Notes: At last, we have arrived at Peragus! I had no idea my handful of ideas for a lead-up would expand as wildly as they did, but we made it. Yay!

Chapter 6: The Lost

She was lost, yet she knew exactly where she was. She floated weightlessly, a single presence surrounded by lights. Memories tugged at her, memories of pain, of fear, of death narrowly escaped. She needed to find her way back, but all she could do was drift helplessly along. She searched among the lights whenever they drew close, looking for the one, for her anchor. She was here, one of these lights.

Something changed. The echoes of what she had left behind were here now. There was fear. And now the lights were going out, one by one, now more quickly. She hastened her search. Where was the one she sought? Where was she?

There were few now, so few left.

Relief flooded her as at last she found the object of her search. Her light was small, a shadow of its former self, so pale she could hardly see it against the darkness, but it was there. Like her, she was trapped in this place, this land of shadows, but together they could find there way back. She strained to pull herself closer, closer, until she could whisper in her ear so quietly nobody else could listen – awaken!

She floated weightlessly. Her breathing was deep and easy despite the gentle pressure of warm liquid against her skin. She felt free, like a first time zero-g jumper, filled with bubbling wonder at the unexpected release of gravity's constraints. Her heart soared and her fingers stretched wide and far until cool glass pressed in against her fingertips.

She wondered, now, at her situation, and with the first thought fuzziness, static, appeared at the edges of her mind. Energy, excited adrenaline pulsed through her as she jumped at the challenge. She pushed back against the fuzziness and grinned as it started to give way. It cracked and a sliver of light shone through. Her grin died, and sudden dread certainty filled her. No. No! She tugged at the fuzziness, at the walls of darkness, clutching them closer to her.

Awaken! The word echoed through her mind, somehow both imperious command and desperate plea. The walls cracked and light was flooding in from everywhere and her walls exploded into a thousand tiny shards, lost forever, as Marina opened her eyes.

Memories crashed in on her, a tidal wave that threatened to pull her under, but she fought, she fought and pushed them back down deep inside her where they couldn't reach her, dormant. It was the same battle she fought every time she woke up. She wondered, as she always did, what would happen when she lost. And as always, she pushed the thought down with the memories before she could answer it. Instead she looked around her and took in her surroundings. Taking action, focusing on the moment, always helped.

She floated in a Kolto tank, the healing fluid tinting the world around her a pale green. She reached up to the transparent breathing mask on her face and the emergency release button there and noticed that her fingers were wrinkly. Very wrinkly. She'd been in this tank a long time.

The Kolto drained away and deposited her on her hands and knees on the padded tank floor. She pulled the mask off over her head and untangled it from the snarled, greasy mess that was her dirty blonde hair. The mask dropped with a wet plop on the damp tank floor and Marina listed to the side and leaned against the glass of the tank, closing her eyes as a wave of light-headedness made her woozy.

The glass was cold on the skin of her arms and legs left exposed by the abbreviated jumpsuit of her undergarments. She shivered. Shouldn't a nurse or someone have come to check on her by now? She could hear the alert pings from the nurse's station even through the Kolto tank glass.

She felt terrible, all the exhaustion of having exercised hard combining with the mental out-of-sorts feeling of having slept too long. All she felt like doing was going back to sleep, though that would only make it worse. A close second on the wishes list was a long hot shower to clean off the sticky, smelly Kolto residue, and a long brush of her hair. Feeling clean always made her feel better.

Okay, something was not right. They definitely should have come to check on her by now, though who the "they" was was still hazy. She eased herself off the glass with a little squelch and felt around for the emergency release lever. There it was, in the recessed cavity right at the center of the circular tank floor, just like in all the other tanks she'd woken up in during—

She cut the thought off with the unconscious reaction of long habit and gave the lever a good yank. A section of glass popped free and swung aside to let in a cold gust of air. Marina shivered again and resisted the urge to pull the glass panel shut again to stay in the humid warmth of the tank and instead crawled out onto the tiled floor that was absolutely freezing. Her teeth chattered as the cold air clung to her damp skin, underwear, and hair.

The pinging fell quiet.

