Shattered Knight

by Tim Radley

KoTOR: Eight months on from the fall of the Star Forge the expected peace has not come to the Republic. The news of Revan's return has become a source of schism and conflict within the galaxy, and Revan himself has his own demons to face.

16. Dark Algebra

16. Dark Algebra

Admiral Bortha sat back in the command chair on the bridge of the Living Fleet's new flagship, in theory master of everything he surveyed. It was quite a nice theory, he thought. But unfortunately, he couldn't fool himself into believing it for a moment.

On the main viewscreen, the world of Korriz hung sullenly, a grey and dismal sphere – or perhaps that was simply his mood. The Living Fleet had, just minutes previously, finished annihilating the Sith world's considerable planetary defences, before pounding a sizable military base located in the Southern hemisphere to sterile dust. Everything about the operation had gone with perfect smoothness and precision, better than even the most optimistic simulations could have suggested. They hadn't lost more than half a dozen fighter drones in the entire engagement, and none of the capitol ships were even scratched.

As Admiral, de facto commander-in-chief of the entire fleet, Bortha would have liked to have been able to take some small amount of credit for the attack's success. He couldn't manage to delude himself even that far, though. Never, in his entire career had he been so entirely superfluous. It hadn't felt like a battle at all. Instead, it had felt like some kind of sick and twisted voyeurism – standing by and gawping as someone was kicked to death in front of him.

He glanced around at the skeleton crew occupying the bridge.

They'd been personally selected by him from his old command crew on the Excelsior. Watching them now, trying to appear busy – or at least vaguely occupied – was enough to draw a faint hint of a smile to his lips.

The bridge controls had reconfigured themselves somehow at Morrigance's behest, changed from Rakatan to something more suitable for use by 'Slaves of the Builders'. Although hardly ideal, they were now at least understandable and useable. Should events actually call for them to be used.

His smile faded swiftly to nothing. Slaves of the Builders seemed, right now, an uncomfortably apt term.

The Living Fleet's strength, Morrigance had gone on to explain to him in the one lengthy conversation they'd had – its perfect unity and flawless coordination, more than two hundred separate 'bodies' under the control of a unifying, gestalt mind – could also, in extremis, become its only real weakness. That was why each ship was to be crewed, so that they could also respond on an individual, uncoordinated basis to particular, individual threats should the need arise.

That need had not arisen. And after the way events here at Korriz had unfurled, Bortha struggled to foresee any set of circumstances where it possibly would.

If either Revan or Malak had possessed such a weapon, they would all now be supping like emperors on Coruscant . . . The thought died away, oddly colourless and empty. If Revan or Malak had had such a weapon, and the war with the Republic had been won, the likelihood was they would simply be fighting another civil war now, like the one the Sith were currently engaged in except on a massively larger and more destructive scale.

War after war after war. Even a warrior could eventually grow sick of it.

Bortha let out a breath, fingers drumming distractedly against the armrest. Morrigance . . .

Perhaps he should feel relieved by the recent turn of events, and the sudden change in leadership. After all, compared with Malefic, she was the height of reasonableness and rationality. Almost civilised, in fact. Except, the feeling he had when he looked into her polished mirror mask, and listened to that utterly emotionless voice . . .

The drumming of his fingers stopped.

Malefic, in the end, he had almost understood, and had in turn known – more or less – where he'd stood. If he failed his master, or otherwise drew his ire in any one of a myriad of ways, one fate awaited. Swift and brutal.

But that was the way of the Sith, and it had been part of his life for a long time now. A person could get used to almost anything.

With Morrigance, when he looked at her, even those small certainties and comforts crumbled. He got the impression that he was simply a game piece, and a very small game piece at that. A pawn.

And the purpose of a pawn was always to be sacrificed.

With her, he suspected, everything boiled down to matters of cold calculus and dark, compassionless algebra. As soon as he ceased to figure in her plans, he would simply cease. And not even serving her to perfection would keep him even notionally safe.

"Sir, a Dagger-class corvette has just dropped out of hyperspace, beyond the fourth planet."

Bortha had to suppress a jolt as Griggs's voice interrupted his ruminations. Not that the event itself was unexpected, except perhaps in its promptness. "And have they transmitted the expected code keys, Commander?"

The image on the viewscreen shifted to show the Corvette, sharp and slender as its designation suggested. More Dark Jedi, was Bortha's guess, though he had not actually been told. He'd also heard that Korriz was home to ancient ruins, perhaps of Rakatan origin. It was the only reason he could fathom for the decision to strike here. Tactically it had gained them nothing.

"Receiving transmission now, Admiral. Codes being checked . . . They clear."

"Then allow them to pass through the perimeter, Commander."

An interesting exchange, Bortha thought dryly as he sat back and the viewscreen once more shifted to show Korriz. One in which they'd almost been able to pretend for a moment or two that they had some kind of relevance, and even influence, over the course of events.

Abruptly a shudder passed through him that he couldn't contain, his expression twisting in a grimace. Of course, all this worry about what Morrigance had in store for them was rather tiptoeing around the very big monster lurking in the back of his thoughts.

Or more accurately, in the heart of the ship, about a hundred metres directly below this chair he sat in, surrounded by a metal cage with filaments and tendrils and thick metal cables all growing through his red-armoured carapace, into flesh. Every time Bortha closed his eyes, that twisted, bisected visage was there, glaring at him as the fine scales covering it shifted colour constantly in furious, writhing patterns.

The rage – tightly bound violence, searching for release – seemed to permeate every fibre of the vessel around him.

I didn't betray you, my Lord. I hope you are able to see that.

He shifted uncomfortably in his seat again, unable to escape the feeling of eyes watching him accusingly. Unable to escape the knowledge that no excuse of his would ever remotely appease them.

-

Juhani cursed beneath her breath as the sea of furred and extravagantly clothed bodies flowed shut in front of her, blocking her path. Her gaze scanned rapidly over the tops of the Bothans' heads, trying to get a renewed visual fix on the thief. She could still sense him – and in particular, the lightsaber that he'd snatched from her belt as she perused a market stall – but amidst the thronging, constantly shifting crowds, the directional sense was vague, all but drowned out by the random background Force noise of so many lives packed into so small an area.

To your left. Two o'clock

Belaya's telepathic call had the Cathar's head swinging round rapidly. Her amber eyes fixed on a flicker of movement as a slight figure barged through a group of shopping Bothan females, drawing outraged exclamations, before darting rapidly towards a narrow gap between two pristine white plastocrete buildings.

Inside her head, Juhani made a rapid set of calculations. Physically, she more than had the strength and stature to barge her way through the mass of smaller Bothans blocking her path, but for all that the idea appealed to the more primal elements of her Cathar blood, that approach was going to cause problems, and likely injuries too. Instead, she drew on the Force, using it to bolster already powerful thigh muscles, and launched herself onto the top of the row of market stalls running parallel to her path.

Shouts of awe and surprise went up around her. She could feel it clearly as hundreds of sets of eyes suddenly noticed her as something more than just another visiting alien to be politely disdained, turning her way and staring. Fingers pointed and voices rose in babbling cacophony.

This type of attention had always been something that made her profoundly uncomfortable; something she'd tried to avoid at all costs. She pushed the external distractions from her mind, focusing on sprinting forwards across the stall roofs. Focusing on each precisely weighted footfall.

Carbon-fibre slats bounced and clattered beneath her feet as she ran, more shouts rising in her wake, anger from stall owners now mixing with the more general surprise. She kept her attention routed firmly towards the thief and her lightsaber though, determined not to loose track of him.

She reached the end of the market stalls. A further Force jump, much larger than the first, carried her to a veranda overlooking the market square, another leap following so quickly that it looked almost like she'd hit and bounced straight off, propelling her onto a sloping, red-tiled roof. Her feet gripped easily and she was off and running again with the barest moment's delay.

Brilliant sunlight poured down around her, Alyaeroon's gleaming white towers rising with stately elegance on every side. In the distance, the city's tightly packed rooftops eventually gave way to a seemingly endless vista of lush green savannah. Juhani paid the broader view little mind, concentrating on following the alleyway that ran alongside her, about six metres below her feet.

Leave it to Bothawui and the Bothans to have even back alleys that were utterly immaculate, she thought dryly as she looked down.

And be grateful they do, Belaya's thought came back, catching Juhani slightly by surprise. She hadn't realised she'd been broadcasting. If not we might have lost him altogether by now.

The thief's back was visible in front of her, his pace seeming to flag slightly, allowing her to gradually close in. He was small for a Bothan, she noted. Scrawny too, and from his mind she was getting a muddy mixture of desperation shot through with flashes of hope that he might actually have pulled this off. Not far now. Not far . . . At a guess, she put him somewhere in mid adolescence.

Another leap, this one purely her own muscle-power, carried her across a side-branch in the alleyway and onto an adjoining roof. Tiles broke off beneath her feet as she landed, sliding out from under her. A Cathar's sense of balance was superb by any standards though, and she didn't even have to break stride.

As the tiles shattered percussively on the alley floor, the young Bothan cast a glance back over his shoulder, spotted her, and tried frantically to increase his pace. To her heightened senses, his breathing was loud and ragged, his fear obvious and intense. She was close enough now that she could even hear the trip-hammer of his heartbeat, thousands of generations of predatory instinct stirring into life.

Abruptly, he veered left, scrambling through a gateway leading to a covered garden and slamming it shut behind him.

Juhani dropped down from the roof, increasing the air resistance around her to slow her fall, landing silently in a crouch. Her remaining short-bladed lightsaber came to hand, though she didn't immediately ignite it.

Beyond the gateway, she could sense the young Bothan, no longer moving. He was . . . agitated.

She frowned hard. There was clearly someone with him. Several someones, perhaps. But she couldn't get any kind of clear mental fix on them. Sometimes there seemed to be at least four or five separate presences. Then they all merged again into one amorphous mass. Then even that impression faded, and there was just the boy. Her stolen lightsaber.

