Shattered Knight

by Tim Radley

KoTOR: Eight months on from the fall of the Star Forge the expected peace has not come to the Republic. The news of Revan's return has become a source of schism and conflict within the galaxy, and Revan himself has his own demons to face.

14. Cold and Bitter Fusion

14. Cold and Bitter Fusion

The sandstorm showed no sign of abating. But then, sandstorms like these were known to last for months on end on Nawathwai, often growing to encompass the entire surface of the planet, swirling through the thin, oxygen-poor atmosphere like a great red veil.

Fine red grit was slowly accumulating in the eyepieces of Tamar's breath mask, and he had to pause briefly – not for the first time in the past couple of hours – to wipe them clean before it rendered him completely blind. More of the grit had managed to find its way through the top layer of his loose fitting robes, and had now worked its way inside his armour, chafing uncomfortably.

In a contest to find the absolute ass-end of nowhere, he reflected, Nawathwai could give even Tattooine a good run for its money.

He pressed on through narrow streets, the wind not so much howling as whining incessantly.

Overhead, the skeletal ribs of an unfinished dome arched high above the planet's capital 'city', Natora Head, reminder of what might have been. If the environment dome had ever been completed. If the terraforming project, designed to unlock the water frozen in the planet's polar icecaps, hadn't been long abandoned. If there really had been rich ore deposits on the planet when Mercator Corporation were tricked into purchasing the world from the Bothans at great expense. If Mercator Corporation hadn't subsequently been forced into bankruptcy, leaving the entire world trapped in a forgotten limbo where nobody wanted to claim responsibility for it . . .

A whole lot of ifs, but just possibly, this might now be a thriving spaceport rather than a rat hole populated near-exclusively by smugglers, the less salubrious type of bounty hunter, and those unfortunate individuals too poor to emigrate at the first available opportunity.

"Any sign, Tee?"

A curt beep in his ear signalled the negative. The utility droid hadn't been able to get any kind of fix on Hulas.

Tamar scanned the hulking plastocrete structure directly across the street in front of him. It was badly scarred and crumbling from years of exposure to similar storms to the current one: Natora Head's main marketplace, and the centrepiece of this Force-forsaken town.

The message Hulas had sent him was brief and to the point. I have information on the person who is framing you. Information that I think you will find extraordinarily valuable. No more than that.

The hologram had then gone on to provide details of this meeting, where allegedly the information would be passed on. It was suspiciously close to their intended destination, and on a time scale that left no scope to do anything other than walk right on in. Come alone, as when we first met in AhtoCity. I include the absence of assassin droids in my definition of alone.

But not utility droids. That was how Tamar had chosen to take Hulas's recorded words anyway. Without that proviso he'd have probably interpreted 'alone' more literally.

Honest until you start thinking too hard about it, was how Yuthura had described it when he'd commented.

A thought that should have had previously occurred to him breached the surface. Nothing in the message had said authoritatively that Hulas would be showing up in person. "Tee, can you get me a list of everyone who's landed on Nawathwai in the past week?"

"Beep-woo-bop."

The length of the list took Tamar by surprise, given what a backwater this world initially seemed. Smugglers needed to keep busy too, he supposed. He concentrated on the last couple of days' activity, but of course, none of the names or ships meant anything to him. Most were likely falsified anyway.

Abruptly he let out a breath. The mask made it sound alarmingly hollow and rasping. "Okay, Tee. I'm going in."

T3 made a cautious whistling noise.

"Hey, when have I ever been anything except scrupulously careful?"

The silence was its own answer.

Passing through a worryingly decrepit and wheezy airlock, sensors in the breath mask told Tamar that the air quality was now just about good enough to sustain human life. He kept it on anyway, noting that at least two-thirds of the people he was passing did likewise – his face wasn't exactly unknown in the galaxy right now, and the less people who saw it, the better. The sudden loss of the all-pervasive wind noise was briefly disorientating, making him wonder if he'd gone partially deaf.

Walking across a half-empty market place, he was aware of natives watching him with a mixture of curiosity and thinly veiled hostility. A glimpse of the modified heavy-blaster pistol worn openly at his hip, and the occasional metal flashes of armour showing through his nondescript outer robes, tended to have those looks turning away very quickly again. His lightsaber was well hidden, so hopefully he was being taken for nothing more than another well-armed bounty hunter – someone you didn't want to hassle or get too curious about.

He located the cantina where the meeting was due to take place. It was about fifty metres along the wall running along the east side of the market. A cursory glance showed that the sign outside was missing at least three letters.

Up to that point, Tamar had been holding his Force-presence very tightly contained, trying to remain as near to invisible as was possible on the off chance there was another Force-adept somewhere in Natora Head. On the slightly more than off chance that this was all some kind of double-cross.

Now he risked opening up just slightly, sending out tentative feelers and trying to get a sense of whether there was trouble waiting for him.

Immediately he brushed against something. It was a fleeting contact, and whatever it was drew back quickly – too quickly for him to sense any more from it than a lingering impression of surprise. Whoever – whatever – it was had definitely felt him.

Tamar's heart thudded. It took a considerable effort not immediately go for his blaster, and he knew that no one watching him could have failed to spot the break in his stride. Grimacing behind the breath mask, he forced himself to keep on walking, trying to scan the marketplace surreptitiously for watchers.

There, on a terrace overlooking the square.

He caught a fleeting glimpse of movement – formed a brief impression of a hooded individual wearing a breath mask similar to his own. They ducked back as soon as his gaze passed over them.

Force guided instinct had him throw himself flat. An instant later, a sniper shot cracked out, passing above his diving form by the merest fraction and punching a hole through the plastocrete wall directly behind him.

The reaction of the other people in the marketplace was telling. There were no screams, and no running around in heedless panic, but in very short order everyone seemed to have disappeared into thin air, leaving him worryingly isolated and exposed.

Just another typical day in Natora Head. Just another shoot out.

It wasn't, he reflected grimly as he scrambled forward on his belly across the grit-covered plastocrete, the fact that it was a trap that surprised him. Just that it was such a blatantly unsubtle one.

- - -

"Looks like someone started on the fun without us." Canderous finally broke the heavy silence.

Bastila turned to look at him. Part of her wanted to scream. Part of her wondered why she didn't.

It was nothing to do with the carnage spread out in front of them. That was all too familiar – scattered metal fragments and the charred hulks of Star Forge droids; blaster burns and broader, sootier smears across floor and walls that indicated the use of a flamethrower. An elite Sith trooper, red armour rent and buckled, sat propped lifelessly against one wall, his presence telling. It wasn't even the freshness of it all, a day or two old at the outside. The physical traces of battle, no matter how terrible, were something they'd all become wearily inured to.

Instead it was the hideous sense that she was trapped inside a half-remembered nightmare – one where she was attempting to sneak past a dozing giant, knowing that the slightest sound or misstep would result in it awakening and all of its fury crashing down on top of her. The lingering impression of everything around her being somehow alive – of being, effectively, trapped in the guts of an indescribably huge living beast – only added to the feeling, until it became all but unbearable.

"If this is somehow your idea of fun." She had to struggle against the instinct to talk in sub-audible whispers, resisting a paranoid certainty that the walls were listening to their every word.

He shrugged. "You take it where you find it, and try not to ask too many uncomfortable questions while you're at it."

She started to open her mouth, but hesitated, the retort dying away unspoken. Instead, she watched him as he prowled the perimeter of the chamber, peering all around him as if looking for something specific. He paused briefly in front of what looked like some kind of control panel. It had been damaged by stray blaster fire, but flickering Rakatan symbols still showed through. "Interesting," he grunted.

"What is?" She hadn't been aware that he could read Rakatan.

"Not that." He made a sweeping gesture with one arm. "Everything around us. I mean, from the outside this might as well be the Leviathan's sistership, but inside . . ." A headshake. "Well, you can see yourself. Could hardly be more different, could it?"

Everything curved, the walls and ceiling supported by almost organic looking ribbing. It reinforced the sense that their surroundings were alive, the corridors and chambers they walked through the equivalent of internal organs. Even the lighting was slightly odd – a sickly kind of hue that ran against human aesthetics.

"And your point?" A taut edge had crept into her voice.

"Didn't say I had a point, now, did I? I just said it was interesting."

"Great," she muttered. "Just when I start thinking the situation can't get any worse and you start channelling Jolee."

The look he shot her way suggested he didn't find the comparison altogether flattering.

Bastila gritted her teeth – struggling against nameless tension crushing in on her from all sides. The walls seemed to shift in the corners of her vision, making her eyes dart this way and that, though there was never anything to see when she tried to look at it directly.

She exhaled deeply, striving for an approximation of calm. "The Star Forge bases what it produces around the characteristics of those who control it. Maybe it was always like that, or maybe it was something it . . . evolved."

"So this is a real Rakatan ship? An old one. Not something Revan or Malak built."

"It looks that way," she answered shortly. He was leaning close to the control panel again. "Don't touch that!"

He glanced back at her, mouth twisting. "How stupid do you think I am, exactly, Princess?"

As he was speaking, his head continued to move forward fractionally – a centimetre or two at most. It passed through some kind of proximity trigger, and a red light came on at about his eye level. This produced a fan of fine red beams, which swept smoothly up and down the length of his body in the space of about half a second.

Not good.

The hush was expectant – waiting for disaster.

There was a sharp clicking noise that made everyone there, Canderous included, jolt. A pair of ceiling panels directly above them retracted.

"Exactly that stupid?" Bastila grasped her badly battered and patched up lightsaber hilt as everyone around her instantly readied their own weapons, scrambling frantically.

"Exactly that stupid," Canderous agreed. The edge of his vibrosword hummed and blurred.

On cue, a pair of battle droids dropped down from above, landing right in the midst of them with a hollow metallic clank.

There was a frozen pause.

Bastila's twin lightsaber blades ignited a fraction before the air filled with blaster-fire. The droids' shields flickered lambently, repelling shot after shot from Republic issue blaster rifles.

As her yellow blades darted to deflect return fire, Bastila was aware of Canderous charging in at one of the droids' exposed flanks. His vibroblade penetrated smoothly through its shields and pierced its metal casing with equal ease. He then proceeded to leverage it open – as if he was attacking a mess tin with a can opener and rather more enthusiasm than its contents probably merited.

The second droid darted forward at her, as if drawn, moth-like, to the glare of her lightsaber.

A rapid flurry of blows cracked off its shields without getting through. One of its vicious looking metal pincers snapped at her, coming within millimetres of finding her flesh and forcing her onto the back foot. Instinct and trained reaction taking over, she shoved it back from her via the Force, toppling it onto its side.

While it was still struggling to right itself, an ion grenade rolled underneath its armoured body. The detonation took out its shields and left it reeling drunkenly. A second or so later a concentrated volley of blaster shots had reduced it to smouldering scrap metal.

