“I’m … just doing … what you created me to do … ”
The pressure subsided slightly. Still suspended in midair, Rusher watched Daiman step toward him. Mismatched eyes looked up. “What?”
Rusher’s mind racing, his mouth moved to match. “Having autonomous forces was your idea. We were created for the purpose. Your purpose!”
Daiman lowered his hand, and his victim dropped violently to the floor. Blond eyebrows tilted in amusement. “Tell me the purpose,” Daiman said, smirking.
Ignoring the shooting pain in his shin from the rough landing, Rusher fought to get to his knees. “We look different. You can’t send your regular forces ahead to Gazzari without him sensing a trap—”
“Any ship can be disguised!”
“—and the truth is,” Rusher said, shifting gears, “you’d rather rent than own!”
“What in blazes are you talking about?”
“I’m saying you’ve got more important things to think about,” Rusher said, getting to his feet. “There are too many details to running an artillery brigade—”
“Details I have designed!”
“And that’s the problem,” Rusher said, searching for his retail smile. “You worked so many complexities into this universe, Lord Daiman, that it’s hard for us lesser beings to cope. Not all organics are up to it.” He slapped his chest. “You created us specialists to manage these systems—and our own affairs—for greater efficiency. We’re like anything else you created to work your will,” he said, “just a little different.”
Rusher watched the Sith Lord, burning eyes still set on him. They really did look like the double stars outside. The brigadier stepped over to retrieve his cane. “And you know what’s really amazing?” he asked. “It all works. The variety you’ve designed into the universe is really something. Genius, really.” He looked back at Daiman. “As my lord knows.”
Daiman stood stone-silent amid the generals and Correctors.
At last, he spoke. “You have your assignments. Prepayments of ordnance and fuel are already being delivered to your ships.” He turned back toward the stairs. “Leave me.”
The sentries opened the doors outward. The generals didn’t waste any time stepping over the Togorian’s remains.
* * *
“Where’d you go?”
Kerra lifted her mask and faced the Bothan, still bound to the round frame. He seemed perturbed by her disappearance; as annoyed as she’d been at his unwillingness to talk, earlier. He’d only agreed to trade information for his freedom, and only after he was freed. “I’m not in the business of helping Jedi,” he’d said.
I’m not in the business of freeing Sith spies, she’d thought.
Hearing approaching voices, she’d headed back into the hallway just in time to see Daiman’s procession depart the heptagonal temple, heading in the opposite direction.
If Daiman was at the front, she hadn’t been able to see him. But where else would he be? “Where is he going?”
“I can answer that,” the spy replied. “And you know how.”
Kerra groaned. Seeing no alternative, she came to a decision. “Hold on.”
“Wait! Whulp!”
Kerra started the wheel moving again, careful not to upset anything as she rolled it through the storage area. The kitchen outside looked as though it had never produced a meal, and yet the larder was fully stocked with fresh food and shining cooking implements. While everyone outside works three shifts for a ration, she thought.
“Is this really necessary? Cut me down from this thing!”
“Just let me do this. There’s a way out of here, but you’re in no shape for sneaking around,” she said. “Now, about Daiman?”
The Bothan fumed. “He’s going to Gazzari,” he said, finally. “Aboard Era Daimanos.”
“Gazzari?” Kerra’s brow furrowed. She thought back on the intelligence reports she’d seen in the Republic. The world sat in a wedge of Daiman’s space between Bactra’s territory and Odion’s. “Does this have to do with what’s going on with Bactra?”
“Yes,” he said.
“And that is?”
“Only once we’re outside.”
Kerra slid up to a window and looked out. There was the flagship Era Daimanos, parked on a rooftop within the compound. The boarding ramps were down on the vessel, and she saw the massive rear engines outgassing. It was a ship preparing to travel.
Kerra opened her pouch. The explosives were there, beneath her clothes and lightsaber. Yes, she thought, it might be easier to do away with Daiman aboard a ship. As inviting a target as the temple had been, she’d still have the problem of escaping from what was, in effect, Corrector Central. How much easier would it be to decapitate the regime from the comfort of a life pod, on the way to someplace else?
