Jaden landed with a soft thud on a pile of something soft and squishy that broke her fall. She resisted the urge to vomit. The smell down here was even worse. She quickly stood up, looking around at the pit she and Kyle were in. She'd landed in a smaller section that connected to a round part in the middle with two other narrow sections branching off of it.
"Jaden, run to the middle. You can jump out from there!" She suddenly saw Kyle standing above the pit, urgency in his voice and she saw why: Panels were slowly pushing their way towards the middle, pushing trash and all manner of junk and disgusting debris towards it. Above the circular center section, a round object with blunt spikes slowly began its descent, its function was to crush and pulverize the garbage. Panic gripped Jaden and she rushed to the middle, aiming a high jump to the ledge where Kyle stood, any more time and the pulverizer would trap her under it, blocking her escape. She leapt for it, missed, grasping for the edge and found Kyle's hand; he pulled her upwards so fast and easily, her foot just clearing the gap between the ledge and the giant crushing head.
They both sat motionless for a moment, the reality of what had almost happened settling over them. He stood up, gently helping her up too and let go of her hands.
"That was too close. We've gotta get outta here." Kyle glanced around, noting the chute they'd just come from and clocking the two others nearby. "Take that chute and I'll take this one, with luck we'll meet up on the other side." Jaden nodded, trying to shake the nerves and hurried to the chute her master had pointed out, flinching at the sounds of the trash compactor behind her, focusing her Force energy on not slipping backwards.
With some momentum, she cleared the top of the chute and entered a small control room guarded by unsuspecting stormtroopers and their commander, a small man with a balding head he was desperately trying to cover up.
"Where did you come from?" He yelled in shock and tried to shoot Jaden, missing miserably. She hacked her way through the stormtroopers until it was just the two of them.
"Activate all the lifts, now!" Jaden demanded. "And be sure to kindly point me to the nearest one."
"Y-y-yes, of course." The little man had his hands up as he went to the control panel and pulled a switch then pointed to the only door out of the room. "I-its through there! Please don't hurt me, I didn't even want this job with the trash compactor but they made me!"
Jaden shook her head and stepped forward to examine the door, fearing no harm from her enemy without his blaster. She sighed with relief. That's pretty convenient that the switch to activate the lifts is on the control panel for the trash compact-
"Wait!" She whirled around to see the small man holding a blaster he'd kept hidden. In the next second he fired off a round and Jaden had no choice but to deflect it back at him. He crumpled to the ground and Jaden exited without a glance back. Never turn your back on an Imperial.
She entered a small hallway that only led one way and took a right at the end of it when she saw that going left was a dead end with crates shoved in the corner. At the end of the hall were two doors, one with red lights signaling it was locked, the other green. She took her only option and heard the sounds of lightsabers clashing. She breathed more easily, knowing Kyle had made it too.
"You should run!" Kyle was taunting as he fought not one, nor two, but three armed cultists at a time. Jaden was so amazed and shocked that she almost sat back and watched the whole thing, but shook herself and jumped into the fray.
Between the two of them it wasn't much of a fight and soon all three Sith lay dead on the floor. Kyle looked up at Jaden, grinning, the excitement of battle ablaze in his eyes, he looked almost ten years younger.
"That worked out well. I thought I'd have to search high and low for you."
"Funny, I was thinking the same about you," Jaden quipped and they both chuckled as Kyle led her out of the room, which had been the one he'd come into through a broken vent and only led back to the compactor. Jaden showed him the locked door.
"I've got this one," Kyle said, starting to mess around with the control pad. "I learned how to hotwire these kinds of things a long time ago, takes some skill, doesn't always work but sometimes…"
The door slid open.
"Got it!" He exclaimed and they entered the room. "I see why they locked it."
The floor was covered with water.
"I guess a pipe burst or something, follow me." Jaden followed Kyle, the water going up to her mid calf at its deepest point and then down again as they approached the lift door on the other side. Kyle tried to open it.
"This lift is locked down, too." He glanced around them and saw a switch several feet away against the wall. "Maybe this switch…" He used the Force to throw the switch, but it flipped back up. "Oh, come on…" With a note of frustration, he pulled the switch down harder this time, forcing it to stay, but sparks began flying from it. "Uh-oh." Kyle followed the chain reaction with his eyes as the circuits in the switch panel overloaded and looked up to the ceiling above them at the power conduits that hung there. He could see it all before it happened. "Jaden, watch out!" There was a small explosion and one end of the conduit fell out of the ceiling, Jaden jumped out of the way and Kyle held the conduit up by the Force grunting with the effort. "Jaden, find a way to drain the water. If this power conduit hits the floor we're both gonna be fried!"
Jaden looked frantically around the room to find something, anything, to drain the water. She looked to the wall on the left hand side facing the door they'd come through and saw the pumps, recently installed by the looks of them. I guess the Imperials had better stuff to do besides immediately draining out this room.
