He stepped inside, and the feel of the floor immediately struck him oddly. He crouched and shined his glow rod directly at it.
It was transparisteel, dimmed the way Junker's cockpit viewport could dim when the ship entered hyperspace. He also noticed a latticework of hair-fine filaments that ran through it, capillaries of unknown purpose. He knelt and looked through the transparisteel; he could just make out the ghosts of shapes in the room below, but nothing distinct.
On the far side of the room, he saw the dark hole of an open lift shaft, the door only half shut, an eye frozen in the act of closing.
He rose and walked to one of the computer consoles. The interface was intuitive and controlled the lighting in the room he was in, as well as the lighting, temperature, and noise in the rooms visible through the floor. He turned on the power to the rooms below, expecting the lights to be non-operational. They functioned, illuminating the equivalent of a fishbowl. He pressed another key to eliminate the dimming effect on the floor.
The observation deck overlooked a subcomplex of rooms that Jaden assumed to have been the clones' living quarters. Hallways radiated outward from a central meeting room and attached mess hall. Two dejarik sets sat atop a table in the meeting room, the static-laden holographic creatures facing each other across the battlefield, the games unfinished. The chairs in both rooms had been pushed neatly under the table. Plates and eating utensils sat in orderly stacks atop the serving counter in the mess. Unlike the rest of the facility, everything in the clones' rooms was in place, tidy, and invariably white, cream, or some shade of gray.
"Womp rats in a maze," he murmured.
Jaden walked the observation chamber, his steps slow, staring at the rooms below his feet, tracing them as if he were walking in them himself. The hallways led to sparsely furnished personal quarters, nine of them. Each contained a bed, a desk, two chairs, some old books in hard copy.
He had not seen an actual book in a long time and he puzzled over their presence-a single data crystal could hold an entire library of information and take up essentially no space at all-until he remembered Dr. Black's words from the holo-log.
The doctors had given the clones hard-copy books so they'd have no datapads from which to scrounge parts. In fact, Jaden realized for the first time that there were no computers of any kind in the clones' rooms. They'd managed to construct lightsabers anyway.
He continued his walk, noting little assertions of individuality in each of the personal quarters-a potted plant, long dead, a remarkable clay sculpture of a human hand, a shelf on which sat four green bottles, their color a contrast with the grays and whites of the complex.
He stopped cold when he stood over the last bedroom, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. Words had been written on the ceiling-Jaden's floor. They were in Basic and underlined, the jagged letters the dried brown of old blood.
Stop looking at us!
Jaden suddenly felt guilty for walking in the footsteps of the doctors. He imagined the clones living in those quarters, day in and day out, the feet of the gods who had made them walking across the ceiling. No privacy, no freedom. Small wonder they had grown so hostile. The thick durasteel walls that encased the clones' area might as well have been bars. Despite what they had done to the others in the complex, Jaden pitied them.
He walked to the nearest console and powered down the lights. The rooms below went dark. He thought they should stay that way.
Somewhere down the lift shaft, a can or metal drum fell, rolled across a hard surface, and rattled itself still.
Startled, Jaden flashed his glow rod around the room. The beam pierced the darkness but illuminated nothing. His fingers warmed as thin tendrils of blue Force lightning snaked from his fingertips and swirled around the glow rod.
He stilled his mind, fell into the Force, and calmed himself. He reminded himself that the clones had been prisoners, victims. He reached out through the Force, feeling for another Force-user nearby, but encountered nothing.
"I am here to help you," he called, his voice echoing around the large chamber, its own version of the distress beacon.
Help you, help you, help you…
No response.
He moved to the open doors of the lift, lightsaber at the ready. The control panel had been destroyed. A charnel reek drifted up through the doors, fumes from some forgotten hell. Shielding his nose with his forearm, he beamed his glow rod down the shaft. It descended perhaps thirty meters. The lift compartment sat at the bottom, its interior visible through a large rectangular hole in its top. He guessed that a lightsaber had cut the hole.
He hung over the void for a long while, smelling death, listening to nothing but his own heartbeat. He had to go down. Metal rungs ran the length of the near side of the shaft, but he did not bother with them.
Drawing on the Force, he picked his spot atop the lift compartment, and leapt. The Force cushioned his impact and he hit the top of the lift in a crouch. Without pausing he lowered himself through the hole in the roof and into the lift proper, lightsaber to hand.
The smell of death was stronger. He started to call out again, but thought better of it.
His glow rod lit a long, narrow corridor that sloped downward. The air felt humid, moist with putrescence. Long, thick streaks of dried blood stained the duracrete floor. Jaden followed them as he might a trail of bread crumbs.
They led to a wide stairway that dropped another ten meters. A large metal hatch waited at the bottom of it. He descended sidelong, his back against one wall. A card reader hung from the wall to one side of the door, its wires and circuitry hanging loose like innards.
Twenty or thirty stormtrooper helmets lay on the floor to either side of the door, stacked into a rough pyramid. Some of them still had heads in them, for Jaden could see dead eyes behind some of the lenses.
The scene reminded Jaden of an offering.
Stenciled on the wall over the doorway:
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY BEYOND THIS POINT
Across the hatch, written in an enormous, diagonal scrawl of dried blood, were three words. Jaden felt chilled when he read them.
"Mother is hungry."
Jaden stared at the hatch a long while, rooted to the last stair. Moving from it seemed a fateful step, a portentous act. Holding his ground, he again reached out through the Force, feeling for the presence of any nearby Force-users.
Making contact almost instantly, he winced at the bitter recoil caused by the touch of a dark sider-but not a pure dark sider. Jaden felt the dark side as though it were adulterated with… something else, the same way his own signature was that of a light-side user adulterated with… something else.
Sentience curses us with a desire to categorize.
He looked down at his hand as if it were a thing apart from him, a piece of him that had betrayed the rest and thereby corrupted the whole. Tiny streamers of Force lightning curled around the glow rod, twisting like things alive.
The regard of the Force-user on the other side of the hatch fixed on him. The mental touch felt as greasy as the air, just as infected with putrescence.
He descended the step and opened the hatch.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The stink hit him first, the reek of old decay. Computer stations lined the walls of the large, rectangular chamber. Blank readout screens dotted the walls here and there. Loose wires hung from everywhere, the entrails of science.
A hole opened in the center of the room, a perfect circle several meters in diameter, like the gullet of some gargantuan beast. Machinery hung from armatures above the hole. Jaden recognized the apparatus immediately-a Spaarti cloning cylinder.