THE VERY SECOND the medkit bleeped to tell her its work was done, Larin slid her half hand free and headed for the refresher. She was tired and ached all over, but this couldn’t wait. There was only so much she could ask of a self-cleaning body glove. A good rinse was exactly what it needed.
When she was done, she did as Ula had suggested, and looked through his suitcases for anything she might be able to wear. Much of it was formal wear and still vacuum-sealed in its original packaging. A lot of it was also made from more expensive natural fabric, and therefore not amenable to on-the-fly adjustments, but Ula wasn’t significantly larger than she. Eventually she found dark blue pants and a matching jacket with a militaristic cut. The sleeves and legs came up to match her length, and the other measurements pulled in tight enough. With the black body glove underneath, she almost looked stylish—but for the bruises on her face and the missing fingers of her left hand.
Larin considered what she had told Ula she would do, and rejected it. She was tired, but knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. The first thing she’d noticed on leaving the refresher was that the ship wasn’t moving. It was still in orbit about Hutta.
She explored the main level of the Auriga Fire. Hetchkee was sound asleep in the crew quarters, and like any good soldier hadn’t been disturbed by her rummaging around. The soft male voices coming down the stairwell from the cockpit belonged to Jet and Ula. All the holds she poked her head into were empty, bar one.
Shigar sat cross-legged with hands folded across his lap and eyes closed. The silver scrap sat innocently on the floor in front of him. His face was expressionless, but she could feel the tension radiating from him like an audible twang. He looked like she had felt half an hour earlier: exhausted, dirty, and beaten half to death.
She went and got the medkit.
“Your arm,” she told him when she returned. “How are you going to achieve anything if you bleed out here in the dark?”
Without moving a single other muscle, he opened his eyes.
“I can’t do it anyway, Larin.”
“You know, you’ll never be able to prove that true,” she said, holding the medkit at him like a challenge. “All you can prove is that you’ve stopped trying.”
“But if you distract me—”
“That’s not the same thing as giving up. That’s called a regroup. I’m your reinforcements.”
His mask of concentration finally broke into a faint smile. “I’d happily trade places with you.”
“Me, too,” she said, raising her injured hand.
He took the medkit from her without another word.
She explained the clothing situation while he tended his arm. He nodded vaguely. She slid down the wall and sat with her back against it. He didn’t stop her. By the light spilling through the open door, he looked much older than she knew him to be.
“Everyone is waiting for me,” he said as the medkit hummed away. “Not just you and Master Satele. Supreme Commander Stantorrs, hundreds of soldiers and starfighter pilots, the entire Republic—waiting for me to do something I’ve never been able to do. Not properly, anyway. It comes and goes. It’s not reliable. I can tell you where your armor came from, but this thing …?”
The piece of droid-nest glinted impassively back at him.
“What about my armor?” she said.
“Once, when I brushed against it, I got a flash of its former owner. She was a sniper from Tatooine. She got a medal for taking out a local Exchange boss.”
“What happened to her?”
“She didn’t die in the armor or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Larin nodded, feeling a small amount of relief. “Maybe she was promoted out of the field and took the armor with her. That happens, sometimes.”
“But she sold it,” he said. “Would she have needed the money that badly?”
“Her kids might have. It’s old armor, Shigar, last in action before the Treaty of Coruscant. Took me a lot of work to get it into the shape it was, let me tell you.”
“You could’ve bought new armor anytime,” he said, “but you didn’t want to. It’s a symbol standing in for all the things that need to be fixed.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Just a guess.”
His green eyes watched her unblinkingly. She felt sometimes that they looked right into her. Sometimes she liked that feeling. Sometimes she didn’t.
“You’re thinking too much,” she told him.
“That’s what I’ve been trained to do.”
“I’m sure it isn’t. I’m sure the Grand Master trained you to think just enough, and no more. But the lesson hasn’t quite sunk in yet because people only learn it the hard way. And that’s where you are right now. Absolutely stuck, in a hard place. Right?”
Still he didn’t look away. “Maybe.”
“Maybe nothing. You know you have to do something. You know what it is and you know why it has to be done. But you can’t do it because you’re too busy going over it and over it, making sure you’re absolutely right. Most of you knows you are right, but there’s a small part that wants to think it over one more time. The reasons, the method, the fallout. Whatever. Like you can plan everything in advance and then just sit back and watch it happen, so perfectly you don’t even have to be there to do it. Things will just happen on their own. Maybe you don’t need to do anything if you think about it hard enough. That’s always worth hoping for.”
“You’re speaking from experience, I can tell.”
“You bet,” she said, but then she stopped. The words had dried up.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“No, I do. I need to tell someone, one day. It might as well be you, now.” She felt her face growing warm, and she turned away, hoping he couldn’t see. “I ratted on a superior officer.”
“I presume you had a reason.”
“The best. Sergeant Donbar was corrupt. But that didn’t change anything. I went against the chain of command and reported him to his superiors. They slapped him down and discharged him, but the reason for it was hushed up. There were always going to people who didn’t believe me, thought I was doing it out of a grudge, but because of the secrecy I couldn’t defend myself. No one wants Special Forces to look bad, and he was about as bad as it gets. He was discharged, and eventually I quit. It got way too uncomfortable.”
“Do you regret it?”
“Sometimes,” she said, thinking of the Zabrak on Coruscant, “but it had to be done. If I tried to capture the weeks of agonizing I went through leading up to me actually doing it, I’d bore you to death.”
The skin around his eyes tightened. “And now you think I should just get over myself and do what I have to do.”
“You don’t agree?”
“Not at all. Finding a planet that could be anywhere in Wild Space is a little different from putting in a report, don’t you think?”
