The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  “What is it?” Saes asked.

  Dor’s beard twitched as he leaned in close to Saes and spoke in a low tone. “The body of a security guard was found in the corridor off the landing bay. His arm and head were severed. It appears to have been the work of a lightsaber.”

  Adrenaline fueled Saes’s pheromones, increasing their odor. “A lightsaber,” he muttered to himself. “Then the explosion in the bay was not an engine malfunction.”

  “It appears not.”

  “We have a Jedi aboard.”

  A murmur went through the bridge crew. The smell of their sweat sweetened with excitement.

  Dor tapped his palm on the hilt of the lanvarok he wore even on bridge duty. “If these Jedi are a vanguard for a larger force …”

  Saes nodded. He could not take the chance. Sadow would be displeased with a delay in the delivery of the Lignan. To the helmsman, he said, “Move us out of the planet’s gravity well and prepare the ship for hyperspace. Plot a route to Primus Goluud and jump as soon as all our ships are back aboard.” To Dor, he said, “You have the bridge.”

  Dor nodded. “Yes, sir. What are you going to do?”

  Saes put his hand on the hilt of his lightsaber. “I am going to retrieve my mask and find our stowaway. A captured Jedi would make a nice gift to accompany the Lignan for Master Sadow.”

  Relin felt the mental fingers of his onetime Padawan and knew that the dead Massassi’s body had been found. Saes was searching for him. Relin resisted the impulse to lower his mental screen and reveal himself. He needed to accomplish his mission, not correct a past wrong.

  He hurried through the maze of corridors, using the Force on groups of two or three crew to remove himself from their perception. The crew of Harbinger was on alert, searching for him, and Relin found it increasingly taxing to render himself hidden from them.

  Ahead, he heard the heavy tread of boots and the booming bass voices of several Massassi. From the sound of it, he put their numbers at six or seven. Given their alert status and attunement to the dark side, he would not be able to use the Force to hide from them. He checked one of the nearby hatches, found it locked, checked another, found that locked, too.

  The voices drew closer. He could not make out their words. They were speaking their native language.

  He pulled an overrider—an electronic lockpick—from his suit and attached it to the nearest door’s control panel. Lights flashed as the equipment interfaced and the overrider tried to find the door’s open code. The Massassi were around the corner. Relin would not get clear in time. He took his lightsaber in hand and ignited it.

  The Massassi fell silent. They must have heard him activate his lightsaber.

  The overrider flashed green and the door opened with a metallic hiss. Moving quickly, he detached the overrider and slid inside as the Massassi rounded the corner.

  A meeting room. A large table surrounded by chairs and dotted with three comp stations sat centermost. A vidscreen, powered down, took up one wall. Transparisteel windows made up the bulkhead, allowing a view of the system outside.

  He crouched with his ear to the door, listening to the voices of the Massassi. They sounded like they were right outside, separated from him only by a thin layer of metal, talking in hushed tones. He winced as his comlink activated and Drev spoke.

  “The transports are returning to the landing bay and both dreadnoughts are moving, Master.”

  Relin heard laserfire in the background of Drev’s transmission, but his mind was on the Massassi in the corridor outside.

  “Stand by,” he whispered. “Stand by.”

  The voices outside went silent. Had they heard Drev? A human would not have been able to hear the comlink transmission, but Massassi had keener senses than humans. Relin sat behind the door, lightsaber humming in his hand, the calm of the Force in his heart, waiting, waiting …

  Nothing.

  He glanced back out of the meeting room windows to see the background of stars shifting slightly as the ship moved away from Phaegon III and its gravity well.

  “They are preparing to jump,” he said to Drev. He had to get to the hyperdrive, and now.

  “Get off that ship, Master, or you’ll go with them.”

  “There is still time.” He pushed the button to open the hatch. “I’m near the hyperdrive chamber and—”

  He found himself staring at the uniformed chest of a Massassi security officer, who held his lanvarok in one hand. The bone spurs and studs under the Massassi’s red flesh gave it a tumorous appearance.