The switches for the pumps sat a little too high for her to reach physically so she reached out through the Force. It worked and they began to make a soft, almost calming noise as the water level slowly shrank until there were only tiny puddles here and there.
Kyle let go of the conduit and eased it down to the dry floor. He was looking up into the ceiling when Jaden returned to his side.
"Well look at that. Guess we made our own path." He pointed into the ceiling and suddenly leapt high and into a huge, black gaping hole that had been made when part of the conduit exploded. Jaden didn't like that she couldn't see very far into the hole, but Kyle had gone first, so she wasn't afraid to follow him. She failed her first jump attempt, then resorted to shimmying up the conduit, balancing about halfway up and aiming a jump to the small ledge she could now make out that Kyle was standing near, his boots barely an outline in the dim, red light that she could now see in the vent space of the ceiling.
In the next moment she was there beside her master and he gestured to a small corridor barely high enough for him to stand up straight and they followed it.
"How are we going to get up into the Castle this way?" Jaden asked.
"Well, when you've been to as many places and done as many things as I have, you really start to figure out where things are and the secrets they contain. Also, I was an Imperial officer once, remember?"
"I still find that the craziest fact about you to date." Jaden shook her head, it was hard to imagine Kyle as a stuffy officer in, of all things, a uniform and taking orders.
"Well believe it, but that was a lifetime ago and I changed my ways pretty quickly."
"Then, how did you become a Jedi?"
"Have I not told you this story?"
"No old timer, you haven't." Jaden stopped, Kyle did too and glanced back at her. She wondered if she'd gone too far, but Kyle's lips cracked into a smile and he chuckled.
"You know, I think I'm starting to rub off on you."
"Corrupt is more of a better term."
"Scratch that, I think you've spent entirely too much time with Jan."
Jaden thought of using this opportunity to ask about the questionable status of their relationship, but second guessed it; he might not tell her anything and then she'd get no backstory whatsoever. She went back for her first question.
"So, how did you become a Jedi?"
"Well, that's something of a long story, but I think I can give you the bullet points while we're figuring out where to go. My father, Morgan Katarn, was a Jedi who escaped the slaughter of the Jedi Knights during Order 66." Jaden nodded to herself, she'd read about that event. Terrible, tragic and saddening were too cheap of words to describe what had happened. "I was pretty young at the time and my mother and I were his only secret he kept from the Jedi Order, and when he escaped, he laid aside his saber to become a family man on our little farm on Sulon.
"Much to his chagrin, I joined the Imperial Academy when I got older. I hadn't known about his past, but I knew he disliked the Empire. Still I felt betrayed by him, that he hadn't been there for my mother or I for some years until the Empire suddenly came into power. But he didn't judge me, he knew how hard it was for a farm boy like me to get an education and at the time, the Imperial Academy was the best there was. My father disappeared again from my life, it was only years later that I discovered he'd become a member of the Rebel Alliance. I found out he was murdered not long before I graduated.
"Some time later, I had become a stormtrooper and led my first assignment: To capture and kill Rebels. That's when I met her."
"Jan?"
"Yeah, I was supposed to execute her and the others she was with but..." Kyle sighed. "I couldn't do it. I wouldn't. Well, long story short, those Rebels got away and Jan offered me a chance. And I took it. That's how I became a Rebel myself, and then, after the war, a mercenary. Jan and I have worked together ever since. She was my co-pilot."
They came to a cross way and Kyle took a guess at which passage to take.
"Did you ever find out who killed your father?" Jaden asked.
"Yes. You see, it wasn't until after his death that my father arranged for his lightsaber to be sent to me, believing I was finally ready to accept it. He encouraged me through a message he'd recorded years before that he wished for me to follow in his footsteps. To become a Jedi and use the Force.
"That's how I met Luke and started my basic training, then started helping him with some problems that sprang up, one of Vader's leftover Inquisitors for starters. A man named Jerec. He was my father's murderer."
The air was heavy with the weight of Kyle's story, but Jaden didn't want to even breathe the wrong way for fear the spell of it would be broken.
"I helped keep the Valley of the Jedi safe from Jerec who wanted to use its power for his own nefarious purposes. After I defeated him, shunning the dark side and killing him in a fair fight, Jan and I were the only ones who knew its location. Luke even asked me not to tell him. I also helped train a few new students when Luke was getting the Academy started, but…"
Jaden waited in rapt silence, with nothing but the sound of their footsteps echoing in the ventilation duct.
"But I was tempted, nearly corrupted by the dark side, I'd found a Sith artifact and was possessed by it. One of Luke's students, a girl I'd helped train, she came after me, she brought me back. I was free but the powers of that artifact I'd found, and the dark place I'd sought out…" He took a breath to calm himself, the memories were still somewhat raw, that much Jaden could tell. "She… she died for her efforts; she died to save me.
