It didn't look like much. Certainly not something he'd been anticipating, waiting for, promising himself was worth these last few months of wandering through the dangerous Unknown Regions with a ragtag group of mercenaries and Jedi, including his own son after having left his own daughter behind.
To Carth's eyes, Verte was strangely inverted. Land masses of either cobalt or charred ash spread across a severe brown sky that almost seemed orange on the side of the planet where it was day.
How long were their days? How long were Katrina's? How many of them had she passed here, and how many did she have left—
Carth steered his attention back to the task at hand— figuring out where the hell to land the Chaser. Dustil sat in the co-pilot's seat next to him, brow furrowing as his eyes scanned and rejected the possible landing sites suggested by the nav system.
"Here's one," he finally said, pointing to a spot on the rotating holomap. "It's about thirty kilometers away from this large complex. Some plains surrounded by rock formations. There's a few trees, so watch it."
"A few trees," Carth repeated to himself, trying not to remember Rakatan water or Tarisian debris—or hell, even asteroids— flying at him from every direction. Landing or taking off without really knowing what lay ahead wasn't an ideal situation for any pilot, let alone on a planet that supposedly held not only his missing wife, but a lost species of ancient Sith capable of things unimaginably terrible.
A flock of tri-winged birds scattered up in front of the cockpit window, but aside from that there was no interruption to the Jedi Chaser's smooth landing. The Ebon Hawk touched down slightly behind her, a little less smoothly if the rattle of the metal flooring beneath Carth's feet was any indication.
He exhaled, running a hand through his hair and leaning back in his seat. "Well, we're here." He put his hands on each armrest and pushed himself up out of the chair. "Let's get over to the Hawk, see what we have in terms of firepower and then start on some approach strategy—"
"Father—" Dustil was still sitting in his chair, staring out at the large rock formation that blocked their view of the complex that supposedly lay on the other side. After a moment more, he turned to look up at Carth. "We still don't know what we're going to find in there. It's not going to be like anything you've encountered before, and definitely nothing like what you're expecting."
What Carth was expecting was the end of all this. One way or another.
"It might not be anything like what you and she encountered on Chael either," he pointed out. "Let's keep an open mind here."
His son cocked an eyebrow. "I am. And I'm ready for the possibility that this might go from being a rescue to a euthanization."
The word made the twisting in Carth's gut (constant and churning since Remli Prime) that much tighter. "I'm ready for that too." And I'm not going to let it happen.
Dustil sighed and shook his head, standing up and putting his arm through the other side of his robe. "Sure you are."
A little bit of cynicism he could take. Paranoia he could even sympathize with. Complete pessimism just made Carth irritated. "We're here now, Dustil. It's a little late to be telling me to get prepared."
His son scoffed. "There's no way to prepare for the Sith, Father. Trust me, I took tests and classes and everything."
"Helpful," Carth muttered, loading both blasters into their holsters.
"Just…whatever we see in there, think twice about it, all right?"
The whole reason they were here was because he'd thought twice about things. Twice about trusting people, and then twice about shutting everybody out. Twice about losing his son, and then twice about whether he'd really gotten him back or not.
Twice about Katrina— Revan, the former Sith Lord who couldn't remember setting events in motion that led to the destruction of Telos and Morgana's death.
"Don't think about Mom." Dustil's voice was harsh, directive. "I told you that."
"Why? What does your mother have to do with any of this?"
"Because I can tell you're thinking about her," his son snapped. "And if I can tell, they can tell. And if they can tell…" He shook his head again. "They'll use her, Father. They'll use her against you, to make you do things and think things that you would never…"
He trailed off into his lightsaber, which he held under his chin for a moment while he tucked in his shirt.
"Dustil—" His son wasn't making sense, and Carth didn't understand, and not understanding was making him tense at a time when he needed to be as focused as possible. "Look, I'll keep my mouth shut and my blasters up and follow your lead, all right? I know I don't have the Force and I haven't seen what the Sith can do like you and the other Jedi have. I don't know what happened to you on Korriban—"
"This isn't like Korriban. Master Uthar and Master Yuthura could fry me or strangle me as much as they wanted and it still wouldn't have changed what I thought or what I remembered." He stepped past Carth, reaching for the tangled belt of supplies and tools lying on the floor and picking what he thought he needed out of it.
