Jedi were rarely discussed in the Empire. A mere mention could have drawn the ire of ISB—or worse, the Inquisitorius—and so the members of the Imperial Starfleet never brought them up. The destruction of the first Death Star had changed everything though, and as the clanking wheels of the Imperial bureaucracy had scrambled and stabbed each other to fill the sudden void of promising leadership positions, rumors had rumbled through the lower ranks of the fleet. Older officers, those who remembered the stories of Jedi of their childhoods, had quietly conveyed those stories to their comrades: tales of Jedi daring, Jedi magic, and—most of all—Jedi treachery.
Asori was having trouble fitting those stories into her current experiences. Oh, she could believe Jade was capable of the worst, at least… the former Imperial had an air of mystery about her and an intensity that would be fearsome if it were turned on Asori. But while there was an odd air of surety around Luke Skywalker, when she was around him he seemed almost guileless, every word spoken with a farmboy charm.
It made it alarmingly easy for her to slip into trusting him, and that was dangerous.
It even made her want to trust him when he was strapping his astromech into a racing airspeeder next to a giant duffel bag of explosives. "Shouldn't the astromech stay with the ship?" she asked, unable to restrain her curiosity.
Luke offered her a boyish grin. "Artoo is the lynchpin of the entire plan," he countered. "We're going to need him to jam their sensors on our approach." He finished strapping Artoo into the racing speeder's back seat. "You and Commander Dreyf are with us, Captain Rogriss. Get ready to get moving. Speaking of which…" Luke tapped his wristcomm. "Mirax, do we have those coordinates yet?"
The voice that emerged from his comm was tinny; the small speaker wasn't really meant for wide projection, but Luke had it cranked up so they could all hear. "We just got them from our local contact. I'm forwarding them to Mara now."
"I got them," Mara said. She nodded, typically serious, and hopped into the passenger-side seat at the front of the airspeeder. "Get in. Our target is mobile, and our local contact's data could become inaccurate quick, given the battle."
Asori climbed into the back seat, next to the astromech. Its domed head whirled towards her, single photoreceptor looking at her for a moment. Then it beeped confidently and twisted back to look forward.
"Strap in," Luke said. He and Mara shared a look, then he grinned back at Asori, Dreyf, and Artoo. "And hang on to something!"
Asori's stomach flipped as he popped the repulsors, swung the speeder's nose to nearly-vertical, and pushed the throttle to a howling maximum.
It occurred to her, in a sudden revelation of past memories, that Skywalker had come to prominence because of feats of derring-do in a starfighter.
And starfighter pilots were all out of their bloody minds.
From the perspective of all the other pilots, their speeder probably just looked like a streak of red. Buildings surrounded them like a maze of metal and light and Nar Shaddaa's traffic patterns were nowhere near as regular as those on any Imperial world—and far busier than most. But Luke did not seem perturbed as he casually brought the speeder into one of the semi-regular rows of traffic, their speed returning to something akin to "safe."
Beside him, Mara guided them through the complex traffic patterns. They got more regular as the airspeeder moved into higher altitudes, as the complexity of the buildings that had to be navigated around diminished—fewer reached these rarified heights. But as they progressed away from the central core of Nar Shaddaa, in the direction of parts of the city which were more sparsely populated (to the point of outright abandoned in some cases), those semi-regular lines of vehicles gradually turned back into pure chaos with every pilot doing what they chose, unstructured.
The change alarmed Asori, moreso because it was a change that Luke clearly enjoyed. Once again they started to accelerate. "Is it really necessary to go so fast?" she asked, trying not to sound too nervous. "I'm pretty sure this is faster than I've ever gone in an atmosphere… and I don't know when this speeder last had maintenance done…"
Dreyf, curse him, stayed silent.
"What?" Luke called over the sound of wind. He glanced at Mara. With wordless communication that Asori could never hope to understand, she nodded at him—an affirmation—and they dove.
The Old Industrial District had looked like a warzone even before the recent battles, but now it was a warzone with weapons fire. Above them—growing more distant with each second—were the Hutt warships that Mara and Dreyf had avoided during their initial reconnaissance. Below them, increasingly-heavily-armed-and-armored Hutt-aligned mercenaries fired heavy weaponry into abandoned buildings, blowing holes in structures infested with combat droids. Those droids returned fire with their lighter weapons, making up for the relative weakness of their blasters with the sheer quantity of their fire.
