SHIGAR WATCHED THE green-helmeted figure crossing the seething mass of hexes in the lake. He couldn’t be sure it was her, and he told himself not to get his hopes up. But his gut was certain. There was something about the way she moved, the slight stiffness of the figure’s left hand as it waved cheerily back.
Darth Chratis stalked away, still trying to raise the Paramount on his comlink. Thus far there had been no answer from the fleet above, even though the comms were finally beginning to clear.
Shigar walked carefully down the bank as the wading figure approached. He held out his hand, and finally caught a glimpse of the face inside the helmet. It was indeed Larin, and she was beaming. With one powerful tug, he pulled her ashore.
She flipped up her visor, and he did the same.
“Fancy meeting you here,” she said.
“Are you crying?”
“What? No. I have allergies. And what if I am? It’s been a long day.”
He embraced her. “It sure has.”
She returned the hug, but not for too long.
“What’s with the hexes?” she asked as they pulled apart.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The thing in the lake disintegrated as the skyhook arrived. I didn’t even know it was made of hexes until then. They looked confused. Now they’re not doing anything at all.”
He spoke too soon. The center of the lake boiled and bubbled. Hexes writhed as the leading edge of something large and gray emerged from the depths. Shigar put his left arm around Larin, ready to protect her behind a shield if this turned out to be a new kind of attack, but she pulled away.
“It’s a ship,” she said, hurrying back down to the lake’s edge. “Look!”
He shaded his eyes. The object did look like a starship. An older model, of Imperial make, perhaps.
The ship rolled, presenting one broad flank to the sky. A hatch opened and two figures climbed out. A strange sound swept across the surface of the lake—a clicking of metal limbs moving through thick fluid. The hexes were stirring, forming a new agglomeration.
All they made was a bridge connecting the ship to the shore. The bridge was aimed directly for Darth Chratis. He looked up as two figures began to walk toward him.
Shigar and Larin loped to join him. A handful of other figures scattered along the crater rim did the same. Shigar picked up speed when he recognized Master Satele as one of the pair that had emerged from the ship. He felt a resurgence of optimism. First Larin, and now her. Perhaps disaster had been averted after all!
Accompanying Master Satele was the Sith apprentice, Eldon Ax. Her helmet was off, exposing wild red hair and dark-rimmed eyes. Shigar was close enough to hear what she said as she approached her Master.
“I release myself from your service, Darth Chratis.”
“Nonsense,” he said with a look of startled outrage. “You are my apprentice, and so you will remain until I judge you fit to be called a Sith.”
“You will release me,” she said, coming to a halt two paces from him, “or suffer the consequences.”
He laughed. “What possible consequences can you threaten me with? Don’t tell me this pathetic Jedi has turned you.” He raised his lightsaber and adopted a ready pose. “I will kill both of you before you take a single step toward me.”
Master Satele drew her blade in response and Shigar wished he hadn’t lost his.
But Eldon Ax didn’t move. “I have not been turned,” she said. “I have simply realized how I have been used. My anger was constantly directed outward, at my mother and Dao Stryver, or inward at myself. The person I should have been most angry at was standing right beside me. My teacher. My Master. You.”
Darth Chratis grinned like a skull. “Anger leads to hate,” he said. “Hate leads to power. See how well I have taught you?”
“You have indeed taught me well. And so I release myself from your service, my lord, knowing that you never would.”
A growing sound from behind her caught Darth Chratis’s attention. The hexes were rising up in an enormous swell and flowing out of the lake. Dripping blood-like fluid, they came en masse for the huddle standing on the crater’s edge. Larin took Shigar’s arm and pulled him well out of the way. Master Satele joined them. Only Ax and her Master stood before the ghastly tide.
Lightning flashed. Darth Chratis’s lightsaber stabbed and cut. But there were too many of them for one man—even a Sith Lord—to hold them back. Ax did nothing as the swell enveloped them both.
“What’s going on?” asked Larin.
Over the noise of the hexes, Master Satele replied, “I think our young friend has discovered who she really wants to be.”
