Dazed, Kerra rolled, Quillan still partially on top of her. Diligence rolled, too, the harbor air currents pitching the vessel’s nose upward. Kerra and the boy slid backward, toward the deck-top railing and the bay, hundreds of meters below. Kerra clawed, desperately seeking a handhold.
A metallic hand grabbed her instead. “We’ve got her!” Master Dackett yelled.
“Move us out!” Kerra heard. Dragged along with Quillan by Dackett and two other troopers, she spotted Rusher standing, partially visible, in the hatchway.
“No,” she yelled, pushing futilely against her bearers. “Tan and Beadle are still down there!”
“We’ve got them,” Rusher called, making a hole for his crew members to pass her into the hatchway. He regarded Quillan, feebly pushing at the air. “You didn’t think we had enough kids along?”
Kerra fought to wrest away from those relaying her down the ladder. So Tan and Beadle had made it out. But they weren’t the only ones in jeopardy. The Celegians were back there, still living a life of unimaginable agony out in the buoys. And what of everyone else on Byllura? In the whole Dyarchy? “We can’t leave!” she said, wincing as the crew set her down on the deck. “You don’t understand. I can’t leave.”
“Not a chance, Holt,” Rusher said, gesturing for the hatch above to be closed and speaking into his comlink. “Orbital velocity, now.”
“You can’t make me go with you!”
“The cargo I’m carrying is yours,” Rusher said, descending the ladder toward her. “Until it’s delivered, you go where we go.”
Feeling the sudden impulse driving the vessel forward, Kerra lay back against the deck, defeated. Rusher stepped past the medic tending to her and headed down the hallway. Kerra glared. “Leaving people behind again. This isn’t going to help your lurch ratio.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“He’s just a kid!” Rusher rapped the head of his walking stick against the railing to the command pit. “And you’re telling me he’s Sith?”
“A Sith Lord,” Kerra corrected.
“Oh, well, that makes sense,” the brigadier said. “We didn’t have a Sith Lord in the collection. Glad you brought him on board!” He glared at the Jedi, sitting on the plush carpet of the bridge and nursing her wrenched thigh. Her attention was where his was: on the boy huddled in the nook, far forward. Rusher had posted armed guards to either side of the teenager, but it hardly seemed necessary. The kid was a mess. Since arriving with Kerra on the bridge, he’d alternated between fevered looks through the viewscreen at Byllura, below—and howling fits with his head tucked between his knees.
A Sith Lord in his pajamas, Rusher thought. I’ve seen it all now. “He’s never been in space before?”
“Quillan’s never been out of his room before,” Kerra said, edging closer—and then back. She seemed to alternate, too: between sympathy and wariness. Rusher understood from her that, minutes earlier, the boy had been trying to kill her. But “Lord Quillan” didn’t look powerful. If anything, he seemed … mentally challenged.
Kerra looked around at the cosmos filling Quillan’s sight on all sides. “It’s this blasted observation lounge of a bridge. Can’t you polarize the viewports, or something?”
“Not under attack, I can’t,” Rusher said, eyes sweeping the space from port to starboard. The Dyarchy battleships he’d seen leaving Hestobyll were all out there, part of a serious space force that included cruisers and snub fighters. He even spotted some troop transports in the mix, all clustered near the battleships. The Dyarchy meant business for someone.
But not them—at least not so far. Despite his words, Diligence wasn’t under attack. Since they’d reached orbit, the Dyarchy fleet had simply sat there, in between them and any hyperspace jump points. Leaving the Bylluran system for anywhere required negotiating this field of predators, poised to strike. And unlike Gazzari, Rusher didn’t figure the ships would suddenly leave on another appointment.
“You say this kid’s their boss,” he said, gesturing toward Quillan. “Is that why they’re not attacking?”
“I don’t know,” Kerra said. All her efforts to reach the boy had failed. “I think they’re waiting for orders.”
“From him?”
