Crosscurrent (4 page)

Kell rose, slid into his mimetic suit, checked the twin cortosis-coated vibroblades sheathed at his belt, and headed for
Predator
’s landing ramp. Before lowering it, he took a blaster and holster from a small-arms locker and strapped them to his thigh. He considered blasters inelegant weapons, but preferred to be overarmed rather than under.

He pressed the release button on the ramp. Hydraulics hummed and the door lowered. Wind and rain hissed into
Predator
. Korriban’s air, pungent with the reek of past ages, filled his nostrils. Thunder boomed.

Kell stared out into the darkness, noted the clustered pinpoints of red light that floated in the pitch. He shifted on his feet as the lights drew closer—a silver protocol droid. He attuned his vision to Fate, saw no
daen nosi
. Droids were programming, nothing more. They made no real choices and so had no lines. The false sentience of the droid unnerved Kell and he cut off the perception.

The anthropomorphic droid strode through the wind and rain to the base of the landing ramp and bowed its head in a hum of servos.

“Master Anzat,” the droid said in Basic. “I am Deefourfive. Please follow me. The Master awaits you.”

The droid’s words rooted Kell to the deck. Despite himself, Kell’s twin hearts doubled their beating rate. Adrenaline flowed into his blood. The feeders in his cheeks spasmed. He inhaled, focused for a moment, and returned his body to calmness, his hormone level to normal.

“
The
Master? Krayt himself?”

“Please follow,” the droid said, turned, and began walking.

Kell pulled up the hood of his suit but did not lower the mask; he strode down the ramp and stepped into the storm. Korriban drenched him. With a minor effort of will, he adjusted his core body temperature to compensate for the chill.

The droid led him along long-dead avenues lined with the ancient stone and steel monuments of the Sith Order. Kell saw no duracrete, no transparisteel, nothing modern. On much of Korriban, he knew, new layers had been built on the old over the millennia, creating a kind of archaeological stratification of the Sith ages.

Not here. Here, the most ancient of Sith tombs and temples sat undisturbed. Here, Krayt wandered in his dreams of conquest.

A flash of lightning veined the sky, painting shadows across the necropolis. Kell’s mimetic suit adjusted to account for the temporary change in lighting. As he walked, he felt a growing regard fix on him, a consciousness.

Ahead, he saw a squat tower of aged stone—Krayt’s sanctuary. Spirals of dark energy swirled in languid arcs around the spire. Only a few windows marred its otherwise featureless exterior, black holes that opened into a dark interior. To Kell, they looked like screaming mouths protesting the events transpiring within.

The droid ascended a wide, tiered stairway that led to a pair of iron doors at the base of the spire. Age-corroded writing and scrollwork spiraled over the door’s surface. Kell could not read it.

“Remain here, please,” the droid said, and vanished behind the doors.

Kell waited under Korriban’s angry sky, surrounded by the tombs of Korriban’s dead Sith Lords. Checking his wrist chrono from time to time, he attuned his senses to his surroundings and waited on Krayt’s pleasure.

Footsteps sounded behind him, barely audible above the rain. He changed his perception as he turned, and saw a thick network of
daen nosi
that extended through the present to the future, wrapping the galaxy like a great serpent that would strangle it.

R
elin and Drev sat in pensive silence as their Infiltrator streaked through the churning blue tunnel of hyperspace. They watched their instrumentation intently, hoping for the telltale beep denoting detection of the hyperspace beacon secreted aboard
Harbinger
. Lingering silence would mean they’d lost Saes.

“Scanners functioning normally,” Drev said. After a sidelong glance at Relin, he began to hum, a free-form, lively tune from his homeworld.

“Must you?” Relin asked, smiling despite himself as he adjusted the instrumentation.

“Yes,” said Drev, also smiling, but without looking up from his instruments. “I must.”

Relin admired his Padawan’s ability to find joy in everything he did, though Relin thought—and taught—that it was more important to maintain emotional evenness. Extremes of emotion could lead to the dark side.