Staring at the wreckage, the dread that Bastila felt was entirely out of proportion to what just had happened. She was dimly aware of Canderous staring at her, a questioning look on his face – something lurking beneath the surface that might have been concern.

It barely registered. Something else had her attention held fast.

She'd felt the sleeping giant awaken.

It peered at her with unblinking eyes from beneath the spikes of a vast and heavy crown.

- - -

'Admiral' Bortha examined the bridge controls with a mixture of resignation and distaste, and inwardly struggled with how to phrase the fact to Darth Malefic that none of it was usable.

All the symbols in front of him were Rakatan, and it wasn't simply a matter of direct translation. You couldn't make even educated guesses, because the way the controls were arranged was completely different to anything he was familiar with, designed to suit the logic and ergonomics of an alien way of thinking.

On top of that, the layout of the bridge itself didn't feel right. Even allowing for the fact that the Rakatans would have different method of sharing out duties, there seemed to be too few stations, and the position and spacing just felt . . . unnatural.

Bortha couldn't escape the feeling that his highly strained staff officers would be about as useful here as raw recruits. He also couldn't escape the feeling that Malefic wasn't going to like being told that fact one bit.

It all felt like a bad cosmic joke at his expense. Admiral, indeed.

He bit down on a frustrated sigh, not wanting to draw any more attention to himself yet. Certainly not wanting to draw Malefic's attention. He walked forward, to the next control station in sequence, uncomfortably aware of the loudness of his footsteps on the metal deck – even more uncomfortably aware of the several sets of eyes watching him.

Again, throat uncomfortably tight, he made a show of inspecting what was in front of him. The pristineness was something else that he found oddly disconcerting. Everything looked as if it had rolled off the production line that morning instead of being tens of thousands of years old . . .. He stopped abruptly, losing track of his thoughts, and looked up.

Something had . . . changed.

The feel of the air reminded him uncomfortably of that awful chamber far down below, bringing back involuntary thoughts of Kassar and screaming that wouldn't stop. He could feel his skin prickling, the fine hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

"M-Master?" It took Bortha a moment to recognise Levix's voice. It was stripped entirely of the all too familiar peremptory Dark Jedi arrogance, and sounded frighteningly young.

Darth Malefic was standing completely motionless, a gleaming red statue. His head was bowed forward fractionally, as though the weight of his crown was too much for his neck muscles to properly support.

It was that crown that held Bortha's gaze, rapt. It was glowing. Shining brighter and brighter until it became painful to look at, and he was forced to flinch away.

Bortha had seen it glow like this before; each time they had gone to battle at Hoth and Tylace, and then again at Daragba. A sideways glance showed Illarie's face, taut and slick beneath a patina of perspiration. She obviously sensed something that he could not. Judging by the look in her eyes, that was something he should be profoundly grateful for.

Abruptly, Darth Malefic moved again, and the spell seemed to shatter, the immediate edge of tension fading from the air.

No one said a word. Bortha could hear multiple sets of lungs, all of them breathing far too quickly.

"Shan," Malefic said at length. Bortha was embarrassed to feel himself jolt as the silence was broken.

"Bastila Shan." The Sith Lord's voice was soft, caressing the name in a manner that was profoundly disturbing. "She is here, aboard this ship."

Gauntleted fingers snapped, pistol shot loud, and he gestured sharply to Levix and Geryoth in turn. "With me."

The Dark Jedi bowed their heads in unison. "We will make her yours, my Lord." Levix's voice was back to hard and arrogant. "When she kneels before you, and surrenders her Battle Meditation into your great hands, nothing in this galaxy will be able to stand before you."

Malefic's gaze snapped round on Levix in a manner that made Bortha wince. He heard a snort from beneath that sleekly angular red helmet.

"I do not care about her Battle Meditation, halfwit. It is nothing to the powers that I already possess, and I will not risk falling to the same obsession as my two predecessors. We go to kill her, and all those with her. Is that understood?"

The bows were considerably deeper and more flustered this time. Bortha noted that Malefic barely bothered glancing at them. The Sith troopers smoothly fell into formation alongside him as he strode imperiously towards the main turbolift.

"No, not you, Illarie," he snapped as Bortha's notional bodyguard started to follow in her Lord's wake. "You and the Admiral will remain here."

Bortha wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or not. The sidelong look he got from Illarie was murderous.

- - -

Morrigance sensed clearly as Darth Malefic began to draw on the power of the Crown of Drochmar. No Force-adept within a span of several light years could have failed to feel that awful storm swirling into life, whether or not its hammering fury was directed at them personally.

At this proximity – a few scant tens of kilometres, give or take – it rapidly became almost overwhelming.

For all the awful weight of it, it is addictive is it not, old friend? It fills your thoughts, more and more. It fills your dreams.

A moment later, she felt a second, much smaller flicker of Force. Compared with the first it was feeble – a guttering candle flame in the face of a hurricane – but it proved to be remarkably persistent and resilient.

Bastila Shan. One egg she'd hoped wouldn't become part of the coming omelette. A pity.

She shook her head slightly – pushed the thought away. Now was not the time for distractions.

After passing through the wormhole leading into this hidden void, Morrigance had de-cloaked her converted fighter, confident that no one on board the shuttle ahead of her would be looking at anything behind them. Instead of following that shuttle towards the living fleet's flagship, she'd piloted slowly and serenely towards another of the Rakatan ships hanging in the darkness alongside it.

It suited her purposes better to work uninterrupted.

Upon setting down, she'd broadcast an ancient Rakatan code sequence to identify herself. If nothing else, it had at least piqued the vessel's curiosity enough to prevent its automated security systems from instantly terminating her the moment she stepped out of her ship.

Her footsteps were soft and muffled as she walked across the landing bay. The combination of silence, stillness, and utter darkness, mixed with the sensation of being watched from all sides, was distinctly eerie. Even if it was something she'd experienced before.

She stopped in front of an activation panel beside the landing bay's main bulkhead door. A thin flashlight beam picked out vertical columns of precisely etched Rakatan symbols. Although she had never possessed Revan's seemingly supernatural knack for picking up languages, she'd learned the main Rakatan languages and sub-dialects well enough over the years.

Stripping off a tight black glove, she laid the palm of her hand against a smooth, flat panel.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then, abruptly, a glowing figure stepped out of the wall in front of her. A Rakatan, and a hologram, though considering the surroundings, her initial thought – a pale cyan ghost – seemed much more appropriate.

It barked at her in its own language: "State your business, slave of the Builders."

She took a moment to get her phrasing in order. "I am in service to – " she recited an identity code that she'd gleaned from documents Revan had obtained from the Star Forge. "I require access and safe passage."

"For what purpose, slave of the Builders?"

That left her slightly taken aback. That answer had been perfectly adequate to gain her unimpeded admission the last time she was here. Perhaps, she thought, the fleet was more awake and alert now thanks to Malefic's efforts. "Classified. Compliance is required. All queries to be taken up with – " she repeated the code.

The hologram vanished, leaving her in near-darkness once more.

The delay before anything happened was just long enough to provoke the beginnings of disquiet, before – finally – the door slid open with a whisper-soft hiss and the lights came on in front of her.

She stepped forward, across the threshold.

"You mean to say that this has all been a waste of time?"

The voice, harsh and strident, belonged to Darth Malak. She stood off to one side, away from the dread apprentice and his dark master, silently observing from the shadows. Light gleamed off the top of his clean-shaven skull, the twin stripes of his red tattoos standing out starkly.

The enclosed space of the Flying Kuat's high-security vault only went to emphasise Malak's immense physical stature. The top of his head almost scraped the ceiling, the muscles of his huge shoulders and back seemingly straining to burst free of his dark red armour, compressing the space around him. Everything about him spoke of barely contained, bestial rage, and she could feel great swells of the Force swirling around him – a surging black vortex. The sheer power that she sensed within him was . . . frightening.

"If you choose to look at it that way." Revan's answer, in comparison, was unreal in its calm. His mask glinted where the light caught its polished surface. By no means a small man, he was nevertheless physically dwarfed in present company. From him, she got almost no Force sense at all.

"What other way of looking at it is there?" Seething rage bubbled just below the surface – a poisoned well.

The air tasted stale to Morrigance as she breathed in, the Flying Kuat's atmospheric scrubbers no longer working at anything close to full efficiency after decades floating dead in space.

"Sometimes it is almost as valuable to know where something is not, as opposed to where it is." The voice was light – halfway amused. A black gloved hand made a casual, flicking gesture. "Besides, there have been . . . compensations. It has by no means been a total loss."

"Jedi texts and Holocrons?" Malak's contempt dripped.

"Knowledge is power. How often have do I tell you that, Mal?" To Morrigance's ears, the diminutive rang like some ghastly mistimed joke. "Surely you've grown tired of hearing it by now?"

"You never expected to find it here at all, did you? This was all one of your . . . sleight of hands." Morrigance could sense Malak's deep frustration clearly. She knew that Revan must sense it too.

"I hoped rather than expected," he said after a lengthy pause. "Alas, it now appears most likely that it was destroyed on Ossus after all. We both knew all along that was a very definite possibility, did we not . . . my apprentice?"

The tone remained light, but the words my apprentice lingered on the air. A very, very pointed reminder, for all that Revan's outward manner was absolutely casual.

It seemed that Malak was perceptive enough to take the reminder for what it was. He inclined his head, albeit grudgingly. Morrigance felt some of the dark power gathered around him subside as his anger reined in. "My master."

Revan acknowledged gracefully, and changed the subject as if it had never truly mattered. "Tell me, Mal." Back so easily to that casual diminutive, which seemed so glaringly out of place. Like calling a terantatek Tiddles. "How go matters with Admiral Karath?"

Silence.

She sensed rumbling resentment – a volcano in the early stages prior to an eruption, days or possibly months or even years from now. It was more tightly contained than the prior rage, but also, she thought, considerably more dangerous. "Have I not earned more than to be subject constantly to these tests of loyalty and obedience?"

Morrigance caught herself sucking in her breath. The Force was gathering around Revan now too, and suddenly she had no wish at all to be quite so close to the pair of them. Dark and unstable stars you orbit, girl

"Indeed. You are far too valuable to me to waste on tests and petty power games."

"Then why use me for this? You have always been the one with the people skills – the charm and the charisma. You're the one who can persuade a person to gladly lay down their life for you after five minutes in your company. Not me."

"Saul has never quite forgiven me for Pallastre," Revan said softly after a disconcertingly lengthy pause. "Oh, intellectually he saw the necessity, and if the decision had been left down to him alone, he would have made exactly the same strategic choice that I did. But emotionally . . .. Emotionally is a different matter. Hard to see your homeworld sacrificed, for whatever reason." A small headshake. "No, I think he would subconsciously find excuses to turn down a direct approach from me."

Malak grunted noncommittally.

