AX GRIPPED THE METAL rail separating the senior command post from the rest of the bridge. Her knuckles were white. She had never before experienced such turbulence in hyperspace. Pilots sometimes bragged of navigating the singularity-rich Maw and told stories of ships lost there in bizarre circumstances. She had always thought them likely to be exaggerated. Now, however, battling the influence of just one black hole, she wondered if she had been a bit hasty in her judgment. It hadn’t seriously occurred to her that she might be snuffed out of the universe by something as simple as a navigational accident. If this last jump from Circarpous V hadn’t been calculated to the greatest degree of precision possible …
With an earsplitting groan, the Paramount burst back into realspace. A new kind of force immediately gripped the bulk cruiser, sending its crew rushing about to compensate for it. Ax let go of the rail and stood straight, lest anyone think her weak.
“We have arrived at the coordinates, Darth Chratis.” The colonel was as thin as a medical droid, and his expression betrayed as much emotion. “All vessels are accounted for.”
“Very good, Kalisch. Show me where we are.”
Images danced around them, projected on massive viewscreens and holoprojectors around the bridge. The jets of the black hole were the first thing Ax noticed, stabbing like shining blades away from an invisible central point. They looked like narrowed eyes staring back at the galaxy in hatred.
From the outside, the galaxy’s potential was completely revealed to her. With so many systems under her control, what couldn’t she achieve?
“We have located a planet,” said the colonel, relaying a report delivered by one of his many underlings. “We believe it to be the one called Sebaddon.”
Ax quelled a sudden rush of excitement. She could betray nothing in front of her Master: relief, ambition, hope …
The screens shifted. A world torn and twisted by gravitational forces appeared before them, blurred with distance.
“My lord,” said the colonel, “the most energy-efficient route is around the black hole.” A map appeared in one of the viewscreens showing a dotted line looping past the singularity then rising to meet the planet at apogee. “On your command, I will issue the orders to the fleet captains.”
“Normally I prefer the direct approach,” Darth Chratis said, peering through slitted eyelids at the views before him. “What is this I see here?” One long finger picked out a particular view. “Energy spikes? Drive signatures?”
The colonel cast a cold, questioning stare at his bridge staff.
“I-it appears to be a space battle, my lord,” ventured one of them, standing timorously in the spotlight.
“Identify those ships,” barked the colonel. “I want to know who sent them.”
“Yes, sir.” The girl who had spoken sat down and began hammering furiously at her workstation.
Ax wondered who could be fighting out here. Stryver had the navicomp, and she had the only whole hex remnant. Therefore it couldn’t possibly be the Republic. Could the Mandalore have formed an army so quickly? What could have roused him to unify his people against this strange outpost rather than a more credible enemy?
“Republic ships, sir,” called someone from the bridge staff, proving her wrong. “Definitely Republic, and they’re taking a hammering, sir. No other visible combatants, but there may have been launches from the ground.”
Darth Chratis grinned, and Ax grinned with him. The Republic had made its move and was being rebuffed. How much easier, then, to swoop in as the savior and “liberate” the planet, right into the Emperor’s arms!
“Take us in, Colonel Kalisch,” Darth Chratis said. “Launch all fighters and prepare for battle.”
“At this distance, our fighters would not be able to break free of the black hole’s gravitational pull,” Kalisch said, smoothly countermanding the order. “The moment it is safe, my lord, I will launch them.”
“Very well,” hissed the Sith Lord. “That will have to do.” He wasn’t used to anything as lowly as physics standing between him and his wishes.
“Full power, all engines,” Kalisch ordered the fleet. “Lock courses and prepare to engage!”
The Imperial fleet came about, straining to reverse the considerable momentum it had already gained just by being in the black hole’s powerful gravitational field. The Paramount’s engines roared and rumbled, casting a bright blue light across those ships coming up in its wake. The lighter cruisers fared better than the massive bulk cruiser and its heavier support vessels. They caught up and began to draw ahead.
It soon became abundantly clear that Kalisch’s original advice had been sound. Instead of picking up velocity as they whipped around the singularity’s event horizon, propelled by freely available gravity, they would struggle to gain every drop of delta-vee, wrung out of the engines at great expense. Their progress was painfully slow. Ax could feel her Master’s impatience growing—redoubled because he knew he could say nothing, threaten no one. This was his decision and his responsibility alone. The crew worked around him in perfect efficiency and with maximum effort. All knew that Darth Chratis would vent his frustration on the first person to fail him in the slightest possible way.
Ax watched the long-range telemetry closely, eager to learn anything she could about the planet’s forces. What she saw puzzled her deeply. There were no ships apart from those belonging to the Republic. Furthermore, there was no obvious assault being conducted from the ground. It looked like the Republic fleet was fighting nothing at all.
Even stranger, the Republic ships appeared to be attacking one another. Half the fleet appeared to be retreating, while the other half either did nothing or actively impeded the rest. As she watched, one small cruiser suddenly switched its drives to full, propelling it wildly into another ship, disintegrating both. It was as though something had infected half the fleet, driving it mad.
Darth Chratis studied the same data with a deeply suspicious expression. Ax wondered if he thought it was a trap. But to what end? The Republic couldn’t possibly benefit from the destruction of its own ships.
