Stop. Stop!
“Stop!”
* * *
Silence. Korsin coughed and opened his eyes.
They were still alive.
“No,” Seelah said, kneeling and clinging to Jariad. “We’re already dead.”
Thanks to you, she did not say—but Korsin felt the words streaming at him through the Force. He didn’t need the help. Her eyes said plenty.
Chapter Two
Omen’s permanent crew came from the same human stock as Korsin: the debris of a noble house, launched skyward centuries before in the whirlwind that formed the Tapani Empire. The Sith had found them, and found them useful. They were skilled in commerce and industry, all the things the Sith Lords needed most but never had time for with their world-building and world-destroying. His ancestors ran ships and factories, and ran them well. And before long, mingling their blood with that of the Dark Jedi, the Force was in his people, too.
They were the future. They couldn’t acknowledge it, but it was obvious. Many of the Sith Lords were still of the crimson-hued species that had long formed the nucleus of their following. But the numbers were turning—and if Naga Sadow wanted to rule the galaxy, they had to.
Naga Sadow. Tentacle-faced, Dark Lord and heir to ancient powers. It was Naga Sadow who had dispatched Omen and Harbinger in search of Lignan crystals; Naga Sadow who needed the crystals on Kirrek, to defeat the Republic and its Jedi.
Or was it the Jedi and their Republic? It didn’t matter. Naga Sadow would kill Commander Korsin and his crew for losing their ship. Seelah was right about that much.
Yet Sadow need not lose the war, depending on what Korsin did now. He still had something. The crystals.
But the crystals were high above at the moment.
It had been a night of horrors, getting 355 people down from the lofty plateau. Sixteen injured had died along the way, and another five had tumbled into the darkness from the narrow ledge that formed the only apparent way up or down. No one doubted that evacuation had been the right call, though. They couldn’t stay up there, not with the fires still burning and the ship precariously perched. The last to leave the ship, Korsin had nearly soiled himself when one of the proton torpedoes had disengaged from the naked tube, tumbling over the precipice and into oblivion.
By sunrise, they’d found a clearing, halfway down the mountain, dotted with wild grasses. Life was everywhere in the galaxy, even here. It was the first good sign. Above, Omen continued to burn. No need to wonder where above them the ship was, Korsin thought. Not while they could follow the smoke.
Now, walking back into the afternoon crowd—less an encampment than a gathering—Korsin knew he never need wonder where his people were, either. Not while his nose worked. “Now I know why we kept the Massassi on their own level,” he said to no one.
“Charming,” came a response from over his shoulder. “I should say they are not very happy with you, either.” Ravilan was a Red Sith, pureblooded as they came. He was quartermaster and keeper of the Massassi, the nasty lumbering bipeds that the Sith prized as instruments of terror on the battlefield. At the moment the Massassi didn’t seem so formidable. Korsin followed Ravilan into the fiendish circle, made even less pleasant by the stench of vomit. Florid monsters two and three meters tall sprawled on the ground, heaving and coughing.
“Maybe some kind of pulmonary edema,” Seelah said, passing around purified-air canisters salvaged from an emergency pack. Before connecting with Devore and securing a place on his team, she’d been a battlefield medic—though Korsin couldn’t tell from her bedside manner, at least with Massassi. She barely touched the wheezing giant. “We’re no longer at elevation, so this should subside. Probably normal.”
To her left, another Massassi hacked mightily—and mutely regarded the result: a handful of dripping scar tissue. Korsin looked at the quartermaster and asked drily, “Is that normal?”
“You know it’s not,” Ravilan snarled.
From across the clearing, Devore Korsin charged in, shoving his son into Seelah’s hands before she was done wiping them. He seized the brute’s massive wrist, looking for himself. His eyes flared at his brother. “But Massasi are tougher than anything!”
“Anything they can punch, kick, or strangle,” Korsin said. An alien planet, however, was an alien planet. They hadn’t had time to do a bioscan. And all the equipment was high above. Devore followed Seelah, backing away from the sickly Massassi.
