Withdrawing her lightsaber from her fourth attacker, Kerra turned back, only to walk into a maelstrom.
You will stop you will stop you will stop!
Four advancing Sith, speaking in unison, pounded at her through the Force. Dizzied by the mental onslaught, Kerra felt her knees buckle. Rolling away on the sweaty sidewalk, she opened her eyes to see them advancing. Advancing—and speaking, their words pummeling her.
Wincing, Kerra looked behind them—and saw one of their airspeeders, hovering, unoccupied, over the scene. Reaching through the Force, she grabbed at it and pushed. The vehicle complied, slamming violently down onto the canal retaining wall behind her surprised attackers. Their psychic attack momentarily broken, Kerra pushed again, causing them to lose their footing on the slick surface. Regaining her feet, she bounded toward them …
… and past them, leaping over the speeder’s debris to the top of the retaining wall. She broke into a run toward the sea, relieved that the mental pressure had abated. Force persuasion was a discipline almost every Force-user learned, even if she loathed using it. But she’d never felt such power behind it before—excepting perhaps Odion’s coaxing call to self-destruction. The only thing that was keeping her alive was that, at least as far as she could tell, the Scarlet Riders had learned mesmerism to the exclusion of other, more physical skills. She could take them in a direct duel—but now was not the time. She spied her real goal, ahead. Tan and Beadle’s captors had loaded them aboard one of the airspeeders, the first in a row of three readying to head across the bay.
She’d have only one chance to catch them.
Speeding up as she approached the trailing airspeeder, Kerra remembered her headset and punched a button. “Rusher, this is Kerra! What ever you do—don’t let the rest of the refugees off the ship!”
Tell me something I don’t know, Rusher thought, pocketing his comlink as he dashed across the once-lush carpet of the ready room. One didn’t go very far in Sith space without seeing a suspicious mind trick now and again. From what he could tell, the characters in red that had ridden up had worked more than a few of them.
The brigadier had been getting ready to kick back in the solarium when he saw them through the skylight: the first fliers coming across from the mesa in the bay. By the time Rusher reached the top of Starboard Three, he’d seen Novallo and her fix-it team standing, hypnotized, in the middle of the metal bridge. In between them and Diligence, riders representing Byllura’s government stalked across the platform, rounding up everyone they could find.
Rusher cursed himself. He’d advised the sentries not to challenge any arrivals too strongly, figuring that the locals were coming to escort the refugees away. Either that, or the Jedi or Trooper Lubboon would be back with the Sullustan kid. But the Sith who ran the planet evidently weren’t going to settle for just his passengers.
It wasn’t the first time a Sith Lord had reneged on Rusher’s independence; not everyone respected the way forces from Mandragall’s former empire did things, and even if they did, they were Sith. Cheating was in their nature. But as far as he knew, the faceless masters of Byllura didn’t even know who or what Rusher’s Brigade was. It was just a crew to enslave, a warship to be grabbed.
A warship where most of the weapons are on the inside, Rusher thought, running onto the bridge. At least the deckwatch had the presence of mind to close the ramps before anyone boarded. But the options from here were limited. This was going to be a close one, if they got out of it.
“Hailed from below, Captain!”
Rusher stepped down into the command pit to see the view from the cam beneath Port Ramp One. A gaggle of red-suits was there, including one toothy monster of a Trandoshan who looked none too comfortable, strapped into his light jumpsuit. Looking up at the cam, the Trandoshan waved a meaty green hand and hissed, “You will open this vessel and report for assignment.”
“It doesn’t work over the comm, pal!” Rusher snorted. These weren’t Sith Lords, or even the higher-quality Sith adepts he’d seen. They were specialists, like him—trained at one thing.
And it wasn’t going well for them. The rider repeated his command.
“Talking louder doesn’t help!” Rusher sat down at the Besalisk’s comm station. “Now can we talk about you returning my crew, or—”
“The Dyarchy has spoken! Open this vessel!”
“If you say so,” Rusher said, pointing to his helmsbeing. “Drop anchor!”