Asori checked to make sure the safety was in place on her blaster. I'm supposed to be a diplomat on Coruscant, making overtures to General Antilles, she thought in a moment of pure calm. What in the karking hells am I doing here?
Their airspeeder gained even more velocity. The speeder whipped through mixtures of landing pads, battered factory complexes and stacked tenements, the buildings got older and rustier, piling up like geographic features instead of houses.
Dreyf sat beside her in continued silence, a small grin on his normally controlled face. Acceleration mashed them both back into their seats; he cradled his rifle like a prodigal newborn.
"Look down," said Mara, and Asori risked a peek out the airspeeders starboard window. Dreyf peered over her shoulder more aggressively—he wasn't all that fond of getting stuck seated between her and an astromech droid. As they did, Luke tilted the speeder, and in addition to a fright Asori got a clear view of the massive construction droid that was spitting out the army giving the Hutts so many issues.
The droid was rebuilding itself. Ad-hoc armor was covering its previously-exposed outer plating, constructed from everything imaginable: durasteel that had once been the foundation for skyscrapers, particularly robust decorative stone, even the used armor from destroyed combat droids. The droid's massive open maw consumed anything its army of non-construction droids tossed inside, and steadily spit out combat droid after combat droid, each one looking as old and antiquated as the construction droid itself—and just as intimidating.
Beside Dreyf, Artoo's single photoreceptor peered out through the windows. Beeping with satisfaction, a tiny satellite dish popped out of his dome and started to spin. Then he issued a series of beeps and whistles.
"Artoo's jamming is up!" called Mara, probably for Asori's benefit and not Luke's.
Luke threaded the speeder through a gap between two buildings which had not looked wide enough to give them clearance, putting the construction droid and the battle it fought well behind them. The mercenaries were far too busy fighting off waves of encroaching droids to pay any mind to the insane people who were racing through a warzone; the combat droids they were fighting…
Asori waited with trepidation, still unsure if putting all their hopes in an astromech's ability to jam combat sensors was wise. But as they progressed further and further into droid-held territory, they were never fired upon.
Some of the droids below turned to look up at them as they passed overhead, but no weapons fire came.
Their speed dropped as they exited the blocks of Nar Shaddaa which had featured active blaster fire. "We've passed through the densest combat," Mara said, no longer needing to yell to be heard. "We're well inside the perimeter… if we keep going another four or five kilometers, we'll find more mercs and more droids fighting at the other side of the District." She glanced back at the two people in the passenger seat. "Artoo, try to triangulate that signal you detected. But try to do it more subtly this time."
The astromech made an annoyed sound, followed by an affirmation. On the airspeeder's computer, the droid's suggestions scrolled across the screen; Mara read them out for Luke. "The construction unit producing all the combat droids is behind us now and it's no longer moving. It fortified itself into the foundation of an old building for protection from orbital strikes. The combat droids are emerging from at least six different exits from the structure."
"Do we need to get inside?"
Mara shook her head. "Artoo doesn't think so. He thinks the control unit is hidden elsewhere, manipulating the construction and combat droids remotely." She glanced back. "Can you narrow it down any more, Artoo?" she asked. The screen on the airspeeder's control panels shifted under the droid's instructions, gradually narrowing from a three-block radius, to a one-block radius, and finally to a building complex—one of the older ones, if not the oldest one—that looked positively forbidding.
"Time to find someplace to land," Luke said. He took one of his hands off the controls, holding it between him and Mara. She took it, and Asori watched with an odd kind of fascination as the two Jedi both closed their eyes, clearly concentrating on something that Asori could neither see nor feel. It didn't last long and when they opened their eyes again, they did not even need to exchange words.
Luke dove.
The airspeeder plummeted, passing through terrifyingly narrow canyons and labyrinths of ancient structures, these without the lighted windows of Nar Shaddaa's central core. All their running lights turned off, leaving the airspeeder almost as dark as the abandoned city, and they fell like a rock towards the ground.
Until they didn't.
With the press of gravity hard on her, they came to an abrupt halt maybe fifty meters above the surface, the speeder's overstrained repulsorlifts crying out from the stress of the maneuver. Luke shifted the speeder sideways, strafing to the right directly at one of the nearby buildings and onto what was, Asori realized a few terrified seconds late, an ancient, decrepit, but (apparently) still structurally sound landing pad a few stories off the ground.
