The Sith control room was dominated by a massive computer and a complicated console manned by three anxious techs. On the screen, flashing red and yellow symbols moved over a tracking grid like insects creeping over a dirty floor. The assembled officers stood in a row under the glow of the computer complex, their electrified eyes reflecting the screen like tiny screens themselves, set in pallid faces. They were speaking in their own profane tongue, a language that crawled into one's ears and seemed to infest the brain, even if the words were unknown and the meanings garbled. On the floor, there lay a lump of rags and flesh that had once been a Sith officer. The rest of the commanders seem entirely unconcerned by the fresh corpse. If the techs heeded it, it was only to avoid tripping over the deadweight in their frantic ministrations to the computer system. To the west, a long corridor coiled away, keeping its secrets.
Shira's eyelids fluttered and she was unceremoniously dumped back into the interrogation room. It took her a moment to locate herself again, to recognize the fluorescent lamps overhead and the prisoner's face across the table. Krysthan Sandor watched her, his angular blue face revealing neither anger nor triumph.
Through their mental connection, Shira was slowly building a map of two Sith bases, but her access to his memories was limited and his mind was remarkably strong.
She typed a few notes into her datapad, feeling Sandor's red eyes upon her face, waiting, expectant. He knew that soon she would push her way back into his mind and go searching for that long western corridor, another feature of the Sith base constructed on the ashy surface of Uxturran. They had been dueling this way for nearly nine hours, a wordless inquisition without pause under the unforgiving lights of the Rhigar interrogation room.
Setting the datapad down on her lap, she invaded his mind again, seeking out the dark corridor that would lead her onward. But just as the control room began to materialize before their shared sight, she felt a stabbing pain at the front of her head and the image dissolved. She blinked, trying awaken to the interrogation room, but even with her eyes open, she couldn't make out the wooden table that separated her from the Sith torturer. They were locked in together in this room and in this trance and now he was assuming control.
Feet trampled over the grimy sidewalks, some pounding the pavement, some plodding, some pausing amidst the milling crowd. The odor of greasy food wafted over the street and the brassy blare of music was enough to knock a grown man to his knees.. Chiss citizens mobbed the sidewalks, their bodies almost obscuring the steady march of the passing parade. High upon a yellow float, representatives from the Ruling Families stood with garlands around their necks, accompanied by beautiful young girls draped in ivory gowns. The parade maidens smiled and reached blue arms to the skies, strewing white confetti over the jostling crowd like falling snow.
Shira grappled against Sandor and the illusion of the Chiss cityscape dissolved into the grim grey door of a Sith base laboratory. It wasn't the place she wanted to go, not again, but it was closer.
Through the grey door and into the laboratory. A Chiss captive scrubs dark smears of blood from a surgical table, working under the supervision of a Sith guard. Two scientists affix electrodes to a bound captive's chest, wires and tubes spreading like tentacles around the prone blue body. Jars line the metal shelves, jars full of clear fluid and samples, precious samples, organs preserved and floating under the illumination of blue light. Everything has its label, including the test subjects, who wear metal collars around their necks. The scalpel glitter of the lights, the shelves, the cold steel tables, comes slicing at one's eyes, but it is the muffled cries that linger on, the screams stifled by rags that still taste like the spit of the prisoners who suffered and screamed before.
She tried to push back through the grey door, to move towards the center of the base, but Sandor would not allow it. He managed to wrest control from her, to shatter the glassy vision of the Sith laboratory and its row after row of gruesome jars.
Looking down, she could see a blue hand, Sandor's hand, holding a laser scalpel. The body of a small brown vermin lay on the dissection table. Its limbs were secured with pins. At the front of the classroom, a professor gave instructions in Cheun, his spectacles slipping down on his nose as he pointed to an anatomical chart. Sandor's hand was steady as he cut a clean line across the torso, as he peeled back fur and muscle to reveal gleaming bone. The professor passed by, nodding his approval, as Sandor parted the ribs like the clasp of a locket and carefully, gently, removed a pink scrap of flesh - the motionless heart.
She began to play pazaak in her head, if only to free herself from Sandor's hold on her mind.
5+3=8
The cards burst out of the deck, blue and white, their numbers blurring before her sight, as the Chiss hostage tried to regain control of the force bond.
8+2=10
10+4=14
She dealt out another card, feeling his thoughts biting at the edge of her mind, sharp teeth eating away at her focus.
6.
14+6=20.
Her eyes jolted open and she heard herself gasp. Once again, she saw the sparse furniture of the interrogation room, the blank concrete wall and Sandor's inscrutable face.
She leaned forward on the table and flung a thought at him.
- I'm sick of these games. I want you to cooperate.
His answer came more quickly than she expected.
- My apologies, but I want you to see it. All of it. I need someone to know. Please.