“From anybody.” The Jedi stood, looking out at the sea of motionless spacecraft.
Rusher waved to the Besalisk in the command pit, ordering a complete scan of all channels coming from Byllura. If any word came up, he wanted to know it first. “Look, Holt, if this kid’s the boss, can’t he tell them to knock off?”
Kerra looked at the teenager, peeking at her with reddened eyes as he quaked. “I don’t think he can tell anyone anything,” she said. “Not without his sister.”
Rusher waved his arms. “Well, let’s get her on the comm then!”
“No!”
The brigadier rocked back on his heels, surprised by the urgency of her response.
“I mean,” Kerra said in a more composed tone, “no, I don’t think it works that way. She speaks for him, but he only speaks to her through the Force.”
“I thought you people could fire your jibber-jabber a long way.”
“It’s not easy, if you’ve never done it before,” Kerra said. “And Quillan’s never had to do it before.”
Rusher’s head swam. Agitated, he raked the head of his cane against the metal railing, causing a clackety-clack that set the Sith boy moaning again.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Rusher said. “I feel like crying, too.” He stomped toward the Jedi. “I don’t want either of you here!”
Flinching at the pressure on her leg, Kerra tried to stand. “You’ve made that clear.”
“There’s never been a Sith aboard Diligence for a reason,” Rusher said, eyebrows flaring. “It keeps me and my crew safe—and them away from the heavy artillery.” He waved at the fuzz of stars beyond one of the Dyarchy’s fleets. “Don’t they teach you your own history out in the Republic? Maybe you’ve heard of a little thing called Telettoh’s Maxim. It goes—”
“Never let Malak aboard,” she finished.
“You’re blasted right!” Generations of military professionals knew the tale of the Republic admiral who’d let a Sith-in-Jedi’s-clothing come along for the ride. He’d spent the rest of his career trying to undo the damage. “We’ll take their jobs. We’ll take their fuel. But we won’t take a Sith across the street. Not if I—”
Morrex called from within the pit. “We got fire, Brigadier!”
“At us?” Rusher dashed back to the railing, distracted from his anger.
The comm officer responded by pointing to the monitors. Lights shone on Byllura’s surface, where Hestobyll and its continent were now slipping into nighttime. But it wasn’t artificial illumination.
Fire.
Kerra limped away from the teenager toward the port window. Studying the surface of the world slipping past, she pointed to locations all along the terminator into night. Rusher joined her, bearing a pair of electrobinoculars. Plumes were rising from several levels of the capital city. “Riots?”
“People are waking up, I’d imagine,” Kerra said. “And waking up angry.” There had been a constant stream of commands coming from the mesa to all of the twins’ minions on Byllura, she explained. Now that Quillan’s sister had no commands to relay, order was collapsing.
Rusher rubbed his forehead. “And the first thing they do is set their place on fire? That doesn’t make any sense at all!”
“How should I know?” Kerra asked. “People have been telling them to work, sleep, and eat for years. This is the first time they’ve had any options.” She paused. “Granted, it’s an odd way to spend your first night off.”
“Don’t ask me,” Rusher said. “I blow stuff up for a living.” He looked back over his shoulder at the warships outside. “If this is our chance, maybe we’d better slip past now—before they realize how fun it is.”
“Yeah,” Kerra said. “I think you’re—”
“Incoming transmissio
n, Brig!”
Just as Daiman had appeared to them days before, now another Sith materialized in the dim light. A dour-looking Krevaaki, Rusher saw, tentacles draped in a cape. “Who’s this?”
“The regent,” Kerra said. “I don’t know his name.” Forward, the boy squealed, mystified by the strange image.
“My name is Saaj Celegian,” the figure in the image responded. The Krevaaki coughed and looked down. “I mean, Saaj Calician.” He paused, his posture straightening. “I know that now.”
Rusher looked at the image, puzzled. “So he knows his name. What’s the big deal?”
“I think it is a big deal,” Kerra said. “Quiet.” She hobbled over to address the hologram. “What do you want?”