“Would you like me to hail either party?” the colonel asked.
“No,” said Ax.
Darth Chratis and Kalisch both turned to her in surprise.
“Master, I advise against explicitly indentifying us as servants of the Emperor,” she said. “Remember that we are the enemy in Lema Xandret’s eyes.”
“Perhaps the traitorous harridan will change her mind,” said Darth Chratis, “now that these weak-willed fools have found her.”
With a blinding flash, the Republic’s capital ship exploded, casting debris in all directions. Ax shielded her eyes against the glare.
“They’re certainly not putting up much of a fight,” she said. Half the Republic ships had been destroyed or crippled. The rest were regrouping and recalling their fighters.
“Regardless, the situation is clear. Sebaddon is no longer a secret. Xandret must choose to bow to the Emperor’s will or face the consequences.”
“She’ll never agree to her own execution.”
Darth Chratis studied her with cold eyes. “Naturally I will say nothing of the fate in store for her. Cease your questioning of my orders. Colonel Kalisch, announce our presence to the citizens of Sebaddon and advise them that we will be taking possession of their world once we have cleared the skies of this Republic rabble.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Ax went back to studying the viewscreens. The firing pattern of the Republic ships looked wrong to her, although she couldn’t quite put a finger on what disturbed her about it. Still no launches from the ground, although infrared showed numerous sites of activity. Cities and factories, Ax assumed, that would be bombed for certain if Xandret resisted. Ax’s instincts told her that victory wasn’t going to come as easily as an announcement of the Empire’s intent to annex the world, but at the same time she couldn’t see how a small, ground-based civilization could hope to prevail against the high ground of space. Even if they did have a mysterious weapon that drove ships and their crews crazy …
The Republic forces must have been taken by surprise. So she was forced to assume. Colonel Kalisch would be sure not to make the same mistakes they had.
No response came from the ground to the Paramount’s hail. Apart from garbled transmissions on Republic frequencies, the bands were empty.
“They ignore us,” said Darth Chratis, “at their peril.”
“Launching fighters in two minutes, my lord,” said Kalisch.
Ax was already heading for the exit from the bridge. “Ready my interceptor,” she called behind her. “I’m going to take a closer look.”
It took her a minute to descend from the bridge to the hangar deck, but it felt like forever. Her Mk. VII advanced interceptor had been shipped from Dromund Kaas with the rest of Darth Chratis’s matériel and kept fully fueled in case a fast launch was required. The ground crew had it warming up and ready for her by the time she got there. Its familiar jutting vanes reassured her in a way that no amount of deceptive diplomacy could. Forgoing a full flight suit, she slipped a helmet over her dreadlocks, climbed aboard, and activated the internal navicomp. It showed her the projected course for the many wings about to launch around her. She switched that off and mapped out her own trajectory.
The hangar crews retreated as fighters began to stream out of the cruiser. The launches were clean and well timed, despite their pilots’ eagerness to engage. Ax slipped into their formation with ease, a sleek black predator surrounded by willing but lesser packmates. She listened to the comms as she monitored the fleet’s disposition, but didn’t respond.
Wave after wave of angular black ISF interceptors streamed away from the Paramount and its ancillary vessels. They were easily a match for the XA-8 and PT-7 starfighters the Republic had launched. Ship-mounted cannons selected targets and prepared to fire on the Republic craft. The range was slightly long, but the still-stately pace of the capital ships ensured a solid base to fire from. A lucky shot or two wasn’t impossible.
Ahead, the vast field of wreckage left by the destruction of the main Republic cruiser was spreading at speed. Only as she neared it did Ax realize what had troubled her about the Republic ships’ behavior.
The surviving ships were firing into the cloud, not at their own renegade vessels.
She peeled away from the wing she had been shadowing and headed directly for the cloud.
“Your primary targets are the damaged vessels” came the orders from the Paramount. “Enemy fighters secondary. We will engage the rest. Fire at will.”
The sky lit up as a smaller Republic ship exploded.
Against that cruel light were silhouetted thousands of floating objects, suspended in space. Some were spinning circles; others were edge-on lines. All were instantly recognizable as hexes, the droids Ax had fought on Hutta, their regular hexagonal bodies identical and faceless apart from the utter blackness of their sensory pods. As she flew among them now, they reached for her with spider-like legs, firing bolts of plasma from their hand weapons to propel them forward.
In that instant, she understood.
“Paramount, recall the fighters immediately. Get them away from that debris field. It’s full of hexes!”
She fired as she flew, destroying one hex with every pulse from her fighter’s ion cannon. For every one she killed, however, three more appeared in her scopes.
“They’re only droids” came back the reply from the Paramount. “What harm can they do against starfighters?”
“Put me through to Darth Chratis,” she snapped. Someone’s head would roll for this. “Master, the Republic ships have been infected with hexes. That’s why they’re self-destructing and turning on one another. I don’t know how the infection occurred, but the debris field is full of hexes. Our targeting priority should be them first, then the fleeing ships.”
“You want us to abandon a golden opportunity to rout the Republic in order to play target practice against a handful of machines?” Darth Chratis’s reply was full of contempt. “Colonel Kalisch’s orders stand.”
