Into the Void: Star Wars (Dawn of the Jedi) (28 page)

“Enough!” Dal said, holding up a hand. He glanced at Lanoree.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” she said.

“And you have no idea what I’ve seen.” He nodded at his Stargazers.

The violence was sudden and shocking. The Stargazers—a human, a Twi’lek, and a Cathar—drew
blasters and power bows and opened fire on the scientists. Lanoree winced but watched,
unable to close her eyes. The Selkaths danced and juddered as blasts and bolts ripped
into them. Blood splashed, fire sizzled across skin, clothes erupted into
flames. In the space of five heartbeats the scientists were dead, the last one sliding
down the wall to slump across her murdered companions.

Calm
, Lanoree told herself,
calm
, and she sought the Force, readying to use it to save herself. The time must come
soon. She had to stop him here and now, and nothing here would end well.

Dal looked at Lanoree. She could not read his eyes. She felt for her sword, but the
scabbard was empty.
And now me?
she thought. Panic came and she washed it away, seeking the familiar Force to prime
herself for action. But her pain was still raw, and shock stoked the storms and uncertainties
inside her.

“You’d lose,” Dal said. “Maybe you’d take a couple of us with you. But my Stargazers
are ready for you. The first touch on their mind and a blaster would open your skull,
or a power bolt would cook your heart.”

Lanoree breathed long and slow, and the moment stretched on.

“I wish …” Dal said. She looked for weakness but saw none. He was expressing frustration,
not regret.

“Wish what?”

“I wish you’d understood. I wish you could have opened your mind to our past. Your
Force is so
constricting
! You think it gives you power, you’re taught that it’s great, but it binds you. You’re
blinkered
by it, but my eyes are wide open. We see the stars! We have a place in the universe
that was taken from us by the Tho Yor. They stole us away, brought us here, denied
us the future we deserved. And I’m going to take it back.”

“You’ll kill everyone.”

“No,” Dal said, smiling. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Dark matter? Gree technology, Dal? You’re playing with something beyond anything
we can even hope to understand.” Lanoree nodded at the bodies still steaming and twitching
in the corner. “You heard them. Even they said that thing is at the edge of known
science, and edges break away.”

“Gather it up,” Dal said to his Stargazers. He turned his back on Lanoree.

There was another explosion somewhere far away.

“Dal, what have you done?” she asked. She stood slowly, holding
onto a wheeled tool cart for support. The Cathar watched her, his gun at the ready.

“Started a little fight.” Dal turned to face her again. For an instant she felt a
flush of memories, but they were all good ones of her time with her brother. They
did not belong here.

“With whom?”

“I arranged that the Knool Tandor dome would find out about Pan Deep’s continuing
business with the Je’daii, and they
hate
them. Many survivors from the bombed domes live there now. Landed one of my Stargazers
there, and by now she’ll have killed several of their corporations’ presidents with
a Je’daii sword.”

“Where did you get—?” Lanoree asked, but then it fell into place. “Kara.”

“Greenwood Station will be blamed for the murders and its alliance with the Je’daii,”
Dal said, his expression unchanging. “Skirmishes are common on Nox. And it won’t be
the first conflict between Knool Tandor and another dome.”

“Covering your tracks,” Lanoree said.

Dal shrugged. Behind him, his Stargazers had wrapped the device in the sheet. It did
not seem at all heavy, and the Twi’lek held it to her chest. They were waiting for
Dal to leave.

“Just like you did on Tython,” Lanoree continued. One hand delved into her utility
belt beneath the robe, rolling the item she sought between thumb and forefinger. A
tracker, small and sharp. “Leaving your bloodied clothes for me to find. Letting our
family believe you dead.”

“I liked being dead,” Dal said. “It gave me freedom from your constant efforts to
push the Force on me when I never,
ever
wanted it.” Another low rumble and a vibration from above. “Soon I’ll be believed
dead again, and gone from here. Free to pursue my own fate.”

“Dal, you don’t know what—”

“I should kill you.” Dal pulled a blaster from beneath his robe and stood with it
pointing down at the floor. He was incredibly still, like a statue. Even his eyes
seemed to have died.

