The Old Republic Series
Author: Sean Williams; Paul S. Kemp; Drew Karpyshyn
Date: 2016-03-15 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Science Fiction
Description: Not just an epic videogame from BioWare and LucasArts, Star Wars: The Old Republic™ spawned a New York Times bestselling series of novels—which are now together in one electrifying ebook bundle. Fatal Alliance, Deceived, Revan, and Annihilation tell four daringly original stories of Jedi and Sith that embody this unique, beloved era in Star Wars Legends storytelling. . . . FATAL ALLIANCE by Sean Williams From across the galaxy they’ve come: a Jedi Padawan, an ex-trooper drummed out of the Republic’s elite Blackstar Squad, and a mysterious Mandalorian. An extraordinary auction has drawn them al
Publisher: Del Rey
Rights: Copyright © 2016 by Sean Williams, Paul S. Kemp, Drew Karphyshyn

Fatal Alliance, Deceived, Revan, and Annihilation are works of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual evants, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

A Del Rey Ebook Omnibus Edition

Fatal Alliance copyright © 2010 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM where indicated.

Deceived copyright © 2011 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM where indicated.

Revan copyright © 2011 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM where indicated.

Annihilation copyright © 2012 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM where indicated.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

DEL REY and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Fatal Alliance, Deceived, Revan, and Annihilation were each published separately by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2010, 2011, 2011, and 2012.

ebook ISBN 9781101968765
randomhousebooks.com
v3.1

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Fatal Alliance
Deceived
Revan
Annihilation

Other Books by These Authors

About the Authors

Excerpt from Star Wars: Scoundrels

Introduction to the Star Wars Expanded Universe

Introduction to the Old Republic Era

Introduction to the Rise of the Empire Era

Excerpt from Star Wars: Death Star

Introduction to the Rebellion Era

Excerpt from Star Wars: Shadow Games

Introduction to the New Republic Era

Excerpt from Star Wars: Scourge

Introduction to the New Jedi Order Era

Excerpt from Star Wars: New Jedi Order: Vector Prime

Introduction to the Legacy Era

Excerpt from Star Wars: Legacy of the Force: Betrayal

Excerpt from Star Wars: Fate of the Jedi: Outcast

Star Wars Legends Novels Timeline

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2010 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-307-79604-2
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v3.1_r2

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Fatal Alliance

Title Page

Copyright

Dramatis Personae

Prologue: Wild Space

Part One: Vested Interests
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Part Two: Hutta
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Part Three: The Chase
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Part Four: Sebaddon
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Five: Fatal Alliance
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Part Six: Preparations for War
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine

Epilogue: Tatooine

Dedication

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Dao Stryver; warrior (Mandalorian male)

Darth Chratis; Sith Lord (human male)

Eldon Ax; Sith apprentice (human female)

Jet Nebula; captain, Auriga Fire (human male)

Larin Moxla; former Republic trooper (Kiffar female)

Satele Shan; Jedi Grand Master (human female)

Shigar Konshi; Jedi Padawan (Kiffar male)

Ula Vii; Imperial agent (Epicanthix male)

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.…

THE LIGHT STAR cruiser looked deceptively insignificant against the backdrop of the galaxy. To the keen eye of a pirate, however, it displayed several desirable qualities: no Imperial or Republic markings; only moderate weaponry and shielding; a crew compartment barely large enough to hold a dozen people; no escort or accompanying vessels.

“It’s your choice, Captain,” hissed a guttural voice into Jet Nebula’s ear. “But don’t take too long about it. Our friend here isn’t going to sit still forever.”

The smuggler calling himself “Jet Nebula” enjoyed keeping his first mate on tenterhooks. He harbored no ill feelings about the mutiny in and of itself. The moment the Auriga Fire stumbled across something really valuable, a takeover attempt had been inevitable. He had hired Shinqo knowing exactly that and lost barely a minute’s sleep since. Dealing with scum was part of the job.

He didn’t like needless violence, though. The snub nose of a blaster digging into Jet’s side was pure overkill.

“Well?” Shinqo prompted him in Rodese as he pretended to dither.

“Keep your shirt on,” Jet said in mock-protest. “We only interdicted them a minute ago. It’s way too soon to plot another jump.”

“Just don’t take any chances,” Shinqo said, emphasizing his point with another jab of the blaster. “And be glad we don’t want your ship, as well.”

Something heavy creaked to Jet’s right. The boxy shape of Clunker swayed into view, dented and dusty, photoreceptors glowing bright. Jet shook his head minutely, and the droid backed out of sight again.

“Don’t make me ask twice,” Shinqo said.

“All right, then.” Jet took the captain’s seat and punched the comm active. “Since you put it so nicely, let’s see who these guys are before we steal the hide off their backs.”

The star cruiser’s running lights blinked and flickered against the black. Its systems were still settling after their sudden wrench from hyperspace, but Jet felt sure the comm was working by now. All ears aboard would be straining to hear what the rugged ship hanging off their bows had to say.

He resorted to short, simple phrases that had served him well enough in the past: “You’re nicked, my beauty. Stand by for boarding.”

“Negative” came the immediate reply. Male, brusque, and human, most likely. “We do not recognize your authority.”

That was a new one. “Who in their right mind would invest any authority in the likes of us?”

“You’re a privateer. You work for the Republic.”

“Now, that simply isn’t true.” Not anymore, anyway, Jet thought. “We’re humble grifters of an independent set, and you happen to have stumbled across our patch. Submit easily, and I’ll see that my bloodthirsty first mate doesn’t blast you all on sight.”

“That won’t happen. We’re on a diplomatic mission.”

“To whom? From where? If I had a credit for every time someone tried that line, you wouldn’t be talking to me now.”

There was a long pause. “All right, then. What will it cost for you to let us go?”

Jet looked at Shinqo, who was calling the shots. Shinqo’s true employers were the Hutts, and sometimes a bribe was worth as much as booty, after the cartels took their cut.

The Rodian shook his head.

“You’re clear out of luck, mate,” Jet told the person on the other end of the comm. “Best vent those air locks, smartish. We’re coming in and don’t want to scuff the merchandise any more than we have to.”

The star cruiser had nothing to say to that.

Shinqo barked into a communicator as Jet brought the sublights into play. “Fekk, Gelss, get ready for action.”

The two Sullustans were part of Shinqo’s treacherous lot, and Jet wouldn’t mind if they paid the price for the mutineers’ haste. Jet had a strong feeling the cruiser wasn’t going to give up lightly. Its lines were too lean, its hull too polished. The name on its starboard side—the only ID it was sporting—said CINZIA in bold black letters, recently affixed. That showed pride.

No, the owners of this ship might not be above offering a bribe to continue on their way, but they wouldn’t roll over easily. Few did, these days. With the Empire and the Republic still at each other’s throats, lacking but a declaration to call their squabbling an honest war, people were taking the law into their own hands. There was so much to lose and so little to gain on every front.

So much for the Treaty of Coruscant. And so much for avoiding unnecessary bloodshed, he thought, reminded of Fekk and Gelss. Be it red or green, blood was all the same. The less spilled around him, the smaller the chance it would be his, one day.

“What are we going to tell our former bosses when we haul in empty?”

“That’s not my problem,” gloated Shinqo. “On flimsi, you’re still captain of the Auriga Fire. It’s your job to come up with an excuse the Republic will believe. I’ll be long gone before then, with the credits.”

True to form, then, the Rodian was planning to stiff Jet at both ends of the deal. That changed everything. Jet glanced at Clunker, who was standing innocently in front of the entrance to the cockpit. No one would get in past him, if push came to shove. More important, no one would get out …

Barely had the Auriga Fire closed half the distance between the two ships when Jet’s misgivings about the cruiser were violently justified. A scattering of red lights danced across the instrument panels; a buzzer harshly sounded. Jet studied the display for a split second, making absolutely certain of what he was seeing, before raising every shield to full and punching the sublights to maximum.

The Auriga Fire rolled edge-on to the cruiser and Shinqo staggered backward. Clunker caught him, deftly twisting the blaster out of the Rodian’s grasp as he did so. At that moment the star cruiser that should have been their prize exploded, sending a blast of pure white light through every viewport, screen, and shield.

Jet had done more than just back the ship away. He had covered his eyes, and now he peered warily through his fingers at instruments gone completely haywire. There was barely anything left where the Cinzia had been. Thuds and clangs registered on the hull as bits of the star cruiser rocketed by.

Shinqo was barking into his communicator again, quick on the uptake, but not quick enough by half. “Who fired? Who ordered you to fire?”

“No one did,” Jet said. “The ship blew itself up—and if I hadn’t caught the neutrino spike from the drives before they went, we’d have been toasted, too.”

Shinqo rounded on him as though he’d planned this all along. “I should shoot you right here.”

“With what, mate?” Jet nodded at Clunker, who pointed the Rodian’s own blaster into his chest. Jet enjoyed the confusion nakedly displayed on his mate’s green, leathery face. “Let’s start this again, shall we? We work for the Hutts now. I get that. One master’s as good as any other, provided the cut’s the same. But we all get equal shares in that cut, right? Or I tell the crew, who will be spoiling for the fight they just missed. They won’t be happy that you were about to rob some of them. And I tell Clunker here, who badly needs another oil bath, to tighten his grip on that trigger and send you after the crew of that ship, whatever dim part of creation they inhabit now. Get it?”

Acceptance replaced anxiety on Shinqo’s face. His hands came up.

“Here, now, Captain, there’s been some kind of misunderstanding.”

“Perhaps you’d like to clarify, then.”

“Sure, sure. You’ll get your share. We all will. I never intended it otherwise.”

“And the Republic?”

“We’ll sort them out—together, like. It wouldn’t be fair to leave it all up to you.”

“I’m relieved to hear that, lad.” Jet nodded at Clunker, who flipped the blaster over and handed it back to its owner. “While I’m captain of this ship, as written on flimsiplast, Barabel hide, or whatever, I expect a certain degree of civility and common purpose. So long as I have that, we’re all going to get along fine.”

He swiveled around to face the instruments, confident that Clunker would stop anything untoward happening behind him. And confident also that the Rodian was smart enough to recognize a compromise when he saw one. Jet didn’t mind who paid him, just like the Hutts didn’t care who handed them their treasure, so long as it was theirs. It all came out in the wash, for those left standing.

“Let’s see what remains of our sorry friend out there …”

The debris field was expanding fast. Sensors tracked the largest chunks, many of which were human-sized or even bigger. That surprised him. A drive blowout usually left only slag and dust.

“That looks like part of the forward section,” said Shinqo, leaning over Jet to point at a screen.

“No life signs.”

“No witnesses,” said the Rodian with satisfaction.

“That’s normally our job,” said Jet, although he had never killed a single person he’d robbed in all his years of pirating—not after he’d robbed them, anyway. Broken a few hearts, sure, and busted a few heads, but nothing worse. “Don’t think they were doing it for us.”

“Why did they do it, then?”

Jet shrugged. “That’s the billion-credit question.”

Shinqo rubbed his chin, making a dry rasping sound with his fingertips. Now that the situation between them was resolved, he had returned to being a proper mate. He had the makings of a good one, when greed didn’t get in the way, otherwise Jet would never have taken him on in the first place. “They had something aboard, something they didn’t want us to get ahold of.”

“Something worth more than their own lives?” Jet turned to meet Shinqo’s slitted eyes. “That sounds pretty valuable to me.”

“Even in pieces, maybe.”

“Exactly what I was thinking.” Jet indicated the copilot’s seat. “Strap yourself in and take control of the tractor beam. Let’s see what we can find.”

The Auriga Fire came about and began scouring the remains of the ship whose journey they had intercepted. A niggling feeling troubled Jet Nebula as he did so. It felt like guilt, and he told himself not to give in to it. He hadn’t killed the crew of the Cinzia. They had pulled that trigger all by themselves. It was just hard luck that their path had crossed his, and his good fortune to be breathing afterward. If his fortune continued to hold, he might yet make a profit from this deep-space run, and then, finally, he could hire a slightly more reputable brand of scum and get back into smuggling again.

Some days were better than others. Maybe this was one of them. He told himself that with all the conviction he could muster, which was plenty for a man in his trade.

What could possibly go wrong?

SHIGAR KONSHI FOLLOWED the sound of blasterfire through Coruscant’s old districts. He never stumbled, never slipped, never lost his way, even through lanes that were narrow and crowded with years of detritus that had settled slowly from the levels above. Cables and signs swayed overhead, hanging so low in places that Shigar was forced to duck beneath them. Tall and slender, with one blue chevron on each cheek, the Jedi apprentice moved with grace and surety surprising for his eighteen years.

At the core of his being, however, he seethed. Master Nikil Nobil’s decision had cut no less deeply for being delivered by hologram from the other side of the galaxy.

“The High Council finds Shigar Konshi unready for Jedi trials.”

The decision had shocked him, but Shigar knew better than to speak. The last thing he wanted to do was convey the shame and resentment he felt in front of the Council.

“Tell him why,” said Grand Master Satele Shan, standing at his side with hands folded firmly before her. She was a full head shorter than Shigar but radiated an indomitable sense of self. Even via holoprojector, she made Master Nobil, an immense Thisspiasian with full ceremonial beard, shift uncomfortably on his tail.

“We—that is, the Council—regard your Padawan’s training as incomplete.”

Shigar flushed. “In what way, Master Nobil?”

His Master silenced him with a gentle but irresistible telepathic nudge. “He is close to attaining full mastery,” she assured the Council. “I am certain that it is only a matter of time.”

“A Jedi Knight is a Jedi Knight in all respects,” said the distant Master. “There are no exceptions, even for you.”

Master Satele nodded her acceptance of the decision. Shigar bit his tongue. She said she believed in him, so why did she not overrule the decision? She didn’t have to submit to the Council. If he weren’t her Padawan, would she have spoken up for him then?

His unsettled feelings were not hidden as well as he would have liked.

“Your lack of self-control reveals itself in many ways,” said Master Nobil to him in a stern tone. “Take your recent comments to Senator Vuub regarding the policies of the Resource Management Council. We may all agree that the Republic’s handling of the current crisis is less than perfect, but anything short of the utmost political discipline is unforgivable at this time. Do you understand?”

Shigar bowed his head. He should’ve known that the slippery Neimoidian was after more than just his opinion when she’d sidled up to him and flattered him with praise. When the Empire had invaded Coruscant, it had only handed the world back to the Republic in exchange for a large number of territorial concessions elsewhere. Ever since then, supply lines had been strained. That Shigar was right, and the RMC a hopelessly corrupt mess, putting the lives of billions at risk from something much worse than war—starvation, disease, disillusionment—simply didn’t count in some circles.

Master Nobil’s forbidding visage softened. “You are naturally disappointed. I understand. Know that the Grand Master has spoken strongly in favor of you for a long time. In all respects but this one do we defer to her judgment. She cannot sway our combined decision, but she has drawn our attention. We will be watching your progress closely, with high expectations.”

The holoconference had ended there, and Shigar felt the same conflicted emptiness in the depths of Coruscant as he had then. Unready? High expectations? The Council was playing a game with him—or so it felt—batting him backward and forward like a felinx in a cage. Would he ever be free to follow his own path?

Master Satele understood his feelings better than he did. “Go for a walk,” she had told him, putting a hand on each shoulder and holding his gaze long enough to make sure he understood her intentions. She was giving him an opportunity to cool down, not dismissing him. “I need to talk to Supreme Commander Stantorrs anyway. Let’s meet later in Union Cloisters.”

“Yes, Master.”

And so he was walking and stewing. Somewhere inside him, he knew, had to be the strength to rise above this temporary setback, the discipline to bring the last threads of his talent into a unified design. But on this occasion, his instincts were leading him away from stillness, not toward it.

The sound of blasterfire grew louder ahead of him.

Shigar stopped in an alley that stank like a woodoo’s leavings. A swinging light flashed fitfully on and off in the level above, casting rubbish and rot in unwanted relief. An ancient droid watched with blinking red eyes from a filthy niche, rusted fingers protectively gathering wires and servos back into its gaping chest plate. The cold war with the Empire was being conducted far away from this alley and its unhappy resident, but its effects were keenly felt. If he wanted to be angry at the state of the Republic, he couldn’t have chosen a better place for it.

The shooting intensified. His hand reached for the grip of his lightsaber.

There is no emotion, he told himself. There is only peace.

But how could there be peace without justice? What did the Jedi Council, sitting comfortably in their new Temple on Tython, know about that?

The sound of screams broke him out of his contemplative trance. Between one heartbeat and the next he was gone, the emerald fire of his lightsaber lingering a split instant behind him, brilliant in the gloom.

LARIN MOXLA PAUSED to tighten the belly strap on her armor. The wretched thing kept coming loose, and she didn’t want to take any chances. Until the justicars got there, she was the only thing standing between the Black Sun gangsters and the relatively innocent residents of Gnawer’s Roost. It sounded like half of it had been shot to pieces already.

Satisfied that nothing too vulnerable was exposed, she peered out from cover and hefted her modified snub rifle. Illegal on Coruscant except for elite special forces commandos, it featured a powerful sniper sight, which she trained on the Black Sun safehouse. The main entrance was deserted, and there was no sign of the roof guard. That was unexpected. Still the blasterfire came from within the fortified building. Could it be a trap of some kind?

Wishing as always that she had backup, she lowered the rifle and lifted her helmeted head into full view. No one took a potshot at her. No one even noticed her. The only people she could see were locals running for cover. But for the commotion coming from within, the street could have been completely deserted.

Trap or no trap, she decided to get closer. Rattling slightly, and ignoring the places where her secondhand armor chafed, Larin hustled low and fast from cover to cover until she was just meters from the front entrance. The weapons-fire was deafening now, and screaming came with it. She tried to identify the weapons. Blaster pistols and rifles of several different makes; at least one floor-mounted cannon; two or three vibrosaws; and beneath all that, a different sound. A roaring, as of superheated gases jetting violently through a nozzle.

A flamethrower.

No gang she’d heard of used fire. The risk of a blaze spreading everywhere was too high. Only someone from outside would employ a weapon like that. Only someone who didn’t care what damage he left in his wake.

Something exploded in an upper room, sending a shower of bricks and dust into the street. Larin ducked instinctively, but the wall held. If it had collapsed, she would have been buried under meters of rubble.

Her left hand wanted to count down, and she let it. It felt wrong otherwise. Moving in—in three … two … one …

Silence fell.

She froze. It was as though someone had pulled a switch. One minute, nine kinds of chaos had been unfolding inside the building. Now there was nothing.

She pulled her hand in, countdown forgotten. She wasn’t going anywhere until she knew what had just happened and who was involved.

Something collapsed inside the building. Larin gripped her rifle more tightly. Footsteps crunched toward the entrance. One set of feet: that was all.

She stood up in full view of the entrance, placed herself side-on to reduce the target she made, and trained her rifle on the darkened doorway.

The footsteps came closer—unhurried, confident, heavy. Very heavy.

The moment she saw movement in the doorway, she cried out in a firm voice, “Hold it right there.”

Booted feet assumed a standing position. Armored shins in metallic gray and green.

“Move slowly forward, into the light.”

The owner of the legs took one step, then two, revealing a Mandalorian so tall his helmeted head brushed the top of the doorway.

“That’s far enough.”

“For what?”

Larin maintained her cool in the face of that harsh, inhuman voice, although it was difficult. She’d seen Mandalorians in action before, and she knew how woefully equipped she was to deal with one now. “For you to tell me what you were doing in there.”

The domed head inclined slightly. “I was seeking information.”

“So you’re a bounty hunter?”

“Does it matter what I am?”

“It does when you’re messing up my people.”

“You do not look like a member of the Black Sun syndicate.”

“I never said I was.”

“You haven’t said you aren’t, either.” The massive figure shifted slightly, finding a new balance. “I’m seeking information concerning a woman called Lema Xandret.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Are you certain of that?”

“I thought I was the one asking questions here.”

“You thought wrong.”

The Mandalorian raised one arm to point at her. A hatch in his sleeve opened, revealing the flamethrower she’d heard in action earlier. She steadied her grip and tried desperately to remember where the weak points on Mandalorian armor were—if there were any …

“Don’t,” said a commanding voice to her left.

Larin glanced automatically and saw a young man in robes standing with one hand raised in the universal stop signal.

The sight of him dropped her guard momentarily.

A sheet of powerful flame roared at her. She ducked, and it seared the air bare millimeters over her head.

She let off a round that ricocheted harmlessly from the Mandalorian’s chest plate and rolled for cover. It was hard to say what surprised her more: a Jedi down deep in the bowels of Coruscant, or the fact that he had the facial tattoos of a Kiffu native, just like she did.

SHIGAR TOOK IN THE confrontation with a glance. He’d never fought a Mandalorian before, but he had been carefully instructed in the art by his Master. They were dangerous, very dangerous, and he almost had second thoughts about taking this one on. Even together, he and a single battered-looking soldier would hardly be sufficient.

Then flame arced across the head of the soldier, and his instincts took over. The soldier ducked for cover with admirable speed. Shigar lunged forward, lightsaber raised to slash at the net that inevitably headed his way. The whine of the suit’s jetpack drowned out the angry sizzling of Shigar’s blade as he cut himself free. Before the Mandalorian had gained barely a meter of altitude, Shigar Force-pushed him sideways into the building beside him, thereby crushing off the jet’s exhaust vent.

With a snarl, the Mandalorian landed heavily on both feet and fired two darts in quick succession, both aimed at Shigar’s face. Shigar deflected them and moved closer, dancing lightly on his feet. From a distance, he was at a disadvantage. Mandalorians were masters of ranged weaponry, and would do anything to avoid hand-to-hand combat except in one of their infamous gladiatorial pits. If he could get near enough to strike—with the soldier maintaining a distracting cover fire—he might just get lucky …

A rocket exploded above his head, then another. They weren’t aimed at him, but at the city’s upper levels. Rubble rained down on him, forcing him to protect his head. The Mandalorian took advantage of that slight distraction to dive under his guard and grip him tight about the throat. Shigar’s confusion was complete—but Mandalorians weren’t supposed to fight at close quarters! Then he was literally flying through the air, hurled by his assailant’s vast physical strength into a wall.

He landed on both feet, stunned but recovering quickly, and readied himself for another attack.

The Mandalorian ran three long steps to his right, leaping one-two-three onto piles of rubbish and from there onto a roof. More rockets arced upward, tearing through the ferrocrete columns of a monorail. Slender spears of metal warped and fell toward Shigar and the soldier. Only with the greatest exertion of the Force that Shigar could summon was he able to deflect them into the ground around them, where they stuck fast, quivering.

“He’s getting away!”

The soldier’s cry was followed by another explosion. A grenade hurled behind the escaping Mandalorian destroyed much of the roof in front of him and sent a huge black mushroom rising into the air. Shigar dived cautiously through it, expecting an ambush, but found the area clear on the far side. He turned in a full circle, banishing the smoke with one out-thrust push.

The Mandalorian was gone. Up, down, sideways—there was no way to tell which direction he had chosen to flee. Shigar reached out through the Force. His heart still hammered, but his breathing was steady and shallow. He felt nothing.

The soldier became visible through the smoke just steps away, moving forward in a cautious crouch. She straightened and planted her feet wide apart. The snout of her rifle targeted him, and for a moment Shigar thought she might actually fire.

“I lost him,” he said, unhappily acknowledging their failure.

“Not your fault,” she said, lowering the rifle. “We did our best.”

“Where did he come from?” he asked.

“I thought it was just the usual Black Sun bust-up,” she said, indicating the destroyed building. “Then he walked out.”

“Why did he attack you?”

“Beats me. Maybe he assumed I was a justicar.”

“You’re not one?”

“No. I don’t like their methods. And they’ll be here soon, so you should get out of here before they decide you’re responsible for all this.”

That was good advice, he acknowledged to himself. The bloodthirsty militia controlling the lower levels was a law unto itself, one that didn’t take kindly to incursions on their territory.

“Let’s see what happened here, first,” he said, moving toward the smoke-blackened doorway with lightsaber at the ready.

“Why? It’s not your problem.”

Shigar didn’t answer that. Whatever was going on here, neither of them could just walk away from it. He sensed that she would be relieved not to be heading into the building alone.

Together they explored the smoking, shattered ruins. Weapons and bodies lay next to one another in equal proportions. Clearly, the inhabitants had taken up arms against the interloper, and in turn every one of them had died. That was grisly, but not surprising. Mandalorians didn’t disapprove of illegals per se, but they did take poorly to being shot at.

On the upper floor, Shigar stopped, sensing something living among the carnage. He raised a hand, cautioning the soldier to proceed more slowly, just in case someone thought they were coming to finish the job. She glided smoothly ahead of him, heedless of danger and with her weapon at the ready. He followed soundlessly in her wake, senses tingling.

They found a single survivor huddled behind a shattered crate, a Nawtolan with blaster burns down much of one side and a dart wound to his neck, lying in a pool of his own blood. The blood was spreading fast. He looked up as Shigar bent over him to check his wounds. What Shigar couldn’t tourniquet he could cauterize, but he would have to move fast to have any chance at all.

“Dao Stryver.” The Nautolan’s voice was a guttural growl, not helped by the damage to his throat. “Came out of nowhere.”

“The Mandalorian?” said the soldier. “Is that who you’re talking about?”

The Nautolan nodded. “Dao Stryver. Wanted what we had. Wouldn’t give it to him.”

The soldier took off her helmet. She was surprisingly young, with short dark hair, a strong jaw, and eyes as green as Shigar’s lightsaber. Most startling were the distinctive black markings of Clan Moxla tattooed across her dirty cheeks.

“What did you have, exactly?” she pressed the Nautolan.

The Nautolan’s eyes rolled up into his head. “Cinzia,” he coughed, spraying dark blood across the front of her armor. “Cinzia.”

“And that is …?” she asked, leaning close as his breathing failed. “Hold on—help’s coming—just hold on!”

Shigar leaned back. There was nothing he could do, not without a proper medpac. The Nautolan had said his last.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“You’ve no reason to be,” she said, staring down at her hands. “He was a member of the Black Sun, probably a murderer himself.”

“Does that make him evil? Lack of food might have done that, or medicine for his family, or a thousand other things.”

“Bad choices don’t make bad people. Right. But what else do we have to go on down here? Sometimes you have to make a stand, even if you can’t tell who the bad guys are anymore.”

A desperately fatigued look crossed her face, then, and Shigar thought that he understood her a little better. Justice was important, and so was the way people defended it, even if that meant fighting alone sometimes.

“My name is Shigar,” he said in a calming voice.

“Nice to meet you, Shigar,” she said, brightening. “And thanks. You probably saved my life back there.”

“I can’t take any credit for that. I’m sure he didn’t consider either of us worthy opponents.”

“Or maybe he worked out that we didn’t know anything about what he was looking for in the safehouse. Lema Xandret: that was the name he used on me. Ever heard of it?”

“No. Not Cinzia, either.”

She rose to her feet in one movement and cocked her rifle onto her back. “Larin, by the way.”

Her grip was surprisingly strong. “Our clans were enemies, once,” Shigar said.

“Ancient history is the least of our troubles. We’d better move out before the justicars get here.”

He looked around him, at the Nautolan, the other bodies, and the wrecked building. Dao Stryver. Lema Xandret. Cinzia.

“I’m going to talk to my Master,” he said. “She should know there’s a Mandalorian making trouble on Coruscant.”

“All right,” she said, hefting her helmet. “Lead the way.”

“You’re coming with me?”

“Never trust a Konshi. That’s what my mother always said. And if we’re going to stop a war between Dao Stryver and the Black Sun, we have to do it right. Right?”

He barely caught her smile before it disappeared behind her helmet.

“Right,” he said.

ELDON AX LICKED her wounds all the way to Dromund Kaas.

The damage to her body was most easily treated. Many of the cuts and gashes she left to scar naturally, believing as her Master had taught her that a lesson quickly forgotten is a lesson poorly learned. The rest she treated with the help of the medkit built into her interceptor’s cockpit, avoiding painkillers and anesthetics completely. It wasn’t pain that worried her. That was good for her, too.

The damage done to her confidence would take much longer to heal—not to mention her prospects of advancement. Darth Chratis would see to that. It didn’t matter that her record on solo missions had been perfect up to this one. It didn’t matter how highly she had been awarded by the Sith Academy. All that mattered was success.

The interceptor burst back into realspace and the Empire’s grim-faced capital, Kaas City, hove into view.

“I will kill you, Dao Stryver,” Eldon Ax swore, “or die trying”

THE DEBRIEF WENT as badly as she feared.

“Tell me about your mission,” her Master instructed in clipped tones from his meditation chamber. Ax had been admitted into his presence before his morning rituals were complete, and she knew well how that annoyed him.

She bowed and did as she was instructed. Her Master doled out orders with an unbendable desire to test her willingness to obey. She knew better than to outright defy him, even when she was doing her best to keep her failure from him.

It was during her mission that the Mandalorian had found her. And it was this encounter she did her best to conceal from her Master, inasmuch as that was possible.

“Tell me more,” said Darth Chratis, rising slowly out of his sarcophagus. In order to focus most effectively, he occupied at least one hour a day in a coffin-like shell that allowed no light or air, forcing him to rely solely on his own energies to survive. “You have not sufficiently explained the reasons for your failure.”

She couldn’t read his mood. His face was a mess of deep wrinkles and fissures from which two blood-red eyes peered out at the world. His knife-thin lips were twisted in a perpetual sneer. Occasionally, a tongue so pale it was almost transparent appeared to taste the air.

“I will not lie to you, Master,” she said, kneeling before him. “While infiltrating an enemy cell, my identity was revealed and I was forced to defend myself.”

“Revealed?” The bloodless lips twitched. “I do not sense the foul stink of the Jedi about you.”

“No, Master. I was exposed by another—one whose people were once allies in our war against the Republic.”

That was the gambit she had settled upon, to turn the blame for the incident back on the person who had caused it.

“So.” Darth Chratis stepped free from the confines of his sarcophagus. The soles of his feet made a sound like dry leaves being crushed. “A Mandalorian.”

“Yes, Master.”

“You fought him?”

“Yes, Master.”

“And he defeated you.”

This wasn’t a question, but it demanded a response. “That is true, Master.”

“Yet you are still here. Why is this?”

Darth Chratis stood directly before her now. One withered claw reached down to touch her chin. His fingernails were like ancient crystals, cold and sharp against her skin. He smelled of death.

She looked up into his forbidding visage and saw nothing there but the implacable demand for the truth. “He did not come to fight me,” she said. “This I believe, although it makes no sense. He asked for me by name. He knew what I am. He asked me questions to which I knew no answer.”

“He interrogated you?” That prompted a frown. “The Emperor will be displeased if you revealed any of his secrets.”

“I would rather die a lingering death at your hands, Master.” Her reply was utterly sincere. She had been a Sith in training all her life. The Empire was as much a part of her as her lightsaber. She would not betray it to a pack of prideful mercenaries who worked with the Empire when it suited them.

But how to convey the truth of this to her Master when it was here, on this critical point, that her story fell apart?

“He asked me nothing about the Empire,” Ax told her Master, remembering the scene with grueling clarity. Her assailant had disarmed her and pinned her with a net resistant to all her efforts to escape. A dart had paralyzed her, leaving only the ability to speak. “He did not torture me. I was wounded solely in self-defense.”

She held out her arms to show Darth Chratis the injuries she had sustained.

He regarded them with no sign of approval.

“You are lying,” he said with ready contempt. “You expect me to believe that a Mandalorian hunted down a Sith apprentice, interrogated her, asked her nothing about the Empire, and then left her alive afterward?”

“Were I lying, Master, I would be sure to do so more plausibly.”

“Then you have become unhinged. How else can I explain it?”

Ax lowered her head. There was nothing more she could say.

Darth Chratis paced across the angular narthex in which he conducted his audiences. Displayed on the walls around him were relics of his many victories, including bisected lightsaber hilts and shattered Jedi relics. Absent were the tributes to his many Sith enemies. Although Darth Chratis hadn’t earned the fear and respect of his peers simply by outperforming them, he didn’t boast about those he had forcibly removed from his path. His reputation was enough.

Only one in three apprentices serving under him survived their training. Eldon Ax wondered breathlessly whether the time had come for her to join those who had failed. Her life had been too short—just seventeen years!—but she wouldn’t raise a hand to defend herself, if her Master chose to end it now. There would be no point. He could strike her down as easily as swatting a fly.

Darth Chratis stopped, turned to face her again.

“If this Mandalorian of yours didn’t ask about the Emperor’s plans, what did he ask you?”

At the time, the questions had puzzled her. They still puzzled her now.

“He was looking for a woman,” she said. “He mentioned a ship. The names meant nothing to me.”

“What names, exactly?”

“Lema Xandret. The Cinzia.”

Suddenly her Master was standing over her again. She gasped. He had made no sound at all. The cold, strong grip of the Force was back at her throat, pulling her irresistibly upright until she was standing on tiptoes.

“Say those names again,” he hissed.

She couldn’t wrench her gaze away from his. “L-Lema Xandret. The Cinzia. Do you know what they mean, Master?”

He let her go and turned away. With two swift gestures, the ruin of his body was wrapped from head to feet in a long, winding cape, as black as his soul, and his right hand gripped a long, sharp-pointed staff.

“No more questions,” he said. “Come.”

With long strides, he left the room.

Eldon Ax took a long, shuddering breath, and hurried in the wake of her Master.

THE SORTING AND STORING of Imperial data was a growth industry on Dromund Kaas, albeit one kept carefully hidden from view. Vast inverted skytowers drilled deep into the jungle’s fertile soil, entombing centuries of multiply redundant records tended by tens of thousands of slaves. Extensive compounds spread out around the entrances, maintaining the highest possible security. To one of these compounds Darth Chratis led Eldon Ax.

He offered not a word of explanation throughout the long shuttle flight from Kaas City, and she endured his silence with something like relief. At least he wasn’t berating her. Her mission had become a complete failure. She’d had to practically hack her way to the spaceport and off the planet—but not before running a search through landing records in recent days. There she found a reference to the Mandalorian. He had the temerity to travel under what appeared to be his real name: Dao Stryver.

Once again she renewed the vow to see him humbled as she had been, no matter how long it took. Perhaps death was too good for him. A quick one, anyway.

Darth Chratis commandeered a private data access chamber seventy floors beneath the surface of the world, one equipped with a giant holoprojector, and ordered that the two of them not be interrupted. Ax trailed obediently behind him, increasingly mystified. Not once in her years of training had he shown any interest in this aspect of Imperial rule. Interstellar bookkeepers was his derogatory term for those who preferred service in the data mines to a more direct pursuit of power. She went to sit in the data requisitioner’s place, but he waved her aside.

“Stand there,” he said, pointing at a position directly in front of the screen and taking the seat himself.

With brisk, angular movements, he began inputting the requests. This as much as anything convinced her that events were taking a very strange turn indeed.

Menus and diagrams came and went in the giant screen. Ax found it difficult to follow, but she sensed that her Master was leading her through the vast and convoluted structure that was Imperial records to one location in particular.

“This,” he said, tapping the keyboard with finality, “is the recruitment database.”

A long list of names appeared in the screen, scrolling by too fast to read.

“Every person to enter the Sith Academy is listed here,” he went on. “Their names, origins, bloodlines—and their fates, too, where applicable. The Dark Council uses this data to arrange matches and to anticipate the potential of offspring. The fortunes of numerous families rest on the nature of this data. It is therefore protected, Ax. It is very secure.”

She indicated her understanding, thus far. “I’m in there,” she said.

“Indeed you are, and so am I. Watch what happens when I input Lema Xandret.”

A new window appeared, showing a woman’s face. Round-featured, blond, keen eyes. It meant nothing to Ax. The space below the picture was filled with words highlighted in urgent red. At the bottom of a long list of entries were two bold lines:

Termination ordered.
File incomplete: target absconded.

Ax frowned. “So … she was a traitor? A Republic spy?”

“Worse than that. We keep fewer records on the Jedi than we do on people like this.” Darth Chratis swiveled in the seat to face her. “Tell me, my apprentice, what happens when a Sith is recruited.”

“The child is removed from its family and placed in the Academy. There its life begins anew, in the service of the Emperor and the Dark Council—as mine did.”

“Exactly. It is a great honor for a family when a child is selected, particularly if their bloodline has not been so honored before. Most parents are pleased, as they should be.”

“And those who are not are executed,” she said. “Was Lema Xandret one of them?”

A cadaverous smile briefly enlivened the withered landscape of Darth Chratis’s face. “Exactly. She was something unremarkable—a droid maker, I think. Yes, exactly that. From a long line of unremarkable droid makers, with no trace of Force sensitivity. She produced a child with the potential to be Sith, and so the child had to go.”

Ax’s Master didn’t show amusement often. It disturbed her more than his rage.

“The file says ‘target absconded,’ ” she said.

“First she tried to hide the child—a late bloomer, who she feared would not survive training on Korriban. When that failed and the child was taken anyway, she ran with the rest of the child’s family—uncles, aunts, cousins, anyone at risk from reprisals—and has never been heard of since.”

“Until now.”

“From the mouth of a Mandalorian,” Darth Chratis said, “to your ears.”

“Why me?” she said, sensing that her Master was studying her closely. “Because my family attempted to hide me, too?”

“Perhaps.”

“What I was before I met you is unimportant,” she assured him. “I am untroubled regarding my family’s fate.”

“Indeed. I trained you well.” Again that desiccated smile. “Perhaps too well.” He leaned closer.

“Look here, Ax. Into my eyes.”

She did so, and the red horror of his gaze filled her.

“The block is strong,” he said, and it was as though the words came from inside her head. “It’s standing between you and the truth. I release it. I release you, Ax. You are free to know the truth about your past.”

She staggered back as though struck, but no physical force had touched her. A silent detonation had gone off in her mind, a depth charge deep below her conscious self. Something stirred there. Something strange and unsuspected.

Ax looked up at the picture in the holoprojector.

Lema Xandret stared back at her with empty eyes.

“She was your mother, Ax,” her Master said. “Does that answer your question?”

Numbly, Ax supposed it did. But at the same time it posed many more.

DARTH CHRATIS USED the chamber’s holoprojector to conduct a secure audience with the Minister of Intelligence. Ax had never met the minister before, nor seen him in any kind of communication, but the immense trust her Master showed by allowing her to remain in the room was utterly lost on her. Her head still rang from the liberation from her Master’s conditioning. Not because of what it revealed, but because of what little difference it made to her.

Her family’s lack of Force sensitivity had been the one thing of which she was certain about her life before becoming a Sith. She had assumed that her family had been killed, but that had never bothered her. She had certainly never worried about it, and it wouldn’t have bothered her now but for one thing.

The block was removed. Memories should have come flooding back about Lema Xandret and her early life.

But there was nothing. Block or no block, there was nothing left. Lema Xandret remained a complete stranger.

With half a mind, she attended to the conversation her Master was having with the minister.

“That’s why the Mandalorian sought to interrogate the girl. She’s a potential lead.”

“A lead to Xandret?”

“What other conclusion can we come to? She must be alive—in the same bolt-hole she fled down in order to evade execution, I presume.”

“What would the Mandalorians want with her?”

“I don’t know, and the fact that we don’t know makes it vital that we find her first.”

“As a matter of principle, Darth Chratis, or Imperial security?”

“The two are often inseparable, Minister, I think you’ll find.”

The man on the screen looked uncomfortable. His was the highest rank any mundane person could attain in the Empire’s intelligence arm, yet to a Sith Lord he was considered fundamentally inferior. Disinclined he might be to acknowledge that a single missing droid maker warranted his attention, even one who tried to hide a Force-sensitive child from the Sith, but to disobey was inconceivable.

Then a thought struck him, and the conflicted look on his face eased.

“I wonder,” he mused, tapping his chin with one long digit. “Just yesterday, a report arrived from our informer in the Republic Senate. The Hutts claim to have gotten their hands on something valuable, and they think the Senate would like to bid for it. Against us. I searched diplomatic dispatches and learned that we’ve received exactly the same offer, but couched in the opposite terms, of course. Ordinarily I would dismiss such an approach as unworthy of attention, but the fact that it came from two widely different sources does lend it some credence. And now this.”

“I fail to see how the Hutts are connected. They are compulsive liars.”

“Undoubtedly. But you see, Darth Chratis, this is where it gets interesting. The ship from which the Hutts claim to have retrieved this mysterious, ah, artifact, data, what have you—that ship is called the Cinzia. And I note in the file you accessed that this is the girl’s birth name.”

Darth Chratis nodded. “There must be a connection.”

“That the ship was named after Lema Xandret’s daughter and a Mandalorian is asking after both of them? I think so.”

“But it helps us very little without knowing what the Hutts are auctioning.”

That took some of the triumph out of the minister’s expression. “I will pursue that information immediately, Darth Chratis.”

“I trust you will, Minister, as a matter of principle.”

The long-distance audience ended with a shower of static.

It took Eldon Ax almost a minute to realize. Disconnected phrases filled her head like birds, looking for somewhere to roost.

… a potential lead …

… named after Lema Xandret’s daughter …

… the girl’s birth name …

It occurred to her only then that the name she thought of as hers was nothing but a version of her mother’s initials.

What have you been doing these last fifteen years, Mother?

“Tell me what you remember, Ax.”

“I don’t want to remember, Master.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s nothing to do with who I am now. So what if Lema Xandret was my mother? If I met her tomorrow, I probably wouldn’t recognize her. I’ve never known her, never needed her.”

“Well, you need her now, Ax—or at least, you need her memories.” Her Master came so close, she could feel the deathly cold of his breath. “It appears that knowledge of Lema Xandret and her missing droid makers is important to the Mandalorians. That means it’s important to the Empire, too, for what strengthens another weakens us. Anything you can remember about your mother’s whereabouts might be crucial. I therefore suggest you try harder. To reward you, I will put the block back in place afterward, so the memories will disappear again, like they never existed.”

“All right, Master,” she said, although her head hurt at the thought. What if nothing came? What if something did? “I’ll try.”

“You’ll do better than try,” Darth Chratis told her with chilling finality. “In ten standard hours I expect to be standing before the Dark Council with you beside me. If you let me down, both of us will suffer.”

ON A GOOD DAY, Ula Vii didn’t talk to anyone. He just listened. That was what he was good at. In his time off, he would sit in his quarters and replay the week’s recordings, scanning whole conversations for anything important. Important things were happening all the time on Coruscant, of course, but isolating items of greatest significance was a critical part of his job, and he liked to think that he was very good at it. Ula was an Imperial informer in the Republic Senate. He bore that responsibility with pride.

On a bad day, he was thrust out of the shadows and into the light: the trouble with playing a part was that sometimes Ula had to actually play it. As a senior assistant to Supreme Commander Stantorrs, Ula was often called upon to take notes, conduct research, and offer advice. All of this placed him in a unique position to assist the Empire in its mission to retake the galaxy, but at the same time he was forced to perform two demanding jobs at once. On bad days, his head ached so much that it felt like it would crack open, spilling all his secrets out onto the floor.

The day he heard about the Cinzia was a very bad day indeed.

The Supreme Commander had had a busy morning: countless visitors, endless supplicants, the eternal buzzing of his comlink. Ula didn’t know how he stood it. Then came the request from Grand Master Satele Shan for an audience, throwing the Supreme Commander’s schedule completely out of whack.

“Can’t you put her off?” Stantorrs asked his secretary, with a look that signaled annoyance. The longer Ula occupied his role, the better he was getting at understanding the expressions of aliens, even noseless, moon-faced Duros like this one. “She was here only an hour ago.”

“She says it’s important.”

“All right, all right. Send her in.”

Ula had never formally met the Jedi Grand Master before. He regarded the Jedi with suspicion and dislike, and not just because they were the Emperor’s enemy.

She strode into the palatial office and offered the Supreme Commander a bow of respect. With a finely boned face and gray-streaked hair, she was not a tall woman, but the position she occupied in the Republic hierarchy was considerable.

Stantorrs stood and offered a nod that seemed much slighter in comparison with hers. Like Ula, he didn’t approve of Jedi, but his reasons had nothing to do with philosophy. Many in the Republic placed the blame for the Empire’s ascendance firmly on the Jedi Council’s collective shoulders. The Treaty of Coruscant had wrenched the galactic capital out of the Emperor’s control once more, but only at great cost to the Republic and its allies, and at terrible loss of face. The Council’s retreat to Tython hadn’t helped.

“How can I help you, Master Shan?” he asked in gruff Basic.

“I’ve received a report from my Padawan of a possible bounty hunter loose in the old district,” she said in measured tones. “Running riot among the criminal classes, apparently.”

“That’s a minor issue. Why bring it to me?”

“Your brief is restoring security on Coruscant. Furthermore, the bounty hunter is a Mandalorian.”

Ula didn’t need to read minds to know what Stantorrs was thinking now. A Mandalorian blockade of the Hydian Way trade route in the last decades of the Great War had crippled the Republic and very nearly led to its ruin. Since his defeat, Mandalore had lost many of his raiders to the gladiatorial pit fights on Geonosis, but Ula wasn’t the only person on Coruscant who knew that Imperial operatives had been behind the anti-Republic action, and that he was still looking for a fight. If he was considering making a move on Coruscant itself, it had to be addressed immediately.

“What can you tell me about him?”

“His name is Dao Stryver. He’s looking for information regarding a woman, Lema Xandret, and something called Cinzia.”

Ula’s ears pricked up at the latter name. He had heard that recently. Where, exactly?

The Supreme Commander was performing the same mental search. “A report,” he mused, drumming his long fingers on the desk. “Something from SIS, I’m sure. Perhaps you should ask them about it.”

A hint of Grand Master Satele Shan’s true authority appeared in her voice. “I am to contact Tython immediately regarding our earlier discussions. General Garza impressed upon me the urgency and secrecy of the matter. I cannot afford to be delayed any further.”

Stantorrs’s waxy skin turned a deep purple. He didn’t like the Republic’s own policies being used against him. Ula hoped for a momentary loss of control, that something might slip about the nature of those earlier meetings. Try as he might, he could learn nothing about them, although he was certain they were of grave importance to his Masters on Dromund Kaas.

Unfortunately Stantorrs’s self-control was a match for his temper.

“I haven’t got time to investigate every minor disruption,” the Supreme Commander fumed. “Ula! Look into it, will you?”

Ula jumped at the mention of his name. “Sir?”

“Follow up this incident for Master Shan. Report to both of us when you find something. If you find something.”

The last was directed at the Grand Master with a generous amount of ill feeling.

“Of course, sir,” said Ula, hoping that the concession was simply a ruse to get the Grand Master off Stantorrs’s back.

“Thank you, Ula, Supreme Commander. I’m most grateful.”

With that, Satele Shan swept from the room, watched resentfully by Stantorrs and his staff. Every department in the Republic was overstretched and understaffed. The last thing anyone wanted was the Jedi sticking their noses in, finding fault, and handing over more work.

Ula’s job wasn’t to sow dissent, but sometimes he wished it was. Dissent practically sowed itself on cursed Coruscant, where the sky was the same heavy gray as its pedwalks and the pockmarks of war still scarred its artificial face.

The Supreme Commander resumed his seat with a heavy sigh. “All right, Ula. You’d better get started.”

“But sir,” Ula said, “surely you don’t—I mean, I thought—”

“No, we’d better do exactly as I said, just in case it does turn out to be important. No sweeping anything aside when Mandalorians are involved. If that rabble of troublemakers is helping the Empire make another move on Coruscant, we need to know about it. But don’t spend too much time on it, eh? The rest of the galaxy won’t wait.”

Ula inclined his head in frustrated obedience. He was dismayed that the Grand Master’s minor request was removing him from the Supreme Commander’s presence. How was he going to gather the intelligence he needed now? This pointless quest could cost him valuable data.

There was no use arguing, and perhaps some benefit to complying, too. Mandalorians weren’t any kind of rabble: their vast numbers of individual clans, each available for hire to the highest bidder, added up to a potent fighting force capable of shifting the balance of power in a major battle, as the Republic had already learned to its cost. The Empire had given the Mandalorians the means of returning to the galaxy and gaining revenge on their enemies, but there was no loyalty lingering between the two sides. With the signing of the Treaty of Coruscant, Emperor and Mandalore had gone their separate ways.

It was worth pursuing this lead, he told himself, even if an hour or two’s research proved that someone had been chasing at shadows and business returned to usual afterward.

It would be out of character, too, to do otherwise. Ula Vii, the amenable functionary, always did as he was told. That was how he had gained such intimate access to the Supreme Commander’s affairs. With a brisk bow, he smoothed the already impeccable front of his uniform as he left the office and headed for the headquarters of his opposite number in the Republic.

STRATEGIC INFORMATION SYSTEMS didn’t advertise its offices in the Heorem Complex, but anyone with any seniority in the administration knew where they were. Ula had had reason to visit only once before, while covering for a Cipher Agent, and he’d made a point of avoiding it ever since. The company of other intelligence operatives bothered him, no matter whose side they were on. They were all of the same breed, more or less: observant, quick thinking, used to seeing—or imagining—deception all around them. Creatures of few words, they gave little away, and their eyes were as pointed as the needles of an interrogator droid.

Ula masked his nervousness behind a façade of calm as he entered the spacious, cultured atrium. The secretary smiled warmly at him.

“Can I help you, sir?”

“Ula Vii, adviser to Supreme Commander Stantorrs.”

His voiceprint was checked, naturally, but unobtrusively. The secretary waved him through. He was met in a conference room by an unreadable Ithorian, possibly female, dressed in simple, black robes bearing no name tags or insignia.

“You’re an Epicanthix,” she said bluntly, from both of her mouths.

As conversation starters, it was a disconcerting one. Most people failed to notice that he wasn’t fully human. He refused to give her the advantage.

“Supreme Commander Stantorrs requests information,” he said.

“Why doesn’t he follow the usual channels?”

“We need an answer quickly,” he said, thinking: So I can get back to my real job. Both of them.

“Ask,” she said.

He gave her the Mandalorian’s name, and the other names associated with the case.

The Ithorian produced a datapad from beneath her robes and tapped at it with one long, slender finger. Apart from that digit, no part of her body moved. Ula waited with no outward sign of impatience, wondering how the creature breathed.

“A ship registered to a Dao Stryver landed on Coruscant two standard days ago,” she finally said. “It left an hour ago.”

“What was the name and class of the ship?”

“First Blood, a modified Kuat D-Seven.”

“Destination?”

“Unknown.”

“Tell me about Lema Xandret.”

“We have no record of that name.”

“Nothing at all?”

“Once,” she said, “information flowed freely across the galaxy, ebbing and flowing as readily as light itself. We prided ourselves on the ease with which we knew all things. Then the Empire came, casting a shadow across the Republic, and the constant shine of knowledge was shattered. Much we would know now comes sluggishly, and in incomplete forms. Our task is as much to reconstruct as to gather.”

“That’s a no, then,” said Ula testily. He was very aware of the state of information in the galaxy, and he didn’t like the Empire being blamed for it. From his point of view, the Republic had never gotten it right, and only the establishment of Imperial rule would enable the right and correct flow of data to everyone.

He wasn’t getting very far with the alien, but he had one question left.

“What about the third name: Cinzia?”

“We have three appearances: two from the Senate and one from an allied spy network. Both point to the same source.”

More spies, Ula thought with distaste. He hated that word. “Who are the Senators?”

“Bimmisaari in the Halla sector and Sneeve in the Kastolar sector.”

“Can you tell me their source?”

“Readily. There are no security warnings attached to this subject.” The Ithorian tapped again. “Both Senators and the spy network report on an unusual auction in Hutt space. Tenders have been called for.”

“Where does the name Cinzia fit in?”

“It appears to be a vessel of some kind.”

“Anything else?”

“Speculation varies among the three parties. I can offer you no hard facts.”

Ula thought quickly to himself. So Dao Stryver was real, and the Cinzia, too. But what was one doing on Coruscant while the other was in Hutt space? How did the greed of a species of malignant criminals connect them?

“Thank you,” he said. “You’ve been some help to us.”

The Ithorian walked him back to the atrium and left him there. The secretary waved cheerfully as he left. A film of sweat covered Ula from head to foot. It could have gone much worse, he told himself, if they had only known what he really was …

Ula had a contact in the office of the Senator from Bimmisaarian. He made an appointment by comlink as he walked. With luck, he hoped, this whole thing could be wrapped up before day’s end and life would return to normal.

“OH, I KNOW exactly what you’re talking about,” breezed Hun et L’Beck over a pot of traditional ale. He had insisted on meeting for lunch, and Ula had found it impossible to talk him out of it. Ula didn’t like eating in public. It was one of the things he preferred to keep to himself, without worrying about what other people thought.

“Go on, then,” he said, moving scraps of yot bean fry-up around his plate. “Tell me everything.”

L’Beck had finished eating long ago and was on to his second pot. That made him even more loquacious than normal, which wasn’t a bad thing. Ula needed him to talk.

“The Senator’s offices on Bimmisaari received a communiqué from Tassaa Bareesh seven days ago. Do you know who she is?”

“A member of the Bareesh Cartel, I presume.”

“Only the head, the matriarch. She has close ties to the Empire, so we keep an eye on her as best we can. There’s nothing we can do about the smuggling, but open slavery is something we try to crack down on.”

Ula nodded. Bimmisaari’s home sector butted directly on Hutt space, so the behavior of the cartels could have a hugely destabilizing effect on the local economy. “Go on.”

“The communiqué was a pitch, really, and a fairly unsubtle one at that. Bareesh was attempting to interest us in something one of her pirates had found in the Outer Rim. Information, apparently, and an unspecified artifact. She didn’t say where they had come from, exactly; way out past Rinn was the only hint she dropped. We didn’t pay it much heed at first, naturally.”

“Why ‘naturally’?”

“Well, we receive dozens of offers from the Hutts every day. Most are scams. Some are traps. All are full of lies. Not so different from what we receive from the Resource Management Council, but at least that’s supposed to be on our side.” L’Beck toasted his own cynical witticism and ordered another drink.

“So you ignored the communiqué,” Ula prompted.

“And that normally would have been the end of it. Except another one arrived, and then another, each adding a little to the story until eventually we had to pay attention. It was quite a clever campaign, actually. We wouldn’t have accepted it if it had arrived all at once, but doled out bit by bit, letting each piece of the puzzle fall into place before offering us the next one, eventually it was enough to get even the Senator himself interested.”

“In what, exactly?”

“The Hutts found a ship. The Cinzia. There was something inside it, apparently, an artifact they’re trying to sell, but that’s not the most important thing. What really makes this interesting is where the ship came from.”

Ula was getting tired of playing games. “Just tell me, will you?”

“I can’t. That information is what the Hutts are selling.” L’Beck leaned forward. “We’ve been trying to generate interest in the Senate. Support is spreading for an official response, but not fast enough. The auction is in a few days’ time, and I’m afraid we’ll miss out.” L’Beck’s voice lowered until it was barely audible over the background noise. “How would you like to be the one to hand the Republic a previously unknown, resource-rich world, ripe for the picking?”

Ula kept his expression neutral. So that was what the fuss was about. New worlds weren’t especially hard to come by, but anything steeped in minerals or biosphere was fiercely contested between the Empire and the Republic. If the Hutts had stumbled across the location of one such world, there was indeed a real chance to profit from the knowledge.

“Are you sure it’s real, not another scam?” he asked L’Beck.

“As sure as we can be,” L’Beck said lightly, taking his third pot from the waiter and knocking back a hefty swallow. “Supreme Chancellor Janarus would authorize a bidding party from Bimmisaari, I’m sure, if we could only get word to him. Do you think you can help?”

And there it was, the appeal for assistance in shoring up local politics. Halla sector wanted not only to be the ones who brought a new world to the Republic’s attention, but access to the Chancellor’s coffers as well. A small percentage would be skimmed off the top to cover administration expenses, no doubt—providing more ale for the likes of Hunet L’Beck and his ilk. Thus the Republic doomed itself, and all it purported to represent.

Ula suppressed his ideological revulsion. “I’ll bring it to Supreme Commander Stantorrs’s attention,” he said. And that was the truth. He had no choice now. If he returned with nothing, and two days later the information did reach the Supreme Chancellor’s ears from another source—well, it wouldn’t pay to be diminished in Stantorrs’s eyes. Maintaining that contact was paramount.

But that wouldn’t stop him from spreading the information elsewhere first.

“I owe you,” said L’Beck as Ula paid the bill and took his leave. That was the best way to leave an informant: in one’s debt. Ula’s coffers, like the Republic’s, weren’t limitless, but they contained enough credits to grease the path to Imperial domination, just a little.

MANY MEANS EXISTED of getting secret transmissions off Coruscant. One could stash an antenna on a little-used building and broadcast when official satellites were out of range. One could pay a lowlife to take a recording to orbit, there to send the message farther by more ordinary means. One could employ a code of such baroque complexity that the transmission resembled layers of noise upon noise, with no significant features.

Ula believed that the best way to arouse suspicion was to go too far out of his way to avoid it. So his preferred method of contacting his superiors was to place a call to Panatha, the planet of his birth, leave a message for his mother, and wait for the reply to come to him. That way, the burden of guilt was shifted elsewhere. It was much easier to brush off receiving an illicit communication, one possibly misplaced, than the accusation of making one.

After notifying the Supreme Commander that he was hot on the case, he went immediately to his austere quarters and sent two signals. Ula lived in Manarai Heights, near his work in the Senate District while at the same time close enough to the Eastport Docking Facility to make a quick getaway if he needed to. He had stashes of documents, credits, and weapons in several locations between home and the spaceport. He also had a secondary apartment, little more than a closet, really, in case he needed somewhere to hide for a while. He wasn’t one for taking chances. The illusion of innocence he had wrapped around himself could be all too easily dispelled. He had seen it happen before. One mistake was all it took …

The bleep of his comlink broke him out of the nervous reverie in which he had spent the last hour. The call was on its way, in response to the first of his signals. He readied himself by straightening his uniform for the dozenth time and taking position in front of his holoprojector. This was the part of his job he liked the least.

A ghostly image appeared before him, flickering blue with static. There was little more than a hint of a face, and the voice was both genderless and species-less. Ula had no idea whom he spoke to on distant Dromund Kaas.

“Report,” said Watcher Three.

Ula summed up everything he had learned in as few words as possible: A ship from an unaffiliated resource-rich world in the Outer Rim had been captured by the Hutts, who were offering information about it to the highest bidder. That same ship was the object of a search by a Mandalorian, Dao Stryver. Another name, Lema Xandret, was implicated. The origins of the ship were unknown, as was its cargo, the mysterious object L’Beck had alluded to. Both were up for auction.

When he finished, the noisy line crackled and fizzed for almost half a minute before Watcher Three responded.

“Very good. This is a matter of concern to the minister. Maintain a close watch and report all developments.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dismissed.”

The transmission ended, and Ula sagged with relief. For all he knew, Watcher Three was a perfectly ordinary person, just another functionary like him, but there was something about that hollow voice that made him feel utterly unworthy. Bad enough that he wasn’t fully human, but worse even than that. He felt dirty, unclean, vile, for no reason at all.

Watcher Three made him feel like he did when he talked to a Sith.

His comlink buzzed again. He prepared himself again, with very different reasons to feel nervous. Whereas the last call had come through perfectly official channels from the Ministry of Intelligence, this one had a very different purpose, and bore risks of its own.

This time, when the holoprojector stirred, it revealed a perfectly clear image of a woman who still struck Ula as looking entirely too young for the role she played in Imperial administration.

“Hello, Ula. How nice to hear from you again. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Ula swallowed. Shullis Khamarr’s smile seemed perfectly sincere, and Ula had no reason to believe it otherwise. The current Minister of Logistics was the same age as he and shared his passionate belief that the Empire was a civilizing force to be reckoned with. They had discussed this subject at length during a shuttle flight from Dromund Kaas, the one time he had visited the Imperial capital world. He had been attending a briefing for members who hadn’t qualified to be Cipher Agents but were still considered useful to the intelligence arm; she was on her way to be promoted to lieutenant. Since then, her rise had been meteoric, while he remained essentially nowhere.

“I have something for you,” he told her. “A world ripe for annexation, discovered by the Hutts.”

“I’ve heard something about this already,” she said. “No one knows where it is, and we won’t until we pay up. Do you have anything to add, Ula?”

He deflated slightly. So he wasn’t the first to make a report. “Not yet, Minister. But I’m well placed to follow it up and hope to learn more soon.”

“That would be to the benefit of us all, Ula,” she said with another smile. “Why did you call me about it?”

“Because it’s the opportunity we’ve been waiting for,” he said, feeling his pulse thudding in his neck. This was as dangerous a territory now as it had ever been. “We don’t need fanatics to rule a galaxy. We just need proper governance and administration. Rules, laws, discipline. When you see those lunatics wreaking havoc on the worlds out here—Jedi and Sith alike—I have to ask what benefit they bring.” He used her own word deliberately. “There wouldn’t be a war at all without them stirring things up.”

“I remember this, Ula,” she said with patience that cut through him like a lightsaber. “I understand your views, but there’s nothing I can do—”

“All we need is just one world, a strong world capable of defending itself, on which the Imperial citizens could thrive without fear or oppression.”

“The world you’ve heard of belongs rightfully to the Emperor. I cannot claim it for myself.”

“But you’re the Minister of Logistics now! The entire Imperial bureaucracy is yours.”

She rebuffed him gently, as she always did. “It is the Emperor’s, as it should be. I am his instrument, and I would not betray his trust.”

“I would never ask you to do that.”

“I know, Ula. You are as loyal as I am, and you mean well, but I fear that what you ask is impossible.”

He took pains never to push their friendship too far, but he was unable to hide his disappointment. “What will it take to change your mind, Minister?”

“When you have the location of the world, talk to me again.”

He knew all too well that betraying the Republic while at the same time trying to convince a senior minister to increase the influence of ordinary people in their relations with the Sith ruling class could bring his entire world to ruin.

“Thank you, Minister,” he said. “You are kind to indulge me.”

“It’s neither kindness, Ula, nor an indulgence. You may call me anytime.”

She ended the transmission, and this time Ula didn’t sag. He already felt fully deflated, insignificant—even if Watcher Three did describe his mission of being one of significance to the Emperor himself. He felt like a grain of sand buffeted by powerful ocean currents. No matter which shore he landed upon, the waves pounded him harder than ever.

Maintain a close watch and report all developments.

That he could do. Exhausted from his day of talking, he filed a written report for Supreme Commander Stantorrs. Then he undressed and lay on his hard bed and waited for dawn.

LARIN MOXLA STOOD in the Senate Gardens, on a busy thoroughfare lined with benches. It was early evening, and the sky was full of lights. She felt uncomfortably exposed, and was struck by how used she’d become to the old districts. Only a few months had passed since she’d been drummed out of Blackstar Squad, and already the hazy sky of the upper levels looked too large, the people too refined, the droids too clean, and the buildings too new. Give her a year, she thought, and she’d be completely at one with the dregs of society.

Her feeling of alienation was only confirmed when a quartet of Senate Security officers strode by, three men—Twi’lek, Zabrak, and human—and a stocky Nikto woman. The SSOs caught sight of her and approached.

“Are you lost?” rumbled the Twi’lek. “You look like you’ve been pulled backward through a Sarlacc.”

“Twice,” the Nikto woman chittered, not unkindly.

Larin wanted to walk away. They were speaking to her soldier-to-soldier, using familiar, bantering tones, but her heart wasn’t in it.

“Thanks, guys,” she said. “I’m okay, and I won’t be here long.” She was waiting for Shigar to return from talking to Satele Shan, and this was where she had said they should meet.

“No worries,” said the human with a wink. “Just try not to frighten anyone.”

“Wait,” said the Zabrak, peering at her. “Do I know you?”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“Yeah, I do,” he said. “You’re Toxic Moxla, the Kiffar who snitched on Sergeant Donbar.”

Larin felt the blood rising to her head. “That’s none of your business.”

“Oh, yeah? I’ve got a cousin in Special Forces who’d disagree,” said the Zabrak, right into her face.

She held his stare, fighting the urge to retreat, or to head-butt him—one swift, solid lunge that might cut her forehead to the bone on his horns, but would certainly lay him out cold.

But then she’d have a probable affray charge to wear afterward. The gardens were full of witnesses, fine, upstanding witnesses who didn’t sleep in an abandoned warehouse and hand-weld their clothes from castoff scrap.

“Easy, Ses,” said the Twi’lek to the Zabrak. “You’ve had one too many fizzbrews over lunch again.”

“When did you hear from your cousin, anyway?” added the Nikto woman, taking his arm and guiding him firmly away. “Last I heard, he owed you money.”

The human cast Larin an apologetic look as the trio led their drunk friend away, but not before he could call over his shoulder, “Crawl back into your hole, Toxic Moxla. We don’t want your kind up here!”

Larin watched the Zabrak go with her face burning hot. How did such a lout ever get into the SSO, let alone know someone in Special Forces? It didn’t seem possible.

But mixed with her outrage was a feeling of deep shame. Yes, she had snitched on her commanding officer. Yes, she was playacting at being a soldier in a poorly made costume. But neither came lightly to her. She had her reasons.

Larin turned to face the distant Jedi Temple. Abandoned in ruins and sealed off ever since the sacking of Coruscant, it was an ominous, shadowy presence against the lights of the skylanes and skyscrapers. Like fate, ever-present.

SHIGAR WAITED FOR five minutes before his Master appeared as though out of nowhere, right by his side. He never heard her coming, but had learned at least not to be as startled as in the early days of his apprenticeship. That, he assumed, was the heart of this particular lesson: some things could never be anticipated, but he could control the way he reacted to them.

They stood together for a moment in the empty cloisters, staring up at the looming, silver cylinder that was the Galactic Justice Center. Its lights burned brightly, and never flickered once.

“You’ve put something in motion, Shigar,” she said.

“Do you see this in the future, Master?” The foresight of Grand Master Satele Shan was legendary, and never wrong.

She shook her head. “Not this time. I received this a moment ago from Supreme Commander Stantorrs.”

She passed Shigar a datapad, and he read the packet of information displayed there twice. It contained everything uncovered about Dao Stryver, Lema Xandret, and the Cinzia in the previous hours. Someone had been busy, he thought.

“The Hutts certainly recognize an opportunity when they see one,” he said, wrapping the new data around everything he had already gleaned about the Mandalorian, the Black Sun, and the attack on Larin Moxla.

“The Cinzia gives Tassaa Bareesh two plays for the price of one,” his Master said. “To the administrations of the Republic and the Empire, the primary concern is the ship’s origin. Where it came from matters much more than its purpose or what it contained. We all know that the Republic is desperate for resources, and any new world will aid its cause. It goes without saying that Supreme Commander Stantorrs will pursue this matter further, on that ground alone.

“From the point of view of the Jedi Council, however, the situation is precisely reversed. The Hutts are auctioning more than just information: there’s the cargo of the ship to consider, too. The object they’re selling presumably has some recognizable value, but as yet we do not know what it is. It could be anything. We can’t ignore the possibility that they have stumbled upon something critical to the Jedi Order—an artifact, perhaps, or a weapon. Many are spoken of in ancient records but are yet unaccounted for; just one might make a difference in the war against the Emperor.”

“It could be a Sith artifact,” he said, knowing full well that the forces of the enemy had their own arsenals, as ancient as the Jedi Order’s.

“That’s also a possibility. We must, therefore, do everything in our power to ensure that this thing the Hutts have—whatever it is—does not fall into the wrong hands.”

“It’s already in the wrong hands,” he said.

“That’s true, but Tassaa Bareesh only recognizes one side: her own. I have no fears of her using this find directly against us. Still, we need to know more about it, and soon. That’s where you come in, Shigar.”

Shigar studied his Master’s face. He had felt that the conversation was more than idle chat, but he hadn’t expected an active role in the situation.

“I will do anything you wish, Master.”

“You will go to the court of Tassaa Bareesh and uncover everything you can about the Cinzia and its contents. You’re to travel incognito in order to minimize our apparent interest in the sale. You will report what you find to me directly, and I will decide what to do with that information. You will leave this evening.”

Her voice was brisk and matter-of-fact, belying the significance of her words. This was a major assignment, cutting through the thick of a complex political knot. Were he to fail, it would reflect badly on the Jedi Order, and perhaps hinder the entire war effort. The responsibility was considerable.

Coming so soon after his disappointment of that morning, however, it was impossible to silence a nagging, doubtful voice.

“Are you sure I’m the right choice?” he asked, dragging the words out as though they were made of lead. “After all, the Council believes me unfit for the trials. There must be someone else better qualified who can do this for you.”

“Are you telling me you don’t want to go, Shigar? That you’re not ready?”

He bowed his head to hide his mingled pride and uncertainty. “I trust your judgment, Master, better than my own.”

“Good, because I believe my reasoning is sound. Your face is unknown on Hutta; you will therefore find it easier to pass unnoticed. And I have faith in you. Remember that. I am certain that this is the path laid down for you.”

“So you have seen something!”

He tried to read her expression in the flickering lights of the city. She could have been amused, concerned, or completely blank. It was hard to tell. Perhaps all three.

He swore to himself that he would make her proud. “What about the situation here—the gangs, the poverty?”

“That’s the responsibility of the local authorities,” she said, fixing him with a firm stare. “They are doing their best.”

He heard the warning in her voice. The Jedi’s role in the galaxy led them outward, to Tython; he had been told many times before that the Republic’s many social problems should not be his, even if this time Mandalorians were involved. Until Mandalore declared himself a particular enemy of someone, he could be considered more or less neutral. “Yes, Master.”

“Go now. There’s a shuttle waiting for you.”

Shigar bowed and went to walk away.

“Be kind, Shigar,” his Master added. “Some roads are harder than yours have been.”

When he turned back, Satele Shan was gone, vanished into the night as though she had never been there at all.

WITH RELIEF, LARIN saw Shigar striding along the thoroughfare toward her. He had been gone less than half an hour, but it felt much longer than that. After the encounter with the Senate Security Officers, she had spoken to no one and avoided catching anyone’s eyes, feeling more out of place than ever. When he returned, she promised herself, and when he had finished assuring her that he had spoken to his Master about the situation down below and she would do something about it, Larin could vanish back down her hole again, just as the Zabrak had advised her to.

It wasn’t that she thought the Zabrak was right. On the contrary. She just didn’t know where to fit in anymore, up here. At least she had something to do in the old districts. Ever since her discharge, she had committed herself to protecting the weak and disenfranchised, those whom even the justicars ignored, to the extent her meager resources allowed. Unlike the justicars, she was interested in something more important than territory, and if that meant working alone, so be it.

“How did it go?” she asked Shigar when he reached her.

“Well. I think.”

“Are you sure about that?”

She didn’t know him well enough to be able to tell what troubled him, but he didn’t seem remotely content. His brow was knuckled, and the blue chevrons on his cheeks were twisted out of shape by the clenched muscles beneath. Perhaps the reassurance she’d been hoping for wasn’t coming after all.

“I have to go somewhere,” he said. “Will you walk with me, part of the way?”

“Sure. Where are we going?”

“Eastport.”

“I thought you only just got to Coruscant.”

“That’s right.” He glanced at her, as though surprised that she had remembered. “I’ve been traveling all my life—since Master Satele took me on, anyway.”

They walked at an easy pace through the temperate night. A light breeze ran its fingers through her short hair, and she was reminded of one good thing about life topside: weather. The last time anything had rained on her was when a sewage line had burst two levels up.

“I haven’t seen another Kiffar for years,” she said to break the silence. “Were you on Kiffu during the Annexation?”

“No. Master Tengrove, the Jedi Watchman of that sector, found me the year before. I was on Dantooine when it happened, helping my Master dig through some ruins.”

“Find anything interesting?”

“I don’t remember.” He glanced at her again. “What about you? The Annexation, I mean.”

“I was there, although I don’t remember it clearly. I was too young. My parents slipped me into a shuttle and got me offworld before the worst of it hit. The shuttle took me to Abregado-rae, where a host family adopted me. They had taken on a lot of kids after the Treaty of Coruscant, but there was always space for another. It was a madhouse.”

“What happened to your parents?”

“They died in prison on Kiffex.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Don’t be. It’s just more ancient history. What about yours?”

“Dead, too—from a vacuum seal accident on a Fresian shuttle, though, nothing to do with the Annexation.”

They walked in silence for a while again, he looking fixedly ahead and she down at her booted feet. She felt the usual mixture of relief and sorrow whenever the matter of her parents’ sacrifice came up. She hadn’t known it at the time, but she had worked out later how much her narrow escape had cost them. With Imperial warships crowding their home planet, they must have bribed an Imperial gunner to overlook an escaping shuttle, plus the shuttle pilot and who knew how many spaceport guards? They had given up everything, just to save her.

And how had she repaid them?

“I have to go to Hutta,” he finally said.

“Why?”

“One of the cartels has discovered something. I need to find out what it is.”

“Is this connected to that Mandalorian?”

“Seems so. But he’s off Coruscant now and won’t be bothering you again.”

“Are you sure he won’t come back?”

“As sure as I can be.”

“Well, that’s something,” she said with more satisfaction than she actually felt. Now that she had accomplished everything she’d set out to do that day, she could reasonably retreat to her sanctuary in the old districts and go back to doing what she did best. The trouble was, she wasn’t quite ready to cast free of Shigar Konshi. He reminded her of what it was like to be given a new mission: objectives, resources, constraints, deadlines. She missed the days when everything was sharply defined and unambiguous.

“Ever been to Hutta before?” she asked him.

“No. Not the surface.”

“It’s vile and dangerous. I was there on a covert op two years ago. Very nearly didn’t get out again.”

“You’ve done covert work?”

“More than I care to think about.” She hadn’t told him about special forces and the Blackstars. As far as Shigar knew, she was just an ordinary trooper, taking a temporary break from duty.

“What about slicing?” he asked her, visibly picking up. “Do they teach you that kind of thing, too?”

“The basics. I learned a whole lot more from a girl called Kixi when I arrived here. Now I could do it in my sleep.”

“And you’re familiar with some of the rougher gangs that run around the underworld. You’d even pass for one of them, with a bit of a wash.”

“Hey, watch it.” She threw a punch at his shoulder, which he dodged with surprising ease.

He stopped walking, not joking around at all, and they stood facing each other.

“You could come with me,” he said, as though the idea had just occurred to him. “To Hutta, I mean.”

“I thought you’d never ask,” she said.

He didn’t laugh. “I’m serious. You just implied I’d need a guide there, and I could certainly use the help. It’s a big job.”

“Will you tell me what we’d be looking for? I don’t like being left in the dark, ever.”

“I don’t know what it is myself. Not yet. I know as little about it as you do.”

“Well …” She pretended to think about it, although she’d worked out her answer while he had been asking about her covert ops qualifications, just like he had been wanting to ask her ever since he finished talking with his Master. That was what he’d had trouble spitting out this whole time. She could see it perfectly now. He didn’t want to ask her outright for fear of putting her on the defensive. And maybe he imagined that she didn’t want to ask him for fear of looking desperate. This way, it looked like they were coming up with the idea together. No one needed to be rescued. They were a team.

His transparency both amused her and warmed her to him. She had no choice but to go to Hutta, if only to save him from what was waiting for him there. Sure, the Sith were hard work, but the Hutts would eat him alive if they captured him in this state.

“All right,” she said, “but one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“You stop thinking that you’re doing me a favor.”

He flushed. “All right.”

“And you buy me a proper meal. I’ve been living on concentrates for weeks.”

“That’s two favors.”

“Think of that last one as good troop management. You don’t want me losing my concentration on the job, do you?”

“I guess not.” He smiled in a way that made him look even younger than he was. “Come on, Moxla. We’re not getting any closer just standing here.”

She sloppily saluted.

They strode off into the night, and within three paces their steps had unconsciously fallen into time.

BLACK ON BLACK, and a hint of bright steel.

The twelve Lords of the Emperor’s Dark Council stared at Eldon Ax and her Master with the combined force of a glacial avalanche.

“… and so you see, my lords,” Darth Chratis concluded, “how this situation can be advanced by the application of swift and appropriate action: the right people in the right place at the right time. My apprentice and I are the people. The place is Hutta. The time to strike is right now.”

They were standing in a recessed section of the floor, surrounded by the Dark Council. Twelve monstrous visages gazed down at them—some exposed and scarred, others hidden by masks—all radiating cool and constant hate. These were the Emperor’s confidants, his most prized servants. They alone saw his face, and now they were seeing Ax’s.

She felt her Master’s fear for the first time, and it thrilled her.

“Spare us the rhetoric, Darth Chratis,” said one of the Dark Lords, a being that might once have been a woman but whose face now was little more than a sexless skeleton. “We will not be moved by speeches.”

“What is it, exactly, that you want?” added another, his voice a high-pitched stiletto issuing from a featureless iron mask. “Tell us your plans.”

“My apprentice will infiltrate the court of Tassaa Bareesh,” Darth Chratis said, “in order to steal the information from the Hutts. I will wait offworld. When she has succeeded, I will proceed to the location of the colony and begin its annexation, to the continued glory of the Empire.”

He bowed low, and Ax was filled with contempt.

“A simple plan,” said another of the Dark Lords. Darth Howl had teeth sharpened to points, and his face was slashed by random patterns of straight lines. “I admire its directness. We do not negotiate with criminals.”

“Tassaa Bareesh has been of use to us,” said another. “It would not be wise to anger her.”

“My apprentice will be circumspect,” Darth Chratis assured them. “She is unknown to them. They will not detect her.”

“And the annexation itself. How will you facilitate this? You cannot have sufficient resources of your own to capture an entire world.”

“No, my lords. I will require at least a division to quash any resistance.”

“An entire division?” Dry mutterings circulated around the ring of Dark Lords. “You ask too much.”

“Do you expect significant resistance?”

“Yes, Darth Howl.” Here Ax’s Master hesitated. The one point he had downplayed during his summary was at last being dragged into view. “The colony was founded by fugitives from the Empire.”

“What kind of fugitives?”

He outlined everything they had uncovered about Lema Xandret while the Council listened in chilly silence. When he described the connection between Xandret and Ax, all eyes turned to her. She did her best to stare right back, although it caused her physical pain at the back of her eye sockets. It was like meeting the gaze of a black hole.

“The Mandalorian let the daughter of the fugitives live,” said Darth Howl when the account was finished. “Can you be sure there is no connection between them?”

“I have examined her thoroughly. She feels no sympathy for the ones we seek.”

“What say you, girl? Tell me what you remember of your mother.”

Ax forced her tongue to unfreeze. She had been spoken to, so she must reply. That was how it worked.

“I remember nothing, my lord. That is both a curse and a blessing.”

“Explain.”

“My lack of memory means that I can offer no clue as to the whereabouts of the fugitives. That is a curse, because it would be simplest to avoid dealing with the Hutts altogether. But if I did remember, my feelings might indeed be clouded, and you would be right to mistrust me. I offer you my assurance that I am loyal, and that the Hutts can be dealt with.”

She felt a pressure on her mind, as though a mountain were leaning on it.

“You are confident,” said Darth Howl. “Perhaps overconfident. But you are not lying.”

“Thank you, my lord.” She bowed deeply.

“That doesn’t mean, however, that we can trust you.”

She straightened. “If I may address the Council once more, there is something I wish to say.”

“Speak,” Darth Howl instructed her.

Darth Chratis shot her a warning glance, but she ignored him.

“This mission is paramount, and not just because of the world we stand to gain. There is something my Master has not raised with you, and it concerns the actions of the Mandalorian, Dao Stryver. His master was once an ally of the Empire, but in recent years Mandalore has been distant, threatening, even. Yet this one knew my history, knew of my biological connection to Lema Xandret, knew where to find me. He knew all these things—how? I believe that finding him and obtaining an answer to this question is critical to the security of the Empire.”

That provoked another round of whispering. A Mandalorian spy in the Imperial administration? Unthinkable—yet potentially disastrous if it was true. It could signal the turning of hostile Mandalorian eyes onto the Empire. Whole chains of command would need to be scrutinized. Purges would be required. Heads would roll, perhaps even the Minister of Intelligence’s. The turmoil could be tremendous.

Darth Chratis stared at her with lips pressed so tightly together he might have been making diamonds out of his teeth.

Then, unexpectedly, Darth Howl began to laugh. It was an awful sound, full of bile and rot and cruelty, and it punctured the tension like a dagger. It echoed through the Council chamber like the sound of breaking glass, bringing all else to silence.

“Eldon Ax,” he said, when his malignant mirth subsided, “you do not fool me.”

The blood in Ax’s veins turned to ice. “I swear, my lord—”

“Do not interrupt.” The whip-crack of command was backed up by the full power of the Force. “I know a liar when I meet one.”

Ax could not move. She could only stare in horror, wondering what had gone wrong.

“You speak of infiltrators in the Empire, of Mandalorian infiltration,” her accuser went on. “But I see you clearly, Eldon Ax. I know what stirs in you, which you would hide from all of us. I feel your hatred for the Mandalorian and the desire for revenge. I know that this mission has nothing to do with the Empire. It is all about proving that Dao Stryver was wrong to dismiss you by not killing you. You yearn to turn the tables on him, to defeat him in turn, and then to kill him. That is all you desire. That is what fills your heart.”

An icy smile spread across Darth Howl’s face.

She braced herself to receive the punishment she deserved.

Instead he said, “I approve.”

The invisible hand gripping Ax from head to foot relaxed. “My lord?”

“You have demonstrated to me that you are a true servant of the dark side, Eldon Ax. I endorse your plans, and I advise my colleagues on the Council to do the same.”

Relief swept through Ax. Coming so soon after her certainty that she was about to die, it made her feel light-headed. “Thank you, my lord.”

Darth Howl raised a hand for silence. “I have just one clarification to make.”

Ax’s Master looked up at him. “Yes, my lord?”

“The issue at hand is not the security of the Empire. There are a dozen sources from which Dao Stryver could have learned the girl’s heritage, including, and not to be forgotten, the girl’s mother herself. The issue is not even the world you hope to bring us, although naturally that would be a significant boon to our preparations for war. No, Darth Chratis, the issue is defiance. Fifteen years ago, Lema Xandret made a stand against the Sith and escaped the punishment that was rightly hers. Now comes this opportunity to correct that oversight. We must take it in order to demonstrate to all that our strength has only increased, and that we never forgive.”

The Council greeted his pronouncement with a murmur of approval. Some eyes glanced at the holoprojector in the center of the room, as though even the absence of the Emperor’s image was enough to inspire respect and fear.

Darth Chratis bowed low. “You have my word, my lords, that an example will be made of the girl’s rebellious kin. Their names will be expunged from history, except as an example to those who would defy us.”

Darth Howl didn’t look at Darth Chratis. His gaze remained firmly fixed on Ax.

“I understand,” Ax told him. And she did. This was a test of loyalty as much as it was a mission to punish forgotten traitors. Being a Sith was not just about feeling hatred and anger; it was finding a way to focus those feelings toward the attainment of mastery. Ax said she had forgotten her mother and held her no affection, but when Lema Xandret stood before her and the time came to deliver her rightful punishment, could Ax be the one to administer it?

She swore that she would. There was no affection in her bones for anyone. Not even her Master.

She stood in silent obedience as Darth Chratis confirmed the details of his plan. The Empire would provide him with half a division to command as he saw fit. They would await word from Ax on Hutta before moving on to their final destination. An Imperial envoy would be sent to provide cover for Ax, but that person would play no significant role in the affair. He or she would simply assure Tassaa Bareesh that the Emperor wasn’t suspiciously disinterested in the auction of her prize.

“Your ambitions are plain to us, Darth Chratis,” Darth Howl told him. “Deliver us this world, and you will be rewarded.”

With one last, overlong bow, Darth Chratis took his leave of the Council, and his apprentice followed respectfully two paces behind.

Only when they were in the shuttle did he turn on her. His slender staff clicked open lengthways at one end and the other retracted, forming the crosspieces and handle of his bloodred lightsaber. It stabbed at her face, stopping just short of her skin, and she froze.

“You surprised me in there,” he said in a deceptively quiet voice. “Don’t ever surprise me again.”

She didn’t say: You’re a fool. You mishandled the whole thing. If you’d let me talk to you beforehand, instead of raging about my inability to remember anything, I could have told you in advance. Instead of betraying you, I saved you, and our plan, from being dismissed out of hand.

“I will not, Master” was all she said.

Satisfied with her compliance, Darth Chratis deactivated his lightsaber and stepped away. Truce, she thought, for now. With a grunt, he settled back to ride out the trip from Korriban back to Dromund Kaas—and from there to Hutta, and the attainment of all their dreams.

“THE HUTTS HAVE created quite a stir,” said Supreme Commander Stantorrs, leaning back in his chair and tapping one finger on his desk. “I’ve received four Senatorial inquiries overnight, and I expect more during the day. Whether this auction is a scam or not, we’ll have to do something about it now.”

Ula said, “We can’t be seen to be sitting on our hands, sir.” Obedience and assurance: that was all the Supreme Commander wanted from his aides. A true meritocracy, however, would have demanded much more from its citizens.

“Indeed not!” Stantorrs exclaimed. “When every world in the Republic, from the outlying settlements to the Core itself, is crying poverty, to let a possible source of resources slip through our fingers would be a public relations disaster, not to mention a setback for galactic security.”

“When the Mandalorians are involved,” said another aide, “it’s often a security issue.”

“Indeed. And that’s why I’ve decided to pursue this, publicly and politically, to ensure that it can’t come back on us later.”

The martial rhythm of the Supreme Commander’s tapping put Ula on edge. Give it a rest, he wanted to yell at them. It’s a smokescreen, a distraction from the real issue—the cold war you’re losing! The Hutts are exploiting and feeding your paranoia at the very same time. Don’t you see how gullible this makes you all look?

So wound up was he in his internal dialogue that he almost didn’t hear the Supreme Commander’s next words.

“That’s why I’ve decided to send you, Ula, to Hutta as an official envoy of the Republic.”

Ula’s thoughts hit the roadblock of that pronouncement and formed a five-skylane pileup.

“You—what, sir?”

“I need someone to investigate and, if necessary, negotiate on our behalf. Not someone senior—we don’t want the Hutts thinking we’re too interested—and not someone from the military, either, since this is a political matter. We need someone informed and dedicated, and the reports you filed last night indicate that you are nothing if not both. Ula, I want you on the first available shuttle.”

The other aides stared at him with undisguised envy as Ula tried to find a way out of the situation.

“I’m flattered, sir, but—”

“Your portfolios are already full, I know, but there’s nothing you can’t delegate. And if it’s security you’re worried about, I’ve requisitioned a full detail. We can’t afford to lose someone of your abilities, Ula.”

Ula swallowed. Stantorrs had shot down his two major objections in little more than one breath. While it was indeed pleasing that the Supreme Commander afforded him such trust, what use was he as an informer in the wrong sector of the galaxy? He needed to be here, in the office, not mucking around with filthy Hutts and potentially coming under fire.

The gang war that had led to Stantorrs hearing about the Cinzia would be just a minor skirmish if the ship’s home was as valuable as the Hutts said it was. Of that Ula was certain, and he was an informer, not a soldier, for a reason. He liked fighting as little as he liked being in the spotlight. He simply wasn’t trained for that kind of thing.

There seemed no way to escape it, though, so he accepted with all the grace he could muster.

“Excellent. I know I can rely on you, Ula. Off the record, I’ll expect you to keep a sharp eye out for Jedi, of course. Satele Shan says she’ll take no official action, but I don’t trust her. You know the major players, don’t you? You see one of them, you let me know.”

Ula nodded. “I will, sir.”

“And if there’s any substance to the Hutts’ claims, report immediately. I’ll have a fleet on standing orders to offer the world protection from the Empire.”

“Yes, sir.” Like anyone with any political savvy, Ula knew that “protection” was something many worlds simply did not want, for fear of the so-called protectors pillaging natural resources and talent. Also, the mere presence of a Republic cruiser, let alone a Jedi, was likely to draw the wrath of the Sith, who could be even worse. “What if it’s nothing?”

“Then we’ve lost nothing, and you get to keep your promotion.” Stantorrs stood and held out his hand. “I’m elevating you to senior aide, effective immediately, and appointing you as acting envoy to the Bareesh Cartel. Congratulations, Ula.”

Ula shook the Supreme Commander’s hand but barely registered the soldierly crush of the strong Duros fingers. Numb from head to foot, he could barely accept what had just happened. The best he could manage was to find ways to profit from it.

As his former colleagues pressed in to offer their congratulations, he realized that this put him in an ideal position to make sure that the Republic didn’t gain from the Hutts’ offer. He could downplay the importance of any information he discovered—even actively interfere with the auction, if it came to that. Whatever the Hutts had, the Republic wouldn’t get access to it.

And then there was the Republic fleet that awaited the outcome of his investigation. If he could send them on a fruitless quest to an empty sector of the galaxy, that could help the Empire in a dozen tangible ways. That the Supreme Commander of the Republic’s military forces and parts of the Senate were absorbed in this unfolding drama was also useful. What had started as a minor curiosity could end up playing a deciding role in the conflict, if he was careful.

“When do you want me to leave, sir?”

“Immediately. Your security detail is waiting.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Ula swallowed his nervousness, made his farewells, and exited the room.

HE DIDN’T GET very far. In the hallway outside the Supreme Commander’s suite of offices, a squad of six soldiers awaited him. They wore smart service dress uniforms and saluted on sight of him.

“Sergeant Robann Potannin,” the lead soldier introduced himself. “We are your escort, Envoy Vii.”

Potannin was swarthy and muscular, and though he was as tall as Ula, he loomed as though from a great height.

“Thank you, Sergeant Potannin. I’ll be grateful for your protection on Hutta. What’s the arrangement? Shall we rendezvous at the appropriate spaceport when the shuttle is ready?”

“Shuttle departs in one hour, sir.”

“Then I’d better get moving, hadn’t I?”

He moved off along the corridor, and the squad fell into formation around him. He stopped, and they stopped, too.

“Where are you going?” he asked Potannin.

“Escorting you to Diplomatic Supplies, sir.”

“That’s not where I’m going. I need to swing by my apartment to pack my bag, and I’m sure I can manage that on my own.”

“Negative, sir. All offworld necessities are provided by Diplomatic Supplies.”

“But my clothes—”

“Not required, sir. Ceremonial attire is being tailored to your measurements as we speak.”

Ula had never seen this side of the Republic administration at work. It was surprisingly, and irritatingly, efficient.

“I have a pet voorpak,” he said, improvising wildly. “If I leave it alone, it’ll die.”

“Not to worry, sir. Provide us with your key and I’ll have it cared for.”

“No, no. That’s not necessary.” Ula ran a hand through his hair. Both packing a bag and his imaginary pet were covers for his real intention. He wanted to send a message from his apartment to his Imperial masters, informing them of this sudden development. Otherwise they might worry at his silence.

Luckily, he had prepared for every contingency.

Pulling his comlink out of his pocket, he said, “I’ll call a neighbor. She’ll look after it. Give me a moment.”

He walked a short distance from Potannin and placed a quick call. The neighbor was imaginary, too, but the number was real. It led to an automated message service that was regularly checked by Watcher Three’s network of agents on Coruscant. After the tone, he recorded his name and ordered two innocuous dishes from a nonexistent menu. The name of the first dish contained nine syllables, the second thirteen, and those numbers allowed Ula’s real message to be decoded from stock phrases every Imperial operative knew by heart: he had experienced an unplanned interruption and would reestablish contact as soon as possible.

At least via the voice-drop his abbreviated message would get through. Who knew when he would find an opportunity to send another?

That thought triggered a whole new wave of trepidation. Bad enough to be in the spotlight, but to be completely cut off from his chain of command was even worse. He could feel his hands beginning to tremble, and to hide that he stuffed them with his comlink into his pockets.

“All right,” he said, turning back to the attentive Sergeant Potannin and beaming the brightest smile he could manage. “I’m all yours.”

Smoothly falling into formation around him, they marched him off to be outfitted for his new role.

THE GLORIOUS JEWEL of the Y’Toub system rose like a bloated corpse from the bottomless sea of space. Shigar squinted out at it, glad for the first time that they hadn’t found more opulent transport. The passenger lounge of the Red Silk Chances was filthy, and its viewports barely counted as translucent, but the squalor matched the view. Hutta looked every bit as foul as its reputation suggested, moldy green and brown like a fruit left to ripen too long, bursting with rot from within.

Larin sat next to him, and their shoulders jostled together every time the freighter rattled beneath them. Her face was hidden by the helmet of her increasingly nonregulation armor, but he could tell from the straightness of her spine that she was paying close attention to everyone around them. The droids and lowlifes taking the trip with them warranted it. Thus far there had been two knife fights, several games of rigged dejarik, numerous arguments over the outcome of the latest Great Hunt, and a vigorous sing-along—in a dialect Shigar had never heard before—that had felt as though it might last forever.

Seeking to calm his nerves, he closed his eyes and concentrated on an oddly shaped shard of plastoid in his right hand that he had picked up in the streets of Coruscant as they had waited to board their shuttle. Nothing about it was familiar, so there was no way his conscious mind could guess its origins or purpose. Determining either or both of those was where his psychometric ability was supposed to come in.

About one in a hundred Kiffar were born with this particular Force talent, deciphering the origin and history of objects by touch alone. Shigar’s came and went despite his every effort, and it was this lack of control that had at least partly put off the Jedi Council when it came to allowing his trials. Plenty of Jedi Knights had no psychometric ability whatsoever, but all were supposed to intimately know their own strengths and weaknesses. A wild talent of any kind was not acceptable.

Shigar focused on his breathing and let the Force flow strongly through him. The shaking of the freighter and the chattering of its passengers receded. He felt only the complex shape of the object in his palm, and examined the way it sat in the universe without recourse to his usual senses. Was it old or new? Did it come from nearby or far away? Was it precious or disposable? Had it been dropped deliberately or without care? Was it manufactured or handmade? Were there thousands of such things in the galaxy, or was this the only one that had ever existed?

Half-felt impressions came and went. He saw a woman’s face—a human woman, with wide-set brown eyes and a distinctive scar across her chin. He pursued that mental scent as far as it went, but nothing more came to him. He let it go, and realized then that he had seen this woman in the old districts, while walking off his anger at the Council’s decision. She had been selling roasted spider-roaches to an Abyssin with one eye. His mind had thrown up her face in desperation. She had nothing at all to do with the scrap of plastoid.

A Jedi Knight is a Jedi Knight in all respects, Master Nobil had said. Until he controlled this talent, he could hardly be said to have control over himself. On that point he had no defense.

Frustrated, he opened his eyes and put the scrap back into his pocket. He had a few pockets now, mainly down his chest and the front of his thighs. They added several kilograms to his body mass and jingled when he walked. The unfamiliar textures and cut of his disguise came courtesy of a market on Klatooine, where he and Larin had boarded the Red Silk Chances for Hutta. He was still getting used to it.

Through the grimy viewport, the foul world’s fifth moon, Nar Shaddaa, was slinking by.

Almost there, Shigar told himself.

“You’re a little small for a bounty hunter, aren’t you?” a six-fingered smuggler asked Larin.

She turned her head the tiniest fraction. “So what? You’re a little too ugly to be human.” Her voice was artificially harshened by the vocoder added to enhance her disguise.

The smuggler only laughed. “You don’t intimidate me, girl. I lost my ship playing pazaak in a den owned by Fa’athra. I’m going to ask him for it back, out of the goodness of his heart. What do you think of that?”

The Hutt called Fa’athra was widely known as the cruelest, most sadistic of all.

“I think that makes you stupid as well as ugly.”

The smuggler laughed again, his face opening like a wound to expose a bewildering variety of snaggled teeth. Shigar was ready to intervene if the exchange became violent, but the smuggler seemed satisfied by Larin’s response.

“Tell your friend here,” the smuggler said, leaning close, “that if he really wants to pass himself off as a rancor racer, he’ll have to roughen his hide up some. Those guys have a life expectancy of less than five minutes. You don’t last longer than that without some kind of damage.”

He turned away to butt heads with someone else, leaving Shigar and Larin to exchange a quick glance.

“I’ll put on the mask when we land,” Shigar whispered to her. He hadn’t wanted to on Klatooine, disliking the grotesque appearance it lent him and the stench of poorly cured leather. “You can say I told you so then.”

She just nodded. He was glad he couldn’t see her expression.

BILBOUSA SPACEPORT WAS crowded with every kind of sentient species and droid model that Larin had ever heard of. The air was thick with spices and a dense mélange of language. As the Red Silk Chances disgorged its passengers with nary a pretense of courtesy, they blended into the muddy stream of life as character befit: pushing, shoving, appealing for passage, or simply standing still and waiting for an opening.

Shigar, now clad in the snarling visage of a rancor racer, blended in perfectly.

They negotiated the press as gracefully as possible and chartered a hopper to take them to Gebroila, the city closest to Tassaa Bareesh’s palace. There was no need to pass through security or to change currencies. All forms of credits were accepted on Hutta. After checking that Shigar’s chip wasn’t counterfeit, the Evocii driver swept them recklessly into the never-ending stream of traffic, provoking a dozen potentially fatal near-misses. Larin kept her eyes and attention on the interior of the cab. Their mission was dangerous enough without worrying about everyday threats.

The journey to Gebroila was a long one, and it felt even longer. Hutta’s damp biosphere was poisoned by millennia of industrial abuse, making it hazardous even to breathe there. Those few species to survive the Hutts’ takeover of the world had mutated beyond recognition. Some, like the hardy chemilizard, had evolved the ability to take sustenance from compounds that might kill an ordinary animal. Others perfected elaborate and expensive chemical defenses, or occupied those few niches that weren’t sodden with pollutants. Such niches were vigorously contested, making their inhabitants some of the most vicious in the galaxy.

The Hutts themselves were a prime example of evolution in action. Corpulent and slug-like, their ancestors must have made easy prey on their original homeworld. But environmental catastrophe had forced them to become hardier in several ways at once, developing surprisingly powerful muscles beneath all their flab, and minds to match. They were the original niche dwellers and now formed the summit of the food chain.

Larin rode in silence, very familiar from her time in special forces with long periods during which nothing happened. She would have liked to make plans for their arrival in Gebroila, but Shigar was silent, caught up in his own thoughts. She let him be and pondered the matter herself. Security around the palace was bound to be tight, and they had been unable to purchase the right IDs to get in. In a culture of fakes and lies, demonstrating appropriate authenticity was going to be difficult—unless they found a back entrance that wasn’t watched from a dozen angles at once. Somehow, she didn’t think it was going to be that easy.

THE PALACE WAS as large as the neighboring city. Shigar was both intimidated and reassured by its sprawling vastness. It would be easier to hide behind those ornate walls, among the thousands of servants, penitents, and other enemies that converged wherever money concentrated. At the same time, there would be eyes everywhere. They couldn’t afford to slip up once.

Shigar paid their hopper driver and added a substantial tip. The driver was a slave, bound by chains to the vehicle he commanded. Evocii had once been the owners of Hutta, but they were now on the very lowest rung of its opportunistic society. Countless generations of inbreeding had reduced them to a pallid, sickly species. Only outside the cities did their fighting spirit remain, in the form of rebel tribes whose vigor caused the Hutts no end of trouble.

The driver’s permanently pained but placid expression didn’t change as he pulled the hopper away from the palace forecourt and sped off.

“Now what?” asked Larin.

“We go in.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.”

He led the way up a long flight of steps—their first taste of Tassaa Bareesh’s imposition on her guests. She would never climb such an obstacle herself. No doubt she had teams of litter-bearers or repulsorsleds to take her wherever she willed. By forcing visitors to do what she would not, before they even entered her domain, and to suffer for it, she automatically placed them at a lower social level.

Larin was fit. She didn’t break stride as they climbed briskly to the guard level, overtaking several other parties along the way. There were three entrances with weapons emplacements mounted over each. Shigar picked the leftmost at random. Four armored Gamorrean guards awaited them, two outside and two inside. Their deep-set eyes regarded every being who approached with equal amounts of suspicion. Behind them, one of the parties they’d overtaken was forcibly pushed back down the stairs, screaming plaintively.

“Are you sure you want to do it this way?” she asked him.

“This is the easy part,” he told her. “Watch.”

The guards crossed vibro-axes as they approached. Shigar stopped obediently and addressed them in a calm voice.

“You don’t need to see our documents. We have the required authorization.”

The axes parted, allowing them through.

“Two down,” Larin’s vocoder crackled.

Shigar repeated the mind trick on the other side of the entrance. Again the axes parted and they walked through. One door up, a loud party of Ortolans did the same, but with official IDs.

“Don’t look so smug,” Larin said to him. “I can see it even through your mask.”

A silver protocol droid stepped out in front of them, backed up by a pair of bug-eyed TT-2G guard droids. “This way, please. Purser Droog will assign you quarters sufficient to your needs.”

“That’s okay,” said Larin. “We know our way around.”

“If you’ll only allow us to verify your IDs,” said the droid more insistently, “Purser Droog will ensure that you are accommodated appropriately.”

“Really, you don’t need to worry.”

“No worry at all, honored guests. You must allow us to show you the proper hospitality.”

Heavy emphasis on the word must prompted Shigar to look up. Weapons emplacements on the interior side of the wall had tracked to target them. The Gamorreans clearly weren’t the only barriers to entry to Tassaa Bareesh’s castle.

“Of course,” Shigar told the droid, suppressing the slightest sign of concern in his voice. “We don’t want to make a fuss.”

The droid bowed and led them to a desk, behind which sat an ill-looking Hutt with deep pouches under his eyes. He was busy with the noisy Ortolans, who appeared to have mislaid one of their passports. This was another setback. Hutts were immune to all forms of Jedi persuasion, so that wasn’t going to work this time. Shigar thought frantically. Fighting his way in wasn’t an option, given the emplacements and the need for secrecy. Neither was fighting his way out, since there were just as many weapons that way. If he didn’t think of something else fast, they would be trapped.

Finally, the purser waved the Peripleens on and gestured for Shigar and Larin to approach.

“Kimwil Kinz and Mer Corrucle,” he said, giving the Hutt the fake names they had settled on during the journey to Hutta. Cupping his hand over his credit chip, he slid it across the desk as though it were some kind of official documentation. Indicating the backs of the Ortolans, disappearing in a huddle into the palace proper, he added, “We’re with them.”

The jaded eyes of the Hutt regarded him with a mixture of hostility and disdain. There was no way of telling which way he would fall. Was he automatically loyal to Tassaa Bareesh, who had placed him in this position of responsibility, or was he bored or drunk enough on his own small power to take up the opportunity Shigar presented? The contents of the credit chip were considerable; they represented everything he had been given to fulfill his mission. If he took it, that would be money well spent.

The purser swept up the chip and tucked it into the folds of his body.

“You’d better hurry,” he rumbled in Huttese. “They’re leaving without you.”

Shigar led Larin away, feeling exposed under the emplacements and full of loathing for the Hutts and the corruption they embraced so readily. Most likely, the purser would betray them within minutes of letting them through, but if he could just get out of his direct line of sight, he and Larin could disappear into the palace’s throng, never to be seen again.

They walked twenty-five paces without interference. At the first available doorway, he turned left, then immediately left again. When no sound of pursuit rang out behind them, he let the breath he’d been holding escape through his teeth.

Larin heard it. “That went as planned, did it?”

“Precisely,” he said with fake cheeriness. “You weren’t worried, were you?”

“Not for a second.” She shook her head. “Let’s find somewhere quiet and out of the way. We need to change the way we look.”

They squeezed into a niche and Shigar gratefully rid himself of the mask and a large amount of his leather rancor-riding gear, leaving him wearing just pants, boots, and a tight black vest on his upper body. He felt 50 percent lighter and was grateful to regain free use of his arms. Larin unsealed her helmet and hitched it securely to her belt, then surrendered the cloak she had been wearing and gave it to him to cover his exposed shoulders. Rubbing dust into their cheeks and foreheads, she did her best to make them look as filthy as everyone else they had seen so far.

Shigar felt dirty enough as it was, and not just because of the close, stinking air of Hutta. They were in, and the first real hurdle of the mission was behind them. Now they could get on with uncovering what Tassaa Bareesh had found on the Cinzia.

Leaving the rest of his disguise tucked well out of sight, they moved off into the halls of the palace, keeping their ears and eyes wide open for surprises.

AT THE REAR of the palace, where a heavily fortified cliff provided a natural shield against snipers and missile attacks, was a private spaceport large enough for a dozen suborbital transports. Six of the berths were already full when the Imperial envoy approached to land. None was registered to the Republic. One looked like a privateer, bulbous and battered, and extensively blackened across one side as though by a powerful blast.

“Good,” said Darth Chratis when Ax communicated that intelligence to him. “We have the jump on the Republic, at least. Any sign of Stryver?”

“None as yet, Master.”

“Keep your senses alert for his presence, but remember your place. Your desire for revenge comes second to the orders of the Dark Council. Fulfill them first, then you may act freely. We need to know what was inside the Cinzia.”

“Yes, Master,” she said with all apparent obedience. In her heart she swore to take whatever opportunities arose, whether Darth Chratis approved or not.

The shuttle came down with a gentle thud. Ax would much rather have come under her own direction, in her own interceptor, but her new role forced her to accept some compromises. She unstrapped herself and moved forward to meet the envoy: Ia Nirvin, a dour, capable man who understood all too well that his role in coming events was ceremonial. His credentials were genuine, and the line of credit he had access to came straight out of the Imperial treasury. He was, however, under express orders to make no deals unless Eldon Ax failed in her mission.

“This way, Envoy,” she said, ushering him to the rear egress ramp. A welcoming committee had already gathered outside. Nirvin adjusted his uniform, waited until his escort had assembled around him, then exited the shuttle.

Ax came last, striding confidently down the ramp. The security detail surrounding the welcoming party noticed her instantly. She was dressed entirely in black, as befit an emissary of the Sith, and her lightsaber hilt dangled openly at her side. The security detail’s uncertainty pleased her. Envoy Nirvin came with the full authority of the Imperial bureaucracy, but who held the real power? Was she bodyguard or puppet master?

A massive Houk approached her. “Your weapon, please.”

Ax unhitched her lightsaber, ignited it, and without saying a word removed the Houk’s head.

Four more Houks moved forward to force the issue.

“There’s no need for such baseless hostility,” said Envoy Nirvin, pressing fearlessly between her and the guards. “She comes in peace as my adviser on esoteric matters. Let the matter drop, or I fear we might as well turn back right now.”

His words were addressed to the welcoming committee, not to her, and she was glad for that. She didn’t care how many Houks she had to kill to make the point to the servants of the Hutts that she wasn’t relinquishing her lightsaber under any circumstances.

The welcoming party conferred in hurried whispers, then nodded their acceptance of the situation. Ax waited until the Houks had retreated, though, before deactivating her blade and relaxing her defensive stance.

“Nice to do business with you, gents,” she said, following the envoy and his retinue into the palace.

“TASSAA BAREESH OFFERS her distinguished guests a most cordial welcome and wishes them a profitable stay in her humble abode.”

Hardly humble, thought Ax, eyeing the garish décor of the throne room. What hadn’t been gilded was encrusted with jewels or draped in silk. No less than one hundred court functionaries had gathered to welcome the modest Imperial contingent, and she had no doubt that the crowd was a deliberate attempt to impress.

The droid translator, a lanky A-1DO “conehead,” did its best to keep up with its mistress’s rumbling speech.

“Tassaa Bareesh invites her distinguished guest to take full advantage of the palace’s amenities before proceeding to the official program. We have a fine array of baths, restaurants, dance halls, fight pits—”

“We’d prefer to press on,” interrupted Envoy Nirvin in a restrained but firm voice. “With all appropriate thanks and gratitude, of course.”

Instead of looking offended, Tassaa Bareesh beamed a wide, lascivious smile. The Hutt matriarch was impressively large, sprawling slug-like with short-fingered hands resting on her bulging belly. Jewels gleamed from numerous necklaces and rings, and silk draped across her sloping shoulders, but nothing could hide the repulsiveness of her skin, which was as green and oily as a swamp reptile’s back. The matriarch rumbled briefly, then reached for a snack. It wriggled and squirmed uselessly before dropping into the cavernous maw and dying with a crunch.

“Tassaa Bareesh understands your urgent desire to proceed to business,” said the translator. “Would you like to view the merchandise?”

“Please.”

The Hutt matriarch barked a command. From the crowd of onlookers stepped a tall, bejeweled Twi’lek, who bowed and said, “My name is Yeama. I will be your guide.”

Nirvin bowed in return. “If the merchandise meets our needs, we may wish to offer a price immediately.”

“Of course,” Yeama said, “but I’m afraid we have another party due to arrive shortly. We could not possibly come to any arrangements until they have had an opportunity to see what you have seen.”

“When is this other party due?”

“Today, I believe.”

“From the Republic?”

“I cannot reveal their identity.”

“Can you tell me how many other interested parties there are?”

Yeama smiled with his lips only. “This way, please.”

Envoy Nirvin’s expression was sour, but he did as he was told. The Twi’lek led him and his retinue from the throne room. They formed a gaudy procession, with Yeama and Nirvin at the lead, accompanied by one Bareesh soldier for every Imperial bodyguard. Ax brought up the rear, glad to be moving again. She tolerated diplomacy rather than enjoying it.

Balancing Ax was the biggest Houk she had ever seen. He matched her stride pace for pace, his expression impassive.

As she left the room, Ax glimpsed an unassuming figure at the back. A human of average height, he wore practical clothes that had seen better days. His salt-and-pepper hair looked as though he had been hauled from bed just moments before. On a street anywhere else in the galaxy, Ax would have ignored him as a matter of course, but in Bareesh’s palace he was the only being not dripping with finery. Standing directly behind him was a boxy old combat droid that looked even more battered than he was.

He saw Ax looking at him and glanced away, as though bored.

She turned her eyes forward and followed the envoy.

YEAMA LED THEM through a maze of corridors, each more opulent than the last. Had Ax any interest in paintings, sculptures, and tapestries—or even just the value of such things—she was sure she would have been impressed. Instead, while carefully memorizing the route, she kept her eyes open for tactical information: how many guards stood at each intersection, which areas were covered by security cams, where blast doors were located, concealed or not.

Unsurprisingly, she quickly concluded that the palace was a fortress wrapped up in tinfoil. The Hutts loved their luxury, but they loved their lives more. Tassaa Bareesh hadn’t elevated herself to head of a Hutt cartel simply by throwing the biggest parties. She knew how to watch her back, too.

There were weaknesses to every security detail, though. Ax was sure she could get to the matriarch if she needed to. Luckily for Tassaa Bareesh, her mission was simply to steal.

Yeama brought the commingled retinues to a halt in a large circular room under a domed roof distinguished by a chandelier made from thousands of pieces of baroquely curved glass. There were only two entrances to this room: the one they had just come through, with thick armored doors currently standing open under a massive stone statue of Tassaa Bareesh herself, and the other ahead of them, with a pair of doors to match, thus forming a security air lock. Yeama clapped his hands, and the doors behind them slammed shut. Ax kept her hand on the pommel of her lightsaber, even though she knew Tassaa Bareesh couldn’t possibly be stupid enough to plan an ambush, and she noted with approval that the envoy’s bodyguards had moved in closer around him.

A thud and a clunk came from the doorways on the opposite side of the room. They swung open, revealing an antechamber that was pleasingly devoid of decoration. Walls, floor, and ceiling were a uniform, spotless white. There was easily enough room for everyone as they filed in after Yeama. The antechamber could have held more than fifty humans.

Four circular vault doors opened onto the antechamber, each more than four meters across. Small but very thick transparisteel portals in the center allowed visual access to the contents. Only one of those portals appeared to be unshuttered. It was to that vault door that Yeama led them.

“Here at last, Envoy Nirvin, is the prize you have been promised. But allow me first to describe how it came to be in our hands.”

Nirvin glanced through the portal, frowned, and turned back to Yeama. “Do so,” he barked.

Ax was too far away to see. She itched to push past them and look for herself, but for the moment she would have to be satisfied with words alone.

“Some of what I am about to tell is known outside this room,” Yeama said. “The rest is not. Two weeks ago, one of our affiliates stopped a ship in the depths of Wild Space.”

Affiliates, Ax assumed, was a diplomatic term for “pirate.” And stopped surely meant “interdicted and boarded under arms.”

“It was a routine encounter, but it soon took a surprising turn.”

“Surprising how?” asked Nirvin.

“Here is the conversation that took place between our affiliate and the vessel.”

An audio recording filled the antechamber, rich with breathing, static, and comm crackle. A couple of clicks suggested that it had been edited, but the ambience sounded authentic.

“Stand by for boarding.”

That was the affiliate, Ax guessed: experienced, pragmatic, with an edge of tension that belied the Twi’lek’s description of the encounter as “routine.”

“Negative. We do not recognize your authority.”

That was the Cinzia, Ax assumed—and here a strange feeling ran down her spine. The speaker was male and sounded impossibly distant. Had he known her mother? Was he related to her?

She forced herself to concentrate on the rest of the conversation.

“You’re a privateer. You work for the Republic.”

“Now, that simply isn’t true.”

“We’re on a diplomatic mission.”

“To whom? From where?”

There was a long, static-filled pause.

“All right, then. What will it cost for you to let us go?”

“You’re clear out of luck, mate. Best vent those air locks, smartish. We’re coming in.”

The recording ended with a blast of white noise that made the envoy jump.

“What was that?” he asked.

“An explosion,” said Yeama. “The ship our affiliate approached possessed an ion drive of unfamiliar design. It was this that blew, taking the ship and all hands with it.”

As though the Twi’lek were reading Ax’s thoughts, he added, “We believe that the drive’s power cells were deliberately ignited.”

“They blew themselves up?”

“Yes, Envoy Nirvin. Rather than be boarded, they chose to destroy their ship and all its contents. Unfortunately for them, the destruction was not complete. Significant fragments survived. What you see before you are two items retrieved from the detritus. The first is the Cinzia’s navicomp, which contains the coordinates of its origin. The second is more mysterious. What do you make of it?”

The envoy peered through the thick transparisteel portal a second time. He frowned once more.

“I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Our sentiments exactly,” Yeama said.

Again, Ax resisted the impulse to push past and see for herself.

“This much we can tell you.” Yeama folded his hands across his midriff. “We have detected signs of machining on the outer shell, which is made from an alloy of two extremely rare metals, lutetium and promethium. So it is a construct of some kind, and one of considerable material value alone. On the other hand, there is also a biological component, the nature of which we have been unable to fathom. It is undoubtedly present, we know it’s in there, but we cannot examine the source of the reading more closely without physically penetrating the casing. Doing so would, of course, reduce the object’s value, so we will leave that up to the ultimate purchaser.”

“Can we get any closer?”

“The combination to the vault is what you will be bidding for, Envoy Nirvin. Until you have purchased it, the door remains shut.”

The envoy nodded his understanding, but his frown remained intact. Stepping away from the window, he finally waved Ax forward.

“Take a look,” he said. “See what you make of it.”

Although it rankled to take the administrative puppet’s orders, Ax did as she was told, peering with intense curiosity at what lay inside the vault. Finally, she could see what all the fuss was about.

The navicomp was easily identifiable, although it had been twisted and partially melted by the blast that had destroyed the ship around it. It was a handheld model, unexpectedly small, more resembling a chunky satellite comlink than the heart of a starship’s navigation system. Presumably it was voiceprinted, but such security provisions could easily be circumvented by a talented slicer. Ax could only take Yeama’s word for whether it still worked or not. It rested in a transparisteel box on a glass plinth to the left of the room’s center, and was closely observed by numerous sensors mounted in the vault’s durasteel walls, floor, and ceiling.

Sitting on the floor to its right was the second object. Nirvin was correct: it didn’t match any design aesthetic she’d ever encountered. It was squat, like a T3 utility droid, but without any legs or visible environmental interfaces. Its body was tubular and rested flush to the floor of the vault. There were no markings apart from a series of almost gill-like ripples around its middle. Its head was slightly convex, as though it had been pushed down from above, and part of it was scorched black. The natural color of its casing appeared to be silver. No writing, no symbols, no identifying markers at all.

Ax didn’t know what it was, either, but she didn’t say so immediately. Taking the opportunity to inspect the interior of the vault in more detail, she memorized sensor emplacements, estimated the strength of the walls, and measured the distance of each object from the door, just in case she had to perform in the dark. It would be much better, of course, to take the prize once it was out of the vault and away from all these impediments, but she would be prepared for anything.

“It could be a bioreactor,” she said to the envoy, returning control of the window to him.

“Plague agents, perhaps?”

“Hard to say without opening it.”

“Indeed.” Nirvin turned back to Yeama. “Is that all you have to show us?”

“All?” The Twi’lek showed his teeth. They were as pointed as the tips of his lekku. “I will escort you to a waiting room, where you may examine data relating to our find in perfect comfort.”

“Very well.” Nirvin indicated that Yeama should lead the way.

Ax fell in behind them, with her huge Houk shadow at her side. The objects in the vault didn’t speak to her either as a Sith apprentice or as the biological offspring of Lema Xandret. The plague bioreactor, if such it was, provoked no memories at all.

The sparse information they had been given told her only a little more. That the object was made from an alloy of extremely rare metals boded well for her Master’s dreams of giving the Emperor a rich new world, but it meant nothing in itself. With the crew of the Cinzia dead, there were no leads to follow there, either, unless she could uncover something that had been hidden by the Hutts—like a survivor, perhaps, or another clue as to the ship’s origins. She didn’t put it past Tassaa Bareesh to auction only half of what they’d found while keeping something extra in reserve, to sell to the auction’s losing party.

Yeama took them out of the antechamber and back into the circular security air lock, where the heavy doors cycled again. From there, Yeama led them along a new set of luscious corridors in the direction of the no doubt equally luscious waiting room.

Ax made it her business to be elsewhere. Confusing her Houk escort with a well-placed mind trick, she slipped away from the group and vanished into the shadows.

ULA ENDURED TASSAA Bareesh’s welcoming spiel with ill-disguised contempt. Cordiality and profitability made untrustworthy bed partners, particularly when honesty and ethics weren’t invited, too. When his host promised him an array of amenities including chemical enhancements and even more dubious forms of entertainment, it was all he could do not to spit to get the bad taste out of his mouth.

“I think we can dispense with all that,” he said. “Why don’t we just get down to business?”

Tassaa Bareesh’s slit-like grin widened even farther, if that were possible.

Her pointy-headed protocol droid assured Ula that Tassaa Bareesh understood completely.

She waved forward an underling, a salacious-looking Twi’lek, who took over negotiations from that point. The Twi’lek promised that they would soon see the legacy of the Cinzia. As Ula was led from the throne room, he glimpsed a scruffy-looking man leaning up against the rear wall with a blank look on his face and a battered orange droid close at his shoulder. The man’s ennui had a manufactured air, and it was this that caught Ula’s eye.

“Who was that fellow back there?” he asked his guide.

“Which fellow?” Yeama didn’t even glance over his shoulder.

Ula described him, not yet willing to give the matter up. Being a good informer meant taking nothing for granted and noticing all the details.

“Grayish hair, prominent nose, brown eyes—with an old droid.”

“Oh, no one in particular,” the Twi’lek assured him. “A pilot whose ship is currently berthed here. He has the favor of my mistress, and therefore the run of the palace.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jet Nebula, Envoy Vii. You won’t have heard of him.”

That was true. It didn’t even sound like a real name. But he wasn’t fool enough to take Yeama at his word. The Hutts and their servants were natural liars. Like him.

He filed the name away in his memory.

YEAMA TOOK HIM through several ridiculous security measures in order to introduce him to the cause of all this fuss. A navicomp and a battered bit of space junk—it all seemed an utter beat-up as far as he could tell, although that in itself was something of a relief. If the charade amounted to nothing, it would soon therefore be over. Nonetheless, he attended carefully to the details and asked the questions expected of him.

“No survivors, you say?” he asked after hearing the last transmissions from the Cinzia. “How can I be sure your affiliate didn’t murder them and concoct this mad story to cover the deed?”

“The fate of the passengers is irrelevant to us,” Yeama answered. “We would not lie to spare your sensibilities.”

That Ula believed completely, and it revived the moral outrage he had felt at being in the court of a Hutt. Tassaa Bareesh’s venal tactics only confirmed his low opinion of her kind and his hopes that they would be undone, somehow. The Hutts were walking a very fine line. The more valuable the items they were auctioning, the more they could obviously charge—but how long until one or another party simply walked in and took them?

He wondered if either side had just such contingencies in place. Supreme Commander Stantorrs obviously suspected so, with respect to the Jedi, and there had been no chance to ask Watcher Three if the Emperor had sent someone other than an official envoy. A Cipher Agent, perhaps, capable of far greater feats than a mere informer such as himself. Ula had glimpsed an Imperial shuttle in the dock at the rear of the palace, so he knew he wasn’t the only envoy Bareesh had entertained that day.

It had occurred to him on the way that the Imperial envoy wouldn’t know that the Republic envoy was actually a traitor with no intention of winning the auction for his so-called masters. If he could only find some way to communicate that message, it might save the Emperor a great deal of trouble and expense …

Yeama was speaking again. “The auction will be held tomorrow, with all parties present. You will be bidding for the combination to this vault. The safety of all parties is our primary concern, so the process will be anonymous. I will take you to your secure accommodation now, and you may examine the data there overnight.”

“If the bidders are anonymous,” said Ula, seeing his chance of getting a message to the Imperial envoy slipping away from him, “how will we know that the bids are genuine?”

“How indeed?” said Yeama, with a knowing smile. “I advise you to bid fairly, so you can be sure that the winning bid reflects the prize’s true worth.”

Thieves and liars and economic rationalists, thought Ula as Yeama led him to the embarrassingly lush hospitality center. To chaos with the lot of them.

ANALYZING THE DATA took the better part of an hour. The Cinzia shown in recordings taken by Bareesh’s pirate had been a light star cruiser of unfamiliar design, but Ula’s sharp eye detected hints of an Imperial chassis under a refurbished hull. It could have been an old S-class model, stripped down and rebuilt from the inside out. The drives had a similar signature, although their emissions had been baffled somehow. Fragments of the hull collected after the explosion showed high proportions of rare metals—similar to those of the object sitting in Tassaa Bareesh’s vault. Nothing about the ship gave any hint as to its origins.

A world rich in exotic metals would be a prize indeed, Ula thought as he scoured the data for clues. Perhaps his trip hadn’t been for nothing after all. Such rare substances were the backbone of many industries, from communications to war. Shortages had delayed many projects crucial to the Empire’s expansion already, including some so secret that he heard of them only through reports issued to Supreme Commander Stantorrs by Republic spies. His own side didn’t trust him to know.

“It’s all a game,” he muttered to himself, pushing the holovid away from him in frustration.

“Is anything the matter, Envoy?” asked Potannin, standing to attention by the entrance to their suite.

“Oh, nothing, Sergeant,” he said. “I’m just tired.”

“Would you like to retire? You have a choice of beds—”

“I don’t think I’ll sleep tonight.”

“You have received several invitations from other parties in the palace, sir. If any interest you, I could make arrangements.”

“Would that be safe?”

Potannin’s angular face displayed confident assurance. “I would hazard a guess, sir, that so long as the Hutts propose to profit from us, we’re in the safest place in the galaxy.”

“True.” Ula thought for a moment. “All right, then. Let me see the list.”

He scanned it quickly, glossing over minor ambassadors, ambitious crime bosses, and several beings whose intentions were even less honorable. One name caught his attention.

“Jet Nebula, that pilot with the ridiculous name who has free run of the palace. What does he want from me?”

“I couldn’t say, sir. But he’s invited you for a drink in a cantina called the Poison Pit.”

“Sounds unpleasant.”

“Shall I turn them all down, sir?”

“Yes. No, wait.” There had been something odd in Jet Nebula’s disaffected stance, and in his placement in the welcoming hall. If he was truly so bored, why had he put himself in a position from which he could study everyone in the room?

“Tell Nebula I’ll meet him in half an hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

Ula picked a refresher at random and changed his robes for something more sensible. The ones Diplomatic Supplies had provided him with made him feel like a clown. And besides, he didn’t want to stand out. If he was going to discover who this Jet Nebula really was—or at the very least, what he knew—he would do it dressed properly.

Before he left the refresher, he took the compact hold-out blaster he’d packed and slipped it into his breast pocket. Just in case.

THE CANTINA WAS as bad as he had anticipated, with alien and human lowlifes clustered in twos and threes over pots of dense-looking brown beverages. A complex roar of ever-changing frequencies blasted the space, performed by a quintet of Bith; Ula could only assume they considered the noise they made to be music.

He exchanged a glance with Potannin, who stationed watches at both entrances and put the three remaining soldiers at strategic points around the cantina. Their presence alone caused some patrons to pick up their drinks and stagger elsewhere.

Jet Nebula occupied a dark corner, sprawled across a low padded lounge with his head tipped back and his battered droid standing protectively at his feet. The glass in front of him was empty. As Ula approached, Jet’s head came up and fixed him with the same stare he had been using earlier that day.

“Nice duds,” he said.

Ula felt his face turning red. Diplomatic Supplies’ idea of “sensible” amounted to a mock-military uniform in purple, with meaningless epaulets and insignias on every available surface. He had taken off the baubles, but there was nothing he could do about the color except drape a gray cloak across his shoulders and hope for the best.

“You wanted to talk with me,” he said, cutting right to the chase.

“That depends, mate. Are you buying?”

“Is that all you’re after—a free drink?”

“So what if I am? A man’s got to take it where he finds it, in my line of work.”

“Which is?”

“Can’t you guess? It takes a faker to know a faker.”

A cold chill ran down Ula’s spine. What was Jet saying? That he knew Ula was an informer? Was he going to blackmail him for money—or worse?

Jet smiled and scratched lazily at his chin. “All these questions are making me thirsty. How about you send your man to buy us a round of Reactor Cores and we’ll talk like proper gentlemen.”

Ula had no choice but to agree. On the off-chance Jet did know something, he didn’t want it revealed in front of his security detail.

Ula gave the orders, and the droid tottered off after Potannin. He sat down, ignoring the sudden weakness in his knees. “What do you want?”

“I’ve already told you, and you’re already providing.”

“I’m not talking about alcohol. Be more explicit.”

“If you can’t figure it out, then you’re no use to me.”

“What do you mean?” Ula felt his indignation rising, but before he could lash out in return, something occurred to him. “Wait a minute. Yeama said you had the favor of Tassaa Bareesh. What are you doing down here cadging drinks off me?”

Jet said nothing.

Ula examined everything he knew about Jet, and found a clutch of previously disconnected facts taking a surprising new configuration in his mind.

“That’s your ship in the dock,” he said, “the one with the blast damage. You ordered a smuggler’s drink. You said faker because of what you do, not me.”

“ ‘All politicians are liars,’ ” he said, “to quote Chancellor Janarus.”

Ula didn’t laugh at the paradox. “You’re the pirate who found the Cinzia.”

“I prefer freight captain,” said Jet, “but I am that fellow.” He executed a mock-bow from his slouched position on the lounge. “The Hutts don’t forget who their friends are.”

“You don’t look like you’re enjoying yourself.”

“What’s not to like? My ship’s impounded, and I can’t leave the palace. I’m in paradise.”

Ula leaned in closer and whispered over the table, “Is that what you want to talk to me about? If so, I don’t have the authority to—”

Jet waved him silent. Potannin had returned with the drinks. They were large, murky, and dangerous looking. Jet raised his, blew off the scintillating foam, and toasted the Republic.

Ula echoed the toast and took a sip. Electric fire burned a skylane down his throat and caused a slow detonation in his stomach.

“Are you all right, sir?” asked Potannin.

“Yes, Sergeant,” he managed. “Leave us for the moment. But stay close.” In case I need a medic …

“Yes, sir.”

The security detail moved respectfully out of earshot.

“Not your usual?” said Jet with a sly smile.

Ula normally didn’t drink at all, but he wasn’t about to admit that. “I can get word to my superior, if you want to arrange an extraction, but—”

“That’s not why I invited you here. I just think someone should know what really happened to the Cinzia in Wild Space that day.”

Ula’s curiosity was roused by that. “I’ve already heard the recording and seen the data. Are you telling me there’s more?”

“Much more. Drink up and listen.”

So began a long and rambling tale about rivalry and betrayals among smugglers. Ula paid close attention at first. Jet had been worse than a smuggler: he had been a privateer hired by the Republic to scour the fringes of the inner galaxy for theft-worthy matériel to assist the Republic cause. That was interesting for two reasons. It confirmed reports suggesting that the Republic did indeed engage in this inglorious tactic. It also showed how easily the objects up for auction could have fallen right into the Republic’s possession. The intervention of the Hutts had, for once, worked to the Empire’s advantage.

Ula felt a little discomfited by that. He believed that civilized society should never allow such decadence and corruption to thrive. That the Republic traded with the likes of Tassaa Bareesh was evidence, if he needed it, of his enemy’s invalidity to rule—but what did it say about the Empire if he allowed it to profit by similar means?

As Jet talked on, Ula’s attention began to drift. Who cared about the invidious Shinqo and whether he had been allowed to leave the palace or not? What did it matter if Jet Nebula felt poorly used by his new masters, who had no intention of sharing the massive profit they were bound to make from the auction with anyone else? Why was he wasting his time on such a self-absorbed, self-pitying display?

Sip by sip, Ula worked his way through the drink. Jet didn’t appear to be touching his much, and that puzzled him, distantly. By the time the smuggler finished describing the sad end of the Cinzia, Ula’s eyesight was beginning to get a little fuzzy.

“Say that again,” he said, finding it strangely hard to keep his elbow planted on the table. “Something about diplomomo—ah, diplomats.”

“They were on a diplomatic mission. I asked them who to, and they didn’t answer. Doesn’t it make you wonder? Both the Republic and the Empire are bidding for information on where these people came from and what they were carrying. If the crew of the Cinzia weren’t coming to talk to either of you, who were they coming to talk to?”

That was an interesting point. Ula filed it away to think about later, when the floor stopped wobbling.

“Then there’s the explosion.”

“What about the explosion?”

“Well, it was a bit overdramatic, wasn’t it? But at the same time, it wasn’t very effective. You’d think if they really wanted to make the point, if they’d cared enough to kill themselves, they’d have gone out of their way to do it right.”

“You would think so. You would,” Ula agreed. “But what if they argued? What if not everyone wanted to be blown up? I wouldn’t want to be.”

“That’s a good point, Envoy Vii,” Jet said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Ula was developing a strong liking for Jet Nebula, despite the fact that he appeared to have grown an extra head. “Another round?”

“Wait,” said the smuggler, sitting up straight all of a sudden. “Something’s not right.”

Ula looked around. It had become very quiet without him noticing. The Zelosian band was making no noise anymore. The cantina’s patrons had all slumped over their tables. Some of them were actually snoring into their drinks. Even the bartender was sprawled across the counter, twitching slightly.

As he watched, Sergeant Potannin sagged forward and fell bonelessly to the floor.

That couldn’t be right, Ula thought. Since when did anyone in a security detail get drunk?

“Obah gas!” Jet was on his feet with a blaster in his hand. “Clunker!”

The battered droid came instantly to the smuggler’s side, its photoreceptors glowing bright.

“Good. Keep an eye on the door. I’m going to—”

A sharp crack came from behind them. The droid tottered, enveloped in bright blue bolts of energy. A whining noise came from its innards. It froze, a restraining bolt projecting from the side of its head.

“Don’t move, Nebula,” called a vocoder-enhanced voice from Ula’s right.

Ula turned in time to see a section of the ceiling fall away. The head and shoulders of a Mandalorian projected from the hole. The rifle he held was aimed squarely at Jet’s chest.

“Stay where you are, Envoy Vii. This doesn’t involve you. Put the blaster down, Nebula—now.”

The smuggler obeyed. “If you wanted to cut in, all you had to do was ask.”

With an elegantly muscular flip, the Mandalorian landed feetfirst on the floor below him. “Your droid will recover. So will the bystanders. I used enough gas to knock them out, no more.”

“Lucky we were drinking Reactor Cores,” Jet said. “Why do you think smugglers order them so much? They taste awful, but they grant immunity to all sorts—”

“Enough talk,” said the Mandalorian, indicating with the rifle’s business end that Jet should step out from behind the table.

“Are you at least going to tell us who you are?” asked the smuggler.

“I know,” said Ula, although he was still struggling to think through the narcotic drink. “You’re Dao Stryver. What is it you want with Lema Xandret, exactly?”

The Mandalorian’s attention turned squarely to him, and suddenly Ula felt completely sober.

“You, too,” said Stryver, swinging the rifle. “You’re both coming with me.”

“Or what?” Jet asked.

“You don’t want to know ‘or what.’ Get moving.”

Too late Ula remembered the hold-out weapon in his pocket. He staggered to his feet and was propelled at blasterpoint from the cantina, Jet Nebula gray-faced at his side.

THE SIGHT OF A distinctively rounded, low-chinned helmet brought Larin to an abrupt halt. With an urgent wave of her hand to signal to Shigar to stay under cover, she backpedaled into a crowded corridor and stayed there until the Mandalorian went safely by.

A second glance told her that it wasn’t Dao Stryver. This one’s armor was silver and blue, not gray and green, and Stryver was both taller and more massive. People moved out of the way.

She grabbed a passerby at random. “Who was that?” she asked, indicating the receding helmet.

“Only Akshae Shanka,” said the mousy Evocii, as though she were an idiot. “Stay away from him, if you know what’s good for you. He’s come second in two separate Great Hunts.”

“And I bet that hasn’t improved his mood,” Larin muttered as the slave hurried away. While the Mandalorians waited for the next big war to break out, they amused themselves by ritual fighting among themselves, drawing in anyone foolish enough to show an interest in their violent ascendancy games. They were dangerous and unpredictable in all things except one: having returned to the galaxy during the Great War, they weren’t going to slink away again anytime soon.

Larin waited a full minute to make sure Shanka didn’t come back, then she moved back out into the flow of the main branch and waved for Shigar to follow.

They were following information gleaned from one of the palace’s chefs. Two high-security visitors—the Republic and Imperial envoys, Larin and Shigar assumed—were being housed in one of the luxury wings deep in the heart of the rambling structure. It was difficult to get into those parts of the palace, but they’d learned of a shaft connecting the underlying service routes—like the one they were following at the moment—and the high-security basements. Getting from one to the other was taking time, but thus far it wasn’t proving to be especially difficult.

Larin led the way, following the map she had memorized and keeping her eyes firmly forward. Shigar was hard on her heels, somewhere; she was sure of that, although she couldn’t see him. He walked as lightly as an Alderaanian swan and vanished into a crowd like a puff of smoke. When she stopped at the next junction to check her bearings, he simply appeared beside her, as if from nowhere.

“Almost there,” he said. “I’ll take point for the next leg.”

“All right,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking: why are we going this way in the first place? Shouldn’t our priority be the vault?”

“It would be, if we knew where it is. When we reach one of the envoys, then we’ll have our guide. We know they’ve both seen it. Asking the right people is always better than asking at random.”

She heartily agreed with that. They’d learned a lot by mingling with the palace’s downtrodden staff, but every important piece of information they had gathered came with a wealth of worthless trivia. Sorting the one out from the other had taken more time than either of them would have liked.

“After you,” she said, waving him ahead of her. It was her turn to trail after now. A pair of people walking side by side always drew more attention than individuals in a crowd. Surrounded by unknown serfs and servants, they blended in, passed by, and were instantly forgotten. That was something Akshae Shanka would never manage.

THEY REACHED THE ENTRANCE to the subterranean shaft without incident. There, Larin tripped a passing Gamorrean into a heavily laden Evocii, and during the resulting distraction Shigar activated his lightsaber and cut through the door’s massive security bolt. Rusty hinges groaned as he swung the door open; no one noticed over the shouts and recriminations. The argument was barely reaching its peak when Larin crept in after him. Together they pulled the massive door closed.

It was much quieter on the other side, and darker, too. Shigar took a deep breath, glad to be out of the multispecies press and the poverty they endured. He had glimpsed the luxuries lavished on those at the top of the social pyramid on Hutta. He knew what privileges they enjoyed. All around him was the cost, in filth and sentient misery.

That the underbelly of Coruscant was exactly the same gave him some pause in blaming the Hutts. Perhaps it was simply the nature of things. Perhaps Master Nobil’s rebuke was well earned. How could the Jedi Order change something that had endured for millennia? It wasn’t the Council’s brief, not when the Emperor’s wolves were snapping at the galaxy’s throat.

A faint yellow light flared into life. “Straight ahead, then left, wasn’t it?”

Larin’s voice echoed sibilantly in the miles of metal pipe ahead of them. By the light of her blaster rifle’s utility torch, he raised one finger to his lips and nodded. She rolled her eyes and said, “There’s no one down here. That’s what we were told.”

He shook his head and indicated that it was her turn to lead. Better not to take any chances, he thought.

Larin moved off at a cautious lope through the tunnel. The pipe was dry and empty, and easily large enough for them to stand upright. They could have run side by side if they’d wanted to. Occasionally the ceiling was interrupted by pipes and clusters of cables, forcing them to duck, and on two occasions they had to jump across a shaft, but apart from that there were no interruptions.

They reached the junction in fifteen minutes. As Larin approached, Shigar reached out for her shoulder. With a firm grip, he pulled her to a halt.

She looked at him inquiringly. He put one hand over the rifle’s lamp, extinguishing the light.

All was black for a moment; then a dull glow appeared. The sound of faint movement echoed around them. Someone was in the tunnel, just around the corner.

Shigar moved forward, hardly daring to breathe. Through the Force, he sensed three organisms in a cluster, but not clearly enough to identify their intentions. If they were lying in wait, why the light? If it wasn’t a trap, why the silence?

He eased his head around the corner. Three large, horned figures stood in a cluster around a lamp, looking up at the ceiling and scratching their heads. They were clearly Hortek, which explained why they weren’t talking: they were telepathic. Furthermore, the thick work uniforms they wore and the tools scattered at their feet explained what they were doing in the tunnels. They were a maintenance team, and therefore perfectly innocent.

Shigar took a moment to reassure Larin, then closed his eyes. His telepathic powers were modest at best, but they had been enhanced under the Grand Master to the point that she could convey simple concepts to him without speaking. The Hortek were receptive to outside thoughts and vulnerable to Force persuasion. If Shigar could combine the two, he could easily get rid of them.

He found the focus required with surprising ease. The practice on the way to Hutta had done him good. Within moments, the Hortek picked up their tools and moved off.

“Nice one,” whispered Larin when the sound of heavy footsteps faded away. She eased around the corner and flicked the light to its lowest setting.

“It gets tougher from here on,” Shigar said, unhitching his lightsaber hilt. “Let’s not get complacent.”

“Hey, look at this.” Larin had the light aimed up at the ceiling, where the Hortek had been working. Something had burst through the shaft’s metal wall, melting it. Several silver threads dangled down like strands of web. Larin blew gently on one of them. It swayed stiffly from side to side. “That looks like wire.”

“It can’t be,” said Shigar. “It’s getting longer.”

Larin pointed the light at the bottom of the thread. Its terminus was visibly extending lower.

“Growing,” she said, “or extruding?”

“Doesn’t matter, either way,” he said. “What’s going on up there is none of our business.”

“In a Hutt’s palace,” she said, “I’d call that a lifesaving philosophy.”

THE FIRST SECURITY drone they encountered was a metal sphere that dropped whirring out of a chimney, sprouting weapons as it came. Larin downed it with one shot, beating Shigar by a bare millisecond.

She blew imaginary smoke from her blaster. “You’ll have to do better than that to beat, uh, me.”

She’d almost said to beat the Blackstars, but caught it in time. She didn’t want him to wonder what one of the Republic’s elite commandos was doing skulking about with him in the bowels of Tassaa Bareesh’s stronghold. Just thinking about telling that story punctured her confidence. Still, what they were doing felt like old times, and the mental state was surprisingly easy to fall into. The brashness, the boasting, and the belligerence—alongside the running around dark places and shooting things.

“Stay alert,” said Shigar. “There’ll be more of those.”

“I was born alert,” she said, not ready to abandon the old-time feeling just yet.

The second security drone whizzed out of a side tunnel, flashing its lights and issuing a warning to stand still. Shigar caught this one, spearing it through the middle with the blade of his lightsaber.

“Not so fast that time, were you?”

She smiled.

They moved cautiously. Drones were a danger, but their presence meant that they were nearing their objective. The luxury wings were almost as heavily protected as Tassaa Bareesh’s sleeping chamber.

The shaft began branching and doubling back on itself. Shigar navigated them unerringly—she hoped—as drones converged on them like millflies. Their reaction times improved with practice until the drones barely had time to appear before being destroyed.

Then a drone three times as large as the others hummed down the shaft toward them, shooting rapidly. Shigar spun his lightsaber like a shield, reflecting its own fire back at it. Gesturing with his hand, he brought down part of the ceiling and crushed the drone under rubble.

“We don’t want to do that very often,” he said when the dust cleared.

“People are bound to notice when the floor caves in under them.”

They picked their way over the pile of fallen masonry.

“Up here,” said Shigar, spying something ahead.

She followed close behind him. There was a ladder mounted firmly in the wall, leading up into a vertical shaft.

“You’re sure this is the one?” she asked.

“As sure as I can be.” He tested his weight on the rungs. They held without complaint. “I’ll go first.”

“Don’t kill anything until I get there,” she said.

THE SHAFT LED to a basement filled with barrels of oil buried under two centimeters of insect shells and dust. It looked as though they hadn’t been touched for decades. Shigar moved lightly through them, leaving barely a footprint. Larin was nearly as stealthy, and she was a sharp shot with that snub rifle of hers. Several times he had been tempted to ask why she had been wasting her time in Coruscant’s old districts, but he didn’t want to pry. Behind the banter, she was tight-lipped. If there was something he needed to know, she would tell him eventually, he was sure.

Be kind, Master Satele had said. He had thought very carefully about that instruction. It had to apply to Larin, the young woman he had already rescued once, from the Mandalorian. Was it a kindness, though, to be ripped out of your home and plunged into the middle of someone else’s war? Some would have thought not. But he sensed in Larin a corrosive rootlessness that could poison her if it wasn’t counteracted. On Coruscant she was just another disenfranchised person caught up in food riots, separatist uprisings, and corruption. What she needed was direction, a purpose. He could give her that much, temporarily, if she wanted it.

The basement of barrels delivered them to a door that had been welded shut. His lightsaber soon disposed of that obstacle. They entered a narrow, musty stairwell that led them up, level by level, to a cellar that was currently in use. A team of Evocii was busy unloading crates of delicate foodstuffs into an expansive cool room. They were far too busy to notice the fleeting figures that ran past them, into the kitchens.

Larin found a closet, and Shigar lured a relatively well-dressed slave in after them.

“We are guests of your mistress,” Shigar told her, encouraging her acceptance of the lie by means of a gentle nudge through the Force. “Obviously, we’ve lost our way.”

“You’re a long way from the throne room, sir.”

“Do you know where the two envoys are quartered?”

“Yes, sir. I work in the laundry detail and am frequently called upon to attend those areas.”

“You’ll be happy to remind us how to get there.”

The Evocii provided a detailed description of the two suites. They were practically side by side, with entrances facing in opposite directions. The suite belonging to Envoy Vii of the Republic was closer.

“Ever heard of this Vii fellow?” Larin asked him in an aside.

Shigar had to confess that he hadn’t. “Politics is my Master’s business.”

“It should be everyone’s business.”

“Between you and me, I agree completely.”

Shigar interrupted the slave, who had descended to ridiculous detail in her efforts to help. “You’ll give us access codes to the secure areas, too, in case we’ve forgotten them.”

“Yes, sir, but not to the suites themselves. I don’t know what they are. The guards can help you with that when you get there, I expect. They will know you, of course …?”

“Of course,” Shigar reassured her. “You don’t need to worry about that.”

“No, sir. I don’t need to worry about that.”

The Evocii obediently gave them all she knew, and Shigar committed it to memory.

“Before you go,” he said to her, “I want you to know that it’s unsafe down here today. Find somewhere to hide, and stay there until the fuss dies down. You don’t want to get hurt.”

“I don’t want to get hurt.”

“That’s right.”

The slave left the closet and hurried off to obey his command.

“Ready?” he asked Larin.

“I was born ready.”

“You’ve already done that one.”

“I have? Well, you’d better tell me where to shoot before I embarrass myself further.”

They eased out of the closet and hurried through the well-appointed corridors. It made a pleasant change not to be kicking up dust and running through cobwebs. Instead, fragile vases and statues lined the corridors, and Shigar took great care not to damage anything unnecessarily. Someone had made these things. The preservation of culture was among a Jedi’s many missions.

They came to the checkpoint the Evocii slave had described. Five Houk sentries guarded the entrance to the Republic guest quarters. That was more than expected. Larin took in the situation at a glance, and communicated her strategy to Shigar with a series of brisk, concise hand gestures. He nodded, happy to take her lead.

She rolled out from cover and came up on her knees, firing into the shoulders of two of the Houks. They toppled backward. Shigar leapt past her, using his blade to defend both of them. A third Houk went down, struck by a bolt from his own weapon, deflected back at him from Shigar’s lightsaber. That left two. Larin took a close burn from one of them and retaliated with two shots to the chest. Shigar sliced the remaining one’s arm off.

He stood still in a defensive pose in the curling smoke, ready to strike again if any of the fallen so much as twitched. Larin moved lightly to his side, unhurt by the near-miss, although her shoulder now boasted a new charcoal patch.

“No alarm,” she said with satisfaction. “We got them all in time.”

“The door will be locked. See if you can get through without triggering anything.”

She knelt down by the lock and took off her helmet while he kept an eye out for passersby. A stream of precision tools came out of the left thigh hatch of her armor. She applied them one by one to the lock mechanism, humming softly as she worked. Shigar was about to ask how much longer she would be when she pocketed the tools, stood up, and touched the access panel.

The door slid open, surprising two Houks on the other side. Shigar deflected their blasterfire while Larin neatly dealt with them. Then they hurried into the suite and closed the door behind them.

The scene awaiting them was utterly unexpected.

A gaudily dressed Twi’lek was standing over the bodies of a Republic security detail. He reached for a communicator, but Shigar whisked it out of his grasp with a quick Force pull.

“What’s going on here?” Larin asked in crisp, commanding tones. “What have you done with the envoy?”

“I?” The Twi’lek looked mortally affronted. “These creatures came to harm through no action of my own. They were found this way, drugged, in a cantina. The envoy is missing.”

Larin pressed the barrel of her rifle under the Twi’lek’s chin. “You’re lying.”

“The envoy is an honored guest, invited here solely to do business! We bear him no ill will!”

“He’s got a point,” Shigar said.

“That doesn’t mean I have to like it.” She reversed the rifle and clubbed the Twi’lek across the head. He dropped like a stone. “You stay there while I double-check your story.”

Shigar closed the door behind them and locked it again. Larin pulled one of the fallen bodyguards up to a couch and lightly slapped his face. “He’s got a pulse. That’s a start.”

Before she could do the man any serious damage, Shigar came to help, lowering the bodyguard’s head onto a cushion before trying to wake him up.

One hand stayed on the cushion. The other cupped the bodyguard’s forehead. Concentrating, Shigar nudged the flow of the Force through his body, encouraging wakefulness.

The bodyguard twitched and opened his eyes in alarm. There was a tearing sound as all the spines on his scalp shot out. The cushion absorbed them all.

“I’m sorry to startle you,” Shigar said in calm voice. “You’ve been drugged. My name is Shigar Konshi. This is Larin Moxla. Grand Master Satele Shan sent us to aid you.” That wasn’t entirely true, but as an explanation it would do.

The man pushed him away and sat up. He ran his hand across his scalp and cleared his throat.

“My apologies for attacking you. I am Sergeant Potannin. Where is Envoy Vii?”

“We don’t know,” said Larin. “We were hoping you could tell us.”

Potannin shook his head. “We must have been ambushed. Envoy Vii was talking to a man who works for the Hutts. His name is Jet Nebula. And there was someone else—a Mandalorian.”

“What Mandalorian?” Larin asked, leaning close. “Do you have a name?”

“I don’t remember.” He looked at Larin and Shigar in appeal. “We have to find the envoy.”

Shigar nodded. An active Dao Stryver on Hutta would be an unexpected complication, but it wasn’t necessarily a disaster. The primary mission could still continue.

“All right,” he said. “You and Larin look for the envoy. If the Twi’lek is telling the truth, the Hutts will help you.”

“And you?” asked Larin.

“I’m going to check out that vault. What you can’t learn from the envoy, I’ll find out there. Sergeant Potannin, will you give me directions?”

Potannin provided a comprehensive description of the route from the luxury suite to the vault, via a security air lock. Shigar committed it to memory.

“Did you see what was in there?”

“There’s the Cinzia’s navicomp and an artifact Envoy Vii couldn’t identify. Made of some weird metal.” Potannin looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, but that’s all I know.”

“No matter.” Shigar wished Potannin had learned more. Ancient Sith and Jedi relics could sometimes be identified by their markings. “I’ll take a look myself and see if I can figure it out.”

“Are you sure you want to do this alone?” asked Larin before he set out.

“I have my comlink,” he said. “I’ll call you if I get into trouble.”

“You’d better.” She touched his arm briefly, and then pulled away. “See you later, either way.”

Shigar left her and Sergeant Potannin to wake the others. With lightsaber at the ready, he eased back into the ebbs and flows of Tassaa Bareesh’s palace and counted off the intersections, one at a time.

DARTH CHRATIS’S VOICE carried faintly across the thousands of kilometers separating him from his apprentice.

“Did you see any Jedi in the Republic envoy’s party?”

“None at all, Master.” Ax could hear the disappointment in her own voice. She’d been looking forward to fighting something more challenging than the inept palace guards. “If they’re here, they’re maintaining a very low profile.”

“It’s clear, then, that they plan to steal the artifact before us. Otherwise they would be visible. Your orders are unchanged. You must move quickly to ensure you get there first.”

“It will be difficult, Master. The doors are massive, and there are bound to be alarms—”

“That’s for you to worry about. Fail me and you will report to the Council yourself.”

The line clicked shut, and Ax smiled in the darkness. Darth Chratis was as transparent as glass. If she succeeded, he planned to take the credit; if she failed, the blame would be hers. But some of the tarnish would inevitably rub off on him if she did fail, halting his plans for advancement. It was amusing, therefore, to keep him nervous. That made him predictable.

Barely three minutes had passed since she had set the charges. They were old, leftovers from a mining expedition that had abandoned its gear in one of the palace’s three warehouses, but she had taken enough of them to knock a small chunk out of a hill. If the timers worked properly, Tassaa Bareesh’s guards would soon have something to occupy their attention.

Meanwhile, she had crawling to do. Plans of the vaults sliced from the palace’s mainframe showed that they were freestanding structures with their own power and air supplies. Surrounding all of the broad durasteel boxes was a meter of clear space, filled with laser trip wires. If anything got past the trip wires and simultaneously touched both box and wall, a circuit would trip, sounding an alarm loud enough to wake the Emperor himself on Dromund Kaas.

The plans also showed that the vault was held in place by a series of repulsors, powered by induction coils at the base of a ferrocrete cradle. Ferrocrete was relatively easy to cut through with a lightsaber. Ax wormed her way through tiny crawl spaces to a position directly under one corner of the vault containing the remains of the Cinzia. Wiring schematics showed no cables at that point. All she would have to do was wait for the distraction, cut her way upward, disable the trip wires, and leap across the gap. Within the hour, she hoped to be touching the outside of the vault with her bare fingertips. From there, she would play it by ear.

She slithered like a rat through spaces that were barely large enough for her to breathe, angling awkwardly around sharp corners and edging with her toes and fingertips. She held her lightsaber ahead of her, ready to cut through any serious obstacles. The air was thick with dust and smoke. She blinked frequently to clear her eyes.

A subsonic boom came through masonry surrounding her, followed quickly by another. She held her breath as the palace shook, and pressed outward with the Force, just in case something heavy shifted into her. A series of smaller booms reverberated when the charges triggered a chain reaction in the palace’s primary reactor, as she’d hoped they might. She imagined the Hutts and their slaves scurrying to find out what had happened. Whether they did or not didn’t matter to her. Neither did she care if the secondary reactor restored power immediately. The vault was self-contained. Keeping her hosts distracted was her primary objective.

Another minute’s crawling brought her to the place she needed to be. The crawl space was broad enough for her to squat, and she did so, holding her lightsaber pommel before her. Closing her eyes, she ignited it and raised the blade slowly into the ceiling above her. Ferrocrete bubbled and hissed; stinging flecks struck her skin. When the hilt was flush with the ceiling itself, she stopped and closed her eyes.

The power of the dark side flowed through her, raising the temperature of the ferrocrete to scalding. She breathed lightly through her nose, not caring if she was scalded. A red glow surrounded her, radiating from the surface above. She maintained her concentration, forming a self-protective bubble about her as the ferrocrete became molten and began to drip.

The bubble rose gently through the lava, delivering her without further effort to the space under the base of the vault. When the bubble broached the top of the molten ferrocrete, she lowered her lightsaber and opened her eyes. By the red glow she made out the durasteel vault through the top of the bubble and a tangle of cables that was part of the ferrocrete structure around her. They remained entangled as the lava cooled. Not one of the cables had been cut, so in theory no alarms should have sounded.

Almost there.

Only the trip wires remained. She raised her head carefully out of the cooling bubble, but didn’t see any sign of lasers anywhere. They should have been clearly visible in all the smoke, but not one glowing line broke the view.

Intrigued, she placed her gloved hands on the still-warm lip of the bubble and raised herself bodily into view.

No alarms. None other than those caused by her explosions, anyway. Against all expectations, the vault’s external security system appeared to be disabled.

Could the Jedi possibly have beaten her to the prize?

She crouched in the space under the vault, next to one of the repulsors holding the massive structure above her head, and reactivated her lightsaber. By its ruddy glow, she made out the lenses of the laser system staring blindly at her. They hadn’t been physically interfered with, at least. She reached up and touched the base of the vault. No footsteps or other obvious movements from within. That was another positive sign.

An unexpected detail gave her further reason to be cautious. The midsection of the vault had been physically connected to the cradle beneath by a series of silver wires. She approached them, careful not to snap them. Their purpose was unknown, as was the way they had prevented the second alarm system from going off. As soon as the vault was penetrated, all of Tassaa Bareesh’s palace should have known.

Something unexpected was going on, and she didn’t like it.

Ax deactivated her lightsaber and sat cross-legged on the hot ferrocrete. If someone deactivated the repulsors, she would be squished like a bug. Quashing that thought as best she could, she cast her feelings out into the space around her, searching for signs of anything out of place.

The vault, first of all, was uninhabited, apart from the faintest glimmer of biological activity inside the anomalous artifact recovered from the Cinzia. She took the opportunity to examine it this way, and felt a rare shiver race down her spine. What was in there? The tiny life signs were clustered in four groups, but they didn’t feel like minds, exactly. And something about them made her instincts recoil.

My mother made this, she couldn’t help but think. My mother, who should be dead.

Putting all speculation on that front firmly from her mind, Ax examined the antechamber and the other three vaults, next. It was possible, albeit exceedingly unlikely, that an entirely independent thief had targeted something in one of the other vaults, shutting down hers in the process. A quick scan proved that theory false. There was no one out there at all.

Almost she gave up there, chiding herself for overreacting. The distraction she had created wouldn’t last forever. And she didn’t want Master Chratis to worry too long. Part of the point of telling him that the mission would be difficult was to surprise him when she pulled it off quickly. The thought filled her with anticipatory satisfaction.

Before rising, she cast a quick mental look through the circular security air lock outside the antechamber.

Her face twisted into an immediate scowl. Jedi! She would recognize that humorless and inhibited mental stench anywhere. A single specimen had bypassed the alarms and burned through the locks on the outer door. That was impressive work, but he wasn’t moving fast enough. She could cut her way under the vault and up into the antechamber long before he had the inner door open. And then, when he did, he would get a whole lot more than he bargained for.

Grinning, she moved from cross-legged to a crouch, and began melting her way through the last barrier standing between her and her enemy.

DAO STRYVER USED a dense, adhesive web extruded from a nozzle on his left cuff to lash Ula and Jet into their seats. The dining room he had led them to was empty, containing nothing but chairs and a table, but as befit the palace of Tassaa Bareesh these were fine examples of precious materials and design, and therefore too sturdy for the prisoners to break.

Ula’s head was pounding with the aftereffects of the Reactor Core, but he noticed the gleam of metal revealed when Stryver welded the door shut. Durasteel, most likely, also befitting the palace of a Hutt. All manner of safety-conscious criminal celebrities might have eaten in this room. And died here, possibly.

Ula tested the bonds and found them to be immovable. His fingers were already going numb.

“You know my name,” said the Mandalorian, standing over him. “How?”

Trying and failing to suppress a stammer, Ula described the report received by Supreme Commander Stantorrs from Grand Master Satele Shan. That was where the Mandalorian had first been identified to him. He had no compunctions about revealing the extent of the Republic’s knowledge, since it would assure Stryver that little else had been uncovered about him or Lema Xandret.

“Will you untie me now?” Ula asked him.

“The only reason you are still alive is because there is no honor in killing you—and no advantage, either.” The Mandalorian towered hugely over him. “That could easily change.”

Ula fell back into his seat and closed his mouth.

Jet sat in the chair next to Ula, staring unflappably up at their captor.

“I assume you know me from somewhere,” he said. “Did I ruin your sister’s reputation? If so, I’m afraid she was quite forgettable.”

Stryver didn’t rise to the bait. “Captain Nebula, I’m told it was you who spoke to the crew of the Cinzia.”

“Who said that?”

“A former crewmate of yours called Shinqo.”

“He’d say anything to get your blaster out of his face.”

“My assessment precisely. Is what he told me true?”

“How do you know I’m any different from him?”

“I’ll be the judge of that.”

“Why you want to know? What’s so important that you’ll go halfway across the galaxy to find it out?”

“Just answer my questions, Nebula. What did they tell you?”

“Do you mean ‘what’ or ‘how much’?”

Ula didn’t understand why Jet was making things more difficult than they had to be. “I’ve heard the recording,” Ula said. “They didn’t say anything to him.”

The Mandalorian turned back to him. “What were their exact words?”

“That they were on a diplomatic mission and didn’t want to be boarded.”

“Did they mention any names?”

“None.”

“Could the recording have been edited?”

“I suppose it might have been, but—”

“Be silent.” Stryver turned back to Jet. “Does the name Lema Xandret mean anything to you?”

“If that’s your sister—”

The butt of Stryver’s blaster dug into Jet’s throat. “Do not play games with me. She was an Imperial droid maker who disappeared fifteen standard years ago. Was her name mentioned by anyone aboard that ship?”

“No,” Jet said. “And there were no survivors, if you think she was aboard. Shinqo told you that, I’m sure.”

“He told me there was wreckage and that you gave it to the Hutts.”

“Why would I do something like that?”

The muffled boom of an explosion rocked the floor, making Ula jump. Dust rained from the ceiling. Stryver pointed his rifle at the door, ready to fire on anyone who burst through it, but the blast had come from much farther away. A second quickly followed the first, and the lights flickered. Distantly, alarms began to sound.

“The palace is under attack,” said the Mandalorian. “There is no time now for prevarication. If you know what survived the explosion, you must tell me.”

There was something in the Mandalorian’s voice, a rising urgency that made Ula speak out of more than just self-preservation.

“I’ve seen it,” he said. “It’s in a vault not far from here.”

“What is it?”

“There are two things, and they’re both for sale. The Cinzia’s navicomp—”

“Intact?”

“So I was told.”

“And the other item?”

“I don’t know what it is.”

“Describe it.”

“Silver, tubular, about a meter high—made of rare metals and some kind of organic component. No insignia. Do you know what it is?”

The Mandalorian fiddled with his armor and projected a tiny holovid of the palace grounds. “There are seven maximum-security vaults in Tassaa Bareesh’s enclave. Tell me which one contains these two items.”

“Why?” asked Jet. “It’s just space junk.”

“You did not believe so,” said the Mandalorian.

“I’ll sell anything, or try to.”

“If you release my hand,” said Ula, “I’ll show you which vault it is.”

“You’re not after this mystery planet as well, are you?” asked Jet, rolling his eyes as Stryver loosened the web restraining Ula’s left hand. “Unless—ah! Yes. Unless you want the navicomp for an entirely different reason.”

Stryver ignored him. “Point,” he said, holding the holovid out to Ula.

“Bring it a bit closer. That one there, I think.”

As the Mandalorian studied the floor plan, Ula slipped his hand into his pocket and produced the hold-out blaster.

He listened to himself speak calmly and without fear, as though he were standing outside his own body, watching what was going on.

“Release my other hand,” he said, pointing the blaster at Stryver’s stomach. “I’d prefer to talk as equals.”

Stryver pushed the holovid into Ula’s eyes, blinding him. Ula squeezed the trigger, but Stryver was too fast. With one sweep of his other arm, he swatted the blaster away. The single shot discharged harmlessly into the ceiling

“Nice try.” Jet chuckled as Stryver reaffixed Ula’s hand to the chair. “You’ve never dealt with his kind before, have you?”

Ula was having trouble seeing the funny side. The fear had come crashing back in. His eyes were still dazzled, and his hand felt like it was broken. “How can you tell?”

“Mandalorians don’t believe they have any equals.”

LARIN SLICED INTO another layer of the palace security program and conducted another search. Dao Stryver’s name still appeared only once: his ship, First Blood, was docked in the palace’s private spaceport. Mentally, she kicked herself for missing something as obvious as that, but she didn’t lose any time over it. The architecture of the palace’s security programs was even more baroque than the palace itself. Even if she had thought to search for the Mandalorian’s name, chances were it wouldn’t have appeared the first time.

“Anything?” asked Sergeant Potannin, who was peering worriedly over her shoulder.

She shook her head. Searches on Ula Vii’s name had turned up nothing as well.

“You’re blocking my light.” Potannin was trying to be helpful, but he was no Shigar. “I’ll holler when I’ve found something.”

Pulling another decryption algorithm from her repertoire, Larin tried another route.

Behind them, the Twi’lek, Yeama, entered the missing envoy’s suite and sketched a bow. The bump on his temple stood out in bright red against the green of his skin.

“My mistress offers her profound apologies. The hunt for the kidnappers and those who attacked your sentries will begin immediately.”

Larin scrambled the holoprojector’s view so Yeama wouldn’t see what she was up to in his mistress’s security infrastructure.

“You have a Mandalorian loose in the palace,” she said, “and you didn’t know about it?”

“He is one of many. They do not like to be watched too closely.”

“Now you know why. Perhaps you’ll think twice about the kind of scum you’re dealing with.”

Yeama stiffened. “And you are—?”

“Does it matter who I am? I’m helping you find the envoy. What are you doing?”

The Twi’lek turned an unhealthy color, even for his species. “Everything in our power, naturally—”

“Good, so hop to it. We’re busy here.”

Yeama retreated and Larin de-scrambled the view she’d been looking at.

“There’s a whole other layer down here,” she muttered, marveling at the intricacies of the system. Either it had evolved piece by piece, as each new development added an extra level to what was already there, or it had been designed by the galaxy’s most paranoid software engineer.

Still no luck with Dao Stryver, however. And Envoy Vii didn’t produce a hit. If either of the two men was moving about in the palace, none of the security system’s pattern recognition systems was tracking them.

Larin was beginning to get desperate. This was the one job she had to do, while Shigar attended to the rest of the mission, and she was failing at it. Proving herself capable wasn’t the issue—she knew she was, or had been, at least, otherwise she would never have been in special forces. Getting a score on the board was the main thing, after so long on the bench.

In desperation, she tried “Jet Nebula.”

Instantly a hit appeared. Not just a location, but a coded tag she recognized as a smuggler’s call for help.

“Got something.” Potannin hurried over. “You said Envoy Vii was with that Nebula character, didn’t you? Well, I’ve found him, at least.”

Potannin clapped his hands together and grinned without humor. “Good work, Larin.”

He turned to the escort squad and rattled off a series of orders. Half would stay; the other half would come with him. Larin had to fight the reflex to obey. Had she remained enlisted in the Blackstars, Potannin would have outranked her.

“I’m coming with you,” she told him as his group assembled, checking weapons and light armor.

He nodded. “I was just about to ask you, Larin. Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it, Sarge.”

“Take point, and lead the way.”

Her face was burning as they hurried through the corridors, the echo of their booted feet preceding them, encouraging the throngs to part. This was too familiar, she told herself—dangerously familiar. She couldn’t let herself think that she was back in the fold. If they found out who she was, they would turn on her, just as the goons on Coruscant had. Better to stand apart, for the future’s sake.

They had almost reached the location on her holopad when an explosion shook the ground beneath them, followed by another a short time later. She called a halt, wondering if they were walking into a trap, but the blasts didn’t come any closer. The lights dimmed for a second, then brightened. The palace’s generators, she guessed—damaged either by sabotage or by accident.

The inhabitants of the palace hurried to find shelter. They didn’t scream or panic. They simply gathered up their valuables and loved ones and went somewhere else. Such things were clearly not uncommon on Hutta, Larin gathered.

“Nearly there,” she said, waving the squad forward again. She moved more cautiously as she approached the flagged location. Just because someone had blown up the power plant didn’t mean there wasn’t a trap ahead.

The map grid correlated with an Industrial-sized but very empty kitchen. Larin fell back and let Potannin take the lead. His squad spread out silently to check every hiding space, communicating solely by gestures. They were well practiced and efficient, yet they turned up nothing but a battered old droid who had taken shelter from the fuss. After scanning it for munitions, they let it alone. It returned to the corner it had been lurking in, watching them silently.

“No sign of Envoy Vii,” said Potannin, stating the obvious. “Are you sure this is the right location?”

“I’m positive. The flag said Nebula was here and in some kind of distress.”

“He must’ve been here at some point, in order to leave that clue, but now he’s been taken elsewhere.”

“There’s no evidence of a struggle …”

A disturbance distracted Larin from the search. The droid had stepped out of its corner and was gesticulating wildly.

“Someone quiet that thing down, will you?” barked Potannin.

“No, wait.” Larin approached it, closely watching every move it made. “I recognize the signals it’s giving. They’re from the civil war. It’s saying …” She searched her memory for the correct translation. It had been a long time since she’d taken The History and Use of Military Languages during her special forces training. “He’s saying he left the flag for us to find. Not us specifically, but anyone who could help him. Reinforcements. He followed his Master—Nebula, I presume—via a transponder of some kind, probably hidden in Nebula’s clothes or body. He’s trying to mount a rescue, but … but he lacks the resources to complete his mission objective.”

The droid nodded, and she addressed him directly. “Who has captured Nebula? A Mandalorian?”

The answer was yes.

No wonder, Larin thought, the droid had been looking for reinforcements. “Is Nebula the only prisoner?”

The answer was no.

“Do you know where they are?”

An emphatic yes. The droid took Larin around to the corner, where he’d scratched a detailed map into the metal wall. She recognized that location from her own data. It was a dining room not a dozen meters away.

“I think we can help each other,” she told the droid, who nodded solemnly. “Weapons ready,” she told the squad. “This Mandalorian is big and dangerous. If you get a shot, take it. But watch out for the prisoners. We can’t afford to harm the envoy.”

The droid tapped her firmly on the shoulder with one square, metal finger.

“Or Nebula,” Larin added.

They took their safeties off and fell in around her. Only when they were moving, with the droid taking the lead, did she realize that she had given the orders, not Potannin, who had obeyed along with the rest of his squad. That made her feel both guilty and pleased, although technically, she supposed, she had no rank now, which meant she had no superiors to worry about. That was the thought she clung to as she ran to face Dao Stryver for the second time.

IT WAS ULA’S turn to have the Mandalorian’s rifle wedged under his chin. He arched his back as far as it went, but the barrel followed him, digging deep into his throat. He was so close to Stryver now that he could hear the whir of his suit’s many mechanisms, even the hiss of air through its respirator as the Mandalorian drew in a breath to speak.

“Answer this question very carefully, Envoy Vii,” Stryver said.

Ula nodded. After his solitary act of defiance, he had no intention of doing anything other than exactly as he was told. His eyesight still sparkled from the dazzling effect of the holoprojector shoved into his face.

“I will.”

“You pointed to a location on the map. Was the vault you indicated the correct one?”

“Yes.”

“It contains the wreckage recovered from the Cinzia?”

“Yes.” He nodded as vigorously as he could to convince Stryver of his sincerity.

The pressure of the rifle fell away. Ula rocked forward, chest heaving. He hadn’t noticed that he’d stopped breathing.

“And you?” Stryver asked Jet. “Do you have any more questions?”

“What, me?” The smuggler watched the weapon closely. It was aimed right at his chest. “Just one. What now? I can’t help commenting that you’ve welded yourself in here with us …”

Something thudded against the sealed door. Stryver and his two captives turned to look at it. The thud came again, and a faint voice calling:

“Open up!”

The Mandalorian turned away and busied himself with his suit, stowing his rifle and pushing buttons with swift, practiced movements.

“I can assure you,” said Ula, “that I have very little value as a hostage.”

Stryver said nothing. As a bright red line began creeping across the reinforced door, the Mandalorian stepped away from them and looked up. A rising whine came from his backpack.

“I suggest closing your eyes,” said Jet, turning his head toward Ula and shielding it as best he could with his shoulder.

There was a flash of light. Smoke and debris filled the air. The whine became a roar, and at that moment the door burst in.

Ula ground his eyelids shut on a cloud of stinging particles. He heard shouts and blasterfire, and felt bodies moving rapidly around him. Something crashed into him, and he felt gloved hands working at his bindings.

“It’ll be all right, sir,” said a familiar voice. “We’ve got you covered now.”

Potannin! Ula could have wept.

When he opened his eyes, the smoke had cleared along with the sparkles from the holoprojector, and Dao Stryver was nowhere to be seen. Two members of Ula’s escort stood guard over the door, while two more picked through the wreckage. The droid Stryver had disabled was pulling Jet free. A soldier in scruffy white armor was peering up into a giant hole in the ceiling, her rifle held at the ready.

Stryver had never had any intention of going out the door, Ula understood. His plan had always been to go up.

The scruffy soldier turned to him. “What did Stryver say to you? Did he tell you what he was looking for?”

“He’s gone to get the navicomp,” said Jet, wiping dust from his eyes.

“Why? Are the Mandalorians after the same thing as we are?”

“I don’t think that’s the only reason. The navicomp wouldn’t just show the ship’s origin, would it? It’d show the intended destination as well.”

The soldier’s helmet cocked slightly. “What difference does that make to anyone?”

“Not to anyone, I’m guessing. Just to him.”

The soldier nodded. “Are you Nebula or the envoy?”

“Call me Jet.”

Ula staggered to his feet, freed at last from the Mandalorian’s sticky web. “Ula Vii, at your service. Thank you, all of you, for rescuing us. Both of us.”

“It’s our duty, sir,” said Potannin with a brisk salute.

“Me,” added the soldier, “I’m just here for the fun of it.”

With that, she slipped her helmet off, revealing the most beautiful woman Ula Vii had ever seen.

UNDER A MASSIVE statue of Tassaa Bareesh, Shigar sealed the outer door behind him, using the Force to assist the hydraulics he’d damaged on the way through. He recognized this type of room; the inner door wouldn’t open until the outer door was closed. He crossed the circular expanse of the security air lock, noting but not being distracted by the gentle tinkling of the glass chandelier above. The air stank of smoke, which was odd. The mysterious explosions had been distant, and he assumed the air-conditioning system of the vault was completely independent.

His senses prickled. Moving slowly and silently, he approached the inner door.

It was unlocked.

There was one thing he would say about the Hutts: when it came to protecting their valuables, they didn’t scrimp. The door was a marvelous piece of machinery, precision-tooled to very precise measurements. It might not withstand a Jedi and his lightsaber, but it would keep a horde of safecrackers busy for a month, and would easily withstand a small nuclear blast.

It certainly wouldn’t open itself.

Shigar deactivated his lightsaber and stood still for a full minute. His slow, shallow breathing and steady heartbeat were all he could hear. If there was anyone on the other side of the door, they were being as quiet as he was.

Reaching out a hand, he tugged on the door’s handle. So well balanced was it that it swung smoothly aside, revealing the antechamber he had been looking for. The four vault doors were exactly as Sergeant Potannin had described. None of them had been interfered with. Behind one of them was the mysterious wreckage that consumed so many people.

In the center of the room, a black pit had been burned into the floor, scarring its otherwise impeccable whiteness. That was where the smoke was coming from. He approached cautiously and looked down. Someone had burned into the room from below, presumably to steal the vault’s contents. But how had they avoided triggering any alarms? And where were they now?

He looked around. The antechamber was empty. There was nowhere to hide. None of the vaults appeared to have been tampered with. All four doors were sealed. There was no other way out, except back through the hole, or—

The small of his back itched. He turned to face the door he had come through. Certainty filled him. Activating his lightsaber, he strode into the air lock room.

“You don’t look like a Jedi, but you sure smell like one.” With a tinkling smash, a skinny girl dressed all in black dropped out of the chandelier. Her hair flailed in thick red dreadlocks like the tentacles of a living thing. “You stink of repression. Let’s see what we can do to change that!”

The girl activated a brilliant crimson lightsaber.

Shigar didn’t return her bloodthirsty grin. He kept his heartbeat steady, raised his lightsaber in return, and adopted a stance of readiness.

She came at him in a storm of blows, feet moving lightly across the floor, almost dancing, blade swinging like a propeller. Their weapons clashed with a furious electric sound. He matched her move for move, but doing so sorely tested him. Every block jarred through him like a hammer blow. His opponent was small, but she was strong, and her eyes were full of hate. The dark side flowed through her in powerful waves.

She drove him back to the room’s inner door and, with a telekinetic sweep, slammed it shut behind him.

“Nowhere to run now, Jedi,” she gloated. “Why don’t you stop fighting defensively and show me what you’ve got? I’m going to kill you either way, but let’s at least make some sport of it.”

Shigar ignored her. He knew that some Sith used verbal attacks alongside physical ones, to dispirit their opponent, but he would not fall victim to such a ploy. Neither would he allow fear or anger to dictate the way he fought. His Master had trained him well. He knew how to fight a Sith—and that was the same way he would fight anyone. The key was to make fewer mistakes than your opponent, and to take every opportunity when it came. The element of surprise could make the difference between a drawn-out battle and a decisive early victory.

Smiling calmly, he faced the snarling girl and reached out his left hand.

AX HEARD THE sound of glass tinkling from behind her and ducked barely in time. Hundreds of tiny shards rushed at her, ripped out of the chandelier by the power of the Jedi’s mind and hurled at the exact spot she had been standing. A second stream followed her as she rolled and flipped away, pushing off with her hands and landing on her feet halfway across the room. Recovering her poise, she wrapped a kinetic shield about her and flung the shards away. Only a handful got through, one cutting her arm and another putting a bloody gash over her left eye. She blinked blood away, relishing the sharpness of the pain.

The tall, skinny Jedi was coming for her, green blade foreshortened by a strong, stabbing blow aimed at her midriff. She swept it aside, only to find that the move was a feint. He aimed a kick at her right knee and brought the blade sweeping around for her head. With a grunt, she took the kick on her shin and saved herself from decapitation only by reducing the hold on her hilt to one hand. Their lightsabers met just centimeters from her skin.

They locked there for a moment, his blade pressing down toward her face, her left leg twisted behind her, in a difficult position to use her weight against him. He was physically stronger than she, and wasn’t above taking advantage of that fact. One solid push and his blade would be burning more than air.

He was stronger, but she was more cunning. Whirling his cloak around his face and throat took barely more telekinetic energy than it did to think of it, and the move had the effect she needed. Taken by surprise, he reeled backward, clutching at the flapping fabric. She retreated only long enough to regain her footing and balance before moving in again, while he was blinded.

Even without the use of his eyes, he still matched her. He anticipated her moves and blocked them one-handed. His other hand tore at the cloak, fighting its strangling folds. When he finally threw it away, he faced her two-handed again, lips pursed and bare-shouldered, and she knew that the game was really on now.

They fought back and forth across the room, slashing and blocking and leaping and running, using walls, floor, and ceiling as launching pads for each new attack. Glass crunched beneath their feet and swirled around them in distracting, potentially blinding streamers. He was good—she had to grudgingly admit that—but she was good, too, and she fought to the very edge of her abilities. Her mission wasn’t going to end here, skewered on a Jedi’s lightsaber. If Darth Chratis was going to stand before the Dark Council and admit that he had failed, then she was going to be there to see it.

The end came unexpectedly for both of them. She had tuned out the sound of alarms and the distant aftershocks of her sabotage, but she remained alert for everything in her environment, just in case her sparring partner tried something new. When a noise came from the other side of the air lock room’s inner door, she initially dismissed it as a ploy to distract her. She had sealed her ferrocrete tunnel behind her, so no one could be coming up that way, and there was no other entrance to the vault.

The sound came again—a muffled metallic thud—and this time she caught the Jedi’s reaction to it. He was distracted, too. His eyes flicked to the sealed inner door.

In that instant she struck.

Her ability to produce Sith lightning wasn’t fully developed yet, and she didn’t dare hope that it could overwhelm anyone with Jedi training, but she used it anyway, blasting her opponent with everything she had. He caught it badly, as though he wasn’t used to facing such attacks—and it occurred to her only then that he was an apprentice like herself. Like her, this could be the first time that he had faced his enemy alone. Unlike her, he wouldn’t live to learn from the experience.

He staggered away, flesh tortured and smoking. She maintained the surge as long as she could, and followed it with two quick strikes to midriff and throat. He barely blocked them, swinging one-handed, holding his other arm across his eyes as though the light blinded him. Thrilled by his weakness, Ax lunged again and again, driving him backward until he hit the wall. He slid down it, blade raised ineffectually to block the killing blow.

His comlink squawked.

“Shigar, watch out. Stryver’s on his way. He’s after the navicomp!”

Triumph turned to all-consuming hatred. Dao Stryver—here!

It was her turn to be surprised.

With one swift kick, the Jedi, Shigar, knocked the lightsaber from her hand. It skittered away, blade flashing and deactivating automatically. She staggered backward, disarmed, and he came to his feet, eyes bloodshot and full of determination. Not hatred. Not anger. She didn’t even have the satisfaction of that small victory.

She ran backward, Force-pulling her fallen hilt to her even though she knew it couldn’t possibly arrive in time. The Jedi followed her, driving her toward the outer door.

When the door burst in behind her, she didn’t need to look to see who was there. She felt his presence as keenly as a dagger in her back.

Dao Stryver.

Caught between a Jedi apprentice and a Mandalorian who had already beaten her once, all she could do was hit the activation stud and hope for a miracle.

LARIN WAS HALFWAY to the vault when Yeama intercepted her. He was standing in the deserted passageway ahead with his hands upraised in the universal signal to halt. She would have pushed right past him had he not been backed up by five Weequay and a dozen ax-wielding Gamorreans.

“I see the missing envoy has returned,” he said, taking in the group behind her with baleful red eyes. “The pirate, too. My mistress will be pleased.”

Larin didn’t have time to discuss the situation. The thought of Shigar facing Dao Stryver alone filled her with urgency. It might already be too late. Her attempts to hail him on the comlink had prompted nothing but silence in reply.

“Thank her for her concern,” she said. “We’re returning the envoy to his quarters now.”

“Are you? Excellent. You may have heard the, ah, occasional disturbance in the last hour. There is nothing to worry about, I assure you of that, but it would be advisable for you to remain in the high-security wing until told otherwise.”

“Sounds like you’re under attack, mate,” said Jet. “Has Fa’athra made his move at last?”

The Twi’lek smiled tightly. “We have many items of great value stored in the palace, so attacks are not uncommon.”

“It’s not coming from outside,” said Larin, growing impatient. “It’s the Mando I warned you about earlier. He’s after the Cinzia’s navicomp.”

“Impossible. No alarm has been raised in that sector of the palace.”

“That’s bound to change, and soon.”

Hefting her rifle, she went to continue on her way.

“Not so fast.” The Twi’lek sidestepped in order to block her path. The Weequay backed him up. “You are going the wrong direction. The envoy’s quarters are that way.”

“Really? It’s easy to get turned around in here.”

“I don’t believe you’re turned around at all. I believe you know exactly where you’re going.” The Twi’lek wasn’t smiling now. “You are not a registered visitor to this palace. The kidnap was a distraction, giving you time to go about your true business. We found the trail you left in our security systems. The sabotage is another distraction. What is your business now? Are you all in league, or just opportunistic collaborators?”

His cold gaze swept the group before him.

Larin didn’t like where this was heading.

“Look,” she said, “we’re not planning to steal your precious things. But someone else is, and we’re trying to stop them. I’m serious. Dao Stryver will be in and out before we get there if you don’t step out of my way right now. Don’t make me make you.”

The Twi’lek didn’t flinch from her ultimatum. “You admit that you are heading for the vault?”

“That’s what I just told you.”

“And yet you insist that your motives are pure?”

“As pure as they’ll ever be.”

“Then you won’t mind if I advise the Imperial envoy to meet us there?”

“Whatever! Just get moving—that’s all I ask.”

Yeama signaled his entourage, who fell in around her and her companions. Once the way was clear, she set a brisk pace while Yeama growled in his native Twi’leki into a comlink.

Behind them, the Republic envoy put up a sustained display of bluster.

“I resent the implication,” he said, “that this is a conspiracy of any kind. If anything, it is I who should be suspicious. I’m the one who has been kidnapped and had my escort neutralized. I’ve been imprisoned and tortured—under the roof of a host whose servant now calls me a criminal! You’ll be lucky if we stick around at all for this sham auction of yours.”

Yeama ignored him, and so did Larin. Still nothing from Shigar.

“No alarms,” she said to the Twi’lek. “And in the middle of all this fuss, too. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

Yeama looked at her for a full three seconds. His only other response was to pick up the pace and begin barking orders into his comlink again.

ULA MAINTAINED HIS diatribe long enough to ensure that his point had been made. It wasn’t even his point. He was playacting the loyal Republic envoy in a difficult situation. Wasn’t that what one should do?

Ula didn’t know. He was light-years out of his depth and heading farther out by the minute. He wished they really were going to his secure quarters rather than rushing headlong into danger. All that stopped him from asking to be exempted from the coming action was the thought of how Larin Moxla would regard his cowardice. She didn’t seem the type to brook anything of the sort.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Everything about her—from her beaten-up armor to the black tattoos across her cheeks—captivated him.

“Don’t even think about it.”

Ula glanced at Jet. He was also watching the remarkable woman who had come from nowhere to lead their mismatched ensemble.

“What do you mean?”

“She’s no good for you, and vice versa.”

Ula flushed. He’d had no idea his instant fascination with her was so obvious.

“What are you talking about?” he said, lowering his voice so no one could overhear. “You know as much about her as I do.”

“I know she’s faking it. And that’s about the only thing you two have in common.”

Again that sly hint that Jet thought Ula was more than he was saying. Or less, if his tone of voice was anything to go by.

“What exactly are you suggesting?”

“Me? Nothing. I’m just making conversation.”

That rapidly became difficult. Their pace was increasing by the minute. Soon they were jogging alongside Potannin and the security detail, with Weequay loping long-legged beside them and Gamorreans struggling along behind. More palace security personnel joined them, Niktos and Houks mainly, forming an ever-growing caravan heading toward the vaults. It was hard to see what lay ahead past the Twi’lek and Larin, but it looked like there were further guards waiting for them. And more than that, besides.

At the entrance to the security air lock lay a scene of utter demolition. Walls had fallen in; the ceiling had collapsed. Tons of stone and reinforced ferrocrete lay between them and their objective. Evocii slaves and security guards picked at the rubble, getting in one another’s way such was their haste to clear a path. Conflicting orders flashed back and forth. Yeama hurried into the mess, trying in vain to impose order.

“This is outrageous,” announced a high-handed voice over the hubbub. It was a tall, long-nosed man in Imperial uniform, shouldering his way toward the Republic entourage. “If you’ve had a role to play in this fraudulent affair—”

“We’ve as much to lose as you,” snapped Ula, wishing he could take his fellow Imperial aside and reveal to him the secret role he was playing. There was no need to argue, except for appearance’s sake. “And are as much in the dark.”

From the other side of the rubble came an explosion, crisp and floor shaking. Ula put his hands over his ears and backed away. Two enormous dirt-moving droids shouldered forward to plow through the mess.

“Stay here,” Larin ordered him, and he was happy for the moment to obey. She joined Yeama in the wake of the heavy lifters, clearly determined to be among the first inside. The Twi’lek didn’t disabuse her of that intention. Once again, Ula admired her confidence. What on Korriban did Jet Nebula mean that she was a faker as well?

A cry went up. The barrier was breached. A cloud of smoke and dust rolled over those assembled. The sound of combat came to them, fierce and pitched.

Larin yelled something over her shoulder.

“What did she say?” Ula asked Jet.

“Something about a Sith. I didn’t catch all of it.”

Ula glanced at the Imperial envoy, who studiously avoided everyone’s gaze.

Yeama waved for reinforcements. A line of Weequay moved in, followed by Potannin and his opposite number on the Imperial side. There was more confusion as all three columns tried to squeeze through space for one. Ula lost sight of Larin, and craned for a better view.

“Why don’t you go closer?” asked Jet.

“I, ah, don’t think that would be safe. Do you?”

“I think it’s all relative, right now.”

Shamed, Ula headed toward the widening hole. Jet followed, leaving his droid to watch the entrance. Seeing Ula moving in, the Imperial envoy followed, not wanting to be left out. The tunnel through the rubble was crowded with people. What lay at the end of it was not clear through the smoke and dust. Blasterfire cast strange lights into the haze, and Ula distinctly heard the sound of the Mandalorian’s jetpack. On top of that scraped the volatile hum of lightsabers.

They passed a twisted sheet of metal that might once have been the security air lock’s outer door. The smell of ozone was overpowering.

“Down, sir!” cried Potannin on seeing him.

Ula let himself be dragged to a relatively sheltered position behind a wall of rubble. From there he still couldn’t see the action, but he could see the back of Larin’s helmet. She was crouched next to Yeama, sighting along her rifle. Her voice came clearly across the sound of battle.

“Still no alarms, eh?”

Ula didn’t hear the Twi’lek’s reply.

A massive explosion brought down most of the ceiling, deafeningly loud. Ula put his back to the stone shield and covered his ears with his hands. Ash and debris rained on him in thick waves. He closed his eyes tightly.

When he tentatively removed his hands, an uncanny silence had fallen. All he could see were people jostling for position, as pale as ghosts. Rubble continued to fall from the roof. Beside him, Jet slowly inched his head upward to view what was going on.

His expression changed to one of astonishment.

“What the brix is that?”

Before Ula could look for himself, a voice spoke, female and full of rage.

“We do not recognize your authority.”

A chill went through him. He had heard that phrase before.

SHIGAR STOOD AT ONE corner of an equilateral triangle, with the young Sith and Dao Stryver occupying the others. The Mandalorian hesitated, clearly surprised to see them both.

“It’s a small galaxy,” reflected Shigar.

“You know him, too?” The Sith’s hostile façade cracked just for an instant.

“You should both have let it be,” said the Mandalorian. “This doesn’t concern you.”

“You were killing people on Coruscant,” Shigar said. “Of course it was my concern.”

“Stay out of this,” the Sith snarled. “He’s mine!”

“I’ve beaten you once already,” Stryver said. “Being killed won’t honor your mother’s actions.”

The young woman turned a shade of red brighter even than her hair.

The Mandalorian raised his left arm and blasted her with his flamethrower.

Shigar ducked and rolled, wondering about the scene that had just played out. Fate had delivered all three of them to the same place at the same time. They were all after the same thing—whatever it was inside the vault—and they had a narrow window before the Hutts realized what was going on and brought the entire weight of the palace’s security forces to bear on them. Stryver would want to move quickly and decisively. Yet he had stopped to chat to the Sith girl. Why?

It was clear that all the talk of her mother had been a ploy to distract her. Her rage was fully enflamed now, which would make her stronger, if she survived the next few seconds. Shigar juggled several options. Retreating to the vault and leaving them to it was one, but there was only one exit from that position, meaning that he would have to face Stryver eventually. And the Mandalorian had bested him, too. Better to fight now, when there was at least a chance that the Sith might serve as a distraction.

Flames roared after the girl’s cartwheeling silhouette. Shigar came at Stryver from the opposite side, swinging his lightsaber to deliver a crippling blow to the shoulder. Stryver raised his arm to block, and Shigar’s blade skated along the powerful Mandalorian armor, leaving a bubbling welt but not penetrating. A hatch in Stryver’s pack opened and a collapsible shockstave fired into his hand. Shigar came in for another strike, and the shockstave stabbed at his chest, blasting him from his feet.

On Stryver’s other side, the Sith burst from the flames, lightsaber upraised and hatred blazing in her eyes. Her leap took her over the flamethrower’s deadly jet and was timed to deliver a spearing thrust to the Mandalorian’s domed helmet. He ducked with startling speed for one so big and thrust the shockstave up at her. She cut it in half, kicked him off-balance, and returned for another slash.

Shigar was back on his feet, circling to take Stryver when an opportunity arose. Again the flamethrower burned, but the element of surprise was lost. The Sith girl easily batted aside the flames. Instead Stryver cast a razor net at her. She ducked its piercing barbs and attempted to shock him with lightning. His insulated suit took the charge and grounded it into the floor, blackening and buckling it. Shigar took the chance to Force-push Stryver to his knees, but the Mandalorian was as solid as a mountain, and he had other weapons he hadn’t revealed yet.

From a thigh hatch, Stryver produced a stubby pistol. He pointed it at Shigar and fired a single time. Shigar dodged but not so quickly that the fringes of the shot missed him completely. He was tossed like a leaf into the wall and slid to the ground, temporarily stunned.

STRYVER TURNED THE weapon on Ax, who dodged more effectively than the slow-witted Jedi had. She had recognized the weapon instantly and knew how dangerous it was. Disruptors were outlawed in every civilized part of the galaxy. She wasn’t surprised to see one on Hutta, in a Mandalorian’s gloved hand.

Ax also knew that handheld disruptors were effective at short range only and could manage a bare handful of shots. If Stryver kept firing and missing, the weapon would soon be useless. So she kept moving around her enemy, practically running on the walls of the battle-blackened security air lock, goading him on by hurling broken glass at his joint seals. Twice, he narrowly missed her, and even the fringes of the beam sent powerful shock waves through her flesh. Only her rage kept her going. She used the pain to fuel the dark side.

The third time he fired in their little dance—the fifth shot overall—she barely felt its aftereffects. The weapon’s charge was dying. Grinning with triumph, she turned her circling run into a headlong launch. Time to bring the fight back to him.

He met her attack with a vibroblade aimed at the throat. She screamed, trying to drive her blade through his armor with all the strength of her muscles and willpower combined. His buzzing blade was so close it brushed her skin, raising a fine spray of blood, but still she didn’t let up. The Mandalorian was reeling back on his feet from her attack. This was the best shot she’d ever had.

His jetpack activated with a whine. Suddenly they were moving, jerking upward as though lifted by a giant puppeteer. Taken by surprise, Ax lost her grip and fell away. Stryver rose above her on twin jets of fiery exhaust. She rolled to avoid their intense heat and covered her eyes from the glare.

Stryver stopped when he reached the domed recess that had once held the tinkling chandelier, and hovered there, punching commands into his weapons systems. Ax had just enough time to realize that he now had the advantage of height before a strong hand gripped her wrist and dragged her aside.

A stream of missiles struck the ground, exactly where she’d been lying. The Jedi had saved her, and she wrenched herself from him, even as she felt a twinge of gratitude. Surely he hadn’t done it out of the vile goodness of his heart! No, she told herself. He knew he couldn’t defeat Stryver on his own. It was either save her or be the next to die.

Concussion missiles blew her and the Jedi into the security air lock’s inner door. They separated to avoid another round, which blasted the door back into the antechamber, exposing the four vault doors and the hole through which Ax had entered. She had a split instant to note that one of the vault doors was glowing bright red, then a rain of blasterfire came from an entirely different part of the room and she realized that someone else had joined the party. The Hutts, presumably, had noticed that their treasure was at risk.

Before she could take advantage of the shift in the battlefield, the Jedi launched himself at Stryver, deflecting missiles away from him as he came. The missiles exploded into the ceiling, bringing down huge swaths of masonry on all three of them. A large chunk struck the Mandalorian, dropping him from his superior vantage point. Ax dodged a slab large enough to crush a bantha and sought her bearings in air suddenly thick with dust. Shadowy figures danced around her—tasseled Weequay, officers in Imperial uniforms, Gamorreans, and more—but Stryver was nowhere to be seen among them. Either a stunned silence had fallen or her ears were overwhelmed by the most recent explosions.

Red light played across the battlefield, then died. Just light, no concussions. Ax blinked and turned to find the source, remembering as she did the glowing vault door. Not a random hit from the Mandalorian’s weapons systems, as she’d initially assumed. It was clear now that the door had melted entirely away, releasing the vault’s precious contents to all comers.

No one was breaking into the vault, however. That much was immediately apparent from the splatters of molten metal on the antechamber floor. It was, rather, the other way around.

SHIGAR MOVED CLOSER, weaving around the newcomers to the fight. They had provided an unexpected but very welcome distraction, yet he worried now about the danger they were putting themselves in. Stryver was down but not out, and the Mandalorian had wiped out an entire cell of the Black Sun syndicate on Coruscant single-handedly. Shigar—his head still ringing from the near-miss with the disruptor—knew that Dao Stryver would stop at nothing less to achieve his goals on Hutta, if he had to.

For the moment, though, all eyes were on the vault. The Hutts’ security measures had failed. Someone had melted the door and gained access to the inside. Shigar wondered if they had come up the floor of the vault, much as the Sith had attempted. But if so, why not leave that way? Why go to the trouble of melting another exit?

The pool of molten metal that had once been a door cast a bloody backlight on the figure that stepped out of the vault. It didn’t look like any kind of being Shigar had seen before. It stood two meters high and seemed at first to be an ordinary biped, with skinny arms and legs of equal length. Then it unfolded another pair of arms attached to its midriff, spaced equally between shoulder and hip joints. It bore no resemblance, however, to insectile species like the Geonosians or the Killik. Its body was a perfect hexagon, stretched vertically. There was no head. Black sensory organs dotted the central body like the eyes of an arachnid, gleaming in the light. Apart from those organs, its skin was silver. He couldn’t tell if it was a creature in an environment suit or some kind of construct.

With unerring steps it crossed the pool of molten metal on feet that were duplicates of its hands. It turned 180 degrees, revealing a back that was identical to the front. When it reached the wreckage of the inner door, it stopped there and swiveled slightly, taking in the ruined security air lock and the beings it contained: the Mandalorian, the Jedi Padawan, the palace guards, the Twi’lek, and the Sith.

“We do not submit to your authority!” it screamed, dropping smoothly into a new posture. The body became a regular hexagon instead of a stretched, almost rectangular torso, and its legs bent into a crouch. All four of its arms splayed out to target different parts of the room.

Shigar instinctively tightened his grip on his lightsaber. He lacked the foresight ability of Master Satele, but every cell in his body screamed in alarm. Whoever or whatever it was that had broken into the Hutts’ vault, it wasn’t going to walk away quietly.

The hands of the creature spat darts of blue fire that ricocheted off armor and lightsaber blades and exploded whenever they struck flesh or stone. The Sith girl stood at the focus of their initial attack, but when she went down the fire became more indiscriminate. Bodies dived in all directions, either hit or seeking cover. It wasn’t easy to tell which. The room’s tortured walls surrendered still more of their mass to dust and gravel.

Shigar stood his ground, reflecting the unfamiliar energy streams back at their source. The creature’s silver skin re-reflected them in turn, setting up a resonant stream between him and it that only became more intense with each pulse it fired—then doubled in intensity as it added an extra arm to the attack.

Shigar braced his feet and held on, determined not to give in before it did. The air hummed and crackled with energy along the pulses’ combined path. He had never seen anything like this before.

Finally something gave. The stream dissipated with a flash sufficiently violent to blow the creature backward into the antechamber. High-energy sparks ricocheted around the security air lock, making everyone duck again.

Shigar dropped his lightsaber, not his guard. His arms felt like they had been hit with hammers. The ringing in his ears was louder than ever. But until he was sure the thing was incapacitated, he wasn’t going to relax one iota.

A second creature stepped from the vault’s steaming interior. It didn’t say anything. It just screamed and fired.

Shigar jumped as high as he could to evade the converging energy pulses. Staccato blue streams followed him, tearing a shallow, meterwide furrow in the wall and ceiling. He glimpsed Larin’s face below him. She was standing in full view, pumping shot after shot into the second creature’s body. Its silver skin dissipated them like raindrops, and he began to worry that he wouldn’t be able to outrun the creature’s vengeance forever.

A trio of tightly spaced concussion missiles from Dao Stryver saved Shigar from bisection. They turned the antechamber into a furnace, finally cutting off the deadly beams. Shigar landed on a section of collapsed roof, winded and singed but largely unharmed.

The creature backflipped, landing on six legs, and stood up again, this time on its hands. It looked exactly the same as it had before.

Behind it, the first one crawled out of the rubble in which it had landed.

A third creature stepped out of the vault.

Shigar’s stomach hollowed.

“Get everyone out,” he shouted to Larin through the comlink before the firing started again. “It’s not safe in here.”

“What about you?”

“I’ll do my best to hold them back.”

“Why not just let them go?”

He didn’t have a short answer to that question. Because doing so would mean admitting failure. Because whatever these creatures were, he wasn’t going to let them have what was inside the Cinzia. Because he wasn’t going to let things this murderous rain fire upon the hapless denizens of the Hutt palace. “Just because.”

“All right,” she said, “but I’ll be back with heavier munitions as soon as—”

Everything else she said went unheard. With an earsplitting screech, the three creatures fired in tandem, tearing the air apart.

LARIN CAUGHT YEAMA by the lekku as he ran for dear life. “Assault cannon, sniper rifles, mass-drivers,” she said. “Everything you’ve got—now!”

The Twi’lek dithered, torn between conflicting fears: of his mistress; of the things wreaking havoc in the demolished security air lock; and of Larin. Given a choice, he looked as though he would run for the nearest ship and head for the stars.

To help change his mind, Larin raised her rifle and aimed it between his eyes. “You won’t get a single step unless you make the call.”

Yeama brought his comlink to his mouth and began issuing orders.

She ran back to where Sergeant Potannin lay on his belly, watching the battle unfold through the standard-issue electromonocular scope she had loaned him. He handed it back to her and said, “I think they’re droids. Look at the one on the left. It’s been damaged.”

She focused the scope on the spider-like creature Potannin had indicated. One of its forelimbs had been sliced away, revealing not flesh or exoskeleton but a mess of wires that flexed and twisted, showering golden sparks. She narrowed the field of view to see more closely. Wires, definitely, as thin as hairs and as lithe as quicksilver.

Her mind cast back to the Hortek maintenance crew she and Shigar had stumbled across in the tunnels below the palace. There she’d seen silver threads as well.

Before she had time to follow the thought through, Yeama returned, pushing a long-barreled sniper rifle into her arms.

“More coming, I hope?”

He nodded unhappily and hurried away.

She lined up the rifle, resting its weight on a protruding chunk of stone.

“Go for the joints,” Potannin advised her, but she ignored him. The hands were doing the damage. If she could take them out, that would reduce the threat to Shigar. At the moment, only he and Stryver were doing anything to stop the killer droids from getting out of the antechamber.

The droids moved fast, and they didn’t move like anything Larin had fired at before. Any of the six limbs could act as a leg, meaning they didn’t so much run as cartwheel from place to place like spindly, animated tumbleweeds, firing as they went. They could also crouch with anywhere from three to all six legs on the ground, giving them a more stable base to fire from. They could even curl into a ball to protect their hexagonal midriffs. Furthermore, the damaged one demonstrated a potent kind of shield when Shigar got too close. It crossed two limbs into an X and created a short-lived circular electromirror that bent his lightsaber back into a V, almost taking off his arm in the process. He retreated, and the droid went back to firing at him.

Larin took her first shot, and missed. Her second hit the forelimb and was deflected. Her third struck the wrist joint squarely, severing the fire-shooting hand with a reddish flash. Instantly the droid rotated to make that limb a foot, bringing another hand weapon into play. She moved her target reticule to aim at that one next.

Another sniper rifle arrived, and Potannin took up the fight. He tried the joints, with little success, and moved on to the sense organs scattered across the chests of the things. The black circles reacted differently from the silver skin under fire. They absorbed everything that came at them, and radiated the energy as heat. Their reflective black surfaces soon turned to red, then ramped up to orange and yellow. Eventually one hit purple and exploded, making the droid spin around in circles for a moment before recovering.

Larin steadily picked off the hand weapons of her chosen target. When there were just two left, the droid transferred its weight to its four injured legs and hopped to where one of its fellows was trading fire with Dao Stryver. The injured droid jumped onto the back of its counterpart, and the two bodies locked together. The four injured legs retracted, creating a more massive droid with eight legs, all willing and able to fire.

“Oh, come on,” she said.

Larin and Sergeant Potannin’s efforts didn’t go unnoticed. The droid menacing Shigar sprayed a wave of blue pulses in their direction, forcing them both to take cover. When it was over, the barrels of both their rifles were blackened but still seemed capable of firing. Sergeant Potannin, however, had not been so lucky. A ricochet had caught him in the eye and killed him instantly.

Before she could get revenge, someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to see Yeama and three Houks pulling in a wheeled, turretmounted laser cannon.

“About time,” she growled, crawling over. “Here, let me. I’ve used this model before.”

Yeama waved her away. His look said as clearly as words that if anyone was going to fire it in his mistress’s palace, it would be him.

She backed down as another wave of blue pulses converged on them. A fourth six-legged droid had emerged from the vault.

“How many of these things are in there?” she asked no one in particular.

Then the cannon was firing, driving all higher thoughts of the situation from her mind. She was a soldier. It was her job to fight, not to analyze. Dropping onto her belly, she picked up the sniper rifle again, test-fired it, and began peppering the enemy with rounds.

“HOW MANY OF those things are in there?” Ula heard Jet say over the sound of blasterfire.

He craned his neck over the fallen beam and risked another look. Sure enough, another of the hexagonal droids had stepped into view.

“Are they in there,” he asked, “or just coming through there?”

“I’m not sure it makes sense if they have another way into the vault. I mean, if they could just turn around and go back, why aren’t they doing that? Why are they fighting to get out past everyone else?”

Ula had wondered why they didn’t just blow a new hole out, but he had soon found an answer to that. Their blue pulses knocked fist-sized chunks of stone from the wall, and plenty of them. They were lethal against flesh, too, but they lacked the punch to get through reinforced ferrocrete. The security air lock was the only route open to them.

It was also the only escape route open to him and Jet, but they had been cut off from it by the reinforced beam they now took shelter behind. Between them and the exit was ten meters of open space, littered with broken glass, rubble, and the occasional body. One of them belonged to the young Sith girl, who had been the first targeted by the hexes, as Ula had come to abbreviate them. Jet’s droid watched helplessly from the other side of the room, unable to get any closer to help his master.

“Watch Stryver,” said Jet.

“Why?” Ula had seen enough of the Mandalorian in action for one lifetime.

“He’s holding back, almost like he’s testing them.”

“Testing who?”

“The droids, of course. Why would he test Shigar? They’ve fought twice already.”

“Why test the hexes?”

“I don’t know. Curiosity, perhaps? Maybe the Mandalore is looking for a new species of pit fighters. Nice name, by the way: hexes.”

They watched as Yeama and Larin positioned a laser cannon for optimal coverage. Larin’s face was hidden by her helmet, but Ula was glad to see that she was still on her feet.

“Maybe that’s what Stryver has been after the whole time,” Jet said. “After all, it was him who talked about droids before. What was that woman’s name? The droid maker?”

“Lema Xandret.”

“Whoever she was, he knew of her, and you said he was asking questions about her all over the place. What if that thing in the Cinzia had something to do with her work? What if the hexes are here now to steal it back?”

“What if they were on the ship the whole time?”

“That can’t be the case. The thing you saw was too small, judging by your description. No, they must’ve gotten in somehow. Maybe someone let them in.”

Ula was watching Shigar, who had developed a new tactic against the hexes. When one of them fired up at Stryver, he hurried in low, under the blue-firing limbs. In close, they were more vulnerable, and he managed to get a couple of good stabs to the body of one of them. It was listing badly to one side, and two of its limbs no longer worked at all.

“That Sith girl is still alive,” said Jet, nudging him with an elbow.

Ula glanced across the battlefield and found to his surprise that this was true. She was rising sluggishly to her hands and knees, shaking her head with a furious expression. Her hair danced like liquid flames. She looked to Ula as though she had been woken from a powerfully unhappy dream.

“They make them tough on Korriban,” said Jet with grim admiration.

The girl was on her feet now. The moment her lightsaber activated, the hexes noticed her. Fourteen streams of energy pulses converged and Ula had time enough to feel sorry for her before she vanished into a glowing sphere of light.

With a boom the laser cannon fired, spearing the eight-legged hex through the midriff. It flailed on its back, screaming piercingly. The two remaining hexes directed their pulses at the cannon’s shield, turning it bright red.

Ula was staring at the Sith girl. Amazingly, she hadn’t died in the concentrated attack. Even more amazingly, she was still standing, and looking angrier than ever.

“Whose authority do you recognize?” she shouted, lurching headlong into the battle. “Whose authority do you recognize?”

The pitch of her fury was so high that part of Ula actually felt sorry for the hexes as she landed among them and started swinging.

AX DREAMED OF A world much larger than normal, where everything seemed strange and mutable and full of threat. She was prone to getting confused, even though she tried very hard to keep up. When she made a mistake people shouted at her, giant people with terrifying voices. It hurt her to be yelled at. She covered her ears with her hands and tried to run. The voices followed her everywhere, shrieking her name.

Cinzia!

Cinzia!

She woke with a start in the middle of a firefight, and couldn’t for a moment remember who or where she was. Every cell of her body hurt. Someone was screaming. Not her. It was the screaming that had woken her. Only on awakening did it become clear that the voice wasn’t coming from a human throat.

She remembered.

Hutta.

The vault.

Lema Xandret.

Her muscles burned as she willed them into action. Raising her head was like lifting a mountain of pain. She felt a scream of her own boiling inside her, a scream of rage and despair and fear. Containing it hurt her, but at the same time it gave her strength. She needed every ounce of strength she could muster to survive the next few seconds.

Out of everyone in the security air lock, the six-legged droid-things had targeted her first of all.

We do not recognize your authority!

She, however, recognized their defiance. It was the same offered by the crew of the Cinzia when they had been confronted by the smuggler. But whose authority did they recognize? There had to be something—or someone—behind their murderous natures.

Ax raised herself to her knees, and from there, with a supreme effort of will, to her feet. The world swayed around her, but the scream was intact, and growing. The dark side swelled inside her.

The creatures from the vault saw her, and instantly turned their blue pulses onto her.

She set the scream free.

A Force barrier surrounded her, bare millimeters from her skin. It shimmered and flickered as wave after wave of energy crashed against it, but it held. It held as long as she screamed, as long as she didn’t want to die.

The attack ceased, and she staggered back a step, breathing heavily. Her lungs were full of hot smoke and ozone. Her head rang with sound. One of the things attacking her had been blown back by some kind of weapon. The details eluded her. The important thing was that the droids were distracted. This was her chance to find out how tough they really were.

“Whose authority do you recognize?” she shouted, launching herself at the nearest. Its hand weapons were concentrated on the shield of a laser cannon and didn’t turn in time. “Whose authority do you recognize?”

The droid-thing didn’t answer.

Her rage spun instants out into hours.

First, she tried spearing the hexagonal body with her lightsaber.

Some kind of shield appeared between them, bending her blade back at her own arm, forcing her to retreat.

Next she tried blasting it with Sith lightning.

The thing’s body caught the energy and discharged it from the tips of its limbs. Four sparkling arms lunged at her, forcing her to duck again.

She reached out a hand and tried to crush its insides telekinetically.

Its honeycomb skeleton resisted more powerfully than durasteel. The hex’s deadly limbs flailed to impale or shoot her, no matter how hard she strained.

They screamed together, locked in a vicious stalemate. She couldn’t kill it, and it couldn’t kill her. It moved on lean, powerful servos that matched her own strength and agility. Its black sense organs tracked her every movement. But every blue pulse it fired at her was reflected by the Force barrier, and every wild slash of its razor-sharp limbs was deflected harmlessly.

Then suddenly it retreated. Its limbs worried at its metallic skin as though scratching itself for fleas. She followed it, puzzled and wary. Was this a trap, some strange new tactic to throw her off her guard? She lunged at it, and it backed rapidly away, firing a stream of blue to keep her at bay.

Then it stopped, stood its ground, and vanished.

For a second Ax doubted the evidence of her own eyes. How could a droid just disappear? It wasn’t possible!

A blast of blue energy struck her from the side, out of thin air, and she realized: the droid had activated a camouflage system, reducing its appearance to little more than a blur. It was blending into the background, circling her, trying to shoot her in the back.

Ax narrowed her eyes. She didn’t know what these things could or couldn’t do, exactly, but of one thing she was completely sure. One way or another, they were going to die. She was going to destroy them all.

SHIGAR BLINKED SWEAT out of his eyes and took the chance to catch his breath. Backup couldn’t have come too soon, even if it was in the form of a Sith and a green-skinned Twi’lek at the controls of a laser cannon. He didn’t have the energy to complain. With one of the droid-things down, speared by the Twi’lek right through the middle, and another occupied by the girl, that left just one for him and Stryver to finish off.

The Mandalorian hovered over it, peppering it with blasterfire and concussion missiles. Shigar waited for an opening.

His comlink buzzed.

“You should fall back,” Larin told him. “We’ve got it covered now.”

“I don’t think it’s that simple.”

“But you’re hurt. At least have someone look at that for you.”

He looked down and noticed for the first time that his left arm was covered with blood. He had been completely oblivious to the pain.

The laser cannon fired again. This time the droid-things were ready. The one Shigar was watching dropped to a crouch and threw up its electromirror shield. The bolt from the cannon knocked it backward, but the bolt itself was reflected into the wall. There it exploded harmlessly, showering two crouching noncombatants with gravel.

Stryver swooped in on his jetpack and landed next to Shigar. Shigar raised his lightsaber, but the Mandalorian wasn’t on the offensive.

“Tell them to aim for the vault,” he said, indicating the comlink.

“Why, what’s in there?”

“Just tell them.”

Then he lifted off and went back to harrying the target. Again the laser cannon fired, and again the bolt exploded into the wall.

Shigar relayed the instruction. “The door’s open,” he said, “and it’s a confined space. Anything left in there will be fried.”

Larin passed the message on to the Twi’lek. From his position, Shigar could see his lekku swinging in an instant negative. A brief argument ensued before Larin came back to him.

“The navicomp might still be in there,” she said over the comlink. “If you can get it out, then they’ll fire into the vault.”

Shigar didn’t dismiss the plan out of hand. Far be it from him to aid the Hutts in their venal pursuits, but the Republic needed all the help it could get in the war against the Empire. It wasn’t his primary mission, but it was still important.

“All right,” he started to say.

Then two things happened that put all thought of the navicomp from his mind. First, the droid-thing attacking the Sith girl disappeared. Second, the laser cannon fired again, and the bolt was deflected a third time into the wall.

Into the same section of the wall, Shigar realized. The shots weren’t ricocheting at random. They were being aimed.

“Stop firing!” he shouted into the comlink. “Tell him to stop firing!”

Larin tapped her helmet, obviously thinking she had misheard his order.

The Sith girl was moving, following a dimple in the air. It fired back at her, blue pulses appearing out of nowhere and bouncing off her Force barrier. The nearly invisible droid-thing was heading for the two noncombatants Shigar had seen earlier.

“I said stop firing!” He waved his arms to convey his urgency. “Now!”

The Twi’lek ignored him. Another bolt went into the wall, widening the crater that had already been bored into it. One more shot, Shigar thought in alarm. That was all it would take to ruin everything.

The hand weapons weren’t strong enough that the droids could shoot their own way out, so they were using the Hutts’ weaponry instead. Instead of killing them, the laser cannon was going to set them free.

Shigar ground his teeth together and sprinted forward. If Larin couldn’t stop the Twi’lek from firing, he would have to throw himself at the camouflaged droid and hope to succeed where the Sith had failed.

Distantly he heard the roar of Stryver’s jetpack pass overhead, but the significance of it eluded him. The shot he had feared came from the laser cannon and bounced off the electromirror shield, into the deepening pit in the wall. Long cracks spread out from it, and suddenly masonry was tumbling down from the wall. The two noncombatants lay directly in the path of the rubble.

Shigar had a choice. He could intercept the droid or save the two men. He couldn’t do both. There was just a split second in which to decide.

Ignoring his pain and exhaustion, he let the Force flow through him and did the only thing he could.

YEAMA’S TEETH WERE bared in determination as he fired at the cowering hex. Larin yelled at him to stop—she had guessed the droid-thing’s intentions, just like Shigar—but the Twi’lek was blindly resolute. He thought he was doing the right thing. He honestly believed that he was on the verge of overpowering his target. He wouldn’t listen.

She braced herself to physically wrench Yeama from the laser cannon’s controls, but the rising whine of a jetpack made her look up. Stryver was on his way. He must also have seen what the laser cannon was doing. But he wasn’t flying to defend the breach, as Shigar was. He was coming right for her.

Barely in time, Larin realized his intentions. She hurled herself away from the cannon and dived for cover. Behind her, the cannon erupted into a ball of flame. Bits of metal whizzed past her, pinging off her armor. A wave of heat engulfed her. She felt like a rancor had gripped her in its jaws and was shaking her back and forth.

When it was over, she looked back at the laser cannon. It was a smoking ruin, destroyed by Stryver’s missiles. Of Yeama, there was no sign at all.

Stryver dropped heavily next to her. His armor was as blackened and dented as hers. “Get into the vault. Destroy everything you find there.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Finish things. I’ve seen enough.”

As he spoke, more of the damaged wall fell away, revealing empty space on the other side. The hexes were already heading for the opening, followed by the Sith. Stryver grunted and took to the air, activating weapons systems he had not yet used against the droids. Larin watched him go, thinking hard.

There would be time for thinking later, she reminded herself again. The priority was to put an end to the current crisis. Stryver wasn’t above taking drastic steps to do exactly that—killing Yeama to put the cannon out of action was just one example—and he seemed to know what he was talking about. Looking around her, she found two of poor Potannin’s guards and called them to her. Moving gingerly through the rubble, they headed for the battle-scarred antechamber, and the gaping mouth of the vault.

ULA STARED UP in horror at the descending mass of masonry. There was nothing he or Jet could do to avoid being crushed, and Jet’s droid was too far away to intervene. There wasn’t time for last regrets or second thoughts. The law of gravity was unbreakable, even on lawless Hutta.

He raised his arms in a futile attempt at self-preservation and closed his eyes.

He didn’t die. His thoughts ground on with increasingly amazed vitality, until eventually it occurred to him that someone had intervened to help him live a little longer.

He opened his eyes. The avalanche had been deflected around them by an invisible force. By the Force, he realized as he looked around for the source of his salvation. It was the Jedi, standing with his left hand outstretched in a warding motion and his expression fierce. Ula himself could feel nothing at all arising from that gesture, but he was profoundly grateful that the stones seemed to do so perfectly well.

Another rumble came from above. The wall wasn’t stable. The Jedi deflected another falling slab, which crashed next to them with a thunderous sound.

“Come on,” said Jet, tugging at his arm. “I think it’s time we found somewhere else to stand.”

Ula wholeheartedly agreed. Conflicted but grateful, he nodded his thanks at the Jedi and scurried with Jet out of the danger zone. Jet was leading them toward what had once been the external exit to the security air lock but was now a path cleared through mountains of rubble. Jet’s droid was waiting for him there, waving his arms. The stubby barrel of the laser cannon protruded from between two large slabs. Behind it, Ula could see Larin and Yeama fighting over the controls.

Then Stryver swooped in, firing at the cannon. Larin jumped or was thrown clear, and Ula’s heart hammered in his chest. Was she hurt? Could he help? Jet pulled him down as the cannon exploded and shrapnel pinged around them. He belatedly covered his head with his hands, feeling as though he had spent the last hour in that position.

This wasn’t becoming of an Imperial operative, he told himself, weary of his own cowardice. He had once had aspirations of being a Cipher Agent, whose job was to negotiate exactly such situations. Here he was, right in the thick of things, and what was he doing? When he wasn’t being saved by Jedi, he was cowering and whimpering at the slightest noise. It simply wouldn’t do.

The droids were busy with Stryver, Shigar, and the Sith. The way into the antechamber was wide open.

“I’m going to see what’s in there,” he said. “Coming?”

Jet looked at him as though he had gone stark, staring mad. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? This is my chance to get in before anyone else does.”

“Isn’t that cheating?”

“If it is, I’m not the only one. Look.” He gripped Jet by the shoulder. “Larin’s moving. I have to stop the Republic from getting there first.”

Jet smiled tightly at that. “I think you mean ‘the Imperials,’ my friend.”

Ula flushed. “Yes. Yes, of course. That’s exactly what I meant.”

“Envoy Nirvin is over there. I don’t think he cares much, either way.”

Jet pointed at a body so badly crushed that Ula couldn’t identify it. Ula winced and averted his eyes.

“Regardless, I’m going. You can come if you want. I don’t care.”

“All right, all right—but keep your head down!”

Jet wiped his palms on his dusty trousers and took the lead, as if by doing so he might increase the chances of either of them returning alive.

THE WALL COLLAPSED despite the Jedi’s best efforts to prop it up. Fresh air rolled in on a wave of dust and ash. Ax’s nearly invisible droid hopped agilely from outcrop to outcrop toward the opening. In two leaps, it reached the hole and jumped into the light of the outside world.

The droid following in its wake fired at her. Its pulses had turned purple, somehow, and now packed a more powerful punch. She rolled, keeping her shield intact, and reflected the pulses back at it. More dust went up, and the droid vanished into the cloud. She didn’t need to use the Force to know that it had followed in its sibling’s footsteps.

Stryver was hot on their heels, jetpack blazing. Ax risked being burned in his afterwash, she was following so close behind him. The Jedi followed her, looking worn out and battered. She considered turning on him and striking him down, taking the chance to finish what they had started earlier, but more important concerns drove her now. She could hear the droids screeching as they burst into the unsuspecting populace of Tassaa Bareesh’s palace. The sound of their voices fueled her desire to destroy them, to see them all very, very dead.

Evocii and other aliens were running everywhere, fleeing both the droids and the Mandalorian firing at them. His concussion missiles brought down ceilings and walls in the droids’ path, stopping them from getting too far ahead. They fired back at him, causing still more collateral damage. If this kept up, Ax thought, it wouldn’t be long before Tassaa Bareesh’s entire place was destroyed. She couldn’t find it in her heart to care.

When Stryver was within range, he used his net launcher to bring the semi-visible droid down. He hadn’t tried this tactic before, she noted. Furthermore, the net was different from the one he had used on her. Why he had changed his tactics was, however, less important at the moment than the fact that they were working. The net’s mesh was electrified, and delivered a powerful pulse of energy to the droidthing’s silver skin. The six-legged creature spasmed and twitched, shedding sparks into everything it touched. Its keening took on a new, desperate note as its camouflage failed.

Ax prepared to rush in and finish it off.

Then she stopped.

What am I doing?

The answer took surprisingly long to come. This wasn’t her fight. Unless one of the droids was carrying the navicomp, she had nothing to gain by killing them. Revenge might seem sweet at that moment, but she would be full of regret later if attaining it meant failing in her mission. Darth Chratis would make sure of that.

The Cinzia, Lema Xandret. They were what mattered.

The Jedi rushed past her, lightsaber upraised. Let him finish off the fallen droid, Ax decided. To him could go that minor spoil. Then he and Stryver could surely finish off the one droid left to deal with on their own.

Unnoticed by either of them, she turned and headed back to the security air lock.

SHIGAR STABBED DOWN into the guts of the fallen droid, pressing hard to penetrate the surprisingly tough metal of its exoskeleton. Its legs strained against the net, failing either to fire at him or to form its electromirror defense. Sparks still discharged all around it, and Shigar was careful not to be either burned or shocked. As it was, the hairs of his arms were standing on end, electrified even along the shaft of his lightsaber.

The droid’s gleaming sense organs turned matte black when it died. It slumped back with a metallic rattle, and its legs hung limp. Still Shigar worked through its body, making sure nothing survived. The case split open, spilling several white, shell-like hemispheres. Fearing they might create some kind of last-minute attack, Shigar speared them, too. They hissed and collapsed, oozing a dark red liquid.

When he was absolutely positive the droid had no life left, he stepped away and hurried after Stryver. The final droid was peppering the Mandalorian with its newly potent pulses, keeping well out of range of his net launcher. Stryver in turn had managed to maneuver it into a cul-de-sac and pinned it between him and a trio of Nikto security guards. Their blasters were ineffectual against the thing’s armor, but they had a distracting effect.

Shigar came up behind the Mandalorian and considered how best he could help. The roof was low and much less sturdy than that of the security air lock. Reaching out through the Force, he loosened a key beam and brought a shower of bricks and ceiling tiles down onto the droid. The distraction was sufficient for Stryver to get close enough to cast the net.

The droid went down with a shriek of pain and anger. Stryver pumped three concussion grenades into its chest, not caring about the Nikto standing nearby. Shigar pushed past him to finish off the droid himself, before anyone else could get hurt.

Prior to delivering the killing blow, he tried talking to it.

“Why are you fighting?”

“We do not recognize—”

“You’re a combat droid. You must have core protocols.”

“—not recognize your—”

“Who is your commander? Your maker?”

“—your authority! We—”

Stryver leaned past him and plunged his collapsible shockstave into the thing’s chest. Its legs flailed, and it squealed so piteously that Shigar almost felt sorry for it. Then its vocabulator function degraded and its voice became little more than piercing electronic tones. He was glad when it finally fell silent.

His comlink buzzed.

“Shigar, I’m in the vault,” said Larin. “You need to see this.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. It—”

With a blast of static, the comlink went dead.

Shigar turned and ran back the way he had come, Stryver’s massive form five long steps ahead of him.

LARIN STEPPED GINGERLY onto the pool of molten metal that had once been the vault’s door. It was still hot. She could feel the heat even through her insulated boots. But it was solid, and her soles held. The body of the droid killed by the cannon lay nearby, its eight legs splayed out and its double body inert.

She quickly surveyed the antechamber and found it to be empty. What had once been white walls were now blackened and scarred, but the other three vaults remained tightly sealed. There was a depression in the center of the room that looked like a tunnel mouth. Re-solidified ferrocrete sealed it shut, however, followed by a layer of molten door metal.

Satisfied that nothing was going to jump her from behind, Larin approached the door itself. Her rifle was cocked and ready, and she had armed backup. Potannin’s squad members were tight-lipped and efficient. Most important, they were following her orders.

The interior of the vault was lit by a single flickering globe. Via the flashes of light it provided, she at last saw with her own eyes the object Potannin had described: a low, domed cylinder made of gleaming silver. The image of a battle-scarred soldier standing low behind her weapon was reflected in its curved front. In the irregular light, she looked both menacing and hesitant.

Gesturing economically, she ordered Potannin’s squad members in past her. They went in separate directions, coming around the object to cover it from every angle. One of them stepped on a long glass tube that shattered with an alarming sound. Nothing sinister, she noted with relief.

There was no sign of the navicomp.

“Destroy everything you find,” Stryver had told her, and she had come armed with grenades to do just that. But she wasn’t about to do anything rash. Who knew what valuable information might disappear forever if she acted precipitously? She may have been dumped from the Republic Special Forces, but that didn’t mean she was about to take orders from a Mandalorian without question.

Larin came forward a step. The toe of her boot caught on something, and when she looked down she saw more of the shining silver threads running across her path.

It came to her in a flash what they might be, and she reached for her comlink to call Shigar.

With a crack, the top of the silver object snapped open. From it issued another droid. She dropped the comlink and fell to one knee, her rifle rising to fire. The droid was coming right for her, legs flailing and screeching like a mad thing. Its wild shape was frozen in a flash of light, silhouetted like a bug on a window. She registered five arms of varying length, and patches in its body that light shone right through. The shots from her rifle tore more holes in its hide and knocked it backward. It flailed and screamed.

She backed away, her heart pounding, pouring round after round into the droid and the object from which it had emerged. This droid wasn’t entirely complete. That much was obvious, even from the brief glimpse she’d received. If it had been, she’d be dead now. It was new, made from scratch inside the object pulled from the Cinzia. As the others had been.

The droid stopped moving. She signaled for a cease-fire, and was grateful for the sudden silence. The air was thick with smoke and static discharges. The tick-ticking of cooling metal was the only sound.

She moved closer to the blaster-scarred droid and the object that had made it. Standing warily over the latter, she pointed her rifle into its gaping maw and peered inside. She saw a mass of silver threads and slender manipulators, still moving despite the damage inflicted upon it. She fired two shots into the maw, and the swirling mass grew frantic. Half a droid foreleg appeared, stunted and deformed. A black sense organ came and went.

Larin knew what it was now. It was a compact droid factory, and it had been busy ever since the Hutts placed it here, sending out tiny threads in search of metals and power, infiltrating security systems and taking everything it needed. Hence the threads she and Shigar had stumbled across under the vaults. Hence the lack of alarms.

She bet herself that if she took a knife to the metal walls of the safe, she would find them barely flimsi-thin—enough to fool a casual glance, but otherwise utterly plundered, dissolved, and removed, ion by ion, for use in the factory’s secret work.

Building vicious, determined, reticent droids that wouldn’t take orders.

Why?

That was a whole other mystery. But the thing was still moving, still functioning. Given enough time, she bet it would repair itself and start all over again. No wonder Stryver wanted it destroyed.

She picked up the comlink.

“Shigar, I’m in the vault,” she told him. “You need to see this.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. It—”

Something red flashed in front of her eyes. A searing pain struck the hand holding her comlink. She stared down in horror at the terrible cauterized wound where her fingers had once been.

Over the humming of her crimson lightsaber, the Sith said, “Give me the navicomp or it’ll be your head you lose next.”

ULA CRANED TO SEE what was going on inside the vault. He and Jet stood in the antechamber and had been just about to venture in after Larin when the sound of blasterfire brought them up short. Bright flashes of light lit up the cramped space. Larin and her two companions were shooting at something. But what? Not another droid, surely!

Ula and Jet dived for cover just in case, and kept their heads down until the rattle of weapons-fire died away.

Ula looked up. He could just see Larin’s silhouette leaning over the object Yeama had shown him. Its top was open, and she fired twice into it.

He was about to clamber to his feet when his eyes caught something out of place among the bits of stone and other rubble on the floor.

It was the navicomp.

One of the hexes must have knocked it out when they emerged to do battle. He scrambled for it before someone else saw and took it. Its transparisteel container was intact, and the device itself looked no worse than it had before.

A feeling of triumph filled him. If he could open the case and get the thing itself free, he could smuggle it under his cloak without anyone else seeing. But first he had to distract Jet. If the smuggler saw it, there was bound to be another fight over it. The whole extended disaster could start all over again.

Footsteps crunched behind him, and he turned, fearing that his find had already been discovered.

It was the red-haired Sith. She was heading for the vault, not him.

His relief was short-lived. The Sith’s lightsaber flashed and Larin gasped with pain.

“Give me the navicomp or it’ll be your head you lose next.”

Ula froze in horror.

“I don’t have it,” Larin said, voice tight.

“I don’t believe you.”

One of Larin’s companions fired at the Sith. She easily deflected the bolt back into his throat. He went down kicking then fell still.

“I’m telling the truth.”

“I’ll count to five. Then I’ll start hacking up your friend here. And then it’ll be your head, I promise.”

The Sith approached the last surviving member of Ula’s security detail. He backed nervously away.

“One.”

The box containing the navicomp was in Ula’s possession. All he had to do was surrender it to the Sith and Larin would be saved. And he would safely deliver the information to the Empire. It was a simple solution to all his problems.

“Two.”

But Ula couldn’t move. The Sith and the Empire weren’t the same thing. Oh, to trillions they were inseparable—the Emperor himself was the Sith to whom all others deferred!—but to him they were very different. On the one hand, the Empire offered a society of rules and clearly defined justice that could, if allowed to do so, bring peace and prosperity to every planet in the galaxy. On the other, oppression and constant conflict. Could he in good conscience give any advantage to the followers of the latter? Would Larin want him to?

“Three.”

If only he could deliver the navicomp to the Minister of Logistics. With it in her hand, she could surely find a way to turn it to their advantage. The Empire was so huge it wouldn’t miss this world’s resources, for all the squabbling over them now. All Ula wanted was the chance to prove the rightness of his principles. He didn’t mind the existence of the Sith, but they shouldn’t be allowed to run roughshod over everyone else.

“Four.”

Yet there was no point dreaming. The Minister of Logistics might have been in another universe entirely. He could no more give her this vital piece in the puzzle than he could stand up to the Sith himself and survive. He was just a pawn in a game much larger than he could imagine. He was insignificant and disposable. How foolish to think that he could ever have changed the way this would turn out! The navicomp had been earmarked for the Sith the very moment she arrived.

“Five.” The Sith moved in to start slashing.

“Wait!” he called out.

All eyes turned to him. The Sith glared at him with hateful eyes. Jet looked as shocked as though Ula had sprouted wings and flown up to the ceiling. Larin’s expression was hidden by her helmet, and that was the one he most wanted to see.

“Here,” he told the Sith, holding up the navicomp. “Take it. Just leave her alone.”

The girl’s expression became hungry, triumphant. Ula didn’t want to get any closer to that blade than he had to. He hefted the box and tossed it to her.

At the height of its arc, a gleaming web reached in and snatched the box clean out of the air.

“What—?” Ula spun around.

The Mandalorian caught the box neatly in one hand and tossed something back to Ula in return. He caught it automatically. It was a heavy metal sphere with a blinking red light.

“No!” screamed the Sith, robbed of her prize.

Stryver was already moving, rising up on his jetpack and heading for the exit.

“Chuck it!” yelled Jet to Ula. “That’s a thermal detonator!”

Ula hurled the sphere away from him as hard as he could. It went up, and kept going up as Shigar, the Jedi, used the Force to sweep it away. The tactic wasn’t entirely defensive. The detonator exploded high in the creaking scaffolding that had once been the security air lock’s roof, directly above Stryver’s escape route. The statue of Tassaa Bareesh toppled and fell. Yet another avalanche came crashing down after it, burying the Mandalorian and a herd of palace guards that had come to quell the disturbance.

The floor gave way, and kept giving way as Stryver fired downward, riding the tide of collapse into the palace’s deeper levels.

Snarling, the Sith girl went after him, determined not to lose her prize. She vanished into the roil of stone and ferrocrete, and didn’t reappear.

Ula took one step toward Larin, but Shigar beat him to it.

“Are you all right?” the Jedi asked her.

She was leaning against the outside of the vault with her crippled left hand compressed under her armpit. With her right hand, she tugged off her helmet. Her face was white and pinched.

“I’ll live,” she said. “Meanwhile, it’s not over. Stryver will head for his ship first chance he gets. You have to cut him off and get the navicomp back, any way you can. Do you think you can do that without me?”

Shigar nodded, tight-lipped, and loped off across the shattered floor to the hole in the wall, leaping gracefully from girder to girder.

Larin held her grin until Shigar was out of sight. Then she slumped in pain.

Ula’s pain was different but no less real. It was clear that Larin had a close connection with Shigar. The Jedi even had tattoos similar to hers. It was some kind of cultural thing, surely. Perhaps they were married. The thought made his chest ache.

He knew it was ridiculous to feel this way. He knew it was based on nothing at all. He knew he had built it all up in his own head, and that made him an idiot of the highest order. He had more important things to worry about than this.

The battle for the navicomp was over. Tassaa Bareesh’s palace security forces would be converging on the site to clean up and make accusations. He didn’t want to be there when that happened. His loyalties were so compromised, he wasn’t sure he could convince anyone that he wasn’t guilty of everything.

“Stryver will be going for his ship, like she said,” he told Jet, “but he’s going the wrong way around. I’ll head him off and see if I can salvage something. Tell her—tell the others I’ll meet them at the shuttle.”

The smuggler studied him closely, and then simply said, “All right, mate. I might need a lift myself.”

“Isn’t your ship—?”

“Impounded and crewless.” He shrugged. “And what’s a freight captain without his ship? Guess I’d better start thinking about a normal job.”

Ula patted him on the shoulder with what he hoped was appropriate bonhomie, because it was utterly genuine. A normal job. Those three words had struck him with the force of one of Stryver’s thermal detonators.

He hurried off, following with infinitely greater clumsiness Shigar’s route across the shattered floor. He ignored the shouts and screams coming from the levels below. He ignored the shaking of his hands. He kept his mind firmly on its goal.

There was an Imperial ship in the palace’s dock. That was where he was headed. If he could get there before it left, he could reveal his true identity and claim amnesty. He could escape with the Sith and the navicomp when she returned from hunting Stryver, and he could finally report to his superior.

He could relax the disguise, and speak freely, without lies or deceptions.

He could be himself. And then …

A normal job?

Nothing at that moment appealed to him more.

AX FELT LIKE she was being swallowed whole by a space slug. Even through the Force barrier she threw around herself as protection from the tumbling surf of rock, every sharp edge and crushing pressure squeezed the breath utterly from her. Almost instantly she gave up trying to guide her descent.

She consoled herself with the knowledge that Stryver had to be faring just as badly. Escaping this way was the height of desperation. She admired his guts even while she despised him for capturing the navicomp out from everyone else.

It wasn’t over yet, though. She would find him, no matter what it took. There was absolutely no way she was going to report to her Master empty-handed.

The rough-and-tumble finally eased off, and she was able to make her way through the debris, using the Force to help shove aside rocks and gravel, cutting through larger obstacles with her lightsaber if she had to. At every pocket of air she stopped to breathe, grateful for every single lungful of oxygen. It was almost completely dark, but very noisy. When the debris itself wasn’t groaning and grinding around her, she could hear voices crying for help.

Finally one arm emerged into free air, then her head. A trio of dusty Evocii grabbed her armpits and began to pull. She shrugged them off and got herself out. At the sight of her lightsaber, they squealed and ran.

Ax dusted herself down.

Now, Stryver.

She had emerged in some kind of dormitory, with bunks lining two walls and the rest crushed under the avalanche. The true extent of the collapse was hard to measure. She could have fallen a dozen levels or just one. Judging by the relative poverty she saw around her, however, she guessed that she was a long way from the luxurious upper floors. These were the beds of slaves, not valets.

Stryver would be farther down, and he would want to go up. His ascent, no doubt, would not be a quiet one.

She closed her eyes and tuned out the screams, the settling debris, the occasional blaster shot. She was looking for one particular sound out of the multitude surrounding her. It would be faint, but it would definitely be there.

The whine of Stryver’s jetpack.

There.

The moment she had it, she swung her lightsaber in a circle around her feet. The floor fell out from under her, and she arrived with perfect poise in the middle of an attempt to rescue a Hutt slave driver’s tail from its squashed position under a fallen wall.

She ignored everyone involved, crossed to the nearest wall, and slashed an impromptu doorway through that in turn. This led to a torture hall, where indolent or disobedient slaves were publicly punished in order to serve as examples to others. Again, Ax didn’t stop to admire the techniques of the Dug in charge. She noted only that many of the screams she had assumed to be caused by the collapse of the building actually emanated from here.

Through another wall, and Stryver’s jetpack was definitely sounding louder. She could also distinguish the dull booming of his assault cannon from the welter of other sounds. Like Ax, he was using the weapons in his arsenal to blast a way through the palace. Where doorways or corridors didn’t exist, he wasn’t above making his own.

Ax skirted the edge of a deep rancor pit. The massive beasts snapped and roared at her, enraged by all the commotion. The handlers did their utmost to restrain them, using chains, hooks, and heavy weights, but the rancors’ wild natures weren’t so easily subdued. The truncated scream of one of the handlers followed Ax as she Forceleapt across the enclosure in pursuit of her quarry.

The jetpack was close enough now that she could smell its exhaust.

Through a junkyard, a cantina, and a Tibanna gas containment facility, at last Ax had reached Stryver’s trail.

It was instantly recognizable. His assault cannon had blasted a tunnel diagonally upward through every structure in his way. The series of holes led through walls and floors in a perfectly straight line. At the end of it, Ax could see a glimmer of bright light: the jetpack’s fiery wash.

Baring her teeth in anticipation, she set off after him. Each leap took her one step higher on the long ad-hoc staircase. The surfaces she landed on were unreliable. Sometimes they crumbled beneath her; sometimes they slipped, still molten from the heat of the cannon. Sometimes people fired at her, made trigger-happy by the Mandalorian’s violent passage. Ax kept her footing and deflected every shot. She didn’t stop for anything or anyone.

Closer and closer she came to Stryver. He didn’t look behind him. His attention was focused solely on going upward. Past the glare of his jetpack she could see the transparisteel box clutched tightly in one massive hand. The navicomp was still inside. She almost reached for it through the Force, but held herself back. If she revealed her presence prematurely, Stryver would have time to react. Better to strike him in the back and take the prize from his dead hands.

Two more floors. Three. She threw up a barrier to prevent the heat of the jetpack from flaying away her skin. Four. Now she was so close she could almost have reached out and tripped him. The pounding of his cannon was deafening.

Now.

She lunged for the navicomp just as Stryver burst through the roof of the palace. A brown glare struck them, and Ax squinted as she struggled for possession of the box. Stryver showed no surprise, although he momentarily lost control of his jetpack. They spiraled and swooped across the roof, while guards peppered them with blasterfire.

Stryver’s gloved hands let go of the box.

For a fleeting instant, she felt triumph. She braced herself to kick away from him.

Then his left hand lunged out to catch her around the throat while his right brought up the assault cannon and fired into her stomach.

At point-blank range, the shot was like being hit by an aircar in full flight. Had she not put a Force barrier in place, her entire midsection would have been instantly vaporized. As it was, she was blown backward out of his cruel grip and left sprawling, momentarily insensate, on the roof.

Stryver caught the box neatly, one-handed, and flew off into the sky.

Ax watched dazedly, too stunned to feel anything other than curiosity. Where was he going? His jetpack couldn’t possibly have enough fuel to get him far. Tassaa Bareesh would have a price on his head within the hour—a price large enough to guarantee he would never leave Hutta.

Then a sleek black shape swooped into view. A ship. She recognized the angular foils of a Kuat scout but couldn’t determine the model. It dipped low to intercept Stryver, and then roared up into the sky.

Her quarry was gone.

She felt nothing.

A blurry shape occluded her view of the muddy sky. She tightened her focus. It was a Nikto guard. She was nudged by a business-like boot, as though to ascertain whether she was alive or dead. Another Nikto joined it, then a third. She watched them as though from the bottom of a deep, dark well.

I will kill you, Dao Stryver, or die trying.

Her rage returned, like life itself. She had lost the navicomp, but that didn’t have to be the end of the world. She would find another way to satisfy Darth Chratis and the Dark Council—and herself, too. It wasn’t really about Stryver and the navicomp, anyway. It was about where they led. The mysterious rare-metal world. The fugitives from Imperial justice. Her mother.

It couldn’t end here.

She wouldn’t let it.

She was on her feet in a single eyeblink. The dozen or so guards converging on her across the roof weren’t going to be a problem at all.

HER FIRST STEP was to devise a new plan. Stealing the navicomp and cracking its secrets obviously wasn’t going to be possible now. Stryver had it, and she had no illusions at all regarding the likelihood of him sharing those secrets.

There had to be another way. All she had to do was find it.

The palace was in an uproar as she fought her way back to the site of the battle with the droids—the “hexes,” as she had overheard someone calling them. It made sense to return to the scene, since only there lay any chance of learning anything about their origins. She wasn’t sure exactly what she hoped to find, though. Maybe the smuggler hadn’t told the Hutts everything he knew. Maybe she could torture him to extract every last piece of information.

As she wound through the palace’s labyrinthine halls, she passed a clutch of Gamorreans bearing the unconscious Jedi captive over their heads. She smirked but didn’t stop. It was good to see someone worse off than she was.

When she arrived at the ruins of the security air lock, she found it sealed behind a dense press of guards wielding laser cannons. The hole in the wall was protected by a bank of portable particle shields. Getting in wasn’t going to be as easy as getting out—and she had no intention of crawling back up the avalanche of debris. Fighting was an option, of course, but fatigue was beginning to take its toll. Under better circumstances, she would never have let Stryver beat her like that.

She needed to be smarter, rather than stronger.

Retreating to a quiet place to think, she examined everything she knew about the hexes. It wasn’t much. They were single-minded—but what did she know about the minds they possessed? They refused to acknowledge any authority beyond that of their maker. They killed everyone else with impunity. Was there anything else she could say about them?

She remembered the way they had tricked the Twi’lek into blowing an escape route for them through the wall. That displayed resourcefulness and cunning, qualities lacking in many droids, but not all. It wasn’t a unique feature of their design.

Something niggled at the back of her brain. A thought stirred there, hesitantly pushing itself forward for consideration.

Escape.

The hexes had been trying to escape.

So where were they trying to escape to?

Home.

But how did they know where home was?

The answer to that question burst into her mind with crystalline clarity.

The navicomp isn’t the only map.

Ax was moving, circling the ruin until she found the path that the two escaping droids had taken. No one stood in her way until she reached the first of the bodies. It was cordoned off by Gamorreans, and she let them be. The Jedi had made a real mess of that hex, spilling its guts out in a mess of silver and red. The second, she hoped, would be in better condition.

It, too, was cordoned off, but she could see through the guards that the body was intact, tangled up in a net like an animal caught in a trap.

Perfect, she thought, bringing her lightsaber into play.

WHEN SHE HAD the corpse safely slung over her shoulder, all she had to do was leave. That was accomplished as easily as walking through the palace to the spaceport, where the Imperial shuttle awaited her pleasure. Palace security had been tightened in an attempt to stop anyone from leaving. The attempt was doomed to failure.

Two armed Imperial guards stood at attention by the air lock’s inner door. They saluted as she stepped through.

“Any problems?” she asked them.

“There was a guy sniffing around the Mandalorian’s ship before it took off,” said one.

“And some nonhuman scum trying to get in here,” said the other. “We sent him packing.”

“Very good.”

She strode confidently up the ramp and into the cockpit, where the pilot sat waiting. He took in her dusty, battered appearance but didn’t remark upon it.

“We’re leaving,” she said. “Advise Darth Chratis of our imminent rendezvous. I want a droid tech on hand the moment we dock.”

“Yes, sir. But what about the envoy?”

“He’s no longer with us.”

The pilot nodded uncertainly, obviously comparing his standing orders with those he had just been given. A Sith always outranked a superior officer. That was the only conclusion available.

While the repulsors warmed up, Ax took the dead hex and stored it in the secure hold that had been set aside for the navicomp. This cargo was no less precious. The good thing about a droid was that, although dead was indisputably dead, memory took time to fade. With the right expertise, the location of the mystery world could be extracted from the data stored in the carcass, and her success would be assured.

A warm glow filled her, part relief, part pride, part exhaustion. She was looking forward to sitting down. But there was something she had to do first.

The shuttle was lifting off when she returned to the cockpit. She gazed through the viewports at the spaceport and its minuscule cluster of ships.

“Which ship did the Republic envoy arrive in?”

“That one,” said the pilot, indicating a stubby, fat-nosed craft resting on four wide-spaced legs.

“Destroy it,” she said.

“Yes, sir.”

The shuttle’s cannon fired, strafing the back of the defenseless ship. It burst into a ball of flame so bright it outshone the sun.

Ax smiled in satisfaction as the palace’s scarred roof receded into the distance. With any luck, she thought, that was the last she’d ever see of Hutta.

SHIGAR HAD SEEN the spaceport on plans of the palace, but hadn’t been there before. He moved quickly and carefully through the corridors of the palace, counting corners and noting landmarks while avoiding guards and security cordons. Getting lost or pinned down was the last thing he needed. Stryver would have farther to go but he knew the layout better. If there was going to be another confrontation, Shigar wanted to have the advantage.

Also on his mind was Larin’s well-being. Again he debated the wisdom of bringing her to Hutta. She had been a great help, and good company, too, but now she was hurt, possibly maimed, and that made her future prospects even grimmer. He swore to make sure her hand was properly tended, but was that enough? Had the kindness he had assumed he was doing for her turned into an intolerable cruelty?

He was afraid of what his Master would think when she saw where his judgment had led him.

All the more important, then, to succeed with Stryver. The entire palace was in an uproar, which was to be expected after explosions in the lower levels, a fight in the security air lock, rogue droids running wild through the corridors, and the multilevel collapse Stryver had engendered. Conflicting alarms overlapped wildly, creating a head-jangling row that Shigar did his best to ignore. He could only imagine how Tassaa Bareesh was taking it.

The spaceport guards were on high alert. Shigar plucked a sentry from his regular patrol and used the Force to persuade him into revealing the command structure of the emplacement. There had been enough killing already that day. Besides, any evidence of a struggle would alert Stryver to an ambush.

Encaasa Bareesh was a junior nephew of the palace’s matriarch. He oversaw the security detail from an office two floors away, and was notorious for only occasionally glancing at the cam views. It was a simple matter to convince Encaasa that a completely unrelated crew member wanted to board their ship, but had misplaced their clearance code. Shigar imagined the indolent Hutt wearily slapping his fat fingers on the right controls and then settling back into his hammock. Not even a palace-wide security alert could ruffle him.

The main entranceway to the spaceport slid open. Shigar walked through, watching behind him for any sign of the Mandalorian. None, yet. The doors closed, leaving him alone in the circular disembarkation area.

Shigar had asked the guard which berth the First Blood had been assigned to, and he headed straight there. The spaceport’s umbilical door was open, revealing the gray skin of Stryver’s ship at the far end. Shigar wasn’t so foolish as to go anywhere near that inviting portal. It would be booby-trapped for certain.

Instead he waited nearby, in full view of both the First Blood and the spaceport entrance, with his lightsaber inactivated but held tightly at the ready. Stryver had to come for his ship sometime, and Shigar would be prepared.

He emptied his mind of all concerns—every worry about Larin and his mission, every ache and pain—and stood poised and ready for action.

The sound of repulsors activating broke him out of his trance. One of the ships was warming up its engines for liftoff. He circled the disembarkation area to identify which one, but the sound wasn’t coming from any of the closed air locks. It was coming from Stryver’s berth.

That surprised him. He had assumed Stryver was traveling alone. There could, therefore, be no one inside his ship to warm it up for him. Either Shigar was wrong on that point, or Stryver had activated it by remote.

The repulsor whine continued to rise in volume. This wasn’t just warming up. The ship was about to take off.

Cursing under his breath, Shigar abandoned subtlety. Approaching the ship’s outer air lock, he quickly examined it for weak points and found just one. The door was keyed to Stryver’s biometric signs—height, breadth, proportion of limbs, and so on—but it also featured an override, just in case Stryver was ever grievously injured in the course of a mission. If he lost a major limb, for instance. That override could be sliced into by someone clever enough.

Shigar wasn’t as good a slicer as Larin, but he had seen this kind of trick before. Mandalorian ships had been Jedi targets ever since the Great War, and he had been taught over and over again the best way to disable them. Working quickly, he tapped a series of codes designed to reset the override function back to a commonly used default. When he typed in the default, the door slid open.

Not a moment too soon. The repulsors were at screaming-pitch and the ship was hovering lightly on the ground. In another second, it would’ve been high above the palace.

Shigar leapt lightly into the air lock and was swept upward with it. The moment his boots touched the floor, however, a secondary security system kicked in. Powerful electric shocks coursed through his body, sending his muscles into irresistible spasms. He fell onto his side, unable even to cry out. His jaw was locked open in a silent scream.

The autopilot raised the ship straight above the spaceport and adjusted its trim. Shigar felt himself rolling toward the open air lock, but couldn’t move a finger to save himself.

The electric shocks ceased the moment he cleared the air lock. That was something to be grateful for as he fell like a stone to the roof below.

HOW LONG HE WAS unconscious he didn’t know. Minutes, probably. Sufficient time for his helpless body to be gathered up by a roof security team, secured with binders at wrists and ankles, and gagged for good measure. When he woke, he was being transported through the palace on the shoulders of a squad of Gamorreans. Neither his lightsaber nor his comlink was within reach.

Instead of fighting, he concentrated on easing his body’s many bruises and batterings. He didn’t know how far he had fallen, but fortunately he had ended up with no broken bones. A ringing skull, yes, and a crushing blow to his dignity, but nothing worse. For the moment, he was grateful simply to be alive.

His captors whisked him at a brisk jog through the palace. He memorized the turns but without a starting point had no way of knowing exactly where he was going. His general impression, however, was of opulence increasing around him, not decreasing. When he arrived at a large space full of people whispering and talking, with one loud voice booming away in Huttese over the top of them, he guessed instantly where he was.

The Gamorreans came to a halt in the center of Tassaa Bareesh’s throne room, and with a coordinated grunt dumped him onto the floor. Silence radiated around him as people noted his presence. He clambered awkwardly to his feet and looked about.

A large crowd of beings stared back at him, whispering and pointing. He saw no less than twenty different species in one quick glance, from trunked Kubaz to feline Cathars, with bipeds occupying a pronounced minority. Their exotic origins belied their unified purpose: to pander and preen before the one who controlled their fates.

“Bona nai kachu,” roared the matriarch of the palace, “dopa meekie Seetha peedunky koochoo!”

Shigar turned to face Tassaa Bareesh. She was sprawled heavily on a horrifically ornate throne-bed at one end of the hall, and decorated almost as ornately as it was. He didn’t know enough about the Hutts to read her expression, but the quivering of her lipless mouth and the spittle she sprayed as she talked left little to the imagination.

An A-1DA protocol droid shuffled forward on spindly legs. “Tassaa Bareesh wishes you to fully comprehend the certainty that you will be punished, treacherous Sith.”

Shigar considered his options. There were at least two dozen weapons trained on him. Behind the crowd, armed guards ran back and forth, responding to various emergencies unfolding in the palace.

He bowed as ceremonially as he was able, given his bindings. “I must correct your mistress. I am in fact a Jedi.”

“Stoopa dopa maskey kung!”

He ignored the insult. “I can hardly have double-crossed you when we had no agreement between us. Beyond trespassing on your territory without permission, I mean no harm.”

Tassaa Bareesh rumbled threateningly, shifting to a different dialect now that she realized he could understand at least some of her words.

“Tassaa Bareesh says: Your intention was to steal from her. For that, you must die.”

“If you search me, you’ll find I’m carrying nothing I didn’t come here with.”

“Tassaa Bareesh says: Your accomplices have made off with the prize.”

“The navicomp? The last time I saw that it was in the grip of a Mandalorian, not a Jedi.”

“Tassaa Bareesh says: Your treachery is surpassed only by your puniness. He stole it from you after you stole it from us.”

“You are upset,” Shigar said. “Your judgment is clouded. A moment ago you thought I was a Sith. Perhaps the lie you think I am telling is actually the truth.”

The crowd muttered in consternation. Clearly few people were bold enough to question Tassaa Bareesh’s judgment to her face.

The Hutt matriarch growled something long and involved that didn’t really need translation. The droid rapidly blinked its round blue eyes and made a valiant effort anyway.

“Tassaa Bareesh is most displeased. She has, ah, devised numerous ways to use you for entertainment.”

Shigar didn’t argue the point. He had finished counting the guards and exits, and reached the conclusion he’d expected. There was no way to fight his way out of this one, and he couldn’t rely on reinforcements. He would have to talk. He might even have to make a deal.

That thought sickened him to the stomach.

“Your anger is perfectly justifiable,” he said. “Your palace has been attacked, and the property and information you planned to sell have been stolen. You’ve been deprived of the profit you deserve. No one would deny that you have a right to seek revenge, to make an example out of those who have caused you embarrassment and significant harm.” He bowed again. “All I beg is that you blame the right people.”

Another explosion ripped through the palace, causing great upset in the throne room. Tassaa Bareesh’s huge eyes showed white around the edges as she waved a Twi’lek over to her. His comlink was squawking urgently. They hastily conversed, too quietly for Shigar to overhear. Then anger got the better of the matriarch. She backhanded the Twi’lek away from her and roared at the translator.

“Tassaa Bareesh wishes you to understand that the spaceport has been attacked,” said the droid, its tapering head bobbing obsequiously.

“By whom?”

“By Imperials. The Republic shuttle has been destroyed.”

Shigar considered saying nothing. On one level he didn’t need to. The actions of the Imperials had won the argument for him, by their blatant violation of the Treaty of Coruscant. But on another level he was still in hot water. Tassaa Bareesh could have him executed just for being an irritation, and an inconvenient reminder of her loss. He had to give her a reason to spare him, not kill him.

He had to appeal to her business sense.

“We are both the victims here,” he said, choosing his words with exquisite care. “Killing me won’t get the navicomp back, and it will make an enemy of the Jedi Council. Either way, you end up worse off. Letting me live, however, offers you a way to cut your losses.”

“Tassaa Bareesh asks: How?”

Shigar swallowed. A bad taste had crept into his mouth. “I intend to follow the Mandalorian wherever he goes. He has injured both my pride and my companion, and he will pay for these crimes. The information he has stolen might no longer be of value, in and of itself, but every new world offers opportunities for trade and exploitation. In return for releasing me, I will ensure that those opportunities come to you first, before anyone else.”

The matriarch hummed a pitch almost too low for a human ear to hear. Her eyes didn’t leave Shigar’s face, but they had an inward cast now.

“Tassaa Bareesh is considering your offer,” said the droid, glancing back and forth between them.

“I worked that out.”

She rumbled something, and the translator said, “Tassaa Bareesh wonders how you intend to follow the Mandalorian when you don’t have a ship, let alone directions.”

“I’m a Jedi.” He tapped his forehead, hoping to hide the fact that he hadn’t the faintest idea on either point. “We have our ways.”

A new wave of whispering spread through the crowd.

“Tassaa Bareesh says that your ways are insufficient. The investment is too risky.”

“But—”

The translator raised a metal hand. “She says that in order to protect her stake in this venture, she must be allowed to provide you with assistance.”

“ ‘Must be’?” The choice of words gave him pause. What was being forced on him, exactly? “Tell me more.”

The matriarch settled back on her throne. Her eyes narrowed to slits.

“Tassaa Bareesh will provide you with transport. Her nephew will make the necessary arrangements. If you accept the offer, you may leave immediately.”

Shigar wondered what would happen if he rejected her offer. He mistrusted the matriarch’s sudden satisfaction. Just moments ago she had been seething with rage at the way her plans had been ruined. Had that been an act, or was this the act?

“All right,” he said, following his instincts. Living right now was better than dying. That was the bottom line. And if he got even luckier, he might be able to do something to help Larin as well, assuming she was still alive. “I accept the offer.”

The matriarch broke out into an enormous and unsavory smile. One chubby finger pointed at him. “U wamma wonka.”

“Tassaa Bareesh says—”

“I know what she said.” He swallowed another foul taste.

She clicked her fingers and the guards dropped their weapons. A Gamorrean scurried forward to return his comlink and lightsaber. He fixed them to his belt and bowed. The crowd watched him, silently now.

“Thank you,” he said. “It’s been a pleasure doing business.”

As the guards led him from the throne room—a guest now, rather than a prisoner—the sound of the Hutt’s chuckling, low and lugubrious, echoed and re-echoed through the sybaritic halls behind him.

“ARE YOU FEELING all right?”

Larin turned to look at the smuggler. She had left herself for a moment, left the ruins of the security air lock and the blasted droid factory, left the clamor of palace security digging through the rubble, even left the occasional potshot in their direction from an ambitious Houk, currently stationed in the hole that shortsighted Yeama had blown through the wall. Now she was back, and the view wasn’t pretty.

The answer came to her at last.

Are you feeling all right?

“Yes.”

They were hunkered down out of sight in the entrance of the vault. She was squatting on her knees, still applying pressure to her injured hand under her right armpit. The suit had sealed the wound as best it could, leaving her nothing else she could do about it now. She knew that well enough, having been injured in combat before. Once, she had been caught in an intense urban guerilla exchange that Special Forces Blackstar Squad had been sent in to deal with. Intel had leaked, leading Larin and three squad members into a trap. She still dreamed sometimes of the way frag grenades had torn into the group, instantly reducing two of her friends to ribbons. She had been sheltered from the bulk of it, but even so the skin down her right leg and side had been flayed completely away, along with a fair chunk of muscle. It had taken an extended period in a bacta tank to regrow the tissue, and three months of rehabilitation to restore her to full flexibility.

This was different, though, and it wasn’t just because fingers couldn’t be regrown. In the Blackstars, she had had many clear-cut reasons to fight: among them strengthening the Republic cause, enforcing principles of liberty and equality among all beings in the galaxy, and furthering her own career. She had thought herself perfectly normal in that regard. Why else did one join special forces but to be a hero on the side of good?

She knew now that not everyone was like her. Every barrel contained a bad apple or two. She also knew just how important at least two of those principles were to her. More important, combined, than the last one. Sacrificing her career to uphold them had seemed the right thing to do, at the time.

Without her career, though, it was very hard to fight for any cause at all. And now her situation was totally muddied. Was invading a sovereign state—albeit one comprising criminals and murderers—the best way to go about enforcing freedom and equality? How did squabbling with Mandalorians and Sith over a battered navicomp help the Republic? To whom did she owe her allegiance now, if not herself or her former peers?

She didn’t have good answers for any of these questions, yet she had lost the fingers of her left hand fighting for them. That made the pain worse, somehow.

“What happened to your droid?” she asked Jet in return.

“Clunker? He’s somewhere under that lot,” the smuggler said, indicating the pile of masonry left in the wake of the thermal detonation. He had armed himself with a blaster dropped by one of the dead soldiers outside. “Don’t worry. He’ll be back when he’s ready.”

“I recognize his model,” she said, clutching at the fact as though it would explain everything. “J-Eight-O, soldier class. That’s why he talks in combat signs. But they were phased out, weren’t they?”

“Perhaps,” he said. “I found him on a scrap heap two years ago. His vocoder was dead, and when I tried to fix it, he just broke it again. That proves how smart he is. He’s worked out that if you don’t respond to orders, no one can prove you heard them.”

“That’s a pretty good survival tactic,” she said, “for anyone in the army.”

They leaned out of the vault to see if anything had changed outside. The Houk kicked up some pebbles nearby, but missed by more than a meter. Potannin’s last surviving escort returned fire from the other side of the antechamber. He missed, too. Larin could have aimed better, even with just one hand.