The thought of anyone frying or strangling Dustil tempered Carth's impatience, but only for a moment. "Then what the hell are you so worried about?"
"Because these Sith can. They don't have to hurt you or threaten to hurt anyone you care about. They make you believe they did. They make you believe you—"
His son straightened up, standing motionless with his back to the brown and black landscape outside of the window. Then his head turned and he stared over his shoulder at Carth
"Don't think about Mom." His voice held everything Carth thought he'd been carrying alone. "Because they can kill her again, Father. They can make the Sith do it. They can make the Jedi do it. They can make Revan or me or even—"
The way Dustil's head quickly turned away to face the nav screens, the way his eyes broke contact with Carth's on the word 'even' made it clear who he'd watched kill his mother.
A thin cloud of white dust and ash floated around him, remnants of an imploded building whose remains were lying all over the courtyard. Most of the largest pieces of wall and floor had broken up upon hitting the ground into much smaller ones, and it was something like a quicksand as Carth climbed over them.
Have to get home, have to find Morgana, have to find Dustil-
Every time he thought he saw the spot where their house had been, it turned out to be the scattered ruins of another. Personal effects were strewn among the rubble. He could hear random commands being shouted from one member of his task force to the other, but Carth kept going, and eventually the voices died down.
When he finally rounded the corner it was eerily silent except for the sound of his own panting and his boots stamping across the dust and debris. Something cracked under his foot, and he bent to inspect it.
He recognized his own face flickering in the broken holocube. Morgana and Dustil's faces were spotty blurs around its cracked screen. Carth looked up at the mountain of steel and plaster before him and recognized the empty shell of their living room; the cratered pit of their bedroom. Something caught in his throat.
Have to find Morgana, have to find Dustil-
As he struggled to work it out, he noticed a thin human hand lying flat and motionless atop the piles of crumbling foundation and half-standing walls that had once formed a line of homes.
It looked so emaciated that at first he thought it belonged to a skeleton or a decomposing body. It wasn't until the glint of the small metal ring around one of the fingers caught his eye that he realized the body wasn't skeletal. It wasn't decomposing either.
Carth raced over through the chalky clouds, digging frantically through the rocks. Her eyes were what he uncovered first, though her long hair was tangled and strewn across them; blue eyes that were dull and pale like the thick white soot on the rocks around him. Dried blood and dirt caked her neck and half of her face.
Carth finally managed to pull the last of the rocks off of her upper body, trembling hands pulling the hair off of her dirty cheeks.
Have to find Morgana-
He had found her. Her eyes were closed and she wasn't moving.
"No, no," he choked as he frantically began digging again, tossing rocks he hadn't known he had the strength to lift over his shoulders like pebbles.
"Medic!" he screamed, hearing his voice echo worthlessly against the ruins of the colony. "I need a medic here now!"
He had cleared everything off her upper body, but her lower- he gulped, trying not to become queasy, though he had never seen anything remotely this bloody even on the battlefield.
The large pieces of their home, pieces he recognized to be that of the walls to Dustil's room- I should have torn that wall down years ago, he thought, a sudden irrational hatred for everything material that had been destroyed or blown up coming over him- that wall that hadn't managed to crack into smaller pieces had crushed Morgana's legs. Dark splotches of blood seeping out from under the boulder were the only indication that any legs had once been under the immovable rock at all.
Carth leaned over her, touching her bruised cheeks gingerly, running his fingers through her tangled hair and pulling them out filthy and bloody. He half-thought he imagined it when she stirred, groaning softly, blinking a few times like that might clear the dust and filth from her eyes.
"Morgana…" He grasped her wrist, trying to massage the cold hand back into life.
It was only then, only as he was still holding onto her hand- so thin and frail, like his son's had been when he was a baby rather than a grown woman's- that he realized he was too late.
"Dustil—" The very idea of himself killing Morgana was almost as unfathomable as Dustil having seen it and—even if only for a moment—believed it was true.
"And it'll look real," Dustil finally continued, looking up again. "It'll look so real that you'll think it happened even though you know you would never do what you're watching yourself doing. You'll start to wonder if that's actually what you did and you just don't remember."
Carth swallowed. "That's not what I did. That's not what happened." Though it had felt like it in the months and years to follow.
