If not for my Force sensitivity, I wouldn't have had any idea the Cartel mercenaries were approaching, charging blindly into the great tempest my acolytes had summoned in a display of tactical stupidity I could only attribute to whatever threats their commanders had made. There was no denying that Iskandar and the others had done an admirable job : I could barely see further than my own nose, and my ears were full of the sound of the screaming winds and the thunderous sound of bolts of lightning falling from the sky, melting the sand where they hit and leaving patches of fulgurite behind.
As the inevitable violence crept closer and closer to actuality, I felt the Dark Side wrapping itself around me, whispering, pleading, threatening, begging. Erebus had told me it was alive and sentient, a god we must honour with our actions in order to be rewarded with power.
But then, Erebus had told me a lot of things, like that the Emperor was the incarnation of the Dark Side, and we should be honored to follow his every command. And, ever since I had crawled away from my final confrontation with my Master, I had held to the principle that doing the opposite of whatever the Vile One would have done in any given situation was a good rule of thumb.
I didn't know whether Erebus had been right in how he'd described the Dark Side, or if it was more like Amberley had told me the Jedi thought of it : a corruption of the Force, created by the evil deeds of countless sentients across the ages. I thought it more likely that the truth laid somewhere in between or beyond any of us mere mortals. In the end, though, it didn't really matter. The Dark Side was real, and it was reacting to what was happening and would soon happen on Savareen.
"I give you nothing," I said softly, confident that the noise of the storm would drown out my words so that nobody would hear me talking to myself and start thinking I was going crazy. JURG-N would hear, of course, but I trusted him not to say anything about it.
"Nothing but this moment," I continued, feeling what I could only describe as the weight of the Dark Side's attention. "The galaxy has forgotten the power of the Dark Side; forgotten the power of the Sith. Both have become little more than legends. Here and now, this will change. Here and now, the galaxy will be reminded of our true might."
"This, I give you, and nothing more, for the blood we spill here is our own," I finished, and the Dark Side shifted in response to my not-quite-prayer. It didn't turn its gaze completely away from me, but I felt its attention partially move to the other Sith standing in the storm, impatiently waiting for the enemy to get close enough.
Good. The Republic already wasn't going to be happy about this : I would much rather avoid accidentally turning this whole battle into a blood sacrifice to the Dark Side of the Force. And besides, in my experience, those never ended well for anyone involved, no matter which side of the knife they started on.
In the last seconds before the blasters started firing, I closed my eyes, and drew on the Force to renew my strength as much as I could. Then I felt it : that unmistakable change in the air that told me that the battle had begun. In the distance, I heard Iskandar scream something, but I couldn't decipher the words.
"Let's go, JURG-N," I told my aide.
"Right behind you, sire," he replied, and we marched forth together.
The Gamorrean was no one important. He was just one more raider in one more warband which had heeded the call of Marlo the Hutt after their leader (who had been shot during the panic in the void by nobody willing to step forward and claim the kill) had been tempted by one of the Cartels' recruiters.
In the three decades since leaving his homeworld behind, the Gamorrean had stolen, killed, tortured and enslaved, for pleasure, sport and profit : just one more cog in the great machine of crime which crushed the Outer Rim, extracting wealth from the suffering and misery of billions of sentients.
Even so, he didn't want to be on Savareen. Sure, he was pissed at Cain for making him feel terrified using his Force magic, but not enough to want to go anywhere near the Sith. But the warband's ship had been too close to the Hutta's Magnificence to make a run for it when the orders had come, and maybe dying on the planet beat certainly dying in the void.
The speeders had stopped working five minutes inside the storm, their engines clogged by sand. The Gamorrean had seen several other machines catch fire and explode as their pilots tried to keep going, but thankfully their own driver was smarter than that and stopped them in time, even if it meant they had to go the rest of the way on foot.
Within five minutes, he'd lost sight of the rest of his team. Within ten, he wasn't even sure he was going in the right direction and hadn't gotten turned around at some point. The sand and the lightning made it impossible to see, and there was so much static in the air comms were down as well.
But he didn't think staying in one place and being buried under the sand was a good idea, so he kept moving in the direction he was mostly sure was the enemy's. He couldn't tell how long he walked, every step forcing him to use his powerful musculature to pull his feet up.
Then he heard a voice, a scream, so loud that it made the ground beneath his boots quake and made him shake inside his armor :
"WE ARE RETURNED !"
