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I.
Amongst the Dead
"I was cold, and sticky. My ears were ringing. I tried to breathe, but cold, foul tasting liquid filled my mouth and nose. Kolto. Damn useful stuff, but immersion in a tank has to be one of the most unpleasant experiences in the galaxy. I flailed around, though, and the sensors must've picked up I'd come to, because the tank began to drain, and the glass lowered.
I had all the strength of a newborn nerf, though. I'm embarrassed to say I fell flat on my face. Not one of my finer moments, all in all. I tried to push myself up, but I couldn't. I just lay there like a lump on the floor, shivering. Kolto glued my eyes shut when I tried to blink, so I just let it, and I think I slept again.
The alarm woke me up. You know the kind. Blaring, commercial, something's-gone-terribly-wrong-everyone-get-out-of-this-joint alarm. It scared me right up onto my feet again, Aithne. An alarm like that, you expect someone, somewhere's shooting, or at least running like hell away from something else. But I looked around, and I couldn't see anything at all to account for all the noise.
I could see that I'd never been to this place in my life. The last thing I could remember, I'd gone to the med bay on the Harbinger for standard medical processing before we landed on Telos, but this was an entirely different med bay. It was smaller, more institutional than military, and for some reason I didn't feel like I was in space anymore. The gravity felt too real.
Strange med bay, no memory of a transfer. It's reason enough for anyone to get a little nervous, but this med bay was weird, Aithne. There were no healers, no technicians around. Not so much as a medical droid. There was just silence, because the alarm had stopped blaring. There were four other kolto tanks besides the one I'd fallen out of, and there were people in the tanks, though. Four men dressed in strange orange uniforms. Not Republic. Some strange company. They were floating around in the tanks like so much algae. After a moment, I went up to one and tapped on the glass, but the guy inside didn't even twitch. Not even a twitch. Even unconscious people in kolto tanks react to stimuli. The guy was so still, I got a heavy, creepy feeling in my stomach. All the others looked just like him, too.
It was damn cold in that med bay, and one look down told me why. Someone had stripped me down to the Republic-issue leotard that they'd given me when I shipped out on the Harbinger. Not entirely immodest, and certainly better than the ratty old underthings I'd had then, but underwear's underwear. Not exactly material to go storming strange facilities in, you know? I looked around for my stuff, but there weren't any hangers or lockers in sight.
I guessed it had been more than a few hours since the Harbinger, because my legs and arms were moving like I'd been heavily sedated, I was extremely hungry, and frankly? I really needed to use the fresher. If I'd been under for a few days, then someone had drugged me on the Harbinger and moved me. Worrying, but not something to panic over. You get into these situations out on the Rim and beyond.
The fresher was pretty easy to find. In the end I couldn't do much more than wash off all the kolto residue and put that leotard on again wet, after I'd taken care of business, but it really couldn't be helped.
The alarm blared out again once I left. Again I looked for people running around, listened for shooting or something equally calamitous. But the alarm tapered off into silence again. I waited for five minutes. Nothing. The alarm rang out through the halls of the place with an undeniable emptiness. So I at least knew that I was temporarily safe from whoever had drugged me and dumped me in this strange med bay, though I might not be safe from whatever had made them evacuate. I figured it was time to find out where I was.
Outside in the hall wasn't any less intimidating than the unmanned med bay or the motionless men in the kolto tanks. The place was deserted. Silence has different qualities. When you're alone in a tiny room and expect to be alone, it can be comforting, peaceful. But when you're alone in a house, a ship, or a facility that ought to be inhabited with other people, but isn't, silence becomes an enemy. Shadows look darker. Echoes seem louder. The hallway from the med bay to the medical supply room wasn't very long, but it felt like a kilometer at least. My steps seemed to thunder out throughout wherever this was, and I jumped with every one of them.
The door to the medical supply room was open, and the terminal controlling the med bay functions was inside. I used it to call up the stats on the guys in the tanks in the med bay, but they only confirmed what I suspected. The others were dead. They hadn't looked like they'd had injuries so severe kolto couldn't cure it, so I called up the recent treatment requests on a hunch.
Turned out, someone had dispensed a lethal dose of sedatives to all five tanks in there, mine included. My body had to have reacted to the poison like it had been trained to do way back before the wars, or I would have been dead, too, Aithne. My body remembered the Jedi. I couldn't remember what color my lightsaber had been. I couldn't feel the Force. But my body still remembered the techniques I had learned as a child.
