Star Wars: Specters of the Past

By SSG Michael B. Jackson

Disclaimer: Star Wars and all associated characters belong, ultimately, to George Lucas, and aren't mine, more's the pity. Still, he's done a damn good job so far, so who's complaining?

A/N: Once again, thanks to those who reviewed, specifically voxenking, Justin-Mullens, Princess-Aiel, SoloKenobi and Scott Ferguson (I'm still avidly following your story, Altered Universe, by the way!). Also, to address some specific points made by AirAuthor: Don't worry; the droids will definitely have their part in things. For chapter three, though, I wanted to focus on the human members of the Skywalker/Solo clan's reactions. I tried to keep Jacen and Jaina as much in character as possible, and you really should read some of the books featuring them; they're interesting characters in and of themselves. As for the Clean-up crew, well, I never really intended for them to be much more than a plot device; I just tend to 'flesh out' even minor characters when I can. I've found that it tends to add a feel of depth to the story. However, since a couple of people have mentioned these guys already, I figured I'd give them a little more screen time in this chapter, and I might find something for them to do later too.

'It's a good thing I'm not claustrophobic,' Mara Jade Skywalker thought to herself sardonically as yet another low groan made itself heard from the less than structurally sound ferocrete labyrinth through which she and the three CRP workers were making their way. Aloud, she said, "So tell me again, guys. There's nothing to worry about, right?"

The team leader, a human of average height and build named Dax, or something like that, said, "Well, uh-"

"Never mind," Mara said resignedly, "Shouldn't of asked."

They continued on in silence again for a time, all the members of Garlan Dax's survey team casting occasional furtive glances in Mara's direction. None of them were used to working around someone who could only be described as a kind of celebrity, a woman who not only was a hero of the Yuuzhan Vong War and a Jedi Master, but who also, apparently, had worked in some capacity for Emperor Palpatine himself back in the days of the Empire. Needless to say, they were all more than a little intimidated.

Finally, the silence was broken by the Bith, Zek. "We're just about there. Another fifty meters down this corridor, down two flights of stairs, and then another twenty-five meters up a short hallway."

Mara nodded absently, and said, "Sounds good."

Within a minute or so, they found themselves in front of the same set of duralloy doors that had greeted Dax and his crew a few days ago. Just as they had been then, the doors were shut tight now, and Dax said, "After we got another crew down here to help us with that carbonite slab, we shut everything up again. We kind of figured that somebody would want to take another look at the place, and we didn't want to take any chances. You never know who or what might be creeping around down here."

Mara gave a short laugh, and said, "I can imagine. I've seen some pretty strange things in Coruscant's underbelly in my time, but I don't think I've ever been this far down before."

The Sullustan, Jyym, said, "I'd hope not. Nobody in their right mind would be down here unless they had to be."

"Other than Emperor Palpatine, apparently," Mara slowly. "But whether or not he was in his right mind is open to interpretation." Then, focusing on the doors, she said, "So, you guys ready?"

Dax nodded, and said, "Sure, but this is going to take a few minutes. We never had time to mess with the door mechanism, so we had to close them the same way we opened them: manually. And we're going to have to do the same this time, unfortunately."

Mara frowned just slightly, and then said, "Well, in that case..."

Narrowing her eyes, she concentrated, reaching into the Force, and then, moving her hands in an opening gesture, she carefully 'pushed' the doors apart.

The survey crew looked on with somewhat awed expressions as the doors parted, apparently through sheer effort of will on Mara's part. None of them had ever seen a Force-user at work before, and they were impressed, to say the least.

As the doors opened, something indefinable seemed to roll out, something that, apparently, only Mara could perceive, judging by the lack of reaction on the others' part. To Mara, it registered as something like a smell, but not. And it was very, very familiar.

"Palpatine." She said flatly.

