Into the Void: Star Wars (Dawn of the Jedi) (32 page)

Once there, what will Dal do? She cannot know. Perhaps he doesn’t know either, and
in that doubt might be her one chance to win him back.

But he’s a murderer
.

She tries to ignore the thought. She will confront that fully when she finds him,
and decide what to do then.

Confused, conflicted, Lanoree finally leaves the plains of slashing grass and chases
her brother into the first rolling dunes of the Red Desert.

At dawn the next day, Lanoree shivers awake from a dream.

She is down in the darkness beneath the Red Desert. The weight of the Old City hangs
around her, crushing her from all directions with its enigmatic history and a million
untold tales. She is in a network of elaborate caverns, all of them illuminated by
flickering firelight burning somewhere out of sight. The walls and ceilings are beautifully
inlaid with pictograms of the timeless Gree, and though she is certain they tell of
long-forgotten histories, she cannot perceive the true stories. It’s as if even with
the truth laid out before her, she can never understand what happened here
.

And then the blood spites appear: soundless, deadly, batlike things the size of her
head with clasping tendrils and dripping teeth. She has no hope of fighting them off.
They circle her in the confined spaces, darting in and biting chunks from her face,
her neck, her waving arms. She feels no pain, but her blood flows. She cries out for
help
.

Her brother watches from the shadows
.

Lanoree sits up and stares at the wide, star-speckled sky. The dream is already fading,
as most dreams do, and she recognizes the blood spites from the few times she has
read about them and how she
imagines them to be. She has never seen any holos or pictures. In her dream they are
monsters, but the real beast merely watched.

It’s a chilling sensation. As she rekindles her fire and looks for food and water,
using survival skills taught to her by her parents from a young age, the idea of Dal
as a monster does
not
fade. Her dream spills into waking hours. Or perhaps in dreams, she could merely
see the truth.

She has only slept for a short time, and she hurries to pick up Dal’s trail again.
Trying to recall maps and legends of the Red Desert, she calculates that the Old City
might be eighty kilometers farther to the south. And though she has lost Dal’s physical
trail, she is now certain that the ruin is his destination.

Lanoree has always been fit, and she starts to run out across the larger dunes and
into the Red Desert. She runs for ten hours, pausing now and then in areas of ragged
plant growth to dig for water. She overturns rocks and eats bugs and ants, and at
one stage she scares some desert wraths from a recent kill. The meat is rich and tough,
and she eats it raw.

The Red Desert is beautiful and daunting, barren and silent. It is a place that would
inspire poets and madmen, and she does her best to remain inwardly focused as well
as outwardly alert. It would be easy to lose oneself out here. Her sense of who she
is remains firm, and there is a familiarity that gives her great comfort—the Force,
strong in every sun-bleached rock and grain of sand.

Just before dusk, she sees the first ruin. It is a tumbled wall at the base of a gentle
slope, little more than a pile of blocks half-buried by shifting desert sands. But
it is obviously not a natural formation. And the cold chill the sighting provokes
convinces her that she is almost there.

Lanoree climbs the slope, and toward its summit she sees footprints. Pausing, she
looks around, but Dal is nowhere in sight. She places her hand, fingers splayed, across
one boot print in the sand and closes her eyes. But the sands here are hot and ever
moving and imbued with a timeless history the breadth of which startles her upright.

“Dal, we shouldn’t be here.” It is the first time she has spoken aloud since leaving
Anil Kesh three days before. Nothing answers.

Reaching the top of the hill she emerges into the last of the day’s sunlight once
again. A kilometer to the west, the sun sinking into its ruin as if that place has
always been its home, lie the sprawling remains of the Old City.

Wishing desperately that everything could be different, Lanoree walks toward it.

As she enters the shadow of the Old City’s largest pyramid, the first blood spite
attacks.

In the Peacemaker, pursuing Dal and his Stargazers past Malterra’s orbit and toward
Sunspot, Tre Sana was quieter than Lanoree had ever known him. But she did not question
his silence. They had seen terrible things, witnessed a tragedy of shattering proportions.
And though she knew of his past as a bad man, Tre’s shock could not be feigned.

