“None of us, Grand Lord.”
“Shut up.” She stroked the cold metal of the vehicle. “Well, Lillia Venn’s life is not over. There is another peak, another place to conquer. I will begin again—in the stars.” Vaguely aware of the shifting feet of her allies behind her, she added: “I will take you all with me, of course.”
“Of course, Grand Lord.”
Outside, two of the guards—once Ori’s fellow Sabers—stepped away from Ori, their attention drawn to the excitement inside. Neither they nor her two remaining captors noticed the discarded, unopened sack of blasters behind them, silently levitating toward the bushes beside the farmhouse. But Ori did, beginning to move even before she heard Jelph’s mental call.
Ori! Down!
Instead of wresting free to run, Ori threw her weight to the ground, surprising the men holding her arms. The distraction was enough for Jelph, who emerged from the farmhouse firing. Brilliant beams not seen on Kesh since the first century of occupation struck the two guards from behind. Ahead, the remaining Sabers turned in shock.
Inside, Venn’s aged form came alive. She glared at her new Lords. “Secure this place!”
Jelph charged the yard, firing anew. The remaining Sabers, who had never deflected a blaster bolt in their lives, moved frantically to parry the energy. Ori rolled on the ground, trying to find one of the fallen guards’ lightsabers. Ahead, she saw the Luzo brothers standing guard in the doorway to the stable—while behind them, the Grand Lord had somehow clambered atop the starfighter.
No, she saw with a start. Not atop the vessel. Inside.
Ori spun toward Jelph, who’d arrived beside her. He saw it, too. For a moment he froze, his blasterfire stopping. The crone was inside his precious starship. He grabbed Ori’s arm and helped her stand.
Firing again at the Luzos and their guards, he pulled at her arm. “Ori, let’s go!”
Suddenly thrown into motion, Ori looked back at the barn. He clearly didn’t understand. “Jelph, no! The Grand Lord is here,” she called. “What are you doing?”
Jelph didn’t answer. Instead he pushed her forward. Away from the barn—toward the river.
Inside, the old woman reached for the throttle.
A tinny voice came from the compartment. “Automatic navigation system engaged. Hover mode activated.” Venn’s eyes opened wide as she began her ascent.
Outside the Aurek, the Luzo brothers ordered the surviving Saber to guard the entrance against Ori and her unknown protector. The rear stable doorway accommodated wide-winged uvak; it would easily permit the exit of a hovering starfighter.
“Such power,” Sawj Luzo said, watching the metal monster rise. “She won’t even need us to sever the moorings.”
“Moorings?” Flen looked beneath the ship. Two tiny monofilament cords tied around the landing struts were just visible now in the light. As the lines pulled taut, the young Lord’s yellow eyes darted to the other ends, buried in the muck where the vessel had parked.
There, in the ground, tiny pins snapped—and brought down a Dark Lord’s dreams.
The security device had gone in before Jelph had brought the first starfighter part down from the jungle. The Aurek had sat hidden beneath a mound of manure in the barn—but beneath it was buried something else: two of the ship’s proton torpedoes, surrounded by thousands of kilograms of ammonium-nitrate-based explosive. Transforming the fertilizer into something fit for an anti-theft system had required much patience and care—but it had given Jelph a way to turn his nominal job into something helpful to his mission.
Now the anti-theft system worked exactly as planned. When the cables yanked upward, triggers snapped shut on the torpedo warheads. The weapons detonated, igniting the surrounding explosives.
Thunder struck the farm as the fireball ripped and tore itself free from the surrounding clay, consuming the stable and its occupants in milliseconds. Outside, Jelph tackled Ori, plunging them both into the water even as the shock wave shredded the ground behind them.
Jerked through the disintegrating barn roof, the strikefighter rode aloft on a geyser of heat and force. For a split second the woman inside rejoiced at the motion, assuming it a natural demonstration of the vehicle’s power. Her elation ended when, the vessel’s shielding inoperative, the other four torpedoes detonated in their launch tubes. Night laborers as far away as Tahv saw the new comet flash into being and die just as quickly, bathing the southern sky with an eerie light.
