Her son had gently nudged her leg with his boot. Three short taps—obviously a signal. She looked at him, mouthed a word: What?
He didn’t move, just cast his eyes to one side, looking past her, then back to her. Then back to looking past her, toward the path they had traveled, then back to her.
Ronn nuzzled up to Bee and said, loudly, “Don’t cry, Bee, this dumb lizard’s not going to hurt you,” which had earned him a kick from their Trandoshan guard that he bore in silence, her brave, brave son. It had also earned Erika a moment to turn her head and look behind them, where she saw what Ronn had seen—sparks, in the distance.
Not close, but not so far, either. She had looked several times since, taking any opportunity for a quick glance, and their pursuers were getting closer, moment by moment.
The sparks were identical to those kicked up by their own mounts every time a steelee’s hoof struck against a metallic rock—wild steelee herds running at night were one of the natural wonders of Elphrona. They made a loud noise, too—a sharp, quick tchk—which helped to disguise what had to be similar sounds emanating from the riders coming up behind them.
Three, she thought. She couldn’t quite make out any details, but it seemed like three, riding side by side.
No one seemed to have noticed besides the two of them. Their Trandoshan guard was keeping her eyes on her captives. And of course, the Nihil weren’t looking anywhere but dead ahead. They were hanging on for dear life, trying to stay in their saddles.
She gave Ronn a questioning look, and he responded with as much of a shrug as he could using just his eyes. He didn’t know who was on their trail, either—and Erika knew he hadn’t been able to raise help from Ogden’s Hope.
Maybe the settlement’s security squad had found their spines and sent a team out to help—but they’d be in a speeder, not as mounted riders.
It didn’t make any sense—but it was a little bit of hope, and hope was in short supply at the moment.
She risked another glance back, just to see if they were getting closer, and this time her luck ran out. The guard saw her doing it and looked, too. She saw their pursuers immediately—impossible to miss, now. The sparks were shooting up to either side like the people chasing them were riding along a road of flame.
The Nihil stood in the cart and yelled out to the rest of her crew.
“Trouble! We got people comin’ up behind, fast! Looks like three of—”
And then Ottoh, who as it turned out was not unconscious but merely pretending to be, waiting for a moment like this, holding his own hope in reserve, clicked his tongue sharply against the roof of his mouth three times. It was a loud sound, and all five of the steelees, well trained and well loved by her husband, knew the command and obeyed immediately.
They stopped, their duralloy hooves locking into the ground with the organomagnetic field that allowed them to climb even the steepest of Elphrona’s mountains—here, the maneuver simply removed all velocity cold, in one quick, snapping movement.
Velocity, but not momentum, not inertia. Three of the Nihil were thrown from their saddles, whipping forward at enormous speed. Their guard, too, who was in the worst possible position when the steelees stopped—standing, unbalanced, in a fast-moving repulsorcart. She shot up and out, as if fired from her own rifle.
A moment later, a thick, hard sound, between a snap and a thud, the sound of something very hard breaking when it hit something even harder.
Erika didn’t see it happen, because she, along with the rest of her family, was pressed together against the front edge of the repulsorcart, a tangle of limbs and pressure and future bruises. Despite that, she was fairly sure she now knew what it sounded like when a Trandoshan’s skull split open against hard ironstone.
And good bloody riddance.
“Is everyone all right?” Erika said.
“I’m okay,” Bee said. Tough little kid.
“Hurt my hand, but it’s nothing too bad,” Ronn said.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t warn you,” Ottoh said, pulling himself out of the tangle. “It wouldn’t have worked if it didn’t surprise them. “Now try to do what I do.”
He rolled himself onto his back, then pulled his legs up close to his chest and extended his arms as far as they would go, trying to get his cuffed wrist out and over his feet, so at least he’d be able to use his hands again.
Erika got ready to repeat the maneuver herself. If they could use their hands, maybe they could find a way to get free, or at least to run.