“What’s your name, Private?” she called to him.

“Hetchkee, sir,” he called back. He was a young Kel Dor, and his face was mostly hidden behind a face mask and goggles designed to protect him from a harsh oxygen atmosphere.

“Who told you to call me ‘sir’?”

“No one, sir.”

He obviously didn’t know anything about her past. She wasn’t going to be the one to fill him in.

The sound of digging grew louder.

“Larin,” said Jet, leaning in closer, “do you think we’ve been left to hold the baby?”

“In what sense?”

“In the Someone’s going to have to explain this mess to Tassaa Bareesh and it might as well be you sense.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “He’ll be back.”

“Who? Your Jedi friend or Envoy Vii?”

Larin looked around. She hadn’t noticed that the envoy was gone—although now that she thought about it, she did remember Jet telling her something about Ula meeting them at the shuttle. It hadn’t occurred to her to wonder when and how they would go about getting there. Ula had left before the security forces had sealed their only way out.

“I mean Shigar,” she said. “Jedi Knights always keep their promises.”

“And what exactly did he promise you?”

She suppressed a sharp reply. What was Jet getting at? Sure, Shigar may not actually have promised to come back for her, but she knew he would if he could. And while Tassaa Bareesh’s security forces amassed outside, there was nothing else she could do but trust him. She had given up trying to hail him on the comlink long ago.

She stood up.

“I suggest—”

The sound of a distant explosion cut her off. The floor shook, and a rain of dust settled down on them from above.

There was no way to tell where this latest blast had come from, so she finished what she’d been about to say.

“I suggest we look at this thing while we still have the chance.”

She crossed to the miniature droid factory and peered inside. The swirling silver cilia were still now, so she felt safe assuming it was dead. She tried tipping it over to see the base, but it was firmly affixed by the wire-like threads that had eaten down into the vault floor like tree roots.

A piece of the silvery alloy had melted off during the firefight in the vault. She picked it up and weighed it in her hand. It was surprisingly heavy.

“Let me get this straight,” she said. “This thing was on the Cinzia. You found it in the wreckage and brought it to Hutta. Tassaa Bareesh locked it in here. It looked inert, but it wasn’t. It sent out those thread things into the floor and began scavenging metal. It infiltrated the security system. It started building the droids.”

“Ula called them hexes.”

That was as good a name as any, for now. “Maybe just one or two hexes at first, to defend itself. It kept them hidden inside, like a nest or an egg. If you look into one of the hexes, you’ll see they’re not solid all the way through. They have a honeycomb structure. So two could easily fit in here, if they were collapsed down.” She poked the cilia with the barrel of her rifle. “Two would be enough to take over a ship.”

Jet looked at her, not the droid-nest. “You think it was waiting for someone to win the auction and take it away?”

“I do. The hexes would’ve emerged, overpowered the crew, and gone safely home.”

He nodded slowly, thinking through her proposition.

“I think you’re partly there,” he said. “Given enough time, I reckon the hexes could’ve escaped from here on their own steam. Note how they emerged from the vault the moment everyone started fighting over it. The door melted like butter, probably thanks to wires like these. If everyone had waited just one more day, I think our nest here would have turned up empty.”

“You might be right,” she said.

“It’s just a guess,” he said self-deprecatingly.

“Here’s another one,” she said, edging back to the door. “If the homing instinct theory is right, then the hexes must know the way home.”

Jet’s face brightened. “So if we can get out of here with one of their brains, we won’t need the navicomp after all!”

They peered out at the body of the double-hex lying on the floor of the vault. The laser cannon had blasted a hole right through both conjoined abdomens. The innards were blackened and melted, totally unsalvageable.

Jet’s face fell. “Worth a thought, anyway.”

Larin leaned back against the wall and closed her eyes. Shigar sure was taking his time. Her blood sugar was low, and the endless pain was making her dizzy.

The sliver of metal from the factory was still in her one good hand. She slipped it into one of her suit’s many sealed compartments. At least they wouldn’t return empty-handed.

A disturbance outside distracted her. “Someone’s coming!” called Hetchkee.

Larin propped the barrel of her rifle on the back of her left hand and trained it through the door. The mound of rubble at the far end of the security air lock was moving. Someone was clearly coming up through it—but was it Stryver, the Sith, or Jet’s loyal droid?

A scuffed orange hand, reaching out of the gravel to find purchase on a fallen beam, soon answered the question.

“Told you,” said Jet with a satisfied expression. “Over here, mate!” he yelled to the droid.

Clunker extricated himself from the rubble and limped over to join them, utterly unmolested. The Houk had stopped firing. Instead of reassuring Larin, that worried her. There was no way to know what was going on outside their impromptu redoubt. She presumed the Hutts wouldn’t leave them alone for long.

“Good work, Hetchkee,” she said, returning to the safety of the vault’s interior. “I think we’ll have more company soon, so stay alert.”

“Yes, sir.” If the soldier was worried by that prospect, he didn’t show it.

Clunker was communicating with Jet via a series of rapid signs.

“Bad news,” the smuggler translated. “Stryver got away with the navicomp.”

“That’s the end of that, then,” she said, unable to hide her bitterness. The trail had gone cold. Any hopes she might have entertained about redeeming herself by means of a successful volunteer mission were now officially dead. “What does he want with this colony, anyway? Doesn’t Mandalore have enough soldiers already?”

“Doesn’t Tassaa Bareesh have enough money?” His cynical smile flashed again. “I think Stryver wanted the navicomp for two reasons. To find the Cinzia’s origins, and to hide its destination. That would make sense if Mandalore has been part of this right from the beginning.”

She stared hard at him. “You could be right. Stryver knew about the Cinzia long before anyone else. It was him going around asking questions that tipped us off.”

“And the Cinzia was on a diplomatic mission, but neither the Empire nor the Republic had ever heard of it. Can you name any other major players in the galaxy at the moment?”

She granted him the point. Even if the Mandalorians hadn’t acted as a united body since the war, it wasn’t inconceivable that they might do so again, for honor, or the right price, or just because they needed a good war. “Why did those things attack Stryver, then?”

“I don’t know.”

“And who saved the nest from destruction when the Cinzia’s crew blew themselves up?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

She shook her head. “Every way I look at this, it keeps on getting crazier.”

“Tassaa Bareesh had no idea, did she?”

The sound of grinding rubble came from outside the vault. Larin hurried to the door before Hetchkee could call. The giant mass of stone blocking the far entrance was moving forward. Behind the crunching of rock and ferrocrete, she could hear a hissing and pounding that could only have come from dirt-moving droids.

“Okay,” she said, “this is it. If you’ve got any other bright ideas, Jet, now would be the time.”

“You’ve had your daily quota, I’m afraid.”

“Well, then, you’d better join me in hoping that Shigar turns up soon. Otherwise, we’ll see what Tassaa Bareesh’s hospitality is really like, behind all the chintz.”

“I suppose we could try to make a last-ditch break for it,” he said.

“And go where?”

“Well, there’s my ship.”

“I thought it was impounded.”

“Oh, that. A small technicality.”

“Like getting out of here alive.”

He winked. “A man can dream, can’t he?”

Levity in the face of unspeakable odds always buoyed her spirits. It surprised her how much she had warmed to the smuggler in their short time together. Maybe their cells would be next to each other in Tassaa Bareesh’s dungeon. Maybe they would be stretched on adjacent racks.

With a rumbling crash, the droids broke through the rubble. Once the way was clear, they retreated to allow the palace’s security forces past. There were dozens of them, all heavily armored and armed, creeping forward across the exposed beams of the floor with sights trained on the vault.

Larin almost laughed. Tassaa Bareesh had sent an army to capture just four people! It would’ve been absurd if she hadn’t been on the wrong end of the equation.

“What do you think, Hetchkee?” she called to the Kel Dor soldier. “We can try surrendering to them, if you like. We haven’t done anything wrong, when you think about it. Your boss was actually invited.”

“I don’t reckon they’re in the mood to care about that, sir.”

That was true enough. The ranks of Weequay, Houks, Niktos, and Gamorreans looked as though they expected a whole army of Sith, Jedi, and Mandalorians to burst out of the vault and make off with their mistress’s fortunes. If only they knew there were just three people and a droid. It hadn’t even occurred to Larin to try unlocking the other three vaults.

“All right, then,” she said. “Wait until you can see the red of their eyes.”

Her opposite number among the security team was saying much the same thing, judging by the sudden tightening of their ranks. One enormous Weequay raised his right hand to give the signal to attack.

At that moment, Larin’s comlink buzzed.

She froze, unable to fire and answer at the same time. What was more important: the last shots she might ever fire in her life, or the last communication she might ever receive?

The Weequay had frozen, too. A blue-skinned Twi’lek had appeared at the far end of the room, waving and shouting something in a language she couldn’t understand.

“Can you follow that?” she asked Jet.

He shook his head. “Sounds important, though, whatever it is.”

No one was coming for them at that moment, so she took the opportunity to put her rifle aside and reach for the comlink.

“Larin, it’s me,” said Shigar. “Where are you?”

“Right where you left me. Tell me you’ve got a flip card up your sleeve.”

“I might just have. Has Tassaa Bareesh sent anyone to you yet?”

She peered out at the masses of security guards. “You could say that.”

“Go wherever they take you. I know what she has in mind.”

“You want me to surrender?”

“It won’t be surrender. We, ah, reached an agreement, she and I.”

Larin didn’t like that moment of hesitation. What if he was under duress and walking her into a trap?

She asked him, “Do you remember lightning season on Kiffu, when the static trees take to the air?”

“What—? Yes, I do. Spark-dragons lure them into caves to steal their charge. I’m not setting you up, Larin. You can rest easy on that score.”

“All right,” she said, keeping a close eye on the leading Weequay. He was yelling at the Twi’lek and brandishing his massive fists. “You’ll be where they take us?”

“Count on it.”

She put down the comlink and turned to Jet. He had heard everything.

“I will admit,” he said, “that I prefer resolutions that involve talking rather than shooting.”

“So you think we should do this?”

“I do. And Clunker agrees.”

The droid looked as though he was fully prepared to shoot his way out, but nodded stiffly.

“Hetchkee! Put down your rifle. When I say so, we’re coming out.”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Wait for the signal. If we get the timing right, I think we’ve got a good chance of surviving this with a little class.”

The Weequay shook his hands overhead one last time, then let them fall to his sides. The Twi’lek looked satisfied. The Weequay turned to his troops and grunted a series of commands.

The security detail rose to its feet one at a time, and lowered their weapons.

“Right,” said Larin. “That’s our cue. Put down your blasters, but keep your hands at your sides. We’re not surrendering.”

She stepped first out of the vault, and the Twi’lek came to meet her.

“I am Sagrillo,” he said with a short bow. “By the order of Tassaa Bareesh, you are free to go.”

Larin kept her relief completely hidden. “You better believe it.”

“And me?” asked Jet hopefully.

“Alas, Captain Nebula, my mistress still has need of your services.” The Twi’lek bowed again. “If you will accompany me, please, all of you, I will take you where you are required to be.”

Larin fell in behind the Twi’lek, with Jet beside him. Clunker and Hetchkee brought up the rear. The only sound was a subterranean growling from the Weequay as the security detail parted before them. Larin considered tipping him a salute farewell, but thought better of it.

She glanced at Jet. Apart from the slow clenching and unclenching of his jaw muscles, he showed no emotion at all.

ULA SAT IN ENCAASA Bareesh’s office and tried not to weep. He should never have come to Hutta. He should have argued with Supreme Commander Stantorrs and made him send someone else. It didn’t matter how it would have looked. He would happily take a greatly diminished position of responsibility in the Republic’s military administration rather than endure another minute in this slovenly disaster area.

From the moment he heard the name of the accursed Cinzia, everything had gone wrong. First he had been kidnapped and interrogated. Then he had been caught in the crossfire among a Sith, a Jedi, and a Mandalorian. Then the brutal hexes had almost killed him. And now …

He put his head in his hands, barely able to think of it.

From outside the office came the sound of constant commotion. The destruction of the Republic shuttle had damaged the palace’s spaceport. Fire and repair crews ran backward and forward, shouting at one another and into comlinks, requesting reinforcements. Ula didn’t offer to help. The palace could burn to the ground with everyone in it for all he cared.

The chances of Larin Moxla still being alive were slim indeed. Of that he was completely certain.

He wasn’t proud of himself for running from the ruins of the security air lock, even though he had been sure at the time that his motives were pure. His performance as a Republic envoy had never been convincing; Jet had seen through him straightaway, even if he hadn’t outright named him an Imperial spy. Better to let that life disappear and start a new one in the Empire, where he could spend less time worrying about who other people thought he was and more on actually doing the right thing.

Getting through the spaceport guards hadn’t been hard, even after the unexpected departure of Dao Stryver’s scout ship. They remembered him from his arrival and let him through. He had approached the Imperial dock without hesitation, confident that the guards would allow him admittance.

It hadn’t gone that way at all.

The shame of it still burned. His fellow Imperials—of a junior rank, what’s more—had turned him away, recognizing him as belonging to a near-human species rather than pure-blooded like themselves. Epicanthix scum, they had called him. You belong in this hole, they told him. Go away before we shoot you dead.

He had staggered out of the spaceport, stunned by the sudden reversal. If his own kind wouldn’t take him in, who would? Barely able to think straight, he had wandered in circles around the neighborhood for what had felt like days, but couldn’t have been any more than an hour. His choices were limited. He could either go back to the Republic and his old job under Supreme Commander Stantorrs—if he wasn’t sacked for failing so miserably in his mission—or do as the Imperial guards had suggested and stay on Hutta. The latter he simply would not do.

When he returned to the spaceport, determined to take his leave of the planet forever, he learned that the Republic shuttle had been destroyed. Bad enough that his fellow Imperials had rejected him; now they had destroyed his only means of getting offworld! He had been so wrapped up in his misery he hadn’t even heard the explosion, and he bore the news that things had gone from bad to worse with a distressing lack of grace.

Luckily, the situation wasn’t without hope. The Imperials’ blatant breaking of the Treaty of Coruscant might, on more civilized worlds, have resulted in all-out war, but on Hutta it was likely to be ignored along with the many other infringements perpetrated by the Sith and the Jedi that day. Furthermore, Ula’s status as a Republic envoy still carried some weight. Tassaa Bareesh’s nephew had installed Ula in his fetid office—a place of leathery drapes and entirely too much velvet, with living things crawling all over the desk—and left him there to sort himself out while the spaceport dealt with much more important emergencies. Ula couldn’t blame him.

The only person Ula blamed was himself. If he hadn’t run away like a coward, he might have been able to make a difference to the mission’s outcome. Larin was very capable, but she was also wounded. And now with Stryver and the Sith gone, one of them presumably with the navicomp, and the guards outside babbling about the Jedi someone had captured, Tassaa Bareesh was unlikely to show anyone involved the slightest clemency. He himself expected a wrathful backlash. All of Hutt space would quiver until she found a way to mitigate her losses.

A swarthy Weequay burst into the office. He didn’t knock. His face was melted into a permanent sneer.

“Up,” he said, poking Ula with his force pike.

Ula’s stomach sank. Here it came, the moment he had been dreading. How would Tassaa Bareesh deal with him? If he was lucky, it would be quick. If he got what he deserved, it would be exceedingly slow.

The Weequay poked him again, and he rose wearily to his feet. Several tiny lizards fell squeaking from his back and crawled off under the couch-bed. At least, he thought, he would be leaving this ghastly menagerie behind.

He was led out into the spaceport, where Encaasa Bareesh and a clutch of Gamorreans were waiting, ceremonial axes at the ready. In their midst was a dirty, beaten man whom Ula didn’t immediately recognize. A crude bandage stanched the flow of blood from a wound on his left arm. A dozen other small cuts and grazes had been left unattended.

“Envoy Vii, I don’t believe we’ve been formally introduced,” the young man formally said. “I’m Shigar Konshi, Jedi Padawan under Grand Master Satele Shan.”

Ula was so surprised by the unexpected deference that it was difficult to respond in kind.

“I thought you’d been captured.”

“I was.”

“So what are you doing here?”

“I’m waiting for—” He glanced over Ula’s shoulder. “Yes, here they come now.”

Ula turned and took in the scene behind him. If he’d been surprised into rudeness before, he was utterly speechless now.

Larin Moxla led a procession of a Weequay, a Twi’lek, Jet Nebula and his droid, and one of Potannin’s surviving guards. They weren’t being shoved along; they weren’t in binders. Like Shigar, they were being treated more like guests than prisoners.

“Nice to see you again, mate,” said Jet, tossing him a casual salute. “If you’re the one who talked us out of that mess, I owe you a dozen Reactor Cores.”

“Not me.” Ula turned helplessly to Shigar for an explanation.

“I cut a deal,” the Padawan said to all of them, although his eyes kept returning to Larin. “Tassaa Bareesh is letting us go.”

“That’s suspiciously generous of her,” she said.

“Yes, well, there’s a catch.” Shigar pulled an unhappy face. “I’ll tell you when we’re on our way.”

“You have a lift, too?” asked Ula, hope beginning to bloom.

“Better than that,” Shigar said. “I have a ship and a captain.”

“Anyone we know?” asked Jet hopefully.

The Twi’lek addressed Jet in clipped, officious terms. “The great Tassaa Bareesh has instructed her nephew to release your vessel, but your contract with our employer remains in force. You will provide passage for the Jedi and his companions to destinations of their choosing. You will not cut and run the moment you leave our airspace. You will return with the information gathered and provide said information in full. Any fiduciary losses incurred during this expedition will be your responsibility.”

“What about the profits?”

“They will be distributed the normal way.”

Jet grimaced. Ula guessed that “the normal way” meant all for Tassaa Bareesh and none for anyone else.

“It’s not much of a deal,” Jet said, “and, well, call me a stickler for details if you like, but I don’t remember there ever being a contract between us.”

The Twi’lek smiled. “There is now.”

“I guess that’s the catch,” said Larin.

“Well,” said Jet, “at least we’re alive and soon to be in motion. There’s nothing that can’t be solved, I’ve found, with the application of a little velocity.”

He winked at Ula, who was still too shocked by the sudden turn of events to manage a natural expression.

“Where are we going, exactly?” he asked the assembled group.

“After Stryver,” said Shigar. “And the longer we stand around here, the bigger the lead he’ll have.”

He bowed to Tassaa Bareesh’s nephew, who grunted something in reply. The Weequay and Gamorreans dispersed, marching with heavy tread off to pursue more important tasks. When the spaceport doors opened to allow them admittance, Jet took the fore, whistling jauntily as he led them to his berth.

“Don’t expect much,” he said. “The Auriga Fire is a loyal old thing but has seen better days. Like you, eh, old buddy?” He clapped Clunker on the shoulder, prompting a rattling noise that disappeared down the inside of the droid’s left leg. “It’ll get you from A to B, but I can’t speak to anything much else.”

He stopped at the disembarkation ramp, where a series of carrybags had been lined up. “Hello,” he said. “Who might these belong to?”

“I think they’re mine,” said Ula. His quarters had obviously been emptied while he had wallowed in self-pity in Encaasa Bareesh’s office.

“So you’re joining us, Envoy Vii?” Jet asked with a knowing gleam in his eye.

“Yes,” he said. “If—ah, if that’s not inconvenient.”

“I can’t guarantee that you’ll get back to Coruscant anytime soon.”

“That’s okay. I would very much like to leave here, immediately.”

“Right you are.”

Jet keyed an elaborate code into his berth, then another into his ship’s air lock. The hull was pitted and scarred with dozens of micrometeorite strikes. Ula fretted about the state of the ship’s particle fields, but supposed that if Jet had survived this long, they couldn’t be that bad.

The air lock slid open.

Jet waved him up the ingress ramp. “After you, then. Mind the step. Crew quarters to your right. Guess that’s what you qualify as now. Someone’s got to help me fly this thing straight.”

Ula grabbed a carrybag as he went by. His sole remaining escort did the same. The ramp creaked and swayed. He wrinkled his nose at the stink emanating from the ship’s interior. It smelled like stale Rodian. The Auriga Fire would undoubtedly be a far cry from the official transport he had enjoyed on the way to Hutta.

Still, he didn’t care. Utter disaster had somehow been avoided, and for that he was grateful. He was alive, and so was Larin; he had clean clothes and transport; there was even a chance he might be able to return with information for his masters on Dromund Kaas. When he thought back to the despair he had been feeling just minutes ago, his present circumstances seemed positively optimistic.

“Stang!”

Jet’s warning forgotten, Ula stubbed his toe on the top of the ramp.

THE AURIGA FIRE was by no means a luxury vessel. From above, the stocky freighter was almost perfectly triangular, with hyperdrives at the base; sensor arrays, shield generators, and comms at the upper point; and a cockpit slightly off-center in the middle, above the main holds. Its low, cramped corridors were arranged in a rough Y, with main hold, crew quarters for five, and a cramped engineering bay at the termini. The cockpit was one level up, accessed by a ladder. Additional holds filled every available piece of ship space, including some, Ula was sure, that weren’t visible to the naked eye. Jet claimed to have had a crew of ten on the run that had encountered the Cinzia. Ula wondered how they had all fit in.

The ship was hardly understocked in terms of equipment. On the short journey back from the refresher, Ula spotted a tractor beam, a crude interdiction device, and power supplies for no less than four tri-laser cannons. Thick cables suggested that the shields were well supplied with power, too. Jet might talk down its capabilities, Ula decided, but the ship could undoubtedly hold its own.

There was just enough room for everyone in the cockpit. Shigar had the copilot’s seat. Larin had clocked more flight hours, but until her hand was properly treated she was relegated to astrometrics. Clunker had patched himself in to the ship’s flight-control systems and shut down his photoreceptors. That left Ula and Hetchkee to ride out the short hop to orbit in the passenger seats.

As the brown atmosphere faded away to stars, Ula instantly felt lighter, both physically and in spirit. Jet deftly guided the ship into a stable parking orbit and put it on autopilot. Then he swiveled in his seat and folded his hands behind his head.

“Now for the ten-trillion-credit question,” he said. “Where to?”

Everyone looked at Shigar, who shifted awkwardly in his seat.

“Easier asked than answered, I’m afraid,” he said. “Tassaa Bareesh thinks we’re going after Stryver, so I guess that’s what we have to do.”

“Why don’t we just run?” Ula asked.

“I can’t,” said Jet.

“Because of a made-up contract?”

“Because she’ll hunt me down and nail me to her wall if I do. She’s planted a homing beacon somewhere on this old bucket. I’m sure of it. That’s what I’d do in her shoes.”

“So we go looking for Stryver,” said Larin. “He’ll head for the hexes’ home, for sure.”

“If we had the navicomp,” said Shigar, “we’d do the same.”

“He has to crack the cipher first,” said Jet. “We had a go or two at it on the way to Hutta, without any luck.”

“Is there any other data we haven’t been given? For instance, when you interdicted the Cinzia, could you tell from its trajectory where it originated?”

Jet shook his head. “We tried that, too. Project the ship’s route back, and you get empty space to the edge of the galaxy, and then a lot more empty space after that. Same with everything else we picked up. It all points nowhere.”

“They were smart,” said Larin. “And they really wanted to stay hidden. I wonder why.”

They pondered that question for a moment, in silence. Ula had no insight to offer into the psychology of Lema Xandret. The hexes were remarkable and strange, but that alone didn’t reveal anything about the people who had made them.

Or did it? On Panatha, Ula’s great-great-grandfather had been fond of collecting ancient Palawan sayings. “What you do speaks louder than what you say” was one of them. Another was “What you make makes you.”

Applying that philosophy to their present situation seemed impossible to Ula, until he remembered something Yeama had told him.

“The thing that built the hexes,” he said. “The nest. It was made of a strange alloy. What was it?”

“Lutetium and promethium,” said Jet.

“So they’re rare metals. There can’t be many worlds where both are found, right?”

Jet poured cold water on this spark of an idea. “There isn’t a single surveyed world with those metals in abundance.”

“What about Wild Space? There are lots of unsurveyed worlds in there.”

“Sure, but it’s a big place and they don’t call it wild for nothing.”

Ula sagged back into his seat. “How did you convince Tassaa Bareesh you had the slightest chance of finding this place?” he asked Shigar. “It seems hopeless to me.”

Shigar looked embarrassed. “I reminded her that I’m a Jedi. I told her we have our ways.”

Larin reached into one of her suit’s compartments and lifted out a strip of silvery metal. “This is how we’re going to find the planet,” she said triumphantly, offering it to Shigar. “This, and your mysterious ways.”

Shigar’s eyebrows went down in confusion, then down even farther in a frown. “No,” he said, pushing the metal away from him. “It won’t work.”

“It has to,” she insisted. “You told me about your psychometric ability—”

“My unreliable psychometric ability, Larin.”

“—and that your Master thinks you can tame it. What better time to try than now?”

“No better time,” he agreed, “but you can’t make it work just by wanting it to.”

“I trust you,” she said with unaffected candor. “And you haven’t let me down yet, not even once. I don’t expect you to start now.”

That stopped his protests. He reached out, took the shard of metal from her hand, and held it up to the light. It gleamed like a metallic diamond.

“Is that what I think it is?” asked Ula.

“It’s a piece of the nest,” she confirmed.

“And Shigar can use his mind to find out where it comes from?”

“I can try,” said Shigar, sternly. “That’s all. I can’t promise anything.”

“Well, it’s a start. How long will it take?”

“I don’t know. I’ll talk to Master Satele, first. She might be able to guide me through this. Can you put a call through to Tython?”

“Faster than you can ask me to.”

“I’ll take it in the main hold,” he said. “There’s a holoprojector there.”

Shigar got up from the copilot’s seat. Jet fiddled with the instruments in front of him, opening up comm channels and shunting data through the ship.

Larin was sitting thoughtfully, eyes staring blankly at the ladder down which Shigar had disappeared. A tiny worry line creased the bridge of her nose.

Ula leaned in to whisper, “You don’t really think he can do this, do you?”

Her green eyes focused on him. “There’s only one thing I think,” she said. “If he doesn’t even try, that’d be worse than failing.”

Ula could only nod in the face of her unswerving integrity, and wish that he possessed half of it.

“Now,” she said, “I have to get this glove off and look at my hand. In the absence of a field medic, I need one of you two to help me out. Private Hetchkee? Envoy Vii?”

“I’ll do it,” said Ula quickly. “You stay here and back up Jet, in case he needs it,” he told Hetchkee.

“Medkit’s in the aft air lock,” Jet called out. “Let me know when you have a destination and I’ll get this crate moving.”

“Will do.”

Larin headed for the ladder and Ula followed her, frantically dredging up everything he’d learned about medicine from a brief training session on Dromund Kaas, years ago.

SHIGAR PACED THE Auriga Fire’s cramped hold as best he could while waiting for Jet to patch him through to Tython. He wasn’t doing a very good job of it. He could only manage three long strides from one side to the other, and he had banged his head on a protruding instrument panel twice already. The pointlessness of the exercise was just becoming apparent to him when the old-model holoprojector flickered and emitted a soft whisper of static.

He pulled from the opposite wall a retractable chair designed for someone much smaller than him and sat down, feeling all knees and elbows.

A blueish image of the Grand Master formed. It flickered and jumped but held firm enough to follow.

“Shigar,” Satele Shan said, raising her hand in greeting. “I’m pleased to hear from you. Are you on Hutta?”

He briefly outlined his current position: in a smuggler’s vessel over the Hutts’ homeworld, still wearing what remained of his impromptu disguise. “I find myself in an intractable position, and I need your counsel, Master.”

She smiled, slightly but not unkindly. “You have agreed to things you do not feel you can accomplish, or which you do not want to accomplish. Perhaps both.”

Her powers of perception startled him. “You can sense this from so far away?” Truly she was the most powerful Jedi in the galaxy!

She shook her head and smiled with charming self-deprecation. “No, Shigar. I just remember what it’s like to be in the field. Responsibility, decisions, consequences—they feel very different when assumed in isolation. Do they not, my Padawan?”

He lowered his head. “Yes, Master.”

“Tell me,” she said, “and I will offer what counsel I can.”

Shigar started at the beginning, with his and Larin’s arrival on Hutta. He skipped the mundane details of his infiltration of the palace and described his first encounter with the unique technology offered for sale by Tassaa Bareesh, the silver roots spreading out from the vault into the underground tunnels, and Larin’s account of the droid-nest that Jet Nebula had pulled from the wreckage of the Cinzia. He described his three-way fight with Dao Stryver and the young Sith, then the emergence of the hexes and their near-escape.

“You fought a Sith?” Master Satele asked him, sounding impressed.

“I believe she was an apprentice like myself,” he admitted, “else I wouldn’t have survived.”

“Regardless. A Sith and a Mandalorian at once, and you did survive. Few Padawans could boast of such a thing, Shigar. The fact that you are not boasting of it I take to be a sign of good character.”

“Master, I do not believe I survived by skill, or even luck.” In the retelling, he noticed several things that hadn’t occurred to him at the time. “Stryver would have defeated both myself and the Sith apprentice, given time. The interruption of the hexes changed everything. He no longer fought us. He stood back to watch us fight this new enemy. I believe he was holding back.”

She leaned back into her seat, cupping her chin with one hand. Shigar recognized the background; she was in her private study, an austere, minimalist space with few ornaments, but constructed from the finest possible orowood.

“I see” was all she said. “Go on.”

He described the hexes in more detail, beginning with the sixfold symmetry of their basic appearance, their identical lack of personality or individuality, and their deadly unwillingness to stand down, then moving on to the glimpses of their internal structure that he had received while killing one of them.

“The technology is quite outside my experience,” he said, remembering honeycomb matrices and strange oily fluids leaking from the body. “The hexes are no more resourceful than any normal droid—certainly no more so than the training droids on Tython—but they display an adaptability I’ve never seen before. An injured one merged with another to form a single eight-legged version. Later, one activated a camouflage system that the others didn’t seem to possess, and the weapons of a third became more powerful. It almost seems like …”

“Like what, Shigar?”

“I don’t want to say evolving, Master, but I do think they’re capable of adaptive redesign.”

“In the heat of combat?”

“Yes. Particularly so, I suspect.”

“That makes them very remarkable droids indeed,” she said. “Who could have built such things?”

“Envoy Vii was interrogated by Dao Stryver, Master. The Mandalorian let slip that Lema Xandret was a droid maker.”

“Do you think these are her creations, Shigar?”

“I have too little information to say for certain, but what we do have is suggestive.”

She nodded. “Indeed. Dao Stryver was hunting both a particular droid maker and a ship containing the means to build remarkable droids. Lema Xandret is most likely the architect of these things. But what is their purpose? If they are weapons, whom are they meant for?”

“It’s possible, Master, that they aren’t weapons at all. Not aimed weapons, anyway. They may simply have been fighting to get home.”

“To do what?”

Shigar had no speculation to offer on that point. He vividly remembered the droids’ screeching rage at being obstructed in their quest to escape. Such emotional programming was not normal for combat droids—or any droids at all, in his experience.

“There’s something else,” he said. “When Stryver confronted the Sith apprentice, he said something about her mother. I don’t know exactly what he meant, but it got a reaction from her. Whoever her mother is, she’s connected somehow.”

He let that fact sit where it was. As it stood, the Sith’s involvement was unexplained. While tempted to draw conclusions from suggestive facts, he thought it best to wait until they had more information. The wrong conclusion could be deadly, if they based their actions upon it.

Master Satele, it seemed, agreed.

“So,” she said, “the thing in the Cinzia wasn’t an ancient artifact that we or the Sith might find useful. It was something strange and new. Where does that leave us?”

“The Mandalorian has the navicomp,” he said. “He’ll be decoding the information it contains as we speak.”

“And then what?”

“His motives are unknown,” Shigar said, casting his mind back to the things Ula and Larin had said on the way to orbit. “I believe that the Mandalorians have been involved in this from the beginning. Stryver may have wanted the navicomp, in part, to destroy evidence that the Cinzia’s ‘diplomatic mission’ was with Mandalore—but that makes less sense the more I think about it. Mandalorians aren’t unified, and they don’t parley with anyone. Fight or conquer, that’s their philosophy.”

“They allied themselves with the Empire against us,” Master Satele reminded him.

“Yes, but that’s the Empire, not some isolated colony in the middle of nowhere.”

She nodded. “What are your plans now, Shigar? Are you returning Envoy Vii and your friend to Coruscant?”

Shigar knew that look on his Master’s face. She already knew the answer to her question. She had either worked it out or seen it in a vision. There was also a slight emphasis on the word friend that encouraged him to cast his answer in the frankest terms possible.

“Larin thinks I can use psychometry to find this world.” He held up the sliver of silvery alloy that she’d recovered from the nest. It glittered in a way that wasn’t beautiful, but was certainly eye catching. “I think she places too much faith in my abilities. I would rather bring it to Tython for someone reliable to read it there.”

“That would waste time, Shigar, and time may be of the essence.”

“Do you know this, Master, or do you just suggest it?”

“It doesn’t matter. I do know that Larin’s faith in you is not unwarranted. Perhaps you should have faith in her, too. Does she strike you as a fantasist?”

“Anything but.” Larin was as solid as a rock. “She sees what she sees and she says what she says.”

“Well, then. Maybe the one who doesn’t see is you, Shigar.”

“Perhaps, Master. But if I fail—”

“Metaphorically speaking,” she said with a smile, “if is the smallest word in the Galactic Standard lexicon, yet it stands between us and our greatest dreams. Let it be a bridge, Shigar. It’s time you crossed it. I will be waiting for you on the other side.”

He took a deep breath. “Yes, Master.”

“Meanwhile, I am hopeful that Supreme Commander Stantorrs will provide us with substantive backup. Where the Mandalorians are concerned, he’s unlikely to take any chances. But it will undoubtedly be a military mission, not Jedi. I’ll suggest rendezvousing at Honoghr. Send coordinates to me there, once you have them, and we’ll get on our way.”

Shigar’s mind reeled at the logistical efforts unfolding in response to his actions. “Yes, Master.”

“The Force is with you, Shigar.”

The line crackled and died.

Shigar slumped momentarily into the seat, and then went to find somewhere quiet to meditate.

LARIN HADN’T INTENDED to eavesdrop on Shigar’s conversation with his Master, but the Auriga Fire was too small to allow anyone actual privacy. Where she and Ula sat facing each other was less than five meters away from Shigar, and the metal-lined corridors carried every sound. Ula spoke softly so as not to disturb him, and it was easy for Larin to phase the envoy out.

She found it much harder, though, to ignore the mess the Sith wretch had made of her hand.

Just getting the glove off had been difficult. No painkillers existed sufficient to shield her entirely from the sensation of blended flesh and plastoid tearing apart. The Sith’s lightsaber had melted both into a horrific seal, one that had stopped her from losing too much blood but would have to be removed before the wound could properly heal. The medkit’s initial scan revealed a mess of truncated bones and blood vessels beneath. It could only deal with them once the wound was cleared.

That job fell to Ula, who wielded a sonic scalpel with more surety than she had expected. Ula talked her through the procedure, in an attempt to reassure both of them, most likely. She gritted her teeth, unable to look away, and at the same time tried to focus her mind on something else.

“What are your plans now, Shigar? Are you returning Envoy Vii and your friend to Coruscant?”

That had to be Shigar’s Master, the legendary Satele Shan. Larin wished she could see her image. She spoke with such surety and confidence, and Shigar responded to both in ways he probably wasn’t even aware of, simultaneously trusting and rebelling. It was hard to imagine him in a junior role to anyone.

“Maybe the one who doesn’t see is you, Shigar.”

“There,” said Ula, gingerly lifting the glove from her brutalized flesh. It came off in three pieces. He had resealed the major blood vessels with a laser cauterizer and applied a bone stabilizer compound. “I think that’s good enough to put in the medkit now. I’ll dig around through the ship’s cupboards later and see if I can find a prosthetic to tide you over until we get home.”

She didn’t want to look at the ruins of her hand, but she had to. The cut ran neatly across all her metacarpals, leaving her without even a single finger stump. The pain was hazy and indistinct now, but very present. Her nerves were obviously still working. That was a good thing, she reminded herself, if she was ever to have a full prosthetic attached.

The medkit swallowed what was left of her hand up to the wrist, and hummed patiently to itself.

“The Force is with you, Shigar.”

Larin heard him sigh, then get up to move elsewhere in the ship. His footsteps thudded heavily, as though he were bearing a heavy weight. Doors opened and closed, sometimes prompted by a thump or two. Finally he stopped. A door closed and sealed. Apart from the combined hum of life-support and a dozen other machines, the ship was silent.

“I said, I have several carrybags full of brand-new clothes. If you or anyone else wanted to change …?”

She focused on Ula’s face. “What? Oh, yes. Sorry. That’s a good idea. Could you help me get my armor off? I won’t be able to reach the seals down my right side until the medkit has finished.”

“Of course. I’d be happy to.”

Together they wrestled her out of her arm and chest plates. The back defeated her entirely, so she showed him how to pop the waist seals and wriggle the shell free. Even through her body glove she felt the coolness of the air. She literally hadn’t taken the armor off for days. On Coruscant, in the dangerous old districts, she had become used to sleeping in it most nights.

The state of the armor dismayed her. It had been well used even before she bought it, but the last few days had tested it beyond reasonable expectations. It was dented, slashed, melted, pierced, and blackened. More than once she found patches of blood she didn’t even remember shedding.

“I can manage the rest,” she said. “There must be a ’fresher in here somewhere.”

“I saw a small one near the starboard hold. Are you sure you’ll be okay on your own?”

“Most definitely. A girl’s gotta keep some secrets.”

He flushed a bright red, and she instantly regretted the joke.

“I’m sorry,” she said, taking his hand. “You’ve been a great help, Envoy Vii. The painkillers are making me feel a bit woozy. I might lie down after I’ve cleaned myself up.”

“Yes, yes, you should rest. And please call me Ula.”

“Thank you, Ula.”

His hand was warm in hers. She surprised herself by not wanting to let him go. They sat without saying anything for a moment, and maybe the painkillers really were getting to her because she felt herself tearing up at this tiny instant of human contact. She had been on her own for so long.

Don’t be an idiot, she told herself. Being in the Blackstars was never like this. We fought and killed together. We didn’t hold hands.

“All right,” Ula said, sounding embarrassed again. “The luggage is in the crew quarters. I’ll let you rummage through it. Call if you need anything, anything at all.”

Larin nodded and wiped her nose.

Ula let her hand go.

When next she glanced up, he was gone.

THE IMPERIAL SHUTTLE came out of hyperspace above the green and empty world of Kant, deep in Bothan space. Kant’s two moons possessed a sparkling array of asteroid companions. Among them lurked the seventeen vessels of the half division granted to Darth Chratis by the Dark Council. The bulk cruiser at its head, an aging hollow-nosed Keizar-Volvec behemoth called Paramount, hung low and heavy dead ahead. Ax felt an anticipatory dread as the shuttle swooped in to dock. She had cleaned the wounds on her face and neck and changed into clean attire. Still, she felt unready for what was surely to come.

A full detail awaited her on the hangar deck. She ignored their salute.

“Where’s the technician I asked for?”

“Specialist Pedisic is on her way, my lord.”

“Not good enough. I asked for one to be here when I arrived. What about Darth Chratis? Is he on his way, too?”

“No, my lord. He wishes you to attend him immediately.”

“Again, not good enough.” She wrapped the Force around the man’s throat and squeezed until he gasped. “Tell him that I have important work to oversee, and I will not be distracted.”

“Yes … sir!” the red-faced soldier managed.

She let him go and he scurried off to obey her orders.

Behind her, the pilot and another grunt carried a sealed metal case down the ramp with exaggerated care. She had impressed upon them the importance of its contents. If anything happened to the remains of the hex, she was sunk along with the mission.

“I need somewhere secure to open this box,” she told the next soldier in line. “Show me to the nearest quarantine bay.”

“Yes, my lord.” He snap-turned neatly on his heel and led her to a glass-windowed room set into one wall of the hangar deck. The box promptly followed.

The quarantine bay was small but well equipped. The box went onto the floor next to a gleaming metal table. A heavy-breathing droid tech finally arrived, and Ax sent everyone else packing.

“Inside that box is a droid,” she told the technician. “And inside the droid is information of the greatest possible importance. It’s your job to get it out.”

“I understand, my lord.”

“Good. Well, open it!”

Specialist Pedisic unsealed the clasps, stared for a moment at what lay within, then reached in to scoop out the remains. The dead hex had collapsed in on itself and was now reduced to the size of a small human child. Its legs curled protectively around its midriff. Dark brown fluid stained everything.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” Pedisic told her, wiping her hands on a cloth she produced from inside her uniform.

“What you’ve seen or done before doesn’t concern me,” Ax said. “It’s what happens now that matters. If I said this was a matter of life and death, I wouldn’t be exaggerating. For you, it certainly is.”

Pedisic swallowed. “Let me send for some more equipment, and I’ll get started right away.”

Ax nodded. “You have one hour.”

She swept out of the quarantine bay, past the double guard stationed at the door, and went to find her Master.

THE BLOW CAME SO fast she couldn’t avoid it, even though she’d expected it from the moment she boarded the Paramount. She felt herself swept up and thrust with crushing force into the nearest bulkhead, and held there, unable to move.

“You were sent to Hutta to claim one thing.”

The deadly hiss of her Master’s voice slid like a red-hot needle into her right ear. She could feel him next to her, even though the room was in absolute darkness. His presence was like a foul-burning fire in the fabric of space itself.

“One thing only,” he repeated, “yet you return without it, you stand by while the Emperor’s official envoy is killed, and you delay before reporting to me. What am I to do with you, Eldon Ax? What punishment would be most fitting?”

“The envoy was a puppet,” she managed in her own defense.

“They always are, but they remain the public face of the Emperor. To slight one of them is to slight him. Would you be party to such a thing? Should he be informed that you have allowed his authority to be disrespected?”

“No, Master. That was not my intent.”

“Perhaps it was not. It is hard to be certain. Your confusion is exposed to me. You are weakened by attachment, by the existence of a mother …”

She flinched away from him as though physically struck. “You lie!” she cried, even though part of her worried that it might be the truth.

The lights burst on, blindingly bright. She fell to the floor, released, and blinked away bright afterimages. The room was square, black, and empty apart from her Master’s meditation sarcophagus mounted securely in the center. He was inside it, his withered face hidden safely behind the lid.

He had never been standing beside her at all.

“Allow me to explain, Master.”

“If you cannot, I will crush your mind to dust.”

She began with her attempt to infiltrate the vault and moved quickly on to her confrontation first with the Jedi Padawan, then with Dao Stryver. Darth Chratis was displeased at her inability to slay either of her enemies, and she felt his feverish will coiling about her again, but she plowed on without hesitation. Her fate rested on convincing him of the worth of the hexes.

“Droids,” he breathed. “Lema Xandret was a droid maker.”

“This surely confirms beyond all possible doubt that the Cinzia was connected to her. Doesn’t it, Master?”

“Do you have any other evidence?”

She pushed aside a memory of the hexes’ relentless screeching. “They consistently attacked me first, as though they possessed an embedded resentment of the Sith. Otherwise, they lashed out only when either attacked themselves or their way was impeded.”

“Suggestive indeed. You say the Mandalorian had the measure of them, as though he had seen their kind before?”

“He held back until it was clear the hexes were going to escape.”

“I find that very interesting, too.”

“The Hutts clearly had no idea what they had found, Master. They might have sold it for the material value alone, had it not been activated.”

“Do you think your presence triggered some kind of awakening?”

“No, Master. It was a matter of expediency. The seed-factory remained relatively quiescent until circumstances ruled that tactic unworkable. Then it moved to another tactic. If the auction had been held a week later, I believe the hexes would have escaped unchecked into the Hutta biosphere, and from there made their journey home.”

“To report, I presume.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Can you recover their route from the remains you brought here?”

“I intend to, Master.”

“If you do not, I will flay you alive in front of the Dark Council, before they in turn flay me.”

“Yes, Master.”

“Abase yourself before me,” he told her, “and swear to me that the thought I see in your mind is not another reason I should kill you now.”

She froze. All she had been thinking was that the hexes fought her as hard as they fought her enemies—harder, in fact, because she was a Sith. Surely, instead, they should have recognized her and held back. After all, Lema Xandret had created both of them. She had even named the ship after her daughter. They should be her allies, not her enemies.

Darth Chratis held her mind like an egg, ready to crack it with a thought.

She did exactly as he said, pressing herself face down onto the cold metal floor to reaffirm her allegiance to him.

“I remain your trustworthy servant,” she said. “I am yours to kill if you deem it fit.”

She waited, hardly daring to breathe, and gradually the pressure eased.

“You shall live,” her Master told her, “for now. Find me the location of that planet. If you fail me again, I will show no mercy. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, Master.”

“Leave.”

She went.

Only when she was sure she had reached a safe distance did she dare think, You can expect no mercy from me, Master, the day our positions are reversed.

THE VERY SECOND the medkit bleeped to tell her its work was done, Larin slid her half hand free and headed for the refresher. She was tired and ached all over, but this couldn’t wait. There was only so much she could ask of a self-cleaning body glove. A good rinse was exactly what it needed.

When she was done, she did as Ula had suggested, and looked through his suitcases for anything she might be able to wear. Much of it was formal wear and still vacuum-sealed in its original packaging. A lot of it was also made from more expensive natural fabric, and therefore not amenable to on-the-fly adjustments, but Ula wasn’t significantly larger than she. Eventually she found dark blue pants and a matching jacket with a militaristic cut. The sleeves and legs came up to match her length, and the other measurements pulled in tight enough. With the black body glove underneath, she almost looked stylish—but for the bruises on her face and the missing fingers of her left hand.

Larin considered what she had told Ula she would do, and rejected it. She was tired, but knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. The first thing she’d noticed on leaving the refresher was that the ship wasn’t moving. It was still in orbit about Hutta.

She explored the main level of the Auriga Fire. Hetchkee was sound asleep in the crew quarters, and like any good soldier hadn’t been disturbed by her rummaging around. The soft male voices coming down the stairwell from the cockpit belonged to Jet and Ula. All the holds she poked her head into were empty, bar one.

Shigar sat cross-legged with hands folded across his lap and eyes closed. The silver scrap sat innocently on the floor in front of him. His face was expressionless, but she could feel the tension radiating from him like an audible twang. He looked like she had felt half an hour earlier: exhausted, dirty, and beaten half to death.

She went and got the medkit.

“Your arm,” she told him when she returned. “How are you going to achieve anything if you bleed out here in the dark?”

Without moving a single other muscle, he opened his eyes.

“I can’t do it anyway, Larin.”

“You know, you’ll never be able to prove that true,” she said, holding the medkit at him like a challenge. “All you can prove is that you’ve stopped trying.”

“But if you distract me—”

“That’s not the same thing as giving up. That’s called a regroup. I’m your reinforcements.”

His mask of concentration finally broke into a faint smile. “I’d happily trade places with you.”

“Me, too,” she said, raising her injured hand.

He took the medkit from her without another word.

She explained the clothing situation while he tended his arm. He nodded vaguely. She slid down the wall and sat with her back against it. He didn’t stop her. By the light spilling through the open door, he looked much older than she knew him to be.

“Everyone is waiting for me,” he said as the medkit hummed away. “Not just you and Master Satele. Supreme Commander Stantorrs, hundreds of soldiers and starfighter pilots, the entire Republic—waiting for me to do something I’ve never been able to do. Not properly, anyway. It comes and goes. It’s not reliable. I can tell you where your armor came from, but this thing …?”

The piece of droid-nest glinted impassively back at him.

“What about my armor?” she said.

“Once, when I brushed against it, I got a flash of its former owner. She was a sniper from Tatooine. She got a medal for taking out a local Exchange boss.”

“What happened to her?”

“She didn’t die in the armor or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Larin nodded, feeling a small amount of relief. “Maybe she was promoted out of the field and took the armor with her. That happens, sometimes.”

“But she sold it,” he said. “Would she have needed the money that badly?”

“Her kids might have. It’s old armor, Shigar, last in action before the Treaty of Coruscant. Took me a lot of work to get it into the shape it was, let me tell you.”

“You could’ve bought new armor anytime,” he said, “but you didn’t want to. It’s a symbol standing in for all the things that need to be fixed.”

“Is that what you think?”

“Just a guess.”

His green eyes watched her unblinkingly. She felt sometimes that they looked right into her. Sometimes she liked that feeling. Sometimes she didn’t.

“You’re thinking too much,” she told him.

“That’s what I’ve been trained to do.”

“I’m sure it isn’t. I’m sure the Grand Master trained you to think just enough, and no more. But the lesson hasn’t quite sunk in yet because people only learn it the hard way. And that’s where you are right now. Absolutely stuck, in a hard place. Right?”

Still he didn’t look away. “Maybe.”

“Maybe nothing. You know you have to do something. You know what it is and you know why it has to be done. But you can’t do it because you’re too busy going over it and over it, making sure you’re absolutely right. Most of you knows you are right, but there’s a small part that wants to think it over one more time. The reasons, the method, the fallout. Whatever. Like you can plan everything in advance and then just sit back and watch it happen, so perfectly you don’t even have to be there to do it. Things will just happen on their own. Maybe you don’t need to do anything if you think about it hard enough. That’s always worth hoping for.”

“You’re speaking from experience, I can tell.”

“You bet,” she said, but then she stopped. The words had dried up.

“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“No, I do. I need to tell someone, one day. It might as well be you, now.” She felt her face growing warm, and she turned away, hoping he couldn’t see. “I ratted on a superior officer.”

“I presume you had a reason.”

“The best. Sergeant Donbar was corrupt. But that didn’t change anything. I went against the chain of command and reported him to his superiors. They slapped him down and discharged him, but the reason for it was hushed up. There were always going to people who didn’t believe me, thought I was doing it out of a grudge, but because of the secrecy I couldn’t defend myself. No one wants Special Forces to look bad, and he was about as bad as it gets. He was discharged, and eventually I quit. It got way too uncomfortable.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Sometimes,” she said, thinking of the Zabrak on Coruscant, “but it had to be done. If I tried to capture the weeks of agonizing I went through leading up to me actually doing it, I’d bore you to death.”

The skin around his eyes tightened. “And now you think I should just get over myself and do what I have to do.”

“You don’t agree?”

“Not at all. Finding a planet that could be anywhere in Wild Space is a little different from putting in a report, don’t you think?”

“Sure it’s different. You don’t stand to lose every friend you’ve ever had if you do the right thing. And you’ve actually been training for this most of your life. Remember, Shigar, that you didn’t have to crawl up from nowhere to get where you are. You were handpicked from everyone on Kiffu to be a Jedi Knight. Whatever happens today, you’ll go back to the life you know. So you can do it at your own pace, or you can do it when you need to do it. I for one think there’s only one right choice.”

He looked away. “You came to tell me you think I’ve got it easy. That makes a huge difference. Thanks.”

His sarcasm stung. Larin didn’t know what she’d come to him for, really, except to break him out of his funk. She was surprised at how deep the feelings ran and the harshness with which she had spoken. It was hard to tell how much was for his benefit.

“All right, then,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it.”

When she stood, her knees practically shook with fatigue.

“I will do it,” he said. “I have to.”

“Well, keep it down when you do. I’m going to catch up on some sleep.”

She didn’t wait for his snappy comeback, if he had one. Letting her legs work on autopilot, she went to a bunk in the crew quarters and was asleep before her head hit the pillow.

SHIGAR LISTENED TO her go. Already he regretted the way he had reacted to her combined advice and confession. Clearly, she had been building up to the latter part for some time, and he should have showed more compassion. But he was so bound up in his own issues, his own self-centered mess, that he hadn’t been able to see the raw wound she had exposed to him. Not her hand, but the aching severance from everything she had once held dear.

How would he feel, he asked himself, if he had to turn his back on the Jedi Order? It was impossible to imagine Master Satele ever doing anything counter to the Code he lived by, but famous Jedi had fallen to the dark side before. What if he discovered that she was in fact working against the Council? And what if he knew that her word would be taken against his? Was his sense of justice strong enough to make the call anyway, as Larin’s had been?

Once he would have been completely sure of himself. Now, after his dealings with Tassaa Bareesh, he wasn’t so sure.

And still there was the matter of the mysterious world, waiting to be resolved.

The piece of droid-nest glinted impassively back at him.

Larin was right on one point: sitting around thinking about it would get him nowhere. All the time he had been isolated in the dark, he hadn’t even touched the silver sliver. He had been trying and failing to get his mind into the right state, believing that there was no point even starting until he was completely ready.

Larin’s faith in you is not unwarranted. Perhaps you should have faith in her, too.

Shigar remembered how he had felt when Master Satele had ordered him to go to Hutta. He had invited Larin along because he felt she needed him to prove something to herself. She was full of bluster but lacking a clear sense of purpose. Now he understood why that core of her life was missing, and it was he who needed to prove something. If he didn’t, he would do much worse than let down his Master and the Republic. He would fail himself.

There’s only one right choice.

He picked up the sliver of metal. It was cool and sharp-edged to the touch. If he put it in his right fist and squeezed, it would surely draw blood.

He engulfed it in his fist and squeezed.

The bottom dropped out of the hold and he was suddenly falling.

His first thought was to grab hold of something and hang on, both mentally and physically. This was utterly unlike any psychometric information he had ever received before. But what he was reading this time was unlike anything he’d tried touching before, so fighting the vision could be self-defeating. Perhaps being plunged in the deep end was exactly what he needed. He braced himself against the rush of vertigo and tried to take from the experience what he could.

Falling. At first there seemed to be nothing more to it than that. Then he noticed details highly reminiscent of the strange blue geometry of hyperspace. Was that what he was glimpsing? The nest’s last journey, or its first?

There was a blinding flash of light, and he stopped with a jerk. All was dark again. Voices came and went, too indistinct to make out words. They were raised, though, as if in an argument. He could make out no faces, no locations, no coordinates. Just a feeling: that the thing the sliver had belonged to was determined to survive.

The Cinzia, he thought. He was spooling back through the droid factory’s history, in reverse. It clearly possessed a rudimentary self-awareness, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise since it had single-handedly organized the surreptitious creation of four advanced combat droids without being detected. Even if most of its internal algorithms were automated, it had taken a certain degree of cunning to know when to lay low and when to become active.

The flash was probably the explosion that had almost killed it.

Shigar wanted to get moving again. The next jump would be the one that would take him home, to where the droid factory had originated. But his eagerness only caused the vision to fray about the edges—and suddenly he was dumped back onto the hard floor of the hold with nothing to show for the experience.

He sat, breathing heavily and cursing his impatience.

When he opened his right hand, the sliver rested on his palm in a growing pool of blood.

What had he done this time, compared with all the other times before, that had worked?

He could guess the answer, and it was dismayingly simple. He hadn’t done anything special. He’d just done it. The Force had moved through him in exactly the right way, and the knowledge he’d been looking for had come to him. It hadn’t taken any particular degree of concentration, or any fancy mental footwork. He had done it because he could do it. There was a fair chance he hadn’t always been able to do it; he was sure that all those years of training hadn’t been for nothing. But at some point, as Larin had said, all the extra thinking he did on the subject had been wasted. It had, in fact, been counterproductive.

The next question was: could he do it again?

He didn’t need to ask. He didn’t want to ask it. The time for questions was over.

He transferred the sliver to his left hand and squeezed again.

A second vision of hyperspace enfolded him. Falling faster this time. The blue tunnel was twisted, warped. He felt dizzy. Mysterious forces tugged at him, shook him violently at times. He felt like he was running down a steep mountain and that at any moment he might trip and tumble headlong all the way to the bottom. As the droid factory’s journey unspooled backward in time, it took him into a deep, dark place.

Shigar didn’t question the vision. He let it unfold at its own pace. The shuddering grew worse as he neared the Cinzia’s origin, until he felt that he might be torn apart.

When it ceased, all was quiet. He felt a sense of homecoming, even though that was surely illusory. The factory was a machine, and it had been leaving its homeworld, not arriving there. But the feeling was persuasive. He felt that he belonged here, and that here—wherever here was—was important and precious. Unique. Shigar understood that feeling, even though he’d never felt it for Kiffu, his birthplace. Shigar had been a citizen of the galaxy for too long to feel close ties anywhere.

Again he thought of Larin and her changed circumstances. She, too, had taken great strides across the Republic and beyond. But now she was stuck on Coruscant—or had been until his arrival. She had never expressed any unhappiness about her relative confinement, but he could only imagine how it must feel.

The droid factory felt as though it belonged. Wherever it came from, that was where it had wanted to be. And Larin had killed it.

Perhaps, he thought, that had been a mercy.

More voices, this time with blurry faces. Human men and women; Shigar didn’t recognize any of them. He made out some words, though, including the hexes’ furious catch-cry. It was being chanted by a group of people, including a woman of middle years, with short ash-blond hair and intelligent eyes. Her hand was raised above her head. She was shaking her fist at the sky—but it wasn’t a sky at all. It was a roof. She was in a large space with a tubular tank at its center, filled with red.

Shigar didn’t fight the vision. He just told it: I want to be inside her head.

And he was. He was enfolded by a turbulent flow of thoughts and sensory impressions. He tumbled, slightly in awe of how easy it had been. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Perhaps there was something special about her, this Lema Xandret.

For it was indeed her. He was buffeted by her rage. He found strength in her determination to live unfettered. He grew weary at the understanding that all things must eventually be compromised, or die. He felt satisfaction at all her achievements. He wept at the mingled love and loss of a child.

Shigar looked through her eyes at the world she had adopted for her own, and felt pride tinged with worry, and an intense desire for revenge.

We do not recognize your authority!

And there it was, at last. Everything he had been looking for: the dense, metallic world, rich with change and vigor, where no one would have looked for it in a million years.

His eyes snapped open. He didn’t feel the pain of the cuts to his palms. He had forgotten the various aches and pains of his body, earned the hard way on Hutta. He felt only a degree of gratitude that he had never experienced before, blended with a powerful sense of achievement.

Climbing to his feet, he hurried to the crew quarters. Larin was already fast asleep. He thought about waking her to tell her the news but reined in the impulse. She deserved her rest. He could thank her later.

Ula and Jet were in the cockpit. He clambered up the ladder and burst into their conversation.

“I know where it is!”

“The world?” asked Ula, looking up in surprise.

“Yes. I found it!”

“Good for you, mate,” said Jet. “Got some coordinates for me?”

“Not exactly,” Shigar said, “but I can describe it to you. I think it’ll be fairly easy to pin down.”

“Well, great. I’m very tired of the view here. Take a seat and we’ll get started.”

Shigar felt his sense of triumph ebb slightly at the thought of what lay ahead of them.

“What?” asked Ula, staring at his face. “Is there a problem?”

“You could say that.”

Their faces fell in unison as he told them.

Finding the planet was one thing.

Getting there would be another entirely.

SPECIALIST PEDISIC LOOKED up as Ax walked into the quarantine bay. The space had been transformed. Large pieces of equipment hovered over the dissection table, connected by thick cables to the bulk cruiser’s main processor arrays. The remains of the hex had been splayed out like a delicate tapestry, revealing intricate details of its structure and function. The cell walls that made it robust as well as lightweight were threaded with shining metal, suggesting that they performed key functions as well as providing internal support. She saw several fist-sized globes like round, silver eggs nestling against more familiar components. The legs had been removed entirely from complex-looking joints and stacked like metal antlers in a transparisteel jar.

“I have much to report, sir,” the specialist said. She had rolled her sleeves up, and her arms were smeared with brown-black goo up to her elbows.

“Then do so.” Ax stood with her hands on her hips at one end of the table. She had been generous. The specialist had had more than an hour. If Darth Chratis had not been so conversational in his discipline, Ax would have come back much sooner.

“Well, the first thing I can tell you is that this thing, whatever it is, isn’t finished.” Pedisic selected a slender-tipped tool from the many surrounding her work space and pointed as she talked. “See here: its neuro-web was interrupted before the completion of a full suite of reflex analogues. And here: there’s a full array of senses about to come online down this dorsal region, but it’s totally unconnected to the central computer. The reporting system has only grown to here and has yet to join the two.”

“You mean it was released too early, before it was ready?”

“There’s evidence to suggest that it was continuing to develop after it left the factory that built it. I suggest this thing would have finished itself, given time.”

Ax remembered how ferociously the thing had fought. And it hadn’t even been complete! “What would the final form have been like?”

“It’s impossible to say. The main data bank doesn’t contain a single template. Instead there are many, with lots of transitional forms. And there’s a biological component, too, that I find very puzzling. This brown stuff must perform some function, otherwise it wouldn’t be present in such quantities. Perhaps it acts as a randomizing agent, encouraging it to adapt more fluidly. It’s hard to analyze, though, because it’s been so severely cooked.”

She looked at Ax reproachfully, as though blaming her for the condition of the sample. In this case, Ax was completely innocent. Either the Jedi or the Mandalorian had done that job for her.

And either way, it was irrelevant.

“So you’ve accessed the brain, then.”

“Yes. Just this minute.”

“How smart was it? Could it fly a ship, for instance?”

“Not likely, my lord, but if it needed to, it could change itself so it could. Like birds grow new parts of their brains in spring to learn new songs. It’s just a matter of—”

Ax waved her silent. “Is the data encoded?”

“Naturally, but the cipher is based on an Imperial system that went out of use fifteen years ago.”

When Lema Xandret fled the Empire, Ax remembered.

“I’ll crack it soon. Don’t worry, my lord. The fact that the thing was incomplete actually made getting in easier. All I have to do is map the architecture and find my way around …”

Ax didn’t pay attention to the specifics. And she hadn’t been aware that she’d looked worried. If this specialist couldn’t do the job, she’d just get another.

“All I want to know is where this thing came from,” she said. “And I want to know now.”

Specialist Pedisic nodded. “Yes, my lord. With your permission, I’ll resume my examination.”

Ax indicated with a flick of one index finger that the specialist should return to work.

While Ax waited, she paced the crowded space, reading raw data and coming to her own conclusions. Nothing she saw contradicted the specialist’s opinions, and there was much more to be absorbed than could have been crammed into that short conversation. The globes contained the hex’s primary processors, where sensory data converged, was exchanged, and provoked various environmental responses. The weapons on each hand were little different in principle from standard blaster technology, but remarkably miniaturized and integrated into a limb capable of gripping and supporting weight as well. This hex had no camouflage system to analyze, and unfortunately the electromirror defense was too badly damaged to reverse-engineer. Whole sections of its body had been fried to ash.

“I’ve cracked the code, my lord,” said the specialist.

Ax hurried to peer over her shoulder. Scrolling through a holopad was a list of symbols—the blocks from which the hex’s mind and all its actions were built. None of the commands, language rules, and algorithms, however, looked remotely familiar to Ax.

“These controlled the hex? The droid, I mean.”

“Yes.”

“Could we use them to control others?”

“I fear not. These particular commands are generated within the device itself—a unique and purely internal system for coordinating its many parts. Each droid would have a different system, so what we’ve gained is merely the language for this droid, which is now dead.”

“All right, but you have translated it, in this case?”

“Yes.”

“So find me what I’m looking for. Time is short.” I have a Mandalorian to beat, she said silently to herself, and if I lose, you are going to pay dearly.

The specialist bent low over the section of the hex she had exposed, remotely operating manipulators capable of tinier measurements than any human could make. Data scrolled dizzyingly in all directions through the holopad, too fast for Ax to follow. Her head soon ached from concentrating too hard on something she didn’t really understand.

“You have one minute,” she told the specialist.

“My lord, I’ve found it,” Pedisic said. “Name, hyperspace coordinates—”

“Give them to me.” A sudden upwelling of excitement filled her. “Now!”

Where are you, Mother?

Specialist Pedisic rattled off a long string of numbers. Ax closed her eyes, visualizing roughly where the location fit into the galactic disk.

It didn’t. It was well above the Mid Rim, in the middle of nowhere.

Ax opened her eyes. “Are you sure that’s what’s in its head?”

“Positive, sir. Although it doesn’t make sense, does it? There’s nothing out there. Nothing at all.”

Well, Ax told herself, that wasn’t entirely true. There were cold dwarfs and orphaned gas giants and all manner of strange stellar beasts. And it was an undiscovered world, after all, fit for traitorous droid makers on the run from the Sith. It wasn’t unreasonable that people desperate to keep their location a secret might have traveled parsecs out of their way to obscure any chance of pursuit.

But what had led Lema Xandret to that isolated haven in the first place? What had encouraged her to look in that direction? The odds of her taking a ship on a long jump to nowhere and just happening to arrive at a habitable world were minute.

“Run the coordinates through Imperial records,” she told the specialist. “I’m guessing we’ll find something in there.”

The request went to the ship’s data banks. Ax tapped her finger on the dissection table as she waited for the response. It took longer than expected, and she had time enough to observe just how much the baked organic residue looked like dried blood …

With a chime, the holopad produced a single line of information.

“Now, that really is impossible,” said the specialist.

“Try again.”

The specialist repeated the procedure from scratch, extracting the embedded data and feeding it into the records.

The same result came back.

“It must be a bluff,” the specialist said. “A false location to throw us off the scent.”

“I don’t think so,” said Ax. “Everything about it looks wrong, but that tells me we must be right. I told you we’d find something, didn’t I?”

“But it’s a black hole,” said the specialist.

“I know. I can read it with my own eyes.”

Ax felt as though that distant, dead star had reached out and clutched her with its irresistible gravity. She was absolutely certain that this was where she would find Lema Xandret, builder of droids who spoke with her own voice.

“I think you’d better give me the name, now,” she said. “We’ll be leaving as soon as the course is plotted.”

IT WAS AN UNASSUMING NAME, Ula thought as the Auriga Fire shook around him, for a colony that shouldn’t exist.

Sebaddon.

“You know we’re insane, don’t you?” Jet said over the sound of the ship’s straining hyperdrives. “If the black hole’s mass shadow doesn’t tear us to pieces, its gravity will suck us in when we arrive.”

“We plotted the course to account for either possibility,” said Shigar. “We’ll be okay. Probably.”

“I’ll try not to think about it,” said Ula through ground teeth.

“I’m just trying not to throw up,” said Larin.

Ula twisted in his seat to look back at her. She winked.

“How much longer?” Shigar asked.

His calm confidence was infuriating. Ula didn’t know how Jet put up with it.

“Somewhere between a minute and never. Most likely the latter.”

The ship creaked from nose to tail as though something had grabbed it at either end and twisted. Ula clutched the arms of his chair and closed his eyes. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. Being an informer was supposed to be sitting in the shadows, stealing information, and plotting the odd assassination. It wasn’t fighting killer droids, being tortured by Mandalorians, or diving headlong into a black hole. That’s what Cipher Agents did.

A strong hand gripped his elbow. His eyes flickered open.

“Don’t worry,” said Larin. “We’ll make it.”

He nodded and forced his hands to release their grip on the chair. Let her think he was reassured, when in fact he was the exact opposite. Shigar’s psychometric revelation had raised her faith in him to new heights, although there was a new tension between them now, as though their relationship had fundamentally shifted. That, Ula thought, might be the most galling thing about his situation.

Her hand slipped away. Her good hand. The one cut in half by the Sith was encased in a mechanical glove, a paddle-like mitten that enabled her to grip, little more. That was the full extent of the Auriga Fire’s prosthetic provisions.

The ship lurched again. Clunker came forward, swaying and rocking, and ran a cable from his midsection into the main console.

“What’s he doing?” Ula asked.

“Syncing his mind to the ship’s computer,” said Jet past his droid’s battered casing.

“You’re letting him fly the ship?”

“He’s got a good head on his shoulders, and his reaction time’s much faster than mine.”

As if to disprove Jet’s assertion, the Auriga Fire tilted alarmingly to starboard, then whipped back to port. Ula was thrown about in his seat harness, but somehow Clunker managed to stay both upright and plugged in.

A moment later the ship’s flight grew calm. The vibrations eased; the complaints from both hyperdrive and hull receded into the background. The knot of tension in Ula’s stomach began to unwind.

“Okay,” said Jet, punching buttons. “It’s coming up now. Hold on!”

Ula stiffened again as the warped textures of hyperspace receded. Normally, a speed-stretched vista of stars would take its place, but out here, on the very fringes of the galaxy, they were pointing out into the relative black. Only the faint light of distant stellar islands existed to be warped by the ship’s motion.

With a gut-roiling wrench, the Auriga Fire returned to realspace, and the shaking resumed.

Jet shut down the hyperdrives and put the repulsors on full. Ula was pressed into his seat as the ship came about. Sensors swept the sky ahead, revealing vistas unseen by anyone apart from Lema Xandret and her companions in the history of the galaxy.

It was much lighter than Ula had expected. That was his first impression. As the ship hove about and the black hole came into view, he saw not a dark absence of light but two bright yellow jets squirting from either pole of the singularity. That was what remained of the hole’s last meal—a dead star, perhaps, or a lonely gas giant that had been unfortunate enough to cross paths with this bottomless monster. As though someone had crammed too much food into their mouth at once, some of the meal squirted back into space, blazing away like celestial torches against the backdrop of the galaxy.

The second thing Ula noticed was the galaxy itself. The ship and its passengers were far enough away from the galaxy’s inhabited disk that they could see it from the outside. A beautiful spiral with a fat central bulge, it occupied almost half of the sky. As it swung into view, Ula forgot his anxieties for a moment and experienced nothing but breathless awe. Every nebula, cluster, and gulf was revealed to him with more clarity and beauty than any map could show. It was hard to believe that something so sublime could be the locus of so much war and grief.

“There’s the planet,” said Jet, playing his instruments like a maestro.

“Sebaddon? Where?” Shigar peered out at the spectacular vista.

“There.” Jet indicated a display. Ula could see nothing more than a dot. “It’s farther out than I expected. We’ll loop around the hole and catch it on the upswing.”

“Is that safe?” Ula asked.

“Relatively. As long as we don’t come too close.”

Ula didn’t want to ask: Relative to what?

Shigar was watching the display. “No sign of any other ships,” he said. “There’s a small moon.”

“How could it have a moon?” asked Hetchkee from the seat behind Ula.

“How could it be here at all?” added Larin.

“A black hole will kill you if you come too close,” said Shigar, “but not if you’re at a safe distance. Things can easily orbit it. Sebaddon, any random piece of junk it’s snapped up over the years, us.”

The way the ship was rattling didn’t make Ula feel remotely safe. “What about heat?” he asked. “Those jets are hot, but not that hot.”

“As the planet orbits, the hole’s gravity will stretch and squeeze it, stopping its core from solidifying. I bet we’ll see volcanoes when we get closer. That must be what’s bringing all the rare metals to the surface—and carbon dioxide, too, which would also help keep the atmosphere warm.”

The jets were getting visibly larger ahead. Clunker remained plugged in. Sebaddon was still invisible to the naked eye, and Ula gave up looking for it.

An alarm sounded. “Ships,” said Jet, “behind us, exactly where we came out.”

“Who do they belong to?” asked Larin.

“Wait until we’ve gone around. Then I’ll be able to tell you.”

The display dissolved into static as they fell deeper into the black hole’s frighteningly intense magnetic field. A smell of ozone filled the cockpit. Anything containing iron began to vibrate at an annoyingly high pitch.

There was no sense of weight because they were free-falling around the hole, using its gravitational pull to launch them out to where the planet was orbiting. Still Ula felt as though he was being simultaneously stretched and squeezed, just like Shigar had described when talking about the planet. Tidal effects, they were called. His lungs struggled to pull in enough air, and purple spots danced in front of his eyes.

Then they were past and the pressure began to ease. He sagged back into the chair, sweating heavily and thanking the Emperor he was still alive.

“Right,” said Jet, “that’s the hard part over. Thanks, Clunker. Sebaddon coming up ahead. We’ll make orbital insertion in about a minute. As for those ships …” He scanned the revived sensor displays. “I count fifteen, with Republic transponder codes. Stantorrs must have moved Coruscant itself to get them here this fast.”

Shigar nodded. It was clear he, too, was impressed. “No sign of Stryver?”

“That’s what the scopes say.”

“What about the Empire?” asked Ula.

“The only ships here are those fifteen and us,” said Jet.

“How would the Sith know where to come, anyway?” asked Larin. “They didn’t have the navicomp.”

“They might have thought of something else, like we did,” said Ula, trying to keep his hopes up even though he phrased it as a warning. “Best not to underestimate them.”

“Indeed,” Larin said. “There it is,” she added, pointing through the forward ports.

Ula craned to see.

Sebaddon was a small world, scarred by tectonic activity, just as Shigar had predicted. Its surface ranged from gray basalt to red-glowing mantle exposed to the atmosphere by constant plate motion. The atmosphere was dense enough to breathe and showed signs of both clouds and precipitation. There were no oceans, just the occasional shining surfaces on the cooler parts of the planet that might have been lakes.

“If that’s water,” Larin said, “the surface could actually be habitable.”

Near one of the “lakes” was a cluster of bright radiation sources, indicating a city of some kind. Elsewhere on the unfolding globe were other bright points, possibly mines or smaller settlements.

“Someone’s been busy,” said Jet. “How long have they been here?”

“We don’t know,” said Shigar.

“I’d guess twenty years, assuming only a small group to start with. The infrastructure is patchy, and there are some places they haven’t spread out to yet.”

Jet pointed at the viewscreen as he talked. There were no ships in orbit or satellites. The tiny moon was completely untouched.

“Do you want me to hail them?” he asked.

“No,” Shigar told him. “Wait for Master Shan to arrive. She should be the one to make first contact.”

“What about Ula?” asked Larin. “He’s the Republic envoy.”

“No offense,” said Shigar, turning to speak directly to Ula, “someone superior to both of us should handle this. I hope you understand.”

“Completely,” he said, with manufactured grace. He would have preferred to bungle a Republic approach to the valuable world in the hope that his enemy’s overtures would be repulsed. But there was no way to argue the point without making people suspicious. He would just have to bide his time and hope another opportunity arose.

The Auriga Fire slipped neatly into a long polar orbit around Sebaddon, and the ship’s engines fell blessedly quiet. Clunker disconnected himself and returned to his place in the corner. It had been hours of racket and mayhem ever since they’d commenced the last jump, and Ula was profoundly glad it was over.

Jet clearly shared his sentiments. The smuggler stood up and tapped at the shielding above the instrument panels. “Come on,” he muttered. “I know it’s here somewhere …”

A hidden panel popped open, and he slipped a hand inside. “Aha! Those fragging Hutts didn’t find everything, thank goodness.”

The hand reappeared in view, holding a slender bottle of golden liquid. Jet cracked the seal and knocked back a swig. “Anyone else for a toast? To making it alive, despite crazy passengers and unreliable directions?”

Jet’s behavior went largely ignored. For the moment, all eyes were on Master Satele’s approaching flotilla. Like Jet, she had chosen to come around the black hole rather than try to power outward against its considerable pull. The vast forces acting on the ships were much more apparent from the outside. Ula was shocked by the speeds they reached at their closest points to the black hole. One of them failed to make the correct insertion and drifted just a fraction off its course. Instantly the hole snatched at it, tumbling it end-over-end into the gaping maw. It disappeared with a scream of X-rays.

One by one, the remaining fourteen ships came out the other side, shaken but intact.

“See if you can raise them yet,” said Shigar. “Code word hawk-bat.”

“Will do.” Jet capped the bottle and put it away before turning to the comm. “Long-range subspace is scrambled by the singularity, so you can’t call home, but we should be able to open short-range transmissions with them in a moment or two.”

“Weird to think that this could all be over in a few minutes,” said Larin as Jet attempted to hail the approaching ships. “I mean, Stryver has either lost interest or fallen into the hole. The Empire has no clue where we’ve gone. Once Master Shan gets in touch with Lema Xandret, our job is done.”

“You’ve forgotten the Hutts,” said Ula. “If they have put a homing device on the ship, they’ll soon track us down.”

“Only if they’re looking for the signal in the right direction. And who’d think to look up here? It’s the perfect hiding place.”

Jet had a point, but Ula didn’t want to admit it. Once Sebaddon was annexed by the Republic, there was nothing he could do but report the planet’s position when he returned to Coruscant, long after the issue of its ownership had been resolved. His mission was on the brink of utter failure, and there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it.

“That Mandalorian seemed pretty canny to me,” chimed in Hetchkee. “I can’t see him falling into a black hole, unless he was pushed.”

“I’m of the same mind,” said Shigar. “It would be unwise to assume we’ve seen the last of him.”

“Got her,” said Jet, falling back into his seat in satisfaction. “Go ahead, Grand Master.”

“Very good work, Shigar,” crackled the voice of Satele Shan from the subspace communicator.

“Thank you, Master.” The Padawan was clearly buoyed by the praise.

“The Supreme Commander would like you to return Envoy Vii to Coruscant as soon as possible.”

“With your permission,” said Shigar, “we’d like to join the companies you brought with you and observe the negotiations.”

“Hang on a minute, mate—” said Jet, but Shigar cut him off.

“We’ve been chasing Lema Xandret for so long. It seems a shame to come all this way and just turn back.”

Ula didn’t know what he thought about that prospect. On the one hand, he expected nothing more interesting than very familiar diplomatic wrangling; on the other hand he was in no hurry to report his failure to either of his masters.

“I expected that,” Master Satele replied with the hint of a smile in her voice. “Colonel Gurin has command of the fleet. I’ll suggest you fall in with Second Company and take the place of the ship we lost. Expect a tactical feed shortly.”

“Thank you again, Master,” Shigar said, surrendering control of the comm to an unhappy Jet Nebula. Already instructions and telemetry were flowing into the Auriga Fire from the approaching ships. When Jet patched his ship’s computer into the feed, it would become part of a much larger tactical entity, no longer a free agent.

“Cheer up,” said Shigar to Jet with a grin. “You’ve worked for the Republic before, haven’t you?”

“Sure, but only for their money. Not for glory or the fun of it, like you seem to.”

“It won’t be for long. I just want to see this.”

“You’re not fooling anyone, Shigar. I know you don’t want to make good on your deal with Tassaa Bareesh.”

Shigar pulled down the corners of his mouth but said nothing to deny the charge.

The cruiser Master Satele occupied hove past them, a golden lozenge that looked deceptively smaller than it actually was, with a command nacelle protruding like an insect’s sting from the rear and a hull studded with turbolaser and ion cannon blisters. By craning his neck, Ula could make out the telemetry streaming into the Auriga Fire. The cruiser was called the Corellia. He recognized its name from Supreme Command Stantorrs’s reports.

Jet surrendered his ship to Republic command. Soon they were just one of eight vessels obeying instructions from Colonel Gurin. The assembly of ships moved smoothly into a lower orbit, juggling course and attitude changes with confident ease. Cheerfully business-like in-tership chatter filled the comm, both biological and droid. Clunker’s usual blank posture became more attentive. Ula, too, listened closely for valuable intel. In such tense times, military protocols changed almost daily.

“I’m registering activity down below,” said Jet. “Xandret and her people know we’re here.”

“Why aren’t they saying anything, then?” asked Larin.

“Perhaps they’re shy.”

“What kind of activity?” asked Shigar.

“Heat dumps, mainly, perhaps reactors firing up. A couple look like industrial sites, but their signatures are off the scale.”

“Are you passing the data on to Colonel Gurin?”

“He’s seeing exactly what we’re seeing, unless he’s admiring the view elsewhere.”

The galaxy formed a beautiful pinwheel backdrop as Satele Shan made her first broadcast to the people of Sebaddon.

“My name is Grand Master Satele Shan,” she said, broadcasting on all frequencies, since most commonly used bands were clogged by radiation from the black hole. “I come not in the name of the Republic, but on behalf of the upholders of peace and justice across the galaxy.”

“What’s that all about?” asked Hetchkee.

“It’s Jedi double talk,” said Larin. “She doesn’t want the Sebaddonites to think they’re about to be invaded.”

“Even though she’s riding at the head of a fleet of Republic warships?”

“Even so.”

Shigar raised a hand for silence. No one had replied, so Master Satele was trying again.

“We have reason to believe that a diplomatic mission sent from Sebaddon was intercepted before it could reach its destination. We are not responsible for its destruction but I wish to convey to you our sin-cerest regrets and to share with you the data we have collected regarding this unfortunate incident.”

“More activity,” said Jet. “Those hot spots are getting really hot.”

“Are you sure they’re not volcanoes?” asked Larin.

He didn’t reply, and neither did the people of Sebaddon to Satele Shan’s last message.

“They could be volcanoes,” said Ula, unwilling to dismiss any suggestion Larin made, even one intended as a joke. “It would make sense to tap into geothermal power on a world like this. If they’ve found a way to store and release that power, that could be what we’re seeing here.”

“Or they could be launch sites,” said Jet.

“If they’re sending up a welcoming party, why wouldn’t they say so?”

“It might not be the sort of welcoming party you’re thinking of.”

“I have come to speak with Lema Xandret,” the Grand Master tried a third time. “I have reason to believe that she might be your leader.”

At last something broke the silence from the planet. A woman’s voice came over the airwaves, crackling faintly with interference.

“We have no leader.”

“Very well,” said Master Satele, “but am I speaking to Lema now?”

“We ask only to be left alone.”

“You have nothing to fear from us. I swear it. We have come to talk, and to offer you protection if you need it. You are under no obligation to offer anything in return.”

“We do not recognize your authority.”

Ula’s skin crawled. “That’s what the hexes said. She sounds just like them.”

Shigar was nodding. “This must be Xandret. The hexes share her voice and her philosophies because she was the one who made them.”

“We have no wish to impose any kind of authority upon you,” Master Satele was saying.

“We ask only to be left alone,” Xandret repeated.

“Those hot spots are about ready to erupt,” said Jet in ominous tones.

“Give me the comm,” Shigar said. “Master, I don’t think talking is going to work. She’s as stubborn as her droids. I suggest finding another approach.”

The Grand Master was already talking: “Perhaps I could speak with you face-to-face. That might help us reach an understanding. Just me and my Padawan, in a place of your choosing. The last thing I want is for you or your leaders to feel threatened or intimidated—”

“We have no leader!” Xandret shouted. “We do not recognize your authority!”

“Here it comes,” said Jet, calling up in the viewscreen several bright flashes from the surface of the world. “They look like missiles to anyone else?”

Ula peered closely at the image. His knowledge of military hardware was patchy, but the rapidly rising dots did have a lethal air. For a start, they moved quickly, accelerating many times faster than most crewed ships would risk in atmosphere. There were eight of them, long and sleek. They spiraled like fireworks as they rose, presenting a much more difficult target to the ships above.

The Auriga Fire lurched underneath him, responding to telemetry from the Corellia. As one, all fifteen ships changed course in response to the rising threat.

“There’s your answer,” said Larin. “Someone is definitely taking this seriously.”

“Fine,” said Jet, “but I’m not slaving my ship to anyone while it’s under fire.”

“Wait,” said Shigar, but it was too late. Jet had already broken the short-lived connection between his ship and those of the Republic. With a flash of its repulsors, the Auriga Fire peeled away from Second Company and accelerated to a higher orbit.

Behind them, the ships of the Republic adopted battle formation, with the Corellia in the center and support vessels in a crisp tetrahedron around it. While fighters launched from hangar decks, its cannons trained on the approaching targets. The Grand Master said nothing, and the usual interfleet chatter ceased.

“Fall in line, Auriga Fire,” came a terse request from the Corellia. “Fall in line!”

Jet ignored it, but kept the tactical feed open.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” said Ula, thinking aloud. “If Xandret wants to stay isolated so badly, why would she want to talk to the Mandalorians? I’d have thought that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.”

“Maybe the Cinzia didn’t represent everyone here,” Larin said. “Maybe the people who blew themselves up were a dissident group.”

“And why attack rather than talk?” he asked, moving on to his next point of puzzlement. “Firing without provocation is madness.”

“Without a doubt,” said Shigar. “They’ve practically signed their own death warrant.”

The missiles roared out of the upper atmosphere and hit the first wave of defensive fire. A dense net of turbolaser pulses and ion torpedoes converged on the eight missiles. The nose of each missile activated a defensive shield not dissimilar to the ones seen on a much smaller scale on Hutta. Mirror-bright, they reflected laser pulses perfectly, and even deflected a large number of torpedoes. The space between the Corellia and the planet below was suddenly full of explosions.

Out of that stew of hot gases only six missiles emerged. The debris of the two that had been hit tumbled on, following their final momentum. Tiny white dots gleamed in the light of the black hole’s jets.

The six missiles hit another wave of defensive fire. The shields flashed again, blinking on and off in rapid succession—to conserve power, Ula assumed. The missiles weren’t large. They couldn’t defend themselves forever against this kind of assault.

But they didn’t have to. Four of the original eight were now close enough to the capital ships to be an imminent threat. Fighters engaged, strafing the missiles from all directions at once. The shields couldn’t cover every possible approach. Three missiles faltered, their drive systems crippled and their sides spewing clouds of debris. The last thundered on, aimed squarely at the Corellia.

The look on Shigar’s face was painful to see. His Master was aboard that ship, and a missile of that size was bound to do considerable damage, perhaps even destroy the Corellia outright. Ula wondered if she was hurrying for an escape pod at that very moment, hoping to outrun her fate.

The missile survived the final wave of defensive fire and struck the Corellia just forward of its stardrive.

Ula winced automatically, expecting a giant explosion.

None came. The missile hit the golden hull with enough force to tear a hole right through it, but instead simply vanished inside. A blast of air and other gases roared out of the hole. No fire. The missile didn’t blow up.

Fleet comms rose up again, betraying a slightly frantic note. Colonel Gurin was on the air, reassuring everyone that the cruiser was intact. There were no more launches visible from the ground. The attack from Sebaddon appeared to have completely fizzled.

The clouds of debris from the seven fallen missiles, still rising under their own momentum, began to arrive. Some of it was scraps of torn hulls and engines. Much consisted of the same white dots Ula had glimpsed earlier. They sparkled like snowflakes in sunlight, drifting around the Republic ships in undirected streams.

“Can we get a closer look at that stuff?” he asked. “If the missiles weren’t packed with explosives, maybe they weren’t missiles at all.”

Jet complied, focusing the ship’s sensors on a nearby patch. The white dots resolved into blobs swimming like amoebas against the black sky.

“I’ll see if I can increase the resolution,” he said.

The view crystallized. The blobs became hexagonal objects waving six slender legs.

Ula felt a wave of alarm. Hexes. Thousands upon thousands of hexes.

“Get us away from them,” said Shigar. “Put me through to Colonel Gurin.”

The view shifted to show one of the Republic attack vessels. The hexes were thicker there. Where the hexes encountered one another, they linked arms and bodies to form larger objects—long strings, nets, or clumpy balls. The cruiser drifted among them, blissfully unaware, even as the drifting hexes found purchase on its hull.

“Get those ships out of there!” Shigar shouted into the subspace communicator. “They’re in terrible danger!”

The reply was crackling and intermittent. “—interference—please repeat—” Behind his voice was the shrieking of alarms.

Ula peered past Shigar to where the Corellia hung against the globe of the planet. Red fire now licked at the rent left by the missile. On Hutta, four hexes had almost beaten a Jedi, a Sith, and a Mandalorian. Over Sebaddon, a missile’s entire payload of hexes had been released into the body of a cruiser. He could only imagine what kind of damage such droids were causing in their hundreds among ordinary troops.

“Forget the Corellia,” said Jet. “We have to warn the others.” He switched the comm to general broadcast. “This is the Auriga Fire. You are under attack. Use your fighters and gun emplacements to clear your hull. Then break orbit and head for clear space. The missiles contain the hexes we saw on Hutta. They’ll rip you apart if you don’t get clear of them.”

“Tell them to ignore all orders from the Corellia,” said Ula. “If the network is compromised, the hexes could sow misinformation or worse.”

Jet took up the advice and passed it on to the other ships. Only then did Ula kick himself for helping the Republic.

But he couldn’t sit by and watch thousands of people die. The Republic had won the race. There was no advantage to be gained by assisting a slaughter.

A blast of powerful static drowned out all communications for a second. Then a new voice spoke from the Corellia.

“We do not recognize your authority!”

“That’s the hexes speaking,” said Larin. “They’ve taken control.”

“The Corellia’s launching escape pods,” said Shigar, pointing. “We have to get in closer. The pods will be able to dodge the hexes better than the big ships, but they need somewhere to rendezvous. We can give them that until someone else arrives.”

“All right,” said Jet, tight-lipped. “I want you and Larin on the tri-lasers, keeping our path clear. If just one of those things gets in here, we’re all dead.”

Shigar rose from his seat and vanished with Larin back into the ship.

“Ula, up here,” said Jet, waving at the empty copilot’s seat. “Hetchkee, you’ll be on tractor control. Clunker, stop the signals from Corellia messing with our systems.” The droid came forward to jack himself into the ship’s computer again.

As Ula changed seats, he noticed a bright flashing light on the instrument panel in front of Jet. “Is that important?”

“Maybe, but it’s one thing we don’t have time to worry about right now.” Jet punched buttons in fast sequence across the instrument panel. “We have more company.”

Ula adjusted his viewscreen so it pointed back at the black hole. By the light of the jets, he made out a string of ships emerging from hyperspace. A large cruiser and numerous smaller vessels, strung out in two precise lines. He recognized their configuration immediately, and a surge of surprise swept through him.

Imperial ships.

But how? Stryver had the navicomp. They must have tracked him down and taken it from him. That would explain why there was no sign of the Mandalorian in the system. Adrenaline made his heart pound harder and faster. Yes, it made sense.

More than how they had gotten here, though, their very presence meant that there was still hope for an Imperial victory. With the Republic forces in such disarray, it would be easy to swoop in and overwhelm them.

Only with difficulty did he suppress a triumphant grin. Sebaddon would become the Empire’s prize after all, and his mission would not have failed.

Then he remembered where he was, and all thoughts of victory fell away. The Auriga Fire was helping the Republic. If the Empire beat the Republic, he would be dead.

Aghast, he stared at the screen as the Imperial engines fired up their drives and powered in to attack.

AX GRIPPED THE METAL rail separating the senior command post from the rest of the bridge. Her knuckles were white. She had never before experienced such turbulence in hyperspace. Pilots sometimes bragged of navigating the singularity-rich Maw and told stories of ships lost there in bizarre circumstances. She had always thought them likely to be exaggerated. Now, however, battling the influence of just one black hole, she wondered if she had been a bit hasty in her judgment. It hadn’t seriously occurred to her that she might be snuffed out of the universe by something as simple as a navigational accident. If this last jump from Circarpous V hadn’t been calculated to the greatest degree of precision possible …

With an earsplitting groan, the Paramount burst back into realspace. A new kind of force immediately gripped the bulk cruiser, sending its crew rushing about to compensate for it. Ax let go of the rail and stood straight, lest anyone think her weak.

“We have arrived at the coordinates, Darth Chratis.” The colonel was as thin as a medical droid, and his expression betrayed as much emotion. “All vessels are accounted for.”

“Very good, Kalisch. Show me where we are.”

Images danced around them, projected on massive viewscreens and holoprojectors around the bridge. The jets of the black hole were the first thing Ax noticed, stabbing like shining blades away from an invisible central point. They looked like narrowed eyes staring back at the galaxy in hatred.

From the outside, the galaxy’s potential was completely revealed to her. With so many systems under her control, what couldn’t she achieve?

“We have located a planet,” said the colonel, relaying a report delivered by one of his many underlings. “We believe it to be the one called Sebaddon.”

Ax quelled a sudden rush of excitement. She could betray nothing in front of her Master: relief, ambition, hope …

The screens shifted. A world torn and twisted by gravitational forces appeared before them, blurred with distance.

“My lord,” said the colonel, “the most energy-efficient route is around the black hole.” A map appeared in one of the viewscreens showing a dotted line looping past the singularity then rising to meet the planet at apogee. “On your command, I will issue the orders to the fleet captains.”

“Normally I prefer the direct approach,” Darth Chratis said, peering through slitted eyelids at the views before him. “What is this I see here?” One long finger picked out a particular view. “Energy spikes? Drive signatures?”

The colonel cast a cold, questioning stare at his bridge staff.

“I-it appears to be a space battle, my lord,” ventured one of them, standing timorously in the spotlight.

“Identify those ships,” barked the colonel. “I want to know who sent them.”

“Yes, sir.” The girl who had spoken sat down and began hammering furiously at her workstation.

Ax wondered who could be fighting out here. Stryver had the navicomp, and she had the only whole hex remnant. Therefore it couldn’t possibly be the Republic. Could the Mandalore have formed an army so quickly? What could have roused him to unify his people against this strange outpost rather than a more credible enemy?

“Republic ships, sir,” called someone from the bridge staff, proving her wrong. “Definitely Republic, and they’re taking a hammering, sir. No other visible combatants, but there may have been launches from the ground.”

Darth Chratis grinned, and Ax grinned with him. The Republic had made its move and was being rebuffed. How much easier, then, to swoop in as the savior and “liberate” the planet, right into the Emperor’s arms!

“Take us in, Colonel Kalisch,” Darth Chratis said. “Launch all fighters and prepare for battle.”

“At this distance, our fighters would not be able to break free of the black hole’s gravitational pull,” Kalisch said, smoothly countermanding the order. “The moment it is safe, my lord, I will launch them.”

“Very well,” hissed the Sith Lord. “That will have to do.” He wasn’t used to anything as lowly as physics standing between him and his wishes.

“Full power, all engines,” Kalisch ordered the fleet. “Lock courses and prepare to engage!”

The Imperial fleet came about, straining to reverse the considerable momentum it had already gained just by being in the black hole’s powerful gravitational field. The Paramount’s engines roared and rumbled, casting a bright blue light across those ships coming up in its wake. The lighter cruisers fared better than the massive bulk cruiser and its heavier support vessels. They caught up and began to draw ahead.

It soon became abundantly clear that Kalisch’s original advice had been sound. Instead of picking up velocity as they whipped around the singularity’s event horizon, propelled by freely available gravity, they would struggle to gain every drop of delta-vee, wrung out of the engines at great expense. Their progress was painfully slow. Ax could feel her Master’s impatience growing—redoubled because he knew he could say nothing, threaten no one. This was his decision and his responsibility alone. The crew worked around him in perfect efficiency and with maximum effort. All knew that Darth Chratis would vent his frustration on the first person to fail him in the slightest possible way.

Ax watched the long-range telemetry closely, eager to learn anything she could about the planet’s forces. What she saw puzzled her deeply. There were no ships apart from those belonging to the Republic. Furthermore, there was no obvious assault being conducted from the ground. It looked like the Republic fleet was fighting nothing at all.

Even stranger, the Republic ships appeared to be attacking one another. Half the fleet appeared to be retreating, while the other half either did nothing or actively impeded the rest. As she watched, one small cruiser suddenly switched its drives to full, propelling it wildly into another ship, disintegrating both. It was as though something had infected half the fleet, driving it mad.

Darth Chratis studied the same data with a deeply suspicious expression. Ax wondered if he thought it was a trap. But to what end? The Republic couldn’t possibly benefit from the destruction of its own ships.

“Would you like me to hail either party?” the colonel asked.

“No,” said Ax.

Darth Chratis and Kalisch both turned to her in surprise.

“Master, I advise against explicitly indentifying us as servants of the Emperor,” she said. “Remember that we are the enemy in Lema Xandret’s eyes.”

“Perhaps the traitorous harridan will change her mind,” said Darth Chratis, “now that these weak-willed fools have found her.”

With a blinding flash, the Republic’s capital ship exploded, casting debris in all directions. Ax shielded her eyes against the glare.

“They’re certainly not putting up much of a fight,” she said. Half the Republic ships had been destroyed or crippled. The rest were regrouping and recalling their fighters.

“Regardless, the situation is clear. Sebaddon is no longer a secret. Xandret must choose to bow to the Emperor’s will or face the consequences.”

“She’ll never agree to her own execution.”

Darth Chratis studied her with cold eyes. “Naturally I will say nothing of the fate in store for her. Cease your questioning of my orders. Colonel Kalisch, announce our presence to the citizens of Sebaddon and advise them that we will be taking possession of their world once we have cleared the skies of this Republic rabble.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Ax went back to studying the viewscreens. The firing pattern of the Republic ships looked wrong to her, although she couldn’t quite put a finger on what disturbed her about it. Still no launches from the ground, although infrared showed numerous sites of activity. Cities and factories, Ax assumed, that would be bombed for certain if Xandret resisted. Ax’s instincts told her that victory wasn’t going to come as easily as an announcement of the Empire’s intent to annex the world, but at the same time she couldn’t see how a small, ground-based civilization could hope to prevail against the high ground of space. Even if they did have a mysterious weapon that drove ships and their crews crazy …

The Republic forces must have been taken by surprise. So she was forced to assume. Colonel Kalisch would be sure not to make the same mistakes they had.

No response came from the ground to the Paramount’s hail. Apart from garbled transmissions on Republic frequencies, the bands were empty.

“They ignore us,” said Darth Chratis, “at their peril.”

“Launching fighters in two minutes, my lord,” said Kalisch.

Ax was already heading for the exit from the bridge. “Ready my interceptor,” she called behind her. “I’m going to take a closer look.”

It took her a minute to descend from the bridge to the hangar deck, but it felt like forever. Her Mk. VII advanced interceptor had been shipped from Dromund Kaas with the rest of Darth Chratis’s matériel and kept fully fueled in case a fast launch was required. The ground crew had it warming up and ready for her by the time she got there. Its familiar jutting vanes reassured her in a way that no amount of deceptive diplomacy could. Forgoing a full flight suit, she slipped a helmet over her dreadlocks, climbed aboard, and activated the internal navicomp. It showed her the projected course for the many wings about to launch around her. She switched that off and mapped out her own trajectory.

The hangar crews retreated as fighters began to stream out of the cruiser. The launches were clean and well timed, despite their pilots’ eagerness to engage. Ax slipped into their formation with ease, a sleek black predator surrounded by willing but lesser packmates. She listened to the comms as she monitored the fleet’s disposition, but didn’t respond.

Wave after wave of angular black ISF interceptors streamed away from the Paramount and its ancillary vessels. They were easily a match for the XA-8 and PT-7 starfighters the Republic had launched. Ship-mounted cannons selected targets and prepared to fire on the Republic craft. The range was slightly long, but the still-stately pace of the capital ships ensured a solid base to fire from. A lucky shot or two wasn’t impossible.

Ahead, the vast field of wreckage left by the destruction of the main Republic cruiser was spreading at speed. Only as she neared it did Ax realize what had troubled her about the Republic ships’ behavior.

The surviving ships were firing into the cloud, not at their own renegade vessels.

She peeled away from the wing she had been shadowing and headed directly for the cloud.

“Your primary targets are the damaged vessels” came the orders from the Paramount. “Enemy fighters secondary. We will engage the rest. Fire at will.”

The sky lit up as a smaller Republic ship exploded.

Against that cruel light were silhouetted thousands of floating objects, suspended in space. Some were spinning circles; others were edge-on lines. All were instantly recognizable as hexes, the droids Ax had fought on Hutta, their regular hexagonal bodies identical and faceless apart from the utter blackness of their sensory pods. As she flew among them now, they reached for her with spider-like legs, firing bolts of plasma from their hand weapons to propel them forward.

In that instant, she understood.

“Paramount, recall the fighters immediately. Get them away from that debris field. It’s full of hexes!”

She fired as she flew, destroying one hex with every pulse from her fighter’s ion cannon. For every one she killed, however, three more appeared in her scopes.

“They’re only droids” came back the reply from the Paramount. “What harm can they do against starfighters?”

“Put me through to Darth Chratis,” she snapped. Someone’s head would roll for this. “Master, the Republic ships have been infected with hexes. That’s why they’re self-destructing and turning on one another. I don’t know how the infection occurred, but the debris field is full of hexes. Our targeting priority should be them first, then the fleeing ships.”

“You want us to abandon a golden opportunity to rout the Republic in order to play target practice against a handful of machines?” Darth Chratis’s reply was full of contempt. “Colonel Kalisch’s orders stand.”

Ax heard one of the bridge crew call out in the background: “Launches!” She looked at her telemetry and saw what the Paramount had detected.

Four missiles were rising from the surface of Sebaddon. Full of hexes, she bet, not conventional explosives. Plus, all of the infected Republic ships still capable of controlled flight were abandoning their chase of the others and coming around to ram the Imperials.

The colonel’s imperious broadcast to the citizens of Sebaddon hadn’t been ignored at all.

“Move the fleet,” she told her Master. “You’ll be caught between them if you continue on that course.”

The Paramount neither responded nor changed course. A wave of anti-missile fire was streaking out to intercept the ascending threats. She could only hope it would be enough.

Around her, hexes swarmed and clutched at the Imperial fighters. Some had linked arms to form wide nets and webs across the sky. Any ship that strayed too close was bound up and crushed. Other hex groups formed whips capable of slinging individual hexes to incredible speeds. Ax herself missed two such wriggling projectiles by only small margins. Other pilots weren’t so lucky.

“Target the larger concentrations,” she advised those fighting around her. “Ignore the infected ships. If they blow, we’ll only have more hexes on our hands.”

She received no official acknowledgment of the orders, but they were obeyed. Squadrons disrupted by the unusual and hostile nature of the debris field re-formed to strafe the densest concentrations of hexes they could find. Ax joined them, taking grim satisfaction every time her cannon blew such an agglomeration to pieces.

Part of her mind paid attention to the wider battlefield. The missiles had performed a startling maneuver in mid-burn by breaking up into four smaller pieces, each capable of independent flight. Now numbering sixteen, they slipped through the first wave of defensive fire. Six mini missiles were taken out in the next wave, and five more in the third. That left five to hit the fleet unharmed.

Ax winced as they struck. There were no explosions, as she had predicted. The Paramount was untouched, fortunately, but four of the larger support vessels were likely to turn, if the hexes gained control. There might be only a couple of dozen in each mini missile, but that could be enough, particularly if they infiltrated the ships’ control systems.

In retaliation, the Paramount launched a series of ground strikes against the origin of the missiles. Ax had expected this, too. Instead of saving the munitions for fending off the hexes they already had, they were potentially being wasted on the people who had sent them. Punishment could wait, in her opinion. Better to be alive and angry than dead.

She turned her attention back to the fighters. The debris field was much clearer than it had been, with only a random scattering of individual hexes left. The infected Republic ships had come around and were accelerating headlong for the Imperial fleet, doing what she had feared they would do once the second fleet was identified. To the people on Sebaddon, to Lema Xandret, the Empire was enemy number one; everyone else had to wait their turn.

“Target the drives,” she ordered the fighters. “Only the drives. We don’t want to break them up, whatever you do. We have to avoid creating another debris field for the fleet to wander into.”

“How do we destroy them, then?” asked one of the pilots.

“We let gravity do it for us,” she said. “Once they can’t maneuver, either the planet or the hole will drag them in.”

“They’re not the orders I’m receiving from Colonel Kalisch,” protested a squad leader.

“I know that.” The Paramount was still worried that the approaching ships were intending merely to ram them. “I’m the only authority you need to worry about, out here. The first pilot who punctures the hull on one of these ships will get a torpedo up their afterburner. Understood?”

“Understood. All right, you have your orders, people. Let’s get to it.”

The fighters peeled off to pursue their new objectives.

Meanwhile, the first infected Imperial ship was beginning to behave erratically.

“Master, I urge you again to move the Paramount to a safe distance.” Where reason had already failed, she attempted flattery. “Were the unthinkable to occur, we would be left without your leadership.”

“Perhaps that would be prudent,” Darth Chratis agreed.

Ax barely heard him. In the background, filling the bridge of the Paramount, a familiar voice was shrieking.

She switched channels to the one Colonel Kalisch had used to broadcast his message to the ground.

“We do not recognize your authority!”

For an instant, Ax thought that her mother was broadcasting to the Imperial ships. Then she realized—with something that might have been a twinge of disappointment—that the voice had the slightly wooden quality of a droid. Why a droid and not Xandret herself?

While the fighters attacked the infected ships and the Paramount slowly ascended out of danger, Ax considered the pros and cons of broadcasting a message herself. It might give her mother cause to hesitate before launching more hexes at the Imperial fleet. But what could she possibly say to this woman she hardly remembered, if she was alive at all? I’m a Sith now. I have no family. That certainly wasn’t going to help.

The retaliatory strikes launched by the Paramount detonated on the surface of the world far below. What had already been a bright hot spot suddenly became a whole lot brighter, and Ax wondered if the question of her mother’s survival was now completely moot.

Two more missiles launched from a different hot spot entirely.

Then the first of the infected Imperial ships exploded, spreading hexes all through the fleet. With the survival of her own kind now at stake, she forced herself to concentrate on what really mattered.

THE AURIGA FIRE’S tri-laser cannon emplacements were to port and starboard, just forward of its hyperdrives. They angled out slightly so they could cover every inch of the ship and were accessed by two tight tunnels that smelled of grease.

Larin had taken the port turret and eased herself into the cracked leather seat with easy familiarity. The prosthetic glove on her left hand was just sufficient to wrap around the cannon’s hand grip, while her right hand handled the delicate movements required to target and fire. The cannon itself operated smoothly, swinging freely on its gimbals as though fresh out of the factory.

It wasn’t the first time she had noticed the mismatch between the Auriga Fire’s appearance and its capabilities. Another concerned its compact tractor beam facility, recessed behind a hatch in the ship’s broad belly. It was a wildly nonstandard feature for a ship of this size. She was curious to know how often it came in handy in the pursuit of Jet’s normal job, but didn’t really think Jet would admit to anything. For the moment, the flash and pound of the cannons was all that concerned her.

A quick depression of the trigger and a web of wriggling hexes vanished in a ball of gases.

“This is as easy as shooting stump-lizards on Kiffex,” she called to Shigar over her head-mounted comlink.

“Watch that trio coming in from above” was all he said.

Larin swung the tri-laser and blasted them into atoms.

“Don’t worry about the Grand Master,” she told him. “We’ll find her.”

He had been subdued ever since the Corellia had detonated, shooting hexes with lethal speed and accuracy. Two-thirds of the cruiser’s escape pods were now accounted for, but Master Satele wasn’t in any of them. Shigar had tried broadcasting over all channels, but the electromagnetic spectrum was a mess. What wasn’t jammed by the black hole, Imperials, or panicked chatter was full of the hexes screeching. It was all the new Republic commander could do to coordinate the larger ships into safely picking up the escape pods without picking up hexes by accident as well.

“Dead ahead,” said Jet from the cockpit. An escape pod had collided with two hexes that were in the process of cutting through the pod’s thin hull. The Auriga Fire swooped in to help.

“One each, Hetchkee,” Larin said as the tractor beam wrenched invisibly at the hexagonal droids. “Favoritism is strongly frowned upon back here.”

She wondered if the former security guard knew she was joking. One hex tumbled away to port, for Shigar to shoot, while the other, after a protracted struggle, wriggled into Larin’s sights. Then it was up to Ula to give the pod’s panicked occupants coordinates for the rendezvous point.

“Stay in the channel we’ve cleared,” he told them. “Don’t take any shortcuts.”

“It was horrible,” babbled a young midshipman on the other end of the line. “There were suddenly so many of them, and they moved so fast—”

“You’re safe now. Just stay in the channel and do what Captain Pipalidi says.”

“Yes, yes—and thank you. Another few seconds, we’d have been holed for sure.”

The pod fired up its retro-rockets and headed off in the right direction. Larin hoped its occupants would be okay now. Several had been rescued and then fallen afoul of the hexes again, through either bad luck or poor judgment. One had stopped to rescue another pod in distress, only to be overwhelmed by hexes hiding inside. The Auriga Fire had been too far away to help, but the screams had carried.

Captain Pipalidi, the Anx in charge of the Commenor and by default what remained of the fleet, had a difficult job ahead of her, distributing the traumatized survivors through the remaining eight ships at her disposal. Larin didn’t envy her that job at all, with long-range comms scrambled and nothing larger than a light assault cruiser to fill the place of the Corellia. But at least the lesson had been learned: the hexes might not look like much individually, but they were tough, and in large numbers were to be taken very seriously indeed.

“There’s another pod at the other side of the web ahead,” said Jet. “Do you think you can get us through?”

Larin peered through the scope. The web was one of the densest they’d seen so far, with hundreds of the hexes linked in a multilimbed structure vaguely reminiscent of one individual hex, spinning slowly against the backdrop of the planet below. The limbs whipped and snapped, flinging hexes at far-off targets and scooping up replacements from the debris cloud around it. The pod Jet had spotted was drifting behind the main body, its retros damaged. The interior light flashed rapidly on and off, spelling out a call for help in Mon Calamari blink code.

“Easily,” said Larin, knowing nothing would make Shigar happier than killing more hexes. Except, of course, finding the Grand Master.

“See those concentrations near the center?” Shigar said. “That’s the best place to hit. Take them out and the structure will tear itself apart.”

“Affirmative.” Larin flexed real and prosthetic hands around the cannon grips, ready for action.

“Launches,” said Ula as the ship roared forward.

Larin glanced at telemetry just long enough to take a quick snapshot of the wider battlefield. It was dominated by several overlapping debris fields in low orbit over Sebaddon, the largest centered on where the Corellia had broken apart. The “safe” segment of the Republic fleet and several dozen escape pods were now well clear of danger, regrouping near the planet’s rocky moon. The Imperial fleet was in the process of splitting in two, as uninfected ships copied the Republic’s tactic of retreat. Two squadrons of Imperial fighters were disabling the engines of several vessels, so they couldn’t spread their infection by ramming or detonating nearby. Larin approved of the tactic. She might have suggested it herself had not the infected Republic ships seemed so intent on targeting the Empire.

Republic fighters swarmed around the uninfected section of the fleet, keeping the hexes at bay. Defying gravity and distance, some actually managed to reach that far. If just one was carrying a nest, the infection could take root all over again.

Her mind latched on to that thought—and for an instant she was back on Hutta, staring at the droid factory, and the Sith blade was flashing like a crimson lightning bolt past her eyes all over again. Her fingers fell with the comlink to the metal floor and a scream of pain boiled in her throat.

She blinked and was back in the present. The scream remained.

Launches, Ula had said. She focused on that instead.

Five missiles were rising through the atmosphere of Sebaddon, launched separately in groups of two and three. The first pairing was aimed at the Imperial forces. The others—she was relieved to see—were aimed nowhere near the Auriga Fire or the rest of the Republic fleet. They appeared in fact to be aimed nowhere at all.

The possible motives of Lema Xandret and her followers fell from Larin’s mind as the Auriga Fire came within range of the giant hex agglomeration. She did as Shigar had suggested, putting bolt after bolt into the nearest internal cluster. That had a satisfactory effect, at first. The hexes’ combined mirror-shield defense was soon overwhelmed, and the cluster began to look decidedly threadbare, like a crater-riddled moon on the verge of collapse. But then, once again, the hexes demonstrated their ability to adapt in the face of a threat.

The cluster rearranged itself into a stubby tube, with one flat end pointing at the Auriga Fire. Larin fired at the tube as a matter of course, and the mirror shields flashed into life, catching the laser bolt and channeling it along the tube’s center. The bolt ricocheted backward and forward, joining others she fired after it, until the whole tube began to glow. She took her remaining thumb off the trigger just as the tube released all the energy it contained in a single, powerful pulse, aimed back at the Auriga Fire.

Even through the ship’s unusually powerful shields, the impact was deafening. Larin fell back into her seat with one arm covering her eyes. A split instant later a second bolt struck the ship, this one created by Shigar’s attempts to destroy the target. The Auriga Fire went into a wild tumble, then righted itself with a jerk.

“—fire! Cease fire!” Jet was yelling.

“All right, we get it.” Larin adjusted her earpiece. “What are we supposed to do now? Pull faces at it until it goes away?”

“I don’t know,” he said, “but we can’t take another hit like that. Our shields are down to forty percent.”

“Angle the shields forward,” said Shigar. “Set a course for the closest of those tube things. When I tell you to, put the sublights on full.”

“That’s madness!” said Ula.

“No, I see where he’s headed.” Jet brought the ship around to face the tube Larin had fired into. Bright discharges still sparked from hex to hex, running in waves up and down the length of the tube. “It wants energy? Energy I’ll happily give it.”

The Auriga Fire leapt forward as though to ram. The hexes fired ineffectually at the forward screens, and the agglomeration’s arms curled in to embrace their attacker. Larin’s hands lay restlessly on the cannon controls as the tube grew rapidly larger ahead of her. This, she told herself, was one situation where firing would definitely make things worse.

Instead, she was part of the bullet and the trigger at the same time.

The Auriga Fire reached the tube’s open end. It was just wide enough for the ship to fit inside, a fact for which Larin was completely grateful: the tri-laser blisters marked the ship’s widest point. The moment it and its passengers were completely encapsulated, Shigar shouted “Now!” and Jet switched the sublights to full.

There followed a horrible moment when the ship strained to move forward, but all the force it produced was sucked up by the weave of tightly bound hexes surrounding it. Larin could see the effect it had on them at horribly close quarters. The hexes writhed and shook, and slowly began to glow. Metal limbs flared like magnesium burning in pure oxygen. Black sensory pods popped and hexagonal bodies stretched. She couldn’t hear anything, but she imagined the hexes screaming.

Turning a laser bolt back onto its owner was one thing. Absorbing all the energy required to accelerate a starship was quite another.

The Auriga Fire burst out the other side, trailing a tail of bright blue. The hex-tube shook and bulged as it tried to contain the energy it had absorbed. A ball as bright as a sun formed in its heart, and Larin feared it might actually shoot out at them, destroying them instantly.

But then the hex-tube buckled, as the ball didn’t so much explode as discharge throughout the entire agglomeration. Thousands of hexes burst apart in an instant, spraying the surrounding vacuum with exotic shrapnel.

“Yee-ha!” yelled Larin, then added more soberly, “Let’s never do that again.”

The beleaguered escape pod and its occupants found themselves unexpectedly out of danger. It was a simple matter now to snatch it up in the tractor beam and haul it to safety outside the debris field, where other ships could look after it.

As the Auriga Fire turned about to look for another harried pod, Shigar said, “Wait.”

“What is it?” she asked, hearing a note of urgency in his voice.

“It’s her. Master Satele is calling me.”

“I’m not picking up any transmissions,” Jet told him.

“She’s not calling me that way.” Larin held her breath, not wanting to distract him as he concentrated on whatever he was receiving through the Force. “See that chunk of the Corellia over there, Jet? Head in that direction.”

“Will do.”

The Auriga Fire accelerated for a relatively large piece of the destroyed cruiser. The twisted, oval fragment was approximately fifty meters down its long axis, and featured a gold finish down one side, revealing that it had once been part of the hull. It tumbled freely through the hexes, and appeared to be the focus of a concerted scavenging effort leaching metal from one end.

Larin readied herself for the order to fire. When Master Satele’s pod came into view, getting her safely and quickly clear would be the priority.

Then: “I don’t see any pods,” Ula said. “Are you sure this is the right spot?”

It wasn’t the first time the former envoy had expressed doubts about Shigar’s abilities. Larin wondered if he was part of the axis in the Republic government that mistrusted the Jedi and their methods.

“I’m sure,” said Shigar. “She’s not in a pod. She must be in a pressurized compartment in that chunk.”

“I can ready a docking ring,” said Jet, “if you can pinpoint her location.”

“We won’t have time,” said Ula. “There are hexes all over that thing.”

Shigar said, “You have vac suits, don’t you? I’ll jump the gap.”

“I’m coming with you,” said Larin.

“No,” he said. “I’ll need you on the cannon, making sure no more come aboard. Drop me off, back away, then come get us when we’re out. I’ll take a spare suit for her.”

“And if her compartment doesn’t have an air lock?”

“Then I’ll think of something else.”

She heard him crawling up his access tunnel, back into the ship, and turned to look at him. “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” she called at him along the tunnel, unable to hide the intense worry she felt. The wreckage was crawling with hexes. One slip, and neither he nor his Master would come back.

“Positive,” he said. “She’s the most important person in the galaxy. It’s my duty to save her.”

Then he was gone, leaving Larin feeling slightly wounded by his words. On Hutta, he hadn’t come to save her. If his deal with Tassaa Bareesh had gone awry, she would have ended up rancor food for certain. But for Master Satele, he swept in with lightsaber swinging, risking life and limb and not even letting Larin help.

She wondered if he thought she might slow him down.

Don’t think like that, she told herself. We’re still partners, and this obviously isn’t going to be over as quickly as we’d thought. Chances are we’ll find plenty more opportunities to fight back-to-back.

She swung the cannon around and picked off a hex standing high on the back of the wreckage. That was one less he would have to worry about.

THE AURIGA FIRE’s vac suits were simple models, with no armor, inbuilt weapons, or maneuvering jets, and barely fifty minutes of air in their backpacks. Shigar guessed they were normally used for quick repairs outside the ship, where they could be tethered to the main life support. Shigar stripped out of the new clothes he had improvised from Ula’s official wardrobe—brown robe, black pants, and sand-colored top, the closest he could approximate to Jedi colors—then picked the cleanest suit from the rack and slipped it quickly over his unprotected limbs. Ideally he would have worn a body glove, like Larin’s, but there wasn’t time for such niceties. He would use biofeedback to regulate his body temperature.

He fixed his lightsaber to a clip on the suit’s right hip, where it would be accessible in an instant, and slung a spare suit over the crook of his left arm.

“Aft air lock primed and ready,” said Jet over the suit’s intercom.

“Okay.” Shigar tested the seals one last time. The air tasted stale, but that was the least of his problems. “Get in as close to the wreckage as you can.”

His breathing sounded loud in his ears as the air lock’s inner door opened and he stepped inside. As the air lock cycled, he took the opportunity to center himself. He knew what to expect. He had faced the hexes before. His priority, however, was to find Master Satele and get her out as quickly as possible. There wasn’t time to fight or take any unnecessary risks. That would only get the both of them killed.

“Can you hear me, Master Satele?” he asked over the suit comm, using a band thick with the static of distant stars. Military forces normally avoided that channel, making it perfect for short-range transmissions that needed to go untraced.

“Perfectly well,” Master Satele responded, faintly but clearly.

“How’s your air?”

“Running low, but not critical yet.”

The outer door opened with a puff of fog and Shigar kicked himself out onto the hull. For a moment the sheer weirdness of his position struck him hard. He was standing practically naked on the hull of a smuggler’s ship, surrounded by killer droids and wrecked ships, with the galaxy’s brilliant spiral to one side and the jets of a black hole to the other.

He couldn’t tell if what he felt was joy or terror.

The twisted wreckage drew nearer. Larin’s cannon flashed, and a hex went tumbling. Using the tractor beam, Hetchkee pulled another hex out of what had once been a window in the Corellia’s hull. That created a clear spot.

Shigar braced himself to jump.

“Here’s as close as we can get,” said Jet. “Don’t miss.”

With one explosive kick of his muscles, Shigar cleared the gap. For a moment the sky turned about him—the planet came into view from behind the Auriga Fire, blistered with magma domes—and then he hit the wreckage solidly, with arms outstretched to find the slightest grip.

He stuck fast, and paused to catch his breath. A hex, alerted to his arrival by the subtle shift in the wreckage’s angular momentum, peered with black eyes out of a nearby hole. Its forelegs came out to point at him. Shigar reached for his lightsaber, but Hetchkee was quicker. The hex swept up and away from him, into empty space, where it was blown to atoms by Larin.

“Thanks,” he said.

“Pleasure” came Larin’s reply. “Are you going to lie there all day while we do all the work?”

He was already moving, tugging himself lightly from handhold to handhold in the perfect free fall of open space.

“You are close,” said Master Satele over the comm. “I can sense you. There’s a shattered access port ahead. Go in that way.”

He obeyed without hesitation, keeping a sharp eye out for more hexes. When he was inside, there would be no rescue from Larin and Hetchkee.

The wreckage appeared to have been part of the Corellia’s forward command center and had been occupied at the time of the disaster. Shigar squeezed past several bodies as he wound his way deep into the twisted structure. The path was tight and occasionally dangerous, with sharp edges and spikes to negotiate. There was very little light.

“Come to the next intersection and stop there for a moment,” she told him. “I have to tell you something.”

The sound of movement came from ahead, through the bulkheads he touched, and Shigar slowed down to a bare creep, every sense attuned to the slightest change. The intersection must once have been broad enough for a landspeeder but was now barely large enough to admit a person, particularly one as tall as him. There was definitely something moving down the right-hand bend.

“What I must tell you is this,” Master Satele said. “Ever since we heard the droids, I’ve been wondering just how much of herself Lema Xandret put into her creations. The answer is around that corner, Shigar. Can you see it yet?”

He edged around the corner to see what lay ahead of him. There were nine motionless hexes clustered around a pressurized door, as though waiting for it to open.

“I’m behind that door,” she said, “and soon you will be, too.”

“How, Master?” He couldn’t conceive of a way to defeat nine hexes at once, when just two had been more than a match for him on Hutta. There was barely enough room to slide by them, let alone fight.

“You told me that the droid factory contained a biological component,” she said. “It seemed reasonable to wonder if the hexes might also.”

“There’s a fluid inside them,” he said, remembering what he had seen on Hutta. “It looks like blood. But they’re definitely droids. They’re not cyborgs.”

“Not in the usual sense. They’re something else. But the fact that they are at least partly alive is the only reason I’m still here.”

“You’re influencing them?”

“As much as I can, which isn’t very much. They only attack when either obstructed or threatened. I’m doing neither, so they’re letting me be. They won’t go away, but at least they’re not being aggressive. I think I can hold them back while you come to the door.”

Shigar swallowed. “You want me to walk right through them?”

“It’s the only way.”

“And then what?”

“Then you open the door and let me out.”

“I have a suit for you—”

“I won’t have the chance to put it on. There’s no air lock. I’ll keep a bubble of air around me using a Force shield. That’ll give me a couple of minutes. You’ll have to move much faster than that, though. I won’t be able to hold the hexes and the shield at the same time.”

Shigar clenched his fists. It seemed impossible. But she was relying on him. No one else could help her.

“I’m on my way, Master.”

He nudged himself around the corner and came into full view of the hexes. Despite his faith in Satele Shan’s mental powers, he fully expected to be shot down at once. Instead the hexes just looked at him with their black sensory pods, and rearranged themselves slightly, so they could watch both the door and him at the same time.

Feeling like he was in some kind of surreal nightmare, Shigar pushed himself into the tangle of fat bodies and angular limbs, taking the utmost care not to touch anything. He didn’t want a chance bump to wake them from their uncharacteristic complacency. He even breathed quietly, despite the perfect insulation of the vacuum around him. The intensity of the hexes’ gaze made him squirm inside.

Finally he was at the door. A red light warned of pressure on the far side. He keyed an override into the pad and the light turned green. The door would open at his command now, expelling the air in an instant.

“Are you ready, Master?”

“Yes.”

He pushed the button. The gale tried to blow him away but he was firmly braced against the opposite wall. The hexes flailed in surprise, suddenly released from Master Satele’s calming influence and blinded by the frozen air coating their sensory pods. Shigar was partly blind, too—he could see only blurrily through the mist stuck to his visor—but he had the advantage of not having to see. His Master’s presence was like a beacon to him.

He lunged into the tiny chamber and hit the switch to seal the door behind him. The hexes scrabbled to get in. It wouldn’t be long before they cut their way through. He had maybe seconds to find another way out.

Master Satele floated in a ball in the center of the room, her Force shield shimmering around her, a milky luminescence maintained barely a finger-span from her body. Shigar was struck by how small she looked. In his mind, she always seemed of gigantic stature, not just dominating the Jedi High Council but influencing the course of the Republic as well. Now, though, she seemed tiny.

A grating noise came from the door. The hexes were already cutting through. Master Satele had left her lightsaber floating beside her, outside the Force shield. He took it in his left hand, reached for his own with his right, and activated them both simultaneously. Their greens were not quite identical, and by their combined light odd shadows danced across the walls.

The room was barely three meters cubed. Apart from the door, there were no other entrances. That didn’t matter. Shigar could make his own. Raising both lightsabers, he stabbed into the wall at a point above his head, then spread both blades out in a circle before meeting at the level of his knees. A red-edged section of the wall fell free, and he kicked it into the space on the far side. Using telekinesis to gather up Master Satele, he propelled himself through the gap.

It was another room, requiring another makeshift door. He moved quickly, with confident strokes. Behind him, the hexes were wriggling through widening rents in the door and wall. In a second they would be upon him.

A hallway, this time. He swept Master Satele ahead of him and hurriedly took his bearings. He had come this way on the journey in. At the far end of the corridor, he could see the distant spiral of the galaxy.

A fat-bodied hex crawled into view, blocking his path.

“Get ready,” he called over his comlink. “I’ll be coming out fast.”

“Good,” said Larin. “It’s getting a little tight out here, too.”

Shigar didn’t waste energy replying. Master Satele’s shield was undoubtedly strong enough to deflect anything the hex could throw at them, so he kept her ahead of him. His job was simply to move both of them—fast.

The Force rushed through him. Ever since his earliest discovery of his powers, he had loved the thrill of speed. It had helped him win races before his removal from Kiffu. It had helped him survive challenges at the academy. Remembering that wild feeling of acceleration, he dug deep into himself and kicked off against the wall behind him.

The corridor blurred. Master Satele preceded him like a cannonball, blowing the hex backward, out of the wreckage and into space. For an instant, all was turning sky and scrabbling legs—then an invisible force wrenched the hex away, and he was swept upward into the waiting air lock of the Auriga Fire.

“Got them, Hetchkee?” came Larin’s voice over the comlink.

“Safe and sound.”

Several quick blasts from the tri-laser put the hex out of commission and sent four others that had emerged after Shigar scurrying for cover. He gripped the sides of the air lock as the ship accelerated away, spinning agilely through the limbs of an approaching agglomeration, with Larin’s covering fire clearing a brightly lit path.

Then the door was shut and warm air rushed in. Shigar hadn’t noticed how cold his fingers had become. He rubbed them quickly together, then righted Master Satele on the floor.

“We’re out of danger now, Master.”

The Force shield shimmered and dissolved.

Grand Master Satele Shan unfolded to a sitting position and opened her eyes. “Thank you, Shigar.” She stood and smoothed down her robes. “I owe you my life.”

Shigar bowed his head and returned her lightsaber. “I did only what I must, Master.”

Her right hand gripped his shoulder. “That’s all we ever do, Shigar, in times of war.”

The inner door opened.

“You’d better get up here,” said Jet over the ship’s internal comm. “Fast.”

Shigar led his Master through the cramped corridors of the ship to the elevated cockpit. Ula and Jet were at the controls, with Clunker standing to one side, as motionless as a statue. Hetchkee was elsewhere—filling the empty tri-laser spot, Shigar assumed, now that the need for the tractor had passed. Ula glanced at them as they entered, then stood up and bowed.

“Grand Master,” he said with a nervous expression on his face, “I am relieved to see you again.”

“Have we met?”

“I am Envoy Vii—on the staff of the Supreme Commander—”

“Forget the introductions,” said Jet. “We can have a tea party later. There’s another ship on the scope.”

“Imperial?” asked Master Satele, leaning over Ula’s chair.

“I don’t think so.” Jet brought up a wide view of the space around Sebaddon. “Just when I thought we were getting a handle on this mess …”

The viewscreen showed the remaining Republic fleet at a much higher orbit than it had been before, well out of range of the hexes. Infected ships were lancing out in wildly different directions, thanks to crippled drives or gravitational pull from either Sebaddon or the black hole. The Imperial fleet, reduced to seven ships—including its bulk cruiser—was also ascending to higher ground. A quick glance at the projected orbits showed that they were likely to cross paths in a few hours—but that was something to worry about later.

“What’s all this?” asked Shigar, brushing his hand through a layer of fuzz surrounding the planet’s equator.

“That’s where the last three missiles broke up,” said Ula, “and two more launched since. They weren’t aimed at anything. I think Xandret is laying down a defensive halo of hexes to protect the planet.”

“As well she might,” said Master Satele. “Show me the latest arrival.”

Jet’s finger stabbed at a bright dot hovering near the planet’s tiny satellite. “It appeared a minute ago.”

“From the same coordinates as everyone else?”

“No. It launched from a crater on the moon. I think it’s been hidden there the whole time.”

She nodded. “I’d like to broadcast a message.”

Jet gave her the comm.

“It’s about time you showed yourself,” she said. “I’d very much like to talk to you, Dao Stryver.”

“And I you, Grand Master” came the immediate reply. “It pleases me that you survived this unflattering rout.”

“Can one take pleasure from the survival of one’s enemy?” she asked the Mandalorian.

“One can indeed,” he said. “I will explain in due course.”

“I very much hope so.”

“Meet me at the moon in half an hour. Send one ship. No escort. You have my word that you and your party will not be harmed.”

Stryver clicked off.

“I don’t trust him,” Shigar said.

“We have no choice,” she said. “Plot the course, Captain Nebula. Take us by the Commenor. I need to speak to Captain Pipalidi now, in case we don’t get another chance.”

“ ‘We’?” asked Jet.

“This mission has already lost seven vessels of war. I will not risk another.”

“Doesn’t anyone care what I’m prepared to risk?”

“Look at this,” said Ula, drawing everyone’s attention back to the viewscreen. “The Imperials are launching a shuttle.”

“We can’t let it reach the jump coordinates,” said Shigar. “If they’re sending for reinforcements—”

“I don’t think that’s where they’re headed,” Satele said. “ ‘One ship, no escort,’ ” she quoted.

“And Stryver did say we wouldn’t be harmed by him,” added Jet. “Are you certain you want to do this?”

“Forget the flyby of the Commenor,” she told him. “Get us moving now. I’ll talk with Captain Pipalidi on the way.”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Jet, casting Master Satele a sardonic salute. “We might as well run to our doom as walk.”

ULA WATCHED WITH mounting dread as the rendezvous point loomed. He was in the worst position imaginable, unable to act against the Republic’s wishes because Satele Shan would immediately overrule him, and unable to reveal his identity to his real masters without blowing his cover. For a wild moment he considered throwing himself on the mercy of the Mandalorians, but sanity, fortunately, prevailed. Stryver had no mercy. The best Ula could have hoped for in his care was slavery.

At least he was alive, he told himself, and had a chance of staying that way if he stepped through this minefield with utmost care.

The Auriga Fire’s blunt nose was angling ahead of the Imperial shuttle on its approach to Sebaddon’s solitary satellite. The moon was blocky and misshapen, more like a brick than a sphere, with a cornucopia of craters and fathomless fissures marring its ugly face. No wonder Stryver had stayed hidden for so long. It didn’t appear to have been mined or booby-trapped, which was a major omission for a colonial administration so keen to remain undisturbed. Ula wondered if they’d simply never thought of it, or if they’d erroneously—but not unreasonably—assumed that they would never be discovered so far from the galactic disk.

The First Blood, Stryver’s scout, anchored itself to the surface of the moon as the two ships approached. It was shaped like a crescent moon, with forward-pointing wings that bristled with weapons and a matte-black, nonreflective skin. There were no markings of any kind, just two glowing circles on either side indicating ready air locks. Jet prepared a docking ring and tube to cross the distance, and jockeyed to approach the starboard air lock. The Imperial pilot noted his intentions and moved to dock on the opposite side. Along with Larin and Hetchkee, Ula watched the shuttle closely for any signs of treachery. The way the Imperials had illegally destroyed the Republic shuttle on Hutta was still painful to him. He expected better.

“Who’s going in?” asked Larin over the internal comm.

“Shigar and I,” said Master Satele, “and Envoy Vii.”

Ula swallowed. “I fear I can be of little use,” he started to say, but was cut off by Larin.

“You’ll need a bodyguard,” she said. “Just for appearances.”

“All right.”

“And take Clunker, too,” said Jet. “I’ll watch through his eyes.”

“Can you and Hetchkee pilot the ship on your own, if you have to?”

“In a pinch,” said the smuggler. “With the right incentive, I could fly a battle cruiser on my own.”

“Very well, then. Maintain the umbilical seal, but close the ship once we have disembarked. Leave on my signal, whether we’re aboard or not.”

“Don’t worry about that,” the smuggler told her. “I’ll dust off if you so much as twitch funny.”

Ula sought distraction in telemetry as the ship settled lightly on the low-gravity moon. Sebaddon hadn’t launched any missiles since the last round. The main hot spot had been made considerably hotter by retaliatory fire, and activity was growing in other regions as well. It looked to him as though the occupants of the planet were regrouping in order to fight back, but it was hard to tell from such a distance. Every spy drone launched by the Republic fleet had been intercepted by the orbital halo of hexes and destroyed.

Maybe, he told himself, he could slip a message of some kind to his opposite number in the Imperial party. That was a small and unlikely hope to cling to.

With a series of clanks and thumps, the ship’s belly grapnels took a firm grip on the dusty soil outside. The whine of repulsorlifts faded away. Jet took his hands off the controls and leaned back into the seat. For all his bluster, he looked exhausted, or at least hung over. His prematurely gray hair stood up on one side, and his eyes were heavily bagged.

“I’ll mind the farm until you get back,” he told them. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

Ula stood, hoping against hope that the Grand Master would change her mind. No such good fortune. She was already heading down the cockpit ladder, trailing Shigar like a pet. Ula waved Clunker ahead of him.

“Good luck,” Jet told him.

“You didn’t say that to the others.”

“I figure they don’t need it.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

Jet grinned. “You’ll be okay. Just remember: you’ve got an unbeatable advantage.”

“What’s that?”

“The ability to see both sides at once.”

Ula didn’t know what to say to that, or to the many other hints Jet had dropped indicating that he knew what Ula was. Ula had never had the courage to ask outright—not even during the long hours when he and the smuggler had sat waiting for Shigar to make good on his psychometric promise. Whether it was true or not that Jet had guessed, Ula would rather it was never said aloud. His life relied on pretense. Once it was gone, he didn’t know what that would leave him.

So he just nodded and headed down the stairs to meet the others at the air lock, wondering how anyone in his position could be considered advantaged. He felt like he was being pulled in a dozen directions. If he wasn’t careful, one sharp tug might tear him to pieces.

AX WALKED THE short distance along the umbilical with measured fury. She burned to be back in her interceptor rather than wasting her time with Mandalorians and envoys again. It was as bad as being back on Hutta, only this time she had no clear advantage to hope for. All she could think of was the work she should have been doing at that moment—protecting the fleet from hexes, at least, or maybe even preparing an attack force to wipe Stryver from the sky. She didn’t like coming to him when called, like some kind of menial.

“You will speak to the meddling Mandalorian on my behalf,” her Master had told her.

“But Master—”

“Do I need to explain to you again what your duty is? It is to serve the Emperor, through me, his instrument. When you defy me, you defy him.”

And that was the problem, of course. She had defied him, by ignoring his orders during the hexes’ attack on Hutta. Now she was being punished for it, while he waited comfortably half frozen in the secret room in his shuttle. Whether her defiance had served the fleet or not was irrelevant. She could only forget all about doing anything constructive—let alone to the betterment of the Empire—until Darth Chratis changed his mind.

“I’m here,” she said when she reached the First Blood’s external air lock. Her right hand fiddled with the hilt of her lightsaber. “Don’t keep me waiting, Stryver.”

The door hissed open. A token escort followed her into the ship—three soldiers in formal black-and-grays. She didn’t look behind her to make sure they were keeping up. As a deliberate act of defiance aimed at both Stryver and her Master, she hadn’t changed out of her combat uniform. It stank of oil and smoke and combat, exactly like Stryver’s ship. Her hair swayed heavily down her back, like thick rope.

The First Blood had a low profile, head-on, but was surprisingly spacious inside. Its walls were ribbed rather than sealed with flat panels; sometimes there were no gaps at all delineating corridor from hold. Wiring and components were occasionally exposed—all, she supposed, in an effort to keep weight down. She also assumed that anything secret was kept well out of sight, so she didn’t trouble herself with memorizing what she saw. She just walked, following the sound of voices leading to the center of the vessel.

“… understand why you need all of us at once. Can’t you tell us now?”

Ax knew that voice. She had heard it on Hutta. It belonged to a near-human who had fought on the Republic side, although clearly not a trooper herself. What was she doing here?

“I don’t like repeating myself,” said another familiar voice: the deep, vocoder-inflected tones of Dao Stryver.

Ax walked around a thick pillar of cables acting as conduit and support, and found herself in the main cabin. It was a circular room with glowing white floor and ceiling, and a central holoprojector. Stryver stood to Ax’s left, helmet just clearing the relatively high ceiling. To his left were a motley group of people, including several more individuals Ax recognized: the Republic envoy, a droid she had seen hanging around Tassaa Bareesh’s security air lock, and the Jedi Padawan. Next to him stood a woman she hadn’t met before, but instantly recognized.

Ax stopped on entering the room, a wary hiss unconsciously escaping from between her teeth. The air was thick with the enemy’s self-righteousness, concentrated mainly around the slight woman with the gray streak wearing the robes of a Jedi Knight. No mere Jedi Knight, she. The Grand Master of the High Council herself! Darth Chratis would grind his crystalline teeth in frustration at missing such a close encounter with the Emperor’s most hated foe. To slay her would bring Ax considerable fame and fortune among those favored by the Dark Council.

Ax forced her hand to leave her hilt alone. For all her ambition, Ax knew that she could not single-handedly beat both Master and Padawan. She would have to strike with words instead of her blade.

“The Jedi Order must be weak indeed,” she said, “for the Grand Master and a youngling to jump on a Mandalorian’s whim.”

The Padawan, Shigar, stiffened at her description of him as a child. “Not so weak,” he said, “that I didn’t save your life at least once on Hutta.”

“You are mistaken,” she said, feeling heat rise up her neck.

“Am I? I’ll try harder not to be, next time.”

“Enough,” said the Grand Master, and the Padawan obeyed her instantly. “We’re all here now, Stryver. Get on with it.”

“I do not take your orders, Grand Master,” said the Mandalorian. “Nonetheless, you have a point. I have brought you here to show you something.”

The holoprojector between them flickered into life. Ax recognized the globe of Sebaddon, with its tiny, gem-like lakes scattered among irregular, continent-sized bulges of heat. Magma seams glowed orange, forming a tracery that on other worlds might have been rivers. Several blue circles at the intersections of such traceries indicated settlements or industrial centers. Ax recognized the one Darth Chratis had bombed when the Paramount was attacked, and many others. Some that she remembered weren’t visible at all.

“This is how Sebaddon looked when I arrived six hours before you,” Stryver said. “This is how it looked when you arrived.”

There was a clear difference: many of the missing hot spots were now present; the brightest were brighter still.

“This is how it looks now.”

Ax didn’t need to study what she already knew. “Your point?”

“They work fast,” said the Padawan. “That’s what Jet said when we arrived. He thought the colony was about twenty years old.”

“It can’t be more than fifteen,” said Ax, remembering how long it had been since Lema Xandret defected.

“It’s actually much less than that,” Stryver said, resting his giant, gloved hands on the edge of the holoprojector and leaning over the image. “Study this sequence of images carefully and you’ll see that the colony expanded five percent since I arrived. If you project that rate of growth backward in time, that gives a founding date of about three weeks ago.”

“Impossible,” she said.

“That’s around when the Cinzia was intercepted,” said Ula.

“So what? It’s still impossible.”

“Is it?” Stryver said. “Lema Xandret chose this colony partly because of its wealth of resources. With an army of willing workers and a means of making new ones, why couldn’t she do whatever else she wanted?”

“If the colony could grow so quickly, why is it still so small?”

“That’s a good question, Eldon Ax. You should know your mother better than anyone else here. What do you think?”

Instead of blushing, Ax felt her face grow cold and taut. “Start talking sense, man, or I’m leaving.”

Both of Stryver’s index fingers tapped heavily, just once, and for the first time Ax noted that he had only four fingers on each hand.

Not exactly a man, then, she thought. But who cares about that?

“I’ve been watching all of you,” he said, “while you blunder about getting yourselves killed. That’s the advantage of being first on the field of battle. Instead of testing Sebaddon’s defenses myself, I sat back and watched you do it. It has been an interesting experiment, one that confirmed my previous observations. The inhabitants of Sebaddon are unwilling even to talk about opening their borders to outsiders—particularly the Empire—and they are capable of defending themselves when pushed.”

“We were taken by surprise,” said Ax. “That won’t happen, next time.”

“If you wait too long, surprise won’t be the only thing you have to worry about.”

“What do you mean?” asked Satele Shan.

“How long will it take you to call for reinforcements? You can’t call, so it’s a two-way trip to send a messenger. Then a fleet has to be assembled. The larger the fleet, the more time you’ll need. And with each hour, Sebaddon is converting more of its precious metals to machines of war. More than thirty ships failed today. How long until fifty ships isn’t enough? A hundred? A thousand?”

Ax sneered. “No single planet could withstand the might of the Imperial war machine.”

“I might agree, if the Imperial war machine was available. But it’s currently stretched across all the galaxy, thin and vulnerable, and the same can be said for the Republic’s. Furthermore, we all know that neither would come if we called. They would think your concerns exaggerated. They are more interested in fighting each other than this single, isolated threat.”

“Is it a threat?” asked Shigar. “Xandret won’t talk to us, but at least she’s stopped firing now we’ve moved away. Why don’t we give her what she wants and leave her alone?”

“Do you really think that’s possible, now?” said the female near-human.

“Why not?” Shigar looked at his Master for support, but she wasn’t giving it to him.

“You are naïve,” said Ax. “This world is too valuable. The Emperor will have it, or no one will.”

“And your mother must be made an example of,” said Stryver, “otherwise the power of the Sith will be eroded.”

“Stop calling her my mother. Lema Xandret is a criminal and a fugitive. There is no possibility that she will escape justice.”

“Would you strike her down yourself, if you could?”

“I would, and I will. She means nothing to me.”

“Good. I believed once that I might reason with her. I believed that I could broker an agreement that would keep her and her creations in check. Now I fear that it is too late for any kind of negotiation. No reasoning or agreement is possible.”

“Has she gone mad?” asked the trooper to Shigar’s right. “If so, there are other options. We could take her out and talk to someone else, for instance.”

“This plan suffers from one small but fatal flaw.”

“That is?” asked the Republic envoy.

“Lema Xandret is already dead. She has been for some time.”

An icy splinter snapped in Ax’s heart at those words, leaving her unable to tell if she felt triumph or grief, or both.

“I THINK IT’S TIME you told us everything you know,” said Master Satele.

“I agree,” said Larin. “Since when do Mandalorians negotiate with anyone?”

Ula remembered Jet telling him, They don’t believe they have any equals.

“You were the person Xandret’s emissaries were hoping to meet,” Ula said. “You came looking for them when they didn’t show up.”

The giant, domed helmet inclined in his direction. “Correct.”

“Was Xandret herself supposed to be aboard the Cinzia?” asked Shigar. “Is that why you think she’s dead?”

“No. She sent another. I believe she was here when she died.”

“So you don’t know for sure?” asked the Sith. Her face had a white, pinched look under her bloodred dreadlocks.

“I am certain of it.”

“Did you kill her? Did you see her body?”

“No.”

“So how can you be certain?”

Stryver tapped his helmet with one gloved finger. Ula couldn’t see the Mandalorian’s face, but was positive he was smiling.

“She means nothing to me,” the young Sith said firmly, as though reassuring herself of the truth of it. “I just want to be certain.”

“Be certain of this, Eldon Ax: when those droids your mother created leave this world, they will consume the entire galaxy in less than a generation.”

Ula blinked. The claim was preposterous, but if Stryver truly believed it, that did explain another puzzling piece of the story.

“So that’s why you were willing to talk to her,” Ula said. “Lema Xandret was a threat or a possible ally—just like the Empire.”

“A force to be reckoned with, potentially,” said Master Satele. “A force we clearly underestimated. But you wouldn’t have taken her word on it. You must have received some kind of proof.”

“A demonstration factory,” said Stryver. “In two days, it manufactured seventeen droids and two duplicates of itself using nothing but the materials around it. The duplicate factories went immediately to work, making another four factories and even more droids. Their rate of reproduction was limited only by the energy available to them; later we discovered how they send out roots to tap into the local supply, ensuring they never run out. Curious, we put the droids in the pit and they prevailed against all but the current champion. Then the droids and factories self-destructed, leaving insufficient remains for us to probe the secrets of their manufacture or function. The message was clear. The Mandalore sent me to pursue the conversation.”

“Why did he send just you?” asked Larin. “You’re not much use to us on your own.”

“I can confirm several hypotheses that you might already be forming. This will save you time so you can begin to act.” Stryver raised his right hand and began ticking off points. “One. Lema Xandret and her fellow refugees arrived on Sebaddon determined to cast off the hierarchy they had left behind. Fifteen years later, hiding was no longer sufficient: Xandret wanted revenge on the people who had stolen her daughter. So she sought out Mandalore to help her. She approached him because my culture eschews the Force. That, after all, was where all this started, with militarized religious cults turning children into monsters.”

Ula didn’t dare look at the young Sith’s face. He didn’t know exactly how the Sith trained their acolytes, but this sounded plausible. He wondered if his Jedi “masters” had a similar system.

“Two.” Stryver’s count continued. “During her self-imposed exile, Xandret and her fellow artisans advanced robotics in directions no one has ever seen before. Finding inspiration and materials in human biology itself, they sought to make droids that would neither age nor grow inflexible and hidebound, so their small colony could last forever. The technical challenges were immense, of course, but they made some progress in unexpected directions. The droids you’ve seen are advanced prototypes called fast breeders. Given enough metal and raw energy, they grow from seeds into fully formed combat versions in a matter of days. The nest on Hutta could have produced dozens of such killers if left undisturbed, and the same is true of the nests on Sebaddon. The hot spots you’ve been observing from above, the ones that look like cities, are in fact droid-building factories. They are churning out fast breeders by the thousand now that the planet’s defenses have been tripped. And not just fast breeders: new factories as well. That is where the true threat lies. This was the weapon she intended to use against the Empire.

“Three. If left unchecked, Xandret’s breeder technology will inevitably outgrow its homeworld and spill out into the galaxy. The math of geometric progression is undeniable: one world this year, two worlds the next; then four, then eight; within a decade it’s two hundred and fifty worlds, then another decade later it’s a quarter of a million. One human generation is all they would need to take over the entire galaxy—along with Sith, Jedi, and Mandalorians alike.

“Four. Negotiation is no longer an option. Xandret put all her prejudices into her droids. You’ve heard their voices. You know what drives them. The only solution is to crush Sebaddon completely. We must be ruthless, decisive, and thorough, in order to ensure that Lema Xandret’s legacy is completely eradicated. Just one nest would be enough to allow all this to start over again.”

Stryver had run out of fingers on his right hand.

“Are you finished?” asked the Sith.

“I will be if this threat isn’t neutralized.”

Stryver’s fists descended to take his weight, knuckle-first, on the side of the holoprojector.

The sphere of Sebaddon turned unstoppably between them. Glowing red lights appeared and spread like a plague in fast motion. Soon the whole planet was red, and streams of tiny, malignant dots began to leap off the surface and escape into unseen spaces.

“You said ‘we.’ ” Satele Shan’s voice made Ula jump. “We must be ruthless. I presume that was deliberate.”

“It was. Everything I have seen, on Hutta and Sebaddon, confirms my worst fears. Sebaddon is responding to the threat you all represent by ramping up production. It must be stopped before the contagion spreads. Since neither Empire nor Republic can single-handedly destroy this menace with the resources available right now, you must work together to see it done.”

“With you in charge, I suppose,” said Larin.

“The end justifies the means.”

“I will never take orders from a Mandalorian,” said the Sith in mocking tones. “And I will never fight alongside a Jedi. You are insane even to suggest it.”

“There must be an alternative,” Master Satele said. “Another attempt at negotiation, perhaps—”

“The planetary defense system is automated,” Stryver said. “The only voices coming from the planet originate with the fast breeders. That’s how I know that Lema Xandret is dead. Everyone down there is dead. It’s just the droids now, and you can’t negotiate with them.”

“Well, we can’t trust one another,” said Shigar. “That’s some choice you’ve given us.”

“Could I make it any other way, I would. Believe me.”

Jedi and Sith glowered at one another over the hologram, and suddenly Ula knew exactly what he had to do. Once again, Jet had been absolutely right. Ula could see both sides at once, and save himself into the bargain.

“Are you the leader of the Imperial fleet?” he asked the young Sith. He already knew the answer. The Emperor would never trust such wealth to someone so young, no matter how powerful she might be. But he had to ask, for appearance’s sake.

“No,” she admitted.

“Whoever that person is, then, I want to speak to them, face-to-face,” he said. “I believe I can bring the Empire to the table.”

“You? My Master would gut a worm like you just to watch you die.”

Ula’s stomach roiled. Her Master. He had hoped for a non-Sith commander, but would have to settle for what he got. “Take me to your command vessel and let me try. If I fail, by the sound of things, I might as well be dead.”

“Your death is closer than you think. He’s in the shuttle.”

“Well, then. All the better. It’ll be over quickly.”

“Envoy Vii,” said Satele Shan, “be very careful. You must be absolutely sure of yourself.”

“I am.” He straightened and puffed out his chest. “If the Empire agrees to Stryver’s suggestion, will you?”

The Grand Master showed no sign of uncertainty. “Of course. We’re not at war, after all, and the threat is severe.”

“Good.” Ula turned back to the Sith girl. She was tight-lipped with rage, as though she couldn’t believe his audacity. “This isn’t a trick. I’ll go with you now, if you’ll take me. Please.”

“Just you,” she finally said. “No one else.”

“That’s out of the question,” said Larin.

“No,” he said, although his heart warmed at her concern. “I’m happy to go on my own. If I can’t convince them with words, what difference would a rifle or two make?”

She reluctantly backed down. “Just be careful. We want you back in one piece.”

“Not several?” said the Sith. She was grinning now, perhaps anticipating the sport her Master would have with him. “I refuse to guarantee anything.”

Ula wondered if he looked as faint as he felt. What if she killed him the moment they were on the other side of the air lock, before he had a chance to speak? That would be the most awful irony of all.

“I’m ready,” he said in as strong a voice as he could muster. “Let’s not keep your Master waiting.”

“Indeed,” she said. “Let’s not.”

“If we don’t hear from you within thirty minutes,” Stryver said, “we’ll assume you are dead.”

Ula walked around the holoprojector and let the Imperial guards take him by the shoulders and frog-march him to the door. There was no turning back now. The eyes of his erstwhile allies in the Republic followed him as he was led off to betray them all.

THE MOMENT THE air lock closed behind them, the puny envoy started to struggle. Ax strode on, her mind full of ways to lessen the inevitable consequences of her failure. She didn’t know what Darth Chratis had expected, but he was sure to turn this unexpected result against her. That she was finding it hard to think wasn’t helping.

“Listen to me,” the envoy called after her. “You have to listen to me!”

She didn’t slow down. She barely even heard him. Lema Xandret is dead, Stryver had said. Everyone down there is dead. She didn’t know why that pronouncement had made a difference, but it seemed to. Her family, her mother—what had happened to her father? She had never asked. Maybe he was dead, too, had died years ago, when she was a child. Maybe he was a Sith Lord who wouldn’t lower himself to be associated with a common woman. Maybe, she thought, just maybe …?

Impossible. She mocked herself for even thinking it. Darth Chratis was no kind of father to her, and never would be. She needed no father, just like she needed no family. If Stryver was right and the fugitives were all dead, that just made her life easier. She wouldn’t have to expend the energy finding and killing them, in the Emperor’s name.

“Please, I’m trying to tell you that I’m not who you think I am! We’re on the same side and have been all the time!”

The squawking of the envoy finally penetrated her consciousness. On the brink of entering the shuttle, she stopped and reached out one half-gripped hand.

He swept out of the guards’ hands and smashed into the air lock wall.

“Don’t even think of lying to me,” she said.

“I’m not.” The envoy was as pale as marble and his voice little more than a whisper, but he didn’t flinch as she approached. “I’m an Imperial agent.”

She activated her lightsaber and held it across his throat.

“You don’t look like a Cipher Agent. You’re not even fully human.”

Her contempt was ferocious. “All right. Not an agent per se, but an informer at least. And I am loyal regardless what species I am. Utterly loyal. I swear it.”

Ax didn’t move. She knew that many highly ranked Republic officers sometimes preferred nonhuman staff in the belief that this would protect them from surveillance. If this envoy had been turned, he would be highly prized by the Minster of Information.

“I tried to board your shuttle on Hutta,” he pressed on, beginning to stammer now, “but the guards t-turned me away.”

That much was true, and it made her hesitate. Ax couldn’t believe she was listening to him—and more, actually considering his story. But his brazenness and bravery in the face of certain death were persuasive. She had to admire his guts, even if she would see them sizzling if she found out that he was trying to trick her. It wasn’t impossible that he was a double agent placed by Satele Shan to lead her and her Master astray …

Ax smiled with her teeth. Darth Chratis would know. If the envoy was telling the truth, it would be a boon for her. If not, her Master would have someone else upon which to act out his displeasure.

“What species are you?” she asked him.

“E-Epicanthix.”

“Never heard of it.”

“We come from Panatha in the Pacanth Reach—”

“I don’t care. If you ever want to see your home again—if you ever want to see anything again—then you’ll tell my Master everything you just told me, and convince him that it’s true.”

“Who is your Master?”

“Darth Chratis. Does that name mean anything to you?”

If anything, the envoy went even paler.

“Good. Then you appreciate the gravity of your situation.”

She deactivated her lightsaber and let him drop. The guards picked him up and dragged him after her, into the shuttle where her Master waited.

Darth Chratis awaited her in the shuttle’s spacious but inhospitable passenger cabin, wearing a bulky armored suit. Only his face was visible, pinched and puckered into a permanent scowl. He leaned heavily on his lightsaber staff.

When he saw the envoy, his brow came down even farther.

“Explain.”

Ax did so, starting at Dao Stryver’s dire predictions and moving quickly on to the possibility of cooperation. The prisoner remained silent throughout, struck dumb by Darth Chratis’s forbidding mien. That was a good thing; had he interrupted at any point, he might have been killed out of hand.

“And Satele Shan has been taken in by this Mandalorian’s machinations?” Her Master’s eyebrows, as thin as old scars, rose up toward his time-worn scalp.

“It appears so,” she said. “She sent her envoy to negotiate on her behalf.”

Now Darth Chratis’s stare descended fully upon him, and the envoy quailed. “Speak.”

“My name is Ula Vii,” he stammered. “I report directly to Watcher Three in the operations division of the Ministry of Intelligence. I am your servant, my lord—a loyal agent of the Empire.”

“A spy? How unfortunate for the Grand Master.” Darth Chratis’s face broke into a broad, cracked smile. “Tell me, spy, how you propose to betray her.”

“Republic and Empire share the same initial objectives,” the envoy said, pulling free from the two guards. He had clearly been thinking hard while waiting his turn to speak. “The smashing of Sebaddon’s orbital defense system comes ahead of any invasion or mass bombardment—the purpose of which would be the neutralization of the planet’s central authority, since it must have one, human or artificial—and together, I agree that we can probably achieve that. But once we have the planet toothless and brainless, the need for an alliance will be gone. I suggest we turn on the Jedi and Dao Stryver then—break the so-called alliance and take what’s rightfully ours. Sebaddon will be the Emperor’s at last. I’ll supply misinformation at every opportunity, ensuring that the Grand Master does not ever find the chance to do the same to you.”

“What do you ask for in return?”

The envoy looked surprised by the question. “Me? Nothing, my lord. I’m simply doing my duty.”

“There must be something important to you, beyond your duty. Ask, and it shall be yours.”

“Well, there is one that I would ask you to spare, after your inevitable victory.”

“Tell me who.”

“She is no one, lower even than a trooper. Her name is Larin Moxla.”

“Do you know this woman, Ax?” Darth Chratis asked.

“I believe I do, Master.”

“Good.”

Darth Chratis’s smile disappeared. The envoy was wrenched roughly forward and raised into the air. He struggled against the invisible hold on him, but there was no resisting it. Ax had experienced the power of her Master’s Force grip. She knew how tight it could be.

“Listen to me, spy.”

The envoy frantically nodded, too frightened to speak aloud.

“I cannot read you. Your mind is shielded from me, by either some unnatural contrivance or a natural talent. I suspect the latter. The Minster of Intelligence seeks out your kind in order to keep his secrets from both his masters and our enemy. So when I look into you, I see no loyalty to the Emperor. I sense only tangled allegiances, with no clear outcomes. Given a choice, I would never trust you.

“Yet you and your kind are a loathsome necessity in times like these. I must find a way to curb your natural instinct for treachery. To that end …” Here Envoy Vii jerked violently forward, so he was staring straight into the eyes of Darth Chratis. “To that end, be sure that if you betray me I will hunt down the fancy of your nonhuman heart and put her through such torments that you will be grateful when I kill her. And then it will be your turn. Is that clear?”

“Yes, my lord. Abundantly so.”

The envoy dropped with a thud to the floor.

“Very good,” said Darth Chratis. “Ax, get him out of my sight. You will return him to Satele Shan with the agreement he promised her, and you will accompany him as my official mouthpiece.”

“But Master—”

“Be silent! I could hardly let him go alone. They would never believe that I trusted them unless I took such precautions. You will watch the Grand Master, and you will watch this one, too. At the slightest sign of treachery, you will notify me and my wrath will descend upon both of them.”

She bowed her head, thinking: Another dead-end task. And probably a suicide mission, too. “I will do as you instruct.”

“I sense your impatience, Ax. Remember that our rewards will be bountiful when victory is complete. When the Grand Master is dead and this world ours, then your apprenticeship will be over. Not before. Go now, and do my bidding.”

“Yes, Master,” she said, bowing deeply, sure that he sensed the burn of excitement in her mind. To be free of him at last, to be a true Sith—that was all she had ever wanted! And she deserved it. She knew that well. Not for nothing had she slaved this last decade and more, to the detriment of all else.

Lema Xandret is dead.

Ax suppressed even the barest hint of regret as she turned and left the shuttle, dragging the quivering informer behind her.

“DID YOU HAVE to bring her back with you?” Larin whispered to Ula as she escorted the passengers of the Auriga Fire to the Commenor’s conference room. “I don’t trust her.”

The envoy adjusted his collar as though he was feeling too hot. “No choice, I’m afraid. Darth Chratis was insistent.”

“Well, he didn’t offer to put one of us on his command deck.”

“I suppose he wouldn’t offer, given the choice, and I’m afraid I didn’t think to ask. I thought the Sith would be valuable as a hostage, that’s all.”

“I suppose she will.” Noticing Ula’s discomfort, she forced a smile. “Hey, look, I’m not saying you didn’t do your best. I’m just glad you got us this far. No one else could’ve done it.” She patted him on the shoulder with her prosthetic half hand.

“Thanks,” he said, looking embarrassed. “I’m glad you think so.”

She couldn’t help a smile. His social awkwardness was both touching and puzzling. How had anyone so clumsy ever risen so high in the Republic administration, let alone survived an audience with a Dark Lord of the Sith? Perhaps Darth Chratis had taken pity on him.

That seemed rather unlikely.

The Sith apprentice, Eldon Ax, walked steadily between Master Satele and Shigar, surrounded by an entourage of business-like soldiers, all holding rifles at the ready. Her wild-haired head was held high, and she took each step as though fighting the urge to spin and fight. She was like a wild animal, held barely in check.

“I don’t trust her,” Larin repeated, “and I’m good at reading people.”

Beside her, Ula cleared his throat but said nothing.

THE MEETING WAS uncomfortable from the beginning. Captain Pipalidi’s crest was a deep purple, and her Basic difficult to understand, as was often the case with Anx, whose voices tended to be so deeply pitched that they bordered on the subsonic. Shigar swore he felt his rib cage rattle on a couple of occasions.

The captain first ordered all nonessential personnel out of the room. Larin was one of those, and Shigar caught the hurt glance she shot him. There was nothing he could do about it, though. He had no power here.

“Colonel Gurin had no opportunity to confirm his succession plans to me,” said Master Satele, “but I know he had the highest regard for you, Captain Pipalidi. He would be glad to know that the fleet is in reliable hands.”

“May it remain so,” the captain growled, with a sharp look at Eldon Ax. The implication was obvious, and twofold. Many in the military harbored hard feelings for the Jedi after the events leading up to the Treaty of Coruscant, when the Order had been deliberately trapped between the Empire and the Mandalorians. The closing of that trap had left the Republic divided over the role Jedi Knights should play in future conflicts. Some even went so far as to mistrust the Order entirely, preferring to leave them out. The fact that Master Satele had brought a Sith to the negotiating table only confirmed those mistrustful feelings.

“My enemy is your enemy,” said Ax. “That makes you useful to me. And vice versa.”

Captain Pipalidi’s crest turned bright orange. “We do not need you, you murderous witch-child—”

“Enough,” said Master Satele, raising both hands. “This won’t get us anywhere. The fact is that we do need her, Captain Pipalidi, and the Imperials as well, so we must negotiate accordingly. Have your analysts confirmed Dao Stryver’s calculations?”

“Yes.” The captain raised herself up to her full height, making her the tallest person in the room by more than a meter. “I have sent a long-range probe droid to convey a message to the Supreme Commander, but I do not anticipate a response of any kind within a day.”

“The chance of Stantorrs sending a fleet on the basis of one message is remote,” Master Satele said. “And by the time it came, Sebaddon would be boiling over.”

“Yes.” That single syllable conveyed a weight of import. For all her dislike of the situation, at least the captain understood its significance.

“I don’t understand why Stryver didn’t tell us this earlier,” said Shigar. “As it stands we have just fifteen ships, now. If we’d combined both our fleets on arrival, it would’ve been over thirty. If he’d warned us—”

“Would you have believed him?” asked Ula.

“No,” said Ax unexpectedly. “I tried to tell my Master about the hexes but he didn’t listen.”

Shigar didn’t add Me, too, but he could have. “So Stryver let us take a hammering just to make a point? If we’d been beaten, that would’ve done no one any good.”

“I’m sure he has his reasons,” said Master Satele. “The same reason, possibly, that he’s the only one of his kind here. If the Mandalore feels so strongly about this, why wouldn’t he send more to back us up?”

“Perhaps he wants us to do his dirty work for him.”

“Or he doesn’t think his people are up to it,” the young Sith said.

Shigar met her quick gaze. If they shared one thing, it seemed, it was a mistrust of the Mandalorians.

“Fifteen ships,” mused Captain Pipalidi, “including one bulk cruiser …”

Ax said, “We have three thousand front-line troops, divided across the remains of three regiments—repulsorlift, heavy weapons, and armored—with two hundred TRA-Nine battle droids. We have shuttles sufficient to land them and support them, but we lost much of our munitions when the ships carrying them were destroyed by the hexes.”

“Are those figures accurate?” asked the captain suspiciously.

“I have been ordered to withhold nothing. It is to our benefit, at the moment, not to do so.”

“In that spirit, I will offer the same. Three thousand five hundred troops, two full regiments. Repulsorlift and armor. Our wings were in the air when their capital ships were destroyed, so most of the fighters themselves survived. Hangar decks are crowded, though, and refueling options limited.”

“We have the same problem,” said Ax. “Colonel Kalisch sent raiding parties to salvage what they could from the infected vessels, but none returned. One came back infected. We destroyed it.”

“We noticed. Our intelligence staff is working double shifts, watching everything around the planet. Not helped, of course, by the fact that we were short-staffed to begin with.”

The captain’s tension visibly eased as she and Ax exchanged details of losses and setbacks. Shigar had heard how battle lines could be blurred on a war’s bloody front. This was the first time he had seen it in action. Perhaps Stryver’s unlikely plan had some merit after all.

Ula broke into the rapid exchange of intelligence.

“Every minute we stand around chatting,” he said, “Xandret’s droids build more of themselves, more factories, more who knows what? If we’re going to stop them, we have to start making solid plans, and fast.”

“Agreed,” said Master Satele. “Our number one priority is stopping the droids from getting more than a toehold in orbit. While their factories are confined to the surface of the planet, it will be possible to defeat them.”

“A whole planet with just fifteen ships?” asked one of the captain’s senior officers. “And just one bulk cruiser?” The hard-skinned major shook his head. “No matter how you divide it up, it’s impossible.”

“Only if we tell ourselves it is,” said Shigar. “Stryver’s data clearly showed how the hexes radiated outward from a central point—the main hot spot your ships bombarded,” he added with a nod to Ax. “I think it’s safe to assume that this was where Xandret and the others founded the colony’s capital. Destroying it didn’t take out the hexes’ coordinating intelligence, but must have hurt it enough to move elsewhere. If we look for the place that’s growing the fastest, that’ll be the place to hit.”

“We have identified two such locations,” said Captain Pipalidi. A hologram flickered to life between them. “Here and here,” she said, indicating one spot at the equator and another at the south pole. “Perhaps the hexes have decided not to put all their eggs in one basket, this time.”

Shigar studied the image. The site on the equator was in the middle of a vast sea of lava, dotted with islands of solid stone. The polar site was much more stable. Straight lines radiated from it in all directions, leading to other spots elsewhere.

“That’s a factory,” he said, pointing at the pole. “Perhaps the master factory, where everything else originates. And that’s the brain,” he said, transferring his finger to the equator.

“How can you possibly know that?” asked Ax.

“Because factories need physical means to get things in and out. Resources, power, finished droids. That’s what these are.” He followed one line from point to point. “Roads or railways of some kind. Or power cables.”

“And brains don’t need anything of the sort,” she said, nodding. “It can just sit there, isolated in the middle of that mess, sending orders out by radio.”

“I think you’re right, Shigar.” Master Satele moved around the globe, rubbing her chin. “Teams striking both at once, plus targeted bombardment at the secondary locations, should be enough to slow the hexes’ growth.”

“Enough to stop it, perhaps,” said Captain Pipalidi, “until reinforcements arrive.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. Shigar knew as well as anyone that, once the threat of the planet was reduced to zero, the alliance would break. This moment of solidarity was both fragile and temporary. No one had forgotten that the Sith and the Jedi, the Empire and the Republic, were anything other than mortal enemies.

“Let’s worry about reinforcements when they get here,” Ula said. “Captain Pipalidi, would you be willing to sketch out a basic plan now, to pass on to Darth Chratis and Colonel Kalisch for their opinion? I suggest dividing resources evenly over all tactical objectives, to ensure that both parties feel that they are included but not exploited, plus double the usual number of commanding officers to each platoon. Discipline must be maintained. We don’t want the troops shooting one another at a critical moment.”

“Naturally not,” said the captain with a bluish cast to her crest. Shigar didn’t know what that meant. Irony, perhaps.

Shigar caught another glance from the young Sith’s direction—bored, this time, and again he sympathized. Their duel in the Hutts’ security air lock felt a lifetime ago. His lightsaber hand itched, but he kept it carefully limp at his side.

THE DOOR TO THE conference room hissed open. Larin was taken by surprise. She had long ago given up trying to read the lips of the people inside. On seeing a major, she automatically stood to attention.

“Private Hetchkee, a moment,” said the sturdy Rellarin. “You, too, Moxla.”

Larin followed Hetchkee and the major into the conference room. The air seemed much denser than normal, as was always the case during long planning sessions. A current projection of the planet hung in the center of the room, dashed and dotted with notations in yellow and green. People huddled around it, making suggestions. The Sith girl was one of them.

Both Shigar and Ula looked up as Larin entered, but it was the captain who spoke.

“We’re sending strike teams to two locations,” she said in a voice so deep it hurt Larin’s breastbone. One long finger stabbed at the globe. “Here, and here. We need people familiar with the hexes to guide each team. Both your names have been mentioned for the assault on the master factory. Private Hetchkee, your detail was with the envoy, under the authority of Supreme Commander Stantorrs. I don’t outrank him, of course, but I can promote you above the rank required for an escort. No one would dream of wasting a lieutenant on such a detail, and we’re short of officers. Will you accept this assignment?”

“Yes, sir.” Hetchkee snap-saluted, looking like he was equal parts delighted and terrified. This was not only the fastest leap up the chain of command imaginable, but it could also be the briefest.

“And what about you, Moxla?”

“Forgive me, sir, but I have a history—”

“So I’m told. I don’t care what happened back then. You’re the closest thing we have to special forces now, so I’d be insane not to use you. All that matters is that you’ll follow orders—and be followed in turn, by anyone who has any doubts. Do you think you can manage that?”

Her face was burning. In the service again! She didn’t know whether to kill Shigar or kiss him.

“Yes, sir. I do. I will.”

“Good. Major Cha, take them to the quartermaster and have them kitted out. I want them briefed and ready for action within the hour.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Rellarin saluted and guided them toward the door. Larin felt as though she were walking through a weightless vacuum—not floating, exactly, but cut loose from everything. One touch, and she could tumble out of control.

The major chuckled once the door was shut behind them. “You should see your faces,” he said. “Well, I can’t really see yours, Hetchkee, but I can imagine.”

“Are we really going to attack the planet, sir?”

“You bet you are. Are you up to it?”

“I’ll do my best, sir.”

“That’s all we can ask of you. What we expect is a different story.”

In no time at all they reached the Commenor’s expansive technical storeroom. Larin gazed hungrily at row after row of clean armor shells, up-to-date weapons, and apparently endless cases of ammunition. She knew this wasn’t a big ship, so the stores weren’t as extensive as she imagined, but it was so much more than she had seen in a long time. She almost wept.

“Here we are. Sergeant, these two new lieutenants find themselves sorely underprovisioned. Make sure they’re equipped with everything they need, and do it on the double.”

“Yes, Major Cha.”

The swarthy sergeant took charge of Larin and led her into paradise.

“WHAT ABOUT THE Mandalorian?” Ax asked when the stunned troopers were gone. “What role does he play in all this?”

She hadn’t forgotten her vow. I will kill you, Dao Stryver, or die trying.

“Apart from supplying any other intel he might have,” said the captain, “I expect him to join the fighters sweeping hexes from orbit.”

“It might be difficult keeping him out of play,” said one of her officers. “Mandalorians love nothing better than a good fight.”

“He’s done a very good job of staying out of this one,” said the Padawan with a shrug. “Maybe he’ll be content with that.”

Ax kept her feelings to herself. She would be hundreds of kilometers away from them, then, intent on destroying the droids’ coordinating intelligence. But she would advise her Master to keep an eye on Stryver’s scout, in the hope that it strayed too close to an Imperial ship. In the chaos of combat, missiles often went astray. She wanted him dead, even if she couldn’t deliver the killing blow herself.

“One of our signals officers believes the hexes identify us by our transponders,” said another alien on the captain’s staff. “We could feather our drives, confuse them.”

“Better yet,” said the Padawan, “we could avoid drives entirely.”

“What do you mean?”

“Shuttle to low orbit, free-fall straight down from there, then chute onto the targets.”

Ax was impressed. She liked that plan, despite herself. “It could work. We’ll show up on radar, of course, but they won’t know what we are. Toss out a bit of junk with us, and they might even mistake us for debris.”

The captain was nodding. “Excellent. The only thing left to decide is who has overall authority.”

There was another awkward silence.

Ax had known this moment was coming. “Darth Chratis or Colonel Kalisch. We have the bulk cruiser.”

“But we have more ships,” said Captain Pipalidi.

“Master Shan should make the call,” said the Padawan, with perfect predictability. “Her foresight is legendary.”

“Does she know how this is going to end?” Ax asked him.

“I do not,” the Grand Master said. “But I do know that we’ll never agree on this point. I suggest we give someone else the authority to oversee this engagement. Not the details, but the key strategic moments. Someone we have already trusted to act as a go-between in difficult circumstances.”

All eyes turned to Envoy Vii.

“I, ah, would be honored, of course,” he said, “but—”

“Darth Chratis will accept this proposal,” said Ax, enjoying the way the traitor squirmed.

“So will I,” said the captain.

“On one condition,” Ax added. “We must be sure that Envoy Vii is acting independently, not under any kind of distress or influence. As we cannot guarantee that he will do so here, in a Republic vessel, we require that he be stationed elsewhere, and remain in constant contact with all parties.”

“Not with you,” said the captain. “Or Dao Stryver.”

“Nebula’s ship,” said Shigar.

The Grand Master nodded. “The Auriga Fire.”

Envoy Vii’s larynx bobbed once, twice, then he visibly got himself together.

“I will accept this responsibility,” he said, “on the assumption that my instructions will be followed to the letter. There’s no point having me in this role if you won’t listen to me. All of you.”

He was looking at the captain, who nodded. Clearly a civilian authority was better than either a Sith or a Jedi. “I will play my part,” she said.

“Darth Chratis will, too,” Ax said. “I’m sure Envoy Vii will do the right thing by all of us.”

He glanced at her, and she saw the terror in his eyes. He understood very well indeed what she had meant.

WHILE THE SITH apprentice relayed the orders to her Master, Ula took a moment to review the plan in his mind. Primary and secondary objectives were now defined. There would be three teams. The first would clear Sebaddon’s orbit so that landing parties could get through. The second, led by Grand Master Shan, would attempt to destroy the droids’ coordinating intelligence—their version of him, he now realized. No doubt the hexes would be seeking to take him out in return. The third team would be lead by Major Cha, with Larin and Hetchkee backing him up. They would drop into the master factory and prevent the droids from creating a new CI.

Ula’s job was to oversee it all and somehow to stay alive.

The Jedi Padawan came in close.

“I don’t know what you told them,” Shigar whispered, “but you’ve got the Imperials jumping exactly in time.”

Ula looked up from the holographic globe. “It was nothing special,” he said, hiding many layers of truth behind a simple lie. “They’re not monsters. They can be made to see reason.”

Shigar’s doubt on that point was impervious. “However you did it, keep it up and you’ll be Supreme Chancellor one day.”

Not if I’m caught. Ula was well aware of how agents were punished by both sides. But part of him was flattered by the Padawan’s confidence in him. He remembered how Shigar had saved him from the collapsing wall on Hutta, and how Larin had volunteered to accompany him to what must have seemed like certain doom, when meeting with Darth Chratis. These acts had been offered freely, without promise of reward. He didn’t understand where they came from, unless they genuinely thought him worth saving.

Him, he wondered, or his false face?

Either way, he felt somewhat buoyed by their regard.

“The Mandalorian agrees,” said the Rellarin major, looking up from a separate holoprojector. “Intel and surveillance, engaging only as instructed.”

“Darth Chratis concurs on all points but one,” added the Sith apprentice on returning to the huddle. “He will fight with Master Shan during the assault on the CI. And I will fight, too.”

The Grand Master nodded slowly. “Very well. My Padawan will be part of the strike force, so that is only fair.”

“Excellent,” said Ula, playing the part of mediator with something like aplomb, he hoped. “We are agreed. All that remains is to begin.”

“No time like the present, I say,” Captain Pipalidi rumbled.

“My sentiments exactly,” said Ula. “I will retire to the Auriga Fire and set up my command post there. On notification that all is in place elsewhere, I will give the order. Nothing is to commence until then. Understood?”

They understood well enough, and he was under no illusions, either. It was all an act, a hasty bandaging of cracks that would inevitably tear the alliance asunder. But while they were prepared to play, so was he.

Captain Pipalidi clicked her fingers and an escort fell in behind him. They marched him through the ship to where the Auriga Fire remained safely docked, then left him there.

The smuggler looked up when he entered the cockpit.

“How’d it go?”

“Could have been worse,” Ula said, falling into the copilot’s seat. “They put me in charge.”

“Well, good for you. That’s the seat to be in if you want to skim a little profit.”

“I’m not interested in doing that.”

“So what are you interested in?”

That was the question, Ula supposed. Was it to give the Sith what they wanted and thereby perpetuate their deadly regime? Was it to provide resources for the Minister of Logistics, in order to further his dream of a more balanced Imperial society? Or was it something else?

He’d always thought of Coruscant as cursed. Only now did he realize just how easy he’d had it there. Out here, the issues were the same, but the blasters aimed at his temple were much, much closer.

LARIN LOOKED OUT a transparisteel portal and wondered if she was dreaming.

The Commenor was stationed in close orbit around Sebaddon’s lumpy moon, in lockstep with the other Republic ships. The Imperial vessels had occupied a different orbit, but they were steadily falling into line. Once the fleets merged, the first attack run would begin. She would be heading down to the surface with the other soldiers to fight the enemy where it lived. Until then, there was nothing to do but stare at the view.

As Larin watched, an almost surreal conjunction occurred before her eyes. The moon, Sebaddon, and the dramatic spiral of the galaxy formed a straight line, with the jets of the black hole aligned at right angles, creating a stellar X. It reminded her of the Cross of Glory, the highest military award given by the Republic. She didn’t believe in omens—or any kind of future-telling at all, really, despite talk of Master Satele’s abilities in that regard—but she decided to take it as a good sign. Everything was lined up. Everything was perfect.

When the conjunction broke apart, she turned away from the viewport and tested her new armor. The suit was clean, fully charged, and equipped with everything she had ever wanted. All the pockets were full, all the seals checked. Her joints moved smoothly, without impediment, and provided assist when requested without jarring or losing control. Her helmet was a little snug, but the quartermaster had assured her they all were, these days. The newer designs were better equipped to prevent head trauma in even the most extreme situations. She would take a little claustrophobia in return for knowing her skull was safe.

In the mirror, she was unrecognizable, and that wasn’t just because of the lieutenant insignia on her shoulders.

“You have fingers,” said a voice from the entrance to the ready room.

She turned, saw Shigar standing there, freshly kitted out in the Jedi version of uniform and armor: browns and blacks, mainly, with loose folds of cloth hiding compact armor plating.

“That is Larin, isn’t it?” he added with a sudden frown.

“Yes,” she said, snapping out of her daze. She tugged the helmet off with her left hand—which, as Shigar pointed out, now had individual digits. The new prosthetic wasn’t permanent; it was just a step up from the crude paddle Ula had found on the Auriga Fire. But it could hold the stock of a rifle while her right hand pulled the trigger. It could type digits into a keypad. It could point.

“It’ll do,” she said, feigning nonchalance.

He came deeper into the room, so they were standing an arm’s length apart. “We’re breaking orbit in ten minutes. I wanted to say good luck.”

Her stomach roiled. She had plans to go over, equipment to check, troops to address—and the jump itself, waiting at the end of all that. She hadn’t dived from orbit since basic training. Only crazy people did it by choice. So many things could go wrong.

She was acutely aware that this could be the last time they ever saw each other.

“Who needs luck?” she said. “You’ve got the Force on your side, and I have lots of blasters.”

He smiled. “Does nothing faze you?”

“Not officially. Just plasma spiders. Oh, and the smell of Reythan crackers, for some reason.”

His smile broadened. “Good for you. Frankly, I’m terrified.”

Her stomach rolled as though it were in free fall.

“Actually,” she said, “this kind of thing makes me a little nervous.”

She leaned closer to him, moving quickly, so she wouldn’t change her mind, and kissed him on the lips.

He pulled away with a shocked look on his face.

“Larin, oh—oh, I’m sorry—I don’t—”

“No,” she said, face burning.

I don’t think of you that way, he’d clearly been about to say. They were words she didn’t want to hear.

“Don’t apologize. I’m sorry.”

“It was my mistake. I thought—”

She stopped. They were talking on top of each other, and his face was as red as hers. She was suddenly afraid to move, to do or say anything lest it be utterly misconstrued. Where had the natural banter between them gone? What had happened to the connection she’d been sure was there?

If she was sure of one thing now, it was that prolonging the awkwardness guaranteed nothing but more of the same.

“I guess this is good-bye,” she said, “for now. Good luck to you, too, Shigar.”

“Thank you,” he said, and although she couldn’t look at him, she knew he was looking hard at her. “Thank you, Larin of Clan Moxla.”

Then he was gone, leaving nothing but his smell behind.

She pressed her face into her hands. “Flack. Flack flack flack!”

“What’s wrong?” asked an entirely new voice from the doorway.

It was Hetchkee. She blinked up at him and tried to focus on something other than what an idiot she felt like.

“Nothing. Just getting myself in the mood.”

“Our platoons are assembled,” he said. “What am I going to tell them?”

He was as scared as she was. “Nothing but the truth,” she told him, “that you’ll kick them in the cargo hold if they make us look bad.”

She scooped up her helmet and followed him to the briefing rooms. Hetchkee’s was first in line. With a deep breath of his unique atmospheric mix, he plunged inside. Larin’s was third along, and she had barely enough time to compose herself before getting there. She was a lieutenant in charge of a vital mission, she reminded herself. She had survived two encounters with the droids of Sebaddon before this, and now she had also survived the most embarrassing romantic encounter of her life. She was special-forces-trained. What could a bunch of lowlife grunts possibly do to throw her?

“Well, well,” said a voice from the troops assembled in the room. “If it isn’t Toxic Moxla, the snitch from Kiffu.”

There, in the front row, was the Zabrak who had challenged her on Coruscant.

Perfect, she thought. Just fragging perfect.

AX LOOKED UP as the Padawan entered the staging area. There wasn’t literally a cloud over his head, but there might as well have been. His face was shadowed, overcast, on the brink of some kind of internal storm.

She moved out of the corner she’d found for herself, far away from the Republic throng waiting for the shuttle to launch, and crossed to him.

“You’re angry,” she said.

“Only at myself.”

He tried to shrug her off, but she wasn’t letting him go so easily.

“That’s the first time I’ve seen you this way. It’s an improvement.”

He gave her a scathing look. “What are you talking about?”

“Anger is a good thing,” she said. “It frees you, makes you stronger.”

“That’s a lie. Anger is a path to the dark side.”

“You say that as though it’s a bad thing.” She drew him closer to her. “You know, you fight pretty well. Imagine how much more powerful you could be if you could shrug off the repressive ways of your masters and—”

“Don’t.” He wrenched his arm free. “Your mother was angry, too, and look where that got her.”

She recoiled.

“What did you plan to do to her when you found her?”

She let the truth of that show on her face.

“Anger and hate bleed everything dry.”

He stalked off.

Ax didn’t smile until she was sure he wasn’t looking. His disgust made him beautiful, and that was reward enough for her.

SHIGAR PUT AS MUCH distance as he could between himself and the Sith girl. She was pretty, but her face hid a foul heart. Best, he told himself, to stay well away.

His revulsion was inevitably entangled with feelings of regret for Larin. How could he have handled that encounter so badly? He should have been less astonished, gentler. Was this what Master Satele had meant about being kind?

His Master came up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. He felt instantly calmer, as though she had sucked the tension out of him.

“We’ll be descending in the same shuttles,” she said. “Imperials and us alike. You will meet far worse.”

“I know, Master. She just took me by surprise.”

“That is ever their aim. When I was a Padawan—”

A clang of metal on metal cut her off. The external air lock hissed open. A squadron of Imperial soldiers marched in, matching the Republic contingent one for one. This was clearly the squad that would be joining them on the drop onto the island containing the hexes’ coordinating intelligence. They were human, hard-faced and heavily armed. Their discipline was impeccable. Not a cheek twitched out of place; not a lip curled.

Behind them came a dark presence that turned Shigar’s blood to water. A tortured amalgam of flesh and metal, he stood a head taller than anyone else and radiated a deep, bone-piercing chill. He had once been a man, but the dark side had twisted every last drop of humanity from him, leaving a husk that looked barely alive. Only his eyes contained any genuine vitality. From them radiated boundless reserves of loathing. He breathed in hurried gasps as though the air smelled foul—or as though each intake might be his last. A long, thin staff tapped in time with the heavy tread of his boots.

“I am here,” Darth Chratis announced. “This operation can now commence.”

“Envoy Vii is awaiting only our personal assignments,” said Satele Shan, standing up to him as though he were any ordinary being. “When we give them to him, he will issue the order.”

“Refer to him as ‘envoy’ no longer.” The Sith Lord looked down his twisted nose at her. “I will obey no servant of the Republic.”

“Director Vii, then, of Independent Operation Sebaddon.” She folded her hands patiently behind her back. “I will take my Padawan on the first of two assaults from the—”

“No. You will take my apprentice, and I will take yours. That is the only way to ensure impartiality.”

The words hung like icicles. Shigar wanted to beg his Master to deny Darth Chratis this condition. Don’t give in to him, he yearned to say. Don’t send me anywhere with that … creature. He’ll kill me as soon as your back is turned!

Master Satele only smiled. “Of course, Darth Chratis. I’m happy to accommodate your wish. Do you wish to divide the rest of our personnel any particular way?”

“They do not concern me.” He waved a hand in easy dismissal.

“Very well. I will assign them randomly. Is that all?”

His gaze narrowed. Her question made him sound like he was being pedantic, and he clearly didn’t like that. “The arrangements are sufficient.”

Master Satele typed rapidly into a datapad. Imperial and Republic comms had been hastily married into one contiguous network, allowing orders to be transmitted from the Auriga Fire via various command vessels. Almost immediately a series of chimes and spoken commands divided the two cohorts into two intermixed groups. Half would stay behind and launch from the Commenor. The rest would return with Darth Chratis to the Imperial shuttle.

Shigar was in the latter group, and he watched with his heart in his mouth as the troopers he would soon be leaving behind fell into their new arrangement, spaced neatly if awkwardly across the staging area. In a very short time, he would be cast adrift in the world of the Imperials, in the clawed fist of Darth Chratis.

Master Satele came up beside him. Once again, she correctly divined the source of his disquiet, but this time there was no calming hand.

“I agreed to Darth Chratis’s request,” she said, “because I cannot afford to trust him. I’m relying on you to make sure he sticks to the arrangement.”

“I’m no match for a Sith Lord,” Shigar said, aghast.

“Oh, he won’t kill you,” she said. “I’m sure he has something worse in mind.”

He understood, then. She was testing him—and if he failed, they might never meet as Jedi again.

“I won’t let you down, Master.”

“The Force will be with you.”

They embraced and went their separate ways.

“SHUTTLES AWAY,” said Jet.

Ula fell back into the copilot’s seat, watching the telemetry confirming Jet’s simple statement. The combined Imperial–Republic fleet had obeyed his order to deploy. Their mad plan might actually work.

In the next hour, four thousand people would converge on Sebaddon singly, there to recombine as attack squads to take out primary and secondary objectives. The Jedi and the Sith would lead the attack on the equator while ordinary soldiers, including Larin, would attack the master factory at the pole. Another two thousand would remain in orbit, keeping the skies clear of hexes and providing occasional bombardment of the ground below. The rest would provide vital support from several distributed HQs, two of which were on the Commenor and the Paramount.

All reporting to him.

And to Jet and Clunker.

The smuggler had refused all offers of security details, comm officers, and gunners, on the grounds that he didn’t want a potentially fractious crew. Choosing one side over another would be politically fraught.

“Don’t we at least need someone to help defend us?” Ula had asked him, slightly aghast at how vulnerable that would leave them.

“Not at all. Clunker can operate the tri-lasers by remote from the bridge.”

“So what was all that on Hutta about needing a crew? Why have you ever needed a crew at all?”

Jet had smiled. “For the company.”

Ula now wondered if it was for an entirely different reason: for a cover. He had noted how silent Jet was most of the time. When he wasn’t playacting the role of a dissolute smuggler, he was watching and listening to everything going on around him. And now, somehow, he had inveigled himself into the center of everything. He was privy to every order that came through the Auriga Fire. Every piece of information on which Ula based those orders was filtered through Jet’s sensors. If Jet pulled the plug, the combined fleet would be left leaderless.

Ula reassured himself that this wasn’t Jet’s style, that if he were ever to try to change the course of the battle, he would do so in a much subtler fashion. Still, Ula would be on the ball for anything at all, and had armed himself with a new hold-out blaster, just in case.

“Deploy fighters,” he ordered the fleet. “Commence bombardment of primary targets.”

Instantly the dots in the main display began to shift. Four squadrons of mixed Mk. VI Imperial interceptors and Republic XA-8 starfighters would strafe the orbital shell of hexes with laser cannons and proton torpedoes, creating holes in four crucial locations. Two of those locations would allow the all-important troop transports access to lower orbit, there to discharge the free-jumpers, Larin among them. It was vital they weren’t interfered with en route. The other two orbital holes would provide critical windows for the bombardment from Paramount, mainly by B-28s with Imperial pilots. In the first engagement, 20 percent of the missiles launched at the planet had been disabled during descent by interfering hexes. Every shot fired now had to count.

The interceptors and starfighters hit the shell of hexes. Space lit up with explosions, sparkling almost delicately in the distance. The Auriga Fire maintained a respectful distance from both main attack forces and the combined Republic–Imperial fleets, stationed at a point equidistant between the planet and its moon, but it wasn’t the only ship ranging freely across the battlefield.

“We’re receiving a hail from the First Blood,” said Jet.

“Put him on.”

“I’m noting an increase in subspace communications,” said Dao Stryver in miniature. His face was one of several at the bottom of the Auriga Fire’s main holodisplay. The crescent of his ship swept across the battlefield in a silver streak. “Since the black hole warps all attempts to communicate outside the system, I suggest that these are all short-range messages, originating on Sebaddon.”

“The hexes,” said Ula. “Could this be how they communicate with one another?”

“It’s a strong possibility that this is the voice of the coordinating intelligence. We’ve detected no other meaningful signals by radio or microwave.”

“Can you locate the source?”

“I’m working on it. With two more ears listening, I’ll be able to triangulate.”

“Consider it done,” Ula said, making a mental note to requisition the resources from Colonel Kalisch and Captain Pipalidi.

“Launches,” announced Jet.

“Us or them?”

“Them.”

Two locations on the globe of Sebaddon had been highlighted. Six missiles were rising on ion engines, their payloads most likely intended to patch the holes the interceptors and starfighters had made in the orbital defense.

“Get those transports through,” Ula broadcast to the fleet’s commanders. “Those holes might not last long.”

Confirmation came from both sides. A dozen medium-sized vessels broke ranks, accelerating at the maximum capacity of their drives. Imperial Vokoff-Strood VT-22 light troop transports raced Celestial Industries NR2 light transports, each carrying hundreds of men and women, humans and aliens, Jedi and Sith, and combat droids, all intent on doing what they could to crush the hex threat.

Already he regretted pressing Larin onto Captain Pipalidi’s staff. It had been worth it for the look of surprise and delight on her face, but what if something were to happen to her? Was that a cost he was willing to bear?

“Don’t forget what Stryver wanted,” said Jet.

“I haven’t,” he said, although it had entirely slipped his mind. “Put me through to Colonel Kalisch.”

The Imperials claimed a lack of resources, and so did Captain Pipalidi when he got through to her. It could well be true, Ula thought, but it was still frustrating.

“Not even one ship?” he pleaded. “It doesn’t have to be battle-worthy. We can be the third ourselves, if necessary.”

“All right,” she said. “You can have my personal transport. Its arms and shields were stripped, so don’t put it in harm’s way.”

“You have my word. Thank you, Captain.”

“Transports through,” said Jet.

Ula kicked himself for not paying attention to the bigger picture. The descending troop transports had powered through the temporary gaps in the orbital shell. Most were unaffected, but one was releasing its jumpers prematurely, fighting a swarm of hexes released from a close-passing missile. All were accompanied by interceptors and starfighters, which would remain under the shell once it closed, to do what damage they could from underneath.

“Launch second bombardment,” Ula ordered. Anything to keep the hexes busy while the free-jumpers fell.

“Confirmed,” said Jet. “No, wait. Kalisch wants to attack a different target. Some of the missiles came from a location that wasn’t on our grid. He’s requesting permission to take it out.”

Ula ground his teeth. On the one hand, it was good that Kalisch had asked permission first. On the other, there wasn’t any doubt in Ula’s mind that he would do what he wanted regardless what Ula said. The Paramount was the ship most at risk from ground launches. As the largest in the combined fleet, it was only natural that the hexes would target it first.

“Tell him to stick to the plan,” Ula said, “and next time I ask for resources, he’d better comply. He can hit that target in the next round.”

Jet grinned as he relayed the order. Kalisch’s response was curt, but he did obey.

“Where are my ears?” asked Stryver.

“Uh, on their way,” said Ula, hastily noting that Pipalidi’s shuttle had left the Commenor and was awaiting instructions. Jet sent the pilot permission to obey Stryver’s orders, within reason, and synchronized its comm with the First Blood’s.

“We’re your third ship,” Ula told the Mandalorian. “You can use our location as a fixed receiver.”

“Don’t forget to share your data,” said Jet. “If Clunker can work out their code, we might gain ourselves a better tactic than just blowing things up.”

“You think you could slice into their command systems?” Ula asked.

“I’m not promising anything.”

Something else for them to keep an eye on, thought Ula. As if there weren’t enough things already.

One of the ground-launched missiles hadn’t exploded in low orbit or targeted the Paramount. It was headed for the moon, and coming very close to the Auriga Fire.

“That’s either aimed at us,” he said, “or it’s the first escaping factory.”

“First of all, let’s get out of its way,” said Jet, activating the ship’s ion drives. “Second, Kalisch seems to have it covered already.”

Ula noted only then the dozen Blackhawks pursuing the missile with weapons locked. He was glad that someone else was on the ball.

As the Auriga Fire moved out of the path of the approaching missile, he noted that all the free-jumpers had left their transports and begun their descent. Behind them came the infected ship. Its drives were locked on full, powering nose-first into the atmosphere. That was official fleet policy now: when infected beyond all hope, crew members were to aim their vessel at the nearest target and ditch. Already its skin glowed bright red, and fragments of hull metal were peeling away, providing both cover and hazards for the free-fallers.

Voices called for him over the comm. A hundred data streams awaited his attention. He couldn’t sit staring at the holo forever.

Good luck, Larin, he thought, trying not to feel like he was saying good-bye forever. I hope this is what you wanted.

THE VT-22 TRANSPORT rattled and shook so much that Larin could barely hear the countdown. Was that one minute or ten to go? She checked the inside of her helmet, which displayed different views of the planet below, their path toward it, and the many, many hexes in their way. Two minutes—that was the answer. She resisted the urge to quadruple-check her airfoil and jet-chute before the hull opened up beneath her and dropped her into the void. Better to use that time to breathe deeply and calmly, and to remember who she had once been.

“Nahrung—keep an eye on those orbital sweeps,” she said to her sergeant over the platoon’s private channel. “If you see anything that looks like a central complex, flag it.” New intel was pouring in every second from the transport and its escorts as they approached the surface of the world. “Ozz—watch the weather. It’s your job to make sure we don’t land in the middle of a volcano.” Ozz was an Imperial, short on words but willing to follow her orders, so far. “Mond—your squad’s the first down. Come in hot, take no prisoners. I want you to put your best shots first. Jopp, for instance. Let’s see if he’s as good at firing a rifle as he is his mouth.”

“Yes, sir,” said Sergeant Mond. The Zabrak, Ses Jopp, muttered something too quiet to catch. He had been nothing but insubordinate ever since he had crossed her path again. Reinforcing the chain of command was the best way to deal with people like him.

“When we’re down, first priority is to take out the factory. Target supply lines, power lines, conveyor belts, heavy lifters—whatever looks essential. Don’t stop to count kills. There’ll be plenty of hexes for everyone. And remember—they redesign fast, so don’t take anything for granted, even if it’s not moving. We don’t know exactly what they’re building down there. Treat everything with caution until you’ve blown it sky-high.”

“Twenty seconds” came the announcement from the transport’s bridge.

The bay doors opened, letting in the light of the black hole. It happened in near-silence, since there was no atmosphere outside. Only mechanical vibrations came through her suit and the harness holding it in place, adding a low whine to the general hubbub.

“Ten seconds.”

The transport rotated to bring its bay doors directly in line with the planet below. Hundreds of troops held their collective breath at the sight. Sebaddon looked forbidding enough in holoprojectors. Rivers of lava, near-molten mountain ranges, and patchy mirror-flat lakes—now known to be sheets of gleaming metal, frozen solid—were clearly visible through the hazy atmosphere.

“Five seconds.”

One last burn put the transport on the correct trajectory. Their destination was the pole, on a completely different path from those heading for the equator. Shigar was among the latter cohort, and even in that moment, with the voice counting down individual seconds, she had time to think of him, and to feel a sudden flash of shame and hurt.

“One.”

“Go.”

Suddenly she was weightless and the transport was rising above her, repulsorlifts flashing, receding rapidly as she fell. All around her were troopers adopting the same position as she was, face forward, arms and legs swept back into straight lines. There was no drag as yet, and there wouldn’t be for some minutes, but atmosphere was unpredictable. She’d heard of limbs and even heads pulled right off by simple telemetry errors. The deceleration when it came would be crushing.

“Good launch, people,” came Major Cha, just one suited being among so many. Clumps of TRA-9 battle droids hung motionless among them, as silent as stone. “Now find your squadmates and tighten up your formation. Maintain comm silence at all times. Going to intel blackout … now.”

Larin’s helmet views suddenly simplified as the company’s network went largely dormant. In order to present the illusion that the falling objects were innocent debris, there would be no internal chatter and no data feeds from the ships above. It would stay like that until the ground was just seconds away. Until then, barring emergencies, it was just her and the data collected so far.

She felt strangely isolated, descending among so many people without exchanging a single word. Other falling troopers, identified by bold black markings on their helmets and chute-packs, clustered into groups of ten or twelve, and those groups in turn fell into their own formations. She stayed where she was, and let her squadrons fall in around her. A rough color-coding system had been improvised to ensure the mixed troops didn’t get their command lines tangled. Like the rest of the lieutenants—brevet or otherwise—Larin’s helmet was green; the three sergeants’ were blue. Major Cha was orange, hanging on his own in the center of the formation.

From far across the other side, she saw another green-helmeted figure give her a thumbs-up. She returned the gesture, knowing it was Hetchkee.

One of her sergeants approached, attitude jets puffing to bring him into physical contact with her. It was Nahrung. They touched faceplates.

“Map grid twenty-five-J,” his muffled voice said. “That’s my best guess.”

She called up the last sweep received before the blackout. The grid reference showed an artificial X, a giant complex of some kind, with numerous smaller tributaries running off in all directions. The blackhole jets cast long shadows across the polar landscape, shadows that might have come from smokestacks—or weapons emplacements.

“That’ll do,” she said. “Good work.”

Something bright and fast flashed by them: a missile, followed by three more in quick succession. Bombardment from the ships behind them, softening what lay ahead. Nahrung drifted away, and she resumed the ready position. Her display was blinking: nearly time to hit atmosphere.

Conscious of everyone watching her, she nudged herself closer to Mond’s squad. Jopp was at point. She came in alongside him then moved a fraction ahead, hoping to send a message to him: that, while she might have put him on the firing line, she wasn’t afraid to be there with him.

Yellow and white mushrooms blossomed on the ground below.

The first fingers of atmosphere touched her, whistling faintly, rocking her almost gently from side to side.

Then she slammed forward, feeling as though she had hit a brick wall. She roared in defiance at the air screaming past her, adding her own noise to the deafening racket. Her first experience of Sebaddon shook and hammered her, rattling every bone in its socket. Her brain rattled and vision blurred. Time became meaningless. There was no point counting the seconds when each overwhelmed her, and nothing changed.

It had to end, and it did, finally. The shaking and shrieking eased. Her suit’s external temperature readings dropped out of the red. The view was no longer vacuum-perfect, since they were in atmosphere now. The neat formation around her gradually re-formed.

Instead of counting the seconds since launch, she was studying an altimeter countdown. The surface of the planet was only kilometers away. They had drifted off-course, probably due to a stronger-than-expected high-altitude wind, but it wasn’t a disaster. Giant mushroom clouds gave her a visual fix on their target. Her suit’s internal guidance system confirmed it.

Clicking twice over her suit radio, she warned the platoon to get ready.

They steadied, angling at a forty-five-degree angle.

When she clicked once more, their airfoils unfurled neatly, like birds in a flock opening their wings at the same time. The wings didn’t open all the way just yet; a full spread would have been torn to shreds, even at such rarefied pressures. As their altitude and speed dropped, they would slowly unfurl to their full extent. One hundred meters from the ground, their jet-chutes would kick in, allowing them to control their landings to the second. They were still moving very quickly. An unassisted landing would result in certain death.

Jopp gusted closer to her, caught by turbulence. The master factory was directly below them, barely five hundred meters away. Intel would be kicking in any second now. Larin checked her suit’s targeting systems and unlocked the rifle she’d handpicked from the quartermaster’s weapons store. The hexes wouldn’t be sitting idly as the assault teams grew near. They would be working busily on something, she was sure, but there was no way to tell yet what that might be. She would just have to be ready for anything.

Her HUD cleared and refreshed with data broadcast from above. The target appeared in perfect clarity, revealed underneath the smoke by radar.

“You know the drill, people,” said Major Cha. “Keep low and tight until you reach your objectives, then disperse. If comms are jammed, follow the flares. If you can’t see the flares, move so you can. This isn’t a free-for-all. Anything with blood in it is not a viable target.”

“You heard the man,” Larin said. “Jet-chutes in thirty seconds. Watch those washes. Don’t singe the head of anyone coming in before you.”

She took a quick scan of the rest of the battlefield.

The Paramount was still intact, although under siege from several directions at once. Some of the orbital hexes had linked bodies to form an energy weapon like the one Jet had taken out earlier. Missiles from below had repaired the holes in the orbital defenses, and there seemed to be some kind of fuss out near the moon. One of the Imperial VT-22s had been infected and was on its way down. Its fiery wake was visible by satellite, carving a black streak across the globe’s upper atmosphere and due to impact near the suspected CI location.

Quickly, not really wanting to know, she checked the manifest of the falling ship. Her heart sank. Shigar had been on that transport. Now it really pained her to think about what had happened in the ready room. If that had been the last time they saw each other, how could she live with herself?

A beeping in her ears told her it was time for her jet-chute to kick in. She pushed the superfluous intel—and feelings—to one side in order to concentrate on the maneuver to come. The jet was little more than a modified thruster retrofitted to suit standard-issue Republic armor. Riding it down would be like taming a wild horse.

“Burn!”

On her command, the platoon lit up the sky. Spears of downward-pointing flame stabbed at the surface of Sebaddon. The silver airfoils reflected the light, transforming the troopers into fiery angels that were visible from below. Intel confirmed that at least some of the tall stacks were weapons emplacements. Perhaps they were swinging to track her and her troopers even now. She braced herself for the first shots even as she tried to keep her bucking jet under control.

She wasn’t the only one having trouble. The comms were full of whoops and warning cries as troopers struggled to maintain position. Two near-collisions between Imperial and Republic troopers prompted an exchange of harsh words, which Sergeant Ozz put a sharp stop to. The last thing they needed now was an internecine fight to break out.

Then the emplacements started firing, and all was chaos. Bolts of blue energy flashed past them, searing the air. Two of her troopers died in the first exchange, tumbling out of control in balls of flame. Larin returned fire, even while struggling to fly the jet. She doubted any of her shots hit home.

Bombardment from above came almost immediately, called in by Major Cha. One emplacement exploded, adding another ball of smoke to what already lay close over the master factory.

A savage grin split Larin’s face. She had forgotten how beautiful aerial combat could be.

A blast at close range wiped the smile away. She’d been hit! Her jet guttered, sending her careening across the sky. Her airfoil whipped in streamers behind her.

Cursing her poor luck, she struggled to control her descent and succeeded only in putting herself into a spin. Her flailing hands reached for the nearest soldier, desperate for something solid to hang onto. The soldier hesitated, and in that fleeting moment, she remembered who he was. Ses Jopp.

Mouthing off out of misplaced loyalty was one thing. Letting a fellow soldier drop to their death was another. She knew he would change his mind—and he did within an instant. His right hand reached for her, timing his grab to match the moment when her arm was nearest to him. Too late.

Larin’s jet-chute failed, and she dropped like a stone out of the sky.

EVEN BEFORE THE alarms started ringing, Shigar knew something was wrong. The transport containing him and Darth Chratis lurched as though hit, and the major in charge of the drop broke off in the middle of issuing a general announcement. Shigar wasn’t patched directly in to the Imperial network, so he couldn’t tell what was happening to the ship in real time. Instead, he was receiving data from the Republic troopers, relayed via neutral command node. The delay between the systems was very nearly fatal.

“Something’s not right,” he told the troopers packaged up next to him in rows, ready to drop. His instincts were warning him to move. Punching the overrides on his harness, he was on his feet as the first of the hexes burst through the outer hull into the troop deployment bay.

Shigar was ready for it. He Force-pushed the droid backward, sending it tumbling into space. There were more behind it, scrabbling for claw-holds on the torn metal. He leapt at them with lightsaber swinging, severing legs and stabbing at sense organs before the hexes could activate their electromirror shields. If he could stop them from getting in, he and the other passengers might have a chance.

The bay wall ripped open at another point, too distant for him to take on both at once. Fortunately, the troopers behind him were ready and brought their own weapons into play. Imperial and Republic blasterfire converged on the invading hexes, knocking several back into the void. Still more came after them, climbing over one another in a horrible swarm. The hexes were returning fire now, those at the back shooting past those in front, and Shigar felt the defense of the bay beginning to turn in the hexes’ favor.

“Get these troopers out of here!” he told the major between cutting two hexes each in two.

On the other side of the bay, he saw the orange helmet nod. Orders went out to open the bay doors early and launch the troopers on their way to Sebaddon. Acknowledgment came from two of the other three bays, and the doors below Shigar opened smoothly, jettisoning their precious cargo, the major with them. Several hexes went, too, which would no doubt make the journey more interesting for all.

Shigar stayed behind, clinging to a stanchion with one hand and kicking another hex back where it came from. It wriggled and spun in free fall, six legs waving frantically.

How long, he wondered, until it redesigned its innards to match the ones in orbit and “grew” a retrothruster or two?

He wasn’t sticking around to find out. The fourth and final bay hadn’t sent any kind of acknowledgment. If they were in trouble, he had to help them.

The ship rocked underfoot as he passed through the air lock and hurried through its empty corridors. Nearing the fourth bay, he heard blasterfire, explosions, and a persistent crackling over his comm. The hexes were jamming both Imperial and Republic frequencies. That was a disturbing development.

An interior bulkhead breached, sending hexes spilling over themselves into the hallway. He braced himself to meet them head-on, using a Force shield to deflect their laser pulses while stabbing with his lightsaber. They hadn’t expected him to be there; that much was certain. They were firing at someone attacking them from inside the bay, and it took them a moment to bring their own shields to bear. Shigar whipped the legs off three, not stopping to impale the fallen bodies. Immobility was good enough.

A black figure leapt through the rent in the wall, wielding a red lightsaber. Lightning flashed from his open hand, sending hexes twitching and smoking in every direction. Caught between Shigar and Darth Chratis, the hexes stood no chance. In moments, Jedi Padawan and Sith Lord stood alone in a field of red-dripping droid debris.

The jamming let up, allowing them to speak.

“The rest have launched,” said Shigar. “We have to get these bay doors open.”

“Do not think to give me instructions, Padawan. You have survived this far by luck alone.” Darth Chratis stalked up the hallway. “The mechanism is damaged. Lieutenant Adamek will either repair it in our absence or widen the existing hole. Failing that, she will exit the ship via the other open bays. That is not our concern. Your priority, and mine, is to stop this ship being turned by the hexes into a weapon.”

“To the bridge, then?” said Shigar, swallowing his annoyance at being spoken to like a child.

“To the bridge.”

They encountered three swarms of hexes on the way. Traveling in groups of six, the droids appeared to be scouring the ships section by section, destroying all evidence of Imperial insignia. The appearance of Darth Chratis and his red blade drove them into an immediate frenzy. On two occasions, Shigar was ignored completely, allowing him to flank the hexes and attack from behind. The element of surprise was working for him for a change, turning an impossible situation into one that was merely difficult.

The Sith Lord swept through hexes with little apparent effort, leaving them for Shigar to finish off. The Sith Lord’s lightsaber had an unusually long reach, emerging as it did from a collapsible staff of some kind. Darth Chratis also had another weapon that Shigar did not. His lightning was much more powerful than Eldon Ax’s efforts and had an effect similar to the electrified nets Stryver had fired at the hexes on Hutta, sending them into paroxysms that left them vulnerable to conventional attack.

“The Grand Master has taught you poorly,” Darth Chratis said, observing Shigar’s efforts to subdue the last of the hexes. “She allows philosophy of mind to interfere with outcomes in combat. That is how the Sith will triumph over you and your kind, in the end. You will hold yourselves back from achieving your true potential.”

Shigar blinked sweat out of his eyes. Satele Shan regarded Force lightning as a pathway to the dark side, and had counseled Shigar many times against its use. Now, though, he could see how Darth Chratis might have a point.

He wasn’t so naïve, however, that he couldn’t see where the Sith Lord was going with this.

“Save your breath, Darth Chratis. Nothing will tempt me to join you.”

The Sith’s smile was horribly humorless, even through the glass of his faceplate.

The bridge was two levels up, sealed behind thick blast doors that even the hexes were having trouble penetrating. Comms were down again, so there was no way to signal the crew within. Darth Chratis tried overriding the locks, but they had been fused into solid lumps of metal by the hexes’ attempts to get in.

“Together,” said Shigar, thinking of the huge masses he had seen Jedi Masters move using nothing but the power of their minds and the Force.

“On my command,” agreed the Sith Lord.

Operating in tandem, they were able to twist the blast doors aside as though they were made of tinfoil. Shigar considered their cooperation a small moral victory until he broke off the effort and shivered. Something of Darth Chratis had clung to him during the effort. A coldness, and a foulness. His fists clenched as he stepped over the buckled metal and onto the bridge. He wanted to strike out at something, but there were no hexes around. Just Imperials, who were temporarily reprieved.

The frightened-looking commander of the transport saluted as Darth Chratis closed on him.

“Tell me the drives are locked” was all the Sith said.

“I-I cannot, my lord. The engine room is not responding. I ordered a maintenance team—”

“They will already be dead. Stay here. We will effect the repairs ourselves.”

Darth Chratis was already leaving.

“Perhaps you should evacuate,” said Shigar to the commander before following. “There’s nothing you can do here.”

“Leave my post?” The Imperial looked affronted at the suggestion. “Never!”

Shigar wanted to argue. The blast doors were down, and the hexes would be back before long. Staying meant certain death for the commander and his bridge crew.

Instead he shrugged. Who was he to fight the stubbornness of the Imperial officer? That wasn’t a Jedi’s job.

“It’s your decision, I guess.”

Putting them from his mind, he hurried after Darth Chratis.

“You waste time,” said the Sith when Shigar caught up.

“You waste lives.”

“Humans are replaceable. Seconds are not.”

Shigar didn’t have a good answer to that, so he concentrated on what they were doing. Darth Chratis was leading him along the transport’s spine, past endless rows of viewports. Outside, the galaxy turned around them, completing a circuit once every few seconds. The transport was spinning, although thanks to the artificial gravity within there was no way of telling. Several hexes were visible, either swimming helplessly through space or crawling along the outer hull. The sphere of Sebaddon came and went, and Shigar couldn’t tell if it was growing nearer or not.

A mass of hexes was waiting for them at the far end, at the entrance to the engineering section. Force lightning spread through them in waves, breaking the mass into manageable parts. Shigar leapt into their midst, deflecting laser pulses back at their owners and dismembering anything that came within reach. When he misjudged a sweep and caught a flesh wound on his side, the pain only heightened his concentration. He moved as though in a dream, with the Force guiding his every step.

Almost with regret he reached the far side. There, Darth Chratis was examining the ion drive controls. They had been partially dismantled by one of the hexes, presumably with the intent to take control and send the transport angling upward to infect the rest of the fleet.

Darth Chratis worked quickly, rewiring the controls into an approximation of their former state. The deck shook as downward acceleration resumed.

“You’ve done it?” Shigar asked him.

“I have.”

Darth Chratis raised a hand, and a section of the wall peeled in, exposing the space outside. Not space anymore, Shigar realized, hearing a rising howl around them. They were entering atmosphere.

“After you, my boy,” said the Sith.

Reluctant though Shigar was to turn his back on one of the Jedi’s ancient enemies, he knew that for now he was safe. His Master had been utterly correct. That bloodred blade was the last thing he had to fear.

Four running steps took Shigar to the hole. The fifth would take him all the way from the burning ship to the planet’s surface.

He leapt, vowing, I will never be your apprentice, Darth Chratis.

A silken sinister voice came back to him in reply.

Make no rash promises. After all, I may soon be in need of a new one.

Shigar closed his mind against any further intrusions, and concentrated solely on falling.

AX TOUCHED DOWN neatly on both feet. The ground was secure: no hidden traps or pitfalls. She punched the button on her harness, and the jet-chute shut down and her airfoil fell away. Sebaddon’s gravity was a little less than standard, leaving her feeling slightly light-headed, but only for a moment. Apart from the yellow jets from the black hole, the sky was red, reflecting the glow of the surrounding lava. Keeping her eyes peeled for hexes, she took two steps forward and looked around for the others who had dropped from orbit with her. Master Satele was one of them. She didn’t like knowing there was a Jedi loose she couldn’t account for.

The squad she’d been nominally part of had aimed for one of the most complex sections of the CI center. From the air, the island as a whole resembled a giant hedge maze, with long, winding buildings connected by thick cables and pipes. She had landed in what could have been an angular, steep-walled street, except that there were no doors, windows, or pedwalks. The purpose of the buildings was unknown, but it was clear that the site was still under construction. One squad had targeted the machines responsible for expanding the structure, while the rest intended to strike at its heart—or what appeared to be its heart from orbit, at least. There were three possible locations, and she was in one of them.

Above her, troopers rained from the sky like seedpods, dropping into their own droid-made little canyons. None appeared to be landing near her. She tried her suit’s comlink, but both Darth Chratis and Master Satele were either off the air or being jammed. The former’s stricken transport shone in the sky like a bright star, haloed with black smoke. It appeared to be coming right for her.

She quickly decided that her landing spot was jinxed, lacking even hexes to kill. So, picking a direction at random, she loped along the canyon, taking what cover she could in blurry-edged shadows. She kept her unlit lightsaber in her hand. Discretion was the better part of valor, particularly on a planet of hexes programmed to kill Sith warriors on sight.

If only, she thought as she had many times, there was some way to tap into that core programming and turn it to her advantage. It was entirely possible that Lema Xandret had put a little more of herself in them than just her thoughts and prejudices. The biological component of every hex had to mean something, after all. If she could appeal to that something, make it listen to reason—her reason …

Around a bend came a Republic trooper, swinging his gun back and forth and running lightly on his feet. Ax stepped back into the shadows. Better to run on her own, she decided, until she was sure what lay ahead of her. She didn’t want anyone getting in the way at a critical moment.

As the trooper went by, she noticed a strange thing. The air was literally shimmering before her eyes. At first she thought it was something to do with her—her sight being interfered with, perhaps. But then she realized that the distortions came from the air itself. It was hot.

Kneeling down and touching the ground, she could feel the heat even through her gloves. All around the CI complex was lava, so that made sense, she supposed.

Something dropped soundlessly behind her.

She was up with lightsaber lit in an instant.

“Impressive reflexes,” said Master Satele, to all appearances unconcerned by the possibility that Ax might have cut her in half. She hadn’t even activated her own lightsaber. “Your peripheral vision could use some work, though. I’ve been on your tail ever since you landed.”

“Well, that’s a productive way to spend your time.” Ax lowered her weapon to her side. “It didn’t occur to you to do something about the mission, I suppose?”

“I’m the first to admit that I’ve got a lot on my mind.” The Jedi smiled. “But not that much. Take off your helmet and tell me what you hear.”

“But—” It’s hot, she was about to say. Then she noticed that Master Satele was sweating inside her own helmet. Clearly she had done exactly as she asked Ax to do—and if she survived, so could Ax.

“All right,” she said, triggering her neck seals. The helmet hissed, and she tugged it off.

The air seared her skin and the inside of her nose. It stank of chemicals, and fire, and ozone. In the distance she could hear voices shouting familiar phrases over and over again.

“We do not recognize your authority!”

“We ask only to be left alone!”

“Hexes,” Ax said. “They’re here somewhere.”

“Not that,” said Master Satele with a quick shake of her head. “Deeper. Behind everything.”

Ax listened again. Then she heard it: a low-frequency growling at the very edge of her hearing, almost impossible to catch.

“Is it the ship?” she asked, indicating the transport still falling from the sky. It was larger now, and still coming right for them.

“I don’t think so. Sounds to me more like drilling.”

“What’s the CI doing mining at a time like this?”

“Material for more hexes, perhaps.”

“This isn’t a factory.”

“No, but there must be nests here somewhere.”

“So let’s find them,” Ax said, not hiding her impatience. “Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be doing?”

High above, an orange flare blossomed into life, painting strange shadows across both their faces.

“That’s what I was waiting for,” Master Satele said. “The troopers have found a way in. Let’s go help them.”

Satele Shan moved from a standing start with surprising speed. Ax was taken by surprise, and had to hustle to keep up. They followed the base of the artificial ravine to the next intersection, and then leapt to the top in order to travel in a straight line, leaping from wall to wall over the empty spaces below. The maze seemed to stretch forever. Ax was reminded of circuit diagrams or logic flow charts, but this strange landscape lacked any overall order or purpose that she could discern. It was more like the random etchings of a wood-boring insect than anything a sentient might design.

Explosions puffed brightly in the distance, reflected from wispy clouds above. The sound of each retort arrived split seconds later. Master Satele changed direction slightly to head straight for the combat zone. Troopers still dropped from the sky, firing at cannon emplacements mounted over the maze. A pall of smoke hung over everything, denser in some places than others. Ax could smell the hexes’ “blood” faintly on the air. It gave her the jitters. She was missing out on the fun.

Glancing over her shoulder, she saw a dozen hexes following them, leaping on their six legs from wall to wall. She laughed. She wouldn’t be missing out for much longer!

Master Satele unexpectedly dropped down into a ravine, and Ax followed. There she stopped dead. The Jedi was standing on the ground with one finger to her lips. She counted down three fingers with her other hand, and then leapt straight up into the air with lightsaber flashing. The first of the pursuing hexes fell in two equal pieces. The rest shrieked and rushed in to fight.

The battle was fast-paced and glorious. On seeing Ax, they immediately fell upon her, but she had the measure of them now. Her Force shield repelled all but the most concentrated fire, and she had more than a mere Padawan and a disinterested Mandalorian to back her up.

The Grand Master possessed prodigious Force powers. A gesture crushed hexes into balls or blew them apart from the inside. A look stilled them in mid-lunge while Ax rushed in to finish them off. In a matter of moments, the dozen were dealt with and Ax was looking around for more.

“This way,” said Master Satele, guiding her to where the flare had come from.

“Shouldn’t we be worried about that?” she asked, pointing at the transport. It was huge in the sky now—or seemed so—and blazed like a false sun.

“Worry all you want,” said Master Satele. “Unless there’s something you can do about it, I don’t see what good it will do.”

Ax had no good answer to that, so she followed with something approaching obedience. The Grand Master had impressed with more than her telekinetic and telepathic skills. Her speed and decisiveness in combat were unbelievable—but she never once made a sound. Her face was calm, almost serene, as she slashed and hacked through the hexes. There was a tranquillity about her, almost a blissfulness, that spoke of an intimacy with violence Ax had not expected.

To the Sith, violence was an art form. To Master Satele, it seemed like life itself.

That didn’t marry at all well with what Ax knew about the Jedi. Weren’t they emotionless, self-righteous hypocrites who fought only when it suited their interests? Didn’t they disdain passion and preach powerlessness to all who would listen and obey?

For the first time, Ax saw that there could be strength in serenity, and steel beneath stillness.

Something exploded in the next ravine across. Before the debris ceased falling, Master Satele had them in the middle of a firefight between a squad of entrenched troopers and no fewer than thirty hexes. The explosion didn’t seem to have had much effect on the hexes’ operation as a whole. If anything, they fought more determinedly than ever. The assault teams had to find another way to attack the installation if they were to have any effect on the CI at all.

The platoon’s lieutenant, an Imperial, acknowledged their presence with a grateful wave.

“The major’s over there,” she said, pointing, when the skirmish was over. “We’re picking up vibrations consistent with geothermal drilling.”

“Of course,” Master Satele said. “That’s what they’re up to. If the CI can tap into the planet’s deeper layers, it’ll have all the power it needs.”

“To do what?” asked Ax.

“That we don’t know,” said the lieutenant. “We’ve found a shaft two avenues away, but it’s heavily defended. We can’t get close enough to lay charges.”

“We’ll take care of that,” said Ax.

“No need,” said Master Satele. “Tell your troops to fall back. I want the area evacuated as quickly as possible.”

“What?” Ax couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “You’re giving up?”

“Not at all. Just letting something else do our work for us.”

She pointed at the sky, at the stricken transport bearing rapidly down on them.

“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant began calling orders through her comlink, and backed them up with another round of flares, just in case the message wasn’t received. Immediately the troopers began pulling back, firing at the hexes coming in their wake.

“What happens if it doesn’t land in exactly the right spot?” Ax asked Master Satele as they leapt across the maze.

“I don’t think it needs to,” the Jedi replied. “If the CI is drilling for geothermal energy, those shafts will be tapping right into the magma layers. Unplug the shafts, and what will we get?”

“A volcano,” she said. “Lots of volcanoes.”

“Exactly. We could take out the hexes’ brain with one hit. Best we not be standing too close when it happens, eh?”

Again, Ax was struck by Maser Shan’s calm. How could she be so sanguine when the island they were standing on might be about to erupt into flows of molten lava? Surely she felt some apprehension about what might happen?

Ax flipped down the visor of her helmet so she could track exactly where the transport was going to hit. It wasn’t as close to her as it seemed: the island was two kilometers across, and the impact point was on the northernmost edge. Still, she ran southward with Master Satele as fast as she could, keen to put space between herself and the inevitable explosion.

While leaping from one artificial canyon wall to the next, another similarity between the maze and computer chips came to her. The walls were barely a meter or two across; they therefore couldn’t possibly contain rooms or corridors, or indeed anything of any substance. She hadn’t wondered what function they performed in and of themselves. Now, though, jumping through waves of hot, rippling air, it occurred to her that the walls looked like the thin ridges engineers added to some computer components to increase the surface area exposed to air. The greater the area, the greater the cooling effect. Heat sinks, they were called.

What if the island wasn’t the hexes’ coordinating brain itself, but a massive heat sink for the brain?

That would mean the assault teams were attacking the wrong thing entirely.

She had just enough time to wonder if the falling transport would be any different when it came down in the distance, lighting up the sky with a bright blue flash. The sound came a second later—both the sonic boom of its passage through the atmosphere and the titanic concussion of its impact and detonation. The ground bucked beneath her feet, and she misjudged her landing on the wall of the next ravine. Wobbling for balance, she felt herself gripped by the left arm and pulled down.

Master Satele steadied her on the floor of the ravine as a rush of superheated gases roared overhead. The ground bucked and buckled beneath them. Ax looked down and saw cracks spreading around her feet. That wasn’t a good sign.

A growing thunder drowned out the sudden return of comms—not that she could have made anything out from the mass of warnings and contradictory orders. A rush of air swept by them. Master Satele cocked her head and pulled Ax along the ravine, away from the source of the wind.

In its wake came a flood of red-hot lava.

“Jump!” Ax cried, wrenching the Grand Master up out of the ravine.

The wall crumbled beneath their combined weight, and they jumped again. The maze was collapsing around them, followed by a tide of red that spread from the crash site. The edge of the flood moved with astonishing speed, consuming troopers and hexes in broad, bubbling swaths. The volcanoes Ax had imagined were nothing compared with this silent, swift seep. The section of the maze she had explored was already subsumed.

All too suddenly the tsunami-like flood was upon them. Two thick crimson tongues closed in front of Ax and Master Satele, cutting off their best route to safe ground.

Master Satele turned, pulling Ax after her. It was clear that she could have run faster on her own, but she didn’t abandon Ax to her fate. Ax didn’t question why. She just accepted the gesture, even as it became clear that it would doom both of them.

The path of stable ground they occupied was shrinking fast.

“One more jump might do it,” said Master Satele. “Are you ready?”

Ax wasn’t, but there was no way she’d admit it. The boiling red gap between them and safety was too large already, and it was growing by the second.

“Ready,” she said.

They ran and leapt together. For a moment, they were high above the drowning maze, held aloft by the Force and momentum, and nothing could touch them. Ax wished she could stay there forever, in that peaceful place where contradictory forces canceled out and all was still.

But gravity conquered all. The ground came closer too quickly, and she screamed as bright red lava rose up to engulf them.

AN HOUR INTO the battle, Ula realized that betraying the Republic was going to be much harder than he had imagined, even from his privileged position high above the battlefield. The problem lay in the sheer amount of data pouring from the battlefield into the Auriga Fire. It was impossible to keep track of it all, let alone to decide which isolated part could be best manipulated in order to benefit his masters. He could barely keep up with the torrent as it was.

Missiles full of hexes had restored the orbital defenses, and provided new weapons with which to pound the combined fleets, making it difficult to lend ground support to the teams below. The CI target was burning, and the pole was hidden under smoke. Comms were erratic at best. Ula had no way of knowing what was going on down there, and the situation on the moon was little different. The hexes had been strafed repeatedly, but without sending in troopers to tackle them face-to-face, it was impossible to tell if the infection had been contained. Every time the alliance made progress, Lema Xandret’s tenacious creations bounced back in a new and surprising way.

“I have locks on three subspace targets,” reported Stryver. “They’re relays, scattered across the globe.”

That was good news. “Send the coordinates to Kalisch and Pipalidi. Tell them to take all three out.”

“We should keep one intact,” said Jet. “How are we going to infiltrate their comms if they don’t have any comms left?”

“How close are we to cracking their cipher?”

“I don’t know. Clunker has worked out the transmission protocols, allowing us to pretend we’re the CI, but we’re no closer to figuring out the actual language it’s using.”

“Then I can’t afford to take the chance. We know they’ll build new relays anyway. This way we gain a momentary advantage. We need every one of those we can get.”

Jet killed the ship’s comm for a moment. “Here’s something else to worry about. What if Stryver’s staying out of the fight purely to get those ciphers? With them, he could turn the hexes on us.”

Ula hadn’t thought that far ahead. “You’re right, and we can’t have that. When Clunker cracks the code, let’s keep it to ourselves.”

“That would make us unstoppable. You don’t strike me as the ruling-the-galaxy sort, but I’m not sure about your masters.”

Ula had absolutely no desire to rule anything. There would be no hiding in the shadows at all while seated on a throne. And he wasn’t going to say anything about his masters, true or false. “What about you?”

The question was a loaded one, and Ula had his hand on the hold-out blaster while he asked it.

Jet laughed. “What, give up my carefree life? I don’t think so, mate. Too much red tape by half.”

A new red light joined the many flashing on the instrument panel. An alarm joined it.

“Multiple launches,” Jet said, all laughter forgotten, “from the planet and the moon, too, this time.” He stopped and peered closer at the viewscreens. “Something’s headed our way. The CI must’ve noticed us sitting here, keeping entirely too low a profile. Time to move.”

Ula notified the leaders of the combined fleet that he was now a target and would be changing orbit. The Commenor acknowledged immediately but didn’t offer any kind of tactical support. The Paramount said nothing at all, just sent a squadron of interceptors.

“Negative, negative,” said Jet to the squadron leader. “Return to the fight. We’ll be okay, and we’ll holler if that changes.”

“The colonel’s orders were very specific,” came back the reply. “We’re not to let you out of our sights.”

The phrase had threatening connotations that Ula was certain were intentional.

“Kalisch, get those ships off our tail,” said Jet to the Paramount. “I’ve got more important things to worry about than your trigger-happy hotshots.”

“Put me through to the director,” came the reply.

No name, thought Ula. Just a title. “Colonel,” he said, “this is Director Vii. Your resources are needed elsewhere. We have to punch through that defensive shell to gain access to the polar regions—”

“Darth Chratis explained your situation,” Kalisch said over him. “I really must insist.”

Ula closed his eyes. This was an open line. If he bowed to the colonel’s wishes, it would be tantamount to acknowledging that he favored—or could at least be influenced by—the Imperials. The time was not yet right to do that.

“Negative, Colonel. I have advised you to send your fighters elsewhere. Recall them or I will be forced to interpret your intentions as hostile and request assistance from Captain Pipalidi.”

Again, the Paramount said nothing, but the ships did at least change course.

Ula mopped his brow. Not only was he failing to betray the Republic, but he was now being forced to defy an officer in the Imperial navy.

“Why are we doing this, again?”

“Beats me,” said Jet. “Officially I’m still hoping to turn a profit, but that’s looking less and less likely every minute.”

“Is that really all you’re interested in?” Ula asked, suddenly irritated by the smuggler’s pretense.

“Can’t it be?” Jet shot back.

“I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. If people knew what you and your ship could really do—”

“No one would ever let me dock anywhere. If they think I’m a hopeless bum, that gives me an edge. It keeps me safe. Like Tassaa Bareesh. If she’d known that I could’ve taken my ship back anytime, she wouldn’t have let me hang around to see what happened. And if I hadn’t hung around, I wouldn’t be here. Granted, here is not looking so comfortable at the moment, but that could change. Life is surprising. I think we’ll pull something out of the hat.”

“It just seems dishonest.”

Jet said, “You should talk.”

Ula bristled. “What do you mean?”

“Come on, mate. I know what you are. I’ve known from the second I saw you. Why do you think I asked you for a drink?”

Ula drew the hold-out blaster and pointed it at Jet. “Tell me what you think I am.”

“I think you’re a braver man than you’re letting on,” Jet said without flinching. “To your superiors you’re just a pawn. To your enemies you’re worse than evil. You’re caught between wanting to do your job and trying to keep your job hidden. It drives you crazy, but you can’t confide in anyone. You have to keep it all locked away, and no one ever appreciates how hard that is. We’re expected to just keep on going, blokes like us, because if we trip, there’s no safety net.”

Ula bristled. “I’m nothing like you.”

“We’re more alike than you think. I’ve been a pawn, and recently, too. Why do you think I was working as a privateer? It wasn’t for the good times, let me tell you.”

“You’re unprincipled, amoral.”

“I’m glad you think so. That means the cover’s working.”

“You’re not making any sense! Why are you telling me this? Do you want me to shoot you or not?”

“I want us to work together exactly as we have been.”

“How can we possibly do that now?”

“You’re speaking like one of them,” said Jet, gesturing at the holoprojector. “You’re not human, but you look human to me. What does it matter who we really are? It’s what we do that matters.”

“But what am I supposed to do?”

“You can put the blaster down, for a start, before I ask Clunker to take it from you.”

Ula stared at him for a long, tortured moment. They had a battle to coordinate, and what had really changed? Jet could have revealed Ula’s secret at any time—just as Ula could have revealed Jet’s, making them even. Nothing was causing the confrontation between them except his own uncertainty and doubt. If Jet thought him brave, perhaps it was time to be.

“All right,” he said, lowering the blaster. Clunker, who had approached somehow without Ula noticing, stepped away.

“Thank you,” said Jet with a loose grin. “You know what the weird thing is? I can’t tell who you’re working for. I mean, I know how it’s supposed to be playing out, but on a practical level you’ve got me beat. As far as I can see, you’re just trying to do the right thing.”

A series of alarms began to sound.

“Uh-oh.” The smuggler’s carefree mood evaporated. “This is what happens when you don’t pay attention.”

Ula hurriedly scanned the telemetry. More launches. More agglomerations forming to target the combined fleets. Still no good news from the ground, and no word at all on Larin or her platoon. A mixed squadron of Republic and Imperial fighters had suffered an internal disagreement, leading to an exchange of fire, and a Turbodyne 1220 drop ship had collided with a Republic NR2 during an assault run. Fierce recriminations were being exchanged by the two sides, and neither Captain Pipalidi nor Colonel Kalisch responded to his hails.

“Now what?” asked Ula.

“Well, if we’re not going to run,” said Jet, “I suggest we turn the full capacity of our scheming minds to finding a way to survive—

“Wait a minute. Where’s Stryver?”

“I can’t see him. He could be around the back side of the moon, or—”

An urgent beeping joined the already strident alarm calls. The map of Sebaddon turned red at the south pole. Ula stared in amazement as the defensive shell of hexes began to part, creating an opening.

“They’re letting us in?”

“Don’t bet on it,” said Jet.

Through the opening in the orbital defenses flew the familiar silver quarter-moon of Stryver’s ship, rising up in a perfectly vertical line.

“What’s he doing there?”

“Running, I think.”

Close on Stryver’s wake came a monster bursting from the heart of the planet.

LARIN IGNORED THE SHRIEKING of alarms and the flashing red lights filling her suit’s helmet. The unlucky shot appeared not to have damaged the fuel line to her jet-chute, but its gyros were completely destroyed. If her airfoil had been intact, that would at least have had a stabilizing effect, but it was nothing but tatters now. Kicking and skidding wildly across the sky, she was completely out of control.

She refused to give in. There had to be a way to bring the jet-chute down safely, and her with it.

First thing first: to get manual control of the jet. It was behind her, but by letting out the restraints she could wriggle around so it was thrusting from her chest. The noise was deafening. She darkened her visor so the flashes wouldn’t blind her.

At least she still had her instruments. It was hard to get a sensible altimeter reading, so she didn’t know exactly how much time she had, but the temperature outside was clear: well below the line. Any exposed flesh would freeze solid in just moments. All the better to work quickly, then.

Tugging off her left glove, she used the artificial digits of her prosthetic to pull at the thruster casing. It fell away behind her—up or down, she couldn’t tell. The horizon was turning wildly around her. Just glancing at it made her feel giddy.

She concentrated on the wiring inside the jet-chute casing instead. Steam hissed into the thin, cold air. Luckily, her fingers weren’t affected by heat, either. The jet-chute was an uncomplicated machine, designed to be rugged rather than versatile. There would be all sorts of safeties and overrides, but she didn’t need them. She just wanted the switch that turned the thrust on and off.

A sharp tug on a particular component had the latter effect. Suddenly everything was still and she was weightless. The world below still turned, but at least it wasn’t changing direction three times every second. Now that she had to look at it, she could see how much closer it had come. Perilously so.

That wasn’t what mattered. At the moment, she had to correct her spin. She counted furiously under her breath, judging the correct burn by instinct more than conscious calculation. She shoved her artificial fingers into the hot innards and switched the thrust back on, just for a second.

She jerked across the sky, slewing madly. Too much, too long. She had to be more precise. Counting again, she tried a second time, with more success. She was still tumbling afterward, but not so badly that the thickening air couldn’t get a stabilizing grip on her. She spread her limbs in a star shape until she was falling steadily face-forward.

The complex at the planet’s south pole was coming up at her with frightening speed. She activated the jet-chute and kept it on full, fighting it at every moment to keep it pointing straight down. It was like trying to balance on a pin: the slightest wobble threatened to tip her over and put her back where she started. She gritted her teeth and held on.

Slowly, steadily, her downward plunge began to ease.

She had time to examine where she was landing. It was a broad, flat plain, crisscrossed with deep cracks that looked too straight to be natural. A door was her first thought, leading to something underground. Around it stood a number of cannon emplacements, all aiming for targets elsewhere, fortunately. It was hard enough just coming down straight, let alone dodging. She wanted to look behind her, to see where the others were, but the merest attempt to do so threatened to upset her delicate balance.

Slower and slower she fell, until she was traveling barely more than running speed. The ground was just dozens of meters away. She began to feel relief. Against all odds, she was going to make it!

With a guttering cough, the jet-chute ran out of fuel.

“No!” she yelled.

But words weren’t enough. She was falling again, and rapidly gaining speed. Just seconds lay between her and being squashed like a bug against the hard face of Sebaddon. Nothing could save her now.

Strong limbs wrapped around her chest. With a gasp, she felt herself squeezed tight and pulled backward. She couldn’t see what had happened, but she recognized the gloves gripping together in front of her. They were standard Republic issue. The jet-chute belonging to the owner of those gloves strained and whined, slowing them so they landed with a tumble, not a splat.

Larin couldn’t believe her luck. Clambering to her feet, she helped her savior free of his jet-chute and airfoil harness. His faceplate cleared and she recognized Hetchkee.

“Couldn’t let you go like that,” he said matter-of-factly. “Equipment failure is inexcusable.”

“Thank you,” she said, meaning both syllables with all her heart. “What happened to Jopp?”

“Called me for help. Didn’t you hear him?”

Larin hadn’t, but she didn’t press it. She had been a little busy at the time. The important thing was that she had survived. As long as Jopp stayed out of her way, they need never talk again—about how his hesitance had almost cost her her life.

“Right,” she said, slipping her glove back onto her frost- and heat-blackened hand. “We’ve got some regrouping to do and hexes to kill. Any idea where our squads came down?”

They ran together for the rendezvous point, jumping over two of the deep cracks along the way. They were definitely machined into a ferrocrete-like surface, with some kind of black sealant at the base. If they weren’t the edges of a massive door, then they could have been canals. But for what? Any water lying around would be frozen solid. They could conceivably have been roads for hexes, only none were in sight.

The rendezvous point was a mess of weapons-fire. Republic and Imperial troopers had dug in and were either setting charges or laying covering fire, hoping to take out the cannons in range. Major Cha barked orders over the patchy comms as bombardment rained down from above. Imperial combat droids lumbered in perfectly straight lines across the battlefield, spitting fire at distant targets. Larin hadn’t grasped how large the master factory site truly was. Standing on top of it, she couldn’t see the edges.

“Moxla! Take a squad and put tower number five out of business. I’ll send someone after you once you’re laid in.”

“Yes, sir.” There was no easy way to tell one squad from another, so she picked a sergeant at random and assigned him to the mission. He was an Imperial, but that didn’t matter. On the ground, under enemy fire, troopers were all the same.

Several supply sleds had come down nearby, and she helped herself to all the launchers and charges she could carry. With the sergeant and his squad in tow, she loped across the flat dome, carefully watching the orientation of the cannon emplacement. At some point, they would be noticed.

She crossed another crack and dropped down inside. It was just deep enough for her to crouch out of sight. She followed the crack until they were as close as they needed to be, and there she ordered the squad to stop.

“Get those launchers unloaded and ready to fire. Sergeant, I want three of your best shots to go on ahead to provide distracting fire, another three to go back and do the same. Spread out, and space your rounds. Keep that emplacement busy.”

“Yes, sir.”

The launchers were lightweight and easy to assemble. They were ready in moments. As a broad field of fire converged on the tower, more potent punches attacked it at regular intervals, shrouding its uppermost reaches with thick, black smoke.

Still it fired, though.

“You and you,” Larin said, pointing at two troopers at random, “with me.”

She grabbed a belt of explosive charges and leapt out of the trench. The troopers followed, running hard for the base of the tower. The emplacement was already busy tracking multiple targets. Hopefully three more would escape unnoticed.

Halfway, they were targeted. The trooper on her right went down, blasted up his middle by pulses of purple fire. Larin and her sole companion dodged left, and the next wave went wide. Then it was targeting the grenade launchers again, and they reached the base unharmed.

It was ten meters across and as solid as a mountain.

She gave half the charges to the trooper. “One every two meters, set to blow on my command.”

He nodded and set off, moving around the base in the direction opposite hers. When they met up, they retreated as far as they dared and dropped flat. The emplacement didn’t seem to notice them. It was firing upward, at something she couldn’t see.

She pushed the remote detonation switch, and debris exploded over their heads. The top of the tower leaned, began to fall.

Then a much brighter flash came from behind her, and the ferrocrete ground bucked. Larin glanced back and saw a large mushroom cloud rising from the rendezvous point. It had been hit by heavier munitions than she’d seen in play from the hexes before. Either Xandret’s droids had evolved again, or they’d knocked something from above off-course. Maybe, she thought, that was what the emplacement had been firing at right before she’d destroyed it: bombardment, deflected just enough to hit the invading forces.

It was going to take ages for the dust to settle, but at least the comms had cleared. She got up and put out a call for all officers to report in.

Hetchkee spoke up from the other side of the dome, and one Imperial lieutenant. No others. No Major Cha.

A silver shape flashed through the clouds above, glinting in the sun. “Is that you, Stryver?” she called. “Tell me what you see up there.”

“One of the major subspace sources is right under your feet,” the Mandalorian replied. “Why put it so far from the CI?”

She didn’t know the answer to that question, and the comm dissolved into static again before she could ask him anything else.

She signaled her trooper to follow her back to the trench. The rest of the squad had re-formed and were packing up the launchers, preparatory to moving elsewhere. Larin didn’t know what her next objective should be. Keep taking out towers? Try to find the others? Without Major Cha, it was going to be difficult to coordinate everyone who remained.

As she hastily considered her options, the black surface at the bottom of the trench shifted. She looked down at her feet and saw a ripple pass through the rubbery black material. It shifted again, and a deep subterranean groan surrounded her.

“Move,” she told the squad. “If this whole thing is a door, then—”

The world fell out from under her before she could finish the sentence. She lunged and barely caught the nearest edge of the trench. The black surface had dissolved as though its molecular structure had suddenly changed from a solid to a liquid. Two troopers fell into blackness, firing at nothing. Their shots ceased after less than a second.

Larin hauled herself out of the suddenly bottomless trench. Another groan shook the air. The opposite walls lurched apart. Ten meters, twenty meters. She was standing with half the squad on the edge of an ever-widening trench. On the other side, the rest of her troopers receded into the distance.

The dome was unfolding, sliding finger-like segments of roof into deep recesses at its edge and releasing a vast upwelling of warmer air. Tendrils of fog sprang into being, mixing with the smoke and creating strange shapes all around her. She looked down, and saw something huge and indistinct stirring. Whatever it was, the hexes must have been building it nonstop, using all the prodigious resources of the metal- and energy-rich world.

“What is that thing?” one of her troopers asked, loud enough to be heard without a comm.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but those look like repulsors—there, around its edge.”

“It’s a ship, shaped like that? Where are its engines?”

A crazy thought occurred to her. “Maybe there aren’t any.”

The troopers looked at her like she was talking gibberish.

The segment of dome they were standing on was nearing the edge of the roof.

“We can’t stay here much longer,” she told what was left of the squad. “I advise you to get ready to jump.”

“Down onto that?” asked one, pointing at the object rising toward them.

“I think it’s a skyhook,” she said, bracing herself, “so we won’t be going down for long.”

SHIGAR STEPPED OUT of his jet-chute harness and stared in horror at the bubbling, bright red lake where his intended landing site had been. He had watched the furious, equator-bound descent of the transport while riding down in its wake. Its impact had sent a shock wave through the complex maze, which buckled and then subsided into the fluid beneath. Everyone on that maze had been swallowed. There were only a few late arrivals left, standing around the edge of the crater like him, staring down into the death of all their hopes.

Master Satele had been in the maze, somewhere, with Eldon Ax. Shigar had tried calling his Master via both the suit and the Force, but received no response to either. All he could see moving were hexes, bobbing and swimming through the red tide, apparently unharmed. Three surviving cannon emplacements fired at anyone in range, to little effect.

Darth Chratis had descended with him and landed not far away.

“Not only must I seek a new apprentice,” said the Sith Lord, red lightsaber standing out at his side like a standard, “but it appears that you are in need of a new Master.”

Shigar’s grief and frustration found a target. “You made this happen,” he said, turning away from the awful view to confront the ancient enemy of the Jedi Order.

“Not I, boy.”

“The Emperor, then, with all his dreams of murder and domination, slaughtering his way across the galaxy.”

“I don’t see the Emperor here, do you?”

“You’re mocking me.”

“Because you deserved to be mocked, boy. You are naïve and sheltered, thanks to the nonsense your Masters have fed you. The true face of the universe frightens you, and you fall back on that nonsense to explain your fear. Only a child closes its eyes when frightened. Look around you and grow up.”

Shigar felt his hackles rising, even though he knew Darth Chratis was trying to get exactly this reaction from him. “You can’t deny that the Sith stole Cinzia Xandret from her mother. That’s what led us here.”

“Lema Xandret was brilliant and mad. She is the one to blame, Shigar. Or Stryver, for not letting the matter rest. Or you.”

“Me? What did I do?”

“It was you who brought the matter to your Master’s attention.”

“Stand back.” Shigar activated his lightsaber. Darth Chratis was getting entirely too close. The red of his blade matched the lava and the sky above. It looked to Shigar like the whole world was turning to blood.

Darth Chratis stopped five paces away, a contemptuously amused expression on his withered face.

“Blame the Emperor for all your troubles, if you must,” he said. “Blame the Empire as a whole. Given the chance, would you explain to all of them how they have been so very wrong? Would you address the Sith, and the ministers, and the troopers, and the spies? I fear they wouldn’t listen to you, not even the people you might imagine to be on your side: the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the dissidents. There are fewer of them than you imagine, you know. And to the rest you are the enemy—you and your Jedi and your Senate. They curse your name just as you curse ours, for the loved ones they’ve lost at your hands, for the goods stolen by your privateers, for the many hardships they’ve endured. You’ll never win them over with your words, with your nonsense, so you’ll be forced to kill them all. How does that sound to you, Padawan? Do you fancy yourself the greatest mass murderer in the history of the galaxy? If not, perhaps you should, for that is the path you are heading down. You and the Emperor—no different at all.”

“You lie.” Shigar backed away, even though Darth Chratis had made no physical move. The weight of his words was threat enough.

“That empty litany will not protect you now, boy. Not from yourself.”

“We fight you because you are evil. Because you are slaves to the dark side.”

“All those billions and billions? Would that the Sith were so plentiful.”

“You have seduced them, twisted their thoughts. They obey you because they fear you.”

“Is the Republic so different?”

“We have laws, safeguards against abuses of power—”

“We have laws, too, albeit different ones, and the Emperor is the ultimate safeguard. There can be no miscarriage of justice under his rule, for his word is law. Where is your precious justice on Coruscant? How has the Republic benefited from your leaders’ inept fumbling?”

Something blossomed in Shigar’s mind like a flower: a flower of certainty, growing strong and sure in the darkness of the hour. He felt as though years of history had condensed to this moment: the reappearance of the Empire and the Mandalorians; the sacking of Coruscant and the fragile treaty that restored it to a greatly diminished Republic; the Annexation of Kiffu and the subjugation of his people.

It boiled down to him and Darth Chratis.

“You are the source of every bad thing that’s happened to the galaxy,” he said. “That’s why we have to fight you. War is inevitable, just like people say it is. There can be no lasting peace with the likes of you.”

“You are more like us than you care to admit,” Darth Chratis snarled. “I am offering to save your life, boy. Join me as my apprentice, and I will open your eyes for good. There can be no peace because peace is the lie. Strength comes only from conflict, and for there to be conflict there must be an enemy. That is the truth that lies behind your Masters’ teachings. Acknowledge it, embrace it, and you will understand why you can never serve them.”

Shigar steadied his lightsaber in a tight, two-handed grip.

Darth Chratis’s deep-set eyes glittered. The tip of his lightsaber didn’t move a millimeter.

Shigar watched it closely, waiting for the first blow to fall.

The Sith Lord laughed, a dreadful cackling sound all at odds with their circumstances.

“Do you think I intend to kill you now, boy? You forget: we have a truce. Unless you plan to attack me, and I am forced to defend myself—”

“I ought to attack you. Any kind of alliance with the Sith is flawed at its heart. Master Shan should never have agreed to it.”

“It was her suggestion, remember—and see how it has trapped you? Obey me and the truce holds. Attack me and the truce is broken.” Darth Chratis chuckled. “Which is it to be?”

Shigar wavered on the verge of acting. He could feel the need for it simmering in every muscle, every nerve. The Force was ready. It filled his veins like lava, burning hot.

He thought of Larin saying, You’re thinking too much.

His lightsaber moved as though of its own accord, sweeping forward into Darth Chratis’s reach with an almost delighted hum. Their blades clashed together once, twice, three times, and the Sith edged back a step.

“Yes, excellent—”

Shigar didn’t let him talk, pressing him with another combination of moves, staying light on his feet for the inevitable responses, feeling with every instinct, every breath, what must be done. They danced together along the lip of the crater, in full view of the surviving members of the attack force. No signals went up; no word to disband the alliance; comms were down, so the joint assault of Sebaddon went on.

Darth Chratis rallied with a series of bold, vicious strikes that cost Shigar the ground he had made, and more. He struck back only with his blade, knowing that he would lose if the duel descended into a free-for-all of telekinesis and other Force powers. That was inevitable. His only hope lay in Darth Chratis making an early mistake, giving Shigar an edge. Even then, it was going to be hard. Sith didn’t die easily.

Neither do Jedi, he told himself, even as sweat trickled into his eyes and he tossed his helmet away, the better to fight unhindered.

“You are growing weary,” said the Sith Lord. “Your resolve is weakening. I can feel it. You know that you will never beat me this way. Your only hope is to reach into your heart for the anger that we both know is there.”

“Anger will never rule me.”

“Think of the Grand Master. Think of your homeworld and all who died there. Tell yourself that I killed them, and seek the strength that knowledge brings.”

“You had nothing to do with Kiffu.”

“Didn’t I?”

Shigar fought on, matching Darth Chratis blow for blow. The red blade took three centimeters off his braid. He scored a line across the Sith’s right shoulder.

“You cannot fight without the dark side.”

Shigar silenced his thoughts and feelings. He was only the blade. He was only the Force.

“You cannot win without the dark side.”

Darth Chratis sent a wave of lightning across the gap between them. Shigar tried to catch it with his lightsaber. The shock coursed up the blade, into the hilt, and from there into his right arm. It burned like acid, much more powerful and insidious than the blast Eldon Ax had hit him with on Hutta. It didn’t just hurt. It ate at his resolve, telling him to fight fire with fire, to use the Sith Lord’s own weapons against him in defiance of his own Master’s advice. If he didn’t, he would surely die.

Shigar fell to his knees, the beginnings of a scream whistling through his clenched teeth.

Why didn’t she warn you? The whisper of doubt in his mind had a voice now. Your Master is famous for seeing the future, so why didn’t she tell you this lay ahead of you?

Because there was nothing she could do about it. That’s why. Her teachings are weaker than those of the Sith, and she knows it. She knows that the Jedi will lose the war that’s inevitably coming. She knows the Emperor will win. By keeping this secret from you, she has killed you.

She lied to you, just as the High Council has lied to you. They don’t care about justice. They are corrupt and weak.

All you have to do is turn your back on them, and you will live.

Darth Chratis’s lightning passed through Shigar’s body and down to his left hand. There it concentrated into a ball, blindingly bright. Waiting to be set free.

Strike me, said the voice, and rise up again, stronger than ever before.

“Die,” said Shigar in a voice that didn’t sound like his own. “Die!”

When he raised his hand, Darth Chratis wasn’t even looking at him. The Sith Lord’s attention had been captured by a shadow that had fallen across them. The thing that had cast it was enormous and bulbous, like a fist as big as a city rising slowly out of the lake. Lava dripped from it like water.

Such was his shock that the Sith lightning concentrated in Shigar’s left hand fizzled out. The rest went with it, along with the pain. Shigar understood then, with piercing clarity, that he had been the source of all of it, ever since Darth Chratis’s initial lightning strike. The voice whispering in his mind—and the doubts it had expressed—had been none other than his own.

His lightsaber lay in blackened pieces at his feet. His suit stank of smoke.

He stood up. The thing from the lake towered over them, no longer rising, just looming, blocking out the sky. The noise it made was deep and resonant, like the song of a deep-sea mammal. It sounded like a summons, offered in the language of worlds.

A small silver dot moved across the sky: Stryver’s scout. Beyond that hung the brilliant constellations of the combined fleets. Flashes of light danced among them, indicating that they were returning fire. Shigar couldn’t tell if they were firing at the hexes or one another.

He looked down at his hands. His gloves were burned right through, but his fingers and palms were undamaged.

This is the path laid down for you, said Master Satele into his mind. They were the same words she had used on Coruscant.

Shigar almost wept with commingled triumph and despair. She was alive, but where did that leave him? Was he tainted by the dark side even though he hadn’t actually struck out at Darth Chratis? Had Master Satele truly known all along that it would come to this, and never warned him?

Again he thought of Larin, telling him that he was lucky for being lifted out of obscurity to train for the Jedi Order. He had even believed her, and found strength in the knowledge that his Master and the High Council would endure. Whatever happens today, you’ll go back to the life you know.

Not anymore.

The galaxy is painted in black and white, he realized, feeling the truth and certainty of it deep in every bone. But from far enough away, it all looks gray.

THICK RED CURRENTS pulled Ax irresistibly downward, tumbling her like a red blood cell in a heart attack. Master Satele gripped her wrist so tightly she feared her bones might break, and she gripped the Jedi back just as hard. She could see nothing but her heads-up display and hear nothing but alarms. The precise specifications of the Republic armored environment suit were unknown to her, but she imagined its cooling systems screaming as they tried to radiate the excess heat, only to be overwhelmed and fail.

She waited, but that didn’t happen. They were tumbling just as violently as before, but she wasn’t getting any hotter.

Instead, a strange feeling came over her, a feeling that was neither entirely physical nor entirely psychic. For all the battering and pummeling going on, she wasn’t in any immediate danger of being crushed or burned. The fluid just looked like lava. She wasn’t being drowned. Tasted, perhaps? Or embraced …?

A powerful urge to swim overcame her, but not to reach the surface. There was something in the lake with them, something that wanted her to come closer. She began to kick and struggle against the current. Master Satele was a deadweight until she divined Ax’s intention and joined in the effort. They wriggled through the thick, red mass, body length by painful body length, occasionally striking solid objects being swept along with the flow. Some clutched at her, but Ax couldn’t tell if they were people or hexes, or an entirely new manifestation of the Sebaddon phenomenon. Instead of stopping, she swam on, following the only compass she had: her gut.

Her questing fingers found something hard and stable submerged in the lava-like liquid. It was smooth and slightly curved, like the side of a submarine. She and Master Shan explored it, looking for a way in. They found extrusions that might have been antennas, cannons, and sublight drives.

A ship. That was where she was supposed to go. Something inside had brought her here.

Satele Shan pulled her closer, touched faceplates. The red liquid parted just enough for Ax to glimpse the Grand Master’s private universe. Her face was drawn but composed.

“Air lock,” she said. “This way.”

“Do you think it’ll work in this stuff?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

They pulled apart, and Master Satele guided her hand to the panel she had found. The controls were instantly recognizable. Ax had seen them on thousands of ships. Thousands of Imperial ships.

She pushed the top button: OPEN. A sudden current swept them closer as the empty chamber sucked in fluid. When the door was completely open, they swam inside and fumbled for the interior controls.

The door slid silently shut, leaving the unceasing turbulence of the fluid outside behind them. Ax floated in silence for a moment, grateful for the respite, the chance to think. Where were they? What was she doing? What had brought her here? She should be swimming for the surface, not exploring sunken artifacts while the rest of the mission fought around her.

“Are you going to open the inner door?” asked Master Satele, pressing close again.

Of course she was. She’d come too far to turn back. Her instincts tugged her on, despite her misgivings.

When she touched the CYCLE button, pumps in the walls strained to drain the fluid away. Weight returned, along with light and air. They finally let each other go. Ax wiped her faceplate clear, and she saw Master Satele doing the same. In the midst of such strangeness, she looked as small as Ax herself. She was glad she wasn’t alone.

The inner door opened, revealing a stock-standard ship’s corridor, scuffed and dusty with age. Ax stepped out of the puddle left in the air lock and put her dripping feet gratefully on a dry surface. She checked her HUD. The air was fine. Cracking the seal on her helmet, she swung the faceplate open.

All she smelled was blood.

Master Satele stepped up beside her with her faceplate open, too. “Any idea whose ship this is?”

Ax kept her thoughts to herself for the moment. She walked along the corridor to the first intersection, mentally plotting the layout. If this was a light cruiser, she decided, the command deck would be to the right, holds to the left, crew quarters down the first ladder, and engineering ahead. She chose to go right, and was rewarded with success. The command deck was small, but felt spacious for being so empty. No instrument panels glowed. No holoprojectors projected. The only signs of life were the lights shining down from above.

“Generator’s clearly functional,” said Master Satele, “but the control systems have been disconnected. If you’re thinking of getting off Sebaddon in this thing, you can forget about it.”

The floor shook beneath them, and Ax was reminded that, although the fluid that had engulfed them hadn’t been lava, they were still standing on top of a giant geothermal drilling site, on a world whose skin was about as stable as a water balloon’s.

The ship rattled and creaked around them. The echoing of its many complaints sounded like a voice, gradually fading into silence.

“Comms are blocked by the hull,” Master Satele went on. “That wouldn’t have been part of the ship’s original design.”

“They never intended to go anywhere,” Ax said, “or to talk to anyone. I bet this is Lema Xandret’s ship.”

Master Satele looked around. “No artwork, no personalized touches, no signs of home. How can you tell?”

“There’s a freight air lock aft,” Ax said, avoiding the question. They headed back the way they had come. “Let’s see what’s through there.”

On the way they passed row after row of empty rooms, confirming Ax’s feeling that the ship had been abandoned. Xandret and the other fugitives had stripped everything useful or personal and moved it elsewhere. Maybe the ship reminded them too much of what they had left behind; maybe they had built more comfortable quarters elsewhere. Perhaps they had kept it as a memento mori, as a symbol of their isolation and abandonment, and never intended to use it again. When they had returned to the galaxy, they had used a different ship entirely, one they had built themselves.

Nowhere in Imperial records, Ax realized, was the name of this ship recorded. Unless she found a survivor, or some kind of record, she might never learn it. That hole in her mother’s history bothered her as they walked and climbed through the ship. She knew it meant nothing, really, and that sticking on this point was a kind of self-defense against the much wider holes that might soon be filled in. But she couldn’t help wondering what it had been like to live with the rocksolid reminder of your betrayal constantly at hand. Maddening, probably.

The aft freight air lock was twice as large as the one they had come through on the port side. It was open, a tubular umbilical leading to spaces unknown. The tube swayed and rocked uncertainly under the influence of the fluid around it.

Ax pressed forward, telling herself there was nothing to fear. She agreed with Stryver. Lema Xandret is already dead. She has been for some time. There was no life in here. The colony had survived long enough to build the hexes, but then it had failed. Either the hexes had killed them, recognizing that the humans had outlived their usefulness, or they had killed themselves. All the evidence Ax expected to find of them was their bodies.

She wasn’t prepared, therefore, for the intimately decorated quarters they had left behind: the pictures, journals, clothes, mobiles, meals, and more that lay scattered throughout the winding corridors of the colony, perfectly preserved in the cool, dry air, as though they had been put aside only an hour ago. There had been children living here. There were memorials to the dead, and to those left behind. Likenesses of the colonists stared out at her from every angle. She recognized her mother’s face in some of the pictures. Lema Xandret had grown older here. Her face was lined, and her hair had turned gray. Her stare was sharp.

“You were right,” said Master Satele with something like admiration in her voice. Concern, too, if Ax’s ears didn’t deceive her.

