught them, and she knew it. He chose to say nothing. She watched him, eyes intent
For the first time, absent the force cage's interference, he heard the low throb of the station's alarms. He'd known something was wrong when no one came to feed him, but knowing and knowing were two different things. "Where is everyone?"
"The station droids are running wild and all the comlinks are dead," she said. "Come on, we're going to the observation deck. Let's see if you can pull your weight and get us out of here."
"At least the view-"
"You're leading the charge, Atton." She stepped aside with a thin, humorless smile and gestured him through the door and out into the mining station's central atrium.
He passed her with a rueful look, limbs still stiff from so long spent cramped inside his cell, smelling he knew of sweat and worse. The filtered air seemed fresh to him. Mining droids lay broken, sparking, here and there. "Looks like you can take care of yourself," he said. The shape of her ass, the cleft, like a peach, sweat on her neck... "You weren't kidding about the droids running wild."
"I don't kid often," she said.
They reached the bank of computer terminals overlooking the mining station's external scaffolds and its docking umbilical. The void waited beyond them, and the roiling asteroid field backlit by the golden ruin of the Peragus II nebula. Atton remembered being impressed by the view when he'd first set foot on Peragus, but three years working the station had stolen that. Now it was just space.
"Alright," he said, not waiting for her go-ahead to slide into the operator's seat and log into the station's system. He raised his hands in a dramatic flourish as she came to stand behind him, looking over his shoulder. "Observe." His fingers flew over the keys. He ran diagnostics, checked log files, and started a systematic ping of the station's comlink systems.
"This doesn't look good," she said after a minute.
"It isn't," he replied. "Breached vents in the underlevel, comm silence across the board, and half the system commands are cut off. Looks like someone took a vibroblade to the computing tower."
"What about that?" She pointed to a blinking indicator next to one of the comm sweep reports.
"Just white noise." He brought it up on the speakers. A mechanical grumble underlain by a tinny whistle like steam escaping a burst pipe. "Probably some mining droids trying to burn their way into the life support system and asphyxiate us. Nothing exciting."
"No." Her eyes narrowed and she leaned closer to the screen, resting a hand on his right shoulder. "That's an astromech droid. My astromech droid. Open the channel."
He did, dubious, but thrilled by her closeness. Her touch felt almost electric. ...the -10 card, switch the face of the +2/-2 card, the total is three-thirteen...
She cleared her throat. "T3? Is that you?"
A tentative chorus of beeps and whistles answered.
She smiled, a cat's self-satisfied grin. "I've got a job for you."
Ten minutes later, the turbolift doors wheezed open.
"I'm not going down there," Atton said at once. ...Czerka All-Purpose Utility Belt, catalog item B-130091, available in black, forest green, sunset blush... "The lower levels are flooded with slag and superheated gases. We'd get cooked alive in seconds." He felt a
She cocked an eyebrow at him. "A Jedi's life is sacrifice."
The turbolift doors closed on her wry smile, her folded arms.
She was out of comm range for the best part of an hour. The droid was incommunicado, too, not that he'd have been able to understand it anyway. He sat by the terminal and drummed out on the keyboard's casing a song he'd heard years before. He remembered the Twi'Lek who'd sung it, zir breathy voice and flushed complexion, though he had forgotten the Nar Shaddaa dive ze'd sung it in.
Ze was beautiful. I asked zir if ze wanted to come home with me, outside, in the alley, and ze kissed my cheek and told me I was ruined. Except that's not how it went, because we fucked and ze told me to play with zir lekku while the recording...
"Ah, a musician. Lovely."
He whirled, scrambling to his feet. An old woman in a brown robe, her cowl pulled low to all but obscure her milky white eyes, stood in the entry to the security center and the medical wing. Her gnarled, veined hands were clasped in front of her and she wore an expression of supreme boredom on her weathered face. "Well, are you going to stand there like a fool?"
He reached for the blaster at his hip, a cheap low-power mining model he'd stripped off of one of the junked droids. He didn't draw it, but he thumbed the safety off. Better safe than sorry. "Who are you?" ...play the +6 card, stand, the total is seventeen, switch...
