A/N: And here we are with the final battle - but not necessarily the final conflict :)
Read, review, and above all, enjoy!
Dislclaimer: wurgh.
Within seconds of the first roar from the edge of the compound, Hulas was on his feet and galloping out of his office at a pace that outstripped even his fellow guards, pausing only to hurriedly snatch up a sniper rifle from beside the door as he did so.
He could already tell that this wasn't a Tusken attack, not with those sounds: he couldn't hear the distinctive braying cries of the Sand People, and certainly not over the buzzing roar of lightsabres. No, this could only be Revan. Gods only knew how she'd gotten here so quickly, but frankly, that didn't matter: what mattered was ending this threat immediately by any means necessary, ideally in the most painful fashion possible.
Catapulting himself through the airlock door with his operatives pouring out behind him, he staggered out into the blazing heat of Tatooine's twin suns, wishing he'd had the change to swap his fine robes for something a little less insulated, and scanned the area through his visor. All around him, seven of the operatives were scattering across the dunes, trying to get a fix on the attackers, pelting the surrounding sands with blaster fire. The eighth operative, his unofficial bodyguard, was dutifully watching his back, keeping an eye on his corners for any sign that the intruders might be sneaking up on him from his blind spots… not that Hulas needed him.
No doubt the intruders thought they were being stealthy, but they hadn't counted on the traps he'd arranged, or the fact that he was armed with a GenoHaradan visor of his own. He could see them all scattered across the dunes, all of them struggling with his defenders in one form or another: Mission Vao was pinned down by gunfire from the sentry turrets and struggling to get her grenades in order, HK-47 was exchanging blaster fire with the troops and barely protected by a rapidly faltering deflector shield, and Revan and Juhani were locked in battle with Subject Alpha and Subject 3 behind the nearest dune.
But they still weren't in his sights. They were still just out of his reach, either hidden behind obstacles or by the bulkheads of his own damn shop, and that wouldn't do; he couldn't just let his operative or his shapeshifters handle this. Ne needed to make sure they were dead by his own hand this time around: he needed to kill them, otherwise he'd never be satisfied that they wouldn't return from the grave again… and worse still, he'd never be able to get their smug, self-righteous, superior attitudes out of his head. He needed to do this himself, to free himself – as he had from every other hateful bastard in the galaxy that had ever made the mistake of making him feel small.
Letting out a low growl of frustration, he dropped into a crouch, shouldered his rifle, took careful aim, and opened fire. A metre from Mission Vao's head, the sand turned to glass, instantly vitrified by the sheer power of the shot, the force of the bolt shattering the glass to shrapnel and spraying it in all directions. Mission cried out as the glass tore into her undefended Lekku, but Hulas could already see that it hadn't done anything other than superficial damage.
He fired again, trying to herd Mission out from cover, but the Twi'lek brat just lobbed a flash grenade over the dune with infuriating accuracy, landing it just close enough to catch Hulas in the blast. Not only did the flash almost blind him through his visor, but the explosion kicked up a huge cloud of sand, spraying it headlong into his face. Dazzled, struggling to wipe the grit from the visor, and spitting sand, Hulas instinctively flung himself to the ground, getting even more sand in his face in the process, and by the time he was able to see clearly again, Mission had moved out of range.
Snarling expletives in both Rodian and Durese, Hulas frantically looked around for another target, and as if the indifferent heavens had finally favoured him, HK-47 appeared in his scope, marching along the higher dunes as he hammered the defenders with blasts from his own sniper rifle. Grinning, Hulas waited until he was certain that the assassin droid's shield was almost out of power, took careful aim at the oblong-shaped head, and fired.
The bolt sizzled straight and true through the air like a lightning bolt, soaring high above the battlefield, and struck 47's head with a hiss of smoke and a loud, resonant, metallic ping. There was a pause, as the assassin droid rocked back and forth on the spot, briefly shaken by the impact, but it wasn't until the smoke and the flash had begun to dissipate that Hulas belatedly realized that the bolt had barely dented 47's armour plating.
Then, in the terrible silence that followed, 47 turned to face Hulas, eyes still glowing hellish red through the fading smoke.
Hulas had just enough time to grab his bodyguard by the collar and yank him in front of him before 47 returned fire, tearing clean through his shield, burrowing into the bodyguard's armour, and punching a hole the size of a Gamorrean's fist in his chest. Only the armour on the opposite side of the dead bodyguard's torso kept Hulas from being killed as well, and even then, the force of the blast was enough to send him crashing to the ground with a corpse sprawling across him.
