TEN

Pellek adjusted her rebreather mask for the twentieth time in the last hour. The air on Espol was thin and gray, with a nasty film of particulate hanging in the air. By the time the sunlight from the planet's ancient star trickled through the atmosphere, it was a watery, pale red that did nothing to illuminate the narrow walkway they were traversing.

Pellek had taken the rear of their three-man column; Dustil presumably knew where they were going and so had taken the front. The glow of his green lightsaber did little to improve the gloom of the planet. She glanced uneasily around her, feeling more than seeing the scattering of shadows around them. The shadows looked far too substantial to be simple tricks of the light. They were following a walkway at the bottom of a canyon that had probably held a river in its prehistory. The ground was littered with small dark stones that slid like ball bearings under her boots.

She'd never been on this planet, of course, but it felt familiar to her. It was the stillness in the air, like the weight of too many souls on her shoulders. Espol was all too reminiscent of Malachor.

She had met Revan on Malachor, just before the end. She had received word that Revan was in a tent on the Western Plains, dreaming up a brilliant strategy, no doubt. When Pellek walked in, the woman was looking thoughtfully at a holo of a spacemap floating in the air above her desk.

Revan looked up. She had cut her hair short by now, and the choppy pieces were shoved under her black cloak. She smiled and got to her feet. "Pel, I didn't think you ever left that starship of yours. How are you?"

Pellek stood stiffly through Revan's embrace, unexpectedly glad for the armor under her robes that dulled the contact. They had been at war for three years, but it felt longer. She had last spoken to Revan in person over a year ago. "I don't have much time," she said shortly.

Revan leaned back, the start of a frown on her face. She looked paler than usual, like she had spent too much time on starships, but Pellek knew Revan often went to the surface to talk to the troops. "Just business, then, General?" she asked. There was no malice in her voice, but something about the words made Pellek shiver. Revan gestured, and two chairs slid back from the holotable. "That's fine. Please, sit down, and tell me what brings you to this Force-forsaken camp. I assume you received my dispatch about Mandalore?"

Pellek sat, pulling her Jedi robes around her to deflect the chill of the unheated tent. Revan didn't seem to feel the cold. "I'm surprised Mandalore agreed to meet you in person," Pellek said. "Intel told us that Mandalore believed the Republic's leadership to be unworthy of his attention."

Revan smirked. "The Republic's leadership is unworthy of his attention. I, however, am not. His losses have gone up since we joined the battle, and particularly this year, when the Senate finally gave me strategic control. In spite of a few, let's call them tactical blunders, we appear to be gaining the upper hand." She looked meaningfully at Pellek.

Pellek flushed and cursed her pale skin for the betrayal. She'd lost too many men, made too many bad decisions. But her soldiers kept following her, in spite of it. As if their loyalty was compelled. "And what will you discuss with Mandalore?" she asked.

"I intend to kill him." Revan laughed shortly at Pellek's expression. "In a fair fight, Pel, don't worry about that. Mandalore will fight me, and it will break the will of his people when he dies."

Pellek shifted, her armor scraping comfortingly across her shoulders. "It won't be enough," she said. "The Mandalorians will just disperse into the Outer Rim and stage guerilla attacks against our colonies. The Core Worlds will be protected, but we can't leave the Rim Worlds to die."

Revan's eyes narrowed. Pellek was reminded of the rumors in the ranks, that Revan was gathering an army loyal only to her, that she had Force powers that no one had ever seen before. "Well, of course not," Revan said. "But don't you see? The Mandalorians aren't the real threat. They're just a decoy, just something to keep our attention while the real enemy moves inward."

"What do you mean? What real enemy?" Pellek asked, frowning. Intel had never reported anything beyond the Mandalorian threat

"I don't know," Revan said, and Pellek knew she was lying. "I intend to find out, but I have to destroy Mandalore first. And you have to end this war."

Pellek's hands clenched on the holotable. "That's why I came. I can't carry out the plan. It's immoral."

