"Hold still, kid," snipped Sprocket as he pinched the skin together and placed a thin strip of dermaseal across the deep cut above Corso's left brow. "I guess that about does it for now," the big man stepped back to admire his handiwork.

"Thanks," said Corso, sliding off the med table and slipping into his shirt, rotating his arm to test the bandage on his shoulder, another bit of Sprocket's doctoring. "Kriffing Justicar ambush. I hate it when they pull that shit."

"Ain't an ounce of honor in any of them," spat Sprocket. "You gonna join me and some of the guys for drinks and a game or two?"

"Naw. Gonna grab some food and go back to my room if it's all the same to you."

"Boy, you spend too much time on your own. This woman really did a job on you, but you can't pine away forever. It's been near a month since you left Rishi, you gotta move on sometime."

"I wouldn't know how even if I wanted to."

"Lots of pretty women around, and some have shown more than a passing interest. You may be a beast out on the streets, but if you don't feed that beast between yer legs, it'll shrink to the point you'll be sitting down to piss or back up and turn yer balls a permanent shade of blue."

"I can't rest my head in anyone else's softness. They're not her."

"Suit yourself, kid. Sounds like you shouldn't have been so quick to leave if she means that much to you."

"It don't matter. It's too late now anyway."

"Perhaps," said Sprocket. "But while you were stroking your misery in the middle of the night, did you ever ask yourself if maybe your hatred for this Skavak fella was greater than your love for her?"

"I reckon if that were so, I didn't deserve to love her in the first place," Corso countered, but in truth, old grievances and jealousy had been factors and not ones he was proud of. "Just drop it, okay?"

Something jostled Ky, a slight tremor beneath her back shook her body, and she groggily reached out for the man who should have been sleeping by her side. Her hand encountered cold, empty space and harsh reality crept up her arm to settle like a stone in her chest. Thick sludge sucked at her thoughts as her mind trudged upward from oblivion. Her eyes fluttered open, tried to focus, slammed shut against the blurry haze, and fluttered again. Parched and dry, her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and a cough tickled the back of her throat.

"Take your time," a female voice drifted to her from somewhere near.

Ky cracked her eyes open, thin slits adjusting to the light, widening little by little to hone in on the face that wavered like a mirage.

"Water," she croaked.

The face moved aside to be replaced by the metal visage of Rook, who lifted her head and placed the rim of a glass to her lips. "Easy, Mistress, not too much," he said and tipped the renewing refreshment into her mouth. It tasted faintly of salt with a hint of lemon and touch of sugar. "This should give you some strength," he said and set the glass on the nightstand.

"Better," Ky said and glanced around to see Skavak standing at the foot of the bed. "How long have I been out?"

"About four hours," answered Beryl.

"I'd have thought you guys would be out there sifting through the ruins by now," said Ky as she extended her arm to Rook to help her sit up.

"He refused to leave you until he knew you were okay," Beryl hitched her head toward Skavak.

"I just wanted to make sure the person we need to get us out of here was on the mend," he shrugged. "No point in reading more into it than that."

"I wasn't reading at all," said Ky.

Three hours later, Ky was on her feet and in the cargo bay along with Beryl and Skavak, preparing to debark and gather what they could. Suspensor sleds had been tethered together to carry the salvage, and filtration masks and goggles had been handed to each.

"The air is breathable," explained Beryl, "but the dust particulates will play hell with our eyes and lungs as well."

"Let's just get this over with," said Ky, staggering as another tremor reverberated through the ship's struts to the deck beneath her feet.

The hydraulics whined as the loading platform lowered them to the planet surface where Ky had landed the Happenstance about a half klick from the periphery of the settlement. Scant light from the system's yellow sun filtered through the haze that hung in an atmosphere made cooler by the dust cloud that swirled ceaselessly in the gusting wind. She noticed that part of the plateau ended in a jagged rim where a sizeable chunk appeared to have been ripped away.

"Well, that explains why the message said there was no escape," said Skavak as they peered over the side to the wreckage far below. "Horrible feeling being trapped like that. Let's move on to the city."

