Annihilation

by Drew Karpyshyn

  For an instant he was left completely exposed to her human companion, but the unexpected ferocity of Gnost-Dural’s sudden switch in tactics caught him unprepared. He hesitated a fraction of a second before thrusting forward, giving the Jedi enough time to leap aside, even as his Sith opponent tripped over her own backpedaling feet and fell to the floor.

  Gnost-Dural lunged forward to deliver a coup de grâce, but his momentum was suddenly reversed and he found himself sailing backward as Darth Karrid hit him with a powerful Force push. He was able to roll into a back somersault as he hit the ground and spring back to his feet, but his brief advantage was lost.

  The two apprentices closed on him again, cutting him off before he could even think about charging toward Karrid. As they approached, he sensed the Imperial reinforcements in the hall outside, scrambling to restore power to the sealed door so they could join the fray.

  Knowing he was running out of time, Gnost-Dural switched tactics again. He thrust out with a powerful Force wave, sweeping them both off their feet. But before he could finish off his prone opponents Karrid unleashed a blast of crackling dark side energy in his direction. Gnost-Dural leapt clear, the deadly blue lightning scorching the floor where he had been standing an instant before.

  He threw his lightsaber in Karrid’s direction, sending it end-over-end on a direct line with his target. The Falleen parried the attack with her own blade, though she was forced to retreat a step to absorb the impact. Gnost-Dural was already in motion, charging past her apprentices before they could scramble to their feet. His lightsaber flew back into his outstretched palm as he fell on Karrid.

  He had trained her in Niman, the sixth and most balanced form of lightsaber combat. Malgus might have taught her other styles, but faced with Gnost-Dural’s furious assault she instinctively fell back into the one she had learned before all others. Niman lent itself well to the Jedi ways, eschewing naked aggression for balance and economy of movement that relied on focus and precision. As a Sith Lord who drew her strength from channeling the raw emotional fury of the dark side, the style compromised Karrid’s abilities. The effect was minimal, but it was more than enough for Gnost-Dural to exploit.

  He used a quick shove with the Force to send her off balance and brought his lightsaber in high to strike at her shoulder. When she raised her own blade to block the blow, he dropped low and took her feet out from under her with a sweep of his leg.

  Karrid toppled over, but the Jedi was forced to turn his back on her to engage the female Sith as she leapt to Karrid’s aid. They exchanged a quick series of blows—plenty of time for Karrid to regain her feet. Instead of attempting to finish Gnost-Dural off by attacking from his flank, however, she retreated from the melee, putting the preservation of her own life above the opportunity to finish off her opponent.

  The male apprentice joined in a second later, and Gnost-Dural switched to the defensive Soresu form. He could sense fatigue seeping into his muscles: the toll of the battle was wearing him down, fractionally slowing his blade and leaving him more vulnerable to the Force attacks of his enemies. An instant later the door whooshed open and a dozen Imperial guards spilled into the room.

  Karrid held up a hand to indicate they should hold their fire.

  “The outcome is inevitable,” Karrid called out to him as he fought off the twin attacks of her apprentices. “I sense your exhaustion. Throw down your weapon and I will let you beg for mercy.”

  Gnost-Dural hadn’t expected to win the battle. From the moment he decided to board the Ascendant Spear, he’d known defeating Karrid was a near impossibility. But he wasn’t about to surrender and grovel at her feet—if for no other reason than that if he did, she would be suspicious and his true plan would never work.

  “I didn’t come here seeking victory,” he said.

  Karrid’s head tilted to the side as she searched for the meaning behind his words. Failing to grasp it, she turned to the soldiers arrayed just inside the door.

  “I want him alive,” she told the captain.

  Gnost-Dural used the last of his dwindling strength to call on the Force for a final desperate leap that sent him hurtling over the apprentices’ heads toward his former Padawan.

  The attack was doomed to failure; there were a dozen ways Karrid could have avoided or repelled the attack. But she didn’t even have to react as the soldiers opened fire with a dozen blasters all set to stun. The bolts knocked the Jedi from the air and sent him slamming hard to the ground. His lightsaber fell from his paralyzed fingers, the blade extinguished as the hilt clattered to the floor.

