Following the quick getaway from Centerpoint, the YT-2400 that ferried the Jedi to the station was now back in hyperspace, returning for Denon.
In the meantime, the stranger who escaped with them, Brisha Syo, was now staying in the YT-2400's guest suite. It was here that Jacen knocked from outside, ten minutes into their trip through hyperspace; he and the other Jedi just got everything settled, so it was now time for him to find out what their guest had to tell them.
"Come in," Brisha said.
Jacen complied, and after the door was closed behind him, he found that Brisha was seated on the edge of her bed, hands folded in her lap and looking back at him in some form of expectation.
"Hello, Jacen," she said in a level tone. "What can I do for you?"
Jacen said nothing as he walked over to a wooden chair in the corner, picked it up, and walked over to Brisha to set the chair down before her.
When he was seated in the chair, Jacen started. "Now that we're safely back in hyperspace, do you mind telling me anymore about yourself?"
"What would you like to know?"
"Namely, how you'll help us settle this conflict," Jacen said. "Which makes it all the more... questionable since you didn't do anything to help Master Ramis, myself, or our apprentices."
"By questionable, you mean suspicious," Brisha stated. It wasn't a question.
"Very well," she continued when Jacen didn't acknowledge her statement. "If you must know, I was acting as a standby for you and your fellow Jedi should you fail to even shut off the robot made of your brother's DNA."
"How do you even know about that?" Jacen asked. "In fact, how did you even know of our mission?"
"I didn't know, per se," Brisha said. "When Corellia announced that it wanted to secede from the Galactic Alliance with a space station capable of destroying stars in distant systems, and which could only be operated by your late brother, I knew that you and at least a few other Jedi would be involved in stopping this station. Obviously, I was correct.
"Now, as to how I knew of that robot, I did some advance investigation of my own before you and your colleagues arrived."
"But if you're interested in helping us stop this conflict," Jacen said, "why didn't you destroy that robot yourself?"
"Well, as you know by now, destroying the robot only makes Centerpoint inert as a battle station," Brisha reminded him. "And I had no access to any computer virus that might, say, destroy the station itself; I simply don't have the resources for that kind of thing."
"But you figured that the Jedi would when we arrived," Jacen figured.
Brisha nodded.
"Fair enough," Jacen said. "Except, again, if you were interested in helping, why didn't you simply introduce yourself to Master Ramis, myself, and the apprentices? It would have been less suspicious than observing us over not-reading a holozine."
Brisha grinned. "Can't fool you, can I?"
Jacen's look remained serious.
"I didn't want to mess up whatever plan you already had," Brisha said. "I thought that the best I could do was just to stay out of the way."
"I guess that makes sense," Jacen said. "But, tell me, if you did some early investigations into the station before we arrived, why didn't you decide to cut the alarms or something? That would have made things a lot easier for myself and my fellow Jedi to... complete our mission." Since Jacen received that vision, he hesitated in thinking that having that virus implanted into Anakin Sal-Solo would have been a good idea for the sake of the galaxy.
"I was about to do that, as a matter of fact," Brisha said. "But you Jedi move quickly; right when I was about to silence the station's alarms, you had reached the control center and the alarms just went off. It was too late."
From what she just said, Jacen felt that was telling the truth. But... there was something off about it. He didn't know what.
"But, you know," Brisha continued, "I couldn't help but notice the way you hesitated when you said that my help would have made your mission a lot easier. It seemed to me as if you had second thoughts, as it were, in having that virus implanted into that robot, never mind destroying it."
Jacen hesitated. How much could he tell this total stranger who he knew nothing about? And who also gave him an air of mistrust?
"You're a Force-sensitive," Jacen said, ignoring her question.
"I doubt it would take a Force-sensitive to tell when even a Jedi is uncertain about the decisions he makes," Brisha said.
"Maybe," Jacen agreed reluctantly. "But you have the Force, don't you?"
"Yes, I do," Brisha answered simply.
"And you never went to the Jedi Order about this?" Jacen asked. "To become an apprentice?"
Brisha shrugged. "I was never interested in joining the Jedi. Or any other Force sect for that matter."
