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