I don't know how I knew, but I just knew that whatever was going on here would come back to me, Aithne. I didn't know then that the Jedi were disappearing. The Republic hadn't told me that much. But they'd recognized me for who I was, called me by name and rank and requested my return to Republic space. A few times, during the years I was out here, my past had caught up to me and I'd had a bit of trouble. And it wasn't hard to guess that for whatever reason, however it had come about, it'd just done so again, and whatever had happened here was the result.
There were holo-logs on the terminal. The planet was Peragus II. Chiefly uninhabited, inhospitable to life, valued only for the fuel it provided. The miners that worked the fuel station on the world were the only inhabitants, so I knew right off I was in the fuel station. Apparently, I'd gotten to the facility three days prior aboard another place I couldn't remember being—the Ebon Hawk.
"Wait. The Ebon Hawk? You found it? Did you come here on the Hawk?" Aithne asked excitedly, grabbing Darden's shoulder.
Darden grinned. "Well, there's some good news, too. Yeah, I have the Hawk. I actually still don't know how it got from the pirates that stole it from you to me, but I could make a pretty good guess. The woman I got it from was another old friend of yours—and I don't think she'd be the type to appreciate any 'dishonoring' of something that had belonged to you."
Aithne blinked. "Who'd you get the ship from?"
"Well if you'll shut up, I'll tell you," Darden laughed. "I'm just now starting to get into this storytelling thing."
Anyway, at the time I thought I knew something about the Ebon Hawk, but it'd been two years since the run-in with Jolee and Dustil, so the name didn't do much more than ring a bell. What was important to me was that, according to the records on the medical terminal, the Ebon Hawk had apparently come in to Peragus with only two droids and two organics on board, and almost half-destroyed. In the log, the medical officer had no idea how the ship, which hadn't possessed any of the standard arrival codes, hadn't been destroyed in the asteroid field that surrounded Peragus II, but the even bigger mystery was how she'd survived the shot that seemed to have blown her nearly to pieces. The log mentioned an unconscious human woman that had been transferred to the med bay—yes, that'd be me—and another human woman. She'd gone to the morgue.
According to the later logs, there'd been some minor disagreement between the miners about what was to be done with me. Somehow, they knew I was a Jedi just like the Republic had known I was a Jedi, and the log said there was some sort of bounty out on live Jedi. Some guy named Coorta and his friends had apparently wanted to sell me, but the authorities on Peragus, thank the Force, hadn't been too keen on the idea. There'd been fighting. Then there had been problems with the mining droids. Then there had been explosions in the tunnels. The dead guys in the med bay had gone there for burns obtained in those explosions.
The last recorded log cut off right after the medical officer yelled they needed to evacuate.
Yeah. It wasn't good. I shut the log down, and as I did, that alarm rang out again, but this time, I really didn't think anyone would come. Murdered men, malfunctioning droids, fighting between the miners. The whole business stank of sabotage. The long and short of it, Aithne, is that I was in a mining facility in a state of emergency with maybe-rogue droids and maybe-rogue miners. The Ebon Hawk might or might not still be there, but even if it was, there wasn't any guarantee that the freighter would be spaceworthy, or that there would be another ship at all. And even if I found a ship, I'd need the departure codes to get through the Peragian asteroid field and off-planet alive.
When problem-solving, it's best to handle it like storytelling, and begin with the beginning. So I decided there in the terminal room that before I did anything, I needed to find supplies and weapons. Once I was equipped to handle the situation, I could get my bearings and actually handle it, and eventually things would work out and I could get off Peragus II.
There was a plasteel cylinder in the room, and the supplies inside were actually better than I expected. Some medic had left his medicine bag in there, empty except for a single medpac, but there were also some computer spikes and a couple of energy bars at the bottom of the barrel. And a plasma torch.
I grabbed the plasma torch, stuffed the computer spikes and one of the energy bars in the bag, and unwrapped the other. I swung the bag over my shoulder and started to eat at the same time, and headed toward the morgue. The medical officer hadn't mentioned in her records whether or not she'd had time to strip the corpses I'd seen using the med bay camera, but on the off-chance that she hadn't had time before evacuation, I figured they might have valuable equipment.
The bodies were there, lying on slabs. The man on the far side of the room had started to smell. The other body was that of a woman, dressed in a brown robe. I stopped by her, finishing my energy bar and dropping the empty wrapper down into my bag. I guessed the old woman had been the one mentioned in the medical log, the one that had been found with me on the Ebon Hawk. I hadn't ever seen her in my life, though.
