The prisoner had just started down the speeder's boarding ramp when the butt of a blaster rifle took her in the back. Unable to catch herself with her hands fastened by magbinders, she hit the ramp hard and went sprawling to the ground. As she writhed there and coughed on the dust her fall had kicked up, the five Sith Remnant troopers accompanying her disembarked. Muted reflections played across the plates of their chrome betaplast armor.
"Get her on her feet," ordered the sergeant. "Here comes the commandant."
Private Calmon Crom and another trooper carried out the order. Shuddering incessantly, the prisoner offered no resistance, just as she hadn't during her arrest. For a Republic spy, she wasn't much of a fighter, nor did she look the part: a slim, unimpressive Human in grubby civilian clothes. Her ginger hair, already a bit wild and unkempt, now curtained one of her eyes.
Calmon was startled by the piercing caw of a low-flying harkhawk, much closer than the others, but he resisted the urge to look up. Commandant Ahid was right in front of them now. "So this is the one?" he asked, echoing Calmon's own skepticism.
"Yes, sir," answered the sergeant. "All the equipment in the safe house was smashed by the time we got there. She almost gave us the slip, but Bruss got lucky. We called in a scanning crew in case we missed anything."
"Good work, Sergeant." Commandant Ahid spoke with a bantha-herding fringe-worlder's accent which his perpetually haughty tone failed to cover up—and everyone on base knew it except him. His steely gaze locked onto the prisoner. "Well, then. Do you have anything to say for yourself, citizen?"
The girl aimed her wavering glare at the commandant's boots.
"She's a very tight-lipped one, sir," the sergeant offered. "We don't even have a name."
Commandant Ahid raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps the tip was no exaggeration, then. Our own locally-grown scum are always quite verbose..." Stepping closer, he reached out to run a hand through the girl's disheveled hair, brushing it free of her eye. The prisoner tensed and jerked away as if his fingers were vibroknives, but this earned her a jab in the back from one of the trooper's rifles.
"Not to worry, citizen," the commandant told her as she stooped over, groaning in pain. "We have a Sith here—Adept Nuruz Lar, very well-trained, and he's already gotten warmed up on your partner. I think he'll be pleased; we didn't even know there were two of you until now." He waved his hand with finality. "Take her away."
Gallamby Outpost loomed ahead, a blocky fort of onyx duracrete circled by a wall of the same material and overlooked by an air defense tower. Faced from the horizon by Gallamby City, the installation was a blight on an otherwise pleasant savanna. But much more out of place were the harkhawks swarming low over the base, sharp and black against the mist-gray sky.
Private Calmon Crom was not the only one to give a wary look skyward as he and his squadmates marched their prisoner from the gate toward the main building. Harkhawks were as ordinary as the grass, but scarcely were they ever seen in groups. For several hundred to converge on a single area and form a flock was totally unheard of, and nobody knew what to make of it.
For almost two hours they had been circling the base, cawing and shrieking and apparently doing nothing else, except making the garrison nervous. While a harkhawk's talons could rip a man's belly open, such attacks were rare, and standard betaplast armor was adequate protection in any case. Two guards had been reprimanded for taking potshots at them, but from what Calmon heard, the low-flying flock was starting to interfere with the base's sensor array, and air control was trying to persuade the commandant to let them deal with the problem.
They passed other patrols entering or leaving the base, as well as the occasional three-limbed K-X12 probe droid hovering about. Coming back to himself, Calmon caught the prisoner glancing surreptitiously his way, barely turning her head. Something glimmered in her eye.
"What are you looking at? Eyes front!" Calmon barked, giving her a shove.
"Or we'll tighten those binders," growled Bruss, the trooper who had captured her. And when the prisoner looked at him, Calmon struck her again, though not hard enough to knock her down.
"Fine, sorry," the girl stammered. They were her first words since her arrest back in town.
Being inside Gallamby Outpost felt like being underground. Every surface was some shade of black, and the sharp, painful white of the glowstrips still somehow felt inadequate. Having learned her lesson, the prisoner kept her head down, her sloppy hair shading both eyes now. Even when they entered the detention area, she didn't look up.
Not that there was much to see. In the room's center, a ring-shaped security desk encircled a slightly corpulent jailer, while four guards loitered nearby. Each wore a gray uniform with a blast vest, rather than full trooper armor. Past them, a narrow hallway ran parallel to a row of five cells. Only the last one was currently occupied, its force field casting a soft violet glow.
The jailer's face brightened as Bruss and Calmon dragged the girl up to him. "Company for the hornhead, eh?" At a leisurely pace he scanned the new prisoner with the desk's built-in holocam and updated his detention log.
"Mmm-hmm, that'll be all. Thank you, Sergeant."
"She's all yours."
The jailer signaled. Two baton-toting detention guards moved on the girl, who had raised her head and was now glancing about with no effort at discretion. Her shyness was suddenly absent, and she seemed particularly interested in the troopers who had escorted her. Still restrained, she twisted to peer into the opaque faceplates of Bruss and Calmon in turn. It was a strange look that she gave them: fearful, but more than that. Urgent. Focused. Forgetting for an instant that she couldn't see his face, Calmon answered reflexively with a scowl.
The sergeant's voice brought him back to himself. "Let's go."
Bringing up the rear, Calmon had only followed him two paces when a heavy clatter caused him to glance back toward the security desk.
The prisoner's magbinders were on the floor.
The detention guards lunged, one from each side, but the girl dropped to a crouch, throwing her arms wide, and both men shot across the room, flattening their two confederates against the far walls. Close to the door, the sergeant and two troopers spun. Even as they leveled their weapons, the girl dove behind the security desk and the bellowing jailer.
Years of training and not-infrequent encounters with Sith Adepts allowed Calmon to fend off his astonishment, as well as to recognize that both he and Bruss still had a clear line of fire. Two rifles swung up in unison, but only one toward the girl; the other swung toward Calmon's head. He could not even feel surprise before a spear of red light pierced his helmet and vaporized his brain.
