The bridge of the Hutta's Magnificence was a mess, but a functioning one. It belonged to Marlo the Hutt's personal fleet, usually tasked with defending the crime lord's holdings in Hutt Space. Its captain was one of Marlo's distant relatives, a typically fat exemplar of the species named Grice.
In Durge's opinion, Grice owned his captaincy to his blood relation to Marlo rather than any actual skill at the job. But the Hutt was still possessed of a certain low cunning, which was probably why he'd survived the cesspit politics of Nal Hutta in the first place. More importantly, he knew just enough about running a ship to make sure to surround himself with subordinates who could actually do the job reasonably well while he watched and occasionally gave orders in Huttese – it was one of the Hutts' many affectations to very rarely lower themselves to speaking Galactic Standard, even though they all understood it perfectly well.
Of course, Durge's presence on the bridge ensured everyone was even more motivated to do their job properly than usual. As a general rule, people tended to do that when a hulking giant covered in armor and with a veritable arsenal of weapons hanging from his body stood near them, looming menacingly.
The main display of the bridge showed the ships gathered around Savareen. There were already more than a hundred of them, of various shapes and sizes, carrying tens of thousands of bloodthirsty raiders. Yet despite the size of the fleet, Durge knew very well that this wasn't the full strength of the Cartels. Far from it, in fact : it wasn't even the full might of the portion of the Cartels directly under Marlo's control. In addition to still keeping forces in reserve to protect his interests elsewhere, Marlo was still working on reactivating some of the mothballed fleets he'd inherited from his forebears in Hutt space in preparation for dealing with the Invincible.
Apart from the Hutta's Magnificence, the ships gathered at Savareen were mercenaries and pirates, drawn to the system by the promise of Hutt credits and opportunities for plunder. They were undisciplined, but they were plentiful and, most importantly of all, they were cheap and disposable.
Durge was no military commander, but the fleet mustering at Savareen didn't need a commander : it needed an enforcer, someone people were too scared of to start trouble. And that was a role the bounty hunter was more than qualified for.
Bounty hunting in the Outer Rim was a dangerous, cut-throat business. Few survived the lifestyle for long, inevitably ending up killed by a target or double-crossed by a client. But not Durge, oh no. He was far too hardy for that.
For Durge was a Gen'Dai, one of the few members of that species still alive. He had survived things most sentients couldn't imagine, had fought for and against every side of the New Sith Wars, had even killed the Mandalore of a few centuries back.
That was part of the reason why he'd accepted the offer of Marlo's recruiter when it had arrived. Durge had waited a thousand years for a chance to avenge himself on the Sith, and until very recently, he'd thought the opportunity was gone – there were rumors of Sith activity in the dark places of the galaxy, but nothing concrete.
And then the Invincible had arrived, carrying a whole bunch of Sith. Darth Cain may not be related to the Darksiders who had imprisoned and tortured the Gen'Dai bounty hunter a thousand years ago, but Durge cared little about that : a debt of pain and blood was owed, and it would be repaid. But Durge knew that even he couldn't take on a whole army by himself, so joining the Hutts' forces was his best bet.
And besides, Marlo's pay for this job was really good. The Hutt knew what Durge was worth, and was clearly willing to throw as much money at this particular problem as it took. Durge wondered how much of that was because of the prestige defeating Cain would gain him, and how much was out of genuine fear of one day sharing Jabba's fate if the Sith Lord wasn't stopped in his tracks.
In the end, Durge didn't really care. His job was to help Grice keep the more hot-headed elements of the fleet in line, and when the campaign actually started, to hunt down any Sith left on Tatooine and kill them in as gruesome a fashion as possible. He'd needed to make a few exemples when he'd first arrived, but these, combined with his reputation, had been enough to calm everyone and even get a few of the warbands to start training seriously.
Truth be told, he was starting to get bored. Maybe he should do a 'surprise inspection' in one of the fighting pits, get his hands dirty again, just to keep the grunts from getting complacent.
"New ships are arriving from hyperspace," called out an officer, drawing Durge out of his bloody fantasies.
"More reinforcements ?" asked Grice's first officer, a Zabrak with more scars on his head than horns. "Did we have any new arrivals planned for today ?"