Lillia Venn had found her way to the sky.
4
The little hut was taking shape. Under a dense canopy of foliage no uvak scout could penetrate, the new structure sat atop a relatively dry lump in the middle of the thicket. The hejarbo shoots grew much stronger up here in the jungle; if it weren’t for Jelph’s lightsaber, Ori never would have cleared the grounds.
Eight weeks had passed since the blast claimed the farm. Jelph and Ori had descended from the jungle only once, under cover of night, to investigate what was left. There wasn’t anything to see. The entire riverbank had fallen into the Marisota River. Dark waters eddied and swirled over the blast crater. All that remained was the stub of a weed-covered path terminating at the river’s edge. The pair had returned to the jungle that night confident that no one would learn there had ever been a starfighter on Kesh. Ori had laughed for the first time in days, quoting her mother’s favorite line.
“The Confidence of the Dead End.”
Since that trip, their focus had been entirely on carving a place for themselves in hiding. There was no returning, Ori now realized; not after her mother’s betrayal. Venn’s death certainly had been broadcast through the Force—and just as certainly, would have set the remaining High Lords against one another all over again. The game was renewed; maybe Candra might even find a role to play. Ori wanted nothing to do with any of it. That part of her was past.
And if no one mourned Lillia Venn, no one had come to look for Ori and Jelph, either. In fact, the two of them had spied fewer Sith and Keshiri in the surrounding lands of late than usual. Presumably, a Grand Lord vanishing mysteriously in an area feared as haunted since the tragedy of the Ragnos Lakes would have that effect.
It was fine with her. Ori had a new vision for herself now—based on an old story she’d heard as a child. Keshiri legend held that soon after the Sith arrived, some of their native population had escaped over the ocean. They’d chosen a one-way trip to privation and likely death over lives of service to the Tribe. Today’s more devoted Keshiri told it as a cautionary tale: choice of destiny was a luxury reserved for the Protectors, not their servants. The cost of arrogance, for a servant, was isolation.
Ori saw it differently. If the exodus really had happened, whoever had led those slaves away was the greatest Keshiri of all time. Their fates had been decided—and defied. Jelph was right. There had to be a way to win at life besides climbing to the top of a fractious order—only to be stabbed by a shikkar or poisoned by a presumed ally. Had Venn been happy, she wondered, being immolated in her moment of triumph? The Tribe members seemed as hopelessly bound to their paths as the Keshiri who remained slaves. And they thought they were smarter?
Looking to the sun vanishing between the trees, Ori began cutting down the last of the meter-length shoots that would form their side door. It felt strange using the Jedi’s weapon, she thought. All the lightsabers the Sith on Kesh used were red, but some of the original castaways kept captured Jedi lightsabers as trophies. She had seen a green one in the Korsin Museum. This one’s color was strange and beautiful, a brilliant blue found nowhere in nature. The only artifact of Jelph’s alien origin.
Well, not the only one, she thought, extinguishing the lightsaber.
That’s where he was now, she knew. As usual, he had risen at dawn to trap breakfast and gather their fruit for later. While offering nothing like the gardening conditions in the lowlands, the jungle provided other means of sustenance year-round; in this latitude, she doubted she would notice when winter came. He spent t
he rest of his day building their shelter, before retiring, at dusk, as he always did, to keep vigil beside the device—the one part of his space vessel he hadn’t brought down to the farm. She walked there now, to the spot in the trees where Jelph sat on a stump for hours, staring at the dark metal case and fiddling with its instruments.
He hadn’t kept it from her. For the Sith, the “transmitter,” as he called it, could be as explosive a discovery as the starfighter. Jelph had kept it for what it represented: his lifeline to the outside. He’d never been able to get a message out; as he explained it, something about Kesh and its shifting magnetic field prevented such attempts. That might not be a permanent situation, but it could be centuries before it changed. Ori wondered if that same phenomenon had thwarted the castaways centuries before. All he was able to do was set the device to scan for signals from the ether, recording them for later playback. Perhaps, if some traveler came near enough, he might be able to get a message to the beyond. She now understood his trips upriver in earlier months: he came to the jungle to see what sounds he’d snared.