“And who is that?” Shigar asked.
With a high-pitched whine, a shuttle swooped low overhead. Master Satele looked up as the craft came around to land. It displayed Republic insignia, and was closely tailed by an Imperial counterpart. They touched down on either side of the tentacle of hexes that had lunged out of the lake.
A junior officer of the Republic jogged from the craft that had landed near them and saluted Larin. Keeping one eye closely on the swarm of hexes that had engulfed Ax and Darth Chratis, the Adarian spoke breathlessly: “We picked up the fringes of an Imperial transmission calling for an emergency evac and followed it down. Is everyone all right?”
“For the moment,” said Master Satele, guiding him away. “What’s the situation in orbit?”
“It’s hard to explain. Our comms went haywire for a while, and now all our data banks have been wiped.”
“By who?”
“I don’t know, sir. Captain Pipalidi will fill in you and Director Vii when I get you back to orbit.”
“Ula made it, too?” asked Larin.
“We have him aboard right now,” he said. “Found him drifting in a capsule, hollering for help, and picked him up on the way down. Won’t explain how he got there, but he seems healthy enough.”
“That’s good,” Larin said. “I’m glad he’s okay.”
Shigar glanced at the shuttle. Was that the envoy’s face he could see, peering out a viewport? He couldn’t tell.
“About the hexes,” the young officer ventured, glancing back over his shoulder. “I mean, is it over?”
“I don’t think so,” said Master Satele. “Not quite.”
ULA WATCHED FROM the safety of the shuttle. There was nothing stopping him from leaving his seat. He wasn’t under guard, or even under suspicion. He could have walked out at any time, and thrown himself to the hexes if he’d wanted to.
Jet’s betrayal of him still stung, though, so he stayed right where he was.
It had started to go wrong before the skyhook had collapsed. After the deflection of the Paramount’s missiles, Jet had considered throwing the Paramount itself down onto the target, in a desperate attempt to thwart the hexes’ plans. Ula had argued against it, unable to bear such a waste of human life.
“A thousand or so to save trillions,” Jet had said. “Isn’t that a fair exchange?”
“We don’t even know if it would work! And if it doesn’t, we’ll be even worse off than we are now.”
“If you’re worried about destroying an Imperial ship—”
“Do you really think I’d let that get in the way of doing the right thing?”
Only as he said the words did he realize that he meant it.
The issue had become entirely moot when the skyhook had gone down.
“Looks like someone’s found a way to do what we can’t,” said Jet. “In which case, we’re no longer needed. Out of the seat, Director Vii. It’s time for us to go our separate ways.”
The announcement had taken Ula completely by surprise. “What are you talking about? I’m staying with you.”
“No, you’re not.” Jet had produced a blaster and covered him while Clunker dragged him from the cockpit. The droid’s strength was too great to resist. “We’ve got business elsewhere.”
“Wait!” Ula had clung to the lip of the air lock. “Take me with you, please!”
Jet had shaken his head, but not without compassion. “You have to find your own place, mate, and I don’t think it’s going to be with me. Say cheerio to that lovely lady—and stop faking it, if you ever hope to have a chance with her.”
The air lock had hissed shut, explosive bolts had fired, and Ula had been flung out into the void. Had the passing shuttle not found him, he might have fallen to the planet below—or even into the black hole—but Ula didn’t suppose that Jet would have left something like that to chance.
Now he was within waving distance of Larin, and he didn’t know what to do.
The mass of hexes that had overwhelmed Darth Chratis retreated into the lake, leaving just the young Sith behind. She turned to face the lake, raised her arms above her head, and spoke to them. The hexes responded, forming new agglomerations, turning their collective mind to new tasks. Some descended back into the lake; others swarmed toward several different places on the crater wall and combined their pulses into powerful cutting lasers. Vibrations reached him even through the walls and floor of the shuttle. He saw Larin and the others shift on their feet, as though the ground was kicking beneath them, too.
Master Satele approached the young Sith. They exchanged a few words, then parted. The Grand Master returned to Larin and Shigar and the officer who had run out to meet them. Together, they hurried into the shuttle.
