6
SULLUST
THE ONLY PLANET IN THE SULLUST SYSTEM
10,000 LIGHTYEARS FROM THE DAGOBAH SYSTEM
The battle ahead of him played out in silence, and stretched out for a hundred kilometers. Ageless watched, hands on his controls, ready to flee should the participants notice him. Before him was the obsidian planet of Sullust, alone amid a sea of stars. The planet’s only moon was soon to peek out from behind it, and its sun, which was ahead and to Ageless’s port, had half the planet framed in light, leaving the dark half facing him. The nightside of Sullust wasn’t totally in darkness, however, for there were hundreds of tiny rivers of lava etched across its surface like red varicose veins, weaving endlessly into large seas of lava. Also, directly above the nightside, was the battle. Ageless hadn't known he was going to come upon any such sight, but here were two Star Destroyers and a number of smaller capital ships maneuvering in a pincer, boxing in a smattering of Rebel forces and blanketing the entire area in an interdictor field so that none could escape into hyperspace.
It was the interdictor field that first alerted Ageless that something was amiss in the Sullust system. He'd been on his way to the Dagobah system when he was pulled out of hyperspace early, his navicomputer and sensors reading a spatial anomaly that could destroy the Dathomirian Curse, and so his hyperdrive automatically reverted him back into realspace.
He knew the problem was an interdictor field as soon as he saw the battling ships.
Interdictor fields were contained, invisible bubbles of energy that sent distortions throughout realspace, and which reverberated into hyperspace as gravity shadows and mass shadows. Hyperdrives were built so that they could not take a ship into hyperspace if there was a viable threat. It was a precautionary measure to ensure you didn’t collide with a supernova or black hole when you set out across the galaxy.
Interdictor fields were a neat piece of tech, and a good way to trick hyperdrives into leaving ships as sitting targets.
Ageless looked out across the slashing turbolaser fire, lances of green and red light cutting across the vacuum and occasionally hitting their targets. In order to make safe passage to Dagobah, he had to come this way—there were no other tried and true hyperlanes, not this far into the Outer Rim. So now his only option was to switch off all power, which he had, and let the Curse drift inexorably toward the battlefield, hopefully unseen. He leaned back in his seat, but he did not relax. Running through breathing exercises helped calm his nerves, but he kept his eyes open as he tracked every ship on passive sensors.
The Curse sailed silently into the battlefield. Turbolaser fire passed both above and below him. Distantly, he saw flares of superheated gases, which marked the explosive end to an X-Wing or TIE fighter. He checked to make sure his shields were ready to go up at a moment’s notice.
Behind him, the door swished open, and R-3PO silently joined him in the cockpit.
“Hey, Threepio. Just in time to join the fun. Come have a seat, you can help me monitor the sensor board.”
“Of course, sir.” The droid slid into the seat behind him and pulled up a sensor screen. “Arfour wants to assure you he has successfully cooled our exhaust. Our ionized trail ought not be detectable except by those ships coming up directly behind us, someone directly in our wake.”
“Excellent.” He spoke into the intercom. “Good work back there, Arfour. Stand by to dump spare coolant, just in case we need to activate the engines and go hot at a moment’s notice.”
The astromech sent a dutiful chirp.
Ageless and the protocol droid sat in silence for a moment while they coasted between the battle. The planet Sullust grew larger. At first, it had only been the size of a fist at arm’s length, but now it was closer to a dinner plate. A piece of oxidized debris panged off the viewport, looked like a piece of a starfighter, a chunk of someone’s etheric rudder. Now, from starboard, there loomed the two Star Destroyers—his ping systems marked them as the Defiant and the Unyielding. Defiant was spearheading this assault, moving fast towards a pair of Nebulon-Bs, which looked to have gotten themselves ambushed after leaving the nearby space station Amaxiova-1.