“Sure it’s different. You don’t stand to lose every friend you’ve ever had if you do the right thing. And you’ve actually been training for this most of your life. Remember, Shigar, that you didn’t have to crawl up from nowhere to get where you are. You were handpicked from everyone on Kiffu to be a Jedi Knight. Whatever happens today, you’ll go back to the life you know. So you can do it at your own pace, or you can do it when you need to do it. I for one think there’s only one right choice.”
He looked away. “You came to tell me you think I’ve got it easy. That makes a huge difference. Thanks.”
His sarcasm stung. Larin didn’t know what she’d come to him for, really, except to break him out of his funk. She was surprised at how deep the feelings ran and the harshness with which she had spoken. It was hard to tell how much was for his benefit.
“All right, then,” she said. “I’ll leave you to it.”
When she stood, her knees practically shook with fatigue.
“I will do it,” he said. “I have to.”
“Well, keep it down when you do. I’m going to catch up on some sleep.”
She didn’t wait for his snappy comeback, if he had one. Letting her legs work on autopilot, she went to a bunk in the crew quarters and was asleep before her head hit the pillow.
SHIGAR LISTENED TO her go. Already he regretted the way he had reacted to her combined advice and confession. Clearly, she had been building up to the latter part for some time, and he should have showed more compassion. But he was so bound up in his own issues, his own self-centered mess, that he hadn’t been able to see the raw wound she had exposed to him. Not her hand, but the aching severance from everything she had once held dear.
How would he feel, he asked himself, if he had to turn his back on the Jedi Order? It was impossible to imagine Master Satele ever doing anything counter to the Code he lived by, but famous Jedi had fallen to the dark side before. What if he discovered that she was in fact working against the Council? And what if he knew that her word would be taken against his? Was his sense of justice strong enough to make the call anyway, as Larin’s had been?
Once he would have been completely sure of himself. Now, after his dealings with Tassaa Bareesh, he wasn’t so sure.
And still there was the matter of the mysterious world, waiting to be resolved.
The piece of droid-nest glinted impassively back at him.
Larin was right on one point: sitting around thinking about it would get him nowhere. All the time he had been isolated in the dark, he hadn’t even touched the silver sliver. He had been trying and failing to get his mind into the right state, believing that there was no point even starting until he was completely ready.
Larin’s faith in you is not unwarranted. Perhaps you should have faith in her, too.
Shigar remembered how he had felt when Master Satele had ordered him to go to Hutta. He had invited Larin along because he felt she needed him to prove something to herself. She was full of bluster but lacking a clear sense of purpose. Now he understood why that core of her life was missing, and it was he who needed to prove something. If he didn’t, he would do much worse than let down his Master and the Republic. He would fail himself.
There’s only one right choice.
He picked up the sliver of metal. It was cool and sharp-edged to the touch. If he put it in his right fist and squeezed, it would surely draw blood.
He engulfed it in his fist and squeezed.
The bottom dropped out of the hold and he was suddenly falling.
His first thought was to grab hold of something and hang on, both mentally and physically. This was utterly unlike any psychometric information he had ever received before. But what he was reading this time was unlike anything he’d tried touching before, so fighting the vision could be self-defeating. Perhaps being plunged in the deep end was exactly what he needed. He braced himself against the rush of vertigo and tried to take from the experience what he could.
Falling. At first there seemed to be nothing more to it than that. Then he noticed details highly reminiscent of the strange blue geometry of hyperspace. Was that what he was glimpsing? The nest’s last journey, or its first?
There was a blinding flash of light, and he stopped with a jerk. All was dark again. Voices came and went, too indistinct to make out words. They were raised, though, as if in an argument. He could make out no faces, no locations, no coordinates. Just a feeling: that the thing the sliver had belonged to was determined to survive.
The Cinzia, he thought. He was spooling back through the droid factory’s history, in reverse. It clearly possessed a rudimentary self-awareness, which shouldn’t have come as a surprise since it had single-handedly organized the surreptitious creation of four advanced combat droids without being detected. Even if most of its internal algorithms were automated, it had taken a certain degree of cunning to know when to lay low and when to become active.
The flash was probably the explosion that had almost killed it.
Shigar wanted to get moving again. The next jump would be the one that would take him home, to where the droid factory had originated. But his eagerness only caused the vision to fray about the edges—and suddenly he was dumped back onto the hard floor of the hold with nothing to show for the experience.
He sat, breathing heavily and cursing his impatience.
When he opened his right hand, the sliver rested on his palm in a growing pool of blood.
What had he done this time, compared with all the other times before, that had worked?
He could guess the answer, and it was dismayingly simple. He hadn’t done anything special. He’d just done it. The Force had moved through him in exactly the right way, and the knowledge he’d been looking for had come to him. It hadn’t taken any particular degree of concentration, or any fancy mental footwork. He had done it because he could do it. There was a fair chance he hadn’t always been able to do it; he was sure that all those years of training hadn’t been for nothing. But at some point, as Larin had said, all the extra thinking he did on the subject had been wasted. It had, in fact, been counterproductive.
The next question was: could he do it again?
He didn’t need to ask. He didn’t want to ask it. The time for questions was over.
He transferred the sliver to his left hand and squeezed again.
A second vision of hyperspace enfolded him. Falling faster this time. The blue tunnel was twisted, warped. He felt dizzy. Mysterious forces tugged at him, shook him violently at times. He felt like he was running down a steep mountain and that at any moment he might trip and tumble headlong all the way to the bottom. As the droid factory’s journey unspooled backward in time, it took him into a deep, dark place.
Shigar didn’t question the vision. He let it unfold at its own pace. The shuddering grew worse as he neared the Cinzia’s origin, until he felt that he might be torn apart.
When it ceased, all was quiet. He felt a sense of homecoming, even though that was surely illusory. The factory was a machine, and it had been leaving its homeworld, not arriving there. But the feeling was persuasive. He felt that he belonged here, and that here—wherever here was—was important and precious. Unique. Shigar understood that feeling, even though he’d never felt it for Kiffu, his birthplace. Shigar had been a citizen of the galaxy for too long to feel close ties anywhere.
