Crosscurrent

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The stink hit him first, the reek of old decay. Computer stations lined the walls of the large, rectangular chamber. Blank readout screens dotted the walls here and there. Loose wires hung from everywhere, the entrails of science.

A hole opened in the center of the room, a perfect circle several meters in diameter, like the gullet of some gargantuan beast. Machinery hung from armatures above the hole. Jaden recognized the apparatus immediately-a Spaarti cloning cylinder.

"You have come to pay homage to Mother," said a voice, a dry, rough version of Kam Solusar's voice.

A figure stepped from the darkness on the far side of the chamber. Shaggy white hair-the color of Master Solusar's-hung loose almost to the clone's waist. Most of his features, too, reminded Jaden of Kam-the high forehead, angled cheeks-but not the eyes. The clone's eyes were as dark and lifeless as pools of stagnant water.

"Kam Solusar," Jaden said, the words slipping free before he could stop them.

The clone sneered, and in that expression lost any resemblance to Master Solusar, who so often wore a smile.

"I do not know that name," the clone said. "I am Alpha."

Alpha wore mismatched attire: clothing salvaged from the facility, bits of stormtrooper armor on both shoulders, the forearms, and the hands, and a rough, handmade cloak fashioned from the hide of some creature that must have lived under the ice in the moon's seas. In the clone's movements, Jaden caught the suggestion of an imposing physicality, controlled savagery. He looked larger than Kam, more there.

Jaden cleared his throat, stepped forward. He lowered his lightsaber but did not deactivate it. "I have come here to… help you."

The clone held his sneer. "We require no help from you. Only the ship that brought you."

"We?"

"Are you Jedi or Sith?"

Jaden took a half step sideways, as if to avoid the ugly import of the question. He reached the edge of the cloning cylinder and winced when he saw within it.

Bodies lay piled in a grotesque heap, a tangle of decayed limbs, torsos, heads, and tattered clothing-a compost heap of butchery. Empty eye sockets stared up at Jaden. Age-ruined lips showed teeth bared in snarls.

"Beautiful, is it not?" asked the Kamclone. "Mother is where life begins and ends."

The stink caused Jaden's eyes to water. He guessed that almost every person in the facility had ended up inside the cylinder, inside Mother.

Fighting down his disgust, he asked, "How many are you? How many survived?"

"How many of them?" the clone said, and a knowing malice slinked into his dead eyes. "Or us?"

The clone stepped to the edge of Mother and started walking the circumference of the cylinder toward Jaden.

Instinctually, Jaden walked the circumference in the same direction, away from the clone, the two of them pacing the face of a chrono, keeping time under the shadow of the inevitable.

The clone nodded at the cylinder, an insane reverence smoothing his expression. "We return here from time to time to thank Mother for our lives. She can create it from the root of a hair, Dr. Green once told me. You were right, Dr. Green," he said to one of the corpses.

Jaden felt entirely exposed. More of them could appear at any moment. He reached out with the Force. He perceived no one else, but it was possible they could screen their presences.

They continued their circling, the pace quickening. Jaden knew what must come but he delayed it, discontented with the realization that all he had endured, all he had asked others to endure, had resulted in no answers. The clones had showed him nothing. The Kamclone was mad. Perhaps they all were. Perhaps he himself was, too.

"Why do you walk away from me?" the Kamclone said.

"Because it does not have to be this way."

"It does," the clone said, his right hand twitching. "Mother is hungry."

Jaden stopped pacing, and his abrupt stop seemed to take the clone by surprise. "I cannot help you," he said.

"You can," the clone said, also stopping. "And you will. You will give us your ship."

"No."

From under his cloak, the clone drew his lightsaber and activated it. A long, unstable red blade cut the shadows, spitting angry sparks.

The clone's fa?ade ran like candle wax, the heat of his rage melting the calm mask of his expression to reveal the savagery beneath. Eyes narrowed, teeth bared, he snarled… and in the sound Jaden heard the violent nature that had slaughtered hundreds of people and thrown their corpses into a cloning pit turned mass grave.

"Mother is hungry!"

Jaden prepared himself, sank into the calm of the Force.

The clone ran one way around the pit and Jaden ran the opposite. They met after fifteen strides, still on Mother's edge, both lightsabers humming. Jaden ducked low under the clone's decapitating cross-stroke and stabbed at his abdomen.