"So then who are you?" Jacen asked. "What do you do? Why are you so interested in stopping a conflict like this?"
"Can't being a good samaritan with special abilities count for something?" Brisha countered.
"It could," Jacen replied stoically. "But what did you do before you decided to try to stop this new crisis?"
"Why are you so interested in knowing that, Master Solo?" Brisha asked.
"Like I said, I wanna get to know a little bit more about you," Jacen said.
Brisha said nothing for a moment before she leaned slightly over. "What kind of person do you think I am?"
"That's the thing," Jacen said. "I really don't know. Which is why I have a hard time trusting you."
"I suppose that's fair," Brisha said, sitting back up. "But before I tell anymore about myself, could you please answer why you seemed so hesitant about... completing your mission?" Her tone was reflective but not mocking of what Jacen said earlier.
Jacen sighed. He had a feeling that if he was going to get any chance of willing cooperation from this woman, he might as well open up as much as he could.
"When my fellow Jedi and I were fighting the thugs protecting Anakin Sal-Solo," he began, "I received a vision. I saw that following the would-be destruction of Centerpoint, the galaxy would fall into utter chaos; anarchy that it could never recover from."
"All of galactic civilization would die?" Brisha asked, obviously concerned.
"Even those living in the Unknown Regions and Wild Space," Jacen confirmed.
"But rendering Centerpoint inert would give the galaxy a better chance?" Brisha asked.
Jacen shrugged. "I suppose. I don't know. All I knew was, we couldn't just leave that station without making sure that the Corellians wouldn't have a weapon that could bring the Galactic Alliance to its knees."
"Understandable," Brisha said. "Well, that confirms it, then."
"Confirms what?" Jacen asked.
"The prophecy in this set of tassels," Brisha answered.
She then reached into the folds of her dress and produced some sort of odd assortment of interwoven tassels.
And immediately, Jacen felt a Force-connection to them.
"You feel it, don't you?" Brisha asked. "Just as I felt it. I learned to decipher one of them through the Force. It told me, in a vague way, to bring it to the one that it calls for. And I sensed that the one it calls for is you, Jacen. Am I right?"
"I feel something," Jacen said, not taking his eyes off the set of tassels. "Maybe it is what you say it is."
"Then it's your destiny to decipher them for yourself and find out what you should do," Brisha said as she offered the set of tassels to him.
Hesitantly, Jacen took the tassels from Brisha and brought them closer to his face. He closed his eyes, plunged deep into the Force, and began using it to decipher what the tassels wanted from him.
And in an instant, as he began to Force-read them, he instinctively learned through the Force that each tassel came from a different culture in the galaxy. Though he didn't know where some of the tassels came from, he could still discern their meanings.
He will remake/rename himself—from the endangered Firrerreo culture.
He will ruin those who deny justice—from the Bith Aalagar race.
He will choose the fate of the weak—from the prisoners of Kessel.
He will immortalize his love—from the dark-sided sentient mynock species native to the Home.
He will choose how he will be loved—from the Alderaanian flower language.
He will win and break his chains—from the homeless subculture of Coruscant.
He will shed his skin and choose a new skin.
He will strengthen himself through sacrifice.
He will crawl through his cloak.
He will know brotherhood.
He will make a pet ("make" as in fabricate).
He will strengthen himself through pain—from the Twi'lek Tahu'ip culture.
He will be drawn from peace into conflict or possibly His life will be balanced between peace and conflict—from the Sith statuary language of Ziost.
And Jacen felt all of that applying to his destiny.
When he was done reading it, he looked back Brisha, who asked, "So... what did they tell you?"
Before he could answer her question, something occurred to him. The expectant, giddy look that she could barely contain; her tensed body language. It was all as if she were anticipating something. Jacen could even feel something oozing from her Force-presence, which she thought that she was containing fairly well.
And now that he came to think of it, as he realized that Brisha was, indeed, hiding something from him, as he suspected earlier, he looked back at the tassels and sensed the presence of Brisha coming from them.
When he looked back up to her, he flat-out asked, "Who are you? Really?"