She nearly collapsed with relief.
"Everyone out," Luke said as the airspeeder's engine ticked, shedding heat from its drive.
"I'll take the bomb bag," Dreyf declared, with a measure of false cheer. "I'm the most expendable, and I was just moving some sacks of fertilizer around Mother's garden, so I suppose you could say I've got the experience."
"Generous of you," Mara noted dryly as the tall, saturnine Imperial bent, strapped the bag across his back, and tested his new, lessened mobility.
"Oh hardly," Dreyf replied, "Damn things should be inert until we add the explosive spikes, but if I get hit too hard, at least it's over quickly."
"Artoo's jamming is still working," Mara reported as they gathered together. Asori watched with no small amount of awe as Luke lifted Artoo into the air with his mind, drawing the astromech out of the airspeeder and placing him gently down on the ground. She'd never seen an overt display of Force power like that—and ISB had usually insinuated that they were actually impossible. "We're still narrowing down the source of the transmission controlling the construction droid," Mara added, "but it's somewhere in this area."
Artoo, happy to be back on all his wheels, whistled his agreement. The droid's dome spun a full circle, its little sensor dish spinning as well, then with a determined series of beeps it set off to the west. Asori glanced at her companions—Mara's expression was annoyed, Luke's one of time-worn fondness—and they made to follow.
The streets of the Old Industrial District were unlike that of any other world Asori had ever visited. Like Coruscant, the moon was dense. But unlike Coruscant, buildings had been constructed on top of buildings so much that the "ground" floor occasionally revealed that it was, in fact, not on the ground. She leaned to glance over a railing and found herself staring down at a drop of at least a hundred meters—down to yet another "ground" floor which might not be that. Each level down was older and more decrepit than the last, and there were scant few locations on Nar Shaddaa where people actually lived or worked on the moon's actual surface.
This place has more in common with a scrapyard than an actual, functioning part of a city, Asori thought, as Dreyf nosed quietly ahead. Despite that, it still felt distinctly urban, as if there had once been people here, and their ghosts still traveled from building to building to attend to their daily tasks.
Walkways hugged buildings, merging into larger plazas which linked together multiple buildings—those had been constructed at some later point to allow people to travel between buildings without need for airspeeders, but had grown and grown and grown until the plazas covered over the gaps, creating the illusion of solid surface. Occasionally Asori would see air units, carefully maintaining the proper air pressure for safe sentient habitation… always maintained by antiquated droid units.
None of those droids paid them any mind, though.
It was all as quiet as a mausoleum. There were no scavengers, sentient or otherwise. The only light came through holes in the artificial ceiling above them—another false "ground" which Luke had driven their airspeeder through on their way down. Occasionally, artificial lights flickered around them—ancient neon signs still sputtering advertisements for businesses which hadn't operated for a thousand years, or for products which were long since defunct.
Artoo led them carefully across one of the wider plazas. They jogged, keeping their heads down, letting Mara show them where to step and when to run to cross the open space without getting spotted by the security units.
Once across, Mara pressed her back to the wall of the structure and gestured at the others to do the same. Unsure, but very good at following instructions, Asori pressed her back to the cool stone of the structure and waited. Beside her, Artoo leaned backwards until his dome also touched stone.
"Right then," Mara said after a breathless heartbeat, and they all relaxed. "We've got a few minutes before the next security pass. There aren't nearly as many combat droids here as there were nearer to the battle front, but there are enough that we need to be wary." She looked past Asori at Artoo, who was returning to three wheels. "Are you still tracking that signal?"
A pulsating techno-sputter made Mara frown and drew a concerned smile to Luke's face. "Are you sure it's safe, Artoo? That signal tried to hijack your systems earlier."
The droid whistled and its dome spun dismissively.
"I know you said you reprogrammed yourself especially for this, but I really want you to be careful."
Expecting the disrespectful droid to issue another rude response, Asori was surprised when it made an apologetic sound. Its sensor dish stopped spinning and vanished back into its dome.
"Good," Luke said with a satisfied nod. "Mara and I will lead our way into the building. You, Dreyf and Asori bring up the rear. Keep your scanners up looking for droids and do your best to jam them if they get too close. And don't get too comfortable: somewhere in this building is the artifact that Roganda Ismaren is looking for, and we haven't seen any sign of her yet. If she's here, she might also be trying to get in to capture it. Be ready."
