There was no telling how large the inside of this underground laboratory was, and the stormtroopers of the empress' elite division spread through its corridors as they sought Darth Maladi. Without the Force to guide them there was no telling where their quarry lay, and Eli and the Jedi found themselves pulled with the flow down one branch in the hallways. Neither Gree nor automated defenses arose to stop them, and Eli was surprised they were progressing so easily. The stormtroopers guided them down a passage walled by bare red rock, then through a door into a chamber filled with large glass capsules, some broken, others intact and filled with sickly fluid and twisted flesh.
The troopers pressed through the nearest door to their right. Eli immediately recognized it as a library. High walls were lined with shelves, themselves littered with folded parchments, bound books, scrolls, and storage devices he didn't recognize. It took the troopers only a few seconds to determine this room was both a dead-end and free of hostiles. They quickly spun around and exited to continue the search for Maladi, but Eli, K'Kruhk, and Lowbacca lingered among the volumes.
"What is this place?" Eli asked, though he already had some idea. Some of the piled tomes looked absolutely ancient. These documents could contain knowledge from the earliest history of the Sith or older, if they were of Gree origin.
K'Kruhk looked over the nearest set of parchments and nodded confirmation. "These are written in no language I recognize. I believe it is an old Gree tongue…"
Eli did not understand Lowbacca's roar, but the Wookiee sounded impressed. Eli was too; he spun on one heel, taking in the centuries or millennia of knowledge piled up in this room. His head swam to think of the power they might unlock.
"Is it all in Gree?" he asked. "There have to be translations somewhere…"
Lowbacca roared again and waved a shaggy arm at once shelf. Eli saw a sealed contained an arm long, went to it, and opened the lid. Datacards, hundreds of them, all lined up in tight rows. He pulled out the first and saw an alpha-numeric indexing label slapped on one side.
"Translations," he said, and cradled the box against his chest. The wisdom here might contain anything, even the secret to regaining the Force.
Before either of the Jedi could step in and pry it from his untrustworthy hands, a stormtrooper darted back inside the room.
"Masters Jedi," the soldier announced, "We've found her. Follow me!"
The stormtroopers followed. Lowbacca and K'Kruhk hurried in his wake. Eli stood there for a second in the empty room, cradling treasures beyond his imagining. Once Maladi was captured or killed, the Jedi would surely come back looking for this knowledge. Eli put the box back on the shelf but grabbed fists of datacards. He stuffed them into the pockets of his trousers, as many as he could fit, then went back into the laboratory.
-{}-
Maladi's lightsaber plunged into her chest just inches from its center. Her face wrenched in pain as the blade angled through her back. As she tried to nudge it upward, cleave through her heart and trigger the baradium bomb lodged beneath them, Cade grabbed both her hands in a firm invisible Force-grip. Her face strained as she realized what was happening, and her eyes met his from across the room. Her rictus of pain turned into a smile; she knew that she'd already won.
Maladi was seconds away from dying. Her lightsaber shut down and rolled from hands too weak to grip, and then legs too weak to stand collapsed beneath her. Cade bounded toward her as she pitched onto the floor. He lunged, caught her with both arms as she fell, and they hit the grate together. He tried to lift her up, and their heads tilted close enough to kiss.
"You… never have… my knowledge…" Maladi creaked through bared teeth. "Never undo... what I've done…"
People were crowding around them; maybe Gunner and their mother, maybe stormtroopers or someone else. Cade didn't pay attention. He was already reaching into himself and calling on the power of dark healing he'd sworn never to use again. It was frighteningly easy to summon. If Maladi died here the baradium bomb would kill him, his mother and half-sister, Jariah and Deliah and other people he cared about. Even worse, it would vaporize Maladi's research, without which it could be impossible to undo the damage she'd wrought. All because Cade had been a second too slow in stopping her.
It he failed now, it would be the end of everything. Cade used the frustration boiling inside him to pull the power outward. Blue lightning sparked from his palms and dances across Maladi's wilting body, but even as he tried to mend the tears in her flesh he knew he simply didn't have the power. The tissue of her lungs was torn, the very walls of her heart scorched. It was all he could do to command the blood to pump through her veins.
There had always been limits to his healing. When he'd saved Deliah on Wayland that had been different; he'd cured her poisoned body on a molecular level by drawing on the light side of the Force, fueled by his love for her. He had none of that for Maladi and he could only use the dark side.
Cade looked up through blue corona enveloping their bodies. Gunner and Morrigan were there, staring down at him in shock. Stormtroopers stood behind him, half-filling the floor. He shouted, "Go! Get out of here! Now, damn it!"
