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.

15. Caught

15. Caught

There was someone sitting in the chair in the corner of the room.

Carth blinked slowly. He probably should have been more surprised than he was. It just seemed inevitable though. Of course someone was sitting in the corner of the room. Why not?

She stood up. Only a she could manage to stand up in quite that way.

"Carth," she said softly, stepping forward, the shadows dropping back and releasing her from their grasp.

"Bliss," he responded. Again, the only surprise was the absence of surprise. Why shouldn't she be here, sitting in the corner? Ah, yes . . . "You're dead."

The Twi'lek woman smiled. It was a sad smile. She looked pale, the rich and vivid yellow of her skin leached away to white by the half-light. For some reason she was dressed exactly like the first time he'd seen her: Sindra – svelte and slinky; walking mantrap. He could smell her perfume. A slim, elegant hand trailed its fingertips along the wall. "I've heard that the Jedi say there is no death."

That part of the Jedi Code that had always bothered Carth. If there was no death, then you could justify almost any action. No price would be too high.

He sat up, the bed sheets pooling around his waist.

Bed. Suddenly his teeth were set on edge. Bed was bad. He couldn't quite remember why, but he knew it to be the truth. Unfortunately, he didn't appear to be wearing anything except for a pressure bandage on one side of his torso, just above the hip. He struggled to concentrate on what was in front of him. "Sometimes, I've found, the Jedi can talk a complete load of bantha crap."

She stepped closer. The perfume grew stronger, almost an entity in its own right. "And sometimes, now and again, they actually say something that's worth listening to. It's how it is with most people."

Carth grimaced, rubbing at his eyes. The sense of unease was growing, not fading. "Look, no offence, Bliss. After my wife . . . after my wife died, for more than a year, I used to talk to her. Whole, long conversations. There came a point when she started answering back, just as clear as this conversation we're having now. A point where the real world stopped seeming so . . . vital, and I came close to . . ." He stopped, shaking his head. Something was just utterly wrong with this picture . . . Frowning, he fixed her gaze with his. "What I'm saying is, for all that I did like you, I just don't think we really got to know each other well enough to commit to that same kind of after-death relationship."

She smiled that sad smile again. "Yes, a few hours spent fleeing for our lives together is hardly a basis for any kind of longer term commitment, is it?" Her expression hardened. "Get over yourself for a moment here, Carth."

"Get over myself? Hey lady, I'm not the one who's coming unannounced into your bedroom while you're sleeping . . ."

Sleeping? Was that what he'd been doing? Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad . . .

Her head tails quivered in momentary amusement. When she spoke again, her voice was pure Sindra. "So let the sheets drop a little lower, fleet boy. Let's see how you measure up."

He felt himself flushing. "Look, tell me what you want, or get lost."

"Tsk, and here I was taking all this trouble to come and see you. So ungrateful." Suddenly she was serious again. "I know you feel guilty about leaving me behind. I know that it troubles you when you think about it, and you think about it far too often." Her head tilted to one side, expression grave. "I thought it might help you to know that I'm all right. That I made it through safely, in the end."

He found himself staring at her. "Let me get this straight, Bliss. You call dying, making it through safely?"

After a moment's pause, she shrugged. One hand rested on her hip. "I suppose that, like in so much of life, how you view things depends on where you're standing."

"There is such a thing as taking looking on the bright side too far, you know that?"

Bliss sighed. "I knew you were going to make this difficult, Carth. You're not one to take the easy way, are you? Paranoid pilots . . ." She shook her head. "But I hope there can be an end to this. You made the right choice, and what happened isn't anyone's fault. I have no cause to regret it, and you shouldn't either."

Then why do you look so sad when you say that, he thought. Carth kept he his mouth shut on the words though.

"There's another reason you came here, isn't there?" He said after a further pause. Suddenly he was cold, gooseflesh forming on his bare chest. There was something about the situation that he should know. Not something that he'd forgotten precisely. More something he was shying away from thinking.

At length, she nodded, lips compressed. He thought then that she looked pained – fearful behind her eyes. "I . . . I want you to try and listen carefully and hear what's being said. To keep an open mind and . . . put aside your instinctive prejudices."

"What's that supposed to mean? What are you talking about, Bliss?"

But she was drifting. Walking away . . .. No, not walking away, more dwindling. The shadows that she'd emerged from seemed to be calling her back to them. When he blinked, she was gone entirely.

He could feel his heart thudding, his mouth uncomfortably dry. There was something else . . . someone else.

"Hello Carth." The voice came from the opposite corner of the room, smooth and mellow with a deeply resonant timbre.

He groped for his gun. It wasn't in any of the usual places: beneath the pillow; on the bedside table; on the floor under the bed.

Of course not, you're asleep.

"I thought we should try to be civilised about this," the voice continued smoothly. "I have to apologise. The lack of civility between us up to now has been entirely my fault. When you work for the Sith, you get locked into a certain way of doing things – a certain mindset – and it becomes difficult to break free from it. Not that that's an excuse. I just hope you'll understand."

Carth turned and stared at the man.

The face was familiar – dark, handsome, a dazzlingly white smile, neatly razored lines of facial hair. He'd seen that face leaning over him on a bridge in Calius saj Leeloo. The rest – the clothing, stylishly rumpled like a playboy-gambler just retired from a long evening on the casino floor – couldn't have been more different. Even the aura – the shadowy, ill-defined sense of dread – seemed to be reigned in, although it was still present; a faint, bitter aftertaste hanging on the air.

"You're the Catcher." His throat felt dry.

The dazzling smile broadened. "That is how I have become known professionally." He walked across the room, lithely padding, full of coiled power, and sat down in the chair Bliss had vacated. The shadows there seemed a living part of him. "You can call me Naemon if you'd prefer."

"What do you want?"

"Me? Oh, I just want to talk. Surely two grown men are capable of having a conversation without, say . . . trying to kill each other?"

His smile was unwavering. Carth felt an almost overwhelmingly strong urge to try to stave it in. The fear was suddenly equally strong though. "I meant, what do you want with me?" He struggled to pull back – to wake up – but everything around him remained resolutely solid and constant.

The Catcher didn't answer right away. He tilted his head, seemingly contemplating something only he could see. "I am, above everything else, a collector."

"Funny. From what I've seen, I'd have said psychotic killer."

There was no direct response. He steepled his hands together, fingertips touching his lips. "I started collecting twenty years ago. In the dark place, when I was just a boy. I had a talent that none of the others did, though at the time I didn't know that on anything other than an instinctive level."

"You're talking about Adrapos. The plague ships."

The Catcher's eyes focused on Carth's face. Not surprised. Not angry. Not anything that seemed a human emotion. "You've done your homework, I see. As have I."

Carth felt something inside him clench. He tried to judge the distance to the door – how long it would take him to get out of the room if he couldn't wake up. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"Just that I have made it my business to know your business. As I do with all my . . . targets."

"And I'm your target?" Carth's teeth set on edge. "You're an assassin, and you want me dead."

The Catcher tutted, seemingly exasperated that Carth didn't get it. "Today I am not an assassin. One is not totally defined by one's job, is one? You are certainly more than just a pilot, after all. Like I said, above everything else, I am a collector."

"I heard the first time. So what do you 'collect'?" Carth fell silent for a couple of beats, understanding dawning. "Wait a minute. You want to collect me?"

The Catcher smiled – a slightly condescending schoolmaster whose slowest pupil has finally caught on. After a moment, the look on his face became strange: almost wistful. "When everyone around me began to die, I tried to save them. I tried so very hard. Of course, I failed, because death is not something that can, or should, be avoided. All I ended up achieving was to prolong the suffering of those I tried to help – made the agony so much worse by drawing it out. Eventually, I realised this. It wasn't a pleasant realisation for me. Finding out that all your good intentions count for nothing, never is, especially when you are just a child trying to help. But it was a necessary realisation."

Carth said nothing. One hand was clenched so tightly that it was sending spasms of pain shooting up his arm. He still didn't wake up though. His surroundings remained unchangeably real.

The Catcher continued, regardless. "After my realisation, I contented myself with easing the others' pain; shepherding them on their way to what lies beyond, and making that transition less frightening."

"You mean, you started killing them."

He snorted. "No. We were all dying. All starving in the darkness. I didn't kill anyone. I simply . . . made the transition easier."

"Right."

"Believe or not, Carth. It changes nothing." He smiled then, the expression disturbing in its intensity. "As more and more of those around me died – companions and acquaintances, then friends and family – I came to realise that, eventually, I was going to be left alone." He shrugged. Something flickered across his face, gone too quickly to read. "I feel no shame in admitting that the prospect scared me. I was eight years old. So when my closest friend was near to passing, I offered to keep him here." He touched the centre of his forehead. "With me. My friend accepted. He was but the first of many. The start of my collection."

Carth stared at him numbly, struggling to digest the meaning of those words.

"There are more than a thousand of us now. A thousand different voices. Immortality of a sort, experiences and foibles preserved instead of being subsumed and lost in the vast, uncaring ocean."

"Bliss . . ." The implications of the earlier visitation sank in. "You utter bastard. You utter . . . Let her go."

"I'm afraid that's impossible, Carth. Even should I want to." He looked almost sad. "She is finding the transition difficult though. She continues to resist, and makes herself suffer in doing so. She is lonely I think. Usually I ensure that those I collect have company, to ease the process of integration, but alas, with her that has thus far proved impossible. When you join us, I think it might help her."

Carth lunged at him.

The Catcher simply gestured calmly.

Suddenly the air around Carth solidified, holding him fast, unable to move a muscle no matter how hard he strained. He felt sweat trickling down the side of his face. His yes bored furiously – and impotently – into the Catcher's face.

"Now, I thought we were trying to be civilized," he chided gently.

"I swear to you, once I wake up from this, I'm going to expend every single ounce of my energy in tracking you down. Then I'm going to kill you."

The Catcher stood up, padding smoothly across the room. Carth's eyes moved to follow, though he couldn't twist his neck around by so much as a millimetre.

The Catcher chuckled. "Well, I wish you luck with that. Really, I do."

Standing in the very periphery of Carth's vision, he bent down and picked something up. It was a towel. For the first time Carth properly took in his surroundings, and the fact they were totally unfamiliar. An upscale hotel perhaps, or even a luxury cabin on a cruise liner. He had no memory of how he had got there, or if he was even there. It could just be a product of his dream state. His memories . . . the last thing he could consciously recall, was going with Yolanda to meet one of her contacts in order to arrange safe passage away from Fondor.

The Catcher walked back into the centre of Carth's field of view. He displayed the towel. In the bottom corner, it had a little embroidered logo, part of which was a stylised sun. "The Sunrider. Interesting. I'm sure we'll meet again in person soon enough, and you'll get the chance to try to put your rather silly little threat into practise."