Crawling out from under the body with great difficulty, Hulas scrambled back into the airlock with blaster bolts nipping at his heels and dived behind cover. Fortunately, 47 was quickly distracted by another gaggle of operatives shooting at him, and Hulas was at least spared another humiliating scurry for safety, but that was all: he could already hear the defending operatives being gunned down with pure mechanical efficiency, feel the explosions as Mission went about disabling the turrets one at a time. The targets had been underestimated, and now he was losing the advantage.
And then, over the side of the other dune, Revan's undefended head appeared, her eyes focussed entirely on Subject 3. Suddenly, Hulas' mind was aflame with visions of the mighty Darth Revan finally being slain not by Malak, a bomb, or even the shapeshifters, but by a simple sniper shot to the head. Almost giggling with repressed excitement, he shouldered the rifle, took aim, and fired.
Once again, the bolt soared straight and true… but all it hit was the blade of Juhani's lightsabre. Suddenly, Hulas was no longer looking at undefended targets, but into the slit-pupiled glare of a furious Cathar.
Then, without warning, Revan turned away from the duel, having been locked in combat with both Subject 3 and Subject Alpha for the few seconds that Juhani had been occupied, and without showing so much as a flicker of alarm, waved a hand in Hulas' direction. A split-second later, the rifle tore itself out of his hand and snapped clean-in half, scattering its pieces across the surrounding dunes.
Suddenly unarmed, Hulas flung himself behind cover again and all but screamed into his commlink, "I want all crew out there supporting the defences right now!"
"But you said you wanted us to guard Dorsk-"
"I don't care what I said! Just do as I say, godsdammit! Senni, get out there too!"
There was silence, broken only by the muffled footsteps of the pilot, copilot, and gunner hurrying out of the airlock with guns at the ready. Of his assistant, there was no sign.
"Senni?"
No response.
"You'd better not be thinking of deserting, Senni. We're in this together: we've been in this ever since you agreed to go behind the backs of the other Overseers on my behalf. You can't leave now! You just can't! Not when we're so close to victory!"
Still nothing. However, the pilot had left his commlink on in all the excitement, so this time the silence was broken by the sound of Mission jumping out from behind a dune and stabbing the unlucky crewmember in the stomach.
At this, Hulas let out a scream of rage. "Fine!" he shrieked. "Just fine!"
Pausing only to slam the airlock door shut behind him and seal it shut, he flung himself up the stairs to the command deck, clambered up the ladder into the upper gun turret, and began scanning the surrounding desert for any sign of viable targets, with little success: Revan and Juhani were moving too quickly for him to get a lock on, Mission had ducked into the shelter of the ship's bow, and 47 was nowhere to be seen, so he was presumably following Mission's lead.
In desperation, Hulas aimed the turret in the direction of the two Jedi and opened fire, spraying the dunes with a hail of heavy blaster fire. All around the ship, sand glowed white-hot, instantly fused into glass, shattering, crumbling into sand all over again, but not a single solitary bolt hit anything living.
Hissing expletives, Hulas switched over to remote control and fired a single proton torpedo from the aft launcher, hoping that this would be enough to kill the four intruders. There was a mighty roar from below him as the torpedo shot free of the ship, followed by a deafening boom as it buried itself in the ground less than a metre from its launcher, and Hulas barely had enough time to shade his eyes from the flash before the entire turret canopy went white.
And then the shockwave hit, rocking the entire ship to its improvised foundations and sending Hulas flying out of his chair; had he fallen a few centimetres further, he would have gone plunging headlong down the access shaft, but managed to latch on to the uppermost rung at the last second.
It took a moment or so, but he was able to haul himself back to his seat just long enough to realize that the torpedo had ended up doing more damage to the ship than anyone outside it: partially buried in sand as it was, the Equus Albus' torpedo tubes had been two metres below ground level when he'd fired, and the explosion had torn a gaping wound the ship's hull… and according to damage reports, the hole was more than big enough for people to easily climb through. And in a final insult, the explosion had kicked up a massive cloud of dust, and it was now impossible to see anything through the turret canopy, so he wouldn't have been able to see enough to defend the ship.
Somewhere far below him, a bratty female voice shrilled, "47, follow me! It's easy street from here!"
And at long last, Hulas lost his temper and – almost without even noticing it – began to scream.
He reached for the remote access controls by his side and began furiously thumping buttons, doing his best to activate every single internal defence system between him and the intruders. Along the way, he must have hit the activation button for the ship's public address system, for as he ranted and raved, he heard his own voice echoing out through the ruptured hull and across the desert.