Gunner didn't freeze under pressure. She spun on the stormtroopers and shouted, "Do it! Evacuate the facility! That's an order!"
"I don't know how long I can keep her alive…" Cade ground his teeth. "Mom… go!"
"No," she kneeled in front of him. Her green eyes pierced him as she said, "If this lab blows I'll die in twelve hours anyway. We need to disarm the bomb."
He wished they'd stop talking, wished they'd let him concentrate. "How in the hell do you plan to do that?"
"She said its beneath us." Gunner stamped the grate. "Skywalker, your lightsaber."
"I'm busy now!"
"I'll get it." Morrigan reached forward and pulled it from his belt.
Still cradling Maladi, still desperately trying to keep her alive, Cade watched his mother scan the room, run to one side, and shove aside a cabinet to reveal the top of a ladder leading down beneath the grate. Gripping the lightsaber in two hands, Morrigan turned it on and cut a hole through the grate big enough to fit through. She shut it off, leaned over, and powered down.
"I think I see it!" Morrigan called. "It's twenty, thirty meters down!"
"I'll go with you," Gunner said.
Morrigan shook her head and threw the lightsaber at her daughter. Gunner caught it against her chest. "I told you to go and this time you're going," Morrigan insisted.
They stared at each other across two meters' distance; then Gunner tossed something back to her mother: a small comlink. Then spun on the closest stormtrooper and said, "Where's your demo-man? Get him down here and send him after Agent Corde! Do it!"
As the stormtroopers relayed orders, Morrigan began to clamber down the ladder. Before her head ducked out of sight Cade called, "Mom! Wait!"
She froze there, and her face softened. "Take her out of here, Cade. Go."
Then she was gone. Cade wanted to climb down the ladder with her, wanted to tell her one last thing, he didn't know what, but he felt Maladi's heart start to tear and renewed his desperate healing. Around him, the last of the stormtroopers were charging up the corkscrew walkway and out of the chamber, all except the one who was running to help Morrigan. A few figures lingered at the walkway's base, watching him: Gunner, Jariah, Deliah, even Ania and Jao.
With that kind of audience he couldn't just tell them to leave him behind.
Maladi whispered in his hear, too soft for the others to hear, "It's too late… Skywalker… end this… together."
"Not on your life," Cade growled, and as he poured savage will into Maladi he pushed to his feet. Cradling her in his arms, he staggered for the path that spiraled upward.
-{}-
Morrigan descended the long ladder as fast as she could, all the while knowing the bomb beneath might blow at any second. She told herself she wouldn't even feel it if it went off; there's be just a split-second of atom-rending white, then nothing.
The red-walled shaft plunged even deeper beneath her, hundreds of meters. One slip of foot or hand and she was done. Each movement required concentration; though Maladi's delaying agent had calmed the poison in her blood, the symptoms still threatened her with nausea. Sometimes the world seemed to spin and she had to slow down, but she never stopped, not until she reached the bottom of the ladder and the grated platform that jutted out over the long drop.
She'd seen baradium warheads before, and this looked standard. The cylindrical capsule was about as long as her arm and wide in diameter as her head. Morrigan lay on her stomach, examined the weapon, and tried to remember how to disarm the damned thing. She marked the transmitter that corresponded to Maladi's pulse monitor and the battery capsule but cutting off either of those would almost certainly combust the warhead.
Two booted feet slammed hard on the grating, jarring her. A white-armored stormtrooper crouched beside her and said, "Please, Agent Corde, let me take a look."
Morrigan rolled to one side and watched him take out a utility knife and pry the bomb's casing apart. She'd brought no knife herself, hadn't thought to. She'd charged down here heroically and stupidly because she'd wanted to give her children a chance to survive.
Not something Nyna Calixte would have done, not at all.
"This thing is wired to blow if we cut power to the transmitter, but I think I see a way around this." She could hear the stormtrooper chewing his lip as he talked. He sounded painfully young.
"What way?" she asked.
"Can you hold this, miss?" He handed her the knife and took something out of his equipment pouch. "I'm going to try and detach the battery without triggering the release."
"How?"
He pried apart a second layer of casing, revealing a tangle of wires connecting the bomb's baradium core to its charge device. Prying the tangle apart with both hands he said, "Miss, you're going to have to listen carefully and cut exactly where I say…"
-{}-
When chaos broke loose in Maladi's lab, Talon knew exactly what she needed to do. She'd listened to everything Maladi and Cade had said in their long exchange. Some of it had shocked her. Some of it had explained what she'd always wondered, namely why Skywalker was so important and how he'd managed to defeat both Talon herself and Lord Krayt time and again.
