16

AMID HYPERSPACE

CURRENTLY MANEUVERING THROUGH THE PERLEMIAN TRADE ROUTE

ABOARD THE DATHOMIRIAN CURSE

Ageless had to trust in Namyr and Kevv’s course corrections. They’d strayed a little ways off the Perlemian Trade Route in order to find the zero-set coordinates of this supposed new way into the Adega system, where Ossus was located. They’d come out of hyperspace a few times to do sneak-and-peaks, hiding within the moons of dead, empty star systems and performing deep-field scans to look for any signs of braking radiation or spacetime wounds—anything to indicate other ships might have come this way already.

Namyr and Kevv flew inside their own ship, the Lady of Hope Ascendant, while Ageless followed along in the Curse. The two ships conferred using tightbeam transmissions, not resorting to radio or even subspace transmissions, in case any pirates or Imperials picked up on them.

They were drifting farther away from the Perlemian Trade Route, and the farther they got away from it, the more they drifted into dark space, areas of the galaxy long considered by stellar cartographers to be far too dangerous or troublesome to navigate. So, they went quietly, doing micro-jumps into lightspeed, sometimes moving at sublight, or popping into and out of hyperspace every few hours.

The system was simple. The two ships came out of hyperspace, scanned for enemies, tightbeamed the next set of coordinates to one another, did a jump, and traveled through hyperspace for several hours more before popping back out at the prearranged time and location. Rinse, repeat.

Ageless and the droids were aboard the Curse, and he passed the time by meditating, doing repairs to the ship, training, and occasionally trying to fix R-3PO’s legs. R4 mostly stayed busy, working around the clock to check circuit boards and make sure the repairs were still holding.

Whenever they came out of hyperspace, Ageless would go on alert, checking all passive sensors for signs of braking radiation or any telltale sign that a hyperdrive had been active in this region. He found small signs here and there, just the faintest hint that someone had been through in weeks or months past. That could mean anything, but he thought he knew what it meant.

The Empire. No one else should be out here, so it has to be them. They’ve mobilized a fleet to find Ossus and begin excavation. But how big is that fleet, and did they leave any spies to cover their tracks?

The journey was fraught with perils. They found numerous stellar objects and anomalies. They came upon a purple, glowing nebula with at least fifty new stars incubating inside it, the sight of which had probably turned away stellar cartographers for millennia. But Ageless followed Namyr’s ship through the next hyperspace jump and they came to a dead star system, with eight different rock planets completely shattered, like something had collided with them all, and a gas giant burning so hot and bright it was becoming almost a second sun to the system. Six black holes warred at the fringes of the star system, slowly tearing it apart over millions of years. The next jump brought them to empty space. The next jump found them facing another nebula, this one blood-red and much smaller than the last, but emitting a myriad of radiation types that confused their navicomputers for several days before they were able to chart a safe way around.

They continued on like this for two weeks, zipping around trinary star systems, through a tight corridor barely navigable between thirty-seven supermassive black holes. If they strayed off the course the Hutts had charted even a little bit, their ships would be devoured. Ageless had never seen a course so hazardous.

Through carbonberg storms and dense molecular clouds that gave off energy readings that confused their sensors, through black empty space, and through more nebulae where insane energy levels made them think they were being targeted a few times when actually it was just a trick of some cosmic anomaly. Ageless felt like he and his allies were explorers, being among the first to see and to navigate these strange cosmic bodies. The only time he had to truly relax was once they were in hyperspace, and he could retreat to his chambers or the cargo bay for meditation and training.

He’d held onto the bodies of Vicious One and Old Miser until he was away from Dagobah, and now vented their bodies into space once he was well into this new course. He’d cleaned up his blood, as well as the blood of his enemies from the cargo bay and had pushed all the pallets to the far walls, giving himself plenty of room to train.

And train he did. For now, Ageless Void had something that he’d not had in ages: a brand-new skill set to dive into.

