Gateways by Aer-ki Jyr (i like reading TXT) 📗

Paul shut down the holograms and hopped down from the railing, then walked off in search of the Archon sanctum as he reached out to the Saiolum simultaneously and tried to get a feel for the now calm and mostly battle free system’s ebb and flows.

He didn’t get far before he stopped cold, turning to look down through the ship’s decks to the black hole below as he could sense it. Faint, distant, but now quite recognizable after his conversation with Azoro. The toxicity was there, riding along with the currents…and it was coming from deep, deep below.

Paul reached out as much as he could, tracing the ripples back to where they came from and finding the fingerprints of what was producing them.

It was the Spice Lords, and there was something wrong with them. Some sort of internal sabotage that was rendering their Saiolum emissions contaminated. They were sick, and being tortured inside indefinitely…and in a far lesser way, it was similar to the way Hadarak felt within the Saiolum…

The Hadarak were designed to be in light misery constantly, and that was the fuel for the Tri’vey toxicity machine…which meant whoever altered the Jedein into Hadarak was probably the same as whoever built the machine, and both creations were merely puzzle pieces in some intergalactic, darkside master plan.

The workout would have to wait, and Paul diverted from his path to the Archon Sanctum to the nearest telepathic receiver in the ship that would let him use the main transmitter to contact the Jedein in the system to do some analysis on the Hadarak, and especially the Spice Lords if they could coax one up near the surface where the Jedein could get a closer look at it…

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