He removed his hand and the glow from the filaments ended. “Those filaments are everywhere, integrated into the structure. It’s possible the entire structure is nothing but the filaments, so fine and closely knit that the walls appear to be a coherent solid.”
Jaden felt the dark-side energies growing more focused. He held his lightsaber hilt in his hand. “The Order’s scientists can study this later, Marr. Right now, let’s find the clones.”
“Right, Master.”
They moved through the docking tube and into the station proper. A vast, high-ceilinged corridor extended to their left and right. The glowing filaments meshed into small clusters above them, lighting the corridor in a dim, greenish glow.
Jaden let the Force fill him, closed his eyes, and reached out with his consciousness for the clones. He did not perceive them, felt only the inchoate, dispersed dark-side power contained in the station. The amount of the power was striking, but it was diffuse, like soft rainfall, like air, something all around them but only barely noticeable. Were it concentrated, it would have been a tsunami, a cyclone.
“Come on,” he said, and started in the direction of the tether. Perhaps the clones had gone down to the planet.
Before they’d moved thirty meters, cysts formed in the walls, hundreds of them, before and behind them, on both sides of the corridors.
“What are those?” Marr asked.
Thin slits formed in the cysts, split open, and expelled the mucus-covered, mummified remains of hundreds of sentient beings. They stood unevenly on bony legs as their empty eye sockets fixed on Jaden and Marr.
“Back to back,” Jaden said.
The clawed hands of the dead extended toward them and, as one, the feet of hundreds of the ancient dead lurched and plodded toward them.
Nyss and the Iteration said nothing as the scout flyer emerged from hyperspace. Immediately Nyss engaged the ship’s baffles. Most scanners would pass directly over the ship without noting it. A soft alarm indicated a radiation danger, so Nyss adjusted the deflector to filter out the harmful rays.
“I can feel the dark side of the Force,” the Iteration said. “It’s faint, but present.”
Nyss grunted acknowledgment. He cared little for what the Iteration felt.
“You don’t speak much,” the Iteration said.
Nyss did not look at the Iteration when he replied. “You are not someone to whom I wish to speak. In a standard hour you’ll be someone else.” He looked over at the clone and grinned harshly. “We’ll speak then.”
The Iteration shifted in his seat and said nothing, but Nyss could sense his discomfort. He supposed the Iteration lived in his own kind of hole. He’d been “alive” for mere hours and was, in effect, to let himself die soon. Had he not been appropriately programmed by the One Sith’s scientists, Nyss might have worried about him balking.
He scanned the system and picked up a ship, the freighter flown by the Jedi and the spacers. It hung on the fringe of the system’s asteroid belt.
Nyss engaged the ion engines and sped toward it. As they neared, the Iteration said, “The Jedi is not aboard that ship. If he was, I would sense him.”
“Then we’re free to blow it from space,” Nyss said.
He approached from an angle above the freighter and brought his weapons online.
An explosion caused Junker to lurch forward. R-6 whooped in alarm, and Khedryn grabbed at the stick as he nearly slammed his head into the instrument panel.
“What the hell was that?” he shouted.
The force of the explosion caused the ship to hurtle toward a nearby asteroid. The oblong ball of rock filled his field of vision, the details of its cratered surface looming larger and larger in his sight. Khedryn cursed and engaged the reverse thrusters.
Another explosion rocked the ship, and the red line of a laser cut the space beside them, slammed into an asteroid, and blew it to pieces. Shards of rock rained against Junker’s hull, pelting it with metal and stone. Khedryn had probably saved the ship through pure luck, reversing the thrusters at just the right moment.
“Someone is shooting at us!” he said, and R-6 whooped again. He directed deflector power to the rear and fired up the engines as an alarm began to blare in the cockpit. His instruments showed him a fire in the engine room.
“Get that fire out, droid,” he said to R-6.
He engaged the engines as another shot skinned Junker along the top. A boom sounded and for a fleeting, terrifying moment the entire instrument panel lost power, but backup brought it online fast. Khedryn shoved