Wherever he looks, the metal is stained brown with muck. Every wall, every junction, every hatch looks the same. Kyle, however, is not concerned about getting lost in this place. He already did it once.

He doesn't have his blaster. Doesn't need it. The droid sentries all around him are as he left them: shorted out hulks and gutted wrecks, their photoreceptors dark and cold. Though his face is uncovered, the stench of Anoat City's sewer system doesn't reach his nostrils.

He gets to the top of the stairs, turns a corner. There are benches and racks strewn with oily tools and pieces of junk, and a conform lounger at the far end. The obese human splaying in the chair is a bit on the swarthy side, with a buzz of dark hair. His workman pants, white wifebeater, and ample rolls of flesh are splattered with mechanical lubricant and filth.

"Jan, I've found Moff Rebus. I'm ready to get out of this mess."

Kyle hears his own words rather than speaking them. He approaches, not seeing himself in the mirror-reflective flash goggles that hide the other man's eyes. Rebus drops the heavy blaster rifle that he was holding like a witch-doctor's staff, but his massive grin stays in place even as Kyle hauls him out of the chair.

"Ah, Katarn! What are you doin' to me?!" he gripes in exasperation. "I've just been minding my own business down here. And business has been good. I'm only designing weapons, it's not like I'm harming anyone. I've been in this place for years. I thought we were clean. Why've you got to drag me outta here again?"

Though he puts up no obvious resistance, it's like dragging a BFF-1 bulk freighter through water. It takes half a minute of huffing and puffing before Kyle gets the fat bastard anywhere near the stairs. Pausing, he grasps a handful of flabby flesh from the Moff's neck and shakes a finger in his face. "Because you're the guy who's gonna help me find Crix Madine," he snaps.

Rebus's smile doesn't go anywhere. "Find him? You are him."

Kyle rolls his eyes and redoubles his efforts. Suddenly his prisoner gets unstuck, and they're moving around the stained floor faster than they can walk, bouncing off the doorframe, sliding down the stairs like they're a greased ramp.

Finally they're tramping through the sewer maze itself. This time Kyle's not so confident of his path, and the layout seems unfamiliar no matter where he turns. Rebus hovers nearby, complaining and sniping, and a few times Kyle has to keep him from wandering off. It's like herding a felinx. The flowing brown muck reaches over their boots, but hardly splashes or ripples as they trudge through it.

Stuff is floating in the current. Nothing good: burned men and woman from Talay. Kids from the images in the paper folder. Kyle quickly learns not to look down at them. Madine's such a sick bastard. Kyle's got to get out of here and make him pay.

Spying a rusty lever on the wall, Kyle cranks it. A wide door opens nearby, exposing another wing of the maze. He gives Rebus a shove and starts to follow, but a horrible, warbling, inhuman squaw-growl echoes from somewhere or other.

Rebus leers smugly over his shoulder. "You forgot about one thing, chump," he gloats. "The dianoga diagnostic!"

The creature growls again, and Kyle slaps at his belt where the blaster should be. Skrag. Kyle thought he'd killed all the beasts the last time he was here.

No choice but to keep moving. Rebus is like a boulder that he has to push ahead of him into the passage. It gets narrower and narrower as they go, darker and darker.

He walks out of the darkness, led by a catwalk along the outside of a cloudcutter on Coruscant. It's a clear night. Imperial City's glittering below him, but there's no air traffic at all, and the sky above is like deep space. Rebus is gone, but Kyle's not concerned. Like he needed that fat son of a ruskakk anyway.

The platform ends at a sheer wall. There's a panel for calling the elevator, but Kyle doesn't know the code. The keypad is strange. It takes up a whole square meter of space. It makes sense, though—no other way to fit all those extra numbers.

Kyle taps away at it for a while, trying different codes, hoping nobody's watching. He'd be embarrassed to have to ask for help. If only Jan was here to give him a lift. In frustration he inputs a word—Lapogo, his grandfather's name. The panel beeps negatively, but when Kyle slaps the wall in frustration, he finds himself on the roof of the cloudcutter.