Brisha's expectant gaze turned to one of disappointment before it just as quickly resolved to careful neutrality.
"If you must know," she said, "my name is not truly Brisha Syo. I was once known as Shria Brie, but I am now known as Lumiya, Dark Lady of the Sith."
Jacen's expression fell into one of shock; he tensed as Lumiya raised her arms to either side of her head, but in surrender, not to attack.
"I don't wish to harm you," she said. "I only wish to help you. That remains the truth."
Jacen remained stunned, not knowing what to do now. On the one hand, she was a Sith; one who believed in the power of the dark side of the Force, and who embraced her inner darkness to lengths that were as self-destructive as they were destructive to all those around her. As a Jedi, Jacen had an obligation to keep her as a prisoner, if not outright kill her.
But because she offered no immediate threat, he was in no position to simply strike her down in cold blood. It wasn't the Jedi way, whether it was in the view of the Living Force or the Unifying Force. All he could do was keep her prisoner here, tell the others aboard the ship, and report back to Uncle Luke and the other Masters of this development.
However, he couldn't help but want to help prove how flimsy her deceit really was.
"No, that doesn't remain the truth," Jacen said in response. "None of what you said is true, except for your identity. In spite of your defenses, I can feel the cracks in your aura, and I can sense your lies. And I can sense your own aura imprinted in these tassels; you've commenced some sort of Force-trick here that would make me believe that this all ties into my destiny. You did something that makes me at least believe that I have a connection with these set of tassels, didn't you?"
Lumiya's face remained expressionless. "I've done no such thing," she lied.
Jacen snorted. "Come on, let it all out. What else you got for me, sister?"
"How about the fact that I knew Vergere?" Lumiya countered.
Jacen couldn't help but laugh. "Oh, I can't wait to hear this. Go on, try me."
"After she provided your aunt the cure that would repress the coomb spore virus," Lumiya began, "she came to me. And we talked about the path that your destiny would take. She would mold you to become the man you would be to stop the Yuuzhan Vong and offer them their salvation through Zonama Sekot. That was why she returned to them; your training didn't stop after she died, Jacen. It was only getting started, and defeating the Vong was the first step. Now the time has come to fulfill the rest of your destiny."
"You mean by propagating a pointless conflict into all-out galactic war to get me to rule over the galaxy or something like that?" Jacen asked. He chuckled hostilely. "I don't think so, Lady of the Sith. No, what I think this is is you wanting me to turn dark, as it were, so that you could get revenge on your ex-boyfriend, my uncle, for making you lose a good chunk of your body years ago. Well, I'm not down with that. And personally, even if you did know Vergere, I doubt that she would associate with a Sith, one who believed so vehemently in the dark side when the Force is so much more complicated than that."
"She associated with you, a Jedi, did she not?" Lumiya pointed out.
"Only to let me realize how confined my views were," Jacen countered. "Why didn't she do the same for you? Because she thought it was necessary? Oh, don't you even start to give me that. Vergere would have never approved of starting a war like this."
"What about letting the Yuuzhan Vong thrive?" Lumiya asked.
"That was to save them," Jacen argued.
"At the cost of how many native galactic lives?" Lumiya asked. "How many species and worlds have fallen because Vergere thought it was the right thing to do for the Vong?"
Jacen took a moment to himself to respond. "It wasn't as if the Yuuzhan Vong didn't suffer losses of their own," he replied meekly.
Lumiya scoffed at him. "Oh, boo-hoo for them," she retorted. "Tell me, why is this crisis any different in the grand scheme of things? You said it yourself, you saw it in the vision; if you destroyed Centerpoint, the whole galaxy would have fallen into total war and anarchy. If you want to prevent that, you will have to listen to what the tassels have told you; you feel that they're right, you know in your heart of hearts and in the Force that they're right. You will have to make the same hard decisions in the coming crisis that you made with Vergere when it came to the Vong."
Jacen looked at his feet for a moment before looking back up at Lumiya resolutely. "No."
"What? What did you say?" she asked angrily and impatiently.
