ship?” Marr asked.
Jaden frowned. “Possible, but they could be after just about anything. Or they could be after nothing. The Solusar clone I faced on the moon was insane. Using reason to anticipate their actions is a fool’s game.”
Jaden flashed on the Kamclone’s wild eyes, the script written in blood on the door of the cloning chamber:
MOTHER IS HUNGRY.
He thought of the corpses piled several meters deep in the cloning cylinder, the thick, pungent stink of decay. The clones had killed everyone.
He had to get into the medical facility or there would be many more dead.
“Land on the roof. Marr, I need a schematic of that building.”
“Yes, Master,” said Marr, and worked the keys of his comp station.
“Still wondering why we’re chasing them?” Khedryn asked Marr, and the Cerean gave no answer.
Junker blazed through the air, the medical facility getting larger in their vision.
“I have it,” Marr said. He tapped a few keys, and a hologram of the building schematics materialized over his station. “Stairwells there and there,” he said, pointing. “Both accessible from the roof.”
“I’ll take the west stairwell,” Jaden said to Marr. “You take the east.”
Marr nodded, his expression unmarked by fear. Jaden credited him for it.
“I’ll go with Marr,” Khedryn said.
Jaden shook his head. “No. You stay on the roof with Junker.”
“I may not be a Jedi, but I can handle myself, Korr.”
“I know that. You’re my last line of defense, Khedryn. If they are making a run for that ship and get past us, I need to know it right away. Understood?”
Khedryn inclined his head. “All right. Understood.”
“Good. Let’s move, Marr.”
Jaden and Marr ran through Junker’s corridors until they reached the cargo bay.
“I need a marker,” Jaden said. “A transponder beacon or something like it. Anything aboard?”
Marr’s expression turned puzzled. “We have salvage beacons. We use them to mark derelict ships if we can’t tow them. We find them later with the beacons.”
“Unique frequency?”
“Have to be. Otherwise other spacers would pick up the signal and take our salvage.”
“Get me one.”
Marr ran across the cargo bay, opened a wall-mounted bin, and pulled out one of the pyramidal beacons and brought it back to Jaden.
“What’s the frequency?”
Marr told him. “Why do you need it?”
“Just in case,” Jaden said. “Always have contingency plans, Marr. Nothing ever goes as planned. Be prepared with backup plans and be prepared to improvise.”
“Yes, Master.”
Khedryn’s voice carried over the comlink. “Setting down.”
Jaden punched a button on the control panel to open the door. Air and Fhost’s dust billowed in. The sound of sirens carried over the wind.
Jaden seized Marr with his eyes. “If it’s the clones in there, then they killed people, Marr. That means we’re past philosophical discussions about nature and self determination. They’ve made their choice. We will have to stop them. Kill them. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Master.”
Jaden heard no hesitation in Marr’s tone. “Good. Now, do not engage the clones alone.”
“Master—”
Jaden held up a hand. “You have had hours of training, Marr. Your connection to the Force is strong, but your abilities are trivial compared with those of a trained Force user. You call me immediately and we engage them together. That’s an order.”
Marr bowed his head. “Yes, Master.”
Only the faint glow of instrumentation broke the darkness of the scout flyer’s cockpit. Both Syll and Nyss, born under the faint sun and dim skies of Umbara, preferred to keep the cockpit lights turned off. They saw in darkness better than they did in light. In some indefinable way, Nyss had always considered himself kin to darkness, an instrument of the night.
He looked under his feet, through the transparisteel bubble of the scout’s cockpit. Korriban roiled below them, spinning slowly in its shroud of clouds. Nyss appreciated the planet’s austere bleakness, even felt a kinship to it. He watched it churn, an angry black ball of storms and dark-side energy. Of course, he felt none of the energy, not even faintly. He and his sister did not possess whatever connection living things ordinarily had with the Force.
He and Syll were unique in the galaxy, disconnected from it.
Perhaps the disconnect made them dead, he mused with a smile. Or maybe he and Syll were the only two really alive and everyone else labored under the illusion of the interconnectedness of life, a shared falsehood belied by the truth of Syll and Nyss’s existence. He liked that. He was truth. The rest of the galaxy was a lie.
He looked over and watched Syll input data into the navicomp. Her dark hair and pale face