Kassav made a disgusted noise, deep in his throat.
The rest of the vote was moot. In any decision related to the Paths, ties went to the Eye, a long-standing rule. With Pan’s vote, it was at least a two-against-two decision for putting a hold on new Nihil activity, at least until the heat from the Legacy Run died down. Lourna Dee hadn’t spoken, but her decision was irrelevant—and it wasn’t surprising she had waited to make her views known. She seemed to prefer that people knew as little as possible about what she was thinking. Whether that was pathological or tactical, Marchion didn’t know. Probably some of both.
“I guess that’s that,” Lourna Dee said. “But I still want to pitch you on a job.”
“Oh?” Marchion said, his voice thin.
Pan Eyta and Kassav didn’t seem particularly thrilled, either. Tempest Runners could authorize raids within their own crews without asking any of the others, but anything that would require Paths needed a full-on vote. Usually, that meant Marchion was the deciding factor, because most of the time the two Tempest Runners who didn’t have a stake in a given job voted against it. Not a bad system, really. As Eye, Marchion was the custodian of the Paths, and so he should have the loudest voice in deciding how they were used.
“I have a new group in my Tempest,” Lourna continued. “Seven Strikes under a Cloud. Came to me with a really interesting plan, actually—they found this settler family on a mining world, very connected. My guys want to kidnap them, hold them for ransom from their rich relatives. It’s smart.”
“No, Lourna. I told you. We all just agreed. No raids until the heat dies down from Hetzal.”
She stepped toward him, her thin face focused, her eyes intense.
“I’m telling you, Marchion, it’ll be easy. The planet is Elphrona, which doesn’t have much of a security force, and apparently the family decided to go all rustic, live way out on their own in the middle of nowhere. Easy pickings. We’ll be in and out.”
Marchion went still, which Lourna took as an invitation to keep talking.
“The Cloud asked for some Paths. You know…just in case. I know we’re under pressure, but this is a new group, lots of potential. I want to bring them into the fold, give them a chance to prove their worth. I’m telling you, too—this operation will have a huge payoff.”
“Elphrona…” Marchion said. “There’s a Jedi outpost on that planet.”
“Is there?” asked Lourna Dee, in a way that made it clear she had already known.
Marchion went silent. The Nihil were not just another group of raiders, like the thousands that operated in the Rim. They were special, powerful…and the reason for that was the Paths. In all the ways that counted, they made the Nihil what they were. They allowed crews to use hyperspace in ways denied to every other ship in the galaxy. Microjumps, leaps to locations inside gravity wells, entering hyperspace from almost anywhere as opposed to having to run elaborate calculations or travel to a non-occluded access zone…they allowed the Nihil’s ships to appear and disappear at will, like spirits. They could be anywhere, at any time, and no defenses could stop them.
The Paths made the Nihil what they were, but they came from a single, unique, not inexhaustible source, and Marchion had placed significant demands upon that source recently, both to fuel the Nihil’s growth and to support plans of his own. The Legacy Run disaster was not the only reason he wanted things to cool off for a little while.
Lourna Dee’s idea, though…it had possibilities.
There was no need to hold a formal vote. Lourna Dee was obviously for it, and the Eye’s two votes would ensure it went ahead, if Marchion Ro agreed.
“Fine,” he said. “Send me the plan, what you think you’ll need, and I’ll get you some Paths. But do not do anything to get the attention of those Jedi. Get in, grab the family, get out.”
“Thank you,” Lourna Dee said, and left. As ever, the woman never said a word more than she needed to.
Kassav and Pan Eyta glanced at each other, then back at Marchion Ro.
Pan shrugged. He left, following Lourna Dee back to the celebration outside.
Kassav did not.
Marchion lifted his mask and replaced it on his head.
“Dunno how that was fair, Ro,” the Weequay said. “You giving Lourna Dee a job, giving her Paths, but saying Pan and me gotta stop. I got people to feed, too. I got like a thousand people in my Tempest, and ain’t one of ’em gonna be happy with this. How about I send you some ideas, maybe you choose one and I can get something going? You’d get a share, too—a full third to the Eye, just like always. Don’t you want that payday?”
