Many believe the dark side of the Force is simple, unlike the light. They are wrong, and Jedi Masters know better. The dark side is very, very complex.
Vader. Palpatine. Gethzerion. C'Baoth. Sedriss. Kun. All of them presented a different facet of the dark side. When Luke learned the dark side, he was not a carbon copy of his master, either... if he had been, he couldn't have come back.
Can she be turned back? was Luke's first thought. He faced the woman he knew as Shira. His friend... his co-pilot... his lover from half a lifetime ago.
Except for appearance, the memory and the reality in front of him had nothing in common.
She swung the whip. Luke turned it aside with a swipe of his lightsaber.
"Why, Shira?" he asked.
Luke had to block another whip swing. "Why, Skywalker? You have the gall to ask me why?"
She showed him her mechanized arm. "You caused this," she said.
"Shira," Luke said, as if disciplining a child.
"DON'T USE THAT NAME!" she bellowed. "I am Lumiya, Dark Lady of the Sith, and killer of the great Luke Skywalker!"
With that, she rushed in to attack Luke. He was ready, and stopped the whip. But the Sith lady pressed her attack, forcing Luke to step back. The woman gave him the smile of a predator.
"One blade? How primitive."
"Works for me," the Jedi Master replied, blocking yet another attack. "Why did you kill that stormtrooper?"
"A compassion for an Imperial, Skywalker?"
"A compassion for a man," Luke said. "Something you clearly had forgotten."
"I only regret it wasn't their commander."
Luke had to retreat again under the twirling lightwhip. "Why is that?" he demanded.
"The old stormtroopers would have shot a Jedi in the back without a second thought," she said. "That was the New Order. Humans asserting their natural right to rule this galaxy without meddling by mystics with strange powers."
Luke nearly laughed. "Yes. And the New Order was created by a Sith lord, enforced by a former Jedi, and kept discipline with Force-sensitive assassins."
Lumiya's eyes flared. "You presume much, Skywalker." She launched another furious attack. The bridge was long behind them. They were battling around stacked machinery, and every once in a while, metal shards flew off when the lightwhip struck it.
"Where were you all this time?"
"Do you expect me to tell you?"
"Why now?"
"Because the last vestiges of the New Order were about to die. That alien-influenced traitor was about to sell it down the river. I stopped him."
"Pellaeon," Luke realized. "You killed him."
The woman got in a whip strike, too far for Luke to block. The Jed sensed it and jumped up, flipping over her and attempting his own attack. He was blocked by Lumiya's quick turn.
"Why are you here instead of commanding some fleet?"
"The scourge of the Jedi must be cleansed from the galaxy forever. Starting with you."
Luke looked at the woman with sadness. At this moment, he knew only one of them would walk away alive. Lumiya had to be stopped, and if she could be turned from the dark side, he wasn't the one to do it.
"Enough games, Skywalker," Lumiya said.
She flipped back, and, landing, produced a second lightwhip.
"I've heard the bodies of Jedi vanish when they die. I'm going to find out." Both whips uncoiled at Luke.
He blocked one, dodged the other, and again jumped over her. While he was above, she tried to get him, but he managed to parry it...
As soon as he landed, he had to roll away from the whips.
He pulled a heavy crate with the Force from the top of a stack and tried to drop it on her, but she hurled it away, almost as a second thought. Luke had to block the whips again.
The Jedi master opened himself to the Force, letting it flow. He had to replenish his strength.
"Tired, Skywalker? Good," she mocked him The whips met his lightsaber again. Luke flipped back, ready once more. As he raised his blade against a new swing by one whip, the other one struck. Luke sensed it soon enough to avoid getting sliced apart, but not to dodge it entirely. The tip of the weapon struck near his saber. Luke winced in pain and dropped it.
He jumped away from her, and then leaped up, grabbing a cable suspended from the ceiling. He suddenly realized his artificial hand wasn't working anymore. He looked down.
Lumiya was holding his lightsaber in her own mechanical hand. She squeezed the metal fingers and crushed the device into a piece of twisted metal.
"Come down, Skywalker," she said.
Luke fell, since at that moment, the cable he was holding either broke or detached from the ceiling. Luke landed on the floor and dodged the whips reaching out at him. He ran backwards, aiming to put as much distance as possible between himself and Lumiya. He would never last long without the lightsaber.
She was running after him, both whips at the ready. Luke entered a side corridor and began looking for a possible route back outside. He had no such luck. Lumiya entered the chamber.
Luke hurled a metal bar at her, but she dodged. He saw no recourse...
The answer came to him like a bolt of lightning. He raised his arm...
A door at the side of the chamber swung open, and stormtroopers ran in, rifles blazing. Within seconds, dozens of bolts pierced Lumiya. She crumpled.