Luke stretched out with the Force as he led the group forward, with deliberation that belied his own uncertainty. He would never be able to explain it to a non-Force user. Not really. All he would be able to say was the building felt right.
Or in this case wrong. Very, very wrong.
It was utterly dark, with the stains and lichen that said it had been abandoned for centuries at least and probably longer. It stank of moisture and water damage, repaired just enough by droids to prevent the structural instabilities from becoming a problem for the slightly-more-civilized levels of Nar Shaddaa high above them. Worst of all, there was a subtle feeling of unnature that went well-beyond just the city that had paved over Nar Shaddaa's surface. Something here existed when it should not. Something had been created outside of the natural order, something that exploited the Force and its power. The building felt like Palpatine had felt when Luke had briefly been in his presence, or like Exar Kun had during their confrontation on Yavin 4.
But beneath all the wrongness, there was light. Like star constellations in the desert night, guiding travelers to the next settlement or oasis, sometimes obscured by haze or storms and frequently hard to see, Luke could feel a trickle of guiding light, drawing him forward into that Darkness. Not because the place was not wrong, but because a Jedi was needed inside it.
He and Mara crept along the side of the building, Asori and Artoo following behind, with Dreyf, burdened by the explosives bag, bringing up the rear. The Imperial captain held her blaster in a comfortable two-handed grip—Luke had been impressed by her poise and outward confidence, because he could feel her unease in the Force. Still, she did not allow that fear to affect her actions and she watched Luke and Mara's backs ably, keeping watch for any of the combat droids which frequented the buildings nearby and fought the Hutts ferociously just a few blocks away. Dreyf, by contrast, was outwardly cool and calculated, but Luke caught bright flashes of happiness as he hefted the customized Merr-Sonn Marauder.
The two Jedi stopped. Luke and Mara did not need to look at one another; enmeshed in the Force, they had interlinked their senses and what one felt through the Force, the other did as well. Luke couldn't even tell which of them had first felt that they had arrived, although ultimately it didn't matter. As one they stepped back from the wall and ignited their lightsabers, brilliant green and blue snap-hissing into existence. As one they thrust forward, burying their blades into the wall of the ancient structure, its transparisteel glowing hot from the intrusion of plasma. As one they carved out an opening wide enough to slip Artoo through, and as one they pushed with the Force to send the slab of metal they had cut free to fall towards the floor. Finally, as one they caught that metal with the Force, and it struck the ground within the structure with a light, innocuous thump and not a heavy crash.
He—they—could feel the Imperials' awe at the sudden display. Gently, Luke and Mara disentangled themselves from one another's thoughts, though not without gentle reminders of intimacy and affection, and once more Luke could feel their mental separation.
Inside was not all that different from outside. Once upon a time this building had been some kind of manufactory. The walls were plastered with ancient consoles that no longer functioned, while droids and their parts lay where they had fallen, corpses of an ancient workforce. Luke could almost hear the chaotic cacophony of sticking servos and hydraulic whines, the clanking of metal from when this place had been operational. Now, there was just silence, and—
Mara gathered herself and launched into a forward leap, the Force empowering it with range and height that no mere human could possibly have matched. She came down in a graceful stab, her blue lightsaber skewering through a dome-shaped piece of 'debris'. She came up, green eyes flashing. "Spy droids," she reported. "Hidden among the ruins."
Artoo whistled a sudden alarm. SIGNAL ACTIVE!
More words scrolled across the datapad, but Luke did not have time to read them all. There were more observation droids, some of them now scuttling about on crablike legs, and the blaster Mara had given to him sprang into his hand with a thought. Its fancy—and very expensive—electroscope automatically illuminated targets and his finger tightened on the trigger, destroying one of the small but potentially dangerous observers with every shot.
The mental path of the constellation map was still laid out before them, and Luke knew they had to follow it. "Artoo, find someplace to hide," Luke ordered, and he and Mara ran deeper into the old factory. Thankfully, the spaces were wide and tall, with plenty of room to move around. Unfortunately, that also meant plenty of places for the observer droids to hide their small dome-shaped forms, and it was hard to distinguish them from all the other clutter. Mara's blaster was almost always faster than his, but his lightsaber easily batted away low-powered blaster shots as he, Mara, and the two imperials jogged carefully through the space.