  “Here!” the Massassi shouted down the hall. Roaring, he swung his lanvarok in a downstroke for Relin’s head, but Relin sidestepped the blow and it slammed into the deck while Relin drove his lightsaber through the Massassi’s abdomen. The Massassi groaned, dropped his weapon. His clawed hands groped reflexively for Relin’s throat as he died.

  Shouts from down the hall told Relin the dead Massassi’s comrades had heard his call. He took a thermal grenade from his flexsuit, stepped out of the room, and tossed it down the corridor at the onrushing Massassi, each with a blaster and lanvarok bare. Recognition of what he had thrown widened their eyes and they dived for cover, but not before one of them got off a blaster shot.

  Relin deflected it with his lightsaber and ducked back into the room he had vacated as the grenade exploded.

  Flames bathed the corridor in orange. The Massassi’s screams were lost in the explosion and the shock wave rattled Relin’s teeth. Alarms shrieked, and fire foam hissed out of valves in the ceiling.

  Relin heard shouts from the other direction and the stomp of many boots. The ship’s entire security force would be coming. As would Saes. He had to move.

  He drew his blaster with his off hand and pelted down the hall, past the bodies of the Massassi, toward the hyperdrive chamber. The time for stealth was past.

  A pair of Massassi appeared in the hallway before him, both with blasters drawn. Before they could shoot, Relin dropped one with a shot from his own blaster, opening a smoking hole in the Massassi’s black uniform and sending the insignia of rank on his chest skittering across the floor. The second Massassi fired his blaster rapidly while shouting for aid and backing away.

  Relin closed the distance, deflecting the blaster shots with his lightsaber as he ran, leaving a trail of scorch marks in his wake along the wall and ceiling. At five paces the Massassi tried to draw his lanvarok, but Relin lunged forward and was upon him too fast. The clean hum of his lightsaber gave way to a muffled sizzle as he cut the Massassi in two.

  He did not slow, could not slow. Shouts told him that pursuit was right behind him. Alarms were sounding all over the ship. When he reached a thick blast door, an idea struck him and he drove his lightsaber’s tip into the control panel. The circuitry expired with smoke and sparks and the blast door descended with a boom. He assumed his pursuers would be able to go around, but it might buy him a few extra moments.

  Drawing on the Force, he enhanced his speed and ran in a blur for the hyperdrive chamber.

  The young helmsman did not look up from his screen as he spoke to Dor. “Colonel, we are clear of the gravity well. System scans show no additional Jedi ships.”

  Dor nodded. “Begin the jump sequence.”

  As the helmsman obeyed, the weapons officer said, “All Blades are returned to the ship, Colonel Dor.”

  Dor heard the question hiding behind the comment. “The Infiltrator remains in range?”

  “Yes, Colonel.”

  Dor stroked the tentacles of his beard. “You have until we jump to destroy it.”

  The helm recited the jump sequence countdown. The weapons officer gave the order to the gun crews to fire at will.

  Eight Massassi warriors armed with blaster rifles and lanvaroks loitered in the large open room adjacent to the hyperdrive chamber. The quills, lumps, and scars that scored their red flesh made them look deformed.

  Relin slowed only long enough to count their numbers and ensure there were no others. He
did not bother to hide himself. They were too alert for that. They saw him, pointed, showed their teeth in a growl. Six pulled their blaster rifles to their shoulders to fire while another spoke into his comlink and the last headed for a wall-mounted alarm.

  Without breaking stride, Relin held up a hand, took telekinetic hold of the blaster rifles aimed at him, ripped them from the Massassi’s hands, and flung them across the large chamber. One fired when it hit the deck, and the shot blew the booted foot from one of the Massassi. He fell to the floor, cursing in his language, the ruins of his ankle leaking black fluid.

  Relin fired his blaster and put a fist-sized hole in the back of the skull of the Massassi about to push the wall alarm. Black blood and brain matter splattered the wall as the body slid to the floor.

  “Run,” he said to the remaining Massassi.

  The six still standing grinned mouthfuls of sharp teeth—the teeth of predators—and drew their lanvaroks, spun them with skill until they hummed. Relin knew what was coming next. He would have to take care that his suit did not get damaged.

