Jaden saw shame and resolve battle in Khedryn's expression. His fingers opened and closed reflexively over the handle of his blaster. His lazy eye floated off for a time before returning to fix on Jaden's face.

"I said I was with you and I'm with you. Blast it, if Marr can fly into Harbinger with Relin, I can walk some abandoned halls with you."

"Thank you," Jaden said, moved by Khedryn's loyalty.

"What do you think they were working on here?"

"Something high priority. Top secret."

"Something dangerous."

"Yes."

They continued on, caution slowing their progress. Eventually they passed through a large botanical garden where cold-stiffened, time-browned vegetables and flowers sagged in their pots like desiccated corpses. Sunlamps hung from the ceiling, eyeballing the death of their charges. The faint smell of soil and organic decay filled the cavernous garden.

They walked through, trying not to smell the death, seeking the central computing core. They passed what Jaden figured to be a barracks: wall-mounted double racks, military-issue blankets, a central table for recreation. Bits of stormtrooper armor lay strewn about here and there. None of the armor exhibited unit identifications. Jaden imagined the troopers had been elite soldiers plucked from various units to serve as security in the facility. They would have been mind-wiped after leaving the facility, he imagined.

A weapons locker adjacent to the barracks had only empty racks save for a lonely BlasTech E-11 on one of the rungs, a heavy blaster commonly used by stormtroopers. Jaden and Khedryn left it alone.

They passed through more corridors, more rooms, but Jaden barely saw them. He wanted to reach the central computing core. He would find an answer there, if anywhere, to the question of the facility's purpose.

"Look at this," Khedryn said, nodding at the walls.

Jaden came back to himself and saw what had caught Khedryn's eye. Scorch marks on the walls, lots of them, even a few on the ceiling. Khedryn ran his gloved fingers over them.

"Blasterfire," Jaden said.

"Looks like quite a battle," Khedryn said. He turned about, examining the walls, floor, ceiling. There were marks everywhere. "Some wild shots taken here. Desperation fire."

"Yes," Jaden said. "Let's keep moving."

The signs of a pitched battle grew more pronounced as they continued deeper into the complex. More scorch marks from blasters, entire suits of stormtrooper armor cast in pieces across the floor with holes in the chest or helmets.

"No bodies," Khedryn said, toeing an empty breastplate. "Pieces look scattered, as if by an animal." He crouched on his haunches and studied a breastplate. He picked it up, put his finger through a narrow hole that showed only the smallest scorch ring around the entry. "Look at this. What kind of blaster makes that neat of an entry wound?"

"That is not a blaster hole," Jaden said. "It's from a lightsaber."

Marr's appearance on the swoop drew some of the Massassi's fire. Blaster shots tore smoking holes in the speeder but Marr drove straight at them, blazing past Relin, the swoop's engine changing pitch and sputtering from the blaster damage.

Amazement did not paralyze Relin. He augmented his speed with the Force and charged out from cover. The nearest pair of Massassi, aiming at Marr's back as he passed them by, never saw the Jedi coming. Relin decapitated both of them with a spinning crosscut before they turned around.

The swoop's engine screamed and Relin turned in time to see Marr roll off its side a moment before it slammed into the loader droid and exploded. Fire, smoke, and a hail of metal parts showered the corridor. The blast wave blew Relin against the wall. Flames engulfed the speeder, droid, and the two Massassi who had sheltered behind it. They staggered down the hall, screaming and burning, making it only three strides before their legs gave out and they fell facedown to the deck.

One of the loader droid's arms protruded from the flaming amalgam of plastic and metal, waving in slow motion as if in farewell. The stink of burned flesh, blaster discharge, and melted plastic filled the hall.

The unexpectedness of the explosion froze the action for a moment. Even the Massassi's blasters went temporarily silent. Marr lay in the center of the hall, a dazed look on his face.

The moment passed; violence re-erupted.

The Massassi near Marr recovered first and trained their blasters on him. But before they could fire, Relin drew on the power he had gained from the Lignan to target a Force blast-a telekinetic burst of concussive force-on the two of them.

His raised hand and a violent impulse drove a focused blast into their throats and visibly crushed both of their tracheas. They fell to the floor, clutching at their ruined windpipes. One discharged his blaster into the ceiling as he went down.

"Cover, Marr!" Relin shouted, in a hard, sharp voice that did not sound like his own.

He realized only then that he was smiling. He was outside himself, someone else.

Marr, his face blackened, bleeding from the nose, heeded Relin's words and scooted against the wall, firing at anything that moved. He hit one Massassi down the hall in the face, another in the leg, then went fully prone in a nearby doorway while blasterfire soaked the air around him.

Relin stepped into the center of the hallway, near the ruins of the swoop and loader droid, his lightsaber blazing, his spirit on fire from the Lignan, his rage the fuel of the conflagration. He laughed aloud, embracing the full power running through his body, drawing on the sea of energy available to him.

The Massassi focused their fire on him, but he deflected it almost casually. Walking down the hall, repelling blaster shots as he went, he moved methodically through the ranks of the security team, crushing throats and shattering chests as he went. The last surviving Massassi threw down his blaster, pulled his lanvarok from the scabbard on his back, snarled, and charged. Relin took mental hold of the Massassi's throat and drove him to his knees, gasping, two paces away.

Relin stared into his yellow eyes, took in the bared fangs dripping saliva, the piercings of steel and bone that disfigured the Massassi's face, the map of veins in his straining arms and neck. He drove his lightsaber into the Massassi's chest and the body fell facedown at his feet.

Around Relin, Harbinger's alarm wailed, the loader droid offered distorted, slurred beeps, and the few stubborn Massassi gasped away the moments that remained to them. In the privacy of his mind, Relin heard Drev's laughter and the irresistible call of his own rage.

The weight of what he had done and how he had done it, what he had become, settled on him. He stood up straight and bore it. He deactivated his lightsaber and Marr's hand closed over his shoulder.

"We should go," the Cerean said. "Now. More will be coming. You lead."

Marr's touch grounded him. His legs went weak and he sagged, but thought of Drev and did not fall. Turning to face Marr, he saw the blood leaking from the Cerean's nose. Marr seemed not to notice it. A contusion was purpling on his right cheek.

"Thank you," Relin said to Marr. "My injuries have… slowed me."

Marr gestured at the corpses. "What kind of creatures are these?"

"Massassi," Relin answered absently. "Warriors bred by Sith alchemy from original Sith stock."

Marr nodded. "Something similar occurred with clones in a recent war in this time." He knelt over one of the dead Massassi and took its blaster, testing its heft in his hand. Seemingly satisfied, he slid it into his thigh holster, keeping his own blaster drawn.

"I do not have much of a charge left in mine," he explained.