She moved coolly past him. Her reflection grew in the cold glass of the observation window. "I hope your skill with a blaster outstrips your talent for conversation, or else our journey together will be a short one indeed."
"I'm also great at running and drinking, your majesty." He drew the blaster pistol. ...seventeen cycles per second means the optimal rotation speed is six hundred and eighty-nine CDM, nineteen cycles per second... "I'll ask one more time. Who are you?"
"Who I am is a question of some complexity, the particulars of which I have neither the time nor the inclination to explore in sufficient detail with you. For now, let it suffice that my name is Kreia and that you and I share a mutual friend, currently endangering herself on our behalf." She pressed a thin hand to the glass, not turning. "She will need both of us to escape this place."
He holstered the blaster. "What are you staring out at there?" He didn't ask her if she was blind; anyone could tell just by watching her that she knew what she was doing, that her sight wasn't tied to things like eyes. ...the face of the +1/-1 card, the total...
"Something is coming," the old woman said. She closed her eyes and let out a long, quiet breath. "I can feel it."
"I've got a bad feeling about...pretty much all of this," Atton said, returning to his seat and swiveling to face the old woman. "Where have you been hiding, anyway?"
"The morgue," she said without a trace of irony.
They waited in uncomfortable silence for a time. Or at least Atton felt uncomfortable; the old woman managed to seem at once incredibly disdainful of his presence and totally unaware that he was with her at all. Finally, after what felt like hours, the station console let out a soft ping. Atton brought up the alert and felt his stomach turn over. "There's a ship coming in through the asteroid field," he said. "It's a republic cruiser. Sith spit, the size of it..."
It glided out from behind a massive asteroid just as he looked up from the console screen. Long and lethal, its crest-like prow a seagoing predator's fin, its engines slung back low. ...the swoop always overheats if you forget to flush the radiators. You have to do it twice as often because of the bugs, or else... "She's broadcasting tags, but there's no response from comm. The Harbinger."
"On your feet, fool," the old woman said sharply.
"Listen, why don't you-"
The doors of the administrative turbolift opened with a ding and a shining silver assassin droid stepped out. "Good-humored appraisal: You will be long-dead by the time the Harbinger docks, so its arrival is of...limited consequence to you." Its hands, works of art in durasteel and plastic polymer, flexed to fit more perfectly around the grip and trigger of a lethal-looking blaster rifle. "I'm afraid things are getting out of hand and the time has come to pare down variables. You understand."
Atton rolled backward off of his seat as blaster fire shredded its upholstery and melted its post to slag. The old woman was solid gone, not so much as a flicker of brown cloth. Atton dragged himself up on the console's smoldering desk and took off at a dead run, squeezing off a couple of pot-shots that ricocheted off of the floor and the droid's silvery chassis. ...switch...
"Irritated declaration: Normally," the droid began, still firing as Atton flung himself behind one of the huge basalt pillars supporting the observation deck's roof, "I would enjoy your attempt to make this a sporting contest, organics, but at present my schedule allows no time for recreation."
Atton took a deep breath. Dive out guns blazing and you're dead. Stay here and you're dead. Molten rock sprayed past him as the droid aimed for the column. Hmm.
The turbolift doors to the mine shafts, behind the droid and to its left, opened, and she came through them like lightning, leaping what had to be fifteen feet as scalding air billowed up the shaft behind her, laden with superheated particles of grit and dirt. The droid spun smoothly on one foot and fired. The bolt went wild and she came down with both hands on the grip of a vibroblade and her whole weight behind the swing. The droid's chassis cracked, the blade shivering down through eight inches of circuitry and hydraulics.
Oil and smoke plumed around the Jedi as she yanked her weapon free.
...switch the face of the +3/-1 card, pure Pazaak, stand, switch...
The droid went to one knee, its arms limp, its photoreceptors flickering. "World-w...w...weary declaration: Oh, b-b-bother."