He raised his vibro-halberd in front of him, clutching it nervously, eyes darting in a vain attempt to pierce the storm. That voice hadn't sounded like it belonged to any sentient species he knew of, and he was reminded of the monsters that he'd seen rampaging across the ship. He knew, now, that they hadn't been real, but they'd certainly felt real at the time and –
A figure emerged from the storm right in front of him. His blood running cold, the Gamorrean squinted, then grunted in relief. This wasn't Cain, nor any of the crazy soldiers and Mandalorians he'd brought with him. This was just a Twi'lek girl, less than a fifth of his weight. He could deal with her easily, just like he'd dealt with the girls he'd taken during his previous trips on Savareen, when he and the rest of the warband had come down to find some amusement during the waiting for the muster to be complete –
The Gamorrean squealed as the first red lightsaber cut him open throat to groin, before going silent as the second cut his head off.
Nefertari kicked the pig's head away, and it disappeared into the storm. Then she turned off her twin lightsabers, clipped them to her belt, and started prowling again, moving across the sand with feather-light steps.
The sandstorm had dramatically altered the battlefield. Not only did anyone who needed to breathe air have to wear a rebreather or choke on sand, not only could nobody see any further than a few meters, the range of blaster fire was severely limited, as you couldn't fire a weapon without the shot hitting innumerable grains of sand, losing its energy pretty fast. In addition, the howling winds and near-constant booms of thunder meant you could barely hear the voices screaming in your comlink.
In other words, the perfect hunting ground for a group of Sith, and Nefertari was taking full advantage of that opportunity to vent some of the anger that forever boiled within her heart.
Nefertari knew what others saw when they looked at her. Just another Twi'lek, another dancer, another slave girl, her beauty the only thing of worth about her. She hated that, and always had, all the way back to the dirty streets where she'd run as a child, before being captured by the Sith 'recruiters' and shipped off to Korriban. One of the reasons she tolerated Iskandar as much as she did was that, for all his arrogance, the pureblood had never regarded her as anything else than a true rival. All the way back to the Academy, he'd sensed her potential and regarded her as a threat, before circumstances had forced them to work together to survive.
She had heard the words of the Lord of Terror before the battle began, carried through the storm to every acolyte by the power of the Dark Side in a casual display of mastery which had sent shivers down her spine. They had been a poignant reminder of just why the young Sith followed Cain, even now, in a galaxy that had largely forgotten them and in which they could all become warlords in their own right if they split up from Perlia.
Darth Cain was the quintessential Sith : a being who forged his own path, who let nothing and no one – not the Vile One, not the Dark Council, not the Emperor, not even the Dark Side itself – dictate his actions. He chose his own course based on his own convictions, and woe betide any who dared to stand in his way. For now, Nefertari could only dream of such power and self-confidence.
But, one day, oh, one day.
"OH, WHAT A DAY !" bellowed someone to her right, loud enough to be heard even over the screams of the storm. "WHAT A LOVELY DAY !"
Nefertari sighed as she recognized the voice of that madman Nux. At some point during his training at the Academy, the Rattataki male had fallen apart like so many students did, but instead of taking his own life, he had sworn to die in glorious battle. The cruel joke of it was that he was terrible at it – not the battle part, Nefertari had to grudgingly admit, but the dying part.
Since escaping Korriban, Nux had been shot, stabbed, poisoned, infected with a flesh-eating disease bred by a mad Sith Lord, crashed a speeder into the side of a tank – twice – and fallen from more cliffs than the Twi'lek cared to remember. And yet, he was still there, proudly displaying the scars of each of his near-death experiences as he searched for another suitably impressive way to get himself killed.
Whether the Force loved or hated Nux was hotly debated among the acolytes. Nux himself was too insane to care, and was kept in check from going too crazy outside of battles only by his respect for Iskandar and Darth Cain – the former because he had helped him escape what he saw as a bad death on Korriban, and the latter because he provided so many opportunities for a glorious end.
A brief opening in the storm let Nefertari watch as Nux charged a squad of eleven raiders of various species, who had somehow managed to stay together in the storm. The first two died before they even realized they were under attack, the next three barely had time to bring their weapons to bear – but the remaining six did have time to open fire. Blaster bolts flew toward the mad acolyte, who didn't even bother trying to dodge or parry them. More than half of them missed their mark, and the rest slammed into the bodyglove Nux wore, leaving obvious burns where they'd pierced through the fabric and into the Rattataki's skin – but Nux didn't slow down, didn't even appear to feel the wounds.
Within a few more seconds, what could generously be called a fight was over, and the last of the raiders was dead. Nefertari was about to turn away from the mad acolyte and go looking for more prey herself when she felt the approach of something large, something which screamed of threat to her senses. Her lightsabers flew to her hands as she looked around, searching for the source of the premonition – and then she saw it.
Nux went flying as a mass of tentacles smashed into his side. Had it been anyone else in his place, Nefertari would have assumed them dead on the spot, but the Rattataki had survived much, much worse than that. She didn't have the time to look at him, however, as her focus was entirely on the sentient who had dispatched him so swiftly.
