"I know your intentions are to save me, Mara, but it's far too late now!" Kyle hissed, readying his lightsaber for battle.
"No, Kyle." Mara Jade replied, lowering her own weapon. "I will not fight you." Kyle felt a twinge of pain in her words… but it was soon buried.
"You are foolish." He spat. "And for that you will die!"
The blade swung high, and crashed down, slicing through her body and ending her life instantly. Kyle looked down at the broken form of the once proud and noble Jedi Knight… and felt nothing but disappointment.
Kyle Katarn sat bolt upright, the sound of sizzling flesh still echoing in his ears. He ran a hand through his sweaty hair, and sighed. Two years after the incident on Dromund Kaas, and he was still having nightmares.
He got out of bed and walked to the kitchenette in his small Coruscant apartment, readying the machines to make a mug of something hot and bitter.
He had seen the nightmare several times before, and it was often the same. Sometimes the words changed. Sometimes Mara said nothing, as she had on that day, but he always killed her. And he always felt no shame or grief from the act, until he woke.
It was too early for anything to be happening on the planet, but Coruscant is never truly devoid of activity. Even at this hour of grey skies, there were freighters droning through the air and chattering people on the streets.
Kyle rubbed his eyes. It was getting difficult to sleep at all with the fear of that nightmare coming back. Dromund Kaas was scary enough on its own, never mind the Sith Temple he had ventured into. But what he had become inside it… what he had almost done to Mara… what he dreamed of doing to her almost every night…
He shuddered. There would be no more sleep tonight. Not with the sound of Mara's dying scream still in his mind.
He sat on the couch and sipped his drink.
Two years since Mara Jade had saved him from himself in that dank, dismal ruin of a temple. Two years since he had dropped his lightsaber on the ground. Two years since he had made the most painful decision of his life… to turn his back on the Force.
Since then he had felt almost deaf and blind. He had been so used to seeing everything, hearing everything, feeling everything, it had made it difficult to be a regular person once again. It was so easy to get dwarfed by the enormity of the power, and it was also easy to see why so many lost themselves to it.
Kyle leaned back on the couch and tried to clear his mind. He was never one for the Jedi art of meditation, but he found it useful after the nightmare came back. He didn't come close to levitating or anything, it only helped to calm him.
Well, that and his drink.
One standard hour later, the comms-unit buzzed. An urgent message was coming through.
Kyle put down his empty mug and flipped the switch, accepting the call.
"Katarn." He grumbled. The screen crackled with static, blurring his contact's face.
"I thought as much." A familiar female voice said, with a cocky smirk so blatant Kyle could hear it in her every word. "How's it going, Katarn?"
"Mara Jade." He said, shaking his head in disbelief, as the visual crackled and finally cleared. "It's been years. What can I do for you?"
"A couple of things." She said. "But first I'd better apologise for waking you up." He decided not to tell her he was already awake.
"The call was high priority, I'm guessing this is something urgent?"
"Very much so." Mara replied, flicking a switch on her own unit, as the screen split and revealed Mon Mothma's face on a separate channel, all three consoles connected in one call.
"Good morning, Katarn." Mothma said. "Mara and I have need of your services."
"Blunt as ever." Kyle said, rubbing an itch in one of his eyes. "What is it this time? More Death Star plans? Another Dark Trooper project?"
"Nothing so swashbuckling, I assure you." Mothma said. Kyle noted Mara Jade had gone silent to let her explain, as if she had already been told all of this…
"Have you ever heard the name Prince Amek?" Mothma asked.
"Can't say I have. Any relation to Princess Leia?" Kyle replied, only half-joking.
"Hardly." Mara said distastefully. "Prince Amek is a… well, let's be simple and call him a gangster. He's wealthy and dangerous, and not known for his legal activities. He resides in a castle in the mountains of Bakura."
"Wait." Kyle said. "I thought the Republic had a strong presence on Bakura these days?"
"We do," Mothma said, retaking leadership of the conversation. "But there's always someone who wants a few extra credits to look the other way. Plus a host of dummy corporations and fronts for his illegal activity can keep the official investigators busy long enough to hide whatever he wants hidden."
"Okay, so we've got a Prince in a castle on Bakura. Where do I come in?" Kyle asked.
"We've heard tell from a contact within Amek's castle that he has recently come into possession of something rather important. A Sith Holocron, said to be lost for decades. It predates the birth of the Emperor himself, and even he believed it to be merely legend."
"We don't even know what's on it." Mara interjected. "It's been lost for so long nobody can separate legend from fact. But a Sith Holocron isn't the kind of thing you let your children play with, y'know? One way or another, it's going to cause trouble."
"So what's this Prince Arden doing with it?" Kyle asked.
"Prince Amek." Mara corrected him.
"As of yet, merely displaying it in a cabinet." Mothma said. "But we've been informed by our contact that he plans to auction it to various black market contacts. If it remained with Amek, the damage could be minimal at best. But it's up for grabs now, anyone could obtain it."
"And who is this contact exactly?" Kyle asked. "I hope you're both aware this could just be a wild Bantha chase from some punk kid, or even a trap to snare a top-tier Republic spy for a candlelit interrogation."