"I know. It's hard to remember that when you're watching it happen in front of you like you're in a sim-vid, though." His son cleared his throat, running his hand back through his hair to hide a quick pass at his eyes. "So don't think about her. Don't think about anything you care about. Sith don't respect things like that. It gets in the way of being a Sith."
It was the first time his son had ever spoken of something the Sith had done without Carth wondering if Dustil had done it too. He didn't need to wonder— he was his mother's son.
He reached out and gripped Dustil's shoulder, squeezing tightly enough that it probably hurt. "We'll stop them, Dustil. We won't let them reach the Republic. They'll never have a chance to do that to anyone else."
"Right." His son nodded grimly. "Just don't let yourself become their last gunla pig."
"So, should I be packing anything special for this trip?" Mira asked, slipping her wrist-launcher over her wrist and flexing her fingers against the leather. "Biochemical ordinance, melee weapons, a bikini?"
"As long as you keep your eyes and ears open, we should be fine," Sarii replied, trying to find a place to store her lightsaber on her armor. "And don't believe everything you see."
Whether Mira or anyone else would be watching Revan closely wasn't really that important. Sarii was ready to shoot if the Dark Lord had so much as a patch of pale skin.
"What is it you expect to see, Master?" Mical asked, glancing up from where he stood near the doorway, already suited up and ready to go. "Or not to see?"
Sarii finally found a spot on her belt to fasten her saber. The click was satisfying. "Revan, Mical. One way or another."
Admiral Onasi and his son were already waiting in the Ebon Hawk's main hold when they got there. Atton was slouching in one of the chairs, his hands folded behind his head and his legs stretched out and crossed in front of him.
"Good." The Admiral cleared his throat. "Let's get started." He loaded a datapad into the center display console. After a moment of buzzing, it began to emit what looked like a hastily compiled display from the Chaser's sensors and nav maps.
"We know there's a large complex on the other side of this rock formation," Admiral Onasi began, tracing the flickering outline of the formation with his finger. "There are a few ships docked in isolation at points around the complex, but we can't get a reading on any of their signatures."
"So what you're saying is we don't really know if Revan's here or not," Atton murmured.
Onasi narrowed his eyes at the pilot but ignored him. "The heat sensors aren't picking up any organic guards or patrolmen around the complex, but we'll have to keep our eyes open for droids, or anything else that might not come up on the scanners."
Mira's arms were folded under one incredulously lifted eyebrow. "We're just going to storm the castle, then? A castle full of mysterious, powerful Sith?"
"No, we're going to scout out the layout and defenses of the complex and then make our next move," Dustil Onasi answered. "Either way, I doubt they're going to answer if we knock."
"I didn't come out here for a suicide mission," the Admiral added. "If push comes to shove, I'll go in after her myself. I won't force any of you to risk your lives for something that's not important to you."
Sarii had to resist the urge to look away when his gaze landed on her.
"I think protecting the galaxy from being enslaved by hypnotized, backwards Sith who call themselves Jedi is in everybody's best interests," Atton said, finally unfolding his legs and rising to his feet, stretching his arms behind his head. He removed his blasters from their holsters and flipped each once in the hand before replacing them. "So, shouldn't we get moving before we lose daylight? Or the cover of night, or whatever time of day a brown sky means?"
The tunnels and valleys through and around the rock formations weren't guarded by any droids, but they were infested with plenty of kinrath. Sarii didn't really mind. It was easier not thinking of what lay ahead when you were preoccupied with what was in front of you.
"Perhaps kinrath are originally from the Unknown Regions as well," Mical said conversationally, stabbing a kinrath cleanly through its middle and stepping over it. "Origination on Verte might explain their hostile nature."
Mira side-stepped a kinrath's stabbing arm and blasted it twice in the head. "Yeah, well, I think it's a little short-sighted to assume that everything mean and nasty comes from the Sith."
Atton was trailing behind the rest of them along with Dustil Onasi, who kept his eyes straight ahead and swung his lightsaber out occasionally to take down a kinrath without even looking.
"She's right," the pilot added. "Mean and nasty things come in all sorts of packaging. If you're the kind of person who thinks mean and nasty is a permanent, constant state of being."
This time, Sarii resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder at him, afraid to see what kind of probably-true accusation might be in his eyes.