"Parasites!" he howled. "All of you! Parasites! You couldn't just let me have what I'd earned, could you? You just couldn't accept that I'd won fair and square! You're all the same, you people: all of you, getting everything you wanted through unearned privilege and stealing what should have belonged to me! I made a success of myself through sheer will, and at every turn, I'm undermined by shiftless beggars demanding money they didn't earn, born-to-rule scum barring their doors to me, slimy Selkath parvenus cheating their way to power through the charity of weak-minded fools, and worst of all, the so-called talented! The GenoHaradan, the Jedi, the Sith, you're all the kriffing same! You think you're better than me! Parasites! You think you've got more right to victory than me?! You think just because you fell into this world with a genetic advantage that let you cheat your way to a passing grade, you've the right to take from a hardworking business professional? WELL, YOU DON'T! I won this! I did this by myself, without natural talent, without help, without handouts, without a privileged background – and all you do is want to steal it from me! Thieves, all of you! Thieves! THIEVES!"
As the dust cleared, Hulas caught a brief glimpse of something human-shaped leaping out from behind the dune, soaring through the air to land atop the turret canopy, exactly one metre above him.
"I seem to recall doing most of the work for you, Hulas," said Revan, grinning wickedly.
Hulas let out an inarticulate shriek of rage. "SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP, YOU BITCH!" he screamed, pummelling the controls in a rage, but by the time he'd gotten around to actually hitting the fire button, Revan had already gone.
And though she hadn't been close enough to attack him directly, she'd been close enough to attack the gun: in the moment or so she'd been perched atop the turret, her lightsabre had sliced clean through the gun's stabilizers, leaving him hitting even less than before.
But still, Hulas went on firing, showering the dunes with blaster fire, trying with all his might to prove that he had the will to carry on where more privileged beings would give up, trying to hit something, anything
A moment later, something on the horizon let out a yowl of pain and crushed to the dirt in a writhing heap as Hulas' salvo hit home at long last, the body erupting into flame as the next two or three salvos hammered it into the sand.
It wasn't until he heard Revan laughing that Hulas realized – with a thrill of embarrassment – that he'd just killed Subject 3.
Now it was two against one: the final shapeshifter was strong, quick, and cunning, but it was still barely a novice compared to Rulan Prolik.
For a full minute, Tarrah and Juhani darted back and forth across the dunes, leading the shapeshifter on a merry dance as it struggled to divide its increasingly fractured attention between its two primary targets. It would lash out with a tentacle studded with cortosis-weave spikes, and Tarrah would block it while Juhani darted in for a surprise attack; the shapeshifter would weave away as a liquid blob of flesh and counterattack with a three-metre-wide set of fanged jaws, only for Juhani to backflip away while Tarrah countered with a disembowelling strike to the shapeshifter's underbelly. The shapeshifter would scream and shift into the form of an armour-plated arachnid, threshing the air with its bladed pedipalps as it zeroed in on Tarrah, only for Juhani to leap down from above and bury her lightsabre in the shapeshifter's undefended back. The arachnid's back erupted into a mass of spines that tried to impale Juhani, but by the time they emerged, Juhani was gone and Tarrah was jabbing her lightsabre into the shapeshifter's eyes.
On and on it went, with every blow being countered and every counterattack being countered; the two Jedi were too quick and too savvy to be hit, and the shapeshifter was too resilient and too regenerative to be easily killed… but it was clear that the shapeshifter couldn't easily cope with dividing its attention in two separate directions, for it had been intended to serve as an assassin, not a duellist. Tackling two targets at once simply hadn't been on the agenda.
And so, when Tarrah finally realized the winning strategy that she'd been hiding up her sleeve all along, the shapeshifter had no defence against it. After all, now that they were out of plasma grenades and Hulas wasn't stupid enough to accidentally gun down one of his own men a second time, killing the shapeshifter wasn't an easy matter anymore… but then again, it wasn't as if they had to kill the shapeshifter. All they needed was to keep it out of commission long enough to finish the job.
In the end, it was Juhani who hit upon the winning method.
As the shapeshifter rounded on Juhani in a wild jumble of Gamorrean fists, Quarren tentacles, bladed limbs, and half-formed weaponry, the Cathar stumbled backwards, almost dropped her lightsabre, and in that moment of vulnerability that might have meant her death, waved a hand in a subtle gesture and said, "Wait!"
And just like that, the shapeshifter stopped dead in its tracks and stood in obedient silence, not daring to move a muscle.
For a moment, there was silence, as Tarrah realized what had just happened.
Of course the shapeshifter was susceptible to the Jedi mind trick! The poor creatures had suffered cataclysmic brain damage over the course of their conversion, so they'd have been weak-minded even before Hulas had started training them like attack animals. On the one hand, this would make it even easier for the Sith to control the assassins that they'd already received, but on the other, Tarrah was just embarrassed that it had taken them this long to realize such an obvious weakness.
But as the shapeshifter remained paralysed, clearly struggling to overcome the compulsion, Tarrah summoned up all her strength, focussing every last atom of her power in the Force into a single kinetic blast, and hit the target in the side with everything she had at once.
