As for the chapter, it’s not just the devil that hides in the details.
Sometimes details make unpleasant things pleasant and desirable, but most often, if you read even a little between the lines, a fairy tale can turn out to be a nightmare, a tragedy where no one will hear your scream behind the prosperous facade.
The darkness always touches for the first time timidly, quietly, fleetingly, leaving the fanfares for the final blow.
It is the same with Chaos.
Many mighty heroes have bent the knee before it and kissed the sword, swearing allegiance, only because they could not see that very first timid touch.
This chapter is the beginning of a story about how easy it is to fall, and about how hard it is to walk against the darkness.
But every journey begins with a single step…
Space.
Eternal.
Cold.
Indifferent.
It will witness the birth and death of stars.
The battles of insects that fancied themselves the pinnacle of the evolution of the universe’s matter.
There are no sounds in space.
Death in it is truly terrible in its majesty.
The vacuum eagerly embraces the sentient, drinking their juices, making their blood literally boil while their lungs struggle to take a breath.
Death by suffocation is probably the most terrible death in space, because the agony is not instantaneous.
And the sentient has time to realize their end, envying their comrades on the crew of the warship who vanished in an instant in the reactor’s detonation.
For them, death was merciful.
It was merciful, albeit a little cruel for those who were sucked into open space, and especially cruel for those who remained in a fragment of the hull of a once-warship, for the ghost of hope still flickered for them.
Yes, the fleet is not just blind boasting with drinking buddies in a bar under the influence; it is also the ability to die so that your comrade on another ship can bring the weapon to bear and manage to fire.
The fleet is the ability to die, but to take a tiny step towards victory.
That is why the Republic did not have a fleet before — at best, there were separate squadrons, and what was called a fleet was more of a pathetic gathering of ships, mocked even by pirates.
By the start of the Clone Wars, things had sharply improved, but still the consequences of a thousand years of peace reaped a bloody harvest time and again.
All the more terrible was the death of crew members, freezing and suffocating in shattered ships, warmed only by the ghost of hope for rescue, with the realization at the end of the path of the insignificance of their choice and their sacrifice.
Their comrades could not snatch victory from the enemy’s iron manipulators.
They would die in a frozen grave, which they proudly called their ship.
They would die in vain…
Worse, many times worse, when you die alone on a lifeless hulk, having this ghost of hope and therefore desperately clinging to life.
Any native of Corellia will tell you about such poor souls, especially if you pour him a glass of good Corellian wine or whiskey.
He can tell you about ghost ships that drifters sometimes find.
These stories are worthy of entire tragic plays or odes to heroism.
But every smuggler, spinning these tales half-truth, half-fiction, will, willingly or not, touch the figurine of the goddess of luck or invoke the spirits of space, because no one wants to find themselves in the place of the heroes of these plays.
But what to do if fate has cast the dice, and you find yourself on a dead ship alone with mysterious voices in your head?
Voices offering salvation.
What will be the price of this salvation?
But life is the heaviest drug, which causes instant addiction.
Therefore, there is no sentient more terrifying and more determined than a dead man who has been given hope for life…
* * * The Kappa-class shuttle rocked slightly when the invisible hand of gravity touched it with its power, tearing the former Captain of Justice Kelvin Skuratti, now a senior agent of the Republic Intelligence Bureau, from the light sleep with which he had been forced to while away the wait, for his uniform, insignia, weapons, and even his hairstyle had been brought to regulation standards, and the details of the mission were firmly learned by his tenacious mind.
The only non-regulation element in the image of the wiry native of Coruscant was a rosary of forty-seven beads, alien to him, but so dear that he was ready to sacrifice a hand just to keep them with him.
Which had happened once…
From the neighboring seat in the troop compartment came a loud, sweet yawn, causing the battered officer sitting nearby to grimace, as if he had smelled the stench of fermented sewage.
The officer’s temples were adorned with gray hair, and his face was crossed by two scars, pulling the skin as if in an eternal, evil grin.
The young Sephi stretched, her robe, a product of the Jedi Temple, tightening, outlining the curves of the girl despite its baggy cut.
Watching this, Skuratti did not curse or make the sign of the holy semicircle only because it was not encouraged by the regulations of the Grand Army of the Republic.
“A Jedi, and a filthy exote at that!” Kelvin thought irritably, trying to give his face the regulation expression of complete indifference.
“How easy it is to work with clones.
They are true soldiers, created for war and loyal to the ideals of democracy!