Eighty of the creatures had survived the crash. Korsin learned that Ravilan’s assistants were burning a third of those survivors, even then, over the hillside. Whatever unseen thing it was on this planet that was killing the Massassi, it was doing it quickly. Ravilan showed him the stinking pyre.
“They’re not far enough away,” Korsin said.
“From whom?” Ravilan responded. “Is that depression a permanent camp? Should we remove to a different mountain?”
“Enough, Rav.”
“No witty comeback? I’m surprised. You at least plan that far ahead.”
Korsin had fenced with Ravilan on earlier missions, but now wasn’t the time. “I said, enough. We’ve surveyed below. You saw it. There’s nowhere to go.” There were beaches at the bottom of the bluff, but they terminated against the oily cliffs that began the next mountain in the chain. And going farther along the chain meant trips through tangles of razor-sharp brambles. “We don’t need an expedition. We’re not staying.”
“I should hope not,” Ravilan said, his own nose turned by the smell of the fires. “But your brother—I mean, Captain Korsin’s other son—feels we shouldn’t wait to return.”
Yaru Korsin stopped. “I have the transmitter codes. It’s my call to make.” He looked up at the second, more distant smoky plume far above. “When it’s safe.”
“Yes, by all means. When it’s safe.”
The commander hadn’t wanted Devore on the mission. Years earlier, he had been relieved when his half brother had abandoned a naval career, drifting into the Sith’s mineralogical service. Power and riches were more easily had there, searching for gems and Force-imbued crystals. With their father’s sponsorship, Devore had become a specialist in using plasma weapons and scanning equipment. The recent conflict with the Jedi found him in high demand—and assigned, with his team, to Omen. Korsin wondered whom he’d played a joke on to deserve that. He’d been told Devore officially answered to him, but that would have been a first. Not even Sith Lords were that powerful.
“You should have kept us in orbit!”
“We were never in orbit!”
Korsin recognized the voice of the navigator, Marcom, coming from over the dusty rise. He already knew the other one.
The old man was trying to push his way out of the crowd when Korsin topped the hill at a full run. Devore’s miners weren’t letting Boyle go. “You don’t know my job!” he yelled. “I did all that I could! Oh, what’s the use talking to …”
Just as Korsin reached the clearing, the crowd surged forward, as if pulled down a drain. One sickeningly familiar crackle followed another.
“No!”
Korsin saw the lightsaber first, rolling toward his feet when he breached the crowd. His father’s old helmsman lay ahead, gutted. Next to Seelah and Jariad stood Devore, his lightsaber glowing crimson in the lengthening shadows.
“The navigator attacked first,” Seelah said.
The commander gawked.
“What difference does it make?” Korsin charged into the center, lifting the loose lightsaber into his hand with the Force. Devore stood his ground, smiling gently and keeping his lightsaber burning. His dark eyes had a wild look, a familiar one. He was shaking a little, but not from fear—not fear Yaru Korsin could feel. The commander knew it was something else, something more dangerous. He turned Marcom’s unlit weapon tip-down and shook it. “That was our navigator, Devore! What if the star charts don’t work?”
“I can find our way back,” Devore said smartly.
“You’ll have to!
” Korsin grew conscious of the mix around him. Gold-uniformed miners in the circle, yes, but bridge crew, too. A red-faced Sith—not Ravilan, but one of his cronies. He was undeterred. “This is not going to do any good, any of you. We wait here until it’s safe to return to the ship. That’s all.”
Seelah straightened, emboldened by the supporters around. “When will it be safe? In days? Weeks?” Her child wailed. “How long must we last—until it’s safe enough for you?”
Korsin stared at her and breathed deeply. He threw Marcom’s lightsaber to the ground. “Tell Ravilan there’s one more for the pyre.” As a begrudging crowd gave him room to exit, he said, “We go when I say. That ship blows up, or tips into the ocean, and we really will have problems. We go when I say.”
The world spun. As Korsin stepped backward, Gloyd stepped forward, keeping a wary yellow eye on the grumbling masses. He’d missed the fun.
“Commander.”
They looked past each other, watching Sith in all directions. “Not really happy here, Gloyd.”