The sheer exertion of firing the blast sent Tarrah flopping backwards to the ground, all her power temporarily depleted, her vision blurring, her ears popping as the world spun and lurched around her… but on the receiving end of the blast, the shapeshifter went flying.
It was as if it had been hit by the wrecking ball on a demolition droid: all eighteen of its current limbs left the ground, its body lurched upwards into the air, twenty separate jaws opened across its mass to scream in panic, and then momentum did the rest, catapulting the bewildering entity skywards. For almost five hundred metres, it soared across the Dune Sea; Tarrah had no idea how high it went, but she knew it couldn't have been any less than two hundred metres before the shapeshifter finally reached the apex of its flight and began plummeting downwards. Less than five seconds later, the shapeshifter hit the dunes with a muffled thud and vanished in a cloud of dust.
Then, as soon as they were sure it was out of reach, Tarrah and Juhani took a deep breath, turned towards the all-too-flimsy door to the Equus Albus, and broke into a run.
There was a bloodcurdling shriek from the gun turret, and then Hulas tried one last time to spray the surrounding area with laser fire, but this time, Tarrah sensed it coming and beat him to the punch.
Less than five metres from the airlock, she threw her lightsabre at the turret, sending it shearing through the air like a bladed discus, slicing the main gun clean in half and slicing through the transparisteel canopy behind it before boomeranging right back into Tarrah's hand – but not before a distinctive scream of pain rang out across desert.
Judging by the amplified yelps and whimpers from inside, Hulas wasn't dead yet, but with his main weapon out of commission, no easy access to a backup weapon, his ship being invaded from two different angles, and a likely serious injury slowing him down, he wasn't going to be a problem for much longer.
For the next few seconds, all Hulas could do was swear.
The impact had sent him tumbling out of his chair, and this time, he really had gone crashing down the ladder, and now he was lying in a heap at the bottom of the access shaft. He'd landed heavily on his left leg, and though he couldn't feel any broken bones, his knee was a bloodied, crumpled mess from a head-on impact with the deck, and blood was now dripping into his eyes from a jagged cut along the length of his forehead. But all that was nothing compared to the lightsabre wound on his belly: Revan's blade had barely nicked him, but he could tell from the howling pain in his midriff that it had definitely been close enough to hit something vital – either his stomach or his intestines, either way fatal. If he couldn't get to a dose of kolto in time, he was going to die.
But by now it scarcely mattered. The airlock door was heavily armoured and there were still a few portable gun turrets inside both access passageways, but there was only so much that they'd be able to do against intruders armed with lightsabres and ion grenades. Mission Vao and HK-47 were already inside the ship, and though they were still bogged down with the ship's internal defences, Revan and Juhani would be joining them in a matter of seconds… and after that, it would all be over.
Unless…
He had one last option left available to him – exactly one. But it would be one that nobody expected: not the worm-headed street-rat with ideas above her station, not the Cathar whore who thought herself above slavery, not the overdesigned assassin droid who didn't have the decency to be a mass-produced model, not even Darth Revan herself. Nobody.
Groaning, Hulas got to his feet and began limping down the access passage, making his way down the passageway that led back to his corridors, the wound on his stomach practically singing in pain with every hobbling step he took.
It seemed to take forever, and for every second of the journey, the sound of blaster fire and flashing lightsabres seemed to be getting closer and closer… but then he heard Senni's nasally whimper and Dorsk's mumbling drone issuing from the makeshift lab in beseeching tones and Hulas knew at once that the intruders had been delayed by the two idiots offering their unconditional surrender. Well, it didn't matter what the traitor and the coward did with their time. In a minute, Hulas would have power beyond any assistant, scientist, or shapeshifter, and as long as those two idiots were still talking, Revan wasn't stopping him from seizing his rightful destiny.
Moments later, Hulas staggered to a halt just outside his quarters, frantically slamming the door shut behind him and all but sealing it shut. At last, he was alone with his prize, alone with his one opportunity to turn the tables on everyone.
The box lay ahead of him, just waiting to be opened, just waiting to unleash the power that had left Darth Revan herself too afraid to touch it again.
Chuckling maniacally to himself despite the pain, he began keying in the buttons that would open the box, carefully following the instructions that his underground contacts had provided for him, hands trembling as he began the sequence that would open the doors to ultimate power to him.
"I'll show you," he muttered feverishly, as he fumbled with the lock. "I'll show you all. And then you'll be sorry."
A moment or so later the box unfolded, its polygonal frame opening like the petals of a flower.
Then blinding light was all Hulas knew.
"Don't shoot! We surrender!"
