STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
On the viewscreen at maximum magnification, Brisha’s home was a hemispherical, light gray bump, a blemish on an irregular dark gray surface. When Jacen stepped the viewscreen down to a medium magnification, he could see the entirety of the asteroid as a dark shadow in the midst of a sea of stars, and, beyond it, the tiny, dirty-orange glow of this star system’s sun, not far from the Bimmiel system, whose fifth planet was notorious for its slashrat population and for being the site of an early Yuuzhan Vong surveying expedition.
Nelani, hovering over Jacen’s shoulder, stared at Brisha’s asteroid and said, “Lovely.” She turned back to Brisha, who lounged in the seat behind the copilot’s position; Ben was copilot on this flight. “I can imagine you enjoying day after day here, sitting by the shores of the lake, watching the glorious sunrises and sunsets …”
Brisha’s face was reflected in the transparisteel of the forward viewport, and Jacen saw her offer Nelani a smile that was just one step short of condescending. “It’s private,” she said. “I like privacy.”
Jacen ignored them, and ignored the sensor readouts before him. Instead, he concentrated on sensing the Force.
On that planetoid, there was something active within the Force, something strong and vibrant … but not alive. Jacen had once had a sense of something like that when, in a restful hour on a visit to a dead coral bed, he’d tried to sense it in the Force and had succeeded. The bed had held dim feelings, like faint, blurry memories, of the accretion of lives that had made it. What was before him now was stronger, more complicated, with more personality … and there was a lot of dark side energy in its vigor.
“It’s a big iron asteroid,” Ben announced. “It’s got a little gravity, but not enough for an atmosphere. We’re going to be floating around a lot.”
Brisha shook her head. “The habitat has artificial gravity. The generators will start up once your shuttle is docked.”
“Aww.” Ben’s was a noise of exasperation. Jacen grinned. He imagined that the boy had been looking forward to a low-gravity environment.
The docking bay was large enough to hold four shuttles, or the Millennium Falcon and one or two smaller craft. Entry to it was at the base of the ten-story-high habitat. Inside, the bay was lofty, the outside wall curved, the inner walls angled, making a near-trapezoid shape. The walls were riveted metal painted a soothing sky blue, and everything was remarkably clean.
As Jacen’s shuttle settled into place in the berth nearest the doors into the habitat proper, the big bay doors slid into place laterally behind them. Jacen felt himself settle deeper into his seat as the habitat’s artificial gravity dialed up. Without being asked, Ben dialed the shuttle’s own gravity down correspondingly, an exercise, and did a fair job of keeping the gravity close to Coruscant standard. Jacen gave him an approving nod.
But Jacen’s mind was elsewhere, part of him still seeking the source of the Force energy he felt.
He saw Brisha smile at him in the viewport reflection. “All the answers you’re looking for are inside,” she said.
Jacen nodded. “Which is not the same as saying everything we want is inside … or that we’re safe inside.”
“Correct,” Brisha said. She rose.
A flexible air lock corridor attached itself to their exterior hatch. Inside, the air was cold, but little eddies of warmth moved through it, evidence of the habitat’s heaters beginning their business.
The hallway, off-white and featureless on the inside, led them to a cross-corridor in the same sky blue as the bay interior. Jacen suspected from the corridor’s curvature that it was a complete circle around the habitat, providing access to the chambers up against the exterior wall.
Ben looked around, blinking. “It’s really clean. I thought this was a mining station.”
Brisha shook her head. “No, it was the administration habitat for the mining company. The administrators and their families lived here, as did the families of several of the more important company officers. And when representatives of the owning company came to visit, there were big chambers where they could have lavish dinners and entertainments. This place was more like a hotel than a mining camp.”
“In terms of design, it’s like an early-model Sienar Mobile Command Post,” Jacen said, “but older. Maybe centuries older.” At Brisha’s slight nod, he continued, “It would have been assembled in space, near where it was to be set up originally. Tugs would have placed it on foundation columns built at its landing zone. But it was a valuable piece of equipment. When the operation was done, its foundation clamps would have released, and it would have been towed off to its next station. Not left here.”
Brisha gave him an encouraging smile, then turned and led the way along the corridor. “Very true. No, the last administrator here arranged for the habitat to be left behind when the mining operation left this asteroid field. To be left behind—and forgotten.” At the first side corridor, she turned left, toward the habitat’s center, and the others followed. The blue walls continued, interrupted by doors suitable to private chambers or small offices. The doors were curved at the top, an antiquated design element.
Jacen quickened his pace to catch up to Brisha. “That’s a lot of arranging. This would have been lot of money for a company just to forget about.”