Ageless looked at the trajectories of each of the Nebulons. He backtracked those trajectories to guess where they had come from. If I had to guess, I’d say they did a slingshot around Sullust’s moon…yep, there’s the periapsis point…so if we reverse that trajectory…yep, there’s the confirmation. The Rebels had most likely been hiding on the dark side of the moon, performing a bit of spying on Sullust, perhaps even planning an attack against Amaxiova-1, but something went wrong. The Imperials came up behind them, flushed them out. The Rebs tried to leave but the interdictor fields kept them from jumping to lightspeed, trapping them around the planet. If they flew off into space they wouldn’t even have the planet as cover. So, they had tried to run, tried to keep the planet between themselves and the Star Destroyers, but they just couldn’t manage to create enough distance.
Now their only hope is a head-on fight, wreak enough havoc, possibly target one of the Star Destroyers’ interdictor field generators and take it out, then escape.
Ageless had seen too many of these exact types of ambushes before, performed to perfection by highly-disciplined, intensely-trained Imperial naval crews. The Rebels would not be winning this one, nor would any of them escape.
As if to underscore this, the exhaust flares of dozens of escape pods suddenly winked in and out of existence, heading away from the Rebel ships. Most of them wouldn’t even make it down to the planet’s surface. And even if they do, where will they go? It’s a volcanic planet, completely under the control of the Empire.
The Dathomirian Curse continued to pass through, so far undetected, or else ignored as a piece of asteroid or other space debris.
“We’ve got a visual on an Imperial ship,” R-3PO said sharply. “Distance one hundred kilometers and closing. It’s behind us, just entered the system. Signal appears to be Arquitens-class vessel. It is pinging the system, declaring itself to be the Adjudicator. Bearing zero-one-nine by positive one-two-seven. Reciprocal heading, moving at five hundred meters per second steady.”
Ageless pulled up his scopes and marked the contact on screen. “Copy Arquitens-class vessel. Marking it now. Keep an eye on it.”
“Yes, sir.”
A squadron of TIEs was coming from the Adjudicator, scattering like a cloud of gnats and encircling the Rebel starfighters. Ageless activated the Curse’s thrusters but kept them on low-impulse power, taking the Curse away from the incoming fighters.
Flashfire battles like this one were becoming more common. The Rebels had defied (and some would say defiled) the Empire when they destroyed the Death Star, and that had redoubled the efforts of Palpatine, Vader, and all their mighty forces. The Empire was pushing hard to either triple or quadruple the output of planets like Sullust, which produced the much-needed ore to build starship hulls, munitions, weapons and armor. But that overreach might actually be creating an inequality of Imperial citizens. Ageless had read articles that were purged from the HoloNet, but were reprinted secretly on the UnderNet, which told of the Empire’s hasty output, placing so many people under strain to pump out more war machines that even Humans were beginning to feel like slaves. If this continued, Ageless calculated, more Imperial citizens could turn sympathetic to the Rebellion.
Just like the Faith-index predicted, he thought idly.
It was the ongoing tipping of scales. One moment the galaxy welcomed Palpatine’s unification of the galactic worlds into an Empire and the dissolution of the archaic Jedi Order, the next minute they were fearful of Palpatine’s iron grip on every system. Then came a Rebellion that caused violence and fear and uncertainty and made people long for the safety and comfort of the Emperor’s unification. But then the Death Star destroyed Alderaan and people once again questioned the Emperor’s methods. Then the Empire became even crueler to those who sympathized with the Rebellion and that sowed fear, which then made the Rebellion seem not such a bad alternative again.
Back and forth, back and forth, people just keep swaying like seaweed. But in the moment, Ageless had to admit, the Rebels seemed to have caught the mood. One of the last reports the Imperial Intelligence Service had shown him concerning the Rebellion’s growth indicated a sizable uptick in recruitment on sixty-two key worlds, some of those being among the Core Worlds.
