SHIGAR MOVED CLOSER, weaving around the newcomers to the fight. They had provided an unexpected but very welcome distraction, yet he worried now about the danger they were putting themselves in. Stryver was down but not out, and the Mandalorian had wiped out an entire cell of the Black Sun syndicate on Coruscant single-handedly. Shigar—his head still ringing from the near-miss with the disruptor—knew that Dao Stryver would stop at nothing less to achieve his goals on Hutta, if he had to.
For the moment, though, all eyes were on the vault. The Hutts’ security measures had failed. Someone had melted the door and gained access to the inside. Shigar wondered if they had come up the floor of the vault, much as the Sith had attempted. But if so, why not leave that way? Why go to the trouble of melting another exit?
The pool of molten metal that had once been a door cast a bloody backlight on the figure that stepped out of the vault. It didn’t look like any kind of being Shigar had seen before. It stood two meters high and seemed at first to be an ordinary biped, with skinny arms and legs of equal length. Then it unfolded another pair of arms attached to its midriff, spaced equally between shoulder and hip joints. It bore no resemblance, however, to insectile species like the Geonosians or the Killik. Its body was a perfect hexagon, stretched vertically. There was no head. Black sensory organs dotted the central body like the eyes of an arachnid, gleaming in the light. Apart from those organs, its skin was silver. He couldn’t tell if it was a creature in an environment suit or some kind of construct.
With unerring steps it crossed the pool of molten metal on feet that were duplicates of its hands. It turned 180 degrees, revealing a back that was identical to the front. When it reached the wreckage of the inner door, it stopped there and swiveled slightly, taking in the ruined security air lock and the beings it contained: the Mandalorian, the Jedi Padawan, the palace guards, the Twi’lek, and the Sith.
“We do not submit to your authority!” it screamed, dropping smoothly into a new posture. The body became a regular hexagon instead of a stretched, almost rectangular torso, and its legs bent into a crouch. All four of its arms splayed out to target different parts of the room.
Shigar instinctively tightened his grip on his lightsaber. He lacked the foresight ability of Master Satele, but every cell in his body screamed in alarm. Whoever or whatever it was that had broken into the Hutts’ vault, it wasn’t going to walk away quietly.
The hands of the creature spat darts of blue fire that ricocheted off armor and lightsaber blades and exploded whenever they struck flesh or stone. The Sith girl stood at the focus of their initial attack, but when she went down the fire became more indiscriminate. Bodies dived in all directions, either hit or seeking cover. It wasn’t easy to tell which. The room’s tortured walls surrendered still more of their mass to dust and gravel.
Shigar stood his ground, reflecting the unfamiliar energy streams back at their source. The creature’s silver skin re-reflected them in turn, setting up a resonant stream between him and it that only became more intense with each pulse it fired—then doubled in intensity as it added an extra arm to the attack.
Shigar braced his feet and held on, determined not to give in before it did. The air hummed and crackled with energy along the pulses’ combined path. He had never seen anything like this before.
Finally something gave. The stream dissipated with a flash sufficiently violent to blow the creature backward into the antechamber. High-energy sparks ricocheted around the security air lock, making everyone duck again.
Shigar dropped his lightsaber, not his guard. His arms felt like they had been hit with hammers. The ringing in his ears was louder than ever. But until he was sure the thing was incapacitated, he wasn’t going to relax one iota.
A second creature stepped from the vault’s steaming interior. It didn’t say anything. It just screamed and fired.
Shigar jumped as high as he could to evade the converging energy pulses. Staccato blue streams followed him, tearing a shallow, meterwide furrow in the wall and ceiling. He glimpsed Larin’s face below him. She was standing in full view, pumping shot after shot into the second creature’s body. Its silver skin dissipated them like raindrops, and he began to worry that he wouldn’t be able to outrun the creature’s vengeance forever.
A trio of tightly spaced concussion missiles from Dao Stryver saved Shigar from bisection. They turned the antechamber into a furnace, finally cutting off the deadly beams. Shigar landed on a section of collapsed roof, winded and singed but largely unharmed.
The creature backflipped, landing on six legs, and stood up again, this time on its hands. It looked exactly the same as it had before.
Behind it, the first one crawled out of the rubble in which it had landed.
A third creature stepped out of the vault.
Shigar’s stomach hollowed.
“Get everyone out,” he shouted to Larin through the comlink before the firing started again. “It’s not safe in here.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll do my best to hold them back.”
“Why not just let them go?”
He didn’t have a short answer to that question. Because doing so would mean admitting failure. Because whatever these creatures were, he wasn’t going to let them have what was inside the Cinzia. Because he wasn’t going to let things this murderous rain fire upon the hapless denizens of the Hutt palace. “Just because.”
“All right,” she said, “but I’ll be back with heavier munitions as soon as—”
Everything else she said went unheard. With an earsplitting screech, the three creatures fired in tandem, tearing the air apart.
LARIN CAUGHT YEAMA by the lekku as he ran for dear life. “Assault cannon, sniper rifles, mass-drivers,” she said. “Everything you’ve got—now!”
The Twi’lek dithered, torn between conflicting fears: of his mistress; of the things wreaking havoc in the demolished security air lock; and of Larin. Given a choice, he looked as though he would run for the nearest ship and head for the stars.
