"Off to the west. It's still pretty far, but it hasn't moved in a while," Jon said, staring at the cockpit screen.
"That seems odd. Wouldn't it be moving constantly, to keep from getting bombarded by the Bloods?"
Jon scanned the murky clouds overhead. "We haven't seen any fighters for a while. Maybe the Bloods are too scared of Shilrakaen's defences to make an assault."
Thayla shook her head. "I doubt it. That space station is massive. It could start dropping wreckage out of their windows from above the atmosphere and the city wouldn't stand a chance, but we don't have a lot of options."
"I don't like this."
She turned toward Jon. "It doesn't matter what we like. Ahor doesn't have the manpower or firepower to defeat the Blood Battalion. Shilrakaen is the closest thing we have to a good option. If they fall, everyone on Centrallis is dead."
Teller suddenly felt like he had been punched in the stomach. He pulled his breathing mask out and slapped in over his face, as the realization hit him that it was up to the three of them to save thousands of lives.
Thayla rested her hand on his back. "It will be ok. We are Jedi. It's our job to protect the innocent and the defenceless when all hope is lost."
Teller's heart stopped racing, but he left his mask in place.
"Once we get there, we can make a plan. We can stop the Blood Battalion. We can get Jamie back. You have to believe that."
"Guys?" Jon called to them, stepping away from the fighters.
Thayla followed him and took a moment to reach out to his mind, wondering exactly what it was he had seen.
The moment their feelings connected, her heart sank.
Off in the distance, far from the dilapidated shacks and the rusting ruins, was a presence unlike anything she had ever felt. Centrallis always seemed to hum with the energy of the dark side. It hovered over the planet like a cloud and had only grown stronger since the space station had arrived, but something was pushing against that energy. Something beneath the layers of dust was fighting it.
Even Teller could feel it, as he grew closer.
"They're here."
Jon's whispered words echoed like thunder, as they felt the dozens of Jedi lying beneath the sand.
Technicians and droids were sprinting through every hallway, like rats in a rotting home.
At any given moment there were leaks that needed plugging, systems malfunctioning and AI failures, and it didn't help that the techs would work on a particular subsystem in one area of the ship, only to find that it had moved a few minutes later.
"Ma'am," said one of them, running up to the Huntress with a clipboard in his hands. "Is there any way you can-"
Once the gaze of the hooded figure was upon him, his body froze like Carbonite. He turned and walked away, without another word.
"Come this way," the figure told her. "It is where I sleep."
She followed it further into the bowels of the space station, listening to its heavy, mechanical feet make massive clangs as they struck the metal floor.
The dark figure seemed to know exactly where it was going, even as the ever-shifting halls continued to perplex the ship's own crew.
They passed by rooms packed end to end with sleep-deprived programmers and fighter bays filled with the strange bat-winged orbs that the ship manifested for them to use.
"The Gangrene is the final step to my ultimate victory," it told her, as they walked out into the central chamber. "With it, the galaxy will be mine."
The central disk was hundreds of miles across, but somehow, as she bathed in the yellow glow, it felt smaller somehow. She could close her eyes and feel every mechanical tendril that ran through it, every plate of black metal that shifted at her touch, and at the center…
"That is where I sleep."
The Huntress could see it in the distance, though not with her eyes. She could see the ship, golden and beautiful. It was also a small ship with a central cockpit, much like a TIE fighter, but with wing-like appendages, and she suddenly realized the fighters were just limp imitations of the glorious original.
"Is it not beautiful?"
There was so much power emanating from it. The glow that embraced her body was the dark side, on a level she had never experienced. It was power enough to shake the galaxy, to topple governments, to bring the most powerful beings in the outer rim to their knees, but as she looked further inward, wriggling herself past the surface-level sensations that surrounded the ship, she could sense death.
Instantly, the glow went out. The Huntress and the entire central ring was plunged into darkness.
"You see what the Jedi have done to me. This is the state they have left me in."
The light slowly came back on and she could see the figure staring down at its mechanical fingers.
"This is the closest I have to a body, reaching out and puppeting this metal form, but that will change."
The power coursed through her once again, as its anger steadily grew.
"Soon, my control will be complete and the Battalion will no longer be under my influence. They will be me."