Again he thought of Larin and her changed circumstances. She, too, had taken great strides across the Republic and beyond. But now she was stuck on Coruscant—or had been until his arrival. She had never expressed any unhappiness about her relative confinement, but he could only imagine how it must feel.
The droid factory felt as though it belonged. Wherever it came from, that was where it had wanted to be. And Larin had killed it.
Perhaps, he thought, that had been a mercy.
More voices, this time with blurry faces. Human men and women; Shigar didn’t recognize any of them. He made out some words, though, including the hexes’ furious catch-cry. It was being chanted by a group of people, including a woman of middle years, with short ash-blond hair and intelligent eyes. Her hand was raised above her head. She was shaking her fist at the sky—but it wasn’t a sky at all. It was a roof. She was in a large space with a tubular tank at its center, filled with red.
Shigar didn’t fight the vision. He just told it: I want to be inside her head.
And he was. He was enfolded by a turbulent flow of thoughts and sensory impressions. He tumbled, slightly in awe of how easy it had been. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Perhaps there was something special about her, this Lema Xandret.
For it was indeed her. He was buffeted by her rage. He found strength in her determination to live unfettered. He grew weary at the understanding that all things must eventually be compromised, or die. He felt satisfaction at all her achievements. He wept at the mingled love and loss of a child.
Shigar looked through her eyes at the world she had adopted for her own, and felt pride tinged with worry, and an intense desire for revenge.
We do not recognize your authority!
And there it was, at last. Everything he had been looking for: the dense, metallic world, rich with change and vigor, where no one would have looked for it in a million years.
His eyes snapped open. He didn’t feel the pain of the cuts to his palms. He had forgotten the various aches and pains of his body, earned the hard way on Hutta. He felt only a degree of gratitude that he had never experienced before, blended with a powerful sense of achievement.
Climbing to his feet, he hurried to the crew quarters. Larin was already fast asleep. He thought about waking her to tell her the news but reined in the impulse. She deserved her rest. He could thank her later.
Ula and Jet were in the cockpit. He clambered up the ladder and burst into their conversation.
“I know where it is!”
“The world?” asked Ula, looking up in surprise.
“Yes. I found it!”
“Good for you, mate,” said Jet. “Got some coordinates for me?”
“Not exactly,” Shigar said, “but I can describe it to you. I think it’ll be fairly easy to pin down.”
“Well, great. I’m very tired of the view here. Take a seat and we’ll get started.”
Shigar felt his sense of triumph ebb slightly at the thought of what lay ahead of them.
“What?” asked Ula, staring at his face. “Is there a problem?”
“You could say that.”
Their faces fell in unison as he told them.
Finding the planet was one thing.
Getting there would be another entirely.
SPECIALIST PEDISIC LOOKED up as Ax walked into the quarantine bay. The space had been transformed. Large pieces of equipment hovered over the dissection table, connected by thick cables to the bulk cruiser’s main processor arrays. The remains of the hex had been splayed out like a delicate tapestry, revealing intricate details of its structure and function. The cell walls that made it robust as well as lightweight were threaded with shining metal, suggesting that they performed key functions as well as providing internal support. She saw several fist-sized globes like round, silver eggs nestling against more familiar components. The legs had been removed entirely from complex-looking joints and stacked like metal antlers in a transparisteel jar.
“I have much to report, sir,” the specialist said. She had rolled her sleeves up, and her arms were smeared with brown-black goo up to her elbows.
“Then do so.” Ax stood with her hands on her hips at one end of the table. She had been generous. The specialist had had more than an hour. If Darth Chratis had not been so conversational in his discipline, Ax would have come back much sooner.
“Well, the first thing I can tell you is that this thing, whatever it is, isn’t finished.” Pedisic selected a slender-tipped tool from the many surrounding her work space and pointed as she talked. “See here: its neuro-web was interrupted before the completion of a full suite of reflex analogues. And here: there’s a full array of senses about to come online down this dorsal region, but it’s totally unconnected to the central computer. The reporting system has only grown to here and has yet to join the two.”
“You mean it was released too early, before it was ready?”
“There’s evidence to suggest that it was continuing to develop after it left the factory that built it. I suggest this thing would have finished itself, given time.”
Ax remembered how ferociously the thing had fought. And it hadn’t even been complete! “What would the final form have been like?”
“It’s impossible to say. The main data bank doesn’t contain a single template. Instead there are many, with lots of transitional forms. And there’s a biological component, too, that I find very puzzling. This brown stuff must perform some function, otherwise it wouldn’t be present in such quantities. Perhaps it acts as a randomizing agent, encouraging it to adapt more fluidly. It’s hard to analyze, though, because it’s been so severely cooked.”
She looked at Ax reproachfully, as though blaming her for the condition of the sample. In this case, Ax was completely innocent. Either the Jedi or the Mandalorian had done that job for her.
And either way, it was irrelevant.
“So you’ve accessed the brain, then.”
“Yes. Just this minute.”
“How smart was it? Could it fly a ship, for instance?”
“Not likely, my lord, but if it needed to, it could change itself so it could. Like birds grow new parts of their brains in spring to learn new songs. It’s just a matter of—”
Ax waved her silent. “Is the data encoded?”
“Naturally, but the cipher is based on an Imperial system that went out of use fifteen years ago.”
When Lema Xandret fled the Empire, Ax remembered.
“I’ll crack it soon. Don’t worry, my lord. The fact that the thing was incomplete actually made getting in easier. All I have to do is map the architecture and find my way around …”
Ax didn’t pay attention to the specifics. And she hadn’t been aware that she’d looked worried. If this specialist couldn’t do the job, she’d just get another.
“All I want to know is where this thing came from,” she said. “And I want to know now.”