Tarrah looked blankly at the two figures cowering before her. The first was undoubtedly one of the scientists that Hulas had recruited from Khomm, a largely nondescript humanoid with a lumpy forehead and green-tinged skin. The second, however, she recognized immediately: it was the Twi'lek messenger who'd given her the invitation to her first meeting with Hulas on Manaan, easily distinguished as he was by the green skin, tired eyes, and the distinctive hangdog face.
"Senni, I take it?" she asked.
"Yes, yes, that's right. Senni Sarvoka, executive assistant, at your service. Look, you don't have to kill us: we're not resisting, we don't have anything against you, and we've got no reason to fulfil the Overseer's orders. Please, just let us go and we'll never bother you again."
"Statement: I recommend shooting the meatbag on general principle, master."
"Oh, hush," said Tarrah.
She thought for a moment, and then pointed at the cowering scientist. "You're the last of the scientists Hulas recruited from the project, right?"
"A-as far as I know, yes," stammered the Khommite. "I was the only one aboard an escape vessel, so I'm probably the only one of the team left alive." As if remembering his manners, he added, "Uh, I'm Dorsk Detrennis, son of Dorsk Detrennis the Elder, grandson of Dorsk D-"
"Nevermind that. Now, do you have any more shapeshifter genetic material?"
"Er, yes. Just over there, on the workbench, along with our stockpile of conversion injectors-"
Without missing a beat, Tarrah waved a hand and sent a bolt of electronics-savaging energy blasting through the workbench, setting fire the equipment, shattering test tubes, and reducing priceless computer databases to molten slag.
"Anything else?"
"No, ma'am."
"Has Hulas taken any samples with him?"
"None at all."
"Do you have any samples with you? Don't lie to me, please: I'll know it."
Dorsk hesitated, and then reached into a pocket of his labcoat, holding out a tiny silver injector gun loaded with a vial of deep orange serum, the needle capped to avoid accidental injections.
"This is the last dose of our breakthrough," he admitted. "It's not just genetic material: it's a special serum for simplified conversion of a subject. I can confirm that it works, but there's only a 50% survival rate, and brain damage remains consistent enough to debilitate memory and cognitive function beyond all trace of an original identity. I suppose a competent geneticist could replicate it given time, but if you want to destroy it… I suppose that would mean the end of the project."
Tarrah took the injector gun from him, silently turning it over in her hands. This was it: this was what she'd been waiting for ever since she'd learned of the project's existence, ever since she'd learned that the Sith would benefit from her careless trust. Her course of action was very clear. She should crush the injector to pulp with the Force right now and be done with it, preferably before Dorsk could change his mind about handing it over.
And yet…
Slowly, as if on puppet strings, Tarrah found herself tucking the still-intact injector gun into a pouch on her utility belt.
"What the hell are you doing?" hissed Mission.
"Acting on instinct."
"I thought we were planning on destroying this stuff!"
"And we might well be doing exactly that. I'm taking my cues from the Force at this point, Mission: I don't know what I'm going to do with this thing, but I get the strangest feeling that I might need it at some point."
Dorsk coughed. "Er… I hate to interrupt, but can I go now?"
Tarrah considered this for a moment. "Does this ship have landspeeders or swoop bikes aboard?"
"Yes. Uh, we have a dock two decks down with at least three swoops."
"Alright then: on your way."
There was a pause, as Dorsk looked from Senni to Tarrah in bewilderment. "You're actually letting me go?" he said incredulously. "No strings attached? No conditions? No negotiation?"
"Well, I can tell that the injector you just gave me was the last viable cloning tool from the project, and without samples of Rulan's DNA, you wouldn't be able to replicate the project no matter how hard you tried. In the end, all you've figured out are new ways of cloning by conversion, and that's about it. Frankly, you'll be leaving under all the conditions I could ask for. So, the most I can ask for you is to take the first ship to Khomm, have another generation of children named after yourself, and never get involved with shady offworld science projects ever again. Stick to ordinary cloning projects from now on. Is that clear?"
"Yes, yes, gracious lady, perfectly clear."
"Good. Now, on your way."
Dorsk bowed low and immediately scurried out of sight as quickly as possible, never to be seen or heard from again – or rather, not to be heard from until a few minutes later, as Tarrah caught the sound of a repulsorlift engine starting up a few decks below as Dorsk soared off into the Dune Sea, bound for Anchorhead.
"Now," said Tarrah, rounding on Senni. "Where's Hulas?"
"Shouldn't you have asked me that sooner?"
"No, not really. I can tell from the blood trail he's left through the ship that he's badly wounded and probably won't be going anywhere in a hurry; he didn't take any DNA samples, so I don't need to worry about him starting another project even if he does get away; and I haven't seen or heard any sign that he's fled via the garage, so he hasn't tried to get away at all. I can clearly sense that he's somewhere aboard this ship. So, if you wouldn't mind not wasting another minute of my time, would you please take us to him?"