Flashes of Taris resurfaced. Of being cut adrift from the Force, helpless amid the benighted ruins and the acidic snowmelt. Ysalamiri, Tamar had explained to her, and that had gone some way to mitigating her persistent sense of failure, on a rational level at least. She bared her teeth in annoyance. Calm. Discipline.

How far away, she sent to Belaya.

Thirty seconds, came back.

I'm going in. Pull the teeth from the trap.

Juhani, wait . . .

But she was already pushing through the gate.

The garden beyond was formed out of a series of asymmetric plastocrete blocks, creating a number of separate level areas. The sun shone down brightly through a trellis roof, creating squares of shade and brilliant light. Brightly flowering climbing plants abounded, covering almost every surface and filling the air with an intensely cloying mix of overlapping perfumes. Her nostrils squeezed shut, almost overwhelmed. Everything was oddly quiet. There was almost a sense of having stepped into a completely different place and time; a strange tranquillity, aeons away from the surrounding bustle of the city.

Sonic baffles, a more rational part of her brain supplied.

The thief – looking more and more like a frightened child – stood about twenty metres away, staring at her and trembling, shoulders hunched. Some said, usually as a derogative, that Bothans had evolved from one of Bothawui's many species of rodent. This one looked on the point of devolving back.

Juhani stepped towards him cautiously, her Force senses extending outwards. "You don't have to be afraid of me. I won't harm you."

No response.

"Who forced you to do this?" She'd known even before he lifted the blade that it wasn't his own desire that drove him.

He opened his mouth to say something, but before he could find his voice, another Bothan, much larger and older, stepped out of the house behind him. Juhani felt the boy's fear spike.

The new arrival put an arm gently around the young thief's shoulders, meeting Juhani's gaze calmly. A gunmetal circlet – a neural band, designed to mask the mind of its wearer – gleamed dully around his brow. Something smelt wrong. Something that even all the intermingling odours of the flowers couldn't entirely mask.

She stretched a hand out. Her stolen lightsaber leapt from the thief's clutches and returned directly to her grasp. He let out a startled yelp.

The older Bothan's fur rippled. He seemed to be amused. "You let him steal it, did you not? You could have done that at any time."

Juhani inclined her head in agreement, watching them both warily. "But then I would not be here, meeting you."

For a moment, the older Bothan simply looked at her, inscrutable. "Indeed not," he said finally. The younger one simply looked chagrined.

"Wouldn't it have been simpler to send a message?" she asked him after a short, uncomfortable pause. "I usually at least read all of my correspondence." Something here was definitely wrong. She could feel her fur lifting, both of her lightsabers held tight and ready.

Then there was a moment of relief. Belaya had arrived, she sensed. She remained outside of the garden, somewhere overhead, looking in. Juhani silently cautioned her to remain there for the moment.

"Yes, but do you have any idea how many other people here on Bothawui read it too? You'd be amazed. Or perhaps you wouldn't." She thought that expression was a smile.

There was a tiny flicker of movement off to the left of her. An infinitesimal shifting of vegetation. She whirled, lightsabers igniting, brilliant blue. Stealth fields dissipated suddenly, something big and dark seemingly materialising from thin air in front of her. Other shapes flickered into view around it, bearing down on her.

She backed off slowly, staring, not wishing to resort to violence quite yet if it could be avoided. The upper, rational part of her brain not wanting to resort to violence, at least.

"Hold!" The Bothan's voice was sharp.

There were four of them in all. Big, stocky, dark-skinned creatures with odd sharp-toothed mouths that slightly resembled those of lampreys. All of them carried extremely vicious looking vibroblades they appeared to be very comfortable in wielding. Startled, she recognised them as Dashade, a species supposedly even nearer to extinction than her own. Their homeworld, Urkupp, had been destroyed forty years ago in the same Cron Drift supernova that had seared the surface of Ossus.

As a species they'd been almost universally feared and loathed, strongly force-resistant killers found in the employ of Sith, or several of the more dangerous galactic criminal organisations. Few had felt much grief at their supposed demise.

"Interesting company you keep," she said finally to the Bothan, carefully measuring her chances. Not good, she concluded. The Dashade looked extremely disciplined and capable.

"My bodyguards. One cannot be too careful these days. I assure you, Jedi Juhani, they do not mean you any harm. You can extinguish your lightsabers."

"Perhaps." She kept the lightsabers ignited though, eyeing the Dashade cautiously. They eyed her straight back, a wall of hard, rippling muscle and impersonal malice. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

"My name is Krusk Fey'lya."

Of clan Alya, who counted the southern city of Alyaeroon as their traditional familial stronghold. Juhani had been dealing with various Alyas over the past few days, as she and Belaya had attempted to arrange for provision to be made for Seboba's former slaves. During that time she'd grown heartily sick of all the tangled layers of double-talk and seemingly pointless intrigue with which even the most apparently straightforward action was invested. As a lesson in patience, it had been valuable, but exceedingly testing.

"And what do you want with me, Master Fey'lya?" she inquired politely.

"The point then, Cathar? Very well." He gestured for the smaller adolescent Bothan to run inside. "I had hoped that I might be able to meet a . . . friend of yours. Although I understand perfectly why he would not wish to set foot here, of all places. Very wise of him."

"What do you want with my . . . friend then?" No real need for him to clarify whom he meant. If she could Force leap through a gap in the trellis, a few precisely measured lightsaber strokes should bring an entire section of it down on top of the Dashade. That would probably be her best chance if it came to a fight.

"To pass on a message." Krusk made a waving gesture. "In many ways you will serve even better than he would though, hero of the Star Forge."

"And the message," she prompted, having no wish to linger over this.

His fur rippled again. "I represent an organisation with strong interests in seeing that the Republic persists long into the future in something resembling its current form. The attention of yourself and your . . . friend, should be directed back towards the centre. To Coruscant and the Jedi order itself, perhaps."

"You work for Hulas," Juhani stated flatly. She knew a little about the Genoharadan.

Krusk shrugged. The neural band covered any other reaction. "Who I work for, Jedi Juhani, is neither here nor there." He had produced an object that looked like a portable comm unit. "Now please, I really do suggest that you put those lightsabers of yours away."

She just looked at him, unblinking.

"With both hands full, you won't be able to catch this when I toss it to you," he explained.

With a fractional nod, she finally did as he asked, dazzling blue blade-beams extinguishing simultaneously. Almost to her surprise, the Dashade did not immediately try to jump her. She caught the comm. unit easily.

"It is already programmed to link you to your former master, Jedi Quatra. All you have to do is activate it."

Juhani looked up at Krusk sharply. Quatra?

"I thought you would find it easier to hear of the situation from a source you trusted. Don't worry," he hastened as her eyes narrowed. "She has no connection to our . . . group, and indeed, I'm sure she'll be most surprised to hear from you." A casual shrug. "Or perhaps not. Who can say with Jedi?"

Juhani's gaze dropped briefly to the blank screen of the comm. unit, then returned to the Bothan.

"I'll leave you to conduct you communication in privacy." Krusk barked something in a language Juhani didn't recognise towards the Dashade, who immediately withdrew towards the house. "Good day to you, Jedi. I would request that you don't try to follow us."

With that, both he and his sinister bodyguard retreated inside. Immediately, a force field sprang up blocking the way after them.

After a few seconds inspecting it, Juhani concluded that she wouldn't be getting through it any time soon, even with the aid of her lightsabers. A shadow passed over and she looked up. Belaya dropped down through a gap in the trellis and landed lightly in front of her.

They shared a look.

"Did you catch all that?" Juhani asked her quietly.

Belaya nodded, frowning. "Very . . . odd." She gave a small headshake. "Being around Revan these past days has proved most enlightening," she murmured, barely audible. "Seeing the way that everything twists and reshapes itself around him. He's like a carelessly drifting singularity, warping what he goes near whether he means to or not. And he continues to inflict damage even once he has passed on by."

Juhani started to retort, annoyed by her friend's tone and implication, but Belaya gestured to the comm. unit. "May I take a look?"

After a slight pause, Juhani handed it over.

Belaya switched it on immediately. For about ten seconds all that the screen displayed was a smoothly rotating holoNet logo. Then a face appeared. In some ways, it was absolutely familiar – thin and hard and wiry, framed by dark, short-cropped hair, eyes piercing and hawkish. In others, it was entire light years different, older and wearier to a degree that simple passage of time couldn't begin to explain.

The woman blinked slowly, as if just roused from sleep. "Belaya? Is that really you?"

"Yes, Master Quatra," Belaya answered, slightly hesitant. "It is me."

The smile of relief that spread across Quatra's lips startled something deep in Juhani's core. It spoke somehow of a weakness and uncertainty that she had never thought to see from this source. "Praise the Force. The messages I sent have finally found you then?"

Belaya's hesitation was longer this time. "Your messages, Master Quatra? Do you mean to say that the Bothan really was working for you?"

"The Bothan?" Quatra frowned. "I take it then, that you aren't here on Coruscant?"

"Bothawui."

"Bothawui," Quatra repeated. "Hmph." Suddenly she was peering past Belaya's shoulder. "Is someone there with you?"

Juhani cleared her throat, unaccountably nervous. The last time she'd seen Quatra, she'd thought that she'd killed the woman, gripped by Cathar battle rage. She had been meaning to seek her old teacher out at some point, but the Taris assignment had arisen, and since then . . . well. "Juhani, Master Quatra."

"Juhani." Quatra's smile then made her decidedly uncomfortable, totally belying the woman she'd previously known – cool, calm and serenely controlled; someone she had wanted to emulate; someone she had wanted to be. Now the Jedi Master's expression was of someone who is simply glad to have some vaguely good news, drawn through with relief. "You are looking well, my dear. It has been far too long since we last spoke. I hope you haven't come to entirely hate me because of what I did to you?"