Carth glowered at him – said nothing.

"But ask yourself something, Carth. How much, truly, do you value this life you currently have?" That smile again, dazzlingly bright. "When was the last time you were really happy and at peace with yourself? You've had your vengeance. You've found your son. Yes, I know about your son – a profoundly troubled young man, I think we'll both agree. Maybe I can do something to help him. What do you think?" The smile faded. "Yet still, you can't find rest, or the slightest shred of joy. You fight for your Republic still, going through the motions, but you no longer belong to it in any meaningful way. Your life is reduced to serving the man who, ultimately, bears responsibility for the ravaging of your homeworld, because he is the best hope for the future you can see. Is the change I offer really so bad in comparison to all of that?"

After several beats, Carth swore at him. Venomously and at length. Futile, but the best he could manage in the circumstances. He could feel his heart thumping. The terror when he had mentioned Dustil . . .

"Think about it. Really. Properly. Look beyond the lies and rationalisations and self-deceptions. Like I said, I'll see you soon." Then he turned and walked out of the room.

Left alone, Carth wasn't sure how long he remained paralysed. Subjectively, it seemed an entire age where all he could do was silently seethe.

All through it, he struggled to wake up, but his surroundings remained constant and there was no noticeable transition between states of consciousness. Eventually, he was forced to conclude that he was already awake.

- - -

"They've gone. We're all alone. Marooned forevermore." There was a dry, cynical chuckle. "If we starve to death, I wonder if our ghosts will remain trapped here, haunting this ship for all the aeons of the future?"

Canderous tore his gaze away from the viewport – the endless expanse of black void surrounding the Rakatan flagship, now very noticeably devoid of any other ships. At what point they'd left he wasn't entirely sure. It could have been anytime during the last twelve hours.

His right arm started to come up awkwardly, then stopped in the belated realisation that, below the elbow, it simply wasn't there. He'd heard comrades from the Mandalorian wars talking about missing limbs as phantom presences – of them itching maddeningly, impossible to scratch. As of yet, he hadn't noticed that, but his brain hadn't adjusted at all to the fact that the limb was absent. He kept trying to use it, and being brought up short.

"If you want, I can hurry things along," he said eventually. "Give you the chance to find out without going to all the time and trouble of starving." His voice was quiet, edged in durasteel.

"One-handed, granddad?" Eichor Kreig, the man's name was, and he was dressed in the red armour of an elite Sith trooper, minus the helmet. His face had been handsome once, but the mess of swellings and half-healed lacerations did a very good job of disguising that. "Like to see you try."

There was no pause. Canderous's left hand came up before Eichor had a chance to breathe out, let alone move, grabbing him by the throat and swinging him round, then slamming him back against the viewport hard enough to make his teeth rattle. "Would you now?"

Eichor tried, and conspicuously failed to smirk as Canderous eyeballed him. "Hey, ease up big man. I'm only kidding with ya. Didn't mean anything by it."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah." There was a faint glimmer of desperation Eichor's dingy-blue eyes.

Canderous headbutted Eichor in the face. The Sith went down like a collapsing sack. "Just to show there's no hard feelings."

Abruptly, he wheeled away, face like a clenched fist, leaving Eichor gulping for air as blood bubbled copiously from a newly opened gash in his forehead. As he walked, he could feel his teeth grinding.

Left to himself, he would have killed Eichor while he still lay unconscious. A simple blaster shot to the back of the head; clean and quick. It wasn't that he had anything much against rank and file Sith troopers, anymore than he had anything personal against the average Republic soldier. Soldiers, by and large, were just that – surprisingly similar, no matter what banner they fought under. And he'd long ago given up taking people trying to kill him personally.

A Mandalorian, though, did not leave an enemy alive behind him where there was even a possibility that he might end up fighting them again. It was ingrained. You removed complications, no questions asked.

Bastila, of course, had had other ideas, for all the fact that she could barely even heal herself. He could have simply ignored her, but he hadn't.

Aside from Eichor and themselves, there were four other survivors. One was another Sith, who'd lost his foot and the lower portion of his leg, and now slipped repeatedly in and out of consciousness, muttering deliriously about the walls watching him. The other three were Republic, although only one of those – Horn – even qualified as walking wounded. Canderous had been involved in enough battlefield triage to know that the other two were as good as dead. It was simply a matter of how long they lasted.

He was heading towards Bastila, he realised after a minute or so. It hadn't been a conscious choice, and that disturbed him slightly. He dealt in matters of being in control.

But his head felt . . . cloudy, thoughts obfuscated, his balance slightly off. Inwardly he acknowledged that he hadn't properly recovered from the loss of his arm, despite both implant and kolto treatment, and what he'd done to Eichor had been at least three-fifths show. If the man had tried to fight back, he could have ended up in serious trouble.

Frak that.

She'd left word that she didn't want to be disturbed under any circumstances. After about a microsecond's consideration, he decided to frak that too.

As he walked, he quickly found himself becoming short of breath, the minor balance problem blossoming into full-blown dizziness. His teeth ground together so hard he could hear them squeaking.

It was something he'd been noticing more and more. Although he was still just about as physically strong as he'd ever been, he found himself picking up injuries far more regularly. Even with his implant, those injuries took longer and longer to fully heal. Little niggles he'd once have shrugged off in no time at all, now bothered him for days on end, and he couldn't escape the certainty that his reflexes weren't as sharp as they'd been even a year ago. At night, he felt deep-seated aching in his joints that he could no longer pass off as phantoms of his imagination.

Somehow, he'd never expected that he'd have to face old age. It wasn't that he'd imagined himself to be immortal. Just that there'd never been a stage of his life where it was possible to envisage lasting this long.

Not that you're going to have to worry about it much longer if you keep this up. He grinned savagely, as much in anger as humour.

It wasn't just the physical that had changed. The physical had changed least of all, in many respects. His gaze dropped involuntary to his missing arm. The bandaged stump of it.

It hadn't even been a conscious choice. Looking back, he knew he could have killed Malefic then. But instead, he'd saved Bastila's life. Purely instinctual. He couldn't even argue with himself about his reasons, because there hadn't been any hint of reason in that moment.

And now there was the stump. A permanent reminder of what he was, and what he wasn't anymore.

A low growl escaped his throat. Growing soft and senile, as well as decrepit?

Another door opened automatically in front him, and suddenly he was walking in the vast cathedral-like space of the ship's heart. He sneered at his own unease as he walked through the clinging gloom, footsteps echoing.

Ahead of him, seated cross-legged in a circle of dim light, Bastila looked tiny and insignificant amid the surrounding vastness. Her makeshift crutch lay on the ground beside her, the leg wound she'd received too severe to mend outside of a prolonged healing trance she hadn't yet found time for. She didn't look round at his approach. Her posture reminded him of when she was deep within a Battle Meditation trance.

In front of her, gleaming softly, was the metal cage. The one in which they'd found the Dark Jedi's corpse, resembling a nerf hock that been roasted at too high a temperature – crispy black and cracked on the outside; raw and angry pink within. Patterns of light played around that cage, steadily shifting, and Canderous knew that she must be calling on the Force, for all the fact he couldn't feel it.

He stopped a few paces behind her, on the boundary of the circle of light surrounding her. It came from a hand-lamp resting on the floor next to her. She still didn't give any sign that she was aware of him. The sound of her breathing was soft and rhythmic, similar to someone sleeping. Up close she looked different, her hair cropped down to no more than a couple of inches all over in a rather brutal attempt to tidy it up after its close encounter with Darth Malefic's lightsaber.

After waiting for a while, he fumbled awkwardly at a compartment in his armour with his left hand. Eventually he produced a silver plated cigar case. Opening the case one-handed was another minor struggle, while extracting cigar, clamping it between his teeth, and stowing the case again turned it into something akin to a piece of performance art. Lighting it was a similar ordeal, and he almost gave up halfway through in disgust. Eventually though, he was inhaling deeply, letting out a long, contented sigh as the smoke filled his lungs.

"What do you want?" Bastila's voice still sounded odd, thick and blurred as though he was listening to it through a wall. It was more coherent than earlier, at least. Perhaps, he reflected, annoyance helped overcome pain.

"The pleasure of your company, Princess? No, I don't think even you're gullible enough to fall for that one. Something came up that I thought you needed to know about."

"If it's about the wormhole closing, I already felt it."

That was a new bit of information. He stood watching as she laboriously levered herself upright, not offering to help and taking another long pull on the cigar. "You felt all the other ships leaving too, I presume then?"

She looked round at him sharply. "All of them?"

"Looks that way."

Her expression was flat; closed. Thinking through implications, he decided.

"I'm guessing this means that not only did our red friend survive, he's still near enough to full working order," he added after several seconds had passed. Despite having a sword driven right through him. How the hell anyone had managed to shift a couple of hundred capital ships so quickly was something he was avoiding thinking about for the moment. One complication at a time.

"Perhaps," was her terse response. Her eyes were looking in his approximate direction, but he could tell she wasn't really seeing him.

He grunted. "That Sith bastard, Kreig, is worried we might be stranded. Much as I'd take satisfaction from informing him that we are, it would probably qualify as a rather fleeting and pyrrhic pleasure."

She looked at him blankly.

"Okay, since your head injury is obviously still affecting you, I'll rephrase that as a question. You do know how to re-open the wormhole, don't you? It's part of the knowledge the vision well gave you, right?"

There was a pause. "I know how to open it from the outside."

Canderous looked at her askance. "And you have reason to think opening it from the inside will be different?"

"Quite frankly, I have no idea."

"Then it's not worth worrying about, is it Princess?" He exhaled a cloud of smoke, drawing a grimace from her.

"So, what's the special occasion this time?" she demanded.

"Hmm?"

"That thing. You said you only smoked them on special occasions."

He shrugged. "Look around you. This kind of crap happens to you every day, does it? An occasion doesn't have to be good to be special."

Her eyes narrowed. "That's so utterly idiotic it almost manages to be profound."

"I'll take that as a compliment."

She snorted. "It wasn't one."

"But, you know, I think I'm still going to take it as one anyway."

Bastila let out an exasperated breath, and turned – rather laboriously – away from him again. She seemed to be staring at the metal cage. "The wormhole being closed is the least of our problems."

Canderous waited for her to go on. She didn't. "Well? I'm not a fraking mind reader."

Something else definitely had her attention occupied. Her mind scarcely seemed present in the room with him at all. "If we want to get out of here, we need to get this ship up and running," she said finally.

As a parting gift, Darth Malefic had destroyed their shuttle, and to a larger extent, the entire docking bay that surrounded it.