To help change his mind, Larin raised her rifle and aimed it between his eyes. “You won’t get a single step unless you make the call.”
Yeama brought his comlink to his mouth and began issuing orders.
She ran back to where Sergeant Potannin lay on his belly, watching the battle unfold through the standard-issue electromonocular scope she had loaned him. He handed it back to her and said, “I think they’re droids. Look at the one on the left. It’s been damaged.”
She focused the scope on the spider-like creature Potannin had indicated. One of its forelimbs had been sliced away, revealing not flesh or exoskeleton but a mess of wires that flexed and twisted, showering golden sparks. She narrowed the field of view to see more closely. Wires, definitely, as thin as hairs and as lithe as quicksilver.
Her mind cast back to the Hortek maintenance crew she and Shigar had stumbled across in the tunnels below the palace. There she’d seen silver threads as well.
Before she had time to follow the thought through, Yeama returned, pushing a long-barreled sniper rifle into her arms.
“More coming, I hope?”
He nodded unhappily and hurried away.
She lined up the rifle, resting its weight on a protruding chunk of stone.
“Go for the joints,” Potannin advised her, but she ignored him. The hands were doing the damage. If she could take them out, that would reduce the threat to Shigar. At the moment, only he and Stryver were doing anything to stop the killer droids from getting out of the antechamber.
The droids moved fast, and they didn’t move like anything Larin had fired at before. Any of the six limbs could act as a leg, meaning they didn’t so much run as cartwheel from place to place like spindly, animated tumbleweeds, firing as they went. They could also crouch with anywhere from three to all six legs on the ground, giving them a more stable base to fire from. They could even curl into a ball to protect their hexagonal midriffs. Furthermore, the damaged one demonstrated a potent kind of shield when Shigar got too close. It crossed two limbs into an X and created a short-lived circular electromirror that bent his lightsaber back into a V, almost taking off his arm in the process. He retreated, and the droid went back to firing at him.
Larin took her first shot, and missed. Her second hit the forelimb and was deflected. Her third struck the wrist joint squarely, severing the fire-shooting hand with a reddish flash. Instantly the droid rotated to make that limb a foot, bringing another hand weapon into play. She moved her target reticule to aim at that one next.
Another sniper rifle arrived, and Potannin took up the fight. He tried the joints, with little success, and moved on to the sense organs scattered across the chests of the things. The black circles reacted differently from the silver skin under fire. They absorbed everything that came at them, and radiated the energy as heat. Their reflective black surfaces soon turned to red, then ramped up to orange and yellow. Eventually one hit purple and exploded, making the droid spin around in circles for a moment before recovering.
Larin steadily picked off the hand weapons of her chosen target. When there were just two left, the droid transferred its weight to its four injured legs and hopped to where one of its fellows was trading fire with Dao Stryver. The injured droid jumped onto the back of its counterpart, and the two bodies locked together. The four injured legs retracted, creating a more massive droid with eight legs, all willing and able to fire.
“Oh, come on,” she said.
Larin and Sergeant Potannin’s efforts didn’t go unnoticed. The droid menacing Shigar sprayed a wave of blue pulses in their direction, forcing them both to take cover. When it was over, the barrels of both their rifles were blackened but still seemed capable of firing. Sergeant Potannin, however, had not been so lucky. A ricochet had caught him in the eye and killed him instantly.
Before she could get revenge, someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to see Yeama and three Houks pulling in a wheeled, turretmounted laser cannon.
“About time,” she growled, crawling over. “Here, let me. I’ve used this model before.”
Yeama waved her away. His look said as clearly as words that if anyone was going to fire it in his mistress’s palace, it would be him.
She backed down as another wave of blue pulses converged on them. A fourth six-legged droid had emerged from the vault.
“How many of these things are in there?” she asked no one in particular.
Then the cannon was firing, driving all higher thoughts of the situation from her mind. She was a soldier. It was her job to fight, not to analyze. Dropping onto her belly, she picked up the sniper rifle again, test-fired it, and began peppering the enemy with rounds.
“HOW MANY OF those things are in there?” Ula heard Jet say over the sound of blasterfire.
He craned his neck over the fallen beam and risked another look. Sure enough, another of the hexagonal droids had stepped into view.
“Are they in there,” he asked, “or just coming through there?”
“I’m not sure it makes sense if they have another way into the vault. I mean, if they could just turn around and go back, why aren’t they doing that? Why are they fighting to get out past everyone else?”
Ula had wondered why they didn’t just blow a new hole out, but he had soon found an answer to that. Their blue pulses knocked fist-sized chunks of stone from the wall, and plenty of them. They were lethal against flesh, too, but they lacked the punch to get through reinforced ferrocrete. The security air lock was the only route open to them.
It was also the only escape route open to him and Jet, but they had been cut off from it by the reinforced beam they now took shelter behind. Between them and the exit was ten meters of open space, littered with broken glass, rubble, and the occasional body. One of them belonged to the young Sith girl, who had been the first targeted by the hexes, as Ula had come to abbreviate them. Jet’s droid watched helplessly from the other side of the room, unable to get any closer to help his master.
“Watch Stryver,” said Jet.
