Ten minutes of travel, and we were in the heart of the Temple District.
Once, when the Jedi Temple was first created, the Republic leadership had transferred an entire nearby district into the Order's ownership. For technical and other necessary purposes.
The district had many names—the Jedi Temple District, the Temple Quarter, the Temple District. Same thing.
After the Great Hyperspace War, the Republic granted the Order the Sacred Spire on Coruscant, north of the Senate District. The Republic expected the Jedi would build a fortress on that mountain, similar to the one they had on Ossus and in a number of other places across the galaxy.
But instead, the Jedi first built only small buildings for meditation. Later, however, the Four Masters—whose figures now adorn the main entrance to the Temple—took measures to build a full academy on the planet. The territory around the Sacred Spire passed to the Jedi. I don't remember how many years they built it, but I remember well that in the district it was forbidden to build buildings higher than the Temple itself, except for docking spires.
Then came the Sith invasion of Coruscant. The Temple was looted and catastrophically damaged. After the peace treaty was signed, the Republic had no funds to reconstruct the Temple, and the Jedi left for Tython. Closer to the New Sith Wars, the Jedi returned to Coruscant and restored the Temple.
The Temple District became a place where the Jedi concentrated their docking complex, hangars, and logistics bases. The constructed docking tower made it possible for large starships to land and take off.
Since the last wars, most of the district had been neglected. The number of Jedi decreased, wars no longer shook the galaxy, and so the district's vast storerooms filled with the Jedi's numerous machines—machines belonging to those who had laid down the role of warriors.
But now that war had returned to the galaxy, there was no choice but to reopen old facilities.
"Probably a thousand years since a Jedi set foot here," Tasi said, watching the massive doors of the mothballed hangar-storeroom slowly creep open.
"Imagine how many relics are in there," I said dreamily. "If only we could take all of them…"
"Who needs that junk?" Kodos Pipe, the foreman of the hangar workers team that was to clear out the old hangar and repair it, said through clenched teeth. "They build ships way better now than they used to. Engines, hyperdrives, electronics—everything is better and more efficient. Just repairing all this junk"—he gestured negligently at the massive hulls lit up by the beams of numerous portable lights—"would cost a fortune."
"Get the lighting on in here," Tasi said with a grimace to Kodos. "We'll take a walk for now…"
I don't know how to describe my feelings… A plunge into history? A ship graveyard?
Dozens of ships of all shapes and makes stood permanently grounded. Freighters, speeders, fighters, frigates, landing craft… They'd all seen better days, but they'd found shelter in this mass grave…
"Just look," Gri pointed at several rows of compact, wedge-shaped fighters. "Those are Aurek fighters! Strike craft the Jedi flew before the Ruusan Reformation! And this? That's a corvette! A whole corvette…"
But I had already stopped listening to him.
The call had become almost tangible. I could practically see a thin thread stretching from me into the unlit depths of the hangar… Led by the Force, I grabbed one of the handheld lights and headed that way.
The hangar Gri needed to clear—scrapping old machinery—could easily fit a small town in Russia. Stretching for dozens of kilometers, it was packed to the ceiling with numerous ships, some even without visible damage, most of which I'd seen in games set in the Old Republic era.
After half an hour of wandering between massive starship hulls, I finally reached the source of the call. A massive shadow, faintly lit by the single light, had painfully familiar shapes—
a hammerhead bow with five forward viewports…
"Defender," I whispered.
A Corellian Defender-class light corvette. A ship intended for Jedi Guardians and Jedi Consulars in that memorable game about the confrontation between Vitiate's Reconstituted Sith Empire and the Old Republic.
These ships were developed by the Corellian Engineering Corporation specifically at the Order's request as baseline vessels for Jedi special missions. Besides being built for a small crew—though it could be flown by a single pilot—the ship carried several rapid-fire cannons, missile launchers, and proton torpedoes. For crew comfort, it had its own rest section—a common room, a conference hall, a room with a large holoprojector…
The ship's ramp was, as expected, lowered. But the hatch was sealed. In one breath I rose upward, placed my hand to the control panel. With a soft click, the hatch locks disengaged, and with reverent awe I watched the massive armored door slide aside with a hiss, letting me aboard.
So familiar to me from many hours of gameplay, the corvette gaped at me in black invitation. The Force screamed, physically dragging me onto the ship. But in my mind one thought pounded: something was wrong. Like I was being lured here. I could practically feel the emanations of the dark side.
Without a lightsaber—and without any weapon at all—I was an easy target. But on the other hand, my mind insisted, something that threatened Jedi couldn't have been hiding for a thousand years in plain sight of the entire Order.