“Recall the rest,” she was saying as she mounted the ramp and entered the main passenger hold. “If they can’t make it here in time, send another shuttle.”
“What’s happening?” Ula asked. “What’s going on out there?”
Master Satele had already left for the cockpit.
“I don’t know,” said Larin, smiling at him. The engines whined. “But it looks like we’re leaving.”
Shigar acknowledged him with a nod, which Ula gravely returned. The Padawan looked no less battered than Larin and Master Satele. The ground war had obviously been just as grueling as that fought in the air.
The shuttle’s repulsorlifts pressed Ula back into the seat. He took one last glimpse through the window and saw the crater walls collapsing around the bloody lake. Fiery lava from the molten sea outside crashed in, burning and destroying as it came. Clouds of smoke thickened and curled, hiding the young Sith from view.
“YOU’RE GOING TO destroy them,” said Master Satele.
Ax didn’t respond. It wasn’t a question, but it demanded an answer, and she was careful to keep it to herself. The hexes were streaming downward to tear the flooded habitat to pieces. When they were done, they would break into the geothermal shafts and keep drilling until raw magma flooded in from below. What the real lava sea didn’t burn, the heat of the core would melt and turn to slag.
“What about Lema Xandret?” Master Satele pressed. “There’s not much of that amniotic fluid left, but it could be saved.”
“Do you think it should be?” Ax asked, thinking of her clone’s life in the tank, cut off from the Force, so insulated from the universe around her that she didn’t even know what the Empire was. Cinzia could have stopped the hexes at any time, but she hadn’t. Lema Xandret’s daughter reborn, and herself, mutated into a horrible echo of motherhood, were more responsible for the damage than the hexes themselves.
It was all about control, she realized now. Xandret had tried to control the cloned Cinzia, and had lost control of the hexes. Darth Chratis had tried to control Ax, but she had turned on him. Anger wasn’t enough on its own.
She could still hear her mother screaming.
“It’s not up to me to decide whether you should save her or not,” Master Satele said, “but you did promise Cinzia.”
Ax had promised many things, to herself, to Darth Chratis, to the Dark Council, and ultimately to the Emperor.
But that had been before. Before she had understood that she had choices.
You can expect no mercy from me, Master, the day our positions are reversed.
“I lied,” she said.
The Grand Master nodded. Ax didn’t know whether she understood or not. That she stopped talking was enough.
Ax stood and watched the hexes at work while the others fled. The smell of burning blood was sweet in her nostrils. The ash that gently rained on her felt soft and warm, like feathers. Slowly, the voice faded from her mind. She breathed deeply, feeling at peace. Only the constant bleating of the shuttle’s pilot disturbed her tranquillity.
She stayed as long as she could. When the ground threatened to dissolve under her and the sky lit up with shooting stars—orbital hexes, falling to their doom—she turned to leave the home her mother had made, forever.
LARIN HAD NEVER met Supreme Commander Stantorrs before, and she barely felt that she had met him now, even after half an hour of debriefing in his office. There were so many aides hurrying about bearing messages and sudden crises needing an instant decision that she rarely had his attention for more than a few seconds at a stretch. Even when she did, she found him very hard to read. Instead of watching his dour Duros face, she concentrated on his long fingers. They tapped, curled, folded, and rested in ways that, she hoped, gave her an insight into what he was thinking.
“You say you were followed there?”
“Yes, sir,” she said. “The Hutts placed a homing beacon in the Auriga Fire.”
“You knew about that before you left Hutta. I seem to recall reading about that somewhere.”
“That’s correct, sir.” This had all been in her report, and was no doubt in numerous other reports about the incident, but she let no sign of impatience slip through her guard. If he wanted to hear it from her face-to-face, so be it. He was the Supreme Commander, after all. “We thought the beacon left with Jet Nebula, but it later turned up in the capsule he used to expel Envoy Vii.”
“This ‘Jet Nebula.’ Is he a real person?”
“Yes, sir. His parents had a strange sense of humor, he says.”
