“Wait a minute. Where’s Stryver?”
“I can’t see him. He could be around the back side of the moon, or—”
An urgent beeping joined the already strident alarm calls. The map of Sebaddon turned red at the south pole. Ula stared in amazement as the defensive shell of hexes began to part, creating an opening.
“They’re letting us in?”
“Don’t bet on it,” said Jet.
Through the opening in the orbital defenses flew the familiar silver quarter-moon of Stryver’s ship, rising up in a perfectly vertical line.
“What’s he doing there?”
“Running, I think.”
Close on Stryver’s wake came a monster bursting from the heart of the planet.
LARIN IGNORED THE SHRIEKING of alarms and the flashing red lights filling her suit’s helmet. The unlucky shot appeared not to have damaged the fuel line to her jet-chute, but its gyros were completely destroyed. If her airfoil had been intact, that would at least have had a stabilizing effect, but it was nothing but tatters now. Kicking and skidding wildly across the sky, she was completely out of control.
She refused to give in. There had to be a way to bring the jet-chute down safely, and her with it.
First thing first: to get manual control of the jet. It was behind her, but by letting out the restraints she could wriggle around so it was thrusting from her chest. The noise was deafening. She darkened her visor so the flashes wouldn’t blind her.
At least she still had her instruments. It was hard to get a sensible altimeter reading, so she didn’t know exactly how much time she had, but the temperature outside was clear: well below the line. Any exposed flesh would freeze solid in just moments. All the better to work quickly, then.
Tugging off her left glove, she used the artificial digits of her prosthetic to pull at the thruster casing. It fell away behind her—up or down, she couldn’t tell. The horizon was turning wildly around her. Just glancing at it made her feel giddy.
She concentrated on the wiring inside the jet-chute casing instead. Steam hissed into the thin, cold air. Luckily, her fingers weren’t affected by heat, either. The jet-chute was an uncomplicated machine, designed to be rugged rather than versatile. There would be all sorts of safeties and overrides, but she didn’t need them. She just wanted the switch that turned the thrust on and off.
A sharp tug on a particular component had the latter effect. Suddenly everything was still and she was weightless. The world below still turned, but at least it wasn’t changing direction three times every second. Now that she had to look at it, she could see how much closer it had come. Perilously so.
That wasn’t what mattered. At the moment, she had to correct her spin. She counted furiously under her breath, judging the correct burn by instinct more than conscious calculation. She shoved her artificial fingers into the hot innards and switched the thrust back on, just for a second.
She jerked across the sky, slewing madly. Too much, too long. She had to be more precise. Counting again, she tried a second time, with more success. She was still tumbling afterward, but not so badly that the thickening air couldn’t get a stabilizing grip on her. She spread her limbs in a star shape until she was falling steadily face-forward.
The complex at the planet’s south pole was coming up at her with frightening speed. She activated the jet-chute and kept it on full, fighting it at every moment to keep it pointing straight down. It was like trying to balance on a pin: the slightest wobble threatened to tip her over and put her back where she started. She gritted her teeth and held on.
Slowly, steadily, her downward plunge began to ease.
She had time to examine where she was landing. It was a broad, flat plain, crisscrossed with deep cracks that looked too straight to be natural. A door was her first thought, leading to something underground. Around it stood a number of cannon emplacements, all aiming for targets elsewhere, fortunately. It was hard enough just coming down straight, let alone dodging. She wanted to look behind her, to see where the others were, but the merest attempt to do so threatened to upset her delicate balance.
Slower and slower she fell, until she was traveling barely more than running speed. The ground was just dozens of meters away. She began to feel relief. Against all odds, she was going to make it!
With a guttering cough, the jet-chute ran out of fuel.
“No!” she yelled.
But words weren’t enough. She was falling again, and rapidly gaining speed. Just seconds lay between her and being squashed like a bug against the hard face of Sebaddon. Nothing could save her now.
