OSSUS
ABOVE THE K’TUZIAN STRETCH
Cazrael’s sensors hadn’t been able to zero in on the Rebel freighter, but he was sure it was out there. He was sure he was close. He called out to his wingmen, “TH-447, bank east, heading zero-two-zero relative. TH-954, give me a low sweep of the canyon floor up ahead, go sensor-active, then take the southerly passage and heat east until you reach the Mal’tuk Crater. Careful, though, when you enter the cave, the ceiling drops real quick, so it’s going to get tight real fast.”
“Copy that, Commander,” said 447.
“Copy, Commander. Heading down,” came 954’s voice, sounding a little bored.
“Stay safe, you two. Keep sharp.”
Cazrael pulled up high out of the canyon and did a slow, wide arc around all of the Trident zone, which technically covered almost a hundred kilometers at this point. The dig site had started out small, but quickly expanded with each new find. It seemed every day there was some tech-head down below who claimed his sensors had picked up something “anomalous.” They kept using that word. And, of course, the excavator droids kept coming up with new finds, or a pocket of gas, or some other “anomalous” thing that would require they stop digging and be reassigned to another part of the Trident zone, where they inevitably found more “anomalous” things.
Caz wasn’t an explorer. He was a combat pilot, and he wasn’t cut out for these simple, sleepy, do-nothing patrols. His senses were honed by years of picking up on Rebel activity, sniffing out their tricks and, occasionally, falling for them. But even the times he’d fallen for them only made him smarter, more perceptive. Experience, as Mauler Mithel had once told him, cannot be substituted. So don’t be afraid to get out there and get your feet wet, Caz. But always, and I mean always, keep your head on a swivel and your sensors casting a wide net.
The sun was low, and he’d bet good credits that whatever team the Rebels had on foot would be moving right now, to take advantage of the dark. That is, if they were even still aboveground. But the Rebel pilot, whoever he or she was, would not be moving anytime soon. That’s because the blue-white exhaust of your typical freighter was way too bright, and easily spotted on a dark night.
That presented Caz with a problem, but also a possible opportunity. With the Rebel ship sitting tight, and likely in the darkest part of the canyon network, it would be difficult to eyeball. And if the pilot was smart, he or she would have found a home in any of a thousand caves or sinkholes that dotted Ossus’s busted surface. And the more Caz flew around, the more he announced his presence to any such pilot using passive scanners.
But if he isn’t moving, that means I can take my time. Me and my guys can take peeks into numerous caves, searching for trace exhaust fumes, and scan the sinkholes in those areas.
In fact, he’d already sent a message up to the Emperor’s Might, requesting permission from the ISB guys up top to grant him access to the satellites they had orbiting Ossus. With the sat-link, he could take the data from the previous few days, looking for any unusual energy signatures at timecodes when neither his nor any other squadrons had been patrolling Trident. It could give him enough data to triangulate the unknown Rebel ship’s route.
And why not? thought Killer Caz, waiting on the confirmation from ISB to give him the sat-link code. I’ve got all night.
* * *
ON THE FOREST MOON OF ENDOR
Han Solo stepped out of the shield generator’s main base, feeling all hope bleed from him. Hands up, he looked around at a soul-crushing site. An entire Imperial legion was waiting for them outside, including numerous AT-ST walkers and scout troopers on speeder bikes. Imperial officers strutted about in full uniform dress, carrying blaster pistols right alongside infantry. It suddenly hit him just how stupid he’d been, not realizing until just now how suspiciously underdefended the shield generator had been.
This was too easy. Just like Leia warned me when we escaped the Death Star years ago. She told me that this was who the Empire was. They lay traps. They followed us back to Yavin IV and I didn’t believe her, and it nearly cost us everything. And here I thought we could just waltz in…
They stood in broad daylight, looking over at the smirking Imperial officers and the faceless, emotionless helmets of all the assembled stormtroopers, their blasters trained on him and his friends. Are they going to execute us now? Are they going to—
“Hello?” shouted a familiar mechanical voice. Han looked for the source but couldn’t immediately find it. “I say, over there! Were you looking for me?”
Han and the others spun around to find Threepio standing and waving his hands from fifty meters away, like an absolute idiot! Han saw him and thought, That bucket of bolts could’ve gone for help, he couldn’t left on the shuttle and gotten back to the Rebel fleet in time to tell them the shield generator is still up. Stars, what has he done? He blew our one chance, our last hope!
“Bring those two down here!” shouted an Imperial officer, and at his gesture a dozen stormtroopers bolted up the hill and aimed their blasters directly at Threepio and Artoo.