Normally, he heard nothing but static. But whatever Jelph had just heard had thrown him.
“I can’t go back,” he said, looking blankly at the device.
Ori looked at the flashing thing, not understanding. “What happened?”
“I caught a signal.” It took him several moments to be able to say the words. “The Jedi are at war with one another.”
“What?”
“A Jedi named Revan,” he said. “When I lived there, Revan was like us—trying to rally the Jedi against a great enemy.” Jelph swallowed, finding his mouth dry. “From the sound of it, something’s gone wrong. The Jedi Order has split. It’s at war with itself.”
Jelph replayed the recorded message for her. A fragment of a warning from a Republic admiral, it cautioned listeners that no Jedi could be trusted. The ages-old compact between Republic and Jedi had been sundered. Now there was only war.
The message ended.
Shaken, Jelph deactivated the device. “This … is our fault. The Covenant.”
“The Jedi sect you belonged to?”
“Yes.” He looked up in the twilight, unable to find any evening stars through the foliage. “And that’s the trouble. There aren’t supposed to be any Jedi sects. The Order is divided now—but we divided it first.” He shook his head. “May the Force help them all.”
He turned his gaze to the wilderness again. Ori let him sit in silence. It occurred to her that during all her days of complaining about the world she had lost, Jelph was living with the loss of a whole galaxy. And he was losing it again now.
At last, he stood and spoke. “I don’t know what to do, Ori. We kept the Tribe from discovering a way off Kesh. But I always held out hope that with the transmitter, I could make contact one day. Make contact,” he said, looking back at her for a moment, “to get us out of this place.”
“And to warn them about my people,” Ori said.
Jelph looked away. There was no avoiding the truth. “Yes.”
Ori touched his shoulder. “It’s only fair. I tried to warn my people about you.”
“Well, it’s pointless now,” he said, stooping to lift a stone from their future front garden. “If the Jedi are divided—or, worse, if Revan or someone else has fallen to the dark side—then bringing a planetful of Sith to their attention is the worst thing I could possibly do for the galaxy.”
“You don’t know that,” she said. “You could be wrong. The Jedi could still come here and wipe everyone out.”
“Yes, I could be wrong.” Laughing to himself, he looked at her. “You know, that’s the first time anyone’s heard me say that. Maybe if I’d said it more often back home, I wouldn’t be here now.” He tossed the stone into the stream and knelt again. “I’ve lived my whole life thinking I knew what I was supposed to do. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”
Watching him, Ori saw the look she’d seen in him in her previous visits to the farm. It was the expression he’d worn when toiling in the muck. Then he had been doing something unpleasant, but he’d been doing it because he had to do it, to keep his garden alive and his customers happy. His duty.
Duty. The term didn’t mean the same thing to the Sith. In the Sabers, Ori had had missions she was charged to perform—but she had taken them on as personal challenges, not out of some loyalty to a higher order. The galaxy didn’t have the right to give her odd jobs. Truly free beings had lives. Slaves had duties.
And now Jelph was suffering, certain that he had some duty to perform, but unsure what it was. What service did he owe the galaxy—a galaxy that had already cast him out?
“Maybe,” Ori said, “maybe Sith philosophy has the answer for you.”
“What?”
“We’re taught to be self-centered. We don’t think us and them. It’s just you, versus everyone else. No one else matters.” Placing her arms around him from behind, she looked out at the dark stream, burbling quietly past on its way to feed the Marisota River. “The Sith cast me out. The Jedi cast you out. Maybe neither side deserves our help.”
“The only side worth saving,” he said, turning toward her, “is ours?”
She smiled up at him. Yes, she had been right from the beginning. He was so much more than a slave. “Give it a try, Jedi,” she said. “If I can do something selfless—then maybe it’s time for you to do something selfish.”
He looked at her for a long moment, a twinkle in his eye. Wordlessly, he broke the embrace and stepped over to the receiver. Uprooting it, he grinned at her. “Shall we?”