  As one, the Massassi jerked back on their lanvaroks. A shower of the sharpened disks attached to the haft, each a few centimeters across, sprayed at Relin. Ready for it, he used the Force to augment an upward leap over the projectiles and reached almost all the way to the ceiling, ten meters up. All but one of the disks flew harmlessly under him. The last scored his forearm, but it was little more than a scratch and did not seem to penetrate his suit.

  He landed in a crouch, lightsaber blazing. “I said run.”

  The largest said, “We are six to your one, Jedi. With more coming.”

  Relin tilted his head, holstered his blaster, and took his lightsaber in both hands.

  Through the large double doors behind the Massassi, Relin heard the hyperdrive hum with pre-jump preparation. Pressure built on his eardrums. The hairs on his arms stood on end. He had no time to waste.

  “You will be fewer than six in a moment. Flee now. Final chance.”

  They lost their smiles but not their fire, and charged him in a loose arc, roaring. He charged them in silence, focused, the Force surging through his muscles.

  When he’d closed to two paces, he bounded over them, flipping in midair and decapitating one as he landed behind their line. By the time they spun to face him, he’d put his lightsaber through a second.

  Sidestepping the downward slash of a lanvarok from a third Massassi, he cut the metal weapon in half, ducked under a crosscut from another, and severed both legs of the nearest Massassi. He backflipped out of range, the screams of the dying loud in his ears.

  The large Massassi put his lanvarok in the skull of the other whose legs Relin had severed, ending the screams, then all three remaining snarled and charged.

  Relin threw his lightsaber at the first, impaling him through the neck. Surprise slowed the others a moment, and Relin took advantage of the reprieve to use the Force to pull his weapon back into his hands.

  They licked their fangs, bounced on their feet, and charged anew.

  He met their advance with his own, ducking, spinning, wheeling, slashing, killing. They could not match his speed, his skill, and within a five-count, pieces of the Massassi and their weapons dotted the bloody deck. All were dead but the one wounded on the foot by the blaster.

  “You must gift me with death, too, Jedi,” the wounded Massassi snarled. “This.” He gestured at his wounded foot. “I will be as a child.”

  Relin stared at him with contempt. He knew the Massassi had been bred as warriors, but their carelessness with their own lives sickened him. “We all live with ourselves.”

  “Not like this! Kill me. I demand it.”

  The Massassi crawled a blaster rifle, leaving a line of smeared blood in his wake.

  “As you’ll have it, then,” Relin said, and put a blaster shot in his skull.

  Deactivating his lightsaber, still centered in the calm of the Force, he turned to the doors. Body and mind tingled with fatigue, but he endured. Behind the door, energy gathered around the hyperdrive. He could feel the change in the air. The dreadnoughts would jump soon. He would not be able to stop Omen, but at least he could stop Harbinger.

  He slipped the overrider over the control panel and hoped it would work quickly. Lights and beeps signified the beginning of the cryptographic holo-chess match. Relin could do nothing but wait. Despite the urgency of the moment, he put his back to the door, sat cross-legged on the floor, stared out and over a chamber of dead Massassi, and held his calm.

  Several corridors opened into the chamber, and Relin heard shouts down two of them. They were coming. The realization did nothing to disturb his calm. Taking comfort in his relationship to the Force, he held the hilt of his lightsaber in his hand, felt the coolness of its metal, studied its lines, recalled its making.

  A long beep signaled the overrider’s victory.

  “Checkmate,” Relin said, standing.

  The hyperdrive chamber’s doors parted. Dry, warm air swarmed out. The gathering energy in the chamber created extreme static electricity. Relin’s hair stood on end. Insects seemed to crawl over his flesh. His robes clung to him as if trying to prevent him from entering.

  The rectangular metal block of the hyperdrive hung in the center of the room from ceiling mounts and a series of power conduits as thick as Relin’s arm. A large, disk-shaped concavity in the floor yawned underneath it, the open mouth into which the drive fed its power. Circuitry crisscrossed the hyperdrive’s face, the circulatory system of interstellar travel.