Nefertari had never met a creature like this before, but she recognized it from her studies in xenobiology, and she cursed. A Gen'Dai. Darth Cain had warned them about the presence of such a being among the enemy during their descent to Savareen's surface.
The Twi'lek acolyte had fought and slain many enemies in her life. But, much to her frustration, she wasn't sure she could defeat such a creature. Her speed and skill with a lightsaber wouldn't amount for much against something with practically limitless endurance, and which could regenerate from pretty much anything.
The Gen'Dai didn't seem to have noticed her yet. She could get away, escape into the storm, but the thought of running from any challenge was abhorrent to her, even though she knew it was the right move. She wasted precious seconds hesitating like this, until the alien took the choice out of her hands :
"CAIN !" roared the monster. "CAIN ! COME AND FACE ME !"
Nefertari felt the cold before she registered the presence of her lord. The temperature had decreased since the storm had blocked the sun, but now ice was forming on the ground, creating strange shapes as it rose up the twisting sand, freezing tendrils of grains in place.
"Cease this unsightly tantrum, Durge," said a voice that cut through the noise of the storm like a vibroblade through flesh. "I am here."
The storm parted before the Lord of Terror, pushed away by the invisible force field of his indomitable will. He walked with the calm of someone strolling through a garden party instead of trudging through the sand in the middle of a chaotic battle, and hadn't even drawn his lightsaber. JURG-N walked besides him, weapons glowing hot with the energy of numerous discharges, each of which Nefertari didn't doubt for a second had hit their marks.
Nefertari grinned, even as she swiftly moved away from the incoming confrontation. It had been too long since she'd gotten a chance to watch Darth Cain in action with her own eyes, and she'd learned something new every single time.
"I will give you one last chance to surrender, Durge," said Cain. "Throw down your weapons, and you will live to see the end of the Hutt Cartels."
The Gen'Dai – Durge, apparently, who must have some important position in the enemy forces for the Sith Lord to have bothered learning his name – laughed.
"Not once in my life have I surrendered, Sith," he boasted. "I won't start now."
"Then you will die," replied the Lord of Terror, and his lightsaber ignited.
I really didn't want to fight an enraged Gen'Dai, especially one who seemed to have a personal grudge against me for some unfathomable reason. But Nux had landed right next to me after his brief flight, and if I had turned and left, he would have seen it. Given everything the Rattataki had survived so far, I found it hard to believe that this skirmish on a random planet was what would finally do him in.
And if he survived, as seemed likely, then his testimony would hurt my reputation greatly. Which would be fine in principle, but unfortunately I relied too heavily on that miserable pile of lies, misunderstandings and half-truths to let that happen.
In the long run, it was much safer for me to confront Durge than lose the respect of the maniacs under my command by running away. I hated how frequent that kind of calculus had become in my life, but there was nothing to do for it.
Having resigned myself to the inevitable, I considered my options. None of JURG-N's weapons could inflict any real harm on Durge. At best, my droid aide could provide a temporary distraction before the bounty hunter smashed him to pieces. He could be repaired, of course, as had happened too many times for my tastes already, but I refused to inflict that upon him for such paltry gains.
Of course, I knew him well enough to realize that, if I told him that openly, I would spend the next month or so facing passive-aggressive bullshit from him.
"JURG-N, make sure we aren't disturbed," I told him instead as I forced myself to walk toward Durge, pushing my rising terror into the Force and disrupting Savareen's poor climate even further as spikes of ice began to grow all around us.
"As you wish, sir," replied my aide, and I suppressed a wince at his tone, knowing I hadn't completely hidden my true reason for the order from him.
Oh well. That was a problem for my future self, and since the lucky bastard wouldn't have to deal with Durge, I was fine with kicking that particular thermal detonator down the road.
Given their entirely understandable grudge against the Empire for the destruction of their homeworld, many of the Gen'Dai survivors had spent decades fighting the Sith wherever they could. As a prominent Imperial figure, that meant I had ended up in the crosshairs of that particular bunch of alien killing machines far too many times for my liking (the ideal number of times being, of course, zero).
I didn't even bother trying to frighten Durge with my aura of dread. While he wouldn't be completely immune to it, even with his Gen'Dai physiology making him feel emotions in an entirely different way than I, it wouldn't make enough of a difference to be worth the effort, and I needed all of my focus to stay alive in any case.
Even boosting my body with the Force, I felt the shock reverberate through my bones as I turned the first blow aside. Durge wasn't holding anything back, coming at me with killing intent from the very start. Someone else might have considered it a sign of respect that he wasn't bothering to try to play with me, but I myself had always enjoyed having my foes underestimate me, even if it had been a long time since it had happened – with someone other than Vitiate, at least, although given the bastard's power compared to mine, whether he'd actually underestimated me or had been right to consider me beneath him was a question best left to philosophers.
