by Claudia Gray
Reath said, “It only takes one or two agents to take down a security shield, or provide reports on defense capabilities. I’d bet anything this is how the Amaxines got intel on their targets before they struck.”
“Or carried explosive devices to detonate only after they were gone. All the more reason to stop the Nihil,” Cohmac said. “Let’s get Dez to the Vessel, if we can. And take it from there.”
The words were getting away from Dez. He couldn’t focus for more than a few moments at a time, on more than one or two things at once. He was with his friends again; he was in danger. That much he understood. The rest would be up to his fellow Jedi.
Aboard the Vessel, Geode was the lone element of calm as Leox paced around the bridge.
“There’s about eighty other ways we can stop Scover Byne from sending indentures to this station,” Leox said. His beads swayed across the bared expanse of his chest as he walked. “But no. Little Bit’s gotta perform cryptanalysis—and yeah, I know, she’s outgrown that nickname, it no longer describes her myriad complexities as an individual, so spare me, all right?”
Geode spared him, which was about the only break Leox figured he’d get all day.
“We now have only a very roundabout pathway from the center of the station to the ship, and I suspect Affie is unaware of this important fact.” Leox breathed out in frustration. By then the Nihil knew another ship had docked, but they either hadn’t found the Vessel yet or were distracted by other concerns. For the moment—for a very brief moment—this ship remained the one safe place around, and it was the one place Affie couldn’t get to. “She’s not going to be able to come back to us. Which means we’re gonna have to be the ones who get to her.”
Leox Gyasi was not a warlike man, but he was one who believed in the power of preparation. He went to the painted, carved trunk he kept on one side of the bridge, opened it up, and dug around beneath the shirts and incense for a second before he pulled out a blaster. It had been a long while since he’d shot anyone, but he remembered how it was done. If anyone got between Affie and safety, pulling that trigger wouldn’t be hard.
He turned to face Geode, who looked on in solemn silence. “Guard the ship,” Leox said. “Stay at the controls. And don’t even think about coming after us unless the situation gets a hell of a lot worse. Not sure exactly how that would even be possible—but fate has a way of showing us how, doesn’t it?”
Which was when the readings on the console began to spike in ominous ways. Solar flares—coming in hard, and soon—extreme enough that they might cause damage even to ships hidden behind the station. Which would mean penetrating the Vessel, and everyone within it, and vaporizing them instantly.
And there wasn’t a damned thing Leox could do about it.
He refused to worry about things he couldn’t change. Time to concentrate on what he could.
With a final nod of farewell, Leox headed for the airlock, toward Affie.
Reath, Dez, and Master Cohmac reached what had once been the closest entrance to the airlock ring and was now a mass of twisted metal. An abandoned Nihil weapon lay on the floor; it took Reath a moment to realize the Nihil lay there, too, half-hidden and crushed by the fallen beams. The man’s helmet had been ripped off in the collapse, revealing a human face that was utterly ordinary except in its slack paleness.
“Who are they?” Reath whispered. “Why do they want us all dead?”
“According to the limited information we have so far, the Nihil are generally more interested in capturing wealth than in slaughter.” Master Cohmac readjusted Dez against his shoulder, all the while looking around them and analyzing the scenario. “However, they won’t hesitate to kill when it serves their purposes, as it very often does. If they want to claim this station as their own, use it the way the Amaxines did, as an advance scouting point for their attacks—”
“Then killing us serves their purposes,” Reath finished. The way to the ship was all but blocked by the wreckage of what appeared to be some kind of blast doors or emergency airlock. “We’ll have to find our way through this mess.”
No sooner had he finished speaking than someone hoisted himself through an opening in the wreckage and landed on their side. Leox Gyasi had removed his beads and carried a blaster, which Reath found unexpectedly jarring. Apparently he’d overheard them, because Leox grinned and said, “That’s the way through this mess. You’re welcome.” Then he brightened. “Dez! Good to see you, my friend! Looks like you’ve got a story to tell.”