She wasn't honestly sure what she felt. Embarrassed over how she remembered herself from the back then? That, and other things too. "I now understand the necessity of the lesson perfectly. And it is me who has need to apologise . . ."

Quatra made a small, soft noise, cutting her off. The corner of her mouth twitched fractionally. "Understanding something and accepting it are very different. It was a cruel lesson, and I often question the method I chose to impart it by." She paused. "Please, don't think I have been ignoring you since. I have been following your progress closely, but it was essential you made the next stage in your development on your own. I always knew that you were destined for great things though, Juhani. That is why I may sometimes have seemed to push you so harshly."

Juhani inclined her head, those words making her feel even more uncomfortable. She wasn't sure what to say.

Belaya interrupted then, much to her relief. "Master, what were the messages you tried to send?"

"It was a request for help, I suppose." Quatra frowned, clearly hesitant. It appeared to take her several seconds to compose herself fully. "I have become more and more certain over these past weeks. There is a darkness here on Coruscant, right at the heart of our Order. A darkness that obscures everything, and threatens to consume us all. I am certain of it."

-

Carth found himself staring at Yolanda's hair. He blinked slowly, dimly aware he was on the edge of falling asleep. And that sleep meant either the Catcher or Bliss. He wasn't sure which prospect was the more frightening one.

Except . . . right then he wasn't really scared.

For some reason that had nothing to do with logic, but was completely certain nonetheless, he was sure that the Catcher's gaze was nowhere close to him right then. Stupidity. Utter stupidity. But still he let himself drift.

A crack of bright light emanating from the bathroom made Yolanda's hair gleam, a warm, deep blonde like poured honey. He reached out to touch it, but his fingertips dropped short. He was too lethargic to stretch further. A tiny smile touched his lips. It was, he thought, almost amazed by the realisation, actually genuine.

The hair, of course, was not attached to Yolanda's head.

It had slid off in his hands several hours ago, right back at the beginning, when urgency had been its own form of madness. A desperate need to push the entire universe away, yet at the same time find something. Cling to something that would hold everything else together.

He exhaled softly, rolling onto his back. The bed beside him was empty, the sheets a tangled mess, still warm with the heat from her body and slightly damp. The scent on the air . . . it pulled him back, more fully to consciousness. It had been a long time since he'd smelt that particular scent, and he struggled to pinpoint how he felt.

A sound from the bathroom cut off. The sonic shower. He glanced across at the chrono, then grimaced. Much, much later than he'd thought. For a moment he struggled to work out where all the time had disappeared, but then realised that, yeah, there had been places along the way.

He groaned, a hand coming up to rub at his eyes as he swore beneath his breath. A moment later, he forced himself to move rather than slip back into dozing, and rolled out of bed, pulling on discarded clothing in a kind of semi-functional half-trance.

Briefly, he hesitated outside the bathroom, before pushing inside.

Yolanda stood with her back to him, half-dressed in the sort of functional plain grey underwear designed to go comfortably under a flightsuit or lightweight armour. Her hands were doing something at the back of her neck with the implant interface there. He winced slightly as he watched her feeding something that looked far too long into the connector port, until it plugged flush against her flesh.

Their eyes met in the mirror. They were green, he noted, even without the contacts. Well, at least as near to green as they were to brown. She didn't say anything, and a moment later, the eye contact broke.

Carth let the door swing shut; cleared his throat. He nodded towards the implant she'd just connected. "What's that?" Utterly lame.

There was a slight pause before a response came. "Visual acuity upgrade," she stated matter-of-factly "Allows me to see the blood flow to a person's face. Acts like a lie detector, and lets me read a person's emotional state to a high degree of accuracy. For species that use their faces to convey emotional state, anyway." After a second or so she added, "I thought it might come in useful for our meeting with Dr. Fleg'manus"

"Ah."

"Although there are other uses too. Right now, for instance, Valden, I can see you're embarrassed as hell, struggling to work out what to say, and wondering how you could have let last night happen."

"Right." He turned away quickly, moving towards the shower cubical, uncomfortably sure that the back of his neck was managing to give away almost as much as his face would have. Damn it. This wasn't how he'd wanted this to go at all.

A noise came from her that sounded like a sigh. "You know, of course, that I'm teasing you, Valden?" Her voice was cool and slightly distant. He got an inkling then that she was perhaps even more uncomfortable than he was. "In order to improve your vision, an implant has to fit either in or over your eyes. This is an advanced response package. Improves my reaction times and reflexes."

"I knew all that," he lied. Then he added, "You were wrong about the 'wondering how I could have let last night happen' part, by the way. I don't regret it." And he really didn't. That was perhaps the most surprising revelation of all.

After a moment, she nodded. "I thought maybe you and your old partner . . ."

"Her name was Bliss." He shook his head. "And no, we weren't like that. That was the first time we'd worked together." A sigh of his own. "We'd only met that day."

"Oh." Her gaze started to drop, then locked more tightly with his. He saw her lips compress. "Let's not turn this into more than it was, hey, Valden?"

"I didn't think I was doing that, was I?"

After a moment, she nodded. She pulled on a top, the same shade of grey as her underwear but thicker material. "We both needed the distraction. And it was pleasant enough, wasn't it?"

"Pleasant enough?" Carth inquired with a raised eyebrow. It seemed such a chilly dismissal.

She smiled fleetingly then. "You'd prefer marks out of ten? Some kind of written testimonial?"

Carth actually laughed, albeit briefly. As the laughter died, he watched her strap on a retractable wrist blade and test it a couple of times. The interplay of the strong, lean muscles in her arms was strangely fascinating to watch as the blade slid smoothly back and forth. "It doesn't have to mean absolutely nothing either, you know. Those aren't the only two possibilities."

"Uh-huh." She pulled her sleeve down to cover the blade. "Let's face it Valden, a few days from now, if we're not dead, we're going to go our separate ways and never see each other again. When it comes to it, we're not even on the same side, even if we're not enemies at the moment. Let's . . . just let's not complicate matters more than absolutely necessary, hey?"

He continued to look at her for several seconds as she finished the business of dressing, barely acknowledging he was even there. He'd hoped somehow that there might have been some change, but apparently not. "So you have some kind of off switch, huh? You can switch straight back to before, as if nothing ever happened?"

He thought she was going to ignore him, as she didn't answer for several seconds. Finally, she turned round and faced him again. Met his gaze directly. "If I didn't have an off switch, as you put it, I'd never have made it away from Nar Shaddaa. If you want to survive all this, you need to grow an off switch too."

He folded his arms.

She sighed. "It's not like I even know a single concrete thing about you." As he opened his mouth, she carried on over the top of him. "And no, Valden, that wasn't a request to know more. I think it's better this way, don't you? All things considered."

She pushed away from the sink behind her, striding past him and back into the bedroom.

"All things considered," Carth echoed quietly to the empty room. He looked at his reflection in the mirror – an unshaven, rather disreputable looking stranger with bloodshot eyes. "I thought maybe it might help if we could take an extra step. Try to trust each other perhaps." His reflection almost seemed to be mocking him. Yeah, because you're so the expert on trust.

He heard her exhale and mutter something beneath her breath. "Just get showered and cleaned up, Valden. The Catcher hasn't stopped. Just because we shared a bed for a night, the Catcher hasn't stopped."

Finally, he did as he was told.

Half an hour later, the two of them were sitting in Dr. Fleg'manus's rather spacious and well-appointed office, watching the Carosite as he fiddled with a holo-terminal.

Tall and long-necked, the short fur of his long muzzle showing grey, Fleg'manus had an air of distracted irritation about him, long, agile fingers and double-opposable thumbs flickering across a key pad almost too rapidly for the eye to follow. "My apologies." The gruff voice, with its thickly accented Basic, indicated that, despite the words, any apologies present were purely notional. "Normally one of my assistants would take care of this sort of thing." He shot an irritated look towards Yolanda, now with her blond wig restored, as he said this. "But since your stipulations indicated the need for secrecy . . ."

"We really do appreciate you going out of your way for us, Doctor," Carth told him, covering up a sigh. And boy, was he making sure they knew just how far he was going out of his way.

The Carosite made a strange low sound that might have conveyed exasperation, irritation or any number of other negative emotions. Then, finally, the holo-terminal flickered to life. Part of Carth couldn't help but wonder if the whole show of messing about hadn't been a put on, designed to pass some of the Doctor's irritation back to its source.

Floating above the terminal was a three-dimensional image, which put Carth in mind of a convoluted star map. Star Map, he thought with a grimace. That wasn't in any way or shape getting old. Blinking, his eyes refocused slightly and he saw it was a diagrammatic representation of what, to his eyes, looked to be an extraordinarily complex molecular structure. "What exactly are we looking at here?"

"This?" Fleg'manus seemed slightly taken aback that Carth would even need to ask. "This shows the stable form of the chemical formula you asked me to process. Its structure at an atomic level."

"What does it do?" Yolanda asked, quiet but firm.

"Do?" Fleg'manus inquired. His head swung round on his long neck to focus on her. "It's a molecule. You were hoping it would perform tricks?"

"What might you use this substance for?" Clipped and icy this time.

Another strange, low noise like before. Definitely irritation, Carth thought. There was an unmistakeable undertone of, just who are these uneducated Gamorreans. He was sure it wasn't purely a product of his own imagination. "I was about to explain," Fleg'manus said shortly. "If you would allow me that opportunity."

Yolanda simply smiled at him broadly. "Thank you Doctor. In layman's terms if possible. Neither of us is remotely as knowledgeable in this area as your good self."

Dr. Fleg'manus blinked, eyeballs rolling in a manner Carth couldn't help but equate with a long-suffering sigh. Give me strength, or the like. "In layman's terms, the substance does absolutely nothing. Is that simple enough for you to fully understand?"