She took its head off in one swing and kicked its still-twitching body over. It fell with a loud, echoing clank. She stood over it; she'd found clothes somewhere, a rough miner's coverall stained with grease and sweat. Her knuckles were scraped and there was a cut across the bridge of her nose.
Atton emerged from behind the half-melted pillar. The old woman stood by the observation window as though she had never troubled herself to move. "Would you like to explain why a really polite assassin droid just tried to ice us?"
"We don't have time to get into it," the exile said, wiping blood from her mouth. "We need to board that ship. I have a plan."
The Harbinger was a mass grave, its dim halls littered with the dead. He tried not to look at them. He tried not to see other faces among those of the Republic soldiers lying in pools of their own blood and viscera, eyes upturned toward the few shipboard runner lights still flickering with life.
...switch the +1/-4 card, the total is eleven-seventeen, switch...
"For the record, I think trying to get into the docking bay via the fuel hookup is insane and we're all going to die."
"Death is certain," Kreia said. "The manner and meaning are in one's hands as is, to a lesser extent, the time."
"You're a ray of sunshine, aren't you?" he picked his way down the echoing corridor. Doors scored by blaster fire juddered in their hydraulic tracks. Beyond were crew quarters where, more often than not, soldiers lay dead in their beds. Slit throats. Punctured lungs. "Even if we do get through that fuel hookup, what's the guarantee we can get to your ship? Also, do I need to remind you that there's an asteroid field waiting out there to smash us into bite-sized chunks for the mynocks to chew on?"
"One problem at a time," the exile said. She took everything in, her gaze sweeping cabins and bulkheads, the carnage of the mess hall, the gutted armory where a quartermaster lay face down on the deck with a vibroblade in his back. The exile drew it out, strings of clotting blood unfurling from it, and examined the worn black hilt, the carbon blade. "Hmm," she mused.
That was when they struck.
They came out of the shadows, hungry ghosts in black and grey, faces hidden behind masks, invisibility rippling away from their bared vibroblades. Atton shot one in the chest and she kept coming, silent and quick as a vrelt, as her comrades vaulted over the long, narrow work table toward where Kreia and Meetra stood.
Atton swept his enemy's leg and shot her again, twice in the back, as she went crashing past him to the deck. The smell of charred meat was overwhelming. This time, she stopped. He realized a moment later that she'd caught him a glancing blow across his right forearm. Blood welled up from the shallow, messy cut, but he had no time for that. He threw himself over the table, sliding on its polished surface, and slammed into another assassin's back. They tumbled to the deck, fighting for control of the blaster as the assassin's vibroblade went skittering away.
Kreia's vibroblade decided the issue for them when she skewered the assassin through the throat. Blood dribbled onto Atton's face and shirt.
...stand, shuffle, deal, play the +5 card, switch the face...
Another of the masked killers flew back suddenly from Meetra and struck the bulkhead wall as through smashed in the chest with a battering ram. He slid to the ground, insensate. The last of the killers lay draped over the table, less one arm and most of her right leg.
"Sith assassins," Kreia opined, kneeling next to the unconscious man. "I feared as much. We must make haste, or more will be upon us soon." Calmly, she slit the assassin's throat and straightened up. "Come, we have lingered too long already."
"I may not look for fair fights, but that was pretty cold," Atton said. He didn't feel the words. He didn't feel anything, watching that pool of blood spread outward from the dead assassin. ...play the -7 card, total is eleven-eleven, switch...
"We do not have the luxury of bringing our enemies to whatever justice the wreck of the Republic might dole out, if it could even be brought to acknowledge the truth that the Sith have returned." The old woman wiped her vibroblade clean with a rag. "Nor do we have time to suborn the loyalty of these beasts, or to take them prisoner. Would you turn our escape into a shuffling chain gang? How long do you think we would last?"
"Alright, sheesh," he brushed past her, heading out of the armory, "point taken."
Meetra remained a moment in the doorway, opening and closing her right hand. She looked pensive, and then she looked pleased. "Let's go," she said. "Lots of ship left."