Though Dez was patently in no shape to tell his story or any other, he managed a crooked smile.
Master Cohmac was less amused. “Captain Gyasi, your courage is commendable, but your prudence is lacking. You are safest aboard the ship—”
“For one, while Affie’s in danger on this station, my own safety doesn’t mean a damn thing,” Leox said. “For two, we’ve got more solar flares coming in any second now, intense ones, so I’m not sure any of us is particularly safe anywhere in this system.”
Reath thought fast. “The station’s shields. Can we strengthen them? Then we could expand them to protect the ships.”
“Perhaps,” Master Cohmac said. “But finding the controls, much less interpreting them—”
“They’ll be in the lower levels,” Reath interjected. Had he really just interrupted a Jedi Master? But this was too important, and they had little time. “I’ve learned my way around down there, and I think the controls are starting to make sense to me. Maybe I can boost the shields.”
Leox nodded. “Sounds like a plan, kid. Good luck down there.” With that he jogged off in search of Affie Hollow.
Master Cohmac wasn’t as easily convinced. “I should be the one to—”
“Please, master. I’m the one who has experience with Amaxine tech.” Reath’s experience primarily consisted of being shot into hyperspace against his will, but it was still more than anyone else in their party possessed. “This task should be mine. Besides, Dez needs you right now.”
His plea might not have worked, if it weren’t for Dez’s knees buckling at that very moment. Master Cohmac caught him, then shook his head. “Very well, Reath. May the Force be with you.”
Reath smiled, turned, and dashed back toward the central arboretum, and the passage that would lead him down to the lower rings.
With the 8-Ts no doubt distracted by all the other mayhem aboard the Amaxine station, reaching the lower levels was easier than it had been. At this point, Reath was grateful for any break they got. Once he reached the main controls, he was able to bring up the station schematics fairly easily—and from there, it was merely a matter of touching the screen. The low hum of power surged through the station, including the shields.
Reath hoped it included the shields, anyway. They’d find out one way or another. With any luck, it wouldn’t be the way that involved being burnt to a crisp by solar flares.
He’d done all he could do, and all that was left was to get back to the ship as fast as possible.
As he hurried back along what remained of the corridor, the scent of smoke thick in the air, he caught sight of more Nihil corpses, more abandoned Nihil weapons. A lightsaber was by far the best weapon to have in battle, but it struck Reath that a blaster could come in handy. One lay far enough away from any of the Nihil bodies for him not to feel like a grave robber, so he knelt to retrieve it. Just before his hand closed over the grip, someone said, “Don’t move.”
Reath froze—except for his eyes, which looked up to see Nan standing there, her blaster aimed directly at him.
The strangest part was that Nan looked so very much the same. Despite the fact that she wore a coverall instead of her colorful patchwork dress, that her bared arms turned out to be thick with tattoos, and that the blue streaks in her hair were matched by lines painted down her face, no great transformation had taken place. Her behavior before hadn’t been a disguise, Reath decided, just another facet of her personality. She was both Nihil warrior and lonely young girl
.
Which side of her would win out?
The only reason Reath didn’t assume it would be the Nihil warrior was the simple fact that she’d gotten the jump on him, yet he remained alive.
No point in bothering with preliminaries. “Everything you told me was true, wasn’t it?” he asked. “The wreck, your parents, all of it. You just left out the part about being rescued by the Nihil.”
“Close, but not quite,” Nan said. Her face was blank, unreadable. Her grip on her blaster remained steady. “Our family joined the Nihil together. They offered us the chance for a better life than we could ever have had otherwise. My mother and father were proud of their choice. I’m proud of their choice. When they died in a raid, I was taken in by Hague. By then I knew I’d always be small—that I’d have to learn how to fight smarter, since I’d never be stronger. That I’d need strategic skills. Who better to teach that than a man who can no longer fight with his body and has to use his brain?”