Strong limbs wrapped around her chest. With a gasp, she felt herself squeezed tight and pulled backward. She couldn’t see what had happened, but she recognized the gloves gripping together in front of her. They were standard Republic issue. The jet-chute belonging to the owner of those gloves strained and whined, slowing them so they landed with a tumble, not a splat.
Larin couldn’t believe her luck. Clambering to her feet, she helped her savior free of his jet-chute and airfoil harness. His faceplate cleared and she recognized Hetchkee.
“Couldn’t let you go like that,” he said matter-of-factly. “Equipment failure is inexcusable.”
“Thank you,” she said, meaning both syllables with all her heart. “What happened to Jopp?”
“Called me for help. Didn’t you hear him?”
Larin hadn’t, but she didn’t press it. She had been a little busy at the time. The important thing was that she had survived. As long as Jopp stayed out of her way, they need never talk again—about how his hesitance had almost cost her her life.
“Right,” she said, slipping her glove back onto her frost- and heat-blackened hand. “We’ve got some regrouping to do and hexes to kill. Any idea where our squads came down?”
They ran together for the rendezvous point, jumping over two of the deep cracks along the way. They were definitely machined into a ferrocrete-like surface, with some kind of black sealant at the base. If they weren’t the edges of a massive door, then they could have been canals. But for what? Any water lying around would be frozen solid. They could conceivably have been roads for hexes, only none were in sight.
The rendezvous point was a mess of weapons-fire. Republic and Imperial troopers had dug in and were either setting charges or laying covering fire, hoping to take out the cannons in range. Major Cha barked orders over the patchy comms as bombardment rained down from above. Imperial combat droids lumbered in perfectly straight lines across the battlefield, spitting fire at distant targets. Larin hadn’t grasped how large the master factory site truly was. Standing on top of it, she couldn’t see the edges.
“Moxla! Take a squad and put tower number five out of business. I’ll send someone after you once you’re laid in.”
“Yes, sir.” There was no easy way to tell one squad from another, so she picked a sergeant at random and assigned him to the mission. He was an Imperial, but that didn’t matter. On the ground, under enemy fire, troopers were all the same.
Several supply sleds had come down nearby, and she helped herself to all the launchers and charges she could carry. With the sergeant and his squad in tow, she loped across the flat dome, carefully watching the orientation of the cannon emplacement. At some point, they would be noticed.
She crossed another crack and dropped down inside. It was just deep enough for her to crouch out of sight. She followed the crack until they were as close as they needed to be, and there she ordered the squad to stop.
“Get those launchers unloaded and ready to fire. Sergeant, I want three of your best shots to go on ahead to provide distracting fire, another three to go back and do the same. Spread out, and space your rounds. Keep that emplacement busy.”
“Yes, sir.”
The launchers were lightweight and easy to assemble. They were ready in moments. As a broad field of fire converged on the tower, more potent punches attacked it at regular intervals, shrouding its uppermost reaches with
thick, black smoke.
Still it fired, though.
“You and you,” Larin said, pointing at two troopers at random, “with me.”
She grabbed a belt of explosive charges and leapt out of the trench. The troopers followed, running hard for the base of the tower. The emplacement was already busy tracking multiple targets. Hopefully three more would escape unnoticed.
Halfway, they were targeted. The trooper on her right went down, blasted up his middle by pulses of purple fire. Larin and her sole companion dodged left, and the next wave went wide. Then it was targeting the grenade launchers again, and they reached the base unharmed.
It was ten meters across and as solid as a mountain.
She gave half the charges to the trooper. “One every two meters, set to blow on my command.”
He nodded and set off, moving around the base in the direction opposite hers. When they met up, they retreated as far as they dared and dropped flat. The emplacement didn’t seem to notice them. It was firing upward, at something she couldn’t see.
She pushed the remote detonation switch, and debris exploded over their heads. The top of the tower leaned, began to fall.