With a metallic crack, Port Ramp One dropped open, smashing the Trandoshan and two of his cronies flat. The ramp lifted back shut less than a second later.
“Good hydraulics, baby!” Rusher said, patting Diligence’s command console and smiling.
A brief respite. His reverie halted when the Mon Calamari navigator spoke up, pointing to another monitor. “Master Dackett’s down there.”
“What?”
“Other side, sir.” Rusher looked at the view from the underbelly. Dackett and several more of the sentries stood, motionless, before another red rider.
“Blast!” Rusher sat back in the chair, flustered. The fat man was going to get him killed one day. “Probably saw the shore and went out looking for the women.”
As Rusher stared, the Trandoshan walked into the scene, rubbing the fresh dent in his rubbery skull. “You will submit, mercenary!” He ignited a short crimson lightsaber. “Open up or we’ll cut you out!” The Trandoshan shot a look at his stupefied hostages. “Or maybe we’ll cut something else!”
Rusher stood, tapping vainly on the comlink. “This is your department, Jedi! Where are you?” Diligence could use a rear-guard action, Jedi-style. “Kerra Holt, come in!”
Nothing.
“Blast and blast!” Rusher said, tossing the comlink to the floor and stomping up the steps to the big window. Their lurch ratio was shot to blazes, anyway. “We’re on our own.” He looked down at the helmsbeing. “Can you lift off without cooking them?”
“Sir, you’re going to leave Master Dackett?”
“He’ll find a way back,” Rusher said, looking back outside. “We’ve still got his old arm.”
Kerra had gone cliff diving a few times as a child on Aquilaris. But never as an adult, never as a Jedi—and never from a ledge that stood not over water, but over a city. Running atop the retaining wall, she saw the permacrete ledge run out just ahead, where it guided the water down a hundred meters to the next level of Hestobyll.
She sped up. Boy, this had better work.
Leaping, Kerra stretched her arms wide, reaching for the rearmost airspeeder as it pulled away. If she was shocked that she’d tried it, she was even more surprised when she overshot it, crashing down upon the suddenly idling vehicle’s hood. Rolling over, she saw the crimson-clad driver struggling with the control yoke. Feeling the impact, the Rodian looked up at her, puzzled.
“Engine problems?” Kerra asked, putting her boot through the windscreen and into the driver’s snout. Scrambling across the shattered remnants, she leapt atop the bewildered Rodian. Crowded from the driver’s seat, the Sith lackey struggled to find his baton. With an inviting target in the creature’s green proboscis, Kerra grabbed him by the scarlet collar and punched repeatedly.
Hanging halfway outside the speeder, the pummeled Sith turned his glassy eyes on her and focused. “You will release me!”
“Okay,” Kerra said, pulling her hands back into the airspeeder. The stunned Rodian plummeted out of sight.
Kicking out the remains of the windscreen—no transparisteel factory here, she saw—Kerra settled into the driver’s seat. Up ahead, the airspeeder bearing Beadle and Tan rocketed away, climbing above the edge of Hestobyll and out over the harbor. It was making a direct line for the mesa at the center of the bay; she set her speeder on a course to follow.
Confirming that she wasn’t being pursued, Kerra looked down and to the left. Something was going on with Diligence, but from her elevation it wasn’t clear what. More people were out on the tarmac and bridge, and she could see
some airspeeders and red outfits. But at least she didn’t see any shooting. Kerra couldn’t imagine that Rusher would endanger his own people on the dock by putting up a struggle—but, then, she never knew with him. If the red-suits down there were as powerful as the ones she had faced, they might have already shown him a thing or two about fast-talking.
Kerra faced a decision. The refugees would certainly be in jeopardy. But just as clearly, everyone who lived on Byllura was in danger: danger of losing their sanity, as they had already lost their independence. This scheme was something Daiman could have dreamed up. The workers weren’t simply enslaved here; the rulers of—what had the Celegian called it?—the Dyarchy were actually turning the people into automatons, one command at a time. Darkknell had been a place where art and other forms of leisure had been discouraged as unnecessary. Byllura had taken Daiman’s notion a step farther. The place was colorless not because the people weren’t allowed to decorate their lives; in fact, they probably weren’t even aware of what things looked like. Or much else, for that matter. Not under that kind of psychic duress. Strong-willed beings could resist Force persuasion, but here there was simply too much of it going on. Wills were being broken before anyone realized they were under attack.
