by Troy Denning
And yet the GAS sergeant continued to stare as the pedramp carried them closer, his attention locking on Vestara. She did a good job of pretending to be unnerved by the scrutiny, allowing her gaze to continually drift back in his direction to see if he was still watching her. Then, when they had drawn to within a few meters of each other, she finally turned on him with a withering teenage sneer.
The sergeant merely smirked and held her gaze.
She looked away almost instantly, and Luke cursed beneath his breath. The recognition had been as plain to see in Vestara’s shock as it had been in the sergeant’s smirk, and that could only mean they knew each other from her time as an apprentice in the Lost Tribe of the Sith.
Luke glanced back toward the tattoo-faced stranger and found the man’s gaze resolutely locked on the BAMR news holo above the platform. Whoever he was—perhaps one of Club Bwua’tu’s more sinister operatives—he clearly had no wish to involve himself any deeper than he already had.
And that was fine with Luke. He used his eyes to signal Doran and Seha back onto the pedramp, then began to drift toward the rear of the platform, feeling more frustrated by the turn of events than alarmed. All of the other teams had reported a flawless infiltration, and now an unlikely coincidence threatened to eliminate the advantage of surprise. It reminded him of one of Nek Bwua’tu’s favorite maxims: No battle plan survives the first ten minutes of battle.
As Luke drew near the pedramp, he unleashed a powerful burst of Force energy. The hologram of Kayala Fei dissolved into static, and every comlink on the platform began to chime for attention. In the same instant the Sith sergeant whirled around with narrowed eyes, obviously searching for the source of the tempest he had just felt in the Force. Then the overhead illumination panels began to sizzle out, and the sergeant’s gaze found Luke just as the entire waiting area was plunged into darkness.
Luke felt the sergeant—the impostor-sergeant—reaching for him in the Force. He allowed the Sith to grab hold—then pulled, jerking the man off the ped ramp. The sergeant let out a muffled cry of surprise, then activated his lightsaber in midflight.
The lightsaber was a big mistake. Totally unaware of their sergeant’s true identity, one of the GAS recruits cried out in alarm, and another yelled, “Jedi!”
Blasterfire began to scream out from the pedramp, turning the darkened platform into a blinding storm of color and flashes. The impostor began to bat bolts back toward the GAS recruits, and shrieking passengers raced about in the dark, slamming into walls and one another.
Then the impostor landed less than two meters away from Luke. He whirled into a shoulder-high slash, simultaneously batting bolts aside and trying to behead Luke. With his own lightsaber still waiting for him at the rendezvous point, Luke could only drop to a crouch and spin into a sweeping heel kick, which the Sith avoided by leaping back out of range.
A gurgle of pain and astonishment suddenly spilled from the sergeant’s mouth, then his lightsaber dropped to his side and deactivated. An instant later his body thumped to the platform, and he began to wail in agony.
“Everyone okay?” Vestara asked, using the wailing of her victim to mask her own voice.
“Yep,” Ben answered. When he spoke again, his voice was moving closer to Vestara. “Are you?”
“I’m fine.” Vestara’s voice was warm. “How about you, old man?”
“Not a scratch,” Luke said, more surprised at Vestara’s quick reaction than he should have been. How many times had she saved his life? And Ben’s? “Thanks … again.”
“My pleasure,” Vestara said.
More blasterfire sounded from high up the pedramp, followed by the snap of breaking bones and the thud of bodies being thrown into walls. In the flashing light, Luke caught a glimpse of two athletic shadows—Doran and Seha—leaping over the separation barrier onto the down side of the pedramp.
“A levtram should be arriving any second,” Luke said. “You two go ahead and board.”
“You coming?” Ben asked out of the darkness.
“Right behind you.” Luke reached out in the Force and found the boiling cloud of anguish that was the wounded impostor’s Force aura. He hated the idea of killing any enemy in cold blood—even a Sith. But he couldn’t take Sith prisoners, and leaving the man alive was not an option. He had recognized Vestara Khai, and if he survived to report that to his superiors, the Lost Tribe would realize that the Jedi had arrived. “I need to take care of something.”