He’s inside
, Lanoree thought, and she wondered what he was finding in there, what he was thinking
and the decisions he was making,
and she knew that now was the time to push. She would push hard and violently, smashing
aside those mental defenses he might believe he had built against her.

“But I can’t,” Dal said. He turned aside and holstered his blaster.

Lanoree brought out her hand and flicked the tracker, closing her eyes, concentrating,
and guiding it quickly across the room until it attached to Dal’s right boot. Then
she opened her eyes and looked around, but no one had seen anything. Perhaps she had
been lucky. Perhaps.

Dal did not even spare her a final glance. With a single nod at the Cathar he left
the room the same way Lanoree and Tre had entered. The Twi’lek carrying the device
followed, along with the human Stargazer.

The Cathar remained, gun aimed at Lanoree. It was a heavy blaster, and its muzzle
still glowed warm. Lanoree clenched her fingers, readying a Force punch.

“Try,” the Cathar said.

“You know I can’t just stand here and let him leave.”

“You won’t be standing there for long.”

Lanoree twitched her finger and a tool flipped from the wide table, clanging against
the wall. The Stargazer didn’t even blink.

“He doesn’t want to hear you die,” the Cathar said.

“That’s kind of my brother.”

“He
is
kind. The only kind man I’ve ever met.”

Lanoree glanced at the huddled, bloody bodies in the corner.

“They were unkind,” the Cathar said. “They hid down here instead of looking to the
stars.”

She sensed movement from the other side of the room. She did not look, but she knew
that Tre was stirring.

“He’s going to kill everyone,” she said. “Once he initiates that device, the dark
matter will form a black hole and everyone in the system—”

“He knows that won’t happen. The stars call. They tell him.”

“Oh, so the stars speak to him,” Lanoree said, laughing softly. “And he’s not mad?”

The Cathar blinked slowly, but she was not even putting a chink in his convictions.
Come on, Tre
, she thought.

Tre groaned. The Cathar glanced his way. Lanoree Force-shoved with everything she
had. Tools and loose components rattled across the table and flew at the Stargazer,
a cabinet tipped and bounced across the floor, a hail of bolts and snipped wires became
a stinging rain that raked across his chest and face, ripping skin and blinding him.

She ducked down and Force-punched, shoving the Cathar back against the wall beside
the door. His blaster fired, the shot smashing a hole in the ceiling. Molten material
and rock fragments showered down. Then the Stargazer clasped at his belt, weeping
blood from ruptured eyes, and a look of ecstasy broke across his face.

“Oh, no,” Lanoree muttered. She looked at Tre and saw that he was barely conscious,
and with every shred of strength and effort she had of the Force, she reached for
him and dragged him halfway across the room toward her. His eyes opened comically
wide as he slid without being touched, and as he reached her and she clasped his clothing
Lanoree shouted, “Bomb!”

The explosion was deafening, shattering, assaulting her body and mind and senses,
and she felt herself thrown around like a snowflake in a storm.

With her parents it was the arts. Her mother wrote the most beautiful poetry, and
her father was a sculptor, his work venerated all across Masara. But Lanoree’s calling
lay in science and alchemy, and how the Force could be used for both. She discovers
that at Anil Kesh. And she revels in it.

Master Dam-Powl shows her the way. The Cathar Temple Master has taught at Anil Kesh
for sixteen years, and at the end of their first long night of discussion, she tells
Lanoree that she has the potential to be her greatest pupil.

“Do you say that to everyone?” Lanoree asks, proud but suspicious.

“I’ve said it to no one before,” Dam-Powl replies.

Over the next few days the studies begin, and Lanoree is amazed. She immerses herself
in Dam-Powl’s instruction, and in doing so her troubles with Dal fade away. They don’t
disappear completely—there is always a shadow and a sense of impending change in her
life—but she sleeps better than she has since leaving home, feels happier, and
realizes that her mind has always been too focused on her brother. Dam-Powl makes
her understand that this is
her
Great Journey as well. And though Lanoree cannot give up on Dal, for the first time
she places herself before him.

With the Chasm beneath them, Anil Kesh has a different feel from all the other temples.
Every moment there is rich, filled with potential, and edged with a sense of danger.
Lanoree has never felt so alive. It is as if the cells of her body are charged, her
mind on fire. When she mentions this, Dam-Powl smiles and nods.

