Picture this in your mind: you are on a dead ship.
The engines are completely destroyed.
The main life support system is knocked out.
Air is only being regenerated by the archaic chemical reaction of oxygen candles — the last hope of a dying ship’s crew in a pathetic attempt to avoid a gruesome death by suffocation.
You woke up in a cooled bacta tank when the backup power source for the medical equipment died.
You woke up only because the oxygen mask, deprived of a supply of life-giving air, began to let in the once life-saving bacta, now threatening to kill you.
It wasn’t the Force that saved you.
It was your own body’s reflexes that saved you, commanding your mind to wake up.
You were lucky to get out.
The medical tech designers had foreseen even this turn of events, equipping the medical tank with an emergency extraction system, both from the outside and from the inside.
You are naked, and the first sensation will be the cold of the ship’s cooled hull.
The cold, seeking to draw the spark of life out of you.
You need to warm up somehow.
In the light of the emergency illumination from chemical lanterns, dimly glowing in the compartment, you will find about a dozen torn corpses and thereby acquire clothing.
The bodies have already had time to freeze thoroughly and stiffen, and this action will take a lot of strength.
For a moment, it will seem that you can barely make out someone’s voices in your head.
Only you can’t quite hear the voices.
Their sweet whisper is drowned out by the sounds of your heartbeat, which is perfectly audible in the sticky, cold silence.
Your mind dismisses them as weakness.
Not surprising.
The treatment took a lot of strength.
Weakness is normal.
After catching your breath a little, you decide it was just a hallucination from exhaustion.
Yes, that must be it.
Having warmed up, you try to leave the compartment, to reach the life-saving bridge or the backup command center.
Even the engine room would do!
You need to somehow signal that you are alive.
The communication devices in the clone helmets only work within the ship.
The armor is too thick.
It doesn’t let the signal through.
Even if it did, a weak transmitter could, at best, reach a geostationary orbit and be picked up by a ship’s sensitive sensors (if one exists), but certainly not across parsecs of empty space.
Of course, the first thing you tried was to contact someone alive on the ship, but in the helmet speakers, flooded from the inside with blood and the contents of the clone’s skull, there was only silence, frightening with the crackle of static in which you could hear a whisper.
After some more time, you discover that the compartment is sealed off by emergency bulkheads, and their sensors indicate a lack of oxygen and any atmosphere beyond them.
You are trapped.
All you can do is wait.
In the gloom of the gradually dying emergency lights.
If you recall, the lanterns glow due to a specific reaction of isotopes.
Yes, it produces a small amount of radiation, by which you will most likely be found.
Search scanners are specifically tuned to this type of radiation, which facilitates the work of rescue teams.
In our case, little is by no means safe.
Prolonged exposure under these lanterns will kill you without medical help.
The light went out.
Now it doesn’t just seem that way.
On the edge of your subconscious, at the junction of reality and delirium, you hear voices.
They are even sometimes distinguishable and give relevant advice.
With them, there is a feeling that you are not alone on the dead ship.
With this circumstance, you gain confidence.
You are Force-sensitive.
A Jedi, to be precise.
A Master, to be completely precise.
You can stretch your body’s resources for months.
If it weren’t for the wounds, you could enter a meditation similar to suspended animation.
Regeneration has drained almost all the resources from your body.
Prolonged meditation would simply kill you now.
You need to regain your strength.
There is a supply of water.
You were lucky with that.
Bacta cannot be exposed to air in its pure form.
Water is added to the tanks containing it to prevent its contact with the atmosphere.
Besides, the voices in your head whispered how to properly filter the water using the clones’ equipment.
Or was that your own experience?
Unknown.
Death by thirst is not a threat; there is enough water ice for one person, and the water hasn’t frozen all the way through.
However, you won’t die from suffocation either.
The realization didn’t come immediately, not without the help of the voices, but you understand: there is food after all.
The soldiers who saved you came to your aid again, even if in a way that would never have occurred to them in their lives.
They simply weren’t taught that method.
The main thing now is to try not to look at the shadows cast by the lantern of one of the clones, shadows to which the dark, three-meter figures of warriors with red glowing visors in their helmets have been joined by the silently reproachful ghosts of the fighters who trusted you with their lives and gave them for you, over whose bodies you committed an act of desecration, instead of giving them a burial rite with full military honors.
However, to the ghosts was added the gaze of still-living comrades, begging for help in their last seconds of life.
Still, you were a decent general.