"You on the other hand, Mal. You are untainted by such bitter associations. You he genuinely liked and admired. A true warrior."

Finally, Malak gave another small nod.

"Now, tell me how matters progress." Revan's voice changed abruptly, making her jolt. It suddenly sounded hollow and alien behind his mask – frighteningly cold. "I do not appreciate having to explain each and every simple request I make. And I believe I enjoy being tested even less than you."

Malak inclined his head much more deeply this time. Morrigance had the impression of a wolf baring its throat, however grudgingly, to the alpha male, acknowledging its supremacy.

For now

"My apologies, my master. I ask your forgiveness."

Revan made a dismissive gesture. "Granted, old friend."

But it was not as simple as that. Other currents ran hidden beneath the surface, which she could only faintly glimpse. Years and years of accumulated personal history.

She heard Malak take a deep breath. "Contact with Admiral Karath has been initiated through our agents. He has not, as yet, reported the matter to Republic intelligence, and he appears to have been persuaded to postpone his resignation from fleet command. For the time being, at least. The agents haven't revealed who they represent, though I scarcely think it is beyond him to work it out for himself."

Revan simply nodded. "Good. Keep me informed."

"You truly think he will join our cause? He has served the Republic loyally for forty years."

"And was about to retire, even as war threatens to overwhelm them. His wife has left him. Petty political squabbles stall the reconstruction work on Pallastre. His career is stuck in a twilit graveyard. No, the Republic, in its current form, is dead to him. His pride has been kicked too many times, and he is looking for something else, whether he knows it yet or not."

Malak simply grunted again – neither agreement nor disagreement. Revan started to turn away.

Do you not have enough Admirals to do your bidding? she had asked him earlier, on the same subject.

His answer had been a laugh. More admirals than I can shake a stick at. In the same way that before you, I had a surfeit of spymasters, none of them worth the name.

He is important?

I cannot be everywhere at once, he'd said at length. And the Sith doctrines are almost as bad, tactically, as the Republic's reactive passivity. Another laugh, darker this time and tinged with bitterness. Sometimes I think I should have made myself Mandalore rather than Dark Lord of the Sith. At least then, I would have followers who know how to properly conduct a war.

Morrigance stepped past a pair of sentry droids – motionless but humming softly, indicating they were entirely active, for all that they made no move to challenge her. The lift car opened in front of her, responding to her approach, and she stepped inside.

She could still feel the storm of Force centred on Darth Malefic as strongly as ever. Almost surprisingly, she could still sense Bastila too, standing firm. It did occur to her to wonder if she might somehow even win. That would certainly be an . . . interesting turn of events. And quite the spanner thrown into the spokes of her plan.

As her fingers moved rapidly to program in the lift car's destination, her mind was already working on contingencies. Several satisfactory ones came to mind almost immediately, though they would likely prove redundant. Across the void, she felt the ripples of people dying, and Bastila's candle flame flickered more wildly than ever, nearly blown out.

She activated the lift car, which accelerated smoothly on the horizontal, taking her rapidly towards the heart of the ship.

"And what of all this?" Malak gestured sharply at the piles of high- security transport crates that filled the vault, all of them with their combination locks now opened. "We simply abandon it?"

Revan looked back, shrugging as if disinterested. "If you see anything you like, then by all means, take it, old friend. I already have all that I need." With that, he strode out of the hold.

Morrigance could feel the turmoil flowing through Malak as he simply stood there. He seemed, for the moment, to have forgotten her presence, and she wasn't immediately sure that she wanted to do anything to draw his attention to it, even by the act of leaving.

So she remained a shade, lurking in the background.

Abruptly, he stepped forward, selecting a crate – seemingly at random, but not; the Force guiding his hands – and opening it.

She heard his breath catch. He reached inside.

The object he pulled out was clearly meant to be a crown. It was a ring of plain and heavy bronze-hued metal, eight inches deep and open at the front. On either side of that front opening was a long spike made of some kind of translucent crystal.

He stared at it in fascination, turning it round in hands that were surprisingly deft for so huge a man.

As she watched, something tightened inside her chest. Part of her wanted nothing more than to turn around and get out of there. Leave him to whatever consequences he brought down upon himself.

Except, she didn't think that Revan would be altogether accepting of that particular action.

She cleared her throat. "Lord Malak, I would advise caution with that."

He turned to face her with measured slowness. "Fel. You are good at lurking in the shadows, aren't you?"

"Well, it is my job."

Malak continued as if she'd never spoken. "And I do not recollect asking for your advice." He took a step forward, looming over her. One thing he was definitely beyond compare at was using his sheer, monstrous presence to dominate and intimidate. "Something you had your eye on yourself I take it? Something you don't want me to have?"

It was a struggle to keep on standing her ground. He crackled with barely contained fury, his eyes as dense as neutron stars, boring into her.

This was not, she reflected, a good position to be in. There was nowhere to retreat. He could block her from going round him, and if he wanted to force a confrontation, there was no way she could avoid it. And she was very, very aware that at this proximity, in this set of circumstances, if that came to pass, he would kill her easily.

"Not at all, Lord Malak." She made sure to keep her voice calm and scrupulously polite, neither challenging nor too deferential, which would merely be an invitation for him to press all the harder. "I merely sought to warn you that the artefact you hold is the Crown of Drochmar."

His expression told her that this meant precisely nothing to him. Which in turn meant that the intelligence report she had taken such pains to compile had gone unread.

"Do not think, just because you share his bed on occasion, that Revan cares for you." She felt something touch her throat – a lingering, deeply unsettling phantom caress that had her struggling to suppress a shudder. His eyes seemed to shine, and she fought down her instinctive urge to shove the touch away. "If I were to throttle the life out of you right now . . ." The caress became like an invisible noose around her neck, not gripping hard enough to choke, but suggesting in completely unambiguous terms that it could, if he willed it so. ". . . he would not so much as bat an eyelid. He would certainly not protect you."

Morrigance met his gaze levelly, projecting an outer calm that did not remotely extend beneath the surface. "I would expect not," she agreed.

The grip on her throat eased up, then finally vanished. "And do not suppose your influence is greater than it truly is. You are a useful tool, among other useful tools. No more. No less."

"Have I done something to offend you, Lord Malak?" she asked mildly. "If so then you have my apologies. I certainly have no wish to expand my sphere of influence, or tread upon the toes of others."

He smiled thinly. Malak hardly ever smiled, and it was a profoundly disturbing expression. "Tell me, Fel, are you a liar, or simply deeply stupid?"

A question she was best off not trying to answer. She looked back at him coldly.

"Now, I happen to know that Revan is remarkably intolerant of stupidity, no matter how aesthetically pleasing the package it comes wrapped in. So I'm guessing it must be the former."

"Aren't all Sith liars, my Lord?" she asked, one eyebrow tilted up. "But, to be absolutely clear: I do not delude myself into thinking I could remotely challenge you, nor do my ambitions stretch in that direction."

Those ultra-dense eyes continued to scour her, unrelenting. Eventually he gave a nod so small it was barely perceptible. It was difficult not to let the relief that welled up inside her show through.

Malak lifted the crown up to his eye level. "So explain to me, what disaster, exactly, will I unleash if I put this on?" Suddenly, he sounded darkly amused.

She took a deep breath. She could feel the latent power the crown – a dark nimbus surrounding the strange, bronzed metal. "If the information Jedi Master Vrook possessed is correct, it is nearly three thousand years old. It was created by a pureblood Sith from the Ch'Hodos system, Sharad Drochmar."

"Fascinating," Malak stated dryly.

"Indeed." Morrigance matched his tone precisely. "Drochmar was a master artificer. A man of great skill and highly specialised Force ability, but – much to his profound bitterness – little wider influence or respect. As his bitterness festered over long years, he sought to use his particular skills to change his situation. He became determined to create an artefact purely for himself: an artefact that would amplify the power of his will a thousand times over; a crown that would proclaim him undeniably as the greatest Sith Lord ever to have lived, and against which no one on Ch'Hodos – or any other of the Sith worlds – could hope to stand. Those who had mocked or ignored him would bow down to him as Dread Emperor, or be utterly destroyed." She shrugged. "If you are going to be delusional, you might as well be grandiose about it, I suppose."

"I take it his efforts were unsuccessful, since he has notably failed to go down in history."

Morrigance shrugged a second time. "His success was . . . qualified. The perfection of his crown became an abiding obsession, to the point that he invested over twenty years in its creation, pouring all of his strength into it – along with the life blood of a succession of apprentices – and making it powerful beyond compare."

"And it is powerful. We both feel that much, do we not?" There was an avid gleam in Malak's eye. "It would be a tragic shame if such a spectacular piece of craftsmanship did not finally find a worthy owner." He lifted it above his head, as though to don it.

"Unfortunately, Drochmar made an error of judgement with its construction." Morrigance wondered if it was just her imagination, but at that moment, the crown's twin crystal spikes seemed to glitter with motes of inner light. She struggled to suppress a shiver.

"Oh?" Malak stopped. The crown was poised millimetres above his shaven scalp.

"As he reached the critical juncture in the creative process, Drochmar grew weak and sickly. There is apparently only so much raw dark Force energy you can channel through your flesh before it starts to have a profoundly negative effect. He became reliant on his final apprentice – a halfblooded female, whose name has not survived the years – to help bring his work to culmination."

"Let me guess." The voice was dryer than Tattooine's deserts now. "The apprentice betrayed the master."

Morrigance inclined her head. "The apprentice made a subtle, but telling alteration to Drochmar's work, subverting its purpose."

"Ah?" Malak lowered the crown so he was holding it in front of his chest again. "Do tell."

"When Drochmar donned the finished product of his work, it was all he could have hoped for and more. His first act was to use the crown to burn the minds of everyone in Ch'Hodos's capital city, Ch'Doran – more than a million people, reduced to little more than packs of ravening ghouls in the space of a few hours as he reached out to them with all his pent-up fury. His second act was to hunt down all his rivals on that world – all those who had done him ill, real or imagined – and annihilate them. No one was able to stand against him."

"And his third act?"

"Was to bow down before his apprentice, an utterly obedient slave." She left the words hanging.

"Explain," Malak pressed sharply.

Morrigance smiled tightly. "The apprentice had been very clever. Each time Drochmar used his crown, it changed him subtly, altering the neural pathways of his brain, effectively binding his will to hers, until he could no more resist her than he could refrain from breathing – slave, automaton and pet."

Silence lingered.

"So you see, what you hold is an interesting paradox. One of the most awesomely powerful Sith artefacts ever created, yet practically, it is close to useless, eventually turning anyone who tries to wield its vast strength into an utterly compliant slave."

"What happened to the apprentice?" Malak asked after several seconds lingering pause, his voice as near to soft as it ever got.