“Why?” Ula had seen enough of the Mandalorian in action for one lifetime.
“He’s holding back, almost like he’s testing them.”
“Testing who?”
“The droids, of course. Why would he test Shigar? They’ve fought twice already.”
“Why test the hexes?”
“I don’t know. Curiosity, perhaps? Maybe the Mandalore is looking for a new species of pit fighters. Nice name, by the way: hexes.”
They watched as Yeama and Larin positioned a laser cannon for optimal coverage. Larin’s face was hidden by her helmet, but Ula was glad to see that she was still on her feet.
“Maybe that’s what Stryver has been after the whole time,” Jet said. “After all, it was him who talked about droids before. What was that woman’s name? The droid maker?”
“Lema Xandret.”
“Whoever she was, he knew of her, and you said he was asking questions about her all over the place. What if that thing in the Cinzia had something to do with her work? What if the hexes are here now to steal it back?”
“What if they were on the ship the whole time?”
“That can’t be the case. The thing you saw was too small, judging by your description. No, they must’ve gotten in somehow. Maybe someone let them in.”
Ula was watching Shigar, who had developed a new tactic against the hexes. When one of them fired up at Stryver, he hurried in low, under the blue-firing limbs. In close, they were more vulnerable, and he managed to get a couple of good stabs to the body of one of them. It was listing badly to one side, and two of its limbs no longer worked at all.
“That Sith girl is still alive,” said Jet, nudging him with an elbow.
Ula glanced across the battlefield and found to his surprise that this was true. She was rising sluggishly to her hands and knees, shaking her head with a furious expression. Her hair danced like liquid flames. She looked to Ula as though she had been woken from a powerfully unhappy dream.
“They make them tough on Korriban,” said Jet with grim admiration.
The girl was on her feet now. The moment her lightsaber activated, the hexes noticed her. Fourteen streams of energy pulses converged and Ula had time enough to feel sorry for her before she vanished into a glowing sphere of light.
With a boom the laser cannon fired, spearing the eight-legged hex through the midriff. It flailed on its back, screaming piercingly. The two remaining hexes directed their pulses at the cannon’s shield, turning it bright red.
Ula was staring at the Sith girl. Amazingly, she hadn’t died in the concentrated attack. Even more amazingly, she was still standing, and looking angrier than ever.
“Whose authority do you recognize?” she shouted, lurching headlong into the battle. “Whose authority do you recognize?”
The pitch of her fury was so high that part of Ula actually felt sorry for the hexes as she landed among them and started swinging.
AX DREAMED OF A world much larger than normal, where everything seemed strange and mutable and full of threat. She was prone to getting confused, even though she tried very hard to keep up. When she made a mistake people shouted at her, giant people with terrifying voices. It hurt her to be yelled at. She covered her ears with her hands and tried to run. The voices followed her everywhere, shrieking her name.
Cinzia!
Cinzia!
She woke with a start in the middle of a firefight, and couldn’t for a moment remember who or where she was. Every cell of her body hurt. Someone was screaming. Not her. It was the screaming that had woken her. Only on awakening did it become clear that the voice wasn’t coming from a human throat.
She remembered.
Hutta.
The vault.
Lema Xandret.
Her muscles burned as she willed them into action. Raising her head was like lifting a mountain of pain. She felt a scream of her own boiling inside her, a scream of rage and despair and fear. Containing it hurt her, but at the same time it gave her strength. She needed every ounce of strength she could muster to survive the next few seconds.
Out of everyone in the security air lock, the six-legged droid-things had targeted her first of all.
We do not recognize your authority!
She, however, recognized their defiance. It was the same offered by the crew of the Cinzia when they had been confronted by the smuggler. But whose authority did they recognize? There had to be something—or someone—behind their murderous natures.
Ax raised herself to her knees, and from there, with a supreme effort of will, to her feet. The world swayed around her, but the scream was intact, and growing. The dark side swelled inside her.
The creatures from the vault saw her, and instantly turned their blue pulses onto her.
She set the scream free.
A Force barrier surrounded her, bare millimeters from her skin. It shimmered and flickered as wave after wave of energy crashed against it, but it held. It held as long as she screamed, as long as she didn’t want to die.
The attack ceased, and she staggered back a step, breathing heavily. Her lungs were full of hot smoke and ozone. Her head rang with sound. One of the things attacking her had been blown back by some kind of weapon. The details eluded her. The important thing was that the droids were distracted. This was her chance to find out how tough they really were.
“Whose authority do you recognize?” she shouted, launching herself at the nearest. Its hand weapons were concentrated on the shield of a laser cannon and didn’t turn in time. “Whose authority do you recognize?”
The droid-thing didn’t answer.
Her rage spun instants out into hours.
First, she tried spearing the hexagonal body with her lightsaber.
Some kind of shield appeared between them, bending her blade back at her own arm, forcing her to retreat.
Next she tried blasting it with Sith lightning.
The thing’s body caught the energy and discharged it from the tips of its limbs. Four sparkling arms lunged at her, forcing her to duck again.
She reached out a hand and tried to crush its insides telekinetically.
Its honeycomb skeleton resisted more powerfully than durasteel. The hex’s deadly limbs flailed to impale or shoot her, no matter how hard she strained.