  As he lay there facedown struggling to cling to consciousness, Karrid strode over and picked up his lightsaber, tucking it into her belt like a hunter claiming a trophy from a prized kill. She rolled him over onto his back with her boot, then crouched down to peer into his masked face.

  “You knew you couldn’t win this battle,” she said. “So why did you really come here?”

  Gnost-Dural had no intention of answering her question, but even if he had his voice would have been drowned out by the sounds of an alarm ringing through the ship.

  Karrid snapped her head in the direction of the guard captain, who was listening intently to a message coming over the receiver in his ear.

  “Reaver Station is under attack!” he blurted out. “A Republic fleet has been detected in the sector. ETA sixteen minutes!”

  “Activate our shields,” Karrid answered, concerned but not panicked. “Recall all crew to their posts. We leave dock in twelve minutes. Anyone not on board will be left behind and face a full court-martial.”

  As the captain relayed her commands to the person on the other end of the transmission, Karrid turned back to look down at Gnost-Dural.

  “Was this your plan? Sacrifice yourself so the Republic could catch us in port and unprepared? Or is there more to your scheme?”

  Gnost-Dural stayed silent, the edges of his vision growing dim as the blackness closed in, the blaring alarms growing fainter and more distant.

  Just before he finally lost consciousness, he heard Karrid say, “This is another battle you cannot win. The Imperial interrogators will make you tell me everything.”

  Reaver Station was in chaos. The alarms echoing through the station were quickly matched by alarms from every ship docked in the hangars as the central tower spread word of the Republic fleet closing in.

  Men and women sprinted back to their vessels, scrambling to get to their battle stations before the enemy arrived. Theron didn’t know how long it would take for his ruse to be discovered, but he knew he had to act fast.

  He ran from the guard post, joining the stampede of soldiers bearing down on the hangar where the Ascendant Spear was docked. As he burst into the bay, he was swept up in the crowd and carried toward the ramps. The guards keeping the crew from boarding the ship were gone, either recalled onto the Spear or overwhelmed by the sudden crush of people scrambling to get to their posts.

  Theron continued to let the crowd carry him along, heading up the ramp and into the vessel. Once aboard, the crowd thinned quickly as people broke off in different directions, heading to their assigned stations.

  Theron did his best to look like he knew where he was going, though in truth he had no idea. He’d only had time to plan out how he’d get himself on the ship. Now that he was aboard he needed to figure out something new, and it was hard to concentrate due to the incessant clang of the Spear’s warning klaxon.

  It wasn’t unheard of for new crew members to get lost when first assigned to a ship as large as the Ascendant Spear, and there were diagrams of the ship’s basic layout posted at several places along the bulkheads. He stopped to check one, quickly memorizing the layout before choosing his destination. He needed somewhere with access to the ship’s main systems so he could slice in and plant the virus, but it had to be isolated enough for him to work in private.

  His eyes fell on the engine room near the rear of the ship. Separated from the rest of the vessel by a he
avily shielded bulkhead to guard against explosions and radioactive discharges, it was accessible only through a single maintenance hatch.

  Moving with a new sense of purpose, he worked his way through the ship toward the turbolift leading down to the vessel’s lowest level. He encountered fewer and fewer people as he went, and by the time he reached the lift he was alone.

  Before he could press the button to call it, the doors slid open to reveal a short, heavyset woman in a major’s uniform.

  “Corporal!” she snapped on seeing Theron waiting for the elevator. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “Shorry, shir,” Theron said, slurring his words and snapping off a sloppy salute. He squinted one eye closed as he swayed unsteadily on his feet. “Gotta get to my posht.”

  “This lift is reserved!” she barked, her voice even louder than the incessant alarms. “Authorized personnel only!”

  “Alarmsh woke me up,” Theron mumbled. “Gotta get to en-ger … en-ger … en-ger-reering.”

