Chapter 7: Bad Memories
"I leave you to the exploration of this place. Here I will remain and attempt to center myself."
Marina left the old woman who knew far too much behind her as the morgue door slid shut, and only then did she allow herself to shudder. There was something about that woman that was both unsettling and, strangely, familiar; a muffled voice calling out from the locked-up part of her mind trying to get out. Yes, best to get away from her as soon as possible.
Her thoughts moved as quickly as her feet as she made her way to the welded door that cut off the med bay from the rest of the station. It was clear that fate was toying with her again. With an entire galaxy to wander, and despite staying far out on the rim where nothing would hold enough interest to draw a Jedi, she'd fallen right into the lap of one. Whatever else this Kreia was, she was definitely a Jedi. Nobody else could be that . . . that . . . well, that Jedi-like. Maybe Kreia had actually rescued her, and maybe not, but either way, she intended to get as far away from her as soon as she possibly could. She wouldn't be guilt-tripped into sticking around, oh no, she'd had more than enough of that.
The plasma cutter lit up with a blinding white light and a loud whine, and she grasped a little tighter on the reassuring textured rubber grip. This was no play thing for small-time mechanics—this was an industrial grade cutter. Marina covered her eyes as best she could and narrowed them to slits as she set the cutter to work on the welded door. Sparks flew everywhere, burning her exposed hands and feet, but she grit her teeth and carried on. Whoever had done this had known what they were doing, and they'd taken the time to do it right. Someone wanted this level completely sealed off. Yet with the only alternative being to starve to death, Marina kept doggedly at it until, with a last good shove, the last bit of weld gave out.
Marina blew out a relieved sigh, red-faced, and wiped sweaty hair out of her face with the back of a singed hand, wincing at the painful contact. Hmm, she'd have to do something about those burns. She headed back to the nurse station and started rifling through the attached medical closet until she found some white gauze. She debated pain pills but decided against them—her head was woozy enough as it was. Instead she'd have to content herself with dipping the gauze into the kolto supply attached to her tank and wrapping her hands, which immediately felt better with the ministration. She gave them an experimental flex, and aside from a distant pain, they felt fine. A few hours and another dip or two and they'd be completely healed. Amazing stuff, this kolto.
With hands freshly wrapped and kolto smeared liberally across the tops of her bare feet, she confronted the now unwelded door and slapped the open button. The door creaked, groaned, and slid about half-way open before grinding to a stop. Good enough. Marina squeezed through.
Th corridor beyond was a disaster. The walls and floor were marred by half-melted, carbon-scored streaks. The lights flickered, damaged in what must have been a serious fight. The floor was littered with mutilated bodies, all in that same uniform. But they were not alone. Now there were droids littered amongst the dead. Marina crouched down to examine one that had a vibrocutter stuck through its head and still twitched feebly. They were durable things, low slung, with six legs. Obviously they were made for hostile environments, or they wouldn't be built so durably, with so much redundancy. They had two heavy arms with the bulky stub of a heavy mining laser on each end.
Well, that explained what had welded the door shut, but it certainly didn't explain why. There must be hundreds of safety protocols buried in those machines to keep them from hurting anyone, much less using makeshift weapons in pitched battle, or revolt, or whatever it was that had happened.
Marina sighed, little closer to an explanation, and pulled the vibrocutter from the droid which emitted a final shower of sparks and lay still. It was better than the plasma torch as it was actually designed to be a cut things, though it was never intended to be a weapon.
She glanced at the cutter's former owner lying half beneath the droid and trying to hold his guts inside the gaping whole that was his stomach, and grimaced. She'd forgotten how bad human entrails smelled.
Meetra Surick gagged and fought her stomach to keep from throwing up.
"Your first time on a battlefield? I always forget how bad the entrails smell. Or maybe I just don't let myself remember."
Meetra turned and stared at the young woman in the brown robe and tan tunic of the Jedi Knight who'd made the comment. The idle tone of it in the face of such horror and tragedy grated on her nerves.
"You mean you're accustomed to this, this . . ." she couldn't find a word horrible enough and simply gestured helplessly at the carnage before them.
The Jedi turned to Meetra and gave her a long, hard look. Once again, even through her anger, Meetra was struck by how penetrating her gaze was, how it felt like she had seen and knew things you could never imagine. "No, Meetra. I am familiar with it, yes, far too familiar, but no matter how many bodies you see, you never get used to it."