Kerra remembered thinking the harbor mesa and the building overhanging it resembled a balo mushroom. Now that first impression seemed prophetic. One of her early assignments as a Padawan had been shutting down a ring of Core World smugglers shuttling shipments of the fungi to Coruscant for processing. Mere busywork for a new recruit; neither the Jedi nor the Republic had much time for spice interdiction, and between war and plague, the population had plenty to forget. But on that assignment, she’d gotten to see people in the grip of narcotics: still functioning, but no longer the masters of their own lives.
That’s who the people of Hestobyll had reminded her of. And whoever—or whatever—was on that vertical island was controlling them in the same way. The Byllurans were still independent beings, but with no will to resist when the call came. And increasingly, no identities of their own.
And there was more going on, she noticed now. Accelerating, Kerra looked down at the buoys leading from the mesa across the bay to the city, behind her. They appeared to be evenly spaced, just like the silos in the city.
“More Celegians,” she murmured, passing over one and getting a closer look. There, visible through the transparent roof of the buoy, bobbed a Celegian in its protective cylinder. Kerra’s mind raced. The Celegians on the mainland weren’t simply public address announcers. These poor creatures were all links in a telepathic communications system—a chain that reached, unbroken, all the way across the water to the mesa and its retreat, high above. She’d heard of ancient signaling methods that used line-of-sight signals instead of electronics. Whoever was running this place had put the entire bay on his telepathic grid. There wasn’t a need for a comlink anywhere.
Except in her case. Reminded, Kerra activated her headset and prepared to call in her destination. The mesa and its metallic cap loomed before her. “Another sanctum,” Kerra groaned, shaking her head. I just hope they don’t use Daiman’s architect!
“They’re putting holes in us, Brigadier!”
Rusher’s nostrils flared. This was worse than mynocks. The second Diligence hit the thrusters and began to hover, several of the red raiders from outside had leapt onto the ship. Now monitors showed the Trandoshan and several of his buddies clinging atop the massive retro-rockets, jabbing at anything they could find with their short red lightsabers.
“Give ’em a spin, helm!”
The tentacle-faced Khil complied, her light green fingers a blur across the console. Around them, Diligence lurched and spun, forcing Rusher to grab on to chair backs for balance. Outside, the scenery of Byllura blew past—and on the monitor, so did several of the Sith climbers.
“Still a couple left, sir!”
“Cut thrusters!” Rusher yelled.
Diligence slammed violently to the platform, just in time for Rusher to yell another command: “Thrusters on!”
The tentacle-faced helmswoman got the picture, making Diligence hop like a Zeltron veil dancer. Bracing himself, Rusher watched the underside monitors. This time, even the muscle-bound Trandoshan lost hold.
Rusher signaled a return to midair. “Good work, Zussh! Next time someone tells me they’ve been to Corellia, I’ll believe them!”
“I’d sssay it’s a good thing we got the hydraulicsss fixed,” the Khil hissed.
“And that Novallo isn’t here to break my neck for that stunt.” Reminded, Rusher walked up the steps to the viewport. “Where are our people?”
Diligence swung over the bay, turned aft, and tilted. Looking down at the platform, Rusher spotted Dackett and Novallo standing with thirty or so crew members, backed toward the far edge of the raised dock. However strong the Sith lackeys’ power of suggestion was, it wasn’t enough to keep victims standing around when all blazes were breaking loose. Rusher saw that the Trandoshan and the few other goons who hadn’t been thrown into the water were out of commission, lying in the huge cracked imprints Diligence had pounded into the tiled surface. But others were coming across the bridge from the city.
Boy, it’ll feel good to shoot something. “Make it an island!”
With a jolt that rocked the bridge, the turbolasers mounted left and right of the crew compartment blasted downward at the metal bridge. Rated for nothing more than clearing asteroids, they were more than sufficient to send the structure—and quite a few of the baton-toting thugs—into the bay.