“Then you’ll want to hear this,” the hulking Houk rasped. “As I see it, we’ve got three choices. We get these people off this rock in whatever will fly. Or we look for cover and hide until they all kill one another.”
“What’s the third choice?”
Gloyd’s painted face crinkled. “There isn’t one. But I figured it’d cheer you up if you thought there was.”
“I hate you.”
“Great. You’ll make someone a fine Sith someday.” Korsin had known Gloyd since his first command. The Houk was the kind of bridge officer every Sith captain wanted: more interested in his own job than in taking someone else’s. Gloyd was smart to spare himself the trouble. Or maybe he just loved blowing things up too much to want to leave the tactical station.
Of course, with that station left roughly a kilometer up the mountain, Korsin had no idea how useful his old ally would be. But Gloyd still had fifty kilos on most of the crew. No one would move against them while they stood together.
No one would move alone, anyway.
Korsin looked back across the clearing at the mob. Ravilan was there now, huddled with Devore and Seelah and a couple of junior officers. Devore spotted his brother watching and averted his gaze; Seelah simply stared back at the commander, unabashed. Korsin spat an epithet. “Gloyd, we’re dying here. I don’t understand them!” “Yeah, you do,” Gloyd said. “You know what we say: You and me, we’re about the job. Other Sith are about what’s next.” The Houk plucked a scaly root from the ground and sniffed it. “Trouble is, this whole place is about what’s next. You’re trying to keep ’em together—when you’ve really got to show ’em there’s something after this rock. There’s no time to win people over. You pick a path. Anybody won’t walk it …”
“Push ’em off?” Korsin grinned. It really wasn’t his style. Gloyd returned the smile and sank his teeth into the root. Wincing comically, the gunnery chief excused himself. They wouldn’t be living off the land—not this land, anyway.
Looking back at the teeming crowd, Korsin found his eyes drifting up toward the dwindling tendril of smoke drifting from the heights above.
Above. Gloyd was right. It was the only way.
Chapter Three
The Massassi had died on the mountain. Korsin had left at dawn with three bearers: the healthiest of the Massassi, each passing around the remaining air canister. It hadn’t lasted, and neither had they. Whatever it was on this planet that didn’t like Massassi existed up above as well as below.
It was just as well, Korsin thought, leaving the blood-colored corpses where they fell. He couldn’t run Massassi. They were pliant and obedient warriors, but they answered to force, not words. A good Sith captain needed to use both, but Korsin leaned more on the latter. It had made for a good career.
Not down the mountain, though. Things were going to get worse. They already had. It had been cold in the night—chillier than he had expected from what seemed like an oceanic climate. Some of the heavily injured had failed from exposure or from lack of medical care.
Later, some kind of animal—Gloyd described it to him as a six-legged mammal, half mouth—vaulted from a burrow and tore into one of the injured. It took five exhausted sentries to slay the beast. One of Devore’s mining specialists cast a chunk of the creature’s body into the campfire and sampled a piece. She vomited blood and died within heartbeats. He was glad he hadn’t been awake for that.
Whatever relief there was in knowing there was life on the planet ended right there. Omen’s crew didn’t number enough to sort out what was safe and what wasn’t. They had to go home, regardless of the state of things with the ship.
Korsin looked up into the morning sky, now streaked more by cirrus clouds than smoke. He hadn’t told the others about the thing that had struck the viewport during the descent. What had he seen? Another predator, probably. There was no point in bringing it up. Everyone was scared enough, and fear led to anger. The Sith understood this—they made use of it—but uncontrolled, it wasn’t doing them any good. The sun hadn’t even set before lightsabers came out again in a dispute over a foodpak. One less Red Sith. Not twenty standard hours since the crash and things were starting to get basic. Tribal.
Time had run out.
Omen had come to rest in a small indentation down a short ways on the other side of a crest. Sky and ocean spread out ahead. The ship had stopped on the incline just in time, and there wasn’t a flat plane left on the vehicle. The sight of his ship, shattered on the alien rocks, moved Korsin only a little. He had known opponents—mainly captains in the Republic—who were sentimental about their commands. It wasn’t the Sith way. Omen was a tool like any other, a blaster or lightsaber, to be used and discarded. And while the ship’s resilience had saved his life, it had betrayed him first. Not a thing to be forgiven.
