Part I
Chapter 3

Tana woke with the feel of durasteel cold against her cheek and the lingering echo of a voice in her mind. Briefly, she wondered if she'd had too much juma the night before, but the dim memory of a medbay lingered. Her eyes refused to open, but the overwhelming stench of kolto hit her nose.

"Dammit, Jaq," she mumbled. " I thought I didn't need any more time in the tank."

She peeled her eyes open and realized immediately that she was no longer in the medbay of the Harbinger. Her brain did a series of rapid calculations, leaving her with an even bigger headache, and the conclusions weren't pretty: she'd been drugged, out for who knew how long, and now she was in some strange medbay – in her underwear.

"And this isn't even one of my worst days," she grumbled as she pulled herself to her feet. She looked around groggily. The full-immersion tank behind her had most likely been her home for the past several days given the way the smell of kolto seemed to have permeated her skin. The other four tanks that lined the circular room had male occupants, and Tana spared a thought for her modesty as she walked to the tank nearest her – the one on the left of 'hers'. Her modesty was safe, she decided a moment later with a small, mental recoil. She did a quick examination of the other three tanks.

All four men had sustained injuries, it was clear, but nothing that a full-immersion tank wouldn't have healed; all four were dead. She shook her head as though to clear it. It just didn't add up and that fueled her determination to find a way out of this medbay. She had the slightly claustrauphobic feeling that let her know she was underground, and she'd never been comfortable being buried alive like this. It didn't matter how much "fresh" air they pumped into places like these; it wasn't the same as an open plain like the one on Dantooine where she'd grown up.

She did a quick rewire of the door and let herself out of the room after a thorough search for clothing, of which there was none. A sealed room on the right resisted all attempts to hack it, but the one on the left opened easily enough and with a quick security bypass, she was able to view the holorecords of the medical officer's security log, learning a little about the strange place where she'd woken, a mining facility she was quickly coming to realize was likely a ghost town. The most useful thing she learned, besides what had happened to those around her, was that all those in the tanks, herself included, had been poisoned with sedatives.

Tana refused to dwell on why she'd survived that. That was a path she would not walk again, no matter what the circumstances surrounding it, and while it was certainly odd that such things seemed to be coming back to her now, when she needed them most, it was no more or less than a rare fluke of the luck she'd been famous for on Morellia. That was it.

What was important was that someone had tried to kill her. Someone had drugged her, brought her here, and tried to kill her, and the most likely suspect was someone she would never have thought, however many days it had been, would be the culprit. Jaq, whatever his motives, was not looking too good right now, despite all his friendliness. Too late, Tana remembered that the best way for an assassin to move in on a target was to get to know the target as intimately as possible. Even thinking about his likely betrayal hurt, on a level she wasn't comfortable with. In the short time she'd known him, she'd grown very fond of the youthful medical officer, and even having to suspect that he'd played some part in her situation on this facility was painful.

She brushed it aside, and used the console in the medical room to open the sealed door and walked across the hallway. She felt her stomach churn with long-buried memories as she realized she was in the morgue. "Stupid," she muttered. There must have been a sign over the damn door. If worse came to it, she could take the clothes from the old woman laying on the nearest slab, but the shreds of her training rebelled against it. Instead she went to the far end of the room, where a man was lying, as though asleep, and she rifled through his clothes, looking for some sort of weapon. She found some sort of mining tool that could probably be used with some effectiveness and was preparing to leave when she heard a voice.

"Find what you're looking for amongst the dead?"

It was the voice she'd heard echoing in her brain as she'd woken, and she turned to find the old woman had gotten up. She stared in shock for a moment.

"So, you're alive after all. I thought you were dead, old woman. You gave me a start."

"Close to death, yes. Closer than I'd like. You have the smell of the kolto tank about you – how do you feel?" the old woman asked. Tana stared at her suspiciously. This was an awfully genial conversation for a morgue.

"Of course I smell of the damn tank, I spent Force only knows how long in there," Tana said hotly. "And I'm a little woozy. I imagine that's normal. Was it your voice then, that I heard earlier – there's something niggling the back of my mind, like I've heard your voice before."

The old woman babbled on to her, and Tana tried to show her some respect. If she was right, this woman, Kreia, she called herself, had woken Tana from the drug-induced sleep she'd been in…and Tana was afraid she knew how the old woman had done it. Eventually they agreed that Kreia would wait in the morgue and Tana would explore the station. Tana tried very hard not to blow up at the woman when she called her a Jedi. She wasn't – not anymore – not for a long time.

When Tana left the old woman to recover her strength, while she searched for a way off the facility, the old woman left her with the parting shot about finding clothes, it was all she could do not to hit her with her newly acquired weapon. But the old woman was right. They HAD been attacked once, and would likely be attacked again. Getting out of there was a top priority. And the woman had seemed honest when she'd claimed she didn't know who had tried to kill her. Which still left Jaq as her primary suspect.

Tana dashed a few unwelcome tears from her eyes. Her first friend since reentering Republic space and she'd already been betrayed. It did not bode well for her future among the Republic. She continued to explore the abandoned station, fighting off droids when she came upon them and trying to learn as much as she could. It seemed, as far as she could tell, that the droids had revolted and so had a decent portion of the miners – right after she'd been brought in on a derelict freighter. And they, like the old woman (hag, her mind whispered) believed her to be a Jedi.

But why now? Why after all these years of being left alone, to fend for herself, was there suddenly so much interest in her as a Jedi, when she hadn't truly been a Jedi in more years than she cared to admit? As she prepared to enter another section of the station, she felt it: the voice of the old woman (hag) in her head, and the first faint stirrings of something she'd thought she'd lost forever on a long ago day on a faraway world. Something she wasn't even sure she welcomed back at all, but there it was, all the same, on the edges of her perception, a faint stir in the Force.

All the power in the Galaxy at her fingertips once again, weak though it may be, and she was tempted to slam that door shut, to stop it from coming through. Something about that thought triggered some other thought in the back of her mind, something important, but it was out of reach and slipped away as she tried to grasp it.

Then the fight had begun and there was nothing but her and the Force, fighting off the droids, and by all the saints of Tython, she'd missed this! She moved through the next few chambers, slightly drunk on the power coursing through her body and terrified of it all the same.

And then, she found Jaq.