by Claudia Gray
At least they’d let go of Dez, who stood there staring dully at the transport pods. He didn’t seem capable of understanding that they meant escape, freedom, home. Either because of his head injury or what the Drengir had done to him—maybe both—he was in a deeply altered state of consciousness.
But Reath had to get through to Dez somehow. He tried, “Dez? Come on. Let’s go.”
No response. The Drengir had begun laughing, an eerie rustling sound.
Maybe my mind trick didn’t work after all, Reath thought. Or maybe it only worked because they already intended to bring Dez to me. Because they wanted me to see him. But why?
Still, Dez hadn’t moved. Maybe a gesture would be easier to understand. Reath held out his hand to Dez.
Finally, Dez took a step toward Reath and the transport pods. The Drengir made no move to stop him. Reath knew that could only mean bad news. Just a few minutes in these creatures’ company had taught him that they weren’t the type to let their victims walk away.
“This one?” Dez said, slurring his words.
“Yes,” said the Drengir leader. “That one. Kill him, and go free.”
Reath had no time to process what he’d just heard because even in that instant, Dez was leaping toward him, lightsaber blazing.
“Who are you?” Cohmac demanded.
The plant creatures ignored him. In the heart of the Amaxine station, they surrounded the Jedi. They always had, Cohmac realized.
He also recognized the oppressive weight settling over them, not so different from the uncanny sensation that came before a groundquake or cyclone. The dark side held power there, power that had been unleashed.
“Your ancestors were imprisoned here,” said Cohmac. “Ages ago. They were held in place by the idols. Am I correct?” Even with his lightsaber in hand and facing down enemies, he wished to remain a scholar.
That the plants heard, or at least didn’t bother pretending not to hear. The plant creatures made a hissing sound of pure contempt. “Not our ancestors. We were imprisoned here. A simple trick, we see now—but we did not see then. It will not be so easy to capture the Drengir again.”
Hadn’t the idols been in place for centuries? But Cohmac vaguely remembered that some forms of plant life could go dormant in hostile environmental conditions, “sleeping” for months, years, or even longer. These beings known as the Drengir must have similar capabilities. In any other situation, it might have been fascinating.
“They are the descendants of the ones who put us here,” snarled another of the Drengir. “Look at their weapons, the ones that glow. They are the same.”
Jedi trapped the Drengir there? Before Cohmac could open his mouth to speak of it, the Drengir leader said, “Not the same. The other weapons were red.”
Orla and Cohmac exchanged quick glances. They each knew what that could mean.
Sith.
A shiver crawled up Cohmac’s back as he realized that the Drengir must have fought, and been captured by, the ancient Sith. If the Drengir were deep enough in the dark side to have presented a challenge to the Sith themselves…
Then the Drengir leader said, with a widening grin, “Time to eat.”
Cohmac responded to the motion before he’d even truly seen it, a slash-flash of movement at the corner of his eye. His lightsaber blade sliced through what he could only call a whip of thorns, as thick around as a human’s forearm. It flopped to the floor, then kept thrashing, bending, almost slithering.
But there was no more time to analyze what it was or what had happened, because the Drengir were upon them.
Cohmac reached out with the Force, working to sense his opponents’ moves before they made them, which gave him time to dodge one of their whips. For her part, Orla leapt up over them in a wide arc, flipping head over heels to land behind the Drengir leader. Both blades of her lightsaber sparked as they pierced the creature’s trunk with two rotating slashes, bright white spears emerging through its bark skin.
Instead of collapsing, the Drengir laughed. It pulled forward, free of the saber, and turned around to slash its thorn whip at Orla. Cohmac realized that the trunk was already healing itself—growing new tissue to replace what had been lost.
Damn and damn, Cohmac thought. How do you kill an enemy who can’t be injured?
The situation wasn’t quite as dire as that, as she proved an instant later when she severed the lower tentacles of a Drengir, who collapsed, alive and conscious but unable to regenerate quickly enough to get back into the fight. Those tentacles must be critical to their balance, Cohmac reasoned. At least they knew one vulnerability to strike at.