Marina took her mind off the discomfort by focusing on her surroundings. She was in a med bay of some kind, judging by the handful of Kolto tanks lining the walls along with her own. Medical readouts blinked crimson beneath each of the tanks and Marina felt a shiver that had nothing to do with the cold run up her spine. Nothing in the silent room had changed, but somehow knowing that she shared it with five eerily floating corpses made it feel different. She stared at the bodies with a morbid curiosity, half fascinated and half repulsed by the combination of familiar and totally foreign.

It didn't matter how much time you spent with the dead – it never got easier.

The closest tank held a human male. His body was frozen in the midst of a massive convulsion that locked his limbs into strange contorted shapes and froze his face into something between a grimace and a sneer. One eye was closed, but the other half-open black iris stared straight at her. The professional buried deep inside her refused to be rattled.

She'd seen worse.

What was more interesting was his clothing. It was a uniform of some kind, a green-on-blue configuration she didn't recognize. Normally, as in her case, patients were stripped of most of their clothing to make sure there were no averse reactions to treatments. Of course, normal procedure went out the airlock in an emergency, and the blistered and seared mess that was his left side certainly qualified as an emergency. In fact, that looked like a rib poking out. Whatever had hit him was hot enough to melt away skin, but low powered enough not to punch straight through him. Her eyes narrowed in thought. Off-hand she couldn't think of any weapons that would—No, NO!

She'd avoided these thoughts for years, yet with the first glance at a body she was sucked back in. Had nothing changed? Every time she thought she'd finally let it all go . . .

She sighed and climbed unsteadily to her feet. Whatever unpleasant memories she'd awoken, they all pointed to the same thing. Violent death, absent doctors—they meant danger.

She was about to step towards the door and out of the oppressive presence of the dead when the tank next to the door caught her attention. The human woman looked, well, normal. Her long black hair was pulled back into a tight bun and, like Marina, she was dressed only in underclothes. Her arm and shoulder were covered in the pale pink of new skin, standing out against her olive complexion, but looked pretty well healed. There were no other visible injuries, yet she floated as silently as the rest, the blinking red of her life-readings monitor lighting up her face with lurid red before blinking off leaving her in the dark once more. Light and shadow, light and shadow. Something felt . . . off. Marina punched a command into the kolto tank monitor. Medications, Treatment Schedules, and Additional Insurance Information flashed across the monitor.

Clarissa A. of Chandrilla, 32 standard years old, currently employed by Bupont Mining Inc, Silver plus insurance policy package provided by Bupont Mining Inc. Local provider: Jeremy Broccovic, office 17c, Administration Level, Peragus II Mining Facility.

Marina frowned. She was . . . familiar . . . with medical treatments for serious injuries, and the pain medication scheduled to be administered by the Kolto tank was far in excess of a human's tolerance levels. In fact, there were built-in safety systems designed to prevent exactly this sort of screw up from happening and it took a lot of doing to get around them. Nobody on a mining station, which this must be, should know how to circumvent those safeguards.

The feeling in her gut was rapidly going from bad to worse. A wound more fitted to a combat zone and sabotage of medical equipment meant that she needed to figure out where here was, in the galactic sense, and leave, as quickly as possible. And not necessarily in that order.

A sudden suspicion gripped her and she turned to check her own tank and, sure enough, she'd been given the same lethal dose. But how did I . . . I couldn't have . . . No, it was luck. Yes, I just got lucky, that's all.

It was definitely time to stop thinking and start acting. It felt like the past was starting to catch up to her, and she'd survived the past nine years, eleven months, and fourteen days by always staying a step or two ahead.

The door slid open with a loud snak that startled Marina despite expecting it. The sudden noise and movement was so out of place in the still quiet.

Wherever this was, it was in the back end of nowhere, judging by the single nurse duty station, which meant she hadn't wandered closer to the core worlds, for which she felt a weight slipping off her shoulders she hadn't even realized was there. She was still far from the past, far from home. She was still Marina.