“What, yes?” An aide had pressed a datapad in front of him. His left index finger stabbed at something on the screen. “That one, of course. Was Tassaa Bareesh herself present in her expedition to Sebaddon?”
“No, sir. She placed someone else in charge, a deputy called Sagrillo.”
“He’s the one who claimed ownership of the planet and declared the remaining joint forces trespassers.”
“Yes, sir. At the time, he outgunned us. His mistress was taking no chances.”
The tips of the Supreme Commander’s fingers joined to form a triangle in front of him. “I can imagine his surprise when your reinforcements turned up.”
Not just our reinforcements, she wanted to say, but the Imperials’ as well. It had only been a matter of time before everyone else arrived. The universe’s usual freakish sense of humor had ensured that they all came more or less simultaneously.
She remembered those stressful hours very well, even though she hadn’t been on the bridge with the senior officers and the negotiators. She had been down in the crew hold, exchanging stories with Hetchkee and Jopp and the others who had survived the ground assault. They had stopped to watch through the viewports as ships flashed in and out of hyperspace around the black hole. There had been several clashes, leaving wreckage to spin helplessly into the impossibly steep gravity well, and several outlier ships had fallen afoul of the jets themselves. They had waited with minds and bodies poisoned by exhaustion for the call to arms, as it surely had to come. The Republic ships left over from the original mission were going to be pulled in eventually, and every available trooper would be desperately needed.
Then suddenly it had been all behind her. The Commenor had jumped to hyperspace, leaving fresh ships and their commanders to sort out the mess. And that was the last she had seen of Sebaddon and its hexes. Every scrap of data from the campaign had been erased—by some kind of exotic electromagnetic pulse, she had been told. All that remained were confused recollections and reports like the one she had filed on returning.
Very few of them mentioned Dao Stryver. During the confusion the Mandalorian had disappeared as though into the depths of the black hole itself, never to be seen since.
“Do you believe Captain Pipalidi acted responsibly in the ensuing confrontation?” Stantorrs asked her.
Larin chose her words with care. The matter of her reenlistment and promotion was still very much undecided, and she didn’t want to jeopardize any chances that might remain.
“I think she did her best in a difficult situation, sir. No one could fault her for that.”
“The service asks of us not our best, but the best possible. Is that what Captain Pipalidi offered?”
It was the same question in different words, and Stantorrs didn’t strike Larin as a being who repeated himself very often.
“I believe so, sir. Every installation on the planet was in flames. All our troops had been evacuated. The mission had already cost the Republic more resources than it could afford, and sticking around would have squandered even more. Withdrawal was therefore the most sensible action to take.”
The Supreme Commander’s hands came to rest facedown on the desk in front of him.
“That’s good to hear, Moxla, because I’m thinking of promoting Pipalidi to colonel over some pretty stiff opposition—the kind of people who think we owe everything to the Jedi, if you can imagine—and it’s good to be backed up by the opinion of someone I can trust. I’m not wrong in thinking that I can trust you, am I, Moxla?”
He undoubtedly knew her history with the Blackstars, so there was no point prevaricating now. “Sir, you can always trust me to speak out if I think a superior officer isn’t pulling her weight.”
“That’s what I thought. And that’s exactly what I need. There’s—what? Can’t he wait?”
Another aide, this time whispering in the Supreme Commander’s ear.
“All right.” His hands rested impotently in his lap. “Well, I’ll make this brief, Moxla. The SSOs you fought with on Sebaddon—a messy bunch, but showed a lot of guts. We’re going to form a new Special Forces squad around them, and we want you to be part of it. We can’t erase your record, but we can add a commendation or two, post factum, to spruce it up a little, and change some of the wording. You’ll retain the rank you were given, brevetted of course, and have the first pick of the troops. What do you say to that?”
Surprise got the better of her tongue. “Uh, yes, sir.”
“You don’t sound particularly enthused, Lieutenant Moxla.”