"After that, I put down my lightsaber for good, swore off the Force, and went back to work with Jan again. If not for her… She really helped me through that time."
"But…" Jaden said quietly. "You're a Jedi now, you train students… How…?"
"How did I return? That's a story for another time, and it looks like we've found the end of this tunnel."
Jaden looked ahead. Kyle was right, the passage they'd been traveling down ended abruptly at the inside of an enormous air tube where gusts of wind traveled up, providing fresh air to the whole facility. She gasped when Kyle suddenly stepped off into the tube and flew upwards.
"Kyle!" She screamed, running to the edge and looking into the dark, windy tube, gripping the side of the wall for support.
"Relax kid!" Echoed Kyle's voice. "I've seen tubes like this before! We can ride them to the top!"
"Oh, Sithspit!" Jaden squeezed her eyes shut and let go of the wall, stepping into blackness and thin air. The current of wind caught her immediately before gravity had the chance to pull her down and she was swept up, tumbling and turning until she got the hang of it. Looking up, she saw the top of the tube and huge fans sucking air towards them. She gulped, not wanting to be cut to ribbons inside those large blades. But she then noticed another passage, this one lit with white light and Kyle was standing on the edge waiting for her!
"C'mon kid, you've got this!" He yelled down and she focused on using the Force to control her flight upwards. Kyle extended his hand and she reached for it, pushing herself forward. Their hands clasped and Kyle pulled her into the safety of the passage.
"Pretty fun, right?" He grinned, raising both eyebrows in delight.
Jaden couldn't see it but knew pieces of her hair had come loose from her braid and were wildly sticking up like crazy. She nodded and started laughing, all the nerves spilling out. Kyle gave her a minute to re-orientate herself.
"It's okay, I did the same the first time I rode something like that." He winked, giving her shoulder a gentle pat.
They continued their journey through the narrow corridor until it opened up into a small room with a dead door on their left, its lights no longer shining, its control pad useless. To their immediate right a bright green laser suddenly blasted through an opening, with its beam's power hitting a containment unit attached to the wall. The two Jedi stopped and stared as the beam stopped, then a few seconds later shot through the short doorway again. Kyle and Jaden looked around for another option out besides the 'doorway of death' as Kyle soon dubbed it.
"I wonder where this leads?" He said looking up to a walkway above their heads, not ten feet up and jumped. Jaden followed and they managed to find a doorway to a ledge that ran in a circle above the strange machine that spat out the green laser. Whenever the laser wasn't firing, they could just make out the conversations of the stormtroopers that guarded the area.
"Boy, I could sure go for a death stick right now."
"Those things'll kill ya, you know."
Jaden looked at Kyle, trying to hold back laughter and whispered, "You sure you made the right decision in quitting Imperial life?"
Kyle cuffed her arm lightly and walked along the walkway towards another access door. They entered another control room filled with Imperials, a cultist standing in their midst.
"How about you take the guy with the lightsaber this time around, I've got the Imps," Kyle muttered to her.
"I take it you have some unfinished business with your former coworkers?" Jaden teased.
Kyle didn't answer but Jaden saw a slight smile form before he hid it and jumped into the fight as well. Two Imperials fell at the end of Kyle's cobalt saber before Jaden's blade ever crossed with the cultist's. The red bladed enemy momentarily took his eyes off of Jaden to watch with morbid fascination as her master proceeded to cut down three more of the Imperials within the blink of an eye. Jaden's eyes followed the cultist's and grinned.
"Gotcha." The cultist looked back at his opponent too late. Jaden's violet blade bashed away his weak attempt at a parry and he was rewarded with a fatal slash across his midsection. Jaden looked away to see Kyle fell four more Imps before the cultist's body thudded to the floor.
Afterwards, they stood panting and took drinks of water from their canteens.
"Well, wasn't that fun?" Kyle said in between gulps of water and deep breaths. He started looking for a way out and found another lift, this one in the open, it's round platform able to fit four people easily. Master and apprentice stepped onto it, praying it wasn't like all the others that'd been shut down. A second later it shot up so suddenly that they both nearly lost their balance.
"Finally…" Kyle said under his breath. "A lift that works."
"What do you think that thing was?"
"What thing?"
"That… machine down there? What does it do?" His apprentice asked.
"If memory serves correctly it provides power to a part of the facility sense it's inside a power column. However, that type of laser belongs to a turbolaser turret, which makes me believe that somewhere above us, at the top of the Castle, is a large turbolaser used for the Castle's defenses."
"Oh," Jaden said, "That might make it hard if we try to fly out of here and they know that we were here."
"Well, one thing at a time."
The lift came out into the open of another control room and some very surprised Imperials. The way the two open doorways on either side of the room and the curve of the walls indicated that they were in a rounded tower of sorts.