As I dodged around Durge's attacks, I struck back with my lightsaber, again and again. Most of my blows landed, thanks to Durge not even bothering to block them. A few were turned aside by his armor – either he'd invested in something capable of withstanding a lightsaber when accepting this job, or his armor was a leftover from his alleged time fighting in the New Sith Wars.
As for the few hits that pierced through the armor, they did little beyond inflict pain – and no Gen'Dai would be undone by something as small as that. After a few exchanges, it was clear that the damage I was inflicting wasn't outpacing Durge's natural healing. But I knew there were limits to a Gen'Dai's regeneration, and as we fought on, a plan began to form in my mind, panic coming to my aid as it always did in the thick of battle to find a way out, no matter how risky.
I dodged Durge's latest strike with a Force-assisted leap backward. As soon as I had landed, I stamped my foot onto the ground, and a path of ice snaked across the sand toward Durge at lightning speed, erupting into a cluster of frozen crystals that caught him just as he was about to lunge at me and holding him in place. I knew this wouldn't last long : the sudden thermal shock had sapped his strength for now, but he would adapt to it in a few seconds and break free.
But those few seconds were all I needed. I raised my left hand into the air, still holding my lightsaber in my right, and reached out with the Force, to the vast energies gathered in the storm around and above us. Force Lightning crackled between my fingers, establishing a symbolic connection between my hand and the raging storm.
As above, so below. As rituals went, it was a very basic one, made possible only by the hard work Iskandar and the others had already put in, but it should do the job.
With a wordless scream, I bent my body and slammed my open palm down, and several bolts of Force-infused lightning came down, striking the frozen form of Durge at the exact same time. I had to use the Force to anchor myself in place and keep from being sent flying by the strength of the resulting explosion, as well as to prevent any flying debris from skewering me.
When my vision cleared from the flash, there was nothing left where Durge had stood but a patch of ash and fulgurite, and a few scorched and heat-warped pieces of armor. That was it : even a Gen'Dai couldn't come back from that. I suppressed a brief flare of shame at the thought of having pushed the species even closer to extinction : he'd tried to kill me first, and had rejected all my attempts to get him to stop.
"Nicely done, sir," said JURG-N, appearing at my side as if out of thin air. Judging by the heat coming off his weapons, he'd needed to shoot a few fools to make sure nobody interfered : I could only hope that had taken the edge off his annoyance with me.
"Thank you, JURG-N," I breathed deeply despite the annoyance of the rebreather, forcing my racing heart to calm down.
"Now, then," I continued with forced insouciance. "Let's see if we can't find an actual challenge before the battle's end."
Jenit Sulla was grinning like a loon under her helmet. Darth Cain really brought them to the nicest places, she reflected as she set another bunch of mercenaries on fire with her wrist-mounted flamethrower. This wasn't the best one, but only because the competition was so severe.
Thanks to the advanced tech inside her helmet (which she'd scavenged from a Republic research facility she'd raided during the Second Great War), Sulla was able to keep an eye on the overall progression of the battle as a whole. Predictably, they were winning – in her opinion, that hadn't ever been in question. The fighters the Cartels had gathered in Savareen were thugs, pirates and mercenaries more used to roughing up civilians and raiding trade hyperlanes than facing actual, properly trained soldiers. Sure, they might have some experience going up against rival warbands, but that didn't amount to much when faced with the likes of Darth Cain's chosen elite.
Broklaw's soldiers had stopped firing from behind their fortified positions and were marching out in squads, keeping close to avoid losing each other. Although they were massively outnumbered, the complete dissolution of the enemy's order of battle meant that, more often than not, the Sith troopers had the numerical advantage in every engagement – which really was overkill at this point.
Sulla herself had let her Mandalorians slip the leash and hunt as they pleased, like the Sith acolytes. With their jetpacks, they could move far more freely than anyone else in this glorious, gory mess of a battle, which gave them plenty of opportunities to pursue their own glory.
She'd have to look into recruitment at some point, she knew. Her warband had always been small : following Darth Cain around meant they couldn't afford to bring younglings along, but there'd always been Mandalorians willing to join to replace the losses they'd taken, since every single one of her warriors had met an end most worthy of song. But things had changed in this new, strange galaxy they found themselves in.
The once-mighty Mandalorian Clans had been reduced to a shadow of their former selves, exhausted by centuries of war against the Republic and each other. Sulla's research in the matter was limited to what she could find on the Holonet, and she wasn't sure how much she trusted the sources she could find, since most of them were from the Republic, but it seemed that the current regime of Mandalore was headed by a pacifist of all things.
