Rusher paused in the doorway and looked back. “And for your information, five-sixths of my crew is dead or missing. Get it right.”
The door closed behind him.
“Bactra is finished,” Narsk said, relaxing on the sand.
The desert breeze was warm on his fur. Quality medpacs were doing wonders for him, too. Odion’s idea of medical care was amputating sore limbs and grafting blasters in their places.
It had taken mere days for the joint surprise attack to break the back of Bactra’s regime. Narsk had left near the outset, as planned, fleeing to an outpost near Jutrand to observe and recuperate. Now he was making his final report. “Odion and Daiman are fighting over the remains, but that’s to be expected.”
A female voice expressed satisfaction. “The errand is complete, then. A bequest will be arranged.”
Narsk bowed his head. “Certainly.” This audience was almost certainly done. Two sentences were the most he’d ever received by hologram.
As he began to rise, another question came: “What … about the Jedi?”
Startled, Narsk straightened himself before the comm unit’s cam. “Kerra Holt? She was on Gazzari,” he said, “targeting Odion. I don’t know if she escaped.”
The words hung in the air for a moment. Narsk wondered whether he was supposed to have said something more—or something different.
“She did escape,” the response came, at last. “I know exactly where she is.”
Narsk didn’t know how, but he knew not to ask. He swallowed hard, his throat only just now restored by the drinks of the oasis resort. He could feel his brief respite coming to an end. “What is your bidding?”
“Keep an eye on her. She could mean more to my plans than you know.” The hologram began to fade into the rays of the double sunset. “And as for you, prepare for travel. I know another who needs the services of a specialist …”
Part Two
THE
DYARCHY
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Saaj Calician liked to look at the grand city, but he couldn’t remember why.
He vaguely recalled first seeing the view from The Loft on his arrival, years earlier. It was then that he had found the metropolis grand, and it was that appraisal that he continued to rely upon, now that his facility for description was leaving him. Today, when the regent looked down, he saw only the geometry of life here; little beings in little hexagonal buildings, rising from the pale cerulean sea that surrounded his mesa. The ocean, too, he seemed to remember liking—but he couldn’t be sure. It was just an impression, and Calician could no longer determine whether it was his thought or somebody else’s.
The Krevaaki lingered at the window ringing the penthouse, letting the sun warm his tentacles. Even through the dark screen, it always helped his circulation. For a moment, he thought he almost had feeling back in all his limbs.
But the feeling was fleeting. Calician’s glowing black eyes narrowed in irritation. Other Krevaaki, twice his age, had more range of movement than he had. Some days he couldn’t even wiggle the feelers beneath his shell-like snout. There was nothing fair about it. The regent had not been living hard. He was not well traveled. But he was, by vocation, the elder—and the job had made him old.
The robed figure writhed in anger. His upper limbs still worked, hidden in the folds of the beige fabric. The Krevaaki he had known, the ones so much more robust at his age: what were they, anyway? Nothings! They were out there now, within the polygonal communes on the horizon, carry ing out his instructions. None of them had risen to anything like his position, even those touched, as he was, with the Force.
He’d heard their tales, back when tales were being told, of famous Krevaaki following the other side of the Force, as Jedi Knights and other fools. What had that brought them? Nothing, compared to what the dark side had made available to him—then, as a youthful adept under Lord Chagras—and now. It was so obvious, what the dark side offered. Great, powerful rewards, like …
… well, he couldn’t remember right now. But he was sure there were some, and those selfless shell-heads back home would never share the benefits. It always felt good to think of the other Krevaaki. Comparing his lot with theirs, Calician knew who he was. Powerful, and real, and independent—
“REGENT!”
The Krevaaki tore from the window, robes billowing. Cramped tentacles tingled to life, suddenly animated by more than his spirit. Scaling the diamond-shaped dais, he faced the shadows without seeing. He was in the Presence, and it was wrong to look too closely.
“Regent-aspect will feed us,” a scratchy female voice commanded.
“I will feed you.”