They returned to the Great Hall, walking past the spiked guard droids, who once again inclined their heads as the Eye and the Tempest Runner passed.
Marchion walked to the edge of the platform, Kassav close on his heels, right up against the blue lights that marked the border of the vacuum shields.
“Your father never would have done something like this,” Kassav said. “Shutting down the Paths? Forget it. Not Asgar Ro. He wasn’t any kind of coward, no way.”
Marchion Ro went very still.
“My father’s dead, Kassav,” he said. “I’m the Eye now. You can do whatever you want with your Tempest, but the Paths come from me. You don’t like it? You want to make a play for me, try to take what I’ve got? Go for it. Just be aware…”
He gestured out at the void.
“…there’s a price.”
“What are you waiting for?” Loden said.
Bell crept closer to the edge of the cliff and peered over. The ground didn’t look any closer than it had the last four times he checked. He looked back at his master, who had his arms folded. He was smiling, but it was one of those smiles that felt much more like a deep, disapproving frown.
Get on with it, that smile said. Unless you’d prefer to be a Padawan for the rest of your life.
The Jedi Order had established outposts across the less-settled sectors of the Republic, both as an opportunity to explore new regions and to offer assistance to any who might need it in those wilder zones. Not as large as full temples, they were staffed by crews of three to seven Jedi, often with a wide range of experience. Getting “outposted” was a common part of the Padawan training regime, and this was what Bell was doing on Elphrona. He and Loden had been there for a while, though they did get the occasional offworld assignment like the Starlight Beacon tour that had ended up with them in the middle of the Legacy Run disaster. They were originally due to be rotated back to Coruscant after that via the Third Horizon—but Chancellor Soh’s hyperspace blockade had gotten them sent back to the outpost for the duration.
The Council thought Jedi might be needed in the Outer Rim more than usual during the crisis. So far, though, the blockade didn’t feel much different from the usual sort of outpost life. For Jedi Padawan Bell Zettifar, that meant constant orders from his master to do utterly impossible things under the guise of “training.”
The wind kicked up, pushing Bell back from the cliff’s edge. He inhaled the unique scent of Elphrona—hot metal and dust.
The Order often built its outposts to fit in with the natural surroundings and culture of the planet where they were based. The outpost on Kashyyyk was a huge tree house. On Mon Cala, it was a gigantic raft grown from coralite, kelp dangling from its underside, providing a reeflike habitat for local sea creatures as it drifted with the currents.
Elphrona was a dry world of slate and clay, topographically diverse. Almost its entire surface was covered by long mountain ranges, composed primarily of iron and other ferrous minerals, which curled along its surface in arcs that followed the pattern of the planet’s magnetic fields. From orbit, it looked beautiful—like a calligrapher had inscribed the entire world with some unimaginably enormous pen. From the ground, it looked exactly like you would think a huge ball of dusty metal might—a world whose bones were clo
se to the skin.
In this hard place, the Jedi had built their outpost out of a mountainside, or rather into it. A face of the iron mountain had been sheared away, carved with laser chisels into a columned templelike entrance. The entrance was flanked by two massive statues of Jedi Knights, their lightsabers out and held in the ready position. The Jedi wore hooded robes of a style that felt like a nod to an earlier era. Above the doors, a gigantic symbol of the Order, the upswept wings embracing a spear of starlight shining up and out into the galaxy.
Bell didn’t love Elphrona—he would have been happier with that Mon Cala posting, for instance, where breezes smelled of sea and life, not rust—but he did love the outpost. It was simple and majestic at the same time. Everything the Jedi should be.
It was dawn, and the rising sunlight caught the electrum of the Jedi symbol, setting it alight with reflected fire. The view from the clifftop where he stood could not be improved. It was perfection.