Senni hesitated.
"Maybe I should rephrase that," Tarrah sighed. "If you'd like to make a good start on becoming the first of a new generation of GenoHaradan Overseer, then maybe it'd be a good idea to show me to wherever your predecessor ended up."
"…what."
"You heard me! The position's open, Senni: nobody's stopping you from claiming Hulas' position except maybe Hulas himself, and he's probably dying even as we speak. But if you want to be the guy who'll rebuild the GenoHaradan and restore it to glory after all the damage Hulas did, you'll need his resources – most prominently, his access key, his commlink, and his datapad… and the only way you'll get those is by helping us track him down. So, how about it… Overseer?"
Hulas looked around in confusion.
He was no longer standing in his private quarters aboard his flagship, but standing in a vast open space, surrounded by seemingly nothing but dazzling white light. At first, he thought that this had to be some kind of optical illusion, that the walls and floor and ceiling had all been painted stark white, and illuminated so severely that they appeared invisible to certain visual spectrums. But as his eyes adjusted to the dazzling radiance of the place, he realized that this was no illusion and there was nothing around him to paint: no walls, no floor, no ceiling, just light.
Perhaps twenty metres ahead of him, a crude-looking enclosure had been erected, and between two rune-studded stone pillars and two engraved stone obelisks, a tiny metal-framed bed sat suspended above the infinite white void. And standing by the bed was…
For the first time in over a decade, Hulas found himself looking at an alien species he didn't recognize. A biped of amphibian or perhaps piscine ancestry, the figure standing before him sported a great domed head, two sideways-stretching stalk eyes, a wide froglike mouth, and a mottled grey-and-black skin tone. However, the moment it saw Hulas, it immediately eyed him with undisguised interest.
"Um… hello?" Hulas asked. "Where am I?"
"You're inside the Box," said the alien, in an unrecognizable language. "You opened it, and now you're trapped here with me. Now, I hope you don't mind me being a tad on the brusque side, but after coming so close to an escape with my last visitor, my patience is starting to run thin. You don't mind that too much, I hope?"
Hulas hesitated, trying to make sense of a single word that the alien had said, without success. It was difficult to concentrate, for there was something oddly familiar about the carvings on the pillars and obelisks around him. Forcing himself to focus, he repeated his query, first in Durese, and then in Basic.
The alien sighed deeply. "It seems I'm not as lucky as I thought. I'd hoped the next visitor might be as fluent as the last, but you clearly don't understand a word of what I'm saying. And without your consent, my escape method is worthless. I have a feeling I'm about to witness history repeat itself."
An idea struck Hulas, and he asked, "Are you some kind of guardian? Something conjured up by the Box, perhaps? Is that the true treasure of the box, then – alien power and knowledge that only you can share?"
"Dear me, another idiot. Power? Knowledge? That was what you wanted by opening the Box? Well, technically, I possess both, but none of them can do either of us any good if you can't understand a word I'm saying."
"I was seeking that knowledge!" Hulas continued. "I need that power to take back what was stolen from me, to achieve victory over the undeserving! I've spent my entire life being looked down on for wanting more than what the universe gave me, and I know that I deserve whatever you have to offer, more than that thieving bitch Revan no doubt tried to steal from you. You've probably been waiting for centuries for the right individual to bestow your knowledge upon, and everyone's disappointed you: too lazy, too vain, too covetous, too bloodthirsty, too voracious, too carnal, but not me! I and I alone have the drive to succeed in the face of their injustices! I deserve it more than any of those overprivileged-"
"Yes, yes, yes," said the alien. "I get the picture. You're clearly a wannabe usurper; as a failed revolutionary, I sympathize, but frankly I have better things to do than to bother with your monolingual nonsense. Admittedly, those things amount largely to practicing riddles, sleeping, and masturbating, as that's all there is to do for fun around here, but any of them would be better than acknowledging your presence. So, if you don't mind, I'm just going to sit here and wait until you lose your temper and run off into the void like all the other idiots. I'm sure you'll have a great time losing your mind out there, but that's really none of my business, so I suppose all I can do is just bid you goodbye. Now fuck off."
And then, for reasons that utterly escaped Hulas, the alien sat down on the bed, turned to face the nearest pillar, and gave every impression that it was ignoring him.
"What are you doing?" Hulas demanded. "I… no, we have business. I deserve the knowledge and power you have to offer. I might not understand you, but I know how important this is. Please. I'm destined to do great things. This is supposed to be the starting point for an empire, built of all the things less-deserving people tried to take from me. Don't you understand? I earned this. I earned this. I earned this. I earned this. I earned this. I earned this. I earned this I earned this."