Ax heard one of the bridge crew call out in the background: “Launches!” She looked at her telemetry and saw what the Paramount had detected.
Four missiles were rising from the surface of Sebaddon. Full of hexes, she bet, not conventional explosives. Plus, all of the infected Republic ships still capable of controlled flight were abandoning their chase of the others and coming around to ram the Imperials.
The colonel’s imperious broadcast to the citizens of Sebaddon hadn’t been ignored at all.
“Move the fleet,” she told her Master. “You’ll be caught between them if you continue on that course.”
The Paramount neither responded nor changed course. A wave of anti-missile fire was streaking out to intercept the ascending threats. She could only hope it would be enough.
Around her, hexes swarmed and clutched at the Imperial fighters. Some had linked arms to form wide nets and webs across the sky. Any ship that strayed too close was bound up and crushed. Other hex groups formed whips capable of slinging individual hexes to incredible speeds. Ax herself missed two such wriggling projectiles by only small margins. Other pilots weren’t so lucky.
“Target the larger concentrations,” she advised those fighting around her. “Ignore the infected ships. If they blow, we’ll only have more hexes on our hands.”
She received no official acknowledgment of the orders, but they were obeyed. Squadrons disrupted by the unusual and hostile nature of the debris field re-formed to strafe the densest concentrations of hexes they could find. Ax joined them, taking grim satisfaction every time her cannon blew such an agglomeration to pieces.
Part of her mind paid attention to the wider battlefield. The missiles had performed a startling maneuver in mid-burn by breaking up into four smaller pieces, each capable of independent flight. Now numbering sixteen, they slipped through the first wave of defensive fire. Six mini missiles were taken out in the next wave, and five more in the third. That left five to hit the fleet unharmed.
Ax winced as they struck. There were no explosions, as she had predicted. The Paramount was untouched, fortunately, but four of the larger support vessels were likely to turn, if the hexes gained control. There might be only a couple of dozen in each mini missile, but that could be enough, particularly if they infiltrated the ships’ control systems.
In retaliation, the Paramount launched a series of ground strikes against the origin of the missiles. Ax had expected this, too. Instead of saving the munitions for fending off the hexes they already had, they were potentially being wasted on the people who had sent them. Punishment could wait, in her opinion. Better to be alive and angry than dead.
She turned her attention back to the fighters. The debris field was much clearer than it had been, with only a random scattering of individual hexes left. The infected Republic ships had come around and were accelerating headlong for the Imperial fleet, doing what she had feared they would do once the second fleet was identified. To the people on Sebaddon, to Lema Xandret, the Empire was enemy number one; everyone else had to wait their turn.
“Target the drives,” she ordered the fighters. “Only the drives. We don’t want to break them up, whatever you do. We have to avoid creating another debris field for the fleet to wander into.”
“How do we destroy them, then?” asked one of the pilots.
“We let gravity do it for us,” she said. “Once they can’t maneuver, either the planet or the hole will drag them in.”
“They’re not the orders I’m receiving from Colonel Kalisch,” protested a squad leader.
“I know that.” The Paramount was still worried that the approaching ships were intending merely to ram them. “I’m the only authority you need to worry about, out here. The first pilot who punctures the hull on one of these ships will get a torpedo up their afterburner. Understood?”
“Understood. All right, you have your orders, people. Let’s get to it.”
The fighters peeled off to pursue their new objectives.
Meanwhile, the first infected Imperial ship was beginning to behave erratically.
“Master, I urge you again to move the Paramount to a safe distance.” Where reason had already failed, she attempted flattery. “Were the unthinkable to occur, we would be left without your leadership.”
“Perhaps that would be prudent,” Darth Chratis agreed.
Ax barely heard him. In the background, filling the bridge of the Paramount, a familiar voice was shrieking.
She switched channels to the one Colonel Kalisch had used to broadcast his message to the ground.
“We do not recognize your authority!”
For an instant, Ax thought that her mother was broadcasting to the Imperial ships. Then she realized—with something that might have been a twinge of disappointment—that the voice had the slightly wooden quality of a droid. Why a droid and not Xandret herself?
While the fighters attacked the infected ships and the Paramount slowly ascended out of danger, Ax considered the pros and cons of broadcasting a message herself. It might give her mother cause to hesitate before launching more hexes at the Imperial fleet. But what could she possibly say to this woman she hardly remembered, if she was alive at all? I’m a Sith now. I have no family. That certainly wasn’t going to help.
The retaliatory strikes launched by the Paramount detonated on the surface of the world far below. What had already been a bright hot spot suddenly became a whole lot brighter, and Ax wondered if the question of her mother’s survival was now completely moot.
Two more missiles launched from a different hot spot entirely.
Then the first of the infected Imperial ships exploded, spreading hexes all through the fleet. With the survival of her own kind now at stake, she forced herself to concentrate on what really mattered.
THE AURIGA FIRE’S tri-laser cannon emplacements were to port and starboard, just forward of its hyperdrives. They angled out slightly so they could cover every inch of the ship and were accessed by two tight tunnels that smelled of grease.