Bell Zettifar, Jedi Padawan, soaked it in. Then he began to turn around, intending to tell his master, Jedi Knight Loden Greatstorm, that he was not ready for this particular exercise today, and wanted to read up on the techniques a bit more before he just jumped off a perfectly good cliff.
“I believe in you,” he heard Loden say from a few meters behind him.
Bell felt his master reach out to the Force, and then something like a hand in the center of his back. And then he was shoved hard, right off the cliff.
* * *
Some thirty kilometers away was the settlement of Ogden’s Hope, a fairly large town built and maintained on the dreams of those who thought they might be able to transform the planet’s mineral wealth into a fortune of their own. The mining industry on Elphrona was over a century old, but the planet’s governments over the decades had successfully resisted the efforts of the huge galactic concerns to buy up and consolidate its resources. The entire planet was divided into a grid, and no one family, corporation, enterprise, or association was allowed to own more than four claims at a time.
That meant much of the planet remained unclaimed, and who knew what treasures might be waiting under the surface, ready to be discovered? Earlier strikes had turned up rare minerals, aurodium and platinum, even stranger substances—a vein of crystals, once. Elphrona was a planet-sized treasure vault, and somehow, it belonged to everyone who lived there. Ogden’s Hope, as a place, was well named. It was a place of possibility, where everyone had an equal chance at success and freedom. Chancellor Lina Soh cited Elphrona often in her speeches as emblematic of the spirit of the Republic. It was a hard place but, generally, a good one.
To this good place, a family had come, from a populous, wealthy world in the Core. A mother, a father, a son, and a daughter. They acquired two claims next to each other, an hour’s speeder ride from Ogden’s Hope—longer if you ran into a rust storm. They built themselves a place to live, with the help of their droids. The first version was just a rough, ugly structure of permacrete, nothing more than a shelter from the sun and wind, but in time it had become theirs. More rooms, more windows, a greenhouse, a second story, decoration, all the little touches that transformed housing into home. They dug into the soil, looking for whatever treasures might be beneath their feet.
The family could have used their droids to do most of the work—but that was not why they had come to Elphrona, and so they all did their part. The children studied with their droid tutors and grew taller every day. The parents worked, and planned, and believed they had made the right decision for themselves and their family.
Until one early morning, the mother, whose name was Erika, looked up from a delving droid she was repairing to see a strange cloud not far from their home. It was odd, unlike anything she had ever seen. For one thing, it hugged the ground like a fogbank. But Elphrona was a dry world. There was water, but it circulated deep below the surface in underground rivers and channels. Rain was a once-per-decade event. So, fog…no. It couldn’t be.
Even beyond that, this cloud looked odd…it had a sheen to it, like a metallic blue. Like a storm cloud, really, though she hadn’t seen one of those since she left her homeworld some years back. And it seemed to be moving with direction, or purpose. Toward them.
“Ottoh,” she called to her husband, who was not far away, spreading feed for their small herd of steelees. The long-legged beasts were clustering around the trough, their excitement at getting their morning meal obvious. “What do you suppose that is?”
Ottoh turned to look. He froze. Unlike his wife, he kept up with galactic affairs—he had not entirely cut himself off from the news of the Republic. And so he had heard stories, and he knew what it meant when a storm came creeping toward your home, or business, or family.
“Get Bee,” he said, dropping the sack of feed he was holding. “I’ll find Ronn. We need to get in the house and seal it up. Now.”
Erika didn’t ask questions. She didn’t hesitate. They were many kilometers from help, and even a good world in the Outer Rim Territories was full of danger. She called for her daughter and ran to the house.
“Ronn!” Ottoh shouted, not taking his eyes off the cloud. “Get in the house right now!”
Within the approaching fog, figures were beginning to become visible, ten or so. He couldn’t make out details yet, but he knew who they were. He had heard the stories—of impossibly vicious marauders who appeared from nowhere and left the same way, leaving nothing in their wake but terror that they would return.