When the stormtroopers had burst into the laboratory, she'd known in an instant what Maladi would do, and how Skywalker would react. The spymaster and poisoner whom Talon had known in Krayt's service would die before allowing her most grandiose scheme to be undone; her new madness, induced by whatever Skywalker had done to her on Wayland, did nothing to change that. Despite Maladi's claims, losing the Force had not liberated her; indeed, she seemed to have become twisted inside than ever.
Because she knew that Maladi would kill herself and trigger the bomb, and Skywalker would desperately try to keep her alive, Talon didn't wait to watch. When the stormtroopers charged in, shouting and waving their rifles Maladi's pet Gree, Talon used the confusion to reach low and pluck Jao Assam's lightsaber from his belt without his noticing. Then she ducked low and scampered through the open door, into the passage full of glass cages and decaying dead. She heard feet approaching and ducked through the next door just as a half-dozen stormtroopers scampered past. She got lucky; none turned and tried to arrest her, though she knew more were coming.
Still clutching the lightsaber with her bound-together hands, Talon hurried through the chamber filled with broken and intact glass tanks. She caught the flail of brown Jedi robes just in time to duck behind one tank and watch through its pale green liquid as Lowbacca and K'Kruhk both marched past. She waited until they were gone and the room was empty to shift the lightsaber in her grip, tap the button for just a second, and use its pure-white blade to sever the bind holding her shackles together.
It had been twenty, thirty seconds since she'd left Maladi's laboratory. Each one was precious. There was no telling how long Skywalker would be able to keep Maladi alive for. Talon darted into the open and ran ahead, ready to cut down anyone who got her in her way. Even without the Force she could kill with a lightsaber.
Right as she got to the chamber's exit a side door hissed open. Talon pivoted, flicked the blade on and raised it to strike, but froze when she saw Eli in front of her, shackled hands raised as though to ward off a blow.
With an elegant flick of the wrist, Talon cut Eli's hands free as well.
"Hurry, apprentice," she said, "We must go! Now!"
"What happened?" he gasped.
There was no time to explain. Talon dashed through the exit and Eli followed her down a long straight hall walled by red stone. Stormtroopers and a few Gree clogged the hall on the far end, but when they saw the two Sith sprinting toward them the soldiers froze, confused. Some instinctively pressed against the wall, others the two Sith had to skirt around. Eli tripped and nearly fell on one trailing Gree tentacle but resumed his charge after Talon. No one raised a blaster to stop them. Talon knew they'd been lucky, and luck wouldn't last.
She counted forty-five seconds when they breached the hallway and went out onto the landing platform. Te Hasa's natural methane stench assailed them but they kept running fast across the mostly-empty pad. Talon aimed for the Imperial shuttle in the center, and again no one moved to stop them, not until Talon and Eli rounded to the entrance portal in the rear.
The stormtrooper guarding the closed portal jerked on sight of them and brought up his rifle. Talon lunged at the guard from the side, wedging the emitter-end of the lightsaber in his flank. She tapped the trigger, spearing through his side, and as his body went limp Eli pulled the blaster from his hands.
That had drawn attention, and Talon could hear more troopers coming around to investigate. Sixty seconds, she thought, and reached into the trooper's belt pouch where she knew his authorization card would be. More stormtroopers came from the right; Eli gunned down two in a volley of laserfire. Talon swiped the fist trooper's card in the reader by the door. The portal to the assault shuttle opened.
Talon charged inside. Eli followed, pumping fire from the blaster with one hand while his other groped for the interior door controls. There were still four troopers inside the shuttle, but they were stunned and trapped in a confined space. Slow to react, with no place to run, the first two fell quickly to Talon's blade. The other two retreated down the cockpit as she advanced through the cabin but Eli fired over her shoulder and dropped them both with smoking helmets.
They clambered into the cockpit together. More stormtroopers had surrounded the shuttle, trying to force their way inside, but the kick of its repulsors and a wash of heat drove them back. With a jerk and shudder the shuttle began to rise off the platform, leaving the troopers and the two remaining ships to shrink below.
Ninety-five seconds, Talon thought as she kicked the engines on and pushed the shuttle toward the sky. Inertia pinned her to the back of her seat and for a second blackness clouded the edge of her vision; then they were pushing clear through clouds, leaving Te Hasa's surface behind them.