When she'd first heard about this, she had lost herself into a drunken stupor, which dear Trevellyan had pulled her from before explaining to her that of course Mandalorian culture had changed since her time. Really, it would have been worrying if it hadn't – if the descendants of her people, both by blood and adoption, had remained the same throughout three and a half thousand years, it would have implied a calcification of their ways which would have been worse than death.
Sulla wasn't sure whether she approved of the current path of the Mandalorians, but until she could visit Mandalore and see it with her own eyes, she reserved her judgment – and she fiercely ignored that nagging doubt in her head which was telling her she was only deceiving herself, ignoring the truth to shield herself from disappointment. Besides, the Mandalorians had still been fighting a war a mere couple decades ago, so clearly the warrior blood and principles of old hadn't been lost yet.
Suddenly, there was a big flash of lightning in the distance to her right, followed by the shockwave of a huge explosion a few seconds later. Her guess was that was where Cain was, casually bending the forces of the universe to his will in order to wreak destruction on his foes once more.
Distracted from her morose thoughts, Sulla plunged on another bunch of raiders, blasting as she came. None of this lot were worthy of joining her warband, that was for sure, but maybe some of the freed slaves on Perlia would be – she'd have to check once they were back.
Now that the war against the Hutt Cartels was in full swing, she'd a feeling they wouldn't lack for enthusiastic volunteers. But, for now, it was time to finish breaking the will of this particular horde of morons.
Victory was in their grasp.
Commander Ruput Broklaw, chief executive officer of the Imperial Army forces under Darth Cain (a rank which didn't technically exist, but nobody had said so to the Lord of Terror), knew this to be true in his bones as he gunned down another mercenary trying to run from the Sith with his blaster. He couldn't get in touch with any of his troops beyond his immediate vicinity due to the storm, but his every instinct was telling him this battle was over but for the clean-up.
Broklaw wasn't a Force-sensitive : like every Human Imperial citizen, he'd been subjected to rigorous testing in his youth, and had come out of the tests with a definite negative on his file. At the time, he'd been disappointed, and hadn't understood why his parents had seemed so relieved at the news. Fifty years later, he understood them a lot better.
If he'd been Force-sensitive, he would've been taken to be trained as a Sith, and odds were they would never have seen him again. They would've given him up if needed, of course : Broklaw's family had been proud, law-abiding Imperials. But they had heard the rumors about the training methods of the Sith, about how only a fraction of the aspiring students ever made it out alive, and – perhaps most importantly – how those who made it through were irreversibly changed by the experience.
Having fought alongside several Sith Lords during his service, Broklaw could say with confidence that the stories were only a pale shadow of the truth, no doubt the result of Imperial Intelligence's constant efforts to play down the truth. Most Sith were cruel, vicious, spiteful, and worse of all, capricious. Broklaw had long ago lost count of how many battles had been lost that could've been won, if only the Sith in charge hadn't done something stupid like, say, broadcast the screams of tortured Republic prisoners on open frequencies, pushing their comrades to fight harder than ever before.
The Sith who could suppress these self-sabotaging tendencies were generally the most dangerous, but even they were still a nightmare to work with for a variety of reasons. And then, of course, there were the kriffers like Erebus, who combined the worst of both options.
When Broklaw's unit had been transferred to Darth Erebus' command, Broklaw had been horrified. He'd heard the stories about the Vile One – everyone had. They'd actually needed to put down a mutiny when a bunch of the troopers, soldiers whose courage and loyalty to the Empire Broklaw knew and respected, had decided that desertion was preferable to participating in Darth Erebus' atrocities.
They had all been executed, of course, which had probably been what they had expected and hoped for all along – and that made the fact Darth Erebus had mysteriously disappeared before Broklaw's unit had even seen the bastard tragically, painfully ironic. Instead, they'd gotten the newly-promoted Darth Cain, who couldn't have been more different from his late and unlamented Master if he'd tried. Or, well, tried harder, because Broklaw was quietly certain nobody in the galaxy had hated Erebus more than Cain, despite the competition being severe.
Since then, Broklaw had been honored to fight under the Lord of Terror as he carved his way through the galaxy, moving from triumph to triumph. He'd risen through the ranks quickly, and eventually ended up as the not-quite-Moff in charge of the military forces assigned to Darth Cain by the time he'd escorted his lord to speak with the Eternal Throne's envoy; a meeting which would change the course of galactic history, by eventually leading to Lady Vaylin deserting Zakuul to become Darth Cain's apprentice.
Cain's Legion, they'd been called back then in the Imperial propaganda holos and the Republic's news reports alike. At its peak, it had counted over one hundred thousands of the toughest men and women of the entire Empire, led by one of its mightiest Sith Lords. Five divisions' worth of soldiers, with the best training and equipment the Lord of Terror could get for them.