They made rapid progress through the bowels of the ship. The medical bay was in ruins, its deck covered in blood and broken glass. The briefing room played host to the corpses of the captain and her officers, all decapitated and set in their chairs. Atton's skin crawled as they moved past that abattoir and on through darkened halls; he was certain someone was still watching, but if they were then they chose not to show themselves. The cramped corridors of the Harbinger left precious little room for maneuvering.
...switch the face of the +4/-4 card, the total is sixteen-ten, double the +3 card, the total is nineteen-eighteen, switch...
"Your arm," she said as they headed aft. "You're hurt."
"It isn't bad." Atton felt a bizarre desire to hide the injury, to conceal his weakness from her.
Kreia snorted. "We do not have time to remedy every scratch and bruise."
They took an access ladder to the cargo hold, dropping one by one into that silent, echoing space. The lights were dim in the long, high-ceilinged corridor. "First portside hall should get us to the fueling station," Atton said. He slid a fresh power cell into his blaster, ejecting the half-spent one in a puff of Tibanna gas and coolant.
"Wait," Kreia held out a hand. "I sense something...a presence..."
The doors at the far end of the hall slid open without a sound. Grey light poured in. A man in black stood framed within the archway, dwarfed by negative space. He was tall, his build muscular, but even from a hundred yards away Atton could see that his skin was a ruin of fissures and scars, his face ruined, one eye rendered useless as a stone by a livid, ugly scar that left his throat half-open. A cold chill rushed through Atton; to suffer wounds like those and survive at all, much less get up and walk...
"Run," said Kreia. "This fight is mine alone."
"He'll kill you," Meetra said. There was no doubt in her voice.
"He cannot kill what he cannot see, and power blinded him long ago." Her grip on the vibroblade's hilt was relaxed, her demeanor determined.
Atton knew a front when he saw one. "Come on," he said, turning to the exile. "We should move if we want to make it to this theoretical ship of yours ahead of sleeps-with-vibroblades."
The exile ignored him. "We'll wait for you as long as we can," she said.
Kreia walked away, heading toward the man in black, the empty door. "Don't be a fool."
They ran.
"I feel you, my master," Sion said. He made a fist of his empty hand, tendons creaking, fractured bones grinding against one another. It felt as all things felt. "No longer do I suffer beneath your false teachings. No longer do your whispers crawl within my skull."
She moved. He felt the ripple of her presence, a diminished thing, an insect crawling in the shadows. "To have fallen so far and learned nothing." Her voice mocked him from the margins of perception. "That is your true failing."
He spun, swinging even as his lightsaber crackled to life, and a volcanic surge of power moved through him as fire cleaved through her wrist, raised to strike. To violate her body, to give his pain to her; he roared with triumph like a beastas her hand fell shriveled, blackened to the deck, and silence fell. She staggered back with a cry, clutching the stump of her hand.
"You are weak, old woman." His ruined body sang with joy. He trembled, holding himself back, savoring the moment. She would feel every scar, every broken bone... He reached for her scorched sleeve. "Everything I have suffered I will visit upon you, again and again, until all that remains is a mewling-"
She looked up, shadows under her cowl. His lightsaber's blade was snuffed out, and then there was a great wind. Her hand shot out like a serpent and seized his arm, smoke rising where her fingers squeezed his ruined flesh.
Sion.
Her voice boomed in his mind. The cargo bay, the flickering lights, the scarred durasteel of the walls were all swept away. He stood in darkness, cold, alone.
We have unfinished business, you and I.
He began to scream, too numb to feel his knees striking the deck, and her face was above him, her words drawing blood from his skin. Stars bloomed and died around him in the vastness of the dark. He raged. He hated.
It was not enough.
...double the +6, pure Pazaak... Atton led the way through the fuel-stinking channel of the refueling port. He swallowed, nauseated by the smell, and let his mouth keep flapping. "So, this is turning out great. We should come back here for a picnic sometime when a Sith Lord isn't trying to murder us, probably so he can make a suit out of our skin."