Eli, panting in the co-pilot's seat, turned wide eyes on Talon and asked, "What just happened?"
She ignored him and began preparing a jump to hyperspace. There would be plenty of time to explain on the long, long trip back to Saijo. Back to their comrades, who'd once been Sith.
-{}-
"Damn!" the stormtrooper snapped.
Morrigan's heart stopped, then beat again. She still wasn't dead. "What?"
"It's not going to work." Fear made the young man's voice tremble. "The failsafes are too redundant. We can't detach the battery without triggering the bomb."
"Well what can we do?"
"I don't know. If we had the right equipment I'd try freezing the triggering mechanism. I don't have it, though. I don't have it…"
The man was about to have a breakdown as the inevitability of death crushed down on him. Morrigan, strangely, felt calm inside. She'd tried. She'd done what she could here and her greatest missteps seemed far away. Being arrogant enough to walk into Maladi's trap still stung, but the worst ones felt distant: thinking she could manipulate Maladi as she'd done Veed and Rulf, plotting and scheming to prove her greatness to herself, callously using loyal Imperial soldiers like this one. Believing the only worthwhile knowledge was the kind that gave power.
Giving up Cade and Kol, of course. That had been the start of everything wrong.
"M-maybe… Maybe we can try something else..." The stormtrooper was stuttering in his panic. "The comm unit. We can try detaching… No… That won't work…"
Morrigan softly asked, "What's your name, trooper?"
The soldier froze. Two heartbeats later he said, "Corporal Pritkiss, Second Company, Eight-Ninth Regiment-"
"Your name."
Another heartbeat. "Damien, miss."
Of course it would be. "That was my father's name," she said. Another loyal soldier of the empire, undone by the Sith.
The stormtrooper didn't have anything to say. She didn't mind. Morrigan closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and savored it. Only a few of those left; she was amazed Cade had lasted as long as he could.
-{}-
They raced down the red stone corridor for the landing pad as quickly as they could. Gunner was up ahead, bellowing orders to anyone who'd hear, telling them to get out and board the assault shuttle, but the troopers were talking back, telling her the shuttle was gone, and they only had two ships left, and one of them was Gree.
Ania barely got that much. She had Maladi's knees digging into her armpits and feet sticking out ahead of her, and as she ran she kept looking back at Skywalker and Jao, who held the rest of Sith's weight between them. As he held on to Maladi's shoulders and face, Skywalker's face was twisted in ferocious concentration. His eyes had turned a terrifying red-gold and sparks of lightning danced from his palms across Maladi's clothes. The Sith woman's face had gone slack and the only reason Ania knew she wasn't dead already was that they weren't all dead too.
Jao, body twisted as he held Maladi up by the waist, kept repeating, "He can't do it much longer. She's almost gone. He can't do it."
Ania trudged ahead as fast as she could, half-dragging all three of them behind her. With Maladi's weight split the worst hindrance was Skywalker, who half-shambled as he struggled to keep the Sith alive.
When they finally breached the portal and went outside, Ania's first breath of Te Hasa's noxious atmosphere made her dizzy. Then she realized the chatter she'd heard was right: there was a gaping open spot on the platform where their shuttle had landed, and dozens of stormtroopers stood under the sun, confused as to what to do.
Thankfully, Jariah and Deliah had hurried ahead and were already lowering Mynock's entry ramp. They stood on either side, indiscriminately waving people inside. Some Imperials were even funneling into the Gree ship, and no one tried to stop them.
Ania, Cade, and Jao hauled Maladi toward Mynock. As they neared the ramp Gunner appeared, and she helped Jao hold up the Sith's midsection as they hauled her into the freighter's hold. The space was already filling up with troopers, but they found a place in the corner to lay Maladi down. Cade went down with her, all the while still pumping dark healing energy across her body.
"We need to take off," Ania panted. "We need to-"
Gunner clamped a hand on her shoulder. "They're on it." Distantly, she heard the hum of warming engines and realized Jariah and Deliah must have hurried up to the cockpit.
Gunner pulled away and plucked a comlink from her pocket. Ania couldn't hear it over the din, but Gunner immediately lowered it, slapped Jao on the chest, "Tell them to take off! Take off now!"
"Got it," Jao announced, and dashed out of sight.
Ania watched, dazed by it all, as Gunner knelt down beside Cade and Maladi, held out the comlink, and said with sad eyes, "It's her."
-{}-
Though the audio on her comlink scratched and background noise blurred her daughter's words, Morrigan could make out Gunner say, "We're aboard Mynock now. Getting ready to leave."