"As I understand it, the Ch'Hodos military decided to carpet bomb the continent on which Drochmar dwelled from orbit. The crown survived the destruction. Not a lot else did."

Abruptly Malak started laughing, as if he suddenly found something uproariously funny. If his smiles were rare, his laughter was unheard of, and it left Morrigance deeply unsettled. The laughter faded quickly, but the unsettled feeling lingered on. "Absolutely factually accurate, almost word for word. Quite frankly I'm astonished."

He'd known all along. He'd been fully aware of her presence the whole time, and had been toying with her for his amusement. She watched him closely, tension filling her, unsure how things would play from here.

All he did was casually toss the crown in the general direction of the packing crate he'd lifted it from.

It hit the rim and bounced off, landing on its side with a weighty metallic thunk. Her gaze was glued to it as it span round a couple of time, before finally toppling over and coming to rest.

When she looked up again, Malak had gone. She let out a long, shuddering breath.

She'd underestimated him. A lot of people had underestimated him. Anyone who simply dismissed him as the brawn to Revan's intellect – a mindless weapon – was likely to be in for an extremely unpleasant surprise somewhere down the line.

She bent down and, very carefully, picked up the discarded crown. The weight of it was surprising – it would be excruciatingly uncomfortable to wear it for any length of time – and the metal felt deeply unpleasant to touch; completely dry, but still somehow oily. She put it back inside its crate and closed it.

After all, Revan is remarkably intolerant of stupidity

The lift car came smoothly to a halt, the doors sliding open silently.

Morrigance stepped out, footsteps rhythmic on the metal floor, seemingly amplified by the vast cathedral-like space around her. She continued forwards until she reached the back wall of the huge, gloomy chamber, able to feel the Force shifting around her in strange, slow flows. There, amid a mass of gleaming tubes and filaments, was a metal cage in the shape of a humanoid figure.

She stopped directly in front of it.

- - -

A Republic commando made a strangled, incoherent sound. A moment later, he opened fire, blazing away madly at something lurking in the shadows, which only his eyes could see.

Another joined in a moment later, completely spooked, discipline disintegrating.

A third dropped to his knees, clutching at his head. He ripped his helmet off, before tugging at his hair, seemingly trying to tear it out by the handful, clawing at his scalp.

The pressure inside Bastila's skull grew to such a level of intensity that an agonised groan was dragged from between tightly clenched teeth. For all that she'd sought to prepare for it in advance, the sheer strength and violence of Malefic's mental assault almost overwhelmed her entirely in those first few seconds. It was all she could do, initially, to keep her own consciousness intact against the onslaught, let alone try to help protect the others from its raging intensity.

There was a high-pitched cry that cut off abruptly. One of the spooked commandos toppled over sideways, hitting the deck with a crash as one of his comrades shot him in the back.

"Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"

The commando who'd fallen to his knees began banging his forehead repeatedly against the floor. The skin of his forehead split open, blood splattering messily with each drumming impact. Still he kept on banging.

The effort of focussing made her scream rawly, though she barely heard it. The dark, crowned and wraith-like form she glimpsed in her mind's eye tore into them with relentless fury. It had every bit as much power as when she'd faced it before at Tylace, but now it seemed to have developed greater skill and subtlety to go with it, cutting with viciously precise assaults rather than flailing clumsily like an idiot giant.

The benefits of practise.

Desperately, shaking uncontrollably, she struggled to resist – to fight back. She drew on all of the discipline learned from countless hours of painstaking practise and the real thing, using a form of her Battle Meditation to reach out and shield those around her; to reinforce their strength and provide a centre they could anchor to. The effort came close to tearing her apart.

Too late for one.

She 'saw' it as a black hand, reaching inside the man's skull with a dreadful casualness and ripping something free. He collapsed instantly, dire ripples spreading through the Force and threatening to sweep her away along with them. The conscious part of him was lost forever in the dark, consuming maelstrom. For a moment, her Battle Meditation came very close to collapsing in on itself, spreading fear and pain and panic rather than abating them.

A strong, armour-plated arm grabbed her round the shoulders, and – almost brutally – yanked her back to her feet. She hadn't noticed until that point that she'd fallen over. It held her upright as her legs threatened immediately to buckle again. Canderous.

She stood firm. Barely.

The man who'd had his consciousness ripped away growled; a dreadfully familiar sound – that of the Mind Burnt. He launched himself at the person nearest to him, bowling them over and tearing into them with bare hands and teeth.

A fraction of a second later a volley of blaster shots slammed into him. Bastila felt his death like a knife-thrust to the gut.

Briefly, the intensity of Malefic's assault redoubled, dragging another incoherent scream from her throat. She staggered, though Canderous was there again quickly, supporting her. She tried to fight back as best she could, making her will hard and slippery so that the Dark Lord's continued thrusts slid repeatedly off her without penetrating beyond the surface.

Growing terror threatened to overwhelm her. His clutching, sticky, tar-like grasp closed in from every side, cutting off her escape routes one by one, absorbing her counterthrusts as if they weren't there . . .

Then, so abruptly that it left her gasping, it died back down – a background susurration of dark waves rather than the crashing tsunami of just an instant before. She gulped for breath, struggling to control her shaking.

For several long seconds she was too light-headed and disoriented to work out what had happened – wondered briefly if she could possibly, crazily, have somehow won without knowing it. Finally, realisation hit her.

"He's coming." She muttered beneath her breath, and saw that Canderous at least heard her. "He's coming for us in person."

- - -

The blade-angled round sharply, whipping through the space her knees would normally have occupied.

Yuthura had anticipated, and rather than try to block, she leapt over the blow, leaving her opponent temporarily overextended. A booted foot connected solidly with his forehead as he attempted to sway back, out of range.

The impact was almost as detrimental to her as it was to him. He shrugged off the after effects almost instantly, though a line of blood now ran from a rapidly forming swelling above his eye. In a boxing contest, it might seriously hamper him given time, but this form of combat was usually over far more quickly than that. She, meanwhile, struggled to disguise the pain from her now badly bruised foot. Much harder and she'd have broken it.

They went back to circling, the brief flurry of blindingly fast and violent activity subsiding into watchfulness and strategic manoeuvring for position. It was a strange, informal dance of rapid freeform footwork and shifting body angles as the two combatants sought to gain an opening to launch their next attacks, identical sword blades shifting constantly in angle and position, but nothing much actually happening.

Those blades were matching ceremonial Echani constructs, lightweight and elegant. Although lacking the deadliness of vibroblades and lightsabers – where even the heaviest armour tended to be nothing better than a psychological comfort – they were a long way from practice weapons, perfectly capable of maiming or killing in skilled hands.

Another brief flurry, too quick for the naked eye to properly pick out individual sword strokes, broke the growing inertia. Yuthura scored a glancing hit that tore through the top level of her opponent's lightweight padded armour, ripping stuffing free but failing to penetrate the flexible carbon-fibre plate inside.

Inevitably, her opponent scored a reciprocal hit, the impact no more able to penetrate than hers, but leaving her with a muscle-deep bruise on her right side, just below her ribcage.

Then they were back to the holding pattern, jockeying once more for position.

The comfort that, in a lightsaber duel, she'd have just won, was rather empty. If this had been done with lightsabers she'd have won four times over already. On each of those four occasions, however, he had managed to hit home shortly after she had – and his hits carried a small, but in the long-term, potentially significant, degree of extra muscle-power behind them.

Although not exactly losing yet, neither was she winning.

His name was Gare N'Valto, and he was the leader of the Echani mercenaries formerly employed by Seboba. Up until a few days ago, he'd been no more than third in command of their group, but a rapid promotion had ensued when HK-47 had so enthusiastically helped take control of the Rancorous's bridge.

Her immediate reaction to his challenge was to laugh in his face. Something, however, had held her back, for all the fact that her view of fighting for honour was below contempt – the preserve of self-deluding idiots, who needed to fool themselves that it somehow transformed morally reprehensible acts into something that was not only respectable, but esteemable.

Instead, after several seconds of careful consideration, she'd accepted.

The look in Gare's eyes had told her she'd been meant to refuse. That the challenge had been no more than a matter of form, designed to assuage the needs of honour and legitimise his command when she turned him down flat out. I've fulfilled all my obligations. You can't blame me if aliens have no sense of the proper way of doing things, he could say.

Too late to take back his words by that time, of course. Much to his chagrin. Especially since he'd made sure the challenge was given in front of witnesses.

That was how they came to be here now, inside one of the Rancorous's empty cargo holds, with only their respective seconds as an audience. She'd prevailed upon Zaalbar to take that role for her, knowing that none of the Jedi would approve at all of what she was doing. There had been no objections on the Wookiee's part – in fact, he seemed honoured to be asked, more impressed by her fluency in Shyriiwook than anything.

Directly behind her, she sensed someone else enter the cargo hold. Jolee. Damn it.

The distraction was fleeting, but it was still almost enough to get her skewered. She managed to twist aside by the skin of her teeth, her lightweight armour just about holding, though the next few seconds were spent almost entirely on the defensive, and for her pains she took another couple of minor follow-up hits.

By the time the situation was stabilised, her breath was coming hard and fast and she could feel sweat running thickly down her back. The one consolation she had was that Gare was also puffing, perspiration gleaming on his brow and mingling with the flowing blood.

The fight had already lasted longer than was usual. Now they were both at the stage where the razor edge of their reflexes had been blunted, and any hits were likely to inflict more and more serious harm, turning into a bloody and crippling contest of attrition, until one of them eventually collapsed from cumulative injuries and exhaustion. There was no first blood rule in play.

The frustrating thing was, of course, that she could end it all any time she chose. One quick and easy Force push to take his legs out from under him; one howling wall of fear and confusion to unsteady his defences for just a microsecond.

Except that would be 'cheating', and even in victory, it would nullify the entire point of what she was doing.

You don't win marks for style.

She wasn't entirely certain if that was her own thought, or something that was projected from Jolee. Whatever the source, it was spot on. She was allowing the need to win clean to straitjacket her.

Gare apparently saw the flicker in her eyes, and took it as another sign of drifting attention.

This time she took a hit deliberately as she came forward, into his lunge. It wasn't merely another glancing half-blow deflecting from body armour to no real gain, but a raking cut that actually drew blood – and pain – from her upper arm.

Less than textbook as it was, the move allowed her to carry her forward momentum and roll in close, inside his reach. Unable to deploy her own blade effectively at that proximity, she settled for elbowing him hard in the side of his head. As he staggered off-balance, she twisted supplely and threw him, using her hip as a pivot. For all his undoubted skill as a martial artist, he was too badly wrong-footed to effectively counter, and ended hitting the metal of the deck. Hard.

The brutal kick designed to take her legs out from under her and immediately level the playing field was expected, and evaded. Her sword came down as he desperately tried to roll out of reach.

It stopped so close to his throat that it actually sliced through the top couple of layers of skin.

