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.