Canderous grunted. "Bit drastic, don't you think, Princess? Just in case you were forgetting, there are four of us still vaguely capable of crewing this heap. We'd be better off stealing one of its shuttles, surely."

"It won't let us take any of its shuttles. Or its fighters, or its gunboats, or anything else for that matter." There was a sharp, brittle edge to her voice as she spoke. Something that he'd come to know meant she was afraid.

"Won't let us?" he queried.

"It's alive," she said heavily. "That's how Malefic is going to use this fleet. That's how he was able to fly all of the ships out of here so quickly. We don't even need four people to get this ship up and running. We just need one person who's willing to join themselves to it. One person who's strong in the Force." She pointed towards the metal cage.

He digested this slowly. "So," he said eventually. "You want to step into a device whose last occupant ended up looking like an overdone nerfburger, and join yourself to something that you say is alive, and incidentally, somewhere around thirty thousand years old. Is that about the size of it? 'Cos yeah, that sounds entirely sensible to me." He flicked ash from the tip of his cigar.

A visible shudder passed up the length of her spine. "Would you shut up please, Canderous?"

After a time a time, standing there in silence, looking at the cage together, he asked, "You were talking to it, weren't you? The ship I mean."

She nodded, so abrupt it was almost invisible.

"It say how the poor bastard ended up in that state?"

One of those areas he was supposed to shut up about, he sensed immediately. Tough.

Another shudder passed through her. "He tried to disconnect. Break the link."

His mouth twisted. "So the ship charbroiled him? Bit on the drastic side, don't you think? Being stuck out here for 30,000 years is going to have an effect on your sanity I'm sure – you'd get slightly lonely I'd imagine – but a bit drastic all the same."

She sighed. "The ship didn't do it. Not deliberately, at least."

"As accidents go it's a pretty damned impressive one." He was unwilling to let it drop, no matter how much she wanted him to.

Her hesitation was obvious. "If a person joins with the ship, it's . . . permanent. From what I've been able to gather, person and ship become, effectively, a single entity fused together by the Force. They can no more separate from each other again, than a person can . . ."

"Shed a limb?" he suggested dryly.

"Shed your consciousness. Your entire being," she corrected.

"Well, that just about settles it then." His response was cheerfully grim. "We go and steal that shuttle, like I said earlier."

Bastila looked round at him again. There was a mixture of fear and frustration in her eyes. "It won't bloody let us, damn it! Weren't you listening to what I said earlier?"

"Where, exactly, did I propose asking for permission? Besides, I may not have Revan's way with other people, but when I set my mind to something I think you'll find I can be pretty damned persuasive."

- - -

"You can stop pretending to be unconscious if you like. I'm sure it must be getting slightly wearing by now."

There was no response. Tamar hadn't, in all honesty, expected that there would be one.

The man's name, according the ID scrip he'd been carrying, was Arathor Dann. After removing his breath mask, Tamar had discovered that – just like the escaped sniper – he was a Miraluka.

The Miraluka were a near-human, inherently Force-sensitive race who'd migrated to the world of Alphredies in the Abron system thousands of years in the past. The sun of the Abron system was a murky red-dwarf, the scant light it gave off primarily in the infra-red end of the spectrum, and gradually, the Miraluka had lost the ability process visible light, simultaneously evolving the ability to see via the Force in compensation.

Right now, he lay strapped securely to a couch in front of Tamar, a disruptor collar – currently switched off – around his throat. The cell they both occupied was located in one of the more dismal sections of the Rancorous's vast belly.

"My apologies if your jaw's starting to hurt," Tamar continued after a short while. "That'll be the painkillers wearing off. Did you know that a couple of your molars had been hollowed out? Someone had filled them with a fast-acting neurotoxin." He made a tutting noise. "Very dangerous. You could have had an extremely nasty accident. Not to worry though. All taken care of now. My dentistry skills are a little crude, unfortunately, but I'm sure they'll improve with practice." A pause. "You don't have to thank me."

Again, no response.

"When I say you don't have to thank me . . ."

"You're Revan." Arathor's voice was dry; cracked. He hadn't moved, and with no obvious outward change – like opening eyes, for instance – it was slightly startling.

Tamar nodded. "That's right. Out of interest, were you expecting me on Nawathwai, or was your decision to have me killed just a spur of the moment type of thing?"

Arathor started to chuckle, but it degenerated rapidly into strangled coughing. "If we'd been expecting the great and terrible Darth Revan, don't you think we would have come a little better prepared than we did?" he eventually managed.

"Maybe you just have a lot of confidence in your own abilities?"

The only answer was silence.

"So Hulas then. What has our fine and upstanding Rodian friend gone and done to get himself targeted for assassination?"

"I just do my job. I don't speculate. I don't ask questions." He sounded contemptuous. "I thought you'd know how these things work. I didn't think you, of all people, would be so naïve."

Tamar simply smiled. "Naivety can have a certain charm, don't you think? So tell me, is this all some kind of petty little Genoharadan internal squabble I've blundered into?"

"Genoharadan?" The Miraluka snorted after a noticeable pause. "You might enjoy fairytales, Revan. I do not."

The smile broadened as he continued to stare at Arathor. A denial, but a denial phrased in such a way that he was meant to take it as an implicit admission, and be sidetracked down a dead-end alley of questioning. "No? Sometimes I do find them quite . . . amusing. How is Morrigance, by the way?"

The complete lack of reaction was telling. For all the previous questions, there had been tiny flickers – nothing that he could read meaning from, just the near-undetectable stirring of the Miraluka's brain as it processed information. Here though, there was absolutely nothing. Not even the most miniscule response. Which meant something was being deliberately hidden – deliberately shielded from view.

"I already told you. I am not part of some phantom cabal that exists only in the fever dreams of conspiracy theorists. I'm just a man doing a job."

Tamar sat back; contemplative. When he spoke again, his voice was arctic cold. "There are many different ways we can approach this, Arathor. We'll stick with Arathor, shall we? Or is there something else you might prefer?" The near imperceptible flicker of the man's thoughts at the edges of his straining Force sense was back. "No? So shall we have this nice, pleasant conversation, or shall we try something different?"

Arathor just snorted contemptuously. "I don't know how much you know about a Miraluka's sight, Revan. But I can tell you now, just from looking at you. You won't torture me. You don't have it in you, whatever you once were."

"Who said anything about torture?" Tamar inquired calmly. "Idiotic interrogatory technique, really, don't you think? Unless your only goal is to get a person to tell you the lies you want to hear."

"Then what are we talking about, exactly, Revan? Maybe I'm just too slow to keep up with your towering intellect."

"I thought we were discussing the health of a mutual friend."

Silence. Again, Tamar could sense absolutely nothing from Arathor.

So be it then.

Inwardly, he steadied himself, locating a calm, almost icy place where no emotion dwelt. So easy, to use a particular interpretation of the Jedi Code and do such terrible things. So easy now to see the way it might have started out, and so easy to repeat it. He steeled himself – emptied his thoughts of doubt.

With luck, Arathor would be able to see the transition in him. That might make it easier. Although, as Arathor had implied, his knowledge of a Miraluka's Force sight – its scope and limitations – was imperfect, to say the least.

This time he probed more insistently at the Miraluka's mind, pushing at the hard, glassy wall of his mental defences until the recipient couldn't fail to notice. He saw Arathor flinch just fractionally as he tightened his grip even further, pressing relentlessly.

So easy, if you didn't let yourself feel. "I'm told that the Force can do terrible things to a person's mind." Tamar's voice was conversational.

Arathor had started to sweat now, though his mental defences remained solid. Tamar continued to press, ramping up the pressure inexorably. It had to be convincing. That was what he told himself.

"So they say." The Miraluka's voice came out as a croak.

Much harder and the defences would shatter. He could feel them stretching towards their limits, no match for his strength. Strength he usually preferred not to acknowledge.

And then, taking him completely unawares, something stirred from deep in the recesses of Tamar's mind – the same broken, disconnected and fragmentary places where he kept his knowledge of battle-tactics and the intricacies of Mandalorian culture. It was . . . recognition. The taste of familiarity.

Those mental defences might shatter and fragment, but they would take the rest of the Miraluka's mind with them. He could see that suddenly with perfect clarity. He could see other things too.

Tamar struggled hard to keep the surprise from showing – from shining forth to the Miraluka's Force sight. How successful he was, he had no idea.

His communicator chose that moment to beep. With an exhalation, relief as much as anything, he released his grip on Arathor's consciousness, and opened the comm. link, listening to what was being said.

After a moment, he frowned. In the background, he could hear Arathor panting raggedly.

From somewhere in the distance there was a low rumbling noise, transmitting itself through the Rancorous's hull and making the cell walls vibrate.

An explosion.

Tamar cut the communication link abruptly and stood up, expression grim. He strode rapidly from the cell.

- - -

The modified fighter made the leap to hyperspace, leaving the Living Fleet behind it, cutting silently through space – a vast and unstoppable school of firaxa sharks moving unstoppably towards a feeding ground.

Morrigance would not, in ordinary circumstances, have chosen to part from the fleet so soon, but the message that had arrived had been of a nature that it was impossible to ignore. Events on Coruscant demanded her attention, and they demanded that attention now.

She told herself that her control was not a factor of distance, and that she had never planned to take the role of fleet commander. That had never been where her talents lay. Nevertheless, a lingering spectre of disquiet remained at the timing.

She reminded herself that, while she had planned for other tests, the Republic expeditionary force had been dispatched handily enough, with no major damage sustained. The fleet itself answered her command with alacrity – after devouring the offering she had presented to it in the form of Darth Malefic and the Crown of Drochmar, it was not in a position to do otherwise. And Admiral Bortha had already proved himself an able enough war leader and tactician, for all the fear that lived within him. He was perfectly competent to act as her surrogate as the next stage was brought into play.

Technically speaking.

Behind her featureless mirror mask, her teeth clenched, fixed in their grisly perma-grin. The level of her disquiet did not diminish.

It was a little like being a juggler, working at the very limits of her skill, with half a dozen different balls spinning constantly through the air. As soon as she dealt with one ball, her focus must transfer immediately on to the next, all the while keeping the overriding pattern firmly in mind.

A juggler in the theatre of the absurd.

After a slight pause, she leant forward and activated a console. The hyperspace journey would be a lengthy one, and she might as well use the time constructively. A list of submitted intelligence reports appeared, bright in the cockpit's gloom. She pulled up the first of them and began to read.

Korda Drace has, as anticipated, moved rapidly to assume control of Darth Auza's assets. The methods he has chosen to employ owe little to subtlety. On Ziost . . .

- - -

Bodies littered the Grand Terrace, the air filled with smoke and the sound of blaster fire. Between broad, towering stone pillars, Ziost's sky was a mass of lividly bruised cloud, rain falling in a drumming deluge.