Larin had taken the port turret and eased herself into the cracked leather seat with easy familiarity. The prosthetic glove on her left hand was just sufficient to wrap around the cannon’s hand grip, while her right hand handled the delicate movements required to target and fire. The cannon itself operated smoothly, swinging freely on its gimbals as though fresh out of the factory.
It wasn’t the first time she had noticed the mismatch between the Auriga Fire’s appearance and its capabilities. Another concerned its compact tractor beam facility, recessed behind a hatch in the ship’s broad belly. It was a wildly nonstandard feature for a ship of this size. She was curious to know how often it came in handy in the pursuit of Jet’s normal job, but didn’t really think Jet would admit to anything. For the moment, the flash and pound of the cannons was all that concerned her.
A quick depression of the trigger and a web of wriggling hexes vanished in a ball of gases.
“This is as easy as shooting stump-lizards on Kiffex,” she called to Shigar over her head-mounted comlink.
“Watch that trio coming in from above” was all he said.
Larin swung the tri-laser and blasted them into atoms.
“Don’t worry about the Grand Master,” she told him. “We’ll find her.”
He had been subdued ever since the Corellia had detonated, shooting hexes with lethal speed and accuracy. Two-thirds of the cruiser’s escape pods were now accounted for, but Master Satele wasn’t in any of them. Shigar had tried broadcasting over all channels, but the electromagnetic spectrum was a mess. What wasn’t jammed by the black hole, Imperials, or panicked chatter was full of the hexes screeching. It was all the new Republic commander could do to coordinate the larger ships into safely picking up the escape pods without picking up hexes by accident as well.
“Dead ahead,” said Jet from the cockpit. An escape pod had collided with two hexes that were in the process of cutting through the pod’s thin hull. The Auriga Fire swooped in to help.
“One each, Hetchkee,” Larin said as the tractor beam wrenched invisibly at the hexagonal droids. “Favoritism is strongly frowned upon back here.”
She wondered if the former security guard knew she was joking. One hex tumbled away to port, for Shigar to shoot, while the other, after a protracted struggle, wriggled into Larin’s sights. Then it was up to Ula to give the pod’s panicked occupants coordinates for the rendezvous point.
“Stay in the channel we’ve cleared,” he told them. “Don’t take any shortcuts.”
“It was horrible,” babbled a young midshipman on the other end of the line. “There were suddenly so many of them, and they moved so fast—”
“You’re safe now. Just stay in the channel and do what Captain Pipalidi says.”
“Yes, yes—and thank you. Another few seconds, we’d have been holed for sure.”
The pod fired up its retro-rockets and headed off in the right direction. Larin hoped its occupants would be okay now. Several had been rescued and then fallen afoul of the hexes again, through either bad luck or poor judgment. One had stopped to rescue another pod in distress, only to be overwhelmed by hexes hiding inside. The Auriga Fire had been too far away to help, but the screams had carried.
Captain Pipalidi, the Anx in charge of the Commenor and by default what remained of the fleet, had a difficult job ahead of her, distributing the traumatized survivors through the remaining eight ships at her disposal. Larin didn’t envy her that job at all, with long-range comms scrambled and nothing larger than a light assault cruiser to fill the place of the Corellia. But at least the lesson had been learned: the hexes might not look like much individually, but they were tough, and in large numbers were to be taken very seriously indeed.
“There’s another pod at the other side of the web ahead,” said Jet. “Do you think you can get us through?”
Larin peered through the scope. The web was one of the densest they’d seen so far, with hundreds of the hexes linked in a multilimbed structure vaguely reminiscent of one individual hex, spinning slowly against the backdrop of the planet below. The limbs whipped and snapped, flinging hexes at far-off targets and scooping up replacements from the debris cloud around it. The pod Jet had spotted was drifting behind the main body, its retros damaged. The interior light flashed rapidly on and off, spelling out a call for help in Mon Calamari blink code.
“Easily,” said Larin, knowing nothing would make Shigar happier than killing more hexes. Except, of course, finding the Grand Master.
“See those concentrations near the center?” Shigar said. “That’s the best place to hit. Take them out and the structure will tear itself apart.”
“Affirmative.” Larin flexed real and prosthetic hands around the cannon grips, ready for action.
“Launches,” said Ula as the ship roared forward.
Larin glanced at telemetry just long enough to take a quick snapshot of the wider battlefield. It was dominated by several overlapping debris fields in low orbit over Sebaddon, the largest centered on where the Corellia had broken apart. The “safe” segment of the Republic fleet and several dozen escape pods were now well clear of danger, regrouping near the planet’s rocky moon. The Imperial fleet was in the process of splitting in two, as uninfected ships copied the Republic’s tactic of retreat. Two squadrons of Imperial fighters were disabling the engines of several vessels, so they couldn’t spread their infection by ramming or detonating nearby. Larin approved of the tactic. She might have suggested it herself had not the infected Republic ships seemed so intent on targeting the Empire.
Republic fighters swarmed around the uninfected section of the fleet, keeping the hexes at bay. Defying gravity and distance, some actually managed to reach that far. If just one was carrying a nest, the infection could take root all over again.