"Immoral?" Revan repeated, eyebrows raised. "They're your plans, Pel. They weren't immoral when you drew them up, were they? When Malak asked you if you could do it, you didn't hesitate to say that you could." Her voice was cold.

Pellek shook her head. "There's a big difference between sitting at a holoboard and actually doing it. They're my men down here—I can't ask them to sacrifice themselves for this, even if it will end the war."

Revan's aura was, as always, unreadable, but Pellek didn't need the Force to see the anger in the woman's eyes. Pellek promised herself that she would not back down this time. There had to be another way.

The moment stretched out too long, but then Revan smiled. "I'm glad you feel that way," she said. "This war has been hard on all of us, and I think you more than others. The way you bond with your soldiers must make it hard for you to lose them. Honestly, if you weren't worried about this plan, I might have to call Master Vrook to come check your Force alignment." Revan leaned her elbows on the table and pushed the dark cloak off her forehead. She sighed. "I'm not going to try to persuade you, Pel. You're in charge of the ground troops. You designed the plan, you found the tech to build the mass shadow generator. If you honestly think we can win this war without doing this, then I trust your decision."

Revan stared at her, and Pellek saw the girl she had grown up with, the one she had smoked a stolen cigarra with behind the Masters' chambers, the one who had never been afraid to sass the instructors, the one she had so admired in the classroom and on the sparring grounds. The one she had never been able to refuse.

Pellek stood and shook her robes into place. "I'll activate the mass shadow generator after I hear from you that Mandalore is dead. Force be with you, Revan."

"And with you, General Tran." Revan flipped her cloak back up, shadowing her eyes. "Force be with us all."

Trudging along the riverbed on Espol, Pellek shook her head clear of the past. Lately, her memories haunted her as much as her actual ghosts did. After Revan revealed herself as Lord of the Sith, Pellek had wondered if she should have seen the Darkness in Revan on Malachor. Surely it was there. Had she missed it, too consumed by her own fears to see what was in front of her? Or had she known, and simply chosen to ignore the signs? Even now, she wasn't sure.

Atton materialized in front of her, marching along behind Carth like he was part of their line. She lengthened her stride to catch up to him. "What's the word, Atton?" she asked.

He glanced at the jagged rocks comprising the sides of the canyon. He looked tired again, like he had on Vintar. "This is a bad place, Pel. We're nothing but marching targets down here."

Pellek nodded. They'd been walking for almost two days now, with just a tense few hours to catch a rest. Espol was nothing but mountain ranges and canyons, and even their speeder wouldn't fit in the narrow passage they were marching through. Dustil was supposedly leading them to a cave where he and Revan had camped the night before they'd been attacked. He'd plotted a course to the campsite as soon as he'd learned where they were landing, and he'd taken off almost before the ship had touched down.

The only conversation in the last six hours had been Dustil's short confirmations that yes, she was here, and yes, she was still alive. Pellek was glad for Atton's company. "Can you feel her?" she asked.

He shook his head. "I looked, but it's hard for me to get around here. Too Dark for me, I think." He grinned weakly. "Good thing I'm such a prickly bastard—I don't think Bao-Dur will even be able to appear."

Ahead of them, Carth slowed and turned around, pulling down his rebreather mask to ask, "Are you talking to one of your ghosts?"

"Atton, but he can't tell if Revan is here." Ahead of them, Dustil paused and waited for them to catch up.

"Tell him to scout ahead for us as far as he can in half-klick intervals and report back to you if there's any trouble ahead." Carth eyed the rockwalls towering over them. "I have a bad feeling about this place."

"Nice of you to ask, Admiral," Atton groused. "Funny, I seem to remember deserting the Fleet about fifteen years ago."

Pellek was too tired to be amused by Atton's banter. "Just do it, okay?" she said.

Atton saluted lazily. "I'll be your tool anytime, babe." He blinked out.

Pellek waved a hand at Dustil to continue, and they started marching again. The canyon was too narrow for two of them to walk comfortably side-by-side, so Carth walked just ahead and talked over his shoulder. "You've been pretty quiet back there," he started.

