by Claudia Gray
Orla brought up the rear, where it was darkest. Her own faint silhouette was only one of the many shadows surrounding them. They were, at this point, too close to risk activating their lightsabers or even using their glow rods at any but the lowest setting.
She didn’t doubt Master Laret. Finding pathways through the Force was a known gift of hers. More important, Master Laret’s judgment was invariably, inarguably correct. It wasn’t a matter of slavishly following the Order’s dictates—Laret Soveral made up her own mind, no matter what, as Orla had learned when trying in vain to sway her judgment. But in making decisions, her master always had some rule in mind, whether it be ethical, legalistic, or otherwise. All those rules urged them to keep doing what they were doing, namely, searching for the royal hostages.
Orla, however, always felt the urge to follow her instincts first, rules be damned. At the moment, her instincts were telling her to stop.
Just to stop. Not to search. Not even to reach out with her feelings. To stop and wait for a sign that would tell them more.
You’re scared, she told herself, resolutely gripping the hilt of her lightsaber. Don’t give into fear. That’s all this is.
Monarch Cassel whispered, “I’ve been thinking.”
That must be a first, Thandeka said to herself, then felt guilty. On Eiram, the jokes about Cassel’s intelligence, or lack thereof, were common…and perhaps not completely wrong. But after hours physically bound to him, she’d learned whatever the man lacked in cleverness, he made up for in kindness. “What about?”
Cassel glanced over at Isamer before answering. The Lasat was too busy stuffing his face with barely cooked meat to pay any attention to their mumblings. Reassured, Cassel said, “He keeps sending his guards out to look for the Jedi, so the Jedi must be fairly close to us.”
“It’s a possibility,” Thandeka said. She wouldn’t extend her hopes any further than that. Thandeka had resigned herself to death hours before—at least, mostly. The one part she couldn’t fully accept was never seeing her wife again. “Why do you mention it?”
“I was thinking that we could do something to get their attention,” Cassel said, his Pantoran face flushing dark blue. “Shout at the top of our voices, something like that.”
“We’re surrounded by solid rock. I don’t think shouting will do us much good.” Then Thandeka considered it. The particulars of Cassel’s suggestion might not be useful, but the basic idea…
She looked around the miserable lair with fresh eyes. Before, she’d only been searching for a means of escape (none) or the weapons that would likely be used for her execution (blasters). This time, Thandeka looked for communications equipment. Nothing in there would broadcast a signal offworld, or even to the surface. But if the Jedi had come close enough to their location, then maybe she could reach them.
One of the handheld comm devices used by the Lasat’s guards sat atop a nearby crate. Thandeka nodded toward it. Cassel stared at her in consternation, but then his jaw dropped as he caught on.
She glanced back at their captor. Isamer was still gulping down his food, oblivious to anything else. They had a brief chance.
Together she and Cassel wriggled a few centimeters to the left, just far enough for her toes to touch that crate. Thandeka thumped it as hard as she could. The comlink tumbled down, landing on the soft edge of her robe, which muffled the sound of its fall. (Not that Isamer was likely to hear it over his growling and smacking.) Using her foot, she pulled the comm unit back toward them.
Cassel and Thandeka’s eyes met in shared glee. Still, getting the comm unit was one thing—effectively using it was another.
The cuffs on her hands made it difficult to grab the comm unit, but she managed it. There was no question of bringing it to her mouth so she might whisper a message; anything she could say loudly enough to be heard at that distance would immediately alert Isamer.
Different kinds of messages could be sent over comms, though, not just voices. Various codes and signals—none of which Thandeka knew—but her message didn’t need to make sense. She only needed the Jedi to detect something, anything, coming from their location.
With her thumb, Thandeka hit a switch, closed her eyes, and thought, They say the Jedi can do anything.
We shall see.
Orla’s comlink began to vibrate against her hip. Confused, she picked it up and saw no message, heard no words. Signal bursts were sometimes used to send codes, but this was just one long burst—static, basically.
Still, it was being sent from very close by, closer than any ship could possibly be.
The kidnappers would communicate with each other intelligibly, Orla reasoned. So this is either a malfunction, or a botched attempt at reaching us.
Either way, it had given her a means of tracing the signal’s location.
Relief washed through Orla. She hated nothing so much as the feeling of being trapped, and wandering around in that maze had felt too much like imprisonment.
But now they could escape.
Keeping both lightsabers crossed in front of him, Reath began backing toward the transport pod. With his shoulder he was able to nudge Dez along, but not quickly.
Reath would have strongly preferred to move quickly, because the Drengir continued to close in around them. However, his obvious plan of escape seemed not to concern them, which meant there was some serious flaw Reath hadn’t thought through yet.
If it’s that big a problem, I’ll find out about it soon enough, he told himself.
He wanted to get them talking, both to learn what he could and so they’d finally stop referring to him as meat. “So,” he said, “are the Drengir from this world and some of you traveled to the station? Or did you settle this planet by leaving the station on one of the hyperspace pods?” To Reath, the pods looked like an automated relay, but he wanted the Drengir to confirm that.