Can he blame me? Would anyone blame me?
You would not question your feelings towards Atton Rand if you did not in some way find them unjustified. Kavar's voice was muted on Verte, an echo in her head rather than a voice.
Which feelings those were—revulsion at his past or undeniable attraction—Sarii decided not to think about right now.
Mical hissed and bit his tongue on a curse as he took a wrong step into a large puddle of black liquid. Someone behind her stifled a laugh.
"Verte is an unknown world," her Padawan shot back over his shoulder. "This material may be abrasive or poisonous, for all we know."
"I think it's just water, Mical," Admiral Onasi replied, making no attempt to hide his grin.
For some reason, his and anyone else's mirth irritated Sarii. Mical was the only one who seemed to realize the seriousness of the situation ahead. The potential danger of what they might find. The inevitability of what they would find, eventually—
Just around the next bend, Sarii could make out a faint whirring sound not unlike a patrolling assault drone floating through the air. She held her hand up to the party behind her, lifting her lightsaber and waiting for whatever it was to round the corner.
The whirring turned into the sound of mechanical joints struggling to bend. The echo of a single syllable being repeated over and over began to echo throughout the cavern. "Wel-wel-wel-wel…"
A sparking, badly damaged protocol droid emerged, crawling on one arm and pushing itself with two half-legs. Sarii lowered her lightsaber.
"At least it's not HK," Dustil said, stepping past all of them to inspect the droid.
His father sighed, flipping his blaster back into its holster. "I think I might have preferred that."
The droid's voice went up and down in pitch as Dustil fiddled with the exposed wiring in its head. Mira stood over him with her assault rifle resting across her shoulder. "Bao-Dur would have had this thing walking with a spring in its step if he were here," she murmured, glancing up at Sarii with a sad smile.
"Who's Bao-Dur?" Dustil asked, turning his head to the side to avoid a slight spray of oil.
"Our engineer," Mical murmured.
"He died on Malachor," Sarii added. "When the Ebon Hawk crash-landed."
It took a moment longer for the awkwardness of the silence that followed to hit Sarii than it had for the others.
"Geeze, is all you can mention the times the Hawk crashed while I was flying it?" Atton finally grumbled.
The droid's one lone eye grew intensely bright for a moment and then grew dim again.
Dustil shook his head and twisted another cord. "This thing needs to be put out of its misery."
"I know a Jawa who probably would have liked the chance to fix it too," Admiral Onasi murmured, glancing across the cavern at Mira.
"A Jawa?" the bounty hunter repeated.
"My daughter," the Admiral answered. "Our daughter, actually. Her name's Celyn. She's five…well, I guess six in another month or so."
"Revan's got a kid?"
So she's breeding now, Sarii thought moodily. Force help that child, she's probably screwed up beyond belief-
"There was no one else to take her, so I had to leave her in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. I hope she doesn't hate me too much for it."
Mira smirked. "I don't suppose you're one of those average fathers with a holo in their back pocket? You know, the Admiral kind who regularly goes on hunts for former Sith Lords in uncharted regions—"
The Admiral sheepishly pulled out a small holocube from the pouch on the side of his belt.
"It goes with me during stints on the Sojourn. I didn't see any reason to stop that practice on this trip."
A pretty little girl with Onasi's brown eyes and Dustil's tapered chin grinned in delight as she spun around on the Admiral's palm. She looked about three or four in the recorded holocube projection.
"Celyn," a woman's voice laughed. "Stop spinning around and hold still—"
Revan. That's Revan's voice.
Celyn and her bouncing brown curls (the hair was Revan's; Sarii remembered her braid swinging back and forth down the halls of the Jedi Temple, the loose strands of hair that popped free and curled around the Jedi's neck) ran straight up to the holocamera, giggling until the recording ended and the little girl's image dissolved back into the holocube.
"She's…adorable," Sarii managed to offer politely.
Onasi snorted, narrowing his eyes at her as he tucked the holocube back into his pouch.
"You sound pretty surprised. Did you think any kids she'd have would turn out deformed and twisted with two heads or something?"
The heat on her face was enough to make Sarii grateful for the darkness of the cave. Then neither Mira nor the Admiral could see her furious blushing.