Dax looked at her a bit curiously, and said, "Well, yeah, that's what we figured. Who else would've kept a place like this? But I thought we already-"

"No," Mara said in an odd tone, shaking her head slightly, "I mean I'm sure now. This is a place where he spent quite a bit of time. He's left an... impression here, one I recognize."

"Uh, if you say so, Master Skywalker," Dax said a bit hesitantly, obviously having no idea what she was talking about.

Mara shook her head, and smiling slightly, said, "Don't worry about it. It's just one of those Jedi things."

"Riiight..." Jyym said skeptically, leading the way inside. "Well, this is it," he said dryly, looking once more at the transparisteel display cases and their ghastly contents that had lately invaded his dreams. "And just as gruesome as it was the first time. If this place really was Palpatine's, it sure doesn't say much about his taste in interior decorating."

"Actually," Mara said, also examining the display cases, "It says a lot about the man. And none of it good. You realize what these are, I take it?"

Jyym nodded, and said, "A few dozen of the Old Republic Jedi, I'd guess?"

Mara nodded as well, and said, "Looks like. And as much as I hate to admit it, I think I can put names to a few of these faces. I think some of these are people I... helped run down."

This pronouncement was met with a chorus of stunned looks from the survey team, who suddenly wondered anew just what, exactly, this woman had done in the Emperor's service. Seeing their expressions, Mara shook her head, and said, "Don't worry, guys. Ancient history. But it does seem like some mistakes keep following you, no matter how far behind you think you've left them."

Without further explanation, Mara began to examine the underground chamber in somewhat greater detail, leaving the survey crew to exchange puzzled and somewhat nervous glances behind her.

After looking over the main gallery thoroughly, Mara moved on to some of the side rooms, and then paused in the 'chapel annex', as it'd been dubbed by Dax's team. Frowning, she turned to Jyym, and said, "This is where you found her, right?"

Stepping up, Jyym nodded, and, pointing to a slightly lighter section of the wall said, "Right back there. Sith-spawned place looked like a church or something, with her as the centerpiece. Damned eerie, like everything else down here."

Mara nodded distractedly, following... something, a feeling, a trace, whatever, toward the bench at the center of the room. Finally, slowly, she reached out to put a hand on it, an odd, unreadable expression settling onto her features.

"He spent a lot of time here," she said matter-of-factly. "His... taint is strong, especially on this bench." Then, shaking her head, she said, "Whoever the lady in the carbonite is, there must have been something personal between her and the Emperor. This is the kind of thing he reserved for people who were... special to him."

Jyym shuddered at this, and said, "Yeah, that's kind of what I figured. Lucky her, huh?"

"That's one way of putting it," Mara said darkly as she moved on toward the living areas.

Again she prowled around, following both her feelings as amplified through the Force, and her instincts, honed through years of covert operations and skullduggery. She searched all of the living areas in turn, but none really grabbed her attention until she reached a small room that appeared to be a workspace of some kind. It contained, among other things, a desk that appeared to be made of real hardwood, a formchair, a high-end computing system, and a Holonet interface. On the walls were hung various holos, paintings, and even a few flat prints, covering a variety of subjects, all of them dark or odd in some way.

Turning her head slightly, Mara said over her shoulder, "You guys might want to stay out there. There's no telling what kind of little 'surprises' I might run into when I start messing around in here. The Emperor was a little... touchy about his privacy."

Taking her advice, the survey team kept a respectful distance as Mara made her way slowly around the room, looking everything over carefully, and then stopped in front of one of the holos. It was a fairly long full motion clip, depicting the explosion of a massive star, the subsequent fiery death of it's planetary system, and the eventual collapse of the stellar remnant into a neutron star. She wasn't sure just what it was about that particular holo that caught her attention at first, but eventually she realized that it was the same thing that'd drawn her to the bench in the 'chapel'. The Emperor had once stood just where she was standing, and he'd done so often. There was then, she decided, more to the holo than met the eye.