Specialist Pedisic nodded. “Yes, my lord. With your permission, I’ll resume my examination.”
Ax indicated with a flick of one index finger that the specialist should return to work.
While Ax waited, she paced the crowded space, reading raw data and coming to her own conclusions. Nothing she saw contradicted the specialist’s opinions, and there was much more to be absorbed than could have been crammed into that short conversation. The globes contained the hex’s primary processors, where sensory data converged, was exchanged, and provoked various environmental responses. The weapons on each hand were little different in principle from standard blaster technology, but remarkably miniaturized and integrated into a limb capable of gripping and supporting weight as well. This hex had no camouflage system to analyze, and unfortunately the electromirror defense was too badly damaged to reverse-engineer. Whole sections of its body had been fried to ash.
“I’ve cracked the code, my lord,” said the specialist.
Ax hurried to peer over her shoulder. Scrolling through a holopad was a list of symbols—the blocks from which the hex’s mind and all its actions were built. None of the commands, language rules, and algorithms, however, looked remotely familiar to Ax.
“These controlled the hex? The droid, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Could we use them to control others?”
“I fear not. These particular commands are generated within the device itself—a unique and purely internal system for coordinating its many parts. Each droid would have a different system, so what we’ve gained is merely the language for this droid, which is now dead.”
“All right, but you have translated it, in this case?”
“Yes.”
“So find me what I’m looking for. Time is short.” I have a Mandalorian to beat, she said silently to herself, and if I lose, you are going to pay dearly.
The specialist bent low over the section of the hex she had exposed, remotely operating manipulators capable of tinier measurements than any human could make. Data scrolled dizzyingly in all directions through the holopad, too fast for Ax to follow. Her head soon ached from concentrating too hard on something she didn’t really understand.
“You have one minute,” she told the specialist.
“My lord, I’ve found it,” Pedisic said. “Name, hyperspace coordinates—”
“Give them to me.” A sudden upwelling of excitement filled her. “Now!”
Where are you, Mother?
Specialist Pedisic rattled off a long string of numbers. Ax closed her eyes, visualizing roughly where the location fit into the galactic disk.
It didn’t. It was well above the Mid Rim, in the middle of nowhere.
Ax opened her eyes. “Are you sure that’s what’s in its head?”
“Positive, sir. Although it doesn’t make sense, does it? There’s nothing out there. Nothing at all.”
Well, Ax told herself, that wasn’t entirely true. There were cold dwarfs and orphaned gas giants and all manner of strange stellar beasts. And it was an undiscovered world, after all, fit for traitorous droid makers on the run from the Sith. It wasn’t unreasonable that people desperate to keep their location a secret might have traveled parsecs out of their way to obscure any chance of pursuit.
But what had led Lema Xandret to that isolated haven in the first place? What had encouraged her to look in that direction? The odds of her taking a ship on a long jump to nowhere and just happening to arrive at a habitable world were minute.
“Run the coordinates through Imperial records,” she told the specialist. “I’m guessing we’ll find something in there.”
The request went to the ship’s data banks. Ax tapped her finger on the dissection table as she waited for the response. It took longer than expected, and she had time enough to observe just how much the baked organic residue looked like dried blood …
With a chime, the holopad produced a single line of information.
“Now, that really is impossible,” said the specialist.
“Try again.”
The specialist repeated the procedure from scratch, extracting the embedded data and feeding it into the records.
The same result came back.
“It must be a bluff,” the specialist said. “A false location to throw us off the scent.”
“I don’t think so,” said Ax. “Everything about it looks wrong, but that tells me we must be right. I told you we’d find something, didn’t I?”
“But it’s a black hole,” said the specialist.
“I know. I can read it with my own eyes.”
Ax felt as though that distant, dead star had reached out and clutched her with its irresistible gravity. She was absolutely certain that this was where she would find Lema Xandret, builder of droids who spoke with her own voice.
“I think you’d better give me the name, now,” she said. “We’ll be leaving as soon as the course is plotted.”
IT WAS AN UNASSUMING NAME, Ula thought as the Auriga Fire shook around him, for a colony that shouldn’t exist.
Sebaddon.
“You know we’re insane, don’t you?” Jet said over the sound of the ship’s straining hyperdrives. “If the black hole’s mass shadow doesn’t tear us to pieces, its gravity will suck us in when we arrive.”
“We plotted the course to account for either possibility,” said Shigar. “We’ll be okay. Probably.”
“I’ll try not to think about it,” said Ula through ground teeth.
“I’m just trying not to throw up,” said Larin.
Ula twisted in his seat to look back at her. She winked.
“How much longer?” Shigar asked.
His calm confidence was infuriating. Ula didn’t know how Jet put up with it.
“Somewhere between a minute and never. Most likely the latter.”
The ship creaked from nose to tail as though something had grabbed it at either end and twisted. Ula clutched the arms of his chair and closed his eyes. This wasn’t what he had signed up for. Being an informer was supposed to be sitting in the shadows, stealing information, and plotting the odd assassination. It wasn’t fighting killer droids, being tortured by Mandalorians, or diving headlong into a black hole. That’s what Cipher Agents did.
A strong hand gripped his elbow. His eyes flickered open.
“Don’t worry,” said Larin. “We’ll make it.”
He nodded and forced his hands to release their grip on the chair. Let her think he was reassured, when in fact he was the exact opposite. Shigar’s psychometric revelation had raised her faith in him to new heights, although there was a new tension between them now, as though their relationship had fundamentally shifted. That, Ula thought, might be the most galling thing about his situation.
Her hand slipped away. Her good hand. The one cut in half by the Sith was encased in a mechanical glove, a paddle-like mitten that enabled her to grip, little more. That was the full extent of the Auriga Fire’s prosthetic provisions.
The ship lurched again. Clunker came forward, swaying and rocking, and ran a cable from his midsection into the main console.
“What’s he doing?” Ula asked.