The droid at their feet twitched suddenly, and the repeated syllable jolted into a full sentence. "S-statement: my master requires the information contained in your otherwise useless central processor. Prepare to be sh-shut down—"
All of the droid's joints went stiff and rigid for a moment, and then collapsed lifeless to the floor, his one eye now dark and off-line.
Admiral Onasi sighed. "Be careful what I wish for."
Dustil pushed himself up from kneeling over the droid, wiping his hands on his pants. "Hey, at least this means HK's been taking care of himself, which probably means he's been taking care of Revan."
"This droid looks far less like an HK droid and far more like an HK droid attacked it," Mical pointed out.
Sarii nodded. "With Revan and HK together again, that sounds about right." She turned and started walking towards the end of the tunnel.
The aggravated noise forced through the Admiral's closed mouth and nostrils told her she hadn't said it casually or quietly enough.
"Listen, Sarii," Onasi snapped, catching up to her. His blatant informality almost stung. "I'm getting pretty sick and tired of this—"
"Sick and tired of this? Of what? Having someone around who's fought in her war? Having someone around that hasn't conveniently forgotten what she did to the galaxy—"
"You think I don't know what she did?" The Admiral's memories hit Sarii like a tidal wave and she physically stumbled. "You think I don't know that she turned trusted men over to her side, practically crushed the Republic, destroyed Telos and… and killed innocent people?"
His eyes were hard like the black and brown rock that surrounded them.
"I know, Master Jedi," Onasi finished tiredly. "But…she and I…we've started our lives over together, we have Celyn and Dustil and Telos…and all I want to do is bring her back and fix it."
He sighed with the weight of the Republic and a lifetime of sorrow Sarii knew even her deepest pain couldn't touch.
"I'm just trying to put my family back together, Sarii. I'm not going to fail them again."
He turned his back on her and continued ahead, past a few tall moss-green tree trunks standing outside the end of the tunnel.
Sarii followed, trying to maintain equal distance between the Admiral and her Padawan, trailing in her peripheral vision. Neither option—walking sheepishly next to someone she'd wronged or self-righteously next to someone she was supposed to be an example for—was appealing. Maybe falling back next to Atton was where she belonged, as long as she couldn't find a compromise between hate and who to direct it at—
She very nearly collided with Onasi's raised hand, indicating to the rest of them to stop. He pointed up ahead to where the valley between the rock formations they were traveling down broke into flat, open plain. More important than the plain was what it revealed—the Sith complex.
Together they crept down the path until the valley ended and the plain began, exposing a large docking platform bordered on two sides by an immense but otherwise nondescript structure. There were no windows, balconies, or outside access points to be seen.
After barely a moment's pause, Admiral Onasi began to head towards the complex
"Perhaps any entrances or exits are located elsewhere," Mical called after him, in as loud a whisper as possible. "They may not even have traditional doors, if they really are an entirely different species—"
Dustil Onasi brushed past him, following his father. Sarii finally noticed a small ship, only slightly larger than a fighter, sitting at the far corner of the docking platform.
"Must be Revan's ship," Mira said, hefting her assault rifle in her hands and starting after them.
"Must that mean we go running towards it like its open season on non-Sith?" Atton added mockingly, sighing and motioning to Sarii with his chin to go ahead of him.
No alarms or sirens went off when they reached the platform, and no one appeared to greet them once they neared the ship, which sat uncomfortably close to the building. The gangplank was down already, as if inviting them to board.
Maybe it's a trap. Revan's good with traps—
The Admiral stopped, lifting his blasters and moving to stand along the hull of the ship. His son crept to the other side, each inching closer to the gangplank. Sarii, Mical, Atton and Mira surrounded the entryway.
Onasi peered around the hull and up the gangplank. Sarii couldn't make out anything inside, except a faint glow as if someone had left a few cabin lights on. That was apparently enough for the Admiral, who nodded across the way to his son and then strode up the gangplank. Sarii let the others go ahead of her before finally following.
The ship was as small on the inside as it looked on the outside, with only a cockpit and a small open space leading to the engine room, a door to what was probably a 'fresher or a cabin, and the lowered gangplank. A few computer screens were still on, but other than that the ship looked deserted.
"Katrina?" Onasi called. There was no answer.
"Maybe we should check out the ship's systems," Dustil said. "She might have made some logs, or the nav screens will show us where else she's been."