"You're wrong. No, more than that, you're lying. What Vergere and I did, we made decisions that were tough, but they were almost always in ways that had benefited both sides in the war. And whatever decisions tipped the scales in either side's favor was balanced out. The galaxy finally had peace after four long years. We made the decisions out of the concept that I had once taught the World Brain of Coruscant: compromise.
"Vergere and I made compromising decisions; where she didn't tell anyone in the New Republic about Elan's plan to eliminate much of the Jedi, she gave my aunt a repression to her deathly illness. Where Vergere had aided the Yuuzhan Vong in hunting my friends and I down over Myrkr, she helped us destroy the voxyn and their queen. Where she had me captured and tortured by the Yuuzhan Vong, I had been taught a greater truth about the Force. Where she had stopped Alpha Red from going into production before it was brought back on track, she prevented the New Republic from turning as monstrous as the invaders. Where she gave the Yuuzhan Vong tactical information about the galaxy, she sacrificed her life to stop a horde of them from killing me, my sister, and our friends. And where she had aided in the invasion overall, she helped the galaxy find peace for all sides, and brought a greater understanding of the Force to the whole of the Jedi.
"What you ask, Lumiya, is total adherence to the outdated idea of the dark side, an anachronism that's better off in the past along with the light side of the Force and the Living Force overall. I'm unwilling to do that, for it upsets the balance of the Force; I can tell, I can feel it, in my bones as well as the Force, more so than whatever feelings that these kriffing tassels give me." He held up the tassels to her face and promptly threw them off to the side. "And you know how I truly know that you're lying?"
"Tell me," Lumiya whispered in a growl, not even bothering to keep up her charade.
"Because, now, I recognize your presence in that vision," Jacen said as he mimicked her whisper. "You conjured that up and fed it into my mind for me to fall for. And you had me, I'll give you that. But now I can see right through it." His tone then rose to regular volume. "Which means two things from this point: you can either calmly surrender so I can take you to this ship's cell, or we can fight to the death."
Lumiya was silent for a moment, neither saying nor doing anything.
And Jacen felt what her next action would be.
In a lightning-fast move, she pulled out a hidden handle from within the folds of her dress and activated the lash of her lightwhip. She struck it for Jacen, who had already cartwheeled off to his left as he simultaneously unhooked and activated his green-bladed lightsaber from his belt.
Propelling herself off the bed, she soared for Jacen as she whipped her weapon at him again. He caught the lightwhip on his blade, but suddenly found it pulled out of his hands by Lumiya's cybernetically-increased strength. His now-deactivated saber went flying off to the side.
But, as always, Jacen was never weaponless; as long as he had the Force, he was never defenseless. For it was that very aspect of himself that he used to shove the midair Lumiya back across the guest suite and right against the wall behind her. As she hit it, Jacen ducked beneath the next, accidental strike of her lightwhip and then used the Force to recall his lightsaber back to his hands as Lumiya landed prone on the floor.
However, as quickly as she landed there, she had leaped back up and rushed for Jacen, whipping at him all the way. But this time, he was prepared, and after dodging her first few lashes, he put the Force behind his strength as he once again caught Lumiya's lightwhip on his lightsaber and pulled her in toward him, having her sail across the room midair again. Once she was close enough to him, he leaped up and planted both feet into her face, sending her falling back to the floor on her back. Meanwhile, he executed a graceful back-flip to return to his feet.
Lumiya looked up and used her free hand to unleash a volley of electricity for Jacen, which he instinctively raised his lightsaber to have the energy channeled through his blade, allowing the electricity to fizzle away into nothingness. Nevertheless, Lumiya used that distraction to leap back to her feet before whipping her weapon at him again, and she used the Force to make sure that her lightwhip wouldn't wrap around his blade again. This time, the weapons were clashing, almost as if they were both lightsabers.
After several clashes between the two of them, it was then that the door to the guest suite was blown in via Force-use from the outside. Both Jacen and Lumiya halted their duel to see who had arrived, and they found Octa, Garis, and Seha filing in respectively, their lightsabers glowing in their hands.
"Surrender, Sith," Octa spat.