Reaching out, she gently lifted the holo from the wall, and carefully examined both it and the section of wall behind it. She found nothing remarkable about the holo itself, but the wall, on the other hand... Almost invisible to the naked eye, there was a hair-thin crack that formed a rectangular outline in the wall. Smiling, Mara thought to herself, 'Even in an inner sanctum that probably nobody but you knew anything about, you were still keeping secrets. It figures.'

Examining the concealed safe closely, she realized that it was one of the models that incorporated a palm reader into the cover. Considering for a moment, she finally thought, 'What the hell. It's as good a bet as any.' With that, she placed her hand over the cover and pressed just slightly, activating the reader.

After a second or so, a metallic voice said, "Subject Jade, Mara, designation 'Emperor's Hand' identified. Access requires supplementary code. Please enunciate."

Biting her lip, Mara thought for a moment, trying to guess which of the myriad of codes she'd memorized over her years in the Emperor's service could possibly be relevant. Finally, she settled on one, a code that only became usable in the unlikely event of the Emperor's demise, if such came to pass. She knew that he'd had a sort of 'dead-man switch' system in place, and if he didn't periodically signal the system, it would presume him dead, setting into motion all sorts of contingencies. Force knew, they'd had to deal with a few of them in the decades since Palpatine's death. She just hoped this place had been tied into that system, at least until the Vong had come.

Figuring she had little to loose, unless there were countermeasures, which, considering whose little hideaway this was, wasn't unlikely, Mara spat out a complicated string of alphanumeric characters and code words. There was a momentary pause as the safe processed this, and Mara steeled herself to react to anything from an electrical discharge to a poisoned needle or whatever else the Emperor's twisted mind might've come up with. Eventually, though, there was a tiny beep, and the safe's voice said, "Code accepted. Access granted."

With that, the cover slid aside, revealing a sturdy-looking duralloy inner door with a simple handle. As the cover fully recessed, Mara heard a faint click, and when she turned the handle, the door opened easily. Knowing Palpatine as she did, there were any number of things that Mara might have expected to find inside. As it happened, what she found wasn't any of those.

On the safe's one shelf, a single standard data module rested. Cocking her head slightly, Mara reached inside and took it, and as she did so, she felt an almost electric tingle travel up from her fingertips. 'He handled this thing a lot,' she thought, mildly surprised. 'I sure hope it's not a home holovid of the Jedi Purges. That'd really be worth my time and trouble.' But somehow she didn't think it was anything nearly that benign.

Pressing a small button on the side, she activated the unit's preview hologenerator, producing a miniature image above it. Usually, such previews were designed to provide a 'cut-to-the-chase' overview of what was contained on the unit, and this one proved to be no different.

The display showed two spherical objects, each with some sort of delicate ring-like structure around it, coming at each other from opposite sides of the projection field. Both were, as such miniature holos always were, drawn in simple wire-frame models, providing little detail or scale. Mara had no idea what they represented, but as they drew nearer and then finally collided, the display did it's best to render a fiery explosion, which was cut curiously short.

'Huh!' Mara thought to herself. 'That didn't look good. And what's this stenciled on the case? Project Star-Hammer? I have a bad feeling about this...'

-----------

Back aboard the medical frigate Mercy's Light, Luke Skywalker was thinking much the same thing. It had been several hours since Doctor Morell's dire pronouncement, and they'd heard nothing since. Apparently, the doctors and med-techs were still running batteries of tests and collating the results, and until they came up with something, Padmé was being kept in isolation. As ship's day had stretched on into afternoon and then into evening, the Skywalkers and Solos had kept a somber vigil outside the treatment room, hardly a word spoken between them. Finally, as evening waned into night, Doctor Morell had come out and politely suggested that since no results appeared to be forthcoming any time soon, it might be a good idea if everyone retired until the morning. No one had much liked this idea, but in the end they had to admit it was sound.

Now, Luke sat alone with his thoughts in the cockpit of the Jade Shadow, having long since put little Ben down for the night in the aft crew quarters. He knew that he should've been at least trying to get some rest, but he was sure that, Jedi meditation techniques or no, he'd be able to find none until he knew what was happening to his mother.

