Star Wars

by Charles Soule

  “Ugh,” Dellex said, her voice uncharacteristically subdued.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Another fleet just dropped in. From the other hyperspace transfer point. We’re boxed in, Kassav.”

  “Tell me it’s Nihil,” he said. “Tell me it’s Pan Eyta’s Tempest.”

  “It’s not. The ships all register as being from Eriadu.”

  “That’s where we messed up the extortion job,” Wet Bub said. “Where that moon got obliterated.”

  An entirely unnecessary clarification. Everyone on that bridge knew exactly what they had done at Eriadu.

  What they might not know, though, was the reputation of the people who lived there. Kassav did. He had looked them up after his little visit to their system. What he’d learned had made him curse for a minute straight. Turned out that the Nihil weren’t the only predators in the galaxy.

  Eriadu was one of those warrior planets. A whole culture steeped in ideals of revenge and justice and blood and honor, easily slighted, always having duels and poisoning each other and whatever.

  But for the moment, it seemed like they had stopped squabbling long enough to come together to hunt him.

  “Guess we’re not running after all,” Kassav said. “Tell every ship. Time to fight. Let’s kill ’em all.”

  Everyone on the bridge turned back to their stations, getting ready for battle. They seemed excited, even his idiot lieutenants, who should probably know better.

  Kassav tapped a control on his command chair, and the music started. More wreckpunk, throbbing and pulsing and clanging. He set the volume to full.

  “For the Nihil!” Kassav shouted, painfully closing his maimed hand into a fist and holding it above his head.

  “For the storm!” came the answering cry, anticipatory and eager.

  Kassav looked at his crew, his eyes flitting from face to face.

  In the green light of the Kur Nebula, still pouring through the bridge viewports, they all looked like corpses, three days dead.

  For the Nihil, Kassav thought. For the storm.

  Loden Greatstorm pushed his Vector a bit harder, accelerating toward the wounded Nihil ship through the vacuum, the iron- and rust-colored orb of Elphrona receding behind them. He sensed Indeera doing the same in her own ship.

  Not far now. He knew that a safe jump to lightspeed required a significant amount of distance from Elphrona. Like the world’s surface, the space around the planet was a roiling mass of magnetic fields and gravity distortions. There was no way the Nihil would be able to escape before he and Indeera caught them.

  And then…well, the Force would be his guide. He did not want the Nihil kidnappers to die. He did not want anyone to die, ever—but sometimes, he had found, people chose their own ends, and there was nothing he or even the Force seemed to be able to do about it.

  Well, that was fatalistic. He’d do everything he could to save every life on that ship. But the innocents would have priority, and the line between innocent and guilty had been drawn very clearly when the Nihil chose to throw a young child out the air lock.

  He keyed on his comm. “Bell, do you read me?”

  “Master!” came the immediate response.

  “Did you…”

  “I did,” Bell said. “I caught her, and we came down safely. Her name is Bee. She’s afraid for her brother and father, but she’s all right.”

  Loden grinned.

  “I knew you could do it, kid,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, nothing the Council could come up with for your trials would beat what you just pulled off. I’m going to put you in for elevation to Jedi Knight as soon as this all gets wrapped up.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. You heard me, right, Indeera?”

  “Absolutely, Loden,” came Indeera Stokes across the comm.

  “See, Bell? All set,” Loden said. “But you need to get Bee back to the outpost. Her mother’s there, with Porter Engle. Tell her we’ll have the rest of her family with her before she knows it. Have Porter give her some stew.”

  “I thought I’d introduce her to Ember, too,” Bell said.

  “Perfect. I’m going to sign off, Bell. Indeera and I have some work to do. I look forward to celebrating your elevation, Jedi Knight Zettifar.”

  “Master…thank you.”

  “I’m not your master anymore, Bell. You’re a Jedi Knight.”

  “Not until the Council declares it, and I want you there when it happens. May the Force be with you.”

  “It is, Bell. Don’t worry. See you soon.”

  Loden flipped off his comm and brought his focus back to the Nihil ship. They were within laser range, and sure enough a few bolts whipped back at them from the vessel’s aft cannon.

  He and Indeera each dodged to the side, their Vectors moving as one, easily avoiding the blasts. His comm crackled to life.

  “How do we do this, Loden?” Indeera said.

  “We both have room for one passenger, and there are two Blythes left on that ship. I’ll slow them down, then you’ll get the first one, and I’ll get the second.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. I don’t want to overthink this.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll follow your lead.”

  Loden accelerated, pushing his Vector to a speed that rapidly overtook the Nihil ship.

  “Get ready,” he said—both to Indeera and, at least to some extent, to himself.

  He shoved his control sticks forward and to the side, simultaneously reaching out with the Force and taking the Vector’s reactive control surfaces and boosting them, allowing him to perform a maneuver impossible for any pilot but a Jedi to pull off. Over the comm, he heard Indeera gasp, and despite himself, he found himself smiling.

  The Vector spiraled up and over the Nihil ship, spinning like a drill, avoiding desperate shots from the vessel’s cannons, and ending in a position where his own craft was nose-to-nose with the Nihil’s but flying backward, matching the much larger ship’s speed perfectly. He was close enough to the other ship that he was inside the effective range of its cannons, and as long as he stayed there, it couldn’t hit him.