She shrugged. "We've all been quiet. If this place bothers you, imagine how Dustil and I feel."

She couldn't see his face. "Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that," he said. He lowered his voice. "Do you think she's here at all?"

Pellek raised her eyebrows. She knew Carth and Dustil had seen some kind of photo of Revan on Vintar, but she'd never really believed that Revan was there. It was too much of a coincidence. She hadn't had a Force connection with Revan for a long time, but the slippery unease she felt on this planet had all of the markings of the woman. "You think Dustil might be mistaken?" she asked as neutrally as possible.

"Or worse," he replied quietly. "You're the one with the Force—what do you see?"

Pellek realized with a shock that Carth thought his son had fallen to the Dark side. So he wasn't entirely blind, after all. But it was one thing for him to suspect it; it was another thing entirely for her to tell a Fleet Admiral that she thought his son was a Sith. "I can feel something of her here," she said truthfully, "but I can't tell if she's still here."

Atton blinked back in well ahead of Carth. He ran toward her, passing through Carth without stopping, and fruitlessly tried to grab her arm. "There must be fifty of them up there," he panted, pointing ahead of them. "Less than a klick—right after the riverbed turns behind the rockface."

"Dustil!" she called ahead. She waved him in and waited while he jogged back to them. She quickly relayed the information to them.

Dustil frowned. "But I don't sense anything ahead of us—are you sure?"

Atton looked like he would have grabbed Dustil by the collar if he could. "Yeah, I'm damn sure I didn't just hallucinate fifty black cloaks who are obviously looking for us. Sure is funny that a powerful Jedi like you didn't notice them, isn't it? I'd call it pretty damn unbelievable, in fact."

Dustil lunged toward Atton. "Why don't you just come out and say it, you worthless piece of Force filament. Come on, accuse me of being a Sith!"

Carth yanked Dustil back by his shoulder. "Cool it!" he ordered. Dustil shrugged off his father's hand but didn't protest. Carth pointed out a couple of crevasses in the left rockwall. "We'll take cover there, and we'll be able to see them as they come around the curve. From what you've told us about them, Dustil, we'll have to find a way to engage them that doesn't require a direct confrontation. Can one of you stop the group in a Stasis field?"

Pellek smiled grimly as they started up the rockface. Clearly, Carth was used to fighting with Jedi. "I might be able to hold some of them, but I don't think I can get them all," she said. "Fifty resisting enemies is a hell of a bucking ronto."

Dustil shook his head. "I can't do Stasis at all. If Pellek can hold them, I can fry them, but I can't keep them in place." He hauled himself over the lip of the ledge and reached his hand down to help her up.

Pellek could feel Atton's gaze on her as she got to her feet. She looked over to see him watching her thoughtfully. "You know what you could do," he began.

"Don't start with me," she interrupted. "That's dangerous as hell. You know how hard it is to stop it once I start."

"What?" Dustil asked. "What can you do?" Carth, who was watching the curve though the binocs, glanced up expectantly.

Pellek sighed. "It'll take too long to explain. But the bottom line is that I can connect to another Force user and use the Force through them. Have to, actually. So I could use your superior Force powers and my ability to Stasis and—"

"Freeze everyone," Dustil finished. "Great idea. Let's do it."

"No, it's not that easy!" she snapped. "I have this—this hole inside of me, and I don't know how to break the connection. Once I start taking the Force from you, I don't know if I'll be able to stop." She could hear Master Vrook's cold words in her head. You can feel the Force, but you cannot feel yourself, he'd said. She was dangerous.

Carth shook his head. "No, no way. We'll find another solution." Even as he spoke, they could see dust coming around the corner.

"There is no other solution!" Dustil said. He ducked down behind the crevasse wall and pulled Pellek down next to him. Pellek could feel the Sith searching for them, their probes leaving oily black tendrils through the Force. He looked her straight in the eyes, and she saw Revan in his fierce gaze. "Do it."