The clone reverse-backflipped, balancing on the pit's edge, then immediately charged Jaden again. He feinted low and unleashed a vicious overhand blow, then another, and another. Jaden parried each one, but the blows began to numb his arms. He let the Force soothe his muscles and augment his strength, and answered with a flurry of blows of his own.

The clone gave no ground, and Jaden could not penetrate his defenses. They crossed blades at the chest, weapons sizzling, the sparks from the clone's blade searing scorch marks into Jaden's suit. The clone grunted, shoved Jaden two meters backward, and lunged after him.

Jaden leapt over his head, flipping, his blade slashing down as he flew over the clone, but the clone parried. Jaden landed on his feet on the edge of the pit and the clone was upon him, forcing his lightsaber high and landing a Force-augmented kick in his chest. Ribs snapped and Jaden staggered backward.

Following up on the opening, the clone leapt forward and cross-cut Jaden at the knees. Jaden leapt over the slash, used an overcut to drive the clone's blade into the deck, where it threw up a shower of sparks. Jaden spun, and angled a reverse-cross-cut for the clone's head.

The clone lurched backward but the tip of Jaden's blade opened a gash in his throat. Staggered, gasping, the clone swung wildly with his lightsaber while unleashing a telekinetic blast against Jaden's chest.

Jaden used the Force to deaden the blow, but his broken ribs ground against one another and he hissed with pain. By now the clone had recovered enough to charge. He attacked high, low, overhand, cross-cuts, Jaden parried them all while backing off. The clone did not relent, pressing Jaden further, faster. Jaden answered where he could but the clone's blade seemed everywhere. Jaden parried left, right, again, again, until he felt a sharp, stinging sensation and both his lightsaber and three fingers went flying off into the darkness.

A side kick from the clone ruined his already broken ribs and sent him down into Mother. He fell amid the corpses, swimming in the gore, feeling as if dead hands were clutching at him. Stinking, wet fluid soaked him. Before he could sit up, the clone leapt into the pit after him and landed on his feet with his legs to either side of Jaden. Jaden could not see the Kamclone's face, could see only the sparking line of his red lightsaber held high for a killing stroke. Jaden focused his mind on the blade as it came down. He threw up an arm, grabbed the clone's wrist, and steered the blade wide.

The clone grunted in frustration, knelt, and grabbed Jaden's throat with his free hand.

"Do not resist. You should be honored to provide sustenance to Mother," he said, and began to squeeze.

Desperate, and still holding the clone's right wrist to keep the sizzling red line of his lightsaber at bay, Jaden used his wounded right hand to claw at the clone's grip, trying to dig his remaining fingers under the clone's and pry loose some space for an inhalation. Failing that, he tried to roll aside, to shift his weight and gain some leverage, or free a leg to kick out, but the clone's Force-augmented strength was greater than Jaden's.

Jaden gagged, tried to shake loose by flailing his head, but failed. His lungs forced him to try to draw air. Unable to pull in oxygen, he saw spots. The clone grunted against Jaden's fading grip, his dark eyes wild, saliva dripping from his gritted teeth.

Jaden's arms were deadwood hanging off his shoulders. As he lost strength, the clone's lightsaber moved closer to his throat. The sparks from the unstable blade struck Jaden's face and arm, pock marking his skin with tiny scorch marks, igniting little flashes of pain. His heart banged in his ears. He was failing. He was going to die.

The realization summoned something from deep within the dark crevices of his mind where he kept secrets even from himself. Force lightning exploded from his hand, squeezed out by the exigency of his circumstances. The blue lines spiraled around the clone's hand and lightsaber.

The clone gasped with surprise, loosened his grip, disengaged. Jaden gulped a lungful of air while the darkness within him swelled and the outburst of Force lightning intensified. Jaden knew that fear had unlocked the darkest part of himself, knew, too, that he could free that part, surrender to it, and save his body while destroying himself.

But he thought of Kyle, of his training, of Relin, and denied the impulse. The Force lightning died.

The clone recovered, growled, raised his lightsaber high.

Jaden reached behind his back, pulled out the lightsaber he had built in his youth, his ignorant youth, a lightsaber not so different from that held by the clone.

