His exhalations steamed in the cool air. The echo of his boots on the floor seemed to carry everywhere. And somewhere in the complex, at the base of the communications tower, the facility sent its heartbeat pulsing into space.
Help us. Help us.
He swallowed and ran a hand through his hair, taking a moment to gather himself. He was not fearful of encountering the clones, if any yet survived. Like all Jedi, he did not fear battle or death. But he was growing ever more fearful of encountering an answer to his question, and he felt certain the lift would take him to it.
Static crackled over the open comlink connection he maintained with Khedryn. Something in the facility's makeup must have interfered with short-range communication. Between outbursts of static, he heard Khedryn's breathing, an occasional whispered curse, the thump of Khedryn's boots on the floor as he made his way back to the ship. The sounds reminded Jaden that he was not alone, that he was still connected.
"Everything all right?" he said in response to another of Khedryn's curses. Static roared in to fill the silence after he'd spoken.
"Fine," Khedryn said, his voice a whisper, as if he feared to awaken whatever slept in the facility. "I'm tripping over debris, is all. This glow rod isn't exactly a-"
Static ate the rest of his reply.
"Let me know when you get to the ship," Jaden said.
"Will do," Khedryn said through the interference.
Serenaded by ever more static, Jaden continued through the facility. Doors and side passages opened here and there. He caught a glimpse of a kitchen that smelled faintly of food rotted long ago, another recreation room with rusted exercise equipment, conference rooms-all of the mundane trappings of a research facility anywhere in the galaxy.
Except for the blaster marks that scored the walls and ceilings, the black lines a cryptic script that chronicled the death of the facility.
Ahead, at the end of a long corridor, he saw the closed double doors of the lift, blackened and scarred by a barrage of blasterfire. A headless body lay on the ground near the lift doors, half propped against the wall, the arms thrown out wide as if to embrace. He noted the lab coat.
Segments of stormtrooper armor containing bits of desiccated body parts littered the corridor between Jaden and the lift. Large pieces of security droids lay strewn about the hall, likewise dismembered-here a leg, there a torso, there a head, the eyes gone dark. Jaden recognized the work of a lightsaber, and a skilled combatant at that.
Guilt dogged Khedryn's steps. He knew Jaden was right-Khedryn would be no help facing any of the clones, should any have survived-but he still felt as if he was abandoning the Jedi.
For all Jaden's power, all his talent, he still struck Khedryn as remarkably fragile and entirely alone. And for all Khedryn's cynicism, he liked Jaden.
"Because I run," Khedryn murmured, embarrassed to have ever uttered the words, notwithstanding their truth. He wished that he understood himself less well, that he could live in ignorance of his character flaws.
He felt himself a coward.
Yet his fear was warranted. He had gotten in much deeper than he had intended, and whatever had happened in the facility was better left undisturbed. He no longer felt like he was walking through a research facility. Instead, he felt like he was walking through the scene of a mass murder.
Sweat soaked his clothes under his envirosuit. His fingers girdled the handle of his blaster too tightly, and he consciously relaxed them. He soft-stepped his way back through the complex, trying even to quiet his breathing, hyper-aware of his surroundings.
The holo-log had unnerved him. He had seen the concern root in the eyes of the doctors, seen the root blossom into fear.
If the Force had led Marr to choose a course that brought them to the moon, then the Force could karking well curl up in a corner and die. Khedryn wanted nothing more than to be off the moon, back aboard Junker drinking pulkay.
Marr had turned some corner around which Khedryn could not see. He'd given up Khedryn's skewed view of the galaxy for the straightforward view of the Jedi. He had seemed eager to fly with Relin. Eager.
Khedryn worried for Marr.
And despite himself, he worried for Jaden.
I do not quit, Jedi. He had said those words. They sounded like self-mockery, like a bad joke. He did quit. He was quitting.
Unbidden, Relin's words bubbled up from the soup of his memory, the Jedi wan, haggard, the walking dead-You cannot always run, Khedryn.
But he always had. Not so much from fear of danger as from fear of standing still.
He cursed under his breath as he walked, each stride punctuated with a soft expletive. The guilt did not relent and he could not believe what he had come to. He was seriously considering turning around to stand next to a Jedi he'd only just met and possibly face foes against which he could do nothing.
Maybe he had turned a corner, too.
And maybe he'd stared out too many viewports while moving through hyperspace and gotten the madness.
The comlink blurted static, putting his already racing heart in the back of his throat.
"Stang," he hissed, his steps already starting to slow. He was still moving in the same direction but only by way of inertia, not propulsion.
Time to change course.
Jaden studied the scene, imagining the battle in his head. Security droids, backed by a squad of stormtroopers, had been waiting when the clones came up the lift. Blasterfire and smoke had filled the hall. The clones, deflecting the shots with their lightsabers, had cut their way through both men and machines. When all had gone quiet, one of the medical corps's doctors had approached the clones, perhaps pleading for mercy or arguing for reason and calm.
They had decapitated her.
He suspected no staff had escaped the facility and, for the first time, he seriously considered the possibility that no clones remained on the moon-that they had taken whatever ships had been available to the staff and fled into the Unknown Regions.
As the dire implications of that settled on him-Jedi-Sith clones roaming space-a burst of static exploded from the comlink. He winced as if it were blasterfire.
"Say again, Khedryn?"
More static. Perhaps they were losing contact altogether.
He picked his way through the aftermath of the battle, feeling as if he were walking through a graveyard, the large pieces of the droids the metallic tombstones. When he reached the doors, he looked down at the corpse. Time had drawn the skin tight over the bones and discolored it to ash. The trousers and lab coat, stuffed with a headless body, struck him as obscene. He read the name on the coat-DR. GRAY.
He flashed back to the holo-log, the fear he had seen in her eyes when she had recorded the final entry.
She had been right to fear. A clone had decapitated her, probably while she stood there unarmed.
Jaden stared at the lift doors and flashed back to the air lock door on Centerpoint Station, the frightened eyes staring at him through the tiny viewport. They had been those of someone who, though armed, was not dangerous.
He reached for the button to summon the lift, cognizant that the same hand and the same gesture had spaced more than two dozen people on Centerpoint.
Somewhere behind the walls a mechanism hummed. The lift still functioned. He stood there awaiting it, living for a moment in his past, in his guilt.
The lift arrived, opened. Dr. Gray's head lay in the center, the open-eyes on the mummified visage staring holes into his soul.
For a moment his feet remained stuck to the floor, pinioned there by Dr. Gray's eyes. Random static from the comlink freed him from his paralysis.
"I am heading down," he said to Khedryn.