The two guards marched through the underbrush quickly and quietly. The first guard took off her helmet and shook the sweat off her blond curls. Her fiancé' also removed his helmet and smiled at her.
"Think this is far enough?" He asked playfully
"Everyone else is investigating the crash sight. Relax..." She smiled sweetly at him as he took her in his arms. They softly kissed, and he was about to suggest that they find a more comfortable position when there was a WHAP sound and she suddenly jerked and went limp. She weakly looked up at him through tear filled eyes.
"What is it?" He asked. "What’s wrong??"
She gave a wordless cry as he lowered her down. Blood tricked from her mouth. He started to lay her down when he felt her back. There was a gaping hole, surrounded by a dark red stain. The breath suddenly rushed from her lungs. He looked up quickly, searching for his love's killer. He saw a faint movement in the trees and lifted his blaster rifle to the movement. there was another faint WHAP of sound as something his rifle at high speed. It exploded, taking most of his hands with it and leaving burns on most of his stomach and chest. Crippled and totally defenseless he turned and ran. There was another WHAP, and something hit his knee, ripping it halfway off. He screamed in pain and fell to the ground. Using a massassi tree branch, he pulled himself back up, cursing incredible pain in his destroyed hands, and started hobbling on one foot. WHAPWHAP! Two horrible pains in his lower back and he fell again. He couldn't feel his legs....he tried to pull himself along the ground but felt a strong grip on his shoulder, that flipped him over to his back. He looked up at a dark figure in black leather armor and a jet-black TIE-pilot helmet. He was pointing a strange handgun at him. It was black, with a black cylinder on the barrel, not any kind of blaster. There were sudden scratchy feelings in his skull, like claws poking at his brain....digging. He let out an insane, painful, scream induced by absolute terror. Then the fingers stopped, and there was a loud WHAP. Then nothing.
* * *
The dark killer grabbed the body of the guard and started to drag it toward the clearing where the other guard was. He mentally went over the info that he ripped from the male guard’s mind. It wasn't enough to get him to the next phase of his plan, but it would help. He had been attacking guards and techs that came into the jungle, picking their brains for information before killing them and disposing of the bodies. He supposed that when he finally got the information he needed, he would make a display of his last victims, to show that the missing people had not gone AWAL as he knew the Yavin Security Force believed. It would be a terrible waste of time and assets for him to sneak onto Yavin 4 if everyone though that all his work was just a set of coincidences. He would let them know he was here soon enough.
He finally got both bodies to the river, and after tying them to large rocks, dumped them both unceremoniously into the brown water.
He watched the blonde's still open eyes staring blankly at him as she sank below the gentle current.
"The jungle is a dangerous place little one." They were both gone in a few seconds. The killer brushed himself off and headed back to his temporary home, not giving his victims a second thought. He had work to do.
* * *
Jacen woke with a start. It was the middle of the night on Yavin 4 and he was drenched in sweat. Had he been having a bad dream? He couldn't remember.... He thought he felt a disturbance in the force. It was probably nothing, he decided. He rolled over and buried his face in the pillow. There was heavy knock on his door. "Come in." He said groggily. Tenel Ka walked in and looked at him seriously "Did you feel something just now?" Jacen sat up quickly "Yeah, like.....I don't know. Like a scream or ...something."
"Yes. I felt it too. I wonder what it was."
"Probably some aftereffects of the crash."
"This is a fact...." Tenel Ka said slowly. She sat next to him on the sleeping pallet and leaned back on the stone wall staring thoughtfully ahead. Jacen sat next to her, also leaning on the wall. They sat in silence for several minutes.
"Did Zekk seem to be acting strange the other day?" Tenel Ka asked.
This was not what Jacen was expecting her to say. "I don't....wait...yeah he was wasn't he?"
"This is a fact. He started acting that way when we found the braces on that transport."
"Maybe it was the bomb....."
Tenel Ka looked at him "Why would there be a bomb in one of the transports in the first place?"
"IO assumed it was just part of the payload. Don't they all have those self destruct detonators?" Jacen asked, thinking of the schematics his sister had.
"Well, Zekk seemed scared over something... maybe it was the bomb."
"We must ask Jaina about it," Tenel Ka stated seriously ," in the morning."
She rested her head on his shoulder and yawned.
"Yeah....." Jacen said, resting the side of his face on Tenel Ka's head.
But, he couldn't help wondering about what had spooked Zekk so badly. He must have wondered to hard, because he fell asleep.
* * *
Taptaptap. Jacen slowly opened his eyes, but did not want to get up. He felt warm and comfy for some reason. He felt a warm tickle on his neck. He blinked the sleep from his eyes and lifted his head. There was a stirring next to him. Jacen came fully awake as Tenel Ka hugged him tighter and reburied her face into his neck. She was murmuring softly in her sleep.
