Chapter 76

Awaken

Arc rolled a small round converter module across his cybernetic hand, then flipped his hand over and let it roll back along the top of his fingers. It came to rest on his knuckles. "I did it. This hand is amazing."

"Did what?" Jyssa asked, glanced back at him from the pilot's chair of the Red Drexl. "I was looking at the controls."

"This," he said, trying to demonstrate it again.

The heavy converter module, about the size of a thermal detonator, slipped off his hand and clunked against the deck.

"Grife. I did it just fine when you weren't looking." The half of Arc's face that still worked properly looked disappointed.

"You look like you're pouting," Jyssa said. "You'll get it right. Xho said you just need to keep practicing with the hand, the more you use it, the more the neural net adapts and gets used to your nerve signal commands. That is some advanced tech he put in you. You probably cost almost as much as my ship."

"Aww, and here I thought I was priceless." He knelt down to pick up the heavy converter module. Back when he was a clone trooper, he used to practice his manual dexterity by contact juggling thermal detonators.

A loud cry came from behind the cockpit. Both of their heads whipped around, and Arc nearly dropped the converter module again.

"Was that..." Jyssa trailed off.

Arc nodded. "Yes, that was Mirian."

Jyssa hopped up from the pilot's chair, and ran to the intercom panel outside the crew cabins. Through the door, she could hear Mirian sobbing. She pressed the intercom button. "Mirian, honey, are you okay?"

She heard a shuddering intake of breath from Mirian over the com. "They're... they're dying. They're burning. I can feel it in my head. No... no!"

"I'm going to override the door," she said to Arc. "Poor girl must be having a flashback..."

From behind her, she heard a small voice.

"It's not a flashback. I can feel it too." Nat had stumbled out of his room in his sleeping clothes. "I don't know what it is, but it's bad. Something very bad is happening. It's like... screams in the Force. Hundreds. Thousands. Maybe more. I can't shut it out!"

He put his hands over his face, and his lekku twitched. Arc put a firm hand on the boy's shoulder, and Nat instinctively wrapped his arms around Arc's waist.

"It hurts... so many..."

Arc kept one hand on Nat's shoulder to comfort him, and he turned to look at Jyssa. Jyssa was standing there in shock, so Arc tried to nod his head in the direction of Mirian's door. He caught the captain's eye, and he mouthed the word 'door' to her, nodding in the direction of the cabin door again.

"Right," she said, and quickly typed in the override code to open the door. She found Mirian, sitting up in her bunk, curled up with her knees pulled in tight. "Grife, I'm no good at this stuff."

Still, she sat down next to Mirian and put her arms around her.

Darth Vader sat inside his hyperbaric chamber. The high oxygen levels helped promote cellular regeneration. His burns would never truly heal, but his damaged parts functioned well enough to remove his breathing mask.

It was a double-edged vibroblade. His suit gave him the freedom to move, but forced him to wear a mask. He could remove the mask here, but then he couldn't move.

The Force had the power to heal. He focused inward, trying to find the inner peace that he once had.

He had not been able to find that peace since he lost the most important piece of his soul. Barely more than a month had passed since he had been betrayed by the Jedi, since Darth Sidious had revealed himself and officially dubbed him Vader.

He had once been a great Jedi, one of the most powerful in the order.

Now there was only Sidious and Vader. The Order was gone. The Jedi were gone.

His inner peace was gone, too.

But Darth Sidious, now the Emperor of all he oversaw, had shown him another path. Peace was a lie, the Emperor had said. There was only passion. Through passion, he could gain strength. Through strength, he could gain victory.

They had gained victory. Over the Jedi, over the Republic, over the Seperatists. But there was one last part of the code of the Sith that the Emperor had revealed to Vader.

Through victory, our chains our broken.

Love and hate coursed through Vader, burning just as hot as the fires of Mustafar. With his passion, and his will, he focused the Force on the burnt tissue of his lungs. His skin, his face, and his missing arms and legs were less important. The ability to walk freely in the air... that was something he deserved.