She hurried on in determined silence. The empty colony was testimony to many things: hopes and fears, bravery and cowardice, the everyday and the profound. Ax wasn’t interested in any of that. She hadn’t come to Sebaddon in search of a museum. She had come because the Dark Council ordered her to, because fate demanded it, and because of Dao Stryver. Maudlin sentimentality was irrelevant to her.

Still, Ax’s pace increased until she was almost running from room to room, seeking something she couldn’t put a name to. Master Satele followed, moving lightly and silently in her wake. The corridors wound deeper and deeper, connecting to larger spaces and more business-like structures, including air and water purifiers and power plants. The pressure steadily increased around them. In several places they saw slow leaks, dripping red into growing puddles.

They came at last to a large, square room that looked more like a warehouse than a laboratory, although clearly it had once been the latter. Droid parts lay scattered in various states of repair alongside tools of all shapes and sizes and arcane instruments of measurement. Holoprojectors displayed rotating designs, revealing several hex variants that Ax hadn’t seen before: versions with ten legs or more, multiple bodies, specialist limbs, and agglomerated into larger machines capable of space travel or mass destruction. Some of them changed as she walked toward them, indicating that the evolutionary algorithms responsible for them were still running. Thick cables ran everywhere through a centimeters-deep layer of red. Some of them led to a tubular glass tank, five times larger than a bacta tank, which stood in one corner of the room. It was full of opaque red fluid, apparently identical to the stuff outside.

Master Satele approached the tank, but Ax hung back. She sensed that this was what had drawn her here, but now that she was standing in front of it, she was nervous. Did she really want to know what her mother’s fate had been?

“It’s warm,” said Master Satele. She had taken off a glove and pressed it against the glass. “Body temperature, or thereabouts.”

“That red stuff,” said Ax. “It’s in all the hexes. It looks like lava, but it’s not. It’s the biological component the Hutts detected.”

“Is it blood?”

“I don’t know.” She shuddered. “I hope not.”

The Grand Master was still standing with her hand touching the glass. She watched Ax closely. “This is what I tap into when I subdue the hexes. It’s alive, but at the same time not alive. It’s incomplete, like a body without a mind.”

“Could the CI be its mind?”

“It could be, but we’ve seen no sign of the CI so far. If it’s in this section of the planet, it’s keeping a very low profile.”

The fluid in the tank stirred, and Master Satele pulled sharply away.

“There’s something else in there,” she said. “I felt it.”

Ax hugged herself without realizing. She wanted to run but couldn’t move. Her feet were frozen to the floor. Her eyes couldn’t look away.

Inside the tank, something white swept against the glass. It vanished almost instantly, back into the red murk, but then returned a moment later, pressing hard.

Ax gasped. It was a human hand. Another appeared beside it, with fingers splayed out wide. The red fluid stirred as the body the hands were attached to steadied itself in the fluid.

Something whirred in the laboratory. A cam turned to stare at Master Satele, then tracked to take in Ax.

“I recognize you.”

The voice came from all around them. Female, breathless, surprised.

“I know you.”

A face loomed closer to the glass wall of the tank, coming slowly into view.

“I am you.”

Ax felt her insides turn to water. The face was her own.

ULA WATCHED THE repulsor platform rising from the planet’s south pole with something approaching awe. The skyhook was huge and well defended, and the hexes had built it in almost no time at all. If Stryver still needed to convince anyone of the reality of his geometric growth theory, the proof was right there in front of him.

“What’s a skyhook doing at the pole?” Jet asked. “It’d be useless, floating there.”

“Why?”

“Because the best place to get to higher orbits is at the equator, and that’s what they’ll be wanting to do. Isn’t it?”

Ula just shrugged. Skyhooks had many uses, not just as a staging point to orbit, as they were usually employed, hanging motionlessly over points on a planet’s surface. They could provide defense or act as displays of wealth. Who knew what the hexes wanted? He was still learning what they could do.

“Target that thing,” he ordered the combined fleet, just to be sure. “Bring it down!”

The Paramount sent a halfhearted salvo in the skyhook’s direction, but it was clear Kalisch was keeping significant firepower in reserve. The Commenor sent nothing at all.

“Didn’t you hear me, Captain Pipalidi? We need to stop that thing from reaching the upper atmosphere.”

“And I need to ensure the security of what ships we have left,” said the leader of the Republic contingent. “If the Paramount turns its weapons on us while we’re looking elsewhere, we’ll be defenseless.”

“If the hexes escape, we all lose.”

“On Kalisch’s head be it.”

He punched the instrument panel in frustration.

Jet looked at him in reproach. “Hey, take it easy.”

“It’s just so—so pointless! What’s the point of fighting each other? All they have to do is cooperate a little longer and we stand a chance.”

“They’re too alike. That’s the problem. You see that in primitive cultures when schisms divide religions into similar but not identical sects. They hate each other more than the enemy.”

“What are you talking about? The Empire isn’t a primitive culture.”

“No, but the principle still holds. Similar hierarchies, with a dominant high priest caste; similar beliefs but different practices; competing over the same territory—”

“Stop it,” said Ula. “You’re not helping.”

“Just trying to point out why it was never going to work.”

“So we shouldn’t even have tried?”

“Everything’s worth trying once. And I have been known to be wrong on occasions. Unfortunately, this isn’t turning out to be one of them.”

“So how do we turn it around? What can we do to stop the hexes from getting out?”

“There’s always Plan B.”

“Which is?”

“I was hoping you might have one.”

Stryver was heading north, away from the south pole. Ula projected the Mandalorian’s progress across a map of the planet’s surface and found the likely CI location at the end of it. That portion of the map was a mess of activity. Ula used satellite and fighter data to zoom in closer.

Something was rising up from a lake of lava, filling the crater where the landing site had been.

“Another skyhook?” he said, pointing at the image.

“It’s in the right spot,” said Jet, “but I don’t think so. The design isn’t right, and it doesn’t appear to have the repulsorlift capacity it would need to get off the ground.”

A circular hatch opened on the top of the thing, like an enormous iris. Another space opened up among the hexes directly above.

Ula waited, but nothing emerged from the hatch.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” he said.

“There’s Stryver again,” Jet said, pointing at a solitary blip circling the new arrival.

“I guess he’s chasing those subspace foci,” Ula said. “That one must be a biggie.”

“Like the skyhook’s.” Jet pointed at the south of the planet. “Which is moving, by the way.”

He was right. The skyhook had drifted away from the pole and was accelerating ponderously northward.

Ula thought fast. If the skyhook kept accelerating at that rate and stayed on that heading …

“They’re two halves of one thing,” he cried. “The skyhook was at the pole because that’s where the master factory built it. Now it’s coming to pick up the CI and take it offworld. I bet the drives are being built on the moon, as we speak. They’re getting ready to break free. We have to stop them!”

“I think you’re right,” said Jet, “and I agree that this is serious. Try Kalisch and Pipalidi one more time. Maybe they’ll change their minds.”

Ula knew it was pointless. The fleet was breaking up. Shots were being fired by fighters passing perilously close to the opposite side’s capital vessels. It was clear that lines were being drawn and beads taken. All it would take was one mistake for open warfare to erupt.

“If there was only some way to make them do what’s needed,” he said.

“I knew you had the makings of an emperor.”

“How can you joke at a time like this?”

“Who’s joking?” Jet turned in his seat and said to Clunker, “Time for Plan B.”

The droid inclined its battered head. A series of new screens flickered in and out of the main holoprojector as the droid sent a series of commands through the Auriga Fire’s main computers.

“Don’t tell me,” said Ula. “You cracked the hex code but have been sitting on it, waiting for the rest of us to figure it out for ourselves.”

“Believe me, I wouldn’t have waited. Also, there’s nothing to be gained in doing that. Once the code is cracked, the hexes are dead, and I’m out of pocket.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Something noble and probably quite stupid. In return, I need you to do something for me.”

“Just ask.”

“I need you to pretend it never happened.”

Ula stared at him.

“Watch the screens,” Jet said.

The combined fleet was breaking up, but not down faction lines. The Paramount was leading one mixed contingent down to a lower orbit, there to target the CI with greater precision. The Commenor was heading for the moon with a smaller retinue and two squadrons of fighters. All internecine squabbling had abruptly ceased.

Comms weren’t down, but they were suspiciously quiet. No one was giving orders to coordinate the fleet’s movements. It was just happening.

“You’re doing this,” Ula said, appalled.

“Clunker is. He’s got a very good head on his shoulders.”

“You used me to infiltrate the Imperial and Republic networks. You cracked their codes. Now you’ve taken over!”

“The end justifies the means, right?”

“That’s what Stryver said. I’m not sure I agree.”

“Being alive is always better than being dead. That’s my golden rule.”

“But what comes afterward?”

“The fleets change their codes. Business goes back to usual.”

“If you let them go.”

“Why wouldn’t I? I’m not power-mad like you. There might be money to be had in empire building, but never at the top. You only end up on the wrong end of a coup, or an invasion, or a sniper’s rifle. Your Emperor will learn that eventually, the hard way.”

Ula was trapped. He had betrayed the Republic, after all, but he had betrayed the Empire along with it. And now he was utterly powerless. All he could do was sit back and watch—and wonder if he would intervene if the opportunity arose. Jet was, after all, doing the job that he had failed to do. Who was he to get in the way?

Maybe Jet, too, was defying his baser instincts and trying to do the right thing.

A voice crackled from the planet on a Republic frequency. Ula recognized it instantly.

“—higher now so the jamming might not be as effective. This is Lieutenant Moxla calling Director Vii. I’ve hitched a lift on the back of the skyhook and I’m placing transponders on the vulnerable points. Strike them as hard as you can. Please respond. Let me know I’m getting through. We’re higher now so the jamming might not be as effective. This is Lieutenant Moxla calling Director—”

“It’s a recording.” Jet reduced the volume. “I see the transponders. If she’s done her job properly, we can hit the skyhook with everything the Paramount has and take it out of commission before it reaches the equator.”

“What about Larin?”

“Maybe she’s already ditched.”

“We can’t know, can we?”

“No. So what do you want to do?”

“Are you really giving me the choice?”

“Not really. Just seeing if you could come up with a decent argument.”

Tiny points of light flared in the holoprojector as the Paramount sent every missile it had on the way.

LARIN RAN LIGHTLY over the uppermost dome of the skyhook, keeping low to avoid the occasional potshot. The structure was made entirely out of linked hex bodies. Some of them retained a modicum of individuality and raised a limb to fire as she went by. She couldn’t watch everywhere at once, but she had managed to avoid any serious injuries thus far.

That would change the moment her message was received, or the fleet opened fire regardless. There was no way off the skyhook now that it was in flight. If it went down, so would she and all her squadmates. Not all of them had jumped aboard with her, but those who had knew what they were getting into. There were perhaps two dozen troopers like her scattered across the moving skyhook, all operating independently.

Comms came and went; she had set her transceiver to broadcast at the earliest opportunity and let it spool on without her hearing. Each transponder she placed pointed to an air vent or sensor array, or anything else that might suffer from an accurately placed hit. She hadn’t wasted time on trying to sneak inside the skyhook. There would have been little benefit in getting herself killed that way.

It was ironic, she thought. Telemetry told her that the skyhook was bringing her closer to where Shigar should have landed, but she probably wouldn’t make it, and neither had he, most likely. His transport had gone down in flames. She might share the same fate as he had and never know it.

Blue light flashed to her right. A trooper had been pinned by three widely spaced hexes, all firing simultaneously. He returned fire, crouching low to present a smaller target, but he couldn’t fire at all of them, and he had nowhere to retreat to. As she watched, taking the measure of his predicament, a shot clipped the neck seal of his helmet, triggering a jet of precious air. He went down, thrashing about to reach the leak, but his shoulder joints wouldn’t flex that far.

She came in low and fast, shooting the nearest hex first, before getting a bead on the others. They shifted their sights to her, but she was practiced at fighting hexes now. She aimed for the sensor pods first because they were easiest to hit. Without eyes, how could they shoot back?

Two other hexes joined in before she reached the fallen trooper. She scooped him up with one hand under his left underarm and kept moving, firing as she went. Using gravity and her own momentum, she took him down the dome as if they were running down the side of a hill.

When they were out of range, she skidded them to a halt. The edge was in sight. Beyond that point, there was nothing but Sebaddon, far below.

He was still thrashing about. She reached for the repair kit in her thigh pocket and urged him to stay still. He obeyed. As she applied the fast-acting sealant to his damaged neck joint, they recognized each other.

The trooper looking up at her was Ses Jopp.

His voice traveled clearly through the material of their suits.

“You’re the last person I expected to see.”

She didn’t want to say that the feeling was mutual. “I couldn’t just leave you there.”

“And I’m grateful, believe me. Thank you, Lieutenant.”

She couldn’t tell if he was sincere or not, but it was something.

“There,” she said, smoothing down the last of the sealant. “You’ll live to fight another day.”

His eyes tracked to her right, over her shoulder.

“Probably not,” he said. “Look.”

She turned and stared up at the sky. Clearly visible were the white streaks of Imperial artillery coming their way. It looked as if the crew of the Paramount were giving it all they had—precisely as they ought to, she thought.

Rather than craning awkwardly up at the approaching missiles, she turned and sat down next to Jopp.

“Best seats in the house, eh?” she said.

He laughed. “Yeah. People would kill for ’em.”

She thought of her former colleagues in the Blackstars, of the bravado and the bonding and the sense of belonging that she had missed so deeply.

“Grunts like us never learn. Fireworks are only pretty from a distance.”

Jopp nodded soberly. “Makes a pleasant change to have an officer down here with us.”

He turned to look at her.

“Guess you’re not so bad after all, Toxic Moxla.”

She smiled. That was as close to an apology as she was likely to get, but in the service it amounted to a vow of loyalty that would endure until they died. It was a shame, she thought, that that wasn’t going to be very long.

EXHAUST TRAILS DREW complex hieroglyphs across the sky. No less than fifteen missiles were converging on the object that had risen out of the lake. The blast radius was going to be so huge, there was no point running.

Shigar braced himself for the explosion. There was a small chance that he could shield himself from the worst of it, but what happened afterward was the great unknown. There might be no island left at all. He couldn’t float about forever on a sea of lava.

On the brink of death, he caught a glimpse of how his life would have played out, had he lived. He knew, intellectually and viscerally, that he had earned the rank of Jedi Knight. Master Nobil couldn’t deny him that now. He had fought and made deals with enemies. He had wrestled with the dark side. He had conquered his one remaining weakness. And, most important, he was willing to fight.

You are a product of your time, he heard his former Master saying. You must confront the times ahead with great care. The Sith are the enemy, but we must not become like them in order to beat them. We must remain true to all that we stand for.

He couldn’t tell if her voice was in the present, or an echo of the future that would never be. Similarly, he couldn’t tell if she was reproaching him or offering him encouragement.

I cannot stand by while politicians play their games, he said in reply. It was an act of thievery that led us here—an act conducted on behalf of the Republic. Even in this corner of the universe, privateers and false treaties have endangered billions of lives. When the whole galaxy is at stake, who can stand idle?

Not you, Shigar Konshi. Not you.

I don’t understand. Are you telling me that I’m wrong, or that I’m right?

Perhaps both. The answer is beyond my sight.

He snapped back to reality.

A powerful roaring filled the air. The lines in the sky converged on a point. The hieroglyph was complete.

Darth Chratis vanished behind a shimmering Force shield.

Shigar stood unprotected, at one with the other troopers staring up at their deaths. He wasn’t afraid to die.

There was a bright flash, then another, then so many they became one simultaneous assault.

Shigar shielded his eyes with his hand.

That he still had a hand and eyes surprised him.

He squinted through his fingers.

The massive structure had generated a broad electromirror shield, and was deflecting the full force of the blasts back out into space.

Relief flooded him, then dismay. He was still alive, but the plan had failed. What now?

Darth Chratis emerged from his shield as superhot clouds radiated above them. He looked as surprised as Shigar felt.

“Unacceptable,” he said.

A second series of flashes came from the south, where something else was undergoing bombardment from above. They turned to see another work of mega-engineering from the hexes drifting across the sky, trailing explosive streamers in its wake. An identical electromirror shield protected it, too.

A skyhook, Shigar realized. The other half of the thing looming over him, undamaged by everything the Empire and the Republic could throw at it.

He almost laughed. “It was all for nothing,” he said to Darth Chratis. “You, me, Larin—everything.”

“Do you find this amusing, boy?”

He didn’t, but the moment had a hysterical edge all the same. He could agonize all he wanted about the choices he had made and would make, about the Jedi Order’s role in the Emperor’s plans, and about the Republic’s feet of clay when it came to taking decisive action—but if nothing stopped the hexes, there wouldn’t be a war at all. The future of the galaxy ended here.

You win, Lema Xandret, he thought, wherever you are.

CINZIA XANDRET STARED out of her tank at the girl she might have been.

“Don’t look at her,” whispered her mother.

“Why not?”

“She’s not real.”

“She looks real enough.”

“But she’s not you.”

“She’s me as I might have been.”

“You are not her. You will never be her. She is a lie and she is evil. She is—”

“Shut up, Mother.”

The whisper ceased. Cinzia’s attention returned to the two people outside the tank, a mature woman with gray-streaked brown hair and her more youthful companion, both dressed in bloodstained armored suits, both strangers, at least to the complex. One she recognized. She had seen that face all her life. It was her own.

“Who are you?” The more senior woman of the two looked shocked and surprised. “Are you Cinzia?”

“I’m her clone,” she said. There was nothing to be gained by hiding the truth, and there was no harm in just talking. “My mother took a tissue sample from me before I was taken away. She made me all over again. The same daughter, but better, purer.”

“That explains why you look younger,” the woman said. She glanced at her companion, who seemed incapable of speech. “My name is Satele Shan. What do you mean—purer?”

“The fluid I’m breathing suppresses my Force abilities. There’s something in it—a metal, I think, or an extract from something that feeds on metal. It keeps me safe.”

“Safe?” Now the other Cinzia spoke. “Dead, more like it.”

The sneer on her own face—beautiful, she was pleased to see, with the addition of a couple more years—was simply horrid to behold.

“See?” her mother whispered. “She thinks you a monster. Call the droids, now. She must be stopped!”

“No,” Cinzia said. “Let me talk to her first. I want to know what happened to her. I want to know why she’s here.”

“She’s come to destroy everything. That’s what they do. They take and they destroy. They will show you no kindness, just as they showed none to her.”

“I told you to be quiet, Mother. Besides, I don’t trust the droids anymore. You know why.”

That did the trick. The eddying swirls of the fluid around her grew quieter.

“Have you lived here all your life?” the woman called Satele Shan asked.

“Yes. I can access all the complex’s cams. Much of it’s automated, you know. The droids are my eyes and ears.”

“You control them?”

“If I want to,” she said, although she was less sure of that now than she had been.

“So you’re responsible for what’s happening out there?” asked the other Cinzia.

“To be honest,” she said, “I don’t know what’s going on out there. They do seem rather busy, though. They’re designed to protect me, and the definition of protect is a bit vague. I guess at the moment that means not telling me stuff. Whatever they’re up to, I’m sure they mean well.”

“You should take a look, Cinzia,” said Satele Shan. “The hexes are killing people.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“They would only do that if they were attacked. Why did you attack them?”

“They are a threat to the entire galaxy.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said. The thought was entirely too preposterous. “You’re just trying to distract me. This is a momentous day. The two Cinzias finally meet! I’ve been waiting for this, well, ever since I was born. At last we are together! I want to hear everything about your life. I want to know if we like the same things, think the same thoughts—”

“I’m not you,” said the older version of herself. “My name is Eldon Ax.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’ll say whatever I like. You’re a freak, a mistake. I should kill you now, just for existing.”

The other Cinzia produced a glowing red sword and held it up between them.

“See?” hissed her mother. “She will do you great harm if you let her, perhaps even kill you!”

“Don’t be cruel,” said Cinzia to both her mother and her twin. “It doesn’t have to be this way.”

“She’s right,” said Satele Shan, putting a hand on the other Cinzia’s arm. “Don’t act rashly.”

“Yes.” The red blade came down. “We need what she knows—about the hexes, about Lema Xandret.”

“How did your mother die?” asked Satele Shan.

“The droids killed her,” Cinzia said, “and the others as well, but she’s not really dead.”

“Don’t tell them,” whispered the voice in her ear. “Don’t tell them!”

“Why did the hexes kill her?”

“They didn’t want to sign a treaty with anyone. When the ship left—”

“The ship named after you?”

“Yes—Mother built that before she made me, and she never came up with another name. The droids didn’t want people coming here, ever. It wasn’t safe for me.” She almost shied away from the thought of what had happened next, but she forced herself not to. The disclosure was important, if she and herself were ever to become one. “The droids killed my mother to stop her sending any more ships. The others tried to stop them, so the droids killed them, too. It was all very stupid, really. Mother should have known how the droids would feel.”

Satele Shan nodded slowly. “So she wasn’t on the ship?”

“No, that was Kenev and Marg Sar.”

“Why didn’t she go with them, if she was their leader?”

“They had no leaders. They didn’t want to live like they had before. They wanted a change.”

“All right, but Kenev and Marg Sar never came back, did they? They killed themselves when the ship was intercepted by a privateer. They blew up the ship.”

That was a shock. The fluid rippled all over her skin, and she hugged herself tightly. “They would’ve wanted to keep the cargo a secret,” she said, thinking it through.

“The droid factory?”

“The plant. That’s what we call them.”

“Something interfered with the explosion,” said Satele Shan. “The plant wasn’t destroyed.”

“It must’ve been one of the droids. They wouldn’t want to die, even though they had to.”

“That’s what led us here, Cinzia. We came to find your mother, to ask her what she wanted to tell the outside world. That’s all.”

Cinzia waited for her mother to say something. For once, though, she was quiet.

“I don’t think she wants to talk to you,” Cinzia said.

“You said she was dead.”

“She is, mostly. The droids took her body away, probably for recycling. But she’s still here, talking to me.”

“Don’t tell them!”

“She doesn’t want me to talk to you, either.”

The two women outside the tank exchanged a concerned glance.

“I’m not mad,” Cinzia said, feeling affronted.

“I don’t see how you could be anything but.”

“We just don’t understand,” said Satele Shan, shushing the other Cinzia.

“No, you don’t. My mother protects me. That’s why the hexes are the way they are. She put herself into them, too.”

“We worked that out. Both her flesh and her philosophy. They are flexible and single-minded at the same time, combining the very best qualities of machines and organics in one creature. Your mother must have been quite brilliant to think of doing that.”

“I still am,” whispered Lema Xandret.

“She says she still is.”

“Don’t you see how the hexes could be a threat?” said Satele Shan, ignoring her comment. “They acknowledge no leader and they want to be left alone. They don’t want to die and they want to protect you. How better to keep you safe than to destroy everyone else, including your mother?”

“It’s logical,” she admitted, remembering how they had disobeyed her, too. Cinzia had begged them to leave the original Lema Xandret alone, but there had been no turning them back, not once their creator had betrayed them. Cinzia’s mother had programmed them too well.

“It’s insane,” muttered the other Cinzia.

“You have to understand them,” she insisted. “If what you say is true, then it does make sense. It’ll be hard to talk them out of attacking your friends.”

“Do you think you could?” asked Satele Shan.

“I could try. But you’d have to promise to leave and never come back.”

“I don’t think that would be possible.”

“Why not?”

“Your world is too valuable. Too many people know it exists now.”

“So? They don’t have to come here. You have the whole galaxy. I just want one world. Is that too much to ask?”

“For some it is.”

“Well, then. We’re at an impasse.”

“Yes. I’m afraid so.”

Cinzia didn’t like the way her other self was looking at her. There was such fury and hurt in those familiar features. She could never imagine looking that way, having that amazing hair.

“Why do the hexes protect you,” the other Cinzia asked, “and not me?”

“Because they don’t know you. You don’t look exactly like me, or live like me, in here. You look like one of the people who took you away.”

“I am one of the people who took me away.”

“But you’re me, too, even though you try to deny it. You don’t have to be the way you are now.”

“How else can I be? I don’t remember anything else.”

“Really?”

“Yes, really. And what’s the point of trying? The droids will kill me anyway.”

“Maybe if we gave them a taste of your genetic code. Maybe then they wouldn’t kill you.”

“So it’d just be me and you in a galaxy full of hexes. Is that what you want?”

She shook her head. “I just want everyone to go away. Everyone else, I mean. Not you. We’ve got so much to catch up on.”

“I’ve got nothing to tell you.”

“But you have! Where you live, what you do. I don’t know anything about anywhere. All I know is Sebaddon, where I was cloned. You can tell me about where I was born.”

“I don’t remember any of that,” said the other Cinzia. “All I know is the Empire.”

“The what?”

Satele Shan stared at her in frank surprise. “You’ve never heard of the Empire?”

“No. Should I have?”

“What about the Sith? The Republic? The Mandalorians?”

Cinzia shook her head in irritation. “Stop showing off. You’re making me feel stupid.”

“I’m not showing off. I’m just amazed that you’ve been so isolated here. It doesn’t seem fair to me that your mother did that to you.”

“She’s trying to turn you against me,” whispered the voice. “Be careful of that one.”

“Mother says I should be careful of you. Why is that?”

“Maybe she’s afraid I’ll take you from her. I promise I won’t try to do that, Cinzia.” Satele Shan’s face was as expressionless as someone trying very hard not to have an expression. “Is your mother with you now? In the tank?”

“Yes.”

“Is she another clone?”

“Not exactly.”

The fluid swirled around her, agitated and wild. Cinzia was pulled away from the glass, into the center of the tank.

“I said, don’t talk to them! Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

“I always listen to you, Mother.”

“But you never do as I say. I told you not to tell them about me!”

“They’d guess anyway. Why make it harder for them?”

“They won’t understand, Cinzia. You have to tell the droids to take them away. They’ll obey you this time. You know they will. When there’s a clearly defined threat, they have to act against it.”

“Just like they acted against you.”

“Yes! Even me! The logic was impeccable. I was stupid to try to fight it.”

Cinzia remembered the days leading up to that terrible moment all too well. There was no suppressing them entirely.

“I think you saw it coming, Mother. You were afraid of the droids. You gave me the overrides in the hope that they would listen to me, but I didn’t use them.” She remembered her passivity with painful keenness. Sometimes she felt bad for not intervening. “The droids are my protectors. You are my protector. I still have both. Was it wrong to do nothing?”

“I’m still here, Cinzia. That’s right. We’ll all protect you, together.”

“But what if you were right, Mother? What if the droids have grown too powerful? That means you agree with Satele Shan and shouldn’t argue against her. I should listen to her, too. Maybe I should use the overrides to stop the droids now, before it’s too late.”

“No, Cinzia, you mustn’t!”

The fluid coiled around her tighter than ever. Even though she struggled, she couldn’t get a grip on the glass.

“Mother, let me go!”

“No!”

“I can’t stand by and let innocent people be hurt. You wouldn’t have wanted that.”

“I must keep you safe!”

“But I have to—you have to—”

Thick currents closed around her throat and filled her mouth, silencing the words. She choked and coughed, unable to fill her lungs.

“Cinzia!”

The cry came from outside the tank.

Help me, she tried to shout. Save me!

With a shattering of glass and a great rush, the tank exploded. Cinzia was tossed and flung on a wave of writhing liquid. Her mother was screaming. She was screaming, too. Something hard smacked against her flesh all down her back and legs. For the first time in her life, she felt her full weight. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. The pressure around her throat eased, only to be replaced with another.

“She can’t get enough oxygen,” someone said. The sound was all wrong. So was the light. “She’s not used to breathing air.”

“What do we do?” That was the other Cinzia. “We have to keep her alive.”

Cinzia flapped weakly with one hand.

“Gene … sampler …” She pointed to the machine that would feed the other Cinzia’s genetic pattern into the hexes’ collective memory. “Promise … save …”

“We’re doing everything we can for you,” said Satele.

She shook her head. “Save … Mother …”

“She’s in the blood, right?” said the other Cinzia. “I thought she was killing you. I thought you were drowning.”

“Promise!”

“All right, all right. I promise.”

Cinzia couldn’t lift, but she could still grip. “Her daughter … her daughter …”

The other Cinzia came closer, dragged into focus by the last of her strength.

“Tell me … everything.”

THE BODY OF THE hairless, emaciated girl became still. Master Satele shook her head. Apart from the trickling and dripping of crimson fluid, the laboratory was silent.

Ax fell back onto her haunches and put her hands over her face. What had just happened? Had she been trying to kill the girl or save her? Not just any girl, of course: her own clone. Did that make it murder, suicide, or fratricide?

She suspected she would never know.

“I’m sorry,” said Master Satele, touching her lightly on the shoulder. “The shock killed her. With the right equipment, we might have—”

Ax shrugged her off and stood too quickly. Her head swam. She imagined she heard a voice from the far depths of her memory, weeping and demanding her attention. She ignored it.

The gene sampler was exactly where Cinzia had indicated it would be. Ax crossed to it and stuck her hand into its diagnostic chute. The cold machine pricked her, drank her blood, hummed to itself, and then beeped inquiringly.

Ax felt a brief moment of panic. The machine wanted confirmation of something. A password? A command phrase? A code?

She remembered everything Cinzia had said in her final moments. She’d made Ax promise to save what was left of Lema Xandret. Was there anything else she’d emphasized? Anything at all?

“ ‘Her daughter,’ ” Ax said.

The machine beeped confirmation.

“What does that mean?” she asked the room in general. “Do the hexes now think I’m her? Am I immune to them? Will they obey my orders now?”

Master Satele had no answers, and neither did anyone else. The way the fluid from the tank tugged at her ankles told her nothing she wanted to know. It had nurtured and smothered Cinzia at the same time—just like Darth Chratis had Ax herself. Cinzia had broken free the only way open to her. Ax hoped to have more options.

There was just one way to find out how the hexes would react to her.

“Let’s go get one and see what happens.”

LARIN WAS BEYOND surprise. After escaping the rain of artillery from the Paramount and riding the skyhook all the way to the equator, it was with only a mild sense of concern that she felt the structure beneath her begin to drop. What now?

Jopp echoed her confusion. “I thought this thing was taking off, and now it’s coming in to land. I wish the hexes would make up their minds.”

The skyhook lurched beneath them, and they gripped each other for support.

“This doesn’t feel like landing,” she said. “Something else—”

She didn’t finish that thought. Every hex in the structure chose that moment to let go of its neighbor, causing the whole structure to slump and sag downward. She was suddenly riding an accelerating wave of individual hexes, not one solid structure. It was like surfing, but without a board, and a sea of molten lava instead of a beach at the other end.

“Hang on!” she cried as the wave of hexes carried them downward.

Jopp clung to her arm as long as he could, but the tide inevitably swept them apart. Larin crouched down and gripped the leading edge of a single hex with all the strength of her prosthetic left hand, hoping to ride out the wave without tumbling or being crushed. The hex didn’t object. It seemed utterly passive. That surprised her, but she didn’t complain. It was just another surprise on the heels of so many.

The torrent of hexes was sufficient to fill the crater that was all that remained of the former CI site. She flinched as a mass of red fluid rose up to meet her, but it wasn’t lava at all. The bloody fluid came up to her knees, then stopped rising. She let go of the hex and found that she could stand.

Feeling like she was walking in a dream, she stepped from hex to hex toward the nearest crater wall. There was no sign of Jopp, but she did make out a figure watching her progress on the edge of the lake, waving encouragement. As she drew nearer, she recognized the forbidding black shape of Darth Chratis. It wasn’t him waving. That was the tall, slender figure standing next to him.

Her heart tripped. It was Shigar.

She increased her pace. Dream or no dream, she was going to take advantage of this development while it lasted.

SHIGAR WATCHED THE green-helmeted figure crossing the seething mass of hexes in the lake. He couldn’t be sure it was her, and he told himself not to get his hopes up. But his gut was certain. There was something about the way she moved, the slight stiffness of the figure’s left hand as it waved cheerily back.

Darth Chratis stalked away, still trying to raise the Paramount on his comlink. Thus far there had been no answer from the fleet above, even though the comms were finally beginning to clear.

Shigar walked carefully down the bank as the wading figure approached. He held out his hand, and finally caught a glimpse of the face inside the helmet. It was indeed Larin, and she was beaming. With one powerful tug, he pulled her ashore.

She flipped up her visor, and he did the same.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she said.

“Are you crying?”

“What? No. I have allergies. And what if I am? It’s been a long day.”

He embraced her. “It sure has.”

She returned the hug, but not for too long.

“What’s with the hexes?” she asked as they pulled apart.

“I don’t know,” he said. “The thing in the lake disintegrated as the skyhook arrived. I didn’t even know it was made of hexes until then. They looked confused. Now they’re not doing anything at all.”

He spoke too soon. The center of the lake boiled and bubbled. Hexes writhed as the leading edge of something large and gray emerged from the depths. Shigar put his left arm around Larin, ready to protect her behind a shield if this turned out to be a new kind of attack, but she pulled away.

“It’s a ship,” she said, hurrying back down to the lake’s edge. “Look!”

He shaded his eyes. The object did look like a starship. An older model, of Imperial make, perhaps.

The ship rolled, presenting one broad flank to the sky. A hatch opened and two figures climbed out. A strange sound swept across the surface of the lake—a clicking of metal limbs moving through thick fluid. The hexes were stirring, forming a new agglomeration.

All they made was a bridge connecting the ship to the shore. The bridge was aimed directly for Darth Chratis. He looked up as two figures began to walk toward him.

Shigar and Larin loped to join him. A handful of other figures scattered along the crater rim did the same. Shigar picked up speed when he recognized Master Satele as one of the pair that had emerged from the ship. He felt a resurgence of optimism. First Larin, and now her. Perhaps disaster had been averted after all!

Accompanying Master Satele was the Sith apprentice, Eldon Ax. Her helmet was off, exposing wild red hair and dark-rimmed eyes. Shigar was close enough to hear what she said as she approached her Master.

“I release myself from your service, Darth Chratis.”

“Nonsense,” he said with a look of startled outrage. “You are my apprentice, and so you will remain until I judge you fit to be called a Sith.”

“You will release me,” she said, coming to a halt two paces from him, “or suffer the consequences.”

He laughed. “What possible consequences can you threaten me with? Don’t tell me this pathetic Jedi has turned you.” He raised his lightsaber and adopted a ready pose. “I will kill both of you before you take a single step toward me.”

Master Satele drew her blade in response and Shigar wished he hadn’t lost his.

But Eldon Ax didn’t move. “I have not been turned,” she said. “I have simply realized how I have been used. My anger was constantly directed outward, at my mother and Dao Stryver, or inward at myself. The person I should have been most angry at was standing right beside me. My teacher. My Master. You.”

Darth Chratis grinned like a skull. “Anger leads to hate,” he said. “Hate leads to power. See how well I have taught you?”

“You have indeed taught me well. And so I release myself from your service, my lord, knowing that you never would.”

A growing sound from behind her caught Darth Chratis’s attention. The hexes were rising up in an enormous swell and flowing out of the lake. Dripping blood-like fluid, they came en masse for the huddle standing on the crater’s edge. Larin took Shigar’s arm and pulled him well out of the way. Master Satele joined them. Only Ax and her Master stood before the ghastly tide.

Lightning flashed. Darth Chratis’s lightsaber stabbed and cut. But there were too many of them for one man—even a Sith Lord—to hold them back. Ax did nothing as the swell enveloped them both.

“What’s going on?” asked Larin.

Over the noise of the hexes, Master Satele replied, “I think our young friend has discovered who she really wants to be.”

“And who is that?” Shigar asked.

With a high-pitched whine, a shuttle swooped low overhead. Master Satele looked up as the craft came around to land. It displayed Republic insignia, and was closely tailed by an Imperial counterpart. They touched down on either side of the tentacle of hexes that had lunged out of the lake.

A junior officer of the Republic jogged from the craft that had landed near them and saluted Larin. Keeping one eye closely on the swarm of hexes that had engulfed Ax and Darth Chratis, the Adarian spoke breathlessly: “We picked up the fringes of an Imperial transmission calling for an emergency evac and followed it down. Is everyone all right?”

“For the moment,” said Master Satele, guiding him away. “What’s the situation in orbit?”

“It’s hard to explain. Our comms went haywire for a while, and now all our data banks have been wiped.”

“By who?”

“I don’t know, sir. Captain Pipalidi will fill in you and Director Vii when I get you back to orbit.”

“Ula made it, too?” asked Larin.

“We have him aboard right now,” he said. “Found him drifting in a capsule, hollering for help, and picked him up on the way down. Won’t explain how he got there, but he seems healthy enough.”

“That’s good,” Larin said. “I’m glad he’s okay.”

Shigar glanced at the shuttle. Was that the envoy’s face he could see, peering out a viewport? He couldn’t tell.

“About the hexes,” the young officer ventured, glancing back over his shoulder. “I mean, is it over?”

“I don’t think so,” said Master Satele. “Not quite.”

ULA WATCHED FROM the safety of the shuttle. There was nothing stopping him from leaving his seat. He wasn’t under guard, or even under suspicion. He could have walked out at any time, and thrown himself to the hexes if he’d wanted to.

Jet’s betrayal of him still stung, though, so he stayed right where he was.

It had started to go wrong before the skyhook had collapsed. After the deflection of the Paramount’s missiles, Jet had considered throwing the Paramount itself down onto the target, in a desperate attempt to thwart the hexes’ plans. Ula had argued against it, unable to bear such a waste of human life.

“A thousand or so to save trillions,” Jet had said. “Isn’t that a fair exchange?”

“We don’t even know if it would work! And if it doesn’t, we’ll be even worse off than we are now.”

“If you’re worried about destroying an Imperial ship—”

“Do you really think I’d let that get in the way of doing the right thing?”

Only as he said the words did he realize that he meant it.

The issue had become entirely moot when the skyhook had gone down.

“Looks like someone’s found a way to do what we can’t,” said Jet. “In which case, we’re no longer needed. Out of the seat, Director Vii. It’s time for us to go our separate ways.”

The announcement had taken Ula completely by surprise. “What are you talking about? I’m staying with you.”

“No, you’re not.” Jet had produced a blaster and covered him while Clunker dragged him from the cockpit. The droid’s strength was too great to resist. “We’ve got business elsewhere.”

“Wait!” Ula had clung to the lip of the air lock. “Take me with you, please!”

Jet had shaken his head, but not without compassion. “You have to find your own place, mate, and I don’t think it’s going to be with me. Say cheerio to that lovely lady—and stop faking it, if you ever hope to have a chance with her.”

The air lock had hissed shut, explosive bolts had fired, and Ula had been flung out into the void. Had the passing shuttle not found him, he might have fallen to the planet below—or even into the black hole—but Ula didn’t suppose that Jet would have left something like that to chance.

Now he was within waving distance of Larin, and he didn’t know what to do.

The mass of hexes that had overwhelmed Darth Chratis retreated into the lake, leaving just the young Sith behind. She turned to face the lake, raised her arms above her head, and spoke to them. The hexes responded, forming new agglomerations, turning their collective mind to new tasks. Some descended back into the lake; others swarmed toward several different places on the crater wall and combined their pulses into powerful cutting lasers. Vibrations reached him even through the walls and floor of the shuttle. He saw Larin and the others shift on their feet, as though the ground was kicking beneath them, too.

Master Satele approached the young Sith. They exchanged a few words, then parted. The Grand Master returned to Larin and Shigar and the officer who had run out to meet them. Together, they hurried into the shuttle.

“Recall the rest,” she was saying as she mounted the ramp and entered the main passenger hold. “If they can’t make it here in time, send another shuttle.”

“What’s happening?” Ula asked. “What’s going on out there?”

Master Satele had already left for the cockpit.

“I don’t know,” said Larin, smiling at him. The engines whined. “But it looks like we’re leaving.”

Shigar acknowledged him with a nod, which Ula gravely returned. The Padawan looked no less battered than Larin and Master Satele. The ground war had obviously been just as grueling as that fought in the air.

The shuttle’s repulsorlifts pressed Ula back into the seat. He took one last glimpse through the window and saw the crater walls collapsing around the bloody lake. Fiery lava from the molten sea outside crashed in, burning and destroying as it came. Clouds of smoke thickened and curled, hiding the young Sith from view.

“YOU’RE GOING TO destroy them,” said Master Satele.

Ax didn’t respond. It wasn’t a question, but it demanded an answer, and she was careful to keep it to herself. The hexes were streaming downward to tear the flooded habitat to pieces. When they were done, they would break into the geothermal shafts and keep drilling until raw magma flooded in from below. What the real lava sea didn’t burn, the heat of the core would melt and turn to slag.

“What about Lema Xandret?” Master Satele pressed. “There’s not much of that amniotic fluid left, but it could be saved.”

“Do you think it should be?” Ax asked, thinking of her clone’s life in the tank, cut off from the Force, so insulated from the universe around her that she didn’t even know what the Empire was. Cinzia could have stopped the hexes at any time, but she hadn’t. Lema Xandret’s daughter reborn, and herself, mutated into a horrible echo of motherhood, were more responsible for the damage than the hexes themselves.

It was all about control, she realized now. Xandret had tried to control the cloned Cinzia, and had lost control of the hexes. Darth Chratis had tried to control Ax, but she had turned on him. Anger wasn’t enough on its own.

She could still hear her mother screaming.

“It’s not up to me to decide whether you should save her or not,” Master Satele said, “but you did promise Cinzia.”

Ax had promised many things, to herself, to Darth Chratis, to the Dark Council, and ultimately to the Emperor.

But that had been before. Before she had understood that she had choices.

You can expect no mercy from me, Master, the day our positions are reversed.

“I lied,” she said.

The Grand Master nodded. Ax didn’t know whether she understood or not. That she stopped talking was enough.

Ax stood and watched the hexes at work while the others fled. The smell of burning blood was sweet in her nostrils. The ash that gently rained on her felt soft and warm, like feathers. Slowly, the voice faded from her mind. She breathed deeply, feeling at peace. Only the constant bleating of the shuttle’s pilot disturbed her tranquillity.

She stayed as long as she could. When the ground threatened to dissolve under her and the sky lit up with shooting stars—orbital hexes, falling to their doom—she turned to leave the home her mother had made, forever.

LARIN HAD NEVER met Supreme Commander Stantorrs before, and she barely felt that she had met him now, even after half an hour of debriefing in his office. There were so many aides hurrying about bearing messages and sudden crises needing an instant decision that she rarely had his attention for more than a few seconds at a stretch. Even when she did, she found him very hard to read. Instead of watching his dour Duros face, she concentrated on his long fingers. They tapped, curled, folded, and rested in ways that, she hoped, gave her an insight into what he was thinking.

“You say you were followed there?”

“Yes, sir,” she said. “The Hutts placed a homing beacon in the Auriga Fire.”

“You knew about that before you left Hutta. I seem to recall reading about that somewhere.”

“That’s correct, sir.” This had all been in her report, and was no doubt in numerous other reports about the incident, but she let no sign of impatience slip through her guard. If he wanted to hear it from her face-to-face, so be it. He was the Supreme Commander, after all. “We thought the beacon left with Jet Nebula, but it later turned up in the capsule he used to expel Envoy Vii.”

“This ‘Jet Nebula.’ Is he a real person?”

“Yes, sir. His parents had a strange sense of humor, he says.”

“What, yes?” An aide had pressed a datapad in front of him. His left index finger stabbed at something on the screen. “That one, of course. Was Tassaa Bareesh herself present in her expedition to Sebaddon?”

“No, sir. She placed someone else in charge, a deputy called Sagrillo.”

“He’s the one who claimed ownership of the planet and declared the remaining joint forces trespassers.”

“Yes, sir. At the time, he outgunned us. His mistress was taking no chances.”

The tips of the Supreme Commander’s fingers joined to form a triangle in front of him. “I can imagine his surprise when your reinforcements turned up.”

Not just our reinforcements, she wanted to say, but the Imperials’ as well. It had only been a matter of time before everyone else arrived. The universe’s usual freakish sense of humor had ensured that they all came more or less simultaneously.

She remembered those stressful hours very well, even though she hadn’t been on the bridge with the senior officers and the negotiators. She had been down in the crew hold, exchanging stories with Hetchkee and Jopp and the others who had survived the ground assault. They had stopped to watch through the viewports as ships flashed in and out of hyperspace around the black hole. There had been several clashes, leaving wreckage to spin helplessly into the impossibly steep gravity well, and several outlier ships had fallen afoul of the jets themselves. They had waited with minds and bodies poisoned by exhaustion for the call to arms, as it surely had to come. The Republic ships left over from the original mission were going to be pulled in eventually, and every available trooper would be desperately needed.

Then suddenly it had been all behind her. The Commenor had jumped to hyperspace, leaving fresh ships and their commanders to sort out the mess. And that was the last she had seen of Sebaddon and its hexes. Every scrap of data from the campaign had been erased—by some kind of exotic electromagnetic pulse, she had been told. All that remained were confused recollections and reports like the one she had filed on returning.

Very few of them mentioned Dao Stryver. During the confusion the Mandalorian had disappeared as though into the depths of the black hole itself, never to be seen since.

“Do you believe Captain Pipalidi acted responsibly in the ensuing confrontation?” Stantorrs asked her.

Larin chose her words with care. The matter of her reenlistment and promotion was still very much undecided, and she didn’t want to jeopardize any chances that might remain.

“I think she did her best in a difficult situation, sir. No one could fault her for that.”

“The service asks of us not our best, but the best possible. Is that what Captain Pipalidi offered?”

It was the same question in different words, and Stantorrs didn’t strike Larin as a being who repeated himself very often.

“I believe so, sir. Every installation on the planet was in flames. All our troops had been evacuated. The mission had already cost the Republic more resources than it could afford, and sticking around would have squandered even more. Withdrawal was therefore the most sensible action to take.”

The Supreme Commander’s hands came to rest facedown on the desk in front of him.

“That’s good to hear, Moxla, because I’m thinking of promoting Pipalidi to colonel over some pretty stiff opposition—the kind of people who think we owe everything to the Jedi, if you can imagine—and it’s good to be backed up by the opinion of someone I can trust. I’m not wrong in thinking that I can trust you, am I, Moxla?”

He undoubtedly knew her history with the Blackstars, so there was no point prevaricating now. “Sir, you can always trust me to speak out if I think a superior officer isn’t pulling her weight.”

“That’s what I thought. And that’s exactly what I need. There’s—what? Can’t he wait?”

Another aide, this time whispering in the Supreme Commander’s ear.

“All right.” His hands rested impotently in his lap. “Well, I’ll make this brief, Moxla. The SSOs you fought with on Sebaddon—a messy bunch, but showed a lot of guts. We’re going to form a new Special Forces squad around them, and we want you to be part of it. We can’t erase your record, but we can add a commendation or two, post factum, to spruce it up a little, and change some of the wording. You’ll retain the rank you were given, brevetted of course, and have the first pick of the troops. What do you say to that?”

Surprise got the better of her tongue. “Uh, yes, sir.”

“You don’t sound particularly enthused, Lieutenant Moxla.”

It didn’t take her long to snap out of herself. Anything was better than sitting around in Coruscant’s underbelly, waiting for the ax to fall. Either outright war with the Empire was going to break out any day, or the Republic’s ability to maintain the peace on its own worlds would fail. This way, she would be right in the thick of it, where she could maybe do some good. She would be working—and if she was lucky, she might be able to bring some people she trusted absolutely along with her. Ses Jopp, for one. She snapped to attention and saluted with appropriate enthusiasm.

“You couldn’t have picked anyone better,” she said. “Give me a month, and your squad will be as polished as your desk.”

“Don’t get me started on that, Moxla,” he said with a sudden rap of his knuckles on the greel wood surface. “Nothing’s as clean as it looks.” Another aide approached, and the Supreme Commander waved her away. “Get to it, Moxla. You have my absolute confidence.”

Larin saluted again and marched for the door. Aides parted before her, watching with eyes that gave away nothing.

“How did it go?” asked Ula, meeting her in the antechamber outside and matching her pace for pace along the corridor.

“Very well, considering,” she said. “Did you have anything to do with that?”

“Unlikely,” he said. “I’ve been shifted to a portfolio in data collection.”

So he wasn’t being modest this time. “I’m sorry, Ula.”

“No, it’s okay. I found my last job a little too … stimulating.”

He smiled, and she found herself smiling along. Ula—still acting as envoy then—had looked out for her on returning to Coruscant, greasing the path to the Supreme Commander’s attention by making sure officers senior to her didn’t dismiss her out of hand, or take credit for her actions. Captain Pipalidi might have played a role in that, as well. That the captain was being promoted suggested she had Stantorrs’s ear on many things to do with Sebaddon, and Larin had certainly helped the whole affair from becoming a complete rout.

“What are you doing now?” Ula asked her.

She didn’t answer immediately, remembering how Ula had cleaned up her wounded hand on the Auriga Fire, and how pleased he’d been to see her when the shuttle had collected them from the burning world. She flexed her new fingers—a proper prosthetic at last, surgically grafted to her, indistinguishable from a real hand—and wondered who would look after him in his new role.

“I have to meet someone right now,” she said, “and then it looks like I’ll be on the move for a while. But I’d like to catch up with you when I get back.”

His smile grew wider. “I can wait.”

“That’s assuming you’ll still be around, of course.”

“The chances of me going anywhere are very slim, now.”

“Great. We can drink Reactor Cores and talk about old times.”

“I’m sure we’ll have lots more to talk about by then.”

“What, the birth and death statistics of Sector Four?”

“Just for starters.”

At the exit to the building, they stopped and looked at each other. Was it her imagination, or did he look younger, lighter, than he had before? It was probably the smile, she decided. She wanted him to stay that way when she was around.

She reached out and took his left hand in hers. Her artificial fingers squeezed lightly. When she walked away, she knew he was watching her, all the way down the steps to the plaza below.

SHIGAR WAS WAITING for her at the Cenotaph of the Innocents, pacing back and forth in front of the first bank of asaari trees. The troubled cast to his brow perfectly matched the heavy gray skies above. He was back in Jedi browns, with a new lightsaber swinging at his hip, but he seemed a completely different person from the one she had met in the old districts not so very long ago. He moved stiffly, still favoring a wound in his side. His hair, cut shorter by Darth Chratis on Sebaddon, hung limply around his face. Watching him, Larin almost regretted coming.

He glanced up as she approached. The blue clan markings on his cheeks looked faded and worn.

“You’re still in uniform. That’s a good sign.”

“Did you think they’d strip me naked and throw me onto the street?” She came to a halt in front of him.

“And now you’re smiling. Things must have gone well.”

“They did.”

“I’m pleased, Larin.”

“Well, likewise. Hello, by the way.”

“Hello. Let’s go over here.”

He led her to a stand of trees planted as a memorial to the people who had died during the Empire’s sacking of the Jedi Temple. One sapling for each victim had grown into a small forest, with grottoes and benches for people to pass a moment in contemplation. They sat side by side, close but not touching, and it seemed for a long while that Shigar wasn’t going to say anything at all. The restless branches rustled above them, moving back and forth in ways that had nothing at all to do with the wind.

“I want to ask you something,” he finally said.

“And I want to tell you something, so we’re even. Do you want to go first?”

“Not particularly, but I will if you want me to.”

“Fire away.”

“Did I do the right thing, bringing you along with me?”

That surprised her. She had been afraid that he was about to reveal that he had changed his mind and wanted to revisit the possibility of romance between them. If he had said that, she would have been forced to find words to explain the way she had felt on that front, and she doubted any such words existed. She knew exactly where those feelings had come from, but she hadn’t quite worked out what they were now. And then there was Ula, whom she definitely intended to look up when she got back.

“I guess,” she said, “it depends on what you mean by ‘right.’ ”

He grimaced. “That doesn’t really help.”

“Well, let me tell you what I was going to say, and maybe that will help. It’s this: Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Just thanks.”

“Why?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re going to make me explain it, aren’t you?”

“If it’s not too much trouble.” He managed a twitch of his lips that might have been a smile.

“It’s pretty simple, really. You came across me when things were the darkest they had ever been. I had no security, no family, no purpose—no life, really. You offered me all of those things. Relatively speaking, of course. I’d never come up against anything like the hexes before, and I’d always prided myself on keeping most of my limbs intact. But the essentials were there. We had the mission; we had roles to play. And I had you.”

She raised a hand to stop him talking over her. “I know I didn’t have you, in any possessive sense, but you represented more to me than just some guy I’d bumped into. You’re Kiffar like me, and there aren’t many of us out there now, so that made you family. And you had my back when things got tough, so that made you—made you like my squad, I guess. You were everything I’d been missing, without ever being able to say so.”

“I’m flattered,” he said.

“Don’t be,” she said. “It wasn’t really anything to do with you. Any other handsome, well-armed Kiffar would have fit the bill.” She smiled to take the sting off her words, and he smiled in return.

“I’m glad,” he said. “That makes me feel like I did do the right thing.”

“Well, think that now, but the day I’m in the Empire’s sights and out of ammo, know that you’ll be the first I blame. At least I’ll have a proper squad with me then, so that’s one box ticked.”

She was surprised by a sudden upwelling of emotion. She really was grateful, but she didn’t know how to convey it, except with a joke.

“Were you seriously thinking I wished I’d never come? Don’t you remember how I used to smell?”

“It still gives me nightmares.”

“Besides, I reckon you have a lot more to worry about now.”

He sobered. “What do you mean?”

“Well, the fact you’re wondering about what you did tells me you’ve entered a whole new world of uncertainty. Doing the right thing isn’t so easy in the real world, is it?”

He studied the grass at their feet. “No.”

“So you learn that lesson, which means you’ll probably become a proper Jedi Knight now, but in the process you come to the shocking realization that nothing will ever be black and white again. It’s all gray.”

“Not all of it,” he said. “There’s still some black.”

“But white is hard to find, right?” She put her prosthetic hand on his shoulder. “You’re a warrior now. Eventually you only see in two colors: black and red. Best get used to that, if you’re going to stay on the front line.”

“Do I have a choice?”

“Sure you do. With the life you’ve had, you’ve always had a choice.”

“Do you still think I’ve had it easy?”

“No, my friend. No.” The flash of anger in his deep green eyes had come too quickly. She worried about that. But she knew she’d said enough. It wasn’t her job to bang his head into shape. “Everyone knows Clan Konshi got a raw deal when it came to looks.”

That put the anger back in its place, where it could simmer until it found another outlet. She pitied the next person who met him on the wrong end of his lightsaber.

“I should go,” he said. “The Council must surely be finished deliberating by now.”

“That’s life in wartime,” she said. “A whole lot of waiting around between bouts of being shot at.”

“Don’t forget to duck, Larin.”

They stood and faced each other.

“Don’t you forget to keep looking for the white,” she said, putting her arms around him and giving him a quick squeeze. “It’s out there somewhere. You just have to find it.”

He nodded.

They left the Cenotaph of the Innocents by separate paths. She didn’t look back.

“HELLO, MOTHER. Sorry I’ve been out of touch for so long. Work has kept me very busy, but I’ll tell you all about that another time. Call me on Coruscant when you have the chance.”

Ula closed the line and settled back to wait. He didn’t think it would be long. After the loss of Darth Chratis, the failure of the Cinzia to amount to anything, and the erasure of the fleet’s data banks, he was sure someone would want to hear his side of the story.

What that would be he had given a great deal of thought.

His comlink bleeped, warning him the call was imminent. That was impressively fast—so fast, in fact, that it made him wonder. Ordinarily someone on Panatha would note the message, then relay the coded request up through the lines of command to Watcher Three, who would then issue orders that would filter back down the lines of command, resulting in that simple ping. Ordinarily, this process could take hours. Occasionally tens of minutes. Never seconds.

Ula looked around his apartment. It seemed smaller than he remembered, and now had a hostile cast to it as well. He would conduct a sweep later that evening in the hope of finding the bug he was now sure was there. Whether he would destroy the bug or not remained an open question.

The holoprojector flickered. He stood in front of it and blanked his face. One of the first things he had learned about espionage was that an apparent lack of emotion enhanced both the credibility of one’s reports and the illusion of authority. That, he suspected, was why he had never seen Watcher Three’s face in more than shadowy outline.

That outline appeared before him now, flickering and straining, as though coming from the other side of the universe. For all Ula knew, though, Watcher Three was on Coruscant as well, perhaps just up the road. Anything was possible. He knew of at least two other intelligence operatives who lived on his block, seeking a similar balance between easy access to the Senate and a ready escape route.

“Report,” said Watcher Three.

Ula needed to go back as far as his arrival on Hutta in order to tell the story properly. He didn’t lie once, but he told far less than the whole truth. As with all intelligence work, much was told by implication. He left Watcher Three to deduce that his rapid advancement from envoy to commander of the joint fleet had less to do with his own abilities than the need for a puppet in both positions. He also let Watcher Three decide that Darth Chratis was the person behind the second placement. Who better, after all, to place the blame on than someone who couldn’t defend himself?

“The last report Stantorrs received that I saw before being transferred,” Ula concluded, “suggested that Sebaddon’s orbit had been disturbed, leading to its imminent destruction by the black hole. Some small amounts of rare metals have been scavenged by the Republic, but Imperial attacks have kept that to a minimum. No wreckage has been recovered from any of the sites established by Lema Xandret and her fellow fugitives.”

Watcher Three didn’t divulge whether or not that accorded with reports made by Colonel Kalisch. He also didn’t mention the mysterious takeover of Kalisch’s ships or the matter of the data banks’ erasure. A computer virus propagated by the infected ships was sufficient to explain away the latter, and the colonel’s natural disinclination to admit that his ships had ever been out of his control fixed the former. Better to have a slightly botched mission on one’s record than a complete failure of command.

That didn’t surprise Ula at all. Jet Nebula had anticipated exactly this outcome. He had made the fleet do what it needed to do, knowing full well that his role in events would never be recorded. The only weak link in his wild plan had been Ula himself. Anyone less confident, less sure of himself, would have killed Ula out of hand, for fear of his secret getting out. But Jet had let him live. And now Ula would repay that favor the only way he could, by making sure that both sides believed the fake version of how things had played out over Sebaddon.

It wasn’t a complete whitewash, of course. Troopers would be telling wild stories about Sebaddon for years, as troopers always did, when wild stories were demanded. No one would believe them, though. And there the matter would finally rest.

“What of the Mandalorian?” Watcher Three asked.

“Gone. He left long before reinforcements arrived. Once the hexes were on the run, he presumably had no interest in the outcome of the battle.”

“Why invest so much in tracking the Cinzia to its source and then play no role in what happens? That doesn’t make sense.”

“He was just one Mandalorian who happened to be personally involved, remember. A raider operating on little more than his own initiative. Xandret might have hoped for some kind of alliance with the Mandalore, but it’s clear he was no more than idly interested. Had he believed the hexes truly remarkable, he would’ve sent more than Stryver to deal with them.”

“And they weren’t remarkable?”

“I leave that for more qualified people than me to decide,” Ula said, safe in the knowledge that Watcher Three would have a markedly vague intelligence on that score. Again, Colonel Kalisch wouldn’t want to be remembered for being routed by a gaggle of droids. Better instead to paint his early losses as the result of a Republic ambush, and minimize all involvement by the hexes, as Captain Pipalidi had. None of the surviving records would contradict either story, thanks to Jet.

Sometimes the smuggler’s brilliance overwhelmed Ula, along with his utter gall. Where was he now? Ula would’ve given his left hand to know.

“The minister is displeased by your demotion,” Watcher Three said. “You are to make every effort to regain your former post.”

Now, that was interesting. Not only was it a completely unreasonable demand, that Ula should have betrayed the Republic while at the same time keeping his position under the Supreme Commander, but the urgency with which they expected him to get back into Stantorrs’s good books suggested that there were no other operatives in that department. Ula would bear that in mind in his future dealings with both sides.

“Yes, sir. I will keep you informed on my progress.”

“Dismissed.”

The holoprojector emptied.

Ula didn’t move.

Before he had counted to ten, a new face appeared before him.

“Hello, Ula,” said Shullis Khamarr, Minister of Logistics. “It’s been a long time. I was becoming concerned.”

Once, Ula would have been struck dumb by this unprompted overture. In their previous dealings, he had invariably been the supplicant. For her to call him out of the blue bespoke a considerable alteration of their dynamic.

“My apologies, Minister, on many accounts. The search for the world I told you about did not go well, and the resources I had hoped to provide the Empire went unrealized. I can only assure you that the enemy did not get the better of us.”

“Well, that’s something. I hope you are not too disappointed.”

“No, Minister. My role here will be much reduced, but I am sure others will rise to take my place.”

“There will be others, yes. None like you, though.” She smiled. “I have always admired your passion and found our conversations to be thought provoking.”

“Minister, on that matter, I fear—”

“Yes, Ula?”

“I fear I may have been mistaken in my former opinions.”

Her smile slipped away. “How so?”

This was the one lie he allowed himself to tell. “During the course of my mission, I worked closely with Darth Chratis and his apprentice, and their actions persuaded me to reconsider the prejudices I held regarding them. I see now how foolish I was to dismiss them so readily. They are crucial to the war effort, and integral to the proper functioning of the Empire.”

The guarded cast to her face eased. “I’ll confess to being relieved, Ula. It was a dangerous heresy you had embraced. Well meant, naturally, but not one that can be tolerated at any level of governance.”

“I see that now. You were very forgiving, Minister.”

“Nonsense, Ula. We are friends, and friends forgive much.”

He wondered if part of her was disappointed. There must have been some advantage—even if merely psychological—to having a private informant intent on maintaining her own advancement. If so, she hid it well.

I am tired of seducing you to my way of thinking, Shullis Khamarr, he said to himself, thinking of Larin and Shigar, who had both rescued him from terrible fates, and the calm stoicism of the Grand Master, Satele Shan. The survivors of Sebaddon would be changed forever by what had happened to them there, and he was no different. I am persuaded that there is more to governance than just rules, laws, and discipline. A culture must have a heart, too. A strong heart that never falters.

“Thank you, Minister,” he said, and offered her a respectful bow.

She concluded their conversation with a hollow platitude, and signed off. Ula wondered if he would ever speak to her again. Probably not. Friendships of any kind were difficult to maintain in the intelligence business, all the more so when one had been demoted.

In the coming weeks he would consider the benefits of playing both sides against the other, attempting to juggle the interplay between them as Jet had. He didn’t have access to an army of unstoppable hexes or a droid that could take over entire fleets, but he was coming to believe that maybe the end did justify the means, sometimes. If he could guide the Empire and the Republic away from war, or at least spare their citizens the worst of their excesses, then that could be a good thing—and a real thing, not fake like everything he had tried before. He would be on his own side, at last, as Larin had been when she had been discharged from special forces—on the side of the trillions of ordinary people trapped in a warring galaxy.

He stood in his tiny apartment and considered his next move. Search for that bug? Draft a coded message for the Ithorian he had spoken to in Strategic Information Systems? Sleep?

Ula didn’t know just yet, which in itself was a pleasing thing.

The walls might be closing in around him, but his horizons were broader now than ever. Even Coruscant didn’t seem as cursed as it once had. Larin was back in the special forces. Satisfaction fairly glowed from her face when she talked about the future. We can drink Reactor Cores and talk about old times. No mention of Shigar, or any of the other survivors of Sebaddon.

That, at least, gave him something to look forward to.

AFTER HOURS OF WAITING, Shigar’s moment had come.

“We find you ready for the trials, Shigar Konshi,” said Master Nobil. “You will be unsurprised, I think, to learn that mastering your psychometric powers was only the smallest part of your journey.”

Shigar wasn’t surprised, but at the same time he couldn’t hide his relief. He bowed deeply before the holographic images of the High Council members, many of whom he had yet to meet in person: brooding Wens Aleusis, brilliant Giffis Fane, young Oric Traless, the newest member of the Council …

“Thank you, Masters,” he said. “I’m sure I won’t disappoint you.”

“Tell me how you resolved your agreement with Tassaa Bareesh,” Master Nobil said. “That was not mentioned in your debriefing session.”

“I’m afraid it remains unresolved,” he said. “The agreement was expedient at the time, but it was always likely to become a liability. She used a homing beacon to find the world herself, so I have no qualms about allowing the Republic there first. She can claim no disadvantage, since the world itself has fallen to no one.”

“There’s the damage to her palace on Hutta,” said Master Fane, “and the very public loss of face. Suudaa Nem’ro must be rubbing his hands with glee.”

“And there must be ramifications for dishonoring her, no doubt.”

“Yes, Master Nobil. I believe there is a price on my head.”

“We’ve all had one of those, at one time or another,” said Master Traless with a wry smile. “Don’t lose any sleep over it, but do keep an eye out.”

“Thank you, Master. I will.”

Shigar knew what they were trying to say. Don’t expect to play this game without breaking the rules. You’ve done it once, and you’ll do it again. Get used to it. It was Larin all over again.

The squabbling of Hutt crime lords didn’t worry him in the slightest. He had much bigger concerns.

“May I address the Council freely?” he asked.

“I think you should,” said Grand Master Shan, the first time she had spoken during the discussion. He had almost forgotten she was there, standing quietly in the corner of the audience chamber they had requisitioned. “There’s been something on your mind ever since Sebaddon.”

“It’s true, Master. I’m not sure where to start.”

“Start with what pains you the most.”

He had never thought of his new understanding as painful, but he saw that it was true. It burned in his chest like fire.

“So many people have died,” he said, “for nothing. Don’t tell me that this is what it’s like in wartime, because officially we’re not at war. Xandret and her hexes weren’t our enemy; Darth Chratis was in fact our ally for a while. Yet they are all dead. I see no sense to it.”

“Go on,” said Master Nobil.

He tried to explain himself clearly. “This whole affair is endemic to the current crisis. The Sith are on the rise. We are on the wane. The Mandalorians and the Hutts stand between us, creating confusion and jostling for advantage. Our options are limited. If we do nothing, millions of people die. If we fight back, we engage with them at their level.”

“Tell us your solution, Shigar,” said Master Traless.

“Attack now. The war is coming—we all know it—so why sit on our hands waiting for the Emperor to make his move? Preempt him before he has a chance to consolidate his power any further. Use the element of surprise while we have it. Don’t expend lives for nothing.”

“The owners of those lives might question the necessity of it,” said Master Nobil. “There is much talk of how we caused the current misfortune by making enemies of the Sith in the first place. Starting a war now would not ease those misgivings.”

“When we’ve won the war, people will see the necessity for it.”

“And if we lose?” asked Master Fane.

“We must not,” Shigar said. “We cannot. And we will not if we act quickly enough. With every day the Emperor grows stronger and we grow weaker. How many spies and traitors erode the fortresses we’ve built around ourselves? How many fruitless battles must we fight before everyone in the Republic deserts us? How many other Sebaddons are out there, waiting for us? The next one might be the one that finishes us.”

“Our mission is to promote peace,” said Master Nobil. “Have you forgotten that?”

“Never, Master. But there are degrees of war, just as there are degrees of peace. An early strike might spare the galaxy from total war.”

“But at what cost? Remember, Shigar, when you used to argue for justice for the billions of ordinary people, caught between the two sides in this conflict? If we act now, their deaths will be laid at our door. Do you want that on your conscience, my young warmonger?”

“No, Master. That is, I don’t—I just—” He looked down at his hands, so startlingly unburned after holding so much power on Sebaddon. If he could do it, why couldn’t the Jedi Council? That was the one lesson Darth Chratis had taught him. “I just think it’s worth considering.”

“We have considered it,” said Master Fane. “And we will continue to consider it until the proper solution presents itself.”

“You’re not the only one who feels this way,” said Master Traless, leaning forward. “We have a thousand young Jedi just waiting—”

He might have said more, but a glance from Master Nobil stilled his tongue.

“Your passion is undiminished, young Shigar. You must take care that it never rules your head. Thank you for your opinions. Come to Tython and finish what you started. When you are fully installed as a Jedi Knight, then you may play your part more fully in the times to come.”

But what is my part?

He let those words sit silently on his tongue as, one by one, the images of the Jedi High Councilors flickered and disappeared.

“We will go together,” Grand Master Shan told him. “The trials are difficult. Many try and fail, so I advise you not to be complacent.”

Her face was unreadable.

“I’m sorry if I’ve displeased you, Master,” he said.

“You haven’t displeased me at all, Shigar. I am simply tired. Like you, I wish a speedy resolution to these times.”

“But not through war.”

“Not if it can be avoided, no. I understand that you don’t see it this way, though. You are a product of your time.”

He started, recognizing her words from the vision he’d had on Sebaddon.

“I know what you’re about to say,” he said. “I’ve seen it. You’re about to tell me that I must confront the times ahead with great care. But I’ve already said that, so now maybe you won’t.”

She smiled. “It’s disconcerting when what you’ve seen doesn’t quite turn out the way it’s supposed to.”

That was true. The conversation had already headed off in a different direction, thanks to his intervention. Next she was supposed to warn him that the Sith were the enemy and that he shouldn’t become like them in order to beat them.

“So the future isn’t always laid in stone?”

“No, and I am glad of that sometimes, Shigar.” She put a hand on his shoulder and guided him toward the door. “You will learn to be, too, I think.”

She did seem tired. He wished there was something he could do to make her feel better. But how could he, a lowly Padawan, understand or even begin to shoulder the heavy load she was under?

Again, a spark of predestination told him that he was brushing closely against something seen in the past.

Be kind, Shigar.

Had she meant herself all along? Had all his agonizing about Larin been for nothing?

Then another thought occurred to him.

Some roads are harder than yours have been.

Were the words so far left unspoken for him to consider now?

She was talking about him.

As they left the audience chamber, he decided that it was okay to feel torn. In fact, he should get used to it. There were serious challenges to come, whether the High Councilors succeeded with their diplomatic efforts or not. In a universe that demanded black and white, he would settle for gray.

And when he passed his trials, he would talk to Master Traless in private. If a thousand Jedi Knights really felt as he did, there would be hope when diplomacy failed.

DARTH HOWL, Dark Lord of the Sith, was less imposing on second meeting than he had been the first time. He wore a black uniform lacking both insignias and trophies, and Ax interpreted that to mean he wasn’t out to impress. That he had asked to meet her in private, on his personal hunting range on Dromund Kaas, she took as a mixed sign.

“Pick a rifle,” he said, indicating an extensive collection lining the wall of his study. “Follow me onto the deck.”

Ax selected an antique weapon with a stock made of bone. Its charge was full and its sights, perfectly aligned. She bet herself Darth Howl kept them all that way, and not just for show.

She was right. The “deck” was an extensive viewing platform overlooking dense, tropical terrain that had been cleared in patches, allowing an unobstructed line of sight to the undergrowth. The sun was at its zenith above the clouds. Conditions were as good as they would ever be on the Imperial capital.

Darth Howl rang a bell. Somewhere in the trees, a cage door rattled open. “I brought you here, Eldon Ax,” he said as he raised his own rifle to scope the range, “so you could explain to me how you killed Darth Chratis.”

She froze. How did he know? She had told no one, and she was sure none of the troopers on Sebaddon would have understood what had happened that day. The hexes had killed so many people. Darth Chratis had been just one of them.

Darth Howl’s rifle emitted a sharp, high-pitched crack, making her jump. Something cried out in the trees below.

The Dark Lord glanced at her and offered her an eerie, sharp-toothed smile.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “As long as you’re up here, you’ll be fine.”

She wondered how long that good fortune would last.

“What makes you think I killed him, my lord?”

“Whenever a former apprentice returns without her Master, the question asks itself. It’s something of a tradition, although not one you’ll hear spoken of much. First you survive the Academy; then you have to survive your Master. That’s how I earned my reputation, and I presume that’s how you plan to do it, too. The question is: how?”

The rifle cracked again.

“If you don’t fire soon, young Ax, I’ll be forced to assume you’ve lost your nerve.”

Ax did as she was told, raising the rifle and holding it steady against the ball of her shoulder. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d fired a blaster of any kind. Certainly not since building her first lightsaber.

She scanned the foliage through the scope. When a fluffy, dark-eyed head peered warily out from cover, she took a shot at it. The rifle produced an odd whining twang but launched an impressive bolt of bright green energy in the right direction. The terrified creature exploded into a ball of flaming fur.

“I used the hexes,” she told Howl, appropriately satisfied, as she lined up for another shot.

“How did you get them to do your bidding?”

“It’s, uh, hard to explain.”

“I’ve not brought you here to make life easy for you.” Another shot from his rifle; another squawk below. “You’ve already told us about the remnant of Lema Xandret present in all the droids. What did you call it, again?”

“The amnioid.”

“Yes. You mentioned in your report that you and the Jedi Grand Master were both able to influence the hexes, thanks to the amnioid. I didn’t realize that you were able to do so to such an overwhelming degree.”

“That wasn’t how I did it.”

Her second shot missed. He was beating her three kills to one.

“Be assured, young Ax, that I’ll get it out of you one way or another.”

There was no denying the threat now. She sought the same steely strength Satele Shan had demonstrated on Sebaddon.

“There was something I omitted from the report, my lord,” she said. “The amnioid didn’t exist solely to control the hexes. It was designed also—mainly, perhaps—to sustain a child in a Force-free bacta tank. She was Xandret’s child. A clone.”

“Of you?”

Ax wouldn’t use the word me. She refused to. “Her name was Cinzia. She believed that I was her.”

“You talked to her?”

“Yes.”

“Then you killed her?”

“No, but I might have. The Grand Master released her when the amnioid tried to smother her. She died upon exposure to air.”

They both fired. At the very same time a bolt of lightning shattered the gloomy sky into a thousand jagged pieces. The synchronicity was unintended but impressive.

“When the hexes weren’t operating independently,” she went on, “they obeyed Cinzia, not the amnioid. Because we possessed identical genetic codes, they also obeyed me. It was easy to make them turn on Darth Chratis.”

“And of course that was necessary. You couldn’t have killed him on your own.”

“No.” It burned her to admit it, but that was the truth, and this seemed like a moment when only the truth would suffice. Darth Howl’s game was utterly unlike any Darth Chratis would have played. She was learning the rules as she went along.

“The omission of the clone from your report,” he said, “was premeditated, deliberate, and dangerous. The Dark Council disapproves of anything that smacks of disloyalty—or of emotional attachment to anything other than the Council itself.”

“I felt no kinship with the clone, my lord,” she said.

“None at all?”

She struggled to find words for the emotions that still stirred her when she thought of the pathetic creature in the tank. “Lema Xandret refused to let her daughter go, so she created a new one, whom she imprisoned. She refused to be controlled, yet she herself was possessive and controlling. What imprisonment might she have fashioned for me had I not been rescued from her by Darth Chratis? Was that why my memories of her have been so easy to suppress? The only thing stirred up in the entire affair was a recollection of her screaming. I think, in short,” she concluded, “that I had a lucky escape. And the clone, too, in the end.”

“Did you order the hexes to commit suicide?”

“That I didn’t do,” she said, “but I probably could have ordered them not to.”

He nodded. “It was the amnioid, then.”

“This time, yes. Lema Xandret lost her daughter twice. There was nothing else to live for. Not even revenge.”

“So instead of becoming their master, you let them die.” Darth Howl lowered his rifle and fixed her with an obsidian stare. “Some might find it puzzling that you did not use the hexes to fulfill your vendetta against Dao Stryver, and then go on to conquer the galaxy.”

“Yes.” I could have been Emperor! “The thought did occur to me. But the Mandalorian had already escaped by then, and I remain loyal to the Dark Council.”

“Some might say that your exposure to the Grand Master of the Jedi addled your thoughts. Some might use this as an argument to never trust you again.”

“I don’t care what people say.”

“You only need to worry about what the Dark Council decides to do about you.”

“I met with them yesterday. They—you said—”

“Many things are said, Ax, and many things are done. They are not always the same.”

She knew it. “So are you going to have me killed?”

He laughed at her, and raised the rifle. Another shot; another scream of pain.

“That depends entirely on how you spin it,” he said. “Were the fugitives punished?”

The fate of her mother and the clone left her in no doubt on that score. “Undoubtedly.”

“Did the planet fall into the Republic’s hands?”

“No.”

“So you survived where your Master did not, and you returned with valuable intel. You are strong and determined, like your mother. You deserve nothing but admiration, and a close eye.

“If anyone does learn the secret about the hexes, the explanation is simple. Your loyalty to the Emperor is such that you would never attempt to unseat him. Note that I said ‘Emperor,’ not the Dark Council. It’s a Sith’s job to try to unseat us. That’s why we have to keep a close eye on you. Fire the gun.”

Ax closed one eye and stilled her hammering heart. Perhaps she would survive after all.

The creature in her sights did not survive, and neither did two more that came to investigate.

She wasn’t going to tell Darth Howl that the only reason she had not spared the hexes was because trying to control them would have undoubtedly backfired. Riddled with the twisted spirit of her mother, the hexes would have turned on her eventually, and she would have ended up as trapped as her clone. Far from becoming Emperor, she would have been a bitter princess in a cage, shouting for help at an empty galaxy.

Better that it all disappear into a black hole, literally and metaphorically, and she get on with her life. Her life. However much of it she had left.

“Why did you invite me here?” she asked. “It wasn’t to grill me on my report or to offer me advice.”

“True. You are young and inexperienced, but you are observant, and you survived this crisis unscathed. Perhaps you are hiding your true feelings well, or you are more resilient than you look. Either way, you can be useful to me. I brought you here to offer you an alliance.”

Ax didn’t even see what lay down her sights. “What kind of alliance?”

“One considerably more to your advantage than the last one. Darth Chratis deserved what came to him. His methods were unreliable, his philosophies dangerous, and his ambition unchecked. It was therefore inevitable that he would fall. The only question was: how far would you fall with him?”

She didn’t answer.

Darth Howl’s teeth gleamed faintly in the night. “Darth Chratis failed you, just as my last apprentice failed me. It’s time to look beyond failure and see the successes awaiting you and I. With my power and your potential, can you imagine what we might accomplish together? We might shake the Supreme Chancellor from his seat, and earn rewards beyond our wildest dreams!”

She wasn’t thinking that far ahead. All she had in mind was how useful it would be to have a Master actually on the Dark Council, not just dreaming about it.

“What happened to your last apprentice?”

“She liked to keep pets,” he said, taking aim and dispatching another hapless furball down below. “And now I keep her in the observation dome directly above our heads. She loves it when I entertain guests.”

His smile was cold and vicious, and something about it thrilled Ax to her core. Darth Howl needed her, and she needed him. There was no shame in admitting it. There were bigger games to play now.

Dao Stryver could wait. When she needed to feel anger in its purest form, he would be there, ready to inspire her. It didn’t matter where he was or what he was doing. The longer her vow remained unfulfilled, the greater her anger would become. The end justifies the means, as he himself had said.

“I would be honored, my lord.”

“Good. And I will accept you as my student. You will put the messy business of your mother behind us and we’ll both look forward to slaughtering the Jedi scum in their beds. And, most important …”

He winked like the chopping of a guillotine.

“Most important of all, my young apprentice, we will both watch our backs.”

THERE WAS NO SHORTAGE of cantinas on Tatooine, nor of cantina brawls. Akshae Shanka had come in second in yet another combat tournament, and emotions were running high. There had been riots around the arena, and several full-blown shoot-outs had rivaled those of the contest itself.

Dao Stryver wasn’t there to fight, however.

From the shadowy depths of the Wing and Wanderer, the Mandalorian watched the arrival of the human who called himself “Jet Nebula” with a keen eye.

The smuggler had a sandy air, as most people did on the desiccated planet. His gray hair was as wild and his uniform as spaceworn as ever. The droid trailing him had earned a couple of extra dents in his travels since Sebaddon. But they looked much as Stryver had expected. They were watchful in a way that older warriors learned to be.

“Jet Nebula” looked around the bar, saw the impassive Gektl sitting alone, and performed a subtle double take.

Then he held up two fingers to the bartender, who chattered confirmation, and he and the droid pressed through the dusty crowd.

“Fancy meeting you here.”

“You recognize me?”

“Dao Stryver, in the flesh. You looked better with your helmet on.”

Stryver showed teeth in a way that might have been mistaken for a smile. “In my culture, this expression is considered a challenge.”

“Come on. I know you can take a joke.” He pulled up a chair. “Besides, you’re obviously waiting for me. I reckon I’m safe at least until you tell me what you want.”

“I’ve come for the droid.”

Nebula raised an eyebrow. “He’s not for sale.”

“I’m not offering you money.”

Two tiny glasses clunked down between them. Stryver made no move to pay, and neither did he. He obviously had a tab.

“Good fortune in battle,” Nebula toasted. “May all your eggspawn hatch as soldiers.”

“You know about that, too?”

“I’ve got a good sense of smell. And I transported some life-paintings from Hoszh Iszhir once. You’ve a nice planet, there, if you breathe poisonous gas.”

Stryver raised the other glass and tipped the fiery liquid down her throat.

“I was wrong to take you for granted,” she said.

“It’s not your fault. I go out of my way to give a certain impression.”

“I am not apologizing. I am offering you a compliment. Few deceive me.”

“We both have our masks. Do you keep your tail trimmed to fit into that armor or have you had it permanently removed?”

She shook her head, unwilling to be deflected. “I’ve been looking for you ever since the Sebaddon affair.”

“I’m gratified it’s taken you so long to find me.”

“The word on the grapevine is that you have been shopping technical data to the black market. What kind of data?”

He shrugged. “Everything I had on the hexes, which wasn’t much. Chemical analyses, video footage, a sample of their subspace code. I sold it as a job lot to a character called Shavak. Don’t worry: there’s nowhere near enough for him or anyone else to rebuild them.”

She let him believe that this was her concern—if he did in fact believe it. He was a man of many masks. In Tassaa Bareesh’s palace he had been careful not to play things too smart lest he be considered a threat, while at the same time he was reinforcing his value as the man who found the Cinzia, and who might find other bounties like it, in order to avoid being conveniently disappeared. While the Hutts had been watching the envoys, the smuggler in their midst had kept his eyes and ears carefully open.

In the same way, he had pulled the strings of the Republic’s puppet envoy, making certain the Xandret affair ended to his advantage. He might be doing much the same thing right now.

“You know, I’d make an excellent Mandalorian,” Nebula said, “were I that way inclined.”

Stryver stiffened in her seat, resisting the urge to reach across the table and tear his puny head right off.

“Explain,” she growled.

“We both have a sense of irony.” He signaled at the bartender for another round of drinks. “And our goals are the same. I mean, seriously. You engineered the whole Sebaddon thing from the start, right? You gave Xandret coordinates for a meeting that would take her through privateer-infested space. You knew where the ship would end up once it was caught, and what the Hutts would probably do with it. Then you hopped around the Empire and the Republic, escalating the situation. You wanted people to think that you were chasing the Cinzia to stop it from falling into anyone else’s hands, but in fact you were doing the exact opposite. That’s why you didn’t kill any of the players you came across. You wanted a fight over the hexes just as much as you wanted to erase your own involvement in it.”

The drinks came. Stryver let hers sit untouched on the table as Nebula went on.

“You were testing the Empire’s and the Republic’s responses to the hexes. You wanted to see who has the edge, these days. Has the Republic recovered from the near-beating you gave them a decade ago? Has the Empire grown strong enough to be considered a serious contender in your next campaign? I’d say the results were tied, which suits me. What do you think? Who’s Mandalore going to fight next, when he gets tired of working for everyone else? That’s the question I bet every Jedi and Sith would like answered right now.”

He skulled the contents of his glass without taking his eyes off her.

She was careful not to give him an answer. “Where does the irony come into it?”

“We have no leader. Do you remember that? I’m sure you do, and I’m sure it struck a chord. Your kind is of a fairly individualistic bent, as is mine. We sympathize with Lema Xandret’s desire to follow her own path, even if we don’t share her methodology. After all, we don’t have the army of droids that allowed her political indulgences—an army that was probably more about building and terraforming originally than fighting anyone, until we showed up. And that’s where the irony lies.

“The Emperor certainly didn’t endorse Xandret’s egalitarian aspirations, and I’m positive the Supreme Chancellor would have disapproved, too. Empires and Republics dislike those with the capacity to overturn their regimes. In that sense, our two squabbling friends are more alike than they prefer to think—and Xandret’s political meme might have been even more dangerous than her hexes, had it escaped.”

Stryver nodded, thinking of the stratified hierarchies, bureaucracies, and underclasses she had witnessed in both Empire and Republic, all foaming with discontent, not all of it brought about by the cold war that had existed for more than a decade now. It wasn’t impossible to imagine either regime being overturned by rebellion from within.

Just as dangerous, however—and far more important—was the possibility that the two rival factions might one day unite against a common enemy, as they had against the hexes. Keeping the two at each other’s throats was therefore vital, from a Mandalorian perspective.

“Are you nodding off,” Jet asked, “or agreeing with me?”

Stryver focused her thoughts. “I am thinking that the most dangerous thing in the galaxy is an ambitious serf.”

“As every exploitative regime discovers to its cost, when those who do the work decide they want to keep the profits for themselves.”

“What would happen if droids ever came to the same decision?”

“It would mean the end of civilization as we know it. Luckily, the hexes weren’t ambitious per se—just badly programmed.”

“I’m not talking about the hexes. I’m talking about Clunker.”

Nebula showed enough teeth to suggest that his smile might be a threat, too. “Don’t you think we’d already be his slaves, if that’s what he wanted?”

“You tell me what he wants. What motivates a machine that can take over Imperial and Republic ships at will, and then just run away?”

“Not power or glory, obviously. Or profit, otherwise I’d be a trillionaire. Sometimes he does what I ask him to, and sometimes he doesn’t, so it’s not about obeying me. To be honest, I’ve been trying to figure him out for years and maybe no closer to the answer than I was when I started.”

“You didn’t make him like this?”

“Not a chance. He was a mistake, some kind of factory error, and he’d been scheduled for melting when I found him. His brain had a reset problem, apparently. Every few minutes, he’d shut down and lose his memory. A droid with no capacity for storing incriminating evidence appealed to me, so I nicked him and patched him up as best I could. These days, he can manage days at a time without flatlining, but it still happens. The only things he remembers are me and the ship, I guess because we were where his life really started.”

Stryver peered up at the stationary droid. “So he won’t remember Sebaddon and what happened there?”

“No. He’s reset four times since then. I’ve come to think it’s all connected—like his thoughts get too big for his brain to handle, so it shuts itself down periodically to stop him going crazy. After all, what could be worse than a droid with ambition, as you put it? You’ve seen what people do to them when they get ideas.”

“And with good reason, when it came to the hexes.”

“Clunker is no hex. He’s just a damaged droid struggling to cope in a big, bad universe.”

“Then perhaps the time has come to relieve him of his burden.”

“I advise against trying.”

“I advise against resisting, Jeke Kerron.” Something hardened in his eyes. Stryver stood and reached for her carbonizer.

She was never entirely sure what happened next.

Clunker moved. That was expected. She had planned for that. But the attack didn’t come from his direction. It came from four other angles simultaneously and she was flung back into her seat by convergent energy pulses. Her suit sparked and smoked; her limbs shook. For a potentially fatal moment, her vision grayed out into nothing.

Then she recovered, and the crowded cantina was exactly as it had been—except that the smuggler and his droid were gone.

“Better drink up,” the bartender chittered, indicating the glass still sitting before her. “He asked us not to kick you out immediately, but there’s a limit to my generosity.”

“He asked—?” She snapped her mouth shut as her brain caught up. He had been coming here for days. That was how she had found him. She had thought him wasting money on fellow gamblers and lowlifes, when in actual fact he had been preparing a trap. For her.

The crowd studiously avoided her challenging stare.

Stryver laughed on the inside, profoundly pleased on two points.

One: she was still alive.

Two: it was good to have a worthy adversary.

Dao Stryver had come a long way from her pit fighting days, when a young Gektl’s life was cheap and expected to last not even a single week. She had accrued considerable glory since then, and considered herself the living embodiment of the Mandalorian creed. War was fought by individuals, not by Emperors and politicians. Battles were decided by people whose names might never be recorded in history. But the point wasn’t history, or even who won. Anyone who strove hard enough could become a hero. That was the point.

Her enemy understood. It was important to her that he did. She had traced his history backward from captain to first officer of a very different vessel, where the trail had ended. But the captain of that ship, Jeke Kerron, had had a reputation for being entirely too smart for his own good. He had made enemies among several cartels and ultimately disappeared. It was a simple leap to wonder if one had taken the place of the other.

They might never be on the same side again, Stryver thought, but at least from now on they would be playing the same game.

She downed the liquor and shouldered her way out of the Wing and Wanderer, into the dry glare of Tatooine. With her helmet back in place, she was just another Mandalorian, one among many on the gladiatorial world. She would search every spaceport in the city as a matter of course, even though she suspected the Auriga Fire would slip through her fingers once more. Then she would report to the Mandalore. If required to do so, she would hunt her enemy to the ends of the galaxy, and she would be ready for him when they met again. If not, she would go back to studying the Empire and the Republic, safe in the knowledge that there would soon be glory enough for everyone.

War was coming. The certainty of it warmed her warrior’s soul.

She raised her eyes to stare at the sun and wished the man who called himself “Jet Nebula” good fortune in battle.

For Kevin and Rebecca: friends, teachers, fellow explorers.

With thanks to Shelly, Frank, Daniel, and both Robs for showing me the way.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2011 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM where indicated.

All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

Used Under Authorization.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Jacket design and illustration by ATTIK
eISBN: 978-0-345-52988-6
www.starwars.com
www.starwarstheoldrepublic.com
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v3.1_r5

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Deceived

Title Page

Copyright

Dramatis Personae

Day One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Day Two
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Day Three
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen

Epilogue

Dedication

Acknowledgments

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Adraas; Sith Lord (human male)

Angral; Sith Lord (human male)

Arra Yooms; child (human female)

Aryn Leneer; Jedi Knight (human female)

Eleena; servant (Twi’lek female)

Malgus; Sith Lord (human male)

Ven Zallow; Jedi Master (male, species unknown)

Vrath Xizor; mercenary (human male)

Zeerid Korr; smuggler (human male)

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.…

Fatman shivered, her metal groaning, as Zeerid pushed her through Ord Mantell’s atmosphere. Friction turned the air to fire, and Zeerid watched the orange glow of the flames through the transparisteel of the freighter’s cockpit.

He was gripping the stick too tightly, he realized, and relaxed.

He hated atmosphere entries, always had, the long forty-count when heat, speed, and ionized particles caused a temporary sensor blackout. He never knew what kind of sky he’d encounter when he came out of the dark. Back when he’d carted Havoc Squadron commandos in a Republic gully jumper, he and his fellow pilots had likened the blackout to diving blind off a seaside cliff.

You always hope to hit deep water, they’d say. But sooner or later the tide goes out and you go hard into rock.

Or hard into a blistering crossfire. Didn’t matter, really. The effect would be the same.

“Coming out of the dark,” he said as the flame diminished and the sky opened below.

No one acknowledged the words. He flew Fatman alone, worked alone. The only things he carted anymore were weapons for The Exchange. He had his reasons, but he tried hard not to think too hard about what he was doing.

He leveled the ship off, straightened, and ran a quick sweep of the surrounding sky. The sensors picked up nothing.

“Deep water and it feels fine,” he said, smiling.

On most planets, the moment he cleared the atmosphere he’d have been busy dodging interdiction by the planetary government. But not on Ord Mantell. The planet was a hive of crime syndicates, mercenaries, bounty hunters, smugglers, weapons dealers, and spicerunners.

And those were just the people who ran the place.

Factional wars and assassinations occupied their attention, not governance, and certainly not law enforcement. The upper and lower latitudes of the planet in particular were sparsely settled and almost never patrolled, a literal no-being’s-land. Zeerid would have been surprised if the government had survsats running orbits over the area.

And all that suited him fine.

Fatman broke through a thick pink blanket of clouds, and the brown, blue, and white of Ord Mantell’s northern hemisphere filled out Zeerid’s field of vision. Snow and ice peppered the canopy, frozen shrapnel, beating a steady rhythm on Fatman’s hull. The setting sun suffused a large swath of the world with orange and red. The northern sea roiled below him, choppy and dark, the irregular white circles of breaking surf denoting the thousands of uncharted islands that poked through the water’s surface. To the west, far in the distance, he could make out the hazy edge of a continent and the thin spine of snowcapped, cloud-topped mountains that ran along its north–south axis.

Motion drew his eye. A flock of leatherwings, too small to cause a sensor blip, flew two hundred meters to starboard and well below him, the tents of their huge, membranous wings flapping slowly in the freezing wind, the arc of the flock like a parenthesis. They were heading south for warmer air and paid him no heed as he flew over and past them, their dull, black eyes blinking against the snow and ice.

He pulled back on the ion engines and slowed still further. A yawn forced itself past his teeth. He sat up straight and tried to blink away the fatigue, but it was as stubborn as an angry bantha. He’d given the ship to the autopilot and dozed during the hyperspace run from Vulta, but that was all the rack he’d had in the last two standard days. It was catching up to him.

He scratched at the stubble of his beard, rubbed the back of his neck, and plugged the drop coordinates into the navicomp. The comp linked with one of Ord Mantell’s unsecured geosyncsats and fed back the location and course to Fatman. Zeerid’s HUD displayed it on the cockpit canopy. He eyed the location and put his finger on the destination.

“Some island no one has ever heard of, up here where no one ever goes. Sounds about right.”

Zeerid turned the ship over to the autopilot, and it banked him toward the island.

His mind wandered as Fatman cut through the sky. The steady patter of ice and snow on the canopy sang him a lullaby. His thoughts drifted back through the clouds to the past, to the days before the accident, before he’d left the marines. Back then, he’d worn the uniform proudly and had still been able to look himself in the mirror—

He caught himself, caught the burgeoning self-pity, and stopped the thoughts cold. He knew where it would lead.

“Stow that, soldier,” he said to himself.

He was what he was, and things were what they were.

“Focus on the work, Z-man.”

He checked his location against the coordinates in the navicomp. Almost there.

“Gear up and get frosty,” he said, echoing the words he used to say to his commandos. “Ninety seconds to the LZ.”

He continued his ritual, checking the charge on his blasters, tightening the straps on his composite armor vest, getting his mind right.

Ahead, he saw the island where he would make the drop: ten square klicks of volcanic rock fringed with a bad haircut of waist-high scrub whipping in the wind. The place would probably be underwater and gone next year.

He angled lower, flew a wide circle, unable to see much detail due to the snow. He ran a scanner sweep, as always, and the chirp of his instrumentation surprised him. A ship was already on the island. He checked his wrist chrono and saw that he was a full twenty standard minutes early. He’d made this run three times and Arigo—he was sure the man’s real name was not Arigo—had never before arrived early.

He descended to a few hundred meters to get a better look.

Arigo’s freighter, the Doghouse, shaped not unlike the body of a legless beetle, sat in a clearing on the east side of the island. Its landing ramp was down and stuck out of its belly like a tongue. Halogens glared into the fading twilight and reflected off the falling snow, turning the flakes into glittering jewels. He saw three men lingering around the ramp, though he was too far away to notice any details other than their white winter parkas.

They spotted Fatman, and one waved a gloved hand.

Zeerid licked his lips and frowned.

Something felt off.

Flares went up from the freighter and burst in the air—green, red, red, green.

That was the correct sequence.

He circled one more time, staring down through the swirl of snow, but saw nothing to cause alarm, no other ships on the island or in the surrounding sea. He pushed aside his concern and chalked his feelings up to the usual tension caused by dealing with miscreants and criminals.

In any event, he could not afford to mess up a drop of several hundred million credits of hardware because he felt skittish. The ultimate buyer—whoever that was—would be unhappy, and The Exchange would take the lost profits from Zeerid in blood and broken bones, then tack it on to the debt he already owed them. He’d lost track of exactly how much that was, but knew it was at least two million credits on the note for Fatman plus almost half that again on advances for Arra’s medical treatment, though he’d kept Arra’s existence a secret and his handler thought the latter were for gambling losses.

“LZ is secure.” He hoped saying it would make it so. “Going in.”

The hum of the reverse thrusters and a swirl of blown snow presaged the thump of Fatman’s touching down on the rock. He landed less than fifty meters from Arigo’s ship.

For a moment he sat in the cockpit, perfectly still, staring at the falling snow, knowing there’d be another drop after this one, then another, then another, and he’d still owe The Exchange more than he’d ever be able to pay. He was on a treadmill with no idea how to get off. Didn’t matter, though. The point was to earn for Arra, maybe get her a hoverchair instead of that wheeled antique. Better yet, prostheses.

He blew out a breath, stood, and tried to find his calm as he threw on a winter parka and fingerless gloves. In the cargo hold, he had to pick his way though the maze of shipping containers. He avoided looking directly at the thick black lettering on their sides, though he knew it by heart, had seen such crates many times in his military career.

DANGER—MUNITIONS.
FOR MILITARY USE ONLY.
KEEP AWAY FROM INTENSE HEAT
OR OTHER ENERGY SOURCES.

In the crates were upward of three hundred million credits’ worth of crew-served laser cannons, MPAPPs, grenades, and enough ammunition to keep even the craziest fire team grinning and sinning for months.

Near the bay’s landing ramp, he saw that three of the four securing straps had come loose from one of the crates of grenades. He was lucky the crate hadn’t bounced around in transit. Maybe the straps had snapped when he set down on the island. He chose to believe that rather than admit to his own sloppiness.

He did not bother reattaching the straps. Arigo’s men would have to undo them to unload anyway.

He loosened his blasters in their holsters and pushed the button to open the bay and lower the ramp. The door descended and snow and cold blew in, the tang of ocean salt. He stepped out into the wind. The light of the setting sun made him squint. He’d been in only artificial light for upward of twelve hours. His boots crunched on the snow-dusted black rock. His exhalations steamed away in the wind.

Two of the men from Arrigo’s freighter detached themselves from their ship and met him halfway. Both were human and bearded. One had a patched eye and a scar like a lightning stroke down one cheek. Both wore blasters on their hips. Like Zeerid, both had the butt straps undone.

Recognizing neither of them rekindled Zeerid’s earlier concerns. He had a mind for faces, and both of the men were strangers.

The drop was starting to taste sour.

“Where’s Arigo?” Zeerid asked.

“Doin’ what Arigo does,” Scar said, and gestured vaguely. “Sent us instead. No worries, though, right?”

No Scar shifted on his feet, antsy, twitchy.

Zeerid nodded, kept his face expressionless as his heart rate amped up and adrenaline started making him warm. Everything smelled wrong, and he’d learned over the years to trust his sense of smell.

“You Zeerid?” Scar asked.

“Z-man.”

No one called him Zeerid except his sister-in-law.

And Aryn, once. But Aryn had been long ago.

“Z-man,” echoed No Scar, shifting on his feet and half giggling.

“Sound funny to you?” Zeerid asked him.

Before No Scar could answer, Scar asked, “Where’s the cargo?”

Zeerid looked past the two men before him to the third, who lingered near the landing ramp of Arigo’s ship. The man’s body language—too focused on the verbal exchange, too coiled—reinforced Zeerid’s worry. He reminded Zeerid of the way rooks looked when facing Imperials for the first time, all attitude and hair trigger.

Suspicion stacked up into certainty. The drop didn’t just smell bad, it was bad.

Arigo was dead, and the crew before him worked for some other faction on Ord Mantell, or worked for some organization sideways to The Exchange. Whatever. Didn’t matter to Zeerid. He never bothered to follow who was fighting who, so he just trusted no one.

But what did matter to him was that the three men standing before him probably had tortured information from Arigo and would kill Zeerid as soon as they confirmed the presence of the cargo.

And there could be still more men hidden aboard the freighter.

It seemed he’d descended out of atmospheric blackout and into a crossfire after all.

What else was new?

“Why you call that ship Fatman?” No Scar asked. Arigo must have told them the name of Zeerid’s ship because Fatman bore no identifying markings. Zeerid used fake ship registries on almost every planet on which he docked.

“ ’Cause it takes a lot to fill her belly.”

“Ship’s a she, though. Right? Why not Fatwoman?”

“Seemed disrespectful.”

No Scar frowned. “Huh? To who?”

Zeerid did not bother to answer. All he’d wanted to do was drop off the munitions, retire some of his debt to The Exchange, and get back to his daughter before he had to get back out in the black and get dirty again.

“Something wrong?” Scar asked, his tone wary. “You look upset.”

“No,” Zeerid said, and forced a half smile. “Everything’s the same as always.”

The men plastered on uncertain grins, unclear on Zeerid’s meaning.

“Right,” Scar said. “Same as always.”

Knowing how things would go, Zeerid felt the calm he usually did when danger impended. He flashed for a moment on Arra’s face, on what she’d do if he died on Ord Mantell, on some no-name island. He pushed the thoughts away. No distractions.

“Cargo is in the main bay. Send your man around. The ship’s open.”

The expressions on the faces of both men hardened, the change nearly imperceptible but clear to Zeerid, a transformation that betrayed their intention to murder. Scar ordered No Scar to go check the cargo.

“He’ll need a lifter,” Zeerid said, readying himself, focusing on speed and precision. “That stuff ain’t a few kilos.”

No Scar stopped within reach of Zeerid, looking back at Scar for guidance, his expression uncertain.

“Nah,” said Scar, his hand hovering near his holster, the motion too casual to be casual. “I just want him to make sure it’s all there. Then I’ll let my people know to release payment.”

He held up his arm as if to show Zeerid a wrist comlink, but the parka covered it.

“It’s all there,” Zeerid said.

“Go on,” said Scar to No Scar. “Check it.”

“Oh,” Zeerid said, and snapped his fingers. “There is one other thing …”

No Scar sighed, stopped, faced him, eyebrows raised in a question, breath steaming out of his nostrils. “What’s that?”

Zeerid made a knife of his left hand and drove his fingertips into No Scar’s throat. While No Scar crumpled to the snow, gagging, Zeerid jerked one of his blasters free of its hip holster and put a hole through Scar’s chest before the man could do anything more than take a surprised step backward and put his hand on the grip of his own weapon. Scar staggered back two more steps, his mouth working but making no sound, his right arm held up, palm out, as if he could stop the shot that had already killed him.

As Scar toppled to the ground, Zeerid took a wild shot at the third man near the Doghouse’s landing ramp but missed high. The third man made himself small beside the Doghouse, drew his blaster pistol, and shouted into a wrist comlink. Zeerid saw movement within the cargo bay of Arigo’s ship—more men with ill intent.

No way to know how many.

He cursed, fired a covering shot, then turned and ran for Fatman. A blaster shot put a smoking black furrow through the sleeve of his parka but missed flesh. Another rang off the hull of Fatman. A third shot hit him square in the back. It felt like getting run over by a speeder. The impact drove the air from his lungs and plowed him face-first into the snow.

He smelled smoke. His armored vest had ablated the shot.

Adrenaline got him to his feet just as fast as he had gone down. Gasping, trying to refill his lungs, he ducked behind a landing skid for cover and wiped the snow from his face. He poked his head out for a moment to look back, saw that No Scar had stopped gagging and started being dead, that Scar stayed politely still, and that six more men were dashing toward him, two armed with blaster rifles and the rest with pistols.

His armor would not stop a rifle bolt.

A shot slammed into the landing skid, another into the snow at his feet, another, another.

“Stang!” he cursed.

The safety of Fatman’s landing ramp and cargo bay, only a few steps from him, somehow looked ten kilometers away.

He took a blaster in each hand, stretched his arms around to either side of the landing skid, and fired as fast he could he pull the trigger in the direction of the onrushing men. He could not see and did not care if he hit anyone, he just wanted to get them on the ground. After he’d squeezed off more than a dozen shots with no return fire, he darted out from the behind the skid and toward the ramp.

He reached it before the shooters recovered enough to let loose another barrage. A few bolts chased him up the ramp, ringing off the metal. Sparks flew and the smell of melted plastoid mixed with the ocean air. He ran past the button to raise the ramp, struck at it, and hurried on toward the cockpit. Only after he’d nearly cleared the cargo bay did it register with him that he wasn’t hearing the whir of turning gears.

He whirled around, cursed.

In his haste, he’d missed the button to raise the landing ramp.

He heard shouts from outside and dared not go back. He could close the bay from the control panel in the cockpit. But he had to hurry.

He pelted through Fatman’s corridors, shouldered open the door to the cockpit, and started punching in the launch sequence. Fatman’s thrusters went live and the ship lurched upward. Blasterfire thumped off the hull but did no harm. He tried to look down out of the canopy, but the ship was angled upward and he could not see the ground. He punched the control to move it forward and heard the distant squeal of metal on metal. It had come from the cargo bay.

Something was slipping around in there.

The loose container of grenades.

And he’d still forgotten to seal the bay.

Cursing himself for a fool, he flicked the switch that brought up the ramp then sealed the cargo bay and evacuated it of oxygen. If anyone had gotten aboard, they would suffocate in there.

He took the controls in hand and fired Fatman’s engines. The ship shot upward. He turned her as he rose, took a look back at the island.

For a moment, he was confused by what he saw. But realization dawned.

When Fatman had lurched up and forward, the remaining straps securing the container of grenades had snapped and the whole shipping container had slid right out the open landing ramp.

He was lucky it hadn’t exploded.

The men who had ambushed him were gathered around the crate, probably wondering what was inside. A quick head count put their number at six, so he figured none had gotten on board Fatman. And none of them seemed to be making for Arigo’s ship, so Zeerid assumed they had no intention of pursuing him in the air. Maybe they were happy enough with the one container.

Amateurs, then. Pirates, maybe.

Zeerid knew he would have to answer to Oren, his handler, not only for the deal going sour but also for the lost grenades.

Kriffing treadmill just kept going faster and faster.

He considered throwing Fatman’s ion engines on full, clearing Ord Mantell’s gravity well, and heading into hyperspace, but changed his mind. He was annoyed and thought he had a better idea.

He wheeled the freighter around and accelerated.

“Weapons going live,” he said, and activated the over-and-under plasma cannons mounted on Fatman’s sides.

The men on the ground, having assumed he would flee, did not notice him coming until he had closed to five hundred meters. Faces stared up at him, hands pointed, and the men started to scramble. A few blaster shots from one of the men traced red lines through the sky, but a blaster could not harm the ship.

Zeerid took aim. The targeting computer centered on the crate.

“LZ is hot,” he said, and lit them up. For an instant pulsing orange lines connected the ship to the island, the ship to the crate of grenades. Then, as the grenades exploded, the lines blossomed into an orange cloud of heat, light, and smoke that engulfed the area. Shrapnel pattered against the canopy, metal this time, not ice, and the shock wave rocked Fatman slightly as Zeerid peeled the ship off and headed skyward.

He glanced back, saw six, motionless, smoking forms scattered around the blast radius.

“That was for you, Arigo.”

He would still have some explaining to do, but at least he’d taken care of the ambushers. That had to be worth something to The Exchange.

Or so he hoped.

Darth Malgus strode the autowalk, the steady rap of his boots on the pavement the tick of a chrono counting down the limited time remaining to the Republic.

Speeders, swoops, and aircars roared above him in unending streams, the motorized circulatory system of the Republic’s heart. Skyrises, bridges, lifts, and plazas covered the entire surface of Coruscant to a height of kilometers, all of it the trappings of a wealthy, decadent civilization, a sheath that sought to hide the rot in a cocoon of duracrete and transparisteel.

But Malgus smelled the decay under the veneer, and he would show them the price of weakness, of complacency.

Soon it would all burn.

He would lay waste to Coruscant. He knew this. He had known it for decades.

Memories floated up from the depths of his mind. He recalled his first pilgrimage to Korriban, remembered the profound sense of holiness he had felt as he walked in isolation through its rocky deserts, through the dusty canyons lined with the tombs of his ancient Sith forebears. He had felt the Force everywhere, had exulted in it, and in his isolation it had showed him a vision. He had seen systems in flames, the fall of a galaxy-spanning government.

He had believed then, had known then and ever since, that the destruction of the Jedi and their Republic would fall to him.

“What are you thinking of, Veradun?” Eleena asked him.

Only Eleena called him by his given name, and only when they were alone. He enjoyed the smooth way the syllables rolled off her tongue and lips, but he tolerated it from no others.

“I am thinking of fire,” he said, the hated respirator partially muffling his voice.

She walked beside him, as beautiful and dangerous as an elegantly crafted lanvarok. She clucked her tongue at his words, eyed him sidelong, but said nothing. Her lavender skin looked luminescent in the setting sun.

Crowds thronged the plaza in which they walked, laughing, scowling, chatting. A human child, a young girl, caught Malgus’s eye when she squealed with delight and ran to the waiting arms of a dark-haired woman, presumably her mother. The girl must have felt his gaze. She looked at him from over her mother’s shoulder, her small face pinched in a question. He stared at her as he walked and she looked away, burying her face in her mother’s neck.

Other than the girl, no one else marked his passage. The citizens of the Republic felt safe so deep in the Core, and the sheer number of beings on Coruscant granted him anonymity. He walked among his prey, cowled, armored under his cloak, unnoticed and unknown, but heavy with purpose.

“This is a beautiful world,” Eleena said.

“Not for very much longer.”

His words seemed to startle her, though he could not imagine why. “Veradun …”

He saw her swallow, look away. Whatever words she intended after his name seemed stuck on the scar that marred her throat.

“You may speak your mind, Eleena.”

Still she looked away, taking in the scenery around them, as if memorizing Coruscant before Malgus and the Empire lit it aflame.

“When will the fighting end?”

The premise of the question confounded him. “What do you mean?”

“Your life is war, Veradun. Our life. When will it end? It cannot always be so.”

He nodded then, understanding the flavor of the conversation to come. She would try to disguise self-perceived wisdom behind questions. As usual, he was of two minds about it. On the one hand, she was but a servant, a woman who provided him companionship when he wished it. On the other hand, she was Eleena. His Eleena.

“You choose to fight beside me, Eleena. You have killed many in the name of the Empire.”

The lavender skin of her cheeks darkened to purple. “I have not killed for the Empire. I fight, and kill, for you. You know this. But you … you fight for the Empire? Only for the Empire?”

“No. I fight because that is what I was made to do and the Empire is the instrument through which I realize my purpose. The Empire is war made manifest. That is why it is perfect.”

She shook her head. “Perfect? Millions die in its wars. Billions.”

“Beings die in war. That is the price that must be paid.”

She stared at a group of children following an adult, perhaps a teacher. “The price for what? Why constant war? Why constant expansion? What is it the Empire wants? What is it you want?”

Behind his respirator, he smiled as he might when entertaining the questions of a precocious child.

“Want is not the point. I serve the Force. The Force is conflict. The Empire is conflict. The two are congruent.”

“You speak as if it were mathematics.”

“It is.”

“The Jedi do not think so.”

He fought down a flash of anger. “The Jedi understand the Force only partially. Some of them are even powerful in its use. But they fail to comprehend the fundamental nature of the Force, that it is conflict. That a light side and a dark side exist is proof of this.”

He thought the conversation over, but she did not relent.

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why conflict? Why would the Force exist to foment conflict and death?”

He sighed, becoming agitated. “Because the survivors of the conflict come to understand the Force more deeply. Their understanding evolves. That is purpose enough.”

Her expression showed that she still did not understand. His tone sharpened as his exasperation grew.

“Conflict drives a more perfect understanding of the Force. The Empire expands and creates conflict. In that regard, the Empire is an instrument of the Force. You see? The Jedi do not understand this. They use the Force to repress themselves and others, to enforce their version of tolerance, harmony. They are fools. And they will see that after today.”

For a time, Eleena said nothing, and the hum and buzz of Coruscant filled the silent gulf between them. When she finally spoke, she sounded like the shy girl he had first rescued from the slave pens of Geonosis.

“Constant war will be your life? Our life? Nothing more?”

He understood her motives at last. She wanted their relationship to change, wanted it, too, to evolve. But his dedication to the perfection of the Empire, which allowed him to perfect his understanding of the Force, precluded any preeminent attachments.

“I am a Sith warrior,” he said.

“And things with us will always be as they are?”

“Master and servant. This displeases you?”

“You do not treat me as your servant. Not always.”

He let a hardness he did not feel creep into his voice. “Yet a servant you are. Do not forget it.”

The lavender skin of her cheeks darkened to purple, but not with shame, with anger. She stopped, turned, and stared directly into his face. He felt as if the cowl and respirator he wore hid nothing from her.

“I know your nature better than you know yourself. I nursed you after the Battle of Alderaan, when you lay near death from that Jedi witch. You speak the words in earnest—conflict, evolution, perfection—but belief does not reach your heart.”

He stared at her, the twin stalks of her lekku framing the lovely symmetry of her face. She held his eyes, unflinching, the scar that stretched across her throat visible under her collar.

Struck by her beauty, he grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her to him. She did not resist and pressed her curves against him. He slipped his respirator to the side and kissed her with his ruined lips, kissed her hard.

“Perhaps you do not know me as well as you imagine,” he said, his voice unmuffled by the mechanical filter of his respirator.

As a boy, he had killed a Twi’lek servant woman in his adoptive father’s house, his first kill. She had committed some minor offense he could no longer recall and that had never mattered. He had not killed her because of her misdeed. He’d killed her to assure himself that he could kill. He still recalled the pride with which his adoptive father had regarded the Twi’lek’s corpse. Soon afterward, Malgus had been sent to the Sith Academy on Dromund Kaas.

“I think I do know you,” she said, defiant.

He smiled, she smiled, and he released her. He replaced his respirator and checked the chrono on his wrist.

If all went as planned, the defense grid should come down in moments.

A surge of emotion went through him, born in his certainty that his entire life had for its purpose the next hour, that the Force had brought him to the moment when he would engineer the fall of the Republic and the ascendance of the Empire.

His comlink received a message. He tapped a key to decrypt it.

It is done, the words read.

The Mandalorian had done her job. He did not know the woman’s real name, so in his mind she had become a title, the Mandalorian. He knew only that she worked for money, hated the Jedi for some personal reason known only to herself, and was extraordinarily skilled.

The message told him that the planet’s defense grid had gone dark, yet none of the thousands of sentients who shared the plaza with him looked concerned. No alarm had sounded. Military and security ships were not racing through the sky. The civilian and military authorities were oblivious to the fact that Coruscant’s security net had been compromised.

But they would notice it before long. And they would disbelieve what their instruments told them. They would run a test to determine if the readings were accurate.

By then, Coruscant would be aflame.

We are moving, he keyed into the device. Meet us within.

He took one last look around, at the children and their parents playing, laughing, eating, everyone going about their lives, unaware that everything was about to change.

“Come,” he said to Eleena, and picked up his pace. His cloak swirled around him. So, too, his anger.

Moments later he received another coded transmission, this one from the hijacked drop ship.

Jump complete. On approach. Arrival in ninety seconds.

Ahead, he saw the four towers surrounding the stacked tiers of the Jedi Temple, its ancient stone as orange as fire in the light of the setting sun. The civilians seemed to give it a wide berth, as if it were a holy place rather than one of sacrilege.

He would reduce it to rubble.

He walked toward it and fate walked beside him.

Statues of long-dead Jedi Masters lined the approach to the Temple’s enormous doorway. The setting sun stretched the statue’s tenebrous forms across the duracrete. He walked through the shadows and past them, noting some names: Odan-Urr, Ooroo, Arca Jeth.

“You have been deceived,” he whispered to them. “Your time is past.”

Most of the Jedi Order’s current Masters were away, either participating in the sham negotiations on Alderaan or protecting Republic interests offplanet, but the Temple was not entirely unguarded. Three uniformed Republic soldiers, blaster rifles in hand, stood watchful near the doors. He sensed two more on a high ledge to his left.

Eleena tensed beside him, but she did not falter.

He checked his chrono again. Fifty-three seconds.

The three soldiers, wary, watched him and Eleena approach. One of them spoke into a wrist comlink, perhaps querying a command center within.

They would not know what to make of Malgus. Despite the war, they felt safe in their enclave in the center of the Republic. He would teach them otherwise.

“Stop right there,” one of them said.

“I cannot stop,” Malgus said, too softly to hear behind the respirator. “Not ever.”

Still heart, still mind, these things eluded Aryn, floated before her like snowflakes in sun, visible for a moment, then melted and gone. She fiddled with the smooth coral beads of the Nautolan tranquillity bracelet Master Zallow had given her when she’d been promoted to Jedi Knight. Silently counting the smooth, slick beads, sliding them over their chain one after another, she sought the calm of the Force.

No use.

What was wrong with her?

Outside, speeders hummed past the large window that looked out on a bucolic, beautiful Alderaanian landscape suitable for a painting. Inside, she felt turmoil. Ordinarily, she was better able to shield herself from surrounding emotions. She usually considered her empathic sense a boon of the Force, but now …

She realized she was bouncing her leg, stopped. She crossed and uncrossed her legs. Did it again.

Syo sat beside her, callused hands crossed over his lap, as still as the towering statuary of Alderaanian statesmen that lined the domed, marble-tiled hall in which they sat. Light from the setting sun poured through the window, pushing long shadows across the floor. Syo did not look at her when he spoke.

“You are restless.”

“Yes.”

In truth, she felt as if she were a boiling pot, the steam of her emotional state seeking escape around the lid of her control. The air felt charged, agitated. She would have attributed the feelings to the stress of the peace negotiations, but it seemed to her something more. She felt a doom creeping up on her, a darkness. Was the Force trying to tell her something?

“Restlessness ill suits you,” Syo said.

“I know. I feel … odd.”

His expression did not change behind his short beard, but he would know to take her feelings seriously. “Odd? How?”

She found his voice calming, which she supposed was part of the reason he had spoken. “As if … as if something is about to happen. I can explain it no better than that.”

“This originates from the Force, from your empathy?”

“I don’t know. I just … feel like something is about to happen.”

He seemed to consider this, then said, “Something is about to happen.” He indicated with a glance the large double doors to their left, behind which Master Dar’nala and Jedi Knight Satele Shan had begun negotiations with the Sith delegation. “An end to the war, if we are fortunate.”

She shook her head. “Something other than that.” She licked her lips, shifted in her seat.

They sat in silence for a time. Aryn continued to fidget.

Syo cleared his throat, and his brown eyes fixed on a point across the hall. He spoke in a soft tone. “They see your agitation. They interpret it as something it is not.”

She knew. She could feel their contempt, an irritation in her mind akin to a pebble in her boot.

A pair of dark-cloaked Sith, members of the Empire’s delegation to Alderaan, sat on a stone bench along the wall opposite Aryn and Syo. Fifteen meters of polished marble floor, the two rows of Alderaanian statuary, and the gulf of competing philosophies separated Jedi and Sith.

Unlike Aryn, the Sith did not appear agitated. They appeared coiled. Both of them leaned forward, forearms on their knees, eyes on Aryn and Syo, as if they might spring to their feet at any moment. Aryn sensed their derision over her lack of control, could see it in the curl of the male’s lip.

She turned her eyes from the Sith and tried to occupy her mind by reading the names engraved on the pedestals of the statues—Keers Dorana, Velben Orr, others she’d never heard of—but the presence of the Sith pressed against her Force sensitivity. She felt as if she were submerged deep underwater, the pressure pushing against her. She kept waiting for her ears to pop, to grant her release in a flash of pain. But it did not come, and her eyes kept returning to the Sith pair.

The woman, her slight frame lost in the shapelessness of her deep blue robes, glared through narrow, pale eyes. Her long dark hair, pulled into a topknot, hung like a hangman’s noose from her scalp. The slim human man who sat beside her had the same sallow skin as the woman, the same pale eyes, the same glare. Aryn assumed them to be siblings. His dark hair and long beard—braided and forked into two tines—could not hide a face so lined with scars and pitted with pockmarks that it reminded Aryn of the ground after an artillery barrage. Her eyes fell to the thin hilt of the man’s lightsaber, the bulky, squared-off hilt of the woman’s.

She imagined their parents had noticed brother and sister’s Force potential when they had been young and shipped them off to Dromund Kaas for indoctrination. She knew that’s what they did with Force-sensitives in the Empire. If true, the Sith sitting across from her hadn’t really fallen to the dark side; they’d never had a chance to rise and become anything else.

She wondered how she might have turned out had she been born in the Empire. Would she have trained at Dromund Kaas, her empathy put in service to pain and torture?

“Do not pity them,” Syo said in Bocce, as if reading her thoughts. Bocce sounded awkward on his lips. “Or doubt yourself.”

His insight surprised her only slightly. He knew her well. “Who is the empath now?” she answered in the same tongue.

“They chose their path. As we all do.”

“I know,” she said.

She shook her head over the wasted potential, and the eyes of both Sith tracked her movement with the alert, focused gaze of predators tracking prey. The Academy at Dromund Kaas had turned them into hunters, and they saw the universe through a hunter’s eyes. Perhaps that explained the war in microcosm.

But it did nothing to explain the proposed peace.

And perhaps that was why Aryn felt so ill at ease.

The offer to negotiate an end to the war had come like a lightning strike from the Sith Emperor, unbidden, unexpected, sending a jolt through the government of the Republic. The Empire and the Republic had agreed to a meeting on Alderaan, the scene of an earlier Republic victory in the war, the number and makeup of the two delegations limited and strictly proscribed. To her surprise, Aryn was among the Jedi selected, though she was stationed perpetually outside the negotiation room.

“You have been honored by this selection,” Master Zallow had told her before she took the ship for Alderaan, and she knew it to be true, yet she had felt uneasy since leaving Coruscant. She felt even less at ease on Alderaan. It wasn’t that she had fought on Alderaan before. It was … something else.

“I am fine,” she said to Syo, hoping that saying it would work a spell and make it so. “Lack of sleep perhaps.”

“Be at ease,” he said. “Everything will work out.”

She nodded, trying to believe it. She closed her eyes on the Sith and fell back on Master Zallow’s teachings. She felt the Force within and around her, a matrix of glowing lines created by the intersection of all living things. As always, the line of Master Zallow glowed as brightly as a guiding star in her inner space.

She missed him, his calm presence, his wisdom.

Focusing inward, she picked a point in her mind, made it a hole, and let her unease drain into it.

Calm settled on her.

When she opened her eyes, she fixed them on the male Sith. Something in his expression, a knowing look in his eye, half hidden by his sneer, troubled Aryn, but she kept her face neutral and held his gaze, as still as a sculpture.

“I see you,” the Sith said from across the room.

“And I you,” she answered, her voice steady.

Malgus let his anger build with each step he took toward the Temple’s entrance. The Force responded to his emotional state, caught him up in its power until he was awash in it. He sensed the seed of fear growing in the soldiers’ guts.

“I said stop,” the lead soldier said again.

“Do nothing,” Malgus said to Eleena over his shoulder. “These are mine.”

She let her hands fall slack to her sides and fell in behind him.

The three guards spread out into an arc as they approached him, their movements cautious, blaster rifles ready. The entrance to the Temple, a fifteen-meter-tall opening in the edifice’s façade, loomed behind them.

“Who are you?” the guard asked.

The last word hung in the air, frozen in time, as Malgus drew on the Force and augmented his speed. The hilt of his lightsaber filled his hand and its red line split the air. He crosscut the guard before him, putting a black canyon in his chest, continued the swing through the guard on his left, and with his left hand used a blast of power to drive the third guard into the Temple wall hard enough to crush bones and kill him.

Malgus felt the sudden surge of terror in the two soldiers up on the ledge to his left, felt them take aim in sweaty hands, start to squeeze triggers. He flung his lightsaber at them, guided it with the Force in a flickering red arc that cut both of them down, then recalled the blade to his hand. He deactivated it and hung it from his belt.

The roar of a rocket pack drew his attention. On a ledge above the Temple’s entrance, the Mandalorian rode the fire on her back to a high window on one of the Temple’s upper tiers and disappeared within. He trusted that she would join him for the combat inside.

He checked his chrono, watched the numbers evaporate. Twenty-nine seconds.

Eleena took the station to his right, and they entered the Temple.

The setting sun at their back reached through the huge doorway and extended their shadows before them, giant, dark heralds marking the path ahead. Within the Temple was a stillness, a peace soon to be shattered.

Malgus’s boots rapped against the polished stone floor. The hall extended before them for several hundred meters. Two rows of elegant columns reached from floor to ceiling on either side, framing a processional down the hall’s center. Ledges and balconies, too, lined both sides.

Malgus felt the presence of more guards and Jedi to his right, his left, and before him.

He checked his chrono. Twelve seconds.

Motion above and to his right, then to the left, drew his eyes. Curious Padawans looked down from the ledges above.

Ahead, half a dozen robed and hooded Jedi dropped from the balconies and took station in the hall. Another Jedi descended the grand staircase at the end of the hall. His Force signature radiated power, confidence—a Master.

As one, the seven Jedi moved toward Malgus and Eleena, and Malgus and Eleena moved toward them.

More and more Padawans gathered on the balconies and walkways above, sparks of light-side blasphemy flickering in Malgus’s perception.

The more powerful Force signatures of the approaching Jedi pressed against Malgus, and his against theirs, the power of each distorting the other by its presence.

In his mind, the countdown continued.

The space between him and the Jedi diminished.

The power within him grew.

They stopped at two meters. The Jedi Master threw back his hood to reveal blond hair graying at the temples, a handsome, ruddy face. Malgus knew his name from his intelligence briefings—Master Ven Zallow.

In appearance, Zallow was everything Malgus—with his pale skin, scars, and hairless pate—was not. With respect to the Force, Malgus was everything Zallow was not.

The six Jedi Knights accompanying Zallow spaced themselves around Malgus and Eleena, to minimize maneuvering room. The Jedi eyed him cautiously, the way they might a trapped predator.

Eleena put her back to Malgus’s. Malgus felt her breathing, deep and regular.

Silence ruled the hall.

Somewhere, a Padawan cleared his throat. Another coughed.

Zallow and Malgus stared into each other’s eyes but exchanged no words. None were necessary. Both knew what would unfold next, what must unfold.

The chrono on Malgus’s wrist began to beep. The slight sound rang out like an explosion in the silent vastness of the hall.

The sound seemed to free the Jedi to act. Half a dozen green and blue lines pierced the dimness as all of the Jedi Knights ignited their lightsabers, backed off a step, and assumed a fighting stance.

All except Zallow, who held his ground before Malgus. Malgus credited him for it and inclined his head in a show of respect.

Perhaps the Jedi Knights thought the beeping chrono indicated a bomb of some kind. In a way, Malgus supposed, it did.

From behind, another sound broke the silence. The whine of the hijacked drop ship’s approaching engines.

Malgus did not turn. Instead, he watched the events behind him by watching the events before him.

The Jedi Knights stepped back another step, looking past Malgus, uncertainty in their expressions. Eleena pressed her back against Malgus. No doubt she could see the drop ship by now as it roared downward, toward the Temple.

Zallow did not step back and his eyes stayed on Malgus.

The sound of the drop ship’s engines grew louder, more acute, a prolonged, mechanical scream.

Malgus watched the eyes of the Jedi Knights widen, heard the shouts of alarm from throughout the hall, then the screams, all of them soon overwhelmed by the roar of the reinforced drop ship slamming at speed into the front of the Temple.

Stone shattered and the Temple’s floor vibrated under the impact. Metal bent, twisted, and shrieked. People, too, bent, twisted, and shrieked. The explosion colored the hall in orange—Malgus could see it reflected in Zallow’s eyes—and the sudden flame drew the oxygen toward it in a powerful wind, as if the conflagration were a great pair of lungs drawing breath.

Malgus did not turn. He had seen the attack thousands of times on computer models and knew exactly what was happening from the sounds he heard.

The drop ship’s enormous speed and mass allowed it to retain momentum and it skidded along the Temple floor, gouging stone, trailing fire, toppling columns, collapsing balconies, crushing bodies.

Still Malgus did not move, nor Zallow.

The drop ship skidded closer, closer, the sound of metal grinding over stone ever louder in Malgus’s ears. More columns collapsed. Eleena pressed against him as the flaming, shredded vessel slid toward them. But it was already losing speed and soon came to a halt.

Dust, heat, and smoke filled the hall. Flames crackled. Shouts of pain and surprise penetrated the sudden silence.

“What have they done?” someone called.

“Medic!” screamed someone else.

Malgus heard the explosive bolts on the specially reinforced passenger compartment of the drop ship blow outward and hit the floor like metal rain, heard the hatch clang to the floor.

For the first time, Zallow looked past Malgus, his head cocked in a question. Uncertainty entered his expression. Malgus savored it.

A prolonged, irregular hum sounded as the fifty Sith warriors within the drop ship’s compartment activated their lightsabers. The sound heralded the fall of the Temple, the fall of Coruscant, the fall of the Republic.

Malgus flashed on the vision he’d seen on Korriban, of a galaxy in flames. He threw back his hood, smiled, and activated his lightsaber.

Zeerid let Fatman fly free and blazed away from Ord Mantell’s surface. He kept his scanners sweeping the area, concerned that the pirates might have allies in another ship somewhere, but he saw no signs of pursuit. In time, he let himself relax.

The pink of Ord Mantell’s clouds and upper stratosphere soon gave way to the black of space. Planetary control did not ping him for identification, and he would not have responded anyway. He did not answer to them. He answered to The Exchange, though he’d never met any serious player in the syndicate face-to-face.

Receiving his instructions through a handler he knew only as Oren, he flew blind most of the time. He got his assignments remotely, picked up cargo where he was told, then dropped it off where he was told. He preferred it that way. It made it feel less personal, which made him feel less dirty.

He took care to return the emphasis on privacy, ensuring that The Exchange knew little about him other than his past as a soldier and pilot. As far as they knew, he had no friends and no family. He knew that if they learned of Arra, they would use her as leverage against him. He could not allow that. And were any harm to ever come to her …

Once again, he realized that he was holding the stick too tightly. He relaxed, breathed deeply, and composed his thoughts. When he felt ready, he plugged in the code for the secure subspace channel he used to communicate with Oren. He waited until he heard the hollow sound of an open connection.

Oren did not waste time with a greeting. “The drop went well, I presume?”

From his voice, Zeerid made Oren as a human male, probably in his forties or early fifties, though he could have been using voice-disguising technology.

“No,” Zeerid said, and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “The drop was an ambush.”

A moment of silence, then, “The purchaser’s agents ambushed you?”

Zeerid shook his head. “I don’t think so. These were men I hadn’t seen before. Pirates, I think. Maybe mercs. I think they killed the purchaser’s men and commandeered the ship.”

“Are you certain?”

Anger bled into Zeerid’s tone. “No, I’m not certain. What’s certain in this work? Ever?”

Oren did not respond. Zeerid lassoed his emotions and continued.

“I’m only certain that the pilot I expected, a fellow named Arigo, was not there. But his ship was. I’m only certain that eight men with blasters and hostile attitudes tried to burn holes through me.”

“Eight men.” Oren’s voice was tight. Not a good sign. “What happened to them?”

Zeerid had the impression that Oren was noting everything he said, filing it away in memory so he could sift it for any inconsistencies later.

“They’re dead. I sniffed out the attack before they sprang it.”

“That seems … convenient, Z-man.”

Zeerid stared out the canopy at Ord Mantell’s star and controlled the flash of temper. He knew that if Oren suspected him of double dealing, or just didn’t believe his story, a word from the man would turn Arra into an orphan.

“Convenient? Let me tell you what’s convenient, Oren. Word is that lots of deals have been going sour because The Exchange won’t play nice with the other syndicates, including the Hutts. And nothing explains lots of deals going sour except a leak. That tells me The Exchange is venting Oh-two.”

Oren did not miss a beat. Zeerid almost admired him. “If one of my fliers thought there might be a leak, he might also think it an ideal time to make a play for some goods himself. Especially if he had heavy debts. Make it look like an ambush of, say, eight men. After all, there’s a ready excuse at hand—this strife with the other syndicates you mentioned.”

“He might,” Zeerid said. “But only if he was stupid. And stupid I am not. Listen, you gave me the drop coordinates on Ord Mantell. Send someone there, a surveillance droid. You’ll see what I left there. But do it quick. Someone is going to clean up that mess before long, I’d wager.”

“So … how did you manage to kill eight men?”

The discussion was about to take a turn for the worse. “They were too close to one of the shipping containers full of grenades when it blew up.”

Oren paused. “One of our shipping containers blew up?”

Zeerid swallowed hard. “I lost it in the escape. The rest of the cargo is intact.”

A long silence followed, an abyss of quiet. Zeerid imagined Oren flipping through the file cabinet of his mind, cross-referencing Zeerid’s story with whatever other pertinent facts Oren already knew or thought he knew.

“This wasn’t my fault,” Zeerid said. “You find your leak, you’ll find who’s at fault.”

“You lost cargo.”

“I saved cargo. If I hadn’t sussed this out, the whole shipment would have been lost to pirates.”

“It would have been recovered. It is difficult to recover exploded grenades. Do you agree?”

“I would have been dead.”

“You are replaceable. I ask again: Do you agree?”

Zeerid could not bring himself to respond.

“I choose to interpret your silence as agreement, Z-man.”

Zeerid glared at the speaker while Oren continued: “At best, you will get paid only half for the job. The amount of the lost cargo will be set against that and added to your marker. It was already in excess of two million credits, if I remember correctly. The note on the ship and some loans against your gambling.”

Oren always remembered correctly. The job would net negative for Zeerid. He wanted to punch something, someone, but there was no one in the cockpit but him.

“This makes me look bad, Z-man,” Oren said. “And I very much dislike looking bad. You will make this up to me.”

Zeerid did not like the sound of that. “How?”

A pause, then, “By doing a spicerun.”

Zeerid shook his head. “I don’t run spice. That was our understanding—”

Oren’s voice never lost its calm, but the edge on it could have gouged armor. “The understanding has changed, contingent, as it was, on your successful completion of assignments. You owe us a large sum of credits and you owe me a large sum of face. You will make up both with a few spiceruns. That’s where the credits are. So that’s where you will be.”

Zeerid said nothing, could say nothing.

“Are we clear, Z-man?”

Zeerid scowled but said, “Clear.”

“Return to Vulta. I will be in touch soon. I have something in mind already.”

I’ll bet you do, Zeerid thought but didn’t say.

The channel closed and Zeerid let fly with a sleet storm of expletives. When he had finally vented, he cleared Ord Mantell’s gravity well and its moons, set a course for Vulta, and engaged the hyperdrive.

“I’m a spicerunner, now,” he said, as the black of space turned to the blue of hyperspace.

The treadmill under his feet had just picked up speed.

Aryn felt dizzy. A rush of emotion flooded her. She could not name it, categorize it. It was just a wash of inchoate, raw feeling. She was swimming in it, sinking.

“Something is happening, Syo,” she said, her voice tight. “I don’t know what it is, but it is not good.”

Master Zallow and the six Jedi Knights near Malgus leapt back and up, flipping at the top of the arc of their leaps, and landed in a crouch twenty meters away.

“May the Force be with you all,” Zallow shouted to his fellow Jedi, and lit his blade.

Dozens more Jedi poured out of the hallway behind him and flowed down the staircase, the blades of their lightsabers visible through the smoke and dust, a forest of green and blue oriflammes. The Jedi did not shout as they charged, but the rumble of their boots and sandals on the floor sounded like rolling thunder.

“Stay near me,” Malgus said over his shoulder to Eleena.

“Yes,” she said, her blasters already in hand.

Malgus’s Sith charged out of the carcass of the drop ship, their collective roar the sound of a hungry, rage-filled beast. The red lines of their blades cut the dust-covered air. Lord Adraas, a political favorite of Darth Angral and constant irritant to Malgus, led them. Like all of the Sith warriors save Malgus, a dark mask obscured his face entirely.

Malgus used his distaste for Adraas to further feed his anger. He had requested that Darth Angral allow him to lead the attack alone, but Angral had insisted that Adraas lead the drop ship team.

Discarding his cloak, discarding the remaining restraints on his rage, Malgus joined the Sith charge, taking position before Adraas. Emotion fed his power, and its swell fairly lifted him from his feet. He felt the power of the dark side around him, within him.

Blaster bolts crisscrossed the battlefield from left and right as two platoons of Republic soldiers emerged from somewhere above and to the side and fired into the Sith ranks.

Malgus, nested deeply in the Force, perceived the dozens of bolts and their trajectory with perfect clarity. Without breaking stride he whipped his blade left, right, angled it ten degrees, and turned three bolts back on the soldiers who’d fired them, killing all three. A soldier had exploded a grenade in his face in the Battle of Alderaan, so he enjoyed killing soldiers when he could. Behind him, Eleena’s twin blasters answered to the left and right with bolts of their own, picking off two more soldiers.

The Sith and Jedi forces closed, Sith battle lust facing the calm of the Jedi, the floor of the Temple the arena where centuries of indeterminate strife would at last reach a conclusion. Those strong in the Force would survive and their understanding of the Force would evolve. Those weak in the Force would die.

Malgus sought Master Zallow but could not make him out from the crowd of faces, dust, flames, and glowing blades. So he chose a Jedi at random from the crowd, a human male with a blue blade and a short beard, and targeted him.

Waves of power distorted the air and dopplered sound as the Jedi and Sith forces crashed into one another and intermixed in a chaotic, roaring tangle of bodies, lightsabers, and shouts.

Malgus augmented his strength with the Force, took a two-handed grip on his blade, and unleashed an overhand slash designed to split the Jedi in half. The Jedi sidestepped the blow and crosscut with his blue blade at Malgus’s throat. Malgus got his blade up in time, parried, and slammed a kick into the Jedi’s mid-section. The blow folded the Jedi in half, sent him reeling backward five paces. Malgus leapt into the air, flipped, landed behind him, and drove his blade through the Jedi. Roaring with battle lust, Malgus sought another opponent.

A flash of lavender skin drew his gaze—Eleena. She ducked under a saber slash and dived to her side, firing half a dozen blaster shots as she did so. The Padawan who’d tried to kill her, a female Zabrak, the horns of her head gilt with colored pigments, deflected the shots as she closed in for another blow. Eleena flipped to her feet, still firing, but the Padawan deflected every shot and drew nearer.

Malgus drew on the Force and with a blast of power drove the Padawan across the hall and into one of the towering columns of stone, where she collapsed, blood leaking from her nose. Eleena continued firing, her eyes darting here and there over the battlefield as she sought targets.

The battle turned ever more chaotic. Jedi and Sith leapt, bounded, rolled, and flipped as red lines intersected with those of blue and green. Blasts of power sent bodies flying through the air, against walls, pulled loose rocks from the ceiling and sent them crashing into flesh. The hall was a cacophony of sound: shouts, screams, the hum of lightsabers, the intermittent sound of weapons-fire. Malgus walked in its midst, reveled in it.

He watched Lord Adraas leap into the middle of a squad of Republic soldiers and punctuate his landing with an explosion of Force energy that cast the soldiers away like dry leaves.

Malgus, not to be outdone, picked a Jedi Knight at random, a human female ten meters away, held forth his left hand, and discharged veins of blue lightning from his fingertips. The jagged lines of energy cut a swath through the battle, harvesting two Padawans as they went, until they caught up to the Jedi Knight and lifted her off her feet.

She screamed as the lightning ripped into her, her flesh made temporarily translucent from the dark power coursing through her. Malgus savored her pain as she died.

He caught Adraas eyeing him and gave him a mocking salute with his lightsaber.

The high-pitched sound of Eleena’s blasters drew his attention. She bounded past him and over the slain female Jedi Knight’s corpse, a lavender blur firing rapidly. Putting her back to a column, she crouched and sought targets for her blasters. She met his eyes, winked, and signaled behind him. He whirled to see a score or more Republic soldiers rushing into the hall from a side room, blaster rifles tracing hot lines through the battlefield. Eleena answered with shots of her own.

Before Malgus could dispatch the soldiers, the Mandalorian rose from somewhere behind them, her jetpack spitting fire, her head-to-toe silver-and-orange armor gleaming in the fire of the hall. Hovering in the air like an avenging spirit, she discharged two small missiles from wrist mounts. They struck the floor near the Republic soldiers and blossomed into flame. Bodies, shouts, and loose rock flew in all directions. Still hovering, she spun a circle in the air while flamethrowers mounted on her forearm engulfed another group of soldiers.

Malgus knew the battle had turned, that it soon would be over. He glanced around, still seeking Zallow, the only opponent in the field worthy of his attention.

Before he could locate the Jedi Master, three more Jedi swarmed him. He parried the chop of a human male, leapt over the low slash of an orange-skinned Togruta female, severed the hand of the third, a female human, disarming her, then grabbed her by the throat with his free hand and slammed her into the floor with his Force-enhanced strength.

“Alara!” said the human male.

Leaping high over the male’s cross-slash, Malgus landed behind the Togruta, who parried his lightsaber strike but could not defend herself against a Force blast that sent her skidding across the hall and into a pile of rubble.

Malgus roared, the lust for battle so pronounced that he would have killed his own warriors were there no Jedi left to slay. He wanted, needed, to kill another and to do so with his hands.

He ducked under a slash from the male, lunged forward, and took the Jedi by the throat. He lifted him from his feet and held him suspended in the air, gagging. The Jedi’s brown eyes showed no fear, but did show pain. Malgus roared, squeezed hard, then dropped the body and stood over it, blade at his side, breath coming hard. The battle still swirled around him and he stood in its center, the eye of the Sith storm.

Malgus finally spotted Master Zallow ten paces away, whirling, spinning, his green blade a blur of precision and speed. One Sith warrior fell to him, another. Lord Adraas landed before him, trying to take Malgus’s kill for himself. Adraas ducked low and slashed at Zallow’s knees. Zallow leapt over the blow and unleashed a blast of energy that sent Adraas skidding on his backside across the hall.

“He is mine!” Malgus shouted, charging through the battlefield. He repeated himself as he passed Adraas. “Zallow is mine!”

Zallow must have heard Malgus, for he turned, met his eyes. Eleena, too, must have heard Malgus’s shouting. She emerged from behind the column, deduced Malgus’s intent, and fired several shots at Zallow.

Zallow, his eyes on Malgus throughout, deflected the bolts with his blade and sent them back at Eleena. Two struck her, and as she collapsed Zallow used a Force blast to drive her body against a column.

Malgus halted in mid-stride, his rage temporarily abated. He turned and stared at Eleena’s fallen form for a long moment, her lavender body crumpled on the floor, her eyes closed, two black circles marring the smooth purple field of her flesh. She looked like a wilted flower.

Anger refilled him, overcame him. A shout of hate, raw and jagged, burst from his throat. Power went with it, shattering a nearby column and sending a rain of stone shards through the room.

He returned his gaze to Zallow and stalked toward him, his rage and power surging before him in a palpable wave. Another Jedi stepped in front of him, blue blade held high. Malgus barely saw him. He simply extended a hand, pushed through the Jedi’s insufficient defenses, seized his throat with the Force, and choked him to death. Tossing the body aside, he moved toward Zallow.

Zallow, for his part, moved toward Malgus. A Sith warrior bounded at Zallow from his left, but Zallow leapt over the Sith’s blade, spun, slashed, and cut down the Sith.

Zallow and Malgus closed. They halted at one meter, studied each other for a moment.

A human male Jedi Knight separated from the swirl of battle and stabbed at Malgus. Malgus sidestepped the blue line of the blade, punched the man in the stomach, doubling him over, and raised his own blade for a killing blow.

Zallow bounded forward and intercepted the downstroke. Zallow and Malgus stared into each other’s faces and the rest of the battle fell away.

There was only Malgus and his rage, and Zallow and his calm.

Their blades sizzling in opposition, each used the Force to press against the strength of the other, but neither had an obvious advantage. Malgus shouted rage into Zallow’s face. Only a furrowed brow and the tight line of his mouth betrayed the tension behind Zallow’s otherwise tranquil expression.

Feeding off the anger from Eleena, Malgus shoved Zallow away and unleashed an onslaught of overhand slashes and crosscuts. Zallow backed off, parrying, unable to respond with blows of his own. Malgus tried to split Zallow’s head but Zallow blocked again and again.

Malgus spun into a high, Force-augmented kick that hit Zallow in the chest and sent him flying backward ten meters. Zallow flipped and landed upright in a crouch near two of Malgus’s Sith warriors.

They lunged for him and Zallow parried one blow, leapt over the second, and spun a rapid circle, cutting down both Sith.

Malgus, burning with hate, flung his lightsaber at Zallow. He guided its trajectory with the Force, and it spun a sizzling path through the air at Zallow’s neck. But Zallow, riding the momentum of his attack on the second Sith, leapt into the air and over the blade.

While Zallow was still in the air, Malgus unleashed a blast of energy that caught the Jedi unprepared and sent him crashing downward into a pile of rubble. He lay there, prone.

Malgus did not hesitate. He mounted the column of his anger, shouting with hate, and leapt twenty meters into the air toward Zallow. Mid-jump, he used the Force to recall his blade to his hand, took a reverse two-handed grip, and prepared to pin Zallow to the Temple floor.

But Zallow rolled out of the way at the last moment and Malgus’s blade sank to the hilt in the stone of the Temple’s floor. Zallow leapt up and over Malgus, landed in a crouch, reactivated his lightsaber, and pelted across the floor back at Malgus.

Eschewing speed and grace for power, Zallow loosed a flurry of rapid strikes, slashes, and lunges. Malgus parried one blow after another but could not find an opening to mount his own counterattack. Lunging forward, Zallow slashed crosswise, Malgus parried, and Zallow slammed the hilt of his saber into the side of Malgus’s jaw.

A tooth dislodged and his respirator was knocked askew. Malgus tasted blood, but he was too deep in the Force for the blow to do real damage. He staggered backward a step, as if the blow had stunned him.

Seeing an opening, Zallow stepped forward and crosscut for Malgus’s throat.

As Malgus knew he would do.

Malgus turned his blade vertical to parry the blow and spun out of the blade lock. Reversing his lightsaber during the spin, he rode it into a stab that pierced Zallow’s abdomen and came out the other side.

Zallow’s expression fell. He hung there, impaled by the red line. He held Malgus’s eyes, and Malgus saw the flames of the burning Temple reflected in Zallow’s green irises.

“It is all going to burn,” Malgus said.

Zallow’s brow furrowed, perhaps with pain, perhaps with despair. Either way, Malgus enjoyed it. He waited for the light to disappear from Zallow’s eyes before jerking his blade free and allowing the body to fall to the floor.

The shock hit Aryn with little warning, the sensation as sudden and powerful as a blaster shot. Her body spasmed. The tranquillity bracelet in her hand, the bracelet given her by Master Zallow, snapped in her clenched fist and the tear-shaped bits of coral rained to the floor.

She doubled over, moaned. Her stomach sank. Her vision blurred. The room spun. Her legs dissolved under her and she felt herself slipping, falling, sinking. A fist formed in her throat, throttling the cry that wanted release and allowing it loose only as an aborted, grief-ridden wail.

Through their connection in the Force, she felt the sharp stab of agony that Master Zallow experienced, felt her own breath hitch in sympathy as he took his final breath and died. The line of his life, usually so bright in her mind’s eye when she felt the Force, usually so close to her own line, vanished from her perception.

Beside her, Syo’s sharp, surprised intake of breath told her that he had felt something, too.

Despite her pain, the rising despair, the reality settled on her immediately. She had seen it in the eyes of the Sith male.

“What was that?” Syo asked, his voice seemingly far away, but his question fat with ugly possibilities.

She lifted her head, her long hair dangling before her face, and stared across the room. Both Sith were standing, their bodies tensed, knowledge in their eyes.

“We are betrayed,” she answered, her voice a hiss.

She left it unsaid that her Master, the man who had been a father to her, was dead.

She was surprised to find her legs sturdy under her as she stood up straight. A group of people stood near her. No, not people. They were statues, Alderaanian statues. She was on Alderaan for peace negotiations with the Sith.

And the Sith had betrayed them. She had fought the Sith on Alderaan before, during the battle for the planet. She would do so again. Now.

“How do you know this, Aryn?”

But Syo’s voice, his doubt, did not erode her certainty.

“I know,” she spat.

The Sith knew, too. They had known all along. She could see it in their faces.

Her view distilled down until it consisted entirely of the two Sith and nothing else. A roar filled her ears, the crashing surf of grief and burgeoning rage. She heard a voice calling her name from some distant place, repeating it as if it were an invocation, but she paid it no heed.

Both Sith eyed her, their stances ready for combat. The man wore the same contemptuous sneer, the curve of his thin lips uglier than the scars that lined his face.

“Aryn!” It was Syo calling her name. “Aryn! Aryn!”

They knew. The Sith knew.

“They knew all along,” she said, speaking as much to herself as Syo.

“What? Knew what? What has happened?”

She did not bother to answer. She fell into the Force, drawing on its power.

Time seemed to slow. She felt as if she existed outside herself, watching. Her body moved across the antechamber, her boots scattering the coral of her bracelet. Violence filled her mind as she moved among the statues of men and women of peace.

“Aryn!” Syo called. “Do not.”

She did not reach for her lightsaber. Her need would not allow for such antiseptic justice. She would avenge Master Zallow’s death with her bare hands.

“No clean death for you,” she said through the wall of her gritted teeth.

Some distant part of her recognized her emotional slippage, recognized in passing that Master Zallow would not have approved. She did not care. The pain was too deep, too fierce. It wanted expression in violence and the two Sith in the room became the focus of its need.

The male Sith reached for his lightsaber. Before he could activate it, Aryn unleashed a blast of power that lifted both Sith from their feet and blew them into the wall. Two Alderaanian statues, caught in the effect of her power, slammed into the wall to either side of the Sith and shattered into chunks.

The Sith must have used the Force to cushion their impact, for neither appeared hurt. Both leapt to their feet and spaced themselves apart for combat. Hilts came to hands and their lightsabers made red lines in the air. The male held his blade high over his head in an unusual style, awaiting her charge, light on the balls of his feet. The female held hers low, in a variant on the medium style.

Behind her, Aryn heard the hum of Syo activating his blade. She did not slow her advance. Using the Force, she jerked the male’s hilt from his hand and brought it flying into her own grasp. Then she tossed it aside, and his sneer melted in the heat of his surprise.

She advanced on him, heedless of the woman, imagining the feel of her hands on his throat. He answered her approach with a blast of power, but she made a V with her hands, formed a wedge with her will, and deflected the blast to either side of her. More statues toppled, shattered. The female Sith, caught in the deflected blast, was thrown backward ten paces.

She closed to five paces, four. The male Sith took a fighting stance. They would fight not with lightsabers but with their hands—close, bloody work.

Aryn used the Force to augment her strength, her speed. She felt it flowing within and around her, turning her body into a weapon—

“Aryn Leneer!” a commanding voice said, Master Dar’nala’s voice. “Jedi Knight Aryn Leneer!”

Syo, too, called to her. “Aryn! Stop!”

The combination of Dar’nala’s and Syo’s voices penetrated the haze of her emotional state. She faltered, slowed, stopped. Reason elbowed its way past her emotional turmoil, and she gave voice to her thoughts. Without taking her eyes from the male Sith, she said, “The Sith have betrayed us, Master Dar’nala. The negotiations were a ploy.”

Dar’nala did not speak for a moment. Then, “You … felt this?”

Tears fought to fall from Aryn’s eyes but she forced them back. She nodded, unable to speak.

Master Dar’nala’s next words hit Aryn like a punch in the stomach.

“Listen to me, Aryn. I know. I know. But hear me now—Coruscant is in Imperial hands.”

Aryn’s breath went out of her. The statement did not make sense. Coruscant, the heart of the Republic, had fallen to the Empire?

“What?” Syo asked. “How? I thought—”

“That cannot be,” Aryn said. She must have misheard. She turned from the male Sith, who had recaptured his sneer, to face the leader of the Jedi delegation

Master Dar’nala stood in the archway, her skin a deeper red than usual. Senator Am-ris and a senior Jedi Knight, Satele Shan, flanked her. The Senator, a Cerean whose ruff of white hair topped the cliff of his furrowed brow, towered over the other two. His worried eyes looked out from a wrinkled face but focused on nothing. He looked lost.

Satele, on the other hand, looked as tightly wound as an ion coil, her gaze fixed straight ahead, her auburn hair mussed, the veneer of her neutral expression unable to mask the emotion boiling beneath it.

Neither Am-ris nor Satele seemed to notice the destruction in the hall. Both looked dazed—blank-eyed refugees wandering through the ruins of events. Only Dar’nala seemed composed, her hands clasped before her, her eyes noting the details in the room—the broken sculptures, the position of Aryn relative to the two Sith.

Aryn wondered what had transpired in the negotiation room. For a fleeting moment, hope rose in her, hope that her fellow Jedi had perceived the Sith betrayal and arrested or killed the Sith negotiators, but that hope faded as the lead Sith negotiator, Lord Baras, emerged from the chamber and stood near Dar’nala.

His wrinkled face could not hold the smugness he felt. It leaked out around the raised corners of his mouth. His dark hair, combed back off a widow’s peak, matched his dark robes and eyes. In a haughty baritone, he said, “It can be, Jedi Knight. And it is. Coruscant has fallen.”

Satele visibly tensed; her left hand clenched into a fist. Am-ris sagged. Dar’nala closed her eyes for a moment, as if struggling to maintain her calm.

“As of now,” Lord Baras continued, “Coruscant belongs to the Empire.”

“How—?” Aryn began, but Dar’nala raised a hand.

“Say nothing more. Say nothing more.”

Aryn swallowed the question she wished to ask.

“Deactivate your lightsaber,” Dar’nala said to Syo, and he did. The female Sith did the same.

“What happened here?” Lord Baras asked, his eyes on the Sith brother and sister, the ruin in the room.

The male Sith bowed, used the Force to pull his lightsaber hilt to his hand, and hooked it to his belt. “A slight disagreement, Lord Baras. Nothing more. Please forgive the tumult.”

Baras stared at the male Sith for a time, then at the female. “It is well that the disagreement did not lead to bloodshed. We are, after all, here to discuss peace.”

He seemed almost about to burst out laughing. Am-ris whirled on him. Satele grabbed the Senator’s cloak, as she might a leash, to keep him from getting too close to Baras.

“Peace! This entire proceeding was a farce—”

“Senator,” Dar’nala said, and took Am-ris by the arm. But Am-ris would have none of it. His voice gained volume as he gave vent to his anger.

“You did not come here to discuss peace! You came here to mask a sneak attack against Coruscant. You are dishonorable liars, worthy of—”

“Senator!” Dar’nala said, and her tone must have reached Am-ris, for he fell silent, his breath coming fast and hard.

Lord Baras appeared untroubled by Am-ris’s outburst. “You are mistaken, Senator. The Empire is here to discuss peace. We simply wished to ensure that the Republic would be more amenable to our terms. Should I understand your outburst to mean that the Republic is no longer interested in negotiating?”

While Am-ris reddened and sputtered, Dar’nala broke in.

“Negotiations will continue, Lord Baras.”

“You are ever the voice of wisdom, Dar’nala,” Baras said. “The Empire will expect a return to the negotiation table at this time tomorrow. If not, matters will go … poorly for the people of Coruscant.”

Dar’nala’s skin darkened further but her voice remained placid. “Our delegation will discuss matters and contact you tomorrow.”

“I shall look forward to that. Rest well.”

Am-ris cursed Baras in Cerean and Baras pretended not to hear.

As the Republic entourage picked its way among the rubble in the hall, among the rubble in their hearts, Aryn felt the mocking eyes of the Sith male upon her and could barely contain a shout of rage. Before leaving the room, she knelt and picked up one of the coral beads from her shattered bracelet.

Malgus surveyed the ruin. The shell of the drop ship still smoked and burned in places. Bits of blackened metal dotted the hall. Walls and columns had been reduced to piles of jagged rubble. Cracks veined the walls and ceiling. Light from the day’s dying sun traced dust-filled lines from roof to floor. Bodies, many of them Sith, but more of them Jedi and Republic military, lay strewn about the floor, amid the rubble. A few groans sounded here and there. The Mandalorian stood in the Temple’s shattered entrance. She held her helmet under her arm and the sun glinted on her long hair. Her eyes moved across the destruction, the hard line of her mouth showing no emotion. She must have felt Malgus’s eyes on her. She met his gaze and nodded. He returned the gesture, one warrior acknowledging another. She pulled her helmet back on, turned, ignited her jetpack, and lifted off into Coruscant’s sky. The Empire would see to her payment.

Of the fifty Sith warriors who had assaulted the Temple, perhaps a score remained on their feet. Malgus was displeased but not surprised to see Lord Adraas among the living. They, too, shared a look across the ruin, but no mutual gesture acknowledged their kinship as warriors. Neither credited the other with anything.

With the battle over, the remaining Sith warriors assembled near the drop ship and raised their fists in a salute to Malgus, shouting a victory cry amid their fallen foes. For a moment, Adraas stood among them and did nothing, merely stared at Malgus, then he, too, reluctantly joined the salute. Malgus let his tardiness pass.

For now.

Malgus acknowledged the salute with a nod.

“You are servants of the Empire,” he said. “And of the Force.”

They shouted once more in response.

Malgus kicked the hilt of Zallow’s weapon out of his way, deactivated his own lightsaber, stepped over Zallow’s body, and strode among the rubble, among the fires, among the dead, until he reached Eleena. He felt the eyes of his warriors on him, the eyes of Adraas, felt the change in sentiment come over them. He did not care.

He knelt and cradled Eleena in his arms. She remained warm, breathing. The puckered blaster wounds Zallow had given her looked like black mouths in the skin of her shoulder and chest. She appeared to have no broken bones.

“Eleena. Open your eyes. Eleena.”

Her eyes fluttered open. “Veradun,” she whispered.

Hearing her pronounce his name before other Sith surprised him, and his hand closed into a fist so tight it made his knuckles ache. She must never—never—behave familiarly with him in front of other Sith.

She must have sensed his anger for she blanched, cowered, staring at his closed fist, her eyes wide.

That she understood her transgression diffused his anger. He unrolled his fist and extended his hand.

“Can you stand?”

“Yes. Thank you, Master.”

He lifted her roughly to her feet, heedless of her wounds. She winced with pain and leaned on him. He allowed it. Her breath came in pained gasps.

“Summon a medical team from Steadfast,” he ordered Adraas.

Adraas’s eyes narrowed. No doubt he thought the task beneath him.

“You heard Darth Malgus,” Adraas said to a nearby Sith warrior. “Summon a medical team.”

“No,” Malgus said. “You do it, Adraas.”

Adraas stared at him for a moment, anger in his eyes, before he pulled a curtain over his irritation and turned his face expressionless. “As you wish, Darth Malgus.”

From outside, explosions like thunder sounded, the steady drumbeat of intense bombardment. Angral’s fleet had begun its attack on Coruscant.

“I signaled to Darth Angral that the Temple was secure,” Adraas said, the faintest hint of defiance in his tone. “You seemed … preoccupied with other things at the time.”

Adraas’s gaze fell on Eleena, then returned to Malgus.

Malgus glared at Adraas, one fist clenched, and fought down the flash of anger. He would not allow Adraas’s borderline insubordination to diminish the rush he felt at his victory.

“I will forgive your arrogation of power this once, but do not overstep again,” Malgus said. “Now remove yourself from my sight.”

Adraas colored with rage, his mouth a thin line of anger, but he dared not say another word. He gave a half bow and stalked off.

Malgus made his grip on Eleena gentler as they turned to look outside. The ruined entrance of the Temple, widened by the drop ship crashing through it, opened onto clear sky. Together, he and Eleena watched Imperial bombers streak out of the orange-and-red clouds and light Coruscant aflame.

“Go see it, Master,” Eleena whispered to him. “It is your victory. I am fine. Go.”

She was not fine and he knew it. But he also knew that he had to see.

He left her and walked the hall until he reached the shattered entranceway. The statues of the Jedi that had lined the processional lay toppled, broken at his feet. He looked out on the culmination of his life.

Imperial ships swarmed the air. Bombs fell like rain and exploded into showers of red and orange and black. Gouts of smoke poured into the sky. The few native speeders that remained in the air were pursued by Imperial fighters and shot down. Hundreds of fires filled Malgus’s field of vision. A skyrise burned, a pillar of flame reaching for the heavens. Secondary explosions sent deep vibrations moaning through the ground. Malgus occasionally caught the sounds of distant, panicked screaming. A handful of Republic fighters got airborne but they were quickly swarmed by Imperial fighters and blown from the sky.

He opened a communications channel to Darkness, Angral’s command cruiser.

“Darth Angral, you have heard that the Jedi Temple is secure?”

The sound of a busy bridge served as background noise to Angral’s response. “I have. You have done well, Darth Malgus. How many warriors died in the assault?”

“Adraas did not tell you?”

Angral did not answer, merely waited for Malgus to answer the original question.

“Perhaps thirty,” Malgus said at last.

“Excellent. I will send a transport to pick up you and your men.”

“I would rather you wait.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I wish to see Coruscant burn.”

“I understand, old friend. I will ensure the bombers spare the Temple. For now.”

The channel closed and Malgus sat down cross-legged in the doorway of the Temple. Soon, several of the Sith warriors took station around him. Together, they bore witness to fire.

In less than half a standard hour, an Imperial medical transport cut through the smoke and flame and other Imperial ships that filled the sky to set down in a cloud of dust on the large processional outside the Jedi Temple. The two pilots, visible through the transparisteel of the cockpit, saluted Malgus.

A belly door slid open and two men in the gray-and-blue of the Imperial Medical Corps hustled down the ramp. Both carried cases of supplies and instruments and both had the soft physiques of men who—despite their warrior training—had not seen hard work in some time. Bipedal medical droids, their polished silver bodies reflecting the fires burning in the cityscape, walked behind them, each pulling a treatment cart with a tri-level gurney behind it.

Malgus rose and approached them. The doctors’ eyes widened at his appearance—his scarred mien alarmed most—and they gave crisp salutes.

“There are several wounded within,” Malgus said. “The Twi’lek female is my servant. Care for her as you would me.”

“An alien, my lord?” asked the older of the two men, his jowls dotted with a day’s growth of gray beard. “As I’m sure you know, Imperial medical facilities in-theater are restricted—”

Malgus took a step toward him and the doctor’s mouth snapped shut.

“Care for her as you would me. Do you understand?”

“Yes, my lord,” the doctor said, and the medical team hurried past.

More explosions rocked the urban landscape. A bomb struck a power station, and an enormous flare of plasma jetted half a kilometer into the sky. A flight of ISF interceptors, notable for their bent wings, streaked over the Temple. The Sith around him cheered.

Eleena emerged from the Temple, her mouth tight with pain. The doctor trailed after her, worry creasing his brow.

“Please, mistress,” the doctor said, eyeing Malgus with terror. “Please.”

Eleena’s eyes widened as she took in the scale of the bombardment, the destruction. Malgus stepped before her.

“Go with the doctors,” he said. “There’s an Imperial medical ship, Steadfast, in orbit with the rest of the cruiser fleet. Await me there. I will come when I am finished here.”

“I do not require care, Master.”

“Do as I command,” he said, though his voice was not harsh.

She swallowed, smiled, and nodded.

“Thank you, my lord,” the doctor said to Malgus. “Come, mistress.” He took Eleena gently by the arm and escorted her aboard the transport while bombs fell and the Republic died.

After the medical team had triaged and loaded the wounded, the Sith loaded their own dead aboard. The bodies would be taken to Dromund Kaas or Korriban for proper rites. Malgus wished Adraas had been among them.

After the transport lifted off, Adraas, masked once more, came to Malgus’s side.

“What of the Jedi bodies?” Adraas asked.

Malgus considered. The Jedi had fought well, especially Zallow. They misunderstood the Force, but he nevertheless wished to treat them honorably. “Make the Temple their tomb. Bring the whole thing down.”

“I will request a bomber to—”

Malgus shook his head and turned on Adraas. They stood about the same height, and Adraas did not quail before Malgus’s appearance.

“No,” Malgus said. “There are more than enough explosives still on the drop ship. Use them.”

“This is an order … my lord?”

Malgus held his calm with difficulty. “Sith should destroy the Jedi Temple, not Imperial pilots. Do you disagree, Adraas?”

Adraas seemed not to have considered this. Malgus was not surprised. Adraas, too, misunderstood the Force, and he had little sense of honor. Still, he did as he was told.

“It will be done, my lord.”

Presently, the charges were set and Malgus held a remote detonator in his hand. He eyed the Temple one last time, its towers, the stacked tiers of the central structure, the toppled statues, the great entryway made into a rough and jagged sneer by the passage of the drop ship. The rest of his Sith forces stood gathered around him.

“Should we remove to a safe distance?” Adraas asked.

Malgus regarded him with contempt. “This is a safe distance.”

“We are twenty meters away from the entrance,” Adraas said.

Staring into Adraas’s face, Malgus activated the detonator. A series of low booms sounded, starting deep within the Temple and drawing closer as the charges exploded in sequence and undermined the Temple’s foundation.

A strong gust of dust and loose debris blew out of the entrance. The explosions on the upper levels began, grew louder, fiercer. Stone cracked. Large chunks fell from the Temple’s façade and crashed to the ground. Flames were visible through the entrance. A whole series of explosions followed in rapid succession, the sound of the snapping spine of the Jedi Order.

The huge edifice, a symbol of the Jedi for centuries, began to fall in on itself. The towers collapsed in its wake, the huge spires crumbling as if in slowed motion. A jet of fire and bits of rock moving faster than the speed of sound exploded out of the now-collapsing entrance.

Instead of taking cover, Malgus fell into the Force, raised both of his hands, palms outward, and formed a transparent wall of power before himself and his warriors. His fellow Sith joined him, mirroring his gesture, mirroring his power. Rocks and debris pelted into the shared barrier, the speeding shrapnel of ruin. The jet of flame struck it and parted around it, water to a stone.

The Temple continued its slow demise, falling inward, shrinking into a shapeless mound of rubble and ruin. And then it was over.

A thick cloud of dust hung like a funeral shroud over the mountain of shattered stone and steel that had been the Jedi Temple. There could have been Jedi survivors in the Temple’s lower levels. Malgus did not care. They were either crushed or trapped forever.

“And so falls the Republic,” Malgus said.

The Sith around him cheered.

No one among the Republic delegation to Alderaan spoke until they had cleared the hall. No one seemed to know what to say. Aryn struggled to keep their collective emotional turmoil at bay. Like her, they were bouncing randomly among grief, rage, and disappointment. Even Dar’nala was struggling to stay centered, though she appeared outwardly calm.

Dar’nala finally broke the silence, her tone, at least, all business.

“We need to reach Master Zym as soon as possible. I need his counsel.”

“How can we be sure he is alive?” Satele asked. “If Coruscant is fallen …”

As one the delegation faltered. Syo and Aryn shared a look of shock. It had not occurred to Aryn that Master Zym, too, might have been lost.

“I would have felt it if he were … dead,” Dar’nala said, nodding as if to assure herself. “Arrange a secure communications link, Satele.”

“Yes, Master Dar’nala.”

“No one is to leave here,” Dar’nala said to all of them. Aryn saw that the Master’s eyes were bloodshot. “When word of the attack reaches the public, the press will want comment. We are to give none until we have settled on our course. I will speak for this delegation for now. Agreed?”

All nodded, even Senator Am-ris.

“This will ultimately be a decision for the Republic to make, Senator,” Dar’nala said. “The Jedi will advise, of course.”

Am-ris slouched when he spoke, weighed down by events. “I will discuss matters with the acting head of the Senate,” he said.

“The Senate may not exist as of today,” Dar’nala said. “You may have to act in its stead. Your advisers here can assist you. We will support you and whatever decision is ultimately made.”

Worry lines creased Am-ris’s forehead. He swallowed, nodded.

They walked through the empty corridors, despondent. The High Council building had been vacated for the negotiations. Even the Alderaanian guards typically stationed within the structure had been relegated to posts outside. Though the windows looked out on courtyards of manicured grass and shrubs, gently flowing fountains, and elegant sculptures, Aryn nevertheless felt as if they were walking through a tomb. Something had died within the building.

Her thoughts churned. All of them seemed to be on the edge of saying something, yet no one said anything. Aryn finally gave voice to what she imagined all of them must be thinking.

“We cannot let this aggression stand, Master.”

Satele and Syo gave small nods of agreement. Dar’nala stared straight out a window at the Alderaanian countryside.

“I fear we will have no choice. The Chancellor is dead—”

“Dead?” Aryn asked.

“We saw it happen,” Satele said, nodding, her voice tight. “He said an Imperial fleet attacked Coruscant. It seems the attack focused on the Senate and the Jedi Temple.”

“I doubt they stopped there,” Am-ris said.

“There were Padawans in the Temple,” Syo said.

Satele continued. “We have no idea of the numbers of the Imperial forces or what other damage they may have wrought.”

“We cannot surrender Coruscant,” Aryn said.

The statement appalled everyone into silence.

“I agree,” Dar’nala said at last. “It should not come to that.”

“Should not?” Syo asked.

Aryn could scarcely believe what she was hearing. The Jedi had been duped, had failed in their charge to protect the Republic. Master Zym should have foreseen the Sith plan. She stared out the windows as they walked, barely seeing the Alderaanian landscape, the nearby river.

She had fought Imperial forces on Alderaan, had beaten them into retreat. She wanted nothing more than to fight them again now.

Dar’nala’s voice brought her back to the present. “How did you know the Sith had attacked Coruscant before we exited the negotiation room, Aryn?”

“I didn’t,” Aryn admitted. “Not with certainty. I only knew that …” She tried and failed to keep the emotion from her voice. “Master Zallow had been killed. And when I saw the look in the eyes of the Sith …”

Syo moved a step closer to her, as if he would protect her from her grief.

“Master Zallow is dead, then,” Dar’nala said, stiffening. Her words sounded tight, the grief leaking through her control. “You are certain?”

Aryn nodded but said nothing more, simply built a wall of her will to hold back tears. Syo seemed to want to offer her comfort, but instead he did nothing.

“We all mourn him, Aryn,” Dar’nala said. “And the others lost today.”

Aryn could not keep the anger from her voice. “Yet you would have us return to negotiate with those who did this.”

Dar’nala stopped in her tracks, turned to face Aryn. Aryn knew she had overstepped. Dar’nala’s voice remained level, but the heat in her eyes could have set Aryn afire.

“There are billions of people on Coruscant. Children. Their lives depend upon us acting judiciously, not rashly. Your emotions are controlling your tongue. Do not let them control your thinking.”

“She is right, Aryn,” Senator Am-ris said and put a hand on Aryn’s shoulder. “We must think of the good of the Republic.”

Aryn knew both of them were right, but it did not matter. She would get justice for Master Zallow, one way or another.

“Forgive me, Master,” she said. “Senator.”

“I understand,” Dar’nala said, and the group started walking again. “I understand all too well.”

Zeerid tried and failed to sleep in his chair for a few hours while Fatman pelted through the blue tunnel of hyperspace. Instead, he worried over his next job. More, he worried about the job after that, and the one after that. He worried about his daughter, about how she’d get the care she needed when he—he saw it as inevitable now—died on one of his jobs. The hole he lived in seemed to be getting deeper all the time, and he got no closer to digging his way out.

The instrumentation beeped a signal to indicate the end of the jump. He de-tinted the cockpit canopy as the ship came out of hyperspace and blue gave way to black.

The ball of Vulta’s star burned in the distance. Vulta was visible through the canopy, its day side shining like a green-and-blue jewel against the dark of space.

Arriving in Vulta’s system made him feel immediately lighter. The part of him that kept work at bay reasserted itself. The thought of seeing Arra always did that for him.

He engaged the engines and Fatman sped through the empty space between him and his daughter. When he neared the planet, he turned the ship over to the autopilot and waited for planetary control to ping him.

While waiting, he called up a news channel on the HoloNet. His small in-cockpit vidscreen showed images of the peace negotiations on Alderaan. He’d forgotten about them. Since mustering out, the war between the Empire and the Republic had become little more than background noise to him. He knew Havoc Squadron had accounted well for itself on Alderaan, but not much more.

Footage of the Sith delegation entering the council building filled the screen, commentary, then footage of the Jedi delegation doing the same. He thought he saw a familiar face among the Jedi.

“Freeze picture and magnify right.”

The vidscreen did as he’d ordered, and there she was—Aryn Leneer. She still wore her long, sandy hair loose, still had the same green eyes, the same hunched posture, as if she were bracing herself against a storm.

Which she was, Zeerid supposed, given the keenness with which she felt the emotions of those around her.

He hadn’t seen her in years. They had become friends during the months they’d served together on Balmorra. He’d come to know that she could fly pretty well and fight very well. He respected that. And because he fought pretty well and flew still better, he thought she had respected him. She never drank with Zeerid and the commandos, but she always hit the cantina with them. Just watching them.

Zeerid had assumed she came along because she liked the emotional temperature of the commandos when they drank—relief and joy at having survived another mission. She always had an openness to her face, an expression in her eyes that said she understood. Her openness had drawn drunk soldiers like sweet flies to nectar honey. They’d wanted to look in her eyes and confess something. Zeerid imagined it must have been exhausting for her. And yet she’d always been there for them. Every time.

The vid cut to a shot of Coruscant and a commentator said, “Until today, when an attack …”

The ship’s comm unit chimed receipt of a signal and Zeerid killed the vid. Expecting planetary control, he reached for it but stopped halfway when he realized it was the encrypted subspace channel he used with The Exchange.

He considered ignoring the hail. Speaking to Oren so near to Vulta would soil his reunion with Arra. He did not want business on his mind when he saw his daughter.

The steady, red blink of the hail continued.

He relented, cursed, and hit the button to open the channel, hit it so hard that he cracked the plastoid. He tensed for what he would hear.

“What?” he barked.

For a moment Oren said nothing, then, “If voice analysis didn’t show it to be you speaking, I might have assumed I’d hailed someone else.”

“I have something else on my mind right now.”

“Oh?” Oren paused, as if awaiting a more thorough explanation. Zeerid offered none, so Oren continued: “As I alluded to before, I have something urgent. Delivery requires someone with extraordinary piloting skills. Someone like you, Z-man.”

“I just finished a job, Oren. I need time—”

“This job will wipe your slate clean.”

Zeerid sat up in his chair, not sure he’d heard correctly. “Say again?”

“You heard me.”

Zeerid had heard him; he just couldn’t believe it. Mere hours ago, he imagined he could never get clear of The Exchange. Now Oren was offering him just that. He tried to keep his voice steady.

“This just a drop?”

“It is a drop.”

“What’s the cargo?” He tried not to choke on the next word. “Spice?”

“Yes.”

“Where is it going?”

He figured it had to be heading to some seriously hot hole of a planet for Oren to have offered to clear his debt.

“Coruscant.” Oren pronounced the name reluctantly, as if he expected Zeerid to balk.

“That’s it?

“Did you hear what I said?”

“I did. You said ‘Coruscant.’ So what’s the catch?”

“The catch?”

“Coruscant ain’t exactly a hot LZ. It’s a vacation compared with what I’m used to. So what’s the catch?”

“You haven’t caught the holo?”

“I’ve been in hyperspace.”

“Of course.” Oren chuckled. “The Empire attacked Coruscant.”

Zeerid leaned in close, once more not sure he had heard correctly. Oren’s simple statement and the flat tone in which he delivered it did not seem to have the wherewithal to carry the import of the words Zeerid thought he’d heard.

“Repeat? There were peace negotiations taking place on Alderaan. I just saw them on the holo. What do you mean by ‘attacked’?”

“I mean attacked. An Imperial fleet is in orbit around the planet. Imperial forces occupy Coruscant. No one knows much else because the Empire is jamming communications out of Coruscant.”

Zeerid’s thoughts still could not quite wrap around the idea. How could the Empire have attacked any of the Core Worlds, much less the capital?

“How could they have gotten past the defense grid? It doesn’t make sense.”

“I neither know nor care about the particulars, Z-man. Though I gather it was a surprise attack that occurred right in the midst of the peace negotiations. If nothing else, one can appreciate the Empire’s boldness. You fought against the Empire, didn’t you, Z-man?”

Zeerid nodded. He had traded shots with Imperial forces many times, originally as a commando in the Republic army, then as … whatever he was now. For a moment, he flashed on the ridiculous notion that he should re-up with the army. He chided himself for stupidity.

“You can get the rest from the holo,” Oren said. “Meanwhile, start planning for this drop.”

The drop. Right.

“You want me to fly a ship full of spice into a freshly conquered world occupied by the Empire? You said they locked down comm traffic. They’ll have orbital traffic to a minimum, too. I can’t sneak through that, even flying dark. They’ll blow me out of space.”

“You’ll find a way.”

“I’m open to suggestions.”

“I have faith you’ll figure something out.”

“At the least we should wait until matters settle. The Empire will probably allow regular commercial ship traffic to resume in a week or so. At that point—”

“That will not work.”

“It’s got to work.”

“No. The cargo needs to move immediately.”

Zeerid was starting to like things less and less. His sense of smell picked up something turning to rot. “Why?”

“You don’t need to know.”

“I do if I’m hauling it. Which I haven’t even decided yet.”

Oren fell silent for a moment. Then, “This is engspice.”

Zeerid blew out a sigh. No wonder the job would wipe his slate clean. Chem-engineered spice was not only especially addictive, it also altered users’ brain chemistry such that only more of the same “brand” of engspice could satisfy their need. Mere spice would not do. Dealers called engspice “the leash,” because it gave them a monopoly over their users. They could charge a premium, and did.

“We have a buyer on Coruscant whose supply is running low. He needs this order to get to Coruscant quickly, Empire or no Empire. You know why.”

Zeerid did know why. “Because if the users can’t get their brand of engspice, they’ll go through withdrawal. And if they get through that …”

“They break their addiction to the brand and our buyer loses his market. His concern over this is great, understandably.”

“Which means The Exchange got to name its price.”

“Which works well for you, Z-man. Don’t sound so contemptuous.”

Zeerid chewed the corner of his lip. He felt a bit nauseated. On the one hand, he could be free with just this run. On the other hand, he’d seen an engspice den on Balmorra once, while serving in the army. Not pretty.

“No,” Zeerid said. For strength, he stared through the cockpit canopy at Vulta, where his daughter lived, and shook his head. “I can’t do it. Spice is bad enough. Engspice is too much. I’ll earn my way out of this some other way.”

Oren’s voice turned hard. “No, you won’t. You can die trying to make this drop, or you can die not making this drop. You understand my meaning?”

Zeerid ground his teeth. “Yes. I understand it.”

“I’m glad. Look at it this way. If you make the drop, you’re even with The Exchange. Maybe you even walk away, huh? If you don’t make the drop, you’re dead and who cares?”

Oren chuckled at his own cleverness, and Zeerid wished for nothing more than to choke the bastard.

“Then I need more,” Zeerid said. If he was going to get dirty, he wanted enough credits in hand to buy a shower for his conscience. “Not just a clean slate. I want two hundred thousand credits on top of wiping out the debt, and I want a hundred of it paid before I land on Vulta, which means you’ve got a quarter of an hour.”

“Z-man …”

“This is non-negotiable.”

“You need some play money, huh?”

“Something like that.”

“Very well. Done. The first one hundred will hit your account before you touch down.”

Zeerid bit his lip in anger. He should have asked for more. “When do I go?”

“The cargo is en route to Vulta now. And when I say it’s time to go, you move your tail.”

“Fine.” Zeerid drew a deep breath. “You done talking, Oren?”

“I’m done.”

“Then I’ve got one more thing.”

“What is it?”

“The more I come to know you, the more I want to shoot you in the face. Just so you heard it from me at least once. Two hundred thousand or no two hundred thousand.”

“This is why I like you, Z-man,” Oren said. “Put your ship down as Red Dwarf and follow the docking instructions. I will contact you when the cargo is ready.”

“You loading Fatman, or am I flying something else?”

“I don’t know yet. Probably we’ll load Fatman in the usual way—a modified maintenance droid. You’ll know when I know.”

“If it ain’t Fatman, make kriffing sure it’s something else fast.”

“I will be in touch.”

“Fine,” Zeerid said, though it wasn’t fine. He closed the channel, sat back in his chair, and stared out into space.

Dar’nala dismissed Aryn and Syo, presumably so she, Satele, and Senator Am-ris could take private counsel with Master Zym. With nothing to do and nothing more to say, Aryn returned to her chambers to …

To what?

She did not know what to do. She felt as if she should be doing something, but she had no idea what. So she ate without tasting, paced the floor, and meditated, trying to keep the pain at bay by staying busy.

When that did not work, she checked the HoloNet for news. Unsurprisingly, the reports were filled with breathless speculation about the Imperial attack on Coruscant and what it meant for the peace negotiations. She could not bear the sound of the newscasters, so she muted the vidscreen.

There was no footage of Coruscant post-attack so Aryn assumed the Empire must have jammed communications. Instead, the footage showed old images of the Republic’s capital. Millions of speeders, swoops, and aircars moved in organized lines above the landscape of duracrete and transparisteel. Thousands of pedestrians strode the autowalks and plazas.

The image changed to a view of the Jedi Temple taken from an airborne recorder. Aryn could not take her eyes from the image, the towers, the tiered layers of the structure. Towering statues of old Masters, lightsabers pointed skyward, lined the broad avenue that led to the enormous doors to the Temple.

She remembered the sense of wonder she’d felt walking under those statues for the first time, side by side with Master Zallow. She’d been a child and the Temple and the statues had seemed impossibly big.

“This will be your home now, Aryn,” Master Zallow had said, and smiled at her in his way.

She wondered how the Temple looked now, after the attack, wondered if it even still stood.

She imagined Master Zallow, commanding the Jedi Knights and Padawans, fighting Sith warriors in the shadows of those statues, just as she had fought the Sith warrior in the midst of the Alderaanian statues. She imagined him falling, dying.

Tears welled anew. She tried to fight them but failed. She could not level out her emotional state, wasn’t even sure she wanted to. The pain of Master Zallow’s death was all she had left of him.

A thought struck her, and the thought transformed into an urgent need. An idea rooted in her mind, in her gut, and she could not unseat it.

She wanted to know the name and face of Master Zallow’s murderer. She wanted to see him. She had to see him. And if she could see the Sith, learn his name, then she could avenge Master Zallow.

The more she pondered the notion, the more needful it became.

But she could learn nothing on Alderaan, as part of a peace negotiation. She knew what Zym, Dar’nala, and Am-ris would decide, what they must decide. They would put up a show of negotiating, then they would accept whatever terms the Sith offered. They would betray the memory of Master Zallow, of all the Jedi who had fought and fallen at the Temple.

It was obscene, and Aryn would not be party to it.

Unable to contain her emotion, she shouted a stream of expletives, one after another, a wide and long river of profanity of the kind she had not uttered since her adolescence.

Moments later, an urgent knock sounded on her door.

“Who is it?” she called, her voice still rough and irritable.

“It is Syo. Are you … well? I heard—”

“It was the vid,” she lied, and powered off the vidscreen. “I want to be alone now, Syo.”

A long silence, then, “You don’t have to carry this alone, Aryn.”

But she did have to carry it alone. The memory of Master Zallow was her weight to bear.

“You know where to find me,” Syo said.

“Thank you,” she said, too softly for him to hear.

She passed the hours in solitude. Day gave way to night and no word came from Master Dar’nala or Satele. She tried to sleep but failed. She dreaded what the morning would bring.

She lay in her bed, in darkness, staring up at the ceiling. Alderaan’s moon, gibbous and hazy, rose and painted the room in lurid light. Everything looked washed out, ghostly, surreal. For a moment she let herself feel as if she’d stepped into a dream. How else could matters have transpired so? How else could the Jedi have failed so?

Master Dar’nala’s voice replayed in her mind, over and over: I fear we will have no choice.

The pain of the words came from the fact that they were correct. The Jedi could not sacrifice Coruscant. The Republic and the Jedi Council would accept a treaty. They had to. All that remained was to negotiate terms, terms that must be favorable to the Empire. In the end, the Empire’s betrayal, the Sith betrayal, would be rewarded with a Jedi capitulation.

While Aryn recognized the reasonableness of the course, she nevertheless could not shed the feeling that it was wrong. Master Dar’nala was wrong. Senator Am-ris was wrong.

Such a thought had never entered her mind before. It, too, brought pain. Everything had changed for her.

Her fists balled with anger and grief, and she felt more shouts creeping up her throat. Breathing deeply, regularly, she sought to quell her loss of control. She knew Master Zallow would not have approved it.

But Master Zallow was dead, murdered by the Sith.

And soon he would be failed by the Order, his memory murdered by political necessity.

Her mind walked through memories of Master Zallow, not of his teachings, but of his smiles, his stern but caring reprimands of her waywardness, the pride she knew he’d felt when she was promoted to Jedi Knight.

Those were the things that had bonded them, not pedagogy.

The hole that had opened in her when she’d felt his death yawned still. She feared she might drain away into it. She knew the name of the hole.

Love.

She’d loved Master Zallow. He’d been a father to her. She had never told him and now she never could. Losing something she loved had ripped her open in a way she had not expected. The pain hurt, but the pain was right.

The Order had wrought a galaxy in which good capitulated to evil, where human feelings—Aryn’s feelings—were crushed under the weight of Jedi nonattachment.

What good was any of it if it brought matters to this?

Her racing thoughts lifted her from bed. She was too restless for sleep. She put her feet on the carpeted floor, hung her head, tried to gather the thoughts bouncing chaotically in her brain.

She realized that she still wore her robes, not her nightclothes. She crossed the room and stepped through the sliding doors to her balcony. The brisk wind mussed her hair. The scent of wildflowers and loam saturated the air. Insects chirped. A night bird cooed.

It would have been peaceful under other circumstances.

A hundred meters down, the Alderaanian landscape unrolled before her, a meadow of tall grasses, shrubs, and slim apo trees that whispered and swayed in the breeze. She could not see the walls of the compound through the vegetation.

It was beautiful, Aryn allowed. Yet she still had the sense that she was standing at the scene of a crime. The cool night air and calm setting did nothing to assuage the feeling that the Jedi had failed catastrophically. She gripped the top of the balcony so tightly that it made her fingers ache.

Beyond the compound, in the distance, the surface of a wide, winding river shimmered in the moonlight. The running lights from a few boats dotted its surface. She watched their slow, hypnotic traverse over the water. The sky, too, was dotted with traffic.

She found it infuriating that life went on as it had for everyone else, while for her, everything had changed. She felt as if she had been hollowed out.

“Thinking of jumping?” a voice said, a gentle smile in the tone.

She started before placing the voice as Syo’s. For a moment, he had sounded exactly like Master Zallow.

Syo stood on the balcony of his own chambers, five meters to her right. He had to have been there the whole time. Perhaps he could not sleep, either.

“No,” she said. “Just thinking.”

His usual calm expression was marred by a furrowed brow and worried eyes. “About Master Zallow?” he asked.

Hearing someone else speak her master’s name at that moment pierced her. Emotion welled in her, put a fist in her throat. She nodded, unable to speak.

“I am sorry for you, Aryn. Master Zallow will be missed.”

She found her voice. “He was more to me than just a master.”

He nodded as if he understood, but she suspected he did not, not really.

“To speak of nonattachment, to understand it, that is one thing. But to practice it …” He stared at her. “That is another.”

“Are you lecturing me, Syo?”

“I am reminding you, Aryn. All Jedi must sacrifice. Sometimes we sacrifice the emotional bonds that usually link people one to another. Sometimes we sacrifice … more, as did Master Zallow. That is the nature of our service. Don’t lose sight of it in your grief.”

She realized that there was more separating her from Syo than five meters of space. Her grief was allowing her to see for the first time.

“You do not understand,” she said.

For a time he said nothing, then, “Maybe I don’t. But I’m here if you need to talk. I am your friend, Aryn. I always will be.”

“I know that.”

He was silent for a moment, then stepped back from the ledge of his balcony. “Good night, Aryn. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Good night, Syo.”

He left her alone with her thoughts, with the night.

Sacrifice, Syo had said. Aryn had already sacrificed much in her life, and Master Zallow had sacrificed all. She did not turn from sacrifice, but sacrifice had to have meaning. And she saw now that it had all been for nothing. Always she had quieted her needs, her desires, under the weight of sacrifice, nonattachment, service. But now her need was too great. She owed Master Zallow too much to let his death go unavenged.

Dar’nala and Zym and Am-ris and the rest of them could accede to onerous Sith terms to save Coruscant. That was a political matter. Aryn’s matter was personal, and she would not shirk it.

She returned to her room and flicked on the vidscreen. More commentary on the attack, a Cerean pundit offering his analysis of how it changed the balance of power in the peace negotiations. Aryn watched the vids to distract her, barely saw them.

Vids.

“Vids,” she said, sitting up.

The Temple’s surveillance system would have recorded the Sith attack. If she could get to it, she could see Master Zallow’s murderer.

Assuming the Temple still stood.

Assuming the recording had not been discovered and destroyed.

Assuming the Jedi did not surrender Coruscant to the Empire.

It should not come to that, Master Dar’nala had said. Should not.

Aryn would not leave her need to chance, not this time.

She was thinking of jumping after all.

Having made the decision, she knew she had to act on it immediately or let doubt assail her certainty. She rose, feeling light on her feet for the first time in hours. She gathered her pack, tightened her robes, and stepped back out onto the balcony. The wind had picked up. The leaves hissed in the breeze. The next step, once taken, was irrevocable. She knew that.

She spared a glance at Syo’s room, saw it was dark.

Heart racing, she turned and leapt into the open air, following her thoughts groundward, untethered from the Order, from nonattachment, from everything save her need to right a wrong.

Using the Force to slow her descent, she hit the ground in a crouch and sped off. No one had seen her leave and no one would mark her absence before dawn. She would be at her ship and gone well before that.

She’d need to figure a way to get to Coruscant, and she had an idea of who could help her. She wanted those surveillance vids. And then she wanted to find the Sith who’d murdered Master Zallow.

The Order might be forced to betray what it stood for, but Aryn would not betray the memory of her master.

The rest of the Sith force had returned to the fleet, but Malgus lingered. He stood alone among the ruins of the Jedi Temple. He powered off his comlink, putting him out of touch with Imperial forces, and communed in solitude with the Force. Walking the perimeter of the ruins, he loitered over the destruction, pleased at his victory but flat with the realization that he had defeated his enemy and no obvious replacement was apparent.

He longed for conflict. He knew this of himself. He needed conflict.

There would be more battles with the Jedi and the Republic, of course, but with the capture and razing of Coruscant, the fall of the Republic was a certainty, only a matter of time. Soon his Force vision would be realized, then … what?

He would have to trust that the Force would present him with another foe, another war worth fighting.

Scaling a mound of rubble, he found a perch that offered an excellent view of the surrounding urbanscape. The cracked face of the statue of Odan-Urr lay atop the mound beside him, eyeing him mournfully.

There, astride the ruins of his enemy, Malgus waited for the Imperial fleet to begin the incineration of the planet.

An hour passed by, then another, and as twilight gave way to night the number of Imperial ships prowling the sky over Coruscant began to thin rather than thicken. Bombers returned to their cruisers, and fighters took up not attack but patrol formations.

What was happening? The Imperial fleet did not have the resources to manage a long-term occupation of Coruscant. Imperial forces had to raze the planet and move on before Republic forces could gather for a counterattack.

And yet … nothing was happening. Malgus did not understand.

He activated his comlink and raised his cruiser, Valor.

“Darth Malgus,” said his second in command, Commander Jard. “We have been unable to raise you for hours. I was concerned for your well-being. I just dispatched a transport to search for you at the Temple.”

“What is happening, Jard? Where are the bombers? When will the planetary bombardment begin?”

Jard stumbled over his reply. “My lord … I … Darth Angral …”

Malgus’s hand squeezed the comlink as he surmised the meaning behind Jard’s stuttering response. “Speak clearly, Commander.”

“It seems the peace negotiations are continuing on Alderaan, my lord. Darth Angral has instructed all forces to stand down until matters there crystallize.”

Malgus watched a patrol of Mark VI interceptors fly over. “Peace negotiations?”

“That is my understanding, Darth Malgus.”

Malgus seethed, stared at a smoke plume thrown up by a burning skyrise. “Thank you, Jard.”

“Will you be returning to Valor, my lord?”

“No,” Malgus said. “But get that transport to me now. I require an audience with Darth Angral.”

The terms of the negotiations prohibited either the Imperial or Republic delegations from posting external security around the High Council building and compound. Instead, both had their extended delegations posted in nearby cities.

Moving with Force-augmented speed, Aryn easily avoided the Alderaanian guards posted on the grounds of the compound. A canine with one of the guard teams must have caught her smell. It growled as she passed, but before the guards could turn on their infrared scanners, Aryn was already a hundred meters away. She did not exit through any of the checkpoints. Instead, she picked her way among the gardens until she reached the compound’s walls, veined in green creepers blooming with yellow and white flowers.

Without slowing, she drew on the Force, leapt into the air, and arced over the five-meter wall. She hit the ground on the other side, free.

To her surprise, she did not feel a pull to turn back. She took this as a sign that she had made the right decision.

The High Council building perched atop a wooded hill. Winding roads, streams, and scenic footpaths led down the hill to a small resort town nestled at its foot. Lights from the town’s buildings blinked through the trees and other foliage. The susurrus of traffic and city life carried up the hill.

It was late, but not so late that she couldn’t hail an aircar taxi and get to the spaceport before her absence was noted.

Without looking back, she sped off into the night.

When she reached town, she located a line of automated aircar taxis parked outside an open-air eatery filled with young people. A Rodian chef manned the central grill, his arms a whirl of cleavers and knives. The smell of roasted meat, smoke, and a spice she could not place filled the air. Music blared from speakers, the bass causing the ground to vibrate. She kept her hood drawn over her face and hopped into the first taxi in line. The anthropomorphic droid driver put an elbow on the seat and turned to face her. It wore a ridiculous cloth hat designed to make it look more human. Given her own fragile emotions, Aryn was pleased to have a droid driver. Droids were voids to her empathic sense.

“Destination, please.”

“The Eeseen spaceport,” she answered.

“Very good, mistress,” it said.

The door of the taxi closed, the engine started, and the car climbed into the air. The town fell away underneath them.

The droid’s social programming kicked in, and it tried to make small talk designed to put a passenger at ease. “Are you from Alderaan, mistress?”

“No,” Aryn said.

“Ah, then may I recommend that you try—”

“I have no need for conversation,” she said. “Please drive in silence.”

“Yes, mistress.”

Once the taxi took position at commercial altitude and fell into a lane, the droid accelerated the taxi to a few hundred kilometers per hour. They’d make the spaceport in half an hour. She considered powering on the in-car vidscreen but decided against it. Instead, she looked out the window at other traffic, at the dark Alderaanian terrain.

“Spaceport ahead, mistress,” said the droid.

Below and ahead, the Eeseen spaceport—one of many on Alderaan—came into view. Aryn could not have missed it. Its lights glowed like a galaxy.

One of the larger structures on the planet, the spaceport was really a series of interconnected structures that straddled fifty square kilometers. The main hub of the port was a series of tiered, concentric arms that twisted around a core of mostly transparisteel, which locals called “the bubble.” It was very much a self-contained city, with its own hotels, restaurants, medical facilities, and security forces.

From above, Aryn knew, the spaceport looked similar to a spiral-armed galaxy. It could dock several hundred ships at a time, from large superfreighters on the lower-level cargo platforms to single-being craft on the upper platforms. A tower for planetary control stuck out of the top of the bubble like a fat antenna.

Due to the late hour, most of the upper docking platforms were dark, but the lower levels were bright and busy with activity. As Aryn watched, a large cargo freighter descended toward one of the lower platforms, while two others began their slow ascent out of dock and into the atmosphere. Shipping firms often did much of their work at night, when in-atmosphere traffic was reduced.

Watching it all, Aryn was once more struck with the oddity of the fact that life for everyone else in the galaxy went on as it had, while the Republic itself was in grave danger. She wanted desperately to scream at all of them: What do you think is going to happen next!

But instead she kept it inside, an emotional pressure that she thought must soon pop an artery.

Dozens of speeders, swoops, and loader droids flew, buzzed, crawled, and rolled along the port’s many docks and in the air around the landing platforms. Automated cranes lifted the huge shipping containers carried in the bays of freighters.

Even from half a kilometer out, Aryn could see the lines of people and droids riding the autowalks and lifts within the spaceport’s central bubble. The whole structure looked like an insect hive. A portion of the bubble near the top housed a luxury hotel. Each room featured a balcony that looked out on Alderaan’s natural beauty. Seeing them, Aryn thought of her exchange with Syo.

“A Jedi must sacrifice,” she said.

She was about to do exactly that.

“I’m sorry, mistress,” said the droid. “Did you say something?”

“No.”

“What entrance, mistress?”

“I need to get to level one, sublevel D.”

“Very good, mistress.”

The aircar descended from the traffic lane to stop at one of the entrances on level one of the spaceport. The droid offered his hand, which featured an integrated card scanner, and Aryn ran her credcard. The Order would be able to track her from its use, but she had no other way to pay. She stepped out of the aircar and hurried through the automated doors of the port.

Once inside, she moved rapidly, barely seeing the other sentients on the walkways and lifts. Conversation occurred around her, but, lost in her thoughts, she heard it only as a distant buzz. Music blared from a darkened cantina. A young couple—a human man and a Cerean woman—walked arm-and-arm out of a restaurant, heads close together, laughing at some shared secret. Droids whirred past Aryn, carting cargo and luggage.

“Pardon me,” they said as they whizzed past.

Vidscreens hung in strategic places throughout the facility. She eyed one, saw a view of Coruscant, which then cut to the High Council compound on Alderaan. She avoided looking at any other vids as she went.

She kept her eyes focused on nothing, hoping that the late hour would spare her any contact with other members of the Jedi delegation who might be stationed at the spaceport. She feared the sound of their voices would pop the bubble of her emotional control.

Hurrying along the corridors, lifts, and walks, she reached the level where she’d landed her Raven and let herself relax. She raised her wrist comlink to her mouth, thinking to hail T6, but a voice from behind called to her and shattered her calm.

“Aryn? Aryn Leneer?”

Her heart lurched as she turned to see Vollen Sor, a fellow Jedi Knight, emerging from a nearby lift and hurrying to catch up with her. Vollen’s Padawan, a Rodian named Keevo, trailed behind him, a satellite in orbit around the planet of his Master. Both wore their traditional robes. They wore their lightsabers openly, outside their robes, as they would in a combat environment.

She tensed. Perhaps Master Dar’nala had noticed her absence and deduced her intent. Perhaps Vollen and Keevo had come to stop her.

She let her hand hover near the hilt of her lightsaber.

By the time the transport set down near the Temple, Malgus had followed enough communication chatter to understand what had occurred. And what he had learned only incensed him further.

He bounded onto the transport and stood in the small, rear cargo bay.

“Leave the bay open as you fly,” he ordered the pilot over the transport’s intercom.

“My lord?”

“Go to a hundred meters up and circle. I want to see the surface.”

“Yes, Darth Malgus.”

As the transport lifted him away from the ruins of the Jedi Temple, wind whipped around the bay and pawed at his cloak. He stood at the edge of the ramp and used the Force to anchor himself in place. From there, he surveyed Coruscant, the planet that should have been destroyed.

Most of the urbanscape was lit, so night did not hide the destruction. A haze of smoke hung like a funeral shroud over the still smoldering ruins. The air carried the faint, sickly sweet tang of burned bodies and melted plastoid. He tried to guess the number of the dead: in the tens of thousands, certainly. A hundred thousand? He could not know. He did know that it should have been billions.

Shafts of steel stuck like bones out of piles of shattered duracrete. Here and there droid-assisted excavation teams sifted through the rubble, seeking survivors or bodies. Frightened faces turned up to watch the transport pass.

“You should be dead,” Malgus said to them. “Not merely frightened.”

Quadrant after quadrant of Coruscant had been reduced to rubble.

But not enough of it.

Most buildings still stood and most of the planet’s people still lived. The Republic had been wounded, but not killed.

And there was nothing more dangerous than a wounded animal.

Malgus had difficulty containing the anger he felt. His fist reflexively clenched and unclenched.

He had been misled. Worse, he had been betrayed. A score of his warriors had died for no reason other than to strengthen the Empire’s negotiating posture.

Sirens screamed in the distance, barely audible over the wind. Far off, unarmed Republic medical ships whirred through the sky. Speeders and swoops dotted the air here and there, the traffic light and haphazard.

Malgus had learned that Darth Angral had dissolved the Senate and declared martial law. But with the planet pacified, Angral had allowed rescuers to save whom they could. Malgus imagined that Angral would soon allow free civilian movement. Life would start again on Coruscant. Malgus did not understand Angral’s thinking.

No. He did not understand the Emperor’s thinking, for it must have been the Emperor who had decided to spare Coruscant.

Nothing was as it should be. Malgus had intended, had expected, to turn Coruscant into a cinder. He knew the Force intended him to topple the Republic and the corrupt Jedi who led it. His vision had shown him as much.

Instead, the Emperor had given the Republic a slight burn and begun to negotiate.

To negotiate.

A squad of ten Imperial fighters sped past, their wings reflecting the red glow of a nearby medical ship’s sirens. Smoke plumes from several ongoing fires snaked into the sky.

Malgus might have hoped that the Emperor planned to force the Republic to surrender Coruscant to the Empire, but he knew better. The fleet had temporarily secured the planet, but they did not have the forces to hold it for long. The planet was too big, the population too numerous, for the Imperial fleet to occupy it indefinitely. Even a formal surrender would not end the resistance of Coruscant’s population, and an insurgency among a population so large would devour Imperial resources.

No, they had to destroy it or return it. And it looked as if the Emperor had decided on the latter, using the threat of the former as leverage in negotiations.

The pilot’s voice sounded over the intercom. “Shall I continue the flyover, my lord?”

“No. Take me to the Senate Building. Notify Darth Angral of our imminent arrival.”

He had seen all he needed to see. Now he needed to hear an explanation.

“Peace,” he said, the word a curse.

Zeerid finally noticed the ping from Vulta’s planetary control. He watched it blink, half dazed, having no idea how long they had been signaling him. He shook his head to clear up his thinking, called up the fake freighter registry Oren had told him to use, ran it through Fatman’s comp, and used it to auto-respond to the ping. In moments he received approval to land and docking instructions.

“Welcome to Vulta, Red Dwarf,” said the controller. “Set down on Yinta Lake landing pad one-eleven B.”

Zeerid tried to let the heat of atmospheric entry burn away thoughts of Oren, of The Exchange, of engspice. He tried instead to focus only on the one hundred thousand credits that should be awaiting him, and what he could do with them.

By the time the ship cleared the stratosphere and entered Vulta’s sky traffic, he had once more begun to distance himself from work and the persona that it necessitated.

But stripping away the vice-runner was getting harder to do all the time. The hole was getting too deep, the costume too sticky. He would be ashamed if his daughter ever learned how he earned a living.

He gave Fatman to the autopilot and went to the small room below the cockpit that he’d converted to his quarters.

His time in the army had taught him the value of organization, and his room reflected it. His rack was neatly made, though no one ever saw it but him. His clothes hung neatly from a wall locker beside the viewport. He kept extra blasters of various makes stowed about the room, and a lockbox held enough extra charger packs to keep him firing for a standard year. The top of his small metal work desk was clear, with nothing atop it but a portcomp and a stack of fraudulent invoices. Integrated into the floor beside it was a hidden safe. He exposed it, input the combination, and opened it. Inside was a bearer payment card with the mere handful of spare credits he’d been able to stash, and, more important, a small holo of his daughter.

Seeing the holo summoned a smile.

He picked it up. He always noticed the same three things about the image: Arra’s long curly hair, her smile, as bright as a nova despite her handicap, and the wheelchair in which she sat.

He could have chosen a holo that didn’t include the chair, but he hadn’t. It pained him to see her in it and it would continue to pain him until he got her out of it.

And that was the point.

The holo reminded him of his purpose. He looked at the holo before he went to sleep in his quarters and he looked at it when he awakened.

He hated the wheelchair. It was the sin he needed to expiate.

Val and Arra had been coming to see him on planetside leave. He’d still been in the army then. Val had been suffering dizzy spells but she had insisted on coming anyway and he, desperate to see his wife and daughter, had done nothing to discourage her. She’d had an episode while driving and careered into another aircar.

The accident had killed Val and left Arra near death. Her legs had been crushed from the impact, and the doctors had been forced to remove them.

He’d mustered out of the army to grieve for Val and take care of Arra, not thinking much beyond just getting through one day and then the next. He’d had no pension, no property, and soon learned that even with his piloting skills he could not find legit work that paid anywhere near what he needed and was going to need. Not only had Arra’s immediate post-crash care resulted in enormous medical bills, but ongoing rehab cost just as much.

Desperate, despondent, he’d taken a leap, jumping into the atmosphere and hoping he hit deep water. He called on some old acquaintances he’d known before his tour in the army, and they’d put him in contact with The Exchange. When he’d heard their offer, he’d hopped on the treadmill, thinking he could make it work.

His debts had only grown since. He’d gone into debt to an Exchange-owned holding company for Fatman, and he pretended to have a gambling problem against which he sometimes took additional loans. In truth, the credits from the loans went to Arra’s ongoing care.

But he was treading water there, too. He could barely make interest payments and while he tried to keep his head above water, Arra remained in a prehistoric, unpowered wheelchair. Zeerid did not make enough to purchase her even a basic hoverchair, much less the prosthetic legs she deserved.

He’d once heard tell of technology in the Empire that could actually regrow limbs, but he refused to think much about it. If it existed somewhere, the cost would put it well beyond his means.

He just wanted to get her a hoverchair, or legs if he could hit a big job. She deserved at least that and he planned to see to it.

The engspice run to Coruscant was the start, the turning point. The front-end money alone could get her a hoverchair, and with his slate wiped clean afterward, he could actually start making real credits without all of it going to paying down debt.

Credits for prosthetics. Credits for regrown legs, maybe.

He’d see her run again, play grav-ball.

He returned the holo to the safe and stripped out of his “work” clothes, sloughing away Z-man the spicerunner to reveal Zeerid the father, and dropped them into a hamper. After he landed, he’d activate the small maintenance droid he kept aboard; it would clean and sweep the ship and launder his clothing.

He threw on a pair of trousers, an undershirt, and his ablative armor vest, then took a collared shirt from its hanger and sniffed it. Smelled reasonably clean.

He swapped out his hip holsters with their GH-44s for a single sling holster he’d wear under his jacket and fill with an E-11, then secured two E-9 blasters, one in an ankle holster, one in the small of his back.

Arra had never seen him holding a blaster since he had mustered out, and, fates willing, she never would. But Zeerid never went anywhere unarmed.

Before leaving his quarters, he sat at the portcomp, logged in, and checked the balance in the dummy account he used with The Exchange.

And there it was—one hundred thousand credits, newly deposited.

“Thank you, Oren.”

He transferred the credits to an untraceable bearer card. It was more than he’d ever held in his hand before.

Vrath sat on one of the many metal benches found in Yinta Lake’s spaceport on Vulta. Droids sped past. Sentients went by in groups of two and three and four. Someone’s voice blared over a loudspeaker.

Like every spaceport on every planet in the galaxy, the place was abuzz with activity: droids, holovids, vehicles, conversations. Vrath tuned it all out.

A large vidscreen hanging from the ceiling showed the latest news on the right side, and the latest ship arrivals and departures on the left. He watched only the arrivals. The board tracked every ship to which planetary control gave docking instructions, the scroll moving as rapidly as the activity in the port. Vrath was waiting for one name in particular.

An exercise of will, the firing of certain neurons, caused his artificial eyes to go to three-times magnification. The words on the screen grew clearer.

The Hutts’ mole in The Exchange had given Vrath a ship’s name, which meant he had a pilot, which meant he could find the engspice and keep it from ever getting to Coruscant.

The Hutts wanted the addicts on Coruscant freed of their reliance on their competitor’s engspice so they could be hooked on Hutt engspice, a new market for the Hutts, as Vrath understood matters.

In truth he found it surprising that The Exchange had been able to find a pilot crazy enough to make a run to Coruscant, a world on Imperial lockdown. The Exchange must have had a flier with uncommon skill.

Or uncommon stupidity.

The overhead vidscreen showed the same news footage that every vidscreen and holovid in the galaxy must have been showing: another story on the peace negotiations on Alderaan. A Togruta female—Vrath knew she was a Jedi Master but could not recall her name—was giving an interview. She looked stern, unbowed as she spoke. Vrath could not make out her words. The sound of engines and people made it impossible to hear. He could have activated the auditory implant in his right ear to pick up the vid’s sound, even through the noise, but he really did not care what the Jedi had to say. He did not care how the war between the Republic and Empire went, so long as he could thread the needle between them and make his credits.

He hoped to retire soon, maybe to Alderaan. If he could take out the engspice, the Hutts would compensate him well. Who knew? Maybe this would be his last job, after which he’d get drunk, fat, and old, in that order.

He alternated his attention between the news and the arrivals board until he saw the name he was waiting for—Red Dwarf.

He slung the satchel that held his equipment over his shoulder, stood, and walked to the Red Dwarf’s landing pad. Lingering among the bustle, he watched unobtrusively as the beat-up freighter set down on the landing pad. He noted the modified engine housings. He suspected Fatman was fast.

He reached into his pack and took the nanodroid dispenser in hand. He ordinarily preferred to use an aerosolized version of the tracking nanos, but the port was too crowded for it.

Ready, he waited.

The senate building came into view, a dome of transparisteel with a tower atop its center aimed like a knife blade at the sky. Most of the windows were dark. The transport headed for the landing pad atop the building. Halogens washed the roof in light. Malgus saw a squad of Imperial guards, gray as shadows in their full armor, and a single, uniformed naval officer near the landing pad. The officer held his hand over his hat to keep the wind from blowing it off.

Malgus did not wait for the ship to touch down. When the transport was still two meters up, he leapt out of the open cargo bay and landed before the officer, whose eyes went wide at the sight of Malgus’s method of debarkation.

The young officer, his gray uniform neatly pressed, his hair neatly combed under his hat, had probably not so much as fired a blaster in years. Malgus did not bother to disguise his contempt. He tolerated the officer and his ilk only because they provided necessary support to those who did the actual fighting for the Empire.

“Darth Malgus, welcome,” the attaché said. “My name is Roon Neele. Darth Angral—”

“Speak only if you must, Roon Neele. Pleasantries annoy me at the best of times. And this is not the best of times.”

Neele’s mouth hung open for a moment, then closed.

“Excellent,” Malgus said, as the transport put down and its weight vibrated the landing pad. “Now take me to Darth Angral.”

“Of course.”

They walked across the roof to the turbo lift. Armored Imperial troops flanked the door to either side of it. Both saluted Malgus. Neele and Malgus rode the lift down several floors in silence. The doors opened to reveal a long, wide hallway lined with office doors to the right and left, and ending in a large pair of double doors on which were engraved the words:

THE OFFICE OF THE CHANCELLOR OF THE REPUBLIC

Two more armed and armored Imperial soldiers stood guard at the doors.

The arc-shaped reception desk immediately before the lift—presumably the domain of the Chancellor’s secretary—sat empty, the secretary long gone.

Roon indicated the Chancellor’s office but did not move to exit.

“Darth Angral has commandeered the Chancellor’s office. He is expecting you.”

Malgus exited the lift and strode down the hall. The offices to either side of him stood empty, all of them showing signs of a hurried evacuation—spilled cups of caf, papers lying loose on the carpeted floor, an overturned chair. Malgus imagined the shock the occupants must have felt as they watched Imperial forces pour out of the sky. He wondered what Angral had done with the Senators and their staffs. Some, he knew, had been killed in the initial attack. Others had probably been executed afterward.

When he reached the end of the hall, the Imperial soldiers saluted, parted, and opened the doors for him. He stepped inside and the doors closed behind him.

Angral sat at the desk of the Republic’s Chancellor, on the far end of an expansive office. His dark hair, shot through with gray, was neatly combed, reminiscent of Roon Neele’s. Elaborate embroidery decorated the color of his cloak. His angular, smooth-shaven face reminded Malgus of a hatchet.

Art from various worlds hung on the walls or sat on display pillars—bone carvings from Mon Calamari, an oil landscape painting from Alderaan, a wood sculpture of a creature Malgus could not identify but that reminded him of one of the mythical zillo beasts of Malastare. An opened bottle of blossom wine sat on Angral’s desk in a crystal decanter. Two chalices sat beside it, both half full with the rare, pale yellow spirit. Angral knew that Malgus did not drink alcohol.

Two large, high-backed leather chairs sat before the desk, their backs to the doorway. Anyone could have been seated in them. Behind the desk, a floor-to-ceiling transparisteel window looked out on the urbanscape. Plumes of black smoke curled into a night sky mostly empty of ships and underlit by the many fires burning across the planet. To Malgus, the black lines of smoke looked like the scribbles of giants. A maze of duracrete buildings extended out to the horizon.

“Darth Malgus,” Angral said, and gestured at one of the chairs. “Please sit.”

Words burst from Malgus before he could stop them. “We hold Coruscant in our fist and need only squeeze. Yet I understand that peace negotiations are continuing.”

Angral did not look surprised at the outburst. He sipped his blossom wine, put the chalice back down. “Your understanding is correct.”

“Why?” Malgus put an accusation in the question. “The Republic is on its knees before us. If we stab it, it dies.”

“Using it as a lever in peace negotiations—”

“Peace is for bureaucrats!” Malgus blurted, too hard, too loud. “It is not for warriors.”

Still Angral’s face held its calm. “You question the wisdom of the Emperor?”

The words cooled Malgus’s heat. He took hold of his temper. “No. I do not question the Emperor.”

“I’m pleased to hear it. Now sit, Malgus.” Angral’s tone left no doubt that the words were not a suggestion.

Malgus picked his way through the artwork. Before he had gotten halfway across the office, Angral said, “Adraas has beaten you here.”

Malgus stopped. “What?”

Adraas rose from one of the chairs before the desk, revealing himself, and turned to face Malgus. He no longer wore his mask, and his face—unmarred and handsome, like Master Zallow’s, and with a neatly trimmed goatee—wore smugness with comfort.

Malgus recalled the look on Zallow’s face when the Jedi had died, and imagined replacing Adraas’s current expression with one that echoed Zallow’s death grimace.

“Darth Malgus,” Adraas said, his false smile more sneer than anything. “I am sorry I did not announce myself before your … outburst.”

Malgus ignored Adraas and addressed Angral directly. “Why is he here?”

Angral smiled, all innocence. “Lord Adraas was giving me his complete report of the attack on the Temple.”

“His report?”

“Yes. He spoke highly of you, Darth Malgus.”

Adraas took the other chalice on Angral’s desk, sipped.

“He? Spoke highly of me?”

Malgus did not play Sith politics well, but he suddenly felt as if he had walked into an ambush. He knew Adraas was a favorite of Angral’s. Were they setting Malgus up? They certainly could use his condemnation of the peace talks against him.

With effort, he got himself under control and sank into the seat beside Adraas. Adraas, too, sat. Malgus endeavored to choose his words with care.

“The attack on the Temple could not have gone better. The plan I developed worked perfectly. The Jedi were caught completely unawares.” He turned to face Adraas. “But your report should have been approved by me before it came to Darth Angral.” He turned back to Angral. “Apologies, my lord.”

Angral waved a hand dismissively. “No apologies are necessary. I solicited his report directly.”

Malgus did not know what to make of that and did not like that he did not know. “Directly? Why?”

“Do you believe that I owe you an explanation, Darth Malgus?”

Malgus had misstepped again. “No, my lord.”

“Nevertheless I will give you one,” Angral said. “The reason is simple. I was unable to locate you.”

“I had powered down my comlink while—”

Adraas interrupted him and Malgus had to restrain the impulse to backhand him across the face.

“We assumed you to be checking on the well-being of your woman,” Adraas said.

“We assumed?” Malgus said. “Do you presume to speak for Darth Angral, Adraas?”

“Of course not,” Adraas said, his tone infuriatingly unworried. “But when we could not locate you, Darth Angral asked me to speak for you.”

And there it was, unadulterated and out in the open. Not even Malgus could miss it. Adraas had essentially admitted that he wished Malgus’s spot in the hierarchy, and Angral’s participation suggested that he sanctioned the power grab.

Malgus’s voice went low and dangerous. “It will take more than words to speak for me, Adraas.”

“No doubt,” Adraas said, and answered Malgus’s stare with one of his own. His dark eyes did not quail before Malgus’s anger.

Angral watched the exchange, then leaned back in his chair.

“Where were you, Darth Malgus?” Angral asked.

Malgus did not take his eyes from Adraas. “Assessing the post-battle situation around the Temple, my lord. Trying to understand …”

He stopped himself. He’d almost said, Trying to understand why the Empire has not razed Coruscant.

“Trying to understand the planetside situation more clearly.”

“I see,” Angral said. “What of this woman Adraas mentioned? I understand from Adraas’s report that she was a liability to you during the attack on the Temple?”

Malgus glared at Adraas. Adraas smiled behind the rim of the chalice as he drank his wine.

“Adraas is mistaken.”

“Is he? Then this woman isn’t a liability to you? She is an alien, isn’t she? A Twi’lek?”

Adraas sniffed with contempt, turned away from Malgus, and sipped his wine, the gestures perfectly capturing the Empire’s view of aliens as—at best—second-class sentients. Angral shared that view and had just let Malgus know it.

“She is,” Malgus answered.

“I see,” Angral said.

Adraas placed his wine chalice on Angral’s desk. “An excellent vintage, Darth Angral. But right at the end of its cellar life.”

“I think so, too,” Angral said.

“Let things linger around overlong and they can turn rancid.”

“Agreed,” Angral said.

Malgus missed nothing, but could say nothing.

Adraas snapped his fingers as if he had just remembered something. “Oh! Darth Malgus, I do regret that I had to refuse your woman treatment aboard Steadfast.”

A tic caused Malgus’s left eye to spasm. His fingers sank into the arms of the chair and pierced the leather. “You did what?”

“Priority is to be given to Imperial forces,” Adraas continued. “Human forces. I’m sure you understand.”

Malgus had had enough. To Angral, he said, “What is this? What is happening here?”

“What do you mean?” Angral asked.

“The Twi’lek woman is planetside,” Adraas said, as if no one else had spoken. “I’m sure the care she receives will be … adequate.”

“I mean what is happening here, now, in this room,” Malgus said. “What is your purpose in this, Angral?”

Angral’s expression hardened, and he set down his glass with an audible clink. “My purpose?”

“Who is this woman to you, Darth Malgus?” Adraas pressed. “Her presence at the battle for the Jedi Temple caused you to make mistakes.”

“Passions can lead to mistakes,” Angral said.

“Passions are power,” Malgus said to Angral. “The Sith know this. Warriors know this.” He fixed his gaze on Adraas, and the words came out a snarl. “What mistakes do you mean, Adraas? Name them.”

Adraas ignored the question. “Do you care for her, Malgus? Love her?”

“She is a servant and you are a fool,” Malgus said, his anger rising. “She satisfies my needs when I require it. Nothing more.”

Adraas smiled as if he’d scored a point. “She is your slave, then? A mongrel harlot who satisfies you because she must?”

The smoldering heat of Malgus’s brewing anger ignited into open flame. Snarling, he leapt from his chair, activated his lightsaber, and unleashed an overhand strike to split Adraas’s head in two.

But Adraas, anticipating Malgus’s attack, bounded to his feet, activated his own lightsaber, and parried the blow. The two men pressed their blades against the other before Angral’s desk, energy sizzling, sparks flying.

Malgus tested Adraas’s strength.

“You have been hiding your power,” he said.

“No,” Adraas answered. “You are just too blind to see the things before your eyes.”

Malgus summoned a reserve of strength and pushed Adraas back a stride. They regarded each other with hate in their eyes.

“That will be all,” Angral said, standing.

Neither Malgus nor Adraas took his eyes from the other and neither deactivated his blade.

“That will be all,” Angral said.

As one, both men backed off another step. Adraas deactivated his lightsaber, then Malgus.

“You should have sent her to my ship for care,” Malgus said, aiming the comment at Adraas, but intending it for both of them.

Angral looked disappointed. “After all of this you still say such things? Very well, Malgus. The woman is in a Republic medical facility near here. I will have the information sent to your pilot.”

Malgus inclined his head in grudging thanks.

“As for you, Lord Adraas,” Angral said, “I accept your report of the battle.”

“Thank you, Darth Angral.”

Angral drew himself up to his full height. “You will, both of you, follow my commands without question or hesitation. I will deal harshly with any deviation from that order. Do you understand?”

Angral had directed the rebuke at both of them, but Malgus understood it to be intended for him.

“Yes, Darth Angral,” they said in unison.

“You are servants of the Empire.”

Malgus, stewing, said nothing.

“Both of you leave me, now,” Angral said.

Still seething, Malgus walked for the door. Adraas fell in a stride behind him.

“Darth Malgus,” Angral called.

Malgus stopped, turned. Adraas stopped as well, keeping some space between them.

“I know you believe that conflict perfects one’s understanding of the Force.” He made Malgus wait a beat before adding, “I will be curious to see if events validate your view.”

“What events?” Malgus asked, and then understood. Angral would let Adraas make his play for Malgus’s role in the hierarchy. He intended to see who would prevail in a conflict between Malgus and Adraas, a conflict conducted in the shadows, by proxy, according to all the ridiculous political rules of the Sith.

Subtle, backhanded conflict was not Malgus’s strength. He glared at Adraas, who glared back.

“That will be all, then,” Angral said, and Malgus walked toward the doors.

“Adraas, remain a moment,” Angral said, and Adraas lingered.

Malgus looked over his shoulder to see Adraas watching him.

Malgus walked out of the office alone, the same way he had walked in. He had been made a fool and was being played for Angral’s amusement.

Worse, the victory he had so dearly won would be for nothing, a mere lever for the Emperor to wield in peace negotiations. After negotiations were concluded, the Empire would leave Coruscant.

In the hall outside, he slammed a fist down on the secretary’s desk, putting a crack on the marble top.

As Vollen and Keevo approached, Aryn realized what she was doing and let her hand fall to her side. She would not fight another Jedi, not ever. Besides, she sensed no hostility in them.

She tried to clear the emotion from her face as Vollen and Keevo avoided a train of cargo droids and approached her. Vollen’s brown hair hung loose over bloodshot eyes. He had not shaved, and the circles darkening the skin under his brown eyes pronounced his need for sleep. Aryn imagined she must look much the same. Her own emotional state made it hard to maintain her empathic shields. Both Vollen and his Padawan sweated apprehension. It came off them in waves.

“Hello, Vollen, Keevo.”

Both of them returned her greeting.

“What are you doing here at this hour, Aryn?” Vollen asked.

For a moment, she had no words. She thought it strange that she had known the question would be coming, yet she had not rehearsed an answer. Perhaps she had not wanted to lie. So she didn’t.

“I’m doing something … something Master Zallow wants me to do.”

Tension visibly flowed out of Vollen’s expression. Relief from both of them flooded Aryn.

“Then Master Zallow survived the Sith attack,” Vollen said, making a fist and grinning. “That is wonderful news. I know you have remained close with him.” He turned to his Padawan. “You see, Keevo. There is hope yet.”

The Rodian nodded. Nictitating membranes washed his large, dark eyes. The oil moisturizing his pebbly green skin glistened in the overhead lights.

“There is always hope,” Aryn said, and ignored how false the words sounded to her. She could not bring herself to break their hearts with the truth. Let them feel some relief, even if only for a time.

A pair of cargo droids wheeled past, beeping in droidspeak.

Vollen stepped closer to her and lowered his voice, as if discussing a conspiracy. “So what is happening in the hall of the High Council? We heard the negotiations would continue. How can Dar’nala justify that? We should be planning a counterattack. The entire Sith delegation should be taken into custody.”

Keevo put his hand on the hilt of his lightsaber and mouthed something in Rodian that Aryn took to be agreement. The Rodian looked around as if concerned someone might have overheard.

Aryn felt the creeping pressure of their suppressed anger, their disappointment. They felt betrayed, deceived. She heard in their words the echo of her own thoughts and started to utter agreement. But before the words had cleared her lips, she saw how the words, the thoughts, if given free rein, would fragment the Jedi Order.

For the first time, the consequences of her decision struck her, but even as they did, she knew she could make no other choice. Hers was the sacrifice. Other Jedi, however, could not make the same choice or the Order would disintegrate.

“Trust that Master Dar’nala knows what she is doing,” she said.

Vollen made a dismissive gesture and went on as if Aryn had not spoken. “There are many of us ready to act, Aryn. If we can coordinate with the surviving members of the Order on Coruscant, we can—”

“Vollen,” Aryn said, her voice soft but her intent sharp.

He stopped talking, met her eyes.

“Do as Master Dar’nala says. You must, or the Order falls. Do you understand?”

“But negotiating with the Sith after this is madness! We are at our weakest. We must retake the initiative—”

“Do as she says, Vollen. I should not even have to say that.” She spoke in a firm, clear voice, to break the conspiratorial spell that Vollen and Keevo had cast with their whispers. “You took an oath. Both of you did. Do you intend to break it?”

Vollen colored. Keevo shifted on his feet and dropped his eyes.

“No,” Vollen said.

Aryn was swimming in Vollen’s frustration, and her own. She felt like a hypocrite.

“Good,” she said, and touched his shoulder. “Things will work out. The Council knows what it is doing. We are an instrument of the Republic, Vollen. We will do what is best for the Republic.”

“I hope you’re right,” Vollen said, sounding unconvinced. Keevo nodded agreement.

Aryn could take no more of her own falsity.

“I must go. Be well, Vollen. And you, Keevo. May the Force be with you both.”

Her recitation of the familiar parting seemed to reassure them.

“And you,” Vollen said.

“Be well, Aryn Leneer,” Keevo said in high-pitched Basic.

“You still haven’t said where you’re going,” Vollen said.

“No, I haven’t,” Aryn said. “It’s … personal.”

She turned and headed for her ship. As she walked, she activated her comlink and hailed her astromech.

“Tee-six, get the ship ready for launch.”

The droid acknowledged receipt and queried about a flight plan.

“None,” Aryn said, and the droid let out a long-suffering beep.

When she reached the landing bay, T6, the dome of his orange head sticking out of the PT-7’s droid socket, beeped a greeting. The Raven starfighter was already in pre-launch and the hum of the warming engine coils made the pad vibrate under her feet.

She stood there for a time, staring at the ladder that led into her cockpit, listening to the hum of the engines, thinking that if she got in and took off, she could never come back.

She thought back to the pain she’d felt when Master Zallow had died. She had felt it physically, a searing shock in her abdomen that burned away doubt. Closing her eyes, she inhaled deeply, a new, clean breath, and shed her outer Jedi robes, the robes she’d earned under Master Zallow’s tutelage.

She could not avenge him as a Jedi. She could and should avenge him as his friend.

“What are you doing, Aryn?” Vollen called from behind her.

She turned to see that Vollen and Keevo had followed her to her ship. Vollen wore a concerned frown.

“Are you following me?” Aryn asked.

“Yes.”

“Don’t,” she said.

“What are you doing, Aryn?”

She put one hand on the ladder to her cockpit. “I already told you, Vollen. Something for Master Zallow.”

“But your robes? I don’t understand.”

She could offer no explanation that would satisfy him. She turned, climbed the ladder to the cockpit, and pulled on her helmet. Thankfully, T6 held any questions it might have had.

Vollen and Keevo walked toward the ship. Aryn felt Vollen’s alarm, his uncertainty. He stopped when he reached Aryn’s robes. He looked as if he were standing over a grave. Perhaps he knew what it meant that Aryn had left them there.

“Tell Master Dar’nala I am sorry,” she called to him. “Tell her, Vollen.”

Vollen and Keevo did not come any closer. It was as though the discarded robes demarcated some boundary they could not cross.

“Sorry for what?” Vollen called. “Aryn, please tell me what you’re doing. Why are you leaving your robes?”

“She will understand, Vollen. Be well.”

She lowered the transparisteel canopy on the cockpit and could not hear whatever Vollen said in response. The engines grew louder and Vollen stood on the landing pad, staring up at Aryn. Keevo stood beside him, his dark eyes on Aryn’s robes.

“Get us out of here, Tee-six,” she said. “Set a course for Vulta, in the Mid Rim.”

She knew someone there, once. She hoped he was still there. If anyone could get her to Coruscant, it was the Z-man.

The droid beeped agreement, and the Raven’s engines lifted it from the pad.

She looked down one last time to see Vollen gathering her robes with the same delicacy he might use to bear a fallen comrade.

Malgus replayed the exchange with Adraas and Angral again and again in his mind. His anger remained unabated when he stepped off the lift onto the roof of the Senate Building and strode toward his transport, ignoring the guards who saluted him as he stalked past. The transport pilot waited on the lowered landing ramp.

“You received a location from Darth Angral?” Malgus asked the pilot. “A hospital?”

“Yes, my lord.”

“Take me there.”

He boarded the transport, the doors whispered closed, and the ship soon lifted off into the hazy destruction of Coruscant’s night sky. They did not have far to fly. In under a quarter hour the pilot’s voice carried over the intercom.

“Coming up on the facility now, my lord. Where shall I set down?”

Below, Malgus saw the multistoried rectangle of the medical facility. Swoops, aircars, speeders, and medical transports crowded the artificially lit landing pad on its roof. Dozens of people moved among the vehicles—doctors, nurses, medics, the wounded. Bodies lay on gurneys here and there.

On the ground level the scene was much the same. Vehicles and people clotted the artery of the road and a mass of people thronged the main entrance to the facility.

“Set down at ground level,” Malgus ordered.

Some of the people on the roof noticed the transport’s Imperial markings. Faces stared skyward, uncertain, frightened, and a few people ran for the lifts. One tripped over a gurney and fell. Another ran into a medic and knocked him flat.

“Darth Angral temporarily commandeered this hospital to triage Imperial wounded,” the pilot said over the intercom. “They’ve all been moved to Steadfast by now.”

“Not all of them,” Malgus said, but not loudly enough to be heard over the intercom.

“There are a lot of people down there, my lord. I don’t see a clear spot to land.”

Malgus stared down at them, his rage bubbling. “Land. They will move.”

The transport wheeled around, hovered, and began to descend. The crowd below parted as the ship neared the duracrete. Malgus could hear the shouting of the crowd through the bulkheads.

“My lord, should I send for some troops? To guard you?”

“I do not require a guard. Keep the ship secure. I will not be long.” Malgus pressed the switch that opened the side door of the transport, and a cacophony of sirens and angry shouts poured through the opening.

Malgus, his own anger more than a match for that of the crowd, discarded his cloak, revealing his scarred face and respirator, and stepped out onto the landing ramp.

Upon seeing him, the crowd fell mute. Only the sirens continued to howl. A sea of faces stared up at him, pale in the streetlights, frightened, smeared with dust and blood, but above all, angry. Their collective rage and fear washed over him. He stood before it, eyeing one of them after another. None could hold his gaze.

He walked down the ramp and into their midst. They gave way before him. The moment he put his foot on the road the shouting renewed.

“Monster!”

“Murderer!”

“We need medical supplies!”

“He is alone. Kill him.”

“Coward!”

His presence among them focused their rage. As the tumult grew, he could not distinguish individual words. He heard only a single, prolonged, hate-filled roar, a wave of fists and bared teeth. It echoed his own emotion, fed it, amplified it.

From somewhere ahead, a fist-sized piece of duracrete arced over the crowd toward him. Without moving, he stopped it in mid-flight with the Force. He let it hang suspended in the air for a moment, so the crowd could see it, before he used the Force to crush it to pieces.

The crowd went silent again as the pebbles and dust rained down on the road, on their heads.

“Who threw that?” Malgus asked, the heat of his anger stoked.

Sirens wailed. A cough from somewhere. Fearful eyes everywhere.

Malgus raised his voice. “I said who threw that?”

No response. The crowd’s anger turned to anxiety.

“Disperse,” Malgus said, his own anger building as theirs receded. “Now.”

Perhaps sensing his anger, those near him started to back away. Some at the fringe of the crowd turned and fled. Most held their ground, though they looked uncertainly at one another.

“We have family inside.”

“I need care,” someone else shouted.

Malgus fell into the Force as his brewing anger bubbled to the surface. “I said disperse!”

When the crowd did not respond to his demand, he slammed a fist into his palm and let anger-fueled power explode outward from his body. Screams sounded as the blast shoved everything away from him in all directions.

Bodies flew backward, slammed into one another, into the walls, against and through windows. The transport he’d rode on lurched from the blast. The doors of the medical facility flew from their mounts and crashed to the ground.

The sirens continued to wail.

Partially vented, he came back to himself.

Moans and pained whimpers sounded from all around him. A child was crying. Bodies lay scattered about like so many rag dolls. Shattered glass covered the ground. Speeders and swoops lay on their sides. Loose papers stirred in the wind.

Unmoved, Malgus walked the now-clear path into the medical facility.

Inside, patients and visitors cowered behind chairs, desks, one another. Malgus’s breathing was the loudest sound in the room. No one dared look at him.

“Where are the Jedi?” someone said.

“The Jedi are dead in their Temple,” Malgus said. “Where I left them. There is no one to save you.”

Someone wept. Another moaned.

Malgus found an overweight human man in the pale blue uniform of a hospital worker and pulled him to his feet by his shirt.

“I am looking for a Twi’lek woman with a scar on her throat,” Malgus said. “She suffered two blaster wounds and was brought here earlier today. Her name is Eleena.”

The man’s eyes darted around as if they were seeking escape from his head. “I don’t know of any Twi’lek. I can check the logs.”

“If harm has come to her here …”

A heavyset nurse, her red hair pulled back into a tight bun, rose from behind a desk. Her uniform looked like a blue tent on her stout body. Freckles dotted her face. “I know the woman you mean. I can take you to her.”

Malgus cast the man to the floor and followed the nurse through the corridors. The air smelled of antiseptic. Walls and floors were clean white or silver.

Staff and medical droids hurried through the halls, barely noticing Malgus, despite his disfigurement. A female voice over the intercom almost continually called doctors to this or that treatment room, or announced codes in various places in the facility.

Malgus and the nurse took a lift up to a treatment ward, walking past rooms overcrowded with patients. A woman’s crying carried through the hall. Moans of pain sounded from other rooms. A team of surgeons hurried past, their faces hidden behind masks spattered with blood.

The nurse did not look at Malgus when she spoke.

“The Twi’lek woman was dropped at the doors by an unmarked transport. We did not realize she was … Imperial.”

Malgus grunted. “You would not have treated her had you known?”

The nurse stopped, turned on her heel, and stared Malgus in his scarred face.

“Of course we would have treated her. We are not savages.”

Malgus did not miss the woman’s subtle emphasis on we.

He decided to allow the nurse her moment of defiance. Her spirit impressed him. “Just take me to her.”

Eleena lay in a bed in a small treatment room with three other patients. One of them, an elderly man, was curled up in a fetal position on the bed, moaning, his sheets bloody. Another, a middle-aged woman with a lacerated face, watched Malgus and the nurse enter, her expression vacant. The third appeared to be asleep.

A fluid line was hooked to Eleena’s unwounded arm and several cables—cables!—connected her to monitoring equipment. The facility must have been stretched to use such dated technology. Her blaster wounds, at least, had been treated and bandaged. The arm with the wounded shoulder had been stabilized in a sling.

Eleena saw him, sat up, and smiled.

He realized that she was the only person in the galaxy who smiled when she saw him.

“Veradun,” she said.

Seeing her face and hearing her voice affected him more than he liked. The anger drained out of him as if he had a hole in his heel. Relief took its place and he did not fight it, though he realized that he had let his feelings for her grow dangerously strong.

When he looked at Eleena, he was looking at his own weakness.

Angral’s words bounced around his consciousness.

Passions can lead to mistakes.

He had to have her, and he had to stay true to the Empire.

He had to square a circle.

He resolved to find a way.

He went to her bedside, touched her face with his callused hand, and started disconnecting her from the fluid line and cables.

“You will be treated aboard my ship. In proper facilities.”

A man’s voice from behind him said, “You there! Stop! You can’t do that!”

Malgus looked over his shoulder to see a male nurse standing in the doorway. The man quailed when he saw Malgus’s visage but he held his ground.

“She is not cleared for discharge.” The man started into the room as if to stop Malgus, but the female nurse who had led Malgus to Eleena interposed her wide body.

“Leave them be, Tal. They are leaving.”

“But—”

“Leave it alone.”

Malgus could not see the fat nurse’s face but he imagined her trying with her expression to communicate to the male nurse that Malgus was a Sith. He asked Eleena, “Can you walk?”

Before she could answer, he scooped her up in his arms.

“I can walk,” she said halfheartedly.

He ignored her, brushed past the nurses and into the corridor. For a time, Eleena looked into the rooms they passed, at the wounded, the dying. But soon it became too much and she buried her head in Malgus’s chest. Malgus enjoyed the feel of her in his arms, the warmth she radiated, the musky smell of her.

“You are thoughtful,” she whispered. The feel of her breath on his ear sent pangs of desire through him.

“I am thinking of geometry,” he said. “Of squares and circles.”

“That’s an odd train of thought.”

“Perhaps not as odd as you think.”

When they exited the facility, she saw the dozens of bodies strewn about the ground. Medical teams hovered over several, treating their wounds. Faces turned to Malgus, eyes wide, but no one said a word as he walked toward the transport.

“What happened here? To these people? It was not like this when I arrived.”

Malgus said nothing.

“They are afraid of you.”

“They should be.”

When they got aboard the transport, Malgus instructed the pilot to fly them to Valor, the orbiting cruiser he commanded. Then he laid Eleena down on a reclinable couch and covered her with a blanket. She touched his hand as he tucked her in.

“There is gentleness in you, Veradun.”

He pulled his hand away from her and stood. “If you ever call me Veradun in public again I will kill you. Do you understand?”

Her smile melted in the heat of his anger. She looked as if he had punched her in the stomach. She sat up on her elbow. “Why are you saying this?”

His voice came out loud and harsh. “Do you understand?”

“Yes! Yes!” She threw off the blanket, rose, and stood before him, her body quaking. “But why are you so angry? Why?”

He stared into her lovely face, swallowed, and shook his head. His anger was only partly her fault. He was angry at Adraas, Angral, the Emperor himself. She was just a convenient focus for it.

“You must do as I ask, Eleena,” he said, more softly. “Please.”

“I will, Malgus.” She stepped forward, raised a hand, and traced the ruined lines written in the skin of his face. Her touch put a charge in him.

“I love you, Malgus.” She peeled away his respirator to reveal the ruins of his mouth. “Do you love me?”

He licked his scarred lips, his thoughts whirling, again no words coming.

“You don’t have to answer,” she said, smiling, her voice soft. “I know that you do.”

Zeerid checked his appearance in the small mirror in the ship’s refresher and chided himself for neglecting to shave. He activated the ship’s maintenance droid and stepped out into the bustle of the docks.

Cargo carts and droids whipped past at breakneck speeds, signal horns clearing the path before them. Treaded droids motored along the walkways. Crew members and dockworkers plied their trade, loading and unloading crates of cargo with the help of crane droids. One of the dockmasters, a fat human with a bald head but a long beard and mustache, walked among the chaos, occasionally shouting an order to someone on the dock, occasionally mouthing something into his comlink. He carried a huge torque wrench in one hand and looked as if he wanted to whack something, or someone, with it. The air smelled faintly of vented gas and engine exhaust, but mostly it smelled like the lake.

The city of Yinta Lake ringed the largest freshwater lake on the planet, Lake Yinta. Geothermal vents kept the water warm even in winter and the differential between the water temperature and the autumn air caused the lake to sweat steam, so the air always felt thick, greasy. It reminded Zeerid of decay, and every time he returned he felt as though the city had decomposed a little more in his absence.

Yinta Lake had begun as an unnamed winter getaway for the planet’s wealthy—those who’d made their fortunes in arms manufacturing—the mansions forming a thin ring around the lakeshore. Back then, the ring had been called the wealth belt.

Over time, the presence of the wealthy had attracted a middling-sized spaceport to bring offworld goods to the onworld money. That had brought workers, then merchants, then the not-so-wealthy, then the very poor.

And by then the unnamed vacation spot had become Yinta, a town, and it had not stopped growing since. Now it was a metropolis—Yinta Lake—an accretion disk of people and buildings that collected around the gravitational pull of the lake.

In time, shipping had polluted the lake’s water, the wealthy had mostly fled, and the city had begun a slow spiral into decrepitude. The once grand mansions on the shore of the lake had been sold off to developers and converted to cheap housing. The wealth belt had become slums and loading docks.

Zeerid had grown up in the slums, smelling the acrid, rotting odor of the lake every day of his childhood. He had provided better for his daughter, but not by much.

The deep, bass boom of a horn carried across the city, the call of one of the enormous flatbed cargo ships that moved goods and people across the lake and up and down the river that fed it. Zeerid smiled when he heard it. He’d awakened to that sound almost every day of his childhood.

He stepped into the tumult, feeling oddly at home and very much looking forward to seeing his daughter.

From the haircut, muscular build, and upright posture, Vrath made the pilot as former military. Vrath, too, was ex-military, having served in the Imperial infantry.

The man smiled as he walked and Vrath found that he liked the man immediately.

Too bad he’d probably have to kill him.

Holding the nanodroid solution dispenser in a slack arm, Vrath knifed through the crowd toward the pilot. He cut in front of him, slowing him, just another body in the press, and squeezed a dollop of the suspension on the ground at their feet.

Vrath pasted on a fake grin and held up his other hand in a frantic wave to no one.

“Rober! Rober, over here!”

He hurried off as if to meet someone but watched the pilot sidelong throughout.

The pilot never even looked down, did not seem to notice Vrath at all. Suspecting nothing, the man stepped in the oily suspension Vrath had left on the floor before him. Others stepped in it afterward, but that would not matter. In moments all traces of it were gone.

Vrath fell in behind the pilot and took the targeted nano-activator from his pack.

Zeerid should not have been smiling, and certainly should not have been at ease. He knew, as he always did, that he was one mistake, one unlucky break away from someone discovering Arra and using her against him. Or worse, harming her. The thought made him sick to his stomach.

He could not let himself get sloppy.

He hopped on the back of a droid-driven cargo cart and rode it until he neared one of the port’s exits. The spaceport and all the vehicles in it rusted in the moisture-rich air of Yinta Lake; the brown smears on walls and in corners looked like bloodstains.

The exit doors slid open, and he hopped off the cargo cart. The collective voice of the streets hit him immediately. The shouts of air taxi drivers vying for fares—Yinta Lake had to have more taxis than any other city in the Mid Rim—street vendors hawking all manner of foods, vehicle horns, the rush of engines.

“Heading to the inner ring, sir?” said one of the taxi drivers, a tiny slip of a man. “Hop right in.”

“Lowest rates in Yinta, sir,” said another, a gray-haired old-timer, cutting in front of the first.

“Vinefish fresh off the grill,” shouted a vendor. “Right here. Right here, sir.”

To his right, a Zeltron woman, perhaps lovely once, but now just haggard, leaned against a wall. When she smiled, she showed the stained teeth of a spice addict.

He winced. Shame warmed his cheeks.

Only the hundred thousand in his pocket and what it could do for Arra kept him on course.

Aircars and speeders lined the street, even a few wheeled vehicles. He pushed through the throng of pedestrians and picked his way through the buzz of traffic to a public comm station across the street.

Once the pilot had cleared the spaceport, Vrath surreptitiously pointed the activator at him and powered it on. The nanodroids adhering to the pilot’s boot came to life.

The press of another button synced the activator to the particular signature of the droids on the pilot and only those droids. He did not want to pick up any of the others that had adhered to other pedestrians.

The bodies of the tracking nanodroids, about the size of a single cell and engineered in a hook shape, would contract to embed themselves in the pilot’s boot sole. From there, they would respond to Vrath’s ping from a distance of up to ten kilometers. Their power cells would keep them responsive for three standard days.

More than enough, Vrath knew. The Exchange had to get the engspice to Coruscant quickly or the market would be lost. He’d be surprised if they didn’t try to move the spice tonight.

He watched the pilot cross the street and head to a public comm station. Turning his ear in the direction of the station, Vrath activated his audio implant.

Zeerid closed the doors of the station for privacy, cutting off the outside noise, and tapped in Nat’s number. He never called her from his ship’s comm unit or his personal comlink for fear that someone in The Exchange was monitoring him. An excess of paranoia had saved his life more than once, most recently on Ord Mantell.

Nat did not answer so he left her a message.

“Nat, it’s Zeerid. I’m onplanet. If you get this soon, bring Arra and meet me at Karson’s Park in an hour. I can’t wait to see you both.”

He disconnected and hailed a taxi.

A thin Bothan driver, his face reminiscent of an equine, stared at him in the rearview mirror.

“Where to?”

“Just drive. Stay low.”

“Your credits, pal.”

Even from afar, Vrath was able to listen through the synthplas walls of the commstation. By the time the call was finished, he had a name for the pilot—Zeerid—and names of people the pilot appeared to care about—Nat and Arra.

He climbed into an air taxi and monitored the tracking droid activator. The droid driver looked back at him.

“Where to, sir?”

“Karson’s Park, eventually,” Vrath said. “But for now, follow my instructions precisely.”

“Yes, sir.”

Zeerid had shown discretion in calling Nat from a public comm station, so Vrath expected him to take a winding route, maybe change vehicles a few times. He settled in for a long ride.

Even if he lost him, he knew how to find him again.

The aircar lifted off the ground and merged with traffic. Zeerid had the driver take a series of abrupt turns for about ten minutes. Throughout, he kept his eyes behind him, trying to see if anyone was following. For a time, he thought another taxi might have been tailing him, but it fell away and did not return.

The glowing sign for a casino he knew, the Silver Falcon, shone ahead.

“Right here, driver.”

He paid the Bothan, hopped out, headed into the casino’s front door and out its back. There, he hailed another taxi and went through the same exercise.

Still no one that he could see. He breathed easier.

He hailed another taxi, one that could house a hoverchair, this one droid-driven.

“Where to, sir?”

Even the droid showed some rust from the air. Its head squeaked when it turned.

“I need to purchase a hoverchair.”

The droid paused for a moment while its processors searched the city directory.

“Of course, sir.”

The taxi lifted off and took him to a medical supply reseller. Medical devices filled the cavernous warehouse, tended to by a single elderly man who reminded Zeerid of a scarecrow.

There, eighty-seven thousand credits got Zeerid a used hoverchair sized for a seven-year-old and a crash course on how to operate it. Zeerid could not stop smiling while the wholesaler’s utility droid loaded the chair in the back of the taxi.

“Don’t see bearer cards all that often,” the old man said, eyeing Zeerid’s method of payment.

“Credits are credits,” Zeerid said. He knew what the man must have been thinking.

“True. I used to be a nurse, you know. That chair is a good device.”

“She’ll love it,” Zeerid said.

The old man rubbed his hands together. “If that’s all then, sir. I’ll just need you to fill out a few forms. The bearer card is untraceable, as you know.”

“Can we do it another time?” Zeerid said, and started walking for the door. “I really have to go.”

The old man tried his best to keep up the pace. “But sir, this is a regulated medical device. Even for resale I need your name and an onplanet address. “Sir! Please, sir!”

Zeerid hopped into the taxi.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said, and closed the cab door. “Karson’s Park,” he said to the droid.

“Very good, sir.”

Through the window of the taxi, Zeerid saw Karson’s Park below. Benches surrounded a large pond in which greenbeaks swam. Walking paths zagged through a small wood. Picnic tables dotted the grass here and there. Public athletic courts, most of them cracked but still usable, formed the geometric meeting grounds where the neighborhood’s youth met and played.

Zeerid checked his chrono as the aircar set down. Right on time.

He paid the driver, threw on a billed hat, unloaded the hoverchair, and pushed it before him as he entered the park. The chair felt light in his hands, though he thought he might just have been excited. He headed straight for the walkway and benches around the pond.

Ahead, he saw Nat pushing Arra in her wheelchair. Arra was tossing to the greenbeaks the processed feed sold by the utility droids that cleaned the park. She laughed as the greenbeaks quacked and squabbled over the feed nuggets. To Zeerid, the sound of her joy was like music.

He spared a quick glance around, seeing many pedestrians and a few droids but nothing that gave him concern.

“Nat!” he called, and waved to them. “Arra!”

He thought his voice sounded different planetside than it did on Fatman, and he approved of the change. It wasn’t the voice of a spicerunner, not even the voice of a soldier. Instead, it was the gentle voice of a father who loved his daughter. Arra made him better. He knew that. And he needed to make sure he saw her more often.

Nat turned Arra’s chair and both of their eyes widened at the sight.

“Daddy!” Arra said.

Of all the words in the galaxy, that was the one he liked to hear most. She wheeled toward him, leaving Nat and the still-squabbling greenbeaks behind.

“What is that?” she asked as she came closer. Her eyes were wide, her smile bright.

He knelt down and scooped her out of her chair in a hug. She felt tiny.

“It is my surprise for you,” he said.

Arra’s face pinched in a question. “And what is that?” she asked, tapping the armor vest he wore under his clothes.

He felt his cheeks warm. “Something for work. That’s all.”

She seemed to accept that. “Look, Aunt Nat. A hoverchair!”

“So I see,” said Nat, walking up behind her.

“Is it for me?” Arra asked.

“Of course it is!” Zeerid answered.

Arra squealed and gave Zeerid another hug, dislodging his hat. “You are the best, Daddy. Can I try it out right now?”

“Sure,” Zeerid said, and set her down in it. “The controls are right here. They’re intuitive, so—”

She manipulated the controls and was off and flying before he could say another word. He just watched her go, smiling.

“Hello, Nat,” he said.

His sister-in-law looked worn, too young for the lines on her face, the circles under her eyes. She wore her brown hair in a style even Zeerid knew was five years out of date. Zeerid wondered how he must look to her. Probably just as worn.

“Zeerid. That was very nice. The chair, I mean.”

“Yeah,” Zeerid said. “She seems to be enjoying it.”

Arra flew the hoverchair after some greenbeaks and they fled into the water.

“Careful, Arra!” he called.

“I’m fine, Daddy,” she said.

He and Nat stood there, next to each other but with an abyss between them.

“Been a while,” Nat said. “She needs to see you more often.”

“I know. I’m trying.”

She seemed to want to say something but held off.

“How’s work?”

“I am a waitress in a casino, Zeerid,” she scoffed. “An old waitress. Work is hard. My feet hurt. My back hurts. I’m tired. And our apartment is the size of an aircar.”

He could not help but take all of it personally. “I will try to send more.”

“No, no.” She waved to punctuate the words. “If it wasn’t for the credits you do send, we’d go hungry. It’s not that. I just … feel like I’m on a treadmill, you know? Can’t stop running but I’m going nowhere.”

He nodded. “I hear you.”

Arra called to him. “Look, Daddy!”

She flew the hoverchair in a tight circle, laughing the whole way.

“Careful, Arra,” he said, but smiled.

“Wait until you’ve got the hang of that, Peashooter,” Nat said.

They stood together in silence for a time. Then Nat’s voice turned serious. “How did you afford the chair, Zeerid?”

He did not look at her, fearful that she’d see the ambivalence in his face.

“Work. What else?”

“What kind of work?”

He did not like the tone of the question. “Same as always.”

She turned on him, and the stern expression on her face channeled Val so well he almost crumbled.

“You’ve been sending us one hundred, two hundred credits a month for almost a year now. Today you show up with a hoverchair that I know costs more than the aircar I drive.”

“Nat—”

“What are you into, Zeerid? You have this ridiculous hat on, armor.”

“The same—”

“Do you think I’m blind? Stupid?”

“No, of course not.”

“I can guess at what you do, Zeerid. Arra has already lost her mother. She can’t lose her father, too. It will crush her.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“You’re not hearing me. You think she’d rather have legs than have her father? That hoverchair more than you? She glows when she knows you are coming to see us. Listen to me, Zeerid. Whatever you’re doing, give it up. Sell that ship of yours, take a job planetside, and just be a father to your daughter.”

He wished he could. “I can’t, Nat. Not yet.” He turned to face her. “One more run and everything changes. One more.”

She stared back at him, her skin pale from too little sun and inadequate nutrition. “I told her not to marry a soldier, much less a pilot.”

“Val?”

“Yes, Val.”

“Nat—”

“You don’t know when to stop, Zeerid. You never have. All of you, you put on that armor, get in that cockpit, and you think you’re invulnerable, that a blaster can’t kill you, that your ship can’t get shot out of the sky. It can, Zeerid. And if yours does, it’ll hurt Arra more than the accident that took her legs.”

He could think of nothing to say because he knew she was right. “I’m going to buy her a sweet ice. You want one?”

She shook her head and he walked toward the concession stand. He felt Nat’s eyes on his back the whole way.

Vrath watched Zeerid walk away from the woman, his sister-in-law, and head to the vendor stands to get a sweet ice for his daughter.

His daughter.

Small wonder that Zeerid operated with such concern for being followed. Vrath knew what an organization like The Exchange, or one like the Hutts, could do to a man with a family. A young child was a lever waiting to be pulled, the marionette strings to make a man dance.

A man living the life Zeerid and Vrath lived had to have either enough power—or a patron with enough power—to protect his family, or his family was at risk. Zeerid had neither power nor patron. Vrath respected the fact that Zeerid had managed to keep his daughter out of the game for so long. No mean feat.

But now she was in it, a piece on the board.

Vrath would not use her, of course. As a matter of professional pride, Vrath never resorted to threats or harm to a man’s family, much less a child. It lacked precision, something a bomber pilot would do, not a sniper.

And Vrath was still a sniper in his soul. One shot, one kill, no collaterals.

He turned away from Nat and Arra to locate Zeerid and found him standing directly behind him, a red sweet ice in one hand, a green in the other, and eyes like spears.

“Do I know you, friend?” Zeerid said. His eyes took in Vrath’s clothes, his bearing.

Vrath slouched some, adopted as harmless a look as he could. “I don’t think so. You from around here?”

Zeerid took a step closer, angling his body for a strike.

Vrath had to fight down the instinct to shift his own stance to eliminate the off-angle of Zeerid’s approach. Zeerid would recognize it. And Vrath could not afford to kill Zeerid now, not until he used Zeerid to locate the engspice.

“What were you looking at, friend?” Zeerid asked.

“Daddy!” Arra called, but Zeerid’s eyes never left Vrath’s face.

“I was just watching the greenbeaks. I like to feed ’em.” He reached into his pocket and grabbed a handful of the feed pellets he’d purchased from one of the park’s droids.

“Daddy, I want the green ’ice!” Arra said.

Seeing the feeding pellets, Zeerid visibly relaxed, though not entirely. “Of course,” he said. “Sorry, pal.”

“Is that your daughter?” Vrath asked, nodding at Arra.

“Yes,” Zeerid answered, and the hint of a smile curled his lips.

“She seems very happy,” Vrath said. “Have a great day, sir.”

Vrath walked past Zeerid and fell in with the runners, bikers, and other sentients using the park. As he did, he chided himself for taking his eyes off Zeerid. The man clearly had a nose for trouble.

Zeerid turned to watch the man walk away. Something about him felt off, but Zeerid could not quite put his finger on it. He’d seemed overly interested in Arra and Nat, and he’d had a coldness to his eyes, despite the stupid grin.

“Daddy! It’s melting!”

Arra steered the chair over to him and he handed over the sweet ice, wiping his hands clean on his jacket.

“Thank you,” she said and took a bite. “Mmm. Deeeeeeelicious!”

He smiled at her, and when he looked back, he could not spot the man anywhere.

“Who was that?” Nat asked when she walked over.

Zeerid absently offered Nat the other sweet ice, still looking in the direction the man had walked. “I don’t know. Nobody.”

Nat must have picked up on Zeerid’s concerns. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” he said, and forced a smile. “I’m sure.”

Only he wasn’t.

“I think I’ll walk you both home, okay?”

“Hooray!” Arra said.

“What is it?” Nat asked. She still had not taken the sweet ice.

“Nothing,” he said, not wanting to alarm her. “Can’t I walk my girls to their door?”

“I’m not walking,” Arra said, grinning. “I’m flying.”

Aryn’s Raven came out of hyperspace. She’d left her robes and her regrets back on Alderaan.

“Straight on to Vulta, Tee-six.”

The astromech took over the flying and the Raven knifed through space. Vulta appeared through the canopy, a lone planet circling its star. The sun’s light glinted off the many artificial satellites in orbit and the space traffic moving to and from the planet.

“Ping planetary control with our official Republic credentials,” she said to T6. “Request a pad at the Yinta Lake spaceport.”

The droid whistled an affirmative.

Aryn would soon know if her absence had been noted. If so, her credentials would probably be no good.

T6 gave a satisfied series of beeps as landing instructions scrolled across Aryn’s HUD.

“Take us down, Tee-six. And also link into the planetary directory and find me an address for Zeerid Korr.”

She had not seen Zeerid in years. He could be dead. Or he might be unwilling to help her. They’d been good friends: Aryn had been the only person Zeerid had told about his wife’s death before he’d mustered out. Aryn had helped him come through the initial shock. And she could still feel the intense grief, the despair he’d endured upon hearing the news. It was similar to what she’d felt when Master Zallow had died. Zeerid had been grateful for her sympathetic ear, she knew. But she was going to be asking him for a lot.

T6 beeped a negative. No Zeerid Korr in the directory.

Aryn clenched a fist as the planet grew larger.

“His wife had a sister. Natala … something. Natala … Yooms. Try her, Tee-six.”

In moments T6 had an address. She lived near the lakeshore in Yinta Lake and had legal guardianship over a nine-year-old girl named Arra Yooms.

“Arra?”

Aryn knew Arra was the name of Zeerid’s daughter. If Natala had custody of the girl, then Zeerid could very well be dead. Her plan began to crumble. She had no one else to whom she could turn. If Zeerid was dead, then so, too, was her opportunity to avenge Master Zallow.

She had no choice but to try. She did not know how she could get through the Imperial blockade at Coruscant without help.

The Raven descended through the atmosphere in a shroud of heat and flame. When she emerged into the blue sky of Vulta’s stratosphere, she could see below them the large blue oval of Lake Yinta and the ring of urbanism that surrounded it.

T6 put them into the flow of the sky traffic, and they headed for their landing pad in Yinta Lake. From there, she’d find Natala.

Zeerid felt like a father as he walked Nat and Arra back to their apartment near the lake. He felt like a failure when he saw what a hole it was. They lived in one of the mansions converted to subsidized housing by the planetary authority. Rust, broken glass, chipped stone, addicts, and drunks seemed omnipresent.

“It looks worse than it is,” Nat said to him, softly enough that Arra could not hear.

Zeerid nodded.

“Did you hear what happened on Coruscant?” Nat said, apparently wanting to change the subject. “It’s all over the ’Net.”

“I heard.”

“How do you think it will turn out?”

He shrugged.

As they walked, he kept his eyes open for anyone suspicious but saw no one. Still, he could not shed the feeling that something had gone awry. The man in the park just smelled wrong.

They took a rickety lift up several floors. Zeerid did not enter the apartment and Nat did not invite him in. Arra turned her hoverchair, maneuvering in the small space like a pro.