"Yield?" she enquired, displaying her pointy teeth as their eyes locked.

She could see him struggling not to gulp and risk slicing his adam's apple in half in the process. "Yield," he agreed.

With a sharp nod, she lifted the blade away and stepped back. Gare's second crossed quickly to his leader's side, helping him back to his feet with a rather fixed look on his face.

"In accordance to the rules of this contest, I claim victory and all of the rights and rewards there implied." As she spoke, coolly formal, she half-expected either Gare or the second to accuse her of cheating, and that the result of the contest should be nullified. Apparently neither of them was quite collected enough to think of that straight off.

Gare was gingerly probing his head-wound with his fingertips. He glowered at her – not at all to plan, eh?

"And?" It was sullen.

"And I have no wish to claim leadership of your cadre. That privilege I grant to you, should you wish to accept it."

She could sense hesitation mixed in with a profound sense of relief. Exactly the result he'd been angling for, even if the means of getting there had included a rather gaping dent to his pride. Apparently, he was capable of swallowing that pride. He managed a rather unsteady half-bow. "I accept your gracious offer, Lady Ban."

"There is, however, one proviso."

Instant, uneasy suspicion flashed in his eyes. "I will, of course, undertake to forswear any vengeance upon you and yours . . ."

"I require rather more than that."

Neither him, nor his second said anything. They simply looked at her.

"As is my unalienable right as victor, I claim one year of service from you, Gare N'Valto, and those you now command. For one year, you will serve me loyally in similar capacity to which you served Seboba the Hutt."

Yuthura again half-expected accusations of cheating to surface, but Gare seemed too stunned to do much more than blink. She briefly wondered if she'd erred in so quickly assigning him leadership, if this was an example of his speed of thought.

It was left to the second to ask: "You have the necessary means of providing for our upkeep?" He seemed to be inwardly struggling to find a way out of this, and repeatedly coming up blank.

"I have the necessary means." One of the credit lines intended to pay Kemo Dreya could be diverted. She turned to address Gare again. "Now, I will leave you to break the news to your fellows. In one hour either yourself, or your chosen representative, will meet with me to draw up formal contracts."

As the two mercenaries walked away, Jolee moved alongside her. She steeled herself inwardly, unable to get any sense of his mood at all – fairly typically.

"Interesting," he said finally, breaking the silence. "Now what, exactly, could the two of you be up to, I wonder?"

She looked at him sidelong. He had the same infuriatingly vague expression he usually wore, for all that she knew it was nothing close to the underlying reality.

"The two of us?" she murmured. "Zaalbar was merely doing me a favour."

"Oh, don't play games with me girl. Give it another twenty or so years, and then you can try. But not now."

Her mouth formed a wry twist. "There's an expression humans have about grandmothers and sucking eggs, isn't there?"

"Now there you go, casting aspersions. I still have all my own teeth, thank you very much. Well . . . except for one. There was this brawl." He scratched the tip of his nose. "Involved a group of off-duty palace guard in a cantina on Onderon, as I recall. They don't take too kindly to ribald ballads about their queen. Very little sense of humour. Something to bear in mind if you're ever passing through that way."

"I'll try to remember that."

"You do that. Now stop trying to sidetrack me, damn it."

Yuthura considered a moment before saying anything. "If you intend on fighting a war, there comes a point where you're going to need an army," she said at last.

For a long time she felt him simply looking at her, seemingly weighing something up. "And this is a war now, is it?"

"I think, inevitably, it is going to be one. Don't you?"

The only answer he gave was to point at her arm. "You're bleeding, girl."

- - -

A thermal detonator exploded thunderously. The pair of Sith troopers closest to the searing flash were hurled against a wall nearly six metres away, crumpling together in a tangled heap.

Bastila flinched as the backwash of heat flowed over her. Her Dark Jedi opponent pressed in hard, straining to take advantage. Their double-bladed lightsabers – red and yellow respectively – locked together tightly, spitting and crackling as they strained against each other.

Close to hers, his face was chubby; soft and almost boyish – not a Sith face at all, apart for the most virulently yellow eyes she'd ever seen. He grimaced and groaned, pushing and straining, sweating profusely as he forced her slowly backwards with his greater weight and muscle strength.

Her attention was split in two as she struggled vainly to hold him off. Part of her was away in the next chamber with him, striving to maintain the thread of her Battle Meditation, feeling Republic soldiers fall and die, for all her efforts as the black avalanche of his power swept over them. She was stretched too thin, slowly failing on both fronts, unable to focus fully on one task or the other. It felt as if she was standing, one foot on either side of a yawning abyss, as it widened inexorably beneath her.

The Dark Jedi spat into her face from about half a metre away.

She didn't even flinch. There wasn't enough of her there to be distracted. In fact, it had almost entirely the opposite effect as intended, strengthening her focus as a glutinous line of his spittle ran thickly down her cheek.

As he grinned at her mockingly, she butted him hard in the face, right between their interlocked blades. His nose crunched, spurting blood as her forehead squashed it flat.

He howled, pain and rage together, reeling back from her. The sensation of another Republic soldier dying, the life choked brutally out of him, made her finishing stroke waver clumsily, and he was able to deflect it aside, coming back at her snarling in fury.

For a moment she was nonplussed to see that one of his eyes had stopped being yellow, and was now a rather mild looking shade of blue. Belatedly, she realised he must be wearing contact lenses – presumably to make his rather cherubic looks more fierce and intimidating.

That, somehow, was far more distracting than being spat at – too human and personalising a detail. As he came at her in a rage-driven flurry, she was driven rapidly backwards.

Gradually she stabilised the situation, her opponent's swings becoming more and more wildly erratic as his momentum faltered. Across from her, Canderous had engaged the other Dark Jedi, keeping him from intervening, and was in the process of brutally and systematically dismantling him. He seemed to be doing a far better job of it than she was.

Malefic was getting closer fast. There was no one left to resist him. Phantom footsteps pounded, echoing through her skull.

Her opponent bellowed incoherently, overcome by frustration that she was still standing, desperate for victory – and the prestige it would grant – before his Dark Lord arrived.

She caught another wild saber-stroke effortlessly, deflecting it upwards and ducking under it, coming inside his guard. A short, stabbing cut pierced halfway through his thigh, and as his leg buckled beneath him, the other end of her saber took him beneath the chin, emerging through the back of his skull.

Canderous, meanwhile, caught his own opponent's lightsaber on his vibrosword, pushed it out wide, then stepped in close. He picked the Dark Jedi up bodily, slamming the man back against the wall, before proceeding to messily stave in the front of his skull with repeated blows from a heavy, armour-plated fist. The crunching noises that carried over the prevailing din made Bastila feel distinctly ill.

The doors opened.

A wave of Force like a hurricane led the way through, picking up battling Republic and Sith soldiers alike, and scattering them like chaff. It caught Bastila full on, sending her tumbling backwards. As she landed, she came within millimetres of impaling herself on her own lightsaber, the brilliant yellow blade humming fiercely next to her cheek.

The body of the Dark Jedi she'd just killed caught her a glancing blow as he bounced past. Splitting pain passed through her skull with the force of the impact.

She blinked, eyes struggling to focus on the figure framed in the doorway. A huge, bloody red idol of doom, more machine of war than living person. Her Force sense of the crown overwhelmed all but the vaguest sense of the person wearing it.

One of the Republic commandos recovered enough to take a pot-shot at him. The blaster bolt splashed off the energy shields surrounding Malefic with a sharp crack, deflecting away.

Grimly, painfully, Bastila hauled herself up onto her hands and knees. She could only watch, though, as Malefic gestured towards the man who'd fired at him. The taste of dark Force energy, flowing all around, was a bitter poison in the back of her throat.

The Republic soldier jerked upright like a puppet yanked hard by invisible strings. He lifted into the air, floating, and Bastila could sense the terrified panic radiating from him as he struggled vainly to resist. She tried to reach out to him – to snatch him free of the Dark Lord's grip – but her effort bounced off, as if hitting a solid glass wall.

Abruptly, there was a massive shift of air pressure. Bastila's ears popped. There was a horrible sound of tendons rupturing and cartilage tearing, then finally of bones cracking and splintering. When it cut off, what was left of the man dropped back to the deck – a misshapen sack of flesh held together mostly by his armour.

Shaking, still able to feel the grim aftershock of the man's death, Bastila made it to her feet.

Malefic's gaze – the pale silver light spilling from the visor of his helmet anyway – turned slowly until it settled on her. There it stopped.

"Bastila Shan." His voice sounded almost polite, far softer than she'd expected, with a faint suggestion of sibilance to it. "I know that the Jedi are overstretched these days, but are you really all they could manage to send against me?"

Her throat felt dry; cracked. Her head was pounding. "The Jedi aren't even remotely interested in you."

He chuckled. "Then it seems that the diversions I arranged have all worked perfectly."

She started to open her mouth to say something else, when she noticed a small, spherical object arcing gently through the air straight towards him. Another thermal detonator.

As her gaze touched it, his head snapped round. He raised a hand, palm outwards, and batted it away using the Force. She dropped flat.

It landed in a tangled clump of Republic and Sith soldiers, still dazed and groggily trying to right themselves from Malefic's initial entrance. A fraction of a second later, it detonated.

The shockwave from the explosion felt like a giant fist pummelling hard into her back. The breath blasted from her body as it hurled her forward, coming to rest directly in front of Darth Malefic on her hands and knees. Her lightsaber jolted free of her grasp and rolled away, nudging against the toes of Malefic's boots before coming to a halt. Someone's severed and badly charred leg thudded down beside her.

As she struggled to draw breath back into her lungs, Canderous – the source of the thermal detonator – attacked Malefic head on.

The Sith Lord's double-bladed lightsaber ignited with a snap-hiss, coming across to parry a blow that would have cleft him from left shoulder through to right hip had it connected. An unrelenting sequence of crunching attacks drove Malefic steadily backwards, yanking his defences this way and that. Just for an instant it looked like Canderous might actually defeat the Sith Lord in that initial onslaught, the tip of his vibrosword scoring a deep groove across the front of Malefic's breastplate. A well aimed follow-up kick sent Malefic staggering backwards.

Moving in to exploit the opening he'd worked, Canderous was caught by another brutally powerful Force wave. It sent him tumbling backwards, bouncing and spinning, his heavy armour squealing as it slid across the metal of the deck.

In that moment, Bastila lunged. She snatched up her fallen lightsaber and rolled forward, directly towards Malefic. Caught with his attention still diverted towards Canderous, almost completely off-guard, he was unable to shift his stance in time . . .

She drove a lightsaber blade straight through his personal shields and hilt deep into his lower abdomen.

- - -

Tamar could sense his quarry somewhere about a hundred metres ahead, although they remained out of sight.