As if on air, Calician glided from the great room and into the hallway, to pass on the command. The meals would be had. He would find the beings on the next level that understood the food dispensers, and if they weren’t capable of fulfilling the request, he would operate them himself. And he could, too. Tentacles that didn’t work for him, minutes before, were suddenly nimble now.
Calician didn’t question it; there was nothing to question. He knew his role. To the Presence, he was the appendage.
“Brigadier Rusher’s asleep,” Beadle Lubboon said. “I was trying to tell him about the housing situation for the refugees and he dozed off again.”
“Again?” Kerra stared at the young Duros, fidgeting outside the door to the barracks. “He does this often?”
“I am new here, myself, ma’am,” Beadle said, apologetically. “But he seems … to be interested in what he’s interested in.”
That sounded like a more gentle description than she would have given. Kerra shook her head. “Wait until Master Dackett gets done in prosthetics,” she said. “Maybe he can make something happen.”
Kerra watched the recruit amble back to the turbolift and turned to the bustling dormitory. After having spent a few days aboard, she’d changed her view of Rusher’s ship. It wasn’t the luxury liner she’d been led to expect by the bridge; that was more an observation lounge where crew and cosmos alike were on display. It appeared that Devaronians—or at least, the bunch that had built the crew compartment—had a fairly stratified social system. Some of the accommodations were fine, if not fancy, individual rooms with views. But most riders traveled in large barracks located not so much “belowdecks” as “between-walls,” in the innermost sections of the ship. Passengers were shelved in long rows of berths stacked three-high. There was barely enough room to walk between them—much less run, as many insisted on doing, despite her repeated warnings.
And it wasn’t like there was anyplace for them to go. Beyond their bunks, there was only an adjoining common activity area that doubled as a mess. When they weren’t eating, they were trying to destroy it. The students weren’t exactly younglings, but they were without Sith supervision for the first time in their lives—locked in a confined space, with nervous energy to spare. Even the young adults seemed to be devolving to the lowest maturity level in the room. Their activities were in real danger of doing lasting damage to the bolted-down furniture, if not the body of the ship. Kerra was glad they’d forgotten the way to where the artillery was stored.
And there were three more roomfuls on other decks, each demanding Kerra’s attention. Even at that, there hadn’t been enough space. While Rusher’s ship had once carried more than three thousand warriors, the majority worked shifts and shared accommodations. Kerra had been forced to put several on the floor in the hallway outside—generally the older students she’d deputized as chaperones. Most of them were happy enough for the chance to get out of the big rooms and actually experience silence again.
It had been an exhausting period. She’d encountered problems she’d never imagined dealing with before, situations taxing all the logistical skills she’d developed under Vannar Treece’s tutelage. Because another feature of Devaronian society meant that almost all its travelers were male, the refresher facilities on the deck were communal, offering none of the privacy that several of the
species under her care required—herself included. She’d started running lines to the refresher on each deck. But even that had been a struggle to set up. She’d soon found that Industrial Heuristics had brought recruits from several of Daiman’s worlds, not just Darkknell, to Gazzari. While the recruiters she’d met had spoken Basic—well, one of them had—several of the species on board didn’t know a word. How did you tell a Wookiee to wait his turn to relieve himself?
There was more. They all breathed oxygen, but the living quarters were always too hot or cold for someone—usually too hot, as the trip dragged on. Some of the species couldn’t be billeted near each other, for olfactory reasons or otherwise. And putting always amorous pubescent Zeltrons on a cruise ship with anyone had been a total mistake.
These were things Industrial Heuristics had already thought out, she was told; the arxeum was designed as a multispecies facility. More than once, Kerra found herself wishing one would miraculously appear.
Little help had come from the brigade members. People had assisted her on occasion under orders, but for the most part, few, beyond young Beadle, volunteered. Most stayed to their own decks. Kerra had wondered aloud about that before Novallo, the middle-aged human engineer. Kerra found the woman otherwise unburdened with the hardship of a personality, but nonetheless asked whether the crew members were always so hostile to civilians.
“Sometimes,” Novallo had answered. “But that’s not it. Your brats are sleeping in their dead friends’ bunks.”