But even those injures were only temporary. More and more Drengir emerged from the vines, revealing that the Jedi were not fighting a mere armed group—but, yes, an army.
Dez’s ears rang. His head ached. The thing in front of him held a fiery saber like his own and kept shouting something Dez couldn’t understand. Only one word made sense: his name.
He didn’t want to hear his name anymore. He didn’t want to hear anything anymore. Dez simply wanted to make everything stop. They said if he killed this thing, it would.
With all his might, he brought his lightsaber down on the other. They crashed together, sending a vibration through his hands and arms. His opponent stumbled backward. Through the rush of blood in his ears, Dez heard the Drengir laughing. He wanted that to stop, too.
For an instant he was able to focus on his opponent—someone young. Someone vaguely familiar. A voice called, “Dez, why are you doing this?”
It made no difference. The opponent had to die.
On her belly, Affie crawled between the layers of storage bins, in search of more of the code. She’d recorded a fair bit of it, but she felt like she needed absolutely everything written on the Amaxine station to prove her case.
And maybe, just maybe, she’d find something else about her family…even something her parents wrote themselves.…
She startled at more sounds below. This wasn’t the loud grinding from before—not nearly as thunderous as that—but still counted as what Leox would term “a ruckus.” Thuds from things or people hitting the floor, the hum of lightsabers, and for some reason a whole lot of rustling from the plants…
Affie grabbed her comlink. “Leox, come in.”
“Something the matter, Little Bit?”
She had bigger problems to deal with than that stupid nickname. “The Jedi are making a whole lot of noise down in the central chamber. No idea why, but they are. If I can hear it all the way up here, I guarantee you Nan and Hague can hear it, too.”
“Hang on just a sec, let me check something—” Leox went silent for a moment, then quietly muttered a rude word he’d never spoken near her before. “Yep, the Nihil know they’re not alone.”
Affie’s hand tightened around the comlink. “How can you tell?”
“I can tell because they’re no longer orbiting the station. The warship’s assumed a locked position. Which means we have to stop orbiting, too, or else they’re going to see us in about…two minutes.”
“Get out of here,” she said. Maybe it was wrong, making a decision like that without the Jedi’s input—but there was no time to waste, and the Jedi were the ones who had caused this problem in the first place. “You and Geode. Just go. Save yourselves.”
“Calm down. All we have to do is slam on the brakes. Maybe we can even link up to one of the airlocks, make ourselves available to help you guys if the situation gets worse.”
“Good,” Affie said. The crashing and yelling from below grew louder. “Because I’m pretty sure it’s going to.”
Lightsaber dueling was widely considered the coolest class at the Jedi Temple. (Reath preferred Ancient History, but he was in an extremely small minority.) All the emphasis on dueling obscured one simple truth: this was a situation a Jedi would almost certainly never encounter even once in a lifetime of service. Only other Jedi carried lightsabers; Jedi did not fight each other in the field or anywhe
re else, for that matter. Ergo, dueling was effectively useless except as exercise.
So Reath had argued, and he still felt like he was right in principle. At the moment, however, dueling practice was the only thing keeping him alive.
Dez Rydan, wild-eyed, went at Reath again and again, relentless. His obvious injuries hadn’t sapped his strength; if anything, Dez was going berserk with adrenaline, almost incapable of rational thought. It was like approaching an injured animal—you could try to take care of it, but it would only snap and claw at you.
Parry. Position two. Twist and parry. Block high, block low, position four. Reath’s body knew the stances and drills so well that he could defend himself without conscious thought. But that was all he could do—defend himself and prolong the fight.
The only other option was maiming or killing Dez Rydan.
“Cut him with the blade that burns,” growled one of the watching Drengir, all of whom seemed highly entertained. “Cook the meat for us.”
Reath wasn’t sure which one of them the Drengir was speaking to, but he didn’t like that instruction either way.