The tracker seemed to be working well, and Lanoree had plotted the projected course
of Dal’s ship three times. Each time the destination came out the same—Sunspot. And
she thought she knew why. The incredible device had been built for the Stargazers
by the scientists of Pan Deep, but to charge it with its driving force Dal had to
visit Sunspot. The mines there were deep and incredibly dangerous, but the rewards
for working there were great. Exotic elements that could be used for fuel or weapons.
Crystals that sang with Force power. And perhaps, exposed to the correct technology,
a touch of dark matter.

Dal’s ship had an eight-million-kilometer head start. Lanoree had tried plotting a
more direct course to Sunspot, but following Dal would be the fastest route. She had
pushed her Peacemaker to its greatest speeds, aware that the modifications she had
commissioned made it one of the fastest ships in the system. Yet Dal remained out
of reach, matching her speed, forging the fastest route to meet Sunspot on its quick
orbit of their star, Tythos.

Settled into their route, Lanoree initiated a contact with Master Dam-Powl. It took
a while for the signal to be acknowledged, and a while longer for the chime of an
incoming connection.

“Lanoree,” Dam-Powl said, and even before the flatscreen snowed in to show her face,
Lanoree knew that the Master knew.

“I can’t believe he did it,” Lanoree said, “just to cover his tracks. To make others
think he was dead.”

“Perhaps there’s more to it than that,” the Je’daii Master said. She looked tired
and drawn, and Lanoree could only imagine the conversations she had been having with
the Je’daii Council. The diplomatic fallout with Nox, the efforts to calm a volatile
situation … but that was beyond Lanoree. She had to stay focused.

“What more?” she asked.

“He must have shared rare knowledge with Pan Deep for them to make his device. To
ensure his uniqueness, he’d have to kill them all.”

“But the whole of Greenwood Station?” Lanoree said. “It’s monstrous.”

“Not everyone died,” Dam-Powl said. “Some transports got away before the final strike.”

“How many were lost?” Lanoree asked quietly.

“So many that the numbers mean little.” The Master sighed heavily, then she seemed
to gather herself. “So. What progress have you made?”

“Dal and the Stargazers are traveling to Sunspot, I believe to arm the device. I have
a trace on him and I’m following, but I’m hours behind.”

“You can’t get in range to destroy his ship?”

And kill my brother?
Lanoree thought, but she could not share that thought. “No, Master. Whoever is funding
his madness bought him quite a special ship. I can’t read its signature, but it wouldn’t
surprise me to discover it’s Je’daii.”

“Stolen?”

“I can tell you more soon.”

“Sunspot and Malterra approach each other in their orbits,” Dam-Powl said, frowning.
“You know what happens once those planets draw close. Magnetic interference, space
storms. Any space travel in their region will be impossible.”

“Then he’s timed this to the heartbeat,” Lanoree said. “He’s planned
everything
in great detail. I’ll have to catch him on Sunspot.”

“Do anything you have to, Lanoree.”

“Of course.”

“Anything.” The Master’s gaze softened.

Lanoree did not reply for a moment, and the silence between them was loaded. Then
she thought of that madness of Dal’s that she had barely touched down in Pan Deep,
and how all-consuming it had felt.

“Be strong, Lanoree. I know you are. But the responsibility is heavy, the price of
failure might be unimaginable. So be
strong
. Experiences like this, such tragedies, can be what makes a good Je’daii great. May
the Force go with you.”

Lanoree nodded and broke the communication. She remained sitting in the cockpit for
some time, thinking things through, saddened and afraid. And she surprised herself
by finding comfort in Tre’s presence.

Her Twi’lek companion came to sit in the seat beside her. The last time they’d traveled
like this there had been a lightness to him, a protective bluster. No more. The silence
was heavy, yet neither of them broke it. Lanoree checked the ship’s systems and kept
an eye on the scanner, always aware of him sitting silently alongside.

It was a long while after her communication with Dam-Powl that Tre spoke at last.

“I feel sick.”