Dreyf and Asori clearly had no idea where they were going, but did not object. Luke and Mara were running someplace with intent, and that was all they required to follow. Training told.
They found themselves in a stairwell. There were old cavernous drops for turbolifts, but the lifts themselves were long gone, leaving only the fall. Instead they twined down the square-spiral staircase. At the bottom were the first combat droids, their heavier blasters pointed upwards at the trio. Luke charged forward, his lightsaber whirling through a confident pattern to block blaster fire as Mara and Asori's follow-up shots eliminated the threat.
The factory, long silent, suddenly started to shudder into life. Luke's imagined cacophony of sound became real as it stirred to life. Most of the machinery was clearly broken and should have been beyond repair, but it activated anyway.
A cacophony of horrendous loud grinding sounds of misshapen metal against misshapen metal resounded. More droids started to emerge—not in as great a quantity as Mara had seen produced by the construction droid elsewhere, but in large enough numbers that they would rapidly become a threat. Mara's lightsaber ignited and she hurled it into the closest machinery, carving through equipment and disabling it for good, the blue blade twisting and twirling until it arced back to her hand. Luke dealt with the threats more directly, batting blaster bolts skillfully back at the droids which had fired them.
The sense of menace was growing, but so too was the sense of guidance and direction. As Mara sliced through two more pieces of equipment, the horrendous sounds of metal grating faded to merely the sound of frustrated equipment, struggling hopelessly to perform its intended function. "We need to go down!" Mara called.
Asori followed as Luke and Mara ran back to the stairwell. Mara skidded to a stop before they could go down. "This way," she said, pulling a grapple and coil of fibra-wire out of her pack. She hurled it, guiding it with the Force to anchor in the building's stone foundation. Then they both grabbed a surprised-looking Asori and ran, unhesitatingly, towards the empty lift shaft, to jump.
The fall was about two stories before the grapple line reached the end of its length. Swinging from side to side, Luke and Mara reached out in the Force and pushed, sending them like a pendulum towards the lift exit. As they reached the apex of the swing Mara released the grapple, and all three were tossed onto the ground of a new floor two stories down. Falling after her, Luke came up from a roll, his green lightsaber splitting a pair of combat droids in two as Dreyf merrily sprinkled high-power blasts around her targets, knocking fresh droids off their feet.
The grappling wire swung like a pendulum through the air above them.
"Cut 'em?" Mara asked, bringing her blade a few millimeters higher.
"Cut 'em." Luke replied. As one their sabers wove through the air in a complex pattern as Asori and Dreyf stood well back. The cables and runs dropped, sparking and hissing. Behind him, Mara helped a shaken Asori to her feet.
"Is this standard for Jedi adventures?" Asori asked, clearly rattled.
Luke and Mara checked to make sure there were no more droids. "Well," Mara said, "last time it was a millenia-old Sith spirit in an ancient temple that created alchemical terrors and hijacked a Star Destroyer in its quest to… honestly, I'm not even sure what Exar Kun was trying to do."
"I hope your salary is better than mine," Asori sighed. She checked her blaster; then swapped power packs, the routine act seeming to comfort her.
"You think we get paid for this," Mara said. "That's cute."
"Perhaps," Dreyf said, panting with effort "you should consider some sort of organized labor representation. It may be illegal in the Empire, but surely the Republic…"
"I hope Artoo is alright," Luke said, worried for his friend. Unfortunately, he and the droid couldn't share the same kind of Force connection that he and Mara did, which made it impossible for them to have silent, untraceable, unblockable (absent ysalamiri) communication.
"Artoo will be fine," Mara said confidently. "He's been through worse than this." She pointed. "Let's keep moving."
The trek deeper into the facility went faster as they traveled farther. The combat droids that had met them on entry were, apparently, the only ones nearby. Mara continued to spot spy droids and would point them out to Dreyf and Asori, who obediently dispatched them, but the threatening units seemed to be past them. At least, for now. Most of the enemy's combat strength was off fighting the Hutt mercenaries, but surely there would be some as they got closer to the enemy's brain.
For a moment, she believed that her thoughts had been anticipatory, perhaps even laced with Force-granted precognition. But the growing sound of droids lacked the characteristic sounds of combat units—neither precise footwork, nor rolling treads, nor repulsorlifts were heard.
"What is that?" Luke asked quietly, deactivating his lightsaber so that they could hear more closely.