Her mind latched on to that thought—and for an instant she was back on Hutta, staring at the droid factory, and the Sith blade was flashing like a crimson lightning bolt past her eyes all over again. Her fingers fell with the comlink to the metal floor and a scream of pain boiled in her throat.
She blinked and was back in the present. The scream remained.
Launches, Ula had said. She focused on that instead.
Five missiles were rising through the atmosphere of Sebaddon, launched separately in groups of two and three. The first pairing was aimed at the Imperial forces. The others—she was relieved to see—were aimed nowhere near the Auriga Fire or the rest of the Republic fleet. They appeared in fact to be aimed nowhere at all.
The possible motives of Lema Xandret and her followers fell from Larin’s mind as the Auriga Fire came within range of the giant hex agglomeration. She did as Shigar had suggested, putting bolt after bolt into the nearest internal cluster. That had a satisfactory effect, at first. The hexes’ combined mirror-shield defense was soon overwhelmed, and the cluster began to look decidedly threadbare, like a crater-riddled moon on the verge of collapse. But then, once again, the hexes demonstrated their ability to adapt in the face of a threat.
The cluster rearranged itself into a stubby tube, with one flat end pointing at the Auriga Fire. Larin fired at the tube as a matter of course, and the mirror shields flashed into life, catching the laser bolt and channeling it along the tube’s center. The bolt ricocheted backward and forward, joining others she fired after it, until the whole tube began to glow. She took her remaining thumb off the trigger just as the tube released all the energy it contained in a single, powerful pulse, aimed back at the Auriga Fire.
Even through the ship’s unusually powerful shields, the impact was deafening. Larin fell back into her seat with one arm covering her eyes. A split instant later a second bolt struck the ship, this one created by Shigar’s attempts to destroy the target. The Auriga Fire went into a wild tumble, then righted itself with a jerk.
“—fire! Cease fire!” Jet was yelling.
“All right, we get it.” Larin adjusted her earpiece. “What are we supposed to do now? Pull faces at it until it goes away?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but we can’t take another hit like that. Our shields are down to forty percent.”
“Angle the shields forward,” said Shigar. “Set a course for the closest of those tube things. When I tell you to, put the sublights on full.”
“That’s madness!” said Ula.
“No, I see where he’s headed.” Jet brought the ship around to face the tube Larin had fired into. Bright discharges still sparked from hex to hex, running in waves up and down the length of the tube. “It wants energy? Energy I’ll happily give it.”
The Auriga Fire leapt forward as though to ram. The hexes fired ineffectually at the forward screens, and the agglomeration’s arms curled in to embrace their attacker. Larin’s hands lay restlessly on the cannon controls as the tube grew rapidly larger ahead of her. This, she told herself, was one situation where firing would definitely make things worse.
Instead, she was part of the bullet and the trigger at the same time.
The Auriga Fire reached the tube’s open end. It was just wide enough for the ship to fit inside, a fact for which Larin was completely grateful: the tri-laser blisters marked the ship’s widest point. The moment it and its passengers were completely encapsulated, Shigar shouted “Now!” and Jet switched the sublights to full.
There followed a horrible moment when the ship strained to move forward, but all the force it produced was sucked up by the weave of tightly bound hexes surrounding it. Larin could see the effect it had on them at horribly close quarters. The hexes writhed and shook, and slowly began to glow. Metal limbs flared like magnesium burning in pure oxygen. Black sensory pods popped and hexagonal bodies stretched. She couldn’t hear anything, but she imagined the hexes screaming.
Turning a laser bolt back onto its owner was one thing. Absorbing all the energy required to accelerate a starship was quite another.
The Auriga Fire burst out the other side, trailing a tail of bright blue. The hex-tube shook and bulged as it tried to contain the energy it had absorbed. A ball as bright as a sun formed in its heart, and Larin feared it might actually shoot out at them, destroying them instantly.
But then the hex-tube buckled, as the ball didn’t so much explode as discharge throughout the entire agglomeration. Thousands of hexes burst apart in an instant, spraying the surrounding vacuum with exotic shrapnel.
“Yee-ha!” yelled Larin, then added more soberly, “Let’s never do that again.”
The beleaguered escape pod and its occupants found themselves unexpectedly out of danger. It was a simple matter now to snatch it up in the tractor beam and haul it to safety outside the debris field, where other ships could look after it.
As the Auriga Fire turned about to look for another harried pod, Shigar said, “Wait.”
“What is it?” she asked, hearing a note of urgency in his voice.
“It’s her. Master Satele is calling me.”
“I’m not picking up any transmissions,” Jet told him.
“She’s not calling me that way.” Larin held her breath, not wanting to distract him as he concentrated on whatever he was receiving through the Force. “See that chunk of the Corellia over there, Jet? Head in that direction.”
“Will do.”
The Auriga Fire accelerated for a relatively large piece of the destroyed cruiser. The twisted, oval fragment was approximately fifty meters down its long axis, and featured a gold finish down one side, revealing that it had once been part of the hull. It tumbled freely through the hexes, and appeared to be the focus of a concerted scavenging effort leaching metal from one end.
Larin readied herself for the order to fire. When Master Satele’s pod came into view, getting her safely and quickly clear would be the priority.