Marina snapped out of the flashback with a gasp and jerked her eyes away from the corpse. By the darkness of the galactic core, she hadn't had one of those in . . . in a long time. Marina didn't like it. First she had somehow gotten caught up in this nightmare without even realizing it, then a maybe-Jedi jumped back into her life that claimed to know things about her, and now the flashbacks were returning. It had the stench of the Fo— . . . of fate about it, and she didn't like it. She needed to get out of here, get away from these people and this place and back on her own where she couldn't hurt anybody, and she needed to do it fast.
Marina tiptoed down the single corridor, her bare feet sidestepping pools of congealed blood and shattered metallic shards, as she moved forward hunched beneath the oppressive atmosphere and low ceiling in equal measure. The silence was broken only by the sound of her breathing and the occasional unnerving clang of machinery from somewhere deeper within the facility.
Then there was a new sound—the dull clanking of droids. Well, at least she knew who won the little civil war here, though the stars only knew how so many of the droids got inside the station without somebody noticing.
At the next doorway the clanking had grown considerably louder—they were just on the other side. Marina shucked her brown pack, gripped the vibrocutter tighter, and hit the open command. The two droids took a moment to register her presence, and Marina took full advantage by launching into action and impaling the first droid through the back. The machine made a digitized wail of distress, its six legs scuttling helplessly on the floor for a moment before going dark. Marina turned her attention to the second, which was ready for her.
The droid raised its arms and fired a single second-long pulse that missed wide right but started tracking in closer. Marina slid left and charged, slamming her humming blade once, twice, three times on the mining droid until it crumpled beneath her.
Marina breathed in large, shaky breaths while her body trembled with the adrenaline pumping through her. She could have died, actually died, right then and there, the end of everything, of all the running, all the secrets, all of it. With a last shudder Marina forced herself back into action, retrieving her bag from beyond the doorway.
It was a good thing those droids were programmed to aim at rock fissures millimeters away, otherwise, well, that hardly bore thinking on.
Pack retrieved, Marina turned to the goal of this little adventure, and ominously, what the droids seemed to have been guarding—the emergency turbolift to the hangar.
The door was closed even though the emergency panel had been smashed and the override lever pulled. Marina reached out and gave it a yank for good measure, but aside from the weak warble of a burnt-out alarm that quickly died away, nothing happened.
At least, nothing with the door.
Funny, the door was opened in my visions, said Kreia's voice in her mind, as casually as if it were a normal conversation over lunch. The woman was going to give her a heart attack! Not to mention that she'd proven pretty unequivocally that she was a Jedi, or at least had once been. These miners had definitely gotten the two of them mixed up, and the sooner Marina could get things cleared up and get out of here, leave behind all the mysteries, the murders, and above all, this nonsense about Jedi and their Force, the better.
She pressed on, trying not to envision Kreia telepathically looking through her eyes or something. The woman was creepy enough without throwing in supernatural powers.
Yes, she definitely needed to get out of here as quickly as possible, and if she, ahem, forgot to come back for the old woman before leaving, well, so much the better.
Marina tightened her grip on the vibrocutter and moved down the hallway again. She needed some sort of security station or, failing that, the control center of this desolate station, that would hopefully have access to the hanger. She pressed on through the single cramped corridor.
There were bodies with frightening regularity. The vast majority had been completely unarmed and fleeing for their lives when they were cut down, though where they'd hoped to run in the tiny, cramped confines of the station she wasn't sure.
She crept along as quietly as she could, the sticky slap of her feet on the freezing tile the only sound. It was the quiet only felt when surrounded by the dead. She reached the end of the hallway and a locked door awaited her. After a few moments of careful slicing the door opened to a security station of some sort. While the corridors had been horrifying, inside the security room it was an atrocity. What passed for a security force on a simple mining station so far out on the rim didn't amount to much, but it had put up a last stand, and at least some of the miners had made it this far before the droids had caught them.
Marina sized up the scene. It appeared that the droids had charged in and swarmed over the token resistance in the initial rush. And yet . . . there was something off about it. There was far more blood then there should have been. Several of the bodies were grossly, unnecessarily, mutilated, and at least one of the miners had shredded the nails and skin off her fingers trying to claw her way out of the room. So the doors had sealed after the droids broke in. They'd been trapped, and whoever had controlled the droids had taken their time slaughtering the miners, guards and helpless workers alike.
Marina felt a cold chill tun down her spine. Whoever she was dealing with was not only highly capable, but psychotic as well. And somewhere deep inside, a small part of the person she had once been wept that her first reaction upon seeing such pain and fear was not sympathy for the victims, but rather a cold analysis of the threat to herself. She shove the errant thought aside. That part of her was dead and gone. It had only lead her to pain and death.