“Syncing his mind to the ship’s computer,” said Jet past his droid’s battered casing.
“You’re letting him fly the ship?”
“He’s got a good head on his shoulders, and his reaction time’s much faster than mine.”
As if to disprove Jet’s assertion, the Auriga Fire tilted alarmingly to starboard, then whipped back to port. Ula was thrown about in his seat harness, but somehow Clunker managed to stay both upright and plugged in.
A moment later the ship’s flight grew calm. The vibrations eased; the complaints from both hyperdrive and hull receded into the background. The knot of tension in Ula’s stomach began to unwind.
“Okay,” said Jet, punching buttons. “It’s coming up now. Hold on!”
Ula stiffened again as the warped textures of hyperspace receded. Normally, a speed-stretched vista of stars would take its place, but out here, on the very fringes of the galaxy, they were pointing out into the relative black. Only the faint light of distant stellar islands existed to be warped by the ship’s motion.
With a gut-roiling wrench, the Auriga Fire returned to realspace, and the shaking resumed.
Jet shut down the hyperdrives and put the repulsors on full. Ula was pressed into his seat as the ship came about. Sensors swept the sky ahead, revealing vistas unseen by anyone apart from Lema Xandret and her companions in the history of the galaxy.
It was much lighter than Ula had expected. That was his first impression. As the ship hove about and the black hole came into view, he saw not a dark absence of light but two bright yellow jets squirting from either pole of the singularity. That was what remained of the hole’s last meal—a dead star, perhaps, or a lonely gas giant that had been unfortunate enough to cross paths with this bottomless monster. As though someone had crammed too much food into their mouth at once, some of the meal squirted back into space, blazing away like celestial torches against the backdrop of the galaxy.
The second thing Ula noticed was the galaxy itself. The ship and its passengers were far enough away from the galaxy’s inhabited disk that they could see it from the outside. A beautiful spiral with a fat central bulge, it occupied almost half of the sky. As it swung into view, Ula forgot his anxieties for a moment and experienced nothing but breathless awe. Every nebula, cluster, and gulf was revealed to him with more clarity and beauty than any map could show. It was hard to believe that something so sublime could be the locus of so much war and grief.
“There’s the planet,” said Jet, playing his instruments like a maestro.
“Sebaddon? Where?” Shigar peered out at the spectacular vista.
“There.” Jet indicated a display. Ula could see nothing more than a dot. “It’s farther out than I expected. We’ll loop around the hole and catch it on the upswing.”
“Is that safe?” Ula asked.
“Relatively. As long as we don’t come too close.”
Ula didn’t want to ask: Relative to what?
Shigar was watching the display. “No sign of any other ships,” he said. “There’s a small moon.”
“How could it have a moon?” asked Hetchkee from the seat behind Ula.
“How could it be here at all?” added Larin.
“A black hole will kill you if you come too close,” said Shigar, “but not if you’re at a safe distance. Things can easily orbit it. Sebaddon, any random piece of junk it’s snapped up over the years, us.”
The way the ship was rattling didn’t make Ula feel remotely safe. “What about heat?” he asked. “Those jets are hot, but not that hot.”
“As the planet orbits, the hole’s gravity will stretch and squeeze it, stopping its core from solidifying. I bet we’ll see volcanoes when we get closer. That must be what’s bringing all the rare metals to the surface—and carbon dioxide, too, which would also help keep the atmosphere warm.”
The jets were getting visibly larger ahead. Clunker remained plugged in. Sebaddon was still invisible to the naked eye, and Ula gave up looking for it.
An alarm sounded. “Ships,” said Jet, “behind us, exactly where we came out.”
“Who do they belong to?” asked Larin.
“Wait until we’ve gone around. Then I’ll be able to tell you.”
The display dissolved into static as they fell deeper into the black hole’s frighteningly intense magnetic field. A smell of ozone filled the cockpit. Anything containing iron began to vibrate at an annoyingly high pitch.
There was no sense of weight because they were free-falling around the hole, using its gravitational pull to launch them out to where the planet was orbiting. Still Ula felt as though he was being simultaneously stretched and squeezed, just like Shigar had described when talking about the planet. Tidal effects, they were called. His lungs struggled to pull in enough air, and purple spots danced in front of his eyes.
Then they were past and the pressure began to ease. He sagged back into the chair, sweating heavily and thanking the Emperor he was still alive.
“Right,” said Jet, “that’s the hard part over. Thanks, Clunker. Sebaddon coming up ahead. We’ll make orbital insertion in about a minute. As for those ships …” He scanned the revived sensor displays. “I count fifteen, with Republic transponder codes. Stantorrs must have moved Coruscant itself to get them here this fast.”
Shigar nodded. It was clear he, too, was impressed. “No sign of Stryver?”
“That’s what the scopes say.”
“What about the Empire?” asked Ula.
“The only ships here are those fifteen and us,” said Jet.
“How would the Sith know where to come, anyway?” asked Larin. “They didn’t have the navicomp.”
“They might have thought of something else, like we did,” said Ula, trying to keep his hopes up even though he phrased it as a warning. “Best not to underestimate them.”
“Indeed,” Larin said. “There it is,” she added, pointing through the forward ports.
Ula craned to see.
Sebaddon was a small world, scarred by tectonic activity, just as Shigar had predicted. Its surface ranged from gray basalt to red-glowing mantle exposed to the atmosphere by constant plate motion. The atmosphere was dense enough to breathe and showed signs of both clouds and precipitation. There were no oceans, just the occasional shining surfaces on the cooler parts of the planet that might have been lakes.
“If that’s water,” Larin said, “the surface could actually be habitable.”
Near one of the “lakes” was a cluster of bright radiation sources, indicating a city of some kind. Elsewhere on the unfolding globe were other bright points, possibly mines or smaller settlements.
“Someone’s been busy,” said Jet. “How long have they been here?”