He could feel it, the scarred alveoli in his lungs were trying to regrow. Old, burned tissue had hardened and made his lungs nearly non-functional. But he could change that. The last line of the code of the Sith echoed in his mind.

The Force shall free me.

He fought the urge to cough. He knew it would interrupt what he was attempting to do. There was pain. In addition to the cells that exchanged oxygen and carbon dioxide in his lungs, the nerve cells were being repaired too.

The pain of the fire was coming back. But he could use it. He could turn that pain into the passion that fueled the dark side of the Force. A wave of pain and fear washed over him.

It was too much. His focus slipped away, and he coughed. He coughed so hard that he could taste the faint metallic hint of blood in his mouth.

The pain and fear were still there. They weren't his own. They came from somewhere else.

He was a Sith. He would endure the pain. Once the coughing subsided, he turned around and reached out with the Force to activate the devices that would replace his breathing gear.

Ahsoka sat up in her bunk. She had been awoken by a scream. No... more than a scream. Something much more. She could feel the pain and suffering of a battlefield, but with none of the bravery and honor. She could see flashes of turbolaser fire, raining down. Mothers, daughters, fathers, and sons, all screaming and dying.

From across the Whipclaw, she heard something she'd never expected to hear. Master It'kla was screaming.

Ignoring the fact that in the warm, damp Dagobah nights she'd taken to sleeping in only her underclothes, she darted out the door to her cabin. When the door to Master It'kla's cabin opened, she saw him, backed up in the corner of the tiny room, screaming and covering his eyes.

"Ylenic," Ahsoka yelled as she ran over to him. She grabbed his wrists, and he continued to struggle. His eyes weren't focused on her. "It's not you. It's somewhere else. I can feel it too. Don't let it take over you."

Ylenic convulsed in her hands, and a blast of Force energy came from him. Ahsoka was sent sprawling, and barely kept herself from bashing her horn-like montrals into Ylenic's bunk.

Taking a moment to center herself in the Force, she reached out to him. Waves of pain and anguish echoed off of him, as if the disturbance in the Force was somehow affecting him far more than it was affecting Ahsoka.

Ahsoka did the only thing she could think to do. She reached out through the Force and touched Ylenic's mind, hoping to find a way to calm him. His pain radiated through the Force, but she ignored it. She crawled over to the older Jedi, reaching out to him with both the Force and her hand.

Through his senses, she could feel the echoes in the Force more clearly. Not because he was a Jedi Master, and more experienced than she was. But because, she realized, that the suffering was coming from members of his own race. The minds of those who were dying echoed more strongly in his mind because they were minds that were shaped like his, in both biology and the Force.

And above it all, through the faint sense of tens of thousands of dead, dying, and the fear, the fire, and the smell of burnt fur, his own personal pain had surfaced.

"Ylasa..." he said, "Not my sister... not..."

Ahsoka shielded his mind as best she could through the Force. The disturbance in the Force rippled around both of them, and she could feel every jolt, every bit of pain, and every death echoing in the strange, alien contours of Ylenic's mind.

Admiral Tarkin stood on the bridge of the dreadnought Exemplar and watched as wave after wave of turbolaser fire penetrated the atmosphere. Huge swaths of the planet below glowed orange, and the largest were slowly going dark. Some of the fires were so strong that they used up the oxygen in the nearby atmosphere, effectively smothering themselves before the wind could bring more.

"I've never seen such a thing," the Captain of the dreadnought, Captain Quellac Linn said. "The rescue crews will need to wear breathing masks. Sensor report that the oxygen levels have been lowered by an average of ten percent over the entire world. Thirty percent for the hardest hit locations."

"Indeed," Tarkin replied. "We will need to account for oxygen usage in any further Base Delta Zero strategies on heavily forested planets in the future. An unforeseen side effect."

Below them, the planet Caamas burned.