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By Root 922 0

were slowed. He was subjected to the medical treatments I mentioned earlier, treatments that kept his bones growing long past the point they should have sealed, that gave him lots more muscle mass. As a baby, he’d had a computer apparatus implanted in his brain by his mother; it helped give him enough focus—monomania may be a better word for it—to learn to control the Force far out of proportion to his age. When he was here, that apparatus was augmented to make his control even greater. It apparently stimulates what’s left of his brain in ways beneficial to Force control. He was equipped with lightsaber weapons, their use part of the hard coding in his brain implant—”

Luke snapped the datapad shut. “How did this happen?”

Bhindi said, “It appears that after leaving Belsavis, he and his mother came to Coruscant and hid here … and by ‘here’ I mean in this very facility. His mother carefully monitored his progress in the Force, training him so that he’d be the most powerful Dark Jedi in existence, and gave him medical treatments to make him much bigger, more imposing, more physically powerful. She also arranged to bring in the ysalamiri to keep him hidden as his presence in the Force grew stronger.”

“Then something happened,” Baljos said. “The notes are not exactly clear, but it seems like they found and took on a partner, another Dark Jedi, and at some point Irek and the new partner got in a dispute and dueled. The partner was killed, and Irek took a lightsaber thrust right through the skull. He died.”

“Died,” Luke said.

“Technically died,” Baljos added. “Brain activity ceased. He fell down and didn’t move anymore. But his mother and the attendant medical droids were able to maintain his autonomic functions and keep his body alive. Her journal, not surprisingly, gets a bit harder to understand at this point, and becomes increasingly demented over the years, but it becomes obvious that she kept his body in suspended animation and had the medical droids insert increasingly sophisticated components into the computer apparatus in his skull.”

Luke grimaced. “With what purpose?”

“I think,” Baljos said, “that she was trying to make him into her son again—an unlikely prospect, since most of the portions of the brain that pertained to memory and the less violent emotions were charred into carbon—and also to make him into a new leader for the Empire. She was just crazy enough to imagine he could be Emperor Irek, loving son, Dark Jedi, and unconquerable tyrant.”

Luke exchanged a look with Mara. She didn’t let any of her emotions reach her face, but he could feel them through the Force, a revulsion for a woman mad enough to keep her own son on the butcher’s block like that for so many years. “What happened to Roganda Ismaren?” he asked.

“She was the female corpse we found here. We ran cell samples against her records in the files. There’s no mistake.”

Luke gave him a disbelieving look. “Irek killed her?”

“He’s not Irek anymore. Lord Nyax killed her. He didn’t recognize her. She was just another moving shape in the way when he broke out of his holding tank.” Baljos shook his head. “Very nasty business. It gives even mad science a bad name.”

“Does he have any weaknesses?” Mara asked.

“Oh, yes.” Baljos gestured at the suspended animation unit. “He’s not ripe.”

“Ripe,” Luke repeated.

“It appears that a groundquake caused some ceiling rubble to drop onto one or more of the ysalamiri, killing them and damaging the unit. He woke up, burst out, went on a rampage, and fled. But he wasn’t due to come out for another couple of years.” Baljos pointed at one of the computer consoles. “All his operational programming was there, plus the refabricated ‘Irek’ memories Roganda planned to implant in him, and they weren’t transferred over. He has his instincts, he has some combat programming, and he has some deep-level motivations—such as to seek out Jedi and kill them, to seek out hotpoints of the Force and control them, to conquer the universe, little things like that. But he lacks memories, tactical skills … even language, I think. I doubt