The clone lunged forward.

Jaden activated his lightsaber and drove the point into and through the clone's abdomen.

The clone's roar turned to a groan, but his momentum carried him forward along Jaden's blade, and as death turned his eyes glassy, he completed his overhand stroke.

The sparking red blade cleaved the bodies beside Jaden and fell from the clone's hand. It lay there, a red line spitting sparks. It had no auto-off, and its energy burned into the corpses and sank part way into the muck. Jaden stared at its red swirl a long time, the dead eyes of the clone fixed on his face all the while.

Finally Jaden thumbed off his lightsaber and the clone's body fell free. He pushed the corpse to the side. Grunting with pain, he bent and picked up the clone's lightsaber, held it beside his own purple blade as best he could with his damaged hand.

Purple and red lines-two lines, two choices.

He deactivated both weapons, slowly stood. Exhaustion made his body shake. Pain turned his vision blurry. He limped to the edge of the cloning cylinder, of Mother.

Desiccated skulls and empty eye sockets bore witness to his passage. Open mouths screamed at him to cast himself in, to join them. The stink made him wince. At least he thought it was the stink.

With effort, grunting with pain, he slowly climbed out of the pit.

When he reached the top, he turned and stared down at the chaotic mass of bodies, all of them twisted together, contorted, as if frozen in a struggle to move over and past one another, or perhaps just pressed into one common mass where struggle no longer mattered. He thought all of it must be a metaphor for something, but his pain- and fatigue-addled mind could not decide for what.

He started to cast the clone's lightsaber back into the mass of flesh at the bottom of the pit, put it to rest beside his own, but decided against it. Instead, he latched it to his belt, turned, and found himself staring into the eyes of an Anzat. Surprise almost caused him to step back and fall again into the pit.

In the silence of the cargo bay, drenched in the power of the Lignan, Relin dwelled on his failures. He had failed Saes, failed Drev, failed the Order. He'd even failed Marr, awakening him to the Force so that his first experience with it was the touch of the Lignan.

Anger turned to rage turned to hate. He welcomed it. The proximity to the Lignan intensified the feelings.

His world zeroed down to three things only-himself, his hate, and the object of his hate, Saes. His life had been nothing more than a series of failures. He intended to end it by rectifying the worst of them-Saes.

The hum of the cargo bay lift penetrated the haze of his emotional state. He stood, lightsaber in hand, Lignan in his being, and waited. He heard the lift doors open, heard the sound of boots on the cargo bay floor, and felt Saes's presence through the Force, the black hole into which Relin had poured his early life. The stacked cargo crates blocked Saes from view, but Relin knew he was there.

Saes's voice carried from somewhere behind the containers. "Your anger pleases me. Your handiwork in the lift would earn admiration even from the most savage of my Massassi. Well done, Master."

The last word struck Relin like a punch in the stomach, and he knew Saes intended it to do exactly that. "I am not your Master."

"No, but you taught me everything I know. Perhaps not the way you intended, but it is to you that I owe my freedom from the slavery of the light side."

Through the Force, Relin tried to pinpoint Saes's location. Augmenting a jump with the power of the Force, he leapt atop one of the storage containers. The vantage gave him a better view of the cargo bay. Above the maze of storage containers, he saw the closed lift doors. But no Saes.

"Show yourself," he said. "Let us finish this."

The overhead lights flickered, dimmed, casting the bay in shadow.

Saes's voice carried from behind him. "Do you know what has happened, Relin? Do you know where we are? When we are?"

Relin turned toward the sound of the voice, his body coiled. "I know. It does not matter. Nothing matters now."

"Because your Padawan is dead?"

Rage clenched Relin's jaw so tightly his teeth ached.

Saes chuckled. "Your anger runs deep, not just about your Padawan, but about… me."

Relin swallowed the fist that formed in his throat. Words rushed up from deep inside, words he'd never said even to himself-Your betrayal broke my heart-but he held them behind the wall of his gritted teeth. He saw now that his descent had begun with the doubt that had rooted in him after Saes had turned to the dark side. His slide had simply been slow but, ultimately, inexorable.

"Come out," he said. "It is time we finished things."

Saes's voice came from Relin's left. "It is not too late. Join me. This is a new time, a new place, ripe for a new beginning."