That isn’t nothing, he thought, watching the first Nebulon-B exploding slowly from the stern. The superheated gases created expansive, almost beautiful light, which swelled and plumed as it rippled towards the front of the ship and broke it apart. It looks like a coriioka tree, when grandmother would light them on fire during Mid-Year Festival. They came apart just like that, exploding quickly from the bottom to the top. More escape pods were fired, and half of those were snatched up by tractor beams. Those poor souls would soon face the torture chambers of Imperial prisons.
Now Sullust was so close that it practically filled his whole viewport. The Dathomirian Curse sailed silently through the battle. The Curse got painted once by targeting computers, and Ageless watched his computer screen for thirty tense seconds before finally some TIE pilot deemed them unimportant to the conflict, and carried on looking for other targets.
After the TIE flew away, he said, “That pilot will announce our whereabouts to either the Defiant or the Unyielding. Imperial protocol says he has to, even if we're non-participants. That means one of them will be searching for us with a tractor beam, see if we had anything to do with these Rebels being here.” He shook his head. “We can’t get taken in. The Service believes I’m still on Phaeda, awaiting their decision on whether or not to kill Gaffrey. They can’t know I’m out here, or what business I’m on.”
“Shall I tell Arfour to cue up the engines?” asked R-3PO.
“Not yet. There’s some debris up ahead. I'm going to activate our orbital maneuvering thrusters to get us over to those.” He pointed to a cluster of hull components, pieces stripped away from a dead ship’s fuselage. “We’ll hide in the shadows, let the fighting go on without us.”
In under three minutes, it was done. The Curse extended her landing gear and activated the magnets to attach to a twenty-meter-long stretch of scorched hull. A Rebel officer that had been vented out into space was out here in the vacuum with them, dead, the laws of physics demanding that he slowly orbit the large chunk of debris forever, or at least until someone or something pushed him away.
Ageless watched the body tumble slowly in the void, and he knew that, had things gone differently for him in any number of past battles, that same fate could have been his. It still might be.
He went through more breathing exercises. Not the ones the Nest instructors had taught him, but the ones his grandmother ingrained in him.
The hull chunk the Curse was attached to spun very slowly through space, changing Ageless’s view from Sullust’s nightside to the raging battle every ninety seconds or so. There came a mid-battle surprise: a small CR-90 ship came from around the moon suddenly and turned on its sublight engines to jump just beside the remaining Nebulon-B, to lend it a hand. Ageless thought, Where the blazes was that thing hiding all this time?
Wherever it came from, it fought like hell, firing proton torpedoes and launching more X-Wing, A-Wing and Y-Wing squadrons.
Ageless watched over the next fifteen minutes as wave after wave of bombers attacked the ulcerous-looking bumps on the belly of the Unyielding, firing missiles and proton torpedoes in stubborn defiance of the Empire. Eventually, there came a small pulse of light, but it soon swelled into a much bigger explosion, and suddenly all sensors showed a weakening in the interdictor field.
“Sir, they’ve managed to take out one of the interdictor field generators,” R-3PO announced happily. “It may be possible to go to lightspeed soon.”
“I see that," he said, flipping the fuel cycling switch and checking his trouble-board. "Too late for most of them, though."
Indeed, the CR-90 was just then obliterated by concentrated turbolaser fire from the Defiant, and the few remaining Rebel starfighters were scrambling back into the launch bay of the last Nebulon, which was already turning around to set a course to escape. It was the very last survivor of the conflict. The Rebels had been decimated, but one sliver of this task force just might survive. They just might make it.
“Should we make ready to depart, sir?”
“Hang on. I want to see this.”
Ageless watched as the Nebulon pushed hard, all engines flaring blue as it headed out-system. The two Star Destroyers and the Adjudicator were all pounding away at its shields.
“Come on…come on,” he whispered.
What was he rooting for? The underdog? Why?”
