Star Wars: Knight Errant (27 page)

Except in her case. Reminded, Kerra activated her headset and prepared to call in her destination. The mesa and its metallic cap loomed before her. “Another sanctum,” Kerra groaned, shaking her head.
I just hope they don’t use Daiman’s architect!

“They’re putting holes in us, Brigadier!”

Rusher’s nostrils flared. This was worse than mynocks. The second
Diligence
hit the thrusters and began to hover, several of the red raiders from outside had leapt onto the ship. Now monitors showed the Trandoshan and several of his buddies clinging atop the massive retro-rockets, jabbing at anything they could find with their short red lightsabers.

“Give ’em a spin, helm!”

The tentacle-faced Khil complied, her light green fingers a blur across the console. Around them,
Diligence
lurched and spun, forcing Rusher to grab on to chair backs for balance. Outside, the scenery of Byllura blew past—and on the monitor, so did several of the Sith climbers.

“Still a couple left, sir!”

“Cut thrusters!” Rusher yelled.

Diligence
slammed violently to the platform, just in time for Rusher to yell another command: “Thrusters on!”

The tentacle-faced helmswoman got the picture, making
Diligence
hop like a Zeltron veil dancer. Bracing himself, Rusher watched the underside monitors. This time, even the muscle-bound Trandoshan lost hold.

Rusher signaled a return to midair. “Good work, Zussh!
Next time someone tells me they’ve been to Corellia, I’ll believe them!”

“I’d sssay it’s a good thing we got the hydraulicsss fixed,” the Khil hissed.

“And that Novallo isn’t here to break my neck for that stunt.” Reminded, Rusher walked up the steps to the viewport. “Where are our people?”

Diligence
swung over the bay, turned aft, and tilted. Looking down at the platform, Rusher spotted Dackett and Novallo standing with thirty or so crew members, backed toward the far edge of the raised dock. However strong the Sith lackeys’ power of suggestion was, it wasn’t enough to keep victims standing around when all blazes were breaking loose. Rusher saw that the Trandoshan and the few other goons who hadn’t been thrown into the water were out of commission, lying in the huge cracked imprints
Diligence
had pounded into the tiled surface. But others were coming across the bridge from the city.

Boy, it’ll feel good to shoot something
. “Make it an island!”

With a jolt that rocked the bridge, the turbolasers mounted left and right of the crew compartment blasted downward at the metal bridge. Rated for nothing more than clearing asteroids, they were more than sufficient to send the structure—and quite a few of the baton-toting thugs—into the bay.

“Brigadier! The airssspeedersss—”

Rusher saw it—and felt it—before Zussh finished hissing the words. A flash of gray filled the viewport before him, sending a tremor through the bridge that knocked him to the carpet. Several of the airspeeders that had brought the trouble to the landing platform were still out there. If he’d forgotten about them, they were reminding him now, slamming against the upper decks and trying to rupture the windows. He’d never be able
to bring the ship’s weapons to bear against them. Too bad they didn’t—

Wait
, Rusher thought.
Weapons, we’ve got
. From his position on the carpet, he turned to face the crew in the command pit. “Spin us again—and hit ’em with the long cannons! The Kellies!”

Zussh’s dark eyes blinked. “Sssir, thossse are in the hold.”

“The carriages and generators are. The barrels are attached to the hull!” Rusher stood, gloves flush with the window. Three airspeeders buzzed past, trying to find a safe means to approach the spinning ship, spinning in place. Spying a red rider making a run, Rusher yelled.
“Hard to starboard!”

Diligence
yawed violently, its protruding Sarrassian iron cannon barrels cleaving the air like a massive rotor. The stern metal tore through the first of the shoddily built airspeeders as if it wasn’t there. While the second speeder avoided that fate, its pilot didn’t, flung nearly over the horizon by the spinning muzzle.