You were just unlucky.
By your estimation, about two months have passed.
Hope is fading before your eyes along with the last oxygen candle.
Your thoughts boil down to just one thing: you want to live!
And then a gentle, kind voice rings out in your head, clearer than ever before.
“Do you want to live?” The whisper warms every cell of your frozen body with its multi-voiced timbre, to the rhythm of which your very soul resonates.
“Who are you?!
The dark side?!
Well, it doesn’t matter.” It really doesn’t matter on the brink of death.
What matters is something else: you are not alone, and it won’t be so lonely to go.
“No.
I am what has always been with you.
What elevated you above others.” “The Force?” You are so weak that you can’t muster the strength to be surprised.
Even though the Force permeates everything around, and some in the Order consider it alive, it has never spoken to anyone so clearly before.
“No.
We are your friend.
We came so that you wouldn’t be alone when your soldiers, whom you mourn, left you here to die.
They are unworthy of such a commander.
The Force abandoned its servant in mercy, so we came, your friends.
We haven’t heard your answer: do you want to live?
We can grant you an easy death if you wish…” “Yes!
I want to live!” “Wait, friend.
Salvation is near.
Closer than you think.
Trust us.
We will help you, just trust us.
Relax and sleep.” Warmth envelops your body, bringing peace.
You are lulled by the gentle whisper of the voices, which have again become barely distinguishable.
For some reason, you remembered your mother, whose image was erased by the Order’s recruiter, who only wanted to calm a child experiencing separation from his mother.
This memory warms your tormented soul; you involuntarily wonder if that Jedi had erased that particular image by chance.
Was it not envy that drove him?
That thought will come later, much later.
But right now, you feel good.
Just good.
If you were deceived, you will be grateful for such an easy and pleasant death, but the voices told the truth.
Not much time passes, and now you are in another medical bay.
You have been saved.
You are safe.
“Are you safe?” the voices ask you with a sly smile.
“Those beings dwelling in the darkness are watching you with their red eyes.
You were lucky.
You survived.
Will you be lucky next time?” “They are far away!” “They are closer than you think.” “Then how…” “We will help you.
We will teach you.” “Why?” “We are your friend, unlike the others.
Without us, you would not have survived.” “I believe you!” You mentally kneel before the voices.
“Teach me!” For the first time in your memory, the voices laughed a beautiful, multi-voiced laugh.
It reminds you so much of your mother’s joyful laughter when you took your first step in life that you involuntarily smile under the oxygen mask, lying in a medicated sleep.
* * * Kelvin Skuratti scrolled through one page of documents after another on his datapad as he walked, adding the obtained facts to the existing ones.
He wanted to get the true picture of events while the xenos engaged in a lengthy, polite conversation, hiding their base fear of the unknown behind a lace of expressions and sharp words.
The captain, on his way to the section where the victim of the Jedi’s (or a Confederacy agent’s, if he wasn’t just a crazy psycho but something more) attack — the Mirialan woman who was receiving aid — was located, regretted that instead of a normal Jedi sorcerer, if the word “normal” could even be applied to them, he was accompanied by this… brat!
The situation was starting to slip out of his control, and with this turn of events, having a full-fledged knight would have been preferable.
But there was a plus side here too.
A true knight, upon hearing the doctor’s story, would have immediately declared it the Order’s business, throwing around words about the machinations of the dark side.
Such things had happened more than once in the officer’s practice.
That meant mission failure.
And mission failure could entail the loss of the sector.
Such “incidents” had become a daily headache in the activities of the Republic’s Intelligence Bureau.
The Jedi kept silent that the Separatists had a new battleship with a ring-mounted ion cannon in their arsenal?
Their silence cost the Republic several fleets of ships and over a dozen lost planets.
This could not be allowed!
Here and now, he had to gather additional information and then interrogate the mad sorcerer.
He needed to shake even a crumb of information out of him while there was still a chance.
The brat from the AgriCorps, fortunately, had no objections on this matter and was only glad that someone had taken the burden of decision-making upon themselves.
The realization of a mistake struck the old intelligence officer like lightning.
As soon as the group of three sentients and four clones reached the desired section, events took a completely different turn.
The rough plan of action that Skuratti had sketched out in his head went straight to hell.
It seemed that from this moment on, he would have to improvise on the fly… When the bulkhead to medbay number eight rose, the barely alive body of a clone literally fell out of it.
The clone was pale.
His chest armor was missing.