Round towers that had once stood as barbicans on either side of the city gate now lay open to the elements, half the walls lying in rubble. Domed houses cracked open like eggshells lined the streets, rusted speeders and busted crates littered the yards. A sign that had broken loose from the front of a shop creaked on its single remaining bolt and tilted streetlamps lined the thoroughfare, their light extinguished forever. A child's toy lay forlorn on the threshold of a home in ruins.

"Where are all the people?" asked Ky. "There's no sign, not even a skull or bone."

"I suspect we'll find the answer there," said Skavak, pointing to a once imposing structure, now diminished to a leaning stack of stucco and stone.

The temple, meeting hall, seat of government, whatever the building's original designation sat at the end of the avenue. Half the roof had caved in, and most of the outer walls had tumbled away. Sheets of flimsi, caught under fallen rafters wagged in the wind, chairs and benches lay crushed on one side of the enormous room and stood in crooked rows on the other.

They picked their way carefully through the clutter of the collapsed side of the building, dragging the sleds behind. They'd opted to stay out from under the part of the roof still intact that groaned and squeaked high above their heads. A podium stood at the far end of the room with a broken altar behind, the top canted at an angle sloping into the floor.

"Help me clear some of this," said Skavak, noticing a steep stairway leading down from under where the altar rested.

"We won't get anything of size up through that opening," observed Beryl.

Ky gave Skavak the stink eye as soon as he started to open his mouth. "Don't even think about saying what I think you were going to say."

"Hey, I wasn't the one who brought up size," he chuckled, then removed a satchel from one of the sleds, lit his glow stick and set his foot on the first step. "After me, ladies."

The dust of ages lay on the steps and cobwebs stuck in their hair and on their fingers as they swept the gauzy veils aside. Bits of rock and pebbles strewn about made the descent slow, and every time the ground shook, more fell from the ceiling forcing them to instinctively crouch and cover their heads. Particulate motes swarmed in the beams of the glow sticks, specks of things long dead, detritus of a dying world. The steady plink of dripping water echoed from below and a musty smell tinged with mold grew more pungent the lower they went.

A hingeless, lockless metal door greeted them at the bottom of the steps, a recessed pull the only way of sliding it open or closed, and the door wouldn't budge.

"Looks like an old ship hatch and bolted from the inside," said Skavak. "Lucky I brought this along."

He removed a cutting torch from the satchel. "If you two would kindly provide some light, I'll get to work."

Ky's back hurt and the heat from the cutting torch mixed with the humidity made the small space feel like a sauna. Sweat trickled down her face, and she shuffled impatiently from foot to foot. It didn't help that her eyes kept dragging themselves to Skavak's back and shoulders where the sweat of his labor had adhered his shirt to muscles that writhed and bunched and practically screamed to be touched.

"Damn!"

"Finally!" said Skavak when something came loose on the other side of the door and swung downward with the screeching of metal on metal. He snuffed the torch and took a crowbar out of the satchel, placed it into the hole and pushed just enough to move the door away from the jamb. Prying the door further, he got situated and pushed with both arms.

Air, thick with centuries-old decay, whooshed through the opened door, and Ky gagged as if she'd just inhaled the dying breath of every corpse in the room. Skeletons littered the floor from those the size of fully grown men to children, most entwined in grisly hugs of comfort, a few bony hands still holding cups.

"Makers balls," gasped Ky. "All of them dead. Some sort of mass suicide."

"Looks like it," said Skavak, and cleared his throat. "I'm not here to mourn the dead but to take their stuff, and we need to get to it before we share their fate."

"Have some fucking respect," snapped Ky.

"Hey, sweetheart, you can't lay this on me. They saw no future and took the easy way out, can't say I blame them. It's a hell of a lot faster and more humane than starvation, especially for the little ones. Go to sleep, don't wake up. There are worse ways to go. Now shall we get our stuff and blow this rock or you want to hold some sort of vigil?"

"You are such a bastard," Ky retorted.

"Maybe, but I'm a live bastard, and I'd like to keep it that way."