Well, that’s a new one
. Rusher watched the third airospeeder hurtle into the bay, struck by a glancing blow. What would he name this tactic? It wasn’t something they could try against a larger ship or a fixed obstacle without snapping off their attachments.
The Rusher Just-This-Once Maneuver, maybe
.

“Visual on Master Dackett, sir.”

“What’s he doing?”

“Beating the Trandoshan to death with his new arm.”

Rusher smiled. “Put us alongside the platform and drop Starboard Ramp Three. Just like a regular evac.”
Well, nothing at all like one. But it’ll do
.

Diligence
dropped into position. Rusher looked for his cane. His sprain from Daiman’s palace had healed, but he might need it for defense when Prenda Novallo
boarded. Mesmerized no longer,
Diligence
’s hull doctor would have just seen him using her precious ship like a battering ram.

But as he watched his crew board on the monitor, he realized that inevitable confrontation would be the least of his troubles. They’d won a few minutes’ respite from the Sith, but the refugees were still aboard, and their nursemaid hadn’t returned. Rusher found his comlink, on the floor.

“Holt! Come in!
Jedi!
”

The light on it blinked. She’d sent a message, during the chaos. But before he could play it back, a call came from the helmsbeing.

“Brigadier, we’ve got new contacts from the north. A lot—and they’re big!”

Rusher gritted his teeth.
Now what?
“Bigger than the airspeeders?”

“Bigger than
us
!”

Rusher dashed to the viewport facing Hestobyll and gaped. Steam was rising from the giant stone pools built into several of the terrace levels. Steam—and something else, something they wouldn’t be able to overcome with a couple of rock-chasers and a few stunts.

His eyes widened. “Little Jedi, wherever you are—I think we’ve made them
mad
!”

A Jedi!

Calician marveled as he shambled away from One. A Jedi Knight was less than ten minutes away from The Loft. There was no need to consult any electronic scanner, nor even any reason to look out the window. The network he’d developed had brought the news instantaneously to him and his young masters.

Part of the inspiration had come from watching jornisae spiders, accidentally and unwisely imported from Cularin to his homeworld. Even when he blinded the
creatures, they could sense the approach of others, feeling vibrations in their webs. The arrayed Celegians created their own web, constantly broadcasting status reports back and forth to one another. The same individuals who provided them the reports were charged with forcing them to send them: the red-clad Unifiers.

Quillan and Dromika hadn’t understood the need for the Sith adepts to wear uniforms; they never expected to see them, anyway. In the body of Dyarchical power, the Unifiers acted both as regulating agents, ensuring that orders were followed—and as antibodies, killing or co-opting pathogens. The biological metaphor was Calician’s, too, straight from his writings about how the pinnacle of Sith power might be achieved.

The glorification of self? The subjugation of others?
Clearly these ancient precepts pointed to only one solution. For just one Sith being to rule a system of life-forms the size of the galaxy, those
others
would have to be part of the
self
. Constituent parts of a larger whole, self-regulating; acting on the direction of the mind. There wasn’t any other way. Governments, despotic or republican, were too inefficient. As long as any other will had force, a leader could not force his will on all.

It had required bringing the twins into his scheme, but he’d done it. Daiman and his Correctors were pikers compared with what they had achieved. To a degree, Byllura operated as a single living being—and, as he could hear from the rumbling outside, the hatchling was about to leave the nest. But that was also the problem.

He remembered it now, as he entered the turbolift and headed to the penthouse. Quillan and Dromika had been necessary. No Sith he’d met, Lord or adept, had the boy’s natural talent for far-seeing; and likely no Force-user, anywhere, was the girl’s equal when it came to giving strong hypnotic commands. But the regent had assumed
his
will would remain intact. He would serve as the ego,
working as the conscious mediator between the outside world and the siblings in their cocoon. To them, the world beneath their comfortable floor was a theoretical place. A realm they would imagine and influence, but never enter. That role would be reserved for Calician.