Relin was already shaking his head.

But Saes continued: "Have you considered that it was never the purpose of the Force that you save me, but that I save you instead? Join me, Relin."

The idea pulled at Relin. He felt rudderless, lost. He could join with Saes- "If you do not, your Padawan will have died in vain."

And with those words, Saes overstepped. Relin's rage bubbled over into action. He took telekinetic hold of the storage containers near the sound of Saes's voice and slammed two of them together. Metal twisted, crashed; the doors of the containers broke open from the impact and more Lignan ore spilled out onto the deck.

He slid another container into them, then another. He realized he was shouting, an incoherent roar of rage with its provenance in a life he now deemed wasted. He stopped, his breath coming hard.

"Come out!"

Saes leapt atop a storage container opposite the one on which Relin stood. A sea of Lignan covered the deck between them, dividing them. Shadows played over the ridges on Saes's bone mask. His lightsaber hung from his belt.

"You stink of rage," Saes said. "Where is the calm of the Force of which you so often spoke? The placidity of combat? Or perhaps that was all a lie, as so much you said and believed was?"

Relin let his anger consume his spirit, fill him entirely, and with it he drew on the Force, adding to his strength, his speed.

"Addictive, is it not?" Saes said. "The Lignan, I mean."

With that, Saes raised his hand and blue Force lightning exploded from his fist. Relin did not try to avoid it. Instead, drawing on the Lignan and fueled with hate, he interposed his lightsaber, drew the lightning to it like iron to a magnet, then spun the blade once over his head and flung the dark side energy back at Saes. More Lignan flared on the floor below as Saes drew on it and absorbed his own Force lightning to no visible effect.

Standing in the shadows of the cargo bay, they regarded each other across the deck of Lignan.

"How should we proceed then?" Saes said.

Relin answered by deactivating his lightsaber.

He was no Jedi, not anymore, and would not fight with a Jedi weapon. Besides, only one form of combat could sate his rage. He tossed his lightsaber down into the pile of Lignan ore below him.

Saes took his point, tilted his head in acknowledgment. He detached his curved lightsaber from his belt and tossed it after Relin's. He flexed his clawed fingers, inhaled deeply.

"So be it, then."

Relin shouted and used a Force-enhanced leap to launch himself into the air toward Saes. Answering with a growl, Saes leapt into the air to meet him. They met midway, colliding over the Lignan, both of them filled with the dark side, stronger, faster.

Relin wrapped one arm around Saes, slammed his brow into Saes's face with the other. The bottom half of the bone mask shattered, raining shards down on the Lignan. Saes's lower tooth tore a ragged hole in Relin's forearm before it dislodged and added itself to the mask fragments raining onto the deck.

Saes slashed his claws across Relin's face. Relin used the Force to resist the blow, but it still dug jagged furrows into his forehead and tore into an eye, though he barely felt the pain.

They fell together, twisting, punching, slashing at a speed and with a force that looked blurry even to Relin. They hit the ground in a tangle of punches and kicks. Hate fueled their blows. Blood sprayed, bones cracked, the Lignan flared all around them as each drew on it in turn.

"I hate you for what you did," Saes spat between his fangs.

"I hate me for what I am," Relin said. He rolled away from Saes and from his knees fired a telekinetic blast that drove Saes through the Lignan ore and into a storage container. "But I hate you more."

He took mental hold of an entire storage container-Lignan ore fell from its open door like droplets of blood-lifted it from the deck, and dropped it on Saes.

Saes caught it in his own mental grasp before it hit. Grunting, Lignan ore flaring to life around him, he threw it back at Relin.

Relin dived aside and the container slammed into another. For the first time, Relin felt the waves of controlled rage radiating from Saes, an anger to match his own. Odd that Relin had never felt it before, in all the time they had spent together as Master and Padawan.

Saes stood and stalked through the Lignan scattered across the floor, the ore flashing as he passed it, consumed by his hate.

"You think rage days old can match mine, nurtured over decades? You think power born of infantile anger can equal mine? I have whet the blade of my hate for years, for this moment!"