The existence of the Force had come as somewhat a surprise, but not as much as the surprise to find it within himself, and to discover that he could actually train in it and use it, same as training his combat skills or piloting skills.

Well, okay, maybe not precisely the same way, because the Force was beyond esoteric—he may as well admit it was mysticism, but mysticism with quantifiable results. That, he’d never seen coming when he first started training in it.

He took to the center of the cargo bay, sitting for a while cross-legged and breathing deep, running through small orbit exercise. Ageless emptied his mind for a time, absorbed in the free-flowing, formless thoughts that come with such meditation. His body was mostly healed but there were still a few aches and pains. He tried to nullify them by allowing the Force to flow into those injured areas, imagining a warm, soothing, massaging sensation. It helped.

After about an hour of this, he got the warning chime that said the Curse was soon to exit hyperspace. He went up to the cockpit, saw the spiraling maw of four different stars being eaten by two warring supermassive black holes, and navigated through a corridor of dangerous nebulae and white holes while at sublight, following Namyr and Kevv in the Ascendant. Balefire storms sent billion-mile-long plumes of red, angry energy clouds throughout the area, forcing them to bounce around at sublight for hours-long course corrections.

“How you doing in there, Ageless?” Namyr asked at one point. They were hiding behind a comet, riding along its icy tail, and were pretty sure their transmissions wouldn’t be picked up by anyone, even had an Imperial vessel been nearby.

“I’m doing okay,” he commed back. “Thanks for asking.”

“Just a few more days like this, then we’re out.”

“Assuming the Hutts’ intel was correct, and there isn’t an ambush waiting for all of us at the other end. This could’ve all just been some massive disinformation campaign by the Empire.”

“I trust Commander Fera’s team. The intel is legit.”

“If you say so.”

They crept through a massive cloud of interstellar space dust, one fraught with fist-sized asteroids that moved at such speeds they got through deflector shields and panged off the hull loudly. Most were made up of tizzyrmenite, a rare mineral that emitted heavy sensor-scrambling radiation and got them lost for a few hours. Once out, they navigated through two more dead star systems, detecting only a little braking radiation, then weathered a storm through white hole ejecta and thence back into hyperspace.

Once they had another clear line that would take them along a twenty-minute micro-jump, Ageless returned to the cargo bay, and resumed meditating. Occasionally, he heard R4’s wheels against the floor, as the astromech popped in and out of the cargo bay to check on him or perform some small bit of maintenance. The Dathomirian Curse popped and hummed all around him.

Eventually, he took out the palm-sized holoprojector that Master Yoda had given him, and sifted through the vids, selecting one of his grandmother’s lessons at random. “—mustn’t forget the Intake Stoppage,” she was saying, kneeling before a fire. It appeared she was talking to someone just off camera. Ageless wondered who it was, and when this recording had been made. Shreya looked young, her facial tattoos not yet as complex as when he’d known her.

“The Intake Stoppage is the moment just before you finish taking in your whole breath,” Shreya explained. “Four seconds of breathing in, then stop it up, like putting a cork on a bottle, but harshly. Then, relax, holding the breath, and then expend it all at once.” She demonstrated this breathing method, holding her hands out to her side. “Feel it moving through you, that Isj’vastkja.”

Ageless knew that word. It meant Unknowable Power or Mysterious Driver.

He followed her example, smiling as she demonstrated techniques he’d witnessed when he used to sit across the campfire from her. Ageless recalled those times well. Sitting here, watching her go through the motions, it was almost like traveling through time. He was a boy again, and yet a student now of this new thing: the Force. What was it? Had the Jedi all truly been masters of it, or only its servants? Or perhaps both?

And what were Ageless’s people’s own legacy with it?

“Feel the furnace of heat growing within the belly,” Shreya was saying. “Then direct that feeling outward, towards the shoulders, down through the elbows and hands, thence into the fingertips…”

He followed her instruction, sensing that warmth spread.