They screamed together, locked in a vicious stalemate. She couldn’t kill it, and it couldn’t kill her. It moved on lean, powerful servos that matched her own strength and agility. Its black sense organs tracked her every movement. But every blue pulse it fired at her was reflected by the Force barrier, and every wild slash of its razor-sharp limbs was deflected harmlessly.
Then suddenly it retreated. Its limbs worried at its metallic skin as though scratching itself for fleas. She followed it, puzzled and wary. Was this a trap, some strange new tactic to throw her off her guard? She lunged at it, and it backed rapidly away, firing a stream of blue to keep her at bay.
Then it stopped, stood its ground, and vanished.
For a second Ax doubted the evidence of her own eyes. How could a droid just disappear? It wasn’t possible!
A blast of blue energy struck her from the side, out of thin air, and she realized: the droid had activated a camouflage system, reducing its appearance to little more than a blur. It was blending into the background, circling her, trying to shoot her in the back.
Ax narrowed her eyes. She didn’t know what these things could or couldn’t do, exactly, but of one thing she was completely sure. One way or another, they were going to die. She was going to destroy them all.
SHIGAR BLINKED SWEAT out of his eyes and took the chance to catch his breath. Backup couldn’t have come too soon, even if it was in the form of a Sith and a green-skinned Twi’lek at the controls of a laser cannon. He didn’t have the energy to complain. With one of the droid-things down, speared by the Twi’lek right through the middle, and another occupied by the girl, that left just one for him and Stryver to finish off.
The Mandalorian hovered over it, peppering it with blasterfire and concussion missiles. Shigar waited for an opening.
His comlink buzzed.
“You should fall back,” Larin told him. “We’ve got it covered now.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“But you’re hurt. At least have someone look at that for you.”
He looked down and noticed for the first time that his left arm was covered with blood. He had been completely oblivious to the pain.
The laser cannon fired again. This time the droid-things were ready. The one Shigar was watching dropped to a crouch and threw up its electromirror shield. The bolt from the cannon knocked it backward, but the bolt itself was reflected into the wall. There it exploded harmlessly, showering two crouching noncombatants with gravel.
Stryver swooped in on his jetpack and landed next to Shigar. Shigar raised his lightsaber, but the Mandalorian wasn’t on the offensive.
“Tell them to aim for the vault,” he said, indicating the comlink.
“Why, what’s in there?”
“Just tell them.”
Then he lifted off and went back to harrying the target. Again the laser cannon fired, and again the bolt exploded into the wall.
Shigar relayed the instruction. “The door’s open,” he said, “and it’s a confined space. Anything left in there will be fried.”
Larin passed the message on to the Twi’lek. From his position, Shigar could see his lekku swinging in an instant negative. A brief argument ensued before Larin came back to him.
“The navicomp might still be in there,” she said over the comlink. “If you can get it out, then they’ll fire into the vault.”
Shigar didn’t dismiss the plan out of hand. Far be it from him to aid the Hutts in their venal pursuits, but the Republic needed all the help it could get in the war against the Empire. It wasn’t his primary mission, but it was still important.
“All right,” he started to say.
Then two things happened that put all thought of the navicomp from his mind. First, the droid-thing attacking the Sith girl disappeared. Second, the laser cannon fired again, and the bolt was deflected a third time into the wall.
Into the same section of the wall, Shigar realized. The shots weren’t ricocheting at random. They were being aimed.
“Stop firing!” he shouted into the comlink. “Tell him to stop firing!”
Larin tapped her helmet, obviously thinking she had misheard his order.
The Sith girl was moving, following a dimple in the air. It fired back at her, blue pulses appearing out of nowhere and bouncing off her Force barrier. The nearly invisible droid-thing was heading for the two noncombatants Shigar had seen earlier.
“I said stop firing!” He waved his arms to convey his urgency. “Now!”
The Twi’lek ignored him. Another bolt went into the wall, widening the crater that had already been bored into it. One more shot, Shigar thought in alarm. That was all it would take to ruin everything.
The hand weapons weren’t strong enough that the droids could shoot their own way out, so they were using the Hutts’ weaponry instead. Instead of killing them, the laser cannon was going to set them free.
Shigar ground his teeth together and sprinted forward. If Larin couldn’t stop the Twi’lek from firing, he would have to throw himself at the camouflaged droid and hope to succeed where the Sith had failed.
Distantly he heard the roar of Stryver’s jetpack pass overhead, but the significance of it eluded him. The shot he had feared came from the laser cannon and bounced off the electromirror shield, into the deepening pit in the wall. Long cracks spread out from it, and suddenly masonry was tumbling down from the wall. The two noncombatants lay directly in the path of the rubble.
Shigar had a choice. He could intercept the droid or save the two men. He couldn’t do both. There was just a split second in which to decide.
Ignoring his pain and exhaustion, he let the Force flow through him and did the only thing he could.
YEAMA’S TEETH WERE bared in determination as he fired at the cowering hex. Larin yelled at him to stop—she had guessed the droid-thing’s intentions, just like Shigar—but the Twi’lek was blindly resolute. He thought he was doing the right thing. He honestly believed that he was on the verge of overpowering his target. He wouldn’t listen.
