The Wilderness (Complete)

[Rev Solomon]

Memories of war weighed heavily on a man. You never forgot the fear, the adrenalin rush, the riot of movement, the thundering guns, the stench of spent blaster cartridges and charred flesh. But what stayed with Reverend Solomon the most after all these years was the faces - the clones he'd broken bread with, shared briefings with, who'd watched his back as he led them into the metallic jaws of hell. Some had fallen in battle, and some had survived to betray him and his master in their blind obedience to Order Sixty-Six. But he remembered them all, and they invaded his dreams, the comrades who'd been left behind, whether to death or to the shroud of evil.

This night another face had joined their ranks, and his heart pounded as he lifted himself off his cot and rubbed his eyes in the dark of his cabin aboard the Exodus.

Twenty minutes later he had strolled to the observation lounge of the Whaladon with a mug of instant caf and his beaten copy of the Book of the Faith, not sure what he meant to do. He was too restless to sleep, too restless to read, and almost too restless to pray. Ever since he'd learned that Serena Laran had been captured by the Empire, she'd never gone far from his thoughts. Whether she had become another casualty to the machinations of the Dark Side or whether she still lingered in captivity, he couldn't tell. His senses didn't reach that far.

Or did they? They had forged a special kind of connection when they were Padwans, what now seemed like eons ago. Was it possible, with enough concentration, that he could find that connection again and sense her, whether she was alive or dead, maybe even deliver a message?

He didn't know the answer. But until Loki, Anbira, and Corell returned from Dac, he was powerless to do anything else. He sat facing the eternal stars, closed his eyes, and focused on his memories of Serena.

[Sol Iman]

Xagobah stood at the front line of the contest for the Mayagil sector, a contest which the Galactic Republic was rapidly losing. The Techno Union had just landed another three battalions of battle droids on its fetid, tropical surface to drive away the Republican forces and put down the last pockets of rebellion among the indigenous Xamster race, a peaceful, aboriginal species caught between two warring behemoths. Virtually all the remaining activities of the Republic on Xagobah were retreating actions, clearing paths for the last of their forces to withdraw so they could regroup and fight another day.

Which was why Jedi Padawan Sol Iman couldn't believe his eyes when he stepped into the fungal forest clearing at the head of his squad of Clone Troopers to find a young, red-haired human woman in robes kneeling over one of about a dozen stricken Xamsters lying on reed mats in the middle of their village. Like Sol, she wore a breather to protect herself from the purplish haze of spores and pollen the fauna spewed freely into the atmosphere, but the lightsaber on her hip was the only salient protection against the legions of clankers that were marching through the swamp not ten kilometers away.

"Serena?" he said, and several Xamsters milling among the hollow-fungus huts spooked and scattered away from him and his little retinue. He stepped carefully around the poor creatures lying sick in their beds. "What the frell are you doing here?"

[Serena]

"Sol?" She lifted her head, no smile in evidence under the mask of the breather. "Master Dremmel sent me to check on the Xamsters of this village." Serena wiped at her brow, damp with humidity and sweat. "There's a sickness... the other Xamsters haven't seen anything like it. Its quite fascinating..."

Her voice trailed off at the look on the other Padawan's face, and she stood to her full height, long red braid swinging against her back. "What are you doing here?" She resisted putting her hands on her hips, just barely.

[Sol Iman]

Sol stared back mutely. A sickness?

He gestured to the clones on either side of him. "We're scouting Seppy troop movements so the gunships can cover our retreat. Serena, we're pulling all Republic forces out of Xagobah within forty-eight hours. This isn't the time for Blue Stripe work."

He took a step toward her, and one of the Xamsters leapt between him and Serena, jabbering angrily at him and brandishing a two-pronged stick.

[Serena]

"Forty-eight hours?" Serena put out a hand, calming the Xamster's fears as she accepted Sol with her body language. "No, no, that isn't enough time. Its a similar strain to - I mean look at these white cell counts." She handed him a datapad full of stats and patient notes.

He didn't look at it. "You can disseminate this with Master Dremmel back at the main force."

"I can't leave them like this," she said, her voice calm to keep the Xamsters from overreacting. "This illness is unnatural. My master would be able to tell for sure, but... I think this is a test. Like an experiment."

[Sol Iman]

The diminutive bat-eared alien gave a guttural grunt and stalked away, eyeballing Sol and the Clonetroopers mistrustfully, but he gave Sol enough space to come closer and take a better look at Serena's datapad.