The sureness in her voice—the clarity of absolute conviction—unnerved Reath. He was used to hearing Padawans speak that way, or Coruscant Patrol starfighter cadets. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone could still believe in violence as a creed, at least not by taking such pride in it. While he’d known such mindsets weren’t just artifacts from history, this was his first encounter with one. He longed to talk about this with her in depth, to understand the Nihil on their own brutal terms.
Getting into a philosophical discussion with a zealot was probably a mistake, though, especially when the zealot was holding a weapon on you.
“Makes sense.” Reath adjusted his stance slightly, as though moving his weight from one leg to another, hoping she wouldn’t realize he was triangulating their positions versus the nearest exit. “I can tell you’re a great strategist already. You got enough information out of me.”
The self-deprecating joke was meant to get Nan off her guard. It didn’t work. “I can’t claim any credit for that. You were overflowing with explanations, because that was your job, right? To tell the desperate frontier folk how glorious their lives will be now that the Jedi have come?”
“I don’t remember promising anyone glory,” he pointed out.
Nan shrugged, like, Fair enough. “You can stop looking for your escape route. I don’t intend to kill you.”
“Your blaster aim suggests otherwise.”
“You could deflect any shots,” she said, nodding toward the lightsaber he still hadn’t drawn from his belt. “Hand to hand versus a Jedi? Useless. That’s one more thing you taught me. When I kill a Jedi, it’ll be with my ship.”
Reath considered this. “You could’ve killed me when my back was turned. You didn’t.”
“No. I haven’t forgotten that you saved me from being kidnapped. You returned me to my fleet. That earns you one chance to walk away.” Nan’s finger massaged the trigger of her blaster. “One.”
Thanks, Reath nearly replied, before deciding he really shouldn’t have to thank anyone for not blowing him to pieces. “Did you enjoy it? Pretending to be helpless?”
“It’s loathsome. I don’t intend to make a habit of it.”
“I can respect that.”
“You will respect us,” Nan said. “In time, you will bow before the Nihil.”
“And here I thought this station was as screwed up as it could possibly be before we even docked,” Leox muttered to himself as he stepped over smoldering wreckage from the explosion. Affie had done a number on the place, that was for sure.
The main thing was to make sure the Nihil didn’t do a number on her.
Sounds echoed from farther down the corridor—footsteps, something else. Leox figured that was the Nihil; the Jedi moved as quiet as tooka cats. Quickly he ducked behind the nearest large piece of debris—a couple of beams that formed a nice solid barrier between him and any marauding warriors. Always good to put something between yourself and negative energy, he thought. Especially armed negative energy.
Despite his lackadaisical habits and disheveled appearance, Leox Gyasi had a sharp mind when he cared to employ it. With near-eidetic precision, he called to mind the layout of the station as they’d previously mapped it, then overlaid Affie’s plan for scouting the code. From there it was relatively simple to figure out how far along in the upper rings she would’ve gone before the Jedi found themselves in trouble, and therefore where she would’ve headed back to after the explosion’s aftermath.
This, naturally, would require Leox to somehow get past both the Nihil and the idol-controlled area that contained the Drengir.
But he wouldn’t have had it any other way. How was he supposed to give Affie a proper guilt trip later if it wasn’t difficult as hell to get her out?
Grinning, Leox waited for his opening, then darted into the station’s inner darkness.
A voice rang through the station. “Nihil, you are summoned!”
Reath turned, startled; Nan bit her lower lip, then said, “If you want to walk away from this alive, I suggest you do so now. The others are coming. I owe you something, but they don’t.”
The Nihil wouldn’t consider themselves bound by a kindness to one of their own, he thought, filing that away for future reference. “Got it.”
He dashed for the nearest doorway, not bothering to glance behind him. If Nan hadn’t shot him in the face, she wouldn’t shoot him in the back.
