The Old Republic Series

by Sean Williams

  Red light played across the battlefield, then died. Just light, no concussions. Ax blinked and turned to find the source, remembering as she did the glowing vault door. Not a random hit from the Mandalorian’s weapons systems, as she’d initially assumed. It was clear now that the door had melted entirely away, releasing the vault’s precious contents to all comers.

  No one was breaking into the vault, however. That much was immediately apparent from the splatters of molten metal on the antechamber floor. It was, rather, the other way around.

  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 Stry
ver 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 fire
fight, 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.