Still, he wondered sometimes if Drev was the only one doing the learning in their relationship. It seemed Relin smiled only when in Drev’s presence. Saes’s betrayal had cut the mirth out of him as skillfully as a surgeon.

Drev tapped the scanner screen with a thick finger. “Come out, come out, whither you hide.”

Presently, the scanner picked up a faint signal. Relin and Drev exhaled as one and leaned forward in their seats.

Drev chuckled and put a finger on the scanner screen. “There. They did it.”

Relin let the navicomp digest the scanner’s input and cross-referenced the coordinates. “The Phaegon system.”

Without waiting for instruction, Drev pulled up the onboard computer’s information on the system.

“There’s nothing there,” Drev said, eyeing the readout. “What is he doing?”

“Still looking, maybe,” Relin said, and took the controls. “We will know soon enough.”

The signal grew in strength as the Infiltrator hurtled through hyperspace.

“He’s deep in-system,” Relin said. “We emerge ten light-seconds out.”

Drev nodded and input the commands into the navicomp. “The system has four planets, each with multiple moons. An asteroid belt divides the third from the fourth.”

“Use it as cover until we understand what Saes is doing.”

“Deactivating the hyperdrive in five, four …”

“Activating signature scrambler and baffles,” Relin said. At the same moment, he used the Force to mask his and Drev’s Force signatures, lest Saes perceive their arrival.

“… two, one,” Drev said, and deactivated the hyperdrive.

The blue tunnel of hyperspace gave way to the black void of stars, planets, and asteroids.

Instantly a wave of dark side energy, raw and jagged,
saturated the ship. Unready for the assault, Relin lost his breath, turned dizzy. Drev groaned, lurched back in his seat as if struck, then vomited down the front of his robes.

“Where is that coming from?” Relin said between gritted teeth.

Drev shook his head, still heaving. He reached for the scanner console.

“Leave it,” Relin said, and adjusted the scanners himself.

They showed nothing nearby but the spinning chaos of the asteroid belt, and Phaegon III and its many moons.

Relin took a moment to clear his head, then drew on the Force to shield them from the ambient dark side energy. With his defenses in place, he felt the energy as only a soft, unpleasant pressure in his mind, incessant raindrops thumping against his skull, but it no longer affected his senses.

“All right?” he asked Drev.

Drev cleared his throat, eyed his flight suit and robes in embarrassment. “I am all right. Apologies, Master.”

Relin waved away the apology. He had been unprepared, too.

“My meal tasted better the first time,” Drev said, smiling, his cheeks bright red.

“Smelled better, too,” Relin said, chuckling as he pored over the scanner’s output.

“So, it’s vomit that looses your sense of humor,” Drev said. He stripped off his robe, balled it up, and retook his seat. He took a gulp of a flavored protein drink in a plastic pouch, swished it around his mouth. “I will keep that in mind. Maybe scatological humor will amuse you also?”

Relin only half smiled. His mind was on their situation. What had they stumbled onto? He had never before
experienced such a wash of pure dark side energy. Whatever Saes had been searching for, he must have found it in the Phaegon system. Drev must have sensed his seriousness.

“What do you make of it?” Drev asked. “A dark side weapon? A Sith artifact maybe?”

Relin shook his head. The energy was not intense, simply widespread. “We will soon know.”

He engaged the ion drive and started to take them into the asteroid belt, but thought better of it. He took his hands from the controls.

“Take us in, Drev,” he said.

He felt his Padawan’s eyes on him. “Into the belt?”

Relin nodded. The Infiltrator’s sensor scrambler and the churn of the asteroid belt would foil any Sith scanners.

“Are you certain, Master?”

“Still your mind,” he said to his Padawan. “Feel the Force, trust it.”

Drev was one of the best raw pilots in the Order. With time and training in the use of the Force, he would become one of the Jedi’s finest.

“Take us in,” Relin repeated.

Drev stared out of the cockpit, at the ocean of whirling rocks. He paused for a long, calming breath, then took the controls and piloted the Infiltrator into the asteroid belt.