The duty station was, as she half-expected, deserted. Marina pulled the rolling chair upright from where it lay on its side and slid into the nurses desk. A plate with moldy half-eaten dinner sat by the blank computer monitor. She gave the screen an experimental tap and the words Bupont Mining Inc. popped up and started bouncing around the screen. Another tap and the corporate database popped up, but with a minimized tab. Another click brought up a paused extranet clip from a soap opera starring that famous twi'lek, what was her name, Loussa? Louissa? The video was paused halfway through.

Whatever had happened here, it had obviously caught them off-guard.

She crossed her legs and leaned back in the chair to plan her next move, and jumped in surprise as she kicked something under the desk. A moment later and she had it pulled out—a small brown knapsack. A quick inspection showed that it was filled with useless baubles, but tucked into the corner she found an identity card for Latisha Stronk and a credit card. She'd find Latisha and return her bag, minus a few credits for keeping it safe for her, just so she could get back on her feet, you understand.

She flipped back to the company database and scrolled quickly through the work holos until she reached the last three and hit play. A face popped up, dark sinned with fuzzy hair and purple lipstick. It seemed that some sort of virus or glitch had gotten into the system, because the data had been largely corrupted and some of the entries were missing altogether. Latisha Stronk's face locked up, got caught in sound loops and was occasionally overwhelmed by static, but it would have to do.

Entry 253-12 . . . still examining the survivors of the damaged freighter—looks like it goes by the name of the Ebon Hawk. Only one survivor, placed in the Kolto tank for recovery. The carbon scoring on the vessel suggests it was in a battle, but no indication of who fired on it . . . couldn't get much from the navicomputer, I'm surprised the ship was able to make it inside the Paragus asteroid field without the asteroid drift charts.

Aside from the lone survivor, we recovered an old woman, no life signs. There was also a protocol droid and a utility droid on board-sent both down to maintenance while security sorts through the other items on the his.

It looks like utility droid, a T3 unit, was able to get the ship working enough to get to the colony. We're prepared to . . .

The entry ended in static. Well, she must have been the survivor, though she couldn't remember anything about an old woman or a freighter. Still, she didn't think about it too hard. It was irrelevant for the next few moments of survival, and besides, she didn't trust the past. The past was dangerous. She was in the Peragus Asteroid Field, and she needed an asteroid drift chart to get out. That was all she needed. She hit the next entry.

Entry 253-15 . . . could be a Jedi, but we won't know for sure until we get the transmission back from the Republic. If the survivor is a Jedi, that would account for the recovery rate . . .

But I'm more concerned that a Jedi here may cause trouble, some of the miners, especially Coorta, are already st—

. . . another accident today, a detonation in the ventilation tunnels . . . if the lock down measures hadn't activated, the whole facility would have been destroyed.

Got most of the injured to the Kolto tanks in time—but the rest had to go the morgue. One of the wounded said a droid caused the accident, but we couldn't get any specifics. I'm not going to lie, this whole situation is starting to scare me.

They were having technical problems then, problems with their droids, perhaps. But problems that got people killed? Sabotage of the Kolto tanks was more than an accident; it was murder. She needed to know more. She pulled up the final log.

Entry 253-18 . . . miners about the Jedi, a number of the droids have been acting oddly, and not even memory wipes seem to be fixing the problem.

There was a detonation in another one of the fuel vents the droids were working in—we deactivated several of them and moved them down to maintenance, but we're still treating the plasma burns . . .

That cuts us down to almost half-shifts, and with the droids malfunctioning, we may not make the Telos shipment for this month. Fortunately the detonation didn't cause a lockd—

::WARNING: There has been a fuel detonation in the mining tunnels. Emergency Lockdown commencing. All personnel report to quarters and prepare for emergency venting countermeasures.::

No! If the ventilation systems are malfunctioning . . . Evacuate the medical bay! Everyone, evac—

Marina stared at the static screen for a long moment. Somehow she knew that Latisha Stronk was dead. The little issues, the steady escalation, there was a pattern to it. It was deliberate, a saboteur testing responses before escalating still further. Something terrible had happened here. And all of this had been caused by some damn Jedi . . . wait. No. Oh no. No no no no no no no, they had it all wrong if they mistook her for a Jedi. She was nothing more than a translator and small-time systems tech. She'd been out in the middle of nowhere, at the far edges of the galaxy wandering from job to job for years, she had nothing to do with the Jedi. No, they must have had her confused with someone else, maybe that old woman, which was almost as bad, to be honest. If all of this was because of some stupid misunderstanding . . . well, there was nothing else for it. As soon as the lockdown was sorted out, one way or another, it was time to run again.