She braced herself to physically wrench Yeama from the laser cannon’s controls, but the rising whine of a jetpack made her look up. Stryver was on his way. He must also have seen what the laser cannon was doing. But he wasn’t flying to defend the breach, as Shigar was. He was coming right for her.
Barely in time, Larin realized his intentions. She hurled herself away from the cannon and dived for cover. Behind her, the cannon erupted into a ball of flame. Bits of metal whizzed past her, pinging off her armor. A wave of heat engulfed her. She felt like a rancor had gripped her in its jaws and was shaking her back and forth.
When it was over, she looked back at the laser cannon. It was a smoking ruin, destroyed by Stryver’s missiles. Of Yeama, there was no sign at all.
Stryver dropped heavily next to her. His armor was as blackened and dented as hers. “Get into the vault. Destroy everything you find there.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Finish things. I’ve seen enough.”
As he spoke, more of the damaged wall fell away, revealing empty space on the other side. The hexes were already heading for the opening, followed by the Sith. Stryver grunted and took to the air, activating weapons systems he had not yet used against the droids. Larin watched him go, thinking hard.
There would be time for thinking later, she reminded herself again. The priority was to put an end to the current crisis. Stryver wasn’t above taking drastic steps to do exactly that—killing Yeama to put the cannon out of action was just one example—and he seemed to know what he was talking about. Looking around her, she found two of poor Potannin’s guards and called them to her. Moving gingerly through the rubble, they headed for the battle-scarred antechamber, and the gaping mouth of the vault.
ULA STARED UP in horror at the descending mass of masonry. There was nothing he or Jet could do to avoid being crushed, and Jet’s droid was too far away to intervene. There wasn’t time for last regrets or second thoughts. The law of gravity was unbreakable, even on lawless Hutta.
He raised his arms in a futile attempt at self-preservation and closed his eyes.
He didn’t die. His thoughts ground on with increasingly amazed vitality, until eventually it occurred to him that someone had intervened to help him live a little longer.
He opened his eyes. The avalanche had been deflected around them by an invisible force. By the Force, he realized as he looked around for the source of his salvation. It was the Jedi, standing with his left hand outstretched in a warding motion and his expression fierce. Ula himself could feel nothing at all arising from that gesture, but he was profoundly grateful that the stones seemed to do so perfectly well.
Another rumble came from above. The wall wasn’t stable. The Jedi deflected another falling slab, which crashed next to them with a thunderous sound.
“Come on,” said Jet, tugging at his arm. “I think it’s time we found somewhere else to stand.”
Ula wholeheartedly agreed. Conflicted but grateful, he nodded his thanks at the Jedi and scurried with Jet out of the danger zone. Jet was leading them toward what had once been the external exit to the security air lock but was now a path cleared through mountains of rubble. Jet’s droid was waiting for him there, waving his arms. The stubby barrel of the laser cannon protruded from between two large slabs. Behind it, Ula could see Larin and Yeama fighting over the controls.
Then Stryver swooped in, firing at the cannon. Larin jumped or was thrown clear, and Ula’s heart hammered in his chest. Was she hurt? Could he help? Jet pulled him down as the cannon exploded and shrapnel pinged around them. He belatedly covered his head with his hands, feeling as though he had spent the last hour in that position.
This wasn’t becoming of an Imperial operative, he told himself, weary of his own cowardice. He had once had aspirations of being a Cipher Agent, whose job was to negotiate exactly such situations. Here he was, right in the thick of things, and what was he doing? When he wasn’t being saved by Jedi, he was cowering and whimpering at the slightest noise. It simply wouldn’t do.
The droids were busy with Stryver, Shigar, and the Sith. The way into the antechamber was wide open.
“I’m going to see what’s in there,” he said. “Coming?”
Jet looked at him as though he had gone stark, staring mad. “You can’t be serious.”
“Why wouldn’t I be? This is my chance to get in before anyone else does.”
“Isn’t that cheating?”
“If it is, I’m not the only one. Look.” He gripped Jet by the shoulder. “Larin’s moving. I have to stop the Republic from getting there first.”
Jet smiled tightly at that. “I think you mean ‘the Imperials,’ my friend.”
Ula flushed. “Yes. Yes, of course. That’s exactly what I meant.”
“Envoy Nirvin is over there. I don’t think he cares much, either way.”
Jet pointed at a body so badly crushed that Ula couldn’t identify it. Ula winced and averted his eyes.
“Regardless, I’m going. You can come if you want. I don’t care.”
“All right, all right—but keep your head down!”
Jet wiped his palms on his dusty trousers and took the lead, as if by doing so he might increase the chances of either of them returning alive.
THE WALL COLLAPSED despite the Jedi’s best efforts to prop it up. Fresh air rolled in on a wave of dust and ash. Ax’s nearly invisible droid hopped agilely from outcrop to outcrop toward the opening. In two leaps, it reached the hole and jumped into the light of the outside world.
The droid following in its wake fired at her. Its pulses had turned purple, somehow, and now packed a more powerful punch. She rolled, keeping her shield intact, and reflected the pulses back at it. More dust went up, and the droid vanished into the cloud. She didn’t need to use the Force to know that it had followed in its sibling’s footsteps.