The butt of a rifle slammed down on Ottoh’s head, and he slumped. His eyes went blank and dazed. He was alive, but Erika didn’t know how much of him was left just then. Her husband wouldn’t be cooking up any more surprises, of that much she was sure.
The Nihil weren’t gone. They had fallen, some had fallen hard, but they were still there, and they still had guns, and now they were very angry. The one who hit her husband lifted his rifle for another crack, and she knew this one would most likely crack his skull for good if the first blow hadn’t.
Erika lunged forward, covering his body with hers, trying to intercept the blow.
“No!” she cried.
The rifle hit her in the side, and she curled up against the pain, which was immediate and immense. But better her than Ottoh.
“Move or you die, too,” the Nihil growled, its voice low and strange.
Someone else outside the cart grabbed the attacker and pulled him back. Erika was struggling to breathe, but she could still hear.
“Don’t kill any of them.”
“Asaria’s dead. She’s dead.”
Asaria, Erika thought, what a lovely name.
“These stupid miners killed half of us already, Dent.”
“Damn right,” she heard Ronn whisper.
“It’s time for some payback.”
“I said no. Every one we kill, that’s twenty-five percent of our take. I’m not worried about the people we lost—it doubles our share. But we lost a speeder, too, and that means we’re in the red on this. We need every credit we can get. Don’t kill any of them. You’re just a Strike. I’m the Cloud. You do what I say.”
A long moment of silence, and Erika knew that the lives of her husband and maybe the rest of her family were dependent on how much respect this Strike had for his Cloud, whatever that meant.
“Fine,” the first Nihil spat, and she heard him walking away.
Erika exhaled slowly.
“Ottoh,” she said.
No answer. She decided she would just believe he was still alive. Hope was a choice—and not unwarranted, either. In the distance, she could hear a sound. Hoofbeats. Their pursuers were catching up.
“We need to kill whoever’s coming after us,” the Nihil’s leader said to the rest of her crew—a Cloud, she had called herself. “Egga, Rel, get up in the hills, on either side. Find spots where you have a good view of the canyon. Mack, Buggo, and I will keep going for the ship. We’ll take the family with us, so they’ll have to come this way. Take them out.”
Erika listened as these arrangements were put into play, and with a jerk, the cart began moving again, rapidly picking up speed.
But now there was no guard, and she was able to complete the maneuver her husband had shown her, getting her hands in front of her as opposed to stuck behind her back. First, she felt Ottoh’s pulse—steady and strong. He was unconscious, but maybe that was all. Her husband attended to, Erika turned to her children. She touched Bee’s face and kissed her, and then took Ronn’s hands in hers.
“You’re both being so strong, so brave. We’re so proud of you.”
“Is Dada all right?” Bee asked.
“He will be. Don’t worry about your father. Just stay calm, and be ready to do whatever I ask you to do, when the time comes. For now, try to get your hands out in front of you, like I di
d. You’re a little wriggly worm. You can do it, I know you can. You, too, Ronn.”
She watched as both her children contorted themselves as she had requested.
Now what? she thought.
Erika had an unconscious husband and two children to save somehow, and—
She remembered their pursuers. Help, maybe, and on its way.
She reached up to grasp the edge of the cart and pulled herself up, looking back. Surely they had to be close—and they were. The delay from Ottoh’s trick with the steelees had done its job. They couldn’t be more than five hundred meters back.
She could see them now—three figures, riding well, riding fast—these were experienced wranglers, nothing like their captors.
Erika wanted to yell out, to tell them they were riding into a trap, but she didn’t think they could hear her, and didn’t want to do anything that would cause the Nihil to decide a seventy-five percent profit margin would be fine after all.
Then something happened.
Three lines of light blossomed from the riders coming up fast behind them: one gold, one blue, one green, and Erika realized what was happening, who these people were.
“By the light,” she breathed. “They’re Jedi.”
“You guys ready to ride the storm?” Kassav shouted.