He lifted a hand and a concussive wave struck Relin like a sledgehammer, drove him through the Lignan, and slammed him against the storage container. Ribs cracked and his lungs evacuated in a wheeze of pain. Saes continued to close the distance, his eyes dark holes behind the mask, his mouth twisted into a symbol of hate. He held up two fingers and Relin felt Saes's mental grasp close on his throat and begin to squeeze, pinching off his wheezes. Relin answered with a Force choke of his own, but it only slowed Saes for a moment before he resisted it with his own power.

Relin's vision grew blurry. Spots appeared before his eyes. He could not even gasp for breath.

Saes stopped before him, loomed over him, his eyes burning.

Feeding tendrils hung from the Anzat's cheeks, their ends a vicious nail of keratin. For a moment, it seemed as if the Anzat's head floated free in space, detached from any body, but Jaden realized that the creature wore a mimetic suit and had thrown back the mask and hood. The rest of his body simply blended in with the background, even up close.

Wrung out from his battle with the clone, Jaden raised his mental defenses too slowly and the Anzat projected his will into Jaden's mind.

Be still.

The words bounced around in Jaden's mind, found purchase in the ancient reptilian structures in the deepest part of his brain. His higher functions screamed for him to act, to defend himself, but the Anzat's mental projection lodged like a leech on Jaden's brain stem, froze his voluntary muscles and chained his will. He felt as if he might be dreaming, his mind in the grip of a nightmare, his body too paralyzed to react.

The Anzat's eyes flashed, the nostrils on his slightly upturned nose flared. He leaned in close, his face only a centimeter from Jaden's, but not quite touching, as if denying himself for a moment some treat he'd longed for. The Anzat's eyes impaled Jaden. He fought against the Anzat's hold on his mind, trying to dislodge the mind leech, but his mind, depleted from the battle with the clone, could not get free.

The Anzat sensed his failed struggle and smiled.

"I am Kell Douro," the Anzat said, his voice thick with an accent that Jaden could not place. "You are my salvation, Jaden Korr."

The Anzat took Jaden by the shoulders and the cables of the alien's appendages burrowed into Jaden's nostrils, the sharp point of the tip slashing sensitive tissues. Pain exploded in his mind, setting off a spark shower of agony before his eyes, but he could not move.

Kell inhaled deeply as he drove his feeders into the blood-slickened tunnels of Jaden's nostrils. He shuddered each time they pierced a membrane or slashed tissue. The lines of their daen nosi swirled around them, their motion rapid, chaotic, a reflection of Kell's own excitement. They became so tangled he had trouble distinguishing the silver of his own lines from the red and green that denoted Jaden's potential futures. His legs weakened at the thought of consuming the Jedi's soup, of understanding at last, after centuries of seeking, the map of the universe and his purpose in it.

He watched his lines enmesh Jaden's, strangle them, wipe out whatever future the Jedi might have had. His feeders pierced a membrane and squirmed for the Jedi's brain, his soup. Jaden's body shuddered.

Kell stared at the daen nosi, expecting to see Jaden's green and red end, overcome by the silver net of Kell's future.

Instead he saw Jaden's lines endure, saw his own lines knotted off and consumed by the dull gray strands of another. The three sets of lines resolved into a noticeable pattern. Behind the pattern, within the pattern, Kell saw the meaning of life, his purpose.

A blaster barrel pressed up against his temple. He felt it only distantly, thickly.

"Thank you," he said.

At first Jaden did not think he was seeing clearly, thought, perhaps, that his mind had retreated into dreams while he died. He saw Khedryn materialize beside the Anzat. Blood dripped from Khedryn's shattered nose, and his eyes were so swollen Jaden was surprised he could see at all. He held the BlasTech E-11 in his hands, the blaster they had seen in the armory off the barracks. He had its barrel pressed against the Anzat's head.

The Anzat's feeders started to retract from Jaden's nose.

"Thank you?" Khedryn said, stress raising his voice an octave higher than usual. "Frag you."

He squeezed the trigger and turned the Anzat's head into a fine red mist. The Anzat's body fell to the floor, blood pouring from the neck stump. The feeder appendages, severed from the nearly vaporized head, still dangled from Jaden's nose. Jaden sagged, wobbled. Khedryn steadied him.

"Are you all right? Jaden?"

Khedryn's voice sounded from far away. But it was drawing closer and Jaden was returning to himself.

"I am all right," he said to Khedryn. "Thank you."