She took Dustil's forearm and felt for him in the Force. He was like a burning tree, fierce and blue at the core, gray and then red-tinged on the outside, and teeming with power. She reached for him, and smiled as his power surged into her. She hadn't realized how little she had felt the Force since her crew left her—connected to Dustil, she could hear the tiny sounds of life on the planet, feel Carth's heart beating, see Atton's glimmering presence beside her. He was incredibly powerful, far more than any of her crew had been. The Force felt so good—

"Hey, back up a little, huh?" Dustil asked shakily. Pellek opened her eyes to see him looking at her with wide eyes. Over Dustil's shoulder, Pellek could see Carth watching them with a scowl of disgust on his face.

Atton leaned over her shoulder and breathed into her ear, "If it was a Force orgasm you wanted, babe, I would have been happy to serve."

Pellek flushed. "Right," she coughed. "I think we can do it." She tugged on her robes and looked firmly at the approaching cloud.

Carth turned back to the canyon and raised his hand behind him. "On my mark. . .mark!"

Pellek pulled on the Force through the connection with Dustil, gasping again at the sheer amount of it, and flung her palm toward the Dark mass. Dustil grunted. She could see the Stasis field soaring toward the Sith through the Force, like a pink net flying through the air. The Sith saw it coming, and an orange field met hers, but she yanked again on the Force and barreled through.

She opened her eyes, panting and sweating, to see fifty cloaked figures frozen in the canyon.

Dustil was panting next to her. He raised a hand toward the mass. "Nothing left to do but fry them—"

"No," Carth interrupted. "Not you. I'll do it." Before Dustil could react, he flung two grenades into the canyon and ducked down. The blast whistled over their heads.

Pellek felt all fifty Sith join the Force at once, like a second shockwave from the grenades. Her Stasis field crumbled into filaments. Dustil clapped her on the shoulder. "Nice work." He pointedly disengaged her hand from his arm. "But do you mind letting go now?"

She concentrated on the flow of the Force from Dustil. As she had expected, she couldn't break the connection, but she reached through the Force and erected a heavy block against him. The dizzying sensation of power slowed to a trickle, then stopped altogether. The connection was still there, but she had dammed the tide. The hole inside her where the Force used to live pulsed angrily. Oh, how she wanted more.

"That's my girl," Atton whispered in her ear. "Give the boy back his Force powers and let's get the frack off this cliff."

Carth put down the binocs. "The riverbed is clear around the curve for at least two klicks. If you two are ready—"

Dustil grinned and swung over the ledge. "Let's go find Case."

Bastila stared blearily at the computer screen, realizing that she had just read the same paragraph five times. It appeared that she was at another dead end. She stood and stretched, feeling as always the metal band around her neck. She rubbed underneath it where it chafed her skin and wished again for Force Heal.

It had been two weeks now since she had given herself up to the Vintari—she kept track on a datapad, one of the few items she was allowed to keep in her sleeping quarters. It would be far too easy to lose track of the days here, and she was afraid of what would happen if she did. She was afraid she would look up one day and realize she had been here for two years. If she even survived that long.

Already, the fifteen or so sentients in her "group" had been reduced by one. The sentient, a Zabrak, went to sleep in her small quarters and never woke back up. Gellan told her that the Zabrak was the only sentient left who was already in the hospital when he arrived. He was now the sentient who had been there the longest. Sentients only lasted a year or two, it seemed, before the constant taking of the Force by the Vintari overwhelmed them.

The door to the library slid open and Gellan entered. From the haggard look on his face, it was clear that he had just come from a session with the cube. He barely nodded in greeting before dropping into a chair near the door. "How goes your research, Master Jedi?" he asked, seemingly nonchalant, but Bastila could hear the exhaustion in his voice.

Bastila frowned. "Perhaps I should assist you to your quarters, Gellan. You should rest." They had taken him almost every day in the last week, and it seemed harder for him to bounce back each time.

Gellan shook his head, wrapping his arms around his chest. His eyes were heavily shadowed, light hair falling limply onto his forehead. "They've almost used me up, I think," he said quietly. "I don't know how many more sessions I can take." He smiled wanly at her. "I'd rather die here than alone in my quarters."