Stryver was hot on their heels, jetpack blazing. Ax risked being burned in his afterwash, she was following so close behind him. The Jedi followed her, looking worn out and battered. She considered turning on him and striking him down, taking the chance to finish what they had started earlier, but more important concerns drove her now. She could hear the droids screeching as they burst into the unsuspecting populace of Tassaa Bareesh’s palace. The sound of their voices fueled her desire to destroy them, to see them all very, very dead.
Evocii and other aliens were running everywhere, fleeing both the droids and the Mandalorian firing at them. His concussion missiles brought down ceilings and walls in the droids’ path, stopping them from getting too far ahead. They fired back at him, causing still more collateral damage. If this kept up, Ax thought, it wouldn’t be long before Tassaa Bareesh’s entire place was destroyed. She couldn’t find it in her heart to care.
When Stryver was within range, he used his net launcher to bring the semi-visible droid down. He hadn’t tried this tactic before, she noted. Furthermore, the net was different from the one he had used on her. Why he had changed his tactics was, however, less important at the moment than the fact that they were working. The net’s mesh was electrified, and delivered a powerful pulse of energy to the droidthing’s silver skin. The six-legged creature spasmed and twitched, shedding sparks into everything it touched. Its keening took on a new, desperate note as its camouflage failed.
Ax prepared to rush in and finish it off.
Then she stopped.
What am I doing?
The answer took surprisingly long to come. This wasn’t her fight. Unless one of the droids was carrying the navicomp, she had nothing to gain by killing them. Revenge might seem sweet at that moment, but she would be full of regret later if attaining it meant failing in her mission. Darth Chratis would make sure of that.
The Cinzia, Lema Xandret. They were what mattered.
The Jedi rushed past her, lightsaber upraised. Let him finish off the fallen droid, Ax decided. To him could go that minor spoil. Then he and Stryver could surely finish off the one droid left to deal with on their own.
Unnoticed by either of them, she turned and headed back to the security air lock.
SHIGAR STABBED DOWN into the guts of the fallen droid, pressing hard to penetrate the surprisingly tough metal of its exoskeleton. Its legs strained against the net, failing either to fire at him or to form its electromirror defense. Sparks still discharged all around it, and Shigar was careful not to be either burned or shocked. As it was, the hairs of his arms were standing on end, electrified even along the shaft of his lightsaber.
The droid’s gleaming sense organs turned matte black when it died. It slumped back with a metallic rattle, and its legs hung limp. Still Shigar worked through its body, making sure nothing survived. The case split open, spilling several white, shell-like hemispheres. Fearing they might create some kind of last-minute attack, Shigar speared them, too. They hissed and collapsed, oozing a dark red liquid.
When he was absolutely positive the droid had no life left, he stepped away and hurried after Stryver. The final droid was peppering the Mandalorian with its newly potent pulses, keeping well out of range of his net launcher. Stryver in turn had managed to maneuver it into a cul-de-sac and pinned it between him and a trio of Nikto security guards. Their blasters were ineffectual against the thing’s armor, but they had a distracting effect.
Shigar came up behind the Mandalorian and considered how best he could help. The roof was low and much less sturdy than that of the security air lock. Reaching out through the Force, he loosened a key beam and brought a shower of bricks and ceiling tiles down onto the droid. The distraction was sufficient for Stryver to get close enough to cast the net.
The droid went down with a shriek of pain and anger. Stryver pumped three concussion grenades into its chest, not caring about the Nikto standing nearby. Shigar pushed past him to finish off the droid himself, before anyone else could get hurt.
Prior to delivering the killing blow, he tried talking to it.
“Why are you fighting?”
“We do not recognize—”
“You’re a combat droid. You must have core protocols.”
“—not recognize your—”
“Who is your commander? Your maker?”
“—your authority! We—”
Stryver leaned past him and plunged his collapsible shockstave into the thing’s chest. Its legs flailed, and it squealed so piteously that Shigar almost felt sorry for it. Then its vocabulator function degraded and its voice became little more than piercing electronic tones. He was glad when it finally fell silent.
His comlink buzzed.
“Shigar, I’m in the vault,” said Larin. “You need to see this.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It—”
With a blast of static, the comlink went dead.
Shigar turned and ran back the way he had come, Stryver’s massive form five long steps ahead of him.
LARIN STEPPED GINGERLY onto the pool of molten metal that had once been the vault’s door. It was still hot. She could feel the heat even through her insulated boots. But it was solid, and her soles held. The body of the droid killed by the cannon lay nearby, its eight legs splayed out and its double body inert.
She quickly surveyed the antechamber and found it to be empty. What had once been white walls were now blackened and scarred, but the other three vaults remained tightly sealed. There was a depression in the center of the room that looked like a tunnel mouth. Re-solidified ferrocrete sealed it shut, however, followed by a layer of molten door metal.
Satisfied that nothing was going to jump her from behind, Larin approached the door itself. Her rifle was cocked and ready, and she had armed backup. Potannin’s squad members were tight-lipped and efficient. Most important, they were following her orders.
The interior of the vault was lit by a single flickering globe. Via the flashes of light it provided, she at last saw with her own eyes the object Potannin had described: a low, domed cylinder made of gleaming silver. The image of a battle-scarred soldier standing low behind her weapon was reflected in its curved front. In the irregular light, she looked both menacing and hesitant.