Now, back to the business of surviving.
The security guards had been armed with cheap shock sticks, good for roughing up a rowdy drunk miner or two, but useless against droids. Marina crouched down and examined one of the security men, dead from three charred holes in his chest. He'd abandoned his shock stick for some sort of hand-held, low-powered mining laser. She picked it up thoughtfully, considering. While it was woefully underpowered for a proper blaster, these weren't exactly military droids she was dealing with. She aimed it at the wall and gave the firing stud an experimental squeeze. The laser didn't fire in a short pulse, but rather a single extended burn, like a drill. Which, she supposed, it was. It barely made a mark on the duraplast wall.
It was the work of a moment to steal the man's belt. She hooked the mining laser's clip through one of the belt loops. It wasn't close to as good as the designed clip on a miner's space suit, but then again, beggars could not afford to be choosers. Even cinched up all the way, the belt still rode low on her hips.
The important thing thing was that priority one was take care of; she was armed. Now back to priority two, figuring out what under the sun was happening on this forsaken station.
What must have once been the chief security officer sat slumped over the desk that dominated the room, his mining laser locked in the death-grip of rigor-mortis. She dumped him unceremoniously to the floor and took his seat.
Finally, bit of luck. The password-protected system was still up from when the man, whoever he'd been, had been looking at it. She flipped through the files quickly. There was a general safety warning worthy of a second read-through. As she'd surmised from the medical logs, she was indeed on Peragus II, but it turned out that the entire planet was highly combustible, not just this asteroid. The first attempt to mine Peragus had cracked the planet and created the asteroid field, and notably the asteroid the station was built into.
The other logs told her mostly what she'd already learned, more problems with the droids being called down to maintenance. Her mental antennae quivered in suspicion at all the droids being gathered in one place, but she had nothing substantial. Finally she found a log marked as personal by the chief security officer. Apparently he wasn't quite as foolish as he'd sounded, and he'd installed a back-door override on the droids on the primary control console on the administration deck. Of course, he wasn't as smart as he thought he was, seeing as how he was dead in the security room far away from the switch he'd needed so badly.
The camera feeds revealed a lot more rooms devoid of life, and handfuls of patrolling droids, and . . . wait. She leaned forward to take a closer look. There was a man locked away in the detentionary! Not exactly something to inspire trust, but he was alive, and if nothing else, at least he was someone she could talk to, someone that wasn't a crazy old woman that had caused this whole confusion by dressing up in robes like a flaming Jedi. And if she was was lucky, he might be able to shed some light on this disaster.
Marina blanked the screen and took another look around the room. Security stations had a tendency to have useful items. On a station as small as this, and as potentially explosive, there wasn't anything along the lines of an armory, but the personnel lockers . . .
Marina dug through the holo pictures, bits of crystallized mineral saved for children, and other momentos of dead men until she got to the good stuff. One of the lockers had a first aid kit, which she placed in her bag, but the real prize was in the not-paranoid-enough officer's locker—an ion grenade. Its electrical surge wasn't pleasant for anything to experience, but it was catastrophic on the more delicate circuitry of droids. And when it came to killing things that wanted to kill her, catastrophic was exactly what she was looking for. With that weapon in hand she went from hunted to hunter. She was holding power.
Marina shuddered and looked away from the grenade. No, that life was over, done and gone. She was going to escape, going to run. No more fighting, no more killing. Just survival. Slowly, her trembling hand released its death grip on the grenade's plastic edges that were biting into her fingers. A fresh sheen of sweat dripped down her face and her ragged breathing slowed as her pulse came back under control.
By the stars, where had that come from? She hadn't felt that sort of, of power trip, in a long time, and she'd been in more than her fair share of tough scrapes since then. What brought this on? Was it that stupid old women playing at being a Jedi when she wouldn't know a real Jedi if . . . no. What was going on with her head? This anger, this frustration at being so powerless, it felt wrong, foreign. Just yesterday she had been almost at peace running and getting lost in the universe once again. Almost. Maybe with just another few months she could have let go completely . . . but it was useless to think on what-ifs, especially now.
Just breathe. Relax. You've been through worse, much worse. Just get out of here, jump a few systems away, then we'll get this all sorted out. Later, I'll figure it out later.
Marina sucked in a big breath and slowly let it out. The smell of burnt flesh didn't do much to settle her nerves. It was time to act, to move, to run. She felt tingly all over, strange. Don't think, move!