  But more important, he had a clear view inside its cockpit, where a rather alarmed woman was flying the ship. She was a Nihil, the first he’d seen with her mask off, and she looked like…a person. A youngish human woman with ragged hair cut short, reddish dirt on her face from the sprint across the surface of Elphrona, and two jagged stripes painted down one cheek in blue. A child of the Force, like any other.

  But the Force did not make your decisions for you, and this particular person had done many terrible things, whether by necessity or choice.

  Her reckoning had come due.

  Loden lifted a hand from his control sticks. He moved it gently to one side, locking eyes with the Nihil woman, and spoke.

  “You will slow your ship and open your outer air lock hatch.”

  Through the transparisteel of the cockpit, he saw the woman mouth the words. Loden reserved the mind touch for times of extraordinary necessity—but this was that, if anything ever was. She didn’t need to hear what he had said, either—the technique was aptly named. Mind-to-mind, that’s all you needed.

  Loden kept his eyes focused on the pilot, maintaining the connection in case he had to offer new instructions. He sensed the Nihil ship slowing, and then Indeera, pulling up and alongside it in her Vector. He knew she would have to leap through vacuum to get into the air lock—but it would be a matter of mere seconds, and the Jedi Order trained its members in techniques to withstand the harsh environment of space. These tricks only worked for a few moments—space was space, after all—but he knew Indeera could do what needed to be done.

  In fact, his connection to the Force told him she had already begun.

  A sense of grea
t alarm from inside the ship, quickly quieted. He didn’t know if Indeera had also used the mind touch, or had been forced to kill the other Nihil inside—he knew several had survived the events on Elphrona.

  This will be over soon, he thought.

  Once Indeera finished her work and had retrieved the first Blythe, Loden could infiltrate the Nihil ship the same way. He would disable it, to allow any survivors from the raider crew to be collected by either Elphrona’s security squads or perhaps a Republic vessel. And then he could bring his newly rescued passenger down to the surface to be reunited with their family. Not a bad day’s work, all things—

  From nowhere, appearing all around him—ships, many ships, leaping in from hyperspace, surrounding him and the Nihil vessel and Indeera’s Vector. That should be all but impossible—so many vessels making such a coordinated jump, and so close to a planet—but the ships were there. Too many for him to count, of all different types. One large craft at the center, sleek and menacing, and around it, a swarm of others—but every last one had three glowing, jagged stripes painted on its hull. Once again, the lightning.

  Once again, the Nihil.

  * * *

  The entire fore bulkhead of the Lourna Dee’s bridge was one large viewport, made of triple-hardened transparisteel inside a diamond-core matrix.

  Through it, Lourna Dee could see what she had been sent to this forsaken planet to retrieve—a damaged Nihil Cloudship, which had brought Dent Margrona’s crew to Elphrona so they could kidnap a family and ransom them off to their rich relatives on Alderaan. Near it, two of those annoying little Jedi vessels—Vectors.

  One was right in front of the Cloudship, so close it was shocking the two ships hadn’t collided—but she had heard Jedi pilots could do amazing things.

  Much good it would do them now. It was two Vectors against an entire Nihil Tempest.

  The first ship pulled away from the Cloudship’s nose, trying either to flee or to get into some sort of attack position.

  Lourna Dee snorted.

  Good luck with that, she thought.

  Kassav looked at the battle display, frowning. Almost simultaneously with his order to his Tempest to move into an offensive position, to go on the attack, the Republic Cruisers had disgorged an unending stream of those arrowhead-shaped fighters they used—Skywings—along with a good number of the bigger workhorse ships, the Longbeams.

  His people were fighting back, and mostly giving as good as they got in the small skirmishes, but the big guns on the Republic heavy cruiser and its five smaller companions were lashing out, almost every shot finding a Cloudship. The shields on the New Elite and some of the bigger Nihil ships could withstand those shots—for a while, at least—but the Cloudships? No way. They flashed into a cloud of flame and vaporized durasteel every time a shot found its target.

  The numbers were still on their side, but it couldn’t last—and the ships from Eriadu were getting closer with every second, creeping up on them, implacable. Either his Nihil punched a hole through the Republic fleet and made it to the hyperlane access point, or they might all die right there.

  There was another ship out there, too—the Jedi cruiser. So far, it hadn’t done anything, but there was no way it didn’t have some of those Vectors aboard. That was the last thing he needed.

  “Anything from the Eye?” he called out.

  “Nothing yet, boss,” Wet Bub answered.

  Kassav hadn’t expected anything. He was pretty damn certain no miraculous escape route was going to be uploaded to their Path engine. If he wanted to get back to Marchion Ro and bury his blade in the smug bastard’s creepy eye, he’d have to do it himself.

  He looked at the tactical display, trying to figure out what orders to give. The Republic was chewing his people apart, their disciplined, coordinated attacks incredibly effective against his Tempest, where each pilot was their own master and fought however the hell they wanted. Most of his Nihil were engaging in dogfights, each trying to shoot down a Republic ship, make a big name for themselves, a good story to tell back at the Great Hall. But against trained military, they just couldn’t—

  That’s it, he thought.