"There is no death, there is the Force," Bastila said automatically. She flushed, realizing that she had implicitly acknowledged the possibility that he would not survive much longer. "I mean, you should concentrate on getting your strength back."

Gellan inclined his head wryly. "I'll defer to your wisdom on the matter." He closed his eyes and settled back in the chair. "So, tell me, Master Jedi, what are you working on today? Still trying to learn Vintari?"

Bastila had declared to anyone who would hear her that she intended to learn the Vintari's language. It provided a convenient cover to her search of the archives on the library computer. As she expected, the computer was heavily censored, and there was certainly no way to get a message out, but she had relatively open access to the moon's records. It was a slow process, but she was starting to notice some patterns. Startol and Tepai were mentioned quite a bit. It seemed that their mating had been an unexpected match between the "priest-class," which she understood to mean the Force users, and the "darjuki" or hereditary leaders. They disappeared from the records, though, when the "Jedi" returned to enslave the people of Vintar, reappearing only in the accounts of the Children's Massacre. Bastila had spent the last three days scouring the archives for some hint of where they had gone in between, but had come up with nothing.

"Learning Vintari is taking longer than I expected," Bastila said. It wasn't entirely a lie—the written language of the moon didn't appear to derive from Basic, and the angular glyphs were very difficult to decipher.

Gellan was quiet for several moments, and Bastila thought he had fallen asleep. "Did the Jedi send you here or did you come on your own?" he asked abruptly.

The question caught Bastila off guard. So far, Gellan had expressed no interest in her work with the Jedi. She instinctively sought the intent of Gellan's question through the Force, and was rewarded by a shock from her collar. She gasped, her vision whiting out for a second. "Why do you ask?" she managed, trying to compose herself. She had such difficulty not using the Force.

Gellan politely looked away while she got her breath back. "I would expect the Jedi to take an interest in a place like this. You're the first Jedi I've met here."

Bastila considered Gellan. Throughout the two weeks she had been on Vintar, he had maintained a courteous reserve from her, unfailingly addressing her as "Master Jedi." Unlike most of the other sentients in their group, however, Gellan spent time in the library between sessions with the cube, and gradually Bastila had gotten to know him. Upon her request, he had told her that his family had refused the Jedi's request to test him as a child because he was the oldest son and would inherit the farm. He had not yet married when he was captured, though he would have been expected to do so within another year or two. From the way he spoke about the Force, Bastila could tell he had some rudimentary training, possibly self-taught, but she couldn't tell how strong a Force-user he was. Though he answered her inquiries freely, he never asked anything of her or her background. She couldn't be sure without the Force, but she thought he could trust him. And Force knew, she needed help from somewhere.

"I have been reading about Vintari history after they defeated the Sith, but there appear to be gaps in their archives," she said. "The gaps make it difficult to understand the darjuki council's decisions."

"Decisions like taking the Force from sentients?" Gellan asked quietly. His eyes were closed again. She noticed that, true to form, he didn't press her for an answer to his question about the Jedi.

"Among other things," she replied. "I want to understand why they're doing this to us, to Force-users. It cannot be simply that they are afraid of the Force. Something changed after the Sith were defeated, and I believe that may be the key to what is happening here."

"Did you look for the secretary's notes?" he asked.

"The what?" Bastila asked. "I have already examined all of the minutes from the darjuki council meetings—they do not reveal anything."

Gellan opened his eyes and leaned forward. "Not the minutes—there's never anything in those. But someone has to take down those minutes, and the secretary on any council always takes more notes than he publishes in the official record. I'm sure it's the same here--see if you can find the draft papers."

"How do you know this? I thought you said you were a farmer on Deralia," she asked.

He hesitated for just an instant. "Trade council," he said, as though that explained everything. He gestured toward the computer. "Go on, try to find it."

Bastila gave him a long look before turning back to the computer and digging through several submenus of information. The official scribe of the darjuki council at the time the Children's Massacre was a Vintari named Horpanoi. She found his obituary a few years later:

Gods be praised: Horpanoi, honored scribe of the darjuki council for the last ten years, has become one with the gods after a long sickness. Prior to his passing, he served as an honored member of the College of Scribes both before and after the Enslavement. His mate, Ballne, will join him with the gods at the sunrise ceremony next holiday.