Not ten seconds later Kaevee unsteadily got to her feet, ears ringing and eyes watering from smoke. She started to lean against the security desk, but jerked back when her hand blindly found the still-warm corpse of the jailer slumped across it.
The four detention guards were not stirring. Nor were the laser-riddled troopers. Sparks and plasteel shards sprinkled from the ceiling as the lone survivor, who had not suffered a scratch, blasted out the room's security cameras.
When the din was finally complete, Atton pulled his helmet off and looked her up and down. "What's wrong? You get hit?"
Kaevee shook her head, her ghastly expression ebbing. "No, I just— I forgot which one you were. And I couldn't sense... Your thoughts, you felt the same as one of them."
"So I'm too good at my job, is what you're telling me. Okay, real sorry. I'll try to work on it." With a wry grin he stepped inside the ring of the security desk, propping his rifle against its edge, and dumped the dead jailer to the floor. Before turning to the console, he produced an ArmaTek frag mine from his backpack and nodded at the exit.
"Right." Recollecting herself, Kaevee stuck the explosive to the doorframe and armed it. Though her gut told her to be afraid of the mine, Atton had exactingly drilled the design and its proper, "safe" use into her head, and she stepped rather than leaped away once she was done. Scanning the bodies and debris—less the former than the latter—she caught sight of the fallen magbinders. That was another "trick" that Atton had taught her; understanding the intricacies of the technology made it easier to sense and manipulate with the Force, though with stun cuffs or more advanced devices the feat was more difficult to replicate.
Mere months ago, Kaevee would have balked at handling an explosive or telekinetically disengaging a set of magbinders, even in in training. Helping Atton to actually spearhead a mission like this—well, to say it would have terrified her wouldn't be a stretch. Even now, it wasn't far off the mark.
But as Kaevee drew near, Atton glanced up from the console and gave her a look that seemed to say, You're doing great, kid. Kaevee imagined she was supposed to be proud of herself. Maybe she would be once they were far away from Vaal.
"Hey, good news. There's no record of your arrest now. You're a model law-abiding citizen just like me."
"Um, thank you," Kaevee said, claiming a blaster pistol from among the ruins. "Listen, the commandant said there's a Sith here. We didn't know about that."
"Nuruz Lar...," Atton murmured absently, apparently trying to place the name even as his hands worked furiously across the console.
"You know him?"
"He was at the academy," he said under his breath, still distracted.
The words What academy? were on the tip of Kaevee's tongue when Atton recovered himself and gave her another, much less friendly look. She was breaking the cardinal injunction—her own and Atris's—to not ask questions about his life prior to the current year.
Feigning disinterest in the hopes of achieving it, Kaevee checked her blaster's power pack and tested the feel of it. It was heavier than she preferred, but it would do.
The security console sang with affirmative beeps and chirps. Atton snatched up his rifle and headed for the cells. After glancing at the booby-trapped door, Kaevee followed.
The Republic Intelligence agent had his back to the far corner of his cell, his face drawn, his whole form tensed and ready to move. Zabraks often struck untraveled Humans and Near-Humans as fierce and even sinister, what with their cranial horns and facial tattoos. For a brief instant, Kaevee was taken back to Daluuj half a standard year before; one of Mira's bounty hunter accomplices had been a Zabrak. Yet when Atton met the agent's gaze through the force field, some unaccountable awkwardness stole over his face and rippled across the opaque surface of his presence in the Force. But then it was gone, and with a strange laugh he went to work on the field control panel.
"Sorry, you reminded me of someone."
"You're supposed to extract me," Sulen Tusser murmured, as though explaining the situation to himself.
"And you're supposed to not get captured. We weren't late to the safe house."
"I'm not accusing you... But there's not supposed to be extraction if I am captured."
"Yeah, why didn't you take your synox hypo?"
The force field dissolved and the cell fell into shadow. Sulen's tone thickened with bitterness. "Because I waited. I got the data I was supposed to, but then I was caught, and I couldn't even die successfully."
"Well, don't be too hard on yourself. Dying's not as easy as you'd think." Again Atton chuckled.
"You're not dying here today," Kaevee put in, hoping to curb Atton's eccentricity. Besides that, she remembered Lannik Mai and Rittu Zarander, the two RI agents who had made the mission to Torque possible and paid with their lives for it. "We're Salvage Team Four, Republic SIS."
The agent stepped from the cell. "Why SIS?"
"Because we're better," Atton explained, leading them back up the hall. "In case it's not clear, we're here to salvage you."
Sulen Tusser had nothing to say to that, though in the Force his feelings were clear as they could be, and he ignored the apologetic glance that Kaevee offered him. For her part, she had no interest in the rivalry between Intelligence and the Strategic Information Service, much less did she understand the point in reinforcing it.
They neared the mouth of the cell block, and Kaevee felt rather than heard the pounding of boots in the hall outside. In unison she and Atton flattened themselves against the wall, the latter pulling Sulen Tusser along with him. Around the corner, the door hissed open, and a squad of Sith troopers spread into the room in a wave.
Then the mine went off with a peal of flame and shrapnel. Caught on the blast's edge, two of the troopers staggered into view, and Kaevee and Atton raised their blasters. Chrome betaplast armor clattered as the bodies fell.
It was worse than the skirmish moments ago: louder, more terrible, more chaotic. Fresh smoke from the bomb veiled the room, thicker than before; bolts flashed through it like lightning in a bloody cloud. Still crouched, Kaevee strafed away from Atton, firing as she went. Lasers tore past her toward the cells or punched sparking dents into the nearby wall. She picked targets out of the haze as best she could, but even when her eyes failed, she sometimes felt something in her hands—a pulse, a tingle, a murmur—and entrusted her shots to the Force.
When it was done they inched their way into the room, eyes watering and ears ringing. Glancing down at the new corpses, Kaevee recalled hearing that some soldiers were fond of counting their kills; she had vowed on the spot that she never would.
With professional ease, Sulen Tusser strode forward to claim a blaster rifle from the wreckage. "Okay. Nicely done, but there's more where these came from. How are we getting out of here?"
