The Old Republic Series

by Sean Williams

  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 cloth
es. 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.”