It’d be nice to do something easy. For a change.
Sealing the pouch, she returned to the Bothan’s torture wheel. He saw her coming. “I’ll tell you the rest, but you have to take me with you. Wherever you’re going.” The spy’s voice stirred with emotion, as it had back on the plaza, nights earlier. “I owe Daiman now, Kerra. You must take me.”
“Nope.”
“What?”
Kerra kicked open a door and grabbed the side of the wheel. “I don’t work with Sith. And I don’t work with people who work with Sith.”
“This again? I don’t—”
“I told you, there’s only one way to get you out of here,” she said, releasing the great wheel and walking toward a corrugated metal door. With a heave, she forced it open, revealing a long stone trough leading downward. Down, and out of Daiman’s compound, terminating in the mountainous refuse pile that abutted the south wall.
“No!” Seeing the long chute below, the spy writhed. “Don’t!”
“If it’s any consolation,” she said, “I don’t think those bonds of yours will survive the landing. I don’t know why, but it looks like the guards loosened them.” She positioned the circular rack on the open ledge.
His eyes burned with anger. “You’ll regret this, Jedi. I’m not what you think I am!”
“So long.”
She gave the wheel a shove.
Only Mak had bothered to wait for Rusher. Using the cane for real, this time, Rusher stepped past the sentries at the gate and looked up at the black wall behind him. Daiman’s favorite suns had just set, he saw. Diligence’s crew wouldn’t have much time to get packed up to move. Master Dackett wasn’t going to like this at all.
There wasn’t any thought of not taking the assignment. Not if Rusher ever wanted to set foot in Daiman’s space again. And one never knew. If Daiman’s gambit proved successful, it might all be Daiman’s space before too long.
Mak looked up at the human and smirked. “Really, Rusher. ‘You’d rather rent than own’?”
“It’s what came to me,” Rusher said, stretching his bruised leg. Just a little sprain; he’d walk it off. “It’s not my line. Admiral Veltraa said it about irregular units, back in the ancient times,” Rusher said. A little history comes in handy.
“I thought you’d converted for a mo-mo-moment.”
“Don’t worry, Mak. I’m not about to start wearing gold armor and chanting.”
Suddenly the two heard a bloodcurdling scream from off to the right. Scanning the ramparts, Rusher saw nothing as the cry trailed off into silence. He cinched up his trench coat. “Crazy place.”
“And that Daiman’s the craziest of all,” Mak said, covering his mouth. “Not much to like about this b-b-business.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Rusher said, straightening his collar. “We get to face Odion. His death-cultists want to be blown up. Makes for a short workday.”
Era Daimanos was Daiman’s flagship in the classic naval sense. Kerra had seen larger, more powerful vessels in the young lord’s fleet; Era was more a cross between a battleship and a pleasure yacht. But Era bore Lord Daiman, and that unlucky fact gave it its distinction.
It had bee
n surprisingly simple for her to reach the ship before Daiman’s entourage. Giving up on navigating the labyrinthine palace, Kerra had found her way to the rooftop. It had been an easy traverse from there in the stealth suit. By the time the first train of bearers arrived with Daiman’s luggage, she was already safely on board, hiding in a service area beneath a deck grating.
The service tunnel was a close fit, but she’d found several passages branching from it to other areas of the ship. She’d been relieved to find one leading to an unused galley, as it meant she could take her time and pick her moment. And in the tunnel, she wouldn’t need the stealth suit every minute of the day. She hoped Daiman wasn’t bringing many adepts sensitive to feelings of hate, because she was coming to absolutely loathe the accursed suit.
Settling in near a grating, Kerra turned up the suit’s audio sensors. She could just make out Daiman and the Woostian aide, passing somewhere in the company of his sentries.
“—as my lord knows, the Bothan spy is missing,” she said. “The Gamorreans left him as instructed. He was not there when they returned.”