I have to wake Dez up, he thought. Make him hear me, if he even can. How am I supposed to get through to him?
Then Reath remembered another voice saying, when he’d been complaining about the frontier assignment, “How am I ever going to get through to you?”
“Master Jora,” Reath said. “Remember her? Our master?”
Dez hardly seemed to understand what Reath was saying. So Reath reached out with the Force, filling his mind with memories of Jora Malli: her warm smile, her surprisingly deep laughter, her insatiable cravings for Bilbringi food—
And then the knowledge that she was dead, far away, never to be seen again—
Reath had managed to create a connection with Dez’s mind just in time to flood it with grief and pain. Dez pulled back and brought up his lightsaber for another blow. Sooner or later, he was going to hit harder than Reath could parry.
Dez stopped mid-movement, as though frozen. His expression remained glazed, but in his eyes there was some evidence that he was at least trying to make sense of what Reath was saying.
Sweat slicked Reath’s skin. The air was thick with moisture and the smells of soil, sap, and mold. He stood there in defense stance, keeping his eyes locked with Dez’s, not knowing how long the respite would last.
Reath attempted to reach out with the Force, to connect with Dez that way, but immediately he stopped. Dez’s mind was almost unrecognizably disordered—frenzied. Even if a connection could be forged through such chaos, it was as likely to disrupt Reath as it was to stabilize Dez. The risk was too great.
He’d have to reach Dez another way.
Carefully, Reath said, “Think about Master Jora. Just imagine her voice. I know you can hear it, inside your head, if you’ll listen. She’d tell you to stop fighting and let me take you home.”
At first it seemed as though Dez hadn’t even heard him. But then he lowered his lightsaber—only a few centimeters, but it was enough to give Reath a chance.
It wasn’t honorable to hit an opponent when he was down. Usually. This was one of the exceptions. Reath swung his blade sharply upward to collide with Dez’s almost at the base. With Dez wobbly and dazed, his grip on his lightsaber gave way. It spun upward, and Reath caught it with his free hand.
He placed himself between Dez and the Drengir, blades crossed. Even through the glare, Reath could see the fury on their twisted faces.
To Dez he said only, “Come on. Let’s go home.”
“And to think,” Orla panted, “some people—say gardening—is a—relaxing hobby!”
Cohmac didn’t laugh at her joke. Not that he ever laughed much. And no doubt he was distracted by trying to keep his head from being chopped off by the Drengir’s thorny whips.
One of those whips had scraped Orla’s calf earlier in the fight. It had been only a glancing blow, but it was enough to make her leg ache from toe to hip. Swelling had already stiffened her ankle and was beginning to do the same to her knee. Poisonous thorns, she figured.
A Drengir lunged at her, but Orla flung herself backward, half jumping, half levitating, until she was clear of the fight. Not that she intended to leave Cohmac alone in it for long, but they could fight better as a unit once she had some perspective on what they were dealing with.
As she came back down, her sore foot made contact, not with the floor, but with something curved and unfixed. Orla landed hard on all fours and glared backward at the 8-T that had had the nerve to be in her way. The droid took no notice, simply kept on pruning back branches.
Pruning.
With shears specially designed to slice through plants.
Orla’s mind whirled with possibilities. The Aytees attack anything they perceive as a threat to the plants. They’re not attacking us at the moment, which means they don’t consider the Drengir to be plants under their care.
Which means there has to be some way to sic the Aytees on the Drengir.
She turned and pounced on the 8-T’s dome; it whistled once in consternation but otherwise kept to its task. No obvious interface presented itself. If she was going to use the droids, she would have to work with their existing programming.
Orla clambered to her feet, ignoring the stab of pain in her ankle. From her vantage point she could see that Cohmac was pinned near one of the central arches. Overhead curved one of the bowers, so thickly enveloped in vines that the metal was almost invisible.