Atton drew his comlink and tapped out a brief signal. "With a little help."
X-C88 was ambling its way through a standard exterior patrol around Gallamby Outpost when its organic teammates arrived. Cognizant of the need to avoid suspicion, it spent three standard minutes completing the current round before entering a droid access hatch on the second level. It allowed the security stud there to scan its identity chip—one of them—before starting a patrol through the outer ring of the facility. Human guards and other personnel glanced placidly at the droid as it went along, but that was all.
Besides its organic complement, Gallamby Outpost had twenty-nine MerenData K-X12 probe droids—Ecksee's own model, and plentiful across the galaxy—for security purposes as well as surveillance operations in the nearby settlement. It was there that one of these droids, designated GS-022, had been deactivated so that Ecksee could take its place—much as the organic designated Private Bruss had been deactivated so that Atton Rand could take his place.
The two cases were not equal, however. Extracting GS-022's identity chip, security matrix, and key memory banks, and then implanting the above into Ecksee would have taken approximately two hours (plus an additional three for diagnostics), assuming the operation was correctly performed by a qualified technician. Stressing the urgency of their mission, the sudden complication of Sulen Tusser's capture, and the datum that I'm making this skrag up as I go along, Atton Rand had performed it in forty-two minutes.
He had succeeded, by his standards. Ecksee was now able to identify itself as GS-022, access the outpost, and communicate with the security network without arousing immediate suspicion—though a maintenance cycle by Remnant technicians would reveal the deception in short order. On the other hand, Ecksee had to go about with a memory core bloated by another droid's heuristics and a good chunk of its memory. Though accessible, this massive and clumsily inserted block of data would take weeks to properly assimilate into Ecksee's memory core—which had already been left somewhat dilapidated by Rand's equally inept attempt at a memory wipe eight months prior.
In short, Ecksee felt even less like itself than usual.
Fifty-four seconds ahead of the mission timetable, Ecksee's internal comlink heard from the security network: Armed intruders in detention area. Cherek Squad tasked to detention. Level one facility alert. Ecksee acknowledged, but remained on its patrol route. Beneath the tolling of alarms, its audioreceptors registered increased chatter among the nearby organics.
Three minutes later, a chime from Atton Rand's comlink, nearly simultaneous with another alert: Cherek Squad neutralized. Level two facility alert. Squads Enth, Onith, and Krenth tasked to detention. Locate intruders.
Consulting the facility schematics from GS-022's memory, Ecksee located a power conduit in a tertiary corridor, near the speeder garage. In thirty-five seconds it disabled the safety features and arranged for an overload. Hurrying away as the conduit vomited sparks and the corridor lights flickered, Ecksee raised central security and transmitted a report, complete with a bogus sensor image: Four hostile organics. Heavily armed.
Central security acknowledged and reassigned the Krenth squad, plus another, to neutralize the "other" intruders. This was favorable, but insufficient. As Atton Rand and his companions penetrated farther through the facility, the Sith would devote progressively larger numbers of troopers to stopping them; the more Ecksee subtracted from that number, the more it added to the probability of mission success.
Minutes later, nearing a hatch leading to a maintenance sublevel, Ecksee was faced with one of those trooper squads, turning a corner and barreling down the middle of the corridor. "Out of the way, clanker! Let's go, let's go, let's go!"
The speed of the organics' approach, their assortment of armament, and the gruff tone of the sergeant combined to trigger Ecksee's threat analysis subroutine. Like all other beings, organic and otherwise, the troopers had to be either Friendly, Hostile, or Neutral—but Ecksee's programming stuttered as it tried to calculate among these three.
The tertiary heuristics constructed by the mission parameters had them conditionally and temporarily under Neutral. However, several other programs would incline Ecksee to reclassify them as Friendly, reinforced by the fact that its primary memory core had not logged any previous instances of hostility from Sith troopers. The choice of Hostile was supported by the loyalty baseline program which had been implanted by the Strategic Information Service—Serve the interests of the Galactic Republic and oppose its enemies.
This was the only modification the Republic had made to Ecksee's programming. The damage to its memory core inflicted by Atton Rand had been left untouched. As a result, Ecksee wasted a considerable amount of time—nearly a full standard second—before resolving the threat analysis subroutine. Serving the interests of the Republic, it decided, was reinforced by conforming to mission parameters.
The fact it had been spoken to primed Ecksee's social behavior index and vocabulator. Its Retort program had been used extensively over the past eight months. But this, too, Ecksee managed to suppress, and a slight adjustment to its repulsorlift allowed it to swerve around the Sith troopers, who stomped past unimpeded.
Having saved itself from its own programming—or rather from what organics had done to its programming—Ecksee hurried on. It had more false alarms to raise.
Atris sat cradled in the comms station chair of the Ebon Hawk's cockpit, her cane wedged into the nearby corner. Around her the starship hummed and murmured to itself, idling in one of the public docking bays of Gallamby settlement. The pre-jump checks were all complete, and the dock attendant had been contentedly bribed into keeping no record of the Hawk's presence. All was ready.
Ahead of her, Cole Terrick occupied the pilot seat, drumming his fingers on the armrest when he wasn't going through redundant system checks. As usual, the approach of danger turned him into an ever-tightening, ever-twisting knot of nervous energy, but a new excitement now tinted his otherwise clouded thoughts. It was the first time Atton had entrusted him with sole control of the Ebon Hawk, beyond routine navigation and the like.
One of the consoles chimed as the ship's comlink received a signal. "Strap in," Cole said over his shoulder. "It's time to rumble."
The meaning of his words trickled into Atris's mind as across a great distance. She was immersed deeply in the Force, projecting her will beyond the town and across the deceptively peaceful fields toward the Sith outpost. Using the harkhawks to distract the soldiers and obfuscate their sensors had been Kaevee's idea, but carrying it out required Atris's deeper connection to the Force. Beast control was something Kaevee had always had a knack for. However, the laigreks of Dantooine naturally lived in hives, whereas these avians were solitary, and commanding them all at once was much more difficult.