Kilometers below, Calician stood downstairs in the control room of The Loft. Beside the sleeping Celegian in his tube, the Krevaaki looked up at the seven video monitors, showing images from across the bay in Hestobyll. It was one of the few surviving parts of the surveillance system the floating brains had not replaced—and now it gave him his only detailed view of what was going on.
As commanded, the workers at the secret underground shipyards had started work on more battleships the instant their recently constructed fleet was safely away. Unfortunately, the knowledge of metal-casting procedures lay not with the workers on the scene, but with a small group of experts on one of the lower floors of the mesa complex. Normally, the Celegians carried their instructions to scarlet-clad Unifiers in facilities all across Byllura, allowing them to run many operations at once. But when the hub Celegian stopped routing messages, the factories were caught without know-how at a critical moment. At six Hestobyll sites, molds filled uncontrolled with molten durasteel, overtopping and setting off chains of explosions. He could see that something similar had happened to three of their munitions factories as well.
Heavy lids drooped as Calician watched the chaos spread. Byllura had been a model of Sith centralization, a nonelectronic system centered on a single Lord’s will. Now the former regent saw it all ending. A body could survive without a thinking mind only while the organs knew their function. Without One, the network was damaged. Without the will of the twins, it could never be repaired.
“—I said, why are you calling us?”
Hearing the Jedi’s voice, Calician shambled back to the holographic setup as best he could on his remaining tentacles. “I am simply calling to learn whether the boy Quillan yet lives.”
“Why?” The dark-haired Jedi in the crisp image appeared to grow more reserved. “Are you looking to parley?”
“No, it’s too late for that,” the Krevaaki said, briefly explaining the mounting industrial disasters spreading across Byllura. He redirected the cam toward a monitor showing Dromika, who had collapsed into a faint after her brother’s disappearance through the window. “She cannot tell a physical presence from one she observes through the Force. She cannot see him, so she does not search for him,” he said, looking at her motionless body.
“She was the only one who could reach him—and for it, she became as much his slave as I did.” Calician refocused the cam on himself and snorted. “Kill him, if it pleases you,” he said, lifting a singed stump that once held a lightsaber. “It might please me.”
The comment caught the Jedi speechless.
Another explosion came from across the bay, this one so loud it was audible through the control room’s windowless walls. “That would be one of the power stations,” Calician said.
The woman crossed her arms, her brow furrowed. “You can’t just send instructions over a comlink, like anyone else?”
“Our minions have none. A secondary communications system provides a potential avenue for dissenters,” he said. “And before you ask, the other Celegians have rebelled, just as One here has. I cannot use them.”
“I wasn’t going to ask,” she said. “But I would ask that you free them.”
“That, Jedi, is the last thing I would do,” he said. “But I can do no more, anyway. I will leave that to the others, when they arrive.” He glanced back at another monitor. “And it seems, now, they have.”
“Others? What are you—”
Before Kerra could finish her question, the skies around Diligence’s bridge came alive with motion.
One after another, colossal white vessels leapt in from hyperspace, surrounding the planet and orbiting fleet. Long and majestic, the crystalline warships—like snowflakes on a skewer, Kerra thought—swiftly opened fire on the Dyarchy’s battleships.
Kerra stumbled toward the command pit, where Rusher and his crew were only beginning to react. So were the battleships, she saw out the starboard viewport. They didn’t need guidance from Byllura to be jolted into defensive action, but they moved sluggishly compared with the cruisers and similarly shaped fighters.
“Get us out of here!” she said.
“Which way?”
“Any way!”
Diligence tossed, banking away from Byllura on a vector through the combat. Watching, Kerra saw the precision with which the newcomers were striking. Two flaming battleships were out of commission—but salvageable. The arrivals were taking care not to destroy their prey.
“I’ve never seen them before,” Rusher said, stepping up to the window beside her.
“I thought you lived around here!”