The Nebulon was gaining distance while the Star Destroyers were struggling to maneuver. The Imperials had been going along a different course, and their yaw was too wide, and it took too long to accomplish, whereas the Nebulon was much more nimble. Speed might just save her here.
“Come on,” said Ageless.
“Come on,” said R-3PO just behind him.
Ageless looked back at the droid. If he didn’t know any better, he would’ve thought he saw true anima in those golden photoreceptors, something akin to hope.
The Nebulon was gaining speed. Energy signature showed it was building up power to its hyperdrive systems. The Star Destroyers were converging on it. The Adjudicator was coming at it from starboard. Then, all at once, a volley of turbolaser fire hit the Nebulon and set off a chain reaction. It happened an instant before its drives flared up, and it rocketed to lightspeed and was gone in a split-second.
“Do you think they made it?” asked Ageless.
“That last shot seemed to have ruptured something critical. My guess is the reactor was nicked.”
“Only nicked?”
“If it had been hit any harder it would have completely obliterated the Nebulon. The odds of a ship making it into and out of hyperspace with that kind of structural damage is approximately eight thousand two hundred twenty-two to one.”
Ageless recalled the words of Gannick Pash, a fellow soldier from his darktrooper days. Pash was a Corellian, and there was a saying among some Corellians about how it was easy to beat the odds as long as you don’t know what they were. Where was Pash these days? Probably dead. Pash had been in the Imperial Forces for a long, long time. He was among the first recruits to join once the Kamino cloning facilities became overworked, and the Empire had started phasing out clones in favor of natural-born soldiers. It was believed that actual Imperial citizens would fight harder to preserve order, having responded to Imperial propaganda on most key worlds. It also didn’t help that the Rebels were just starting to perform small sabotage operations in and around cloning facilities. If not for that, Imperial recruitment might never have opened up for a Zabrak.
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Pash had eagerly joined after one of his best friends was killed when the Empire attacked a secret Rebel base on Corellia. Ageless remembered him as one of the few soldiers that did not judge him for being a Zabrak in a Human-dominated military. Indeed, Pash had socked a few guys in the jaw for making denigrating remarks about Ageless’s horns and his upbringing on Dathomir. Pash was a reminder that not all the Imperials were bad, they just believed what they had been told.
Like I did.
“The fleet is beginning to break up, sir.”
Ageless snapped out of the trip down Memory Lane, and looked at the Unyielding and the Defiant as they recovered their starfighter squadrons and began to turn out-system. Perhaps following that Nebulon’s final trajectory. Radio communications had been jammed by the Star Destroyers throughout the battle, but now that blanket was lifting. Comms chatter returned, both civvie and military channels could be picked up.
“Arfour,” he said into the intercom. “Prepare to switch off magnetic grapnels. Three…two…one…detach.” There was a soft thump as the landing gear detached from the giant hull shard they had been hiding behind, and now the Dathomirian Curse went drifting away. The dead Rebel sailed past his viewport once more. Ageless watched the corpse for a moment, then made a sudden decision. “Arfour, prepare to open cargo bay doors.”
“What are you doing, sir?” asked R-3PO.
“Just because he’s dead doesn’t mean he hasn’t earned some dignity.”
Arfour opened the cargo bay door and used his thrusters to fly out into space, then grabbed the Rebel’s corpse with a handler arm and brought it onboard.
As they made their way across Sullust’s nightside, the navicomputer suggested a slingshot orbit around the planet. Ageless moved at the prescribed speed to complete the maneuver and began setting a course for Dagobah—the last stretch of their journey into a dark and forgotten corner of the galaxy. Once it was all done, he asked R-3PO if he could handle it from here.
“Of course, sir,” the droid said eagerly, sitting in the captain’s seat. “I remember which switches to flip once the navicomputer is finished calculating the coordinates. As long as there are no more surprises, I shouldn’t think it longer than five minutes before we make the jump.”
He patted the droid on the shoulder. “Thanks, Threepio.”