Silence stretched out.

"Perhaps in slightly less simple terms than that, Doctor," Carth finally managed.

A low rumbling seemed to pass up the considerable length of the Carosite's neck. "Very well. There are certain signature structures in the substance that are familiar to me from particular bio-weapons I have been given to study on the Republic's behalf. But the molecule itself seems to have been designed to break down rapidly and completely, leaving no discernable trace of itself behind."

Carth stared at him. "Wouldn't that be very bad? I mean, a bio-weapon that is effectively undetectable, if that's what you're saying . . .?"

There was the eye-rolling blink thing again. "If you'd listen rather than talk for a moment, please. The 'break down rapidly and completely' part of what I said is of key significance. In any species that this substance is theoretically capable of harming, it would break down within the circulatory system before it had the chance to actually do any harm. And this is a specifically designed behaviour. See the bondings here, here and here? That can only be intentional." A head swung to peer at each of them in turn. "In its current state, this is a very complex substance designed to do nothing at all in a very complex way."

"You say current state," Yolanda was saying. "That seems to imply other possible states."

Carth was barely paying attention. There was an uncomfortable tightness in his gut. He'd been sure that this must be something important. Absolutely positive. But, then, he only had her word on any of this. He shot Yolanda a sudden, sidelong look. If somehow she'd known all along he was eavesdropping . . .

Fleg'manus was making a dismissive waving gesture with one of his rather odd-looking hands. "A figure of speech. I'm not used to translating into layman, as you put it. I was perhaps a little imprecise."

An idea occurred, more vain hope if he was honest. "When you say it does nothing, could you be missing something?" He groped around for what he meant. "Could it be doing something that you either couldn't detect or weren't looking for?"

The expression on the Carosite's face suggested that Carth had just accused him of something akin to cooking and eating his own children. "Such as?" The sarcasm invested in those two words was off the scale. Tell me my job, little man.

"Could it, for example, be destroying midichlorians? Could the break-down process you're witnessing be this happening?"

There was a rather impressive snorting noise. "Mr. Mayer, midichlorians are an entirely theoretical concept that has yet to gain general acceptance by the wider scientific community. One shouldn't put too much stock in sensationalist holoNet documentaries and the mumblings of eccentric religious orders."

Carth was aware that Yolanda was watching him closely, and from the way she shifted suddenly in her seat, he got the distinct impression that she'd suddenly made a big connection in her head there. That she now knew exactly why he was asking the question.

Her face gave nothing away. He cleared his throat. "Hypothetically speaking, if midichlorians were to exist . . ."

Another snort that seemed to pass the entire length of his considerable muzzle, gaining volume the entire way. "No Mr. Mayer. The theories so far put forward would imply the presence of midichlorians in every living cell. This substance breaks down almost immediately within the circulatory system. If it were killing midichlorians, it would only be doing so to a very small fraction of them before it ceased to become effective. Besides, there is nothing about the structure here that even remotely suggests such a thing."

And you're absolutely certain of that, Carth wanted to press, but didn't. He knew full well what kind of response he'd get.

Yolanda spoke up abruptly, catching him slightly by surprise. "In the same document where we found this formula, there were a number of what we believe to be genetic code sequences. Could these be used to alter the formula in some way? To tailor it, perhaps?"

Dr Fleg'manus did the equivalent of sitting back hard, neck straightening and jerking upwards to increase his effective height by several inches. "Why didn't you disclose this at the beginning? If you want me to perform an effective analysis, I require all pertinent information available. As it is, all you've managed to do is waste my time and yours."

Carth shot Yolanda a sidelong look. "Tell me, am I being particularly slow here . . .?"

That same snorting noise came from Dr Fleg'manus again, also accompanied by the eye roll thing this time. "What I believe your companion is suggesting, Mr. Mayer, is that this substance in front of us is the base for a bio-weapon designed to undetectably target specific individuals while leaving all around them completely unharmed. An interesting theory, which I am not in any position to either confirm or refute."

As Carth attempted to digest this and work out how it affected everything he'd three-quarters convinced himself that he'd worked out, Dr. Fleg'manus's desk comm beeped.

"Please, excuse me." Not bothering to wait for a response, the Carosite turned his back on them.

There was a rapid, muttered conferral, from which Carth failed to pick out anything much apart from the words: 'Yes, they were just about to leave. You're very welcome to them.' Then Fleg'manus severed the link and looked back at them.

"That was my colleague, Dr. Ellas," he explained. "For some reason, he was very eager to speak to you, Mr. Mayer." The Carosite's tone of voice strongly suggested that he couldn't begin to fathom how that was even a possibility. "It sounded particularly urgent. I suggest that you don't keep him waiting."

That said, he gestured rather pointedly towards the door.

-

"I remember you telling me, fairly recently, that you had stopped dancing a long time ago."

Yuthura didn't immediately acknowledge the source of those words. Instead, she inclined her head towards the man standing opposite her, across the practise mat. Her breath was still coming hard and fast.

His name was Ranis Sansiki. He was tall and lean to the point of gauntness, and with his balding head and slightly rounded looking shoulders, he had more the look of a librarian than a warrior. In some ways that wasn't so far from the truth, Ranis acting as both chronicler and poet to the Echani troupe she now commanded. In other respects, though, it was about as misleading an impression as it was possible to form.

Ranis was also the Echani's combat instructor – a martial artist of extraordinary skill – and Yuthura couldn't help but think that if she'd faced him instead of Gare in their absurd little duel, she would not now be in this position at all. He inclined his head smoothly to match her gesture exactly.

At least he too was breathing hard from the sparring. That was somewhat mollifying. She picked up a towel, using it to wipe the sweat from her face and head tails. "Thank you, Ranis," she said once her breathing was back under control again.

He inclined his head again. "A genuine pleasure." And the words were actually sincere, so far as she could tell. "It isn't often that an employer of ours shows any interest in our ways." There was a subtle frown as he said this. From their earlier conversations, Yuthura had formed the definite impression that most of the Echani themselves no longer showed as much interest in those ways as Ranis thought proper.

Only then, finally, did she turn and face Jolee. She arched one smooth brow inquiringly, not saying anything.

"I don't think you were being entirely honest with me," he said.

Again, she didn't reply, wiping her hands carefully on the towel before stowing it away. Inwardly she was trying to work out what purpose lay beneath the words – what he actually wanted with her.

"I was just passing." He answered the question before she put voice to it. "We're due to drop out of hyperspace in about five minutes time. I thought I'd see if you might like to walk with me to the bridge? Unless you're embarrassed to be seen with an old man?"

"Not nearly so old as you try to make out sometimes," she murmured, falling into step with him.

"Hey, girl? Did you say something? You'll have to speak up a bit."

And that didn't fool her for even a moment, obvious and deliberate self-parody. "No, I didn't say anything," she said, more loudly this time, playing along.

Funny really. Every minute of the past thirty hours had seemed, at the time, to last an hour in its own right. Yet now that the time was gone . . . it scarcely seemed to have existed at all. Too fast. Much too fast. And she was left with a feeling inside her chest that she couldn't imagine being worse if she was walking to face her own execution.

Glancing at Jolee sidelong, she finally allowed herself to respond to his opening probes. Easier than certain other questions by far. "Dance and combat have certain commonalities. In the core skills that underpin both disciplines, at least. But that is as far as it goes." She shook her head. "To a Twi'lek, it has a spiritual aspect beyond the simple physical. The Great Dance. All existence." She couldn't entirely stop the bitter twist that played across her lips then. "It is a religion as sure as any faith in the Force. That faith shattered within me a long time ago."

"Ah," he said quietly. "Faith is an interesting mistress."

Yuthura bared her teeth, slightly surprised by the intensity of what she suddenly felt. "Faith is a vicious bitch who keeps us slave and prisoner."

"My chains shall be broken?" he suggested after a short pause.

"The Force shall free me," she echoed. She wasn't sure if she was smiling or grimacing. She could feel her lekku twisting in agitation. "There was a time when that spoke very clearly to me. It is a lie of course. Or at least, no more than half the truth. Where it frees with one hand it simultaneously binds you with another."

"And that rankles?"

"Not like it once did."

For a moment, they both fell silent, simply walking. In its upper levels, the corridors of the Rancorous were broad enough to accommodate a grav-sled flanked by a full retinue of guards. The light was orange, warm and oddly flame-like. Evenly spaced alcoves and archways created areas of deep shadow – far from a practical design for a starship.

"You think you're going to lose him, don't you?" he said after a while.

She didn't ask what Jolee meant. She knew well enough. Tamar. "I don't own him. He's not mine to lose, anymore than I am his."

"You know very well what I mean, girl."

They reached the main turbo-lift. She hit the control to summon it, before glancing at Jolee curiously. "You act differently with me than the others, you know that?" He was much more sparing with the senile old coot act, for one thing. Of course, he still did it, but there were times like now when he appeared to forget.

He snorted, apparently readying to launch back into the act. He stopped though, letting a breath out abruptly. "Sometimes it's useful. Sometimes not. You kind of get a feel for it."

"I make you uncomfortable somehow, I think," she said after a short while. "You're worried I might fall back? You think I might end up dragging him back with me too?"

He snorted more loudly this time. "Don't flatter yourself, girly. Takes more than some slip of a Twi'lek lass to get me worried. I've seen things that would make your hair curl." A brief pause as he looked at her. "If you had any, of course."

She kept on looking at him coolly. The lift arrived, opening with a pneumatic hiss. They stepped forward together, into a space the size of a small cargo bay on a human designed vessel. "You once told me that I reminded you of someone. Who did you mean?"

"Hmm?" The lift doors closed. Jolee scanned the controls rather more intently than there complexity merited. "No, I really don't think I did." He shot her an accusing look. "You're just making that up to make an old man think he's going senile, aren't you? Very cruel."