  He keyed open a fleet-wide comm channel.

  “My Nihil—this is the Tempest Runner. You’re teaching these Republic fools one hell of a lesson. I’m impressed. But I want them to leave this battle knowing better than to go up against us again. Stop fighting them on their terms. They won’t learn a thing.

  “Fight like the Nihil,” he said. “Fight free. Fight dirty.”

  He grinned.

  “Show them who we are. That’s an order.”

  It took a moment or two for that instruction to sink in, but then one of the larger ships, a repurposed freighter only a little smaller than the New Elite, opened its cargo bay doors. Its engines kicked on and something spilled out, propelled by the momentum, a gelatinous gray goo. Kassav remembered that this particular ship was a hijack. Evidently the new Nihil owners had never emptied the cargo containers, and evidently the ship was originally some kind of waste carrier.

  The sludge oozed out in a noxious flood, coating the Republic fighters pursuing the freighter. Two Skywings spun out and collided, causing an explosion…which ignited the whole load. Flame rippled out in a surging wave, catching every Republic ship that had been coated with the gunk when the Nihil freighter let fly. They all blew up, every one, in a chain reaction of explosions that was one of the most beautiful things Kassav had ever seen.

  Fight dirty, indeed.

  The rest of the Nihil saw it, too, and they got the message. Suddenly it wasn’t about dogfights or head-on battles with your opponents. Kassav watched one of his ships land on one of the bigger Republic craft, then do a high-intensity engine burn right into the bridge viewport. He saw another crew use the harpoon trick that had worked so well in Ab Dalis, ripping apart one of the five cruisers.

  It wasn’t all good news, though—one of his bigger vessels, a light corvette, was under heavy attack from a squadron of Longbeams. Its engines flared out, and the vessel began to drift.

  That’s that, Kassav thought. Blast it. Could’ve used that ship down the road.

  A number of escape pods jettisoned from the ailing Nihil corvette, and the Longbeams immediately broke off their attack and began collecting them with some sort of magnetic clamp apparatus. They towed them back to the nearest big Republic Cruiser, entering its docking bay with the pods trailing behind.

  Kassav worried for a moment about what those prisoners might be able to tell the Republic about the Nihil and its operations, then realized it probably didn’t matter. Things couldn’t get much worse.

  And then the Republic Cruiser blew up, in a massive explosion that also took out a number of smaller craft nearby. At the same time, the engines on the Nihil corvette, the one Kassav had written off, flared back into life, and the ship slewed around, its weapons firing at a nearby set of Skywings.

  Kassav understood what had happened. The escape pods didn’t have his people aboard—they’d been packed with explosives, and when the Republic idiots got all noble and tried to rescue them because…

  “Heh,” he said to himself. “We are all the Republic.”

  He keyed the comm back on.

  “That’s it!” he cried. “Smash a hole right through them! I’m with you all!”

  He keyed off the comm system and lifted his hand to chew the edge of his thumb—a nervous habit—until he realized he no longer had a thumb on that hand.

  “Any word from Marchion Ro?” he called over to Wet Bub.

  In response, just a shake of the head, long, dangling ears flopping against Bub’s skull.

  Not that he had expected anything. It was Kassav against the galaxy. Just like always.

  * * *

  Admiral Kronara couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He didn’t expect a bunch of c
riminals to fight with anything resembling honor, but this was…despicable.

  One of the larger Nihil vessels had just released a huge swath of reactor by-products from its engines, creating a tail of invisible, deeply toxic radiation that not only snarled sensors, but poisoned any pilot that happened to fly through it. They’d be condemning them to a slow, agonizing death unless they reached medical facilities immediately.

  That will catch some of their own ships, too, he thought. It has to. They’re killing their own people.

  The Nihil didn’t seem to care. About that, about anything, beyond causing as much damage as they possibly could.

  That strategy was succeeding. He was down two of his Pacifier-class patrol cruisers, the Marillion of Alderaan and the Yekkabird from Corellia, along with their crews and a good number of the Longbeam attack ships and Skywing fighters.

  He wouldn’t say the Nihil were winning, exactly—their tactics were all offense, no defense, and they were taking hits, their numbers decreasing…but they weren’t exactly losing, either. This had to end, and soon. It was time to escalate his response.

  Admiral Kronara checked the displays again, looking at the position of the small Eriaduan flotilla moving inexorably toward the battle.

  Not close enough yet, he thought.

  “Get me the Ataraxia,” he said, calling over to his communications officer.

  Master Jora Malli’s voice came over the comm a few moments later. “Admiral,” she said. “How can I help?”

  “The Nihil are using unorthodox tactics, ugly moves. We can beat them, but RDC pilots don’t train for things like this. It’ll take time, and it’ll cost lives. If you and your people are willing—”

  The Jedi agreed before he finished the sentence. “We’ll see what we can do, Admiral. The Force provides quite an edge in battle.”

  “We’d be grateful for the assist,” he said.

  “Of course,” she said, and ended the transmission.