"The contact is a servant within Amek's castle." Mara said. "A young girl by the name of Qella. We can't trust her 100%, but she's given us enough to consider it."
"She took a risk just contacting us." Mothma said. "Tri-wave transmission from a local cantina, encoded with two different cipher keys, one of which hasn't been used for years. If Amek was laying a trap for us, he could've have done it much easier than this. It was deliberately made hard to understand, to ensure only we'd get it. Besides, she's smart. She left a code-word in the transmission for our agent to use when they meet her."
"What is it?" Kyle asked. Mara opened her mouth, but Mothma immediately held up a hand.
"If you accept the mission, Katarn, then you will be told. Until then her safety is our concern."
"Well you're both barking up the wrong tree. I'm not a Republic soldier. I never even was. I was a double-agent, briefly a Jedi, and now a mercenary. If you want my services, you're paying for them like any other customer."
"We know that well, Katarn. We didn't expect you to do this out the goodness of your heart. You'll be paid handsomely for your part in this."
Mara shuffled closer to her camera.
"Bottom line, Kyle, we need you for this. We need someone who won't be recognised immediately, which puts Luke and I out of the picture, or else I'd be doing it myself. We need someone who has talent in infiltration and sabotage, which puts your average Republic grunt off the list. And above all else, Kyle, we need someone we can trust."
Kyle thought about it, but he knew that, even from across so many star-systems, Mara Jade had already foreseen his decision.
"Got nothing better to do I guess." He said with a shrug.
"I'm glad to hear it." Mon Mothma said, proceeding with an explanation she had undoubtedly prepared for this very moment. "You'll be heading in with a group of merchant traders. As far as anyone will know, you're just another face in the crowd. Once on Bakura, you'll meet with our contact and work your way into the auction. For that, you'll have access to funds from the Republic in order to place bids. We need to stop anyone else from finding out before we do."
Kyle sighed heavily.
"Better not be another Dark Trooper project…"
Commander Piter Peake was regretting all the times he'd decided on a second breakfast instead of a trip to the exercise room.
Sweat ran off him in rivers, his bulky armour had been taken from him (as had his weaponry) and what he remained wearing was soaked and sticking to him.
The arena was large, but the randomly alternating panels made it difficult to traverse. One moment you would see a passage in front of you, then a panel from the floor would slide upwards and block your path. Or a wall would rotate and trap you, then drop away to reveal a path. The walls were twice the height of any man, too tall to be climbed and too smooth to be gripped.
Piter Peake had been running for several minutes, and already he was out of breath, but he dared not stop. The constant sound of rapid-fire laser turrets tracking his movements was enough to keep him going, although he didn't know how much longer he could last.
He turned a corner, and found himself in a dead end. Before he had a chance to turn back, the walls rotated, closing off the passage behind him and forcing him to make a snap decision between the three new routes, all of which led to more turrets.
Piter Peake didn't bother thinking it over and simply ran forwards, dodging between more panels. He had seen many displays of this sort of thing before, but normally he was watching from afar, chortling merrily at the sight. Now he was on ground-level, and all because of one tiny mistake.
Suddenly a panel in front of him shot up, bashing his nose from the speed it rose with. It blocked his path, and suddenly three more walls rose, fencing him in. Above him, Piter Peake could hear the rapid-fire turrets rotating, scanning, looking for him. Then they stopped rotating. Their heat-sensors had located him through the panels. At least five turrets were pointed at him, but none could penetrate the solid durasteel panels that imprisoned him.
And then the panels began to descend. Slowly, merely an inch at a time, as Piter Peake heard the turrets charging their next shots. He scrabbled at the walls, desperately searching for a way out, but to no avail. The walls continued to sink into the floor. He looked down, hoping against hope that he'd be standing on some kind of vent panel or access hatch, but there was nothing beneath his feet but more smooth, shiny durasteel.
Finally, the panels lowered enough for the turrets to find their targets.
And they fired.
The panels all straightened out and slid back down into the ground with a series of loud, clattering bangs. The turrets de-activated, their prey eliminated, and returned to stationary positions.
Prince Amek had watched the entire spectacle from his throne in the observation room high above the arena. Amek himself was no stranger to the arena, it had been built to his specifications and utilised on a daily basis to keep his mind sharp and his body strong.
It was, however, used on occasion for punishing those who failed him, like the erstwhile Commander Piter Peake. To the left of Prince Amek sat Peake's replacement, the recently promoted Commander Brindt.
"Allow this to be a reminder." Amek said to him, his voice like silver on a cold morning. "I do not tolerate failure from those I entrust with positions of control."
Brindt shuddered as he watched a pair of maintenance droids use their manipulator arms to grip various pieces of Piter Peake's body and place them in a water-tight disposal bag.
"Yes sir." Brindt replied as boldly as he could muster. "I understand. I will remember."
"I'm glad to hear that." Amek said, standing up and walking towards the door. "I'd hate to have the arena cleaned twice in one day, after all."
Brindt was about to follow him, but took a brief glance back into the arena. One of the maintenance droids had found what looked like an eyeball, and placed it nonchalantly in its disposal bin.
Brindt swallowed hard, and hurried after Prince Amek.