There was a subtle shifting sensation; a small change in acceleration forces. They'd made the jump out of hyperspace, and very smoothly too by the feel of it. Yuthura felt something clench inside her, but she forced the sensation away, leaning across Jolee and selecting the button for bridge. After a fraction of a second's delay, the lift whirred into life.

As she stepped back, Jolee sighed abruptly – almost resigned. "Did Tamar ever tell you about Nayama?"

After a moment, Yuthura shook her head. "He tends to keep other people's confidences."

"Considerate of him," he murmured. Eventually he added, "Nayama was my wife."

Yuthura looked at him sidelong. His gaze seemed to be off somewhere miles away. "She was a Twi'lek?" But she knew even before she asked that that wasn't what he'd meant by reminded.

He shook his head. She could tell he was somewhere deep in painful memories. "I didn't mean you reminded me of her physically." Suddenly though, a slow smile spread across his lips and the pain seemed to drop away. "Although she did have this way of moving . . .. It was quite something to see."

Yuthura looked away and snorted. Suddenly she was sure that this wasn't something she truly wanted to hear. Something too personal and intimate, which she was no good at all at dealing with.

Jolee's smile faded. "You're very different people, but occasionally the mind plays little tricks . . . Little things . . ." He trailed off.

The lift stooped, the doors sliding open.

Jolee was looking hard at her again. "Very cleverly diverted from my question, by the way. Someone might almost mistake you for a Jedi."

Another snort, covering a brief, uncomfortable pang of . . . of something. Regret perhaps? It seemed like half a lifetime ago that she'd stood before the Jedi Council on Coruscant and asked to be readmitted to the Order. Now, she was no longer entirely sure that she'd even ask the question in the same position. So much had changed. So much about her self-perception had changed.

How much of it was for the better, she couldn't say.

Tamar was standing with his back to them, halfway across the bridge, staring out of the viewscreen at the sparse backdrop of faint stars. He hadn't looked round at their arrival; hadn't acknowledged it in any way at all.

As she looked at him, she could feel the Force flowing around him in subtle ebbs and flows. His consciousness was obviously somewhere far removed from here, and as she concentrated on him more intently, she felt her awareness shift. He almost seemed to shine then, the normally tightly contained core of power he held deep within him now breaking through to the surface in a way she hadn't seen before.

Part of her wondered what he might be able to do if he ever let himself tap fully into that power. On different levels, the idea was both strangely seductive and deeply scary all at once.

She pushed the thought away as she continued to stare at him. Something – a thread of Force, almost like an umbilicus – emerged from that core, connecting him to something distant that she couldn't sense.

Bastila Shan. A name she had heard a lot about, and someone she found herself thinking of more and more. Someone she couldn't help resenting, no matter how small minded and petty that was, and no matter how much she tried not to.

Stupid to dislike someone you haven't even met. A self-mocking smile touched her lips, but vanished quickly. Stupid to feel so jealous.

You think you're going to lose him, don't you? Jolee's words echoed, but they weren't, she thought, quite the truth of it. She'd always known that they would lose each other, inevitably. At least in that way. It was just . . . just that she wanted more time. A bit more time.

The grimace lasted longer than the smile.

"There are other kinds of bonds to those of the Force," Jolee murmured from beside her, making her jolt. "Some might say those are the important kind."

She didn't say anything. A visible shudder passed up Tamar's back, and the sense of Force flowing around him cut off. The thread died away, at least from her perceptions, but she knew it remained nonetheless.

He gestured towards one of the tactical stations, and she could tell from the nuances of his movements that his mind still wasn't focused on the here and now. "Ready the pre-programmed sequence. Target is . . ." He reeled off a rapid fire string of coordinates that, as far as Yuthura could tell, pinpointed an empty patch of space a few hundred kilometres directly in front of their position.

"Sir," came the acknowledgement.

"Fire."

She didn't really see the complex series of detonations. Her attention was focused on the Force rather than anything her eyes were showing her. Tamar was reaching out again, grasping hold of something that the overlapping patterns of detonations briefly outlined, and manipulating it with his will.

At first she couldn't tell what it actually was he manipulated, but then it . . . blossomed. That was the only word she could think of to describe it, the fabric of the Force swelling suddenly and flowering outwards in a graceful, spreading circular ripple.

A gate. A door.

A wormhole, her eyes informed her as the Force sense faded, and her other physical senses resumed control. A gaping throat of darkness, hanging in front of them.

And beyond it, something waited.

-

"Might I remind you that the Jedi Order has maintained its independence from Senate jurisdiction for nigh on a thousand years?" Ulthor Bey'lesk's voice was a low grumble. The elderly, grey-furred Bothan peered round the chamber at his fellow Jedi Masters as though to emphasise his words.

Or perhaps, Quatra thought sourly, given how myopic he'd become over the years, he was just checking to make sure that he still had an audience.

"I think everyone here is fully aware of this fact." Mida Tapawan's immediate response was thin and reedy. And, as was its want in recent times, uncomfortably shrill.

Quatra stifled a weary sigh. Is this what it has come to? This Grand Council of Masters.

Grand Council. If ever two words had been designed to mock, then surely it must be those. They didn't even occupy the old formal Council chambers, where such gatherings had always been conducted in the past. That had been one thing they had at least all been able to agree upon. The demise of the old Council there had left a lingering echo on the Force, and seemed to have permeated the very walls of the structure. It was now a very disturbing place to be, and not remotely somewhere to conduct calm and measured business.

And that, right at the supposed heart of the Order's strength.

So instead, they had gathered in the largest of the Temple's lecture auditoriums, where, more usually, apprentices or Padawans would assemble to be taught. Although any given gathering of Padawans was likely to display more accumulated wisdom than was currently on view, she couldn't help but think.

"Do you, Master Tapawan?" Ulthor inquired with bare politeness. "Do you honestly? While everyone here may very well be aware on a purely factual level, the attitudes I am seeing from so many of our number regrettably suggest that they have forgotten entirely the deeper truths of the matter."

Quatra stifled another sigh. For all that she understood Ulthor's point of view, and even agreed with it, he could have phrased it in a less deliberately patronising tone.

She looked around the auditorium, bright sunlight spilling through the transparisteel panels of the ceiling, and felt something that wasn't entirely removed from despair. A Grand Council, where supposedly every Jedi Master in the Order was required to be in attendance. In practise, of course, given the timescales involved in its calling, some had simply not received the message in time, or were engaged in business too critical to pull away from. Perhaps some too had simply ignored the call entirely. Quatra couldn't deny she had felt that temptation when the summons first came to her. But even allowing for the fact that maybe as many as a third of their number were absent, the relative sparseness of the gathering was . . . disquieting.

"And what are those truths? That times and circumstances change, perhaps? That binding ourselves rigidly to traditions of the past for no better reason than that they are traditions, is in itself a blindness amounting to folly."

The speaker here was one of the younger Masters, newly appointed in the months after the battle of the Star Forge. Ta-Shakti, his name was. A Togruta. And while the words themselves were sensible enough, the stridency bordering on belligerence of his tone was not.

"But this is not just a simple matter of tradition, is it?" Marek Dawnlight, several seats along from Quatra's own position, put in before Ulthor could launch his own withering counter argument. "This is a fundamental tenet of our Order's entire reason for being. We work alongside the Republic in cooperation, but we always retain our independence from it. That is crucial to what we are. Ask those of us who work along the Outer Rim upon worlds that are not a part of the Republic's compass – worlds that do not necessarily trust the Galactic Senate to hold their best interests at heart – what impact might it have if we were suddenly, in perception, to become the Senate's foot soldiers. Our role as mediators and negotiators – as emissaries of peace – would be immediately and irrevocably undermined. What of us then, when we are regarded as no more than another branch of Republic law enforcement? Let us not speak of traditions here, when what is at stake is the entire meaning of our existence."

But if it were just their numbers – or rather lack of – that was at issue here, then that would have been entirely fine. From Quatra's viewpoint at least. No, the more telling problem was the entrenched divisions that she could sense, not even lurking beneath the surface anymore but openly on display.

She looked around at the faces, many of them belonging to people she had known for years, though just as many were new to her. There hadn't been a Grand Council of the Masters in almost forty years, since shortly after Exar Kun's defeat on Yavin. Back then, she'd been no more than an apprentice, but the results of that gathering had echoed profoundly down the years.

The entire nature of the Jedi had altered then, she had to acknowledge. In the years since, they'd become a more cloistered order, and yes, it was undeniable – they were now further removed from the galaxy at large than they'd once been. Aloof was not an accusation entirely without foundation. A determination had been made at that last Grand Council to alter the teaching methods of centuries. The Order had begun to actively seek out the Force sensitive at a much younger age so that they might grow to maturity already schooled in the ways and wisdom of the Force, removed from outside distractions and attachments. Profound changes to the Order's attitude to personal relationships had been enshrined. Even the Jedi Code itself had been subtly amended, the teaching of it becoming a far more formalised and tightly regulated thing. All to ensure that what had happened once, Jedi turning against Jedi, could never happen again.

And what a success it has been.

This gathering promised, in its way, to have just as momentous an impact, determining the Jedi Order's very path within the galaxy. If they didn't manage to sunder themselves in two in the process. The more that Quatra looked at those faces around her though, the more that latter possibility looked the likely outcome.

Even Revan and Malak had not managed to divide them so surely as they were divided today.

She found herself wishing then, for the presence of Vandar Tokare. His calm wisdom and serenity had always seemed to spread to those around him, bringing a sense of proportion to even the most dire of circumstances.

Hell, she thought, a thin smile touching thinner lips, she'd have settled for Vrook Lamar. Vrook at least, had been capable of banging heads together where necessary, forging consensus – even if half the time it was consensus against him – by sheer force of prickly personality.