“Don’t move!” the lead trooper commanded.
“We surrender,” Threepio said.
Then, all at once, there came an ear-piercing cry: “Aaaayyyyeeeeaahhhhh!”
Ten or more Ewoks suddenly ambushed the troopers, throwing themselves bodily and tackling them to the ground. And before the Imperials surrounding Han could even respond, there came a horn from up on high somewhere. Trees! It’s in the trees! And then a second horn sounded, and when it did, from the grass emerged dozens, perhaps hundreds of Ewoks, some wearing leaves and twigs as camouflage, all with slingshots and bows.
And they fired instantly.
Most of what they did had no effect, arrows and rocks bounced off plastoid armor, but one or two troopers went down, a couple of them panicked and went to cover, expecting blasterfire. And for a moment, for just one second, there was enough commotion and chaos that Han sought to take advantage. He reached out and grabbed a stormtrooper and flung him into his buddy. A couple of his Rebel party did the same. One of them managed to grab a blaster or two, and fired wildly around. Leia and Chewie scrambled to grab their own blasters and Leia fired upwards and took out the pilot of an AT-ST.
As Han and his friends sought shelter by the shield generator’s main bunker doors, scout troopers deployed in speeder bikes and raced out into the forest to take down the Ewoks, some of whom were beating a tactical retreat. Han saw one lucky arrow strike a trooper in the neck, right in between his helmet and the collar of his chest armor. Another Rebel fired and got a headshot on an Imperial officer. Han and Leia fired madly all around, trying to create more chaos, hunkering down beside the generator’s door.
And he thought, This is it! We get one more shot! They won’t be taken by surprise again, if we’re going to do this, we need to do it now!
The firefight intensified, people were dropping left and right. Two of his Rebel commandoes fell dead. Three stormtroopers took a shot to center mass and went down hard. Ewoks poured out of the grass and dragged five or six troopers down into the mud.
Han could barely see out into the woods as the Imperial walkers started firing on the Ewoks, and he spied Chewie running off with a pair of Ewoks in the direction of one of the walkers—
“The code’s changed!” Leia shouted from behind him. “We need Artoo!”
Han scrambled to look for a way in, and opened a panel to expose the main access box. “Here’s the terminal!”
Leia had her commlink in hand and shouted, “Artoo, where are you? We need you at the bunker right away!”
This is it, Han thought. Last chance. This is all we get. Last chance to get that bastard Palpatine for annihilating Leia’s planet, our last chance to gut the Empire, and get a little payback for what they did to you and Luke back on Bespin. Hang in there, Han. Stay focused. And don’t think about the odds…
* * *
OSSUS
BENEATH MOUNT GUJAHHL
Ageless signaled for Namyr to lower her blaster. Something in the Force told him it was okay to do so, and he was following its guidance now. The strange protocol/assassin droid amalgam, Triple-Zero, lowered its weapons, too. “That’s more like it,” Doctor Aphra said, wearing a cocky smirk. And for a moment they all just stood and watched as she knelt and fiddled with a few dials on the exploration droid she called Busy. “This only works if you have at least a small sample of Koboh matter,” she said. “And since it’s nearly indestructible, that means you have to find a shard that has fallen off naturally. Luckily, I found such a piece a few levels up.”
Ageless said, “How does the Busy droid counteract Koboh matter?”
“By using an energy emitter to create and distribute anti-Koboh matter.”
“Right,” he deadpanned. “And how does it do that?”
“By creating an inverse-resonance field that allows for a small opening between molecules, whereupon the device then injects a localized, zero-point ‘arrhythmia’ in the protective coating in the accent molecule.” She looked at him sardonically. “Does me explaining it make it make any more sense to you?”
“And Cal Kestis had one of these…things?” Namyr asked.
“Cal Kestis was lucky to find such a device that could help him do that. Who actually built it is anyone’s guess. He was just a scavenger, one who got lucky.” Doctor Aphra finished with the dials on Busy’s head, then set the exploration droid down beside the hole in the ground, which was caked with Koboh matter. “Stand back, I’m not actually sure this won’t cause an explosion.”
“Wait, what—”
“Just kidding,” Aphra laughed and winked. “But seriously, bad stuff could happen.”
Ageless and Namyr exchanged glances, backed up a few paces, and watched as Busy fired a strange black substance onto the ground. It looked sludgy at first, but then crystalized, forming black obsidian. Aphra quickly walked over and knelt by the anti-Koboh matter and shot it with a small, handheld stunner-looking device, which emitted a blue-and-purple beam, igniting the anti-Koboh matter.