But the alien refused to acknowledge him.
All the same, Hulas went on begging, pleading, always returning to the refrain of "I earned this." As the hours went by and the endless light began to weigh on him, he tried harder, going so far as to shout the words of his refrain into the alien's face. And when that didn't work, he flailed wildly at the alien's undefended body with his fists but didn't seem capable of inflicting the slightest bit of harm: his fists just passed clean through the alien's flesh without leaving a mark.
In the end, Hulas' composure gave out long before the alien's, and he stormed off into the dazzling void beyond the boundaries of the alien's bedchamber, vowing to return once he'd figured out a way of forcing the smug, self-important bastard to surrender what he didn't deserve to keep. For almost an hour, he walked headlong into the whiteness, half-expecting to eventually run into a wall but finding nothing even after he broke into a run and went jogging onwards for another sixty minutes. Eventually, he ran out of breath and turned around, hoping to see the alien hurrying after him with an apology…
…only to see nothing but endless white void as far as the eye could see.
Puzzled, he tried to retrace his steps to the alien's bedchamber, but no matter how far he walked, the familiar enclosure refused to creep back into view.
All he found was another vast expanse of white.
Suddenly very nervous, he picked another direction and ran that way, praying to a deity he didn't really believe in that he'd find a path back to the alien, but in the end, all he found was more void.
In a panic, he began to shout, trying to get the alien's attention in the dim and desperate hope that it would find him and rescue him. But after another hour of aimless running and terrified screaming, no sign of the alien could be seen, and certainly no way of escaping the void.
It wasn't until much, much later, when he finally collapsed to a heap somewhere in the infinite blazing daytime and curled himself into a weeping, foetal ball, that he finally remembered what was so familiar about the carvings on the pillars and obelisks surround the alien's bed: they were identical to the carvings on the side of the Box. This wasn't just a vision brought about by the device, but the very device he'd wanted to discover.
He'd wanted into the Box.
Now, here he was.
At long last, Hulas had found something that was his to keep. He'd taken it back from the undeserving, gotten revenge on them for lording their superiority over him, made sure that they'd never be able to take it away from him, and now he'd unlocked its true power – over him – and guaranteed that it would be his, forever.
He'd earned it.
Hours later, Subject Alpha was finally able to claw its way out of the crater it had left in the sand, and once the Jedi mind trick had worn off, it clumsily made its way back to base.
After wading through the bodies of the slaughtered crew and searching the wreckage of the ship, it eventually located its master. True, he was lying in the middle of his quarters, unmoving and responsive, but that didn't matter to the shapeshifter. All that mattered was that it knew where it would be receiving orders from.
The fact that he wasn't giving any orders was incidental. The orders would arrive in time. It had been trained to follow orders and protect its master, so that was what it would do.
It briefly noted that someone had pillaged Hulas' quarters in its absence. For one thing, the Box that its master had obsessed over was long-gone, as was the datapad he'd been using for "financial resources," and the passcard to Hulas' personal speeder. Even the Overseer's access keys had been stolen. But that didn't matter. It wasn't Subject Alpha's job to go chasing after things without being told unless it directly endangered Hulas. If Hulas wanted it to chase down the thieves, it would do so when he said so and not before.
The fact that Hulas was lying on the floor in a pool of blood, not moving or even breathing, was incidental. It wasn't Subject Alpha's place to question what the master did in his spare time. Its place was simply to obey. If Hulas didn't feel like ordering it to do something right now, it would wait until he felt like it: it had been conditioned to protect him and to obey his commands, so that was what it would do.
Time passed.
Hours went by, then days, and still Hulas did not move. As the generator failed for lack of maintenance and the air conditioning faltered, Hulas' skin turned dry and papery in the oppressively arid heat of Tatooine, his eyes shrivelling up and dissolving into cavernous hollows, his mouth gaping open wider and wider, his body growing thinner and thinner beneath his increasingly filthy clothing as his body gradually mummified.
But still, Subject Alpha waited, breaking its vigil only when hunger drove it to hurry outside and kill the first thing with enough meat on its bones to sustain itself – sometimes a wraid, sometimes a Jawa, sometimes a Tusken Raider. But no matter what the shapeshifter ate, it always returned to Hulas' side.
If Hulas was getting thinner and less recognizable over the passing weeks, that was his business. It wasn't Subject Alpha's place to question him. Its duty was to follow his orders and to keep him safe, even if it was only from the desert rodents and insects that routinely scuttled into the ship and tried to gnaw upon the master's undefended flesh. Still, Subject Alpha couldn't complain. At least the rodents gave it something more convenient to eat.