I called the Force to me, wrapping it around myself like a cocoon. Calming my mind, I opened myself to the Force again, letting it flood the ship's compartments.
I found the dark side source in a far compartment where, as my memory suggested, there was a storage room. In the game I used it to stash things I didn't need but my inner hoarder refused to sell.
Carefully, meter by meter, I moved through the corvette's compartments toward my goal, not forgetting to turn my head and scan my surroundings.
There had clearly been a fight aboard—the walls had blaster scorches in places. Several chairs on the bridge had been ripped out by the roots and tossed right there. Dust-covered instrument panels showed no damage. I didn't wander through the cabins—there would be time for that later.
I understood that this ship, and no other, would be mine. The Force had led me onto its deck. I didn't think that could be called coincidence. Not in this universe.
The storage room met me with a soft radiation of the Force. Muted, like light under water, it seemed to emanate from the entire space. It felt as if the Force had soaked into the place.
Along the storage room's walls, numerous cabinets with locked doors piled up. In front of them, a meter away, closer to the center of the room, stood footlockers—floor chests that served as storage…
The thread of the call came from one of the central cabinets. I approached it, listening to my sensations. Without a doubt, dark side Force emanated from behind the cabinet doors. But I felt it as dull, as if time had thinned it. Not dangerous.
When I opened the doors, I lost the power of speech for a moment.
Dozens of small transparent cases, firmly fixed into the cabinet walls, held nearly a hundred crystals of varied colors and shapes. The Force in them seemed asleep, but the moment I took one case—containing a Tatooine krayt dragon pearl—and opened it, I felt concentrated light side Force emanating from it. Closing the case, I returned it to its place. A real trove of lightsaber crystals! You could buy several capital ships for just a couple of them—and that was only a rough estimate.
In the main body of the cabinet, on mounts in the same transparent Force-shielding tubes, lay numerous lightsaber hilts. Dozens of lightsaber hilts—single-bladed and double-bladed, lightsaber staffs. There were even a couple bulky lightsaber pikes!
Some of them seemed vaguely familiar. Others were utterly unremarkable.
But only one hilt drew my attention.
About thirty centimeters long, black matte metal—phrik, as my memory prompted—decorated with fused threads and elements of aurodium at the top and bottom. A small clip-like latch near the emitter prevented hands from sliding along the hilt, and a pair of buttons hinted at the ability to change the blade's length.
As if in a trance, I drew the hilt from its container and settled it into my right hand. The hilt seemed to resonate with my Force, both focusing me and relaxing me at the same time. The effect made me think that specific crystals were set into the hilt's slots.
Finally, the pad of my thumb rested on the activation switch.
With a characteristic hiss, a yellow blade filled with sunlight sprang from the hilt. Under the blade's steady hum, an image from the game's expansion trailer appeared before my eyes: Arcann, one of Valkorion's twin sons, killing the other, Thexan. Cut in half, Thexan drops his saber—identical to the one in my hand like two drops of water—and falls to his knees, struck down by his brother's blade that slashed across Thexan's torso.
My entire being filled with power that my body barely contained. Yellowish lightning crawled over my hands, sparking as it touched the blade.
I was holding the blade of Thexan—the slain son of Valkorion, the Immortal Emperor.
I felt the resonance of the Force imprint within the saber's crystals with my own. The blade, like an extension of my arm, obeyed me without the slightest effort. With calm determination I could charge into an attack right now and emerge victorious. The resonance refreshed in my memory the techniques and rituals Valkorion had awakened in me. Dark and light, they intertwined into a threatening knot I hoped to use in the future.
Suddenly, it was as if I plunged into my own memories. My life on Earth rewound backward, from my youth to my childhood. I'm fifteen, then ten, five, three, one…
Then I slammed, as if at full speed, into a blue-violet wall that appeared in my path. The vision scattered instantly, but I seemed to see—with infant eyes—the ghostly figure of Valkorion standing beside a midwife holding me.
***
"You all right?" Gri looked at me doubtfully. "This wreck is more than a thousand years old!"
"Actually, more than three thousand," Kodos grumbled. "Everything that can be broken in there is already broken. Better take any 'Tatra'—better armed, more respectable, and clearly in better condition. You're a Jedi—you could even register a Hammerhead in your name."
"No," I shook my head. "The Defender."
"Your business," Gri shrugged. He bent over the terminal and quickly entered my name into the ship's records. "There. All done. Your Defender is officially registered in the registries. You can own it."
"Thanks, Gri," I smiled. "Pick anything for yourself?"