A soft female hand touched his arm. “No, you don’t,” Vestara said. “He’s not going to tell anyone what he saw.”
The lights of a levtram appeared in the transit lane, and Luke felt Doran and Seha reaching out to him as they scurried past. They were pouring reassurance into the Force, letting him know that the fight had been obscured by darkness. And that meant it would be difficult to confirm that Jedi had been involved. After all, no matter what the GAS recruits thought they had seen, anyone the Sith sent to investigate would quickly realize that the only lightsaber involved belonged to a member of the Lost Tribe.
Luke breathed a sigh of relief, then glanced toward the levtram boarding berth. In the brightening glow of its headlamps, he could already see the silhouettes of dozens of passengers lining up to escape the chaos on the platform. He turned back toward Vestara’s voice. The recruits might not have anything useful to tell their superiors, but their wounded leader would.
“Go,” he ordered her. “I won’t be a second.”
“No,” Vestara replied. “Trust me. He won’t live long enough to tell anyone anything.”
Something small and glassy shattered on the platform at her feet, and Luke realized why the impostor was still screaming in anguish. Vestara had attacked him with a shikkar, a glass stiletto used by members of the Lost Tribe to express disdain for the victim of the assault. After stabbing an enemy, they would snap off the hilt and leave the blade buried deep in a vital organ, condemning the victim to a death as certain as it was painful.
“I had to use his own shikkar against him, so the High Lords will assume this is a vendetta killing.” Vestara tried to pull Luke toward the boarding berth. “But it won’t work if we’re still standing over the body when the lights come on.”
“We won’t be.” Luke pulled his arm free. As much as he admired Vestara’s quick thinking, there was a ruthlessness in her casual willingness to prolong the man’s anguish—a coldness—that made him wonder if she would ever be capable of becoming a true Jedi Knight. She still didn’t seem to understand that the way a person won a battle was far more important than whether she won it. “But there’s no need to make him suffer. Dead is dead.”
Luke reached out in the Force and found the sensation of burning cold that was the shikkar buried inside the Sith’s torso. It seemed to be only a few millimeters below the throbbing fire of the man’s heart, a placement likely to kill him a bit more slowly than Vestara believed. Luke touched the blade in the Force and tipped it upward just a millimeter—then heard the impostor gasp as it sliced into his heart.
Vestara’s hand tightened on Luke’s arm. “What happened? You didn’t—”
“It will look like the blade shifted,” Luke assured her. “Even the High Lords will never know why. Who was he?”
“An old friend of my father’s,” Vestara said, sounding a bit sad and disappointed. “Master Myal.”
“I see,” Luke replied.
The levtram arrived at the boarding berth and opened its doors, and panicked passengers from the platform began to push inside without giving anyone on board a chance to debark. Luke took a moment to look around, then—when he did not see any trace of the tattooed man from the pedramp—he and Vestara pushed into the panicked crowd.
As they entered the glow from the lights inside the car, Luke was surprised to see that there were tears welling in Vestara’s eyes.
“What did he do to make you hate him so much?”
“Hate him?” Vestara looked up to meet Luke’s gaze. “I didn’t
hate him. He was always very kind to me.”
Luke frowned. “Then you used his own shikkar because …”
“Because I didn’t have mine, and we have a war to win.” Vestara rose onto her tiptoes and whispered into his ear. “I did it for the Jedi cause, Master Skywalker.”
SHE CAME TO HIM IN DARKNESS, AS HIS TORMENTORS ALWAYS DID, A cold malevolence waiting at the foot of his cot. Wynn Dorvan did not move, did not change his breathing, did not even test the restraints holding his limbs splayed and immobile. He merely closed his eyes and willed himself to escape into sleep.