A double file of elite Sith troopers advanced steadily, laying down a constant wall of blaster fire. Behind them came a cadre of half a dozen Dark Jedi, robed in grey and black, and at the centre of their ranks, a figure armoured all in black, ribbed and glittering. A red-bladed lightsaber glowed in one hand, the other wearing an armoured gauntlet so outsized as to appear almost comical. Beneath a polished metal skullcap, Drace's face was as livid as the clouds, the tattoos beneath his eyes almost seeming to shine, his copper-red beard garishly bright.

The Sith forces came to a halt before a flight of steps, leading up to a pair of immense metal doors. The troopers spread out in disciplined formation, Drace advancing through their number. At the foot of the steps he stopped, staring intently upwards.

After a moment, he lifted his gauntleted fist – pointed at the doors. There was a thin, high whining note, the air around the gauntlet suddenly crackling as a charge built up. That charge was unleashed abruptly – a dazzling flash that gave a fleeting impression of multiple tongues of red lightning, bright enough to perma-etch itself into an observer's retinas. The metal doors exploded inwards with a deafening clang.

A moment later Drace's Sith rushed in, more blaster fire greeting their advance.

- - -

Drace, however, does not stand unopposed. Jurriance, the Keeper, has also taken the bait dangled in front of him, and vies openly to assume Auza's vacated throne . . .

- - -

The silver levitation disk rose into view from the shadow of the altar, surrounded by translucent violet shields. Seated cross-legged in the centre of the disk, cradled by those protective barriers, was a man, robed in immaculate white. A ragged mane of hair the colour of bleached bone stood on end, floating in a strange corona around his head. Eyes as pale as Arkanian ice glared out from a deeply creased face that somehow managed not to appear old.

The man's arms outstretched, a smile spreading across bloodless lips as blaster fire flickered and dispersed off the shields surrounding him. Force lightning sprang from his hands in raging storms, strobing repeatedly, until the air itself seemed to become alive with it.

When the lightning finally faded again, the entire centre of the temple was a mess of the dead and dying, the reek of charred flesh so strong it was a near physical presence. Jurriance and the levitation disk floated imperiously forward, untouched above the carnage.

There was movement off to one side. Jurriance's gaze snapped round.

Drace stepped out from between two pillars. Before Jurriance could react, red energy exploded from Drace's clenched fist, slamming into the levitation disk and sending it careening wildly across the chamber.

Jurriance howled, incoherent rage. The rows of statues lining the temple's upper galleries suddenly began to glow with cold blue light.

A moment later pale Sith ghosts leapt forth, shrieking like demented banshees as they descended on Drace and the other Dark Jedi who had violated their sanctuary.

- - -

Other parties have taken a more circumspect approach, watching the contest between Drace and Jurriance with interest, waiting for an opportunity to take advantage . . .

- - -

The masked sniper watched the events playing out on the Grand Terrace from a hilltop more than a mile distant. An extended rifle with a telescopic scope trained a targeting laser onto a particular spot of ground as rain continued to pour down in thick sheets.

Once the sniper was happy that this spot really was the optimum one to generate the required effect, they pulled a secondary trigger, broadcasting the fact to a Sith dreadnaught that sat waiting in orbit.

It took about three seconds for there to be any response. Then a cataclysmically intense pillar of energy flashed down from the heavens, targeting the exact spot that the sniper had 'painted' with the laser.

At first, everything happened in a strange, almost stately silence. The ground around the impact zone rippled as if suddenly transformed to liquid. A moment later, a vast shockwave of superheated air rolled out in every direction. The towering pillars blew apart like matchsticks, the entire face of the terrace collapsing a fraction afterwards in a vast, slow motion landslide. Clouds of dust rose up, hundreds of metres into the air, the falling rain boiling away in thick columns of steam.

Only then, finally, did the sound arrive. Sensors in the sniper's helmet cut in to protect their hearing from a racket like the thunder from a thousand, thousand simultaneous lightning strikes.

After it had passed, the sniper calmly began to disassemble their rifle, then climbed onto a swoop bike and sped away.

- - -

Darth Malefic's continued absence from Sith space is also starting to cause questions. Free of the direct yoke of their master's influence, those who pledged allegiance to him are now manoeuvring with increasing vigour. Cardula Drin has gone as far as to declare herself Malefic's chosen proxy, and moves to assassinate those she sees as rivals in the name of loyalty to her Dark Lord . . .

- - -

Their mouths separated, the kiss breaking. Cardula's darkly gleaming red lips curved in a knowing smile, a sharp red-nailed fingertip trailing teasingly across the sculpted musculature of Morn Jereth's exposed chest. Then she turned away, snatching up a dark red robe and pulling it on over pale flesh drawn with swirls of delicate Sith tattoos. Coils of elegantly disarrayed brassy-blonde hair bounced around her shoulders.

Jereth remained standing fixedly in place, half-naked and completely motionless. After a couple of seconds, his face twisted and darkened in a scowl of rage. "Cardula! What have you done to me, you witch?"

She didn't look round and kept on walking, letting loose a dark and smoky laugh. "Done to you, Jereth, my dear? Only what you intended to do to me, as soon as you'd earned yourself another notch in your bedpost."

"Cardula!"

From behind Jereth came a soft splashing sound – something big, which up to now had remained hidden from his Force sense, slipping smoothly into the pool of stagnant, lily-covered water. Through the transparisteel roof panels of the arboretum, steaming jungle could be seen, spreading out in every direction as far as the eye could see.

A narrow, toothsome head emerged from the pool. And another. Four of them in total. Hssiss. Dark side dragons, as they were sometimes grandiosely referred to. They looked more like three-metre long crocodiles, wearing elaborate spine-covered fancy dress.

Sweat trickled down Jereth's almost unnaturally handsome face. Still he couldn't so much as twitch below the neck. "Damn it, Cardula! You've made your point. We can make a deal. An alliance . . ."

The four Hssiss emerged from the pool, water dripping from dark, scaly hide. Cardula had almost reached the exit now. One of the Hssiss brushed against Jereth's leg.

She heard his scream of terror as he realised what it was that had rubbed up against him, and what was about to happen. A pair of doors slid shut between them, muffling the sound as terror became something else, and the scream lost all coherence.

- - -

Those rivals, of course, are not standing idly by, seeking to elevate their own positions by whatever means is available to them. Again, for the moment, all is done in the name of their Dark Lord . . .

- - -

The jungle floor shook, ripples spreading out across the surface of a muddy pool. A roost of brightly coloured birds exploded from the treetops, cawing raucously and scattering across the cloudy evening sky.

Multiple sets of titanic, pounding footsteps came ever closer to the sheltered clearing and the ornate palace of mirror-polished plasteel and crystal that sat in the middle of it. The sound of undergrowth being crushed and torn up – of entire trees being splintered and knocked aside – grew ever closer. Automated gun turrets whirred into life as their perimeter was breached, laying down a heavy barrage of high-grade blaster fire. One by one, these turrets died, smashed to fragments by the unseen foe.

Finally, emerging from the jungle, eight towering metal figures hove into view. They had started out as demolition droids, each one standing over twenty metres tall. At some point, someone had converted them into enormous walking battle platforms.

Without pausing, they stepped forward and began to tear their way through the palace walls.

- - -

Morrigance looked up briefly from the report, staring out of the fighter's cockpit and into hyperspace. Some things at least, by their very nature, could be counted on to progress oh so predictably to plan.

- - -

Carth groped at the side of his neck, his fingers clumsy as they struggled to grip onto the tiny dart that protruded from his flesh. He was lying on his back. He assumed he was on his back, because he could see the ceiling. Hmm, ceilings didn't, in his experience, tend to sway like that.

Yolanda's voice came from what sounded like miles away. ". . . I assure you Ensign. I have the situation entirely under control . . ."

The ensign said something that was drowned out by the sound of blood rushing in Carth's ears. He finally managed to get blunt fingernails to grip into the dart's surface and managed to prise it free, even as the feeling started to absent itself from his extremities. His eyelids suddenly felt as if they had lead weights attached.

". . . I'm his nurse."

His nurse? Carth's thoughts, and the ensign's words, meshed surreally into one. It jolted him back, temporarily at least, from the yawning abyss of unconsciousness that sought to claim him.

". . . en route for a private clinic at Kamari . . ." Yolanda's words faded out in a mass of strange swooshing noises.

". . . not an ambulance service!" The ensign sounded indignant. Carth thought that he might be smiling, though not for any good reason. You tell her.

". . . harmless. He just suffers from delusionary episodes now and again . . ."

The ensign said something sharp that again yanked Carth back as he slid towards the edge of unconsciousness. In it was the word, Sith.

"Yes, his delusions are about Sith." There was a weary sigh. "They always have been, for the past twenty years or so, I'm told. The fact remains, in all that time, he has never once been violent or dangerous to . . ."

It took Carth a moment or two to process the fact that he was the person they were both talking about here. Hey, wait a bloody minute . . . He struggled to make himself move; to make a noise to attract their attention, but nothing was working or responding.

". . . still should have informed us in advance. We could have taken steps . . ."

"Do you have any idea who his father is?" Yolanda's voice was suddenly sharp. The name she mentioned meant nothing at all to Carth. ". . . the noted Fondorian industrialist? No? Well, he's kind of touchy about details of his son and sole heir's mental health getting out. Touchy enough to set bounty hunters after anyone who lets that kind of information get into the public domain, if you catch my drift . . ."

Her voice seemed to be dwindling, coming from further and further away. He couldn't see the ceiling anymore either, darkness clouding the edges of his vision. Bliss. The Catcher . . . The thought left him suddenly afraid, making him shy back from the clutching blackness.

"No I wasn't threatening you, ensign. I was simply stating . . ."

Barely audible at all now.

". . . yes, everything is perfectly under control now, thank you." A pause, Carth's ears full of strange distorting sounds. ". . . and yes, I assure you that no other passengers will be disturbed. He won't be allowed out of this cabin again until we arrive at Kamari . . ." Yolanda was still speaking, Carth could tell, but the words just weren't getting through to his brain.

He was aware of the doors closing. Then nothing.

There was a slight stinging sensation in the side of Carth's neck, followed by something cold enough to make him gasp convulsively flowing just beneath his skin. He blinked slowly, everything swimming and blurring in front of his eyes. A woman with collar-length blonde hair and eyes that were too green to be altogether natural was kneeling over him on the bed, holding a hypospray.

It took him several seconds to recognise Yolanda, different again from the last time he remembered seeing her. Every time different. She might almost be a shapeshifter, he mused. She was scowling heavily.

"What the hell do you think you're playing at, Valden? Have you taken total leave of your senses?"

All he could manage immediately was to blink stupidly a couple of times. He tried to speak, but his mouth just opened and produced a wordless exhalation.