Not much up here. Just a landing pad. He paces there for a while, peers up into the sky. This calm, this glimmering, it was like this on Sulon. Kyle wonders if the shuttle is even going to show up at this point.

When he's fed up with waiting, he starts putting on his stormtrooper armor. The helmet seals up fine, but the HUD won't activate. He'd better not tell anyone.

"Hey, you! You! You gotta problem with me!"

The voice is creaking, slurred, like a drunkard's. Kyle turns to find Griff Grawley shambling toward him. The old-timer's grip is irresistible. "You're under arrest," he explains. "If only your father could see you now!"

Kyle protests, trying to catch a rail or a sensor mast or something with his free arm. "Father doesn't need to know I'm a stormtrooper! He's dead—there's no other way I can get him out of debt!"

"You always did make excuses like a faggot," Mister Grawley retorts with searing contempt. "Now get outta here! In ya go!"

He flings Kyle through a doorway. The room on the other side is spacious and packed full of people. Soft chairs, gleaming chandeliers, tables covered with elegant crystal cups and plates of vague but colorful food. It's got the feel of a cocktail party from a holovid, warm and slick and relaxed.

A Gran waiter catches Kyle by the armored shoulders as he comes stumbling in. "Abadu tee cha-pu taa!" he chuckles, and with a gentle push sends Kyle meandering through the crowd.

There's all kinds of people he recognizes here: his Academy roommate Meck Odom chatting it up with Mon Mothma. General Rieekan juggling a colorful ring of soocha balls. Nil Ondi sucking his thumb. Kyle's baffled and embarrassed. He feels like stopping to talk, but everyone seems to be absorbed in these tight little rings of conversation, so he keeps going, praying for an opening.

Dark troopers are standing on top of the next three or four tables—the skeletal-looking phase-one model. They're dancing slowly, suavely. Kyle slips by as quick as he can, wary of catching their interest. Those vibroblades on their arms would go right through his plastoid armor.

Finally he's at the bar, except the wall behind it is lined with holobooks. The barkeep's a scarred Trandoshan. Kyle doesn't like the look of him—they're trigger-happy with those concussion rifles—and can't decide what to order.

"Guess I'll have some... scrambled iridium mountain gorg eggs?" he says at last.

The Trandoshan gives an ominous growl, but immediately hands over a glass of eggs. Kyle is apprehensive. Not only are they steaming hot, but he forgot to ask for a fork.

"Well, you're looking pretty peached with yourself, Rimmer," cries the other man at the bar. It's his old classmate, Nathan Donar III.

Kyle warns him, "You can't call me a Rimmer anymore. I'm cadet leader now."

Nathan slaps him on the back. "Oh, but how can I forget that fateful asteroid mission, where our fearless leader, Kyle Katarn—"

"Give it a rest, Nathan."

They go back and forth like that for a while. Kyle's constantly glancing down at his eggs to keep them from disappearing.

"You know, you never did send a thank-you for putting that Gromas dust in your boots." Nathan's pouty voice gets more exaggerated by the second. Stars, was this guy annoying.

"What do you care about Gromas?"

A series of menacing hiss-chirp-beeps cuts through the conversation—the dark troopers spotting an intruder. Kyle doesn't turn around. If he doesn't look at them, they can't get mad at him. He has reason to be mad, though—his glass of eggs is gone.

"Come on, cadet leader. It's time to atone for killing us all." Not Nathan anymore. Now it's Mon Mothma.

Kyle can only answer, "Yes, sir," to that. He'll never talk back to his mother.

The Delta troop transport's dark cabin undulates. Deep, distorted groans come from the bulkheads, like they're underwater.

"We've come ashore!" shouts one of his squadmates. "Get ready!"

There's a rustle and clattering of equipment. Kyle struggles to free himself from the acceleration couch. The straps keep snagging on his armor's plastoid plates.

Finally he manages. Stormtroopers push and shove as they squeeze out the open hatch. White boots stamp over dew-touched grass, hurdle stones and other debris.