She flipped Latisha's bag, no, her bag, onto her shoulders and headed to the door to the lobby. It was jammed, with dark black streaks of charred carbon smeared across it. She was trapped. The sealing mechanism had been welded shut, and the small part of her mind she thought she had sealed away forever started to calculate what temperature was required to melt the door like that, and which devices could do that, and could she make it into a weapon?

Marina wasn't sure if it was what was happening around her, or the faint stirring behind the locked doors of her memories, that frightened her more.

She moved to avoid thinking and headed into the only door she hadn't tried yet. The doors slid open and Marina shuddered again, but even her revulsion couldn't stop her from wrinkling her nose. It was a morgue.

At least fifteen bodies were lined on makeshift pallets. Aside from an old woman in brown robes, the rest wore that same miner's uniform she'd seen on the bodies in the Kolto tanks. They had various injuries, and most had obviously come to violent ends. The man closest to the door had no hair and most of his exposed skin was either melted off or a mess of blisters and puss. The woman next to him had been cut in half, and next to her was a man who seemed to have been flattened by something considerably larger than he was. But there, on the next pallet over, was a man with a white sheet smeared with red draped over him. They must have just brought him in when the lockdown triggered and everyone fled. That meant there was a chance . . .

Marina pulled on the sheet but it stuck to the dried blood. She grimaced and gave it a sharp tug, and it ripped free with a disgusting squelch. Her eyes slid from the gruesome injuries straight to the tool belt still securely fastened around his waist, complete with plasma cutter. She started to loosen the belt from his waist when—

"Find what you're looking for amongst the dead?"

Marina shrieked and whirled, plasma cutter somehow clutched tight in her hands and ignited. The old woman, now very much alive, stood before her, a wry half-smile on her lips. Her hood was folded down and covered her eyes.

Marina half-collapsed, half sat, on the pallet of the dead man. "Kriffing skag-lick, you scared me half to death. I thought you were dead!" She didn't let go of the plasma cutter.

…

The woman known as Kreia gazed down at the frightened but quickly recovering mechanic before her. She seemed young, especially for one who had done so much, lost so much. And, as was most intriguing, had given up so much. Yes, the woman with the clumsily chopped black hair that stuck to her face with Kolto residue, the girl that wandered the halls of death in pale bare feet, the mere child lost in the dark and trying to feel her way back home, was not an impressive one at first glance. Certainly she lacked the presence one would expect from anyone with the prominence one such as she had held. And yet . . . oh yes, and yet. Appearances could be deceiving.

…

The old woman grimaced. "Close to death, yes, closer than I'd like. You have the smell of the Kolto tank about you . . . how do you feel?"

The brittle but refined voice put Marina instantly on guard. It tugged at her with a strange familiarity. She shrugged it aside. Come on Marina, focus. A strange woman that was supposed to be dead, surrounded by bodies, and her first instinct was to ask how Marina was feeling? Something was very wrong here. Add to that that Marina was off-balance, still disoriented from her time in the tank, and more than a little scared and it was no surprise that Marina was not ready to put up with any crap. And besides, if it came down to it, she was the one with the plasma cutter.

"Enough with the false concern. Who are you, and what do you want?"

The woman's lips curled into a small smile, completely unimpressed by the brandished power tool. It looked even creepier not being able to see her eyes beneath her lowered hood.

"I am Kreia, and I am your rescuer, as you are mine. Tell me, do you recall what happened?"

Marina felt the pieces starting to click into place. The log entries mentioned that there'd been an old woman, an old dead woman, on the ship they'd picked her up on. She tightened her grip on weapon. "No, and I'm the one asking the questions. How did I get here?"

The woman, Kreia, sighed, and a hint of something, annoyance?, irritation?, crept into her voice. "I confess, I know little more than you do. I do recall rescuing you. The Republic ship you were on was attacked, and you were the only survivor. A result of your Jedi training, no doubt."