"Did you get your espionage training from a Gamorrean correspondence course? 'Be good spy in one-two-lots easy steps'?"

Everything came back in a startling rush, the lethargy dropping away from him in a skittery confusion of near-panicked turmoil. Whatever had been in that hypospray certainly packed quite a kick. Carth's gaze settled on the tranq gun resting on the bed and his expression tightened abruptly. He moved quickly, grabbing hold of Yolanda and rolling her over onto her back before she could react, holding her wrists pinned above her head so she couldn't reach the gun again. There was a painful twinge from his bandaged side as he did so, his breathing coming heavily. He could still taste the Catcher's presence lingering in the room.

"What was I thinking?" It came out raw and harsh, quietly furious. "You're the one who booked passage on a luxury passenger liner. When we've got a damned Sith assassin on our heels." The conversation with the Catcher was playing over in his head. The conversation with Bliss . . .

For a moment, she struggled to break his grip, but Carth had purposefully trapped both her legs with his body, preventing her getting any leverage.

"So?" She stopped struggling, glaring daggers at him. "It was the best choice available with the notice I had. Do you think it was easy lugging your unconscious carcass around with me?"

The last thing Carth remembered before waking up on this bed, with the Catcher for company, was paying a visit to a 'trusted' contact of Yolanda's in order to arrange for passage off Fondor. Unfortunately, Carth seemed to have stirred up the local exchange cell with his treatment of their Verpine ally, and they'd been laying in wait for them there. A firefight had ensued. He'd taken a blaster shot the side at some point, and the rest was nothing more than an incoherent jumble of images.

He frowned. "You shot me in the neck." He could feel the spot where the dart had hit him, itching.

Yolanda looked up at him, calm now. "With a tranquiliser. To stop you getting us both thrown in the bloody brig, with all your babbling about the Sith being after us and having to turn the ship around."

Carth started to retort angrily again, but caught himself. He stared down at her, suddenly highly self-conscious about their respective positions. The fact he was holding her down on the bed with her wrists pinned above her head.

She seemed to read the discomfiture in his expression, and twisted in a way that wasn't quite an escape attempt. Her face lifted, whispering close to his ear. "Like it rough then, do you Valden?" Then she licked the side of his neck and made a noise that was disturbingly like a cat purring.

He let go of her and pushed away, moving across to the far side of the cabin with a haste that was almost unseemly. As Yolanda sat up, rubbing at the white marks his grip had left around her wrists, he ran a hand distractedly through his hair. "Look, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to . . ." he trailed off with a shake of his head.

"Don't worry about it." Her tone was neutral. She was looking at him critically. "You know, Valden, if you're going to dye your hair like that, you should think about getting your facial hair electrolysised. That stubble's a dead giveaway."

Carth didn't say anything to that. He wasn't even looking directly at her anymore. He was staring off into the corner of the room where Bliss had appeared. "The Catcher's found us again," he said at length, almost absently. "He's going to be laying in wait for us as soon as we make our next stopover."

"That's not possible." Yolanda was frowning.

"No?" Carth met her gaze fixedly. "He came to me earlier, in my . . ." He was going to say sleep, but caught himself. He still wasn't sure if he'd been awake during that or not.

"So?" She stood up. "You were kept fully sedated. You don't know where we're going. You don't know where we are. Even if your pet bogeyman did pay a visit, you couldn't have given anything crucial away. Because you didn't know anything."

Carth picked up the same towel the Catcher had earlier on, and slung it at her. "Look at the logo in the corner."

She did. "The Sunrider," she read. Then, "He saw this?"

"Saw it. Read it out loud. Took great delight in telling me what it meant."

Yolanda swore. She started pacing

"We have to get this ship stopped and on a different heading. Because you know he's not going to settle for just killing the pair of us when he catches up to us." There was no response, so he added: "So you see, my 'babbling about Sith' to the ship's crew wasn't completely without purpose."

"No. Just incompetently done," she muttered.

Carth shot her a sour look.

Yolanda swore again, her pacing picking up momentum. "Okay, so I really screwed up good there, didn't I? There's not a chance anyone's going to believe a word we say after the line of nerf-crap I've just finished pedalling."

He stared at her. Suspicions were suddenly blossoming, unbid, as he managed to make his thoughts move temporarily past his nighttime visitation. "Why didn't you just dump me on Fondor when you had the chance? You were looking to get away from me at the first opportunity. What changed that?"

Her expression turned flinty. "Let me get this straight. You'd have preferred me to have left you for Torval Heida and his mob?"

"No, I'm not saying that." Inwardly Carth cursed himself for not knowing when to keep his big mouth shut. He started to apologise, when something else clicked inside his head. "Wait. That conversation I overheard between you and your handler. You were given an order, and one you weren't too damn pleased about. You were ordered to stick with me, weren't you? Find out all you can. Don't let me out of your sight. That sort of thing."

"Force, you're an ass sometimes."

"I . . ."

Yolanda didn't let him get any further. "If this was back on . . ." she started, before clamming up tight almost immediately.

"Emberlene?" Carth offered.

The look in her eyes was enough to make him flinch. "If this was back on Emberlene," she bit out, "And if I still believed in any of the nerf-brained idiocy they like to peddle there, I'd be forced to kill you for that kind of slight to my honour."

Carth blinked, taken aback. "Look, I'm sorry if I've . . ."

"You saved my life on Berchest. You didn't abandon me. That placed me in your debt. And whatever you may think of me, that is something I take very seriously."

"Now wait just a minute. There's no kind of debt. Anyone else would have done the same."

Her lips twisted. "But you can't manage to apply that same logic back to me. I can't be repaying a debt I accrued. I can't be doing what 'anyone else' would have done in the circumstances. You can be pure and good in your motives, but no one else can. Is that the way it is?"

Carth swallowed – let out a breath. "I really am sorry. That wasn't what I meant. And . . . thank you for saving my life. I just . . ." He stopped himself, realising that foot and mouth were in strong danger of intersecting again. He really couldn't think straight at the moment. The Catcher kept drifting back. "Let's just leave it at thank you."

Yolanda's expression smoothed over near instantly. A tiny smile touched her lips. "So that's settled. Now. The Catcher then. Would you like to come and help sabotage a ship with me? I think we've got about three hours."

After a pause, Carth nodded, slightly hesitant. Part of him couldn't help but wonder if he'd just been conned somehow. Mostly, though, he was too distracted to care.

- - -

The bulkhead doors slammed shut, cutting off the storm of blaster fire. Canderous fell back against the wall, his breath coming raggedly. His personal shields had been torn to shreds, his heavy armour scorched black to go with the gouges Darth Malefic's lightsaber had inflicted. Sweat poured down his face, which was now somewhat light in the eyebrow department.

His gaze met Bastila's, who looked on wordlessly, her face pale and taut.

"Okay, so maybe it's not going to let us take a shuttle," he conceded between ragged pants. "Not easily."

Bastila just snorted, turned her back on him, and started to lurch away, ungainly but with a surprising turn of speed.

"I never should have let you distract me." She sounded quietly furious. "I've known all along exactly what I needed to do."

Pushing away from the wall, he forced himself to follow her. "Yeah? Mind explaining it me then? Us old Mandalorians can be a bit slow sometimes. It's all the war wounds, probably."

There was another louder snort. "Why didn't you kill Darth Malefic?" The cold edge of anger in her words took him by surprise with its sheer intensity.

It was several seconds before he replied. "Short answer, Princess? Because the bastard kicked my arse. Painful as it is to admit . . ."

"You know very well what I mean."

He shrugged. But he did indeed know exactly what she meant. He just didn't have any good answer, for either himself or for her. "Split second reaction. There wasn't any conscious decision involved." It was far easier if that was true. The problem was, it was sounding less and less true every time he said it to himself. "Next time I'll be sure to bear it in mind. Let the Sith Lord take your head off."

"What happened to the man who won the battle of Althir so ruthlessly? See an opening and take it. Isn't that the Mandalorian way? We needed that man against Malefic."

Canderous's grimace was uncomfortable. The coldness of her words needled him in ways he hadn't thought that she, of all people, could needle him. "People change. You Jedi believe that, right? You wouldn't spout that tedious 'no one is beyond redemption' crap otherwise. Blame Revan if you want someone to blame it on."

Yeah, right. He sneered inwardly.

"Revan would have killed the Sith Lord. No questions asked. Tamar would have done what you did."

"There's a difference, is there? Thought they were the same person."

"You know there's a difference."

Canderous shrugged again. "Okay then," he conceded with a grimace. "Blame Tamar for turning me into a weakling. Or blame yourself maybe. Whatever."

He heard the air whistling between her teeth. "Sometimes maybe we do need the Revans and the Mandalorians. Do you have any idea what this might cost the rest of the galaxy?"

"No, I don't." His voice was flat – steely. "And here's the thing. Neither do you. Malefic's being manipulated by someone else. We both know that. There's no telling that his death would have made any positive difference. And who's to say your Battle Meditation won't prove more beneficial to the rest of the galaxy, long term, than his death."

She laughed, the sound dark and edged in bitterness. "My Battle Meditation."

"Or even just you, Princess. What do you want? Blood?" Canderous felt his patience slip. "Look, you're alive. We have a list of fraking problems as long as . . . as long as your arm. So that's basically exactly the same as every other bloody day since forever. Stop complaining and get on with it."

"That's exactly what I'm doing."

With that, silence fell, except for the uneven dragging sound her limping footsteps made beside him.

"You still haven't told me what it is you intend to do. That is what I asked, before you bit my head off." Except of course, she had told him. Well enough that he knew the answer anyway.

"Before I bit your head off?" It was accompanied by a strangled laugh. In the brief sidelong glance she cast his way, her eyes looked positively haunted.

"I'm waiting," he pressed, as she still didn't say anything. Something about her right now was making him feel deeply uneasy on levels that he couldn't quite put into cogent thought.

She made a soft, unfathomable noise. "We don't just have to escape here. We have to stop the fleet too. Malefic's crown. The carnage he could inflict . . ."

"I was there. You don't need to explain it."

Bastila continued as if she hadn't heard. "This is the flagship. The strongest ship in the fleet. The strongest will, and the one that's meant to lead. I could feel its anger at being left behind."

Canderous just grunted. But he knew where this was going.

"With my Battle Meditation . . ." Something that was partly a laugh, but mainly something else. "Those words again. Perhaps, in the end, that's all I am meant to be?" A headshake, obviously annoyed with herself. "Maybe, just maybe, with that, I'll have the strength that's needed. If not the strength to take the fleet back from his control entirely, then perhaps enough to cripple it. To stop him using the fleet effectively for long enough that it can be defeated."

