The viewport was a new experience. Kory tried to savor it, but glancing out the transparisteel only showed black, empty space. No clue as to where she was or where she was going and the pale girl reflected back at her didn't have an answer either.
The military shuttle had room for twenty, but they'd crammed twenty five slaves in. Most were human but Kory saw a few aliens as well as she sat in her seat next to a large boy with dark hair and broad shoulders. Some Twi'leks with twitching lekku, a corpse-pale Rattataki chewing on her nails, and in the farthest row, a slight figure wrapped up in a tattered hood flashed her a yellow eyed stare when she looked that way.
Kory looked back to the front and tried to ignore the pressure building in her bladder and the anxiety building in her gut.
Usually the rust-buckets they transported slaves in were converted bulk freighters with coffin-like interiors. This was the first time she'd been transported by a shuttle. It even had seats and the troopers hadn't even mag-cuffed the slaves to rails. Odd that was, especially because there were only four troopers, all stowed up at the front, watching the slaves with expressionless visors and fiberweave gloves wrapped around collar-remotes.
Kory fingered the collar around her own throat. Four years ago, the electric prods had felt claustrophobic. Now it was almost scary how she almost forgot she was wearing one. The scarier thing was you wanted the guards to use the remotes because the alternative was the carbon scored blasters. One was painful, the other was fatal. The boy beside her saw Kory eying the troopers and shook his head. "Wouldn't try it girl." He had a soft voice for such a big frame and Kory snorted.
"I'm just wondering if they'd be nice enough to turn the life-support up a little."
The shuttle was loaded past occupancy and the air cyclers were whining overtime to take the exhaled waste of thirty-some aliens and humans and crank it back into something approaching air.
"Take small sips," the boy responded, "That's what I'm doing."
"Shut it back there," one of the troopers barked, static leaking out of his helmet vocoder.
They both went silent for a few minutes. Then the boy said quietly, "I'm Gerd."
They'd been glancing at each other out of their eye-corners the entire flight, but this was the first time they'd broken the silence. Slaves kept their mouths zipped during transport. Talking slaves made the guards nervous and nervous guards had those blasters and collar remotes. But the dark haired boy had something, one of those vibes Kory sometimes picked up, that made her feel relaxed. Made her want to trust him. "Kory," she replied even more quietly, "Do you know what's going on?"
Gerd shook his head. "Space me if I know. Two weeks ago I was cracking ore on Yidgda III, then some scary fellow in a robe showed up and the foremen were punting me to the port fast enough to burn carbon." Gerd paused then glanced at her softly, "How about you?"
"About the same." Kory whispered, "Except mine was three days ago. Pulled me off the factories at Brental."
"Brental? Is that where…" Gerd let his question dangle and touched his cheek.
Kory tucked her chin away, dipping the burn scar under her right eye back into the shadows. "I was lucky. I was at the back of the line. The ones up front were insta-baked when the smelters started leaking."
"I like it," Gerd said after a moment of silence, "Draws attention to your pretty blue eyes."
Kory gave him a crooked grin, "You're cute. Spend all the flight thinking that one up?"
Gerd shook his head, "Mining gives you plenty of time with nothing but thinking. I've been polishing that gem for months now." He smiled with his eyes. Solid, warm, brown ones, "Just now had the courage to say it, that's all"
Kory's crooked grin straightened, she looked back to the viewport, this time hiding the color in her cheeks. "Nice to know where we're going though, yeah?"
"Korriban."
Kory and Gerd both craned their necks.
The boy in the seat behind them shrank down like a mouse, "I-I mean, that's just what I overheard." He stared down and clasped his hands together into nervous knots.
"I heard it too." His seat-mate, a stocky Zabrak with an angry look in his orange eyes, growled "Guard was blathering all about it. How we're going to be saber-bait for the Sith."
Kory's hand tightened on the armrest. Everyone in the Empire heard stories about the Sith. From what she understood, the military served the Sith just as the slaves served the foremen and Moffs and industrial corporations. Completely at their masters' whims. You heard strange stories about the Sith, everything from their red laser swords to strange powers. Some whispered it was some sort of universal energy called the Force, others called it black magic. One thing all the stories agreed on was their cruelty, their capricious nature, their ability to do anything and everything to someone who failed them.