Ageless looked on in amazement as some of the Koboh matter actually peeled back, then disintegrated. But not nearly all of it. In fact, all Aphra had managed to do was create a gap big enough for a single person to squeeze through.
“I can’t use it all up at once,” she said. “I only have a limited amount. And the charge in this beam emitter isn’t strong enough to disintegrate all of it in one shot.”
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Ageless shrugged. “So, what now?”
“I reckon you go first, Horns,” she said, pointing to Ageless. “Then I go. Then the pretty lady, then Triple-Zero. That way we’re all equally separated from our partners, and tag-teaming the other two is less likely. Helps us trust each other more. Make sense?”
Namyr said, “You’re awful chipper for a person who’s just been ambushed and made to create an alliance with said ambushers.”
“And for someone who suspects there’s something dangerous below, which a Jedi Master gave his life to make sure no one ever found,” Ageless put in.
Aphra put on her usual perky smile, and said, “Triple-Zero and I have seen a lot, haven’t we, big guy?”
“We have,” the droid said evenly.
“And there isn’t a lot that scares us anymore. Well, nothing more than the Empire. But at this point I think the four of us are all on the same page. Discovery before fascism, right? I mean, we can all go back to living in a fascist regime tomorrow, but for today, for right now, let’s all pretend that crap doesn’t exist, and that we’re friends who met in better times.” She walked closer to Ageless. “I’m in it for the research, my friend. For the study and the knowledge. The Empire’s just a means to an end, an unfortunate employer that has all the credits. Savvy?”
Ageless walked over and peered down into the hole she had made. He took out his electrobinoculars and set them to low-light enhancement. What he saw was a stupendous drop. He looked over at Aphra. “You and your droid have ascension cables?”
“Wouldn’t be decent explorers if we didn’t, now would we, Horns?”
“All right, then. We’ll go with your plan, but with a slight alteration. You go first, then me, then the droid, then my partner there.”
Doctor Aphra made a face like a child that had eaten something yucky, then shrugged. “Okay, Horns. You twisted my arm. Away we go.”
* * *
ALONG THE K’TUZIAN STRETCH
“Come along. Why are you wasting time?” said Ether.
But Mara did not see this as wasting time. She had been kneeling here for several minutes, reaching out to the stone walls and touching them lightly with her fingers, stretching both outwardly and inwardly with the Force, just as Master Palpatine had taught her to do. Mara had a latent ability to touch objects and feel their echo. It was called psychometry, and it allowed her sense recent events in certain locations, or detect the thoughts, emotions, or intentions of people who had recently handled a certain object.
She had discovered such an echo, a warm pocket that apparently only she could feel. The Inquisitor standing next to her seemed oblivious, and was urging her to abandon her attempts at psychometry.
Mara said calmly, “They were here. They were right here in this cave, and they swung over from that basalt pillar over there.” She shut her eyes tight, reaching further inward, and sensed something in a dark corner of the cave. The sun had set, it was nearly pitch-black in here, only Ossus’s moon shone its silvery light into this crevice. She sensed an object resonating in the dark, and crawled over to it on hands and knees, lifting it.
“What is that?” asked Ether.
Mara glanced at him irritably. If he had indeed once been an Inquisitor, as she suspected, she theorized his folly had been a lack of patience when zeroing in on a target. She stood up, holding the tiny ration bar wrapper in her hand. Made to disintegrate after only a few hours of being torn open, so as to leave no trace, the wrapper crumbled in her hand.
But not before she sensed an inward echo. The thoughts of a male Zabrak suddenly leapt to her mind:
—have to move on—Dark Voice beckoning, but what does it want?—this is leading to—hopefully Namyr can trust me a little further—if only Yoda had taught me how to—
And everything after that was simply complex emotions, a swirl of conflicting thoughts, a mind driven by order and intense training, but also looking forwards eagerly to a goal he’d set himself to. A mind that was very close to achieving that which it had sought for so long, and yet didn’t even know what it was ultimately at the end of the search.
“They were here,” Mara said, rising to her full height.
“How can you be sure?” asked Ether. He pointed to another pillar beyond the clifftop. “They could’ve swung to any number of other—”
“Down here, in this cave. They were determined. They were going to go deep. They planned it out. They don’t trust each other, I sense that much. There is only two interlopers. One is a male Zabrak, and he’s…not like the other one. He’s here on his own mission, but for the moment his goals and that of his female friend are aligned.”
