Into the Void: Star Wars (Dawn of the Jedi) (37 page)

She plotted the fastest course that would take them to the Old City and handed control
to the ship’s computer.

As she unbuckled herself and stood to squeeze back into the main cabin, something
struck her.

Lanoree gasped and sank back into the seat. A vision. A blow. A ripple in the Force,
far greater than she had ever felt before.
A ship
, she thought.
A battle. Death and chaos, and one among them
 …

Then the vision was gone, leaving barely an echo in its wake. Dal’s ship? She thought
not. There was no sense of recognition at all; indeed, a coldness had taken her, and
an alienness seemed to haunt the shadows of her mind. Soon, that too was fading.

Lanoree shook her head. Then she lifted Tre from the copilot’s seat and carried him
to the cot. His eyes opened as she lay him down.

“Half a day and we’ll be entering Tython’s atmosphere,” she said.

“Just blast me into space. I’ll feel better that way.” He sat up slowly and squinted
at Lanoree.

“How do you feel?”

“How do I look?”

“Covered in vomit.”

“That’s how I feel.”

Lanoree sat next to him, frowning. “Everything feels so strange.”

“Well, you did just heal a hole in your chest. You should be dead.”

She thought of her experiment and the life she had coaxed into it.

“Maybe,” she said. “I need rest.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. “Wake me when
we’re approaching Tython.” Without even hearing Tre’s response she fell into a deep,
troubled sleep.

Her dreams are strange. She is aware that they are dreams, yet they are more chilling
than ever before. She constantly tries waking herself, but she does not feel in control.

There is a figure. Tall, cloaked, armored, an unmarked helmet hiding its features.
In its hand is a weapon the like of which she has never seen before. A sword, but
strange, with pure Force as its blade.

The same dream, again and again.

Only hands on her shoulder and a familiar voice bring her up from that vision.

“Lanoree. Tython. But something’s very wrong.”

Approaching Tython, the chaos on the planet’s surface was evident.

“What’s that?” Tre asked.

“Force Storm.” Lanoree had never witnessed one from space, but it looked far more
violent and widespread than any she had experienced before. She tried contacting Master
Dam-Powl again, but though her comm unit was now functioning, no signals could pierce
the storm.

“He’s started already,” Tre said. “Whatever it is your mad brother’s trying to do,
it’s begun.”

“Maybe,” Lanoree said. And that was her great fear. If Dal initiated the device, perhaps
Tython’s first response would be a shudder of the Force and storms to rip across the
planet’s surface. “Maybe I’m too late.”

She jumped into the cockpit and steered them into a dive into the atmosphere that
was all but suicidal.

Every moment might be their last. She would make them all count.

Never forget that we were brought here. Tython is a planet rich in the Force, but
it is also a place of mystery, unknown to us, existing here for eons before the Tho
Yor arrived. Its age is deep, its stories deeper. We are but residents here; our true
home is in the Force
.

—Master Deela jan Morolla, 3,528 TYA

For Tre, the descent must have been terrifying. The Peacemaker blazed, hull creaking
in protest at the incredible forces and terrible heat, flames smearing the windows,
acceleration pressing him back against the seat with enough pressure to make his ears
and nose bleed and his lekku drain of blood. Lanoree barely noticed these physical
effects. The Force was in turmoil, and the closer she came to home, the more lost
she felt.

But though she sought Dal and his mad plans, she was not convinced that this storm
was connected to him. She sensed it all across Tython, erupting from the deep places
of the world and springing from the widest skies. The disturbance was powerful, but
the planet still stood solid.

She thought again of that vision in her dream and the strange feeling she’d had flying
through the violent space between the inner planets.

Dal is my focus
, she thought. Gripping the flight stick she urged the Peacemaker into an even deeper,
more dangerous descent. She was forcing the ship past its design constraints and thrusting
it into the danger zone. But there was no other way. Every breath she took between
now and finding Dal might be one breath too long, and her last.

The Peacemaker burst from the clouds above Talss. She headed west, skimming hilltops,
watching scanners confused and disturbed by the ongoing Force Storm, and an urgent
chiming marked a partial return of her comm signal.

She immediately sent a signal for Master Dam-Powl. It was answered in moments, and
the flustered Master appeared on the Peacemaker’s flatscreen.

“Lanoree,” she said. “I … the worst.”

“Master! Dal gave me the slip, but I know where he’s going, and I know what he has.”
Dam-Powl’s image seemed not to be hearing the message. She looked older than before,
distracted, and she was not as well presented as usual. Lanoree could not even tell
where the Master was transmitting from; the room around her was clean, modern, empty.

“… ship from out of system …” Dam-Powl continued speaking, but Lanoree could not hear.
She adjusted some controls, checked transmit levels. But the storm’s effects were
insurmountable.

“Master, I’m almost at the Old City. Are there Je’daii there waiting for him?”

“… withdrew, but there are safeguards,” Master Dam-Powl said. She seemed to gather
herself and stare at Lanoree from the flatscreen. “He must be stopped. Whatever is
happening now … end it all.”

“Master?”

“I sense that everything is about to change,” Dam-Powl said. She went to say something
else, but the screen snowed and her voice disappeared into a crackling haze of interference.
Lanoree tried one more time, then turned the comm unit off.

What had she meant? A ship from out of system? One of the Sleeper ships returned?
Lanoree was more than intrigued, but she was also set
on her course, and Master Dam-Powl’s words did nothing to dissuade her.

“Please, just land this thing,” Tre said. “I’ve got nothing else to throw up.”

“Almost there,” Lanoree said. She looked across at Tre, pleased that he seemed a little
better. Perhaps whatever had poisoned him on Nox could be treated, given time.