Quatra realised then, her smile becoming self-mocking, that she was sitting there, watching and waiting for some one to take charge. Just like half the rest of us. She drew in a deep breath; opened her mouth to speak . . .

And was beaten to the punch.

"Your words do you credit, Marek," the female voice said smoothly, "but I can't help thinking you overstate the case here, and even risk the accusation of melodrama."

Quatra's gaze snapped round on the speaker. It was one of the holographic projections intermingled with their number. Traditional rules on Council members being gathered in person had, given the circumstances, been relaxed to allow for maximum participation.

"Melodrama, Leandra?" Marek responded, his tone carefully measured this time. "Perhaps so, but I think one of us at least has to ensure we are aware of the scale of the folly that is proposed here."

"More than one," Ulthor grumbled irritably, and there were several other murmurs of ascent from around the auditorium.

"But in overstating our concerns, we are in danger of allowing undeniably powerful emotions to sway our decisions." The hologram looked around the chamber, as if silently asking for reasonableness and calm. "It surely behoves us to address the matter before us in as measured a manner as possible, so that we do not risk acting out of fear. Because if we are honest, who among us here today does not hold at least some fear for what we discuss?" A pause for emphasis. "I know that I do."

Silence. Quatra studied the smooth holographic face of the woman. Leandra Corva-Dey. She'd known her back when they had both been Padawans together, though she hadn't immediately recognised her. But yes, now she could see the echo of the woman she'd once known there before her. In truth, Leandra had probably aged far better than she had, and the voice . . . it was difficult, in all honesty, to recall that voice.

Something niggled at her slightly though. Something off.

It was a moment before it came to her. She'd heard that Leandra was one of the prime motivators behind both the calling of this Grand Council, and the proposed deal with the Republic Senate that was now provoking such contention. Yet . . . she wasn't here in person?

"Look out of any window in this temple complex," Leandra was saying after another interjection from Marek that Quatra had missed in her distraction. "The Senate is within easy walking distance of us, visible for all to see. As far as most of the galaxy is concerned, we already stand together as twin pillars at the Republic's heart. And are not a large proportion of the problems now facing us down to the public's perception of our lack of accountability?"

"So you propose that we cede our independence entirely? We become simply another arm of the galactic legislature?" a Twi'lek Master, who Quatra couldn't immediately put a name to, suggested. The tightness of his face as he spoke made his disapproval clear enough, for all that his tone stayed resolutely neutral.

"No one is suggesting that at all," Ti-Shakti snapped back in obvious irritation.

"The Senate do not – and, in the end, cannot – have any true understanding of the nature of the Force. Simply as a practical matter, how can they be expected to legislate something they do not comprehend?" This was a female Zabrak. Calli Zen? No, Zen had died with Vandar and Vrook and all the others, Quatra reminded herself.

"Please," Leandra's voice held a kind of put upon patience. A schoolteacher dealing with a clutch of demanding toddlers, Quatra couldn't help but think, and almost smiled at the notion. The two of them had been friends at one time, she recollected. That seemed a very long time ago. "We need to try to maintain a measure of perspective here. The proposal under discussion does not for a moment suggest that we suddenly become an arm of the Senate's will. It does not propose that we give up thousands of years of tradition in a single shot. All it proposes is the introduction of a series of checks and balances, and that we be transparently accountable for the decisions we make."

That was the other nagging thing that troubled her about Leandra Corva-Dey – the reasons for their friendship's final dissolution. Time heals, she reminded herself inwardly. Sometimes even the worst looking wounds could scab over.

Or the most innocuous could fester.

"We already have a system of checks and balances. One that has grown out of the quiet wisdom of the Force and served us well for millennia. And everyone in this chamber today is most assuredly accountable for their every decision and action. It is insulting to suggest otherwise." Marek again.

An emotive subject, Quatra thought. But as Jedi, and Jedi Masters in particular, they were supposed to be beyond that emotion. And there, perhaps, was the most dangerous self-deception that they faced.

The holograph of Leandra inclined its head. "Insult was certainly not my intent." The smooth reasonableness of her tone managed to make Marek sound almost childish. "But from the perspective of the galaxy at large, we are accountable only to ourselves, and all the laws that bind us are of our own devising and enforcement. Let us face facts. The Republic's trust in us has broken down to such a level that we have to take visible and substantive steps if we are to have a hope of restoring it."

"And so we are to make ourselves accountable to Republic bean counters and lawyers? How then, do we even pretend to serve the will of the Force?" The Zabrak again. Vida Yart, Quatra saw as she glanced down at the seating plan. Another of the new ones, like Ti-Shakti.

"And we are forgetting that one of the prime purposes of our order is to act as balance and guide to the Senate. Not the other way around." Ulthor again, sounding crotchety. With Vandar's demise he was one of the oldest and most experienced of them left.

This was going to take a while.

"I acknowledge that this is a very difficult subject for us," Leandra turned and addressed the Bothan directly. "We all still have our pride don't we? Pride in what we are, and pride in our history. We are supposed to be above such pride, but that . . . that is difficult. Can we not acknowledge though, that we have sometimes made mistakes in our choices? Serious mistakes that have had profound consequences in the galaxy at large. Who here can truly say they have not questioned and agonised over our past choices, in matters of the Mandalorian war and Revan in particular?"

And there it was. All the nagging doubt crystallised to form a hard and solid lump.

This time Quatra did speak, almost without consciously thinking. "It is easy to talk of mistakes when one has for so long absented oneself from the decision making process entirely."

Leandra turned round and looked at her curiously. After a brief pause, a smile touched her lips. "Quatra. My old friend."

Those words – the way she said them – made something inside Quatra tighten. It almost seemed as if she had been . . . reminding herself? "Leandra," she managed. "It's been a long time, hasn't it? I thought you were done with the business of councils and us Jedi Masters."

Leandra had been promoted to masterhood several years ahead of Quatra, by that time the friendship of their early Padawan days faded to little more than old acquaintance. She had, so Quatra had heard, been a member of the Jedi Council that Revan had so fatefully gone before to petition for aid against the Mandalorians, and had been one of the few Masters to speak openly in favour of his position.

When the Council had forbidden Revan from taking action, she had apparently argued strenuously against the decision. Although she had not joined Revan's cause when he had disobeyed the Council's will – no one of Master level had, the schism confined to the ranks of Knights and Padawans – she had eventually resigned her position at the end of the Mandalorian war, leaving Coruscant behind to take on watchman duties somewhere on the outer rim.

And as far as Quatra knew, before these recent events, no one had heard a single word from her since.

"Anyone can change their mind, can't they Quatra?" Leandra was smiling. "I heard that even Jolee Bindo has returned to the order, and if he can let bygones be bygones, then surely so can I? Foolish to let individual differences of opinion divide us at such a crucial time."

Quatra inclined her head. Part of her wanted to ask why now was so much more urgent than when Malak and the infinite fleet had been driving the Republic to the brink of destruction. She kept her mouth shut though, realising how petty it would sound. Inside, the nagging doubts had increased rather than lessened.

"And where is the disagreeable old coot anyway?" a voice drawled. "No, not you Ulthor. Bindo I mean."

At this, a smattering of laughter passed around the auditorium, breaking through the uncomfortable edge of tension. Ulthor muttered something beneath his breath that didn't carry.

"He was assigned to keep watch on Revan," another voice answered. Quatra didn't look at the speaker, her attention still fixed upon the hologram of Leandra, striving to find something there to allay her sudden fears. "No one has heard from him in weeks."

Bothan space, as of few days ago, she thought distractedly, but didn't say, not caring to explain how she had that knowledge. Not now at least, in front of everyone. Silence spread around the chamber like a pall. Revan. The other great monkey they had sitting on their collective backs.

"The oracles tell us nothing still? The future continues to lie clouded from our sight?" Someone finally asked as the tension grew to near unbearable levels.

"Something blinds us, as it has for weeks now." Since the old Council's demise, the voice didn't add, but the meaning was clear enough to Quatra's ears. "There is a veiling shadow that makes seeing even the present difficult."

Leandra's expression hadn't so much as flickered in the past thirty seconds. Why aren't you here in person?

"We are letting ourselves be sidetracked from the matter in hand here." Mida Tapawan again. Quatra recognised the voice clearly.

Why, Leandra?

"Agreed." Marek and Vida Yart spoke together in stereo. After a second or so, Marek inclined his head and gestured, yielding the floor to Vida. "We still haven't heard any convincing argument as to why we need to renegotiate our relationship with the Senate," the Zabrak said. "They have always seen the wisdom of our current relationship, and they will see that again once they find a measure of calm. Right now it should be our goal to help guide them towards that calm rather than pandering to their whims."

"With respect," Mida Tapawan responded, voice rising in barely contained annoyance. "You have not been on Coruscant these past weeks, Vida. You have not seen the vehemence of opinion aimed against us, even from former staunch allies. If we do not show willingness to compromise, then change will be imposed on us. Make no mistake."

"Compromise?" Quatra heard Marek snort. "There is a difference between compromise and what is proposed today. We will of course, hear the Senate's concerns . . ."

"But we won't will we?" Leandra stood up again, Quatra still watching the woman's face closely. And the more she watched it, the more of a stranger's face it became. Leandra had never been so . . . reasonable. "Your tone of voice tells me you are quite categorically not hearing the Senate's concerns. Is it not better that we engage with them now, and make ourselves a part of this process, guiding its direction from within? Better, surely, than arraying ourselves against them, the very people we are supposed to serve and protect. Can we not admit to our imperfections and seek out ways to correct them? Have we no humility? I cannot see the future, Masters, but I do not have to, to know that it will be one we come to regret if we do not learn to bend before the prevailing wind."

The words passed Quatra by though. Something about this woman was wrong. Very wrong. She wondered how the others didn't sense it. It was more than simple nagging now.