“Your lord knows,” Daiman said to his aide. “I knew he’d find a way, once we left him alone. An intrepid little beast. Quite entertaining.”
Beneath the floor, Kerra pursed her lips. She’d thought the Gamorreans had loosened the Bothan’s bonds before they’d left him alone. It didn’t make much sense.
Hearing the engines of the vessel throttle up, Kerra strained to catch Daiman’s final comment before he went out of earshot: “All proceeds according to my design.”
Kerra looked at the explosives sitting inside her bag and smiled. Just wait, Dark Lord. Let’s see you design your way out of this!
CHAPTER SEVEN
The tortured ground pointed up; turrets of Sarrassian iron pointed out, and down. Standing in the spotters’ nest atop Diligence’s hull, Rusher regarded the sight with pride, wondering if this was how gardeners felt.
Of course, he planted death, rather than life. But in Sith space, that seemed to fit.
Hours earlier, it had been a rusty ridge, untouched by organics. Now cannon barrels lined the eastern edge of the bowl valley, the weapons planted just inside the stalagmite line by his busy crews. Taking macrobinoculars from one of his aides, Rusher looked along the ridgeline. There were the Nosaurian’s long Brock-Eight cannons, just going in to the north. Lower down, Mak was positioning his droids as best he could, given the many crevasses in the landform.
Rusher had seldom deployed in such challenging terrain. The “valley” was actually an ancient crater several kilometers across; their ridge was part of the eastern wall, broken several times by tectonic action and meteor strikes. The curious stone shards rising from the ridge had made finding an elevated place to land Diligence difficult. Rusher guessed they came from acid rain, generated by the same volcanoes whose smoke gave Gazzari its low ceiling. Weather seemed to come in only two kinds here: rain, or ashfall. Watching blackened motes flutter by, he was thankful they’d gotten here during the latter. Rain that could give a crater teeth was something he didn’t want to be out in.
Below, he saw what the combination of the two had wrought. The floor of the crater was a tarry slick, a featureless sheen stretching to the corresponding ridge far away. Daiman had perched his vessel on the northern crater wall; even now, his elite troops were setting up temporary structures down in the valley. Or trying to. The surface slurry looked ankle-deep. Rusher could see the Daimanites struggling in the terrain.
But the idea was pretty clever, Rusher thought. By raising decoy tents and depots there, Daiman stood a chance of convincing anyone landing that the terrain was manageable. Lost moments in the valley would give his irregulars the advantage. The planet looked as if it had been created specifically with an ambush in mind.
Of course, Daiman would say he’d done exactly that, Rusher thought, rubbing his neck.
He turned his attention back to his own forces. Rusher treated deployments like a science, but visually they had the artistic appeal of a dance. They’d parked Diligence in a clearing behind stone spires a couple of meters high, just tall enough to screen their cargo operations. Landing on flat ground to permit easier unloading, they’d activated the precious hydraulic lifts to tilt the nose of the crew compartment downward, providing Rusher’s rooftop command center a better angle on the valley.
Now, before any enemies were even in the system, the real operation was under way. With the ramps on Diligence’s two cargo-cluster feet petaled outward, all eight battalions hit the ground simultaneously. Squads of rifle-toting troopers emerged first, setting a perimeter. Scouts followed on their speeder bikes, examining terrain and checking for mines.
Then the majors—Rusher always fancied the old Republic ranks—emerged with their headquarters units, conferring electronically about deployment zones with their spotter counterparts on Diligence’s roof. The big machines came last, wheeling out the bases of the larger pieces and bringing down the long barrels from their stowage spaces outside the ship’s hull.
There were no assembly workers in Rusher’s Brigade. No gunners, either, for that matter. As specialists went, Rusher was a committed generalist. Every laborer who built the weapons was also rated to operate them, and anyone who wanted the fun of firing one had to build the emplacement beforehand and tear it down after the party ended. Artillery pieces were complicated enough that an intimate understanding of them was necessary at every step, from assembly to use to retrieval. It was something he’d learned from old Yulan, back in better days. If a turbolaser blast took out half your people, you didn’t want to lose the only ones who knew how to shoot back. Or how to lift off in a hurry.