Jacen squeezed his arms tighter around her, feeling her soft hair and supple reptilian armor that she slept in clinging to her back. He squeezed her tighter, and looked up to see Jaina standing in his doorway looking at him with and arched eyebrow.
Jacen jumped up and Tenel Ka woke, and jumped when she saw Jaina. They both turned deep red. "Uhh, Good Morning Sis." Jacen said with a lopsided grin.
Jaina glanced at her chrono "Good afternoon you two." She grinned and walked out. after a few seconds Tenel Ka, still red, jumped up and followed her out "We had better ask her about the bombs." she said gruffly. Jacen, still a little sleepy, flopped back on his bed and pressed his face back into the pillow. It still smelled like Tenel Ka's hair.
* * *
Jaina was walking down the hallway toward the hangar bay, still chuckling about the look on both Jacen's and Tenel Ka's faces. Suddenly someone grabbed her shoulders from behind her. She jumped and whirled around.
"Zekk! You startled me." Zekk was grinning down on her.
"That was kinda the idea."
Jaina flushed and looked back up at him.
"So, what are you doing?" he asked, taking her hand.
"Well, I was going out to tinker with the Rock Dragon." She said, smiling sweetly at him.
"So your to busy to take a walk with me?" He asked, raising his eyebrows.
Jaina pretended to think it over. "Hmmm, I'm really pretty busy....maybe later." she said in a serious voice.
"Maybe later?" Zekk smiled at her and slid his arms around her waist.
"Maybe later....." Jaina put her arms around his neck and pulled his face down to hers. Once again, just as they were about to kiss....
"JAAAAINAAAA! Where are you?" Tenel Ka called down the halls. Zekk slid his arms off her and turned to see Tenel Ka at the other end of the hallway. She spotted them and trotted up.
"There you are. We have something important we need to ask you." Tenel Ka had acted like she didn't know what they had been doing.
"Can't it wait?" Jaina asked in a way-to-pleasant voice
"No."
Jaina heaved a sigh and looked up at Zekk apologetically. "Sorry, Zekk."
"That’s ok. You go ahead, I promised Anja that I would show her the river where we always swim. She said she got a new swimsuit and wants to put it to use. See you two later." He walked away toward the hallway where Anja's room was.
As soon as he was out of sight, Jaina used a few choice words that would have shattered the ears of most people in the imperial palace, and even turned heads in the Mos Eisly Cantina.
Tenel Ka wasn’t affected by her language. "So are you going to come now?"
"I kriffing guess I kriffing might as well. You kriffing ruined my kriffing chances with Zekk, and now he's going off to kriffing swim with that kriffing bitch Anja, whose going to be strutting around in her kriffing little swimsuit like she's hot stang..." Jaina continued talking until they arrived back to her room. Jacen was waiting for them.
"We wanted to know if those bombs we found were a part of a transports normal self destruct mechanism."
Jaina forgot about Zekk for a moment and went to her datapad, calling up the schematics of a transport.
"Hmmm....yeah, but not in the place we saw....those were positioned to destroy cargo , not disintegrate the ship...."
"Why would it be there? There was no cargo...." Jacen said, puzzled.
"Ah. Aha. Maybe they were placed there to try to convince whoever found the wreck that the cargo hold was empty. The bombs would have gone off and that would have explained why there was nothing inside the cargo hold."
Jaina bit her lower lip. "Those braces were a perfect fit for a TIE-Interceptor. you don't think that-" She was cut off, by a great tremor in the force.
They all followed their senses into the jungle.
* * *
Zekk was sitting on a boulder watching Anja swim. He admired her smooth easy strokes. She surfaced and looked up at him. Water was running down her body, off her maroon swimsuit. It went nicely with her dark, streaked hair and big brown eyes. She smiles playful at him.
"Want to come in? The water is great."
Zekk hopped of the boulder and walked towards her smiling when he caught a breeze carrying a sour smell.
"Hold on a second, I have to check something out." He walked toward the smell, ignoring the hurt, pouty look she was giving him.
Zekk went about twenty meters into the trees when he found the clearing. There was a large massassi tree branch over it, and on the branch, eight bodies were hung by their necks or ankles. There were five guards and three techs of some kind. They had been there for a few days, Zekk guessed. But the thing that caught his attention was the mark on the tree trunk. It was burned into the trunk with a laser, a simple drawing of a sinister looking skull shadowed over by a hood with dark dead eyes. He must have been standing there for several minutes, because the other young Jedi knights were behind him all of a sudden. They all looked like they were going to be sick.
"What is that mark?" Tenel Ka asked.
It took Zekk a second to find his voice.
"That is the symbol of the Death Knights."
They were about to ask more questions, when they heard the explosion.