“Come now, Wynn.” The voice was female and familiar, a voice he had heard before. “You know you won’t be rid of me that easily.”
The cell grew bright as the illumination panels activated overhead, and Wynn squeezed his eyes shut against the brilliance. It was impossible to mark the passing of time in the ceaseless darkness between torture sessions, but the pain stabbing through his head suggested it had been many days since his last interrogation.
“Wynn, you mustn’t keep me waiting,” the voice said. Something cold and slimy slithered around his bare ankle. “Not your Beloved Queen of the Stars.”
Wynn’s eyes popped open, filling his head with an explosion of pain and light, and he raised his head. Standing at the foot of his cot he saw two silhouettes, one a female human and one … something else.
“That’s better.” The voice seemed to be coming from the silhouette on the left—a hideous, sinuate thing with tentacles instead of arms, with blazing white stars where there should have been eyes. Abeloth. “I was afraid you were going to make me summon Lady Korelei.”
The memories of his recent Force torture only grew stronger as time passed, and the mere mention of Korelei’s name sent an electric bolt of fear shooting through his body. He ignored it—just as he ignored the inner voice telling him to scream and beg for mercy. The slightest hint of weakness would only bring Korelei back all the sooner, to pry from him the few secrets he had not yet surrendered—his most important secrets, the ones he was determined to carry into oblivion with him.
And so Wynn said the only thing he could say, the one thing that just might get him killed before Korelei returned: “Are you real?” He let his head drop back to the cot. “You can’t be real. You’re too blasted ugly.”
The silhouette remained silent for a moment, and had Wynn been a Jedi, he was fairly certain he would have felt her anger building in the Force. But when Abeloth spoke, her voice remained cool and in control, and Wynn knew he would not escape his torment so easily.
“I am very real, Wynn—more real than you can know,” she said. “And I grow weary of your tricks, as do the Sith. Lady Korelei is ready to employ the necromantic option.”
Wynn managed a sort of nod. “Let her.” As he spoke, the light started to grow less painful, and when he glanced toward the silhouette it began to seem less hideous and sinuate—more substantial and vaguely human. “If Lady Korelei could get truth from a dead man, she wouldn’t be wasting time trying to extract it from a living one.”
“So you have been lying to her?”
“No one can lie to a Sith Lord,” he said. “That’s what she keeps telling me.”
“You might be an exception,” the woman said. “You are certainly not telling her what the Sith wish to know.”
Now that Wynn’s vision was clearing, he could see that his visitor had changed from the hideous tentacle-armed Abeloth into an elegant, blue-skinned Jessar female. There was a slight bulge to her eyes, and her face looked as though it were starting to peel from a bad sunburn. But anyone with access to the HoloNet would have no trouble recognizing her as Rokari Kem, Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance.
“You might suggest that she ask nicely,” Wynn said. “Really, who wants to cooperate with someone who keeps blasting Force probes through his mind?”
“Then perhaps we should try something else,” Kem suggested. “How would you like to be released from this cell?”
Wynn raised his head as high as was possible. “You must know how very silly that question is.”
Kem’s only response was a series of soft clicks as the cuffs around Wynn’s wrists and ankles fell open. The tension vanished from his arms and legs, and when he tried to pull his pain-numbed limbs in toward his body, they actually moved.
More suspicious than surprised, Wynn struggled into an upright position and was finally able to get a good look at Kem’s companion. Dressed in the gray jumpsuit of a GAS prisoner, the woman had blond hair, narrow eyes, and a hard, familiar face that Wynn knew he should have recognized, but could not quite place in his current condition.
He shifted his gaze back to Kem. “Well, that was easy,” he said. “What’s the catch?”
“Catch?” Kem asked. “Ah—what I want in return. That would be your help.”
“My help?” Wynn echoed, still trying to work out the second woman’s identity—and what she had to do with his own captivity. “To do what?”
“Help me rule,” Kem replied simply.