Luke couldn't believe what was happening, but since he already did what he planned to do, now wasn't the time. "Get out of here!" he yelled. "Colonel, get your men out, now!" he pointed back towards the door. The stormtrooper officer looked a him. Luke once again reached into the Force, called on all the power he could muster, and shoved all the men through the door, rushing after them himself.
The moment he cleared the doorway, the ceiling in the room behind him collapsed.
Luke dropped unceremoniously on top of a stormtrooper. "Need... rest..." he managed before passing out.
XXX
"Well, he's an unusual patient."
"What do you mean, Doctor?" General Fel asked.
"I wouldn't have believed that one's blood sugar could go so low and not kill the man," he said. "He shouldn't have had any energy left in him. And there's something else."
"What?"
"There are these strange sub-cellular structures, that we don't know anything about. All cells have them—mine, yours, even that plant's—but concentrations differ. His concentration is about a thousand times higher than mine."
"So?"
"I tried to look up the information in our databases, but there was nothing there. Just a file stating that to access this information, one required alpha-alpha clearance."
"Alpha-alpha?" Fel said incredulously. "That's the highest clearance the Empire has had. I doubt anyone short of a Grand Admiral had one. Maybe not even them."
"I know. I assume that it has something to do with the Force."
Fel looked at him. "What do you think of the Force, Doctor?"
"I can't deny that it exists."
"Well, neither can I. He saved all these men..."
"Some of them weren't very happy having been thrown around like that."
"Back to the Force. Do you think the Jedi are right, in their concept of an energy field?"
"Maybe... we don't know much about the Force..."
"Neither do we," Luke sat up.
"How long were you awake, Commander Skywalker?"
"Long enough. How much time had—"
"A day and a half, roughly."
"Where are we?"
"Still in the same place. We were about to leave. There was nothing left at that base."
"Doctor, am I fit to go on duty?"
"You are... Commander?"
"Thank you." Luke stood up. "As far as those 'sub-cellular structure' go," he said. "I know something
bout them. I'm not surprised the information was purged from Imperial databases, though."
"What are they?" Fel asked.
"They are called midi-chlorians. As to what they are, even Jedi scientists didn't really know... but they are lifeforms in their own right," he said. "The concentration of midi-chlorians in one's cell is correlated with Force potential."
"It makes sense that Palpatine didn't want the information to be widespread. The last thing he wanted was a simple, reliable way to determine if one was Force-sensitive."
"How did you learn this?" Fel asked.
Luke frowned, and the general realized that he had reminded the Jedi Master of something painful. "I'm sorry," he said.
Luke breathed. "I am over that... mostly. To answer your question, I learned this from Callista. A Jedi Knight of the Old Republic, stuck inside a computer for decades."
Fel shrugged. He'd seen stranger things.
"Not having a reliable test was the biggest problem in finding candidates for the Jedi Academy, in the first years. The midi-chlorian count is the only foolproof test we have that doesn't require someone Force-sensitive to administer it."
"So how did you find anyone before you knew?"
"By looking for people who defied laws of probability. Incredibly lucky gamblers, people who managed to avoid danger that was all around them..." He chuckled. "Pilots who escaped death one too many times."
"Of course, this brought many false positives. Believe it or not, General, Corellians have only a slightly higher percentage of Force-sensitives than the human average."
Fel nodded. "So you don't really know what the Force is?"
"No. And I am not ashamed of it, General. Claiming to know everything about Force is is the height of arrogance. The old Jedi were right in that anger and fear may lead to the Dark Side, but arrogance leads there as well." He turned to the General. "So we didn't learn anything from that base—whoever Lumiya was working with vanished without a trace."
"Working with?" Fel asked. "How do you know she wasn't following someone's orders?"
"She was never good at that. She would only obey someone she knew to be more powerful. Vader, Palpatine... No. She was definitely behind the assassination of Pellaeon, she told me as much herself. Whoever else is involved in this is either her partner or subordinate. I wouldn't be surprised if she's behind all of this by herself."
"Then whoever was serving her—"
"Is now acting by themselves. Depending on their own abilities, that might make them more or less dangerous. Not knowing who these people are, we just don't know. I'm sure they'd be human—Lumiya was one of the true believers in the New Order."
"So we narrowed it down to about half the galaxy," Fel said.
"No answers?"
"I think we need to take a more... active role if we're to find anything."
"General?" Luke asked.
Fel punched in a code on his comlink. "Fel to Taldine," he said.
"Taldine here. Your orders, sir?"
"Recall all ground teams. Ready the fleet. Battle formation. Fel out."
Luke looked at him. Fel took a breath.
"We're going into the Empire," he said.