Star Wars Infinities: The Master

Chapter 20

By: Christopher W. Blaine

e-mail: darth_yoshi@yahoo.com

DISCLAIMER: All of the characters and situations contained in this story are ©2003 by LucasFilm Ltd. They are used here without permission for fan-related entertainment purposes only. This original story is ©2003 by Christopher W. Blaine.

"All I ever wanted to do was be a Jedi Knight and maybe, just maybe, marry a certain princess that I know and have lots of little Kyps."

Ippy, busy programming the weapons, did not reply. He normally didn't when Kyp began recounting what he wanted his life to be like. The droid never had understood why sentients always rebelled against their programming. He was a warrior so logic dictated that he involve himself in fighting, not loving. Not that Ippy knew what love was, though he had found it was something that made people do incredibly chaotic things.

Chewbacca poked his head into the cockpit and barked a question. "The furbag wants to know if you have gotten us into trouble again."

Kyp didn't bother to turn around; with the interface hood on he would not have been able to see Chewbacca, but through the ship's organic feelings, he could sense where the big Wookie was. "Something is going on around the planet, Chewie, but I'm not sure what it is."

"It is a fleet of vessels, sir," Ippy replied as he charged the laser cannons. "Approximately 100 capital class vessels of varying design and approximately 200 fighter craft. I am also picking up transmissions from the surface."

"I thought this planet was abandoned," Kyp wondered out loud.

"The Imperial Encyclopedia, which I am well-versed in, indicates that the planet is supposed to be abandoned. It is officially listed a monument to both Darth Maul and Darth Vader since they both died here."

Kyp snorted and reached out with the Force. "Does the encyclopedia bother to say that they died because they killed each other?" He tried to pick out an individual fighter to try and get a read on the pilot, but the Dark Side energy coming off of Korriban was interfering with most of his abilities. "It's like trying to breath through ferrocrete," he muttered.

Chewbacca wailed and shook Kyp by the shoulder. "The Wookie wishes to man one of the gun mounts."

"Go ahead; we're too close to Korriban to risk trying to use the dovin basils; I'm afraid of what it might do to the ship." Vong technology was never meant to be mated with something like a freighter and while the organic parts would do fine under the stress of gravity, the actual ship could come apart.

"There appears to be no rhyme or reason to the ship or fighter types," Ippy commented. "Slave I  just came out of hyperspace. See-Threepio is attempting to contact us. Can I ignore him?"

"Negative. Tell him to plot a course for Tatooine and have him report to my father until I come back for him," Kyp snapped as he rolled the Falcon. They started heading down towards the planet; he was hoping that maybe they could pick up another signal from the surface to give them some sort of hint as to whom they were dealing with. "Do you think it's the Empire, Ippy?"

"I don't know," the droid snapped back. "I don't think, I merely process facts as I receive them. The facts indicate that only one of the galactic governments would have this many vessels in one place." The ship lurched as Kyp pulled up just before hitting the atmosphere. Two fighters behind him had to veer sharply away. The images he was receiving through the hood identified them as X-Wings.

The New Republic had the most X-Wings, but the Tarkinists kept some for garrison and security duty. Three TIE Bombers, in a V-formation did a flyby as they tried to round the planet. "The bombers are attempting to hail us. They are speaking standard Galactic Basic. Now switching to various other languages. It appears to be a standard recording."

"They must use it to lull people into a false sense of security," Kyp mused. He reached up and pulled off the hood, wanting to feast his own eyes on the fleet. They came around the planet, ten fighters in hot pursuit of them, and five going after Slave I as it turned to make a jump into hyperspace.

They almost missed the fleet, as all of the hulls were jet black. The lights of the various docking bays, viewports and weapons mounts gave the impression of stars. It was only when their attitude adjustment thrusters fired did Kyp note that they were actually ships.

Painting ships black was considered too dangerous even for most space pirates. If another vessel happened to have no sensors for whatever reason, they could always eyeball other ships in their path. "By the Force," he whispered as he spied one gigantic ship. He recognized it immediately, but he had only seen one other of that class before. "It's a Super-class star destroyer," he said. "That proves it, this is an Imperial fleet!"

Ippy disagreed with him. "All vessels have an IFF transponder, but all military vessels have a redundant secondary that very few know about. I'm accessing it now." Kyp didn't argue, but instead pulled up just as the two lead fighters started to fire. The Falcon rocked with the force of the blasts.