Khedryn smiled. "That is a thank-you I'll accept."

Wincing, Jaden jerked the feeders out of his nose and dropped them on the Anzat's body. Nausea seized him and he vomited onto the floor. Khedryn put a hand on his shoulder and nodded at the Anzat's corpse.

"That thing got to me before it got you. What is it?"

Jaden wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and straightened on shaky legs.

"An Anzat. I think he followed us from Fhost, but I'm not sure."

"You sure you're all right?"

Jaden took in the ruin of Khedryn's face.

"I should be asking that of you."

Khedryn took Jaden's arm and helped support him. "I've been beaten worse than this, Jedi." He looked down into Mother, at the slain clone and the grizzly contents of her gullet.

"What happened here? Are those the doctors and stormies? Stang."

"Yes," Jaden said, and deliberately did not look into Mother. "I'll explain the rest on the way out. We must hurry. There are more surviving clones, Khedryn. They want a ship and we cannot allow that. We need to get back to Flotsam. Now."

Khedryn cleared his throat, spit blood and phlegm onto the floor. "If they take my ship anywhere, I will hunt them across the 'verse."

"Yes," Jaden said, and activated his purple-bladed saber. He could barely hold it in his wounded hand. "We will."

"Where did you get that lightsaber?" Khedryn asked.

"Long story."

Together they hurried back through the facility, both holding weapons built decades earlier-Khedryn a stormtrooper-issued blaster, Jaden a lightsaber he'd built as a boy. They retraced their steps past one scene of slaughter to another. The facility seemed less ominous to Jaden now, but it still felt haunted by ghosts.

Jaden told Khedryn what he'd learned from the clone: that other clones had survived on the moon for decades, that they wanted desperately to get off, that they were mad and dangerous.

"Did they have any children?"

Khedryn's question slowed Jaden's steps. He had not considered that. "I… don't know."

By the time they neared the West Entry, Jaden had recovered some of his strength. He did not have the time or capacity to interpret all he'd learned-about the facility and himself-but he would, later.

"Did you get the answer you wanted?" Khedryn asked as he pulled up his helmet and sealed the neck ring.

"I don't know," Jaden admitted. He deactivated his lightsaber and started to pull up his helmet, realized that his suit was so damaged from combat with the clone that sealing it was pointless.

Seeing that, Khedryn said, "You will be cold."

"I'll abide," Jaden said.

Relin was going to die, was going to add another failure to the long line of failures that composed his life as a Jedi. The rage went out of him as if drained through a hole in his heel. Despair replaced it, black and empty.

Saes held out a hand, and his lightsaber flew from the deck to his palm. He ignited it. In its hum, Relin heard his death pronounced.

"You understand now, at the end," Saes said. He removed the remains of his mask and regarded Relin with yellow eyes that looked almost sympathetic. "That pleases me."

Relin dwelled in the bottomless void of his despondence. And in the void, in its endlessness, he saw his purpose fulfilled.

He drew on the Lignan, fed its power into the hole at his core. The emptiness in him was insatiable, drinking the power as fast as he could pull it in, yet never getting filled.

His body and mind swelled with the influx. The ore dotting the deck flared in answer to his desires. Sneering, Saes drew on the Lignan himself.

Relin gripped Saes's throat in his mental grasp. Saes tried to swat away the Force choke with his own power. His eyes widened when he realized he could not. He gasped, staggered. Relin sat up, thought of Drev, and squeezed.

Saes stumbled forward, lightsaber held high. Filled with power, Relin used the Force to pull Saes's lightsaber from his fist. It leapt through the air and landed in Relin's hand. He rose to his knees and Saes fell to his before Relin, still clutching his throat.

Relin had nothing more to say to his former Padawan. He drove Saes's own lightsaber into and through his chest. Saes fell face-first to the deck without a sound.

Relin stared at the red lightsaber blade in his hand. He had resolved that he would not fight with a Jedi weapon and he had not. He had fought with a Sith weapon and it had been appropriate.

His body felt charged, so filled with the dark side of the Force that he no longer felt human. He had transcended. He sagged to the floor among the flaring ore. The metal of the deck felt cold under him. Blood poured out of his face, his nose. Chunks of Lignan dug into his flesh. With Saes dead, he suddenly felt his injuries, and agony accompanied each breath.