His hand darted across the table and caught hold of her fist.
She recoiled, pulling her hand away.
- Don't touch me. I'm going back into your mind again, even if I have to drill my way in. This time you'll give me answers.
She straightened up in her seat and prepared to push into his mind again. There would be no sleep until she completed the maps, until she unlocked a path through the bases and found the security systems, the barracks and the prisoners' cells. She would hurt him if she had to, to get at what he knew. It would have been easier if he'd cursed at her and struggled, but he remained polite even as she invaded his mind, even as they fought for power and even she pulled answers from him like rotten teeth.
He showed her horrible things, crimes that she knew would leave her sleepless even when she retreated to the safety of her bunk, and he gave her glimpses of his life before he defected to the Sith, a hardscrabble life in the city ghetto, long hours in the medical college, isolation on a farming backwater. He wanted her to know him, as though it might explain the atrocities he had committed against his own people – but it didn't and it never would. If anything, when she saw that he had not been born a monster, she despised him for having chosen to become one.
But more disturbing was the dawning realization that, as the force bond grew in strength, his confessions were acquiring a strange sense of purpose. He wanted to divulge everything he had done, to make her see it and feel it around her as vividly as though she had lived it. He wanted her to know it all, and when she had felt the full horror of it, he wanted something more: he wanted her to forgive him.
Atton slouched in the pilot's seat, shuffling his deck of pazaak cards from one hand to the other. The cards fluttered together in the air like a flurry of blue-and-white wings before settling back into his cool, dry palm.
Concentrating, he slowed down the motion, fanning out the cards and suspending them in mid-air so that they formed an arc between his outstretched hands.
Pazaak was the only pure thing, the one game in town that added up to something. Sure, there were tons of skifters and hustlers lurking around, but he trusted the white numbers stamped on the cards and the pleasurable certainty of arithmetic. Life, unfortunately, was not a game of pazaak and it sure as hell didn't add up to 20. If the Force was supposed to tally up good and evil, light and dark, like balances on a cosmic ledger, then he figured someone had royally messed up the math. Even when he was playing fair, the house seemed to have stacked the deck against him and just about everyone else he'd ever met.
Atton tried not to think about Prisoner 164, the woman named Tahet, or about how much Shira surely loathed him now that everything had come to light. He wanted to fix his mind on the cards floating in front of him, forming a bridge between his two hands. He focused on the deck and made the cards pirouette in the air, each moving in its own orbit, whirling quicker, quicker, fast enough to make a guy dizzy if he stared at them too hard trying to discern the numbers. He was about to fold the cards back into his hands when HK came clattering into the cockpit.
"[Observation:] Upon conducting a diagnostic, I discovered an intriguing file in my databanks. I was most surprised to find that it was about you, Meatbag, from the time prior to your name re-assignment."
The spinning procession of pazaak cards fell to pieces, showering scraps of blue-and-white cardboard all over the cockpit.
"Damn it, HK, look what you made me do!"
"[Conciliatory Declaration:] Yes, your organic ineptitude is no doubt entirely my fault and has nothing at all to do with your own clumsiness," HK intoned. "[Grudging Admission:] Yet, while you have appeared lackadaisical and uselessly merciful during our period of acquaintance, I must concede that your K-C ratio was most impressive."
Atton scanned over the navigation panel, taking an undue interest in the group of black buttons, levers and meters that controlled flight altitude. "I don't know what you're talking about. Honestly, I think you're starting to glitch out."
"[Evaluation:] I am operating in exemplary condition and will happily prove my adherence to correct protocols by slaughtering any target within range" HK answered, the merest hint of indignation creeping into his metallic voice. "[Statement:] It is exceedingly unlikely that even your fallible human memory would erase information about the Kill-Conversion ratio, the most significant statistic for determining one's continued utility to Revan and the program. According to your file, you were 16-148, surely nothing for any mere sentient to be ashamed of."
"I'm not ashamed of anything," Atton said. "Look, HK, you've got the wrong guy, alright? I get mistaken for a lot of people - mostly the charming, ruggedly handsome ones."
"[Commentary:] On the next occasion you opt to diverge from the truth, I would suggest you devise a credible lie, 'Jaq'. In any case, it is rare to encounter a sentient who participated in Revan's program. I would be pleased to compare notes on techniques. [Curious Inquiry:] What sort of methods did you prefer for breaking recalcitrant Jedi?"
Atton slumped over the navigation system, his head in his hands. "I should have known this was coming. Droids always bust in the head," he muttered. "If you're not careful, I'm gonna have to fish out the old hydrospanner and, believe me, it isn't going to be pretty."