Still, there was the occasional irreplaceable component. Rusher saw his, perched down on the cargo support and screaming inaudibly at teams on the ground. Master Ryland Dackett was the reason things looked choreographed rather than chaotic. He’d spent his life helping Sith shoot Sith. Enough, Rusher imagined, to qualify as an honorary Jedi. He was getting results, as usual. Everything was moving nicely. Engineer Novallo was out giving Diligence’s clubbed feet a once-over. Tun-Badon, the creepy Sanyassan running Serraknife Battalion, was scaring the blazes out of his team; no wonder they were always the first to finish deploying. This could be done in record time, despite the terrain.
A light on the northern crater wall caught Rusher’s attention. He redirected the macrobinoculars to see Daiman emerging from Era Daimanos. Gone was the spectral cape from days before. Today’s Daiman was downright demure, decked out in a royal blue flak jacket and leather leggings that tucked into knee-high boots. Dressed for a fight, Rusher thought. Or maybe the weather’s just too rotten for the draperies.
Scanning away from Daiman’s departing entourage, Rusher thought for a moment he spied movement beneath one of the flagship’s cargo ramps. Something seemed to stir there in the falling ash, almost like a frosted phantom.
Zeroing in, he looked again. Nothing.
Rusher rapped the macrobinoculars twice against the railing. “Get these checked,” he said, passing them to an aide. “If there’s one thing I’ll need today, it’s eyes that work!”
It had been the most frustrating journey Kerra had endured since arriving in Sith space. Hearing Daiman board his starship while on Darkknell, she’d assumed she’d be able to find him later just by looking for the biggest room. Not so. Era Daimanos lacked any lavish pleasure dome like the one in his Xakrean compound.
She’d heard a rumor on the work line that Daiman didn’t care for spaceflight. She couldn’t imagine him having a weak stomach; maybe the so-called creator of the cosmos simply felt inadequate actually seeing it up close. That was as good an explanation as any for the fact that there was no hint of Daiman in any of the major cabins with views to the outside. He didn’t seem the sort to cocoon himself in a meditation chamber, but after the third day and night, she’d actually begun searching rooms that small.
Again, no luck. Maybe he stores himself in deep f
reeze to stay all shiny, she’d thought.
Worse, while the service tunnels were both deserted and extensive, the one place they didn’t seem to go was toward the reactors. Then again, that might have been for the best. Era was well fixed for kitchens, but it came up short in the life pod department. Evidently, Daiman’s life was the only one that mattered. There was no easy way to blow up the ship and escape.
So she’d waited. The baradium nitrite packs were swiftly becoming the most traveled explosives in the history of guerrilla warfare.
By the fourth day, when Era had groaned to a landing, Kerra was afraid Daiman wasn’t on the ship at all. It had been a relief, on finally reaching a cargo ramp, to see Daiman’s seven-tentacled sun standard hanging outside. Several hundred meters across Gazzari’s surface, another stood before a canvas dome erected in a forest of jagged pillars. Kerra had seen several of Daiman’s aides milling about—and, finally, the popinjay himself. The headquarters dome was well within the power of her explosives to destroy. Looking toward the eastern ridge of the crater, she’d seen several more ships parked in the highlands. Lots of options for escape. Things were finally breaking her way.
Or so it had seemed. Now, on the ground, Kerra realized the destination was more aggravating than the flight. The Mark VI, which had kept her alive throughout her exploration of Daiman’s Darkknell castle, was almost entirely useless here. The fine particles of volcanic dust drifting through the air found something to love about the suit. Or maybe about Kerra. For whatever reason, the ash only clung to her while the suit was activated.
It made the “stealth suit” nothing of the kind. After five minutes walking around on Gazzari, she’d look like a short Talz—covered with white dust instead of fur, and with a clipped mask instead of a weird proboscis.
Star Wars: Knight Errant Page 9