Beyond the Last Illusion
Chapter 2
Sleep, and dreams, often come even when they are least expected.
She was walking in the Halls of the Ancestors – the mausoleum in the city's lowest levels, the place where the great souls of past times were carved in stone, set to guard their own ashes in the catacombs' memorial vaults. In the dream, she walked behind Almeck, her father's staunch friend and advisor. Down, down, they proceeded, descending passage after winding passage. As they walked, the air grew colder and colder, until frost bit at her lings and numbed her limbs.
"Here is the place, my lady," Almeck said – only her guide was no longer Almeck at all, but rather a tall person she did not recognize, veiled in dark robes. He wrapped her in a dark cloak also, and the cold abated. Then snow began to drift down, inexplicably…for the vaults were contained underground, beneath the city's protective dome. Were they not? Icy flakes settled on her lashes and piled about her feet. When she looked at the passageway ahead it had disappeared to be replaced by a snowy plain. The glow lamps which had adorned the corridor's hard carven walls were now distant stars and the luminous face of Concordia, her homeworld's moon.
"No!" she cried out in horror – for the snow was drenched in blood. Armored warriors – men bearing the clan insignia of her own people – swarmed over the crimson snow, faceless and terrible behind their war masks, their gleaming helmets. They bore down on another figure: a Jedi in clothing white like the snow. His saber flashed and spun, but the warriors surrounded him. "N,o! No!" she shouted, struggling to move. Her body was now encased in ice, in cold despair, and she could neither breathe nor lift her limbs.
But the scene changed again. The stark battlefield was now nothing but a carving on the wall, something she had seen many times in her youth. Her hand traced the outline of the story in the cold wall. The warriors did not move, and the Jedi stood still, weapon raised in a last doomed stand against certain destruction. She raised her hands to the wall and scrabbled her fingers against the awful image. It crumbled to dust beneath her clawing grasp, and she tore at it – more and more- until it all came away. Beneath lay the natural stone – crystal, shining within the veins of dark rock. In the glittering factes of the crystal she saw her home, her city, rebuilt into pinnacles of light, gleaming thin planes of crystal glass. And in the center of the city, in the center of the palace, in the center of the throne room, she saw herself. Herself and another, strange and yet familiar…
Satine Kryze woke, her heart filled with a terrible longing, and her mind reeling with sudden, incontrovertible panic.
Pulse drumming in her ears, breathing coming short and fast, Satine struggled to shake off the interrupted dream, to understand what was so wrong, so terrifying. For a moment only the dreadful certainty of danger would make itself felt to her dulled senses. Fighting down the mindless panic, forcing her shuddering lungs to hold each breath deeply, she listened.
There was nothing. Nothing – and that was wrong. There should be the low thrum and gentle hiss of air through the ventilation system. The absence of sound was eerie, as was the absence of light. It was pitch dark. The tiny emergency lights which rimmed the edges of the floor, the flickering muted light of the various control panels set into the bulkheads around the small cabin – both had been extinguished, plunging them into utter blackness and stillness. Her heart fought to escape the cage of her ribs, and yet her arms and legs refused to move. The inky darkness seemed palpable, a thing holding her down with an iron hand.
Without warning, the black void was shattered and filled with fragmented light and sound. Faster than her mind could make sense of them, violent images flashed before her astonished eyes. A sharp, spitting hiss and throttling hum erupted into the quiet. A beam of blue light shot into existence from nowhere and swept across her vision, weaving a deadly arc of light in the close space. A shower of sparks. Something metallic fell with a shriek onto the deck below. In the glimpse of eerie light she saw the bits of droid still red-hot along their edges, their wires grotesquely mangled and melted. She saw the blue-cast profile of the young Jedi, every muscle tensed into inhuman, icy awareness. She saw the gaping hole yawning in the ceiling, where an acoustic thermo-panel had been neatly cut away to make an entrance point for the floating assassin probe.
"Are you all right?" a soft, urgent voice demanded of her. Was she all right? What? Sitting up, she nodded in shocked confusion. An Assasin probe. Sent to kill her. They had been found, again. The realizations hit her one by one, like a series of blows. An arm found its way under her elbow and around her back, pushed her upright. The lightsaber's weird glow was suddenly extinguished.
"Go to the upper deck lounge. Disappear in the crowd," Qui Gon Jinn's voice ordered, near at hand. "I'll find the operator."
"Yes, master." The reply was instantaneous, full of unspoken meaning. They never bothered to consult her, Satine reflected. In such moments the two Jedi were like one person, only speaking aloud out of habit, as some elderly persons did. They could act as a single fluid entity, calculating and adjusting as the situation demanded. They were even better than a Mandalorian elite squad.
She was now being half dragged out the door, into the corridor beyond. It too was shrouded in absolute dark. "They've cut the main power to this deck," Obi Wan said, thinking aloud for her benefit.. "The lift won't work. We'll have to climb."
Satine shook herself out of the stupor, felt new strength flood into her trembling limbs. She pushed away his supporting hand. "I'm perfectly fine," she snorted. "Climb where?" In answer he seized her hand and sprinted headlong down the passageway. She ran flat out to keep pace with him in the pitch dark. He came to sudden halt, and she slammed into his side, less than gracefully.
"Careful," he breathed, so close she could feel his warm breath. That hint of mocking humor rose to the surface in his voice. How could he think this was funny? The saber blazed into life again, making her skin prickle with its searing heat. A double reinforced lift door stood before them. Into the control panel the saber went, with a horrible smell of melted plastoid and hot metal. The doors sprang open, revealing a black shaft devoid of any lift.