Then: “I don’t see any pods,” Ula said. “Are you sure this is the right spot?”
It wasn’t the first time the former envoy had expressed doubts about Shigar’s abilities. Larin wondered if he was part of the axis in the Republic government that mistrusted the Jedi and their methods.
“I’m sure,” said Shigar. “She’s not in a pod. She must be in a pressurized compartment in that chunk.”
“I can ready a docking ring,” said Jet, “if you can pinpoint her location.”
“We won’t have time,” said Ula. “There are hexes all over that thing.”
Shigar said, “You have vac suits, don’t you? I’ll jump the gap.”
“I’m coming with you,” said Larin.
“No,” he said. “I’ll need you on the cannon, making sure no more come aboard. Drop me off, back away, then come get us when we’re out. I’ll take a spare suit for her.”
“And if her compartment doesn’t have an air lock?”
“Then I’ll think of something else.”
She heard him crawling up his access tunnel, back into the ship, and turned to look at him. “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” she called at him along the tunnel, unable to hide the intense worry she felt. The wreckage was crawling with hexes. One slip, and neither he nor his Master would come back.
“Positive,” he said. “She’s the most important person in the galaxy. It’s my duty to save her.”
Then he was gone, leaving Larin feeling slightly wounded by his words. On Hutta, he hadn’t come to save her. If his deal with Tassaa Bareesh had gone awry, she would have ended up rancor food for certain. But for Master Satele, he swept in with lightsaber swinging, risking life and limb and not even letting Larin help.
She wondered if he thought she might slow him down.
Don’t think like that, she told herself. We’re still partners, and this obviously isn’t going to be over as quickly as we’d thought. Chances are we’ll find plenty more opportunities to fight back-to-back.
She swung the cannon around and picked off a hex standing high on the back of the wreckage. That was one less he would have to worry about.
THE AURIGA FIRE’s vac suits were simple models, with no armor, inbuilt weapons, or maneuvering jets, and barely fifty minutes of air in their backpacks. Shigar guessed they were normally used for quick repairs outside the ship, where they could be tethered to the main life support. Shigar stripped out of the new clothes he had improvised from Ula’s official wardrobe—brown robe, black pants, and sand-colored top, the closest he could approximate to Jedi colors—then picked the cleanest suit from the rack and slipped it quickly over his unprotected limbs. Ideally he would have worn a body glove, like Larin’s, but there wasn’t time for such niceties. He would use biofeedback to regulate his body temperature.
He fixed his lightsaber to a clip on the suit’s right hip, where it would be accessible in an instant, and slung a spare suit over the crook of his left arm.
“Aft air lock primed and ready,” said Jet over the suit’s intercom.
“Okay.” Shigar tested the seals one last time. The air tasted stale, but that was the least of his problems. “Get in as close to the wreckage as you can.”
His breathing sounded loud in his ears as the air lock’s inner door opened and he stepped inside. As the air lock cycled, he took the opportunity to center himself. He knew what to expect. He had faced the hexes before. His priority, however, was to find Master Satele and get her out as quickly as possible. There wasn’t time to fight or take any unnecessary risks. That would only get the both of them killed.
“Can you hear me, Master Satele?” he asked over the suit comm, using a band thick with the static of distant stars. Military forces normally avoided that channel, making it perfect for short-range transmissions that needed to go untraced.
“Perfectly well,” Master Satele responded, faintly but clearly.
“How’s your air?”
“Running low, but not critical yet.”
The outer door opened with a puff of fog and Shigar kicked himself out onto the hull. For a moment the sheer weirdness of his position struck him hard. He was standing practically naked on the hull of a smuggler’s ship, surrounded by killer droids and wrecked ships, with the galaxy’s brilliant spiral to one side and the jets of a black hole to the other.
He couldn’t tell if what he felt was joy or terror.
The twisted wreckage drew nearer. Larin’s cannon flashed, and a hex went tumbling. Using the tractor beam, Hetchkee pulled another hex out of what had once been a window in the Corellia’s hull. That created a clear spot.
Shigar braced himself to jump.
“Here’s as close as we can get,” said Jet. “Don’t miss.”
With one explosive kick of his muscles, Shigar cleared the gap. For a moment the sky turned about him—the planet came into view from behind the Auriga Fire, blistered with magma domes—and then he hit the wreckage solidly, with arms outstretched to find the slightest grip.
He stuck fast, and paused to catch his breath. A hex, alerted to his arrival by the subtle shift in the wreckage’s angular momentum, peered with black eyes out of a nearby hole. Its forelegs came out to point at him. Shigar reached for his lightsaber, but Hetchkee was quicker. The hex swept up and away from him, into empty space, where it was blown to atoms by Larin.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Pleasure” came Larin’s reply. “Are you going to lie there all day while we do all the work?”
He was already moving, tugging himself lightly from handhold to handhold in the perfect free fall of open space.
“You are close,” said Master Satele over the comm. “I can sense you. There’s a shattered access port ahead. Go in that way.”
He obeyed without hesitation, keeping a sharp eye out for more hexes. When he was inside, there would be no rescue from Larin and Hetchkee.