"[Nostalgic Commentary:] I was always partial to heavy artillery myself. There can be nothing more invigorating to one's systems than a sunny afternoon in the turret room, watching the fleshy Jedi scurry back and forth until it's time to scrub up the pulpy mess," HK droned. "I must confess that I sacrificed several potential conversions in this gratifying manner."
Atton reached under his jacket and withdrew his lightsaber. The beam materialized with a vicious hiss. "I'm not kidding, HK. One more word and I start making repairs with this, instead of the hydrospanner. Now, get out of my office."
"[Patient Correction:] This is not an office, Meatbag. It is a cockpit, in a ship that does not belong to you. Thus the use of the word 'my' is also remarkably inapt."
The yellow 'saber took a lazy swipe at HK's visor, singeing the ugly grate over the droid's vocabulator unit. Atton listened as the metal feet clanked a heavy retreat across the ship's deck. The damn droid would probably wander off and confide his gory reminiscences to the hyperdrive or one of the automatic doors.
Atton knew that he shouldn't have let it get to him, but these days it was getting harder to keep his pazaak face. As distant as she was, the force bond with Shira was getting stronger and it was becoming increasingly difficult to disentangle her responses from his own.
He could feel her pain. Not in the way smarmy talk show hosts did on the afternoon holo-vids, nodding their heads sympathetically as guests recounted their tales of woe, and straining to squeeze out a few glycerine tears for the folks at home. No, he could actually feel the shock of revelation quake through her limbs, her rage, her disgust, the maddening guilt that was worst of all. Sometimes her thoughts would intrude upon his own, commercial breaks in his regularly scheduled program of studied indifference. Her nightmares invaded his stony sleep and shook him awake, leaving him dazed and bleary-eyed. It always took a few seconds to find himself again.
He used to wonder if, amidst all the killing, he'd managed to murder his conscience. At times, he'd questioned whether it had ever existed at all, if he'd always just rotated between convenient evil and self-interested apathy. He knew now that even if he had smothered his conscience, it had risen again like a vengeful spirit. It whispered to him now with a woman's voice. It was a voice that could have belonged to Shira or to Tahet, or one of the long line of people he'd tortured or cheated, lied to or abandoned. It recounted his crimes, never letting him forget who he was and what he had been. When it spoke, its words were like blood trickling from a gash, seeping through the bandages and clouding them crimson. He wondered why he'd ever wanted a conscience in the first place. It was an idiotic thing to ask for, worse than begging for a knife in the gut.
He hated his newfound conscience and he hated the force bond with Shira and he hated the fact that he still loved her, like the fool everyone thought he was, like the sucker he promised he'd never become. She was practically obligated to despise him anyway. If she was keeping up the force bond, it was probably because she wanted to torment him, to make him as miserable as she was. If he had any sense in his head, he knew that he would have turned around and flown himself back to Republic space, dumped HK on Mical or Mira, and bolted off to the nearest hole-in-the-wall cantina. But then, he'd never had any damn sense, had always been stubborn as a bantha and he figured it wasn't going to change anytime soon. He would keep on flying, keep on following the co-ordinates on Konrad's map, keep on hoping, bumbling moth-like towards a lantern fire.
Revan drummed his fingers on the boardroom table and then poured himself another cup of lanthe, the Chiss answer to caffa. It was a green liquid served lukewarm, as bland as the beige walls adorning all of the interchangeable conference rooms, but it fought off the drowsiness symptomatic of rising with Rhigar's pale sun.
The most recent meeting with Captain Otranian had not gone according to plan. The officer was pushing for fast action, especially since the Ruling Families had granted the mission three additional units of soldiers, a team of techs and use of a warship. Revan attempted to explain the importance of strategic planning, the need to glean more information about the threat, but he knew that Otranian wasn't happy about the delay.
Of course, military men rarely appreciated taking orders from Jedi, preachy ascetics wearing thread-bare robes and infuriating expressions of utter calm. Revan knew it from experience. He may have won his fellow Jedi to the wars with stirring speeches and noble rhetoric, but to earn the allegiance of soldiers, his voice had to become the clash of battle, an eloquence that sounded through cannon fire, grenade blasts and a crackling pyre of enemy bodies sending sparks up into the night. If he was going to gain the respect of these new soldiers, it would be through winning strategy, not speed and bluster. He would preserve every life he could, not simply out of vague humanitarian sentiment, but to win their loyalty, a resource more precious than skin and sinew, blood and bone.
Revan was taking another sip of lanthe when Shira burst through the door. From her scraped-back pony-tail and flushed face, it was obvious that she'd been running laps on the academy track. She was wearing yet another variation on her usual bedraggled blue robe and she looked as though she'd chosen exercise over much-needed sleep.
"You're late," he said. "I don't like to be kept waiting."
She plopped down in the chair across from him. "So? What did you want to talk about?"