“We don’t know,” said Shigar.
“I’d guess twenty years, assuming only a small group to start with. The infrastructure is patchy, and there are some places they haven’t spread out to yet.”
Jet pointed at the viewscreen as he talked. There were no ships in orbit or satellites. The tiny moon was completely untouched.
“Do you want me to hail them?” he asked.
“No,” Shigar told him. “Wait for Master Shan to arrive. She should be the one to make first contact.”
“What about Ula?” asked Larin. “He’s the Republic envoy.”
“No offense,” said Shigar, turning to speak directly to Ula, “someone superior to both of us should handle this. I hope you understand.”
“Completely,” he said, with manufactured grace. He would have preferred to bungle a Republic approach to the valuable world in the hope that his enemy’s overtures would be repulsed. But there was no way to argue the point without making people suspicious. He would just have to bide his time and hope another opportunity arose.
The Auriga Fire slipped neatly into a long polar orbit around Sebaddon, and the ship’s engines fell blessedly quiet. Clunker disconnected himself and returned to his place in the corner. It had been hours of racket and mayhem ever since they’d commenced the last jump, and Ula was profoundly glad it was over.
Jet clearly shared his sentiments. The smuggler stood up and tapped at the shielding above the instrument panels. “Come on,” he muttered. “I know it’s here somewhere …”
A hidden panel popped open, and he slipped a hand inside. “Aha! Those fragging Hutts didn’t find everything, thank goodness.”
The hand reappeared in view, holding a slender bottle of golden liquid. Jet cracked the seal and knocked back a swig. “Anyone else for a toast? To making it alive, despite crazy passengers and unreliable directions?”
Jet’s behavior went largely ignored. For the moment, all eyes were on Master Satele’s approaching flotilla. Like Jet, she had chosen to come around the black hole rather than try to power outward against its considerable pull. The vast forces acting on the ships were much more apparent from the outside. Ula was shocked by the speeds they reached at their closest points to the black hole. One of them failed to make the correct insertion and drifted just a fraction off its course. Instantly the hole snatched at it, tumbling it end-over-end into the gaping maw. It disappeared with a scream of X-rays.
One by one, the remaining fourteen ships came out the other side, shaken but intact.
“See if you can raise them yet,” said Shigar. “Code word hawk-bat.”
“Will do.” Jet capped the bottle and put it away before turning to the comm. “Long-range subspace is scrambled by the singularity, so you can’t call home, but we should be able to open short-range transmissions with them in a moment or two.”
“Weird to think that this could all be over in a few minutes,” said Larin as Jet attempted to hail the approaching ships. “I mean, Stryver has either lost interest or fallen into the hole. The Empire has no clue where we’ve gone. Once Master Shan gets in touch with Lema Xandret, our job is done.”
“You’ve forgotten the Hutts,” said Ula. “If they have put a homing device on the ship, they’ll soon track us down.”
“Only if they’re looking for the signal in the right direction. And who’d think to look up here? It’s the perfect hiding place.”
Jet had a point, but Ula didn’t want to admit it. Once Sebaddon was annexed by the Republic, there was nothing he could do but report the planet’s position when he returned to Coruscant, long after the issue of its ownership had been resolved. His mission was on the brink of utter failure, and there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it.
“That Mandalorian seemed pretty canny to me,” chimed in Hetchkee. “I can’t see him falling into a black hole, unless he was pushed.”
“I’m of the same mind,” said Shigar. “It would be unwise to assume we’ve seen the last of him.”
“Got her,” said Jet, falling back into his seat in satisfaction. “Go ahead, Grand Master.”
“Very good work, Shigar,” crackled the voice of Satele Shan from the subspace communicator.
“Thank you, Master.” The Padawan was clearly buoyed by the praise.
“The Supreme Commander would like you to return Envoy Vii to Coruscant as soon as possible.”
“With your permission,” said Shigar, “we’d like to join the companies you brought with you and observe the negotiations.”
“Hang on a minute, mate—” said Jet, but Shigar cut him off.
“We’ve been chasing Lema Xandret for so long. It seems a shame to come all this way and just turn back.”
Ula didn’t know what he thought about that prospect. On the one hand, he expected nothing more interesting than very familiar diplomatic wrangling; on the other hand he was in no hurry to report his failure to either of his masters.
“I expected that,” Master Satele replied with the hint of a smile in her voice. “Colonel Gurin has command of the fleet. I’ll suggest you fall in with Second Company and take the place of the ship we lost. Expect a tactical feed shortly.”
“Thank you again, Master,” Shigar said, surrendering control of the comm to an unhappy Jet Nebula. Already instructions and telemetry were flowing into the Auriga Fire from the approaching ships. When Jet patched his ship’s computer into the feed, it would become part of a much larger tactical entity, no longer a free agent.
“Cheer up,” said Shigar to Jet with a grin. “You’ve worked for the Republic before, haven’t you?”
“Sure, but only for their money. Not for glory or the fun of it, like you seem to.”
“It won’t be for long. I just want to see this.”
“You’re not fooling anyone, Shigar. I know you don’t want to make good on your deal with Tassaa Bareesh.”
Shigar pulled down the corners of his mouth but said nothing to deny the charge.
The cruiser Master Satele occupied hove past them, a golden lozenge that looked deceptively smaller than it actually was, with a command nacelle protruding like an insect’s sting from the rear and a hull studded with turbolaser and ion cannon blisters. By craning his neck, Ula could make out the telemetry streaming into the Auriga Fire. The cruiser was called the Corellia. He recognized its name from Supreme Command Stantorrs’s reports.
Jet surrendered his ship to Republic command. Soon they were just one of eight vessels obeying instructions from Colonel Gurin. The assembly of ships moved smoothly into a lower orbit, juggling course and attitude changes with confident ease. Cheerfully business-like in-tership chatter filled the comm, both biological and droid. Clunker’s usual blank posture became more attentive. Ula, too, listened closely for valuable intel. In such tense times, military protocols changed almost daily.