"Maybe this is a trap and a whole armada of creepy crawly Sith are waiting for us down at the other end of the gangplank—"
"Shh," Mira hissed, interrupting Atton. There was a muffled noise from the engine room, following by whirring that grew louder and louder by the second.
Onasi, Mira, and Atton lifted their blasters. Mical, Dustil, and Sarii extended their lightsabers.
A pair of droid legs emerged out of the darkness of the engine room's doorway. They were followed by the rest of T3, who immediately backed up into the wall behind him with a series of startled beeps at the sight of their drawn weapons.
"T3." The Admiral didn't sound very relieved.
"Frack, announce yourself next time," Mira said, lowering her wrist-launcher.
The droid made an indignant series of noises indicating that he had been in the middle of a self-diagnostic and repair.
"Well, sorry to disturb you," Dustil Onasi replied, one side of his mouth lifted. "Not like you're doing anything important out here that we need to know about."
"Where's the hunter-killer droid?" Atton asked, looking around warily.
"Where's Revan, for that matter?" Mical added.
"I programmed you to follow her," Carth Onasi told T3, whose domed top was spinning from turning to acknowledge each speaker. "Where is she?"
It was a full minute before the droid finished beeping his reply.
"He says Revan began shutting him down when she became aware he was attempting to follow her," her Padawan translated. "She leaves the ship each morning at a prescribed hour accompanied by HK and returns each evening at around the same time. Last evening, however, she did not return."
The Admiral was silent for a moment. "Do you know how she gets into the complex? Have you seen whoever's inside? Has she or HK said or told you anything about what goes on in there?"
T3 shook his head mournfully, speaking in beeps and buzzes again.
"If she has encrypted whatever information she has been gathering, it is unlikely we would be able to open it within an acceptable window of time," Mical said. "We would need privacy to decode it at our leisure."
"Or Revan to give us the code herself," Mira added. "Straight from the hessi's mouth is always better than backhanded from the donkey's hoof."
"We could just, I don't know, wait for her to come back," Atton said, plopping himself down in the pilot's chair. "Sounds like a little more stable of a plan then trying to find an entrance to a building that doesn't look like it has any, or walking blind into a fight with enemies we don't know anything about."
Onasi ran a hand through his hair. "T3, you said last night Katrina didn't come back. Has that ever happened before?"
The droid beeped a negative reply.
"What is she like when she comes back out of there? Are they hurting her?"
There was a pause uncharacteristic to a droid before T3 answered.
"She appears tired," Mical repeated. "Exhausted and…different, somehow. His language is difficult to read."
The droid had trailed off in code and noise too hurried and high pitched for anyone to follow. The way the rest of him didn't seem quite as agitated made Sarii think T3 knew more than he was telling.
"We need to get inside and find her," Onasi said, looking up at them.
"Without knowing how many are inside? Without knowing what they're capable of?" Atton rolled his eyes. "Wow, sir, you really are one of the brilliant strategists I always knew made up the Republic brass."
"No one's asking you to come, Rand," Dustil replied.
"And even if you were, I'm still not entirely convinced I want to start sticking my neck out for you—"
"Slow down, boys," Mira interrupted, putting her hands up. "Let's think this thing through. We can't all go barging in there. At least one gun and one Jedi should stay out here in case the Sith don't exactly welcome us. As much as I love a good party, I'm happy to sit this one out. Unless you want to stay behind, Rand." She cocked an eyebrow at him. "You sound a little scared."
The pilot snorted. "I'm not scared, I'm smart. There's a difference. I'll go."
Admiral Onasi nodded. "Mical? Sarii?"
Sarii knew the right answer, the answer a Jedi who truly lived by the ideals of no emotion and redemption for all would give. She knew her responsibility on this mission: to gather information and intelligence on a potential Sith threat to Republic space. To do that required her to actually observe and interact with that Sith threat, regardless of whether it might include helping Revan— or fighting her.
But still, her mouth refused to move.
"Mical's got Republic Intel experience," Atton finally said. "Think you're up for another information-gathering expedition?"
"I'm here as a Jedi Padawan, not as an intelligence officer," Mical answered, but he glanced sideways at her. I will follow your instructions, Master.
It took barely a moment for Sarii to make her choice.