Only it had gone wrong. Emerging onto the top floor, he remembered it all. The excitement had restored some of his faculties, some of the independent spirit he once had. It wasn’t possible to mediate between someone of Dromika’s power and the rest of society without losing one’s own identity. He wasn’t strong enough. He doubted anyone was.

And yet, there wasn’t anything to be done about it. He stole a glance toward the twins as he walked toward his place by the window. Sandy-haired Quillan sat and stared, mouth unwiped, wearing his night-clothes at midday, as he did every day. Dromika lay on her back, braiding and unbraiding her hair as she pawed at a pillow with her bare toes. Calician quickly looked away. There was no defeating power such as theirs.

Hearing more thunder across the bay, Calician realized the rest of the galaxy would soon learn the same. The battleships were ready and rising from their construction hangars, secreted beneath Hestobyll’s just-drained reflecting pools. Mammoth, two-pronged affairs of precious imported durasteel, the fourteen vessels had been constructed quietly over five years in preparation for this day.

And each, critically, included an important passenger: a Celegian. The same training centers on Byllura that had turned raw Sith adepts into masters of persuasion had worked their ways on the few Celegians they’d found who were receptive to the Force. None of them would ever rival the hated Master Ooroo for power. But ensconced at the heart of a battleship, each would ensure that orders from Byllura were followed exactly. Unlike
their cousins in the harbor and up in the city silos, they wouldn’t simply pass commands along. They’d ensure they were followed, forcing their will on crew and escorting fighter pilots, alike.

Some had taken convincing. The Celegians were an accursedly independent lot. But, as here on Byllura, there would be Unifiers present to ensure their participation. And if that failed, the threat of harm to their fellows in captivity had always worked.

There weren’t many of them, but they would be enough. They would be the first wave, claiming Daiman’s rearward systems. Calician hoped they might even be able to win space engagements and land battles without a shot fired. Any Daimanite that approached within half a kilometer of the ship-brains would be vulnerable to their attack. The twins would command them—and thus command all. Nothing would be able to stop them.

“Regent-aspect … will protect us,” Dromika said.

Calician turned, puzzled. The girl was sitting up now, looking at him plaintively as she calmed Quillan. The boy was in a fetal position again, as he often was when confronted with something new. “I will protect you,” the regent said, belatedly. Dromika’s uncharacteristically tentative question hadn’t had her usual strength of psyche behind it.

But the next one did. “You will tell us how to destroy a Jedi,” the girl said, green eyes flaring with orange fire. “You will tell us,
now
.”

Mindlessly, he repeated her demands—and then found he had nothing to say. He had faced plenty of Jedi Knights while learning the Sith ways. But none had come to Byllura and its neighboring systems in the eight years since its founding.

The Grumani sector had been too far gone by then, Byllura too far into the Sith interior. While he’d heard
rumors of Jedi stabs into Sith space, they’d always attacked elsewhere. But he knew he had faced them once. He just knew …

Chitinous eyelids flipping closed, the Krevaaki sank his head in shame. “I … I don’t know how, Lord Dromika. I don’t remember.”

“You will destroy the Jedi!”

“I will defeat the Jedi,” Calician said, whirling with renewed vigor back toward the turbolift. The words he had spoken were Dromika’s, but also his. He had created the perfect Sith command structure. As horrible as it was to lose his place in it, that paled before letting a Jedi take it down, in its moment of triumph. Better to lose to another Sith than a Jedi.

He might forget the rest, but no Sith could forget that.

The trick with invading hidden fortresses, Kerra thought, was picking a strategy and sticking with it all the way. She hadn’t dealt with enough to declare herself an expert, but given her recent experiences, it seemed a truism. You could sneak in, evading detection at all costs and shying away from all encounters; or you could just barge in, leaving nothing standing, including the doors. Hopping back and forth between the approaches simply clouded the issue. Once you had a trail of bodies behind you, it really was past time to consider a subtle approach.