The troopers spread out, taking cover behind chunks of wall. Kyle grabs a spot, peers past the barrel of his E-11. They're near the bottom of the gentle slope leading up to the front of the Katarn home on Sulon.

I get it, he realizes. They killed my father, and now I'm finishing the job.

Somebody shouts, "We've got bungalows!" as the front door bursts open and hostiles come barreling out. But Kyle hesitates—they're stormtroopers too. There must be some mistake.

No time to think. Kyle picks a target and squeezes the trigger, but his E-11 is dead. Cursing, he checks to see if he's got anything else, comes up with a packered mortar gun. The loading slider rattles open, but the shells slip out of his hand like greased nerf sausages. Then it's too late. The avalanche of stormtroopers crashes down on them.

Laser fire shreds the still morning air, but Kyle also sees troopers throwing shockballs, jabbing with sharp sticks, brawling and tackling each other like it's a sporting event.

Somebody shoves him out into the open. He makes a desperate clutch for the mortar gun, but it's like a balloon and goes half-floating, half-bouncing away into the melee. Kyle is swallowed up in it all: flinging his fists, tripping, shoving, swimming in armored bodies. The clashing of plasteel on plasteel sounds like a hailstorm.

It lasts for what feels like hours, so it takes a while to notice when it's winding down. Even as he throws one stormtrooper headlong into the irrigation channel, he spots two others shaking hands. A third is wiping the brow of his helmet. Others are sitting on the lawn in exhaustion or milling about aimlessly. Kyle turns in a slow circle, watching as the free-for-all breaks down into a few isolated brawls, soon to dissolve completely.

"Cracken's gonna be proud of us now!" one trooper says smugly.

"That's it? This was all for nothing?!" demands Kyle.

When nobody answers, he storms his way up the hill and into the house. He might as well stand guard there.

There are scrambled iridium mountain gorg eggs in the kitchen. Lots of them: huge platters cover the table, the counters, even the chairs, steaming and golden and looking utterly delicious. On the thermastove, more are cooking in a frying pan nearly two meters wide.

A brown-skinned human is tending them. His dark hair is smartly cut, and his indigo Corellian-style leisure suit and cape look very expensive.

"Don't I know you from somewhere?" Kyle asks.

"The name's Lando Carlistrieekan," replies the man. He seems focused on the eggs, stirring them with something or other.

"What are you doing here?"

Lando offers an apologetic smile and a shrug. "Just makin' some breakfast. You know, people keep asking me how I'd feel if I'd skipped it. Like it's a trick question or something. Me, I don't get it."

Kyle doesn't either, but before he can ask another question, his helmet HUD powers on. The icon in the corner shows a grinning man with large flash goggles. "Hey, Katarn! Looks like you're getting a transmission!"

"Rebus?"

The corpulent Imperial scientist doesn't reply.

Instead Kyle's father does, in the form of a sputtering blue holorecording in the doorway.

"This message is intended for my son, Kyle Katarn. Kyle, I have left two very important items for you. The first is a ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-a-a-a-a..."

The holo catches, stutters, and Kyle clutches his head as the whole room starts to wobble...

Splash.

The stench came so suddenly that Kyle had to fight down an urge to vomit. Bending over in case of failure, he nearly lost his balance completely on the unfamiliar footing. The scum was up over his ankles and seeping into his boots, warm as a jungle summer. He couldn't see a damn thing.

None of that happened—it wasn't real, he thought when he had finished gagging. I was just dreaming... and now I'm... not?

Something moved only meters ahead, sending ripples through the sewage. Kyle's heartbeats turned to concussion grenade detonations in his chest as he searched himself for his bryar pistol, his stun baton, a glowlamp, anything, and came up short.

His nerve-freezing dread thawed to confusion when he heard something else: low, stuttering sobs. Whimpers. The sounds that are only made by a person lost in a universe of darkness. The sounds of utter sentient despair.