Gesturing economically, she ordered Potannin’s squad members in past her. They went in separate directions, coming around the object to cover it from every angle. One of them stepped on a long glass tube that shattered with an alarming sound. Nothing sinister, she noted with relief.
There was no sign of the navicomp.
“Destroy everything you find,” Stryver had told her, and she had come armed with grenades to do just that. But she wasn’t about to do anything rash. Who knew what valuable information might disappear forever if she acted precipitously? She may have been dumped from the Republic Special Forces, but that didn’t mean she was about to take orders from a Mandalorian without question.
Larin came forward a step. The toe of her boot caught on something, and when she looked down she saw more of the shining silver threads running across her path.
It came to her in a flash what they might be, and she reached for her comlink to call Shigar.
With a crack, the top of the silver object snapped open. From it issued another droid. She dropped the comlink and fell to one knee, her rifle rising to fire. The droid was coming right for her, legs flailing and screeching like a mad thing. Its wild shape was frozen in a flash of light, silhouetted like a bug on a window. She registered five arms of varying length, and patches in its body that light shone right through. The shots from her rifle tore more holes in its hide and knocked it backward. It flailed and screamed.
She backed away, her heart pounding, pouring round after round into the droid and the object from which it had emerged. This droid wasn’t entirely complete. That much was obvious, even from the brief glimpse she’d received. If it had been, she’d be dead now. It was new, made from scratch inside the object pulled from the Cinzia. As the others had been.
The droid stopped moving. She signaled for a cease-fire, and was grateful for the sudden silence. The air was thick with smoke and static discharges. The tick-ticking of cooling metal was the only sound.
She moved closer to the blaster-scarred droid and the object that had made it. Standing warily over the latter, she pointed her rifle into its gaping maw and peered inside. She saw a mass of silver threads and slender manipulators, still moving despite the damage inflicted upon it. She fired two shots into the maw, and the swirling mass grew frantic. Half a droid foreleg appeared, stunted and deformed. A black sense organ came and went.
Larin knew what it was now. It was a compact droid factory, and it had been busy ever since the Hutts placed it here, sending out tiny threads in search of metals and power, infiltrating security systems and taking everything it needed. Hence the threads she and Shigar had stumbled across under the vaults. Hence the lack of alarms.
She bet herself that if she took a knife to the metal walls of the safe, she would find them barely flimsi-thin—enough to fool a casual glance, but otherwise utterly plundered, dissolved, and removed, ion by ion, for use in the factory’s secret work.
Building vicious, determined, reticent droids that wouldn’t take orders.
Why?
That was a whole other mystery. But the thing was still moving, still functioning. Given enough time, she bet it would repair itself and start all over again. No wonder Stryver wanted it destroyed.
She picked up the comlink.
“Shigar, I’m in the vault,” she told him. “You need to see this.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. It—”
Something red flashed in front of her eyes. A searing pain struck the hand holding her comlink. She stared down in horror at the terrible cauterized wound where her fingers had once been.
Over the humming of her crimson lightsaber, the Sith said, “Give me the navicomp or it’ll be your head you lose next.”
ULA CRANED TO SEE what was going on inside the vault. He and Jet stood in the antechamber and had been just about to venture in after Larin when the sound of blasterfire brought them up short. Bright flashes of light lit up the cramped space. Larin and her two companions were shooting at something. But what? Not another droid, surely!
Ula and Jet dived for cover just in case, and kept their heads down until the rattle of weapons-fire died away.
Ula looked up. He could just see Larin’s silhouette leaning over the object Yeama had shown him. Its top was open, and she fired twice into it.
He was about to clamber to his feet when his eyes caught something out of place among the bits of stone and other rubble on the floor.
It was the navicomp.
One of the hexes must have knocked it out when they emerged to do battle. He scrambled for it before someone else saw and took it. Its transparisteel container was intact, and the device itself looked no worse than it had before.
A feeling of triumph filled him. If he could open the case and get the thing itself free, he could smuggle it under his cloak without anyone else seeing. But first he had to distract Jet. If the smuggler saw it, there was bound to be another fight over it. The whole extended disaster could start all over again.
Footsteps crunched behind him, and he turned, fearing that his find had already been discovered.
It was the red-haired Sith. She was heading for the vault, not him.
His relief was short-lived. The Sith’s lightsaber flashed and Larin gasped with pain.
“Give me the navicomp or it’ll be your head you lose next.”
Ula froze in horror.
“I don’t have it,” Larin said, voice tight.
“I don’t believe you.”
One of Larin’s companions fired at the Sith. She easily deflected the bolt back into his throat. He went down kicking then fell still.
“I’m telling the truth.”
“I’ll count to five. Then I’ll start hacking up your friend here. And then it’ll be your head, I promise.”
The Sith approached the last surviving member of Ula’s security detail. He backed nervously away.
“One.”
The box containing the navicomp was in Ula’s possession. All he had to do was surrender it to the Sith and Larin would be saved. And he would safely deliver the information to the Empire. It was a simple solution to all his problems.
“Two.”