"He's right, Mical," she replied. "You'd write a better report than I ever could. Go with them."
Her Padawan nodded, looking at the Onasis expectantly.
"We're not going to hang around in there any longer than it takes to find Katrina," the Admiral said, crossing to the cockpit's control panel and hitting a few buttons. "Use the ship's sensors to track us, and give us a warning on the comm if you see anything coming our way."
He removed his blasters, glancing at his son, who returned the quick nod and lead the way down the gangplank. The Admiral and Mical followed, and Atton shrugged his eyebrows at Sarii and Mira before heading out of the ship.
"Good luck," Sarii called after them.
"The boys on their way to fight, and the girls left at home to watch the droids and the ship." Mira snorted. "And they say chivalry is dead."
It was an almost embarrassingly short amount of time before they were captured.
Carth was too busy hating himself to be embarrassed. He should have known, from the way an entrance magically appeared and opened for them. An open door policy at your enemy's stronghold fairly screamed trap.
He saw them coming before Mira and Sarii did, and he silenced the comm rather than alert the surprisingly human guards who, after a short firefight, surrounded them and took their weapons without saying a word.
To him, anyway. The color had drained from Dustil's face despite the stubborn rigidity of his features. Mical looked like he was concentrating hard on something. None of Atton's protests or quips got any verbal reaction as the three men were led away, separated from Carth.
He struggled to remind himself that if they were going to kill them, they would have done it already. A voice he was trying desperately to silence in his head told him there were worse things for Jedi than death.
He tried to keep an eye out for Katrina or HK as the Sith marched him past glossy black hallway after glossy black hallway, but there wasn't a soul in sight, except for the octet escorting him to wherever was their final destination.
There hadn't been any other option. Katrina was in here, somewhere, and she hadn't come out for at least a day. Carth wasn't about to wait and see what "different" meant if he could help it.
Still, if you were going to go on a suicide mission, you didn't have to bring your son and two other people, did you, old man?
The guards stopped in front of what looked to Carth like a wall of black rock. To his surprise, the guards walked straight at it, as if it wasn't there. He blinked and jerked under their grip right when he thought he was about to hit it, but when his eyes opened again they were in a large room.
Must be a hologram, or a force field disguised somehow—
There wasn't time to think about it. In front of him stood a dozen tall, dark red-skinned creatures with elongated limbs and facial features. These were the Sith. The true Sith.
Several of them wore robes or cloaks that covered their faces, so Carth could only assume they were the same species as the ones with exposed heads from their height and body shape. One completed cloaked figure was shorter than the others, but no less imposing or silent.
The guards in front of him parted and stepped back with the others.
"Admiral Onasi," the creature finally greeted. Its voice sounded male, with a slight hiss behind each word.
Dustil had said they were capable of things he couldn't imagine. They would take your memories, your thoughts, your words, and twist them to use against you.
Don't say anything, Carth told himself, glaring silently at them. Don't confirm their information, just let them think you're some unlucky spacer who crash-landed here—
"Strange that a Republic official has wandered so far from known space."
He didn't like this. Something didn't feel right, and years of life experience told him that it was more than the fact that he was in the middle of a Sith stronghold surrounded by their most powerful members.
The creature cocked his head to the side, studying Carth. He turned towards the other cloaked creatures around him as if consulting them with his gaze alone. He seemed to linger on the shorter one wearing the mask.
Don't say anything, don't think anything, just stand here and be quiet, be silent, be smart-
"Nevertheless, welcome, Admiral," the creature finished. "I believe we have something you've been looking for."
His head shot up. His jaw dropped before he could think of things like concealing his identity, protecting the Republic.
"Don't worry, Admiral. Your search wasn't in vain."
All of it fell flat against this new voice; a low, straightforward soprano even through the mask.
He recognized that stance easily now- the way she stood with her head slightly tilted downward, the way one hand barely grazed her lightsaber and the other lay flat at her side.
She made no move towards him; made no sign of greeting or surprise or any kind of emotional reaction. But he knew without words, without being able to see her face:
Revan the Dark Lord turned Jedi Master; Katrina the Consular with a green lightsaber; his wife, his daughter's mother, his son's Master- both of them, all of them, stood before him.
"Katrina?" Carth finally managed to sputter.
None of them reacted. It was unsettling. He felt like he should say it again.