"Jaden, take the left way and I'll take the right, clear out the enemy as we go and meet in the middle," Kyle said and was off quick as a flash.
Jaden went through the left way and crept along the crescent shape of the passage, confronting no one until she heard the voices of stormtroopers nearby.
"This place is creepy! Was this really Darth Vader's castle?" One said.
"That's what I heard," replied the other.
"Sure glad I wasn't stationed here when Vader was alive. I heard he liked to use stormtroopers for lightsaber practice."
"I've never even seen a lightsaber."
"Let's hope we never have to."
Jaden chuckled and showed them hers when she stepped out to show herself.
At the end of the corridor she entered through a door that opened into the middle of this round tower they were in. It was a section further up in the power column that housed the machine which went on hundreds of yards below, intermittently spitting out its powerful beam of verdant light. She was so high up she was close to the roof of it where wires and pipes and vents interconnected with each other.
This is it? A dead end? She saw Kyle and ran to meet him.
"We're at a dead end, Kyle!" She lamented. "What are we going to do?"
Kyle looked around. "We're still technically in the underbelly of the Castle, not the Castle itself. Somewhere above us should be the main rooms but, we'd have to have entered a different way." His tone held hints of dejectedness, though he was trying not to show it.
Jaden hung her head. It would take hours to double back and they didn't have much time, the Disciples of Ragnos were probably draining the Force power from this place at that very moment. She looked back up at the ceiling, remembering how they'd made their own way back in the flooded room with the power conduit. Along the wall just below the vaulted ceiling were four panels that seemed to be stabilizing the machine's energy.
"What if we made our own way?" She asked Kyle, he followed her gaze to the panels and grinned.
"Good idea! We can feed the energy back into the machine and overload it!" They split up again and ran along the ledge, using the Force to pull the panels down, forcing the energy to become unstable. They backed up as close to the wall as they could as the machine overloaded, followed by several small explosions, parts of the ceiling began to fall apart all around them. It was all noise and explosions of light, they struggled to stay on the ledge. As some of the debris and rubble fell, a large chunk hit the walkway near where Kyle was standing and it crumbled beneath him. Jaden watched in horror as the floor fell away and Kyle with it, his scream echoing loudly throughout the chamber.
"KYLE!" Jaden's scream mingled with her master's.
She bit her lip to hold back another scream as wet tears poured down her face, her legs screaming to get away from the destruction raining down around her, but her head refusing to look away. There was no time, only adrenaline and unsorted thoughts.
Jaden looked for a way out and saw it, a hole just big enough for her to jump through had opened in the vault of the ceiling just as she had hoped and she leapt for it. She crawled through rumble as she pushed her way past the weakened parts of the roof and higher into a more stable section. She sat inside an undamaged part of a vent and curled her legs up, hugging them with her arms and resting her chin on her knees to keep herself from falling apart as sobs threatened to spill out.
Kyle. Where's Kyle? Where are you Kyle? Are you dead? What do I do? What should I do? What do I tell Luke? What do I tell Jan? Oh Stars what do I do?
Breath came ragged and harsh, she leaned against the wall even as the others seemed to close in on her. She picked a spot, a speck of the wall and focused on that instead of the image of Kyle falling, panic and sheer terror pasted on his face that mirrored her own, the whites of his eyes... Breathing very slowly became normal again as she sorted out her raging storm of thoughts and emotions. She didn't have much options, and trying to go back to look for Kyle was nigh on impossible. She reckoned she could eventually find a way out, but what then? What of their mission?
She decided to make a very hard choice. One that she knew without Kyle's training, without all those Scenarios meant to teach her about failure and persevering, she'd never be able to make it. She hated it as much as she felt she could hate anything, but she did it anyway.
With a heavy resolve, she chose to move on and complete the mission alone.
AUTHOR'S NOTES:
Some of you hardcore fans who know the lore behind Kyle Katarn, his father and overall backstory will know that what I wrote for his backstory in this chapter is very different and my own original interpretation of it. I just wanted to note that my only reason for changing it was because I did intense research on Kyle's origin story only AFTER coming up with my own ideas. I liked what I personally had come up with and didn't want to change it, but made sure to weave in elements of the original story but also make it my own. I know some people may be upset with the amount of creative liberty I took, but this was my story to write and I wanted to find a balance of the source material and my own original ideas.
Also, when Kyle mentions the female student that died trying to save him from the dark side, I did base this part of his story off the Mysteries of the Sith game. HOWEVER, I am in no way implying that that student is Mara Jade. I know a lot of people love her character and may wish to see her in this story. I'm deeply sorry, but because she does not appear in the Jedi Academy game AND because I personally do not know that character enough to depict her as accurately as I would like, I did not add her to this story. Again, I'm sorry for that disappointment.
Thank you for your understanding and for giving my story a chance.