Star Wars_ X-Wing 03_ The Krytos Trap - Michael A. Stackpole [125]
The car ascended quickly and quietly. Corran shook the lees of sleep from his head. He squeezed himself into the corner of the car just left of the doors, out of direct line with the opening. Blaster in his right hand, he was ready to pivot on his left foot, duck low, and come out shooting if he had to.
The lift slowed, then stopped.
The doors opened whisper-quiet.
The musty scent of stale air rolled into the lift. Corran brought the neck of his tunic up over his nose, then dropped it again, realizing it smelled slightly worse than the chamber beyond the doorway. He peeked out quickly and beyond a gauzy wall of spider webs saw a grey room and shadowy figures scattered about it. He ducked back, then looked out again.
No one is moving. Aside from the spiders and whatever they snack on, there’s nothing living in here.
He sliced the web-wall in half with his left hand, then stepped into the long, rectangular room. Dust billowed up around his feet and coated his soles. Slender, dust-laden web-strands hung down from the ceiling like vines in a forest. Some of them attached themselves to the figures in the room, as if etheric umbilical cords maintaining the figures in their twilight existence.
Corran had no idea where he was, but the taint of evil in the room threatened to overwhelm him. That surprised him because he saw no active threat and didn’t feel directly menaced. The sensation reminded him of his days back in CorSec, when he entered the scene of a particularly violent massacre of spice runners who had angered Durga the Hutt. It was all destruction, but not wanton—it was completely calculated and deliberate.
The figures he saw were all statues and mannequins. As he approached the first one, a little light flashed on in the space before it and resolved into a hologram of the head and shoulders of a man. A voice from the base of the statue said, “Avan Post, Jedi Master from Chandrila, served with distinction in the Clone Wars.”
Corran looked up at the head of the white marble statue to see if it matched the hologram, but the face on the statue had been destroyed. The stone had melted back to the level of the ears and streamed down over the figure’s torso. Nothing else about the statue’s shape enabled Corran to figure out if it was Post or not. Then again, why would the hologram of Post be connected to this statue if it isn’t him?
Corran frowned. And why remove his face?
Corran moved deeper into the room. The muted illumination came from glowtiles set near floor level and enabled Corran to pick out two darkened doorways set into one of the longer walls, but he didn’t feel compelled to head out and explore the area beyond them. He couldn’t explain it, but he had a hunch there was something important in the room, something he had to find. While intellectually he knew running far and fast was the best thing for him, his father had always encouraged him to follow his hunches. Doing that has kept me alive. No reason to change now, especially now.
As he moved through the chamber it became obvious that the statues and display cases were all exhibits in some sort of museum. A Jedi museum. Everything pertained in one way or another to Jedi Knights and Masters, with the vast majority of them having served in the Clone Wars. Just over forty years ago, all of these people were alive.
Without fail, whether the representation was a static hologram with little mementos, or a life-size statue, or a mannequin dressed as the person it represented, the Jedi’s image had been ruined. Some statues lay in pieces on the ground. Some of the mannequins had limbs missing or holes pounded through the torsos. All of them had been defaced—most literally, though some had only had their eyes carved out. He could not discern