He frowned at the screen. He was no healer, and the medical readout meant little to him. He was ready to suggest that Serena could tell the Separatists all about it if she chose to stay, but then -

"Experiment?" He looked down at the Xamsters lying listlessly at his feet, eyes clouded and rheumy, mottled blue skin a few shades paler than it should be, with dark veins pressing up from beneath the scales. The one Serena had been tending was shivering in the muggy heat, and another one was swatting at the empty air above its face and mumbling to itself. To his untrained eye, it could have been any number of tropical illnesses - parasitic, viral, even the work of toxic spores. But if it was the work of the Separatists, Republic Command would need to know.

"You think this is a Separatist bio-weapon?"

[Serena]

"Yes." Serena spoke simply, but with conviction. "I need to get this information to Master Dremmel." Her green eyes were bright against her pale skin. "Maybe you can take it with you, see that he gets it?"

She knelt down again beside the sickest Xamster, who was shivering despite the heat. Putting her hand on his head, she started to regulate her breathing as she prepared for another healing trance.

[Sol Iman]

Sol looked helplessly at the scene before him, clutching the datapad in a white-knuckled grasp.

"Serena, if you've got enough data to send to Master Dremmel, I need to get you out of here right away. There are ten columns of heavy clankers just north of here. If you're right, it's only a matter of time before they come to check on their handiwork."

She was lost to her trance. Sol crouched by her side and laid his hand on her arm. "Serena, we have to go. The Techno Union won't care that you're a healer."

[Serena]

She sighed, releasing the Xamster and slowly opening her eyes. "You're right." Serena ran her fingers along the Xamster's cranial ridges, trying to soothe its fever even as she got to her feet. "I just... I hate to leave them like this."

The padawan looked around a little helplessly. "I'd suggest evacuation, but they'd never leave their malvil-trees." She spoke to the community leader, giving instructions on continued care of the sick, while Sol conferred with the squad of clones he'd brought with him.

By the time she was ready to go almost thirty minutes had passed and the clones were no where to be seen.

[Sol Iman]

Sol stood alone to await Serena, thumb tucked in one shoulder strap of his field pack.

"I've sent Sergeant Sev and the men to continue the patrol," he said. "I'll conduct you on the shortest path back to Master Dremmel. Sev's got a copy of your data, so it's sure to make it either way." She opened her mouth, and he raised an index finger. "No arguments."

[Serena]

"All right," she said, hitching up her holdall on her shoulder. "I was just going to say that I was ready." She offered him a small smile, just visible under the breather's mask.

After a few minutes of walking, Serena pushed another fungi branch out of her face, raising a cloud of purplish spores that danced in front of her. "I wasn't aware 'shortest route' was code for 'no path.'" She coughed, "Are you sure that we're going the right direction?"

She stopped walking, shading her eyes against the sun to look through the purplish haze. "I came that way, over those hills."

[Sol Iman]

"And Vulture Droids have been buzzing those hills all morning," Sol replied. "We're better off under cover."

They trudged downward through yellow fronds of mushroom filaments and into soggy footing. As they passed a stand of rigid, woody grass, Sol stopped and snapped off a stem about nine feet high and broke it in half over his knee.

"This'll make it easier," he said, handing one of the makeshift walking sticks to Serena. He took another step and sent up another puff of spores. "Agh. This stuff's everywhere."

He charted them a course that avoided the thickest parts of the fungus colonies. Large mushroom bells loomed overhead, leaking spore dust from their gills.

"What kind of symptoms were you dealing with back there?"

[Serena]

"Nausea, fever, shakes, hallucinations, although it seems to be different in each of the affected. The base infection is the same - respiratory trouble, much like what inhaling these spores does to humans. Like asthma... but more complicated. Once it gets rooted in the lungs," she coughed, using the stem to help her footing over some rocks, "it starts to affect the brain."

Serena took a deep breath, sweat dripping coolly down her back in the heat. "The first Xamsters affected died yesterday. That village lost another two this morning." Her hand tightened on the walking stick with frustration, "The others you saw... they won't last another two days."

[Sol Iman]

Sol could hear the outrage in her voice, and he felt it, too. Serena had a natural sensitivity bordering on the empathic. It worked both ways when she felt strongly enough about something. Sol thought that probably was a good asset for a diplomat to have. But a warrior had to remain objective. That the Separatists had unleashed such a weapon on aboriginals was bad enough. But now they needed to ensure that it was never used anywhere else.

"I'm sorry, Serena." He batted away a large, buzzing insect that seemed to be pondering a nice, bloody aperitif. "We'll come back and drive the Techno Union off this world. For now, we just need to make sure this plague doesn't spread."

It suddenly occurred to him with that she'd been in close contact with at least a dozen infected individuals. "How... exactly does it spread?"

[Serena]

"I'm not exactly sure. But I am fairly certain it is airborne." Serena tapped her breather. "Since I never took this off the chance of me contracting it is almost zero. And it looked like it was made specifically to interact with Xamster biology. We're in no danger."