Ageless took one last look at Sullust. He wondered what the Rebels had been doing here. Was it a feint? Were they trying to disrupt ore shipments from the planet? Fleet that size...seems like they were staging something. Or preparing to.
Suddenly, he felt a ripple across his body. The hairs on his arms and legs stood on and end and he thought he heard a whisper. Not the Dark Voice this time, thank the gods, but there was a feminine quality to it. He winced because it felt like someone had his brain in a vise. He shook it off. The feeling was there and gone, with absolutely no aftereffects, not even an echo of that voice. But when he looked back at Sullust, for just a second he thought he saw the flashes of a Rebel fleet there, and a great battle. His heartrate spiked in horror, and he heard thousands of voices crying out as one. Then he blinked and it was gone.
What in the blazes…?
He hove a sigh, and realized he was sweating.
The whole effect was like that of a dream, and the emotions stayed with him a moment, following him away from the cockpit. And again, just like a dream, he felt he had briefly understood the context of what he’d seen. Somehow, he knew that what he had just seen had been the future, and that he was a part of it somehow. But even as he returned to his quarters he felt the effects slipping away. Just like after a nightmare, when one is grateful to feel the negative emotions finally bleeding away, Ageless let out another heavy sigh.
This had been happening, on and off. The most recent had been when he stood near the ocean on Phaeda and confronted Gaffrey. What is happening to me?
Tired though he was, he knew he would not be able to immediately fall asleep, so he pulled the covering off of the one-and-a-half-meter-tall chrome droid in the corner of his room and activated it. The TRD-5 was a trainer droid, capable of increasing or decreasing its height, dexterity and strength to mimic those of different species. It could even attach more arms to simulate many-armed creatures.
“Greetings, Master,” it said. “What are we on today? Preset series seven, I believe?”
“Let’s go for series nine instead.”
The TRD-5 tilted its head quizzically. “Are you certain?”
“I’m certain.” He quickly pulled off his clothes and slipped into a training suit that would absorb his sweat.
“Very well. Which species ought I simulate?”
“Surprise me.”
“Trandoshan it is, then.”
The TRD-5’s legs extended a quarter-meter, making it taller. It dropped into a low Teräs Kasi stance, reaching out its padded arms to form the bridge with Ageless’s own.
They stayed here for several long moments, lightly pressing against one another’s forearm, trying to see how solid they both were, testing each other’s balance. Like a dejarik game, they had to see which way their opponent was thinking. Suddenly, the droid slapped Ageless’s elbow out of the way and performed a high-speed finger thrust at his throat. Ageless blocked it in time and tugged at the droid’s wrist, putting the droid slightly off-balance. It staggered forward, its next strike sloppy, and Ageless slipped the attack and delivered an elbow into the droid’s head, just as it performed an uppercut to his rubs.
“Oof!” He backed off, rubbing his side. “Nice one,” he wheezed.
“Thank you, Master. A cunning trick you pulled there.”
Once more they lowered themselves into a stance and touched forearms.
Ageless attacked first, wiping the droid’s limbs out of the way in one slick motion and trapping them against its chest, but the droid surprised him with a headbutt that stunned him, just before it came forward with a series of leg checks and then swept his feet out from under him and slammed him against the floor and placed a knee on his chest.
The droid helped him up. “There was a marginal error in your left-leading stance, it left an opening in your centerline that I exploited.”
“I saw that. I was too focused on trapping your limbs, forgot what’s important.”
They began again.
Touching forearms, they waited even longer before moving this time. Then, with sudden ferocity, the droid slapped Ageless’s forearm out of the way and came forward with an elbow to his head. Ageless ducked it, slipped his horned head under the droid’s armpit, hugged its shoulder close before uppercutting the spot where the metanephric kidney would be on a most reptiloids such as Trandoshans, and reaped the droid's feet and slammed it to the floor.
“A wonderful application of Udas’mon,” said the droid as it got to its feet. “I’ve not seen that move from you in a while, and never delivered so smoothly.”