Kory had seen one once. The stories didn't exaggerate. And now she was part of the slave shipment headed to their homeworld. Dad was right, she realized, we were born under a bad-luck star.
"You don't know that,"Gerd was still arguing with the Zabrak and losing badly. "Probably just need more laborers."
"Yeah?" The Zabrak growled, "Think they need your friend's skinny asteroid on a plasma-drill? Think the skrunt here's going to be hauling many rocks before his twiggy back breaks?"
"My name's Alif."
"Shut it, skrunt." the Zabrak leaned forward, "See friend we're on a one-way trip, all tickets paid, express ride because those Sith down there want us nice and breathing when they start practicing their magics on us."
"Magic?" Gerd snorted, "You're going to be telling me about the space-wizards of Uvultha next."
The Zabrak snarled and lunged forward, grabbing Kory's headrest and thrusting his head between them. "I saw one of them lift my uncle up and kill him with his own horns. He just stared and pop-pop-pop." The Zabrak tapped down on his own horns, "drove them right through his skull. So what the kriff you call that if it isn't-"
His rant got interrupted as his collar sparked with blue tendrils. The Zabrak snarled and jerked back into his seat. One of the troopers stalked forward, one hand on the remote, the other hip-aiming a mean looking scatter-gun down the row.
"I said shut it." The trooper's distorted voice came out as an electric snarl, "Any other scum feeling a little deaf?"
Kory carefully kept her stare down, feeling the trooper's hidden eyes pan across the seated slaves. She'd been shocked before. They didn't nickname the collars "tongue-cleavers" for nothing. After a final, lingering moment, the trooper turned around and stalked back up the aisle.
"Kriffing scum sucker" the Zabrak muttered quietly. His voice was raw and cracked, but Zabrak were tough aliens to slap around. "See him in a collar one day."
"Look!" Gerd hissed suddenly. Kory jerked her gaze to the transparisteel viewport and her jaw dropped.
A long white shape filled in the empty space outside, the triangle form of an Imperial dreadnought. Bristling with turbolasers, large as an orbital platform. She saw more in the distance, orbiting a rust-brown planet that barely shimmered with the blur of an atmosphere.
Gerd whistled, "Just one of those can obliterate a city in seconds."
A pair of Sith fighters with forward-swept wings hissed down from their right and dropped behind the shuttle. They trailed the shuttle as it entered the planet's orbit, ready to escort it or blow it out of the sky. The shuttle stayed on its course as it chased the twilight down and across the planet, breaking into the waning hours of the daylight zone.
Outside the transparisteel, the blackness of space began to crispen and orange. Fire leapt off the outer hull and the shuttle creaked and groaned. Kory looked out the transparisteel get her first view of the planet below.
At first all she saw was empty wasteland, an orange sere of dust and rock, then a black smudge in the distance. Fifteen seconds and twenty kilometers later, durasteel gray began to enter the picture in the form of toy-sized gun batteries and tiny blurs that the shuttle's slipstream tore by too fast to see.
Then Kory realized those toy-sized guns on the ground were turbolaser batteries with cannons massive enough to punch holes through cruiser plating. And the canyon mouth the shuttle was flying towards was still getting bigger.
The feeling of smallness increased as the scale of what they were flying into hit her. The sunlight cut off as the shuttle flashed into the canyon's mouth. Running lights snapped on, illuminating massive faces carved into the sandstone bluffs. Kory pressed her nose to the transparisteel and saw lights below.
"What are those?" Kory asked. Gerd shrugged with a scan-me gesture. Alif was the one who answered her.
"Excavations," he whispered quietly, "Supposedly there's hundreds of ruins in this valley and the Sith want them all dug up."
Gerd grunted "Told you, laborers."
"Saber-bait." the Zabrak insisted.
Gerd sighed, "What do you think Kory?"
"I think I have a bad feeling about this."
The Zabrak snorted. "We're slaves on a shuttle about to set down on the birthplace of some of the most sadistic murglaks the galaxy's ever spaced out. Everyone's got a bad feeling."
Kory didn't answer him, but that wasn't the feeling she meant. Her throat felt tight and her insides chilled, like someone had force-fed ice down her throat. Something about the valley walls flashing past them and the squat pyramidal structure capping off the end of it, was making her feel like claws were scritching at her on the other side of that transparisteel window.