"Nothing on the agenda," answered someone else. "The next ones are a bunch of Trandoshan hunters who aren't due for another two days, galactic standard."
That was strange, but not unheard of with this lot. For all of Marlo's efforts to keep the muster confidential, word had still inevitably spread across the underworld. Their policy was that if a crew was resourceful enough to find them without being officially invited, then they deserved to be added to the fleet once a proper contract was negotiated by one of Grice's stable of protocol droids.
Still, Durge might have to intervene at some point, so he looked up at the screens and waited. A few seconds later, the ships emerged from hyperspace – not in the loose formation typical of the raider warbands of the Outer Rim, but aligned with the kind of military precision Durge had only witnessed a handful of times in his long, long life.
There was a moment of silence as data poured in from the scanners, then someone spoke up in a voice trembling with mixed surprise and fear :
"That … that's the Dread Son among them," said the Human. "Varan's personal ship before he got offed, and the one who led the Sith forces on Tatooine."
The Sith had found them. Had someone talked, revealing the muster's position to them ? Possible. But as Durge looked at the data still coming in, he realized two things : first, the Sith fleet was massively outnumbered by the mercenary armada, and secondly, the Invincible was nowhere to be seen. It seemed Marlo's intel that the superdreadnought's hyperdrive was still under repair was correct after all.
Durge would never admit it aloud, but part of him was relieved the Sith flagship wasn't here. He was strong and hard to kill, but everyone had limits, and the Invincible definitely was past his.
"I want to talk to them," Durge growled at the closest comms officer. "Open a link."
The terrified Ithorian leaned away from the bounty hunter and glanced toward Grice, but the Hutt was too busy staring at the screens slaw-jacked to care. Durge growled menacingly, and the Ithorian jumped in fright before starting to press keys on his console.
Under his full helmet, Durge smiled. This job was starting to get interesting.
Once again, I was presented with incontrovertible evidence that the Force had it out for me.
I had been on the bridge of the Dread Son when it, along with the rest of what could be called a fleet if you were very generous, dropped out of hyperspace. Everyone expected me to be there, and if there was any danger, I wanted to be in a position to see it and do something about it.
JURG-N was with me, as were Commanders Sulla and Broklaw. I'd almost managed to leave the Mandalorians on Perlia by telling Sulla she could stay with her new paramour if she wanted (how Trevellyan and her had ended up as a couple, I had no idea and didn't want to know), but she'd assured me her honor demanded she join me to Savareen, even if we didn't expect much resistance.
On balance, having to deal with her and her warband was marginally worth it for the added firepower, so I had resigned myself to dealing with her habit of charging straight at the enemy and trust in her beskar armor and (admittedly very impressive for a non-Force sensitive) martial prowess to see her through. The fact that her warband absolutely loved her for it was, in my eyes, a clear sign that the Mandalorian Clans had always been destined for an alliance with the Sith Empire.
I would soon have reason to be very grateful for her presence, but I didn't know that at the time.
Proximity alarms began to blare the moment we emerged from hyperspace, and as our scanners came back online, we immediately saw why.
Scores of vessels hung in the void around Savareen, many of which were promptly identified as belonging to one gang or another using the archives our spooks had cobbled together.
The Dread Son and its escorts had emerged from hyperspace deep into the system. We were surrounded on all sides. The only reason we hadn't yet been blasted to pieces was that the criminals were as surprised as we were by the whole thing, and clearly had no idea how to respond. Which, the part of me that never stopped looking for advantages pointed out, indicated a lack of a proper chain of command, only to be expected from what I must assume was some kind of mercenary force the Cartels were mustering in order to strike at me. And this wasn't an ambush, so the precautions I had taken to keep my departure and destination secret as long as possible appeared to have worked.
Furthermore, I noted as I took a closer look at the sensors, terrifying as this fleet was to me at the moment, there was no way it could possibly defeat the Invincible, unless Kasteen and a solid half of the crew all got drunk or fell deadly ill simultaneously. And, since the latter had already occurred once due to a rival Sith Lord's plot, there were measures in place to prevent it from happening again.