“I do a lot of shadow-boxing when you’re on shutdown mode.”
“I see. I will have to select more permutations of combative applications, and develop more cunning subroutines to deal with that.”
“I hope you will. The better you get, the better I get.”
They went back and forth for half an hour, Ageless building up a drenching sweat, the droid calm and unrelenting. Ageless was in such a trance he almost didn’t feel the lurch as the Curse made the jump to lightspeed. When he felt himself getting sluggish, he switched off the TRD-5 and put it back in the corner to recharge. Then he did something his grandmother taught him ages ago when trying to get him to perform her people’s ritual dance. High repetition of basic movements, she told him. That will ingrain the skills better.
It was a philosophy reflected in the military: Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. It just meant that you wanted no “fat” on a technique, no extra meat, you did not want to telegraph the movement. The slower you train, the smoother a technique becomes, as long as you perform high repetitions of it. Then, you will notice that when you perform the movement under pressure, you are surprisingly fast at it.
So he jabbed in the air at one-quarter speed, then put together punching combinations, and finally did the same with basic kicks. Nothing too fancy, nothing too acrobatic. Just high reps of basic movements. He did this for another hour, breathing steadily, then went to the fresher to take a cold shower. Cold showers were an old habit for him, the coldness vasoconstricted the entire body and increased recovery.
Once he was dried off, he felt he had finally earned some rest. He laid down with his datapad and pulled up a book on the history of the ancient Sith. Not many historical accounts were left, and those that could be found were apocryphal at best. Their translations were sketchy, and the original authors could easily have been lying about all they’d seen. The stories included names of Sith taken from stone tablets on Gamorr, a tomb on Thule, and they told of cities being razed and planets being conquered and half-forgotten prophecies that never came true. All of it with clouded accounts of wars on planets like Alderaan and Ossus and Kashyyyk. He found one account that said that the Sith used to have titles and ranks, such as Invic, Ordonn, and Darth. Ageless recalled a story his grandmother once told him about the Witches of Dathomir, about a song they sang called Ush’kin tak Ordonn’darth’mik Banj, about an evil group of sorcerers that used a mystical power to invade Dathomir, but were repelled by the Witches.
And, of course, he could not help but think of Darth Vader, who wielded a lightsaber and was said to kill men from across the room. Was it only stories? Perhaps the Dark Lord only killed men using some unknown sonic weapon, and people merely attributed it to some great sorcery. Perhaps this was done for the purposes of propaganda and fear-mongering. Did he choose the title Darth in reverence of the old Sith, or did he, Vader, see himself as an extension of their ancient order?
Is he truly a Sith? Is the Emperor?
Ageless glanced over at the lightsaber on the table beside his bed.
You don’t know the power of the Dark Side.
He went back to reading the histories. His eyes felt heavier with each word.
When he finally closed his eyes, he fell asleep almost immediately.
After a few minutes or a few hours, he sensed a sudden chill in the air. And then he felt heat, and smelled smoke. When he opened his eyes, he was seated around a campfire. All around him were the dusty and rocky plains of Dathomir. Seated across from him, staring at him through the flames, was his grandmother.
* * *
The night was cold, but the campfire kept him warm, made him feel safe. Like that feeling you got when you huddled under a blanket with a parent or close sibling. The chill wind bit deeply, somehow making him recall the cold of Hoth, even though he hadn’t been there yet. His visit to Hoth was still far, far in his future. The boy did not yet know betrayal, only love. “You apply friction to the stick like this,” his grandmother said, showing him how to rub the two sticks together to make fire. She made it look so easy, forming an ember quickly, and placing it into the middle of the nest of punk the boy had prepared.
“Blow,” she said. “Gently.”