Lumiya's subsequent growl turned into a full-out animal-like shriek before she began wildly lashing her lightwhip at a superhuman rate around the room. Her Jedi opponents could do nothing more than dodge all around and deflect her attacks with their lightsabers when necessary, but so far, not even Jacen could find an opening through her defenses. He couldn't even concentrate to use a Fallanassi illusion to get her to calm down or anything else like that.
Finally, however, the battle reached its turning point when one of Lumiya's insane lashes hit Jacen square in the right shoulder.
He fell to the deck on his back while Garis, having circled behind Lumiya in the midst of her attack, watched in shock and horror as his Master collapsed to the floor. It was then that Lumiya had stopped her frenzied attack upon seeing Jacen on the floor, and she whirled her whip around to snap at back upon the wounded Master.
Emitting a primal yell, Garis charged in behind the Sith woman. Her attention was diverted from her intended target when she heard that scream coming in from behind. She quickly pivoted around too late, and the next thing she knew, her lightwhip-wielding arm was lopped off by Garis. She screamed in agony as she stepped away from her attacker.
But Garis didn't let up. He then chopped off Lumiya's other arm with a synchronized cry from both; Garis in rage, Lumiya in pain. Lumiya took another two steps back, only for her right leg to be chopped off by Garis's blade. She collapsed to the floor just as she was going into shock; she almost didn't feel as Garis lopped off her final leg in anger.
"This is for Jacen," he growled as he raised his lightsaber to decapitate her.
But his attack was stopped by Jacen's hand grabbing Garis's weapon-wielding wrist. The apprentice looked over in shock at his stern-looking Master, whose cauterized wound was still healing on the spot.
"Garis, no," Jacen said. "If you kill her in anger, you will be no better than her."
Garis's indignant stare at Jacen gradually resolved to one of realization of his own faults. He then looked down from his Master's gaze. "Yes, Master. I understand. I won't do it again."
"Let's hope not," Jacen said as he spared a glance back at Seha and Octa, who only stood back in concern from the scene. He looked back at his apprentice and said, "We'll talk about this later, in private."
But before any of the Jedi could do or say anything else, Lumiya let out a short roar of both anger and pain. They diverted their attention to her dismembered form.
"Kill me," she demanded.
Jacen shook his head. "None of us will do that." He spared a glance at Garis, wordlessly reminding him of what he just did. When he returned his full attention to Lumiya, he said, "We will bring you back to the Galactic Alliance where you will stand trial for your crimes. And we will tend to your injuries. Garis, Seha, please take her to the medbay and-"
Before Jacen could finish that sentence, Lumiya's eyes glowed pure white as she let out another bout of angry yelling. The Jedi watched, stunned in horror, as the Sith woman's whole body soon started to glow pure white, her body overflowing with energy.
Jacen knew what she was doing; she was deliberately overpowering herself so that she would unleash an explosion that would destroy the entire ship. It would be her final act of evil against the Jedi, Jacen thought.
Concentrating, he erected an extremely thick Force-shield to trap in the resulting power, focusing it on the half of the room that Lumiya lay on. Sensing his effort, the three other Jedi added their own energy with his.
When Lumiya finally exploded and died from her own energy, the blast that would have annihilated the YT-2400 was, indeed, relegated inside the reinforced bubble that the Jedi were upholding.
But the immensity and the sheer power of the explosion took the wind out of the four Jedi, even as their shield withstood the blast. And as the shield gradually weakened, Jacen knew that the shield wouldn't hold, and that, at the very most, take out three-fourths of the ship, and maybe the Jedi bodies could be excavated from space.
So Jacen knew what he had to do; quickly withdrawing his power from the Force-bubble, he began to absorb the remnants of Lumiya's power. He drew in what remained of the Sith woman into his being, feeling her anger, pain, and evil, experiencing the lifetime of hatred that she had not only endured, but thrived on.
And after a while... he simply let all that power dissipate completely into the Force with the rest of Lumiya.
Her evil had been vanquished completely. And Jacen had taken what remained of her and let it all die, as it should have a long time ago.