It didn’t take her long to snap out of herself. Anything was better than sitting around in Coruscant’s underbelly, waiting for the ax to fall. Either outright war with the Empire was going to break out any day, or the Republic’s ability to maintain the peace on its own worlds would fail. This way, she would be right in the thick of it, where she could maybe do some good. She would be working—and if she was lucky, she might be able to bring some people she trusted absolutely along with her. Ses Jopp, for one. She snapped to attention and saluted with appropriate enthusiasm.
“You couldn’t have picked anyone better,” she said. “Give me a month, and your squad will be as polished as your desk.”
“Don’t get me started on that, Moxla,” he said with a sudden rap of his knuckles on the greel wood surface. “Nothing’s as clean as it looks.” Another aide approached, and the Supreme Commander waved her away. “Get to it, Moxla. You have my absolute confidence.”
Larin saluted again and marched for the door. Aides parted before her, watching with eyes that gave away nothing.
“How did it go?” asked Ula, meeting her in the antechamber outside and matching her pace for pace along the corridor.
“Very well, considering,” she said. “Did you have anything to do with that?”
“Unlikely,” he said. “I’ve been shifted to a portfolio in data collection.”
So he wasn’t being modest this time. “I’m sorry, Ula.”
“No, it’s okay. I found my last job a little too … stimulating.”
He smiled, and she found herself smiling along. Ula—still acting as envoy then—had looked out for her on returning to Coruscant, greasing the path to the Supreme Commander’s attention by making sure officers senior to her didn’t dismiss her out of hand, or take credit for her actions. Captain Pipalidi might have played a role in that, as well. That the captain was being promoted suggested she had Stantorrs’s ear on many things to do with Sebaddon, and Larin had certainly helped the whole affair from becoming a complete rout.
“What are you doing now?” Ula asked her.
She didn’t answer immediately, remembering how Ula had cleaned up her wounded hand on the Auriga Fire, and how pleased he’d been to see her when the shuttle had collected them from the burning world. She flexed her new fingers—a proper prosthetic at last, surgically grafted to her, indistinguishable from a real hand—and wondered who would look after him in his new role.
“I have to meet someone right now,” she said, “and then it looks like I’ll be on the move for a while. But I’d like to catch up with you when I get back.”
His smile grew wider. “I can wait.”
“That’s assuming you’ll still be around, of course.”
“The chances of me going anywhere are very slim, now.”
“Great. We can drink Reactor Cores and talk about old times.”
“I’m sure we’ll have lots more to talk about by then.”
“What, the birth and death statistics of Sector Four?”
“Just for starters.”
At the exit to the building, they stopped and looked at each other. Was it her imagination, or did he look younger, lighter, than he had before? It was probably the smile, she decided. She wanted him to stay that way when she was around.
She reached out and took his left hand in hers. Her artificial fingers squeezed lightly. When she walked away, she knew he was watching her, all the way down the steps to the plaza below.
SHIGAR WAS WAITING for her at the Cenotaph of the Innocents, pacing back and forth in front of the first bank of asaari trees. The troubled cast to his brow perfectly matched the heavy gray skies above. He was back in Jedi browns, with a new lightsaber swinging at his hip, but he seemed a completely different person from the one she had met in the old districts not so very long ago. He moved stiffly, still favoring a wound in his side. His hair, cut shorter by Darth Chratis on Sebaddon, hung limply around his face. Watching him, Larin almost regretted coming.
He glanced up as she approached. The blue clan markings on his cheeks looked faded and worn.
“You’re still in uniform. That’s a good sign.”
“Did you think they’d strip me naked and throw me onto the street?” She came to a halt in front of him.
“And now you’re smiling. Things must have gone well.”
“They did.”
“I’m pleased, Larin.”
“Well, likewise. Hello, by the way.”
“Hello. Let’s go over here.”
He led her to a stand of trees planted as a memorial to the people who had died during the Empire’s sacking of the Jedi Temple. One sapling for each victim had grown into a small forest, with grottoes and benches for people to pass a moment in contemplation. They sat side by side, close but not touching, and it seemed for a long while that Shigar wasn’t going to say anything at all. The restless branches rustled above them, moving back and forth in ways that had nothing at all to do with the wind.