The saber disappeared once more. "On my back. Quick," the young Jedi ordered, as sharp and confident as Qui Gon Jinn had been a minute earlier. Without pausing to object to his commanding tone, Satine obeyed, grabbing him about the neck and twisting her legs around his slim waist. She squeezed her eyes shut despite the dark, dreading the horrible moment to come.
She still cried out as they sailed into darkness and plummeted straight down. There was a long second's swooping fall and then their speed seemed to lessen, to flow with some other hidden power, and they landed almost gently on a hard protrusion. She heard the soft thrum of a liquid cable launching from its projector, the clink of its grappling end as found leverage high overhead. "Hang on," the Jedi advised, needlessly. They swung out and up again, and then they were half-rising with the cable's retraction, half climbing one hand at a time, straight up. She could hear Obi Wan's breathing – deep and controlled, full of effort but not quite strain, despite the extra weight. They were ascending the interior wall of the shaft toward a narrow beam of light which must mark the lift port for the upper decks.
"Well," Satine remarked. "We're getting better at this climbing business. You haven't dropped me this time."
She could feel his tiny snort of dark amusement, the subtle shrug of shoulder muscles beneath her hands. "Don't tempt me."
And in that moment, silently smiling in return, dangling perilously above the dark pit on a narrow thread, headed from danger into danger, she decided that perhaps she did not hate him so very, very much after all.
Qui Gin Jinn shoved aside yet another panel of insulation netting and sighed in frustration. He should have sent Obi Wan up into the maze of connecting vent shafts – besides being smaller across the shoulders and more compact in general, he was a good thirty years younger.
"I'm too old for this," the Jedi master complained ruefully, trying hard to ignore the cramping pain in his back and legs. He had navigated the interlocking web of passages thus far by following the trail of small holes the hunter-killer droid had carved in the filters stretched across the ducts. This last branch, however, narrowed to an impossible diameter. He would have to retreat to the previous crossways – an easy forty meters backward in tight quarters.
Then he heard it – the high reverberating hum of another seeker droid, fast approaching his position from behind. What a stroke of good fortune that the vent shaft magnified its repulsors' sound fifty-fold, or he might not have sensed its imminent arrival. There was no room to maneuver in the tunnel; he may as well have been a cork jammed into a bottle of vintage Serrenoan wine. Grimacing, Qui Gon shimmied his saber hilt into one hand and then flicked the activation switch, holding the weapon against the flat surface of the tunnel floor. A quick twist of the wrist and he had sheared away a sizeable hole directly beneath his body. He tumbled through without hesitation, sucking in a hissing breath as the red hot fused edges brushed against his trouser leg.
Dropping through the ceiling of the space below and landing in a crouch on a rubber-matted deck, he brandished the saber high over his head. Screams of terror and surprise filled the air. A jet of scalding water sprayed wildly across the room, and there was a clatter of large pots being dropped against a hard surface. Qui Gon registered that this must be the ship's galley – but there was no time for an apology.
The hunter-seeker descended through the hole after him, targeting light already flashing. A deadly bolt of blaster fire pinged off the saber's blade, ricocheting into a piece of machinery on the far wall. Another shot followed, and another. Qui Gon somersaulted up onto the broad food-prep counter, scattering bits of salad and chopped nuts underfoot, and swung for the droid assassin. It zoomed away, toward the roof again, and its next shot glanced off the Jedi's blade to explode in a container of sarasata pickles. Vinegar and frizzled bits of vegetable spattered in every direction. The automatic fire extinguisher system went off, pouring a self-expanding foam upon every unfortunate being in a five meter radius.
Half blind, and choking on the white billows of synthetic flame retardant, Qui Gon made another cut with his saber, and found his mark. The droid clattered to the deck in two pieces, while the Jedi ducked out of the galley into the serving area, where the patrons of the dining mezzanine were hurriedly evacuating. A befuddled protocol model serving droid tottered about in circles, waving its hands in distress. "Fire in the kitchens," it moaned. "Please evacuate the immediate area. Fire in the kitchens."
Leaving the hysterical droid to sort out the problem as best it could, Qui Gon slipped through the jostling crowd with as much speed as his great height and long stride could afford him. He headed for the nearest quiet spot – a niche intended as a recharge station for the countless cleaning bots that swept the floors and polished the chrome accents in the luxury cabins.
"Obi Wan," he barked into his comlink, cueing it to his apprentice's coded frequency. No response.
The Force was seething with confusion and annoyance. He could barely make out individual presences in the ocean of disgruntled emotion. Closing his eyes, he let his awareness drift a little further into deep currents, where relative distances meant nothing…he could sense his Padawan, a few decks above. He must have reached the entertainment lounge safely. And another presence – a cunning, focused mind, calmly intent on its prey. That would be the bounty hunter. He too was above this level, seeking for the refugees.
Qui Gon tried the comlink again. His apprentice's voice came through garbled by background noise. "Master. Did you find the bounty hunter?" Obi Wan asked without preface.
"I've disabled another remote," Qui Gon answered. "The operator is headed in your direction. Be alert. I'll see if I can find his transport in the hangar deck. Contact me if you change position."
"Yes, master." There was more background interference – it sounded like loud music, the swell and buzz of a crowd, before the link cut out.
Qui Gon waited until the greater part of the crowd had dwindled away, and then dashed into a lift tube, hitting the control panel's touch sensitive surface with an impatient hand. In a moment he was whisked away to the hangar decks. He had no idea how the assassin had managed to get on board; but if he had any say in the matter, the villain would not find it so easy to get off again.