Then a much brighter flash came from behind her, and the ferrocrete ground bucked. Larin glanced back and saw a large mushroom cloud rising from the rendezvous point. It had been hit by heavier munitions than she’d seen in play from the hexes before. Either Xandret’s droids had evolved again, or they’d knocked something from above off-course. Maybe, she thought, that was what the emplacement had been firing at right before she’d destroyed it: bombardment, deflected just enough to hit the invading forces.
It was going to take ages for the dust to settle, but at least the comms had cleared. She got up and put out a call for all officers to report in.
Hetchkee spoke up from the other side of the dome, and one Imperial lieutenant. No others. No Major Cha.
A silver shape flashed through the clouds above, glinting in the sun. “Is that you, Stryver?” she called. “Tell me what you see up there.”
“One of the major subspace sources is right under your feet,” the Mandalorian replied. “Why put it so far from the CI?”
She didn’t know the answer to that question, and the comm dissolved into static again before she could ask him anything else.
She signaled her trooper to follow her back to the trench. The rest of the squad had re-formed and were packing up the launchers, preparatory to moving elsewhere. Larin didn’t know what her next objective should be. Keep taking out towers? Try to find the others? Without Major Cha, it was going to be difficult to coordinate everyone who remained.
As she hastily considered her options, the black surface at the bottom of the trench shifted. She looked down at her feet and saw a ripple pass through the rubbery black material. It shifted again, and a deep subterranean groan surrounded her.
“Move,” she told the squad. “If this whole thing is a door, then—”
The world fell out from under her before she could finish the sentence. She lunged and barely caught the nearest edge of the trench. The black surface had dissolved as though its molecular structure had suddenly changed from a solid to a liquid. Two troopers fell into blackness, firing at nothing. Their shots ceased after less than a second.
Larin hauled herself out of the suddenly bottomless trench. Another groan shook the air. The opposite walls lurched apart. Ten meters, twenty meters. She was standing with half the squad on the edge of an ever-widening trench. On the other side, the rest of her troopers receded into the distance.
The dome was unfolding, sliding finger-like segments of roof into deep recesses at its edge and releasing a vast upwelling of warmer air. Tendrils of fog sprang into being, mixing with the smoke and creating strange shapes all around her. She looked down, and saw something huge and indistinct stirring. Whatever it was, the hexes must have been building it nonstop, using all the prodigious resources of the metal- and energy-rich world.
“What is that thing?” one of her troopers asked, loud enough to be heard without a comm.
“I don’t know,” she said, “but those look like repulsors—there, around its edge.”
“It’s a ship, shaped like that? Where are its engines?”
A crazy thought occurred to her. “Maybe there aren’t any.”
The troopers looked at her like she was talking gibberish.
The segment of dome they were standing on was nearing the edge of the roof.
“We can’t stay here much longer,” she told what was left of the squad. “I advise you to get ready to jump.”
“Down onto that?” asked one, pointing at the object rising toward them.
“I think it’s a skyhook,” she said, bracing herself, “so we won’t be going down for long.”
SHIGAR STEPPED OUT of his jet-chute harness and stared in horror at the bubbling, bright red lake where his intended landing site had been. He had watched the furious, equator-bound descent of the transport while riding down in its wake. Its impact had sent a shock wave through the complex maze, which buckled and then subsided into the fluid beneath. Everyone on that maze had been swallowed. There were only a few late arrivals left, standing around the edge of the crater like him, staring down into the death of all their hopes.
Master Satele had been in the maze, somewhere, with Eldon Ax. Shigar had tried calling his Master via both the suit and the Force, but received no response to either. All he could see moving were hexes, bobbing and swimming through the red tide, apparently unharmed. Three surviving cannon emplacements fired at anyone in range, to little effect.
Darth Chratis had descended with him and landed not far away.