She looked as though she was about to laugh, and then a strange expression passed over her face. She doubled over suddenly and let out a piercing shriek. Atton seized her shoulder. "Hey," he shouted. "Hey, stay with me."
She looked up at him, her body twisted snakelike and shaking. Her eyes were black as night, her mouth wide open, and the screaming didn't end, didn't peter out. It went on and on, ringing in Atton's ears, getting louder. Meetra scratched viciously at her right hand with her left; Atton could hardly restrain her when she reached for her vibroblade. He dragged her toward the tunnel, the weapon clattering to the grating underfoot.
...switch the face of the...
She fought him like a wild kath hound, thrashing and bucking, and she was strong. Her heels scuffed over the deck as they emerged from the refueling junction into the station's docking wing. Dead miners lay here and there, bodies scorched by plasma drills and mining lasers. People Atton had known, had gambled with, had complained alongside. He dragged her, this stranger, through the tangle of bodies, determination lending him strength.
It wasn't until he was hammering a faulty door release plate that he noticed the droid, a stubby astromech gliding along in their wake on its treads and somehow managing to look worried. "Hey," he said. "Where did you come from, trashcan?" Meetra went limp in his arms, her sudden dead weight almost too much for his exhausted arms.
"My hand." Her voice was a broken rasp. There was blood on her upper lip and she held her right hand clutched against her chest, its fingers locked in a white-knuckled fist. "My hand...Kreia."
The droid scooted past them and extended its interface arm, jacking into the port below the door's control panel. It opened. Beyond, a battered freighter weighted hunkered on its landing legs, ramp extended like a gaping mouth.
Meetra pulled away from him, straightening. She unclenched her hand with an obvious effort of will, leaving bloody crescents in her palm. She looked back, and then she stalked across the deck, up the boarding ramp, and into the ship.
"Onward and upward, I guess," Atton said to the droid.
It made a quiet, doubtful sound.
The ship looked like a smuggler, judging by the amount of illegal technology hidden under its unassuming hull. High-powered turrets, fuel-injected engines, redundant shields... Kreia appeared in the cockpit as Atton was running through the preflight checks. Her right sleeve was empty and she walked with the dragging limp of someone who had pushed herself far beyond her capabilities.
"Go," she said, her voice pained. "I have delayed him only for a short while. Soon the Harbinger's guns will be turned against us."
The exile looked at the older woman, but she said nothing.
Atton engaged the ship's repulsors. "I've got a bad feeling about this," he said, more to himself than to either of the women.
The Ebon Hawk answered him with dreamlike swiftness. She had more power than any freighter had a right to. More reasons to thank the smugglers who had refitted her, whoever they were. In an instant they were clear of the docking bay, racing past the Harbinger as the great warship came slowly about. Turbolaser blasts raked the darkness, stabbing between the drifting asteroids with surgical precision. One kiss and the Ebon Hawk, the name the little brass plate by the pilot's seat bore, would be dust and vapor. Atton flew her hard, diving and dodging, firing her maneuvering thrusters wildly. Inertia pressed him back into the sweat-stained padding of the seat as he wrestled for more speed, for more distance between the Hawk and the Harbinger.
"Fire on the asteroids," Meetra said suddenly.
"Are you kidding?" he shouted. "We'll take out the station; there could be survivors! Not to mention this is where half the Outer Rim's fuel-"
Her hand closed like a vise on his shoulder. "Do it."
He tasked the turret quickly, striking keys with shaking fingers. Light lanced through the dark of space to rake furrows in the side of an asteroid as they corkscrewed deftly around it. Its blasted surface cracked, streamers of superheated gas and fire emerging under tremendous pressure, and as they raced clear of the field the rock blew apart in a silent glory of red and gold. Others went up around it, a chain reaction that swept out through the field like a grass fire spreading in a high wind.
Switch the face of the +1/-4 card...
The Harbinger plowed through the flame and ruin, her hull cutting void, and Atton threw the hyperspace lever. The stars stretched into lines of light.