The boy leaned forward and blew into the smoking punk. Soon, he had built a second campfire, and was stoking it. Then his grandmother led him over to the lytyyl trees, which sprouted limbs this time of year, just before they dropped their seeds and died. He placed a dead limb between the split boughs of two trees close together, then threw smaller limbs on top of it, forming a latticework of leaves that would form the roof of their shelter.
The boy worked hard into the night. His hands sometimes bled from the thorns in the lytyyl’s branches. His grandmother’s hands were far too callused to bleed, and she handled the branches as though her flesh were made of stone. When the boy was finished building the debris hut, his grandmother took him over to the first campfire and bade him to stare into it. “What am I looking for?” he asked.
“The stars,” she said.
“But the stars are up there,” he said, pointing to the night sky. Three moons shone down on them; the fourth was hidden behind a thick, black cloud.
“They are in here, too,” his grandmother said, directing his attention back to the fire. She smiled. Her face was lined by advanced years, her horns had yellowed and chipped, and stemming from them were old tattoos that wound web-like down into her face. “You see? You see the stars?”
The boy looked into the fire. He searched deeply through its flames but never saw any stars. Behind him, his grandmother laughed, as though just looking at his bunched-up face recalled to her the times in her youth when she had been so foolish as to think staring harder would make the stars appear. The boy looked at her sourly. “You’re trying to trick me again.”
“Oh, sweet boy, how could I ever fool you?” She gestured at the flames, and when she did, a small, almost imperceptible sliver of green light oozed from her fingertips and splashed into the flames, turning them temporarily green. Suddenly, both campfires were snuffed out, as quickly as candles by a puff of wind.
Now it was very, very cold. And dark. Even the combined light of the three moons did not seem to be enough.
The boy felt fear leap into his chest and seize his throat. “Grandmother!” he shouted, reaching around in the dark for her. “Grandmother?”
He heard cackling, and another flash of green light lanced out from the old woman’s fingers. It was only a second, but he saw her, limned by jade light. The light was pouring out of her, and curled like a milky substance in black water. When the green light touched the place where the two campfires had been, it reignited them, more intensely than before, and smoke filled his nostrils, and the heat was so great it felt like it was burning his skin.
He leapt back from her. “Grandmother,” he gasped. “Are you…one of them?”
“And what if I was?” she said, directing him back to the spot where he’d been sitting by the fire. “Would you love me any less?”
Slowly, the boy sat back down. He held out his hands to keep them warm, and gazed back into the flames, wondering if stars really were trapped inside somehow, or if the source of her magic was contained within. Or does her magic come from someplace else?
“Remember the breathing exercises that I taught you?” she said from somewhere behind him, somewhere in the dark. “Remember the humming?”
“Y-yes,” he said quaveringly.
“Inhale, then do the hum. Then sing the song. Sing the song to Yoda when you find him.”
“Who’s Yoda?”
“Just sing,” she said.
The boy inhaled through his nose, and exhaled through his lips. With little air left in his lungs, he started humming. It was a toneless sort of hum, one that was meant to clear his mind, empty all his thoughts. Then he took another deep breath and exhaled and repeated it. Then he took one last big breath, and sang the song.
* * *
Ageless woke up singing. It was practically a whisper. It was a melody that went on and on, in search of some logical crescendo and conclusion. His body was trembling. He felt cold, except for his hands, which felt warm, like they were close to a fire. The rocky plains of Dathomir were somehow still before him, like the after-image of staring at a sun for too long.
The illusion was only brief, though, and he slipped on his boots and went walking down the corridors of the Dathomirian Curse.
A shadow followed him. It was almost like the familiar feeling of his operational training coming back to him, that paranoia, that sensation that someone was following him. He no longer felt cold, but he did feel a tingling sensation coming over him, from his lower spine up into the crown of his head. He kept singing the song, not knowing where it was going. He had never known where it was going. The tingling sensation grew to encompass the walls, the wires behind each bulkhead, the droids themselves. He could almost feel exactly where R4 and R-3PO were and sense exactly what they were doing. In fact, he was sure he could, just like he was sure he could smell the smoke from the campfire and the aroma of the eggs his grandmother was cooking over it—
The sensation abruptly ended, and he was once again locked in the present. In reality.