Fastening the seat's crash webbing was awkward with one hand, but Atris managed it as Cole carried the starship out of the bay on repulsors. The motley town of Gallamby shrank beneath them. The engines engaged, and seconds later they were roaring low over the grasslands.
"Firing range in sixty seconds. Atris, are you sure those birds are enough to scramble their sensors?"
Atris emerged somewhat from her concentration. "They will buy you a few seconds."
"Guess that's got to be enough..." Cole's tone lowered to an urgent sort of mumble. "Okay, power to cannons, targeting computer. First the AA tower, then the transmitter on the north end of the building. Try to get 'em both in one pass."
Atris had noticed that the spacer was much quieter and more tactful than usual when the two were alone together. Though he liberally shared his sarcasm and belligerence with the entire rest of the crew, including the droids, never did he make a sharp remark at Atris's expense.
Privately, she was grateful.
The ship's instruments wailed as the targeting computer registered a lock, and red fire pulsed from the Ebon Hawk's wing cannons in two bursts. The anti-air turret was still belatedly swiveling toward them when it turned to a fountain of flame and superheated metal. Swearing under his breath, Cole switched over to repulsorlifts, bringing them to a hard stop over the wall, past the outpost's main building. In a span of time far quicker than was safe for such an operation, he whipped the Hawk around, fired again, then set the ship down on the roof so roughly that he may as well have dropped himself and Atris from the loading ramp.
"Okay—not too bad," he said between gasps.
"Not too much, no."
Outside an alarm was screaming, and the flock of panicked harkhawks—now released from Atris's control—dispersed in all directions. Inky smoke climbed from the decapitated air defense tower and from the savaged roof of the outpost. As well as pieces of the transmitter, the latter was strewn with blasted duracrete fragments from Cole's inept second barrage. Fear poured into the Force as soldiers on the ground sprinted for cover.
With a few taps at the keys, Cole sent a signal to Atton's comlink. He received back only a ping, suggesting the team below was too busy to send a proper message. The spacer shrugged and deployed the Ebon Hawk's belly turret.
Somewhat wearied from her control of the harkhawks, Atris tentatively reached out with the Force, probing for their other companions. Atton's presence was murky at best, and Ecksee had none to speak of, but Kaevee, as usual, was not difficult to sense. "They're coming. Not close, but not far either."
"Great."
Atris remained as she was, joined with the Force and letting it flow into her—until another presence made itself known: keen, hateful, and suddenly alert.
Atris's mind fell back into the cockpit. She may have gasped or made some sudden movement, because Cole half-turned in his chair. "You all right?"
She hesitated as the pang of concern sharpened in her—and then passed like a phantom pain from her lost hand. Months ago she had accompanied Atton into the heart of danger at Torque Highport, surviving a confrontation with a minor Sith Lord, and that mission had stirred something in her. It was not some delusion of youth, but she had since come to suspect that she was stronger and more alive than she had allowed herself to believe during her years of exile; and she sometimes felt prompted or even obliged to emerge from her solitude and protection aboard the Ebon Hawk and to do something. And now it was Kaevee in the heart of danger, where a dark assassin lurked...
But no, Atris reminded herself. Atton was there too, the most capable of any of them. He had no need of help from a disgraced Jedi Master who had not held a blade in six years. She had trusted him—and Kaevee—to begin this plan; she would trust them to complete it.
Besides, Atris did not have to be with Kaevee to help her. She needed only to stay centered focused in the Force.
"I am fine," she told Cole at last. "I only hope that our next takeoff will be more pleasant than the landing was."
The younger man's skepticism was plain on his face. "Ordinary" though he was, Cole Terrick had apparently been well aware of the Force's existence even before his fateful first encounter with the Ebon Hawk's crew. Putting something past him was not as easy as a Jedi or Sith might assume.
Even so, he didn't press. "Atris... Don't start hoping things."
Atton and his companions staggered as the turbolift lurched to a sudden halt. An alarm toned, followed by a string of furious, frenzied Binary jabbering as its security system reasserted itself and belatedly fried the computer spike that Atton had overridden it with. The lights died, but Atton had already retrieved the lightsaber from his utility pouch. Snapping it on and filling the compartment with a fractious blue glow, he made quick work of the door.
As soon as the way was clear, he put the saber away and swept into the hall beyond, rifle at the ready. Kaevee and Sulen followed, the former at the rear. The Zabrak showed no surprise at the lightsaber; he'd seen it already, when they'd had to cut their way out of the last three turbolifts.
The hall was clear, but there were several connected corridors in sight, and footsteps echoed from at least one. Atton glanced at the number beside the turbolift and quietly said, "Only a few levels to go. Let's take the stairs," before heading in what he felt reasonably sure was the right direction. He hadn't had much time to study the outpost schematics.
Keep moving, keep moving, he told himself. They had to stay ahead of the troopers, ahead of the Sith Adept, who would probably wise up to Ecksee's deception faster than the rest—and Atton had to stay ahead of the past.
It wasn't usually a problem, hadn't been in months. Weird. Sulen Tusser being a Zabrak hadn't been a surprise, and they were common enough in the galaxy. But when Atton had seen him there in the cell, for some reason he remembered Bao-Dur. Remembered hard.
Bao-Dur hadn't been ready and alert; he'd been slumped up against the wall, bereft of his repulsor arm. And there hadn't been a force field—only a solid, heavy door that blocked out all light. And the stench when that door had opened...
It hadn't been that long ago.
Involuntarily Atton squeezed the rifle in his hands, feeling out of place as he clunked along in the stolen Sith trooper armor. He didn't have time for this. Play the minus-four card, the totals are seventeen-thirteen. Play the minus-five card, totals are sixteen-thirteen...
Several turns later they caught sight of a stairwell entrance—and three troopers guided by a K-X12 probe droid, which Atton and Sulen reduced to corpses and a scrap pile in a few seconds. After the fact, it turned out Kaevee had blasted a trooper coming around the corner behind them.
Atton didn't congratulate her, though; he was too busy realizing a laser bolt had paid his shoulder a visit, leaving a sweet, scalding pain behind.