“As do I,” she said. “Whatever Dal has become I can’t believe he would—”

“No, I mean …” Tre trailed off and then vomited copiously between his feet. Ironholgs
crackled in alarm, and Lanoree climbed from her seat and surveyed the mess. The ship’s
support systems sprang into overdrive, but the air filters could not work fast enough
to swallow the stink.

“Oh,” Lanoree said.

Tre was panting and wiping his mouth, sweating, shivering. “S-sorry.”

“Nox,” she said. “We breathed too much of its atmosphere.”

“You?”

“I feel fine.”
Do I?
she thought. She assessed herself and found nothing of concern, save her mixed emotions
about Dal. But there were still two days’ traveling until they reached Sunspot. If
Tre sickened, there was nothing she could do but practice the medical skills she had
learned at Mahara Kesh. And if he died, there was the air lock.

But
she
could not fall ill. She only hoped that Tre’s sickness was a result of Nox’s poisonous
atmosphere, not something more insidious he might have caught. If at any point he
appeared contagious, she might have to take action.

She looked away from Tre for a moment at the cockpit screens. The signal from Dal’s
ship was still on the tracker, still eight million kilometers ahead of them. She could
not take any risks.

But she knew she could never throw Tre from the air lock alive.

“Use my cot to rest,” she said. “I’ll clean it up. Drink plenty of water.”

Tre did not argue. He pushed past her, lay on her cot, and slept almost instantly.

Lanoree looked down at the vomit spread across the cockpit floor. “I wish you had
arms,” she said to Ironholgs. The droid grated something that sounded like a chuckle.

Over the next two days Tre did not grow any worse, but neither did he improve. He
ate small amounts of food, but more often than not brought it back up. He drank plenty
of water. Shivering and sweating in Lanoree’s cot, his sleep was troubled, and his
dream mumblings were incoherent and disturbing.

Lanoree spent most of the time in her cockpit seat, keeping track of Dal’s ship and
catching brief, uncomfortable naps. Her dreams were vague and unpleasant. She woke
more than once with the idea that something was flapping silently about her head,
slashing with barbed tendrils and seeking her blood.

And she had one dream where she watched from outside the system as Tython itself,
and Tythos, and then every planet and moon that orbited it, was swallowed to nothing.
Billions of lives and loves and dreams wiped out almost in the blink of an eye.

As they approached Sunspot at last, she accessed the ship’s computers to remind herself
about the damned place. She knew that environmentally it was even more unwelcoming
and harsh than Nox. Her research reminded her how much so.

Sunspot was the first planet of the system. Its orbit sometimes took it as close as
forty-eight million kilometers from Tythos. It was considered
a solid planet, yet much of its surface was in constant turmoil, volcanoes and quakes
changing its landscape almost from day to day. Its more settled areas were mainly
at the poles, and it was here that the scattered mining communities were located.
It was perhaps the harshest inhabited environment in the Tythan system, yet the rewards
for the miners were huge. Most only lasted one or two seasons before leaving the planet
and vowing never to return. Around 10 percent of those who went to Sunspot seeking
their fortunes died there. It was a hungry planet, and though it gave, it also took
as much as it could.

It was also a curiosity in the system, because it orbited counter to every other planet.
There were those who speculated that it was a rogue planetoid, tumbled into Tythos’s
gravity well in the distant past. This raised some startling ramifications, and three
thousand years ago there had been a series of exploratory missions visiting the planet,
searching for any signs of previous habitation. But none had ever been found: no trace
of civilizations, no ruins, no evidence that any sort of life had ever flourished
there. Sunspot was a dead planet that breathed the white-hot breath of molten rock,
and the rest of the system regarded it merely as a resource.

Even approaching Sunspot’s dark side, the violence of its surface was obvious. It
radiated a steady glow from a fine network of volcano ranges and magma lakes and rivers,
and the shadows of noxious gas clouds the size of a continent filtered the light,
turning it an almost attractive pinkish hue.

“Southern pole,” Lanoree said. Dal’s ship had slowed considerably and was entering
the atmosphere, swinging around to approach Sunspot’s south pole from the planet’s
dark side. She had already calculated a similar path, and the Peacemaker’s computer
was taking them in.