Even if they are only familiar with these ideals through training programs compiled on their homeworld of Kamino…
These temple guards, these blind dogs of the Senate, aren’t fit to lick the clones’ boots!” Against his will, an image of a Jedi ruffling his hair, when he was still a very small boy, was retrieved from the officer’s memory file.
“All Jedi except one…” The Sephi rubbed her small fists over her eyes and smiled amiably at the officer, asking in a slightly sleepy and capricious voice: “Are we landing?” “Yes, ma’am…
ma’am,” the intelligence officer replied gloomily, hesitating for a second, like any other military man, not knowing how to conduct a conversation with someone who was outside the army’s table of organization but could easily outrank any admiral in terms of authority.
“We’ve entered the planetoid’s gravity field.
The pilot is already on the landing glide path.” “Oh, how long can this go on!” the Sephi pouted.
“I asked you to call me by my first name — Justine, and in the most extreme case, by my last name — Amitasi.
Every time you call me ma’am, I get the feeling that I’m not twenty-seven standard years old, but all forty, or worse, I’m the same age as…
Master Yoda himself!” The captain did not respond to this remark, only mentally spat, running through the details of the mission in his head to calm himself, having no opportunity to do anything more productive.
The way the girl breathed the name of the Grand Master of the Jedi Order…
The intonations in her voice were more appropriate for describing her lover than for characterizing an old wizard and one of the best strategists of the Grand Army of the Republic.
The shuttle majestically glided into the hangar, guided by the experienced hand of a veteran clone with grace and skill, and settled into the landing circle, carelessly drawn in yellow paint on the steel floor made of armor plates.
Skuratti noted this as he descended the landing ramp, making a mental note to write a memo to the head of the hospital they had arrived at.
“Just because this hospital survived four assault attempts and lost two-fifths of its personnel doesn’t mean the need to follow regulations and instructions has disappeared, thereby demoralizing the staff!” the captain fumed inwardly.
“Poor things…
They chose the path of saving lives, but were forced to take up arms!
I couldn’t do that.
So, even though I passed the Knight Trials, I chose to serve in the AgriCorps,” Amitasi thought, looking at the picture of the barely covered traces of the recent assault under emergency repairs.
She felt a little uneasy as twenty clones, marching in lockstep with rifles on their shoulders, fell in behind the delegation.
She wanted to crawl into the farthest, darkest corner to escape the war, because that vision… That vision filled with horror, with which the Force had “blessed” Amitasi.
The girl had seen deaths.
Many deaths.
The sorrowful end of her own teacher and many others.
But beyond that, she had seen the source that brought death on the barrels of its blasters.
She had seen the clones.
Their march through the burning Jedi Temple was so similar to these precise footsteps.
Justine was not strong in the art of foresight.
The girl had never understood for what sins the Force had decided to reveal to her such terrible pictures, full of pain and despair.
Master Yoda assured her that the future was in constant motion, its nature changeable, meaning any prediction was merely one of countless possible outcomes.
Perhaps someone would call it cowardice, an escape from reality, but the Sephi girl clung desperately to the wise Jedi’s words.
It was all a lie!
It simply could not be that the clones, reliable soldiers of the Republic and loyal comrades in arms, had done something so… Justine bit her lip until it bled.
“Stop thinking about it!” A little more, and she would catch the smell of burnt walls and corpses inside the Temple again, but this time in reality.
Bad thoughts materialize.
If Amitasi told anyone about her vision, she would surely be considered crazy.
So she would tell no one about it; she would hold her tongue to the very end.
She had seen enough deaths!
The delegation was already being awaited at the shuttle, and none other than the head of the hospital himself, nervously shifting from foot to foot, stood near the hangar exit.
As soon as he spotted the robed Jedi and the officer in the gray, nondescript uniform of the Intelligence Bureau, he quickly scurried toward them, raising a hand with suction cups to face level in a pathetic parody of a military salute.
The doctor radiated hope, confusion, and fear simultaneously, with a strange touch of… pleasure?
Justine, despite her knightly status, still had difficulty reading the emotions of other beings through the Force, especially Rodians.
“Just how much Rodians look like bugs!
Especially this albino.
And his name fits — Gnolius Veit.
His dossier has a lot of interesting points.
Unreliable, in my opinion, just like all xenos.” “Great spirits!
I am glad you responded so quickly to my call for help!