Ether, apparently sensing her power at work, spoke to her with renewed appreciation. “How deep, Hand? Because the maps say that the excavator droids and the research teams found only lava veins, and rivers of magma at lower levels.”
Mara took out her datapad and scanned through the 3D maps of all the caves being worked on beneath them. There were a number of them, hundreds of meters down, that had been excavated but left mostly to droids to continue the research, while the rest of the dig teams went off chasing other new, more “anomalous” and exciting sites. She said, “There’s a magna-rail and a turbolift down here. But they only went that way because they didn’t have a ship.” She looked back at her Horizon-class ship, hovering at the mouth of the cave. “If we take my ship down to the canyon floor, there is a series of sulfur pools beside an old obsidian cave. It goes straight down. A few excavator droids mapped it, but no sapients have gone down there yet.”
Ether’s smile parted his beard, and he said, “A shortcut.”
“Yes. We’ll catch up to them…here,” she said, pointing to a spot on the holographic map. “Near where Aphra last reported in.”
“Aphra?”
“Doctor Chelli Lona Aphra. A Human researcher and archaeologist, sometimes used by Lord Vader to go in search of certain artifacts. Usually Jedi artifacts.” Mara rubbed her chin with forefinger, ruminating. “But why would they be heading directly towards her of all people? Is it a coincidence? Because there’s no one else down there except her and her droid.”
“And knowledge!” the Dark Voice suddenly cried into her mind. “It is there! You must seek it! You must seek the tomb of Ooroo! Find what it is that he stored deep within the—”
With an effort, Mara suppressed that fiendish presence, and focused on the mind of the ones she was hunting.
Ether brushed past her, heading for Mara’s ship. “Let’s get aboard. Now! If your feeling is right, we’ve no time to lose.”
* * *
OSSUS
BENEATH MOUNT GUJAHHL
Namyr watched Doctor Aphra and Ageless Void touch down first. The ceiling had been as tall as Aphra had claimed, and for a while she thought they might run out of line with their ascension cables before they reached the first stalagmite, which jutted up from the ground like the fang of some colossal serpent. Once they finally made it to a ledge, they used their ascension cables to drop lower on the jagged stalagmite, until at last they touched the floor.
They now stood inside a massive structure that no other person had stood in for over five thousand years. No one, that is, except for Jedi Master Ooroo. If Doctor Aphra’s tale could be believed, of course. Aphra deployed disc droids from her belt, each one no bigger than a dinner plate, and the hovering discs emitted enough light to illuminate their surroundings up to about eighty meters.
And what they saw was staggering. Pathways carved into the stone floor, long dried-up fountains that stood before massive arches, and the arches themselves were carved with eroded symbols. There were massive statues crumbled to mostly pebbles and dust, but the faces of a few Humans and Twi’leks and even Wookiees stared back at them from the crumbling walls.
They started walking, all of them remaining absolutely silent, as if they were afraid of wakign the dead. Doctor Aphra took the lead and Namyr watched her closely. The walls here were hundreds of meters apart, with numerous durasteel beams that had collapsed to the floor and smashed into duracrete.
Namyr kept her breather on, same as Ageless and Aphra. Ancient tombs had been known to contain captured gases that became dangerous over time, even deadly.
As she walked, she cast the occasional glance over to the droid, Triple-Zero. Namyr wouldn’t let the droid stay behind her, nor would she let it flank her. Surreptitiously, Namyr drew towards the back of the group, bringing up their rear so that her blaster could face the droid’s back. If it was an assassin droid, as was claimed, then it likely had picked up on her maneuver. Which meant it had allowed her to do so. Which meant it wasn’t at all worried about her.
That thought disturbed her. Namyr cast about, looking for any obvious trap.
“Over here,” Aphra said. “Ooroo’s just right down this way.”
The doctor guided them past another stalagmite that had grown so tall it had merged with a stalactite on the ceiling, creating a stone column so large the Dathomirian Curse could probably park on its jagged side.
Thinking of the Curse had her thinking about Kevv. Namyr suddenly wondered if he was okay. They had left him alone for several days now and there was no way of knowing if he was all right, or even if he was still alive. She and Kevv had come to this planet to discover the Empire’s plans and to determine if there was anything here that Palpatine might be able to use against the Rebel Alliance. For the last few days, she’d gotten comfortable with the notion that nothing was here, that if there was she would’ve found it by now. She had decided to stay on Ossus with Ageless Void purely as an ally on an extended recon mission and possible sabotage work.