But the pain of his body paled in comparison with the pain of his spirit.

He shouted, trying to purge the pain and despair in a wail that shook the crossbeams of the cargo bay. But both were infinite. He could have shouted for eternity and found no relief.

Still, he refused to fail again.

Saes had called his rage days old, but it was more than that. It was a conflagration, the sum total of all the repressed emotion of Relin's life compressed into a tiny singularity of self-consuming anger and despair from which nothing could escape, not even him.

And that, he realized, was the unspoken, unacknowledged pith of the dark side-it consumed all who turned to it. Yet he did not turn away. He wanted nothing more than to be consumed, to be reduced to oblivion, annihilated. He welcomed it.

But he would not go alone.

He continued to draw in the power of the Lignan, to feed it into the hole he had become, to let it amplify his hate and despair even as he died. Power burned in him. He was vaguely conscious of the remaining crystals around him flaring, a brief flash of life before he consumed their power and turned them dull and dead.

Unbound by concern for his continuing survival, he took in as much energy as he could control. Spirals of energy formed around his body. He felt his torso growing lighter, the flesh becoming diaphanous, transformed by power to become one with the energy.

Barely able to feel his own flesh, he nevertheless reached out for his dead Padawan. His fingers closed over Saes's forearm and slid along until he held his former Padawan's hand.

Tears flowed as energy gathered, turned on itself, grew stronger. Coils of blue power, like long lines of Force lightning, shot out from his flesh, roiled in the air above him, striking the ceiling and the storage containers, penetrating the ship.

He drew in more power, more, until the entire cargo bay was lit with a network of twisting, jagged lines of energy, a circulatory system through which flowed his rage. The lines spread from the cargo bay and through the ship like veins, like an enormous garrote that would strangle Harbinger to death. Relin's mind became one with them. Power and hate pulsed along them with each beat of his heart. They were an extension of him and he felt them as they squirmed through the ship, wrapping it in their net, from the rear section, along the spin, to the forward section with the black scar of Drev's grave gouged into its face.

He was ready, then.

He knew he was lost, and yet he was found.

"Laugh even when you die," he whispered.

He squeezed Saes's cold, scaled hand, imagined Drev's face, and laughed for joy as the power crescendoed and began to consume Harbinger in fire.

Marr perceived a light through his eyelids. He struggled to open them but they felt as if they weighed a kilo. Finally able to pry them open, he winced against the glare blazing through Junker's cockpit viewport.

Harbinger fell into the moon's thin atmosphere and skidded along, an ever-lengthening spear of flame in its wake. Bleary-eyed, he saw fire consume the entire ship until the massive vessel exploded in a cloud of smoke and flame.

Relin had done it, he realized, but he felt no elation.

There is nothing certain.

The autopilot was flying Junker straight into the aftermath of the explosion but Marr did not trust himself enough to change the ship's course. He needed to reach the surface and hope that Jaden and Khedryn would see him and help him.

He was dying, he knew. Already the pain in his back was diminishing-not a good sign-and he felt a creeping cold enshrouding his body.

He tried to reach for the emergency distress beacon, thinking he would activate it and that matters would end as they had begun, with the beep of someone in distress.

But he could not reach it. His body no longer answered his commands.

Pain and blood loss drew him back into darkness.

Jaden and Khedryn stepped through the hatch and into the blowing snow and ice. Jaden welcomed the elements, the freezing air, and the pain. He inhaled deeply, hoping to cleanse his lungs of any residuum of Mother or the facility. Khedryn pointed ahead.

"Flotsam is still there." His voice sounded metallic through his helmet's external mike.

Jaden saw. Shields still secured the ship's viewports. The clones had not gotten in, which meant they had not gotten off the moon… yet.

"The Anzat had a ship."

"Right," Khedryn said, and started trudging through the snow. "Let's get aboard Flotsam and get into the air. We can find it that way."

They had not taken five strides before a ship streaked into view, flying low, its engines a barely audible hum over the wind. Jaden recognized the silhouette immediately from the low profile and wide wings-a CloakShape fighter, modified with a hyperspace sled and coated in the black fiberplast typical of a StealthX. It would have been almost invisible against a field of stars. In atmosphere, it looked like a piece of outer space had descended planetside.