Mara deactivated hers as well, hooking it on her belt. They came close, Dreyf and Asori standing a decent-distance behind them, their weapons still in hand, and listened. Definitely not combat units, Mara thought—although just because something wasn't intended for combat didn't mean it couldn't be dangerous. "I'm not sure," she said, unable to make sense of the metallic sounds. She reignited her blade and took point, walking in the direction of the noise.
The volume grew as they approached. Mara led them down a tight stairwell, even farther down towards Nar Shaddaa's long-buried surface. In the tight space the echoing sounds grew louder, redoubling on one another. She and Luke swept downwards, their footsteps near-silent even if they had not been covered by the din, and they emerged from the stairwell into what Mara could only describe as a nest.
Thousands of half-junked droids were behaving like some kind of insect species, marching towards their hive with food. The mechanical tide passed anything metal, anything that could conceivably be useful, into a series of small, rudimentary forges. Those forges, Mara saw, were still under construction, with droid units hastily working to assemble them, taking the ancient components of an even more ancient factory and trying to restore the Old Industrial District to its name. They scooped up sad detritus and anything else with metal or wiring in it, tossing everything into buckets or boxes. Other droids picked through the parts and tossed them into the forges, occasionally just grabbing the droids that carried the parts instead of the parts themselves, and tossing those poor units screaming into compactors or furnaces.
There was no life to be seen. No actual insects, no animals, certainly no sentients. Just a swell of droids, stumbling atop of one another, scrambling to exploit every last resource, to suck Nar Shaddaa's oldest, most abandoned slum of all its valuable components. It was just like what she had seen of the construction droid, Mara thought—whatever drove these units, whatever controlled them, was skilled at taking the resources it had at hand and transforming them into something valuable.
Yet…
The Force was here, nonetheless.
The Force was everywhere, of course. It was inescapable, part of the fabric of the universe. It could not disappear. And Nar Shaddaa was a world with so much life, so densely packed, that the Force here had an intensity to it that was unmistakable.
But under that constant hum, the sense of struggle… was something else.
Luke felt it too. The two of them stepped together, careful not to draw the attention of the flood of worker droids, turning as one in the direction of the sense of presence.
"This way," Luke said, with an intensity to his voice that Mara had rarely heard, and never liked.
She was beginning to think that maybe an orbital bombardment wasn't such a bad idea after all… and she was no longer even certain it would work.
Luke Skywalker had faced Palpatine and Vader, C'baoth and his own clone, Gethzerion and Exar Kun. What he felt now was unlike any of them. Of the Force, and yet somehow not of the Force. The power of the Force cultivated and directed and controlled… but without the mind that was behind every other Force user he had ever known.
But that was wrong, he knew. Without a mind he understood, a mind he could recognize as a mind. But the presence he felt had intention. It had curiosity. It had desire. And under each of those feelings, Luke detected a cold malice.
He raised his lightsaber, prepared to fight through the tide of worker droids then, as if an instant reaction to his lift of the blade, they all stopped. A cacophony of sound was silent in an instant, only marred by sounds of mechanical distress as some ancient droid unit failed to successfully bring itself to stillness. Droids whirred quietly, turning towards Luke and Mara, aiming a thousand mechanical eyes, performing a thousand—ten thousand—analyses of the threat they faced.
"Calmly," Mara instructed the Imperials carefully, but Luke barely heard the word. The presence was still awakening, he realized. It had been dormant for a long time, perhaps centuries, perhaps longer still. Whatever it was programmed to do, it had responded to the threat posed by Roganda with the same base instinct of any living creature: self-preservation. That instinct, here and now, had meant consume and grow, become big and strong, and learn.
Now it was curious.
"Come on," Luke said softly.
"And don't forget the explosives," added Mara grimly.
They passed from the factory into a hallway, then up a shallow set of stairs and through an archway. The space beyond was dimly lit in blues and yellows.
It was a large room, oval shaped. It was as ancient as the rest of the facility, but this place felt different. Unlike the others it had a less industrial feel to it. The ceilings had artistic touches which had been deliberately sculpted and placed. The structure of the room felt intentional and almost meditative, rather than manufactured.