Fear gripped her, the dread certainty that was building inside of her of what she didn't, couldn't, believe, that was creeping towards her conscious mind. Marina snatched up her pitiful, makeshift blade and dashed past the bodies, out of the room that suddenly felt claustrophobic, and into the hallway. A trio of mining droids trundled down the hallway in a loose patrol. Marina charged ahead recklessly, throwing caution to the winds, and dove into them as if a Mandalorian squadron was driving her onwards. No, don't think, don't feel it, just move, faster, faster! The world was cracking around her, feelings, memories all pouring in, she had to move, had to run!
Marina's sword flashed in the dim lighting as she danced between the droids, her vibrocutter biting metallic chunks out of their chassis. She was moving, she was fast, she was free! Marina laughed in the wild exhilaration of the moment, free from the weight she hadn't realized she had been carrying as she cut down the droids. She felt good, felt fast, felt stronger than she had in a long—
Too fast.
Marina jerked to a stop, her blade frozen mid-swing, as the last droid warbled a final cry, sparked, and slumped to the deck, and her past finally, after all these years, caught up to her.
No. It couldn't be, not after so long, not now. After years of telling herself she wasn't desperately hoping for it, years of being terrified it would happen, and nothing, but now, now . . .
Now, after ten years, the Force came back to her.
Marina sagged to her knees, then dropped to the metal grating beside the lifeless droids while a riot of emotions flooded through her. She wanted to weep in relief, rage in anger, and escape into the beckoning arms of unconsciousness as the hope, fear, wild happiness, anguishing despair, and all the rest warred within her. And yet, beneath it all, was the small, ever-shifting sphere of potential that was the force. It was quiet, a whisper of its former power, but after a decade of silence its every quiet whisper echoed like the ticking of a clock in a silent room.
No, she couldn't go through this again. Not again.
::Ah, you hear it. It is faint, but it is there.::
Marina screamed as the voice spoke in her mind. It was too much all at once. All she had given up on ever having again, she could have it all back again! But the memories, the pain . . . nothing was worth that. She tried to turn away, to ignore the tiny pool of the force inside of her, but it was so close again, it was right there.
Her control snapped and she grasped at the Force, clutched at it hopelessly, her physical body twitching, so desperate was her internal struggling. And, just as she knew it would, just as she had been warned so many times before that it would, it slipped through her grasp and was gone. It could not be forced. She sighed with as much regret as relief, and slowly unknotted into a sweaty, splotchy, quivering mass on the grated floor.
The words returned to her mind, but she had no more energy to fight or question them. All she could do was listen and hope her brain could attach meaning to the words later when the universe started making sense again.
::It has not been so long as for you to forget the feel of the Force. Do not turn away from it. Listen, feel it echoing within you. I will guide you down the familiar paths.::
The words slowly faded to nothing, but as they diminished the feeling of the force returned from its frightened flight at her clumsy grasping. The Force needed no guide, not here, not in familiar ground. It trickled where it had once been a flood, but it dripped into the hidden depths Marina had locked away within herself, the memories long forgotten, and soaked new life into grief and pain long since shriveled into desiccated, hardened husks.
Marina was wracked by a single, soul-wrenching sob as the tide of memories and feelings from within her, awakened by the force, threatened to break free once again, and she fled to the only escape that beckoned, into the welcoming silence of oblivion.
Surrounded by the lifeless shells of humans now devoid of the force the old woman smiled. The connection was severed, for now, and she backed away from the tangled web of emotions and memories. She knew those feelings, knew them better than anyone else in the galaxy. But the two of them would not be alone forever. No, someday . . . but not today. One step at a time. Today, a new game was beginning. This game was unlike any other she had ever played over the years; this time she faced an opponent who had never lost, whom most said could never be beaten. The forces arrayed against her were many, but they were mere pieces in the battle. Dangerous in their own right, yes, but nothing compared to the opponent across from her. The perfect opponent for her final, greatest game, to save the galaxy itself from endless destruction.
She smiled as she, too, felt the faint touches of the force caress her calloused and gnarled hands. She had lived for so long with it just out of reach, but always there, unlike the unconscious women she'd come so far to find. Her smile faded as she returned to her train of thought.
This time she played against her oldest friend. She cast her consciousness out into the stream of the force. Far in the distance, beyond reach, for the moment, were the great tides and eddies navigated by the great Jedi and Sith Masters. But it was enough, for now.
Your move.