Her father had told her to trust her gut. Insisted on it almost religiously, but he'd never said why. Right now, Kory felt that planet racing her was an open grave, dug up. Excavated. Waiting for fresh corpses. Waiting for her.
All too soon the shuttle's landing thrusters were vibrating, bringing them down to a landing. The troopers started barking orders and the slaves stumbled out of their seats. Someone activated the ramp and harsh light spilled in. Kory followed Gerd's massive back as they joined the flow and then she was outside. An avenue of colossal statues stooped their backs under the blistering red sunlight. Dust and grit swirled up from the shuttle's retros thrust at Kory's eyes. More troopers, these in sand-scratched red armor barked more orders and waved more blasters, ushering the slaves up a ramp to the massive pyramid-topped structure at the end of the valley.
Looking at it sent a shiver up Kory's spine. Everything about it, from the cold gleam of durasteel to the wide, gaping mouth of an entry-way struck her as wrong. Dangerous. For a moment, Kory just stood still, letting the other slaves stumble and flow around her.
Then someone jostled her shoulder and Kory suddenly felt something. Like a flash of carbonite, or a freezing, electric shock. Something cold. Powerful. The hooded alien who'd brushed her shoulder, the one Kory had glanced in the corner of the shuttle, the one with the flash of animal eyes, turned around.
Kory sucked in a sharp breath. Surprise laced with fear cracked up her spine, because under that hood wasn't a Twi'lek or a Zabrak, it was a red skinned, yellow eyed alien female with a narrow face pinched sharp with bony spurs around her eye-sockets.
A Sith Pureblood. Space. Me. The stories about the regular Sith were bad enough. The red skins...those were stories you didn't want to hear twice.
And around her neck...
Kory only had a second to gape before the Pureblood girl glared. Her eyes were pure venom. Poison yellow, simmering with danger. Kory snapped her gaze to the ground. She didn't dare to breath. When she finally did look up, the Pureblood was gone, vanished into the line of slaves and Kory stood still. Part of her refused to process what she'd seen. Part of her knew exactly what she'd seen. The shiny durasteel of a slave collar just like Kory's, wrapped around the neck of a Pureblood Sith as red as the one she'd seen once, a very long time ago.
But a Pureblood slave? How?
Someone nudged her arm and Kory almost jumped. Gerd looked down at her, concerned. Kory shook her head at his silent question and the question became a warning jerk of his head. They were drawing stares from the red-armored troopers. Kory heard the whine of a shock-baton starting to power up and she quickly grabbed Gerd's hand and tugged him along.
Together they followed the rest of the slaves into the gaping mouth of the pyramidal structure. The sunlight outside sliced away, replaced by pale white lighting.
Kory had been in a lot of slave-pens. This was nothing like she'd imagined. The entire place was a hybrid of modern and ancient. The walls were cold-stamped durasteel, the floor was weathered sandstone tiles, scrubbed smooth by countless generations of feet. Statues of hooded figures loomed over the slaves like brooding giants and blood red banners stamped with the six-spoked wheel of the Empire draped from the gaping archways and hovered on the walls.
She caught glimpses of young men and women in black tunics or robes. Every one of them stopped and stared at the slaves passing by. Every one of them had glinting, hooded eyes that put Kory in mind of Firaxa sharks. The entire place felt cold. Not like the life-support was cranked low, more subtle. A chill that seeped into Kory's bones and didn't leave even as she rubbed her arms.
What is this place?
They were led down a side corridor, through cold durasteel archways lit barely with light panels, into some sort of audience hall made out of dusty stone. They weren't the only slaves either. Kory saw a massive Houk with gladiator scars carved on its warty chest and a one-eyed abyssin blinking in the corner. Some feline Cathar bared their fangs at any of the other slaves that got too close and a trio of twi'leks with scarred lekku watched everything with impassive silence.
Usually you could tell what the work was going to be. Picked with skinny ones like Alif - it was going to be because your hands were small and dexterous. Settled in amid a bunch of young female twi'leks? Every orifice was going to be hurting the morning after. Thrown in with Zabraks and big lads like Gerd? It was going to be strained back muscles and fatigued sleeping in the rock quarries.
But this, this was too random. Dozens of species, dozens of body types, a cross-section of the various slaves of the Empire, maybe a hundred total.