Other voices entered the debate, taking them slowly round in circles. A lot was said, but Quatra didn't think that anyone was truly listening to each other anymore, if they ever had been at all. Her own attention began to drift until a subliminal vibration coming from the communicator in the pocket of her robes snapped her attention back. Proper etiquette said she should not even be carrying it in here.

She took it surreptitiously from her pocket and read the message that been sent to her.

It was from Belaya. She and Juhani would arrive on Coruscant in the next seven hours, ahead of schedule. There was a request for an immediate meeting in private, away from the Grand Jedi Temple. The implication was that the two of them were being followed.

-

"So, what do you want?" Carth barely managed even a veneer of politeness as he caught sight of the Caamasi, standing and waiting calmly in front of them with his arms folded, hands concealed by voluminous sleeves.

Dr Ellas's placid, blue-on-green eyes moved briefly past him to settle on Yolanda. He didn't raise any protest to her presence though, focusing quickly back on Carth. There was no preamble. "You have to leave this place. Quickly."

Carth felt his heart lurch and simply stared at him. He had the sense of Yolanda suddenly drifting away to one side, giving the appearance of doing it completely casually, but putting herself in a position to flank Ellas should the need arise. To take him unawares and slide her concealed blade through his ribcage.

He realised then that he hadn't said anything at all to her about the Caamasi – about him being a former Jedi, and perhaps a powerful one. The one who built Darth Revan's new identity. Then again, he hadn't told her anything at all that was true about himself either. So much for the idea of trust that he'd mentioned earlier. Suddenly, the urge to open up – for some level of honesty in their interaction – was a powerful one.

He shook his head, shoving the idiocy away – struggling to concentrate. "What are you talking about?"

"The Dark Jedi pursuing you both is very close. He will arrive at Kamari Station within the next few hours. I would advise against you being here when that happens."

The words, serene and unruffled though they were, acted like a kick to the gut. He struggled to draw enough breath to make his voice work. "How the hell do you know about that?"

Ellas tilted his head fractionally to one side. If Ellas was human, Carth would have interpreted the expression on his face as perplexed, but he suspected those eyes could be misleading. "I saw your reaction to the news about the Sunrider. And I saw then the link that was tied to you through the Force."

"And you didn't say anything?"

"You didn't seem inclined to extend our conversation." There was a noticeable pause as he obviously substituted a word just before he voiced it. "Valden."

Carth grunted, conceding the point. A glance across at Yolanda showed that her attention was fixed very firmly on Ellas. The fact that he'd revealed himself as a Force adept didn't seem to have altered her intent at all.

"Unfortunately it was beyond my ability to sever the connection." A short, ruminating pause. "Not without considerable further study, at least. The best I could manage in the circumstances was to shield you for a time. I hope, at least, that it gained you one night of trouble free sleep?"

Carth felt his cheeks start to heat at that, and was grateful when Yolanda jumped in as he groped for a response.

"If you were shielding Valden, how exactly did he find us?" There was a dangerous edge to her voice, and she'd drifted closer to Ellas, now in almost perfect position to deliver a rapid killing strike.

Ellas spread his hands. "Perhaps we should walk as well as talk, do you not think?"

"Perhaps you should answer the question first," came her immediate retort.

Ellas folded his hands again. "An error of judgment on my part, it seems." To Carth, the Caamasi sounded both apologetic and slightly embarrassed. Glad I'm not the only one. "Your Dark Jedi . . . acquaintance seems to have been able to detect and home in on my efforts at shielding you. Rather than hiding you from him as I'd hoped, I may have inadvertently led him straight to you."

Yolanda swore concisely beneath her breath. For a moment Carth was afraid she was going to attack Ellas anyway, something clenching inside him as he prepared to intercede. Then she started walking rapidly, back towards the quarters they'd been assigned.

Carth fell into step with her, struggling to conceal his relief. Ellas kept pace alongside them with ease, though he seemed to glide as much as walk.

"I suspect your pursuer already knows the identity of the vessel you arrived on, so I have made arrangements for another ship." Ellas was holding a data-scrip out to him, and Carth accepted it numbly.

He heard Yolanda snort with abortive, bitter-edged laughter. "Most generous of you."

"I never acquired more than the most minimal of competence with a lightsaber." Ellas's tone as he continued was politely conversational, seemingly oblivious to her mood. "And I was always more interested in the healing and scholarly applications of the Force. I still have one or two tricks at my disposal though. I should, at the least, be able to provide you with a decent head start."

Carth stopped abruptly in his tracks. He let the data scrip slide between his fingers, then trod on it deliberately as it hit the floor. A mixed group of Duros, Ugnaughts and Ryloshi fell silent as they walked past in the opposite direction, necks craning in curiosity.

Ellas gestured vaguely in their direction. "Carry on," he mouthed. Immediately they resumed their conversation as if it had never paused, seeming to have lost any interest they had.

"Valden," he started carefully once they'd gone. "I really think . . ."

"We're not running," Carth stated flatly.

Ellas blinked in a way that made him look somehow puzzled. "I think the Republic has more use for you and the information you carry than it does for a fallen Jedi well past his prime." There was a note of reproach in amongst the words.

And what, precisely, do you know about the information I carry? Carth bit down on the words though, trying to stay calm and measured. Failing. The Catcher's face lurked somewhere behind his eyes, grinning tauntingly. "You know about what happened to the Sunrider. That didn't happen because this Dark Jedi thought he was destroying me. It happened because he found I wasn't there. Punishment and message together. If I run, he'll do exactly the same thing here."

And here there were millions of people. Not thousands.

He heard Yolanda's breath hiss between her teeth in obvious annoyance, but didn't look at her. "And on top of that there's someone I have an obligation to. Someone I abandoned once. Someone I won't abandon a second time."

"Valden!" Yolanda's voice was sharp.

He didn't look at her. "This is nothing to do with you. Leave. Take the ship Dr Ellas arranged for us and get away from here." His gaze dropped involuntarily to the data scrip he'd just crushed. Yeah, that was clever. Then he added, much more softly, "Please."

Ellas still hadn't said anything. The intensity with which he was looking at Carth made him profoundly uncomfortable, sure that the Caamasi was seeing far more than simply the surface.

"Love 'em and leave 'em kind of guy, hey Valden?" The words dripped acid. For all that Carth could see their carefully calculated intent, they still made him flinch. He managed to keep himself from responding though.

Ellas's ears twitched, fur rippling softly. "And there I was, serene in my decision of self-sacrifice. I am not an especially brave man, but . . . so simple, I thought." The soft sound that emerged was oddly wistful. "What then, do you suggest instead, Valden?"

He just stared at Ellas, trying to work out if he could or even should trust him. This man who, if his words were to be believed, had helped to reshape and rebuild Revan's memories. He took a deep breath. On top of everything else, this made him someone he absolutely couldn't afford to let the Catcher catch. "What I suggest, is that the two of us go and meet him. Just like you planned to do alone. And then . . ." Something in Carth's voice turned utterly cold. "Then we kill him."

Their eyes remained locked silently together for what seemed like a long time. He could tell that the Caamasi was deeply troubled.

He had enough problems of his own.

Finally Yolanda made a loud and rather rude noise, breaking the silence that had settled in. "You know Valden, it almost seems impossible, but I think I actually managed to overestimate your intelligence. And since I had you down as being barely more sentient than a wroshyr wood door knob, that's quite some going."

Carth turned slowly and glared at her. "What?"

"Your inability to count beyond two, for starters. There are three of us here."

Briefly his eyes screwed shut. But he recognised that expression – ghosts of it at least – from Morgana. There would be no shifting of ground. No retreat. "Three," he agreed quietly, suddenly feeling sick.

"We had best get moving then, if we are to prepare." Ellas stated quietly. "We don't have long."

-

He was being watched.

Tamar had been able to sense that the ship was alive from the moment their shuttle had passed through the wormhole mouth. Now that they were inside that vast, darkly gleaming vessel, the intensity of the sensation had increased approximately a thousand fold. It was something different to the Star Forge. There, he had sensed a vast, crushingly powerful, but completely impersonal dark presence all around him. It fed upon the violence and death he brought with him, but was utterly indifferent to its outcome. Here though . . . here he got the sense of something active and intent, and most of all, aware of them, scrutinising their every forward step.

Scrutinising him.

That was the part that truly made his flesh crawl. The sense that the ship was watching him specifically. Watching him because it recognised him. Because it knew him.

From what Bastila had told him across the bond, it should not have come as a surprise. Perhaps, he thought, that impression of being recognised was simply a projection of his own imagination – his sense of reality warping to fit with his expectations.

His head was pounding. It felt almost like all the millions of tons of surrounding metal were pressing in on him directly. Walking silently at his side, he could sense the tightly drawn tension in Yuthura too.

He'd wanted her to remain back on the Rancorous. No sense in risking more of them than necessary inside the wormhole, and someone to pull them out if it collapsed, or something else went wrong. That was the surface reasoning at least. One look at her expression – the way her lekku were held – had made his jaw snap shut on that suggestion though. So Jolee had stayed behind instead.

Their footsteps echoed. Everything around them was silent and still. Somehow, that made the tension worse.

Bastila was somewhere very close now. For all that she was currently blocking him out as firmly as she could manage, he could tell that much.

His mouth was dry. Over the past few days, the two of them had probably spent more time communicating across their shared bond than in all their previous time of knowing one another. Yet not a single word spoken had been anything but business: about Malefic and the Living Fleet, the hyperspace pocket, the wormhole, and how it could be opened. He'd felt the underlying turmoil in her – anger and fear mixed in with a myriad of other emotions – for all that she'd sought to guard that part of herself from him. From herself, too, maybe.

Force knew what she'd sensed from in turn. He suspected though, that it was something very different from the calm reassurance he'd been consciously trying to impart.