We have an emergency!” the native of Rodia whined in a nasal voice, crumpling his robe, play-acting and clearly overdoing it in the opinion of the seasoned captain.
“Enough, Mr.
Gnolius!” Justine replied in a melodious, slightly languid voice, adjusting the mane of snow-white hair that flowed in a voluminous wave over her Jedi robe, after exchanging formal greetings.
“We have come here to help you with this trivial problem…” “You don’t understand!
This is a catastrophe!” the Rodian began to lisp, overcome with emotion.
Barely suppressing the reflexive urge to pinch what was left of his nose, Skuratti tried to stay as far from the xenos as possible and breathe only intermittently while he spoke.
“I’d rather inhale the miasma of a Hutt’s belch while standing knee-deep in the excrement of Gamorrean whelps than breathe in the pheromones of a native of Rodia!” the captain thought distantly, but a moment later he tensed, turning into all ears, the moment the Rodian nasally uttered the next phrase: “He stabbed poor Kylie twenty-eight times!
That knife, he made it from a fragment of a saw and his own skin!
And then he started drinking her blood, right from the severed artery!
Isn’t that a nightmare?
Six clones couldn’t drag him off!
Even after they shot him with stun blasters!
He kept screaming about angels born from a corpse, about the voice of truth, while he was punching through a clone’s chest armor with his bare hand to get to his heart!” This was said with the horror and simultaneous delight in cruelty characteristic of natives of Rodia, who were both cowardly and cruel by nature.
“That wasn’t mentioned in your report,” the girl stammered, paling.
“This nightmare happened while you were flying!
We gave the patient a triple dose of sedatives, but it only calmed him down and made him sluggish, not put him to sleep!
I don’t know what he went through, and I don’t want to know why he was the only one left alive and what destroyed his squad.” “You are not cleared to know that by rank!
That falls under the jurisdiction of the Intelligence Bureau,” Kelvin snapped.
“He is a Jedi, and this falls under the jurisdiction of the Order!” the Sephi flared up.
“I was personally authorized by the Council as the Order’s sole representative in this sector!” “We’ll sort that out during the inquiry!
And we’ll start, I think, with an interrogation.
Take us straight to him, Doctor.” “A squad wiped out, a single survivor, and this too… Could this be a betrayal?” It sounded very much like a Separatist ambush, but too many pieces of the puzzle refused to fit into a single logical picture… Darkness.
Why are we afraid of it?
There are many answers to this question, but they all lead to one simple, primal truth: we are not afraid of the darkness; we are afraid of the unknown, of what it hides.
In the darkness, imagination turns against us, transforming from a faithful companion in life into a treacherous enemy who knows every one of our weaknesses.
Imagination fills mysterious shadows with terrifying details, forcing us to invent fears and phobias for ourselves.
Darkness, like a talented artist meticulously choosing a brush and paint from a palette, paints the perfect nightmare, which is often simple, too.
Why do we descend into the realm of impenetrable gloom?
Most often, it is simple loneliness that leads us into the darkness, no matter what kind.
We are social beings, even if we sometimes allow ourselves to imagine we are introverts who don’t need society.
Even the most radical misanthrope needs society’s approval, recognition as a person, and evaluation of their achievements.
Left in complete, non-ephemeral solitude, we voluntarily descend into the gloom ourselves.
At that moment, the fear of loneliness is stronger than the fear of the unknown.
The darkness knows this circumstance well.
It patiently waits for the person who has fallen into it to realize the full depth of the abyss and try to escape, and if the person is weak, they will strangle themselves with the bonds of their own fears.
Then the shadows lurking in the darkness will have their long-awaited feast.
Chaos lurks in the darkness, luring incautious souls with the false glimmer of saving light.
There, in the gloom of eternal night, it presents itself to the lost soul as a kind, harmless grandfather who has been waiting for his beloved grandson, or a caring mother, whose idealized image we carry through our whole lives, weaving it into our souls like a red thread.
Chaos in these moments is gentle, covering you with a warm, heavy blanket against the surrounding darkness.
It brings deliverance from the blood-curdling, otherworldly horror of the dark abyss of the unknown, a horror stitched into our blood at a programmatic level.
Chaos demands nothing and asks for nothing.
Not yet.
That moment will come when the victim has warmed up from the cold of the darkness.
Otherwise, the victim might become wary and slip the hook.
No, Chaos does not sink its hook into us itself.
The truth, again, is simple and therefore terrible: we do it all ourselves, voluntarily.