"Are you all right?" asked a wide-eyed Kaevee, drawing near.
Atton waved her off. "Course I am. Why wouldn't I be?" It had only grazed him, and the armor had taken the worst of it. He pried off the warped, half-melted chunk of chrome betaplast and let it clatter to the floor.
Turning, he discovered that Sulen Tusser had searched the corpses and found a logpad—thinner and much simpler than a regular datapad—and typed something out before offering it to Atton. "This is what I learned. What the Republic needs to know. If I don't make it—"
But Atton was already shaking his head in disbelief. Another reminder, another echo, another sick joke being played on him, and this time Atton didn't have it in him to laugh it off. He gave the logpad a glance, then snatched it out of the Zabrak's hand and put it in his utility pouch. With an aggression that he couldn't quite stifle, he said, "Forget it. What did my partner tell you? None of us is gonna die here. Now let's get a move on."
He felt Kaevee's eyes on his back as he went for the door. To tell the truth, when Atton had come up with this haphazard plan, he'd been impressed with the kid just for agreeing to be the prisoner in the first place, and was even more so now that she'd actually done it and kept her head. Starry-eyed half-Jedi though she was, Kaevee wasn't practically helpless like when they had first met.
Still, she couldn't handle herself alone, and if it hadn't been for Atton, she would still be squatting in the ruins of Dantooine, living a pointless life, but still safe. He had to get her out of here in one piece, too. Otherwise, what was the point of finding her?
He practically charged into the stairwell; a crazed part of him hoped to find it full of armed troopers simply for the noise and mayhem, but it was deserted. Still, the air felt a little cooler, and his head cleared as they climbed toward their objective.
X-C88 called on the comlink and gave a terse report. "They're on to Ecksee," Atton explained to his companions. "No more false alarms, and the garrison's regrouping."
Sulen grunted. "Still, keeping them on a wild bantha chase this long? I'm impressed with that droid of yours."
"Yeah, I never thought the pile of scrap would come in handy like this." Before he could remember anything else, Atton spoke into the comlink. "We're almost to the loading room. Get up here or you'll be a permanent resident."
After three levels the stairwell ended at the outpost's storerooms, which wrapped around a large chamber hosting a freight elevator accessing the roof. Once inside, they could ride that up to the Ebon Hawk.
The corridors were extra-wide, the doors thick and reinforced. Approaching the one to the loading room, Atton handed Kaevee the last two frag mines, and she stuck them along the wall some meters back. They were no danger to Ecksee, whenever it showed up; it would register as friendly to the mine's sensors.
"Got a reception ready in there," said Atton. He had spent his last computer spike on the lock mechanism, and his hand waited over the door release.
Sulen Tusser squinted at him, but didn't ask how he knew.
Kaevee sensed the same thing in the next room that Atton did: vigilant, well-honed aggression, and lots of it. When she stretched out further she felt the same thing, but a sea of it filling the base beneath them—and rising fast, soon to drown them. But also, just twenty or thirty meters above, through a few layers of durasteel, a solid light in the Force, like a star shining down on the waves.
Please help me, Atris, Kaevee thought. We're almost there.
"I'll go in first, make some noise," Atton was saying. "Kaevee, go left. Sulen, go right."
They nodded, taking positions, and he thumbed the release.
The door was a blast door, a multilayered iris of reinforced durasteel that split at angles from corner to corner. As soon as the gap could accommodate a Human body, Atton cleared it with a Force-assisted leap. Hidden by the still-expanding bulkheads, the room sounded with an eruption of laser fire, the crackle of a lightsaber, and a frenzied scream worthy of a lunatic.
Beyond incredulity, Kaevee simply contained her pounding heart until the door was open, and the Force rushed through her as it had few times before. And as before, on Malachor V, it was not her own strength and focus and light, but Atris's, because she had asked for it and the once-Jedi Master had heard, and was ready.
Centered around the large, rectangular slab of a freight elevator, the loading room was cluttered with stacks of plasteel containers, parked grav-loaders, and other pieces of equipment, and overlooked by a half-ring catwalk ten meters up—and it swarmed with more than a dozen Remnant troopers. On the far end, Atton was dancing through a welter of red bolts and slivers of glowing metal, spinning, sidestepping, darting into and out of cover. With wild swings of the lightsaber he deflected barrages of fire, cut through Sith troopers, and even slashed random crates and machines as if for the mere, raving joy of it. Not content with the saber, he returned fire from a blaster pistol in his off hand. There was no telling where his rifle had gone.
Though Atton's audacity had startled the troopers into breaking ranks, that same quality made him a tempting target, and already they were regrouping to concentrate fire. But plenty of them had taken note of the other intruders as well, and soon every surface crackled with small explosions and pops and pings as the room was swept with a hailstorm of laser fire.
Kaevee moved into the storm, threading her way through the maze of obstacles, aiming and firing as she went. Every shadow of fear or fatigue in her was gone; she was not astonished as she put bolts through the center of black faceplates or strayed millimeters away from incoming fire without flinching. Atris's borrowed light left her thoughts clear and wordless as the Force carried her along on its crystalline tide.
The first two troopers she killed did not die unnoticed; even as they fell, four others snapped their rifles toward Kaevee. Rather than firing, she cut the air with her hand. Force energy flung the nearest ones off their feet, sent the others reeling, and turned containers into missiles.
A burst of red energy from above tore a molten spiral into the metal beside Kaevee's feet. Stumbling, she half-dove, half-fell to her knees, hugging the side of a cryo-cylinder as troopers on the catwalk chewed into it with their rifles. Sparks rained around her, and she felt the stream of power from her mentor begin to ebb.
Meters away, a trooper on the ground level began to strafe around the cylinder, only for his knees to be shot out from under him. Where from, Kaevee could not say, but she knew that Sulen Tusser was pulling his weight.
