Abyss (42 page)

“Absolutely,” Vestara said. “Ship has toyed with me, but he remains completely under Abeloth’s control.”

“Which means we remain trapped on this death planet.” Lady Rhea grew thoughtful.
“Unless
 …” She paused, then turned to Vestara. “You already have this figured out, don’t you?”

Vestara grinned, not even caring that the scar at the corner of her mouth would make her smile appear lopsided.

“I believe so,” she said. “If Ship can take all of us in one trip, the
Skywalkers must be very near. And they had to come in
something
. Once Ship takes us to them—”

“Absolutely.” Lady Rhea paused as Abeloth and Xal emerged from behind Ship, then turned away and spoke in a Force whisper so low that Vestara was not sure she heard it even inside her own mind. “We kill the Skywalkers and …”

“… we steal
their
vessel,” Vestara finished with a wry smile. “How hard can it be?”

That awful smell, Ben realized, was probably him. It reminded him of sour nerf milk, with a hint of ash and mildew. His tongue lay in his mouth like a raw sausage—swollen, numb, and cold—and he felt generally sore and weak, with a muddled, throbbing head that made him feel like he had died and just didn’t realize it yet.

Which, Ben suddenly remembered, was a distinct possibility.

He opened his eyes and found himself staring up into the familiar red strobing of alarm lights in Sinkhole Station’s smoky control room. He glanced over and saw that his IV drip bags had drained themselves flat, which meant he had been Mind Walking for at least a day—and probably much longer, assuming his symptoms were due to dehydration.

“Mra
 … 
dhe muck!”
he croaked. He swallowed, then tried again. “Now I see why these head cases would rather die than return to their bodies.”

When no reply came, Ben looked over and found his father still
lying motionless on his gurney, his gaze vacant and fixed on the ceiling.

“Dad
?”

Nothing moved but his father’s mouth, which opened barely far enough to emit a hoarse whisper. “Uh … yeah.”

“You okay?”

The eyes closed in what was probably as close to a nod as Luke could manage. “I will be,” he rasped. “Just need to … get blood to my muscles again.”

“Yeah, well good luck with that.”

Ben used the Force to undo the straps across his own chest, then tried to sit up … and dropped back to his gurney in a heap.

“It’s always like this,” a familiar voice said behind Ben. “Give yourselves a minute.”

Recalling his reluctant Mind Walker guide, Ben craned his neck around and looked toward the far side of the chamber. Rhondi Tremaine was still sitting where he had left her before going beyond shadows, slumped against an equipment cabinet with her legs splayed out beside her. The stun cuffs he had slapped on her before leaving were still on her wrists, securing her to the floor beam he had exposed. With sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, and a brow furrowed in pain, she looked just as bad as Ben felt. The sight of how little care he had taken for her comfort made Ben wince at his behavior. He had deliberately not offered to set an IV drip for her, believing that if she were in danger of dying, she would be more eager to make their trip a quick one, so she could be certain of returning to free her brother.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. “Better than you look, I hope.”

“
That’s
nice.” Her gaze shifted to Luke. “If you want grandchildren someday, you need to have a conversation with your son about how to talk to the ladies.”

“Ben, be nice to the lady,” Luke ordered. “And get her out of those stun cuffs.”

“Sure.” Ben tried again to sit up, and this time he succeeded. “As soon as I take care of
you
.”

He freed himself from the IV catheters and the gurney straps, then did the same for his father and retrieved three packs of hydrade from
his supply bag. When his father proved too weak to push the suck-nozzle through the punch hole, Ben did it for him.

“Dad, that trip … it was pretty dark,” Ben said, holding the tube into his father’s mouth. “Worse than a triple hit of yarrock, even.”

Ben could tell by the way his father’s eyes widened that he had used a really bad analogy.

“Uh, not that I’d
know,
” he said. “Just assuming, really.”

Luke stopped sipping long enough to say, “You’d
better
be.”

“No worries,” Ben said. “I get plenty of weirdness just being your son.”

When Ben fell silent for a moment, his father reached up and took the sip-pack. “Keep talking.”

Ben looked away, unsure how to broach the subject of what they had experienced together at the Lake of Apparitions. Actually, he was not even sure they had seen the same things.

Finally, he just asked it. “All the stuff that happened while we were Mind Walking … was that
real
?”

“Talking to Anakin and your mother, you mean?”

Ben nodded and began to feel a little more certain of the experience. “And to Jacen.”

“Was that real
?” Luke repeated. He let out a choked half laugh. “Maybe you’d rather ask me something else, like what’s the ultimate origin of the Force.”

“We’ll save the easy stuff for later,” Ben replied. “Seriously, this whole experience is making me barvy. I need to figure it out now.”

His father closed his eyes and let out a long breath, then said, “You’re the detective, Ben. You can figure this out for yourself—in fact, I think you have to.”

Ben sighed. Sometimes he really hated having a Jedi Master for a father. Everything was a lesson.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s start with the fact that we both saw the same people at the Lake of Apparitions.”

“We
all
saw the same people,” Rhondi added. She jerked her stun cuffs against the beam to which Ben had secured them. “How about a little consideration here?”

Seeing that his father was strong enough to hold his own sip-pack, Ben grabbed another and started toward Rhondi. “If we all saw the same thing, that means we really experienced
something
. We just can’t be sure
what
, since we were …”

“Outside
our bodies,” Luke clarified.

“Because our bodies don’t exist beyond shadows,” Rhondi said. “Only our true presences.”

“Yeah, you keep saying that,” Ben said. He squatted next to Rhondi. “But your word isn’t evidence. I still don’t know whether I had the experience of
really
talking to Mom, or if I just saw what someone in that … 
place
wanted me to see.”