He held up a bulb of smash, bright blue and soft, with a slim nozzle at one end, designed to make the drug accessible to just about every type of gas exchange anatomy in the galaxy. Whether you had a nose, a trunk, stomata, a proboscis, or just some weird hole in your face, you could use a smashbulb. Which was good, because his team had all those options and more.
The crew of the New Elite lifted their own bulbs, anticipatory grins on every face. Music vibrated every surface; big, booming wreckpunk, where every instrument the bands used was made from the re-forged wreckage of crashed starships.
Kassav took a good, long puff, and boom, his mind lit up. Everything was sharper, brighter. He could do this. He could. He could do this. He could do it all.
He watched as his crew did the same—a few ran the smash straight into the gas filters of their masks, a neat trick that intensified the effects. Saw the energy ripple through them, that charge, that rush, that sugar candy hit that made everything glow and buzz and hiss. He dropped his empty bulb on the deck and grinned.
“Feels good, don’t it?” he shouted, spitting the words. “Feels like the Nihil, right?”
His people roared. Some were twitching in time to the music. Some were just twitching.
“Okay—you all enjoy—give it a minute, but then take the rounder. We need to be sharp for this. Let’s ride the storm, not let the storm ride us, yeah?”
By way of example—you needed to provide an example from time to time as a leader—he reached into his tunic and pulled out a small orange-and-yellow pill. He held it up, showing it to his crew, then popped it into his mouth and bit down. Almost immediately, the smash high took on a new, swirling quality, like waves in a storm-tossed sea. Huge, powerful, you needed to watch yourself—but these waves…you could surf.
It reminded him of hyperspace, a little. Not the normal kind, but the weird roads of Marchion Ro’s Paths. Kassav turned to look out the bridge’s viewport, watching as the hyperlane rolled on past. Tunnels built from endless ribbons of light, many colors, washing and tossing and weaving into one another. There was some meaning there, but he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out.
He had no idea where the Paths came from. Marchion Ro was cagey about it, never giving too many details, and his father had been the same way. Kassav sometimes wanted to find out the secret at blasterpoint or, even better, at the edge of a blade, but the Ros were not stupid people. Or at least, Asgar hadn’t been. He knew what he had with the Paths, and knew people would want it. And while Marchion Ro wasn’t his father, not even close, he’d inherited all the safeguards Asgar set up. The Gaze Electric, those gnarly guard droids he used…it was hard to get close to Marchion. He’d made it clear that the Paths themselves had their own safeguards, too. If he died, so would they. That hadn’t happened when Asgar died, but then again, Marchion didn’t have a son to whom he could pass the family business.
But it wasn’t just starships and murder droids protecting Marchion Ro. It was also the structure his father had insisted the Nihil adopt when he’d brought them the Paths so many years ago. Before that, the group was much smaller, barely a gang, really. It kept its operations to a tiny corner of the Rim, close to Thull’s Shroud by Belsavis, pulling off whatever little jobs it could. Asgar Ro had shown up one day and offered them the Paths, in exchange for a third of the take of any operations that used them. But that wasn’t all—he wanted a vote, too.
Any jobs that used the Paths required a full vote of the three Tempest Runners, plus the Eye, and any tie vote went the Eye’s way. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, but it meant that he, Pan Eyta, and Lourna Dee were always against one another in a way, always courting the Eye’s favor to get Paths. In theory, they could all team up to try to go after Marchion, but there was too much bad blood. Most of the time, Kassav could barely be in the same room with Lourna Dee and Pan Eyta, much less contemplate sharing the throne with them.
Marchion was all alone, and should be completely vulnerable…but somehow, he wasn’t. He was protected, by the system his much smarter father had set up. It was annoying…but it worked.
Hell, Kassav had copied a lot of Asgar’s ideas for his own Tempest.