  A transparisteel window on the far side of the chamber opened onto an adjoining room. A pair of wide-eyed human engineers in the black uniforms of Sadow’s forces pointed at him, shouted something, and reached frantically for communicators. Relin used a telekinetic blast to slam both men against the far wall and they slumped to the floor, out of sight.

  Relin had seen a hyperdrive bisected once for engineers to study. The complexity of the circuitry, the odd geometry of its inner workings, had left him nauseous. And now that complexity, that geometry, began to do its work. Machinery clicked, connected, turned. The power conduits squirmed like snakes as more energy coursed through them. The hum increased in volume. Relin felt light-headed. Radiation filled the room, he knew. He would need treatment for radiation poisoning if he survived.

  If.

  He placed a hand on the hyperdrive. The metal felt warm, as slick as talc. It pulsed like a living thing, seeming to shift, to flow under his touch. A headache rooted in his left temple, intensified. His stomach flirted with nausea.

  He removed three of his mag-grenades from the pocket of his flexsuit, attached two of them to the face of the hyperdrive, a third to the main power conduit connection. He checked his chrono to mark the time and rapidly set the timers.

  The grenades began ticking away the remaining moments of Harbinger’s existence.

  He turned for the door, activating his communicator. “Charges are set. Heading out now, Drev.”

  “Understood. The Blades have cleared out. Perhaps I have frightened them.”

  Relin heard the beginning of a smile in his tone.

  Drev went on: “I am alone out here. Well, except for the two hulking dreadnoughts bristling with weapons.”

  Relin stood amid the Massassi he had slaughtered. “Jump out of the system. With their ships clear, the cannons may fire.”

  “They’re preparing for a jump, Master. They won’t risk firing.”

  “They may. Jump out, Drev.”

  “I am not leaving you.”

  “Jump, Drev. That is an order.”

  “No.”

  Relin cocked his head. “No?”

  “I’m not leaving, Master. Both ships are in jump prep. Neither will risk firing.”

  Relin shook his head, incredulous at his Padawan’s stand. “You are leaving. Harbinger will not be able to jump, but Omen will. There’s nothing we can do about that now. But we can warn Odan-Urr and Memit Nadill about the ore and wha
t it can do. That is your task.”

  “No. I won’t. We go together or not at all.”

  Relin lost his calm for the first time since coming aboard the dreadnought.

  “You will do it and do it now. That is a direct order.”

  “You’re breaking up, Master.”

  “Blast it, Drev! You heard—”

  “Understood, Master. I will get in close, scrape the surface of the ship. The laser cannons from Omen will not be able to engage me there, and for Harbinger it will be like using a club to swat a fly. Get to an escape pod and we’ll dock. Out. And they won’t fire anyway. Out, again.”

  The link went quiet. “Drev? Drev?”

  His Padawan did not respond.

  “Blast!”

  “You have a way of losing your Padawans,” said a coarse voice behind him, a voice that Relin still heard in the quiet, solitary moments of his life when he had only his failures for company.

  “Saes.” The word came out a curse, and Relin accompanied its pronounciation with the sizzling sound that came with activation of his lightsaber.

  The Sith entered from the same corridor Relin had used. He wore the loose browns and blacks favored by dark side users. The red blade of his lightsaber filled the space between them. His scaly, reddish brown skin was the color of blood. He strode among the scattered Massassi parts that littered the bloody floor of the chamber, his eye ridge cocked, a sneer curling his lip over one of the small horns that jutted from the side of his jaw. His long hair, bound into a rope with bone circlets, hung to his waist.

  “I should have known it was you on my ship. Who else but a Jedi? Who else but Relin Druur? I learned such things from you.” He shook his head, poked a Massassi corpse with a toe. “It seems long ago now.”

  “You destroyed every life-form on that moon. You learned nothing from me.”

  Saes laughed, the sound fat with contempt. “I learned much from you, but it was not what you sought to teach. You should not have come here, Relin. But then you always were the fool.”