As these turbulent thoughts rolled around through his head, he noticed a familiar presence, always in the back of his mind, but now drawing closer. Smiling softly, he turned toward the ship's main hatchway just before the attention chime rang. He pressed the release stud, and the hatch slid upward, reveling his late-night visitor.

"Leia," he said, looking into her troubled eyes. "Come on in."

Wordlessly, she climbed the ramp and strode up to embrace her brother. For a moment, they just pressed each other close, and then, smiling a bit wanly, she looked up at him and said, "I thought you might need that. I felt the turmoil you're going through, and I knew you were alone over here. Except for Ben, of course, and I didn't think he'd be able to help you with this."

Luke sighed, and said, "I'm not sure if anyone really can, Leia. I just- I can't believe this. I can't believe that the Force would be so cruel as to deliver our mother to us after all these years and then take her away again. And without us even having a chance to get to know her. It's- it's too much like-"

"Like Endor." She said quietly.

Luke nodded slowly, and said, "Like Endor." Then, breaking their embrace, Luke turned and began to pace restlessly. "I saved him, Leia," he said in a ragged tone. "I did something that not even the Jedi masters thought could be done! I pulled Darth Vader away from the Emperor, away from the Dark Side, and brought Anakin Skywalker back to the light! There at the end, there was no Darth Vader anymore, Leia; there was only our father, restored to himself after all that time. I'd found him and I'd brought him back. And then-"

"He died," Leia said in a whisper.

Luke stopped pacing, hunching over one of the flight chairs instead, and said, "Right there in my arms on the cold, hard deck of that hangar. I'd saved him, and I got to know him for all of about fifteen minutes before he died. And you never got to know him at all."

Biting her lip, Leia said, "Luke, you know how I felt then. I- I don't think I could've even faced him, much less gotten to know him. It took years before I was even willing to have children, knowing that he'd be part of their heritage. I-"

Luke shook his head slowly, and said, "I know that, Leia. But you don't feel that way now, do you? And who knows how long it would've taken you to come around if things had been different. But that's my point; none of us ever had the chance to see what would've happened. What could've happened. And now it's happening all over again."

"Luke," Leia said imploringly, vaguely disturbed by the direction his emotions seemed to be moving in. It reminded her too much of one of the stories she'd heard years ago, when she'd been on Tatooine trying to recover the moss-painting Killik Twilight. She'd miraculously recovered her grandmother, Shmi Skywalker's personal journal, and, in the course of investigating what was written in it, had discovered the circumstances surrounding her grandmother's death.

She'd been told that Shmi had been abducted and tortured by Tuskin Raiders, Tatooine's much-feared Sandpeople, and that she'd died there in the Raiders' camp. But the disturbing part of the story had involved not her grandmother, but her father.

Apparently, he'd showed up at the Lars homestead out of the blue, and, discovering Shmi's predicament, had immediately set out to rescue her. Unfortunately, Leia was told, he found her too late, just in time for her to die in his arms. And then he'd done the unthinkable. Letting his rage consume him, he'd lashed out and killed every Tuskin in the camp, to the last woman and child, an act that any Jedi, even a Padawan such as he'd been at the time should have recognized as belonging to the Dark Side.

While Leia had no real fear of her brother allowing the emotions caused by their mother's plight to drive him toward the Dark Side, she was still concerned for him. She was afraid that whatever happened, Luke would end up blaming himself, perhaps for the rest of his life. And if that happened, Force only knew what it might do to him eventually. She knew that, however he felt, he'd continue to do the things expected of him, to perform the duties he felt he had to. But she had the feeling that if their mother died, some part of Luke would die with her, and he'd never be the same again.

"Luke," she said again, this time consolingly. But before she could say anything further, she was interrupted by a steady beeping from the ship's com system.

Looking up from the console he'd been staring at, Luke hit the 'acknowledge' key, and said, "Skywalker."