“I’m registering activity down below,” said Jet. “Xandret and her people know we’re here.”
“Why aren’t they saying anything, then?” asked Larin.
“Perhaps they’re shy.”
“What kind of activity?” asked Shigar.
“Heat dumps, mainly, perhaps reactors firing up. A couple look like industrial sites, but their signatures are off the scale.”
“Are you passing the data on to Colonel Gurin?”
“He’s seeing exactly what we’re seeing, unless he’s admiring the view elsewhere.”
The galaxy formed a beautiful pinwheel backdrop as Satele Shan made her first broadcast to the people of Sebaddon.
“My name is Grand Master Satele Shan,” she said, broadcasting on all frequencies, since most commonly used bands were clogged by radiation from the black hole. “I come not in the name of the Republic, but on behalf of the upholders of peace and justice across the galaxy.”
“What’s that all about?” asked Hetchkee.
“It’s Jedi double talk,” said Larin. “She doesn’t want the Sebaddonites to think they’re about to be invaded.”
“Even though she’s riding at the head of a fleet of Republic warships?”
“Even so.”
Shigar raised a hand for silence. No one had replied, so Master Satele was trying again.
“We have reason to believe that a diplomatic mission sent from Sebaddon was intercepted before it could reach its destination. We are not responsible for its destruction but I wish to convey to you our sin-cerest regrets and to share with you the data we have collected regarding this unfortunate incident.”
“More activity,” said Jet. “Those hot spots are getting really hot.”
“Are you sure they’re not volcanoes?” asked Larin.
He didn’t reply, and neither did the people of Sebaddon to Satele Shan’s last message.
“They could be volcanoes,” said Ula, unwilling to dismiss any suggestion Larin made, even one intended as a joke. “It would make sense to tap into geothermal power on a world like this. If they’ve found a way to store and release that power, that could be what we’re seeing here.”
“Or they could be launch sites,” said Jet.
“If they’re sending up a welcoming party, why wouldn’t they say so?”
“It might not be the sort of welcoming party you’re thinking of.”
“I have come to speak with Lema Xandret,” the Grand Master tried a third time. “I have reason to believe that she might be your leader.”
At last something broke the silence from the planet. A woman’s voice came over the airwaves, crackling faintly with interference.
“We have no leader.”
“Very well,” said Master Satele, “but am I speaking to Lema now?”
“We ask only to be left alone.”
“You have nothing to fear from us. I swear it. We have come to talk, and to offer you protection if you need it. You are under no obligation to offer anything in return.”
“We do not recognize your authority.”
Ula’s skin crawled. “That’s what the hexes said. She sounds just like them.”
Shigar was nodding. “This must be Xandret. The hexes share her voice and her philosophies because she was the one who made them.”
“We have no wish to impose any kind of authority upon you,” Master Satele was saying.
“We ask only to be left alone,” Xandret repeated.
“Those hot spots are about ready to erupt,” said Jet in ominous tones.
“Give me the comm,” Shigar said. “Master, I don’t think talking is going to work. She’s as stubborn as her droids. I suggest finding another approach.”
The Grand Master was already talking: “Perhaps I could speak with you face-to-face. That might help us reach an understanding. Just me and my Padawan, in a place of your choosing. The last thing I want is for you or your leaders to feel threatened or intimidated—”
“We have no leader!” Xandret shouted. “We do not recognize your authority!”
“Here it comes,” said Jet, calling up in the viewscreen several bright flashes from the surface of the world. “They look like missiles to anyone else?”
Ula peered closely at the image. His knowledge of military hardware was patchy, but the rapidly rising dots did have a lethal air. For a start, they moved quickly, accelerating many times faster than most crewed ships would risk in atmosphere. There were eight of them, long and sleek. They spiraled like fireworks as they rose, presenting a much more difficult target to the ships above.
The Auriga Fire lurched underneath him, responding to telemetry from the Corellia. As one, all fifteen ships changed course in response to the rising threat.
“There’s your answer,” said Larin. “Someone is definitely taking this seriously.”
“Fine,” said Jet, “but I’m not slaving my ship to anyone while it’s under fire.”
“Wait,” said Shigar, but it was too late. Jet had already broken the short-lived connection between his ship and those of the Republic. With a flash of its repulsors, the Auriga Fire peeled away from Second Company and accelerated to a higher orbit.
Behind them, the ships of the Republic adopted battle formation, with the Corellia in the center and support vessels in a crisp tetrahedron around it. While fighters launched from hangar decks, its cannons trained on the approaching targets. The Grand Master said nothing, and the usual interfleet chatter ceased.
“Fall in line, Auriga Fire,” came a terse request from the Corellia. “Fall in line!”
Jet ignored it, but kept the tactical feed open.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” said Ula, thinking aloud. “If Xandret wants to stay isolated so badly, why would she want to talk to the Mandalorians? I’d have thought that’s exactly the wrong thing to do.”
“Maybe the Cinzia didn’t represent everyone here,” Larin said. “Maybe the people who blew themselves up were a dissident group.”
“And why attack rather than talk?” he asked, moving on to his next point of puzzlement. “Firing without provocation is madness.”
“Without a doubt,” said Shigar. “They’ve practically signed their own death warrant.”
The missiles roared out of the upper atmosphere and hit the first wave of defensive fire. A dense net of turbolaser pulses and ion torpedoes converged on the eight missiles. The nose of each missile activated a defensive shield not dissimilar to the ones seen on a much smaller scale on Hutta. Mirror-bright, they reflected laser pulses perfectly, and even deflected a large number of torpedoes. The space between the Corellia and the planet below was suddenly full of explosions.
Out of that stew of hot gases only six missiles emerged. The debris of the two that had been hit tumbled on, following their final momentum. Tiny white dots gleamed in the light of the black hole’s jets.