Before I could use reminiscing about the bad old days as an escape from my current problems, however, Broklaw turned toward me, eyes wide.
"Did you know about this, my lord ?" he asked.
I knew what it meant : had I known about this gathering of vessels, and brought our flotilla here as part of some equally deranged and genius scheme ?
The answer was simple : no, I karking had not. If I had known about this, I wouldn't have come anywhere near this system with so few vessels. But I couldn't say it out loud : it would damage morale, and I needed everyone at their best if I was to have any chance of surviving this deathtrap.
So, I simply smiled, and forced my growing panic into the Force. Let them come to whatever conclusions they wished – even a false belief that I knew what I was doing could be useful if it kept them fighting rather than giving up.
To my dismay, Sulla started chuckling.
"We're being hailed," reported Captain Durant before Broklaw or anyone else could question me further.
Durant had been an officer on the Invincible for several years before being given command of the Dread Son when I'd sent Vaylin off to Tatooine. He had been born a Human, but was now a Cyborg, with numerous implants having been required to keep him alive after having come to the very edge of death in the course of his duties. There had been many such individuals in the Sith Empire : it had been one of the Empire's many contradictions that the lives of some of its people were considered valuable enough to spend a lot of resources on cybernetics to keep them alive, while simultaneously being willing to throw thousands of lives away on pointless endeavours whenever a Sith Lord got another 'brilliant idea'.
The fact Durant had managed to rise through the ranks on the Invincible when Kasteen was notoriously disturbed by their presence (she had never admitted it in my presence, but I could read her unease easily enough) was a testament to his skills. Another silver lining : as always, I was surrounded by people who knew their job. Unfortunately, they all assumed the same was true of me.
"Accept the link," I ordered, seizing the distraction, and was soon presented with the projected image of a hulking humanoid wearing a suit of armor that completely covered it from head to toe.
It was quite the intimidating sight. While most sentient species in the galaxy followed the humanoid pattern, the laws of biology imposed hard limitations of maximum size, and this being was just slightly over them. Their armor covered them completely, masking their species entirely – or so it would have been for anyone else.
It was subtle, but there were hints in the body language – the impossibly fluid movements, the way the armor didn't move quite right – that let me know what kind of being I was facing, and my stomach dropped.
"I see the Gen'Dai have survived to the current era," I said mildly. "How fortunate."
It was absolutely not fortunate as far as I was concerned. I had nothing against the Gen'Dai as a species, obviously : they had been a tranquil, pacifist race fine with living quietly on their homeworld and researching philosophy with the kind of serenity only attainable when you were almost unkillable … until the Empire had bombed it to ruins and driven them to the brink of extinction, turning the small diaspora of survivors into ferocious anti-Imperial warriors who also happened to be incredibly strong and hard to kill.
"Cain," said the Gen'Dai, the word positively dripping with threat. But I was all too used to conversing with people who wanted my death, and far too many of them had been much more dangerous than even this admittedly impressive specimen, so I didn't let any of my fear show.
"That is my name, yes," I replied. "But I'm afraid you've me at a disadvantage. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking ?"
"I am Durge," he said, and I thought he sounded slightly taken aback by my politeness (which was a frequent reaction, and one of the reasons I kept doing it, the other being that sometimes, just sometimes, diplomacy actually worked to avoid fights). "I do not know who betrayed our position to you, but if you think this pitiful fleet you've gathered will be enough, then you are as mad as every Sith I've ever met."
"Oh ?" I raised an eyebrow at that. "And how many Sith have you met, exactly ? I know your people are long-lived, but not that long-lived."
"I killed many of your kind during the New Sith Wars," Durge boasted. "They thought themselves invincible, each and everyone of them – but they died all the same."
I had to give it to Durge : that did sound like the Sith I was familiar with. But I couldn't exactly admit it, not with everyone else on the Dread Son's bridge not-so-discreetly listening in on the conversation.
"Interesting," I replied, maintaining my facade of calm and leaning back in my seat. "But I assure you : you have never met a Sith like me."
He let out an approximation of a laugh that filled me with terror.
"They all said that, too. But for all your tricks, you're only human. We'll see how well you manage once your ship has been blown to pieces and you drift in the void !"
