Lineage X
Chapter 10
The shuffling procession made slow progress through the crumbled byways of the district, defunct boulevards and roughly cleared alleys between ruined structures providing a rough mountain pass through treacherous territory. At one intersection, the bumbling hovercart of bodies was joined by another, replete with its own escort of lurching attendants.
Obi-Wan followed close behind, veiled in shadow both literal and figurative, his own efforts directed less at concealment – for his quarry showed no signs of great perceptive power – than at quelling his own rising gorge. The sight of so many ghastly limbs piled helter-skelter upon the shipping palettes sickened him. He had of course seen the aftermath of battle fields before, been made to look upon the mangled handiwork of war at a young age – but even then, when the bodies were removed, they had been carted away with due ceremony, or at least a respectful covering. Here, dumped upon a trolley like meats fresh from an abbatoir, the dead were more defiled and desecrated than those he had seen purposefully mutilated by their foes.
And their staring eye sockets, gaping mouths, and rigor-stricken limbs, clutched in a gross paroxysm of outrage, did nothing to ameliorate the effect.
This perverse cavalcade came at last to its destination – a pair of massive ray-shielded gates set in a blank durasteel walll, a shining new construct amid the decrepit bones and ruins of the old city. Guard bastions were set at regular intervals along the top, and automated sentry cannon punctuated its surface. It was fortified like a castle under siege, which only made sense here on the world of pitched warfare and fathomless hatred, and yet the expensive and avante garde nature of the defenses seemed jarringly out of place. Melida and Daan had been scrapping together makeshift weaponry and bombs for decades… while the newcomer had obviously brought his own playthings and set them on display for all to see, an ostentation of power and wealth.
The young Jedi breathed out slowly, taking in every detail of the formidable security measures. Entry would not be easy – and espionage near impossible unless he could contrive a means to slip through the heavily barricaded main gates and thus gain access to the fortress' inner workings.
Ranks of armed guards moved forward to relieve the scavenging parties of their burdens. A few droids – the spindle-legged Trade Federation models, he noted with curiosity – were left in charge of the goods while the portals were levered open a few meters to admit the hover-palettes. The first load of decaying cargo had been safely propelled inside before the obvious idea presented itself to his imagination.
And it was a blessing that he had no time to think twice, for surely had he been granted any chance to reconsider, he would never have acted as he did now: a flick of the Force to send some stray rubble flying across the open courtyard, a more emphatic surge of power to send a droid sentry flying smack into the wall, and the whole lot were convinced they had been attacked. The droids moved in a synchronized unit toward the supposed origin of the threat, pumping the general vicinity full of blaster bolts. One or two of the automatic cannon set high in the wall picked up on the cue and loaded several high-power artillery rounds in to the unfortunate pile of masonry, too, producing a cataclysmic dust-cloud and deafening noise that nicely covered Obi-Wan's lightning-quick egress from his shelter. In a heartbeat, he had ducked and rolled to the abandoned palette's edge, nudged the nearest dangling pair of blood-crusted legs upward, and inserted himself beneath the topmost corpse in the pile, sucking in a deep tai sumi breath, one he intended to hold long enough to break his personal best of 11.5 standard minutes.
Having obliterated their imagined assailants, the droids returned to duty and trundled the second load directly through the gates and into the main body of the citadel.
After a solid ten minutes, he was certain he would pass out – Jedi training notwithstanding. Lungs screaming for air, and head reeling despite the extreme slowing of his metabolism made possible by a finely controlled application of the Force, he abandoned his ambition to top his own record and sucked in a shuddering breath between gritted teeth. The stench of rancid flesh clotted in his throat and turned his stomach, but he focused his awareness outward, on the passing surroundings. His semi-hibernation had allowed him to pass through a scanner array without being noticed. They had then descended to a sub-level inside a huge lift, and were now traveling along a long corridor, the droids' feet echoing sharply on unadorned walls and floors. The inert mass atop him threatened to slide off the palette when they came to an abrupt halt before a final pair of massive hangar doors, perhaps the entrance to a factory floor, judging by the sense of space just beyond and the vague hum of generators audible even through the thick panels. He seized a handful of stiffening muscle and bone and wrenched the corpse back upward
A code was entered, and the doors parted to admit them into a cavernous interior chamber. He could hear sound bounce off high girders, lose itself among the far corners.
"Put the new shipment here," a deeper droid voice ordered, and the original escort clanked away double-file, leaving the two heaps of fallen soldiers in a lonely side bay, a temperature controlled storage area. A door was slammed shut, and darkness descended.
At which point the padawan's control broke. With a hissing imprecation he wriggled free of his erstwhile prison, shuddering as he squirmed out of the suffocating mass of arms and legs and broken chests. His fingers brushed against staring eyes, teeth exposed by the leer of death, patches of cloth still damp with sticky blood and entrails..