“On each inhalation, suck that power back into your belly, and on each exhalation, eject it from your belly and shoot it into your veins, into your fingertips. That’s it…that’s it…feeling that power bristling beneath the surface!” she breathed with intensity, “…just like that…feel it!”

Ageless went through several more cycles of this, until he heard the chime again, another summons to the cockpit. He was there just in time to strap in and revert back into realspace, and stared into an empty patch of space. The Ascendant was directly in front of him, banking slowly to starboard and already tightbeaming him a series of coordinate groupings. Soon enough, they had performed a thirty-three-second micro-jump to the surrounding debris cloud of yet another dead system. Then a seventeen-minute micro-jump to the outskirts of a dense, pink molecular cloud littered with planets being ripped apart by some unknown force.

They didn’t stay very long to investigate this phenomenon, their sensors told them plenty, though. Hyper-tidal forces being created by several neutron stars falling into a black hole, all surrounded by a colossal, sensor-scrambling balefire storm. Basically, the conclusion was don’t go near this place. They set another course, and now were on a six-hour trip into hyperspace, approaching the final stretch of their journey to Ossus.

Ageless got some sleep. After four hours, he awoke to get something to eat and checked his bandages. He took another kolto injection and replaced one of his bacta patches with a fresh one, then he went into the cargo bay to stretch and do some calisthenic exercises. Once he was done, he took the lightsaber in hand, walked to the center of the cargo bay, and ignited it.

Ageless began going through the first four lightsaber forms. Slowly. Starting with Shii-Cho and then flowing seamlessly into Makashi, connecting their footwork and toying with inserting several Teräs Kasi movements. His reflections on his battle against Vicious One had him making modifications to his style to fit more aggressive opponents, and here he brought in Ataru, Form IV of lightsaber combat.

After feeling somewhat stifled and limited, he began making alterations here, as well, creating new drills to run through, combining fast, light-footed steps of evasion, which he borrowed from the Echani style of unarmed combat, of which he was probably only a middling practitioner. He’d dabbled in the Echani style while he was at the Nest, but now saw fresh and exciting new applications for its footwork when it came to fighting an opponent with a blunt or edged weapon in close quarters.

This became an exhilarating new hobby, and Ageless threw himself into it, opening up his datapad to take assiduous notes, making suggestions to himself for future training ideas. The Echani footwork was an inspired addition, he decided, as few weapons arts tried to be as mobile and yet as aggressive, getting in and out quickly. Most weapons arts either tried to stay in one spot to hold their ground, or had just enough footwork to regain an advantageous position.

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Few weapons arts moved with such alacrity and intent as the Echani art did. It was subtle, but clearly present. He wondered why no one else had ever seen this connection.

Or have they? Perhaps some Jedi did, or maybe some of their enemies did. Perhaps this was once common knowledge before they were all wiped out. Well, all but one, at least.

Ageless tapped his chin, thinking.

I wonder if Vader or Palpatine ever put this together. Or Luke Skywalker. Or Yoda. Or any of them.

He thought a little longer on it, and decided it was worth pursuing. He also liked the idea of returning to the discovery he’d made on Dagobah, that being the fact that holding a lightsaber tip-down was better for him—it opened up a myriad of opportunities when fighting against a lightsaber-user who had been traditionally trained. It was merely a thought experiment, but from what he’d learned from Yoda, from what he’d seen of the first four lightsaber forms, there was obviously room for improvement.

Then there was Form VI. Niman. A lightsaber form that was supposed to combine all previous lightsaber styles into a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none style. Bringing it all together, as it were, to be as well rounded as possible.

He hadn’t had much time to look into that while on Dagobah, but Yoda had left him with a handful of materials to take with him, an old hologram that appeared to show young Jedi Padawans going through some of the movements. Ageless decided that he would—

The chime sounded, and once again he had to pry himself away from his studies to return to the cockpit and prepare for the exit from hyperspace.