“We balance on the precipice of knowledge,” she says. “The unknown lies below us,
always threatening to draw us down or rise up and swallow us. The Force is charged
and powerful here. Anyone familiar can feel and sense it, but if you’re
powerful
with the Force …” She grimaces and presses a fist to her forehead. “Sometimes it
hurts. But it’s a hurt worth weathering.”

Dam-Powl introduces her to sciences that Lanoree has only ever heard or read about.
She knows of Je’daii who are disturbed by some of what occurs at Anil Kesh, but she
listens to the Master wide-eyed and with an open mind. She finds plenty to concern
her but so much more that fascinates. She’s aware of Dam-Powl’s watching her carefully,
taking stock. She is eager to please.

In the storage pens in one of the temple’s supporting arms are the altered animals.
Taken from the Abyss of Ruh, a dangerous place deep in the Rift six hundred kilometers
to the east, these strange and fearsome creatures have been genetically manipulated
using the Force to serve the Je’daii. Lanoree is amazed at the changes in them—none
are hurt or damaged, and it’s as if their alterations are the true wish of evolution.

Dam-Powl takes her through a network of laboratories. In one, weapons are altered
and adapted using Force-driven metallurgy. In another, weapons specific to the Force
are being tested. Chemicals are changed and transmuted; solids have their structures
re-formed; and the wild power of the Chasm beneath them is harnessed in thick-walled
compounds, dancing and flashing, striking and snapping like a living thing.

It is in the last room that Dam-Powl shows her that Lanoree knows her future lies.

“The talents needed for this are deep,” the Je’daii Master says, “the risks great.
But the rewards are huge. I’m going to teach you.”

Lanoree stares at the two Je’daii in the center of the room. Before each of them is
a shape. Something that should not live, yet it flexes and breathes. A thing that
should not be, yet here it is.

“Wrought from their own flesh and blood,” Dam-Powl says, “and nurtured using the Force.”

Lanoree is terrified and thrilled. She has heard of this, but never thought it was
true. Never suspected she would see it for herself.

“The alchemy of flesh,” she whispers. Despite her fear, she is eager to begin.

“Tell me you can get us out of here.” Tre’s voice. His urgency pulled her quickly
back to her senses. That, and the stench of sewage and death.

Everything ached, and in a few places she hurt terribly. Her head still throbbed as
if someone were jumping up and down on it. She smelled blood, and knew it was her
own. But Tre was far from gentle as he grabbed her beneath the armpits and tried to
haul her upright. Lanoree shoved him back and sent him stumbling into the shattered
table.

She looked around and tried to take stock. It looked bad.

The Cathar Stargazer had exploded his suicide vest, demolishing the wall and bringing
down most of the ceiling. The doorway was blocked by torn metal and smashed stone,
and fractured rock had fallen behind it. The rest of the ceiling was spattered with
his blood, a great swath of it burned black by the bomb’s fire flash. The remainder
of the large room was a mess—scientists’ bodies scattered from the corner where they’d
been massacred; tools and components everywhere; the large central table ruptured
and splintered. If she hadn’t pulled Tre behind there with her, they’d have both died.

There was a wide crack in one wall, and through this seeped a steady stream of effluent.
A pipe or chute had been ruptured somewhere, and the leak was speeding up rather than
slowing down.

“Look,” Tre said, pointing. “Another door there.” He was almost shouting, and blood
ran from his ears. Lanoree also heard the fading
whine from her tortured eardrums, but that was the least of her worries.

“That Cathar’s bomb can’t have done that,” she said, pointing at the rent in the wall.
It was on the opposite side of the room from the doorway the explosion had blocked.

“There was another explosion when I was trying to wake you,” Tre said. “Far away,
up there. To feel it down here it must have been big. What’s happening? What have
we started?”

“A war. And Dal started it. Come on. We’ve got to stop him leaving Greenwood Station.”

“I feel sick,” Tre said. “It stinks. My head hurts. I think my skull might be—”

“I’ll break it myself,” Lanoree said. “Come on! Help me with this door.” She searched
the room for her sword, knowing she would not find it, mourning its loss. Tem Madog
himself had forged that sword for her. She’d rather have lost an arm.