Into the Void: Star Wars (Dawn of the Jedi) (36 page)

She breathed deeply and welcomed the Force flowing through her. Closed her eyes. Shut
away the pain that threatened to make her sick, the tiredness that lured her down
to sleep, and death. The Force grew stronger in her, tingling in her fingertips and
toes, her neck, her wounded chest, and she directed it into her experiment.

The alchemy came alive within her. It was a burning star with a dark heart.
That, I have to watch
, she thought, but agonies swept through her, distracting her. The power was wonderful.
She smiled.

The flesh before her started to bubble and boil, and without opening her eyes she
stripped off her tattered robe and undergarments and leaned forward.

The smell of burning flesh filled the Peacemaker.

She heard a pitiful whine from Tre but did not look. If he was afraid, he could cover
his eyes.

Bogan loomed and she opened her mind’s eye to embrace its darkened surface, and at
the same time she felt a warm, wet touch between her breasts. It caressed the angry
wound and numbed. Lanoree welcomed the contact and sought more, leaning farther forward
until she was directly over the pedestal of flesh.
My flesh, my experiment, my very own alchemy of self
.

She sought and found Ashla, a bright spark within the Force. And experiencing herself
in balance, the talents she had been made aware of at Anil Kesh, and which she had
been practicing for so long, began to flow.

Flesh flowed with them.

Bogan is in her dreams. She was there before becoming a Ranger, but only briefly in
the company of others. A visit, an education. And in her memory Ashla was always a
constant light that drew her away from darkness.

But in these dreams there
is
no Ashla. She stands on a hillside on Bogan, beside the ruins of stone buildings
thousands of years old, looking up at another Bogan staring down. Two moons, both
of them dark. No hope of light.

Lanoree sprang awake and sat up, clutching her hands to her chest. She was on her
cot, still naked but with a thin sheet gathered around her waist. Ironholgs clacked.
Tre sat slumped in the corner, head to one side and eyes barely open.

“The sleeper wakes,” he said weakly, and he looked very sick.

Beside her cot, on the floor between her and Tre, was the experiment. It was withered
and dry now, the petrified remnants of something long dead. Even the blood that had
dripped onto its base was dark, dry, and flaked, as if it had fallen long ago.

She looked down at the wound in her chest and took in a deep, startled breath. Her
skin was rough and scarred, and there was a definite depression in her chest. But
the blaster hole had vanished. She
closed her eyes and breathed deeply, twisting to the left and right, and felt no pain
inside. Nothing out of place. Nothing missing.

“You look better,” Tre said.

“You look worse.” Lanoree stood from the cot and quickly snatched up her clothes,
pulling them on, then knelt beside Tre, resting one hand against his cheek.

“I think whatever poisoned me on Nox has reached somewhere vital,” he said. “My heart
staggers. My breathing … light.” His lekku were limp and pale, and she had never seen
his red skin so wan.

“I can help you,” she said, but then she frowned.
That withered thing, dry and old … there’s nothing left
. “Not how I helped myself, but I can use the Force to cleanse your blood, perhaps.
To purge you.”

“No time,” Tre said. “I’ll be fine … had worse … no time.”

And Lanoree knew that he was right. There
was
no time, and perhaps even now they were too late. Dal might not have killed her with
the blaster—

But he meant to, he wanted me to die, he shot me to kill me!

—but if he reached the Old City and initiated the device, then he might succeed in
killing her anyway.

Lanoree slapped a compartment open and dropped a medpac into Tre’s lap. “Here. Drugs.
I’m sorry, Tre. Do what you can for now, and I’ll …” He waved her away.

She rushed into the cockpit and ran her hands across the Peacemaker’s controls. It
felt like coming home. She fired the engines and then paused as the ship shuddered
around them. “Thank you, Tre,” she said. “For coming to rescue me.”

“Only ’cuz I can’t fly your ship,” he said from behind her. She smiled, pleased that
he was nowhere near the bad man he had once been. She only hoped he had more time
to make things even better.

The scanners flashed, warning lights chimed. She switched on comm to send a message
to Tython, but the flatscreen was a haze of snow and crackles. Nothing manifested,
and its level indicator fluctuated rapidly. She could have examined the readings closer,
but there was no need. Sometimes instruments gave voice to what was visibly obvious.

Outside, the skies and surface of Sunspot were in turmoil. The fiery clouds and lightning
she had witnessed as Tre and Ironholgs pulled
her from the mine had increased. Now they looked cataclysmic. Fingers of lightning
thrashed down all around, making the ground shudder and the air bend. The skies were
deep red and violent orange, streaked here and there with white-hot flame that ignited
massive, thundering explosions high up.

Malterra was close. Gravities fought as each planet exerted influence over the other,
and it seemed that both sought dominance.

They could retreat underground into the deepest mines, as most of Sunspot’s miners
did on every such occasion. For four days they would live down there, feeling the
world around them shaking and sensing the great energies being expended above. And
then they would climb to the surface to repair any damage, and the mining would begin
again.

Dal planned this
, Lanoree thought.
He must have. Once in a Malterran year, a quarter of a Tythan year; such coincidence
can’t be an accident
.

But Lanoree knew that she had no choice. If she desired, she could consult the ship’s
computer and calculate the odds of her being able to pilot the ship out through such
a storm. But she never liked hearing the odds.