Skavak pulled two scrunched up satchels out of his bag and threw one to Ky and the other to Beryl. "Load up, ladies, times a-wastin'."

Ky took stock of her surroundings while Skavak and Beryl eased their way through the bones to a raised section with several chests and another altar flanked by two stone statues. Both wore robes, one tall with the features of a Chiss, the other shorter with the visage of a bearded human and much too large to have come through any narrow opening.

Although the walls were carved from the bedrock of the planet, the ceiling was durasteel plating supported by rafters of the same material. "They dug this out and erected the building on top once those statues were in place," stated Ky.

"Yeah, I noticed that," said Beryl. "One thing for sure, those statues won't be leaving."

"No, but these will," said Skavak and held up a smaller version of each before placing them into his bag.

Several beautifully detailed tapestries hung from the side walls and pedestals held bowls cast of solid aurodium, a ball carved with the topography of the planet, a mother and child statuette, an intricately inscribed astrolabe encrusted with gems.

'Corso would not approve,' Ky thought, then cast her melancholy aside to get down to more practical endeavors. She shook out the bag and threaded her way past the dead to begin plundering this tomb of the forgotten. She worked her way down the wall toward the last pedestal which held a faintly glowing polyhedron, a Jedi Holocron.

She picked it up, and a biting tingle played along her fingers as if it were repulsed by her touch. "What the hell is a Jedi Holocron doing here?" she said before placing it into the bag.

"The Jedi will pay a pretty sum for that," answered Skavak. "Remind me to tell you about Master Maanak Tuul when we get back to the ship."

"You seem to know a lot," said Ky.

"I know people, and they talk with the right incentive," he replied.

Ky drug a chair over and began unhooking the tapestries from the wall, folding each carefully and laying them aside before heading back to the stairs to fetch another bag from the sleds above.

"There has to be more than this," grumbled Skavak as he opened another chest filled with various medium of data storage, from datapads to binders filled with sheets of handwritten flimsi.

"Maybe the Rommi treasure is knowledge and written accounts of history," said Ky as she reentered the room. "Not everything has a purely monetary value."

"Everything is worth something to someone, but the legend tells of much more. Relics, artwork, precious metals and gems, even stacks of credits. We have to be missing something."

Another tremor shook the room, reminding them that the planet was impatient to attend to its own business and their timetable was irrelevant.

"Something shifted behind this wall hanging," said Beryl, pushing the tapestry aside to reveal a partially exposed lock panel with a keypad. She removed her slicing kit from her belt, pried off the keypad casing and attached a data spike to the exposed nodes before attaching her datapad to the spike. "This may take a while, so why don't you two take a break."

Skavak pulled a silver flask from his back pocket, took a sip and handed it to Ky. "This might put some color back in your cheeks," he said.

"You wouldn't happen to have a picnic basket in there too," she said.

"Naw. My basket of goodies is more up front." The corners of his eyes crinkled mockingly as he met her gaze.

"You really are full of yourself," Ky scoffed. "Why don't you tell me about this Maanak Tuul if you can pull yourself away from self-worship for a bit."

Skavak winked and leaned against the altar. "I'd rather have you full of me, but, I guess I can settle for telling you a story instead." He folded his arms across his chest and began. "Over three hundred years ago, House Rommi vehemently debated the Chiss Parliament to open their borders to the outside to establish trade and exchange ideas. He was gaining traction and attracting followers. Rommi also, secretly, created a haven for force-sensitives. Then, as now, force users are considered illogical, chaotic beings who do not conform and either faced exile or execution. Nan'Patha'Rommi's son had been born force-sensitive. You can understand his predicament."

Ky nodded, and he continued. "He'd secreted away vast sums of currency and even stolen many artifacts and writings from the early days of the Chiss, which indicated that they had originated from a lost human colonization party. I guess he figured common ancestry might help open doors and not make them appear so alien. Something that the Ascendancy would rather not be verified by outsiders. There is safety in absolute segregation, and they will pay handsomely to recover this data."

"And this Tuul fellow. Where does he come in?" asked Ky.