But Ula couldn’t move. The Sith and the Empire weren’t the same thing. Oh, to trillions they were inseparable—the Emperor himself was the Sith to whom all others deferred!—but to him they were very different. On the one hand, the Empire offered a society of rules and clearly defined justice that could, if allowed to do so, bring peace and prosperity to every planet in the galaxy. On the other, oppression and constant conflict. Could he in good conscience give any advantage to the followers of the latter? Would Larin want him to?
“Three.”
If only he could deliver the navicomp to the Minister of Logistics. With it in her hand, she could surely find a way to turn it to their advantage. The Empire was so huge it wouldn’t miss this world’s resources, for all the squabbling over them now. All Ula wanted was the chance to prove the rightness of his principles. He didn’t mind the existence of the Sith, but they shouldn’t be allowed to run roughshod over everyone else.
“Four.”
Yet there was no point dreaming. The Minister of Logistics might have been in another universe entirely. He could no more give her this vital piece in the puzzle than he could stand up to the Sith himself and survive. He was just a pawn in a game much larger than he could imagine. He was insignificant and disposable. How foolish to think that he could ever have changed the way this would turn out! The navicomp had been earmarked for the Sith the very moment she arrived.
“Five.” The Sith moved in to start slashing.
“Wait!” he called out.
All eyes turned to him. The Sith glared at him with hateful eyes. Jet looked as shocked as though Ula had sprouted wings and flown up to the ceiling. Larin’s expression was hidden by her helmet, and that was the one he most wanted to see.
“Here,” he told the Sith, holding up the navicomp. “Take it. Just leave her alone.”
The girl’s expression became hungry, triumphant. Ula didn’t want to get any closer to that blade than he had to. He hefted the box and tossed it to her.
At the height of its arc, a gleaming web reached in and snatched the box clean out of the air.
“What—?” Ula spun around.
The Mandalorian caught the box neatly in one hand and tossed something back to Ula in return. He caught it automatically. It was a heavy metal sphere with a blinking red light.
“No!” screamed the Sith, robbed of her prize.
Stryver was already moving, rising up on his jetpack and heading for the exit.
“Chuck it!” yelled Jet to Ula. “That’s a thermal detonator!”
Ula hurled the sphere away from him as hard as he could. It went up, and kept going up as Shigar, the Jedi, used the Force to sweep it away. The tactic wasn’t entirely defensive. The detonator exploded high in the creaking scaffolding that had once been the security air lock’s roof, directly above Stryver’s escape route. The statue of Tassaa Bareesh toppled and fell. Yet another avalanche came crashing down after it, burying the Mandalorian and a herd of palace guards that had come to quell the disturbance.
The floor gave way, and kept giving way as Stryver fired downward, riding the tide of collapse into the palace’s deeper levels.
Snarling, the Sith girl went after him, determined not to lose her prize. She vanished into the roil of stone and ferrocrete, and didn’t reappear.
Ula took one step toward Larin, but Shigar beat him to it.
“Are you all right?” the Jedi asked her.
She was leaning against the outside of the vault with her crippled left hand compressed under her armpit. With her right hand, she tugged off her helmet. Her face was white and pinched.
“I’ll live,” she said. “Meanwhile, it’s not over. Stryver will head for his ship first chance he gets. You have to cut him off and get the navicomp back, any way you can. Do you think you can do that without me?”
Shigar nodded, tight-lipped, and loped off across the shattered floor to the hole in the wall, leaping gracefully from girder to girder.
Larin held her grin until Shigar was out of sight. Then she slumped in pain.
Ula’s pain was different but no less real. It was clear that Larin had a close connection with Shigar. The Jedi even had tattoos similar to hers. It was some kind of cultural thing, surely. Perhaps they were married. The thought made his chest ache.
He knew it was ridiculous to feel this way. He knew it was based on nothing at all. He knew he had built it all up in his own head, and that made him an idiot of the highest order. He had more important things to worry about than this.
The battle for the navicomp was over. Tassaa Bareesh’s palace security forces would be converging on the site to clean up and make accusations. He didn’t want to be there when that happened. His loyalties were so compromised, he wasn’t sure he could convince anyone that he wasn’t guilty of everything.
“Stryver will be going for his ship, like she said,” he told Jet, “but he’s going the wrong way around. I’ll head him off and see if I can salvage something. Tell her—tell the others I’ll meet them at the shuttle.”
The smuggler studied him closely, and then simply said, “All right, mate. I might need a lift myself.”
“Isn’t your ship—?”
“Impounded and crewless.” He shrugged. “And what’s a freight captain without his ship? Guess I’d better start thinking about a normal job.”
Ula patted him on the shoulder with what he hoped was appropriate bonhomie, because it was utterly genuine. A normal job. Those three words had struck him with the force of one of Stryver’s thermal detonators.
He hurried off, following with infinitely greater clumsiness Shigar’s route across the shattered floor. He ignored the shouts and screams coming from the levels below. He ignored the shaking of his hands. He kept his mind firmly on its goal.
There was an Imperial ship in the palace’s dock. That was where he was headed. If he could get there before it left, he could reveal his true identity and claim amnesty. He could escape with the Sith and the navicomp when she returned from hunting Stryver, and he could finally report to his superior.
He could relax the disguise, and speak freely, without lies or deceptions.
He could be himself. And then …
A normal job?
Nothing at that moment appealed to him more.