She was old—definitely over sixty, and maybe over seventy. There were wrinkles as deep as canyons all around her mouth and brow. You know how you can tell how a person has lived by the lines that develop on their face? Well her face told the story of a woman that had thought and frowned more than she had smiled and laughed. There was a lot of anger in her face, and sorrow, too. It made me a little sad, because she obviously hadn't been very happy. Also, it was too bad that I couldn't ask her how the hell I'd ended up on the Ebon Hawk instead of the Harbinger. But it couldn't really be helped, so after I patted her briefly to make sure there wasn't anything on the body a little more deadly than a plasma torch, I moved on to the barrels in the corners of the room and the man on the other side.
The closer I got to the other guy, the more he stank. I wrinkled my nose, but I figured beggars shouldn't be choosers in mining facilities where everything goes wrong, so I grit my teeth and went for his pockets.
Then I nearly jumped out of my skin when someone talked to me.
"Find what you are looking for amongst the dead?"
I was tense, I was scared, I was ready to fight. I whirled, only to see the dead old lady sitting up on her slab, with her head turned toward me beneath the hood of her robe she'd raised. Aithne—it's terrifying when dead people sit up—you don't even—
Anyway, I took a brief minute to restart my heart, then addressed the sitting corpse. "You frightened me," I told her. "I could've sworn you were dead. You were cold, waxy, you weren't breathing—"
Of course, there hadn't been any smell around the woman, though according to the holo-records she'd have had to have been dead longer than the miner. Realizing this, I went quiet.
"Close to death, yes," the woman croaked. Her voice was low, dry, like dead grass crunching beneath someone's foot. "Closer than I'd like. You have the smell of the kolto tank about you. How do you feel?" She stood up.
Her voice made me shiver. "How do I feel? You were dead! Who are you? What do you want with me?" Okay, so I was a little rude. She'd startled me.
I couldn't make out her eyes underneath that hood. I could only see the woman's pale, withered cheeks, and her wrinkled lips, the color of dry blood. But the lips pursed at me in disapproval. "I am Kreia," she told me with dignity. "And I am your rescuer—as you are mine. Tell me—do you recall what happened?"
It wasn't really an answer to the question, and it made me nervous. And seeing as I actually didn't recall what had happened, and what it was Kreia was claiming to have rescued me from, it annoyed me a little, too. For all I knew this reanimated corpse could be anyone. "If you don't mind, I'll ask the questions for now. How did I get here?"
Kreia moved her shoulders in the vaguest approximation of a shrug. "I confess I know little more than you do," she told me. "I do not know where 'here' is. I do recall rescuing you—the Republic ship you were on was attacked, and you were the only survivor. A result of your Jedi training, no doubt."
Aithne, I had asked for the records of my name and my military history to be sealed, and right then, I could no more use the Force than I could fly. So now everyone and their dog seemed to think I was a Jedi, it was just a little disconcerting. "This is Peragus II," I told the woman. "We're in the mining facility. You know a little too much about me, Kreia. If that is your name. Darden's mine, but I think you know that."
Her silence was tacit confirmation.
"I'm not a Jedi," I informed her. "I'm not in the Order anymore."
Kreia's lips curved up. "Your stance, your walk tells me you are a Jedi," she replied. "Your walk is heavy. You carry something that weighs you down."
It was pretty apparent that Kreia was some sort of Jedi herself, and once I thought of it, I realized that that could explain the 'death'. I guessed Kreia had been in some sort of Force-induced trance that I'd woken her from when I'd searched her. But I certainly didn't want to talk about the Force and whatever might be weighing me down with a stranger, Jedi or not. Especially a Jedi. "Let's not talk about that," I said uneasily. "Let's deal with what the hell is going on right now, shall we?" I didn't really give her a chance to answer, but plowed right on. "Excellent. Why are we here?"
Kreia shifted from one foot to the other. She was nervous herself, but it didn't look like she was nervous about me. "I do not know," she said. "I was removed from the events of the world as I slept. A survey of the surroundings may provide the answers we seek. The ship we arrived in must still be in this place. We should recover it and leave."
"The Ebon Hawk. The medical officer's log says it was wasted, but I want to know why you're referring to 'we'," I told her. Kreia gave me a bad feeling. "I don't know you," I explained, "I have only your word for it that you rescued me from the Harbinger—I don't remember. So I would like to know why you think we're in this together, please."
Kreia's legs buckled, just a little. She sat back down on the slab where she had been lying when I found her. She was still weak, but she didn't mention anything about it, and when she spoke, her voice was strong. "We were attacked once," she said. "And I fear our attackers will not give up the hunt so easily—without transport, weapons, and information, they will find us very easy prey indeed."