Ori watched him cradle the blinking machine for a moment before she realized what he intended. Exhaling, she stepped over and helped him carry the transmitter to the side of the stream. With one great heave, they tossed it in. Striking a shoal beneath the current, the contraption splintered noisily into shards. They watched together for a moment as bits of casing bobbed and vanished into the darkness. Then they turned back toward their house.
The cords were cut.
It was time to live.
PANTHEON
1
3000 BBY
Time is a lover, the old saying went: a Sith lover. She tempts you with forever—and then cuts you and leaves you for dead.
Staring into the reflecting pool, Varner Hilts studied the latest scar from time, his one and only long-term relationship. No, he couldn’t blame this on a trick of the light, or the polluted water. It was real. A fresh crack ran straight from his left eye to his temple. Turning his head and looking more closely, he swore. Why wasn’t there at least a matching wrinkle on the other side? Time wasn’t big on symmetry.
Hilts was well on his way to becoming the most worthless construct in all creation: an elder in a Sith society. It was the great irony of the Tribe on Kesh. A man without enemies lived long, but had no future. By virtue of his unique calling, Hilts had managed to survive decades of tumult—but for what? So he could spend thirty more years walking past the same basin, observing his decline every day on his way to work?
Well, traditions are important, Hilts thought. Kneeling over the reflection, he brought his hand to his face and squinted. Slowly, his finger traced the new crevasse …
CRACK!
Ancient stone shattered. Startled, Hilts looked up. High above, a section of Tahv’s suspended aqueduct heaved and gave way, shearing loose from its towering support.
“Caretaker!”
Before Hilts could fully stand, a purple blur appeared from the alley. The Keshiri male dived headlong into Hilts’s paunch, knocking the human backward. Giant slabs of stonework smashed to the street, pulverizing the rim of the basin where Hilts had knelt moments before.
Flat on his back on the pavement, Hilts reached through the Force and deflected chunks of debris from himself and his rescuer. But no power could stop the crush of brackish water cascading down from the shattered sluice. The Keshiri shielded Hilts as best he could until the shower of water and roc
ks subsided.
Coughing, Hilts recognized his savior. “Trying to score points with the boss, Jaye?” As he spoke, he rose, shaking grimy water from his sparse silvery hair.
“I-I’m sorry for pushing you, Master Hilts,” the Keshiri stammered. “I was passing this way—”
“Calm down.” Hilts knew it was a useless instruction, even though Jaye was officially his to command. The moon-faced native had no more chance of relaxing than Hilts had of becoming Grand Lord. “Just a normal day in ‘the Crown of Kesh.’ ”
“It’s the conjunction,” Jaye said, wiping his superior’s cape. Nervous black eyes scanned the now-broken skyline of the capital city. “The omen I’ve been telling you about!”
“And telling me. And telling me.” Hilts spied a crowd of humans quarreling near the fallen aqueduct section. Pinning blame, it seemed, was Tahv’s only growth industry. He pulled his aide’s sleeve. “Let’s get to the office before someone decides we brought it down by breathing heavily!”
* * *
In an earlier day, Sith on Kesh bided their time to achieve power, temporarily following others in order to one day claim the prize. For most in that simpler era, Yaru Korsin’s power structure of High Lords, Lords, and Sabers worked as a means to an end. The hierarchy survived because it served the purposes of enough people—people with the power to defend the system against those who would destroy it. For more than a thousand years after the founder’s death, the Tribe had thrived.
But the Second Millennium brought unrelenting tribulations. Grand Lord Lillia Venn had vanished more than nine hundred years earlier on what the Keshiri locals remembered, rather ineloquently, as the Night of the Upside-Down Meteor. It had certainly presaged doom for Omen’s grandchildren. Learning of her disappearance, Venn’s rivals attacked her supporters first—and then one another. Defeated combatants quit the capital city and took to the hinterlands, where many found common cause with disenfranchised human slaves. Increasing numbers of Sith pressed peace-loving Keshiri into their forces. For centuries, factions united long enough to conquer Tahv and slay the ruling Grand Lord—only to immediately begin fighting among themselves. One rebel force became two, which became twenty. Power in the Tribe poisoned whoever tasted it.
Lost Tribe of the Sith: The Collected Stories Page 16