Swallowing, raising his hands even though he couldn't see them, Kyle decided to take a risk. "Who's there?"

He flinched when a grid of illumination banks overhead switched on. They made a sound like a rusted hatch slamming shut. Shadowing his hands with his eyes, Kyle followed the brown-stained metal walls to a ceiling that could be scraped by the head of an AT-ST/A walker. Humanoid silhouettes crowded the viewports up there—some appeared to be wearing robes, others uniforms—gazing down into the room with inscrutable intent.

A despondent moan drew Kyle's attention to the human sprawled before him. His clothes were soaked through with muck, his ragged hair and beard disheveled and dripping. The look in those sunken, bloodshot eyes was an incarnation of horror.

"Katarn," he croaked. "Kyle... Katarn..."

For an infinite moment, Kyle stared down at the wretched figure as if he had discovered the universe itself for the first time—

"You."

—and the universe was bile and injustice and spite and rage.

Kyle remembered shaking this creature's hand, and his fingernails bit into his palms. His knuckles crackled. "You did this."

Crix Madine's head twitched back and forth. His mouth barely moved. "No. No..."

"You raped those children," said Kyle Katarn. Waves of wastewater crashed as he stepped forward. "The Alliance is tearing itself apart because of you."

"No, I couldn't stop it, Kyle. I didn't— I wasn't the same after Dentaal, and General Cracken, he— They put something in my..." Crix Madine choked, shook his head. "Please, you've got to help me, Kyle. You've got to get me out of here, before it's—"

"You— tricked— me— before..." Kyle's breathing, his words, were not under his full control. This was the moment he'd been waiting for, dreaming of, for all those miserable weeks he had spent being beaten into the ground by the consequences of this man's actions, and of his own.

"It's almost too late. Shaparo tried to tell you—"

"STOP! TALKING!" The words exploded against the walls and crashed back on them like twin thunderclaps as Kyle grabbed Crix's collar in a strangling grip and hauled him to his feet, brown slime rolling off his drenched clothes and splattering below. He didn't care what Shaparo had said, or Mon Mothma, or Cracken, or anyone else. Words didn't matter. He smashed Madine's nose with the crown of his skull, then power-kneed him between the legs. The moments that followed were slow and fast at the same time, vivid and delirious. Kyle became endless, nameless, a spinning blood-black void, a singularity of wrath.

He returned to himself like a tremendous rubber band's snap as the haymaker of a lifetime knocked Crix spread-eagle on his back. Flecks of wastewater stung Kyle's eyes from the splash, but he didn't wipe it away. Straddling Madine, he yanked the man upright by his collar and screamed into his bloody, mottled face, "TAKE IT ALL BACK, YOU FRACKING HUTT-SPAWN! SAY IT'S NOT MY FAULT! SAY IT! SAY IT!"

"ITSNATCHUR— fall-ll-ll-ll-lt..." hacked Madine. The blood spilling from his shattered nose was nearly black. "...b'Kaarnn... Itsnot gunna stopp..." He leaned in close enough for Kyle to smell his rancid breath and gurgled, "Ihwzz... nevver just mmee."

The lights flickered as an electric cracking sound echoed in the room: a speaker turning on. Then came a voice too deep to be human, shaking with hearty, contemptuous laughter. Kyle's guts knotted as he gazed at the shadowed figures watching—and clapping—from the viewports high above. In his rage, he had forgotten them completely.

"What— Who's there?!" he tried to shout, but his throat was as dry as the blister-deserts of Dennogra.

"Your efforts are in vain," the deep voice gloated, then went back to laughing as a chorus of applause joined in.

Madine flopped back into the sewage as Kyle catapulted to his feet, turning back and forth. "Who are you people?!" he roared. "WHAT THE HELL HAVE YOU DONE?!"

No answer came, but the applause and laughter ebbed, and Kyle now found himself more concerned with the intensifying ripples and swirls that troubled the muck on every side. Gritting his teeth, he cast about. There was no obvious exit to the room, but pieces of debris were floating in or protruding from the sewage. Maybe there was something he could use to defend himself.