Through the speaker came a tinny but recognizable voice that said, "It's me, farmboy. And have I got a Sith-load of news for you."

Luke smiled, and said, "Mara. Well, I suppose I can say the same."

"Really," Mara said. "Do tell. I suppose you've got an ID on the carbonite lady by now?"

"You could say that," Luke said wryly. "Her name's Padmé Naberrie Amidala Skywalker."

The com was silent for a moment, and then, in a quizzical tone, Mara said, "Uh, last name's not a coincidence, I take it?"

Luke gave a short laugh, and then said, "Only if you consider her being married to my father a coincidence."

There was a low whistle from the other end, causing both Luke and Leia to smile, and then Mara said, "Well, I guess that might explain her 'place of honor' down there in Palpatine's little trophy room." Then, an incredulous note in her voice, Mara said, "So this lady is your mother, Luke? Are you sure? I mean, this was Palpatine's little collection, and you know the kinds of dirty tricks he liked to play."

"I'm sure," Luke said quietly. "As soon as the doctor started the thawing process, I felt that something momentous was happening. And when we finally realized who she was... it was like that moment on Bespin, when Vader told me who he really was. Well, I mean, really, it was almost the exact opposite of that moment, joyous instead of horrifying, but the same certainty was there. She is my mother. Our mother, I mean. And Leia felt it too, isn't that right?"

"I did," Leia said, "and she is. I'm sure of it too."

"Oh, hey," Mara said, a bit surprised. "Didn't know you were there too, Leia. But that's good, because you need to hear what I have to say too. But first, tell me this: if you two just found your mom after all this time, why do both of you sound so down? What's wrong?"

Luke sighed, and said, "She's sick, Mara. Dying, maybe. And so far, none of the doctors up here can figure out why."

"Sith-spit," Mara said bitterly, feeling her husband's pain both through his voice and through the connection they shared in the Force. "Well, farmboy, whatever's wrong with her, we'll beat it. We beat the coomb spores Nom Anor used on me, after all, and those were some of the nastiest little pieces of biotech the Vong thought up. If we can beat that, we can beat this."

Luke smiled, his spirits momentarily buoyed by his wife's words, and said, "You're right, Mara. We've done the impossible before, so we'll be able to do this." Then, frowning slightly, he said, "So what was your news? You said that both Leia and I needed to hear?"

Mara sighed, and said, "Well, actually, this probably needs to go all the way up to Admiral Kre'fey, and probably even higher from there. But you two will do for starts."

Also frowning now, Leia said, "Ok, Mara, you've piqued my curiosity. Just what exactly did you find down there?"

"Well," Mara said, "Let me put it to you this way. Both of you could claim to know Emperor Palpatine's character pretty well, right?"

A bit puzzled, Luke said, "Uh, I suppose so."

"And would either of you say that he ever struck you as the type of person who'd be willing to let anyone have anything that he considered to be his?"

Leia gave a short laugh, and said, "Not likely."

"Alright," Mara said slowly, "and here's the kicker. Do you two think he considered the whole Force-damned galaxy his?"

Frowning again, Luke said, "I think that's a pretty safe bet, Mara. Where are you going with this?"

Mara sighed once more and said, "Unfortunately, I knew Palpatine all too well. Sometimes, he could be almost childish about some things. And some children would rather smash a favorite toy with a hammer rather than see it go to a rival, right?"

Truly perplexed now, Luke and Leia looked at each other for a moment, and then Leia said, "Sure. So?"

"So," Mara said darkly, "I just found the plans for a hammer big enough to smash a galaxy with. And I'm pretty sure the little kid in question managed to give it a good swing before he was removed from the playground permanently."

Well, chapter six turned out a little longer than the others, but I wanted to get Mara's little excursion in there plus a little brother-sister time for Luke and Leia. Next chapter, we'll find out a little bit more of what's wrong with Padmé, and plans will begin to be made. Thanks again for the reviews, and please keep them coming.