Blood oozed from a wound on his chest.
The blood was dark, thick… unhealthy.
Too viscous, as if it had clotted several hours ago.
The Sephi froze like a statue when the clone splattered her with blood from his wound.
The Rodian squealed in fright and, unable to withstand such an assault on his own psyche, collapsed in a faint, like a Nabooian lady hearing how the dockworkers talk while loading her reticule into the hold, trying to stuff an evening cosmetic bag of impossible size into a twice-smaller hold of a pleasure yacht.
“Provide aid to the casualties!” the captain snapped a crisp, short command to the clones, who were stunned for a moment, while simultaneously drawing a blaster from its holster and cocking it into combat mode, not forgetting to clip his trusty datapad to his belt, which was also his weapon, only a subtler one.
Two clones, obeying the order, stayed to administer first aid; the rest, raising their blasters to the ready, followed the officer who was striding confidently deeper into the section.
Kelvin knew where to go.
Such medical bases were built according to a single standard design.
To his annoyance, the Sephi, after a moment’s hesitation, followed him.
The girl hadn’t even bothered to wipe off the blood that was running in black blotches down her pale pink skin.
“How wonderful!” a voice full of pleasure rang out.
The sweet cries sounded closer and closer, and mixed with them were sounds more suited not to a hospital ward but to a brothel, and one located on the lowest level of Coruscant at that.
Thoughts of a firing squad warmed the officer’s soul as he jabbed the barrel of his blaster pistol into the console, opening the door.
He even drew in a breath to berate this entire den of iniquity before shooting them, but reality made Skuratti choke on his air, achieving what no one had managed for a very long time.
A hardened officer, who had seen all sorts of things in his years of service, did not think that anything in this galaxy could surprise him.
He had never been so wrong.
In his youth, when he was still naive and believed devoutly in democracy, he had once stormed a brothel.
And it was no ordinary establishment.
The most diverse xenos offered dubious services there.
It was rumored that most senators held their lewd games in this place.
He especially remembered the female Quarren working there.
It was hard to describe for what kind of services the authorized representatives of the Republic’s worlds used these particular xenos… “Ple-e-e-e-e-e-asure!
Pa-a-a-a-a-a-in!” wailed the Mirialan woman, who was straddling a clone, flagellating herself with her fingers that had grown to an excessive length.
Tentacles, there was no other word for it, were lacerating the flesh of the xeno, whose skin was filling with all shades of purple instead of the usual color of a “dead Hutt.” The Mirialan woman was committing indecency with the drugged clones, while they, in turn, were using the numerous wounds on her body in a completely shameless manner.
This scene, perhaps, would haunt the captain’s nightmares for the rest of his days.
The clones who burst into the room with weapons at the ready, inhaling noisily, froze, not knowing how to react to the, so to speak, “entertainment” of their genetic brothers.
They hadn’t been taught this on Kamino!
The algorithm of action in such situations was not prescribed in the regulations.
This wasn’t in the training.
This wasn’t in the war.
No, some clones had known the warmth of female caresses; sometimes soldiers even spent their meager salaries in brothels, but the picture of depravity before them was overwhelming, stupefying… and aroused a desire to join in, luring them with a sweetish smell that seeped through the filters in their helmets.
Fortunately for their souls, sanity, and male health, Skuratti did not fall into a stupor.
The officer knew perfectly well how to act in unclear situations.
He simply fired.
And then again.
And so on until the end of the magazine.
Then he reloaded and fired again, emptying another power cell.
Kelvin shot to kill: in the heart and head.
The officer regretted one thing: he didn’t have a flamethrower or, at the very least, a detonator.
All this depravity awakened in the captain’s soul a wave of all-consuming righteous anger, a desire to carry out a “Base Delta Zero” on the entire complex along with the staff who had allowed this.
And then do it again, until the complete annihilation of the planetoid.
To discourage the others.
“Gas command!” the intelligence officer barked in a voice seething with rage.
Holding his breath and trying not to touch the bodies, he rushed to the corner of the ward.
With movements honed by a hundred drills, he pulled the fire alarm lever and took a breathing mask from a special box.
A second.
The officer donned a civilian-grade gas mask designed to protect against combustion products, taking a breath only when the device’s automatic system forcefully purged the mask.
Now the fire alarm siren was blaring throughout all the rooms of the medical base.
The automatic systems shut down the ventilation of the eighth section and lowered the blast-resistant, fireproof bulkheads, simultaneously activating the firefighting droids, waiting only for confirmation from the security post.