Rusher had been little kinder, for the few minutes she’d actually seen him in the past week. She’d only caught him a couple of times in the days since Gazzari, always when he was on the way to someplace else. Everything involving the refugees he’d delegated, particularly to the spacey but well-meaning Duros. It was probably the most she could expect from someone who worked for the Sith. He was the wrong person to look to for assistance, much less compassion.
In stark contrast had been the old-timer named Dackett, who claimed to have a lifetime of experience in quartering integrated crews. Like the guns in the hold, the man seemed made of Sarrassian iron. When Kerra had first seen him, he was in medbay, loudly refusing to allow the medics to reattach his arm until worse-off gunners had been treated. It had been too late to save the limb by the time they’d gotten to him, but he was more concerned about making ship and crew whole again. He’d never been officially restored to his duties as far as she knew, but the droids had given up sedating him after the fourth futile day of trying to keep him confined. The man reminded her a bit of a friend she’d made on Chelloa: totally living for the people. It was good to have any help at all.
Dackett was more familiar with the species living in the Grumani sector, and in several cases had sent over gunners who could serve as interpreters. More important, he’d made the food situation their one bright spot. Rusher’s Brigade ate better than anyone she’d met in the Daimanate—and even with the large number of refugees, they still numbered less than the ship’s regular complement. Most of the students’ dietetic needs had been addressed by what was in the larder; the gunners were a diverse bunch. But watching the teenagers, Kerra saw that many either gorged themselves, hoarded food in their berths, or both. The hardships of years of slavery weren’t going away on a single starship ride.
The saddest thing was how many, amid all the tumult, sat in silence, shell-shocked by recent events. How could she explain everything that had happened to them, in any language? And when she did speak to them, all wanted to know one thing: What would happen to them now?
Kerra wondered, too. There were so many of them. She’d thought seriously more than once about taking them all back where they’d come from. But there were all sorts of problems with that. Even if she could get Rusher to agree—a prospect she put little stock in—they hadn’t all hailed from the same place. And even if they did return to Daiman’s territory, his forces simply weren’t going to welcome their arrival. She envisioned going to one planet only to see the students forcibly redistributed again, perhaps as pawns in yet another deadly scheme. And that was unacceptable. Daiman’s specter, she’d realized, was the unifying thread in the stories of the few refugees she’d gotten to know.
Like Eejor, the diminutive Ortolan, whose toddler sister had died from the poisons in Daiman’s water. Eejor’s parents had delayed reporting her death for a year in order to accumulate enough rations to buy a positive recommendation from his factory shift leader. Or Yuru, the Snivvian teenager, whose four older siblings had died in Daiman’s slave armies. His look-alike father had attended work disguised as him the day Industrial Heuristics came to administer its tests.
The most heartbreaking case was Lureia, a human girl, ten years old at most. Her family had the misfortune to live on one of the frontier worlds passed back and forth between Daiman and Odion. After successive invasions, only Lureia’s teenage sister remained from her family—until the day that her sister, too, did not return home. For a week, the child lived in panic, knowing nothing until corporate scouts arrived, seemingly convinced that Lureia was a budding expert in repulsorlift design. Now she sat all day in her bunk, folding and refolding the ragged blue headband that was the last connection to her sister.
Kerra had no answers for the girl—but her own question had been answered. Gub had been the first to suggest it, days earlier. He might have wanted to keep his granddaughter around—but it was more important to him that she be transported to a better place, with a better life. Kerra had thought to make Darkknell a better place for everyone by doing away with Daiman. If she’d failed at that, at least she could make sure that Lureia’s sister and all the other guardians had not made their sacrifices in vain. She’d gotten Tan and the others out of the Daimanate. Now she had to make sure they wound up in a safe place.
If such a thing existed in Sith space.
“Don’t move, Kerra! I’ve got you in my sights!”
Kerra looked over to the short ashen blur behind the mess counter. “If you want to be silent, Tan, you’d better turn the sound baffles on.” Stepping over, she gave the amorphous shape a kindly swat. “And you’ve still got some growing to do, if you want to hunt Sith.”