Huddled behind cover, Kaevee squeezed her eyes shut and tried to visualize the catwalk filled with troopers above. In a manner beyond her words or understanding, the composite of interlocked metal took form in her mind, and she focused all of the pressure she could muster onto a single support strut. Feverish, agonizing seconds passed as the metal brace vibrated, hummed, rattled, and finally—
Snapped, causing the whole platform to lurch—not catastrophically, but enough to stagger the nine Remnant troopers stationed there, breaking their rain of fire on the room below. In the seconds those men spent flailing and regaining their balance, Atton Force-leaped from the chaos below and landed among them with swift death in his hands.
Kaevee forced her eyes open. She saw spots—and armor-sheathed limbs, helmeted heads, and lost weapons clattering and bouncing as they fell from the catwalk. Across the room, a rifle's mouth flared between two large crates, Sulen Tusser's stony visage flickering murky red in the shadows there. Three troopers were moving on him, but the Zabrak dropped them even as Kaevee took aim.
Then, jarringly, painfully, the room was quiet.
"Sulen, you hit?"
"No, I'm fine."
"Kaevee?"
Kaevee stood, hearing her companions' words only as raw sound, unintelligent like the hum of the air scrubbers and the hiss of melted durasteel as it cooled. She checked her pistol's power cell, but did not see the reading. Around her she felt the presences of the dying men as they shrank away, like thinning clouds of smoke. The hard edges of the room tingled and swam, and for a measureless moment she was on Malachor V, in a hallway carpeted with bodies—
Atris's final gift came as pulse of warmth, invisible and unheard. The nightmares melted away and Kaevee snapped back to herself, sweating and drained but steady on her feet.
"Kaevee, you with me?"
Atton started across the room at a fast stride, holstering his weapons, but even as he drew near, the girl's thousand-meter stare left through some back door.
"I'm fine, it's just..." With a glance, she took in the scorched, smoking, bloody mess they—but mostly Atton—had made of the loading room. "I'm ready to get out of here."
"You and me both. Keep an eye on that door, and stay sharp. You're doing great, kid." Atton wasn't lying, and he flashed his winning smile to prove it. She didn't return the favor, but that was okay.
Atton stepped onto the platform of the freight elevator, hunting for the controls—none in sight. Despite having already drawn heavily on the Force to clear the room, he kept his senses alert. Still, he focused them there in the room, rather than getting drawn out into the pandemonium of the wider facility.
Sulen Tusser emerged from behind a grav-loader at that moment, stepping over a tractor prong which had been cut free by one of Atton's wilder lightsaber swings. His rifle gave an electric whine as he slapped in a new power cell. Having now lived through a couple firefights with the guy, Atton thought he was okay for an RI agent.
In a far corner they spotted a transparisteel booth hosting a bank of computer stations. Being the closest, Sulen started toward it. Atton then had a funny feeling that he should be facing the door, and put a hand to his blaster as he did so. A heartbeat later it opened and X-C88 ambled in, identifying itself with a tootle. Kaevee poked her head up from behind a plasteel crate.
"About time you made it," Atton snapped. Ecksee waved its arms and buzzed a rejoinder, and he pretended to listen, pretended to be satisfied with the emptiness of the hallway. Meanwhile he pulled the Force tight around himself, because he trusted his gut.
Naturally that was what saved him, because next he made a jerky, frantic sidestep because his gut told him to. His Force sense told him that something went whizzing past him, separated from his head by a handspan of air; it embedded itself in the far wall with a nice thud-clang. Atton had not seen the knife, or whatever it was, but as he righted himself he saw the black-gloved hand that had thrown it. For a second it was only the outstretched hand, suspended in midair right next to Ecksee like something from one of those stupid holo-thriller serials. But then, with a shimmer, the blackness grew into an arm, a torso, then the rest of a humanoid figure as the stealth field enveloping it dissolved. It was a feline Cathar, with a short, dirty-copper mane.
A sweep of Force power sent Ecksee tumbling sideways, shrieking as it collided with a plasteel crate meters away. With his other hand the Sith tossed something else, which skittered and clattered to a stop about Atton's feet while he was still grabbing his saber hilt. It was the two mines Kaevee had set out in the corridor, now gutted and useless; a good enough stealth field could fool their sensors.
Nuruz Lar's radiation-yellow eyes glanced at something over Atton's shoulder—probably the knife he'd just dodged. "I'd compliment your reflexes, Rand, but we both know that was only luck. That's all you ever had going for you."
"Gotten me this far," Atton noted. "How about you? Still no promotion? Still a plain Adept like all the other boys and girls?"
That got Nuruz to show his teeth. Good. A few seconds talking skrag would give Atton a chance to rack his brain, to try and remember what he could about this psychotic felinoid, how he fought and what his weaknesses might be.
But Nuruz mastered himself quicker than many Adepts would and turned a devilish grin on Kaevee, who was still braced behind the crate from before. Her pistol was leveled at the Cathar's heart, but the lightsaber hilt in his hand was enough to give her pause.
"You look lost, little one."
Nuruz stretched forth a hand, and an invisible cord yanked Kaevee headfirst over the crate; her blaster went skidding away as the Cathar sprinted toward her. Realizing he had completely fracked up, Atton was already running too and snapping off shots from the pistol in his off-hand—for all the good that did. Bolts of light thumped into crates and canisters while Nuruz flowed between them like a gust of black wind.
The distance between the Sith and Kaevee was halved in less than a breath, or it would have been, had Atton been remembering to breathe. The moment didn't freeze before his eyes, and the Force didn't dial down the passage of time to let him think and figure out what the Sith was up to. It didn't need to; he simply knew, because he had been there himself, lifetimes ago.
He'd explained it to a new squadmate like this: Target someone he's supposed to protect. His bratty Padawan, some other companion, even a random civilian, and let Jedi compassion take care of the rest. He'll walk right into your stun net to save them because he has to—because that's who he is.
A Force-powered leap shot Atton to a grav-loader along the Sith's path. As he landed in a crouch, a scarlet-white blur ripped through the plasteel plating from the other side, nearly shaving his scalp off. An instant later Nuruz Lar slid into view, but pivoted and rounded on Atton, rather than continuing toward Kaevee, whose face was still acquainted with the floor two meters away. Atton's blaster snapped up for a point-blank shot. The barrel coughed sparks as the red blade cut through it with a twirl, then looped down toward Atton's shoulder, only to meet a counterpart that glowed blue and spat hairline arcs of unstable plasma.