The connection went dead, cut off on the other end, leaving me with Broklaw and Sulla staring at me.
"Well, that was interesting," I said with a forced smile, as if I was amused by Durge's threats (which, to be honest, didn't rank very high when compared to all the others I had received over the course of my life, but that didn't make the Gen'Dai any less terrifying). "Before anything else, though, open a line to Perlia, please."
Within second, we had a link to the Invincible, Kasteen's projection appearing before me. The connection was spotty : the image was flickering, and I couldn't hear anything she said. According to Durant's subordinates, the pirates were using some kind of system-wide jammer, which was no doubt why Malden and his associates hadn't heard anything about this muster.
"This is Darth Cain," I said, hoping that the Invincible's systems would be able to parse my meaning through the distortion. "We have found numerous Hutt ships found in Savareen. I believe their intended target was Tatooine : reinforce the system with everything we have. May the Force serve you well."
With that, I signalled to cut off the link. I wanted to ask for help, but there was no point. Vaylin would come the moment she heard about what was going on, of that I had no doubt, but with the Invincible's hyperdrive disabled, there was little she could actually do.
So I might as well warn them of the threat to Tatooine. If I made it out, that show of concern could only improve my reputation with the Republic, and if I didn't, then none of this mess would be my problem any longer. Not that I intended to go down easily, of course.
"We cannot face this fleet head-on with our available ships," I declared, which was nothing less than the truth. Still, better to take that course off the table as soon as possible, just in case.
What we could, and should by all rights do, was try to escape. If we started moving right now, our superior discipline should let us concentrate our firepower to punch through the still disorganised pirates and go to hyperspace. Some of our ships may be lost in the process, but the Dread Son had been Varan's flagship for a reason, so at least I should make it out alive.
But running away would do irreparable harm to my fraudulent reputation for fearlessly facing danger, and I was marginally more scared of the lunatics under my command than of the mercenary horde in front of me. So that option was taken off the table until there was absolutely no other choice.
And there had to be another choice, I refused to believe otherwise. As I considered the situation, my heart pumped adrenaline through my veins : between that and me using my connection to the Force to conceal the fear I felt, time appeared to slow down, in a way I was all too familiar with.
Our greatest advantage at the moment was that, despite outnumbering us more than twenty to one, the pirate ships weren't a real fleet. This was a gathering of warbands, drawn together by the promise of plunder and the Cartels' favor. None of the captains trusted one another, a state of affairs I was all too familiar with. Although the Sith Navy, at least, had been disciplined enough that various battlegroups could work together against a common enemy … most of the time … when there wasn't more than one Sith Lord present …
… really, I thought, not for the first time and certainly not the last, it was a miracle the Empire had lasted as long as it had.
In any case, that didn't mean we could win, or even achieve victory in detail by fighting each warband alone. But it did mean we had a brief window of time in which we could act to change the situation in our favor. My gaze fell upon the slowly rotating orb of Savareen itself, and immediately, I realized what I had to do if I wanted to have any chance of making through this alive and with my undeserved reputation intact.
"Since we cannot win the battle in the void, we won't fight in the void," I declared, and everyone looked at me like I'd said something profound instead of making a self-evident observation. "Take us closer to Savareen, Captain Durant. We will land on the planet and fight them on the ground. Find us somewhere on this world away from any civilization where we can land, and ready the crews for complete evacuation."
Sure, we would still be massively outnumbered, but we would be able to leverage our advantages a lot more effectively, and I would bet on the forces of the Sith Empire against the mercenaries and pirates of the Outer Rim any day. I could feel my subconscious already drafting vague plans, ready to push them to the front of my mind when they were needed. I had fought in void battles before, but my expertise laid more in planetside engagements, where at least I could use my lightsaber to fight back against whoever was trying to kill me – whereas there was no chance of me being able to deflect a spaceship's turbolaser burst with my blade. Maybe the Wrath or the Hero of Tython could have managed it, but I wasn't anywhere close to these monsters.
"My lord," said Durant respectfully (and by that I mean actually respectfully, not the kind of respectfully which secretly translates to 'you karking lunatic'), "the enemy ships are certain to intercept us if we do this."
