Overhead, the alarm continued its wail.

Marr tried to push Relin along. "You lead."

Relin stood his ground, shook his head. "No, Marr. Go back."

"I know what you will say, but I can help you." He tried again to nudge Relin forward. "There is little time. You are sick, Relin. You cannot make it alone."

Relin was sick, but not only in the way Marr meant. And he had to do it alone.

"I have lost two Padawans already, Marr. One to darkness and another to fire. I will not be responsible for anyone else."

Marr stood up straight. "It is my choice to make."

Relin's temper flared and he poked a finger into the Cerean's chest. "It is not. You are to return to Junker and get off this ship. Now."

Marr looked as if Relin had struck him. His expression fell. "But… what you taught me in the ship, about the Force. I did not… I felt the power of the Lignan. I know this ship needs to be destroyed."

Relin's anger leaked over the brim of his control. "You felt nothing, Cerean! Nothing!" He felt a burning in his fingertips, looked down to see blue Force lightning leaking from them, snaking around the hilt of his deactivated lightsaber. He felt himself color with shame. He did not look up when he spoke, though he managed a gentler tone.

"Go, Marr. Please."

"But I felt the Force… "

"Then let your awakening be my legacy. But I can teach you nothing more. You must go."

He felt Marr's eyes on him, studying him, as if Relin were a computation Marr needed to solve. "You do not intend to escape."

Relin did not deny it. "I am no longer a Jedi, Marr. I am just… a murderer. And there's yet more murder that I must do."

Marr kept his face expressionless. "You do not have to do this in this way."

"Good-bye, Marr. Seal up Junker and go. Things will end as they must."

Marr hesitated, but finally extended his hand. Relin tucked his lightsaber hilt under his left arm and clasped Marr's hand.

"May the-" Marr stopped himself, started again. "Good luck, Relin."

Relin winced over the verbal detour and what it meant. "And you, Marr. Do me a service. Tell Jaden that he was right. And tell him that he was also wrong. There is nothing certain. There's only the search for it. Things only turn dangerous when you think the search is over. He will know what I mean."

"I will tell him," Marr said.

Relin allowed himself that maybe those words, too, could be his legacy.

Without another word, he turned from Marr and headed down a side corridor. The moment he had his back to Marr, the moment that shame no longer reined in rage, he embraced fully what he had become.

Kell trailed the Starhawk by fifty kilometers, well out of visual range given the snowstorm. And the Starhawk's scanners would never pierce Predator's sensor baffles. Jaden's ship showed up clearly on Predator's scanners, though, and Kell traced its flight as it closed on the source of the Imperial beacon. He knew when they reached it, for the Starhawk slowed, circled. Kell kept Predator as a distance, waiting for Jaden to set down.

He did not have to wait long.

He delayed a quarter hour before piloting Predator in the direction of Jaden's ship, but stayed high enough to make visual detection difficult.

Below, he saw a building complex, its walls gripped in ice, the spike of the communications tower blinking red through the storm. He snapped photos with his ship's nose cam, intending to send them to Wyyrlok via subspace when he got back into outer space.

Despite the beacon's warning, he expected little danger from anything or anyone other than Jaden. He supposed there could be some leftover and still-functioning automated security apparatus, but he could not imagine anything organic surviving for long on the moon.

He set Predator down a kilometer away from the Starhawk and hurried to the hold. The stasis chambers stood empty-he had fed on all his stored meat-but they piqued his hunger for Jaden. His feeders twisted in his cheek sacs.

He donned his mimetic suit and activated it, holstered his blaster, sheathed his vibroblades. He threw a thick envirosuit over the whole and climbed into his covered speeder.

Wind buffeted the cargo bay the moment he opened the door, The speeder rocked on its repulsorlifts. Snow and ice blew in, dusting the windscreen. Kell activated Predator's security system as he drove the speeder out of the bay.

Gliding over the frozen landscape, he downloaded the Starhawk's location from Predator's computer and accelerated to full speed, chasing Fate. He stopped the speeder fifty meters from Jaden's landing site, threw up the hood of his weather-cloak, and climbed out.

The wind and cold rifled his cloak, wormed under his insulation, and stabbed at his skin. The faint aroma of sulfur hung in the freezing air, probably due to volcanism.

With an effort of will, he elevated his core body temperature until he felt comfortable. He trudged to the top of a snow dune-the wind tried to pull him from his perch-and glassed the Starhawk's landing site with a pair of macro binoculars.

The ship sat on its skids atop a clear field of packed ice, apparently sealed tight. He increased the magnification of the binoculars and confirmed that security screens covered the viewports.

Most likely Jaden had already exited the ship.

Examining the area around the ship, he thought he might have seen indentations in the snow that could have been footprints leading toward the facility, but he'd have to get closer. He glassed the facility itself.

Snow covered all but the communications tower and the rectangular central facility. He noted the single-story steel-and-duracrete construction, the lack of windows, the sealed hatches for doors. The whole place sweated Imperial functionalism, with nothing wasted on aesthetics.

Probably a research facility of some kind, Kell supposed. He imagined a lower level or two below ground. An experiment gone awry would explain the beacon's message.

Walking sideways down the dune, he returned to the speeder and used its onboard scanners to check the complex for radiation. His body could endure radiation exposure that would kill most other sentients, but he saw no reason in taking chances.

Detecting nothing dangerous, he drove the speeder up to the Starhawk. He stripped off his envirosuit, exposing the mimetic suit, and pulled up its hood and mask. As he disembarked the speeder, he upped his core temperature still more. The mimetic suit turned him white, even mimed a tumble of blowing snow.

Drawing his blaster, he walked the area around the ship until he found the footprints. They were so deep that the wind and snow had not yet effaced them. Two pairs of boots dug a chain of little pits in the snow in the direction of a large entry hatch in the main complex.

Jaden was not alone. He was accompanied by either Khedryn Faal or Marr Idi-Shael. Their soup Kell did not crave, not anymore. His appetite was limited to Jaden Korr.

He hurried back to the speeder, parked it out of sight of the Starhawk, and headed for the hatch.

His mimetic suit turned him into just more blowing snow.

He was a ghost.