  “You’re drunk!” she spat, her voice filled with disgust. “Are you scheduled for duty?”

  “Oh-nine-hundred,” he replied.

  “That’s not for another six hours,” she said with an exasperated shake of her head. “Go back and sleep it off in your bunk.”

  “Shure thing, shir,” Theron said, fumbling out another clumsy salute.

  He turned and staggered off in the opposite direction, down the corridor and around the corner. Once he was out of sight he dropped the act and moved quickly down the passage, taking a series of twists and turns that eventually doubled him back to the turbolift.

  Peering around the corner, he made sure the major was gone before making a dash for the lift. He waited impatiently for the doors to open, then slipped inside and punched the button for G Deck, hoping he wouldn’t run into anyone else.

  Luck was with him. He didn’t see anybody as he made his way from the elevator to the engine room’s access hatch. Unlike the automated doors controlled by access panels, this was an old durasteel hinge model, opened by turning a heavy wheel in the center of the hatch.

  The wheel was stiff from lack of use, and despite his best efforts Theron couldn’t budge it. He realized the maintenance crew probably used a wrench to gain the necessary leverage, but all he had was his pistol. He looked around the empty corridor, trying to find something else he could use. Seeing nothing, he shrugged and pulled the blaster from the holster on his hip, jamming it into the spokes of the door’s wheel.

  Grabbing the pistol’s grip with one hand and the barrel with the other he pulled for all he was worth. The veins on his neck bulged as his muscles strained. Just as he thought he was about to pass out from the effort, the wheel let loose with a groan and moved a quarter turn.

  Theron adjusted his grip on the pistol and pulled again. The wheel moved more easily this time; another quarter turn. He regripped for a third time and pulled. The wheel completed its revolution and the door popped open with a loud clang.

  Standing motionless, he waited to see if anyone would respond to the noise, but all he heard was the clanging alarm. When he removed the pistol from the spokes of the wheel he noticed that the barrel had been bent. The weapon was useless.

  Out of habit he slapped it into his leg holster, then stepped in through the hatch, pulling the heavy durasteel door closed behind him. He turned the wheel on the inside a quarter turn—enough to keep the hatch from popping open, but not so far he’d have to struggle to open it when he was ready to get out.

  He was standing on a narrow metal walkway that ran the full forty-meter length of the engine room. To his left was a reinforced bulkhead, to his right the Spear’s massive hyperdrive and the enormous ion engines that propelled the ship when it moved at sublight speeds. The walls and ceiling were covered with a maze of pipes, tubes, cords, and wires running among hundreds of seemingly randomly placed electrical boxes, fuse panels, and computer chip relays.

  In addition to the alarms he could still hear and feel through the vibrations in the walkway, there was a steady, low-pitched hum coming from the ion engines. The air in the engine room was twenty degrees warmer than the corridor he had just come in from, and it smelled of ozone and burning plastic.

  If the heat doesn’t make me pass out, the fumes just might.

  There were no control panels down here in the bowels of the ship, but Theron knew he could slice the Spear by tapping directly into the main system. All he had to do was figure out which of the hundreds of wires and relays connected the engine room to the primary command console on the bridge.

  Shouldn’t take more than a few hours, right?

  To his relief, the clanging alarms finally stopped. The blessed silence was broken by two long blasts from a distant horn, and the ground shifted under his feet as the Ascendant Spear disengaged from Reaver Station.

  Guess you’re not leaving anytime soon, he thought. Might as well get to work.

  CHAPTER 25

  THE IMPERIAL SHUTTLE’S TEN-HOUR JOURNEY from Reaver Station back to Jigani Port gave Teff’ith plenty of time to think about her deal with Theron. She wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, but the basic details were clear—Theron and the weird-looking Jedi were trying something crazy and foolish, and if she didn’t deliver her message to Grand Master Satele Shan a lot of people were going to die.