"You're going to join yourself to it, aren't you? Same way as that side of roasted meat."

She nodded once, emphatic. Outwardly emphatic. "I have to."

He opened his mouth then closed it again. "It scares you, doesn't it?" It wasn't remotely what he wanted to say, but it was what came out.

"Fear is an illusion," she murmured beneath her breath.

"I not asking some fraking Jedi," he snapped. "I'm asking you."

"It terrifies me," she answered finally, the words scarcely audible.

- - -

From somewhere close by came the sound of an explosion, accompanied by a sharp cry that cut off abruptly. The lights in the cell went out, the pervasive electric humming much more noticeable now for its complete absence. There was a burst of blaster fire, muffled through the walls, followed by garbled shouting, then running footsteps and finally silence, broken intermittently by the sound of something sparking.

Arathor Dann redoubled the flow of Force to his bonds, suspecting for the first time that there really was no one paying attention to him. That this wasn't all some kind of elaborate ruse meant to raise his hopes then shatter them, which had been his lingering suspicion ever since Revan had exited so hastily without even bothering to turn the disrupter collar on.

There were more running footsteps. Another explosion. Frag grenade in an enclosed space, he recognised from the familiar and distinctive sound. These noises were much further away though, and the only reason he could hear them with such clarity was because of the Force flowing through him, enhancing the acuity of his senses.

The first of the straps, holding him around the upper torso finally sprung loose. To begin with, he'd tried simply to enhance his strength and burst his way free of the restraints by brute force. That effort had failed abysmally though, leaving him with this slower and more painstaking method of getting loose.

Now that the first strap was gone, it became much easier. A minute or so of frantic wriggling and twisting and squirming allowed him to get an arm free. From that point onwards, it was simple.

Once on his feet, he unfastened the lifeless disrupter collar from around his neck and slung it into the corner. That left him with the cell door to deal with. It wobbled back and forth in the frame as he tried it, suggesting that it normally relied on a power lock to hold it secure. Even with that power supply gone though, it still put up a stubborn amount of resistance.

Eventually, Arathor was forced to give in and draw upon the Force again, acutely aware that if either Revan, or either of the other two extremely strong Force users he'd sensed on board, weren't fully distracted, he was running a big risk of giving himself away.

Metal gave way abruptly with an alarmingly loud shrieking wail, just before the flesh of his hands started to tear from the strain. The door slid back.

For a moment, he simply stood in place, listening intently. The entire cellblock seemed to be in utter darkness, so it wasn't just his own cell that had had the power cut off. Darkness to a Miraluka though, was not a handicap. He didn't require anything so mundane as light to see by.

Abruptly, he started forward.

He made it as far as the control station at the end of the cellblock without incident. The sounds of blaster fire and explosions were becoming more distant and less frequent, which meant he probably had to move fast to make the opportunity he'd been presented with count.

The control station was unlocked, and from the look of things, it had been the scene of an intense firefight. Consoles had been blasted apart and vast swathes of the walls were badly charred, indicating either a plasma grenade or a thermal detonator. There were a number of broken droid parts scattered across the floor, but no sign of bodies.

Arathor's attention alighted on a terminal. It was still on, its screen flickering and halfway obscured by some kind of liquid spilled across it. Blood, he noted grimly as his fingertips trailed through it.

Excitement suddenly flared, quickly strangled back into disciplined urgency. Not only was it still switched on, it was logged on. And there was a data card in it.

Working rapidly, he managed to call up schematics for the ship, locate the quickest route to one of its landing bays, and download it onto the card. At that moment, footsteps started pounding rapidly along the corridor outside.

Arathor tensed, flattening himself against the wall. But the footsteps went straight past the control station without pausing. Through the wall he had the impression of around a dozen glowing grey figures, moving fast, filled with a sense of near frantic urgency. Their voices echoed weirdly to his Force-enhanced hearing.

As soon as they were gone, he made a move to grab the data card and get out of there. He noticed some of the other options that the terminal menu was presenting him with though, and hesitated. Suddenly his heart was thudding again for very different reasons.

Not only was the terminal logged on, it was logged on with high-level access rights. Communication logs . . . Navigation logs and route plans . . .. As they flicked across his mind 's eye, he digested the details rapidly.

This was too good an opportunity to waste.

- - -

"So, what's Emberlene like then?"

Yolanda looked at Carth sidelong, her expression sour. "Why?"

They were standing in a reception area of one the upper rings of Kamari station. Everything around them was bright and clean and minimalistically elegant – all immaculate white tiles and transparisteel walls, running water flowing between them, so you were left with the impression that you should be able to see straight through them, while not actually being able to. The sound the running water made – just loud and pervasive enough to discourage casual eavesdropping, while not impeding conversation – was oddly soothing.

Carth shrugged. "No particular reason. I'm just trying to make conversation." Distracting himself from his inner thoughts. Thoughts of Bliss and the Catcher, and all that the Catcher had told him.

"Well don't." The reply was short and snappish.

Kamari station was one of the most renowned medical research facilities in the Republic, home to numerous clinics dedicated to providing advanced and specialist treatments of virtually any condition it was possible to name. Permanent home to more than eight million people, and the prestigious Kamari University of Medicine, it was like a miniature world in its own right, orbiting a distant blue-white sun.

And if you wanted to find somewhere where you had the best chance of identifying, say, a peculiarly advanced chemical formula, as well as gain access to the most complete genetic database in the known galaxy, this was the place to head.

"Fine." Carth let out a breath, glanced around uncomfortably for about the twelfth time in the past ten minutes, and tried to stop himself feeling so damn jittery.

His gaze lingered briefly on a screen that was playing a holoNet news feed with the sound turned low. It seemed to be about some scandal involving a Coruscant senator and a famous actress though, so he moved quickly on. That the rest of the Republic could be caught up in such . . . trivialities amazed him.

It had been getting on for twelve hours since they'd parted with the Sunrider. That had gone almost too smoothly for Carth's liking. When things went exactly according to plan, with no sniff of a hitch in sight, he always found himself looking nervously over his shoulder until the inevitable sting in the tail caught up with him.

It was rare indeed that he found himself disappointed.

Yolanda had simply walked into a restricted crew area with all of the self-confidence of someone who owned the entire luxury liner. There she'd gone completely unchallenged as she'd hacked a computer terminal, spoofing sensor feeds to simulate a serious problem in the hyperdrive core, before stealing the access codes for the emergency hyperspace yacht that shipping regulations stated all passenger vessels above a certain size and complement must carry.

As soon as the Sunrider ditched back to sub-light, they'd taken the yacht – again unchallenged – and made it clear.

Assuming that the Sunrider's crew stuck to standard regulations – and for a vessel as prestigious as the Sunrider they almost certainly wouldn't even think of violating them – the liner would be forced to put in at the nearest starport, and get the fault that had forced it out of hyperspace thoroughly checked out. Whatever kind of ambush the Catcher had waiting would sit unsprung.

That was the theory at least. And theory and reality were meshing quite well thus far. If only he could believe it.

Yolanda spoke without warning, making him jolt. "Emberlene is one of the most beautiful places in the galaxy. I left there when I was twelve years old, and I've never been back. I never will go back there alive, under any circumstances."

The quiet venom in her tone left Carth temporarily taken aback. "I er . . . didn't mean to raise a sensitive subject."

"Of course you didn't."

He decided very quickly on silence as the best policy. Starting an argument and drawing the attention of everyone in the reception area came very low on the list of possible good moves right now.

She surprised him by continuing anyway, not looking in his direction. "My parents were . . . dissidents, freedom fighters, terrorists. Pick your own word of preference. Idiots stupid enough to anger the Council of Elders, at any rate. They were convicted of treason, and as an immediate family member, their treason was my treason."

Carth stared at her – the side of her head anyway, blonde hair falling across her face and making it impossible to read. "Wait a minute. You said you were twelve . . ."

The look in her eyes as she briefly raised her head made him shut up quickly. "My mother managed to get me off world before the net closed in. My father . . . he wasn't so lucky." The fingers of one hand drummed briefly against her thigh. "We ended up on Nar Shaddaa, my mother and I. You know anything about people from our world, Valden?"

He selected his words carefully. "I know that the female mercenaries from Emberlene are highly sought after. In the same way that Mandalorians and Echani are. Not much else."

She nodded. He thought she might be smiling, though her hair still obscured most of her face from his view. "My people would be most upset that your opinion of them is so low. In their own eyes, they are the very pinnacle of martial skill and deadliness in all the galaxy. The Mistral. The best of the best." A headshake. "My mother was one, and I was already training to join their number when I departed Emberlene for good. In a way, I suppose, Nar Shaddaa simply completed that training."

"From what I know of Nar Shaddaa, it can't have been the easiest place to grow up." Discomfort pricked at him. He felt almost guilty, like he was eavesdropping on something he shouldn't be. Absolutely nothing, then this . . .

She snorted. "By twelve on Emberlene I was already grown up. But yes, there are probably easier places to try to make a life than smuggler's moon. Still, countless millions do manage it, one way or another."

A pause. Carth started to open his mouth, but then she carried on again.

"My mother fell in with a particularly powerful Exchange boss, and through her so did I. She . . . she burned for revenge for what had happened on Emberlene, but to get her revenge she needed allies. On Nar Shaddaa your choice of allies is strictly limited."

Carth looked away. "I know what that's like," he said quietly; finally. "To become so consumed by the death of a loved one . . ."

Yolanda let out a bitter sounding half-laugh. "You think she wanted revenge for my father, Valden? You really don't know anything at all about my people, do you? Men are lesser by the way of thinking that prevails on Emberlene. Ultimately expendable. My father was a source of good genes. Nothing more. My mother wanted vengeance for her stolen honour."

"So what happened?" he asked quietly as she stayed silent. The water running between the walls seemed louder than before.

"Eventually she went back to Emberlene, and in a way I suppose, she had her vengeance. She caused enough in the way of carnage anyway from what I hear. In the end though, inevitably, she was hunted down. So she did what any warrior of Emberlene would when faced with final dishonour. She killed herself." There was another pause, then venomously: "Deluded idiot."

"And you?"

"I worked off the debts that my mother had incurred as a thief and a spy for the Exchange. I was good at it. Made a name and reputation for myself, in a quiet sort of way. I don't fool myself as to the nature of the work I did, but it was preferable to wasting my life as a mindless slave to the demands of honour. Or a pleasure slave for that matter. Eventually, as is the way of things, my boss in the Exchange got himself entangled with a fish of a far bigger order than himself. He died. I no longer had a job, and I left Nar Shaddaa behind me. Eventually other, more rewarding employment opportunities arose."

"Such as?" Carth inquired when it became obvious that she wasn't going to say anything more.