Four meters to his left he spied the impossible: his bryar pistol resting on an upturned plastoid crate that bobbed over the liquid filth. Before Kyle could step toward it, though, something glimmered in the corner of his eye. Without moving his body, he looked.

It was a stone's throw past Madine, motionless amid the lapping scum: a blood-red orb that reflected the light of the illumination banks like a Corusca gem. Slitted black down the middle, it was embedded in a knob of brown flesh thicker than a human neck.

Kyle looked at it.

It looked at Kyle.

A deep, warbling growl was the only warning it gave before the sewage erupted. Kyle lunged half-blind through a storm of spewing filth, but something hard and elastic slammed into his thigh and knocked his feet out from under him. He went down with a splash, then pushed himself up again, spitting and retching. Directly ahead, a black-brown tendril curled around the plastoid crate and blindly pulled. The pistol slid off and plopped under the foaming waves.

Kyle launched himself into a desperate belly-flop and reached frantically, blindly for the weapon. Behind him he could hear Madine: blubbering, thrashing, screaming.

Finally Kyle's hand clamped onto the bryar pistol's grip, and elation kicked a new surge of adrenaline into his system—right before he felt a numbing noose-grip clamp onto his ankle like a Haruun Kal gripleaf. The pistol accidentally discharged as Kyle rolled over onto his back, the shot bouncing crazily between the magnetically sealed walls before hissing into the water. To his consternation, it was a faint, low-setting bolt, dimmer even than the illumination banks above.

Kyle cursed as a second tentacle snaked around his torso, squeezing away his breath while the one on his leg tugged him, sloshing and struggling, toward the mound of muscle which now only barely crested above the lake of sewage. The dianoga's eyestalk stared Kyle down, guileless and simple, while its maw waited somewhere below. A reddish tinge bubbling up into the brown-white waves was the only remaining sign of Crix Madine.

Kyle Katarn, however, had other things on his mind. Another tentacle was trying to yank his shooting arm around behind his back. Clutching that wrist with his free hand, he barely managed to resist, while his thumb madly flicked the power trigger of his pistol toward the highest setting. A maximum-power shot was enough to punch through three layers of stormtrooper armor, but it would take more than one to kill a dianoga, unless he got it in the brain...

Inexplicably, the overhead speaker had switched on again, and General Cracken's voice was blaring down at him, droning and thick with static distortion:

"...severe disciplinary action. Alliance High Command is taking this investigation very seriously, and Intelligence is cooperating in every possible way. In the meantime, we ask that all Alliance personnel remain patient. Transparency is a very high priority for us, but there is still the matter of security—"

The dianoga was three meters away. The scumwater seemed to bubble and froth with the beast's anticipation. Its tendrils were like coiled durasteel. Twisting, straining, Kyle tried to level his bryar pistol—

Kyle shot forward so forcefully that the entire copilot station rattled. Something that had been balanced on the console clattered to the floor. Heaving, shivering with sweat, Kyle cast his eyes about the Moldy Crow's cockpit, squinting against the swirling vortex of hyperspace.

"Are you okay in there?" called Jan from the galley.

Laughing hoarsely with relief, Kyle looked down at the object he had dislodged. It was his imagecaster, locked on the last frame from WeeGee's recording of himself and his father.

"Yeah! Yeah...," he said over his shoulder, and wiped his brow. "Just a nightmare, that's all."

As he bent over to retrieve the device, Jan appeared in the doorway. "Well, okay. You were out for a couple hours. Why don't you come get some dinner? You ought to eat something."

Kyle pushed out a breath as his mind roiled with chaotic images: places he had been, faces from his past, friends and enemies, voices... All jumbled together...

Nothing to do but shake it off. Considering everything that had happened in recent weeks, he should have expected nightmares a lot sooner.

Meanwhile, Jan was right there, and she was as real as it got.

"Yeah, sounds good," Kyle said, and followed her to the galley.

Still... some it had felt just as real...