“Not only must I seek a new apprentice,” said the Sith Lord, red lightsaber standing out at his side like a standard, “but it appears that you are in need of a new Master.”
Shigar’s grief and frustration found a target. “You made this happen,” he said, turning away from the awful view to confront the ancient enemy of the Jedi Order.
“Not I, boy.”
“The Emperor, then, with all his dreams of murder and domination, slaughtering his way across the galaxy.”
“I don’t see the Emperor here, do you?”
“You’re mocking me.”
“Because you deserved to be mocked, boy. You are naïve and sheltered, thanks to the nonsense your Masters have fed you. The true face of the universe frightens you, and you fall back on that nonsense to explain your fear. Only a child closes its eyes when frightened. Look around you and grow up.”
Shigar felt his hackles rising, even though he knew Darth Chratis was trying to get exactly this reaction from him. “You can’t deny that the Sith stole Cinzia Xandret from her mother. That’s what led us here.”
“Lema Xandret was brilliant and mad. She is the one to blame, Shigar. Or Stryver, for not letting the matter rest. Or you.”
“Me? What did I do?”
“It was you who brought the matter to your Master’s attention.”
“Stand back.” Shigar activated his lightsaber. Darth Chratis was getting entirely too close. The red of his blade matched the lava and the sky above. It looked to Shigar like the whole world was turning to blood.
Darth Chratis stopped five paces away, a contemptuously amused expression on his withered face.
“Blame the Emperor for all your troubles, if you must,” he said. “Blame the Empire as a whole. Given the chance, would you explain to all of them how they have been so very wrong? Would you address the Sith, and the ministers, and the troopers, and the spies? I fear they wouldn’t listen to you, not even the people you might imagine to be on your side: the oppressed, the disenfranchised, the dissidents. There are fewer of them than you imagine, you know. And to the rest you are the enemy—you and your Jedi and your Senate. They curse your name just as you curse ours, for the loved ones they’ve lost at your hands, for the goods stolen by your privateers, for the many hardships they’ve endured. You’ll never win them over wi
th your words, with your nonsense, so you’ll be forced to kill them all. How does that sound to you, Padawan? Do you fancy yourself the greatest mass murderer in the history of the galaxy? If not, perhaps you should, for that is the path you are heading down. You and the Emperor—no different at all.”
“You lie.” Shigar backed away, even though Darth Chratis had made no physical move. The weight of his words was threat enough.
“That empty litany will not protect you now, boy. Not from yourself.”
“We fight you because you are evil. Because you are slaves to the dark side.”
“All those billions and billions? Would that the Sith were so plentiful.”
“You have seduced them, twisted their thoughts. They obey you because they fear you.”
“Is the Republic so different?”
“We have laws, safeguards against abuses of power—”
“We have laws, too, albeit different ones, and the Emperor is the ultimate safeguard. There can be no miscarriage of justice under his rule, for his word is law. Where is your precious justice on Coruscant? How has the Republic benefited from your leaders’ inept fumbling?”
Something blossomed in Shigar’s mind like a flower: a flower of certainty, growing strong and sure in the darkness of the hour. He felt as though years of history had condensed to this moment: the reappearance of the Empire and the Mandalorians; the sacking of Coruscant and the fragile treaty that restored it to a greatly diminished Republic; the Annexation of Kiffu and the subjugation of his people.
It boiled down to him and Darth Chratis.
“You are the source of every bad thing that’s happened to the galaxy,” he said. “That’s why we have to fight you. War is inevitable, just like people say it is. There can be no lasting peace with the likes of you.”
“You are more like us than you care to admit,” Darth Chratis snarled. “I am offering to save your life, boy. Join me as my apprentice, and I will open your eyes for good. There can be no peace because peace is the lie. Strength comes only from conflict, and for there to be conflict there must be an enemy. That is the truth that lies behind your Masters’ teachings. Acknowledge it, embrace it, and you will understand why you can never serve them.”
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