"Maanak Tuul believed that a unified force was stronger than the sum of its parts. Neither light nor dark, he adhered to the philosophy of a combination of both. The Jedi shunned him as being a radical heretic, and when they found out that he had been secretly communicating with the Sith, they tried to imprison him. He fled into wild space, drawn by something he didn't understand until he landed on the moon where Rommi's sanctuary for his son and other force-sensitives was located. He became a religious leader, of sorts. It's even rumored he married a Chiss woman."

"So how did they end up here?" Ky prodded.

"Rommi's wife betrayed him to the Ascendancy in return for assurances that her family's name would be restored and their daughter would be admitted into the military academy with honor. Family honor is everything to the Chiss. Rommi was warned and escaped with the help of his followers and had barely left the moon in a transport carrying his son, his people and Tuul when the military chased them into the Redoubt. I suppose they were left no option but to enter the Eidolon, and this," he fanned his arm out to encompass the room's grisly occupants, "is the sad ending to their tale."

"And they were here for over a hundred years before that message went out? They accomplished a lot in that time."

"You get enough force users together with one goal in mind, and they can move mountains," said Skavak.

"But they couldn't save themselves." Ky shook her head.

"Ironic isn't it?"

"More like tragic, but where are the rest of them? There are no more than thirty, maybe forty people in this room."

"Door's open," said Beryl. "Perhaps we'll find out more in here."

A low whistle escaped Skavak's lips as they stepped into the adjoining chamber. "Now that's what I'm talkin' about."

The floor rocked beneath them, cargo crates jumped, their contents clinking and rattling. "We need to load as much as we can and get out of here," said Beryl. "Those tremors are closer together and getting stronger."

They spent the next two hours toting crates up the steps to the sleds above, taking only brief breaks to drink water and catch their breath. The contents of those too heavy to lift were broken down into smaller crates, many they didn't even open, and the work continued until a low rumble rolled through the rock and a crack snaked across one wall. The fissure shifted, and water began seeping into the room darkening the floor in an ever-expanding stain.

"We need to go," said Skavak.

"Not before I take a look in there," said Ky, nodding toward an arched opening at the far end of the room. "I have to know what happened to the others and something in there is calling, I can't ignore it any longer."

Beyond the arch lay a gaping cavern, the depths like pitch slathered across a midnight sky. Here and there, the light from Ky's glow stick reflected off crystals, and on the floor chalky white bones scrawled the epitaph of lost people and dead hope.

"There must be hundreds, maybe a thousand," she sighed, her voice returning in whispered echoes that crawled like insects down her spine.

Off to the right apart from the others, a single skeleton sat, back supported by a stalagmite, robes decayed to rags and arms akimbo as if surrendering to the final great mystery. The beam from Ky's glow stick twinkled off the hilt of a lightsaber not far from one outstretched bony hand and reflected back from a medallion lying against an alabaster sternum. The silken cord had frayed in spots, and the sigil seemed familiar though she couldn't tell from where. She knelt and picked up the lightsaber then reached to grasp the medallion that alternated between the warmth of the sands of Rishi and burning cold as if she held ice in her fingers for too long.

"Hey," a voice came from behind her, and she started at the abrupt intrusion into wherever the hell she'd just been. The memory of a face, eyes black as cinders, breath like charred meat began to fade in a swirling fog that dissipated when a hand closed on her elbow and dragged her to her feet. She wanted to leave the medallion but couldn't, and she was damned if she knew why.

"We gotta go," said Skavak and tugged her toward the archway, through the altar room, and up the steps. "You okay?" he stopped to survey her face in the fading light of day.

"Yeah, I'm fine," she brushed off his hand to help Beryl guide the sleds through the rubble and into the street.

The wind buffeted them as they made their way back to the Happenstance, the air chilled to the point of being uncomfortable and tremors rumbled under their feet. Rook lowered the platform, and they entered the ship, grateful for light and warmth and the promise of escape.

Ky stripped off the goggles and facemask and headed toward the cockpit. "Preflights will be done in five. Strap in, and let's get the hell off this rock."