“Working hypothesis: sabotage.
The surveillance system is disabled; otherwise, the security post would have raised the alarm.
A new Separatist weapon has presumably been dispersed in the section.
Gas?
Aerosol?
Contact?
Clearly some kind of mutagen with a hallucinogen.
Instantaneous effect?
Yes, otherwise the clones in the section’s duty room would have raised the alarm.
Even if it hadn’t hit them instantly, they wouldn’t have been able to report it.
No communication.
The signal relay is apparently disconnected or damaged.
My comlink can’t reach the remaining escort group, let alone the security post.
The planetoid has an iron-nickel composition, which, combined with duraplast, has good shielding properties.
In the clone helmets, the comlink will only work for receiving.
The section is isolated.
The clones at the security post should detect problems in the system and draw the right conclusions: someone damaged the system, possibly sabotage.
Our people managed to lock down the attacked section.
Now we just have to not suffocate, like a Gizka in a Hutt’s stomach.” Thoughts replaced one another, racing at the speed of a protocol droid’s calculations.
Rage again rolled through the captain’s blood like a wave of fire.
Adrenaline rushed to his head.
The wave of anger was so strong that a memory was retrieved from the officer’s mental file cabinet.
He had just received the rank of senior sergeant.
Another den.
A xenos, unworthy of being called sentient, keeping other xenos in slave cages, turning them into beasts with his cruelty.
Palms rubbed raw.
The monotonous blows of a stock of an assault rifle, which had already crumbled from the impacts.
A Wookiee slaver lying at his feet, beaten to death with that stock.
Pain in his leg.
The Wookiee had torn a piece of muscle from his leg with its teeth as a parting gift.
“Officer!
What do you think you’re doing?!” the Sephi snapped at Skuratti, flying into the ward.
Hoping to find someone alive there, Amitasi had not seen what Kelvin had seen.
The little knight had only caught a glimpse of the entire scene of the massacre while wiping off the blood, which turned out to be surprisingly caustic.
The picture before her was even less appetizing than the hell that had unfolded before the officer’s eyes.
The tentacles were still moving.
On the faces — well, on what was left of them — of all the participants in the orgy, a smile full of bliss was frozen.
Justine paled even more and vomited.
But it wasn’t the sight of the mangled corpses that caused it.
The sweet, alluring smell emanating from the bodies gave rise to an abnormal desire to be there, in their place.
“Sergeant!” The captain tapped the helmet of a clone who was shaking his head in confusion.
The sergeant flinched.
A howl and the sound of running footsteps came from the corridor.
The sergeant raised his rifle at the sound; instincts drilled into his subconscious by years of training and the kicks of Mandalorian instructors kicked in.
A short burst of blue flashes threw the being, once a clone, back a couple of steps.
His brother.
The being’s armor was red and sticky with blood.
Severed heads hung from its belt.
The heads of former comrades and medical staff.
Instead of the snow-white helmet from the third-series armor kit, the clone’s head was adorned with a “helmet” made from a Twi’lek’s skull.
The green lekku hanging behind it bounced jauntily in time with the former clone’s run.
One of the shots severed the madman’s arm.
Blood streamed, but he paid no attention.
All that mattered now was the homemade axe in his hand and new skulls in his field of view!
“Blood for the Blood God!” the being bellowed in a distorted voice, lunging into the attack.
The military opened fire on the madman, tearing chunks of flesh from him, spattering the gray walls with shreds of burned organic matter.
They only managed to stop the creature a step away from the captain, literally cutting it in half with a burst of fire.
Kelvin fired a full burst from his blaster at point-blank range, incinerating the beast’s skull, but the decapitated corpse still swung its axe, striving even from beyond the grave to reach its killers.
“Captaaaaain!
Saaaaave me!” Doctor Veit came running from the other end of the passage, stumbling.
His sudden appearance startled the tense clones so badly that they nearly shot the exotic on pure instinct, only redirecting their rifle bursts into the ceiling at the last moment, shattering a light panel.
The flickering light did nothing to make the scene before the humans and exotics look any better.
Another clone was walking slowly, staggering, behind the doctor.
Or rather, what had once been a clone.
Its body had swollen.
Its stomach, along with its armor, had split open.
Its entrails had spilled from its belly and were now dragging along behind the clone, leaving smoking trails in its wake.
“Fire!” the captain barked, making the first shot.