The six missiles hit another wave of defensive fire. The shields flashed again, blinking on and off in rapid succession—to conserve power, Ula assumed. The missiles weren’t large. They couldn’t defend themselves forever against this kind of assault.
But they didn’t have to. Four of the original eight were now close enough to the capital ships to be an imminent threat. Fighters engaged, strafing the missiles from all directions at once. The shields couldn’t cover every possible approach. Three missiles faltered, their drive systems crippled and their sides spewing clouds of debris. The last thundered on, aimed squarely at the Corellia.
The look on Shigar’s face was painful to see. His Master was aboard that ship, and a missile of that size was bound to do considerable damage, perhaps even destroy the Corellia outright. Ula wondered if she was hurrying for an escape pod at that very moment, hoping to outrun her fate.
The missile survived the final wave of defensive fire and struck the Corellia just forward of its stardrive.
Ula winced automatically, expecting a giant explosion.
None came. The missile hit the golden hull with enough force to tear a hole right through it, but instead simply vanished inside. A blast of air and other gases roared out of the hole. No fire. The missile didn’t blow up.
Fleet comms rose up again, betraying a slightly frantic note. Colonel Gurin was on the air, reassuring everyone that the cruiser was intact. There were no more launches visible from the ground. The attack from Sebaddon appeared to have completely fizzled.
The clouds of debris from the seven fallen missiles, still rising under their own momentum, began to arrive. Some of it was scraps of torn hulls and engines. Much consisted of the same white dots Ula had glimpsed earlier. They sparkled like snowflakes in sunlight, drifting around the Republic ships in undirected streams.
“Can we get a closer look at that stuff?” he asked. “If the missiles weren’t packed with explosives, maybe they weren’t missiles at all.”
Jet complied, focusing the ship’s sensors on a nearby patch. The white dots resolved into blobs swimming like amoebas against the black sky.
“I’ll see if I can increase the resolution,” he said.
The view crystallized. The blobs became hexagonal objects waving six slender legs.
Ula felt a wave of alarm. Hexes. Thousands upon thousands of hexes.
“Get us away from them,” said Shigar. “Put me through to Colonel Gurin.”
The view shifted to show one of the Republic attack vessels. The hexes were thicker there. Where the hexes encountered one another, they linked arms and bodies to form larger objects—long strings, nets, or clumpy balls. The cruiser drifted among them, blissfully unaware, even as the drifting hexes found purchase on its hull.
“Get those ships out of there!” Shigar shouted into the subspace communicator. “They’re in terrible danger!”
The reply was crackling and intermittent. “—interference—please repeat—” Behind his voice was the shrieking of alarms.
Ula peered past Shigar to where the Corellia hung against the globe of the planet. Red fire now licked at the rent left by the missile. On Hutta, four hexes had almost beaten a Jedi, a Sith, and a Mandalorian. Over Sebaddon, a missile’s entire payload of hexes had been released into the body of a cruiser. He could only imagine what kind of damage such droids were causing in their hundreds among ordinary troops.
“Forget the Corellia,” said Jet. “We have to warn the others.” He switched the comm to general broadcast. “This is the Auriga Fire. You are under attack. Use your fighters and gun emplacements to clear your hull. Then break orbit and head for clear space. The missiles contain the hexes we saw on Hutta. They’ll rip you apart if you don’t get clear of them.”
“Tell them to ignore all orders from the Corellia,” said Ula. “If the network is compromised, the hexes could sow misinformation or worse.”
Jet took up the advice and passed it on to the other ships. Only then did Ula kick himself for helping the Republic.
But he couldn’t sit by and watch thousands of people die. The Republic had won the race. There was no advantage to be gained by assisting a slaughter.
A blast of powerful static drowned out all communications for a second. Then a new voice spoke from the Corellia.
“We do not recognize your authority!”
“That’s the hexes speaking,” said Larin. “They’ve taken control.”
“The Corellia’s launching escape pods,” said Shigar, pointing. “We have to get in closer. The pods will be able to dodge the hexes better than the big ships, but they need somewhere to rendezvous. We can give them that until someone else arrives.”
“All right,” said Jet, tight-lipped. “I want you and Larin on the tri-lasers, keeping our path clear. If just one of those things gets in here, we’re all dead.”
Shigar rose from his seat and vanished with Larin back into the ship.
“Ula, up here,” said Jet, waving at the empty copilot’s seat. “Hetchkee, you’ll be on tractor control. Clunker, stop the signals from Corellia messing with our systems.” The droid came forward to jack himself into the ship’s computer again.
As Ula changed seats, he noticed a bright flashing light on the instrument panel in front of Jet. “Is that important?”
“Maybe, but it’s one thing we don’t have time to worry about right now.” Jet punched buttons in fast sequence across the instrument panel. “We have more company.”
Ula adjusted his viewscreen so it pointed back at the black hole. By the light of the jets, he made out a string of ships emerging from hyperspace. A large cruiser and numerous smaller vessels, strung out in two precise lines. He recognized their configuration immediately, and a surge of surprise swept through him.
Imperial ships.
But how? Stryver had the navicomp. They must have tracked him down and taken it from him. That would explain why there was no sign of the Mandalorian in the system. Adrenaline made his heart pound harder and faster. Yes, it made sense.
More than how they had gotten here, though, their very presence meant that there was still hope for an Imperial victory. With the Republic forces in such disarray, it would be easy to swoop in and overwhelm them.
Only with difficulty did he suppress a triumphant grin. Sebaddon would become the Empire’s prize after all, and his mission would not have failed.
Then he remembered where he was, and all thoughts of victory fell away. The Auriga Fire was helping the Republic. If the Empire beat the Republic, he would be dead.
Aghast, he stared at the screen as the Imperial engines fired up their drives and powered in to attack.