“You are a pilot’s daughter,” he said.

She beamed. “I love you, Daddy.”

“And I love you.”

He lifted her out of the chair and squeezed her so hard she squealed. He felt the absence of her legs like a hole in his heart. He didn’t want to let her go but knew he must.

He could see a bit of the tiny two-room flat over Nat’s shoulder. One window, a galley kitchen.

“Will you come back soon, Daddy?” Arra asked as he lowered her back into the chair.

“Yes,” he said, as unequivocal as a blaster shot. “Soon.” He stole her nose and she giggled. “I’ll give this back to you when I return.”

Nat, standing beside her, stroked her hair. “Time for homework, Arra. Then bedtime.”

“All right, Aunt Nat. Bye, Daddy,” she said, her eyes watering. She was trying to be strong.

Zeerid knelt. “I will be back soon. Within days. All right?”

She nodded and he mussed her hair. She turned the hoverchair and headed for her room.

He filed the image of her face in the file cabinet of his memory.

“She loves that chair,” Nat said. “You did good, Zeerid.”

“I’m going to get you both out of here,” he said, determined to make it so. “After this next job—”

Nat held up a hand and shook her head. “I don’t want to hear about the job. I just want you to promise that you won’t take unnecessary chances.”

“I promise,” he said.

“We’ll see you when you come back. We’re fine here, Zeerid. It doesn’t look like much, but we’re fine.”

He reached into his jacket and took out the bearer card. “There are over thirteen thousand credits on this. Take it. Buy something nice for you and Arra.”

She eyed the card as if it might bite her. “Thirteen thousand …” She looked him in the face. “How’d you come by this amount of money?”

He ignored the question and held up the card until she took it.

“Thank you, Nat. For everything.” He hugged her, the gesture as awkward as always. She felt too thin, as threadbare as an old sweater. He vowed to himself then and there that he was getting both of them out of the slum. He’d do whatever he had to do.

“Take care of yourself, Z-man,” Nat said.

“I will. And I’ll be back soon.”

To that, she said nothing.

The moment the door closed and the locks clicked into place, he flipped the switch in his brain. Zeerid the father fled before Z-man the soldier and smuggler.

The man at the park had been all wrong, from his hair, to his clothes, to the coldness in his eyes. He could have been nobody. Or he could have been somebody.

Zeerid decided that he would linger in the apartment building for a while, out of sight, just to be sure Nat and Arra were safe.

He took station on their floor and settled in. He hadn’t done sentry duty since he was a new recruit. Felt good, though.

Vrath sat in the aircar taxi on the street outside the decrepit apartment building. The smell of rotten fish and dirty lake filled the air. He watched for a long time, monitoring Zeerid’s movements with the tracker. Zeerid had stopped moving. Perhaps he shared an apartment there with Nat and Arra.

He gave it a while longer, then decided to take a look. He paid the droid driver, hopped out of the aircar, dodged the few ramshackle speeders and the public speeder bus that flew low through the street, and headed across to the apartment building.

Zeerid’s eyes adjusted to the dim lights that flickered intermittently in the hallway. The door to Nat and Arra’s flat was about halfway down the corridor. There was no other way in or out of the apartment. All he needed to do was take a boresighting down the hall.

The far end of the hallway ended in a cracked glass window. The near side ended in the lift and a door to the stairs. Other than scaling the building from the outside, the lift and the stairs were the only way onto the fourth floor. He could cover both.

He thought about just lingering in the hallway and putting the muzzle of his blaster into the belly of anyone who looked at him sideways. But that wouldn’t do. He did not want to draw too much attention to himself and he did not want to cause a scene unnecessarily. He finally decided to take station on the emergency stairwell to the side of the lift. He propped the door open so he could see the lift, the hall, and the stairs.

A good field of fire, he decided.

He took the E-9 blaster pistol—small, compact, but with decent power—held it in his front jacket pocket, and waited.

Minutes passed, turned to half an hour, to an hour, and he began to think his paranoia had ill served him. The building did not see a lot of foot traffic. A near-obsolete utility droid came up the creaky lift and vacuumed the floor, ignoring Zeerid altogether. When it completed its sweep, it retired to a utility closet next to the lift.

Zeerid sat alone with only uncomfortable thoughts for company in a stairwell that smelled of urine and vomit. He had let his daughter down. To try and give her a better life, he had turned himself into the kind of man he once would have regarded with contempt. And what did she have to show for it? A decrepit apartment and an absentee father who could die on his next run.

And a hoverchair, he reminded himself. But still …

He had to get out of the life. But there was no walking away until he’d cleared his debt with The Exchange. So he’d make a last run to Coruscant—

The door to the stairwell on the ground floor opened with an angry squeal. At almost the same moment, he heard the rumble of the lift coming up the shaft.

Alert and tense, he went to the railing at the edge of the stairwell and peered down. Light from the fluorescent fixture attached to the ceiling two floors above him did little to illuminate the stairwell. Shadows coated the lower floors but Zeerid thought he saw a form there, humanoid, and watched it start up the stairs.

Meanwhile, the chime of the lift announced its arrival on the fourth floor.

Cupping his blaster in his hand, Zeerid flattened himself against the wall near the doorway of the stairwell. The footsteps coming from below continued their slow ascent. They stopped from time to time, as if the person was unsure of his or her destination, or was stopping to listen.

The lift doors opened and Zeerid heard the soft susurrus of quiet movement. The lift doors closed.

The footsteps on the steps started again, stopped.

Zeerid waited a three-count and poked his head around the doorway to give him a view of the hallway.

A cloaked figure stole down the corridor, about the size of the man he’d met in the park. He was checking the doors for apartment numbers. Zeerid could not see the figure’s hands. He shot a look back at the stairwell, heard nothing, and stole out into the hallway.

The figure stopped before Nat’s apartment and consulted a palm-sized portcomp, as if confirming an address.

Zeerid had seen all he needed to see. He brandished the E-9.

“You! Move away from that door.”

The figure turned toward him, reached for something at waist level. Zeerid did not hesitate. He pulled the trigger, and the muffled whump of the E-9 sounded like a polite cough.

In near-perfect time with Zeerid pulling the trigger, the motion so fast that it was blurry, the figure whipped free a silver cylinder that grew a glowing green line and deflected the E-9’s bolt into the floor.

Before Zeerid squeezed off another shot, the figured cocked its head and deactivated the lightsaber.

“Zeerid?”

A woman.

Zeerid did not lower his weapon or his temperature. He could not make sense of the lightsaber. A Jedi?

“Who are you?” he asked.

The figure threw back her hood to reveal long sandy hair and the warm green eyes that Zeerid had never forgotten. The heat and tension went out of him in a rush.

“Aryn? Aryn Leneer? What are you doing here?”

“Looking for you,” she said. She motioned at the door to Nat’s apartment. “I thought I would try your sister-in-law’s—”

“Are you alone? Did someone follow you?”

She looked taken aback by the rapid-fire questions. “I … yes. No.”

“How did you find me?”

“Luck. I remembered your sister-in-law’s name. I hoped she could help me find you.”

“Stay there,” he said, and hurried back down the hall to the stairwell. He looked down and saw nothing and no one. Whoever had been on the stairs was gone.

He told himself that it was probably just a resident coming home.

He turned to find himself staring into Aryn’s concerned face. She looked much as she had when she’d held him while he cried over Val’s death.

“What is wrong?” she asked.

No doubt she could feel his apprehension.

“Probably nothing. I’m overreacting, I think.”

She smiled her smile but he saw something new in her eyes—a hardness. He did not need to be a Force-user to know that something was different.

“What happened to you?” he asked. “I just saw you on the ’Net. I thought you were on Alderaan.”

A veil fell over her eyes and closed her off. He’d never seen it before, not from her, though he imagined his own expression looked much the same when he was working.

“I was. That’s part of what I want to talk about. I need your help. Can we go somewhere and talk?”

“This really is not a good time, Aryn.”

“It’s important.”

He had a flash of fear, thinking the Jedi had caught wind of the engspice delivery, had learned that he was to deliver it, and were intent on stopping him. But she said nothing about engspice.

“It’s a personal issue, Z-man. Not something for the Order.”

He breathed easier, even smiled at how silly his name sounded when she said it. Maybe it sounded that silly all the time. He shot a glance back down the hall at Nat’s apartment.

Closed and secure, like all the other doors in the hall. A blaster shot and an activated lightsaber had not even merited an open door.

He had to get them both out of there. It was no place for a child.

Aryn touched his arm. “Are you all right?”

He let out a long breath and tried to shed some stress. He was overreacting. Since arriving on planet, he had taken all of the precautions he usually took. No one he didn’t want to know knew of his relationship to Arra or Nat, much less where they lived. Aryn had stumbled on him only because they were friends from way back and she knew Nat’s name. The man in the park had probably been nobody, just a random passerby.

“No, I’m all right. I do know a place we can talk. For old times’ sake. But I may have to cut it short. I’m expecting a call.”

Zeerid could get the ping from Oren at any time.

They walked out to the street and waited with a small crowd for a public speeder bus to arrive. They boarded and it pulled away. Zeerid watched Nat and Arra’s building vanish below them. He tried to fill the pit in his stomach by telling himself that they would be fine.

Vrath lingered outside the stairwell entrance to Zeerid’s apartment. His tracker had shown him Zeerid’s location before he’d gotten halfway up the stairs.

An ambush or just extreme cautiousness?

Leaning against the crumbling brick wall, he eyed the tracker. It showed Zeerid moving away on the speeder bus. Vrath had seen the woman who had accompanied him. It wasn’t Nat.

He activated his comlink and raised the rest of his team, all of whom were stationed at or near the Yinta Lake spaceport.

“He’s mobile, on a speeder bus, heading in your direction. I’m en route.”

Zeerid and Aryn rode the airbus in silence to a stop near the hulking, rusty geometry of the spaceport. From there, they walked the busy street to a casino Zeerid knew, the Spiral Galaxy, where Nat worked. An overpowering sea of smoke, shouts, flashing lights, and music greeted them. No one would overhear them there.

Zeerid led Aryn to the bar area, found a corner table that allowed him a view of the rest of the room, and sat. He waved off the server before the young man ever reached their table. Aryn glanced around the casino, tiny furrows lining her brow. She looked to have aged ten years since he’d last seen her. He imagined he looked much the same to her, if not worse. He was surprised she had recognized him. But then, maybe she hadn’t recognized him by sight so much as by feel.

He leaned back in the chair and spoke loud enough to be heard over the ambient sound. “You said you needed my help?”

She nodded, leaned forward to put her elbows on the table. She looked past him as she spoke, and he had the impression she was reciting something she had rehearsed. “I need to get to Coruscant as soon as possible.”

He chuckled. “That makes two of us.”

His response threw her off. “How do you mean?”

“Never mind. Coruscant isn’t exactly Jedi-friendly at the moment.”

“No. And this … isn’t sanctioned by the Order.”

Her response threw him off. He’d never known Aryn to buck orders.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“You’ll want to wait until the negotiations on Alderaan are completed, right? See how things shake out? In a week—”

“I can’t wait.”

“No? Why?”

She sat back in her chair as if to open some distance between them, room for a lie maybe. “I need to get something from the Temple.”

“What?”

“Something personal.”

He leaned forward, closing the gap between them, reducing the room for falsehoods. “Aryn, we haven’t seen each other in years. You show up out of a nebula and tell me you want my help to get to a world just conquered by the Empire and that getting you there isn’t sanctioned by the Jedi Order.”

He let her stew in that for a moment before continuing. “Maybe I want to help you. Maybe I can.”

She looked up at that, hope in her eyes.

“You were there for me when I went through a tough time. But I need to understand what’s really happening here.”

She smiled and shook her head. “I missed you and didn’t know it.”

He felt his cheeks warm and tried to hide his discomfiture. Of course, he could hide nothing from her. She would feel the warmth her words put in him.

She slid her chair forward and crossed her hands on the table. He was very conscious of how close her hands were to his. It seemed he had missed her, too.

“The attack killed someone I cared about.”

The sinking feeling he felt surprised him.

“A husband?” Could Jedi even marry? He didn’t know.

She shook her head. “My master. Ven Zallow.”

“I’m sorry.” He touched her hand in sympathy and it put such a charge through him that he pulled away. Surprisingly, he did not see pain in her expression, but anger.

“The Temple will have vids of the attack. I need to see how he died.”

“It could’ve been bombs, Aryn. Anything.”

She shook her head before he finished his sentence. “No. It was a Sith.”

“You know this?”

“I know it. And I want to see that Sith, know his name.”

Insight dawned. “You want to kill him.”

She did not gainsay it.

He blew out a whistle. “Blast, Aryn, I thought you’d come here to arrest me.”

“Arrest you? Why?”

“Never mind,” he said. “No wonder the Order didn’t sanction your going to Coruscant. What would this do to the peace negotiations? You’re talking about assassinating someone.”

The coldness in her eyes was new to him. “I’m talking about avenging my master. They murdered him, Zeerid. I will not let it stand. Do you think I don’t know exactly what I am doing? What it will cost?”

“No, I don’t think you know.”

“You’re wrong. I want help from you, Zeerid, not a lecture. Now, I need to get to Coruscant. Will you help?”

He’d been working alone since he’d mustered out. Preferred it that way. But working with Aryn had always felt … right. If he was going to fly with anyone, it would be her.

His comm buzzed. He checked it, saw an encrypted message from Oren, decrypted it.

Goods are aboard Fatman. Leave immediately. Cargo is hot.

He looked across the table at Aryn. “Your timing is good.”

Her eyes formed a question.

“I’m flying to Coruscant, too. Right now.”

“What?” She looked dumbfounded.

He pushed back his chair and stood. “Coming?”

She stayed in her chair. “You’re flying to Coruscant? Now?”

“Right now.”

She stood. “Then yes, I’m coming.”

“Whatever you flew here, you need to leave it. We’re taking only my ship.”

Aryn tapped on her comlink and spoke over the sound of the casino.

“Tee-six, put the Raven in lockdown. I am going offplanet. Monitor our usual subspace channel, and I will contact you when I can.”

The droid’s answering beeps were lost to the cacophony.

They started picking their way through the crowd.

Aryn took him by the bicep and pulled his ear to her mouth. “It can’t be coincidence, you know. Consider the timing. The Force brought us here at this moment so that we can help each other. You see that, don’t you?”

At a table near them, bells rang and a Zabrak raised his arms high, shouting with joy.

“Jackpot!” the Zabrak said. “Jackpot!”

Zeerid decided that he had to tell her. He shouted over the noise. “If the Force brought us together, then the Force has an odd sense of humor.”

Her eyes narrowed in a question. “What are you talking about?”

He dived in. “Listen, what I’m doing makes what you’re doing look like charity work.”

Her expression fell and her body leaned backward slightly. “What do you mean?”

“I’m going to give you another chance to ask that question before I answer it. Before you do, realize that I would make this run whether you came or not, Aryn. I am not proud of it, but I have to do it. Now, do you want to know?”

“Yes,” she said, and blinked. “But later. Right now—and do not look around—there are people watching us.”

An effort of will kept his eyes on her. Oren had told him the cargo was hot, but he didn’t realize it was that hot. He feigned a smile. “Where? How many?”

“Two that I can see. A human male at the bar, brown jacket, long black hair. To my right, a human male in a long black coat and gloves.”

“You sure?” He nodded as if he was agreeing with something she said.

“Mostly.”

“How do we play it?” he asked her.

Funny how they so easily fell back into old roles. She giving the orders and he obeying them.

“We play dumb and make for the spaceport. We’ll evaluate as we go. Then …”

“Then?”

Her hand went under her cloak, to the hilt of her lightsaber. “Then we improvise.”

He took mental stock of all the weapons he bore and their location on his person.

“Good enough,” he said, and they headed for the exit.

The shuttle took Eleena and Malgus skyward to Malgus’s cruiser, Valor. Malgus stared out one of the viewports as they broke through the atmosphere. He felt Eleena’s eyes on him but did not turn to her. His thoughts were on the Force, on the Empire, and how the two seemed to be diverging before his eyes. The question for him was singular—what would he do about it?

The pilot’s voice carried over the speaker. “Darth Malgus, Darth Angral wishes to speak to you.”

Malgus cocked his head in a question. He looked to Eleena but she looked away, out a viewport at the receding surface of Coruscant.

“Put him through.”

The small vidscreen in the shuttle’s passenger compartment lit up and projected a holographic image of Darth Angral. He sat at the same desk in the Chancellor’s office from which he had previously lectured Malgus. Malgus wondered if Adraas remained there still.

“My lord,” Malgus said, though the words felt false.

“Darth Malgus, I see you have recovered your … companion. I am pleased for you.”

“I am returning her to Valor, then I will return to the surface to assist—”

Angral held up a hand and shook his head. “There is no need for that, old friend. Your presence on Coruscant is no longer necessary. Instead, I need you to command the blockade and ensure the safety of the hyperspace lanes.”

“My lord, any naval officer could—”

“But I am ordering you to do this, Darth Malgus.”

Malgus stared at the image of Darth Angral for a long while before he trusted himself to answer. “Very well, Darth Angral.”

He cut off the connection, and the image sank back into the screen.

A headache rooted in the base of his skull. He could feel the veins in his head pulsing, each beat amplifying his disillusionment, his growing rage.

He did not need to be skilled in political maneuvering to understand that Angral ordering him into an unimportant role was a way of sending the clear message that he was out of favor. Angral had used him just long enough to ensure the success of the sacking of Coruscant, and now he was being edged aside in favor of Lord Adraas. In the span of a day he had gone from the conqueror of Coruscant to a second-tier Darth.

He glanced over at Eleena once more, wondering how much of it she understood.

She did not look at him, just continued to look out the viewport.

Pedestrians thronged the misty street outside the casino. The smell of the lake was strong: dead fish, other organic decay. Zeerid swept the crowd with his eyes, seeking anyone else that struck him as suspicious. He saw twenty men in the crowded street who might have been eyeing him.

“I can’t make anyone in this crowd,” he said.

Two drunk Houks staggered by, shouting a song in their native tongue. A young Bothan revved his swoop engine and blasted into the air. Ubiquitous aircar taxis lined the street. Private aircars and a public speeder bus flew above them.

“Keep moving,” Aryn said. “No urgency, though.”

The spaceport occupied several blocks beginning across the street from them. Digital billboards affixed to its side played advertisements for everything from vacation homes to energy bars to debt relief counseling. Zeerid sympathized with that last.

Moving with forced casualness, they cut across the street, eliciting the honk of a signal horn and a raised fist, and headed for the nearest entrance to the spaceport.

“Don’t look back,” Aryn said. “They’re there.”

“How do you know?”

“I know.”

The doors to the spaceport opened. Baggage trams pulled by droids rolled through the doors, followed by a dozen or so recent arrivals of several different sentient species. The doors closing behind them cut short the pitches of the taxi drivers.

Vrath sat on a bench inside the spaceport, pressed between a female Rodian on his left and a male Ithorian on his right. The Ithorian smelled like leather and hummed a tune through his two mouths.

Vrath endured, and watched Zeerid and the woman enter the spaceport. Zeerid glanced around, suspicion in his eyes. But Vrath had spent years perfecting his own inconspicuousness, a skill invaluable to a sniper, and Zeerid’s eyes moved over and past him.

He whispered commands, the sound inaudible above the commotion of the spaceport. The implant in his jaw amplified the words and sent them to the earpieces of his team.

“He is wary. Keep your distance.”

Vrath did not want Zeerid to sense danger and bolt before Vrath located the cargo. His team had stolen aboard Zeerid’s ship hours earlier and searched it. They’d found nothing and, other than a routine visit from one of the port’s maintenance inspection droids, no one had been aboard since. Two of his team were stationed near the ship, keeping an eye on it.

Vrath watched Zeerid and the woman with his peripheral vision and, using his audial implant, listened to them as best he could over the sounds of the port.

Zeerid studied the faces of those around them, looking for anyone else who might be watching them. Faces blurred into one another. He felt as if their pursuers were breathing right down his neck. Unable to stop himself, he turned and shot a glance backward.

Through the sea of faces, he glimpsed the two men Aryn had described in the casino. Both saw him looking at them.

He looked away, cursing himself.

“They know we know,” he said.

Aryn was staring at a wall-mounted vidscreen that showed a news piece about the negotiations on Alderaan.

A BREAKTHROUGH IN NEGOTIATIONS? read the caption.

A human man, his dark hair combed back over a wrinkled face, was speaking. Zeerid did not recognize him. The tag below his image named him LORD BARAS.

“Did you hear what I said, Aryn?”

She pulled her eyes away from the screen with difficulty. “I heard you. What do you think they want?”

Zeerid had made a lot of enemies since signing on with The Exchange, but he figured those pursuing them wanted the engspice.

“They want the cargo we’re taking to Coruscant,” he said.

They hopped on an autowalk that sped them across the port. Through the transparisteel windows along one wall, they could see freighters and other small starships sitting on the port’s landing pads. Crane droids loaded and unloaded cargo.

He used the reflection in the transparisteel to determine if the men were still behind them. They were. But he still could not tell if there were more or just the two.

“They just got on the autowalk behind us,” Zeerid said, as the men followed them onto the belt.

“Tell me what it is, Zeerid. The cargo.”

He did not hesitate, though he did not look at her when he answered. Instead, he stared at his own reflection in the transparisteel. “Engspice.”

She said nothing for a time, and he disliked the import of the silence.

“How did you get into running engspice?” she asked finally.

He disliked even more the accusation he heard in her tone and turned to face her. “How did you fall out with the Order and go off looking to murder? It’s a long story, yes? Well, so is this.”

She stared into his face, those open green eyes. He saw more pain in them than he’d ever seen before. “You’re right. I’m sorry, Zeerid. I didn’t mean—”

“I’m not proud of it, Aryn.”

“I know.”

She would know. She would sense his guilt, his ambivalence.

“We do what we do,” she said.

“We do what we must.”

“Right,” she said. “What we must.”

They switched walks, took an autostair up a floor. He continued to watch the two men behind them. They made no move to close the distance between them.

“What are they waiting for?” Aryn asked.

Zeerid had wondered the same thing but realization soon dawned. “They don’t know whether I know where the spice is.”

Ahead, he saw the landing pad where Fatman as Red Dwarf was docked. A long cargo tram rolled past. A platoon of maintenance droids trudged near it. A man and woman before it waved to each other, smiled, embraced, and moved on.

Another two men near it drew his attention. One sat on a chair near the door that led out to the landing pad. A portcomp sat open on his lap, but he paid it no heed. The second faced the transparisteel window, ostensibly looking out on the landing pad. Zeerid imagined him watching them approach in its reflection.

“Do you know where it is?” Aryn asked.

“It’s on my ship,” he said. “The Exchange uses jacked maintenance droids to sneak illicit cargo onto their mules.”

Vrath walked beside a Twi’lek women carrying a small travel bag. He stayed close to her and let his body language suggest that they were together. When he heard Zeerid’s words via his audial implant, he cursed himself for missing the obvious—the maintenance droid had been hijacked with stealth programming to load the engspice.

Vrath did not have the firepower on hand to destroy Zeerid’s ship, so he’d have to do things the hard way.

“The cargo is on the target’s ship and the target is not to get aboard,” he said, his words loud enough that the Twi’lek looked at him askance and moved away.

“Keene,” he said to the driver of the speeder he had stationed outside. “Be ready with an evac off the target’s landing pad.”

Vrath drew his blaster and pushed through the crowd.

“Everybody down!”

The man facing the transparisteel window turned while the man on the bench set aside his portacomp and stood.

“Here they come,” Zeerid said.

Aryn let her hand fall to the hilt of her lightsaber. “I see them.”

Zeerid glanced back and saw the two men who had trailed them out of the casino moving at a jog, then a run, through the crowd. Both reached behind their backs for weapons.

A third man Zeerid had not noticed before, but who looked vaguely familiar to him, shouted for everyone to get down and fired a blaster shot into the high ceiling.

Panic gripped the crowd. Screams erupted from all around and people dived to the ground or ducked behind benches and chairs. The dozens of droids in the vicinity stopped in their work and glanced about in confusion, their programming leaving them slow to respond to the unexpected.

The two men between Aryn and Zeerid and the ship had blasters in hand, firing as they approached. Aryn’s lightsaber hummed to life, spun a rapid arc before them, and deflected the shots into the ceiling and floor.

More screams. The acrid stink of discharged blasters.

Zeerid pulled his blaster from under his armpit and put two shots into one of the two men. The impact blew the man from his feet and left a charred shirt and two black holes in his chest.

Zeerid grabbed Aryn and pulled her down behind the box-shaped body of a stationary maintenance droid while the surviving man in front of them returned fire and the three men closing from behind opened up. A shot grazed the sole of Zeerid’s boot and left it smoking and black. The droid they sheltered behind vibrated under the impact of multiple shots.

“Do not move, droid,” Zeerid said.

But it could not have moved had it wished to. Smoke rose from the holes in its body, and sparks shot out.

“We have to get to my ship,” Zeerid said.

“The authorities will be coming …”

Zeerid shook his head. “Too many questions, Aryn. I’ve got engspice aboard. They’ll seize the ship and arrest us both. We have to go. Now.”

The men from behind were closing, using benches, chairs, and the bodies of passersby and droids for cover as they closed the distance. The screams and shouts of the civvies made it hard to think.

“I just want the cargo,” one of the men, the leader apparently, shouted above the tumult.

For answer, Zeerid popped up from behind the droid and fired three quick shots. He hit no one but he drove all three of the men behind them to the ground. He whirled on the man before them just in time to see the red muzzle flare of the blaster shot that slammed into his chest and sent him sliding three meters along the floor. The impact blew the breath from his lungs and left him gasping. Black smoke spiraled up from the hole ablated in his armored vest.

He’d been hit before and kept his wits, despite the pain and difficulty breathing.

“I’m hit,” he said.

He rolled over onto this stomach and fired as rapidly as he could pull the trigger at the three men behind them. They responded in kind. Blaster bolts put holes in the floor around him. Chunks of floor tile flew into the air. He could barely hear anything over the sound of blasterfire and the screams of the civvies.

A shot from the attack’s leader, the man who looked so familiar, caught Zeerid’s shoulder. Once more his armor spared him serious injury but the impact sent a jolt of pain down the length of his arm, left his hand numb, and sent his blaster skittering over the floor.

It stopped directly before a Zeltron female who lay flat on the floor. He met her wide-eyed gaze and saw the mindless fear. She made no move toward the blaster.

He rolled for cover away from the woman as more and more shots from the three men caged him in. Near him, a civilian moaned, presumably hit in the crossfire. A woman shrieked.

He had to get clear.

But before he could stand Aryn was over him, her blade a blur of motion that formed a cocoon of green light around them, deflecting blaster shots in all directions. She grabbed him under his armpit and helped him to his feet while still deflecting shots.

“Up,” she said. “Up.”

He still had not caught his breath enough to reply, but with her assistance he got to his feet. His right arm hung from his shoulder like a slab of meat. Reaching behind to the small of his back, he pulled the E-9 he kept there and took it in his left hand.

“The ship,” he said, still struggling for air.

Aryn gestured at a cargo tram near the three men shooting at them from behind. The six cars of the tram rushed toward the men, propelled by Aryn’s power. They scrambled aside, and Aryn and Zeerid dashed for Fatman.

The single man standing between them and the ship fired once, twice, and Aryn deflected both shots. Zeerid leveled the E-9 and fired. The shot hit the man in the brow and he fell backward, eyes wide open, blood pooling, dead.

As they pelted to the ship, more blaster shots rang out and Aryn’s blade hummed. The energy of the weapon caused Zeerid’s hair to stand on end.

They bounded over the dead man and through the transparisteel doors to the landing pad. The doors slid shut behind them, shutting off the screams of the civvies. Zeerid was grateful for it. Blaster shots thudded into the doors. The sound of speeders, swoops, and other nearby ships put a thrum in the air.

Shots rang out from above and to the right. A bolt clipped Aryn in the calf and knocked her legs out from under her.

An unmarked open-topped speeder flew in from the right, the pilot, a human male, firing over the side.

Zeerid crouched, one hand on Aryn, as he fired three shots with the E-9, trying to target one of the grav-thrusters on the speeder but hitting only the surrounding fuselage. The shots did no damage so he targeted the cockpit. Trying to avoid Zeerid’s fire, the pilot overcompensated and the speeder turned hard right. While the pilot scrambled to regain control, Zeerid grabbed Aryn with his good arm and pulled her to her feet.

“I’m all right,” she said. “Go, go.”

Sirens screamed in the distance, presaging the arrival of the port authorities.

Supporting each other arm in arm, they limped to the entry door and Zeerid punched in the code. Behind them, the doors to the landing pad slid open. Shots rang off the hull of Fatman. Zeerid fired a few blind bolts behind him. Aryn deflected another two shots into the bulkhead.

The ship’s door slid open too karking slow. Zeerid grabbed Aryn and climbed in before the door was all the way open. He hit the button to close it and the door stopped and reversed itself.

“I’ve got to get us out of here. You’re all right?”

“I’m fine,” she said.

The wound on her calf was ugly but looked like a graze. The pink, raw meat of her flesh was bordered by black lines of charred skin.

He pelted through Fatman’s corridors until he reached the cockpit, slammed himself into the pilot’s seat, and fired up the engines. His numb arm made it difficult, but he managed. He looked out of the cockpit for the speeder, saw it above him.

He’d ram it if it didn’t get out of the way.

The thrusters engaged and Fatman rose off the pad. The speeder wheeled to the side. The pilot fired wildly at the cockpit, but Fatman’s transparisteel canopy turned the shots without so much as a mark.

Zeerid considered blowing the speeder from the air with Fatman’s plasma cannons, but the falling debris might hurt an innocent.

“Consider yourself fortunate, fella.”

When he had ten meters of altitude, he engaged the ion engines and Fatman blazed skyward. He monitored the scanners to ensure no one was following them.

When he saw nothing, he let himself uncoil. He tested his arm, found it unbroken, just badly bruised. The feeling was already beginning to return to his hand.

Once the ship broached the atmosphere, he gave her to the autopilot and hurried back to the hold to check on Aryn.

Vrath holstered his still-warm weapon while he watched Zeerid’s ship lift into Vulta’s night sky. The ship’s ion engines flared blue and the freighter sped into the darkness and mingled with the rest of the night traffic.

He cursed as he surveyed the ruins of their ambush: two of his men dead, one wounded, the authorities en route, and he’d neither seized nor destroyed the engspice.

The Hutts would be unhappy.

Hundreds of faces stared out at them through the transparisteel windows of the spaceport. Behind the faces, he saw security droids and blue-uniformed security officers speeding along the autowalks. Some of the gawkers turned to the officers, pointed fingers outside at Vrath and his men. He could hear sirens in the distance.

“Time to get clear, boss,” said Deron.

Vrath nodded. He regretted leaving his dead behind, but their identities would tell the authorities nothing. They’d all been surgically altered several times over. Their current identities would not be traceable to the Hutts.

Keene set the speeder down on the landing pad. Vrath, Deron, and Lom hopped in.

“Move,” Vrath said.

Keene brought the speeder up and punched the acceleration. The wind whipped over them. Keene kept the speeder low and mixed with the traffic in the heart of Yinta Lake. Vrath kept an eye behind them for pursuit but saw none.

“We are clear,” he said.

Keene slowed the speeder and changed course, heading for their safehouse.

Lom started a stream of expletives that lasted three minutes. When he finished, Deron said, “The Hutts said nothing about Jedi involvement.”

“No, they didn’t,” Vrath agreed, though he doubted his contact with the Hutts had known.

“What are the Jedi doing with a spicerunner?” Deron asked.

Vrath shook his head, pondering. Jedi involvement made no sense, unless …

“Maybe the Jedi want to put their agent on Coruscant and they’re using a spicerunner to get her there.”

Deron harrumphed, seemingly unimpressed with the explanation.

“So how do they get through the Imperial blockade and get to Coruscant? He can’t just fly up to an Imperial cruiser.”

“No,” Vrath said, still thinking. “He can’t. But he’s got to have something in mind. The spice needs to get there and get there fast.”

“Right.”

Vrath made up his mind. “Keene, get me to Razor.”

“Why? What are you going to do?” Deron asked.

“I’m going to fly right up to an Imperial cruiser.”

“Huh?”

Vrath did not waste time with further explanation. The authorities would be searching for them once they analyzed video of the battle in the spaceport. Probably The Exchange already had the video, too. They’d be hunting Vrath and his team also.

“Get to your ships and get offplanet,” Vrath said. His team had landed in the bush outside Yinta Lake, and had not registered with planetary control.

“We rendezvous in three standard days at the usual place on Ord Mantell.”

He would get one more chance at stopping the engspice.

Zeerid found Aryn limping through the corridors toward the cockpit.

“We’re away,” he said. “Safely, it seems. I got nothing but normal traffic on the scanners.”

“Good. Now what?”

“Now we go to Coruscant.”

She said, “How will we get through the Imperial blockade?”

“Ah. Well, that’s complicated. Why don’t you go take care of that leg?”

“Why don’t you take care of that arm?”

“I need to eyeball the cargo. You don’t need to come.”

“I think I won’t.”

He nodded. “Medbay is forward and starboard.”

She smiled. “Kolto for your cuts.”

“Kolto for your cuts,” he echoed, a soldier’s phrase for medical care in the field.

“There’s food in the galley,” he said. “Protein bars and glucose supplements, mostly. Help yourself.”

“You’re still eating like a soldier.”

“I still do lots of things like a soldier.”

Just not the most important things.

She headed off and he headed toward the cargo bay, sneaking up on the crates as if they were an easily startled animal. They were small, maybe a meter on a side, tiny in the otherwise empty hold. He didn’t know what he had expected. Something bigger, he supposed. They seemed like a great deal of trouble for such small containers. He ran his hands over them and decided he did not want to see the spice after all.

He headed back to the cockpit to pilot his ship. The hail from Oren was already blinking. He punched it.

“Go,” he said.

“Our hackers have the film from the spaceport. I have seen your little incident.”

“Incident? I was shot. Twice.”

“Facial recognition on the apparent leader of the hit team gives an ID of Vrath Xizor.” Oren chuckled. “Apparently he’s an elementary school teacher from the Core.”

“I think we can safely assume that is fake. Who is he, Oren?”

“Free agent, we think. Probably works for the Hutts. They wouldn’t want the engspice to get to Coruscant. They’re … at odds with our buyer.”

The Hutts. It seemed they were into everything.

“Is that all you have?” Zeerid asked him.

“That’s all I have. How are you planning to get the spice to Coruscant, Z-man?”

“I’m not telling you a kriffin’ thing, Oren. You have a leak in your organization. I’ll get it there. That’s all you need to know.”

Oren chuckled. “Good-bye, Z-man.”

Behind him, Aryn cleared her throat. Zeerid could not bring himself to make eye contact with her. He started punching coordinates into the navicomp and Aryn eased into the copilot’s seat. It had been a long while since anyone had shared the cockpit with him. She had bandaged up her calf.

“Bandage looks good,” he said.

“Thanks.” She eyed the math in the navicomp. “That’s not going to get us to Coruscant.”

“No,” he said. “It’s going to take us to the Kravos system.”

“That’s a dead system,” she said. “On the edge of Imperial space.”

He nodded. “Supply convoys stop there to skim the gas giants for hydrogen.”

“I don’t understand. What’s the plan to get to Coruscant?”

“I thought you had the plan,” he said.

“What?”

He smiled. “I’m joking.”

“Not funny. The plan, Zeerid.”

He nodded. “It’s dangerous.”

Aryn seemed unbothered. She stared out the cockpit as they flew into the velvet of space, waiting for him to explain. He tried.

“I’m going to piggyback Fatman on an Imperial ship.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what it sounds like. I heard about it in flight school, back in the service.”

“You heard about it?”

Zeerid continued as if she had said nothing. “Centuries ago, smugglers used to jump into and out of hyperspace milliseconds after a Republic ship, say a big supply ship, heading for Coruscant. Smuggler comes out of hyperspace and goes cold except for thrusters.”

Aryn considered it. “Hard to pick up on sensors.”

“Right, but only if you come out in the supply ship’s shadow. And only if you come out and get cold right away.”

“You’d have to know right where they’d come out.”

“And they did then. And we do now.”

Zeerid knew all the details of every hyperspace lane in the Core. If he knew where the Imperial ships entered hyperspace and their ultimate destination, he knew where they would come out.

“Then what?”

“Then you latch on.”

Aryn’s eyes looked as wide as a Rodian’s. “You latch on?”

“An electromagnetic seal. That part’s easy to do.”

“They’ll feel it.”

Zeerid nodded. “Gotta be a big enough ship and you’ve got to latch onto a cargo bay or something similar. Something likely to be empty. Then, once you get through the atmosphere, you disengage the seal and float away into clear sky.”

It sounded ridiculous when he spoke it aloud. He could not believe he was contemplating it.

Aryn blew out a sigh, stared out the cockpit. “This is your plan?”

“Such as it is. You have something better?”

“Who’s ever done it?”

“No one I know. When the Republic learned of it, they adjusted their sensor scans to look for it. No one’s done it in centuries.”

“But the Empire won’t know about it.”

“So I hope.”

He tried hard not to see the doubt in her expression. It echoed his own.

“This is all I’ve got, Aryn. It’s this or nothing.”

She stared out the cockpit, the turn of her thoughts visible behind the green veil of her eyes.

Fatman was almost clear of gravity wells.

“I can still drop you somewhere,” he said, hoping she would not take him up on it. “You don’t have to hitch a ride with me.”

She smiled. “This is all I’ve got, too, Z-man.”

“Aren’t we a pair, then.”

She chuckled, but it faded quickly.

“Aryn? You all right?”

“I feel like I left Alderaan a lifetime ago,” she said. “It’s been hours.”

“A lot can happen in a handful of hours,” he said.

She nodded, drifted off.

“Aryn?”

She came back to him from wherever she’d been. “I’m with you,” she said. “And I think I can help make this work.”

Vrath turned Razor’s navicomp loose, and it generated a course to Coruscant. Even if Zeerid jumped into hyperspace right away—which Vrath doubted—Vrath’s modified Imperial drop ship would still beat Fatman to Coruscant. His work required much travel. Razor had the best hyperdrive credits could buy.

When the navicomp had finished its calculations, he engaged the hyperdrive and the ship blazed through hyperspace. He dimmed the cockpit and watched a bulkhead-mounted chrono tick away the seconds, the minutes. After a short time, he disengaged the hyperdrive and the black of normal space replaced the cerulean churn of hyperspace. In the distance, day-side Coruscant gleamed against the black of space.

The planet, entirely coated in duracrete and metal, always reminded Vrath of a giant cog, the mainspring of the Republic. He wondered what would befall the Republic now that the spring had been fouled.

For a moment, he turned nostalgic for his time in the Imperial Army, when he had turned Republic soldiers into rag dolls at over three hundred meters. He’d had fifty-three confirmed kills before getting thrown out of the service and regretted not one. He’d hated everything about the service except for the killing and how he felt after winning a battle. He imagined how it must feel for Imperial forces to walk as conquerors on Coruscant’s surface, for the navy to own the space around the jewel of the Republic.

Even from a distance, Vrath could see the silver arrows of two Imperial cruisers patrolling the black around Coruscant. A third orbited a moon. Ordinarily a flotilla of satellites whirled around the planet, too, but Vrath saw none. Perhaps the Empire had destroyed them as part of its forced communications blackout of the planet.

Two of the dozen or so fighters escorting the nearest cruiser, the new Mark VII advanced interceptors, peeled off and sped toward Vrath’s ship. He made sure his weapons systems were powered down and put his communications gear on open hail. Almost before he lifted his hand from the control panel, the navy pinged him.

“Unidentified vessel,” said a stern voice that sounded like every Imperial communications officer he’d heard during all his time in the corps. “You are in restricted space. Power down your engines and deflectors completely and prepare to be towed. Any deviation from that instruction will result in your immediate destruction.”

Vrath did not doubt it. “Message received. Will comply.” He powered down his engines and deactivated his deflectors. “I need to speak to the OIC. I have information of interest to the Empire.”

The fighters buzzed his drop ship. One of them swooped around and under Razor. As it pulled out in front of him, it activated an electromagnetic tow. A glowing blue line formed between the two ships, and the Mark VII started pulling him through space. The other fighter maintained position behind Razor so he could blow Vrath from space should it prove necessary. Ahead, the tunnel of the cruiser’s landing bay loomed.

The fighter pulled Vrath through the throat of the cruiser’s landing bay until they reached an isolated landing pad where two dozen troopers in full gray battle armor awaited him, along with a tall, redheaded naval officer. He nodded at them through the canopy, unstrapped from the chair, disarmed himself of both his blaster and his knives, and headed out.

By the time Razor’s landing ramp clanged off the metal deck of the cruiser, he was staring at the dead eyes of fourteen TH-17 blaster rifles.

“Secure him,” the naval officer said.

Two of the armored troopers shouldered their weapons and rushed him. He did not resist as one put flex binders on his wrists and the other patted him down.

“He is unarmed,” the one said, his voice the modulated mechanical sound of the helmet’s speaker.

“Search the ship,” the naval officer said. “I want to see his flight records.”

“Yes, sir,” responded the troopers, and seven of them boarded the ship to search.

“There is nothing of interest aboard,” Vrath said. “I came from Vulta. That’s as far back as the records go.”

The naval officer smiled, a tight, false gesture, and walked up to Vrath. His unwrinkled uniform smelled freshly cleaned. The freckles on his pale face looked like a pox.

Vrath could have killed him with a high kick to the trachea, but he thought it unwise.

“I am Commander Jard, first officer of the Imperial cruiser Valor. You are under arrest for flying in restricted space. Whether your punishment is execution or mere imprisonment is entirely at my discretion and depends upon how satisfied I am with the answers you provide to my questions.”

“I understand.”

“What is your name? Where did you come from?”

He barely remembered the name his mother had given him. He offered the one his profession had most recently given him. “Vrath Xizor. As I said, I flew here directly from Vulta.”

“What brought you here, Vrath Xizor?”

“I have information of interest to the OIC.”

The naval officer cocked his head. “Are you military, Vrath Xizor?”

“Former. Special detachment from the Four Hundred and Third. Company E.”

“An Imperial sniper?”

Vrath was impressed that Jard knew his unit designation. He nodded.

“Well, Vrath Xizor of the Four Hundred Third, you may tell me your information.”

“I would prefer to speak directly to the captain.”

“Darth Malgus will not—”

“Darth? The commander is a Sith?”

Jard looked hard at Vrath.

“He will want to hear what I have to say,” Vrath said. “It concerns the Jedi.”

Jard studied his face. “Put him in the brig,” he said to another soldier standing behind Vrath. “If Darth Malgus wishes to speak to you, he will do so. If he does not, then he does not.”

“You’re making a mistake—”

“Shut up,” one of the troopers said, and cuffed him in the back of the head.

Three troopers escorted Vrath out of the landing bay and into a nearby lift. Vrath did not resist. It had been years since he’d been aboard an Imperial ship, and they remained exactly as he remembered—antiseptic, purely functional killing machines.

Just like him.

“This one was a sniper detached from the Four Hundred Third,” said one of the troopers to another.

“Or so he says.”

“That true?” said another. “I heard things about that unit.”

Vrath said nothing, merely stared into the tinted slit of the trooper’s helmet visor.

“Some kind of supermen is what I heard.”

The trooper holding his shoulder gave him a shake. “This one don’t look like much.”

Vrath only smiled. He didn’t look like much—deliberately so.

The soldiers trekked him deeper into the bowels of the ship. The corridors narrowed, and blue-uniformed security personal started to appear at doors that answered only to certain keycodes. Vrath had been in Imperial brigs many times, usually for insubordination.

Before they reached the bridge one of the troopers—the one with a sergeant’s symbol on his shoulder plate—held up a hand for the others to stop. He cocked his head to the side as he listened to something over his helmet’s speaker. He glanced at Vrath as he listened.

“Confirmed,” he said to whomever he was speaking. Then, to his men, “Darth Malgus wants him on the bridge.”

The three men shared a look and reversed course.

“Lucky you, Four Hundred Third,” said the trooper holding him.

Exploding into motion, Vrath drove a kick into the chest plate of the trooper in front of him, sending him flying into the sergeant and knocking both of them hard against the wall. Then he spun behind the third while slipping his bound arms over the trooper’s head. He maneuvered the binders under the neck ring of the helmet and squeezed, not enough to kill, just enough to make a point.

The man’s gags sounded loud in his helmet speaker. His fingers clawed at Vrath’s arms. He was probably starting to see spots.

Vrath released him and shoved him away. The entire exchange had taken perhaps four seconds. The two men he’d knocked against the wall had their rifles aimed at his head.

Vrath held out his arms for them to take. “Don’t look like much,” he said.

Fatman came out of hyperspace in the Kravos system. Zeerid immediately engaged the ion engines and flew the freighter into the system’s soup.

Debris from a partially dispersed accretion disk around the system’s star filled the black with ionized gas and debris. Some fluke of solar system evolution had resulted in an orange gas giant forming a few hundred thousand kilos outside the far border of the disk.

Zeerid wheeled Fatman through the swirl, deftly dodging asteroids and smaller particles. He maneuvered the ship to the end of the disk and maintained his position, though it taxed his piloting skill.

“Now what?” Aryn asked.

“We wait. And when an Imperial convoy heading to Coruscant comes through, we roll the dice.”

“How will we know it’s heading for Coruscant?”

“We won’t know, strictly speaking. But Imperial Navy regs call for a convoy heading to an occupied world to have an escort of at least three frigates. If we see that, it’s probably heading to Coruscant.”

“And if we don’t see that?”

Zeerid preferred not to think about it. “We will.”

“What if you’re wrong? What if the convoy isn’t heading to Coruscant?”

“Then it’ll jump where it’s jumping and we’ll jump to Coruscant, bare naked and within range of an Imperial fleet. You’re not the modest sort, are you?”

He tried to convey with his grin a confidence he did not feel.

She only shook her head and stared out at the gas giant.

They waited. A medical transport came through and Zeerid ignored it. A single cruiser came through later and still they waited. After several hours, Zeerid’s instruments showed another hyperspace distortion.

A convoy appeared, three supply superfreighters and four frigates bristling with weapons.

“That’s our ride,” he said. “You ready?”

“I’m ready,” she said.

The lift doors opened to reveal a short corridor that led to the double doors of the cruiser’s bridge. A pair of armored soldiers stood near the lift, awaiting Vrath’s arrival. Two more stood down the corridor before the bridge doors.

The three troopers who had escorted Vrath to the lift handed him off to those in the hall.

“He’s dangerous,” the sergeant said. “Watch him.”

“Yes, sir,” said the two troopers in the corridor, their expressions unreadable behind their helmets. They flanked Vrath but did not touch him as they led him to the bridge. The double doors opened to reveal the dimly lit, multi-leveled oval chamber of the cruiser’s bridge.

A score of naval officers—all human—sat at their posts, hovered over their compscreens. A huge viewscreen to the left provided a magnified view of Coruscant and the surrounding space. The hum of low, curt conversation and the thrum of electronics filled the air.

A swivel-mounted command chair sat on the center of the bridge on a raised platform. Commander Jard stood beside it, one hand on its armrest, conferring with the man who sat in it. Jard glanced at Vrath and spoke to the man, whom Vrath assumed to be Darth Malgus. He activated his audial implant to hear the exchange.

“My lord,” Jard said. “The prisoner I spoke of is here.”

Malgus turned his eyes to Vrath and whatever smugness Vrath had felt over showing up some troopers sank under the weight of that gaze. Malgus rose and strode across the bridge toward Vrath. He stood well over two meters, and the black cape he wore looked like a pavilion tent.

He never took his eyes from Vrath’s face as he approached. Scars lined his face, and a network of blue veins made a patchwork of his bald pate. He was so pale he could have been a corpse, the walking dead. The small respirator he wore hid his mouth and lips. But it was his eyes that cowed Vrath. Malgus was all eyes. The sum of him, of his power, radiated outward from his bloodshot gaze.

He dismissed the guards who flanked Vrath and, with a gesture, used the Force to pry open the binders on Vrath’s wrists. They fell to the floor of the bridge with a dull clang.

“You mentioned a Jedi to Commander Jard.” His voice, deep and rough, sounded like stones grinding together.

“I did … my lord.” Malgus’s mere presence pulled the last words out of him.

“Explain.”

Vrath found it more difficult than he would have imagined to compose his thoughts. “A freighter is en route to Coruscant. A Jedi is aboard.”

“Just one?”

“As far as I know just one, yes,” Vrath said, nodding. “A woman. Human, mid-thirties, I’d say. Long, light brown hair. She is flying with a man named Zeerid Korr. As far as I know, they are the only crew.”

“How do you know this woman is a Jedi?”

Vrath was starting to feel cold. He had to work to keep his voice steady. “I saw her using a green lightsaber. I saw her do things with the Force.” He held up his hands to show Malgus his wrists, still red from the binders Malgus had unlocked. “Things like this.”

Malgus eased half a step closer to Vrath and Vrath felt decidedly overwhelmed. “Tell me then, Vrath Xizor, what else is aboard this ship and why and when it is coming to Coruscant?”

Vrath bumped up against the doors behind him. He considered lying but did not think he could pull it off.

“Engspice, my lord. The ship is carrying engspice.”

He saw connections being made, conclusions being drawn, and more questions forming in the deep wells of Malgus’s eyes.

“This Zeerid Korr is a spicerunner?”

“He is.”

“Why would a Jedi associate with a spicerunner, Vrath Xizor?”

“I … don’t know, my lord.”

“And you?” Malgus loomed over him, all dark eyes, all dark armor, all dark power. “Are you a spicerunner? A business rival, maybe?”

The lie exited his mouth before wisdom could stop it. “No, no, I am a former Imperial. A sniper. I’m … I’m just doing my part for the Empire, my lord.”

Malgus inhaled deeply, exhaled, the mechanical sound heavy with disappointment. “You are a poor liar. You are a rival spicerunner, or a killer in service to one of the syndicates that runs spice.”

Vrath dared not deny it. He stood there, frozen, pinioned by Malgus’s eyes.

“When is this freighter due to arrive?” Malgus asked. “And how do they plan to get through the blockade?”

Vrath found his mouth was dry. He cleared his throat. “They are coming soon. Today. They must.”

“Because of the engspice?”

Vrath could not meet Malgus’s eyes. “Yes. I don’t know how they intend to get through, but I know they will try.”

Malgus stared at him for a long second that felt like an eternity to Vrath.

“You will remain on the bridge, Vrath Xizor. If this freighter and the Jedi it carries show up, I will overlook your illegal flight into restricted space. Perhaps I will even compensate you for your service. But if the ship doesn’t show then I will devise a … suitable punishment for a spicerunner found in restricted space. Does that seem to you unreasonable?”

Vrath choked on his response. “No, my lord.”

“Excellent.”

Malgus turned from Vrath and Vrath felt as though the air had become easier to breathe. Malgus took a seat in his command chair and spoke to Commander Jard.

“Commander, intensify all scanning until further notice. Any unusual readings are to be reported to me. And dispatch a squad of fighters to put eyes on all incoming ships.”

“Most of the fighter fleet is otherwise assigned, my lord.”

“Use shuttles then.”

“Yes, my lord,” answered Jard.

Vrath stared at the cruiser’s viewscreen, hoping that Zeerid had not scratched the run for some reason. Or just as bad, that Zeerid had somehow beaten him to Coruscant and already snuck through the blockade.

He had never before felt so vulnerable.

“We have to jump right on their heels, Aryn.”

Aryn did not bother to respond. She dwelled in the Force, floated in and on the warm network of lines that connected all things, one to another. Her consciousness expanded to see and feel everything near her. She focused on her perception of the passage of time, first on how it felt as she moved through it, then on spreading it, stretching it, until she could linger in a millisecond as if it were a moment, then a minute. To Zeerid it would appear that she were a blur of motion, existing simultaneously in multiple places. To her, it felt as if the universe around her had stilled. She smiled, seeing the moments that hung before her, each millisecond a long moment in which she could think, in which she could act. The effort taxed her, and she knew she could not maintain it for long.

“Watch the scanner,” Zeerid said, his words a lifetime in the utterance.

She did not watch the scanner. Her body could respond faster than any machine. Instead she watched the viewscreen. The Imperial ships had finished their hydrogen skim and now maneuvered into a formation suitable for a hyperspace jump, the supply ships within the ring of the frigate escort.

She tensed.

“They’re forming up,” Zeerid said. The waves of his tension crashed against her but she dammed them off, did not allow them to disrupt her focus.

She watched, waited, waited …

As one, the Imperial ships began to stretch in her perception. For a nanosecond, all of them seemed to stretch to infinity, their rear engines a hundred thousand kilometers off Fatman’s bow, their forms reaching across and through an incomprehensible distance. She knew it was illusion, that is was a trick of her perception caused by the moment they entered hyperspace seeming to freeze before her eyes.

She engaged Fatman’s hyperdrive and the black night of space turned blue.

“Now, Aryn! Now!” Zeerid said, but he was far too late.

They were already gone.

She remained immersed in the Force as Fatman surged through hyperspace. The ordinary maddening churn slowed to a crawl of spirals and whorls, the script of the universe writ large in characters of blue, turquoise, midnight, and lavender. She fancied there might be meaning in the lines, an important revelation that hung before her, just beyond the reach of her consciousness.

She lost track of the slow passage of time. Zeerid spoke to her from time to time but his words bounced off her perception, ricocheted without her comprehension. In time, something he said penetrated her understanding.

“Coming out, Aryn. Be ready.”

She watched Zeerid, moving in slow motion, pull back on the lever that engaged the hyperdrive.

She readied herself, and the moment the blue of hyperspace started to fade into black, she pushed a series of buttons and switches that turned Fatman cold except for life support, thrusters, and the small amount of power they’d need to create an electromagnetic bond.

The blue disappeared in favor of the midnight of space, and she returned to normal perception.

“Engaging thrusters,” Zeerid said. “Well done, Aryn.”

Sweat soaked her robes, pasted them to her body. She felt as if she had not slept in days.

“Now it gets fun,” Zeerid said.

The trailing freighter in the convoy, five times the size of Fatman, flew right before them. They had jumped out within the ring of frigates and gone cold so fast the frigates would not have perceived their arrival. They were directly under one of the freighters, a kilometer beneath its underside, maybe less.

In the distance, the metal-and-duracrete sphere of Coruscant floated in space. The rest of the convoy spread out before them. The trailing freighter’s ion engines fired, and it started to head out.

“Not so fast,” Zeerid said.

He punched the thrusters and Fatman lurched toward the freighter until its underside filled their field of vision. It started to pull away.

Zeerid hit the thrusters again.

“There it is,” he said, closing on the freighter’s cargo bay. His hands flew over the instrument panel, using one thruster then another to angle the ship, finally flipping Fatman over so that her flat ventral side faced a flat spot on the Imperial freighter. As they closed, Zeerid flipped a switch, using Fatman’s deflector array to form an electromagnetic field. He killed the thrusters and they coasted in.

“Brace,” he said.

Fatman closed a few hundred meters more and then the electromagnetic field did the rest, pulling them tight against the Imperial ship. Aryn felt barely a lurch.

“As soft as a kiss,” Zeerid said, and eased back in his seat. He looked over at Aryn, all grins, seemingly unsurprised by his success. “Let’s take a ride.”

Malgus felt a flash of discomfort, the irritating needle stab of a light-side user, the feeling oddly similar to that which he had felt when he’d fought Master Zallow in the Temple. The feeling lasted barely an instant and disappeared, leaving only a sensory ghost in its wake.

“Are you all right, my lord?” Jard said.

Malgus waved a hand dismissively. He sat in the command chair and the viewscreen of Valor showed the distant silver-and-white triangles of an Imperial convoy just out of hyperspace.

“Magnify the convoy,” he said, and the image grew large enough to see the ships—blocky freighters escorted by the much smaller, sleeker navy frigates. He saw nothing out of the ordinary.

Jard monitored incoming transmissions and ships’ registries from the command lectern at which he stood.

“All appears in order, Darth Malgus.”

Malgus examined the convoy’s details on his own command readout. They bore medical supplies, spare parts, and a contingent of Imperial soldiers. All perfectly ordinary.

“They are requesting landing instructions, my lord.”

“Provide it to them. But have the shuttles put eyes on them.”

“We could delay them, my lord. If you think something is amiss.”

“No. Let’s get those supplies on the ground so they can be distributed.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Aryn and Zeerid both hunched in their seats and said nothing, as if their silence within the cockpit would somehow assist Fatman in passing through the blockade. Zeerid radiated both apprehension and excitement. The angle at which Fatman had connected to the freighter restricted their field of vision to seventy or eighty degrees. The system moved into and out of their view, one small slice at a time. The convoy was on an approach vector and moving at less than one-half. Aryn could see the tail end of the starboard side of another freighter fifteen kilometers away.

“Can anyone see us?” she asked, her voice almost a whisper.

“Not at that distance,” Zeerid said. “We just look like part of the line of the ship. We’ll cut loose during atmospheric entry. Their sensors will be blacked out and we’ll be gone before they’re wise to us. I think we’re going to make it, Aryn.”

She nodded. She thought so, too.

Seconds slogged by, stretched into minutes.

“We have to be getting close,” Zeerid said.

Motion near the tail end of the nearby freighter drew Aryn’s eye. A small ship moved slowly around the freighter. Its tri-winged configuration told her it was an Imperial shuttle. She watched it for a time, unconcerned, until another came into view, this one cruising underneath the freighter.

“What are those shuttles doing?” she asked.

He frowned. “I have no idea.”

They watched the shuttles move methodically along the length and breadth of the tail section of the freighter.

“They’re checking its exterior,” Aryn said, and she felt Zeerid’s level of apprehension rise as he realized the same thing.

“Maybe it suffered damage in hyperspace,” Zeerid said. “Could be they’re just checking the one.”

“Could be,” Aryn said, and knew that neither of them believed it.

Zeerid cleared his throat, rubbed the back of his neck. “If we get seen, we either make a dash for the atmosphere and try to get lost under it, or we jump into hyperspace.”

“I need to get to the planet.”

Zeerid nodded. “Me, too. It’s unanimous then. We’ll make a dash.”

Malgus sat in his chair and watched his shuttles slide around the freighters, sand flies to banthas. None had reported seeing anything unusual.

One of the junior officers on a scanner called Commander Jard to him. The two conferred briefly, and Jard returned to his command lectern near Malgus.

“What is it?” Malgus asked.

“An anomalous reading from the Dromo,” Jard said. “An unusual magnetic signature.”

Malgus saw Vrath tense and lean toward them.

“Halt them and send the shuttles over.”

“My lord, it could just be an engine malfunction, scanner noise.”

Malgus thought not. “Do it, Commander.”

Jard raised the Dromo on the ship-to-ship. “Freighter Dromo, come to a full stop immediately.”

He cut off the connection before the Dromo’s captain could protest, then dispatched the shuttles.

“If there’s anything to it,” Jard said. “We’ll soon know.”

Aryn and Zeerid watched first one then another shuttle peel away from the other vessel and start toward them. Zeerid cursed as their freighter began to slow.

“Are we stopping?” Aryn asked.

Zeerid nodded, licked his lips. “I think we go hot right now. I don’t want a cold ship when they spot us.”

“If you fire up the engines, their scanners will pick us up.”

“They’re going to see us anyway. Those shuttles are coming. Let’s fire her up and make our run. You ready?”

Aryn watched the shuttles close the gap between them. She nodded. “Ready.”

Zeerid pushed buttons and flipped switches. Fatman came back to life.

The communications officer spun in his chair. “Sir, secured communication from Darth Angral. Shall I put it through?”

“What have the shuttles found?” Malgus asked Jard.

“Not there yet, my lord.”

Vrath turned his head sideways, as if he heard better out of one ear than another.

“Anomalous reading just flared and vanished,” the scan officer said.

“Vanished?” Jard asked.

“I’m getting something else,” said the scan officer.

“Darth Malgus,” said the communication officer. “Darth Angral insists I put him through.”

“Put him through,” Malgus said irritably, and slapped the comm button. He put a wireless earpiece in his ear so Angral’s words would be heard only by him.

“What is it, my lord?”

Darth Angral’s smooth voice carried over the connection. “Malgus, how goes the patrol?”

“I am in the middle of something, Darth Angral. I beg you to be brief.”

Before Angral could reply, the scan officer said, “Engines. Sir, I think there’s a ship hiding in the Dromo’s shadow.”

“That’s it!” Vrath said. “That is them!”

“Alert the shuttles,” Jard said. “Now.”

“Engines ready to burn,” Zeerid said.

The shuttles, perhaps a kilometer or two away, either spotted them or got word of Fatman’s presence. One peeled left, the other right. Fatman’s thrusters pushed it off the freighter. Zeerid engaged the ion drives and Fatman screamed through the space between the two shuttles. He throttled the freighter’s engines to full and headed straight for the next nearest freighter.

Aryn had flown with Zeerid many times but had forgotten what an instinctive flier he was. He seemed to consult his instruments only rarely, instead relying on intuition, experience, and his own reflexes.

A bit like Force-piloting without the Force, she supposed.

Fatman twirled a spiral as it closed on the nearest freighter and pelted along its exterior.

“Give me a hug,” Zeerid muttered.

Aryn gripped the armrests of her chair, expecting the red lines of the frigates’ plasma cannons to light the sky at any moment, but no fire came. She checked the scanner. No fighters yet, either.

“What are they waiting on?” she said.

Zeerid ran Fatman along the bulkhead of the freighter, close enough that Aryn felt as if she could have reached out and touched it. She imagined the crew of the Imperial freighter ducking low as Fatman buzzed them.

“Too much traffic and we’re staying too close,” he said, whipping Fatman over and past the bridge of the freighter. “They don’t want to hit their own ships.”

Jard’s voice was tense with urgency. “That’s a Corellian XS freighter, my lord.”

Vrath nodded and pointed at the viewscreen. “That’s the one I told you about, Darth Malgus. Shoot him down!”

Malgus used a blast of power to throw Vrath against the far wall.

“Shut your mouth,” Malgus said to him.

“Are you speaking to me?” Angral asked in his earpiece.

Malgus had forgotten about Angral. “Of course not, my lord. Give me a moment, please.”

He muted the earpiece and eyed the viewscreen. He could not shoot the freighter down in the midst of the convoy. Valor’s armaments could inadvertently hit an Imperial ship. The frigates would be in the same situation. Their formation was designed to thwart attacks from outside the convoy, not attacks from within.

“Keep the ship on screen. Pursue at full and order the rest of the convoy to get clear.”

“Yes, my lord,” Jard said, and made it happen.

Valor’s engines fired on full and the cruiser lurched after the freighter.

Vrath climbed to his feet, favoring his side.

Possibilities played out in Malgus’s mind. With a Jedi aboard, shooting the freighter down could undermine the peace negotiations. Of course, the mere fact that a Jedi was inbound to Coruscant arguably undermined the peace process already.

Malgus stared at the viewscreen, watched the cruiser gain on the freighter. In moments he would get a clear field of fire.

The Empire needed war to thrive. He knew that.

He needed war to thrive. He knew that, too.

He had it within his power, possibly, to reignite the war.

He saw Coruscant in the viewscreen beyond the freighter and imagined it in flames.

The flashing light on his console reminded him that Darth Angral was waiting.

“Hail the freighter,” he said.

Jard looked puzzled. “I doubt they will answer.”

“Try, Commander.”

Aryn did not need to consult her scanner display to know that the ships of the convoy were peeling away to give the cruiser and frigates a clear field of fire. Zeerid said nothing, merely handled the stick, worked the instrument panel, and occasionally consulted the scanner readout. Fatman banked hard right, jumped away from the near freighter, and covered the short gulf of empty space between it and the next. Zeerid was frog-hopping along the convoy, all while trying to get Fatman closer to the planet.

But the convoy was starting to break up. The freighters and frigates accelerated away from one another. And above them all loomed the enormous bulk of the Imperial cruiser, waiting for its chance.

“I’m running out of ships, Aryn. We have to make a run for the atmosphere.”

Before them, the glowing orb of Coruscant’s night side hung in the deep night of space. The sun crested behind the planet, and Coruscant’s horizon line lit up like it was on fire.

“Do it,” she said. “No, wait. They’re hailing us. Holo.”

“You’re kidding?”

Aryn shook her head and Zeerid activated the small transmitter mounted in his instrument panel.

A hologram of an Imperial bridge took shape. Crew sat at their stations, their images clear in the holo’s resolution. Two human men stood in the foreground, one a thin redhead in the uniform of a naval officer, one a towering, bulky figure of a man who wore a heavy black cape and whose eyes seemed to glow in the light of the bridge’s instrumentation. The eyes studied Zeerid with such intensity that it made him uncomfortable even through the holo. A respirator clung to the man’s face, covering his mouth. His pale skin looked as gray as a corpse’s.

“Power down entirely,” said the tall man, his voice as raw as an open wound. “You have five seconds.”

Aryn leaned in close to see the hologram better. The man’s eyes moved from Zeerid to her and even across the distance he felt their power. She recognized him. He had fought in the Battle of Alderaan.

“He is Sith,” Aryn said. “Darth Malgus.”

Motion behind Malgus caught Aryn’s eye, a third man, short, arms crossed across his chest. She and Zeerid almost bumped heads as they eyed the holo. Aryn recognized him. So did Zeerid, it seemed.

“That’s the man that ambushed us in the spaceport,” Zeerid said. “Vrath Xizor.”

“He alerted them we were coming.”

Zeerid stared at the holo then leaned back, eyes wide. “Stang, Aryn. That’s the same man I saw in Karson’s Park on Vulta.”

“Where?”

“He knows I have a daughter.”

“You have two seconds,” Malgus said.

Zeerid hit the TRANSMIT button. “To hell with you, Sith.”

He cut off the transmission, unleashed a rain of expletives, and put Fatman into a rapid spin that turned Aryn light-headed and would make it as difficult as possible for targeting computers to lock on.

Malgus stared at the holotransmitter, now dark, on which he had communicated with the freighter, the freighter that had a Jedi aboard.

Torn, he thought of Eleena, of Lord Adraas, of Angral, of the flawed Empire that was taking shape before his eyes and how it fell short of the Empire as it should be, an Empire congruent with the needs of the Force.

“They will be clear of the convoy shortly, Commander Jard,” said Lieutenant Makk, the bridge weapons officer.

Malgus watched the freighter dance among the now-separating ships of the convoy, trying to hug what vessels it could as it skipped toward Coruscant.

He thought he should shoot it down and hope that the death of a Jedi over Coruscant would destroy the peace talks and restart the war.

He should do it.

He knew he should.

“I think he’s going to try to make the planet,” Jard said. “Why doesn’t he just jump out?”

Members of the bridge crew shook their heads at the pilot’s foolishness. Were he wise, he would have jumped into hyperspace and fled.

“His need to get to the planet outweighs the risk of his getting shot down,” Malgus said, intrigued.

“All this for spice?” Jard said.

“Perhaps it is the Jedi’s need that drives them.”

“Curious,” Jard observed.

“Agreed,” Malgus said. With difficultly, he let curiosity murder temptation. “Get close enough to use the tractor beam. There is more to this than mere spicerunning.”

“Yes, my lord.”

Malgus tapped the earpiece and reopened the channel with Darth Angral.

“What is happening there?” Angral asked, his tone perturbed.

Malgus offered a half-truth. “A spicerunner is trying to get through the blockade.”

“Ah, I see.” Angral paused, then said, “I have received a communiqué from our delegation on Alderaan.”

The mere mention of the delegation caused Malgus a flash of rage, a flash that almost caused him to reconsider his decision to capture, rather than destroy, the freighter.

Angral continued: “A member of the Jedi delegation has left Alderaan without filing a flight plan and without reporting her intent to her superiors. The Jedi have reason to believe that she may be heading to Coruscant. Her activities are unauthorized by the Jedi Council and she is to be treated no differently from the spicerunner you are pursuing now.”

“She?” Malgus asked, eyeing the freighter on the viewscreen, recalling the woman he had seen in the vidscreen. “This rogue Jedi is a woman?”

“A human woman, yes. Aryn Leneer. Her actions, whatever they may be, are not to be attributed to the Jedi Council or the Republic. The Emperor wants nothing to affect the ongoing negotiations. Do you understand, Darth Malgus?”

Malgus understood all too well. “The Jedi delegation told Lord Baras of this rogue Jedi? They sacrificed one of their own to ensure that the negotiations continued smoothly?”

“Master Dar’nala herself, as I understand it.”

Malgus shook his head in disgust. He felt a hint of sympathy for Aryn Leneer. Like him, she had been betrayed by those she believed in and served. Of course, what she believed in and served was heretical.

“If this Jedi does attempt to reach Coruscant and she falls into your hands, you are to destroy her. Am I clear, Darth Malgus?”

“Yes, my lord.”

The freighter broke free of the convoy into open space and flew an evasive path toward Coruscant. Perhaps the pilot thought to escape in the planet’s atmosphere.

“Engage the tractor beam,” Commander Jard said, and Malgus did not gainsay the order.

He cut the connection with Angral.

He had disobeyed an order, taken the first step down a path he had never before trod. He still wasn’t sure why.

There was nothing between Fatman and Coruscant but open space, and that meant fire would be incoming. Aryn watched the distance to the planet’s atmosphere shrink on her scanner. She sat hunched, braced against the plasma fire she knew must soon come. She thought they might make it until Fatman lurched and lost half of its velocity, throwing Aryn and Zeerid forward in their seats.

“What’s that?” Aryn said, checking the instrument panel.

“Tractor beam,” Zeerid said, and pushed down hard on the stick. Fatman dived, her nose facing the planet, and Aryn could see the night side of Coruscant, the lines of light from the urbanscape like glowing script on the otherwise dark surface.

The ship was not accelerating. Alarms wailed and Fatman’s engines screamed, battling with the tractor beam but losing decisively.

The cruiser started to reel them in.

Cursing, Zeerid cut off the engines and Fatman’s reverse motion increased noticeably. Through the canopy, Aryn watched the distant stars move past them in reverse. She imagined the cruiser’s landing bay opening as they approached, a mouth that would chew them up.

She cleared her mind, thought of Master Zallow, and readied herself to face the Sith Lord and whatever else she might find on the cruiser. She reached into her pocket, traced her fingers over the single stone she’d brought from Alderaan, the stone from the Nautolan calming bracelet Master Zallow had given her. The cool, smooth touch of it helped clear her mind.

“I’m sorry, Zeerid,” she said.

“I was coming anyway, Aryn. And you didn’t get me caught. I got you caught. And anyway don’t apologize yet.” His hands flew over the instrument panel. “No Imperial tractor beam is holding my ship. I have to get back to Vulta and my daughter.”

He ratcheted up the power to the engines, though he didn’t yet engage them. The ship vibrated as Zeerid backed up the power and held it just before the exchange manifolds, a river of energy gathering behind a dam.

“What are you going to do?” Aryn asked, though she suspected she knew.

“Shooting this cork out of the bottle,” he said, and diverted more power to the engines. He made as though he were shaking a bottle of soda water. “Get yourself strapped in, Aryn. Not just the lap. All five points.”

Aryn did so. “You could tear the ship in half,” she said. “Or the engines might blow.”

He nodded. “Or we might break loose. But for that to work, I need to get oblique to the pull at the correct moment.” He checked the scanner. “You’re not so big,” he said to the cruiser.

His even tone and steady hands did not surprise Aryn. He seemed to thrive under stress. He’d have made a decent Jedi, she imagined.

She checked the distance between the cruiser and Fatman, the speed the beam was pulling them.

“You have five seconds,” she said.

“I know.”

“Four.”

“Do you believe that’s helpful?”

“Two.”

He tapped another series of keys and the engines whined so loudly they overwhelmed the alarm.

“One second,” she said.

In her mind’s eye, she imagined Fatman snapping in two, imagined she and Zeerid perishing in the vacuum, their dying sight pieces of Fatman flaming like pyrotechnics as they cut a path through Coruscant’s atmosphere.

“And … we go!” Zeerid said.

He twisted the stick leftward at the same moment that he released all of the pent-up power into the engines.

The sudden rush arrested the backward motion of the ship and Fatman bucked like an angry rancor. Metal creaked, screamed under the stress. Somewhere deep within the ship, something burst with a hiss.

For a fraction of a second the ship hung in space, perfectly still, engines wailing, their power warring with the tractor beam’s pull. And then Fatman tore loose and streaked free. The sudden acceleration pressed Aryn and Zeerid into the back of their seats.

Fire alarms sounded. Aryn checked the board.

“Fires in the engine compartment, Zeerid.”

He was talking to himself under his breath, handling the stick, watching the scanner, and might not have heard her.

“He’s right behind us,” Zeerid said.

“Get into the atmosphere,” she said. “That cruiser has no maneuverability outside a vacuum. We can ditch somewhere, get lost in the sky traffic before they can dispatch a fighter.”

“Right,” he said, and slammed down on the stick.

Fatman dipped her nose and Coruscant once more came into view, tantalizingly close.

Smoke wafted into the cockpit from the rear, the smell of seared electronics.

“Aryn!”

“I’m on it,” she said, and started to unstrap herself.

“Chemical extinguishers are in wall mounts in every corridor.”

On the main screen, Malgus watched the freighter’s engines flare blue. The ship shook loose of the tractor beam’s noose and dived toward the planet like a blaster shot. A murmur went through the bridge crew.

“Pursue, helm,” Commander Jard said.

The helmsman engaged the engines and accelerated after the freighter.

“The tractor has failed, my lord,” Commander Jard said to Malgus, checking the command readout. “We will have it up again in moments.”

Malgus watched the freighter open some distance between it and the cruiser, and made up his mind. He had crossed a line and started down a road when he had first engaged the tractor beam. But the time was not yet right to walk farther down that road. He could not afford to let the Jedi, Aryn Leneer, get to Coruscant, lest Angral start to perceive motives in Malgus that Malgus would not yet acknowledge in himself.

“No,” he said. “They’ll be in the atmosphere in a moment. Shoot them down.”

“Very good, my lord.” Jard looked to the weapons officer. “Weapons free, Lieutenant Makk.” Jard looked to Malgus. “Shall I alert the planetary fighter wing, my lord?”

“That shouldn’t be necessary, provided Lieutenant Makk does his job.”

“Very good, my lord.”

Red lines from Valor’s plasma cannons filled the space between the ship, the fire so thick that the lines seemed to bleed together into a red plane.

Aryn got halfway out of her seat when an explosion rocked the ship. Fatman lurched and Aryn fell to the floor.

“Back in your seat,” Zeerid said. “Weapons are hot on that cruiser.”

Aryn climbed into her seat and got the lap strap on. The moment the buckle clicked into place, Zeerid went evasive. Coruscant spun in the viewscreen as Fatman spun, wheeled, and dived. The red lines of plasma fire lit up the black of space. Zeerid went hard right, down, then left.

The ship knifed into the atmosphere.

“Divert everything but the engines and life support to the rear deflectors.”

Aryn worked the instrument panel, doing as Zeerid ordered.

Another explosion rocked the ship.

“The deflectors aren’t going to take another one,” she said.

Zeerid nodded. The orange flames of atmospheric entry were visible through the canopy. Plasma bolts knifed over them, under, to the left. Zeerid cut Fatman to the right as they descended, risking a bad entry that could burn them up.

The smoke in the cockpit thickened.

“Masks?” Aryn asked, coughing.

“There,” Zeerid responded, nodding at a ship’s locker between their seats. Aryn threw it open, grabbed two masks, tossed one to Zeerid, and pulled the other one on herself.

“You’ve got the stick,” Zeerid said while he pulled on his mask.

Aryn grabbed the copilot’s stick and continued Fatman’s spiraling descent toward Coruscant.

Fire from the cruiser hit the ship on the starboard side and caused the freighter to spin wildly. Aryn felt dizzy, sick.

“I have the stick,” Zeerid said, his voice muffled by the mask. He got the spin under control and drove Fatman almost vertically into the atmosphere. The cockpit grew hot. Flames engulfed the ship. They must have looked like a comet cutting through the sky.

“Too steep,” Aryn said.

“I know,” Zeerid said. “But we’ve got to get in.”

The unrelenting fire from the cruiser struck the freighter again, the impact shoving them through the stratosphere. The flames diminished, vanished, and Coruscant was once more visible below them.

“We’re through,” Aryn said.

Without warning the engines died and Fatman went limp in the air, spinning, falling, but with no power.

Zeerid cursed, slammed his hand against the instrument panel, trying frantically to refire them, but to no avail.

“They can still hit us here,” he said, and unbuckled his belts. “I got nothing but thrusters. Get to the escape pod.”

“The cargo, Zeerid.”

He hesitated, finally shook his head and unbuckled her straps. “Forget the cargo. Move.”

She stood and another bolt hit Fatman. An explosion rocked the rear of the ship. Another. They were going down. Alarms wailed. The ship was burning, falling through the sky. Zeerid hit the control panel to engage the thrusters and keep the ship in the air.

For the moment, at least.

“They are dead in the air,” Lieutenant Makk announced. “Drifting on thrusters.”

Commander Jard looked to Malgus for the kill order. Vrath, too, looked on with interest.

The freighter hung low over Coruscant’s atmosphere. It limped along on thrusters, trailing flames from its dead ion engines. They could rope them back in with the tractor.

“Shoot them down,” Malgus ordered.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Vrath smile and cross his arms over his chest.

Explosions in the rear of Fatman started to spread, the secondary explosions working their way forward in a series of dull booms. They would never make it to the escape pod.

Aryn activated her lightsaber. “Grab hold of something.”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting us out.”

“What?”

She did not bother to explain. Bracing herself and holding on to her seat strap, she stabbed her blade through the transparisteel of the cockpit canopy and opened a gash. The oxygen rushed out of the cockpit while the pressure equalized. Their masks allowed them to breathe, despite the thin atmosphere. The cold startled Aryn.

She used her blade to cut a door out of the canopy. The thin air whipped by, whistling.

“We’re fifty kilometers up, Aryn!” Zeerid said, his voice rising for the first time. “The velocity alone—”

She grabbed him by the arm and gave him a shake to shut him up. “Do not let go of me no matter what. Do you understand? No matter what.”

His eyes were wide behind the lenses of his mask. He nodded.

She did not hesitate. She sank into the Force, cocooned them both in a protective sheath, and leapt out of the ship and into the open air.

The wind and velocity tore them backward. They slammed into the ship’s fuselage and whipped through the flames pouring out its sides. At almost the same moment, plasma fire from the cruiser above them hit Fatman dorsally and the ship exploded into an expanding ball of flame. The blast wave sent them careering crazily through the sky and set them to spinning like a pinwheel. For an alarming moment, Aryn’s vision blurred and she feared she would lose consciousness, but she held on to awareness with both hands and fought through it.

Zeerid was shouting but Aryn could not make it out.

Her stomach crawled up her throat as they plummeted, spinning wildly, toward the planet below. Her perspective alternated crazily from flaming pieces of Fatman, to Coruscant below, to the sky above and the distant silhouette of the Imperial cruiser, to Fatman again. The motion was pulling the blood from her head. Sparks blinked before her eyes. She had to stop the spinning or she would pass out.

She made her grip a vise around Zeerid and used the Force first to slow, then to stop the spin. They ended up hand in hand, passing through clouds, falling at terminal velocity toward Coruscant’s surface.

Malgus watched the freighter disintegrate into flaming debris over Coruscant. He expected the faint touch of the Jedi’s Force signature to disintegrate with it, but he felt it still.

“Magnify,” he said, leaning forward in the command chair. The image on the viewscreen grew larger.

Chunks of jagged steel and a large portion of the forward section of the ship burned their way toward the surface.

“Did an escape pod launch before the ship exploded?”

“No, my lord,” Jard said. “There were no survivors.”

But there had been. The Jedi, at least, had survived. He could still feel her presence, though it was fading with distance, a splinter in the skin of his perception.

He considered dispatching fighters, a search party, but decided against it. He was not yet sure what he would do about the Jedi, but whatever it was, he would do it himself.

“Very good, Commander Jard. Well done, Lieutenant Makk.” He turned to Vrath. “You are done here, Vrath Xizor.”

Vrath shifted on his feet, swallowed, cleared his throat. “You mentioned the possibility of payment, my lord?”

Malgus credited him with bravery, if nothing else. Malgus rose and walked over. He stood twenty centimeters taller than Vrath but the smaller man held his ground and kept most of the fear from the slits of his eyes.

“It is not enough that you’ve killed a rival and destroyed the engspice your employer wished to prevent reaching the surface?”

“I did not—”

Malgus held up a gloved hand. “The petty squabbles of criminals hold little interest for me.”

Vrath licked his lips, drew himself up straight. “I brought you a Jedi, my lord. That was her on the holo.”

“So you did.”

“Will I … be paid, then?”

Malgus regarded him coolly, and the small man seemed to withdraw into himself. The fear in his eyes expanded, the knowledge that he was a lone prey animal surrounded by predators.

“I am a man of my word,” Malgus said. “You will be paid.”

Vrath let out a long breath. “Thank you, my lord.”

“You may take your ship to the planet. The coordinates will be provided to you and I will arrange for payment there.”

“And then I can leave?”

Malgus smiled under his respirator. “That is a different question.”

Vrath took half a step back. He looked as if he had been slapped. “What does that mean? I … will not be allowed to leave?”

“No unauthorized ships may leave Coruscant at this time. You will remain on the planet until things change.”

“But, my lord—”

“Or I can blow your ship from space the moment it leaves my landing bay,” Malgus said.

Vrath swallowed hard. “Thank you, my lord.”

Malgus waved him away. Security escorted him from the bridge.

After the chaos of the cockpit, the quiet of the fall seemed oddly incongruous. Aryn heard only the rush of the wind, the steady thump of her heartbeat in her ears. Zeerid’s fear was a tangible thing to her, and it fell with them.

She felt free, exhilarated, and the feeling surprised her. To the east Coruscant’s surface curved away from them and the morning sun crept over the horizon line, bathing the planet in gold. The sight took her breath away. She shook Zeerid’s arm and nodded at the rising sun. He did not respond. His eyes stared straight down, iron to the magnet of the planet’s surface. Aryn allowed herself to enjoy the view for a few seconds before trying to save their lives.

The drag increased as the thin air of the upper atmosphere gave way to the thicker, breathable air of the lower. Below them, Coruscant transformed from a brown-and-black ball crisscrossed with seemingly random whorls of light, to a distinguishable geometry of well-lit cities, roads, skyways, quadrants, and blocks. She could make out tiny black forms moving against the urbanscape, the ants of aircars, speeders, and swoops, but far fewer than ordinary. Plumes of smoke traced twisting black lines into the air. Large areas of Galactic City lay in ruins, dark lesions on the skin of the planet.

The Empire must have killed tens of thousands. More, perhaps.

The wind changed pitch, whistled past her ears. She fancied she heard whispers in it, the soul of the planet sharing its pain. Her clothing flapped audibly behind her.

Below, she could distinguish more and more details of Coruscant’s upper levels: the lines of skyscrapers, the geometry of plazas and parks, the orderly, straight lines of roads.

She let herself feel the descent and used the feeling to fall into the Force. Nestled in its power, she marshaled her strength. She pulled Zeerid toward her. Unresisting, he felt as limp as a rag doll in her hands. She drew him to her, under her, wrapped her arms and legs around him.

“Ready yourself,” she shouted in his ear. “Nod if you understand.”

His head bobbed once, tense and rapid.

The buildings below grew larger, more defined. They descended toward a large plaza, a flat trapezoid of duracrete with stratoscrapers anchoring each of its corners.

“I will slow us,” she shouted. “But we will still hit with some force. I will release you before we hit. Try to roll with the impact.”

He nodded again.

She lowered her head, angled her body, and tried to use the wind resistance to create some slight motion forward, rather than entirely downward. The ground rushed up to meet them.

They passed through the ring of skyrises, plummeting past the roofs, windows, balconies. Given the hour, she doubted anyone saw their descent.

She reached out with the Force, channeled power into a wide column beneath them. She conceptualized the power as somewhat similar to what she would use when augmenting a leap, except that instead of a sudden rush of power to drive her upward, she instead used the power in a gentler, passive fashion. She imagined it as a balloon, soft and yielding at first, but providing ever-increasing resistance as they fell farther into it.

They slowed and Zeerid shifted in her grasp. Perhaps he did not believe it.

Pressure built behind Aryn’s eyes, an ache formed in her head.

The balloon of her power slowed them further. She could see benches in the plaza, a fountain. She could distinguish individual windows in the skyrises around them. They were five hundred meters up and still falling fast.

The pressure in her brain intensified. Her vision blurred. The ache in her head became a knife stab of pain. She screamed but held on, held on.

Four hundred meters. Three hundred.

They slowed still more and Aryn feared she could not bear any more.

Two hundred.

A second stretched into an eternity of pain and pressure. She thought she must burst.

“Hang on, Aryn!” Zeerid said, his voice muffled by the mask. He was rigid in her arms.

Fifty meters.

They were still going too fast.

Twenty, ten.

She dug deep, pulled out what power she could, and expended it in a final shout, an expulsion of power that entirely arrested their descent for a moment. They hung in the air for a fraction of a second, suspended only by the invisible power of the Force and Aryn’s ability to use it.

And then they were falling free.

She released Zeerid and they both hit the duracrete feetfirst, the shock of impact sending jolts of pain up Aryn’s ankles and calves. She rode the momentum of the fall into a roll that knocked the wind from her and tore a divot of skin from her scalp.

But she was alive.

She lifted herself to all fours, every muscle screaming, legs quivering, blood dripping from her scalp. She tore off her mask.

“Zeerid!”

“I’m all right,” he answered, his voice as raw as old leather. “I can’t believe it, but I am all right.”

She sagged back to the duracrete, rolled over onto her back, and stared up at dawn’s light spreading across the sky. The long thin clouds, painted with the light of daybreak, looked like veins of gold. She simply lay there, exhausted.

Zeerid crawled over to her, cursing with pain throughout. He peeled off his mask and lay on his back next to her. They stared up at the sky together.

“Is anything broken?” she asked him.

He turned to look at her, shook his head, looked back at the sky. “If we get out of this, I’m becoming a farmer on Dantooine. I swear it.”

She smiled.

“I’m not joking.”

She held her smile; he began to chuckle, louder, and the chuckle turned into a laugh.

She could not help it. A wide smile split her face, followed by a chuckle, and then she joined him in full, both of them giggling hysterically at the dawn sky of a new day.

Vrath’s hands sweated on Razor’s stick. Despite Malgus purporting to be a man of his word, Vrath felt certain the Imperial cruiser would shoot him from space after he exited the landing bay. For a moment, he considered veering off deeper insystem, accelerating to full to get out of Coruscant’s gravity well, then jumping into hyperspace, but he did not think he would make it.

More important, he feared that even if he did make it, Malgus would hunt him down on principle. Vrath knew that Malgus would do it because Vrath would have done the same. He’d looked into the Sith Lord’s eyes and seen the same relentlessness he tried to cultivate in his own. He would not cross Malgus.

He let the ship’s autopilot ride the coordinates provided to him by Valor into Coruscant’s atmosphere. It would put him down in one of Galactic City’s smaller spaceports, probably one commandeered by Imperial soldiers.

Presently, the spaceport hailed him and sent him landing instructions. He affirmed them and sat back in his chair.

He resolved that he would not leave Razor once he put down on Coruscant. He wanted no further interaction with conquering Imperials. He wanted only to wait until peace negotiations on Alderaan were concluded, however long that might take, and then get off Coruscant.

Malgus knew Aryn Leneer had somehow survived the destruction of her ship and he suspected she had survived the descent to Coruscant’s surface. He did not want Angral to learn of her escape. Such knowledge would be … premature.

He would need to track her down. To do that, he needed to determine why she had returned to Coruscant in the first place.

“I will be in my quarters,” he said to Commander Jard.

“If anything requires your attention, I will alert you immediately.”

When he reached his quarters, he found Eleena sleeping. Her blasters, tucked into their holsters, lay on the bed beside her. She slept with one hand on them. He watched the steady rise and fall of her chest, the half smile she wore even while sleeping. She had shed the sling on her arm.

Staring at her, he acknowledged to himself that he cared for her. Deeply.

And that, he knew, was his weakness.

He stared at her and thought of the Twi’lek servant woman he had murdered in his youth …

He realized that his fists were clenched.

Shaking his head, he closed the door to the room in which Eleena slept and started up the portcomp at his work desk. He wanted to learn more of Aryn Leneer, so he linked to several Imperial databases and input her name.

Her picture came up first. He studied her image, her eyes. She reminded him of Eleena. But she looked different from the woman he had seen on the vidscreen on Valor’s bridge. The change was in her eyes. They’d grown harder. Something had happened to her in the interim.

He scrolled through the file.

She was a Force empath, he saw. An orphan from Balmorra, taken into the Jedi academy as a child. He scrolled deeper into her file and there found her motivation.

A picture of Master Ven Zallow stared out of the screen at Malgus, a day-old ghost.

Aryn Leneer had been Master Zallow’s Padawan. Zallow had raised her from childhood.

He scrolled back up to Aryn’s image. Back then, her green eyes had held no guile, no edge. He could tell by looking at her that she left herself too open to pain. Her Force empathy would have only increased her sensitivity.

He leaned back in the chair.

She had felt her Master die, had felt Malgus drive his blade through him.

That was what had changed her, changed her so much that she had abandoned her Order and rushed across space to Coruscant.

Why?

He saw the faint reflection of his own face in the compscreen, superimposed over hers. His eyes, dark and deeply set in the black pits of his sockets. Her eyes, green, soft, and gentle.

But not anymore.

They were the same, he realized. They had both loved and their love had brought them pain. In a flash of understanding, he knew why she had come to Coruscant.

“She is looking for me,” he said.

She would not know she was looking for him because she had no way to know who had killed her Master. But she had come to Coruscant to find out, to avenge Zallow.

Where would she go first?

He thought he knew.

He inhaled deeply, tapped his finger on the edge of the desk.

She was hunting him. He admired her for that. It seemed very … unlike a Jedi.

Of course, Malgus would not sit idle while she sought him out.

He would hunt her.

A squad of six imperial fighters, bent wing interceptors, zoomed overhead, the hum of their engines drowning out and throttling Zeerid’s and Aryn’s laughter. The bent panels of the fighters’ wings formed parentheses around the central fuselage.

“That doesn’t look right,” Zeerid said. “Imperial ships over Coruscant.”

“No,” Aryn said. “It doesn’t.”

Zeerid looked higher up in the sky, trying to spot any sign of his destroyed ship. He saw nothing. Fatman had served him well and nearly gotten them away from the cruiser.

He smiled, thinking that engspice addicts all over Coruscant would soon go through withdrawal. But after those few days of torture, they’d have freedom, should they choose it.

Zeerid felt a peculiar sense of freedom, too. He had not delivered spice. That pleased him. In a way, the Empire had freed him from his treadmill, had destroyed it in a hail of plasma fire.

Of course, The Exchange would try to kill him. He’d have that to contend with.

“What are you thinking?” Aryn said.

“I’m thinking about Arra,” he answered, as the weight of his situation overburdened the relief he felt at surviving a fall of fifty klicks.

The man who had stood beside the Sith Lord on the bridge of the cruiser had been the same man that Zeerid had seen back at Karson’s Park on Vulta, the same man who had led the ambush on him and Aryn in the spaceport.

Vrath Xizor, Oren had named him.

Vrath knew about Arra and Nat.

And if Vrath decided for some reason to share that information with The Exchange, Oren would order more than just Zeerid’s death. They’d make an example of him and his family.

He sat up with a grunt. “I have to get back to Vulta. Now.”

Aryn sat up beside him. She must have felt the fear in him. “Because of the man on the cruiser?”

Zeerid nodded. “He knows about Arra.”

“I don’t understand why—”

“No one in my … work knows that I have a daughter, Aryn. They’d use her against me if they did. Hurt her. But now he knows. He saw me in the park with her. I talked to him.” He put his face in his hands.

Aryn put a hand on his back. “Zeerid …”

He shook it off and climbed to his feet. “I have to get back.”

“How?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know, but I’m going. I owe you for saving me. I won’t forget that, but—”

She held up a hand. “Wait. Just wait. Think it through, Zeerid. They’re not going to let him leave, this man who knows about your daughter. No one has gotten off Coruscant since the attack. And no one will until the peace negotiations are concluded and the planet’s disposition decided. They’ll keep him on the cruiser or ground him on the planet. He’s not going anywhere.”

Zeerid considered the words. They made sense. His heart continued to pound, but slower.

“He’s here, you think.”

“Possibly. Maybe even likely. But he’s not returning to Vulta, at least not yet.”

Zeerid knew that Vrath already could have told someone else about Arra, but he thought it unlikely. No one gave away leverage. It was like giving away credits. No, Vrath had kept it to himself. Maybe to sell to The Exchange, maybe to use later. But he hadn’t used it yet. He’d had to get to Coruscant from Vulta too fast. He must have left immediately after the ambush.

“Why didn’t he use Arra against you back on Vulta?” Aryn asked. “Could’ve forced you to turn over the cargo.”

Zeerid didn’t know. “Maybe he would have. Maybe that was him in the stairwell of the apartment complex yesterday. Maybe we frightened him off. Or maybe he didn’t have time. He had to follow me to ensure he could locate the spice. If he’d have grabbed Arra, he might have lost me, or I might have flown off with the spice without ever knowing he had her.”

Aryn said nothing as Zeerid let his thoughts meander into the briar patch of the criminal underworld.

“Maybe he just wouldn’t hurt a child,” Aryn said.

“Maybe,” Zeerid said, but did not believe it. He hadn’t met many criminals who operated with any kind of ethical code.

“Listen,” Aryn said. “I’ll help you get off the planet or find him here. But first I need to get to the Temple.”

“You came here to kill someone, Aryn. I cannot spare that kind of time.”

Her face flushed, and he saw some inner battle going on behind her eyes. “I can just identify him.” She said it as if trying to convince herself. “I can find him another time. But I must have his name. This may be my only chance.” She blew out a deep breath. “I would welcome your help.”

“Been real useful so far,” he said.

“You got me here.”

“I got us blown out of space.”

“And yet here we are.”

“And here we are.”

“Let me get a name and then I’ll help you get offplanet. Agreed?”

He made up his mind, nodded. “All right, I’m with you, but we have to do this fast.”

Malgus waited for Eleena to awaken, his mind moving through possibilities, still trying to square a circle. He was beginning to think it could not be done.

Eleena emerged from the bedroom of his quarters, barely covered in a light shirt and her undergarments. As always, her beauty struck him, the grace of her movement. She smiled.

“How long did I sleep?”

“Not long,” he said.

She poured tea for both of them and sat on the floor near his feet.

“I have something I need you to do,” he said.

“Name it.”

“You will take several shuttles to Coruscant. Ten members of my security team, Imperial soldiers, will accompany you.”

In his head, he had already picked the men—Kerse’s squad—men whose discretion he knew he could trust. He continued: “I will give you a list.”

She sipped her tea, leaned her head against his calf. “What will be on this list?”

“Names and locations, mostly. Some technology and its location.”

He had pulled it all from the Imperial database while she had been sleeping.

“What do you want me to do?”

“Find everyone and everything you can on that list and bring it to this ship.”

She sat up straight, looked up at him. The question was in the pools of her eyes.

“The people are to be made prisoners,” he said. “The technology confiscated as spoils of war.”

The question did not leave her eyes. She gave it voice.

“Why me, beloved? Why not your Sith?”

He ran his hand over her left lekku, and she closed her eyes in pleasure.

“Because I know I can trust you,” he said. “But I’m not yet entirely sure whom else I can trust. Not until things progress a bit further.”

She opened her eyes and pulled away from him. Concern creased her forehead. “Progress further? Are you in danger?”

“Nothing that I cannot deal with. But I need you to do this.”

She leaned back into him, her arm draped over his legs. “Then I will do it.”

The smell of her clouded his thoughts and he fought for clarity. “Tell no one else of this. Report it only as a routine transfer of cargo.”

“I will. But … why are you doing all of this?”

“I’m simply taking precautions. Go, Eleena.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

She rose, bent, and kissed first his left cheek, then his right.

“I will see you soon. What are you going to do while I am gone?”

He was going to disobey Angral’s orders yet again and return to Coruscant. “I am going hunting.”

The smell of smoke and melted plastoid hung thick in the air. Aryn and Zeerid picked their way on foot through the streets and autowalks of Coruscant. Aryn was conscious of the fact that level after level of urbanscape extended into the depths below her. She realized that she had never put a boot to solid ground on Coruscant. Not really. Instead she, like so many, simply trod the network of walkways and duracrete streets on the surface level, unaware of most that went on in the lower levels. She had lived on the planet for decades but did not know it well.

The sun pulled itself into the sky, slowly, as if it did not want to reveal the ruin. Her eye fell on a distant, isolated skyrise that leaned precipitously to one side, the attack having damaged its foundation. It, like all of Coruscant, like the entirety of the Republic, had been knocked off kilter.

In the distance, the black dots of a few aircars and speeders populated the morning sky. Sirens blared from somewhere, rescue teams still searching the wreckage, pulling the living and dead from the ruins.

Coruscant was coming to life for another day, the day after everything had changed.

As they traveled, they encountered piles of rubble, streets flooded by broken water lines, shattered valves spitting gas or fuel. It was like seeing bloody viscera, the innards of the planet.

A few faces regarded them from behind windows or from balconies high above, the uncertainty and fear in their eyes the expected aftereffect of unexpected war, but they saw far fewer people than Aryn might have imagined. She wondered if many had fled to the lower levels. Perhaps the damage was less severe there. If so, the underlevels must have been thronged.

As the morning stretched, an increasing number of vehicles filled the sky. Medical and rescue ships screamed past. Swoops and speeders, bearing one or two riders to who knew where streaked over them.

Due to her empathic sense, Aryn felt the dread in the air as a tangible thing, a pall that overhung the entire planet. It wore on her, weighed her down. The towers of duracrete and transparisteel seemed ready to fall in on her. She felt hunched, tensed in anticipation of a blow. The dread was omnipresent, an entire planet of billions of people projecting raw emotion into the air.

She could not wall them out. She did not want to wall them out. The Jedi had failed them. She deserved to feel what they felt.

“Aryn, did you hear me? Aryn?”

She came back to herself to see Zeerid standing beside an open-topped Armin speeder. It was just sitting there in the middle of the street. His face twisted with concern when he saw her expression. His straggly beard and wide eyes made him look like a religious fanatic.

“Are you all right?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, I’m fine. It’s just … fear is everywhere. The air is full of it.”

Zeerid nodded, his lips pressed together and forming a soft line of sympathy. “I’m sorry you have to feel it, Aryn. Everyone on Coruscant knows what the Empire has done to some conquered worlds. But if they were going to do it here, I think they’d have done it already.”

“It’s only been a day,” Aryn said, but still she hoped he was right.

A squad of Imperial fighters flew high overhead, the unmistakable hum of their engines cutting through the morning’s silence.

Zeerid climbed into the speeder, stripped its storage compartment of four protein bars, a pair of macrobinoculars, and two bottles of water. He tossed a bar and bottle to Aryn.

“Eat. Drink,” he said, and ducked under the control panel.

“What are you doing?” Aryn asked him. She guzzled the water to get the grit out of her throat, then peeled the wrapper on the bar and ate.

The speeder’s engine hummed to life and Zeerid popped back up from under the instrumentation.

“I’m taking this speeder. We can’t walk all the way to the Jedi Temple. Get in.” He must have read the look on her face. “It isn’t stealing, Aryn. It’s abandoned. Come on.”

She climbed in and strapped herself into the seat. Zeerid launched the Armin into the sky.

They made rapid progress. There was little traffic. Zeerid flew at an altitude of about half a kilo. For a time, Aryn looked out and down on Coruscant, but the rubbled buildings, smoldering fires, and black holes in the urbanscape wore her down until it all began to look the same. When she realized she had become inured to the sight of the destruction, she sat back in her seat and stared out the windshield at the smoke-filled sky.

“The Temple is ahead,” Zeerid said, coming around. “There.”

When she saw it, her heart sank. A hole opened in her stomach and she felt as if she were falling. She extended a hand to the safety bar and held it tight, to keep from falling.

“I’m so sorry, Aryn,” Zeerid said.

Aryn had no words. The Temple, the Jedi sanctuary that had stood for millennia, had been reduced to a mountain of smoking stone and steel. The destruction wrought by the Sith on Coruscant generally had left her pained. The destruction of the Temple left her gutted. She had to remember to breathe. She could not take her eyes from it.

Zeerid reached across the speeder and took her hand in his. She closed her fingers around his and held on as if she were sinking and he was a life ring.

“I don’t think we should set down, Aryn. No data cards survived that.”

“Fly closer, Zeerid.”

“You sure?”

She nodded, and he took the speeder in for a better look. Smoke leaked from between blackened stones. The remains of the towers lay in chunks across the ruins of the main Temple, as if they had folded over on it.

Broken columns jutted up from the ruins like broken bones. Aryn braced herself for bodies, but thankfully saw none. Instead, she saw broken pieces of statuary here and there, the jagged remains of the stone corpses of ancient Jedi Masters.

Thousands of years of honorable history reduced in a day to dust and ash and ruins by Imperial bombs. The fires would smolder for days, deep in the pile. Loss suffused her, but she was too dried out for tears.

How wonderful and terrible, she thought, was the capacity of the mind to absorb pain.

Zeerid had not released her hand, nor she his. “If your Master was here when the bombs hit, then he … he died in the blast. And it was just some anonymous Imperial pilot, Aryn. There’s no one for you to find, no one for you to hunt down.”

She was shaking her head before he’d finished speaking. “He did not die in a blast.”

“Aryn—”

She jerked her hand from him, and some of the grief and anger she felt sharpened her tone. “I felt it, Zeerid! I felt him die! And it was no bomb blast. It was a lightsaber. Right here.”

She touched her abdomen, and the memory of the pain she’d felt when Master Zallow had died made her wince.

Zeerid’s arm and hand still stretched across the seat toward Aryn, but he did not touch her. “I believe you. I do.”

He circled the ruins in silence. “So, what now?”

“I need to go down.”

“That is not a good idea, Aryn.”

He was probably right, but she wanted to touch it, to stand amid the rubble. She fought down the impulse and tried to quell her emotions with thought, reason. “No, don’t go down. There is another way in.”

“There’s nothing standing.”

“The Temple extends underground. One of the rooms where backup surveillance is stored is fairly deep. It may have survived the blast.”

Zeerid looked as if he wanted to protest but did not. Aryn was grateful to him for it.

“Where is the other way in?”

“Through the Works,” Aryn answered.

Malgus’s private shuttle bore him toward Coruscant’s surface. Eleena and her team had left Valor in a convoy of three shuttles an hour earlier. They would already be well into their mission.

He sat alone, the steady rasp of his respirator the only sound in the compartment. Staring at his reflection in the transparisteel window of the shuttle, he tried to sort his thoughts.

Wild ideas bounced around his brain, thoughts that he dared not latch onto for fear of where they would carry him.

He knew only one thing with certainty—Angral was wrong. The Dark Council was wrong. Perhaps even the Emperor was wrong. Peace was a mistake. Peace would cause the Empire to drift into decadence, as had the Republic. Peace would cause the Sith to become weak in their understanding of the Force, as had the Jedi. The sacking of Coruscant was evidence of that decadence, that weakness.

No, peace was atrophy. Only through conflict could potential be realized.

Malgus understood that the role of the Republic and the Jedi was merely to serve as the whetstone against which the Empire and the Sith would sharpen themselves, make themselves more deadly.

Peace, were it to come, would dull them.

But, while Malgus knew that the Empire needed war, he had yet to determine how to bring it about.

“Entering the atmosphere, my lord,” said his pilot.

He watched the fire of atmospheric entry sheathe the ship, and pondered something he recalled from his time at the Sith Academy on Dromund Kaas.

It was said the ancient Sith of Korriban purged their bodies with fire, learned strength through pain, encouraged growth through destruction.

There was wisdom in that, Malgus thought. Sometimes a thing could not be fixed. Instead, it had to be destroyed and remade.

“Remade,” he said, his voice harsh through the respirator. “Destroyed and remade.”

“Darth Malgus,” said the pilot over the comm. “Where shall I fly you? I do not have a flight plan.”

The fire of reentry had faded. The smolder in Malgus was growing into flames. Aryn Leneer’s unexpected presence had started him down a path he should have trod long ago. He was grateful to her for that.

Below, the cityscape of Coruscant, pockmarked and smoking here and there from Imperial bombs, came into view.

“The Jedi Temple,” he said. “Circle at one hundred meters.”

If nothing else, he would soon have his own personal war. Aryn Leneer had come to Coruscant looking for him. And he had returned looking for her.

They would meet on the rubbled grave of the Jedi Order.

Aryn pointed over the windscreen at an enormous building of duracrete and steel that could have held ten athletic stadiums. The peak of the dome stood several hundred meters high, and the innumerable venting towers and smokestacks that stuck from its surface looked like a thicket of spears. Not a single window marred the metal-and-duracrete façade.

“The Works,” Aryn said. “Or at least one of the hubs. Set down there.”

As Zeerid piloted the speeder down, Aryn looked back over the urbanscape, orienting herself to the relative position of the Jedi Temple. She could not see the actual ruins from their location—the intervening terrain blocked it—but she could see the smoke plumes.

The image of the ruined temple still haunted her memory.

Zeerid put the speeder down atop a nearby parking structure. Few other vehicles shared the structure. A single speeder and two swoops—both tipped onto their sides—were all that Aryn saw.

“Where is everyone?” Zeerid asked.

“Hiding in the lower levels, maybe. Staying home.”

Though it seemed a lifetime ago, the attack had happened only a day before. The populace was still in shock, hiding perhaps, picking up what pieces they could.

They took a lift and autowalk to the Works hub. A large gate and security station provided ingress through the ten-meter duracrete walls. While the gate remained closed, the security station stood empty. Ordinarily it would have been well guarded. Aryn and Zeerid climbed over and through unchallenged.

The mammoth structure of the hub, larger even than a Republic cruiser, loomed before them.

Zeerid drew a blaster from his hip holster, then pulled another from a hidden holster in the small of his back and offered it to Aryn. She declined.

“Thought I’d ask,” Zeerid said. “That lightsaber doesn’t do you much good at twenty meters.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

The arched double doors that offered entry looked like something from an ancient Alderaanian castle built for titans. They were enormous. Aryn’s Raven starfighter could have flown through them.

“Power is still on and controls are still live,” Zeerid said, examining the console on the doors.

Aryn tapped a code she’d learned years before into the console.

Somewhere invisible gears turned, the groans of giants, and the doors began to rise.

The doors opened and they entered, walking empty corridors that smelled of grease and faintly of burning. The metal floor vibrated under their feet, the snores of some enormous, unseen mechanical beast. The shaking increased as they moved deeper into the complex. Somewhere, metal ground against metal.

They cut away from the wide main corridor through which they’d entered and moved through a network of halls and offices sized not for vehicles but for sentients.

“I’ve never seen the inside of a hub,” Zeerid said. “Not much to look at. Where are all the mechanisms?”

Aryn led him through a series of deserted security checkpoints until they reached a set of soundproofed doors that opened onto the central chamber under the dome.

EARWEAR AND HELMETS REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT FOR ALL NON-DROIDS read a sign on the door.

She pulled open the doors and sound poured out in a rush: the rhythmic clang of metal scraping metal, the hiss of vented air and gas, the discordant hum of hundreds of enormous engines and pumps, the beeps and whistles of maintenance droids.

Zeerid’s arms fell slack at his side. His mouth hung open.

The Works was difficult to comprehend all at once. The central chamber itself was several kilometers in diameter and hundreds of meters tall. Tiered flooring and a network of stairs and cage lifts made the whole of it look like a mad industrial artist’s take on an insect hive. Aryn always felt miniaturized when she saw it. It seemed made for an alien race ten times the size of humans: gears as large as starfighters, pipes wide enough to fly a speeder into, individual mechanisms that reached floor-to-ceiling, chains and belts hundreds of meters long. Hundreds of droids scurried, rolled, and walked among the workings, checking gauges, readouts, maintaining equipment, greasing mechanisms. The sound was overwhelming, a deafening industrial cacophony.

Compared with the advanced technology apparent elsewhere on Coruscant—with its sleek lines, compact designs, and sheer elegance—the Works looked primitive, garish in its enormity, like a throwback to ancient times when steam and combustion powered industry. But Aryn knew it was an illusion.

The Works stretched under Coruscant’s crust from pole to pole, generally accessible only through the hubs. Its pipes, lines, hoses, and conduits formed the circulatory system of the planet, through which water, heat, electricity, and any number of other necessities flowed. It represented the peak of Republic technology.

“Follow me!” she shouted above the noise, and Zeerid nodded.

Following signs and calling upon her memory, Aryn led Zeerid through the maze of raised flooring, lifts, and autostairs. Droids moved past them, oblivious, and it occurred to Aryn that the droids in the Works would probably have kept doing their work even if everyone on Coruscant were dead. The thought struck her as grotesque.

Zeerid turned circles as they walked, trying to take it all in.

“This is unbelievable,” he said to her. “I wish I had a holorecorder.”

She nodded and hurried along.

They soon left behind the mechanical tumult of the hub proper. As the sound faded behind them, the corridors narrowed and darkened, and the wall-mounted lights became less frequent. Pipes and conduits snaked on and through the ceiling, the floor, the entrails of plantwide convenience. Zeerid pulled a chemlight from one of the pockets of his flight pants, snapped it in half, and held it aloft as they advanced. Both of them were sweating in the still air of the tunnels.

“There are security droids in these tunnels,” she said. “We don’t have a proper pass. They will try to stop us.”

“Great,” Zeerid said. Then, “You sure you know where you’re going?”

She nodded, though she was beginning to feel lost.

From ahead she heard the whir of servos, the rattle of metal. A droid.

She pulled Zeerid to a stop and activated her lightsaber, fearing a security droid. Dust danced in the green light of its glow. Zeerid pulled his blaster, held the chemlight up higher.

“What is it?” he whispered.

A form moved in the shadows, small, cylindrical, a droid. Not a security droid but an astromech. It emerged into the light and she saw the flat, circular head and dun coloration of a T7. Scratches marred the droid’s surface, and loose wires dangled from one of its shoulder joints. But she knew its color and felt as if she were seeing a ghost, a specter from her past haunting the dark tunnels of the Works. Deactivating her blade, she said, “Tee-seven?”

Her voice cracked on the words.

When he beeped a greeting in droidspeak, she knew it was him, his mechanical voice redolent somehow of very human joys, triumphs, and pain, the soundtrack of her time in the Temple, of her life with Master Zallow. Tears pooled in her eyes as T7 wheeled toward them.

“You know this astromech?” Zeerid asked.

“It was Master Zallow’s droid,” she said.

She knelt before T7, daubing at the dirt on his head as she might a small child. He whistled with pleasure.

“How did you get here?” she asked. “How did you … survive the attack?”

She struggled to follow his droidspeak, so rapidly did he spit out his beeps, whistles, and chirps. In the end, she determined that a Sith force had attacked the Temple, that Master Zallow had sent T7 away during the fight, and that T7 had sneaked back to the battlefield after all had gone quiet. Later, the Sith had returned, presumably to lay explosives, and T7 had fled to the lower levels.

“I know about Master Zallow, Tee-seven,” she said.

He moaned, a low whistle of despair.

“Did you see his—Did you see him when it happened?”

The droid whistled a negative.

“Why did you go back after the battle?” Zeerid asked the droid.

A long whistle, then a compartment in T7’s body slid open and T7 extended a thin metal arm from within.

The arm held Master Zallow’s lightsaber.

Aryn recoiled, stared at it for a long moment, memories crowding around her, falling like rain.

“You went back to get this? Just to get this?”

Another negative whistle. Another long, hard-to-follow monologue in droidspeak.

T7 had gone back to see if anyone had survived but had found only the lightsaber.

Once more, Aryn stared determinism in the face. The Force had brought her to Zeerid at the exact moment when Zeerid was making a run to Coruscant. And now the Force had caused T7 to find Master Zallow’s lightsaber so that the droid could give it to her.

Aryn decided that it could not be coincidence. It was the Force showing her that the course she pursued was the right one, at least for her.

She took the cool metal of the saber’s hilt in her hand, tested its weight. The hilt was larger than hers, slightly heavier, yet it felt familiar in her hand. She remembered the many times she’d seen it in Master Zallow’s hands as he had trained her in lightsaber combat. She activated it and the green blade sprang to life. She stared at it, thinking of her master, then turned it off.

She clipped it to her belt, beside her own, and patted T7 on the head.

“Thank you, Tee-seven. This means more to me than you know. You were very brave to return there.”

The droid beeped with pleasure and sympathy.

“Have you seen any other survivors?” Zeerid asked, and Aryn felt ashamed for not asking the question herself.

T7 whistled a somber negative.

Zeerid holstered his blaster. “What about security droids?”

Another negative.

“I need to get to the backup surveillance station,” Aryn said. “Is it still standing? Can you lead the way?”

T7 chirped with enthusiasm, spun his head around, and headed off down the corridor, wires still dangling from his shoulder joint. Aryn and Zeerid fell in behind him. Aryn felt the weight of the extra lightsaber on her belt, heavy with the memories it bore.

T7 led them on through the labyrinthine passageways of the Works, avoiding collapsed or blocked corridors, doubling back when necessary, descending ever deeper into the hive of pipes, gears, and machinery. Aryn was soon lost. Had they not encountered T7, they could have wandered for days before finding their way.

In time, they reached an area familiar to Aryn.

“We’re near now,” she said to Zeerid.

Ahead, she saw the turbolift that would take them up into the lower levels of the Temple. T7 plugged into the control panel and the lift’s mechanism began to hum. As the doors slid open, Aryn braced herself to see something horrible, but there was nothing behind them save the empty box of the passenger compartment.

The three of them entered, the doors closed, and the lift began to rise. Aryn could feel Zeerid’s concern for her. He watched her sidelong, thinking she did not notice. But she did, and his concern touched her.

“I am glad that you’re with me,” she said to him.

He colored with embarrassment. “Yes, well. Me, too.”

The doors opened to reveal a long corridor. The emergency lights overhead flickered and buzzed. T7 started ahead, and Aryn and Zeerid followed.

Aryn had walked the corridor before, long ago, yet to her everything felt different. It no longer felt like the Jedi Temple. Instead, it felt like a tomb. The Sith attack had destroyed more than merely the Temple’s structure. Something else had died when the structure fell. It had been a symbol of justice for thousands of years. And now it was gone.

There was symbolism in that, Aryn supposed.

She wanted out as soon as possible, but first she had to see if there was any record of the attack.

T7’s servos, and Aryn’s and Zeerid’s footsteps, sounded loud in the silence. Rooms off the main corridor looked entirely ordinary. Chairs, desks, comps, everything in order. The attack had destroyed the surface structure but left the core intact.

Maybe there was symbolism in that, too, Aryn thought, and let herself hope.

When they reached the secondary surveillance room, they found it, too, entirely intact. The five monitoring stations each featured a chair, desk, and a computer, with a large vidscreen suspended from the wall above it. All of the screens were dark.

“Can you get some power in here, Tee-seven?” asked Aryn.

The droid beeped an affirmative, rolled over to a wall jack, and plugged in. In moments, the room came to life. The overhead lights brightened. Computers and the monitors hummed awake.

“I want to see whatever we’ve got of the attack. Can you find that?”

Again the droid beeped an affirmative.

Zeerid wheeled a chair over to Aryn. She sat, her heart racing, her breath coming fast. Zeerid put a hand on her shoulder, just for a moment, then pulled up another chair and sat beside her. They stared at the dark security monitor, waiting for T7 to show them horror.

The droid let out an excited series of whistles. He had located the footage. Aryn gripped the arms of the chair.

“Play it,” she said.

A single glowing line formed on the monitor and expanded up and down until it filled the screen. Images formed on it. The main security cam had a view opposite the main doors of the Temple, so it could record those coming in or leaving.

Aryn’s mouth was dry. She was afraid to blink for fear of missing something, though that was ridiculous since T7 could freeze, replay, and even magnify any image on the screen.

They watched as a cloaked figure and a Twi’lek woman armed with blasters walked through the Temple’s enormous doors.

“Does the Temple post guards?” Zeerid asked.

Aryn nodded.

Neither of them needed to say what must have happened to the guards.

As the pair walked brazenly down the entry hallway, the cam showed people gathering on the balconies above, looking down.

“They didn’t know what to make of him,” Zeerid said.

Aryn nodded.

“He is big,” Zeerid said.

“Freeze on his face and magnify,” Aryn said to T7.

The image froze, centered on the man’s hooded face, and magnified. She could make out nothing in the shadowed depths of his cowl except what looked to be the bottom of a mask of some kind.

“Is that a mask?” Zeerid asked.

“I don’t know. The Twi’lek, Tee-seven,” she said, and T7 pulled the image back, recentered on the Twi’lek, and did the same.

The Twi’lek’s face filled the screen.

“Skin color is unusual,” Zeerid said. He leaned forward in his chair, peering intently.

She was beautiful, Aryn allowed.

And she was a murderer. Or at least associated with one.

“See the scar,” Zeerid said. He stood and pointed a finger at the screen, at the Twi’lek’s throat. There, a jagged scar cut an irregular path across her neck. “Between that and her skin, maybe we can identify her?”

“Maybe,” Aryn said, and tried to swallow. She was less interested in the Twi’lek than she was in the hooded figure. “Continue, Tee-seven.”

They watched as the two strode halfway down the hall. Aryn’s breath caught when she watched Master Zallow emerge from off cam to confront the Sith and the Twi’lek. Six other Jedi Knights accompanied him.

“Freeze, Tee-seven.”

The frame stopped, and Aryn studied Master Zallow’s face. He looked as he always had—stern, focused. Seeing him somehow freed her to grieve with something other than tears. She recalled some of their training sessions, how he had at first insisted that she fight with his style, but had later relented and allowed her to find her own path. The memory made her smile, and cry.

“Are you all right?” Zeerid asked.

She nodded, wiped away the tears with the sleeve of her robe. “Tee-seven, let me see the faces on the other Jedi.”

T7 flipped through a variety of footage from recorders at different angles until it finally captured the faces of the other Jedi. Aryn recognized each of them, though she did not know them well. Still, she recited their names. She figured she owed them at least that.

“Bynin, Ceras, Okean, Draerd, Kursil, Kalla.”

“Friends?” Zeerid asked, his voice soft.

“No,” Aryn said. “But they were Jedi.”

“It’s not possible that this Sith and Twi’lek took down those Jedi and the Temple alone,” Zeerid said, though he sounded uncertain. “Is it?”

Aryn did not know. “Continue, Tee-seven.”

The footage started again. Master Zallow went face-to-face with the Sith. The other Jedi ignited their blades. Aryn stared at Master Zallow and the Sith warrior, seeing if they exchanged words, gestures, anything. They didn’t, at least as far as she could see.

“Stang,” Zeerid breathed.

“What?” Aryn said. “Freeze it, Tee-seven. What is it?”

The image froze. She saw nothing unusual happening between Master Zallow and the Sith.

“There,” Zeerid said. He bounced out of his seat again and pointed at something beyond the Temple’s tall entrance, something in the sky. Aryn did not see it.

“What is it?”

“A ship,” Zeerid said. “Here. See it?”

Aryn stood and squinted at the screen. She did see it, though it was hard to distinguish against the sky through the slit of the Temple’s floor-to-ceiling open doors.

“Note the silhouette,” Zeerid said. “That’s an NR-two gully jumper, a Republic ship. Like the kind I used to fly. See it?”

Aryn did, but she did not understand its significance.

“Magnify, Tee-seven,” said Zeerid, and the droid complied. The ship came into clear view.

“No markings,” Zeerid said. “But look at its nose, its trajectory. It’s coming down, right at the Temple.”

“You sure?”

“It doesn’t look damaged,” Zeerid said thoughtfully. “Back out to normal magnification and play it, Tee-seven.”

They watched in awed silence as the gulley jumper crashed through the Temple’s entrance, tore through the hall, collapsing columns as it went, a rolling mass of metal and flame, until it stopped right behind the Sith facing Master Zallow.

Neither the Sith nor Master Zallow had moved.

“Mid-section is still intact,” Zeerid said, “It must have been reinforced.” He looked over to Aryn. “There’s something in it. A bomb, maybe.”

“Not a bomb,” Aryn said, beginning to understand.

They watched as a large hatch on the center compartment of the NR2 exploded outward and dozens of Sith warriors poured out, glowing red blades in hand.

Zeerid sat back in his chair. “Worse than a bomb.”

Master Zallow ignited his blade, and many more Jedi rushed in from off cam to reinforce him. Aryn watched it all, her eyes fixed on the Sith. As the battle began, he discarded his cloak, showing his face at last.

“Freeze it,” she said, and T7 did. Her voice was cold. “Magnify his face.”

The image centered and grew to show the Sith. A bald head lined with blue veins, the scarred face, the intense eyes, and not a mask but a respirator.

“That’s the same man from the cruiser!” Zeerid said.

“Darth Malgus,” Aryn said, sudden tension forming at the base of her skull. “Darth Malgus led the attack.” She stared into Malgus’s dark eyes for a time, hardened herself for what she knew would be coming. “Continue it, Tee-seven.”

She watched the battle unfold, trying to keep her passions in check. She imagined she could feel the emotions of the combatants pouring through the vid. Her entire body was tense, coiled, as she watched.

The flow of battle separated Master Zallow and Malgus from the outset. Both fought their way through enemies, obviously seeking the other.

“That’s a Mandalorian,” Zeerid said.

Aryn nodded. A Mandalorian in full battle armor appeared amid the battle, flamethrowers spitting fire.

“That’s hotter than some war zones I’ve been in,” Zeerid said.

It was. Flames burned everywhere, piles of rubble littered the hall, blasterfire crisscrossed the battlefield, and everywhere Jedi fought Sith. It became difficult to track any individual actions. Everything bled into the anonymous chaos of battle. She kept her eyes locked on Master Zallow as he moved toward Malgus, and as Malgus moved toward him.

As they closed on each other, she saw Malgus save the Twi’lek woman from a Padawan’s attack, saw him respond with even greater anger when she was hit with blasterfire.

“I didn’t know Sith cared about anything,” Zeerid said.

She, too, found Malgus’s response surprising, but had little time to consider it because Malgus and Master Zallow at last met in battle.

She rose from her chair as the duel began to unfold, stepping closer to the monitor. She watched them trade flurries, each test the other’s skill. She watched Malgus throw his lightsaber, saw Master Zallow leap over it, saw Malgus knock him from the air in the midst of his leap and follow up with a leaping charge that Master Zallow avoided at the last minute.

Her heart was pounding. She kept hoping for something to intervene, to change the outcome she knew could not be changed. Barring that, she hoped to see a mistake from Master Zallow, or some treachery by Malgus, that would explain what she expected in moments—Master Zallow’s fall to Malgus.

They engaged on the far side of the hall, Master Zallow loosing a torrent of blows. Malgus fell back under the onslaught, but Aryn saw that he was drawing Master Zallow in.

And then it happened.

Master Zallow slammed the hilt of his lightsaber into the side of Malgus’s face, driving him back a step. He moved to follow up but Malgus anticipated it, spun, and drove his lightsaber through Master Zallow’s abdomen.

“That’s enough, Tee-seven,” Zeerid said. “We’ve seen enough.”

“We haven’t,” Aryn said. “Play it again, Tee-seven.”

The droid did.

“Again.”

“Again. He says something at the end. Close up on his mouth.”

T7 did as she asked. Master Zallow’s blow to Malgus’s face had knocked his respirator aside and Aryn could see the Sith’s scarred, deformed lips. He mouthed words to Master Zallow as Master Zallow died. Aryn read his lips, whispered the words.

“It’s all going to burn.”

She found that she was holding her side as she watched, as if it were she that had been impaled on a Sith blade. She relived the pain she’d felt on Alderaan when she’d felt Master Zallow die. And overlaying all of it: anger.

And now she had a focus for that anger—Darth Malgus.

“Again, Tee-seven.”

“Aryn,” Zeerid said.

“Again.”

“Not again, Tee-seven.” Zeerid turned around so that they were facing each other. “What are you doing? What more do you need to see?”

“I’m not seeing it. I’m feeling it. Leave me alone, Zeerid.”

He must have understood, for he released her and she turned back to the monitor.

“Magnify Master Zallow’s face and play it again, Tee-Seven.”

She watched his expression as he died over and over. His eyes haunted her, but she could not look away. Each time, before the light went out of them, she saw in his eyes what he was thinking the moment he died:

I failed.

And then Malgus’s words. “It’s all going to burn.”

Whatever walls she had built around her pain collapsed as thoroughly as the Temple. Her eyes welled and tears poured freely down her face. Yet still she watched. She wanted to remember her Master’s pain, tuck it away and hold it inside of her, a dark seed to yield dark fruit when she finally faced Malgus.

Before she killed Malgus, she desperately wanted him to feel the same kind of pain Master Zallow had felt.

A gentle touch on her shoulder—Zeerid—brought her around. The monitor screen was blank. How long had she been sitting there, staring at a blank screen, imagining death and revenge and pain?

“Time to go, Aryn,” Zeerid said, and helped steer her from the room.

T7 whistled sympathy.

“Are you all right?” Zeerid asked.

She knew how she must look. Using the sleeve of her tunic, she wiped the tears from her face.

“I’m all right,” she said.

He looked as if he wanted to embrace her, but she knew he would not take the liberty without her giving him a sign that it was all right.

She gave him no such sign. She did not want relief from her grief, her pain. She simply wanted to pass it on to Malgus somehow.

“Keep a copy of that footage, Tee-seven,” she said. “Bring it with you.”

The droid beeped an affirmative.

They walked back through the Works and to the surface in silence. By the time they returned to their speeder, Aryn had rebuilt the walls around her emotions. She managed the grief, endured the pain, but put it within reach, so she could call on it when she needed it.

She and Zeerid lifted T7 onto the droid mount at the rear of the speeder.

“I need to get up to that cruiser,” she said.

Zeerid activated the magnetic clamp to hold T7 in place. “You can’t attack a cruiser, Aryn.”

“I don’t want to attack it. I just want to get aboard it.”

“And face him. Darth Malgus.”

“And face him,” she affirmed with a nod.

“And how do you think that plays out if you get aboard? Are you just going to walk through all those Imperial troops? Think he’ll just let you through and meet you in honorable combat?”

She did not like Zeerid’s tone. “I’ll bring the cruiser down. With him on it.”

“And you on it.”

She stuck out her chin. “If that’s what it takes.”

He slapped a hand in frustration on T7’s body. The droid beeped in irritation.

“Aryn, you’ve been watching the HoloNet too much. It won’t work like that. You’ll get captured, tortured, killed. He’s a Sith. They flew a ship into the Temple, killed dozens of Jedi, bombed Coruscant. Come on. Think!”

“I have. And I have to do this.”

He must have seen the resolve in her eyes. He swallowed, looked past her, as if gathering his thoughts, then back at her.

“You said you would help me get offplanet.”

“I know,” she said.

“I can’t follow you to the cruiser. I have a daughter, Aryn. I just want to get off the planet and get back to her before The Exchange or anyone else gets to her.”

The heat went out of her in a rush. “You’ve done more than enough, Zeerid. I wouldn’t let you come even if you volunteered.”

They both stared at each other a long time, something unsaid hanging in the air between them. T7’s head rotated from Zeerid to Aryn and back to Zeerid.

“You don’t need to face him,” he said to her.

Grime from the Works stained Zeerid’s coat and trousers. Lack of sleep had painted circles under his brown eyes. He hadn’t shaved in days and black stubble coated his cheeks. His appearance once more struck Aryn as that of a mad prophet, though it seemed she was the one acting out of madness.

“Yes, I do,” she said.

She reached out a hand and wiped away some dirt on his cheek. At first he looked startled at her touch, then looked as if he wanted to say something, but did not.

“We go our separate ways here, Z-man,” she said. She sensed his alarm at the thought. “You keep the speeder and T7. I’ll figure something else out. Good-bye, Zeerid.”

T7 uttered a doleful whistle as she walked away. Zeerid’s words pulled her back around, just as hers had pulled him back around earlier in the day.

“Let me help you, Aryn. I’m not going at that cruiser, but I can help you get aboard.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Maybe you stow away on an Imperial transport heading for it.” He pointed at a distant black form moving across the afternoon sky. “They come and go regularly and always to the same spaceport. And I know that spaceport. I’ve parked Fatman there myself a few times. I’ll figure out a way to get you aboard a transport while I find a ship to get me offplanet. So no good-byes yet. I still need your help and you still need mine. Good enough?”

Aryn did not have to consider long. She could use Zeerid’s help, and she wanted to keep his company for as long as possible.

“Good enough,” she said.

“And who knows?” he said as she climbed into the speeder. “Maybe you’ll come to your senses in the meantime.”

Zeerid drove the Armin speeder low, hugging the urbanscape, until he reached a bombed-out apartment building. There was nothing particularly notable about it. It just seemed a decent place to hole up.

The façade had fallen away from the building’s upper levels, exposing the interior flats and rooms. It looked as if the Empire had peeled the rind off the building to expose its guts. Zeerid supposed the Empire had done just that to all of Coruscant: they had vivisected the Republic.

The rubbled façade of the building lay in a heap of glass and stone at the building’s base, a pile of ruin intermixed with furniture, shattered vidscreens, and the other indicia of habitation.

The interior remained largely intact, though the dust of pulverized stone coated everything. Shards of shattered glass like fangs hung from windows. A few live wires spat sparks. Water leaked from somewhere, formed a minor cascade pouring down from one of the upper floors. Not a single light glowed in the entire building. It appeared abandoned.

“This should serve,” he said to Aryn and T7. He piloted the speeder around and through the rubble until he had it near one of the exposed lower apartments.

“Serve for what?” Aryn asked, and T7 echoed her question with a beep.

“I’m going to scout the spaceport. You both are going to stay here.”

Aryn shook her head. “No, I should come.”

“I work better alone, Aryn. At least when it comes to surveillance. Take some time—”

“I don’t need time. I need to get to that cruiser.”

“And this is the best way to do that. So take some time to eat and … pull yourself together.” He winced as he said that last, thinking she’d take offense, but it appeared barely to register. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He tossed her another of the protein bars he’d taken from the speeder’s console compartment.

“Zeerid …,” she said.

“Please, Aryn. I’m just eyeballing it. I won’t do anything without you.”

She relented with a sigh and climbed out of the speeder. She unclamped T7 and lowered him to the ground.

“I’ll return as soon as I can,” Zeerid said. “Keep an eye on her, Tee-seven.”

The droid whooped agreement and Zeerid sped off.

Avoiding the search-and-rescue teams working in the still-smoldering ruins, Zeerid made his way toward the quadrant’s port, the Liston Spaceport. He could see it in the distance, framed against the night sky, the curved appendages of its large craft landing pads raised skyward like the hopeful arms of a penitent. It appeared undamaged by the attack, at least from a distance.

As he watched, the roof doors to one of the many small-craft landing bays opened in the main body of the port, a mouth spitting light into the dark air. He killed the speeder’s thrusters and pulled to the side.

In the sky above the port, the running lights of three Imperial shuttles came into view as they descended into the port. The mouth of the doors swallowed them, closed, and killed the light once more.

At least he knew there were ships there.

Zeerid stayed where he was and for a time watched to see if there was more traffic. He saw none. In normal times, even a small spaceport like the Liston would have been buzzing with activity.

He fired the speeder back up and drove on, wanting to get a closer look. The area around the port to a distance of several kilometers had been hit hard by Imperial bombs. Burned-out buildings tilted like drunks on their foundations. Jagged, charred holes pockmarked the ground. Autowalks hung askew, forming a mad web of walking paths that led nowhere. Live wires spat angry sparks. Chunks of duracrete lay here and there, haphazardly strewn about by the force of the bombs.

He drove slowly, without lights, avoiding the hazards. He saw no one in the area, no movement at all. It felt like a ghost town. The stink of char hung in the air. So, too, the faint, sickly-sweet stink of organic decay. The ruins were the tombs of thousands. He tried to put it out of his mind, hoping that many had been able to flee into the lower levels before the bombing began in earnest.

He saw an unattended multistory parking structure. Half of it lay in ruins. The other half looked stable enough, and it was only a few blocks from the port. He drove the speeder into the lower level and parked it there. He’d cover the rest of the way on foot. He wanted to eyeball the port unseen and could do that best without a vehicle.

Republic flight school had taught him ground evasion—to prepare him should his ship ever go down in enemy-held territory—and he put his skills to use. As unobtrusively as a shadow, he moved among the stone rubble and steel beams and abandoned vehicles, keeping undercover as much as possible to avoid being seen from the air. He knew the Empire sometimes used airborne surveillance droids.

Ahead, a ten-story hotel, The Nebula, stuck out of the smoking, rubbled urbanscape. Unlike almost everything else around it, it looked mostly intact except for a few shattered windows on the lower floors. Zeerid saw no lights in any of the rooms so he assumed it had no power and was unoccupied. He dashed across the street to the hotel, pried open the doors, and entered the lobby. No welcoming droids, no one at the concierge desk, deep darkness.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Anyone here?”

No response.

With the power out, he ignored the lifts and headed for the stairs. He was mildly winded by the time he reached the roof access door. He kicked it open, blaster in hand. Nothing. He ducked low and headed for the edge of the roof. From there, he had a good view of the spaceport. He pulled out the macrobinoculars he had taken from the Armin speeder and glassed the port.

The control spire was a dark spike of transparisteel, obviously unoccupied. All the entrances appeared locked down except one, and a dozen Imperial soldiers in full gray battle armor guarded it. Zeerid imagined there were more Imperial troops within the complex itself. It seemed the Empire had shut down all of the port save for a few of the small-craft landing pads, probably to give the already stretched troops less ground to secure.

Large transparisteel windows in the wall opened up on the near pads. Through them, he saw the three Imperial shuttles that had just landed. All of them had a numerical designation written above the word VALOR, the name of Darth Malgus’s cruiser.

“Looks like you’ll get your wish, Aryn,” he muttered.

He saw another ship there, too, a modified Imperial drop ship, Dragonfly-class. He rolled a dial on the macrobinoculars to magnify the image.

No Imperial markings, and the landing ramp was up as if it were ready to launch.

A couple of dozen workers in dungarees went about the business of operating the port, as did half a dozen or so droids wheeling among the ships, fuel lines, loading cranes, and comp terminals.

A flash of lavender filled the binoculars’ field of vision and he backed out of the high modification.

A Twi’lek female had walked in front of the window and temporarily filled the lenses with her lavender skin.

Lavender skin.

He watched as the Twi’lek and a squad of uniformed Imperial soldiers in half armor put six hooded and manacled sentients into one of the shuttles. Zeerid tried to keep the binoculars on the Twi’lek, who appeared to be giving orders to the troops, but it necessitated hopping the binoculars from window to window as she moved, and he sometimes lost her.

Like the Twi’lek in the vid at the Jedi Temple, she wore twin blasters on her hips. She also wore the tight-fitting trousers and high boots.

“Has to be her,” he said. But he wanted to confirm, so he waited, and watched, and at last she turned her face to the window and he saw it, the jagged scar on her throat.

“Gotcha,” he said.

The Twi’lek spoke into her comlink, and the shuttle with the civvies started to wind up. As it rose on its thrusters, the roof doors of the pad slid open, once more spilling light into the night sky. When the shuttle broke the roofline, it engaged its engines and took off, presumably heading back to Valor. The doors closed behind it.

The Twi’lek and about a dozen troops remained on the pad. Workers, too, and droids. Zeerid watched a team of workers and the treaded box of a maintenance droid start refueling one of the shuttles from a thick hose connected to an underground tank.

Seeing that, Zeerid struck on a plan. He pocketed the binoculars and hurried back out of the hotel, to the speeder, and back to Aryn.

The shuttle flew a silent vigil over the ruins of the Jedi Temple. Malgus’s pilot’s voice carried over the intership comm. Boredom tinged his tone.

“Shall I remain here, my lord?”

“You will remain until I say otherwise,” Malgus answered. “Internal and external lights are to remain off.”

“As you wish, my lord.”

Malgus’s shuttle hovered over the ruins of the Jedi Temple at about three hundred meters. From that height, the Temple was little more than a tumble of stones in the starlight. He had lingered over the ruins for hours, as day had faded to night, and still Aryn Leneer had not shown.

But she would come. He knew she would.

Aryn unwrapped and ate the protein bar Zeerid had given her. She and T7 had sheltered in one of the apartments. She sat on a dusty couch, the stink of a burning planet in her nostrils. She replayed in her mind Master Zallow’s death, the look on his face. She saw once more the ruins of the Temple and she knew that his body lay beneath the mountain of rubble.

Fighting the rising tide of grief, she adopted a meditative posture, closed her eyes, and tried to drift into the Force.

“Still heart, still mind,” she intoned, but both proved impossible.

Eventually, she sat back on the couch and stared up at the sky. The omnipresent smoke looked like black clouds against the stars. Now and again she saw a ship’s lights in the distance and presumed them to belong to an Imperial patrol craft.

In time, her emotional and physical exhaustion chased her down and she drifted off to sleep.

She dreamed of Master Zallow. He stood before her on the ruins of the Jedi Temple, his robes billowing in the breeze. The cracked stone face of Odan-Urr watched them. Master Zallow’s mouth moved but no sound emerged. He seemed to be trying to tell her something.

“I cannot hear you, Master,” she said. “What are you saying?”

She tried to get closer to him, picking her way through the debris, but the closer she tried to get, the farther he moved away. Finally her frustration got the better of her and she screamed, “I don’t know what you want me to do!”

She woke, heart pounding, and found T7 standing before her. He whistled a question.

“No, I’m fine,” she said, but she wasn’t.

She stood and pulled her cloak tight about her.

She checked her chrono. Zeerid had been gone for over an hour. He would probably be gone another hour, at least.

Her dream had left her shaken. She took the hilt of Master Zallow’s lightsaber in her hands, turned it over, studied its craftsmanship. Its design mirrored his personality: solid, without flourish, but wonderful in its plainness.

She wanted to return to the Temple, to the scene where murder had occurred. She should have made Zeerid set down the speeder when they’d been over it earlier. She wanted to walk among the ruins and commune with the dead. She hooked Master Zallow’s weapon to her belt.

“I have to go somewhere, Tee-seven. I’ll be back soon.”

He whistled another question, alarm in the beeps.

“Tell him I’ll be back. There is nothing to worry about.”

She left the ruined apartment building and headed back toward the Jedi Temple.

There was something there for her. There had to be.

When Zeerid returned to their safehouse in the ruined apartment building, he found Aryn gone. Her absence put a lump in his throat. T7 whistled to him from one of the apartments.

“Where is she, Tee-seven?” he asked.

The small droid chattered, whistled, and beeped so fast that Zeerid could scarcely follow. In the end, he gathered that Aryn had left the apartment after a short rest, and that she did not tell T7 where she was going.

But Zeerid knew where she would go. She’d go to where Master Zallow died.

“Let’s go, Tee-seven,” he said, and loaded the droid up onto the speeder.

Aryn’s emotions roiled, her mood as dark as the night. Ordinarily, the artificial lights of hundreds of thousands of businesses and advertisements lit Coruscant’s night sky. But the attack had knocked the power out over huge swaths of the planet, and the dark silence made the city feel like a mausoleum.

Aryn picked her way through the black darkness and approached the Temple along the wide, stone-paved processional that once had led to the Temple’s grand main entrance. Malgus must have used the same approach, she realized, and it appalled her that the last person to walk the processional before the Temple’s fall had been a Sith. She found it obscene.

She fancied she was retracing his footsteps, her boots effacing the wrongness of his passage.

She slowed, steeling herself, as the rubbled structure materialized out of the darkness before her. The attack had turned the Temple’s once curved lines and elegant spires into a shapeless mound of ruin, a burial cairn for the Jedi Order.

The sight of it scratched the scab from the wound of her grief. As she approached, the ghosts of her past rose out of the ruin—her time in the Temple as a youngling, as a Padawan, the ceremony when she’d been promoted to Jedi Knight. The Temple had been her home for decades, and her father had been murdered in it.

In her mind’s eye she saw the final blow that had slain her master, as clear as if she were once more watching the vid in the Temple’s surveillance room. She saw Malgus spin, reverse his grip, and drive his lightsaber through Master Zallow. And once more she saw the look in Master Zallow’s face as the light went out of his eyes, the despair there. He had failed and he had known it. Maybe he had also known, as Aryn now did, that the Jedi Order had failed, too.

The thought of her master dying with despair in his heart drove a hot spike of rage through the sore of her loss.

And yet … she could not shake the look she had seen in his eyes in her dream. It had looked like concern, a warning maybe. He had wanted to tell her something …

She shook her head. It had been but a dream, not a vision, just a projection of her own subconscious. She dismissed it.

She would find Malgus and she would kill him.

She reached the edge of the ruins, climbed the jagged chunks of stone. They still felt warm, still radiated the heat of their own destruction. She walked among them, the graves of dozens of Jedi, and wept through her anger.

A feeling seized her as the strings of her Force sensitivity vibrated with a discordant note. The feeling took her by the shoulders, shook her, and emptied her of grief, leaving only anger.

She knew the feeling’s origin.

She activated her lightsaber and tried to pinpoint Malgus’s location.

Malgus felt the signature of another Force-user, the uncomfortable pressure of the light side, and it pulled him to his feet. The pressure reminded him of how he’d felt in the presence of Master Zallow, and he knew that Aryn Leneer had come at last.

“Take the shuttle down to fifty meters,” he said, adrenaline already coursing through his body. “And when I exit, you may leave.”

“When you exit, my lord?”

Malgus did not respond. Instead, he overrode the in-flight safeties and pushed the button to open the side hatch. As the door slid open, as the night air poured in, redolent with the stink of a ruined Temple and a burned planet, he let anger fill him.

The ship descended to fifty meters. Below, the ruined Temple was dark, covered in the velvet of night. But he perceived the presence of Aryn Leneer as clearly as he would have under a noon sun.

He stepped to the doorway, drew on the Force, activated his lightsaber, and leapt out into the dark.

A roar, heavy with hate and rage, pulled Aryn’s eyes skyward. Malgus descended like a meteor. His cape flew out behind and over him, a comma of darkness, and he held his lightsaber in a two-handed grip. Power went before him in a wave of visible distortion. The shuttle out of which he had leapt flew off into the night sky.

Aryn fell fully into the Force, raised her defenses, took a fighting stance, and parried Malgus’s two-handed overhand slash. Still, he landed in a cocoon of power, hitting the ground in an explosion of might that shattered the stones around them and turned them into a hail of shrapnel. Unflinching, Aryn deflected them with the Force as she parried another slash from Malgus. The force of the Sith’s blow made her arms quiver, but she gave no ground.

Blades locked, sparking, their eyes met.

Malgus’s dark eyes burned with a rage that knifed through her. The anger he radiated was tangible to Aryn, made the air feel greasy, polluted. But she felt something else in it, something unexpected, an odd ambivalence.

“I know why you’ve come,” he said, his voice a hiss from behind his respirator.

She forced words between gritted teeth. “You killed Master Zallow.”

“And now I will kill you, too,” he said. “In the same place I killed him.” He leaned into his blade, pushed her back a step, and unleashed a Force-augmented kick at her ribs.

But she was the quicker, and a flip sent her over his head and fifty meters away, deeper into the mountain of ruins where her Master had died. She landed in a crouch atop one of the broken columns sticking out of the rubble.

“You will find that difficult,” she called, and answered his anger with a wave of her own. “I assure you of that.”

Malgus gestured with his left hand, and the column she stood on began to shake. She leapt off it to another nearby, then another, then another, leapfrogging her way across the ruins, back toward Malgus.

When she landed atop a large chunk of stone ten meters from the Sith, he made a cutting gesture with his free hand and two pieces of statuary rose from the rubble and rushed toward her from either side. She leapt into the air and they smashed into each other beneath her, spraying shards of rock. She landed atop the remains, lightsaber ready.

Malgus growled, leapt through the air from his perch toward hers. She slid to the side of his downward slash and his blade split the stone at their feet. She unleashed a crosscut that would have decapitated him had he not ducked under it.

She flipped up and over him onto another piece of rubble, fifteen meters away. Taking telekinetic hold of a large stone near Malgus, she flung it at him. He never moved, simply held his ground and split the incoming rock in two with his lightsaber. Red sparks and bits of stone rained down

Aryn could not find her calm. She was fighting angry, but did not care. Snarling, thinking of her Master, she bounded across the hill of rubble, leaping from one chunk of rock to another, closing the distance with Malgus. He answered her charge with one of his own, the two of them jumping across the gravestones of the Jedi Order until they closed to within striking distance.

Aryn stabbed low and Malgus slapped her blade out wide, reversed his motion, and unleashed a backhand swing at her abdomen. She leapt over it, pulling her legs in tight, and loosed a two-handed overhead strike as she came back down. Malgus parried crosswise with his blade and stepped into a Force-augmented side kick aimed at her ribs. She caught the kick with her free hand, closed her arm over his leg, spun, and flung Malgus twenty meters from her. He flipped in midair and landed atop the cracked face of the Odan-Urr statue that had once lined the processional approach into the Temple.

She took the hilt of Master Zallow’s lightsaber in her off hand, crouched, and bounded into a leap toward him. He watched her come and at the apex of the leap’s arc, he thrust his left hand at her, roaring, and veins of Force lightning squirmed toward her.

Ready for it, she activated Master Zallow’s lightsaber, used it to form an X with her own, and intercepted the lightning on the two blades.

His power met her will. The lightning twisted around the glowing blades. The force of it stopped her downward descent and held her aloft in the air for a moment, suspended on a column built of the dark side.

And then she overcame it. The lightning dissipated to nothingness and she, unharmed by it, fell straight down, landing on her feet atop a shifting pile of rubble and deactivating Master Zallow’s blade.

The moment she landed, Malgus was upon her, his blade slashing, stabbing, spinning. He tried to use his superior strength to force her off the stone, off balance, but she answered his strength with speed, sidestepping his blows, leaping over them, parrying, unleashing her own flurries. The hum of their weapons through the air, the sizzle of crossed blades, merged into a single song of speed and power.

Zeerid flew the speeder full-throttle at over a hundred meters in altitude. He watched an Imperial shuttle accelerate into the sky from the vicinity of the Jedi Temple. Thinking of Aryn, he felt his stomach flutter. He flew still higher, hoping to catch a glimpse of her near the Temple.

And he did.

She and Darth Malgus bounded across the ruins of the Temple, their blades flashing, locking, the speed of their duel so fast Zeerid could barely follow their movement. Despite himself, he found the combat beautiful.

He slowed the speeder and T7 beeped a question.

Aryn had done what she had come to Coruscant to do—she was facing Malgus.

And Zeerid had seen what Malgus had done in the Temple. The Sith deserved death.

But he worried over Aryn’s reasons. The line between seeking justice and seeking revenge was thin indeed, but Zeerid could see that Aryn had stepped over it. She wanted Malgus dead because she wanted revenge. And there would be no undoing it once it was done.

He knew that better than most.

He made up his mind and accelerated the speeder to full.

Aryn and Malgus locked blades.

“I am more than your match, Sith,” she said over the sparks of their joined lightsabers.

“Your Master was not,” Malgus said, grunting, and shoved her with a telekinetic blast of such force that she flew backward and slammed into the rock and rubble. She used the Force to cushion the impact, but she still landed on her back and the impact blew the breath from her lungs.

Malgus leapt high into the air, shouting with rage, his blade held high for a killing stroke. She rolled aside as he came down and his blade sank to its hilt in the rubble of the Temple. She leapt to her feet and unleashed a backhand crosscut at his throat. He got his blade free and vertical to parry it, but at the same time she pointed the blade end of Master Zallow’s lightsaber at Malgus and activated it.

He must have sensed his danger at the last moment for he slid partially aside. Still, the green line of Master Zallow’s blade pierced his armor and side and elicited a snarl of pain and rage. Before Aryn could follow up, Malgus drove an open hand into the side of her face.

She was unready for the blow. The Force-augmented impact exploded a spark shower in her brain and sent her cartwheeling away from Malgus; she slammed into a rock and landed on her side ten meters away. Adrenaline pulled her to her feet, though she swayed unsteadily. She spat a mouthful of blood and held both lightsabers at the ready.

Malgus stood astride the ruins, his blade sizzling, eyeing the smoking hole in his armor, the furrow in his flesh.

Seeing an opportunity, she did not hesitate.

Using the Force to guide it, she hurled Master Zallow’s lightsaber at Malgus. The blade cut a glittering green arc through the air as it spun end over end toward Malgus’s head.

Despite his wound, the Sith slapped aside Aryn’s Force-hold on the blade and snatched it out of the air, as quick as a sand viper. He deactivated the blade, held the hilt in his hand, studied it. He looked up and over at Aryn, his eyes burning. She imagined him smiling under his respirator.

“This weapon did not avail him and it will not avail you.”

The sound of an engine pulled Aryn’s head around. She whirled, her blade ready, and saw the Armin speeder roaring out of the sky like a comet, Zeerid in the driver’s seat. T7 sat in the rear. He came in too hard and the thrusters could not completely stop the speeder from slamming into the ruins. Metal creaked. Dust flew up.

“Aryn!” Zeerid called. “Get in!”

Zeerid looked past her to Malgus, seemed to consider unloading a blaster shot, but thought better of it.

“Come on, Aryn!” Zeerid shouted, and T7 backed him up with an urgent whistle. “Please. You said you would help me.”

She hesitated.

Malgus looked at her, brandished Master Zallow’s hilt, a taunt to keep her there.

She made her decision.

She wanted to efface the smugness she’d heard in his tone, to see in his eyes what she had seen in Master Zallow’s. Killing him was not enough. She wanted to see him in pain. She just had to figure out how to do it.

She leapt high into the air and landed beside Zeerid in the speeder.

“Death is too easy, Sith,” she called to Malgus, the venom in her tone surprising even to her. “I am going to hurt you first.”

The words left a bad taste in her mouth. She felt Zeerid’s eyes on her and dared not look him in the face.

Malgus, too, seemed almost puzzled, to judge from his furrowed brow and the tilt of his head.

“Go,” she said.

Zeerid accelerated and started to turn the speeder.

Anger went forth from Malgus. He reactivated Master Zallow’s blade and hurled it after them. Zeerid tried to wheel out of the way but the blade curled and kept coming at them. T7 beeped in alarm.

Aryn watched the weapon spin, felt it, and before it reached the speeder, she reached out with the Force and snatched it from Malgus’s mental grasp. The weapon turned upward over the speeder and descended hilt-first into her hand as Zeerid rose into the night sky and sped away. She deactivated it.

She looked back one last time to see Malgus standing atop the ruined temple, his blade in hand, his cape fluttering in the wind. He looked like a victorious conqueror.

And she hated him.

Zeerid flew low and fast through Coruscant’s streets, wheeling around buildings, careering down alleys, descending into the lower levels as he went. Soon, the sky was lost to the density of structures above them. They were in an industrial underworld, a series of metal-and-duracrete tunnels that covered the entire planet.

“Anyone following?” he said.

Aryn did not answer. She sat in the passenger seat and stared at her Master’s lightsaber hilt as if she’d never seen it before.

“Aryn! Is anyone following?”

“No,” she said, but did not look back.

Zeerid shot a glance behind them, above them, and saw no one. He let himself breathe easier.

“Blast, Aryn, what were you doing?”

She answered in a tone as mechanical as a protocol droid’s. “What I came here to do, Zeerid. Facing Malgus. What were you doing?”

“Helping you.”

“I didn’t need help.”

“No?” He stared at her across the speeder’s compartment.

“No.”

Zeerid thought otherwise. “Why’d you get in the speeder, Aryn?”

“I didn’t want you to get hurt. And I said I would help you get offplanet.”

“A lie,” Zeerid said. “Why not just stay there and finish it?”

She looked away from him as she answered. “Because …”

“Because?”

“Because killing him is not enough,” she blurted. “I want to hurt him.”

She hooked her Master’s lightsaber hilt to her belt and looked over at Zeerid. “I want to hurt him like he hurt me, like he hurt Master Zallow before he died.”

“Aryn, I don’t have to be an empath to feel your ambivalence. Revenge—”

She raised a hand to cut him off. “I do not want to hear it, Zeerid.”

He said it anyway. He owed her as much. “This doesn’t sound much like you.”

“We haven’t seen each other in years,” she snapped. “What do you know about me?”

The sharp tone cut him. “Not as much as I thought, it seems.”

For a time, silence sat between them like a wall.

“I hired on with The Exchange for a good reason, I thought. To provide a good life for my daughter.”

“Zeerid—”

“Just listen, Aryn!” He took a breath to calm himself. “And that one decision, that seemed so right, led to me running weapons, and then to running spice. One decision, Aryn. One act.”

She shook her head. “This isn’t like that, Zeerid. I know what I’m doing.”

He wasn’t so sure but decided not to press further. He changed the subject. “I think I can get us into the spaceport. There are ships there, from Valor, and Imperial troopers, but I have a plan.”

Without looking at him, she reached across the seat and touched his hand, just for a moment. “I’m sorry for the way I spoke, Zeerid. I’m not …”

He shook his head. “No apologies, Aryn. I know you’re hurting. I just … don’t want you to make it worse for yourself. I know how that can happen. Are you … seeing clearly?”

He felt ridiculous trying to provide an empath, of all people, with insight into her emotional state.

“I am,” she said, but he heard uncertainty in her tone.

“In the end, you have to live with yourself.”

He knew well how difficult that could get.

“I know,” she said. “I know. Now, what’s your plan?”

He told her.

She listened attentively, nodded when he was done. “That should work.”

“Tee-seven can do it?”

Aryn nodded, and T7 beeped agreement.

“I will help you get in and get a ship,” Aryn said. “But … I’m not leaving Coruscant.”

“I figured you’d say that,” he said, but in his own mind he had not yet conceded the point. He wrestled with whether to tell her about the Twi’lek.

“You are holding something back,” she said.

He rubbed the back of his neck, torn.

In the end, he decided he owed her honesty, and he knew he could not make decisions for her.

“The Twi’lek we saw in the vid at the Temple …”

He trailed off. Aryn grabbed his forearm, squeezed.

“Tell me, Zeerid.”

He swallowed, feeling complicit in a crime. It wasn’t so much harm to the Twi’lek that concerned him, as it was harm to Aryn.

“I saw her at the Liston Spaceport. She was there.”

Aryn’s fingernails sank into his skin, but she seemed not to notice. He welcomed the pain. She stared off through the windscreen. He fancied he could see her weighing options in the scale of her mind. He held out hope she would choose the right one.

“I want to see her,” she said. “Let’s go.”

That was not the answer Zeerid had been hoping to hear.

Malgus sat among the ruins, the fallen statues of his ancient foes, and pondered. The night breeze blew cool over his face. He replayed his confrontation with Aryn Leneer. Her power had surprised him. So, too, the anger that underlay it.

The anger he understood, even respected, but he didn’t understand how she’d come by it. She had known that he’d killed Master Zallow when they had fought on the ruins. But she had not known when they had first seen each other on the ship-to-ship holo over Coruscant, when Valor had shot down the freighter. He was certain of that. He would have felt the knife point of her rage if she had known then.

So she must have learned in the interim that he had killed Master Zallow.

Either she’d seen it somehow—a surveillance recording pulled from the rubble, maybe—or she’d interrogated a witness, a survivor who had escaped, or maybe a droid who had crawled out of the destruction.

Either way, she now knew the details of the attack.

It pleased him that she knew. The destruction of the Jedi Temple was the greatest achievement of his life. He wanted the Jedi—wanted Aryn Leneer—to know it was he who had done it, he who had left the corpses of so many Jedi buried in the rubbled tomb of their onetime Temple.

But something worried at the edge of his mind. She had not fled on the speeder out of fear. He would have felt that, too.

I am going to hurt you, she’d said.

How could she hurt him?

And all at once he knew. She knew the details of his attack on the Temple, so she knew Eleena had accompanied him. She might even have seen in Malgus’s behavior what Lord Adraas had seen—his feelings for Eleena. She would hurt him the same way Adraas and Angral would try to manipulate him.

The realization sent a rush of emotion through him, a rush it took him a moment to recognize as fear. He activated his comlink and tried to raise his lover on their normal frequency.

No response.

A flutter formed in his stomach. He raised Jard.

“Jard, has Eleena returned to Valor?”

“She has not, my lord,” returned Jard. “One of her shuttles has returned, but she was not aboard.”

A fishhook of fear lodged in Malgus’s gut and pulled him to his feet.

“When is the last time she checked in?” he asked.

“She has not checked in, my lord. Is there cause for concern? Should I send a team to retrieve her?”

“No,” Malgus said. “I will find her myself.”

There could be any number of reasons for Eleena to be out of contact. She could have simply turned off her comm.

But Malgus could not shake the unease he felt. He hailed his personal pilot and summoned the shuttle back to the Temple. He knew where Eleena and her team had set down—the Liston Spaceport. He would look for her there first.

The sky lightened to the east. Zeerid checked his chrono. Almost dawn. The night had disappeared on him. He was too wired to feel fatigue. He worked up the nerve to ask his question of Aryn.

“What are you going to do?” he asked.

She did not look at him, and he took that as a bad sign. “I’m going to get you into the spaceport and you’re going to fly back to your daughter.”

Assuming he could dodge Imperial cruisers on the way out, which would be no mean feat.

“That isn’t what I mean, Aryn, and you know it. What are you going to do with her?”

Aryn did not answer, but the set of her jaw told Zeerid all he needed to know. He regretted mentioning the Twi’lek to Aryn. His honesty would cost Aryn her soul. Hunting the Sith who had murdered her Master was one thing. Killing the Twi’lek simply to hurt Malgus was something else. As he drove, he found himself hoping that the Twi’lek had left the spaceport.

Ahead, the port came into view. He scanned the sky, saw nothing. The control tower was still dark. The Empire had done a poor job of securing the port—they had far too few men guarding a location with many potential entry points—but Zeerid supposed they had limited troops and an entire planet to police. He was glad of it. Otherwise, his plan would have had no chance to succeed.

“I’ll circle wide and we’ll go up top. The key to this is speed.”

“Won’t they spot us on scanners?”

“The tower’s dark and I don’t see any hardware around. If they have orbiting surveillance on the port, well …”

He shrugged. If the Empire had orbiting surveillance or high-altitude surveillance droids watching the spaceport, he and Aryn would have problems.

“Speed is still the key,” he said. “Even if they see us, if we can get in and out fast enough, we can still pull it off.”

Aryn brushed her hair from her face. “Where did you see her? The Twi’lek?”

“There,” he said, pointing at the large transparisteel windows that opened onto the small-craft landing pad where he had spotted the shuttles, the drop ship, and the Twi’lek. Without bringing his macrobinoculars to bear, all he could see through the windows were indiscriminate gray shapes, presumably the shuttles. Aryn stared at the windows for a moment, then nodded to herself.

“Let’s go,” she said.

He killed the running lights on the speeder and took it up to five hundred meters, just above the top of the main center structure in the spaceport. Pushing the thrusters as hard as he could, he accelerated toward it.

His heart raced, not out of fear that they would be caught, but out of concern that Aryn would find the Twi’lek.

He swerved around one of the large-craft landing arms that reached up and over them. He hunched behind the controls, anticipating fire at any moment. But none came.

Below them perhaps a hundred meters, he could see the roof doors of the various small-craft landing pads. Aryn unstrapped herself, turned, and unlatched T7. The droid beeped.

Zeerid slowed the speeder but did not stop. If anyone had seen them approach, he wanted them to think that the speeder just kept on going.

“Ready?” he asked, and set the speeder’s unsophisticated autopilot to fly on another ten klicks before setting down.

“Ready.”

He released the stick, and he and Aryn quickly maneuvered onto the back of the speeder near T7. The wind pulled at them. He had trouble balancing but Aryn took him by the arm and steadied him. They sandwiched the droid between them, shared a look.

“Go,” he said.

She nodded and they stepped off the back of the speeder.

T7 whooped as they fell. The droid’s bulk did not allow them to control their descent; they were flipping end over end immediately. Zeerid’s field of vision veered rapidly, wildly, between the starry sky and the top of the spaceport below. His stomach crawled up his throat and he gritted his teeth to keep down the protein bar he’d eaten.

End over end they spun, T7 whistling with alarm, until Aryn seized them in her power, ended the spinning, and slowed their descent. The metal and duracrete of the spaceport’s roof rushed up to meet them. They had only a second, two. Aryn grunted, slowed them still further, further, until they touched down gently on the roof.

“Much better than last time,” Zeerid said, grinning, heart racing. “I could go my whole life without another fall and feel I’d missed nothing.”

Aryn did not so much as smile.

Zeerid gathered himself, took a blaster in each hand, and scanned the rooftop. He spotted a conduit access panel. “There.”

They ran over to it and he shot off the metal cover with his blaster, exposing a viper’s nest of wires. Ordinarily, a breached cover would have set off an alarm in the control tower, but the control tower was dark, unoccupied.

“Do it, Tee-seven.”

A panel in the droid’s abdomen opened and several thin, mechanical arms reached out. All ended in one kind of tool or another. T7 stuck the arms into the wires and began to work. Zeerid, still concerned that they may have been spotted, scanned the sky. He saw nothing.

T7 hummed while he worked.

“Come on, come on,” Zeerid said to the droid. To Aryn, he said, “You all right?”

She seemed oddly calm, or preoccupied.

“I’m fine,” she said.

The droid gave an excited series of whistles and whoops.

“He’s into the safety and fire suppression system,” Aryn said.

“Trigger it with a ten-second delay,” Zeerid said to the droid.

The droid beeped acquiescence.

Malgus bounded into the shuttle as it set down near the Temple.

“The Liston Spaceport,” he said to the pilot. “Quickly.”

“Yes, my lord.”

He tried again to raise Eleena on the comm but got no response. With each moment that passed his concern grew. He recognized that his emotions were driving him, controlling him, knew too the weakness it evidenced, but he could not let her come to harm, not by a Jedi.

Angral’s admonition bounced around his brain: Passions can lead to mistakes.

The pilot’s voice over the comm disrupted his train of thought.

“Have you heard the news from Alderaan, my lord?”

“What news?” Malgus said. His muscles bunched, as if in anticipation of a blow, or combat.

The blow came and hit him hard.

“There are rumors that an accord has been reached and that a peace treaty will be signed later today. In exchange for the turnover of certain outlying systems to Imperial control, Coruscant will be returned to the Republic.”

The pilot’s words pushed Angral’s words out of Malgus’s brain and ricocheted around in his head like blaster shots.

Outlying systems.

Coruscant returned to the Republic.

Peace.

The words applied heat to Malgus’s already bubbling emotions. He thought of Angral and Adraas sitting somewhere together, drinking wine and thinking that they had accomplished something by forcing the Republic to surrender some insignificant systems, when in fact they had poisoned the body of the Empire with the venom of peace.

“Peace!”

He paced the compartment, fists clenched, a wild animal tiring of its cage. His thoughts veered between Eleena on the one hand, Angral and Adraas on the other.

“Peace!”

He slammed his fist into the bulkhead, welcomed the pain.

They thought they could tame him, Angral and Adraas, thought they could use Eleena to domesticate him. And wasn’t that what she wanted, too? She, who sought to be his conscience. She, who asked him to put love before his duty to the Empire.

Malgus’s brewing anger boiled over into rage. He slammed his fists down on the worktable, denting it. He picked up a chair and threw it against the bulkhead, drove his fist through the small vidscreen built into the wall.

“Is everything all right, Darth Malgus?” the pilot called over the comm.

“Everything is fine,” Malgus said, though nothing was.

“Coming up on the spaceport now, my lord,” said the pilot.

Zeerid watched T7 work, anxious. His internal clock was running. They needed to keep moving.

Having jacked into the spaceport safety and fire suppression system, T7 was to send a false signal into the network, tricking the sensors into detecting a fuel gas leak in the landing bay where the Imperial shuttles had landed. An alarm indicating the leak of highly explosive fuel gas should trigger evacuation and venting procedures.

Or so Zeerid hoped.

The droid’s metal arms worked their magic. T7 cut a wire here, soldered there, reattached several cables here, then plugged into the interface he had rewired. His low whistles and chirps told Zeerid he was communicating with the spaceport’s network. After a short time, the droid retracted his metal arms into the cylinder of his body.

“Done?” Zeerid asked.

T7 beeped an affirmative.

Zeerid slapped him on the head and the droid protested with a low beep.

“Then let’s go,” Zeerid said.

He and Aryn sprinted across the roof toward the launch doors, with T7 wheeling after them. Zeerid counted down from ten in his head. Just as they reached the launch doors, just as he finished his countdown, sirens began to wail, audible even from the roof. A mechanical voice spoke over the facility’s speakers.

“A hazardous substance spill has occurred in landing bay sixteen-B. There is significant danger. Please move rapidly toward the nearest exit. A hazardous substance spill has occurred in landing bay sixteen-B …”

“If Tee-seven did his job,” Zeerid said, and the droid beeped indignantly, “the system will detect the fuel gas leak in the pad right below us. When it does, it should open the launch doors automatically to vent the gas—”

The roof vibrated as the launch doors unsealed and started slowly to slide open.

“Nicely done,” Zeerid said to the droid.

Ahead, Malgus saw the small spaceport the Empire had commandeered. It looked somewhat like an upside-down spider with a few too many legs, with large-craft landing arms sticking out from the bloated body and raised skyward. Launch doors over the various small-craft landing pads dotted the spider’s body. All were closed save one. Light spilled out into the sky through the open doors.

“There is a crowd near the port’s entrance,” the pilot said.

Malgus looked away from the open launch doors to see dozens of people pouring out of one of the entrances to the spaceport and milling about. Most were port workers in dungarees, citizens of Coruscant whom the Empire had pressed into service to do menial labor at the port, but he counted perhaps twenty Imperial soldiers, a dozen navy sailors, and a handful of other soldiers in half armor.

He pressed his face to the window to look more closely at the soldiers. He saw Captain Kerse, one of those he had picked to accompany Eleena.

But he did not see Eleena.

“Set down near the doors,” he said. “Quickly.”

The shuttle touched down with a heavy thud and Malgus hurried out. Upon seeing him, the Imperial soldiers snapped to attention and offered a salute. The workers backed away, fear in their eyes. Perhaps they’d heard of what he’d done at the hospital.

Malgus walked up to Captain Kerse, a powerfully built man whose bald head sat like a boulder upon his thick neck. Malgus towered over him.

“Darth Malgus, there is a fuel gas leak in the small-craft landing area. We evacuated while the safety system—”

“Where is Eleena?” Malgus asked.

“She is …” Kerse looked around the crowd. His skin turned blotchy. To one of his men, he said, “Where is the Twi’lek?”

“I saw her near the other shuttle, sir,” replied another of the soldiers. “I assumed she followed.”

Malgus grabbed Kerse by his plasteel breastplate and pulled him nose-to-nose.

“She was with you before the gas leak?”

Kerse’s head bobbed on his neck. “Yes. She—”

“Take me.”

“The fuel gas, my lord.”

“There is no fuel gas! It is a ruse to get to Eleena.”

To get to him.

“What?” Kerse said.

Malgus threw Kerse to the ground and strode past him for the port’s doors. Behind him, he heard Kerse call out for the other soldiers to follow. By the time the doors slid open before Malgus, he had six elite soldiers with blaster rifles in orbit around him.

“This way, my lord,” said Kerse, taking position beside him.

“Speed and precision,” Zeerid said, as much a reminder to himself as to Aryn. “Speed and precision.”

They watched the launch doors pull back to vent nonexistent fuel gas. The open doors revealed the landing pad below. Zeerid saw the two Imperial shuttles, the Dragonfly-class drop ship. The sirens continued to scream. The automated voice on the speakers continued to drone on.

Zeerid would hijack the drop ship. He’d have to dodge Imperial fighters and cruisers on his way out of Coruscant’s space. The shuttles would fly like the square heaps they were, and he’d get shot down as soon as he cleared the atmosphere. The dropship, at least, would give him a decent chance of getting clear.

He took Aryn by the bicep. “You can still come with me, Aryn.”

She looked him in the face and he saw once more, for the first time since seeing her again, the deep understanding that lived in her eyes.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You can,” he insisted. “You’ve honored your Master’s memory.”

“Time to go,” she said. “Speed and precision, you said.”

He bit back his reply and once more they wrapped T7 in their shared grasp and leapt into the void. Again Aryn’s power slowed their descent and cushioned their landing.

They hit the pad’s metal-and-duracrete floor, assaulted on all sides by the wail of the sirens and the relentless voice on the loudspeakers. Zeerid took quick stock of the situation.

He saw no one in the landing area and the only way out—a pair of double doors leading into a long corridor beyond—were open. Everyone must have evacuated.

Both of the Imperial shuttles had their landing ramps down. The drop ship did not and the canopy of its cockpit was dimmed, as opaque as dirty water.

“Tee-seven, I need you to crack open that Dragonfly. Right now.”

The droid beeped agreement and wheeled toward the drop ship’s rear door. Zeerid looked to Aryn and gave it another try.

“Reconsider, Aryn.” He stood directly before her, forcing her to see him, to hear him. “Come with me. Please.” He smiled, trying to make light. “We’ll start a farm on Dantooine, just like I said.”

She smiled, seemingly amused by the thought, and he was pleased to see it. “I can’t, Zeerid. You’ll make a good farmer, though. I’m going to find the Twi’lek and—”

She stopped in mid-sentence, her eyes fixed on something over Zeerid’s shoulder.

He whirled around to see the Twi’lek descending the near shuttle’s landing ramp, a rucksack thrown over her shoulder. Two Imperial soldiers in plasteel breastplates flanked her to either side. Each had a blaster rifle slung over his shoulder. All three wore breathing masks. They had not left their ship when the alarm sounded, had instead just donned masks. Perhaps there was something on the shuttle they were unwilling to leave unguarded. Everyone froze, and for a moment no one moved.

Then all at once everyone moved.

The Twi’lek dropped her rucksack, her eyes wide behind the lens of her mask, and went for her blasters. The soldiers cursed in muffled tones, unslung their rifles, and tried to bring them to bear.

Aryn ignited her lightsaber.

Zeerid, one of his blasters still in hand, fired at the soldier on the right. Two shots screamed into the soldier’s chest. Armor ablated in a puff of smoke and the force of the impact knocked the man from the ramp, turned his mask sideways on his face. He hit the deck and lay there, scrabbling for cover. Zeerid fired again, and a hit to the man’s midsection made him go still.

The Twi’lek got her blasters clear and fired two, four, six shots at Zeerid. Aryn slid before him and her blade deflected all of the shots, two of them back at the other soldier, which opened small holes in the soldier’s mask. He fell forward onto the ramp, dead.

“Get out of here, Zeerid,” Aryn said over her shoulder. She started walking toward the shuttle, toward the Twi’lek.

“Aryn,” Zeerid called, but she did not hear him. He imagined she heard only the voice of her dead Master now.

Zeerid realized it was no longer his fight. He holstered his blaster and watched. There was nothing else he could do.

Aryn strode toward the shuttle while the Twi’lek backed up the landing ramp, taking aim. Before the Twi’lek could fire, Aryn gestured with her left hand, and both of the blasters flew from the Twi’lek’s hands and landed at Aryn’s feet. The Twi’lek mouthed something lost in the muffle of her mask. Aryn stepped over and past the blasters.

The Twi’lek, wide-eyed, turned to flee into the shuttle’s compartment. Again, Aryn gestured and a blast of power went forth from her, slammed into the Twi’lek’s back, and drove her hard into the bulkhead. She collapsed within the shuttle’s compartment, only her feet sticking out far enough for Zeerid to see.

Aryn deactivated her blade. She stopped for a moment and lowered her head, thinking.

Zeerid let himself hope, almost called her name again.

But then she raised her head and walked for the landing ramp, stepping over the corpse of the soldier.

Zeerid hung his head for a moment, saddened. It was her decision, her fight. He gathered himself, turned, and shouted at T7.

“Get that Dragonfly open, Tee-seven. It’s time to go.”

Vrath awoke to the sound of blasterfire, the high-pitched whine of sirens, and the voice on the port’s speaker system saying something about a fuel leak. He’d taken a sleeptab to put him out and it took a few moments for his head to clear. He’d fallen asleep in the cockpit. He checked his chrono. Almost dawn, or just after. He’d been out the better part of the night.

Something thudded into Razor’s hull, a blaster shot.

“What in the—”

He undimmed the cockpit’s transparisteel canopy and looked out on the landing pad. Razor’s angle offered him a very small field of vision so he could see little, merely part of one of the Imperial shuttles docked near him. Strangely, he saw no workers, no Imperial soldiers, no droids.

He heard a few more blaster shots from behind the ship. He had no idea what was going on and had no desire to find out. He did not yet have permission to leave Coruscant, but he would not leave his ship in dock in the midst of a firefight or whatever was happening out there. He figured he’d just take Razor into the air and stay in-atmosphere. He put the dull monotone of the spaceport’s automated announcement on his in-ship comm.

“A hazardous substance spill has occurred in landing bay sixteen-B. There is significant danger. Please move rapidly toward the nearest exit. A hazardous substance spill …”

On the wall near him, written in large black letters, were the words: LANDING BAY 16-B.

He double-checked to ensure Razor was still sealed tight. It wasn’t. The rear door was open. He cursed. He swore he’d closed it. He hit the button to close it but it still flashed as unsealed and open. Something was keeping it open, or there was a malfunction in the circuit.

He would have to close it with the rear switch or cargo would fall out as he flew. He started Razor’s auto-launch sequence, rose, and headed for the rear of the ship. Halfway there, he realized he’d left his blaster and blades in the cockpit. He’d stripped them off when he’d grabbed some shuteye.

No matter. He wouldn’t need them.

Aryn felt light-headed as she walked up the shuttle’s landing ramp. She held her lightsaber hilt in her hand, held anger in her heart.

She slowed when the Twi’lek stirred, groaned, and turned over to watch her approach.

Aryn held up her free hand and almost said, I won’t hurt you, but walled off the words before they escaped her mouth.

She did not want to lie.

The woman scrabbled backward crabwise, eyes showing no fear, taking Aryn in, until she bumped into the bulkhead. She slid up the wall so that she was standing. Aryn stopped two paces from her. They regarded each other across the limitless gulf of their respective understandings.

Outside, the sirens howled. Aryn could no longer see Zeerid. More important, he could no longer see her.

The Twi’lek’s eyes fell to Aryn’s lightsaber hilt. Aryn felt no fear radiating from the woman, just a soft, profound sadness.

“You have come to kill me.”

Aryn did not deny it. Her mouth was dry. She belted her own lightsaber, took Master Zallow’s in hand.

“I see your anger,” the Twi’lek said.

Aryn thought of Master Zallow and hardened her resolve. “You don’t know me, woman. Do not pretend that you do.”

She ignited Master Zallow’s lightsaber. The Twi’lek’s eyes widened and a flash of fear cracked her calm façade.

“I don’t,” the Twi’lek acknowledged. “But I know anger when I see it. I know it quite well.”

A sad smile illuminated her face, overcoming the fear in her expression. She was thinking of something or someone other than Aryn and the sadness she radiated increased, sharpened.

“Anger is just pain renamed,” she said. “This I know well, too. And sometimes … the pain runs too deep. Pain drives you, yes?”

Aryn had expected resistance, a fight, a protest, something. Instead, the Twi’lek seemed … resigned.

“You will kill me, Jedi? Because of Darth Malgus? Something he did?”

Hearing Malgus’s name uttered stoked the heat of Aryn’s anger. “He hurt someone I loved.”

The Twi’lek nodded, gave a single, short outburst that might have been a pained laugh. “He hurts even those he himself loves.” She smiled, and her soft voice sounded like rainfall. “These men and their wars. His name is Veradun, Jedi. And he would kill me if he knew I told you. But names are important.”

Aryn had to work to keep hold of her anger. The Twi’lek seemed so … fragile, so hurt. “I don’t care what his name is. You were there with him. In the attack on the Temple. I saw it.”

“The Temple. Ah.” She nodded. “Yes, I was with him. I love him. I fight at his side. You would do the same.”

Aryn could not deny it. She would have done the same; she had done the same.

The anger she’d carried since feeling Master Zallow’s death began to shrink, to drain out of her in the face of the Twi’lek’s pain and sadness, in the realization that her own pain was not the moral center of the universe. The loss of her anger startled her. Since his death, she had been nothing but anger. Without it, she felt empty.

Pain by another name, the Twi’lek had said. Indeed.

“Please be quick,” the Twi’lek said. “A clean death, yes?”

The words sounded not so much like a challenge as a request.

“What is your name?” Aryn asked.

“Eleena,” the Twi’lek said.

Aryn stepped toward her. Eleena’s eyes went to Aryn’s blade but she did not shrink from Aryn’s approach. She stared into Aryn’s eyes and Aryn into hers, each measuring the other’s pain, the other’s loss.

“Names are important,” Aryn said. She flipped her grip on her dead Master’s lightsaber, deactivated the blade, and slammed the pommel against Eleena’s temple. The Twi’lek collapsed without a sound.

“And I won’t kill you, Eleena.”

In so many ways, Eleena was already dead. Aryn pitied her.

She still felt compelled to avenge Master Zallow, but she could not murder Eleena to make Malgus suffer. Master Zallow would never have countenanced it. Aryn could not avenge him by betraying what he stood for. Perhaps he had failed. Perhaps the Order had failed. But both had failed nobly. There was something to that.

She remembered the dream she’d had of Master Zallow, of him standing on the Temple’s ruins silently mouthing words at her that she could not then understand.

She understood them now.

“Be true to yourself,” he had said.

Hadn’t Zeerid been trying to tell her the same thing all along?

“I am sorry, my lord,” Kerse said as they hurried through the spaceport. “I assumed they had evacuated, and we had not yet had a chance to take a head count—”

“Save your excuses, Kerse,” Malgus said and resisted the urge to cut the man in two.

The long main corridor within the port felt kilometers long. Counters lined it, businesses, even vendor carts, all of them abandoned. Vidscreens sat dark on the walls of lounges and clubs.

Smaller corridors branched off the main one, leading to commercial passenger pads, to lifts that led to the large craft staging areas, and to the small-craft pads.

“Move,” Malgus said to them, and they did. To Kerse, he said, “Show me where you saw her last.”

Kerse pointed to a side corridor far ahead, near the end of the main corridor. “It’s there, my lord. Pad 16-B. On the left.”

Malgus thought 16-B was close to the launch doors he had seen open upon his arrival at the spaceport. He augmented his speed with the Force and blazed along the hall, leaving the soldiers far behind. The walls, signs, and floor were a blur to him as he sped toward the landing pad, toward Eleena.

T7 had the rear hatch open on the Dragonfly and was still plugged into the control panel. Zeerid spent a few long moments turning his head from the Dragonfly to the Imperial shuttle where Aryn had disappeared with the Twi’lek, then back again. He finally started to head for the Dragonfly, but Aryn’s voice pulled him around.

“Zeerid!”

He turned to see Aryn emerge from the shuttle, carrying the still body of the Twi’lek in her arms. Zeerid could not tell whether the Twi’lek was dead or alive. He walked toward Aryn slowly, his eyes not on the Twi’lek but on Aryn.

“Do I want to know?”

He dreaded the answer.

“I didn’t kill her, Zeerid. It was important to me that you knew that.”

Zeerid let himself breathe. “I’m glad, Aryn. Then you’ll come with me, now?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Tee-seven has the Dragonfly opened.”

“I can’t, Zeerid, but I’m … all right now. Do you understand?”

“I don’t, no.”

Aryn opened her mouth to speak, stopped, and cocked her head, as if she’d heard something from far off.

“He’s coming,” she said.

The hairs on the back of Zeerid’s neck rose. “Who’s coming? Malgus?”

Aryn knelt and laid the Twi’lek down as gently as she might a newborn child.

The sirens suddenly stopped wailing, the sound cut off as if by a razor. The unexpected silence felt ominous. Zeerid eyed the open double doors of the landing pad. A dark corridor stretched beyond them.

Aryn rose, closed her eyes, inhaled.

“Go, Zeerid,” she said.

“I’m not leaving,” Zeerid said, and drew his other blaster. He ran his tongue over lips gone dry.

She opened her eyes and grabbed him with her gaze. “You are leaving and you’re leaving now, Z-man. Think of your daughter. Go right now. Go … be a farmer.”

She smiled and pushed him away. He stared into her face, knowing she was right.

He could not make Arra an orphan, not even for Aryn. Still, he was unwilling to leave her. He stepped closer to her, and her expression softened. She reached up and touched his face.

“Go.”

Driven by nothing more than impulse, he grabbed her by the shoulders and kissed her full on the mouth. She did not resist, even returned it. He held her away from him at arm’s length.

“You are a fool, Aryn Leneer,” he said.

“Maybe.”

He turned and headed for the Dragonfly. The feel of her lips lingered on his, a ghost of softness he hoped would haunt him forever. He only wished he had kissed her longer.

He imagined her eyes on him and he dared not look back for fear of losing his will to leave. He thought of the holo of Arra he used to keep on Fatman, her smile, her laugh, thought of his promise to Nat that he would not take unnecessary chances.

Hard as it was, he kept his back turned to Aryn Leneer.

“Get aboard, Tee-seven,” he said as he walked up the landing ramp.

T7 beeped a sad negative.

“You’re not coming?”

Again, a sad negative.

Zeerid patted the droid on his head. “You are a brave one. Thank you for your help. Take care of Aryn.”

T7 whistled an affirmative, followed that with a somber farewell, and wheeled away from the Dragonfly.

The ship’s engines were already winding up. T7 must have started the launch sequence.

Vrath picked his way through Razor’s narrow corridors until he reached the rear compartment, which he’d converted from troop carrier to cargo hold. Stacked crates magnetically sealed to the deck dotted the hold, forming a rats’ maze. He hurried through it to the rear door. The firefight outside seemed to have abated, so he allowed himself to relax.

Zeerid watched T7 move away. He hit the control panel to close the rear door, and it began to rise. He waited until the latches sealed. Still thinking of Aryn, he put his hand on the cold metal of the door.

The Dragonfly lurched as it rose on its thrusters. He needed to get to the cockpit. He could not have the autopilot flying the ship when the Imperials started shooting.

He hurried through the converted cargo bay, made into a labyrinth by the many storage crates that dotted it. Rounding a corner, he nearly bumped into another man.

It took a moment for recognition to dawn—the small frame, the neatly parted dark hair, the deep sockets with their dead eyes, the thin mouth.

It was the man from Karson’s Park.

It was the man who had betrayed Zeerid and Aryn to the Sith.

It was the man who knew about Arra and Nat.

“You!” Vrath Xizor said.

“Me,” Zeerid affirmed.

Aryn watched the Dragonfly lift off, missing Zeerid already. She tried to summon the rage that had brought her to Coruscant to face Malgus, but she no longer felt the same heat. She reached into her pocket, found the bead from the Nautolan bracelet, held it between forefinger and thumb.

She would face Malgus. She had to. But she would face him as her Master would have wished, with calmness in her heart.

She stood over Eleena’s body and waited. Malgus’s presence pressed against her as he drew nearer. His anger went before him like a storm.

Malgus rushed through the large double doors and into the landing bay. Vrath Xizor’s ship, Razor, rose on its thrusters toward the open roof doors. Two Imperial shuttles sat idle on the landing pad.

“Eleena!” he shouted, hating himself for his vulnerability but unable to contain the shout.

He reached out with the Force as Razor continued its rise, tried to take it in his mental grasp. Its ascent slowed. He held forth both of his arms, made claws of his hands, and shouted with frustration as he sought to hold back the power of the ship’s thrusters.

He felt a tightness in his mind, the string of his power being drawn taut, stretching, stretching. He would not release the ship. Its thrusters began to whine. He held it, teeth gritted, sweat soaking his body, his breath a dry rattle through his respirator.

And then the string snapped and the ship flew free, lifting clear of the roof doors.

He roared his rage as the ship’s engines fired and it headed for the heavens. Seething, he activated his wrist chrono.

“Jard, the spicerunner’s drop ship has just left the Liston Spaceport. Eleena may be aboard. Secure it with a tractor beam and detain everyone aboard—”

The hum of an activating lightsaber cut off his words. Another followed it. He looked across the landing pad and saw Aryn Leneer, a lightsaber in each hand, standing over the body of Eleena.

The pure hate and raw rage pouring off Malgus struck Aryn like a physical blow. She braced herself against it as she might a hailstorm. She realized how strongly he felt for the Twi’lek, how he sublimated all of his emotion for her into hate and rage.

He ignited his lightsaber and his eyes and the plates of his armor reflected its red glow. He reached a hand behind him, made a sharp, cutting gesture, and the doors to the hangar slammed closed. Another gesture and the emergency locks turned into place.

“Just us,” he said, his voice as rough as a rasp. He had not taken his eyes from Eleena.

Aryn indicated the Twi’lek. “She is alive, Sith. And I know your feelings for her.”

“You know nothing,” Malgus said, and took a slow step toward her.

“Let the drop ship go. Give the order, or I will kill her.”

“You lie.”

Aryn placed Master Zallow’s blade at Eleena’s neck.

Raw emotion surged out of Malgus, a gust of rage.

“I promise you I will do it,” Aryn said.

Malgus’s free hand clenched into a fist. “If you have harmed her permanently, I will see that you suffer. I promise you that.”

Aryn understood less and less about Malgus with each word he spoke. Still, she maintained her bluff. “Give the order, Malgus!”

Malgus glared at her, snarled, spoke into his comlink. “Jard, belay my previous order. The drop ship is to be allowed to leave the system.”

“My lord?”

“Do it, Jard!”

“Yes, my lord.”

Malgus walked toward Aryn, the slow movements of a hunter that smelled prey.

“And now, Jedi? You cannot leave here.”

“I don’t want to leave, Malgus.”

His eyes smiled. “No. You want to kill me. Need to, yes? Because of your master?”

The feelings the words mined out of the dark parts of her soul felt uncomfortably close to the rage flowing from Malgus. A day earlier and her feelings might have mirrored his. That they didn’t she owed to Eleena.

And Zeerid.

And Master Zallow.

“I wanted to hurt you, Sith. Hurt you by hurting her. But I won’t add to her pain. She suffers enough already.”

Malgus stopped in his advance. His eyes went to the Twi’lek, and to her surprise, Aryn felt something akin to pity radiate from him, just a flash, quickly washed away by hate.

“Enough words,” he said, returning his gaze to Aryn. “Make your attempt, Aryn Leneer. I am here.”

He discarded his cape, stood up straight, and saluted her with his lightsaber.

She hefted her lightsaber, Master Zallow’s lightsaber, felt the weight of both in her hands. She fell into the lines of the Force, at peace, calm.

Still heart. Still mind.

She had trained in dual lightsaber combat when she had been a Padawan, but she rarely fought with two blades in a genuine combat situation. She would now, here, today. She thought it fitting that she do so.

She did not wait for Malgus. She bounded across the hangar, her speed augmented by the Force, the lines of her blades leaving a blur of light in their wake. Malgus held his ground, blade ready.

She stabbed low with her primary blade, high with her secondary. Malgus leapt over both, flipped, landed behind her, and crosscut for her neck.

She ducked under it while spinning into a reverse leg sweep that caught his feet and tripped him. When he hit the ground, she rose, turned, raised both blades, and drove them down in a parallel overhand slash. Malgus somersaulted backward, and Aryn’s blades cut gashes in the floor of the hangar. Sparks flew.

Malgus bounced up from the somersault and loosed a telekinetic blast that lifted Aryn from her feet and blew her across the hangar. She slammed into one of the shuttle’s bulkheads, but used the Force to cushion the blow so that it did no harm. Bouncing off the cool metal, she charged Malgus. As she ran, she cast first her own lightsaber at Malgus, then Master Zallow’s, using the Force to guide both.

The attack caught Malgus unprepared, and Aryn’s blade bit into his armor. Sparks flew and Malgus winced, snarled with pain. He ducked under Master Zallow’s blade, and Aryn recalled both to her hands as she ran. The moment she had them, she cast them both at Malgus again.

But this time he was ready. Augmenting his speed with the Force, he flipped high into the air and out of the way of both. She anticipated his movement, however, bounded forward to cut him off and landed a flying kick in his chest. He used the Force to diminish the blow’s impact but it drove him back a step and she heard his breath hitch through the sound of his respirator.

He recovered, roared, raised his blade high to cut her in two, and brought it down. But she had already summoned her own blade back to her hand and interposed it in a parry.

Malgus’s strength drove her to her knees. She held out her other hand and pulled Master Zallow’s blade to her hand, stabbed for his stomach with it.

Malgus sidestepped the stab, though it skinned his armor and showered sparks. He pushed her blade to the side with his own and kicked her in the face. The strength behind the blow blew through her defenses, caused her to see stars, loosed teeth, and sent her head over heels backward. She landed on her knees, stunned, seeing double.

She rose, swayed on her feet, seeing four blades in her hands rather than two. Something was in her mouth and she spat it out—a tooth, the root forked and bloody.

“You are a child to hate,” Malgus said, his tone incongruously soft as he stalked toward her. “Your anger barely smolders. You are a fraction of what you could be.”

She needed time to recover her senses, some distance from Malgus. She backflipped high into the air and landed atop the Imperial shuttle. Her mind was beginning to clear.

“Your Master was also misguided. He thought to defeat me with calm, but failed. You thought to defeat me with anger, but carry too little, despite your loss.”

Aryn’s vision began to clear. She felt more herself.

“Be grateful for that, Jedi. Anger exacts its own price.”

Again she felt the odd sense of sympathy or pity adulterating the otherwise pure hate flowing from Malgus. His eyes went to Eleena, her body crumpled on the landing pad’s floor.

As Aryn prepared to leap at Malgus, he held forth a hand, almost casually, and lightning sizzled through the space between them. Aryn interposed her lightsabers, but the power in the lightning exceeded anything she had felt from Malgus before. It blasted through her defenses and both lightsabers flew from her hands. The lightning seized her, lifted her up, and threw her from the top of the shuttle.

As she flew toward the deck, she smelled burning flesh, heard screaming, realized that it was her flesh, her screams. She hit the ground hard and her head bounced off the ground. Sparks erupted in her brain, pain, and everything went dark.

Zeerid’s military training responded faster than his thoughts. He made a knife of his right hand and drove it at the smaller man’s throat. But Vrath, too, must have been trained. A sweeping side block with his left hand threw Zeerid’s arm out wide, then Vrath seized the arm by the wrist, shifted his feet to get him closer to Zeerid, and rotated into a hip toss. Zeerid saw it coming, rode with the throw, hit the ground in a roll, and came up with his E-9 drawn and aimed.

A kick from Vrath sent the blaster flying and it discharged into the bulkhead. Vrath followed the side kick into a spinning back kick but Zeerid anticipated it, took the blow to the side to capture the leg, stood, and drove his fist into the man’s nose.

Bone crunched and blood exploded outward.

Vrath flailed wildly with his left hand, driving his straightened fingers into Zeerid’s throat, a blow that would have killed him if the man had been able to put more into it. As it was, the blow caused Zeerid to release Vrath’s leg and recoil.

Zeerid reached behind his back for his second blaster and started to pull it loose. But Vrath charged him before Zeerid could bring it to bear, drove Zeerid up against one of the cargo crates. The sharp point of the crate’s corner pressed into Zeerid’s back, and he grunted at the pain. Vrath’s hand snaked around Zeerid’s, caught him by the wrist, levered it, and slammed it against the crate. The second blaster fell to the floor and the man kicked it away.

Zeerid grunted with effort and shoved Vrath away from him.

They regarded each other from three paces, both gasping. Vrath’s eyes watered. Blood poured out of his nose. Zeerid had trouble breathing through his damaged trachea.

“Guess it had to come to this,” the man said, his voice made nasal by his broken nose. “Didn’t it, Zeerid Korr?”

He covered first one nostril, then the other, blowing out blood and snot in turn.

“I’m Vrath, by the way. Vrath Xizor.”

Zeerid barely heard him. He took the time Vrath had used to clear his nose to recover his own breath and eye the floor for either blaster. Both weapons had disappeared under crates during the scrum.

Vrath felt the damage to his nose with a two-finger pincer. “What are you? Harriers? Commandos?”

Zeerid’s breathing cleared and the two men began to circle.

“Havoc Squadron,” Zeerid said, sizing up the smaller man.

“First in,” Vrath said, reciting one of the squad’s mottos.

“You?” Zeerid asked.

“Imperial sniper corps.”

“A skulker,” Zeerid said.

Vrath lost his smile at the insult. “I killed over fifty men in a Republic uniform, Korr. You’ll be just another number to me.”

“We’ll see,” Zeerid said, as calm as the quiet moments before a thunderstorm.

Vrath feinted, drawing a response from Zeerid. Vrath grinned, his teeth bloody with runoff from his nose.

“Jumpy, yeah?”

Zeerid watched for an opening as they circled. When he saw one, he feinted high and lunged in low, thinking to take Vrath down where Zeerid’s size would give him the advantage. Vrath sprawled to avoid the takedown, but Zeerid used his weight to drive him up against the bulkhead. Vrath threw a short elbow, grazing Zeerid’s head, another, catching him on the cheek.

Grunting, Zeerid pushed himself away from the smaller man to get some room to work. When he had it, still holding Vrath’s arms, he put a knee into his abdomen, another, another. Vrath grunted, turned his body to keep his hips in the way.

Vrath’s fingers slid up Zeerid’s shoulder to his face, toward his eyes. Zeerid shook his head but Vrath’s fingers found the sockets, started to burrow.

Zeerid shoved him away and backed off, blinking, covering his retreat with a front kick.

Vrath lunged at him, seized him around the thighs, lifted him off the ground, and threw him back down. Zeerid’s head hit the deck hard and he saw stars. Vrath squirmed atop him, fast, elusive, his arms and legs everywhere, wrapping Zeerid up. Soon he had his body atop Zeerid. Elbows and fists poured down, one after another. Zeerid took a blow to the cheek, the temple, another to the cheek, the top of his head. The last opened him up and blood ran warm and slick down his pate, smeared his face, darkened Vrath’s elbow.

Desperate, he reached for Vrath’s arms but the man was too fast and the blood made his skin slick, more difficult to get a grip. Zeerid wrapped his arms around Vrath’s back, pulled him close to disallow him the room he needed to ply his elbows.

And then Vrath made a mistake. Trying to pull himself back up to loose more elbows, he put his face above Zeerid’s with only a few centimeters between them. Zeerid threw his head up and slammed his brow into Vrath’s already broken nose.

Vrath cried out in pain, instinctively recoiled. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Zeerid seized one of Vrath’s wrists, rolled him over, threw his legs on either side of Vrath’s shoulder, extended Vrath’s arm, then extended his own body to lever the arm at the elbow.

Vrath screamed as the hyperextension turned into an audible break. The arm went loose in Zeerid’s grasp, the joint shattered.

He released Vrath’s elbow, rolled, and bounded to his feet. Vrath, his face twisted in pain, crawled for where the E-9 had disappeared under a crate. Zeerid cut him off, picked him off the floor, and shoved him hard toward the bulkhead. Vrath careered into the metal wall, off kilter. He tried to catch himself with his broken arm but it just hung limp from the joint and he caught the side of his head flush. His eyes rolled and he went down in a heap.

Zeerid jumped atop him, punched him square in the eye, thinking he was only stunned, but the man stayed limp beneath him. Blood dripped from Zeerid’s head onto Vrath’s face.

Gasping, Zeerid checked Vrath’s pulse. Still alive.

All at once the adrenaline that had fueled him during the combat drained out of him. His entire body ached. His breath came ragged and he had no strength. Stabs of pain in his face and head echoed each beat of his heart. The entire fight had taken maybe forty seconds. He felt as if he’d been beaten for hours.

He stared down at Vrath, wondering what to do with him. He searched the man’s pants, jacket, coat. He found several IDs and other personal items. He also found flex binders. He flipped Vrath over and pulled his arms behind him.

He felt the bones in the broken arm grind together and Vrath groaned.

“Sorry,” Zeerid said. There was nothing he could do about the arm.

Once he had the man’s arms secured, he slung him over his shoulders and carried him on shaky legs through the ship to the cockpit. A Dragonfly had no brig and there was no way Zeerid was letting Vrath out of his sight.

By the time he reached the cockpit, the ship had cleared the spaceport and angled upward for the atmosphere. Zeerid studied the instrumentation. His face was swelling and his eye was damaged from Vrath’s fingers so he had to squint. He took off his shirt and used it to apply pressure to his head wound. He didn’t want to bleed all over the controls.

A weapons belt with a GH-22 blaster and several knives lay on the pilot’s seat. Vrath’s weapons, presumably. Zeerid belted them on and sat.

He’d never flown a Dragonfly-class drop ship before, but he could fly any kniffing thing that tramped the stars. He’d need to get past the Imperial blockade and get into a hyperspace lane.

“Time to dance between the raindrops,” he said, and disengaged the autopilot.

He looked down out of the canopy at the spaceport far below, wondering what had happened with Aryn. He’d have paid a lot of credits to have her beside him right then.

Aryn opened her eyes. Malgus stood over her, his bloodshot eyes fixed on her face. He held the Twi’lek, still unconscious, in his arms. He also held both of Aryn’s lightsabers. His own lightsaber hilt hung from his belt.

He had not killed her. She had no idea why.

He stared down at her and she felt his ambivalence. He was struggling with something.

“Take them and go,” he said, and dropped both of her lightsabers. They hit the floor in a clatter. “Take the shuttle. I will ensure you have safe passage away from Coruscant.”

She did not move. The lightsabers were centimeters from her hand.

His eyes narrowed. “Unless your need to avenge your Master requires you to die, you should do as I command, Jedi.”

She pushed herself up with one hand, took both of the lightsabers in the other. The metal was cool in her palm. “Why?”

“Because you spared her,” he said, his voice soft behind the respirator. “Were our situations reversed, I would not have done so. Because your presence made me aware of something I should have known long ago.”

Aryn rose, still cautious, and clipped the lightsabers to her belt.

“We will be leaving Coruscant, you know,” he said, almost sadly. “The Empire, I mean. All that remains is to sign the treaty. Then we will have peace. Does that please you?”

“Please me?” She still did not understand. She inventoried her injuries. Lots of bruises and lacerations. Nothing broken. She inventoried her soul. Nothing broken there, either.

She looked into Malgus’s face. She did not know what to say. “Perhaps we will meet again, under other circumstances.”

“If we meet again, Aryn Leneer,” Malgus said. “I will kill you as I did your Master. Do not mistake my actions for mercy. I am repaying a debt. When you leave here, it is paid.”

Aryn licked her lips, stared him in the face, and nodded.

“Do you know your own Order betrayed you, Jedi?” he said. “They informed us that you might be coming here.”

Aryn was not surprised, but the betrayal still hurt.

“I no longer belong to an Order,” she said, her throat tight.

He laughed, the sound like a hacking cough. “Then we have more in common than anger,” he said. “Now, go.”

She did not understand and resigned herself to never understanding. She turned, still disbelieving, and headed for the shuttle. T7 emerged from hiding near the ship and beeped a question. She had no answer. Together, they boarded the shuttle. When she reached the cockpit and sat, she realized that she was shaking.

“Still heart, still mind,” she said, and felt calmer.

Exhaling, she engaged the thrusters. She had no idea where she would go.

As the blue of Coruscant’s sky gave way to the black of space, Zeerid started to sweat. He eyed the sensors for Imperial ships. They would have detected him by now. A cruiser showed on his screen, maybe Valor, maybe another one. He wheeled the drop ship away from it, accelerated for the nearest hyperlane. He just wanted to jump somewhere, anywhere.

A beep from the panel drew his attention. It took him a moment to realize it was a hail. It took him another moment to figure out how to operate it. He slapped the button, opening the channel. If nothing else, he’d curse out the Imperials before they shot him down.

“Drop ship Razor, you are cleared to leave.”

Zeerid assumed it had to be a ruse, a bad joke. But he saw nothing on the scanner, and the cruiser did not move to interdict.

He flew for the hyperlane. He let the navicomp calculate a course and tried to believe his luck. Vrath’s voice startled him.

“Not bad, Commando. I’m impressed.”

“Impressing you isn’t my concern, skulker.”

Vrath chuckled, but it turned into a cough and a wince. “There are pain pills in the medbay. You mind?”

“Later,” Zeerid said.

“It hurts pretty bad, marine.”

“Good.”

“It’s just business, Korr.”

Zeerid thought of Arra, Nat, Aryn. “Right. Business.”

He’d had all he could take of business.

“We’re done as far as I’m concerned,” Vrath said. “I was hired to stop that engspice from getting to Coruscant. I did that. Which means we’re done. I report back and we never see each other again. I’d like my ship back, though.”

Zeerid resisted the urge to punch a restrained man. He was behaving as if they’d just had a friendly sparring match, that they’d go out for drinks later.

“The Exchange probably won’t be as forgiving though, eh?” Vrath said. “I hear they don’t tolerate lost shipments. You and your family are going to have a hard row there.”

Vrath’s words made Zeerid’s breath hitch. Hearing them changed everything. His knuckles turned white on the stick as options played out in his mind. Adrenaline filled him to his eyes. He stared straight out the cockpit window.

“They don’t know I have a family.”

“Not yet,” Vrath said. “But they will. They always do—”

Too late Vrath seemed to realize he’d stepped on a mine. He tried to chuckle it away but Zeerid heard the fear behind the laughter.

“Or maybe they won’t. I’m just talking here.”

“You talk too much,” Zeerid said while he hardened his expression, hardened his mind. The alchemy of necessity distilled his list of options down to one.

He put himself on autopilot and stood.

“On your feet, Vrath.”

When the man did not stand right off, Zeerid pulled him roughly to his feet. Vrath groaned with pain.

“Easy there, marine. Pain meds now, yeah?”

He sounded doubtful.

“Walk,” Zeerid said.

“To where?”

Zeerid stuck the GH-22 in his back. “Move.”

Reluctantly, Vrath let Zeerid push him through the corridors of the ship. The man moved slowly, as if he knew Zeerid’s intent, and Zeerid had to push him along. A few turns, a few corridors, and Zeerid saw an air lock door. He steered Vrath to it, stopped before it.

“Turn around.”

Vrath did. His face was blotchy, but whether from the beating or from fear Zeerid could not tell.

“This is about your daughter, yeah? Well, I already told my people, Korr. They already know.”

Zeerid heard the high pitch of a lie in Vrath’s tone. “A lie. You already told me you didn’t. You said, ‘Not yet.’ ”

He moved Vrath out of the way with the blaster and activated the internal doors on the air lock. They unsealed and slid open with a hiss. A red light set into the ceiling lit up and began to spin.

Zeerid showed him the blaster. “You want this?” He nodded at the air lock. “Or that?”

Vrath looked at the weapon, the air lock, swallowed hard.

“It doesn’t have to go this way, Korr. I won’t tell anyone about you or your family. You can even keep the ship.”

“I can’t take that chance.”

Vrath tried to smile, but it looked like a death grimace. “Come on, Korr. If I say I won’t talk, I won’t talk. I’m nothing if not a man of my word.”

Zeerid thought of the promise he’d made to Nat, that he’d take no unnecessary chances. “Yeah. Me, too.”

Desperation crept into Vrath’s voice. He shifted on his feet. “You’ll have to bear this, Korr. This will make you a murderer. Kill a man with his own weapon. You want that weight?”

Zeerid knew what he was doing. Or at least he thought so. “I can carry it. And I don’t need a lecture about murder from a skulker.”

Fear made Vrath’s eyes water. “That was war, Korr. Think about it. Think hard.”

“I have. Pick, or I pick for you. Just another number, right?”

Vrath stared into Zeerid’s face. Maybe he saw the blankness, the resolve. “To hell with you, Korr. To hell with you.”

Zeerid pushed him into the air lock.

“I could have killed her, Korr. Both of them. Back at the park on Vulta. You know I could have. But I didn’t.”

“No,” Zeerid said. “You didn’t.”

He activated the seal and the door started to close.

“I wish I had killed them now! I wish I had!”

Zeerid stopped the door, a sudden flash of anger rekindling his strength. He reached into the air lock and grabbed Vrath by the shirt, shook him. “If you had harmed her, this would be coming to you with a sharp blade and a slow touch. You hear me, skulker? Do you?”

He kicked Vrath in the stomach, doubling the man over with the blow. While Vrath gasped for breath, Zeerid reactivated the door and it sealed shut. Vrath stared at him through the tiny transparisteel window, all wild eyes, snarls, and teeth.

Zeerid hit the button to evacuate the air lock. The warning alarm wailed.

He gave one more glance at Vrath, saw the fear there, then he turned and walked back toward the cockpit.

Murderer.

That’s what he was.

The siren stopped and he felt a soft rumble as the external air lock door opened.

A pit opened in his stomach.

Emotion, nameless and raw, caused his eyes to water. He wiped them clear.

He was a murderer, and he felt heavy already.

But he would carry it—for Nat, for Arra. He expected he’d carry it the rest of his life and the weight would never diminish. He’d killed men before, but not like that, not like he’d killed Vrath.

For the first time, he understood, really understood, why Aryn had returned to Coruscant.

He prayed to gods he did not believe in that she reconsidered what she had come to do. She felt things too keenly to feel what he felt. She could never carry it. It would destroy her. Better she should die.

All of a sudden, he just wanted to sleep.

He overrode the navicomp’s random course and plugged in the coordinates to Vulta. His hands shook the whole time.

In moments, Razor jumped into hyperspace.

He had always flown alone, but he’d never felt alone in the cockpit, not until that moment.

Sitting back in the chair, he tried to sleep.

And tried not to dream.

Malgus watched the shuttle piloted by Aryn Leneer rise on its thrusters. He raised Jard on the comm.

“A shuttle is lifting off from Liston,” he said. “It is also clear to leave Coruscant’s space.”

“Yes, my lord,” Jard answered.

Malgus could have broken his word to the Jedi, could have shot Aryn Leneer from the sky. But he would not. He kept his promises.

But he realized, more than ever, that the Jedi were too dangerous for him to allow them to exist. They were to the Sith what Eleena was to him—an example of peace, of comfort, and therefore a temptation to weakness. Angral did not see it. The Emperor did not see it. But Malgus saw it. And he knew what he must do. He must destroy the Jedi utterly.

He knelt beside Eleena, cradled her head in his left arm. He studied her face, its symmetry, the line of her jaw, the deep-set eyes, the perfectly formed nose. He remembered the first time he had seen her, a cowed, beaten slave barely out of her teens. He’d killed her owner for his brutality, taken her into his house, trained her in combat. She had been his companion, his lover, his conscience ever since.

Her eyes fluttered open, focused. She smiled. “Veradun, you are my rescuer.”

“Yes,” he said.

“Where is the woman?” Eleena asked. “The Jedi?”

“She is gone. She will never hurt you again.”

She leaned her head back into his arm, closed her eyes, and sighed contentedly. “I knew you loved me.”

“I do,” he acknowledged, and her smile widened. He felt tears forming in his eyes, his weakness made manifest.

She opened her eyes, saw the tears, reached up an arm to put a hand on his cheek. “What is wrong, my love?”

“That I love you is what is wrong, Eleena.”

“Veradun—”

He steeled himself, stood, ignited his lightsaber, and drove it through her heart.

Her eyes widened, never left his face, pierced him. Her mouth opened in a surprised gasp. She seemed as if she wanted to say something, but no sound emerged from her mouth.

And then it was over and she was gone.

He deactivated his blade.

He could no longer afford a conscience, or a weakness, not if he was to do what must be done. He could serve only one master.

He stood over her body until his tears dried.

He resolved that he’d never shed another. He’d had to destroy what he loved. And he knew he would have to do it again. First the Jedi, then …

Behind him, Kerse and his soldiers were worrying at the landing bay doors, trying to cut their way in.

Malgus knelt and picked up her limp body. She felt as light as gauze in his arms. He would give her a funeral with honor, and then he would begin.

His vision on Korriban had shown him a galaxy in flames. But it was not just the Republic that required cleansing by fire.

Night, and controlled rage, wrapped Malgus. His anger smoldered always now, and his thoughts mirrored the caliginous air. He had taken a ship in secret from the Unknown Regions, where he was currently stationed, and made his way to the planet. No one knew he had come.

He focused on keeping his Force signature suppressed. He did not want anyone to learn of his presence prematurely.

A sliver of moon cut a narrow slit in the dark sky, painted everything in grays and blacks.

The stone wall of the compound, eight meters tall, rose before him, its surface as rough and pitted as Malgus’s mien. Drawing on the Force, he augmented a leap that carried him up and over the wall. He landed in a well-tended garden courtyard. Sculpted dwarf trees and bushes cast strange, malformed shadows in the moonlight. The gentle sound of a fountain mixed with the night hum of insects.

Malgus moved through the garden, a deeper darkness among the shadows, his boots soft on the grass.

A few lights lit the windows of the rectangular manse that sat in the center of the grounds. The manse, the garden, the fountain, all of it, looked similar to some soft world in the Republic, some decadent Jedi sanctuary where so-called Force scholars pondered peace and sought tranquillity.

Malgus knew it was folly. Empires and the men who ruled empires could not stay sharp when surrounded by comfort, by peace.

By love.

Low voices sounded from ahead, barely audible in the stillness. Malgus did not slow and made no attempt to hide his approach as he emerged from the darkness of the garden.

They saw him immediately, two Imperial troopers in half armor. They leveled their blaster rifles.

“Who in the—”

He drew on the Force, gestured as if he were shooing away insects, and sent both of the troopers flying against the wall of the manse hard enough to crack bone. Both sagged to the ground, unmoving. The black eyes of their helmets stared at Malgus.

He walked between their bodies and through the sliding doors of the manse, reminded of his attack on the Jedi Temple back on Coruscant.

Except then Eleena had accompanied him. It seemed a lifetime ago.

Thinking of Eleena blew oxygen on the embers of his anger. In life, Eleena had been his weakness, a tool to be exploited by rivals. In death, she had become his strength, her memory the lens of his rage.

He resided in the calm eye of a storm of hate. Power churned around him, within him. He did not feel as if he were drawing on the Force, using it. He felt as if he were the Force, as if he had merged with it.

He had evolved. Nothing split his loyalties any longer. He served the Force and only the Force, and his understanding of it increased daily.

The growing power whirling around him, leaking through the lid of his control, made the suppression of his Force signature impossible. All at once he lowered all of the mental barriers, let the full force of his power roil around him.

“Adraas!” he shouted, putting enough power into his voice to cause the ceiling and walls to vibrate. “Adraas!”

He strode through the rooms and hallways of Adraas’s retreat, toppling or destroying everything within reach—antique desks, the bizarre, erotic statuary favored by Adraas, everything. He left ruin in his wake, all while shouting for Adraas to show himself. His voice rang off the walls.

He rounded a corner to see a squad of six Imperial troopers in full armor, blaster rifles ready, the front three on one knee before the other three.

They had been waiting for him.

His Force-enhanced reflexes moved faster than their trigger fingers. Without slowing his pace, he pulled his lightsaber into his hand and activated it as the blasters discharged. The red line of his weapon spun so fast in his hand it expanded into a shield.

Two of the blaster shots ricocheted off his weapon and into the ceiling. He deflected the other four back at the troopers, putting black holes through two chests and two face masks. Another two strides and a lunge brought him upon the surviving two troopers before they could fire again. He crosscut, spun, and crosscut again, killing both.

He deactivated his lightsaber and continued on through the manse until he reached a large central hall, perhaps fifteen meters wide and twenty-five long. Decorative wood columns that supported upper balconies lined its length at even intervals. A pair of double doors stood on the far side of the hall, opposite those Malgus had entered.

Lord Adraas stood within the open doorway. He wore a black cloak over his elaborate armor.

“Malgus,” Adraas said, his voice showing surprise, but his tone turning Malgus’s name into an insult. “You were in the Unknown Regions.”

“I am in the Unknown Regions.”

Adraas understood the implication. “I knew you would come one day.”

“Then you know I am here for you.”

Adraas ignited his lightsaber, shed his cloak. “For me, yes.” He chuckled. “I understand you, Malgus. Understand you quite well.”

“You understand nothing,” Malgus said, and stepped into the room.

Malgus felt the hate pouring off Adraas, the power, but it paled in comparison to the rage and hate roiling in Malgus. In his mind’s eye, he saw Eleena’s face as she died. It poured fuel on the flames of his rage.

Adraas, too, stepped into the room. “Do you think that your presence here is a surprise? That I have not long foreseen this?”

Malgus chuckled, the sound loud off the high ceiling. “You have foreseen it but you cannot stop it. You are a child, Adraas. And tonight you pay. Angral is not here to protect you. No one is.”

Adraas scoffed. “I have hidden my true power from you, Malgus. It is you who will not leave here.”

“Then show me your power,” Malgus said, sneering.

Adraas snarled and held forth his left hand. Force lightning crackled from his fingertips, filled the space between them.

Malgus interposed his lightsaber, drew the lightning to it, and started walking toward Adraas. The power swirled around the red blade, sizzling, crackling, pushed against Malgus, but he strode through it. The skin of his hands blistered but Malgus endured the pain, paid it as the price of his cause.

As he walked, he spun his blade in an arc above his head, gathering the lightning, then flung it back at Adraas. It slammed into his chest, lifted him bodily from the ground, and threw him hard against the far well.

“Is that your power?” Malgus asked, still advancing, cloaked in rage. “That is what you wished to show me?”

Adraas climbed to his feet, his armor charred and smoking. A snarl split his face.

Malgus picked up his pace, turned the walk into a charge. His boots thumped off the wood floor of the hall. He did not bother with finesse. He vented his rage in a continuous roar as he unleashed a furious series of blows: an overhand slash that Adraas parried; a low stab that Adraas barely sidestepped; a side kick that connected to Adraas’s side, broke ribs, and flung Adraas fully across the narrow axis of the hall. He crashed into a column and the impact split it as would lightning a tree.

Adraas growled as he climbed to his feet. Power gathered around him, a black storm of energy, and he leapt at Malgus, his blade held high.

Malgus sneered, gestured, seized Adraas in his power, and pulled him from the air at the apex of his leap.

Adraas hit the ground in a heap, his breath coming in wheezes. He climbed to all fours, then to his feet, favoring his side, his blade held limply before him.

“You hid nothing from me,” Malgus said, and the power in his voice caused Adraas to wince. “You are a fool, Adraas. Your skill is in politics, in currying favor with your betters. Your understanding of the Force is nothing compared to mine.”

Adraas snarled, started to charge toward Malgus, a last-ditch attempt to salvage his dignity if not his life.

Malgus held forth his hand and the rage within him manifested in blue veins of lightning that discharged from his fingertips and slammed into Adraas. The power stopped Adraas’s charge cold, blew his lightsaber from his hand, caught him up in a cage of burning lightning. He screamed, squirming in frustration and pain.

“End it, Malgus! End it!”

Malgus unclenched his fingers and released the lightning. Adraas fell to the ground, his flesh smoking, the skin of his once handsome face blistered and peeling. Again he rose to all fours and looked up at Malgus.

“Angral will avenge me.”

“Angral will suspect what has happened here,” Malgus said, and strode toward him. “But he will never know, not for certain, not until it is too late.”

“Too late for what?” Adraas asked.

Malgus did not answer.

“You are mad,” Adraas said, and leapt to his feet and charged. He pulled his lightsaber to his fist and activated it. The attack took Malgus momentarily by surprise.

Adraas loosed a flurry of strikes, his blade a humming, red blur as he spun, stabbed, slashed, and cut. Malgus backed off a single step, another, then held his ground, his own blade an answer to all of Adraas’s attacks. Adraas shouted as he attacked, the sound that of desperation, filled with the knowledge that he was no match for Malgus.

Finally Malgus answered with an attack of his own, forcing Adraas back with the power and speed of his blows. When he had Adraas backed up against the wall, he crosscut for his head. Adraas ducked under and Malgus cut a column in two. As the huge upper piece of the column crashed to the floor and the balcony lurched above them, Adraas fell to one knee and stabbed at Malgus’s chest. Malgus spun out of the way and rode the spin into a chop that severed Adraas’s arm at the elbow. Adraas screamed and clutched his arm at the bicep while his forearm fell to the floor along with the column.

Malgus had taught the lesson he’d come to teach.

He deactivated his lightsaber, held up his left hand, and made a pincer of his fingers.

Adraas tried to use his own power to defend himself but Malgus pushed through it and took telekinetic hold of Adraas’s throat.

Adraas gagged, the capillaries in his wide eyes beginning to pop. Malgus’s power lifted Adraas from the floor, his legs kicking, gasping.

Malgus stood directly before Adraas, his hate the vise closing on Adraas’s trachea.

“You and Angral caused this, Adraas. And the Emperor. There can be no peace with the Jedi, no truce.” He clenched his fist. “There can be no peace, at all. Not ever.”

Adraas’s only answer was continued gagging.

Seeing him there, hanging, near death, Malgus thought of Eleena, of Adraas’s description of her. He released Adraas from the clutch of his Force choke.

Adraas hit the ground on his back, gasping. Malgus had a knee on his chest and both his hands on his throat before Adraas could recover. He would kill Adraas with his bare hands.

“Look me in the eyes,” he said, and made Adraas look at him. “In the eyes!”

Adraas’s eyes showed petechial hemorrhaging but Malgus knew he was coherent.

“You called her a mongrel,” Malgus said. He removed his gauntlets, took Adraas by the throat, and began to squeeze. “To my face you called her that. Her.”

Adraas blinked, his eyes watering. His mouth opened and closed but no sound emerged.

“You are the mongrel, Adraas.” Malgus bent low, nose-to-nose. “Angral’s mongrel and you and those like you have mongrelized the purity of the Empire with your pollution, trading strength for a wretched peace.”

Adraas’s trachea collapsed in Malgus’s grip. There was no final cough or gag. Adraas died in silence.

Malgus rose and stood over Adraas’s body. He pulled on his gloves, adjusted his armor, his cloak, and walked out of the manse.

The rising sun peeked over the mountains on Dantooine, and the thin clouds at the horizon line looked to have caught fire. Shadows stretched over the valley, gradually receding as the sun rose higher. The trees whispered in a breeze that bore the scent of loam, decaying fruit, and the recent rain.

Zeerid stood in the midst of the damp dirt and tall grass, under the open sky, and faced the fact that he had no idea whatsoever about what he should be doing.

Probably sowing seeds, he supposed, or grafting vines, or testing the soil or something. But it was all a guess. He glanced around as if there might be someone nearby whom he could ask for assistance, but the next nearest farm was twenty klicks to the west.

He was on his own.

“Same as always,” he said to himself with a smile.

After getting clear of Coruscant, he’d flown to Vulta, scooped up Nat and Arra, and fled deeper into the Outer Rim. There, he’d sold Razor and its cargo on the black market and, with the credits he’d earned, bought Nat her own home and bought him and Arra an old vineyard—long unused for growing—from an elderly couple.

He’d become a farmer, of sorts. Or at least a farm owner. Just as he’d told Aryn he would.

Thinking of Aryn, especially her eyes, made him smile, but the smile curled down under the weight of bad memories.

He had never seen her again after leaving Coruscant. For a time he’d tried to learn what had happened to her, but a search of the HoloNet turned up nothing. He knew, however, that Darth Malgus had lived. He presumed that meant Aryn had not, and he’d been unable to tell Arra why Daddy sometimes cried.

And he still secretly hoped the presumption was wrong, that she’d escaped somehow, remembered who she was.

He thought of her every day, her smile, her hair, but especially her eyes. The understanding he saw in them had always drawn him to her. Still did, though he was drawn only to her memory now.

He hoped she had found whatever she’d been seeking before the end.

He looked around his new estate, at the large home he and Arra rattled around in, at the various outbuildings that held equipment he did not know how to operate, at the row upon row of trellises that lined the fallow vine fields, and he felt … free.

He owed no one anything and The Exchange would never find him, even if they somehow realized that he was still alive. He owned land, a home, and had enough credits left over to hire a crew that could help him turn the land into a decent winery within a year or two. Or maybe he’d convert the farm and grow tabac. Months earlier, he could not have imagined such a life for himself.

Grinning like a fool, he sat down in the center of his plot of dirt and watched the sunrise.

A black dot above the horizon drew his eye.

A ship.

He watched it, unconcerned until it started to get larger. He could not yet make out its lines, but he could see its course.

It was heading in his direction.

A flash of panic seized him but he fought it down. His eyes went to the house, where Arra slept. He turned his gaze back to the ship.

He disliked unidentified ships descending from the sky in his direction. They always reminded him of the gully jumper he’d watched crash into the Jedi Temple. They always reminded him of Aryn.

“They could not have found us,” he said. “It is nothing.”

The ship grew still larger as it closed the distance. It was moving fast.

From the tri-winged design he made it as a BT7 Thunderstrike: a multi-use ship common even out on the Rim. He stood as it closed. He could hear the deep bass hum of its engines.

“Daddy!”

Arra’s voice turned his head around. She had come out of the house and sat in the wooden swing chair on the covered porch of the house. She smiled and waved.

“The rain’s gone!” she said.

“Get in the house, Arra!” he shouted, pointing at the door.

“But Daddy—”

“Get inside right now.”

He did not bother to see if she complied. The ship probably had not seen him yet. The trellises and their veins of browning vines would have concealed him from an airborne viewer. He ducked low and darted toward the edge of the field, sheltering as best he could behind one of the trellises. He pulled some dead vines from it so that he could look through to the open area at the edge of the field where the ship was likely to put down.

If it was coming to his farm.

He spared a glance back at the house and saw that Arra had gone back inside. He reached down to his ankle holster and pulled out the E-3 he kept there, then reached around to the small of his back for the E-9 he kept there. He chided himself for not wearing his ordinary hip holster with its twin BlasTech 4s. Arra disliked seeing the weapons, so he’d taken to wearing only those he could carry in concealed holsters. But little E-series popguns would have trouble doing much to someone in ablative armor.

Again, if the ship was coming to his farm.

The ship came into view, and he noted its lack of markings. Not a good sign. It slowed, circled the farm, and he tried to make himself small. Its engines slowed and its thrusters engaged. It was coming down.

He cursed, cursed, and cursed.

Tension coiled within him but he still felt the habitual calm that always served him well in combat. He reminded himself not to shoot until he knew what he was facing. It was possible that whoever was in the Thunderstrike intended him no harm. Another local, maybe. Or an official in an unmarked ship.

But he doubted it.

If they were agents of The Exchange, he wanted to take at least one alive, to find out how they’d tracked him down.

The ship set down, its skids sinking into the wet ground. The engines wound down but did not turn off. He could see the pilot through the transparisteel canopy—a human man in the jacket, helmet, and glasses that seemed to be the bush pilot uniform out on the Rim. He was talking to someone or someones in the rear compartment, but Zeerid could not see who.

He heard the doors on the far side of the ship slide open, then close. He still could not see anyone. The ship’s engines wound back up slightly, the thrusters engaged, and it started to lift off. He gave it a few seconds to get up in the air and engage its engines fully then stepped out from behind the trellis.

A single figure walked toward his home, a human woman with short hair, dressed in baggy trousers and a short coat. He leveled both blasters at her back.

“Do not take another step.”

She stopped and held out her hands to either side.

He started to circle so he could see her face.

“Are you going to shoot at me every time we meet?”

The sound of her voice stopped him in his tracks, sent his heart racing, stole his breath. “Aryn?”

She turned, and it was her. He could not believe it.

The first words out of his mouth were ridiculous. “Your hair!”

She ran her hand through her shorn hair. “Yeah, I needed a change.”

He heard the seriousness in her tone and answered in kind as he walked toward her. His legs felt unsteady under him. “I know what you mean.”

She smiled softly, and it was the same as it had ever been, as warm as the rising sun.

“I looked everywhere for you,” she said. “I wanted to make sure you were all right.”

“I looked for you, too,” he said. “But there was nothing. I watched every holo story about the Jedi. It said they were leaving Coruscant …”

Her expression fell. “I resigned from the Order, Zeerid.”

He stopped in his tracks. “You what?”

“I resigned. Like I said, I needed a change.”

“I thought you meant your hair.”

She smiled at that, too, then indicated the blasters with her eyes. “Are you going to put those away?”

He felt himself color. “Of course. I mean, yes. Right.”

He holstered both his weapons, hands shaking. “How did you find me?”

“You said you’d become a farmer on Dantooine.” She held her arms out to the side, indicating the landscape. “And here you are.”

“And here I am.”

“Don’t worry,” she said, anticipating his concern. “No one else could find you. Just me.”

“Just you. Just you.”

He was smiling stupidly, echoing her words, and probably looked like a fool. He didn’t care. She was smiling, too, and he could take no more.

“Stang, Aryn!” he said. He ran toward her and scooped her into his arms.

She returned his embrace and he pulled her tighter, felt her body against his, inhaled the smell of her hair. He enjoyed the moment then held her at arm’s length.

“Wait, how did you … get off Coruscant? Malgus—”

She nodded. “We reached an understanding, of sorts.”

He wanted to ask about the Twi’lek but was afraid of the answer. Perhaps she felt his emotional turmoil, or perhaps she knew him well enough to anticipate the question.

“Even after you left I did not hurt her. Eleena, I mean. I left her with Malgus. I don’t know if I did her any favors, though.”

He hugged her again, more relieved than he would have expected. “I’m glad, Aryn. I’m glad you did that. And I’m glad you’re here.”

Tears leaked from his eyes. He was not sure why.

She pushed him back and studied his face. “What is it? You’re upset.”

Words pushed up his throat but he kept them behind his teeth. He remembered the air lock on Razor, but shook his head. Vrath was his weight to carry.

“It’s nothing. I’m just glad to see you. An understanding with Malgus? What does that mean?”

“He let me go.”

“He what?”

Aryn nodded. “He let me go. I still don’t understand why. Not fully.”

“Are you … still hunting him?”

A shadow passed over Aryn’s expression, but her soft smile brightened her face and chased it away. She put her fingers on a necklace she wore. A stone hung from a silver chain. Zeerid thought it was a Nautolan jewel of some kind.

“No, I’m not hunting him. When I faced him I felt his hate, his rage.” She shuddered, wrapped her arms around her slim body. “It was like nothing I’d encountered in a Sith before. He lives in a dark place. And I … did not want to follow him there.”

Zeerid understood better than she knew. He lived in his own dark place.

“You don’t want to carry that,” he said to her, to himself.

“No,” she said. “I don’t want to carry that.”

He shook off the darkness and forced a smile. “Will you be staying for a while?”

Before Aryn could answer, Arra’s voice carried from the house. “Daddy! Can I come out now?”

He waved her out and she threw open the door, bounded across the porch, down the stairs, and across the swath.

Aryn grabbed him by the arm. “She’s running, Zeerid.”

“Prosthetics,” he said, and his eyes welled anew to see her running toward him with Aryn at his side.

When Arra reached them, she stopped before them, out of breath, her curly hair mussed, her eyes curious and her smile wide. She extended a small hand, all serious. “Hello. My name is Arra.”

Aryn knelt down to look her in the eye. Taking her hand, she said, “I’m Aryn. Hello, Arra. It’s nice to meet you.”

“You have pretty eyes,” Arra said.

“Thank you.”

Zeerid spoke his hopes aloud. “I think Aryn is going to stay with us for a while. Won’t that be nice?”

Arra nodded.

“Aren’t you, Aryn? Staying for a while?”

Aryn rose and Zeerid’s hopes rose with her, fragile, ready to be dashed. When she looked at him and nodded, he grinned like a fool.

“Do you like to play grav-ball?” Arra asked her.

“You can teach me,” Aryn said.

“How about some food?” Zeerid said.

“Race you!” Arra said, and sprinted for the house.

Zeerid and Aryn fell in behind her, all three of them laughing, free.

For Jen, and Riordan, and Roarke

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My thanks to Shelly, Sue, Leland, and David, for all their help and encouragement.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2011 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ™.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

eISBN: 978-0-345-53282-4
www.starwars.com
www.starwarstheoldrepublic.com
www.delreybooks.com

Cover design and illustration: ATTIK
v3.1_r4

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Revan

Title Page

Copyright

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Part One

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen

Part Two

Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine

Epilogue

Dedication

Acknowledgments

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Bastila Shan; Jedi Knight (human female)

Canderous Ordo; Mandalorian mercenary (human male)

Darth Nyriss; Dark Councilor (Sith female)

Darth Xedrix; Dark Councilor (human male)

Meetra Surik; Jedi Knight (human female)

Murtog; security chief (human male)

Revan; Jedi Master (human male)

Lord Scourge; Sith Lord (Sith male)

Sechel; adviser (Sith male)

T3-M4; astromech (droid)

A long time ago in a galaxy
far, far away.…

PROLOGUE

HERE THE DARKNESS REIGNS ETERNAL. There is no sun, no dawn; just the perpetual gloom of night. The only illumination comes from jagged forks of lightning, carving a wicked path through angry clouds. In their savage wake thunder shreds the sky, unleashing a torrent of hard, cold rain.

The storm is coming, and there is no escape.

Revan’s eyes snapped open, the primal fury of his nightmare wrenching him awake for the third night in a row.

He lay still and quiet, turning his focus inward to ease the pounding of his heart as he silently recited the opening line of the Jedi mantra.

There is no emotion; there is peace.

A sense of calm settled over him, washing away the irrational terror of his dream. Yet he knew better than to merely dismiss it. The storm that haunted him each time he closed his eyes was more than just a nightmare. Conjured up from the deepest corners of his mind, the storm had meaning. But try as he might, Revan couldn’t figure out what his subconscious was trying to tell him.

Was it a warning? A long-forgotten memory? A vision of the future? All three?

Careful not to wake his wife, he rolled out of bed and went into the refresher to splash some cool water on his face. Catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror, he stopped to study his reflection.

Even now, two standard years after rediscovering his true identity, he still had trouble reconciling the face in the mirror with the man he had been before the Jedi Council had turned him back to the light.

Revan: Jedi; hero; traitor; conqueror; villain; savior. He was all these things and more. He was a living legend; the embodiment of myth and folklore; a figure that transcended history. Yet all he saw staring back at him was an ordinary man who hadn’t slept in three nights.

Fatigue was taking its toll. His angular features had become thin and drawn. His pale skin accentuated the dark circles under eyes that stared back at him from deep hollows.

Bracing a hand on either side of the sink, he slumped his head and let out a long, low sigh, his black, shoulder-length hair falling forward to cover his face like a dark curtain. After several seconds he stood up straight, using the fingers of both hands to sweep his hair back into place.

Moving quietly, he made his way from the refresher and across the small living room of his apartment. He proceeded out onto the balcony, where he stopped and stared out across Coruscant’s endless cityscape.

Traffic in the galactic capital never stopped, and he found the constant buzz and blur of shuttles speeding by soothing. He leaned out over the railing of the balcony as far as he could, his eyes unable to pierce the darkness to make out the planet’s surface hundreds of stories below.

“Don’t jump. I don’t want to have to clean up the mess.”

He turned his head at the sound of Bastila’s voice behind him.

She stood at the threshold of the balcony door, the bedsheet draped around her shoulders to ward off the night’s chill. Her long brown hair—normally pulled back up from her forehead into a bun on top and a short ponytail below—hung loose and sleep-tousled. Her face was only partially illuminated by the glow of the city below, yet he could see her lips pressed into a wry smile. Despite her joking words, he could see real concern etched on her features.

“Sorry,” he said, stepping away from the rail and turning toward her. “Didn’t mean to wake you. Just needed to clear my head.”

“Maybe you should speak to the Jedi Council,” Bastila suggested. “They might be able to help.”

“You want me to ask the Council for help?” he echoed. “You must have had too much of that Corellian wine at dinner.”

“They owe you,” Bastila insisted. “If it weren’t for you, Darth Malak would have destroyed the Republic, eliminated the Council, and all but wiped out the Jedi. They owe you everything!”

Revan didn’t answer right away. What she said was true—he had stopped Darth Malak and destroyed the Star Forge. But it wasn’t that simple. Malak had been Revan’s apprentice. Against the wishes of the Council, the two had led an army of Jedi and Republic soldiers against Mandalorian raiders threatening colonies in the Outer Rim … only to return not as heroes, but as conquerors.

Revan and Malak had both sought to destroy the Republic. But Malak had betrayed his Master, and Revan had been captured by the Jedi Council, barely alive, his body and mind shattered. The Council had saved his life, but they had also stripped his memories and rebuilt him as a weapon that could be unleashed against Darth Malak and his followers.

“The Council doesn’t owe me anything,” Revan whispered. “All the good I’ve done can’t balance out the evil that came before.”

Bastila brought her hand up and put it gently but firmly over Revan’s lips.

“Don’t talk like that. They can’t blame you for what happened. Not anymore. You’re not the same man you were. The Revan I know is a hero. A champion of the light. You redeemed me after Malak turned me to the dark side.”

Revan reached up and wrapped his fingers around the delicate hand resting on his lips, then softly pulled it down. “Like you and the Council redeemed me.”

Bastila turned away, and Revan instantly regretted his words. He knew she was ashamed of her involvement in his capture and her role in erasing his memory.

“What we did was wrong. At the time I thought we had no other choice, but if I had to do it over again—”

“No,” Revan said, cutting her off. “I wouldn’t want you to change anything. If none of this had happened, I might never have found you.”

She turned back to face him, and he could see the hurt and bitterness lingering in her eyes.

“What the Council did to you wasn’t right,” she insisted. “They took away your memories! They stole your identity!”

“It came back,” Revan assured her, pulling her close and wrapping his arms around her. “You have to let go of your anger.”

She didn’t fight his embrace, though she stood rigid at first. Then he felt the tension melting away from her body as she lowered her head onto his shoulder.

“There is no emotion, there is peace,” she whispered, reciting aloud the same words Revan had sought solace in only a few minutes earlier.

They stood there in silence, holding each other until Revan felt her shiver.

“It’s cold out here,” he said. “We should go back inside.”

Twenty minutes later Bastila was fast asleep, but Revan lay on the bed with his eyes open, staring at the ceiling.

He was thinking about what Bastila had said about the Council taking his identity. As his mind had healed, many of his memories had returned, along with his sense of self. But he knew parts were still missing, possibly gone forever.

As a Jedi he knew the importance of letting go of bitterness and anger, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t still wonder about what he had lost.

Something had happened to him and Malak beyond the Outer Rim. They had gone to defeat the Mandalorians, but they had returned as disciples of the dark side. The official story was that they had been corrupted by the ancient power of the Star Forge, but Revan suspected there was more to it. And he knew it had something to do with his nightmares.

A terrible world of thunder and lightning, shrouded in perpetual night.

He and Malak had found something. He couldn’t remember what it was, or where it was, but he feared it on a deep, primal level. Somehow he knew that whatever the terrible secret might be, it was a threat far greater than the Mandalorians or the Star Forge. And Revan was convinced it was still out there.

The storm is coming, and there is no escape.

PART ONE

CHAPTER 1

LORD SCOURGE RAISED the hood of his cloak as he stepped off the shuttle, a shield against the wind and pelting rain. Storms were common here on Dromund Kaas; dark clouds perpetually blocked out the sun, rendering terms like day and night meaningless. The only natural illumination came from the frequent bursts of lightning arcing across the sky, but the glow from the spaceport and nearby Kaas City provided more than enough light to see where he was going.

The powerful electrical storms were a physical manifestation of the dark side power that engulfed the entire planet—a power that had brought the Sith back here a millennium before, when their very survival had been in doubt.

After a crushing defeat in the Great Hyperspace War, the Emperor had risen up from the tattered ranks of the remaining Sith Lords to lead his followers on a desperate exodus to the farthest reaches of the galaxy. Fleeing the Republic armies and the relentless revenge of the Jedi, they eventually resettled far beyond the borders of Republic-charted space on their long-lost ancestral homeworld.

There, safely hidden from their enemies, the Sith began to rebuild their Empire. Under the guidance of the Emperor—the immortal and all-powerful savior who still reigned over them even after a thousand years—they abandoned the hedonistic lifestyles of their barbaric ancestors.

Instead they created a near-perfect society in which the Imperial military operated and controlled virtually every aspect of daily life. Farmers, mechanics, teachers, cooks, janitors—all were part of the great martial machine, each individual a cog trained to perform his or her duties with maximum discipline and efficiency. As a result, the Sith had been able to conquer and enslave world after world in the unexplored regions of the galaxy, until their power and influence rivaled those of their glorious past.

Another burst of lightning split the sky, momentarily illuminating the massive citadel that loomed over Kaas City. Built by slaves and devoted followers, the citadel served as both palace and fortress, an unassailable meeting place for the Emperor and the twelve handpicked Sith Lords who made up his Dark Council.

A decade earlier, when Scourge had first arrived on Dromund Kaas as a young apprentice, he had vowed to one day set foot inside the citadel’s exclusive halls. Yet in all his years of training at the Sith Academy on Kaas City’s borders, he had never been granted the privilege. He had been one of the top students, marked by his superiors for his strength in the Force and his fanatic devotion to the ways of the Sith. But acolytes were not permitted inside the citadel; its secrets were reserved for those in direct service to the Emperor and the Dark Council.

The dark side power emanating from within the building was undeniable; he had felt the raw, crackling energy every day during his years as an acolyte. He had drawn on it, focusing his mind and spirit to channel the power through his own body to sustain him during the brutal training sessions.

Now, after almost two years away, he was back on Dromund Kaas. Standing on the landing pad, he could once again feel the dark side deep inside his bones, the sizzling heat more than compensating for the minor discomfort of the wind and rain. But he was no longer a mere apprentice. Scourge had returned to the seat of Imperial power as a full-fledged Sith Lord.

He had known this day would come eventually. After graduating from the Sith Academy he had hoped for a posting on Dromund Kaas. Instead he had been sent to the fringes of the Empire to help quell a series of minor rebellions on recently conquered worlds. Scourge suspected the posting had been a punishment of some type. One of his instructors, jealous of the star pupil’s potential, had probably recommended that he be stationed as far from the seat of Imperial power as possible to slow his ascent to the upper ranks of Sith society.

Unfortunately, Scourge had no proof to back his theory. Yet even exiled to the uncivilized sectors on the farthest borders of the Empire, he had still managed to forge his reputation. His martial skills and ruthless pursuit of the rebel leaders caught the notice of several prominent military leaders. Now, two years after leaving the Academy, he had returned to Dromund Kaas as a newly anointed Lord of the Sith. More important, he was here at the personal request of Darth Nyriss, one of the most senior members of the Emperor’s Dark Council.

“Lord Scourge,” a figure called out over the wind, running up to greet him. “I am Sechel. Welcome to Dromund Kaas.”

“Welcome back,” Scourge corrected as the man dropped to one knee and bowed his head in a gesture of respect. “This is not my first time on this world.”

Sechel’s hood was pulled up against the rain, covering his features, but during his approach Scourge had noticed the red skin and dangling cheek tendrils that marked him as a pureblood Sith, just like Lord Scourge himself. But while Scourge was an imposing figure, tall and broad-shouldered, this man was small and slight. Reaching out, Scourge sensed only the faintest hint of the Force in the other, and his features twisted into a sneer of revulsion.

Unlike the humans that made up the bulk of the Empire’s population, the Sith species were all blessed with the power of the Force to varying degrees. It marked them as the elite; it elevated them above the lower ranks of Imperial society. And it was a legacy that was fervently protected.

A pureblood born without any connection to the Force was an abomination; by custom such a creature could not be suffered to live. During his time at the Academy, Lord Scourge had encountered a handful of Sith whose power in the Force was noticeably weak. Hampered by their failing, they relied on the influence of their high-ranking families to find them postings as low-level aids or administrative officials at the Academy, where their handicap would be least noticed. Spared from the lower castes only by their pureblood heritage, in Scourge’s eyes they were barely better than slaves, though he did have to admit that the more competent ones could have their uses.

But never before had he encountered one of his own kind with as feeble an attunement to the Force as the man huddled at his feet. The fact that Darth Nyriss had sent someone so vile and unworthy to greet him was unsettling. He’d expected a more substantial and impressive welcome.

“Get up,” he snarled, making no effort to conceal his disgust.

Sechel quickly scrambled to his feet. “Darth Nyriss sends her apologies for not coming to meet you personally,” he said quickly. “There have been several attempts on her life recently, and she only leaves her palace under the rarest of circumstances.”

“I’m well aware of her situation,” Scourge replied.

“Y-yes, my lord,” Sechel stammered. “Of course. That’s why you’re here. Excuse my stupidity.”

A crash of thunder nearly drowned out Sechel’s apology, heralding an increase in the storm’s intensity. The driving rain started to come down in stinging sheets.

“Were your Master’s instructions to leave me standing here in this downpour until I drowned?” Scourge demanded.

“F-forgive me, my lord. Please, follow me. We have a speeder waiting to take you to the domicile.”

A short distance from the spaceport was a small landing pad. A constant stream of hovercabs was landing and taking off—the preferred way for those of the lower ranks who couldn’t afford their own speeder to traverse the city. As was typical at a busy spaceport, a thick crowd surrounded the base of the landing pad. Those just arriving quickly fell into the queues waiting to hire a driver, moving with the disciplined precision that was the hallmark of Imperial society.

Of course, Lord Scourge had no need to step into the line. While some in the crowd cast sharp glances at Sechel as he tried to force a path through, the throng quickly parted upon catching sight of the towering figure behind him. Even with his hood drawn against the rain, Scourge’s black cape, his spiked armor, his dark red complexion, and the lightsaber prominently displayed at his side clearly marked him as a Sith Lord.

The individuals in the crowd showed a wide variety of reactions to his presence. Many were slaves or indentured servants out running errands for their masters; they wisely kept their eyes fixed on the ground, careful not to make eye contact. The Enlisted—the ranks of ordinary individuals conscripted into mandatory military service—snapped smartly to attention, as if waiting for Scourge to inspect them as he passed by.

The Subjugates—the caste of offworld merchants, traders, dignitaries, and visitors from planets not yet granted full status in the Empire—stared with a mixture of wonder and fear as they stepped quickly aside. Many of them bowed as a sign of respect. On their homeworlds they might be rich and powerful, but here on Dromund Kaas they were well aware that they ranked only slightly above the servants and slaves.

The only exception to the rule was a pair of humans, one male, the other female. Scourge noticed them standing at the foot of the stairs leading up to the landing pad, stubbornly holding their ground.

They were wearing expensive clothes—matching red pants and tops trimmed with white—and both clearly wore light armor beneath their outfits. Dangling from the man’s shoulder was a large assault rifle, and the woman had a blaster pistol strapped across each hip. However, the two humans were clearly not part of the military, as neither displayed the official Imperial insignia or any indication of rank on their garb.

It wasn’t unusual for Subjugate mercenaries from other worlds to visit Dromund Kaas. Some came seeking profit, hiring their services out to the highest bidder; others came to prove their value to the Empire in the hope of one day being granted the rare privilege of full Imperial citizenship. But mercenaries typically reacted with deference and humility when confronted with someone of Scourge’s rank.

By law, Scourge could have them imprisoned or executed for even a trifling offense. Judging by their confrontational behavior, they were blissfully unaware of this fact.

As the rest of the crowd parted, the mercenaries remained in place, staring defiantly at Scourge as he approached. The Sith Lord bristled at the continued lack of respect. Sechel must have felt it as well, because he quickly rushed ahead to confront the pair.

Scourge didn’t slow his pace, but neither did he make a move to catch up with the scurrying servant. At this distance, he couldn’t hear what was being said over the wind and rain. But Sechel was speaking frantically, gesturing and waving his arms while the humans stared at him with cold contempt. Finally, the woman nodded, and the pair slowly moved out of the way. Satisfied, Sechel turned and waited for Scourge to arrive.

“A thousand apologies, my lord,” he said as they mounted the steps. “Some Subjugates lack a proper understanding of our customs.”

“Perhaps they need me to remind them of their place,” Scourge growled.

“If that is your wish, my lord,” Sechel said. “However, I must remind you that Darth Nyriss is expecting you.”

Scourge decided to let the matter drop. They climbed into the waiting speeder; Sechel at the controls. Scourge settled into the luxurious seat, pleased to note that the vehicle had a roof—many of the hovercabs were open to the elements. The engines engaged, and they rose to a height of ten meters before the speeder accelerated, leaving the spaceport behind.

They rode in silence, drawing ever closer to the massive citadel that stood at the heart of Kaas City. But Scourge knew this was not their destination today. Like every member of the Dark Council, Darth Nyriss was allowed access to the Emperor’s citadel. In the wake of two recent assassination attempts, however, Scourge fully expected her to stay within the walls of the personal stronghold she maintained on the outskirts of Kaas City, surrounded by her most trusted staff and servants.

This didn’t strike Scourge as cowardly in any way; Nyriss was simply being practical. Like any high-ranking Sith, she had many enemies. Until she discovered who was behind the assassination attempts, exposing herself unnecessarily was a foolish and unwarranted risk.

Yet her practicality had to be balanced against the understanding that her rank was based solely on strength. If Nyriss appeared weak or ineffective—if she was unable to take firm and decisive action against whoever was plotting her death—others would sense it. Rivals both off and on the Dark Council would prey on her situation, leveraging her vulnerable position to their own advantage. Darth Nyriss would not be the first of the Emperor’s inner circle to lose her life.

That was why Scourge was here. To root out the secret masterminds behind the assassinations, and destroy them.

Given the importance of his mission, he couldn’t understand why Nyriss hadn’t sent a full honor guard to escort him through the city. She should want everyone to know of his arrival. He was proof that steps were being taken to solve her problem; a warning to any other rivals who might be emboldened by the recent attempts on her life. Keeping his arrival almost secret served no purpose … at least none Scourge could see.

They passed by the Emperor’s citadel and made their way to the western edge of the city. After several more minutes, Scourge felt the speeder begin to slow as Sechel brought it in for a landing.

“We’re here, my lord,” Sechel said as the vehicle touched down.

They were in a large courtyard. High stone walls stood to the north and south. The east end was open to the street; the west was bordered by what Scourge assumed was Darth Nyriss’s stronghold. In many ways the building resembled the Emperor’s citadel, though on a significantly smaller scale. The architectural similarities were more than just an homage to the Emperor. Like his citadel, this building would serve both as Nyriss’s dwelling and as a fortress she could fall back to in times of trouble, and it had been designed to be simultaneously ornate, imposing, and easily defensible.

The courtyard itself was populated by half a dozen large statues, each several meters wide at the base and easily twice as tall as Scourge. The two largest depicted humanoids in Sith robes—a male and a female. They stood with their arms raised slightly forward, their hands palms up. The man’s face was hidden by a hood—the common depiction of the Emperor. The woman had her hood thrown back to reveal fierce Sith features; if the sculptor’s work was accurate, Scourge knew this was his first glimpse of what Darth Nyriss actually looked like.

The other statues were abstract pieces, though each incorporated Nyriss’s household emblem—a four-pointed star inside a wide circle. The ground was covered with fine white pebbles. A rare type of lichen that thrived in the gloom of Dromund Kaas had been planted in decorative patterns throughout the stone, the faint purple glow providing a ghostly illumination. A smooth path of finished stone led from the massive double doors that marked the entrance to the stronghold, through the center of the courtyard, and out to the small landing pad where their speeder had touched down.

Sechel scrambled out of the vehicle and raced around to open the exit hatch on the other side for his passenger. Scourge stepped out of the speeder and into the rain, which had lessened only slightly during their journey.

“This way, my lord,” Sechel said, heading down the path.

Scourge followed him, fully expecting the doors to swing wide at their approach. To his surprise, the entrance remained sealed. Sechel didn’t seem taken aback, however. Instead, he turned to the small holoscreen on the side and pressed the call button.

A flickering image materialized on the holoscreen—a human male of about forty. He appeared to be wearing the standard uniform of an Imperial security officer, and Scourge surmised he was the head of Nyriss’s personal guard.

“Our guest has arrived, Murtog,” Sechel explained, nodding in Scourge’s direction.

“Did you verify his identity?” Murtog asked.

“W-what are you talking about?” Sechel stammered.

“How do we know this is the real Lord Scourge? How do we know this isn’t another assassin?”

The questions seemed to catch Sechel completely off guard.

“I don’t … I mean, he seems to be … uh, that is …”

“I’m not letting him in until I have proof,” Murtog declared.

Sechel glanced back over his shoulder at Lord Scourge, his expression a mix of humiliation and fear. Then he leaned in close to the holocomm and, in a low voice, said, “This is completely inappropriate. You’ve overstepped your authority!”

“I’m the security chief,” Murtog reminded him. “This is completely within my authority. Just give me five minutes to confirm everything’s on the up-and-up.”

Scourge stepped forward, grabbing Sechel by the shoulder and yanking him aside.

“You dare insult me by making me wait out in the rain like some beggar?” he spat at the screen. “I am a guest! Darth Nyriss herself invited me!”

Murtog barked out a sharp laugh. “You might want to check your facts on that.”

The holoscreen clicked off abruptly. Scourge turned around to find Sechel cowering against the wall.

“I’m sorry, my lord,” he said. “Murtog has become somewhat paranoid since—”

Scourge cut him off. “What did he mean when he told me to check my facts? Was I invited by Darth Nyriss, or not?”

“You were. Of course you were. Sort of.”

Scourge raised his hand toward Sechel and reached out to the Force. The servant began to gasp and clutch at his throat as his body was lifted slowly up into the air by an invisible hand.

“You will tell me what is going on,” Scourge said, his voice devoid of all emotion. “You will tell me everything, or you will die. Do you understand?”

Sechel tried to speak but could only cough and sputter. Instead he nodded frantically. Satisfied, Scourge released his hold. Abruptly Sechel dropped the full meter to the ground, where he landed in a heap, grunting in pain before scrambling to his knees.

“It wasn’t Darth Nyriss’s idea to hire you,” he explained, his voice still raw and rough from the choking. “After the second assassination attempt, the Emperor suggested that her own people could be involved. He suggested she bring someone in from the outside.”

Suddenly it all made sense. The Emperor’s will was absolute; a “suggestion” from him was a de facto order. Darth Nyriss had invited him here because she’d had no choice. Scourge had assumed he was an honored guest, but in actuality he was nothing but an interloper. His presence was an insult to her loyal followers, and a reminder that the Emperor doubted her ability to deal with the assassins herself. That was why he’d received such a meager reception, and why Nyriss’s security chief had reacted to him with such hostility.

Scourge realized he was in a precarious situation. His efforts to investigate the assassinations would be met with resistance and suspicion. Any mistakes—even those that were not his fault—would be blamed on him. A single misstep could spell the end of his career, or even his life.

He was still pondering this new information when he heard a speeder approaching through the storm. The sound was innocuous, but it instantly put his senses on high alert. His heart began beating rapidly and his breathing quickened. A rush of adrenaline caused his cheek tendrils to twitch and his muscles to tense.

He drew his lightsaber and glanced up at the sky. At his feet, Sechel cried out and covered his face, assuming the lightsaber was meant for him. Scourge ignored him.

In the darkness of the storm, he could just make out the speeder’s silhouette heading straight for them. He reached out with the Force, probing the vehicle and its passengers. He felt a bolt of anger rip through him as his suspicions were confirmed: Whoever was in the speeder was coming to kill him.

All of this, from Scourge’s first awareness of the speeder to confirmation of its hostile intent, took less than two seconds. Time enough for the speeder to close the distance and come bearing down on him.

Scourge leapt to the side as a barrage of blasterfire was unleashed from the vehicle. He hit the ground in a roll that brought him to his feet just in time to spring clear of a second series of bolts. Moving with the blinding speed of the Force, he raced across the courtyard, bolts ricocheting off the ground just behind him every step of the way. He dived behind the cover of the Emperor’s statue, his mind assessing the situation.

The speeder had to be equipped with an autotargeting blaster cannon; there was no other way the shots could have tracked him so closely on his desperate run for cover. Even a Sith Lord couldn’t evade that kind of firepower forever. He had to disable the vehicle.

The speeder was heading away from him, circling around for another strafing run. Before it could complete its turn, Scourge stepped out from behind the statue and launched his lightsaber across the courtyard. The crimson blade went spiraling through the night, tracing a wide, looping arc. It clipped the back end of the speeder, sending up a shower of spark and flame, and continued on its trajectory to return to Scourge’s outstretched hand.

The hum of the speeder’s engine pitched into a screaming whine as it completed its turn. Black smoke, barely visible against the dark clouds, billowed out from the rear engine. The vehicle began to lurch and wobble, losing altitude rapidly even as it opened fire yet again.

Scourge ducked back behind the Emperor’s statue, pressing his back firmly against it as a shower of bolts rained down on him. A second later the speeder flew overhead, its angle of attack dropping so steeply it actually decapitated the statue he was hiding behind.

The heavy stone head toppled down toward him, forcing Scourge to break cover to avoid being crushed. At the same time, he saw the speeder slam into the ground. Emergency repulsor fields absorbed the impact, saving the vehicle from being smashed to bits, but it still hit hard enough to send a piece of the damaged engine flying.

Holding his lightsaber high above his head with both hands, Scourge charged the downed speeder. Two passengers scrambled from the wreckage, shaken but unharmed. Scourge was only mildly surprised to recognize the two red-clothed mercenaries he’d encountered on the speeder pad back near the spaceport.

The male was on the far side of the speeder, struggling to get his blaster rifle out of the wreckage. The female was on the near side, her blaster pistols already drawn. Scourge was less than five meters away when she opened fire.

He didn’t bother trying to block the bolts. Instead, he launched himself upward, his forward momentum carrying him in a high, somersaulting leap that arced over both the woman and the damaged speeder. The sudden move caught her off guard, and though she fired several hurried shots, none hit him.

Twisting 180 degrees as he flew through the air, he landed on the other side of the speeder, right beside the male mercenary just as the man was bringing his own weapon to bear. Before he could fire, Scourge slashed his lightsaber diagonally across his enemy’s torso.

As the man’s corpse toppled to the ground, Scourge turned his attention back to the first mercenary. By this time she had spun to face him, and as her partner went down she unloaded another series of shots, forcing Scourge to duck behind the speeder for cover.

This time several of her blasts found their mark. Scourge’s armor absorbed the worst of the attack, but he felt a searing pain in his shoulder as a small amount of the particle beam energy found its way through a joint in his armor to scorch his flesh.

He focused on the pain, transforming it into anger to fuel the Force for a savage counterattack. At the same time, instinctively, he drew upon his opponent’s fear, adding it to his own passion and further amplifying the power he was gathering.

Channeling his rage, he unleashed a concentrated wave of energy that struck the woman square in the chest. The impact lifted her off her feet and sent her flying backward through the air. Her journey was cut short when she slammed against the base of one of the abstract statues. The sudden stop jarred the pistols from her hands, leaving her momentarily defenseless.

Scourge placed one hand on the hood of the speeder and vaulted over it, rushing to close in on his prone foe before she could regain her footing. But the mercenary was quick: She scrambled to her feet and pulled out a short electrorod, its tip crackling with a charge potent enough to knock an opponent unconscious with even a grazing blow.

Scourge pulled up short. The mercenary dropped into a fighting crouch, and the two combatants circled each other warily.

Had he wanted to, Scourge could have ended the encounter right then and there. Without her pistols, electrorod or not, the mercenary had no chance against a Sith Lord with a lightsaber. But killing her wouldn’t get him what he really wanted.

“Tell me who hired you and I’ll let you live,” he said.

“Do I look that stupid?” she countered, feinting and making a quick lunge that Scourge easily sidestepped.

“You’re obviously skilled,” he told her. “I can use someone like you. Tell me who hired you, and I’ll let you work for me. That, or throw your life away.”

She hesitated, and for an instant Scourge thought she might drop her weapon. And then the night was shattered by the sound of multiple blaster carbines. The bolts hammered the mercenary in the back, sending her stumbling toward Scourge. He saw a look of total bewilderment on her face as she sank to her knees. Her mouth moved, but no words came out. Then she fell facedown in the gravel, dead.

Turning, Scourge saw half a dozen guards standing in the courtyard near the door leading into the stronghold. Among them was a human wearing a commander’s uniform. He was short, broad-shouldered, and barrel-chested, with close-cropped blond hair and a neatly trimmed blond beard that contrasted sharply with his dark brown skin. Scourge recognized him from the holo: Murtog, Darth Nyriss’s head of security.

Before Scourge could say anything, Sechel exclaimed, “About time you got here.”

He was still cowering against the wall, in nearly the exact same place Scourge had left him after the brief interrogation that had preceded the ambush.

“Get up,” Murtog told him, and the Sith lackey did as ordered.

“Clean this mess up,” Murtog snapped at his guards, who scrambled to obey.

Satisfied, the security chief slung his weapon over his shoulder and nodded in Scourge’s direction. “Darth Nyriss will see you now.”

CHAPTER 2

AS MURTOG LED THE WAY through the halls of the stronghold, Lord Scourge did his best to ignore the pain radiating from his wounded shoulder. Instead he focused on his surroundings, hoping to learn more of Lord Nyriss before they came face-to-face.

The interior architecture was typical of Sith aristocracy: a series of long, wide corridors with thick stone walls, vaulted ceilings, and countless imposing steel doors, all closed to conceal the rooms behind them. The halls were lavishly decorated in bold colors: red, black, and purple. Expensive woven rugs covered the floors, and the walls were lined with a collection of pictures, sculptures, and holoprojections worthy of any museum.

Murtog set a quick pace, giving Scourge little time to study the works. However, Sechel—trailing a few steps behind—provided a running commentary on significant pieces as they marched past.

“This is a bust of the infamous warlord Ugroth. He swore fealty to Darth Nyriss a dozen years ago when she led an Imperial force into his sector to subdue a potential uprising.

“This holoprojection was a gift from Queen Ressa of Drezzi to thank Darth Nyriss for her merciful treatment of the royal family when the Empire conquered their world. Her husband was executed, but the queen and her children were spared.

“This portrait commemorates Darth Nyriss’s victory during …”

Realizing he wasn’t going to gain any real insight from Sechel’s descriptions, Scourge tuned him out. Still, he understood and appreciated the overt display of opulence. Nyriss was a member of the Dark Council; she was one of the twelve most important and influential individuals in the Empire. The material treasures were a symbol of her own worth; a reminder to any visitors that she was a being of rank and power.

Numerous sentries stood guard throughout the halls. They nodded in acknowledgment as Murtog passed. Such a high number of guards stationed inside the stronghold was a bit atypical, but considering the recent assassination attempts it wasn’t unexpected. Scourge wondered if Murtog would increase their numbers, given the most recent incident … though Scourge wasn’t convinced it had actually been an assassination attempt.