Still, it had a purpose. Flying again was out of the question, but the sight of the metal tower just above the bridge gave him hope. The receiver would find the Republic’s hyperspace beacons in an instant, telling Korsin his location. And the ship’s transmitter would tell the Sith where to find Omen—and, more important, the Lignan. Maybe not in time for the engagement at Kirrek, but Sadow would want it nonetheless. Walking carefully over loose stones to the airlock, Korsin tried not to think of the other possibility. If the Battle of Kirrek was lost because Omen was lost, he would die.
But he would die having completed his mission.
A vial lay empty in Devore’s open, quaking palm.
Devore had somehow gotten to Omen first—and was sitting in the commander’s chair. Well, slouching was more like it. “I see your cabin’s intact,” Korsin said. He remembered Seelah returning to the living quarters for little Jariad. In a fire, you go for the thing you love.
“I didn’t go there first,” Devore said, limply letting the vial drop to the deck beside the command chair. There was another container there, particles of glistening spice still beside it. He’s been here awhile, Korsin guessed. He had a sneaking suspicion spice was why Devore had gone into mining in the first place; it had certainly shortened his naval career. “I didn’t go there—I mean, it wasn’t first,” Devore said, pointing vaguely to the ceiling. “I went to look at the transmitter array.”
“Structure looked sound.”
“From outside, maybe.” Slouched in the command chair, Devore watched blankly as his brother clambered over fallen beams to reach the ladder. Above the ceiling panels, Korsin saw what Devore must have seen: a melted mass of electronics, fried when a seam opened in the hull during the descent. The external transmitter stood, all right—but as a monument to its former purpose, nothing more.
Climbing down, Korsin made his way to the comm control panel and pressed the button several times. Nothing. He sighed. The story was the same everywhere on the bridge. He switched the transmitter on one last time and stepped back over the debris. Omen was dead. But Sith had survived death before, and the guts of Omen still held enough spare parts
to allow a transplant. His eyes darted to the hallway. Surely, in the workshop—
“Gone, with the armory!” The explosion had vented most of the stores into space. Devore buried his face in his hands, finished.
Korsin wasn’t. “The landing bay. The Blades.” The fighters had been in flight when Omen made its sudden departure, but something in the landing bay might be serviceable.
“Forget it, Yaru. The deck was crushed when we hit. I couldn’t even get in there.”
“Then we will cut the ship down deck by deck and fabricate the parts we need!”
“With what? Our lightsabers?” Devore rose, steadying himself against the armrest. “We’re done!” His cough became a laugh. The Lignan crystals offered the Sith power—just not the kind to operate a distress beacon, a receiver, or even the celestial atlas. “We are here, Yaru. We are here and we are out of action. Out of the war. Out of everything. We are out of it!”
“You’re out of it.”
Korsin climbed into a hallway and began rummaging through cabinets, looking for something that would help those below. Unfortunately, Omen had been outfitted for a deep-space mission. Sith provisioners were sparing. No portable generators at all. Another compartment. Clothes. That would help tonight, but they wouldn’t be staying.
“We have to stay,” Devore said, as if he had read Korsin’s thought.
“What?”
“We have to stay,” Devore repeated. Standing alone, a tombstone in the shadows of the hallway, he spoke with a voice that quaked. “It’s been two days. You don’t understand. It’s been two days.”
Korsin didn’t stop his search, passing in front of his brother to another door, jammed by the damage.
“It’s been two days, Yaru. Naga Sadow will think we ran away. To take the Lignan crystals for ourselves!”
“He’ll blame Saes,” Korsin said, remembering. Naga Sadow hadn’t fully trusted the fallen Jedi who captained the Harbinger. He’d asked Korsin to keep an eye on Saes, to report back. When he did—if he did—Korsin fully intended to explain how the Harbinger had lost control, how the Harbinger had struck the Omen. With any luck, Sadow had Harbinger already—
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