“Then you must agree that the place is real,” Rhondi observed, “if you believe someone in it can make you see
anything
.”

Ben nodded, the blood in his veins suddenly running slow and cold. “It’s real. I felt something there that I recognized from before …” He turned to his father. “From when I was at Shelter. It’s what drove me away from the Force.”

“You’re sure?” Luke asked.

Again, Ben nodded. “It’s as real as we are,” he said. “And I’m pretty sure it’s behind the paranoid delusions that Jedi Knights my age keep having.”

“It’s a good theory,” Luke said. “But how is it spreading, for example?”

“The same way
that’s
happening.” Ben waved through the viewport at all the bodies floating in the meditation vault beyond the control room. “The same way I felt it at Shelter. Through the Force.”

“Your Jedi Knights aren’t sick,” Rhondi said. “They are only being called home.”

Ben glanced back to her and realized that he had not yet released her stun cuffs, but he decided it might be better to wait until they had finished the conversation. He prepared a sip-pack for her, then held the tube to her lips and returned his attention to his father.

“You might call
that
evidence, too,” Ben said. “Qwallo Mode didn’t show up here by accident.”

Luke sat up and reached for a second sip-pack. “I’m not arguing
against you there, Ben,” he said. “I’m just trying to think things through. For instance, why aren’t Kam and Tionne having trouble? Or any of the
adult
Jedi Knights who spent time guarding Shelter?”

Ben could only shake his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “If I’m not affected—or infected—it has to be because I withdrew from the Force. Maybe trained adult Jedi have too many defenses. Or maybe there’s something smart behind this. If the Masters Solusar
had
felt that place reaching out—”

“Right,” Luke said. “The young ones would have been moved. But why
now?
It’s been nearly a decade and a half since there were any students at Shelter.”

That
answer, Ben did not have to think about at all. It was all around him, in the strobing alarm light and the smoking circuits—in the
timing
of when things started to go wrong in the control room.

“Centerpoint Station was destroyed—
that’s
what changed.” He looked back to Rhondi. “That’s when these alarms started going off, and it’s when Rhondi and her brother started to feel compelled to return—along with a lot of Daala’s other spies.”

“Daala’s
spies
?” Luke turned to Rhondi.

“Long story,” she said. “Ben’s right. When you destroyed Centerpoint Station, everything changed.”

“It’s like we opened a hatch or something,” Ben said. “And suddenly, whatever we felt in Shelter started leaking out—maybe
reaching
out—beyond the Maw.”

Ben knew by the sudden paling of his father’s face that he had made a convincing argument.

“Wonderful,” Luke said. “Any idea
what
, exactly, is getting out?”

Ben could only shake his head. “And I’m still trying to figure out the Lake of Apparitions,” he said. “I’m convinced that it’s real. But …”

He let the sentence trail off, unable to ask the question.

“But you don’t know whether that was really your mother you saw,” Luke finished. “It’s a hard question to answer—maybe one that we
can’t
answer.”

Ben turned to Rhondi and raised a questioning brow.

She jerked her stun cuffs against the beam and raised her own brow. He thumbed the release pad, and the cuffs came undone.

Rhondi’s jaw fell. “They weren’t even
locked
?”

“In case I didn’t make it back,” Ben said. “I’m not that cruel. Now, what can you tell me about my mother?”

Rhondi rubbed her chafed wrists. “We all return to the Force when we depart our bodies,” she said. “Afterward, those who are strong in the Force sometimes show themselves in the Lake of Apparitions. Whether it’s where they abide or is only a portal through which they can look, I don’t know … but I believe those we see are real.”

“What about Mind Walkers whose bodies die while they’re beyond shadows?” Ben asked. “Do they go to the Lake of Apparitions, too?”

“Not at first,” Rhondi said. “At first, they stay beyond shadows with us. But after a time, they seem to lose their way, and then sometimes we see them in the Lake of Apparitions.”

“How long do they stay there?” Luke asked. “Could you see your grandparents, for instance, or even your ancestors?”

Rhondi shook her head. “Eventually, they no longer show themselves.” She took a long sip of her hydrade, then shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I don’t know why.”

Ben scowled at her claim, but before he could think of a way to test it, the muffled
karrummph
of a detonating magmine reverberated through the control room floor. Rhondi’s eyes went wide with horror, and she turned toward Ben.

“You
promised!”

“Promised what?” Luke asked.

“That I’d let her brother go if she helped us,” Ben explained. He turned to Rhondi. “He’s probably okay. That door charge was placed to direct the blast—”

“Probably?”
Rhondi staggered to her feet and started up toward the exit at the back of the trilevel room. “You murglak!”

“Rhondi, hold on!” Ben stepped to where he could see the mine he had placed on the hatch. “It’s welded, remember? And don’t forget the door charge!”

“Welded?”
Luke echoed, intercepting Ben.
“Door charge?
Ben, what the blazes have you been doing while I was gone?”

“I’ll explain in a minute,” Ben said, continuing to look toward the exit. Rhondi had reached the hatch and was beginning to pound it
with the heel of her hand. “Right now, I’d better get to that charge before she—”

Ben was interrupted by a stunned cry as a red circle of blazing heat burned through the back of Rhondi’s skull. Her body, lifeless before the scream died, crumpled to the floor. Behind her, the bright column of a scarlet lightsaber began to cut a smoking furrow through the thick metal of the hatch.

A wave of danger sense rolled up Ben’s spine. He turned to find his father already standing beside the gurney, his lightsaber in hand and his attention fixed on the entry hatch. Ben could see by how low he held his hand, and by the fatigue in his eyes, that his father was still weak. But he could also feel his father drawing on the Force, pulling it into himself to enliven atrophied muscles and restore dead synapses.