Yolanda just tilted her head back, blowing strands of blonde hair away from her face. "Don't push your luck, Valden." She sighed. "You know, I think you're only, what, the fourth person I've ever told all that to? I'm currently sitting here, struggling to work out why the hell I just did that."

Carth shrugged uncomfortably. "Maybe I have an honest face or something?"

This time she really did laugh properly, loud enough to make a pair of Duros sitting across the other side of the reception area turn and look at them, clearly annoyed by the disturbance. "You know, I think that's it exactly. Not your face though. What lies beneath your face. There's this . . . I don't know, innate sense of trustworthiness? It really is startlingly compelling somehow. Especially in this business. It's been a long time since I've spent much time around a straightforwardly honest person. Obviously I've lost that knack and no longer know how to deal with it properly."

He turned his gaze away from her, uncomfortable with the intensity with which she was looking at him. Embarrassed and annoyed.

"Or maybe I've been underestimating you all this time. Maybe the truth is you're so brilliantly skilled at all this that you've managed to fool me completely, right from the beginning."

Before he could formulate some kind of response to that, Carth realised that they were being watched, and not just by the Duros. A door behind the reception desk had opened. The person standing framed in it was looking at them intently.

It was a Caamasi. A very tall, stately looking creature covered in downy golden fur, highlighted on the face by dark-purple stripes. Strange and compelling blue-on-green eyes met Carth's gaze unblinkingly. Not the person they were here to see. Dr. Fleg'manus was supposedly a Carosite.

The Caamasi inclined its head towards Carth in acknowledgement and greeting, then started to cross towards them, the long skirts of the robes it wore making it look as if it was gliding rather than walking. Yolanda twisted round in her seat, looking up at it. Carth noted that her right hand had drifted closer to the holdout blaster he knew she wore. He had to forcibly stop himself from duplicating the gesture.

"Greetings, good sir. Ma'am." The Caamasi's voice was every bit as solemn and stately as its appearance. "I was wondering if I could impose myself for a moment of your time." Those latter words were addressed directly towards Carth.

"I'm sorry. I don't believe we've met before." Carth knew the Caamasi to be staunch supporters of the Republic, pacifists and negotiators with a strong reputation as being a voice of wisdom and moderation on the galactic stage. And unlike, for example, the Jedi, they were actually highly respected for that, instead of being condemned as a bunch of interfering meddlers. Nevertheless, something about the whole situation struck an off note with Carth, and he immediately felt his hackles rise.

"No," the Caamasi agreed. "We haven't. But nevertheless I believe there are matters we do need to talk about."

The Caamasi's words had a kind of weight to them, which instinctively left Carth wanting to accept and agree to them. He resisted. "I don't believe I caught your name."

"My apologies for my lack of manners. My name is Dr Ulvol Ellas. Although there is no reason that either of you should be familiar with it."

I know who you are, Captain Onasi. The words echoed in his head.

Yolanda almost certainly couldn't have missed the jolt that passed through him, any further protest he had dying away unspoken. He looked at Dr Ellas warily.

It may be better if this discussion takes place away from your companion's ears.

"Of course, I'd be honoured. Yolanda, if you could stay and keep an eye out for Dr Fleg'manus so we don't miss our appointment . . .?"

She astonished him by not raising even the slightest hint of a protest. All she did was look at him a certain way, a small, cynical half-smile touching her lips. Thinks this is all some kind of Republic intelligence thing. He was quite content to leave her with that impression, because to be honest, he was baffled. For all he knew it was a Republic intelligence thing.

"Might I ask why you are here, Captain?" Dr Ellas asked as soon as the door to his office whispered shut behind them.

"My disguise is that easy to see through, is it?"

The Caamasi fixed him with its startling and solemn eyes. "I'm sure that it's a perfectly good disguise. Perhaps to someone with an understanding of human faces as . . . scant as mine, the changes to the finer details are something I do not pick-up so well on?"

"We all look alike to you?" Carth interpreted.

Dr Ellas made a noise that Carth suspected was analogous to chuckling. "No, no. Not entirely alike, at least."

"And you do have the Force to guide you."

"Force sensitivity is fairly common among my kind. In comparison with most other sentient species, at least."

It was far more than that though, in this case. "You're a Jedi, Dr Ellas?"

Those blue on green eyes regarded him unblinkingly. "I was once a part of that esteemable order, yes," he finally conceded. "Not to appear rude or impatient, Captain Onasi, but you have still to answer my initial question."

Carth hesitated, looking past the Caamasi and staring at an impressively large aquarium built into one wall. "We're here to see a colleague of yours – Dr. Fleg'manus – on a matter . . ." Carth caught himself. "On a matter I'm afraid I really can't discuss with you."

He could almost feel Dr Ellas looking at him – looking at him with more than just his eyes. His own gaze moved on from the aquarium to a holo-screen playing the same news feed as the reception area outside.

Suddenly Dr Ellas made the chuckling noise again, though this time the tone was slightly different. Self-mocking perhaps. "How foolish and arrogant I am. When I saw you, waiting in the reception area I was so certain you had come for me."

"For you? Why would you expect me to come and see you, Doctor? You said yourself that we had never met before." Confusion – more confusion – burgeoned.

Carth suspected that Dr Ellas's expression constituted something like a smile. "Not really you specifically, Captain Onasi. But I was expecting someone. I've been waiting for more than a year now. Waiting for the day. When I saw you, knowing your connection . . . I just assumed without properly considering other possibilities."

"Waiting for what day?" Carth was now utterly perplexed by the entire conversation. "Wait." He made an internal leap. "You're waiting for Revan, aren't you? You already said you used to be part of the Jedi Order." Another leap, this one even further. "Were you . . . his old master?"

The Caamasi's 'smile' remained, wistful perhaps. "Nothing like that, Captain. I humbly apologise for wasting your time this way. I feel quite embarrassed by my obvious lack of wisdom and forethought."

A polite dismissal.

Carth wasn't quite ready to be dismissed yet. His thoughts were whirring "Why did you leave the Jedi order then? Why do you expect him to seek you out?" And there had been no hint of denial on that part.

For a moment, it seemed that the Caamasi would not answer. Then Dr Ellas exhaled softly. "I suppose it doesn't hurt for you to know. As part of my duties to the order, I was required to do something that . . . ran counter to the oaths I had taken as a healer. It was, I believe, a necessary action, but not perhaps a moral one, and not one I could easily reconcile within myself once it was done. I decided that I had to step down from the Order until such time that I regain the inner equilibrium that is proper to a Jedi. Until that time, I work here, as a healer like I was before. Atonement perhaps."

"Wait, I don't understand." Not a word. Though there were sudden creeping thoughts . . .

There was another exhalation. "Memory has always been something that has had particular significance in Caamasi culture, Captain Onasi. As a healer, it has always been my area of specialisation."

Suddenly though, Carth wasn't really hearing anything that Dr Ellas was saying. He was staring intently at the holoscreen. On it, the image had just changed to show a sleek and gleaming passenger liner. The caption below read, very clearly "The Sunrider".

Heart thudding, a nauseous, twisting sensation in his gut, he strode across rapidly and turned the volume up.

". . . Just In. The Arravelle line luxury passenger cruiser, The Sunrider, flying on the Windward Colonies-Core loop, was attacked and destroyed this morning by unknown forces outside of the Jumus system. Jumasi officials have stated that no survivors have yet been found, and it is feared . . ."

- - -

"Get out of my way." Bastila's voice was clipped and icily precise. There was only the slightest distortion from her injured jaw now.

Canderous stood in front of her, an immovable Mandalorian wall, armour-plated in battle-scarred durasteel. He kept his expression fixed solid, eyes boring into her. "Now that ain't going to happen." He kept the words quiet, almost soft.

The skin around her eyes screwed up, bruised looking and drawn in deep lines. "I was actually stupid enough to think that I could trust you."

Something about the tone of her voice actually needled – pierced a surface that was seemingly rock and drew blood from it. "You can trust me. You can trust me absolutely when I say I'm not going to let you do this."

"Let me do this?" The edge to her voice became almost shrill. Definitely getting better. "Since when do I require your permission?"

At his back, Canderous could feel the static charge hanging around the metal cage. It made the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. The ghostly glowing globules crawling near-frantically across the walls cast ever-shifting patterns of twisting light and shade. If he'd ever had any doubts about Bastila's claim that the ship was alive, they were non-existent right now.

"Maybe since I'm blocking your way?" He affected a shrug. It ended up slightly lopsided.

Suddenly, there was a sensation like the air hardening around him, something akin to a giant invisible fist trying to grip him and lock him firmly in place. Bastila started to limp around him . . .

He bit down hard on the inside of his mouth, tasting salty, coppery blood. The flare of pain allowed him to focus his thoughts into a dense ball and caused the grip on him to snap abruptly. He shifted round to cut her off again. "Now that was low, Princess. I thought you were better than that."

She glowered at him. "Damn it, Canderous. I have to do this. I don't want to do it, but I have to. Malefic has to be stopped. If there was any good alternative, believe me, I'd take it."

The static sensation grew stronger by the moment. If the ship was capable of reaching out and striking him down, it surely would have right then.

Canderous locked his gaze with hers, dismissing the creepy thought as so much fraking bantha crap. "Let's be honest here shall we? No punches pulled. This won't work, and I see it in your eyes that part of you at least knows it won't work. As long as Malefic has that fraking crown of his, you're not going to be able to take the fleet from him. You're not even going to be able to disrupt it to any great extent. You're just going to end up being subsumed. Another part of his forces. Another tool for him to use. And if you think the situation is bad now, you wait till he has Battle Meditation to go alongside his two-hundred odd capitol ships."

"Is that how weak you think I am?" Bitterness crept into her voice.

He grimaced. Tamar should be dealing with this. Not him. Someone, at least, who knew what to do with words and emotions. His own. Hers. "There's a big difference between weakness and realistic knowledge of your capabilities. You've faced him and that crown twice now, and I know I'm still alive solely because of you. But tell me. How much better, exactly, do you think it's going to go when you face it and him again?"

"It's the only way." The words rang hollowly. "Please Canderous. This is hard enough already."

He kept his expression pitiless. "I thought you'd got over this. This urge for martyrdom. For stupid, sacrificial atonement, and making yourself suffer."

"This is not the same thing."

"So what happens when you end up serving Malefic like you ended up serving Malak? That's how it turned out the last time you took it upon yourself to single-handedly save the galaxy."

Her face was white. "You utter bastard."

"Yeah, that's me. Never claimed different. But ask yourself, is this really your idea? Or is it this ship's? Did it plant the idea in your head when you spoke to it, maybe? Perhaps it wants out of here, to join its departed . . ." He groped for the correct word. "Comrades. And it has to know that the only way it can accomplish this is by persuading you to cooperate."