“Yes, it is.” Brisha looked agreeable. “But the administrator who arranged it was capable of coming up with the bribes and persuading people to look away. He was, after all, a Sith.”
Brisha brushed off further questions until they’d reached a turbolift near the habitat’s center and ridden it up four floors. It opened onto a circular chamber twenty meters across. The ceiling was fifteen meters above, a curved surface made of a thick layer of transparisteel; scratched so much over the centuries by minor meteorite impacts that it seemed frosted in places, it was still clear enough to show a glorious starfield beyond.
The chamber itself could have been an extension of Dr. Rotham’s quarters. Its walls were lined with shelving, and there were narrow catwalks along the shelving at three-meter height intervals, with black metal staircases providing access between the catwalks. The shelves were thick with books, rolls of flimsi, flickering holograms, statuettes, kinetic art, and even, Jacen saw, the bottled head of a Rodian, its funnel-like snout pointed straight at the turbolift doors through which they’d entered. There was furniture at floor level, mostly long, dark sofas. They looked hard and uninviting, but Jacen recognized them as a modern brand whose surfaces inflated and deflated according to the movements and postures of those who sat upon them.
The room fairly reeked of Force energy—dark side energy. But as strong as it was, this was not the source of all the power, all the dark influence Jacen had been detecting since their arrival. That lay below them, a long way down.
Why does dark side power always seem drawn to the depths? he wondered. Is there something intrinsic that associates it with the deep places, the gorges, the cracks? Even after decades of study, he’d never figured that out.
As Jacen stood in the turbolift doorway, taking in the sensations of Force power like a hungry man sampling scents in a restaurant, Nelani moved into the room’s center, her hand on the hilt of the lightsaber at her belt. She spoke, her voice artificially, mockingly light: “So you’re some sort of Sith.”
Brisha shook her head and moved to stretch out on the nearest sofa, her back supported by one end. The sofa puffed up a little under her weight. She leaned back, her posture negligent, and stretched her arms above her head. “No. If you pay attention to what you’re feeling, you can detect the light side here, as well as the dark side. In these relics, and in me.”
Jacen couldn’t be sure if the last statement was true. Brisha hadn’t manifested any sort of Force energy beyond the energy with which any living being—other than the Yuuzhan Vong—resonated. But he could detect little waves of light-side energy here, intermixed with the dark side.
“So how do you define yourself?” he asked. He moved forward, torn between curiosity—part of him wanted to race among the shelves, looking at each item in turn—and caution.
“A student,” Brisha said. “A student of the Force in all its aspects. And yes, I’ve concentrated on knowledge of the Sith … on utilizing their techniques without greed, without self-interest, to make things better, the same way the best Jedi use the light-side techniques.”
“Then you’ve been corrupted,” Nelani said.
Brisha gave her a pitying look. “You’re so young. Nelani, wielders of the Force all face possible corruption, and many of them give in. It’s just the form that the corruption takes from dark side to light side that differs. The corrupt light-siders become hidebound, so governed by regulation and custom that they can no longer think, no longer feel, no longer adapt—it’s what destroyed the Jedi at the end of the Old Republic.”
“There’s something to that,” Jacen admitted. “You’re not the first person I’ve heard suggest a sort of light-side ossification. But that doesn’t prove that prolonged use of the dark side doesn’t inevitably lead to corruption.”
Brisha sighed, exasperated, and crossed her arms before her. “What is corruption, Jacen? A hard-line light-sider will say that any use of the Force for personal gain is ‘corrupt.’ But someone who mixes altruism with self-interest in very human measures, across a span of decades, isn’t corrupt; he or she is just behaving according to the nature of the species.”
Now she, rather than the items on the shelves, had Jacen’s attention. He moved over to stand before her. “Explain that.”
“I’d love to. But first, some context.”
Jacen heard Ben sigh. Jacen grinned, and Brisha’s smile matched his. Ben was as well behaved as anyone could expect, but his impatience with adult concerns such as providing context for a complicated issue matched that of any adolescent.
“This planetoid,” Brisha said, “was populated long before the miners came. A species of creature settled here. Desiccated bodies I’ve found in the deep places, and signs I’ve seen through the Force, indicate that they were akin to mynocks—silicon-based, invertebrate, subsisting on stellar radiation and silicate materials. The ones here evolved or mutated into a sapient species, over how many millennia I can’t speculate, and developed a society involving cultural hierarchies, stratification as we see in human cultures.”
Jacen nodded. “And the remnant Force energies I’m feeling originated with them?”