“I want to ask you something,” he finally said.
“And I want to tell you something, so we’re even. Do you want to go first?”
“Not particularly, but I will if you want me to.”
“Fire away.”
“Did I do the right thing, bringing you along with me?”
That surprised her. She had been afraid that he was about to reveal that he had changed his mind and wanted to revisit the possibility of romance between them. If he had said that, she would have been forced to find words to explain the way she had felt on that front, and she doubted any such words existed. She knew exactly where those feelings had come from, but she hadn’t quite worked out what they were now. And then there was Ula, whom she definitely intended to look up when she got back.
“I guess,” she said, “it depends on what you mean by ‘right.’ ”
He grimaced. “That doesn’t really help.”
“Well, let me tell you what I was going to say, and maybe that will help. It’s this: Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Just thanks.”
“Why?”
She rolled her eyes. “You’re going to make me explain it, aren’t you?”
“If it’s not too much trouble.” He managed a twitch of his lips that might have been a smile.
“It’s pretty simple, really. You came across me when things were the darkest they had ever been. I had no security, no family, no purpose—no life, really. You offered me all of those things. Relatively speaking, of course. I’d never come up against anything like the hexes before, and I’d always prided myself on keeping most of my limbs intact. But the essentials were there. We had the mission; we had roles to play. And I had you.”
She raised a hand to stop him talking over her. “I know I didn’t have you, in any possessive sense, but you represented more to me than just some guy I’d bumped into. You’re Kiffar like me, and there aren’t many of us out there now, so that made you family. And you had my back when things got tough, so that made you—made you like my squad, I guess. You were everything I’d been missing, without ever being able to say so.”
“I’m flattered,” he said.
“Don’t be,” she said. “It wasn’t really anything to do with you. Any other handsome, well-armed Kiffar would have fit the bill.” She smiled to take the sting off her words, and he smiled in return.
“I’m glad,” he said. “That makes me feel like I did do the right thing.”
“Well, think that now, but the day I’m in the Empire’s sights and out of ammo, know that you’ll be the first I blame. At least I’ll have a proper squad with me then, so that’s one box ticked.”
She was surprised by a sudden upwelling of emotion. She really was grateful, but she didn’t know how to convey it, except with a joke.
“Were you seriously thinking I wished I’d never come? Don’t you remember how I used to smell?”
“It still gives me nightmares.”
“Besides, I reckon you have a lot more to worry about now.”
He sobered. “What do you mean?”
“Well, the fact you’re wondering about what you did tells me you’ve entered a whole new world of uncertainty. Doing the right thing isn’t so easy in the real world, is it?”
He studied the grass at their feet. “No.”
“So you learn that lesson, which means you’ll probably become a proper Jedi Knight now, but in the process you come to the shocking realization that nothing will ever be black and white again. It’s all gray.”
“Not all of it,” he said. “There’s still some black.”
“But white is hard to find, right?” She put her prosthetic hand on his shoulder. “You’re a warrior now. Eventually you only see in two colors: black and red. Best get used to that, if you’re going to stay on the front line.”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Sure you do. With the life you’ve had, you’ve always had a choice.”
“Do you still think I’ve had it easy?”
“No, my friend. No.” The flash of anger in his deep green eyes had come too quickly. She worried about that. But she knew she’d said enough. It wasn’t her job to bang his head into shape. “Everyone knows Clan Konshi got a raw deal when it came to looks.”
That put the anger back in its place, where it could simmer until it found another outlet. She pitied the next person who met him on the wrong end of his lightsaber.
“I should go,” he said. “The Council must surely be finished deliberating by now.”
“That’s life in wartime,” she said. “A whole lot of waiting around between bouts of being shot at.”
“Don’t forget to duck, Larin.”
They stood and faced each other.
“Don’t you forget to keep looking for the white,” she said, putting her arms around him and giving him a quick squeeze. “It’s out there somewhere. You just have to find it.”
He nodded.
They left the Cenotaph of the Innocents by separate paths. She didn’t look back.