Jaden knew that it was too late to seek cover. Khedryn must have realized the same thing. He took station beside Jaden, freed the shoulder stock on the E-11, and aimed it at the ship's cockpit. Jaden activated his lightsaber and held his ground. The weapon's hilt was unsteady in his two-fingered grasp. He switched to his left hand, where it felt awkward, but at least he could hold it.

The CloakShape slowed, maneuvered over them, and hovered at maybe ten meters. The energy from the engines warmed the air. The barrels of the laser cannons looked like tunnels that went on forever. Jaden and Khedryn stood still on the frozen ground, cloaked in the fighter's faint shadow. The ship dipped its nose so that the cockpit had a clear view of them and they of it. The transparisteel was dimmed so that they could not see within. Jaden reached out with the Force-even that small effort tried him, after all he'd been through-and felt the Force presences of ten beings.

"They do have children aboard," he said. "Or there were more clones than we thought."

Khedryn lowered his blaster, a symbolic gesture only. The blaster could not have penetrated the CloakShape's hide.

"Maybe they don't know who we are or what… happened."

Jaden shook his head, his eyes fixed on the cockpit. "No. They know I killed one of them. The holo-log said they had an empathic connection, maybe even a telepathic one. They know."

"Stang," Khedryn murmured.

For a time they stood there, staring up at the unseen crew through the swirl. Finally Jaden shouted up at the cockpit.

"If you leave I will have to come after you."

He gave that a moment to register and still received no response. He deactivated his saber, turned away from the fighter, and walked through the cold and snow for Flotsam.

"Let's go, Khedryn."

"Go?" Khedryn said, and hurried after him, looking back over his shoulder at the fighter.

"We are either dead or we're not. Their choice."

Khedryn fell in beside him, partially hunched as though in anticipation of a blow.

Jaden did not flinch-though Khedryn did-when a shriek tore through the sky, not the cannons on the CloakShape fighter, but the wail of engines failing, of superstructure collapsing.

Jaden turned, already flashing back to his vision, and looked up to see the sky on fire. An enormous ship-it could only be Harbinger-streaked across the upper atmosphere, leaving a fat line of fire kilometers long.

"Stang," Khedryn said in a hush.

With the suddenness of a blaster shot, the cruiser exploded, the fireball starting in the rear engine section and racing forward along the length of the ship until the entire vessel vaporized into a billion-billion tiny, glowing particles that lit the sky like pyrotechnics.

Jaden watched, not breathing, as they started to fall to the surface, a rain of evil. He lived alternately in the present and the memory of his vision. He felt the oily touch of the Lignan, the familiar nudge in his very being impelling him to darkness. The feeling did not elicit in him the horror he remembered from his vision and he wondered what that meant. He resisted the pull-his will, his ability to choose, was something internal, unconstrained by the external.

The CloakShape fighter's engines fired and Khedryn and Jaden watched it accelerate skyward, its form a black silhouette against the still-glowing sky.

"It is heading right into the debris," Khedryn said. "What are they doing?"

Jaden understood exactly what they were doing. They were taking in the Lignan's power.

"I will have to come after you," he said again, more softly, unsure how he felt about the words.

Another boom sounded far above them, not an explosion but a sonic boom, a ship entering or leaving atmosphere. At first Jaden assumed it was the CloakShape exiting the moon's atmosphere, but instead he saw a familiar disk cutting its way through the sky, falling out of the ruin of Harbinger's death. Junker looked wounded, incomplete without Flotsam attached to its fittings and Khedryn in its cockpit.

Jaden imagined it passing the CloakShape fighter and its crew of dark side clones on its way down, imagined paths crossing, lines meeting at angles, currents intersecting. He thought of Relin and felt profound sadness. He knew the ancient Jedi would not be aboard Junker.

"That is Junker!" Khedryn said. He took Jaden by the shoulder, shook him with joy. Jaden winced from the pain but could not stop smiling himself.

With the ship so close, Khedryn tried to raise Marr on his suit's comlink. No response.

"Look at the way she's flying," Khedryn said, joy giving way to concern in his tone. "She's on autopilot."

Jaden reached out with the Force, felt Marr's faint Force presence, felt, too, that the Cerean was near death.

"Let's move," he said, and they ran for Junker as it started to set down.