What he said interested them, he could tell—but they still didn’t acknowledge him. One of them said, “Others of our kind remain on the station. It has seen them.”
The Drengir leader hissed, which seemed to be their version of a thoughtful sound. “Then they were not killed. Only dormant. If they are dormant, they can be freed.”
“Can we do it without falling dormant ourselves?” asked another Drengir. “Why should we risk ourselves for the weak?”
In response, the Drengir leader lashed out with his thorn whip, forcing the speaker to crouch submissively. “We do not risk ourselves for the weak. We risk ourselves to learn if we can again use the pods. If so, we can resume our hunt. At last we will find fresh meat.”
“Okay, so, that’s just one mention of ‘meat’ too many, and we’re going to go now,” Reath said, nudging the tottering Dez more strongly toward the first pod.
“We will be able to hunt!” A Drengir pointed a moldy green finger at Dez. “This one has told us that nothing holds us back any longer.”
When did Dez start giving Drengir pep talks? But by then Reath understood that Dez wasn’t himself and hadn’t been since almost the moment of his transport. He’d obviously sustained a serious head injury, but that had been only the start of his problems. The Force alone knew what Dez might’ve been drugged with or interrogated about.
He faced the Drengir evenly as he kept edging Dez farther and farther back. They’d almost reached the launch mechanism.
“Once the Amaxines were our enemies,” said the Drengir leader to those who surrounded him. His followers all rustled in apparent agreement. “They built this structure to better fight us. Then we found it, and used it to fight them. They abandoned the station, left it to us. Our victory!”
The Drengir all shouted with the memory of that glory. Based on what Reath had studied about the Amaxines, any victory against them would’ve been hard-won. All he cared about was that the howling celebration had given him the moment of distraction he needed to elbow Dez through the pod door. Dez stumbled and landed on his hands and knees; Reath winced, but told himself that at least that w
ould be the last of Dez Rydan’s suffering.
One of the Drengir motioned toward them. “Let them go to the station. We will follow.”
“Follow…” Reath’s voice trailed off. There were two transit pods in the launcher, and he’d worked them around to one while not noticing Drengir already boarding the other. Summoning his courage, he said, “Fine. Follow us. We have friends aboard the station.”
They acknowledged him again—but with braying, rustling laughter that sent shivers along Reath’s spine. “This station will be ours, and our conquest of the galaxy can resume.”
Reath imagined the thick greenery throughout the Amaxine station. Drengir could’ve been—must’ve been in stasis the entire time, hidden in plain sight. The darkness surrounding them hadn’t been the shadow of something long dead, but of something that could awaken again.
“Gotta go,” Reath said. “Thanks for the stimulating conversation.”
The Drengir’s laughter filled his ears until he, too, was in the transport pod. Extinguishing the lightsabers, Reath dropped them, pulled the hatch door shut, and hit the one control on the panel. Immediately the workings began their strange whine-hum.
“Where are we?” Dez managed to say. He remained on his hands and knees. “I don’t understand where we are.”
Reath helped Dez into the one seat, crouching by him to keep him steady. “It doesn’t matter, because we’re not staying,” he said gently. “We’re going home.”
And the Drengir will be right behind us.
Hague’s blaster fired.
As though in slow motion, Cohmac saw Orla’s raised hand and felt her pushing back through the Force.
The energy bolt crackled in the air—not frozen in place but moving forward slowly enough that the Jedi were able to easily step around it. As soon as it was behind them, Orla let it go. It crashed into the wall with a spray of sparks that briefly illuminated Hague’s astonished face.
“Why do you attack us?” Cohmac demanded. “We have done you no harm.”
Orla added, “We helped you.”
“Yes, you did. But you did that as much for yourselves as for me, didn’t you?” Hague retained some remnant of the avuncular warmth he’d shown when they all first met after the Legacy Run disaster, but the blaster he held told the true story. “It suited your vanity to be the great and wise, saving the poor and helpless. But the Nihil are poor no longer, and we have never been helpless.”
And there it was—Hague’s anger, no longer masked. In him it was not a sudden flame of temper but a deeply banked, volcanic heat that roiled on and on. Nor was his anger purely for himself; this was something he bore for his people. Cohmac wondered who the Nihil were—where they must have come from—to carry such wrath as their birthright.
He said only, “None of that answers the question. Why do you attack us?”
“We were the only ones stranded here—but misfortune fell on our entire Cloud.”
Hague spoke as though they should know what “Cloud” referred to. Probably a subset of the Nihil, Cohmac reasoned.
Meanwhile, Hague continued, “What should have been a moment of supreme triumph is instead indignity. When we are asked for our trawl, we will have almost nothing to offer, and they might cast us out.” A gleam came into his eyes. “But if we offer them the lives of the Jedi—and the secrets of this space station—those will make up for everything. Now that the rest of our Cloud is here, we can finally act.”
Hague lifted his blaster and fired—not at the Jedi but at the shield doors behind them. They slid shut with a heavy bang, sealing them in. Cohmac and Orla exchanged glances that revealed they’d each looked for an exit and found none.
“Your sorcery cannot save you,” Hague said. But he appeared somewhat shaken.