The Nihil.
* * *
Bell reached out to the Force. He knew that, as a Jedi, he could survive this fall. He had seen Loden do similar things many times in the past—most recently on Hetzal Prime, but in training, too. Loden could drop like a rock and then slow himself at the last moment for a perfect landing. It wasn’t flying—no Jedi born without wings could fly as far as Bell knew—but it also was not exactly falling.
Bell knew it could be done, and he knew Loden Greatstorm believed he could do it. His master—probably—would not have used the Force to shove him off that obscenely high cliff otherwise. Bell thought the Jedi Council would frown on inadvertent Padawan murder—but he also thought Loden could talk his way out of it, probably by arguing that the Order had no use for a Padawan who couldn’t master something as simple as a controlled descent.
All of this flashed through Bell’s head in the merest second after his plummet began. With a massive effort, he forced himself to focus, to find the flame of the Force within and fan it into greater life, and through it connect with the air currents rushing past his face and whipping through his dreadlocks. Loden had given him instruction on how to execute this maneuver safely, though he was frustratingly vague in his description of how it was supposed to work.
In general, the idea was to guide yourself to the updrafts, and use them as a foundation to slow your fall. Once you figured that out, you were somehow also supposed to use the Force to push against the ground as it drew closer. The two elements could slow you down enough to land safely. Bell had achieved it easily enough in Temple training when falling from lesser heights, or if dropping onto a repulsor pad that would prevent any real injury.
But now, when plummeting from a cliff, facing a horrendous maiming if he was lucky, he could barely even remember what Loden had told him to do. He knew the real challenge here was not mastery of the Force, but mastery of fear—always the Jedi’s greatest test.
A test he was about to fail. And from this height, he knew even Loden Greatstorm could not catch him. This was it. The end. Bell closed his eyes. The fear rushed in, and he didn’t even fight it. He asked for serenity, and hoped he would just die quickly and not be left in broken agony on the jagged iron rocks at the base of the cliff.
The wind stopped rushing past him.
Bell opened his eyes and saw the ground, a meter or so below him. Then he dropped, hitting hard, though not as hard as he woul
d have if his fall had not been stopped.
He rolled over, groaning, and a shadow fell across him.
“You need to figure this out,” Indeera Stokes said. “Loden really is going to kill you one of these times.”
She extended a hand, and Bell took it and let the other Jedi pull him up. Indeera was Tholothian, with dark skin only a few shades lighter than Bell’s own, elegant white tendrils in lieu of hair, and eyes so blue they almost seemed to glow, just like every member of her species Bell had ever met. Her leathers were scratched and worn, with the Jedi insignia in white on one shoulder. She wore her lightsaber holster on a strap of yellow webbing slung diagonally across her chest, and kept a dark-gray nanofoil scarf wrapped around her neck—useful as a mask in dust storms, and moldable into almost any shape she might need.
Standing at Indeera’s side was a small, four-legged creature, mostly mottled black, white, and gray, but with spots of red and orange here and there, and bright-yellow eyes. A charhound, native to Elphrona. She took a few steps forward and nuzzled at Bell’s hand; he scratched behind her ears, and the little beast purred with pleasure.
“Hi, Ember,” Bell said. “Nice to see you, too.”
He gave the charhound one last scratch and looked back at Indeera.
“Did Loden ask you to catch me?” he said, brushing dust off his own leathers, originally bright white but now well worn in, stained and mottled, evidence of hard use.
“Yep,” Indeera said. “No shame in it. No Jedi is perfect at everything from the start.”
She held out his lightsaber hilt. He hadn’t even felt it fall from his side. Bell took it and slipped it into his own holster, worn at his hip.
“No shame…” he said.
Loden knew he’d fail from the beginning.
“I just don’t get why he won’t let it go,” he said. “I clearly can’t do this.”
“Because one day you’ll fall off a cliff for real, and he wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t try to keep you from dying when you do. Jedi fall off things a lot. You need to be ready.”
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