Marina bristled, half from the assumption and half from the way she was being prodded. Concern, followed up by accusations? She was being examined, analyzed, and it made her feel uncomfortable, like she was naked . . . well, more naked. "If you think I'm a Jedi, you are very mistaken."

Kreia crossed her arms, hiding them in the loose sleeves of her robe. "Your stance, your walk tells me you are a Jedi. Your walk is heavy; you carry something that weighs you down.

This voice, the familiarity was pulling at her again, distracting her. It seemed . . . familiar somehow, like she'd heard it bef— The memory slammed home. In the Kolto tank. She'd heard Kreia speak in her mind. It was so startling her thoughts slipped out without her realizing it. "I heard your voice while I was in the Kolto tank."

Kreia gave her a fleeting but genuine smile. "Yes, I had hoped as much. I slept too long and could not awaken. It may be that I reached out unconsciously, and your mind was a willing one . . . or, perhaps, you have been trained for such things?"

Marina did not like the wry humor in Kreia's voice one bit. She was toying with her again. Well, two could play at that game. "So, you can touch minds and feign death . . . if anyone here is a Jedi, it's you.

Kreia shook her head. "Keep your past, then. We do not have time to quibble; let us focus on the moment at hand."

"Yeah, well, the moment at hand is that there's a med bay full of floating bodies that were poisoned after they got in the Kolto tank, and all of this happened because somebody thought there was a Jedi here, and from where I'm standing, that looks like you."

Kreia chuckled as Marina waved the plasma cutter threateningly. She chuckled! "Indeed? And they spared you alone of all those on the station? Strange mercy for an unremarkable woman."

"But I wasn't spared, I got the same dosage as everyone else. I'm just like the rest of them." Marina's voice lost some of the fire as a note of desperation crept in. "You hear me? I'm just like the rest of them."

"And you survived, where the others did not? A Jedi trance could protect one from such poisons."

But it wasn't, she hadn't . . . She had been unconscious, surely . . . Ugh, she was letting Kreia get under her skin. "Well, you seem to know a lot about Jedi techniques."

"And so do you."

…

Kreia gave herself a mental nod of satisfaction. She had broken through the tough shell to the vulnerable core beneath. She would have no defense now for what was to come next, and it was time to move forward.

"Perhaps we could discuss it at length later on. Now we have other concerns, among them finding our new enemy. We were attacked once, and I fear our attackers will not give up the hunt so easily. Without transport, weapons, and information, they will find us easy prey indeed."

Marina seemed to have shrunk in on herself. Her toy was held limply at her side. "Isn't there something you can tell me about this place? Anything?"

Kreia felt something as she looked down at the woman who had suffered so much, endured so much, that she had not felt in many years. She examined this emotion critically, with the experience of a lifetime of knowing herself. She felt . . . protective. The young woman had so much potential, could become something so much more. "We must be cautious. Even as I slept I felt much unrest here. I saw strange visions, minds colored with fear."

It had been troubling, and filled her with an anxiety very unlike her. She had only just reestablished her connection with the force that had been so maddeningly just out of reach for so long, and she had had to delve deep, relying on every scrap of experience she had, to bury herself deep enough in the Force to survive the battle. It had been too much, and without an anchor she had become . . . lost. She had wandered among the minds of this place, desperately searching for the woman before her now, as one by one they were extinguished in blood and fire. Then at last, at last, she had found her anchor, and drew them both back to reality. She could not lose her again. Would not lose her.

"Now everything here feels terribly silent. A last word of caution. I would find out as much as you can about this place, quickly. The ship we arrived in, the Ebon Hawk, may still be in this place. We must recover it. I fear we will need to depart as suddenly as we arrived." Marina looked so small and afraid Kreia searched for something to try to cheer her up, or at least distract her distract her from her pain for a moment. "You may wish to extend your list to some clothes, if only for proper first impressions."

Marina actually blushed and looked mildly affronted, and a little of her fire returned.

"Maybe when I return you'll actually answer my questions."

Humor had never been Kreia's strength.