The next several hours were spent in careful silence. They coasted past the ninth and outermost planet of a star system. Both the Ascendant’s and the Curse’s sensors detected trace amounts of braking radiation, and later, once they’d flown past the orbital path of a gas giant, Kevv reported via tightbeam that he thought he’d detected signs of a damaged TIE fighter that had been left abandoned and adrift around the rings of the gas giant, but he couldn’t confirm.

They treaded carefully here, running cold whenever they could afford it.

When they felt safe enough to do so, they performed a series of sublight jumps until they reached the far side of the star system, having found no other sign of fellow travelers, and made another jump into hyperspace. Before they did, though, Namyr said, “We’ve clear a path around the hyperspace distortion that cut off Ossus from normal hyperlanes. Looks like whatever it was that did it, we’ve made our way around the energy’s flux shadow. I see no signs of a supernova, nor the remains of any kind of superweapon.”

Ageless confirmed he hadn’t seen anything of the like, either, and they continued on their journey in silence.

After training a bit more, Ageless went to the fresher to take a spritz shower, ate a quick meal, and meditated for a while before getting some rest. He awoke to another chime, another quick micro-jump around a black hole cluster, and then did some stretching before reviewing his previous day’s notes. Inspired by all he’d discovered, he brought the TRD-5 training droid into the cargo bay with him, and asked it to go through all that it had learned on Dagobah concerning lightsaber combat.

“I want to try something new,” Ageless said. “Set intensity levels to medium. Let’s start slow with this, see if we can’t find the gaps in the Jedi method of fighting.”

“Affirmative. Intensity level set to medium.”

“Here,” Ageless said, picking up the only working electrostaff on the ship, the weapon of Vicious One. “I want you to use this like you saw in the lightsaber forms. Can you do that?”

“I can, sir.”

Ageless took in a deep breath, and lowered himself in Forward Ysalamir Stance, from Makashi. “Then let’s train.”

* * *

Ageless had often heard it said that life is lived moving forward, but only experienced looking back where you’ve been. He’d also heard that training hard fundamentally changed a person’s character, because it forced you to reflect on your progress, on how far you’d come. During the next day, while he trained against the droid, he felt himself looking backwards through time. Looking back at who he’d been. The training brought this on, because it was all so new, such a fresh way of looking at combat. He’d never imagined it. And whenever he failed to achieve a hit against TRD-5 and its ersatz lightsaber, he felt a bit of his pride wounded.

And also a bit of that same pride washing away.

He didn’t care much when the droid hit him. Not here, not on his ship. There was no one watching, no one to impress, no master to make proud, no employer or government to serve, no higher power or greater order, not even himself. Ageless wasn’t doing this for his own ego, he was doing it out of a soul’s intensely questing need.

He wanted to know more about the Force. He wanted to know more about lightsaber dueling from an academic standpoint, and then from a view of application. He needed to know more. It was a thirst for knowledge that made him forget himself, forget his ego whenever TRD-5 scored a hit against him. Indeed, being hit only invigorated him, made him adjust his stance work minutely, caused him to channel the Force in different ways, seeking balance within.

Ageless felt almost alien in his own body, a mind and a spirit that had been transplanted in place of the old ones. Or was this merely a phase?

He didn’t know. He didn’t care.

He enjoyed the training for the sake of training, and was vaguely aware that R-3PO had dragged himself into the cargo bay to watch, and that R4 was recording his sparring sessions with TRD-5. Ageless thought this was a great idea, and asked R4 to play back the footage of the times he’d gotten hit by the training droid, asking the droid to play it in slow-motion so that he could critique his own technique.

Ageless meditated in the pilot’s seat, waiting for the next exit from hyperspace. When the time came, he reverted back into realspace, and found himself staring out at the strange, white-hot half-sphere that was the remains of a star being devoured by a black hole. Radiation was off the charts, sensors saw a neutron star pulsing at insanely high power just a few million miles away, and there were spiraling lights off in the distance (say about two or three lightyears away) that were enormous and looked to be a star system suffering some slow but no less cataclysmic event.

