Enemy Lines II_ Rebel Stand - Aaron Allston [39]
Baljos rose from a pile of rubbish—a collapsed desk, a toppled cabinet, a spray pattern of body parts Luke thought were more droid components until he took a closer look at them. “Fatality here,” Baljos said, his voice unusually subdued. “Human female, middle-aged, cut into about eight pieces. Lightsaber damage again, I think.” He turned away from the grisly spectacle. “Danni?”
Danni held one of her sensors in her hand. “There’s a lot of electromagnetical. From functioning equipment, I think. It’s masking any major biological energy, if there is any.”
Luke closed his eyes and extended his perceptions into the Force.
He didn’t find any signs of large living organisms. He couldn’t. As soon as he began to extend his awareness, he became aware of it, the darkness he’d detected from above. Here, it was much closer, a suffusion of anger and violent intent that threatened to make him sick to his stomach. He opened his eyes and shook his head at the other Jedi. “We search the hard way,” he said.
It was an expansive scientific complex. This floor had indeed been a scientific research station … decades in the past. Computer systems dating from before Luke’s birth lay under dust covers, and Danni identified one long-unused laboratory as being devoted to cellular analysis.
The most curious feature of the floor, however, was a chamber to one side of the laboratories. It held nothing more than a long apparatus that looked like a bed with a lid. “A hermetically sealed sleeping unit,” Bhindi suggested.
“An Imperial-era suspended animation unit,” Baljos corrected. “Later modified to be different from production units, since whatever was in it was nearly three meters tall. Not human.”
Privately, Luke disagreed. The characteristic of the chamber that many of the others couldn’t detect was that it reeked of the dark side of the Force—it was the source, or at least a source, of the disquiet he had felt. And it somehow suggested humanity to him, humanity at its worst.
There was something familiar about this darkness, familiar and ghastly. “Can you tell what it was?” Luke asked.
Baljos looked at the unit. The transparisteel cover had been thrown aside with such strength and violence that it was warped, the hinges along one side and locking latch on the other broken. The machinery that would have surrounded the sleeper like insulation was torn free from its housing and lay in pieces around the chamber. So did four medical droids—Luke thought it was four, gauging from the number of droid heads within sight, but he had to admit that their state of dismemberment made actual calculations difficult. “Depends on whether any memory survived in this machinery,” Baljos said. “More Bhindi’s department than mine. But if it did, and even if the memory doesn’t obligingly say ‘Ithorian’ or ‘wampa’ or something, I might be able to figure it out based on the settings and life-sign readings it recorded.”
Mara stuck her head in through a darkened doorway at the corner of the chamber. “Luke, this should interest you.” She tossed something toward Luke’s feet.
From the manner with which it twisted and curled as it flew, Luke suspected that it was part of an amphistaff, but when it landed at his feet, he saw that he’d been wrong. This sinuous body was covered in fur and had legs ending in needlelike claws. It had been dead for some days. “Ysalamiri,” he said.
“Your friend and mine,” Mara said. “There are pieces of a cage and some Myrkr tree limbs in here. And access halls to similar chambers at the other seven corners of the chamber. Dead ysalamiri there, too.”
“That actually makes sense.” Ysalamiri were reptilian creatures of the planet Myrkr. Generally docile, content to live on their trees, they had a trait that made them of considerable interest to Jedi and other Force-wielders: They projected a sort of energy that repelled the