She stopped for a moment, wiping stray hairs off her forehead where they were clinging damply. "Its really warm today." Serena looked around. "The pollen is getting thicker, too. At least, its not as hazy on the path I took before."

[Sol Iman]

"I've felt worse on Felucia," Sol said, squinting to keep the spores out of his eyes. He rubbed a hand across his forehead and looked at it, finding they were mixing with his sweat to produce a gray, sooty grime. "But not by much."

He was beginning to question the wisdom of diving so deep into the mushroom groves. He hadn't seen the haze this thick in the week and a half he'd been on Xagobah, and he was beginning to worry for the filter at the end of his breathing mask, which was whirring away at maximum.

"Wait, that doesn't make sense, does it? Why would the Separatists develop a vector that only affects the Xams--"

Sol stopped in mid-stride. Some hundred yards away, a flock of tulee birds flapped away on their leathery wings, bothered by some disturbance in the undergrowth. One look at Serena was enough to tell him she'd sensed it, too.

A moment later, their lightsabers were hissing in their hands as heavy blaster bolts screamed at them through the mushroom stalks.

[Serena]

Serena gritted her teeth as her lightsaber thrummed to life, and then forced herself to relax. Feel the Force. She instinctively moved her saber as blaster bolts made fungi explode all around them, deflecting two that would have ended her life.

The purplish smog created by the abundance of spores and pollen in the air was swirling at the source of the blaster bolts, and she could suddenly hear something large crashing through the mushroom grove. "Clankers? I thought this way was supposed to be safer?!" The blaster bolts ceased abruptly, leaving her ears ringing in the sudden silence.

She could sense the danger wasn't over, and the air felt thick despite her breather. As she was looking around, Sol grabbed her arm and they took off through the stalks. "They're trying to flank us."

Sure enough their trajectory took them straight into a B3 Heavy that was moving rather quietly through the fungi. She held her saber at the ready, but Sol leapt at it, his flashing lightsaber lopping off an outstretched limb. Serena turned the way they'd come just as more blaster bolts shredded the stalks behind them, splattering the padawans with apothecium and hymenium.

She deflected the ones that came too close, her body moving before thought as she used the graceful forms of Shien.

[Sol Iman]

With an upward stroke, Sol cleaved the super battle droid in two, and each sparking half collapsed into the mud. He turned to find Serena trying to backtrack.

"Not that way - they'll catch us in a crossfire. Come on!"

He leapt over the remains of the battle droid with Serena at his heels. As they passed under a low-hanging mushroom bell, Sol whipped his saber up through the stalk connecting it to the rest of the tree and brought it crashing down behind them. The billowing cloud would help to cover their escape.

They ran on instinct, leaping over fallen fiber logs and swampy cesspools of decay. The sound of blaster fire faded away, leaving only the primordial music of the fungal forest droning around them.

It wasn't until they crested a ridge and skidded down the loamy soil on the other side that they stopped to catch their breath. Solomon leaned back against the hillside and sucked huge lungfuls, now dripping with sweat. "Standard clanker sweeping tactics," he said. "Fan out in a line and march across the land, clean out any resistance they find. They're awfully single-minded about it, so now we're on the safe side of the patrol, they won't be coming back."

He glanced over at Serena, who was staring at him with a grave look on her face. "What? What is it?"

Sol followed her eyes down to the corrugated tube of his breathing mask. There was a gaping gash through it the size of a blaster bolt, ringed with twisting threads of partially melted plastic.

"Aw, frell."

[Serena]

Serena dug about in her holdall and pulled out an antihistamine hypospray that she unceremoniously pressed against Sol's neck. He jerked away from instinct, but it didn't hurt. "That should help stall the allergic reaction to the spores, but it won't last too long."

She lay back against the dark rich loam, coughing. "We're going to have to hurry." Serena stared up through the caps at the purplish haze, seeing spots dancing in the sky. She shifted her gaze, and the spots moved. The padawan rubbed her eyes, and coughed again. "Feeling a little dehydrated from running," she said, moving her mask just long enough to drink from her canteen.

She decided she was going to keep lying down until Sol told her he was ready to move. Dashing about in the mushroom groves had worn her out more than she would have expected.

[Sol Iman]

With a huff of frustration, Sol pulled the mask off and dropped it in the mud. It was useless now, and he didn't need the dead weight.

"I have some training in filtering toxins. Guess it's time to put it into practice."

He took a pull from his own canteen. As tempted as he was to wash his face, he knew it would be a futile effort, and he couldn't afford to waste the water.

Once his breathing was back under control, he stowed his canteen and held out a hand to Serena. "Come on. We'd better get moving again." He lifted her from the steep bank - something about the feel of her hand against his skin seemed strange, even with all the particles swirling in the air. "How are you feeling?" he asked.