The wreckage appeared to have been part of the Corellia’s forward command center and had been occupied at the time of the disaster. Shigar squeezed past several bodies as he wound his way deep into the twisted structure. The path was tight and occasionally dangerous, with sharp edges and spikes to negotiate. There was very little light.
“Come to the next intersection and stop there for a moment,” she told him. “I have to tell you something.”
The sound of movement came from ahead, through the bulkheads he touched, and Shigar slowed down to a bare creep, every sense attuned to the slightest change. The intersection must once have been broad enough for a landspeeder but was now barely large enough to admit a person, particularly one as tall as him. There was definitely something moving down the right-hand bend.
“What I must tell you is this,” Master Satele said. “Ever since we heard the droids, I’ve been wondering just how much of herself Lema Xandret put into her creations. The answer is around that corner, Shigar. Can you see it yet?”
He edged around the corner to see what lay ahead of him. There were nine motionless hexes clustered around a pressurized door, as though waiting for it to open.
“I’m behind that door,” she said, “and soon you will be, too.”
“How, Master?” He couldn’t conceive of a way to defeat nine hexes at once, when just two had been more than a match for him on Hutta. There was barely enough room to slide by them, let alone fight.
“You told me that the droid factory contained a biological component,” she said. “It seemed reasonable to wonder if the hexes might also.”
“There’s a fluid inside them,” he said, remembering what he had seen on Hutta. “It looks like blood. But they’re definitely droids. They’re not cyborgs.”
“Not in the usual sense. They’re something else. But the fact that they are at least partly alive is the only reason I’m still here.”
“You’re influencing them?”
“As much as I can, which isn’t very much. They only attack when either obstructed or threatened. I’m doing neither, so they’re letting me be. They won’t go away, but at least they’re not being aggressive. I think I can hold them back while you come to the door.”
Shigar swallowed. “You want me to walk right through them?”
“It’s the only way.”
“And then what?”
“Then you open the door and let me out.”
“I have a suit for you—”
“I won’t have the chance to put it on. There’s no air lock. I’ll keep a bubble of air around me using a Force shield. That’ll give me a couple of minutes. You’ll have to move much faster than that, though. I won’t be able to hold the hexes and the shield at the same time.”
Shigar clenched his fists. It seemed impossible. But she was relying on him. No one else could help her.
“I’m on my way, Master.”
He nudged himself around the corner and came into full view of the hexes. Despite his faith in Satele Shan’s mental powers, he fully expected to be shot down at once. Instead the hexes just looked at him with their black sensory pods, and rearranged themselves slightly, so they could watch both the door and him at the same time.
Feeling like he was in some kind of surreal nightmare, Shigar pushed himself into the tangle of fat bodies and angular limbs, taking the utmost care not to touch anything. He didn’t want a chance bump to wake them from their uncharacteristic complacency. He even breathed quietly, despite the perfect insulation of the vacuum around him. The intensity of the hexes’ gaze made him squirm inside.
Finally he was at the door. A red light warned of pressure on the far side. He keyed an override into the pad and the light turned green. The door would open at his command now, expelling the air in an instant.
“Are you ready, Master?”
“Yes.”
He pushed the button. The gale tried to blow him away but he was firmly braced against the opposite wall. The hexes flailed in surprise, suddenly released from Master Satele’s calming influence and blinded by the frozen air coating their sensory pods. Shigar was partly blind, too—he could see only blurrily through the mist stuck to his visor—but he had the advantage of not having to see. His Master’s presence was like a beacon to him.
He lunged into the tiny chamber and hit the switch to seal the door behind him. The hexes scrabbled to get in. It wouldn’t be long before they cut their way through. He had maybe seconds to find another way out.
Master Satele floated in a ball in the center of the room, her Force shield shimmering around her, a milky luminescence maintained barely a finger-span from her body. Shigar was struck by how small she looked. In his mind, she always seemed of gigantic stature, not just dominating the Jedi High Council but influencing the course of the Republic as well. Now, though, she seemed tiny.
A grating noise came from the door. The hexes were already cutting through. Master Satele had left her lightsaber floating beside her, outside the Force shield. He took it in his left hand, reached for his own with his right, and activated them both simultaneously. Their greens were not quite identical, and by their combined light odd shadows danced across the walls.
The room was barely three meters cubed. Apart from the door, there were no other entrances. That didn’t matter. Shigar could make his own. Raising both lightsabers, he stabbed into the wall at a point above his head, then spread both blades out in a circle before meeting at the level of his knees. A red-edged section of the wall fell free, and he kicked it into the space on the far side. Using telekinesis to gather up Master Satele, he propelled himself through the gap.
It was another room, requiring another makeshift door. He moved quickly, with confident strokes. Behind him, the hexes were wriggling through widening rents in the door and wall. In a second they would be upon him.
A hallway, this time. He swept Master Satele ahead of him and hurriedly took his bearings. He had come this way on the journey in. At the far end of the corridor, he could see the distant spiral of the galaxy.
A fat-bodied hex crawled into view, blocking his path.
“Get ready,” he called over his comlink. “I’ll be coming out fast.”
“Good,” said Larin. “It’s getting a little tight out here, too.”