Though it sounded impressive on paper, on the galactic scale, it was a small number, nothing compared to the millions-strong armies the combatants of the Great War had thrown at each other, but they had left their mark in the history books long before the Invincible had begun striking fear into the hearts of Navy personnel everywhere.
So, really, fighting this rabble the Hutts had put together was beneath them. Broklaw could only hope the Cartels would find some proper fighters to throw at them eventually : otherwise, this war Lady Vaylin had started was going to be dreadfully boring.
The storm had been a surprise. Darth Cain had obviously planned it all along, since he'd made sure everyone was carrying a rebreather, but it had been some time since the Lord of Terror had used a large-scale Force ritual like this. Most often, his aura of fear was more than enough for the Legion to gain the advantage.
In Broklaw's opinion, there were probably some politics involved. The ritual was a demonstration of the power of the Sith, which the galaxy had forgotten in the last thousand years. And the fact it was used against the Hutt Cartels in the name of ending slavery ensured that the Republic would stay divided on how to respond.
Truly, Broklaw reflected, Darth Cain was a master manipulator as well as warrior.
As more and more time passed without any word from the forces deployed on Savareen, Grice was growing more and more nervous. It had been three hours now : they should have heard something back by now. Even in the worst-case scenario of a complete defeat, they should have seen the survivors fleeing back to their ships in orbit, but so far, nothing and no one had escaped the sandstorm that was now covering a sizeable portion of a continental landmass.
"Uhm, Captain ?" called out one of the bridge officer, sounding nervous under the veneer of practiced calm. "We're getting some strange readings of the sensors."
Slowly – It wouldn't do to show worry to his lessers – Grice turned his eyes to the officer, and gestured for him to continue.
"We are detecting a hyperspace disruption approaching, captain," he explained. "It looks like a single ship approaching the system, but the numbers are … well, they're all wrong."
"How so ?" Grice spoke in Huttese (a language spoken by every bridge crew as a matter of course).
"They're too big. Nothing in the galaxy has the kind of displacement we're reading, at least not with those energy signatures. The only ship I can think of that would match them would be …"
The officer trailed off, too afraid to give voice to his guess, but Grice didn't need him to. His mind had already reached the same conclusion – but no. No, it couldn't be. Marlo's intelligence had been clear, and if it were wrong, then surely the Sith would've brought it with them in the first wave.
Unless, the paranoid voice that lived in the head of every Hutt who survived long enough to reach adulthood in the Cartels, that had all been part of Darth Cain's plan from the beginning. To wound them in space with his sorcery before drawing them on the planet by using himself as bait under the cover of the storm, while their ships were all gathered in one place, too close to a planet to escape quickly into hyperspace …
Grice opened his mouth – to say what, he didn't know. But before he could speak, the bridge was filled with the sound of klaxons and alarms, and all he could do was stare in shock and terror as a new silhouette appeared on the system holomap – one which was familiar to every sentient in the galaxy with access to the Holonet.
The Invincible had come to Savareen.
The Invincible exited hyperspace, and a cheer of joy, relief, and what Obi-Wan was distressingly certain was bloodthirsty anticipation rose on the bridge for a moment, before being silenced by a gesture of Commodore Kasteen.
"No temporal anomalies detected, Commodore," reported one of the officers, causing a second, smaller cheer. "We maintained synchronicity during transit within measurable deviation."
That had been the fear on everyone's mind, Obi-Wan very much included. Sure, the Invincible's engineers had assured everyone they weren't going to skip forward through time again, but presumably they had thought the same during the superdreadnought's last voyage. The thought of finding himself centuries, even millennia in the future had strained his ability to remain calm under pressure. As a result, he'd spent most of the trip in the quarters Commodore Kasteen had granted him and Master Plo Koon, trying to meditate despite the Dark Side which seemed to suffuse the entire vessel.
Next to him, Master Plo Koon looked far more at ease, though even he couldn't be called relaxed. Like Obi-Wan, the Kel Dor had rushed to the Invincible once they'd received word that Anakin had (somehow) made his way on the ship and was (again, somehow) fixing the superdreadnought's hyperdrive, only to find himself stuck aboard as the ship left Perlia for Savareen. Technically speaking, the two Jedi could have left on a transport right before departure, but the only thing worse than being there on the Invincible's first hyperspace journey in the current era was not being there for it.
"Find out where Teacher is," snarled Vaylin from where she sat on the bridge's central throne. With any other Sith apprentice, Obi-Wan was fairly sure her sitting on it would have been a sign of her plotting betrayal and usurpation of her Master, but with Vaylin, it reminded him more of a child clutching to something which reminded them of an absent parent. "Quickly !"