"The guys and I from Kodos's crew will take one of the ten Tranta-type corvettes." Gri pointed at a luxurious corvette, gathering dust alongside its sister ships in one of the neighboring hangars. "Unlikely there'll be demand, but still better than nothing." With that, the Nautolan winked.
Meanwhile, with the datapad containing the Defender's registration documents in hand, I looked involuntarily at the proud corvette being raised by a loader from the hangar depths.
"My guys will check it," Pipe offered. "Might not even fly."
Together with his crew, the man headed toward the dusty corvette.
I looked around. We were standing on the enormous surface of the Far Storerooms—what they called two dozen vast storerooms like the one where we'd found the Defender. Rectangular metal boxes, each with many cargo lifts that brought stored equipment up and out. And judging by the many ships being raised from the depths of the storerooms, there was plenty of hardware down there.
Mostly Republic. I couldn't find a single large Sith ship.
"And there's a lot of hardware?" I asked Gri. The Nautolan checked the list.
"Pretty much a whole squadron. We've only started, and we've already found five Hammerheads, ten—correction, nine—Tatra corvettes." The Nautolan smiled predatorily. "A hundred Aurek fighters, old shuttles, frigates. The sixth hangar is completely packed with ancient ground vehicles—they can't even identify it, straight to smelting—nothing intact. Looks like they gathered up all the junk when restoring the Temple after the Sith attack on Coruscant and shoved it all in there. Scrap metal, basically. But we've only opened a third of the hangars so far while you were crawling over the Defender from top to bottom. How much good stuff is in the rest—I don't even know."
"Well, that's going to be a lot of money," I fished.
"Hardly," Gri grimaced. "Who needs them in such pathetic condition? They'll patch them just enough to lift off the platforms, then it's onward to the orbital boneyard. In their current state, I'd price what we have now at fifty million credits."
"Still not small," I whistled.
"That's peanuts," the Nautolan snorted. "The Temple's budget for a couple months. The point isn't profit—it's freeing space as fast as possible." He nodded toward the Temple Docking Complex, where another group of Acclamators was being loaded.
The triangular hulls of the assault ships stood out as strange protrusions over the technogenic zone around the Temple.
I stood there, watching another trio of ships soar into the sky, carrying thousands of clones off to war against the Confederacy's droids.
Somewhere out there, the first battles were already flaring—and the first Jedi were already dying. Just during the time I'd been in the Temple, they had brought in around a dozen Knights, Masters, and Padawans. Burned by blaster fire, maimed by munitions explosions—they steadily filled the Halls of Healing's beds and the funeral pyres.
Strangely enough, my conscience didn't torment me for not telling the Council what I knew about the galaxy's future. I owed the Order nothing, and I wasn't exactly overflowing with altruism…
If anything, I had a debt to Valkorion, and I shouldn't delay repaying it.
Gri promised to deliver my belongings to the corvette and let me know when it was ready. He didn't forget to hint that he had contacts at the local Corellian Engineering Corporation office. I said I wouldn't forget, and headed back to the Temple.
Upgrading the corvette would be desirable, but not necessary right now.
On board, I ran the ship's diagnostics, which spilled all the Corellian product's secrets to me. Since the last activation, some circuits had suffered—those responsible for lighting and power to a number of noncritical systems, like the holoprojector in the conference hall and the crew showers. None of that affected piloting or the ship's ability to fly to Yavin 4.
The navigation computer, which hadn't crumbled to dust over thousands of years, surprisingly worked fine and was ready to take me anywhere. Just pick coordinates.
And it was the navcomputer I had to deal with in the near future.
The thing was, its memory held all data on the previous owner's travels through the galaxy. Including in Sith Empire space. And even in Wild Space. Only the navcomputer's data lagged behind the galaxy's current data by three thousand years.
Celestial bodies have a habit of changing their positions in space. So Yavin 4's coordinates—nearly four thousand years old—would, at best, take me into empty space. At worst—into the heart of a star, or somewhere equally bad.
The simplest way out would be to buy a new navicomputer or update the data on this one. Such a procedure cost only a couple hundred credits—money I even had lying around in my pockets. But it would lead to a complete wipe of the old database preserved in the computer's depths. Like saving over one file with another of the same name. One replaces the other. The first is gone.
That didn't suit me at all.
As I had already realized, many planets in this galaxy by this time were either forgotten or deliberately removed from most databases. Yavin 4 was missing even from the Temple Archives. Not to mention the coordinates of Zakuul, Nathema, Tython, and many, many others. As if the Jedi had painstakingly deleted information about these worlds, trying to forget the sad pages of their Order's history tied to them.
A Jedi, oddly enough, helped me solve this dilemma.
While the corvette was being inspected and lightly repaired, I used the chance to visit the so-called Archives.