“We don’t need sorcery,” Orla shot back. She always did let herself be baited a little too quickly. “We have lightsabers.”
Hague no longer wanted to engage with them; Cohmac could not tell whether the man was intimidated or merely moving on. Hague’s head turned as he spoke into a small comlink pinned to the lapel of his jacket: “Intruders aboard the station are confirmed. Two Jedi. Possibly others, as movement in the transport areas of the station has also been detected.”
Transport areas? Cohmac filed that away for later reference—assuming there was a later.
From Hague’s comlink came a harsh voice: “Send a team to investigate the transport areas and clear them. Hold the Jedi. Another team will join for the extermination.”
Affie didn’t want to leave her mission unfinished. But the Jedi were already in trouble. That meant Leox and Geode might be, too. While she hadn’t been able to identify every strange sound ricocheting through the station in the past few hours, the last loud bangs had definitely been blaster fire striking metal. She wanted her friends to leave the station alive, which meant putting her mission aside for a while.
At least they’d rearmed themselves, as Leox had suggested. She put one hand on the lone thermal detonator in her bag, just to reassure herself it was there. It would be better not to fight at all, but if the Nihil had started a fight, Affie wanted to know she could end it.
A barely audible thump seemed to be coming from the airlock ring. Affie hesitated—get to the fight or head to the airlock, where apparently the Vessel had just docked? They’d have better odds in a fight if Leox and Geode were with them. The airlock ring it was.
Bag scraping along the wall behind her, Affie made her way around the corner, into a corridor that opened up into the main arboretum. So far as she could see, nothing had changed; the idols were back more or less where they’d been before and the 8-Ts were gardening as usual. But some of the greenery down there—trees and logs and such—had it moved? Since when did plants wander?
Affie gave herself permission to keep going and ask questions later.
She continued down the long spiral walkway into the path that traced the circumference of the airlock ring, where, apparently, the Vessel had not docked. Instead, several dark-clad figures were emerging from what had to be a massive ship. As Affie’s eyes adjusted, she could make out the blue streaks painted into their hair and across the ghoulish breathmasks they wore.
Those masks were all too familiar.
“The Nihil,” she whispered. Their huge warship had docked with the station after all. They were invading the station en masse. What chance did she and her friends have?
None…unless she stopped the war party from boarding.
Affie didn’t see the Jedi below her. For their sakes, she hoped they weren’t too close by. No time to check. She took the thermal detonator from her bag. Its heft felt strange in her hand, unfamiliar and frightening; Affie knew how dangerous a weapon it was. She’d never actually used one before.
But she’d brought it to save her friends, and that’s what she intended to do. Affie set its timer to ten seconds and then hurled it straight toward the airlock connected with the Nihil ship.
Dropping to the walkway floor, she had just enough time to cover her head before the explosion.
BOOM! The shock wave hit her, a physical impact that knocked her onto her side. Even though her arms had been over her ears, she was momentarily deafened to anything but a high-pitched static sound. Blinking, Affie stared up at air thick with swirling dust and small scorched pieces of what might have been fabric, armor, or skin.
Nausea gripped her. Affie’d had to defend herself and her ship before, but actually killing multiple people—even if they were Nihil—
Then she felt, rather than heard, feet marching up the metal steps of the walkway.
Someone had survived the blast, and that someone was coming directly toward her.
Me and my big mouth, Orla thought, not for the first time, when she realized the Nihil freighter was docking with the station only fifty meters down that arc of the airlock corridor, past the nearest arch. I bragged about our having lightsabers, and what happens? More enemies than the three of us could ever cut down.
<
br /> Probably this was the Force teaching her about humility. Orla hated humility.
Her consternation lasted only as long as it took her to turn toward their oncoming attackers, because at that moment, something detonated with a mighty roar. The flash-bang of the explosion sent Hague staggering backward, and even the Jedi rocked on their feet. At least some of the Nihil fell, but through the roiling black smoke just beyond the arch, other warriors continued rushing toward them, ignoring their fallen comrades.
Had a Nihil weapon gone off accidentally? Was this ancient station finally starting to break down after all the mayhem of the past several days?
Doesn’t matter, Orla figured. You caught a break. Use it.
She launched herself toward Hague, who had righted himself—but only just. Orla landed almost at his feet, as if she were kneeling before him. Maybe he thought she was about to surrender. Instead she ignited her double-bladed saber—blades parallel, handle still locked—and slashed upward to slice his blaster rifle into three parts. Plasma sparks sprayed around them as Orla snapped her saber handle open so the two blades shone from either end.
Hague winced, but his anger was greater than his caution. With the smoldering piece of the blaster rifle still in his hands, he swung down at Orla’s head. She managed to dodge, then leapt backward several meters to get a better look at the unfolding conflict.
Cohmac faced the archway, blocking fire with his lightsaber at such speed that Orla could hardly make out the blade; he seemed to be holding a swirling shield of brilliant color. Because of that, the Nihil couldn’t advance past the archway to infiltrate the station at large.
That wasn’t a victory. Only a stalemate. Even if Orla joined him, two Jedi could only hold that many armed warriors at bay for so long.