Once again, the instruments on both the Ascendant and the Curse were thrown into chaos.

How in the nine hells did the Hutts chart any kind of course out here? These regions we’re coming to, it all looks like the end of the universe has already started in here.

It was a sobering reminder to Ageless that he’d gotten comfortable thinking of the galaxy as wholly charted and safe. He’d always felt that, but for a few rare cosmic anomalies, hyperspace travel was safe. But that was only because stellar cartographers of the past several thousand years had so carefully and so bravely charted safe courses throughout the galaxy.

Namyr and Kevv plotted another course and he matched theirs, trusting them completely. Once they performed a series of short sublight jumps away from the black hole, they prepared to make one last jump.

“This is it,” Namyr said. “Last jump. The next time we exit hyperspace, we should be just at the edge of the Adega system. Ossus is near its center. It’s a nine-and-a-half-hour trip through hyperspace, so get cozy. And get some rest.”

“Understood,” he said, tapping a button to check his fuel mixture. “Let’s be prepared for anything. And may the Force be with us.” He said that last part almost without thinking.

“May the Force be with us,” Namyr agreed.

Then, the Lady of Hope Ascendant blasted forward into hyperspace, and the Dathomirian Curse was right behind it.

Ageless took a short nap, then awoke, took a spritz shower, ate a meal, and returned to the cargo bay and got back to training.

* * *

The great weakness of Niman was its take on inside defenses, he was now sure of it. Ageless had tested this hybrid form of lightsaber combat, and noted that, without an intense focus on Makashi’s anti-lightsaber defenses, Niman would likely only get a practitioner killed against another saber-user. Especially one with even a tenuous connection to the Force, which presumably all Jedi and Sith were. So, he had to made adjustments for that.

The remedy, he thought, still lay within the Echani martial art. Its footwork melded nicely with the hands of Teräs Kasi, and there was a pretty slick evasion technique from Udas’mon that he’d discovered worked very well against TRD-5’s saber slashing. But would it ever work against a seasoned saber practitioner? he wondered.

Ageless loved this sense of discovery. It was like a speeder mechanic dissecting all the needless parts on a speeder bike’s repulse attenuator, finding workarounds that made the engine hum more smoothly, more efficiently, squeezing every ounce of banthapower out of it. Maximizing potential, fitting the seat for its user. He was dissecting martial arts that past masters had developed, but that didn’t mean they’d been perfected. Often, martial arts fell into a dangerous pattern: they got very good at fighting against themselves.

Teräs Kasi started out being a martial art to fight Jedi, but since the Jedi were all but extinct, Teräs Kasi schools now mostly fought against other Teräs Kasi schools. It caused a muddying effect, techniques that had once been useful against lightsaber-users were neglected, unnecessary, tossed aside, forgotten.

And it had surely happened with saber combat.

Ataru practitioners likely got very good at fighting other Ataru practitioners.

Jedi knew Jedi techniques. And focused on those.

Sith knew Sith techniques. And focused on those.

Echani knew Echani techniques. And focused on those.

So, examining his notes, Ageless absorbed what he had learned and decided to reflect upon it in meditation. Taking deep breaths, moving the Force throughout his body using small orbit exercises, expanding from the center of his belly and out through his fingertips as Shreya had said in the holovid, then contracting, then expanding it again, replaying his fight against Vicious One again and again, applying what he had learned, inserting techniques that he thought would have been more beneficial.

When he was finished, he fought against TRD-5 again, this time telling him to turn up the intensity. They went at it for two hours, breaking every ten minutes or so for Ageless to hydrate, then back at it.

He took a couple of hits, a crack across his horns, almost got stunned twice by the buzzing electrostaff, but then…something happened. An opening in his mind—a breakthrough, even. Ageless started making progress, pushing forward with the Echani footwork and dancing out of the way of the droid’s most powerful attacks wherever he saw the opening.

It was working so well he told TRD-5 to turn up the intensity to maximum.