“Yes. Their records—for they invented a form of record keeping, a sort of information-imbued sculpture, some forms of which I’ve learned to translate—”
“One of the tassels?”
“Yes, one your expert probably couldn’t read. These creatures’ records indicate that at one point a ruling class exiled a whole subsociety, sealing them within caves and caverns of this asteroid, cutting them off from the stellar energies that sustained them. They lived there, slowly dying of starvation, sustaining themselves poorly off the mineral content of the stones within the asteroid. And it was there that one of their number learned to detect, and then manipulate, the Force. That one eventually became leader of the other exiles, then led them to break out of the asteroid interior and conquer the others.”
“So why aren’t all mynocks now Force-wielding star travelers ruling the galaxy?” Nelani asked.
Brisha shrugged. “I can only guess. In their writing, there’s a reference for the Home, this asteroid, plus mentions of the Return, suggesting that they could not spawn—or divide, as the mynocks do—anywhere but here. If that’s true, then they couldn’t spread too far through the galaxy, and a fatal contagion or similar disaster here could wipe out the entire species within a matter of years. The point, though, is that for quite a while they were a species led by a caste of Force-users, who eventually became a caste of dark side Force-users. They learned techniques related to their mynock natures, such as the ability to leach energy from living beings, including their own kind, at great distances, and associated skills with communicating instantaneously at those distances, a phenomenon the Jedi sometimes experience. They wielded tremendous amounts of dark side energy, and a lot of that energy was eventually radiated into the cavern system that had been their home during the exile, and which had subsequently become a sacred place to them.
“So they died out,” she continued, “and centuries or millennia later, an operation settled here to mine this asteroid belt. And it wouldn’t have begun mining underneath the directors’ habitat, except someone discovered the caverns and all the metal-bearing ore lodes that had been denuded by the mynocks eating all the silicon-based stone out from around them.”
“I can guess some of the rest,” Jacen said.
“Go ahead.”
“Prolonged exposure of the miners to a well of dark side energy led to weird incidents. People seeing things, Force-sensitives manifesting odd abilities. Perhaps channeling your mynocks, behaving like them, and being considered insane.”
“Very good.” Brisha nodded. “The director of that time hushed up the reports, closed down that mine—the rest of the operation in these asteroids was unaffected—and kept things tightly under wraps. He, too, was a Force-sensitive and had been experiencing things, experimenting, acquiring and testing new powers. When this asteroid belt eventually became less profitable as a mining operation, he closed it down, carefully mismanaged things so that the habitat would be left here and forgotten … and then, leaving it behind, he went out into the galaxy, finding the Sith, apprenticing himself, eventually becoming the Sith Master Darth Vectivus.”
“Never heard of him,” Jacen said.
Brisha’s expression showed a little impatience. “That’s because he did no evil. He didn’t attempt to conquer the galaxy, try to wipe out the population of a star system, or start an all-out war with the Jedi. He just existed, learned. Died of old age, surrounded by family and friends.”
Nelani gave her a skeptical look. “A patron of the arts, supporter of charitable causes, and inventor of the cyclonic highball, favorite alcoholic drink of island tourists everywhere.”
“You mock,” Brisha said, “which is fine, but you mock out of ignorance, which is not. You don’t know anything about Darth Vectivus.”
Nelani gave her a frosty smile. “Including whether he ever existed, or whether he was the jolly nice man you describe.”
“And you can only find out the truth by learning.”
“How did he keep from being ruled, and ruined, by greed?” Jacen asked.
“Ah. That’s easy. He developed a strong ethical code before he ever felt any pull from the dark side. He was an adult, a hardheaded businessman with a keenly balanced sense of both profit and fairness, and when temptation whispered in his ear he could ignore it as easily as he could ignore the importunings of equally destructive softheartedness.” She glanced at Nelani as she spoke those last few words, then returned her attention to Jacen. “The Sith who were famous for being bad, Jacen, were the way they were because they were badly damaged men or women to start with. Not because they were Sith. Usually, they were weak, or deluded, or greedy to begin with. Like your grandfather. I knew him, you know.”
Jacen shook his head. “How could I know? I don’t know anything about you.”
“Conceded. I haven’t been using my true name. It’s inconvenient.”
“So you’re saying that you didn’t lure us here to kill us.”
“Correct.”
“And it wasn’t because you’re lonely, or just wanted to show the place off.”
Brisha’s smile turned genuine again. “No.”
“Then why?”
“Because, down in the caverns, where the dark side power is greatest, there is a Sith Lord, and I didn’t think I should face him alone.”