"Rear shields down fifteen percent! What the hell is chasing us?"

He looked down at the threat screen and saw that a TIE variant he had never seen before had replaced the two X-Wings. Most TIE models contained a cockpit sandwiched between two solar panels. There was another design, the TIE Defender, which had three panels at 120 degree spacing around the cockpit. The two firing at him had five.

"That would be a TIE Punisher. Only ten were ever made and they were assigned to garrison duty at Seinar Fleet Systems," Ippy told him. "Ah," he said. "Once again the droid brain triumphs over the sentient's stupidity!"

The ship bucked under some more blasts and Kyp saw his shielding in some spots was now less than ten percent. "Anytime you feel like firing, Chewbacca!"

The Wookie roared back and Kyp somehow got the impression that his loops and dips were not appreciated. He needed to level out to give Chewbacca a good shot, but there was no way he could do that with all of the black-hulled ships in his way. He reached up and put on the hood and let himself sink back into the mind of his ship. It reached out with gravity to pick out each vessel and then Kyp mentally asked it if it could give them a path to safety.

A voice whispered in his ear. "Closer, come closer to the planet."

"Sithspawn! Now I've got ghosts talking to me!" There was vibration through the deck plates as Chewbacca opened up with the quad laser cannons. The red lances of light, which burned though the left solar panel and sent it spinning into a slower Y-Wing, kissed a standard TIE fighter. Kyp tried to concentrate on the ship but the voice was becoming insistent. "Closer," it called to him.

Kyp knew that the spirits of the dead Sith Lords resided on Korriban. It was where they spent eternity for the most part, trapped on a dead world inside giant massive statues. It was the price they paid for the power they held in life. Each and every Dark Lord had tried to figure out a way to cheat death, to keep from ending up as a monument to their own personal avarice, but none had succeeded as far Kyp knew.

He wondered if one of those Dark Lords was calling out to him now, trying to get him to kill himself for its own demonic pleasure?

But good men had died here as his father had told him, and Padme Amidala had related how Anakin Skywalker had defeated Darth Maul here as well. One would have thought that the sacrifice of her beloved would have convinced her to return to the light side, but Padme had explained that her heart had been so broken by Anakin's death, that she had simply stopped caring and had given herself completely to the Dark Side.

He couldn't imagine such despair. "Leave me alone," he said aloud to the spirit.

Ippy gave off a curse word and threw his mechanical hands in the air. "Fine, fly the damn ship yourself! Let them capture us, I don't care, human. Everyone can use a good droid."

"Not you!" Kyp moaned. Chewbacca scored another hit as an X-Wing became space dust. Kyp saw that he had no choice but had to head towards the planet. ""I am not doing this to make you happy!"

"Of course you aren't, nobody every wants to make the droid happy!"

"Shut up, Ippy!" Kyp said and he once again reached into the Force. He wanted to identify the voice that was calling to him. Again and again, its voice becoming more and more hurried as he approached at as fast a speed as he could muster. In the corner of his mind, he picked up the ion cannons of two New republic B-Wings taking down Slave I. It didn't look good for Threepio.

Chewbacca roared and Ippy reminded him that he was heading for the planet surface. "I know!" Kyp called back. "Just keep shooting!"

Ippy fired off a concussion missile that caught a passing Lambda­-class shuttle in the engines. There was a bright flash and then it lost control, hitting the atmosphere and bouncing off to tumble into space. "Two corvettes are moving in to block us," Ippy said.

"Just keep the fighters off of me, I'm going down to the planet and we're going to skim the landmasses. The capital ships can't follow!" he said triumphantly.

"No, they can just fire their turbolasers down and fry us in an instant!"

Chewbacca gave a whoop as one of the TIE Punishers exploded into nothingness. The other veered away obviously not wanting to face the Wookie's wrath in its own. In place of the custom Imperial fighters came a group of 5 CloakShape fighters, older model snubnose craft used mostly by pirates.

"Put all the shields to the rear," Kyp ordered.

Ippy complied, reminding him that there could be ground batteries. Kyp shook his head. "I don't pick anything like that up. There are some people on the surface, several in fact, but there doesn't appear to be any sort of base defenses. I think they rely on the fleet for that."