"No, they will not," I replied. "I shall make sure of it."
There was a pause, then the man's eyes widened in understanding, and he bowed deeply.
"I see. Forgive my impertinence, my Lord. It shall be done as you command."
"I have no doubt of that," I said, waving off his apology before turning to the two other officers on the bridge. "Commander Broklaw, prepare our forces for rapid disembarkation, and the ships for complete evacuation. Sulla, get your warband ready for action : whatever surprises they've been preparing during transit, we're going to need them. I will be in my quarters, opening us a path."
They all saluted, each in a different way – the Imperial Army, Navy and Mandalorians all had different salutes, which was a pain in the backside to keep track of to avoid offending someone unintentionally. Fortunately, as a Sith Lord, I wasn't expected to salute anybody, and the forms of obeisance to my superiors were a lot more direct (there were only so many ways you could kneel, after all, though grovelling was a much more elaborate art).
With that, I stood up and walked out of the bridge, JURG-N faithfully following at my heels, leaving behind me a crew convinced I was going to save the day once again. And, damn it all, but I actually was going to, at least in the short term. But that didn't mean I would enjoy it : this was going to be unpleasant, and it wouldn't help my reputation with the Republic, but it should work, and a clear and current threat to my life had to take priority over possible future trouble.
It had been some time since I'd last done what I was about to do, but there were things you never lost the knack for. Riding a speeder, discreetly testing a drink for poison, or drawing on the power of the Force to spread your own terror to thousands of crew members on enemy ships; that sort of things.
Weirdly, however, the main thought in my mind was that Amberley was going to be really cross with me.
It started with a cold feeling down Goran Barloe's back. The Spike, Goran's ship, was moving toward the Sith flotilla along with a bunch of others, ready to add their firepower to the storm of death which would teach the bastards not to mess with the Hutts.
Goran's first instinct was to check the climate controls. The Spike wasn't a young ship : Goran had taken it from his predecessor when he'd killed him, and he had won it at a game of sabbac, and so on for who knew how long. With all the expenses that came with running a mercenary band, there was never enough money for proper repairs, so the air conditioning suddenly going overdrive wasn't exactly uncommon. But the screen told him everything was normal, even as the mercenary captain started to actually shiver inside his armor.
"What in the Corellian Hells is going on ?" he muttered, starting to feel nervous. He hadn't drunk that much last night, and the hangover had been gone by the time he'd gotten back to the bridge.
Suddenly, he remembered the stories that had been circulating in the fleet, telling of the bizarre, dark sorceries the Sith were capable of. Even a thousand years after the end of the New Sith Wars, there were still legends of the Darksiders' deeds going around. Goran had thought them to be nothing more than stories, tall tales passed along from the survivors of the wars looking to score free drinks in bars, but now he wasn't so sure.
"What's that ?!" shouted Terry, a big, hulking Human whom Goran had seen skin Wookies alive without flinching, but who now sounded like a little girl. He was staring at nothing in particular, trembling hands reaching for the weapons at his waist – a gun and mace that could do a lot of damage to the bridge's fragil equipment, especially when thrown around by someone with Terry's muscles.
Goran was about to shout at the brute (what exactly, he didn't know) when suddenly, the lights of the bridge dimmed, as if there'd been a power outage – except the emergency lights should have turned on then, and they hadn't.
The shadows grew, filling the bridge, and then came alive all around him. Vile, shapeless things rose up and fell upon the crew, whose screams of horror and pain soon covered the alarm noises of the consoles. Terry himself gave a terrified shriek before disappearing under the weight of three of the shadow beasts, but Goran had no time to think about his companion's or his ship's predicament, too busy with his own.
Before Goran's eyes, the floor in front of him parted, thick metal plates torn apart by the claws of some large abomination as it pushed its way through. To Goran's panic-stricken mind, the horror looked like an amalgamation of every sentient he had ever killed in service of his greed, and the mercenary captain had killed a lot of people during his career indeed.