The dark side fed on passion and raw emotion, but it was important to temper it with cold analysis and reason. Even as he marched to meet his new liege, Scourge’s mind was trying to piece together the parts of a puzzle that didn’t seem to fit.

The alleged assassins had struck in the courtyard, exposing their presence while still outside the secured walls and gates of the stronghold. Even if Scourge hadn’t stopped them, there was no chance they could actually have gotten inside the building to strike at Nyriss. Which probably meant she wasn’t their real target: He was.

But who had set him up, and why? Murtog seemed a likely candidate. Though only a human, he had risen to a prominent rank in Nyriss’s service—a position almost on par with Scourge’s own newly appointed status. The first lesson Scourge had learned during his time at the Academy was that your peers could be your most dangerous rivals, Force-users or not.

And Murtog had every reason to feel threatened. He had failed to find those behind the assassination attempts on his liege. Scourge’s arrival was a direct challenge to his competence as security chief. What better way to eliminate a potential rival than to expose his incompetence by killing him in a staged assassination attempt? That could explain why Murtog refused to let Scourge in when they’d first arrived, and why Murtog’s soldiers had killed the female mercenary just when she’d been on the verge of surrendering.

However, Murtog wasn’t Scourge’s only suspect. Sechel had similar self-preserving motives. If Scourge succeeded in his mission, he would likely be rewarded with a permanent position that would surely rank above the servile Sith adviser in Darth Nyriss’s hierarchy. Sechel had managed to find himself a niche in Sith society by clinging to his role as an adviser to Nyriss. It made sense to assume he would do anything in his power to remove an individual he viewed as a threat to his own position of power.

Scourge had witnessed Sechel speaking to the mercenaries at the spaceport earlier. At the time it had seemed he was shooing them away out of respect for a high-ranking Sith Lord newly arrived on the planet. Now Scourge wondered if he had been giving them last-minute instructions. The fact that Sechel had survived the battle in the courtyard was also suspicious. It was possible he was just lucky or had the highly evolved survival skills of a true coward, but it was also possible the mercenaries had been careful not to fire anywhere near him.

Murtog rounded another corner. The pain in Scourge’s shoulder was becoming more intense as his armor rubbed against the wounded flesh. Yet he kept pace with the stocky human, refusing to show any sign of weakness.

The hall came to a dead end against another imposing door. This one, closed like all the others, was flanked by Sith apprentices. He doubted Nyriss would have made the Sith answer directly to a human, so they were probably not under Murtog’s direct command. But based on the fact that they made no move to challenge the security chief as he approached, it was clear to Scourge that Murtog enjoyed a privileged position in Nyriss’s household.

Murtog stepped forward and rapped his knuckles gently on the door, then took a step back and stood at attention.

While they waited for an answer to the knock, Scourge realized there was a third possibility: Murtog and Sechel might have been working together to plan the attack in the courtyard. At the Academy, lesser students would sometimes conspire together to bring down a more talented individual. It wasn’t hard to imagine the same kind of thing happening outside the facility’s walls, as well.

For the moment it wasn’t possible to know which of his theories—if any—was correct. But Scourge knew he’d have to watch his back.

The door opened to reveal a young Twi’lek. She was clad in black robes, with Nyriss’s four-pointed star emblazoned in purple on both the chest and back, surrounded by a red circle. A shock collar was fastened securely around her neck, but even without it, her status would have been immediately obvious simply because of her species.

When the Sith had fallen into full retreat during the last days of the Great Hyperspace War, they had taken with them a number of prisoners captured during their early victories over Republic worlds. Those prisoners—mostly humans and Twi’leks—had been condemned to a life of slavery.

By the Emperor’s order, no slave could ever be granted his or her freedom, and the status of the parent would be passed down to the child generation after generation. Because of this directive, there was never any doubt about the role of any Twi’lek in the Empire—they were and always would be slaves, descended from ancestors too weak to save themselves from the Sith invaders.

The slave bent to one knee and kept her eyes to the ground as Murtog, Scourge, and Sechel stepped through. Then she closed the door behind them and retreated into a corner.

The well-lit room appeared to be a study or private library. The walls were lined with shelves, their ancient wooden frames warped by the weight of the treasures they bore.

Scourge couldn’t help but stare in wonder at the collection. During his days at the Academy he had seen only one physical manuscript—an ancient tome dating back more than ten thousand years to the arrival of the first Dark Jedi on Dromund Kaas. The book was considered a priceless artifact, one of the academy’s greatest treasures.

Yet here dozens—if not hundreds—of volumes filled the shelves on the left wall. Most of the books were large and thick, their bound pages protected by covers of leather or some similarly cured hide … though Scourge guessed that not all of them were made from skin cured from mindless beasts. They had an antiquated look about them, though most appeared to be preserved in good condition, if somewhat worn from use. Obviously Nyriss had paged through them many times.

The shelves on the right wall contained reference material that looked even more ancient and delicate. Loose leaves of yellowed parchment were held in place with delicate wire clips; rolled scrolls were encased in clear protective tubes. A hinged glass cover sheltered several books that looked as if they might crumble into dust should a strong breeze pass through the room.

But not everything in the room was an archaic relic. On the rear wall was a large bank of holodisks and datacards, and in the center of the room was a computer workstation where a figure Scourge could only assume to be Darth Nyriss sat hunched, staring at the display monitor. The hood of her loose-fitting cowl—red, accented with purple and black—was pulled up over her head, and the long, loose sleeves even covered her hands and fingers as she worked at the terminal.

Neither Murtog nor Sechel made any sound to announce their presence, so Scourge took his cue from them and stood silently while Nyriss focused intently on the computer’s display. Her cloaked form blocked any view of the screen, so it was impossible for him to see what she was studying. However, he thought he could hazard a guess: Darth Nyriss was well known for her proficiency in the ancient arts of Sith sorcery.

During his time at the Academy, Scourge had discovered that there were many ways to draw upon the power of the Force. His natural talents had led him down the path of the warrior: learning to channel his emotions into strength and raw outbursts of lethal energy. But other students had trained with the Inquisitors, studying a very different curriculum.

Millennia earlier, those who followed the dark side had learned to harness and shape the Force through complex rituals that could control the mind of an enemy and sometimes even warp reality itself. Much of this arcane knowledge had been lost, but those who managed to unlock even a few of the secrets of the past were often rewarded with a more subtle—though just as potent—form of power.

It was rumored that the perpetual storms of Dromund Kaas were the result of the Emperor performing one of these rituals. Scourge didn’t know if that was true, but he knew that Nyriss had gained her place in the Dark Council through her knowledge and understanding of things he could never hope to fully grasp.

After several minutes Nyriss pushed herself away from the desk, rose from her chair, and turned to face them, pulling back the hood of her cloak as she did so.

Scourge was taken aback by her appearance, though he did his best to hide his reaction. Like him, she was a pure-blooded Sith. But her face was creased with deep wrinkles, and the tendrils dangling from her cheeks and chin were withered. Her skin was pale, more pink than red, and mottled with dark brown age spots.

He didn’t know how old Darth Nyriss was, though he knew she had served on the Dark Council for nearly two decades; only two other members had longer tenures. Despite this, he had been expecting someone more akin to the fiercely beautiful woman depicted in the statues of the courtyard. Instead, he was confronted with a shriveled hag.

Unbidden, the words of one of the instructors at the Academy leapt to the forefront of his mind: The Force can be bent to your will, but often there is a cost. The most powerful rituals of the dark side exact a toll few are willing to pay.

Perhaps Nyriss was not really as old as she appeared. A lifetime spent delving into the ancient secrets of Sith sorcery had given her one of the highest positions in the Empire. Maybe it had also drained her of her youth and vitality.

“Not what you expected?” Nyriss said as if reading his mind, a sly smile on her cracked and flaking lips.

In contrast with her decrepit features, her voice was strong and vibrant, and she stood tall and straight. A sharp gleam in her eye further belied her venerability, leading Scourge to surmise that her appearance was intentional.

There were a number of ways to stay young and beautiful; Nyriss could easily have afforded them had she wished to. Instead, she had chosen to let herself age prematurely. Either she didn’t care about the superficiality of physical attractiveness, or she chose to flaunt the ravishing effects of the dark side as a symbol of all she had learned and accomplished.

“Forgive me, my lord,” he said with a slight bow, employing the gender-neutral honorific used to address Sith Lords of either sex. “There was an incident on my arrival that has left me a little off-balance.”

“I’m well aware of what transpired in the courtyard,” Nyriss said, tilting her wizened head in the direction of the monitor. A still image of Scourge in the first few seconds after the battle was frozen on the screen, captured by one of the stronghold’s security cams. “You dealt with the assassins quite efficiently.”

Scourge hesitated a split second before replying. He wanted to speak with Nyriss about his suspicions, but both Murtog and Sechel were in the room. Even if they hadn’t been, it was dangerous to throw out unfounded accusations implicating two of her highest-ranking followers without proof; they wouldn’t have been in their current positions if she didn’t have some level of trust in them.

“I expect this will not be the last such incident,” he said, choosing his words carefully.

“It appears you are wounded,” Nyriss remarked, noticing the scorch marks on the shoulder plating of his armor. “Do you need medical attention?”

“It can wait. The injury is not serious, and the pain is irrelevant. I would rather finish our business here.”

Nyriss nodded in approval. “I would like to hear your analysis of the attack,” she continued. “Perhaps we can learn something of who was behind it.”

“That would have been easier if Murtog’s troops had not killed the second assassin just as she was about to surrender,” he replied.

From the corner of his eye he saw Murtog bristle, but the security chief remained silent.

“You think Murtog made a mistake?” Nyriss pressed.

“He was somewhat overzealous in his efforts to eliminate an immediate threat,” Scourge answered diplomatically.

Sechel stifled a high-pitched giggle, and Nyriss shot him a stern glare.

“Let’s continue this conversation in private,” she said, dismissing Murtog and Sechel with a wave of her hand.

The two quickly bowed and turned to the door, which had already been opened by the Twi’lek slave, who closed the door behind them before retreating to her corner.

“You have something you wish to tell me,” Nyriss said once they were gone. “Discretion and subtlety have their place, but now when you speak to me I expect total candor.”

Scourge nodded.

“Let me guess,” she continued. “You suspect my own people are behind these recent attempts on my life.”

“No one is above suspicion,” Scourge admitted. “But I assume you have very thoroughly investigated everyone on your staff. If they were guilty, you probably would have discovered something by now.”

“I’m glad to see you understand I am not completely incompetent.”

“I do not believe the attack in the courtyard was another attempt on your life,” Scourge said. “I think the mercenaries were hired to eliminate me.”

“And since Murtog sees you as a rival and potential threat, you naturally suspect he was behind it.”

“Possibly. Or it may have been Sechel. Or both working in concert.”

“And what do you have to base this on?”

“Mostly circumstantial evidence. But my instincts feel there is enough to act on.”

“You expect me to turn on two of my most trusted servants based on little more than your hunch?”

“My instincts are seldom wrong,” Scourge said. “My reputation is well earned.”

“So what is it you suggest I do? Dismissal? Execution?”

Suddenly the conversation felt like a test, as if Nyriss was trying to evaluate him based on his answers. If so, he was ready for the challenge.

“It would be foolish to throw away someone as valuable as either Murtog or Sechel without concrete proof,” Scourge replied. “But I would like the chance to interrogate both of them.”

“A good interrogator can make a subject admit to anything,” Nyriss countered. “Even something that isn’t true.”

“Torturing a false confession out of them wouldn’t serve any purpose,” Scourge assured her. “I need the truth, and I would be careful not to do any permanent physical or mental damage. If one or both prove to be innocent, I’m sure you would want them to be just as capable when they return to their post as they were before my questioning.”

A flicker of approval on Nyriss’s face convinced Scourge he had given a satisfactory answer. However, the test was not over yet.

“If I did allow you to question them, whom would you speak with first?”

“Your security chief. Murtog.”

“Why Murtog?”

“If he’s guilty, he will be easier to break.”

Nyriss raised an eyebrow in surprise. “You think Sechel could withstand interrogation longer than Murtog?”

Scourge knew it sounded unlikely: a trained soldier should easily outlast a cowardly sycophant. “Murtog is physically stronger,” he said, “but tolerance for pain is useful only against the simplest and least effective interrogation methods. There are far more subtle and effective ways to get answers. Murtog, like most soldiers, will have had training in interrogation resistance. I know these techniques, and I know how to counter them. Sechel, on the other hand, is far less predictable. On the surface he seems weak and helpless. But he has risen to a position of rank by using cunning, creativity, and quick thinking. It will take me time to truly understand how his mind works. I will have to learn all his tricks before I can set my trap. His interrogation would be a much more involved and complicated process than Murtog’s.”

“Very impressive,” Nyriss remarked. “However, the interrogations won’t be necessary.”

Scourge shook his head, puzzled.

“You were right about the mercenaries, but I already know who hired them to try to kill you.”

“Who?”

“Me.”

“You?” Scourge exclaimed. Her admission had caught him off guard.

“After the second assassination attempt, Murtog and Sechel found a lead. I hired those mercenaries to follow up on it. But before they could, the Emperor decided to interfere, forcing me to bring you in. Your arrival left me with an excess of outside agents, so I told Sechel to instruct the mercenaries to try to take you out of the picture. Consider it a test.”

“Of course,” Scourge muttered, silently cursing himself for being so shortsighted.

He had originally assumed Nyriss had brought him here because she had heard of his success in his earlier postings. If that had been true, she would have had no need to reassure herself of his potential.

But the truth was very different. As she herself had said, his presence here was only because of what she considered to be the Emperor’s interference in her affairs. Given that, it was only logical she would want proof of his competence.

“If they managed to kill you, then you weren’t worthy of serving me,” Nyriss explained. “If you killed them, then you proved that they were a waste of resources. Either way, I would be left with the most suitable candidate for the job.”

Scourge wasn’t resentful over what Nyriss had done; in fact, he admired her for it. His only regret was that he had been blind to her machinations.

“I’ve spent too much time away from Dromund Kaas,” he grumbled. “I’ve forgotten the ways of the Sith.”

“That time away is what earned you this post,” she reminded him. “It wasn’t just your success at quashing the rebels and eliminating their leaders. The Emperor chose you because he knew you had been removed from the politics of Dromund Kaas and the Dark Council; you were untainted by any allegiance to a secret master who might be involved in the conspiracy against me. That made you a candidate I couldn’t possibly object to.”

There was almost something insulting in her tone, as if Scourge’s lack of political experience was a personal weakness. Perhaps it was.

Nyriss had held on to her position for the past twenty years; to do so required as much cunning and intelligence as raw power. Next to her, he was little more than a naïve child.

The realization excited him. Now that he had survived Darth Nyriss’s unexpected initiation, he would have a chance to learn at the feet of a master manipulator … providing there wasn’t another attempt on her life.

“You said you found a lead,” he said, quickly moving on to the reason he had been sent here in the first place. “Something you wanted the mercenaries to follow up on.”

Nyriss didn’t reply right away. Instead she seemed to be studying him. “You are familiar with the details of the last attempt on my life?” she asked finally.

“One of your serving droids was replaced with a duplicate,” Scourge said, recalling the details from the file. “The droid was equipped with a disruptor beam; it was programmed to fire once it had a clear shot at you, but the bolt missed and struck one of your servants instead.”

“My best chef. I still haven’t found a replacement for her,” Nyriss said with what seemed like genuine remorse. “The droid wiped its memory core immediately after the attempt, but Sechel was able to slice the core and salvage some of the data.”

“Was he able to identify who programmed the droid?”

“No, but he was able to determine where it was manufactured—a privately owned plant on Hallion.”

Scourge recognized the name. Hallion was a recently conquered world; it had been brought into the Empire’s fold only in the last decade. The difficult transition from private enterprise to an Imperial economy was still taking place. No doubt it would be easy to convince those who owned an asset like a droid manufacturing plant to strike back at the Empire before it seized full control of the facility.

“You want me to go check out the plant,” Scourge guessed.

“I want Sechel to check out the plant,” she clarified. “Once inside, he can slice into their computer network to find out who arranged the purchase. I hired those mercenaries you dispatched to get him past security. That task now falls to you.”

“When do we leave?”

“Not for a few days. I’ll send a file to your quarters to get you up to speed. And a med droid to fix up your shoulder.”

Scourge nodded, and Nyriss turned away and seated herself back at the computer, dismissing him without a word.

For a moment he simply stood there, gathering himself as he processed everything that had happened. Sechel and Murtog hadn’t been behind the attack at the gates, but that didn’t mean they weren’t plotting against him. He was still an interloper, still a potential rival for the favor of their mistress. If they saw an opportunity to eliminate him, they’d surely take it.

He felt a gentle tug on his elbow. Glancing down he saw the young Twi’lek slave at his side. The door to the hall was already open; she ushered him out of the room in silence, then closed the door behind him.

Sechel was waiting for him in the corridor. “Lord Scourge,” he said with a bow, “I would be honored to escort you to your room. I promise there won’t be any more ambushes on the way.”

There was something almost mocking in his tone. Scourge’s initial impulse was to slap the insolent wretch across the mouth with the back of his hand, but he quickly realized that would be a mistake. Nyriss clearly valued Sechel over him, at least for now. He would have to prove himself to her before he could take the liberty of putting the fawning adviser in his proper place.

“Lead the way,” he ordered. His tone was arrogant, yet inside he was feeling the first stirrings of self-doubt. His arrival on Dromund Kaas had not gone as planned. Things here were not as simple as they had been at the Academy or out on the border regions. Here, even a non-Force-sensitive Sith like Sechel was held in higher esteem than he was, which meant Scourge was both expendable and vulnerable. He’d have to be very careful if he hoped to survive long enough to win Nyriss’s favor.

CHAPTER 3

THE GALACTIC MARKET on Coruscant was as busy as ever, but nobody paid any attention to Revan as he made his way through the crowds. Almost two years had passed since he had been proclaimed the savior of the galaxy. Though the Senate had awarded him its highest honor, the Cross of Glory, in a ceremony broadcast across the HoloNet, and his name was well remembered, his ordinary and rather unremarkable features had faded from public memory. In the aftermath of the presentation he had become a reclusive hero, eschewing public appearances and declining interview requests from any and all media outlets. He had shaved off his beard, and he rarely wore his Jedi robes out in public, making it even less likely anyone would notice him.

He liked being anonymous; it was one of the reasons he had settled on Coruscant. With one trillion people it was easy to blend into the crowd. That was even truer here in the Galactic Market, the most cosmopolitan section of the Republic’s capital world. Merchants and shoppers of virtually every known species gathered to conduct commerce in a kaleidoscope of colors, shapes, and sizes. Red-skinned Togrutas intermingled with blue-skinned Twi’leks; diminutive Sullustans haggled with massive Hutts; fish-like Mon Calamari shared the streets with feline Cathar. Among such a diverse and interesting group, nobody paid any attention to a lone human and his astromech droid.

Unfortunately, the lack of attention meant that many in the crowd accidentally kicked, bumped, or tripped over T3-M4 as he scooted along at Revan’s heel. The droid expressed his displeasure with a steady stream of angry beeps and chirps.

“Now you know why I told HK-Forty-seven he couldn’t come,” Revan told T3. “He’d probably try to clear a path through all these ‘meatbags’ with a flamethrower.”

The astromech responded with a long, low whistle, and Revan laughed out loud before adding, “Let’s not and say we did. Besides, we’re almost there.”

They reached their destination a few minutes later: the Dealer’s Den, a small cantina in the far corner of the Galactic Market that offered drinks, dancers, and gambling. The Dealer’s Den catered to the seedier elements of Coruscant society: black-market smugglers; thugs and bounty hunters; stim and spice dealers. As a result, the clientele was predominantly a mix of species with unsavory galactic reputations. Scattered among the Rodians, Chevin, and Kubaz were a handful of humans, including the man Revan had come looking for: Canderous Ordo.

The Mandalorian was sitting by himself at a small table in the far corner, his back to the wall as was his habit. He was wearing his familiar outfit of tan pants, a leatheris vest, and a sleeveless black shirt that left his heavily muscled arms bare in order to display the clan mark tattooed on his left shoulder. His hair was styled in a brush cut, accentuating his square jaw and rugged, no-nonsense features. He still looked every bit the part of a mercenary, though Revan knew he hadn’t accepted a job since they’d teamed up to take down Darth Malak two years earlier.

A scantily clad Twi’lek dancer was giving Canderous a private performance as he sipped on a blue-tinged drink. Despite the distraction, he noticed Revan immediately. He raised a meaty hand in a wave and shooed away his entertainment.

The dancer shot Revan an angry glare as she stomped away, her head-tails twitching with irritation.

T3 beeped in surprise.

“I guess he’s a good tipper,” Revan answered with a shrug.

Nobody else paid them much attention as they crossed the cantina floor and took a seat at the Mandalorian’s table.

“You look like death warmed over,” Canderous said by way of greeting. “Is being married to Bastila really that bad?”

“I’m not getting much sleep lately,” Revan admitted. “Bad dreams,” he added as Canderous arched an eyebrow. “Besides, you’re one to talk. Looks like you haven’t shaved in three days.”

The Mandalorian smiled and caressed the stubble across his cheeks and chin with an open palm. “The ladies around here like their men to have rough edges. You want something to drink?”

Revan shook his head. “Not from here. That concoction you’ve got looks like it could peel the enamel off my teeth.”

Canderous shrugged and raised his glass to his lips. He took a long swig, closed his eyes, and shuddered.

“It’s an acquired taste,” he admitted. “So why are you here? I get the feeling this isn’t just a social call.”

“I’ve got some questions about the war.”

Revan didn’t need to clarify; for Canderous there was only one war that mattered. He and Revan had fought on opposite sides, mortal enemies who knew each other only by reputation long before they joined forces against Malak and became friends.

“Not much to say. We lost. You won,” Canderous said with a shrug. “We thought we could conquer the Republic, but instead we ended up a broken people.”

He spoke with a casual indifference, but Revan knew him well enough to sense the bitterness and regret behind his words. The Mandalorians had been a proud and noble culture, fighting battles to win honor and glory; now the clans were scattered across the galaxy, reduced to working as mercenaries and thugs for the highest bidder. Revan didn’t like bringing up such a painful topic, but there was information he needed, and he felt this was the only way to get it.

“There’s one thing I never understood about the Mandalorian Wars,” he pressed. “What started them? Why, after all these centuries, did you suddenly decide to launch an all-out attack on the Republic?”

“It was Mandalore’s idea.”

Revan knew that Canderous wasn’t referring to the original founder of his people. For centuries, each successive leader of the Mandalorian clans had symbolically taken up the name of Mandalore as a way to simultaneously honor his cultural heritage and reinforce his own authority. To distinguish among rulers, each chose an honorific to define his or her reign, such as Mandalore the Conqueror or Mandalore the Indomitable. The most recent ruler had called himself Mandalore the Ultimate.

“Mandalore felt the Republic was weak,” Canderous continued. “Vulnerable. He summoned the warriors of the clans, and we followed him into what we thought would be our greatest conquest.”

There was no need to ask if Canderous or any of his fellow warriors had hesitated. When Mandalore called, the clans answered. While there might be battles and disputes among those seeking to be Mandalore’s successor when he fell, once the decision was made there was never any dissent or debate.

“Things were going fine until you came along,” Canderous said with a grim smile. “You and your followers turned the entire tide of the war against us. Eventually you killed Mandalore, and everything changed.”

Revan couldn’t actually remember any of his battles against the Mandalorians; they were buried in the part of his mind that had been locked away when the Jedi Council turned him against Malak. But he had studied up on his own history enough to fill in the missing details from Canderous’s narrative.

In battle after battle, Revan had led the Jedi and Republic forces to victory. Realizing defeat was inevitable, Mandalore the Ultimate had challenged Revan to single combat, and Revan had accepted.

Though the Mandalorian fought valiantly, in the end he was no match for the Jedi Order’s most powerful champion. But it wasn’t enough for Revan to simply defeat his enemy. In Mandalorian culture, the death of one leader was merely an opportunity for another warrior to seize control of the clans by claiming the fallen Mandalore’s helmet. To prevent this, Revan had stripped the helmet from his vanquished foe’s corpse and hidden it on an unknown world.

For a warrior culture defined and bound by tradition and honor codes, the loss of Mandalore’s Mask was a crippling blow. Denied the sole item recognized as the symbol of leadership, the Mandalorians could not choose a new Mandalore. With no universally acclaimed ruler, the various clans began to fight among themselves for power. Their armies became fragmented and ineffective, and within weeks a series of decisive victories by Revan’s troops forced the Mandalorians to accept an unconditional surrender.

The humiliating defeat and the loss of Mandalore’s Mask destroyed the once proud culture. Canderous had spoken of this once during the time they’d spent together stopping Malak. Surprisingly, he didn’t blame Revan for what had become of the Mandalorians. He blamed Mandalore for not being strong enough to win their battle; he blamed the brothers and sisters of his clan for being too weak to pick up the pieces so they could rebuild their society. But mostly, he just didn’t talk about it.

Revan hated picking at the old wound, but he felt he had no choice.

“Is there anything else you can tell me? About what happened before Mandalore declared war on the Republic? Anything unusual that might have been a catalyst for the war?”

Canderous tilted his head to the side and squinted one eye. “This have anything to do with those bad dreams you mentioned?”

“It might.”

The Mandalorian nodded. “You’re getting more of your memories back, aren’t you?”

“Only bits and pieces. I keep having visions of a world I don’t recognize. The whole planet is covered in electrical storms, day and night.”

“Doesn’t sound familiar,” Canderous said after a few moments of thought. “What do you think it means?”

“I wish I knew. But I’ve got a bad feeling about it.”

“And you think it’s connected to our war against the Republic?”

“Think about it,” Revan explained. “Mandalore the Ultimate decides to do something none of his predecessors even considered: launch an all-out war on the Republic. Malak and I defeat you. But after that, we mysteriously take our troops and disappear into the Unknown Regions beyond Mandalorian space. When we return, we decide to launch a war against the Republic, too.”

“It does seem like sort of a strange coincidence,” Canderous agreed. “You think you ran across this storm-covered planet in the Unknown Regions?”

“I’m not sure. But something happened to us out there. Something made us turn against the Republic. Maybe it’s connected to Mandalore’s decision to attack the Republic in the first place.”

“And you think whatever this thing is, it’s still out there? And it’s still dangerous?”

“I feel like visions are a warning. Like part of my old self is trying to tell me something I can’t afford to ignore.” Revan sighed. “Sounds a little crazy, doesn’t it?”

Canderous barked out a laugh. “After everything we’ve been through, this just feels like old times.” He looked at Revan. “So what is it you want me to do?”

“I want to know more about Mandalore the Ultimate. But nobody’s going to talk to an outsider like me. I need someone who can talk to the clans and get answers.”

There was a long silence while Revan waited for Canderous to reply. He noticed that the Mandalorian’s fingers were gripping his glass so hard, they were turning white.

“I’ve spent most of the last five years trying to avoid other Mandalorians,” he finally muttered.

“I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it was important.”

Canderous took a deep breath and downed the rest of his drink, closing his eyes and shuddering just as he had with the previous gulp.

“You know why I’ve been hanging around this kriffing bar for two years, turning down everyone who came to offer me a job?” he asked. He didn’t bother to wait for a reply. “I had a feeling you were going to get mixed up in something interesting, and I wanted to be around for the fun. Guess this is it.”

“I knew I could count on you, Canderous.”

“Let me reach out to some people,” the Mandalorian said. “See what I can dig up. Can’t promise I’ll find anything, though.”

“I’m kind of hoping you don’t,” Revan replied. “But neither one of us is that lucky.”

CHAPTER 4

LOCATED IN A REMOTE SYSTEM far from any major hyperspace lanes, Hallion was a small and insignificant planet among the dozens of worlds dominated by the Sith Empire. Its only remarkable features were the seven small natural satellites that orbited the world, just barely large enough to be considered moons. On this evening four of them were waxing full, their combined glow illuminating the darkness enough for Scourge to clearly make out the details of the Uxiol Droid Manufacturing plant’s exterior even without his night goggles.

“Your blueprints didn’t show a security fence,” he whispered.

He and Sechel were huddled in a small copse of trees on the edge of a field roughly twenty meters from the plant.

“Maybe it’s new,” Sechel replied, also speaking softly. “Shouldn’t be a problem, though. Once you’re on the other side you can just open the gate and let me in.”

Scourge had noticed a remarkable change in Sechel during the mission. The sniveling boot-lick that had greeted him at the spaceport on Dromund Kaas was gone, replaced by someone who was intelligent and self-confident. Obviously, the personality he had displayed on their first meeting had been a ruse; a cover he used to hide his true nature from outsiders. He was still probably useless in an actual fight, but Scourge was beginning to understand how he had risen to such a prominent position in Nyriss’s household. He had compensated for his lack of the Force by developing his mental skills; and apparently Sechel had enjoyed a very successful career with Imperial Intelligence before becoming Nyriss’s chief adviser.

“If they’ve got autoguns on the roof, we’ll be dead before we get anywhere near that maintenance door,” Scourge growled.

“It’s a manufacturing plant, not a fortress,” Sechel assured him. “Most of their security is electronic. You know, stuff I can slice. The worst you’ll have to deal with is a couple of roving security droids.”

“Patrol drones or assault droids?”

“Patrol drones. UDM doesn’t manufacture assault droids. Too expensive for a small company like this.” After a short pause, Sechel added, “Are you always this skittish on a job?”

“Only fools charge ahead without knowing what lies in wait,” Scourge answered through gritted teeth.

It was more than the other’s insolence that grated on him; Sechel’s question had struck a nerve. There was something about this job that made Scourge uneasy. Part of it was being forced to work with a partner; normally he worked alone. Yet there was more to his unease than the presence of the Sith crouched beside him. It wasn’t anything he could put his finger on, but something felt off. It made him hesitant, more cautious than usual.

“You’re sure the entrance code will work? It’s not going to set off some kind of alarm?” he asked, trying to think of anything that could possibly go wrong. “I can handle a few patrol drones, but if a dozen of them come down on us all at once we’re in trouble.”

“The code will work,” Sechel promised. “This is a simple job.”

He was right. This was a simple job, and Scourge was forced to admit that maybe the problem wasn’t the mission.

“Taking things for granted is a good way to get yourself killed,” Scourge told him as he stood up, trying to justify his behavior even as he struggled to push away the self-doubt creeping through the corners of his mind.

He made a final check of his equipment and armor, then slid his night goggles into place. The world took on an eerie green glow as the illumination from the moons above was enhanced tenfold. He drew his lightsaber but didn’t ignite it.

According to the blueprints they’d gone over, there weren’t supposed to be any cams. But there wasn’t supposed to be a fence, either.

“Meet me at the gate,” Scourge said. Not bothering to wait for a reply, he broke from his cover, sprinting toward the three-meter-high security fence. Building speed with a dozen quick steps, he launched himself into the air, his cape billowing out behind him. He cleared the fence by only a few centimeters, close enough that he could feel a tingle in the soles of his boots from the lethal current coursing through it.

At the apex of his leap he hung suspended in the air for just an instant; then gravity reasserted its hold and he plummeted to the ground. He landed in a three-point stance, using his free hand to help absorb the impact.

He turned his head quickly from side to side, looking to see if there was any reaction to his sudden arrival. Fortunately, his entrance had gone unnoticed.

Crouched low to the ground, he ran along the perimeter of the fence, heading to the gate he and Sechel had spotted earlier. As he approached, he noticed a single droid posted as a guard.

It was conical in shape, a little more than a meter tall, and half a meter wide at its base. It hovered a meter off the ground, and three long, thin legs dangled below it, each ending in a trifingered claw. A ring of lights encircled the main body two-thirds of the way up, blinking in some indefinable pattern. Scourge’s night-vision goggles distorted all colors to varying shades of green, but he could clearly make out a two-tone pattern on the droid’s hull—probably gray and orange, Uxiol Droid Manufacturing’s corporate colors.

It was clearly a patrol drone, just as Sechel had promised. Assault droids were much larger—at least twice the size—and were usually designed as two-legged walking units. They were covered in thick plate armor, and tended to have heavy blaster cannons mounted on their exterior—neither of which the floating sentry possessed.

The patrol drone’s sensors were focused on the gate, not on the Sith warrior bearing down on it from behind. Once he closed to within ten meters, Scourge ignited his lightsaber and launched it with a quick flick of the wrist. The spinning blade easily sliced through the unreinforced plating of the droid’s hull and into its control circuits, sending up a shower of sparks before returning to Scourge’s hand.

The hovering drone dropped to the ground, its repulsors rendered nonfunctional. Two of its three legs were pinned beneath the conical body; the third jutted out at a strange angle, mangled by the fall. The row of blinking lights flashed erratically, internal sensors overwhelmed by the catastrophic damage. But still the droid managed an awkward spin that brought it face-to-face with the intruder. A panel on its hull slid open, and Scourge could just make out the circular tip of a small internal blaster taking aim as he closed in for the final blow.

The drone fired, but its targeting systems were no longer operational and the bolt flew high and wide. Scourge was on it before it had a chance to try again. His boot delivered a heavy kick, toppling the droid helplessly onto its side. Two quick chops from his lightsaber finished the job, and the row of flickering lights went dark.

Scourge was breathing hard from the exertion. Defeating a droid never gave him the same rush as killing a flesh-and-blood foe, but he could still feel the adrenaline pumping through his veins, washing away his earlier unease about the mission.

With the sentry dispatched, he was able to focus on the control panel beside the gate, though he kept his lightsaber drawn and ready just in case. Fortunately it was a standard layout, and he was able to cut the power to the fence and open the gate with a few simple button pushes. Sechel was already waiting for him on the other side.

He glanced down at the disabled patrol drone as he passed through the gate, and gave Scourge a look that seemed to say I told you so. Scourge ignored him and headed for the maintenance door. Sechel scrambled after him.

The small maintenance door was made of heavily reinforced durasteel. Scourge doubted even his lightsaber would be able to penetrate it. Hopefully, he wouldn’t have to try.

Sechel stepped up to the security pad beside the door and entered a long series of numbers. Scourge stood watch, in case any more patrol drones appeared. After a few tense seconds there was a soft beep from the security pad, and the door slid open.

“See?” Sechel said. “No alarms. No assault droids. Nothing to worry about.”

“We’re not done yet,” Scourge replied, shouldering past him and into the manufacturing plant.

They found themselves standing in a narrow, dimly lit corridor. If the blueprints they had were accurate, it should lead them into the plant from the rear. From there they would have to cross the production floor to the records office, where Sechel would slice into the plant’s network to find out who had paid UDM to manufacture the custom-built droid that had tried—and failed—to kill Nyriss.

“Stay close,” Scourge instructed Sechel as he removed his night-vision goggles with his free hand and clipped them to his belt. “If we run into trouble, hide in a corner and try not to get shot.”

“That’s what I do best,” Sechel assured him.

Scourge set off down the hall, Sechel following a few steps behind. It continued straight for about thirty meters, then made a sharp left turn that terminated in a closed door.

Unlike the door that had given them access to the plant, this one didn’t appear to be reinforced or locked. From the other side Scourge could clearly hear the deep, rhythmic thud of heavy machinery churning away.

He pressed the access panel on the wall, his muscles instinctively coiling as he dropped into a fighting crouch. The door slid open to reveal the plant’s main production floor, and a wave of intense heat smacked him in the face, momentarily taking his breath away. But he relaxed a second later when he realized there was no ambush waiting for them on the other side.

The manufacturing floor was massive—at least a hundred meters across and easily twice as long. Numerous doors and passages lined each wall, dozens of exits all leading to different areas of the plant. A network of metal catwalks and stairwells crisscrossed the room. In the center was the source of the intense heat: four enormous vats of molten metal, each ten meters tall and twenty meters in diameter.

Half a dozen long conveyor belts extended from the vats to run the entire length of the manufacturing floor, each covered with thousands of individual parts and pieces waiting to be assembled into functional droids. The giant engines powering the belts crashed and churned, drowning out all other sound.

Hundreds of bipedal assembly droids lined the conveyor belts, but Scourge knew they didn’t present any type of threat. Assembly droids were severely limited in their programming, incapable of performing anything other than the simplest jobs. Unlike the patrol drone he’d dispatched earlier, these would ignore his presence and continue working at their assigned tasks. Apart from the assembly droids, there didn’t appear to be anyone around. The plant’s flesh-and-blood supervisors would have left for the night long before. Reaching out with the Force, he could sense no other living beings in the vicinity.

“Well?” Sechel asked, trying to peer past Scourge’s massive frame to get a better view of what lay beyond the door.

Even though Sechel was right behind him, it was almost impossible to hear his voice over the conveyor belt’s pounding engines. Scourge signaled all clear and stepped through.

The records office was located in the southwest corner of the plant, adjacent to the manufacturing floor. They’d have to cross nearly the entire length of the room to get there, and Scourge was perspiring heavily under his armor after only a few seconds. The heat was oppressive; the air almost seemed to stick in his throat. The deafening clang of the engines was relentless.

He cast a glance back at his companion. Even though Sechel wasn’t wearing armor, he was lagging well behind. Clearly, a life of upper-class luxury had left him thoroughly unprepared for the physical demands of the manufacturing floor’s unexpectedly harsh environment. But he struggled gamely onward, wheezing with every labored step.

The entrance to the records office turned out to be locked.

“Hurry up and get us inside,” Scourge shouted. He wanted to get the information and get out. More important at the moment, he knew the office would probably be climate-controlled.

Too weary to nod, Sechel leaned against the wall and punched in the security code.

The door didn’t open.

“Try again,” Scourge pressed, thinking that in his weakened state Sechel might have hit a wrong key. “Be careful this time.”

With painstaking precision, Sechel tapped out the code a second time. The roar of the engines drowned out any sound, but Scourge could see the control panel turn red. The words ACCESS DENIED flashed on the display.

Sechel’s mouth moved in an inaudible curse and he tried for a third time, but Scourge already knew it was hopeless. The door required a different code than the one they had used to get past the exterior entrance.

Scourge raised his lightsaber and yanked Sechel out of the way. He heard the man shouting, but couldn’t make out the words. Gripping the hilt of his lightsaber with both hands, he brought the blade crashing down on the panel, splitting it in two and carving a long, deep furrow in the wall behind it.

The door sprang open—and suddenly Scourge’s eardrums were nearly shattered by a long, whooping siren. He grabbed Sechel by the collar and tossed him into the room, silently cursing himself for making such a foolish mistake.

“Slice into the network and get what you need. I’ll hold off security.”

Sechel didn’t waste time with an answer: He began frantically typing at one of the terminals.

Scourge could feel the cool air spilling out of the records office and washing over him. He allowed himself a few seconds to bask in its luxury, then turned to face the inevitable enemy onslaught, determined not to make any more missteps.

Two hovering patrol drones similar to the one he had dispatched earlier were the first to arrive on the scene, swooping down to floor level from one of the catwalks near the eastern wall. Scourge charged, moving with the supernatural speed of the Force.

The drones opened fire, but Scourge never changed course, relying on his armor to absorb their blaster bolts. One of the bolts narrowly missed his ear; two more slammed into his chest. He felt the impact, but it wasn’t enough even to knock him off-stride.

He dropped into a forward somersault as the droids unleashed a second volley, knowing they would be targeting his exposed face and head. The bolts flew harmlessly over him as he tucked, rolled, and then came back up on his feet, finally close enough to retaliate.

The patrol drones were not made for close combat. A series of vicious cuts with his lightsaber put a quick end to the encounter. The droids fell to the ground in a shower of sparks, their spindly legs twitching for a few seconds before they shut down completely.

Scourge turned his attention to the next two patrol drones. He dispatched the first by hurling his lightsaber at it, knocking it from the air with a single well-placed throw before it even got close enough to use its internally mounted blaster.

The second took evasive action, dropping down behind the conveyor belt and a line of assembly droids. It skimmed along the ground, closing the gap until it popped up from behind its cover so it could fire at point-blank range. Scourge made sure it never got the chance.

Reaching out to grab the drone with the invisible hand of the Force, he slammed it back down to the ground. Its legs snapped off and went flying; its exterior hull cracked in multiple places; several of the welded plates tore loose. All the lights on its body went dim.

The alarm sirens were still howling; it wouldn’t be long before security droids stationed in other sections of the plant showed up. If the droids kept arriving in small groups of two or even three, Scourge knew he could hold off several more waves at least. If they arrived in greater numbers, he was going to have a problem.

He was breathing heavily, the sweat so thick on his red skin he felt as if he had been swimming in the ocean. The Force had sustained him so far: protecting him from the worst of the heat and allowing him to move faster than his enemies could react. But he could draw on it for only so long before exhaustion set in. Already he could feel himself tiring. Sechel had to locate the information soon, or they’d have to retreat empty-handed.

He saw three patrol drones enter from one of the passages at the north end of the manufacturing plant. Two more were moving in from the east. Grimacing, Scourge tightened his grip on his lightsaber and prepared to do battle yet again. Instead of closing in on him, however, the droids kept their distance.

The reason for their puzzling behavior became clear a moment later when a massive assault droid lumbered into view. Like the patrol drones, it had the gray-and-orange finish common to all UDM models. But that was where the similarities ended.

Three meters tall and covered in thick armor plating, the security droid walked on a pair of hinged-metal legs, each as thick around as Scourge’s waist. Its armless body was thick and wide, two meters on every side, topped by a pair of heavy blaster cannons instead of a head.

The droid broke into a run toward him, moving fast despite its bulk. At the same time, it opened fire with both cannons. Scourge leapt for cover behind the nearest conveyor belt, unwilling to trust his armor against such overwhelming firepower.

The security droid didn’t let up; the bolts ripped into the conveyor belt and the hapless assembly droids lined up along it.

Crouched low, Scourge ran back toward a nearby stairwell leading up to the narrow catwalks that ran above the manufacturing floor. A shower of twisted, scorched metal rained down on his back—bits and pieces of those assembly droids unfortunate enough to get in the way of the cannon fire.

From the corner of his eye he saw the patrol drones swooping in to join the fray. Because of the engines and sirens, he couldn’t hear the assault droid coming after him, but he could feel its heavy footsteps vibrating the floor.

Reaching the stairwell, he took the steps three at a time. The assault droid continued to fire, but it wasn’t designed to take out aerial targets. Its bulky armor plating limited its vertical range of motion, and from the floor it couldn’t get the proper angle for a clear shot toward the ceiling. Its bolts ricocheted off the reinforced metal of the catwalk’s safety rails and floor, but none even came close to its intended target.

Scourge’s elevated position on the catwalk didn’t help against the patrol drones, however. Their repulsors allowed them to rise up to the level of the catwalks with ease.

With the five hovering patrol drones closing in on him, Scourge raced toward the vats of molten metal in the center of the room. The catwalk he was on passed right beside the nearest vat. As he drew closer, the heat became almost unbearable. He felt his skin blistering, but he ignored the pain and continued onward.

The drones were rapidly closing in. Two of them swooped in from the side, trying to cut him off. Their path took them directly over the vat, and Scourge seized the opportunity. Drawing on his rapidly dwindling reserves, he used the Force to knock one of the drones off-course, sending it careening sideways into its partner. The midair collision wasn’t hard enough to inflict any direct damage, but it caused both to spin out of control. Unable to right themselves in time, they tumbled down into the vat, where the bubbling molten metal closed over them.

The three remaining patrol drones altered their course to steer clear of the vats, confirming Scourge’s fear that the trick would only work once. They opened fire, but their target suddenly reversed his direction to race back along the catwalk toward the assault droid on the floor below. One of the bolts struck Scourge squarely between the shoulder blades, but luckily it didn’t penetrate his armor.

The assault droid continued to fire ineffectually at Scourge from below as he charged at it. He closed the gap until he was directly above it, then grabbed the catwalk’s safety rail and vaulted over the side. He landed directly on the square, flat top of the assault droid and chopped down with his lightsaber.

The blade bit deep into the droid’s armor plating but failed to reach any of the internal circuitry. The droid shook angrily from side to side, and Scourge was thrown off. Rolling to absorb the landing, he scrambled to his feet and circled behind the droid. He knew his only chance was to stay on its blind side, so it wouldn’t be able to bring its blaster cannons to bear.

He slashed at the armor-plated body twice more. The first blow left a scorched furrow. The second—delivered in precisely the same location—went all the way through. The assault droid reacted with a shudder, momentarily listing to one side. But before Scourge could follow up with another attack, it kicked out with one of its massive legs, catching him in the chest and sending him crashing to the ground.

A sharp pain shot up from his side, and he knew at least one of his ribs had been cracked. The assault droid was slowly, jerkily, turning to face him. The three remaining patrol drones were once again bearing down on him, close enough to open fire.

Scourge scrambled forward on his hands and knees. The assault droid was tall enough for him to crawl under its legs and take shelter beneath its body. The blaster bolts from the patrol drones ricocheted ineffectually off the larger droid’s armor plating. The assault droid returned fire, its programming instinctively identifying anyone firing at it as a hostile threat. Its blaster cannons tore through the patrol drones, reducing all three to scrap.

At the same time, Scourge drove his lightsaber up into the assault droid from below. To save costs and improve mobility, the underside of the droid wasn’t equipped with the heavy armor plating that protected the rest of its exterior, and the blade went deep. Scourge stabbed the vulnerable underbelly twice more before rolling clear and springing back to his feet.

Staggering, the droid tried to turn to face him. It was leaking thick, black lubricant from where Scourge had sliced it open, the liquid forming a rapidly spreading pool beneath its feet. A muffled explosion came from somewhere inside the droid, and a wisp of smoke curled out. Its legs sagged, and it slowly toppled forward, then lay still.

Scourge didn’t have time to savor his victory. A swarm of patrol drones poured into the room, emerging alone or in pairs from passages on both the north and south walls. At the same time two more assault droids marched into view, and the Sith Lord’s spirits sank.

There was no shame in fleeing a battle that couldn’t be won; only a fool continued to fight against impossible odds. Yet even if he were willing to risk Nyriss’s wrath by abandoning Sechel, Scourge doubted escape would be possible. There were too many droids, and he was nearing the point of total exhaustion.

With a grim smile he raised his lightsaber, prepared to inflict as much damage as possible before he died. And then suddenly everything went dark.

Scourge fumbled for his night goggles, knowing the illumination from his lightsaber wouldn’t be enough to fight by. He yanked them from his belt and slid them into place, then stood stock-still, stunned by what he was seeing. None of the droids had taken the opportunity to advance on him. The assault droids hadn’t moved; the patrol drones had all fallen to the ground.

Only then did he register the fact that it wasn’t just dark—it was silent. The deafening engines had ground to a halt. The conveyor belts were quiet, and even the assembly droids seemed to be frozen in place.

He punched the comlink on his wrist. “Sechel? Are you there?”

“You’re still alive?” Sechel asked. He sounded surprised, but before Scourge could ponder that, he swiftly added, “Good. I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

“What just happened?”

“I copied the files I needed from the records office. Then I sliced into the power grid and used the emergency override to shut everything down. Figured you could use the help.”

“I could have handled it if it wasn’t for the assault droids,” Scourge said, making no effort to hide the accusation.

“Assault droids? Really? Must be a new prototype UDM is working on.”

“Where are you now?” Scourge asked.

“Still near the records office.”

“Stay there—I’ll come get you.”

“I don’t think we have time for that,” Sechel said.

“What are you talking about?”

“You know those big vats? They use trivium generators to melt the metal. Shutting down the power grid destabilized the reactor cores.”

“How long before they blow?”

“Not long enough to keep discussing it.”

Scourge took the hint. Forcing his weary legs into a run, he raced across the pitch-black manufacturing floor. His broken ribs made it almost impossible to catch his breath, and his thighs and calves were on fire. He caught up to Sechel halfway down the maintenance corridor they had used to enter the building.

He didn’t say anything as he ran, conserving what little breath he had for a final push to get clear of the blast radius. He burst through the maintenance door and into the cool night air, Sechel only a few steps behind him.

Jumping the security fence wasn’t an option in his current state, so he headed for the gate he’d unlocked for Sechel at the start of the mission. He was slowing down, the weight of his armor sapping the last of his strength; he drew on the Force to give himself a last burst of speed. Sechel caught up with him a few steps before the gate. The blast wave caught them an instant later.

Fortunately, most of the explosion was contained within the plant, preventing them from being pulverized by the concussive force. As it was, they were swept off their feet and sent tumbling through the security gate by a wall of air, sound, and shards of glass. Scourge hit the ground, rolled onto his stomach, and instinctively covered the back of his head as debris rained down around them. He lay there for about thirty seconds, dazed, ears still ringing.

He forced himself to his feet, triggering a coughing fit. The broken ribs made it feel like his chest was being stabbed as he hacked up blood-flecked phlegm. The back of his head and neck were also bleeding: flying glass had cut him in at least a dozen places, though his armor had shielded most of his body.

Confident that none of his injuries was life threatening, he turned his attention to his companion. Sechel lay facedown on the ground beside him, not moving. He hadn’t been wearing any armor, and his back was a bloody mess. Though the glass shards had shredded his clothes and the flesh beneath, all of the wounds looked superficial.

Scourge prodded him with his foot until he finally responded with a groan.

“Get up,” Scourge wheezed. “I’m too weak to carry you.”

Sechel did as ordered, and the pair of them limped back through the forest toward their waiting shuttle. Behind them, the UDM plant burned.

CHAPTER 5

REVAN RARELY VISITED the Jedi Temple on Coruscant anymore. Though technically still a member of the Order, he couldn’t help but feel like an intruder as he mounted the steps and passed between the twin rows of statues that stood guard at the entrance.

Many Jedi, particularly the Padawans and younger Jedi Knights, considered him a hero, a living legend. But the more conservative Masters held a very different view. Some resented him for leading thousands of Jedi to their deaths in the war against the Mandalorians. Others could not forgive him for the millions of Republic soldiers and citizens killed when he and Malak returned from the Unknown Regions as conquerors. Officially, he had been redeemed and returned to the light, but there were those who still felt he bore the indelible corruption of the dark side.

To be fair, Revan had done little to try to convince them otherwise.

At the top of the stairs he passed through the Temple entrance, crossing the long, marble floor as he made his way to the interior courtyard.

The Council had offered to find a suitable Master to retrain him in the proper ways of the Jedi—an offer he had flatly refused. Revan had learned too much about the Force, both the light side and the dark, to take instruction like some common Padawan. His contrariness might have been overlooked had Bastila not chosen a similar path. At one time she had been the Order’s bright young star. But Malak had temporarily turned her to the dark side, and the Council believed that she also needed to be retrained. When she refused, some of them saw a familiar pattern: Revan leading a promising young Jedi away from the accepted teachings of the Order.

Their marriage further exacerbated the situation. The Jedi Order opposed emotional attachments, believing they were a stepping-stone to destruction. They taught that love begat jealousy, which led to the dark side. But Revan had seen its redemptive powers firsthand. It was his love that had brought Bastila back to the light; their emotional bond had wrought salvation for both of them.

Denying or attempting to utterly control emotion, Revan felt, was a fool’s game. Jealousy was actually the result of ill-prepared Jedi being overwhelmed by feelings they had never learned to face. Revan believed Jedi could be taught to use positive emotions like love and happiness to strengthen their connection to the Force in the same way that hatred and anger gave power to those who followed the dark side.

Emerging from the entrance hall, Revan was struck as always by the magnificent view. The Jedi Temple had been built atop a massive mountain, its rooftop converted into a huge open-air courtyard that overlooked Coruscant’s endless cityscape a full kilometer below. A towering spire had been built on each of the courtyard’s corners, and a fifth spire, larger than the others, rose up from the center.

Small clusters of robed figures, a mixture of Jedi Padawans, Knights, and Masters, filled the area. Some made their way quickly through the garden paths on business. Others lounged on benches or by fountains, taking a break from chores or training exercises.

Revan kept the brown hood of his traditional Jedi cloak up to avoid being recognized. He wanted to conduct his business and be on his way as quickly as possible. The sooner he left the Temple, the better.

He hadn’t always felt this way. In the first few weeks after Malak’s defeat, when he was still being honored and feted as the savior of the galaxy, he had approached the Council with an offer to share his new understanding of the Force with the other members of the Order. He had expected some resistance, of course. The Council was stuck in the old ways. They didn’t understand that the Force was alive. They couldn’t accept that it had evolved beyond their staid teachings. Yet he had been unprepared for the sheer hostility of the Council’s reaction.

Not only did they reject his offer, but a handful of Councilors had wanted to banish him from the Order. Fortunately, cooler heads had prevailed. Revan was a hero. The tale of his redemption and return to the light had spread throughout the galaxy … though the sordid details of how the Jedi had stripped away his identity had been carefully excised. The wiser members of the Council understood that the legend of Revan was far too valuable to throw away simply because they no longer had any use for the man himself.

In the end a compromise was reached. The Jedi would not speak out against his marriage to Bastila. Officially, both would still be recognized as Jedi in good standing, with all corresponding rights and privileges. In exchange, Revan promised not to spread his heresy to other members of the Order.

At first, Bastila wanted to reject their terms. But Revan convinced her that an ideological war with the Jedi Council served no purpose. They had done their part; it was time for them to fade from history and live out the rest of their days in peace.

And so they had … until Revan started having those blasted dreams.

That was why he was there now. Canderous was out among his own people, seeing if he could find some connection between the war and a planet shrouded in the darkness of eternal storms. He’d been gone several weeks, and Revan had yet to hear back. But rather than sit around and do nothing, he’d decided to do a little investigation of his own.

Moving with long, quick strides he made his way to the spire on the northwest corner of the courtyard. This tower was home to the Council of First Knowledge, a collection of five Jedi Masters and their underlings who specialized in the history and lore of the entire Order. It was also home to the Temple Archives—by far the galaxy’s largest assembled collection of documents, data disks, and holocrons. It was often said that if an item did not appear in the Archive records, then it did not exist.

Despite the bold claim, Revan doubted he’d find anything to explain his dreams lurking in the stacks. He’d actually come here in search of something else. Someone else. A name from his past.

Massive chunks of his memory were still missing. To fill in the gaps, he’d need to speak to someone who had been with him during that time. Someone who had served beside him in the war.

Malak had been his right hand during the campaign against the Mandalorians. But Malak was dead; Revan would get no answers there. Yet there had been another—a powerful Jedi named Meetra Surik. Meetra had been among the first to join Revan’s cause, and she quickly proved herself to be a brilliant tactician and military leader.

Recognizing her potential, Revan had made her a general, giving her control over nearly half of the Republic and Jedi troops under his command. Meetra had been instrumental in defeating the Mandalorians, dealing them a devastating blow during the Battle of Malachor V … though at a cost nearly impossible to fathom.

He hesitated only briefly at the door leading into the spire, steeling himself for what he might find. Then he entered the building and mounted the long, spiral staircase leading up to the first floor of the Archives.

Revan had defeated Mandalore shortly after Meetra’s victory at Malachor V, effectively ending the war. Then he and Malak had set off into the Unknown Regions, while Meetra had returned to face the judgment of the Jedi Council. She hadn’t spoken to Revan since; he didn’t even know where she was.

He knew some of the details of what had happened. On her return, the Jedi Council had declared her a traitor for following Revan. They had stripped her of her rank and banished her, branding her as the Exile. According to the rumors, she had left Republic space and simply disappeared. Yet Revan felt there was more to the story.

Meetra hadn’t tried to contact him following Malak’s defeat. Even if she had left Republic space, she surely would have heard of Revan’s redemption by now. The fact that there had been no word from her was disturbing.

Once he had tried to reach out to her with the Force. Serving in battle with someone formed a special bond; even across the breadth of the galaxy he should have been able to get some vague sense of her presence. Yet he had felt nothing. The simplest explanation was that she had become one with the Force, but Revan couldn’t allow himself to believe she was dead. After surviving the horrors of Malachor V, an anonymous death in the Outer Rim simply didn’t seem fair.

He stepped from the spiral staircase and onto the fourth-story landing, then pushed open the door to the second floor of the Archives. He was relieved to see there was nobody else around; he wanted to do his research in private.

Passing through the tightly packed stacks of data disks, he took a seat at one of the holo-terminals. He wasn’t sure exactly what he was looking for, so he simply entered Meetra’s name into the index.

Several entries came up, including an official report on Malachor V compiled by one of the Jedi Archivists. He made a mental note of the reference number, retrieved the data disk from its shelf, and inserted it into the terminal.

He spent the next few minutes reviewing the report, but failed to come across anything he didn’t already know. Malachor V had been a trap, a ploy to lure the Mandalorian fleet in close enough to the planet to unleash the mass-shadow generator—an experimental superweapon that would draw upon the gravitational anomalies unique to the Malachor system to instantaneously destroy every ship orbiting the planet.

Revan split his fleet in two, giving command of one half to Meetra. While he led his forces against Mandalore’s flagship, he ordered his most trusted general to use her fleet as bait to lure the bulk of the Mandalorian ships within range of the mass-shadow generator.

The Mandalorians had taken the bait, and once they were in range Meetra gave the order to engage the mass-shadow generator. The atmosphere exploded in a flash of fire, leaving only ash behind. Everything on Malachor’s surface—every plant and tree, every animal and insect—was instantly vaporized by the intense heat. The ground cracked and heaved, leaving deep scars across the blasted landscape.

At the same time hundreds of ships, Republic and Mandalorian alike, were yanked from orbit by the creation of an irresistible gravity vortex at the planet’s core. They crashed into the surface of the world, striking with such velocity that their hulls actually penetrated several kilometers into the ground, burying the twisted wreckage and broken bodies. Tens of thousands of lives were snuffed out in a fraction of a second.

Revan’s and Meetra’s ships had both been safely beyond the range of the superweapon, though whether that was by luck or design Revan honestly couldn’t say.

His memories of that time were gone, and looking back on his actions, he couldn’t fully explain or justify them. Had he known what was going to happen, willingly sacrificing thousands of his own followers to achieve ultimate victory over the Mandalorians? Or had something in the plan gone horribly wrong?

The report wasn’t so ambiguous: it claimed Revan and Meetra both knew what would happen. It declared them criminals of war and mass murderers. The author of the report speculated that Malachor V was proof that even then Revan had already embraced the ways of the dark side.

But Revan wasn’t interested in the opinions of some anonymous Jedi Archivist; he only cared for the facts … particularly what happened to Meetra after the battle. And here the report was severely lacking.

All he could glean was that she had returned of her own free will to face the Council, which summarily banished her from the Jedi Order and Republic space.

“I should have guessed it was you.”

The voice came from behind, sharp with indignation.

Revan rose from his chair and turned to face the speaker. She wore the traditional robes of a Jedi Archivist, though Revan knew she was in fact a Jedi Master. She was young for the position, about Bastila’s age, but her hair was platinum white. She had cold blue eyes, and a pale complexion that spoke of a life spent inside the Archives, well sheltered from the rays of the sun.

“Atris,” Revan said with a nod and a forced smile, silently cursing.

Once a close friend of Meetra’s, Atris had refused to join those who had gone to battle the Mandalorians. A staunch traditionalist, she had shared the unfavorable opinion of Revan common to the older, more conservative Masters. Of all the people who could have interrupted his search, he could think of few he wanted to encounter less.

“Still trying to recapture your lost memories?” she asked a little too smugly, and Revan understood that her arrival was no accident.

Atris must have tagged the report he’d been reading so it would alert her whenever it was referenced. There were no rules or regulations against this kind of security feature, but it was rarely done. As a rule, those who served the Council of First Knowledge respected the right to personal privacy of Jedi visiting the Temple Archives.

Yet even though Revan had sought to keep his investigations private, he had done nothing wrong. And he still needed answers.

“This report seems to skim over some of the relevant details,” he said. “Shoddy work,” he added on a sudden hunch.

He saw Atris bristle and he knew he’d guessed right: not only had she tagged the report, she’d also prepared it.

“Maybe you just can’t see the obvious truth in front of you,” she snapped.

Revan smiled. Despite all the Jedi teachings about peace and serenity, he’d always had a knack for riling up overly sanctimonious members of the Order like Atris.

“Guess I just need your great wisdom to help me understand what I’m missing.”

“What makes you think I would do anything to help you?”

“I’m still a Jedi, and Meetra’s sentence is a matter of record,” he reminded her, suddenly serious. “I have a right to know the truth of what happened. All of it.”

“What more is there to tell? She made the mistake of following you. You led her down the path to the dark side. She committed an unforgivable act, and for this the Council banished her.”

“It was a desperate act during a desperate time,” Revan said. “And the mass-shadow generator was an experimental prototype. How could the Council be sure Meetra even knew what would happen? What if it was all a mistake? A terrible accident?”

“The mass-shadow generator was a weapon of war,” Atris replied with a cool, rational calm. “Its sole purpose was death and destruction, and she gave the order to activate it. How is that an accident?”

“But she obviously regretted her actions, and she surrendered voluntarily to the Council. Why wouldn’t they show her mercy?”

“They needed to make an example of her.” Atris made no effort to hide the bitterness in her voice. “She became a symbol for all those who had defied the will of the Council. Mercy was not an option.”

“It can’t be that simple,” Revan pressed. “My crimes were far worse, yet the Council gave me a second chance.”

“You could still be of use to us.”

Revan sensed there was something she wasn’t saying. “What does that mean? Meetra was a powerful Jedi. Why didn’t the Council try to redeem her?”

The archivist shook her head in disbelief. “You really have no idea what you did to her, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Revan snapped, allowing his frustration to bubble over. “My memory has more holes in it than a Kaminoan sponge. So why don’t you just tell me?”

Atris bit her lower lip and glared at him. Then, perhaps realizing that answering his questions was the quickest way to get him to leave, she began to speak.

“Meetra was much closer to the mass-shadow generator than you were. She felt the shock wave; it nearly killed her. Left her vulnerable. At the same time, she felt the deaths of the Mandalorians and her fellow soldiers through the Force. It was all too much to bear in her weakened state. It would have killed her.” She paused for emphasis, before continuing. “Instinctively, she protected herself the only way she knew how. She cut herself off from the Force … permanently.”

“I’m sorry,” Revan said sincerely. “I had no idea.”

“Really?” Atris replied angrily. “Then why did you and Malak leave her behind when you went into the Unknown Regions? You realized she was of no further use to you, and you abandoned her. That’s why she came back to the Order to face judgment.”

“I didn’t see that in your report. Is that fact, or just speculation?”

Her refusal to speak was reply enough.

“Even if what you say is true,” Revan continued, “I’m not the same man anymore. Is it right to still hold me accountable for those crimes?”

“A chalarax can’t change its spots,” she muttered under her breath.

Revan was too busy trying to process all he had learned to react to her comment. If Meetra was cut off from the Force, that would explain why he hadn’t been able to sense her presence. That meant she could still be alive somewhere; she might still know something that could help him understand the meaning of his vision.

“Do you know where she went?” he asked. “I need to speak with her.”

“Haven’t you done enough already?” Atris demanded. “It’s your fault she defied the Council and betrayed the Order. It’s your fault she fell to the dark side and was branded the Exile. It’s your fault she cut herself off from the Force. For a Jedi, that’s a fate worse than death!”

“I’ve come closer to death than most,” Revan countered, “and I can assure you that’s not true.”

Atris snorted in contempt. “That is the difference between us. I live for the Force. You live for yourself.”

Revan shrugged, knowing a philosophical argument wasn’t going to get him any closer to finding Meetra. “Whatever you think of me,” he said, “I did not compel Meetra into any of this. She made her own choices. And it should be her decision now if she wants to speak to me again, not yours. If you know where she is, you have to tell me.”

“I haven’t spoken to her since her trial,” Atris answered through gritted teeth, and Revan knew she was telling the truth. “I do not know where she went, and I hope I never see her again. The Exile betrayed the Order, as did you.

“You’re not welcome here. Go back home to your wife.” Atris spoke the last word with such venom, she nearly choked on it.

“Uh, uh, uh,” Revan said, wagging his finger at her. “There is no emotion; there is peace.”

Her lip curled up in a snarl and she spun on her heel and stormed out of the room. Revan waited until the sound of her feet on the stairs faded, then sat slowly back down in the chair.

With Atris gone, he could let his sarcastic mask slip. Despite what he’d said to her, he couldn’t help but feel responsible for Meetra. He’d refused to give Atris the satisfaction of seeing his guilt and grief, but now that he was alone, the emotions came flooding to the surface. Most of his specific memories of Meetra were gone; he could recall only disjointed bits and pieces. But she had once been one of his closest friends, and he still felt a powerful emotional connection to her.

Slumping forward, he buried his face in his hands. He expected tears to follow, but that didn’t happen. Instead, he just felt a hollow, numbing sorrow. After several minutes, he took a deep breath to collect himself and rose to his feet. Then he headed out the Archives door and down the stairs.

He’d come to the Temple in search of an old friend and confidante, hoping she could help him understand the dreams that plagued his nights. Instead he’d found a dead end and learned the grim truth about the one they called the Exile.

“No wonder I never come here anymore,” he grumbled under his breath as he made his way across the courtyard and headed for the exit.

CHAPTER 6

A WEEK HAD PASSED since the mission on Hallion. Daily doses of kolto had healed Scourge’s wounds; even his cracked ribs were fully mended. But his pride and confidence were still wounded. The mission had been a success, but things had gone a lot less smoothly than he would have liked. No doubt Sechel’s report to Nyriss would paint each of his mistakes in the most garish tone.

He was desperate to find some way to vent his frustrations, and today he had finally felt well enough to visit the stronghold’s exercise yard for a much-needed workout. He rarely went more than two or three days without practicing his drills, knowing that his continued survival would often depend on his martial expertise.

Though there were others in the yard, none was a worthy sparring partner. He would gain little from testing himself against any of Murtog’s soldiers. Even the guard captain himself wouldn’t present any real challenge to a fully trained Sith Lord.

Instead he performed a complex routine of drills designed to hone his reflexes, all while wearing his heavy armor. His crimson blade hummed as he cycled through the aggressive thrusts and cuts of Juyo, the seventh form of lightsaber combat. The weapon moved so fast that it was nothing but a blur, but each strike was precise and controlled.

In the middle of his routine he noticed that Nyriss’s young Twi’lek slave had entered the yard. She stood patiently off to one side, her head bowed respectfully.

Scourge put an abrupt end to the session, knowing she would be here only if Nyriss had sent her. He flicked his lightsaber off and clipped it to his belt before crossing the yard to her.

“Darth Nyriss wishes to speak to you,” the Twi’lek said softly, keeping her eyes focused on the ground.

“Will Sechel be there?” he demanded.

“I do not know, my lord,” she replied.

Scourge frowned. He had not seen or spoken with Sechel since their return.

“Take me to Nyriss.”

The slave nodded, then turned and set off. Scourge fell into step behind her.

He’d sought Sechel out several times over the past week, but the aide always seemed to be off on some task or assignment. It could have been coincidence, but it was also possible Sechel was avoiding him.

If that was the case, Scourge might know why. During his recovery, he’d had plenty of time to think back on the mission. Rehashing it in his head had brought several inconsistencies to light—things Sechel might not want to discuss with Scourge face-to-face.

The slave was leading him through the east wing of the stronghold. She was moving quickly ahead of him, but with his long legs Scourge had little trouble keeping up. As he walked, he continued to mull over the issue of Sechel.

At the time he’d credited the aide with saving his life by shutting down the manufacturing plant’s power grid and disabling the security droids. Now he wondered if that had been an accident. The more he thought about it, the more the evidence seemed to indicate that Sechel hadn’t wanted him to survive the mission.

Sechel had obviously needed Scourge’s help to get past the drones and the fence outside the plant. And he’d needed Scourge to hold off security long enough for him to slice into UDM’s computer network. But after that, Scourge became expendable. Once the droids were deactivated, Sechel no longer needed the Sith Lord to protect him.

What at first sounded like a paranoid fantasy became more and more plausible as Scourge recalled specific details of the mission. He had no way of knowing how long it had taken Sechel to slice into the network, but he’d likely found the files he was looking for in the first few minutes. Looking back, it seemed as if he could have shut down the power grid much sooner than he had.

What if Sechel had waited as long as possible before deactivating the droids, hoping they would have enough time to kill Scourge? From the records room, Sechel couldn’t have seen what was happening out on the manufacturing floor. He’d probably assumed Scourge was already dead by the time he shut everything down.

That would also explain why Sechel hadn’t bothered to contact him with a warning that the plant was about to explode. He’d only mentioned the reactors because Scourge called him on the holocomm after everything went dark. If Scourge hadn’t initiated the holocall, Sechel might have slipped away in the darkness alone.

Sechel’s early assurances that UDM didn’t have assault droids were also suspect. The units Scourge had encountered could have been experimental prototypes, as Sechel had claimed, but it was also possible he’d known about them all along and hadn’t said anything, hoping Scourge would be caught off guard by their arrival.

Three pieces of circumstantial evidence—a possible delay in shutting down the droids, Sechel not contacting him to warn about the impending explosion, and the unexpected presence of the assault droids—weren’t enough for Scourge to be certain of anything. Yet the fact that Sechel now seemed to be avoiding him further strengthened the Sith Lord’s desire to question him in a very long, very private session. Unfortunately, that talk would have to wait. Sechel still enjoyed Nyriss’s protection, and Scourge wasn’t willing to risk the Dark Councilor’s wrath by interrogating him. Not yet, at least.

They had reached the door to Nyriss’s private chamber. Scourge briefly considered whether he should say something about his suspicions to her, then decided against it. Sechel was an expert at political maneuvering; if he was guilty, involving Nyriss would only work in the adviser’s favor. Better to confront him directly when the time was right.

The Twi’lek slave knocked lightly on the door, and Nyriss’s voice called out, “Enter!” from the other side.

Once again, Nyriss sat at the computer console in the center of the room. As she rose from her chair and turned to face Scourge, the slave closed the door, sealing the three of them alone in the room.

“I was given word you have recovered from your injuries,” Nyriss said.

“Nothing serious, my lord,” Scourge replied.

“You seem to have a habit of getting wounded in my service.”

“I was surprised by the assault droids.”

“And I’m surprised they gave you so much trouble.”

Scourge remained silent.

Nyriss stretched her dry, cracked lips into an unsettling grin that seemed to fill the entire lower half of her wrinkled face. Scourge endured the rictus without comment until it mercifully faded.

“I find it odd that someone with your reputation would be hard-pressed to defeat a single assault droid and a few patrol drones, yet you dispatched my mercenaries with ease.”

It was obvious she was getting at something, but Scourge had no idea what it might be. “I … I don’t understand,” he finally admitted.

“No, you don’t,” she agreed, briefly flashing another disconcerting smile. “Recite the Sith Code for me,” she instructed, sounding like one of the trainers at the Academy.

“Peace is a lie; there is only passion. Through passion, I gain strength.” The words came easily to Scourge; the mantra had been drilled into his brain during his training until it was second nature. “Through strength, I gain power. Through power, I gain victory. Through victory my chains are broken.”

“You know the words, but you do not truly understand them,” Nyriss admonished. “The dark side draws on the most powerful emotions: anger, hatred, fear. We are taught to use our emotions to unlock our true potential and unleash the Force against our enemies.”

Scourge pushed down the impatience threatening to rise within him. She was saying nothing he hadn’t heard countless times during his apprenticeship, but she must have a reason he wasn’t yet seeing.

“The Force runs through every living being,” she went on. “When we fight an opponent of flesh and blood, we draw on their emotions, as well. All who follow the dark side instinctively do this on some level—it is so instinctive that most instructors feel it does not need to be taught.” She paused, and again he wondered where she was going with all this.

“I have studied your records from the Academy and observed your battle with the mercenaries in my courtyard,” she said at last. “You have a special gift. You do not just feed on the raw emotions of your foe; you gorge yourself on them. You feast on their primal fear. It amplifies your hate and anger. It fuels the power of the Force. It transforms you into an instrument of death and destruction.”

Scourge nodded. Battling a living foe was intoxicating; with each attack and counter he felt a rush of heat coursing through his veins, energizing and empowering him. Yet he had felt almost none of that at the UDM plant. “When I fought the security droid, there was nothing to grab on to. It was cold. Empty.”

“Precisely. You tried to feed off its nonexistent emotions, and in doing so only made yourself weaker. I wonder that this wasn’t observed in you; even the most powerful gift needs guiding to be used effectively.” She shook her head. “You are so used to using your gift that you neglect the most basic source of power: yourself. The next time you find yourself in a similar situation, you must turn your focus inward. Draw on your own emotions, and you will destroy your mechanical enemies as readily as you slaughter your organic ones.”

Scourge nodded. He did not like being lectured, but her observation was a good one: he realized that he had, indeed, learned to rely on the emotions of his enemies to feed his power, and he had not seen that such a gift could also be a weakness. But one that, with time and practice, could be overcome.

“A valuable lesson, my lord. One I will take to heart.”

“I have enough sycophants working for me,” she answered, brushing off his gratitude.

“But none can do what I do,” Scourge reminded her.

Nyriss spread her lips into another gruesome smile, and Scourge resisted the urge to shudder as a chill crawled down his spine.

“I hope your restored confidence will serve you well on your next mission,” she said. “The files Sechel recovered from UDM proved quite fruitful. He traced the payment for the custom droid sent to assassinate me back to a group of radical human separatists from Bosthirda dedicated to freeing their world from the tyranny of the Emperor and the Dark Council.”

Heavy sarcasm dripped from her voice, and Scourge shared her contempt. There were some enemies he could respect; there were some causes he could understand even if he fought against them. This was not one of them.

There were recently conquered worlds that suffered under the Empire’s yoke—planets like Hallion, where rebellion was to be expected. But Bosthirda had been part of the Empire for hundreds of years. Its people were full citizens, with all the rights and privileges of those on Dromund Kaas.

Human separatist propaganda might cry out against unfair treatment of their species, but Scourge knew their claims were unfounded. The original Dark Jedi who had taught the Sith tribes the ways of the Force millennia ago had been human. And though their bloodlines had been absorbed into the Sith aristocracy long ago, humans still made up the vast majority of the Imperial population.

There were human slaves, of course, but these were individuals born into the lower ranks of society, or those who had fallen through their own failures and weakness. Unlike other lesser species, they were not persecuted or discriminated against in any real way. There were no laws limiting their movements, no restrictions on what rank or position they could hold.

Humans could rise to the highest ranks of the Imperial military; a number of worlds were even ruled by wealthy and powerful human families; and the Emperor had appointed many humans to serve on the Dark Council. Of the twelve current members, five were human, including Darth Xedrix—the Councilor with the longest active service.

Humans had no right or reason to complain about their status in the Empire. The separatists were nothing but ungrateful scum and traitors.

“Why did they target you?” Scourge wondered aloud. “Why not strike at the Emperor himself?”

“The Emperor is too well protected,” Nyriss said. “Since they cannot get to him, one of the longest-serving members of the Dark Council is the next best thing.

“And they would never strike at Darth Xedrix,” she added. “He is human; they probably consider him one of their own.”

“What about Darth Igrol?” Scourge asked. “He is Sith, and he has served longer than anyone except Darth Xedrix.”

“Igrol resides on Dromund Fels. Killing one of the Dark Council on Dromund Kaas—the Imperial capital—makes more of a statement.” She paused. “They may also have chosen me because of my history with Darth Xedrix. Ever since I joined the Dark Council there has been animosity between us. At the time he was one of the most powerful members, yet even from the start he sensed my potential and feared it. For decades he has schemed against me, but I have outmaneuvered him every time, slowly building up my allies and influence while his have dwindled away.”

Nyriss wasn’t telling Scourge anything new. It was common knowledge that members of the Dark Council typically viewed one another as dangerous rivals, and there were always rumors of shadowy feuds being fought behind the scenes. Scourge believed the Emperor actually encouraged the infighting, since it dissuaded the various members from uniting their resources against him.

Despite what Nyriss claimed, however, her rivalry with Darth Xedrix had been anything but one-sided. Both had seen their fortunes rise and fall and rise again, with neither able to gain enough of an upper hand to eliminate the other.

Somehow Scourge didn’t think it would be prudent to mention this.

“The separatists probably see my rivalry with Darth Xedrix as proof I dislike all humans. Untrue, of course, but a well-crafted lie will often serve where truth will not.”

Her logic was sound, but the reasons hardly mattered. The separatists had tried to kill a member of the Dark Council. There had to be retribution.

“I will find these traitors and eviscerate them,” he declared.

“They’ve already been found. Sechel was able to use the information he acquired at UDM to locate their base in the mountains of Bosthirda. If they heard about the destruction of the UDM plant, they may be suspicious. We must strike quickly, before they can move to a new location. My people are leaving for Bosthirda tonight; you will accompany them.”

“You’re sending Sechel with me again?”

Nyriss nodded. “They may have connections to other terrorist groups. Sechel will be able to slice their records and find out who they are working with. I’m also sending Murtog and his soldiers with you. Sechel will be your precision instrument; the soldiers will be your blunt tool.”

Scourge would have preferred to leave Sechel behind, at least until he’d had a chance to confirm his suspicions.

He briefly considered sharing his concerns with Nyriss, then decided to stick with his original plan of keeping them to himself. He’d just have to keep a close eye on Sechel during the mission, and be wary of walking into any traps. There would be plenty of time to deal with him once the separatists were eliminated and he had proven himself worthy in Darth Nyriss’s eyes.

“The human filth will die, my lord,” Scourge promised, bowing low. “I will not fail.”

CHAPTER 7

FOR THE SECOND TIME in the space of a single month, Revan found himself at a table in the back of the Dealer’s Den, surrounded by the dregs of Coruscant.

“You couldn’t have just contacted me via holocomm?” he asked Canderous as he took a seat.

T3 obediently rolled underneath the table to sit patiently at their feet, safely away from where the waitresses might trip over him.

“I need to talk to you face-to-face about this,” the Mandalorian replied.

“Sounds ominous.”

T3 chirped his agreement.

“You still having those nightmares?” Canderous asked.

“Sometimes. I’m dealing with it.”

The dreams were coming only two or three times a week now, instead of every night. Revan didn’t know if this was because his subconscious was gaining more control over the repressed memory, or if it had something to do with the fact that he was taking steps to investigate his vision. Whatever the explanation, over the past week he had finally been able to grab a few nights of fitful rest. It wasn’t enough to get rid of the dark circles under his eyes, but he no longer felt utterly exhausted.

“Tell me what you found,” he said.

“I didn’t learn anything about a planet covered in storms and eternal night. But I did dig up something you might be interested in.”

The astromech droid at Revan’s feet beeped twice. It was obvious even to him that Canderous was hesitant to speak.

“I hope you’re not waiting for me to try to buy this information from you,” Revan joked. “I left most of my credits at home.”

Canderous shifted uncomfortably, then leaned forward to speak in a low whisper. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, you being a Jedi and all, but I think you have a right to know.”

“If you’re worried I’ll go running to the Council with your secret, don’t be.”

“It’s not just them. You can’t tell the Galactic Senate, either.”

“Whatever you’ve got to say must be pretty bad,” Revan remarked.

“Depends on your point of view.”

The big man leaned back in his chair and took a deep breath. Revan stayed silent, giving his friend time to gather himself.

“I got in contact with some of my people, just like you asked,” Canderous said finally. “I found out that dozens of the strongest chiefs are gathering their clans at Rekkiad.”

Revan recognized the name. Located in the Outer Rim system of the same name, Rekkiad was a virtually uninhabited world of ice and snow.

“They’re planning another invasion,” he guessed, assuming that was why Canderous was worried about the Jedi or the Republic finding out.

“No, they’re not,” Canderous assured him. “Not yet, at least. They’re searching for Mandalore’s Mask. They think you hid it somewhere on Rekkiad.”

An image flickered through Revan’s mind: he and Malak standing on the top of a glacier, surrounded by a swirling blizzard. It vanished before he could grasp it, retreating into the dark corners of his subconscious. Yet the brief flash of the resurfacing memory was enough to confirm what Canderous had said.

“I think they may be right,” Revan muttered.

Canderous was silent, obviously expecting him to say more. But there wasn’t anything he could add. The memory was gone.

“You know what the Mask means to my people,” Canderous said. “Without it we are lost, vagabonds wandering the galaxy without a purpose. Recovering the Mask could be the key to restoring Mandalorian honor—and power.”

Revan knew all this. That was why he had hidden the Mask after slaying Mandalore the Ultimate—a final act to demoralize a defeated foe. He’d hoped it would take the Mandalorians generations to recover from the loss of their most revered cultural symbol. Without it, the war-like clans would be too busy fighting among themselves for power to even think about conquering Republic worlds. But if the Mask were to be found again …

“Whoever finds it will be hailed as the new leader of the clans,” Canderous continued. “Mandalore will rise again, and the Mandalorians will follow.”

Revan knew that Canderous was sharing this knowledge with him out of loyalty. They had been through too many battles together for him to keep this secret. Yet he also understood why Canderous had been reluctant to speak. He was still a Mandalorian, and he feared for the future of his people.

The wounds of the Mandalorian Wars were still fresh in the minds of the Jedi and the Republic. The looming specter of a Mandalorian army unified by a single war-like leader would not be ignored. Even if the Jedi Council refused to take action again, the Senate would send its fleets to crush the potential threat before it could begin.

In their disorganized and depleted state, it was unlikely the Mandalorians would be able to resist. After the inevitable defeat, the Senate would likely impose martial law over the surviving clans, forcing them to disarm and abandon the customs and practices of their warrior culture. If the Republic found out about this, the Mandalorians as Canderous knew them would cease to exist forever.

“Do you believe the Mandalorians will attack the Republic again if the Mask is found?” Revan asked.

“Depends who finds it,” Canderous answered candidly. “Some of the clan leaders want nothing more than to avenge our defeat. Others would rather try to rebuild our society. We were great warriors before we started conquering Republic worlds; it’s possible we can restore our honor without violating the treaty terms we agreed to.”

The terms I forced you to accept, Revan thought.

It was ironic that Canderous was sharing all this with the architect of the Mandalorians’ greatest defeat. Almost a decade earlier, Revan had been one of the few willing to take action against the invading clans. But he was not the same person he was back then. He no longer clung to the simplistic ideals of right and wrong or good and evil. He understood better than anyone that dark and light were intertwined in strange and complex ways. And on some primal level, he knew this was all somehow connected to his visions of a dark, storm-swept world.

The Mandalorians had the potential to be a very real threat, but his visions had convinced him there was something far more dangerous lurking beyond the borders of known space. The fate of the entire galaxy might rest on the repressed memories trying to break free from the prison of his own mind, and sending a hostile Republic fleet to scatter the clans wouldn’t get him any closer to unlocking the truth.

“I’m not going to say anything about this to the Senate or the Council,” Revan assured his friend. “But whoever finds the Mandalore’s Mask will shape the destiny of your people for the next thousand years. I think it might be a good idea for us to be there when that happens.”

A broad grin spread across Canderous’s scarred, square jaw, and he reached across the table and slapped the Jedi on the shoulder. “I knew I could count on you.”

“Time to get the old gang back together for one last adventure.”

“Not everyone,” Revan countered. “Juhani and Jolee are Jedi; they still answer to the Council. They might feel obligated to say something about this.”

“I got no problem with leaving the cat girl and the old man behind.”

“I don’t want to get Mission and Zaalbar mixed up in this, either,” Revan continued. “They’ve worked hard to build up a nice importexport business over the past year. I don’t want them to throw it all away.”

“They would if you asked them to,” Canderous noted. “Wouldn’t even think twice about it.”

“That’s why I’m not going to ask. Mission’s had it rough her whole life. Now that she’s finally got it back on track, I’m not going to mess things up for her.”

“Okay, scratch the Twi’lek kid. But what about Zaalbar? That Wookiee knows how to handle himself when things get rough.”

“Mission and Big Z are a team. We can’t break them up.”

Canderous rolled his eyes. “We’re getting a little short on bodies here.”

T3 whistled loudly, and Revan reached down to give him a reassuring pat on the head. “Don’t worry, little fella. You’re too useful to leave behind.”

The astromech droid whistled again.

“Good point,” Revan replied. “HK’s a little too trigger-happy to bring on this mission. Things tend to get bloody when he’s around.”

“You realize we’re going to a planet overrun with Mandalorians?” Canderous reminded him. “Bloody is probably unavoidable.”

“I’m hoping at least some of the clans can be reasoned with,” Revan explained. “If we bring a homicidal assassin droid with us, I don’t think they’re going to give us much of a chance to explain why we’re there.”

“We’re a little short on bodies,” Canderous repeated. “What about that other Jedi who helped you during the war? Not Malak. The one they call the Exile.”

“Meetra,” Revan said.

“I heard she and the Council had a falling-out.”

“I don’t know where she is.”

“Might be worth tracking her down,” Canderous pressed. “She proved herself during the war.”

Revan wasn’t sure how much Canderous knew about Malachor V and the mass-shadow generator. The mission report was sealed away in the Jedi Archives; he might have no idea that she had lured thousands of his fellow soldiers into a trap. It was also possible he was fully aware of Meetra’s actions, and respected her even more for making the ruthless but tactically brilliant decision to sacrifice thousands of her own people to achieve victory. In either case, Revan didn’t want to get into the tragic tale of Meetra’s banishment and her severance from the Force.

“She may have had a falling-out with the Council, but she’s still a Jedi,” he lied, doing his best to ignore the twinge of guilt he felt for his role in her ultimate fate.

“So who’s that leave, then? You, me, and this half-sized bucket of bolts?”

Canderous gave T3 a playful kick with one of his heavy boots. The droid beeped angrily in response.

“Don’t forget Bastila,” Revan added.

“I thought you wanted to leave the Jedi out of this.”

“She’s my wife,” Revan answered. “I’m not going to abandon her.”

“Hey, it’s your call,” Canderous said, holding his hands up defensively. “She’s welcome to come along. I mean, if you really think you can convince her that heading to the Outer Rim to explore Rekkiad’s frozen wastelands is a good idea.”

“Well,” Revan said with a shrug, “we never did go on a honeymoon.”

BASTILA WAS SITTING in the living room when he got home, watching holovids while she waited for him to return. Revan wondered if she’d been waiting long.

He hadn’t told her where he was going, and he hadn’t told her about sending Canderous off to investigate the Mandalorians—he just hadn’t seen any point in worrying her if there was nothing she could do to help. Now that they had a plan, however, he was eager to share it with her. He just had to be careful how he explained it all.

“Sorry,” he said as he crossed the room and bent down to give her a kiss. “I didn’t know I’d be so late. You shouldn’t have waited up.”

“That’s okay,” she said, taking his hand and pulling him down onto the couch beside her. “I couldn’t sleep.”

Still holding his hand, she turned to face him. “I’ve got something to tell you,” she said.

“Me, too. Big news.”

“I bet mine is bigger,” she said with a faint smile.

“That’s a bet you’d lose,” he warned her.

“I’m pregnant.”

Revan was stunned into silence for several long seconds. When he finally managed to speak, all he could say was, “Okay, you win.”

REVAN COULDN’T BELIEVE he hadn’t noticed Bastila’s pregnancy earlier. Though there were no visible physical signs of her condition, it should have been obvious. The instant she’d told him, he’d clearly sensed the life growing inside her through the Force.

“I must be getting senile in my old age,” he said, caressing her still-flat belly.

“You’ve had a lot on your mind,” Bastila reminded him. “And you haven’t been sleeping much.”

It was still too early to tell if it was a boy or a girl, but it didn’t matter to Revan either way. He and Bastila were going to have a child; it was the happiest day of his life. There was just one small problem.

“Talk about bad timing,” Bastila murmured, echoing his own sentiments.

Once he’d gotten over the joyful shock of her news, he’d told her about his meeting with Canderous.

“I have to do this,” he said softly. “It’s the only way I’m ever going to find out what that vision actually means.”

“What if you don’t find out?” Bastila countered. “Your nightmares are fading. Maybe in a few months they’ll stop.”

“Maybe,” he agreed, though he didn’t believe it. “But I think these are more than just old memories bubbling up. They’re a warning. Even if the visions stop, the threat they represent would still be out there.”

“Haven’t you done enough already?” Bastila asked, her voice rising slightly. “You saved the Republic from the Mandalorians. You saved the Republic from Malak. And in return, you had your identity destroyed and were ostracized by the Council.”

She pulled away from him, her anger building. “You don’t owe them anything anymore,” she insisted. “You’ve paid for your mistakes. You’ve sacrificed enough. You’ve earned the right to live out your days in peace!”

“If I don’t do something, nobody else will,” he said, shaking his head.

“So what? So nobody does anything. Whatever evil’s lurking in the Unknown Regions might not show itself for decades! We could both be old and gray by then. We have a chance to live out our entire lives in perfect happiness. Are you willing to risk throwing all that away?”

It was tempting to give in. It would be easy to pretend nothing was wrong and just live in blissful ignorance like trillions of other beings in the galaxy. There was only one problem with her argument.

“I’m not doing this for the Republic,” he explained. “I’m not doing it for you. I’m not even doing it for me. I’m doing it for our child. And our child’s children. We might never live to see the horrors that are coming, but they will.” He tightened his arm around her. “We have to protect the Republic for them. We have to risk our chance at happiness so they can have a life we might never know.”

Bastila didn’t answer. Instead she leaned against him, resting her head on his shoulder, and he knew she felt the same way.

“When do we leave?” she asked after a long moment of silence.

“You can’t come with me,” Revan objected gently. “What if I find something on Rekkiad? Some clue connected to my past? What if it leads me farther into the Outer Rim? Or even the Unknown Regions? We could be gone for months. Maybe longer. Do you really want to give birth on some uninhabited world on the edges of the galaxy? And then what will we do? How are we going to care for an infant under those conditions? I won’t risk the life of our child like that. And I know you won’t, either.”

Bastila reached two fingers up and pressed them gently against Revan’s lips. “If I say you’re right,” she whispered, “will you please shut up?”

He nodded silently.

“Because I can think of better things to do on the last night before you leave than talking.”

Revan couldn’t have agreed with her more.

BASTILA ACCOMPANIED REVAN and T3 to the spaceport. Canderous was already there, loading supplies onto the Ebon Hawk.

The Ebon Hawk had served Revan well during his hunt for Darth Malak. Owned by a succession of smugglers and pirates, it was one of the fastest ships in the galaxy. It had enough room to comfortably accommodate a crew of eight—with cargo and supplies—yet a single individual could pilot it when necessary.

Technically speaking, the Ebon Hawk still belonged to Davik Kang, a Tarisian crime lord. But Davik wouldn’t be coming to reclaim it: he was long dead, his body buried beneath the ruins of Taris when Malak bombed the city-world from orbit.

“Be careful out there,” Bastila said.

“I always am,” he answered with a smile, wiping a single tear from the corner of her eye.

They didn’t need to say anything else; they’d said their true goodbyes in private the previous night. Bastila’s years of Jedi training had left her uncomfortable with public displays of emotion, but she stood up on her toes and planted a long, hard kiss on Revan’s lips. Then she turned away and quickly left the spaceport.

Canderous raised a curious eyebrow but showed enough restraint not to ask why she wasn’t coming.

They finished loading the ship in silence. Twenty minutes later the Ebon Hawk took flight.

CHAPTER 8

BOSTHIRDA’S ORANGE SUN WAS SETTING QUICKLY.

Scourge, crouched in the shadows of a cramped alley in the warehouse district on the outskirts of Jerunga, the planetary capital, watched it disappear. As darkness fell, the photosensitive streetlamps kicked in, casting the entire district in a pale yellow glow.

The dim artificial illumination was enough to give Scourge a clear view of the two-story building across the street. From the outside, there was no way to tell that the structure was the separatists’ base. There were no autoguns on the roof; no guards patrolled the perimeter. The loading bay doors were ordinary durasteel, rather than the reinforced kind used to construct blast doors. The windows were blacked out, and several security cams panned back and forth, surveying the street, but neither was unusual for buildings in this district.

Instead of military fortifications that might draw unwanted attention, the separatists relied on anonymity and secrecy to protect them. They would be unprepared for the wrath about to rain down upon them.

His comlink beeped softly, followed by Murtog’s whispered voice. “Team is in position.”

“Hold until my signal,” Scourge replied. “Give me time to take out those cams.”

“Could be droids in there,” Sechel chimed in. “You sure you don’t want Murtog’s team to go in first and clear the way?”

Scourge gritted his teeth. Did Sechel know about Scourge’s difficulties in taking down the droids at the UDM plant? Were his words a way of saying, I know your secrets; I know your weaknesses?

On the other hand, if Sechel was just making a joke based on what had happened on their last mission, then Scourge’s paranoid over-analysis meant that the slimy little sycophant had gotten to him.

Neither option sat well with the Sith Lord, particularly since he still wasn’t sure whether Sechel was trying to get him killed.

“Remember the plan,” Scourge snapped. “The two of you stay back until I give the all-clear. We can’t risk a stray blaster bolt taking out our Lord’s favorite adviser; leave the dirty work to me and your team.”

“Understood,” Murtog agreed.

Keeping Murtog out of the battle wasn’t the best tactical choice, but it was worth it to keep Sechel away from the action. Scourge didn’t need to be looking over his shoulder while he was fighting the separatists. Plus, Murtog would be at a safe distance, as well—just in case he turned out to be a co-conspirator.

“I’ll send the signal once I poke out their eyes,” Scourge said, rising to his feet.

Careful to stay in the shadows, Scourge crossed the street to the building adjacent to the base and crept around the back. There he located the utility ladder running up the side of the building and climbed to the rooftop, from which he could look down on the roof of the separatist base. The gap between the buildings was substantial: nearly ten meters. Scourge measured the distance, took a dozen steps back, then ran to the edge and leapt over the precipice.

He pulled his knees up and tucked into a forward roll as he landed, then sprang to his feet, lightsaber drawn and ready. There were four cams on the roof, mounted on poles at each corner. In rapid succession he reached out with the Force and snapped them off one by one, sending them tumbling from their perches to shatter on the street below.

“Target is blind. Move in,” he said into his comlink.

In the street below, small squads of Murtog’s soldiers were approaching the building. Scourge waited while they launched their first volley of flash and stun grenades, followed by a round of suppressing fire as the soldiers took cover positions near the door. From inside came the sound of blaster carbines as the separatists returned fire.

Moving quickly but calmly, Scourge crossed the rooftop to the hatch built into the center. A few seconds later it swung open and a pair of separatists emerged—snipers coming to the roof to take a position on the attackers below.

Scourge hacked down the first with his lightsaber, then grabbed the second by the scruff of his collar and yanked him off his feet. The young human looked at him with abject horror, his panic so great that he never even thought to raise his weapon.

The Sith Lord fed on the man’s fear, savoring it as the heat of the dark side rushed through him. Effortlessly toting the sniper along, he took three quick steps toward the rooftop’s edge, then hurled the man over. The sniper’s terrified scream was cut short a second later by his fatal impact with the ground below.

Scourge turned and raced back to the open hatch. He could hear frenzied shouts and blasterfire. An instant later an explosion rocked the entire building, followed by several seconds of silence. Another round of blasterfire and shouting confirmed that Murtog’s team had breached the entrance.

Scourge leapt through the hatch leading into the warehouse’s upper floor. There were no interior walls; it consisted of a single massive room. In the far corner a staircase led down to the lower level. A row of mattresses ran along one wall, but the primary purpose of the space seemed to be storage. Crates and footlockers were scattered about, along with a haphazard collection of armor, weapons, and other military equipment. A computer terminal had been set up near the mattresses, along with four blank monitors that would once have shown the images from the security cams on the roof.

Scourge registered all this without conscious thought; his primary focus was on the twenty-odd humans struggling into their combat gear to join the battle downstairs. Unfortunately for them, that was never going to happen.

Like a red wind, Scourge swept through their ranks, slashing left and right, hewing off limbs and decapitating bodies. Violent bursts of the Force picked his victims up and tossed them around like rag dolls, breaking bones and shattering skulls.

The separatists offered virtually no resistance. They had been caught off guard; they hadn’t expected an ambush from the roof. These were not soldiers. They were ordinary men and women who had received only the most basic training when they’d joined the cause. Scourge’s savage and sudden assault, and the bloody carnage he left in his wake, sent them into a panic. He fed on their primal fears. Some he killed, others he left mortally wounded and writhing on the floor, their lives enduring for thirty or forty agonizing seconds while their high-pitched cries of pain fueled his bloodlust.

Had the separatists coordinated their efforts into a focused and organized counterattack they might have been able to challenge him. But they just scattered, running for their lives. Scourge drank in their terror and confusion, and felt the growing power of the dark side. He channeled that power and refocused it, sending it out in waves that rippled across the room, further inciting the panicked retreat of his enemies.

When two women managed to resist the onslaught of fear and fight back, he was on them in an instant, cutting them down with a few quick slashes of his lightsaber. Everyone else was running. Some fled downstairs. Scourge let them go; they wouldn’t get past Murtog’s team. Others tried to hide, cowering behind crates and footlockers. But Scourge didn’t need to see them to hunt them down. He could sense them through the Force, trembling and sobbing silently, their minds numb with shock, and he stalked them one by one, breathing hard not with exertion but excitement.

It was over in minutes. Only then, standing alone amid the bodies, did Scourge notice that the sounds of battle from below had ended.

Moving quickly, he crossed the room and descended the staircase. The floor below was similar to the one above: except for a row of offices built along the east side of the building, there were no interior walls; the floor was stacked with crates and piled with supplies. Bodies were scattered everywhere. Most were separatists, but Scourge noticed three or four wearing Nyriss’s colors. The rest of Murtog’s team were methodically searching the dead, looking for survivors to interrogate.

Scourge shook his head, knowing it was a waste of time. The greatest fear of any separatist organization was betrayal from within. Only the two or three top people would know anything useful, and they would never have allowed themselves to be taken alive.

Confident that the building was secure, he deactivated his lightsaber and clipped it onto his belt. Then he activated the comlink on his wrist.

“All clear, Murtog. Get Sechel in here.”

“We’re already inside,” Murtog’s voice came back to him. “Found their control center in some offices at the back.”

Scourge had to clench his teeth to keep from screaming with rage. He had given specific orders, and Murtog and Sechel had willfully disobeyed them.

He made his way toward the offices with long, purposeful strides. As he approached, his anger gave way to suspicion. There had to be a reason they had defied him. Were they simply undercutting his authority, or was it something more sinister. Were they setting some kind of trap?

As he drew near the offices, he saw both Sechel and Murtog huddled at a comm terminal. Surprisingly, there were no other members of Murtog’s team nearby. Scourge approached cautiously, probing with the Force to see if he could detect any immediate threat.

Neither turned as he approached; their attention was focused entirely on the comm.

“Are there any others?” Murtog was asking.

“Not that I can find,” Sechel replied. “But I might be able to—”

“I gave you two an order!” Scourge barked as he came up behind them.

They both turned to face him. Murtog’s lips were pressed tightly together, and he seemed to have gone pale. But Sechel seemed more amused than scared.

“After you were gone I realized a flaw in your plan,” he said with an ingratiating smile. “If the separatists had anything incriminating here in the base, they’d probably try to destroy it before we could get our hands on it. I told Murtog I might be able to salvage something if he could get me inside. But the longer we waited, the less chance we’d have to recover anything useful.”

Scourge didn’t say anything, his eyes fixed on Sechel with a piercing glare.

“We would have tried to contact you, but you’d already started the mission. We didn’t want to distract you.”

“Do you take me for a fool?” Scourge asked softly, his hand casually falling to the hilt of his lightsaber.

Sechel’s smile faded, and Scourge caught a hint of fear in his eyes.

“I don’t normally disobey orders,” Murtog said, jumping in to try to defuse the situation. “But in this case Sechel was right. Once the separatists knew the battle was lost, they ran a cleaner program on their computers to erase all their datafiles. If we’d waited for your signal, everything would have been lost.”

Scourge let the hand drop from his weapon. Now was not the time to settle this. But it was one more thing Sechel would answer for once he finally got a chance to speak with him alone.

“What did you find?”

“A recording of a recent communication,” Sechel answered, pressing a button on the terminal.

A ghostly blue, three-dimensional image crackled into being, hovering a few centimeters above the holocomm. The frozen image was slightly under a meter in height, a perfect miniature of the speaker.

“Darth Xedrix,” Scourge gasped.

“Most of the call was already erased by the cleaner program,” Sechel explained. “But I was able to save this.”

He hit another button and the recording began to play. It was obviously damaged; the image flickered in and out of focus, and the audio was plagued by bursts of static that cut off much of what was said.

“… latest failed attempt …” Xedrix said, his voice thin and crackling. “Nyriss is dangerous, and must not be … keep allegiances hidden … stop the Emperor … madness must end …”

“Can you get anything more?” Scourge asked.

“Not here,” Sechel answered. “Give me enough time and the proper equipment and I should be able to come up with plenty.”

“Tell your team to load up every terminal and datafile they find,” Scourge instructed Murtog. “Nyriss won’t be pleased if we leave something important behind.”

Sechel didn’t say anything, but the grin on his face spoke volumes.

NYRISS’S PERSONAL SLAVE GREETED them at the front door as the three arrived back at the palace.

“My mistress received your message,” she said to Scourge. “She wishes to speak to you at once.”

“Get started on those datafiles as soon as Murtog’s team finishes unloading them,” he said to Sechel.

“Forgive me, my lord,” the young Twi’lek said, her voice trembling slightly. “Darth Nyriss wants to speak to all three of you.”

Scourge glanced from the slave to Sechel and Murtog, wondering if they knew anything more than he did. They only shrugged.

“Let’s go,” Scourge said with a brisk nod.

The Twi’lek turned and led them down the now-familiar corridors to Darth Nyriss’s personal chamber. As she always did, the slave knocked once on the door and waited for acknowledgment from within.

“Enter,” Nyriss called.

The slave opened the door and slipped to the side to allow Scourge, Murtog, and Sechel to crowd into the small room where Nyriss sat at her computer terminal, looking as if she hadn’t moved since the last time Scourge had seen her there. She flicked off the terminal, spun in her chair, and stood up.

“Is it true?” she asked, not even bothering to greet them. “Is Darth Xedrix a traitor to the Empire?”

“We found a recording of a call from him at the separatist base,” Sechel said. “They were obviously working with him.”

Despite the compelling evidence, Scourge wasn’t fully convinced. Xedrix was human, which didn’t sit well with some of the Sith pureblood families in the nobility of the Empire. Yet whatever petty prejudices he had endured in his life were insignificant compared with all he had achieved.

Darth Xedrix was the longest-serving member of the Dark Council, having joined a full decade before Nyriss. He had risen to the penultimate position in the Empire, and while Scourge could understand his desire to eliminate Nyriss or other potential rivals, it was hard to imagine that he would be bold enough to challenge the immortal, all-powerful Emperor.

“Xedrix’s betrayal makes no sense,” he said, feeling confident enough in his analysis of the situation to voice his opinion.

“It makes perfect sense if you know the man as I do,” Nyriss assured him. “Xedrix is old and desperate. He knows his position has become vulnerable. Soon the Emperor will have no further use for him. In his arrogance, he thinks he can usurp the Emperor’s position and save himself. That is why he plotted with the separatists to assassinate me. He knows those of us currently on the Dark Council would oppose him in his bid for power. He seeks to replace us with new members who are weak and inexperienced. He thinks he will be able to manipulate them and seize control of the entire Council, so that they will follow him when he finally moves against the Emperor.”

Her explanation made sense. He had seen firsthand how those in power became desperate when they sensed their positions were threatened.

“It won’t be long before Darth Xedrix learns of the attack on Bosthirda,” Nyriss continued. “We must act quickly.”

“I’m surprised the Emperor instructed you to deal with this,” Scourge remarked. “I’d have expected him to order the Imperial Guard to arrest Xedrix.”

“The Emperor doesn’t know,” Nyriss said.

“Darth Xedrix has allied himself with separatists,” Scourge insisted. “He’s a traitor to the Empire! It is our duty to report him.”

“I don’t think that would be the best plan,” Sechel cautioned, ignoring Scourge and addressing Nyriss directly. “We have little evidence, and your rivalry with Xedrix is well known. If we come forward with these accusations, he will simply deny them. The Emperor is unlikely to act without first gathering more proof. This will give Xedrix a chance to cover up his involvement, or go into hiding.”

“Sechel is right,” Nyriss said. “The element of surprise is our greatest advantage. Xedrix doesn’t know we have exposed his treachery. If we strike now, we can catch him unprepared.”

It was obvious her mind was made up, and Scourge could follow the logic of her arguments. Yet he still felt uncomfortable not reporting Xedrix to the Emperor.

“An assault on his stronghold will be difficult,” Murtog warned. “We don’t have the numbers to overwhelm his defenses, and I don’t like hiring mercenaries for a job like this. Too much chance one of them will sell us out to Xedrix.”

“Perhaps assassination is the way to go,” Sechel suggested. “Do to him what he tried to do to you.”

“We would need a particularly skilled and accomplished assassin,” Nyriss said. She looked at Scourge. “Do you think you can get close enough to Xedrix?”

Scourge carefully considered all the variables before he replied. His first instinct was to propose an undercover operation, with him seeking a position on Xedrix’s personal staff. Over several weeks he could study the routines of his intended victim and all his servants, patiently waiting for a chance to catch him alone, unarmed and unprepared. But there were no Sith among Xedrix’s followers. Many Sith were prejudiced against humans. No doubt the Dark Councilor would never allow Sith too close to him, fearing they might one day turn on him.

Scourge might be able to find some other way to infiltrate Xedrix’s inner circle, but as Nyriss had pointed out they needed to act quickly. There wasn’t time for a prolonged undercover mission.

“Inside his stronghold he is untouchable,” he declared finally.

“There may be a way to lure him out,” Sechel said. “The separatists seem to use coded communications whenever they contact Xedrix. If I can replicate the code, I can send a message requesting an urgent meeting at some remote location.”

“An ambush might work,” Murtog agreed. “Xedrix won’t want to draw attention to his treachery. At most, he’ll have two or three of his most trusted followers with him. With enough troops we should be able to take him down.”

“No,” Nyriss said, shaking her wizened head. “Xedrix would sense it coming. Whoever we send will have to hide his presence through the Force until Xedrix walks into the trap.”

It was obvious whom she was referring to, but Scourge was still reluctant. “Asking me to kill a member of the Dark Council is not as simple as you make it sound.”

“I did not expect you to balk at this task,” Nyriss said. “He has committed treason. He brought this on himself.”

“You misunderstand,” Scourge said, choosing his words carefully. “The human traitor deserves to die. But he is a Dark Lord of the Sith. Alone, what chance will I have against him?”

“I should have known,” Sechel said, grinning. “You’re afraid.”

“Fighting a battle I can’t win isn’t brave,” Scourge shot back. “It’s stupid.”

“At least you have the courage to speak your mind,” Nyriss said.

“You already have enough sycophants,” Scourge replied, glaring at Sechel.

Nyriss flashed one of her ghastly grins, sending a chill down Scourge’s spine. Somehow he kept himself from shuddering.

“I think the two of us should continue this conversation privately,” she said.

Sechel and Murtog bowed and left without a word. Scourge was pleased to see they were chastened by their sudden exclusion. Nyriss didn’t speak until the Twi’lek servant had closed the door behind them.

“You are right to be cautious,” she said. “But you underestimate your own abilities.”

Scourge’s thoughts jumped back to the slaughter at the separatist warehouse; he remembered the energy and exhilaration he’d felt. He could sense his power was growing. His connection to the dark side had never been stronger. But butchering poorly prepared soldiers was not the same as facing highly trained Sith. “Xedrix won’t come alone. He’ll have me outnumbered.”

“Xedrix surrounds himself with acolytes of the dark side. Your talent will let you feed on their power and turn it against them. The greater your opponent’s connection to the Force, the stronger you become.”

“Strong enough to kill a member of the Dark Council?”

“Against me, you would stand no chance,” Nyriss replied. “But Xedrix is old and infirm. And he is human—they are a lesser species. Over the decades, the dark side has exacted too great a toll on his body. He is a hollow shell of what he once was. He holds on to his current position only because of his cunning. His followers obey him without question, too frightened of his reputation to see how age has ravaged his flesh and left him weak.”

Nyriss paused, waiting for Scourge’s response. He wasn’t eager to offer one without carefully considering everything he had learned.

He believed what Nyriss had told him about his own abilities: He had felt the truth of it in his most recent battles. But he wasn’t ready to trust her. If Xedrix was really as weak as she claimed, she wouldn’t need Scourge’s help to eliminate him.

The truth was, Scourge wanted to kill Xedrix. It wasn’t just his loyalty to the Emperor, though he firmly believed the only fit punishment for treason was death. He wanted to test himself against a member of the Dark Council; he wanted to prove to himself and to Nyriss that he was worthy of this task. If Darth Xedrix fell to his hand, his name would be hailed and feared throughout the Empire. Nyriss would be indebted to him for eliminating her rival, and the Emperor would reward him for executing a traitor.

It was unlikely he would be chosen to replace Xedrix on the Dark Council. Scourge was still too young, too unknown. He hadn’t forged the necessary political alliances or built up a cadre of servants and followers. Yet this would be a bold first step; it would make his name known in the halls of power. And when another vacancy opened on the Council down the road—in five years, or maybe ten—he would be the leading candidate.

“Tell Sechel to set up the meeting,” he said.

Nyriss smiled again, but this time Scourge didn’t find it so unnerving. Instead, he found himself wondering if it would be her he replaced when he finally ascended to his rightful position.

CHAPTER 9

REVAN STARED AT the flickering topographic map of Rekkiad on the Ebon Hawk’s navigation screens. The glacier-covered world had never been settled; no cities or villages dotted his screen. The scans revealed nothing but a frozen wasteland of ice and snow, stretching off for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.

According to Canderous, the Mandalorians had set up a temporary landing field somewhere on the planet’s surface. The clans that had gathered on Rekkiad worked together to maintain and protect the vessels there; it was effectively neutral ground. Outside the landing field, however, each clan laid claim to its own territory—a claim they were willing to fight to defend.

Neither Revan nor Canderous thought it was wise to take the Ebon Hawk to the communal landing strip. Outsiders weren’t welcome among the Mandalorians. Canderous figured they’d have better luck dealing directly with Clan Ordo, his own people.

The original plan was to land within walking distance of Clan Ordo’s base camp and approach on foot. Using spaceports was rarely a preferred option for the kind of smugglers and miscreants who had owned the Ebon Hawk throughout its history, and many had installed customized upgrades to allow the ship to land in less-than-ideal conditions. But Revan doubted they had ever intended to visit a world as inhospitable as Rekkiad, and he was starting to have second thoughts.

Gale-force winds hammered the ship’s hull, causing it to buck and lurch, and a blizzard of swirling snow and ice limited the range of the Hawk’s sensors. To get close enough for the topographic scan, Revan had to bring them in only a few hundred meters above the surface of the world—close enough that one wrong move could send them crashing into the surface.

T3 beeped anxiously at Revan’s side, crowding the pilot’s chair as Revan fought to keep the ship level.

“Get Canderous up here,” Revan barked. “Tell him to check those grid coordinates again.”

The little astromech droid spun around and sped off in search of the third member of their crew.

A gust of wind caused the ship to veer down and to the left. The safety restraints bit into Revan’s flesh as he jammed the throttle forward and yanked back on the stick, pulling the ship up out of a steep dive moments before it hit the ground.

The ship veered off course, and suddenly a massive glacier jutting up from the planet’s frozen surface materialized on the nav display.

Revan banked hard to avoid plowing into the wall of ice, but even the lightning-fast reactions of a Jedi couldn’t entirely overcome the Hawk’s momentum. The ship was spared a direct hit, but its underside clipped a sharp outcropping of ice.

The impact sent the Hawk into a spiraling, twisting roll. Revan wrenched the stick from side to side, fighting for control. Using the Force, he was able to anticipate and react to the erratic flight with instantaneous precision adjustments, keeping the ship aloft until it regained its equilibrium.

The immediate crisis averted, Revan took the Hawk up to a safer altitude and set the autopilot. Then he slumped in his chair and let out a long, low sigh. After a few seconds he straightened up, readjusted his restraint belts, and checked the instrument panel.

A blinking red warning light confirmed his fears: the impact with the glacier had damaged the landing gear.

Revan muttered a curse under his breath, just as a much louder string of profanity came from Canderous staggering into the cockpit. T3 rolled in after him, beeping indignantly.

“You trying to smash us into gree pulp back there?” Canderous grumbled, plopping down into the copilot’s seat. “I thought you knew how to fly this rusted slag-heap.”

“I thought you said Clan Ordo had set up a camp somewhere on this frozen rock,” Revan shot back. “Couldn’t see a blasted thing on those grid coordinates you gave me.”

“Maybe they moved to another location,” Canderous said with a shrug. “Can’t have gone too far, though. Not in these conditions. Do a ground scan of the area and they’ll probably turn up.”

“That’s what I was doing,” Revan replied through gritted teeth. “Turns out it’s a good way to get up close and personal with a glacier.”

Canderous glanced over at the warning light. “That why that red light’s blinking?”

“The landing gear got smashed up when we clipped the glacier.”

“You couldn’t just fly around it?”

Revan rolled his eyes.

“Go down for another look,” Canderous advised after a few moments of strained silence. “Clan Ordo’s gotta be close by.”

“Even if we find them, then what? You really expect me to bring the ship in on busted landing gear?”

“You’re a smart guy,” Canderous answered, shifting to get comfortable in his seat. “You’ll think of something.”

There wasn’t much point in continuing the argument, so Revan let it drop. Yet he couldn’t help but wonder at the recent change he’d noticed in Canderous.

As long as he’d known the Mandalorian, he’d sensed an underlying tension in him. Like a soldier in enemy territory, he was always ready for a fight. As a Mandalorian, he was never fully accepted by those in the Republic, and he knew it.

Now, however, he seemed different. He was still gruff and taciturn. But ever since they’d left Coruscant, he’d been less grim, more relaxed. He was eager to be back among his own people, and he wasn’t about to let a few minor setbacks like a missing camp or damaged landing gear stop him.

To be fair, Revan had no intention of abandoning their quest, either. There was too much at stake to turn back. Which meant Canderous was right: the only real option was to keep looking for Clan Ordo’s camp and hope they got lucky.

Revan brought the Hawk in low again, but this time he throttled it back to half speed. The swirling winds still made for a rough ride, but at least he’d have more time to react if something went wrong.

“See if you can do something to give our sensors a boost,” he said to T3.

The little astromech chirped with pleasure and extended a small probe from a panel in his side to interface directly with the Hawk’s systems.

While T3 worked, Revan began a standard search pattern with the original coordinates for the camp at the center. Taking the Hawk around in ever-widening circles, he spiraled outward, letting the sensors scan the ground for signs of life. Suddenly T3 began beeping excitedly. Canderous leaned forward to look at the scanner’s display.

“I think your droid’s got some rust on the brain,” he said. “I don’t see anything.”

Revan knew better than to doubt the little astromech. “Can you enhance the image?” he asked T3.

T3 responded with a low whistle, and a second later a static-filled thermal image appeared on the screen. The details were difficult to make out, but it appeared to be a small collection of tents and temporary shelters built against the leeward side of a small mountain of ice and snow.

“Could be them,” Canderous admitted, reaching out one of his massive hands to give T3 a friendly pat on the head. The droid squawked an indignant protest, and he quickly pulled his hand back.

“Doesn’t look like there’s a landing strip at the camp,” Revan noted. “See any place for us to touch down?”

The display zoomed out as T3 adjusted the Hawk’s scanners to pan rapidly back and forth across the snow. A few seconds later they zoomed in again.

“Perfect,” Revan said with a smile. “Nice work, Tee-Three.”

“Uh … that’s not a landing strip,” Canderous cautioned. “It’s a giant snowdrift.”

“With the landing gear shot, we’re going to need something to cushion the blow when we hit the ground.”

“You really think this’ll work?”

“Sure,” Revan replied. “But you’d better strap yourself in, just in case.”

Canderous scrambled to lock in his safety belt as Revan sent the Hawk into its descent. T3 scooted across the cockpit to the metal braces anchored to the floor and locked his wheels in with a metallic thunk.

Fighting wind and gravity, Revan struggled to keep the damaged ship level as he took it down. Seconds before they touched ground, a blast of wind grabbed the Ebon Hawk and pitched it hard to starboard. Revan jammed the stick to port, desperately trying to keep the ship from flipping over. It slammed into the snowbank at a forty-five degree angle, carving a fifty-meter-long trench in the powder before finally coming to rest.

Looking through the small cockpit window, Revan could see nothing but blue-white flakes; the entire front half of the ship was buried in the drift. But the sensors indicated that, apart from the already damaged landing gear, the Hawk had survived relatively unscathed. More important, so had its passengers.

Revan carefully unbuckled his safety belt, knowing he would have bruises where the straps had dug into him during the collision. Beside him, Canderous was doing the same. T3 simply unlocked his wheels from the braces and rolled free.

“I guess sometimes it’s not so bad being a droid,” Canderous groaned as he stood up, rubbing his right shoulder with his left hand.

“You mean like when you’re marching through a blizzard?” Revan asked. “This snowdrift’s at least five kilometers from the campsite.”

Canderous only grunted in reply.

While the big Mandalorian gathered the gear and supplies for their trek from the cargo hold, Revan and T3 ran diagnostics on the Hawk to determine the full extent of the damage.

“Doesn’t look too bad,” Revan commented when they were done. “Think you can fix it up while we head off to the camp?”

T3 beeped twice.

“It’s going to be hard for you to keep up out there in the snow,” Revan reminded him. “Besides, someone has to stay and guard the ship.”

The astromech reluctantly whistled his consent.

“You get started on repairs; I’ll go give Canderous a hand.”

It took them almost an hour before they were ready to venture out into the frigid wasteland. They were bundled up head-to-toe in thick winter garb: snow pants, hooded jackets, scarves, goggles, heavy boots, and fur-lined gloves—all of it white to provide camouflage in case they ran into trouble.

Canderous had armed himself with a heavy repeating blaster carbine. He offered a similar weapon to Revan, but the Jedi shook his head.

“You don’t want to be swinging that lightsaber around when we get to the camp,” Canderous said. “Jedi aren’t too popular out here.”

Revan frowned, then nodded. He knew Canderous had a point, but he didn’t relish the idea of lugging the massive gun along. He picked up a pair of blaster pistols. “I’ll get by with these,” he said, sliding them into the straps on either hip.

“Suit yourself,” Canderous said with a shrug. Then he added, “When we get to the camp, let me do the talking. Remember: these are my people.”

“I can live with that,” Revan said, hitting the switch to lower the cargo hold’s loading ramp. “But if we’re going to get there before dark, we’d better get moving.”

They maneuvered the hoversled they had loaded up with supplies down the ramp and out into the raging blizzard. The howling wind threatened to knock them off their feet and made conversation almost impossible. The swirling snow almost blinded them, but Revan had entered the camp’s coordinates on a portable locater to keep them on track, and he used hand gestures to communicate their route to Canderous. The heavy layers of clothing made the subzero conditions bearable; the hard labor of trudging through the snow over uneven terrain helped warm them up, too.

After almost two hours of slow progress, Revan saw the dim outline of a small mountain ahead of them. He signaled to Canderous, indicating that the camp was on the other side. The Mandalorian nodded, and signaled back that they needed to step up the pace. Revan nodded his agreement. The light around them was fading as Rekkiad’s sun—invisible through the storm—slowly set. The last thing they needed was to have to press on in total darkness.

As they skirted the base of the mountain and reached the leeward side, the wind died to almost nothing. It wasn’t long before they could see the soft glow of lights from the camp.

Gradually more details of the camp came into view. There were roughly a dozen small tents set up only a few meters away from a sheer wall of ice at the mountain’s base. Set away from the tents was a roughly constructed shack; Revan noticed a pair of generators hooked up to it, no doubt to provide power and heat, and he guessed it doubled as a meeting room and a supply center for any stores that would suffer if left out in the cold.

Several sleds were scattered among the tents, some laden with supplies, others empty.

On the far side of the camp were four large, tarp-covered mounds. Revan’s heart sank.

As part of the terms of the surrender, he’d ordered the Mandalorians to disassemble their infamous Basilisk war droids—great metal beasts the Mandalorians often rode into combat. Judging by the size of the covered objects, and by whatever hints of shape weren’t obscured by the tarps, some of the defeated had chosen to ignore his decree.

“One more step and we paint the snow with your brains!” a voice shouted out.

Four sentries rose up into view from behind the drifts, two on either side of Revan and Canderous. Dressed in heavy cold-weather clothes of mostly blues, golds, and browns, they were armed with blaster rifles, which they had carefully trained on the interlopers.

“Lay your weapons down and identify yourselves!” The speaker—a male—was the sentry closest to Revan on his left.

Out of the corner of his eye, the Jedi could see that Canderous was holding his ground, careful to avoid any sudden movement but not making any effort to obey the order. Revan decided the smart thing to do would be to follow his lead.

“My name is Canderous of Clan Ordo,” the big man shouted. “And I don’t lay down my weapons for anyone!”

From the stunned silence it was clear his name had gotten their attention.

“How do we know you’re really Canderous?” one of the other sentries demanded. This was also a man’s voice, deeper than the first.

“Well, Edric,” Canderous replied, “I could punch you in the face until I straightened out that crooked beak of yours, but we’d probably all freeze to death before I finished.”

The sentry barked out a laugh, slung his gun over his shoulder, threw his arms wide, and ran to enclose Canderous in a fierce hug. “It’s good to see you again, brother!” he shouted.

Revan was relieved to see that the other sentries had also lowered their weapons. They came forward to form a tight circle around Canderous as they clasped his hands, slapped him on the back, and offered loud traditional greetings in Mando’a.

After a few minutes the one Canderous had called Edric spoke up again.

“Let’s get you and your friend out of the cold,” he said in Basic. “Leave your sled; we’ll have someone else come get it.”

The other three sentries stayed at their post as Edric led Revan and Canderous through the camp toward the supply shack in the center. As they passed the tents, heads poked out to see what was happening; shortly a small crowd had grown in the newcomers’ wake. Revan could hear a buzz of excitement building, but his Mando’a was too rusty, and he couldn’t pick out what was being said.

At the door of the building, Edric stamped his boots clear of snow before going inside; his guests did the same.

The first thing Revan noticed was the warmth. His goggles fogged up, and he was only too happy to remove them to get a better view of the surroundings.

As he had suspected, the shack served as both supply hut and meeting room. There were seven or eight Mandalorians already inside the building, lounging among the crates and packages, using them as makeshift furniture. In one corner was a massive pile of coats, scarves, and gloves. Edric was already stripping off his cold-weather gear and tossing it on the pile. Revan quickly and gratefully followed suit.

Canderous didn’t have a chance to do the same. The instant he removed his goggles and unzipped his hood to expose his face, he was swarmed. Another round of traditional Mando’a greetings rose up from the well-wishers, and Revan couldn’t help but notice the pure joy on his friend’s face as he was reunited with the other members of his clan.

One of the things Revan had always admired about the Mandalorians even as he’d fought them was their loyalty. The ties that held a clan together went beyond friendship and even family; it was an essential part of the culture, ingrained in children from the day they were born or adopted into the clan.

Not wanting to detract from the moment, he stood a respectful distance away. He was just beginning to wonder how much longer the celebratory reception would continue when the door swung open and a tall, broad-shouldered figure forced its way into the room.

The door slammed shut, and everything went silent. Nobody spoke as the figure peeled away the layers of clothing, revealing the face of an attractive woman. She had olive skin, and her straight, shoulder-length black hair was streaked with purple and red highlights. Her high, sharp cheekbones were tattooed with intricate blue swirls. Her eyes were also blue, but so pale they looked like shards of ice.

Unlike everyone else they had come across, she didn’t rush over to greet Canderous. Instead, she glared at him without saying a word.

“Su cuy’gar, Canderous,” she finally said.

It was a common Mandalorian greeting, but something about the way she said it made Revan think the literal translation of the words—So you’re still alive—was closer to her true intent.

“Su cuy’gar, Veela,” he replied softly.

She took a step toward him, then snapped her head to the side to stare at Revan. She was tall enough to look him in the eye.

Without looking back at Canderous, she asked him in Mando’a, “Do you want me to speak Basic so the Outsider can understand us?”

“I understand well enough,” Revan replied in her native tongue.

Veela arched her eyebrow in mild surprise, then turned her attention back to Canderous. “What are you doing here?”

“Is that any way to greet a clan-brother?” Canderous asked.

“Are you still my clan-brother? You left us after the war. You deserted Clan Ordo to become a mercenary.”

“There was no Clan Ordo after the war,” Canderous snapped back at her. “Tegris was dead. We had no leader. We were scattered. Broken. Defeated. I wasn’t the only one who left.”

“We heard you were working for the Jedi,” Veela said, her voice low and hateful.

In the silence that followed, the sentry called Edric spoke up. “Cin vhetin,” he said, and there was a general murmur of agreement from the others in the room.

The literal translation of the phrase was “driven snow”—appropriate given the conditions outside. But Revan knew that the true meaning of the phrase was closer to “The past is in the past.” The Mandalorians believed that once you took up the arms and armor of the clan, your past was irrelevant. Edric was saying that whatever Canderous had done over the past few years was irrelevant now that he had returned.

From Veela’s expression, it was difficult to tell if she agreed with him. But she let the matter of Canderous’s past drop.

“I’m the leader of this clan now,” she insisted. “I still have a right to know why you’re here.”

“To help Clan Ordo find Mandalore’s Mask.”

Veela tilted her head to the side, as if getting a different angle might help her see whether Canderous was being completely honest with her.

“And what about this Outsider?” she asked, pointing to Revan.

“He is my friend. My brother. He will help us in our search.”

“Do you have a name, Outsider?” Veela asked.

“His name is Avner,” Canderous said, cutting Revan off. “He’s a mercenary. We met while I was working for Davik Kang.”

“You can’t speak for yourself?” she asked, still focused on Revan. “I thought you understood Mando’a. Am I going too fast for you?”

“I understand,” Revan answered. “You speak well.”

There was a gasp from the crowd, followed by the sound of stifled, nervous laughter.

Revan knew full well the insult he had given. The Mandalorians were warriors; they had nothing but contempt for diplomats and politicians. They valued actions over words, and he’d just implied that Veela was all talk.

“Brother Canderous vouched for you, so you can stay,” Veela said through clenched teeth. “But if you betray us, I’ll kill you. If your weakness causes one of my people to get hurt, I’ll kill you. If you slow us down, I’ll kill you. Is that clear?”

“Wait … what was that second one again? Maybe I should write this down.”

There was another round of stifled laughter. Veela pretended not to hear it as she turned back to Canderous. “Welcome home, brother,” she said flatly.

She grabbed her winter gear, quickly threw it back on, and left without saying another word. Once she was gone, the others in the room seemed to relax.

Revan motioned to Canderous, calling him over to join him in the corner before he was swallowed up in a crowd of old friends.

“Avner?” he whispered in Basic. “That’s the best name you could come up with?”

“What’s wrong with Avner?”

“You just rearranged the letters in Revan.”

“Relax. Nobody out here’s going to—” Canderous stopped abruptly as he noticed Edric ambling toward them.

“Don’t judge Veela too harshly,” the sentry said, misinterpreting their hushed dialogue. “She’s a good leader, but she has a temper.” He looked at Revan. “You should remember that the next time you provoke her.”

“I just got caught in the middle,” Revan protested. “Canderous is the one she’s really mad at. I get the sense you two have a history.”

“You could say that,” the big man admitted. “She’s my wife.”

CHAPTER 10

SCOURGE HAD BEEN WAITING inside the cave on Bosthirda for nearly an hour when he finally heard the faint sound of a speeder landing outside. A few minutes later he heard footsteps coming down the passage. He smiled. Unlike his previous missions for Nyriss, this time he was not plagued with doubts and uncertainties. The anticipation of the coming kill kept him well focused on the task at hand.

As expected, Darth Xedrix hadn’t come alone. A pair of Sith acolytes—humans, one male, one female—preceded him, striding into the cave, lightsabers drawn. They wore light armor under robes of blue and gold, the colors of their liege.

The circular cavern was only ten meters in diameter and dark. The only illumination came from their blades and the glowing fungus that clung to the rough rock walls. Scourge crouched in the shadows, wrapped in a cloak of the dark side that both made him invisible to the Force and helped to ward off the chill of the subterranean air. He remained motionless as the pair passed within a few meters of his hiding place, patiently waiting.

Darth Xedrix trailed his escort by several paces. Unlike his acolytes, he had not drawn his weapon, and he wore no visible armor beneath his robes. He was several centimeters taller than Scourge, but much thinner. He had thick, shoulder-length white hair, but no beard. His face was lined, though not as extensively or deeply as Nyriss’s, and there was a hint of a stoop to his shoulders and a cautious frailty about the way he moved.

His appearance recalled Nyriss’s words: He is human—they are a lesser species. Over the decades, the dark side has exacted too great a toll on his body. He is a hollow shell of what he once was.

Yet Scourge could sense the Councilor’s enormous power. Darth Xedrix was still a member of the Dark Council, and underestimating him would be a fatal mistake.

The moment the tall human passed Scourge’s hiding place, Scourge leapt, igniting his lightsaber as he flew through the air. For a moment he thought his first strike would find its mark, and he was almost disappointed at the thought of ending Xedrix’s life so easily. But at the last instant the human’s own blade materialized seemingly out of nowhere to intercept the blow.

They exchanged a quick flurry of thrusts and parries. Scourge tried and failed to draw on his foe’s fear and anger—Xedrix was too controlled, and it felt more like fighting a droid. Scourge forcibly thrust his own fears away and reached deep inside himself to find the fury he needed.

He had maneuvered himself so that he was behind Xedrix, blocking the passage that was the only route into and out of the cave. The two acolytes had already spun around and rushed in to join the fray, and he prepared himself to deal with them, too.

But suddenly he had only those two to deal with as Xedrix backed away. He seemed to be more obsessed with preserving his own life than killing his enemy—a weakness that left him content to let his two underlings face this unknown foe while he stayed at a safe distance.

The two apprentices launched themselves at Scourge, unleashing their rage as they drew on the power of the dark side, unaware that their anger was feeding their opponent, as well.

The female came in high, her lightsaber slashing at Scourge’s head. At the same time the human male came in low, looking to chop at his enemy’s legs.

Scourge ducked under the woman’s blows, spinning to the side as he parried the lightsaber at his knees. The pair came at him again, once more coordinating their attacks, this time trying to flank him on either side. Scourge lunged forward, splitting the attack by diving into a forward roll that took him between his two opponents.

For an instant he was vulnerable; one quick cut from either foe could have ended his life. But they were inexperienced, and they hadn’t expected him to move toward them. By the time the woman reacted with a backhand swipe of her weapon, the moment had been lost. The lightsaber hummed by his cheek as he tumbled between them, but he emerged unscathed.

The man was slower to react. By the time Scourge was back on his feet, the acolyte was only just starting to turn around. The Sith Lord delivered a quick kick to the back of the man’s knee; the man pin-wheeled his arms as he fought to regain his balance.

Scourge saw the opening and delivered what would have been a lethal blow had the woman not thrown herself between them and parried the blow. Her move was reckless and foolhardy, but Scourge hadn’t been expecting it, and her impulsive reaction saved her companion. It also exposed her weakness.

The female was the more dangerous opponent, but she obviously cared for her partner. She was willing to put herself in harm’s way to defend him—a flaw Scourge could easily exploit.

He abruptly changed tactics, shifting from the conventional defensive positions of the Soresu form to the acrobatic attack sequences of Ataru. Taking two quick steps to gain speed, Scourge leapt at the nearby cavern wall, planted both feet on its vertical surface, then pushed off hard to launch himself in a spinning flip over the man’s head.

His opponent tried to turn and pivot to keep Scourge in front of him, but the furious burst of action was too fast for his lightsaber to track. He was late bringing his blade up to protect his head, once again exposing himself to a lethal strike.

This time when the woman moved in to protect her partner, Scourge was ready. He had purposefully directed his leap so that he came in at a sharper angle than necessary, leaving barely enough room for the female to come between him and his supposed target. When Scourge suddenly redirected his blade mid-leap to strike at her instead, she instinctively stepped back to absorb the impact with her own weapon. But with her partner crowded directly behind her, there was no room. Their bodies collided and their feet tangled together, sending both of them crashing awkwardly to the ground.

Scourge landed beside their prone forms. He brought his heavy boot crashing down on his fallen foe’s face, relishing the wet crunch of cartilage and bone beneath his heel. Her body spasmed, the muscles locked in the seizures of her death throes.

The man had scrambled to his feet, but instead of throwing himself at Scourge, he only stared at the woman’s twitching corpse. Scourge could taste his horror and fear; they gave him a fresh burst of energy. He lashed out with the Force, striking the man in the chest hard enough to send him stumbling back several steps into the cavern wall.

The man struck the rough-hewn rock hard enough to knock the lightsaber from his hand, leaving him unarmed. With a casual flick of his wrist, Scourge sent his own lightsaber spiraling toward his defenseless foe. At the last second, the man threw up his hands in a vain effort to protect himself, but the glowing blade easily sliced through his palms and throat before ricocheting back to Scourge’s waiting grasp.

As the human’s corpse crumpled to the ground, Scourge was already turning to face his last remaining foe. Darth Xedrix was standing motionless in the center of the cavern, watching the action with a cool, detached reserve. His lightsaber was still drawn, but he held it casually at his side, the blade pointed toward the floor.

“I know you,” he said, his voice echoing off the chamber’s stone walls. “Nyriss’s new pet. Lord Scourge.” He wrinkled his features in distaste. “Why do you purebloods always choose such ludicrous names for yourselves? Do you think it’s intimidating?”

Scourge didn’t reply. Instead he raised his blade and began a slow, cautious advance.

Xedrix laughed. “Are you really that stupid, Scourge? Has Nyriss actually convinced you that you have the strength to stand against a member of the Dark Council? Has she promised you riches and power if you defeat me?”

“She didn’t need to promise me anything,” Scourge answered. “You are a traitor to the Empire. It is my honor and duty to kill you.”

“Ah, now I understand,” Xedrix said with a smile, twirling his lightsaber at his side. “She played on your loyalty to our glorious Emperor. How quaint.”

Scourge stopped, suddenly aware that he didn’t feel any fear emanating from his foe. There was no anger, either. He didn’t get any sense of emotion coming from Darth Xedrix at all, and he realized the old man was consciously shielding himself from Scourge’s awareness.

Scourge concentrated his focus, reaching out with the Force to pierce the veil Xedrix had wrapped around himself, only to find nothing but a swirling maelstrom of dark side energy.

Scourge broke into a run, charging at his enemy the instant he understood the nature of the trap. Xedrix had kept him talking while he gathered his power for a single, lethal attack.

Xedrix raised his left hand and unleashed his power in a storm of purple lightning. Scourge instinctively used the Force to throw up an invisible barrier to shield himself. The bolts arced through the air, ripping through the shield to engulf Scourge in electric agony.

He screamed, his voice rising above the hiss and crackle of the fiery energy coursing through his veins. Every nerve in his body exploded in excruciating pain as the lightning seared his flesh, cooking him in his own armor. He fell to the floor, curled into himself, his skin blistered and burned. The whole thing had taken only a few seconds.

“You didn’t realize Nyriss sent you here to die, did you?” Xedrix mocked. “She never expected you to kill me. You were nothing but a message, a warning.”

Ignoring the terrible pain, Scourge somehow forced himself to his feet. Xedrix raised an eyebrow in mild surprise.

“Is that what you call the attempts on her life?” Scourge gasped. “A warning?”

Xedrix laughed again. “You think I’m the one who hired those inept assassins? Nyriss has you twisted in knots. She’s using you for a game far beyond anything you can imagine.”

Scourge shook his head, trying as much to shake off the residual effects of the lightning as to deny Xedrix’s words.

“You feel your strength returning, do you?” Xedrix observed. “Think carefully before you challenge me again. I might not let you live next time.”

“Why did you let me live?” Scourge wanted to know.

“You have potential,” Xedrix said. “And thanks to you, I have need of some new apprentices. I could find a use for someone with your talents.”

“You want me to betray Nyriss?”

“What do you owe her?” Xedrix demanded. “She used you. She sent you here to die just to make a point.”

Scourge didn’t answer. Instead, he was thinking back on everything that had happened since he’d first entered Nyriss’s service. Nyriss had admitted to hiring the mercenaries to test him, but even after that, he’d still suspected Sechel of plotting to kill him. Had the conniving adviser merely been following Nyriss’s orders all along?

“Nyriss betrayed you. Swear loyalty to me and I promise you the chance for revenge.”

Everything Xedrix said made perfect sense, but on some deep, primal level Scourge felt he was being twisted and manipulated. The old human’s words seemed to slither into the cracks and crevices of Scourge’s mind, burrowing into his thoughts.

No! his mind screamed in silent protest. It’s a trick!

But was it? Nyriss had convinced him he could kill Darth Xedrix, but a single burst of dark side lightning had nearly killed him instead. The only reason he was still alive was because Darth Xedrix was toying with him.

What if he’s not toying with me? Scourge suddenly wondered. What if he tried to kill me but failed?

Nyriss had said that Xedrix was old and frail. She’d claimed the Force had ravaged his body; she’d said he only held on to his power through reputation and cunning. What if he was relying on those same tools right now?

Scourge reached out with the Force again, trying once more to catch a glimpse beneath Xedrix’s veil. To his surprise he sensed something this time. Fear. Desperation. And almost no trace of the dark side burning inside his enemy.

All the pieces clicked into place. Nyriss was right: Xedrix was a shell of what he had once been. The entire time Scourge had been battling the two apprentices, Xedrix had been gathering his strength for a single surprise attack. When his apprentices fell, he’d stalled for even more time by taunting Scourge. And he still hadn’t been able to gather enough power to kill his enemy.

The blast of lightning had taken everything the old man had in reserve. In Xedrix the flame of the dark side had become the faintest flicker. When he saw that Scourge had survived, he’d realized his only chance of survival was to trick him into switching sides. He’d tried to use the faint echo of the Force to dominate Scourge’s mind, augmenting it with persuasive words in a form of temporary hypnosis. But he lacked the strength even for that desperate gambit.

The brilliant bluff had almost worked.

“Your words are hollow, Xedrix. Just like your power.”

Scourge marched forward with grim determination. Xedrix brought his lightsaber up, but Scourge used his own blade to slap it aside with ease. The strength of the blow sent the weapon tumbling from the old man’s frail grasp, the blade extinguishing as the hilt clattered onto the stone at their feet.

Xedrix staggered backward. He no longer pretended power: he looked desperate and afraid. “Please, Lord Scourge, I’ll give you anything you want. Slaves. Wealth. Power.”

“Power?” Scourge snorted in contempt. “You can’t give what isn’t yours.”

He slashed his blade diagonally across Xedrix’s chest, slicing him from shoulder to hip.

The old man gasped once before falling over backward, his eyes frozen wide in horror, seeming to stare up at the stalactites growing from the cavern ceiling.

Knowing that Nyriss would want proof of his death, Scourge reached down and grasped a fistful of the old man’s hair with his free hand. Then he slowly drew his lightsaber across the Dark Councilor’s throat, the glowing blade cauterizing the wound as he neatly severed the head.

He left the rest of the body—along with the corpses of the two apprentices—in the cave as he trudged back up the passage leading to the surface. As he walked, he couldn’t help dwelling on Xedrix’s warnings about Nyriss.

Much of what the old man had said to him had been lies, but the best lies were always built on layers of truth. It was entirely possible that she was using him. At the very least, he could assume she was keeping secrets from him.

Confronting her directly would be a waste of time. Fortunately, there were other ways to get information.

Despite the possible consequences, Scourge decided it was finally time for his private talk with Sechel.

CHAPTER 11

REVAN SHIVERED IN THE COLD. Beside him, Malak said something, but the fierce wind whipping across the plateau devoured his words.

“What?” Revan shouted.

“Are you sure it’s here?” Malak called back.

“It’s here,” Revan said with a nod. “I can feel it.”

“Maybe it’s on the other side.”

Revan glanced over at the other peak rising up beside them, barely visible through the swirling snow. It was nearly identical to the one they were on—a tall, narrow column of wind-carved ice and snow rising up several kilometers from Rekkiad’s surface, its peak worn to a smooth, flat plain of ice.

“It’s this one,” Revan answered confidently. “The entrance is around here somewhere.”

The two figures moved slowly back and forth across the exposed plateau, searching with the Force as much as with their eyes.

“Here!” Malak shouted. “I found it!”

Revan woke from the dream with a start, his mind groggy as he tried to get his bearings.

It was cool in the thermal tent he and Canderous shared. The insulated lining kept out the worst of the weather, but the nighttime temperatures were still low enough that Revan felt a chill through two layers of clothes and his sleeping bag.

As his eyes adjusted to the soft glow of the small heater in the center of the tent, he was able to make out more details of his surroundings. Canderous was still asleep beside him, wrapped tightly in his sleeping bag and snoring loudly.

Revan’s mind began to reassemble the bits and pieces from the previous night.

He’d hoped Canderous would offer more details about his marriage to Veela after she’d stormed out of the supply shack, but he’d stayed silent on the subject. Despite his curiosity, Revan hadn’t pressed him.

Instead they’d spent the rest of the night celebrating the big man’s return to his people. Edric and the others offered up countless tales of Canderous’s youth. His many battles and victories against overwhelming odds were the stuff of legend among Clan Ordo.

They’d also offered up plenty of kri’gee, a bitter Mandalorian ale. Not wanting to be resented as an outsider, Revan had matched the other revelers drink for drink. The vile beverage packed plenty of kick; he hadn’t had a hangover this bad since his wedding night. His head was spinning, his eyes were blurred, and his mouth tasted like he’d been chewing on bantha fur. He’d still be sleeping it off if not for the dream.

No, not a dream. Another memory bubbling to the surface.

He and Malak had been searching for something here on Rekkiad. Something that was somehow connected to Mandalore’s Mask. He didn’t know what it was, but with a little help he might be able to use the details of his dream to figure out where they had been looking.

He peeled back the sleeping bag and immediately felt goose bumps prickling up on the flesh beneath his long-sleeved shirt. Ignoring the cold, he picked his way through the semi-darkness until he found his personal holocomm lying under a pile of clothes in one corner of the tent.

Scooting back into the warmth of his sleeping bag, Revan activated the device. “Tee-Three, can you read me?”

A tiny holographic image of the droid materialized in front of him, beeping with concern.

“Everything’s fine,” Revan reassured in a whisper. “Just try to keep it down. Canderous is still asleep.”

The astromech’s response was an excited whistle, though the volume was slightly lower than before.

“See? I knew you’d be able to put the Hawk back together without my help.”

T3 beeped indignantly.

“Yeah, that snow gets everywhere. But it’ll melt. Besides, you can worry about that later. I need you to do something for me. Start scanning the topography maps for two massive columns of ice standing close together. Two or three kilometers high, at least. When you find them, send me the coordinates.”

There were roughly thirty seconds of silence on the other end before T3 chirped a reply.

“Great work, Tee-Three. Remember, keep an eye on the ship. I’ll call you if we need anything else.”

Revan turned off the holocomm, knowing the easy part was over. T3 might have been slightly annoyed with him, but dealing with the droid was going to be a whole lot easier than getting the snoring giant beside him up and moving.

“Wake up,” he said, reaching across the heater to shake Canderous out of his slumber. “We need to talk.”

Canderous grumbled something profane in Mando’a at him and rolled over onto his other side.

“It’s important,” Revan said, shaking him even harder. “You have to get Veela to move the camp.”

“Huh? What? What about Veela?” Canderous mumbled, opening one eye.

“You have to get her to move the camp.”

The eye closed again. “That’s her call, not mine. She’s the clan chief.”

“I think they’re looking for Mandalore’s Mask in the wrong place.”

Both eyes snapped open, and Canderous levered himself up to a sitting position. “Well, why didn’t you say so?”

——

“EVERYBODY’S HERE,” Veela declared. “Say what you have to say.”

Revan’s head was still pounding from the kri’gee, and in the close quarters of the supply shed her voice was loud enough to make him wince.

Including Canderous and Revan, a total of eight had gathered for the impromptu council. Veela had called them together at Canderous’s insistence—three men and two women. Edric was there, and Revan recognized most of the others from the night before, though he couldn’t recall their names.

“We have to move the camp,” Canderous told them.

As when they first arrived, Revan and Canderous had decided to let Canderous do most of the talking. It would be easier to convince the Mandalorians if they heard the idea from one of their own—provided Veela was willing to listen to anything her husband had to say.

“Move the camp?” she asked incredulously. “You think it’s so easy to just pick up and go?”

“It took our scouts weeks to find this location,” one of the other women chimed in.

“This is a good spot,” Edric agreed. “We’re sheltered from the worst of the wind and snow. The mountain protects us from getting flanked, and the only way in is right past our sentries.”

“Give me one good reason we should move,” Veela demanded.

“Because we’ll never find Mandalore’s Mask if we stay here,” Canderous answered.

There was a long moment of silence, his words hanging in the air.

“Nobody knows where Revan hid the Mask,” Veela said quietly. “The clans have each staked out their territory, hoping it’s in their destiny to find that which we all seek.”

“Seems like a poor way to choose a leader,” Revan offered.

Veela glared at him, but it was one of the other women who replied.

“Fate will make the choice for us. Whichever clan is destined to find the Mask, will.”

“Is that how all the clans ended up here on Rekkiad?” Revan countered. “Fate? Chance? Blind luck?”

“You show your ignorance when you speak of things you don’t understand,” Veela said. “Fate and destiny are not the same as luck. It was not chance that brought us here. It was persistence. Perseverance. We are here because we are strong.” She paused a moment, then continued a little more calmly. “When Revan hid Mandalore’s Mask, most of our people scattered in disgrace. But some of us refused to give up. We stayed behind to look for what was lost instead of running off to become mercenaries and hired thugs.”

As she spoke, her eyes flicked toward Canderous. Revan followed her gaze to see his friend staring at the floor in shame.

“For years we have kept up our search,” she continued. “We know Revan disappeared for three days after the massacre at Malachor Five. There are only a handful of stable hyperspace lanes in that sector, only a few dozen habitable planets he would have been able to journey to in that time. So we have been searching each world in turn, scouring the surface meter by meter. On the first world there were less than fifty of us; it took us two years to explore the entire planet. But with each world our numbers grew. More clans joined in the search, and each clan’s numbers increased. Our quest gave us purpose; it united us as a people once more.”

She looked back at Canderous. “Slowly those who turned their backs on the Mandalorian ways have come trickling back. Now we number in the thousands. Over a hundred clans have gathered on Rekkiad. If we fail to find the Mask here, we will move on to the next world. And our numbers will continue to grow. Eventually we will find what we seek. And when one of our own finally reclaims Mandalore’s Mask, our numbers will be legion. On that day the new Mandalore will call upon the armies of our people, and we will answer!”

She turned and glared at Revan once more. “That is what we mean when we speak of fate,” she concluded “We will find what we seek. It is inevitable. It is the destiny of our people.”

The end of her speech was marked by a solemn silence. Looking around the room, Revan could see the power her words had on the other Mandalorians. Even Canderous had been moved.

“I can help you achieve your destiny,” Revan promised. “I know where Revan hid the Mask. Listen to me, and I will help you find it.”

“Impossible,” Veela said with a shake of her head. “Nobody knows where he hid Mandalore’s Mask.”

“I have access to resources you don’t,” Revan insisted, choosing his words carefully. “Republic records. Military transcripts. Battle plans. Flight paths and navigation charts. You say you aren’t even sure if the Mask is on Rekkiad. But I am. The Mask is here, on this world. And with my help, Clan Ordo will be the ones who find it.”

Veela didn’t say anything at first. Instead she turned and fixed her gaze on Canderous. “Avner is your friend,” she said, her words almost an accusation. “Can we trust him?”

“I wouldn’t have told him of our search if I didn’t trust him with my life,” Canderous answered without hesitation. “And I wouldn’t have brought him if I didn’t believe he could help us.”

All eyes focused on Veela as she considered all she had heard.

“Where do you suggest we move our camp to?” she finally asked.

“About fifty kilometers from here two columns of ice rise straight up, towering several kilometers above Rekkiad’s surface.”

“The Twin Spears,” Edric blurted out excitedly. “Are you saying the Mask is there?”

“There is an entrance to a tunnel in the plateau on top of one of the pillars. The tunnel leads deep into the heart of the ice. I believe that is where Revan hid Mandalore’s Mask.”

“The Twin Spears are in Clan Jendri’s territory,” Veela warned. “If they catch us moving in on their turf, there will be blood.”

“Did you really expect to find the Mask without having to fight for it?” Canderous asked.

Veela shook her head. Then she turned her attention to the rest of her advisers, scanning their faces, reading their emotions.

“Pack up the camp!” she shouted at last, thrusting her fist into the air. “We’re marching on the Twin Spears!”

REVAN WAS AMAZED by the efficiency of the Mandalorians. Veela’s order spread quickly through the camp, prompting everyone into a flurry of activity. Each individual had a specific job, which they carried out with military precision. Some took down the tents, wrapping them into tightly rolled bundles and packing them away into footlockers along with small personal items. Others emptied the supply hut, loading the crates of food, generators, heaters, and fuel onto the heavy cargo sleds.

Within an hour they were under way, all trace of their old camp left behind as three dozen men and women headed out in a long, well-spaced column.

A team of six led by Edric scouted up ahead to find the best path and to make sure the way was clear. Another half dozen fell farther back to guard the column’s flank. The rest marched in pairs between the two patrols; while one pulled the cargo sled, the other marched alongside with weapons drawn, wary for an ambush. Every hour the partners would switch positions.

In the middle of the column, the six Basilisk war droids trudged along, each towing a massive cargo sled loaded with hundreds of kilos of gear. To Revan, they looked like five-meter-tall, two-legged dragons. They walked with heavy, lumbering strides, their wings folded beneath their long metallic bodies. High-powered laser cannons were mounted on their flexible, armored necks, allowing the droids to fire in all directions. Each was controlled by a single pilot seated atop the curved spine.

Not surprisingly, Veela was one of the pilots; commanding a Basilisk war droid was an honor reserved for only the most revered warriors of the clan. Revan couldn’t help but notice Canderous casting wistful glances at the great metal beasts, recalling his own days of glory now that he was forced to walk beside them.

Veela set a grueling pace, which offered plenty of distraction from both idle thoughts and the biting cold. When they stopped for a one-hour break at midday, Revan felt as if he might collapse into the nearest snowbank. All he wanted to do was eat his food and rest up for the next leg of the journey, but that was not to be.

Like the night before, a steady stream of visitors came by to speak with Canderous. The older members of Clan Ordo came to recount stories of past adventures they had shared with him. Some of the younger ones who had been raised on tales of his exploits came to see the living legend with their own eyes.

Even as an outsider, it was obvious to Revan that his friend had been fully accepted back into the clan. But there was more to it than the mere joy of a prodigal son’s return. The Mandalorians were energized, excited. Gossip had spread through the camp, and everyone seemed to know that Mandalore’s Mask might soon be in their grasp. And though Veela had technically been the one to give the order to move out, everyone also seemed to understand that Canderous’s arrival had been the true catalyst for this call to action.

The break ended far too soon for Revan’s liking, but by calling on the Force to revitalize his tired limbs, he managed to stand up and get his feet moving when they set out again.

Darkness came well before they reached their destination. Edric and his scouts had discovered a small valley carved into the ice where they could take shelter for the night, and Veela called a halt to their march. The camp was set up as quickly and proficiently as it had been struck earlier that morning, and Revan soon found himself in a tent with Canderous, curled up in his sleeping bag on the verge of dozing off.

He estimated that they had covered thirty kilometers on their trek. The realization that they had gone well over half the distance already came as a welcome relief, allowing him to drift off into much-needed sleep.

There were no dreams to plague him that night, though he did wake up once when he heard someone fumbling at the entrance to the tent.

“Someone’s outside,” he whispered to Canderous before realizing he was alone in the tent.

A few seconds later the exterior flap was pulled aside, letting in a blast of cold air. Canderous followed in its wake. He sealed the flap, quietly crept back over to his sleeping bag, and wrapped himself inside.

“Where’ve you been?” Revan whispered.

“Sorry. Tried not to wake you,” Canderous replied.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Veela and I had some catching up to do,” the big man said, and even in the darkness Revan could tell he was grinning from ear to ear.

They didn’t speak again, but Revan couldn’t help noticing the irony. When he’d left his wife behind to come here, he’d never imagined that Canderous would be reuniting with his own. He didn’t begrudge Canderous his happiness, but it made him miss Bastila all the more.

They broke camp early the next morning, and by the time they stopped for lunch they could clearly see the distant outline of the Twin Spears through Rekkiad’s perpetual ice fog and swirling snow.

“We’re well inside Clan Jendri’s territory,” Veela said, coming over to sit beside Revan and Canderous as they tore into their rations. “Gotta stay sharp.”

“Do you think they know we’re here?” Revan asked.

“Hard to say. If they’re anywhere near the Twin Spears, the scouts would have seen us by now. But it’s a big territory. They could be a hundred kilometers away in any direction.”

“Maybe we’ll get lucky and they’ll never know we’re here,” Revan said optimistically.

Veela glanced over at Canderous and shook her head.

“We Mandalorians have a saying,” Canderous explained. “A warrior who doesn’t hope for battle has no hope during battle.”

“That’s a good one,” Revan admitted. “But here’s one I like: You can’t lose a battle you never fight.”

“You can’t win it, either,” Veela said.

They finished their food in silence. Once they were done, the group set out again. Two hours later they reached their final destination, a small, low-lying patch of ground nestled between the Spears.

“Sleep well,” Veela announced to her followers as they set up camp. “Tomorrow Clan Ordo will claim its destiny!”

THE ATTACK CAME just before dawn. Subconsciously, Revan felt the danger through the Force, causing his eyes to snap open a split second before the sentries sounded the alarm.

He was alone in his tent again. Obviously Canderous had decided to spend another night with Veela.

Knowing his friend would meet him on the battlefield, Revan kicked free of his sleeping bag and struggled quickly into his layers of clothing. Remembering his promise to Canderous, he tucked his lightsaber out of sight beneath his belt, arming himself instead with the twin blasters he had been carrying since they’d left the Ebon Hawk.

The sounds of battle could already be heard outside, and Revan charged from the tent to join the fray. All around him he saw the men and women of Clan Ordo, most clad only in underclothes and a few scraps of plated armor, battling the forces of Clan Jendri that were swarming in from all sides. Clan Jendri outnumbered Clan Ordo by almost two to one, though Revan noticed they had only four Basilisks.

The Basilisks swooped back and forth above the battle, raining blasterfire down from the sky. Immediately Revan recognized the Jendri strategy: they had concentrated their attack near the Ordo Basilisks, hoping to keep Veela and her fellow pilots from reaching the deadly machines.

Revan opened fire with his blasters, drawing on the Force to augment his accuracy. His first volley dropped an enemy soldier charging toward him; his second took out a sniper half hidden on a ridge over twenty meters away. But he knew the battle wouldn’t be won by blasters alone.

He sprinted across the center of the camp, heading toward the rear where the Ordo Basilisks were parked. Enemy blasterfire poured down, forcing him to duck, dodge, and weave, but none of the bolts found a mark.

Canderous and Veela had managed to get there ahead of him. Basilisk fire had them pinned down behind an outcropping of jagged, snow-tipped rocks, along with the rest of the Ordo Basilisk pilots.

Revan skidded to a stop, dropping to his knees and sliding the last few meters across the icy surface to join them. Canderous flashed him a fierce grin.

Moving in unison, Canderous and Veela popped up from behind the rocks to fire at the enemy war droids. The blasterfire ricocheted harmlessly off the armor plating, and they were forced to duck again when the Basilisk’s rider veered it around to return fire.

“Welcome to the party!” Canderous shouted to Revan. “Got any bright ideas?”

“Have you tried shooting the pilots?” Revan asked.

“Easier said than done,” Veela answered.

It was true; the Mandalorians riding on the back of the war droids were held in place by heavily armored saddles that protected most of their bodies. A few key spots near their heads and shoulders were vulnerable, but hitting a moving target that size would require a small miracle, even for Revan.

“All we need is to buy a few seconds,” Veela said. “Just enough time for us to get into our Basilisks and fire them up.”

Revan nudged Canderous with his elbow, drawing the big man’s attention as he dropped the blaster from his hand and moved his open palm to cover the lightsaber hilt under his belt. Canderous responded with a faint nod.

“I can create a distraction,” Revan said. “But you’ll have to move fast.”

“Whatever you’re thinking, do it,” Veela said. “If we don’t get to our Basilisks, we don’t stand a chance.”

Discarding one of his blasters, Revan leapt over the rock, drawing and igniting his lightsaber in a single motion. The glowing green blade instantly drew the attention of all four Jendri Basilisks, as the pilots swung their beasts around to target the hated Jedi who had suddenly appeared in their midst.

Revan had fought plenty of Basilisks during his campaign against the Mandalorians. The trick was to keep moving and get in close enough to limit the effectiveness of their blaster cannons. Though capable of achieving high speeds during a bombing run or charging enemy lines, the droids were slowed down by their heavy armor whenever they tried to turn or change course.

He charged the nearest rider, zigzagging to keep the Basilisk from getting a clear shot. Running directly beneath the belly of the low-flying beast, he leapt high in the air to slash his lightsaber across the droid’s tail. The energy blade ricocheted off the armor plating, but not before slicing through one of the stabilizing fins at the tip.

The pilot tried to pull his Basilisk into a steep climb so he could loop around and come diving back down at Revan—a difficult maneuver even without a missing stabilizer fin. The damaged droid tried to respond to his command, but it veered wildly out of control, turning on its side and nearly dumping the rider to the ground.

Revan took the opportunity to leap on the Basilisk’s back, grabbing hold of the back of the pilot’s seat. The Mandalorian reached back over his shoulder to grab at the stowaway, but Revan easily avoided his grasp as he slid his lightsaber tip through the back of the seat and through the pilot’s torso.

The Basilisk screamed as the semi-sentient droid felt the death of its rider through the symbiotic link the Mandalorians shared with their mechanical mounts. Left without guidance or direction, the simple artificial intelligence programs reverted to a primal attempt to rid the Basilisk of its new rider; the thrashing sent the Basilisk into a deadly dive.

Revan leapt clear just before it hit the ground. His fall cushioned by the snow, he rolled, sprang back to his feet, and turned his attention to the three remaining Basilisks.

He wasn’t surprised to see them circling high above him, well out of the reach of even a Jedi’s leap. Just as he had learned how to fight Basilisks during the Mandalorian Wars, their riders had also learned the best strategies to use when facing a member of the Jedi Order. If they stayed at a distance and coordinated their fire, it was only a matter of time until they brought Revan down.

Fortunately, he wasn’t fighting alone. His distraction had given Veela and the other Clan Ordo riders the time they needed. As the Jendri pilots prepared to retaliate against Revan, six Ordo Basilisks took to the air in attack formation.

Now outnumbered two to one, the Jendri pilots banked their war droids away from the enemy squadron and fled. Instead of pursuing, the Ordo riders turned their attention to the enemy forces on the ground.

The battle quickly turned into a rout. Even with superior numbers, the Jendri troops couldn’t match the awesome firepower of half a dozen Basilisks. The carnage lasted less than five minutes before the Jendri ranks broke.

Revan didn’t bother to participate in the final stages of the slaughter. He’d known the battle was over the instant Veela and the others took to the sky.

He looked around for Canderous and found him perched atop one of the Basilisks, screaming out a Mandalorian war cry as he arced back and forth across the field, butchering his enemies. Such vicious savagery was typical of Mandalorian warfare, and yet Revan knew that once the battle was over, Clan Jendri would hold no grudge against the victors. If Mandalore ever rose again and called them to fight alongside Clan Ordo, they would answer without hesitation.

His thoughts were interrupted when a great shadow passed over him, followed a second later by the heavy thud as Canderous brought his Basilisk in for a landing a few meters away.

“Better put that thing away,” he said, leaping to the ground and nodding at Revan’s lightsaber.

“Why, you think Veela’s going to forget I have it?” Revan asked. But he extinguished the blade as he spoke.

“I doubt anyone other than the pilots saw what happened. No point advertising what you really are any more than we have to.”

Revan changed the subject. “You think they’ll try another attack?”

“No,” Canderous said.

“You sure? I get the feeling they don’t like us being in their territory.”

“They fled the battle.” Canderous grinned. “It’s our territory now.” His grin grew wider. “Felt good to fly into battle again.”

“Where’d you get the mount?” Revan asked.

“Belongs to a young man named Grizzer. He still hasn’t been tested in battle, so Veela told me I could use it if we ran into any trouble.”

“When’d she tell you that?”

“The other night.”

“You mean when you were sharing her tent?”

Canderous shrugged.

“What does Grizzer think about that?”

“Veela’s the clan leader. He’ll do what she says.”

“And what’s she going to say now that she knows I’m a Jedi?” Revan wondered.

“Guess we’re going to find out,” Canderous said as Veela’s Basilisk swooped in to land beside them.

The Clan Ordo leader didn’t say a word as she climbed down from her seat. She walked toward the two men, her expression unreadable.

“Go help with the wounded,” she said to Revan. “You Jedi are good at that, right?”

He nodded.

“After that get some rest. Both of you. Tomorrow we climb the first Spear. Be ready to leave at daybreak.” Her words were calm, almost casual, but there was a fierce intensity in her eyes that made Revan wonder if he’d made an enormous mistake.

CHAPTER 12

“I WASN’T TOLD to expect you back yet, Lord Scourge,” the guard at the gate said.

“Maybe Darth Nyriss didn’t think you needed to know my schedule,” Scourge replied, his tone dripping with acid.

The guard nodded and buzzed Scourge in.

Scourge moved quickly down the stronghold’s halls, hoping his rebuke had shocked the guard into not reporting his arrival. The truth was, Nyriss didn’t know he was back yet. He had been expected to contact her immediately after the mission to kill Darth Xedrix was over, but he’d stayed silent, hastening his return journey to Dromund Kaas so he could question Sechel before anyone else knew he had touched down on the planet. He’d arrived late at night, and if he was lucky, he’d catch Sechel asleep in his room.

In the servants’ wing he paused at the large wooden door and tested the handle, expecting it to be locked. To his surprise, it turned silently in his hand. Was Sechel expecting someone? Or was he merely so confident in his position as Nyriss’s favorite that he believed himself safe?

Scourge entered the room, silently locking the door behind him, then crept through the darkness to the bed where Sechel lay sleeping beneath the covers. Reaching out, he placed his gloved hand firmly over Sechel’s mouth.

Sechel woke with a start, thrashing and loosing muffled cries into Scourge’s palm. The Sith Lord pressed down harder and leaned in close.

“Cry out for help and you’re dead,” he whispered in Sechel’s ear. “Do you understand?”

Feeling the adviser nod, Scourge slowly drew his hand away.

“Lord Scourge?” Sechel asked softly. “Is that you? It’s hard to see in the dark.”

“No light,” Scourge warned, knowing someone might see the glow from beneath the door and decide to investigate.

“I trust your mission went well,” Sechel said. Scourge couldn’t see the expression on the adviser’s face, but he detected the faintest tremor in his voice.

“You’re going to answer my questions,” Scourge said.

“Of course, my lord,” Sechel replied, reverting to the fawning, ingratiating tone he’d adopted at their first meeting.

“Meekness will not save you tonight,” Scourge said. “The truth is your only hope of surviving this interrogation.”

He pulled a short, sharp blade from his belt and pressed it against Sechel’s cheek. “My first question is a simple one: Has Nyriss been using me?”

“My lord, why would you think—mmph!”

Scourge jammed his hand over Sechel’s mouth, cutting off his words. Then he drew the edge of his blade slowly along the base of one of the fleshy tendrils dangling from Sechel’s cheek.

The smaller man screamed in agony, but his cries were swallowed up in Scourge’s glove. Scourge kept a steady pressure on the blade so that the fine edge sliced cleanly through the tendril, severing it. Blood began to weep from the wound.

Scourge waited until Sechel’s spasms had stopped before he pulled his hand away. To his credit, Sechel was smart enough to limit further reaction to a soft whimper.

“When I ask a question, I want a direct and immediate answer,” Scourge said. “So I will ask again: Is Nyriss using me?”

“Of course she is,” Sechel mumbled. “She uses everybody.”

“Was Darth Xedrix really working with the human separatists?”

“Yes.”

Scourge analyzed the response, focusing on the tone, pitch, and inflection. Sechel was speaking the truth.

“Did Xedrix actually try to kill Nyriss?”

When Sechel hesitated, Scourge responded by slamming his hand over his mouth again. Ignoring the muffled pleas, he lowered his blade to the adviser’s face and severed another tendril.

“Next time I take an eye,” he said once Sechel had recovered from the pain. “Remember, direct and immediate answers.”

Lying took thought and effort. It took time. Forcing a subject to answer quickly was a simple but effective tool.

He removed his hand again, ready to slash Sechel’s throat if he cried out for help. Again, the adviser had the survival instinct to hold his tongue.

“Again: Did Xedrix actually try to kill Nyriss?”

“No.”

The answer was spoken sullenly and resentfully, but Scourge could sense the truth behind the attitude.

“Who hired the assassins?”

“Nyriss did. She wanted to draw suspicion away from herself.”

“Suspicion? Suspicion of what?”

“Ask her yourself!” Sechel spat.

Scourge sighed and clamped his hand over Sechel’s mouth yet again. But before he could bring the blade to bear, the door swung open with such force it nearly broke free from its hinges.

Darth Nyriss stood on the other side, framed by the light of the hallway’s glow lamps.

“I will answer all your questions,” she said calmly, “but if you harm Sechel again, I will end you.”

Scourge tossed the knife aside and slowly stood up from the bed. His heart was pounding, and he had to fight against the urge to go for his lightsaber. He’d known there were risks in coming after Sechel; now all he could do was hope his actions hadn’t cost him his life.

“I assume this conversation will be in private?” he asked.

She nodded and turned away. Scourge didn’t even look back at Sechel as he followed Nyriss out into the hall.

Darth Nyriss was silent until they reached her private chamber. Scourge was surprised to find that her Twi’lek slave was not present. It seemed that whatever was about to be said could not be trusted even to the Twi’lek’s faithful ears.

“Are you loyal to the Empire?” Nyriss asked him.

“I thought I would get to ask the questions,” Scourge replied.

“Remember your place,” she warned. “Listen to what I have to say. When I am finished, you will have your chance to speak.”

“I am loyal to the Emperor,” Scourge declared.

“Loyal to the Emperor, or to the Empire?” she pressed. “They are two different things.”

“What do you mean?”

“The Emperor is mad. Unchecked, he will destroy us all.”

“For a thousand years the Empire has thrived under his rule,” Scourge countered.

Her words were treason, but there was little he could do about it. If he tried to strike her down, he was fairly sure he would not be able to stand against her. Unlike Darth Xedrix, she was a Sith Council member in the prime of her powers. Now that she had told him her true feelings, she couldn’t let him leave her room alive. Not if she felt he would report her to the Emperor. His only option—his only hope for survival—was to play along.

“The Emperor has expanded our borders,” Nyriss admitted. “He has made us stronger. But he is only doing this for one purpose. He is planning an attack on the Republic. He intends to start another war with the Jedi.”

“No,” Scourge said, shaking his head. “Impossible.”

The Great Hyperspace War had been one of the darkest times in the history of the Sith. Under the leadership of Naga Sadow, they had invaded the newly discovered Republic, seeking to conquer it as they had conquered every other civilization they had encountered. But despite their early victories, they had quickly lost ground. The Republic hadn’t just defeated the Sith fleets; they had annihilated them. And then the Jedi had pursued the fleeing survivors across the galaxy, nearly hunting the Sith to extinction.

The decisive actions of the Emperor had saved them. He had led the remaining Sith into the unexplored regions of the galaxy, a decades-long flight that ended only when they rediscovered and reclaimed Dromund Kaas, their long-lost ancestral home. Fortunately, the Republic and the Jedi had never found them here—a small stroke of luck that had allowed the Empire to survive.

Over the next centuries, the Sith slowly rebuilt what they had lost. They began to expand their Empire again. They conquered newly discovered worlds in sectors on the far fringes of the galaxy, far beyond the borders of Republic-explored space, safely hidden from the ever-vigilant Jedi Order.

Every Sith knew the story; it was taught to them at an early age. And while the official stance was that the Empire was slowly gathering its strength to one day strike back at their enemies, the truth was far different. Scourge and Nyriss both understood the folly of that path; they understood that the Empire could survive only as long as the Jedi remained unaware that the Sith still lived.

If the Emperor was really planning to attack the Republic again, he would be repeating the mistakes of Naga Sadow. He would start a war they couldn’t possibly win, and this time the Jedi would not stop until they had wiped the Sith out completely.

“You’re lying,” Scourge insisted. “Attacking the Republic makes no sense. The Emperor is not a fool.”

“No,” Nyriss admitted. “He is no fool. He is arrogant. He is powerful. And he is mad.” She looked directly at Scourge. “Some of us on the Dark Council learned of his plan. To save the Empire—to save our entire species—we formed an alliance, vowing to work together to bring the Emperor down.”

“Was Darth Xedrix part of this alliance?”

“He was.”

“Yet you betrayed him.”

“He became a necessary sacrifice for the cause.”

“If he was your ally, why did he have to die?”

“If the Emperor suspected the members of the Dark Council of allying against him, he would kill us all. We had to take steps to protect ourselves. To throw off suspicion, we had to distance ourselves from the separatists who openly oppose the Emperor.”

“That’s why you staged the fake assassinations against yourself,” Scourge said. “If the separatists were targeting you, the Emperor would be less likely to suspect you were working with them.”

Nyriss nodded.

“The plan was to have my own people ‘investigate’ the attempts on my life and place the blame accordingly. But then the Emperor sent you, and the plan had to change. Your arrival meant the Emperor suspected this was bigger than a simple separatist uprising. It wouldn’t be enough to implicate a radical fringe group of terrorists.”

“So you framed Xedrix.”

“You can’t frame someone who is guilty,” Nyriss corrected. “I just exposed him. Xedrix really was working with the separatists. Every piece of evidence you uncovered on your missions was real. It had to be. I could not afford to be caught in a lie if you or the Emperor looked deeper into the matter. Allowing Xedrix to take the blame will confirm the Emperor’s suspicion that the separatists were working with someone on the Dark Council. His death will keep my involvement—and that of my co-conspirators—secret.”

“And you get to eliminate a longtime rival,” Scourge added.

“A fortuitous bonus,” Nyriss agreed, her face breaking into one of her hideous grins. “Xedrix will not be missed,” she added. “He was a weak link in our chain. He was human, and his power was fading. If one of us had to be sacrificed, he was the most logical choice.”

“Why tell all this to me?” Scourge asked.

“You already suspected something was wrong,” Nyriss told him. “Why else would you have tried to interrogate Sechel? If I simply kill you, though, it might raise the Emperor’s suspicions even farther. He sent you to investigate the assassinations; it would be better if you were the one to tell him Darth Xedrix was responsible.”

She paused for a long moment before continuing. “During your service you have proven your worth to me. You are strong in the Force. Intelligent. Perceptive. You have incredible potential. My hope is that by revealing the truth I can convince you to join our cause. I would hate to discard such a valuable tool without good reason.”

Scourge narrowed his eyes. This was too easy. Even if he swore allegiance to Nyriss, she couldn’t just let him walk out of the room. The risk that he might report her to the Emperor was too great. She had to have some other way to protect herself, some angle he hadn’t considered.

He realized he was in over his depth. Ever since he had come to work for Nyriss, she had been playing him. She’d twisted and manipulated him for her own purposes, and he had danced for her like a puppet on a string.

“What’s the catch?” he finally asked. “How do you know I won’t betray your confidence?”

“Very good,” she said, smiling fiendishly in approval. “I would have been disappointed if you had simply accepted my offer. Short of killing you, there is no way I can completely eliminate the risk that you will try to expose me. But what proof do you have? Accuse me, and I will simply claim that you are the real traitor, trying to frame me after you killed Darth Xedrix.

“Remember: whatever actual evidence exists will implicate you, not me. He died by your blade. Are you certain you left no evidence behind that could implicate you in his murder? No drops of blood? No flecks of skin? No witnesses who can place you at the spaceport on Bosthirda the day Xedrix died?”

Scourge nodded in appreciation. He couldn’t help but admire how thoroughly Nyriss had entangled him in her web. “Let me guess—the files Sechel recovered from the UDM manufacturing plant and the separatist base will implicate me, as well?”

“Sechel is very good at what he does. Even the experts can’t tell when he’s doctored a datafile,” she assured him. “Even with all the evidence pointing in your direction, it’s possible the Emperor would still believe you over a member of the Dark Council, but honestly, he would probably kill us both just to be safe. That way the traitor is dead no matter which one of us is guilty. And I don’t think you’re the type to martyr yourself out of loyalty to the Emperor.”

“So where do we go from here?” Scourge asked.

“Now I must persuade you to truly believe in our cause,” Nyriss said. “It’s not enough to secure your silence through threats and blackmail. When we finally move against the Emperor, I want you on our side.”

“And how do you intend to convince me?”

“Have you ever heard tales of the Emperor’s childhood?”

Scourge shook his head. “I don’t even know what planet he’s from.”

“Few people do. He’s hidden his past, because if the truth came to light none would follow him.”

Scourge was interested despite himself.

“He was born almost a thousand years ago,” she went on, “in the decades before the Great Hyperspace War with the Republic. He spent his childhood on Nathema, a lush and vibrant agricultural world on the far fringes of the Empire.”

“Nathema? I’ve never heard of it.”

“Once it went by another name, but that name has long been forgotten … just like the planet itself. The Emperor erased Nathema from the history books and the astrogation charts to hide all evidence of his crimes.”

“Crimes?”

“Through the lost rituals of the ancients, he used the dark side to conquer death and make himself immortal. But his immortality came with a cost. Telling you what happened is not enough. You must see for yourself. Only then will you understand the price the Emperor was willing to pay. Only then will you understand why he must be stopped.”

“And how am I to find this lost world?”

“I will take you there,” Nyriss said. “Then you can witness the horror with your own eyes.”

“How do I know this isn’t a trap?” Scourge demanded. “Another elaborate trick to manipulate me into doing your bidding?”

“You don’t,” Nyriss admitted. “But what other choice do you have?”

She had a point. “When do we leave?” he asked.

“Patience, Lord Scourge,” Nyriss said. “It will take several days before we are ready to leave. The journey is long, and we must be certain the Emperor never finds out. Traveling to Nathema is punishable by death.”

“Will Sechel be joining us?”

“No. This is for your eyes alone.”

Scourge nodded, silently wondering if the adviser would try to seek revenge for the brutal interrogation.

“You are part of the inner circle now,” Nyriss assured him. “Sechel will not dare to harm you. See to your injuries,” she instructed, noting the burns left behind by Darth Xedrix’s lightning attack. “Then return to your room and get some rest.”

As he turned to go, she gave him another of her unsettling smiles. “You might want to sleep with one eye open, though. Just in case.”

CHAPTER 13

CLAN ORDO’S VICTORY CELEBRATIONS continued late into the night. Six members of the clan, four men and two women, had died in the battle, a quarter of the casualties they had inflicted on Clan Jendri.

Veela had ordered all thirty bodies to be gathered together into a massive funeral pyre. Revan understood this mixing of friend and foe: they were all Mandalorians who had died in battle. By custom they were all due a warrior’s funeral, regardless of which clan they had been fighting for. The pyre burned for hours, the flames lighting the night and warming the camp as the brothers and sisters of the fallen recounted tales of their bravery. They honored their memories through song and feast, simultaneously grieving their deaths and celebrating the resounding Ordo victory.

The ale flowed freely, but Revan had limited himself to a single mug. Because he had fought with Clan Ordo, he was entitled to join the revelry. But though he knew their customs, he wasn’t Mandalorian. It was difficult for him to rejoice in the loss of comrades, no matter how honorable their deaths may have been. Revan was also wary of what Veela might do now that she knew he was a Jedi. Hopefully she just thought he was an anonymous rogue Master; if she knew who he really was there could be trouble.

Many Mandalorians despised the Jedi—and Revan in particular. Revan had been responsible for countless Mandalorian deaths, and he had stolen and hidden Mandalore’s Mask, an act some considered a war crime. Considering Veela’s fierce pride in her people and her culture, she probably wouldn’t simply forgive and forget. Fortunately, it seemed like she wasn’t aware of his true identity.

Over the course of the evening, Edric and several others came over to speak with him, making a point to include him in the clan festivities. Everyone seemed to know he had drawn the fire of the enemy Basilisks, allowing the pilots to reach their mounts. Interestingly, though, none of them knew any of the details of what had occurred out beyond the edges of the main battle. Obviously Veela had sworn the other pilots to secrecy.

He should have taken that as a good sign, but he kept catching glimpses of Veela and the other pilots watching him suspiciously. They might not know he was Revan, but they knew he was a Jedi and that clearly bothered them.

He wasn’t sure if Veela had ordered them to stay silent out of respect for what he had done during the battle, or because she thought they still needed him to find Mandalore’s Mask, or even because of her feelings for Canderous. But whatever the explanation, his secret seemed safe … for now.

When he finally climbed into bed late that night he was surprised to hear Canderous come stumbling into the tent a few minutes later.

“I thought you’d be with Veela.”

“She’s not too happy with me right now,” Canderous explained. “I’ll let her cool down for the night.”

“Sorry about that.”

“You did what you had to do,” his friend answered as he settled into his sleeping bag. “Sooner or later it was going to come out anyway.”

“How bad is this?”

“Veela doesn’t like Jedi,” Canderous admitted. “But she’s hard to read. Hopefully she’ll just hold a grudge for a few days.” The big man rolled over onto his side. “Either that, or she’ll try to kill us on tomorrow’s climb.”

Revan couldn’t tell if he was joking.

——

THE WEATHER IN THE MORNING was the same as every other morning on Rekkiad—freezing cold, with fierce winds and swirling snow that limited visibility. Revan had been hoping for a calm, clear day so they could use the Basilisks to fly them up to the top. But even here at the base, unexpected gusts had enough strength to almost knock him off his feet. Higher up, the wind shear and lack of visibility would make an attempted landing on the summit suicidal, even for the most skilled pilots. Dangerous as it was, climbing to the top was the only real option.

“Bad conditions for an ascent,” Canderous remarked as they stood at the base of the first Spear.

“This is as good as it gets,” Veela said. “If you’re scared, I’ll get Edric to take your place and you can watch over the camp.”

“The old man would probably have a heart attack halfway up,” Canderous answered with a grin.

“He’s only a year older than you,” Veela pointed out.

“But I’m like a fine wine,” he replied. “I get better with age.”

The playful exchange eased some of Revan’s concerns about the mission, though he still wasn’t thrilled by the makeup of the climbing team. There were eight of them in total: Revan, Canderous, Veela, and the five other Basilisk riders, including Grizzer—the young man who’d given up his mount to Canderous.

Veela’s picks made a certain amount of sense. Going after Mandalore’s Mask was a great honor, and the Basilisk riders were among the most respected warriors in the clan. The only other person who might have been included was Edric, but he had been chosen to stay behind to lead Clan Ordo in case Veela and the others never came back.

Yet Revan couldn’t help noticing that all of the climbers chosen knew he was a Jedi. And Edric, Canderous’s oldest and most loyal friend, was being left behind. He wished he’d had a chance to talk to Canderous before they had left. Now all he could do was keep his guard up throughout the ascent, just in case.

They broke into two teams of four, the members of each team connected by a long length of climbing rope. Canderous, Revan, and two of the pilots made up the first group, Veela and the other three pilots the second. In addition to their winter clothing and gear, each climber had a twenty-kilo pack of supplies and rations strapped across his or her shoulders.

The two teams began their ascent simultaneously, moving along parallel paths up the sheer vertical surface of the wall of ice that made up the Spear’s face. Each meter of progress was earned only by hacking into the ice, chipping away with a sharp-ended pick to create a small hold for a hand or foot, then hammering a braced pulley into the wall to secure the climbing rope. The pattern was repeated again and again.

Progress was slow and exhausting; a single misstep could send a climber plunging to a quick and gruesome death. Theoretically, the ropes and pulleys connecting each team should allow the other three members to bear the weight if one should fall, but none of them was inclined to test the theory.

AFTER ONLY FIFTY METERS, the roaring wind was already strong enough to rip away their voices, forcing them to communicate with simple hand gestures. Despite the cold, Revan was sweating heavily beneath his layers of clothing, his body warmed by the steady physical exertion as they battled their way meter by painful meter toward the top.

At least he was safe from Veela for the time being. The difficult climb required total focus and concentration from every climber as they worked in concert to reach the peak. Even if the Ordo pilots were plotting against him, they simply wouldn’t be able to try anything until they reached the plateau at the top.

At the start of the climb the summit was invisible, lost in the swirl of snow and clouds. But by the fifth hour they had risen above the worst of the storm, giving them their first glimpse of the Spear’s peak, illuminated by Rekkiad’s pale orange sun.

They were well over halfway to their goal, but exhaustion and fatigue were beginning to impede their progress. As the altitude increased, the air became thinner, leaving all the climbers panting and gasping. The pack strapped to Revan’s back seemed to have doubled in weight, and he could feel the straps digging into his shoulders even through his clothes. But there was little to do except ignore the pain and concentrate on the climb.

Veela’s team was about fifty meters ahead. Suddenly one of their riders lost his footing and slipped. He dropped ten meters before the ropes abruptly stopped his fall, leaving him dangling helplessly at the end of the line. The abrupt stop had jerked his backpack partially around, twisting the shoulder straps so that his arms were partially pinned behind his back. Combined with the howling winds buffeting him back and forth, he was unable to reestablish a grip on the mountain.

Veela and the others began the slow and careful process of climbing back down to help him. It took about two minutes for Revan’s team to draw level with Veela and her crew as they backtracked to rescue the wayward climber. Realizing the situation was under control, Revan’s team pressed on toward the top.

Five minutes after the fall, Revan glanced back down to see that all four of Veela’s team were once again safely in position. They were not trying to regain the lead, but moved more slowly and cautiously than before.

Two hours later Revan’s team reached the top. Canderous was first; planting his feet firmly, he reached down to grab Revan’s arm and haul him up. Revan did the same for the woman trailing behind him, and she did the same for the man behind her.

The top of the first Spear was a featureless plateau of slick ice covered by a thin dusting of snow. Looking across the gap between the two Spears, Revan could see that the other summit was as bare and featureless as this one.

“Now what?” Canderous shouted over the roar of the wind.

“If this is the right peak, there should be an entrance around here somewhere,” Revan yelled back. A gust of wind shoved him sideways, and he almost stumbled.

“An entrance to what?”

Revan only shrugged. His vision hadn’t shown him what he and Malak had discovered, and no more memories had bubbled to the surface during the climb.

They all set their backpacks on the ground and started a grid-pattern search over the plateau’s surface. It didn’t take them long to find what they were looking for.

Near the center of the plateau, under a dusting of snow, was a small durasteel hatch. Revan grabbed the handle and pulled hard, calling on the Force to give him strength when he felt his muscles beginning to strain. Slowly, reluctantly, the heavy cover swung open to reveal a ladder leading down into darkness.

“You stay here and wait for Veela,” Canderous ordered the other two Mandalorians. “We’ll go down and check it out.”

He retrieved several glow sticks from his backpack on the ground, along with a blaster pistol. Revan didn’t have a weapon in his pack. Everyone on the climb already knew he was a Jedi, and he was confident the lightsaber at his belt would be enough to deal with anything they ran into.

Not that he expected any trouble. It was hard to imagine a more remote, isolated, and inhospitable location. It was easy to see why he had decided to hide Mandalore’s Mask here.

But where was here, exactly? Why was there a secret underground chamber built into the Spear, and how had he and Malak found it in the first place?

Canderous walked over to the hatch and dropped one of the glow sticks into it. It tumbled down, illuminating the length of the shaft as it fell. It stopped some thirty meters below, bouncing, rolling, and then settling on the ground.

“After you,” Canderous said.

As Revan began the long descent, his mind started to spin. Brief flashes of dormant memories exploded into his consciousness, only to vanish before he could fully grasp them.

He had an overwhelming sense of déjà vu; he knew with certainty he and Malak had explored the dark chamber beneath the ice just as he and Canderous were exploring it now.

The sights and sounds of his previous visit blended with his current surroundings, the images overlapping one another, obscuring his vision and making him dizzy. It got so bad that Revan had to close his eyes, clinging to the rungs of the ladder with a tense grip.

“You okay?” Canderous asked from a few meters above. His voice echoed loudly off the rough-hewn rock walls.

“My past is catching up with me,” Revan explained, shaking his head to dispel the vertigo.

He waited a few more seconds, and when he opened his eyes again everything had returned to normal. Taking a deep breath, he continued downward until he reached the bottom. The shaft ended in a tight, twisting tunnel that continued horizontally. Resisting the urge to draw his lightsaber, Revan pulled out another glow stick and started down the passage. Canderous followed close behind.

The tunnel was narrow, forcing them to walk single-file, but the ceiling was high enough that even Canderous didn’t have to duck. It didn’t take long for Revan to realize that they were walking on a slight decline, going ever deeper into the heart of the Spear. The air around them grew warmer, causing them to unbutton their jackets and lower their hoods.

As they continued on, Revan began to feel the unmistakable presence of the dark side. His hand dropped to the lightsaber at his belt, but he relaxed as he realized that the sensation was too faint to signify an immediate threat. Once the Force had been strong in this place, but over time—many decades, or even centuries—it had faded away to little more than a memory.

Eventually the passage brought them into a large circular chamber hewn from the rock. Easily thirty meters across, the chamber was empty save for a large stone crypt in the center.

“What is this place?” Canderous whispered.

“I think it’s the burial chamber of an ancient Sith Lord,” Revan answered. “Like the tombs on Korriban.”

“Why would they bury him here in this frozen wasteland?”

To his own surprise, Revan knew the answer to that question. “He was an exile. He fled here with a handful of his fanatically loyal followers many centuries ago. When he died, they carved out this secret chamber to inter him so his enemies couldn’t find and desecrate his remains.”

“How do you know that?”

Revan shrugged. “I just know. Malak and I came here looking for this crypt. Someone must have told us about it.”

“You mean someone like Mandalore?”

Another memory came crashing in on Revan, triggered by the words of his friend.

Mandalore the Ultimate lay dying at his feet. Coughing on the blood welling up in his lungs, he reached up and peeled off his Mask, the most sacred symbol of his people.

“It wasn’t supposed to end like this,” he said, his voice soft and low. “They promised me victory. Only now do I see how I was betrayed.”

Revan tilted his head to the side, puzzled. “What are you talking about?”

“They tricked me. We were never meant to win this war. They used me and my people to test the Republic’s strength.”

“Who used you?”

“The Sith.”

The recollection ended abruptly, slipping quickly back into Revan’s subconscious. But in bubbling up to the surface, it had released a host of other trapped memories, and they crashed over Revan like a wave, staggering him.

“I remember,” he muttered, placing his hand on the wall for support. “I remember.”

“What?” Canderous asked anxiously. “What do you remember?”

Revan didn’t answer. Instead he crossed the chamber to the sarcophagus in the center. Carved into the granite sides was an interweaving pattern of circles and diagonal lines, most likely a family crest or seal. The tomb’s heavy stone lid was smooth and unadorned, but as Revan drew closer he could see marks and scratches along the edges, signs that it had been moved several times.

Reaching out to the Force, Revan focused on the lid. After a moment it began to move, the edge grating along the lip of the lower half of the sarcophagus as it slowly rose into the air.

Careful not to let the heavy lid drop, he moved it off to the side and gently lowered it to the floor. Then he stepped up to the sarcophagus and peered inside.

There were no remains to be seen. The enemies of the anonymous Sith Lord in the tomb must have found him after all, stealing his mummified corpse for some dark and twisted purpose. The missing body didn’t come as a surprise to Revan, and he suddenly remembered that he and Malak had also found the sarcophagus empty.

But they hadn’t left it that way. Inside was a datacron—a small cube similar to the holocrons used by the Jedi and Sith to record their teachings for future generations. However, unlike those powerful artifacts, the datacron was not created using the Force; it was simply a repository of information.

But Revan barely looked at the datacron. His attention was gripped by the object that lay beside it: Mandalore’s Mask. And as he reached in and picked up the sacred relic, his mind flashed back to the moment he had left it there.

“So Mandalore was telling the truth,” Malak said.

“Did you really think his last words would be a lie?” Revan asked.

“Now what?”

“We have our proof,” Revan said. “The Sith are not extinct. They have to be stopped.”

“What about the Mandalorians?”

“Without the Mask, they are nothing,” Revan said, placing the Mask inside the empty sepulcher.

The memory ended, rudely snapping Revan back to the present. He lifted the Mask and held it aloft so Canderous could see.

The big man walked slowly toward him, as if in a daze. He didn’t speak, but as he approached, his hands came up almost involuntarily, his fingers reaching out toward the lost symbol of his people.

Neither noticed Veela and the others enter the chamber.

“How dare you defile Mandalore’s Mask with your filthy Jedi hands!” Veela shouted, breaking the spell that had momentarily enthralled the two men.

Revan looked up to see her standing at the cavern’s entrance, flanked by the other climbers. All six Mandalorians were armed with blaster pistols, their muzzles aimed directly at the two men standing by the crypt.

“Veela!” Canderous demanded. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Put the Mask down and step away from the crypt,” she commanded, ignoring him.

Moving slowly so as not to alarm anyone, Revan placed the Mask back in the crypt.

“Avner fought beside us,” Canderous protested. “He led us to Mandalore’s Mask. And you repay him with betrayal?”

Veela barked out a harsh laugh. “Who are you to talk of betrayal? You turned your back on your people. And for what? To throw your lot in with Revan the Butcher?”

“When did you figure it out?” Canderous asked, not bothering to deny the truth.

“Once he revealed himself to be a Jedi, it was obvious,” she said with a sneer. “Especially with that name. Did you really think rearranging Revan into Avner would fool us?”

“This isn’t about him,” Canderous said. “It’s about me, isn’t it?”

Veela bit down hard on her lip but didn’t answer.

“I’m not here to claim the Mask for myself,” Canderous assured her. “You’re the rightful leader of Clan Ordo. I’m not here to challenge you.”

“You still don’t get it,” Veela said, shaking her head. “You should be our leader, not me! You were our greatest warrior. You were our champion. Our hero. When Mandalore fell, you should have been the one to take his place!” She looked at him sadly. “Instead, you abandoned us. You abandoned me.”

“I’m sorry,” Canderous said softly. “When our clan fell apart, I was lost. I had to get away. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You could have stayed and help piece it back together,” Veela insisted, her voice cracking slightly as she lowered the blaster in her hand.

“Cin vhetin,” Canderous said. “I can’t undo the past. But I’m here now.”

“That’s why I didn’t tell the others in the camp,” she admitted. “I didn’t want to destroy your reputation by telling them you fell in with Revan.”

“You didn’t tell them because you’re afraid they would agree with me,” Canderous countered. “Revan is not our enemy. Not now. Without him, Clan Jendri would have slaughtered us. Without him, we would never have found Mandalore’s Mask. Revan has proved himself to be our brother; and what you are doing brings dishonor on our clan!”

“No,” Veela insisted. “You’re wrong. Clan Ordo might accept a Jedi, but not him. Anyone but him.”

“There’s only one way to be sure. We let the whole clan decide.”

“That’s not an option,” Veela replied, raising her blaster back up. “Revan cannot leave this chamber alive.”

“You know Revan’s reputation,” Canderous warned. “And mine. There may be six of you, but do you really think you have a chance against us both?”

“We’re not here to kill you,” Veela told him. “Just him.”

“And you expect me to stand by and do nothing?”

“I expect you to join us!” Veela shouted. “You are Mandalorian! Clan Ordo is your family, not Revan. You have to choose: him or us.”

“It doesn’t have to be this way,” Canderous said evenly. “Lower your weapons. End this madness. We’ll take Mandalore’s Mask back down to the camp together.”

“This is your last chance, Canderous,” Veela said. “Choose!”

Her hand was trembling, making it difficult for her to aim. But the other five held their blasters steady and true.

“You can’t win this battle,” Revan said quietly, speaking more to the others than Veela.

“We killed dozens of Jedi during the war,” Veela answered grimly.

“I’m no ordinary Jedi.”

“Veela,” Canderous pleaded, “please don’t do this.”

Her shoulders slumped and she let out a sigh of resignation. “Kill them both.”

Revan was in motion, his lightsaber flashing to life, before the words had finished spilling from her mouth. As Veela and two of the others—reacting slightly faster than the rest—fired their blasters, the green blade transformed into a spinning, twirling blur as he used it to deflect their bolts back in the direction of the shooters.

One of the deflected bolts struck its mark, taking down the woman on Veela’s left. Canderous and Revan dived for cover behind the sarcophagus just as the other Mandalorians opened fire. Canderous popped up briefly to fire, sending the Mandalorians breaking for cover. There were precious few places to hide in the open chamber, however, and Canderous took two of them down before they made it to safety.

Veela and the other two survivors scrambled back into the passage near the chamber entrance, ducking out of sight around the corner to regroup. A second later a trio of grenades skittered across the floor, bouncing and rolling to a stop near the base of the sarcophagus.

The instant before they detonated, Revan reached out with the Force and hurled the heavy stone lid of the sarcophagus toward the grenades. It acted as a shield, absorbing the worst of the blast before exploding into pebbles and dust.

The explosion was deafening, though; the concussive force strong enough to knock both Canderous and Revan off their feet. As Revan struggled to stand up, the only sound he could hear was a high-pitched ringing in his ears.

Veela and her team seized the advantage and charged into the room, blaster pistols blazing. All three aimed at Revan, who just barely rolled clear in time.

From the corner of his eye he saw Canderous lying on his stomach, arms stretched out in front of him to brace his pistol on the floor as he took careful aim. An instant later, Veela went down from a clean kill shot through her heart.

Their attention drawn for just an instant by the body of their leader tumbling to the floor, the two remaining Mandalorians faltered. Revan used that moment to unleash a sidearm throw of his lightsaber. The blade went spinning out in a wide arcing path that ended both their lives before they could move.

Revan adeptly caught his lightsaber by its hilt as it returned to his hand, then slowly stood up straight, his ears still ringing. Nearby, Canderous still lay on the floor, frozen in the same position he had been in moments earlier. Slowly, Revan approached him, trying to see if he was injured.

The big man didn’t move until Revan reached down and placed a hand on his shoulder. Then Canderous snapped his head around in surprise. He mouthed something, but Revan couldn’t hear what he was saying, so he only shrugged in response.

Canderous pushed himself up off his stomach and onto his feet, leaving his pistol on the ground. He walked over to where Veela lay facedown on the floor and rolled her over.

Her eyes were wide, gazing unseeing up at the ceiling. Tenderly, he closed the lids, then folded her hands over her chest. Then he stood up straight and turned away, staring off into an empty corner of the chamber.

After a few minutes, Revan went over to stand beside him.

“I’m sorry.” His voice sounded strange to him. His hearing was still distorted by the grenade, and he wasn’t sure if Canderous had heard him. “I’m sorry,” he repeated, this time more loudly.

Canderous turned his head to look at him. “Me, too,” he answered before turning to stare back at the wall, his words hollow and flat. “Me, too.”

CHAPTER 14

CANDEROUS CONTINUED TO STARE at the cavern wall while Revan stood by in respectful silence. Eventually he turned back to Revan and said, “We shouldn’t just leave them lying here like this. It’s disrespectful.”

Revan nodded. The Mandalorians still lay where they had fallen, their bodies crumpled in unnatural positions.

Together the two men gathered them up one by one and lay them down side by side in the center of the room. As he had done with Veela, Canderous closed their eyes and crossed their hands over their chests.

If there had been any way to make a funeral pyre, Revan would have suggested they burn them in the Mandalorian custom. But with no fuel that wasn’t going to be possible.

“What am I going to tell the others?” Canderous wondered once they were done arranging the bodies.

Revan understood his dilemma. There would be a lot of questions when they returned alone with Mandalore’s Mask, and Canderous didn’t want to bring shame onto Veela’s name.

“Keep it simple,” Revan suggested. “Say we ran into unexpected resistance from guardian droids programmed to protect the crypt. Tell them Veela and the others died in battle, and they fought like true warriors before they fell.”

Canderous nodded, then slowly walked over to the sarcophagus. He took out Mandalore’s Mask, then, almost as an afterthought, picked up the datacron.

“What’s this?” he asked, looking curiously at the small cube.

“It’s a chronicle of the Sith Lord who was buried here,” Revan said. “I think Malak and I found it hidden in the tomb the last time we were here.”

“Do you remember what’s on it?”

“Mostly.”

“Tell me.”

Revan knew Canderous was hoping there would be something in the history that would help him understand why Veela had turned on him. From what Revan remembered of the story, it would offer little solace, but he wasn’t about to deny the request.

“His name was Lord Dramath the Second. A thousand years ago his father, the original Lord Dramath, ruled over a planet called Medriaas. He was overthrown by another Sith named Lord Vitiate, who renamed the planet Nathema. With his father’s death, the younger Lord Dramath fled. He hid on Rekkiad with a handful of loyal followers, and when he died they buried him here with the datacron.”

“So it has nothing to do with Mandalore or his Mask?” Canderous asked, shaking his head. “You just decided to hide it here, too?”

Revan hesitated for a moment. “Actually, it has everything to do with Mandalore,” he said finally.

Canderous had a right to know the truth, but first Revan had to put all the pieces back together for himself. Coming to the underground burial chamber had triggered the return of a host of lost memories. They had come to him in disconnected scraps and momentary flashes of insight. He needed time to process the information—to sort it into something that made some kind of sense.

“Can we talk about this later?” was all he said.

Canderous studied Revan’s face, seemed about to say something, but then nodded. “Let’s get some rest,” he suggested. “We can’t make it back down the mountain tonight, anyway. We can talk in the morning.”

Spending the night exposed on the plateau’s surface wasn’t an option; not while they could stay underground in a geothermally heated cavern that was sheltered from the elements. They unrolled their sleeping bags near the edge of the chamber, as far away from Veela and the other bodies as possible. Sharing the room with six corpses was unpleasant, but it was better than freezing to death.

Neither man slept well. Revan could hear Canderous tossing and turning. Once Revan thought he heard him whisper Veela’s name.

Revan’s thoughts wouldn’t let him sleep, either. He had hoped finding Mandalore’s Mask would be a breakthrough, the key to unlocking all his lost memories. But the more he tried to reassemble the fragmented images swarming in his head, the more he realized how much was still missing. He had taken only a small step forward, and he suspected the journey was far from over.

When sleep finally overcame him, he dreamed about the world of endless storms and perpetual night again. It seemed more vivid than before; more substantial. More real.

He couldn’t say how long he slept; it was difficult to sense the passage of time in the chamber. When he woke he didn’t feel refreshed, but he knew it was pointless to try to go back to sleep.

Canderous was already up, pacing slowly back and forth from one side of the chamber to the other, staring at the Mask he held in his hands.

Revan stood up and stretched, working the kinks out of his neck and shoulders. “I’m ready to tell you what I remember about Mandalore,” he said. “If you still want to know.”

“I do.”

Taking one last breath to help gather his thoughts, Revan launched into the tale. “About two years before he declared war on the Republic, Mandalore was approached by a man with skin the color of blood—a Sith.”

“I thought the Jedi wiped the Sith out.”

“So did the Jedi. The Sith species vanished after the Great Hyperspace War. One of their kind hasn’t been seen in Republic space in over a thousand years. But this red-skinned being came to Mandalore. He claimed to be the emissary of a powerful Master—a descendant of the Sith Lord who had driven Dramath into exile—and convinced Mandalore to help him search for his enemy’s tomb.”

Revan was speaking slowly, the words coming out only as fast as the details came into focus. His recollections were still hazy and jumbled. The original time and place of each specific memory was unclear. Mandalore had told him some of this. Other details had come from the datacron in the tomb. Most of it he had learned much later, after he and Malak had journeyed into the Unknown Regions themselves.

It was impossible to sort it all out. Out of necessity, his damaged mind had collapsed his memories into one another, merging them into a semi-coherent whole as he’d slept.

“Mandalore helped the Sith find Dramath’s hidden crypt,” he continued. “The Sith took the remains to give to his Master, and in exchange he told Mandalore of a vision his Master had had of the Mandalorians rising up against the Republic. He told him they would conquer world after world, crushing their enemies until the Republic collapsed in on itself. He promised the Mandalorians a glorious victory, and Mandalore believed him.”

“Mandalore the Ultimate wouldn’t lead us into war against the Republic just because some stranger told him we’d win,” Canderous protested.

“It’s more complicated than that. The Sith used the power of the dark side to manipulate him. Only as Mandalore lay dying at my feet was the spell finally broken and he realized he’d been tricked. That was why he told me about this place. So I could come and see for myself.”

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Canderous said. “You say the Sith tricked Mandalore into attacking the Republic. But why?”

“I don’t know,” Revan admitted. “Maybe it was a test of your strength. Or ours. Maybe the Sith are planning another invasion, and they sought to weaken the Republic.”

“But you don’t know for sure?”

“I’m remembering more and more, but there’s still so much missing.” Revan paused before adding, “Maybe I’ll find the answers on Nathema.”

“Nathema?”

“The hyperspace coordinates are on the datacron. I think Malak and I went there to try to learn more.”

“Is Nathema the world you keep dreaming about? The one covered in storms and darkness?” Canderous asked.

Revan closed his eyes and concentrated, summoning the image that had haunted him for so many nights. He tried to associate the vision with the name, but somehow he knew it didn’t fit.

“No. The planet in my dreams isn’t Nathema.”

“You’re sure?”

“I can’t really be sure of anything,” Revan confessed. “But it just doesn’t feel right. I think … I think we went there after Nathema.”

“And when you returned, you tried to conquer the Republic. Just like Mandalore.”

Revan shook his head. “It’s not the same. Mandalore was a warrior, and he had no loyalty to the Republic. Convincing him to attack was more persuasion than domination. The Sith was only telling him what he wanted to hear; he was playing off Mandalore’s own hidden desires.

“But Malak and I were Jedi. It would take more than some persuasive words and a subtle push from the Force to turn us to the dark side. Something else happened to us out there. We found something that changed us.”

“You don’t think going to Nathema again is a little risky?” Canderous asked.

“I have to,” Revan answered. “It’s the only way I’ll find out what happened.”

“What if the same thing happens again?”

“I’ll be more careful this time. My guard will be up.”

“Do you think that’s going to make a difference?”

“I hope so.”

“So when do we leave?”

“You’re not coming,” Revan said. “You have to stay here with your people.” He held up his hand to cut off any protests. “Veela was right about one thing—you should be the leader of the Mandalorians. The Mask is there, just waiting for you to claim it.”

“You need my help,” Canderous insisted. “I turned my back on Veela when she needed me. I’m not going to make the same mistake with you.”

“That’s why you have to stay,” Revan told him. “The Mandalorians were tricked into a war that nearly destroyed them. I don’t know who the Sith was or what he was after, but he knew you couldn’t win. He knew a war against the Republic would leave the Mandalorians devastated.”

“If the Sith are planning another invasion of the Republic, they’d have to come through Mandalorian space first,” Canderous muttered. “Maybe they were trying to get us out of the way.”

“Maybe. Or maybe they wanted to twist your culture and beliefs in the hope you’d join them. Many of the Mandalorians are bitter, and hungry for revenge. Without a new Mandalore, how hard would it be for someone to manipulate them into going to war again?” Revan frowned. “Your people have lost their way, Canderous. You need to help them find it again. The fate of the galaxy could depend on it.”

Canderous stared at Revan, and then down at the Mask in his hands. He stood stock-still for a moment. Then, slowly, he raised the Mask and slipped it over his head.

“Mandalore has returned,” he declared. “I am Mandalore the Preserver, and I will restore the honor and glory of my people!”

T3-M4 GREETED REVAN’S RETURN to the Ebon Hawk with a shrill stream of beeps and whistles. The astromech was spinning in place so rapidly that Revan feared he might burn out a circuit.

“Settle down, little fella,” he said, reaching out to pat the droid. “I’m glad to see you, too.”

T3 stopped spinning and responded with an inquisitive chirp.

“Canderous is staying here,” Revan explained. “These are his people. This is where he belongs.”

T3 beeped twice.

“No, we’re not going home yet,” Revan said, settling into the pilot’s chair and punching in their hyperspace coordinates.

“We’re headed into the Unknown Regions, to a planet called Nathema.”

CHAPTER 15

SCOURGE KNEW THAT Nyriss was watching him carefully. For the past week, ever since she had told him the truth about Xedrix, he had felt her presence constantly. He had promised not to act on his knowledge until he saw Nathema for himself, and he intended to keep that promise. He knew she didn’t trust him, and he knew she’d try to kill him if she felt threatened—and also that she was powerful enough to have a good chance of succeeding. But he had his own reasons for obeying. He was curious about what she had told him. He wanted to know more about the Emperor’s mysterious past. And if it turned out that Nyriss was telling the truth—if the Emperor really was mad enough to start another war with the Republic—then maybe Scourge should consider taking her side.

Now the day of reckoning was here. Nyriss had come for him early, waking him with a subtle whisper in his ear.

“It’s time.”

He’d dressed quickly, then followed her out to the spaceport, where a private shuttle was waiting for them. Unlike the rest of her fleet, this one bore neither her colors nor her crest. This journey would be conducted in utter secrecy.

The shuttle was clearly built for speed; there was no armor to speak of, and at first glance it was easy to miss the single blaster turret mounted under the cockpit. Scourge was no expert on starship weaponry, but he guessed it would only be effective at close range.

The interior was more functional than luxurious, with room to seat six. On this trip, he and Nyriss would be the only passengers.

She settled into the pilot’s chair, her fingers moving rapidly over the controls with a dexterity that belied their gnarled, wrinkled appearance. Neither of them spoke as the shuttle took to the sky, climbing rapidly through the clouds and lightning until it broke free of the atmosphere.

Nyriss made a few more adjustments and punched in their route, and the ship jumped into hyperspace, leaving Dromund Kaas—and Nyriss’s loyal followers—behind.

“Nothing I tell you can prepare you for what you will see on Nathema,” Nyriss warned him. “But I will tell you the history of the Emperor and his homeworld.”

“How can I know you’re telling the truth?”

She shrugged. “Believe it or not as you see fit. If nothing else, it will help pass the time.”

She settled herself more comfortably, and as she spoke, her voice took on the singsong tone of children’s storyteller. “The Emperor’s name was Tenebrae,” she began. “They say he was born with eyes as black as the void of empty space, and that he never cried, even as an infant. No animal would come near him, and when he began to talk, his voice carried a weight and power that should not come from a child.

“At the age of six he began to manifest signs of the Force, marking him as one of the ruling elite. But his parents were simple farmers, and the Force was not strong in them. Suspicious about the boy’s power, his father confronted his mother, who admitted to having an affair with the Sith Lord who ruled over them.

“The father flew into a rage, attacking the boy’s mother. Tenebrae stopped him, feeding on his father’s anger and hate to call upon the dark side. He snapped his father’s neck with a mere thought, killing him instantly. His mother died more slowly. Tenebrae made her suffer for months as punishment for betraying the family, torturing her with the Force as he honed his powers.

“Now orphaned by his own hand, he made the others in his village bow down to him. Those who refused, he tortured and killed through the Force.

“Over the next few years his reputation and influence spread to nearby villages, and he amassed legions of both fanatical and terrified followers. He killed thousands during his rise to power. Many died just to feed his insatiable appetite for suffering, tortured for days in public executions so he could savor their agonizing ends.”

“This sounds more like a legend than a history,” Scourge remarked.

“I cannot guarantee the truth of this story,” Nyriss admitted. “Those who witnessed the events no longer live to verify them. But if you had ever met the Emperor in person, you would not be so hesitant to accept the tale as fact.”

“What about Nathema’s ruler? The boy’s father? You claimed he was a Sith Lord. Surely he didn’t sit back doing nothing while a child conquered his people village by village?”

“Tenebrae’s father was named Lord Dramath. He heard rumors, but they came from a remote and insignificant territory. He had long forgotten the simple commoner who had borne him a son, and he considered the plight of a few small villages beneath his notice. Had Dramath acted more swiftly, the Emperor might have been stopped. But it took almost four years before he decided to go see Tenebrae for himself.

“Lord Dramath intended to judge the child’s power to determine if he was worthy of serving the Sith Lord, or if he should simply be executed. But Tenebrae had no intention of serving—or of dying. When they met face-to-face, Tenebrae proved the stronger. Only ten years old, he stripped his father of his power and his mind. Lord Dramath spent his last moments weeping in terror, gazing up into the black eyes of his son.

“It took Tenebrae three more years to gain control of the rest of Nathema. Dramath’s firstborn son fled rather than face his formidable half brother, but other powerful Sith sought to seize the empty throne. All fell before the dark prodigy, and with each victory he grew more powerful and more ruthless.

“At thirteen he presented himself to Marka Ragnos, the Lord of all Sith and the ruler of the Sith Council. Impressed by the teenager’s ambition and power, Marka Ragnos granted him the title of Lord Vitiate. His position as ruler of Nathema officially recognized, Lord Vitiate returned to his home to conduct his research into the depths of the dark side’s power.

“He stayed there for a hundred years. When Marka Ragnos fell, Lord Vitiate did not join in the mad rush to claim his position. He was not part of the Great Hyperspace War against the Republic. When Naga Sadow and Ludo Kressh fought for leadership of the Sith, he took no side. But in the aftermath of the war—after our defeat at the hands of the Republic and our flight to escape the massacre of our people by the Jedi—he emerged from his solitude to call a great council of all the Sith Lords who remained. He invited them to his palace on Nathema, built on the site of his childhood home, the place where he had killed his adopted father and tortured his mother to death. He invited them to participate in a ritual to unlock the full potential of the dark side; he promised they would unleash power beyond anything they had ever witnessed or imagined.”

“Didn’t they suspect a trap?”

“Perhaps.” Nyriss shrugged. “Some refused to answer his call. But many more came. After all, what could one man do against a hundred Sith Lords? Remember, he was not the Emperor back then. He was merely Lord Vitiate, ruler of a single planet of no particular importance. He hadn’t fought in any battles of note or achieved any great victories or conquests beyond his homeworld. He had the reputation of a scholar, not a warrior.

“And the Sith Lords were driven by fear. Many thought the Jedi would soon wipe them all out. They were desperate for anything they could use as a weapon against the servants of the light side. Lord Vitiate played upon these fears, convincing those who answered his call to set aside their suspicions of him and of one another to join in a single glorious cause.

“Once they arrived on Nathema, they quickly fell under Lord Vitiate’s control. He dominated their minds, crushed their resistance. He turned them into slaves to his will, forcing them to participate in the most complex ritual of Sith sorcery ever attempted. Calling on the dark side, Lord Vitiate devoured them. He fed on their power, absorbing it into himself, utterly obliterating all traces of his victims.

“But the ritual was not confined to the doomed Sith Lords. They were but the eye of the storm; the center of a vortex that spread across the entire planet. Every man, woman, and child on Nathema died that day. Every beast, bird, and fish; all the insects and plants; every living being touched by the Force was consumed. When the ritual ended, Nathema was no longer a world. It was a husk sucked dry. Lord Vitiate sacrificed millions, stealing their life force to make himself immortal. Their deaths also made him stronger than any Sith who had come before, and he ceased to be known as Lord Vitiate. On that day, the Emperor was truly born.”

Scourge wondered if Nyriss expected him to be horrified by the tale. If so, she was about to be disappointed.

“The Emperor seized what was his by right,” he said. “The strong take from the weak. That is our way. Doing it on a scale of millions doesn’t change anything—it just proves he deserves to be our Emperor.”

“So I used to think,” Nyriss said, smiling ghoulishly. “And then I saw Nathema for myself.”

She didn’t say anything else for the remainder of the trip, leaving Scourge to wonder in silence why she was so confident he would come around to her side.

He felt the first hints of what was waiting for him when the shuttle dropped out of hyperspace. Through the windows of the cockpit he saw a gray-and-brown planet looming large before them. Gazing at it, he felt something strange and unsettling. Something unnatural.

It took him several moments to realize what was wrong, and even when he did, he didn’t fully grasp the implications. He wasn’t feeling the Force.

The sensation was completely alien. The Force was omnipresent. It radiated stronger in certain places and at certain times, and the balance of the dark side and the light constantly shifted. But it was always there in some way, shape, or form.

Now, however, he felt nothing. He had become so accustomed to the presence of the Force in the background that its complete absence was almost overwhelming, leaving him unable to speak.

“Prepare yourself,” Nyriss said. “We’re going down to the surface.”

The absence grew steadily more pronounced as the shuttle approached and then landed on Nathema.

“Come with me,” Nyriss commanded, rising up from her seat.

Still mute, Scourge followed her down the shuttle’s boarding ramp and out onto the world itself.

They had touched down at a spaceport in a city. Or what used to be a city. The spaceport was surrounded by the buildings, speeder pads, and streets one would expect to see in a planet’s major metropolitan center. But it was eerily quiet; the incessant murmur of the crowds and the constant hum of traffic whizzing past on busy streets were missing.

There wasn’t even any wind, and the air tasted stale in Scourge’s mouth. The temperature was neither cold nor hot, but he felt himself starting to shiver.

“You feel the chill of the Void,” Nyriss told him. “The Force is energy; it gives heat to our emotions and our minds. But here it has been stripped away.”

She led him along the deserted streets as Scourge stared in fascinated horror, trying to grasp the magnitude of what he was witnessing. The buildings seemed to be almost fully intact; there was none of the damage and destruction normally associated with millions of simultaneous deaths. However, there were other signs of what had happened here.

Mangled speeders and shuttles were strewn about, the remains of vehicles in motion that had crashed to a halt when their pilots were taken by the ritual. And everywhere Scourge looked there were small piles of clothes: jackets, slacks, and boots that had survived what their owners had not. Normally these remains would have been picked over by scavengers, but on Nathema even the vermin and insects were extinct.

“Where are the droids?” Scourge asked.

He was shocked at the sound of his own voice. It was flat and dull, as if even sound waves had been distorted by the ritual.

“The ritual overloaded their circuits,” Nyriss explained, her voice as hollow and washed out as his. “The damage was irreparable; even their memory cores were completely wiped out.”

Scourge glanced upward and noticed something else unusual. The sun shining down on them from above—a star that had appeared bright orange as they’d approached the planet—was now a pale shade of brown. In fact, everything around them was either brown or gray, as if the colors had been leached out.

Scourge was well acquainted with death. He had no trouble understanding massacres and mass slaughter. Death and destruction unleashed powerful emotions like fear, suffering, and hatred; they fueled the power of the dark side. But what had happened on Nathema was different, and it disturbed him in a deep and profound way.

The Emperor had consumed everything. Life, sound, color, even the Force—nothing remained. This wasn’t about conquest or domination or destroying an enemy—all concepts Scourge embraced.

Everything on Nathema had simply been snuffed out, extinguished so completely that it ceased to have any meaning or purpose. It was a vacuum of existence; a blight on the natural order.

“I’ve seen enough,” he declared.

Nyriss nodded, and they turned and made their way back to the ship.

Scourge finally understood why Nyriss and the others wanted to take the Emperor down. Destroying your enemies—even destroying a planet—was understandable. But this wasn’t simple destruction. It was annihilation; obliteration. The very fabric of the Force had been shredded. Anyone capable of turning an entire planet into a nihilistic abomination had to be completely mad. After seeing the horrors of Nathema, he truly believed the Emperor might declare another war against the Republic, exposing them to the Jedi and leading to the eventual extinction of their species.

By the time they reached the shuttle, Scourge’s stomach was churning. He had lived his whole life attuned to the Force; having it stripped away had left him physically ill. The shuttle shook as they took to the air, and he fought against the urge to vomit.

As they broke the atmosphere of the cursed world, some semblance of normalcy returned. Scourge felt the Force rushing in to fill the emptiness inside him; he felt its power invigorating him and restoring his strength. At the same time, he also felt something else: the presence of someone strong in the Force—someone who was neither Nyriss nor him.

Nyriss suddenly began punching away at the shuttle’s controls, scanning the system for another vessel, and Scourge knew she felt it, too.

“There,” she said, pointing at the readout. “A ship just dropped out of hyperspace in this system.”

“Could the Emperor have sent someone to follow us?” Scourge asked.

“I don’t think so,” she replied, staring at the screens. “Its signature doesn’t match any design I’ve ever seen before.”

From her voice it was clear she was as puzzled as he was. If the ship hadn’t followed them here, the odds against it showing up at the same time they were here were astronomical. But Scourge understood the ways of the Force too well to believe in coincidence. There had to be some connection between them and the unexpected visitor.

“Looks like a small freighter of some kind,” Nyriss muttered. “I don’t think they’ve seen us.”

Scourge realized they had two options. The first was to make a quick jump to hyperspace in an effort to escape before being noticed.

Nyriss decided to take the second option. Reaching out a finger, she activated the shuttle’s ion cannon, locked onto the unidentified vessel, and fired.

THE INSTANT THE EBON HAWK dropped out of hyperspace near Nathema, Revan was overwhelmed by a barrage of mental images. Everything came crashing in on him, the memories he was so desperate to regain fusing with a trauma he had tried so hard to repress. Caught between the two, he cried out and clutched his head in his hands.

For several seconds he didn’t move, his conscious will battling with his runaway subconscious. One by one, he was able to take the recollections, process them, and store them away, slowly regaining control.

He knew with absolute certainty that he had been to this world before. He remembered its deserted city and its lifeless surface. He remembered searching the empty buildings with Malak, looking for archives, records, and astrogation charts that would guide them on the next step of the journey. But most of all, he remembered the horror of a dead planet entirely stripped of the Force.

T3 was at his side, beeping with concern. Revan blinked away the last of his fugue state and glanced down at the Hawk’s sensors to see what had the little droid so upset.

The sensors had picked up another vessel in the system. It was difficult to draw on the Force so close to the ravaged world, and he struggled to get some sense of the passengers on the other ship. By the time his groggy mind registered the threat they posed, it was too late.

The ion blast hit the Hawk full-bore, shorting out its circuits and engines and leaving them at the mercy of the gravitational field from the planet below.

Revan scrambled to steer the ship as it was pulled down into Nathema’s atmosphere, wondering at the chances of surviving a second crash landing in a row. The ion blast had damaged the flight controls and stabilizers, and the ship veered wildly as it plummeted toward the surface. He had no idea if the other vessel was following him; his sensors had been knocked out along with everything else. But he knew if he didn’t get the engines and repulsors back online, the Ebon Hawk would be smashed to pieces by the fall.

“Tee-Three!” he shouted, but the astromech had already sprung into action.

T3 had connected himself to the cockpit’s main control panel with a twenty-centimeter-long slicing tool. Lights on the cockpit dashboard began to flicker and flash as T3 rerouted power from damaged circuits. Through the cockpit window, Revan could see the distant outline of a city far below, the skyscrapers seeming to growing rapidly as the Hawk rushed toward them at terminal velocity.

Inside the control panel something crackled and popped. Smoke poured into the cockpit. T3 squealed in alarm, but his warning was drowned out by the sound of the Hawk’s engines roaring back to life.

Revan pulled back hard on the stick, and the nose of the Hawk grudgingly angled upward, emergency repulsors screaming.

“Brace for impact!” he shouted an instant before they slammed into the edge of one of the massive skyscrapers, sending a shower of permacrete and plasteel tumbling to the empty street below.

The Hawk ricocheted off the building and began to spin wildly. Then it slammed into the ground at an awkward angle, skipping along the street like a stone cast across water before finally coming to rest.

CHAPTER 16

SCOURGE HAD NO DESIRE to return to Nathema, but he didn’t raise any objection when Nyriss redirected their shuttle back toward the planet’s surface in pursuit of the damaged freighter. They had to find out who was on that vessel, why they were here, and if they were still alive.

It had crashed down in one of the handful of cities that dotted the world, leaving a path of damaged buildings and mangled speeders in its wake. The ship itself still seemed to be relatively intact; it lay wedged against the base of a skyscraper at the end of a main thoroughfare.

Nyriss brought the shuttle in cautiously, wary of return fire as she scanned the enemy vessel.

“Anybody alive in there?” Scourge asked.

Anywhere else in the galaxy he would have been able to sense the survivors through the Force. Here on Nathema, however, the aftermath of the Emperor’s grim ritual blinded his abilities.

“I’m picking up readings of an organic life-form on board,” Nyriss confirmed.

They brought the shuttle in for a landing roughly fifty meters from the other vessel. There had been no reaction of any kind from the enemy craft as they approached.

“Search the interior,” Nyriss ordered. “I’ll wait here.”

Disembarking, Scourge got his first good look at the ship. It was an unusual shape—flat and circular, like a disk. He approached it cautiously, his heart pounding. Normally he relied on the Force to warn him of potential danger; without it he felt vulnerable and almost helpless. It was a feeling he most definitely did not like.

He was halfway to the vessel when another thought struck him. What if Nyriss simply decided to take off in her shuttle and leave him here? The thought froze him for a moment, until he realized how ridiculous the idea was. If Nyriss had wanted to get rid of him, she could have done so a dozen different ways already. There was no reason to abandon him on Nathema—not after risking her own life to bring him here in the first place.

Scourge steeled himself and continued his advance until he reached the strange ship’s underbelly. He pushed the access panel on the hull, and the boarding ramp slowly descended. He wasn’t surprised to find it unlocked; most ships had emergency overrides on their security systems in case of a crash, in order to allow rescue workers to get inside and help the injured.

Scourge activated his lightsaber. The familiar hum and hiss of the blade springing to life sounded weak and distant, and the crimson blade appeared faded—even his weapon was not immune to the effects of the dead planet. But he suspected it would still get the job done if he encountered any resistance.

He climbed up the boarding ramp and into the hull of the ship. He followed the circular layout, briefly glancing into storage rooms and passenger bunks in his search for whoever might be on board. He found nothing until he reached the cockpit.

Strapped into the chair was an unconscious—or dead—human male clad in simple brown robes. He appeared to be about forty standard years old. He was thin and wiry, with dark, shoulder-length hair and rough black stubble on his cheeks and chin. Blood poured from a deep gash on his forehead and covered his face; during the crash something that wasn’t strapped down must have struck him.

Coming closer, Scourge put two fingers on the side of the man’s neck, checking for a pulse. He had barely registered the faint flutter of life when his gaze fell on the hilt hooked to the man’s belt: a lightsaber. Instinctively he tried to reach out with the Force to get some sense of the man’s power, but he felt only the emptiness of Nathema.

Grabbing the lightsaber and clipping it onto his own belt, he unbuckled the man, slung him over his shoulder, and carried him off the vessel.

The weight of the unconscious man made it difficult to move any faster than a brisk walk, but Scourge pressed the pace. He was eager to leave Nathema behind him for good this time. Nyriss was waiting for him back at the shuttle, standing just inside the boarding ramp. Scourge strode past her and onto the ship, where he tossed the unconscious man roughly onto the floor. He was about to mention the lightsaber, but Nyriss spoke before he had a chance.

“I know this man,” she said, her voice grim. “His name is Revan. He’s a Jedi and a Republic spy.”

“A Republic spy?” Scourge’s brain took the news and jumped to the next logical conclusion. “If the Jedi know we exist, they will come for us. They will try to finish the extermination of our species that they began in the Great Hyperspace War!”

“Our existence is still hidden,” she assured him. “Revan and another Jedi—a man named Malak—discovered Dromund Kaas by accident. They were captured before they could return and report their findings to the Republic.”

“When did all this happen?”

“Five years ago. The Emperor sentenced Revan to death.”

“Then what’s he doing here?”

“I don’t know,” Nyriss admitted. “But he couldn’t have escaped the citadel’s dungeons unless the Emperor allowed it. It stands to reason that he wouldn’t still be alive unless he was working for the Emperor.”

“How is that possible?” Scourge countered. “The Jedi are our sworn enemies.”

Nyriss didn’t answer. “Watch him closely,” she said, returning to the pilot’s seat. “He is powerful and extremely dangerous.”

“Why don’t we just kill him?”

“Not yet. Not until we know why he is here. We’ll take him back to my stronghold for questioning.”

“I’ve never interrogated a Jedi,” Scourge said after a moment. He smiled. “I’m looking forward to it.”

REVAN HAD NO IDEA where he was when he awoke, though it was obviously some kind of prison cell. He was propped up in a cold metal chair. His hands were bound to the arms, his ankles tied to the legs. For the moment, he was alone.

His mind felt slow and dull, and he knew he’d been drugged. It was difficult to concentrate; impossible to focus his thoughts enough to use the Force. It took all his willpower just to recall the last moments of the Ebon Hawk crashing on Nathema.

He struggled to take stock of his situation, but he couldn’t pierce the haze of the drugs.

The door to his cell slid open and two figures entered, one male and one female. The sight of their red skin tweaked something in his addled brain, but it took several seconds before he could make the connection.

“Sith,” he whispered, his throat dry and his voice hoarse.

“Welcome back, Revan,” the female said in Basic.

He stared at her withered, wrinkled face, trying and failing to dredge up her name. “Do I know you?”

The tall male Sith beside her reached out with a hand and casually delivered a backhanded slap across Revan’s cheek. “We don’t have time to play games,” he said. His voice wasn’t angry or threatening; it was calm and completely matter-of-fact.

Revan tasted blood; the smack had cut the inside of his mouth. He could feel the sting of the wound and the swelling of his lip. Apparently the drugs used to dull his mind had been carefully selected so they would not interfere with the sensation of physical pain.

“I don’t think this is a game,” the female said, raising an eyebrow. “I think he’s actually forgotten me.”

She leaned in close beside him and whispered in his ear: “What happened to you, Revan? Where did you go? Why did you return?”

When he didn’t answer, she stepped back and nodded. Then she waved a hand and an interrogator droid—Revan hadn’t even noticed it hovering behind the two Sith—floated over and extended a long, thin needle into his neck.

He grimaced in pain as the needle punctured his skin, then screamed as it discharged a powerful electrical burst, setting his nerves on fire.

The Sith male waved a hand and the interrogator droid retreated.

“What happened to your partner?” he asked. “Malak?”

“I killed him,” Revan said.

“Why?”

“It’s complicated.”

The male’s expression didn’t change, but the female smiled in amusement, the expression transforming her wrinkled features into those of a grinning skull.

“Eventually you’ll tell us everything we want to know,” the male assured him.

“Maybe so,” Revan conceded. “But I’m going to make you work for it.”

AFTER FOUR HOURS of questioning the prisoner, Nyriss ordered Scourge to take a break. They left him in his cell, tied to his chair, neither of them speaking until they were outside in the hall and the door to his cell had closed behind them.

“How much longer will it take to break him?” Nyriss asked.

Scourge considered the question carefully before answering. Early in his training, he had shown a knack for torture and interrogation, skills the instructors had encouraged during his years at the Academy. He was an expert in the field; he knew that wringing information out of an unwilling source was about far more than just inflicting pain.

Apply enough punishment and everyone would talk, but most of what they said would be desperately babbled lies, evasions, and half truths. Without any way to verify accuracy, information gathered through torture was often unreliable and even worthless.

Effective interrogation was an art, and Scourge had an innate ability to parse fact from fiction. He knew what questions to ask and in what order; he understood when to ratchet up the intensity and when to pull back. He knew how to use the threat of pain and the reward of mercy to control his subjects.

His advanced techniques, combined with his ability to draw upon the dark side, allowed him to quickly dominate weak minds. Strong-willed subjects were more of a challenge, yet in the end he always got results. Until now.

Interrogating the Jedi had resulted in nothing but frustration and dead ends. His will was strong, as was his command of the Force. Even drugged to the edge of unconsciousness he was able to draw on it to help him endure the pain and the relentless barrage of questions. But there was something else, as well.

Nyriss wanted to know how he had escaped the dungeons of the citadel. She wanted to know about his relationship with the Emperor. She wanted to know why he had come to Nathema. On all those counts, Scourge had come up empty. Revan was resisting him, true, but at some times it almost seemed as if Revan himself didn’t know—as if the information had been wiped from his mind.

“We might be wasting our time,” he finally admitted. “His pain threshold is high, but we’re already at the limits of what a human can endure. If I press any harder, we risk killing him.” Scourge had seen it happen many times. Unskilled or overeager interrogators could easily push their subjects too far. In his mind this was the ultimate failure: you couldn’t get answers from a corpse.

With difficult subjects you had to be patient. It might take multiple sessions over several days to get anything useful. But even knowing this, Scourge didn’t hold out much hope for his chances with Revan.

“I could question him for months, but the information you want just isn’t there.”

“That is unfortunate.” Nyriss sighed. “I was hoping to verify my theory.”

“What theory?”

“The Emperor has the ability to dominate and enslave the minds of those who serve him,” she explained. “It’s one of the reasons he has ruled for so long. Those that are transformed become fanatical zealots who live to serve; they are not capable of betraying him.” She glanced back at the door behind which they had left the Jedi. “I suspect that instead of executing Revan as he publicly proclaimed, the Emperor turned him into a puppet of his will and sent him back to the Republic to gather information.”

“If he’s been gathering intel on the Republic for five years, the Emperor must be closer to launching his invasion than we thought,” Scourge noted, alarmed at how close their mad ruler had already come to exposing them to the Jedi.

Nyriss shook her head. “The Emperor is more patient and careful than any being in the galaxy. He has lived for nearly a thousand years; he might live for ten thousand more. He leaves nothing to chance. If necessary, he will spend decades, maybe even centuries, preparing. No, we still have time. And Revan may still be of use to us.”

“How so?”

“You said it yourself: something happened to his mind. His memories are lost, but so is his knowledge of and loyalty to the Emperor. Whatever was done to him, it freed him from the Emperor’s domination. If we can learn how this happened, we might be able to use it to bring the Emperor down. Remember that all those who have direct access to the Emperor—the Emperor’s Voice, the Emperor’s Hand, the soldiers in the Imperial Guard—are under his spell. Breaking that spell, turning his most loyal followers against him, is our best chance of defeating him and saving the Empire from his mad plan to attack the Republic.

“We need Revan alive so we can study him,” she concluded. “He is too valuable a resource to throw away.”

What she said made sense, but Scourge knew it would be far more difficult and complicated than she made it sound. “It might take years before you understand what happened to him,” he warned her.

“The Emperor is not the only one who can be patient,” she replied.

PART TWO

CHAPTER 17

BASTILA TUCKED HER SON into bed and leaned down to kiss him on the cheek. At the door of his room she turned and looked back at him, marveling at how much the three-year-old boy already looked like his father. He had the same dark, shoulder-length hair and the thin, angular face. His eyes were closed now, but she knew they were dark and brooding … just like Revan’s. And though he was already drifting off to sleep, his expression was still unusually serious and intense for a child his age.

She sighed and turned away. Bastila often worried about the effect her son’s turbulent childhood would have on him. Growing up without a father was difficult enough, but the first few years of his life had been scarred by war and terror.

After Malak had been defeated, Bastila, like most other citizens of the Republic, had hoped to enjoy many decades of peace. Instead, a group of rogue Jedi had broken away from the Order, plunging the galaxy once more into civil war.

Led by a woman named Kreia, the rogue Jedi turned to the dark side teachings uncovered by Malak and Revan. Kreia took the name Darth Traya, and her followers called themselves the Sith after the long-lost species that had invaded the Republic a millennium before. They began a systemic purge of the galaxy, hunting down those who still held fast to the Jedi Code, killing them by the tens of thousands. Their relentless pursuit virtually wiped out the Order, and only those few who managed to flee or hide survived.

Had Revan returned to face this new threat, Bastila would have eagerly fought by his side. Together they might have been able to quell the uprising, ending it before the horrors of war enveloped the Republic and millions lost their lives. But she had heard nothing of her husband since he had set off with Canderous four years earlier.

Alone, she dared not challenge Darth Traya and her followers. Instead, she had focused on keeping her son alive. It had been the Exile—Meetra Surik—who had taken up the fight against the rogue Jedi. Three years after Revan’s unsuccessful attempt to locate her, she had emerged on her own to oppose and eventually defeat Darth Traya. Like Revan before her, she became the savior of the galaxy. And also as with Revan, there were many who felt her recent actions could not atone for the sins of her past.

And now this woman—hero to some, villain to so many others—was sitting in the living room of Bastila’s apartment, patiently waiting for her to finish putting her son to bed.

“He’s asleep,” Bastila said as she returned, speaking softly.

“He’s beautiful,” Meetra answered, adding, “He looks like his father.”

Bastila nodded at the compliment. She wasn’t sure what to make of the woman before her. Meetra had short brown hair, pale white skin, and piercing blue eyes. She was taller than Bastila, and almost a decade older, though she would still be considered beautiful by any empirical measure. She possessed a presence and confidence, along with an enviable natural grace. She was clad in the simple robes of a Jedi Master, but somehow she managed to make even the drab brown cloth seem stylish.

Foolish as it was, Bastila couldn’t help but feel some hint of jealousy. Meetra had known Revan long before Bastila; she had answered his call to go to war against the Mandalorians, and in doing so she became one of his most trusted advisers and closest friends. Bastila knew they had shared a special bond not unlike that of Padawan and Master. Worst of all, Meetra was an integral part of Revan’s lost past—a past he had felt compelled to go in search of, even though it meant leaving his pregnant wife behind.

There is no emotion, there is peace, she thought. The familiar words of the Jedi mantra were easy to recite, but much more difficult to follow.

“You said we needed to speak,” Bastila said.

“I wasn’t sure if we should come,” Meetra admitted. “I understand this might be difficult for you. But Tee-Three insisted.” She reached out and patted the little astromech accompanying her on the head.

The last time Bastila had seen T3-M4 he had been boarding the Ebon Hawk with Revan and Canderous. Her husband was still missing, but the droid had returned. Clearly he had latched on to Meetra, following at her heel as he had once followed Revan … one more small detail to feed Bastila’s irrational jealousy.

“As much as I tried, I couldn’t get him to tell me anything,” Meetra added.

Bastila smiled faintly. “I gave him special instructions the night before he left with Revan. I told Tee-Three if they ever became separated, he had to come find me. I programmed him so he wouldn’t tell anyone else what had happened until I heard it first.”

Meetra nodded. “A wise move. We’ve both experienced enough betrayal to understand you never know whom to trust.”

“I never imagined I’d be in hiding when he returned,” Bastila continued. “I’m sorry about that, Tee-Three. If I’d known you were back, I would have tried to contact you.”

The droid beeped in acceptance of her apology.

“Fortunately he found me,” Meetra said. “I guess he thought I was the next best thing, given my history with Revan.”

Bastila bit her lip to keep from saying anything. She knew her feelings of resentment were neither justified nor fair, but even her Jedi training couldn’t quell her emotions.

“Or maybe he just knew I’d need his help,” Meetra added quickly, perhaps aware she had in some way offended her host.

“The little guy does have a knack for joining up with galactic saviors,” Bastila remarked, trying to keep her voice neutral.

The droid beeped in agitation.

“I’m sorry,” Bastila said again. “You’re right. You’ve been very patient so far. I’m just not sure I’m ready to hear what you have to tell me.”

She’d often wondered if Revan was still alive. She’d always imagined their love would let her sense him through the Force, even across the breadth of an entire galaxy. Once he left, she learned that wasn’t true. Some nights she would dream of him, but she was never sure if these were true visions or merely manifestations of the loneliness she’d felt since he’d gone.

Still, she believed she would have sensed a disturbance in the Force if he had died. Clinging to that gave her hope. Now, however, her belief might be exposed as a mere illusion if T3 told her that Revan was dead. She wanted to hear the truth, of course, but she was determined to hang on to the fantasy for just a few seconds longer.

“Take your time,” Meetra said. “I know this is difficult. Tee-Three’s waited three years for this; he can wait a little while longer.”

Her words were meant as comfort, but they had the opposite effect. “Maybe this would be easier if Tee-Three and I spoke in private,” Bastila said.

It was clear the request had caught Meetra off guard, but she quickly regained her composure. “I understand you want to be cautious,” she said sympathetically, “but Canderous told me all about Revan and his search for the storm-covered world.”

Bastila grimaced. She’d heard rumors that a Mandalorian had aided the Exile in her battle against Darth Traya.

“Is it true?” Bastila asked. “Is Canderous the new Mandalore?”

Meetra nodded. “Revan helped him find Mandalore’s Mask before continuing on alone.”

“What else do you know that I don’t?” Bastila asked, trying to keep the bitterness out of her voice.

“I would never intentionally keep any knowledge of Revan from you,” Meetra assured her earnestly. “You are his wife; you have more right to the truth than anyone.”

Bastila swallowed hard, suddenly ashamed. “You have the same right,” she said. “You stood by Revan’s side at the beginning; he had no truer friend. Whatever Tee-Three has to say, we should hear it together.”

Meetra nodded her appreciation, but didn’t speak.

Taking a deep breath, Bastila sat down on the living room chair, facing her guests. She folded her hands in her lap, mentally bracing herself for what was to come.

“I’m ready,” she said.

In a series of beeps, chimes, and holorecordings T3 relayed his story. He began with Revan returning to the Ebon Hawk on Rekkiad. He told them how he and Revan had left Canderous behind and journeyed to Nathema alone. He described the unexpected attack on the Ebon Hawk and the near-fatal crash landing on Nathema’s surface.

He explained how he had checked on the unconscious Revan to make sure he was still alive, then been forced to hide when someone else boarded the ship.

When he played the holorecording he’d made of the red-skinned man who’d taken Revan off the ship, Bastila gasped.

“I guess the Sith aren’t as extinct as the Jedi thought,” Meetra said.

“The Order is wrong again,” Bastila muttered. “Big surprise.”

T3 let out a low whistle, apologizing for his cowardice, but Bastila shook her head.

“That wasn’t cowardice,” she told the little droid. “If you hadn’t hid, they’d have captured you, too. Or turned you into scrap.”

“The only way you could help Revan was by making it back in one piece,” Meetra added.

Mollified, T3 continued his story. He told them how Revan was taken onto a waiting shuttle and whisked away. With his master gone, returning to Bastila became the astromech’s primary purpose, as per her last-minute instructions before they’d left Coruscant.

The first step involved getting the Ebon Hawk airborne again. The droid described in detail his arduous efforts to repair the damage done by the crash. For months he scoured the streets of the deserted city, gathering scrap, salvage, and other necessary parts.

“And you never saw anyone during that time?” Meetra asked. “No refugees? No looters?”

T3 chirped out a confirmation.

Bastila blinked in surprise. “No animals? No insects? Not even any plants? How could the entire population of an entire world just be wiped out?”

Meetra shifted uncomfortably in her seat, and Bastila knew she was thinking back to her role in the massacre of Malachor V. She felt a sudden burst of empathy for the other woman. Bastila didn’t condone what she had done, but she understood what it was like to be ashamed of acts in your past. She herself had let Malak turn her to the dark side; only the power of Revan’s love had redeemed her.

Bastila sensed that despite all Meetra had done to stop Darth Traya, she was haunted by guilt and remorse. She was still looking for redemption.

Unaware of the awkward tension in the room, the droid continued his tale. After nearly a year he was finally able to get the Ebon Hawk airborne again, though its hyperdrive core was only operating at minimal efficiency. The Hawk limped back to Republic space; by the time it arrived, Traya and her followers had all but wiped out the Jedi. Bastila was gone; T3 didn’t know where to search for her, or whether she was even alive.

It was during this time that the little astromech droid stumbled across the disassembled pieces of HK-47, abandoned on a remote and nameless world. Recognizing his old companion, the little droid gathered up the pieces and stored them on the Ebon Hawk.

The chance encounter was the kind of coincidence that Bastila would have chalked up to the influence of the Force had T3 been an organic being.

“Do you have any idea how he got there?” she asked. “I always wondered what happened to him after he disappeared.”

Meetra shook her head, answering on behalf of the droid. “His memory core was damaged. Even after I repaired him, he was unable to recall anything. Actually,” she admitted, “I had hoped you might be able to tell me what had happened to him.”

Bastila shrugged. “When he found out Revan had left, HK decided to go after him. But I refused to tell him where my husband had gone.”

“A wise move,” Meetra said. “The last thing Revan needed while helping Canderous and the Mandalorians was a homicidal droid following him around.”

“HK stormed off, swearing he would track Revan down on his own,” Bastila continued. “That was the last I heard of him until he showed up again with you.”

“There must be some part of his programming that compels him to seek Revan out,” Meetra muttered. “If I had known that, I would have been more careful.”

“What do you mean?”

“I left HK under the supervision of the new Jedi Council. I didn’t think it was safe to have him roaming the galaxy, and I assumed he would be content to stay with the Jedi, awaiting further orders. But he disappeared soon after I left. Now I realize he’s probably gone in search of Revan again.”

Suddenly worried, Bastila asked, “Is there any chance he’ll find him?” She directed her question to T3. “Did you tell him anything about what happened to Revan?”

T3 responded with a negative buzz that sounded almost offended. Clearly the astromech felt the same reservations about involving the hunter-killer droid as his human counterparts.

Relieved, Bastila muttered, “Someone should try to track him down. Find and disable him before he hurts anyone else.”

There was little conviction behind her words; as dangerous as HK was, he was only one droid. She had more important things on her mind. Her husband was still missing, and for the first time in years, she was on the verge of being able to do something about it.

“The Jedi are already searching for HK,” Meetra assured her. “Don’t worry about him.”

Bastila nodded. “Tee-Three,” she said. “Tell us the rest of your story. What happened next?”

The astromech continued his tale.

After finding the disassembled bits of HK-47, he fell in with Meetra, joining her as he had joined Revan many years before. By the time he learned Bastila was alive, he was once again caught up in a battle for the Republic’s survival. Despite his instructions, he knew he couldn’t abandon Meetra until the safety of the Republic was secured.

His confession caused Bastila to feel another surge of bitterness. T3 had chosen to help Meetra instead of following Bastila’s instructions. He’d put the Exile’s mission above his loyalty to Revan.

The emotion passed quickly, replaced by guilt and shame. Bastila’s love for Revan had once again momentarily blinded her to logic and reason. Her husband was one man; it was foolish to value his life against the fate of millions. If Revan had been standing in the room, he would have congratulated the droid for putting the greater good above personal wants and desires.

“Revan would be proud of you,” she told the little droid. “I’m proud of you, too.”

“I think our path is clear,” Meetra declared. “I will go to Nathema and see if I can learn Revan’s fate.”

“You?” Bastila said, her voice showing more anger and surprise than she intended. “What about me? You expect me to just sit here and wait, not even knowing if he’s alive or dead?”

“What has changed since Revan left?” Meetra asked softly. “You stayed behind to care for your son. Are you prepared to leave him behind now?”

“Of course not!” Bastila spat. She almost added, I’ll bring him with me, but at the last second she realized how reckless and ridiculous that would be.

Revan had left because he believed there was something in the Unknown Regions that was a far greater threat than any the Republic had ever faced. Guided by his visions of a storm-covered world, he thought his journey was the only way to protect the future of his family. Following in his footsteps might expose their son to the very threat Revan was trying to stop; it would be a betrayal of the very principles that had sent him on his journey in the first place, and it would endanger their child.

“I’m sorry,” Bastila whispered. “I didn’t mean to … I just … I miss him. I feel so helpless. So useless. All I do is wait. You don’t understand how hard it’s been.”

“I can only imagine how you’ve suffered,” Meetra replied gently. “I wish I could say it will get easier. But I fear that may not be the case. We all have burdens to bear, and this is yours.”

Her words offered little comfort, but Bastila appreciated her honesty.

“I will do everything in my power to find Revan,” Meetra promised. “If he is still alive, I will do whatever it takes to bring him back to you.”

T3 beeped twice.

“I would be honored if you came,” Meetra told him, “as long as Bastila doesn’t object.”

Bastila wanted T3 to stay with her; his holorecordings and data banks were all she had left of her husband. But she was thinking rationally now.

“You’re going to need his help,” she said. “He spent months exploring Nathema while searching for parts to repair the Hawk.”

“Then we must leave as soon as possible,” Meetra declared, rising to her feet.

“Please, wait just a moment longer,” Bastila said.

Leaving Meetra and T3 to in the living room, she rushed into the bedchamber and opened the wooden chest tucked away in the back of her closet. She grabbed two items, then returned to her waiting guests.

“Give these to Revan,” she said, placing the items in Meetra’s hands.

The first was a holorecording she had made of their son’s last birthday celebration. The second was a heavy object wrapped in a swath of black cloth.

Meetra glanced at her, silently asking permission to unwrap it. Bastila answered with a subtle nod. Meetra unwound the cloth carefully, revealing a worn and scarred metal helmet with a red-and-gray faceplate.

“Revan’s mask!” Meetra gasped. “I thought it was lost when he was captured by the Jedi strike team.”

“I led that strike team,” Bastila reminded her. “I don’t know why, but I took it when Revan fell. Perhaps even then I sensed our fates were intertwined. I never told anyone. Not the Council. Not even him.”

“Why not?”

Bastila hesitated, then decided Meetra deserved to know the truth. “Revan wore the mask during the Mandalorian Wars, and during his time as Darth Revan. To me, it symbolizes his dark past—a relic from a time before he became the man I loved. I was afraid that if I showed it to him, it might trigger something inside his mind. It might awaken some dormant evil, rekindle the spark of the dark side.”

“Then why give it to me now?”

“I tried to keep Revan’s past at bay, but now I understand that was wrong. I was being selfish. His past is a part of him, whether I like it or not.” She looked away from the mask. “When you find him, give him the mask. It might mean nothing to him now, but there’s a chance it will bring back some of what he has lost. Seeing it might restore crucial memories that will help you return safely.”

“What if your fears are right?” Meetra asked, her voice grim. “The mask could bring back his memories. But what if it does more? What if it unleashes the power of the dark side in him?”

“I don’t care,” Bastila said defiantly. “Not if that power helps bring him back to me.”

As a Jedi, her words were blasphemy. She half expected Meetra to throw the mask to the ground in disgust. Instead the other woman rewrapped it in the cloth and tucked it safely away beneath her robes without saying a word.

CHAPTER 18

MEETRA DIDN’T KNOW what to expect as the Ebon Hawk dropped out of hyperspace and began the approach toward Nathema. T3-M4 had told her that the planet was deserted, but the little droid had found no apparent cause of the mass extinction. While exploring the surface on his last visit, he’d run tests that confirmed the environment was free of toxins and radiation; beyond that everything else was speculation.

As the ship drew closer to the dingy brown world she felt a growing sense of unease and discomfort. In some ways it reminded her of Malachor V—the massive and instantaneous loss of life on that doomed world had created a wound in the Force. The activation of the mass-shadow generator had obliterated two armies, shredding apart the bonds of the Force that linked all living things.

Meetra had been close enough to feel the shock wave; to survive it she had cut herself off from the Force, shielding her psyche against the horrors of what she had unleashed. Many years had passed before she regained her connection to the Force, but in the end, surviving the trauma of Malachor V had given her the strength to defeat Darth Traya and her followers.

At first she assumed some similar tragedy had occurred on Nathema; a superweapon capable of snuffing out an entire planet would leave a blanketing echo of death and darkness. As the Ebon Hawk descended through the atmosphere, however, she realized this sensation was markedly different.

It took her a few seconds to put her finger on it, her mind analyzing the problem even as her hands automatically made the necessary adjustments to bring the ship in for a landing near the coordinates T3 had given her.

The events of Malachor had left a mark on the Force; a wound that would not heal. Here, however, the Force was simply … gone. It was as if someone had ripped it away, leaving only an empty void behind.

Her discomfort grew as the ship drew closer to the surface. This world was unnatural, and her body’s instinctive reaction was one of illness and revulsion. She glanced over at T3 hovering anxiously near her in the cockpit, but the droid seemed unaffected. His lack of reaction merely reinforced the nature of her own suffering; as a droid, T3 could not sense the Force, and he wouldn’t notice if it was suddenly missing.

Through the cockpit window Meetra saw a path of destruction winding its way through the city below: the remnants of Revan’s crash landing. A massive chunk of permacrete had been smashed loose from a skyscraper passing by on the ship’s starboard side. The pavement of the street and sidewalk below had been torn up when the vessel had skipped and skidded down the thoroughfare. The mangled remnants of hovercars and speeders traced an irregular line down the street, the smaller vehicles crushed by the passage of the far more massive starship.

Meetra selected her landing spot and set the ship down carefully. The oppressiveness of the Void was bearing down on her, but she did her best to ignore it.

“Come on, Tee-Three,” she said, unbuckling herself from the pilot’s chair. “Let’s take a look around and see what we can find.”

As she stepped off the shuttle she felt like she had been punched in the gut; she doubled over, and T3 beeped in concern.

“I’m okay,” she gasped, slowly straightening up.

She had visited Malachor V years after the cataclysm of the mass-shadow generator. Traversing its surface had been agony. Mentally, she had still sensed the anguish of all who had lost their lives there. Physically, the intense gravity of the world had held her in its crushing grip, leaving her gasping for breath. It had been the most awful and horrific experience of her life … until now.

On Malachor she’d felt the echoes of unimaginable pain and suffering—but at least she’d felt something. Here on Nathema, there was only a cold emptiness. It was unnatural; abhorrent. On Malachor she had felt the echo of great destruction; here there was only the unbearable void of annihilation.

Her body reacted with a revulsion so strong she felt physically ill. Her mind briefly tried to imagine what had happened to cause such an abomination, then recoiled from the answers. Her mind went blank and her body numb.

She stood motionless for several minutes, or maybe it was several hours; time had no meaning here. But the incessant squawking of T3 eventually roused her from her stupor.

Drawing on the mental focusing techniques she had learned as a Padawan, she forced herself to concentrate on something—anything—besides the inescapable nonpresence of the Force.

You’ve come here to find Revan, she thought. There has to be some clue as to where the Sith might have taken him.

“We need to find some kind of archive,” she said out loud. “Something that can tell us more about this world.”

Her voice sounded hollow and washed out, but it was just one more unsettling detail of Nathema that she refused to dwell on.

The lights on T3 blinked rapidly as the astromech quickly scanned his memory circuits. A few seconds later he beeped excitedly and took off down the street.

Meetra followed him, her long legs allowing her to quickly catch up to and keep pace with the droid. The brisk walk made her feel more normal; physical activity seemed to help keep Nathema’s oppressive emptiness at bay.

The droid led her to the entrance of what appeared to be some kind of official government building. On the outside were characters she couldn’t read. In the Republic all government business was conducted in Basic. And while it was likely the inhabitants of Nathema had been familiar with Basic—the lingua franca of interstellar trade was known to virtually every spacefaring species in the galaxy—they had obviously marked their building in a native tongue.

The building was three stories high, with only a handful of windows looking out to the street and a pair of uninviting doors that seemed to be the common fashion of bureaucratic strongholds across every culture of the galaxy.

The doors were locked, but she carved through the security bolt with her lightsaber, trying to ignore the dim and washed-out appearance of the glowing blade.

Focus on the task at hand, she reminded herself. Just find the information you’re looking for as quickly as possible and you can get off this blasted world.

She stepped through, T3 following at her heel. It was dark inside; whatever source had once powered the building had long since fallen into disrepair. Meetra pulled a glow rod from one of the many pockets sewn into the wide fabric belt on her waist and ignited it, illuminating their surroundings with its eerie green glow.

The first things she noticed were the piles of clothes scattered haphazardly about. She realized they must have fallen to the ground when the wearers vanished. It took all her mental discipline to keep her mind from speculating on what kind of event could have caused the bizarre phenomenon.

Exploring the ground floor revealed it to be some type of reception area or lobby. There was a large desk set up to face the door, perfectly positioned for the person behind it to greet visitors. Apart from several uncomfortable-looking chairs arranged in what was probably a central waiting room, there didn’t seem to be much else of interest on the lower level.

There was a lift in the corner leading to the upper floors, but with no power it was of little use. Fortunately, a quick search located a staircase behind an unmarked door near the back of the building.

“Let’s check out the upper floors,” she said, and T3 beeped in agreement.

For some astromech droids stairs could be a problem, but T3 was remarkably versatile. By locking his wheels to keep from rolling backward, he was able to use his front legs to lever himself up the steps one at a time. It took him a little longer to reach the top of the flight than his human companion, but at least Meetra didn’t have to try to carry him.

The second floor was filled with data terminals and cubicles—workstations for the government drones who had once wandered the offices and halls. Unfortunately, without power the computer network had ceased to function, rendering the terminals useless.

“Let’s see if we can find the main data bank on the next floor up,” Meetra suggested.

A few minutes later they were on the third floor. Like the level below, it seemed to consist primarily of offices, cubicles, and workstations. Near the back of the building they found a single durasteel door. On the wall beside it was what appeared to be a security keypad.

“Show me what you’ve got,” Meetra said, pointing to the pad.

T3 rolled up to the wall. A panel on his body slid open to reveal a long, thin electrical probe, which he extended so that it pierced the security pad. There was a brief pause, then the unmistakable zap of a powerful electrical discharge. The keypad lit up and the door slid open.

As Meetra had hoped, the room beyond housed the primary computer data banks.

“Grab anything that looks useful so we can get out of here,” she said.

T3 hustled to oblige, inserting his versatile probe into an interface port so he could slice into the defunct network. As he had done with the door panel, T3 gave the data bank a powerful electric jolt to temporarily reactivate it so he could download the relevant files.

The entire process took less than five minutes, but for Meetra it might as well have been an eternity. She had managed to keep busy up until this point, but while waiting idly by for T3 to finish she began to notice the absence of the Force once more.

She could feel the Void pressing in on her from all sides. At the same time it was pulling on her, trying to rip away the very essence of her existence. Nature abhors a vacuum; the emptiness was trying to fill itself with her energy. For an instant she felt as if she were going to become undone, her physical body discorporating into trillions of subatomic particles that would scatter across the entire surface of Nathema.

No! she screamed in her mind. The Void will not take me! I am more than just a collection of random matter and particles! I am a living being. I am Meetra Surik!

The affirmation of her own existence seemed to push the Void back, at least for the moment. But Meetra knew she couldn’t hold out against it much longer. As much as she tried to ignore what she felt—or, more precisely, didn’t feel—all around her, she knew it was only a matter of time until the horrors of Nathema stripped away her sanity.

She was just about to tell T3 it was time to go when he beeped triumphantly and retracted the probe.

“I need to get back to the ship,” she told him. “You can tell me what you found when we’re off this world.”

Once she was in motion she felt better, but she could still sense the Void hovering on the fringes of her awareness. It was like being stalked by some nameless, faceless, invisible creature. She felt it lurking around every corner, just waiting for her to let her guard down so it could take her.

She quickened her pace, trusting her droid companion to keep up, too intent on keeping a grip on herself to reply to his indignant chirps.

By the time she reached the Ebon Hawk she was running, though she wasn’t even aware of it. One single thought dominated her conscious mind: Escape!

She strapped herself into the pilot’s chair and fired up the engines just as T3, who had fallen behind, came racing up the boarding ramp.

“Hold on,” she warned as she closed the hatch and punched the engines.

The Ebon Hawk took flight, hurtling itself up toward the sky and beyond. They broke atmosphere, but Meetra didn’t slow the ship down. She kept the engines on full until they were on the very edge of the solar system. Only then, with several million kilometers between her and Nathema, did she feel safe enough to throttle back.

T3 rolled up beside her and let out a worried whistle.

“You wouldn’t understand,” she told him. “But I’m okay now. Just give me a few minutes and we’ll take a look at what you pulled from those data banks.”

IT TOOK LONGER than Meetra expected for T3 to decipher and translate the files from Nathema into something she could scan with the ship’s computer. It was nearly two days before she could begin looking through the files. However, she reminded herself, considering he was processing millions of terabytes of data originally compiled on computers using fundamentally alien technology, the fact that he accomplished anything at all was a small miracle.

During her initial investigations several things quickly became clear. The building they had raided had been some type of archival storage office, a mundane but vital component of any complex government. It contained government documents, historical accounts and transcripts, and, most promising of all, detailed census records collected from numerous worlds.

From the census data it became clear that Nathema had once been part of the Sith Empire. Oddly, all the records seemed to predate the Great Hyperspace War. Whatever event had stripped Nathema of all life and left it devoid of the Force must have happened almost a thousand years before.

Because of that, it was impossible to tell if the Sith Empire as described in the records still existed. But given T3’s holorecording of the red-skinned being taking Revan, Meetra was willing to bet it still survived in some form.

Revan had left Bastila behind because he feared the greatest threat to the Republic’s survival was lurking in the Unknown Regions. The reemergence of the Sith Empire certainly qualified.

The theory also fit with what Canderous had told her. The Mandalorian had claimed that Revan asked him to restore the glory and strength of his people so they could stand against the Sith should they ever try to invade the Republic again.

According to the census records, the Sith Empire comprised several dozen planets. The Sith who had taken Revan might have come from any one of those worlds; if she could figure out which was his home, she might be able to narrow her search.

However, as she cross-checked the names and galactic coordinates of the listed worlds, Meetra quickly realized that they were all planets already known to the Republic. Over the last thousand years, the Jedi had systematically purged every planet mentioned in the census of their Sith influence: these were the records of a Sith Empire that was no more.

Refusing to give up, she dug deeper into the datafiles they had gathered, examining records pertaining to Nathema itself. For several days she pored through the archives, stopping neither to eat nor to sleep. Every few hours she refreshed herself with a quick meditation break, drawing on the Force to replenish her fading stores of energy and mental focus so she could continue her work.

There were tens of thousands of government documents and reports collected from over fifty different agencies, but Meetra refused to be daunted by the monumental task. She continued to pore through the archives, and slowly a picture began to emerge.

The people of Nathema had spent their last days in a terrified and desperate state. They had known it was only a matter of time until the Jedi found them, and the ruler of Nathema—a Sith named Lord Vitiate—had preyed upon his people’s fear. Transcripts of Vitiate’s public speeches were filled with graphic warnings of what the Jedi would do once they arrived. Records confirmed that his speeches had been broadcast and transmitted across the whole of the Empire, sowing the seeds of terror among all the Sith worlds. Vitiate had consciously and carefully driven the people into a state of panic, knowing they would blindly follow anyone who offered hope.

Vitiate was quick to fulfill that role, and he put out a call for all the other surviving Dark Lords to join him on Nathema in a ritual that he promised would lead the Sith to salvation.

At the same time he was doing this, Vitiate also had top historians and scientists secretly trying to determine the location of a planet called Dromund Kaas—the long-lost homeworld of the original Sith species.