  She tried to tell herself she didn’t really care what happened to a bunch of people she’d never met, but during the long flight her mind kept conjuring up images of orbital cities in ruins, the bodies of men, women, and children scattered among the wreckage. She’d seen plenty of pictures of death and destruction on the holovids and never given them a second thought, but this was different. Those people were already dead; there was no point worrying about them. The ones on Duro were still alive.

  No profit for us in letting them die, she thought, reminding herself why she was really doing this. Theron had promised her a big fat payday when this was all over, and it wasn’t like she was taking any real risk. Agreeing to the job had actually gotten her off Reaver Station before the Jedi and Theron pulled off whatever crazy stunt they were planning.

  Only risk is if Theron doesn’t make it, she thought.

  She realized the thought of him dying on Reaver Station actually bothered her more than thinking of all the nameless victims on Duro. Try as she might, she couldn’t convince herself it was entirely because he wouldn’t be able to pay her.

  She slept for a few hours, letting the shuttle’s autopilot navigate through hyperspace. She dreamed of Ngani Zho, the crazy old Jedi who’d thrown himself in front of a blaster bolt meant for her, sacrificing his life for her own. But she didn’t dream of their time together or his death; in her dreams it was like the old man had never left.

  Teff’ith was on the Imperial shuttle, heading back to Jigani Port. Ngani Zho was sitting in the seat beside her. His scraggly gray hair and bushy eyebrows were wild and disheveled—looking at him, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine he had never owned a comb in his life. He wore an old Jedi robe, wrinkled and stained, with the hood thrown back. There were several charred holes in his chest where the blasters had ripped through him, but his blue eyes were sharp and bright.

  “I expected better from you, Teff’ith,” he said. “You think I gave my life up just so you could keep on working for the Black Sun?”

  “Pft. Work for Old Tion Brotherhood now.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  “Big things ahead for us.”

  “At least we agree on that.”

  “Why did you save us?”

  A beep from the autopilot alerting her that they were preparing to drop out of hyperspace startled her awake before the man in her dream could give her an answer.

  “Stupid Jedi,” Teff’ith muttered as she switched the shuttle over to manual control.

  She dropped from hyperspace in the Desevro system, charted a course for the shuttle to bring her into Jigani Port, then opened a holo channel.

>   “Welcome back, Sunshine!” Gorvich said once the holo was connected. “Quick turnaround. I guess everything must have gone real smooth.”

  “Not smooth. Left Jedi and Theron at Reaver Station.”

  Gorvich chuckled. “Sounds like a good story. Lay it on me.”

  “Not over comm channels. Meet us at Jedi’s fancy shuttle. You move it?”

  “Nah, it’s still in the hangar at Jigani Port. How long till you get there?”

  “Thirty minutes,” she said, flicking off the holo so she wouldn’t have to deal with Gorvich for one second longer than absolutely necessary.

  By the time she arrived at the hangar where the Prosperity was parked, Gorvich was already waiting for her.

  “Okay, Sunshine. We’re here. So what’s the deal? Why’d you ditch the others?”

  She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. She wanted to tell Gorvich as little about what had happened as possible. If he knew Theron had offered her ten thousand credits, he’d want a cut.

  “Didn’t ditch them. Told us to go. Need us to deliver a message.”

  “I don’t follow,” Gorvich said, scratching his head. “You going back to pick them up later?”

  “Not part of the plan.”

  “So how are they going to get off Reaver Station?”

  Teff’ith shrugged. “Never told us. Just said take shuttle. Go deliver message.”

  Gorvich shook his head. “I knew they were up to something funny. This won’t come back later and bite me when I’m not looking, will it?”

  “You be fine,” the Twi’lek assured him.

  Gorvich crossed his arms and stared at Teff’ith, his eyes staying above the neck for a change.

  “I know you’re keeping something from me, Sunshine. But I’ll let it slide since you set this whole deal up.”

  “Still owe us our cut,” she reminded him.

  “Don’t worry, I got the credits stashed away somewhere safe.” Gorvich laughed—a mean, spiteful sound. “Guess we aren’t going to get those bonus credits your friend promised, though.”