CORELLIAN SPACE, ABOVE TRALUS
Leia sat in the officers’ mess with Admiral Limpan, steaming cups of caf on the gleaming white table between them. “The GA tends to fall into the old trap of thinking of the Corellians as naughty children,” she said. “They’re not. They’re people who have never lost the pioneering spirit, even though their system has been well settled for millennia. Pioneering spirit, pioneering contempt for authority, pioneering disdain for complication or overanalysis. Think of them as children and you inevitably forget how dangerous they can be.”
Limpan said, “That’s surprisingly candid for one who is married to a Corellian.”
“Han is one of the most dangerous people in the galaxy.” Leia did not look at all abashed by this admission. “And I’ve been proud for more than thirty years of the ways he uses his dangerousness—”
A shrill alarm cut off her words. Uniformed officers at the surrounding tables stood, as did Limpan and Leia. “Intrusion alert,” the admiral said. “I’m needed—”
“I’ll stay with you, if I may,” Leia said.
The bridge was only a few dozen meters away, and when Limpan and Leia charged through the blast doors onto the elevated walkway, it was buzzing with activity. Officers shouted reports to one another, and a hologram of nearby space hung above the walkway. It showed the curved orbital line of distantly spaced Galactic Alliance ships and a formation of incoming craft in three groups, the fuzziness and blob-like nature of the formation informing Leia that its exact composition had not yet been determined by the sensors.
“All vessels and ground control, go to battle stations, launch all ready squadrons,” Limpan shouted. “Scramble all squadrons. Recall all scouting vehicles that can arrive here before or within three minutes after the arrival of that formation. All other scouts, initiate fishnet scout patterns on a slow traverse back toward Tralus. Navigation, what’s their course?”
A male officer, also a Duros, in one of the pits below, called up, “Sixty–forty probability Rellidir or Blue Diver.”
“Starfighter control, route one squadron in four down toward Rellidir, two in four toward Blue Diver, one in four remains with each launching ship.” The admiral’s head whipped around as she studied each station below the walkway.
“Admiral,” Leia said, “I have some experience with starfighter coordination, if I can be of any help …”
Limpan nodded absently. “Back through the blast doors we came in, immediate right—that is, to ship’s port—first door, tell Colonel Moyan to confirm your involvement with my aide. And thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” Leia turned to rush back toward the bridge exit. Her words caught a little in her throat. The admiral had just thanked her for volunteering to commit what might end up being an act of treason—for if Leia could help Han survive the battle to come, she would do so, even if she had to act directly against the interests of the Galactic Alliance.
Syal cursed as her Twee cleared the exit doors of Blue Diver hangar and slowly began to accelerate. It still seemed so slow … She and her squadmates, five of them, lined up in a V-formation; her commander, who had been the pilot of the X-wing that bedeviled her during test runs, at point.
Gray One turned to lead the rest of the squadron down into the atmosphere. Syal checked her navigation board, saw that their destination was a point due south of the city of Rellidir. She nodded. The Corellians were coming to take their city back. She didn’t know whether, in her heart, to wish them luck or not.
Panther Flight—Han and Wedge—stayed well toward the rear of the Corellian formation.
Han chafed. It was wrong to be at the rear of any formation. When you were at the rear, spiteful enemy gunners concentrated their fire on you and you got your butt shot off. When you were at the rear, your placement marked you as a slow or indifferent pilot. Even the missile-launching craft were ahead of them; they had to be in place in the skies east of Rellidir before Han and Wedge made their approach.
To make things more irritating, Han still hadn’t heard from Leia. Admittedly, communication between them was going to be tricky and occasional. He glanced at the comm-equipped datapad that he had carefully glued to the Shriek control board once he’d been sealed into the vehicle—its lit screen remained aggravatingly blank.
Worse still, Wedge seemed to be reading his mind. “Don’t get impatient,” he said, his voice so clear in Han’s ears that he could have been sitting in the now empty copilot’s seat. “We’ll get there soon enough.”
“Impatient?” Han added an edge of disbelief to his voice. “Sonny, I’m just sitting here playing sabacc with the droid brains.”
“Good. Getting skinned will make you mean.”
Han grinned. He put on a little thrust, bringing him up slightly ahead of Wedge’s Shriek. “And getting your hatches blown off will make you mean.”
Wedge’s voice became less cordial, more military. “Forward starfighter edges now encountering enemy units.”
“Lucky them,” Han said.
RELLIDIR, TRALUS
This time, Jaina spoke each word with brilliant, individual clarity, making it impossible to misunderstand her. “I. Said. Drop. The. Shields. Over.”