Meetra discovered this only because of T3’s exceptional slicing skills. The astromech had not only copied and translated all the data from the archives, but also decrypted the pass codes to unlock classified government files, which he had then marked as having top priority to help simplify Meetra’s investigations.

The team Vitiate assigned to search out Dromund Kaas had operated in total secrecy, sequestered day and night in a research lab as they studied the ancient star maps and astrogation charts. Fortunately the leader of the team had been a meticulous record keeper, and every step of the process had been carefully documented—including the moment of triumph when they were finally able to theorize a hyperspace route that would lead them safely back to Dromund Kaas, where the Jedi could never follow.

The final entry in the team leader’s project log detailed her efforts to prepare her findings so they could be presented to Vitiate in person. Lord Vitiate publicly proclaimed the commencement of his great ritual just three days later.

Chronologically, there were no records after the proclamation. Nothing from the research team; nothing from any of the other departments. It was as if every member of Nathema’s sprawling government had simultaneously vanished from existence. Even without any official account of what had happened next, however, it wasn’t hard for Meetra to put the missing pieces together.

The ritual had obviously destroyed Nathema, snuffing out all life on the world. Lord Vitiate had offered his people hope, and instead had brought them a fate worse than death—utter eradication of life, existence, and even the Force.

Meetra was no expert on dark side sorcery, but it was safe to assume Vitiate not only survived the ritual, but emerged more powerful than ever. And with the destruction of everyone on Nathema—including his research team—he alone would have known the location of Dromund Kaas.

The plan was both horrifying and brilliant. In addition to becoming more powerful than Meetra could imagine, Vitiate could blame the extinction of his homeworld on the Jedi, further panicking the remaining Sith worlds. Then he could have offered them a glimmer of hope, promising to lead all those who swore loyalty to him to a place where the Jedi would never find them.

If Vitiate had been as cunning as Meetra imagined him to be, he wouldn’t have led his followers directly to Dromund Kaas. Instead, he would have taken them on a long and trying exodus—during which the Sith would have been forced to turn to him time and again for support and guidance, their dependence on him growing until he went from leader to hero to savior. By the time they finally reached Dromund Kaas, they would likely have worshiped Vitiate as a god—all-powerful and all-knowing.

Fascinating history, to be sure, but Meetra didn’t know how it could help her find Revan. Vitiate’s grand plan had taken place over a thousand years earlier. Surely Vitiate himself was long dead, and even if he had led the Sith to Dromund Kaas, there was no guarantee they were still there.

There were other possibilities to consider, as well. The Sith were an aggressive and war-like species; it was possible that Dromund Kaas was just one of many worlds in the Unknown Regions that had fallen under their control over the last thousand years. It was possible—and even likely—that the red-skinned being who had captured Revan had taken him to an entirely different planet, one she had never even heard of. But at least she had a lead. And no matter how slim the odds of finding her mentor, Meetra wasn’t about to give up. She trusted in the Force; eventually it would lead her to him.

From the census records, it was clear that humans were—or had been—part of the Sith Empire. If Vitiate’s followers had settled on Dromund Kaas, she should be able to pass among them by posing as a mercenary, a role she knew well from the years she had spent living as the Exile in the Outer Rim.

As she punched the hyperspace coordinates from the research team leader’s logbook into the nav computer, T3 came over and chirped inquisitively.

“We’re going to a world called Dromund Kaas,” Meetra said as the Ebon Hawk made the jump to lightspeed. “If Revan’s there, we’ll find him.”

CHAPTER 19

SCOURGE TYPED IN the access code to unlock the door leading to the underground holding cells built beneath Nyriss’s stronghold. He didn’t acknowledge the guards standing watch as he stepped through, and they made no move to stop him. He had passed the checkpoint hundreds of times, and they had stopped bothering with Murtog’s official security protocols long ago.

He descended the stairs to the dimly lit, dead-end hall at the bottom. There were four doors, two on either side. Beside each door was a monitor, showing a holovid of what was happening inside each cell. Three of the cells were empty; the fourth had been occupied by the same prisoner for the past three years.

The image showed Revan seated in a familiar position, his legs crossed and his hands resting palms-up on his thighs. His eyes were closed, his face calm … though Scourge knew that had as much to do with the medication as the meditation.

The prisoner had not left his cell for even a single moment since his capture. There was a refresher in the corner, a small sink and a bed against one wall. In the beginning they had brought in a chair to strap him to for his interrogation sessions, but after the first few months Scourge convinced Nyriss that torturing Revan was an unproductive waste of both time and resources.

By that time Revan had already told them everything—as much as he could remember, at least. He had revealed that the Jedi had wiped away most of his early memories, including all traces of what had happened to him in the Emperor’s dungeons. He had confessed that he had come to Nathema in the hopes of reclaiming his lost past, following the same trail he had embarked on years before.

He couldn’t tell Nyriss anything about what she really asked. And though she still suspected he had been dominated by and then broken free of the Emperor’s will, the scientists she had brought in to study him had been unable to find anything useful with all their testing and research.

After six months Nyriss had lost interest in her Jedi prisoner. Her attention moved on to other plots and intrigues, though she kept him alive just in case. But while Nyriss ignored Revan, Scourge had become obsessed with him.

The Jedi’s command of and connection to the Force was unlike anything Scourge had sensed in anyone else. Even though Revan was constantly drugged, it was impossible not to sense his strength. After years of studying him, Scourge had come to understand why the Jedi had such a fearsome reputation among the Sith. With men and women like Revan in their ranks, it was easy to see how they had beaten back the Sith invasion a thousand years earlier. And it confirmed what he already suspected: the Emperor’s plan to launch another invasion against the Republic at this point in time was tantamount to suicide.

However, it was more than the Jedi’s raw power that interested Scourge. Unlike all the instructors at the Academy, or even Nyriss herself, Revan had experienced both the light and dark sides of the Force. He had a unique perspective on its strengths and weaknesses, and Scourge was eager to learn from his experience.

It hadn’t been easy, of course. Revan had regarded him as an enemy at first: Scourge was the being who tortured him for information. But over time that had slowly changed. Revan was held in almost total seclusion. The guards were forbidden to speak with him, and once Nyriss all but forgot about him, the weekly visits from Scourge were his only source of conversation or contact.

Scourge understood that long periods of solitary confinement could be even harder to endure than the brutal physical suffering of the interrogations. Loneliness and isolation would eat away at the mind and the spirit; it was inevitable that Revan would forge a relationship with the only person he ever had any contact with.

It was a slow and subtle process, and even now they still regarded each other with suspicion and mistrust. But eventually the instinctive need for interaction had caused Revan to open up. He would give carefully guarded answers to Scourge’s questions about his beliefs and philosophies, or let slip bits and pieces of his knowledge of the Force.

No matter how long they spoke, Revan was careful to say very little, but over the years the tiny drops of wisdom had accumulated into a great reservoir for Scourge to draw on. Nyriss may have had no further use for Revan, but Scourge was going to exploit this invaluable resource for all it was worth.

Scourge unlocked the door to Revan’s cell. The Jedi was still wearing the same brown robes he had been captured in; the clothes—like the prisoner himself—had not been properly cleaned in three years. Scourge winced at the stale, pungent scent wafting off the human, but it was a small price to pay, considering how much he had already gained from their regular visits.

“Revan,” he said, noting that the prisoner’s eyes were still closed. “I wish to speak with you.”

REVAN OPENED HIS EYES as if responding to the Sith’s voice, though in truth he had sensed his approach from the moment he began to descend the staircase. It was difficult to draw upon the Force through the veil of mind-altering chemicals in his system, but over the years he had learned a handful of tricks.

Though they had spoken hundreds of times, the Sith had never told Revan his name. Not that it mattered. To Revan he was nothing more than a tool—his one hope of ever getting out of the cell alive.

In the first few months he had hoped that someone would come for him: Canderous, or T3-M4, or maybe even Bastila, drawn to him by the Force. But as time passed, his drug-addled brain finally realized he was truly alone.

He had tried reaching out to Bastila with the Force, but the drugs and the vast distance of an entire galaxy must have stopped her from sensing his need. He had almost given up once he realized there would be no rescue; his situation seemed hopeless. And then his muddled mind seized on the Sith interrogator.

It was clear the red-skinned being was subservient to the withered hag who had been present during the early interrogations. It was also obvious that he was more than just a thug hired to torture information out of prisoners. Revan had sensed the Force in him; he had incredible potential. Fortunately for Revan, he was also arrogant, overconfident, and ambitious.

Over the course of many months, Revan fed that ambition with tiny crumbs meant to draw the Sith Lord in. He spoke of his past, knowing his triumphs over Malak and other powerful individuals would feed the young Sith’s desire to rise above his current station.

Revan also made a point of bringing up the Force regularly. He had once served the dark side, and he understood its insatiable lust for power. The chance to learn something—anything—new about the Force was a temptation the Sith could not resist.

He was willing to give the Sith glimpses of his wisdom because with each conversation he learned a little bit more about his captors. The interrogator was careful; he tried to reveal as little of himself and the world outside the cell as possible. But over many months and hundreds of conversations it was inevitable some things would slip.

To facilitate the process, Revan had carefully forged a relationship with the anonymous Sith, establishing a familiar rapport that made it easier for the Sith to unknowingly open up about himself even as he thought he was using Revan.

His efforts had been well rewarded. Over the past three years he had learned much about the Sith society the Republic believed to be extinct. He knew they were ruled by an Emperor; he knew they controlled hundreds of worlds.

About a year earlier, he had learned the name of the female who had overseen the first few interrogations. Her name was Nyriss, and she was one of the Emperor’s handpicked advisers.

At one point his captor had let slip that the Emperor was secretly planning an invasion against the Republic. More important, he had revealed that he and Nyriss—along with many other Sith—were determined to stop him.

Revan had seized on that shared goal, and for the past few months he had been playing on it at every opportunity.

It all might be futile. All his efforts might amount to nothing more than a game he was playing merely to help pass the endless hours of his incarceration. But if there was a chance, however small, that he could somehow use this knowledge to break free of his prison, he intended to take it.

THE JEDI HAD OPENED his eyes, but he still seemed to be lost in thought. Scourge wondered if they had altered his medication recently. Every few months they had to switch him to a new formula as his body became more resistant to the daily dose of drugs meant to keep him docile and helpless. For the first few days after each switch, Revan seemed even more out of it than usual.

“Revan,” he repeated, speaking more loudly. He clapped his hands sharply, the sound echoing off the walls of the cell.

“I’m sorry, my lord,” Revan said in response, slurring his words slightly. “I’m having trouble … focusing. It’s good to see you again,” he added with a faint smile. “I always enjoy your visits.”

Scourge would never admit it to anyone, of course, but he also enjoyed them. He had developed a great respect and even admiration for Revan; ironic, given how much his opinion of Nyriss had gone down in the last few months.

“You seem troubled, my lord.”

“Nyriss still refuses to take any real action against the Emperor,” he grumbled.

It felt good to say the words out loud. That was an unexpected benefit of being the only person who ever spoke to the prisoner. Anything he said in the cell would never leave these walls; here he could vent his frustrations aloud without fear of reprisal.

“She tells me we must be patient, but her energies and resources are focused on besting her rivals on the Dark Council.”

“Nyriss is driven by fear,” Revan explained, speaking in the slow, monotonous cadence Scourge had never really gotten used to. “Openly striking against the Emperor puts her life at risk. Her own immediate survival is more important to her than the fate of your Empire.”

“There are powerful allies who could be persuaded to help her,” Scourge replied. “All they need is someone to step up and take charge. All they need is a leader to spur them to action.”

“I was betrayed by Malak,” Revan reminded him. “Nyriss is afraid the same thing could happen to her. If she steps forward as leader, she can no longer hide in the shadows with the others. She will be exposed, and it would only take one ambitious rival to betray her to the Emperor and bring everything crashing down.”

Scourge nodded, remembering how Nyriss had done the same thing to eliminate Darth Xedrix. At the time he had believed her when she said it was for the good of the cause, but now he suspected it had just been an excuse to remove a rival from the Dark Council.

“If all the conspirators are too afraid to step forward, the Emperor will never be stopped,” Scourge muttered. “Eventually he will lead us into a war we cannot win, and the Jedi will wipe us out in retaliation. Ultimately doing nothing is the most dangerous choice of all.”

“Nyriss blinds herself to that truth. That is the way of the dark side,” Revan said. “Those who follow it are driven by fear and ambition. They are too selfish to see that great victories often require sacrifice.”

Scourge grimaced. Sometimes he grew tired of Revan’s preaching against the dark side. In this case, however, the Jedi was at least partially correct. Nyriss wouldn’t think twice about sacrificing an ally or a follower, but she would never consider sacrificing herself.

Revan, on the other hand, had journeyed across the galaxy in the face of unknown dangers because he thought there might be something that threatened his beloved Republic. He had put himself in harm’s way for something he believed in.

A year earlier Scourge would have laughed at his foolishness; after all, what had Revan accomplished besides becoming a prisoner? Now, however, he understood that though the Jedi had failed, at least he had made the effort. At least he’d had a chance to succeed. Nyriss, it seemed, wasn’t even going to make the attempt. She had failed to stop the Emperor before she had even begun.

“You need to find another ally to your cause,” Revan said. “Someone powerful, but who is not caught up in the politics of the Dark Council.”

Scourge laughed out loud at what Revan was clearly implying.

“You must be growing desperate if you think you can talk me into helping you escape.”

MENTALLY, REVAN WINCED. He had pushed too far too fast. Instead of subtle manipulation, he had stumbled into revealing a clumsy and obvious ploy. He never would have made such a foolish mistake if his mind was clear.

But he thought it might still be possible to salvage the situation. He had to give the Sith something else to focus on, something he cared about above everything else.

“We share a common goal,” Revan admitted. “We both want to stop the Emperor from invading the Republic. But I am not proposing an alliance.” He paused. “I do not need your help to escape. The Force has shown me that my freedom is drawing near.”

“The Force has shown you? What do you mean? Have you had a vision?”

As Revan suspected, his jailer had never experienced a vision through the Force. It wasn’t unusual: the phenomenon was much rarer in those who followed the dark side. Their focus was internal—they used the Force as a tool, rather than seeing themselves as instruments of the Force’s will. They were not accustomed to opening themselves up to the Force for guidance and direction.

“The Force has shown me that my future lies beyond these walls,” Revan lied.

“I don’t put much faith in visions and prophecy,” the Sith said.

“Have you ever felt a premonition of danger through the Force?” Revan asked, trying to help him understand. “Sensed a threat before it was revealed?”

“Of course.”

“The visions are merely an extrapolation of this. The Force flows across both space and time; it links the past, present, and future.”

“It is said that Naga Sadow had visions of the Sith crushing the Republic during the Great Hyperspace War,” Scourge countered. “We both know that never came to pass.”

“The future is always in motion. The Force grants us visions that show us only one of many possible outcomes.”

“Then what use are they?”

“They can guide our actions, give us direction. They can show us a path we wish to follow, or one we can try to avoid.”

“Like the vision that brought you here,” Scourge asked. “The dream of Dromund Kaas and its storm-covered sky?”

“That was a memory, not a vision,” Revan reminded him. “But the Force does sometimes speak to us through our dreams.”

“And what does your vision show you? How do you make your great escape from this dungeon?”

Revan chose his next words carefully, his dulled wits sensing an opportunity. He knew his best chance—perhaps his only chance—of escape was with the Sith’s help. But he could not be the one to suggest the alliance; the Sith Lord had to think it was his idea.

That was why he had fabricated the lie about the vision: to draw attention away from his clumsy efforts to convince the Sith to help him. Now, however, he had an opportunity to plant a seed.

“You will understand in time,” he said cryptically, knowing the other would dwell on the hidden meaning behind his words.

The Sith was already obsessed with him. He hungered to tap into Revan’s understanding of the Force, and the Jedi knew he dominated the red-skinned being’s conscious and unconscious thoughts. It would only be natural for Revan to sometimes be the subject of the Sith Lord’s dreams.

Hopefully, the Sith would come to believe that his ordinary dreams were actually visions granted by the Force. If all went well, he would come to believe there was a greater power trying to draw them together. He might decide of his own accord that Revan was the key to defeating the Emperor, spurring him to help the Jedi escape.

It was a long shot, but Revan had nothing else to hope for.

“I have no wish to play your games,” the Sith snapped, annoyed by the enigmatic response. He turned on the heel of his boot without saying a word and marched out of the cell, sealing the door behind him. Revan knew from experience it would be at least a week before he returned. The abrupt ending to their conversation and the impending prolonged absence were intended as punishment; his interrogator had long ago replaced physical torture with the supposed mental anguish of isolation.

For most prisoners this would have been an effective tool, but Revan was able to endure the long periods alone by meditating on the Force. At times like these he would try to reach out to Bastila, hoping at least to let her know he was still alive.

He opened himself up to the Force. As it flowed through him, images of the woman he loved danced through his head. And then suddenly they were gone, replaced by the amorphous face of another.

“Meetra,” Revan gasped as the features shifted sharply into focus. They held for an instant, and then vanished.

Revan knew this was more than some mere recollection of a lost friend. It had been too intense and powerful to be a memory. It was almost as if in describing the nature of Force visions to the Sith, he had triggered one of his own.

Though it had lasted only a second, the meaning was abundantly clear. Meetra was coming to rescue him.

CHAPTER 20

MEETRA FOUGHT TO KEEP the Ebon Hawk steady on its descent through the fierce storms raging in the skies above Kaas City spaceport.

She knew the storm-ravaged world had to be the world Canderous had spoken of; the one Revan had seen in his dreams. The dark side was powerful here. It was strong enough to send a shiver down her spine, but the sensation was infinitely better than the awful nothingness of Nathema.

As she brought the ship in to land, she knew with a sudden and unshakable certainty that Revan was somewhere on this world.

“He’s here, Tee-Three,” she informed her companion, trying to contain her excitement. “I can feel it.”

The droid beeped eagerly.

“It won’t be that easy,” she replied. “I’ll need to scout around a bit, get a feel for this world.”

The droid whistled apprehensively.

“Just stay close and follow my lead,” she told him. “We’ll be fine.”

A few minutes later she had successfully settled the Hawk on one of the spaceport’s many landing pads.

“Nobody here knows I’m a Jedi,” she reminded her astromech companion just before they descended the boarding ramp. “Let’s try to keep it that way.”

Her lightsaber was tucked safely out of sight, and she had changed from her brown robes into black pants and a sleeveless red top. It was unlikely anyone here would recognize the traditional outfit of the Jedi Order, but she wasn’t taking any chances.

A customs official was waiting for them outside the ship—a middle-aged human female. The fact that humans could hold official government positions was a good sign: they were obviously common enough on Dromund Kaas that she wouldn’t automatically draw attention here because of her species.

“Your vessel is unregistered,” the woman told her in Basic, her voice simultaneously accusing and bored. “You’ll have to come with me.”

Meetra wasn’t surprised to be greeted in the familiar language. The Sith had once been an Empire controlling multiple worlds, cultures, and societies; naturally they would fall back on a common language, and Basic was by far the simplest and most widespread choice.

“I like to keep my comings and goings off the record,” she replied.

“That can be arranged,” the woman said with a quick glance to make sure there was nobody within earshot. “Naturally we charge a fee for that kind of premium service.”

Meetra had no idea what kind of currency was used on Dromund Kaas, but she highly doubted they’d take Republic credits. “I converted my funds into something a little easier to carry,” she explained, holding up a small but perfectly cut diamond.

The customs official’s eyes lit up as she stared at the valuable gemstone.

“If you keep my arrival off the record I’ll make sure you’re rewarded once I turn these into something a little easier to spend,” Meetra promised.

The woman’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “I have a strict payment-up-front policy,” she said.

“Maybe you could make an exception this one time, seeing as how we’re both human,” Meetra suggested, reaching out with the Force to give the woman’s psyche a gentle nudge.

“I guess I could make an exception this one time,” the woman said with an affable shrug. “Seeing as how we’re both human.”

“I knew we could work something out,” Meetra replied with a smile. “Now, I don’t suppose you’d know the name of someone in the city who’d give me a fair price for my stones?”

“Larvit’s your best bet,” the other woman told her. “He drives a hard bargain, but he won’t try to cheat you. Let me give you the directions.”

Meetra decided to walk to Larvit’s store, rather than hire a speeder. Wandering the streets of Kaas City on foot would give her a better feel for the planet and its people, making it easier to fit in.

The population seemed to be primarily made up of the red-skinned Sith and humans, all dressed in standardized uniforms or military garb. She noticed a handful of Zabrak and Twi’leks; unlike the Sith and humans they did not wear uniforms, and without exception they were all fitted with shock collars. With a start Meetra realized that the unfortunate slaves were likely descended from prisoners who’d been taken by the Sith a thousand years earlier during the Great Hyperspace War.

The directions the customs official had given her were simple, and she found her destination without any trouble. From the outside, Larvit’s shop didn’t look like the kind of place one would chose to conduct illegal business. It was situated in the middle of the street, and its window boasted the same official government seal she had noticed on virtually every building she’d passed along the way.

She stepped into Larvit’s store and made a quick evaluation of her surroundings. It looked like a cross between a pawnshop and a supply post. The tall, gray-haired man behind the counter was wearing a red shirt and black pants, both freshly pressed. On his left shoulder were several bars that probably represented some kind of military rank, and the left breast pocket was emblazoned with the same symbol that adorned his window.

Meetra had expected to find herself in a shady black-market operation, but clearly she was in some kind of official government-controlled business. Still, she had nowhere else to go, so she marched straight up to the gray-haired man and dumped a handful of gems on the counter.

“Please present your Imperial identification card—” he started to say, but the routine greeting died in his mouth when he saw the small fortune scattered across his countertop.

His eyes went wide, first with greed and then with fear. Leaping from behind the counter, he rushed to the front of the shop and quickly closed and locked the door.

“What do you think you’re doing?” he demanded in a low voice, peering through the window to see if anyone had noticed his sudden dash across the store.

Meetra slowly brought her right hand up to the lightsaber hidden at her belt. “I was told you’re the man to see about business I want to keep off the record.”

“I am, I am,” Larvit assured her, regaining some of his composure. “But you can’t just toss your stuff out on the counter for anyone to see. What if an Imperial inspector happened to wander in?”

“Sorry,” Meetra said. “I didn’t realize it was a big deal.”

Larvit snorted derisively. “Great. A Subjugate. Here’s a tip, off-worlder. Next time you visit Dromund Kaas, learn the customs first.”

Meetra nodded and let her hand drop, but she remained vigilant.

“How did you find out about me?” Larvit asked. “Who sent you?”

“Does it matter?” Meetra replied.

Larvit shook his head and made his way back over to inspect the stones still sitting atop the counter.

“Is this the full extent of your collection?” he asked, picking up one of the gems and bringing it up to his aging eye for closer inspection.

“It’s as much as I’m willing to sell right now.”

“I understand,” he said with a smile. “Do you need the credits immediately, or can you wait a few weeks?”

“What’s the difference?”

“I can offer more if you give me time to find the right buyer,” he explained.

Meetra shook her head. “I don’t have that kind of time.”

“That is unfortunate,” he said sympathetically. “That will have to be reflected in the price, of course.”

“Of course.”

“I’m willing to offer seven thousand Imperial credits for the lot,” he said, leaning back and crossing his arms to signify the price was non-negotiable.

Meetra wasn’t about to fall for such an obvious ploy. Even though she had no concept of what an Imperial credit was actually worth, she had done enough haggling in her day to know that his opening offer was merely a baseline.

“Twenty thousand,” she countered, knowing it was a ridiculously high number.

“Even if you could wait to find a buyer I could never go higher than eighteen,” he answered. “I’ll give you ten.”

“Make it fifteen and I promise I’ll come to you first the next time I’m looking to deal.”

“I’ll give you twelve,” he said, wagging a finger in her face. “You won’t find anybody else who’ll go higher than eleven!”

“I’ll sell them for thirteen and some information,” she answered.

“What kind of information?”

“I’m looking for someone. A friend. I need the name of a contact who knows how to find people.”

“People that don’t want to be found?”

“I’d rather not say.”

The storekeeper crossed his arms again and stroked his chin thoughtfully. “Make it twelve-five and we have a deal. I’ll even set up the meeting.”

Ten minutes later Meetra walked out of his establishment with twelve thousand, five hundred Imperial credits and an appointment to meet someone called Sechel in two days.

MEETRA WAS SURPRISED by the high-class atmosphere of the Nexus Room.

Over the past two days she’d come to learn that Imperial society was all about status, caste, and class. Clearly her contact was a being of significant rank.

She was greeted at the door by a young human male wearing expensive clothes and a prominently displayed slave collar. Larvit must have provided a description of her, because he seemed to know who she was.

“Welcome to the Nexus Room,” the young man said, casting his gaze respectfully to the ground. “Master Sechel is expecting you.”

In Meetra’s eyes, slavery was one of the most vile and despicable practices in the galaxy. The Republic had officially condemned slavery, though she knew it still existed under euphemisms like indentured service or lifelong personal attendant. And on Hutt-controlled planets, which were outside Republic jurisdiction, individuals were openly bought and sold like chattel. But somehow what she had encountered on Dromund Kaas seemed much worse.

In the Sith Empire slavery was a societal institution, governed by laws and regulations and seemingly accepted without question by the citizens. Slaves were symbols of rank; the wealthy and powerful used them as status symbols to be paraded out in front of their peers.

There was an abject hopelessness in the eyes of the slaves; they were condemned to a lifetime of servitude with no chance of freedom. Even on Hutt worlds slaves could at least dream of one day escaping to the Republic and starting a new life. But in the Sith Empire, slaves had nowhere to run. Every planet would condemn them; at best an escaped slave would be returned to a wrathful owner, or claimed by a new one. Multiple escape attempts were met with public execution—a slow and agonizing death according to what Meetra had seen in the official records from Nathema.

“Forgive me, mistress,” the young man said, bowing low and folding his hands together in a universal gesture of supplication, “but droids are not allowed inside the club.”

“Wait here, Tee-Three,” Meetra said. Her voice was sharp as she fought to contain her outrage at the young man’s circumstances. Unfortunately, the slave thought her barely contained anger was directed at him, and he began to tremble.

She could see the terror in his eyes, and she could only imagine what punishments he would be subjected to if he offended a guest of the club. But he no doubt faced even worse consequences if he were to violate the rules and let T3 accompany her inside.

She didn’t dare offer him any words of comfort. She couldn’t do anything that might draw attention to herself. So she simply had to let the young man suffer, silently hoping his mental anguish would quickly pass once she went inside.

“P-please follow me,” he stammered.

Still trembling, he led her to a table in the back where a Sith in expensive courtier’s clothes was already seated. She could tell by his appearance—and even by the way that he sat—that he was more diplomat than warrior. There was something soft and supple about his appearance; his muscles were not well defined, and he didn’t seem to possess the physical self-awareness common among those who relied on their martial skills to survive. He was clearly part of the aristocracy.

Meetra made a mental note not to underestimate him; what he lacked in physical prowess he probably more than made up for with intellect and cunning.

Sechel dismissed the young slave with a disparaging flick of his wrist, then motioned for her to sit down at the table in the chair across from him.

As she did, he flashed a well-practiced smile and she noticed something odd about his face. In addition to their red skin, the Sith were marked by fleshy tendrils that dangled from cheeks and chin. On Sechel, two of the tendrils were disfigured stumps; it appeared as if they might have been cut off.

She pulled her focus away from his cheeks and up to his eyes, lest he catch her staring at his deformity.

“Larvit tells me you are looking for someone,” Sechel said, jumping right to the matter at hand.

“He said you could help me find him,” Meetra replied.

“For the right price I can find almost anyone,” Sechel assured her. “And I happen to know you have more than ample funds to cover my costs.”

“I see Larvit does not believe in discretion when it comes to discussing business matters,” Meetra grumbled.

“If you didn’t want him to discuss the terms of your deal, you should have negotiated that into the price,” Sechel replied. “Shall I assume you want our discussions to remain private?”

Meetra nodded, wondering how much of a premium that would be.

“Tell me about the person you are looking for.”

“I’m looking for a Sith.”

Meetra wasn’t foolish enough to admit she was looking for Revan. Without knowing who had taken him or why, even bringing him up would be too great a risk. Thanks to T3’s holorecording, however, she knew what the Sith who had captured him looked like. Hopefully, if she could find his abductor, he might lead her to Revan.

“Does this Sith have a name?”

“He probably does, but I don’t know what it is.”

“Ah, progress,” Sechel said, clapping his hands together and rubbing them in anticipation. “Now we know he is male. Can you provide me a description?”

“I can do better than that,” she answered, pulling a personal holoprojector from one of her pockets.

She flicked a switch and it displayed a still image she had copied from T3’s holorecording. The image was carefully cropped to remove all traces of Revan or the Ebon Hawk, leaving only a close-up of the Sith who had taken him.

Sechel’s reaction to the image was so subtle that Meetra almost didn’t notice it. His eyes widened slightly in recognition; an instinctive, unconscious reaction. It lasted only a fraction of a second, and Meetra was impressed with how well he was able to hide his surprise.

“Interesting,” the Sith said, pretending to study the picture. “He appears to be a Sith Lord. That means I will have to charge extra.”

There was no doubt in Meetra’s mind that Sechel knew exactly who the Sith Lord was, but she thought there was more benefit to playing along than calling him on his lie.

“I need to speak with him on an urgent matter.”

“Perhaps if you tell me the nature of your business, it will help me track him down. Is he a friend? An enemy?”

“Not a friend, exactly,” Meetra said evasively. “But certainly not an enemy. He has information about a private matter that I wish to discuss.”

“Keeping information from me will make my job more difficult,” Sechel warned her. “It will drive up the price substantially.”

“You already know I can pay,” she reminded him. “My business will remain private.”

“If I do locate this being, what should I tell him?”

Meetra hesitated. She didn’t know the exact nature of the relationship between Sechel and the mysterious Sith. If they were friends, he wouldn’t simply tell her where to find him. Not without warning him first.

“I would like you to set up a meeting between us,” she said finally, hoping her answer was vague enough that Sechel might still suspect she didn’t mean the other Sith any harm.

“A private meeting, yes?” he asked with a smile.

Meetra nodded.

“Very well,” he said. “I will try to locate him and offer to set up a meeting. Of course, I can make no promise that he’ll agree to see you.”

“It’s in his best interest,” Meetra said. “I’m sure you can be very convincing.”

“Certainly. But that also costs extra.”

Meetra sighed wearily. “How much?”

“Five thousand credits.”

Sechel proved to be a much shrewder negotiator than Larvit; he knew he had all the leverage. In the end they settled on four thousand credits, much closer to his opening offer than Meetra had originally intended.

She rose to leave the table, then was hit by a sudden inspiration. “How much to purchase the slave at the door?” she asked.

If she could buy the young man, she could give him his freedom.

“If you are interested in purchasing slaves, you’ll find a much better selection in the city’s central market,” he assured her.

“I’m interested in him specifically,” she said.

“Why?”

There was no mistaking the sudden suspicion in Sechel’s voice, and Meetra knew she had misplayed her hand.

“I like his look,” she said with a coy smile.

“You can hire his services by speaking with the concierge of the club,” he said.

“That’s something I’ll have to look into,” she said, her heart sinking as she realized she could do nothing for the young man now.

Sechel wouldn’t just forget about her unusual interest in an otherwise anonymous slave. If she did anything to help him win his freedom, it would certainly get back to Sechel, and she couldn’t risk blowing her cover.

“Would you like me to have him escort you out?” Sechel offered.

“Thank you,” she said, grinning lasciviously.

The young man was summoned to the table, and she could feel his fear at being singled out by the woman he thought he had offended earlier. He didn’t speak as he led her to the door, where T3 was waiting for them.

“It was our pleasure to serve you, mistress,” he said, his voice cracking.

“Everything was satisfactory,” she said, her voice dripping with disdain and contempt.

The slave bowed and backed away, obviously relieved at what he perceived to be a more normal reaction from a patron of the club. Once he vanished back inside, Meetra spun on her heel and walked away quickly, anxious to put the club behind her.

T3 scurried to keep up, beeping out a question.

“We’re getting closer,” she promised him. Then she added, “The sooner we’re off this accursed world the better.”

CHAPTER 21

YOU WILL UNDERSTAND IN TIME.

Back in his private quarters, Scourge tried to push the last words of his most recent conversation with Revan from his mind, but they kept returning.

It had been almost a week since he’d walked out on Revan, abandoning him to suffer the torments of his solitary confinement. They had been talking about visions: how the Force could speak to you if you listened; how it could show you visions of your possible future.

The Jedi had implied that he had witnessed something to do with his eventual release from Nyriss’s prison, but Scourge knew better than to take anything the captive said at face value.

Revan was smart. Even as Scourge used him to learn about the Force, the Jedi was trying to manipulate Scourge into helping him escape. It was possible everything he’d said had been nothing but lies. It was also possible he had been telling the truth. Maybe he really had seen something that gave him hope of escape.

Scourge knew he should tell Nyriss about this latest development, but so far he had kept silent on the matter. If she knew, there was a strong chance she would simply decide to execute Revan rather than allow him any opportunity to escape.

And that was the real problem. If Revan died, did any real chance of stopping the Emperor die with him? When the Jedi said Nyriss would never step forward to lead the others against the Emperor, the words rang true. Revan, on the other hand, had already proved he was both eager and willing to stop the Sith from invading the Republic. He had hinted at an alliance between them, and as ridiculous as it might have seemed at first, Scourge couldn’t help but see some merit in the idea.

They shared a strong commitment to a common goal; alliances had been forged on far less. But agreeing to work with the Jedi wouldn’t just mean freeing him from his cell. It would mean a betrayal of Nyriss, and Scourge wasn’t ready to take on both her and the Emperor quite yet.

Especially when all of this was predicated on an alleged Force vision of Revan’s that might not actually have existed.

The sharp knock on his door came as a relief. His mind was running in circles; it would be good to have something to distract him.

When he opened the door, he was surprised to see Sechel standing on the other side. For the most part, the sycophantic Sith had avoided him for the last three years, partly out of fear and partly because Nyriss had forbidden him from seeking vengeance for the brutal interrogation that had left him scarred for life.

There had been occasions where they had been forced to work together on some task or mission for Nyriss, but the innate mistrust all Sith had of one another had escalated between them to the point that it actually impacted their ability to work effectively together. It hadn’t taken long for Nyriss to realize their talents were put to better use independently.

“Why are you here?” Scourge asked.

“I have news you will be interested in,” Sechel replied, smiling in a way that made Scourge want to strangle him.

“Did Nyriss send you?”

“I am here of my own volition.”

“What is this about?” Scourge demanded.

“Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“No.”

Sechel shrugged. “I was only trying to show some discretion. For your sake.”

“Get to the point,” Scourge said through gritted teeth.

“A woman came to me today. Human. She’s looking for you.”

“A human? Why?”

“She didn’t say. She didn’t offer her name, and given her reluctance to discuss the matter I didn’t ask.”

“If she found you, then she already knows where to find me,” Scourge said.

Sechel shook his head. “We crossed paths quite by accident. She has no idea you and I know each other at all. She simply hired me to find you.”

“Maybe you’d better come in and tell me the whole story,” Scourge said, relenting and stepping aside.

“On second thought, I think I’ll stay out here,” the other Sith replied. “I get the feeling you don’t like the answers I’m giving you.”

“Do you think I need to get you alone to inflict pain?” Scourge asked, casually reaching out with the Force to give Sechel’s windpipe a quick squeeze.

Sechel gasped and threw his hands up to his throat, his eyes wide with fear. “Nyriss will have your head if you harm me again!” he blustered.

“That won’t bring you back if you’re dead,” Scourge pointed out. “Now stop playing games and tell me exactly what happened.”

“This woman was referred to me by a business associate,” Sechel explained. “She offered me a substantial sum to track down the man in her holoimage.”

“A holoimage?”

“Apparently she doesn’t even know your name. But she has an excellent image of your face, and she’s willing to pay a substantial sum to meet with you.”

“And you have no idea why?”

“I can speculate.”

“Please do,” Scourge said grimly.

“Think of how many lives you have ended. How many assassinations you’ve performed. Isn’t it possible that on one of these missions your face was captured by a security cam?”

Scourge was always careful on his missions, but nobody was perfect. “It’s possible,” he admitted grudgingly.

“Now imagine someone who knew the victim finds the footage. Maybe a wife, or a daughter. Driven by her lust for revenge, she could search the whole Empire for the one who wronged her.”

“You think she wants to kill me?”

“Probably. Most people do. But she insisted on meeting you in person.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Scourge asked abruptly.

“I have a reputation to protect. She paid me to do a job; I don’t want rumors to spread that I cheated a client. It’s bad for business.”

“Does Nyriss know about your so-called business?”

“She allows me to freelance as long as it doesn’t interfere with my work on her behalf. And in this case, it may actually benefit her. And you,” he added. “If this woman intends you harm, she must be dealt with appropriately. That is why I think you should meet with her.”

“And there’s always a chance she might actually succeed, isn’t there?”

“Doubtful,” Sechel said. “Just to be on the safe side, though, I wouldn’t suggest you go to meet her alone.”

“You want to come with me?”

“Not in the least,” Sechel assured him. “This seems more like a job for Murtog and his crew.”

Scourge didn’t speak right away. He ran over everything Sechel had told him, trying to determine if he was being set up. The mere fact that Sechel hadn’t simply turned the woman away was enough to make Scourge wary of the meeting.

If someone really was looking to do him harm, it was doubtful that Sechel would warn him simply because they both served Nyriss. But if he suspected the woman was tied to something in Scourge’s past—some dark secret or inconvenient truth—bringing it to light was an effective way to make Scourge look bad.

If she turned out to be someone looking for revenge, it would prove that Scourge had been sloppy in the past, planting seeds of doubt about him in Nyriss’s mind. And even if she wasn’t, the situation was still likely to create some kind of mess for Scourge to clean up. That alone might be enough to convince Sechel to help her.

Simply refusing the meeting wasn’t an option, however. Now that he knew she was out there, Scourge had to take action. Whatever the motive behind her search for him, he had to face her. It was the only way to unravel the mystery.

Sechel knew all this, of course. That was why he’d suggested sending Murtog along. On the surface it appeared the best way to deal with a possible enemy, but Scourge knew what he really wanted was to have somebody else there who would report back on the meeting if the truth turned out to be embarrassing.

On the other hand, if he decided to meet her alone he was putting himself at greater risk. It might also look like he had something to hide, and he had no doubt Sechel would twist that fact to suit his own needs somewhere down the road.

“Congratulations,” he said to the smaller Sith. “You’ve backed me into a corner. Set up the meeting, and tell Murtog and his men to be there.”

“Of course, Lord Scourge,” Sechel said with a mocking bow. “I’m always happy to be of service.”

MEETRA WAS WARY of a trap even before she felt the warning premonitions through the Force.

Sechel had given her a time and location for the meeting; he’d even told her the name of the man from the holovid—Lord Scourge. But she still didn’t trust him.

Arriving at the location only confirmed her suspicions. Sechel’s instructions had led her to an isolated cave on the outskirts of the city—the perfect place for an ambush. A single speeder was parked in a clearing about fifty meters away from the entrance, evidence that somebody else was already there. It was possible the Sith had come alone, but Meetra estimated the vehicle could hold as many as six adult humanoids. There was also the possibility that other speeders had been hidden nearby, meaning she had no idea how many might be waiting for her inside the cave.

T3-M4 obviously shared her concerns. The droid twittered nervously as she brought the speeder in for a landing on a patch of bare dirt near the other speeder.

“I know, I know,” she muttered. “But this is the only lead we’ve got.”

She climbed out of the speeder and extended a small cargo ramp so T3 could exit as well. The mouth of the cave loomed before them, black and forbidding.

Earlier, she had discussed several dozen strategies with T3, laying out contingency plans for the most common conceivable scenarios. Fortunately their planning had included a potential ambush by enemies hiding under the cover of darkness.

“Operation supernova is a go,” she whispered.

T3 beeped uncertainly.

“We’ll give them every chance to surrender,” she assured him. “But be ready for this to get ugly. Hopefully it won’t come to that,” she added. “Maybe Lord Scourge is curious enough about why I’m here to hear me out before he tries anything.”

T3 didn’t reply; she took it as a bad sign that he was suddenly speechless.

Walking slowly, she entered the cave. It was too dark to see more than a meter in front of her, but she could sense several other beings inside, watching her approach. She assumed they were using night-vision goggles; it was the only way for anyone’s sight to pierce the darkness of the cave.

She tried to act timid and unsure, a clueless victim walking heedlessly into the waiting trap. The more vulnerable she appeared, the closer they’d let her advance before taking any action.

“Stay close, Tee-Three,” she whispered, keeping her voice low so only he could hear her.

“Is anybody here?” she called out, making her voice tremble slightly.

She took another seemingly cautious step forward.

“Hello? Is anyone here?”

“Don’t move!” a voice shouted from the darkness. “We have you surrounded.”

“Lord Scourge,” she called out. “Is that you? I only want to talk.”

“Lie flat on the ground and put your hands behind your head,” the voice ordered. “If not, we open fire.”

“Now, Tee-Three!”

The little droid turned his headlamp to full power. In the tight confines it had the intensity of a small sun, easily illuminating the entire cave. The sudden flash of brightness also overloaded the night-vision goggles of her adversaries, temporarily blinding them.

It took Meetra less than a second to see and process the odds she was up against. Four soldiers—two male and two female, each wearing heavy armor and carrying a blaster carbine—had taken up positions around the cave, forming a loose semicircle around their intended victim. A tall Sith stood in an alcove near the back corner of the cave.

The four soldiers opened fire. Even blinded by the flash of T3’s lamp, they were disciplined enough to react by unleashing a volley of blaster bolts at the last known location of their target. Unfortunately for them, Meetra’s reactions were quicker than theirs.

By the time the bolts hit home, Meetra was already on the move. She snapped off a quick back handspring to dodge the blasterfire, then reversed her direction with a flying leap toward the nearest assailant.

Her lightsaber was already in her hand when she landed, and she plunged her blade through the vulnerable joint between the chest plate and right shoulder guard of the soldier’s combat suit. Unlike his cortosis-laced armor, the man’s flesh and bone provided almost no resistance to the lightsaber as it drove straight through his heart.

As he fell to the ground, Meetra thrust her free hand out toward the next closest soldier, palm open. The woman flew backward, lifted off her feet and hurtled across the cave by the Force until she slammed into the rock face of the far wall. She slid to the ground, dead.

The other two soldiers had ripped off their night-vision goggles and opened fire again. Meetra deflected the bolts with her lightsaber.

With their attention focused on the Jedi wreaking havoc in their ranks, the soldiers forgot about T3-M4. The droid took full advantage of the situation, rolling forward until he was close enough to unleash a jet of flame from the short nozzle jutting out from the center of his torso.

The flames engulfed the nearest soldier; as his dying shrieks momentarily distracted his companion, Meetra charged forward with a burst of speed to deliver a vicious two-handed slash of her blade that cleaved through the plates of the woman’s armor and bit deep into her chest.

At last, Meetra turned to face the Sith. Now that she had a chance to focus her attention more closely, she recognized him from T3’s holovid. Apparently Lord Scourge had decided to show up after all.

Curiously, he hadn’t done anything to help the soldiers during the short and violent encounter. He hadn’t tried to flee, either. In fact, he hadn’t seemed to have moved at all, other than to draw and ignite the crimson blade of his lightsaber.

He held his weapon in front of him in a standard defensive posture, staring at Meetra with a look of utter disbelief on his face.

Wary of a trap, Meetra took a single step toward him.

“You’re a Jedi,” he said, his words causing her to freeze in her tracks. “What he said was true. He saw you. He knew.”

Meetra wasn’t about to attack someone who didn’t seem to want to do her any harm; that went against everything she believed in. But she wasn’t going to let her guard down, either.

“What are you talking about?” she demanded.

“You’re here because of Revan,” he said, his voice filled with wonder. “You’ve come to rescue him.”

“I’m impressed you figured it out so quickly,” she admitted.

“I didn’t figure it out,” he said. “Revan told me.”

THE INSTANT THE BLUE-BLADED lightsaber had materialized in the human female’s hand, Scourge realized she was a Jedi. And he could only think of one reason a Jedi would come to Dromund Kaas in search of him—she was here to rescue Revan.

He was impressed with how easily she had dismantled Murtog and his handpicked team. He could feel her channeling the Force, yet it was somehow different from what he had felt when he battled other Sith.

She wasn’t afraid to kill, but he sensed she took no real pleasure in it. Instead of feeding off her anger and hate, it was as if she kept her emotions at arm’s length so the Force could flow through her unhindered.

Part of him wanted to leap into the fray: battling this Jedi would be a true test of his skills. He didn’t know which of them would prove the stronger, but he was intrigued by the challenge. Yet another part of him knew she represented something far more significant than a worthy foe.

“What do you mean Revan told you?” she demanded.

“When I last spoke with him he said something I didn’t believe. I thought he was lying to manipulate me. I didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me.”

Actually, Scourge still wasn’t sure he understood. Not fully. The female Jedi’s presence was proof that Revan was telling the truth about his Force vision. He had hinted to Scourge that his freedom was close at hand; he must have had a premonition of her arrival.

The revelation was what had stayed Scourge’s blade. He wasn’t willing to do battle with her until he had carefully considered all the implications and alternatives.

“If you spoke to Revan, then you know where he is,” the woman said.

She was still poised in a combat-ready stance, as was Scourge—neither willing to make the first move, but each ready to respond to an attack by the other.

“Revan is a prisoner,” Scourge told her.

“Then I order you to set him free!” she demanded.

“It’s not that simple.”

Nothing about this situation was simple. As he spoke to the Jedi, Scourge was still trying to understand why Revan had mentioned his vision to him at all.

At the time he’d thought the prisoner was simply trying to manipulate him, to trick him into helping him escape. Now, however, it seemed as if Revan’s words had been a warning—almost as if he knew Scourge would find himself in this situation.

It made no sense to give any kind of warning to an enemy. However, if Revan believed that he and Scourge were destined to become allies, then his words did make sense. Was it possible he had seen a vision of Scourge working with him?

It seemed to be the only answer that fit. He had sometimes sensed that Revan was trying to recruit him to his side; the feeling had been even stronger in their last conversation. He’d dismissed it as desperation to escape, but what if Revan knew the events he had foreseen were drawing near? What if he had witnessed this confrontation in the cave, and he had been trying to make Scourge understand that they had to become allies to stop the Emperor?

“Tell me where Revan is,” the woman said. “Tell me where he’s being held and I will let you walk away.”

He realized his adversary was misinterpreting his reluctance to fight as fear. She was as confused about this as he was. Yet the more Scourge thought about it, the clearer it became.

Nyriss would never move against the Emperor; he knew that now. He had come to accept that neither she nor any of the other Dark Council members who had plotted with her would ever actually dare to strike.

If anyone was going to stop the Emperor from his mad invasion of the Republic, it would have to be Scourge. But he couldn’t do it alone.

“Come with me and I will take you and your droid to see Revan,” he said, deactivating his blade. “He will tell you the truth.”

The Jedi wasn’t so quick to lower her weapon.

Her astromech droid rolled up to stand beside her, squawking loudly.

“Tee-Three’s right. I’ve already walked into one trap today,” the Jedi answered. “I think I’ve hit my quota.”

Scourge understood her reluctance. Under normal circumstances she would be a fool to accompany him. But this situation was as far from normal as he could imagine.

“Revan told me you were coming,” he tried to explain. “I think the Force gave him a vision of us working together.”

“Then why did you set an ambush?”

“I didn’t know who you were,” Scourge pointed out. “You wouldn’t tell Sechel any of the details of who you were or why you were looking for me.”

“You’re lying,” she said with a disbelieving shake of her head. “You’re afraid to face me. You’ll say anything to avoid a fight.”

“Do I seem afraid to you?”

“No,” she admitted. “You seem strangely calm.”

“That is because I finally understand what Revan meant. He wants us to unite against a common foe.”

“What common foe?”

“Our Emperor is planning an invasion of the Republic. Revan wants to stop him. So do I.”

“Why would you want to stop an invasion of the Republic?”

“The Emperor is mad. He wants to repeat the mistakes of the Great Hyperspace War; he wants to plunge us into a conflict that will end with our extinction.”

The Jedi lowered her lightsaber, but didn’t deactivate it. “Then why did you take Revan prisoner on Nathema?”

“That was before I knew his purpose here.”

He could tell she was still suspicious, and rightfully so. But he thought of something that might convince her. “You spoke of Nathema. Have you been to that world? Have you walked upon its surface?”

“I have,” she said quietly, and he could tell from the haunted expression on her face that she spoke the truth.

“That was the Emperor’s homeworld. To give himself greater power, he unleashed a ritual that devoured everything. When I saw what happened there, I understood the true depths of his insanity. I realized his mind was so twisted and disturbed that he was not fit to rule, and I swore to find a way to stop him.”

He paused and looked steadily at Meetra. “You walk the path of the light; I have chosen to follow the dark side. But we both know the horrors of Nathema are a blight upon the galaxy. Revan knows this, as well. That is why he wants us to work together.”

The Jedi considered his words carefully, then deactivated her blade. But Scourge could tell she still wasn’t wholly convinced.

“Before I go anywhere with you, I’m going to need more to go on than just your word,” she said.

Scourge nodded. Her caution was a good thing; if she’d believed him too easily he would have had to question her judgment.

“I can bring you proof,” he told her. “Wait here and I will return tomorrow.”

“How do I know you won’t just come back with more reinforcements?”

“You will sense me through the Force before I actually arrive. If I’m not alone, you will have plenty of time to make your escape.”

“What about Revan?” the Jedi asked.

“He is safe for the moment,” Scourge assured her. “But I cannot free him without help.”

“You have until tomorrow,” the Jedi told him. “Return with proof and we can work together to free Revan.”

Scourge tucked the hilt of his lightsaber back into his belt and walked slowly past the Jedi and her droid toward the entrance of the cave. They stepped aside at his approach, keeping a safe distance between them.

Just before he left the cave, the Jedi called out a final warning.

“If you betray me in any way—if you come back with reinforcements, or even if you don’t come back at all—I will hunt you down.”

“Save your anger for the Emperor,” Scourge called back over his shoulder. “He is the real enemy.”

CHAPTER 22

SCOURGE KNEW HE HAD TO ACT QUICKLY. With long, rapid strides he marched from the cave to the waiting speeder and took to the air, heading back to Kaas City.

He’d promised the Jedi he would return to the cave within one day, but that wasn’t his biggest concern. Sechel had set up the meeting and maneuvered Scourge into taking Murtog with him; no doubt he was eagerly waiting for the security chief’s report on what happened. He had to find Sechel and deal with him before the adviser became suspicious.

Sechel would most likely be at the Nexus Room, enjoying a selection of fine wines while waiting for Murtog to call in. As a Sith Lord, Scourge had access to the facility, but he didn’t want to confront Sechel in a public setting.

He brought his speeder in for a landing a block away from the club, jumped out, and walked to the building. The slave on duty greeted him as he entered the lobby.

“Welcome, my lord,” the young human said, bowing low.

“I have a message for Sechel,” Scourge told him.

“Of course, my lord. Follow me.”

As the slave turned to enter the club, Scourge reached out a hand and grabbed him by the shoulder. “I did not say I wish to speak with him,” he hissed, “I said I had a message.”

“F-forgive me, master,” the slave stammered, obviously terrified. “P-please tell me what you wish me to do.”

“Wait until I leave,” Scourge explained slowly, as if he were talking to a simpleton. “Then tell Sechel that Murtog needs to meet him. He’ll know where.” He stared down at the slave. “Do you understand?”

The slave nodded, his eyes wide with fear.

“Do not tell him I was here,” Scourge instructed. “Do not mention me at all. Simply deliver the message. If you fail me, I will have them flay the flesh from your bones.”

They both knew it was not an idle threat; by right Scourge could inflict any punishment he chose on a disobedient slave. Of course, the young man would also be punished if anyone discovered he had lied to a member of the club, but Scourge had far more important things to worry about than the fate of an insignificant slave.

The young man stood, still and silent, knowing anything he said could only make things worse.

Scourge turned and left the club. Once outside, he ducked around a nearby corner where he could watch the door.

Sechel emerged a few minutes later and made his way quickly down the street. He didn’t appear to be particularly worried or cautious; he had been expecting to hear from Murtog, so he had no reason to be suspicious.

Scourge followed him at a safe distance, careful not to draw attention to himself. Sechel didn’t head back to Nyriss’s stronghold; as Scourge expected he had a private location where he could conduct business he didn’t want others to know about.

He continued for several blocks, then stopped at a small two-story apartment building in one of Kaas City’s residential districts. He punched in the security code to unlock the door and slipped inside. Scourge waited a few seconds, then approached the building.

Glancing around to make sure there were no witnesses, he pulled out his lightsaber and ignited the blade, jamming it into the security panel. The lock sparked and sizzled, the circuits frying in an instant. A second later the door slid open; as he’d suspected, the panel had been programmed to open the door if it malfunctioned so the residents wouldn’t be locked in or out of the apartment complex.

The interior was little more than a hall giving access to the various apartments. There were four doors on the lower level, but Scourge ignored them—Sechel would never lower himself to rent a ground-floor unit. There was no turbolift, but in the back of the building there was a staircase leading up to the second level.

Scourge made his way up. The suites on the top floor were obviously larger: instead of four doors there were only two. Scourge picked one of the doors at random and pressed the buzzer. He waited for nearly a minute, but there was no reply. Either the unit wasn’t occupied, or the resident was not at home.

He tried the buzzer on the other door. A few seconds later he heard footsteps approaching, then the door slid open. From Sechel’s expression it was clear he was caught off guard at finding Scourge instead of Murtog waiting for him on the other side.

Before he could react, Scourge jabbed out with his hand, driving his fingers into Sechel’s throat.

The other Sith dropped to his knees, gasping for air. Scourge stepped inside the apartment and closed the door behind him.

Sechel struggled to speak, but all that came out was a rasping cough.

“Make any sound louder than a whisper and your life will end in unbearable agony,” Scourge warned him.

The adviser held up his hand and nodded to show he understood. Scourge waited patiently for him to catch his breath.

After a few minutes Sechel had the strength to stand up. He brushed his clothes off, trying to compose himself.

“Where is Murtog?” he eventually asked, keeping his voice low.

“Dead,” Scourge replied.

Sechel’s eyes flickered wide for an instant, but otherwise he showed no reaction. “It seems I underestimated this woman,” he said, his tone not in the least bit apologetic. “I assume since you survived that she now shares Murtog’s fate?”

“How much did Nyriss know about the meeting?” Scourge demanded, ignoring Sechel’s question.

“Nothing.”

“You didn’t mention it to her?”

Sechel sniffed indignantly. “You have an overly high opinion of yourself if you think Nyriss cares about some anonymous female from your past. This is beneath her notice.”

Scourge nodded. Sechel guarded his cards closely; he wouldn’t mention anything to Nyriss until he had decided how best to turn the situation to his advantage.

“What about Murtog?” Scourge asked. “Would he say anything? Would he tell Nyriss where he was going?”

“She doesn’t keep tabs on us like children,” Sechel sneered.

“How long until she begins to miss him?” Scourge asked.

“You mean how long until she finds out you got him killed?” Sechel mocked. “I’d say you have another three days before she begins to wonder about his absence.”

“Three days,” Scourge muttered. “We’ll have to move fast.”

“What are you talking about?”

Sechel had obviously sensed Scourge’s urgency; he must have assumed something had gone very, very wrong at the meeting. He thought Scourge was in trouble. He wrongly believed the Sith Lord had come here looking for help, and it was making him arrogant.

Scourge decided it was time to clarify the situation. “I want your files.”

“What files?”

“The ones implicating Nyriss and the other Dark Council members. I want everything you’ve gathered that could be used to expose them as traitors.”

To his credit, Sechel didn’t deny the files existed. It would have been a pointless endeavor; Scourge knew him too well. The adviser was loyal to Nyriss, but his primary concern would always be for himself. If things ever went bad, he would need something to bargain with, and what better bargaining chip than detailed records of everything Nyriss and her co-conspirators had been involved in ever since they’d started plotting against the Emperor?

“You’re crossing a dangerous line,” Sechel warned. “Nyriss has turned a blind eye to my collection; I’m too valuable for her to cast me aside. You, however, are expendable. If she finds out about this, she’ll have your head.”

“Nyriss is not your concern. I am. Give me the files. I won’t ask again.”

Sechel knew the lengths Scourge was willing to go in pursuit of information; the scars on his cheek reminded him every time he looked in a mirror. And this time he couldn’t count on a timely interruption to put an end to the torture.

“Wait here,” he said, turning and heading into the apartment.

Scourge, who had no intention of letting Sechel out of his sight, followed right behind him.

Sechel glanced back and sighed in resignation. He made his way to a small closet in the back of the apartment and slid the door open. At first glance the closet appeared empty. Sechel dropped to one knee and slid back a small hidden panel on the floor, revealing a security keypad. With Scourge watching closely over his shoulder, he punched in the access code. A panel in the back wall of the closet slid aside, revealing a hidden safe. Sechel punched another code into the keypad, and the door opened with an audible click.

“Slowly,” Scourge warned.

“There’s a blaster inside,” Sechel confessed. “But I have no intention of trying to use it against you.”

“A wise decision.”

Sechel pulled gently on the corner of the safe’s door, allowing it to swing wide and reveal the contents. As he had said, there was a small hold-out blaster inside. There were also several data disks, each labeled with a date and arranged in chronological order.

“Is this everything?” Scourge demanded.

“It’s all here,” Sechel assured him. “But it’s encrypted. If anything happens to me, the data is useless. I’m the only one who can decode it.”

Scourge had no way to tell if Sechel was bluffing. But he was willing to take the risk.

“I’m sure I can find a slicer somewhere who’s up to the challenge,” he said, stepping in close behind him.

He brought his left arm up and under Sechel’s chin, the forearm pressing hard on his windpipe. At the same time his right hand reached around and gripped the top of Sechel’s head.

Sechel had become a liability. Scourge couldn’t leave him behind, and taking him with him was far more trouble than it was worth.

The smaller Sith struggled to break the hold as Scourge began to apply pressure to the vertebrae in his neck. There were literally hundreds of ways he could have killed Sechel, but given their history he wanted their final moments to be up close and personal.

Sechel tried to kick him, but Scourge had positioned himself so that the flailing foot of the other Sith only struck feebly against his thigh. He took a deep breath, braced his left arm, and yanked hard with his right hand. There was a surprisingly loud pop, and Sechel’s body spasmed once before going completely limp.

Releasing his grip to let the body slump to the floor, Scourge gathered up the data disks and left the apartment, the door automatically sliding shut behind him.

MEETRA SAT STILL and silent on the floor of the cave, her legs crossed and her hands held at chest height, palms facing each other. She had opened herself up to the Force, looking for guidance and wisdom, but here on Dromund Kaas, where the dark side prevailed, it was difficult to find the inner tranquillity necessary for enlightenment.

Having T3 running long, nervous circles around her certainly didn’t help, but she was afraid if she told him to stay still he might have a meltdown. And she understood the droid’s anxiety.

She still wasn’t sure what to make of Lord Scourge. She had sensed that his offer to work together was sincere, though she wondered how much of that was Revan’s doing. It was easy to understand how Scourge could be drawn to him; Revan’s command of the Force was greater than that of anyone else she had ever met. And she knew how charismatic he could be. Even though he was a prisoner it wasn’t hard to imagine him being in total control of the situation.

But if he had recruited Scourge as an ally, it had been out of necessity rather than choice. The Sith was wholly consumed by the dark side. He had no respect for life, no desire to serve any needs but his own. Even if what he said about wanting to stop the Emperor was true, his motivations were survival and self-preservation.

She didn’t trust him, but if he could prove that he and Revan were on the same side she would work with him. The risk of betrayal was one she was willing to take if it gave her a chance to rescue her friend.

The little droid was passing by her on one of his many, many laps when she heard the sound of a speeder approaching. T3 stopped and dimmed his light, casting the cave in shadow once more.

“I told you he’d come back,” Meetra said. “He’s alone,” she added before T3 could ask the obvious question.

She scrambled to her feet as Lord Scourge marched confidently into the cave, ready to respond at the first hint of aggression.

“I have what you need,” he said, holding up several data disks. “This will prove what I said about trying to stop the Emperor. You will see that we are on the same side.”

Scourge stepped forward and extended his hand, offering her the disks. She hesitated for only a moment before coming close enough to take them from his grasp. She returned to T3, carefully retracing her steps so as not to turn her back on the red-skinned Sith.

“We’ll need time to look these over,” she said.

“They might be encrypted,” Scourge told her.

“I’ve never come across a code my friend here couldn’t crack,” she said, and T3 beeped his agreement.

“I suspected as much. How long do you think it will take?”

“Why? Are you in a rush?”

“Events have been set in motion,” he explained. “We have two, maybe three days before the window of opportunity closes.”

“Work fast, T3,” she said. She looked up at Scourge. “We’d be more comfortable if you weren’t hovering over us.

“I will return in three hours,” he said. “Alone, of course.”

It only took half that time for T3 to decrypt and verify the authenticity of the data. As promised, it confirmed what the Sith had said—he really was plotting to overthrow the Emperor. However, it wasn’t just Scourge. Several members of the Dark Council, the Emperor’s circle of handpicked advisers, had joined together in a conspiracy to remove him from the throne.

Yet after more than a decade, they had made no real progress. Instead, the disks cataloged a litany of power plays and double crosses among the various leaders of the conspiracy. They spent so much time plotting against one another that the idea of them actually working together to defeat the Emperor seemed ludicrous.

“No wonder he’s willing to work with Revan,” Meetra muttered. “He’s just sick of waiting.”

By the time Scourge returned, she had made her decision.

“I believe you,” she said. “I’m ready to work together.”

“Does this mean you’ll tell me your name?” the Sith asked.

“I’m Meetra. And this is Tee-Three-Em-Four.”

The droid let out a shrill chirp.

“What’s he saying?” Scourge asked.

“He says it’s time for you to take us to see Revan.”

“The situation has changed. That isn’t an option any longer.”

“Why not?”

“He is being held by a Sith Lord called Nyriss.”

“She’s on the Dark Council,” Meetra said, recalling the name from the data disks. “She’s the one who brought you into the conspiracy.”

Scourge nodded.

“If she’s holding Revan, why can’t you take us to him?”

“When I first made the offer, I was hoping Revan could convince you that we should work together,” Scourge explained. “Going to see him now would only be an unnecessary risk.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I could probably get you in to see him, but that won’t help get him out of his cell. And it might raise suspicion.”

“Just take me to him,” Meetra insisted. “Leave the escape to me.”

“You can’t fight your way through Nyriss’s entire army of followers,” Scourge said. “Even with my help. She has hundreds of guards and dozens of acolytes trained in the dark side. If we’re going to break Revan out, we need a distraction. Something to draw the attention of the guards away while we sneak in.”

“I assume you have a plan?”

“I do,” Scourge said, smiling. “I’m going to get the Emperor to help us.”

CHAPTER 23

THOUGH HE APPEARED CALM on the outside, Scourge’s heart was pounding as he mounted the steps to the Emperor’s citadel. He was playing a dangerous game, but there were no other options. Time was the enemy; if they had any hope of getting Revan out of her dungeon alive, they had to act before Nyriss realized Scourge had betrayed her.

Soon—maybe tomorrow, maybe even today—Nyriss would begin to wonder about Sechel and Murtog’s absence. It wouldn’t take her long to learn that they had been working with Scourge, and from there she would easily fill in the blanks.

He’d briefly considered approaching one of the other members of the Dark Council, hoping to convince him or her to help him get rid of Nyriss the same way she had used him to eliminate Darth Xedrix. But even if they agreed to help him, it would be weeks before they put a plan into place. Like Nyriss, they were too cautious—too afraid—to take any action that might put them at risk.

The Emperor was the only Sith on all of Dromund Kaas with the will to take the kind of quick and decisive action required. Convincing him that Nyriss was a traitor would be simple enough with the files he’d acquired from Sechel. The trick was making the Emperor believe Scourge had been an unknowing pawn in her plans.

T3 had doctored the data disks, removing all evidence of Scourge’s part in the conspiracy. Scourge would claim that he came forward as soon as he learned of the plot … but there was no guarantee the Emperor would believe him.

Scourge was going to present the evidence in person. If the Emperor suspected he was lying—or if he was simply powerful enough to see the truth—escape would be impossible. He was putting himself at great risk for the sake of the cause—something he never would have considered before he met Revan.

At the top of the stairs he was stopped by a pair of Sith soldiers clad in red armor—two of the famed Imperial Guard. An army of elite warriors, the Imperial Guard underwent months of brutal training to transform them into the most disciplined and deadly troops in the Empire. Many didn’t survive, but those who did emerged as fanatically loyal zealots willing to sacrifice their lives to defend the Emperor.

“State your business,” one of the guards said, barring his way with a heavy electrostaff.

“I must see the Emperor immediately.”

He hadn’t known what kind of reaction his bold statement would produce—mocking laughter or flat refusal were the most likely options.

“Only those on the Dark Council can speak with the Emperor,” the second soldier told him, her tone curt and official.

“My name is Lord Scourge; I serve Darth Nyriss. I am here on her behalf.”

The soldiers looked at each other, and he sensed their uncertainty.

“The Emperor is in danger,” Scourge insisted. “I must speak with him.”

“Wait here,” the male guard told him.

He disappeared inside the Citadel and didn’t return for several minutes. The entire time passed in silence; the remaining guard saw no reason to speak to Scourge, and he knew better than to say anything more to her. Simple lies were the most effective, and Scourge had no intention of saying anything more than was absolutely necessary.

When the first soldier emerged, he was accompanied by four more of his comrades. All were Sith, and three wore uniforms identical to those of the guards stationed at the door. The fourth was also clad in red armor, but her outfit was more elaborate.

“I am Captain Yarri,” she told him. “Come with me.”

They left the original two guards behind as she led him into the citadel. She walked in front of him, while two of the newcomers flanked him. The fourth fell into line directly behind him so that he was completely surrounded.

The design of the citadel reminded Scourge of Nyriss’s stronghold; not surprising, given that she had built her edifice in the same style to honor the Emperor. The interior was a virtual maze of corridors with gray and forbidding stone walls, punctuated by heavy wooden doors leading off to antechambers and side rooms.

However, where Nyriss lined the halls with statues, busts, and wall hangings glorifying her reputation and achievements, the decor of the citadel was far more utilitarian. Statues were few and far between, and the few splashes of color in the scattered wall hangings were muted by the dim lighting that cast everything in shadow.

“You are taking me to the Emperor?” Scourge asked.

“You may speak with one of the Emperor’s advisers.”

“Unacceptable. I did not come to meet with a servant.”

“The choice is not yours to make,” Captain Yarri replied brusquely.

Scourge stopped in his tracks, causing the soldier walking behind to stumble into him. The Sith Lord angrily shoved him back. In response, the two guards who had been at his side whipped out their electrostaffs.

“Stop!” Captain Yarri shouted, and they froze in their tracks.

“I am a Lord of the Sith,” Scourge reminded him. “And an agent of Darth Nyriss. I order you to take me to the Emperor.”

“That is not permitted.”

“These are exceptional circumstances.”

“How so?”

“That is for the Emperor’s ears alone. I must speak to him in person.”

“The Emperor does not like to be disturbed.”

“He will want to hear what I have to say.”

“If he feels you’ve wasted his time, you will be punished,” the captain warned.

The calm, almost casual way she spoke the simple threat was far more effective than providing gruesome details. But Scourge wasn’t about to back down now.

“It will not be a waste of his time.”

The captain considered the request, then nodded. “As you wish.”

As she led him down the twisting corridors of the citadel, Scourge made a mental note of their path. When he and Revan finally struck at the Emperor, they would need to know as much of the layout of the citadel as possible.

Eventually they turned down a hall that terminated at a pair of large durasteel doors.

“The throne room lies beyond,” Captain Yarri told him. “There you will find the Emperor.” She turned to face him. “I will give you one last chance to reconsider.”

“I’ve made my decision.”

“Then you must proceed alone. I will not violate the sanctity of the throne room.”

She motioned with her hand, and two of the soldiers stepped forward, one by each of the massive doors. Grunting with exertion, they pushed the doors inward; then they stepped to the side, standing at attention with their backs against the wall just outside the throne room’s now-open entrance.

Scourge expected them to search him, or at least instruct him to turn over his weapons. But Yarri and the others simply stood at attention, waiting for him to enter. The fact that they showed no concern over letting an armed Sith Lord speak to the Emperor face-to-face without any kind of preparation was a testament to the Emperor’s unfathomable power.

Thinking about that power gave Scourge pause. Like Revan, the Emperor understood the Force in ways Scourge never would. It was possible he experienced the same kinds of visions as the Jedi; it was also possible he could peer into Scourge’s mind and instantly know the truth of everything he was saying. Meeting him face-to-face could be tantamount to suicide.

No, Scourge thought. If that were the case, he would have sensed Nyriss’s betrayal long ago.

As powerful as the Emperor might be, he was not omniscient. He was, however, intelligent and cunning enough to have held on to his throne for over a thousand years—an unprecedented reign among the conniving and cutthroat politics of the Sith. Which meant Scourge would have to be very careful not to say anything that might give him away.

Captain Yarri and the other guards were still patiently waiting. No doubt they were used to seeing this kind of hesitation in those who were about to meet with the Emperor.

Steeling himself, Scourge stepped inside.

The throne room was enormous: twenty meters wide and at least forty meters long, with an arched ceiling that rose fifteen meters above. Apart from the throne at the far end, it was virtually empty.

The throne sat on an elevated circular pedestal, several meters in diameter. As Scourge walked forward, he noticed that the throne was facing away from him, its high back effectively blocking any view of its occupant.

After a few more steps, the pedestal swiveled around, turning the throne so that it faced him. And for the first time in his life, Scourge set eyes upon the Emperor.

The figure before him appeared unremarkable. The Emperor was clad in unadorned black robes, the raised hood effectively hiding his face. Yet Scourge could feel the power of the dark side emanating from him with such intensity that it caused a faint rippling of the air.

The Emperor rose to his feet, and the durasteel doors swung shut behind Scourge with a booming crash. Scourge’s step faltered briefly at the sound, but he continued forward.

As he reached the foot of the pedestal he dropped to one knee, bowing low, his eyes focused on a spot on the ground in front of him.

“Rise, Lord Scourge,” the Emperor told him, “and speak your piece.”

Scourge stood up to address the Sith looming above him. The Emperor had thrown back his hood to reveal his face; his eyes were as black as the Void itself.

Staring into the hollow darkness of the Emperor’s gaze, Scourge’s mind flashed back to Nathema, and he shivered at the memory.

He tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat. His mouth was suddenly so dry he felt as if he might choke. He swallowed hard and coughed, finally bringing up enough saliva to talk.

“Three years ago I went to serve Darth Nyriss at your request,” Scourge began. “I discovered that Darth Xedrix was a traitor. He had allied himself with separatists to kill Nyriss, and I executed him for his crimes.”

“Your service has been noted,” the Emperor assured him.

There was something strange about the Emperor’s voice. It didn’t sound like the voice of a single being. It had an unusual echo and resonance, almost as if a great multitude were speaking his words in perfect symphony.

A grim theory passed unbidden through Scourge’s mind: was it possible all those that had been consumed by the ritual on Nathema still existed in some form within the Emperor himself? Nyriss said he’d devoured them, but what if she was only partially correct? What if he had imprisoned their spirits inside his own corporeal form, slowly feeding on their life energy over a thousand years to keep himself young and strong?

Scourge pushed such thoughts away; he needed to focus. One wrong word and the Emperor might see through his lies.

“I continued to serve Darth Nyriss after Xedrix’s death,” Scourge explained. “And I continued to investigate the separatists.”

He paused, waiting for the Emperor to ask what he’d found. After a few seconds he realized the inquiry was not coming.

“I became suspicious of one of Nyriss’s advisers, a man named Sechel. I turned the focus of my investigation to him. But Sechel was careful; he covered his tracks well. It took me until yesterday before I was certain of his guilt. He was also secretly working with the separatists, and he suffered the same fate as Xedrix.”

“You should speak to Darth Nyriss if you seek to be rewarded for your actions,” the Emperor said. There was no change in his tone, but the implied threat was clear: This is beneath me and you are wasting my time.

Scourge swallowed hard, his mouth dry once more. “That is not why I have come before you. Among Sechel’s effects I found these datafiles.”

He held up the disks.

“They show that Darth Xedrix was not the only member of the Dark Council to betray you. He was merely sacrificed to keep the involvement of the others secret. Darth Nyriss was also involved in the plot, along with several others.”

The Emperor had no physical reaction to the revelation; he stayed as still and calm as death itself. But the air around Scourge seemed to grow colder.

“Are you certain of these accusations?”

“I would stake my life on them, my lord Emperor.”

“You already have.”

Scourge felt a shiver trace its way down his spine, and he knew that far more than his life was at risk. The Emperor was no longer a member of the Sith species; his power and immortality had transformed him into a being unique in the galaxy. When he spoke of life and death, it had far deeper meaning than the mere physical existence of the lesser beings that served him.

“Does Nyriss know you are here?”

“No. I came to you as soon as I deciphered the data on Sechel’s disks.”

There was a long silence, and Scourge had the distinct impression that the Emperor was somehow communicating with someone outside the room.

A few seconds later the doors to the throne room opened and Captain Yarri strode in, accompanied by a Sith wearing the same dark robes as the Emperor.

They approached Scourge, and the robed Sith held out his hand expectantly. Scourge handed him the disks.

“Keep Lord Scourge in custody until this matter is settled,” the Emperor intoned.

“Forgive me, Lord Emperor,” Scourge said, speaking quickly but trying to keep his tone humble. “But Nyriss is expecting my return. If I am absent, she will grow suspicious.”

The Emperor’s dark eyes seemed to flicker with annoyance, and Scourge feared he had gone too far. The best he could hope for as punishment for his insolence would be a quick and relatively painless death.

However, when the Emperor spoke again it was not to pass judgment on him.

“You are bold to speak to me in this way,” he stated. “And because you are right, I will reward your initiative … this time. When Nyriss falls, you will be first in line for her seat on the Dark Council.”

“Thank you, Lord Emperor,” Scourge said with a bow.

“If your information proves false, however,” the Emperor added, “you will suffer a fate more terrible than anything you can imagine.”

As he spoke, the dark circles of his eyes seemed to fill with a swirling red mist, and for a brief instant the Emperor gave Scourge a glimpse of his true self.

Scourge cried out in anguish as the Emperor’s mind brushed against his, then he collapsed to the floor, shaking like a child. The touch lasted less than a second, but in that time he witnessed indescribable horrors that dwarfed anything the dark side could conjure even in his worst nightmares. And beneath the formless terrors lurked the unbearable Void, the pure emptiness of total annihilation.

It was over as quickly as it had begun, the awful vision retreating into his subconscious like a repressed memory as Scourge picked himself up off the floor. Neither Captain Yarri nor the robed Sith made any move to help him.

“Come with me,” the captain said once he was on his feet.

Only then did Scourge notice that the Emperor had retaken his seat on the throne, and that the pedestal had spun around to face away from him.

The dark-robed Sith stayed behind as Yarri led Scourge out of the throne room and into the hall beyond.

“I see why you tried to talk me out of this,” Scourge muttered as they made their way back toward the citadel’s main entrance.

“You took a great risk,” Yarri said, though it was hard to tell if she thought him admirable or foolish. “But if your information is good, it sounds like you’ll be on the Dark Council the next time we meet.”

“What about Nyriss?” Scourge asked. “What will the Emperor do to her?”

“She will be purged by the Imperial Guard,” Yarri said. “Along with her entire staff of followers.”

“I’d rather not be there when it happens,” Scourge said. “When will you make your move?”

“Soon,” the captain said. “For now, return to Nyriss so she doesn’t grow suspicious.”

They had reached the top of the staircase leading down from the citadel’s entrance to the street below.

“I will tell my people not to harm you,” Captain Yarri promised before turning away.

Just before she disappeared into the citadel she added, “But when the battle starts, try to stay out of the way just in case.”

CHAPTER 24

MEETRA DIDN’T LIKE THE IDEA of pretending to be Scourge’s newly purchased slave, but the Sith had assured her it was the best way for her to infiltrate Nyriss’s stronghold without drawing unwanted attention.

To complete the ruse, she had changed her functional pants and top for a revealing purple outfit more suited to a dancer in one of the low-rent clubs she’d frequented during her days as a mercenary. The tight-fitting clothes left her arms and midriff bare, but an excess of exposed skin wasn’t the worst part of the disguise.

Scourge had also insisted she wear a slave’s shock collar around her neck. It was nonfunctional, of course—she’d had T3 carefully inspect it to make sure—but she still rankled at the idea of adorning herself with a symbol so closely linked to the galaxy’s most vile practice.

However, as distasteful as it was, she knew Scourge was right. Every slave on Dromund Kaas was forced to wear the collar; without it, no one would believe their story. T3 was accompanying them, as well, similarly equipped with a nonfunctioning restraining bolt.

“Welcome back, Lord Scourge,” a guard stationed just inside the main entrance said as the trio passed by. “Darth Nyriss was just asking about you.”

“In what regard?” the Sith asked, as Meetra struggled to hide her interest.

“Sechel and Murtog both left two days ago; she wondered if you knew where they had gone.”

“They didn’t include me in their plans,” Scourge said with a shrug. “I’ve been scouring the slave markets for the past few days, looking for a worthy purchase.”

“Of course, my lord,” the guard said with a slight bow. He snuck a quick peek at Meetra, a knowing glint in his eye and a faint smile on his lips, before turning his attention back to Lord Scourge. “I will inform Darth Nyriss that you have not seen the others,” he said.

“Good. Once I am settled, I will go speak with her myself to see if she wants me to inquire after them.”

He turned on his heel, dismissing the underling as he continued down the hall with long, quick strides. Meetra and T3 scrambled to keep pace, staying a respectful two steps behind their supposed owner.

Once they were out of sight and earshot of the guards, Scourge stopped and turned to address them. “This could complicate things,” he said. “Nyriss wouldn’t have asked after the others if she wasn’t growing concerned. I had hoped to avoid her until the Emperor made his move, but if I put off seeing her now it will look suspicious.”

Scourge had spoken to the Emperor just that morning; Meetra imagined it would take at least another day or two before he assembled his forces to strike at Nyriss.

“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she warned him. “If you meet with her, Tee-Three and I had better go with you.”

“Ridiculous!” Scourge spat. “I would never be so insulting as to bring one of my personal slaves into a meeting with someone of Nyriss’s rank.”

“Then you’d better think of something fast,” Meetra said. “Because if this all goes sour, I’m going to whip out my lightsaber and start chopping off heads.”

“I could bring you if I was presenting you to Nyriss as a gift,” Scourge said. “But then there would be no reason for me to keep you close by.”

“Forget it,” Meetra snarled.

T3 echoed her sentiment with a shrill squawk.

“Then what do you suggest?” Scourge demanded.

“Take me to Revan now,” Meetra said. “I’ll take my chances on fighting our way out.”

“I didn’t bring you here so you could throw your life away. And I have no intention of becoming a martyr.”

Meetra was about to fire back another angry retort when the stronghold was rocked to its foundations by a very loud explosion coming from somewhere off to the east.

“The Imperial Guard,” Scourge gasped. “They’re here!”

Alarms began to ring through the corridor, mingling with the sounds of shouts and running feet as Nyriss’s people responded to the sudden attack.

Meetra reached up and yanked the slave collar from her neck, hurling it across the floor. T3 mimicked her by popping off his restraining bolt.

“The dungeon is this way,” Scourge said, quickly putting their now-pointless argument behind them. “Follow me.”

The explosions continued as he led them through the twisting passages. They were coming from all sides; obviously the Imperial Guard had the entire stronghold surrounded. Based on the frequency and size of the distant explosions, Meetra guessed they were using an artillery assault to try to breach the walls at multiple locations. Males and females ran past them in both directions, some rushing to join the fray and others scrambling to safety. The unexpected attack had caught Nyriss’s people completely off guard. They were in disarray, their efforts to defend the stronghold uncoordinated and disorganized.

“I would have expected someone on the Dark Council to put up better resistance,” Meetra said as they turned a corner and raced down another hall.

“The security chief and three of his top lieutenants aren’t here to rally them, thanks to you,” he reminded her.

They rounded another corner and confronted the first real sign of any kind of counterattack. Eight soldiers led by a lightsaber-wielding Sith acolyte had taken up positions in the corridor roughly ten meters away from a large, smoking hole in the wall.

As the smoke cleared, dozens of red-uniformed soldiers poured through the breach, armed with blaster pistols and electrostaffs.

Nyriss’s people opened fire, mowing down the first wave. Those in the ranks behind never even slowed. Driven forward by their furious devotion to the Emperor, they charged the enemy line with a reckless disregard for their own safety.

Had the defenders held their ground and continued to fire, they might have survived several more waves. But their morale was shaken by the berserker mentality of their attackers, so instead they broke ranks and tried to flee. None of them succeeded.

Three were taken down by blasterfire, shot in the back as they turned to run. The other five, including the acolyte with the lightsaber, were swallowed up by a sea of red-uniformed guards and smashed down with electrostaffs.

The entire incident took less than ten seconds; plenty of time for Scourge to lead Meetra and T3 in another direction. But instead of trying to avoid the melee, the Sith had simply held his ground and watched.

As the last defender fell, the invaders broke into two teams and set off in opposite directions down the hall. The chance to hide until they passed was lost; as the red-robed butchers approached, Meetra started to reach for the lightsaber hidden inside her black, knee-high leather boot.

Scourge grabbed her wrist and shook his head. He stepped back against the wall, dragging her with him. Recognizing Scourge as a friendly target, the Imperial Guards ran past without even a second glance.

“The dungeons are close,” Scourge told her once they were alone again.

They were fortunate enough not to encounter any more battles for the rest of the journey, though they came across the aftermath of several violent skirmishes. Some of the bodies wore the red uniforms of the invaders, but for every one of them there were at least five of Nyriss’s people.

Security guards, acolytes, and even civilian staff lay strewn about the halls and corridors; the Emperor’s Guard had spared no one. Meetra understood there had been no other way to free Revan, but she still felt revulsion at the wholesale slaughter. When she noticed the body of a young Twi’lek slave lying on the floor with her throat cut, she forced herself to look away.

“Nyriss’s personal attendant,” Scourge noted. “But I don’t see Nyriss among the dead.”

T3 beeped and Meetra shook her head.

“I don’t think she escaped,” she said, remembering the ruthless efficiency and organization of the attacking troops.

“Her fate is irrelevant,” Scourge declared.

“Right. Take us to Revan.”

They rounded a final corner, bringing them face-to-face with a massive durasteel door. Scourge stepped up and punched in a security code, but the door didn’t open. He tried again, and the pad responded with a sharp buzz.

“The whole place is in emergency lockdown,” he said. “My security codes won’t work.”

“Don’t worry,” Meetra said confidently. “Tee-Three can slice through any security system.”

“He’d better hurry,” Scourge said. “I don’t sense guards on the other side of the door.”

“You think they fled?”

He shook his head. “I think when the alarms went off Nyriss told them to execute the prisoner.”

AT FIRST REVAN THOUGHT the distant explosions were an unusual side effect of some new drug combination his captors were trying on him. But when the alarms started blaring, his addled mind realized the facility was under attack.

“Meetra,” he mumbled.

He struggled to his feet, battling the mind-numbing effects of the chemicals coursing through his veins. Had his mind been able to focus, he could have purged them from his system. But of course, the entire point of the drugs was to keep him from drawing on the Force.

A few seconds later he heard someone outside the door of his cell. When the door opened he expected to see Scourge, but instead he found himself faced with an unfamiliar guard.

The young man was a dark-skinned human. He was holding a blaster out at arm’s length, pointing it at Revan. His hand was visibly trembling.

From outside another voice shouted, “Hurry. Do it!”

Even in Revan’s clouded state, the situation was obvious. In the wake of the attack, someone had ordered them to kill the prisoner.

“Squeeze the trigger and it will be the last action you ever take,” Revan warned.

“Come on,” the other voice said. “Just do it! What’s the problem?”

“Shut up!” the young man shouted to his hidden companion. “You were too scared to even open the cell!”

Their fear was completely understandable. Since his incarceration, Revan had been held under strict quarantine. Nobody had been given access to his cell without Scourge being present, and even then the Sith had mostly come to see him alone. No doubt it had been drilled into the guards’ heads over and over how powerful and dangerous the prisoner was. They’d been warned against having any dealings with him whatsoever; his mysterious reputation built up over years of speculation and rumors among his jailers.

“Set the weapon down if you want to live,” Revan told the young man. Through the veil of drugs, he strained to reach out with the Force, amplifying the other’s fear and confusion.

“No!” his friend shouted above the piercing alarms, still staying hidden around the corner. “He’ll kill us!”

“I promise to spare you,” Revan said. “I give you my word as a Jedi.”

“See? See?” the man with the gun squealed. “I told you he was a Jedi!”

“Nyriss has sent you on a suicide mission,” Revan told them.

“How do you know who we work for?” the man barked, the pitch of his voice rising.

“The Force shows me many things.”

Another explosion from above, this one much closer, caused the guard to nearly drop his weapon. He fumbled it briefly before seizing it with both hands and quickly bringing it up again to point at Revan.

Revan briefly contemplated making a grab for the blaster, but the drugs slowed him physically as much as mentally. Instead he remained still and calm.

“This is bad,” the young man said, squeezing the blaster’s handle so hard that his knuckles were becoming discolored. “This is bad.”

“Just walk away from all this,” Revan told them. “It’s your only real chance of survival.”

“We can’t walk away,” the guard moaned. “The door upstairs won’t open. We’re locked in!”

“Just shoot him!” his friend shouted. “He can’t hurt you. If he was going to stop you, he would’ve done it by now.”

There were several seconds of silence, punctuated by the alarms and another series of explosions in rapid succession.

“Nyriss will kill us if she finds us down here with you still alive,” the man with the blaster said, his voice almost apologetic.

“Nyriss is already dead,” Revan said, trying a different tactic as he tried to apply even more pressure through the Force. “Do you hear the explosions? The alarms? My friends are coming to liberate me.

“You say you’re trapped in here. What do you think my friends will do if they find you standing over my corpse?”

“He’s got a point,” the unseen speaker said reluctantly. “Listen to all those bombs going off. This isn’t just some quick hit-and-run attack.”

“Surrender to me and I will guarantee your safety,” Revan said. “I give you my word as a Jedi.”

The young man’s head turned quickly back and forth, from Revan to his friend outside the cell and then back to Revan again. Then he dropped the blaster as if it were on fire.

Revan calmly stepped out of the cell and got his first look at the other guard: another human male, perhaps a few years older than the first. Both guards were frozen with fear, watching his every move intently. Each time the alarm whooped overhead, they flinched.

“I will not harm you,” Revan assured them.

Both men seemed to relax a little, and Revan tried to project calm, soothing waves through the Force to further ease their minds.

“Sit down over there against the wall until my friends arrive,” he suggested. “You don’t want them to mistake you for a threat.”

Seeing the wisdom of his words, both men scrambled to follow his instructions.

Several minutes later they heard a loud crash from above, followed by the sound of footsteps racing down the steep stairs.

And then Meetra descended into view, dressed in some type of dancer’s outfit. Seeing Revan, her face broke into a wide grin.

“I knew I’d find you,” she said, rushing over to embrace him fiercely.

“It’s been a long time,” Revan whispered, wrapping his arms around her.

After a moment she broke the embrace, and Revan noticed her nose had crinkled up against the powerful odor wafting off him.

“A real long time,” he said with an apologetic shrug, eliciting a soft laugh from Meetra.

“A touching reunion,” a familiar voice said.

“Lord Scourge!” one of the guards shrieked in terror.

Revan spun Meetra to the side and stepped in front of her, an instinctive but foolish move. Meetra was a Jedi; she knew how to handle herself. And unarmed he was no match for the Sith.

“It’s okay,” Meetra said, placing a hand on Revan’s shoulder. “Scourge is here to help us.”

It took Revan’s foggy mind a moment to process what she was saying. Once he figured it out, he couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

“So I finally get to learn your name,” he said. “Scourge. No wonder you didn’t want to tell me.”

“Make jokes once we’re safely away from here,” Scourge said.

“He’s right,” Meetra told him. “Tee-Three’s keeping watch at the top of the stairs. Come on.”

“Go ahead,” the Sith told them, drawing his lightsaber and approaching the guards cowering on the floor. “I’ll take care of the witnesses.”

“No,” Revan said. “I promised to protect them.”

Scourge gave him a look of utter disbelief. “It’s going to be hard enough to get out of here without escorting these pathetic excuses for soldiers.”

“I gave them my word,” Revan said. A rush of dizziness swept over him, and he reeled.

“What’s wrong?” Meetra asked, reaching out to catch him before he fell.

“They keep me drugged,” Revan said. “I just need a minute.”

With Meetra’s help he lowered himself to the floor. His heart was pounding and his head was spinning. During the confrontation with the guard, he must have instinctively used the Force to keep the worst of the drug’s effects at bay. But he wasn’t strong enough to keep it up any longer, and now his body was responding with an acute over-reaction.

Scourge stepped over to a medkit on the wall and yanked it open. He grabbed a hypodermic filled with a green luminescent fluid.

“This will help,” he said, injecting it into Revan’s arm. “But it will take a few minutes.”

“I have something else,” Meetra told him. “Bastila asked me to give it to you.”

She nodded at Scourge, who pulled a package from the large pouch on his hip. He tossed it to Revan, who didn’t even try to catch it, but just picked it up off the floor.

The object was wrapped in cloth. It was clearly metal, and there was something oddly familiar about it.

“You spoke with Bastila?” he asked. “You saw her?”

Meetra nodded. “And your son. They’re both well.”

Revan smiled. His mind felt like it was floating blissfully away, but he wasn’t sure if the euphoria was triggered by thoughts of his family or the drugs still working their way out of his system.

He unwrapped the cloth to reveal the masked helmet he had worn during his campaigns against the Mandalorians and the Republic. In an instant, all his lost memories came flooding back to him.

A million images—years upon years of forgotten people, places, and events—flooded his consciousness simultaneously. In his weakened state it was too much to take. As his brain went into sensory overload, his body went limp.

——

“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” Scourge demanded as Revan collapsed on the floor.

“I—I don’t know,” Meetra said, her hands fumbling to check Revan’s pulse as he lay motionless on the ground.

His eyes were closed, but the lids were fluttering madly. Otherwise he was completely still.

From the stairs, T3 let out a piercing wail, several octaves higher than the incessant alarms.

“Someone’s coming!” Meetra said.

Scourge turned to the guards still sitting on the floor.

“Ready your blasters, you fools!” he shouted.

As they scrambled to their feet, T3 let out what could only be described as a shriek of terror. An instant later, the little astromech came tumbling down the stairs and bounced across the floor as if he’d been shot from a cannon. He landed in the corner on his back, his wheels still spinning.

“Get Revan out of the way,” Scourge said to Meetra.

As she dragged the Jedi’s unconscious body into the nearby cell, one of the guards drew his weapon, while the other rushed over and picked his discarded blaster up from where Revan had kicked it aside.

Scourge nodded at the guards. In response to his silent command they crept to the foot of the stairs and peered up toward the door above.

A burst of purple lightning arced down the steps, catching both men in the chest. They barely had time to scream before they were turned into charred and smoking husks.

Scourge took a step back, knowing exactly who had been responsible for unleashing the fury of the dark side against the hapless guards.

Nyriss made her way slowly down the stairs, the outspread fingers of her left hand still crackling with electricity. In her right hand she held her lightsaber, the blade humming softly. By the time she reached the bottom, Meetra had emerged from the nearby cell.

She ignited her lightsaber and came to stand beside Scourge.

“What’s this?” Nyriss asked, her voice mocking. “Another Jedi?”

When neither of them answered, she turned her head to the side and laughed bitterly. “The Imperial Guard will make sure I never leave my stronghold alive,” she told them. “But neither will any of you.”

She raised her free hand above her head and fired off another burst of lightning. Both Scourge and Meetra threw themselves clear of the deadly electrical bolt, but in doing so they gave Nyriss the early advantage.

Before they could recover, she leapt at them. Despite her withered appearance, she moved with the all the speed and ferocity of a dark side warrior in her prime. She landed right between her two adversaries, her blade flashing back and forth in a series of slashes and cuts that immediately threw her two opponents on the defensive.

Scourge barely managed to parry the first wave of her assault, unable to even think about countering with an attack of his own. Another quick thrust forced him off balance and he staggered backward.

Nyriss seized on the opportunity to focus all her efforts on breaking through Meetra’s defenses. The Jedi was clearly overmatched; though she managed to hold her ground, she was forced down to one knee.

In the awkward position her right flank was exposed, and Nyriss brought her blade in to deliver a crippling cut. At the same time, Scourge lashed out with the Force, catching Nyriss flush in the center of her chest.

An ordinary foe would have been thrown clear across the room, but Nyriss instinctively threw up a Force barrier to protect herself, absorbing and redirecting the brunt of the impact. Even so, Scourge’s attack knocked her off balance just enough to send her lightsaber wide of the mark, giving Meetra the opportunity she needed to scramble away to safety.

Scourge rushed forward, hoping to drive Nyriss back into a corner, but she met his charge with an invisible wave of rippling energy. It picked Scourge up and tossed him head-over-heels, sending him crashing to the wall.

Dazed, he looked up just in time to see another bolt of violet lightning catch Meetra in the chest. Like Nyriss, she threw up a barrier to save herself from the worst of it, but she was still knocked from her feet.

“Did you think I would be as easy to defeat as Xedrix?” Nyriss shouted, raising her lightsaber triumphantly above her head.

The air around her began to crackle and grow hot as she gathered herself for the killing blow. Scourge felt the energy building inside her, and he knew he would be powerless to stop it. Nyriss was too powerful; her command of the dark side was too strong.

“Gaze upon me and see your doom!” she declared. “I am Darth Nyriss, Lord of the Sith. I am the conqueror of Drezzi, the destroyer of Melldia, and a member of the Dark Council!”

Scourge braced himself for the end.

Just then, Revan emerged from the cell. He had pulled the hood of his Jedi robe up to cover his head, and he wore the red-and-gray mask, hiding his face.

A dozen bolts of lightning sprang from Nyriss’s hand, arcing across the room to incinerate her enemies. Instead of leaping back into the cell to avoid the deadly attack, Revan stepped forward to intercept it.

Both hands were held in front of him, his arms fully extended at shoulder height, his thumbs touching and his fingers splayed wide. He drew the bolts of lightning into his waiting grasp, channeling them away from their intended targets and absorbing their power.

“I am Revan reborn,” he said to Nyriss. “And before me you are nothing.”

Nyriss’s eyes went wide as Revan unleashed the power of her own attack against her. She tried to throw up another Force shield, but the bolts ripped it apart and continued on unabated. The lightning engulfed her, the intense heat consuming her instantly, leaving only a pile of charred ash.

Scourge slowly clambered to his feet as Revan helped Meetra up. In the corner, the upended astromech let out a plaintive whistle and awkwardly managed to rock himself back into an upright position.

Revan walked over and knelt beside the closer of the two dead soldiers. He placed a hand on the man’s chest, but didn’t speak.

“We have to go,” Meetra said softly, coming over and gently touching Revan on the shoulder to interrupt his thoughts. “We don’t want the Imperial Guard to know you were here.”

He stood up and slowly turned to Scourge.

There was something unnerving about staring into the faceless mask; it made Revan seem more intimidating, more powerful. Or maybe Scourge just felt that way because he’d watched him destroy Nyriss.

Whatever the reason, he was more confident than ever that he’d made the right choice. If anyone had the strength to stop the Emperor, it was this man.

“This is yours,” the Sith said, taking the hilt of Revan’s lightsaber from his belt.

Revan accepted the gift with a brief nod, then simply said, “Get us out of here.”

CHAPTER 25

SCOURGE LED THEM UP the stairs and back to the breach in the wall where the Emperor’s Guard had first burst in. Though they could hear the distant sounds of battle echoing faintly through the halls, they didn’t encounter combatants from either side.

Once they were outside Meetra allowed herself to breathe a sigh of relief.

Night had fallen, but several fires burning inside Nyriss’s stronghold illuminated the grounds, giving them a clear view of the destruction. The thick stone wall surrounding the courtyard and the building had been reduced to rubble, and judging by the number of bodies strewn about the courtyard, this had been the location of the fiercest fighting.

They picked their way through the carnage to where Scourge’s speeder stood unharmed near the landing pad. Every vehicle around it had been destroyed by artillery fire.

“It’s a miracle this thing’s still in one piece,” Revan remarked.

“The Guard must have been watching our arrival,” Scourge said. “They knew which speeder was mine.”

The four of them climbed in, Revan and Meetra helping T3, then headed for the cave where Meetra and Scourge had first met.

During the journey, Meetra tried to study Revan without being too obvious. He was still wearing the red-and-gray mask; for her this was his true face. She knew what he looked like beneath his helmet, but he had almost never removed it during their campaign against the Mandalorians.

Seeing him in the cell without it had struck her as odd. The passage of the years and the suffering he had endured as a prisoner were clearly etched on his features. When he wore the mask, however, all that was hidden. It made him look indomitable, invincible—a legend come to life.

Meetra remembered what Bastila had said to her when she had given her the mask. She said she had hidden it from Revan for all those years because she feared what it represented. She feared it would change him. Now Meetra understood what she meant.

Without the mask he looked more human. It was easier to remember he was just a man, with all the weaknesses and vulnerabilities that implied. With the mask, however, Revan was an icon, a symbol. He was the shaper of history, an individual defined by his actions rather than his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs.

Maybe Bastila was right; maybe Revan needed to become what he once had been to survive this. He had easily bested Darth Nyriss, but the Emperor was a much greater opponent. And yet she couldn’t help but feel some small tinge of regret knowing the man Bastila loved might have been swallowed up by the weight of Revan’s own past.

Scourge brought the speeder in to land, and the three passengers disembarked.

“You’re not coming?” Meetra asked when the Sith made no move to join them.

“I’m going back to Kaas City,” he said. “I’ll see if I can learn any more details about the attack. If we’re lucky, the Emperor has spread his resources too thin, leaving him vulnerable. Now might be the time to strike.”

“Bring back some supplies,” Revan said. “Food. Water. Soap so I can wash the filth of that prison off me.”

Scourge nodded. “I’ll be back in a few hours.”

The three of them went into the cave, T3 using his lamp to illuminate the dark interior.

The cave was empty now. While waiting for Scourge to return from his meeting with the Emperor, Meetra and T3 had buried the bodies of the fallen security chief and his soldiers in a bare patch of ground a short hike away from the cave’s entrance.

“I’m sure you’re eager to change out of those clothes,” Revan said.

What about you? Meetra thought. Why haven’t you taken off that mask yet?

“We have something to show you first,” she said. “Tee-Three, play the holovid.”

The droid rolled up beside them, projecting a thirty-centimeter-tall image of Bastila cooing over Revan’s three-year-old son.

“I don’t know if you’ll ever see this,” Bastila said, adjusting a lock of hair on the boy’s head as she spoke to the holorecorder. “But I have to believe you’ll return someday. And when you do, I thought you’d want to share your son’s birthday.”

Revan didn’t say anything. As if in a daze, he slowly sat down on the floor so the projection was at eye level.

“Wave to Daddy,” Bastila said, pointing in the direction of the recorder. “Say, ‘We miss you!’ ”

The boy did as instructed, waving his tiny arm vigorously as he repeated Bastila’s words.

To Meetra’s relief, Revan reached up and removed his mask as the holovid continued to play, setting it down on the ground beside him.

“I know we didn’t discuss names before you left,” Bastila said. “But I called him Vaner.”

Revan smiled, realizing it was an anagram of his own name.

“I want him to know who his father is,” the holo continued. “I want him to understand you are a part of him.”

A tear rolled down Revan’s cheek as he watched the vid, and Meetra quietly retreated into a dark corner of the cave to let him watch in private. She’d stashed her clothes here before she and Scourge had left for Nyriss’s stronghold, and the shadows gave her the privacy she needed to change out of her slave’s outfit.

Instead of the black pants and sleeveless red shirt she’d worn on her first arrival, however, she once again donned her Jedi robes. She didn’t consciously think about her choice, and it was only as she was clipping the lightsaber to her belt that she realized what she’d done.

You’re following Revan’s lead, she thought. If he’s wearing Jedi robes, then so are you. Just like old times.

As the holovid continued to play, she lingered near the back of the cave. She couldn’t help but overhear Bastila say, “I love you, Revan,” as the recording came to an end.

“I love you, too,” Revan responded, the acoustics of the cave making his voice unnaturally loud.

Meetra shifted her feet uncomfortably at the exchange. She wasn’t jealous of Bastila; Meetra loved Revan, but not in that way. She’d never had romantic feelings for her mentor. Rather, she regarded him with deep admiration and intense devotion.

At this moment, however, she was acutely aware that Bastila and Revan shared a relationship that went far deeper than what Meetra shared with him. She knew she shouldn’t begrudge them that, but some small part of her couldn’t help but feel her reunion with Revan had been preempted by a holovid.

T3 beeped inquisitively as the video came to an end.

“Of course,” Revan said. “I’ll watch it a hundred times over if I can. But give me a minute.”

He stood up and went to join Meetra in the back of the cave.

“Thank you for this,” he said. “And for saving me.”

“It was nothing.”

“No,” Revan said, shaking his head. “Do not underestimate all you have accomplished. Nobody else could have found me across an entire galaxy. Nobody else could have saved me from my imprisonment.” He studied her for a moment. “I was told you had been cut off from the Force, but I can sense its power in you. I always knew you had great potential, but you have become far greater than I could ever have imagined.”

“I’m just following in your footsteps.”

“Not anymore,” Revan replied. “You have blazed your own trail. I can sense you have walked a path even I would not dare to tread. I owe you everything, Meetra. It is a debt I will never be able to repay.”

“No,” Meetra said with a wan smile. “Without your teaching, I could never have become what I am today. I am the one who owes a debt she can never repay.”

“Then why don’t we call it even?” Revan said.

“A wise and just solution,” she replied. “As always.”

“Would you like to see the holovid of Bastila and my son?” he asked, offering her his hand. “It would mean more to watch it with a friend at my side.”

“Of course,” she said, a lump forming in her throat. “It would be my honor.”

WHEN SCOURGE ARRIVED BACK at the cave he found Meetra and Revan huddled side by side on the floor, staring at a holovid projected by T3. He caught a glimpse of a young human female and what Scourge assumed was her child, but as he approached the droid quickly cut the recording off.

“What was that?” he asked.

“My wife and son,” Revan said.

He stood up stiffly and stretched, and Scourge wondered how long he had been sitting on the floor of the cave watching the holovid. He also noticed that Revan had removed his mask; it was sitting on the ground beside him, seemingly forgotten.

“I didn’t know you were married,” he said.

When Revan didn’t answer, it was clear he had no intention of discussing his personal life with a Sith. They might be allies, Scourge realized, but they were far from friends. Which was as it should be—for a Sith Lord, friends were a liability.

“What did you find out?” Meetra asked as Revan extended a hand to help her up.

“It wasn’t just Nyriss who was attacked. The Emperor killed them all.”

“The files you showed me listed five current members of the Dark Council plotting against him,” Meetra said, looking to clarify. “Are you saying the Emperor’s Guard wiped out all five in the space of a single day?”

“I said he killed them all,” Scourge replied. “All twelve members of the Dark Council—even those who weren’t part of the conspiracy. He wanted to send a message no one would ever forget.”

“How is that possible?” Revan asked. “He attacked a dozen of the most powerful Sith Lords in their seats of power simultaneously? How many troops does he have?”

“The Imperial Guard were only unleashed on Nyriss and two others. The Emperor must have assumed they were the ones least likely to answer his summons. The other nine were called together in the hours before the attack to meet with the Emperor at his citadel. None of them left alive.”

“So what’s happening now?” Meetra asked.

“News of the massacre spread quickly,” Scourge said. “As you would expect, the result was chaos. Thousands are fleeing for their lives, fearing we are on the brink of civil war. Others see an opportunity to strike at rivals weakened by the sudden loss of political allies, and armed platoons are roaming the streets.”

“How did the Emperor react?” Revan asked.

“He’s declared martial law and imposed a curfew over the entire city. The Guard are enforcing his orders with their typical ruthless efficiency. He also forbade any ship or shuttle to land or leave before he launched his attack, and he shut down all offworld communications.”

“He’s quarantined the entire planet,” Revan said. “He wants to get everything here back under control before any other worlds hear that he slaughtered the entire Dark Council.”

“You told me he was mad,” Meetra muttered, “but this is outrageous. There had to be a better way for him to handle this. Thousands of his people are going to die before order is restored.”

“The last time I was here on Dromund Kaas, I peered into the depths of the Emperor’s mind,” Revan told them. “A thousand lives mean nothing to him.”

“The last time you were here?” Scourge said, pouncing on the phrase. “Have some of your memories returned?”

“Seeing my old mask triggered something. I remember everything now,” Revan admitted. “Malak and I learned the Sith still survived. We came here to Dromund Kaas to investigate. Posing as mercenaries, we spent months learning everything we could about the Emperor and his people. Even back then he was already planning his invasion of the Republic. When Malak and I learned of his preparations, we tried to stop him. We found a member of the Imperial Guard who was willing to sneak us inside the citadel.”

“Impossible,” Scourge declared. “The Guard are bound to the Emperor’s will at the end of their training by a powerful ritual. They would never betray him!”

“True, but we didn’t know that at the time,” Revan explained. “We were being led into a trap; the Emperor wanted us to come to him. When we got to his throne room, he was ready and waiting.” His voice dropped low. “We underestimated his power. When we confronted him, he didn’t even have to fight us. Instead, he broke our wills. He dominated our minds, turning us into puppets to do his bidding. He sent us back to the Republic as the vanguard of his invasion, with instructions to report back when all resistance was crushed.

“But though we had underestimated the Emperor’s power, he underestimated us, as well. Our wills were stronger than he thought; our minds twisted and perverted his instructions until we thought we were acting of our own accord. Malak and I were turned to the dark side, but in doing so we found the strength to block out all memory of the Sith and the Emperor, partially freeing us from his control.”

“But you still called yourself Sith,” Meetra said, puzzled. “You still attacked the Republic and brought it to the verge of collapse before the Jedi captured you. And even after you stopped Malak, the Republic was still as vulnerable as it’s ever been. Why didn’t the Emperor just invade then?”

“He didn’t know what had happened,” Revan explained. “He was waiting for us to report back. When he heard nothing, he assumed we had failed. He returned to his original plans, slowly and carefully building up his strength so that when he finally did invade there would be no chance of defeat.”

Meetra glanced over at Scourge, and the Sith could guess what she was thinking. He’d originally allied with them because he feared invading the Republic would be a disaster. With Revan implying the Emperor could actually succeed, she feared he would turn on them.

Two days earlier she would have been right. However, everything had changed when Scourge met the Emperor in person.

“I won’t betray you,” he assured her. “When I spoke with the Emperor, I briefly touched his mind. What he did on Nathema only hints at the horrors he is capable of unleashing on the galaxy. I truly understand what he has become, and I know that unchecked he will lead us to annihilation. It is inevitable.”

“A good speech,” Meetra said. “But why should we believe you?”

“It’s true,” Revan assured her. “When the Emperor broke my will, he looked into my mind, and I was able to see the reflection of his own evil. Invading the Republic is only the first step of his plan. He has become obsessed with power and immortality. The dark side is like a cancer inside him; it grows faster than he can feed it. He has consumed an entire world, but he still hungers. And with his hunger comes an all-consuming fear. He has lived a thousand years; he knows he could live many thousands more. He is terrified of death.”

“Everyone is scared of dying,” Meetra said.

“Not like this. For him death is not merely the end of his physical existence. The Emperor has spent a millennium gathering his strength; if he dies he will lose everything. The thought of near-infinite power slipping from his grasp has driven him mad. In his twisted mind, the only way to preserve what he has accomplished is to annihilate every potential threat in the galaxy.”

“Nathema was just the beginning,” Scourge agreed. “He will destroy world after world, his power and madness growing in concert until he alone is left, Emperor over an empty and lifeless galaxy.”

Meetra stared at the two in horror.

“You’ve been to Nathema,” Scourge said. “You felt the Void. You know what the Emperor is capable of.”

“She understands,” Revan said, reading her expression more accurately than Scourge. “That’s not it.”

“He’s quarantined Dromund Kaas,” Meetra said, trying to lead them to the same conclusion. “What if he’s preparing to do the same thing here that he did on Nathema?”

Scourge hadn’t considered that possibility, and it chilled him to his core.

“Is that possible?” he asked. “Nyriss told me the ritual on Nathema took days, if not weeks. And the Emperor had to trick hundreds of other powerful Sith into working with him so he could draw on their power.”

“He’s stronger now,” Revan said. “But even if it’s possible, I don’t think he’ll go that far. At least not yet. He is too patient, too careful. Dromund Kaas is the heart of his Empire and the seat of his power. He has too many valuable resources here to throw it all away. But once he is ready, there will be nothing left to stop him from launching his invasion of the Republic.”

“What do you mean?” Meetra asked.

Scourge answered on Revan’s behalf. “The Emperor had to keep his plans secret because he knew the Dark Council would oppose him. Now they are wiped out. And whoever he picks to replace them will remember what happened to their predecessors, and be too terrified to speak out against him.”

“He can also use this to rally the will of the people,” Revan added. “He can claim the Dark Council was working with agents of the Republic, and that is why he destroyed them. He will claim the Sith Empire has been rediscovered by its old enemy. He will convince his subjects that the only hope of survival is to strike first.”

“He won’t make his proclamation until order is restored on Dromund Kaas,” Scourge noted.

“That doesn’t give us much time,” Meetra remarked, remembering how efficiently the Guard had overrun Nyriss’s stronghold.

“The Guard are patrolling the streets, enforcing the curfew,” Scourge said. “Only a handful remain stationed at the citadel. Now is our best chance to strike at the Emperor.”

“This time I know his tricks and tactics,” Revan assured them. “I can shield my mind from being dominated by his will, and I can show you how to do the same.”

“We should wait until dawn,” Scourge said. “There will be fewer people out in the light of day. And most of the Guard will be recovering at the barracks after patrolling the streets all night.”

“Good,” Revan said. “That gives us a few hours to try to get some rest.”

Both Meetra and Scourge nodded in agreement, though the Sith doubted any of them would get much sleep.

CHAPTER 26

SCOURGE HOVERED ON THE EDGE OF SLEEP. His body was exhausted, but his mind was churning. Unable to still his thoughts and let sleep wash over him, he tossed and turned.

Unlike his Jedi companions, he had never learned to sit and meditate in order to draw sustenance from the Force. The dark side was about action and activity, not restful contemplation. But he knew that if he didn’t try something, he would have to endure a long and restless night.

He propped himself into a sitting position and closed his eyes, trying to open himself up to the Force. Taking slow, deep breaths, he focused on letting his mind open itself to the infinite possibilities swirling through time and space. After several minutes he managed to drift into a state of semiconsciousness.

Revan lay motionless on the floor of the Citadel’s throne room. Meetra and Scourge lay beside him, their bodies twisted and broken, clinging to the last moments of life.

The Emperor approached the trio, regarding them with a cold and casual contempt as he loomed above his fallen adversaries. Scourge tried to stand and flee, but his crippled limbs wouldn’t support his weight. All he could do was crawl on his belly like a worm.

His efforts drew the attention of the Emperor, who didn’t speak but came over and lowered himself to one knee. He grabbed Scourge by the shoulder and rolled him over so he was staring up into the twin voids of the Emperor’s eyes.

As he reached out a hand and placed it on Scourge’s forehead, the Sith began to scream.

Scourge’s eyes popped open as his mind snapped to a fully alert state of consciousness. His heart was pounding, and he could still hear the sound of his own scream ringing in his ears.

Glancing around the cave he realized the scream must have been confined to his mind; neither Meetra nor Revan had reacted in any way. She was sitting in the same cross-legged pose Revan had often assumed during his time in Nyriss’s prison. Revan was kneeling in front of T3-M4, hunched forward as he rewatched the holovid of his wife and son.

Scourge shook his head, trying to push away the remnants of his dream. But the memory stayed with him, and he began to realize that what he had seen was something more than a mere nightmare.

The experience lacked the hazy, surreal feel of a dream. It had been too vivid, the details too sharp and precise to be a figment manifested by his subconscious. There was only one possible explanation for what had happened: the Force had given Scourge a vision.

Scourge’s hands began to tremble slightly as he realized he had witnessed his own destruction at the Emperor’s hand. Even worse, the vision made it clear that both Meetra and Revan would suffer the same fate. He had opened himself up to the Force, and it had shown him that their coming mission would end in failure.

He glanced over at the Jedi, wondering if he should warn them. Even if he did, would they believe what he said? Could he believe it?

His training at the Academy had taught him little about the prophetic abilities of the Force. Was what he had seen inevitable, or was it a fate he could somehow avoid? Maybe his strong connection to the dark side would somehow color his visions, distorting them so they showed the worst of all possible futures.

The simplest course would be to tell Revan what he had seen and hear his opinion of it. But Scourge knew his allies’ trust in him was already fragile. If he admitted he thought their mission was doomed, it could convince them he couldn’t be trusted. They might even decide it was his presence that caused their failure; after all, he was the one who had seen the vision.

Scourge continued to struggle with what he had seen, trying to understand what it meant and what he should do about it. But after several more minutes of silently talking himself in circles, he realized he simply wouldn’t find the answers on his own.

He pushed himself to his feet and went over to where Revan was sitting. T3 paused the playback of the holovid as he approached, but left the still image of Revan’s wife and son hovering in the air.

“May I speak with you?” Scourge asked, taking a seat beside the Jedi without waiting for a reply.

“You may,” Revan said, not bothering to tear his gaze away from the projection of his family.

“I want to know more about the Force,” Scourge said. “I want to understand it as you do.”

Revan turned to give him a quizzical look. “You want to know this now?”

“This might be our last chance,” Scourge said. “I’ve been thinking about something you said to me the last time we spoke in your cell.”

“What is that?”

“You knew Meetra was coming to rescue you because the Force had given you a vision.”

Revan smiled. “Actually, I was bluffing. I was trying to trick you. I was hoping you might dream of me escaping, and think the Force was guiding you to help me.”

“Is that how it happens?” Scourge asked, slightly miffed at Revan’s confession. “They come to you in your dreams?”

“No. A Force vision is more powerful than any dream. There is an intensity that jumps out at you, and the details do not fade. But I figured you wouldn’t know the difference.”

I do now, Scourge thought.

“I won’t apologize for lying to you,” Revan said, mistaking the reason for his companion’s silence. “And if it makes you feel any better, I actually did have a vision of Meetra after we spoke.”

“That seems a highly unlikely coincidence,” Scourge noted.

“That is the way of the Force,” Revan said. “Cause and effect are not a simple linear relationship. The Force transcends space and time; it flows through us and around us; it influences our past, present, and future. Maybe I spoke to you of visions because I knew the Force was trying to reach out to me. Or maybe Meetra came to Dromund Kaas because I told you someone was coming to rescue me.”

“But she started looking for you long before we had our conversation,” Scourge protested.

“It’s complicated,” Revan answered with a cryptic smile. “Jedi scholars have devoted centuries to understanding the ways of the Force, and we have only scratched the surface.”

Scourge silently tried to digest what he was being told. At the same time, he tried to form the questions that would give him the answers he wanted without revealing what he had seen.

“Once you had the vision of Meetra, were you certain she was coming? Did you know for sure that she would help free you?”

Revan shook his head. “We can never be certain about anything. The future is always in motion, and a vision shows you only one of many possible outcomes.”

“Then what purpose do visions serve?”

“They guide us,” Revan explained. “They give us focus. They show us a goal to strive for, or something we can work to prevent.”

“So the visions are not absolute?”

“As I said, the future is always in motion.”

There was another long period of silence before Scourge asked another question. “Have you had any visions of what will happen when we face the Emperor?”

“No,” Revan said. “The dark side obscures my sight. We are walking into a time and place of shadows, and I cannot promise you that we will ever come out.”

“Doesn’t that terrify you?”

“Fear is only an emotion; a trick the mind plays on us. You must learn to set your fear aside.”

“We Sith are taught to embrace our fear,” Scourge told him. “We transform it into anger and use it to fuel the power of the dark side.”

“But then your actions will always be driven by that fear,” Revan said.

“And what are your actions driven by?” Scourge asked. “Logic? Reason?”

“No,” Revan admitted. “If I were reasonable, I would never have left my family behind to face the Emperor.”

“Then why did you do it?”

Revan nodded in the direction of the holoprojection. “For them. I want my son to live a long and healthy life. I want him to know peace, not war. I’ve come to stop the Emperor for him.”

“And what if we don’t stop him?” Scourge said, treading perilously close to the heart of what he really wanted to say. “What if he’s too strong?”

“That is a possibility,” Revan admitted. “But even if we fail to defeat the Emperor, there is still hope. My return will give him pause. He will wonder how I threw off the chains of his will. He will wonder why I have returned, and how much the Republic now knows of his plan. He will even wonder about Malak. For all the Emperor knows, Malak is still out there, plotting to take the Emperor down if I fail.”

“You’re just trying to buy time,” Scourge gasped. “You don’t care if the Emperor kills us all—you just want to delay him!”

“No,” Revan said. “I want to live. Even more, I want to purge the galaxy of his evil once and for all. But I understand that there can be victory even in defeat. Even if we fall, we will buy time. Maybe a few years. More likely a few decades.”

“Time for your son to become a man,” Scourge noted bitterly. “Are you hoping he will finish what you might not?”

“Him or someone else,” Revan admitted. “The Force always strives for balance. The Emperor is an agent of darkness and destruction. It is inevitable that a champion of the light will one day rise to oppose him. I may be that champion.” He spoke with no hint of hubris. “I’ve played the role before. At the very least, I will make the Emperor step back and reconsider his plan. If that is my fate—if my role is to sacrifice myself for the one who will come next—then I embrace it.”

Scourge shook his head. “I’m beginning to think you are as mad as the Emperor. I have no intention of dying tomorrow.”

“Neither do I. But if death comes, I will face it without fear. You will find our task easier if you can convince yourself to do the same,” he said, before turning his attention back to the holoprojection.

“Start over from the beginning,” Revan told T3, and the astromech obediently restarted the recording.

Scourge got to his feet and walked back to the section of the cave he had been sitting in earlier. He briefly considered talking to Meetra, then realized that would be a waste of time. She would only echo what Revan had said.

The Sith sat down and crossed his legs again, closing his eyes. But he wasn’t able to clear his mind this time. Instead, he kept running over Revan’s words, playing them against the enduring images of his vision, trying to understand what it all meant.

CHAPTER 27

AS PLANNED, Revan, Meetra, Scourge, and T3-M4 left the cave at dawn, though dawn on Dromund Kaas was a term with little meaning. The black storm clouds completely blocked out the sun, and the sky was only marginally lighter than it had been during the night.

A steady drizzle fell on them as they climbed into the speeder. They rode in silence, all of them preparing in their own way for what they knew lay ahead. Meetra had gone into what Revan called her warrior’s trance; she sat still and straight, her eyes focused on nothing as she stared straight ahead.

He had seen it many times during the war against the Mandalorians. Before each major battle she would try to center her emotions, cleansing herself of all fear and hatred lest the imminent violence draw her toward the dark side. She believed she could transform herself into a perfect conduit for the Force, an incorruptible weapon of light.

Revan was no longer sure such a thing was possible, but he didn’t say anything to Meetra for fear of disrupting her routine.

With his memories restored, Revan recalled that he, too, had once clung to a set of rituals before each battle. He would stare at his reflection in the mirror, his face covered by his mask as he recited the Jedi Code over and over until the words seemed to blend together, their meaning lost in the rhythmic repetition of a mantra.

In those days, he had believed this would protect him from the dark side, but he no longer had any such illusions. He was older and wiser. He understood that the two sides of the Force were more closely intertwined with each other than either the Jedi or the Sith would ever admit. He had learned to balance on the knife-edge between them, drawing on both the light and dark sides for strength.

As much as things had changed, however, he still felt the old stirrings of glory as they set off—a faint echo from the impetuousness of youth that had caused him to defy the Council and lead his fellow Jedi into war so many years before.

Even T3 was strangely subdued, the gravity of their situation weighing as heavily on the astromech as it did on his organic companions.

Revan knew he didn’t have to worry about Meetra or the faithful droid. Scourge was another matter, however. The conversation they’d had during the night left little doubt that the Sith was troubled.

Unlike the Jedi, he had not spent a lifetime preparing for this. The concept of self-sacrifice came easily to those who walked the path of the light. Even though he occasionally strayed into the dark side, Revan still embraced the nobility of the idea.

For the Sith, however, there was no such thing as a noble death. Scourge understood the concept of sacrifice, but only when it came to sacrificing others. He had been taught to value survival above all else. Even his willingness to join with Revan and Meetra was driven by his desire for self-preservation; ultimately he wanted victory only for his sake, and not for the sake of others.

Perhaps there was no greater illustration of the difference between the light side and the dark, and Revan knew it would make their mission more difficult for Scourge. He had tried to make him understand during their brief conversation, but it was hard to undo years of teaching in a single night.

Still, the Sith seemed to be holding himself together well enough this morning.

“I can’t bring the speeder in too close,” Scourge said now, taking them in for a landing on the farthest outskirts of Kaas City. “They might have set up ion cannons to shoot down any unauthorized vehicles.”

They continued on foot, making their way through the empty streets heading toward the citadel. They didn’t encounter a single living soul on their journey; apart from the Emperor’s Guard, nobody dared to violate the curfew. And three Force-sensitive individuals and an astromech equipped with top-of-the-line optical and audio sensors had no trouble avoiding the handful of patrols still wandering the streets.

As they drew closer to the city’s center, the signs of the previous night’s mayhem became more frequent and more striking. Most of the windows were shattered, and many of the buildings were blackened by smoke or completely gutted by fire. The street was pockmarked with craters and covered with the burned-out husks of speeders lying on their sides. Most of the dead had been carted away, either by friends or Imperial cleaning crews, but there was still the odd body slumped in a doorway or half hidden under a refuse pile down a side alley.

When they finally reached the citadel, there were no sentries standing by the entrance at the top of the stairs.

“If we run into anyone, let me do the talking,” Scourge whispered as they mounted the steps.

They were only a few meters away from the entrance when the door flew open and half a dozen of the red-uniformed soldiers spilled out, armed with blasters and electrostaffs.

“You are in violation of the Imperial curfew,” one of the soldiers informed them. “Surrender your weapons and you will be escorted to a nearby prison facility.”

“You fool!” Lord Scourge spat at the Guard, his voice rising with arrogant indignation. “Do you know who I am?”

“Only those explicitly authorized by the Emperor are permitted on the streets,” the soldier replied, his voice wavering only slightly.

“I need no authorization! My name is Lord Scourge, and I demand a meeting with the Emperor.”

From the reaction of the soldiers it was clear they recognized the name. No doubt every member of the Emperor’s Guard was aware by now that Scourge had been the catalyst for the Emperor’s sudden purging of the entire Dark Council.

“We will escort you to him,” the leader replied, lowering his weapon. “But the others must wait here.”

“No,” Scourge said. “They will come with me to speak with the Emperor in person.”

The soldier seemed on the verge of denying the request, and Revan mentally prepared himself to unleash his fury, but at the last minute the man relented … at least partially.

“Follow me,” he said. “I’ll ask the captain to meet us outside the throne room. She will decide whether to allow this.”

Revan was impressed by Scourge’s performance, not to mention relieved. On his last visit to Dromund Kaas, he and Malak had learned everything they could about the Imperial Guard. Though not attuned to the Force in the classical sense, the elite soldiers had a connection with the Emperor, allowing them to draw strength from the dark side. They were formidable opponents, even for a Jedi.

He’d feared they’d have to fight through dozens of the Guard before reaching the throne room, giving the Emperor ample time to prepare his counterattack. Now, however, they had a chance to take their adversary by surprise.

They were led down a twisting maze of corridors, a long and winding journey that Revan remembered from his last visit to the citadel. He and Malak had followed the same route, led by a Guard they had bribed for access, completely unaware that they were being led into a trap.

It was possible the same thing was being done to them this time, as well, but Revan didn’t think that was the case. The guard who had betrayed him and Malak had met with them numerous times before leading them into the citadel, no doubt reporting back to the Emperor after each visit. This time, however, events had moved too quickly and too spontaneously for the Emperor’s patient hand to be behind them.

As they drew closer to the throne room, Revan’s thoughts drifted back to his last confrontation with the Emperor. In all his battles, he had never faced an enemy with that kind of power. The dark side had radiated from him in palpable waves, his physical shell barely able to contain the crackling energy.

In their last meeting he had overwhelmed Revan completely; it wasn’t even fair to call it a battle. Revan had grown since then. He was far more powerful now, but was he a match for the Emperor?

Alone, probably not. With the combined strength of Meetra, Scourge, and even T3, however, he believed they stood a real chance of victory.

Despite this, he still felt a chill in his gut when he saw again the enormous durasteel doors of the throne room. They were shut, of course, but he knew all too well what lay beyond.

“Where is your captain?” Scourge demanded, and Revan realized there was nobody there to meet them.

“She is coming,” the Guard assured him.

“I will not be kept waiting,” Scourge snarled, continuing to play his part. “I demand you open these doors immediately!”

The soldier hesitated, then motioned for two of his men to do as Scourge had commanded.

Revan braced himself for what was to come. They had discussed this part of their plan before leaving the cave. The instant the doors were pushed opened, all four would charge inside. While Revan rushed the Emperor, Meetra and Scourge would hang back and hold off the guards long enough for T3 to close and seal the doors.

Their timing had to be almost perfect; Revan knew he couldn’t go toe-to-toe with the Emperor by himself for very long. He sensed Meetra tensing beside him, and his own hand drifted to the hilt of his lightsaber beneath his belt in anticipation.

“What is going on here?” a female voice called out from behind him.

The two soldiers who had been about to push open the heavy durasteel doors froze in place.

“Captain Yarri,” said the man who escorted them in, snapping off a sharp salute. “Lord Scourge demands another meeting with the Emperor.”

Revan was standing with his back to the captain, but he didn’t need to see her face to recognize the name: Yarri—the Guard who had led him and Malak into the Emperor’s trap.

“This is not acceptable, Lord Scourge,” she said, the heels of her boots clacking as she approached. “If you wish to speak with the Emperor, you must do so alone.”

“I do not take orders from you, Captain,” Scourge said.

“In the citadel you do,” she answered. “You other two and the droid, step away from there.”

Revan had been carefully facing away from the speakers during the entire conversation, his eyes fixed on the massive doors. Suddenly he felt a hand on his shoulder as one of the soldiers tried to pull him clear of the entrance.

He slapped the hand away and turned to face them. Yarri was standing beside Scourge, a few meters away from the rest of the group. She had come alone to meet them, bringing their escort up to a total of seven.

The captain’s eyes went wide with shock as she saw his unmistakable red-and-gray mask.

She gasped, then shouted out, “Assassins! Kill them all!”

Revan lashed out with his foot, delivering a side kick to the chest of the guard who had grabbed his shoulder, sending the man stumbling back. T3-M4, his electrical circuits instantly processing the situation, reacted by firing off his built-in blaster; the beam struck the soldier square in the chest. At the same time, Meetra threw herself at the two guards standing in front of the doors to the throne room, her lightsaber materializing in her hand.

Ordinary soldiers would have been chopped down before they could even draw their weapons, but the Imperial Guard were not so easily felled. The first soldier met her charge and parried the first strike with his electrostaff, the resilient metal of his weapon deflecting the energy blade of the Jedi off to the side so that it carved a deep scar in the wall.

The second soldier leapt into the fray, forcing Meetra to fall back a step to absorb their coordinated attack. Slightly farther away, Scourge and Captain Yarri were also already engaged in close-quarters combat, his lightsaber clashing against her electrostaff as they battled in the narrow confines of the entrance hall.

An alarm began to ring out in the hall, triggered by one of the other three soldiers. Before they could join in the fight, Revan thrust his hand, palm up, in the direction of the sealed durasteel doors, blasting them wide open with the power of the Force.

“Into the throne room!” he shouted, rushing forward.

One of the guards battling Meetra broke off and tried to cut Revan off. The Jedi gathered himself and leapt high in the air, tucking his knees in tight to somersault over his opponent. The guard reacted to the unexpected move a fraction too slowly, his electrostaff slicing through the air above his head and missing Revan by only a few centimeters.

Revan landed on the ground and wheeled around to face the other man. He thrust out with the Force, the impact hitting the soldier square in the chest. Instead of sending him flying, it only staggered him back half a step—this close to the Emperor they were sworn to protect, the guards were able to draw on his power to protect themselves.

Still, the slight stumble gave Revan enough time to draw his lightsaber and go on the offensive. He came in with a high, overhand chop—an obvious feint meant to draw the defenses of his opponent upward, leaving his legs exposed to a quick follow-up strike.

The guard recognized the familiar ploy, countering it by parrying the overhand chop then quickly dropping his blade low to intercept the inevitable slash at his legs. Only Revan didn’t go for his legs. Anticipating that his opponent’s defenses would go low, he kept his blade up high, allowing him to end the battle with a horizontal cut across the man’s suddenly exposed throat.

T3 had followed him into the throne room, but Meetra and Scourge were still locked in battle with the guards in the hall outside. They were waging a fighting retreat; they had maneuvered themselves so they could back into the throne room while keeping the guards at bay.

At the far end of the hall, another half a dozen of the Imperial Guard rounded the corner. Revan reached out with the Force and ripped the vaulted stone archway in the ceiling above them free from its setting. A shower of dust and debris rained down on the reinforcements, sending them into temporary retreat.

It wasn’t enough to block the passage, but it did buy Scourge and Meetra a few precious seconds to complete their retreat into the chamber. They crossed the threshold, still engaged with Captain Yarri and the three surviving Imperial Guard that had escorted them to the throne room.

Revan reached out with the Force and slammed the durasteel doors shut, the clang echoing loudly in the throne room.

“Seal the doors!” he shouted at T3. Then he turned his attention to the other end of the throne room.

The Emperor was seated on his throne, watching the proceedings with cold detachment. Revan felt the same chill he had experienced the last time he had come into the Emperor’s presence, the physical manifestation of his enemy’s malevolent power.

“I did not expect you to return,” the Emperor said, rising to his feet.

Revan didn’t bother to reply as he charged forward.

SCOURGE WAS AN EXPERT SWORDSMAN; at the Academy even the instructors had been reluctant to face him in the training ring. When the dark side flowed through him, his blade was more than a weapon. It became an extension of his will.

Captain Yarri’s skill with her electrostaff was impressive, but ultimately she was no match for a Sith Lord. Knowing this, she had wisely adopted a defensive style to hold off the first few flurries of Scourge’s attack, her focus on stalling him long enough for one of her companions to join the fray before switching to a more aggressive form.

Now Scourge was forced to defend himself on two fronts as he backed into the throne room. In his peripheral vision he saw that Meetra was in a similar situation, retreating while battling a pair of enemies.

The fact that Revan hadn’t come to their aid told Scourge that the Jedi had gone to confront the Emperor, conjuring up images from Scourge’s vision of him lying broken and beaten on the floor at the Emperor’s feet.

Yarri’s staff slipped through his defenses and clipped him on his right shoulder. Scourge’s armor absorbed the worst of the blow, though he felt a painful jolt from the electrostaff’s charge that made his hand and arm tingle.

Even as Scourge cursed himself for allowing thoughts of his vision to distract him, he deftly switched his blade from his temporarily numb right hand to his left. The move was dangerous; it left him momentarily vulnerable as he made the switch. Fortunately his opponents were unprepared for the unorthodox tactic, and neither was able to take advantage.

While he and Meetra fought the quartet of guards, T3-M4 was busy sealing the doors. The droid was spraying black foam along the edge where the double doors came together. Scourge recognized the foam as a powerful contact adhesive commonly used to repair starships; seconds after being exposed to air it would harden into a substance that could be cut only with a plasma torch.

Yarri’s blade nearly caught him again, narrowly missing his cheek, and Scourge swore out loud. If he didn’t stay focused on the fight, his vision of the Emperor killing him wouldn’t even have a chance to come true.

“Go help Revan!” Meetra shouted to T3 as the astromech finished his task.

Scourge pressed his attack, calling on the dark side to transform his uncertainty and fear into white-hot rage. He felt the power coursing through him, the spark of fury deep inside him igniting into a firestorm of death and destruction.

Left-handed, Scourge unleashed a pair of savage chops at Yarri’s partner, using raw brute strength to overpower his physically weaker opponent. The guard parried the blows, but the first knocked him off balance and the second sent him stumbling backward.

While the guard struggled to recover, Scourge focused his assault on the captain. Yarri sensed the shift in her opponent too late to switch back to a more defensive form, and the Sith Lord was quick to exploit the tactical flaw.

A four-move sequence overwhelmed Yarri, causing her to leave her right flank unprotected. Scourge seized the opportunity, his blade biting deep into her hip. Yarri screamed, dropped her blade, and fell to the ground. The other guard leapt to her defense, recklessly throwing himself between his fallen captain and Scourge. The only reward for his effort was a quick death, delivered by a diagonal lightsaber slash across his chest.

At Scourge’s feet, Yarri fumbled to reclaim her weapon. The agony of her wound made her desperate and clumsy, giving Scourge time to relish her suffering. As her fingers wrapped around the hilt of her electrostaff, he brought his boot down on top of her hand, crushing the bones.

He stared into the captain’s eyes one last time, savoring her terror before decapitating her with a single stroke.

“We have to help Revan!” Meetra shouted, and Scourge turned to see that she, too, had just finished off her opponents. “He needs us!”

CHAPTER 28

AS MEETRA AND SCOURGE BATTLED the Guard, Revan charged toward the Emperor.

His opponent stood perfectly still, focusing and channeling his power. At the last possible instant, the Emperor unleashed a wave of energy that swept Revan off his feet and sent him flying backward.

Revan twisted in midair so that he was able to roll with the impact when he landed. He quickly sprang back to his feet and advanced again, moving more slowly this time.

The Emperor stood in the exact same position as before; it was as if he hadn’t even moved. Revan began to sense the oppressive presence of the dark side weighing down on him. The Emperor was trying to crush his will: to dominate and enslave his mind as he had before. This time, however, Revan was ready.

Instead of charging forward, he opened himself up to the Force, letting both the light and the dark side flow through him like twin rushing rivers. But instead of focusing or channeling the Force, he released it in its purest form.

There was brilliant flash as the air between the two combatants lit up. The energy unleashed was powerful enough to send Revan staggering. The Emperor, unprepared and with much of his strength diverted to his effort to dominate Revan’s mind, was sent flying backward.

He landed in a heap on the floor and Revan raced toward him. The Emperor rolled over, lifted himself up on one knee, and his hands flew forward as he hurtled a bolt of dark side lightning at his enemy.

Revan intercepted the bolt with the blade of his lightsaber, though the impact stopped his charge dead in its tracks.

The Emperor unleashed three more bolts in quick succession. Revan batted the first aside with his lightsaber, ducked the second, then deflected the third back in the direction of its source.

It struck the Emperor in the chest, sending him sliding several meters back on the floor. For the first time the Sith’s emotionless veneer cracked as he let out a primal hiss of hate. The sound sent shivers down Revan’s spine.

The Emperor rose to his feet, his robes smoking and singed where the lighting had struck him. His black eyes flashed red, and he raised both hands high above his head.

Revan knew he was gathering his power to unleash a swirling storm of pure dark side energy, just as Nyriss had done. The Jedi quickly calculated his options. Realizing he couldn’t close the gap between them quickly enough to stop the assault, he gathered his own energy and spread his hands before him, ready to catch and absorb the Emperor’s attack.

A dozen bolts of purple lightning arced from the Emperor toward him. Revan tried to draw them in and contain them, but the Emperor was infinitely more powerful than Darth Nyriss had ever been.

Revan’s body was engulfed in agony as the electricity coursed through his body. His skin began to boil and blister, the flesh of his face melting and sticking to the superheated metal of his mask as the Emperor poured more and more power into him.

Through the haze of indescribable pain, he saw T3-M4 rushing in to help him. The droid let loose with his flamethrower, bathing the Emperor in fire. At the last instant the Emperor cocooned himself in the Force to save himself from being incinerated, breaking his focus on Revan.

The Jedi collapsed to the ground, burned but still alive, the hilt of his extinguished lightsaber lying on the floor less than a meter beyond his grasp.

Almost too weak to move, Revan managed to raise his head just in time to see the Emperor turn on the brave little astromech. A tremor rippled through the air as the Emperor unleashed the full power of the Force against the defenseless droid.

T3 never stood a chance. The little droid exploded into a million pieces, internal circuits and external casing obliterated in a single instant.

“No!” Revan screamed from the ground as bits of his friend rained down on him in the form of unrecognizable shrapnel.

He tried to rise, but his injured body refused to respond. Instinctively, he called on the Force to give him strength and heal his wounds.

The Emperor was approaching him with calm, purposeful steps. Once he reached Revan’s side he calmly bent down and picked up the Jedi’s fallen weapon, igniting the blade.

The healing properties of the Force were powerful, but Revan’s wounds were severe and he needed more time to restore his strength. Helpless, he could only stare up at the Emperor as he raised the lightsaber to deliver the killing blow.

EVEN AS SHE CALLED to Scourge to help, Meetra was already sprinting toward the far end of the throne room. Scourge hesitated before joining her, taking a moment to survey the situation, memories of his vision of their failure still fresh in his mind.

What he saw was not good. Revan was being electrocuted, his body spasming uncontrollably as the Emperor blasted him with dark purple lightning.

Revan’s astromech launched a jet of flame at the Emperor, freeing Revan, who collapsed to the ground. In retaliation, the Emperor disintegrated the offending droid, strode over to where Revan lay, and picked the vanquished Jedi’s lightsaber up off the floor.

It all happened in the space of only a few seconds. Meetra was moving fast, but she was too far away to stop the Emperor from eviscerating the prone Jedi at his feet.

In desperation, she hurled her lightsaber with a wild sidearm throw, guiding it with the Force so that it spiraled end-over-end to intercept the descending blade, knocking it from the Emperor’s grasp and sending it skittering across the floor.

Suddenly empty-handed, the Emperor took a quick step back. His attention had been focused solely on Revan; Meetra’s trick had caught him by surprise. Scourge realized that if she had aimed at the Emperor instead of the blade, she could have ended his life even as he ended Revan’s. But her instincts to save her friend overrode her desire to kill her enemy, and Scourge could only lament the lost opportunity.

Meetra was still rushing forward, using the Force to return her lightsaber to her waiting hand.

Sensing hesitation and uncertainty in the Emperor as he tried to evaluate the strength and weaknesses of his new foe, Scourge rushed forward to join Meetra and Revan.

Meetra had placed herself between the Emperor and Revan, valiantly protecting her wounded friend. As Scourge reached them, Revan managed to stand up again. He reached out with an open palm and his lightsaber sprang from the floor and into his waiting grasp.

The three of them stood side by side, two Jedi and a Sith Lord against the Emperor.

“I expected better from you, Lord Scourge,” the Emperor said.

Scourge wondered if he was stalling for time so his Guard could break through the sealed door. There wasn’t much chance of that, however; by the time they broke into the throne room the battle would already be decided, one way or the other.

“He has seen the depths of your evil,” Revan declared. “He stands with us now.”

“Then he will die with you, as well.”

“You can’t defeat all three of us,” Revan said. “United, we are stronger than even you.”

“That remains to be seen,” the Emperor replied.

For Scourge, the universe suddenly seemed frozen in place, as if time itself had stopped. He realized he was at a crux in history; fate and destiny would be forever altered in the next few moments.

The Force washed over him in a wave, and a million possible futures flickered through his mind simultaneously. In some the Emperor was no more; in others he had transformed the entire galaxy into an empty wasteland. He saw both Revan’s triumph and defeat in the throne room; he saw variations of his own life and death played out over and over in every conceivable way, shape, and form.

He had to choose, but there was no way to know which was the most likely outcome, or what actions of his would lead to which results. Revan had said visions could guide the Jedi, but for Scourge they brought nothing but confusion.

The moment passed and the universe began to move again, though everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. Revan and Meetra stepped forward, ready to initiate the final confrontation. Scourge knew he had to act now; he had to make his choice.

In a sudden moment of clarity he saw the Emperor lying defeated at the feet of a powerful Jedi … but that Jedi was neither Revan nor Meetra. And the Sith Lord knew what he had to do.

Instead of advancing with his two companions, Scourge stepped to the side so that he was standing directly behind Meetra. There was a flicker in his consciousness as the universe snapped back to full speed, and he slid the blade of his lightsaber between her shoulders.

Meetra gasped and toppled forward, dead before she hit the floor. Revan’s head snapped to the side, shock and horror emanating from him even though his mask hid his expression. The distraction gave the Emperor the opportunity he needed, and he unleashed another blast of lightning into the Jedi’s chest.

Scourge could smell burning flesh as Revan screamed once then collapsed to the ground, unconscious.

The Emperor turned to face Scourge, and the Sith Lord dropped to one knee, head bowed in supplication.

“Explain yourself,” the Emperor said, and Scourge knew if he chose his words poorly they would be the last he ever spoke.

“The Jedi was working with Nyriss,” he said, speaking quickly. “He claimed he had once been your servant, but that he had returned to destroy you. I knew I was not strong enough to defeat him myself, so I lured him here to face you.”

“Why didn’t you mention this when you told me about Nyriss’s betrayal?”

“I didn’t know,” Scourge lied. “I only found out after the Guard razed her stronghold. The Jedi sought me out. They knew I worked for Nyriss; they never suspected that I was the one who had betrayed her.”

“So you led them to me.”

“I knew they could never defeat you,” Scourge said. “So I played along, waiting for my chance to turn on them and prove my loyalty to you once more.”

“If this is true,” the Emperor said. “Then you must finish it.”

Scourge nodded, and rose to his feet. He walked over to Revan, bent down, and ripped off his helmet. The Jedi’s face was badly burned, the outline of his mask indelibly seared into his cheeks and forehead. He was still unconscious, his body in shock from his wounds; without medical attention he would die soon anyway.

The Sith Lord raised his lightsaber to deliver the coup de grâce. He brought his arm down, but it suddenly stopped as if an invisible and impossibly strong hand had seized his wrist. He glanced back at the Emperor in surprise.

“Put away your blade. You have passed the test,” the Emperor said. “But Revan can still be of use to me.”

Despite his curiosity, Scourge knew better than to ask how. He couldn’t risk anything that might make it appear he was concerned about the Jedi’s fate. To sell his lie, he had to make it seem as if everything he had done had been for the most obvious and selfish of reasons.

“Twice I have stopped those who sought to defeat you,” he said, extinguishing his blade and bowing before the Emperor. “I trust you will remember this when you select the members of the new Dark Council.”

The Emperor smiled, and Scourge’s entire body went cold.

“I promise you will be given your just reward.”

CHAPTER 29

“THE RITUAL IS ABOUT TO BEGIN,” the Emperor intoned.

Scourge nodded, though even if he had wanted to refuse it was far too late now.

He was standing in the center of a cylindrical metal platform roughly two meters across. Dozens of wires and IV tubes had been hooked to his body. The wires were connected to several generators arranged in a circle around the platform, the IV tubes ran to clear vats filled with a strange green bubbling liquid.

They were still inside the citadel, but this private chamber was much smaller than the throne room. It was unfurnished and, apart from the Emperor, Scourge, and the infernal machinery he was hooked up to, completely empty.

In the wake of Revan’s defeat, the Emperor hadn’t made him a member of the Dark Council after all. Instead, he had created a new position for Scourge: the Emperor’s Wrath.

The Emperor had believed his explanation about Revan. As a reward Scourge was to become his personal enforcer and executioner, taking his orders directly from the Emperor and answering to no one but him.

That wasn’t the full extent of his reward, however. For his role in exposing Xedrix, Nyriss, and Revan, the Emperor had promised to grant Scourge the gift of eternal life. He would forever serve at the Emperor’s side, an honor far greater than even that of being selected for the Dark Council.

Scourge had eagerly accepted, knowing his new position would give him both time and opportunity to find another way to stop the Emperor before his madness and hunger consumed the galaxy.

“Open yourself to the dark side,” the Emperor said, and Scourge felt the air around him begin to swirl with power.

Betraying his allies had not altered the inevitable outcome; the Emperor would have won regardless. At least this way Scourge was still alive to carry on their cause.

Revan was still alive, too, but he was as good as dead to Scourge. The Emperor was holding him prisoner in a secret facility, and Scourge knew he could never risk trying to find its location. He couldn’t do anything that might suggest an ongoing connection between him and Revan. Doing so would expose the truth to the Emperor, making his sacrifice of the Jedi pointless.

“Let the spark of eternal life ignite within you!” the Emperor called out.

Scourge felt a sharp burst of heat in his chest. He gritted his teeth in pain as the heat grew more intense.

He felt no guilt or remorse over what he had done. He knew the Jedi would never have chosen this path, of course. They would have felt the price of betrayal was too high.

Scourge knew they were wrong. There was no sense in throwing his life away with theirs. Betrayal was the cost of stopping the Emperor, and he alone had been willing to pay it.

Revan had been right about one thing, however: the attack had made the Emperor step back from his plans to invade the Republic. Instead of looking beyond the borders of the Sith Empire, he had turned his attention inward, focusing on restoring stability and control over Dromund Kaas and the other worlds he ruled.

The Dark Council would have to be rebuilt. It was inevitable there would be infighting and high turnover in the first few years as the new members vied with one another to curry favor with the Emperor. And he, in turn, would keep a close eye on the actions of the Council until the plots and schemes returned to a more normal and expected level.

It would be several decades, maybe longer, before the Emperor revisited the idea of invading the Republic. In that time, much could happen. Revan had spoken of another champion who would rise; Scourge had seen that champion in his final vision. Blessed with eternal life, Scourge would serve faithfully at the Emperor’s side, biding his time as he waited for that champion to emerge from the mists of time.

While serving, he would study the Emperor. He would learn everything about him. He would come to understand his strengths and weaknesses so that when the time came, he could help Revan’s prophesied champion destroy the Emperor once and for all.

“Feel your mortality as it is stripped away.”

Scourge screamed as invisible claws tore at his insides, seemingly shredding his vital organs.

The heat in his chest had spread to the rest of his body; it felt as if his blood were made of fire. The agony became unbearable, and he shrieked and collapsed to the floor.

“The ritual cannot be undone,” the Emperor said as Scourge writhed and wept at his feet.

Through his torment, Scourge realized with dawning horror what the Emperor was saying. The ritual was over, but the searing heat and the rending of his insides continued unabated.

Focusing his will, he managed to still the convulsions racking his body. He forced himself to his knees, though every movement seemed to amplify the pain. Trembling, he rose to his feet and addressed the Emperor.

“How long will this anguish last?” he asked, his jaw clenched.

“As time passes you will learn to accept and endure your suffering,” the Emperor answered. “Your mind and body will find ways to deal with the pain. After many months you will become accustomed enough to it to function in your role as the Emperor’s Wrath. Eventually you will simply become numb, unable to feel anything at all.”

“Why?” Scourge asked, his voice something between a sob and a moan.

“Everything has a cost,” the Emperor explained. “This is the price of immortality.”

REVAN’S CELL WAS AS MUCH LABORATORY AS PRISON. Trapped in a suspended cage of shimmering power, he hovered somewhere between life and death.

His paralyzed body was in some kind of stasis, preserved and protected so that even time itself could not touch him. But his consciousness was fully aware.

Meetra could sense his suffering. When she had died, she had not become one with the Force. Loyal to the end, her spirit had remained with Revan, an invisible presence hovering just outside his cell.

She couldn’t speak with him; whatever arcane Sith sorcery the Emperor had used to bind Revan in his cell made that impossible. She doubted Revan was even aware she was there. Yet even though she couldn’t communicate with him, she was able to offer aid and support, her power trickling through the energy barrier that surrounded him, a lifeline he could cling to in the dark ocean of his imprisonment.

As the Emperor fed off him, Meetra was allowing Revan to feed off her. Her sustenance strengthened his resolve whenever he grew weak, refreshing and restoring him so he could continue his never-ending mental war.

Because of her, Revan was able to do more than just fight to keep the Emperor at bay.

REVAN COULD FEEL THE EMPEROR FEEDING ON HIM, drawing on his power to sate his endless hunger. Though the two were physically separated by a dozen parsecs, there was still an unbreakable mental link, fashioned by the Emperor and sustained by the infernal machines powering the cell.

Yet the Emperor wanted more than to leach off his fallen adversary’s power to sustain his own twisted existence. Revan could feel the enemy inside his head. He could sense the unmistakable darkness of the Emperor sifting through his thoughts and memories, seeking, probing, digging for answers.

He wanted information on the Republic and the Jedi. How strong were they? Where were they vulnerable? How much did they know about the Sith and the Emperor himself? He wanted information on Revan. What had happened during his own invasion of the Republic? Why had it failed? How had he freed himself from the Emperor’s control?

The answers were all there, but Revan would not surrender them easily. Though he was physically helpless, mentally he was strong enough to wage war against the Emperor, guarding and protecting his secrets for however long it might take.

And Revan knew something the Emperor did not. The connection between them went both ways. There were brief moments—times when the Emperor was intently focused on something else—when he could subvert their relationship by planting seeds in the Emperor’s thoughts.

He had to be careful, lest his enemy discover what he was doing. But he was able to push and nudge the Emperor’s own thoughts and beliefs, subtly manipulating them in ways that could have profound effects. Revan played on the Emperor’s caution and patience, constantly pushing them to the forefront of his enemy’s mind. He augmented his irrational fear of death. At every opportunity he reinforced the idea that invading the Republic was reckless and dangerous.

It was impossible to know what would have happened if Scourge had not betrayed them in the throne room. They might have lost anyway, but they also might have defeated the Emperor, forever freeing the galaxy from the threat of annihilation at the hands of a madman. There was no way to be sure, and no point in dwelling on the past.

Revan was certain of one thing, though: for however many centuries his body survived in stasis, he would fight to stop the Emperor from invading the Republic.

He clung to this certainty; it gave him hope. He knew there was no chance of escape from his prison. He knew it was inevitable that one day the Emperor would win their endless battle of wills.

But if he managed to delay him for fifty years, Bastila might never have to experience the horrors of another galactic war. A hundred and his son could live his whole life in an era of peace, never knowing the fear of facing utter annihilation.

Whenever his thoughts turned to his wife and son, he tried to reach out to them through the Force, offering comfort and strength from the other side of the galaxy. He didn’t know if they ever felt him, but he liked to imagine that they did.

Even if they couldn’t, just thinking of them gave him strength. Revan was fighting for the future of his wife and child, and it was a fight he did not intend to lose.

EPILOGUE

“WHY IS YOUR HAIR ALL GRAY?” Reesa, the youngest of Bastila’s grandchildren, asked.

“Because I’m an old, old woman,” Bastila replied.

“Is that why you’re all wrinkly, too?” her brother Bress asked.

“Come on, you two,” their mother said, scooping them up in her arms. “I think it’s time for bed.”

She hustled the kids out of the living room, leaving Bastila alone with her son.

“I’m glad you came today,” Bastila said. “It means a lot to me.”

Vaner reached out to wrap his hand around his mother’s fingers and gave her a reassuring squeeze. “I know this is a tough time for you,” he said. “You always get down when your anniversary comes around. Have you been thinking about him?”

“I think about him a lot,” she answered.

“So do I,” her son admitted. “I wonder what he’d say to me if we ever meet.”

“He’d tell you he was proud of you,” Bastila assured him.

“You don’t think he’d be disappointed that I never joined the Jedi Order?”

Bastila shook her head. “You’ve done too much in your life to have those kinds of regrets,” she told him. “The Jedi are guardians and protectors of the galaxy, but these past fifty years we’ve needed so much more. The Republic had to rebuild. We needed leaders to unite us, to help us work together. You saw that need, and you filled it.”

Her son laughed. “You sound like my campaign manager. Vote Vaner Shan for Supreme Chancellor!”

Bastila shook her head. “You joke, but if you wanted that post you could have it.”

“I’ll get back to you on that.”

“Besides,” she added after a moment’s thought, “if you were a Jedi you never could have married Emess.”

“When we first met, you said she was too young for me,” he reminded her.

“I’m older and wiser now,” she said.

“Aren’t we all?”

They were quiet for a few more minutes before Vaner asked another question. “Do you think he’s still alive?”

“I don’t know,” Bastila admitted. “If he is, why didn’t he come back? On the other hand, there are times when I think I can still sense his presence, like he’s reaching out to me from somewhere far away.”

Vaner smiled, but didn’t say anything.

“You think your old mother’s going senile, don’t you?”

“Sometimes the Force is a little hard to understand.”

“You’d better get used to it,” she told him. “It’s in your blood. I can already sense it in those kids of yours.”

“I guess it skips a generation,” Vaner said with a soft laugh.

After a few more minutes of silence he spoke again; it was a question Bastila had expected to hear for many years.

“Do you ever wish he had stayed with you instead?”

“I miss your father every day of my life,” she said, “but I never once thought that.”

“Why not?”

“Revan knew there was something out there—something that threatened the Republic. Maybe something that threatened the entire galaxy. He went to stop it, and I know he succeeded.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because you and I are here talking about this,” she said. “We haven’t been wiped out by war, or turned into refugees. The galaxy hasn’t come to some kind of horrific end. Whatever Revan did, he made it possible for you and me to live our lives without fear and hardship. And for that, I will always be grateful.”

She reached out and placed a wrinkled hand on each of her son’s cheeks, pulling him in close and kissing him softly on the head.

“I better go check on Emess and the kids,” he said, standing up.

“Of course,” she said, waving her hand. “Go, go. I’ll just stay here on the couch and have a little nap.”

Her son headed off to the guest room in the back, and Bastila closed her eyes, quickly drifting into sleep. As always, she dreamed of Revan.

For my wife, Jennifer

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Revan’s story stretches all the way back to the original Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and I want to thank everyone at BioWare who contributed to that fantastic game. Similarly, I owe a debt of gratitude to everyone at Obsidian who worked on KOTOR 2, and everyone at BioWare Austin who helped create the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO. But most of all I want to thank all the Star Wars and Revan fans who have waited so many years for a conclusion to this tale: without your undying support this novel would never have happened.

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Annihilation is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

Copyright © 2012 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization. Excerpt from Star Wars: Scoundrels copyright © 2012 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or ™ where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.

Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

This book contains an excerpt from Star Wars: Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

eISBN: 978-0-345-53567-2
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Jacket design and illustration: LucasArts
v3.1_r3

Contents

Master - Table of Contents

Annihilation

Title Page

Copyright

Dramatis Personae

Prologue

Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three

Epilogue

Dedication

Acknowledgments

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Theron Shan; Republic Strategic Information Service agent (human male)

Marcus Trant; Director of Republic Strategic Information Service (human male)

Jace Malcom; Supreme Commander of the Republic military (human male)

Satele Shan; Grand Master of the Jedi Order (human female)

Gnost-Dural; Jedi Master (Kel Dor male)

Teff’ith; smuggler for the Old Tion Brotherhood (Twi’lek female)

Gorvich; smuggler for the Old Tion Brotherhood (human male)

Darth Karrid; Sith Lord (Falleen female)

Darth Marr; Sith Lord (human male)

Minister Davidge; Imperial Minister of Logistics (human male)

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.…

PROLOGUE

THE AIR INSIDE THE CAVE was cool, but a thin sheen of perspiration coated Satele Shan’s skin. The hard, uneven stone dug into her back and shoulders through the blanket she lay on. She shifted and twisted to escape the discomfort, the dim light of glow sticks casting the shadow of her writhing limbs into a grotesque dance on the far wall.

“Try to remain still, Satele.”

Master Ngani Zho, the mentor who had brought her to the sanctuary of this cave, spoke softly, but his deep voice still resonated in the close confines of their hidden refuge.

Outside, the galaxy was engulfed by war. The Sith, ancient enemies of the Jedi Order long thought extinct, had returned to threaten the existence of the Republic that had stood for thousands of standard years.

Satele Shan had seen the horrors of this war firsthand, battling with her fellow Jedi alongside the soldiers of the Republic against the enemy hordes. She had seen worlds burn. She had seen friends die. She had suffered more than she ever imagined she could and survived. Yet the pain she experienced now was something entirely different.

There is no emotion, there is peace.

The mantra of the Jedi helped her focus, and she closed her eyes as she tried to draw on the Force to calm herself. But her body refused to obey her mind, and instead of a slow pattern of inhale–exhale, her breath continued to come in ragged, rapid gasps.

The Masters at the Jedi academy had never prepared her for this. How could they?

“Satele! Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

Her eyes snapped open in response to Ngani Zho’s voice. Gritting her teeth while another wave of agony washed over her, she could only nod in reply, her fingers clenching his hand as she tried to draw the strength to sustain herself through this ordeal.

“We’re almost done, Satele. Just one more push.”

The final contraction felt like it was ripping her apart, but she followed her Master’s instructions and pushed despite the pain. Satele screamed, and then suddenly the pain was gone. An instant later the loud cries of a child—her child—filled the cave.

“It’s a boy, Satele,” Master Zho said as he cut the umbilical. “You have a son.”

Satele had known the child she carried was male for months; she had felt him through the Force as his life grew stronger within her. But hearing the words spoken aloud somehow made this all feel more real. She had brought life into a galaxy overwhelmed with death.

“Here, Satele,” Master Zho whispered, holding the infant out to her.

Exhausted, she struggled to find enough strength to reach out with her weary arms. Ngani had wrapped the babe in a swaddling blanket; warm and enveloped as he had been in the womb, he was no longer crying.

Pulling the child close to her chest, she couldn’t help but wonder what destiny the Force had chosen for her son. She had no doubt his path would be a difficult one, for in these dark times no path was easy. What role would he play in the fate of the galaxy?

She knew her own role well enough: Satele Shan, hero of the Republic, paragon of the Jedi Order. Strong in the Force. She was a champion of the light; a symbol; an icon.

The rank and file saw her as the embodiment of everything the Jedi and the Republic stood for. And that was why she had been forced to hide her pregnancy. For the first months it had been simple—the loose-fitting Jedi robes had easily covered the swelling of her belly. But in the later months a more elaborate ruse was necessary.

She couldn’t have done it without Master Zho’s help. When her condition became impossible to conceal and she had been forced to go into hiding, he had told the Jedi Council and the leaders of the Republic military that he had sent Satele on a vital mission—something he could not speak of for fear of endangering her life. Given Master Zho’s impeccable reputation, none had questioned him.

Now, however, the mission was over. It was time for her to return; the Republic had fought too long without their champion. The Sith Empire’s relentless advance had gone too far. She could no longer ignore the Republic’s need.

“Are you sure about this, Satele? You don’t want to reconsider?”

Satele looked down at the baby resting so peacefully in her arms, and realized she would treasure this moment for the rest of her life. Whenever she was scared or alone or consumed by grief, she could draw on the memory of the first time she held her son.

In the early stages of her pregnancy, she’d struggled against her maternal feelings as she’d felt the life growing inside her. She had tried to rationalize her protective instincts as nothing more than a biological imperative—an evolutionary mechanism to ensure the propagation of the species. But as the weeks and months passed, she realized her love for her unborn child was more than just biology and hormones. The emotional bond was real, and her desire to do anything—take any risk or commit any act—to protect her son was almost overwhelming.

She would do everything in her power to protect him—even terrible, violent things. She would put his needs above all others, even if it meant an entire planet must suffer to spare him pain. Given her position and power, this was unacceptable.

“You promised you would take him,” Satele said softly, gazing down into the child’s wide, wondering eyes.

“I will,” Ngani assured her. “If that’s still what you want.”

“What I want has nothing to do with it,” she muttered as she reluctantly handed the child back to her Master. “For the sake of the galaxy, this is what must be.”

As he took the child from her arms, the moment of greatest joy she would ever know ended. The child began to whimper, so Ngani stood up and began to cross quickly back and forth across the cave’s uneven floor. The movement seemed to settle the child, much to Satele’s relief.

“And you’re sure you don’t want to tell the father?” her Master asked as he paced.

“No. He’s a good man, but there is darkness in him.”

Ngani nodded, accepting her decision.

“What’s his name?” he asked.

Satele was momentarily taken aback. He had never asked her the father’s name before, and she had never offered it. Then she realized he was talking about the baby.

“You are going to raise him,” she said with a shake of her head. “You should choose his name.”

The Jedi Master stopped pacing and fixed her with a glare she remembered from her days as a Padawan.

“You’re his mother. His name should come from you.”

Satele turned her head to the side and closed her eyes as exhaustion washed over her.

“Theron,” she murmured. “His name is Theron.”

CHAPTER 1

THERON SHAN WALKED QUICKLY through the packed streets of Nar Shaddaa’s Promenade. His unassuming features—pale skin, brown hair, brown eyes, average build—allowed him to blend easily into the crowd. The cybernetic implants visible around his left eye and right ear were his most distinguishing features, but he wasn’t the only one sporting them on Nar Shaddaa, and they typically didn’t draw unwanted attention.

The Hutt-controlled moon was a landscape of unfettered urban sprawl, marked by towering skytowers crammed too close together and gaudy, glowing billboards that dominated the horizon as far as the eye could see in every direction. Sometimes called Little Coruscant, it was hard to accept Nar Shaddaa as a true homage to the Republic capital world; in Theron’s eyes it was more akin to a grotesque parody.

Coruscant had been designed with an eye to aesthetics: there was a pleasing flow to the cityscape and a consistent and complementary style to the architecture. The city was carefully divided into various districts, making it easy to navigate. The pedestrian walks were crowded but clean, the endless stream of airspeeders overhead stayed within the designated traffic lanes. On Coruscant, there was an unmistakable sense of order and purpose. At times, Theron found it positively stifling.

Here on the Smugglers’ Moon, however, it was a glorious free-for-all. Run-down residential buildings were scattered haphazardly among seedy-looking commercial structures; factories abutted restaurants and clubs, with no regard for the toxic clouds of filth spilling out over the patrons. With no traffic rules in force, airspeeders and swoop bikes darted and dived in seemingly random directions, sometimes flying so low the pedestrians ducked and covered their heads.

As Theron turned a corner, he realized someone was following him. He hadn’t actually seen anyone on his tail, but he could sense it. He could feel eyes watching him, scoping him out, measuring him as a target.

Master Ngani Zho, the Jedi who’d raised him, would probably have claimed Theron’s awareness came through the Force. But despite coming from a long line of famous Jedi, Theron wasn’t one of the Order. In fact, he had no special connection to the Force at all.

What he did have was a decade’s worth of experience working for Republic Strategic Information Service. He’d been trained to notice minute details; to be hyperaware of his surroundings at all times. And even though his conscious mind was distracted by the details of his coming mission, his subconscious one had instinctively picked up on something that had triggered alarms in his head. He knew better than to ignore them. Careful not to break stride, turn his head, or do anything else that might tip off his pursuer, Theron used his peripheral vision to scan the area.

At street level, everything was a chaotic mishmash of bright, flashing colors. A constant assault from an army of pink, purple, green, and blue signs and billboards provided perfect camouflage for whoever might be following him. Fortunately the intensity of the inescapable neon was muted by the layer of grime that clung to every surface—a reminder of the unchecked pollution in the atmosphere that would eventually transform Nar Shaddaa into an uninhabitable wasteland.

It wasn’t easy to pick someone who looked suspicious out from the crowd. The population of the Smugglers’ Moon was as varied, unpredictable, and seedy as the surroundings. In the years since the signing of the Treaty of Coruscant, the Hutts had remained staunchly neutral in the ongoing cold war between the Republic and the Sith Empire, making Nar Shaddaa a common gathering place for criminal elements from all corners of the galaxy: Black Sun slavers, Rodian pickpockets, Twi’lek hustlers, Chevin stim dealers. Any and all illicit activities were tolerated on Nar Shaddaa, provided the Hutts got their cut.

Still, there were those too greedy or stupid to cut the Hutts in on their action. When that happened there were consequences. Things got messy.

Is that what this is about? Theron wondered. Is Morbo on to me? Did he send someone to take me out?

He passed by the statue of Karragga the Unyielding that dominated the Promenade. Though he’d been to Nar Shaddaa many times, he couldn’t help but pause for a second and shake his head in disbelief: a thirty-meter-tall Hutt made of solid gold was too ostentatious to ignore. Shaking his head also gave him a chance to quickly glance from side to side to catch a glimpse of someone darting into a doorway off to his left. He didn’t get a good look at whoever it was, but the sudden movement was unnatural enough to stand out.

Someone working alone. Could be a mugger. Or a trained assassin.

Theron was on a tight schedule; it was time to force the action. He turned down a narrow side street, leaving the worst of the crowds—and the relative safety they provided—behind. Off the main thoroughfare there were fewer neon lights and more shadowy corners. If his tail was going to try something, this was the perfect place to make a move.

A slight buzzing of the cybernetic implant in his right ear alerted him to an incoming transmission. There was only one person who knew his private frequency. Theron had to take the call.

“Accept incoming,” he whispered. Louder, he said, “Director.”

“Theron.” The head of Strategic Information Service, as he so often did, sounded annoyed. “Where are you?”

“I’m on vacation,” Theron replied. “I put in for some R and R. Remember?”

Theron realized the Director’s call could work to his advantage. Whoever was following him would think he was distracted, vulnerable. All he had to do was pretend to be oblivious while listening for his stalker to creep up close, then suddenly turn the tables.

“Vacation, huh?” the Director grumbled in his ear as Theron continued farther into the deserted alley. “That’s funny, because I have a report that one of our field agents has been spotted snooping around on Nar Shaddaa.”

“Are you keeping tabs on me?”

“What are you doing on Nar Shaddaa?” the Director demanded.

“Maybe I just like the climate.”

“Smog clouds and acid rain? Not likely. You’re up to something.”

Well, right now I’m about to be ambushed in a dark alley, Theron thought.

Out loud, he said, “I’m taking care of some personal business.”

“What’s Teff’ith mixed up in now?” the Director asked with a sigh.

Even though he couldn’t see the man on the other end of the call, Theron could picture his boss rubbing his temples in exasperation.

“Teff’ith’s not a bad kid,” Theron insisted. “She just tends to fall in with the wrong crowd.”

“Guess that explains how she ended up working with you,” the Director grumbled.

Theron had stopped walking, and was standing with one hand up to the cyberlink in his ear, staring straight ahead.

Might as well be wearing a sign that says, come and get me! Time to make your move, whoever you are.

“Ngani Zho saw something special in her,” Theron said to the Director.

“I know Master Zho raised you, but by the time he met Teff’ith he was … troubled.”

You almost said crazy, didn’t you?

“She has key underworld contacts,” Theron explained, “and she knows how to handle herself in a tough spot. We might need a favor from her someday. I’m just looking out for a potential asset.”

“What makes you think she’d ever help us? Didn’t Teff’ith say she’d kill you if she ever saw you again?”

“Then I’ll make sure she doesn’t see me.”

“I hate to do this, Theron,” the Director said with another sigh. “But I’m ordering you to pull out of Nar Shaddaa. It’s for your own good.”

Theron felt the unmistakable shape of a vibroblade’s tip pressing up against his back and a deep voice growled, “Move and you’re dead!” in his other ear.

“You worry too much,” Theron told the Director, keeping his voice light. “Everything’s under control.” In a whisper he added, “Disconnect,” and the comlink in his ear shut down.

“Get your hands up!” his unseen assailant snarled.

Theron slowly raised his arms in the air, silently cursing himself for letting his assailant get so close.

Never even heard him coming. Was I really that sloppy, or is he that good?

“Lose the piece.”

The words were in Basic, but the voice was definitely not human—too deep, too rumbling. The speaker was large, but without turning around there was no way for Theron to pin down what species he was dealing with.

The comlink in his ear buzzed again, but this time Theron ignored the Director’s call. He clicked his teeth together twice, temporarily shutting the cybernetics off so he could focus on getting out of the alley alive.

“I said lose the piece!”

The order was accentuated by a jabbing of the blade against Theron’s back. Reaching down slowly, Theron slid his blaster pistol from the holster on his hip and let it drop to the ground. He briefly considered making a move; there were a dozen ways he could try to surprise and disarm his opponent. But without knowing exactly who or what he was facing, it was too risky.

Patience. Analyze the situation. Wait for your chance.

“Those are some fancy wrist guards you got. Maybe have a poison dart or a pinpoint blaster built in, right? Lose ’em.”

Any hope Theron had of catching his assailant by surprise with the weapons in his customized bracers vanished as he unclipped the metal bands from his forearms and let them fall at his feet.

The fact that his assailant had marked the bracers as potential weapons also meant this wasn’t some run-of-the-mill mugger. An Imperial operative would probably recognize the bracers, but it didn’t make sense for any of them to be targeting Theron on a Hutt-controlled world … especially now that Imperial Intelligence had been officially disbanded. That left only one other likely—and unsettling—option: a bounty hunter or assassin working for Morbo the Hutt.

“Now turn around, real slow.”

The pressure of the blade eased as the ambusher took a step back. Theron turned to see a violet-skinned Houk towering over him, his heavyset torso and thick, muscular limbs seeming to fill the entire width of the narrow alley. His froglike features were set in a grim scowl, his eyes fixed intently on his victim.

He was pretty sure the Houk didn’t have any backup—he would have noticed if there was more than one person following him. But even if he was acting alone, Theron was no match for the massive brute’s raw muscle. Under normal conditions he could make up what he lacked in strength with speed, but in the tight confines of the narrow alley avoiding the deadly vibroblade might be difficult … especially if the Houk was trained in close-quarters fighting. Given his choice of weapon, Theron had to assume he was facing a capable and deadly opponent.

“What’s your interest in Morbo?” the Houk demanded.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Theron said, his earlier hypothesis about his ambusher working for the Hutt seemingly confirmed.

“I’ve seen you scoping out Morbo’s place for the past three days,” the Houk snarled. “Lie to me again, and I won’t ask nicely next time,” he added, waving the vibroblade back and forth for emphasis.

The threat didn’t bother Theron nearly as much as the realization that he’d been made during his recon trips to Morbo’s club.

“Never saw you at Morbo’s,” Theron admitted. “Didn’t think anybody saw me, either.”

“I’ve been trained to know what to look for,” the Houk answered.

Trained? Theron wondered. By whom? Imperial Intelligence?

As if echoing his own thoughts, the Houk asked, “Who are you working for?”

Theron wasn’t about to reveal his connection to SIS, and he suspected another evasive answer would be met with violence.

“Take the shot!” Theron shouted, as if calling out to an unseen accomplice.

The Houk’s head turned just a fraction as he reacted to Theron’s bluff.

Seizing on the distraction, Theron lashed out with a quick kick to the Houk’s midsection. The impact caused no real damage, but it momentarily knocked the big alien off balance, giving Theron more room to operate.

He was already backpedaling in anticipation of the counterattack; even so he barely avoided the expected lunge of his opponent. As he feared, the Houk wasn’t just some clumsy brawler—he was quicker than he seemed.

As the Houk moved in, Theron tried to disarm him with a wrist lock, reaching out for the hand that held the blade. The Houk countered by twisting his body and throwing his opposite shoulder into Theron, sending him stumbling back.

Unable to set his feet, Theron was forced on the defensive. The alley was too narrow to dodge from side to side, so his only option was full-scale retreat, backpedaling rapidly as the Houk charged forward, the blade slicing and stabbing the empty air centimeters from Theron’s chest. Theron suddenly stopped short and dropped to the ground, rolling into the thick legs of his advancing foe. The move caught the Houk by surprise; he tripped over Theron and tumbled to the ground, the fall knocking the vibroblade from his grasp.

One of the Houk’s knobby knees caught Theron in the chin as he fell over him, splitting his lip and making him see stars. Woozy, Theron ignored the pain and leapt to his feet, and with his first step he staggered sideways into the side of the alley before crashing back down to the ground.

A massive hand closed around his ankle as the still-prone Houk tried to drag Theron close enough to finish him off. Theron lashed out with his free leg, smashing his foot twice into the Houk’s corpulent face. The viselike grip slipped just enough for Theron to free himself with a twisting roll, and he scrambled on hands and knees toward where his blaster and bracers lay on the ground.

The Houk struggled back to his feet, but by the time he was upright Theron had seized one of the bracers, slapped it onto his right forearm, and taken aim.

“Toxicity seven,” he muttered, squeezing his hand into a tight fist.

A small dart launched from a thin barrel built into the bracer and buried itself in the Houk’s chest. The mighty alien went rigid as a powerful electrical charge surged through him. He convulsed for several seconds, and then dropped to the ground, twitching slightly from the aftereffects.

Theron considered what to do with the immobilized but still-conscious Houk as he quickly gathered his gear. It wouldn’t take long for the effects of the electrical blast to wear off, but for the next few minutes the Houk was basically helpless. Theron wasn’t about to execute a helpless opponent … but he wasn’t above interrogating him. “Toxicity two,” he whispered, firing another dart into the Houk’s thigh from point-blank range.

He waited thirty seconds for the mind-clouding drug to take effect before he started asking questions.

“How did you spot me?” he asked. “You said you were trained. By whom?”

The Houk shook his head groggily, struggling to resist the chemicals coursing through his system. In a few minutes they would render him unconscious—Theron needed to get answers before that happened.

“Hey!” Theron snapped, slapping the Houk’s meaty cheek. “Who trained you?”

“Republic SIS,” the Houk mumbled.

“Republic SIS?” Theron repeated, his mind struggling to accept what he’d just heard.

“Covert surveillance,” the groggy Houk confirmed, his tongue loosened by Theron’s truth serum. “Watching Morbo. Part of Operation Transom.”

SIS has eyes on Morbo. No wonder the Director knew I was here.

Theron had never heard of Transom, but that wasn’t unusual. SIS had ongoing missions all across the galaxy, and only the Director and the agents involved would be aware of the details.

Just my luck to stumble into an active SIS mission.

“What are you going to do with me?” the Houk asked, slurring his words and struggling to keep his eyes open as sleep slowly dragged him down.

“Relax, big guy,” Theron said. “We’re on the same side.”

The Director had ordered Theron off Nar Shaddaa; obviously he was worried about him interfering with Transom, whatever it might be. But Teff’ith’s life was at stake, and Theron wasn’t about to abandon her, even if it meant defying a direct order.

The Houk began to snore loudly, ending any hope Theron had of asking him for more details about Operation Transom.

It has to be in the early stages, Theron reasoned. They’re still just observing the target. If I get in and out quickly, it shouldn’t have any significant impact on the mission.

He knew the Director would never buy that argument as justification for what he was about to do. But it was always easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

Grabbing hold of the Houk’s arms, he dragged the sleeping alien into a corner of the alley, hiding him behind several trash bins. He’d wake up in a couple of hours with a pounding headache, but otherwise unharmed. Plenty of time for Theron to meet with Morbo and bargain for Teff’ith’s life.

He set off down the alley at a brisk trot, trying not to think about the fact that he was putting his entire career in jeopardy.

CHAPTER 2

THERON’S LIP STARTED TO SWELL from the blow from the Houk’s knee; he felt like he’d been smashed with a swoop rider’s helmet. He had a few small medkits tucked into his belt, but it didn’t seem worth the effort. The wound was painful, but not debilitating.

Instead, he ran through a simple series of mental exercises Ngani Zho had taught him to soothe the body and mind. It was a trick the Jedi used to help them draw on the Force to heal themselves, but Theron had found that there were benefits even for someone like him.

He acknowledged the pain in his lip, embraced it, then let it slip away from his consciousness. Almost instantly the pain faded, though the damage remained. Good enough until the mission was over and he could get a med droid to fix him up properly.

Winding his way through the back alleys without further incident, he emerged in the corner of a small square in the Red Light District. There were fewer people here than in the Promenade, but it was crowded enough that Theron kept an eye peeled for pickpockets as he crossed the square. A trio of teens on swoop bikes buzzed the crowd, flying the colors of one of the local street gangs. They laughed at the angry shouts of the pedestrians, circling tauntingly just above their heads before zooming off to disappear around the corner.

Theron paid them little heed as he approached his destination: a squat, two-story building on the other side of the square owned by Morbo the Hutt, one of the moon’s many local crime lords. In the front of the building was a small casino bar called Morbo’s Paradise; in the back was a warehouse for storing whatever illegal goods the Hutt was trafficking, along with Morbo’s private office.

The plan was simple: Go into the club, slip a hefty handful of credits to the manager, and ask for a meeting with Morbo. Once inside, Theron would use his powers of persuasion—and the Hutt’s greed and self-interest—to convince Morbo to call off the hit on Teff’ith and her crew. Quick, clean, and simple wasn’t Theron’s usual style, but he wasn’t in the mood for any surprises.

The club was more crowded than usual. Probably irrelevant, but Theron couldn’t help but notice. After the ambush in the alley, his senses were on high alert. He quickly scanned the club for anyone who seemed out of place—if SIS had assigned the Houk to keep an eye on Morbo, there could be other agents on the case.

He didn’t see anyone who specifically grabbed his attention, but he did notice something else unusual. Most of the patrons weren’t gambling. They sipped drinks, sitting alone or in pairs at tables and at the bar as if waiting for something. A few openly studied him as he strode toward Rers Shallit, the Neimoidian manager of the club, who was standing in a corner near the back. Behind him a pair of Gamorrean bouncers stood on either side of a door leading to the rooms in the back of the club.

Early in his preliminary investigations, Theron had learned that Rers was Morbo’s second in command. The Hutt called the shots; the Neimoidian was in charge of carrying out his orders. Theron had also learned that Rers was dumb enough to take cuts for himself when Morbo wasn’t looking, but smart enough to keep the grifts small and unnoticeable.

Eager at this point to get the mission over with, Theron skipped all pretense.

“I need to speak to Morbo.”

“Forget it. Go wait with the others.”

The reply caught Theron off guard. He’d expected Rers to say something like, Nobody speaks to Morbo. Talk to me and I’ll pass it along. Or maybe, What’s in it for me?

The unexpected response stoked Theron’s already burning curiosity; he struggled to stay on script.

“Get me in to see your boss and I’ll make it worth your while.”

The Neimoidian held him in a withering gaze.

“Morbo runs a clean auction. No sneak peeks at the merchandise. Go sit down before this gets ugly.”

The Gamorreans turned to him, their porcine snouts curled in anticipation, revealing their protruding tusks.

“Can’t blame a guy for trying,” Theron said with a shrug as the pieces clicked into place. The extra patrons at the club weren’t gambling because they were here looking to buy. Theron hadn’t heard anything about an auction in the three days he’d been on Nar Shaddaa. It must have been set up weeks ago; potential buyers already contacted long before he arrived. And Theron could think of only one reason for all the secrecy.

Morbo’s auctioning off captured Republic POWs.

Slavery was legal in the Sith Empire and on Hutt-controlled worlds. The Republic generally turned a blind eye to the Hutt slave trade, but there was one notable exception. Any Hutt who auctioned off captured Republic soldiers inevitably became a target of covert Republic retaliation: privateers seizing cargo in transit, anonymous vandals targeting the Hutt’s holdings and warehouses on various planets, customs officials on Core Worlds conducting numerous “random” inspections on arriving shipments from the Hutt’s business partners.

Selling POWs into slavery was bad business, and most Hutts avoided it. But Morbo was greedy, even for his notoriously avaricious species, and a secret auction of Republic prisoners was right up his alley.

Aware that Rers was still watching him, Theron made his way over to an empty table near the entrance and sat down. The Gamorrean bouncers eyed his retreat, snouts sagging in disappointment at the lost chance to pummel a seemingly helpless customer.

He settled into his seat and mulled over his options. Everyone probably assumed he represented a buyer wishing to remain anonymous, and he’d have to play along if he didn’t want to raise suspicion. He could wait out the auction, toss out a few lowball bids to play his part, then try to meet with Morbo after to bargain for Teff’ith’s life. That would be the most prudent course of action. But the idea of sitting idly by while his fellow soldiers were auctioned off like chattel galled Theron.

What if I’m not the only one not willing to just let this happen? Is this what Operation Transom is about?

Then again, if SIS had learned about Morbo’s secret auction, the Director could have thrown together a special op to try to liberate their fellow soldiers.

And I might have just messed the whole thing up by taking out Operation Transom’s point man.

Theron’s first instinct was to do whatever it took to free the Republic prisoners—if he screwed up the mission, he should be the one to fix it. On the other hand, if Transom was still on, the last thing Theron wanted was to get in the way.

There was no way to know which was the right call; not without more information. Unfortunately, contacting SIS wasn’t an option. Like all the casinos in the Red Light District, Morbo’s club was equipped with top-of-the-line security equipment. Any incoming or outgoing transmissions in a three-block radius would be intercepted and analyzed—a standard precaution to prevent cheaters from communicating with a partner outside the casino who could be using a computer to calculate the odds on the games.

Theron surveyed the crowd, searching again for some sign that SIS had another agent in place posing as a buyer. But nobody stood out from the crowd … of course. If they did, the mission would be blown.

Gotta make the call. Sit tight, or get on your feet and get moving.

For Theron, it wasn’t hard to reach a decision. Rers and the other patrons had shifted their focus from him to other new arrivals, making it easy for him to get up and slip outside without attracting attention.

In front of the club, he cast a quick glance to make sure nobody was watching, then casually wandered into the side alley and made for the warehouse built onto the back. He didn’t need to see inside to picture the scene: armed guards watching over unfortunate prisoners about to be auctioned off.

There was a single durasteel door at the back, a pair of blacked-out windows one story up. He dismissed the door; taking the obvious entrance would give the guards time to react. It was unlikely the windows were alarmed or protected by a security field—the difficulty in getting to them was defense enough. He considered scaling the wall to get to the windows, but he’d be exposed if any of the guards wandered out into the back alley. Better to come at them from above, where he was less likely to get noticed.

Theron wandered back out to the front of the club and merged with the flow of pedestrians wandering the square. He walked halfway down the block, passed three buildings on the same side of the street, then paused at the entrance of a narrow back lane next to a three-story building; judging from the signage it was a combination pawnshop and dance hall. He checked to see if anyone was watching.

The three hoodlums on swoop bikes he’d seen earlier streaked overhead again, coming in so low that pedestrians had to duck to avoid getting clipped. They whooped and yelled before climbing safely out of reach and accelerating into the distance. Theron took advantage of the distraction and ducked into the alley, sauntering to the back of the building. He pulled his climbing gloves from where they had been tucked in at the rear of his belt, tugged them over his hands, flexed his fingers. He tested the grip on the side of the building; a million needle-like nanofibers woven into the fabric of the gloves caught on the invisible imperfections of the seemingly smooth surface, giving him purchase.

Moving with the simian dexterity of a Kashyyyk tach, he scampered up the side of the pawnshop’s exterior wall and onto the roof. He didn’t pause to catch his breath, taking three quick steps and leaping across the narrow alley separating the pawnshop from the two-story building beside it. He landed softly, tucking into a roll to absorb the impact. The alley before the next building over was slightly wider, and he once again ran across the roof and jumped across without any hesitation. On the rooftop of the building adjacent to Morbo’s club, he paused and contemplated the nearly ten-meter gap between them.

You’ve made longer jumps before. And if you fall, you’ve survived worse.

Gathering himself, he sprinted toward the edge. Half a step before he jumped the three joyriding teens whizzed down the alley in front of him on their swoops, unaware Theron was leaping across the rooftops just above them.

Distracted, Theron stumbled, his boot slipping on the uneven surface of the roof as he planted his foot for his final leap. His body’s muscle memory reacted instinctively to the sudden loss of balance and momentum by throwing itself forward to offset its shifting center of gravity; Theron was still able to push off the ledge. Halfway across the gap, he realized he wasn’t going to make it. He threw his left arm out in a desperate attempt to snag the ledge. The fingertips of his climbing glove grazed against the surface, the nanofibers latching onto the permacrete half a meter below the roof.

His plunge came to an abrupt and jarring halt, nearly wrenching his left shoulder from its socket, and his body twisted so hard he slammed into the building. He grunted in pain as the wind got knocked from his lungs. Supported by his single, aching limb, he dangled in the breeze and struggled to catch his breath.

After several seconds Theron had recovered enough to reach up and slap his right palm against the building, allowing his other arm to bear some of his weight. Ignoring the protest of his left shoulder socket, he hauled himself up and over the ledge and lay on his stomach atop the roof of Morbo’s club. Rising to his feet, he tested his shoulder with a quick range of motions. The pain made him grit his teeth, but nothing seemed seriously damaged.

At the same time, Theron listened for any sound indicating that his inelegant arrival had attracted the attention of someone inside the club. Hearing nothing but the noise of the swoop-riding teens fading away into the distance, he dropped into a crouch and scuttled along the rooftop to the edge of the rear wall. From his belt he pulled out a length of thin, flexible wire tipped with a small precision laser cutter and a miniature cam.

Theron flicked the cam on, and the image that fed into its lens was transmitted to a heads-up display embedded in the cybernetic implant in his left eye. Using the cam’s relayed image to guide his hand, he carefully lowered the wire over the edge until it was even with the top left corner of one of the blacked-out windows. With a series of whispered commands, Theron cycled the cam through the visible, infrared, and ultraviolet spectrums, searching the various wavelengths for the faint, shimmering glow that would indicate the presence of some type of security field protecting the windows.

He wasn’t surprised to find the windows were clean; even Morbo couldn’t afford to invest in expensive electronic security fields on every possible point of access.

Theron twisted the base of the wire and the laser activated, melting a tiny hole in the corner of the glass and allowing him to work the cam through for a look inside the warehouse. Scattered crates and shipping containers. In the back corner four Cathar were huddled together on the floor, three males and one female. The prisoners had their hands clasped behind their backs, their heads held high even though their feline features were set in grim resignation. A pair of armed guards, both human, stood watch over them, their slouched stances and disinterested expressions revealing their boredom as they waited for Morbo to start the auction.

Moving the laser in slow circles, Theron melted the circumference of the hole in the window until it was large enough for him to reach his hand through, but hopefully still small enough to escape attention. He retracted the wire, stored it safely in his belt, then carefully lowered himself over the edge until his feet rested on the windowsill.

Using the climbing glove of his left hand to help maintain his balance, he peered through the hole, pinpointing the location of each guard with the automated targeting implant in his left eye. He shifted so he could slip his right hand through the hole in the glass. Though firing blind, his cybernetic augmentations kept him locked onto his targets as he whispered, “Toxicity six,” and launched the last two darts from his bracer.

When he peeked back through the hole in the window, he saw that both guards were down and out. The captives on the ground looked around with a confused mixture of fear and hope. Knowing it was unlikely anyone in the casino at the front of the club would hear, Theron turned his head to the side and punched away the rest of the glass with the ball of his fist.

Moving quickly, he squeezed through the window frame and dropped to the ground below, tucking-and-rolling to absorb the impact. He sprang to his feet and raised a finger to his lips. The female Cathar, the senior-ranking member of the group based on her sergeant’s stripes, nodded curtly in understanding.

Theron rifled through the pockets of the unconscious guards, finding a small key on the second. Moments later the Cathar were free of their restraints and on their feet. Theron moved to the exit on the far side of the warehouse floor. He made sure the door to the alley wasn’t locked, and that opening it wouldn’t trigger any alarms, as the Cathar rubbed their wrists to restore circulation.

“Who are you?” the female Cathar asked.

“Republic SIS,” Theron said. “We look after our own.

“That door leads to the back alley,” he added, pointing to the exit. “Can you make it from here?”

The Cathar nodded as she bent down and retrieved the blaster rifle from the guard at her feet. One of her companions snatched another blaster from the second guard.

“Thank you,” she said, before she and the others sped off toward freedom.

Once the Cathar were safely away, he searched the rest of the warehouse until he located the door that led to the private offices between the warehouse in the back of the building and the casino club out front. Theron opened the door carefully, peering through the doorway to discover that the corridor was empty. He guessed Morbo’s thugs were probably out front keeping an eye on the prospective buyers waiting for the auction.

The corridor led off in two directions. Standing still, Theron heard the unmistakable murmur of a crowded bar coming from off to his right, so he turned and headed the opposite way. He didn’t have to go far before he found what he was looking for: a thick beaded curtain hung across an archway at the end of the hall.

Theron stepped through and came face-to-face with the club’s owner. Morbo’s private office was a testament to the gluttony, vanity, and avarice of his species. The crime lord’s bulk was draped over a luxurious custom-made couch, and the rest of the room was cluttered with opulent gold statues, gaudy paintings, and other garish objets d’art fashioned in the crime lord’s own image. Several female Twi’lek servants scurried about the room with downcast eyes as they whisked away the remains of what appeared to be a lavish and exotic feast for a dozen people, but which Theron realized was merely the Hutt’s pre-auction meal.

Morbo stared at him with unmistakable disdain. He clearly didn’t see Theron as a threat, though his servants had all retreated and were cowering in the far corners of the room.

“I told Rers no visitors before the auction,” he growled in Huttese, his voice so deep Theron could feel it trembling through the floor and up into his feet. “Next auction I should put that useless Neimoidian up for sale.”

Like all SIS agents, Theron was fluent in Huttese. But the language put a strain on human vocal cords, so he stuck with Basic for his reply.

“I’m not here for the auction.”

“No? Then come back later.” Morbo’s long, thick tongue darted out to lick away a spot of grease rolling down the jowls of his chin. “I have to show my merchandise in ten minutes.”

Theron didn’t think it was prudent to mention that, because of him, the auction had been postponed indefinitely. “I’ll be quick, great and mighty Morbo. What I have to say could be very profitable for you.”

The combination of stroking the Hutt’s ego and dropping the magic p-word grabbed Morbo’s full attention.

“Speak. It better be worth my time.”

“I know about the hit on the members of the Old Tion Brotherhood,” Theron said, jumping straight to the point.

Morbo laughed, slapping his meaty hands against the rolls of fat covering his chest.

“You’re too late. I hired someone else for that job.”

“I’m not bidding for the contract. I want you to call it off.”

“Impossible. The Brotherhood smuggled spice through my territory without paying my commission. You should know better.”

“I’m not with the Brotherhood,” Theron assured him. “I represent other interests.”

“Then why do you care?”

“This isn’t a smart business move,” Theron continued, evading the question as his mind raced to come up with a convincing argument that wouldn’t reveal who he was or whom he worked for. “Going to war with the Brotherhood could be expensive. But call off the hit and I’ll find the credits to cover your commission.”

“This isn’t about credits,” Morbo said, his sluglike body quaking with rage. “Since Zedania took over, the Old Tion Brotherhood has been expanding. Looking for new territory. I need to send her a message—nobody messes with Morbo!”

“Zedania didn’t authorize this mission,” Theron explained. “The smugglers are working freelance.”

“Then she won’t care if I eliminate them.”

“One of them works for me,” Theron lied. “If you hurt her, I’ll care.”

“Her,” Morbo said with a cunning smile. “You mean the Twi’lek.”

Theron didn’t see much point in trying to deny it. He nodded.

“You say she works for you,” Morbo continued, his tail twitching slightly. “But who are you, exactly?”

“Someone who wants to see Zedania fail,” Theron lied. “I’ve worked hard to get my contact close to her. If you don’t call off this hit, I have to start over.”

Morbo chuckled, the rolls of fat quivering with delight. Clearly he relished the idea of a mole inside someone else’s criminal organization. His eyes narrowed as he tried to assemble the random bits of truth and fiction from Theron’s story together into a single theory.

“You represent a rival looking to take Zedania’s place? Another gang looking to bring the Brotherhood down? Law enforcement from the Tion Hegemony?”

“I really can’t say.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Morbo said with a regretful sigh. “Your friends are ready to leave. They’re loading the spice onto their ship. My people are already headed to the spaceport. You’re too late.”

Theron swore in Old High Gamorrese as he spun on his heel and darted back into the hall. As he ran toward the door leading back to the warehouse he heard angry shouts of surprise coming from the other side; someone had found the downed guards.

He continued past the warehouse door, his legs chewing up the ground in long, quick strides as he continued down the hall and burst through the door leading into the club. The Gamorrean bouncers on either side were too surprised to try to stop him; their job was to keep people from going into the back, not stop someone coming out.

Theron didn’t look back as he raced out the door and into the street, heading for the spaceport.

CHAPTER 3

AS HE BOBBED AND WEAVED his way through the crowd, Theron realized he’d never get to the spaceport in time on foot. Fortunately, the unmistakable whine of incoming swoop engines gave him an idea.

Dashing into the middle of the square where he’d be most visible, he shook his fist and shouted up at the young gang members who had circled back around to buzz the crowd yet again.

“Take your flying toys and get on home, you little punks!”

As he’d expected, the three riders banked their swoops and came straight at him, drawn by his challenge.

Theron ducked and covered his head as the first swoop buzzed past a couple of meters overhead. The second came even closer. Theron turned and ran toward the cover of the nearest building, throwing quick glances back over his shoulder as he pretended to flee in terror. The third rider took the bait and gave chase, accelerating to cut Theron off before he could get to safety. He came in much lower than the other two, trying to force Theron to prostrate himself on the ground to avoid getting struck by his swoop.

Theron played his part by crouching low as if cowering in fear; then at the last moment he sprang up and grabbed the rider’s arm as the swoop narrowly missed him.

Caught by surprise, the young thug was yanked from his seat. Theron held his grip for just an instant, twisting so that the rider fell hard on his backside and not on his unprotected head. The rider rolled across the square as the swoop veered and spun crazily out of control until the internal stabilizers righted it; the swoop’s built-in safety protocols detected the rider’s absence and brought the vehicle down for a safe landing on the other side of the square.

The crowd processed what had just happened in a stunned silence, broken by the sound of the other two swoops racing away, their riders unaware of their friend’s fate. Then everyone erupted in a spontaneous round of applause and cheers.

Theron ignored them and ran over to check on the fallen rider. The young man had rolled over onto his back, where he lay dazed and groaning. Several patches of skin on his bare arms and hands had been scraped raw from his fall, but otherwise he appeared okay.

“Hey, kid—next time, wear a helmet,” Theron said, giving him a pat on the cheek.

The teen only groaned in reply, though he did manage to flash an obscene gesture. Theron took that as a sign he was all right.

The sound of the retreating swoop engines changed pitch: the other two thugs were circling back. Theron turned and ran for the fallen rider’s swoop, leapt on, and fired up the engine.

As he took off, he hoped the other two would stop to look after their friend instead of giving chase. Glancing back over his shoulder, however, he wasn’t surprised to see them close on his tail. Theron punched the accelerator, pushing his ride to full speed as he climbed in altitude, the buildings and streets a blur of colors as he flew past.

In the days before joining the SIS, Theron had carved out a reputation on the minor-league swoop circuits of Manaan; he doubted the riders in pursuit were a match for his skills. But he was on an unfamiliar machine, racing through streets they knew like the back of their hands. Losing them wasn’t going to be easy.

He didn’t worry about them taking him down with blasters; swoop bikes were notoriously unstable, and at high speeds even the most experienced riders needed both hands to maintain control. But if they were reckless enough, they could try ramming him with their own swoops to force him into a crash.

“Navigation overlay for current location,” he whispered, and the HUD in his left eye implant responded by superimposing a map of the surrounding area over his vision. The blue dot signifying his location was moving too quickly across the map for Theron to look for shortcuts, so he plotted a course through the main thoroughfares. He doubted his pursuers would do the same.

The swoop he took was improperly balanced, and it would take a while for him to get a true feel for the bike. He banked hard around a corner, struggling to hold the line as the swoop tried listing to the left. Throwing his weight in the opposite direction he managed to stay upright, but the awkward move cost him speed.

Glancing back over his shoulder, Theron saw only one gang member in pursuit. Alarms went off in his head, and he focused on the map overlaying his vision. He saw the side alley on the map a split second before it appeared to his left, giving him just enough time to throttle back. The early deceleration allowed Theron to narrowly avoid a collision as the second rider shot out of the alley just in front of him in an attempt to knock him off his swoop. Theron dived down and to the left, the sharp change of direction overstressing the stabilizers on the misbalanced vehicle. Instead of fighting to stay upright, though, he leaned into it and hammered the accelerator, pushing the swoop into a tight barrel roll that took him under the rider who’d cut in front of him.

The kid following wasn’t able to mimic Theron’s move; the only way he could avoid ramming into his partner was by slamming the emergency brakes, stalling the engine as the other two swoops raced ahead and left him behind.

The spaceport was only a few kilometers away, well outside the territory of the rider’s gang. With his friends no longer in the picture, Theron figured his pursuer just needed a little more encouragement to give up the chase. He released the grip of his right hand as he grabbed the blaster on his hip. The swoop bucked and swayed as soon as he let go, but now that he was used to the idiosyncrasies of the machine Theron managed to maintain control long enough to turn and fire a pair of quick shots at his pursuer.

The bolts went nowhere near their target. Flying a swoop bike with one hand was a feat in itself; holding it steady enough to accurately aim was nearly impossible. Regardless, the bolts had the desired effect: the other rider decided he’d had enough and veered off, ending the pursuit.

Theron slowed his vehicle and slapped his blaster back into its holster, struggling to keep the swoop online the entire time. Once he had two hands on the handles again, he took it back up to full speed for the rest of the journey. He arrived at the spaceport less than a minute later, bringing the swoop in for a landing near the main doors leading into the hangar bays where Teff’ith and her crew had docked their ship.

A small crowd was milling around outside the entrance. Curious, Theron tapped an agitated-looking Sullustan on the shoulder.

“What’s going on here, friend?”

“Ugly business,” the Sullustan replied in his native tongue. “Hutt business.”

“Which Hutt? Morbo?” Theron asked in Basic. He had a bad feeling he already knew the answer.

The Sullustan shrugged.

“Don’t know. Armed men show up, tell everyone in Bays Seven through Twelve to clear out. I don’t ask questions.”

The distinctive sound of a heavy repeating blaster rang out from inside the hangar. The crowd collectively flinched and took a few steps back, leaving a clear path for Theron as he ran inside.

Teff’ith was in the middle of loading crates of tightly packed spice onto the ship when she was suddenly hit with an overpowering sense that something wasn’t right. Nothing specific, just a half-imagined tingling in the tips of her lekku. Based on past experience she knew better than to ignore it.

“Something bad coming,” she said in her heavily accented Basic, drawing twin blasters that she kept at her sides and scanning the spaceport for anything suspicious.

Gorvich, the human who’d set up the spice deal on Nar Shaddaa, snorted as he finished his preflight inspection of the ship’s exterior.

“You’ve been complaining ever since we landed, Sunshine.”

Teff’ith’s lip curled up in a sneer. Gorvich had originally given her the nickname because of her yellow skin and “sunny” disposition; she was convinced he kept using it just to annoy her.

She had a nickname for him too: Idiot. Hardly original, but accurate. In her twenty-odd standard years she had worked as security and muscle for low-level scum across the galaxy, trying to scrape out a living on the fringes of so-called decent society. She’d dealt with thieves, killers, slavers, and sociopaths, but nobody brought bile to her throat like Gorvich—not even that SIS agent who’d gotten her mixed up in a crazy suicide mission almost two years ago.

It was tempting to just put Gorvich out of his misery with one clean shot between the eyes, but that would mean walking away from the Old Tion Brotherhood, and Teff’ith wasn’t ready to do that. The Brotherhood was growing fast, and Teff’ith was already earning a reputation. If she played her cards right, the next few years could see her moving up the ranks until she was the one calling the shots instead of taking orders from morons.

Frinn—another member of the crew—grunted as he sauntered down the ship’s boarding ramp to join them on the loading platform. “Sounds like you’re just trying to get out of loading these crates,” he said.

Teff’ith ignored him. He was almost as stupid as Gorvich, but he wasn’t in charge. She didn’t need to convince him of anything.

“Forget the cargo. Gotta go. We leave now.”

“Are you crazy, Sunshine? Do you know how much this spice is worth?” said Gorvich.

“Can’t spend if you dead.”

“Did you know she was this paranoid when you decided to bring her along?” Frinn asked Gorvich, smirking.

“Think Morbo double-crossed us?” Teff’ith asked. “Sent goons to get our cargo?”

Gorvich laughed. “Not likely. Morbo doesn’t even know we’re here.”

Teff’ith’s eyes went wide. “What you mean?”

“I’m not cutting that bloated slug in on our deal just because he thinks he owns this district. Figured we’d handle the deal ourselves and make an extra twenty percent.”

“Idiot!” Teff’ith spat, barely suppressing the urge to unleash a volley of bolts into his chest at point-blank range. “Morbo knows! Going to get us killed!”

Gorvich rolled his eyes, but Vebb, the fourth member of their crew, set down the crate he was carrying and joined the conversation.

“Maybe she’s right,” the Rodian said. “I feel it, too. Something’s off.”

As soon as he spoke Teff’ith realized what was wrong. The spaceport was always bustling with activity: crews loading or unloading their ships; mechanics making repairs. But instead of the familiar sounds, right now she heard only silence. All the loading docks around their vessel were deserted.

“Down!” she shouted, diving forward, tackling Gorvich, and dragging them both to the ground behind a stack of crates still waiting to be loaded onto the ship.

Vebb followed her lead, his thin, wiry body ducking behind the crate he had just set on the ground. Frinn, however, just stood where he was, staring at them with a look of skeptical bemusement. A second later a heavy repeating blaster echoed through the deserted spaceport and Frinn’s body slumped to the ground, his dead eyes open and his face frozen in the same stupid expression.

Teff’ith poked her head up then ducked back down almost instantly behind her makeshift bunker as another volley rang out. From the sound she was able to pick out general points of origin for the shots.

“Two shooters,” she said to Gorvich, tilting her head in each direction. “There and there.”

Gorvich popped his head up briefly, then ducked back down as the assassins opened fire.

“I can’t see ’em.”

Teff’ith didn’t bother to tell him what a waste of effort his actions were. The far side of the hangar was shrouded in thick shadows and cluttered with heavy machinery for loading and unloading cargo from the incoming ships; the assassins were well protected and well hidden.

“Maybe we can make a break for the ship,” Gorvich suggested as he checked the charge on each of his blasters.

She almost let him try, but then realized she’d need his help if she was going to get out of this alive.

“Shooters got the angle on ship. Cut us down if we go for it.”

“So what’s the plan?”

Teff’ith ran through the possible scenarios in her mind. The shooters had chosen their positions to pen them in and keep them from getting to the safety of the ship, but there was a door in the rear of the hangar she might be able to reach. If she got through the door she could work her way through the adjacent docking bays of the spaceport and try to flank their attackers.

“Slip out the back. Into Bay Seven. Circle around to Bay Nine. Come up behind.”

“Sounds risky,” Gorvich said, eyeing the open stretch between their current position and the door at the rear of their hangar. “Want me to send Vebb?”

Teff’ith glanced over at the Rodian, still cowering behind the crate. He was a good pilot, but not much use in a fight; he hadn’t even drawn his pistol.

“You joking?”

“What if there are more than just two shooters?” Gorvich asked.

Teff’ith was surprised her idiot leader was capable of anticipating a trap, though she had already considered the possibility. If she had been the one planning this ambush, she’d have tried to flush the targets away from the ship and through the door at the rear leading into the adjacent hangar … and right into the waiting crosshairs of a third shooter. Bay 7 wasn’t in use; the lights were off, and try as she might she couldn’t tell if there was someone waiting in the gloom to spring a trap. But she didn’t see any other options. Better to just go for it and hope there were only two assassins.

“Cover us,” she said, getting her long legs ready for the quick sprint to the door.

Gorvich nodded, then popped up from behind the crates, screaming his fury as he unleashed a wild volley of shots to draw their enemies’ fire.

Teff’ith took off, crouching low but moving fast as she broke for the door and the darkness beyond.

Theron ran through the deserted hangars, heading toward Bay 8, where Teff’ith’s crew had docked their ship. He heard another round of blasterfire and took it as a good sign—there wouldn’t have been more shots unless Teff’ith and her people were fighting back.

Charging into the middle of the firefight in Bay 8 was too risky even for Theron, so he took a detour through the adjacent hangar. He plunged into the darkness of the unused Bay 7, nearly knocking over a heavily armored figure half hidden in the shadows. A single, thick horn protruded from the center of his bald head, clearly marking him as an Advozse even in the near darkness.

He was standing in the middle of the room with his blaster rifle raised to his shoulder, back toward the entrance Theron had come through, attention focused on the door leading into Teff’ith’s hangar. Hearing the pounding steps coming up behind him, the Advozse started to turn toward the new arrival, but Theron was on him before he could react. With a front kick he knocked the blaster rifle from the alien’s hands, then threw a quick flurry of punches at his face. However, the assassin wasn’t some clumsy street thug; he ducked under the blows and took Theron off his feet with a leg sweep.

Theron rolled out of the way as his foe brought an elbow crashing down on the floor where his head had been an instant before. Still prone, he lashed out with his boot, but the Advozse turned away, and instead of crashing into his jaw it glanced off his shoulder.

The assassin reached to his belt for his backup weapon. Theron was faster, snapping his arm up as he growled, “Toxicity ten,” unleashing the only unused weapon still left in his bracer. Unlike the arsenal of incapacitating darts, the single-shot pinpoint laser was lethal at a range of less than three meters. The bright intensity of the needle-thin beam pierced the darkness and struck the Advozse just below the horn protruding from the center of his brow, killing him instantly.

The body toppled forward, momentarily pinning Theron beneath its bulk. Before he had a chance to roll the fallen assassin off him someone else came barreling into the room from the door on the opposite end.

Teff’ith heard the assassins returning Gorvich’s fire as she raced, exposed, across the hangar floor. A pair of bolts ricocheted off the ground beside her as she dived through the open door and into the unlit room beyond, safely out of the line of fire.

She slid across the floor and scrambled to her feet, bracing herself for the deadly impact of a blaster bolt from the possible third assassin waiting in the shadows. But the trap was never sprung, and Teff’ith grinned as she realized they might still get out of this alive.

Assassins didn’t want to cut the bounty three ways. Greedy. Stupid.

Eager to make them pay for their mistake, she rushed through the room and out the door on the other side. She never even noticed the two figures—one alive, one dead—lying in the shadows on the floor only a few meters off to the side.

Theron watched Teff’ith race past, oblivious to his presence. Once she was gone, he rolled out from under the Advozse’s corpse and got to his feet. He preferred to disable opponents when possible, but sometimes that wasn’t an option. In any case, he wasn’t about to shed tears for a hired assassin.

He’d saved Teff’ith from walking into a deadly trap, and he’d done it without giving himself away. But there were other assassins to deal with, and though Teff’ith might have gained the upper hand thanks to his intervention, he wasn’t about to leave her fate to chance.

Moving more cautiously and keeping to the shadows, he slipped away in the direction the young Twi’lek had disappeared.

CHAPTER 4

TEFF’ITH EMERGED FROM THE DARKNESS of Bay 7 into the central supply room serving Hangars 7 to 12. Her original plan had been to go through the supply room into Bay 9 and try to come at the assassins from behind. But when her eyes fell on the heavy loader and a damaged fuel core resting in the corner, she had a better idea.

The core was cylindrical in shape, one meter thick and two meters tall, and it weighed over a ton. It wasn’t uncommon for ships to make minor repairs while docked at a spaceport, but replacing an engine’s fuel core was a major undertaking. It wasn’t just the size that made repairs difficult. Residual fuel trapped inside the core was highly flammable. The core was enveloped in thick shield casing, but if the casing was cracked, and the liquid inside exposed to air, it could ignite.

Teff’ith inspected the core. The casing was fully intact; it had probably been replaced because of a blockage in the lines. Reassured the engine core wouldn’t unexpectedly explode, she jumped into the loader’s operator seat and primed the starter. The compact vehicle’s powerful engine coughed, sputtered, and belched out a thick cloud of black smoke before finally catching. The loader had seen better days, but it would be good enough for what she had planned. She could feel the vibrations of the twin treads rumbling over the floor and up through her chair as she maneuvered the loader over to the fuel core.

With a couple of button presses, she manipulated the loading arms so that they grabbed the fuel core at either end and hoisted it into the air, holding it lengthwise. She lowered the arms slightly until the core was level with her seat, allowing her to just barely see over the top of the cylinder toward where she was going. She spun the loader in place, then sent it chugging back through the door she had just entered.

Theron heard the loader’s engine and quickly ducked into the shadows out of sight as it came chugging past, carrying a discarded starship fuel core. Seeing Teff’ith at the controls, he knew exactly what she was planning and decided it was time for him to make his exit. He waited until the loader disappeared through the door heading back to Bay 7, then he slipped into the supply room and out through one of the bays on the opposite side, confident she could take care of the remaining assassins without any more help from him.

Teff’ith saw Gorvich’s eyes grow wide as the loader rumbled through the door at the rear of the hangar. The assassins still hidden on the far side opened fire at the new target, but Teff’ith was careful to keep her head tucked behind the fuel core, and their bolts deflected harmlessly off the cylinder’s thick casing. Gorvich took the opportunity to pop up from behind his cover and fire a few token shots at his attackers as Teff’ith steered the loader to where Vebb was hiding.

“Time to go,” she shouted over the engine.

She positioned her vehicle to block the assassins from getting a clear shot, allowing the Rodian to scamper over to the ship’s loading ramp and disappear into the hold.

As she turned the loader in Gorvich’s direction, one of the assassins finally broke cover and moved to a new position to get a shot at Teff’ith. The Twi’lek couldn’t make out the species through the helmet and full-body armor, but the figure appeared female.

Finally presented with a target he could see, Gorvich seized the opportunity. His twin blasters struck with deadly precision, dropping the exposed assassin in her tracks before she had taken two steps.

“Nice shot,” Teff’ith noted, grudgingly admitting to herself that Gorvich wasn’t completely useless.

“Nice ride,” Gorvich responded, cocking one eyebrow at the loader.

The lone remaining assassin fired off another round; once again it deflected harmlessly off the massive engine core. The ship’s engine behind them roared to life, and the hangar’s roof slid slowly open with a loud squeal as Vebb prepared for takeoff.

“Green-skinned scum-sucker better not ditch us,” Gorvich spat.

Your style, not his, Teff’ith thought. Out loud she said, “Get to the ship.”

Gorvich shook his head.

“I’m not leaving half our shipment behind. Get rid of this last assassin and we can take our time loading up the rest of the spice.”

Teff’ith was about to tell him how stupid he was being when she saw something small and round flying through the air toward them.

“Detonator!” she shouted, ducking down low in her seat.

Gorvich dived behind the loader as the detonator exploded. There was a sudden flash of light and sound, and then everything went black.

As her consciousness returned, Teff’ith slowly opened her eyes. She was lying on the ground, covered in a fine powder, and the only sound she heard was a piercing whine. She surveyed the scene around her, struggling to make sense of what had happened.

Much of the detonator’s concussive shock wave escaped through the roof, but the blast had still been powerful enough to wreak havoc on the hangar. The crates had been blown to bits, showering the hangar and everything in it in a dusting of spice and splintered chunks of wood. The loader lay on its side beside her, upended by the force of the blast.

The bodies of Frinn and the bounty hunter Gorvich shot had been flung all the way to the rear of the hangar, where they’d landed in twisted heaps. Teff’ith realized the loader had shielded her from the worst of the blast; it was the only reason she’d survived. She wondered if Gorvich had been as lucky as she rose unsteadily to her feet.

Her ears were still ringing and her balance was off kilter; it was all she could do not to topple over. On the far side of the room she saw an armored man crawling on his hands and knees—the assassin who’d tossed the explosive. He was clearly shaken and disoriented, but he was moving slowly toward where his blaster rifle lay on the floor nearby.

Teff’ith grabbed for the pistol at her hip, but the sudden motion was too much in her wobbly state, and she staggered sideways and fell to the ground. Her clumsy movements drew the attention of the assassin as he wrapped his fingers around his weapon.

He drew it up slowly and took aim at Teff’ith. Before he could fire, a single shot came from over her shoulder, striking him in the chest. His armor absorbed the worst of the blow, but the impact sent him sprawling backward and the gun dropped from his hand.

Teff’ith turned to see Vebb coming down the ship’s boarding ramp, pistol in hand and a grim look in his eyes as he advanced on his vulnerable opponent.

In a fair fight the pilot wouldn’t have stood a chance, but Vebb had been inside the ship when the detonator had gone off—he was the only one not staggering and stumbling around. The assassin sat up and fumbled at his belt, going for his backup weapon as Vebb continued toward him. The Rodian fired three more shots from point-blank range, putting an end to his desperate, clumsy efforts.

He turned to Teff’ith and took hold of her arm, dragging her to her feet.

“Not so fast,” she grumbled, swaying unsteadily even with his support.

“Gotta hurry,” he told her, his voice sounding distant and hollow.

Teff’ith looked in the direction he was pointing and saw that the ship’s core had been badly damaged by the explosion.

“Casing’s cracked,” he said. “Thing could blow any second.”

Teff’ith nodded. With Vebb’s help she stumbled over to the waiting ship and half staggered, half crawled up the boarding ramp. To her surprise, Gorvich was already waiting for them in the hold.

“Check her out,” Vebb said as he gently lowered her to the floor. Then he punched the button to retract the ramp before racing up to the cockpit.

Gorvich was covered in scrapes and bruises, and he moved with a pronounced limp as he slowly made his way over to the ship’s medkit. But otherwise he seemed to be okay; clearly the loader had shielded him from the worst of the blast as well.

Fortune favors fools, Teff’ith thought as the ship took to the air.

There was a deep boom from somewhere far below them as the cracked casing on the engine core gave way. The explosion made the ship buck and lurch, sending Gorvich tumbling hard to the floor where he landed with a heavy grunt.

“Stupid Rodian can’t even fly straight,” he muttered as he hauled himself back to his feet.

In her mind’s eye Teff’ith could imagine the damage caused by the fuel core’s detonation. Bays 7 through 12 would all be out of commission for weeks as crews cleaned up the mess and made structural repairs. The Hutts wouldn’t be happy about the lost revenue; they’d be looking for someone to blame. Morbo might end up having to foot the bill—he was the one who organized the hit that went sour. She decided it would be wise to stay far away from Nar Shaddaa for the foreseeable future.

Gorvich sat down gingerly beside her and opened the medkit.

“Show me where it hurts, Sunshine,” he said with a lecherous smile.

“Don’t need help,” she growled, slapping his hand away as he reached out toward her.

“Why are you so mad? We may have left half the spice behind, but it’s still a good score.”

“Frinn’s dead,” she reminded him. “Your fault. Should have paid Morbo.”

Gorvich shrugged. “Never liked Frinn much. Besides, now we get to split his share. It all worked out for the best.”

Teff’ith wasn’t so ready to simply dismiss everything that had happened. Now that they were free and clear, she had a strong sense that they weren’t seeing all the pieces of the puzzle.

“Missing something,” she muttered. “Why only two assassins? Send three, we don’t stand a chance.”

“We got lucky. Happens sometimes. Try to enjoy it.”

“Don’t rely on luck. It turns.”

“Always doom and gloom with you, isn’t it, Sunshine?” Gorvich said, shaking his head as he rose to his feet and made his way to the cockpit.

Alone in the hold, Teff’ith couldn’t let it go. She kept playing the fight over and over in her head, trying to understand why Morbo hadn’t taken the simple precaution of sending a third assassin to cut off their retreat. The more she struggled with the problem, the more she became convinced she had overlooked something very, very obvious.

Theron was already outside the spaceport, milling with the rest of the crowd beyond the doors, when he heard the first explosion. He resisted the urge to rush back inside; he didn’t want to draw any unwanted attention to himself, but he couldn’t help wondering if something had gone wrong with Teff’ith’s plan. When he saw her ship taking off after a short time, he breathed a deep sigh of relief.

The second explosion came an instant later, this one much larger than the first. Cries of dismay welled up from the crowd, most from pilots and captains imagining what damage might have been done to their ships.

“Which hangar are you in?” Theron asked the Sullustan he’d been speaking with earlier.

“Bay Ten,” he replied glumly in his native tongue. Then his eyes narrowed. “You ran inside. Why?”

“Had to check on my cargo,” Theron lied. “Make sure everything was safe.”

“You come back out, big explosions,” the Sullustan continued. “Suspicious.”

“Don’t try to pin this on me,” Theron said defensively. “You said it yourself. Hutt business. You got a problem, talk to them.”

The Sullustan continued to glare at Theron for several seconds, then finally turned away.

“Just worried about my ship.”

“Me too,” Theron said. When he continued, he spoke loud enough for the others in the crowd to hear. “That explosion sounded bad. The Hutts will probably want to shut down the whole spaceport while they make repairs.”

“Shut it down?” the Sullustan echoed, the idea suddenly taking root in his head.

“Yeah. They’ll probably quarantine the whole area and seize everything inside as evidence while they investigate what happened.”

There was a moment of stunned silence as the crowd pondered the implications of his words, then a woman shouted, “No way I’m letting those greedy slugs get their mitts on my ship!”

Her defiant outcry touched off a stampede as everyone tried to get inside at once, pushing and shoving one another out of the way in their haste to grab whatever cargo they could and take off before the Hutts swooped in and closed the spaceport down.

Theron waited a few seconds until the small crowd had completely disappeared into the spaceport. Confident there wouldn’t be any witnesses sticking around to give his description to the Hutts and cause trouble for Republic SIS, he sauntered off in the other direction, whistling an old Mantellian tune.

CHAPTER 5

MARCUS TRANT HAD A LOT ON HIS MIND. As Director of Republic Strategic Information Service, that wasn’t unusual—he was always juggling the day-to-day operations of the Republic’s intelligence arm with the political games necessary for any government agency to stay afloat. Unlike some of the Republic’s more traditional institutions—the Jedi, or the Galactic Senate, for example—SIS still had to justify its existence at every turn to keep from getting shut down or having its funding slashed by a Senator campaigning for reelection on a platform of “responsible government spending.”

Unlike the military, most of what the SIS did was behind the scenes and off the record. Marcus liked to tell his operatives that if they did their job right, nobody would even know what they had done. Unfortunately, that answer didn’t fly when facing a budget hearing. The bureaucrats who ultimately decided his organization’s fate wanted something to show for the credits they poured into the SIS. They expected the Director to reveal highly classified mission details, ignoring the fact that doing so would jeopardize his people.

Fending off their ridiculous requests was exhausting; things would be much easier with a strong political ally who could vouch for the value of what the SIS did. Someone too powerful and important to be questioned by the politicians and desk-jockeys. Someone like Jace Malcom, the Supreme Commander of the Republic military. Jace was a highly respected and universally admired war hero; having him in the SIS corner would help get the simpering bureaucrats to back off. The recently appointed Supreme Commander had asked SIS to undertake a special mission. Everything had been going smoothly until Theron got mixed up in it.

The Director hadn’t heard from Theron since yesterday, when he’d tersely broken off their conversation about what he was doing on Nar Shaddaa. Since then Theron had disappeared, but not before disabling a fellow SIS agent, causing an industrial accident at one of Nar Shaddaa’s spaceports, and unraveling three months of covert surveillance.

Despite all this, the Director was waiting before filing his official report. Theron was one of his best agents; he’d earned the benefit of the doubt. The least Marcus could do was wait to hear his side of the story before ending his career.

The receptionist behind the desk in Jace’s waiting room looked up at his arrival, and Marcus was immediately struck by her remarkable green eyes.

“Go right in, Director,” she said, flashing him a dazzling smile as she pressed the button to open the office door in the wall behind her. “The Commander’s waiting for you.”

He passed by the receptionist and into the office beyond, trying to focus on how he could explain what had gone wrong to the Supreme Commander without getting Theron court-martialed.

Jace Malcom was seated behind a desk, studying his computer monitor intently. His skin was lighter than the Director’s own ebony hue, though still tanned and weathered—the complexion of a man who had spent most of his life outdoors. Hints of his age showed in the crow’s-feet around his eyes and the slight graying at the temples of his dark hair, though it was hard to notice with the short military cut he sported. But his body was still in fighting shape: broad-shouldered and thick-chested, he looked like he could hold his own on the battlefield.

His most notable feature was the gruesome patchwork of scars and melted flesh that covered most of the right side of his face. He’d been wounded by a detonator many years ago at the Battle of Alderaan while serving as the leader of the legendary Havoc Squad special forces unit.

Looking at the scarring, the Director couldn’t help thinking of Theron again. It had been Theron’s mother—Master Satele Shan, now the Grand Master of the Jedi Order—who’d led the Jedi that fought alongside Havoc Squad that day. Together Satele and Jace fought the Sith Lord Darth Malgus on the battlefield, turning the tide of the conflict. Though Malgus survived the encounter, the Republic won the day and reclaimed Alderaan from the Empire.

“Close the door, Director,” Jace said, turning away from the screen. “And take a seat.”

Marcus snapped off a curt salute, then settled into the chair across from the Supreme Commander.

“Your message said we had to talk about Transom,” Jace said. “I assume something’s gone wrong.”

“Someone slipped in and freed the prisoners before the auction,” the Director explained. “Stole them right out from under Morbo’s nose.”

“And blew up a spaceport, too,” Jace noted.

“And that,” Marcus admitted sheepishly.

Transom is Jace’s pet project. Should have guessed he’d be following it more closely than usual.

“I thought the plan was to wait until after the auction,” Jace pressed. “Get our people back after they left Nar Shaddaa so Morbo wouldn’t know we’d found out about his slave trafficking ring.”

“We had a communication breakdown,” Marcus said, choosing his words carefully. “Two agents following different agendas got in each other’s way. We’re still trying to sort out the details.”

“Isn’t it your job to make sure your agents stay out of each other’s way?” the Supreme Commander asked.

The Director’s options were clear—tell Jace about Theron defying orders to act on his own, or stay silent and take the blame himself.

“You’re right, sir. I accept full responsibility. It won’t happen again.”

The Supreme Commander didn’t reply. Instead, he just stared at Marcus in silence, causing the Director to shift uncomfortably in his seat.

He knows I’m holding something back. Covering for someone.

Eager to get out from under Jace’s penetrating gaze, the Director broke the silence.

“I know how important Operation Transom was to you, sir,” Marcus said. “And we did manage to rescue Republic soldiers who would otherwise have spent their lives as slaves.

“Maybe what happened on Nar Shaddaa will send a message,” he continued. “Make the Hutts think twice before selling off Republic POWs. Remind them that we look after our own.”

“Let’s hope so,” Jace said, his glare softening. “Maybe it’s for the best, anyway. Free up resources for something else. Something big.”

Something bigger than saving your fellow soldiers from slavery? Marcus silently wondered.

“What are your feelings on the current state of the war effort?” the Supreme Commander asked, seeming to suddenly change topics.

The question was familiar enough; the Director had answered it a hundred different times in various meetings over the years. Usually he would give the answer he thought the listener was looking for to make the meeting go more smoothly. But Jace wasn’t like the politicians he usually dealt with, and he decided that being blunt and honest was worth the risk.

“The Empire is reeling. For the first time in decades we have the upper hand. When the Emperor fell, it left a void atop the Sith power structure. Malgus tried to fill it, but when his coup failed and he was killed, the Empire was left without a clear leader to rally them.”

After a brief pause he added, “Imperial Intelligence has fallen apart. Without their input, the Imperial military strategy has become ineffective and unfocused. You can’t run a war without good intel.”

“You don’t have to sell me on SIS,” Jace told him, a hint of a smile on his lips. “I appreciate what you bring to the table. Believe it or not, I actually read all those reports you send me.”

“Sorry, Commander. Guess I’m used to dealing with politicians and bureaucrats.”

“I’ve been studying your analysis of Imperial threats quite closely,” Jace continued. “There’s one in particular that caught my eye: the Ascendant Spear.”

Once again Marcus’s thoughts returned to Theron. The Ascendant Spear was a prototype long-range battle cruiser developed by the brilliant Darth Mekhis as part of a secret Imperial weapons program. Theron, with the help of his mentor Jedi Master Ngani Zho, learned about the program and nearly ended it by killing Darth Mekhis. Of all her deadly creations, only the Ascendant Spear still survived.

Zho died on that mission, Marcus thought. Gave his life to save Teff’ith. That’s why Theron feels responsible for her now.

All the connections to Theron were starting to feel like more than just coincidence. His mother would probably say something about the Force working in mysterious ways, but the Director knew Theron wasn’t attuned to the Force. Not like a Jedi.

“Something wrong, Director?”

Marcus shook his head, trying to get out of his own thoughts. “Just thinking about the Ascendant Spear.”

“Fill me in.”

“Most of what we know is theory and conjecture, pieced together from battlefield reports. It’s got some kind of revolutionary hyperdrive—probably the fastest ship ever built. Enough firepower to wipe out an entire fleet.”

“Your reports estimate the Ascendant Spear is responsible for more Republic casualties than the next ten most effective Imperial battle cruisers combined.”

“The Spear is so much more advanced than any other ship that we still don’t know its full capabilities,” the Director admitted.

“And what about the commander? Darth Karrid?”

“Darth Malgus’s apprentice,” the Director said. “She’s a Falleen. Used to be on our side. Trained with the Jedi before defecting to the Sith.”

“I’m surprised they accepted her,” Jace said. “I thought they believed only humans and pure-blooded Sith were worthy of joining their ranks.”

“Malgus was different,” Marcus explained, before adding, “Karrid’s a tactical genius, and she’s completely ruthless. Every battle the Ascendant Spear has been involved in has been a massacre for our side. If it weren’t for Karrid and the Spear, we might have already won this war.”

Jace nodded, and the Director had the impression that the Supreme Commander already knew all this. It was almost as if Jace had been testing him.

“I’m putting a task force together to take Ascendant Spear down,” the Supreme Commander said.

Marcus was impressed by the boldness of the plan, but his enthusiasm was tempered by reality. As much as he wanted to voice his support to get in good with Jace, he felt he owed it to the Supreme Commander to be honest.

“SIS has investigated this option before,” Marcus said. “We couldn’t find a way to make it work.”

“This isn’t going to be an SIS op,” Jace told him. “I want a joint mission with the full cooperation of the military, the Jedi, and SIS.”

“SIS is at your disposal,” the Director assured him, though inside he was skeptical. Joint missions were great in theory, but in practice they tended to become turf wars as the different agencies fought to take all the credit and shift all the blame.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jace said. “But this is too big for anyone to handle alone. The only way to pull this off is to work together.”

The Supreme Commander stood and came around from behind the desk, moving quickly. He seized Marcus’s shoulders with his massive hands, his steel grip just short of being painful. Leaning forward, he brought his face in close. His unblinking eyes seemed to bore deep into the Director, as if Jace was seeking out the depths of his heart and mind.

“Don’t tell me what I want to hear,” he insisted. “I believe we can do this, and I need you to believe it, too. Are you with me, Marcus? Really, truly with me?”

“I’m with you, Commander,” the Director vowed, his reservations swept away by the Supreme Commander’s raw intensity and conviction.

“Good man,” Jace said, patting him on the shoulders as he released his grip and stood up. “I knew I could count on you.”

He made his way back around to the other side of the desk and settled back into his chair.

“I’m sending you everything I have on the Spear and Darth Karrid,” Jace told him. “Classified reports from every military engagement the Spear’s been involved in, confidential evaluations prepared by Karrid’s trainers and the Masters at the Jedi academy. Everything. Study it all in detail and send me a list of agents you’d recommend for this job. I want those dossiers by next week.”

“Yes, sir,” Marcus said.

“Remember—this is our top priority,” Jace said. “The Ascendant Spear is the single biggest threat to the Republic, our fleets and our citizens. I intend to destroy it, and I want you to tell me how.”

CHAPTER 6

“THIS IS AN OUTRAGE!” Darth Ravage exclaimed. “Malgus was a traitor who tried to usurp the Emperor’s throne! Now you expect us to grant his apprentice a seat on the Dark Council?”

Darth Marr, senior-ranking member of the Dark Council, refused to respond in kind to Ravage’s aggressive outburst. Instead, he carefully gauged the reactions of the six other members who had gathered in the meeting chamber deep inside the Emperor’s Citadel on Dromund Kaas. Unlike Ravage, they remained calm, though from their expressions it was clear they shared his reservations.

“No one of us can make demands on the others,” Marr assured them. “But I will remind you that Darth Karrid turned her back on Malgus when he turned his back on us. And Darth Hadra’s untimely demise has left the Sphere of Technology vacant. All I’m asking is that you consider her as a candidate for the position.”

“She’s a Falleen,” Darth Mortis objected. Darth Rictus, the oldest member of the Council, nodded to show he shared Mortis’s opinion.

Marr fought back the urge to rail against their bigotry. Malgus had overreached when he tried to proclaim himself the new Emperor, but he was right about one thing: If the Empire wanted to defeat the Republic, they could no longer cling to their overt prejudice against lesser species. Keeping entire worlds subjugated put too great a strain on Imperial military resources; it was far more efficient to try and enlist them as willing allies in the war against the Republic.

But Marr knew arguments would only push the already fragile Dark Council toward a complete schism. Now was not the time for infighting. The Republic had them in retreat across the galaxy; a united front was their only hope of survival. Defense of the Empire was his official Sphere of Influence, so it fell to him to bridge the divides among his fellow Council members.

“Our numbers dwindle,” Marr reminded them. “We need allies. Elevating a Falleen to the Council shows other species that there is a place for them in our Empire.”

“Perhaps the problem is that the other species have forgotten their proper place,” Mortis replied.

“Well played, Mortis,” Darth Vowrawn chimed in, letting his words hang in the air for a dramatic moment before adding, “Yet we should not dismiss Darth Karrid so quickly.”

Marr had been hoping for Vowrawn’s support. A pure-blooded Sith who reveled in the courtly intrigue, sly politics, and unbridled hedonism of the Imperial nobility, he was also responsible for the Production and Logistics Sphere of Influence. He knew numbers better than anyone; the Republic had more soldiers, more resources, and more allies than the Empire, and if the Empire couldn’t recruit more worlds to its side it was going to lose.

“Darth Karrid has proven herself quite valuable to our war effort,” Vowrawn reminded them all. “Without her our situation would be untenable, rather than just precarious.”

Darth Ravage grunted, unconvinced. “You’re giving the credit to her, when we all know it should really go to the ship. Any one of us could have her success if we controlled the Ascendant Spear.”

“And therein lies the problem,” Vowrawn continued. “We don’t control it. She does. And I doubt she’ll hand it over to you just because you ask.”

“The ship is part of the equation,” Marr admitted. “Darth Mekhis controlled the Technology Sphere when she developed the Ascendant Spear. There is some logic in giving the portfolio to the one who now controls the last of her creations.”

“Are you scared of her?” Darth Rictus asked, ending his question with a gleeful cackle.

Marr ignored the question, refusing to rise to the old man’s bait.

“I’m willing to consider other candidates for the seat,” he continued. “If any of you has a worthy suggestion.”

“Darth Gravus,” Mortis offered, and there was a general murmur of assent from the rest of the group.

Inwardly, Marr cringed. It wasn’t that Gravus wasn’t suitable for the position. The Dark Lord had proven his worth by successfully undermining the Republic campaign to restore the devastated world of Taris. But Gravus was a link to the old ways. Ambitious and ruthless, he had earned many influential allies in the upper echelons of Imperial society … and just as many enemies. Bringing him into the Council would open the door for more infighting as old grudges would be rekindled, and it would do nothing to convince other species to join the Imperial cause. Worst of all, his selection was sure to anger Darth Karrid. Fortunately, Gravus’s victory on Taris had been overshadowed when his fleets lost control of the mineral-rich world of Leritor, a costly setback for the Empire.

“Gravus failed to keep the Republic at bay in the Mid Rim,” he reminded them.

“He has fallen back to Bothawui to regroup,” Mortis replied. “Soon he will launch a counteroffensive and reclaim Leritor for the Empire.”

“If he is successful, then I can see no reason to oppose him as a candidate,” Marr grudgingly admitted.

“Then we are all in agreement,” Mortis pushed. “Once Leritor is back under Imperial control, Gravus should be given a seat on the Dark Council and control over the Technology Sphere.”

Marr spoke quickly, before anyone else could interject. “I said I wouldn’t oppose Gravus as a candidate,” he said, his voice firm. “He should be considered. As should Karrid. We should take some time to think about both candidates before we make a final decision.”

“Once again we are all humbled by your wisdom, Darth Marr,” Vowrawn said, his voice hovering on the line between sincerity and mockery. “I propose we adjourn this meeting so we can all ponder this very important decision.”

As the members of the Dark Council left the room, Marr could only imagine how Darth Karrid would react when she heard the news. He decided it would be best if he told her himself.

It took less than twenty minutes for Marr’s private shuttle to whisk him away from the Citadel to the private landing pad at his personal stronghold on the outskirts of Kaas City. An honor guard of half a dozen Imperial soldiers in full armor stood smartly at attention as he strode down the boarding ramp, and a pair of bowing servants dressed in his personal colors opened the massive doors leading from the landing pad to the interior chambers.

Part domicile, part fortress, the stronghold’s halls were busy with household staff and military personnel scurrying to and fro, each tending to their respective duties. They bowed or saluted appropriately as Marr passed, his long strides taking him directly to the communications room.

“Put me in contact with Darth Karrid,” he told the officer in charge.

“At once, my Lord,” she told him, then barked out a quick series of orders to her three-person staff.

Marr would have preferred to deliver the details of the Dark Council’s meeting to Karrid in person, but time was of the essence. He wanted to speak with her before she heard the whispers and rumors of what had happened so he could mitigate her reaction.

“The Ascendant Spear has received our signal, Darth Marr,” the officer confirmed. “Decryption may take a few seconds.”

Marr nodded, knowing there was no possible way any of the other members of the Council—or anyone from the Republic—could overhear what was about to be said. Even if they somehow intercepted the signal he was transmitting, it would be impossible to decode without a black cipher, the Empire’s encryption device.

Developed by Imperial Intelligence before the organization collapsed, the black ciphers were the most advanced encryption machines ever devised. Apart from the ones installed on the Empire’s fifteen largest capital ships—including the Ascendant Spear—there were only two others: one in the office of the Imperial Minister of Logistics, and one in Darth Marr’s possession.

The holoimage flickered and materialized before him as the cipher unscrambled the incoming return signal to reveal Darth Karrid. Her bright emerald skin and long black hair—some gathered in a topknot, some flowing down her back—were muted by the blue-tinged holosignal. She had high, prominent cheekbones, a flawless complexion, and a sharp, well-proportioned nose and chin. But there was a vaguely disconcerting reptilian hint to her exotic features, particularly around her cold, dead eyes. And in Karrid’s case the exquisite symmetrical perfection so common to her species was marred by the prominent tattoos and cybernetic implants that completely covered the left side of her face.

“Darth Marr,” she said by way of greeting. “I was expecting your call.”

From the holo, Marr recognized that she had relayed his incoming signal to the seclusion of her private command pod deep inside the Ascendant Spear. The complex network of biomechanical interfaces that allowed Karrid to become one with Darth Mekhis’s marvelous warship framed her image: dozens of long, thin wires snaking out from the walls and ceiling and into the back of Karrid’s neck and skull.

“Leave us,” Marr commanded, and the communications officer and her staff vanished from the room.

“You spoke with the other members of the Dark Council?” Karrid asked once they were alone.

“The ones that matter,” Marr said.

“And what was their reaction?”

“They agreed that you are a strong candidate,” Marr said, choosing his words carefully. “But there are some who expressed concerns.”

“Who?” Karrid demanded, her face twisting in anger. “Ravage? That old fool, Rictus?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Marr explained. “The Council must reach a consensus to bring in a new member.”

“Is it because I’m Falleen?”

“There are other concerns,” Marr said, evading the question. “You were Malgus’s apprentice for many years; his actions will always color your reputation.”

“Malgus was a traitor,” Karrid spat out, her bright green skin taking on a reddish hue reflecting her heightened emotional state. “But I have done more to support the Imperial war effort than anyone!”

“Those of us who have dedicated our lives in the service of the Dark Council might disagree,” Marr replied coldly.

“I meant no disrespect, Darth Marr,” Karrid said, her voice slipping into a seductive purr.

Marr knew her reaction was instinctual; the Falleen had evolved overtly sensual mannerisms as a survival mechanism for the species. Marr was smart enough to recognize and dismiss the subtle feelings of arousal her voice triggered in him, but individuals of most humanoid species found it hard to resist the Falleen charms.

“I have proven my loyalty to the Empire countless times,” Karrid continued, pleading her case. “I did not think the Council would simply cast me aside.”

“You have not been cast aside,” he assured her. “You are still a candidate. But there are others.”

“Who?”

Marr hesitated, then decided she would eventually find out anyway. “Darth Gravus.”

“Gravus?” she hissed. “So Mortis is behind this; he and Gravus are thick as thieves.”

“Mortis supports Gravus,” Marr admitted, “but so do many other members of the Council. His work on Taris shows that he would do well in charge of the Technology Sphere.”

“The Empire claims to be a meritocracy,” Karrid said. “We punish failure and reward success. I have only victories to my name, but Gravus lost Leritor to the Republic. How can the Council prefer him over me?”

“Gravus is planning to recapture Leritor,” Marr said. “But even if he succeeds, the decision is not final,” he added, hoping to mollify her. “You will both be considered for the position.”

“So there is still a chance,” Karrid replied, seizing on the thin strand of hope. She brought a delicate hand up to her lips as she contemplated the possibility of victory.

“Assuming he can defeat the Republic fleet over Leritor, most of the Council will probably support Gravus,” Marr cautioned, not wanting her to get her hopes too high only to have them dashed.

“And what about you, Marr?” she asked, her voice slipping once more into the seductive purr.

“I would prefer the position go to you,” Marr assured her. “In the long run you can be of more value to the Empire than Gravus. But I will not risk tearing the Dark Council apart by challenging the others if they back him.”

“So you will not fight for me?”

“We must choose our battles wisely,” he reminded her. “Sometimes it is better to be patient.”

“I have been patient,” she answered, her expression a sensual pout.

“There are other seats on the Council. Other Spheres of Influence that need to be filled. Gravus may be the leading candidate, but you are next in line.”

There was a long pause before Karrid nodded her acceptance.

“I understand, Darth Marr. Even though we are allies, I cannot expect you to fight this battle on my behalf.”

Marr felt a great sense of relief, though he was careful not to show his reaction. Part of him had feared Karrid might react with blind rage at being passed over. If she turned against the Empire, the Ascendant Spear would cripple the Imperial fleet, paving the way for a quick and certain Republic victory in the war.

“Your time will come,” Marr assured her. “It is inevitable.”

“At least we agree on something,” she said with a smile.

CHAPTER 7

THERON PUNCHED THE COMLINK of his small shuttle, opening a hailing frequency with the control tower at one of the hundreds of spaceports on Coruscant’s surface.

“This is Sojourner, requesting landing clearance.”

“Copy that, Sojourner. Transmit ship registration for authentication.”

“Transmitting.”

There was a longer pause than usual on the other end of the comlink before the voice replied, “Sojourner, you need to reroute to another spaceport. Sending coordinates now.”

Theron didn’t bother to protest; he knew what was going on.

Guess I should have called the Director after that mess on Nar Shaddaa.

“Understood,” he said, not bothering to look at the new coordinates. He already knew exactly where they would order him to go.

“A security escort is awaiting your arrival,” the tower added.

“I bet they are,” he answered, disconnecting the call.

As he brought the ship in to land, Theron noticed two men wearing Coruscant Security Force uniforms standing by a waiting speeder. He doubted they were actually part of the official planetwide security force. The Director wouldn’t involve a civilian organization unless he had to, and it was common for SIS personnel to adopt the uniforms of local authorities when they were expecting trouble but wanted to avoid drawing extra attention.

“Theron Shan?” one of the men said as he climbed out of his shuttle.

“What if I say no?”

“Don’t cause any trouble,” the other warned. “The Director’s not in the mood.”

Theron briefly thought about making a move. It wasn’t that he was actually worried about what the Director had planned, but he was eager to test himself against the two agents sent to bring him in. But in the end, he realized he was being foolish. The agents were just following orders; no need to hurt somebody.

“We’re all on the same side here,” he assured them.

The ride to SIS headquarters was conducted in complete silence. Theron’s escorts appeared calm and relaxed, but he could tell they were watching him closely the entire way. Upon landing, they led him into the building, one marching in front of him, the other behind. They didn’t break formation until they reached the Director’s office.

One of the men reached out and pressed the buzzer on the door. In response it slid open and the Director called out, “I’ll take it from here.”

Theron gave each of his guards a cheery wave and stepped into the room. As the door slid shut behind him, the Director looked up from behind his desk and shook his head.

“Care to tell me why I shouldn’t have you court-martialed for physically assaulting a fellow agent?”

“That Houk came at me first,” Theron reminded him. “I was just minding my own business on Nar Shaddaa when he pressed that knife up against my back. How was I supposed to know he was one of ours?”

“A review board might buy that,” the Director admitted. “Until they remember the part where I ordered you to get off Nar Shaddaa!”

“I just thought you were being overprotective,” Theron protested. “I would have taken you a little more seriously if I’d known you were in the middle of a mission. But you didn’t really explain the situation.”

“I don’t have to explain things!” the Director snapped. “I’m the boss, remember? I give you an order and you follow it.”

Theron shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“At least I managed to rescue the prisoners.”

“But you did it in a way that compromised the entire operation. You think this is the first time Morbo’s auctioned off our people? We’ve been watching him for months. Tracking his suppliers and marking his buyers, slowly putting together all the bits and pieces of the entire operation. Operation Transom wasn’t about rescuing four Cathar; it was about putting an end to the whole POW slave trade!”

“Come on, Director,” Theron replied, raising an incredulous eyebrow. “We both know that would never happen. Even if you shut down everyone Morbo ever dealt with, someone else would just step in to take his place.”

“Maybe so,” the Director conceded. “But at least we’d slow them down for a while. Make the traffic dry up.”

“Morbo and everyone else at that auction thinks the explosion at the spaceport has something to do with selling POWs,” Theron countered. “They’re not going to start chasing after fresh meat anytime soon.”

“I heard there were casualties,” the Director said.

“Four dead,” Theron admitted. “Three were hired assassins. Kind of asking for it if you go into that line of work. The fourth was a low-level thug working for the Old Tion Brotherhood. I looked into him; he won’t be missed.”

“So Teff’ith made it out okay?”

“More or less.”

“Then I guess it’s all worth it in your book.” The Director sighed. “Did she have any idea you were there?”

“I don’t think so.”

“With all the times you’ve helped her out, she can’t be that bright if she hasn’t noticed you by now.”

Theron smiled. “Maybe I’m just that good.”

“I still think you should let her know that she’s in your debt. Might make her more likely to help us out down the road.”

“That’s not how Teff’ith’s mind works,” Theron said, shaking his head. “She’s … complicated.”

The Director got up from behind his desk and came around to the other side, crossing his arms as he sat on the edge.

“Theron—she’s become more trouble than she’s worth,” the Director told him. “It was bad enough when all you were doing was chewing up your vacation days to help her out. Now it’s interfering with ongoing SIS missions. I can’t allow that.”

“I know you think this is just some crazy obsession,” Theron told him. “But down the road this is going to pay off. Sooner or later SIS is going to need her help.”

“How do you know that? Is that you talking, or Ngani Zho? You having visions through the Force now?”

The words stung, but Theron wasn’t going to back down.

“Master Zho used to tell me that what most people call gut instinct is really just the Force reaching out to us. He said we’d be better off if we listened to it more often. And I have a feeling about Teff’ith.”

“And I’ve got a feeling about you,” the Director said. “A bad feeling.”

He turned away and went back to sit behind his desk. He took a deep breath and let it out in a long, slow sigh. Then he reached out with his hands and placed them on the top of his desk, fingers spread wide as if bracing himself for what he was about to say.

“Theron—I’m transferring you to the analytics department. Effective immediately.”

“Analytics?” Theron exclaimed in disbelief. “You trying to turn me into some kind of number-crunching desk-jockey?”

“I can’t just ignore what happened on Nar Shaddaa,” the Director said. “You’re a good agent, and I want to keep you in the fold, but you have to learn that your actions have consequences.

“Besides,” he added, “it’s good to have experience in other departments. I think a three-month stretch with analytics will make you a more rounded agent.”

“I’m plenty rounded already,” Theron said.

“You need a break from fieldwork,” the Director insisted. “Since you can’t seem to stay out of trouble even when you’re supposed to be on vacation, this is the only option I have left.”

“I’m not cut out for office work,” Theron said. “You’ve seen my personnel profile.”

“Our evaluations say you’re highly intelligent, intuitive, and adaptable. I think you’ll fit in just fine.”

Theron chewed his lip in angry silence before saying, “What if I resign?”

“You won’t,” the Director countered. “You care too much about the Republic to simply abandon the cause.”

“I could go work for the military,” he threatened.

“Saluting superior officers? Following orders? Barking out ‘Sir, yes, sir’ twenty times a day? Right.”

“Fine then,” Theron said. “I’ll just put in for the rest of my vacation time.”

“Request denied,” the Director answered. “Got a special project in the works, by order of the Republic Supreme Commander. All hands on board. Nothing personal.”

Theron sighed and bowed his head in defeat.

“You start tomorrow morning,” the Director continued. “Analytics is on the third floor. Do I need to send another escort to make sure you show up?”

“I’ll be there,” Theron promised. “But I won’t be happy about it.”

“Give analytics a chance,” the Director suggested. “They do important work, and we really are working on a special assignment for Jace Malcom. We’re calling it Operation End Game.

“Trust me, Theron,” he added. “You want to be a part of this.”

CHAPTER 8

SEATED IN THE COMMAND CHAIR on the bridge of the Ascendant Spear, Darth Karrid struggled to keep her contempt at bay as her gaze traced across the two dozen Imperial officers and crew working at their stations all around her. Huddled over consoles and computer screens, their fingers flew over control pads as they reacted to the constant stream of incoming data while the vessel hurled through the empty void of hyperspace. The inefficiency of their clumsy, archaic method of interacting with the ship filled her with disgust.

“Ten minutes until we reach Leritor, my Lord,” Moff Lorman said from his seat on the far side of the bridge.

“Be sure to come out of hyperspace beyond the range of the Republic sensors,” she cautioned.

It was unlikely Lorman would make such a careless and obvious error; the Moff was a capable officer. But like nearly every Imperial assigned to the Ascendant Spear he was an interloper on her ship, an insignificant parasite clinging to the underbelly, and she didn’t trust him not to make a mistake that would put her ship in danger.

Darth Mekhis had designed the vessel with numerous automated systems, and the Spear required a crew of only three thousand to operate at peak efficiency—less than half of what would typically be assigned to an Imperial capital ship. Karrid had come to accept them as a necessary inconvenience, though there were times, like now, when she resented their presence.

When plugged into the Spear’s command pod she had total access to all the vessel’s systems and sensors, but the effort of controlling an entire capital ship single-handedly was mentally and physically exhausting. She had no choice but to defer to Moff Lorman and his crew during routine travel and other similarly mundane activities, allowing them to run the vessel using conventional means while she saved her energies for the high intensity of battle.

“When will we send a message to Darth Gravus telling him reinforcements are on the way, my Lord?” Moff Lorman asked.

Karrid rose from her seat. “I will contact Gravus,” she said. “After I have taken command of my ship.”

She crossed the bridge with quick, purposeful strides, making her way to the turbolift. The doors slid open and she stepped inside, pressing the button that whisked her down past floor after floor until she reached the innermost level of the vessel. She stepped out of the turbolift and made her way down the short corridor leading to a heavily secured door. A retinal scan confirmed her identity, and the door slid open to reveal the Ascendant Spear’s true heart.

The circular chamber was nearly thirty meters in diameter, but the inside was empty save for the control console on the perimeter, Karrid’s two apprentices—one a male human, the other a female pure-blooded Sith—and the large crystal sphere in the center. The apprentices were sitting cross-legged on the floor on either side of the sphere, meditating to focus their minds in preparation for the coming battle.

“It’s time,” Karrid said as she approached the sphere.

She placed a hand on the cool exterior, and the sphere parted vertically in the middle, the two halves opening at her touch to reveal the true genius of Darth Mekhis.

The interior of the Ascendant Spear’s isolated command pod featured a single chair surrounded by dozens of monitors and screens. A delicate web of interwoven wires was suspended a meter above the chair. A dozen loose strands hung down from the web, each tipped with a long, thin needle.

Lowering herself into the chair, Karrid’s fingers tapped at the control panels built into the arms. The pod slowly closed, encasing her in the nearly indestructible glittering cocoon. The fingers of her left hand traced a complex pattern over the control panel, powering up the command pod and causing the web of dangling wires above her head to come to life. Twisting and writhing, they slithered down to wrap themselves around Karrid’s face and the back of her skull.

Karrid closed her eyes in eager anticipation, allowing the dark side of the Force to flow through her. Outside the sphere, she sensed her apprentices deep in meditation, opening themselves to her so she could draw on their strength as she took command of the Spear.

The wires gently caressed her neck and cheeks with the fine-tipped needles on the end, sending a shiver down the Falleen’s spine. Then one of the needles plunged itself into the cybernetic implant at the back of her neck, making her gasp aloud. Another slid into the implant behind her left ear, and two more burrowed into the left side of her skull on either side of her temple. Two connected to her forehead and five more pierced the back of her skull. The final strand of wire slithered across the lid of her still-closed eye before slipping into the tiny aperture of the cybernetic interface implanted in her left cheek.

She opened her eyes, her vision now an amalgamation of what she saw on the screens and monitors as well as everything within range of the ship’s sensors. The starfield flickered rapidly into view as the Ascendant Spear dropped from hyperspace on the edge of the Yucrales sector, just beyond sensor range of the Imperial and Republic fleets engaged in battle over the skies of Leritor. Though the other ships couldn’t detect her presence at this range, the Spear’s advanced systems gave Karrid a perfect awareness of what was transpiring.

A combination of her Force abilities and the cybernetic implants relaying data from the Ascendant Spear’s long-range scanners enabled Karrid to instantly see that although the battle had just begun, Darth Gravus already had the upper hand.

The Republic had a single capital ship in the fray—the Mardorus, a D-class attack cruiser. Over five hundred meters in length, the Mardorus had a wide, flat hull covered with a thick layer of armor plating, as if the vessel were hidden under a hump-shaped shell. It was supported by two Hammerheads half its size—easily identifiable by the forward bridges extending perpendicularly above and below the longer main body of the vessel—and three slightly smaller CR-12 corvettes—sleek, narrow ships equipped with battering-ram-shaped bows to run enemy blockades and prominent external afterburners to enhance speed and maneuverability. The fleet was rounded out by half a dozen BT-7 Thunderclap fighters. The latest Republic incarnation in personal attack-craft, the agile Thunderclap resembled a sideways Y, with the cockpit situated in the crook of the two smaller arms.

In contrast, Gravus’s personal Dreadnought, Exemplar, was almost eight hundred meters in length. The wedge-shaped capital ship was flanked by three claw-shaped C-class destroyers that were nearly as large as the Republic flagship. Each destroyer was supported by a complement of six Interceptors, the Empire’s agile, fang-winged answer to the Republic Thunderclap.

Gravus had devised a battle plan that would minimize the risk to his own ship. The destroyers had been deployed to engage the corvettes and Thunderclap fighters, freeing up the quick and nimble Interceptors to continuously strafe the Hammerheads and the heavily armored Mardorus. This allowed the Exemplar to remain at a safe distance, firing away with its batteries at the Republic vessels with no fear of any return assault. Unfortunately, unless Gravus moved closer to the action he was limited to inflicting minimal damage on the enemy capital ship’s deflector shields and reinforced hull. Ultimately the Imperials would prevail, but it would be a battle of attrition.

Karrid had neither the patience nor the temperament for such a strategy. With a flick of her little finger, she opened a hailing channel to the Exemplar, accelerating the Ascendant Spear toward the other vessels at the same time.

“Darth Gravus, this is Darth Karrid. The Ascendant Spear is at your disposal.”

Gravus’s reply was swift and certain. “Disengage, Karrid! We didn’t call for reinforcements. This is my battle to win—not yours!”

Karrid ignored his orders; the Ascendant Spear’s engines had already accelerated the ship to 70 percent of maximum sublight speed, bringing them in range of the Republic sensors. The triangular design of the Spear was common among Imperial capital ships, but its immense size—more than twice that of any other participant in the battle—was instantly recognizable.

As Karrid had expected, the Spear’s arrival drew an immediate response as one of the Republic Hammerheads disengaged and came about to face the new threat. Two of the Thunderclap fighters also veered around, spinning and diving to avoid the destroyer cannons as they sped off to support the Hammerhead.

The Hammerhead’s turbolasers opened fire a second later. On a level deep within her subconscious mind, Karrid felt the heat as the Spear’s deflectors easily repelled the first volley. An instant later the Thunderclaps swooped in, one from port, the other from starboard. Lacking enough firepower to inflict significant damage on a ship the size of the Ascendant Spear beyond point-blank range, the pilots relied on speed and maneuverability to get in close enough to strafe the surface of the larger vessel.

To Karrid they were like annoying insects buzzing in her ear; the only logical response was to slap them out of existence. She focused her mind on the starboard defense turrets, using the Spear’s sensors to track the fast-moving Thunderclap before willing the guns to fire. A rapid series of ion blasts hit the fighter in rapid succession, each one striking its target with the unnatural precision made possible only by the perfect fusion of machine and organic.

The Thunderclap exploded in a ball of heat and light, but Karrid barely noticed. She had her sights set fully on the second fighter. The pilot was taking desperate evasive maneuvers, wheeling, spinning, and diving at crazy angles. Against the augmented reactions derived from Karrid’s symbiotic link to her ship, he may as well have been standing still. The port turrets fired, and the second Thunderclap disintegrated.

The Hammerhead opened fire again, and Karrid once more had the sensation of distant heat as the deflectors repelled the incoming blasts. The Hammerhead was still too far out to pose any real threat; it had been relying on the fighters to occupy the enemy until it got in close enough to pierce the Spear’s shields. Bereft of their escort, they were vulnerable and exposed.

Karrid seized the opportunity, opening fire with the Ascendant Spear’s main guns. The blackness of space was illuminated by a blazing barrage of concentrated red energy beams. They ripped through the Hammerhead’s deflector shields and shredded the armor-plated hull. Inside, the emergency systems would be overloaded as the vessel’s automated systems tried to somehow keep it functional long enough for the crew to evacuate. A second volley from the Spear ended that faint hope as the lasers pierced the engine core containment unit, and the Hammerhead vanished in a violent explosion.

Gravus’s voice rang out once more, simultaneously echoing in Karrid’s ears and in the part of her brain that was linked into the ship’s communications systems.

“You think this will turn the Dark Council against me, Karrid?” he sneered. “You could take out every Republic ship in this quadrant, but when it comes time to choose someone to join their ranks, they’ll still pick me over a Falleen!”

“You do not grasp the danger you are in, Gravus,” she answered coldly. “You could be killed in this battle. I am here to ensure a desirable outcome for the Empire.”

The threat was veiled, but like any true Sith her rival immediately understood the sinister implications of her words: only one of them would leave this battle alive.

“Ignore the Republic ships!” Gravus commanded his fleet, forgetting in his panic that the new orders were being transmitted over the same standard Imperial frequency Karrid was using. “Fire on the Ascendant Spear! Destroy it at all costs! Do not let it—”

His words were cut off midsentence as Gravus—or someone under his command—had the sense to flip over to an auxiliary communications channel. But Karrid knew words alone wouldn’t be enough to justify killing Gravus to the Council; she needed him to make the first move.

The unexpected switch from Republic targets to the Ascendant Spear threw the Imperial fleet into disarray. The Interceptors swarming the Mardorus and the Hammerhead abandoned their strafing runs, peeling away to regroup for a coordinated assault on their new target. The destroyers disengaged from the Republic corvettes and Thunderclaps, pulling back as they moved to position themselves between the Exemplar and Karrid’s retaliation.

The Republic fleet, unaware that they now shared a common enemy with their Imperial foes, seized the advantage. Seven Interceptors were wiped out by the batteries of the Hammerhead and the Mardorus, and a steady stream of fire from the corvettes pummeled the retreating destroyers, overloading their deflector shields so that the incoming Thunderclaps were able to inflict heavy damage.

Karrid watched the sudden tactical shift with an intense hunger, instantly aware of the position and shield status of every vessel through the Spear’s advanced sensors, the information relayed directly through the pulsing wires of the command pod and into her cybernetic implants. Realizing the Republic vessels were focused on the suddenly vulnerable ships of Gravus’s fleet, she sent the Spear charging into the heart of the fray.

Neither Gravus nor the Republic commander anticipated her strategy. Capital ships typically stayed at range, knowing their powerful guns could wear down smaller vessels from a safe distance. By moving into range of the fleets Karrid was taking a risk; if they coordinated their efforts they could overwhelm the Spear. But Karrid knew the element of surprise would prevent that from happening, and at close proximity the Spear’s turbolasers could rip through deflectors and obliterate any of the other vessels in seconds. She started with the Mardorus.

As the Spear bore down on the Republic ship, the battle descended into chaos. One of the corvettes and two of the Thunderclaps altered course to try to save their flagship; the rest continued their assault on the crippled destroyers. Eight Interceptors swooped back to try to save the destroyers; the rest hurtled toward the Spear. The Hammerhead closed on the Exemplar as it tried to flee to the farthest edge of the conflict.

The Mardorus tried to ward off the Ascendant Spear, but before it could bring its guns to bear Karrid opened fire with her entire forward-facing battery. Turbolasers and ion cannons roared, combining in a glorious symphony of destruction, all but vaporizing the Mardorus in a matter of seconds.

Karrid relished the kill, sensing the terror of the dying crew through the Force. An instant later she felt a sharp sliver of pain slicing through her, like someone had slid a vibroblade between her shoulders. Gravus had taken the bait, ordering the Exemplar to fire on the Spear.

The blast penetrated the deflector shields and scorched the exterior hull, damage to the ship registering in Karrid’s mind like a wound to her own body. The Exemplar was too far away to do any serious harm, but by firing the first shot Gravus had given Karrid the justification she needed to target his ships without having to answer to the Dark Council for destroying an Imperial fleet.

The fighters that had tried to come to the Mardorus’s aid swooped by the Spear, their strafing run sending a thousand pinpricks up Karrid’s arms. She snuffed them out before they could make a second run. The Hammerhead had caught the Exemplar, forcing Gravus to focus on the immediate threat and preventing him from firing a second shot at the Spear.