This was one of those rare moments when a blaster would’ve been more useful than a lightsaber. Orla reminded herself to carry one in future, then summoned the strength to leap even farther up than before—again half levitating—soaring all the way up to the bower. At the topmost point, she swung her lightsaber, severing the bower’s connection to the ceiling. As the metal sagged and she began her descent, she yelled, “Look out above!” Her friend would need no more than that to understand what she’d set into motion.
Orla controlled her fall as best she could, but even her soft landing sent more pain jolting through her entire leg. The poison had continued to spread. Antitox, she thought. As soon as possible. Just not yet.
Entangled as it was in vines, the bower fell in stages—each stem unraveling only so far, then pausing, until the weight forced it to go farther still. It wobbled from side to side, which got the attention of the 8-Ts. Orla limped back toward the thick of the fray. As she’d anticipated, Cohmac had figured out her plan; he’d edged backward until he was well clear of the bower’s ultimate resting place. The Drengir, believing their enemies to be in retreat, had moved into prime position. Orla rejoined Cohmac, each of them parrying blows from the thorn whips with their sabers in a whir of light. Every sweep of a saber sent the tips of thorns spraying around the station, like deadly poison darts.
The bower finally tumbled to the floor with a thud. It clocked one of the Drengir, but that was just a side benefit. The Drengir were covered with the vines and trapped as surely as though they’d been caught in a net. That wouldn’t last long, of course, before they got out. Orla wanted them to get out—or, rather, she wanted them to try.
“Cut yourselves free!” yelled the Drengir leader. One of his spiky hands slashed through a vine with a spray of sap. The other Drengir followed suit, shredding the vines with all their might.
And that was when the 8-Ts stepped in.
They swarmed the Drengir. First a handful, then a dozen, then more droids from all over the station were rolling across floors and down walls, pruning shears clicking. Soon the Drengir began to howl in protest as those shears found their targets. The Drengir would have no trouble destroying the 8-Ts once they were free—but that would take them a while.
“Good thinking,” Cohmac said to Orla. “This is our chance.”
“Couldn’t agree more.”
Orla let the battle fall away from her memory, the tension from her body. She inhaled deeply, inhabiting only the moment. From the depths of her
mind, she called upon the Force to answer.
As she opened her perception further, she became more able to sense Cohmac beside her, doing the same thing. His courage rallied her own. With renewed determination, she traced the outlines of darkness, formed it in the shape of a sphere, felt Cohmac’s effort doubling her own. Then she centered that energy within the idols, squaring the circle—
A burst of brilliant greenish light lit up the entire station for a moment. Orla’s first impulse was that something had gone wrong with the inner illumination, or worse, that internal systems were beginning to explode. Then she realized the light had been only in her mind’s eye, her consciousness attempting to make sense of the pure power of the Force.
In that instant, the fight between the Drengir and the 8-Ts ended. Once again the Drengir blended into the murk of the jungle. Orla could almost have lost them. The 8-Ts whirled in brief confusion, then got back to the important work of gardening.
Would this hold the Drengir in place?
“That’s the seal,” she said, almost in a daze. “It’s working.”
“Hopefully forever, but at least for a short while.” Already Cohmac had fully recovered and had once again pulled up the hood of his robe in preparation for travel. “That gives us time to escape and reconnect with Reath. I hope Affie has finished with the code.”
“If she hasn’t, we’ll make Leox and Geode call her back.” Orla pushed up the sleeves of her spotless white robe. “Let’s move.”
They hustled toward the door that would lead to the airlock ring. Sensing their approach, the door slid open, revealing the darkened space. But in the middle of that area stood a slender, stooped figure. As Orla’s eyes adjusted to the light, she recognized who had found them.
“I’m afraid I have to ask you to stay right here,” said Hague, leveling his blaster straight at them.
Cohmac and Orla crept along behind Master Laret through the cave tunnels. They were getting closer to the kidnappers’ lair—they all could sense that—but pinpointing their precise location was proving difficult. The problem was compounded by the reality that choosing the wrong path to the hostages could lead them straight into armed guards, or explosive booby traps.