The ship's organic mind reeled as a turbolaser blast raced past them, missing the Falcon by meters. "Easy, baby," Kyp told the ship. He tried to sooth it but it seemed to be very, very upset. His perceptions started to change and he could no longer feel the world around him like he normally could.

"Yes!" the voice said in obvious glee. The hood went black and Kyp ripped it off and reached out for the yoke. He toggled the concussion missile controls to his thumb trigger. "I don't like this!" he said, realizing that something had just happened to his ship. He jerked the yoke hard to the left and Chewbacca took down two of their pursuers. The ships, trailing smoke, tumbled down towards the brown surface.

Kyp pointed the Falcon straight up and pushed the throttle forward even more. The compensators screamed as the tried to pull free of Korriban's gravity. Another turbolaser just missed them and Kyp wondered what ship was firing at them. "Did you get a read on that big ship?"

"I did, but I thought I was supposed to shut up," Ippy said. Kyp threw him a dirty look and used the Force to pull out one of his photoreceptors. "Hey!" the droid protested. "Fine, fleshy thing! It came back as the Sith Lord. My military database indicates that it was ship that was never commissioned. It was being built over Byss when the war started, but it was never completed."

"Five years would be enough time," Kyp said. He remembered once hearing about how certain members of the Corporate Sector Authority had arranged for ship hulls to be stolen out of the shipyards in order to be brought into their own fleets at the start of the war. Then maybe they were looking at a CSA fleet? They certainly had the capital to purchase all of the vessels.

"Plot us a course," Kyp said, now noting a buzzing in the back of his head. He suddenly had a compulsion to put the hood back on. He shook his head and gritted his teeth as they broke the atmospheric canopy and shot out into free space.

"Slave I is disabled," Ippy said.

"We can't go after him," Kyp announced as he examined the threat board. Several fighters were circling the Mandalorian craft even as two transports slowly made their way towards it. Jango Fett's ship was a loss, as was his droid. "Chewbacca won't be happy."

"Wookies seldom are," Ippy said. Kyp looked at him and suppressed a chuckle as his loose photoreceptor swung and clanged against his metal face.

The Falcon took a strong hit on the port side, sending it off course. Kyp saw that the TIE Punisher had returned. He felt himself getting angry, which was not all that uncommon for him. He knew better than to give in to his rage this close to Korriban and he refrained from calling on his Force reserves to choke the life out of the enemy pilot.

"We need a course out of here!" he announced as he dove to avoid a Corellian Corvette that opened fire. One of his overhead shields went completely out and he could smell the acrid smoke of an electrical fire. "They're eating us up!" he said as he tried to get on a course away from the fleet.

Again the TIE Punisher fired and again the supercharged blast shook the freighter off course. "Hull breech in the lower engineering spaces," Ippy said as he activated the damage control droids. Small, almost rodent-like droids would be dispatched to weld a new plate in place. There was nothing Kyp could do for any organic parts that had been shot off of his ship.

Chewbacca gave a war cry and the laser cannon came to life. Red lines of death crossed empty space to take down first one, then two and finally three TIE Bombers. The slower fighters never had a chance against Chewbacca's good eye.

"Put on the hood," a voice said in his head, clear as a bell. "Do it, son of Durron."

"Great, you know my name, can you guess my favorite color?" Kyp said out loud. He fired a missile before getting a lock, scattering two X-Wings that had been doing a chicken run on him. "Leave me alone, Palpatine or Freedon Nadd or whoever you are!"

"Are you talking to me?" Ippy asked, his tone indicating that his patience programming was beginning to wear thin.

"No!" Kyp snapped. He yanked hard to port, the Falcon literally screaming past several CloakShape fighters that had to scatter. The young Jedi was flying like a madman, all the while Chewbacca was firing away. More ships were hit, including the corvette that was now behind them, and the Wookie roared in what could only be described as pure delight.

The TIE Punisher concentrated its fire on the starboard side and an explosion rocked the ship. An alarm started blaring and Kyp's hand moved toward the escape pod ejection button. He pressed it and double-checked the remaining pod. "They blew out the damn thing," he said. By ejecting the destroyed escape device, the ship could be sealed with an emergency field.

"The hood," the voice called out again.

"Take the damn controls," Kyp told Ippy and the droid happily complied. Suddenly they shot straight up on their Z-axis and began to spin. Kyp grabbed the hood and pulled it down and pulled it over his head. "Alright, I'm here!"