He accelerated without hesitation and the ship darted through the field of slowly spinning rock, diving, ascending, rolling. Pitted stones flashed on the viewscreen for a moment, vanished as Drev cruised under them, over them, around them. One of the Infiltrator’s wings caught an oblong asteroid and the ship lurched, started to spin.

“Master—”

“Calm, Drev,” Relin said, and his Padawan zagged
out of the way of another asteroid as he righted the starfighter.

“Well done, Padawan,” Relin said. “Well done.”

A smile split Drev’s face as he continued through the belt.

Relin monitored the sensors. “There is an asteroid on the edge of the belt, more than ten kilometers in diameter, in a very slow spin.”

“I see it.”

“Set us down there but stay powered up. Let us see what we see.”

Drev maneuvered them over the asteroid and set down the Infiltrator. Phaegon III loomed large in their viewscreen against a backdrop of stars.

Drev was still smiling. Relin chose to ignore his Padawan’s emotional high.

“Give me a heads-up display and magnify.”

A HUD appeared off center in the cockpit window. Drev input a few commands and magnified the image.

Plumes of smoke spiraled from the charred surface of one of Phaegon III’s small moons. Saes’s dreadnought and its sister ship hung like carrion birds in low orbit over the moon’s corpse. A steady stream of transports moved between the moon’s surface and the belly-slung landing bays of the two Sith ships.

Drev lost his smile as he worked the scanners. “That is not—how can—? Master, that moon should be covered in vegetation.” He looked up from his scan. “And life.”

Relin felt his Padawan’s anger over the destruction. He knew where anger led. The young man moved from joy to rage as if his emotions were on a pendulum.

“Stay focused on our task, Drev. The scope of the matter cannot affect your thinking. Do not let anger cloud your mind.”

Drev stared at him as if he were something appalling
he’d found on the bottom of his boot. “The
matter?
It is not a mere matter. They incinerated an entire moon! It is an atrocity.”

Relin nodded. “The word fits. But you are a Jedi. Master your emotions. Especially now.
Especially
now, Padawan.”

Drev stared at him a moment longer before turning back to the scanners. When he spoke, his voice was stiff. “There are hundreds of mining droids on the moon.”

More to himself than Drev, Relin said, “Saes incinerated the crust, then loosed the mining droids.” He focused his Force sense on the transports and their cargo. Though he had been ready, the dark side backlash elicited a gasp and set him backward in his chair.

“It is the cargo.”

“The cargo? What did he pull out of that moon?”

Relin shook his head as he took the controls. “I do not know. An ore of some kind, something attuned to the dark side.” Relin knew of such things. “Whatever it is, it is powerful. Maybe powerful enough to determine the outcome of the assault on Kirrek. That’s what Saes has been searching for, and that is why Sadow delayed his assault. We cannot allow it to get out of the system.”

“You have a plan, I trust,” Drev said, not so much a question as an assertion.

“We take those dreadnoughts out of the sky. Or at least keep them here.”

Drev licked his lips, no doubt pondering the relative sizes of the Infiltrator and the dreadnoughts, not unlike the relative difference between a bloodfly and a rancor. “How?”

Relin lifted the Infiltrator off the asteroid and flew it into open space. “I’m going aboard. Saes and I should get reacquainted.”

He expected at least a chuckle from his Padawan, but
Drev did not so much as smile. He stared out the viewscreen at the dead moon, at the Sith ships, his lips fixed in a hard line.

Relin put a hand on his Padawan’s shoulder and unharnessed himself from his seat.

“You have the controls. The scrambler and baffles will not keep us invisible for long. I just need a little time.”

Drev nodded as the Infiltrator sped toward the dreadnoughts. “You will have it. You’ll try to board a transport?”

“That is what I am thinking,” Relin answered as he moved to the cramped rear compartment of the Infiltrator. Rapidly he peeled off his robes and donned a vac-ready flexsuit, formulating the details of a plan as he went.