Ageless released himself into the Force’s hands, almost like he was going down a river, obeying its current, though occasionally he was able to redirect its speed and course. The Force moved through him, almost dancing, sort of playful one minute and then deadly serious the next.

This fusion between the Force and his lightsaber, his Teräs Kasi hands and Echani footwork, his Makashi bladework and Udas’mon upper-body swaying, switching between tip-up and tip-down to confuse the training bot, occasionally throwing in a push-kick, a shin-press, an unconventional riposte, peppering in a jab or an uppercut or a knee…

It was flowing.

By the Force, it was flowing!

And then thwack! He would receive a hard hit from TRD-5, who had found a gaping hole in his defenses. It went on like this.

Yes, it was flowing, but there was no real cohesion yet between all of the techniques. There was no gestalt, and that was something this evolving new style would need. An overarching “theme,” if you will, a supreme sense of capability between all the motions. That sort of thing, he knew, took time. Like cooking a superb meal—it wasn’t just about following the recipe, a martial artist must also marinate and season.

He’d once seen a holovid documentary about a female Twi’lek tizi’nth musician who was known across the Core Worlds as possibly the greatest, most innovative new player, having invented three separate brand-new music genres during her long, illustrious career. When asked what made a “new sound” work for her, she’d said, “It has to have soul. The artist has to feel it, and yet be unable to explain it. Maybe you can’t even teach it. Not yet. Others will have to follow you by imitating, and later they will be able to dissect it. You won’t know what you’ve created until others have seen it, until the ‘rubber hits the road’ as the saying goes.”

Ageless felt this way about what he was doing now. It was not a completely new martial arts system yet. Not yet, but it could be. He could sense it. He felt it.

And, without him even knowing it, as he moved around the droid and countered it, a bright green light began to emanated from his fingers. The stoic flame was splashing around him in the air like liquid green light, a dazzling array of sparks occasionally shooting out of his palms. Ageless had no control of this, it just started happening. And the more the green flames flowing out of his hands, the more connection he felt over the Force.

And then, almost as soon as he was aware of it, the stoic flame vanished, the power within receding like the tide of the ocean. He had the training droid stop, then stood there, panting, sweating, and feeling bathed in a great and wise power he had never dreamt possible.

* * *

“Exiting hyperspace soon, sir,” said R-3PO, seated in the copilot’s seat. R4 had helped prop him there and strapped him in. “Less than three minutes.”

“Thanks, Threepio,” Ageless said, stepping into the cockpit. He felt fully refreshed now. He was in full combat armor, in case…well, just in case. If they met enemies and were boarded, or had to do a boarding action themselves, he wanted to be ready. A holdout blaster was strapped to his ankle, a DL-32 was strapped to his thigh, and the lightsaber hung from his belt. The L-22a blaster rifle was resting against the flight controls. “Arfour, get back to the circuitry bay. That V-5 connector was looking like it was getting ready to melt, I want you to keep an eye on it when we exit hyperspace.”

The astromech chirped helpfully and rolled towards the rear of the ship.

“How’s our exhaust manifold doing?” he asked R-3PO. “Any more shimmying?”

“No shimmies, sir.”

“Fuel equalizers still redlining?”

“No, sir. Arfour saw to that.”

“Stars, he’s good. He finds a workaround for everything. Prep a deep-field sensor scan once we revert back into realspace. We picked up enough braking radiation along the way, pretty much guaranteeing the Empire already sent someone out this way. If we get spotted as soon as we reach Ossus, I want to know about it so we can turn around and head out.” It’ll be a whole lot of traveling for nothing if they spot us as soon as we get here, he thought. Well, not for nothing. The training had been good, and he’d needed the alone time to think. It had been good, all in all.

“Exiting hyperspace in ten seconds, sir.”

Ageless took a deep breath, ran through a quick cycle of small orbit, stretching out through the Force and drawing from it to relax his body and focus his senses. “Okay. Let’s do it.”

“Exiting hyperspace in three…two…one—”