He was closing in quickly now, after almost half a day's chase since the ambush at the marketplace. Wind whined continuously through the arid canyons of Nawathwai's endless cold, stony desert, swirling up sand and grit and reducing visibility to the low tens of metres.

He'd escaped from the sniper by snatching up a rusting engine block leaning against an empty market stall via the Force, then hurling it through the wall the sniper had just put a dinner-plate size hole in. Rotten and crumbling plastocrete had given way with a crash, creating an impromptu doorway, which he'd promptly dived through, just ahead of another sniper-shot.

That hadn't been the end of it of by any means.

The sniper had still, apparently, been able to keep track of him through the walls – whether through a thermal-imaging scope, or some other means. He'd ended up desperately evading pot-shots taken straight through the old and weak plastocrete as he wove his way between the empty shelves of a long abandoned storehouse. If not for the aid of the Force in anticipating those shots, he'd have been dead several times over.

Each shot, though, had enabled him to get a clearer mental fix on the sniper's position, and work his way round through the interior of the buildings surrounding the marketplace towards them. Eventually, as he'd started to get close, the sniper had upped and run for it.

That had left something of a dilemma. Chase down the sniper. Chase down the hooded, Force-sensitive individual he'd first sensed. Or let them both go, and try to make a meeting that he strongly suspected wasn't going to be happening anymore.

In the end, he'd opted for the middle of the three options, figuring that this person was likely to know more than a hired assassin.

Keeping his target's faint but distinctive Force-spoor fixed firmly in his head, Tamar had spent several hours of cat and mouse pursuit through the semi-derelict outskirts of Natora Head. Occasionally he would catch glimpses of his quarry's back in the distance, but he never managed to get any closer than that.

When his target grabbed a speeder, Tamar had followed suit. The rather decrepit and not altogether safe-looking heap he'd chosen to steal had been selected solely because it had a security system that he could disable relatively quickly – a length of chain tied to a metal post.

After some rather frantic tearing through Natora's streets, the pursuit had moved out into the surrounding desert. Over the past couple of hours they'd covered somewhere over four hundred kilometres through the continuous sandstorm, the terrain at first flat and featureless, then gradually becoming more rough and undulating, passing through deep and winding gullies carved millions of years ago when water had run freely on Nawathwai's surface.

During that time, he'd gradually lost ground, for all he'd been pushing his speeder right to the limits – and at times, several percentile points beyond. About five minutes ago, though, just when he'd been in danger of loosing the spoor entirely, he'd become aware that the person he was pursuing had abruptly stopped moving.

As he'd closed in, he'd slowed his speeder down to a crawl, looking out for an ambush that had never come, before finally ditching the heap of junk a short way back, hidden around a bend in the canyon.

"Tee, you have any way of seeing what's up ahead?" Unless his quarry had run out of fuel, or had some other kind of mechanical problem, they were unlikely to have stopped in the middle of nowhere simply for the hell of it.

There was a slight delay before a response came. The beeps and whistles told him that Nawathwai's satellite system, while eminently sliceable, was far too sparse and primitive to penetrate the storm cover. It hardly came as a surprise, but it wasn't exactly what he'd wanted to hear.

Suddenly the swirling wall of dust and grit parted in front of him like a curtain being drawn back. He got a brief glimpse of a red sandstone cliff face, looming startlingly out of nothing in front of him. If he'd still been going full tilt on the speeder, he'd have had about a tenth of second's warning before a sudden and rather terminal impact.

There was a diagonal line of steep and precarious steps carved into the rock. About halfway up, maybe fifty metres above Tamar's position, he saw the figure he'd been chasing, robes flapping wildly in the wind. They seemed to be looking directly down at him, and he had a fleeting, burning impression of their eyes meeting. Then the storm closed back in, and the figure was gone again.

Tamar drew his blaster-pistol and redoubled his pace.

A speeder – in rather better condition than the one he'd stolen – had been dumped at the bottom of the steps. As he sprinted around it, he got a brief flash of warning through the Force.

A fraction of a second later, the speeder exploded.

- - -

The moment stood crystallised in time, the entire universe frozen mid-step. Malefic seemed to be staring down at her, almost in curiosity, silver light from his visor spilling over her.

Bastila fractured the moment; yanked her lightsaber blade upwards, still buried hilt-deep in his armour – a disembowelling stroke.

Nothing happened. There was no sense of pain from Malefic. No sense of hurt, or weakness. He simply stood there in front of her. Belatedly, she noticed the hissing, sputtering noise her lightsaber blade was making, and realised that it was only penetrating through the top few millimetres of his armour before the beam short-circuited and gave out.

There was a layer of cortosis fibre laminated between the red metal plates of Malefic's armour.

Even as the realisation hit home, Malefic backhanded her, almost casually, across the face.

The impact sent her sprawling full length across the deck, her skull ringing, her jaw gone instantly and entirely numb. She tried to move, but her limbs had turned to rubber, and she dropped back with an incoherent groan. Bloody drool splattered from the corner of her mouth, her vision distorting as the world around her gyrated through slow, disorienting loops. She was dimly aware of the Sith Lord's lightsaber lifting – a red lightning flash – but couldn't do anything about it, unable to make her body respond, let alone reach the Force.

The finishing stroke never came.

She waited and waited, but it never arrived. There was a repeated hard, sparking-cracking sound that she eventually realised was a lightsaber and vibrosword clashing repeatedly together.

Canderous.

Dark Force clouds gathered like thunderheads. It was almost as if she could see through Malefic's armoured outer shell to a hollow wraith of darkness bound within, crackling with malevolence. The crown seemed to shine with a kind of negative light, dominating everything. He was driving Canderous inexorably backwards, metre by relentless metre.

A half-choked scream was dragged from her throat as she forced herself to focus, refusing to surrender to the lullingly seductive tides of unconsciousness. The Force, as she drew on it, was ice-cold water – refreshing and agonising at once, clearing her head but leaving her scraped completely raw. Her jaw throbbed. She thought it might be broken. Groaning, she dragged herself first to her knees, then – legs shaking violently – to her feet.

By most standards, Canderous was a big man. In combat, he usually had advantages of strength and reach over opponents, and knew exactly how to make those advantages pay. Not this time. Malefic was one of the few individuals Bastila had seen, outside of Wookiees, who could have stood toe to toe with Darth Malak and not been overshadowed.

Malefic's lightsaber flashed time and again, in brutal, relentless strokes.

Each time, Canderous parried. Each time, he was forced to give up another step of ground. His every attempt at countering was turned aside with peremptory ease, and the attempts became less and less frequent. She could sense him tiring by the moment.

Jaw throbbing, grotesquely swollen and locked in place, she shaped the Force and channelled it towards Canderous, trying to strengthen and reinforce, sweeping away his fatigue. The effort made her stagger, sweat stinging her eyes. She wanted to throw up, but there didn't seem to be anything inside her.

Malefic batted Canderous's guard down with a brutally pummelling stroke, the reverse end of his doubled-bladed saber whipping round before the Mandalorian could recover. As Canderous desperately swayed back in an effort to evade, it scorched a black gouge through his chest-plate.

It barely did more than brush across his skin, but Bastila still felt his pain, reflected back across the Force link as if it was her own. She whimpered involuntarily at the burning sensation in her chest, and attempted to redouble the flow of Force.

Canderous counterattacked without pause, catching Malefic slightly by surprise, vibrosword raising sparks off the Sith Lord's armour. For a second or so the momentum of the contest reversed, Canderous driving Malefic onto the back foot, regaining most of the ground he'd lost, and scoring another glancing hit which deflected off the Sith Lord's shoulder plate . . .

Malefic simply lashed out with another pummelling Force wave.

This time she could feel that Canderous was expecting it. He managed to twist to one side, so that only the periphery of it caught him. It still sent him spinning backwards close to four metres, even if he did manage to stay upright this time.

Before Malefic could close the gap again, Bastila launched herself at him. Or at least, lurched clumsily in his approximate direction. The floor was still tilting oddly, and she realised clinically through the pain in her head that she had a concussion. It felt like she was muffled from the world by a choking layer of cotton wool, her feet bound inside clumsy lead-filled boots.

Malefic wheeled on her, catching her attack easily and sending her staggering with the sheer power of his riposte. Her arms felt numb from the impact, and her balance was completely shot. His next attack almost drove her to her knees.

Before he could overwhelm her defences entirely, Canderous was back alongside her, pressing him hard.

With two opponents for him to face, it suddenly became a much more even fight. If Bastila had been closer to a hundred percent, she and Canderous might even have held the upper hand between them. As it was, they managed to work well enough together that Malefic was never able to isolate either one of them for long enough to truly make his physical advantages tell.

Even so, they didn't manage to work any effective openings themselves. Malefic wasn't simply a freakishly powerful brute; he was also a frighteningly good swordsman.

"You're being played," she tried to say as the fight temporarily settled into stalemate. Unfortunately, her jaw refused to work properly, and her tongue felt like it had swollen far too big for her mouth. The noise that came out was largely unrecognisable as speech.

Something in it seemed to get through to Malefic though. He attacked so hard that she struggled to keep a proper grip on her lightsaber as she parried. Canderous came quickly to the rescue, forcing Malefic back again. By that time, she was panting raggedly, her shoulder joints screaming.

Behind her one of the survivors from the thermal detonator made a low, incoherent noise. She recognised it from army field hospitals – the sound of someone too badly hurt to have the energy to scream. She tried again, fractionally more coherently this time, to speak. She would have made an absolutely rotten ventriloquist. "I mean it." I ean 't. "Daragba . . . the Vision Well was . . ." Ragba te isn ell.

Malefic wasn't, apparently, interested in conversation. He came at her relentlessly, without pausing.

Parrying another particularly vicious assault, Bastila got the set of her body slightly wrong, and the impact that juddered through her frame caused her left leg to buckle beneath her. A wrenching gasp was torn from her lips as she dropped to one knee. One hand lost its grip on her lightsaber hilt, leaving her wide open . . .

Canderous's vibrosword came across her to intercept, blocking Malefic's lightsaber centimetres from her face.

It was a mistake. A Mandalorian warrior – the Mandalorian warrior that Canderous had once been – would have let Malefic take her head off without a second thought. A fraction of a second later his vibrosword would have driven up, unstoppably, beneath the Sith Lord's armpit, sundering through armour as if it wasn't there and ripping right through his chest cavity. Victory would have been achieved, albeit victory with a sacrifice.

Mandalorians had always understood the cold necessity of sacrifice when it came to matters of war.

She sensed something like surprise from Canderous. Inescapable knowledge of his own error.

Malefic reversed his stroke with lightning rapidity. The other end of the double-bladed saber came down across Canderous's elbow joint – took his right arm clean off and insta-cauterized the stump. Vibrosword and armour-plated forearm clanged loudly as they hit the deck.

