Star Wars_ The Old Republic_ Revan - Drew Karpyshyn [85]
The entire process took less than five minutes, but for Meetra it might as well have been an eternity. She had managed to keep busy up until this point, but while waiting idly by for T3 to finish she began to notice the absence of the Force once more.
She could feel the Void pressing in on her from all sides. At the same time it was pulling on her, trying to rip away the very essence of her existence. Nature abhors a vacuum; the emptiness was trying to fill itself with her energy. For an instant she felt as if she were going to become undone, her physical body discorporating into trillions of subatomic particles that would scatter across the entire surface of Nathema.
No! she screamed in her mind. The Void will not take me! I am more than just a collection of random matter and particles! I am a living being. I am Meetra Surik!
The affirmation of her own existence seemed to push the Void back, at least for the moment. But Meetra knew she couldn’t hold out against it much longer. As much as she tried to ignore what she felt—or, more precisely, didn’t feel—all around her, she knew it was only a matter of time until the horrors of Nathema stripped away her sanity.
She was just about to tell T3 it was time to go when he beeped triumphantly and retracted the probe.
“I need to get back to the ship,” she told him. “You can tell me what you found when we’re off this world.”
Once she was in motion she felt better, but she could still sense the Void hovering on the fringes of her awareness. It was like being stalked by some nameless, faceless, invisible creature. She felt it lurking around every corner, just waiting for her to let her guard down so it could take her.
She quickened her pace, trusting her droid companion to keep up, too intent on keeping a grip on herself to reply to his indignant chirps.
By the time she reached the Ebon Hawk she was running, though she wasn’t even aware of it. One single thought dominated her conscious mind: Escape!
She strapped herself into the pilot’s chair and fired up the engines just as T3, who had fallen behind, came racing up the boarding ramp.
“Hold on,” she warned as she closed the hatch and punched the engines.
The Ebon Hawk took flight, hurtling itself up toward the sky and beyond. They broke atmosphere, but Meetra didn’t slow the ship down. She kept the engines on full until they were on the very edge of the solar system. Only then, with several million kilometers between her and Nathema, did she feel safe enough to throttle back.
T3 rolled up beside her and let out a worried whistle.
“You wouldn’t understand,” she told him. “But I’m okay now. Just give me a few minutes and we’ll take a look at what you pulled from those data banks.”
IT TOOK LONGER than Meetra expected for T3 to decipher and translate the files from Nathema into something she could scan with the ship’s computer. It was nearly two days before she could begin looking through the files. However, she reminded herself, considering he was processing millions of terabytes of data originally compiled on computers using fundamentally alien technology, the fact that he accomplished anything at all was a small miracle.
During her initial investigations several things quickly became clear. The building they had raided had been some type of archival storage office, a mundane but vital component of any complex government. It contained government documents, historical accounts and transcripts, and, most promising of all, detailed census records collected from numerous worlds.
From the census data it became clear that Nathema had once been part of the Sith Empire. Oddly, all the records seemed to predate the Great Hyperspace War. Whatever event had stripped Nathema of all life and left it devoid of the Force must have happened almost a thousand years before.
Because