“What’s the plan?” he asked. His lekku were stroking either side of his face as if
giving comfort.

“Plan?” she asked.

“Is she always like this?” Tre asked Ironholgs over his shoulder, and Lanoree smiled.
The droid issued no reply; some of its circuits were fried, and it was in need of
repair. Again, given time.

The ship jolted as a streak of Force lightning arced down and split the sky. Lanoree
cringed and jerked the ship to one side. To crash now would be—

A chime from the sensors. She leaned to the left and shielded a scanner from reflected
light from outside, and then she saw it. Several kilometers in the distance, and at
least thirty kilometers from the first ruins of the Old City.

“What now?” Tre asked.

“Crashed ship.” She tweaked the sensor controls, then sat back and sighed in satisfaction.
“Something going for us, at last.”

“His?”

“Yes. Deathblaster. Let’s take a look.”

She brought the Peacemaker in low, the remaining laser cannons at the ready for any
aggression. The Deathblaster might have been a wreck, but that didn’t mean it didn’t
have fight left in it. She circled at a distance, scanning for life-forms. There was
nothing. If the Stargazers and her brother were still on board, they were dead.

She felt a pang at that, unsure whether it was grief or regret.

“Why not just blast it?” Tre asked. The ship had landed hard, gouging furrows from
the soil across a low hillside, and then broken up when it struck a rocky outcropping.
There was no sign of fire or explosion.

“Can’t in case the device is still inside,” she said. But that was not the whole reason.
“Setting down.”

They landed with barely a jolt, and the Peacemaker seemed to croak and sigh with relief.
As she was about to speak, Tre held up one hand.

“Who’s going to look after you if I stay here?”

“I was just going to say you don’t need to come,” Lanoree said. “This was never really
your fight.”

Tre’s face darkened and his lekku dipped to communicate anger. “It’s
everyone’s
fight,” he said. “We just happen to be the only two here.”

“You sound like a bad holo.” Lanoree smiled and opened the hatch. Hand on sword hilt,
Force senses fogged by the storms that raged across Tython’s surface, she stepped
down onto her home planet one more time.

They split up as they approached the crashed Stargazer ship, and Lanoree’s nervousness
grew. She did not want to find her brother dead among the wreckage. Whether that said
she was a good person, whether it spoke of an unreasonable sense of forgiveness, she
did not know. It simply was. She had always held out hope for him. Even as he turned
that blaster on her and she had a split second to partially shield herself with the
Force, she had felt so sorry for him.

A fool, perhaps. But a sister for sure. She hoped her parents would be proud.

Lanoree closed on the ship and probed outward with her Force senses. She could not
detect anyone inside at all. Tre approached slowly from the other side, and when he
hefted a rock and threw it at the hull, she ran forward to tackle anyone who emerged.
But all was silent.

She climbed the tilted hull and shone a glow rod through a smashed door. The insides
were a mess—crushed paneling, hanging wires and cables, a tumbled seat, and hardened
impact-foam formed around the empty shapes of at least four people. She could see
two bodies still encased in foam, and the parts exposed were badly mutilated by the
crash.

Lanoree signaled for Tre to wait where he was, then climbed inside. Neither body was
Dal’s. She breathed a sigh of relief, then jumped at a particularly strong crash of
lightning from outside.

There was no sign of the device. And no evidence of a battle or being shot down. The
Force Storm had downed this ship, and she wondered at the stroke of luck.

She touched the hull on the way out, then slid down the ship’s back to the engine
cowls. They were still almost too hot to touch.

“Thirty kilometers to the Old City, and they’re on foot,” she shouted.

“How long ago?” Tre asked.

“Not long. Still hot. But we need to hurry.” They ran back to the Peacemaker, and
Lanoree took off and drifted them quickly across the landscape. Tre sat beside her
and kept his eye on the scanners as she steered them through valleys and around rocky
summits. She was more than aware of the element of surprise they had on their side
once again. Dal thought she was dead.

Approaching the Old City, she experienced flashbacks of the last time she had been
here. After finding Dal’s bloodied clothing and believing him dead, she had returned
to Anil Kesh to face the repercussions of his final acts. Following the inquest into
Skott Yun’s murder—for which blame was laid squarely on Dal—she had been granted a
period of leave, during which she had traveled home and told her parents everything
that had happened.

They had blamed themselves. And Lanoree had blamed
her
self. A distance had grown between them, and when the time came to embark upon the
rest of her Great Journey—alone this time, a situation she would grow to prefer—she
had grabbed at it.

She had never returned to the Old City. Dal was dead and gone, some
thing
had taken him down, and there was nothing to be gained from visiting that place again.

Besides, there was the sense of fear that had flooded her, which she had attributed
to the immense age of the place, the unknown history, the mystery that even the Force
could not enlighten. She had never spoken of it. She believed that place should always
be left alone.

And now, here she was again.

“Sensors don’t show any life-forms,” she said.

“No Je’daii here? Surely they’d be guarding against him getting past you?”

“I think Master Dam-Powl said they withdrew.” She pointed up at
the sky. “There’s something else going on. Connected or not, I think we’re on our
own.”

“You Je’daii and your mysteries,” Tre said, lekku shrugging. “So where are they?”

“They must have gone down already.”

“Down?”

“There are tunnels beneath the ruins. Caverns. Lakes. Deep places.”

“I’ve had enough of the underground.”

Lanoree looked at him, one eyebrow raised, although this time she did not say,
You don’t have to come
.

“Let’s make it quick,” Tre said.

“You’re feeling better?”