The acolytes lay defeated.  Spite was gone.  We had one final task before battle before we could claim victory.  Malevius.

There was only one (visible) door left, so, uh, we charged in it.  Two turrets immediately greeted us and began to open fire.  I leapt to one, intending to keep it occupied.  Argent began to attack the other one.  Lyndee paused to check her space-email or something.  The turrets went haywire and were defeated.  There was now a force-field between us and the remainder of the room.  Before breaking through it, a hologram of Malevius fired up.  This wasn't good.

He was doing this for the good of all, you see.  The Rakata were stirring (even though they'd been gone for thousands of years), disturbed evidently by the war.   Not sure why they weren't disturbed by previous wars... maybe more dark energies were flowing, disturbing them.  Regardless, we were fools for disrupting his research.  Alas, he really just wanted to demean us; the coward had already fled.  

Still, there was a treasure trove behind the force field (knowledge is the best treasure!).  We started to bypass the field by cutting into the wall.  This had the unfortunate side effect of releasing a poisonous gas that compelled us to withdraw a short distance.  Argent used his flame thrower to neutralize the vapors until we were able to gain access.  We uncovered an artifact that Malevius used to escape.  I removed the focus crystal to allow us to investigate it later without having to worry about any uninvited guests.  Lyndee attempted to recover what she could from his computer systems.  We grabbed what we could and ran before the baron's exploding ship turned the facility into a glowing crater.

We were at a loss.  We weren't able to figure out how to activate the artifact, so the Baron's trail was growing colder by the minute.  We knew roughly the radius he could have teleported out to, but unfortunately a brute force search just isn't feasible for a single man.  We lept back to the Rakata ship, which was no longer there.

There was a massive fight between what looked like three factions.  The only thing certain is that we were the losers.  At this point I fear we've been playing the patsy.  Or if not a patsy, we've been played by all the factions.  There shouldn't have been any way all these people knew where our capital ship was... 

We sent a message to Nebulous to bring him up to date, and retired to neutral territory to plan our next move.  First thing we need to do is sweep for sensors/tracking devices.  I'm going to ask Nebulous if he knows anything about this teleportation device, and whether he can activate it or not.