“Blast!” Tan Tengo pulled off the mask of the stealth suit, causing the system to deactivate. The Sullustan was a comical sight, binding the outfit in a dozen different ways just to get it to fit. The Bothan’s mask was a better match for her bulbous facial features, but the rest of it was so scrunched that the baffles couldn’t do their jobs. “I thought I had you that time!”
The suit had made Tan, now Kerra’s bunkmate again, the life of what had once been the Sat’skar barracks. Kerra certainly had no interest in using the thing ever again, though she had wondered a few times if by turning it inside out, she might shut out the noise of the deck.
And Tan now clung to anything having to do with Kerra. Some of it was the situation, she knew, but not all of it. Just as a nanny and part-time tutor, Kerra already had been Tan’s hero on Darkknell. Learning that the bedtime stories her human big sister had told her back then were true—and that Kerra was one of the Jedi Knights she’d described? That was heaven. Watching Tan strike a sequence of action poses in the comically large suit, Kerra rolled her eyes. Her comet had picked up a tail.
“Aren’t you sleepy yet?”
“Darkknell time, Kerra!”
Kerra yawned. “That excuse won’t last forever.” She looked over at the open door at the back of the galley. “Were you just wearing that thing outside?”
Tan giggled. “Just trying it out again.”
“Again. Find out anything juicy?”
“Well, if you’re trying to pin down the elusive captain, you’ll find him two decks up in the solarium.” Tan smirked. “I followed that skinny Duros.”
“Good girl. Five Jedi points for you.”
Rusher emptied another square glass. Lum ale wasn’t his favorite, but he wasn’t going to waste the good stuff. Not this week.
The solarium alway
s seemed to have a silly name to him. The spaceliner part of Diligence went from stars, to stars. No one was going to get a tan watching hyperspace blur by. But they’d left the little room intact, partially because it gave Rusher a place to unwind and study his history holos.
Neither facts nor fermentation were working for him today. Rusher had been in constant motion since the first hyperspace jump, one of a series needed to escape Daiman’s territory. Inventory and casualties, casualties and inventory. There’d been not a minute to think about where they were going, or what he might do then. He’d made sure of it.
The crew expected—no, needed—to see the same Jarrow Rusher they always had. Upbeat. Joking. Ready with a quotation or an alternate history in a millisecond. And he had given them that. On the bridge, in the ward room, and, most of all, in medbay. He’d learned that from his mentor Yulan, before the bad times. “Units take losses. Leaders take charge.”
But he didn’t know how to take this one. As they’d figured it, Diligence now had but two working battalions. One laser battalion—Ripper, fully outfitted and staffed with the merger of personnel from Coyn’skar—and one missile battalion in Zhaboka. He hadn’t led so few in more than a decade. Four cargo ramps on each side seemed superfluous. Ripper and Zhaboka each had a side of the ship to themselves.
Running too small a crew in Sith space was perilous, even beyond the hazards of the battlefield. As he’d just seen with Daiman, Sith Lords absorbed independent operations into their slave armies all the time. Size meant effectiveness, which meant independence. And security—security they wouldn’t have now. Historical knowledge, like power, was fragmented in Sith space. But try as he might, he couldn’t remember any cases where enslaved units lasted long enough to be remembered, much less feted by later generations.
Love of history had, in fact, led to Rusher’s independence in the first place. He’d had the relative good fortune to be born into the systems of Lord Mandragall. A real throwback, Mandragall had known more about the Sith of old than most of his rivals—and had used that knowledge to develop the scheme that had, thus far, kept Sith talons off Diligence. He’d found it, of all places, in the recordings of Elcho Kressh, whose father, Ludo, had figured in the Great Hyperspace War millennia before. Ludo had made his son sit out that disastrous conflict in a hidden location. But though frail of frame, Elcho was not one to take the Sith Empire’s failure idly. Elcho spent years developing a counterattack plan, making the most of the small forces available to him. The concept, as Mandragall had learned from one of tentacle-faced Elcho’s holocrons, was simple—and quite applicable to his modern world.
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