It stared at Goran as it climbed out of the hold it had made, its dozens of mismatched eyes glowing with malevolent glee. Then it smiled at the mercenary captain, displaying all manner of teeth which had no right to be together in any singular jaw, and reached out toward him with a limb that was at once scaled, covered in fur, bare, armored and clad in several kinds of clothes.
Too scared to try to make sense of what his eyes were telling him, Goran drew his blaster and fired wildly at the monster, but the shots had no visible effect on it, and it laughed with a voice straight out of nightmares. Goran screamed then, all rational thought deserting him.
So lost to fear was the mercenary captain, he didn't see his final shot nail the Spike's pilot in the back of the skull, killing him instantly. But even if he had, he wouldn't have been able to do anything to prevent the ensuing catastrophe, too busy screaming and flailing at the empty air, just like the rest of the bridge crew.
With its pilot dead and no one able to change course, the Spike continued on its last heading, which now intersected with that of the Tail of Garruk, another mercenary ship which had also started drifting for much the same reason, with the difference that when its pilot had run away from his post and knocked himself unconscious against the nearest bulkhead, he had accidentally knocked over the controls and sent the ship careening off on a new trajectory.
Nine minutes later, the two ships collided, escape pods rushing out of both as those few crew members who had managed to keep their wits fled the incoming explosion. Amidst the anarchy that had descended upon the Hutt fleet, however, the collision went almost unremarked.
Standing in the Dread Son's cargo bay with the rest of the Sith acolytes, ready to disembark the moment the ship touched the ground, Iskandar Khayon was in awe.
He could feel what Darth Cain was doing – even the non-Force sensitives could, in a limited fashion. From within his sanctum, the Lord of Terror was wielding the full extent of his great power, using fear as a weapon to break the coordination of the pirate fleet, reducing the great pack of predators into a herd of panicked prey animals.
Under the Sith Lord's sorcerous display, the pureblood could feel the terror and confusion of the Hutt pawns. Some of them had, perhaps, encountered Jedi before : the Knights of the Republic might have a weaker presence in the Outer Rim than in the Core, but they were still present. And perhaps the mercenaries had thought, like so many others before them, that Jedi and Sith were more or less the same, just with differently colored lightsabers and a more pragmatic code of ethics.
Now they learned the depth of their mistake. Iskandar could feel their terror echoing through the Force, even as he listened in on reports of their fleet disintegrating through his earpiece. Some ships had completely gone dark, their crew succumbing to the terror-induced insanity and turning on each other, but they were relatively few. And, with the sheer distances involved in any kind of space battle, only two of them had collided as a result, the rest simply drifting in the cold void.
Far more commonly, the ships turned back and fled, desperate to put as much distance as possible between themselves and what they instinctively recognized as the source of the sudden, inexplicable dread which had seized their hearts (or whatever equivalent organ they had for those with a more exotic biology) and was telling them that their death had come, there was nothing they could do to fight it, and fleeing was their only chance of survival.
This was power in par with the legendary Dread Masters, yet unmarred by the madness that had caused them to turn against the Empire following their liberation from the Republic's prisons. Unlike what these ancient Sith had been capable of, the effect wouldn't last, for the Lord of Terror was alone where the Dread Masters had worked in concert to inflict madness upon their victims. But even once the supernatural dread faded away, Iskandar expected it would take a lot of convincing by whoever was in charge to get them to go back into the fight.
When Darth Cain was aboard the Invincible, that power was enough to create openings the superdreadnought could use to utterly crush their foes. The combination of the ship's power and that of its master was something none had ever managed to defeat. This time, however, the Invincible wasn't here. Without its firepower added to the equation, the numbers were clear : their flotilla might be able to inflict disproportionate damage on the Hutt armada before the Lord of Terror's spell dissipated, but not enough to significantly affect their odds of ultimate victory.
In this situation, the logical move would have been to retreat while the Hutt forces were distracted by Darth Cain's sorcery : to take the flotilla back to Tatooine, or even Perlia itself. There, they could have regrouped, while their enemies were left quaking in their boots at the mere thought of crossing the Lord of Terror and feeling his power again.
It was what Iskandar would have done, and he felt no shame in it : merely learning where the Hutts were gathering their forces to strike back at the Sith was a strategic victory. But that was why he still had a long way to go before being Darth Cain's equal. Where everyone else had seen a trap they'd stumbled into and needed to escape while they could, the Lord of Terror had instead seen an opportunity.