He walked to the cargo bay and found the body of the dead Rebel. Arfour had wrapped the body up nicely, but the outline of the head clearly indicated it had been a male Twi’lek. He knelt beside it, removed some of the wrappings, and searched the Rebel’s uniform for any ID. He was startled when R-3PO suddenly spoke from the doorway.
“Sir?” said the droid. “Sir, are you all right?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, Threepio. Just checking on our guest here.”
“Well, that is a relief. Arfour and I were worried you were never going to wake up again.”
Ageless rubbed his eyes. That was strange, he still felt tired. “What do you mean?”
“You’ve been asleep for a while, sir.”
Ageless suddenly realized he was extremely thirsty, and hungry. “What day is it?”
“Zhellday, sir.”
Ageless’s eyes widened in shock. “I’ve been asleep for two days?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What—how—why didn’t you wake me?”
“We tried, sir, but nothing seemed to work. Your vitals were fine and you showed no sign of illness. Your breathing was steady and your airways were not lodged. There was no sign of brain trauma. I was hoping it was only extreme exhaustion, seeing as how you’ve been constantly on edge these last few months—”
As R-3PO prattled on, Ageless tried to come to terms with that.
Two days? I was asleep for two days? It felt like maybe an hour. Not even. Maybe there was something wrong with the air-recyclers. It wouldn’t have affected the droids, so they wouldn’t have noticed.
Ageless looked around at the ship, at the glimmering floors. He leaned against a bulkhead to feel something tangible, to make sure that he was actually here and not back on Dathomir. He closed his eyes and for a moment he felt the call of the Dark Voice. Just inarticulate sounds that penetrated his mind and sank deep into his bones. He could not explain it all, but he did know that he had been feeling this way ever since what happened on Hoth and Bespin.
Something’s wrong with me.
The first germ of an idea now festered, an idea that he may have suffered trauma, that this all might be part of some physiological damage that no autoscans would be able to detect.
“Get me some water,” he said. “Right now. And food rations. And I’m going to need an autoscanner to check my vitals.”
“Of course, sir. I am so happy you’re awake now, and Arfour will be delighted to hear it, too. We both were beginning to wonder if we ought to leave, perhaps return you to a more civilized system with hospitals. Also, the signal we’ve been getting has been—”
“Leave? Leave where?”
R-3PO tilted his head. “Dagobah, sir.”
“Wait, we made it? We’re there?”
“We’ve been here almost a full day. I studied closely how you flew the Curse, and, if I do so say so myself, I’ve done a very good job of getting us into a stable orbit around the planet.”
Ageless tried to make sense of that. The fact that he had been out for two days and had not awakened from need of food or water disturbed him greatly, it painted a grim picture about his physical and mental health, to say nothing of the hallucinations, which were only getting stronger. But then something else struck him. “You said you picked up a signal?”
“Yes, sir. Most unsettling, I must say.”
“Why unsettling?”
“Because it’s an old code that’s broadcasting. Very old. But for my previous master’s programming skills, and his past as a smuggler, I never would have known it was a thieves-cant encoding; a kind of language and coding system used by a now-defunct smugglers’ guild. It was difficult to decrypt at first, but Arfour helped me develop a ciphertext subroutine and I believe I’ve translated it. Also of note, the rate of the signal’s decay suggests it has been here many years. Perhaps a decade. It is broadcasting from an unknown ship’s black box, which likely crashed here long ago.”
“What does it say?”
“It only repeats one message, sir, over and over: ‘Do not come near this place. Attempt no rescue. He means to be left alone. Leave us all to our deaths. Leave us. Here there is only death.’ Message ends. Would you like a cup of joffa, sir? I have learned to make a good cup.”