Screams of pain, and of terror. The Dark Jedi, the ghostly shadow at the edges of Dermitchal's perception, laughed, the maniacal laugh that had become a daily constant. He was sure the monstrous blends of machinery and flesh that stood in the room, the technobeast zombies, would have laughed too if they could but feel emotion again.

Lightning leapt from the shadow's fingertips, striking the Mandalorian warrior in the chest. More screams. The pain fed the shadow. The shadow grew stronger. The shadow's strength had to grow. It sensed a tremor in the Force.

Someone had arrived at Shola. The hellworld had a new visitor. This visitor was strong, and the shadow could sense that his soul would be delectable for feeding.

Piroc had come at last.

Space, Shola System

The Call of Destiny flared back into realspace in the Shola system. Outside the cockpit viewport, the planet loomed, a foreboding sphere of flame, in the blackness of space. I guided the ship down toward the fiery world, intent on finding that castle, getting Roykin, and spacing out as fast as I could. It all seemed like a good plan. The Dark Jedi that was supposedly here would no doubt be unwilling to be cooperative enough for it to work, though. I could feel it in my gut.

The Call suddenly shuddered as I entered the upper atmosphere of Shola. I checked over the external sensors. There was very little wind. What the hell could cause a freighter to lurch like that?

Again, the freighter suddenly shook violently. I would have been thrown clear of my seat if I weren't buckled in. The freighter kept shaking, and suddenly a violent sound blasted through the ship. Proximity alarms started wailing. A whole chunk of the Call, nearly the entire port side of the freighter, had been ripped clean away. A huge mass of metal was just gone.

I unbuckled, a risky move right now, and ran from the cockpit and into the main hold. I stopped short, right by the equipment locker. You could see straight out to the sky!

I ripped the locker open frantically, and grabbed the WESTAR-M5, my WESTAR-34s and my Bryar pistol, and ran back into the cockpit. I was back in my seat and buckled as the first impact came.

More alarms blared, this time for shield impact. I looked out the viewport into the hellish scene before me, and couldn't believe what I saw flying toward the ship. It was… by Chaos, it was a huge swarm of rocks. Kriffing rocks were flying towards the Call at a speed exceeding most missiles.

By Hell!

The swarm of rocks hit the ship full on. I covered my face with one arm, despite my helmet, as the viewport shattered from the impact. I could hear the impacts from across the ship, making it lurch, 

even as I fought to maintain control. Another impact, this one bigger than the other ones, sounded through the ship. I looked at the readouts in horror. The engines were gone!

A ship without engines was nothing short of a massive coffin, and in atmosphere, it's a massive coffin being dragged down by gravity. The ship was falling, from a pretty damn good height, toward the rivers of lava below.

In good news, I could see the castle Drolslobba told me about. The black turrets almost blended into the mountains around it. I had one shot to make this work.

I flipped up a small panel on the console and flicked one of the switches. Behind me, the door to the cockpit slid shut. I flicked the second switch, and with an even more powerful lurch, the cockpit, which also functioned as an escape pod, broke free of the doomed Call of Destiny, and rocketed towards the planet below.

The mountains were coming up fast.

Really fast.

Damn it.

The pod roared out of the sky and into the mountain chain near the castle. The pod hit ground, bounced once violently, and hit the ground again, skidding across the dirt and rock to a halt at a huge boulder. On the sensor board, I could see the flare of an explosion behind us as the Call of Destiny succumbed to its destiny: a huge fireball blasting outward from a crater on the planet's surface.

I just had one question as I sat there, still buckled into the pilot's seat of the cockpit/escape pod. What the hell just happened? How the hell did the rocks get catapulted that high into the sky? And what happened to the side of the ship at the beginning of all that?

There was only one even remotely logical explanation for all that, and it was really pushing it.

The Dark Jedi. He somehow managed to use the mystical Force to destroy a ship without conventional weaponry. If he could do something of that magnitude, I was kind of worried for Dermitchal's chances, and my own. There was no way this could be good.

I belted on my sidearms and grabbed the M5 rifle. Glancing up at the castle several hundred feet up above me, two thoughts crossed my mind.

One: it is gonna be one hell of a climb.

Two: I have a really bad feeling about this.

"Your friend is here," the voice hissed. "He's more skilled than I could have imagined." Dermitchal could feel the shadow somehow… extending himself, reaching out. It must be the all-powerful Force the Jedi 

were supposed to have. "He comes here even now to save you. How noble." The shadow spat the word, as if it soiled his tongue. The shadow's hooded face turned to one of the zombie-like minions in the room. "Find Piroc. Bring him before me. And I will kill both of you."

The mountains were absolutely terrific. Impossible to scale, I had to rely on my whipcord grappling hook and wrist vibroblades to ascend near-vertical cliffs. By the time I had reached a point where I could stop, a small outcrop just big enough to sit on somewhat comfortably, I was exhausted. My arms were sore and my back ached. And the heat from the flaming lava 1,000 meters below me really wasn't helping. The only water I had was the minimal life-support supply in my helmet. I had drained half of it already, and I still had a long way to go.

After about an hour of resting, I turned and began to scale the cliff face again. My arms were sore from pulling myself up and up over the course of several hours, and I wouldn't be in peak fighting shape when I reached the top. I'd have to find cover for a time when I got up there and rest.

I reached another outcrop, a slightly larger one, and decided to rest there for a few hours. Whatever was waiting for me up top was certainly not friendly, and since it was maybe another half hour climb to the top, it could wait for morning. Or whenever I woke up. I don't know what the local time is.

As I took my helmet off, I heard, above the roar of the lava far below, an inhuman wail bellow across the mountain range, echoing eerily. And another wail joined in, and another. Soon there were a dozen different things wailing from the top of the mountain.

No doubt they were the mindless minions of the Dark Jedi.

And they were surely on the hunt. For me. He knew I was coming.

There wasn't a chance in Hell that this was good at all.