As soon as Reath had made it to safe cover, however, he ducked and angled himself to see inside the central globe chamber as best he could. Nan stood exactly where he’d left her, but she wasn’t looking after him. Her attention was all for the other Nihil.
They didn’t wear uniforms, exactly, though there was a sameness to their garb: dark, padded, covered in strips or panels of safety material that would be impervious to water, maybe to fire, as well. Their telltale helmets and breathmasks hung around their necks or from utility belts, which suggested a gas attack wasn’t imminent. As far as Reath could read their expressions, they seemed neither exultant nor discouraged. That suggested his fellow Jedi remained alive…but the Nihil still felt they could accomplish their goals.
“Cloud,” said this Nihil group’s leader, a Trandoshan male, “we have a way to prove ourselves to the Tempest Runner.”
Grins and a few cheers answered this. They seem to use weather imagery, storm imagery, Reath reasoned.
“This station gives us the power to reach any place in the galaxy within moments,” said the leader. “Only our people, not our ships—but our people can make the way ready for the attacks to come. Take down shields, create distractions, send homing beacons…anything and everything we need to become the dominant power in this part of the galaxy.”
“No!” shouted someone in the back. “In the entire galaxy!”
This won more cheers, and the leader smiled. “We thought we would not be able to make up for failure to enter the action. But when we reveal this station—and reveal that by taking it, we have humiliated the Jedi?—we’ll be in his favor. The best raids, the best position within the Tempest…all of it will be ours.”
The Drengir believe they can use this station to wreak havoc across the galaxy, Reath thought. The Nihil believe they can, too.
Which means if anybody’s going to hold this station, it has to be the Republic—
But maybe nobody should hold it at all.
Almost at the moment Cohmac would’ve given up all hope of finding a clear path, a glint of illumination revealed just enough space clear of debris for him to bring Dez through to the docking ring.
Dez tried to make it through on his own, but his movements were still slow, uncoordinated. Cohmac had to help him every centimeter of the way, practically dragging him at the end. What had the Drengir done to him? What toxic effects did their poisons have? Was Dez recovering—or was a slower-acting substance working its way through his system, tearing him down?
“Here we are, see?” Cohmac adjusted Dez so he could look ahead, into the entrance of the Vessel. “Back
where we belong.”
“The Drengir…”
“No, no,” Cohmac said, hoping Dez could truly understand. “They are gone now. They can hurt you no longer.”
As he hustled them toward the Vessel’s airlock, a large shadow in the distance—darker than the other shadows—caught Cohmac’s eye for only an instant. In the next, he could see nothing there. But it had looked like…It couldn’t have been…
Cohmac muttered, “Geode?”
The scent of smoke clung to Affie. It seemed to have embedded itself in her clothes, her hair, even her skin. She longed for that incredible bathtub in Scover’s fancy Coruscant hotel room.…
But that was too close to longing for Scover for Affie’s approval. She couldn’t think about that as she crawled back into the guts of the Amaxine station. Her loyalty to Scover couldn’t coexist with her desire to erase the illegal practices that apparently formed such a large part of the Byne Guild’s prosperity. Her love for her adoptive mother was at war with her love for the biological mother she’d lost so long before.
She’ll see how much better it is to do without it, Affie reasoned as she crawled. She’ll be happier knowing her pilots are safe. I won’t have to turn anything in, just show my proof to her, and she’ll back down. It’ll teach her a lesson in the best possible way.
Next up on Affie’s list of places to search was the station’s gravitational matrix. It was located up high—near the very top of the sphere. Instead of crawling, it was time to climb.
When she found the access tube that led upward, her heart sank. It was narrow and showed more signs of age than most other areas of the station; just with the beam of her glow rod, she could make out several places where panels were missing, exposing wires. There was no other illumination in the tube, meaning she’d have to make her way upward in the dark. And vines had grown through holes and slits in the walls, curling all around the tube ladder’s rungs. That would make it slippery, but Affie told herself the tube was almost too narrow for her to fall. At least the 8-Ts were busy.