They had come to free Savareen from the Cartels, and they wouldn't leave until that mission was accomplished, regardless of the forces arrayed against them. Nobody had really been surprised when Darth Cain had given the order to prepare to land on the planet while he handled the enemy fleet himself : they had merely been reminded that Darth Cain did not retreat from any challenge.
It was how the Sith Lord had carved his legend in what had become the distant past, and now, they were going to write another chapter of it in the sands of Savareen with the blood of their enemies. Since the Invincible's return, the galaxy had only seen Darth Cain with the overwhelming power of his flagship behind him, and Lady Vaylin's liberation of Tatooine had been the result of careful planning against an overconfident foe. Now, they would learn that the Lord of Terror was never more dangerous than in battle against odds anyone else would consider impossible.
And it would all happen because Darth Cain himself had chosen Savareen as their next target. Truly, Iskandar reflected, the Force served the Lord of Terror well.
A soldier walked between the ranks, distributing kits to everyone, trooper and acolyte. When he got to Iskandar and the pureblood asked what this was about, he shrugged and said :
"Darth Cain's orders, sir. Everyone needs to have a survival kit before we land."
Iskandar accepted the package, as did Nefertari next to him. He checked its contents : it was standard stuff, with a rebreather, some rations, water and basic medicines and bandages, of the kind the Empire had produced untold billions during its wars with the Republic.
Iskandar felt a pang of sadness at the sudden realization that these must have come straight from the Invincible's stocks, and that even as Perlia and any other world which fell under the Lord of Terror's aegis began military production, no more truly like it would ever be made. It was a small thing, but surprisingly distressing.
Telling himself that he was being overly sentimental, he took a deep breath as he attached the kit to his belt. The cargo bay was full of the smells of machinery and sweat. It was the smell of war, holding its breath in the moments before battle was joined. Through it, he caught the familiar scent of his Twi'lek companion.
Before he realized what he was doing, he reached out and squeezed her hand, which completely disappeared inside his much larger hand. He didn't need to look in her direction to feel Nefertari's glare, but she didn't pull her hand free either.
"We're entering the atmosphere," said the captain's voice over the speakers. "Everyone, hold on to something : this is going to be rough."
Iskandar didn't know Captain Durant personally, but he served under Darth Cain, and thus could be assumed to know his job. If he was telling them the descent would be rough, then it would have been suicidal for any other shipmaster.
Gritting his teeth, Iskandar prepared himself. This wasn't his first hot drop, but those things never got any less unpleasant.
"At least we'll have plenty of people to kill once we get down," he heard Nefertari say, her smile audible in her voice.
"True," the pureblood replied, finding himself smiling in turn.
The defense of Perlia had been a slaughter that had ended before it had properly begun, and the liberation of Tatooine had been a well-planned, well-executed operation where everything had unfolded according to plan. But this ? This was going to be a proper battle, fit to make the galaxy remember who the Sith truly were.
Darth Cain had already shown what he was capable of. Soon, Iskandar and the other acolytes would have a chance to do the same – as would the Sith troopers and their Mandalorian allies.
The pureblood almost felt sorry for the Hutt mercenaries. Almost.
AN : Since I began writing this story, a question that has come up in the comments, again and again, is "How powerful is Darth Cain, really ?".
Now, we see the first display of the Lord of Terror's might, and learn that not without reason did Darth Erebus choose him as one of his apprentices.
That being said, this isn't as overpowered as it might look. Spreading his aura of terror across such vast distances is very tiring, and as Iskandar noted, it isn't permanent either. But it is a very useful trump card, and you can well imagine how the modern galaxy will react to something which was only of passing interest back in the Old Republic.
And we see, too, how Cain has trapped himself with his own reputation, in typical Cain fashion.
This chapter was shorter than the previous ones, because the Savareen arc will cover multiple chapters, so pacing demands I cut things up differently. Hopefully this will mean more frequent updates, but, well, we'll see.
As always, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and look forward to your thoughts.
Zahariel out.