But now, down here, so far beneath the surface of Ossus, so far away from not only the Alliance but from sunlight, from fresh air and food supply…It’s as if all those dark fears of childhood are waiting for us, and come back only when the dark surrounds us. Because now I feel it. Something so close and tangible, I don’t need any spirits to tell me, no Force or gods. I feel…something. A resonance. Something’s wrong. Something down here is all wrong—
“This is the Library!” Aphra shouted. “Look! Look here at the engraving! This is Old Sala-Besh, an even older derivative of the trade tongue. I recognize some of it, let’s see…” She ran her fingers over a stone tablet that had fallen smashed to pieces, some of it turned to dust. “This says ‘With the knowledge of the ancients, we…’ I can’t tell the middle bit. The last part says ‘…is hereby bestowed to those wise and fortunate few who seek its pages.’ This is it! It has to be! Come on, this way! Ooroo’s carbonite slab is just over here! This means he was protecting something inside the Great Jedi Library!”
“We don’t know that for sure—” Namyr began.
“Come on! Hurry!”
Doctor Aphra led them eagerly through a passage as tall as a light freighter is wide, then down a series of stone steps. Namyr pulled on her goggles and set them to detail-enhancement, using Scene-It programs to pick out any interesting tidbits the goggles’ AI noticed. Ahead of her, Triple-Zero abruptly spun his head around in a perfect 180-degree turn, and looked right at her. The droid’s red eyes bore into her.
“Is there a problem?” she said.
“There might be,” said the droid. “There always might be.” The head spun back to face front, and they continued on.
They descended into another large chamber, and came to an area pulverized by time, erosion, and neglect. The ceiling had collapsed, bringing part of the floor from the upper level crashing down, partially burying the immense carbonite slab that, perhaps not surprisingly, was in great condition. The jellyfish form of the Celegian Jedi Master was before them, and for a moment no one approached it, no one even moved. Then, slowly, they all picked their way around the mound of rubble. They stood and shone their flashlights on the Celegian’s face to see greater detail. The disc droids still hovered overhead almost soundlessly, bathing the chamber in light.
“He’s here,” Aphra said in wonderment. “He’s actually, really here.”
Ageless looked up at the hole in the ceiling, to the floor above. “I wonder if whatever he was guarding is still up there.” He winced, as if suddenly getting a headache. Namyr had seen him do this numerous times now, and wondered if this was an effect from whatever tenuous connection he had to the Force. Or whatever it is he believes in.
“The markings on the carbonite slab are remarkable,” Aphra said, kneeling beside it. “Absolutely remarkable. Look here, you can see where they used trikkanna-gas modulators instead of tibanna. Trikkanna was a much less stable gas than tibanna, far more volatile and likely to explode in unideal conditions, but it could preserve someone much, much longer than tibanna gas ever could.”
“Where is trikkanna gas mined now?” asked Namyr, slowly walking around the carbonite slab.
“It isn’t. Trikkanna gas had to be artificially made on a planet whose name is lost to time. There’s nobody left who knows how to make it, we don’t even have a partial recipe for it. But with this,” she said. “With a sample of this, we might be able to reverse-engineer it, figure out how the ancients did it.”
“Does anybody see any controls?” asked Triple-Zero. The droid had just asked exactly what was on Namyr’s mind, and what she believed was on everyone’s mind. If the controls were made of durasteel, and if the wires and circuits were made from old Jedi alchemy, as many old machines on Ossus were said to have been, then it was possible (however unlikely) that they would be able melt the carbonite and free Master Ooroo’s corpse.
“I’m going up,” said Ageless.
They all turned to him. The Zabrak was still gazing up through the hole in the ceiling, eyes focused on everything and nothing.
“You’re going up?” Namyr asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I want to see what he was protecting.”
“Well, hang on a minute, none of us should go anywhere alone. Let’s focus on one thing at a time.”
“The doctor and her droid can look for controls,” Ageless said, and did a gear check. He shed a few pounds by leaving some water and rations behind. Namyr knew what that meant. It was a tactical move, for when a person is preparing themselves in case they needed to move quickly and needed to be lighter. Ageless hadn’t done that the whole time they were down here.
But now he feels like he needs to. Which means he’s paranoid. Which means he senses something.
“Hang on,” she said, doing the same thing. “I’m coming with you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know. But I’m coming with you. You two good on your own for now?”
“We’ve survived this long,” Aphra said, with a chipper smile and a wink. “Good luck. Feel free to take one of my disc droids with you. No one’s paid the light bill here in ages! Ha!”