“Brigadier! The airssspeedersss—”
Rusher saw it—and felt it—before Zussh finished hissing the words. A flash of gray filled the viewport before him, sending a tremor through the bridge that knocked him to the carpet. Several of the airspeeders that had brought the trouble to the landing platform were still out there. If he’d forgotten about them, they were reminding him now, slamming against the upper decks and trying to rupture the windows. He’d never be able to bring the ship’s weapons to bear against them. Too bad they didn’t—
Wait, Rusher thought. Weapons, we’ve got. From his position on the carpet, he turned to face the crew in the command pit. “Spin us again—and hit ’em with the long cannons! The Kellies!”
Zussh’s dark eyes blinked. “Sssir, thossse are in the hold.”
“The carriages and generators are. The barrels are attached to the hull!” Rusher stood, gloves flush with the window. Three airspeeders buzzed past, trying to find a safe means to approach the spinning ship, spinning in place. Spying a red rider making a run, Rusher yelled. “Hard to starboard!”
Diligence yawed violently, its protruding Sarrassian iron cannon barrels cleaving the air like a massive rotor. The stern metal tore through the first of the shoddily built airspeeders as if it wasn’t there. While the second speeder avoided that fate, its pilot didn’t, flung nearly over the horizon by the spinning muzzle.
Well, that’s a new one. Rusher watched the third airospeeder hurtle into the bay, struck by a glancing blow. What would he name this tactic? It wasn’t something they could try against a larger ship or a fixed obstacle without snapping off their attachments. The Rusher Just-This-Once Maneuver, maybe.
“Visual on Master Dackett, sir.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Beating the Trandoshan to death with his new arm.”
Rusher smiled. “Put us alongside the platform and drop Starboard Ramp Three. Just like a regular evac.” Well, nothing at all like one. But it’ll do.
Diligence dropped into position. Rusher looked for his cane. His sprain from Daiman’s palace had healed, but he might need it for defense when Prenda Novallo boarded. Mesmerized no longer, Diligence’s hull doctor would have just seen him using her precious ship like a battering ram.
But as he watched his crew board on the monitor, he realized that inevitable confrontation would be the least of his troubles. They’d won a few minutes’ respite from th
e Sith, but the refugees were still aboard, and their nursemaid hadn’t returned. Rusher found his comlink, on the floor.
“Holt! Come in! Jedi!”
The light on it blinked. She’d sent a message, during the chaos. But before he could play it back, a call came from the helmsbeing.
“Brigadier, we’ve got new contacts from the north. A lot—and they’re big!”
Rusher gritted his teeth. Now what? “Bigger than the airspeeders?”
“Bigger than us!”
Rusher dashed to the viewport facing Hestobyll and gaped. Steam was rising from the giant stone pools built into several of the terrace levels. Steam—and something else, something they wouldn’t be able to overcome with a couple of rock-chasers and a few stunts.
His eyes widened. “Little Jedi, wherever you are—I think we’ve made them mad!”
A Jedi!
Calician marveled as he shambled away from One. A Jedi Knight was less than ten minutes away from The Loft. There was no need to consult any electronic scanner, nor even any reason to look out the window. The network he’d developed had brought the news instantaneously to him and his young masters.
Part of the inspiration had come from watching jornisae spiders, accidentally and unwisely imported from Cularin to his homeworld. Even when he blinded the creatures, they could sense the approach of others, feeling vibrations in their webs. The arrayed Celegians created their own web, constantly broadcasting status reports back and forth to one another. The same individuals who provided them the reports were charged with forcing them to send them: the red-clad Unifiers.
Quillan and Dromika hadn’t understood the need for the Sith adepts to wear uniforms; they never expected to see them, anyway. In the body of Dyarchical power, the Unifiers acted both as regulating agents, ensuring that orders were followed—and as antibodies, killing or co-opting pathogens. The biological metaphor was Calician’s, too, straight from his writings about how the pinnacle of Sith power might be achieved.
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