But first he needed to get out of the corridor and deeper into the ship. He'd inhaled as best he could and readied himself to move when a roar from Junker's cargo bay drowned out the sound of blasterfire. For a moment he could not place the origin of the sound, but then it occurred to him-it was an engine.
Flotsam set down twenty meters from the large central structure. The craft's landing threw up a cloud of snow. Jaden unstrapped himself from his seat. Khedryn did the same.
"You needn't come, Khedryn."
Khedryn smiled, his floating eye staring out the cockpit viewport, his other on Jaden's face.
"That's as true a statement as you've uttered, Jedi. But I think I'll come along anyway." He winked his lazy eye. "There might be something here worth salvaging."
Jaden smiled, grateful for the companionship. "Let's gear up, then."
Both donned environment suits, sealed the helmets, tested the comlinks, and opened the starboard side exit.
The frozen air and snow of an icy world blew in and dusted the floor at their feet. The envirosuits blunted the force of the cold, but Jaden's skin still goose-pimpled. He stood at the top of the ramp, staring out at the drifts and the swirling snow.
Khedryn's voice sounded in his helmet. "Jaden? Let's move. Even with the suits we don't want to be out in this any longer than necessary."
But Jaden needed to feel the air, taste it. He deactivated the seal on his helmet, and it disconnected with a slight hiss.
Khedryn took him by the arm. "What are you doing?"
"I need to do this, Khedryn."
"Why?"
Jaden did not answer, but Khedryn let him go, muttering about eyes and cursing randomly.
Jaden lifted off the helmet and gasped at the smell of the air, the cut of the wind against his skin. He was living his Force vision, the imagined and the real melding into one in the frozen air of the moon.
He inhaled. The air felt like fire in his throat and he imagined himself purged by the pain. Moisture from his breath formed clouds in the air before him, collected in his beard, froze there. The wind hissed past his ears. In the distance, he heard the crack of ice.
All of it as it had been in his vision.
He knelt, removed a glove, and took a handful of snow from the deck, letting it melt in his hand. He looked out through the swirl and saw the red light of the communications tower looming over the rest of the complex, blinking at him through the snow.
Help us. Help us.
He would.
Standing, he slid his glove back over his freezing hand, resealed his helmet, then activated his lightsaber. The heat it threw off warmed him.
"Follow me," he said to Khedryn.
Khedryn drew his blaster and followed him toward the facility. "I am increasingly concerned that all Jedi are crazed."
Jaden smiled but otherwise left the comment alone. Khedryn tapped a control pad on his suit's forearm and remotely closed and secured the Starhawk.
The deep snow clutched at their feet, as if trying to slow their advance and give them time to reconsider. Jaden looked up, eyed the slate of the sky, imagined not snow falling but reified evil.
"Do you think they're all right?" Khedryn said over the comlink, apparently misunderstanding his look. "Would you know if… something happened?"
"The Force is with them," Jaden said.
"You said that before, but it's not an answer."
"I do not have many of those."
The facility looked to Jaden not like an ordinary building, but like a tomb that held an enormous evil better left alone. He was unsure that he should dig it up, yet he felt he had no choice. He faltered in his steps.
Khedryn stepped to his side. "Come on, Jaden. Keep moving. There is a hatch ahead."
Jaden continued on, walking beside a skew-eyed salvager on a moon not found on any star charts.
"Hey, was I in your vision?" Khedryn asked him.
"No."
"That's not reassuring," Khedryn said, and chuckled.
Jaden laughed, too, glad once more for Khedryn's presence.
They neared the hatch, and Jaden was certain that whatever fate the Force had for him lurked behind it.
Marr held a blaster in one hand and with his other the steering bars of Khedryn's Searing swoop. The swoop's motor was so loud it sounded like an ongoing explosion.
Marr's heart beat so fast he could hardly breathe. Recalling Relin's words, he turned inward, focused his mind on the keep within him, thought of how he felt when immersed in a difficult calculation, a distant, warm isolation that brought him calm.
His heart and breathing slowed, replaced by a pleasing serenity.
Centered, resolved, he revved the swoop's engine and bolted out of the cargo bay into the corridor, firing his blaster as fast as he could pull the trigger, hoping the Force would guide some of his shots.
Blasterfire from Harbinger's security forces answered his own, sizzled past his ears, and thumped into the swoop. It bucked under him like an angry bantha, but he held his seat. He picked a spot in the hall-where the two humanoids sheltered behind the loading droid-ducked low behind the windscreen and, still firing his blaster wildly, flew right at them.
Jaden expected to find the hatch rusted shut, or protected by a security system. Instead they found it propped open a few centimeters. Khedryn and he stared at the hatch for a long moment, the wind howling past their helmets.
"What do you make of that?" Khedryn asked, nodding at the item holding the door open.
Jaden knelt and picked it up-the back hand plate from a suit of Imperial stormtrooper armor.
"Is that from a stormie suit?"
Jaden nodded, turning the plastoid plate over in his hand. "It is. Odd."
"Probably been there for decades," Khedryn said, but he did not sound as if he believed it. He looked over his shoulder as if he expected a squad of the 501st to come charging out of the snow.
"Probably," Jaden agreed. On edge, he pulled the heavy metal door open the rest of the way. It opened onto a small foyer. A transparisteel observation window on an inner wall opened onto a guard station. Another hatch, thrown open, revealed a hallway that led deeper into the facility. Over the hatch, written in Basic in stenciled letters, were the words:
WEST ENTRY. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.
Jaden reached out with the Force, seeking any Force-sensitives within range, but felt none.
"Follow me," he said, leading Khedryn past the post and through the hatch, his lightsaber a torch in the otherwise dark corridor. Khedryn activated a glow rod and added its light to the weapon's glow.
Walking those metal-floored, abandoned halls, Jaden felt as if he had stepped into the past as surely as Relin had stepped into the future.
"Ten degrees Celsius," Khedryn said, taking the information from his suit readout. He unsealed his helmet, letting it hang from its connectors down his back. "Someone is keeping the place warm."
Jaden unsealed his own helmet, his breath steaming in the air. They walked on, their feet moving through the detritus of a rapid retreat: scrap electronics; flimsiplast, the ink long faded; stray data crystals; oddly, a hairbrush.
Khedryn cleared his throat, a nervous sound. "What do you suppose happened here?"
Jaden shook his head.
They moved through hall after hall, room after room, and everywhere it was the same-debris littered the floor in the silent, cool air. They found nothing to indicate the facility's purpose.