She felt the onset of his shock as if it was her own; gasped with him in sympathetic unison as he reeled backwards.

Her own lightsaber swung in desperation for Malefic's legs, forcing the Sith Lord into a hasty parry. Peripherally she was aware of Canderous folding up; falling to his knees.

Malefic battered at her, subtlety sacrificed for overwhelming power – a desire to be finished with this. She fell back rapidly, yielding ground in a kind of ungainly, backwards staggering half-run, drawing him away from the fallen Mandalorian. After about the fourth of fifth desperate block, her arms ached so badly that she could barely lift them.

Then she ran out of space to retreat into, the curve of the wall at her back. Hers and Malefic's blades locked together, which she knew then and there was a fatal error, but she didn't have any choice in the matter.

His strength was overpowering. Grimly she felt her own blade being twisted down and round, her efforts to stop it about as useful as trying to hold back an avalanche with her bare hands. It came closer and closer to her left thigh, until she could feel the fierce heat radiating from it. As she tried to resist, it felt like her arms were wrenching from their sockets.

Frantically, she lashed out with the Force – a driving spike of will aimed at the dark core of his mind.

It stuck what seemed to be an impervious wall, bouncing off uselessly. He struck straight back at her overwhelmingly, slicing brutally through her mental defences.

Distantly, she heard herself cry out. One of her biceps ripped in an agonising flare, her arm giving way. Her own lightsaber blade was wrenched down abruptly by Malefic's, straight into the meat of her thigh, slicing deeply through muscle tissue and frying the surrounding flesh black.

She collapsed with a strangled gasp as her leg buckled beneath her. Her lightsaber was torn from her grasp, bouncing away across the deck.

Something hefty hit Malefic hard on the side of his helmeted head. He staggered with the impact. His saber-stroke, jolted awry, passed just over her head, giving her a lopsided impromptu haircut, but nothing worse than that.

The object that had hit him, Bastila noted numbly as it landed a few feet in front of her, was Canderous's severed forearm, encased in armour plating.

Malefic whirled on the Mandalorian, who'd managed to haul himself upright again. His regenerative implant, Bastila realised, would have blunted the worst affects of the shock by now. He kicked at something lying in front of him, sending it sliding rapidly across the deck just before another brutally powerful Force wave from Malefic slammed straight into him.

This time he went down hard, hitting the deck with an audible crunch. He gave no sign of moving, let alone getting up.

The sliding object passed straight between Malefic's planted feet, coming to a halt directly in front of her. Her eyes were slow to focus on it. Canderous's vibrosword.

Body responded quicker than mind, guided by instinct or Force, or maybe both. She picked it up with her still functional arm and lunged from her knees with every ounce of her strength and bodyweight behind it.

Malefic had sensed her movement and was in the process of spinning back towards her, incredibly fast and agile given his size and bulky armour . . .

The vibrosword beat his lightsaber, passing just beneath its leading edge and angling upwards. It drove through his armour with a shrieking metallic crunch, piercing right through the left side of his abdomen, before emerging from his back.

Time again seemed to stand still, almost exactly symmetric with before. The tableau was the same. Her on her knees, a blade seemingly driven through the Sith Lord's torso as he stared down at her, the sliver light from his visor illuminating her in a pale aura.

There was one key difference this time, though. Cortosis fibre might be useful for repelling lightsabers, but against over a metre of ultra-sharp, powered metal it was pretty much neither here nor there.

His lightsaber fell from his hands, bounced, extinguished.

- - -

Morrigance was yanked back from her reverie. In front of her, the cradle gleamed oddly. She thought, uneasily, that she was standing several paces closer to it than she had been, with no knowledge of the intervening steps. Behind it, the twisted mass of filaments and pipes stirred with patterns of light and shade that the ambient lighting couldn't quite account for, and she could still vaguely sense the ship's – for want of a better word – mind, watching her: utterly vast and alien. Her attempts to communicate with it had proved . . . frustrating.

Malefic's pain, transmitted and amplified via the crown, quickly drowned out her awareness of the ship in a tide of dark and violent ripples. He was very badly hurt, she could tell at once. In fact, without the Force to sustain him, he would very probably be dead already.

She let out an annoyed breath – touched the plain, dull metal ring she wore upon one finger. Concentrating, she sent a command across the void, directly to his head.

He answered her call. Because of the crown, he had long since lost the option of resisting.

- - -

"Our Lord needs our help."

Admiral Bortha jolted at Illarie's words. The symbols in front of him, which had almost been starting to make some kind of sense, swam out of focus, and he completely lost the thread of his thoughts. He looked round at the Dark Jedi sourly, but she was already striding rapidly towards the bridge's exit.

"Our Lord ordered us to remain here," he called out after her. His voice sounded small to his own ears, anything but that of an admiral.

There was no response, so he tried again. "You remember what he does to those who try to 'help' unasked for? Mek Valloon for instance."

She stopped; glanced back at him. There was no attempt to even slightly mask the sneer. "How does one so spineless rise so high in the Sith Fleet? Please, I'd like to know."

Their eyes locked, neither of them backing down. Eventually Illarie bared her teeth. "I have his order." A hand came up to touch the side of her head, and briefly, he saw a ghost of unease in her. It quickly vanished underneath the sneering surface. "He commands us to join his side. Now."

She started walking again, boot heels tapping out a rapid staccato rhythm on the deck.

Gritting his teeth, Bortha had to halfway run to keep up with her.

He didn't know how long they strode through the vast ship's silent and eerily deserted chambers. Long enough, and at such a pace that he was badly out of breath by the time Illarie halted abruptly in front of him. He barely stopped himself from blundering into her back.

Suddenly there was an ominous sense of pressure on the air that even he could feel. Static and something else. Something bad was coming. Something terrible. Part of him wanted to turn and run, but Fleet discipline still bound him in too tightly. The doors in front of them opened.

Bortha stared, wide-eyed.

Darth Malefic lurched through, his gait halfway between badly malfunctioning droid and lifelong cantina drunk at throwing out time. It took Bortha's mind a second or so to process the fact that the object sticking through the left side of his torso was a vibrosword. It took him even longer to realise that the liquid flowing down his armoured left leg, spattering across the floor in coin-sized droplets, and trailing away into the distance behind him in a trail of unevenly spaced footprints, was blood.

The Dark Lord's breathing rasped like a rusty saw blade.

Illarie rushed across to him, and he all but collapsed on top of her. Bortha could clearly see the strain in her posture as she struggled under his overbearing weight to keep him upright.

Leaning on her, Malefic's hands groped uncoordinatedly for the hilt of the embedded vibrosword, gripping it tightly. He made a high, thin noise that reminded Bortha slightly of superheated steam escaping from a pressure valve.

He looked away as the sword came out, though the sound effects were just as bad as the visuals would have been: a low, strangled grown; a sudden, thick and copious splattering of liquid; then a heavy metallic clang, followed by grimly agonised, almost bestial panting.

When Bortha looked back, Malefic and Illarie were both on their knees upon the deck. Bizarrely, the sight reminded him of a weird parody of doomed lovers in a stage play, seeking one last kiss from each other before dying tragically in each other's embrace.

Malefic's huge, red-gauntleted hands gripped either side of Illarie's shaven head, which suddenly looked tiny and bird-like, delicately fragile. His forehead hung forward at such an angle that his crown almost looked as if it was in danger of sliding off.

Abruptly Malefic's grip tightened and he drew her closer.

Difficult to kiss through that helmet. It was an insane, disconnected thought.

Bortha heard Illarie yelp in pain. Malefic's fingers gouged brutally into her flesh, crushingly strong for all his current weakness. Abruptly, the yelp became an all out scream. Fierce, orange-tinted light suddenly shone from her flesh, drawing her in x-ray, before bursting free of her eyes and mouth in blazing beams that were drawn directly into Malefic's body.

Bortha could smell something a little bit like charbroiling meat. It tickled at his nostrils. Then, abruptly, he twisted away, gagging – emptying the contents of his stomach noisily on the deck.

Behind him, he heard a soft, almost gentle thud. His neck muscles dragged his gaze back, half involuntarily. Part of him gibbered that he didn't want to look. He didn't want to damn well look!

What was left of Illarie resembled a papier-mache doll – a lifeless, hollowed out, mummified shell that might disintegrate and blow away in a stiff breeze. Everything remotely to do with life had been sucked straight out of her. As he watched, glassy-eyed, Malefic unfolded himself smoothly and stood up. The flow of blood had slowed to an intermittent dripping.

That glowing silver visor now fixed firmly upon Bortha. The Dark Lord's breathing sawed as harshly as before, though it seemed much more vigorous now.

"Come, Admiral. Follow me."

There was no refusing that.

- - -

Tamar rode the outer edge of the explosion up the cliff-face in a truly enormous Force-jump. At the apex of the leap, when gravity started to kick in again, he hit a wrist control. A grappling hook deployed from his armour, micro-razors embedding in the sandstone and locking tight.

He fell back a short distance before the rope trailing from the grappling hook jerked taut, managing to bring his legs up and brace himself a fraction before he hit the rockface. Even so, it knocked a good portion of the breath from his body.

Steadying himself, he glanced around quickly to get his bearings.

He'd made it more than halfway up the narrow stairs. Glancing up gave him a brief glimpse of his quarry's back, before they reached the cave at the top of the steps and disappeared inside. He could sense tightly controlled borderline panic flowing from them. That definitely hadn't gone quite to plan.

Quickly, he unspooled more rope from the grappling hook, lowering himself until his feet touched the steps, before disconnecting himself from it. A blaster shot cracked off his energy shield and deflected away, spinning him round and making him stagger back a couple of steps before he managed to recover his balance.

His heart thudded as he swayed vertiginously on the edge. The drop back to the canyon floor looked much more substantial from up here than it had from down below.

Flattening himself against the wall, a second blaster shot missed him narrowly.

Coming to the rapid conclusion that survival was far more important than stealth, or concealing his identity, he drew his lightsaber from a concealed compartment in one of the thigh plates of his armour. The cyan blade glowed fiercely through the swirling dust, instinctively moving to deflect the third and forth shots harmlessly away. His free hand drew his own plaster pistol, firing up into the cave mouth where he could sense the gunman.

Steadily he started to advance up the steps.

Another blaster shot spat his way, a second gunman joining the first. Tamar reached up towards him with the Force and pulled.

His intent had simply been to yank the gun from the man's hands, but a moment later, he heard a terrified wail and caught a brief glimpse of a camouflaged figure tumbling from the cave mouth, out into the canyon. He winced at the sound of a crunching impact that came a moment later from below.

The first gunman popped abruptly up from cover, gun blazing. Tamar's lightsaber intercepted easily, and a calmly precise countershot into the darkness above ended things, taking the man squarely in the head.

Tamar pushed away pity and revulsion as he felt the man's life extinguish. He started to run up the last couple of dozen steps.