Bastila pulled up the records of the College of the Scribes and found, at the bottom of a fourth-tier submenu, "Personal papers of the scribes." She opened the folder and found a collection for Horpanoi. Sure enough, inside the collection was a reproduction of pages and pages of handwritten notes, written in a miniscule hand on unlined paper. "Force guide me," Bastila whispered, and quickly scanned the pages, trying to make out something from the dense Vintari writing.

Something caught her eye, so small that she almost missed it. It was a word that apparently had no Vintari translation, as it was written in Basic. She brought a hand to her mouth.

Gellan was now leaning across the table. "What did you find?" he asked.

She looked up. "Holocron," she whispered. Whatever the purpose of the cube and the Force-stealing, it came from the Sith. She felt a surge of triumph—she knew there was a reason she had been led here, and this had to be it. She just needed time to decipher the notes—

The library door opened before she could explain her findings to Gellan. She quickly blanked the computer and stood. "Yes?" she asked the uniformed Vintari in the door.

It consulted a datapad and cocked its head. "Bastila Shan, please accompany me for your session," it said in accented Basic.

Bastila's stomach clenched in dread and she felt suddenly like a youngling. "But you took me yesterday," she protested, hearing the tremble in her voice.

Gellan moved in front of her. "She hasn't had time to recover yet," he said. "Leave her be another day."

The guard's head fur darkened. "It is time for her session," it repeated, and walked around Gellan to take Bastila by the arm. Gellan reached for the Vintari before Bastila could stop him. The Vintari hit a button on the datapad and Gellan staggered back, hands around the collar. A grunt escaped between his clenched teeth. The Vintari pushed Bastila roughly toward the door and Gellan moved again to intercept. This time, the shock sent him to his knees.

"Stop it!" Bastila cried. She went out the door, hands raised in surrender. "I'll come with you, please, stop hurting him." No sentient should be sacrificing himself for her.

The guard marched her through now-familiar hallways to the session room. She entered with a sigh and seated herself at the table, trying not to think of Gellan but hoping all the same that they would not punish him further for trying to help her. She sternly reminded herself to show some dignity. They had not broken her yet.

The door slid open and Tepai entered with another Vintari. Bastila's eyes widened. "Follani!" she exclaimed.

The child was dressed in the same white as Tepai and had an eerie look of serenity of her face. Her head fur had been stained with some kind of pink dye. She sat at the table, feet dangling from the chair, and folded her hands. "Greetings, Bastila Shan," she said in clear Basic.

Tepai took the seat next to the child. "Follani is learning how to use her gifts. She will be assisting me today."

Bastila swallowed the disgust in her throat. "But she's just a child!" she said. "How can you use her in this—this abomination?"

Follani's serene smile faded for a second, but then she fixed it back in place. "Concentrate on the cube, please," she asked.

As she always did, Bastila contemplated resistance, but all that would get her was a shocking from the collar. She reluctantly fixed her attention on the cube, and tried to remember that she was getting close to finding answers. She just needed more time in the archive. She was close, was close, was close—

An hour later, barely able to see through the weariness that seemed to come from her very soul, she stumbled back into the holding area. It took a long time to get to the library. She pressed her palm against the door release and entered the room.

She blinked and stared around. The room was empty.

"They took the computers after you left," Gellan said quietly from the doorway.

Bastila whirled to face him. "But—but I was close to understanding. I—needed the library. How will I—" her knees went suddenly weak but she locked them stiffly and refused to fall.

Gellan approached her and put a hesitant hand on her shoulder. "I couldn't stop them, Bastila," he said. "I'm sorry."

A sob bubbled up in her chest and she found herself crying against Gellan's chest as he whispered comforting things to her. Bastila barely heard him. All she could see was the empty room and her last hope disappearing with the computer.

The Force had forsaken her.