“Negative on that, negative.” The groundside officer’s voice sounded young and a little panicky. “The enemy is less than three minutes away and descending rapidly.”
“Goodness,” Jaina said. “At two seconds to drop the shields and two to raise them again after we’re outside, that gives you, what? More than two and a half minutes to dither and still be safe? Drop the karking shields and let us out!” She pounded a portion of her control boards, unoccupied by buttons or readouts, with her fist.
Her squadron circled above downtown Rellidir, confined by the energy shields defending that portion of the city. Other starfighters were buzzing beneath her, but none of the other squadrons seemed as anxious to leave the shielded area.
“Orders are for all squadrons to stay close at hand and defend the center,” the anonymous officer said. “So you’re to stay put.”
“This is Hardpoint Squadron, the Jedi unit.” Jaina’s voice was a hiss of anger. “We’re not part of your immediate command structure. Let us out and we’ll do a much better job of defending you.”
“That’s a negative, Hardpoint. My orders are specific, and I’m not going to bother the commander right now with your request. Out.”
“Cringing, whimpering, mewling idiot,” Jaina said. “I’ve seen mouse droids with more guts and thud bugs with more brains.”
“I doubt he can hear you, One.” That was Zekk’s voice.
“I know.” Jaina sighed. “I guess we’re stuck here. Hardpoints, maintain your flight patterns and call out when the opportunities start raining down on us.”
She received a chorus of affirmatives but was too discouraged to pay much attention to them.
STAR SYSTEM MZX32905, NEAR BIMMIEL
The three Jedi and Brisha rode the turbolift back down to the bottom level of the habitat.
“That’s something you could have mentioned from the beginning,” Nelani said. “There’s a Sith in the basement. Any other home in the galaxy, that’d be the first thing out of someone’s mouth.”
“What’s his name?” Ben asked.
Brisha shrugged. “He hasn’t revealed himself to me, and so certainly hasn’t told me his name.” Then she grinned, suddenly playful. “Darth something, I expect.”
“There haven’t been any Sith in the galaxy since—what? The death of the last clone of the Emperor?” Jacen asked.
“True and not true,” Brisha said. “In terms of the classic Master-and-apprentice Sith structure, ‘there can be only two,’ you’re correct. I’m not sure I even count the Emperor’s clones as Sith. After all, they didn’t earn their Sith knowledge, didn’t acquire it through sweat and sacrifice; they inherited it like a package of downloaded computer programming. I think that the last Sith were gone when the Emperor and your grandfather died on the same day.
“But,” she continued, “plenty of Sith legacy survived. Individuals who were candidates to become Sith and failed for some reason to achieve full apprenticeship. They knew enough to survive, knew enough to continue learning. One may have learned enough to become a Master.”
The turbolift thudded to a halt at the habitat’s bottom level, the level by which they’d originally entered the structure. Brisha led them from there through a side door into a hexagonal room dominated by a tube. Tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, it was a cylinder of transparisteel marked by a pair of metal rails. The tube was just under two meters in diameter, and suspended above it on a metal brace was a sort of metal-wheeled cart. The cart had six seats up front, a copious cargo area in the middle, and a backward-facing set of six seats at the very end. Its nose was partly within the cylinder, pointed downward, the front set of wheels on the rails.
Ben peered at the tube. It led down past the floor into darkness, but as he watched, the interior surface of the tube began to glow. Meters below, he could see the rocky surface of the asteroid, and the tube continuing into the ground. “This is going to be fun,” he said matter-of-factly.
“The boy shouldn’t go,” Brisha said. “He’s not yet strong enough to face a Sith.”
Ben felt a flash of resentment but kept it from his face. “Tell you what, I’ll just resist all temptation,” he said.
Brisha gave him a severe stare. “The last time I met your father, our parting was not pleasant. He may have had time to forgive … but he certainly wouldn’t forgive me a second time if I managed to get his only child killed.”
“Then I won’t do that, either.”
Jacen climbed the skeletal metal stairs up to the mine car and hopped into the front seat. “He comes with us. That way no one can assault him while he remains behind.”
“If you say so.” Brisha followed and settled into the seat beside him.
In moments Nelani and Ben were in the rear seat.
Brisha flipped a button. Gauges and controls suddenly lit up on the mine car’s control panel. “Atmospheric pressure in the caverns is at point nine five of habitat standard,” she said. “Your ears may pop.” She hit a button. The railcar rolled into the tube, picked up speed, and plunged toward the asteroid surface.
And through it, into blackness.