“Can you make it up here, strap in?” she asked Tre. She heard a groan, and then his
shuffling footsteps as he came to join her. He stank. His breathing was ragged.

“I’ll probably puke again.”

“Don’t worry. Ironholgs, prepare for takeoff.”

The droid clacked and clicked.

Lanoree increased power to the engines. The ship felt strong and confident around
her, and as she took in a deep breath, she felt the same.
I am renewed
, she thought. She knew that the sense of power and superiority she felt was wrong;
her alchemies were talents that should be borne lightly.

Ashla and Bogan be damned. She had a more immediate fight on her hands.

“Here goes nothing,” she said, and the Peacemaker blasted from Sunspot’s surface and
into cosmic chaos.

The most direct route from Sunspot to Tython would have taken them straight through
Malterra. Lanoree programmed the route four times, and each time the ship’s computer
threw out a different alternative. So in the end she took manual control, switched
on four screens with different scaled space charts, and trusted her instincts.

There is no fear; there is power
, she thought, and she worked with the Force to see them through. She felt queasy.
She convinced herself that it was the result of her healing, as opposed to an unsettling
of her balance.
But the flesh was strong. The strength, the
potential! She could not hold down the excitement she felt at such arcane alchemies.

“We should wait,” Tre said beside her, weak and scared. She did not answer. He knew
as well as she how much was at stake, and how much of a start Dal had on them. They
had to travel as fast as they could. There was no other way.

The Peacemaker took a pounding as she curved them up out of Sunspot’s atmosphere,
but the craft had been built to last. The noise was tremendous, and she could hardly
hear her own shout. The straps cut into her shoulders and chest. The windows shimmered
with heat on the outside. Her seat creaked in its mounting, loose panels rattled and
shook, and the flight stick vibrated so hard in her hand that soon her fingers and
forearm grew numb. She could not let go. She fought the storm through the ship, and
calmed herself with the Force, and Dal was large in her mind’s eye.

She remembered his face as he’d pointed the blaster and his eyes as he’d pulled the
trigger, and there was nothing there.

Scanners showed that they were almost fifteen kilometers above the planet’s surface,
and she increased the power to break them into space. Once there, she hoped the abuse
the ship was undergoing might lessen.

But she was wrong. Space itself was being rippled and torn by the forces exerted between
the two planets as they rapidly closed on each other. They would pass within half
a million kilometers of each other, and that sounded like a comfortable distance.
But flying between them felt like dropping a feather into the winds of Talss’s grassy
plains. Her instruments went haywire from the magnetic and gravitational chaos dancing
between worlds. Ironholgs skittered across the cabin behind
her and tipped onto his side, sparks arcing from several slits on his head.

“Your droid’s exploded,” Tre said. Even his voice sounded dismantled, broken into
constituent parts by the incredible assault on the ship and everything within it.
“How long till the Peacemaker goes, too?”

“The Peacemaker
won’t
go!” Lanoree shouted. “Your brain will fall from your butt before that happens.”

“I think it already has,” he shouted. She was pleased to hear humor, because perhaps
that meant Tre was feeling better. Maybe the medicines he’d taken had helped. But
she could not fool herself. She had cured her own terrible wounds using arcane and
dangerous Force alchemy, but Tre was different. The poisons eating at him might be
slowed, but to stop them would require expert attention.

She tried to communicate with Tython, to warn them, but all comm systems remained
down. An hour after the attempt, her own message came back to her, surprising her
with its air of desperation. She felt sick, and Tre vomited beside her. At least this
time he turned away from her before letting go.

“That’s the second time you’ve done that to my ship!” she shouted. No reply from Tre.
She glanced across, and he was sitting with his chin touching his chest. His lekku
hung limp and unmoving. She switched on the grav unit, but it was malfunctioning in
the storms. Her stomach rose and fell. She pressed back into her seat. Something seemed
to have come loose in her chest, and she probed delicately, using the Force to feel
out the geography of her wound. It felt fine; her fix had been good. Perhaps it was
simply her held breath.

Time moved on, every moment an eternity. The Peacemaker shook and vibrated, and more
rattles developed. The ship was being shaken to pieces. Arc lightning struck them
three times, the third time such a heavy charge that every seam and hole in the hull,
control panel, and structure lit up as if they were being burned apart. Lanoree screamed
out loud but could not hear, and she quietly prepared herself for death.
I’ll feel nothing
, she thought, but she knew what she would see at the moment of death: the madness
on her brother’s face.

But the ship held together and they did not die.

When they were a million kilometers out from Sunspot, Malterra passed its closest
point to that planet. Lanoree watched the passage on one of her scanner screens, and
wondered at the immense forces and pressures being exerted there right now. In those
deep mines, miners huddled. She had every respect for them and wished them well.

At last, as the storms seemed to be getting better instead of worse, she ran a full
systems check on the ship. Ironholgs was still out of action so she had to do it herself.
They had taken a battering. Life support was damaged, but would last them to Tython.
One of the laser cannons had been fractured; she shut off the pod supplying it in
case of leakage. A fuel rod had ruptured, and she jettisoned it into space. But the
hull integrity was good, and all vital systems were functioning. The Peacemaker was
well enough to get them to Tython, and that was her only aim.