One of the damaged destroyers had been finished off by the corvettes, which were now being hard-pressed by a phalanx of Interceptors. The second Interceptor squad was closing in on the Spear. Karrid opened fire with her turbolasers, but only managed to hit two of them as the rest continued in undeterred.

Karrid’s fingers flickered and danced on the control panel, and the Spear banked at an impossible angle, directly into the path of the incoming horde. The Spear had the maneuverability of a vessel half its size, and the unexpected change in direction happened too quickly for the Interceptors to react. The tiny fighters were smashed to smithereens against the gargantuan battleship’s hull.

The move also brought the front of the Spear in line with the surviving destroyers and Interceptors, still locked in battle with the corvettes. Karrid’s eyes flickered over the screens of the pod as she descended on the skirmish, the massive capital ship dwarfing the other players.

She tapped the control panel, her fingers a blur as she selected her targets in rapid succession. The Interceptors, too engaged with the Republic vessels to take evasive action, were wiped out in the first volley. The corvettes were next, their deflectors useless against the Spear’s point-blank assault. The destroyers, already heavily damaged, were a mere afterthought. Several of the vessels were engulfed by fiery explosions, others rendered lifeless hunks of scrap, their hulls perforated with countless gaping holes. But Karrid didn’t have time to relish the carnage as she turned her attention to her final goal.

The remaining Hammerhead was still firing at the Exemplar. Locked in close combat with the Republic ship, Gravus had been unable to prepare his vessel for the jump to hyperspace—lowering the shields to make the jump wasn’t an option when an enemy was firing at you. There had been a brief window for them both to escape while the Spear was wiping out the other ships, but the Republic commander had failed to fully grasp the situation. Instead of mutual flight, he had chosen to continue the battle rather than risk an attempted retreat that would leave him vulnerable to the Exemplar. Now it was too late for both of them.

The Ascendant Spear closed rapidly on the two remaining ships. Concentrating her turbolasers on the Hammerhead’s center, she sliced it cleanly in two. Bodies and debris spilled out from the gutted Republic ship into the cold, dark void of space.

At the same time she sensed a massive energy signature emanating from the Exemplar: Gravus was trying to make a last desperate jump to hyperspace. He’d dropped his shields and left his ship vulnerable to attack, but he knew he had no hope of defeating the Empire’s most feared weapon if he stayed to fight. Drawing on the automated targeting systems of the Spear, Karrid fired a precision strike to disable the Exemplar’s hyperdrive, leaving Gravus at her mercy.

A sudden beeping in her ear told her Gravus was trying to open up a hailing channel, but she had no interest in listening to him barter and beg for his life. Instead, she took aim and fired for the last time. The unshielded Exemplar exploded into a ball of spectacular blue flame, instantly killing everyone aboard.

Karrid sent the Spear in a long slow circle, scanning the wreckage and debris of the entire battle for signs of life, but finding nothing. Satisfied, she contacted the bridge.

“Moff Lorman, prepare to resume command.”

“Yes, my Lord,” he replied.

Karrid tapped the controls beneath her fingers once more, severing her connection with the Spear. She shuddered as the wires retracted, the needles of the biosynthetic interfaces slowly withdrawing from her cybernetic implants. A wave of exhaustion washed over her, along with an overwhelming sense of intense and irreplaceable loss. Each time she broke her connection with the ship it felt like losing a limb.

The crystal sphere slowly opened to reveal her two apprentices still sitting cross-legged on the floor on either side. Their faces were drawn and haggard, their brows covered with sheens of sweat from supporting their Master’s exertion. But though they shared her fatigue, only she knew the glory of becoming one with the Spear, and only she could understand the emptiness that enveloped her when the connection was broken.

“Tell Moff Lorman to transmit the record of the battle to the Dark Council,” she said, her voice weary. “Let them see that Gravus was a traitor to the Empire.”

To herself she added, And let them see what happens to those who get in my way.

CHAPTER 9

THE ANALYTICS OFFICE was a windowless, overcrowded room packed with computer terminals and twenty-three SIS agents gathering, organizing, and analyzing data from the thousands of reports that came in every day.

For the past week the cramped office might as well have been Theron’s home as he and the rest of the understaffed team worked double shifts to try to stay on top of everything coming in. However, despite making a sincere effort to contribute, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was wasting his time.

It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in what analytics was doing; he understood they were a vital component of SIS. But Theron had developed a unique set of specialized skills, almost none of which were applicable to his current position.

It made him want to scream. Twenty times a day a piece of small but unusual information that begged further attention would pass across his desk: a potential lead to what might possibly be a mission critical to the safety of the Republic. Instead of being able to act on these leads he had to write up reports with recommendations on how to proceed, then forward them to his superiors for review, knowing full well that by the time a field agent was assigned to the case the opportunity would probably be lost.

And even when he wasn’t in the office, he was still stuck on Coruscant—probably the safest and most secure planet in the Republic, and the absolute last place Theron wanted to be.

He feared that he was losing his edge, that day after day of boring desk work had dulled his survival instincts. The Director had sentenced him to three months in this prison, and if he served his full time he might never regain them.

If he didn’t get out of analytics soon, something bad was bound to happen. Maybe he’d resign in disgust. Go rogue and take off on a mission without SIS approval or support. Or maybe he’d just snap and go on a rampage throughout the analytics office, smashing every monitor and computer station he could before the authorities dragged him away. Or, most terrifying of all, maybe he’d just learn to accept the drudgery of his new post.

The only thing that had kept him sane so far was the few hours each day he was able to work on Operation End Game, Jace Malcom’s special project. The Ascendant Spear was the last vestige of Darth Mekhis’s superweapons research program—one last loose thread from the mission that had cost Ngani Zho his life. Theron had no problem spending his time trying to devise a plan to bring the Spear down. What bothered him was the thought that some other agent would be the one to actually put that plan into effect.

He felt a tap on his shoulder as the voice of his supervisor said, “Time to pack it in, Theron.”

Surprised, Theron glanced at the chrono on the wall.

“Guess I lost track of time,” he said.

Another sign you’re losing your edge. The days used to drag on forever; you could feel each individual, agonizing second slipping by. Now you’re getting so used to being stuck in the chair you don’t even notice when it’s time to leave. You’re numb.

“Go home and get some sleep,” his supervisor ordered. “The reports will still be here tomorrow.”

Is that supposed to make me feel better? Theron silently wondered as he stood up and headed back to his apartment.

Once inside, he briefly considered doing some off-the-clock work on Operation End Game—even from home he had access to files with all but the highest level of security clearance. But the drudgery of analytics sapped both his physical and mental energy. All he wanted to do was collapse into bed.

They’re grinding you down, bit by bit.

Ignoring the voice inside his head, Theron made his way to the bedroom at the rear of the apartment, stripped off his clothes, flicked off the light, and crawled under the covers. Just as he was on the verge of drifting off, however, he was jarred awake by the chime of an incoming holocall.

“Accept incoming,” he muttered groggily, taking a moment to realize the call wasn’t coming on his cybernetic implant.

He rolled over and tapped the holocomm on the nightstand beside the bed, propping himself up on his elbow to get a better view. To his surprise, an image of Teff’ith materialized before him, the glow of the holo spreading faintly across the otherwise darkened room.

“Why you in bed?” the Twi’lek asked, arching her eyebrows in surprise. “You sleeping or you with a friend?”

“I’m … I’m alone,” Theron stammered, his mind spinning as he tried to wrap his head around the situation.

Why is she calling? Where is she calling from? How did she know where I’m staying?

“Didn’t think you’d be home,” Teff’ith said. “Gonna leave a message.”

Theron realized he wasn’t the only one taken aback by their unexpected conversation. Knowing Teff’ith was a bit flustered as well helped him regain some of his composure.

“So give me the message.”

After a moment’s hesitation, Teff’ith took a deep breath then blurted out, “Know you were there on Nar Shaddaa. Don’t need you following us. Don’t want you following us. Back off or you be sorry!”

“How’d you even get this number?” Theron asked, not bothering to respond to her ultimatum.

“Not so hard,” Teff’ith replied. “You think you only one who can find people?”

“So you went to all the trouble of tracking me down just to tell me to leave you alone?”

“Didn’t ask for your help,” Teff’ith snapped, ignoring his observation. “Don’t need it. Take care of ourself.”

“Really? Seemed to me if I hadn’t stepped in you’d be a rotting corpse in a Nar Shaddaa landfill right about now.”

“Think we owe you now?” Teff’ith sneered. “That why you help us?”

“I just happened to be in the area. Thought I’d help you out for old times’ sake.”

“Liar. Not just Nar Shaddaa, right? You there on Korriban? Belsavis? Ziost?”

“I’ve never been to Ziost in my life,” Theron answered truthfully.

“No more watching,” Teff’ith continued. “Stop following us. Got it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” Theron answered. “I’m staying on Coruscant for a while. Taking some time off from fieldwork. I’m focusing on reports and paperwork now.”

Why would you even tell her that? You becoming one of those office drones that complains to anyone who’ll listen?

“You behind a desk?” Teff’ith’s face broke into a grin. “Funny.”

“The choice wasn’t really mine,” Theron said, his voice betraying more anger than he intended.

“Always got a choice,” Teff’ith sniffed. “Sounds like you just a quitter.”

“Why do you even care?” Theron demanded.

“Don’t,” Teff’ith said with a shrug. “Be boring. We don’t care. Just leave us alone.”

The holo abruptly disconnected, leaving Theron alone in the dark. He rolled over, closed his eyes, and tried to go to sleep. But something Teff’ith had said had lodged itself inside his head, and instead of drifting off into dreamland, he kept circling back to it.

She mentioned Ziost. The Old Tion Brotherhood must have begun moving in there when the Empire started allowing outsiders to visit the world.

The simple fact might seem insignificant, but Theron knew there was a reason he couldn’t let it go. His subconscious had latched onto it for some reason; now he had to draw it out.

Ziost. That’s the key. Ziost.

In a flash of inspiration, it all came together—Operation End Game. Ignited by the catalyst, the past week of research and analysis fused into the beginnings of a plan to bring down the Ascendant Spear.

Theron sprang out of bed, eager to record the details while they were still fresh in his mind.

And with a little luck, this will get me back in the field, too.

Darth Marr was the last of the assembled Dark Council members to arrive at their secret chamber beneath the Citadel. He’d scheduled the meeting, contacting the others only hours after learning of Darth Gravus’s death. But even though he’d summoned them, he still had no idea what he was going to say.

He’d reviewed the official records of the battle over Leritor, including transcriptions of the communications between Gravus and Karrid in the field reports filed by Moff Lorman.

The Ascendant Spear dropped out of hyperspace beyond range of the Republic scanners, at which time Darth Karrid informed Darth Gravus of our arrival.

“Darth Gravus, this is Darth Karrid. The Ascendant Spear is at your disposal.”

“Disengage, Karrid! We didn’t call for reinforcements. This is my battle to win—not yours!”

Darth Karrid disregarded Darth Gravus’s request, choosing to aid the Imperial war effort by engaging the enemy fleet. After the Ascendant Spear disposed of one of the Republic Hammerheads, Darth Gravus and Darth Karrid had the following exchange:

“You think this will turn the Dark Council against me, Karrid? You could take out every Republic ship in this quadrant, but when it comes time to choose someone to join their ranks, they’ll still pick me over a Falleen!”

“You do not grasp the danger you are in, Gravus. You could be killed in this battle. I am here to ensure a desirable outcome for the Empire.”

“Ignore the Republic ships! Fire on the Ascendant Spear! Destroy it at all costs! Do not let it—”

At this time Gravus switched to an auxiliary communications channel. Shortly after this he fired on the Ascendant Spear as we continued to engage the Republic fleet. Darth Karrid was forced to destroy Gravus and his fleet to defend her ship and crew.

The official military review would clearly show Gravus had been in the wrong. However, it was obvious to Marr—just as it would be obvious to everyone on the Dark Council—that Karrid had intentionally goaded him into firing the first shot.

The fact that Karrid had brazenly defied Marr’s instructions and undermined his attempts to unify the Sith by eliminating a rival was disturbing; he was starting to wonder if granting her a seat on the Dark Council would be more trouble than it was worth. His immediate concern, however, was dealing with the fallout from the other Sith Lords assembled in the room.

“Darth Marr,” Vowrawn said by way of greeting, “it’s impolite to keep us all waiting.”

Marr ignored the Sith’s sardonic words. “You all know what happened to Gravus,” he said, getting straight to the matter at hand. “You all know why we’re here.”

“It seems Gravus is no longer a viable candidate,” Vowrawn said with a coy smile. “Does this mean Karrid is our choice by default?”

“That question must be answered by the entire Dark Council,” Marr replied, bracing himself for the outrage and protests of the others.

There was an unexpected silence before the ancient Darth Rictus spoke up.

“Karrid answered the question for us,” he proclaimed. “She bested her rival with strength, yet was cunning enough to make it appear she was in the right. These are the traits of a true Sith.”

Darth Marr was left momentarily speechless at the unexpected show of support. Given Rictus’s many years on the Dark Council, his approval would go a long way toward winning the others over.

“We were willing to give the seat to Gravus if he defeated the Republic at Leritor,” Mortis chimed in. “Since Karrid claimed the victory, she deserves the prize.”

Marr was even more surprised by Mortis’s support. His Sphere of Influence was Laws and Justice. And even though the Empire’s version of justice could often be summarized as “might makes right,” he had assumed Mortis would be outraged by what Karrid had done.

“Gravus was your candidate,” he said, looking for clarification. “You don’t want to seek revenge for his death?”

“I thought Gravus was more powerful than Karrid,” he replied. “But his death proves otherwise. She issued a challenge, and he accepted by firing on her ship … a fatal mistake. It seems I underestimated the Falleen.”

“She took bold action,” Darth Ravage added. “She saw what she wanted and she seized it. If more of the other Sith Lords beneath us followed her example, the Republic would not have us running like cowards.”

Their words momentarily caught Marr by surprise. Though Karrid’s actions were perfectly in line with the traditional ways of the Sith, he’d thought it would take longer for the rest of the Dark Council to overcome their inherent prejudice and welcome a member of a lesser species into their ranks.

However, he understood that their willingness to embrace Karrid was still driven by the one trait they all shared—self-preservation. As Dark Lords of the Sith, they understood the power of Karrid’s ship, and the opportunity she represented. The Spear was vital if they hoped to turn the tide of the galactic war … and down the road Karrid could be a powerful ally to use against not only the Republic, but also the other members of the Dark Council.

For now they would invite her in with open arms, each publicly voicing support to try to win her over as they bided their time. Waiting patiently, they would play their political games, trying to twist her allegiance so they could use her and her ship to their own advantage, even as they slowly plotted her destruction. In other words, they would see her as they each saw every other member of the Dark Council: simultaneously a potential ally and a potential enemy.

Marr sighed inwardly. Karrid had not hesitated to wipe out a fellow Dark Lord to advance her own career, even though the loss of Gravus made the Empire more vulnerable to the Republic. He had hoped the Falleen might be more open to his efforts to unify the Sith against a common foe, but she had proven herself to be as much a student of the old ways as all the others.

Despite his best efforts, the culture of backstabbing and infighting still prevailed. The Emperor had kept it under control by virtue of his own unassailable position and power, but in his absence it was eating away at the core of the Empire. And Marr was starting to doubt if he—or any among the great Sith Lords—would be able to stop it.

CHAPTER 10

MARCUS MOVED QUICKLY through the halls of Coruscant’s massive Senate Building, heading for Jace Malcom’s office in the military wing. Forty standard years ago the Senators would have been horrified if a military officer—even the Supreme Commander of all Republic forces—had an office in the same building. Back then, most politicians had openly called for a massive decrease in the size of the Republic fleet and a reduction in the number of soldiers. The idea of a full-scale galactic war seemed preposterous, and the desire to shrink the scope and budget of the armed forces was virtually unanimous.

Four decades of war against the reemerged Sith Empire had changed things significantly. When the Treaty of Coruscant had been forced on the Republic years ago, some believed a lasting peace with the Empire was possible. But in the last eighteen months the uneasy truce had collapsed, and a return to full-scale hostilities silenced all talk of peace in the halls of the Senate. As the tide of war shifted to the Republic’s favor, the idea of ending the Imperial threat once and for all began to gain support.

The Republic’s growing military resolve was championed by the newly elected Chancellor Saresh. The former governor of Taris, few had seen her as a candidate for the Republic’s highest political position, but she swept to power on a wave of aggressive anti-Imperial sentiment. Unlike others vying to succeed Chancellor Janarus, she hadn’t promised to bring the Republic peace; she promised victory.

Within days of her election she enacted all thirty-six wartime provisions listed in the Galactic Constitution, greatly expanding the powers and responsibilities of her office and allowing her to make major political appointments without Senate approval. There had been some behind-the-scenes grumbling at the sudden increase in executive power, but Saresh quickly quieted the dissenters by appointing the wildly popular Jace Malcom as the new Supreme Commander.

The Director had studied Saresh’s rapid rise to power carefully; it was impossible not to be impressed by her ambition and her political brilliance. Tapping Jace for Supreme Commander had been a particularly astute move. Nobody would speak out against such a long-serving Republic hero; his selection legitimized every appointment that came after. Saresh had found the perfect candidate to solidify her support, and she’d put the military under the charge of a man who was as eager to wipe out the Republic’s Imperial foes as she was.

Not that the Director minded. He also believed crushing the Empire was key to securing the Republic, and he was ready to show how valuable SIS would be to that cause. Operation Transom hadn’t ended as planned; Operation End Game was his chance to make up for it.

As he approached Jace’s office, Marcus allowed himself a hint of a smile. They’d presented the Supreme Commander with a basic outline of Operation End Game just yesterday, and Jace had already scheduled a meeting to discuss it in more detail. Clearly he’d been impressed.

The Director was more than a little impressed himself. The analytics team had gone above and beyond for this project. They’d managed to pull everything together in just over a week, thanks largely to Theron’s contributions.

Marcus had been worried about Theron’s potentially disruptive impact when he’d assigned him to the team, though he’d hoped the nature of their research might make the transition from fieldwork easier. Much to the Director’s relief, as soon as Theron realized analytics was working on a way to put an end to Darth Mekhis’s legacy once and for all, he’d thrown himself into the work.

Maybe he’s maturing, Marcus thought.

The Director wasn’t normally an optimistic man, but he couldn’t help but wonder if things were looking up. If Theron learned to stay out of trouble and Jace could secure SIS’s future long-term funding, maybe he wouldn’t wake up every morning with a crippling migraine.

“Welcome back, Director,” the receptionist greeted him, her features breaking into a smile.

“Did you miss me?” he asked, responding with a grin of his own.

“I count every second of every day that you’re not here,” she replied, even as she buzzed him in.

As before, Jace Malcom was sitting behind his desk when the Director entered his office.

“I’ve already started pulling together the resources you requested for Operation End Game,” the Supreme Commander told him, jumping right to the point. “You’ll have everything you need.”

“I’ll pass your appreciation on to the analytics team,” Marcus replied. “They were pulling double shifts all week to get this done. The overtime took a big chunk out of our budget, but we figured this was worth it.”

“I can take a hint,” Jace said with a smile, indicating for the Director to take a seat in the chair across from him. “I’ll make sure your department gets all the credits you need going forward.”

Marcus nodded in thanks as he sat down.

“I was glad to see you calling out the need for the Jedi to be involved in your report,” Jace said. “I know some folks don’t like working with them.”

“They’re a valuable resource for the Republic,” the Director replied. “We just have to learn to use them properly.”

“They offered to have Master Gnost-Dural join our team.”

“A good choice,” the Director said, recalling the files the Order had sent over to the SIS. “Darth Karrid was Gnost-Dural’s apprentice before she decided to study under Malgus.”

“I don’t think they’d phrase it like that,” Jace told him with a wry smile. “They’d probably say she fell to the temptations of the dark side.”

Marcus frowned. “You think the Jedi are sending Gnost-Dural so he can try to redeem her?”

“Gnost-Dural’s a pragmatist,” Jace assured him. “Well, as much as any Jedi can be. He won’t do anything that might endanger the mission.”

When Marcus didn’t reply right away, Jace asked, “Is this going to be a problem for your people?”

“No, sir. Every name on that list I gave you is a professional. Whichever one of my agents you select for the mission will work alongside Gnost-Dural without complaint.”

“Actually,” Jace said. “I wanted to talk to you about that list.”

For some reason, the hairs on the back of Marcus’s neck stood up.

“The files were all very impressive. But why wasn’t Theron Shan among them?”

For a moment, the Director was too stunned to reply. SIS kept the identities of their field agents under close wraps. For security reasons, only a handful of people had access to department personnel records, and the Supreme Commander wasn’t one of them. The Director had given him a list of six agents who might be suitable for Operation End Game, but that list didn’t include Theron.

“You know Theron?” he asked, wondering where the Supreme Commander had come up with the name.

“Only from the analytics report,” Jace admitted. “He was listed as the agent who uncovered Darth Mekhis’s research.”

The Director shook his head, confused. He’d reviewed the report before it was sent to Jace. Theron’s name had been redacted from the files—he was certain of it. Someone in analytics must have altered the final report before forwarding it to Jace … and Marcus had a pretty good idea who the culprit was.

No wonder Theron was so happy to be working on this report, the Director thought, gritting his teeth as he felt one of his migraines threatening to come on.

Jace picked up on the Director’s discomfort.

“Is something wrong? Is Theron Shan no longer with SIS?”

Marcus thought about lying, but he didn’t want to risk damaging his relationship with the Supreme Commander if the truth ever came to light. “Theron’s still with us.”

“Is he a good agent?”

“One of our best,” the Director admitted. “But every agent on the list I gave you is just as capable.”

“If Theron Shan started this, don’t you think he’s earned the right to see it through?”

“Theron may not be the best candidate for this particular mission,” Marcus replied. “This is a joint operation with the Jedi. He works best on his own.”

“The report says he was working with a Jedi when he went after Darth Mekhis. Someone named Ngani Zho.”

“That was a unique situation.”

Jace arched the eyebrow on the good side of his face in surprise. “You don’t think Operation End Game is a unique situation?”

“Theron’s methods can sometimes be a bit too … stylish,” Marcus explained, choosing his words carefully.

“Stylish?”

“He prefers to go through the window instead of a perfectly good door.”

“I know the type,” Jace said, nodding. “More than a few of them in the military. Get addicted to the adrenaline rush. Always looking for action. Makes them trigger-happy. They get too fond of killing and bloodshed.”

“Theron’s not like that,” the Director assured him, unwilling to sully his agent’s reputation, even if he did feel like tossing Theron into a trash compactor at the moment.

“You’re obviously concerned about something,” Jace continued. “Are you worried he might betray us?”

“His loyalty to the Republic is absolute,” the Director said emphatically. “He’s just … unfocused. He sees something that doesn’t sit right with him and he has to get involved, even if it’s not part of the mission. He likes to improvise instead of sticking to plans.”

“Sounds to me like he’s just going above and beyond,” the Supreme Commander said. “We could use someone like that for this mission.”

Realizing the argument was already lost, the Director held back a sigh as he asked, “Do you want me to send over his file?”

“I doubt there’s anything in there you can’t tell me now.”

“What do you want to know?”

“His name is Shan. Any relation to the Jedi Grand Master?”

“Shan is a very common name. Probably ten million of them on Coruscant alone.”

“You didn’t answer my question,” Jace said, fixing Marcus with a piercing stare.

“Theron’s her son,” Marcus admitted.

Jace blinked in surprise. “Satele Shan … had a son?”

“Only a handful of people know,” Marcus explained. “Obviously this is something we want to keep under wraps. The Jedi aren’t supposed to have children.”

“Who’s the father? Another Jedi?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think even Theron knows.”

The Supreme Commander was quiet for a few moments. “I’m guessing Theron isn’t attuned to the Force,” he said at last. “Otherwise he’d be in the Order instead of SIS.”

“True.”

“But this could still be good for the mission,” Jace said, speaking quickly. “Working with Jedi isn’t easy. His relationship with Satele might make it easier to coordinate our efforts with the Order.”

“Theron doesn’t really have a relationship with Satele,” the Director cautioned. “She gave him up at birth. I don’t even know if they’ve ever met.”

“I see,” Jace said, furrowing his brow. “Seems odd he wouldn’t want to get to know her, given that they both serve the Republic.”

“Theron’s relationship with the Jedi is complicated,” the Director explained. “He was raised in secret by Master Ngani Zho, Satele’s mentor. Taught him everything the young Padawans learn at the academy—mental discipline, Jedi philosophy. I guess Zho just assumed he would follow in Satele’s footsteps when he got older. But the Jedi refused to take him. Turns out he wasn’t sensitive to the Force.”

“He took after his father,” Jace muttered.

“Probably,” Marcus agreed. “Kind of made Theron rethink all those lessons he’d learned as a kid.”

“Do you think he harbors any resentment toward the Jedi because they rejected him?”

“He respects what the Jedi do for the Republic,” Marcus replied. “But he’s seen firsthand that they’re not perfect. Made him a bit cynical when it comes to some of their more strongly held beliefs.”

There was a long silence as the Supreme Commander weighed this new information.

“I want him for this mission,” Jace suddenly declared, thumping his hand on the top of his desk for emphasis. “I served with Satele Shan during the war. If Theron has any of his mother in him, he’s the perfect man for this job.”

“Theron’s good,” the Director said, making a final halfhearted effort to change the Supreme Chancellor’s mind, “but I really think we’d be better off going with one of the agents from my original list.”

Jace shook his head. “Theron’s the one.”

“Yes, sir,” the Director replied, though his response lacked any real enthusiasm. “I’ll send his file so you can look it over, and I’ll let Theron know.”

“Don’t be so glum, Marcus,” Jace said with a grin. “I’ve got a gut feeling about this kid, and I’ve learned to trust my gut.”

CHAPTER 11

MINISTER DAVIDGE, the Imperial Minister of Logistics, tapped at the console of his computer, flipping through screen after screen of numbers arranged in columns, tables, graphs, and charts.

The entirety of the Empire was represented in those numbers: every citizen, every soldier, every subjugate, and every slave on every world. Every ship in every fleet, as well as all the resources produced across all the systems and sectors under Imperial control, was accounted for in mind-numbing detail and accuracy. The totalitarian rule of the Emperor had led to a very efficient and organized system of inventories and censuses that measured everything under his control. And though he was gone—much to Minister Davidge’s relief—the bureaucratic network he’d installed still remained.

The screens and screens of numbers were the lifeblood Davidge needed; without accurate, up-to-date data he couldn’t do his job—and in his mind, it was clearly the most important job in the Empire. Logistics, on a meta scale, were the be-all and end-all of the Empire’s survival. Resources and manpower dictated supplies and labor, which dictated the potential production and expected consumption of everything.

Without him, the Empire had no plan to guide its course. Without him, the Minister of War wouldn’t know how many ships or troops to send to each sector, or which worlds were worth fighting for and which weren’t worth the resources to defend. Even the Dark Council’s members relied on him to give them a sense of the relative strength of the Empire compared to the Republic.

Unfortunately, the minister lacked hard numbers on the Republic. Ever since the collapse of Imperial Intelligence, data on the enemy had come from estimates, assumptions, and guesswork. It added variance to his equations, and Minister Davidge hated variance. It required him to provide predictions for both high and low ends of the spectrum, doubling his workload as he offered up predictive models tracking the ebb and flow of the galactic war.

Even using the lowest estimates of Republic resources, the truth was inescapable. The tide had turned against the Empire, and if something didn’t radically change over the next few years their defeat was inevitable. It was simple math.

The minister finished up his final review of the data, gathered his report, and stood from his desk, stretching to loosen his cramped and tired muscles. He’d been huddled over the chair for nearly twelve hours, but Darth Marr had presented him with a question, and Davidge needed to be sure of the answer before he replied.

Confident in his analysis, he turned and headed to the locked durasteel door in the back of his office. He punched in the sixteen-digit code to unlock it, stepped inside, and sealed the door behind him. He moved quickly over to the communications console in the center of the room and activated the black cipher to send out an encrypted message to Darth Marr.

The Sith Lord answered immediately; clearly he’d been waiting for Davidge’s call.

“My Lord,” the minister said. “I’ve reviewed the situation in the Boranall system as you commanded.”

“I assumed as much when I saw your call,” Marr answered, his voice calm and cold as the grave.

Davidge suppressed an urge to shudder. He didn’t like dealing with the Dark Council—the Sith Lords were strange creatures beyond his comprehension. They were driven by emotion and passion rather than logic and careful analysis. They often relied on visions and prophecy gleaned through the Force, allowing some mystical, unquantifiable power to guide their actions rather than the undeniable truth of numbers. And sometimes they stubbornly refused to believe what he tried to tell them—especially when he delivered news they didn’t want to hear.

Marr was better than some of the others; he didn’t rage and scream at Davidge when he didn’t get the answer he sought, like Ravage, and he didn’t seem to be eviscerating the minister with his eyes like Mortis. Most important, Marr understood that the minister’s projections were not guarantees. Unforeseen variables could alter the equation, rendering the minister’s numbers obsolete. But there was still something unsettling about the icy calm with which Marr always addressed him.

“What is your analysis?” Marr pressed, and Davidge realized the Sith had been waiting for him to give his report.

“Uh … given the estimated level of Republic-backed resistance and the growing tide of anti-Imperial sentiment among the native population, we should abandon our campaign in the Boranall system.”

“There are three habitable worlds in that system,” Marr said. “Nearly twenty billion people.”

“Y-yes, my Lord. But none of the planets has the abundance of resources necessary to offset the losses we will inevitably sustain if we try to keep the population under Imperial control.”

“What’s the loss ratio?”

“Extrapolated over six months, there is a net point two percent reduction in total Imperial output if we let the system go.”

“And if we try to hold it?”

“Conservative estimates put the loss at point four percent.” After a moment he hastily added, “In the worst-case scenario, losses could hit point seven percent.”

To some the numbers might sound small, but Davidge knew Marr was wise enough to understand the incredible scope of even two one-hundredths of a percent of the Empire’s total resources.

“The cost is high,” Marr acknowledged, but then he added, “but the Boranall system is not the only place in the Empire threatening to break away from our control. Crushing this uprising will send a message to other systems.”

“Of course, my Lord,” Davidge said, though silently he sighed.

He understood Marr’s reasoning—expend extra resources on the Boranall system in the hope that it would offset future losses. But in the minister’s experience, such a plan rarely worked. Anti-Imperial sentiment would still rise up in other systems, fed and fueled by the Republic and their promises of liberation.

They would never recoup the extra few tenths of a percent it would cost them to hold the system. In Davidge’s mind, this is how the Empire would fall—not in some epic battle, but by tiny margins bleeding away. A death of a million microscopic cuts. But he dared not argue with Darth Marr.

“I will arrange to have one of our nearby fleets send reinforcements to the system,” the minister said.

“I believe Darth Karrid is still in that sector,” Marr said. “The Ascendant Spear’s arrival should put a quick end to the uprising.”

The minister fought back another sigh. He was all too familiar with Darth Karrid and her methods. Whenever the Ascendant Spear was brought into a conflict, casualties and collateral damage increased exponentially. There was no doubt in his mind that the loss ratio would now push toward the highest of his estimates.

Against his better judgment, the minister decided to speak up.

“I’m still trying to absorb the cost of Darth Karrid’s intervention at Leritor. The loss of Gravus’s fleet has negatively impacted our projections. In this case, it might be better if you ordered someone else to go.”

“Darth Karrid is a member of the Dark Council now,” Marr reminded him. “She does not take orders from me. Or from you.”

“Forgive me, my Lord. I meant no offense.”

“Choose your words more carefully when you contact Darth Karrid to request her assistance in this matter.”

Davidge understood numbers better than people, but it was obvious what Marr was hoping to accomplish. It was well known that he had supported the Falleen’s candidacy from the beginning, and having the Minister of Logistics personally petition Darth Karrid for aid in the Boranall system would further legitimize her new position. And persuading her to undertake a mission in a remote system would keep her and the Ascendant Spear away from the machinations of any other members of the Dark Council who might be looking to recruit her allegiance, at least for a while. It wasn’t the first time the minister had been forced to bow to the politics of the Dark Council. At least this time the cost to the Empire was less than it had been on other occasions.

“I understand, my Lord. I will contact her at once.”

“Try to be convincing when you ask for her help,” Marr warned before disconnecting the signal.

From his reports, the minister knew every potentially significant detail about Boranall and the other worlds in the system: their geography and climate; their citizens and culture; their resources and industry. And he knew exactly how he would present this proposal to Darth Karrid.

He composed a brief message summarizing the situation, running it through the cipher before transmitting it to the Ascendant Spear with a highest priority ranking. Despite this, it took almost thirty minutes before he received her reply. The delay was troubling; it hinted that the Falleen, like so many other of the high-ranking Sith Lords, had little regard for the crucial role the Minister of Logistics played in the ongoing galactic war.

Pushing his fears aside, Minister Davidge answered the incoming holo. Darth Karrid’s face materialized before him. Each time he saw her, Davidge couldn’t help but notice her marred beauty. Her perfect skin had been disfigured by the tattoos on her face that represented her devotion to the ways of the Sith; the cybernetic implants dominating her left side transformed her features into a grotesque mix of flesh and steel.

“I received your message, Minister Davidge,” Darth Karrid said, her tone somewhere between annoyance and contempt. “Is this foolishness on Boranall really worthy of the Ascendant Spear?”

No, it’s not, Davidge thought. But Marr wants you there.

Out loud he said, “We have reports of a steady buildup of Republic ships in the region in conjunction with numerous accounts of growing anti-Imperial sentiment among the locals. My projections show that if this potential uprising is not dealt with swiftly, it could have a ripple effect throughout the Empire.”

She twisted her face up in a sneer.

“And what made you think this insignificant system was important enough to trouble a member of the Dark Council?”

Knowing Marr would be displeased if Karrid discovered his involvement, the minister instead went with a carefully fabricated justification for contacting her.

“There is a hypermatter research station on Boranall,” Davidge told her.

There was some truth to his statement: there was an old hypermatter research station on Boranall, the largest and most heavily populated planet in the similarly named system. But he omitted the fact that it was a useless government boondoggle put in place generations ago by corrupt politicians taking payouts from the wealthy family that owned the research company. The archaic equipment had fallen into disrepair, and the technicians supposedly working there were mostly relatives of influential nobles with no proper training.

“Since you are now overseeing the Technology Sphere of Influence,” Davidge continued, blatantly appealing to her ego, “I thought you might want to handle this personally. We can’t let the research station fall under Republic control.”

Karrid favored him with a coy smile—an expression that at the height of her beauty would have made Davidge’s knees buckle with yearning and desire. Now, however, her gruesome visage merely churned his stomach.

“Perhaps Marr is right about you,” she purred. “Maybe you are of some use to the Empire after all.”

Davidge remained silent.

“You’re in luck, Minister,” she said after a brief moment of contemplation. “I will set a course for the Boranall system and put an end to the flickers of rebellion.”

“I thank you on behalf of the Empire,” Davidge replied.

Karrid didn’t bother to reply as she terminated the call. Relieved, the minister turned off the cipher, rose from his seat, and walked out of the communications room. He closed the durasteel door behind him, waiting for the single beep that confirmed it was locked and the cipher beyond was secure. Then he returned to his desk and went back to studying his tables, charts, and graphs.

CHAPTER 12

THERON HAD NO INTENTION of showing up late for his briefing with the Supreme Commander. The Director was already furious with him for slipping his name into the summary report for Operation End Game; no sense adding fuel to the fire. As a result, he arrived at Jace’s office twenty minutes early.

“Take a seat,” the receptionist instructed, pointing to one of several chairs against the wall. “The Supreme Commander will see you once everyone is here.”

There was nothing in her tone to indicate this was anything but standard protocol, but Theron couldn’t help but wonder if the Director had given explicit instructions not to let him in to speak with Jace Malcom unescorted. However, looking at the young woman’s bearing—professional, but in no way wary or guarded—convinced him he was just being paranoid. He smiled to himself as he sat down, glad to see his survival skills were operating at full throttle once again. For a field agent, a little paranoia was a good thing: sometimes they really were out to get you.

The Director arrived about fifteen minutes later. He gave a perfunctory nod to Theron, then a warm smile and wink to the receptionist. The young woman blushed and smiled herself as she pretended not to have seen the gesture.

Looks like the Director’s looking for wife number three, Theron thought to himself.

“Any advice for this meeting?” Theron asked quietly as his boss took a seat beside him to wait.

“Since when does anything I ever tell you matter?” he replied in a sharp whisper, just low enough to keep the receptionist from hearing. “You just do whatever you want anyway.”

“But I get results,” Theron reminded him. “That’s why you keep me around.”

The Director didn’t reply, and Theron could tell he was biting his tongue to keep from unleashing a full-blown rant in front of the receptionist.

“Jace is a military man,” the Director finally said after regaining his composure. “He likes discipline and order. Pull one of your typical reckless stunts while he’s calling the shots and he’ll crush you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Theron promised.

They passed the next few minutes in uncomfortable silence until Master Gnost-Dural, their Jedi liaison, arrived. The Kel Dor was slightly taller than Theron, though he appeared thinner—possibly because of his loose-fitting Jedi robe. His rough, ridged skin was a faded hue of yellow-brown. Like all Kel Dor who ventured from the helium-rich atmosphere of their homeworld, his eyes were protected by formfitting goggles and the lower half of his face was partially obscured by a steel breathing mask. The mask covered the fleshy chasm that Kel Dor possessed in place of a nose and mouth, though it left his ten-centimeter-long, downward-protruding tusks exposed.

Given his complexion, the mask, the tusks, and the odd-shaped cranium typical of the species, Master Gnost-Dural’s appearance was intimidating and unsettling. But Theron knew the Jedi was one of the most respected and honored Masters in the Order.

He was the Republic’s foremost expert on the Sith; he had studied them in detail for many years in his role as keeper of the Jedi Archives. Having reviewed the file the Jedi sent over, however, Theron knew he was more than a mere historian. Gnost-Dural was also an accomplished warrior; he’d been battling the Sith ever since their startling reemergence on the galactic stage, longer than Theron had even been alive.

Theron wondered what the Kel Dor thought of Grand Master Satele Shan. Though there were no records of them serving directly together, he surely knew the head of the Jedi Order personally. He also wondered if Gnost-Dural knew Satele was his mother. Not that Theron really cared either way. Satele’s connection to him was purely biological. His lineage had no bearing on who he was or what he had become; the only real parent he’d had was Master Zho.

“Greetings, Director,” the alien said, his voice deep and resonant even through his mask. “And to you, Agent Shan.”

“Call me Theron.”

“As you wish. I knew Master Zho; he spoke of you often. I grieved when I heard of his loss, though I take solace knowing he became one with the Force.”

Theron was familiar enough with Jedi philosophy not to take offense at the well-intentioned words. He also made note of the fact that Gnost-Dural mentioned Zho, but not Satele … though he might just have been exercising discretion.

“The Supreme Commander will see you now,” the young woman said, pressing a button behind her desk that caused the door to swing open. The three men rose as one and entered the room where Jace was waiting. The Supreme Commander sprang to his feet as they entered, coming over quickly to close the door behind them.

“Director. Master Gnost-Dural,” he said, nodding at each of them in turn. “Good to finally meet you, Theron.”

His words came quickly, as if he was nervous. Theron chalked it up to excitement over the mission.

“I want everyone to speak freely,” Malcom continued. “Rank means nothing here—we’re all equals in this meeting. If you have something to say, just say it.”

“Think you can handle that, Theron?” the Director asked sarcastically.

“I’ll try to get over my natural shyness.”

“Perhaps we should bring each other up to speed,” Master Gnost-Dural suggested. “You can tell me more about Operation End Game, and I can tell you about the Ascendant Spear’s commander. She was once my Padawan, though she went by the name of Kana Terrid back then.”

“I helped put together the analytics report,” Theron reminded them. “I’ve studied everything that was in the files in detail. I’m more interested in what wasn’t in the files.”

The Jedi nodded. “Kana showed great promise during her training, though I was always wary of her ambition. She rarely limited herself to the tasks I set her to; she liked to go off on her own. Take risks. Always looking for the next new challenge.”

“Sounds familiar,” the Director mumbled, but Theron ignored him.

“Instead of trying to change her nature, I sought to guide and direct her natural curiosity. I encouraged her to explore and branch out.”

“That doesn’t sound familiar,” Theron interjected, arching an eyebrow in his boss’s direction.

“It may be my fault that she fell to the dark side,” Gnost-Dural admitted. “I thought her training had given her the discipline to keep her safe, but perhaps giving her so much freedom was a mistake.”

Theron chimed in before the Director could say anything. “Some people are just drawn to the dark side. Forcing her to follow a rigid set of rules might have made her abandon the Jedi Order even sooner.”

“She didn’t abandon the Jedi Order,” Gnost-Dural replied. “Not as you think. I wanted to get one of my people into the Sith; someone to help bring them down from the inside. I was the one who sent her to study under Darth Malgus. I knew it was a risk. If she was discovered she would suffer untold tortures and a gruesome, painful death. Even worse, I knew the temptation of the dark side would test her: Malgus was both powerful and charismatic.”

Theron wasn’t entirely sure the risk of falling to the dark side was worse than torture and death, but he managed to keep his mouth shut.

“For several years she worked undercover, studying at Malgus’s feet while secretly relaying information back to me. Much of what we know about the Ascendant Spear came from her initial reports, and her information led to several key Republic victories.”

“Let me guess what happened next,” Theron said. “The intel kept flowing, but it became less valuable. The information was still accurate, but it wasn’t as strategically important.”

“She became a double agent,” the Kel Dor confirmed. “She was feeding us insignificant scraps on the Empire’s plans while relaying critical Republic intel to Darth Malgus.

“Before she abandoned us, we learned that the ship’s full potential can only be unlocked by those with a powerful connection to the Force,” the Jedi added. “But it also requires special cybernetic implants to interface with the control systems. It is this union of ship and Sith that makes the Spear such a formidable weapon.

“I believe Malgus convinced my Padawan to submit to the surgery for the cybernetic implants so she could take command of the vessel. That was likely the final temptation that lured her over to the dark side.”

The Kel Dor’s insistence on finding some identifiable reason for Karrid’s betrayal didn’t sit well with Theron.

“You’re not going on this mission to try to redeem your former Padawan, are you?” he asked. “I know you Jedi believe nobody is beyond redemption, but bringing down the Spear is going to be hard enough already.”

“My actions unleashed Darth Karrid on the galaxy,” Gnost-Dural explained. “It is my responsibility to stop her. That is my only concern.”

Theron nodded. Taking care of unfinished business was something he could understand.

“In any event, Kana changed her name to Darth Karrid, and I haven’t had any contact with her since,” Gnost-Dural concluded. “Everything I know about her now comes to me from other sources, like SIS.”

“We’ve just learned that Darth Karrid has recently been given a seat on the Dark Council,” the Director chimed in.

“This doesn’t change anything,” Jace insisted. “It just means taking Karrid and the Spear down will have an even greater impact on the Empire. That’s why Operation End Game is so important.

“After reviewing all the scenarios analytics offered, we realize we can’t stop the Spear unless we first get a saboteur on board,” the Supreme Commander told Gnost-Dural. “The plan is to have Theron stow away on the ship while it’s docked at an Imperial spaceport for crew leave.”

“The Spear never stays in port for long,” Theron added. “Getting a saboteur on board requires preparation and planning. We’d have to know which spaceport Karrid was heading for so we could get there first to set everything up.”

“We do have a mole inside Imperial fleet communications,” the Director said. “And she can divert copies of any messages being transmitted to or from the Ascendant Spear to us. But those messages are coded.”

“Then it won’t do us any good,” Theron noted. “Unless we have a black cipher.”

“Hasn’t acquiring a black cipher been a Republic priority for months?” Gnost-Dural asked, impressing Theron with his knowledge of something that didn’t fall under the Order’s typical purview.

“The Empire has taken every precaution to keep that from happening,” Jace replied. “On two occasions we even salvaged a damaged cipher from the wreckage of an Imperial capital ship in the hope of repairing or reverse-engineering it.

“Unfortunately, the ciphers are designed with a self-destruct function. When a capital ship goes down, the ciphers automatically burn out their decryption cores. Without a functional core, the cipher is just a worthless metal box.”

“So how do you propose we acquire one?” asked Theron.

“The Imperial Minister of Logistics uses one to communicate with capital ships across the galaxy,” the Director explained. “It’s in his office at the Orbital Defense Command Center on Ziost.”

“So we need to break into one of the most heavily guarded buildings on one of the Empire’s most critical and well-defended worlds and steal the cipher without setting off the self-destruct sequence?” the Jedi asked, making sure he was clear on the plan.

“It’s more complicated than that,” Theron said. “If a working cipher goes missing, the Empire will just reprogram all their codes.”

Theron knew it wasn’t as simple as he was making it sound. The black ciphers had been designed to prevent anyone from tampering with them; they couldn’t be reprogrammed in the field. Changing the encryption codes would require the Empire to recall their capital ships so technicians could synchronize the changes on each vessel. It would be costly and time consuming, but it was still a better option than letting the enemy listen in on their classified transmissions.

“But the Empire won’t go to the trouble and expense of changing the codes if they don’t think the cipher is missing,” the Director explained. “We need to break into the minister’s office and swap the working cipher’s core with one of the burned-out cores from the damaged ciphers we recovered. Make them think the one in the minister’s office was somehow damaged, causing it to set off the self-destruct sequence.”

“Won’t they be suspicious if the cipher is mysteriously damaged?” the Jedi asked.

“Not if they think it was damaged in a terrorist attack,” Theron chimed in. “Plenty of Imperial installations on other worlds have been targeted in the past. We switch the cores, then detonate some explosives inside the building. Make it look like local anti-Imperial separatists set off a blast that triggered the cipher’s self-destruct sequence.”

“Could be heavy civilian casualties if we aren’t careful,” the Jedi noted.

“We’ll do everything we can to minimize collateral damage,” Jace promised.

“We’ll need the architectural blueprints for the Orbital Defense Command Center,” Gnost-Dural added. “Along with a list of all their security protocols. Does SIS have a contact on Ziost we can use?”

“We haven’t been able to make any inroads into Ziost yet,” the Director admitted.

“I know someone who can help,” Theron said. “A freelancer I worked with before.” The hard part is going to be convincing her to work with me again.

“Even if Theron’s friend helps us out,” the Director cautioned, “we’re still working on a good cover story to get onto Ziost without drawing attention.”

“I can take care of that,” Gnost-Dural offered.

Theron raised an eyebrow in surprise.

“SIS aren’t the only ones who need to infiltrate Imperial worlds,” the Kel Dor explained.

“Then it’s settled,” Theron said. “So when do we leave?”

He knew they could keep going over the mission backward and forward, hashing out every last detail, but he didn’t see the point. Part of what made him a good agent was the ability to think on his feet. Any specifics they came up with now would be pure speculation. It was inevitable things would change during the actual mission, and overplanning would only make it harder to adapt and improvise.

“Give me time to get our cover story in place,” Gnost-Dural said. “We can meet at my private hangar in two days. I’ll send you the location.”

“I’m glad you’re both eager to start,” Jace said. “But let’s not rush into anything.”

“You wanted Theron on this op,” Marcus said, coming to his agent’s defense. “I’ve learned that when he’s ready to go, the best thing is to just get out of his way.”

“I can do that,” Jace vowed. “Gentlemen, Operation End Game has officially begun. May luck—and the Force—be with you.”

Realizing they had been dismissed, Theron, the Director, and Gnost-Dural filed out of the Supreme Commander’s office and into the reception area outside.

“You two go on ahead,” the Director told them, casting a quick glance over at the receptionist as the office door closed behind them. “I need to speak with this young lady about some paperwork. Coordinating SIS resources with the military … gotta make everything official.”

Theron suspected that whatever the Director wanted to talk about was decidedly unofficial, but he had enough tact not to say anything as he and Gnost-Dural continued out into the hall alone.

“I’m looking forward to working with you,” the Jedi said once they reached a branch in the hall where they would part ways. “And I can assure you that my feelings for my former Padawan won’t interfere with our mission.”

“That’s good to know,” Theron said, thinking, If it comes down to it, will you be able to kill her? Or will you hesitate?

“I’ll see you in two days,” Gnost-Dural said, then turned and headed off in the other direction.

As he watched him go, the personal holocomm on Theron’s belt started to beep. Curious, he answered the call. To his surprise the Supreme Commander’s face materialized before him.

“Theron, I’d like to speak to you again before the mission. Alone. At my private residence.”

“Of course, sir,” Theron said, too taken aback to think of anything else.

“Good. I’ll send you the address. Be there tomorrow night.”

The call ended before Theron could ask any questions, leaving him wondering what the Supreme Commander of the Republic could possibly want to discuss.

CHAPTER 13

JACE MALCOM SHIFTED HIS POSITION, unable to get comfortable on the couch in the living room of his modestly furnished apartment as he waited for Theron to arrive. The Supreme Commander wasn’t normally so restless. During his military career he’d spent many hours just sitting and waiting; a soldier’s life was long stretches of boredom broken up by brief interludes of intense action. He’d learned long ago how to stay calm and relaxed as the minutes ticked by. But this situation was unlike anything he’d ever dealt with before.

When the buzzer at his door rang, he actually sprang to his feet and paused a moment to collect himself before opening the door.

“Thanks for coming, Theron,” he said to the young man on the other side.

“I’m not going to miss a meeting with the Supreme Commander,” Theron replied.

“This wasn’t an order,” Jace assured him. “Just a request.”

“Coming from someone in your position, they’re basically the same thing.”

Jace nodded. He had been an officer in command of others for many years, but his recent promotion to Supreme Commander had taken things to a level he still wasn’t quite used to.

“Come in and sit down,” he said. “Please,” he added, hoping to make it seem like an invitation.

Theron settled into one of the two chairs across from the couch. Jace couldn’t help but notice his choice of seat—facing the door, and the farthest position away from where anyone else could sit.

“Nice place you have here, Commander. Kind of expected the walls to be covered with all your medals and commendations.”

“They clashed with the drapes,” Jace explained. “Can I get you something to drink? I’ve got a nice Alderaanian vintage if you like wine. Or Corellian Reserve if you prefer brandy.”

“No thanks, sir.”

“How about some Mandalorian kri’gee?”

“Always wanted to try the hard stuff,” Theron said. “Sure, I’ll take a glass.”

Jace made his way over to the liquor cabinet in the corner and poured them both a shot, then brought it over to his guest before taking a seat on the couch facing him. In the light of the apartment he could see that Theron favored his mother’s side; he could make out a few faint hints of Satele Shan in the younger man’s features, though if he didn’t know who his mother was it wouldn’t have been noticeable.

“To the Republic?” Theron asked, holding up his glass.

“The Republic,” Jace agreed, and they both downed their drinks in a single gulp.

Theron coughed and sputtered for a few seconds—a common reaction in those tasting kri’gee for the first time.

“Want another?” Jace asked. “It’ll grow on you.”

“I’m good,” Theron gasped, his face still red from choking on the first glass.

They set their empty glasses on the coffee table between them, and an uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Jace knew Theron was waiting for him to speak, but he honestly didn’t know where to begin.

“I served with your mother,” he finally said. “On Alderaan. She was a remarkable woman.”

He could see a change come over Theron’s face—he was suddenly guarded and wary.

“I figured you knew,” he said. “Is that why you picked me for this mission?”

“I’ve seen your service record, Theron. You’ve earned this.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I wondered if there was some of your mother in you,” Jace admitted.

“I don’t mean to be rude, Commander, but if you brought me here to ask about Satele you’re out of luck. I barely know her.”

There was a shortness to Theron’s reply. It wasn’t exactly anger or bitterness; more like exasperation. As if he’d had or imagined this conversation so many times before that he was simply tired of it.

“So you’ve never reached out to her? Or she to you?”

Theron shrugged. “Never saw any reason. When I was born, she gave me up to dedicate herself to the Republic. I understand why she did it, and I respect her choice. I chose to serve the Republic, too. That’s why I joined SIS. Making her part of my life now would just complicate things for both of us; make both of our jobs harder. I don’t see the point.”

“You seem pretty sure of this,” Jace noted.

“Ngani Zho helped me understand why Satele did what she did. I’ve come to terms with it. I’ve moved on.”

“But what about your father? Didn’t you ever want to ask Satele about him?”

“Master Zho was my father. He raised me. Made me who I am.”

The conversation wasn’t going as well as Jace had hoped. He was dancing around the real issue, and he realized he was actually afraid. He’d faced death too many times to count, but here he was, too scared to tell Theron why he was really here. Taking a deep breath, the Supreme Commander decided it was time to charge into the breach.

“Theron, I didn’t know Satele had a son. I only found out a few days ago when I saw your name in the report and I asked the Director if you were related.”

“Kind of wish he’d lied to you,” Theron grumbled. “Could have avoided this whole awkward chat.”

Jace ignored him and pressed on, determined to get the truth out there.

“He gave me your personnel file. I checked when you were born, confirming what I already suspected. Theron—I believe that I am your father.”

There was a long silence before Theron finally spoke.

“I already told you,” he said coldly. “Master Zho was my father.”

“Theron—you have to believe that I had no idea. When Satele broke off our relationship, I thought it was because of the Jedi Order’s ban against emotional attachments. I didn’t realize she was pregnant.”

Theron stood up suddenly.

“Commander, I’m sorry she lied to you. But this is between you and her. You need to talk to Satele.”

“That’s the last thing I need right now,” Jace replied. “She lied to me. Hid you from me. I’m so mad I wouldn’t even know what to say to her.”

“But she’d know what to say to you,” Theron said sympathetically. “The Jedi always have an explanation.”

“Exactly. I’m in no mood to hear her prattle on about peace and controlling your emotions. That’s why I came to you.”

“I still don’t know what you want from me,” Theron said, shaking his head. “Why tell me this?”

“Why?” Jace rose to his feet. “You’re my son. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”

“No!” Theron snapped, taking a step back. “We’re just strangers who happen to share a biological connection.”

“That’s my point,” Jace insisted, resisting the urge to take a step forward. “We don’t have to be strangers.”

“I don’t need someone to take me fishing or teach me how to ride a hoverbike.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Jace said, shaking his head in frustration. “I just want to get to know you better. Maybe we have more in common than you think.”

Theron sighed and brought a hand up to rub his temples.

“Your timing on this is really terrible, Commander,” he said.

“I could have handled this better,” Jace admitted. “I just thought you had a right to know. I’m still trying to figure this all out.”

“Fair enough,” Theron said, his tone softening. “I’ve been dealing with Satele’s decision my whole life, but you just found out. I guess it’s going to take you some time to get a handle on it.”

Jace stayed silent, sensing that Theron was heading somewhere.

“I have a lot of respect and admiration for you and what you do,” Theron told him. “And maybe we do have a lot in common. We’ve both dedicated our lives to helping the Republic. Maybe when I get back from Ziost, we can try to get to know each other better.”

“Don’t worry,” Jace assured him. “We can take it slow.”

“If we were taking it slow you wouldn’t have dropped this bomb on our first visit.”

“Sorry about that,” Jace said. “I thought you deserved to know before the mission … just in case.”

The professional soldier in him realized how poorly he had handled the whole situation, though there wasn’t much he could do about it now.

“You and Master Gnost-Dural are scheduled to leave tomorrow. Do you need me to postpone the mission for a few days while you process this?”

“Give me a little credit, Commander,” Theron replied. “I’m more worried about you. Knowing I’m your son might affect your judgment on Operation End Game.”

“You don’t get to be Supreme Commander unless you can put personal feelings aside for the greater good of the Republic,” Jace replied.

“Glad to hear it.”

There was another long, uncomfortable silence before Theron finally said, “I should go. I still have some things to get ready before I leave.”

“Right. Of course.”

Jace escorted Theron to the door. Just before he left, the young man turned to him.

“We can talk again when I get back.”

“Looking forward to it,” Jace answered with a smile.

The door slid closed and Jace slowly made his way back over to collapse onto the couch. His heart was pounding and his body felt simultaneously wired and exhausted—the same reaction he had at the end of an intense battle. He closed his eyes to take a short nap and slipped immediately off to sleep—a useful skill most soldiers quickly learned.

Jace lay motionless with his eyes closed on his cot as consciousness slowly returned, floating on a cloud of kolto. He could hear the celebration taking place outside his tent; Havoc Squad had won a great victory today over the Empire. The Republic had been giving ground ever since the Sith had first reappeared and seized Korriban; reclaiming Alderaan was a morale boost the troops desperately needed.

The songs and laughter of the soldiers from outside the tent sounded as if they were coming from a great distance—muted by the drugs that numbed the pain of his disfigured face.

The explosion from the grenade he’d clutched in his hand while tackling Darth Malgus had scarred him for life, but his desperate actions had saved Satele Shan’s life … just as her unexpected arrival had saved him from execution at the hands of the Sith earlier in the battle.

“How are you feeling?” a gentle voice cooed in his ear, and he opened his eyes to see Satele hovering over him.

“Muddled,” Jace said with a smile. “Kolto’s making me a bit woozy.”

He could feel his burned skin stretching and cracking at the gesture, and he half expected Satele to recoil as he realized what a gruesome sight he must be.

Instead, she returned his smile and reached out to place a soft hand on his bare arm. Her touch sent a shiver along his spine.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her. “On Alderaan, I mean?”

“I had a vision,” she told him. “The Force showed me that you would need my help on Alderaan, and I petitioned the Council to send reinforcements.”

“Might have to rethink my opinion on that mystical mumbo-jumbo,” Jace teased her. “Those Imps were about to make me a full head shorter before you arrived. Guess I owe you one.”

“After all the battles we’ve fought together, I’ve stopped keeping track of who owes whom,” Satele told him. “You know I’ll always be there for you, and I know you’ll be there for me.”

“We make a good team,” Jace conceded. “They find Malgus’s body yet?”

Satele shook her head. “I’m starting to think he survived the battle.”

“You dropped a mountain on him,” Jace grunted in disbelief. “How could anyone survive that?”

“He’s a powerful Sith Lord. It’s possible he used the dark side to survive my final assault. But you should not let that detract from this moment. All of Alderaan is hailing you as a hero this night. If you’re up to it I can take you out to enjoy the celebrations.”

“I’d rather stay here in my tent … alone with you.”

Satele tried to dismiss his comment with a laugh, but there was a nervousness in her reaction that Jace could sense even through the fading fugue of the painkillers in his system.

“I’m serious, Satele,” he said. “You know how I feel about you. I’ve felt that way for years, ever since we first met.”

“That’s the kolto talking,” she said, though she sounded unsure.

“The kolto’s just giving me the courage to say what I’ve felt this entire time,” Jace insisted, sitting up and clasping her hand between his. “Or maybe it’s knowing I was only seconds away from death. Whatever the reason, I can’t keep playing this game.

“I can’t ignore what’s in my heart,” he continued, the words coming in a rush, his mind suddenly focused and clear. “And I know you feel something for me, too.”

Satele shook her head, but she didn’t pull her hand away.

“I am a Jedi. We must unburden ourselves from emotion and passion to find peace.”

“What peace can you find when the galaxy is consumed by war?” Jace asked. “Instead of denying what we feel, we should embrace it. Together we are greater than each of us alone. You can’t deny it.”

“I’m a Jedi,” she repeated, though Jace could tell her resolve was weakening.

“There have been Jedi who fell in love,” he said. “The Order pretends it never happens, but we both know that isn’t true.”

Satele was silent for several moments. When she spoke her voice was little more than a whisper.

“I’ve feared this moment since we first met,” she told him.

She leaned in and gave Jace a gentle kiss on the lips, careful not to brush the exposed and tender flesh of his wounds.

Jace woke with a start, nearly spilling himself off his couch.

He hadn’t dreamed about Satele for years. He’d thought the memories, and the pain they brought him, had been boxed safely away. Speaking with Theron—speaking with his son—had reopened old wounds.

Checking his watch, he saw nearly two hours had passed since Theron had left. That would explain the crick in his neck. The couch was fine for a brief power nap, but it was no place to spend the night.

Grunting like a man decades older, he forced himself to his feet and staggered off to bed, wondering if his nights would now be haunted by the only woman he had ever loved.

Back in his apartment, Theron couldn’t stop pacing. The conversation with Jace—with your father—had affected him more than he wanted to admit. Logically, everything he’d said to Jace was true: Ngani Zho had raised him, and the only real connection he had with the Supreme Commander was some shared DNA.

Emotionally, however, he couldn’t simply brush the revelation off. It rekindled long-forgotten feelings of anger and betrayal toward his mother: feelings he thought he’d come to terms with long ago. But when it came to Jace, he wasn’t sure what he felt.

He wasn’t angry; it wasn’t fair to blame the Supreme Commander for what Satele had done. He wasn’t feeling happy or excited or relieved: he’d never felt the need to know his biological father before, so it wasn’t like some great void in his life had suddenly been filled. Yet even though he couldn’t describe it, he was feeling something.

You’re not going to figure this out in one night.

Theron stopped pacing and shook his head, trying to regain his focus. Operation End Game had to be his top priority; he couldn’t afford to be distracted by this unexpected family drama. He had to put all thoughts of his parents aside and concentrate on the mission.

He took a few deep breaths to regain his composure—a simple trick he’d learned from Ngani Zho.

Your real father.

Ignoring the voice inside his head, he made his way over to the holo-terminal in the center of the room. He’d set up his apartment so that all incoming holocalls were automatically tracked and traced. He pulled up the data from his last call—Teff’ith—and sent off a hailing signal, not bothering to hide the identity tag on the transmission.

If she’s dead-set on not talking to me, she’ll just ignore the call.

The holo beeped several times before Teff’ith finally answered.

“Told you to leave us alone,” she snarled as her image materialized before him.

“You didn’t have to pick up.”

“Beeping holo’s annoying. What you want?”

“I need a favor.”

Theron half expected her to cut the call short right there. Instead, she gave an exasperated sigh.

“Knew you were following us for a reason.”

“It’s a small favor,” Theron assured her. “Just need you to make one call.”

“To who?” she asked, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.

Theron took it as a good sign that she hadn’t said no.

“I have some business on Ziost. I need a contact there who can hold on to an important package for a few days until I come to pick it up. Might also need him to get me a few things. Blueprints. Information. Maybe some explosives. You know anyone like that?”

“Thought you said you weren’t following us on Ziost!” she said, her tone dripping with accusation.

Theron held up his hands defensively. “Never set foot on that planet in my life. I only know you were there because you mentioned it on our last call.”

Teff’ith’s head-tails twitched as she debated whether to believe him or not.

“What this about?” she finally demanded.

“Can’t say,” Theron replied. “Top secret. But it won’t cause any problems for you or the Old Tion Brotherhood.”

“Cause problems for the Empire?”

Theron shrugged. “Does that really matter to you?”

“Got a contact who works with the ZLF,” Teff’ith said. “Maybe could do it.”

Theron had read several reports focusing on the Ziost Liberation Front, a radical separatist group that had vowed to free their homeworld from Imperial control. Relying primarily on violent guerrilla attacks, they targeted both military and civilian targets, making them technically a terrorist organization. The ZLF was too extreme for the Republic to officially support them, but for this mission they were exactly what he needed.

And you won’t have to worry about any of them being sympathetic to the Empire.

“That should work,” Theron said. “Can you set up a meeting?”

“Never said we’d help you yet,” Teff’ith reminded him. “Gotta work out the terms.”

“Two hundred credits,” Theron opened.

“A thousand,” she countered.

“I’m not giving you a thousand credits just to set up a meeting,” Theron said with a laugh. “Three hundred—take it or leave it.”

Teff’ith chewed her lip for a minute as she considered the offer.

“Four hundred,” she said. “In advance. And this makes us even for Nar Shaddaa.”

Before Theron could agree she quickly added, “We set this up and you leave us alone from now on. We see you following us again, we kill you.”

“Figured that would be part of the deal,” he said. “Four hundred credits, in advance, and you’ll never see me again.”

Satisfied, Teff’ith said, “Okay, we set it up.”

CHAPTER 14

THERON WAS IMPRESSED with the ship Gnost-Dural had procured for their journey to Ziost. The TZ-6 executive shuttle was one of Corellian Engineering Corporation’s most luxurious mass-production vessels; the ship was easily worth five times the value of any craft Theron had ever owned. The name stenciled on the side, PROSPERITY, seemed particularly apt.

“The Jedi must pay better than I thought,” he said, running an appreciative hand along the gleaming hull.

“I’ll be playing the part of a wealthy industrialist,” Gnost-Dural explained. “It would look unusual if we were traveling in a substandard vessel.”

“Hey, you don’t need to convince me,” Theron said. “I like traveling in style.”

Theron took two quick steps up the boarding ramp, eager to check out the interior … and just as eager to leave Coruscant behind. He knew from past experience that once the mission was under way, his mind would be too focused to keep brooding over the fact that Jace Malcom was his father.

“So tell me more about our cover story,” Theron said, settling into one of the six luxurious reclining passenger seats. The plush cushions momentarily gave way beneath his weight before reshaping themselves to perfectly conform to every contour of his body.

“I will play the part of Ess Drellid, a wealthy noble who owns several factories in the Deadalis sector,” Gnost-Dural explained. The Jedi chose to remain standing rather than join Theron in one of the adjacent seats.

“You will be my security chief, looking to upgrade weapons and armor for my personal bodyguards; Ziost has a thriving black market for both.

“Everything on board our ship will support this story, just in case customs officials decide to conduct a random search of the vessel.”

“What if someone gets suspicious and digs into our backstory?” Theron asked, reluctantly getting to his feet and leaving the comfort of the passenger chair behind.

“My people have seeded the various databases the Empire has access to with documents that will support our story. Short of someone actually traveling to the Deadalis sector to investigate the factories in person, our story will hold up.”

“You’ve got quite the little operation going,” Theron said appreciatively. “For a Jedi historian, you make a pretty good spy.”

“As I said before, SIS are not the only ones gathering intelligence on our enemy,” Gnost-Dural reminded him, following close behind as Theron headed for the cockpit. “But your efforts are focused primarily on the military and the day-to-day operations of the Empire. My people are more interested in those who follow the dark side of the Force: the Sith Lords, the Dark Council, and even the Emperor.”

“I heard the Emperor’s dead,” Theron noted, taking a seat in the copilot’s chair.

“That is what many believe,” Gnost-Dural said cryptically, settling into the pilot’s chair beside him.

“You don’t buy that?”

Theron was pleased to discover that, like the passenger seats in the rear of the shuttle, the chairs in the cockpit adjusted themselves to provide maximum comfort and support. That would come in handy for the long flight to Ziost.

“There are many possibilities I have not yet ruled out. The Emperor may be dead. He may be in hiding. Or he may never have existed at all … at least not in any true sense of the word.”

“Haven’t heard that one before,” Theron admitted.

“There is some evidence to support the theory that the thousand-year-old Sith Emperor was merely a myth,” Gnost-Dural explained while going through a standard preflight check of their vessel.

“It’s possible that the Emperor is really just the strongest member of the Dark Council. When he or she dies, the next strongest secretly assumes that role, perpetuating the myth of an eternal, all-powerful being to keep the masses and other Sith Lords in line.”

“If that’s the case, then why all the rumors that the Emperor is dead?” Theron asked, cross-checking the instruments and readouts. “Why hasn’t one of them just stepped into his robes and made a quick public appearance?”

“The Dark Council, like the rest of the Empire, is in flux. There may be disagreement among them as to who should be the next one to assume the Emperor’s role.

“Or,” the Jedi added, “the rumors could all be true, and the Emperor was actually an ancient being of unfathomable power who has recently disappeared, leaving his followers stumbling in his absence.

“Whatever the truth,” Gnost-Dural vowed, “I will one day find out. Knowledge is the key to stopping the Sith.”

“I thought taking out the Ascendant Spear was the key,” Theron joked.

“The Spear is the key to defeating the Empire and putting a quick end to the galactic war,” Gnost-Dural clarified, raising his voice to be heard as he fired up the ship’s engines. “But the Sith are another matter entirely. Even if the Empire falls, the followers of the dark side will continue to exist in hiding.

“That is why I have devoted myself to studying the Sith. I am determined to find a way to cleanse the galaxy of their corrupting influence, putting an end to the eternal struggle between the light and dark sides of the Force.”

“Uh … okay. Hope that works out for you.”

Theron could feel the seat beneath him adjusting as the force of their liftoff pressed him into his chair. The Prosperity’s thrust was impressive.

“You mock me,” Gnost-Dural said. “Did Master Zho not speak to you of the Force and the battle between the forces of light and darkness?”

“He was more interested in teaching me the skills I needed to survive,” Theron replied. “I think he was expecting the instructors at the Jedi academy to fill me in on that kind of stuff,” he added. “But when I didn’t show an affinity for the Force, they refused to take me.”

“The Force manifests itself in many ways,” Gnost-Dural assured him. “It flows through all living things. Not being a Jedi doesn’t diminish your worth.”

“Never said it did,” Theron answered, a little more sharply than he intended.

“I need to input our destination into the nav computer,” Gnost-Dural said, perhaps sensing it was time to put an end to the conversation.

Theron was all too happy to let the matter drop. In his few weeks at the academy, he’d experienced enough of the unintentional but unmistakable self-righteous superiority of the Jedi to last a lifetime.

Could have been worse, Theron thought. At least he didn’t ask me about my mother. Once again, Theron wondered if the Kel Dor knew about Satele’s secret shame.

The rest of the trip passed in relative silence, both men retreating to inner contemplation as they went through the mundane routines of deep-space travel. Theron actually appreciated the lack of conversation; it gave him time to mentally prepare for the coming mission. By the time they were halfway to Ziost, he’d successfully banished all thoughts of Jace and Satele, leaving his mind clear and focused.

The clearance procedures for ships approaching Ziost were far too regulated to actually be efficient, but they passed through the gauntlet of customs and security with little difficulty and were given permission to land. Once the Prosperity touched down, the faceless guards tasked with authorizing their presence on the Imperial-controlled world simply asked Gnost-Dural a few routine questions, ran a quick verification of his ship’s registration, and made a perfunctory search of the interior before waving them through.

Safely out of earshot, Theron couldn’t help but whisper, “If we knew customs was just going to wave us through, we wouldn’t have had to ship the decryption core here ahead of time.”

“The Empire has ears everywhere,” Gnost-Dural cautioned.

Duly chastened, Theron decided to keep any further smart-mouthed comments to himself.

As they made their way from the landing bay to a speeder waiting outside the spaceport to take them to Teff’ith’s contact, Theron couldn’t help but marvel at the cosmopolitan feel of the crowd. He counted at least a dozen different species from every corner of the galaxy, including sectors where countless Republic soldiers had given their lives to save the local populations from being conquered and enslaved by the Sith.

The scene was even more difficult to fathom when one considered Ziost’s history. The Sith had fled here over twenty thousand years ago when a war of succession reduced Korriban to an uninhabitable wasteland. They adopted Ziost as their new homeworld, and at one time it had even served as the capital of the Sith Empire.

No one from the Republic had ever even officially set foot on Ziost; since its founding it had remained under the absolute control of the xenophobic Sith Empire. Even as recently as a decade ago, the only nonhuman, non-Sith purebloods on the world would have been slaves in chains or cages. Now, however, the planet had been reinvented as the gateway to the Empire: the place where anyone seeking an alternative to dealing with the Republic was welcome to come and do business with the Sith.

While some might see Ziost’s newfound openness as proof the Empire had become more tolerant and accepting, Theron wasn’t fooled. The Imperials were losing the war; they were desperate. So desperate they were willing to swallow their bigotry to welcome the so-called lesser species with open arms, at least on this one planet.

Theron’s thoughts were interrupted by a subtle nudge from Gnost-Dural. The Jedi Master was looking up at a nearby holoscreen running an official news report. The images primarily showed the mangled wreckage of several medium-sized Republic ships—the kind used in hit-and-run attacks on Imperial fleets. The voice of an Imperial shill played over the images of death and destruction.

“A recent attempt by the Republic and anti-Imperial separatists to conquer the loyal citizens of the Boranall system was easily repulsed by the might of the Imperial defenders.”

One shot in particular grabbed Theron’s attention—two halves of a Republic vessel floating side by side, the hull split cleanly between bow and stern, like a giant saw had sliced it through. He knew of only one ship in the galaxy with laser cannons powerful enough to inflict that kind of damage.

The images changed to show several city blocks on the planetary surface that had been leveled by an orbital bombardment. Most of the buildings were reduced to rubble; those few that still stood had huge chunks torn away to expose the bent and twisted durasteel beams that supported their frames. The streets were impassable, choked with debris and the bodies of innocent civilians.

“Before the arrival of their Imperial saviors, the citizens of Boranall were subjected to a cowardly assault from the Republic fleet orbiting their world.”

Theron couldn’t help but shake his head in denial at the blatant Imperial propaganda. Orbital bombardment of civilians wasn’t something the Republic practiced, and none of the vanquished Republic ships they’d shown had the firepower to wreak that kind of havoc.

The more likely explanation was that the Spear had wiped out the Republic ships, then turned its guns on Boranall. Whether Karrid was eliminating resistance on the ground or simply punishing the planet for daring to harbor anti-Imperial separatists didn’t matter to Theron—there was no excuse for the kind of slaughter she’d unleashed.

He saw Gnost-Dural stiffen, and he realized the Jedi Master had come to the same conclusions he had. Theron hoped seeing the horrors his former apprentice was capable of might convince Gnost-Dural to abandon his hope that she could be redeemed, though he knew enough about Jedi in general to realize this probably wouldn’t change anything.

The two men continued in silence through the spaceport to where Gnost-Dural had arranged to have a speeder waiting for them. Stepping outside, Theron was struck by a cold blast of wind. Shivering, he pulled his cloak tighter around his body. The air was dry and gritty with tiny particles of dirt and dust swept along by the breeze, and he squinted, wishing he had a cover for his face. The Kel Dor, with his goggles and breathing mask, didn’t seem bothered by the harsh wind, though Theron took some small satisfaction in seeing him also shivering from the cold.

Fortunately their speeder was as luxurious as their shuttle had been, with a sealed climate-controlled dome to shield them from the elements. Once again Gnost-Dural sat in the pilot’s chair and Theron took the seat beside him. Theron wasn’t much of a follower, but he was happy to defer to his partner on the little things.

They zipped through the bustling streets of Ziost’s market district, their speeder whisking them above the crowds. There were still several hours of daylight, and Theron was clearly able to see the people below them in the light of the world’s distant and faded orange sun. Although he only got a brief view from above, the market district had the same vibrant, cosmopolitan feel as the spaceport. As soon as they passed into the neighboring residential district, however, everything changed.

It was still crowded—Ziost was a heavily populated metropolis. But the life and color seemed to vanish in an instant. Everything was drab and gray—the buildings, the streets, and even the clothes of the people in the crowd.

“You can feel the oppression of this place,” Gnost-Dural said. “The hopeless despair of the entire city.”

Theron nodded, knowing the Jedi wasn’t referring to something he sensed through the Force. Under Imperial rule there were harsh penalties for even minor infractions, and it wasn’t hard to see the impact. Unlike the chaos of Nar Shaddaa, here there was an orderly, almost rigid flow of traffic, both on the ground and in the air. Pedestrians moved with brisk purpose, heads down, eager to get off the street and back to the anonymous safety of their homes. Speeders stayed in their designated lanes, and nobody dared to go faster than the posted limit. Swoop bikes were nowhere to be found, and if there were gangs on Ziost, Theron imagined they’d be careful to stay well hidden.

It made for good Imperial propaganda; they claimed their worlds were free of all petty crime. But Theron would gladly take a few pickpockets and some graffiti over a sterile, lifeless existence under a completely totalitarian government.

“We’re almost there,” Gnost-Dural informed him as they left the residential district and passed into an industrial area populated by square, windowless warehouses. “I hope your friend’s contact comes through for us.”

“Me too.”

He brought the speeder down just outside the door of one of the buildings. To Theron’s eye it looked exactly like every other structure on the street, but he trusted the Jedi to deliver them to the address Teff’ith had provided.

Bracing themselves against the bitter wind, they rushed from the speeder to the door. It opened as they reached it, and they hurried inside. Beyond the door was a small open-air office and reception area. Four desks were arranged around the room, though none of them was currently occupied. A single door on the far wall led into the warehouse at the back.

“Good to get out of the cold, isn’t it?” their host said cheerfully.

He was a middle-aged human. The crown of his bald head was surrounded by a ring of curly brown hair. His face was ruddy, his features plain. His loose-fitting clothes were unremarkable, but Theron could tell they had been selected partly to hide the man’s flabby chest and protruding gut.

Unassuming and nonthreatening. The perfect front man for a brutal group like the ZLF.

“Name’s Vinn,” he said, thrusting out a meaty hand. “You must be Teff’ith’s friends.”

Theron shook the man’s hand but didn’t offer his name. Gnost-Dural followed his lead.

“Everything you sent ahead is here, safe and sound,” Vinn said, getting right to business. “Got it all safely hidden away back in the warehouse. Even that burned-out computer core.

“Kinda curious as to what you need that for,” he added with a chuckle.

“What did you find out about the Orbital Defense Command Center?” Theron said, not bothering to satisfy Vinn’s curiosity.

“Got the architectural blueprints right here,” he said, pulling out a datapad. “And everything anyone could possibly want to know about the security systems they have in place.”

He hesitated for a second, as if debating how much he was willing to share with these strangers based solely on Teff’ith’s referral.

“You know,” he said, drawing the words out slowly, “if you’re looking to cause trouble for the Empire, I have some friends who might be interested in lending a hand.”

I bet you do, Theron thought. But if any of your ZLF brothers get captured, the Imperial interrogators will make them sing. Can’t take that risk.

Out loud he simply said, “We prefer to work alone.”

“Understood,” Vinn said with a cheery nod. “Just putting it out there.”

Theron took the datapad and briefly flicked through the contents.

“Top-of-the-line system; redundant fail-safes,” he muttered. “No surprise there. I’m probably going to need some extra high-tech equipment,” he continued without looking up. “If I put together a list, can you get me everything I need?”

“That’ll cost extra,” their chubby host said apologetically.

“We can pay. As long as you deliver the goods.”

Vinn’s chest puffed up with pride. “Hardware and equipment is my specialty. If somebody manufactures it, I can find it.

“Could take a couple days, though,” he added.

“Until then we should try to keep a low profile,” Gnost-Dural said. “Stay out of trouble.”

You’ve been talking with the Director, Theron thought.

“Don’t worry,” he said, holding up the datapad. “I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.”

CHAPTER 15

IN KEEPING WITH HIS COVER as a wealthy industrialist, Gnost-Dural had rented them a two-bedroom suite on Ziost that was the height of luxury and comfort—nearly twice the size of Theron’s apartment on Coruscant. It had taken a good hour to thoroughly sweep the place for bugs and recording devices.

The bed in Theron’s room was the most comfortable one he’d ever had the pleasure of sleeping in, but he was never able to get more than a few hours’ rest while on a mission. By the time Gnost-Dural emerged from his own quarters, Theron was already hunched over the counter of the breakfast nook, studying the information on the datapad Vinn had given him.

“You’re up early,” the Jedi remarked.

“I’ve been thinking about the mission,” Theron said, eyes on the screen. “I think we need more than a simple bombing to distract the Empire from what we’re really up to. For this feint to work, we need to rattle their cage. Give them something to really worry about.”

The Jedi took a seat in the chair across from Theron. “Sounds like you already have something in mind.”

“We need to make this look like a failed assassination attempt on the Minister of Logistics,” Theron said, finally looking up from the datapad. “Convince the Empire that the cipher was damaged accidentally when the assassins were discovered trying to set up explosives in the minister’s office.”

“That would certainly give them something else to focus on,” Gnost-Dural agreed. “So how do we pull it off?”

“I break into the minister’s office and switch the cipher cores. Then I start setting up explosives under his desk. You send an anonymous tip to the Imperials about what’s happening so that they charge in and catch me in the act. The explosives go off ‘accidentally’ during my escape and they think the blast caused the cipher’s self-destruct sequence to trigger.”

“The second I tip the Imperials off, every guard in that place will be swarming that office from all directions,” Gnost-Dural warned. “You won’t have a chance.”

“Not necessarily,” Theron replied. “I’ve been looking over the security plans. The Orbital Defense Command Center’s primary function is to guard against a Republic fleet attacking Ziost. Their biggest fear is that an enemy force will take over the station during a full-scale planetary invasion.

“Because of that, they have an emergency lockdown state that automatically triggers if certain protocols are met that indicate a possible Republic invasion. During lockdown, every floor on the building goes into quarantine to restrict movement of any enemy troops that might have infiltrated the facility.

“Every door and lift in the place is locked and disabled. And the Empire is so worried about being betrayed from within, even the Imperial soldiers inside the building can’t open them. There’s no way to override the lockdown until a special emergency response unit has swept the building and verified it’s clear of hostiles.”

“How are we supposed to simulate a Republic invasion of Ziost?” Master Gnost-Dural asked.

“What’s the first thing any fleet does when it’s trying to put troops on the ground in a heavily defended enemy city?”

“Knock out the power,” Gnost-Dural replied after a moment’s consideration. “Leave your enemy fumbling around in the dark.”

“Exactly. If there’s a citywide blackout, the ODCC’s auxiliary generators kick in to keep the place running, and the whole facility goes into lockdown automatically. Even after you tip off the Empire that there’s an assassin in the minister’s office, they won’t be able to send reinforcements in my direction until they restore primary power or the emergency response team finishes its sweep.

“If we hit them at night, when the minister and his staff aren’t working, that floor will only have a handful of guards patrolling it. Nothing I can’t handle.”

“If the whole place is locked down,” the Kel Dor asked, “then how are you going to get out?”

“The emergency response team can still use the doors and turbolifts during lockdown—all it takes is an ID badge and a matching retinal scan from one of their officers.”

“Do you think Vinn could get his hands on something like that?”

“Maybe, but he already knows more than I like. Give him too many pieces and he might put the whole puzzle together.”

“You think he’ll betray us?”

“Probably not, but I’d rather not take any chances. The ZLF has its own agenda, and I don’t want it getting mixed up in Operation End Game any more than absolutely necessary.”

“So how are you going to get the badge and retinal scan?”

Don’t worry,” Theron assured him. “I’ve got it covered.”

From a table in the back corner of the bar, Theron watched his target closely as he tossed back another drink with his fellow soldiers. The Hammer and Nail was located only a few blocks from the Orbital Defense Command Center, making it a popular hangout for the troops stationed there. It was easy to spot them in the crowd, as they tended to wear their uniforms even when off duty, particularly the officers.

The Empire was a martial society, and there were status and perks given to those of higher rank. The waitress made more frequent trips to tables where the officers gathered; the bartender filled their glasses right to the rim. He’d even seen a handful of civilian patrons and enlisted troops surrender their tables if there weren’t empty seats when the officers entered, though the manner in which they slinked away made it seem more like fear than a sign of respect.

Theron had set his sights on a man named Captain Pressik, commander of one of the ODCC’s emergency response teams. Tall, blond, and handsome, the broad-shouldered officer carried himself with the privileged air of someone who had grown up being taught he was better than everyone else. Even among the other members of his elite unit, he carried himself with an air of arrogance and superiority.

Theron’s investigations had uncovered Pressik’s reputation for being a hard drinker when he wasn’t on duty. And when he got drunk, he got violent, though he was smart enough to pick his fights with civilians to avoid any consequences that might harm his military career.

Pressik’s shift had ended several hours ago; since then he had been here at the bar drinking with a handful of other officers. But while most of them nursed glasses of wine or ale, he was tossing back White Nova doubles with reckless abandon. Not that Theron minded; the more Pressik drank, the easier this would be.

He said something to the others at his table, eliciting a round of ribald laughter. Then he got up and made his way toward the refresher. Theron moved quickly to cut him off, walking with a pronounced drunken stagger. He bumped into the soldier as they both tried to enter the refresher at the same time, using the contact to get in close enough for the scanner in his pocket to read the data encoded on the ID badge prominently displayed on the left breast pocket of Pressik’s uniform.

“Sorry,” Theron grumbled.

“Watch where you’re going!” the man snapped, roughly shoving Theron back with his shoulder and forearm.

“Mind if I go first?” Theron asked, taking a step toward the refresher, stalling to give the scanner the thirty seconds it would take to download the data from Pressik’s badge. “Kind of an emergency.”

The soldier didn’t reply as he squeezed past Theron and into the refresher, the door whooshing shut behind him.

Theron remained standing just outside the door, considering his options. He knew the scanner hadn’t had enough time to finish the job. And the holorecorder in the implant of his left eye hadn’t captured a clear enough shot of Pressik’s face to duplicate his retinal scan. He had no choice but to try again.

The refresher opened a few moments later and Pressik stepped out, giving Theron a dangerous glare when he saw him still waiting by the door.

“What’s your problem, Subjugate?” he said, using the Imperial term for those without citizen status.

The implication in the word was clear: Here on Ziost, you have no rank. You have no rights. Back down.

“I was here first,” Theron said, slurring his words and leaning forward as if he were having trouble keeping his balance. “You cut the line.”

From the corner of his eye, Theron noticed the patrons at the nearby tables scooping up their drinks and rapidly retreating to a safe distance.

Pressik’s lip curled up into a snarl of contempt as he fixed his piercing blue eyes on the maggot in front of him.

Perfect, Theron thought. Give me a nice clear shot of those pretty little peepers.

To Theron’s surprise, Pressik turned away after a few seconds.

“Sit down, Subjugate,” he said.

Theron wasn’t sure why Pressik was backing down. Maybe he’d seen something in Theron’s eyes that made him realize this wasn’t the typical cowering victim he was used to bullying. Maybe his superiors, fed up with his off-duty altercations, had taken him to task and warned him to keep his temper in check.

One thing Theron was sure about, however—he still needed more time for the scanner to do its job.

“You’re the Suj-u-grate,” Theron spat out, fumbling over the word in his feigned drunken stupor. He reached out and shoved Pressik in the back as he walked away.

Pressik wheeled on him, his right hand balled into a fist. He dropped low as he threw a powerful uppercut into Theron’s midsection. Theron saw it coming—it was a clumsy brawler’s punch. But he resisted his natural instincts to block or evade the attack. Staying in character as an inebriated civilian, all he could do was brace himself as the blow landed.

The air whooshed out of him and his knees buckled. He staggered forward and wrapped his arms around Pressik in a bear hug, using the other man to support his weight so he could stay on his feet … and to keep him from stepping back and out of the scanner’s limited range.

“Get off me!” Pressik shouted, struggling to shake him off.

Theron grappled awkwardly with the bigger man, managing to tie up his arms and buying himself a brief respite from further punishment. The other officers rushed in from the far side of the bar to join the fray.

Just a few more seconds, Theron thought, still holding on to Pressik for all he was worth.

He felt the hands of the other soldiers seizing him as they tried to pry him loose from their friend. Someone was raining blows down on his neck and shoulders from behind.

Four on one, Theron thought as he twisted and turned, doing his best to absorb the beating. The kind of odds the Empire just loves.

They managed to haul Theron off Pressik just as he felt the scanner in his pocket vibrating to signify the download was complete. As Pressik stumbled backward, Theron went limp and collapsed to the floor.

“Get him on his feet!” Pressik shouted, and two of his companions grabbed Theron under his armpits and yanked him to his feet.

And now the big finale, Theron thought as Pressik wound up and launched a haymaker at his jaw.

Everything went white as stars exploded in Theron’s vision. When the men holding him up let go, he dropped to the floor, semiconscious. He tried to keep from blacking out as someone grabbed his ankles and dragged him facedown to the door, his cheek scraping roughly across the dirty, sticky floor.

His head was still spinning as they lifted him up into the air, rocked him back and forth a few times to gather momentum, then tossed him out onto the street. He landed awkwardly on his shoulder, re-aggravating the injury he’d sustained during his last job on Nar Shaddaa.

Somehow he rolled onto his side, just in time to receive a hard kick from Pressik right in the ribs. The soldier leaned over and spit on him, then—laughing—he and his friends turned and headed back into the bar.

Theron lay curled up in the fetal position on the street, evaluating his injuries. The inside of his lip was cut where Pressik’s punch had mashed it against his teeth, filling his mouth with blood. As he spit it out, he could feel a gap with his tongue where one of his teeth had been knocked out. The side of his face that had scraped along the floor was raw and stinging, and a sharp pain every time he inhaled was probably a sign of a cracked rib.

Could have been worse, he thought, slowing his breathing and running through some basic mental exercises to help him deal with the worst of the pain. They could have curb-stomped me right into the nearest medcenter. Or the morgue.

After a few minutes, Theron gingerly got to his feet and made his way slowly down the street toward the room he shared with Gnost-Dural, careful to keep up a lurching, drunken gait in case anyone was watching him.

“Are you sure you’re up for this, Theron?” Gnost-Dural asked.

“I’m fine,” Theron said, trying not to wince as he strapped on the backpack carrying the burned-out cipher core and all his other supplies.

Three days had passed since he’d been pummeled at the bar. His face was still bruised and his ribs and shoulder were still tender, but the injuries weren’t worth delaying the mission over.

He was wearing a black bodysuit and balaclava to conceal his face. Gnost-Dural’s outfit was more elaborate—a loose-fitting black robe with a heavy hood and a fabric mask to obscure his alien features. Theron made one last run through his mental checklist, making sure everything had been taken care of.

“You’d better get going,” Theron told his Jedi companion once he had finished his final cross-check. “Give me thirty minutes to get in position before you kill the lights, and another ninety before you tip off the Empire. That should give me plenty of time to switch the cipher cores and get the explosives ready before they sound the alarm.”

Master Gnost-Dural nodded. “I’ll be waiting for you at the rendezvous site when you’re done inside the ODCC,” he said. Just before Theron slipped out the door Gnost-Dural added, “May the Force be with you.”

CHAPTER 16

ZIOST’S ICY, UNRELENTING WIND buffeted Theron’s body as he huddled on the roof’s edge of the building across the street from the Orbital Defense Command Center. He had on his night goggles and had already anchored the tripod of his grappling gun securely. He’d even carefully selected his target—a spot just below the surveillance cams mounted on the side of the windowless ODCC building. Now he was just waiting for Gnost-Dural to do his part.

The citywide blackout would temporarily disable the surveillance cams, but it would only take a few seconds for the auxiliary generators to ramp up and get them working again. Theron would have to act fast if he didn’t want to be seen breaking in; his adrenaline was pumping, his mind focused and alert, his muscles poised to spring into action. But he couldn’t do anything until Gnost-Dural knocked out the power.

This is why I like to work alone, he thought, crouching lower to the rooftop as another blast of wind whipped across the surface.

He trusted the Jedi, and his role in the mission was simple enough. But in the back of his mind he couldn’t help but wonder if his partner was up to the task.

Guess I’ll know in a few minutes. Either the lights go out and the mission is a go, or I lose my fingers to a serious case of frostbite.

Unlike Republic worlds where electricity was supplied by private companies, Ziost’s main power station was a government-controlled facility under military supervision. To defend it against orbital strikes, it had been built into a reinforced bunker twenty meters below the surface of the planet. The only entrance was a heavily defended turbolift, making it virtually impossible for someone to get inside without being seen.

Fortunately, Master Gnost-Dural didn’t have to get into the main station to wreak havoc with Ziost’s power supply. The electricity generated in the heavily defended facility had to be dispersed across the entire city through a network of substations and transformers, which divided and subdivided to feed the millions of users plugged into the electrical grid. And though the network was designed with redundancies to reroute power in the event of damaged lines or substations, it was a logistical impossibility to fully guarantee uninterrupted service. That was why places like the ODCC had their own emergency generators.

Vinn had provided them with blueprints for the electrical grid, allowing them to identify the three key junction points that needed to be taken out to kill the power supply for their target. By planting explosives at each location and detonating them simultaneously, they could cause a massive blackout that would take hours to restore.

The first two locations were both small auxiliary substations; neither one was guarded, and it was a simple matter for the Jedi to plant the detonite charges and set the timers. The third location, however, was one of the city’s five primary substations. It would have been prohibitively expensive for the Empire to replicate the near-impregnable defenses of the main power station at each of the substations, but it did take some precautions. The small building was surrounded by a three-meter-high, electrified chain-link fence. There were half a dozen guards stationed at the facility; every twenty minutes they took turns circling the perimeter in pairs while the others sat inside the substation’s tiny break room playing sabacc and trying to stay warm.

Gnost-Dural could have easily used his lightsaber to slice through the fence and dispatched all six of the soldiers before they could call for help. But the iconic weapon of the Jedi left distinctive marks on both flesh and steel. Leaving behind evidence pointing to a Jedi’s involvement would blow apart the cover story that this was the work of a local anti-Imperial resistance group. Instead, he hid in the shadows and waited for the two guards on patrol to pass, then raced up to the fence. Using a pair of insulated wire cutters, he snipped open a hole just large enough for him to slip through without touching the deadly fence, then he raced up to the side of the building.

Heading in the same clockwise direction as the patrolling guards, he circled the perimeter until he reached the building’s only entrance. Instead of the modern automatic security doors that slid open with the touch of a button, the building was fitted with an archaic metal plate that swung open on its hinges when the handle was turned.

Pressing himself against the side of the door, the Jedi carefully turned the handle and eased it open a few centimeters. Light spilled out into the dark night, along with the conversation and laughter of the guards in the break room just on the other side. Crouching down, he rolled a small canister along the ground and into the room before pulling the door shut.

Calling on the Force he warped, twisted, and snapped the handle off. A second later there were cries of alarm from inside as black, noxious smoke billowed out from the imperfectly sealed edges of the door. He heard running feet, followed by the sound of someone frantically struggling with the door’s handle on the other side, unaware it had been disabled. There was a loud bang as someone threw their body at the door, then a woman shouted “Stand clear!”

Three blaster bolts pierced the door in rapid succession, ripping finger-sized holes in the steel. Then there was a loud thump as someone kicked at the door, once again to no avail. By this time the two guards on patrol had heard the commotion. Still playing the part of an anti-Imperial terrorist, Gnost-Dural crouched on one knee, drew his blaster, and shot the first one as he came racing around the corner, killing him instantly.

As he always did, the Jedi felt a twinge of sorrow at taking another’s life. But decades of war against a brutal and relentless foe had forced Gnost-Dural, like so many others in the Order, to come to grips with the moral ambiguity of killing an enemy in the pursuit of a peace that would save the lives of trillions.

The partner of the guard whom Gnost-Dural shot managed to duck back behind the cover of the building’s edge. Gnost-Dural stood up and reached out with the Force, using it to pick the surviving soldier up and pull her out into the open. She flew several meters through the air before landing on the exposed ground; Gnost-Dural shot her before she could even get to her feet.

Turning back to the door, he placed a thin strip of detonite along the edge, retreated to a safe distance, then set it off. The blast blew the damaged door open. It took several seconds for the poison gas from the detonator to clear the room and reveal the bodies of the four guards just inside the door. Gnost-Dural was reminded of the value of the Jedi teachings. Had the soldiers stayed calm during his attack, they could have retreated into the small control room in the back of the building to escape the smoke. But fear had clouded their minds, and in their panic they had congregated around the only exit to the outside world, dooming themselves.

The Jedi stepped over the fallen soldiers and crossed the room to the door at the rear. It was locked, but another strip of detonite gave him access to the control room beyond. He set the explosives, syncing the timer to go off in three minutes—the exact same time as the charges at the other two locations. Then he turned and left the building, slipped through the hole he’d cut in the perimeter fence, and headed toward the rendezvous point where Theron would meet up with him later.

Theron didn’t hear the explosions from the substations, but he knew exactly when they happened. Everything in an area of six square blocks went instantly and completely dark; a second later his night-vision goggles adjusted to the lack of illumination, allowing him to see everything through a hazy green filter.

He fired his grappling gun, the three-pronged harpoon embedding itself in the permacrete side of the Orbital Defense Command Center five meters below the height of the roof Theron was perched on. He clipped a sliding pulley and handle onto the line and leapt off the edge, letting gravity pull him down the zip line.

It took only a few seconds until he reached the end of the line. Clamping down on the pulley he slowed his descent to keep from smashing into the side of the ODCC. He made sure the pulley was latched on to the end of the grappling hook protruding from the wall, then released the line.

The thin wire shot away from him, retracted at an incredible speed by the recoiling springs in the grappling gun anchored on the roof across the street. A second later the auxiliary generators kicked in and the ODCC emergency lights illuminated the night. He heard the soft whir of the surveillance cams sticking out from the side of the building a few meters above him as they resumed their automated pan-and-scan search of the surrounding area. But the cams weren’t positioned to look straight down; he was safe.

Forced to dangle by one hand from the grappling hook’s pulley, he used his free arm to pull out a small tube of inert plasma gel. Squeezing the tube, he covered a one-meter-by-one-meter square on the side of the building with the pasty-white substance. Then he tucked the half-empty tube back into his belt and brought out a small rod tipped with a pair of electrical prongs.

He waited a few seconds for the gel to set, then pressed the prongs into the gel on the wall and pulled the trigger. The rod hummed as it discharged a powerful current, catalyzing the inert plasma suspended in the paste.

Theron turned his head to the side and closed his eyes as the substance began to smolder and spark. When he opened his eyes a few seconds later, the gel had burned a hole clean through the permacrete wall.

Still hanging from the grappling hook, Theron hauled himself up so he could swing his legs through the hole before letting go. The effort aggravated his injured left shoulder, but it was more annoyance than inconvenience.

He found himself in an empty office on the third floor of the ODCC. Theron slung the backpack off his shoulder and onto the ground. The soft glow of the building’s emergency lights made his night goggles unnecessary, so he stashed them in the pack, then peeled off the outer layer of his clothes. Underneath the black bodysuit he wore an exact replica of an emergency response team’s captain’s uniform, complete with an encoded ID badge like the one he’d scanned in the bar. From inside the backpack he pulled out a heavy assault rifle—more firepower than he probably needed, but it would fit the story of a militant terrorist group. He stuffed the discarded outer clothes into the pack before hoisting it up onto his back again.

From the architectural diagrams Vinn had provided, he knew he was on the same floor as the minister’s office, though he was on the opposite side of the facility. Unfortunately, his access point had been limited by the surrounding buildings; there weren’t any structures tall enough on the other side of the ODCC for him to get high enough to use the zip line. With the facility still in lockdown, however, he didn’t have to worry about any guards patrolling the area.

The door leading from the office and out into the hall was locked; he could tell by the blinking red light above the small access panel on the side. As he approached, the panel began to blink yellow as the security system automatically scanned his badge. He leaned forward, bringing his eyes only a few centimeters away from the panel to let it scan the contact lenses he’d slipped in before the mission. The lenses didn’t affect his vision, but they mimicked the retinal pattern of Captain Pressik.

The light above the panel switched from yellow to green and the door slid open. Theron poked his head into the hall, looking both left and right but seeing no one. He stepped into the hall and moved quickly to the door at the far end that would lead him into the adjacent wing.

Once again he let the system read his badge and scan his eyes, and the door’s status changed from red to yellow to green before it slid open. On the other side were two guards sitting casually on the floor of the hall, idly passing the time as they waited for the lockdown to end.

They glanced up in surprise as Theron stepped through the door. Seeing his captain’s uniform, their first instinct was to scramble to their feet and stand at attention. But even though Theron was dressed like an officer, there were too many other things that didn’t add up. The lockdown was only a few minutes old; it was too soon for the emergency response team to already be on the third floor. Plus, he should have been coming from the other direction—working his way up from the main floor and the front entrance. Finally, Imperial officers carried blasters, not backpacks and assault rifles.

All of this passed through their heads in a fraction of a second, and though they were already reaching for their weapons as they started to stand, the momentary delay gave Theron time to mow them down.

As he stood over the bodies of the two soldiers, Theron knew he’d have to be more cautious from this point forward. At some point this pair would be expected to check in, and when they didn’t the other guards would know something was wrong. It was also possible someone had heard the sound of the shots, and though the lockdown kept them from investigating they’d be alert and on guard from this point on. He wasn’t going to come through any more doors to find his enemies lounging on the floor.

The corridor he was in took a ninety-degree turn to his right before coming up against another sealed door. This time Theron was more careful, crouching low to the side of the door as he slipped his backpack off and set his assault rifle on the floor beside him. He dug around until he found what he wanted—a pair of detonators—then leaned in and let the scanner read his retinal signature.

As the door slid open Theron pressed himself against the wall, taking cover behind the edge of the doorjamb. He poked his head out just enough to see down the corridor, then pulled it back as the waiting guards unleashed a volley of blaster bolts in his direction.

There were three this time, strategically spread out at various points along the hall. Theron pressed the small button on the first detonator to prime it, then tossed it down the corridor with a flick of his wrist, careful to keep from exposing himself to the enemy’s line of fire.

Even before the inevitable explosion, he was already priming the second detonator. The first blast went off and Theron made his move. He wanted to get this one all the way down to the far end of the hall, so he had to lean out to get enough leverage for the throw, momentarily leaving himself open.

As he did so he saw one of the guards lying on the floor, a casualty of the first blast. The other two had been far enough down the hall to survive, but the explosion had left them distracted and disoriented, and neither one was able to get off a clean shot in the brief second Theron was exposed.

In the aftermath of the second detonator’s explosion, Theron scooped up his assault rifle and peeked around the edge of the doorjamb. Another soldier was down, and the third was reeling from the explosions. He fired at Theron, but his shots flew high and wide. Theron remained calm as he took careful aim and dropped his foe with a short burst.

He threw the backpack on once more and continued down the hall, counting the doors on his left. When he reached the third one, he stopped and went through the necessary routine to unlock it. He stepped into the minister’s office then sealed the door behind him, just in case.

The office was large—ten meters by ten in Theron’s estimation. A number of comfortable-looking chairs were arranged around a small, circular meeting table near the front. In the back was a massive desk made of dark brown wood. Intricate designs had been carved into the front and sides, and the heavy legs were sculpted into ornate, sweeping curves. Theron had expected to find propaganda posters or a self-portrait of the minister, but the walls were surprisingly empty.

According to Vinn’s blueprints, the minister’s private communications room was through an exit in the back—the most logical place to store the black cipher. But as Theron stared at the massive durasteel door at the rear of the office, he realized Vinn’s blueprints hadn’t shown everything.

He approached the security panel of the locked door and quickly determined that a simple badge and retinal scan weren’t going to get him in this time. There was a numbered keypad beside the door, and Theron guessed only the minister himself knew the access code.

Theron quickly reviewed his options. He still had some plasma gel left, but not enough to burn through the heavy steel door. He had his slicing equipment; he could probably crack the code, but that would take time he didn’t have. And even if he managed to get lucky and crack the code quickly, it was possible the door wouldn’t even open until the lockdown was over.

“This is going to be a problem,” Theron muttered.

CHAPTER 17

MASTER GNOST-DURAL didn’t need a chrono to know it was time to send the anonymous tip; being attuned to the Force made his internal clock as accurate as any manufactured timepiece.

He punched a button on the holocomm belted to his waist to scramble the signal, which would distort the image and make it harder to trace. Then he sent a transmission to the Imperial garrison next to the Orbital Defense Command Center.

Because of the scrambler, when they answered the signal was a mess of static-snow, flickering low-res images and bad audio.

“Imperial Garrison Three Forty-Three.” He could just barely make out a woman’s voice over the crackles and hiss. “Check your holo settings,” she advised. “We’re getting strong interference.”

“The minister’s life is in danger,” Gnost-Dural said. “They’re setting explosives in his office.”

“Who are you?” the voice on the other end demanded sharply. “How did you get this frequency?”

“I’m a friend of the Empire,” the Jedi lied. “If you hurry you can stop them.” Abruptly, he ended the call.

Even if the woman on the other end suspected the call was a hoax, they couldn’t afford to ignore it … not with the citywide blackout.

“Your friends are on their way, Theron,” Gnost-Dural whispered to himself. “I hope you’re ready for them.”

Theron raced down the hall outside Minister Davidge’s office, heading for the stairwell with the assault rifle clutched in one hand, and the pack with the damaged cipher core inside still strapped to his back.

The pack was much lighter now that he’d finished planting the explosives and setting the timer in Minister Davidge’s office, but he was behind schedule. Thanks to Gnost-Dural’s anonymous tip, it wouldn’t be long before the emergency response team converged on the third floor to try to catch the would-be assassins in the act.

If everything had gone according to plan, he would already have the cipher core and all he’d have to do was get far enough away from the office to be clear of the blast radius. When the team showed up the detonite would go off “accidentally,” and he’d slip away in the ensuing chaos.

Unfortunately, the durasteel security door between him and the comm room had thrown a kink into his plans. Theron had stared at it for several minutes, his mind desperately trying to figure out a solution. He couldn’t open it, and he couldn’t go through it. But, he realized, he could still go around it.

The walls of the minister’s communications room were probably reinforced with the same durasteel as the door, but the ceiling would have to be made from more conventional building materials to allow the minister to transmit and receive signals from the room.

Theron didn’t have enough plasma gel left to eat through the durasteel, but if he got into the office directly above the room, he could make a hole in the floor and drop down.

As he raced toward the stairwell, he saw the status light shift from red to yellow, even though he was still too far away for the scanner to read his badge. By the time it switched to green he had realized what was happening, and as the door slid open he dropped to the ground in a tumbling roll, bracing himself for the collision with the man on the other side.

The Imperial soldier was bent over and leaning forward so the retinal scanner could confirm his identity, the other five members of his team huddled close behind him, alert and ready. Two were watching the stairs above and below, guarding against an enemy ambush. The other three had their weapons trained on the hall, ready to fire on any available target the instant the door opened. But their weapons and their focus were at chest height; they hadn’t expected someone to come rolling in like a human wrecking ball.

In the split second before their collision, Theron recognized the man on the other side of the door—his old friend Captain Pressik. Theron plowed into his knees, sending them both crashing to the ground. In the tight confines of the stairwell the momentum of their flailing bodies had a domino effect on the other guards, and the entire team was sent sprawling. The one farthest back from the door tumbled down the stairwell, while the others were knocked from their feet in a pile of thrashing limbs.

Theron’s impact jammed his sore shoulder, and the pain made him lose his grip on his assault rifle. Despite this, he was still the first to regain his feet. Pressik’s eyes opened wide in recognition as he saw who was responsible for the carnage.

As Pressik reached for the pistol on his hip, Theron delivered a hard kick to his jaw, stunning him. Then he scooped up his assault rifle from the ground and sprang backward into the hall.

One of the other soldiers had managed to collect himself enough to fire off a wild shot with his own weapon. The bolt whizzed by Theron’s ear as he slapped at the panel, shutting the door with a sharp whoosh. He heard the ricochet of a second shot deflect off the door panel as he turned and sprinted back toward the minister’s office. He managed to duck inside just as the stairwell door opened again and a barrage of bolts whisked down the corridor.

Theron slung the backpack off his shoulders so it wouldn’t impede his movement. Staying low to the floor, he poked his head around the corner to return fire. Knowing he’d present too tempting a target if he took the time to aim, he squeezed off a burst of wild shots, hoping to get lucky.

He didn’t hear any cries of pain, but he also didn’t hear the sound of feet charging down the hall toward him. He may not have hit his target, but at least he’d made them think twice about coming after him. Unfortunately, they had him pinned down and they knew it. The hallway was filled with a steady barrage of blaster bolts—suppressing fire to keep Theron from getting off a return shot.

He reached into the backpack and pulled out a small reflective mirror. Carefully, he angled it so he could see down the hall without exposing himself to the endless rain of enemy shots. What he saw didn’t fill him with encouragement.

Captain Pressik was back on his feet; he and other members of his team were crouched low and advancing down the hall, pressing themselves up against opposite walls of the corridor. The others were positioned several meters behind them, weapons trained on the office door, ready to unleash with their assault rifles if Theron exposed himself again.

Theron realized his situation was hopeless. If he still had his detonators he might be able to toss one down the hall. Even though leaning around the corner to make the throw would be the last thing he ever did, at least he’d take a few of the Imperial scum with him.

Actually, Theron realized, I can take them all with me.

He scrambled over to the explosives by the minister’s desk, knowing he could set off the entire charge just by pulling out the wrong wire on the timer. With the amount of detonite he’d used, the blast would take out the entire team … and reduce him to ashes and dust.

He took a deep breath, readying himself for a martyr’s death. He knew the men outside were getting close; in a few more seconds it would all be over.

Guess Jace and I aren’t going to get to know each other better after all.

The sound of a single assault rifle echoed down the hall. A second later it was joined by screams of pain and surprise, and then the sound of several weapons firing. But to Theron’s surprise, the bolts weren’t ricocheting off the floor and walls around the still-open door of the minister’s office.

He scrambled over to the door and poked his head around the corner, his weapon ready. Two of Pressik’s men were down; the captain and the others had turned their attention to a figure firing at them from the shadows just beyond the door leading to the stairwell. Seizing his chance, Theron opened up with his own weapon. In a matter of seconds the deadly cross fire had mowed the trapped Imperials down.

“It’s me,” the voice of Master Gnost-Dural called out, careful not to use any names. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m okay,” Theron called back, stepping out into the hall.

A second later the Jedi emerged from the darkness of the stairwell. In the glow of the emergency lights, Theron could see that he was still wearing his disguise, his features carefully hidden by his robe and hood. But over the fabric that concealed his face he wore a monocle-like lens, and pinned to the front of his robe was an ID badge identical to the one on Theron’s uniform.

“Seal that door,” Theron said.

The Kel Dor leaned in close enough for the retinal scanner to read the holoimage off his monocle, then hit the button to close the door when the status light turned green.

“Any reason you didn’t tell me you made copies of the badge and retinal image for yourself?” Theron asked.

“You seemed to think the mission would be easier if you went alone,” Gnost-Dural told him. “I didn’t see the point in arguing.”

“So you were planning to show up the whole time?” Theron asked. “What, did the Force give you a vision that I was going to need some help?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” the Kel Dor said, missing the fact that Theron was joking. “When you were late arriving at the rendezvous point I feared something had gone wrong. Fortunately, you left the grappling gun set up on the building across the street. I was able to use it to follow your path and get inside.”

“Well … thanks,” Theron said. “I owe you one.”

“The Jedi don’t keep track of such things,” he replied, and Theron wondered if the Kel Dor was trying to be funny.

“It won’t be long before they send another emergency response team to this floor,” Gnost-Dural continued. “We need to get out of here.”

“One problem,” Theron said. “Follow me.”

He led the Jedi into the minister’s office and showed him the durasteel door.

“So … any chance you can use the Force to just rip that thing open for me?”

“Some of the great Masters of legend might have had that kind of power, but such a feat is beyond me.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Okay, new plan. I need to get to the fourth floor, but like you said: there could be another emergency response team coming up the stairwell at any moment. I know that durasteel door’s too thick for your lightsaber to cut through it, but I’ll bet you can slice a hole in the ceiling of this office for me to crawl through, right?”

“I could, but it would leave a very distinctive mark.”

“Don’t worry about that,” Theron told him. “When that detonite blows all that’s going to be left of this office are splinters and ash.”

The Jedi nodded. He pulled out the hilt of his lightsaber and ignited the blade. Reaching up, he slowly carved a perfect circle in the ceiling above them. Tiles, plaster, and a shower of insulation came tumbling down.

“Imperial reinforcements are coming,” Gnost-Dural said. “I can sense them.”

“How close?”

“Close. I’ll hold them off to buy you some time.”

Theron nodded and scooped his backpack off the floor, tossing it up and through the hole in the ceiling. Then he jumped up, his fingers wrapping around the lip as he pulled himself up and into the fourth floor office above them, grunting with the effort and the burst of pain that flared up in his injured shoulder.

The minister’s office was larger than the one he was now standing in. After slinging his backpack over his good shoulder, he had to go out to the hall and into the office next door before he was standing above the communications room.

He pulled out the igniter rod and the tube of plasma gel, using the last of it to melt a hole in the ceiling as he heard the sound of blasterfire rising up from the floor below. Knowing Gnost-Dural wouldn’t be able to keep the Imperial reinforcements at bay for long, he dropped down into the communications room.

The black cipher was sitting on the communications console in the center of the room. Extracting the core without triggering the self-destruct sequence was a delicate process—one wrong move and the entire mission became nothing but a waste of time and resources. Fortunately, Theron had practiced the procedure hundreds of times on the damaged ciphers the Republic had recovered. When he started, it had taken him almost ten minutes. But with each attempt he got faster and faster, cutting his time to under a minute.

No need to try for a personal record, he reminded himself as his nimble fingers worked their magic.

Ninety seconds later, the prize was his. He wrapped it in a protective layer of microweave fabric and pulled out a hard-sided protective case from his backpack. He opened it up and removed the damaged core, slapping it into the cipher. Then he placed the working core into the protective case, snapped it shut, and stuffed it in his backpack.

“It’s time to go.” Gnost-Dural’s voice came from above him. Looking up, he saw the Jedi peering down at him through the hole in the communications room ceiling.

Theron jumped up and grabbed Gnost-Dural’s offered hand, allowing the Jedi to help haul him up so he didn’t have to put any further strain on his aching shoulder. The wounded joint had gone from sore to outright painful, but Theron pushed all thoughts of it aside.

“What happened to the reinforcements?” he asked.

“I was unable to keep them from advancing into the room,” the Jedi told him. “Once they were in close quarters, I had no choice but to use my lightsaber.”

“It’s okay,” Theron told him. “The blast will cover up the evidence. The timer’s ticking—we need to get clear.”

“How much time do we have?”

Theron checked his chronometer.

“Sixty seconds—run!”

Theron led the way, his mind tracing the optimal escape route from his memory of the ODCC’s architectural diagrams.

It took them ten seconds to reach the fourth-floor stairwell and use the badge/retinal scan combo to open the door. Ten more to head up two flights to the sixth floor and over to the emergency roof access. Ten more to race to the far side of the roof.

There Theron realized one of them wasn’t going to make it.

“I packed an emergency chute into my backpack,” he said, struggling to take it off so he could hand it to Gnost-Dural. “Take a running leap off the edge and pull this cord to deploy.”

“Don’t be foolish,” the Jedi told him. “The Force will protect me.”

And with that, he disappeared over the edge. Theron blinked in surprise, then scrambled to get the backpack securely on again.

His chrono beeped, warning him he only had five seconds until detonation. He took three running steps toward the edge and jumped, pulling the cord to deploy the chute as the building erupted behind him. A wave of hot air propelled from the blast seized his parachute, launching him high in the air and sending him spinning and tumbling out of control. The guide wires tangled together, partially collapsing the chute. Instead of floating gently to the ground, he began to pick up speed, his legs and arms flailing as he tried to control his rapid descent.

Ten meters above the ground the wires suddenly untangled, and the fabric canopy unfurled wide over him. It slowed his fall, but Theron was still coming in hard. He braced his legs together and flexed his knees as he hit the ground, absorbing the crushing landing with the big muscles of his lower body and core while simultaneously trying to roll with the impact. His teeth slammed together and he felt a sharp pain shooting through his ankles and all the way up to the crown of his head as his body crumpled from the force of the landing.

The roll wasn’t much better, as he came down on his already damaged shoulder, causing his arm to pop out of the socket. He would have cried out in pain if all the wind hadn’t been knocked from his body, leaving him gasping for breath.

He lay there for a few seconds, amazed that he was alive. He forced himself to his feet just as Gnost-Dural emerged from the darkness of the night to check on him. Seeing that the Jedi was limping badly after his six-story fall gave him a small bit of satisfaction.

“Guess we both had a rougher landing than expected,” Theron said, shouting to be heard above the wailing sirens that now filled the night.

“Let me help you,” Gnost-Dural said, noticing Theron’s left arm dangling uselessly at his side.

Theron nodded, then braced himself as the Jedi took hold of his arm by the wrist and elbow. With a quick twist and pull, he popped the shoulder back into the joint. Theron let out a loud scream. Fortunately the wailing sirens would drown out the sound so that it wouldn’t give away their position to any nearby Imperials.

“Emergency crews are responding to the blast,” Gnost-Dural said. “We need to get out of here. Can you walk?”

Theron nodded and the two men limped away into the shadows, leaning on each other for support.

CHAPTER 18

MINISTER DAVIDGE FOUND IT DIFFICULT to focus on his work. In part it was relocating to a temporary office on the west side of the Orbital Defense Command Center—an unavoidable circumstance considering that his old office and a dozen others on the eastern wing of the building had been reduced to rubble the night before last.

The extra guards posted outside his door—and inside his door, and following him even when he went home at night—didn’t help, though he understood the reason behind the extra security.

Most troubling of all, however, was the fact that he had personally been targeted for assassination. He’d always considered himself a mere cog in the Imperial machine—a key cog, to be sure, but not one who would ever garner that kind of attention. The Sith Lords and Grand Moffs were the face of the Empire; he was just the man who kept the shuttles running on time. He always believed he was protected by his anonymity; he wasn’t really part of the war—he was just an analyst crunching numbers.

That comforting illusion had been blown to pieces just as surely as everything in his office. While he might not bear any particular ill will to the enemies of the Empire, the attempt on his life made him understand that they hated and despised him. It was unsettling. Disturbing. And it made dealing with the entire unpleasant business extremely stressful.

He’d reviewed the latest report from the Imperial investigators multiple times; looking over the facts that had been gathered over the last thirty-six hours again and again as he tried to make sense of the whole affair … and prepared to give his own report to Darth Marr.

The communications room they had set up for him in his temporary office lacked the durasteel door of his original office; it was separated from the rest of the room by a simple sliding door. But it still gave him the privacy he needed. More important, it also had a black cipher to make sure nobody could listen in on his most sensitive communications.

He activated the cipher and waited for the holo of Darth Marr to materialize as he received and decoded the incoming call with his own cipher.

“I didn’t expect to have to wait a day and a half to get a status report from you, Minister Davidge,” Marr said to open their conversation.

“I didn’t want to contact you until I was certain the conversation would be secure,” he explained.

The cipher in his old office had been destroyed, and there was only one other on Ziost—an inactive spare that had been stored in the maximum-security underground vault beneath the ODCC. With everything else that was going on, it had taken some time before the engineers had hooked it up to the communications equipment in his new office.

“Cautious as ever,” Marr noted, though Davidge couldn’t tell if it was meant as a compliment, an insult, or simply an offhand remark.

“I have the details of the report, my Lord,” he said.

“I assumed as much when you called me.”

Realizing he was testing Marr’s patience, the minister dived right into it.

“None of the suspected terrorists were captured,” he said, opening with the bad news. “We believe there may have been as many as six involved, but our surveillance cams were only able to capture one of them.”

“I assume you have authorities looking for this person?”

“He—or possibly she—was covered head-to-toe in heavy clothing. Even the face was obscured by a hood and mask.”

“So we have no leads,” Marr said.

“We know the Ziost Liberation Front was behind it,” the minister told him. “They’ve claimed responsibility.”

“What about our security protocols? How did they fail so completely?”

“Actually, my Lord, they didn’t. The protocols were designed to keep enemy forces from taking control of the ODCC, not to prevent an attempted assassination. Even with all the damage, orbital defense systems were never compromised or in danger of being disrupted.”

“What of the cipher in your office? Was it compromised?”

“We recovered the cipher from the wreckage,” the minister told him. “The blast severely damaged it and triggered the core’s self-destruct sequence, but at least it’s accounted for.”

In the minister’s mind, this was the best news of all. Had they been unable to find the cipher in the debris and ashes, they would have had to change the cipher codes. Recalling all the capital ships equipped with a black cipher to be reprogrammed and synchronized would have reduced Imperial efficiency by almost a full percent for the quarter—a loss ratio the minister didn’t even like to contemplate.

“So what is your recommendation going forward?” Marr wanted to know.

“The overall impact of this terrorist attack on the Imperial war effort is negligible,” the minister assured him. “Resources and personnel amount to a loss ratio of less than a one-thousandth of one percent. I’ve already requisitioned troops to replace those who died during the attack, and repairs on the damaged section of the ODCC are under way.”

“So you propose we should simply continue on exactly as before?”

“I’ve ordered security for all the Imperial ministers to be increased,” Davidge admitted. “Again, the overall impact on the Empire is almost too small to calculate. Even at my highest estimates—”

Marr held up a hand to cut him off.

“Spare me the specifics. There’s no need to justify your personal protection detail. The Dark Council is well aware of the value you and the other ministers contribute to the Empire.”

The compliment should have made Davidge feel good. Instead, it only reinforced his recent epiphany that he was not an anonymous bean-counter. The implications of the Dark Council understanding his importance to the Empire were even more terrifying than the attempt on his life. The Sith Lords didn’t ignore things of value. They fought to control them … or destroy them if they belonged to someone else.

“Thank you, my Lord. It’s good to know I’m appreciated.”

“I think this attack should signal a shift in our policy,” Marr told him.

“What sort of change?”

“When this war began, we were the aggressors. Now we keep giving ground to the Republic.”

“It’s not a matter of choice, my Lord. It’s a question of resources. The Republic has more ships in their fleet and more soldiers in their army.”

“Retreat makes us look weak. Vulnerable,” Marr continued, as if he hadn’t heard Davidge. “It emboldens groups like the ZLF. Makes them dare to plot the assassination of top Imperial officials.”

“This was one incident, my Lord. But overall we have not seen a statistically relevant increase in anti-Imperial activities.”

“You understand numbers, Minister. I understand the minds of our followers and our enemies. This attack heralds a shift in attitude that we cannot ignore.

“We need to push forward on several fronts. Reclaim some of the worlds we have lost to the Republic. Attack new worlds that have never before trembled before the might of Imperial power.”

Davidge groaned inside. There was no point in arguing with Marr’s orders, but the minister knew launching new campaigns of conquest against the Republic would increase the quarter’s loss ratio.

“I am sending a list of possible targets for analysis. Find where we can reap the most reward for our efforts,” Marr told him.

“Of course, my Lord,” Davidge replied. “You know what is best for the Empire.”

“I recommend we use Moff Nezzor,” Marr said. “You don’t seem to have him doing anything vital at the moment.”

That’s because he’s an unprofessional, bloodthirsty sociopath with no regard for the lives of the enemy or his own soldiers.

“I will be sure to choose targets from your list that will take best advantage of Moff Nezzor’s unique talents,” Davidge said aloud, though the idea caused bile to bubble up in his throat.

“I know you will,” Marr told him. “That’s why I find you so useful.”

“The first stage of the plan was a complete success,” Jace told the three fellow conspirators who had gathered in his office for the debriefing. “I think we should celebrate with a drink!”

“I agree,” the Director said. “Master Gnost-Dural—we have some Dorin pleech.”

“A gracious offer, but I will decline.”

“Suit yourself,” the Director said with a shrug. “Theron, what’s your preference?”

“I don’t have any kri’gee here in the office,” Jace said with a smile. “But I’ve got some of that Corellian Reserve I told you about.”

“Sounds good,” Theron replied.

It had been five days since he and Gnost-Dural had leapt off the edge of the exploding ODCC building. They’d spent the first three of those days waiting on Ziost after local authorities closed all the spaceports and temporarily barred any civilian ships from landing on or leaving the planet.

Not that Theron had minded at the time. He spent the days convalescing while Gnost-Dural made some discreet inquiries into the Imperial investigations. Fortunately, the ZLF had been all too happy to claim responsibility for the attack. Even though they’d actually had nothing to do with it, its members were eager to take the credit for striking a blow against the hated Empire.

With the Imperials focused on hunting down the ZLF members responsible, it was simple enough for Theron and Gnost-Dural to leave once the spaceports reopened.

Bad luck for any members who get caught, though, Theron had thought at the time. But the fate of a small group of radical anti-Imperials on Ziost wasn’t something he could afford to worry about.

After leaving Ziost, they’d returned directly to Coruscant to deliver the cipher core to Jace, who had promptly turned it over to the Director and SIS. Now, two days later, Theron and his partner were in the Supreme Commander’s office, being waited on by two of the most important men in the Republic.

“We’ve already intercepted several key Imperial transmissions,” the Director said, bringing Theron’s drink over to him once Jace was done pouring it. “It appears they’re ramping up their military presence in several contested sectors.”

Theron took a sip of his drink before speaking, savoring the warm, sweet liquid as it traced its way down his throat.

“If SIS is careful, we could use the intel to our advantage without the Empire ever suspecting we’re listening in on their encrypted messages.”

“Sounds risky,” Jace warned. “We’re closer to stopping the Ascendant Spear than we’ve ever been. I’m not going to let it slip through our fingers because we got greedy.”

“SIS knows how to be discreet,” the Director assured him. “Give the analytics team access to those transmissions. Let us run our scenarios. I’m sure we’ll find something we can exploit without tipping anyone off.”

Jace was still reluctant.

“What do you think, Master Gnost-Dural?”

“A tool is of no use if you never pick it up,” the Jedi told him.

Master Zho couldn’t have said it better himself, Theron thought, raising a glass to his dearly departed friend before taking another sip of the delicious brandy.

“I promise we won’t act on anything without your approval,” the Director added.

“Looks like I’m outnumbered,” Jace said with a smile. “Just be careful. And don’t forget what we’re really looking for.

“We’ve moved into phase two of our plan,” he declared. “We monitor the Imperial transmissions and wait for the Spear to send word that it’s coming into port.”

He turned to Theron. “Once it’s docked, you slip on board, slice into the Spear’s systems, program a dormant virus to disrupt the ship’s hyperdrive and defenses, and get off the ship before it returns to duty.”

“Sounds easy when you say it,” Theron said.

“Can’t be any harder than stealing the cipher,” the Director noted.

“Once everything’s in place, we track the Spear’s movements and set an ambush,” Jace continued. “Hit her with everything we’ve got. During the battle, we send a signal to activate the dormant virus and we take Darth Karrid and her ship down.”

“SIS is still trying to pull together the necessary resources,” the Director cautioned.

“The Spear will dock at a military space station, not some civilian spaceport. We’ll need an Imperial military shuttle, proper IDs, uniforms, clearance papers … it’s proving more difficult than we thought.”

“Perhaps Theron’s contact can help us again,” Gnost-Dural suggested.

“The Old Tion Brotherhood has been smuggling contraband onto Imperial space stations for years,” Theron agreed. “They know every trick in the book to get past security.”

“Getting Teff’ith to set up a meeting on Ziost is one thing,” the Director cautioned. “But I don’t like you bringing her into an active role in this mission.”

“Why not?” Jace wanted to know. “Can’t we trust her?”

“Yes,” Theron said, even as the Director answered, “No.”

Jace looked back and forth between them, but neither man was willing to back down.

“I’ve got this covered,” Theron assured the Supreme Commander. “Compared to getting the cipher, this job’s a piece of cake.”

“You had help getting the cipher,” the Director reminded him.

“I’m willing to accompany Theron again when he goes to meet his contact,” Gnost-Dural offered.

Before Theron could object, Jace spoke up.

“Then it’s settled. We let Theron and Master Gnost-Dural reach out to this Teff’ith person.”

“I’ll have SIS keep working on getting what we need,” the Director said. “Just in case Theron’s contact doesn’t pan out.”

“Let’s take the Prosperity again,” Theron said to the Jedi, ignoring the Director’s lack of confidence. “Might as well travel in comfort.”

“We can leave tomorrow,” the Jedi agreed.

The Supreme Commander raised his glass in the air.

“To the Republic!”

Theron and the Director echoed his toast, and all three men downed what was left in their glasses.

With the meeting over Theron, Gnost-Dural, and the Director left Jace’s office. The young woman behind the reception desk nodded pleasantly at the first two, then gave the Director a glare so filled with venomous rage it actually made Theron shiver.

“Uh, you two go on ahead,” the Director whispered. “I need to schedule some other appointments with the Supreme Commander.”

Maybe she’s not going to be his third wife after all, Theron thought as he and Gnost-Dural continued down the hall.

“Theron,” the Jedi said once they were out of earshot of the others. “I have a message for you. From Grand Master Satele Shan.”

“Oh?” Theron said, trying to appear nonchalant. Once again he wondered if the Jedi knew about their relationship.

“She wishes to speak with you tonight. In her private chambers.”

“Did she say why?”

“No. She only asked that you not mention this to the Supreme Commander.”

Great, Theron thought. Mom and Dad are fighting. Isn’t it fun being part of a family?

“Not sure if I’ll have time,” Theron said. “Some things I need to take care of before we leave tomorrow.”

“I understand,” Gnost-Dural said. “But if you change your mind, Grand Master Shan will be expecting you.”

CHAPTER 19

THE LAST TIME THERON HAD SPOKEN with Satele had been on Tython. That meeting had been his idea; he’d snuck into her private quarters to tell her about Ngani Zho’s death. Zho had been her Master and her mentor, and she deserved to hear the news in person, not over a holo or in some report.

At the time, he’d pretended not to know she was his mother, and she made no mention of recognizing him as her son. But he had the sense they both knew the truth, though neither was willing to acknowledge it. This time would be different, Theron decided. He was tired of playing games.

Well, most games. Despite being invited, he was still breaking into her apartment. Part of it was the challenge—he just wanted to prove he could do it. But he also didn’t want others to figure out that he and Satele were related. Shan was a common surname, but it was unusual for an SIS field agent to meet in person with the Grand Master of the Jedi Order. It wasn’t like he was being followed, but on the slim chance someone saw him at her door he didn’t want anyone to start making connections. Theron was convinced his life would get a lot more complicated if their relationship went public.

Probably bad for her, too, Theron assured himself. Doing her a favor by breaking in.

The Jedi still officially condemned the emotional attachments of marriage and children. If people found out Satele had a son, they’d think she was a hypocrite.

If they knew she spent her whole life acting as if I didn’t even exist, Theron wondered, would that make things better or worse?

Disabling the building’s perimeter sensors and scaling the wall took only a few minutes, and it gave Theron a chance to work out his injured shoulder. He’d been favoring it for the past five days; it was time to see how it was healing.

By the time he swung his legs over the railing of her third-floor balcony, he was satisfied that he’d make a full recovery. His shoulder was a little tired, but otherwise felt good. Another week and it would be back to 100 percent.

The sliding glass doors leading from the balcony and into the apartment were wide open, despite the chill of the night air. Clearly, Satele was expecting him.

As he stepped into the apartment, she rose from the chair she had been sitting in.

She was wearing the simple brown robes of a Jedi, her hood thrown back. Her shoulder-length hair was brown with some faint silver-gray highlights that gave her a regal air. Theron didn’t see much family resemblance in their features, but he wasn’t looking that hard. Her skin was surprisingly smooth and clear; though she was close to sixty, she looked at least two decades younger.

Is that because the Force flows through her, or is it just good genes?

“Thank you for coming,” she said. “Please come in and close the door.”

Theron complied, sliding the patio doors shut as his eyes took in his surroundings. The apartment was fully furnished and decorated—nothing overly lavish or opulent, but it was obvious more than a few credits had been spent.

“I thought the Jedi didn’t believe in material goods.”

“The apartment was furnished when I moved in,” Satele said. “And it’s important to make visitors feel comfortable. Do you really think less of me because I’m not living in an empty hut with nothing to my name but the clothes on my back and a meditation mat?”

“That’s how Master Zho lived most of his life,” Theron said.

“He was never Grand Master. He enjoyed a simpler existence. I have certain expectations and obligations that I must meet, even if they go against what I would choose for myself.”

“You wanted to see me,” Theron said, changing the subject. After a brief pause he added a sarcastic, “Mother.”

“You have every right to be angry with me,” Satele replied, her voice calm but also tinged with sorrow. “I don’t expect you to fully understand why I had to give you up, but you should know it was the most difficult thing I have ever done.”

“Is that why you wanted to see me?” Theron asked. “To tell me you made a mistake?”

“I didn’t say that,” she replied. “As hard as it was, giving you up was the right choice. I would do it again.”

Theron sighed. “I understand better than you think,” he said, his voice softening. “I’m not angry at you. I respect what you did. You made a sacrifice for the sake of the Republic.”

“And for you, Theron,” Satele said, coming toward him and placing a hand on his arm. “I knew Ngani Zho would raise you well. You were better off with him than me.”

Theron didn’t shrug her hand away, though he stiffened uncomfortably at her touch. Sensing this, she pulled back, though her serene expression never changed.

“When I see what you’ve become,” she continued, “I know I made the right decision. Ngani Zho would be proud of you, Theron. I’m proud of you.”

“I don’t need your approval,” Theron said, though he was careful to keep any venom from coloring his words.

“Of course not,” she said, turning away and walking back to the center of the room before turning to face him again. “But you have it anyway.”

“Was there anything else you wanted to say?” Theron asked. “Master Gnost-Dural and I are leaving tomorrow morning.”

“I know you’ve been working with Jace Malcom.”

“You mean my father?”

“I suppose it was inevitable that he would find out,” she said. “Perhaps I should have told him sooner.”

“That’s between you and him,” Theron insisted. “I’m happy with my life. I’m comfortable with who I am. None of this matters to me.”

“But it matters to Jace,” she said. “You may not hold any bitterness in your heart toward me, but I fear he does.”

“I can see how that might be a problem,” Theron said. “For the Republic, I mean.”

He didn’t need a report from analytics to understand that anything that might negatively affect the relationship between the leader of the Jedi and the Supreme Commander of all Republic forces was a potential cause for concern.

“Jace is a good soldier,” Satele assured him. “He will not put his personal feelings ahead of his duty and responsibilities. We have that in common.”

“Really? I thought that might be the reason you never told him about me. You didn’t think he’d be able to handle the emotional burden of a child.”

“It wasn’t that,” she said, speaking slowly. “I’ve known Jace for many years. We fought side by side, and we truly cared for each other. But as the war continued, I felt something change in him. I feared he would fall to the dark side.”

Theron actually laughed out loud. “You were afraid Jace Malcom, the Supreme Commander, would betray the Republic?”

“Of course not,” she replied, a hint of frustration poking through her calm exterior. “Jace will always be loyal to the Republic. But you do not have to follow the Sith to be an agent of the dark side. Jace is a good man, but the war has left its mark on him. There is so much anger and bitterness inside him. So much hate.”

“Hate leads to the dark side,” Theron said, getting the words out before she could. “Ngani Zho taught me all the Jedi platitudes,” he added.

“You mock, but there is truth in our teachings,” she chided him.

“Wow—you sound just like my mother,” Theron joked.

“Jace fights this war out of revenge,” she continued, trying to make him see the urgency of her warning. “It clouds his judgment. It can make him do terrible things if he believes they are necessary to save the Republic.”

“That doesn’t sound so wrong to me,” Theron answered. “Sometimes the ends justify the means.”

“The dark side is insidious,” she warned. “Hate will transform you into the very evil that you are fighting so hard against.

“I know Master Zho taught you this lesson,” she added softly.

“He taught me a lot of things,” Theron shot back, his blood suddenly boiling. “Back when he thought I was going to be a Jedi. But I’m not a Jedi, and neither is my father.”

It was clear to him now what was going on. Satele was afraid Jace was going to somehow corrupt him, and she was determined to save her son by sharing her glorious wisdom. Her condescending arrogance encapsulated everything that was wrong with the Jedi.

“Light side, dark side—these are just empty words,” he continued, his voice rising to a shout. “There are only two sides I care about: us and them. Republic or Empire!”

“It was not my intention to upset you,” she said.

“Of course not,” Theron replied. “That would mean I was showing some emotion. And we all know there is no emotion, only peace.

Right?”

He waited for Satele to offer another prepackaged Jedi mantra in response, but the Grand Master caught him off guard.

“Theron, I know you don’t want me as part of your life,” she said, seemingly abandoning their argument midstream and changing topics. “I respect your choice. But you know where to find me if you ever need my help. Reach out to me and I will be there. I promise.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Theron said. “Are we done here?”

“I have said my piece,” she told him.

Theron turned his back on her and marched over to the balcony doors. He yanked them open and climbed over the railing, relieved to leave Satele and her insipid Jedi philosophy behind.

Satele watched Theron go, hoping she hadn’t done more harm than good.

The meeting had been a constant battle between the logical part of her mind and the powerful feelings she had felt welling up inside her. She hadn’t expected to be so profoundly affected merely from speaking with Theron; even though he was her biological son, she barely knew him. He wasn’t part of her life anymore, not in any real sense. And yet it had taken all her training to deny the emotions that threatened to overwhelm her.

The Jedi restriction against family attachments made more sense to her now than ever. She couldn’t even fathom how much harder it would have been to remain calm and focused if she had raised Theron herself. All of her feelings would have been magnified a thousandfold, making it impossible not to respond to his anger with her own.

Even now, several minutes after he was gone, she could still feel the effects of their confrontation. Her heart was beating far too rapidly in response to the adrenaline that had flooded her system.

“There is no emotion, there is peace,” she whispered, seeking solace in the same words Theron had thrown in her face.

She had hoped that being raised by Ngani Zho, her old Master, would have prepared Theron to better understand and appreciate her fears about Jace. And it was possible he might still heed her warning. Satele suspected her son’s anger was more a product of the emotional stress of confronting his mother than a response to her actual arguments. Once he calmed down, there was still a chance he would see her point.

Or maybe he just has too much of his father in him.

Maybe meeting Theron was a mistake. Maybe she had made things worse. Maybe she was wrong to speak with Theron behind his father’s back.

Because of their history, she tried to keep her relationship with Jace strictly professional. By focusing exclusively on their duties to the Republic, they avoided dredging up painful memories and feelings. But maybe denying their past wasn’t always the answer.

Maybe it was time to talk to Jace, not as Grand Master to Supreme Commander, but as a man and woman who had once shared a deep and powerful love.

Satele shook her head. She was restless and unsettled, unable to find a proper sense of calm and balance. She sensed long-denied memories creeping around the edges of her consciousness, awakened by Theron’s presence. Instead of pushing them away as she had so often done in the past, she closed her eyes and sat down cross-legged on the floor, opening herself to them. Painful as they were, she needed to accept and acknowledge their existence if she hoped to focus and still her racing thoughts.

Jace’s command tent was a buzz of activity, with soldiers rushing in and out, delivering status reports to the newly promoted general and relaying his orders to his troops. He was standing over a small table, looking over a map of the battlefield covered with red and blue markers indicating the respective position of enemy and allied troops,

“General Malcom,” Satele said as she entered the tent and approached the table, “I need to speak with you. Alone.”

She could have waited until evening fell; most nights Jace still managed to slip away and see her in private. But what she had to say couldn’t wait.

So far they had managed to keep their love—and their six-month affair—secret. Approaching him in the open lacked discretion, but it wasn’t unheard of for a Republic general and a Jedi Master to discuss strategy in private, so her request wasn’t likely to raise any suspicions.

“You heard Master Shan,” Jace barked. “Clear out.”

The soldiers in the tent, along with the half dozen officers who served as his advisers in the field, moved with typical military precision and efficiency, emptying the tent in a matter of seconds.

“What is it, Satele?” Jace asked, dropping the formal address he’d used in front of the others.

She heard the worry and concern in his tone. She hadn’t told him she was pregnant yet. She’d only sensed the days-old life growing inside her because of her powerful connection with the Force; it would be months before her body began to show any physical signs of her condition.

Jace must have read something in her expression—after six months of sharing their most intimate moments, it was difficult to hide anything from each other. But Satele hadn’t come to tell him about the pregnancy. Not yet. There was something else she had to deal with first.

“I’ve heard you’re sending troops up into the mountains to search for the Imperials who fled the battle.”

Jace nodded. “Some of them surrendered when we broke their ranks, but most of them are trying to make their way over to the spaceports near Gell Mattar so they can escape offworld.”

“Let them go,” Satele said. “You don’t need to hunt them down like animals.”

“If they surrender to the patrols, we won’t do them any harm.”

“They don’t know that,” Satele reminded him. “They will fight out of fear for their lives, and your people will have no choice but to fight back. Call off the patrols and many lives will be spared.”

“I’m not going to let enemy soldiers get away and go back to the Empire just so we can face them in another battle on some other world!” he protested.

“How many of them will actually return to the Empire?” Satele countered. “Most of them will slink off to other worlds and disappear into civilian life.”

“I disagree,” he said. “And it’s my decision, not yours.”

“This decision is guided by anger and hate,” Satele warned him.

“Of course it is!” Jace shouted. “You’ve seen what they’re capable of. You’ve seen the death and horror they’ve unleashed on innocent worlds. We’re supposed to hate them! They’re the enemy!”

There was a sudden silence, the fury of his words momentarily shocking them both into silence. Then Jace came around from behind his table and placed his hands on Satele’s shoulders.

“I’m sorry, Satele. I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. But I can’t do what you do. I can’t just brush away all the pain the Empire has caused.”

“Revenge won’t ease that pain, Jace.”

“When the war first started, I used to keep a list of every friend I’d seen die in battle,” Jace told her. “I’d recite their names each night before I went to sleep, trying to remember their faces. Clinging to their memories.

“As the war dragged on, the list grew longer. After a few years it was too long for me to recite each night. Then it became too long for me to even remember them all. Hundreds and hundreds of good men and women, their lives taken by the Empire.

“And every Imperial soldier that isn’t captured or killed is someone who might add another name to that list,” Jace continued. “That’s why I have to send out my patrols. That’s why we have to hunt the enemy down like animals. I owe it to the names on that list.”

Satele remained silent as he spoke, but his words filled her with horror and dread. She knew Jace was loyal, but she’d never imagined his loyalty to his fallen friends would be the catalyst for so much anger.

“Killing Imperials can’t bring back the people on the list,” she told him.

“Killing Imperials is how we win this war,” he told her. “And winning the war is the only way to stop adding names to my list.”

“This is a dangerous path, Jace. You’re taking the love for your friends and turning it into something dark and twisted. Something that will drive you to evil.”

“We don’t see things the same way,” Jace explained. “I’m not a Jedi.”

“What if something happens to me?” Satele wondered. “What happens if one day you add my name to your list?” Silently she added: Or your child’s?

Jace’s expression was grim. “I’d rain destruction down on the Empire,” he said quietly. “I’d destroy their cities and burn their worlds.”

“That’s not what I would want.”

“I know,” Jace answered. “But I can’t help who I am.” After a few seconds he added, “And I don’t think we’re really that different. If something happened to me, I don’t believe you could pretend it didn’t matter. I think in your grief and anger you’d lash out at the Empire, too.”

“That’s not the Jedi way,” she said, but even as she spoke the words she wondered if Jace was right.

How could she not hate the Empire if they took away the man she loved? How could she not hate them if they had the blood of her unborn child on their hands?

“I’m … I’m not a soldier,” she said, her voice uncertain as she took a step back from him. “I’m a Jedi.”

“It’s okay, Satele,” Jace said, stepping toward her and extending his hand.

She turned and rushed from the tent, ignoring him as he called out for her to wait. She fled beyond the perimeter of the camp and into the cover of the night’s darkness, where she finally stopped and collapsed on the ground. Her breath was coming in ragged gasps that quickly turned into hitching sobs as she was drowned in a flood of powerful emotions. The tears came next, and she didn’t try to stop them.

She cried for several minutes before slowly collecting herself. The flow of tears dried up and her sobs became a soothing rhythm of inhale–exhale.

She recognized that part of her reaction was due to the hormones coursing through her pregnant body, and some of it was due to her still struggling to accept the fact that she was going to have a child. But that couldn’t explain everything away.

She had sensed the hate and darkness inside Jace before, though it had taken the impending birth of their child to make her confront him about it. What she hadn’t realized was that the same potential for hate and anger lurked inside her, as well.

Her feelings for Jace were too strong. If something happened to him, she feared all her Jedi training wouldn’t be able to save her from seeking vengeance against the Empire. With her child, she knew, it would be even worse.

“This path leads to the dark side,” she said, and in that moment of clarity Satele knew what she had to do.

Satele opened her eyes as the memories faded away. They still hurt, even three decades later. As much as she wanted to believe she could master and control her emotions, when it came to Theron and Jace she had to recognize that it simply wasn’t possible. They would always evoke a powerful reaction in her; it was a weakness she had to acknowledge.

If she were to confront Jace about his potentially harmful influence on their son, it would only make things worse. Like Theron, he would react to her interference with anger, and she would inevitably respond in kind. Better not to get involved any further.

She had cut them out of her life for a reason: it was the only way she could fully serve the Republic. She had sacrificed her chance to have a family and an ordinary life when she chose the Order, and—hard as it was—she couldn’t go back on that decision now.

CHAPTER 20

GNOST-DURAL WAS ALREADY WAITING for him when Theron arrived at the shuttle. He expected him to ask if he had spoken with Satele, but the Kel Dor didn’t bring it up.

“So where do we go to meet this contact of yours?”

“Jigani Port,” Theron said. “On Desevro.”

Tracking Teff’ith down hadn’t been hard; the SIS had a well-established network of informants at all the major spaceports that weren’t under Imperial control. Getting information on the movements of people passing through the ports in the Hutt worlds or nonaffiliated sectors like the Tion Hegemony was a routine procedure, provided the target wasn’t taking unusual steps to conceal his or her identity.

The purpose of the network wasn’t really to allow Theron to get regular updates on a small-time criminal working for the Old Tion Brotherhood, but he wasn’t the only agent who used SIS resources to track individuals for non-official reasons. The Director normally turned a blind eye to these minor violations if the agents didn’t overly abuse the system, though now that Teff’ith could actually be useful to the Republic there was no reason to worry about being discreet.

As the Jedi punched in the coordinates to the Prosperity’s nav computer, Theron’s mind kept drifting back to his meeting with Satele and her warnings about Jace. It wasn’t like him to lose his composure. Satele hadn’t done or said anything that didn’t fit with what he expected from a Jedi Master. It really shouldn’t have set him off like it did.

“Prepare for liftoff,” Gnost-Dural said.

Theron understood that in the grand scheme of things, the Jedi were good to have around—the Republic wouldn’t have survived without them. And though there may be differences between how they perceived the war against the Empire and how the rest of the Republic viewed it, in the end they were all on the same side. So why had he lashed out so intensely at Satele? Was it because, as Grand Master, all the stereotypical Jedi traits he found most irritating were amplified in her? Or was it just because she was his mother?

Their shuttle took to the sky, breaking Coruscant’s atmosphere a few seconds later. Once it was clear of the planet’s orbital flight lanes, Gnost-Dural flipped the switch and they made the jump to hyperspace. As the starfield through the cockpit window became a blur of white, Theron decided he might as well pass the time by finding out if his partner shared Satele’s opinions about the Supreme Commander.

“I met with Grand Master Shan,” he said.

“Good,” Gnost-Dural replied. “I trust the meeting went well?”

Theron still didn’t know if the Kel Dor knew Satele was his mother, so he decided not to bring it up.

“She has some concerns about Jace Malcom. She’s worried he’s driven by hate and vengeance. She’s afraid he might slip over to the dark side.”

“Grand Master Shan knows him better than I do,” Gnost-Dural admitted. “They served together many times. It’s possible she saw something in him that troubled her.”

“You don’t sound too worried about it.”

“It’s a common fear in our Order when we work with the military,” Gnost-Dural explained. “Jedi are not soldiers; we do not approach war with the same mentality. Times of galactic strife and suffering will inevitably force the Republic into a struggle between the darkness and the light. As Jedi, it is our role to try to keep the Republic on the proper path.

“At times, this can lead to tension and conflict, particularly when dealing with someone as strong-willed as Jace Malcom. But it does not mean we are not all working to achieve the same goals.”

“Sounds pretty reasonable when you say it like that,” said Theron.

“I’m surprised Grand Master Shan didn’t explain this to you herself.”

“Maybe she tried,” Theron admitted, “but the words she used didn’t really get through.”

“Sometimes personalities clash. Even the Grand Master is not the right teacher for every student,” Gnost-Dural noted.

Theron bristled momentarily at the implication that he was learning at Gnost-Dural’s feet, but he quickly brushed his irritation aside. The Kel Dor hadn’t meant anything by his words; it was just that odd way Jedi had of speaking that made normal folks feel like they were being condescending.

Maybe half the problem is you, he chided himself. Gotta stop being so sensitive.

He yawned, suddenly aware of how tired he was. He hadn’t slept well after his meeting with Satele.

“I’m going to grab forty winks,” he said. “Wake me when we get to Desevro.”

The customs authorities at Jigani Port weren’t anything like Imperial security on Ziost. They didn’t require clearance papers or approvals or even an official ship registration. All they wanted was someone to pay the fifty-credit docking fee and a hundred-credit deposit on the hangar.

Theron paid them out of his own pocket, not bothering to get a receipt so he could apply for reimbursement later. He wasn’t sure how much of this mission was coming out of the SIS budget, but considering the Jedi had supplied the ship he didn’t mind footing the bill for parking.

“Where to now?” Gnost-Dural asked Theron as he paid the customs official.

“If I know Teff’ith, she’ll be hanging around the dirtiest, nastiest, most dangerous spot to get a drink in this place.”

“That’d be the Crooked Finger,” the customs agent answered. “Not sure it’s your kind of place, fellas,” he said, glancing up at the Jedi’s luxury shuttle. “Want me to arrange a security escort?”

It wasn’t difficult to understand his concern. Gnost-Dural was wearing nondescript robes rather than his Jedi garb, and his lightsaber was tucked out of sight. Theron had donned his custom bracers, with a full complement of toxin darts and a recharged pinpoint laser. But not everyone would realize they were more than just a stylish choice of wardrobe, and the single blaster on his hip looked woefully underpowered for the kind of people they were bound to run into wandering Jigani Port’s seedier dives.

“We can handle ourselves,” Theron assured him. “Just point us in the right direction.”

When they reached the Crooked Finger, it was everything Theron had expected: dimly lit to hide the dirt and grime, and overflowing with a motley assortment of heavily armed thugs and criminals. Music from a slightly out-of-time live band spilled out the door, along with the clamor of the patrons shouting to be heard above the music.

A pair of large Nikto sitting by the door sprang up as they entered, barring their way.

“Cover charge to get in,” the bigger of the two said. “Fifty credits each.”

Theron highly doubted they actually worked for the bar, but he didn’t see the point in starting something. Before he could dig out any more credits, though, Gnost-Dural intervened.

“No cover for us,” he said, waving his hand in front of him in an almost hypnotic gesture. “We’re friends of the owner.”

“Guess we can let you through,” the smaller Nikto answered as he and his friend stepped to the side. “Seeing as how you know the owner.”

Once they were inside, Theron leaned in close enough for Gnost-Dural to hear him above the music and the general din of the crowd.

“Do you know how much easier my life would be if I could learn that trick?” he said. “Best thing about being a Jedi, if you ask me.”

“It doesn’t work on everyone,” Gnost-Dural reminded him. “Only those with weak minds. Nikto are particularly susceptible.”

They made their way through the maze of tables and chairs, Theron’s eyes scanning the bar for a yellow-skinned Twi’lek. He spotted her sitting at a table in the back corner with a scrawny-looking Rodian.

Theron had expected her to be sitting alone; Teff’ith didn’t normally make friends.

“There she is,” he told his companion. “Better let me do the talking.”

As they drew near, he could see that the Rodian was talking animatedly with Teff’ith. He couldn’t make out the words, but the Rodian’s lips were moving, his ears were twitching, and his hands gesticulated wildly. Teff’ith, on the other hand, was barely paying attention. She looked bored, or maybe drunk, sitting slumped forward in her seat with her hands folded in her lap beneath the table.

“Hello, Teff’ith,” Theron said when they reached the table. “Mind if we sit down?”

Her disaffected posture vanished as she whipped a blaster up from under the table; clearly she’d had it in her lap the entire time. The Rodian’s eyes opened wide, then went back to normal once he realized she wasn’t pointing the pistol at him.

“Saw you across the room,” Teff’ith said to Theron. “Too crowded to shoot until you got close.”

Despite her words, Theron knew she had no intention of actually pulling the trigger. Not unless he gave her a reason to.

“You get to the count of three to walk away,” she said, her oddly accented Basic still as impossible to place as Theron remembered.

“There’s no need for the pistol,” Gnost-Dural said, his hand making the same slow wave he’d used on the Nikto at the door. “We’re all friends here.”

A strange look crossed over Teff’ith’s face and the tip of her blaster dipped momentarily, only to pop back up and take dead aim at Theron’s midsection.

“Not friends. One.”

“I’m not here checking up on you,” Theron reassured her. “I’m just here to talk business.”

“Not interested. Deal was you leave us alone. Two.”

“The job pays well,” Theron continued. “If you can handle it.”

“Maybe we should listen to him,” the Rodian chimed in.

Teff’ith glared at him, before turning her gaze back to Theron.

“Vebb convinced us,” she said, placing the blaster flat on the table. “You sit. You talk. We listen. Then we shoot you.”

Theron and Gnost-Dural settled into the two open seats at the table.

“Ugly-head got a name?” Teff’ith asked, nodding at the Kel Dor.

“Gnost-Dural,” he answered, not even slightly offended by the insult.

“Master Gnost-Dural,” Theron clarified. “He’s a Jedi. Like Master Zho.”

“Zho not like other Jedi,” Teff’ith grunted, and Theron couldn’t argue with that.

“Your assistance on Ziost was quite helpful,” the Kel Dor said, trying to get on her good side.

“You cutting deals with outsiders behind Gorvich’s back?” Vebb said, shaking his head. “That’s bad business, Teff.”

Teff’ith shot Gnost-Dural an angry glare before turning her attention back to Theron.

“You said you got another job?”

“Everyone knows the Brotherhood smuggles contraband onto the Imperial space stations,” Theron said, speaking quickly. “You’ve got the contacts, you’ve got the clearance codes, and you’ve got the ships.”

“We know what we got. You got a point?”

“I want you to help us get onto one of the space stations.”

“Which one?”

“We don’t really know yet. It’s going to be sort of a last-minute thing when it happens.”

Teff’ith shook her head. “Can’t help.”

“What are you talking about, Teff?” the Rodian exclaimed. “Gorvich can pull this off no problem.”

“Shut up, Vebb,” Teff’ith growled. Turning to Theron she said, “Too dangerous. Another crazy mission.” Nodding in Gnost-Dural’s direction she added, “Another crazy Jedi.”

“Come on, Teff’ith. You won’t even have to be involved. Just set up another meeting with someone who can help us out.”

“Already set up meeting for you,” she said. “One per customer.”

“Don’t do it for me, then,” Theron said, reaching for one last card to play. “Do it because it’s the right thing. Do it because Ngani Zho would have wanted you to help us. It’s the least you can do for him, now that he’s gone.”

“Zho’s debt’s nontransferable,” she said, but Theron could see her resolve softening at the mention of their old friend. Teff’ith hadn’t been around Zho for long, but he knew they’d formed a powerful bond. His mentor had that effect on people.

“I’ll throw in enough credits to choke a bantha,” Theron offered.

“Okay,” she finally agreed. “We take you to Gorvich, but that’s it. Then you disappear. For real this time.”

“Of course,” Theron promised her. “I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

CHAPTER 21

HUDDLED WITH GNOST-DURAL in the back of the airspeeder taking them from Jigani Port to the nearby city of Maslovar, Theron was convinced they would drop out of the sky at any moment. The constant high-pitched whine of the engine made conversation impossible, and every few minutes the pilot had to drop them to a height of only a few meters above Desevro’s swampy surface to keep the repulsorlift from overheating. The stabilizers weren’t much better, and each time a gust of wind hit them the speeder threatened to flip over.

The flight lasted only twenty minutes, but by the time they touched down in the center of the city Theron’s stomach was trying to crawl up and out of his throat.

“Best hotel in Maslovar!” their pilot proclaimed as his passengers climbed out of the backseat.

Looking at the dilapidated building before them, Theron was convinced there had to be a better option. But he wasn’t eager to get back on the speeder anytime soon.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as it looks, he silently hoped as they collected their bags and headed inside.

Teff’ith had agreed to set up a meeting with Gorvich three days from now. Theron wasn’t happy about the delay, but she insisted it would take some time to pull together everything they’d need to get past Imperial security on whichever space station ended up being their destination. Until then, there was nothing for Theron and Gnost-Dural to do but wait.

They’d asked Teff’ith to recommend a place to stay; seeing where she’d sent them made it clear she still wasn’t happy about working with him.

“We need a room,” Theron said at the check-in desk. “Three nights. Two beds.”

The woman behind the counter didn’t speak as she punched at the buttons on her console. Eventually she produced a pair of keycards.

“Sixty credits per night. Pay up front.”

Theron slid the credits across the counter, and she handed him the keycards. “Level six. Top floor. Turbolift is broken.”

Theron prepared himself for the worst as he entered the room, and he wasn’t disappointed. An unidentifiable but distinctly unpleasant odor wafted out to meet them as the door slid open, and Theron was certain he heard the scuttling of vermin running for cover as he flicked on the lights.

“There is no comfort, only filth,” he mumbled.

“We could return to the shuttle,” Gnost-Dural suggested. “There are sleeping quarters, a shower, and a refresher on board.”

“I think the floor of the shuttle would be more comfortable than this place,” Theron agreed. “But I need a few minutes before I can handle another speeder ride like the last one.”

“You and Teff’ith have an interesting relationship,” Gnost-Dural said.

“It’s not really a relationship,” Theron explained. “She’s just one of my contacts.”

“She is clearly more than that,” Gnost-Dural countered.

“Ngani Zho saw something in her. He took her under his wing. I guess I feel responsible for her now that he’s gone.”

“Do you have feelings for her?”

Theron laughed. “Not like you’re implying. She’s more like a kid sister. Annoying, always getting into trouble, but you know there’s good buried somewhere deep inside.”

“It must be buried very deep,” the Jedi noted, “for her to send you to a place like this.”

“She’s not going to double-cross us,” Theron assured him.

“Because of her respect for Master Zho?”

“It’s not just that. She’s got honor.

“She could have abandoned me on Darth Mekhis’s flagship. Could have taken my shuttle and left me to die there when it self-destructed. But she didn’t. She waited while the whole place was collapsing around her. Gave me time to get back to the shuttle.”

“No wonder she’s hostile,” the Jedi said. “She saved your life, and now you come and ask her for another favor. You are the one in debt to her.”

Before Theron could reply, the cybernetic implant in his right ear buzzed.

“Hold on,” he said to Gnost-Dural, holding up a hand for silence. “Incoming call from the Director.”

He whispered, “Accept incoming,” before saying more loudly, “Director—any news?”

“The bird is coming back to the nest,” the Director said. “The one in the manax tree.”

From the analytics report, Theron knew there were just a handful of Imperial space stations large enough to accommodate a vessel the size of the Spear. Only one was located in a system starting with the same letter as manax—Reaver Station in the Marranis system on the Outer Rim.

“Copy. What’s the timetable?”

“Landing tomorrow. Should splash around in the birdbath for two days before flying south for the winter.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“Nothing relevant,” the Director said after a brief pause. “Good luck,” he added, ending the call before Theron could ask any more questions.

“Disconnect,” Theron whispered as the static of the open channel hissed softly in his ear.

He waited for the comlink to click off before telling Gnost-Dural, “The Spear’s docking at Reaver Station to give the crew two days of R and R.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow. By the time we meet with Teff’ith’s contact they’ll already be back on active duty.”

“It might be weeks—maybe even months—before the Spear docks again,” Gnost-Dural warned.

“We need to convince Gorvich to move a little faster,” Theron agreed.

Theron didn’t believe it was possible, but the speeder that took them back to Jigani Port was in even worse shape than the previous one. But his stomach wasn’t lurching when they touched down this time; he was too focused on the mission.

Returning to the Crooked Finger, they found Teff’ith and her Rodian friend still sitting at the same table where they had left them an hour earlier.

“Didn’t like the hotel?” Teff’ith asked when she saw them approaching.

“Change of plans,” Theron said. “We need to see Gorvich today. Right now.”

The Twi’lek shook her head. “Impossible. Three days, remember?”

“I’m not playing around, Teff’ith.”

Something in his voice made her take notice, and she let out a long sigh.

“We take you to Gorvich. Follow us.”

The instant Gorvich opened the door to his apartment, Theron disliked him. He was dressed in expensive, overly fashionable clothes—dark, tailor-fit slacks and a patterned shirt made from expensive Saava silk. He was wearing several ostentatious rings, and a thick gold chain dangled from his neck. His hair was blond, his features average, but there was something distasteful about his look—an expression on his face and the way he carried himself—that elicited a powerful sense of revulsion. When he opened his mouth to speak, he did nothing to offset the first impression, his voice arrogant, mocking, and self-obsessed all at the same time.

“Hey, Sunshine,” he said to Teff’ith by way of greeting, flashing her a lecherous grin that made Theron want to pop him in the nose. “These the big spenders you told me about?”

“Gorvich, Theron,” Teff’ith said, making her introduction as brief as possible. “You two talk. We’re done.”

Gorvich laughed. “Sunshine hasn’t succumbed to my charms yet, but she’ll come around. They all do. I have a special relationship with the ladies.”

“Keep talking,” Teff’ith said, tapping the handle of her blaster. “Make it so you never have a special relationship ever again.”

He responded with a wink and another laugh before turning his attention to Theron.

“Come on in. Let’s talk business.”

The three of them followed him into the living room. Though the apartment was small, it was well furnished. Theron noticed that all the pieces appeared new, and they seemed more suited for a much larger place.

He’s getting a little taste of success, Theron thought. Figures he’ll be moving on to bigger and better things in the near future.

Gorvich settled himself into an oversized easy chair, but didn’t invite his guests to sit. Instead, he left them standing awkwardly in the center of the room.

Trying to make us feel uncomfortable. Inferior. Like we’re servants waiting on him.

“Heard you need to get aboard an Imperial space station,” Gorvich began. “Going to have to throw together clearance papers for the whole lot of them since you don’t know which one you want to visit. Gotta charge you extra for that.”

“We know where we’re going now,” Theron told him. “Reaver Station.”

“Still gotta charge you extra, I’m afraid,” Gorvich said with an affected shrug. “Started the paperwork when Teff’ith first called.”

“Fine. Whatever,” Theron said, knowing he didn’t have time to argue. “But we need to leave today or the deal’s off.”

“You must be inhaling some of your Kel Dor buddy’s atmosphere. That stuff will rot your brain. No way I can pull it all together today.”

“It’s today or not at all,” Theron insisted.

“Do you know how complicated this is? We need uniforms. IDs. Clearance papers. An Imperial shuttle.”

“The Old Tion Brotherhood moves thousands of credits’ worth of contraband spice and stims through Imperial space stations every week,” Theron said. “You telling me you don’t have that stuff on hand and ready to go?”

“I might be able to scramble something up in a few hours,” Gorvich admitted. “But I’m going to have to charge you a premium for short notice.”

“Not a problem,” Theron assured him, though he wasn’t sure that was true. They had a lockbox stuffed with thirty thousand credits hidden away in a secret security compartment on Gnost-Dural’s shuttle, but Gorvich had all the leverage and he knew it. It was possible he might come up with a ridiculous price they couldn’t meet with the funds on hand. And authorizing more credits from SIS would take time … not to mention, a transfer of that size to any account on a gang-ridden planet like Desevro was bound to attract all kinds of attention from anyone involved in the transaction.

Theron decided not to bring this up, however. Better to negotiate the deal, then try to convince Gorvich to settle on a lower price once he’d already done the work to get everything ready.

“You know I can’t do anything for your friend there,” Gorvich told them. “Ain’t no Kel Dor in the Imp army. He’ll stick out like a sore thumb.”

“I will stay out of sight on the shuttle,” Gnost-Dural assured him. “I assume the kind of clearances you procure will allow us to avoid a search of our vessel.”

“We have a couple of security folks we pay to look the other way.”

“So, do we have a deal?” Theron wanted to know.

“You don’t know my price yet.”

“Just name it.”

“Forty thousand credits.”

“Done,” Theron said with no hesitation, relying on his partner to be smart enough to play along. Fortunately Gnost-Dural didn’t show any reaction.

Two hours later they were in Gorvich’s private hangar while he walked them through the Imperial shuttle he’d procured. Teff’ith was still hanging around, though she hadn’t said more than two words the entire time.

“Standard Imperial fleet issue,” Gorvich said, pointing to a uniform draped over the pilot’s chair. “Made you a corporal. Any rank higher than that starts to attract too much attention. You know who to salute and when? You mess that up and people are going to notice.”

“I think I can handle it,” Theron said. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d gone undercover as an enemy combatant.

“Got your clearance codes programmed into the ship’s computer. All you have to do is send them when they ask for verification. They’ll have you dock over on C wing. We’ve got an understanding with security there. Shouldn’t give you any trouble. After that, you’re on your own.”

Gorvich scratched at the stubble on his chin and squinted one eye at Theron.

“Teff’ith never did say why you were going there. You ain’t sellin’ nothing, are you? Because the Brotherhood won’t be too happy if you cut them out.”

The way you tried to cut Morbo out of your deal on Nar Shaddaa? Theron thought.

“Got a cousin stationed on one of the capital ships,” Theron said aloud. “Docking at Reaver Station. He’s done with the war. Wants me to come get him out.”

“Desertion and dereliction of duty,” Gorvich said with a nod. “That I can understand.”

“Anything else we need to know?” Theron asked.

“Guess not. Just hand over the credits and you’re on your way.”

“They’re on our ship,” Theron said.

“Great,” Gorvich said, rubbing his hands together in excitement. “Let’s go get ’em.”

When they reached the Prosperity’s hangar, Gorvich let out a long whistle of appreciation.

“Nice ride,” Teff’ith grudgingly admitted.

“Wait here,” Theron said as he tapped in the code to open the boarding ramp, then climbed up and into the shuttle.

Gnost-Dural didn’t bother to come with him; Theron was glad to see the Jedi had no problem letting him take the lead when it was appropriate. Even better, he knew his partner had his back if something should go wrong, as it had at the ODCC on Ziost.

He opened the hidden security panel and dragged out the lockbox, then carried it back down the boarding ramp and set it at Gorvich’s feet and opened it.

“Isn’t that a pretty sight, Sunshine?” Gorvich said.

“Just hand over our cut,” Teff’ith replied.

“Give me a minute to count it. Make sure your friends aren’t pulling a fast one.”

“About that,” Theron said. “There’s only thirty thousand credits there. That’s all we’ve got.”

“So go get more,” Gorvich growled.

“We don’t have time,” Theron told him. “Not sure I’d trust anyone around here with that kind of transaction anyway.”

Theron was watching the other man closely, ready in case he went for his weapon. Shooting Gorvich might mess up the plan—the corrupt guards on Reaver Station could be friends of his—but he wasn’t going to let Gorvich get the drop on him. In the back of his mind, he wondered whose side Teff’ith would be on if things got ugly.

“We agreed on forty,” Gorvich reminded him.

“I’m good for it,” Theron assured him. “Thirty now and ten when we get back.”

“I’m not convinced you’re going to make it back,” Gorvich said. “I need enough credits to cover the cost of the shuttle in case you mess up and the Imps don’t let you leave.”

There was no way the simple Imperial supply shuttle Gorvich was lending them was worth anything above twenty thousand credits, but Theron wasn’t going to argue the point.

“Tell you what,” he said. “We get back, we’ll give you another twenty instead of ten.”

Gorvich was silent as he considered the offer.

“Good money, Gorvich,” Teff’ith chimed in. “Easy money.”

“Okay, here’s the deal,” he finally said. “Thirty up front. Twenty when you get back. And you leave me the command codes to your shuttle as collateral.”

“The Prosperity’s worth at least fifty thousand credits on its own!” Theron protested. Not to mention Gnost-Dural might have sensitive information on board.

“Good incentive to come back,” Gorvich said. “Wouldn’t want you to ‘rescue your cousin’ and then take off somewhere.”

From his tone it was clear he didn’t buy Theron’s cover story.

Theron glanced over at Gnost-Dural, who gave him a slight nod.

“Okay, we have a deal.”

“Let me throw in one last wrinkle,” Gorvich said with a grin. “You take Teff’ith with you.”

“What?” the Twi’lek exclaimed. “Why?”

“Not sure what these two are really up to,” Gorvich said, “but I want someone to keep an eye on them. Make sure they don’t do anything that’s going to cause trouble for the Brotherhood.”

“So you go,” Teff’ith spat.

“Sounds a little too risky for me. Besides, you’re the one who brokered this deal. You’re the one vouching for these two.”

“Just wanted the credits,” Teff’ith protested.

Gorvich shrugged. “That’s the deal, Sunshine. You go with them or we cancel the whole thing.”

Teff’ith glared at Theron, then over at Gorvich.

“Want a higher cut. Hazard pay.”

“Sure thing, Sunshine,” Gorvich said. “I’ll throw in an extra three thousand when you get back … if you get back.”

She turned on Theron. “You dragging us on another suicide mission?”

He shook his head. “Quick in and out,” he promised. “A couple of hours and you’re heading back. Easy money.”

“Spend the credits before we get back,” she warned Gorvich, “and you wake up missing a finger.”

“Sounds like we have a deal,” he said with a smile.

CHAPTER 22

COMPARED WITH THE PROSPERITY, the interior of the Imperial supply shuttle was cramped and uncomfortable. It had seating for four, but because most of the rear was occupied by the cargo hold, the chairs were jammed two by two in the cockpit with hardly any legroom.

When Theron tried to sit in the pilot’s seat, Teff’ith pushed him aside.

“You sit in back,” she ordered.

Knowing she was still fuming over being forced to accompany them on the mission, he didn’t bother to argue. Gnost-Dural took a seat in the copilot’s chair beside Teff’ith without comment.

At least this Imperial uniform’s a good fit, Theron thought as he squeezed into the seat behind Teff’ith.

But though it was the right size, he knew from past undercover experience that the cheap material of the cuffs and collar would still end up chafing his skin.

Just one more reason nobody should ever enlist with the Empire.

A few minutes later they were on their way to Reaver Station, a journey that would take roughly ten hours at the shuttle’s top hyperspace speed. Theron would have been fine passing the journey in silence, but Gnost-Dural seemed to have other ideas.

“Your friend Gorvich is an unpleasant man,” he said to Teff’ith.

“Gorvich is no friend. Just work for him. Pay’s good.”

“So that’s your driving motivation in life?” the Kel Dor asked. “Material wealth?”

“Tell Ugly-face not to get all Jedi-preachy,” Teff’ith said over her shoulder to Theron.

“Sorry,” Theron replied. “Jedi can’t help trying to save someone they think is in need of moral guidance. It’s like a compulsion with them.”

“Don’t need saving,” Teff’ith said to Gnost-Dural.

“You don’t mind spending your life surrounded by people like Gorvich?”

“Just a stepping-stone. Won’t be there forever. Moving up the Brotherhood ranks.”

“And when you do, you’ll find those in charge are even more selfish, brutal, and vicious than Gorvich,” the Jedi assured her.

“Why we really going to Reaver Station?” Teff’ith asked, changing the subject.

“To rid the galaxy of a great evil,” Gnost-Dural replied.

Teff’ith snorted.

“Gorvich is plenty evil. Should rid the galaxy of him.”

“If you hate him so much,” Theron asked from the back, “why’d you save him on Nar Shaddaa?”

“Don’t leave partners behind. Even scum like Gorvich. Part of being a team.”

The next few minutes passed in silence before she returned to her earlier line of inquiry.

“What’s going down at Reaver Station? Need to know if things get ugly.”

“Don’t worry,” Theron assured her. “You just need to drop me off and wait inside the shuttle with Master Gnost-Dural for a few hours while I take care of some business. That’s it. Easy.”

“Too easy,” Teff’ith replied. “Not your style.”

“Maybe I’ve changed.”

Another snort from Teff’ith ended all conversation until they reached their destination, and Theron allowed himself to slip into a light meditative trance—yet another useful trick he’d learned from Ngani Zho—to rest up and ready himself for what lay ahead.

When they finally dropped from hyperspace, they had a clear view of Reaver Station; the massive spaceport was the size of a small moon. Struggling to look over Teff’ith’s shoulder, Theron could make out an enormous capital ship docked on the far side—the Ascendant Spear.

“Go ahead and open a hailing frequency,” Theron said, then added, “Better let me do the talking.”

Teff’ith clicked the transmit button on the shuttle’s control panel, but she didn’t give him a chance to speak.

“Reaver Station, this is Imperial shuttle TK-37059 requesting permission to dock,” she said, her heavily accented Basic disappearing as her voice slipped into the precise, clipped cadence common to citizens of the Empire.

“Copy, TK-37059. Ready for clearance codes.”

“Transmitting codes now,” she said before clicking off the comm channel.

“You’ve done this before,” Gnost-Dural remarked, clearly as impressed and surprised as Theron. “Your accent is impeccable.”

“Easy to fake Imp fancy talk,” she said, brushing away the compliment.

The console beeped, and she pressed the button to reopen the channel.

“TK-37059, you have clearance to land,” the voice on the other end said. “Proceed to Hangar Fourteen in D wing.”

“Copy, Reaver Station,” Teff’ith replied, then clicked off the channel a second time.

“I thought Gorvich said we were supposed to land in C wing,” Theron said.

“Usually do,” Teff’ith answered.

“So why the change?”

“Maybe Gorvich sold us out. Want to turn back?”

“No,” Theron said after a quick deliberation. “Go ahead and dock.”

Teff’ith brought the shuttle into the open hangar bay for a landing and the air-lock doors closed behind them. A pair of guards—both human, both male—emerged from a door leading into the station, but they didn’t act as if they were expecting anything out of the ordinary.

“Wait here,” Theron told the other two. “But be ready to bug out if something goes off the rails.”

Exiting the shuttle, he approached the two guards, trying to appear casual even as his mind was racing. There wasn’t an ambush waiting for them, so Gorvich hadn’t betrayed them. But if these guards weren’t on the take, they might want to inspect the shuttle, and Theron couldn’t let that happen.

“Gorvich didn’t say anything about sending a fresh face on this run,” one of the guards said.

Theron let out a sigh of relief.

“He told me we were supposed to dock in C wing,” Theron said, warming up to the part of a small-time thug working for the Old Tion Brotherhood. “Had me worried.”

“C wing’s reserved for that giant capital ship you saw on your way in. Had to shift some stuff around.”

“Could’ve given us a heads-up,” Theron said.

“Told Gorvich,” the guard replied. “Guess he didn’t pass it on.”

“Guess he wanted to make the new guy sweat,” the other guard said with a laugh.

“Where’s your friend?” the first one asked. “The one with that sexy voice?”

“Staying on the shuttle,” Theron said. “Keeping an eye on the cargo.”

“Yeah? What’s the haul this time? Stims? Spice? Banned holovids?”

“Is this part of hazing the new guy?” Theron asked. “Gorvich tell you to waste my time with all these questions?”

“Just trying to be friendly,” one of the guards said. “Maybe you can leave us a little free sample when you go.”

“I think we’re done here,” Theron said. “We keep chatting and someone’s going to get suspicious.”

“Fine,” the first guard said, finally taking the hint. “We got other shuttles coming in, anyway.”

“Just keep your head down and don’t do anything stupid, rookie,” the second warned him. “You get caught, we don’t know you.”

Theron waited for the guards to leave before returning to the shuttle.

“Everything’s good,” he said, giving a quick status update. “Sit tight. Everything goes smooth and I’ll be back in a few hours.”

“May the Force be with you, Theron,” Gnost-Dural said.

“Don’t mess up,” Teff’ith said, offering her own words of support.

Theron left the shuttle and exited the hangar, making his way onto Reaver Station, marveling at the size and scope.

The Empire understood the need to let military personnel enjoy a break from their daily routine, but unlike the Republic it was paranoid about soldiers deserting whenever they landed on a world. To offset this, they’d designed Reaver Station to have all the amenities anyone would expect in a planetary port city, giving the soldiers a place to relax, but leaving them no other option but to return to their ship when their leave was over. Spread out over the station’s four levels was a wide assortment of shops, bars, restaurants, holotheaters, casinos, sport courts, and clubs, all packed with men and women eager to cut loose before returning to the drudgery and discipline of their assigned posts on their respective ships.

Theron’s plan was simple enough—sneak onto the Ascendant Spear while it was docked, slice into the computer systems, and plant the dormant virus. Next, he’d rig up the communications protocols to receive a special Republic transmission that would trigger the virus when the time was right. Then he’d slip off the ship, head back to the shuttle, and get off the station with no one the wiser.

The fact that Reaver Station was a secure military facility would only make things easier. The only people on board either served in the military or had special authorization to be here. Because of that, security on the ships actually docked at the station was bound to be lax. For a vessel the size of the Spear, there’d be a constant stream of men and women coming and going—heading out into the station for some fun, then stumbling back to their bunks on the ship to rest for a few hours before heading out again. At most, they’d have to flash a boarding ID to the guards stationed at the hangar’s entrance—a nod to the fact that nobody would be able to remember the names and faces of every person who was stationed on the ship.

All Theron had to do was borrow a boarding ID from someone too drunk or preoccupied to notice it was missing so he could forge a copy. But first he had to figure out where the crew members of the Ascendant Spear were gathered.

The bonds among those who served together on a ship were strong, and most personnel on leave tended to hang out with the same people they worked beside day after day. They would congregate in the same general area of the station, their sheer numbers driving away most of those on the station who served on smaller vessels.

He made his way toward an information booth located near the hangar bays.

“Welcome to Reaver Station, Corporal,” the woman behind the desk said.

Her voice was chipper and she had a wide smile plastered across her face, but there was something in her eyes that made Theron think her cheerfulness was just a façade—the result of Imperial training to boost the morale of the men and women arriving for a few precious days of R&R.

“Just got in on a supply run,” Theron said. “First time here. Looking for a good place to grab some grub.”

“Normally I’d suggest the Golden Galley,” she said. “Great food, good prices, and you can have them take it right off your payroll if you’re a little short of credits. But you don’t want to go there today.”

“Why not?” Theron asked, feigning ignorance.

“Had a full capital ship arrive earlier today. They hit that place like a fefze swarm.”

“I’m not in a rush,” Theron said. “Care to tell me how to get there?”

Following the woman’s directions eventually brought Theron to his destination. The woman at the information booth’s description of a deadly fefze swarm was accurate—the restaurant and every other establishment around it were overflowing with men and women in uniform. They spilled out into the streets, forming haphazard queues to wait outside the doors of any spot that served food or drink.

Theron slowly made his way through the crowd, searching for an easy target that could provide him with a boarding ID. Many of the bars he passed were projecting the feed from the official Imperial news holo where the crowd outside could watch as a way to keep the people in line from becoming too impatient and unruly.

It was hard to hear the newscasters over the din of the crowd, but the sharp trill indicating a breaking story caught Theron’s attention. He stopped and turned his head up to hear the latest Imperial propaganda.

“The Empire scored a major victory just hours ago with a surprise assault on the Republic agriworld of Ruan.”

A cheer rose up from the crowd, but Theron was too shocked to join in. Ruan was a major producer of food for Coruscant and several other ecumenopolis worlds. It was also deep inside Republic space—a planet most considered well beyond the reach of the Empire.

“Enemy casualties are estimated in the thousands, as an Imperial fleet under the command of Moff Nezzor unleashed an orbital bombardment that devastated production facilities on the surface.”

And killed thousands of innocent civilians in the process.

“The Republic fleet in the area was destroyed, with enemy reinforcements arriving too late to affect the outcome of the battle. An official press release from the office of the Minister of War reads as follows:

“ ‘Moff Nezzor’s resounding victory at Ruan demonstrates the strength of the Empire and exposes the vulnerability of the Republic. Those who say our enemy has gained the upper hand in the galactic war must clearly recognize this day as proof that the Empire is stronger than it has ever been. The Republic is unable to defend its own worlds and her citizens tremble before the might of the Imperial fleet. Their defeat and eventual surrender is inevitable. All hail the Immortal Emperor.’ ”

Theron turned away from the holo, ignoring the raucous celebrations of those around him. As bad as the attack itself had been, what it represented was far worse. The holo claimed capital ships had been involved in the attack; that meant the orders should have been transmitted using the black cipher. SIS should have known the attack was coming, but somehow the Republic was caught completely unprepared. It didn’t make any sense.

Unless our cipher isn’t working anymore.

The realization made Theron feel physically ill. He needed to speak to the Director. He needed to know what had gone wrong. If there was a leak in SIS analytics, they might have to scrap the entire mission.

Abandoning the still-cheering crowd around the Golden Galley, he ran back to the hangar where they had docked and scrambled up and into the shuttle.

“Why you back so soon?” Teff’ith demanded as Theron burst in on them.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, addressing Gnost-Dural. “I need to speak with the Director. Or Jace. Maybe both of them.”

“Impossible,” the Jedi said. “We don’t have a secure channel.”

Theron rushed up to the cockpit. He quickly surveyed the hangar through the window until he spotted a communications terminal in the corner.

“I can slice into the Imperial comm channels,” he said. “Piggyback our signal on the station’s secure network. Scramble it with a basic SIS encryption and bounce it through half a dozen relays so nobody knows where it’s originating from.

“Should buy us a minute or two of secure time.”

“Sounds risky,” Teff’ith said.

“We don’t have any choice,” Theron insisted, still speaking to Gnost-Dural.

“Do what you have to do,” the Jedi said.

Theron exited the shuttle and raced over to the comm terminal, pulling his custom-designed slicer spike from the hip pocket of his uniform. The spike was small, about twice the size and thickness of a pen, with a small interface cable extending several centimeters from the bottom. He plugged the cable into one of the terminal’s access ports and turned the spike on. A second later the spike’s short-range signal synced up with Theron’s cybernetic implants, allowing him to interface directly with Reaver Station’s communications network.

His fingers flew over the keyboard as the spike relayed streams of data to his implants. It only took a minute for him to burrow his way through the various levels of electronic security and gain unrestricted access to the network’s core operating system. It took several more minutes to set up the encryption and the complicated system of relay jumps, but it was a necessary precaution. He’d use them to buy a few minutes of secure transmission before the station’s automated network systems responded to the unauthorized intrusion and shut them down.

He raced back over to the shuttle and climbed inside.

“Got it,” he said as he settled into the pilot’s seat. Gnost-Dural and Teff’ith crowded in on either side of him.

Theron switched the shuttle’s transmitter on, keying it to the same frequency as the terminal in the hangar. He had to work fast, so he fired off an emergency priority signal to SIS, knowing protocols would relay it immediately to the Director wherever he was.

A few seconds later the Director’s voice came through the ship’s speaker; adding video to the signal would only have made things more complicated.

“Theron—what’s wrong?”

“You heard about the attack on Ruan?”

“Of course,” the Director said. “I’m in a debriefing with the Supreme Commander right now.”

“Is everything all right, Theron?” Jace’s voice chimed in. “Where are you calling from?”

“Reaver Station.”

“Are you insane?” the Director sputtered.

“It’s okay. The signal’s secure. For now.”

“You can’t know that,” the Director insisted. “What if the—”

“I don’t have much time,” Theron said, cutting him off. “I think the mission’s been compromised.”

“Why?” Jace demanded.

“The Empire should have used the black ciphers to transmit the orders to the capital ships. We should have known about the attack.”

There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line before Jace said, “We knew.”

“You … you knew?” Theron said, his mind struggling to grasp what he was hearing. “Why weren’t we better prepared? Why didn’t you do anything?”

“We sent medical supplies, food, and emergency volunteers,” Jace replied.

“What about the reinforcements? Why were they too far away to get there in time? We should have scrambled one of our fleets.”

“We couldn’t,” Jace said. “The risk of tipping off the Empire was too great. If they found a fleet waiting for them on Ruan, they’d know we were intercepting their cipher transmissions.”

Horror slowly dawned on Theron as he realized what Jace was saying.

“You knew the Empire would wipe out our ships at Ruan. You knew they’d bombard the planet. Thousands of civilians are dead, and you did nothing to help them!”

“I had no choice,” Jace said, his voice cold. “If we don’t stop the Ascendant Spear, we don’t stop this war. You’re worried about thousands of innocent lives, but I’m worried about millions.”

Theron didn’t say anything. He sat in the pilot’s chair, speechless as Satele’s warning ran through his mind:

Jace fights this war out of revenge. It clouds his judgment. It can make him do terrible things if he believes they are necessary to save the Republic.

“Theron?” Jace said from the other end of the transmission. “Theron, are you still there?”

“We’re here,” Gnost-Dural spoke up.

“You have to see the big picture, Theron,” Jace said, “We have to wait for our chance to stop the Spear. No matter how horrific these attacks may be.”

“Attacks?” Theron said, snapping out of his daze. “Ruan wasn’t the only one?”

“Theron,” the Director’s voice snapped. “Your job is to get on board the Spear! This doesn’t concern you.”

“Where will they strike next?” Theron demanded, ignoring the Director. “Jace—where?”

“Duro,” the Supreme Commander said with a heavy sigh. “They’re going to hit the shipyards in thirty-six standard hours.”

Duro was a heavily industrialized and densely populated world. Though the planet itself was too polluted to support life, billions lived in the orbital cities above it. An Imperial attack on Duro would have minimal long-term strategic value for the Empire, but the casualties for the Republic were almost too catastrophic to fathom.

“You have to stop them,” Theron said. “Set an ambush. Take out the Imperial fleet the second they enter the system.”

“That’s not going to happen,” Jace told him. “The Spear isn’t going to be involved in the attack.”

“We’re increasing Republic patrols in the sector,” the Director added, “but if we scale them up too fast the Empire will grow suspicious.”

“Theron, sometimes sacrifices have to be made,” Jace said.

“But you have to draw the line somewhere!”

“The Empire won’t. So neither can we.”

Satele was right about you, Theron thought, remembering her final argument: Hate will transform you into the very evil that you are fighting so hard against.

“There’s nothing you can do to stop this, Theron,” the Director told him. “So do your duty. Complete your mission. The Republic is counting on you.”

The transmission abruptly ended, though Theron wasn’t sure if they had cut him off or if the Reaver’s automated security systems had finally unraveled his tricks and disconnected the signal.

CHAPTER 23

THERON STOOD UP from the pilot’s seat slowly, his body and mind numb.

“Theron,” Gnost-Dural asked, “are you okay?”

“The Director was right,” Theron replied. “There’s nothing we can do. An Imperial fleet is going to hit Duro, and we can’t stop it.”

“Call back,” Teff’ith suggested. “Tell them you quit.”

“There may be another way,” Gnost-Dural said. “If the Spear was part of the Imperial fleet attacking Duro, Jace would be willing to set up an ambush.”

“But it’s not,” Theron said, his mind unable to follow where the Jedi was heading. “The Spear will still be here when Duro is attacked.”

“Maybe not. Can you send off another message?”

Theron shook his head. “Used every trick in my bag to pull that off. The network security programs automatically adjust and adapt to slicer attacks. They’ll be able to lock me out almost instantly if I try it again. Probably even trace the location to this hangar.”

“Then we need someone to deliver it.” Gnost-Dural turned to Teff’ith. “We need your help.”

“Not trying anything to get us killed,” she warned.

“All you have to do is deliver a message,” he told her. “Tell Jace Malcom that the Ascendant Spear will be at Duro.”

“She’ll never be able to get a message to the Republic Supreme Commander,” Theron said, suddenly understanding where Gnost-Dural was headed. “But I know who can—Satele!”

“I should have thought of her myself,” the Jedi agreed.

“Go to the Jedi enclave on Coruscant,” he said to Teff’ith, speaking quickly. “Ask for Grand Master Satele Shan. Tell her everything that happened here.”

“We fly Imperial shuttle to Coruscant, we get blown from the sky!” Teff’ith protested.

“Go back to Jigani Port and take my shuttle,” Gnost-Dural said. “It’s faster anyway.”

“We leave, you two going to be stuck on Reaver Station,” Teff’ith reminded them.

From her tone Theron wasn’t sure if she was worried about them, or sarcastically pointing out something obvious she thought they were foolishly forgetting.

“Theron and I can look after ourselves,” the Jedi assured her.

“Tell the authorities that I sent you,” Theron said. “Grand Master Shan will listen if you mention my name.”

“Grand Master Shan,” Teff’ith said, her eyes narrowing suspiciously as she put two and two together. “Theron Shan. You related?”

“She’s my mother,” Theron said, the situation too urgent for him to even care whether Gnost-Dural already knew.

He expected Teff’ith to make some kind of comment, maybe ask why he wasn’t a Jedi. But all she said was, “What’s in it for us?”

“Another ten thousand credits,” Theron promised. “And a get-out-of-jail-free card if you’re ever arrested in Republic space.”

“Deal.”

Gnost-Dural turned his attention back to Theron. “You still need to get on the Spear. If you don’t sabotage the systems, Karrid will be able to escape the Republic ambush.”

“I’m on it,” Theron said. “What about you?”

“I’m going to convince my old apprentice to take her ship to Duro.”

Pulling the hood of his cloak up over his head to obscure his features, the Jedi slipped out of the shuttle and took off, moving with the supernatural speed of one driven by the Force. Theron watched him until he vanished through the hangar door, leaving him and Teff’ith alone.

“Can I trust you on this?” he asked the Twi’lek. “Millions of innocent lives are at stake.”

“Ten thousand credits to deliver one message? Stupid not to do it.”

“Good. Tell Satele Shan everything that happened here. She has to convince Jace to send the Republic fleet to Duro.”

Theron wondered what the Director or Jace would say once they learned that a Twi’lek enforcer for the Old Tion Brotherhood now knew all the critical details of their top-secret mission. He’d probably get court-martialed, and rightfully so. But he trusted Teff’ith. More important, he didn’t have any other options. Not if he wanted to keep Duro from being the site of one of the war’s bloodiest massacres.

He started to leave the ship, then paused to say one last thing to Teff’ith. “Remember,” he warned her. “Double-cross us and you don’t get paid.”

“Got it,” she said, her lekku flicking in annoyance. “Said stupid not to do it. We not stupid.”

Gnost-Dural was little more than a blur of motion and movement as he raced through the corridors of Reaver Station. The Imperial soldiers he flew past reacted with a mix of surprise, curiosity, and alarm, but he came and went so fast none of them fully realized what had happened. Left in his wake, they exchanged a few puzzled glances with their friends, then laughed off the odd but seemingly harmless encounter as their minds convinced them that the person who’d just run by couldn’t possibly have been moving that fast.

He didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he let the Force guide him. When they’d first arrived at Reaver Station, he had gently reached out with his mind until he sensed his former Padawan. Now he was using her familiar presence—shrouded in the dark side, but still unmistakable after so many years—as a beacon to guide him to her.

At the same time, he was careful to mask his own presence so as not to warn her of his coming. As he drew closer it would be impossible to completely hide himself from her awareness should she suddenly choose to focus her thoughts on finding him, but there was no reason she would do so. Not until he was so close that it no longer mattered.

As he drew near the Ascendant Spear’s hangar, he slowed his pace. There were more people here, men and women returning from or heading out on shore leave. But none of the off-duty soldiers paid him any special heed. Those coming back to the ship were tired and inebriated, and those leaving were too eager to begin their leave to pay close enough attention to the hooded figure’s hidden features to realize he wasn’t human.

That changed when he reached the two guards on duty at one of the many boarding ramps leading from the hangar floor into the Spear itself.

“Who are you?” one demanded, stepping in his path.

She moved with a sure confidence that Gnost-Dural recognized all too well; he knew there would be little chance of using the Force to persuade her to let him pass. Should it be necessary, he was ready to resort to violence to get inside, but he thought there might still be another way.

He threw back his hood, revealing his alien features. He took deep, slow breaths through his mask, which gave off a deep, angry hiss in response as he tilted his head back slightly to make his tusks more prominent.

“My name is Darth Malitiae,” he said, dropping his already baritone voice a full octave lower. “I have business with Darth Karrid.”

The guard hesitated but held her ground, and he realized she would need more convincing. The Kel Dor extended his hand while simultaneously reaching out with the Force to apply a faint pressure on her windpipe.

She threw her hands up to her throat and her eyes went wide with terror as her air supply was cut off. After a few moments he released his hold, causing her to collapse to her knees as she took in deep, desperate gulps of oxygen.

“When a superior wants to pass,” he snarled, “you would be wise to step aside.”

“Forgive me, my Lord,” the guard gasped as she crawled out of his way. Keeping her eyes carefully averted to the ground, she said, “I will inform Darth Karrid of your arrival.”

“Darth Karrid is expecting me. I refuse to wait so my presence can be announced by some groveling worm,” he sneered as he brushed past her.

The second guard made no move to stop him. Instead, he cowered off to one side, trying very hard not to be noticed.

The Jedi moved quickly up the boarding ramp and into the Spear, not certain how long the ruse would work. Though the guards hadn’t dared to stop him, once he was gone they would almost surely inform someone on board the ship of their honored guest’s arrival. It wouldn’t take long after that for someone to realize something was wrong and order security to hunt down the intruder.

Still guided by the power of the Force emanating from Darth Karrid, he made his way deeper and deeper into the ship. He could feel evil and corruption enveloping him, growing steadily stronger during his descent, and he knew it wasn’t because of his former Padawan’s presence. When Darth Mekhis had created the Ascendant Spear, she’d used a combination of experimental technology and Sith alchemy to imbue the ship itself with the energies of the dark side. By the time Gnost-Dural stepped into the turbolift that would take him to the black heart of the vessel, the Jedi was feeling physically nauseated from the effects. But he also sensed he was nearing his goal.

As he dropped into the very bowels of the ship, the claustrophobic feeling of the dark side pressing in on him from all sides was so strong that he almost didn’t sense the soldiers waiting in the corridor just beyond the turbolift’s doors. At the last possible instant, the Force granted him a sudden premonition of the lethal trap. Pulling his green-bladed lightsaber from his belt he dropped to the ground, pressing himself facedown flat on the floor as the turbolift came to a stop on the Spear’s lowest level.

The guards’ blaster bolts shredded the turbolift’s doors as they slid open, ricocheting over Gnost-Dural’s head as they carved an arc at waist height. The Jedi responded by lashing out with the Force, hurling the four heavily armored soldiers several meters back down the corridor. Before they even hit the ground he had sprung to his feet, charging toward them as he threw his lightsaber sidearm. The spinning blade struck the nearest of his foes, slicing through the chest plate of his battle armor and into the vulnerable flesh beneath.

The surviving three guards didn’t try to regain their feet, instead firing wildly at him from where they lay sprawled on the floor. The Kel Dor angled his charge toward the side wall, leaping and planting a foot halfway up the surface to give him leverage for a high, twisting spin that scraped the ceiling, his arms tucked in close to his chest and his horizontal body perfectly parallel to the floor.

The unexpected move again caught the soldiers off guard, their bolts whizzing beneath him. He landed on his feet amid his still-prone adversaries, his lightsaber flying back into his hand as he recalled it with the Force. He turned sideways, narrowly dodging fire from the closest soldier while a pair of quick flicks with his lightsaber deflected the bolts from the other two harmlessly off to either side.

The hard heel of his boot slammed down on the helmeted head of the man at his feet. At the same time he used the Force to pick up the other two and send them crashing into the ceiling before letting them drop back down to the floor. Momentarily stunned, all three were defenseless against the quick series of cuts and thrusts from his lightsaber that finished them off.

Knowing reinforcements wouldn’t be far behind, he raced down the hall and burst through the door at the end, coming face-to-face with Darth Karrid and her two apprentices.

They were standing in a large, circular chamber: his former Padawan in the center, a male human on her right and a female pure-blooded Sith on her left. Behind Karrid he could see a large crystal sphere, and on the side wall he saw a small control console. Otherwise the room was empty.

All three of his adversaries wore black armor and sported the fierce facial tattoos so common in those who followed the dark side. Their lightsabers were drawn and ready, the shimmering blades casting a crimson glow over the dimly lit room. Clearly they were expecting him, though whether they had sensed his presence through the Force or had simply been warned by the guards outside, he couldn’t say.

“I knew you would come for me one day, Gnost-Dural,” Karrid said, her lips curling into a smile of anticipation. “But even you should know better than to challenge me here on my own ship.”

“A Jedi pursues the dark side, no matter where it tries to hide,” he answered.

“Noble and foolish as ever,” she mocked. “You have no idea of how powerful I’ve become.

“Malgus showed me the true power,” she said, her voice slowly rising with each word. “He led me down the path to greatness. He revealed the secrets you dared not face!

“He taught me to embrace all the things the Jedi fear!” she shouted, her voice echoing off the circular chamber’s walls. “Now I will use them to destroy you and every follower you have brought onto my ship!”

“I have come alone,” Gnost-Dural replied, remaining calm in the face of her growing anger. “It was my decision to send you to Darth Malgus. I started you on this path; no one else is to blame.”

“How quaint,” she said with a sneer. “I thought you’d led a strike team here to kill me, but you just want to save your Padawan from the perils of the dark side.”

“I will purge the galaxy of the evil I unleashed upon it,” he said, his voice betraying nothing beyond firm resolution. “Whether this ends in redemption or death is your decision, not mine.”

Karrid casually twirled her lightsaber, carving long, lazy circles in the air as her apprentices fanned out to either side, slowly moving into position to flank the Jedi.

“I heard tales of your great prowess in battle while I was on Tython,” she told him. “But during all my years as a Padawan I never saw any evidence of it. I’m curious to see how badly your reputation has been exaggerated.”

Gnost-Dural sensed Imperial reinforcements drawing near. Spinning back to the door behind him, he thrust his lightsaber into the access panel on the wall, sending up a shower of sparks as he fried the circuits, sealing the door so nobody else could enter the room.

He wheeled back to face Karrid and her apprentices and slowly circled to his left, keeping his back against the wall as he tried to gauge the strength of his opponents.

“You’ve given yourself over to the Ascendant Spear,” Gnost-Dural warned his former Padawan, holding his own weapon steady in front of him, two hands on the hilt in a classic defensive posture. “It has consumed your thoughts and training. In learning to master this ship, your other skills have atrophied.”

“That is why I don’t intend to face you alone,” Karrid said.

A slight nod of the Falleen’s head sent her apprentices rushing forward, and Master Gnost-Dural braced to meet their charge.

CHAPTER 24

THERON HAD NO IDEA what Gnost-Dural was planning, but he knew he had to get on the Ascendant Spear quickly. Instead of heading back to the Golden Galley where he might hope to steal a boarding pass, he headed for the hangar where the ship had docked.

The scene was one of chaos—hundreds of crew members milled around the hangar, clearly agitated. Six guards stood with weapons drawn, lined up at the base of each of the half dozen ramps leading into the ship, blocking the way.

Theron slipped into the crowd, studying the guards. He quickly realized they weren’t allowing anyone to leave the vessel. Anyone trying to board was subject to a lengthy interrogation and inspection of their ID before being allowed to pass; the delay was causing a steady increase in the crowd waiting impatiently to be allowed back on.

Whatever Gnost-Dural had done had caused security to clamp down hard.

“What’s going on?” Theron asked a tall woman beside him.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” she answered, clearly annoyed and not entirely sober. “I just want to get back to my bunk.”

There were angry murmurs in the crowd, and a handful of people actually pushed through to verbally confront the guards at the base of the boarding ramps—something that would never have happened a year ago. Imperial citizens were raised in a military culture that trained them to respect authority. But the traditional discipline of the Imperial troops had been frayed by their recent setbacks in the war. And with hundreds of tired and drunk crew members coming back from R&R, tempers were high.

An idea struck Theron. It was crazy, impulsive, and risky … in other words, just his style.

He worked his way through the crowd, heading out of the hangar and back into Reaver Station. He remembered passing by a small security post: a room where the soldiers responsible for inspecting the incoming vessels could pass the time while they waited for arrivals. With C wing shut down to other traffic because of the Spear’s presence, the guard post was unstaffed.

Theron paused at the door, glancing around quickly, and made sure nobody in the crowd of people passing by was paying any attention to him; they were too wrapped up in their own thoughts and conversations, or focused on meeting up with friends to enjoy their brief time on the station away from whatever vessel they served on.

He pulled the slicer spike from his pocket, concealing it in his palm as he clipped it into the access panel on the wall. He was careful to stand straight and tall, his shoulders back and his head held high as he quickly sliced through the locked door; hunching over and other furtive behavior would draw far more attention from the people walking by than someone who clearly looked like he had every right to be there.

The door slid open and Theron stepped confidently into the small room beyond before closing it behind him. The guard post was crowded—four chairs packed in around a large control console, with vidscreens displaying the various hangars across the station: EMPTY; PENDING ARRIVAL; SECURITY CHECK IN PROGRESS; CLEARED TO BOARD. Every hangar in C wing was set to the same status: INACTIVE.

Because hangar security needed to know the number and size of incoming vessels so they could properly handle inspections, the guard post had access to Reaver Station’s external scanners and the early-warning beacons. The beacons were the first line of defense, strategically placed to detect incoming vessels long before they actually reached Reaver Station.

It didn’t take long for Theron to slice into the system. The scanners currently showed a few dozen Imperial vessels in the sector, arriving, departing, or waiting for clearance from the central tower to land.

He quickly verified that Teff’ith was gone; the status display of the hangar where they had docked now read EMPTY. Satisfied, he made a small adjustment to one of the settings on his slicer spike, then began to feed a steady stream of false data into the system.

Several dozen vessels ranging in size from single-pilot fighters all the way up to full capital ships suddenly materialized on the scanners, popping into existence near the early-warning beacons. The data mimicked the effect of a large, well-coordinated fleet dropping from hyperspace all at once on the farthest edges of the sector. A few seconds later alarms began to ring out through Reaver Station warning of the simulated Republic attack.

The sizzle and hum of clashing blades echoed off the walls of the cavernous chamber as Karrid’s apprentices engaged Gnost-Dural. Their attacks were basic variations on the Makashi style, a precise and economical lightsaber form designed for maximum results with minimal movement by stressing jabs and thrusts.

Their skills were raw; like Karrid much of their training had focused on developing the unique abilities required to help their Master command the Ascendant Spear. They were still able to call on the fury of the dark side to move with astonishing strength and speed, but they hadn’t mastered the subtle art of allowing the Force to guide their blades. They were wielding the weapon instead of allowing it to become an extension of themselves.

Nevertheless they were relentless in their attacks, and there were two of them. Gnost-Dural was forced onto the defensive to ward off their attacks, occasionally slipping in quick maneuvers drawn from the more aggressive Ataru form to keep them off balance.

Darth Karrid merely observed the battle at first, keeping a safe distance from the deadly blade of her former Master while his focus and energies were drained by her apprentices.

Realizing he would eventually wear down if he allowed the battle to become a duel of attrition, the Kel Dor countered with Djem So, the fifth of the seven recognized lightsaber forms. Concentrating his counterattacks exclusively on the physically smaller female Sith, he unleashed a series of savage blows, driving her into a stumbling retreat.

For an instant he was left completely exposed to her human companion, but the unexpected ferocity of Gnost-Dural’s sudden switch in tactics caught him unprepared. He hesitated a fraction of a second before thrusting forward, giving the Jedi enough time to leap aside, even as his Sith opponent tripped over her own backpedaling feet and fell to the floor.

Gnost-Dural lunged forward to deliver a coup de grâce, but his momentum was suddenly reversed and he found himself sailing backward as Darth Karrid hit him with a powerful Force push. He was able to roll into a back somersault as he hit the ground and spring back to his feet, but his brief advantage was lost.

The two apprentices closed on him again, cutting him off before he could even think about charging toward Karrid. As they approached, he sensed the Imperial reinforcements in the hall outside, scrambling to restore power to the sealed door so they could join the fray.

Knowing he was running out of time, Gnost-Dural switched tactics again. He thrust out with a powerful Force wave, sweeping them both off their feet. But before he could finish off his prone opponents Karrid unleashed a blast of crackling dark side energy in his direction. Gnost-Dural leapt clear, the deadly blue lightning scorching the floor where he had been standing an instant before.

He threw his lightsaber in Karrid’s direction, sending it end-over-end on a direct line with his target. The Falleen parried the attack with her own blade, though she was forced to retreat a step to absorb the impact. Gnost-Dural was already in motion, charging past her apprentices before they could scramble to their feet. His lightsaber flew back into his outstretched palm as he fell on Karrid.

He had trained her in Niman, the sixth and most balanced form of lightsaber combat. Malgus might have taught her other styles, but faced with Gnost-Dural’s furious assault she instinctively fell back into the one she had learned before all others. Niman lent itself well to the Jedi ways, eschewing naked aggression for balance and economy of movement that relied on focus and precision. As a Sith Lord who drew her strength from channeling the raw emotional fury of the dark side, the style compromised Karrid’s abilities. The effect was minimal, but it was more than enough for Gnost-Dural to exploit.

He used a quick shove with the Force to send her off balance and brought his lightsaber in high to strike at her shoulder. When she raised her own blade to block the blow, he dropped low and took her feet out from under her with a sweep of his leg.

Karrid toppled over, but the Jedi was forced to turn his back on her to engage the female Sith as she leapt to Karrid’s aid. They exchanged a quick series of blows—plenty of time for Karrid to regain her feet. Instead of attempting to finish Gnost-Dural off by attacking from his flank, however, she retreated from the melee, putting the preservation of her own life above the opportunity to finish off her opponent.

The male apprentice joined in a second later, and Gnost-Dural switched to the defensive Soresu form. He could sense fatigue seeping into his muscles: the toll of the battle was wearing him down, fractionally slowing his blade and leaving him more vulnerable to the Force attacks of his enemies. An instant later the door whooshed open and a dozen Imperial guards spilled into the room.

Karrid held up a hand to indicate they should hold their fire.

“The outcome is inevitable,” Karrid called out to him as he fought off the twin attacks of her apprentices. “I sense your exhaustion. Throw down your weapon and I will let you beg for mercy.”

Gnost-Dural hadn’t expected to win the battle. From the moment he decided to board the Ascendant Spear, he’d known defeating Karrid was a near impossibility. But he wasn’t about to surrender and grovel at her feet—if for no other reason than that if he did, she would be suspicious and his true plan would never work.

“I didn’t come here seeking victory,” he said.

Karrid’s head tilted to the side as she searched for the meaning behind his words. Failing to grasp it, she turned to the soldiers arrayed just inside the door.

“I want him alive,” she told the captain.

Gnost-Dural used the last of his dwindling strength to call on the Force for a final desperate leap that sent him hurtling over the apprentices’ heads toward his former Padawan.

The attack was doomed to failure; there were a dozen ways Karrid could have avoided or repelled the attack. But she didn’t even have to react as the soldiers opened fire with a dozen blasters all set to stun. The bolts knocked the Jedi from the air and sent him slamming hard to the ground. His lightsaber fell from his paralyzed fingers, the blade extinguished as the hilt clattered to the floor.

As he lay there facedown struggling to cling to consciousness, Karrid strode over and picked up his lightsaber, tucking it into her belt like a hunter claiming a trophy from a prized kill. She rolled him over onto his back with her boot, then crouched down to peer into his masked face.

“You knew you couldn’t win this battle,” she said. “So why did you really come here?”

Gnost-Dural had no intention of answering her question, but even if he had his voice would have been drowned out by the sounds of an alarm ringing through the ship.

Karrid snapped her head in the direction of the guard captain, who was listening intently to a message coming over the receiver in his ear.

“Reaver Station is under attack!” he blurted out. “A Republic fleet has been detected in the sector. ETA sixteen minutes!”

“Activate our shields,” Karrid answered, concerned but not panicked. “Recall all crew to their posts. We leave dock in twelve minutes. Anyone not on board will be left behind and face a full court-martial.”

As the captain relayed her commands to the person on the other end of the transmission, Karrid turned back to look down at Gnost-Dural.

“Was this your plan? Sacrifice yourself so the Republic could catch us in port and unprepared? Or is there more to your scheme?”

Gnost-Dural stayed silent, the edges of his vision growing dim as the blackness closed in, the blaring alarms growing fainter and more distant.

Just before he finally lost consciousness, he heard Karrid say, “This is another battle you cannot win. The Imperial interrogators will make you tell me everything.”

Reaver Station was in chaos. The alarms echoing through the station were quickly matched by alarms from every ship docked in the hangars as the central tower spread word of the Republic fleet closing in.

Men and women sprinted back to their vessels, scrambling to get to their battle stations before the enemy arrived. Theron didn’t know how long it would take for his ruse to be discovered, but he knew he had to act fast.

He ran from the guard post, joining the stampede of soldiers bearing down on the hangar where the Ascendant Spear was docked. As he burst into the bay, he was swept up in the crowd and carried toward the ramps. The guards keeping the crew from boarding the ship were gone, either recalled onto the Spear or overwhelmed by the sudden crush of people scrambling to get to their posts.

Theron continued to let the crowd carry him along, heading up the ramp and into the vessel. Once aboard, the crowd thinned quickly as people broke off in different directions, heading to their assigned stations.

Theron did his best to look like he knew where he was going, though in truth he had no idea. He’d only had time to plan out how he’d get himself on the ship. Now that he was aboard he needed to figure out something new, and it was hard to concentrate due to the incessant clang of the Spear’s warning klaxon.

It wasn’t unheard of for new crew members to get lost when first assigned to a ship as large as the Ascendant Spear, and there were diagrams of the ship’s basic layout posted at several places along the bulkheads. He stopped to check one, quickly memorizing the layout before choosing his destination. He needed somewhere with access to the ship’s main systems so he could slice in and plant the virus, but it had to be isolated enough for him to work in private.

His eyes fell on the engine room near the rear of the ship. Separated from the rest of the vessel by a heavily shielded bulkhead to guard against explosions and radioactive discharges, it was accessible only through a single maintenance hatch.

Moving with a new sense of purpose, he worked his way through the ship toward the turbolift leading down to the vessel’s lowest level. He encountered fewer and fewer people as he went, and by the time he reached the lift he was alone.

Before he could press the button to call it, the doors slid open to reveal a short, heavyset woman in a major’s uniform.

“Corporal!” she snapped on seeing Theron waiting for the elevator. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Shorry, shir,” Theron said, slurring his words and snapping off a sloppy salute. He squinted one eye closed as he swayed unsteadily on his feet. “Gotta get to my posht.”

“This lift is reserved!” she barked, her voice even louder than the incessant alarms. “Authorized personnel only!”

“Alarmsh woke me up,” Theron mumbled. “Gotta get to en-ger … en-ger … en-ger-reering.”

“You’re drunk!” she spat, her voice filled with disgust. “Are you scheduled for duty?”

“Oh-nine-hundred,” he replied.

“That’s not for another six hours,” she said with an exasperated shake of her head. “Go back and sleep it off in your bunk.”

“Shure thing, shir,” Theron said, fumbling out another clumsy salute.

He turned and staggered off in the opposite direction, down the corridor and around the corner. Once he was out of sight he dropped the act and moved quickly down the passage, taking a series of twists and turns that eventually doubled him back to the turbolift.

Peering around the corner, he made sure the major was gone before making a dash for the lift. He waited impatiently for the doors to open, then slipped inside and punched the button for G Deck, hoping he wouldn’t run into anyone else.

Luck was with him. He didn’t see anybody as he made his way from the elevator to the engine room’s access hatch. Unlike the automated doors controlled by access panels, this was an old durasteel hinge model, opened by turning a heavy wheel in the center of the hatch.

The wheel was stiff from lack of use, and despite his best efforts Theron couldn’t budge it. He realized the maintenance crew probably used a wrench to gain the necessary leverage, but all he had was his pistol. He looked around the empty corridor, trying to find something else he could use. Seeing nothing, he shrugged and pulled the blaster from the holster on his hip, jamming it into the spokes of the door’s wheel.

Grabbing the pistol’s grip with one hand and the barrel with the other he pulled for all he was worth. The veins on his neck bulged as his muscles strained. Just as he thought he was about to pass out from the effort, the wheel let loose with a groan and moved a quarter turn.

Theron adjusted his grip on the pistol and pulled again. The wheel moved more easily this time; another quarter turn. He regripped for a third time and pulled. The wheel completed its revolution and the door popped open with a loud clang.

Standing motionless, he waited to see if anyone would respond to the noise, but all he heard was the clanging alarm. When he removed the pistol from the spokes of the wheel he noticed that the barrel had been bent. The weapon was useless.

Out of habit he slapped it into his leg holster, then stepped in through the hatch, pulling the heavy durasteel door closed behind him. He turned the wheel on the inside a quarter turn—enough to keep the hatch from popping open, but not so far he’d have to struggle to open it when he was ready to get out.

He was standing on a narrow metal walkway that ran the full forty-meter length of the engine room. To his left was a reinforced bulkhead, to his right the Spear’s massive hyperdrive and the enormous ion engines that propelled the ship when it moved at sublight speeds. The walls and ceiling were covered with a maze of pipes, tubes, cords, and wires running among hundreds of seemingly randomly placed electrical boxes, fuse panels, and computer chip relays.

In addition to the alarms he could still hear and feel through the vibrations in the walkway, there was a steady, low-pitched hum coming from the ion engines. The air in the engine room was twenty degrees warmer than the corridor he had just come in from, and it smelled of ozone and burning plastic.

If the heat doesn’t make me pass out, the fumes just might.

There were no control panels down here in the bowels of the ship, but Theron knew he could slice the Spear by tapping directly into the main system. All he had to do was figure out which of the hundreds of wires and relays connected the engine room to the primary command console on the bridge.

Shouldn’t take more than a few hours, right?

To his relief, the clanging alarms finally stopped. The blessed silence was broken by two long blasts from a distant horn, and the ground shifted under his feet as the Ascendant Spear disengaged from Reaver Station.

Guess you’re not leaving anytime soon, he thought. Might as well get to work.

CHAPTER 25

THE IMPERIAL SHUTTLE’S TEN-HOUR JOURNEY from Reaver Station back to Jigani Port gave Teff’ith plenty of time to think about her deal with Theron. She wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, but the basic details were clear—Theron and the weird-looking Jedi were trying something crazy and foolish, and if she didn’t deliver her message to Grand Master Satele Shan a lot of people were going to die.

She tried to tell herself she didn’t really care what happened to a bunch of people she’d never met, but during the long flight her mind kept conjuring up images of orbital cities in ruins, the bodies of men, women, and children scattered among the wreckage. She’d seen plenty of pictures of death and destruction on the holovids and never given them a second thought, but this was different. Those people were already dead; there was no point worrying about them. The ones on Duro were still alive.

No profit for us in letting them die, she thought, reminding herself why she was really doing this. Theron had promised her a big fat payday when this was all over, and it wasn’t like she was taking any real risk. Agreeing to the job had actually gotten her off Reaver Station before the Jedi and Theron pulled off whatever crazy stunt they were planning.

Only risk is if Theron doesn’t make it, she thought.

She realized the thought of him dying on Reaver Station actually bothered her more than thinking of all the nameless victims on Duro. Try as she might, she couldn’t convince herself it was entirely because he wouldn’t be able to pay her.

She slept for a few hours, letting the shuttle’s autopilot navigate through hyperspace. She dreamed of Ngani Zho, the crazy old Jedi who’d thrown himself in front of a blaster bolt meant for her, sacrificing his life for her own. But she didn’t dream of their time together or his death; in her dreams it was like the old man had never left.

Teff’ith was on the Imperial shuttle, heading back to Jigani Port. Ngani Zho was sitting in the seat beside her. His scraggly gray hair and bushy eyebrows were wild and disheveled—looking at him, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine he had never owned a comb in his life. He wore an old Jedi robe, wrinkled and stained, with the hood thrown back. There were several charred holes in his chest where the blasters had ripped through him, but his blue eyes were sharp and bright.

“I expected better from you, Teff’ith,” he said. “You think I gave my life up just so you could keep on working for the Black Sun?”

“Pft. Work for Old Tion Brotherhood now.”

“That’s not the point.”

“Big things ahead for us.”

“At least we agree on that.”

“Why did you save us?”

A beep from the autopilot alerting her that they were preparing to drop out of hyperspace startled her awake before the man in her dream could give her an answer.

“Stupid Jedi,” Teff’ith muttered as she switched the shuttle over to manual control.

She dropped from hyperspace in the Desevro system, charted a course for the shuttle to bring her into Jigani Port, then opened a holo channel.

“Welcome back, Sunshine!” Gorvich said once the holo was connected. “Quick turnaround. I guess everything must have gone real smooth.”

“Not smooth. Left Jedi and Theron at Reaver Station.”

Gorvich chuckled. “Sounds like a good story. Lay it on me.”

“Not over comm channels. Meet us at Jedi’s fancy shuttle. You move it?”

“Nah, it’s still in the hangar at Jigani Port. How long till you get there?”

“Thirty minutes,” she said, flicking off the holo so she wouldn’t have to deal with Gorvich for one second longer than absolutely necessary.

By the time she arrived at the hangar where the Prosperity was parked, Gorvich was already waiting for her.

“Okay, Sunshine. We’re here. So what’s the deal? Why’d you ditch the others?”

She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. She wanted to tell Gorvich as little about what had happened as possible. If he knew Theron had offered her ten thousand credits, he’d want a cut.

“Didn’t ditch them. Told us to go. Need us to deliver a message.”

“I don’t follow,” Gorvich said, scratching his head. “You going back to pick them up later?”

“Not part of the plan.”

“So how are they going to get off Reaver Station?”

Teff’ith shrugged. “Never told us. Just said take shuttle. Go deliver message.”

Gorvich shook his head. “I knew they were up to something funny. This won’t come back later and bite me when I’m not looking, will it?”

“You be fine,” the Twi’lek assured him.

Gorvich crossed his arms and stared at Teff’ith, his eyes staying above the neck for a change.

“I know you’re keeping something from me, Sunshine. But I’ll let it slide since you set this whole deal up.”

“Still owe us our cut,” she reminded him.

“Don’t worry, I got the credits stashed away somewhere safe.” Gorvich laughed—a mean, spiteful sound. “Guess we aren’t going to get those bonus credits your friend promised, though.”

“Might still make it off Reaver Station,” Teff’ith said, a little more defensively than she intended.

“I’m just going to assume he’s not coming back,” Gorvich said. “Good thing we took this shuttle for collateral. Already got a couple of buyers lined up.”

Seeing Teff’ith’s scowl, he added, “Hey, I didn’t think any of you was going to make it back.”

“Why you sent us with them? Want to keep all the credits for yourself?”

“Water under the bridge, Sunshine,” he said with an indifferent shrug. “Now that you’re back I’m happy to share.”

“Can’t sell shuttle,” she told him, already tiring of the conversation. “Need it to deliver message.”

“Whoa, hold on a second. What are you talking about? You think I’m going to just let you take off in my collateral?” Gorvich’s eyes narrowed. “How do I know you and your friends aren’t trying to pull a fast one? You say they’re still on Reaver Station, but for all I know you dropped them off at some luxury resort. Then they send you back here to get the Prosperity so you can all meet up later and get out of paying me the rest of the credits I was promised!”

“Idiot,” Teff’ith said with a shake of her head, turning away from him and heading toward the shuttle.

“One more step and I ventilate your pretty little skull, Sunshine.”

She turned around slowly to see Gorvich had drawn his blaster and was pointing it right at her.

“Saved your life on Nar Shaddaa,” she hissed.

“That’s why I didn’t shoot you in the back,” he admitted. “But I don’t like being played. So stop holding out and tell me what’s really going on.”

Teff’ith bit her lip, trying to find a way to talk herself out of this without having to cut Gorvich in on her side deal. In the end, she couldn’t do it.

“Theron offered ten thousand credits to deliver message to Coruscant. Gotta take fancy shuttle to get there in time.”

“Ten thousand credits, huh?” Gorvich lowered his blaster, though he didn’t put it away.

“Cut you in for three,” Teff’ith said.

“Hold on a second, Sunshine,” he said, holding up his free hand. “You really believe you’re going to get ten thousand credits just to deliver a message to Coruscant? You’re dreaming.”

“Deal’s good,” she insisted, not wanting to get into the details.

“You don’t think Coruscant customs has access to the Prosperity’s records? They’ll toss you in jail for theft the second you touch down.”

Teff’ith hadn’t considered that. Hopefully she’d be able to convince the authorities that she really did have an urgent message for Grand Master Satele Shan.

“Hah, didn’t think of that, did you?” Gorvich gloated, recognizing the reason for her silence. “See, that’s why you need me around watching out for you.”

“Worth the risk,” Teff’ith argued. “Ten thousand credits too good to pass up.”

“If he pays you. He already owes us another twenty on credit. And remember how he renegotiated the original deal? He says ten now, but when it comes time to pay who knows how much he’ll actually be willing to fork over. Maybe zero.”

“Won’t be zero,” Teff’ith grumbled.

“Even if he comes through with the ten he promised and the twenty he already owes us, I’ve got a better deal for you,” Gorvich said. “Forget about the message. We sell the Prosperity and split the profit. We both come out way ahead in that game.”

Teff’ith wasn’t surprised by Gorvich’s plan; he was a despicable man with no honor. But he knew how to turn a profit. And everything he’d said about Theron was true—Theron had reneged on the original deal. And even if she delivered the message and he didn’t double-cross her, there was a good chance whatever crazy plan he was trying to pull off wouldn’t work. If he was killed or captured by the Sith, she could kiss her credits good-bye.

“Well, Sunshine, what’s it going to be?”

“How much we get for the shuttle?”

“Fifty thousand, easy. Plus I’ve still got your cut of the thirty I stashed away.”

If she tried to help Theron, Gorvich might just shoot her where she stood. Even if she tricked or overpowered him, her days with the Old Tion Brotherhood would be over. And there was a good chance she might not get paid anyway.

Or she could abandon Theron, keep working with Gorvich, and continue climbing the ranks of the Brotherhood while making an easy forty thousand credits.

“Good money, Sunshine,” Gorvich prodded. “Enough to ease any guilt about betraying a friend.”

And how long till you betray us?

Teff’ith sprang into action, hoping to catch Gorvich off guard as he waited for her answer. He was standing three steps away from her, his gun still pointed casually at the ground. Her first step was free. On her second his eyes went wide with the realization of what was happening. On the third he was bringing the gun up, but he only got it halfway before she knocked it out of his hand with a spinning back kick. She followed it up with a jumping front kick, swinging her foot as hard as she could and catching him right between the legs. Gorvich collapsed on the ground, curled up in the fetal position, groaning softly.

Teff’ith scooped up his fallen pistol, pointed it at him, then decided not to pull the trigger. Instead, she tucked it into her belt and raced over to the shuttle. She punched in the access code and the Prosperity’s boarding ramp descended with a soft hiss from the pressurized cabin. She ran up it, turning to glance back at Gorvich.

He was still on the floor, but he was crawling toward the ship. He met her eye with a hate-filled gaze. Something in that look made Teff’ith realize he wasn’t done yet. Reacting on pure instinct, she threw herself back and to the side, grabbing one of the boarding ramp’s struts to keep from falling off. At the same time, Gorvich’s hand flickered, dropping to the sharpened blade he kept strapped to his thigh and hurling it in her direction with a single, well-practiced motion almost too quick for the eye to follow.

The blade buried itself deep in Teff’ith’s shoulder, almost knocking her off the boarding ramp. Using the strut for leverage, she hauled herself into the ship and hit the button to close the boarding ramp behind her, acutely aware that if she hadn’t tried to get out of the way the blade now protruding from her shoulder would have buried itself deep in her back. Ignoring her injury, she rushed to the cockpit, fired up the engine, sent the signal to open the hangar doors, and took to the air.

Back on the ground Gorvich crawled over to the control panel and hauled himself up, slamming the button to close the hangar doors with his fist.

Teff’ith saw the hangar doors stop at halfway open, then slowly start to close again. She gritted her teeth, yanked back hard on the control stick to send the ship hurtling forward, and braced for impact.

The Prosperity’s hull, like everything else about the vessel, was top-of-the-line. The multiple layers of durasteel plating and the reinforced frame struck the hangar’s doors and wrenched them off their hinges, sending them flying as the thrusters powered the ship on through and up into the sky.

Climbing toward the upper atmosphere, Teff’ith felt a subtle shimmy in the shuttle’s formerly velvet-smooth ride, but checking the ship’s instrument panel showed no significant damage. A few minutes later she was far enough away from the planet’s gravitational field to engage the hyperspace drive and activate the advanced autopilot to take her to Coruscant.

Only then did she tend to her wounded shoulder, digging out the medkit from beneath the pilot’s seat. She inspected the blade, making sure she wouldn’t bleed out if she pulled it free. Fortunately it had struck muscle and bone rather than a major artery, and she was able to remove it without any real difficulty … though doing so made her tilt her head back and scream.

Blocking out the pain, she treated and dressed the wound with the efficiency of one all too familiar with administering back-alley medicine. She inspected her work one final time before taking a pair of kolto-filled hypodermics and jabbing them into her thigh.

The pain disappeared almost instantly, and she felt a pleasant warmth spreading through her. She shifted in her seat and the chair responded by automatically adjusting itself to her new position, enveloping her in luxurious comfort.

She turned her head to the side and saw Ngani Zho once again sitting in the seat beside her.

“I’m proud of you, my girl. For sparing Gorvich, and for making the right choice.”

“Now maybe stupid Jedi leave us alone,” she murmured, her words trailing off into a soft snore.

“I have the latest casualty estimates for tomorrow’s attack on Duro,” the Director said.

“Do you really think I want to see them?” Jace asked. The Supreme Commander was slumped in the chair behind his desk, his hand clutching an empty glass. He leaned forward and grabbed the long neck of the half-full bottle in front of him and refilled his drink for what Marcus guessed wasn’t the first time this evening.

“The extra patrols you’re sending help. Not much, but a little.”

“We save a few hundred,” Jace grunted bitterly. “But we still sacrifice thousands.”

“We could try to come up with an excuse to have an actual fleet orbiting the planet,” the Director suggested. “Make up some honor to give to one of Duro’s citizens. Have the ships there as part of the celebration.”

“Imagine you’re the Imperial Minister of Logistics,” Jace said, his words clear despite the alcohol he’d consumed. “What would you think if you found a ceremonial fleet stationed at Duro when you launched your surprise attack? Would you believe it was just coincidence?”

The Director sighed. “No. I’d think the cipher codes had been compromised.”

Jace raised his drink in a silent toast to his honesty, then downed it in a single gulp.

“Grab yourself a glass,” he said, nodding over to the bar in the corner as he refilled his own.

The Director did just that before sitting in one of the chairs on the opposite side of the Supreme Commander’s desk. Jace held the bottle up and Marcus extended his glass.

“You think Theron’s going to follow through on the mission?” Jace asked as he poured.

Marcus drained half his drink before answering, “He’s my best agent.”

“You used to say he was ‘one of the best,’ ” Jace noted.

“I upgraded him after he brought back the black cipher.”

“What about Gnost-Dural? He’s a Jedi.” Jace emptied his glass again. “They’re not always great at following orders that don’t fit their understanding of the universe.”

“I think he’s smart enough to understand why we had to do this. And aborting the mission doesn’t help Duro.”

“So you think they’ll go forward?”

“I think so. They both care too much about the Republic to let this go off the rails.”

“And after this is over—after we bring down the Spear and finally put an end to this blasted war—you think Theron will ever forgive me?”

The Director didn’t answer; instead he just drained what was left of his drink.

“Do you support my decision?” Jace wanted to know.

“I do,” Marcus said. “It’s the right call. Don’t know if I could have made it, though. And I don’t know how either of us is supposed to live with it.”

Jace grabbed the bottle and refilled their glasses.

“Making a decision like this is brutal,” the Supreme Commander agreed. “But living with it is worse.”

CHAPTER 26

HUNCHED OVER ONE OF THE MANY computer relay panels in the Ascendant Spear’s engine room, Theron wiped the sweat away from his brow before it ran down and stung his eyes. With the help of his slicer spike, he tapped into the panel and ran a diagnostic search to map out the various systems it was connected to.

Theron had been hiding in the engine room ever since the Spear left Reaver Station. He had no way to get off the vessel until it docked again short of stealing an escape pod, which would trigger an emergency alarm and get him blasted out of existence. Fortunately, the hours he’d been stuck on the narrow walkway in the sweltering, reeking engine room had actually proved beneficial. Realizing he wasn’t going anywhere soon, Theron had spent his time trying to get a better understanding of the vessel’s inner workings.

Mapping each relay individually was a simple but time-consuming process—one he’d already repeated over a dozen times. But the grueling work was the key to piecing together a complete picture of the Spear’s control systems. There was no single central network connecting everything; each system was controlled independently, linked to several different relays that could allow functionality to be rerouted through multiple pathways if something went wrong.

His exploration of the engine room was proving to be simultaneously exhausting, fascinating, and disheartening. The complexity of the ship was mind boggling. It was the crowning achievement of Darth Mekhis’s experimental weapons program. SIS had long suspected that there was some kind of link between the vessel itself and whoever was in command; Mekhis had specialized in combining biology and cybernetics. But the full scope of the symbiotic relationship went far beyond anything they had theorized.

Whenever Theron sliced into a computer terminal, his cybernetic implants allowed him to interface directly with the network. But there was still a wall of separation, a clear distinction between user and device. Mekhis had found a way to tear down that wall; when Karrid was in command of the Spear the ship became part of her … or maybe she became part of the ship. They were inseparable. The connection gave her the ability to read and react almost instantly during a battle, the Spear’s sensors relaying information directly into her awareness, then responding immediately to her commands.

It also gave her a heightened awareness of everything that was happening with the vessel’s systems while she was linked to the ship. Theron would have to be extremely cautious with anything he did, taking extra care to use a light touch so Karrid wouldn’t sense his presence. And he realized the original plan of planting a dormant virus probably wouldn’t work.

Even if Karrid didn’t notice the intrusion, the Spear had multiple layers of safeguards and redundancies that would quickly isolate and disable the virus, the relays cutting off the malware as they rerouted the damaged functions through a new path.

The only hope of effectively sabotaging the vessel was for Theron to be actively slicing the system while the Spear was in battle, shifting and switching his electronic attacks to stay a step ahead of the vessel’s security protocols. The dilemma of how he was supposed to actually get off the ship if he was actively sabotaging it in the middle of a battle was something he tried not to worry about for the moment.

On the plus side, the Spear’s unique design allowed Theron’s own cybernetic implants to operate at peak efficiency while he was plugged into the ship, giving him a level of access unlike anything he’d experienced before. He’d already managed to patch into the ship’s internal communications, allowing the implant in his ear to receive all their transmissions.

“Red Patrol checking in,” a voice chimed in his ear. “E Deck is clear. Proceeding to F Deck.”

Theron sighed and disconnected his slicer spike from the panel. He stood up straight, stretching to ease a crick in his back.

Tapping into the comm systems had allowed him to follow the progress of the security patrols Karrid had dispatched once she realized the Republic fleet hadn’t really existed. Theron had been tracking them closely as they systematically worked their way through each level of the vessel wing by wing. He hated to interrupt his work, but it was time to move if he didn’t want to be discovered.

He went to the durasteel maintenance hatch and slowly turned the wheel to open it. There was a sharp clink as the hatch popped free, and a soft squeak from the hinges as it swung open. Theron poked his head out into the corridor, not expecting to see anyone but also not willing to take any chances. His only weapon was the blaster he had tucked in the holster of his uniform, but he had no intention of firing it after bending the barrel prying open the engine room’s security hatch.

Fortunately the hall was deserted, so he climbed out and closed the hatch behind him, trying not to make any noise. He worked his way down the hall, listening intently for the footsteps of anyone approaching. It wasn’t likely he would run into anybody; G Deck consisted primarily of the engine room and, way on the opposite end, the Spear’s private command chamber. Apart from the security sweep, nobody had any reason to be on the level. Even Karrid wouldn’t venture down unless the Spear was about to go into battle.

Two turbolifts—one near the engine room at the stern, the other near the command chamber at the bow—were the only ways to access the lowest level of the ship. Theron knew the security patrols worked from stern to bow, so he carefully made his way toward the stern, away from the lift he had taken when he first boarded the vessel.

Because of the size and irregular shape of the ion and hypermatter drives, the two sides of G Deck weren’t connected by a single straight corridor. The hall twisted and turned. At each bend, Theron paused and peeked around the corner, knowing if he was discovered he would have a hard time explaining his presence. After several minutes of careful skulking, he finally reached the turbolift near the front of the vessel. The hall continued another thirty meters before finally terminating in a large, sealed door.

Theron knew the Spear’s command chamber lay beyond, but he resisted the urge to go investigate. The engine room was where he could do the most damage; no point in risking exposure by snooping around just to satisfy his curiosity. He hit the panel on the turbolift, contemplating his next move as he waited for it to arrive. In his ear he could hear the progress of the security team as they reported back each time they cleared another section of the deck above him.

Theron considered heading up to the crew quarters on C Deck. He could look for an untended cabin where he could switch his grubby uniform for fresh clothes, leaving him less likely to draw attention if he needed to move around the ship. He might even get a chance to swap his blaster for one that worked. But whoever’s uniform and weapon he borrowed was likely to notice if one or the other was missing, and that could reinforce suspicions about a stowaway on board. The last thing he needed to worry about was another round of security sweeps.

When the turbolift arrived, he realized he’d have more luck going to the laundry on E Deck. He could also try to sneak something to eat from the nearby food prep areas in the galley kitchens, and his sweaty, shoddy appearance was less likely to draw attention among crew who spent their days working around steam-belching laundry machines, smoking ovens, and splattering pots and cauldrons. Hitting the button, he took several deep breaths to get into character, mentally throwing together a number of potential excuses and explanations in case anyone caught him helping himself to a uniform or stealing some extra food.

Stepping off the lift, he saw he didn’t have to worry. E Deck was a hub of frenetic activity, the men and women assigned to the military’s essential but often forgotten service roles rushing back and forth with the energy and focus of a highly trained special ops team. Too absorbed in their own tasks to worry about a junior officer wandering through, none of them paid Theron any attention. In his earpiece he heard another update from the security team; by Theron’s estimate they were halfway done with their sweep through F Deck.

Making his way into the laundry, Theron snagged a pair of pants and a top that looked as if they would fit and tucked them under his arm. Careful not to act suspicious, he made his way over to a hidden corner by one of the washing machines, ducked behind it, and stripped off his grimy clothes. Once he had the new uniform on he was pleasantly surprised to see he had been promoted to captain. Given the harsh penalties for insubordination in the Empire, it was unlikely anyone below his rank would want to draw attention to themselves by confronting him.

If I could find a Grand Moff’s outfit I might just be able to walk onto the bridge and take command.

Though it was only a joke, the thought gave Theron pause. If he could somehow get his hands on some explosives, say from the armory, he could plant them in the engine room and wreak significant damage. As quickly as the idea came to mind, however, he dismissed it. Security around the armory would be much tighter than what he faced here, and even an officer requisitioning several kilograms of explosives was bound to raise questions he couldn’t answer.

Sticking with his original plan, he made his way into the kitchens, dumping his soiled uniform into a hamper half full of dirty laundry. As he’d hoped, the enlisted men and women did their best to avoid making eye contact with him as he marched past, his chest puffed out with what he hoped was the appropriate level of Imperial arrogance and privilege.

In the kitchen he resisted the urge to go after the hot food being prepared for the crew’s next meal, despite his grumbling stomach. Instead, he made his way into the storage lockers in the back and grabbed a pair of ration packs. A young man in cook’s garb gave him a curious look, but when Theron narrowed his eyes at the soldier, his gaze snapped down to the floor. Without saying anything, Theron marched out with his prize and back into the hall.

Another update in his ear informed him the security team had completed the sweep of F Deck and was moving on. Theron made his way back out into the hall and headed down the length of the ship toward the turbolift at the stern. As he reached it he heard another update from the security team.

“Engine room is clear. Moving on.”

He called the turbolift, stepped inside, and thumbed the button for G Deck to complete his circuitous route and return him to where he started.

The corridor was empty as he stepped off the lift; the security patrol had already moved on to the other side of the ship. The wheel on the access hatch turned easier this time, loosened up by its recent use.

Back inside the engine room, he stripped off the captain’s uniform, carefully folding it and setting it in the metal walkway just inside the hatch, along with his bent pistol, his slicer spike, and one of the ration packs he’d stolen. He took a few minutes to consume the contents of the second ration pack. By the time he was done eating he was already covered in sweat. He’d hoped the heat would be more bearable wearing only his underwear and boots. It wasn’t, but at least his new uniform wouldn’t end up covered in dirt and sweat stains.

Retrieving his slicer spike, he returned to the arduous task of learning everything he possibly could about the Ascendant Spear.

A jolt of excruciating pain jarred Gnost-Dural back to consciousness. It felt as if he were being cooked alive from the inside. His eyes popped open wide, adding to his suffering. Someone had removed his protective goggles, and the oxygen-rich atmosphere of the ship felt like acid on his pupils. Squeezing his tortured eyes shut, he let loose a scream, the sound muffled by his breathing mask.

“He’s awake,” he heard Darth Karrid say, and the burning agony suddenly stopped.

Though still unable to open his eyes, the Kel Dor was able to take stock of his surroundings. He was lying on a hard platform or table set at a forty-five-degree angle, his wrists and ankles tightly shackled so that he was spread-eagled against the surface. His robe and most of his clothes had been stripped away, leaving him almost naked.

In addition to Karrid, there were others in the room with him. He recognized the presence of the female Sith apprentice, though he couldn’t sense Karrid’s male follower anywhere close by. And there were two others. He couldn’t feel the dark side emanating from them so he assumed they were not Sith but rather Imperial soldiers: guards, or specially trained interrogators. He heard footsteps approaching, then the sound of Darth Karrid’s voice, much closer than before.

“We know the attack on Reaver Station was staged,” she said, her voice filled with an icy calm. “But I don’t understand why. What was the purpose of setting off a false alarm?”

The Jedi didn’t know what she was talking about, but he suspected Theron had something to do with it. Whatever his partner had been up to, he hoped it had worked—if Theron hadn’t successfully planted the virus in the Spear’s systems, Gnost-Dural’s plan was doomed to fail.

“Hit him again,” Darth Karrid said, tired of waiting for him to answer her question.

This time his body felt not heat, but a strange kind of internalized pressure. His lungs and stomach expanded, as if rapidly filling up with air; his arteries and veins engorged with blood; his arms and legs swelled with fluid, the restraints on his wrists and ankles biting hard into his swelling flesh.

His eyes bulged against his lids and every organ in his body felt stretched and distended, ready to burst or tear apart. Gnost-Dural screamed again through his mask. The pain was unlike anything he had ever felt before, the experience uniquely horrifying … and then suddenly it was gone. Gnost-Dural’s body went limp, like a partially deflated balloon. A second later he began to tremble, every muscle quivering involuntarily. The spasm lasted for several seconds before he was finally able to calm his mind and regain control of his physical body.

“Darth Mekhis was a true genius,” Karrid said with obvious admiration. “She understood that the normal methods of torture had little value against those who can draw upon the Force to sustain them. But even a Jedi Master is helpless against her remarkable machine.

“It attacks the mind and the spirit,” she explained, “but leaves the body intact. Any imaginable horror can be inflicted simply by stimulating the receptors of the brain. The pain will feel completely real, but the flesh is unharmed.”

Gnost-Dural understood the grim implications of what she was saying. Conventional torture would eventually surpass the limits of physical endurance; beyond a certain point the subject would perish. But with Mekhis’s infernal machine, no matter how much a victim suffered, the agony would never end.

Dwelling on the endless horror is another part of the torture, the Jedi reminded himself. Stay calm. Focus on what you need to do.

When he’d first regained consciousness, Gnost-Dural had no sense of how long he had been out. Despite Karrid’s torture, however, he felt his perception of time and space—an awareness born of being closely attuned to the universal power of the Force—returning. A little more than ten hours had passed since the confrontation in Karrid’s inner sanctum; the attack on Duro was still too far away. He needed to hold out for several more hours if his plan was going to work.

“You cannot break me,” he said, his voice cracking from the strain he had already been put through.

“We both know I can,” Karrid whispered from just beside him, running her long fingers seductively along the rough skin of the Kel Dor’s cheek. “But I don’t have to. I know you weren’t acting alone. A security sweep of the ship captured your friends. If you want to spare them this suffering, you will tell me what I want to know.”

Gnost-Dural had to admire the ploy, but he knew she was bluffing. It was possible Theron was somewhere on the ship—he hoped it was true—but he trusted his partner was skilled enough to avoid any kind of security patrol. And Theron was working alone. Karrid had said “friends,” plural, as if there were more than one.

“I know you’re lying,” he told her. “Because I came alone.”

Karrid pulled her hand away from his face in frustration.

“Again,” she said.

This time it felt like a million long, thin needles were impaling every centimeter of his body. They punctured his flesh clean through, sliding through skin, muscle, sinew, and bone before sliding out the other side. They pierced his internal organs; his eyes; even his skull, stabbing into his brain.

He fought against it, trying to summon the Force to ease his suffering. He opened his mouth to recite the Jedi Code to focus his mind and energy, but instead of the soothing words all that emerged was another endless scream.

The needles vanished, disappearing instantly just like the heat and the pressure. And once again, there had been no real harm done to his body, though the memories of the pain lingered.

“The Republic attack on Reaver Station wasn’t real,” Darth Karrid said, her voice finally betraying a hint of her impatience. “So what was the point of a false alarm? Is a real invasion coming next? One we will dismiss because we think it’s just another equipment malfunction?”

“Yes,” Gnost-Dural croaked. “That’s it. You figured it out.”

“Or was it a ploy to cause confusion?” Karrid continued, ignoring his obviously false confession. “A distraction so your allies already on the Reaver Station could set some kind of trap? Something that will be waiting for us if we return to port?”

“The dark side has made you paranoid,” the Jedi whispered. “It blinds you to the truth. Reject the teachings of the Sith and you will have clarity and understanding.”

“Clarity comes through suffering,” Karrid told him. “You will learn that lesson soon enough.”

He heard footsteps as she walked away from him, then heard her speaking to someone else—probably her pure-blooded Sith apprentice.

“Stay here with the interrogators. Watch the Jedi. Do not underestimate him, and beware of trickery through the Force.”

“As you wish, Master,” a female voice replied.

“We will speak again when I return,” Karrid called out to him. “After a few hours on the table has made you more cooperative.”

Gnost-Dural wasn’t aware of her leaving as the interrogators turned on the machine and his world became pain.

In the hall beyond the interrogation room, Karrid paused long enough to savor her former Master’s screams before continuing on. Her security sweeps hadn’t turned up any other stowaways, though she hadn’t expected them to. Sneaking onto her ship was a mission doomed to failure, as evidenced by Gnost-Dural’s capture. She felt it was far more likely his presence was a feint; a suicidal sacrifice to draw her attention away from the real threat.

She’d hoped the Kel Dor would break easily, but she hadn’t really expected that, either. Even Darth Mekhis’s wondrous device would need time to wear down a Jedi Master. But eventually he would tell her everything she wanted to know: who he was working with; how he had known to find her on Reaver Station; why they had staged the false Republic attack. Until then, she was going to keep the Ascendant Spear out on deep patrol, safely away from whatever plot the Republic had cobbled together to destroy her. But that wasn’t the only precaution she was taking.

She took the turbolift to A Deck, where the highest-ranking officers had their private quarters. There she found the newest additions to her crew ready and waiting for her arrival.

Lord Quux was a red-skinned pureblood; Lord Ordez was a dark-skinned human. They had come to Reaver Station to swear fealty to the newest member of the Dark Council, though Karrid had initially been reluctant to welcome them aboard her vessel for fear they might one day be tempted to try to take it from her.

However, Gnost-Dural’s attack had made her reconsider her position. Now that she was on the Dark Council, she had to expect there would be other attempts on her life—if not by the Jedi, then by rivals within the Empire. Realizing it might be wise to keep a pair of well-trained warriors by her side at all times, she’d sent a shuttle to the station to retrieve them.

“I trust your accommodations are to your liking?”

“Exquisite,” Lord Quux replied, while Lord Ordez only bowed his head to show he approved.

“Come with me,” she told them. “We must begin your training.”

“Training, Darth Karrid?” Lord Quux asked.

“If you want to serve me, you must learn to serve my ship as well,” she told them. “I promise you’ll find the experience … rewarding.”

CHAPTER 27

THE KNIFE WOUND ON TEFF’ITH’S SHOULDER barely bothered her as she worked the Prosperity’s controls, bringing the shuttle out of hyperspace just beyond the mass shadow cast by Coruscant’s gravity well.

The capital world of the Republic loomed before her in all its glory, a city world with almost a trillion people on the surface. The four moons orbiting the planet were almost lost among the artificial satellites swirling around it. Massive mirror stations collected and redirected light and heat from Coruscant’s sun to the poles, transforming every square centimeter of the surface into livable land. Ponderous habitation spheres slowly circled the world, swelling the official population by another hundred billion. And giant space stations directed the endless stream of thousands of ships arriving and departing.

Teff’ith just stared out the window of the cockpit. It had been almost two years since she’d last been here … not since her first run-in with Theron. She’d forgotten how overwhelming the galaxy’s most densely populated planet could be when seen from above. The incessant beep of the shuttle’s comlink finally snapped her out of her fog, and she reached out to open the channel.

“Prosperity, do you read?” a man’s voice crackled out. “This is Coruscant flight control station 473. Prosperity, please acknowledge.”

“This is Prosperity,” Teff’ith answered, realizing the shuttle’s auto-transponder must have transmitted the registration directly to the nearest space station for clearance upon her arrival. “What’s wrong?”

“Been trying to hail you for almost two full minutes. Might want to check your comm equipment.”

“Roger,” Teff’ith replied, not certain what else to say. She knew how to smuggle a ship onto Coruscant, but she had no idea what the protocols were for a legal landing on the surface.

“You looking for surface clearance?” the man asked her after a few seconds of silence.

“Roger,” Teff’ith agreed.

Another few seconds passed before the man asked, “Do you have your destination?” He was clearly getting annoyed.

“The Jedi,” Teff’ith blurted out. “Grand Master Satele.”

There was a long pause on the other end before the man replied, “You are cleared for landing at Diplomatic Spaceport 27-B. Transmitting coordinates now.”

“Roger,” Teff’ith said again.

“Over and out.”

Relieved to put an end to the awkward conversation, Teff’ith turned the ship over to the autopilot, allowing it to chart its own course down to the surface. She was surprised she didn’t have to wait in some kind of queue or touch down at one of the orbital space stations for some kind of verification before landing. But then she remembered whose shuttle she was flying, and she realized she had probably been given some kind of special priority service.

The shuttle plunged down into Coruscant’s atmosphere, the autopilot falling into the nearest officially designated flight path as it sped her rapidly to the surface. The ship rattled slightly as it came in, a result of the damage it had sustained crashing through the doors of the hangar during her escape from Jigani Port. But Teff’ith barely noticed, her attention focused on the unimaginable crush of buildings, speeders, and people on the surface.

Coruscant truly was a wonder of the galaxy. There were other worlds with endless cityscapes, like the Hutt-controlled moon of Nar Shaddaa, but none of them rivaled the Republic capital. The tallest, grandest buildings on the Hutt world would have been dwarfed by even the smallest of Coruscant’s skytowers. The general feel of Nar Shaddaa was one of claustrophobia: cramped and crowded. The effect of Coruscant was almost the exact opposite—the towers reaching up forever into the sky and the endless streams of traffic stretching off to disappear over the horizon made the world appear even larger and grander than it actually was.

The autopilot chimed softly, indicating she was nearing her destination. Teff’ith switched over to manual control when she saw the spaceport below her. She didn’t trust autopilots to bring a ship down smoothly at the best of times, and she feared the Prosperity’s damaged hull might throw its precisely calibrated systems off.

Diplomatic Spaceport 27-B was an arrangement of half a dozen circular landing pads in a circle atop a very large, flat-roofed building. In the center of the landing pads was a small structure that Teff’ith guessed housed a turbolift leading to the building’s interior, along with a handful of security personnel. A pair of small airspeeders were parked in one corner of the room, with enough space to accommodate several more.

The shuttle touched down with a slight thump, and Teff’ith killed the engines. She saw two men in official-looking uniforms—one carrying a blaster rifle, the other armed with a pistol—striding out of the central structure toward her vessel, confirming that at least half of her hypothesis was right.

Just like Gorvich said. Coming to arrest us.

She briefly considered firing up the shuttle again and taking off, but she’d come too far to turn back now. Hopefully the guards would be willing to listen to reason.

As she came down the boarding ramp the two men were waiting patiently. She took it as a good sign that neither one had bothered to ready his weapon, yet.

“Miss, is there anyone else on your shuttle?” the one with the pistol asked.

Teff’ith shook her head. She could see the guards exchange a knowing glance, and she saw their muscles tense up slightly.

“Is this your shuttle, miss?” the second wanted to know.

“Not ours. Belongs to Jedi. Gnost-Dural.”

“And where is Master Gnost-Dural, miss?”

Had the guards tried to bully or intimidate her she would have had no trouble dealing with them. But she found this unrelenting politeness, with its thinly veiled undercurrent of suspicion, strangely alarming.

“Gnost-Dural not here. Gave shuttle to us. We have urgent message for Grand Master Satele Shan.”

“Who’s ‘we,’ miss?” the one with the pistol asked. “I thought you said you were alone.”

Teff’ith rolled her eyes. “We is me. Nobody else. Just me.” She put an unduly heavy emphasis on the final pronoun.

“Do you have any identification, miss?”

“We—I—got no time for stupid questions,” she snapped, her composure finally slipping. “Got to see Grand Master Shan right now.”

The guards looked at each other, then back at her.

“If you have a message for her you can give it to us. We’ll make sure she gets it.”

Teff’ith shook her head. “Gotta be in person. Now!”

The guards must have exchanged some kind of unspoken signal, because suddenly they both had their weapons trained on her.

“Miss, please remove your blaster and set it on the ground. Slowly.”

Teff’ith did as instructed.

“Miss, you need to come with us.”

“We go with you,” Teff’ith said, trying to sound calm instead of like some raving lunatic. “But you send message to Grand Master Shan. Tell her Theron sent us.”

While the guard with the blaster rifle kept his weapon pointed at her, the other holstered his pistol and came over to collect her weapon from the ground. Then he gave her a quick pat-down, careful to avoid the wound on her shoulder. To her surprise, he didn’t slap a pair of stun cuffs on her, only took her by the elbow and led her inside the small structure in the middle of the spaceport, his partner following behind with his weapon still at the ready. It was clear they didn’t trust her, but since she’d arrived in a Jedi Master’s shuttle they were hesitant to treat her like a common criminal.

As Teff’ith suspected, there was a turbolift at the rear of the structure, along with two chairs and a holo-terminal. The only door was the one they had just entered, though there were two small windows on each of the side walls.

“Sit down, miss,” the guard at her elbow said.

Still hoping she could reason with them, she did as instructed.

“Send a message to Grand Master Shan,” she reminded him. “You promised us.”

“Just try to remain calm, miss. We’ll get this sorted out.”

“Nothing to sort,” she said, rising up from her chair. “Call Shan!”

The guard with the blaster rifle took a step back, weapon raised, as the other came forward and grabbed her elbow again.

“We’ll put a request in through the proper channels,” he said, hoping to calm her while trying to guide her back into the chair. “Just sit down and relax. Someone is on the way.”

Teff’ith let her shoulders slump and bowed her head as she started to lower herself into her seat. Thinking she was resigned to her fate, the guard at her elbow relaxed his grip.

Instead of sitting down, Teff’ith spun free, yanking the pistol from his holster with one hand as she slid around behind him, using his body to shield her from the guard with the blaster rifle. At the same time she grabbed his wrist with her other hand, twisting his arm up and behind his back while jamming the pistol against the side of his neck.

It happened in the blink of an eye; the other guard didn’t even have time to cry out in surprise before Teff’ith had his partner at her mercy.

“Let him go!” he said, raising his blaster rifle.

Teff’ith twisted her human shield’s arm up even farther behind him. He grunted in pain as she peered at the other man from over his shoulder.

“You go outside. Close the door. Come back in, friend dies!”

The guard hesitated, and Teff’ith pressed her pistol even harder into her captive’s neck.

“Listen to her!” he pleaded. “Do what she says!”

Keeping his weapon high, the other guard slowly backed up until he was outside the small building. He waited a moment, then ducked to the side and out of Teff’ith’s line of fire. She braced, fearing he would pop back around the corner to take a shot at her. But instead the door slid shut as he hit the access panel on the outer wall.

Teff’ith shoved her captive in the back, sending him stumbling away from her. She raised the blaster and fired, frying the panel by the turbolift and causing the man to let out a sharp yelp as he dropped to the floor.

Backing away to the far corner of the room, Teff’ith said, “Get up. Use holo. Call Grand Master Shan.”

“I … I don’t know how to reach her,” he said. “I don’t have that kind of authority.”

“Call your boss. Call boss’s boss. Get Shan on the holo or you die.”

“Okay,” he said, getting to his feet. “Okay, I’ll try.”

Teff’ith had no idea if her plan would work. She knew in the Empire they’d rather let a hostage die than disturb a Sith Lord with this kind of request. She hoped things were different in the Republic.

In the five minutes it took the guard to run his request up a chain of superiors, explaining his situation each time, three speeders came in to land on the roof outside, each carrying four more armed security personnel.

Teff’ith kept one eye on the guard at the holo while the other darted back and forth to the windows at the gathering array of firepower, wondering how long she had until they tried to storm the building.

Just as she was about to give up hope of ending this without bloodshed, the man at the holo said, “I got her! She’s here!”

Teff’ith glanced over to see a woman’s face on the holo. She had no idea what Grand Master Shan looked like, though she thought she could see a faint resemblance in the face to Theron.

“In the corner,” she said, motioning with the gun. “Face down. You move, I shoot.”

“There’s no need for violence,” the woman on the holo said as the guard complied with her instructions. “Let’s try to stay calm.”

“Tried that,” Teff’ith told her, keeping the weapon trained on the guard in the corner. “Nobody listened. Violence only way to get results.”

“I’m here now,” the woman said, obviously trying to soothe her. “I’m listening.”

“You Grand Master Satele Shan?”

“I am.”

“Message from Theron. Needs your help. Sent me to tell you.”

From the expression on the woman’s face, Teff’ith knew Satele was who she claimed to be. She also knew Satele had no doubt that she was telling the truth.

“What happened? What’s wrong?”

“Not here,” Teff’ith said, shaking her head. “Too many ears. Somewhere private.”

“Do you want to come to me?” Satele asked. “Or should I come to you?”

Teff’ith glanced out the window to see more than twenty armed guards waiting on the roof outside.

“You come here. We not going anywhere.”

Thirty seconds after ending her holo call with Satele, Teff’ith saw the guards outside pulling back and lowering their weapons, though none of them left. Five minutes later another airspeeder touched down, this one carrying a single figure in a brown robe.

Ignoring the armed guards, she jumped from her speeder and walked quickly toward where Teff’ith was holed up. As she drew closer, the Twi’lek recognized her as the woman from the holo call. She paused at the door.

“It’s Grand Master Satele Shan,” she said.

“Get up,” Teff’ith said to the man still lying on the ground. “Open the door.”

He did as instructed. Satele glanced from the guard, to Teff’ith, then back to the guard before stepping inside.

“Go,” she said to the guard. “And take the rest of your CSF friends with you. This is Jedi business.”

The man looked back at Teff’ith, then bolted for freedom when she nodded.

Satele closed the door behind him, sealing the two of them alone in the room.

“You don’t need that pistol anymore,” she said.

Teff’ith glanced down at her hand, surprised to realize she was still holding the blaster. She quickly set it on the chair beside her.

“You said Theron sent you,” the Jedi said. “He needs my help.”

“Gnost-Dural, too. Tried to tell guards. Wouldn’t listen.”

“Tell me everything,” Satele said. “Starting with your name.”

CHAPTER 28

THERON POPPED THE SALT TABLETS and downed the last of the water from his second ration kit, hoping it would be enough to keep his body hydrated and his muscles from cramping for a few more hours in the sweltering engine room.

He was nearly finished mapping the Ascendant Spear’s control systems; he only had a handful of relays left to go. And as he had become more and more familiar with the systems, he’d started writing preprogrammed subroutines to disrupt the ship’s operations: one to disable the hyperdrive; another to take down the shields; a third to throw off the targeting systems of the laser cannons. He saved each subroutine as he created it in his cybernetic implant, storing them electronically for later reference, much the way he might memorize a list of names or numbers using his organic memory. Later, he’d be able to call them up and deploy them in rapid succession against Karrid and her ship, giving the Republic fleet a fighting chance when they faced off against the Spear over Duro.

There was just one problem with his plan: so far he had heard nothing about the Spear making preparations to go to Duro. Master Gnost-Dural had assured Theron he’d convince Karrid to go there, but Theron had no way to know if his friend was alive or dead. He’d been listening to the commands issued to and from the vessel’s bridge ever since he’d sliced into the comm channels, but so far he hadn’t heard a word about the Jedi, and the only orders Karrid had given the Spear were to stay out in deep space until they knew more about the feigned attack on Reaver Station.

His slicer spike pinged, notifying him that it had finished mapping the current relay. Theron disconnected it and scanned the data, the information transmitted wirelessly from the spike to the implant in his left eye, superimposing the image over his normal vision.

He recognized a familiar pattern from a previous relay—one that indicated a holding cell, complete with security cams providing live images. The previous cell Theron had stumbled across had been empty. He’d tapped into the cams hoping to see Gnost-Dural, only to be faced with an empty room. He hadn’t thought to look for another holding cell, however. Reattaching the slicer spike to the relay, he established a connection with the security cams, projecting the image onto his visual overlay. This time he found what he was looking for.

Gnost-Dural was alive, strapped to some kind of table. His robe and most of his clothes had been stripped away; even on the low-quality image there was no mistaking the Kel Dor’s exposed body.

Theron carefully used his link with the cam to have it pan slowly around the room. The Jedi was not alone. In addition to a pair of Imperial soldiers, there was also a female Sith pureblood in the room watching over him. From her black robes and facial tattoos it wasn’t hard to assume she was a follower of the dark side. She was probably Darth Karrid’s apprentice, tasked with making sure the prisoner didn’t escape.

Moving the cam back to its original position, Theron cut the feed. He had no idea if the Sith would be able to sense him spying on them through the Force, but he didn’t want to take any chances. Besides, he’d seen all he needed to see.

His mind quickly ran through his options. He could try to help the Jedi escape, but was that what Gnost-Dural wanted? He’d told Theron he was going to convince Darth Karrid to go to Duro; was getting captured part of the plan? Did he know his former Padawan well enough to think he could manipulate her into going to Duro by allowing her to interrogate him? It was a tactic SIS had used in the past, though the success rate wasn’t high. Sometimes the target saw through the ruse and refused to take the bait. Other times they simply killed their prisoner before the false information could be fed to them.

There was no way to know if getting caught was actually a calculated gamble by his partner or if something had simply gone terribly wrong with his original plan. But if something had gone wrong, Theron realized there wasn’t much he could do to help. He might be able to overpower the guards or the Sith individually, but he doubted he could handle all of them together. And even if he did, breaking Gnost-Dural from his prison would only alert Karrid that her old Master wasn’t the only one who had infiltrated the Spear. The entire ship would go into lockdown until they were both found.