He saw her flinch, but she didn't back down.

Inside him, there was something close to desperation. The kind of fear he'd once had before going into battle, before that had all scabbed over and he'd become all but inured to feelings of any kind. He pressed on hard, knowing that it was the one opening he had. "Are you going to be using the ship, Bastila, or is the ship going to be using you? I've seen how you've changed over the past weeks. Grown into something more. A real Jedi? Hah! I can't believe I'm saying any of this. But right now, this isn't you talking."

She turned her back on him, and he saw a shudder pass up the length of her spine. The shudder echoed through him. Weakness. Strength. He didn't know.

When she spoke again, her voice was muffled. "Even if you're right in every word, I still have to do it. There are some facts that are unassailable. If we don't get this ship working, we're stuck here. No comms signal will penetrate this void, and no one on the outside is ever going to find us. We both know the expeditionary force must have been destroyed."

Frustration gnawed at Canderous's guts like an infestation of hungry blood worms. He felt exhausted, like he was embroiled in a life-or-death sabre fight instead of just a conversation. "What about the bond?"

"The bond?"

"To Revan. What d'you think I mean, Princess?" It came out as a brutal snap he hadn't quite intended. "Will that reach out of here?"

There was no answer right away. "I don't know," she said finally; emptily.

"Then try it, damn it. It's got to be better than what you're proposing."

"Why are you bothered so damn much about this, Canderous? Why does my fate matter to you at all?"

He flinched, and was very glad she couldn't see him. For a moment, his mouth was fixed, turned down at the corners. "Because I fraking care about what happens to you, maybe? There. Satisfied?"

Another shudder passed through her, stronger than the first. There was a long silence, the shifting patterns of light seemingly becoming more and more frantic all the time. The ship sensing its grip slipping. "The bond . . . It's almost gone." Her voice was hollow – barely audible. "Just a thread. Hardly there at all anymore."

"Just try it. Please, just try it."

There was no response. She stood silent and completely motionless.

- - -

"The target has made it clear." The voice, belonging to one of the Echani mercenaries – one of her mercenaries; that thought was still slightly odd – came over Yuthura's earpiece, crackling with a faint undertone of distortion.

"Fire after it. Near misses, and a few glancing hits off its shields if you can manage it. But nothing to risk destroying or crippling it." Tamar's voice, calmly businesslike, answered almost immediately.

He was standing about halfway across the Rancorous's bridge from her, hands moving across the controls in front of him almost too fast for the eye to follow. She could sense an absolute intensity of focus from him to the exclusion of anything else that was somehow . . . disturbing. No, only disturbing with knowledge of what he once had been. But nevertheless . . . her lips compressed, head tails flexing distractedly on her shoulders.

"Wait ninety seconds, then scramble a pursuit. Make it look good. Make him work for it, but don't actually catch him."

"Aye, sir."

And suddenly the focus seemed to let up, just like that. There was no external change, but for all that, it was clear. He looked round from his console and their eyes met. His expression was impassive, no hint of a smile – externally at least. The tips of her head tails traced a simple pattern that she knew he understood. Everything all right?

There was a small nod. His eyes moved on from her.

She touched her earpiece again. "Okay, Gare, you can stand down."

"Lady Ban," the acknowledgement came.

"Pass on my appreciation to the others for a job well done." Then she cut the link.

Tamar was communicating with T3: "What about the tracking devices?"

"Beep-woo-weep-bop."

Translation: the primary one had been discovered and deactivated. Exactly as they'd anticipated really, if the Miraluka was anything like competent.

"And the secondary?"

The secondary transmitter had been implanted subcutaneously while Arathor Dann had been unconscious. It was extremely small, and almost undetectable, made of materials that would not show up on an x-ray and could even evade most full-body scans looking specifically for that sort of thing.

"Beep-woo."

Gone too. Now that was downright impressive. Not so much the fact he'd found it, but that he'd found it and dealt with it so quickly in such a pressurised situation.

"And the tertiary?"

The passive, hidden among his teeth. The one they'd gambled that Dann would miss after discovering the first two. The decoy and the real one, as they were supposed to seem.

"Woo-wop-beep."

Still in place.

"Beep-beep-wee-woo-beep-bop," T3 added rapid fire.

Not only was the tertiary tracking device still in place, but according to the tell-tales that T3 had been monitoring, the Miraluka had accessed the computer files they'd left open for him to steal. Yuthura felt a small surge of relief. The first hurdle, at least, had been cleared. That last bit in particular, so crucial, had been a chancy gamble on both Arathor's skill level and temperament.

"Well done Tee."

Seemingly satisfied, Tamar handed control of the Rancorous's bridge back to the normal duty crew. As he walked past her position, she fell smoothly and silently into step with him. Jolee joined them as they stepped into the main bridge turbolift.

"Well, that was . . . elaborate," he commented, breaking the silence.

Yuthura looked on wordlessly as Tamar glanced across at him. Jedi Master. Sometimes it was easy to forget that of Jolee. She suspected that suited him just fine. Finally, Tamar shrugged. "I . . . felt his mind. There was something familiar about it. Something familiar from before."

"Oh yes? Well out with it then. No sense tiptoeing around the terentatek, as it were."

"Sith conditioning. Elite Sith intelligence conditioning, designed to make a captured operative all but impossible to crack. From the amount of knowledge I have on it in here, I think it might even be something I invented personally." The words were clinical, but she knew from other more subtle signs that he was disturbed.

"Interesting," Jolee commented, after a distinct pause.

"He's one of hers." Tamar's voice was flat, in a distant place.

"So you decided to use him as bait?"

"Oh, I'd already decided to use him as bait. I just wasn't quite sure before then who I was baiting." Tamar spoke quietly. To Yuthura he felt very tightly contained, all of his defensive walls tightly and solidly in place, letting very little of himself leak out.

"Uh-huh." Jolee scratched the tip of his nose. "You know what, in my experience, is the biggest problem when fishing unfamiliar waters?"

"I'm sure you'll tell me."

"Oh, you're sure are you? Starting to find the old man predictable are you? Thinking maybe you've got him all figured out?"

Tamar gave a mock shudder. "Now there's a frightening thought."

"Now what was I saying before you interrupted so rudely? Ah, yes. Fishing. The biggest problem with fishing unfamiliar waters is that all too often you can end up inadvertently hooking something big enough to capsize your fishing boat."

"I'm not entirely unaware of the risks. Would you have preferred it if I tried to pull the information out of him by force?"

Jolee grunted. A partial concession. "And then there's always the possibility that you're not the one who's doing the trolling here."

"We'll see."

The turbolift reached its destination. The doors slid open, but suddenly Tamar seemed to have become fixed in place.

Yuthura stared at him, able to feel something. Not sure what it was she felt.

- - -

As the door closed again behind Yolanda, Carth resumed his pacing around the pristine apartment located in one of Kamari station's habitation rings. He went clockwise this time, retracing the path he'd already walked a dozen times. One hand raked distractedly at his hair, further disarraying it. The other hand held a glass, all but forgotten, half-full of dark amber liquid.

"This has to stop." As though to emphasise his point, Carth stopped his pacing to match his words and fixed Yolanda with his gaze.

Everything around him seemed strange and disconnected and jittery. The meeting with Dr Fleg'manus had finished more than an hour ago. It was nothing more than a hazy blur in his memory, details a smeared mess. The one concrete thing they'd got, was that the Carosite would run the equation for them, but it would take time.

She looked back at him levelly, seating herself in the middle of the room's lone couch, arms spreading out to either side along its back, legs crossing smoothly. He didn't have any clue how she could be so utterly phlegmatic and calm.

"From this point forwards we're not running away any more." He shook his head distractedly. His earlier threat to the Catcher rang hollowly

"And so you're going to do exactly what the Catcher is goading you to do."

He grimaced at her. "Two thousand innocent civilians died. They died because of me. Because of the fact I ran from him." And Bliss. Never abandoned anyone on a mission before . . .. Those words he'd spoken drifted back to him, taunting. He was a hypocrite and a liar. He'd abandoned her utterly, to the very worst sort of damnation.

"No, two thousand people are now dead because of a psychotic Sith assassin. A psychotic Sith assassin, who, it seems, knows who you really are, and exactly what buttons he needs to push to get to you." Yolanda sounded exasperated suddenly. "Were you never taught how to compartmentalise?"

Carth gritted his teeth so hard that it almost became a snarl. "As long as we keep on running from him, he's going to keep on doing this, again and again."

"For as long as he knows the affect it has on you," she agreed. "For as long as he thinks it gains him something." So utterly calm it was stupefying.

He whirled away from her, back to one of the viewports, gazing out at the smooth arc of featureless plasteel that constituted the bulk of the view. He started to lift the glass he held to his lips, but saw that his hand was shaking and lowered it again. Instead, he tried to draw in deep breaths. His collar felt too tight.

Peripherally, he was aware of Yolanda rising from the couch; crossing to stand a couple of paces behind him. He didn't look round.

"There's something else that's bothering you, isn't there? Something that's been bothering you since you regained consciousness on the Sunrider. It's to do with him, isn't it? Something he said?"

He didn't say anything.

Her hand touched his shoulder. The contact made him flinch involuntarily.

"If it affects you, then the situation we're in right now, it affects me too." Her voice was unflinchingly steady.

"I'm sorry. It's just . . ." That you're utterly pathetic? "Everything keeps spinning round and round, twisting into knots. I can feel him there, lurking on the edges. Waiting and watching until an opening allows him in." He gestured towards a bottle resting on a low, glass-topped table. It was nearer empty than full, containing the same amber liquid as his half-drained glass. "I had a thought that I could dodge him by finding oblivion through that." He shrugged. "Seemed as logical as anything else that's happened recently. Utterly pathetic." Echoing the inner voice.

She reached around him. Cool, strong fingers eased the glass free of his grasp. He didn't resist, and she tipped its contents into the nearest plant pot. Her voice, when she spoke again near his ear was . . . different. "Perhaps I can help you find another way of dodging him."

He turned slowly and stared at her.

- - -

Morrigance pulled up one last report. She was scheduled to drop out of hyperspace in about twenty minutes.

It was a very short report; the results of a thorough search against fleet personal records based on a hologram provided by one of her most able operatives. The report showed the photographs of the ten faces that came closest to matching that of the hologram provided, based on an advanced interpolative matching algorithm designed to filter out even the most modern facial prosthetics.

Her gaze stopped on the fourth of the photographs on the page. It was a very familiar face, belonging to one of the Republic's most celebrated war heroes.

Carth Onasi.

Now that was interesting. And as coincidences went, it was one she couldn't bring herself to ignore.

---

Thanks again to Jedi Boadicea for beta reading.

Also, massive thanks for all the reviews and feedback.