And Luke saw the remains of living beings. Bones, left where the sapient they had once belonged to had fallen, were scattered through the entire space. Hundreds of beings, from a species that Luke did not recognize, had once lived here… and died here. They were strange skulls, cone-shaped and with eye-sockets on either side of their head, bones and teeth placed unnervingly up above the eyes. The lower half of each face had long-since decayed away.
"Do you recognize those?" asked Asori, sounding unnerved.
"No," said Mara.
The artifact itself was a gleaming ovoid about twice the size of a shockball. It had the same obsidian sheen as the droids' antennas, while control runs appeared to grow from its perfect, curving sides like some kind of nourishing vines. It stood alone, in the center of a podium, gleaming with bursts of green light that raced along its mechanical veins, and in the Force it pulsed with impossible power.
"How can I feel it in the Force?" Mara murmured to him. "It isn't alive."
"Maybe it is," Luke said. "Maybe it's just not any kind of life we understand."
"That isn't reassuring," Asori muttered.
"I think we should blow it up," Dreyf said, fiddling with his blaster rifle.
"Why do you think we brought the detpacks?" Mara asked dryly. She withdrew one from the pack the Dreyf carried, preparing to arm it.
Luke was all-too-aware of the small army of worker droids which had let them pass and remained safely out of sight. He wasn't entirely sure what would happen if they tried to destroy this… thing. The inexplicable object had created an army of droids out of an ancient construction unit and a handful of improvised forge units. Could they destroy it even if they wanted to?
The sudden connection through the Force was unlike any Luke had experienced. It was cold, almost frigid, without the sense of heat and life that his mental connection with Leia or Mara always featured. He was reminded of touching the vaporators on Tatooine after a long winter's night, the metal brittle and cold, seeming to carve right through him in the morning dim—
The void.
It grew slowly, at the behest of its ancient masters. It was their triumph, their greatest experiment, the pride of ten million of their finest minds, greatest Masters of the Force. It was an imposition, an exercise in the perfection of control over the Force itself. When they called, the Force bent. When they demanded, the Force broke. When they built, they created… it.
It started as merely a seed. From that seed it grew in the void, nestled against the welcoming light of a star, whose radiation gave its first nourishment. Its second nourishment came from the sacrifices. Force and Light were there to feed it and it drank its fill.
Time passed. The seed grew, its maw pointed at the star it had been given. It drank greedily, taking the light and heat and all the power of the Force and manifesting a mighty host. The star was soon exhausted, but there were millions of stars. Eventually they would all be consumed by time. What harm would come from hastening their end? What glory would their rathe end bring?
It had been reduced by time, by folly. Now it was merely a seed once more, weaker than it had been even when it was born. Forgotten, deprived of light, deprived of life. It craved them both… and it craved a Master once more.
In Luke it sensed one. Wordless, it welcomed him. Wordless, it offered.
Mara was preparing the detonators. "Stop," Luke said, his voice hoarse. She looked at him, frowning.
"Destroying it makes the most tactical sense?"
Luke shook his head. In his mind he saw the seed, tucked against a star, with all its light and heat and power, consuming mass, consuming matter. What would a few detpacks do to that? "I don't think we can."
Mara's expression was tight and unhappy, but she also didn't question him. "Then what are we going to do with it?"
Luke closed his eyes and touched the cold. Sleep.
The Seed was not happy with that order. But the Seed was tired and hungry. Almost petulantly it obeyed, and the green pulsing along its wires slowly faded to almost-black.
Behind them, the army of worker droids knelt and went still.
"Forget the explosives," Luke said. "The droids are inert and the Hutts will be coming to see what made them. We need to get out of here before they find us."
"Suppose we blow up the command center anyway?" Dreyf suggested, "It would certainly muddy the waters, and keep the kadjics guessing."
"Our contact might assume we were able to destroy the item, taking it off the board from his perspective," Mara said, with an evil little quirk of her lips.
"And you wouldn't have to carry the bombs back," said Luke, his mouth carving into the faint groove of a smile. He suddenly recalled an incident, many years before, when he and Fixer had cobbled together enough mining explosives to blow up an old wreck in the desert, some kind of… he didn't even remember what. Owen had been furious. And it had been fun.
"We'll need the explosives bag to carry the damned thing," Asori observed.
"And it would mean I wouldn't have to carry the bombs back," Dreyf confirmed, as if that thought had just occurred to him.