"Would you care for some lanthe? It's good for what ails you."
Revan didn't wait for an answer, just poured out a cup from the kettle and set it in front of her. It was a good trick in negotiations, control masquerading as hospitality. Besides, if the purple crescents under Shira's eyes were any indication, she needed to guzzle down about a dozen cups of the stuff just to keep from slipping into a coma.
Shira picked up the cup, sloshed the liquid around a bit and took a sip.
"Lanthe, you said? This stuff isn't bad."
"It isn't precisely good either, but this is the Unknown Regions and we make do," Revan said. "I called you in because I want to know how the questioning with Sandor went. The Chiss forces are demanding action and I want to know where we stand."
"I have information for you, Revan, good information, but I need something from you first. Like I told you before, I appreciate reciprocity: a question for a question and an answer for an answer."
He drew his cup of lanthe up to his lips, hiding his grimace. He didn't like the sound of her request, which wasn't a request but a sort of extortion, the kind of thing he would have expected from a two-bit cantina rat or a Hutt moneylender, not a Jedi. Of course, she'd never been much of a Jedi. Maybe that was why he found her interesting.
"What is it?" he sighed.
"I need to you tell me what happened to a friend of mine," she said. "Did you know Tahet Ghane? She was my master back at the Enclave. I think she may have been captured by one of the agents in your conversion program. She may have been murdered. Did you order it?"
Revan paused, wondering if he could sidestep the question. The memories were hazy, as though someone had reached out and smudged them with a careless finger, and then, there had been so many prisoners, more than he could remember.
He shook his head slowly. "I can't be sure. I doubt that I would have done it. I would have hated to sacrifice a master, to lose all those valuable skills. I didn't supervise the program and frankly, the people I entrusted it to let the interrogators get out of control. Some of them had vendettas, some of them were angry and some of them just enjoyed hurting Jedi or anyone else they could get their hands on.
I do remember distributing personnel files accompanied by assassination orders on the most troublesome agents when the abuses finally came to my attention. Of course, there were problems that go along with training an elite force – if their loyalties turn, they become harder to catch and harder to kill. If your master was murdered, we may have punished the killer, but it was a chaotic time and a lot of things happened that I still can't account for."
"You don't know anything about a Prisoner #164? Do you remember the names of any of the interrogators who would have been assigned to her? It's important, Revan. I need to know."
"Look, Shira, I'm not trying to be evasive here. The truth is, I don't know about everything that happened. That one word, 'Revan,' became so much bigger than me and what I wanted to achieve. Even when I was sleeping, the gears of the mechanism were grinding around, committing acts in my name, as a result of policies set in a meeting or the way some officer interpreted one of my manuals.
"When the Jedi Council took my memory and my identity and let me hide under the name, 'Nazir Santu', it was a relief, as though a burden had been lifted for a while. I am sorry that I can't help you, but part of me is glad that I can't remember it all or I think the weight of it would crush me, would crush anyone who stood under it. You may think it's important to know, but for me, it's important not to know any more than I have to."
Shira reached across the table and touched his hand. "I know you feel guilty, Revan. I followed you to that marsh, where the force ghosts were. I found the viridian crystal you left for Alek there. What did he say to you?"
He inched his hand away from her. He didn't want her damn sympathy. He just wanted to her to stop prying, pretending as though they were here for some kind of Jedi reunion party.
"I think that's enough for today. I answered your question. Now I'd like you to debrief me on the situation with Sandor. Has he revealed anything of strategic importance? We need to have a battle plan ready. I can't stall the attack much longer."
Shira leaned back in her chair, her expression wavering between indignation and the pained, wet-eyed look of a kicked kath hound puppy. She reached under the lapel of her robe and pulled out a black datapad.
"You'll find all the information you need here. I've created maps on the two bases that Sandor showed me and I've also recorded details about the surrounding terrain."
"Good," Revan said. "How can we get around security?"
"The main entrance and most of the doors on the Uxturran base seem to open via handprint recognition. We'll need to bring Sandor with us to open the doors."
"Or Sandor's hand," Revan said.
Shira winced. "I don't think that's necessary. I'll ensure he doesn't get in the way."
"Be sure he doesn't then," Revan replied. "If he even looks at us the wrong way, I'll do what I must to preserve the integrity of our mission. If that means I have to cut the hand off his corpse and carry the bloody thing around in my pocket, so be it. You may want to pass that information on to him, just in case he decides to get any bright ideas."
Shira stood up from the table. "Well, if it comes to that, I'm glad you'll be the one carrying the amputated hand."
"Don't be squeamish," Revan muttered, already scanning over the datapad. "We're here to do the galaxy's dirty work."
"Don't I know it," Shira said. "Believe me, Revan, from what I've seen, we've got a mess to clean up."