Shigar didn’t waste energy replying. Master Satele’s shield was undoubtedly strong enough to deflect anything the hex could throw at them, so he kept her ahead of him. His job was simply to move both of them—fast.
The Force rushed through him. Ever since his earliest discovery of his powers, he had loved the thrill of speed. It had helped him win races before his removal from Kiffu. It had helped him survive challenges at the academy. Remembering that wild feeling of acceleration, he dug deep into himself and kicked off against the wall behind him.
The corridor blurred. Master Satele preceded him like a cannonball, blowing the hex backward, out of the wreckage and into space. For an instant, all was turning sky and scrabbling legs—then an invisible force wrenched the hex away, and he was swept upward into the waiting air lock of the Auriga Fire.
“Got them, Hetchkee?” came Larin’s voice over the comlink.
“Safe and sound.”
Several quick blasts from the tri-laser put the hex out of commission and sent four others that had emerged after Shigar scurrying for cover. He gripped the sides of the air lock as the ship accelerated away, spinning agilely through the limbs of an approaching agglomeration, with Larin’s covering fire clearing a brightly lit path.
Then the door was shut and warm air rushed in. Shigar hadn’t noticed how cold his fingers had become. He rubbed them quickly together, then righted Master Satele on the floor.
“We’re out of danger now, Master.”
The Force shield shimmered and dissolved.
Grand Master Satele Shan unfolded to a sitting position and opened her eyes. “Thank you, Shigar.” She stood and smoothed down her robes. “I owe you my life.”
Shigar bowed his head and returned her lightsaber. “I did only what I must, Master.”
Her right hand gripped his shoulder. “That’s all we ever do, Shigar, in times of war.”
The inner door opened.
“You’d better get up here,” said Jet over the ship’s internal comm. “Fast.”
Shigar led his Master through the cramped corridors of the ship to the elevated cockpit. Ula and Jet were at the controls, with Clunker standing to one side, as motionless as a statue. Hetchkee was elsewhere—filling the empty tri-laser spot, Shigar assumed, now that the need for the tractor had passed. Ula glanced at them as they entered, then stood up and bowed.
“Grand Master,” he said with a nervous expression on his face, “I am relieved to see you again.”
“Have we met?”
“I am Envoy Vii—on the staff of the Supreme Commander—”
“Forget the introductions,” said Jet. “We can have a tea party later. There’s another ship on the scope.”
“Imperial?” asked Master Satele, leaning over Ula’s chair.
“I don’t think so.” Jet brought up a wide view of the space around Sebaddon. “Just when I thought we were getting a handle on this mess …”
The viewscreen showed the remaining Republic fleet at a much higher orbit than it had been before, well out of range of the hexes. Infected ships were lancing out in wildly different directions, thanks to crippled drives or gravitational pull from either Sebaddon or the black hole. The Imperial fleet, reduced to seven ships—including its bulk cruiser—was also ascending to higher ground. A quick glance at the projected orbits showed that they were likely to cross paths in a few hours—but that was something to worry about later.
“What’s all this?” asked Shigar, brushing his hand through a layer of fuzz surrounding the planet’s equator.
“That’s where the last three missiles broke up,” said Ula, “and two more launched since. They weren’t aimed at anything. I think Xandret is laying down a defensive halo of hexes to protect the planet.”
“As well she might,” said Master Satele. “Show me the latest arrival.”
Jet’s finger stabbed at a bright dot hovering near the planet’s tiny satellite. “It appeared a minute ago.”
“From the same coordinates as everyone else?”
“No. It launched from a crater on the moon. I think it’s been hidden there the whole time.”
She nodded. “I’d like to broadcast a message.”
Jet gave her the comm.
“It’s about time you showed yourself,” she said. “I’d very much like to talk to you, Dao Stryver.”
“And I you, Grand Master” came the immediate reply. “It pleases me that you survived this unflattering rout.”
“Can one take pleasure from the survival of one’s enemy?” she asked the Mandalorian.
“One can indeed,” he said. “I will explain in due course.”
“I very much hope so.”
“Meet me at the moon in half an hour. Send one ship. No escort. You have my word that you and your party will not be harmed.”
Stryver clicked off.
“I don’t trust him,” Shigar said.
“We have no choice,” she said. “Plot the course, Captain Nebula. Take us by the Commenor. I need to speak to Captain Pipalidi now, in case we don’t get another chance.”
“ ‘We’?” asked Jet.
“This mission has already lost seven vessels of war. I will not risk another.”
“Doesn’t anyone care what I’m prepared to risk?”
“Look at this,” said Ula, drawing everyone’s attention back to the viewscreen. “The Imperials are launching a shuttle.”
“We can’t let it reach the jump coordinates,” said Shigar. “If they’re sending for reinforcements—”
“I don’t think that’s where they’re headed,” Satele said. “ ‘One ship, no escort,’ ” she quoted.
“And Stryver did say we wouldn’t be harmed by him,” added Jet. “Are you certain you want to do this?”
“Forget the flyby of the Commenor,” she told him. “Get us moving now. I’ll talk with Captain Pipalidi on the way.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Jet, casting Master Satele a sardonic salute. “We might as well run to our doom as walk.”