Now Wynn was surprised. “You want me to help you rule the Galactic Alliance?”
“You would help me run the government, yes,” Kem confirmed. “You would be saving lives, Wynn—a great many lives.”
Keenly aware that there had to be a trap—with Abeloth and her Sith, there was always a trap—Wynn fell silent and did his best to sort through priorities with his torture-raddled brain. His most important goal was to protect the informal intelligence network he had been operating with Admiral and Eramuth Bwua’tu. By now, the two Bothans knew of his capture, and they had undoubtedly taken precautions to protect themselves. But the network itself would be vital to the Jedi when they returned to liberate the planet, and so far he had managed to avoid revealing its existence to Lady Korelei and her assistants.
But Wynn knew he could not put that off much longer. He had run out of unimportant details three sessions earlier and begun to feed his tormentors small scraps of more valuable information. Now they were beginning to put together a more complete picture of the secret workings of the Galactic Alliance government—a picture that was leading them closer to Club Bwua’tu all the time.
“Is it such a hard decision, Wynn?” Kem asked. “You can save lives and escape your torture. Or you can condemn thousands to die … and remain here to feed Lady Korelei’s appetites.”
Of course, it wasn’t a hard decision at all—and that’s what made Wynn hesitate. Rokari Kem—or Abeloth, or whatever she called herself—was not only the new leader of the Galactic Alliance. She was also the secret leader of the Sith, and Sith cared nothing about the lives they took or the harm they caused. They cared only about their own power. If Abeloth was willing to forgo the secrets that her torturers were slowly prying from his mind, then it could only mean she saw a more valuable way to use him—a way that would allow her to do even more damage to the Galactic Alliance.
But Abeloth didn’t know everything, and one of the things she didn’t know was that Wynn just needed to buy time—time for the Jedi to arrive before he broke. Finally, he looked up and met Kem’s gaze.
“You’d move me out of this cell?” he asked. “And keep me away from Lady Korelei?”
“Of course,” Kem assured him. “As long as you continue to serve me, you’ll be safe from Lady Korelei.”
“I won’t be your mouthpiece,” Wynn warned. His demands, he knew, would mean nothing to her—but he had to make them, or she would grow suspicious of his true motives. “And I won’t feed you the names of beings who stand against you.”
“I expect nothing of the sort,” Kem assured him, smiling broadly and warmly. “I have enough names to last a standard year.”
Wynn allowed his discomfort at the assertion to show in his face, but asked, “Well then, what do you expect from me?”
“Nothing but what you gave Chief Daala,” Kem said. “By all accounts, you’re an excellent administrator and a capable adviser.”
“You want
my advice?” Wynn began to think he was hallucinating—that he had finally broken under Korelei’s attentions and lost his mind. “You can’t be sincere.”
“But I am … so very sincere.” Kem reached for the arm of the woman she had brought along, then pulled her forward to stand next to the cot. “I’m sure you remember Lieutenant Lydea Pagorski?”
Pagorski—of course. She was the Imperial intelligence officer who had perjured herself at Tahiri Veila’s murder trial. Wynn nodded and turned to the woman.
“I do,” he said. “I’m sorry to see you here, too.”
Pagorski’s face grew even paler, and she cast a nervous glance toward Kem.
Kem merely rolled her eyes. “There’s no need to feel sorry for the lieutenant,” she said. “The Empire wants her returned, and I’d like to know whether to grant their request.”
“You’re asking me to make the decision?” Wynn asked, more suspicious than ever.
“To give me your opinion, yes,” Kem said. “You won’t be making any decisions yourself.”
Wynn began to feel a little better about the arrangement. Kem and her Sith were, after all, practically strangers to the galaxy at large. It made sense that they might need someone like him to help sort through the thousands of diplomatic petitions that came through the Chief of State’s office every day.
“What did the Empire offer in return for Lieutenant Pagorski’s release?” he asked.
Kem frowned. “Nothing.”
“Not even a task force port call?”