That was the dark side of the bond. That no matter how much you might want it, you could never be entirely alone in your own head, the one critical freedom everyone else took for granted utterly denied to you. And you could never, ever – no matter what discipline you possessed – control entirely what leaked through.

So while there had been a truly horrendous sense of loss when they had agreed to part – to block off the bond as firmly as they could manage and let it wither and die with time and distance – there had had also been the sweetest, most powerful relief. A sense of freedom, which permeated through the pangs of withdrawal from that unbearable addiction.

It seemed, though, that it was not something you could escape quite so easily.

They reached a doorway, stopping briefly – him, Yuthura, plus a half dozen of the Echani mercenaries. Bastila stood the other side of it. At this proximity, the sense of her was just as strong as his sense of the ship.

He paused and glanced across at Yuthura. Their eyes met, but neither of them said anything.

They should have said something prior to now. He should have said something; something more than he had already. There'd been so many other distractions and things to steal the attention, but that wasn't in the end a remotely good excuse. Above all, he shouldn't have let himself believe her simple assurance of understanding simply because it had been the most convenient thing for him to hear.

Now though, there was no time. Her mouth twitched; bared sharp white teeth. It wasn't quite a smile. It wasn't quite reassuring either.

He stepped forward. The door opened, and they walked on through.

His eyes moved immediately to where Bastila stood. That was another thing about a bond like the one they shared. At this range, you always knew exactly where the other person was, whether you wanted to or not. There was no hiding.

Which was why he'd been ever so slightly surprised that she wasn't there waiting for them when their shuttle had landed. For some reason though, she'd made them come this extra distance to meet her. Her back was turned to him now, the hood of her Jedi robes pulled up as she stood, apparently gazing out of a viewport at the empty void that lay beyond.

She didn't look round, or say anything.

That first move would be left to him. He thought he understood that wish – that desire for a modicum of control, however small – and cleared his throat, opening his mouth to greet her.

Canderous beat him to it. "I'm disappointed in you, Revan. Keeping company with this bunch of posing Echani dandies. I thought you had better taste than that. Don't you have any real men to follow you?"

A hint of a smile touched Tamar's lips, the edge of the tension in him breaking slightly. So familiar. He looked back round, realising that, with the amount of his attention consumed by Bastila, he hadn't registered anyone else there as more than an outline – a body occupying space.

That smile faded as he finally saw Canderous properly; his heavy armour, dull and charred, a deep rent across the chest plate that had obviously been inflicted by a lightsaber. It was his right arm though – or rather, the lack of it – that drew his attention most.

He forced himself to lift his gaze to that granite fist of a face and spoke lightly, as if he'd seen nothing out of the ordinary at all. "Well, I don't notice you bringing any warriors to my cause."

There was a noticeable pause, Canderous's expression becoming oddly fixed. After a moment one cheek twitched, the corner of his mouth turning up in dry amusement. "Perhaps if you'd asked nicely, I would have done."

"I'll bear that in mind," Tamar answered quietly. "And maybe one day take you up on that." He realised as he spoke that the words were no longer being said in jest at all, absolutely deadly serious.

From the look in his eyes – surprised, then wary – he saw that Canderous had just realised it too. His expression became almost . . . introspective? That was as far as Tamar could read it, at any rate. "You've changed, Tamar," he said then, voice uncharacteristically muted.

It wasn't often that Canderous called him anything but Revan. After a slightly uneasy moment, Tamar cracked another smile, nodding towards the Mandalorian's missing arm. "Not nearly as much as you, I see."

Canderous smirked in turn. "Remember the choices you gave me, the last time we parted?"

"Those weren't choices. They were suggestions. And you did ask for my opinion."

"That I did." He waved Tamar's quibbling away. "Anyway, I decided after our conversation that I should stay like you suggested. Give the Princess here a hand."

There was a moment of perfect silence. Mutual recognition at just how bad a joke it was. Then, simultaneously, they started laughing, loud and uproarious, the sound echoing off the ribbed chamber's walls. It wasn't so much humour as a kind of relief. Tamar was aware that the others were staring at the two of them in nonplussed bemusement, but didn't really care.

As the laughter started to die away Bastila's snort cut through it piercingly.

"Good to see you again, Canderous." Tamar inclined his head.

"You too, Tamar." A dry chuckle. "Better than the alternatives at least."

Bastila walked between them then, her step ragged. She stopped close to Canderous's side. Suddenly she consumed Tamar's full attention again, everything else sliding into the background. He barely needed the Force bond to sense the seething impatience in her. The nervous intensity.

And he knew then too that the decision to stand so near to Canderous was a very deliberate one, designed to send a message. Just like making them come this short distance to meet her had been.

She pulled her hood back and looked straight at him. He found himself staring. She looked very different to how he remembered. And it wasn't just her hair, now cropped almost brutally short in a way that seemed to change the entire look of her face. Older, he decided. She looked much older – someone who now understood a lot more about the universe, although that newfound understanding didn't appear to have brought with it any happiness.

"Hello Bastila," he said, aware that he'd stayed quiet for too long.

Something in her eyes seemed to tighten. Were even those two simple words the wrong ones?

"Tamar," she responded at length. Her voice was that of a stranger.

From Yuthura he sensed a kind of watchful and darkly cynical amusement. He took a deep breath, trying to salvage something. "Shall we get out of here then? I don't know about you, but I don't have much desire to linger here any longer than we have to."

-

"Ah. So it is a trap." Morrigance heard Quatra sigh softly. She didn't sound altogether surprised. "Yes, I suppose that the caution contained in Belaya's communication was slightly out of character. I tried to work that out of her, you know, but never quite successfully. She still has a tendency to charge on in, and subtlety be damned." A tiny pause. Morrigance could feel the woman probing at her with the Force as she spoke. Those probes bounced off, encountering walls of ablative armour. "Juhani too for that matter." A dry, inward directed smile touched the woman's lips. "And me as well, it would seem. Perhaps, in the end, you teach more of yourself than you intend to."

Morrigance took a step forward, out of the shade of the trees she was standing under. This corner of the park was oddly quiet. The sun had disappeared behind the surrounding mega-skyscrapers many minutes ago, and down at this level twilight was closing in. The files of traffic high above seemed to belong to an entirely different world.

She touched the side of her featureless mirror mask, a hologram flickering to life over the top of it. "Quatra. My old friend."

Across the clearing from her, Quatra's expression became tight and flinty. "You are not Leandra."

"I knew her though, very briefly." Still wearing Leandra's face, Morrigance fashioned a warm and friendly smile. "After Revan claimed the title of Dark Lord, she came to find him – to try and persuade him back from his chosen course."

Quatra flinched; exhaled softly. "And Revan killed her for her troubles."

Morrigance shook her head. "No, Leandra never got as far as Revan. I had my job, and did it."

The Jedi Master stared at her. "You're her. The Sith Lord. The woman Revan mentioned in his interrogation transcripts. You never left here at all, which is why no one has been able to find a trace of your existence."

In answer, Morrigance simply made the holographic face smile more broadly.

"And now you wear the title Darth. I hope you are enjoying it, but from what I hear it is a bitter thing to bear."

The smile faded slightly. Morrigance continued to walk forward, slow and stately, closing the gap between them. "I have never been one for titles, and I make no claims at all on that one in particular. Leave it for other fools to fight over."

She saw something flicker in Quatra's eyes – something harden. "And now you're going to kill me. Like you killed the Jedi Council."

Morrigance stopped. There was still a gap of about six metres between them. "I made sure everyone who knew Leandra well during the latter period of her life was . . . indisposed. You were something of a borderline case, however, and in the end I decided to take a risk. That was a mistake, I acknowledge. Your mistake was in not concealing your reactions."

"None of us are really behaving like Jedi anymore, are we? I think we're scared of having lost so much control, but being Jedi, we can't allow ourselves to admit that. We need to relearn humility."

Morrigance simply shrugged. She decided it would be best not to allow herself to be drawn into a conversation on her views about the Jedi Order.

"As do you, I think. You had to see me to my fate in person, didn't you? Does death bring you that much pleasure?" Suddenly Quatra's lightsabers were in hand, her stance changing to instant combat readiness. "You will find I'm not quite as defenceless as I might appear."

"I'm not here to fight you, Master Quatra." Morrigance kept her tone respectful. "Nor am I personally here to kill you."

"No?" Quatra raised an eyebrow. Her lightsabers ignited simultaneously, incandescent blue. "Then why, exactly are you here?"

Morrigance made Leandra's face smile again, broader than ever – warm and friendly. "Me? I'm here to distract you."

Celyanda, now.

Two further lightsabers ignited, blazing silver-white in the descending gloom. Holding them, twin figures emerged from the surrounding undergrowth, flanking Quatra on either side.

-

An airlock on Kamari station, as pristine and sterile as all the gleaming white metal that surrounded it. A spaceship, too large for one of the internal landing bays, had docked there several minutes earlier. As yet, there had been no sign of movement from within. No one had answered any hails or attempts at opening communication.

With each passing second where absolutely nothing happened, the tension among those watching and waiting ramped up another notch.

Finally, there was movement – a shadow passing across the transparisteel window set in the airlock door. A murmur spread like a ripple through the assembled gathering.

A few seconds later, there was a soft hissing sound as different atmospheric pressures equalised. Then the airlock door opened. In the region of two dozen blaster rifles shifted fractionally in nervous grips. There was a collective intake of breath.

Then a lone, dark-robed figure stepped into view. A lightsaber dangled casually from one hand, unlit, while a broad and friendly looking smile spread across the man's lips.

There was no challenge. No order to stop or surrender. A hail of blaster fire met him, far too focused and intense for that single lightsaber blade to block.

---

Again, many, many thanks to Jedi Boadicea for beta reading for me.