I admit I lost my temper. Her evasiveness was grating on me. "You haven't answered the question!" I snapped. Kreia opened her mouth to answer, but she was getting paler by the second, trembling. She was trying very hard to sit straight, to stay strong. And I was yelling at her. I sighed. I couldn't just leave her here. I waved my hand. "No, it's fine," I said irritably. "You were dead, or so close to it I couldn't tell the difference. Friend or foe, I can't just abandon you, can I? But you're nervous. You're really nervous. Why?"
Kreia shifted on her slab. "Even as I slept, I felt much unrest here," she said. An answer, at last. "I saw strange visions, minds colored with fear—now, everything feels terribly silent. I would find out as much as you can about this place quickly—I fear we will need to depart as suddenly as we arrived."
Her hand quivered. I evaluated Kreia's condition quickly, and realized that, though I would like company as I explored the Peragus mining station, Kreia was in no state to go poking around for information. "Fine," I said. "I'll go look for the ship we got here on—and weapons. You stay here and rest."
Beneath Kreia's hood, I got the distinct idea that the old woman looked me up and down, taking in my current state of undress. Her mouth quirked up. "You may wish to extend your search to some clothes," she suggested drily, "If only for proper first impressions."
I acknowledged the suggestion, and started to go. But right before I left, my suspicion struck me once again, and I asked, "Kreia? The patients in the medical bay were killed by a lethal dose of sedatives. Any idea how it happened?"
Kreia shook her head. "I do not know—why did they spare you?"
"They didn't. I got the same dose, but I survived."
The old lady seemed pleased by this. "Indeed. A Jedi trance could protect one from such poisons. In fact, the sedatives may have been intended to keep you unconscious for some time. It would prove lethal to those untrained in such techniques, however. Most curious."
The clinical way she analyzed the situation was a little disturbing. Four men had died, and she called it curious! But I was really more interested, again, in how in the world Kreia knew about my Jedi training. "Who are you?" I asked her. "How do you know so much about Jedi techniques? You used one, didn't you? To survive whatever happened on the Ebon Hawk?"
Kreia didn't answer. Again. "Perhaps we could discuss it at length later on," she said instead. "Now we have other concerns—among them, finding our new enemy."
It was almost a promise of a future answer, and I'd known the woman five minutes and guessed that was probably all I'd get right now until both of us were someplace safer. "So perhaps when I get back from investigating this place you'll actually answer when I ask you a question?" I asked her, just for confirmation of what I suspected.
"I have found that answers come in their own time, not ours," Kreia replied levelly. "Turn your energy to the matter at hand—if we cannot find a way out of here, the answers will prove useless anyway."
I considered this, and ruefully agreed. "You have a point there, at least." I looked at Kreia one more time, pale and trembling with the effort of sitting up straight. "You'll be alright, won't you? I'll be back soon…"
Kreia dismissed my concern with a wave of her hand. "I leave you to the explorations of this place. Here I will remain and attempt to center myself."
As I turned to leave, she drew her legs up under her into a meditative pose. She was definitely a Jedi. Deep trance, cryptic non-answers, Temple posture, all the signs were there. I was in a whole heap of trouble, and only some of it had to do with a mining facility in a state of emergency. It occurred to me as I left the room and started down the abandoned hallway that Kreia was 'attempting to center herself' in the morgue. She'd asked me when she sat up if I had found what I needed amongst the dead. I hadn't, but I wondered if Kreia would.
"Kreia. I feel like I should know her," Aithne said musingly, looking down at the small sculpture of a building she had created with her share of Darden's spare components. "She just feels really familiar."
Darden's face was an interesting study of sorrow and anger as Aithne spoke the name of the old woman in her tale. "She never believed that you actually forgot. I don't think she could bring herself to believe it. But you couldn't be expected to remember or even recognize her by the name 'Kreia'."
"So it wasn't her name?" Aithne asked.
"No," Darden said. "Don't ask me what it actually was; she never did tell me, and I've never tried to find out for myself."
"So this woman—Kreia—she's actually dead now."
"Yes," Darden said shortly, dismantling her assembled blaster scope with one clench of her fist.
"Was I close to her, before?" Aithne asked tentatively.
"I don't know," Darden said. "She thought you were. I hope you weren't."
"You were close to her, then, and didn't like what you saw."
"That's one way of putting it." Darden was silent for a long moment.
"Do you want some water?" Aithne asked.
"Yeah."
Aithne went over to her kitchen-corner, and poured some water out of a pitcher into a small clay cup. She brought it back to Darden, who took a sip, then continued. "So I left Kreia in the morgue and went off by myself through the station…"
A/N: If you're reading? Thanks. If you review? Thank you very much. See you Thursday.
May the Force Be With You,
LMSharp