Atton struggled to stand as Nuruz bore down on him. The Cathar's eyes shone like they were stealing the light of their crossed blades. "You are going soft," he crowed. "That's how they used to catch Jedi!"
How I used to, thought Atton contemptuously. "I don't feel like I'm caught."
"Then you're as blind as they were."
Yep. He did love talking this much. With a grunt, Atton shunted their lock into the grav-loader, then sent Nuruz staggering back with a kick. Behind him, he could sense Kaevee scampering away, and thanked the stars he no longer needed to tell her to leave Dark Jedi to him.
Speaking of whom, Nuruz barely seemed annoyed by the kick. Atton watched as the Cathar settled into a stance with his dominant foot back and blade held in both hands, slowly rising. Shien form, from the looks of it—for Jedi who thought the best everything was a good offense. This, too, was vaguely familiar.
"How long has it been, Atton—five years, six? Let's see what you've learned since then."
Atton rolled his eyes, then stepped in and got down to business.
In Trayus Academy he had chosen Niman—Meetra's style. While not brainlessly simple like Form One, it was similarly basic, well-rounded and adaptable. Even so, Atton found himself challenging the Cathar strength for strength; there wasn't time to drag this out. They strafed and circled each other, trading savage blows that seemed more suited to vibrocleavers or war batons than the allegedly elegant tools of the Jedi. Misses and parried swings chopped nearby containers to pieces, spilling more debris to the floor.
In a vague, disjointed fashion, Atton surmised that something was happening in the wider room around them. Machinery whined as it powered up, growled or clanked as it moved. A banging sounded from the door. Ecksee's sketchy repulsorlift hummed somewhere. Kaevee and Sulen were huddling in the control booth.
Atton's frustration guttered and smoldered toward open flame as the tenuous partnership wore on. Nuruz was just another Sith Adept, maybe better than average, and for all his big talk, he didn't seem to have learned anything new since they had sparred half a decade ago. By now he should've made a mistake, or his defense should have crumbled. So why hadn't it?
"You're weak!" Nuruz taunted between flurries of slashes. "Weaker than in the academy—I can sense the difference. The Force is forsaking you!"
He gestured, and the blaster-scorched body of a Sith trooper flew toward Atton like a thrown doll. Leaping aside, Atton searched for a retort but only came up with, "Good riddance." He resented the dead men scattered about; taking them down had blunted his edge.
Nuruz showed his fangs. "A poor excuse for a Jedi. But then, you never were much of a Sith, were you? Only a thug who was lucky enough to be our master's plaything. You'd never have survived Trayus Academy otherwise—we all knew it."
Going blade to blade hadn't worked out. Maybe the answer was to talk the other guy to death. "Oh, I'm sorry. Did I make you jealous?"
"I? No, only curious. Humans are supposed to be clever, like the Cathar. The Exile gave you power and protection merely so she could satisfy herself with you." The Sith Adept brought his guard in and crouched slightly; his voice lowered almost to a purr. "What sort of fool would throw that away?"
What sort of fool.
That started to do it; for all Atton was aware that this schutta didn't know half of the real story, he could feel his knuckles whitening around the lightsaber hilt in his grasp. He could sense that squirming, snarling, wounded pride within that Silbus and the other Sith had told him to harness, to tame—and he had learned how to. He hadn't really done it since carving through the Sith Marauders on Malachor half a year ago. However, that instinct, that need to grind Nuruz's bones and shut him up—or to make him shriek like Jedi on the rack once had—told Atton that all the power was still there for the taking. He opened himself to that power, let it fill him with flame and smoke until his blood started to boil—
And nailed his feet to the floor, because he still wasn't an idiot, or at least not completely. That rage was his weapon, his tool to pull out when he decided to; not when some strutting Dark Jedi goon wanted to get him so mad that he'd make a mistake. But it served Atton to pretend he was that mad, to pretend that it was overwhelming him. As it had been with so many fights in the past against so many people—Jedi, Sith, gangsters, soldiers, and even Meetra at the very end—Atton became the person his enemy wanted him to be.
He strained his face into something like anguish, twitched forward as though barely managing to hold himself back from a crazy charge, let his guard dip carelessly—and sure enough Nuruz Lar sprang at him with a skewering thrust.
At the last instant Atton lurched aside, spinning into what was probably the best-timed and most elegant kick of his life; he planted it between Nuruz's shoulder blades, sending him tumbling across a crate, red lightsaber slicing out chunks as he went, and into a stack of plasteel drums hard enough to jostle them.
"Atton! Atton, come on!"
Kaevee's shout cut through the fog of anger in Atton's mind. Whirling, he saw her and Sulen scrambling onto the freight elevator. The glowstrip tracing its edge was flashing on and off in tune with a buzzer, and its guard rails were unfolding. More alarming, the oversized door they had entered from—someone must have locked it before—was finally opening, revealing a hallway that was now lousy with armored Remnant troopers.
The ones in front raised their weapons, but stopped short as a grav-loader lumbered toward them out of the maze of cargo, knocking over a stack of plasteel drums as it went. Several of the men opened fire, but they needn't have bothered. The machine's chassis, savaged by the recent melee, was already spurting flame in multiple directions, and its repulsorlift failed after only a few seconds. A booming clang shook the room as it dropped just before the doorway, largely blocking the field of fire between it and the elevator. Ecksee broke through a cockpit window and rushed to join its companions.
There were a couple of plasteel crates on the platform; Kaevee and Sulen crouched behind them and poured fire on the troopers as they struggled to get around the misplaced grav-loader. Atton scrambled aboard in time for the lift to announce its ascent with a grating clank. His still-active lightsaber drew a volley of blaster bolts, and he deflected them frantically.