“I live on this ship,” he said, fumbling nervously with his cane. “I work all over. But nobody knows how many Sith Lords there are—if these are even Sith.”
Kerra scowled. Someone else would sure be nice, for a change. But out here, nested within competing Sith statelets, it couldn’t be anyone else.
Grabbing onto Rusher’s arm as Diligence weaved—she’d nearly forgotten her injury in the excitement—Kerra foundered emotionally. This was her worst nightmare from Darkknell, realized. It was exactly what she was afraid would happen in the Daimanate, had she caused a collapse from within that was visible from without. She looked over her shoulder to Byllura. There wasn’t any time to get any of those people free. The whole Dyarchy was collapsing—and, somehow, the twins’ rivals had seen it. But how, so quickly?
With a start, Kerra realized the Dyarchy bordered Daiman’s territory. Were these ships his? What could Daiman do, she wondered, if he knew the power the twins held? His greatest desire was to subjugate absolutely, to render other organics literal extensions of his will. But the twins had accomplished something he hadn’t.
For whatever reason, Daiman still counted his own ego, his own individuality too important. He wanted to subsume others, yet at the same time he enjoyed dominating them too much to truly allow a merger of will and matter. But Quillan and Dromika didn’t understand the concept of “other.” As near as Kerra could tell, from infancy they’d treated the Force as another of their senses—and they had no clear understanding of where they stopped, and others began. For all his bluster, Daiman had come to his Force powers too late. He had already known who he was by then.
What could Daiman do if he captured the twins now? Could he co-opt them?
Learn from them?
Kerra looked back to the tactical display. They weren’t anywhere near escaping the battle zone yet—and there was another vessel, still larger, up ahead. The flagship, hanging back and observing everything.
And at the moment, blocking their path.
Behind, she saw the hologram, still there. “Calician, can’t you do something?”
The former regent shook his head, sadly. “This is not my house.” He paused, then looked up. “The dowager will decide our fate.”
The image disappeared.
“Tractor beam’s got us, Brigadier!”
Rusher looked at Kerra, mouthing the words unbelievingly. The dowager?
“That’s her,” Narsk said, standing in the doorway of the flagship. “That’s Kerra Holt.” The Bothan looked at the hologram and smiled, toothily. No more running, little Jedi.
And it had been easy, just like the rest of this job.
Narsk
had arrived on Byllura just a day earlier, traveling aboard a special stealth fighter contributed by his latest employer. Quickly locating the video surveillance system left over from early in the twins’ reign, he’d installed a secret transmitter and left for higher ground, atop the cataracts, to monitor it.
He’d been surprised—but not alarmed—to see the Jedi and her warship appear that morning. But it had worked out well: the artillery carrier’s communications were even easier to crack from his position. From them, he learned that Kerra was indeed at the center of the chaos being wrought below; when he’d seen her chasing across the bay to the mesa, he’d directed his client to be at the ready.
And when he’d ascertained that she was in the sanctum, he pulled the trigger, cutting in and giving her the information she needed. He didn’t even wait to learn the result, heading back to space—and a rendezvous with the arriving flagship.
Easy. The Jedi had not disappointed.
“Very good, Narsk Ka’hane. Take a seat.”
Narsk settled back in a hide-covered chair and watched his own breath as he exhaled. She kept it so cold here. Through the shimmering frost particles, he focused on his employer. She was the best looking of all the Sith Lords he’d worked for, he thought. Daiman tried to look like the center of attention. This woman earned it.
Human and just a few years older than Kerra, the woman struck a noble warrior’s pose in white furs and armor. Her skin was clear, freckled with frost. Golden eyes, narrow and fiercely intelligent, looked back at him.
He wasn’t human, but if he were—
“Thanks for the good work, agent,” she said, stepping past him onto the upper deck of the bridge. “And for the thought.” She looked down and addressed the hologram. “So you’re the Jedi.”
“You … have the advantage.”
Star Wars: Knight Errant Page 23