Occasionally, a Jawa clan or a Tusken tribe would try to scavenge the wreckage, and though they were successful in making off with parts of the engine, a few salvageable weapons, and even the occasional chunk of the hull, they rarely got as far as Hulas' cabin. Those who did would be eaten unless they fled before Subject Alpha could finish taking bites out of their slower comrades. One way or another, as weeks turned into months, the natives soon learned to avoid the GenoHaradan ship.
Every so often, a Czerka salvage squad tried to reclaim the Equus Albus, but Subject Alpha was quick to dissuade them and eat as many as possible before they fled. In time, Czerka learned to avoid the wreckage as well, and even the hunters and criminals that had followed them to the planet followed their lead.
And still, Hulas gave no orders, no matter how patiently Subject Alpha waited and how obediently it kept him safe.
Time passed. Bit by bit, the roof of the ship collapsed, and the upper decks gave way under the accumulating weight of the sand and the passing years, gradually exposing Hulas to the open air, but still, Subject Alpha did its best to protect him, sheltering his body from the elements and from predators with every shape in its repertoire.
A decade or so went by, and it soon became clear that the ship could no longer protect them, for there was nothing left of it apart from the desiccated husks of bulkheads and deckplates gradually sinking beneath the sands. Eventually, Hulas came apart as well, his mummified skin cracking open at the first touch of a sandstorm, his bones suddenly finding themselves exposed to open air.
In the end, with the animals of Tatooine growing more ravenous with every day, there was only one thing that Subject Alpha could do to defend its master, and so, it took Hulas into its own body, scooping his sun-bleached bones into its gaping maw and consuming them whole. It didn't matter that Hulas was now nothing more than a skeleton that was rapidly being digested in Subject Alpha's stomach; he still existed as nutrients and proteins and so many other elements that lingered on in its body. And if he still existed, he could still give orders.
By then, the Equus Albus was gone and had been nothing more than a few rusted shards of metal buried in the dunes for years on end. Any trace of the Overseer's base had long since been erased by more than a decade's worth of scavenging and sandstorms, but Subject Alpha would still need to maintain its post until Hulas finally gave an order. And for that to work, it would need to be fed… and yet it would also need to maintain its watch without straying too far from its post.
And for that, Subject Alpha would need to change in a most drastic way.
During its time on Kosytus Station, it had been taught an incredible variety of forms, many of which it would never need to take, and some of which it had been taught entirely as a joke. But it remembered them nonetheless, and in the years that had passed since Hulas had ceased to move, Subject Alpha's powers had grown enough for it to achieve the one form that might allow it to maintain its vigil.
Swelling mightily with all the biomass it could possibly conjure, Subject Alpha changed one final time, never to assume a different form ever again, and took root in the sand. Burrowing deeper and deeper and deeper until only its mouth protruded from the ground in an ant-lion-like pit, it shaped its jaws into a tentacle-shrouded teeth-lined mouth leading to the vastest and slowest-digesting stomach on the planet, the better to preserve its meals for as long as possible.
And as time went on, people gradually began to tumble into it, either by mistake or by the design of others, and Subject Alpha was sustained – not only by their flesh, but by the minds that it slowly digested, the newly-redesigned digestive tract assimilating the neural impulses of its prey just as surely as their flesh. From these impulses, it gained their memories, their thoughts, their personalities, and though it couldn't understand them, their whispering minds gave it hope: if they could live on for so many years after they had been digested, so could its master. One day, Hulas would speak to it as well.
As long as its abyssal maw protruded just above the sand and its hungry belly sat patiently beneath it, there would always be more victims ready to be digested, just as there would be another year to wait for Hulas to give it new orders. Another year, another decade, another generation, another century, another millennium, it didn't matter. One day, Hulas would give it an order.
In the meantime, Subject Alpha would be the monument that Hulas had always wanted, a landmark in the sands of Tatooine that would last until time came to an end.
Eventually, the Jawas – having seen the true nature of the monster that haunted the Dune Sea over the course of the decades – gave both Subject Alpha and the place where it waited a name of their own, befitting the monument to fear and hunger that Subject Alpha had become. In time, the foreign visitors to Tatooine adopted the name in reverence and dread, but few would ever learn what that name meant or how it could possibly have come about.
After all, nobody knew enough of the Jawa tongue to know that "Carkoon" meant "Faceless One."
A/N: I know, I know, it's ludicrous, but I just couldn't resist giving the Sarlacc a backstory.
Also, because I was such a fan of the Mind Prison, I just couldn't help giving it a bigger role in the story, so it seemed appropriate to mix the two subplots together for the finale.
Meanwhile, up next:
AN EPILOGUE OF LORD OF THE RINGS PROPORTIONS!