Inside, only the first few metres of the cave were natural. Beyond that, a tunnel proceeded deeper into the cliff, supporting props spaced every few metres and electric lights strung along the ceiling. Several of them flickered and hummed, while others had broken entirely leaving deep, unevenly spaced puddles of shadow.

Tamar could sense his target a short distance ahead, no longer moving, and hastened forward, switching his lightsaber off so it's humming didn't give him away, but still keeping both it and the blaster in hand.

After a distance of about fifty metres, the tunnel turned abruptly to the left, opening out into a vast, cavernous space. Looming out of the gloom in the centre of that space was a ship – some kind of Corellian-designed light freighter, not entirely dissimilar to the Ebon Hawk. Overhead the cavern's ceiling was artificial, and from the look of it could open as and when required. Some kind of secret smuggler's landing pad, obviously. Presumably, it dated back to a time when Nawathwai wasn't quite so blatantly lawless, and such subterfuge was actually necessary.

Edging around the freighter's bulk, Tamar heard voices from a few metres ahead. He stopped, dropping into a crouch in the cover of the freighter's landing gear.

One of the voices was female. He didn't manage to pick out any of the words, but he did get enough of a sense of her mind as she spoke to identify her. The sniper. She was Force sensitive too, he noted. It was very mild, so she might not even be aware of it, and it hadn't registered with him before, but at this proximity, it was unmistakeable.

The second voice was male and belonged to the person he'd been following. The breath-mask made it sound more harsh and guttural than it probably was, though he only managed to pick up snatches. ". . . Nix and Jaren . . . holding him off . . . don't imagine it'll be long . . . persistent bastard . . . damned strong . . . We need to . . . powered up and gone."

Tamar started edging forward.

"Him?" he managed to pick out from the woman's much quieter voice. Then, after missing something too low to pick up: ". . . the worm never showed . . ."

"Could be him," The man agreed. Tamar could hear him much more clearly now "If it is, she'll want to know . . ."

Tamar stopped again. She'll . . . He shook his head, forcing himself to concentrate on the here and now instead of letting his thoughts wander away down wildly speculative highways.

He could see both of them now, standing at the foot of the freighter's entrance ramp.

"No time," the man was saying, turning away from the woman and starting rapidly up the ramp.

The woman was looking straight towards him. Like everyone else who ventured out on Nawathwai's surface, she wore a breath mask that covered the lower portion of her face. Her eyes, however, were not covered by the normal goggles you'd expect to see, but a plain black cloth wrapping.

A Miraluka.

Suddenly he knew how she'd been able to shoot at him so readily through the walls earlier on. He likewise knew that she could 'see' him perfectly now, for all the cover and shade he was notionally concealed by.

Her pistol shot came before he could react, and hit him directly in the centre of his chest. His shields just about held, but the kick of the impact was enough to send him sprawling onto his backside with a feeling akin to having just been punched by an angry Wookiee.

A series of follow up shots stitched across the ground, missing by centimetres as he rolled desperately to evade. One hit part of the ships' landing gear, knocking a sizable chunk of metal loose.

As he came upright again, he hurled a wave of Force at her and ignited his lightsaber. She managed to evade the Force wave, leaping backwards with the grace of a trained gymnast. On 'seeing' the lightsaber, she obviously decided on discretion being the better part of valour, and turned and ran.

Before he could even think about following, Force lightning crackled around him, stripping away the last remnants of his shields, and sending him reeling forwards.

He whirled on the man, standing at the top of the ramp. The effects of the electricity left a deep-seated ache in his teeth.

"Perhaps we can just talk?" Tamar suggested, finally breaking the lingering silence as they faced off with each other.

Or perhaps not. The man moved to hit a control to raise the ramp. Instantly, Tamar picked up the lump of landing gear that the woman had shot loose, and hurled it at him with the Force.

It hit home smack in the middle of his forehead. He crumpled bonelessly.

Tamar let out a breath. The female sniper had already made it out of the cavern, and he could still sense her running. He was content enough to let her go, leaping onto the steadily closing ramp and allowing it to carry him up into the main body of the freighter.

His quarry, finally run down, was well and truly unconscious, flat out on the deck in front of him. A quick check of his pulse told him it was no more or less serious than that.

He called in to T3. A short exchange later, a rendezvous had been arranged, the utility droid to fly their ship out here and pick him up. Before their conversation broke off, T3 let him know that Hulas had finally been in touch, leaving another message.

"Play it then," he said resignedly

There was a fractional pause, before the link crackled to life again.

"My apologies for not being able to keep our scheduled meeting." For some reason, just the tone of the Rodian's voice managed to set Tamar's teeth on edge. "Unfortunately, I learned that our communication had become compromised. You may be in danger. I pray that this message does not reach you too late."

Tamar stifled a sigh.

"It is still absolutely imperative that we have our discussion, and I suggest we rearrange . . ."

Barely listening to the remainder of Hulas's recorded words, Tamar bent down and, with a stifled grunt of effort, picked the unconscious man up, hefting him across his shoulder like a grain sack. Although by no means huge, he was more than heavy enough, and it was a struggle to get the weight comfortably settled.

The recording stopped.

"Well, I suppose it's the thought that counts," Tamar muttered sourly. "Okay Tee, let Hulas know that I'll get back to him. When it suits me."

- - -

"My apprentice. You appear to have gotten lost. You're on the wrong ship."

On the surface, at least, Darth Malefic's voice was mild. Morrigance didn't let that fool her. She'd been following his darkly furious presence inside her head for the last hour, ever since his shuttle had started the flight across the void from the flagship.

She turned around to face him slowly. "No, my Lord, I think you'll find I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be."

She felt his anger flare, but it still didn't reach the surface. He seemed to be too busy inspecting their surroundings. The level of his control surprised her slightly.

"Interesting," he said at length. "For some reason, I'd assumed the chamber in the flagship would be unique."

"That would be rather a major vulnerability, don't you think?" she responded neutrally. "Take out the flagship, and the entire fleet is crippled. No, any one of the vessels can act as the command ship if required."

"How very sensible."

Her gaze moved past Malefic's shoulder to the figure trailing nervously behind. Bortha. First name Vorsk. Captain of the Excelsior, her memory supplied. Competent enough, supposedly, though he'd never made much of an impression on her the couple of previous occasions on which they'd met. He was, she sensed, absolutely terrified.

Calmly she reached out to him through the Force and froze him securely in position. A random, unpredictable element right now would not be a good thing.

"Now that wasn't very polite, was it?" Malefic's voice was altogether less mild this time. He started walking towards her, beside the cradle, apparently entirely unaware that he did so because she wished it.

"My Lord?" She feigned incomprehension.

"Release the good Admiral, my apprentice. Then be so good as to apologise to him."

"The Admiral, my Lord?"

"A recent promotion. I'm sure that you'll be wanting to extend your congratulations to him." She could feel the Force flowing around Darth Malefic in a vast and angry maelstrom. The crown's crystal spikes were glowing brighter and brighter with each step that he took towards her.

Morrigance inclined her head in Bortha's direction. "My congratulations, Admiral Bortha. I do hope you are enjoying the fruits of your labours?"

The fear emanating from the paralysed figure, if anything, seemed to have increased in intensity. At least he had a sense of realism, she thought. Which was a lot more than could be a said for most Sith.

Malefic was standing less than two metres in front of her now, a looming monstrosity. She could clearly see the jagged rent in his armour – the now dried blood that surrounded it. She could also clearly sense the pain he was in. It fed the burning anger, and from what she could tell, fed the dark Force power flowing through him equally.

A dangerous game, testing the limits of control that the crown gave her like this, she acknowledged inwardly. If she had misjudged, then at this proximity it was very likely to prove fatal.

"I told you to release him."

"So you did," Calmly, and very blatantly, Morrigance turned her back on him. Reaching out with a black-gloved hand, she touched the metal casing of the cradle, causing the front of it to slide open. "Serebos."

The silence became so thick and heavy it was almost like a physical presence there with them. She could sense a note of confusion intermingling with Malefic's anger. Confusion as to why he was just standing there, doing absolutely nothing.

"That name no longer exists . . ." His voice rasped harshly.

"Yes, you changed it after Darth Malak staved your head in. Brain damage gave you an over active sense of melodrama, it seems."

"My apprentice . . ."

Morrigance raised a hand, and he shut up mid-sentence. She could sense his confusion growing exponentially, marked disquiet now puncturing the fury. "I find it interesting that even Darth Auza, who at least had the excuse of never having met me before, eventually had the wit to become suspicious of me. Even if it was far too late in the end. While you, who spent so many weeks instructing me on how to master a lightsaber at Revan's behest, never had a single moment of doubt."

She felt his shock. "Who are you?"

For a time, she didn't answer, seemingly inspecting the cradle in front of her. Finally, she turned back to him. Power vibrated through him, the crown a glowing beacon. She could feel that power straining for release, but it was not able to attain it. Hers absolutely. "Guess."

There was no response.

"No ideas? Well, while you think about it, perhaps you'd like to step forward, into there." She gestured towards the cradle.

He did as he was told. He was trying to resist, she sensed – the upper, conscious portions of his mind at least – but the crown had altered the underlying foundations profoundly, and he no longer remotely belonged to himself.

"I spent a long time, struggling to find a way to make use of this fleet." Her voice sounded contemplative – almost musing. "Revan never managed it. Even the fleet's creator never managed it. He didn't fully think through the implications of ships that were alive, you see. Alive and with a will."

She could feel Malefic's hate as he gazed down at her. Calmly, she reached up and around his head, fingers deftly locating the catches on either side of his helmet before springing them and lifting the faceplate away.

"When a person joins with this fleet," she continued, "they become part of it irrevocably. And the fleet becomes a part of them, forevermore inseparable. Control becomes a two way process, and the will of these ships is strong indeed. I have to say I almost kicked myself when I remembered Drochmar's crown; the answer staring me in the face for all that time."

His eyes – if he could make it so, she knew that she would now be suffering all the agonies he was capable of imagining. The patterns of ever-shifting colour on his skin crawled even more frantically than normal, the colour red predominating.

"The crown through which an apprentice once gained control over her master. Now again. And when the master becomes part of the fleet, and the fleet becomes part of him . . ." She left the inference hanging. The cradle clicked softly closed around Malefic's titanic frame.

"Beware of apprentices bearing gifts, my Lord. We are Sith, and all is treachery in the end."

The mass of cables and filaments surrounding Malefic began to stir.

---

Continued thanks to Jedi Boadicea for beta reading. And continued thanks for the wonderfully in depth feedback from all my regular reviewers :). I appreciate it so much.

Feza, I've watched the last couple of seasons of Babylon 5, though didn't really get heavily into it before that. I think my inspiration for the living ships and joining with them probably came more from Farscape though. You should see some more Carth next chapter.