Most important of all, rescuing Gnost-Dural did nothing to address the problem of getting the Spear to Duro in the next twelve hours. If getting captured was part of his plan, rescuing him would ruin everything. If it wasn’t, they were doomed anyway. Hard as it was, Theron had to leave Gnost-Dural in enemy hands, trusting that his partner knew what he was doing.

Trying not to think about what the Imperials would do to the Kel Dor, he returned to his work, attaching the slicer spike to the next relay. But it was impossible to push the Jedi completely from his mind. If Gnost-Dural was going to do something to deliver Karrid and the Spear into the hands of the Republic, he had to do it soon. Time was running out.

This time Gnost-Dural’s torment was cold. Not the cold of bitter wind or a frozen world, but the black chill of the grave. He could feel his flesh rot and decay, his skin growing taut, his bones becoming hollow and brittle before crumbling into dust.

When the suffering abruptly and mercifully ended, Gnost-Dural’s mind teetered on the brink of madness, shattered by hours upon hours of unspeakable torments. Even as he sought refuge in an ocean of dementia and delusion, some small part of him fought to cling to the last threads of his sanity.

Had the Sith ordered another immediate bout of torture, he would have succumbed, sinking into the depths of lunacy. Instead, she commanded the interrogators to halt, perhaps sensing how close he was to being lost forever and knowing the punishments Darth Karrid would inflict if she failed to uncover his secrets.

“Are you ready to talk now, Jedi?” she asked.

Still struggling to sort reality from the crazed pain hallucinations creeping around the edges of his mind, Gnost-Dural could only whisper, “No more. No more.”

“You can end this,” the Sith told him. “Tell Darth Karrid what she wants to know and your suffering will be over.”

“I will talk,” he promised. “No more … I will talk … no more … I will talk … no more …”

Turning away from the babbling Kel Dor, the apprentice said, “Inform Darth Karrid that the prisoner is ready for her.”

By the time Darth Karrid arrived a few minutes later, Gnost-Dural had regained much of his composure, though he was careful to keep playing the part of a broken victim. Given his current state, it was an easy role to slip into.

“No more … I will talk,” he mumbled as he heard Karrid’s familiar footsteps approach. “I will talk.”

“I told you I would break you,” the Falleen whispered in his ear. “Now that you have tasted the power of the dark side, you can understand why I left the Jedi to follow Malgus.”

“I will talk,” the Jedi answered. “No more … I will talk.”

“Why did you come aboard my vessel?” Karrid asked. “Why face me and my apprentices? Why enter a battle you knew you couldn’t win?”

“A distraction,” Gnost-Dural breathed. “Keep you away.”

“Away? Away from what?”

“Duro. The attack on Duro.”

“How do you know about that?”

Though blind without his protective goggles, he knew Karrid was watching him closely. Studying him; analyzing his words to see if he was lying. The best way to keep her from recognizing his deception was to blend fact and fiction; seed his lies with bits of truth.

“The black cipher. We cracked the codes.”

He could sense Karrid suddenly stand up straight, shocked by the news.

“That’s how we found you,” Gnost-Dural continued. “We intercepted a message that you were going to Reaver Station.”

“How long have you had the cipher?” she demanded, crouching down beside him again.

“Since Ziost.”

He didn’t need to say any more for her to know what he was talking about. And the less he said, the harder it would be for her to get a read on him.

“You came to the station, you attacked me on my ship, you staged a false Republic invasion fleet … all to make sure we didn’t go to Duro?”

“We were afraid of you,” Gnost-Dural said, feeding her ego. “The Republic is setting an ambush at Duro. But we can’t spare enough ships to bring down the Spear. You would turn the battle against us.”

“My ship was never part of the fleet heading to Duro,” Karrid said, and he heard the suspicion in her voice.

“You are on the Dark Council. You choose your own path,” Gnost-Dural explained, remembering how headstrong she had been as his Padawan as he played even further to her pride. “We feared you would defy the will of the Minister of War and come to Duro to claim your share of the glory.”

“Then why are you telling me this now?” Karrid asks. “Are you hoping I will show you mercy?”

Gnost-Dural tried to laugh, but all that came out was a hollow, haunted rasping of breath.

“My plan worked,” he said, offering the final piece of bait. “It’s too late. We’re too far away. You’ll never get to Duro in time for the battle.”

Now it was Karrid’s turn to laugh.

“You’re wrong, Master,” she sneered. “You have no idea how fast my ship really is. When the Republic springs their trap at Duro, we will be there!”

Karrid stood up and headed for the door.

“Watch him,” she said. “No more torture. I want him alive and sane so he can witness our destruction of Duro and the Republic fleet.”

“Should we send a message to warn Moff Nezzor about the ambush?” her apprentice asked.

“The Republic has broken the cipher codes,” Karrid snapped. “Sending the message now will only let them know we’re coming. They might even abandon their plan. Better to sacrifice a few of our own ships than to let the Republic fleet escape.”

“Forgive me, Master,” the apprentice replied. “There is so much I still have to learn.”

“Tell Moff Lorman to set a course for Duro, maximum speed,” she ordered before leaving the room.

I’ve done all I can, Theron, the old Jedi thought. Now it’s up to you.

Deep in the bowels of the engine room Theron finally heard the orders he’d been waiting for coming from the bridge.

“Set a course for Duro.”

A klaxon rang out three times across the ship, the signal for the crew to prepare for the jump to hyperspace. A moment later the hyperdrive core began to howl as it ramped up to full power.

He did it! Somehow, Master Gnost-Dural did it!

Theron redoubled his efforts, knowing he had to finish mapping the relays if the ambush was going to stand any chance of taking down the Ascendant Spear … assuming there actually was an ambush.

Gnost-Dural had done his job, and Theron was busy doing his. But none of it would matter if Teff’ith and Satele couldn’t convince Jace to send a Republic fleet to Duro.

CHAPTER 29

“NO!” JACE SAID, slamming his fist down on the back of the couch he was standing by. “This is insane!”

Satele’s call had woken him in the middle of the night. When she told him she was coming over right away to see him, he’d still been too bleary from the shots he’d shared with Marcus earlier to ask any questions or protest. Not that he would have refused her request. He and Satele had spoken many times since she’d ended their relationship—given their respective roles in the Republic and the Jedi Order it was inevitable. But their meetings had always been official, held in offices or meeting rooms. She’d never come to his apartment before, so he knew whatever business she had was urgent; the Grand Master of the Jedi Order was not a woman prone to overreaction.

By the time she’d showed up at his door, Jace’s mind was right enough to guess what this was about—somehow she’d found out about Theron, the Spear, and the impending attack on Duro that was now less than ten hours away. He expected she would try to talk him out of his plan. What he hadn’t expected was the scruffy-looking Twi’lek street thug who accompanied the Grand Master, nor the wild story she told.

“Do you know how many laws and regulations Theron violated by roping you into this?” he shouted at her.

Satele and the Twi’lek were standing side by side in the middle of his living room, a united front opposing him.

“Theron could be court-martialed,” Jace continued, stepping around from behind the couch and moving toward them as his voice got louder and louder. “Arrested. This is bordering on treason!”

“You shout at him, not me!” Teff’ith snapped back, holding her ground and refusing to be intimidated by his bluster.

“None of that matters now,” Satele told him. “Theron and Master Gnost-Dural will bring the Ascendant Spear to Duro. You need to be there waiting for them.”

“You don’t know that,” Jace said. “You just met this Twi’lek. For all we know, she’s an Imperial agent leading us into some kind of trap.”

“I can sense the truth in her words,” Satele assured him.

Jace snorted. “And you couldn’t possibly be wrong, because no Jedi in history has ever been betrayed by someone close to them. You Jedi may see more than the rest of us, but you don’t see nearly as much as you think.”

“Sometimes we are blind when it comes to those close to us,” Satele admitted. “But I’m right about this,” she added with the resolute calm Jace had found so infuriating when they were together. “We can trust Teff’ith.”

“Even if she’s on our side, we still don’t know if the Spear will actually show up at Duro. She can’t even tell us what Theron and Gnost-Dural were planning.”

“Was no plan,” Teff’ith explained. “Making it up as they go.”

“That’s even worse!” Jace shouted, turning away from them to stalk around the living room. “You can’t just improvise your way through something like this.”

“Don’t underestimate Master Gnost-Dural,” Satele cautioned. “Darth Karrid was his apprentice for many years. He knows her mind and personality better than she does.”

“Then why didn’t he know she was going to defect to the Sith?” Jace challenged.

“We knew the risk. But we decided it was worth it to get someone close to Malgus,” Satele said. “Gnost-Dural will find a way to make Darth Karrid bring the Spear to Duro.”

“I wish I had your confidence,” Jace said, shaking his head. “But even if he does get her to send the Spear, we can’t face it at full power. Theron was supposed to sabotage the ship, but we have no idea what he’s done. Even if he manages to plant the virus in the Spear’s systems, we don’t have any way to activate it without knowing what frequency to transmit the code on.”

“Theron will find a way,” Satele assured him. “Maybe he’ll trigger the virus himself.”

“And maybe he won’t. If I send a fleet to Duro and the Spear shows up at full power, we’ll be slaughtered along with the civilians on the planet.”

“Send two fleets!” Teff’ith blurted. “Send five. Send ten! Even the Spear can’t win then.”

“We don’t have enough ships in the sector,” Jace said. “And even if we did, sending orders to have everyone converge on Duro at the same time would tip the Empire off. They’d know we were there, and they’d call off the attack.”

“At least Duro would be spared,” Satele chimed in.

“Duro is irrelevant,” Jace said. “This is about stopping the Spear. It’s about winning the war.”

“The Republic doesn’t win if we don’t protect our people,” Satele told him. “We are not the Empire. You used to understand the difference.”

Jace bristled at her words. “Is that why you left me? Is that why you didn’t tell me Theron was our son?”

He heard a slight gasp from Teff’ith as she reacted to the revelation, but he ignored the Twi’lek, his attention focused on Grand Master Shan.

“I saw the war change you,” Satele said. “I saw you heading down a path I could not follow. I tried to help you, but I realized I was only being dragged down with you.”

“So you abandoned me.”

“I thought our feelings for each other were making things worse. I was afraid if you knew you had a son, your desire to protect him at any cost would take you even farther down that dark path.”

“Is that how you really see me?” Jace asked. “As some kind of monster?”

Satele shook her head.

“I do not always agree with your decisions, but I know you are a good man. Hate and anger are part of you, but they have not consumed you.”

The Jedi sighed. “I used to believe that was because of what I had done. Turning away from you, hiding your son from you—I used to tell myself these actions saved you from yourself.”

“And what do you think now?”

Satele hesitated, her eyes shifting to the floor momentarily as if she couldn’t bear to meet Jace’s gaze.

Is she ashamed? Jace wondered.

“Now I do not know,” she said.

She looked up at him again, struggling to maintain the reserve appropriate for a Jedi Grand Master. But Jace knew her well enough to see what was beneath her stoic mask: regret, uncertainty, self-doubt.

“Maybe I was wrong to hide Theron from you. Maybe I made things worse.”

There was a long silence, finally broken by Teff’ith. “Jedi Grand Master mom, Supreme Commander dad. Now we get why Theron’s so messed up. So you sending a fleet, or what?”

When Jace didn’t answer, Satele spoke up.

“You can’t let Duro be sacked,” she told him. “I know you, Jace. You’ll never be able to live with yourself. It will destroy you.”

“It’s worth it if holding back our fleet means we still have a chance to take down the Spear,” he said stubbornly.

“If you send the fleet and the Ascendant Spear isn’t there, you save Duro,” Satele said, trying to reason with him. “If you don’t send a fleet, and Karrid is there, then you lose both Duro and your best chance of taking down the Spear.”

“Easy choice,” Teff’ith agreed.

“You’re forgetting the third option,” Jace told them. “We send a fleet, the Spear is there, but Theron fails in his mission. Then we lose everything—our chance at the Spear, Duro, and our fleet. You’re asking me to risk all this on blind faith that Theron will succeed. The Supreme Commander doesn’t have the luxury of blind faith.”

“It’s not blind faith,” Satele assured him. “It’s faith in Theron. Faith in our son.”

Jace stared down at the floor, clenching and unclenching his hands. He knew what he wanted to do, but this was the most important decision he’d ever make. He couldn’t afford to be wrong.

“I don’t suppose you’ve had some kind of vision?” he said to Satele. “Something telling us what we should do?”

“The Force has not shown me what will happen,” Satele admitted. “The future is always in motion.”

“Could’ve just lied,” Teff’ith mumbled.

“Trust your heart,” Satele told him.

“Not a very Jedi thing to say,” Jace said.

“You’re not a Jedi,” she reminded him.

The Supreme Commander took a deep breath, then slowly let it out. He’d been fighting the Sith for forty years: fighting for the Republic, fighting for the men and women who went into battle beside him, fighting for the future of the entire galaxy. But now that he knew he had a son, he had something else worth fighting for. Theron was counting on him, and he wasn’t going to let him down.

“I’ll send the fleet,” he said. “Now get out of my apartment so I can change—I need to be on my flagship within the hour or we won’t get there in time.”

“You leading the fleet?” Teff’ith asked, clearly surprised.

“If Darth Karrid doesn’t show, then Chancellor Saresh is going to demand my resignation for botching this mission anyway. Might as well go out in a blaze of glory.”

“I’m coming, too,” Satele declared.

“Forget it,” Jace replied. “We’re not risking both the Supreme Commander and the Grand Master of the Jedi Order on the same mission.”

“We serve the Republic,” she reminded him, “and this mission is critical to the war effort. If there’s even a chance I could help, I need to be there.

“And the Order is strong enough to survive my loss if something happens,” she assured him. “Just as the military can survive yours.”

“Good luck,” Teff’ith said.

“You’re coming, too,” Jace told her.

“What? Why us?”

“I’m risking everything on your story, but I’m still the Supreme Commander of the Republic military. I still have responsibilities. If it turns out you’re actually an Imperial spy setting us up, letting you go would make things even worse. So I’m not letting you out of my sight until all this is over, just in case.”

“Theron better mess up the Spear real good,” Teff’ith grumbled. “Don’t wanna get blown to bits.”

“You’re not the only one,” Jace agreed.

The howling of the hyperdrive made it hard to concentrate, but Theron was still able to tap into the Spear’s navigation systems to get a sense of where they were. At first he thought there was no way they’d get to Duro in time, but the ship was moving at speeds he was having trouble believing. He checked and double-checked the data, wondering if there was an error somewhere. He’d studied the hyperdrive systems, and it shouldn’t have been possible for them to be moving this fast. Not without some external power source boosting the system.

Darth Karrid.

Tracking their progress backward, he realized the ship’s velocity had jumped when the systems for her personal command pod engaged. The engines were actually drawing more power from her, the symbiotic link between Sith and ship channeling dark side energies through Karrid to augment the Spear’s abilities.

With a sinking feeling he realized that even with all the time he’d spent mapping the networks and studying the ship, he still didn’t have any real concept of the Ascendant Spear’s full potential. Darth Karrid’s ship might be too formidable a foe for the Republic fleet. Theron hoped the Republic’s chance for victory wasn’t already lost.

CHAPTER 30

ENCASED WITHIN THE CRYSTAL SPHERE of her command pod, Darth Karrid could feel the power of the Ascendant Spear coursing through the wires attached to the implants in her neck, face, and skull. The wires twitched and twisted like they were alive, pulsing with energy and matching the rhythm of her racing heart as it sent blood rushing through her veins.

Her excitement was more than the anticipation of the coming battle. Guiding the ship through the extra-dimensional landscape of hyperspace was exhilarating, a thrill beyond any other mental or physical pleasure. She had transcended her shell of flesh and bone, becoming one with the Ascendant Spear as planets and stars flew past her on all sides, sensed rather than seen, vanishing from her awareness in seconds as they were left trillions of kilometers behind her.

She could feel the presence of her apprentice and his two new companions outside the confines of the pod as she fed off them to enhance and augment her connection to the dark side … and to the ship. Yet she realized that, eager as she was to get to Duro, she had to pace herself. Her second apprentice was still watching guard over Gnost-Dural, and though Lord Quux and Lord Ordez were strong, they were still not used to the unique strain of supporting her while she controlled the Spear. She had to be careful not to exhaust them before the battle.

The ship slowed ever so slightly in response to her unspoken directive, allowing her to conserve her strength as they continued to hurtle to their destination.

Moff Nezzor, commander of the Imperial capital ship Extempus, relished the moments before leading his fleet into battle. The attack on the agriworld Ruan had been a glorious victory, but it would pale compared with the devastation he planned to unleash against Duro.

As with the previous attack on an unsuspecting, lightly defended Republic world, the plan was elegant in its simplicity. Hit the Duro shipyards to cripple production, bombard the orbiting cities to inflict maximum damage and casualties, then retreat before Republic reinforcements in the sector could respond to the threat.

Nezzor approved of this recent shift in Imperial tactics. While some—like Davidge, the prissy Minister of Logistics—might argue that the Empire gained little tangible benefit from an attack on Duro, the Grand Moff understood the psychological value of striking soft targets with the primary purpose of massacre and mayhem. And personally, he much preferred an unopposed run against a heavily populated civilian world to a lengthy engagement against Republic defenders over a resource-rich planet with high long-term strategic value.

“Two minutes to Duro, Moff Nezzor,” the navigator seated on the other side of the bridge informed him.

“Ready a general comm channel,” Nezzor commanded, eager to begin issuing orders to direct his fleet’s assault the instant they dropped from hyperspace.

“Aye-aye, sir.”

A smile crept across Nezzor’s thin, cracked lips.

He felt the familiar surge of deceleration, and the starfield outside the bridge’s viewing window transformed from solid white to the starfield of realspace. They arrived on the edges of the Duro system, far enough from the sun’s gravity well but still only a few minutes from the world itself. But instead of seeing the eponymous planet and its orbiting cities in the distance, helpless and at their mercy, Moff Nezzor found himself facing an entire Republic fleet stretched out before him, arrayed for battle.

Impossible! he thought, shouting out “Full shields!” even as the enemy opened fire.

Jace Malcom kept his eyes carefully focused on the battle monitors on board the bridge of the Aegis in the moments before the battle began.

From the intercepted cipher transmissions, he knew the Empire was sending a fleet designed for a cowardly hit-and-run assault: Moff Nezzor’s capital ship Extempus, a Delta-class carrier with a full complement of two dozen Interceptors, two Dreadnoughts, and three destroyers.

On the Republic side, Jace had called in all military vessels in the sector: three capital ships, including the Aegis, four Hammerheads, six corvettes, and four support squads of eight Thunderclap fighters. The Empire was outgunned by a greater than three-to-one margin, but Jace wasn’t taking any chances. If the Ascendant Spear was with them the Empire had the edge.

He had already given the commanders of the other capital ships the order to concentrate their fire exclusively on the Spear the instant it dropped from hyperspace, hoping to inflict some significant damage before Karrid could activate her shields. At the same time, the rest of his fleet would focus on the Extempus and the remaining Imperials.

The monitor began to flash with Imperial vessels blinking into existence on the scanner as they dropped out of hyperspace. The Hammerheads and corvettes opened fire on the enemy, but per Jace’s orders the capital ships held off, waiting for the Spear.

The Extempus suffered several direct hits before its shields came up, giving it a momentary reprieve. A destroyer exploded as a lucky shot from one of the corvettes ruptured the hypermatter core. The other destroyers, the Dreadnoughts, and the carrier managed to escape significant damage in the initial assault.

Jace continued to stare at the screen, trying to will the Ascendant Spear to materialize. The Thunderclaps dived into the fray, two squadrons swarming the Extempus while the other two each went for one of the Dreadnoughts. The corvettes descended on the carrier, trying to disable it before it was able to deploy the Interceptors in its hold.

“Supreme Commander Jace,” Admiral Gorwin radioed from one of the other capital ships. “No sign of the Ascendant Spear. Permission to engage other targets.”

“Permission granted,” Jace growled, his hands gripping the arms of his command chair so hard his knuckles turned white.

He turned to where Satele and Teff’ith were standing in a corner of the bridge.

“Darth Karrid is coming,” the Jedi assured him.

“We can’t wait any longer,” Jace replied. “Not if we want to minimize Republic casualties.”

He turned to the comm terminal that connected him to the other sections of the ship. “Concentrate fire on the Extempus. Make Nezzor pay for what he did to Ruan.”

The bridge of the Extempus was dark, lit only by the dim illumination of emergency lighting and the glow of the panels from the consoles that lined the perimeter.

“We just lost the Dravilla,” his first officer informed him.

Outside the viewing window, Moff Nezzor could see the doomed destroyer as it was engulfed in a series of explosions.

“Shield status,” he demanded.

“Under twenty percent.”

Nezzor had come expecting a slaughter. He’d found one, but there was no denying he was on the wrong side. Even without the advantage of surprise, the Republic force he was facing would have crushed his fleet.

But if he was going to die, it wouldn’t be while attempting a retreat.

“Set a course for the nearest orbital city,” he ordered. “Full speed ahead.”

The helmsman hesitated before a lifetime of Imperial training compelled him to obey the suicide order. “Aye-aye, sir.”

If this was Nezzor’s final battle, he was going to take as many Republic lives with him as possible.

Jace saw the Extempus change course and accelerate, though it took him a few seconds to realize what Nezzor was planning.

“All ships, concentrate full fire on the Extempus!” he shouted, transmitting his orders across the entire Republic fleet. “They’re trying to crash into the cities!”

Following his command, the entire Republic fleet—minus six fighters that were lost during the battle—disengaged from their targets and turned toward the Imperial flagship. Seeing the opportunity, the rest of the Imperial fleet began a full retreat in the opposite direction, desperately trying to put enough distance between them and the Republic ships to safely activate their hyperdrives and escape with their lives.

Karrid braced herself for a moment of disorientation as the Ascendant Spear dropped out of hyperspace in the Duro system. Though it only took a fraction of a second for the sensors to adjust to the physical laws and dimensions of realspace and come back online, in her state of heightened acuity the delay felt like an eternity. The instant her hyperspace-induced blindness passed, however, she was able to pinpoint the location of every ship across the entire battlefield.

The Spear had appeared well beyond the edges of the Duro system, rather than where she expected the Republic ambush would engage Nezzor’s fleet. The lifeless remains of several Imperial vessels floated silently in the distance. Beyond them, a single vessel—Nezzor’s Extempus—was racing toward Duro itself, with Republic ships giving chase. The surviving remnants of the Imperial fleet—a Dreadnought, a destroyer, and a handful of Interceptors—were headed in the opposite direction, toward Karrid and the edges of the system. Facing overwhelming odds, they’d chosen to abandon their commander and flee the battle.

Karrid’s fingers tapped lightly at the control pad on the arm of her chair, sending signals shooting up the wires linked into her cybernetic implants and off to the ship itself. The Ascendant Spear responded to her commands by targeting the approaching Imperial vessels as they lowered their shields in preparation for the jump to hyperspace, never suspecting one of their own would fire at them. The Spear’s ion cannons tore into the defenseless ships, blasting them into cosmic dust as a reward for their cowardice.

The Spear changed course as Karrid sent it accelerating toward the Republic vessels. Still too far away for even her incomparable weapons, she targeted the enemy flagship and prepared to fire as soon as she got into range.

Theron had felt the Spear drop from hyperspace, the screaming drive core mercifully winding down as it did. When the ship’s sensors came online, he was already plugged in, lurking in the corners of the network just beyond Karrid’s consciousness.

Even though he was receiving data in real time, he was still caught off guard when she fired on the advancing Imperial vessels. Not that he would have done anything to stop her even if he’d been expecting it. But the speed and precision with which she dispatched her targets reinforced his earlier fears that the Spear was going to win the battle, despite his best efforts.

He pushed the negative thoughts from his mind as Karrid advanced on the Republic fleet in the distance. His link to the ship gave Theron a rough idea of the Republic numbers, but the data was coming too quickly for him to fully process it. Not that it mattered—his attention needed to be focused on the internal workings of the Spear if he had any hope of slowing Karrid down.

As the targeting systems came online, Theron used his slicer spike to upload one of his virus subroutines, praying it would work.

Nezzor’s desperate suicide run never had a chance, but that didn’t keep Jace from cursing under his breath as the Republic fleet bombarded the Imperial flagship. When the Extempus’s shields went down, exhausted by the constant barrage of enemy fire, he pumped his fist. A second later he stood up and let out a primal victory roar as a series of explosions tore the vessel apart, eliminating the threat.

“Darth Karrid is here!” Satele suddenly declared, abruptly ending his celebration.

Jace slammed himself back into his chair, his eyes flicking back and forth over the screen depicting the battlefield.

“Where? I don’t see it!”

A second later a ship appeared on the very edge of scanner range, and he didn’t need the helmsman’s confirmation to know it was the Ascendant Spear.

“Never in doubt,” he heard Teff’ith say, though it sounded more like she was speaking to herself.

“All ships, prepare for battle,” he barked out. “We do whatever it takes to bring the Spear down!”

The ships in the fleet turned away from the smoking wreckage of the Extempus, carving a wide arc as they circled around to head in the opposite direction. The Spear was closing on them fast, though it was still too far away to engage.

“Look at the size of that beast!” the helmsman gasped as the sensors threw up the enemy vessel’s dimensions on his readout.

“Shields up. Prepare to fire the second we come in range,” Jace ordered, knowing full well the Spear’s guns would be able to tear them apart long before they ever got close enough to retaliate.

Come on, Theron. Don’t let us down!

“Sir!” the helmsman warned. “Enemy fire incoming!”

“Brace for impact!” Jace shouted as his screen showed the incoming ion blasts.

He prayed the shields would hold, but to his surprise the blast flew high and wide.

“She missed,” the helmsman said, shocked. “Flat-out missed us!”

“Target in range,” the gunner told him.

Jace bared his teeth in a fierce grin.

“Hit her back with everything we’ve got!”

Darth Karrid saw her shot miss its mark, but it took her a second to wrap her mind around what had happened. The target hadn’t taken any evasive maneuvers, or deflected the attack with shields … she had just missed.

She ran a quick diagnostic check of her targeting array, only to find it was entirely miscalibrated. It only took her a few seconds to correct the mistake, but in that time the Republic vessels had come close enough to bring their own weapons to bear.

Sensing the incoming fire, she redirected energy from the aft shields to reinforce the deflectors facing the advancing fleet. The incoming blasts were deflected harmlessly, and Karrid took aim for a second time, only to see her shot go wide yet again. As the Republic ships launched a second volley, Karrid reran the diagnostics on the targeting array, isolated another error, and adjusted for it.

An instant before the second round of incoming Republic fire hit, the aft shields suddenly surged to full capacity, draining all power from the forward deflectors. Instead of being easily repelled, the laser bolts and ion blasts smashed into the Spear’s hull, making Karrid cry out in pain. The damage was significant, and she tapped frantically at the control pad to reroute the affected systems through new relays and restore optimal efficiency, starting with the deflector shields.

The Republic ships were fanning out as they drew closer, looking to surround her vessel so they could attack from all sides. Karrid engaged the sublight thrusters and veered sharply to starboard, tilting the nose of the Spear down at a forty-five-degree angle and accelerating far too quickly for the Republic vessels to keep up. She dived down and away, buying time to fix her malfunctioning systems.

She saw the Republic vessels trying vainly to pursue her, and then suddenly they were gone as the entire external sensor network went down. Completely blind to what lay outside her vessel, Karrid momentarily panicked, her arms flailing wildly and her head thrashing violently from side to side. The sensation of the wires connecting her to her ship slapping against her face and shoulders snapped her back to her senses, and in that instant she felt him.

An intruder. An interloper. A saboteur on her ship, slicing into her private network.

The violation enraged her. Bellowing out a roar, Karrid threw herself into the task of finding and destroying the enemy within. Her fury energized her, fueling the fires of the dark side that burned within her and her ship. Outside the crystal sphere of her command pod she felt Lord Quux and Lord Ordez nearly break from the increased strain, though her apprentice never wavered. But as close as they came to failing her, they somehow managed to stay in their meditative trance, allowing Karrid to draw on their power to push herself and the Spear far beyond their previous limits.

Within seconds she had rerouted all primary battle systems to new pathways, sealing off the old ones to isolate any potential viruses and keep them from spreading. The sensors came back online, as did the shields and her targeting array. Now that she knew the slicer was there, she was able to sense his next attack, disable it before it could take effect, and trace it back to its source.

“Security to the engine room,” she hissed into the pod’s comlink. She realized the slicer could probably hear her, but there was nothing she could do about it.

The slicer tried to disrupt another system, but now that she knew where the attacks were coming from it was easy to keep them from doing any real harm. With the internal threat neutralized, she turned her attention back to the battle just in time to throw up her shields to ward off another attack. Her evasive maneuver had separated her from the Republic fleet, but they were closing in once again. She took aim at the closest vessel—one of the Hammerheads—and fired.

When the Ascendant Spear suddenly veered away from the fleet and took off in an unexpected direction, Jace knew they had Karrid on the run.

“She’s vulnerable,” he said. “Finish her off. Now!”

Every ship in the Republic fleet scrambled to intercept the enemy vessel on its new course. Emboldened by the misfiring guns and the failing shields, they came in hard and fast, looking to put a quick end to the battle. The Aegis fired again, as did many of the other vessels, targeting the same location where they had pierced the shields and punctured the Spear’s hull in their previous attack.

Rather than inflicting even more damage, the entirety of their attacks was deflected away. The guns of the Spear opened fire again, but this time instead of sailing wide they scored a direct hit on one of the Hammerheads. The combined power of the precisely aimed ion cannons and turbolasers ripped through the shields and shredded the Hammerhead, crippling the ship with a single devastating attack.

“Pull back!” Jace ordered, realizing their advantage had been lost. “Pull back and regroup!”

One of the corvettes was lost as the Republic fleet aborted its headlong charge, snuffed out by the Spear’s defense turrets when it got too close. Another blast from the ion cannons rocked the Aegis as it tried to retreat to a safe distance, sending Teff’ith and Satele sprawling to the ground and nearly knocking Jace out of his command seat.

“Damage report!”

“Shields took the worst of it. No critical systems hit. We’ve lost power to Sector Four. Medical teams are on their way.”

“Shields?”

“Down to seventy percent.”

Shields drained 30 percent from a single attack? Jace marveled.

An instant later he was hit with the sobering realization that they didn’t stand a chance. War raged across the entire galaxy; the Republic had brought in only as many ships as were in the vicinity. “Call for reinforcements,” he said, knowing it would be hours before any ships stationed in other parts of the galaxy could reach them. “Take evasive action,” he ordered the rest of his fleet. “Keep your distance.”

Even if they couldn’t beat the Spear, they could at least try to drag the battle out as long as possible to give Theron and Gnost-Dural a chance to pull off a miracle.

CHAPTER 31

THERON RAN BACK AND FORTH along the engine room’s narrow walkways, racing from relay to relay as he uploaded his virus subroutines. The first few worked perfectly, sending the Spear’s shots wide, dropping the shields, and disabling the sensors. Then Karrid had figured it out.

He tried desperately to find new vulnerabilities to exploit, but each time he did it only took two or three seconds for her to counteract his efforts. Still plugged into the ship’s comm system and scanners, he heard her send security down to the engine room, and he let out a strangled cry of frustration when she destroyed the Hammerhead.

She’s too good. Too fast. Too smart. This isn’t going to work.

But she was also in the middle of fighting an entire Republic fleet. Her focus was on the weapons and shields; sensors and communications: all the things the Spear needed to survive the battle. She still hadn’t realized that he’d disabled the turbolifts leading down to G Deck to buy himself more time.

She’s on G Deck, too. The far side.

If he couldn’t stop Karrid remotely by slicing into the Spear’s systems, maybe he could stop her face-to-face. After all, he’d stopped Darth Mekhis.

That was different. You caught her off guard. Tricked her. Karrid’s going to be ready. And she might not be alone. You’re going to need help.

Even if Karrid didn’t realize he’d knocked out the turbolifts, he only had a couple more minutes before the ship’s automated repair systems got them working again. He’d have to work fast.

Grabbing his slicer spike, he tapped into the relay controlling Gnost-Dural’s holding cell. Karrid was still focused on protecting the critical battle systems, and he was able to worm his way inside.

Gnost-Dural had spent the hours since Darth Karrid’s last visit in quiet, reflective meditation. As per the Sith Lord’s instructions, the interrogators had spared him more torture with Mekhis’s infernal machine. The respite had allowed the Jedi to calm and focus his mind, subtly drawing on the Force to refresh and restore his ravaged body and spirit.

The power of the dark side all around him was impossible to ignore; it seeped from the very walls of the Ascendant Spear, a twisted creation of a brilliant but diseased mind. Yet even here, surrounded by darkness, the power of the light shone through. The Force flowed through all living things, and there were several thousand crew on the ship. Most of them were ordinary men and women, soldiers for the Empire because of birth and upbringing, not because of some inherent evil.

Careful not to do anything that might draw the attention of the pure-blooded apprentice he sensed in the room with him, Gnost-Dural drew upon the Force to grant him a picture of his surroundings. The first thing he sensed was the battle raging outside the ship; the Republic fleet had come to Duro! But it didn’t take him long to realize they were overmatched, and he knew if he didn’t do something the battle would be lost.

He turned his heightened perception inward, allowing him to construct a highly detailed picture of his holding cell. The interrogators were seated in chairs on the far side of the medium-sized room, next to the panel that could unleash unbearable horrors on their prisoner with a simple touch of a button. They were both male, and both carried pistols at their sides. His protective goggles, Jedi robe, and other clothes had been discarded in the back corner of the room, tossed aside once he had been stripped down and strapped to the table.

In the opposite corner of the room was the Sith apprentice, sitting cross-legged on the floor. She was turning the hilt of a lightsaber over and over in her hands, as if somehow drawn to it. Gnost-Dural recognized the weapon he had forged while still a Padawan on Coruscant. She had witnessed his lightsaber skills during their battle; now it seemed she was intent on finding some explanation in his weapon. Gnost-Dural sensed and sympathized with her confusion: she had been raised to believe the power of the dark side dwarfed that of the light, and she was unable to convince herself that a Jedi could so easily have bested her in combat without some kind of inherent advantage.

“I could teach you how to use that,” he said.

Startled, she glanced up at the prisoner, taking a moment to realize he was drawing on the Force to “see” her.

“I know how to use a lightsaber,” she said defensively.

“I could teach you how to use it properly,” he explained. “Not as a clumsy weapon guided by hate and anger, but as an extension of yourself that protects and defends those in need.”

The interrogators glanced over, their curiosity piqued by the exchange. Noticing them, the Sith stood up, suddenly self-conscious about sitting on the floor as if subservient to them.

“Karrid warned me to watch for your tricks,” she said.

“This is no trick. Karrid is afraid of me—you sensed it. But I am not afraid of her.”

“Because you are stronger?” she sneered.

“Because the light side teaches us not to be afraid. Don’t you want to live free of fear? And anger? And hate?”

For a second Gnost-Dural felt a connection with her, and he thought he might reach her. Then a wall of blackness fell between them, and the connection was gone.

“Your friends are dying out there,” she said, her voice filled with spite and venom. “Can you feel it? Darth Karrid and her ship are tearing them apart. I should be at her side for this victory to share in the glory, but instead I’m here watching over you!”

“Then go,” Gnost-Dural said. “I’m not the one keeping you.”

One of the interrogators laughed, and the Sith silenced him with an icy glare.

“I don’t need you or your weapon,” she said to Gnost-Dural, tossing his lightsaber into the corner of the room with the rest of his discarded property. Then she crossed her arms and stood with her back to the door, staring at him defiantly.

The Jedi sighed, knowing the opportunity was lost. But before hope could slip away completely, the shackles on his wrists and ankles sprang open with a sharp click, dropping him to the floor.

Theron!

Gnost-Dural reacted with the superior reflexes and blinding speed of a true Jedi Master, already in motion before the others even realized something had gone wrong. He landed on his feet, his lightsaber flying from the corner and into the outstretched palm of his right hand, the blade springing to life with a sharp hiss. At the same time his protective goggles flew up into his left hand and he yanked them into place.

One of the interrogators slammed his hand on the button to activate the machine, but with the prisoner already free of his restraints nothing happened. His partner reacted with more sense, pulling his pistol. Darth Karrid’s apprentice made the wisest choice of all. She turned and fled out the door.

The guard with the pistol fired, but Gnost-Dural batted the blaster bolt aside. He saw the second guard reaching forward to hit the alarm, and knocked him back with a powerful Force push. Two quick steps closed the distance between them in the small room, and he ended both their lives with a pair of clean, efficient cuts of his glowing blade. Then he raced from the room in pursuit of Karrid’s apprentice, ignoring his Jedi robe and clothes still lying in the back corner of the room.

He saw her disappear around a corner at the end of a twenty-meter hall, and he gave chase. She was waiting for him as he rounded the corner, her own lightsaber drawn. She tried to impale him, hoping his momentum as he came barreling around the corner would carry him right onto the deadly tip of her outstretched blade. But Gnost-Dural twisted to the side; her thrust only traced a thin line across the topmost layer of skin of his bared chest. Ignoring the smell of his own charred flesh, he retaliated by driving an elbow into the Sith’s jaw, sending her stumbling back.

She threw up her lightsaber in a defensive stance to hold him off, but one-on-one she was no match for the Kel Dor. He came at her with a flurry of intense strikes drawn from Juyo, the highly aggressive seventh form of lightsaber combat designed specifically to overwhelm a lone opponent in a one-on-one duel. The chaotic patterns and haphazard sequences picked apart the Sith’s defenses in a matter of seconds, the battle ending with Master Gnost-Dural plunging his lightsaber through her chest and out the other side, impaling her as she had originally tried to do to him.

As her corpse toppled to the floor, Gnost-Dural was already on the move, headed directly for the Spear’s control room to face Darth Karrid yet again.

Theron had no idea if his plot to free Gnost-Dural had worked or not. Just as he finished slicing into the holding cell’s systems and released the Jedi’s restraints, Darth Karrid shut him out, rerouting the pathway through another relay.

Realizing she would soon do the same with the turbolift, he decided to get moving or he’d end up trapped in the engine room. Grabbing his slicer spike and tucking it into the top of his boot, he dashed over to the captain’s uniform he’d carefully folded and set on the floor. He considered then quickly rejected the idea of spending the time to pull it on; a stolen uniform wasn’t going to fool the security teams converging on his location.

Grabbing the pistol with the bent barrel just in case, he turned the wheel and pushed open the maintenance hatch. The corridor outside was blessedly cool; he actually shivered as the climate-controlled air washed over his sweat-soaked body.

The sound of the nearby turbolift as it cranked into operation set him in motion. He had reached the first bend in the passage leading to the far side of G Deck when he heard the door open.

Glancing back, he saw several heavily armored security guards step out. Fortunately, it took them a moment to notice the man in his briefs running away from them at the far end of the hall. Theron had just enough time to dart around the corner as blaster bolts struck the ground and wall beside him, missing him by the narrowest of margins.

Theron didn’t think he’d have any trouble staying ahead of the Imps in their heavy armor. But after half a dozen more running steps he pulled up lame and cried out in pain, hopping on one foot as his left calf seized. Despite his efforts to stay hydrated during his time in the sweltering engine room, his body was rebelling. The muscle had cramped up, a brutal contraction so tight it felt as if it was going to rip itself apart. Any movement of his toes or ankle caused bolts of fire to shoot up through his body, and trying to put any weight on it almost made him pass out.

Suddenly the soldiers in the armor didn’t seem that slow. Bracing himself with his left hand against the wall, he hopped down the corridor on his good foot, teeth clenched against the agony emanating from his knotted muscle. He heard the heavy footsteps of his pursuers closing in, and he half turned to fire off three quick shots back down the hall.

He didn’t bother to aim; his blaster’s warped barrel would have made it impossible to guess where the bolts were headed. All he wanted to do was send a warning to his pursuers, hopefully slowing them down. The pistol made strange sounds as he fired. Instead of the familiar sharp, reverberating twang, the shots sounded almost wet, with a lower pitch. With the bolts impeded by the warped barrel, the blaster’s power pack wasn’t able to fully discharge the intense energy buildup generated with each shot. He could feel the heat radiating out from the power pack in his hand, and he knew he couldn’t keep shooting without risking a power pack overload and a deadly explosion of superheated gas.

On the bright side, the cramp was fading as he rounded another corner, and he was able to carefully put weight on his left foot again, though he still wasn’t able to run at full speed. He pressed onward, hobbling along and hoping the security team behind him was the only one he had to worry about. If there was another team coming down the lift near Karrid’s command chamber he’d be trapped between them with no hope of escape. To his relief, when he rounded the final turn he saw the long corridor leading to the entrance of the command chamber stretched out before him, totally empty. He shambled down the hall, but just as he passed the turbolift the door flew open.

Theron tried to wheel around and deliver a spinning kick to the first guard coming through the door, but as he planted his left leg and tried to push off for leverage, the calf seized up again. His leg caved beneath him, and instead of pulling off a dazzling martial arts move that left his opponent incapacitated, he ended up in a sweaty pile on the floor.

“Theron!” a familiar voice said, and he looked up to see Gnost-Dural standing over him, lightsaber in hand.

“Thought you were another security patrol,” Theron grunted through the pain as the Jedi extended a hand to help him up.

“I ran into them on my way to the lift,” the Jedi replied, his voice grim. In a lighter tone he added, “Why are you in your underwear?”

“Didn’t want you to feel awkward,” Theron said, nodding at the Kel Dor’s own near nakedness as he leaned on him for support.

He stepped gingerly on his cramping leg and winced in pain. Before the Jedi could ask about it, a pair of guards from the pursuing security patrol poked their heads around the corner and fired. The Jedi stepped in front of Theron and batted away the blaster bolts before using the Force to hurl the guards back around the corner. From the grunts and groans it was clear they had slammed into the other members of the team hard enough to inflict real damage.

“Come on,” Gnost-Dural said, using one hand to help hold Theron upright while the other kept a firm grip on his lightsaber.

Together they staggered the last twenty meters to the sealed door ahead of them. Theron dropped to a knee to relieve the pressure on his injured leg, pulled the slicer spike from his boot, and set to work on the door.

At the same time, Gnost-Dural hurled his lightsaber down the hall, striking down a guard who’d dared to peek around the corner.

“I can’t hold them off forever, Theron,” he said. “And reinforcements are on the way.”

As if summoned by his words, the turbolift door slid open again, spilling out another half dozen armored Imperial soldiers.

“Got it,” Theron said, yanking his spike free and crawling forward on his hands and knees as the door slid open.

Gnost-Dural was right behind him, and as the guards in the hall opened fire, the two men rolled for cover on either side of the door’s interior. With the bolts ricocheting off the floor, the Jedi reached up and jammed his lightsaber into the access panel on the wall, sending off a shower of sparks as the door slammed shut.

To Theron’s surprise, the room was empty except for a control panel along the periphery, a large, opaque crystal sphere in the center, and three figures with facial tattoos and black robes sitting cross-legged on the floor around the sphere. Two were human males—one younger with white skin, the other older with dark skin. The third was a male red-skinned Sith pureblood. Their eyes were closed and they appeared to be lost deep in meditation.

Gnost-Dural sprang to his feet and hurled his lightsaber, but he wasn’t aiming at any of the figures on the floor. The whirling blade flew over their heads and ricocheted off the crystal sphere before returning to the Jedi’s hand, leaving no mark on the surface.

Simultaneously, the eyes of all three figures on the floor snapped open and they sprang to their feet, their weapons flaring to life. Instead of conventional weapons, the Sith held a pair of slightly shorter purple blades, one in each hand, while the dark-skinned man wielded a long, double-bladed lightsaber that seemed to shift between crimson and black.

“I see you’ve got some new friends,” Gnost-Dural said to the apprentice he had faced before.

When he didn’t reply, the Jedi said to Theron, “Let me deal with them. You find a way to get inside Karrid’s command pod and stop her from destroying the Republic fleet!”

CHAPTER 32

DARTH KARRID HAD TO ADMIRE the Republic fleet commander. Realizing they couldn’t exchange blows with the Ascendant Spear, they’d switched tactics, scattering to harry her from a distance while employing a series of hit-and-run attacks and feints to frustrate her and extend the battle.

The defensive strategy gave them no hope of inflicting any actual damage against the Spear, but it prevented Karrid from wiping them all out in a single glorious attack. Instead, she was forced to hunt down each ship one by one. She began with one of the capital ships, turning the Spear on an intercept course as her target used a series of random and unexpected changes of direction to try to evade her. The other vessels in the Republic fleet tried to distract her from her goal, firing at her flanks while keeping to what seemed a safe distance.

But with the Spear there was no safe distance. Even as she closed on the first capital ship, choosing one of the three at random, she was able to target one of the corvettes swooping in on her starboard side. The Spear’s guns roared as the corvette tried to veer off at the last second, but the ion cannons were able to penetrate the shields, ravaging the hull and knocking out all power other than emergency life support.

Instead of changing course to finish off the now helpless corvette, Karrid continued to bear down on the capital ship, relentlessly pursuing it as she hammered away with her turbolasers, rapidly draining what remained of their shields in preparation for the coup de grâce.

The other two capital ships converged on her, guns blazing. Even the Spear’s deflectors couldn’t hold up for long against their coordinated assault, and Karrid was forced to break off from her original prey … but not before unleashing a final volley that crippled the engines.

She changed course and accelerated, circling up and away from the other two capital ships before coming around to face them. The vessels wisely broke off in opposite directions, so she chose one at random and resumed her pursuit, knowing this one wouldn’t be saved by an untimely intervention of the others … not with one of them forced to limp along at a fraction of its top speed.

Before she could engage the second capital ship, however, she felt a sudden drop in power, and the Spear slowed noticeably. It took her a moment to recognize what had happened, and then she realized she could no longer sense Quux, Ordez, and her apprentice. Something had broken them out of their meditative trance, forcing Karrid to rely only on her own power to control the vessel.

Briefly turning her focus from the battlefield to her immediate surroundings, she sensed a battle raging in the command chamber outside her impervious crystal sphere. Gnost-Dural had escaped and come for her. Karrid returned her attention to the battle, confident her new followers would be more than a match for the Jedi. And though it was more difficult trying to control the Spear alone, she had done it before.

At the same time, she sensed another intrusion attempt from the saboteur—this one coming from the control console outside her command pod. She batted away the clumsy attempt, knowing he would try again—one more distraction to further slow her down. Though it would now take longer to finish off the Republic fleet, Karrid knew that victory was still inevitable.

Jace had tasted defeat before, but never as bitter as this. Though the battle would drag on, he already knew it was over. Republic casualties were mounting; he’d lost several support vessels, and one of his capital ships was barely mobile. Now Karrid was coming after the Aegis.

The Spear was closing in on them, though more slowly than before. He didn’t know if Karrid was being cautious, or if she was merely toying with them, but it didn’t matter. Her ship was still too fast and maneuverable for them to outrun. And with only one capital ship still able to come to his aid, there wouldn’t be enough of a threat to force her to break off her attack.

“Enemy coming in range,” the helmsman noted.

Jace realized he meant they were now in the Spear’s range … they were still too far away for the Aegis to fight back.

“Divert all available power to the deflectors,” he said, knowing it would only buy them a few more minutes. “Shut down everything except life support and sensors. Even the weapons systems.”

The bridge suddenly went dark, lit only by the glow of the screens.

“Going to end bad?” Teff’ith asked from somewhere in the blackness.

“Very bad,” Jace answered.

Gnost-Dural rushed his three opponents, hoping to put a quick end to the battle. His blade flickered and danced as his body went into a series of spins and leaps. Karrid’s apprentice—the one he’d fought before—retreated, but the two newcomers met his assault head-on, driving him back with their aggressive counterattacks.

Realizing he wasn’t just facing raw apprentices this time, the Jedi switched back to a more defensive strategy as his enemies pressed forward. The Sith’s twin purple blades came at him from all angles, a high slash from the right; a low cut from the left; a pair of diagonal chops. The human’s massive double-bladed lightsaber was more direct, crashing down in a repetitive series of overhand strikes as he tried to bludgeon his way through Gnost-Dural’s guard.

The Jedi Master met and repelled each and every attack, holding his ground behind a near-impenetrable wall of defense. Even with the apprentice joining the fray, he didn’t waver—the Soresu style, when performed perfectly, could keep numerous attackers with a variety of styles at bay indefinitely … or at least until exhaustion and fatigue forced Gnost-Dural to make a mistake.

That was the great drawback of Soresu: it demanded a passive role—it could delay defeat, but it couldn’t bring victory. And at three against one, his enemies would not need long to wear him down. Fortunately, despite the impressive individual skill possessed by two of his three opponents, his foes were not attacking him as a group. They lacked unity of purpose. They didn’t time or coordinate their attacks, occasionally even getting in one another’s way.

Gnost-Dural was able to exploit this single flaw to his advantage, drawing both of his more skilled opponents in at the same time by dipping his right shoulder and letting his blade slip a fraction too far forward as he parried one of his third foe’s clumsy thrusts.

Both seized the chance to come at him hard, looking to exploit the perceived vulnerability, allowing Gnost-Dural to spin quickly away in the opposite direction. Suddenly bereft of their shared target, the two Sith were forced to pull back and abort their attacks to keep from getting tangled up with each other, momentarily leaving the apprentice at Gnost-Dural’s mercy.

He wasted no time in disposing of his lesser opponent. The apprentice blocked two overhand strikes, but then overreached when the Kel Dor feinted a third, leaving himself vulnerable down low. The Jedi turned his wrist and spun to his left, reversing the direction of his blade too quickly for the apprentice to recover, and removed him from the battle with a deep slash across the midsection that nearly severed the young man in two.

The entire sequence had taken less than a second, but even so Gnost-Dural barely turned back in time to ward off the next wave of attacks from the two more dangerous warriors. Once again he fell into the precise, efficient moves of Soresu to battle them to a standstill. But he could already feel fatigue creeping in, the intensity of the combat wearing him down despite the sustaining power of the Force.

Theron worked furiously at the command console along the edge of the room, knowing his slicer spike wouldn’t last much longer before burning out. He’d overclocked to 150 percent capacity as he burrowed into the digital labyrinth, looking for a way to get inside Karrid’s invulnerable crystal sphere.

This was different from slicing the relays in the engine room. The console was linked directly to Karrid’s command pod, an emergency override her apprentices could use to get her out if something ever went wrong—say, if the vessel suffered major damage while she was at the controls, leaving her comatose and trapped inside the crystal sphere. But every time Theron tried to activate the emergency override, Karrid thwarted his efforts. She wasn’t three steps ahead of him this time; without the support of her meditating followers she had slowed down to Theron’s level. But she had home-field advantage; she knew the inner workings of her ship better than he ever would.

Theron kept trying, waging digital war with her, painfully aware that time was running out. Gnost-Dural couldn’t hold off her lightsaber-wielding bodyguards much longer; the security personnel in the hall were using a plasma torch to carve through the disabled door, and outside the Spear was picking off the Republic ships one by one.

He cursed as Karrid booted him from the system, forcing him to start all over.

“Shields down to ten percent,” the helmsman said as another volley slammed into the Aegis, causing it to buck and heave.

Jace knew they’d already taken heavy damage; the only reason the alarms weren’t blaring through the ship was because he’d diverted power from the emergency response systems to the deflectors. With their shields down to critical levels, one more hit was all it would take to finish them off.

“I’m sorry, Jace,” Satele said, emerging from the darkness to place a hand on his shoulder.

He reached up and covered her hand with his thick, callused fingers.

“At least we fought the good fight,” he replied, squeezing Satele’s hand as they braced for the end.

Theron realized what he was doing wrong. He was trying to gain control of the pod’s emergency override—basically trying to pull control of a vital system out of Karrid’s grasp. But he didn’t need to control the emergency override to trigger it.

Instead of trying to take control of the system, he flooded it with a rush of false data. Critical damage reports from all sectors of the vessel poured in, the catastrophic failure of the entire ship setting off the emergency evacuation alarms.

At the same time he heard a loud hiss as the airtight crystal sphere popped open. Darth Karrid was seated in a chair in the middle, surrounded by a writhing mass of loose, dangling wires that only seconds before had linked her to the ship.

The Falleen’s eyes went wide and she screamed as the connection was broken—a keening wail of loss and suffering. Seeing Theron, she rose from her seat, pulled her lightsaber, and slowly advanced on him with murder in her eyes.

“Status report!” Moff Lorman shouted as the evacuation alarms rang out on the bridge of the Ascendant Spear.

“Has to be a system malfunction, sir!” one of the crew said. “According to this, we’re all dead.”

“Darth Karrid has relinquished control of the vessel,” someone else informed him.

The Moff hesitated, knowing his next decision could forever alter the course of his career … and possibly cost him his life. Darth Karrid had never turned control of the Spear over to him during battle. Not once. If she was incapacitated, then he clearly needed to step in. But it was hard to imagine how something like that could have happened.

What if she hadn’t relinquished control? What if this was just another malfunction? Or some kind of ploy to trick the Republic? If he tried to take control of the ship against her wishes, she’d have him skinned alive.

“Sir? Do you want to take command?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet. Not until we know what’s going on.”

In the darkness that enveloped the bridge of the Aegis, every second spent waiting for the Spear’s final attack felt like an eternity. Satele had turned her hand on Jace’s shoulder so she could grip him more tightly—Jace felt her squeezing as hard as she could. He didn’t mind; at least in their final moments they had each other.

Several more eternities ticked by. Then Teff’ith said, “Not dead yet.”

No, Jace thought. But we should be. Unless …

“This is our chance! Transfer all power to the forward guns! All ships fire at will! Fire at will!”

As the Ascendant Spear heaved and shook under the relentless Republic assault, Moff Lorman realized the alarms ringing out were no longer due to a malfunction in the system. His reluctance to take command of the Spear had left it vulnerable, and the Republic fleet had seized the moment.

All around him people were shouting, relaying damage reports from all decks. He had no idea if Darth Karrid was still alive, but he wasn’t going to hesitate a second time.

“Abandon ship!” he shouted, thumbing the button to transmit his orders to the entire crew. “By order of Moff Lorman, abandon ship!”

Then he jumped from his chair and joined the rush of men and women racing from the bridge toward the nearest escape pods.

CHAPTER 33

IN ALL HER YEARS learning the ways of the dark side, Karrid had never felt a rage like this. The alarms pealing through the ship only added to her fury; to her they were like the cries of her own child. The worm crawling away from her in his underwear had caused this. The maggot had violated her ship, his intrusion corrupting the Spear. He had befouled Darth Mekhis’s perfect creation. He had torn her away from her second self, severing the bond that made her whole. For that, she wasn’t going to just kill him. She wasn’t even going to capture him and strap him to the interrogation machine. She was going to hack him apart piece by piece, listening to him scream and beg for mercy as she hewed off his limbs one by one before gutting him and leaving him writhing in agony on the floor.

Theron didn’t bother calling out to Gnost-Dural for help as Karrid slowly advanced on him; the Jedi already had his hands full. He didn’t try to reason with his assailant, either—he could see the madness in her eyes.

She threw her lightsaber and Theron rolled out of the way, grabbing his damaged blaster from where it rested on the floor beside him as he did so. The blade cleaved the control panel he’d used to slice into the Spear and force her from her pod, and he realized she hadn’t been aiming at him—she was just destroying the thing he’d used against her.

The lightsaber flew back to her hand and she turned to Theron, who was still lying on the floor. He raised his blaster and pointed it at her, a hollow gesture considering he couldn’t fire it again without causing the overloaded power pack to explode.

She took another step forward, raising her blade to hurl it again, and this time Theron knew he was going to be the target. Just as the blade was released from her hand, the entire ship was rocked, knocking Karrid off balance and disrupting her aim by a few precious centimeters. The deadly blade carved a furrow in the floor just beside Theron’s right hand.

The room shook again, and Theron heard the distant sound of an explosion, audible even over the clanging alarms. It was followed quickly by several more detonations, and the entire vessel began to shake and shudder as the Republic fleet rained fire down upon them. Karrid screamed and wheeled away from Theron, racing back to her command pod so she could retake control and save her precious ship. She threw herself into the seat, the dangling wires coming to life, their tips burrowing into the implants of her flesh.

Theron squeezed the trigger on his defective blaster. No bolts came out, but the power pack shrieked and squealed in protest. He hurled the blaster in Karrid’s direction. It landed short and skittered across the floor, sliding up against the base of her command chair as the two halves of the sphere snapped shut.

Even through the impervious crystal, the explosion was loud enough to make his ears ring. It was impossible to see through the opaque crystal to witness the gruesome carnage inside, but Theron didn’t necessarily think that was a bad thing. As much as he wanted to defeat Darth Karrid, he had no desire to see her splattered all over the command pod’s walls.

But though their Master was dead, her apprentices fought on.

Master Gnost-Dural saw Darth Karrid leave her pod and head toward Theron, but he wasn’t able to break away from his duel with the two Sith Lords. As fatigue had whittled away the Jedi’s speed and concentration, he had stopped being able to stand his ground. The relentless pressure of his opponents had slowly driven him backward until they had him against the wall.

Despite what was happening all around them, their battle had raged on unabated. With single-minded focus his enemies ignored the alarms as they began to ring out. The explosions that rocked the ship and made the entire room shake had given them no pause. But the blast from inside Karrid’s command pod was so near and so loud it actually snapped the attention of all three combatants away from their duel.

Over the loudspeaker a voice rose above the alarms, giving the order to abandon ship. Gnost-Dural knew the Imperial soldiers outside trying to cut through the door would heed the call, but he wasn’t so sure about the two Sith in the room.

“You can stay and finish me off as this ship crumbles around us,” the Kel Dor said, gasping for breath. “Or we can call this a draw and make a break for the escape pods.”

The pureblood raised his purple blades as if ready to continue the fight, but he quickly changed his mind when his partner turned and raced toward the exit. A powerful blast of the Force sent the jammed door panel hurtling out into the now empty hall beyond. A second later they were gone, disappearing down the hall.

Another explosion caused the Spear to start listing over to its side. The artificial gravity systems should have reacted and automatically recalibrated themselves. But the damage inflicted by the Republic fleet must have been too great, and suddenly Gnost-Dural found himself slipping down the tilted floor. He slid out the door and into the corridor, joined a second later by Theron. The Jedi Master used the Force to keep himself from slamming into the wall; the SIS agent wasn’t so lucky.

“I think we’ve overstayed our welcome,” Theron said.

“Lead the way,” the Jedi offered.

The ship slowly continued to tip, and soon the side wall served as their floor. They reached the turbolift without seeing any sign of the two Sith Lords, or any of the soldiers they had run into earlier.

“Looks like we’re the last ones at the party,” Theron said as the lift doors opened and they awkwardly crawled inside. “Better remember to turn out the lights.”

“I think the Republic is doing that for us,” the Jedi answered as another series of explosions capsized the Spear completely and the turbolift shuddered to a halt.

From on board the bridge of the Aegis, Jace watched the mass exodus of nearly a thousand escape pods as the Imperials fled the Ascendant Spear. By his order, the fleet was still firing on Karrid’s ship. He thought about calling off the assault; he had no idea if his son—and Master Gnost-Dural—were still aboard. But the risk of a final retaliation, even as the vessel lay dying, was too great. As Supreme Commander of the Republic forces, he couldn’t jeopardize the lives of everyone aboard the ships under his command for the sake of a single person—not even his own son.

He tried to reassure himself by arguing that he didn’t actually have any proof Theron had been on the ship during the battle, but given everything that had taken place it was likely. Hopefully he had some way of getting off alive, though from what he knew of his son, not having a pre-planned evacuation strategy wouldn’t have stopped him.

The escape pods continued to deploy, shooting off in a hundred different directions. It would be impossible to track them all down … though it wouldn’t be hard to turn the guns of the fleet against them and wipe virtually all of them out.

“Just letting them all go?” Teff’ith asked.

“What do you care?” Jace snapped.

“Don’t,” the Twi’lek said with a shrug. “Just surprised. Thought you hated Imps.”

Lacking hyperdrives, the range of the pods was limited; most would end up landing on Duro’s orbital cities, where authorities would take them into custody. Some would head in the opposite direction, trying to make it to the system’s less populated worlds. There they would hole up, relying on the transponders to lead an Imperial recovery team to their location for rescue, but the number who would actually make it back to the Empire was minimal.

Besides, Jace thought, Theron might be on one of them.

He glanced over at Satele and saw that her eyes were staring off into the distance at nothing in particular. He recognized the look; she was reaching out with the Force to try to find Theron and Gnost-Dural.

“Are they out there?”

“I don’t know,” she said at last, bowing her head in defeat. “The dark side energies of the Spear make it difficult to see. Perhaps if we had a special bond …” She trailed off.

“Don’t worry,” Teff’ith said. “Theron’s tough. Just better remember to pay us when it’s over.”

Despite her seemingly cavalier attitude, even Jace could tell she was as troubled as the rest of them.

Theron had left his slicer spike behind in the control console of Karrid’s inner sanctum; at the time retrieving it had taken a backseat to avoiding getting chopped in half by her flying lightsaber. Without it, however, he was unable to slice into the turbolift to try to restart it. Forced to rely on cruder methods, he kicked the wall twice and a deep groan came up from the shaft below—or maybe now it was above. Slowly, the lift started moving again.

“I’m surprised that worked,” the Jedi remarked.

“Me and this ship have a bit of a history now,” Theron said with a wink.

When they reached D Deck the lift doors opened several centimeters, then stopped. Theron kicked the wall again, but nothing happened.

“Can you, uh, you know?” Theron asked his companion, twiddling his fingers in the air.

“Using the Force is more taxing than you think,” the Jedi told him. “Grab on.” Gnost-Dural took hold of the edge of one of the doors, Theron the other. Grunting and straining, they managed to make enough room to squeeze through. The corridor beyond was dark—even the emergency lighting had failed. As they climbed out onto the floor—what had been the ceiling before the Spear capsized—the Jedi ignited his green blade to light their way. The ship shuddered again, and they heard a deep boom—distinctly different from the sound of the explosions caused by the Republic bombardment.

“Engine room,” Theron said. “Cooling systems must have shut down.”

He knew Gnost-Dural didn’t need him to explain what would happen when the hypermatter containment unit overheated—the resulting explosion would vaporize the entire ship. Scrambling down the hall, they reached the escape pod bays.

“Empty,” Theron muttered as they passed the first bay. “Empty. Empty. Empty. Ah—there it is!

“Karrid’s private escape pod,” Theron said with a smile. “Figured nobody would be dumb enough to grab it.”

They piled in as the ship began to shake even more violently than before. Theron slammed the button to seal the pod doors and Gnost-Dural punched the controls to jettison them out into space.

Theron looked back at the dying Spear through the rear viewport as they floated away. The ship erupted in a fireworks display of explosions, each one seemingly brighter and larger than the last. And then the vessel was consumed in a brilliant white flash, punctuated by the rapidly expanding ring of glowing energy that characterized a massive hypermatter explosion.

An oppressive silence hovered over the bridge of the Aegis. The sound of fingers tapping at control consoles and the soft electronic beeps from the workstations only emphasized the complete lack of conversation.

It’s been too long, Jace thought. Nobody on board could have survived that last explosion.

He glanced over at Satele, but she didn’t return his gaze. She was standing with her eyes closed and her hands clasped in front of her chest. Jace had no way of knowing if she was still trying to use the Force to find Theron, or if she was just trying to hold herself together.

“Signal coming in from one of the escape pods, sir!”

The crewman’s voice shattered the silence. Startled, Jace let out a breath he didn’t even know he was holding.

“Patch it through,” the Supreme Commander ordered, his heart pounding with a mixture of hope and dread.

“Hey, Aegis,” Theron’s voice came over the speaker. “Any chance me and my Jedi friend here can hitch a ride?”

Five minutes later Jace, Satele, and Teff’ith were down in the docking bay—along with another twenty members of the Aegis crew—as the escape pod door popped open. Master Gnost-Dural came out first, followed by Theron. Everyone assembled broke into a round of spontaneous applause and cheers. Jace joined in, slapping his big hands heartily together as an unexpected wave of pride and joy he hadn’t felt in years rushed through him. It was all he could do to keep from charging forward and embracing both of the heroes in a fierce bear hug.

“Welcome back,” he said, snapping off a sharp salute instead.

“Looks like everyone showed up to say hi,” Theron said, his eyes shifting from the crowd, to Jace, to Teff’ith, and finally to Satele. “And I do mean everyone.”

“The Republic owes you a debt it can never repay,” Satele said, and Jace could tell she was also struggling to stay reserved in front of the rest of the assembled troops.

It was the irrepressible Twi’lek who finally said what they were all thinking but didn’t have the courage to bring up.

“You know you both naked, right?”

EPILOGUE

JACE TRIED TO PROJECT an outward display of authoritarian calm as he sat in the chair behind his desk, but inside his stomach was churning.

This is crazy. You’ve done a million debriefs. This is no different.

But it was different, simply because of who was involved.

Satele and Master Gnost-Dural were already there, seated in two of the four chairs that had been set up on the other side of Jace’s desk. The other two seats were empty, reserved for the Director and, of course, Theron. Three days had passed since the victory at Duro. In that time, Jace hadn’t spoken to either Satele or Theron, apart from a few words as he presented Theron, Gnost-Dural, and Teff’ith with the Cross of Glory, the Republic’s highest honor, at a semi-private ceremony attended by several dozen dignitaries and officials. From the other side of the door he heard his receptionist’s cheerful, high-pitched laugh; a few seconds later the door opened and Marcus stepped in, closing it behind them.

“Where’s Theron?” Jace asked.

“He said he couldn’t make it,” the Director said, clearly uncomfortable. “He’s given me his report. We can contact him after the debrief if we have any follow-up questions.”

Jace was stunned. Blowing off the debriefing wasn’t an official act of insubordination; technically Theron answered to the Director, not Jace. Marcus could have ordered him to come, of course, but that would have been entirely counterproductive. Still, Jace had been hoping to see him.

“Okay then,” he said, covering his disappointment with gruff professionalism. “Let’s begin.”

The debrief didn’t take nearly as long as Jace would have expected for an assignment of this nature and complexity. He could have blustered about how the entire mission was put in jeopardy because Theron and Gnost-Dural failed to follow orders, but it would have been just for show. Everyone in the room knew the truth, and Jace trusted Satele and Marcus to know best how to handle their people going forward. Instead, they stuck to facts and analysis, and the whole thing was over in less than an hour.

As everyone rose to leave, Jace said, “Grand Master Satele, can you stay a moment?”

Gnost-Dural and the Director left quickly, closing the door behind them without being asked.

“You aren’t the only one who was hoping Theron would be here,” Satele said once they were alone.

“Is it that obvious?” he asked, coming out from behind his desk to try to pace out some of his frustration.

“It is to me,” Satele said, standing motionless as she watched him go back and forth. “But I can understand why he wouldn’t be in the mood for a family reunion.”

“Do you think he still blames me?”

“You did the right thing. You brought the fleet to Duro.”

“Does that make up for letting the Empire attack Ruan?”

“We can’t always fix our mistakes,” she told him. “We can only learn from them.”

Jace frowned—as usual, he didn’t find the typical Jedi wisdom particularly helpful. He stopped pacing and turned to Satele, standing right in front of her.

“How do I make this right?”

Satele shook her head. “You know him as well as I do.”

“That’s the problem,” he said. “I want to get to know him better.”

“Then wait for him to come to you,” she said.

“That doesn’t seem to be working too well for you,” Jace pointed out.

“The circumstances of your relationship with our son are different from mine,” Satele noted, and Jace sensed a deep regret behind her words.

“Don’t you ever want to go and talk to him?”

“There are a lot of things we want that we cannot have,” she answered, her expression unreadable. “It’s the burden of leadership.”

She reached out and placed a tender hand on his shoulder. She left it there for a long moment, then pulled away and turned to go.

“Good-bye, Supreme Commander.”

“Good-bye, Grand Master,” he replied.

When she was gone, he sat down at his desk and fired up his workstation, determined to lose himself in the endless mountain of reports that always seemed to need his attention. To his surprise, he saw there was a private holorecording waiting for him.

“Sorry I missed the debrief, Commander,” Theron said to him when he opened the message. “Something I needed to take care of. But maybe later we can go get that drink we talked about. Give us a chance to just … I don’t know … talk, I guess.”

Jace flicked off the message as it ended with a small, contented smile.

Hidden in the shadows in the back corner of Teff’ith’s hotel room, Theron watched the Twi’lek pack, listening with amusement to her grumbling complaints as she rummaged through the room in search of anything worth stealing.

“Stupid Republic gives us a stupid medal! Can’t spend medal. Not even worth it to melt down.”

“Looking for something?” he asked, stepping into view.

As if by magic, her blaster suddenly appeared in her hand.

“How’d you get in?”

“Believe it or not, these high-class hotels don’t actually have great security.”

Teff’ith lowered her blaster, but shot him a dirty look. “Never paid us,” she accused.

“Got your credits right here,” Theron said, pointing to a bag in the corner where he’d been standing.

“Actual credits? Not a Republic chip?”

“Ten thousand actual credits. I didn’t think a Republic credit chip would have much value where you’re going.”

“Ten thousand?” she protested. “What about credits Gorvich stole from us?”

“That’s between you and him,” Theron said with a shrug.

“Knew we couldn’t trust you,” Teff’ith said with a scowl as she went over and picked up the bag.

“I might be able to come up with a couple thousand more if you stick around,” he offered.

“Not staying,” she said, dumping the credits onto the hotel room bed so she could count them. “Hate it here. Too shiny.”

I know what you mean, Theron thought. Out loud he asked, “So what’s your plan?”

“Don’t know. Figure it out. Can’t go back to Old Tion Brotherhood thanks to you.”

“I bet the Director could find a position for you with SIS as a field agent.”

“Pass,” she said, scooping up the credits and stuffing them back into the bag. “Not interested in filing reports for a boss behind a desk. We only work for ourselves.”

She slung the bag over her shoulder and headed toward the door. Before leaving, she turned back to Theron.

“No more spying on us,” she said, waggling a finger in his direction. “Don’t need you watching over our shoulder like big brother.”

Theron watched her go, not saying anything until the door had closed behind her.

“You might not need me watching over your shoulder, but I’ll be there anyway,” he vowed softly. “That’s what family does.”

To Jennifer, the reason for everything

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Though my name is the one featured on the cover of this book, as with any Star Wars novel it couldn’t have come together without the contributions of many other people. Theron Shan and Teff’ith were first introduced in Star Wars: The Old Republic: The Lost Suns comic series, so I have to thank Alexander Freed and the folks over at Dark Horse Comics for creating such fun and memorable characters. Similarly, Jace Malcolm, Satele Shan, and several other characters featured in Annihilation were originally created by the Star Wars: The Old Republic team over at BioWare, so I owe them a debt of gratitude as well.

I’d also like to thank everyone over at Del Rey and LucasBooks, particularly my editors, Frank Parisi and Jennifer Heddle. Weaving a new story into a collaborative setting like the Star Wars universe is always a delicate proposition, and I couldn’t have done it without all their feedback and help.

Finally, I’d like to give a special acknowledgment to all the fans of my writing: Without your support, I wouldn’t be where I am today.

BY SEAN WILLIAMS

The Unknown Soldier (with Shane Dix)

Metal Fatigue

The Resurrected Man

EVERGENCE (with Shane Dix]

The Prodigal Sun

The Dying Light

The Dark Imbalance

THE BOOKS OF THE CHANGE

The Stone Mage & the Sea

The Sky Warden & the Sun

The Storm Weaver & the Sand

ORPHANS (with Shane Dix)

Echoes of Earth

Orphans of Earth

Heirs of Earth

THE BOOKS OF THE CATACLYSM

The Crooked Letter

The Blood Debt

The Hanging Mountains

The Devoured Earth

GEODESICA (with Shane Dix)

Ascent

Descent

THE BROKEN LAND

The Changeling

The Dust Devils

The Scarecrow

ASTROPOLIS

Saturn Returns

Earth Ascendant

Remaining in Light

COLLECTIONS

Doorways to Eternity

A View Before Dying

New Adventures in Sci-Fi

Light Bodies Falling

Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams

Star Wars: Force Heretic I: Remnant (with Shane Dix)

Star Wars: Force Heretic II: Refugee (with Shane Dix)

Star Wars: Force Heretic III: Reunion (with Shane Dix)

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

THE FIXERS

Castle of Zombies

Planet of Cyborgs

Curse of the Vampire

Invasion of the Freaks

BY PAUL S. KEMP

Star Wars: Riptide

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Deceived

Star Wars: Crosscurrent

THE EREVIS CALE TRILOGY

Twilight Falling

Dawn of Night

Midnight’s Mask

THE TWILIGHT WAR

Shadowbred

Shadowstorm

Shadowrealm

BY DREW KARPYSHYN

STAR WARS

Star Wars: Darth Bane: Path of Destruction

Star Wars: Darth Bane: Rule of Two

Star Wars: Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan

Star Wars: The Old Republic: Annihilation

MASS EFFECT

Mass Effect: Revelation

Mass Effect: Ascension

Mass Effect: Retribution

TEMPLE HILL

Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, SEAN WILLIAMS has published thirty novels for readers of all ages, seventy short stories across numerous genres, and even the odd poem. He has been called “the premier Australian speculative fiction writer of the age,” the “Emperor of Sci-Fi,” and the “King of Chameleons” for the diversity of his output. Best-known internationally for his award-winning space opera series, such as Evergence, Geodesica, and Astropolis, he is also the author of ten linked fantasy novels inspired by the landscapes of his childhood: the dry, flatlands of South Australia, where he still lives with his wife and family.

DREW KARPYSHYN is the bestselling author of Star Wars: The Old Republic: Revan and the Star Wars: Darth Bane trilogy: Path of Destruction, Rule of Two, and Dynasty of Evil. He also wrote the acclaimed Mass Effect series of novels and worked as a writer/designer on numerous award-winning videogames. After spending most of his life in Canada, he finally grew tired of the long, cold winters and headed south in search of a climate more conducive to year-round golf. Drew Karpyshyn now lives in Texas with his wife, Jennifer, and their cat.

PAUL S. KEMP is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Star Wars: Crosscurrent, as well as nine Forgotten Realms fantasy novels and many short stories. When he’s not writing, he practices corporate law in Michigan, which has inspired him to write some really believable villains. He digs cigars, single malt scotch, and ales, and tries to hum the theme song to Shaft at least once per day. Paul Kemp lives and works in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, with his wife, twin sons, and a couple of cats.

READ ON FOR AN EXCERPT FROM

STAR WARS: SCOUNDRELS

BY TIMOTHY ZAHN

PUBLISHED BY DEL REY BOOKS

The starlines collapsed into stars, and the Imperial Star Destroyer Dominator had arrived. Standing on the command walkway, his hands clasped stiffly behind his back, Captain Worhven glared at the misty planet floating in the blackness directly ahead and wondered what in blazes he and his ship were doing here.

For these were not good times. The Emperor’s sudden dissolution of the Imperial Senate had sent dangerous swells of uncertainty throughout the galaxy, which played into the hands of radical groups like the so-called Rebel Alliance. At the same time, criminal organizations like Black Sun and the Hutt syndicates openly flouted the law, buying and selling spice, stolen merchandise, and local and regional officials alike.

Even worse, Palpatine’s brand-new toy, the weapon that was supposed to finally convince both insurgents and lawbreakers that the Empire was deadly serious about taking them down, had inexplicably been destroyed at Yavin. Worhven still hadn’t heard an official explanation for that incident.

Evil times, indeed. And evil times called for a strong and massive response. The minute the word came in from Yavin, Imperial Center should have ordered a full Fleet deployment, concentrating its efforts on the most important, the most insubordinate, and the most jittery systems. It was the classic response to crisis, a method that dated back thousands of years, and by all rights and logic the Dominator should have been at the forefront of any such deployment.

Instead, Worhven and his ship had been pressed into mule cart duty.

“Ah—Captain,” a cheery voice boomed behind him.

Worhven took a deep, calming breath. “Lord d’Ashewl,” he replied, making sure to keep his back to the other while he forced his expression into something more politically proper for the occasion.

It was well he’d started rearranging his face when he did. Barely five seconds later d’Ashewl came to a stop beside him, right up at his side instead of stopping the two steps back that Worhven demanded of even senior officers until he gestured them forward.

But that was hardly a surprise. What would a fat, stupid, accidentally rich member of Imperial Center’s upper court know of ship’s protocol?

A rhetorical question. The answer, of course, was nothing.

But if d’Ashewl didn’t understand basic courtesy, Worhven did. And he would treat his guest with the proper respect. Even if it killed him. “My Lord,” he said politely, turning to face the other. “I trust you slept well.”

“I did,” d’Ashewl said, his eyes on the planet ahead. “So that’s Wukkar out there, is it?”

“Yes, my Lord,” Worhven said, resisting the urge to wonder aloud if d’Ashewl thought the Dominator might have somehow drifted off course during ship’s night. “As per your orders.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” d’Ashewl said, craning his neck a little. “It’s just so hard to tell from this distance. Most worlds out there look distressingly alike.”

“Yes, my Lord,” Worhven repeated, again resisting the words that so badly wanted to come out. Of course there were certain basic similarities between inhabited worlds. Those similarities were what made them inhabitable in the first place. But to say that they all looked alike was the mark of either inexperience or blatant stupidity. With d’Ashewl, there was a good chance it was both.

“But if you say it’s Wukkar, then I believe it,” d’Ashewl continued. “Have you compiled the list of incoming yachts that I asked for?”

Worhven suppressed a sigh. Not just mule cart duty, but handmaiden duty, as well. “The comm officer has it,” he said, turning his head and gesturing toward the starboard crew pit. Out of the corner of his eye he saw now that he and d’Ashewl weren’t alone: d’Ashewl’s young manservant, Dayja, had apparently accompanied his superior and was standing a respectful half-dozen steps back along the walkway.

At least one of the pair knew something about proper protocol.

“Excellent, excellent,” d’Ashewl said, rubbing his hands together. “There’s a wager afoot, Captain, as to which of our group will arrive first and which will arrive last. Thanks to you and your magnificent ship, I stand to win a great deal of money.”

Worhven felt his lip twist. A ludicrous and pointless wager, to match the Dominator’s ludicrous and pointless errand. It was nice to know that in a universe on the edge of going mad, there was still ironic symmetry to be found.

“You’ll have your man relay the data to my floater,” d’Ashewl continued. “My man and I shall leave as soon as the Dominator reaches orbit.” He cocked his head. “Your orders were to remain in the region in the event that I needed further transport, were they not?”

The captain allowed his hands, safely out of d’Ashewl’s sight at his sides, to curl into angry and frustrated fists. “Yes, my Lord.”

“Good,” d’Ashewl said cheerfully. “Lord Toorfi has been known to suddenly change his mind on where the games are to continue, and if he does I need to be ready to once again beat him to the new destination. You’ll be no more than three hours away at all times, correct?”

“Yes, my Lord,” Worhven said. Fat, stupid, and a cheat besides. Clearly, all the others involved in this vague high-stakes gaming tournament had arrived at Wukkar via their own ships. Only d’Ashewl had had the supreme gall to talk someone on Imperial Center into letting him borrow an Imperial Star Destroyer for the occasion.

“But for now, all I need is for your men to prepare to launch my floater,” d’Ashewl continued. “After that, you may take the rest of the day off. Perhaps the rest of the month, as well. One never knows how long old men’s stamina and money will last, eh?”

Without waiting for a reply—which was just as well, because Worhven didn’t have any that he was willing to share—the rotund man turned and waddled back along the walkway toward the aft bridge. Dayja waited until he’d passed, then dropped into step the prescribed three paces behind him.

Worhven watched until the pair had passed beneath the archway and into the aft bridge turbolift, just to make sure they were truly gone. Then, unclenching his teeth, he turned to the comm officer. “Signal Hangar Command,” he ordered. “Our passenger is ready to leave.”

He threw a final glower at the aft bridge. Take the day off, indeed. Enough condescending idiocy like that from the Empire’s ruling class, and Worhven would be sorely tempted to join the Rebellion himself. “And tell them to make it quick,” he added. “I don’t want Lord d’Ashewl or his ship aboard a single millisecond longer than necessary.”

“I should probably have you whipped,” d’Ashewl commented absently.

Dayja half turned in the floater’s command chair to look over his shoulder. “Excuse me?” he asked.

“I said I should probably have you whipped,” d’Ashewl repeated, gazing at his datapad as he lazed comfortably on the luxurious couch in the lounge just behind the cockpit.

“Any particular reason?”

“Not really,” d’Ashewl said. “But it’s becoming the big thing among the upper echelon of the court these days, and I’d hate to be left out of the truly important trends.”

“Ah,” Dayja said. “I trust these rituals aren’t done in public?”

“Oh, no, the sessions are quite private and secretive,” d’Ashewl assured him. “But that’s a good point. Unless we happen to meet up with others of my same lofty stature, there really wouldn’t be any purpose.” He considered. “At least not until we get back to Imperial Center. We may want to try it then.”

“Speaking only for myself, I’d be content to put it off,” Dayja said. “It does sound rather pointless.”

“That’s because you have a lower-class attitude,” d’Ashewl chided. “It’s a conspicuous consumption sort of thing. A demonstration that one has such an overabundance of servants and slaves that he can afford to put one out of commission for a few days merely on a whim.”

“It still sounds pointless,” Dayja said. “Ripping someone’s flesh from his body is a great deal of work. I prefer to have a good reason if I’m going to go to that much effort.” He nodded at the datapad. “Any luck?”

“Unfortunately, the chance cubes aren’t falling in our favor,” d’Ashewl said, tossing the instrument onto the couch beside him. “Our tipoff came just a bit too late. It looks like Qazadi is already here.”

“You’re sure?”

“There were only eight possibilities, and all eight have landed and their passengers dispersed.”

Dayja turned back forward, eyeing the planet rushing up toward them and trying to estimate distances and times. If the yacht carrying their quarry had just landed, there might still be a chance of intercepting him before he went to ground.

“And the latest was over three hours ago,” d’Ashewl added. “So you might as well ease back on the throttle and enjoy the ride.”

Dayja suppressed a flicker of annoyance. “So in other words, we took the Dominator out of service for nothing.”

“Not entirely,” d’Ashewl said. “Captain Worhven had the opportunity to work on his patience level.”

Despite his frustration, Dayja had to smile. “You do play the pompous-jay role very well.”

“Thank you,” d’Ashewl said. “I’m glad my talents are still of some use to the department. And don’t be too annoyed that we missed him. It would have been nicely dramatic, snatching him out of the sky as we’d hoped. But such a triumph would have come with its own set of costs. For one thing, Captain Worhven would have had to be brought into your confidence, which would have cost you a perfectly good cover identity.”

“And possibly yours?”

“Very likely,” d’Ashewl agreed. “And while the director has plenty of scoundrel and server identities to pass out, he can slip someone into the Imperial court only so often before the other members catch on. They may be arrogant and pompous, but they’re not stupid. All things considered, it’s probably just as well things have worked out this way.”

“Perhaps,” Dayja said, not entirely ready to concede the point. “Still, he’s going to be harder to get out of Villachor’s mansion than he would have been if we’d caught him along the way.”

“Even so, it will be easier than digging him out of one of Black Sun’s complexes on Imperial Center,” d’Ashewl countered. “Assuming we could find him in that rathole in the first place.” He gestured toward the viewport. “And don’t think it would have been that easy to pluck him out of space. Think Xizor’s Virago, only scaled up fifty or a hundred times, and you’ll get an idea what kind of nut it would have been to crack.”

“All nuts can be cracked,” Dayja said with a shrug. “All it takes is the right application of pressure.”

“Provided the nutcracker itself doesn’t break in the process,” d’Ashewl said, his voice going suddenly dark. “You’ve never tangled with Black Sun at this level, Dayja. I have. Qazadi is one of the worst, with every bit of Xizor’s craftiness and manipulation.”

“But without the prince’s charm?”

“Joke if you wish,” d’Ashewl rumbled. “But be careful. If not for yourself, for me. I have the ghosts of far too many lost agents swirling through my memory as it is.”

“I understand,” Dayja said quietly. “I’ll be careful.”

“Good.” D’Ashewl huffed out a short puff of air, an affectation Dayja guessed he’d picked up from others of Imperial Center’s elite. “All right. We still don’t know why Qazadi is here, whether he’s on assignment, lying low, or in some kind of disfavor with Xizor and the rest of the upper echelon.”

“But we’re sure he’ll be staying at Villachor’s?”

“I can’t see him coming to Wukkar and staying anywhere but the sector chief’s mansion,” d’Ashewl said. “But there may be other possibilities, and it wouldn’t hurt for you to poke around a bit. I’ve downloaded everything we’ve got on Villachor, his people, and the Marblewood Estate for you. Unfortunately, there isn’t very much.”

“I guess I’ll have to get inside and see the place for myself,” Dayja said. “I’m thinking the upcoming Festival of Four Honorings will be my best bet.”

“If Villachor follows his usual pattern of hosting one of Iltarr City’s venues at Marblewood,” d’Ashewl warned. “It’s possible that with Qazadi visiting he’ll pass that role to someone else.”

“I don’t think so,” Dayja said. “High-level Black Sun operatives like to use social celebrations as cover for meetings with offworld contacts and to set up future blackmail or bribe opportunities. In fact, given the timing of Qazadi’s visit, it’s possible he’s here to observe or assist with some particularly troublesome problem.”

“You’ve done your homework,” d’Ashewl said. “Excellent. Do bear in mind, though, that the influx of people also means Marblewood’s security force will be on heightened alert.”

“Don’t worry,” Dayja said calmly. “You can get through any door if you know the proper way to knock. I’ll just have to keep knocking until I find that pattern.”

According to Wukkar’s largest and most influential fashion magazines, all of which were delighted to run extensive stories on Avrak Villachor whenever he paid them to do so, Villachor’s famed Marblewood Estate was one of the true showcases of the galaxy. It was essentially a country manor in the midst of Iltarr City: a walled-off expanse of landscaped grounds surrounding a former governor’s mansion built in classic High Empress Teta style.

The more breathless of the commentators always liked to remind their readers of Villachor’s many business and philanthropic achievements and awards, and predicted that there would be more such honors in the future. Other commentators, the unpaid ones, countered with more ominous suggestions that Villachor’s most likely achievement would be to suffer an early and violent death.

Both predictions were probably right; the thought flicked through Villachor’s mind as he stood at the main entrance to his mansion and watched the line of five ordinary-looking landspeeders float through the gate and into his courtyard. In fact, there was every chance that he was about to face one or the other of those events right now.

The only question was which one.

Proper etiquette on Wukkar dictated that a host be waiting beside the landspeeder door when a distinguished guest emerged. In this case, though, that would be impossible. All five landspeeders had dark-tint windows, and there was no way to know which one his mysterious visitor was riding in. If Villachor guessed wrong, not only would he have violated prescribed manners, but he would also look like a fool.

And so he paused on the bottom step until the landspeeders came to a well-practiced simultaneous halt. The doors of all but the second vehicle opened and began discharging the passengers, most of them hard-faced human men who would have fit in seamlessly with Villachor’s own cadre of guards and enforcers. They spread out into a loose and casual-looking circle around the vehicles, and one of them murmured something into the small comlink clipped to his collar. The final landspeeder’s doors opened—

Villachor felt his throat tighten as he caught his first glimpse of gray-green scales above a colorful beaded tunic. This was no human. This was a Falleen.

And not just one, but an entire landspeeder full of them. Even as Villachor started forward, two Falleen emerged from each side of the vehicle, their hands on their holstered blasters, their eyes flicking to and past Villachor to the mansion towering behind him. Special bodyguards, which could only be for an equally special guest. Villachor picked up his pace, trying to hurry without looking like it, his heart thudding with unpleasant anticipation. If it was Prince Xizor in that landspeeder, this day was likely to end very badly. Unannounced visits from Black Sun’s chief nearly always did.

It was indeed another Falleen who stepped out into the sunlight as Villachor reached his proper place at the vehicle’s side. But to his quiet relief, it wasn’t Xizor. It was merely Qazadi, one of Black Sun’s nine vigos.

It was only as Villachor dropped to one knee and bowed his head in reverence to his guest that the significance of that thought belatedly struck him. Only one of the nine most powerful beings in Black Sun?

Just because the Falleen standing in front of him wasn’t Xizor didn’t mean the day might not still end in death.

“I greet you, Your Excellency,” Villachor said, bowing still lower. If he were in trouble, an extra show of humility probably wouldn’t save him, but it might at least buy him a less painful death. “I’m Avrak Villachor, chief of this sector’s operations, and your humble servant.”

“I greet you in turn, Sector Chief Villachor,” Qazadi said. His voice was smooth and melodious, very much like Xizor’s, but with a darker edge of menace lurking beneath it. “You may rise.”

“Thank you, Your Excellency,” Villachor said, getting back to his feet. “How may I serve you?”

“You may take me to a guest suite,” Qazadi said. His eyes seemed to glitter with some kind of private amusement. “And then you may relax.”

Villachor frowned. “Excuse me, Your Excellency?” he asked carefully.

“You fear that I’ve come to exact judgment upon you,” Qazadi said, his voice still dark, yet at the same time oddly conversational. The gray-green scales of his face were changing, too, Villachor noted, with a hint of pink touching his upper cheeks. “And such thoughts should never be simply dismissed,” the Falleen added, “for I do not leave Imperial Center without great cause.”

“Yes, Your Excellency,” Villachor said. The sense of dark uncertainty still hung over the group like an early-morning fog, but to his mild surprise he could feel his heartbeat slowing and an unexpected calm beginning to flow through him. Something about the Falleen’s voice was more soothing than he’d realized.

“But in this case, the cause has nothing to do with you,” Qazadi continued. “With Lord Vader’s absence from Imperial Center leaving his spies temporarily leaderless, Prince Xizor has decided it would be wise to shuffle the cards a bit.” He gave Villachor a thin smile. “In this case, a most appropriate metaphor.”

Villachor felt his mouth go suddenly dry. Was Qazadi actually talking about—

“My vault is at your complete disposal, Your Excellency,” he managed.

“Thank you,” Qazadi said, as if Villachor actually had a choice in the matter. “While my guards bring in my belongings and arrange my suite, we will go investigate the security of your vault.”

The breeze that had been drifting across Villachor’s face shifted direction, and suddenly the calmness that had settled comfortably across his mind vanished. It hadn’t been Qazadi’s voice at all, Villachor realized acidly, but just another of those cursed body-chemical tricks Falleen liked to pull on people. “As you wish, Your Excellency,” he said, bowing again and gesturing to the mansion door. “Please, follow me.”

The hotel that d’Ashewl had arranged for was in the very center of Iltarr City’s most exclusive district, and the Imperial Suite was the finest accommodations the hotel had to offer. More important, from Dayja’s point of view, the humble servants’ quarters tacked onto one edge of the suite had a private door that opened right beside one of the hotel’s back stairwells.

An hour after d’Ashewl finished his grand mid-afternoon dinner and retired to his suite, Dayja had changed from servant’s livery to more nondescript clothing and was on the streets. A few minutes’ walk, and he was out of the enclave of the rich and powerful and into a poorer, nastier section of the city.

Modern Intelligence operations usually began at a field officer’s desk, with a complete rundown of the target’s communications, finances, and social webs. But in this case, Dayja knew, such an approach would be less than useless. Black Sun’s top chiefs were exceptionally good at covering their tracks and burying all the connections and pings that could be used to ensnare lesser criminals. In addition, many of those hidden connections had built-in flags to alert the crime lord to the presence of an investigation. The last thing Dayja could afford would be to drive Qazadi deeper underground or, worse, send him scurrying back to Imperial Center where he would once again be under the direct protection of Xizor and the vast Black Sun resources there.

And so Dayja would do this the old-fashioned way: poking and prodding at the edges of Black Sun’s operations in Iltarr City, making a nuisance of himself until he drew the right person’s attention.

He spent the rest of the evening just walking around, observing the people and absorbing the feel and rhythms of the city. As the sky darkened toward evening he went back to one of the three clandestine dealers he’d spotted earlier and bought two decagrams of Nyriaan spice, commenting casually about the higher quality of the drug that he was used to.

By the time he was ready to head back to the hotel he had bought samples from two more dealers, making similar disparaging observations each time. Black Sun dealt heavily in Nyriaan spice, and there was a good chance that all three dealers were connected at least peripherally to Villachor. With any luck, news of this contemptuous stranger would begin filtering up the command chain.

He was within sight of the enclave’s private security force station when he was jumped by three young toughs.

For the first hopeful moment he thought that perhaps Black Sun’s local intel web was better than he’d expected. But it was quickly clear that the thugs weren’t working for Villachor or anyone else, but merely wanted to steal the decagrams of spice he was carrying. All three of the youths carried knives, and one of them had a small blaster, and there was a burning fire in their eyes that said they would have the spice no matter what the cost.

Unfortunately for them, Dayja had a knife, too, one which he’d taken off the body of a criminal who’d once had similar plans for him. Thirty seconds later, he was once again walking toward home, leaving the three bodies dribbling their blood away into the drainage gutter alongside the walkway.

Tomorrow, he decided, he would suggest that d’Ashewl make a show of visiting some of the local cultural centers, where Dayja would have a chance to better size up the city’s ruling class. Then it would be another solo excursion into the fringes, and more of this same kind of subtle troublemaking. Between the high classes and the low, sooner or later Villachor or his people were bound to take notice.

He was well past the security station, with visions of a soft bed dancing before his eyes, before the police finally arrived to collect the bodies he’d left behind.

Han Solo had never been in Reggilio’s Cantina before. But he’d been in hundreds just like it, and he knew the type well. It was reasonably quiet, though from wariness rather than good manners; slightly boisterous, though with the restraint that came of the need to keep a low profile; and decorated in dilapidated scruffiness, with no apologies offered or expected.

It was, in short, the perfect place for a trap.

A meter away on the other half of the booth’s wraparound seat, Chewbacca growled unhappily.

“No kidding,” Han growled back, tapping his fingertips restlessly against the mug of Corellian spiced ale that he still hadn’t touched. “But if there’s even a chance this is legit, we have to take it.”

Chewbacca rumbled a suggestion.

“No,” Han said flatly. “They’re running a rebellion, remember? They haven’t got anything extra to spare.”

Chewbacca growled again.

“Sure we’re worth it,” Han agreed. “Shooting those TIEs off Luke alone should have doubled the reward. But you saw the look on Dodonna’s face—he wasn’t all that happy about giving us the first batch. If Her Royal Highness hadn’t been standing right there saying good-bye, I’m pretty sure he would have tried to talk us down.”

He glared into his mug. Besides, he didn’t add, asking Princess Leia for a replacement reward would mean he’d have to tell her how he’d lost the first stack. Not in gambling or bad investments or even drinking, but to a kriffing pirate.

And then she would give him one of those looks.

There were, he decided, worse things than being on Jabba’s hit list.

On the other hand, if this offer of a job he’d picked up at the Ord Mantell drop was for real, there was a good chance Leia would never have to know.

“Hello there, Solo.” The raspy voice came from Han’s right. “Eyes front, hands flat on the table. You, too, Wookiee.”

Han set his teeth firmly together as he let go of his mug and laid his hands palms-down on the table. So much for the job offer being legit. “That you Falsta?”

“Hey—good memory,” Falsta said approvingly as he sidled around into Han’s view and sat down on the chair across the table. He was just as Han remembered him: short and scrawny, wearing a four-day stubble and his usual wraparound leather jacket over yet another from his collection of flame-bird shirts. His blaster was even uglier than his shirt: a heavily modified Clone Wars–era DT-57.

Falsta liked to claim the weapon had once been owned by General Grievous himself. Han didn’t believe that any more than anyone else did.

“I hear Jabba’s mad at you,” Falsta continued, resting his elbow on the table and leveling the barrel of his blaster squarely at Han’s face. “Again.”

“I hear you’ve branched out into assassinations,” Han countered, eyeing the blaster and carefully repositioning his leg underneath the table. He would have just one shot at this.

Falsta shrugged. “Hey, if that’s what the customer wants, that’s what the customer gets. I can tell you this much: Black Sun pays a whole lot better for a kill than Jabba does for a grab.” He wiggled the barrel of his blaster a little. “Not that I don’t mind picking up a little free money. As long as I just happen to be here anyway.”

“Sure, why not?” Han agreed, frowning. That was a strange comment. Was Falsta saying that he wasn’t the one who’d sent Han that message?

No—ridiculous. The galaxy was a huge place. There was no possible way that a bounty hunter could have just happened to drop in on a random cantina in a random city on a random world at the same time Han was there. No, Falsta was just being cute.

That was fine. Han could be cute, too. “So you’re saying that if I gave you double what Jabba’s offering, you’d get up and walk away?” he asked.

Falsta smiled evilly. “You got it on you?”

Han inclined his head toward Chewbacca. “Third power pack down from the shoulder.”

Falsta’s eyes flicked to Chewbacca’s bandoleer—

And in a single contorted motion Han banged his knee up, slamming the table into Falsta’s elbow and knocking his blaster out of line, as he grabbed his mug and hurled the Corellian spiced ale into Falsta’s eyes. There was a brief flash of heat as the bounty hunter’s reflexive shot sizzled past Han’s left ear.

One shot was all Falsta got. An instant later his blaster was pointed harmlessly at the ceiling, frozen in place by Chewbacca’s iron grip around both the weapon and the hand holding it.

That should have been the end of it. Falsta should have conceded defeat, surrendered his blaster, and walked out of the cantina, a little humiliated but still alive.

But Falsta had never been the type to concede anything. Even as he blinked furiously at the ale still running down into his eyes, his left hand jabbed like a knife inside his jacket and emerged with a small hold-out blaster.

He was in the process of lining up the weapon when Han shot him under the table. Falsta fell forward, his right arm still raised in Chewbacca’s grip, his hold-out blaster clattering across the tabletop before it came to a halt. Chewbacca held that pose another moment, then lowered Falsta’s arm to the table, deftly removing the blaster from the dead man’s hand as he did so.

For a half-dozen seconds Han didn’t move, gripping his blaster under the table, his eyes darting around the cantina. The place had gone quiet, with practically every eye now focused on him. As far as he could tell, no one had drawn a weapon, but most of the patrons at the nearest tables had their hands on or near their holsters.

Chewbacca rumbled a warning. “You all saw it,” Han called, though he doubted more than a few of them actually had. “He shot first.”

There was another moment of silence. Then, almost casually, hands lifted from blasters, heads turned away, and the low conversation resumed.

Maybe this sort of thing happened all the time in Reggilio’s. Or maybe they all knew Falsta well enough that no one was going to miss him.

Still, it was definitely time to move on. “Come on,” Han muttered, holstering his blaster and sliding around the side of the table. They would go back to the spaceport area, he decided, poke around the cantinas there and see if they could snag a pick-up cargo. It almost certainly wouldn’t net them enough to pay off Jabba, but it would at least get them off Wukkar. He stood up, giving the cantina one final check—

“Excuse me?”

Han spun around, reflexively dropping his hand back to the grip of his blaster. But it was just an ordinary human man hurrying toward him.

Or rather, most of a man. Much of the other’s face was covered in a flesh-colored medseal that had been stretched across the skin and hair, with a prosthetic eye bobbing along at the spot where his right eye would normally be.

It wasn’t just any eye, either. It was something alien-designed, glittering like a smaller version of an Arconian multifaceted eye. Even in the cantina’s dim light the effect was striking, unsettling, and strangely hypnotic.

With a jolt, Han realized he’d been staring and forced his gaze away. Not only was it rude, but a visual grab like that was exactly the sort of trick a clever assassin might use to draw his victim’s attention at a critical moment.

But the man’s hands were empty, with no blaster or blade in sight. In fact, his right hand wouldn’t have been of any use anyway. Twisted and misshapen, it was wrapped tightly in the same medseal as the man’s face. Either it had been seriously damaged or else there was a prosthetic under there that had come from the same aliens who’d supplied him with that eye. “You might want to see about getting a different eye,” Han suggested, relaxing a bit.

“I need to see about a great many things,” the man said, stopping a couple of meters back. His remaining eye flicked to Han’s blaster, then rose with an effort back to his face. “Allow me to introduce myself,” he continued. “My name is Eanjer—well, my surname isn’t important. What is important is that I’ve been robbed of a great deal of money.”

“Sorry to hear it,” Han said, backing toward the door. “You need to talk to Iltarr City Security.”

“They can’t help me,” Eanjer said, taking one step forward with each backward one Han took. “I want my money back, and I need someone who can handle himself and doesn’t mind working outside law or custom. That’s why I’m here. I was hoping I could find someone who fit both those criteria.” His eye flicked to Falsta’s body. “Having seen you in action, it’s clear that you’re exactly the type of person I’m looking for.”

“It was self-defense,” Han countered, picking up his pace. The man’s problem was probably some petty gambling debt, and he had no intention of getting tangled up in something like that.

But whatever else Eanjer might be, the man was determined. He picked up his pace to match Han’s, staying right with him. “I don’t want you to do it for free,” he said. “I can pay. I can pay very, very well.”

Han slowed to a reluctant halt. It was probably still something petty, and hearing the man out would be a complete waste of time. But sitting around a spaceport cantina probably would be, too.

And if he didn’t listen, there was a fair chance the pest would follow him all the way to the spaceport. “How much are we talking about?” he asked.

“At a minimum, all your expenses,” Eanjer said. “At a maximum—” He glanced around and lowered his voice to a whisper. “The criminals stole over a hundred and sixty-three million credits. If you get it back, I’ll split it with you and whoever else you call in to help you.”

Han felt his throat tighten. This could still be nothing. Eanjer might just be spinning cobwebs.

But if he was telling the truth …

“Fine,” Han said. “Let’s talk. But not here.”

Eanjer looked back at Falsta’s body, a shiver running through him. “No,” he agreed softly. “Any place but here.”

“The thief’s name is Avrak Villachor,” Eanjer said, his single eye darting around the diner Han had chosen, a more upscale place than the cantina and a prudent three blocks away. “More precisely, he’s the leader of the particular group involved. I understand he’s also affiliated with some large criminal organization—I don’t know which one.”

Han looked across the table at Chewbacca and raised his eyebrows. The Wookiee gave a little shrug and shook his head. Apparently, he’d never heard of Villachor, either. “Yeah, there are lots to choose from,” he told Eanjer.

“Indeed.” Eanjer looked down at his drink as if noticing it for the first time, then continued his nervous scanning of the room. “My father is—was—a very successful goods importer. Three weeks ago, Villachor came to our home with a group of thugs and demanded he sign over his business to Villachor’s organization. When he refused—” A barely perceptible shudder ran through his body. “They killed him,” he said, his voice almost too low to hear. “They just … they didn’t even use blasters. It was some kind of fragmentation grenade. It just tore him …” He trailed off.

“That what happened to your face?” Han asked.

Eanjer blinked and looked up. “What? Oh.” He lifted his medsealed hand to gently touch his medsealed face. “Yes, I caught the edge of the blast. There was so much blood. They must have thought I was dead …” He shook his head, as if trying to shake away the memory. “Anyway, they took everything from his safe and left. All the corporate records, the data on our transport network, the lists of subcontractors—everything.”

“Including a hundred and sixty-three million credits?” Han asked. “Must have been a pretty big safe.”

“Not really,” Eanjer said. “Walk-in, but nothing special. The money was in credit tabs, a million credits per. A hip pouch would hold them all.” He hitched his chair a little closer to the table. “But here’s the thing. Credit tabs are keyed to the owner and the owner’s designated agents. With my father now dead, I’m the only one who can get the full value out of them. For anyone else, they’re worth no more than a quarter, maybe half a percent of the face value. And that’s only if Villachor can find a slicer who can get through the security coding.”

“That still leaves him eight hundred thousand,” Han pointed out. “Not bad for a night’s work.”

“Which is why I have no doubt that he’s currently hunting for a slicer to do the job.” Eanjer took a deep breath. “Here’s the thing. The business records Villachor stole don’t matter. All the people who worked for us were there specifically and personally because of my father, and without him they’re going to fade away into the mist. Especially since the credit tabs were on hand because we were preparing to pay out for services received. You don’t pay a shipper, he doesn’t work for you anymore.”

Especially if that shipper was actually a smuggler, which was what Han strongly suspected was behind the family’s so-called import business. He still wasn’t sure if Eanjer himself knew that, suspected it, or was completely oblivious. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You want us to break into Villachor’s place—you know where that is, by the way?”

“Oh, yes,” Eanjer said, nodding. “It’s right here in Iltarr City. It’s an estate called Marblewood, nearly a square kilometer worth of grounds surrounding a big mansion.”

“Ah,” Han said. Probably the big open space in the northern part of the city that he’d spotted as he was bringing the Falcon in. At the time, he’d guessed it was a park. “You want us to go there, break into wherever he’s keeping the credit tabs, steal them, and get out again. That about cover it?”

“Yes,” Eanjer said. “And I’m very grateful—”

“No.”

Eanjer’s single eye blinked. “Excuse me?”

“You’ve got the wrong man,” Han told him. “We’re shippers, like your father. We don’t know the first thing about breaking into vaults.”

“But surely you know people who do,” Eanjer said. “You could call them. I’ll split the money with them, too. Everyone can have an equal share.”

“You can call them yourself.”

“But I don’t know any such people,” Eanjer protested, his voice pleading now. “I can’t just pick up a comlink and ask for the nearest thief. And without you—” He broke off, visibly forcing himself back under control. “I saw how you handled that man in the cantina,” he said. “You think fast and you act decisively. More important, you didn’t kill him until you had no choice. That means I can trust you to get the job done, and to deal fairly with me when it’s over.”

Han sighed. “Look—”

“No, you look,” Eanjer bit out, a hint of anger peeking through the frustration. “I’ve been sitting in cantinas for two solid weeks. You’re the first person I’ve found who gives me any hope at all. Villachor’s already had three weeks to find a slicer for those credit tabs. If I don’t get them out before he does, he’ll win. He’ll win everything.”

Han looked at Chewbacca. But the other was sitting quietly, with no hint as to what he was thinking or feeling. Clearly, he was leaving this one totally up to Han. “Is it the money you really want?” he asked Eanjer. “Or are you looking for vengeance?”

Eanjer looked down at his hand. “A little of both,” he admitted.

Han lifted his mug and took a long swallow. He was right, of course. He and Chewbacca really weren’t the ones for this job.

But Eanjer was also right. They knew plenty of people who were.

And with a hundred and sixty-three million credits on the line …

“I need to make a call,” he said, lowering his mug and pulling out his comlink.

Eanjer nodded, making no move to leave. “Right.”

Han paused. “A private call.”

For another second Eanjer still didn’t move. Then, abruptly, his eye widened. “Oh,” he said, getting hastily to his feet. “Right. I’ll, uh, I’ll be back.”

Chewbacca warbled a question. “It can’t hurt to ask around,” Han told him, keying in a number and trying to keep his voice calm. A hundred and sixty-three million. Even a small slice of that would pay off Jabba a dozen times over. And not just Jabba, but everyone else who wanted a piece of Han’s head surrounded by onions on a serving dish. He could pay them all off his back, and still have enough for him and Chewie to run free and clear wherever they wanted. Maybe for the rest of their lives. “I just hope Rachele Ree’s at home and not off on a trip somewhere.”

To his mild surprise, she was home.

“Well, hello, Han,” she said cheerfully when Han had identified himself. “Nice to hear from you, for a change. Are you on Wukkar? Oh, yes—I see you are. Iltarr City, eh? Best Corellian food on the planet.”

Chewbacca rumbled a comment under his breath. Han nodded sourly. His comlink was supposedly set up to prevent location backtracks, but electronic safeguards never seemed to even slow Rachele down. “Got a question,” he said. “Two questions. First, have you heard anything about a high-level break-in and murder over the last month or so? It would have been at an import company.”

“You talking about Polestar Imports?” Rachele asked. “Sure—it was the talk of the lounges about three weeks ago. The owner was killed, and his son apparently went underground.”

“Well, he’s bobbed back up again,” Han said. “Is the son’s name Eanjer, and was he hurt in the attack?”

“Let me check … yes—Eanjer Kunarazti. As to whether he was hurt … the article doesn’t say. Let me check one of my other sources … yes, looks like it. His blood was found at the scene, anyway.”

“Good enough,” Han said. He hadn’t really thought Eanjer was pulling a scam, but it never hurt to check. “I mean, not good, but—”

“I know what you mean,” Rachele said, with what Han could imagine was a sly smile. “Second question?”

“Can you run a few names and see if any of them is in spitting distance of Wukkar right now?” Han asked. “Eanjer’s offered me the job of getting back the money that was stolen.”

“Really,” Rachele said, sounding bemused. “You been branching out since I saw you last?”

“Not really,” Han said. Fighting a battle or two for the Rebel Alliance didn’t qualify as branching out, he told himself firmly. “He just likes the way I do things.”

“Doesn’t everybody?” Rachele countered dryly. “No problem. Who are you looking for?”

Han ran down all the names he could think of, people who were both competent and reasonably trustworthy. Considering how many years he’d spent swimming through the galaxy’s fringe, it was a surprisingly short list. He added three more names at Chewbacca’s suggestion, and pointedly ignored the Wookiee’s fourth offering. “That’s it,” he told Rachele. “If I think of anyone else I’ll call you back.”

“Sure,” Rachele said. “Did your new friend mention the potential take? Some of these people will want to know that up front.”

Han smiled tightly, wishing he were there to see her expression. “If we get it all, we’ll be splitting a hundred and sixty-three million.”

There was a moment of stunned silence at the other end. “Really,” Rachele said at last. “Wow. You could practically hire Jabba himself for that amount.”

“Thanks, but we’ll pass,” Han said. “And that number assumes Eanjer lives through the whole thing. You should probably make that clear, too.”

“I will,” Rachele said. “So it’s all in credit tabs, huh? Makes sense. Okay, I’ll make some calls and get back to you. Does he have any idea where the credit tabs are?”

“He says they’re with someone named Villachor,” Han said. “You know him?”

There was another short pause. “Yes, I’ve heard of him,” Rachele said, her voice subtly changed. “Okay, I’ll get started on your list. Where are you staying?”

“Right now, we’re just bunking in the Falcon.”

“Well, you’ll eventually need something in town,” Rachele said. “Of course, everything in sight’s already been booked for the upcoming Festival. But I’ll see what I can come up with.”

“Thanks, Rachele,” Han said. “I owe you.”

“Bet on it. Catch you later.”

Han keyed off the comlink and put it away. Chewbacca warbled a question.

“Because I don’t want him, that’s why,” Han said. “I doubt he’d show up even if I asked.”

Chewbacca growled again.

“Because he said he never wants to see me again, remember?” Han countered back. “Lando does occasionally mean what he says, you know.”

A motion caught the edge of his eye, and he looked up to see Eanjer moving hesitantly toward them. “Is everything all right?” he asked, his eye flicking back and forth between them.

“Sure,” Han said. “I’ve got someone looking into getting a team together.”

“Wonderful,” Eanjer said, coming the rest of the way to the table and easing into his seat. He must have seen the end of that brief argument, Han decided, and probably thought it had been more serious than it actually was. “This person is someone you can trust?”

Han nodded. “She’s a low-ranking member of the old Wukkar aristocracy. Knows everyone and everything, and isn’t exactly thrilled with the people who are running the show right now.”

“If you say so,” Eanjer said. He didn’t sound entirely convinced, but it was clear he wasn’t ready to press the issue. “I think I’ve come up with a perfect time for the break-in. Two weeks from now is the Festival of Four Honorings.”

Han looked at Chewbacca, got a shrug in return. “Never heard of it,” he told Eanjer.

“It’s Wukkar’s version of Carnival Week,” Eanjer said, his lip twisting. “Anything Imperial Center does, someone here has to do better. Anyway, it’s a seven-day event, with a day each devoted to stone, air, water, and fire, with a prep day in between each of the Honorings. It’s the most important event on Wukkar, with people coming from as far away as Vuma and Imperial Center to attend.”

“And probably pickpockets from as far away as Nal Hutta,” Han murmured.

“I wouldn’t know,” Eanjer said. “My point is that Villachor hosts one of the city’s biggest celebrations on his grounds.”

Han sat up a little straighter. “On his grounds? You mean he lets people wander around right next to his house?”

“More a mansion than a house,” Eanjer said. “Or perhaps more a fortress than a mansion. But yes, thousands of people come and go freely over those four days.”

Chewbacca warbled the obvious point. “Of course he’ll have beefed-up security,” Han agreed. “But at least we won’t have to get over any walls and through an outer sentry line. How do we get an invitation to this thing?”

“None needed,” Eanjer said. “It’s open to all.” The half of his mouth that was visible curved upward in a bitter smile. “Villachor likes to style himself as a philanthropist and a friend of the city. He also likes to show off his wealth and style.”

“That’s okay,” Han said. “Some of my best deals came from people who thought they were better and smarter than everyone else. This might actually work.”

“Then you’ll help me?” Eanjer asked hopefully.

“Let’s first see what Rachele comes up with,” Han said. “I’ve got some ideas, but like I said before, this isn’t our specialty. But if we can get the people I need, we should at least have a shot.”

“Make sure they know what’s involved,” Eanjer said. “A hundred and sixty-three million.”

“Yeah, I got that part,” Han said. “Give me your comlink number, and I’ll call when we’ve got more to talk about.”

“All right,” Eanjer said a bit uncertainly as he dug out a data card and handed it over. “When will that be?”

“When,” Han said with exaggerated patience, “we’ve got more to talk about.”

They were back at the Falcon when Rachele’s report came in.

As usual with life, the results were mixed. Many of the people Han had hoped to contact were out of touch, out of the immediate area, or temporarily out of circulation. Others who might otherwise have been possibilities would take too long to get ahold of, especially with the two-week countdown to the Festival that Eanjer was looking at.

And there were a couple who were unavailable themselves but had people they could recommend. Mazzic, in particular, had already grabbed the initiative and informed Rachele that he would be sending two new recruits who matched the skills of the ones Han had asked about.

Chewbacca wasn’t at all sure he liked that. “Yeah, me neither,” Han agreed, frowning at the note Rachele had sent. Still, Mazzic had been trustworthy enough in the past. More to the point, he was notorious for not trusting anyone himself until he’d thoroughly checked out the candidate. If he was okay with these recruits, they were probably safe enough.

Unless he was trying to get back at Han for something. But that was unlikely. Han hadn’t done anything to Mazzic, not that he could remember. Certainly not lately.

Chewbacca grunted a question.

“I guess we go hunting,” Han told him, levering himself to his feet. “Go fire up the Falcon. I’ll see about getting us a liftoff slot.”

STAR WARS—LEGENDS

What is a legend? According to the Random House Dictionary, a legend is “a nonhistorical or unverifiable story handed down by tradition from earlier times and popularly accepted as historical.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “a story from the past that is believed by many people but cannot be proved to be true.” And Wikipedia says, “Legends are tales that, because of the tie to a historical event or location, are believable, though not necessarily believed.” Because of this inherent believability, legends tend to live on in a culture, told and retold even though they are generally regarded as fiction.

Long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, a legend was born: The story of Luke Skywalker and his fellow heroes, Princess Leia and Han Solo. Three blockbuster movies introduced these characters and their stories to millions of people who embraced these tales and began to build upon them, as is done with myths everywhere. And thus novels, short stories, and comic books were published, expanding the Star Wars universe introduced in the original trilogy and later enhanced by the prequel movies and the animated TV series The Clone Wars. The enormous body of work that grew around the films and The Clone Wars came to be known as The Expanded Universe.

Now, as new movies, television shows, and books move into the realm of the official canon, The Expanded Universe must take its place firmly in the realm of legends. But, like all great legends, the fact that we can’t prove the veracity of every detail doesn’t make the stories any less entertaining or worthy of being read. These legends remain true to the spirit of Star Wars and in that way are another avenue through which we can get to know and understand our beloved heroes in that galaxy far, far away.

—Del Rey Books, May 2014

Turn the page or jump to the timeline of Star Wars Legends novels to learn more.

Introduction to the OLD REPUBLIC Era
(5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

Long—long—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: A New Hope … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.

But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.

The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s central worlds. This war resulted in the first destruction of the Sith Empire—but it was hardly the last. For the next four thousand years, skirmishes between the Republic and Sith grew into wars, with the scales always tilting toward one or the other, and peace never lasting. The galaxy was a place of almost constant strife: Sith armies against Republic armies; Force-using Sith Lords against Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights; and the dreaded nomadic mercenaries called Mandalorians bringing muscle and firepower wherever they stood to gain.

Then, a thousand years before A New Hope and the Battle of Yavin, the Jedi defeated the Sith at the Battle of Ruusan, decimating the so-called Brotherhood of Darkness that was the heart of the Sith Empire—and most of its power.

One Sith Lord survived—Darth Bane—and his vision for the Sith differed from that of his predecessors. He instituted a new doctrine: No longer would the followers of the dark side build empires or amass great armies of Force-users. There would be only two Sith at a time: a Master and an apprentice. From that time on, the Sith remained in hiding, biding their time and plotting their revenge, while the rest of the galaxy enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace, so long and strong that the Republic eventually dismantled its standing armies.

But while the Republic seemed strong, its institutions had begun to rot. Greedy corporations sought profits above all else and a corrupt Senate did nothing to stop them, until the corporations reduced many planets to raw materials for factories and entire species became subjects for exploitation. Individual Jedi continued to defend the Republic’s citizens and obey the will of the Force, but the Jedi Order to which they answered grew increasingly out of touch. And a new Sith mastermind, Darth Sidious, at last saw a way to restore Sith domination over the galaxy and its inhabitants, and quietly worked to set in motion the revenge of the Sith …

If you’re a reader new to the Old Republic era, here are three great starting points:

• The Old Republic: Deceived, by Paul S. Kemp: Kemp tells the tale of the Republic’s betrayal by the Sith Empire, and features Darth Malgus, an intriguing, complicated villain.

• Knight Errant, by John Jackson Miller: Alone in Sith territory, the headstrong Jedi Kerra Holt seeks to thwart the designs of an eccentric clan of fearsome, powerful, and bizarre Sith Lords.

• Darth Bane: Path of Destruction, by Drew Karpyshyn: A portrait of one of the most famous Sith Lords, from his horrifying childhood to an adulthood spent in the implacable pursuit of vengeance.

Introduction to the RISE OF THE EMPIRE Era
(33–0 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

This is the era of the Star Wars prequel films, in which Darth Sidious’s schemes lead to the devastating Clone Wars, the betrayal and destruction of the Jedi Order, and the Republic’s transformation into the Empire. It also begins the tragic story of Anakin Skywalker, the boy identified by the Jedi as the Chosen One of ancient prophecy, the one destined to bring balance to the Force. But, as seen in the movies, Anakin’s passions lead him to the dark side, and he becomes the legendary masked and helmeted villain Darth Vader.

Before his fall, however, Anakin spends many years being trained as a Jedi by Obi-Wan Kenobi. When the Clone Wars break out, pitting the Republic against the secessionist Trade Federation, Anakin becomes a war hero and one of the galaxy’s greatest Jedi Knights. But his love for the Naboo Queen and Senator Padmé Amidala, and his friendship with Supreme Chancellor Palpatine—secretly known as the Sith Lord Darth Sidious—will be his undoing …

If you’re a reader looking to jump into the Rise of the Empire era, here are four great starting points:

• Labyrinth of Evil, by James Luceno: Luceno’s tale of the last days of the Clone Wars is equal parts compelling detective story and breakneck adventure, leading directly into the beginning of Star Wars: Episode III Revenge of the Sith.

• Republic Commando: Hard Contact, by Karen Traviss: The first of the Republic Commando books introduces us to a band of clone soldiers, their trainers, and the Jedi generals who lead them, mixing incisive character studies with a deep understanding of the lives of soldiers at war.

• Death Troopers, by Joe Schreiber: A story of horror aboard a Star Destroyer that you’ll need to read with the lights on. Supporting roles by Han Solo and his Wookiee sidekick, Chewbacca, are just icing on the cake.

• The Han Solo Adventures, by Brian Daley: Han and Chewie come to glorious life in these three swashbuckling tales of smuggling, romance, and danger in the early days before they meet Luke and Leia.

Read on for an excerpt from a Star Wars Legends novel set in the Rise of the Empire era.

1

FLIGHT DECK, IMPERIAL-CLASS STAR DESTROYER STEEL TALON, POLAR ORBIT, PLANET DESPAYRE, HORUZ SYSTEM, ATRIVIS SECTOR, OUTER RIM TERRITORIES

The alert siren screamed, a piercing wail that couldn’t be ignored by any being on board with ears and a pulse. It had one thing to say, and it said it loud and clear:

Scramble!

Lieutenant Commander Villian “Vil” Dance came out of a deep sleep at the blaring alarm, sat up, and leapt from his rack to the expanded metal deck of the Ready Room quarters. Save for the helmet, he already wore his space suit, one of the first things an on-call TIE pilot learned to do was sleep in full battle gear. He ran for the door, half a step ahead of the next pilot to awaken. He grabbed his headgear, darted into the hall and turned to the right, then sprinted for the launching bay.

It could be a drill; there had been plenty of those lately to keep the pilots on their toes. But maybe this time it wasn’t. One could always hope.

Vil ran into the assembly area. A-grav on the flight deck was kept at slightly below one g, so that the pilots, all of whom were human or humanoid, could move a little faster and get to their stations a little sooner. The smell of launch lube was acrid in the cold air, and the pulsing lights painted the area in bright, primary flashes. Techs scrambled, getting the TIE fighters to final-set for takeoff, while pilots ran toward the craft. Vil noticed that it was just his squad being scrambled. Must not be a big problem, whatever it was.

Command always said it didn’t matter which unit you got. TIE fighters were all the same, down to the last nut and bolt, but even so, every pilot had his or her favorite ship. You weren’t supposed to personalize them, of course, but there were ways to tell—a scratch here, a scuff mark there … after a while, you got to where you knew which fighter was which. And no matter what Command said, some were better than others—a little faster, a little tighter in the turns, the laser cannons a hair quicker to fire when you touched the stud. Vil happened to know that his assigned ship this rotation was Black-11, one of his favorites. Maybe it was pure superstition, but he breathed just a little easier, knowing that particular craft had his name on it this time around.

The command officer on deck, Captain Rax Exeter, waved Vil over.

“Cap, what’s up? Another drill?”

“Negative, Lieutenant. A group of prisoners somehow managed to take over one of the new Lambda-class shuttles. They’re trying to get far enough away to make the jump to hyperspace. That isn’t going to happen on my watch. The ID codes and tracking will be in your fighter’s computer. Don’t let ’em get away, son.”

“No, sir. What about the crew?” Vil knew the new shuttles carried only a pilot and copilot.

“Assumed dead. These are bad guys doing this, Dance—traitors and murderers. That’s reason enough to cook them, but we do not want them getting away to tell anybody what the Empire is doing out here, do we?”

“No, sir!”

“Go, Lieutenant, go!”

Vil nodded, not bothering to salute, then turned and ran. As he did, he put his helmet on and locked it into place. The hiss of air into his face was metallic and cool as the suit’s system went online. It felt very comforting. The vac suit’s extreme-temp-resistant weave of durasteel and plastoid, along with the polarizing densecris helmet, were the only things that would protect him from hard vacuum. Suit failure could make a strong man lose consciousness in under ten seconds, and die in under a minute. He’d seen it happen.

TIE fighters, in order to save mass, had no defensive shield generators, no hyperdrive capability, and no emergency life-support systems. They were thus fragile, but fast, and that was fine with Vil. He’d rather dodge enemy fire than hope it would bounce off. There was no skill in piloting some lumbering chunk of durasteel; might as well be sitting with your feet up at a turbolaser console back on the ship. Where was the fun in that?

The TIE tech had the hatch up on Black-11 as Vil arrived at the gantry above the ship. It was the work of an instant to clamber down and into the fighter’s snug cockpit.

The hatch came down and hissed shut. Vil touched the power-up stud, and the inside of the TIE—named for the twin ion engines that drove it—lit up. He scanned the controls with a quick and experienced eye. All systems were green.

The tech raised his hand in question. Vil waved back. “Go!”

“Copy that, ST-One-One. Prepare for insertion.”

Vil felt his lips twitch in annoyance. The Empire was determined to erase all signs of individuality in its pilots, on the absurd theory that nameless, faceless operators were somehow more effective. Thus the classification numbers, the anonymous flight suits and helmets, and the random rotation of spacecraft. The standardizing approach had worked reasonably well in the Clone Wars, but there was one important difference here: neither Vil nor any other TIE pilot that he knew of was a clone. None of the members of Alpha Squad had any intention of being reduced to automata. If that was what the Empire really wanted, let them use droid pilots and see how well that worked.

His musing was interrupted by the small jolt of the cycling rack below the gantry kicking on. Vil’s ship began to move toward the launching bay door. He saw the tech slip his own helmet on and lock it down.

Already the bay pumps were working full blast, depressurizing the area. By the time the launch doors were open, the air would be cycled. Vil took a deep breath, readying himself for the heavy hand of g-force that would push him back into the seat when the engines hurled him forward.

Launch Control’s voice crackled in his headphones. “Alpha Squad Leader, stand by for launch.”

“Copy,” Vil said. The launch doors pulled back with tantalizing slowness, the hydraulic thrum of their movement made audible by conduction through the floor and Black-11’s frame.

“You are go for launch in five, four, three, two … go!”

Outside the confines of the Star Destroyer, the vastness of space enveloped Lieutenant Vil Dance as the ion engines pushed the TIE past the last stray wisps of frozen air and into the infinite dark. He grinned. He always did. He couldn’t help it.

Back where I belong …

The flat blackness of space surrounded him. Behind him, he knew, the Steel Talon was seemingly shrinking as they pulled away from it. “Down” and to port was the curvature of the prison planet. Though they were in polar orbit, Despayre’s axial tilt showed more of the night side than day. The dark hemisphere was mostly unrelieved blackness, with a few lonely lights here and there.

Vil flicked his comm—though it came on automatically at launch, a good pilot always toggled it, just to be sure. “Alpha Squad, pyramid formation on me as soon as you are clear,” he said. “Go to tactical channel five, that’s tac-fiver, and log in.”

Vil switched his own comm channel to five. It was a lower-powered band with a shorter range, but that was the point—you didn’t want the enemy overhearing you. And in some cases, it wasn’t a good idea for the comm officer monitoring you back on the base ship to be privy to conversations, either. They tended to be a bit more informal than the Empire liked.

There came a chorus of “Copy, Alpha Leader!” from the other eleven pilots in his squad as they switched over to the new channel.

It took only a few seconds for the last fighter to launch, and only a few more for the squad to form behind Vil.

“What’s the drill, Vil?” That from Benjo, aka ST-1-2, his second in command and right panelman.

“Alpha Squadron, we have a Lambda-class shuttle captured by prisoners. They are running for hyper. Either they give up and come back, or we dust ’em.”

“Lambda-class? That’s one of the new ones, right? They have any guns?”

Vil sighed. That was Raar Anyell, a Corellian like Vil himself, but not somebody you’d want to hold up as a prime example of the human species. “Don’t you bother to read the boards at all, Anyell?”

“I was just about to do that, sir, when the alarm went off. Was looking right at ’em. Had the latest notices right in my hand. Sir.”

The other pilots laughed, and even Vil had to grin. Anyell was a foul-up everywhere except in the cockpit, but he was a good enough pilot that Vil was willing to give him some slice.

His sensor screen pinged, giving him an image of their quarry. He altered course to intercept.

“Anybody else behind on his homework, listen up,” he said. “The Lambda-class shuttle is twenty meters long, has a top speed of fourteen hundred g, a Class-One hyperdrive, and can carry twenty troops in full battle gear—probably a couple more convicts in civvies.

“The ship carries three double-blaster cannons and two double-laser cannons. It can’t accelerate worth a wheep and it turns slower than a comet, but if you get in its sights, it can blow you to itty-bitty pieces. It would be embarrassing to have to inform your family you got shot apart by a shuttle, so stay alert.”

There came another chorus of acknowledgments:

“Copy, sir.”

“Yes, sir!”

“No sweat.”

“Anyell, I didn’t hear your response.”

“Oh, sorry, sir, I was taking a little nap. What was the question?”

Before the squad commander could reply, the shuttle suddenly loomed ahead. It was running as silently as possible, with no lights, but as its orbit brought it across the terminator and out of Despayre’s night side, the sunlight struck rays from its hull.

“There is our target, four kilometers dead ahead. I want a fast flyby so they can see us, and then I want a fountain pattern dispersal and loop, two klicks minimum distance and bracket, one, four, four, and two, you know who you are. I’ll move in close and have a word with whoever they have flying the stolen spacecraft.”

Benjo: “Aw, Lieutenant, come on, let us have a shot, too.”

“Negative. If you had a clue about the vessel, I might, but since you’re just as likely to shoot each other as the quarry, you’ll hold the bracket.”

More acknowledgments, but without much enthusiasm. He couldn’t blame his squad—they hadn’t had any action except drills since they’d been assigned to this project—but his secondary goal was to bring all his men back alive. The primary, of course, was to accomplish their mission. He didn’t need a squad for this; any fighter pilot worth his spit should be able to deal with a lumbering shuttle, even one with the new-vehicle smell still in it. The Lambda’s delta vee wasn’t all that efficient, but with constant drive it could get above the solar plane and far enough out of the planet’s gravity well to engage its hyperdrive fairly soon—and once it was in the chute, they’d never find it.

But that wasn’t going to happen.

The pyramid-shaped formation zipped past the fleeing shuttle, close enough for Vil to see the pilot sitting in the command seat. He didn’t look surprised, of course—he would have seen them coming on the sensors. But he couldn’t outrun them, couldn’t dodge, and no way could he take out a full squad of TIE fighters even if he was the best gunner who’d ever lived, not in that boat. And anyway, Vil wasn’t going to give him the opportunity to try.

The squad flowered into the dispersal maneuver as ordered, looping out and away to their assigned positions, angled pressor beams in their arrays providing maneuverability. Vil pulled a high-g tight turn and came around to parallel the shuttle a few hundred meters away, slightly above it. He watched the wing turrets closely. As soon as they started to track him, he jinked to port, then to starboard, slowed, then sped up. They tried to keep up with him, but they were a hair too slow.

Vil toggled to a wide-band channel. They’d hear this back in the Destroyer, he knew.

“Attention, shuttle RLH-One. Turn the craft around and proceed immediately to Star Destroyer Steel Talon’s tractor beam range.”

There was no answer; nothing but the slight hiss of the carrier.

“Shuttle craft, do you copy my transmission?”

Another pause. Then: “Yeah, we hear you, rocketjock. We aren’t of a mind to do that.”

Vil looked at his control panel. They were two minutes away from Minimum Safe Distance—the point far enough from Despayre where they could safely attempt the jump to lightspeed. Jump too close to a planet’s gravity well and the shift would tear the vessel apart. If the guy he was talking to had enough skill to fly the shuttle, he’d know that. His control panel would tell him when he reached MSD, and then it would be over. Lieutenant Dance would have failed a mission, for the first time.

Never happen, he thought. “Turn it around, or we will fire,” he said.

“You’d do that? Just blow us apart? Essentially murder fifteen men—and two women? One of them is old enough to be your granny. You can live with that?”

He was stalling for time, Vil knew. The beings on that shuttle were bad enough to have been sent to the galaxy’s number one prison planet, and the Imperial courts didn’t bother to do that with petty thieves or traffic violators. His granny hadn’t robbed any banks or killed anybody. Not that he knew of, anyway.

“Shuttle pilot, I say again—”

Vil saw the port turret on the shuttle open up. He cut across the craft’s flight path, angling away aft as the starboard gun began firing. He hit his thrusters full, coming up in a half loop and twisting away from the incoming laserfire.

Even a good gunner couldn’t have spiked him at this angle, and these guys weren’t anywhere close to good enough. Still, the pulsed incandescent beams came close.

“Lieutenant—!” That from Benjo.

“Hold your position, Alpha Squad, there’s no problem here.” Cool and calm. Like discussing what they might be having for dinner.

He zipped Black-11 out of range.

The clock was running down. Less than a minute to MSD.

“Last chance, shuttle. Turn it around. Now.”

In answer, the pilot pulled the shuttle topward so his gunners could get a better angle. They started shooting again.

The shots were wild, but there was always a chance a stray beam could hit you, even by accident. And wouldn’t that be a glorious end to an unblemished career? To be killed by a convict on a milking shuttle?

Enough of this. Vil hit the drive controls and damped the thrust to zero. Then he pushed the throttles to full, angled to port and topside, did a roll and loop, and came around, driving at the shuttle amidships.

He pressed the fire-control button.

Black-11 spat twin laser bolts from the low-temp tips—blip-blip, blip-blip, blip-blip—

Vil Dance was a better-than-average shooter. The bolts ripped into the shuttle, chewed it up, and as he overflew and peeled away to starboard-downside, the Lambda blew apart, shattering into at least half a dozen large pieces and hundreds of smaller ones amid a cloud of flash-frozen air, liquid, and debris.

And pinwheeling bodies.

Vil switched back to tac-five. “Anyell, Lude, move in and check for survivors.” He kept his voice calm, emotionless, no big deal. His pulse was racing, but they didn’t have to know that. Let them think his heart pumped liquid oxy.

“None of ’em were wearing suits, Lieutenant,” Lude said a moment later. “No survivors. Too bad about that brand-new ship.”

“Good hit, Vil,” Benjo said. “Congratulations.”

Vil felt a warm glow of satisfaction. It had been a good hit. And they had been firing at him, so it wasn’t like shooting yorks in a canister. It had been a righteous response.

He switched back to the main op-chan. “Fighter Control, this is ST-One-One, Lieutenant Vil Dance of TIE fighter Alpha Squadron. Mission accomplished. You might want to send out a recovery vessel to pick up the pieces.”

“Copy, ST-One-One,” said Captain Exeter. “Good job.”

“Thank you, sir. Let’s return to base, Alpha Squad.”

Vil smiled as he waited for his team to form up again. This was the best job in the galaxy, being a fighter pilot. He couldn’t imagine a better one. He was young, not even twenty-five yet, and already a legend among his peers—and among the ladies as well. Life was good.

As they started for the Destroyer, Vil saw in the distance the frame of the gigantic battle station that was being built in planetary orbit. They were a hundred kilometers away from the structure, and it was still skeletal, its interior construction only just begun, but even so, it looked impossibly huge at this distance. It was to be the size of a small moon when it was finished, dwarfing the largest Star Destroyer.

Incredible to think about. And if he kept racking up missions like the one just completed, there was a very good chance that he would be assigned as unit commander on board the new station.

He led his squad back to the equatorial launching bay. Looking at the awe-inspiring base, he felt a surge of pride in the Empire, and a feeling of gratitude at being a part of the Tarkin Doctrine’s glorious mission. There was no official appellation or designation, other than battle station, that he knew of for the Grand Moff’s vision, but there was a name for it that everybody he knew, officers and enlisted alike, used.

They called it the Death Star.

Introduction to the REBELLION Era
(0–5 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

This is the period of the classic Star Wars movie trilogy—A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi—in which a ragtag band of Rebels battles the Empire, and Luke Skywalker learns the ways of the Force and must avoid his father’s fate.

During this time, the Empire controls nearly the entire settled galaxy. Out in the Rim worlds, Imperial stormtroopers suppress uprisings with brutal efficiency, many alien species have been enslaved, and entire star systems are brutally exploited by the Empire’s war machine. In the central systems, however, most citizens support the Empire, weighing misgivings about its harsh methods against the memories of the horror and chaos of the Clone Wars. Few dare to openly oppose Emperor Palpatine’s rule.

But the Rebel Alliance is growing. Rebel cells strike in secret from hidden bases scattered among the stars, encouraging some of the braver Senators to speak out against the Empire. When the Rebels learn that the Empire is building the Death Star, a space station with enough firepower to destroy entire planets, Princess Leia Organa, who represents her homeworld, Alderaan, in the Senate and is secretly a high-ranking member of the Rebel Alliance, receives the plans for the battle station and flees in search of the exiled Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Thus begin the events that lead her to meet the smuggler and soon-to-be hero Han Solo, to discover her long-lost brother, Luke Skywalker, and to help the Rebellion take down the Emperor and restore democracy to the galaxy: the events of the three films A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi.

If you’re a reader looking for places to jump in and explore the Rebellion-era novels, here are five great places to start:

• Death Star, by Michael Reaves and Steve Perry: The story of the construction of the massive battle station, touching on the lives of the builders, planners, soldiers, and support staff who populate the monstrous vessel, as well as the masterminds behind the design and those who intend to make use of it: the Emperor and Darth Vader.

• The Mandalorian Armor, by K. W. Jeter: The famous bounty hunter Boba Fett stars in a twisty tale of betrayal within the galactic underworld, highlighted by a riveting confrontation between bounty hunters and a band of Hutts.

• Shadows of the Empire, by Steve Perry: A tale of the shadowy parts of the Empire and an underworld criminal mastermind who is out to kill Luke Skywalker, while our other heroes try to figure out how to rescue Han Solo, who has been frozen in carbonite for delivery to Jabba the Hutt.

• Tales of the Bounty Hunters, edited by Kevin J. Anderson: The bounty hunters summoned by Darth Vader to capture the Millennium Falcon tell their stories in this anthology of short tales, culminating with Daniel Keys Moran’s elegiac “The Last One Standing.”

• Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor, by Matthew Stover: A tale set shortly after the events of Return of the Jedi, in which Luke must defeat the flamboyant dark sider known as Lord Shadowspawn while the pilots of Rogue Squadron duel his servants amid tumbling asteroids.

Read on for an excerpt from a Star Wars Legends novel set in the Rebellion era.

ONE

“THIS IS IT, EADEN. THIS IS THE DAY WE ONE-UP SOLO.”

Dash Rendar sat back in the pilot’s chair of the Outrider, feeling an almost palpable sense of satisfaction. It was a good feeling—nearly tingly, in fact. And he expected to relive it every time he bragged about how fast he’d done the Kessel Run. It was, after all, acknowledged to be the ultimate test of a pilot’s skill … and propensity for risk taking. Every time you ran it, you risked your cargo, your life, and your reputation, but you got your goods where they were going faster than more cautious pilots and you could walk into any port with a swagger in your step. The faster your time, the bigger your swagger.

“Hubris,” said Eaden Vrill, his dark, liquid gaze on the tactical display. His voice was a low rumble, more suited for underwater communication than atmospheric, and his Basic took some getting used to, with its hard-edged fricatives and sibilants. Dash was used to it; he and the Nautolan had been partners for some time.

“Confidence,” Dash retorted, annoyed at being pulled out of his pleasant reverie. “The Outrider is twice the ship the Falcon is.” As far as he was concerned Solo’s boat was a scow compared with Dash’s heavily modified YT-2400.

Eaden glanced at him. “You confuse pride of possession with a distinct entity. The ship is not you, nor did you build it. Its speed—”

“Is largely the result of my expert modifications.”

“Beg to differ,” the Nautolan replied. “The improvements are almost entirely the result of repairs carried out by LE-BO2D9. The rest is unarguably the result of my superior navigation skills.”

Dash glanced at his navigator. “Now who’s overweening? Hubris, my—”

“You imply that I’m boasting. I’m not—but feel free to correct me if I’ve misinterpreted your colorful patois. I am concentrating.” He hesitated, then added: “We’re entering the Pit.”

Reason enough to concentrate, Dash knew. He rocked his seat forward, hitting the comm button on the pilot’s console as he did. “Hey, Leebo, we’re headed into the Pit.”

“Imagine my excitement.” The reply came back in the sarcastic voice of the repair droid’s previous owner, Kood Gareeda—a stand-up comic who toured the Rim perpetually. Dash had seen Gareeda’s routine; he was wise to keep moving.

“I guess I’ll have to,” he said in response.

“Try not to break the ship—again,” Leebo added. “And try especially hard not to give me anything to shoot at.”

“Do my best.” Dash took the steering yoke and turned off the autopilot. “Course?” he prompted Eaden.

The Nautolan navigator locked the course coordinates into the navicomp, and Dash watched them appear as a bright saffron arc on the tactical display. He frowned at the solid yellow line. “Hey, this isn’t a leisurely holiday tour.”

“You refer to the arc of our course?”

Dash sighed and pointed at the navicomp monitor. “Look at the blasted line. Do you see red?”

Eaden looked. “I see no red.”

“That’s because the course you set is safe.”

“And this is a problem because?”

“Because safe isn’t gonna better Solo’s time.”

Eaden Vrill blinked his extraordinarily large maroon eyes. Two of his fourteen tentacle-like tresses lifted their tips toward Dash. “You wish me to recalculate?”

“What I wish is to beat Solo’s alleged record.”

“I’m simply being careful. We have an expensive cargo that we have yet to be paid for.”

“All the more reason to get it to port quickly,” Dash said. He gestured at the monitor. “So reset the course, please. We have to skate as close to the Maw as Solo did. Closer, if possible.”

Eaden made an almost subsonic rumble of disapproval and ran nimble fingers over the console. The arc of light on the tactical display shot forth again. The curve was more pronounced now, running closer to the Maw, where the color deepened from yellow to orange to a satisfying shade of crimson.

“Keep in mind,” Eaden cautioned, “that nothing in the galaxy is static. The orbital trajectories of stars, systems—”

“Are negligible within the context of human and humanoid life spans. If I were a Cephalon, say, it might be something to worry about.” Dash took the steering yoke in hand, aimed the Outrider along the flaming arc, and punched the hyperdrive.

It was just a microjump to put them in the vicinity. To fly hyper along the edge of the Pit was almost impossible. For one thing, the gravity well could yank you out of hyperspace in a heartbeat even if you’d tinkered with your failsafes—which, of course, Dash had. Then there was the fact that the hard radiation from the nebula that cradled the asteroid field played havoc with instrumentation—adhering to a set sublight course that skirted the fringes of the Pit was about the only way Dash knew he could come through in one piece. Deviation on one side could result in clipping a wandering asteroid; deviation on the other would send the ship into the gravitational pull of the Maw, a cluster of black holes that warped local space. Fly too close to one of those singularities and all kinds of bad things could happen—not the least of which was having one’s atoms stretched to an infinite length by the tidal forces that waited to tear everything apart.

He was counting down to the end of the jump when the Outrider trembled abruptly, the unexpected vibration passing through Dash’s hands and up his arms. He frowned. That wasn’t right. He opened his mouth to say something to Eaden when the ship bucked like a fractious tauntaun and dropped out of hyperspace.

“What the—”

“Oh, mother of chaos!” Leebo’s bleat came through the com in a wash of static. “Incoming!”

“Incoming what?” Dash looked frantically at the tac display—which made no sense. There was no gravity well here—

“Incoming Imperials! There’s an Imperial cruiser bearing down on us from astern—Interceptor-class!”

Dash swore in three languages—adding several choice moans in Wookieespeak. The Interceptors had gravity generators—four of them—that could suck a smaller ship right out of hyperspace or keep it from fleeing by producing a false gravity well. They’d flown right into a trap—probably set up here at the top of the Kessel run for the express purpose of catching smugglers.

The ship rocked violently to port and Leebo uttered a shrill, metallic squeal.

Before Dash’s eyes the tac display finally made sense. Outrider had dropped back into realspace close enough to the contents of the Pit that they were practically kissing the asteroid field. If the cruiser’s gravity well had hit them a few seconds sooner, they might have hit something big enough to hurt. Bad.

He pushed the thought down and focused on the display. A slowly rotating planetoid the shape of an egg and the size of an old-style generation ship lay several hundred klicks off their port bow. It was moving lazily across the general flow of rocky traffic, rolling on its long axis. In a split second, he’d made his decision. They’d hide behind that and use it to guard their flank while they made their getaway.

He manhandled the steering yoke hard to port and hit the ion drives hard. The Outrider leapt toward the egg-shaped planetoid, nosing down slightly in anticipation of dropping beneath the great rock.

When they were close enough that the bulging flanks of the planetoid filled the forward viewport, there was a resonant ping from the proximity sensors and Eaden sat bolt upright. “Target dead ahead!”

“And up!” Leebo screeched through the intercom. A barrage of laser fire erupted from the Outrider’s cannon emplacement at the upper horizon of the planetoid. Dash looked up and felt his blood run cold. Over the close horizon of the great gray egg loomed the bow of an Imperial light cruiser, its laser ports glowing red. Leebo’s useless salvo had pattered harmlessly against its heavy shielding.

Dash thrust the steering yoke forward. The ship plummeted in response, accelerating as she dived beneath the planetoid. A trail of laserfire from the Imperial ship lit up her wake.

“What are you doing?” cried Leebo.

“Proving that size isn’t everything!”

Dash continued to accelerate, giving the Outrider even more juice as they passed beneath the long axis of the planetoid and began ascending. The cruiser was five times bigger than the Outrider, which meant it was, at minimum, at least five times less maneuverable. By the time the captain figured out what Dash was doing and was able to turn the ship or order up a new firing solution, the target would be gone.

He hoped.

The Outrider described a perfect semicircle in the void of space, pressor beams providing maneuverability in the vacuum. It sailed around the planetoid upside down relative to the cruiser and whizzed over it toward the Maw.

“I need a quick course adjustment,” he told his navigator, then spared a second to glance at the rearview screen. As he had hoped, the Imperial captain had read his move as an attempt to flee and had started to turn his ship in anticipation of pursuit into the Pit. He was still swinging to port as the Outrider streaked away in the opposite direction, toward the cluster of black holes.

“I sometimes think,” said Eaden, as his webbed fingers played over the instrumentation, “that you are a certifiable madman. I assume you want a course that the Imperials will be loath to follow.”

“I want the Imperials to think I’ve chosen death over dishonor.”

The Nautolan gave him a sidewise glance. “You may well have done just that.”

“Cute. Range to the rim of the Maw?”

“Two-point-three light-hours and closing.”

Dash’s gaze swept the tactical display, taking in the diffuse rims of the gravity wells, depicted in the display as broad, glowing bands of faded orange. If they eluded the cruiser, and went to hyperspace at the right moment and dived into the Maw at just the right angle, they could, with more luck than anyone had any right to expect, use their superluminal velocity to skip them along the outer edge of the region like a flat stone across a lake. Theoretically, anyway. If the gravitational waves generated by the various collapsed masses didn’t muck up their navigation or suck them out of hyperspace again. If they could maintain a safe course through the complicated orbital arabesques being performed by the singularities. If they could get far enough from the Imperial’s gravity generators to make the jump in the first place.

Eaden pointed out these various risks with maddening calm, and Leebo chimed in over the comm with even more maddening hysteria. Dash shouted them both down.

“As much as I hate to quote an adversary,” he said, “remember what Han says in situations like this?”

“Enlighten me,” Eaden replied. It was, Dash thought, hard to believe that an amphibious humanoid could manage so dry a tone.

“Never tell me the odds.”

The navicomp beeped, and he punched the ion drives. Hard.

TWO

I LOVE TO WATCH YOUR SHOW, AND WILL ALWAYS COME Back for more. I’ll be Coming For about the tenth time to see You At Your Next Concert. —a Die-Hard fan

Javul Charn stared at the holographic message that hovered in the air before her face. On the surface it looked just like all the other fan mail she’d gotten in this packet, but her gut told her it wasn’t fan mail at all. It was a warning.

Reading it over for the second time, she used the tip of her finger to select the oddly capitalized words from the text and drag them to a separate line, wondering how it had gotten past Kendara Farlion, her road manager and professional worrywart. Dara was used to seeing quirky holomail, but quirkiness usually had a pattern to it.

This wasn’t a pattern.

Javul looked at the finished sentences hovering before her eyes: Watch Your Back. Coming For You At Your Next Concert. Die-Hard.

Was that last just a throwaway line or something more? A clue, perhaps?

At your next concert, the message said, but that didn’t guarantee that something wouldn’t happen before then. Her next concert was a little over a week away on Rodia, and would kick off a tour that would take them all the way to the Core Worlds, ending on Alderaan.

Panic fluttered beneath Javul’s breastbone and she felt suddenly, unutterably alone. Beyond the door of the luxurious cabin on her equally luxurious private yacht, the Nova’s Heart—named after her first holo-album to sell ten billion copies—her entourage and crew went about the hundreds of daily tasks that were integral to producing and maintaining her seemingly endless cycles of live concerts, holocasts, personal appearances, and travel. And yet—here, in her private sanctum, no less—someone had managed to breach the battlements of her life.

A slender arm the color of burnished bronze thrust over her shoulder, its index finger pointing at the curt warning still hanging in the air. “Chaos Hell, JC! What the blazes is that?”

Javul only just kept herself from falling out of her chair onto the carpeted deck. “Blast it, Dara! Can’t you make some noise when you enter a room? Can’t you ping?” She killed the message and swung around, catching the crestfallen expression on the other woman’s face.

“Since when do I have to ping to come into your office? And—hey—language? You talk like that in front of a holocam, and your name will be mud in households from here to the Rim.”

Javul gestured helplessly. “I’m sorry, but you scared the fr—” She swallowed. “You scared me.”

“I’m not surprised. Who sent that?”

“Sent what?” Javul said innocently.

“Too late. I saw it. Watch your back? What’s up with that? I didn’t see that in your mail.”

“It was part of a longer communication. There were capitalized words that spelled out this—message.”

“Warning,” Dara said.

Javul worried her lower lip with her teeth, reluctant to admit that she’d come to the same conclusion. “I don’t know that warning is—”

“Oh, it is. Trust me on this one, JC.” Kendara’s dark violet eyes were huge. “You have a stalker. What remains to be seen is how serious he, she, or it is.”

A stalker. There—the word had been spoken, and made real. Okay. Deeeep breath.

“Yeah. Looks like it,” she said. “This … this isn’t the first one of these I’ve gotten. There was one in the batch of holomail after the previous concert, too. Remember the black fire lilies?”

“Do I? Yeah, I should say I do. You mean, that wasn’t a compliment?”

Javul shook her head, remembering the rain of gleaming black, pungently fragrant blooms that had fallen all around her and her entourage as they’d ascended the landing ramp of her yacht after an appearance on Imperial Center. “I think that was a warning, too. He wanted me to know the sort of thing he could arrange.”

“He?”

“I’m assuming—the messages are anonymous.”

“I see. Then all that stuff about cultural relativity and how the black lilies were especially prized by the Elom as—”

“I made it up. I didn’t want you guys to … you know.”

Kendara put her hands on her hips and glared down at Javul, one bright orange curl falling over her forehead. “Yeah, I know. You didn’t want us to know your life was in danger. Which is kinda—what’s the word I’m searching for? Oh, yeah—stupid. Of course, I’m just your road manager, the head of your entourage. What good’s an entourage if you won’t let us take care of you?

“I can’t believe you’d leave me out of the loop on something like this. I’m not just your road manager. I’m your best friend. I’m the one who’s been pulling you out of scrapes since we were teenagers. Do I have to remind you of the lengths to which obsessed individuals will go? Do you remember any of our so-called adventures on Tatooine? That Zabrak spacer who thought you’d make the perfect little wifey. That guy who wanted to buy out Chalmun and set you up as the house chanteuse? The stormtroopers who—”

Javul raised her hands against the volley of words. “You’re right. Of course, you’re right. I should have said something before. But … well, at first I was thinking it was just an overzealous fanboy and then … I don’t know. I figured if the guy was on Coruscant—I mean, Imperial Center—and we were leaving …”

“Yeah, well, apparently he’s taking his show on the road, too.”

The truth of that statement made Javul’s throat tighten. She clasped her hands together in her lap, flexing her fingers to make the rainbow stones inlaid into each nail glitter and flash. “So now you know. What do you think we should do?”

Kendara tilted her head to one side in thought. Then she said, “Two things. One, I’d split us into two travel parties. Second, I’d hire bodyguards.”

“Okay on the splitting up—but bodyguards?”

“Yeah. Steely-eyed, laser-toting, massively intimidating bodyguards.”

Javul shook her head. “I don’t know, Dara. It’s already freakishly hard to keep a low profile in this business, and if we contract with a security company, we increase our footprint, our baggage … and the number of people who have to have oversight.”

“I’m not thinking of hiring from a security firm.”

“Then where am I supposed to come by these steely-eyed, laser-toting … characters?”

A smile curved Kendara Farlion’s lips and her teeth showed, white and even in her face. “I never thought I’d say this, but there are advantages to being from Mos Eisley. I know exactly where to look for that kind of character.”

Introduction to the NEW REPUBLIC Era
(5–25 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

The destruction of the second Death Star and the death of Emperor Palpatine—the climactic conclusion of Return of the Jedi—has shaken the Empire to its core. While the remnant of the loyal Imperials settles in for a long, drawn-out last stand, the victorious Rebel Alliance and its supporters found a galactic governing authority they name the New Republic. Troops and warships are donated to the cause, as New Republic military leaders forge plans to seize Imperial fortress worlds, invade the Core Worlds, and retake Coruscant itself. Eventually, the Imperial Remnant is pushed back to a small part of the Outer Rim, and the New Republic is finally able to focus on restoring just and democratic government to the galaxy.

At last the heroes of the Rebellion are free to pursue their own lives. Han and Leia marry … but before the birth of their twins, Jacen and Jaina, the galaxy is once again torn asunder by war, as the Imperial forces—under the control of military mastermind Grand Admiral Thrawn—step up their campaign of raids against the New Republic. Even after Thrawn is defeated, the Imperial forces forge on, harrying the New Republic and Luke’s nascent Jedi academy—the start of Luke’s dream to rebuild the Jedi Order from the ground up. Plagues, insurrections, and rogue warlords add to the chaos and push the New Republic back a step for every two steps it takes forward in its quest for peace and prosperity for all. Meanwhile, Leia becomes Chief of State of the New Republic, and the Solos’ third child, a boy they name Anakin, after his grandfather, is born; Luke has met Mara Jade, a secret dark side apprentice to the Emperor whom he helps bring into the light, and the two subsequently fall in love and marry.

Finally, after a series of further setbacks and plots against the young galactic government and Luke’s Jedi, a peace treaty formally ends the long conflict between the New Republic and the remnants of the Empire. The events of these years are the answer to the question … “What happened after the movies?”

If you’re a reader looking to dive into the New Republic era, here are three great starting points:

• X-Wing: Rogue Squadron, by Michael A. Stackpole: A taste of life at the edge, Rogue Squadron and the subsequent X-Wing novels bring to life Wedge Antilles and his brave, sometimes rambunctious fellow pilots in fast-paced adventures that switch smoothly and easily between entertaining repartee and tense battlefield action.

• Heir to the Empire, by Timothy Zahn: The book that reintroduced a generation of fans to Star Wars is full of the elements that made the movies great—space battles, intriguing villains, and derring-do.

• Before the Storm, by Michael P. Kube-McDowell: With a harder sci-fi edge to Star Wars, this novel features the classic heroes Han, Luke, and Leia, and explores everything from military forensics to the nature of the Force.

Read on for an excerpt from a Star Wars Legends novel set in the New Republic era.

CHAPTER
ONE
A MYSTERY ON MAKEM TE

Mander Zuma pursed his lips as he moved through the back alleys of Makem Te. He was far from the Tract, far from the necropolis that dominated this world, far from the site of Toro Irana’s death.

And far from satisfied with what he had discovered so far about the death of his former apprentice.

Word had reached Yavin 4 and the new Jedi Order in the form of a complaint from the Congress of Caliphs that ruled Makem Te, of a blue-skinned Jedi who had killed a Caliph’s nephew. Apologies were made through the New Republic’s diplomatic channels, but Mander was pulled from his regular duties in the Archives and dispatched to find out what had really happened.

His assignment made perfect sense to Mander. He had taught Toro in the ways of the Force, and had monitored the young Jedi’s own reports back to the Order. His own skill set dovetailed nicely with Toro’s assigned mission. Yet the older Jedi was still reluctant to leave behind the Archives, to leave Yavin 4 after years of diligent and productive research.

What Mander found on this planet surprised him. Not that Toro had gotten into a fight—the young man had been headstrong and easily riled even when he had been his apprentice, and the Swokes Swokes were by all reports a prickly species to deal with. But the idea that Toro had gotten into an argument so easily, or that he had made such a fatal mistake in combat, troubled Mander deeply as he made the long trip from Yavin to Makem Te. As he stepped off the shuttle and breathed the dusty air of this world, the questions swirled within him. What had gone wrong? Had it been his training that had been at fault? Had Mander prepared him insufficiently? Or were there other factors at work?

As a student, Toro had been a superb warrior—limber and smooth, a blue-fleshed blur in combat. More important, he bonded with his lightsaber, treating the blade as an extension of his self. Even in training, Mander was impressed with the young Pantoran’s skill and confidence.

Mander himself had none of that easiness in combat. The Force was strong in the older Jedi, but it was directed elsewhere. He could feel the energy moving through him, but his own lightsaber often felt like an alien thing, a lump in his hand. He had come to the Force late in life, as did many in the later years of the Empire, and it showed.

Toro was better with a lightsaber, and Mander was sure that he would have become a fine Jedi Knight. A better Jedi Knight than he. But now Toro was dead and Mander was not sure why.

Mander’s first stop was to claim the body and examine it, a rented medical droid at his side burbling commentary. The dried flecks of blood on his apprentice’s lips and the broken bones along one side of his body spoke of a sudden, violent end. But there was also a darkening of the young man’s veins and arteries—violet against the sea-blue of his flesh—that had not be present in life, and pointed to an external agent at work.

Further, purple crystals budded at the corners of Toro’s eyes. Mander was not sure if this was natural to the Pantorans in death, but he assumed it was not, and took a sample of the material. It had a pungent aroma, more cloying than the acrid dust of Makem Te’s air. There were similar crystals in the dead Jedi’s darkened veins, now stilled of pulsing life. Something had been injected or ingested, he decided.

Toro was under the influence of something else before the fight, Mander thought, and possibly the two events were tied. The older Jedi double-checked his evaluation before consigning Toro’s body to the funeral pyre. The Swokes Swokes, regardless of their official indignation, were extremely helpful with funeral arrangements. It was a point of pride for them.

Mander Zuma visited the scene of Toro’s death, the restaurant. It had been closed for a period of mourning for the Caliph’s nephew, but already the smashed furniture had been stacked to one side for recycling and a new sheet of plate glass installed, replacing the one shattered by Toro’s exit. The wait staff was initially unhelpful, but Mander’s modest knowledge of Swoken, the native language—combined with a bit of the Force in the voice—helped smooth out the questions. By the end of the interview the staff was positively chatty about the incident.

Yes, the blue-skinned Jedi had been there. He was waiting for someone, he had said. He had been drinking. A lot. Local stuff, but a Rodian came in with another bottle. A gift. The Jedi had insulted the staff. Insulted the other diners. He had gotten into an argument with Choka Chok, the Caliph’s nephew. The Jedi pulled his lightsaber and killed Choka Chok. Killed five more regulars as well, and had left a dozen regenerating. Screaming in that weird, liquid-sounding, offworlder Basic. Not a proper language at all. Foaming at the mouth. Then he had smashed his way through the window. The wait staff thought he was trying to escape, but had forgotten he was forty floors up. The joke was on him. No, no one had found the Jedi’s energy blade, or at least reported that they had found it. Yes, yes, they had the bottle the Rodian brought somewhere around. They were still cleaning up the mess.

The Swokes Swokes provided the bottle and Mander calibrated his medical datapad. A few simple tests on the dregs in the bottle confirmed his hunch—there was something unusual in the scentwine. Potent, unknown, and similar in composition to the crystalline tears at the corners of the corpse’s eyes. Distilled out, it had the same cloying smell. The wine’s bouquet covered the smell.

Poison, then. The Rodian brought the wine. Was the poison what clouded his judgment at the end?

The possibility left Mander concerned. Why was Toro unwary enough to drink the wine in the first place? A Jedi in the field had to be aware of his surroundings and potential attacks. Had he trusted the Rodian, or whoever the Rodian represented? And what, if anything, did this have to do with his assigned task, to acquire the navigation coordinates for the Indrexu Spiral? Was someone trying to stop the New Republic from gaining those codes? Or had Toro stumbled onto something else?

Indeed, scanning the last communications from Toro to the new Jedi Order had been troubling as well. They had been brief, even terse. He had made initial contacts. He had begun negotiations. He was pleased with the progress. Nothing to indicate that there was a problem. Even so, there was a brusqueness in his communiqués that now gave Mander pause. Details were missing.

Now the trail led to this warehouse, made of ancient wood, reinforced with the cold iron that was so much a part of Swokes Swokes architecture. There were few Rodians on Makem Te, and it was relatively easy to track Toro’s deadly wine steward back here. A Rodian family cartel ran a small trade out of these warehouses, trafficking in ornate funeral plaques and reliquaries and other offworld items.

The darkness of the alley cloaked him more effectively than any mind trick, but the lock was old and stubborn, and at last Mander used the Force to snap the hasp. So much for getting in and getting out without leaving any trace, he thought. Carefully, he slid the door open, but was met only with a hollow echo of the sliding metal. He slipped inside, leaving enough of a gap that he could leave quickly if things went bad.

Mander moved quietly at first, but, it was quickly clear that no one seemed to be present. Moonlight from the frosted skylights overhead shone on a bare floor. Mander reached into a vest pocket and pulled out a set of magnaspecs—two pinkish lenses set in hexagonal frames. He unfolded the lenses and placed them on the bridge of his nose; magnets in the frame held them there, pinching his flesh slightly. When he tapped the side of the lenses they issued a soft, pale red glow, heightening the available light in the dim warehouse.

Large wooden racks stood in neat ordered rows from floor to ceiling along the length of the structure. Empty cargo containers were lined along one wall, and a trio of manual loadlifters—great walker engines with huge spatulate hands—along the other. These Rodians were too poor, or too cheap, for droid-operated versions. The shelves were heavily laden with blank epitaph plates and bolts of funeral shrouds, all covered in a thin coating of dust. Scraps and more dust were heaped in the corners as well. Whatever business was being done out of this warehouse had precious little to do with mortuary arrangements.

In the center of the room was a pile of broken crates, damaged and abandoned in a rush to clear out. Clear spots showed where other crates once stood, and the dust was disturbed by the broad feet of the loadlifters. Somewhere far off, in some connecting warehouse, there was a soft thunder of people moving crates, but this place was devoid of workers.

Mander frowned. Whoever poisoned Toro expected someone to come after them, and had probably decided to put a few planets between them and their pursuers. No doubt the warehouse was under an assumed name and behind three shell companies. Tracking them down would not be easy.

Mander poked through the trash with his toe—funeral robes and tapestries, metal plates with Swokes Swokes memorials—about three or four containers’ worth that had been breached and abandoned. And there, glittering in the moonlight, something dark and crystalline.

The Jedi knelt down next to the pile and examined the crystals. They were purplish, dark almost to the point of being black. He sniffed it, and it gave off a rich, pungent aroma. Spice, but unlike any he had seen before. He pulled out a plasticlear envelope and scooped a handful of crystals into it.

That was when he knew he was not alone. It could have been a shadow against the moonlight or a footstep landing too heavily, but at once he knew that someone else was in the warehouse with him. He rose slowly from his examination, trying to move naturally, his hand fumbling with the strap of the lightsaber. Still, he engaged it and brought the ignited blade up, glowing green, before the first blaster bolt erupted.

Mander parried the energy discharge, trying to send it back to his attacker but succeeding only in deflecting it among the racks of epitaph markers. Inwardly he cursed at his lack of skill. Another shot unleashed, again from near the warehouse’s entrance, and again Mander turned the energy pulse aside, but only just, and it scorched the wall behind him. Mander reminded himself that he was in a wooden building containing flammable funeral shrouds. Too many such stray shots would be a bad thing.

“I can do this all day,” he lied to the darkness. “Why don’t you come out and we can talk?”

There was a shadow against the doorway, and for a moment Mander was sure that his assailant would try to flee. Instead, a lone figure walked into a rectangular square of moonlight. Smoke swirled from the barrel of her DL-22 heavy blaster. She was almost Mander’s height, and even in the pale radiance Mander could see that her flesh was a rich blue, marked with yellow swirls on each cheek. Long hair—a deeper blue in shade, almost to the color of night—was worn short in the front, woven in a thick braid down the back. A Pantoran, then, like Toro. Her lips were a thin, grim line and her eyes flashed with anger.

“Why are you shooting at me?” said Mander calmly, as if being shot at in a warehouse were a common occurrence for him.

“I’m here for justice,” she said, and the barrel came up. Despite himself, Mander brought up his lightsaber in defense, but she did not fire.

“Justice is good,” said Mander, trying to keep his voice casual. “I’m seeking justice as well. Perhaps you’d like to help me find some.” He paused and added, “You know, I once trained a Pantoran in the ways of the Force.”

This time she did shoot, and Mander almost toppled back onto the pile of trash bringing his blade up. Almost too late, and as it was he deflected the bolt upward instead of back. There was the distant crash of a shattered skylight.

“You’re the one responsible for Toro’s death, then,” said the Pantoran, her words as sharp as a vibroblade’s edge.

“Relative?” asked Mander, willing himself to be ready for another shot. It did not come.

“Sister.”

Mander forced himself to relax, or at least give the impression of relaxing. He deactivated his lightsaber, even though he wasn’t sure he could reignite it fast enough should she choose to fire. “You’re Reen Irana, then,” he said. “Toro spoke to me of you.”

The blaster jerked toward him for a moment, but the Pantoran did not fire. Mander added quickly, “I was not here when Toro died. I was back at the academy on Yavin Four. I came here when we heard the news. To find out what happened. And to finish Toro’s assignment.”

The blaster wavered, just a bit, but at last she pointed it away from the Jedi. Even in the moonlight, he could see a wetness glistening at the corner of her eyes. “It’s your fault,” she managed at last, her voice throaty with grief. Mander waited, giving her time to gather her thoughts. When she spoke again, the iron had returned to her words. “Toro was a dreamer, and you took him to become a Jedi and now he’s dead. You’re responsible.”

Mander held his palms out and said simply, “Yes.”

Reen was startled at the admission. She had apparently expected the Jedi to say many things, but not this.

Mander looked hard at the young Pantoran—he could see the resemblance to Toro in her face. He continued, “Yes I am responsible. Every man’s journey is his own, but I did train your brother, and he was here on Makem Te on Jedi business. So yes, we … I … put him in harm’s way. And … I failed to prepare him for what he faced here. That is why I am here. I want to find out who poisoned your brother, to see justice brought against them.”

For the first time, the Pantoran seemed confused. “Poison?” she managed.

“I believe so,” said Mander. “I found something strange in his blood. And now there is this.” He held up the clear envelope with the crystals. “I found it here in the warehouse.”

The Pantoran kept her blaster aimed at the Jedi, but reached out with the other hand. Mander held the envelope out to her, and she took it, taking a few steps back immediately in case this was a trick.

Reen stared at the purplish crystals, then shook her head. She holstered her blaster, and Mander returned his now-inert lightsaber to his belt.

“I think it is the poison that was used,” said Mander. “A Rodian administered it with some wine he brought to your brother in the restaurant. That was why Toro was unable to defend himself at his full abilities. Why he made such a mistake in combat and plunged out the window.”

Another noise in the darkness around them. Mander’s head came up. It was not from outside the warehouse this time. Inside. Someone familiar with the area, who knew where to step. “Hold on,” he said. “Others are here.”

Reen began to say, “Don’t worry. That’s just—” But her words were cut off as Mander grabbed her and pulled her down. Blaster bolts erupted from three sides, firing into the pile of abandoned crates.

Reen had her own blaster out in a flash, and for a wild moment Mander was afraid she was going to use it on him. But instead she returned fire against the assault, using the discarded shipping containers as cover.

Mander rose to a crouch, his lightsaber ignited and at the ready. The shots were heavy but not well placed, and he managed to bounce a few of them back. There was a shout of pain, and a string of curses in Swoken. Mander thought he must have gotten one of them.

“I’d say a dozen,” shouted Reen. “Some of them up on the racks. Swokes Swokes. Some Rodians, too.”

“Must be the Rodians that use the warehouse,” responded Mander.

“I know the clan,” said Reen, bringing down a pair. “Bomu family. I recognize the facial tattoos. We’re pinned down!”

“Hang on,” said Mander, “I’m going to level the playing field.”

Reen may have said something but Mander didn’t pay attention. Instead he leapt forward, somersaulting toward one of the racks the Rodians were using as a perch. Blaster bolts fell around him, but he didn’t use his blade to block. Rather, he pulled it effortlessly through the rack’s iron supports, slicing the metal easily. The entire set of racks shuddered, and then began to collapse in on itself, the shriek of the metal matched by the surprised shouts of the ambushers.

Reen was at his side. “What did you do?”

“I made a new pile of trash to hide behind,” said Mander as one of the surviving Swokes Swokes rose from the debris, a thick-barreled blaster in his hand. One swipe with the blade cut the weapon in two, and then the Swokes Swokes fell backward as Reen discharged a bolt squarely into the attacker’s face.

There was a short pause in the battle, and then the blasterfire started again, heavier than before. Looking back, Mander saw that their previous hiding place was on fire, and the flames were already spreading through the bolts of funeral cloth and to the room’s supports. The Rodians had climbed down to the ground, trying to surround the pair. They were now clear in the firelight.

“They’re trying to burn us out. Can you make it to the door?” asked Mander, but Reen just shook her head and brought down a Rodian from across the room.

Mander looked across the open floor between him and the entrance. Alone, on his best day, he might be able to make it. Carrying the Pantoran, he doubted he could get halfway before the cross fire caught him. He was about to chance it anyway when something extremely large shifted in the background.

It was one of the manual loadlifters, wading into a squad of Swokes Swokes. The huge flat feet smashed one, while the others broke and ran as it spun and slammed into another set of racks, toppling them against their neighbors in a chain of collapsing shelves. The Rodians and Swokes Swokes started pulling back, firing behind them to deter pursuit. Perched in the control pit of the lifter, limned by sparking control screens, was a Bothan—long-faced and furry.

Reen put a hand on Mander’s shoulder. “Don’t worry. He’s with me.”

The Bothan was having trouble handling the loadlifter, and as he tried to get the walker under control it grazed one of the already-burning roof supports. The support groaned menacingly, and parts of the roof and skylight started to cascade down around them.

“About time you showed up!” bellowed Reen at the pilot of the stumbling walker. “Now get us out of here before this place comes down around us.”

The Bothan got the loadlifter under something like control, and brought one of the large pallet-hands level to the floor. Reen grabbed on, and Mander leapt ahead of her, turning to help her up. Then the pair gripped the sides of the lifter as the Bothan maneuvered it toward the doors through a tunnel of the now-flaming warehouse. The large door was still almost completely shut, but at the last moment the Bothan spun the lifter around and slammed through it backward, smashing the door off its hinges.

Then they were outside, tromping through the alleys. The loadlifter got clear of the worst of the fire, and set the pair down. The Bothan himself slid down from the side of the now-smoking control pit. Whatever the Bothan had done to get it working had set its internal electronics on fire.

“I thought you Jedi were never supposed to be surprised,” said Reen.

“I was distracted,” said Mander, trying to keep the irritation within himself out of his voice. She was right. Despite her presence, he should have noticed their assailants creeping into their positions.

In the distance there were shouts and klaxons. The local authorities were responding to the fire, and the flames were clear along the roofline now.

“We need to be elsewhere,” said Reen. “A pity we didn’t get one of the Rodians alive.”

“We found the poison that they used on your brother,” said Mander. “And we know that they’re willing to kill to cover their tracks. For the moment, that’s enough.”

Dejarro of the Bomu clan made his way through the Swokes Swokes bazaar, past the hucksters selling memorial mementos and purified ointments and funeral wreaths. Past the stalls of seers and spiritualists who, for a small fee, would contact the spirits of the recently interred and, for a slightly larger fee, confirm that they were resting comfortably and satisfied with their funeral arrangements. Dejarro squeezed his way among the lumbering forms of the Makem Te inhabitants, his own Rodian frame unlikely to win any shoving match. He kept one hand inside his jacket, tightly gripping his heavy prize, fearful that something else would go wrong.

The word had come down that afternoon: Koax, the one-eyed Klatooinian, had arrived on the planet, bearing with her both the goodwill of her master, the Spice Lord, and the lordship’s demands that the assigned task had been completed.

Dejarro of the Bomu clan carried both good news and bad along with his package, and it was a good question which of the three was the heaviest weight.

At the fourth street, at the alchemical shop, he turned right and made for a singularly empty shop that displayed funeral wrappings but had never seemed to succeed in selling any of them. The Swokes Swokes behind the counter, scarred from many regenerations, just nodded to him as he passed through. Dejarro had been here before. The Rodian climbed the iron spiral staircase to a windowless upper storage room.

The room was lit by a single bulb, hanging from a noose-like cord. Koax was waiting for him, surrounded by racks of long-sleeved robes, used to dress the dead before interment or cremation. To Dejarro, it felt like they were surrounded by silent witnesses to hear his report. There was a low table between the two of them.

The Klatooinian herself was lean and muscular, thinner than most of her species. She was dressed in dark red spacer’s slacks and a vest, and kept a set of ceremonial throwing knives on her belt alongside her blaster. Dejarro knew the Klatooinians were mostly traditionalists, favoring the old weapons and ways. Koax apparently kept the affectations of the past alongside the more effective present.

The Klatooinian’s face was thin as well, but what took Dejarro aback was the crater where one eye had once been. Some would have worn a patch, or had a plate bolted to their skull to hide the deformity, but Koax set a glowing red gem deep into her empty socket. The Rodian wondered if the gem allowed the Spice Lord’s agent to see into alien frequencies or tell if someone was lying. The idea chilled Dejarro to the bone.

“Waajo koosoro?” asked the Klatooinian in fluid Huttese. Have you brought it?

Dejarro nodded and pulled the prize from beneath his jacket. It was a thin cylinder fitted with a worn, comfortable grip along one side. It was heavier than Dejarro had thought it would be, particularly since he had seen it used with fluid, almost effortless grace. Heavy enough to hold the soul of a man, he had thought at the time.

He placed the lightsaber on the table between them.

Koax looked down at the device with her good eye, but did not reach out for it. The red gem set deep into her skull kept a bead on Dejarro, who waited to be dismissed or questioned.

“Were there any problems?” asked the Klatooinian.

“We found it on the street,” said Dejarro, his voice sounding a little strained in the dusty dead air. “Not too far from the body.”

“Did anyone see you take it?” She was still examining the deactivated blade before her.

“I don’t think …” And Koax looked up at him, her gemstone eye blazing for a moment. “No! No. No one saw it. It went better than we had planned. I had the wine delivered, and we were prepared to move in when he started a fight by himself. Once he went out the window, we were afraid we had lost him. That he had used some sort of Jeedai trick to escape us. That he could fly away. But when we got to the bottom of the building, there he was, dead, and the item was right beside him, just as you see it now.”

Koax grunted an affirmation, then said, “We?”

“The other members in good standing of the Bomu clan,” said Dejarro. “Trusted family all. We would have taken the body itself, but the local law was already coming down on us. As it was, I grabbed the lightsaber and kept it, until I heard from you. Kept it safe, like you ordered.”

“Did you turn it on?” asked Koax, almost casually.

“No, no,” Dejarro assured her. “I don’t know if it still works or not. I just followed your orders. Drug the Jeedai. Take his lightsaber. Bring it to you. Nothing about figuring out if it worked.”

Koax gave a throaty chuckle and reached out to the lightsaber, grasping its short hilt and activating the blade. It sprang like a genie from the bottle, a bolt of brilliant blue-white, accompanied by a flash of radiant thunder. The empty robes that hung around them threw back deep shadows, doubling their number.

Koax moved the blade back and forth, and it looked to Dejarro as if the blade fought her, like it had its own inertia—its own spirit—resisting her control, fighting her grip. Koax seemed to feel it as well, and frowned, then thumbed off the blade. At once the upper storage room was plunged back into a dim light, which to the Rodian seemed even darker than before.

“Good,” said Koax, and reached for her belt. Despite himself, Dejarro’s hand twitched toward his own weapons belt, but the Klatooinian instead brought out a vial tucked between her belt and her dun-colored flesh. Koax smiled, and it was not a pleasant smile. She had made Dejarro flinch, and understood in an instant how much the Rodian trusted her.

How much he feared her.

Koax set the vial on the table. Even in the dim light Dejarro could see that it was tightly packed with purplish crystals, deeper in hue than any he had seen before.

“Pure,” said Koax. “None of that diluted garbage that reaches the street. Cut it, share, use it, I don’t care. We’re done.”

Dejarro looked at the vial, then up at the Klatooinian, then nodded, reached out, and snagged the vial. He tucked it into an inner pocket and said, “There’s something else.”

Koax’s eyebrow, the one above the gem-set socket, jerked upward slightly. “Something else?”

“It took you a while to contact us,” said Dejarro. “While we were waiting, there was another.”

“Another?” Koax repeated, her voice careful, trying to draw the story out.

“Another Jeedai,” said the Rodian. “Came to the restaurant. Talked to the staff. Tracked us back to the warehouse.”

Koax held her hands out, palms outward. “Didn’t you think to burn out the warehouse and move your supplies, just to prevent that possibility?”

“We were in the process … that is, we intended to. But we didn’t think he would get here before you,” managed Dejarro.

Koax frowned and looked at the empty table once more. “Tell me what happened.”

“We ambushed him,” said Dejarro quietly. “Ambushed the Jeedai.”

“Did you kill him?” said Koax, and her intent was clear in the tone of her question: One dead Jedi on Makem Te was a casualty. Two would attract more attention than the Spice Lord would want.

“We lost a lot of people. The Jeedai … he had backup, and he …” Dejarro froze when Koax transfixed him with the ruby eye.

“Did you kill him?” she repeated.

“No,” said Dejarro, looking away. “There was a firefight. The warehouse caught fire in the battle.”

“Too little, too late,” said Koax. “You should have torched the place the night the first Jeedai died.”

Dejarro nodded. “We didn’t want to lose the stock. We had a lot of funeral supplies there.”

Then Koax did something that Dejarro did not expect. She laughed. It was a full-throated, hearty, honest laugh, the laugh of someone confronted by the basic stupidity of the galaxy. “You kill a Jeedai, then are surprised to find another one comes looking for him. You let this new Jeedai uncover your operation, resulting in a firefight and setting the warehouse ablaze, and you’re worried about the stock?”

Dejarro himself managed a sickly chuckle and said, “We’re tapped out now, except for …” He tapped the vial in his pocket with his palm.

“I see,” said Koax, pulling her features back into a stern repose. “So you need …”

“More of the hard spice. More Tempest,” said Dejarro. “We can make it up to you. Just a little advance. Enough to keep the regulars stocked up. We did what you asked for. We didn’t expect the Jeedai to bring backup.”

“I don’t think the Spice Lord will be happy about this development. Do you think that’s the case?” asked Koax.

“If you want, I can talk to the Spice Lord,” said Dejarro. “Explain things.”

“The Spice Lord has more important matters to deal with than talking to street-level dealers,” said Koax. “That is why the Spice Lord has me.” She skewered him with her good eye, and a silence grew between the two.

“So.” Dejarro’s throat was dry now. “Do you think you could do something about this?”

“Yes, I think I could,” she said. “I think I could warn the Spice Lord that there is another Jeedai. One with allies. I could also find out who these allies are, and tell you. Is that what you would want?”

Dejarro nodded. “The Jeedai killed my clanbrothers and clansisters,” he said. “We need vengeance on their behalf.”

“Consider it done,” said Koax. “You have my word—the Bomu clan will get its vengeance against this Jeedai. But I will warn you, if the Jeedai killed so many of your clan just at the outset, there will be more lives lost before you get your vengeance.”

Dejarro nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, yes, we know. It is the price you pay for vengeance.” The Rodian turned to leave the Klatooinian with her prize.

“One last thing,” said Koax, and Dejarro froze in his tracks, turning slightly.

“I will have to tell the Spice Lord that we have this problem because the Bomu clan neglected to cover its tracks sufficiently,” said Koax. “And I will have to report that I have taken appropriate action.” The Klatooinian’s hand drifted to her weapons belt.

Dejarro pulled his blaster, and if Koax had been going for her own, he would have beaten her to the draw. Instead, the Klatooinian pulled one of her throwing blades, and in a graceful, almost casual flick of the wrist, planted it deeply in the Rodian’s neck from five paces away. Dejarro went down, gurgling.

Koax liked to think that last noise was an attempt at an apology.

The Spice Lord’s agent knelt over the dead Rodian and pulled the small vial—the last pure sample of Tempest on Makem Te—from Dejarro’s inside pocket. Then she pulled one of the death robes from its hooks and draped it solemnly over the body.

“Another victim of this new Jeedai,” said Koax. “But I am good to my word, and will gladly throw as many of your clan in his way as I need to.” She let out a deep sigh.

“But first,” continued the one-eyed Klatooinian, “I will have to send a message to the Spice Lord, presenting the bad news. And let me tell you, Rodian, that you got off easy in that you had to deal with me instead of the one I serve.”

Introduction to the NEW JEDI ORDER Era
(25–40 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

A quarter century after A New Hope and the destruction of the Death Star, the galaxy is free of wide-scale conflicts—but the New Republic must contend with many regional brushfires. And Luke Skywalker’s Jedi Order faces its own growing pains: Some New Republic officials want to rein in the Jedi, leading Luke to wonder if the Jedi Council should be restored.

On the planet Rhommamool, Leia Organa Solo, Mara Jade Skywalker, and Jaina Solo meet with a mysterious rabble-rouser named Nom Anor. Anor rejects Leia’s diplomatic entreaties, but she’s more disturbed by what she finds when she reaches out to him in the Force: nothing. It’s as if he isn’t there.

Anor is a secret agent of the Yuuzhan Vong, powerful warriors from another galaxy who regard technology as blasphemous, relying on biological constructs to serve as their starships, weapons, and communicators. Long ago, a devastating war destroyed much of the Yuuzhan Vong’s galaxy and cut them off from the Force, sending their clans across the intergalactic void in search of a new home. Now they are at the edge of the Star Wars galaxy, ready to invade.

As head of the New Jedi Order, Luke is central to the galaxy’s defense; Leia’s skills as a former Chief of State and respected political adviser are also called on. The five-year war shakes the galaxy to its foundations. Technologically advanced worlds within the Yuuzhan Vong invasion corridor are subjected to the newcomers’ biotechnology and altered into strange hybrids combining what they had been with the new Yuuzhan Vong ecosystem. Entire species are enslaved—or eradicated. The New Republic is ill prepared to meet the extragalactic threat, with regional rivalries, political dissension, and concern over the Imperial Remnant limiting the effectiveness of its military response. Wrangling in the Senate snarls the war plans, as do disagreements between planetary fleets and armies, while assassination and war thin the ranks of the New Republic’s leaders. Officers and pilots who battled for so long against the Empire, such as Admiral Ackbar and Wedge Antilles, work feverishly to figure out how to outmaneuver their new enemies.

The invasion sorely challenges the Jedi, as well. Some take it upon themselves to meet the Yuuzhan Vong threat head-on, disdaining foot-dragging by politicians—and some of those skirt the dark side of the Force, giving in to their anger and fear as the Yuuzhan Vong ruin worlds and lives. The Yuuzhan Vong come to recognize the Jedi as the biggest threat to their plans, and begin hunting them down using New Republic traitors and bioengineered killers. At the forefront of the war against the Jedi are the Solo children—now teenagers and Jedi Knights in their own right. By the time the war is over, the Solo family will never be the same again.

The other heroes of the Rebellion, too, face personal struggles and tragedies. Luke fears for the life of his wife, Mara—infected with a Yuuzhan Vong–engineered disease—and for that of his newborn son, Ben, hunted by the Jedi’s enemies. Han and Leia’s losses are even harder to bear, as their oldest friends and children risk everything to stop the Yuuzhan Vong.

If you’re a reader looking to explore the epic tale of the Yuuzhan Vong war and the era of Luke’s New Jedi Order, the best place to start is with the first book in the series:

• The New Jedi Order: Vector Prime, by R. A. Salvatore: The first novel in the series introduces the pitiless Yuuzhan Vong and immediately makes clear that the heroes of the Rebellion are in mortal danger.

Read on for an excerpt from a Star Wars Legends novel set in the New Jedi Order era.

ONE
Fraying Fabric

It was too peaceful out here, surrounded by the vacuum of space and with only the continual hum of the twin ion drives breaking the silence. While she loved these moments of peace, Leia Organa Solo also viewed them as an emotional trap, for she had been around long enough to understand the turmoil she would find at the end of this ride.

Like the end of every ride, lately.

Leia paused a moment before she entered the bridge of the Jade Sabre, the new shuttle her brother, Luke, had built for his wife, Mara Jade. Before her, and apparently oblivious to her, Mara and Jaina sat comfortably, side by side at the controls, talking and smiling. Leia focused on her daughter, Jaina, sixteen years old, but with the mature and calm demeanor of a veteran pilot. Jaina looked a lot like Leia, with long dark hair and brown eyes contrasting sharply with her smooth and creamy skin. Indeed, Leia saw much of herself in the girl—no, not girl, Leia corrected her own thoughts, but young woman. That same sparkle behind the brown eyes, mischievous, adventurous, determined.

That notion set Leia back a bit, for she recognized then that when she looked at Jaina, she was seeing not a reflection of herself but an image of the girl she had once been. A twinge of sadness caught her as she considered her own life now: a diplomat, a bureaucrat, a mediator, always trying to calm things down, always working for the peace and prosperity of the New Republic. Did she miss the days when the most common noise around her had been the sharp blare of a blaster or the hiss of a lightsaber? Was she sorry that those wild times had been replaced by the droning of the ion drives and the sharp bickering of one pride-wounded emissary after another?

Perhaps, Leia had to admit, but in looking at Jaina and those simmering dark eyes, she could take vicarious pleasure.

Another twinge—jealousy?—caught her by surprise, as Mara and Jaina erupted into laughter over some joke Leia had not overheard. But she pushed the absurd notion far from her mind as she considered her sister-in-law, Luke’s wife and Jaina’s tutor—at Jaina’s own request—in the ways of the Jedi. Mara was not a substitute mother for Jaina, but rather a big sister, and when Leia considered the fires that constantly burned in Mara’s green eyes, she understood that the woman could give to Jaina things that Leia could not, and that those lessons and that friendship would prove valuable indeed to her daughter. And so she forced aside her jealousy and was merely glad that Jaina had found such a friend.

She started onto the bridge, but paused again, sensing movement behind her. She knew before looking that it was Bolpuhr, her Noghri bodyguard, and barely gave him a glance as he glided to the side, moving so easily and gracefully that he reminded her of a lace curtain drifting lazily in a gentle breeze. She had accepted young Bolpuhr as her shadow for just that reason, for he was as unobtrusive as any bodyguard could be. Leia marveled at the young Noghri, at how his grace and silence covered a perfectly deadly fighting ability.

She held up her hand, indicating that Bolpuhr should remain out here, and though his usually emotionless face did flash Leia a quick expression of disappointment, she knew he would obey. Bolpuhr, and all the Noghri, would do anything Leia asked of them. He would jump off a cliff or dive into the hot end of an ion engine for her, and the only time she ever saw any sign of discontentment with her orders was when Bolpuhr thought she might be placing him in a difficult position to properly defend her.

As he was thinking now, Leia understood, though why in the world Bolpuhr would fear for her safety on her sister-in-law’s private shuttle was beyond her. Sometimes dedication could be taken a bit too far.

With a nod to Bolpuhr, she turned back to the bridge and crossed through the open doorway. “How much longer?” she asked, and was amused to see both Jaina and Mara jump in surprise at her sudden appearance.

In answer, Jaina increased the magnification on the forward screen, and instead of the unremarkable dots of light, there appeared an image of two planets, one mostly blue and white, the other reddish in hue, seemingly so close together that Leia wondered how it was that the blue-and-white one, the larger of the pair, had not grasped the other in its gravity and turned it into a moon. Parked halfway between them, perhaps a half a million kilometers from either, deck lights glittering in the shadows of the blue-and-white planet, loomed a Mon Calamari battle cruiser, the Mediator, one of the newest ships in the New Republic fleet.

“They’re at their closest,” Mara observed, referring to the planets.

“I beg your indulgence,” came a melodic voice from the doorway, and the protocol droid C-3PO walked into the room. “But I do not believe that is correct.”

“Close enough,” Mara said. She turned to Jaina. “Both Rhommamool and Osarian are ground based, technologically—”

“Rhommamool almost exclusively so!” C-3PO quickly added, drawing a scowl from all three of the women. Oblivious, he rambled on. “Even Osarian’s fleet must be considered marginal, at best. Unless, of course, one is using the Pantang Scale of Aero-techno Advancement, which counts even a simple landspeeder as highly as it would a Star Destroyer. Perfectly ridiculous scale.”

“Thank you, Threepio,” Leia said, her tone indicating that she had heard more than enough.

“They’ve both got missiles that can hit each other from this close distance, though,” Mara continued.

“Oh, yes!” the droid exclaimed. “And given the proximity of their relative elliptical orbits—”

“Thank you, Threepio,” Leia said.

“—they will remain within striking distance for some time,” C-3PO continued without missing a beat. “Months, at least. In fact, they will be even closer in two standard weeks, the closest they will be to each other for a decade to come.”

“Thank you, Threepio!” Mara and Leia said together.

“And the closest they have been for a decade previous,” the droid had to slip in, as the women turned back to their conversation.

Mara shook her head, trying to remember her original point to Jaina. “That’s why your mother chose to come out now.”

“You’re expecting a fight?” Jaina asked, and neither Leia nor Mara missed the sparkle in her eye.

“The Mediator will keep them behaving,” Leia said hopefully. Indeed, the battle cruiser was an impressive warship, an updated and more heavily armed and armored version of the Mon Calamari star cruiser.

Mara looked back to the screen and shook her head, unconvinced. “It’ll take more than a show of force to stop this catastrophe,” she replied.

“Indeed, it has been escalating, by all reports,” C-3PO piped up. “It started as a simple mining dispute over mineral rights, but now the rhetoric is more appropriate for some kind of a holy crusade.”

“It’s the leader on Rhommamool,” Mara remarked. “Nom Anor. He’s reached down and grabbed his followers by their most basic instincts, weaving the dispute against Osarian into a more general matter of tyranny and oppression. Don’t underestimate him.”

“I can’t begin to give you a full list of tyrants like Nom Anor that I’ve dealt with,” Leia said with a resigned shrug.

“I have that very list available,” C-3PO blurted. “Tonkoss Rathba of—”

“Thank you, Threepio,” Leia said, too politely.

“Why, of course, Princess Leia,” the droid replied. “I do so like to be of service. Now where was I? Oh, yes. Tonkoss Rathba of—”

“Not now, Threepio,” Leia insisted, then to Mara, she added, “I’ve seen his type often.”

“Not like him,” Mara replied, somewhat softly, and the sudden weakness in her voice reminded Leia and Jaina that Mara, despite her nearly constant bravado and overabundance of energy, was seriously ill, with a strange and thankfully rare disease that had killed dozens of others and against which the best doctors in the New Republic had proven completely helpless. Of those who had contracted the molecular disorder, only Mara and one other remained alive, and that other person, being studied intently on Coruscant, was fast dying.

“Daluba,” C-3PO went on. “And of course, there was Icknya—”

Leia started to turn to the droid, hoping to politely but firmly shut him up, but Jaina’s cry stopped her abruptly and swung her back to face the screen.

“Incoming ships!” Jaina announced, her voice full of surprise. The telltale blips had appeared on her sensor viewer as if from nowhere.

“Four of them,” Mara confirmed. Even as she spoke, the warning buzzers began to go off. “From Osarian.” She turned her curious expression up to Leia. “They know who we are?”

Leia nodded. “And they know why I’ve come.”

“Then they should know to leave us alone,” Jaina reasoned.

Leia nodded again, but understood better. She had come to the system not to meet with the Osarians—not at first, at least—but with their principal rival, Nom Anor, the cult figure stirring up trouble on Rhommamool. “Tell them to back off,” she instructed Mara.

“Politely?” Mara asked, smiling, and with that dangerous twinkle in her eyes.

“New Republic shuttle,” a halting voice crackled over the comm. “This is Captain Grappa of Osarian First-Force.”

With a flick of a switch, Mara put an image of the captain on the viewscreen, and Leia sighed as the green skin, spiny head ridge, and tapirlike snout came into view.

“Wonderful,” she remarked sarcastically.

“The Osarians have hired Rodians?” Jaina asked.

“Nothing like a few mercenaries to quiet things down,” Leia replied dryly.

“Oh, dear me,” C-3PO remarked, and he shuffled aside nervously.

“You come with us,” Grappa insisted, his multifaceted eyes sparkling eagerly. “To Osa-Prime.”

“Seems the Osarians want to talk with you first,” Mara said.

“They’re afraid that my meeting with Nom Anor will only heighten his stature, both among the Rhommamoolians and throughout the sector,” Leia reasoned, a notion not without credence, and one that she had debated endlessly before making the decision to come here.

“Whatever the reason, they’re closing fast,” Mara replied. Both she and Jaina looked to Leia for instructions, for while the Jade Sabre was Mara’s ship, this was Leia’s mission.

“Princess Leia?” an obviously alarmed C-3PO asked.

Leia sat down in the chair behind Mara, intently studying the screen, which Jaina had switched back to a normal space view. The four approaching fighters were clearly visible.

“Lose them,” she said determinedly, a request that neither of the pilots needed to hear twice. Indeed, Mara had been eager to put the shuttle, with its powerful twin engines and state-of-the-art maneuvering systems, through a real test.

Green eyes sparkling, smile wide, Mara reached for the controls, but then retracted her hands and put them on her lap. “You heard her, Jaina,” she said.

Jaina’s mouth dropped open; so did Leia’s.

“You mean it?” Jaina asked.

Mara’s only reply was an almost bored expression, along with a slight yawn, as if this whole thing was no big deal, and certainly nothing that Jaina couldn’t easily handle.

“Yes!” Jaina whispered, clenching her fists, wearing a smile nearly wide enough to take in her ears. She rubbed her hands together, then reached out to the right, rolling her fingers over the floating-ball control of the inertial compensator. “Strap in,” she ordered, and she dialed it down to 95 percent, as fighter pilots often did so that they could gain a tactile feel to the movements of their ships. Reading the g’s, Jaina had heard it called, and she always preferred flying that way, where fast turns and mighty acceleration could push her back in her seat.

“Not too much,” Leia said with concern.

But her daughter was in her element now, Leia knew, and she’d push the shuttle to its limits. Leia felt the lean as Jaina veered right, angling away from the approaching ships.

“If you run, we shoot you down!” came the uneven voice of Grappa.

“Z-95 Headhunters,” Mara said derisively of the closing craft, an antiquated starfighter, and she flipped off the comm switch and looked back at Leia. “Can’t shoot what you can’t catch,” she explained. “Kick them in,” she added to Jaina, motioning to the primary thrusters, thinking that a burst of the powerful engines would shoot the Jade Sabre right past the befuddled Rodians and their outdated starfighters.

Even as she spoke, though, two more blips appeared on the sensors, streaking out from the shadows around Rhommamool, angling right in line with the Jade Sabre.

“Mara,” Leia said with concern. At that, Mara did reach for the controls. But only for a moment, and then she looked Jaina right in the eye and nodded for the young woman to proceed.

Leia lurched forward in her seat, held back only by the belt, as Jaina reversed throttle and kicked the etheric rudder right. There came a metallic thump behind them—C-3PO hitting the wall, Leia guessed.

Even as the Jade Sabre came to a sudden halt, nose turned starboard, Jaina pumped it out to full throttle and kicked the rudder back to the left, then hard right, fishtailing the ship about in a brutal one-eighty, then working the rudder hard and somewhat choppy in straightening out her direct retreat. As they turned, a laser cannon blast cut across their bow.

“All right, the first four are on our tail,” Mara instructed calmly. The Jade Sabre jolted, hit aft, a blow the shields easily held back.

“Try a—” Mara started to say, but she lost the words, and nearly her lunch, as Jaina pulled a snap roll right, and then another right behind it.

“Oh, we’ll be killed!” came C-3PO’s cry from the doorway, and Leia managed to turn her head to see the droid leaning in against the metal jamb, and then to see him fly away, with a pitiful cry, as Jaina kicked the etheric rudder again, putting the ship into another sudden fishtail.

A pair of Headhunters streaked past the viewscreen, but just for a split second, for Jaina vectored away at a different angle, and at single-engine full throttle, pressing Leia back in her seat. Leia wanted to say something to Jaina then, some words of encouragement or advice, but found her words stuck in her throat. And not for any g forces.

It was the sight of Jaina, the fire in her brown eyes, the determined set of her jaw, the sheer concentration. At that moment, Leia knew.

Her daughter was a woman now, and with all the grit of her father and mother combined.

Mara glanced over her right shoulder, between Jaina and Leia, and both followed her lead long enough to see that two of the initial four had altered course accordingly and were fast closing, laser cannons blasting away.

“Hold on,” a confident Jaina warned, and she pulled back the stick, lifting the Jade Sabre’s nose, then shoved it forward, dropping the shuttle into a sudden, inverted loop.

“We’re doomed!” C-3PO cried from the hallway—the hallway ceiling, Leia knew.

Halfway around, Jaina broke the loop with a snap roll, then kicked her into a fishtail and a barrel roll, bringing her about to nearly their original course, but with the initial four behind them. Now she did kick in both ion drives, as if to use sheer speed to split the gap between the two incoming fighters.

Both angled out suddenly, then turned back in, widening that escape route but giving them a longer shooting angle at the shuttle, and an easier turn to pursue.

“They’re good,” Mara warned, but, like Leia, she found her words lost in her throat, as Jaina, teeth gritted to fight back the g’s, reversed throttle.

“Princess—” The plaintive cry from the corridor ended abruptly in a loud crash.

“Coming in hot!” Mara cried, noting the fighter fast approaching to port.

Jaina didn’t, couldn’t even hear her; she had turned inward now, was feeling the Force coursing through her, was registering every movement of her enemies and reacting instinctively, playing the game three moves ahead. Before Mara had even begun to speak, Jaina had hit the forward attitude adjustment jets, lifting the nose, then she pumped the throttle and kicked the rudder, lifting the Jade Sabre and bringing her nose about to starboard, to directly face the other incoming Headhunter.

And that eager Rodian did come in at them, and hard, and the Jade Sabre’s defensive array screeched and lit up, warning of a lock-on.

“Jaina!” Leia cried.

“He’s got us!” Mara added.

But then the closer ship, coming from port, passed right under the Jade Sabre, and Jaina fired the repulsorlifts, bouncing the Jade Sabre up and sending the poor Headhunter into a wild, spinning roll.

The closing ship from starboard let fly its concussion missile, but it, and the Headhunter, zipped right underneath the elevated Jade Sabre.

Before the three women could even begin to catch their breath, another ship streaked in, an X-wing, the new XJ version of the starfighter, its own laser cannons blasting away from its wingtips. Not at the Jade Sabre, though, but at the Headhunter that had just gone past.

“Who is that?” Leia asked, and Jaina, equally curious, brought the Jade Sabre about hard.

The Headhunter snap-rolled left and dived, but the far superior X-wing stayed on her, lasers scoring hit after hit, depleting her shields and then blasting her apart into a million pieces.

“A Jedi,” Mara and Jaina said together, and Leia, when she paused to collect the Force sensations about her, concurred.

“Fast to the Mediator,” Leia instructed her daughter, and Jaina swung the Jade Sabre about yet again.

“I didn’t know there were any Jedi in the sector,” Leia said to Mara, who could only shrug, equally at a loss.

“Another one’s out,” Jaina informed them, watching the blips on her sensor screen. “And two others are vectoring away.”

“They want no part of a Jedi showing a willingness to shoot back,” Mara remarked.

“Maybe Rodians are smarter than I thought,” Leia said dryly. “Smooth it out,” she instructed her daughter, unbuckling and climbing unsteadily to her feet.

Jaina reluctantly dialed the inertial compensator back to full.

“Only one pursuing,” Jaina informed them as Leia made her way to the door.

“The X-wing,” Mara added, and Leia nodded.

In the hallway outside the bridge, Leia found C-3PO inverted and against the wall, his feet sticking up in the air, his head crunched forward so that his chin was tight against his chest.

“You have to learn to hold on,” Leia said to him, helping him upright. She glanced across the way to Bolpuhr as she spoke, to find the Noghri still standing calmly in the exact spot she had assigned him.

Somehow, she wasn’t amazed.

Jaina took the Jade Sabre at a swift but steady pace toward the distant Mediator. She checked often for pursuit, but it quickly became obvious that the Rodians in their outdated Headhunters wanted no part of this fight.

Leia rejoined them a short while later, to find Jaina in complete control and Mara resting back in her seat, eyes closed. Even when Jaina asked her aunt a question about docking procedures, the woman didn’t respond, didn’t even open her eyes.

“They’ll guide you in,” Leia interjected, and sure enough, a voice from the Mediator crackled over the opened comm, giving explicit directions for entry vector.

Jaina took her in, and Jaina took her down, easily—and after the display of flying she had just given them out with the Headhunters, Leia wasn’t the least bit surprised by her ability to so smoothly tight-dock a ship as large as the Jade Sabre.

That final shudder as Jaina eased off the repulsorlifts and settled the shuttle onto the docking bay floor stirred Mara from her rest. She opened her eyes and, seeing where they were, rose quickly.

And then she swayed and seemed as if she would fall.

Leia and Jaina were there in an instant, catching and steadying her.

She regained her balance and took a deep breath. “Maybe next time you can dial down the inertial compensator to ninety-seven instead of ninety-five,” she said jokingly, straining a smile.

Jaina laughed, but Leia’s face showed her deep concern. “Are you all right?” she asked.

Mara eyed her directly.

“Perhaps we should find a place where you can rest,” Leia said.

“Where we all can rest,” Mara corrected, and her tone told Leia to back off, a reminder that Leia was intruding on a private place for Mara, a place she had explicitly instructed all of her friends, even her husband, not to go. This disease was Mara’s fight alone, to Mara’s thinking, a battle that had forced her to reconsider everything she thought about her life, past, present, and future, and everything she thought about death.

Leia held her stare for a moment longer, but replaced her own concerned expression with one of acceptance. Mara did not want to be coddled or cuddled. She was determined to live on in an existence that did not name her disease as the most pressing and important facet of her entire life, to live on as she had before, with the illness being relegated to the position of nuisance, and nothing more.

Of course, Leia understood it to be much more than that, an internal churning that required Mara to spend hours and tremendous Force energy merely holding it in check. But that was Mara’s business.

“I hope to meet with Nom Anor tomorrow,” Leia explained, as the three, with C-3PO and Bolpuhr in tow, headed for the lower hatch, then moved down to the landing bay. A contingent of New Republic Honor Guard stood waiting there, along with Commander Ackdool, a Mon Calamarian with large, probing eyes, a fishlike face, and salmon-colored skin. “By all reports, we should all be rested before dealing with him.”

“Believe those reports,” Mara said.

“And first, it seems I get to meet with our savior Jedi,” Leia added dryly, looking back behind the Jade Sabre to see the X-wing gliding in to rest.

“Wurth Skidder,” Jaina remarked, recognizing the markings under the canopy on the starfighter.

“Why am I not surprised?” Leia asked, and she blew a sigh.

Ackdool came over to them, then, and extended his formal greetings to the distinguished guests, but Leia’s reaction set him back on his heels—indeed, it raised more than a few eyebrows among the members of the Mediator’s Honor Guard.

“Why did you send him out?” Leia snapped, motioning toward the docking X-wing.

Commander Ackdool started to answer, but Leia continued. “If we had needed assistance, we would have called for it.”

“Of course, Princess Leia,” Commander Ackdool said with a polite bow.

“They why send him out?”

“Why do you assume that Wurth Skidder flew out at my command?” the cool Commander Ackdool dared to respond. “Why would you assume that Wurth Skidder heeds any order I might give?”

“Couple o’ ridge-head parachutes floating over Osarian, if those Rodians had any luck,” came the singsong voice of Wurth Skidder. The cocky young man was fast approaching, pulling off his helmet and giving his shock of blond hair a tousle as he walked.

Leia stepped out to intercept him and took another quick step for no better reason than to make the Jedi stop short. “Wurth Skidder,” she said.

“Princess,” the man replied with a bow.

“Did you have a little fun out there?”

“More than a little,” the Jedi said with a wide grin and a sniffle—and he always seemed to be sniffling, and his hair always looked as if he had just walked in from a Tatooine sandstorm. “Fun for me, I mean, and not for the Rodians.”

“And the cost of your fun?” Leia asked.

That took the smile from Wurth Skidder’s face, and he looked at Leia curiously, obviously not understanding.

“The cost,” Leia explained. “What did your little excursion cost?”

“A couple of proton torpedos,” Wurth replied with a shrug. “A little fuel.”

“And a year of diplomatic missions to calm down the Osarians,” Leia retorted.

“But they shot first,” Wurth protested.

“Do you even understand that your stupidity likely escalated an already impossible situation?” Leia’s voice was as firm and cold as anyone present had ever heard it. So cold, in fact, that the always overprotective Bolpuhr, fearing trouble, glided closer to her, hanging back just behind her left shoulder, within fast striking distance of the Jedi.

“They were attacking you,” Wurth Skidder retorted. “Six of them!”

“They were trying to bring us down to Osarian,” Leia harshly explained. “A not-so-unexpected response, given my announced intentions here. And so we planned to avoid them. Avoid! Do you understand that word?”

Wurth Skidder said nothing.

“Avoid them and thus cause no further problems or hard feelings,” Leia went on. “And so we would have, and we would have asked for no explanations from Shunta Osarian Dharrg, all of us pretending that nothing had ever happened.”

“But—”

“And our graciousness in not mentioning this unfortunate incident would have bought me the bargaining capital I need to bring some kind of conciliation from Osarian toward Rhommamool,” Leia continued, anger creeping in thicker with each word. “But now we can’t do that, can we? Now, so that Wurth Skidder could paint another skull on the side of his X-wing, I’ll have to deal with an incident.”

“They shot first,” Wurth Skidder reiterated when it became apparent that Leia was done.

“And better that they had shot last,” Leia replied. “And if Shunta Osarian Dharrg demands reparations, we’ll agree, with all apologies, and any monies to be paid will come from Wurth Skidder’s private funds.”

The Jedi squared his shoulders at the suggestion, but then Leia hit him with a sudden and devastating shot. “My brother will see to it.”

Wurth Skidder bowed again, glared at Leia and all around, then turned on his heel and walked briskly away.

“My apologies, Princess Leia,” Ackdool said. “But I have no real authority over Jedi Skidder. I had thought it a blessing when he arrived two weeks ago. His Jedi skills should certainly come in handy against any terrorist attempts—and we have heard rumors of many—against the Mediator.”

“And you are indeed within striking distance of surface missiles,” C-3PO added, but he stopped short, this time catching on to the many disapproving looks that came his way.

“I did not know that Jedi Skidder would prove so …” Ackdool paused, searching for the right word. “Intractable.”

“Stubborn, you mean,” Leia said. As they all started away, Leia did manage a bit of a smile when she heard Mara behind her tell Jaina, “Maybe Nom Anor has met his match.”

C-9PO, a protocol droid, its copper coloring tinged red from the constantly blowing dusts of Rhommamool, skittered down an alley to the side of the main avenue of Redhaven and peeked out cautiously at the tumult beyond. The fanatical followers of Nom Anor, the Red Knights of Life, had gone on the rampage again, riding throughout the city in an apparent purge of landspeeders on their tutakans, eight-legged lizards with enormous tusks that climbed right up past their black eyes and curled in like white eyebrows.

“Ride the beasts given by Life!” one Red Knight screamed at a poor civilian as the wrinkled Dressellian merchant was dragged from the cockpit and punched and pushed to the ground.

“Perversion!” several other Red Knights cried in unison. “Life-pretender!” And they set upon the landspeeder with their tubal-iron pummelstaves, smashing the windshield, bashing in the side moldings, crushing the steering wheel and other controls, even knocking one of the rear drive’s cylindrical engines from its mounts.

Satisfied that the craft was wrecked beyond repair, they pulled the Dressellian to his feet and shoved him to and fro, warning him to ride creatures, not machines—or, better still, to use the legs that nature had provided and walk. Then they beat him back down to the ground and moved on, some climbing back atop the tutakans, others running beside.

The landspeeder continued to hover, though it had only a couple of repulsors still firing. It looked more like a twisted lump of beaten metal than a vehicle, tilting to one side because of the unequal weight distribution and the weakened lift capacity.

“Oh, dear me,” the protocol droid said, ducking low as the contingent stormed past.

Tap, tap, tap came the ringing of metal on metal against the top of the droid’s head. C-9PO slowly turned about and saw the fringe of the telltale black capes, and the red-dyed hides.

With a screech, the droid stood up and tried to run away, but a pummelstave smashed in the side of his leg and he went facedown in the red dust. He lifted his head, but rising up on his arms only gave the two Red Knights a better handhold as they walked past, each scooping the droid under one shoulder and dragging him along.

“Got a Ninepio,” one of the pair called out to his lizard-riding buddies, and a cheer went up.

The doomed droid knew the destination: the Square of Hopeful Redemption.

C-9PO was glad that he wasn’t programmed to experience pain.

* * *

“It was a stupid thing to do,” Leia said firmly.

“Wurth thought he was helping us,” Jaina reminded, but Leia wasn’t buying that argument.

“Wurth was trying to find his own thrills,” she corrected.

“And that hotshot attitude of his will reinforce the ring of truth to Nom Anor’s diatribes against the Jedi,” Mara said. “He’s not without followers on Osarian.” As she finished, she looked down at the table, at the pile of leaflets Commander Ackdool had given them, colorful propaganda railing against the New Republic, against the Jedi, and against anything mechanical and technological, and somehow tying all of these supposed ills to the cultural disease that engulfed the society of the planet Osarian.

“Why does Nom Anor hate the Jedi?” Jaina asked. “What do we have to do with the struggle between Osarian and Rhommamool? I never even heard of these planets until you mentioned that we’d be coming here.”

“The Jedi have nothing to do with this struggle,” Leia replied. “Or at least, they didn’t until Wurth Skidder’s antics.”

“Nom Anor hates the New Republic,” Mara added. “And he hates the Jedi as symbols of the New Republic.”

“Is there anything Nom Anor doesn’t hate?” Leia asked dryly.

“Don’t take him lightly,” Mara warned yet again. “His religious cry to abandon technology and machines, to look for truth in the natural elements and life of the universe, and to resist the joining of planets in false confederations resonates deeply in many people, particularly those who have been the victims of such planetary alliances, like the miners of Rhommamool.”

Leia didn’t disagree. She had spent many hours before and during the journey here reading the history of the two planets, and she knew that the situation on Rhommamool was much more complicated than that. While many of the miners had traveled to the inhospitable red planet voluntarily, there were quite a number who were the descendants of the original “colonists”—involuntary immigrants sent there to work the mines because of high crimes they had committed.

Whatever the truth of the situation, though, Leia couldn’t deny that Rhommamool was the perfect breeding ground for zealots like Nom Anor. Life there was tough—even basics like water could be hard to come by—while the prosperous Osarians lived in comfort on white sandy beaches and crystal-clear lakes.

“I still don’t understand how any of that concerns the Jedi,” Jaina remarked.

“Nom Anor was stirring up anger against the Jedi long before he ever came to Rhommamool,” Mara explained. “Here, he’s just found a convenient receptacle for his wrath.”

“And with the Jedi Knights scattered throughout the galaxy, and so many of them following their own agendas, Nom Anor might just find plenty of ammunition to add to his arguments,” Leia added grimly. “I’m glad that my brother is thinking of reestablishing the Jedi Council.”

Mara nodded, but Jaina seemed less convinced. “Jacen doesn’t think that’s such a good idea,” she reminded her mother.

Leia shrugged. Her oldest son, Jaina’s twin, had indeed expressed serious doubts about the course of the Jedi Knights.

“If we can’t bring some sense of order to the galaxy, particularly to isolated planets like Osarian and Rhommamool, then we’re no better than the Empire,” Mara remarked.

“We’re better than the Empire,” Leia insisted.

“Not in Nom Anor’s eyes,” Jaina said.

And Mara reiterated her warning to Leia not to take the man lightly. “He’s the strangest man I ever met,” she explained, and given her past exploits with notorious sorts like Jabba the Hutt and Talon Karrde, that was quite a statement. “Even when I tried to use the Force to gain a better perspective on him, I drew …” Mara paused, as if looking for some way to properly express the feeling. “A blank,” she decided. “As if the Force had nothing to do with him.”

Leia and Jaina looked at her curiously.

“No,” Mara corrected. “More like he had nothing to do with the Force.”

The perfect disconnected ideologue, Leia thought, and she expressed her feelings with a single sarcastic word: “Wonderful.”

He stood on the platform surrounded by his fanatical Red Knights. Before him, ten thousand Rhommamoolians crowded into every open space of the great public square of Redhaven, once the primary trading spaceport of the planet. But those facilities had been leveled in the early days of the uprising, with the Rhommamoolians declaring their independence from Osarian. And more recently, since the coming of Nom Anor as spearhead of the revolution, the place had been renamed the Square of Hopeful Redemption.

Here, the citizens came to declare freedom from Osarian.

Here, the followers came to renounce the New Republic.

Here, the believers came to renounce the Jedi.

And here, the fanatics came to discredit progress and technology, to cry out for a simpler time, when the strength of a being’s legs, and not the weight of his purse, determined how far he could travel, and the strength of his hands, and not the weight of his purse, allowed him to harvest the gifts of nature.

Nom Anor loved it all, the adulation and the fanatical, bordering on suicidal, devotion. He cared nothing for Rhommamool or its inhabitants, cared nothing for the foolish cries for some ridiculous “simpler time.”

But how he loved the chaos his words and followers inflicted upon the order of the galaxy. How he loved the brooding undercurrent of resentment toward the New Republic, and the simmering anger aimed at the Jedi Knights, these supercreatures of the galaxy.

Wouldn’t his superiors be pleased?

Nom Anor flipped his shiny black cape back from his shoulder and held his fist upraised into the air, drawing shrieks of appreciation. In the center of the square, where once had stood the Portmaster’s Pavilion, now was a huge pit, thirty meters in diameter and ten deep. Whistles and whines emanated from that pit, along with cries for mercy and pitifully polite words of protest—the voices of droids collected by the folk of Rhommamool and dropped into the hole.

Great cheers erupted from all corners of the square as a pair of the Red Knights entered from one avenue, dragging a 9PO protocol droid between them. They went to the edge of the pit, took up the poor 9PO by the arms and the legs, and on a three-count, launched him onto the pile of metal consisting of the astromech and mine-sniffer droids, the Redhaven street-cleaner droids, and the personal butler droids of the wealthier Rhommamoolian citizens.

When the hooting and cheering died down, Nom Anor opened his hands, revealing a single small stone. Then he clenched his fist again, squeezing with tremendous power, crushing the stone in his grasp so that dust and flecks of rock splinters slipped out the sides.

The signal to begin.

As one the crowd surged forward, lifting great chunks of stone, the debris from the wreckage of the pavilion. They came to the edge of the pit one after another and hurled their heavy missiles at the pile of droids.

The stoning went on for the rest of the afternoon, until the red glare of the sun thinned to a brilliant crimson line along the horizon, until the dozens and dozens of droids were no more than scrap metal and sparking wires.

And Nom Anor, silent and dignified, watched it all somberly, accepting this great tribute his followers had paid to him, this public execution of the hated droids.

Introduction to the LEGACY Era
(40+ YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)

The Yuuzhan Vong have been defeated, but the galaxy has been slow to recover from their depredations, with powerful worlds chafing at the economic burdens and military restrictions put upon them by the nascent Galactic Alliance, once-powerful species seeking to rise again, newly prosperous worlds testing their influence, and long-buried secrets coming to light. The result of all this instability is civil war. Faced with a Galactic Alliance that has fallen away from its values, Luke and the Jedi Order must decide where their loyalties lie—and so, too, must the heroes of the Rebellion.

While hostilities spread across the Core Worlds, lurking in the shadows is a Sith adept who wastes no time in taking advantage of the galactic chaos to wage a very personal war against the Skywalkers and the Solos. Luke will face terrible loss, Han and Leia will be tested as never before, and their daughter, Jaina, will learn just what it means to fulfill her destiny as “the Sword of the Jedi.” And even as the Galactic Alliance pulls the galaxy back from the brink of total disaster, the Skywalker–Solo clan will never be the same again.

The mop-up is difficult. Luke Skywalker is exiled from Coruscant, and while he and his son, Jedi Knight Ben Skywalker, set out on a quest to discover what caused such darkness to befall the galaxy and their family, Han and Leia are left to raise their granddaughter, Allana, and help shepherd the government back into some semblance of order. But little do any of them know that a long-lost tribe of Sith is making its way toward the Core, determined to fulfill their destiny of dominance over the galaxy … and that both Sith and Jedi are about to run headlong into a terrifying creature of untold Force abilities and an insatiable appetite for power …

If you’re a reader new to the Legacy era, here are four great starting points:

• Legacy of the Force: Betrayal, by Aaron Allston: The first in the nine-book Legacy of the Force series, setting the stage for galactic civil war and a fall to darkness.

• Millennium Falcon, by James Luceno: Han Solo’s famous freighter becomes a character in her own right as Han, Leia, their granddaughter Allana, and the droid C-3PO set out on an adventure that brings to light the ship’s colorful, mysterious past.

• Crosscurrent, by Paul S. Kemp: A remnant of the Old Republic comes into Luke Skywalker’s time in a tale of insane clones and time-traveling Jedi and Sith.

• Fate of the Jedi: Outcast by Aaron Allston: The nine-book Fate of the Jedi series blasts off with the new adventures of Luke and Ben Skywalker—Jedi Master and apprentice, father and son—in search of answers to a terrifying question.

Read on for excerpts from Star Wars Legends novels set in the Legacy era.

chapter one

CORUSCANT

“He doesn’t exist.” With those words, spoken without any conscious thought or effort on his part, Luke Skywalker sat upright in bed and looked around at the dimly illuminated chamber.

There wasn’t much to see. Members of the Jedi order, even Masters such as Luke, didn’t accumulate much personal property. Within view were chairs situated in front of unlit computer screens; a wall rack holding plasteel staves and other practice weapons; a table littered with personal effects such as datapads, notes scrawled on scraps of flimsi, datachips holding reports from various Jedi Masters, and a crude and not at all accurate sandglass statuette in Luke’s image sent to him by a child from Tatooine. Inset into the stone-veneer walls were drawers holding his and Mara’s limited selection of clothes. Their lightsabers were behind Luke, resting on a shelf on the headboard of their bed.

His wife, Mara Jade Skywalker, had more personal items and equipment, of course. Disguises, weapons, communications gear, falsified documents. A former spy, she had never given up the trappings of that trade, but those items weren’t here. Luke wasn’t sure where she kept them. She didn’t bother him with such details.

Beside him, she stirred, and he glanced down at her. Her red hair, kept a medium length this season, was an unruly mess, but there was no sleepiness in her eyes when they opened. In brighter light, he knew, those eyes were an amazing green. “Who doesn’t exist?” she asked.

“I don’t know. An enemy.”

“You dreamed about him?”

He nodded. “I’ve had the dream a couple of times before. It’s not just a dream. It’s coming to me through currents in the Force. He’s all wrapped up in shadows—a dark hooded cloak, but more than that, shadows of light and …” Luke shook his head, struggling for the correct word. “And ignorance. And denial. And he brings great pain to the galaxy … and to me.”

“Well, if he brings pain to the galaxy, you’re obviously going to feel it.”

“No, to me personally, in addition to his other evil.” Luke sighed and lay down again. “It’s too vague. And when I’m awake, when I try to peer into the future to find him, I can’t.”

“Because he doesn’t exist.”

“That’s what the dream tells me.” Luke hissed in aggravation.

“Could it be Raynar?”

Luke considered. Raynar Thul, former Jedi Knight, presumed dead during the Yuuzhan Vong war, had been discovered a few years earlier—horribly burned during the war, mentally transformed in the years since through his involvement with the insectoid Killik race. That transformation had been a malevolent one, and the Jedi order had had to deal with him. Now he languished in a well-protected cell deep within the Jedi Temple, undergoing treatment for his mental and physical afflictions.

Treatment. Treatment meant change; perhaps, in changing, Raynar was becoming something new, and Luke’s presentment pointed toward the being Raynar would someday become.

Luke shook his head and pushed the possibility away. “In this vision, I don’t sense Raynar’s alienness. Mentally, emotionally, whoever it is remains human, or near human. There’s even the possibility that it’s my father.”

“Darth Vader.”

“No. Before he was Darth Vader. Or just when he was becoming Vader.” Luke’s gaze lost focus as he tried to recapture the dream. “What little of his face I can see reminds me of the features of Anakin Skywalker as a Jedi. But his eyes … as I watch, they turn a molten gold or orange, transforming from Force-use and anger …”

“I have an idea.”

“Tell me.”

“Let’s wait until he shows up, then crush him.”

Luke smiled. “All right.” He closed his eyes and his breathing slowed, an effort to return to sleep.

Within a minute the rhythm of his breathing became that of natural sleep.

But Mara lay awake, her attention on the ceiling—beyond it, through dozens of floor levels of the Jedi enclave to the skies of Coruscant above—and searched for any hint, any flicker of what it was that was causing her husband worry.

She found no sign of it. And she, too, slept.

ADUMAR

The gleaming pearl-gray turbolift doors slid open sideways, and warm air bearing an aroma that advertised death and destruction washed over Jacen Solo, his cousin Ben Skywalker, and their guide.

Jacen took a deep breath and held it. The odors of this subterranean factory were not the smells of corrupted flesh or gangrenous wounds—smells Jacen was familiar with—but those of labor and industry. The great chamber before them had been a missile manufacturing center for decades, and no amount of rigorous cleaning would ever be quite able to eliminate the odors of sweat, machine lubricant, newly fabricated composite materials, solid fuel propellants, and high explosives that filled the air.

Jacen expelled the breath and stepped out of the turbolift, then walked the handful of steps up to the rail overlooking the chamber. He walked rapidly so that his Jedi cloak would billow a little as he strode, so that his boot heels would ring on the metal flooring of this observation catwalk, and so his apprentice and guide would be left behind for a moment. This was a performance for his guide and all the other representatives of the Dammant Killers company. Jacen knew he was carrying off his role quite well; the company officials he’d been dealing with remained properly intimidated. But he didn’t know whether to attribute his success to his bearing and manner, his lean, brooding, and handsome looks, or his name—for on this world of Adumar, with its history of fascination with pilots, the name of Jacen’s father, Han Solo, went a very long way.

His guide, a slender, balding man named Testan ke Harran, moved up to the rail to Jacen’s right. Contrasting with the dull grays and blues that were common on this factory’s walls and its workers’ uniforms, Testan was a riot of color—his tunic, with its nearly knee-length hem and its flowing sleeves, was the precise orange of X-wing fighter pilot uniforms, though decorated with purple crisscross lines breaking it down into a flickering expanse of small diamond shapes, and his trousers, belt, and scarf were a gleaming gold.

Testan stroked his lustrous black beard, the gesture a failed attempt to conceal the man’s nervousness. Jacen felt, rather than saw, Ben move up on the other side of Testan.

“You can see,” Testan said, “ar workars enjoy very fan conditions.”

Ben cleared his throat. “He says their workers enjoy very fine conditions.”

Jacen nodded absently. He understood Testan’s words, and it had taken him little time to learn and understand the Adumari accent, but this was another act, a ploy to keep the Adumari off-balance. He leaned forward to give the manufacturing floor below his full attention.

The room was large enough to act as a hangar and maintenance bay for four full squadrons of X-wing snubfighters. Tall duracrete partitions divided the space into eight lanes, each of which enclosed an assembly line; materials entered through small portals in the wall to the left, rolled along on luminous white conveyor belts, and eventually exited through portals on the far right. Laborers in gray jumpsuits flanked the belts and worked on the materials as they passed.

On the nearest belt, immediately below Jacen, the materials being worked on appeared to be compact visual sensor assemblies. The conveyor belt brought in eight such units and stopped. Moving quickly, the laborers plugged small cables into the units and turned to look into monitors, which showed black-and-white images of jumpsuited waists and worker hands. The workers turned the units this way and that, confirming that the sensors were properly calibrated.

One monitor never lit up with a view from the sensor. The worker on that unit unplugged it and set it on a table running parallel to the conveyor belt. A moment later, the other workers on this section unplugged their sensor units and the conveyor belt jerked into motion again, carrying the remaining seven units to the next station.

One lane over, the conveyor belt remained in constant motion, carrying sensor unit housings along. The workers on that belt, fewer in number than the sensor testers, reached out occasionally to turn a housing, to look inside, to examine the exterior for cracks or warping. Some workers, distributed at intervals along the line, rapped each housing with a small rubber-headed hammer. Jacen assumed they were listening for a musical tone he could not possibly hear at this distance over the roar of noise from the floor.

Another lane away from him, the workers were clad not in jumpsuits but in full-coverage hazardous materials suits of a lighter and more reflective gray than the usual worker outfit. Their conveyor belt carried white plates bearing irregular balls the size of a human head but a nearly luminous green. The belt stopped as each set of eight such balls entered the lane, giving the workers time to plunge needle-like sensors into each ball. They, too, checked monitors for a few seconds before withdrawing the needles to allow the balls to continue on. Jacen knew that poisonous green—it was the color of the high explosive Adumari manufacturers used to fabricate the concussion missiles they exported.

While Jacen made his initial survey, Ben kept their guide occupied. “Do you wax your beard?” he asked.

“I do not.”

“It just seems very shiny. Do you oil it?”

Testan’s voice was a little more irritated in tone. “I do not oil it. I condition it. And I brush it.”

“Do you brush it with butter?”

Jacen finally looked to the right, past Testan and at his cousin. Ben was thirteen standard years of age, not tall but well muscled, with a fine-featured freckled face under a mass of flame-red hair. Ben turned, his face impassive, to look at Jacen, then said, “The Jedi Knight acknowledges that this factory seems to meet the minimum, the absolute minimum, required safety and comfort standards of a Galactic Alliance military contractor.”

Jacen nodded. The nod meant Good improvisation. He was exerting no Force skill to communicate words to Ben; Ben’s role was to pretend to act as his mentor’s translator, when his actual function was to convince the locals that adult Jedi were even more aloof and mysterious than they had thought.

“No, no, no.” Testan drew a sleeve over his brow, dabbing away a little perspiration. “We are wall above minimam standards. Those duracrete barriers? They will vent any explosive farce upward, saving the majority of workars in case of calamity. Workar shifts are only two-fifths the day in length, unlike the old days.”

Ben repeated Testan’s words, and Jacen shrugged.

Ben imitated his motion. The gesture caused his own Jedi robe to gape open, revealing the lightsaber hanging from his belt.

Testan glanced at it, then looked back at Jacen, clearly worried. “Your apprentice—” Unsure, he looked to Ben again. “You are very young, are you not, to be wearing such a weapon?”

Ben gave him a blank look. “It’s a practice lightsaber.”

“Ah.” Testan nodded as though he understood.

And there it was. Perhaps it was just the thought of a thirteen-year-old with a deadly cutting implement at hand, but Testan’s defenses slipped enough that the worry began to pour through.

It was like the game in which children are told, “For the next hour, do not think about banthas.” Try as they might, they would, within minutes or even seconds, think about a bantha.

Testan’s control finally gave way and he thought about the banthas—or, rather, a place he wasn’t supposed to go, even to think about. Jacen could feel Testan try to clamp down on the thought. Something in the increased potency of that worry told Jacen that they must be nearer to the source of his concern than during previous parts of their factory tour.

When Testan turned back, Jacen looked directly at him and said, “There is something here. Something wrong.” They were the first words he’d spoken in Testan’s presence.

Testan shook his head. “No. Evrything is fan.”

Jacen looked past him, toward the wall to the far right of the chamber. It was gray and regular, a series of metal panels each the height of a man and twice as wide stacked like bricks. He began a slow, deliberate scrutiny, traversing right to left. His gaze swept the walls, the assembly lines, the elevated observation chamber directly opposite the turbolifts by which they had entered, and continued along the wall to the left.

As his attention reached the middle of the left wall, along the observation balcony, he felt another pulse of worry from Testan. Ben cleared his throat, a signal; the boy, though nowhere near as sensitive in the Force as Jacen, had gotten the same feeling.

Jacen set off along the balcony in that direction. This time the ringing of his boots and billowing of his cloak were a side effect of his speed rather than an act.

“You wish to see the observation chambar?” Testan hurried to keep up. His anxiety was growing, and there was something within it, like a shiny stone at the bottom of a murky pond.

Jacen reached into that pond to draw out the prize within.

It was a memory of a door. It was broad and gray, closing from above as men and women—in dark blue jumpsuits, the outfits of supervisors in this facility—scurried out ahead of its closing. When it settled in place, it was identical to the wall panels Jacen saw ahead of him in the here and now.

Jacen glanced over his shoulder at Testan. “Your thoughts betray you.”

Testan paled. “No, there is nothing to betray.”

Jacen rounded the observation balcony corner, took a few more steps, and skidded to a halt in front of one of the wall sections.

It was here. He knew because he could feel something beyond.

Conflict. He himself was there, fighting. So was Ben. It was a faint glimpse of the future, and he and his apprentice would be in peril beyond.

He jerked his head toward the wall.

Ben brought out his lightsaber and switched it on. With a snap-hiss sound, its blue blade of coherent energy extended to full length.

Ben plunged the blade into the wall panel and began to drag it around in a large circle.

Testan, his voice pained, said, “He told us it was a practice weapon.”

Jacen gave him an innocent look. “It’s true from a certain point of view. He does practice with it.” In his nervousness, Testan didn’t seem to notice that Jacen was understanding him clearly now.

Ben completed his circle and gave the meter-and-a-half-high section he’d outlined a little kick. It fell away into a well-lit chamber, clanging on the floor beyond; the edges still glowed with the heat the lightsaber had poured into them.

Ben stepped through. Jacen ducked to follow. He heard Testan muttering—doubtless an alert into a comlink. Jacen didn’t bother to interfere. They’d just been within clear sight of hundreds of workers and the observation chamber. Dealing with Testan wouldn’t keep the alarm from being broadcast.

The room beyond Ben’s improvised doorway was actually a corridor, four meters wide and eight high, every surface made up of the same dull gray metal rectangles found in the outer chamber, greenish white light pouring from the luminous ceiling. To the left, the corridor ended after a few meters, and that end was heavily packed with tall plasteel transport containers. They were marked DANGER, DO NOT DROP, and DAMMANT KILLER MODEL 16, QUANTITY 24.

To the right, the corridor extended another forty meters and then opened up; the rail and drop-off at the end suggested that it opened onto another observation balcony above another fabrication chamber.

Now making the turn from the balcony into the corridor and running toward them were half a dozen troops armed with blaster rifles. Their orange jumpsuits were reminiscent of X-wing pilot uniforms, but the green carapace armor over their lower legs, torsos, lower arms, and heads was more like stormtrooper speeder bike armor painted the wrong color.

And then behind the first six troops came another six, and then another eight …

Jacen brought his lightsaber out and snapped it into life; the incandescent green of his blade was reflected as highlights against the walls and the armor of the oncoming troops. “Stay behind me,” he said.

“Yes, sir.” Ben’s sigh was audible, and Jacen grinned.

The foremost trooper, who bore gold bars on his helmet and wrists, shouted, his voice mechanically amplified: “Stop whar you are! This saction is restricted!”

Jacen moved forward at a walk. He rotated his wrist, moving his lightsaber blade around in front of him in a pattern vaguely reminiscent of butterfly wings. He shouted back, “Could you speak up? I’m a little deaf.”

Ben snickered. “Good one.”

“You may not entar this saction!”

They were now twenty meters from the ranks of troopers ahead.

Jacen continued twirling his blade in a practice form. “Fewer people will be hurt if you just get out of my way.” It was a sort of ritual thing to say. Massed enemy forces almost never backed down, despite the reputation of the Jedi—a reputation that became more widespread, more supernatural, with each year the Jedi prospered under Luke Skywalker’s leadership.

The phrase was ritual in another way, too. Once upon a time, Jacen would have felt tragedy surround him when his actions resulted in the deaths of common soldiers, common guards. But over time he’d lost that sense. There was a wearying inevitability to leaders sending their troops to die against more powerful enemies. It had been happening as long as there were violent leaders and obedient followers. In death, these people became one with the Force, and when Jacen had accepted that fact, his sense of tragedy had largely evaporated.

He took another two steps and the trooper commander called, “Fire!”

The troopers began firing. Jacen gave himself over to the Force, to his awareness of his surroundings, to his sudden oneness with the men and women trying to kill him.

He simply ignored most of the blaster bolts. When he felt them angling in toward him, he twirled his lightsaber blade in line and batted them away, usually back toward the crowd of troopers. In the first few seconds of their assault, four troopers fell to blasts launched by their friends. The smell of burned flesh began to fill the corridor.

Jacen felt danger from behind; felt Ben react to it. Jacen didn’t shift his attention; he continued his march forward. He’d prefer to be able to protect the inexperienced youth, but the boy was good at blaster defense practice. Hard as it was to trust a Jedi whose skills were just developing, he had to. To teach, to learn, he had to trust.

Jacen intercepted the next blaster shot that came his way and batted it toward the trooper commander. It struck the man in the helmet and caromed off, burning out against the ceiling; a portion four meters square of the ceiling’s illumination winked out, darkening the corridor. The commander fell. The shot was probably not fatal—protected by his helmet, the man would have forehead and scalp burns, probably a concussion, but he was unlikely to die.

The strategy had its desired effect. The troopers saw their commander fall. They continued firing but also exchanged looks. Jacen never broke pace, and a trooper with silver stripes on his helmet called “Back, back.” In good order, the troopers began a withdrawal.

Behind him, Jacen heard more blasterfire and the distinctive zap of a lightsaber blade intercepting it, deflecting it. Within the flow of the Force, Jacen felt a shot coming in toward his back, felt it being slapped aside, saw and felt it as it hit the wall to his right. The heat from the shot warmed his right shoulder.

But the defenders continued their retreat, and soon the last of them was around the corner. Jacen’s path to the railing was clear. He strode up to it.

Over the rail, a dozen meters down, was another assembly-line pit, where line after line of munitions components was being assembled—though at the moment all the lines were stopped, their anonymous jumpsuited workers staring up at Jacen.

Jacen’s movement out of the corridor brought him within sight of the orange-and-green defenders, who were now arrayed in disciplined rows along the walkway to Jacen’s left. As soon as he reached the railing they opened fire again. Their tighter formation allowed them to concentrate their fire, and Jacen found himself deflecting more shots than before.

He felt rather than saw Ben scoot into position behind him, but no blaster bolts came at him from that direction. “What now?” Ben asked.

“Finish the mission.” Jacen caught a too-close bolt on his blade near the hilt; unable to aim the deflection, he saw the bolt flash down into the assembly area. It hit a monitor screen. The men and women near the screen dived for cover. Jacen winced; a fraction of a degree of arc difference and that bolt could have hit an explosives package. As inured as he was to causing death, he didn’t want to cause it by accident.

“But you’re in charge—”

“I’m busy.” Jacen took a step forward to give himself more maneuvering and swinging space and concentrated on his attackers. He needed to protect himself and Ben now, to defend a broader area. He focused on batting bolt after bolt back into the ranks of the attackers, saw one, two, three of the soldiers fall.

There was a lull in the barrage of fire. Jacen took a moment to glance over his shoulder. Ben stood at the railing, staring down into the manufacturing line, and to his eye he held a small but expensive holocam unit—the sort carried by wealthy vacationers and holocam hobbyists all over the galaxy.

As Jacen returned his attention to the soldiers, Ben began talking: “Um, this is Ben Skywalker. Jedi Knight Jacen Solo and I are in a, I don’t know, secret part of the Dammant Killers plant under the city of Cartann on the planet Adumar. You’re looking at a missile manufacturing line. It’s making missiles that are not being reported to the GA. They’re selling to planets that aren’t supposed to be getting them. Dammant is breaking the rules. Oh, and the noise you’re hearing? Their guys are trying to kill us.”

Jacen felt Ben’s motion as the boy swung to record the blaster-versus-lightsaber conflict.

“Is that enough?” Ben asked.

Jacen shook his head. “Get the whole chamber. And while you’re doing it, figure out what we’re supposed to do next.”

“I was kind of thinking we ought to get out of here.”

With the tip of his lightsaber blade, Jacen caught a blast that was crackling in toward his right shin. He popped the blast back toward its firer. It hit the woman’s blaster rifle, searing it into an unrecognizable lump, causing her green shoulder armor momentarily to catch fire. She retreated, one of her fellow soldiers patting out her flames. Now there were fewer than fifteen soldiers standing against the Jedi, and their temporary commander was obviously rethinking his make-a-stand orders.

“Good. How?”

“Well, the way we came in—no. They’d be waiting for us.”

“Correct.”

“And you never want to fight the enemy on ground he’s chosen if you can avoid it.”

Jacen grinned. Ben’s words, so adult, were a quote from Han Solo, a man whose wisdom was often questionable—except on matters of personal survival. “Also correct.”

“So … the ends of those assembly lines?”

“Good. So go.”

Jacen heard the scrape of a heel as Ben vaulted over the rail. Not waiting, Jacen leapt laterally, clearing the rail by half a meter, and spun as he fell. Ahead of and below him, Ben was just landing in a crouch on the nearest assembly line, which was loaded with opalescent shell casings. As Jacen landed, bent knees and a little upward push from the Force easing the impact, Ben raced forward, reflexively swatting aside the grasping hand of a too-bold line worker, and crouched as he lunged through the diminutive portal at the end of the line.

Jacen followed. He heard and felt the heat of blaster bolts hitting the assembly line behind him. He swung his lightsaber back over his shoulder, intercepting one bolt, taking the full force of the impact rather than deflecting the bolt into a neighboring line.

No line workers tried to grab him, and in seconds he was squeezing through the portal.

GALACTIC ALLIANCE DIPLOMATIC SHUTTLE, HIGH CORUSCANT ORBIT

ONE BY ONE, THE STARS OVERHEAD BEGAN TO DISAPPEAR, swallowed by some enormous darkness interposing itself from above and behind the shuttle. Sharply pointed at its most forward position, broadening behind, the flood of blackness advanced, blotting out more and more of the unblinking starfield, until darkness was all there was to see.

Then, all across the length and breadth of the ominous shape, lights came on—blue and white running lights, tiny red hatch and security lights, sudden glows from within transparisteel viewports, one large rectangular whiteness limned by atmosphere shields. The lights showed the vast triangle to be the underside of an Imperial Star Destroyer, painted black, forbidding a moment ago, now comparatively cheerful in its proper running configuration. It was the Gilad Pellaeon, newly arrived from the Imperial Remnant, and its officers clearly knew how to put on a show.

Jaina Solo, sitting with the others in the dimly lit passenger compartment of the government VIP shuttle, watched the entire display through the overhead transparisteel canopy and laughed out loud.

The Bothan in the sumptuously padded chair next to hers gave her a curious look. His mottled red and tan fur twitched, either from suppressed irritation or embarrassment at Jaina’s outburst. “What do you find so amusing?”

“Oh, both the obviousness of it and the skill with which it was performed. It’s so very, You used to think of us as dark and scary, but now we’re just your stylish allies.” Jaina lowered her voice so that her next comment would not carry to the passengers in the seats behind. “The press will love it. That image will play on the holonews broadcasts constantly. Mark my words.”

“Was that little show a Jagged Fel detail?”

Jaina tilted her head, considering. “I don’t know. He could have come up with it, but he usually doesn’t spend his time planning displays or events. When he does, though, they’re usually pretty … effective.”

The shuttle rose toward the Gilad Pellaeon’s main landing bay. In moments, it was through the square atmosphere barrier shield and drifting sideways to land on the deck nearby. The landing place was clearly marked—hundreds of beings, most wearing gray Imperial uniforms or the distinctive white armor of the Imperial stormtrooper, waited in the bay, and the one circular spot where none stood was just the right size for the Galactic Alliance shuttle.

The passengers rose as the shuttle settled into place. The Bothan smoothed his tunic, a cheerful blue decorated with a golden sliver pattern suggesting claws. “Time to go to work. You won’t let me get killed, will you?”

Jaina let her eyes widen. “Is that what I was supposed to be doing here?” she asked in droll tones. “I should have brought my lightsaber.”

The Bothan offered a long-suffering sigh and turned toward the exit.

They descended the shuttle’s boarding ramp. With no duties required of her other than to keep alert and be the Jedi face at this preliminary meeting, Jaina was able to stand back and observe. She was struck with the unreality of it all. The niece and daughter of three of the most famous enemies of the Empire during the First Galactic Civil War of a few decades earlier, she was now witness to events that might bring the Galactic Empire—or Imperial Remnant, as it was called everywhere outside its own borders—into the Galactic Alliance on a lasting basis.

And at the center of the plan was the man, flanked by Imperial officers, who now approached the Bothan. Slightly under average size, though towering well above Jaina’s diminutive height, he was dark-haired, with a trim beard and mustache that gave him a rakish look, and was handsome in a way that became more pronounced when he glowered. A scar on his forehead ran up into his hairline and seemed to continue as a lock of white hair from that point. He wore expensive but subdued black civilian garments, neck-to-toe, that would be inconspicuous anywhere on Coruscant but stood out in sharp relief to the gray and white uniforms, white armor, and colorful Alliance clothes surrounding him.

He had one moment to glance at Jaina. The look probably appeared neutral to onlookers, but for her it carried just a twinkle of humor, a touch of exasperation that the two of them had to put up with all these delays. Then an Alliance functionary, notable for his blandness, made introductions: “Imperial Head of State the most honorable Jagged Fel, may I present Senator Tiurrg Drey’lye of Bothawui, head of the Senate Unification Preparations Committee.”

Jagged Fel took the Senator’s hand. “I’m pleased to be working with you.”

“And delighted to meet you. Chief of State Daala sends her compliments and looks forward to meeting you when you make planetfall.”

Jag nodded. “And now, I believe, protocol insists that we open a bottle or a dozen of wine and make some preliminary discussion of security, introduction protocols, and so on.”

“Fortunately about the wine, and regrettably about everything else, you are correct.”

At the end of two full standard hours—Jaina knew from regular, surreptitious consultations of her chrono—Jag was able to convince the Senator and his retinue to accept a tour of the Gilad Pellaeon. He was also able to request a private consultation with the sole representative of the Jedi Order present. Moments later, the gray-walled conference room was empty of everyone but Jag and Jaina.

Jag glanced toward the door. “Security seal, access limited to Jagged Fel and Jedi Jaina Solo, voice identification, activate.” The door hissed in response as it sealed. Then Jag returned his attention to Jaina.

She let an expression of anger and accusation cross her face. “You’re not fooling anyone, Fel. You’re planning for an Imperial invasion of Alliance space.”

Jag nodded. “I’ve been planning it for quite a while. Come here.”

She moved to him, settled into his lap, and was suddenly but not unexpectedly caught in his embrace. They kissed urgently, hungrily.

Finally Jaina drew back and smiled at him. “This isn’t going to be a routine part of your consultations with every Jedi.”

“Uh, no. That would cause some trouble here and at home. But I actually do have business with the Jedi that does not involve the Galactic Alliance, at least not initially.”

“What sort of business?”

“Whether or not the Galactic Empire joins with the Galactic Alliance, I think there ought to be an official Jedi presence in the Empire. A second Temple, a branch, an offshoot, whatever. Providing advice and insight to the Head of State.”

“And protection?”

He shrugged. “Less of an issue. I’m doing all right. Two years in this position and not dead yet.”

“Emperor Palpatine went nearly twenty-five years.”

“I guess that makes him my hero.”

Jaina snorted. “Don’t even say that in jest … Jag, if the Remnant doesn’t join the Alliance, I’m not sure the Jedi can have a presence without Alliance approval.”

“The Order still keeps its training facility for youngsters in Hapan space. And the Hapans haven’t rejoined.”

“You sound annoyed. The Hapans still giving you trouble?”

“Let’s not talk about that.”

“Besides, moving the school back to Alliance space is just a matter of time, logistics, and finances; there’s no question that it will happen. On the other hand, it’s very likely that the government would withhold approval for a Jedi branch in the Remnant, just out of spite, if the Remnant doesn’t join.”

“Well, there’s such a thing as an unofficial presence. And there’s such a thing as rival schools, schismatic branches, and places for former Jedi to go when they can’t be at the Temple.”

Jaina smiled again, but now there was suspicion in her expression. “You just want to have this so I’ll be assigned to come to the Remnant and set it up.”

“That’s a motive, but not the only one. Remember, to the Moffs and to a lot of the Imperial population, the Jedi have been bogeymen since Palpatine died. At the very least, I don’t want them to be inappropriately afraid of the woman I’m in love with.”

Jaina was silent for a moment. “Have we talked enough politics?”

“I think so.”

“Good.”

HORN FAMILY QUARTERS,
KALLAD’S DREAM VACATION HOSTEL,
CORUSCANT

Yawning, hair tousled, clad in a blue dressing robe, Valin Horn knew that he did not look anything like an experienced Jedi Knight. He looked like an unshaven, unkempt bachelor, which he also was. But here, in these rented quarters, there would be only family to see him—at least until he had breakfast, shaved, and dressed.

The Horns did not live here, of course. His mother, Mirax, was the anchor for the immediate family. Manager of a variety of interlinked businesses—trading, interplanetary finances, gambling and recreation, and, if rumors were true, still a little smuggling here and there—she maintained her home and business address on Corellia. Corran, her husband and Valin’s father, was a Jedi Master, much of his life spent on missions away from the family, but his true home was where his heart resided, wherever Mirax lived. Valin and his sister, Jysella, also Jedi, lived wherever their missions sent them, and also counted Mirax as the center of the family.

Now Mirax had rented temporary quarters on Coruscant so the family could collect on one of its rare occasions, this time for the Unification Summit, where she and Corran would separately give depositions on the relationships among the Confederation states, the Imperial Remnant, and the Galactic Alliance as they related to trade and Jedi activities. Mirax had insisted that Valin and Jysella leave their Temple quarters and stay with their parents while these events were taking place, and few forces in the galaxy could stand before her decision—Luke Skywalker certainly knew better than to try.

Moving from the refresher toward the kitchen and dining nook, Valin brushed a lock of brown hair out of his eyes and grinned. Much as he might put up a public show of protest—the independent young man who did not need parents to direct his actions or tell him where to sleep—he hardly minded. It was good to see family. And both Corran and Mirax were better cooks than the ones at the Jedi Temple.

There was no sound of conversation from the kitchen, but there was some clattering of pans, so at least one of his parents must still be on hand. As he stepped from the hallway into the dining nook, Valin saw that it was his mother, her back to him as she worked at the stove. He pulled a chair from the table and sat. “Good morning.”

“A joke, so early?” Mirax did not turn to face him, but her tone was cheerful. “No morning is good. I come light-years from Corellia to be with my family, and what happens? I have to keep Jedi hours to see them. Don’t you know that I’m an executive? And a lazy one?”

“I forgot.” Valin took a deep breath, sampling the smells of breakfast. His mother was making hotcakes Corellian-style, nerf sausage links on the side, and caf was brewing. For a moment, Valin was transported back to his childhood, to the family breakfasts that had been somewhat more common before the Yuuzhan Vong came, before Valin and Jysella had started down the Jedi path. “Where are Dad and Sella?”

“Your father is out getting some back-door information from other Jedi Masters for his deposition.” Mirax pulled a plate from a cabinet and began sliding hotcakes and links onto it. “Your sister left early and wouldn’t say what she was doing, which I assume either means it’s Jedi business I can’t know about or that she’s seeing some man she doesn’t want me to know about.”

“Or both.”

“Or both.” Mirax turned and moved over to put the plate down before him. She set utensils beside it.

The plate was heaped high with food, and Valin recoiled from it in mock horror. “Stang, Mom, you’re feeding your son, not a squadron of Gamorreans.” Then he caught sight of his mother’s face and he was suddenly no longer in a joking mood.

This wasn’t his mother.

Oh, the woman had Mirax’s features. She had the round face that admirers had called “cute” far more often than “beautiful,” much to Mirax’s chagrin. She had Mirax’s generous, curving lips that smiled so readily and expressively, and Mirax’s bright, lively brown eyes. She had Mirax’s hair, a glossy black with flecks of gray, worn shoulder-length to fit readily under a pilot’s helmet, even though she piloted far less often these days. She was Mirax to every freckle and dimple.

But she was not Mirax.

The woman, whoever she was, caught sight of Valin’s confusion. “Something wrong?”

“Uh, no.” Stunned, Valin looked down at his plate.

He had to think—logically, correctly, and fast. He might be in grave danger right now, though the Force currently gave him no indication of imminent attack. The true Mirax, wherever she was, might be in serious trouble or worse. Valin tried in vain to slow his heart rate and speed up his thinking processes.

Fact: Mirax had been here but had been replaced by an imposter. Presumably the real Mirax was gone; Valin could not sense anyone but himself and the imposter in the immediate vicinity. The imposter had remained behind for some reason that had to relate to Valin, Jysella, or Corran. It couldn’t have been to capture Valin, as she could have done that with drugs or other methods while he slept, so the food was probably not drugged.

Under Not-Mirax’s concerned gaze, he took a tentative bite of sausage and turned a reassuring smile he didn’t feel toward her.

Fact: Creating an imposter this perfect must have taken a fortune in money, an incredible amount of research, and a volunteer willing to let her features be permanently carved into the likeness of another’s. Or perhaps this was a clone, raised and trained for the purpose of simulating Mirax. Or maybe she was a droid, one of the very expensive, very rare human replica droids. Or maybe a shape-shifter. Whichever, the simulation was nearly perfect. Valin hadn’t recognized the deception until …

Until what? What had tipped him off? He took another bite, not registering the sausage’s taste or temperature, and maintained the face-hurting smile as he tried to recall the detail that had alerted him that this wasn’t his mother.

He couldn’t figure it out. It was just an instant realization, too fleeting to remember, too overwhelming to reject.

Would Corran be able to see through the deception? Would Jysella? Surely, they had to be able to. But what if they couldn’t? Valin would accuse this woman and be thought insane.

Were Corran and Jysella even still at liberty? Still alive? At this moment, the Not-Mirax’s colleagues could be spiriting the two of them away with the true Mirax. Or Corran and Jysella could be lying, bleeding, at the bottom of an access shaft, their lives draining away.

Valin couldn’t think straight. The situation was too overwhelming, the mystery too deep, and the only person here who knew the answers was the one who wore the face of his mother.

He stood, sending his chair clattering backward, and fixed the false Mirax with a hard look. “Just a moment.” He dashed to his room.

His lightsaber was still where he’d left it, on the nightstand beside his bed. He snatched it up and gave it a near-instantaneous examination. Battery power was still optimal; there was no sign that it had been tampered with.

He returned to the dining room with the weapon in his hand. Not-Mirax, clearly confused and beginning to look a little alarmed, stood by the stove, staring at him.

Valin ignited the lightsaber, its snap-hiss of activation startlingly loud, and held the point of the gleaming energy blade against the food on his plate. Hotcakes shriveled and blackened from contact with the weapon’s plasma. Valin gave Not-Mirax an approving nod. “Flesh does the same thing under the same conditions, you know.”

“Valin, what’s wrong?”

“You may address me as Jedi Horn. You don’t have the right to use my personal name.” Valin swung the lightsaber around in a practice form, allowing the blade to come within a few centimeters of the glow rod fixture overhead, the wall, the dining table, and the woman with his mother’s face. “You probably know from your research that the Jedi don’t worry much about amputations.”

Not-Mirax shrank back away from him, both hands on the stove edge behind her. “What?”

“We know that a severed limb can readily be replaced by a prosthetic that looks identical to the real thing. Prosthetics offer sensation and do everything flesh can. They’re ideal substitutes in every way, except for requiring maintenance. So we don’t feel too badly when we have to cut the arm or leg off a very bad person. But I assure you, that very bad person remembers the pain forever.”

“Valin, I’m going to call your father now.” Not-Mirax sidled toward the blue bantha-hide carrybag she had left on a side table.

Valin positioned the tip of his lightsaber directly beneath her chin. At the distance of half a centimeter, its containing force field kept her from feeling any heat from the blade, but a slight twitch on Valin’s part could maim or kill her instantly. She froze.

“No, you’re not. You know what you’re going to do instead?”

Not-Mirax’s voice wavered. “What?”

“You’re going to tell me what you’ve done with my mother!” The last several words emerged as a bellow, driven by fear and anger. Valin knew that he looked as angry as he sounded; he could feel blood reddening his face, could even see redness begin to suffuse everything in his vision.

“Boy, put the blade down.” Those were not the woman’s words. They came from behind. Valin spun, bringing his blade up into a defensive position.

In the doorway stood a man, middle-aged, clean-shaven, his hair graying from brown. He was of below-average height, his eyes a startling green. He wore the brown robes of a Jedi. His hands were on his belt, his own lightsaber still dangling from it.

He was Valin’s father, Jedi Master Corran Horn. But he wasn’t, any more than the woman behind Valin was Mirax Horn.

Valin felt a wave of despair wash over him. Both parents replaced. Odds were growing that the real Corran and Mirax were already dead.

Yet Valin’s voice was soft when he spoke. “They may have made you a virtual double for my father. But they can’t have given you his expertise with the lightsaber.”

“You don’t want to do what you’re thinking about, son.”

“When I cut you in half, that’s all the proof anyone will ever need that you’re not the real Corran Horn.”

Valin lunged.

The STAR WARS Legends Novels Timeline

BEFORE THE REPUBLIC 37,000–25,000 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

25793 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

Dawn of the Jedi: Into the Void

OLD REPUBLIC 5000–67 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories

3954 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

The Old Republic: Revan

3650 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

The Old Republic: Deceived

Red Harvest

The Old Republic: Fatal Alliance

The Old Republic: Annihilation

1032 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

Knight Errant

Darth Bane: Path of Destruction

Darth Bane: Rule of Two

Darth Bane: Dynasty of Evil

RISE OF THE EMPIRE 67–0 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

67 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

Darth Plagueis

33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

Darth Maul: Saboteur[*]

Cloak of Deception

Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter

Maul: Lockdown

32 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

STAR WARS: EPISODE I: The Phantom Menace

Rogue Planet

Outbound Flight

The Approaching Storm

22 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

STAR WARS: EPISODE II: Attack of the Clones

22-19 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

The Clone Wars: Wild Space

The Clone Wars: No Prisoners

Clone Wars Gambit

Stealth

Siege

Republic Commando

Hard Contact

Triple Zero

True Colors

Order 66

Shatterpoint

The Cestus Deception

The Hive[*]

MedStar I: Battle Surgeons

MedStar II: Jedi Healer

Jedi Trial

Yoda: Dark Rendezvous

Labyrinth of Evil

19 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

STAR WARS: EPISODE III: Revenge of the Sith

Kenobi

Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader

Imperial Commando: 501st

Coruscant Nights

Jedi Twilight

Street of Shadows

Patterns of Force

The Last Jedi

10 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A New Hope

The Han Solo Trilogy

The Paradise Snare

The Hutt Gambit

Rebel Dawn

The Adventures of Lando Calrissian

The Force Unleashed

The Han Solo Adventures

Death Troopers

The Force Unleashed II

REBELLION 0–5 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A New Hope

Death Star

Shadow Games

STAR WARS: EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE

Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina

Tales from the Empire

Tales from the New Republic

Winner Lose All[*]

Scoundrels

Allegiance

Choices of One

Honor Among Thieves

Galaxies: The Ruins of Dantooine

Splinter of the Mind’s Eye

Empire and Rebellion: Razor’s Edge

3 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A New Hope

STAR WARS: EPISODE V: THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Tales of the Bounty Hunters

Shadows of the Empire

4 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A New Hope

STAR WARS: EPISODE VI: RETURN OF THE JEDI

Tales from Jabba’s Palace

The Bounty Hunter Wars

The Mandalorian Armor

Slave Ship

Hard Merchandise

The Truce at Bakura

Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor

NEW REPUBLIC 5–25 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A New Hope

X-Wing

Rogue Squadron

Wedge’s Gamble

The Krytos Trap

The Bacta War

Wraith Squadron

Iron Fist

Solo Command

The Courtship of Princess Leia

A Forest Apart[*]

Tatooine Ghost

The Thrawn Trilogy

Heir to the Empire

Dark Force Rising

The Last Command

X-Wing: Isard’s Revenge

The Jedi Academy Trilogy

Jedi Search

Dark Apprentice

Champions of the Force

I, Jedi

Children of the Jedi

Darksaber

Planet of Twilight

X-Wing: Starfighters of Adumar

The Crystal Star

The Black Fleet Crisis Trilogy

Before the Storm

Shield of Lies

Tyrant’s Test

The New Rebellion

The Corellian Trilogy

Ambush at Corellia

Assault at Selonia

Showdown at Centerpoint

The Hand of Thrawn Duology

Specter of the Past

Vision of the Future

Scourge

Fool’s Bargain[*]

Survivor’s Quest

NEW JEDI ORDER 25–40 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A New Hope

Boba Fett: A Practical Man[*]

The New Jedi Order

Vector Prime

Dark Tide I: Onslaught

Dark Tide II: Ruin

Agents of Chaos I: Hero’s Trial

Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse

Balance Point

Recovery[*]

Edge of Victory I: Conquest

Edge of Victory II: Rebirth

Star by Star

Dark Journey

Enemy Lines I: Rebel Dream

Enemy Lines II: Rebel Stand

Traitor

Destiny’s Way

Ylesia[*]

Force Heretic I: Remnant

Force Heretic II: Refugee

Force Heretic III: Reunion

The Final Prophecy

The Unifying Force

35 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A New Hope

The Dark Nest Trilogy

The Joiner King

The Unseen Queen

The Swarm War

LEGACY 40+ YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A New Hope

Legacy of the Force

Betrayal

Bloodlines

Tempest

Exile

Sacrifice

Inferno

Fury

Revelation

Invincible

Crosscurrent

Riptide

Millennium Falcon

43 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A New Hope

Fate of the Jedi

Outcast

Omen

Abyss

Backlash

Allies

Vortex

Conviction

Ascension

Apocalypse

X-Wing: Mercy Kill

45 YEARS AFTER STAR WARS: A New Hope

Crucible

*An eBook novella

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