The crew of the Invincible went to work with smooth efficiency, and soon a picture of the situation in Savareen began to emerge. All the information collected by the ship's many sensors was being collated on various holo displays hovering in front of where Commodore Kasteen stood, which Obi-Wan and the others could read over her shoulder.
It was clear that a battle had happened in the system recently. The husks of several ships drifted in the void, but to Obi-Wan's eyes, they didn't look like they'd been disabled in a void engagement : instead, they seemed to have fallen to sabotage or accident. The Jedi Knight assumed these were the result of Darth Cain unleashing his aura of terror on the enemy fleet.
And speaking of the enemy fleet, it was gathered right above Savareen, all packed together into what was, in space warfare, extremely close proximity.
"We appear to have caught them completely by surprise," reported someone. "Their shields are up and weapons active, but all their attention is either on the planet itself or on each other."
The reason for the raider ships' distraction was obvious : there was a massive sandstorm on the planet, right beneath the Hutt fleet. Even standing in the shadow of the Invincible's and Lady Vaylin's presence, Obi-Wan could sense the Force at work within the tempest. It was no natural storm, that much was obvious, though Obi-Wan felt faint as he tried to imagine the kind of power required to create such a thing.
"Now we know where Darth Cain is," noted Kasteen.
"Yes," agreed Vaylin, relaxing a little. "I can feel him. He's in that storm." Then her expression darkened. "And those ships are in the way."
Obi-Wan wasn't a master of void warfare, but he didn't need to be to realize what the positioning of the Hutt armada signified. Next to him, Master Plo Koon, who was as close to such an expert as the Jedi Order could claim to possess thanks to his experience in the Stark Hyperspace War, tensed as he came to the same realization.
"We should kill them all," hissed Vaylin.
Obi-Wan suppressed a wince, both at her words and at the sudden spike in the Force they had caused.
"That is certainly an option available to us, but Darth Cain ordered us to give the pirates laying waste to Perlia itself a chance to surrender and ten minutes to comply," replied the Commodore. "You know he would want us to do the same here. And besides, we'll need every ship we can get to continue our war against the Cartels."
Vaylin briefly glared at the Commodore, who held her gaze with commendable aplomb, before turning aside and nodding. It looked like nothing more than a teenager grumpy at being told no by an authority figure, which would've been somewhat amusing if not for the small detail that Cain's apprentice was quite possibly the most powerful Force user in the galaxy. Also, there was the fact that, according to the Jedi archives, Vaylin was older than that, and her not immediately murdering Kasteen for talking back to her was apparently a great step up from how she'd behaved in her time as one of the leaders of the Eternal Throne of Zakuul.
The thought of Darth Cain getting his hands on a bunch more ships right after his flagship had been repaired wasn't one Obi-Wan enjoyed, but given the alternative was to stand there and watch as the Invincible mercilessly obliterated the pirate armada in what would clearly be a one-sided carnage, he remained silent.
"Put me on an open broadcast," Kasteen ordered one of her officers. Seconds later, the channel was opened, and she started speaking, her Basic edged with that crisp accent Obi-Wan had started to associate with the members of the fallen Sith Empire :
"Minions of the Hutts, I am Commodore Kasteen of the Invincible. Your masters told you this ship was disabled, yet as you can see, it is fully operational. I shall give you all the same warning that was given to the scum who dared defile Perlia with their presence : power down your weapons, shields and engines, and you will live to be judged for your crimes. Try to fight or flee, and you will be destroyed. You have ten minutes to comply."
She gestured, and the link was cut.
"Start deploying the fighters," she ordered. "Make sure none of them can make a break for it, and prepare a firing solution for the main gun for the largest ships in that fleet in case we need to make an example."
"What do you intend to do with those who surrender ?" asked Plo Koon cautiously.
"The same thing we did at Perlia and Tatooine, I expect," replied the Sith Commodore. "Deliver them to the local civilian authorities for trial."
Obi-Wan had looked into that during his time on the planet. Of the thousands of raiders who'd been captured when Varan's fleet had been dismantled, a large majority had been sentenced to death under local Perlian law, which was about as harsh as was common in the Rim. The remainder, who hadn't been found to have directly participated in the atrocities inflicted upon the Perlians, had been sentenced to imprisonment and hard labor.
Somehow, the Jedi Knight doubted the courts of Savareen, such as they would be once the local gangs were cleaned out and the people given the chance to organize themselves, would be any more merciful to the raiders who had occupied their system for who knew how long. He couldn't quite find it in himself to feel sorry for them, though.