Only seconds remained before they would disappear into the shaft above. Before Atton could feel good about that, though, he looked to the side and found Nuruz Lar clinging to the guard rail with one hand. Heavy, pained breaths hissed through his feline teeth, but his eyes were absolutely crazed with determination.
Apparently the beating he'd taken below wasn't enough of a hint for him.
Snarling, and obviously using the Force to boost his strength, Nuruz Lar managed to haul himself up over the guard rail and onto the lift. His red blade sliced an arc into the platform as he landed.
Stepping back to escape the troopers' already-diminishing field of fire, Atton telekinetically flung the nearest plasteel crate. The crunch it made as it flattened Nuruz's midsection against the durasteel rail might have sickened another man. The Sith collapsed like a puppet with cut strings, and his lightsaber left his fingers, fizzling out before rolling from the platform.
Seconds later the shaft swallowed them. When Atton extinguished his blade, there was nothing to see by except the platform's white glowstrip—which was somehow glaring and dim at the same time. Kaevee, Sulen, and Ecksee were all a little battered, but otherwise fine.
"Cole, we're on our way to the roof," Atton said into the comlink, his chest heaving. "Are we ready to fly?"
"What, soon? By now I thought you were giving me time to take a nap."
Atton glanced at his companions and switched it off. "Funniest bastard in the Outer Rim," he growled, and nobody laughed.
For a moment his eyes joined Kaevee's, which were unreadable in the dark. Briefly, he wondered if she'd heard any of Nuruz Lar's words. And what it mattered if she had.
Glancing at the floor, he asked, "Can they stop the lift from down there?"
"I hope not," said Sulen.
They were startled by an unfamiliar sound that barely carried over the hum of the lift. Strained and nightmarish and... wet, it didn't seem like something a living creature should make. When it repeated, Atton recognized his name.
Nuruz Lar lay convulsing on his side where he had fallen, deep in shadow. His clawed hands twitched uncontrollably, but one seemed to be trying for a beckoning gesture. Seeing Atton draw near, the Cathar—
Smiled.
Smiled like he had won.
"Well played... Atton." With every other word he coughed or spat blood, which shone ruby when touched by the glowstrip's light. "But you—are doomed... Revan is coming—with all the Sith... We'll blot out—all the stars of—your Republic..."
Unblinking, Atton stayed with those eyes, saw them glowing like molten gold, and slowly knelt beside the Sith.
"You're with them now—traitor... All you fight for will be—"
The emitter shroud of Atton's lightsaber pounded Nuruz's skull before it snapped on, burning a hole through the Cathar's brain and a molten shaft through the floor of the lift.
The same moment he stood and powered the weapon down, a hatch opened overhead, and fresh gray sky swept the dark aside like a drawn curtain. The lift completed its journey with a satisfying clank. A plain, pleasant afternoon soothed them with its scent, tainted only a little by black smoke and whining klaxons. To Atton's eyes, however, the most beautiful thing by far was the crouching hull of the Ebon Hawk, idling just a stone's throw away.
No one needed telling, but he said it anyway: "Let's get the hell out of here."
Being a backwater of the Gordian Reach, Vaal enjoyed only a meager Remnant military presence. Even so, the sudden radio silence of Gallamby Outpost had been noticed, and two corvettes were on their way to investigate. But before their sensors could even search for the Ebon Hawk, much less find it while the scrambler was active, the navicomputer chimed that it was ready—a sound from which Kaevee, on the whole, had learned to take a profound sort of relief. "Coordinates set."
"Easy does it," said Cole, grasping the hyperspace lever.
Kaevee realized with a jolt that in the course of all the past day's perilous endeavors, she had forgotten to take her thyahiptolamine. Resigning herself, she drew a sharp breath and held it, watching the starfield begin to warp before them. Butterflies thronged in her stomach as the Hawk blazed into hyperspace, churning her guts like the blue vortex outside before finally settling down.
"Well, I'll be damned. So we actually made it out in one piece, all of us."
For perhaps the first time since they had met, at least the first time Kaevee could remember, Cole Terrick was actually, genuinely grinning at her. A part of her tried to resent him; after all, he had once again stayed out of the line of fire, this time while she and Atton marched into the belly of the beast to contend with multitudes of soldiers and a ruthless Sith Adept. However, though she couldn't share in his mirth, she was simply too exhausted to be vexed—and too grateful that they were all still alive.
After the post-jump check they ventured into the main hold to find Sulen Tusser slumped at the dining table. While Cole introduced himself, Kaevee followed a bangle of beeps and chirps to the garage. Peeking in, she saw X-C88 perched on the work bench, its mechanical arms twitching and jerking while the Remote hovered nearby. Perhaps the probe droid had been damaged from being thrown by the Dark Jedi earlier.
"Where's Atton?" asked Kaevee as she returned to the hold.
"Refresher," replied Sulen, between gulps of water from a canteen Cole had provided. "Getting out of that armor." After draining it, the agent fixed his eyes on Kaevee. "I told you before, I'm supposed to be expendable. If I'm compromised, I don't come back alive. So why did you people come for me?"
Cole crossed his arms and leaned back against the holotable. "Does it matter?"
Kaevee looked from him to Sulen, again remembering Lannik Mai and Rittu Zarander, who had died on Gulvitch. "Republic Intelligence has lost a lot of agents in this campaign. Our superior decided he wanted to save one."
"Ah... Your superior. Can't tell me who that is, can you?"
It wasn't that they couldn't; more that it wasn't a good idea to, as Director Malanheimer had put it. Kaevee shook her head. "Besides, that data you have is important."
"Well, I only have half of it," replied Sulen wearily. "I found nothing about where this... 'true Sith' armada is supposed to be coming in. Poking too much into that's what got me captured."
At that moment the medbay door opened and Atton sauntered out, sloppily dressed in his usual attire, minus the ribbed jacket. As he approached, Cole straightened and asked Sulen, "Well, what's the other half?"
"A list of targets the Sith are going to hit soon. Days from now, at most." Sulen's face colored with new energy, new urgency, as he faced Atton. "The first one's Obeth Station in the Landor system."