But for what? Looking around, Kory noticed it didn't seem like any of the other slaves had a clue either.
Then the doors opened and a trio of figures walked in. Two were human, one was a red-skinned Sith. The quiet whispers died to silence as one of the humans stepped up to the dias. Kory had never seen an angrier man.
His skin was corpse-pale, his hair and chin-beard were the color of shaded blood, a tattoo slashed across his right eye like a swollen scar and his lips were thin, blood-clenched lines. Laminated armor with durasteel ribs covered him from head to toe and a long metal cylinder dangled from his belt.
A laser-sword. No, that wasn't right. Lightsaber.
Kory's throat tightened. Her gut started to sink, even before he started to speak.
"I am Overseer Harkun." The man's voice was a kath hound growl, just one octave above a foaming snarl. "And you...all of you...are scum."
His voice commanded obedience, it demanded silence. Not one slave breathed a word. They'd heard this spiel before from countless foremen and other overseers. Scum, useless, lazy. It was expected, along with work faster, reduced rations, and I'll give you some encouragement.
This wasn't a bored recital. This was passionate. With hate. Harkun glared out at the crowd,
"You stand on three thousand years of power. Countless generations of Sith have sharpened their skills with the Force and honed their connection to the Dark Side here. By tradition, you should be on your knees. By precedent, in chains. Instead..."
His mouth twisted and his next words came out like swallowed bile. "You are here in defiance of tradition, to be trained as Sith. Because you are all Force sensitives."
Kory felt stunned. She looked at Gerd and Gerd stared back with wide eyes. The audience chamber erupted into sharp hisses and quick whispers that died as soon as the Overseer started talking.
"Certain Lords of the Sith believe any of you scum can learn the power of the Dark Side. This is the only reason you have been granted a chance to rise out of your puddled slime-pits." Harkun's eyes narrowed and his finger jabbed out, "You. Slave. Step forward."
A human slave stumbled forward, eyes carefully lowered, head tilted to the ground. Harkun's lips curled up tight in disgust. "These Lords believe you can learn to channel the Dark Side into power." Harkun said, still pointing at the slave.
"Power such as this."
A blue stream of electricity crackled from his fingertip and struck the slave in the chest. The slave collapsed, his screams bounced off the walls and Kory sucked in a startled breath. It wasn't a trick, it wasn't a stunner, the lightning was leaping out of his finger.
The Sith. The power of the Force. The stories were true.
"As you can see, this is a ludicrous concept. An insulting one." Harkun raised his voice over the slave and the crackling lightning and kept talking. "At this academy, the weak perish, the strong endure, but only the Sith will thrive. And none of you are Sith. You are Slaves. You do not have the mindset to be Sith, the strength of will to bend the galaxy to you."
The slave was still screaming. Words choked and foamed, gashed out between spasming teeth. Please. Please. Please. Kory's stomach sickened, but she didn't dare look away from Harkun's words.
"If, by some luck, you survive the basic training , you will then be competing in Trials for the attention of Darths and Lords. Sith more powerful than you can ever imagine. You will be competing against the cream of the Sith, acolytes with lineages of blood and power stretching back for centuries, for the privilege of being selected to be an apprentice."
The lightning stopped. Smoke rose off the twitching slave. His flesh was striped with red and black burns and his chest trembled like a rabbit, hands barely twitching, mouth sipping in desperate breaths of air. Please...please...please wheezed out.
"For those of you who still doubt me, who think because you are Force sensitive you are now too valuable to kill, who perhaps believe I am merely trying to frighten you into submission...well..." Harkun smiled, "Let me rectify that."
"No." Kory whispered. Gerd squeezed her arm in warning, his face pale. The rest of Harkun's fingers rose up to flank his index finger.
Kory didn't want to remember what happened next. Not the fat ropes of plasma-blue lightning, or the hissing pop of flesh cooked from the inside exploding out or the smell of burnt meat that made her mouth salivate and her stomach roll.
But Kory could never forget the way Harkun lifted his hand, and a blackened, withered husk that two minutes ago had been a young, healthy slave rose up from the ground and levitated in the air. Harkun clenched his fist and the withered husk crackled, snapped, and collapsed into black ash and gray fragments of bone.
The smile was still on Harkun's face. It actually widened.
"Welcome to the Academy, slave-acolytes."