He stumbled away, hit the freezing wall of this refrigeration unit, rubbed both hands over his tunics and trousers, feeling the clinging detritus staining their fibers, the impalpable traces of death woven into their fibers. His teeth chattered with the cold, and incipient sickness rising in his throat. He was suddenly grateful for the pitch black of his surroundings; he did not wish to see the faces of those who had been his close companions the last fifteen minutes.
Squatting down on his haunches, he recited the Lotus of Imperturbable Bliss mantra seven times, according to tradition, each repetition grounding one of his main energetic chakras back in the Force's radiant center. Revulsion seeped from him, into the sluggish currents of Light, while his instinctive nausea slowly subsided.
And now to work.
The lock on the refrigeration unit's door was no match for the Force; he swung the reinforced panel open on silent hinges, reaching out into the plenum like some furtive forest creature scenting the wind for sign of danger. The universal energy was badly disturbed here, contorted into dizzying knots and pained reticulations, an agony of disorder and perversion. But there were no particular centers within the marbled skein of this chaos, no shining stars in the nebula of dark design.
Droids, then. Or the Fallen Ones. But not Syfo –Dyas… unless the renegade Jedi were well hidden by his own masterful power. A step forward, then another, submerging his own presence into the nameless flood of power as far as he dared, drawing a mantle of light about him as shield and veil.
The rafters would provide the best vantage point; a swift Force-propelled leap brought him onto the nearest cross-beam, a precarious perch from which to observe the machinations below. He crept along his narrow path, to a joining section at the roof's apex, and crouched against the upright beam, staring down at the spectacle beneath him, his mind only reluctantly piecing together what eyes and gut intuition conveyed with a weird lucidity. What he beheld was…. the resurrection of the dead.
A travesty of it.
An obscene blasphemy committed against the Force itself. Here, at one end, bodies were unloaded from carts, splayed out upon cold slab tables, stripped of garments and equipment, prodded and examined by a bevy of droids. Some were passed along, others discarded into a furnace to one side. The reek of cremation hung in the air despite the powerful venting system. Further along, the selected corpses were subjected to an even odder treatment, submerged in a vat of liquid that looked as though it might be a bacta variant…
His head spun, and he clutched at the durasteel beam for support. Heights had never affected him before; glancing down at the slopping liquid in its transparent walled tank, he knew that it was nothing wholesome. Outwardly benign, it exuded a pale mist in the Force, a sickly nimbus of Dark power, one he had felt but recently on Dathomir.
A sharp inhalation. Talzin's pact with her visitor: had she imparted some sithly black arts to Syfo Dyas in exchange for the location of certain artifacts? It must be so.
He forced himself to watch the next step in the vile proceedings. Mechanical slings and braces were employed to lever the dripping bodies from the witch's brew, whereupon they were blasted dry and laid out again, only to be descended upon by an advanced model medical droid fitted with a bevy of injector arms. Nearby stood an open crate of the bantha snot he and Neild had previously discovered and muddled over – and as he watched in gaping horror, the droid set to work on its latest victim, ruthlessly injecting copious volumes of the milky substance – the nano droids- into what would be key circulatory targets in a living body: arteries, abdomen, spinal cord.
The process efficiently completed, the abused corpse was set aside upon another bare surface. And here the transformation took place – lumpen flesh twitched, then writhed, and soon bone and tendon convulsed, the pallid frame wracked by tremors as though in pain or deepest throes of nightmare… all in silence, in hollow void. The bodies moved, spasmed, stiltedly sat or attempted to stand and fell flat upon their faces, unaided and unnoticed. And yet they were nothing, as vapid and insubstantial in the Force as any automaton, as any dead thing.
Eventually another droid came to shepherd the newly re-animated away, a clumsy knot of men and women trudging obediently in its wake as it led them through the far doors and on to whatever unthinkable fate awaited them – presumably the blank subservience of their comrades, the mindless horde of soldiery he had seen scavenging aoming the bomb site, and earlier when the Young had raided the Trade Federation delivery.
Obi-Wan sank down against the cold cross-brace and remembered to close his mouth, dragging one hand over it, slowly, as though to wipe away some bitter-sweet aftertaste of bile upon his lips. The very Force seemed to sigh dolefully in his ear, an ethereal lamentation.
Syfo-Dyas was beyond depraved. He was utterly irredeemable.
There is more than one kind of living death, Seeker. The first is a thing of fantasy, of horror tales spun upon hearthstones for children's delight.
You mean zombies. There is no such thing.
Not in truth. But there is another sort of living death, one all too common among sentients. To live without mindfulness, without purpose, without awareness of our luminous origin and destination – this is to be dead while alive, the spirit extinguished even while the gross matter of its vessel still burns with vitality. Such are all pleasure-seekers, wealth-hoarders, power-mongers, desirers of pomp and glory. The living dead in fact and deed.
And the third, Master?
Ah. The third. That is what we have attained, Seeker. A death that is life, the passing of light into light, of lantern into supernal fire.
Teach me, my Master. This is what I seek to know.
The true death is like unto a second birth, its seeking a labor of spirit. You will bring it forth in pain and groaning, and rejoice only when it is done. Prepare yourself.