Kassav had three Storms up at the top of his Tempest’s hierarchy: Gravhan, Dellex, and Wet Bub. They all wanted to be him, but they would never work together to get rid of him, because then none of them would be the Tempest Runner—they’d still just be three Storms sharing power. Yep. It was a good little system.
All three of those Storms were on the bridge of the New Elite, and they’d all blown smash right when he did. He didn’t know if they’d all taken the rounder, or if the Clouds and Strikes in their crews had, either…but that was all right. A little edge wasn’t such a bad thing. The Nihil were all about edge. It wouldn’t be a problem, as long as everyone did what they were told.
And everyone would. That was the other thing that made the Nihil such a great system, even if this particular truth was hidden down deep, making it hard to see unless you were near the top of the organization. On the surface, the Nihil were all about freedom, about breaking away from the galaxy’s systems of control. Forget the Republic, forget the Hutts, forget anything but doing what you wanted when you wanted. That was the sales pitch, how they got people to join up. Ride the storm, baby, ride that storm.
But once you were a Nihil, you still had a boot on your chest, even if you didn’t always feel it because of all of the burn parties and smash and the thrill of taking what you wanted, when you wanted. You still had to do exactly what your bosses above you said, and the bosses above them. If you didn’t, at best you didn’t get your share of the Rule of Three. At worst, you got a vibroblade in your neck, or you got thrown out of the Great Hall the hard way. Everyone had to stay in line, everyone paid their price. Well, everyone but Marchion Ro and the Tempest Runners—him, Lourna Dee, and that flashy brute Pan Eyta, did he even realize how stupid he looked, a Dowutin trying to be fashionable? Anyway.
The Nihil was just another form of control, an engine designed to roll credits up to the people at the top of the organization.
Yeah, good little system.
Kassav surveyed his crew, the upper echelons of his Tempest. Gravhan, Wet Bub, and there was Dellex right up front, her one organic eye gleaming from the smash—oh yeah, she definitely hadn’t taken that rounder—and their crews arranged behind them.
“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Kassav said. “We’re gonna string these jerks along, make them pay us so much money there won’t be more than two credits left in the whole blasted system. We’re gonna take ’em f
or everything they’ve got, and they’ll be happy we did.”
Everyone liked that—lots of savage grins and appreciative words from the crew.
“We’re about to drop out of lightspeed in this system called Eriadu. They’re hurting pretty bad from the Republic’s hyperspace blockade—not enough food to go around down there. Word is the people are ready to overthrow the governors. So those guys are already in trouble, and they ain’t gonna want any more. Perfect for us.
“Everything will start to happen fast once we show up—we gotta cut this close because of the way the Emergences are lined up. Storms, you all got your crews briefed? Everyone knows their job?”
“Dunno about these other two jokers, Kassav, but my line knows their business good,” Gravhan said, fingering a tusk. He was a Chevin, mostly just one huge head to look at him, with wrinkled gray skin and wisps of long blond hair on his scalp. He looked slow and ponderous, and maybe he was, but Kassav had once seen him rip a security guard in half with his bare hands. They were robbing a bank in a tiny settlement on some backwater ice planet. Gravhan had just grabbed the guy, and…well, if Kassav’s Tempest had a motto, it would be something like Strength Wins, and Gravhan was the perfect example of that. Just ask that security guard.
“My people are ready, too, boss,” Dellex said. “I’ve been drilling them ever since you laid out the plan.”
“I bet,” Gravhan said, and a few of his Strikes chuckled, people too dumb to know that you didn’t want Dellex on your bad side.
Kassav had known the woman for a long time, even had a little thing with her a while back. He knew she thought she was ugly as sin, and that’s why she kept spending all her money on fancy mechanical upgrades. She was making herself beautiful, one shiny new body part at a time. But all that metal didn’t do her personality any favors. She was getting prettier, sure, but colder, too. Kassav had a feeling those chuckle-happy Strikes in Gravhan’s crew might find themselves with their skulls crushed some night soon.
Oh well. Not his problem. There were always more Strikes.
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