His perceptions immediately focused in on the world that he came to know as the mind of the ship, where the living creature that had bonded with the Millennium Falcon thought, dreamed and imagined. When he was not looking to use the ship's advanced organic senses, he normally found it to be a place of tranquility, made up of varying shades of colors.

This time his mind's eye met the dark brown orbs of something most definitely human. "Ahhhhh!" Kyp screamed, startled. "What the hell?"

The image suddenly changed in focus and it was as if Kyp had stepped back several meters. Before him stood a man who was most definitely a Jedi; Kyp could tell by his brown and tan robes. His father wore similar robes and Kyp had been taught that most Jedi, in the days of the Old Republic, had worn similar attire. The Jedi was tall, taller than Kyp, with skin almost as dark as his robes. His head was hairless and there was a confident look in his eyes. "Greetings, son of Ferrin Durron, I am Mace Windu, Jedi Master."

"Uh-huh," Kyp stammered. He felt the ship make another sudden turn and then it dived. "Or are you a Sith projection?"

"You should be able to tell," Mace told him, offering no other answer. Kyp dipped into the Force, trying to sense the Dark Side, but it was everywhere in this system.

"How did you get into my ship?"

"A fair question," the image replied. "The Sith are not the only ones who understand the concept of spirit projection. The Jedi were who originally discovered the ability, but we were loathe to use it because immortality ultimately leads to complacency and madness."

"Uh-huh."

"Your ship, it is amazing how it is a living thing, or I should say was," Mace said with some regret. Kyp felt a lump form in his throat as he realized that the damage that had been done to the Falcon must have been extensive indeed. He had just lost what he considered a close friend. "My spirit did not cross over after my death at the hands of Darth Maul, why, I cannot tell you."

"I need coordinates for the hyperspace jump, or I can just guess," Ippy said. Kyp noted that their progress was less erratic which meant that they were pulling away from the fleet.

"You need to go to Dathomir." Kyp asked why and why he should even believe what could be nothing more that a Sith magic trick. "I already know your thoughts; you project a severe presence in the Force. I will tell you all you need to know; I've spent nearly two decades dealing with the souls of the Sith."

"Coordinates?"

Kyp considered it for a moment and again tried to read the image in the Force. He realized that what he was observing was merely a projection of the mind he was in contact with. Could it really be the famous Mace Windu, a Jedi master that his father had told him tale after tale about? He again attempted to use the Force to guide his decision, but the Dark Side permeated the hyperstrings of matter in this universe and so he was forced to rely on something else: instinct.

When fighting the Yuzheen Vong, there were many times that Kyp could not use the Force. The Vong were dead to it and while he had enjoyed limited success against them, for the most part he had to rely on gut feelings. It was what Corran had used to compensate for his lack of ability in certain areas and it was something that Kyp should have felt more comfortable about using. When he had been a teenager, he no problem going with a hunch.

Now he was older, a young man and he suddenly felt fear. He sucked in a deep breath. "We're going to Dathomir," he told Ippy.

"That is in Imperial territory, sir; perhaps you'd like to make a quick stop by the Imperial Palace for tea while we are at it," the droid responded even as it programmed in the course. "Out of the cooking utensil and into the heart of the sun."

The Falcon lurched forward and then there was the sound of something breaking. Kyp pulled off the hood and jumped out of the pilot's seat. Running back to the engineering section, he saw the problem immediately. "Ippy, the cooling pipe to the hyperdrive has broken; switch to the secondaries."

"Secondaries have been destroyed by enemy fire," Ippy called out.

Chewbacca appeared next to Kyp, almost by magic. The Wookie shoved past him and reached down for the broken pipe. Grabbing with his bionic hands, Chewbacca pulled the two broken pieces together even as boiling fluid poured onto his fur. Kyp had no time for words but instead pushed out a hand and concentrated on the pipe sections. He imagined them heating up, coaxed the molecules to being their dance. The pipe heated up at the very ends and coolant began to flash to steam.

Slowly the pipes started to weld together, Chewbacca crushing them slightly as he pulled them together. The compartment was filling with saturated vapor and Kyp had to resist the urge to cough. After a few moments, the leak was repaired. "Punch it, Ippy!" he cried out.

The Millennium Falcon shot into hyperspace and Chewbacca and Kyp went rolling into the cargo area.