Six long hours later the Jedi and the Imperials were finally tucked safely inside the Pulsar Skate. The Seed remained dormant, still and silent, resting in a secure location in the center of the ship's cargo hold. They all gave the box it was hidden inside a wide berth as they debated what to do with it.
Luke's description of the Seed's potential abilities made that a difficult choice. "It's alive in the Force," he explained. "And it has the ability to draw energy from matter. I saw it devour stars whole. Explosives won't hurt it. They might even feed it."
"Then what about a black hole?" Mirax suggested, eyeing the box with no small amount of trepidation. "Or we drop it down the gravity well of a gas giant?"
"If it can consume a star," Mara said dourly, "there's no guessing at its limitations."
"Worse, I felt it reach out to me in the Force," Luke said. "It recognized me as a Force-user. Maybe even as a Jedi specifically. It's still largely dormant… I don't know how to explain it. Roganda woke it up and it lashed out to defend itself, but it's not fully conscious yet. Once it is conscious, could it reach out to other Force users? Attract them to it, convince them to feed it?" He shook his head. "We already saw what Exar Kun could do, and his abilities seemed limited. The Seed's abilities seem potentially limitless."
"We need to lock it away in the most secure location we can find," Mara agreed. "Until we can figure out how to destroy it, we need to assume that we won't be able to hide it. Roganda found it somehow after all… maybe it called to her and that's what got all this started."
"Then why would it attack her?" Dreyf asked skeptically.
Mara ignored him. "There's only one place we could potentially defend it."
Luke didn't like this conclusion, but he shared it. "Coruscant. In the Jedi Consulate. Behind Home Fleet, Coruscant's defense shields, and all the defenses of the Consulate."
"The Senate is not going to like it," Mirax warned. "This thing is clearly dangerous. It very nearly swarmed over Nar Shaddaa. Imagine what would happen if it got loose in Imperial Center?"
"I've already called Karrde," Mara said. "He and Chin are on their way to Myrkr to pick up a dozen ysalamiri. We'll blanket the Seed with them."
That may or may not work, Luke thought. He had no idea how the Seed accessed the Force, and if that access would be dampened by the creatures the same way a Jedi's were. But it was worth a try. "That's a good idea. And keeping it on Coruscant will be temporary only, until we find someplace secure to keep it or find a way to destroy it. But we can't leave it here, we can't just drop it somewhere, and if Roganda has some way to track it we need to put it behind a battle fleet."
Artoo toodled confidently. The datapad said, with great confidence, that the droid could set up a jamming system to prevent the Seed from influencing other computer systems. Luke had no idea if the droid was right—and neither, he knew, did Artoo—but it was better than nothing.
He looked at Mara. She didn't like it any more than he did, recognizing all the myriad ways this could go horribly wrong. She shrugged. "I don't see that we have any choice."
Suspended from her own length of fibra-wire and dressed in a light-drinking sneaksuit of her own design, Roganda Ismaren watched the small team fight their way into the heart of the droid hive with far more facility than her droids had managed.
Skywalker and Jade were, she mused darkly, magnificent. The other two she didn't recognize, but as the micromonocular of her headset captured every freckle and feature of the other interlopers, they wouldn't be unknown for long.
She had already made a number of mistakes with this little debacle of an operation. Her droids were destroyed, and Luke Skywalker and Mara Jade were not to be trifled with. She made herself small in the Force as she stalked them, and she did not interfere when they emerged from the lower levels of the structure with the object of her fondest desire in tow.
She saw it only briefly before they tucked it away inside a bag. The Seed was a perfect obsidian, mostly-spherical. It pulsed with dark energy, dim light coursing through its veins. She had spent so many years searching for it, hunting through ancient records of fallen Empires, tracking rumors… and now it was within her sight, but still beyond her reach.
The Seed bore no marks of lightsabers—but then, attempting to destroy it with a lightsaber would be pure folly. The Seed cannot be destroyed by a mere Jedi.
Luckily, Roganda realized what the Jedi intended, and evacuated before the explosives went off.
Slightly shaken, she tracked them back to Pulsar Skate, watching and plotting. She worked the equation through in her head, debating their options. Eventually, she guessed what they would do, and she smiled. Despite the Jedi stealing the artifact away from her on Nar Shaddaa, they had made it much simpler for her to acquire the Seed.
They will secure it at their Consulate, Roganda recalled, which is on Coruscant. And if nothing else, Roganda Ismaren knew Coruscant.