Before the ten minutes were up, well over four-fifth of the Hutt fleet had signalled their surrender, and the rest had joined the husks drifting in Savareen space. Interestingly, the largest and most powerful Hutt ship, designated Hutta's Magnificence, had been the very first to offer its surrender, the transmission being delivered by a protocol droid Obi-Wan would've sworn sounded terrified.
As the Invincible approached Savareen, disgorging troop transports toward the surrendered vessels, the storm began to fade with a speed Obi-Wan didn't think was natural.
"Ma'am, we're getting a transmission from the surface," called out a bridge officer soon after, face beaming under her mask of discipline. "It's from Darth Cain !"
"Put it on," ordered Vaylin before the Commodore had a chance to say anything.
Wisely, the officer obeyed, and soon the image of Darth Cain appeared above the bridge's main holographic display. The connection was patchy, but the figure of the Sith Lord was unmistakable, even with the rebreather covering the lower half of his face. Obi-Wan couldn't see any trace of injury on Cain, which he had to admit didn't surprise him : if a bunch of Hutt-hired mercenaries were enough to kill him, the Sith Lord wouldn't have made it to the current era.
"Teacher," said Vaylin, smiling widely, the aura of threat she'd been projecting melting away.
"Lord Cain," Kasteen saluted the image of the Lord of Terror.
"Vaylin, Commodore Kasteen," said Cain, looking at each of the two ladies in turn. "I must confess, I'm surprised by your presence. Pleasantly so, of course, but I was given to understand it'd be several months at the very least before the Invincible was fit for travel again. What happened to change that ? I hope you didn't do anything risky to come to my aid. As you can see," he extended his arms, no doubt gesturing to the utter carnage that must be surrounding him outside the projector's field of view, "we managed quite well on our own."
"We had help from Knight Kenobi's Padawan, my lord," explained Kasteen. "He was the one to show the engineers how to fix the hyperdrive with the parts we acquired on Tatooine."
Cain raised an eyebrow, the motion obvious enough to be visible despite the poor connection.
"Young Skywalker ? Really ? … Hmm. I suppose that isn't beyond my expectations; the lad is quite strong in the Force. I'll have to thank him personally for his assistance, then."
Oh, they were going to have fun unpacking that statement and its implications back at the Jedi Temple, Obi-Wan could already tell. It was fortunate that Anakin was currently asleep in the infirmary of the Invincible, having collapsed from exhaustion moments after the flagship had entered hyperspace – along with over half the ship's engineering corps, who had all been pushed beyond their limits to finish the repairs as fast as possible.
"I'll make sure he's made aware," said Kasteen. "What are your orders, lord ?"
"What's the situation in the void ? We only just managed to get this comm working."
"The Hutt ships have either surrendered or been destroyed," reported the Commodore. "We are sending troops to seize the bridges of every vessel, and teams of operatives to root through their databanks and gather any intelligence which might be useful in the future."
"Good. I will ask, but I don't think anyone thought to take any prisoners down here. The ships we landed in will need some repairs before they can take off again, though : the storm did a number on them. Send a transport to my location so I can join you aboard, along with medical aid for the wounded. Then we'll start working on actually liberating this planet, now that this little distraction is out of the way."
"As you command, my lord," saluted Kasteen. "The transport will be there promptly."
A 'little distraction'. Force, was he serious ? From anyone else, Obi-Wan would have thought the words a mere jest, but coming from the Lord of Terror, they sounded all too plausible.
AN : Congratulations on the comments of the SB thread, who manifested Nux the Sith Acolyte through sheer commitment to the Fury Road references and asking for more information on the other Sith acolytes. I don't expect him to be a recurring character, but we'll see.
As you no doubt anticipated, the Battle of Savareen was a curbstomp. That's what happens when a horde gathered to ransack a planet assumed to be more or less defenceless faces off against a force of trained professionals led by someone who might very well be the single most experienced warlord in the galaxy at the moment, with a cabal of sorcerers and crazy Mandalorians at his side. But don't worry : I'm sure this story will give me plenty of opportunities to write proper fight scenes in the future.
In SWTOR, Gen'Dai can be killed by any Character Class during the Imperial Storyline on Nar Shadda, and by elite Republican soldiers during the Jedi Knight Storyline on Hoth. So, while they are clearly difficult to kill, they aren't invincible to even conventional weapons, so long as you dedicate enough firepower to the task.
For some reason, this story seems to be picking up : I'm getting a lot of emails from ffnet about new people following/favoring it. Which is great, of course, but it does make me curious : where do you come from, new readers ? Were you merely looking for new SW or 40K stories using the website's own search functions, or did you hear about it elsewhere ?
As always, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts and comments. Also, reminder that this story has a TVTropes page, if you're interested in adding more stuff to it.
Zahariel out.