"Cade?"
"He's right here. We've got Maladi. She… doesn't look like she'll make it."
"Cade, can you hear me? Cade?"
Two heartbeats. Then she heard his voice, as pained as she'd ever known it. "I hear you, Mom."
"We can't disable the bomb. We don't have the equipment. Just go. Get clear now."
He didn't seem to have heard her. His voice strained, "Mom… Maladi… She can't hold on…"
"Just go," she said as the link drowned in static. As the connection dissolved to nothing she thought to say: "I love you both."
She said it. She'd never know if they'd heard. Likely they hadn't, which was fitting in a way; it was something she should have said far more early and often than she had.
Morrigan squeezed the dead comlink in her hand and looked at the young man with her father's name. He'd taken his helmet off, revealing a smooth clean-shaven face. His eyes were dark and afraid, and she reached across the grating to take his rough, warm hand. Then she closed her eyes and breathed deep. It was the simple things that mattered most, not the ambition and scheming. She'd taken too long to learn that, but at least she'd learned it. Late was better than never after all.
-{}-
In the final moments, as the last spark of her life dimmed to nothing, Cade saw deep into Maladi. He saw the girl she'd once been: Malincha, daughter of a Jedi, who'd watched her father fall before Darth Krayt's blade and buried grief deep within herself until she'd thought it gone. With the dark side as her tool she'd dedicated herself to seeking perfection: perfect knowledge, perfect control, perfect schemes and poisons. At every step the Force had confounded her genius, always denying what she'd desired. In the end, with Cade's help, she'd realized that, broken, and sought to deny what she could not control. Unable to dominate the universe she'd worked to escape it. Maladi had called the Force's silence liberation, but in seeking it she'd been seeking the cold, empty freedom of death.
Cade saw and felt it all through a connection beyond love or hate, deepened by resonance. He understood all the drives Maladi had buried deep inside, but unlike her he'd unearthed them, faced them, and come to terms. When death's void swallowed her last spark, all his dark and desperate anger followed. An aching empathy replaced them, and when his senses returned Cade stayed where he was, exhausted, Maladi's cooling body clasped against his.
He became aware that he was on Mynock, and that Mynock was trembling as it climbed through the atmosphere. He lifted his head and looked around; stormtroopers, lots of them, all packed in his ship. Why weren't they in their own? He couldn't remember. He marked two brown Jedi robes among them, and a few Imperial Knights in their scarlet. Nobody he wanted to see.
Cade stayed where he was. He remembered what they'd left his mother behind down there, and that she hadn't been able to defuse the bomb. He'd rather have her body in his arms than Maladi's, but the two had been alike in their fashion. All their scheming, their ambitions, their dueling plots and secret lives had led both women to the same place in the end.
For a while, Cade stared at nothing and felt Mynock breach atmosphere and soar smoothly into space. As the ship stopped trembling, his half-sister crouched in front of them. The usual sour sneer was gone from Gunner's face; she more tired and vulnerable than he'd ever seen her.
"The baradium bomb went off," she explained. Her eyes were tilted toward the floor, staring into nothing too. "The Gree say they'll send down a recovery team to check the site… But we're pretty sure the explosion destroyed the entire facility. What wasn't destroyed got crushed beneath thousands of tons of rock."
"Okay," Cade said.
"Agent Corde… Our mother…" Gunner trailed off.
"I know."
"We didn't get any of her data. Maladi's. None of her research, none of those translated histories she was talking about…"
"I get it," Cade grunted, but that was a lie. He didn't 'get it.' Nobody did. Starting from scratch, it could take years to find an antidote to Maladi's virus, assuming there was one at all. The Jedi, Sith, and Imperial Knights had all gone functionally extinct. No one could predict what this would mean for the galaxy.
At the moment, hollowed by personal grief, Cade found it hard to care.
He pulled his body out beneath Maladi's and lay hers flat on the deck. Gunner held out a hand; Cade stared at it for a moment, then grabbed it tight and allowed her to pull him up. A handful of people had gathered to watch: he counted K'Kruhk, Azlyn, Lowbacca. No Sith, he realized dully. Probably explained the missing ship.
The Whiphid Grand Master shuffled close and lowered his shaggy head. "So this," he said, "is the author of our fates."
"She said she was gonna set us all free." Cade's voice cracked. "Damn Sith cheeka. She got her wish, didn't she?"
Lowbacca gave a low roar and removed his brown robe. The Wookie lowered it over Maladi's body, hiding it from view. Something welled in Cade's throat; it felt like a shroud for them all.