A/N: We're back!

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Disclaimer: Wargh.


Five extremely crowded minutes later, Tarrah stepped out onto the glossy white floor of Kosytus Station's main hangar bay, followed closely by the rest of the crew.

Unlike some of the other space stations she'd visited over the course of her (likely fictious) career, the GenoHaradan's secret base opted for neither grandeur nor sheer utility: Hulas hadn't clad everything in gleaming sheets of precious metals to impress visitors or left the place as a skeleton of scaffolding and wires for the sake of convenience, but instead had kept everything shielded with stark white durasteel panelling, giving the place an almost glacial appearance, even the floor.

More unnervingly, the lighting was a lot more subdued than Tarrah had been expecting, so rather than glowing under fluorescent lighting like the corridors of a hospital ship, everything seemed pale and wan, like an icefield under a midnight sun.

Also, it was freezing.

Either Hulas had gotten cheap on the central heating for this place, or he'd just decided that the GenoHaradan didn't need little things like warmth and comfort in order to work effectively, because the current room temperature stood at a grand total of roughly four degrees standard – and this was in the hangar bay, surrounded by blazing exhaust and engines being repaired, where the constant churning of machinery could be at least relied upon to warm the air. Gods only knew what it was like elsewhere in the station, because right now, Tarrah could feel the cold even through the dense layering of her uniform coat.

All around them, a small army of technicians were busying themselves with maintaining the small fleet of ungraceful-looking vessels the GenoHaradan had assembled, most of them transports, cargo freighters, and repair ships, but also a handful of short-range fighters for defending the base. Clearly, Hulas knew that the Sith would expect them to handle the defence and maintenance of their investment and had planned accordingly. Perhaps these transports would also be used to deliver the shapeshifters into the field in time, but of course, that just raised the question of how they were expected to do that. Would they just be landed at a spaceport, or dropped from orbit in a pod, or-

"Hey, you! Commander!"

Tarrah spun around: an officious-looking human in the uniform of a GenoHaradan XO was marching towards them, face hidden by a mask of his own.

But to Tarrah's surprise, he walked right past her, instead zeroing on Canderous. Presumably, the armour he'd stolen back on Yavin Station had belonged to this little squad's commander, because otherwise, there was absolutely nothing about the disguise that screamed "leadership material."

"Where have you been?" the executive officer demanded. "You were scheduled to arrive five hours ago! The Sith are already here, the Overseer has demanded all personnel be waiting in readiness for the official inspection, and all of you are away from your posts. Where the kriff were you?"

"Five hours?" Tarrah whispered to Carth.

"Hey, don't look at me: I did as well as I could while avoiding Sith activity. It's not my damn fault if these mercs couldn't keep up with their own timetable."

Meanwhile, Canderous appeared to have stepped quite neatly into his new role. "We ran into a little bit of trouble in the Yavin System," he grunted. "Seems our armourer's been under attack by the smugglers that were supposed to be on his side. We had to fight our way through them just so we could get as far as our gear."

"You must be joking! We had a deal with those bastards!"

"Does it look like I'm joking? Now, you said we had duties; could you show us to the direction of the nearest computer outlet? Our astromech-"

Tarrah coughed loudly.

"Our astrosurveillance droid needs to get its bearings as quickly as possible and we need a full download of our patrol routes. So, if you don't mind…"

Evidently, Canderous' demeanour was authentic enough to be taken serious, for the officer wearily led them out of the hangar and into a wide corridor just shy of Kosytus Station's main concourse, where a small security office happened to contain the necessary dataport for T3 to use.

"There," he grumbled. "You'll only have baseline access until you can have more advanced levels cleared with our head of security or the Overseer. Now, I've got a lot of work to do, so I hope you won't need any further assistance."

"Oh, we won't," said Canderous, cheerily. "Incidentally, could you turn your head to the left for just a moment, please?"

On instinct, the officer turned his head. Then, without warning, the aging Mandalorian's hands clamped down on his skull and twisted sharply to the left with a muffled crunch.

Tarrah winced as the body flopped to the deck. "Did you really have to do that?" she asked, irritably.

"He has seen us up-close, remember? We can't afford to let him notify anyone about any details that didn't line up with what Hulas was expecting. Besides, breaking someone's neck isn't always a guaranteed method of execution: chances are, he's just paralysed."

By way of evidence, the body let out a long, gurgling moan that could have been the officer's final death rattle or a futile plea for help from a brand-new quadriplegic.

"Not the point, Canderous. What are we supposed to do with the body? The moment anyone finds this, the jig's up!"

"Statement: I am highly experienced in the fine art of disposing of organic evidence, master, and judging by his design specifications, this astromech droid is more than adequately equipped for the task."

T3 bipped helpfully, raising a buzz-sawed appendage by way of agreement.

Tarrah threw up her hands in exasperation. "Fine, fine. If you can get the job done as humanely as possible without leaving a mess, it doesn't kriffing matter. In the meantime, we're going to need those blueprints, T3: once you're finished helping 47 chop this bastard up, bypass as many layers of security as you can without tripping the slicing alerts and then send copies of the floor plan off to our datapads. The rest of you, keep watch and try to make it look like you're meant to be here."

Five minutes later, the job was done. Tarrah had no idea how the two droids had managed it, but it involved a lot of muffled sawing sounds and visceral crunches, and by the end, T3 was busily mopping the floor with a sponge-mop extension while still connected the outlet, while 47 was nonchalantly shuffling a number of carefully wrapped packages into a waste disposal chute. A moment later, datapads began beeping as they received the floor plans; unsurprisingly, they couldn't tell her Hulas was, but they identified his office very clearly, along with the labs and the gene storage vault.

"Right," said Tarrah briskly. "You've all got your assignments. Let's get moving, people… and be ready for anything."


From his office, Hulas could see that the shapeshifters were progressing rapidly.

After so many experiments conducted on the diluted samples that Hulas had brought back from his secret travels, they were no longer fumbling blindly in the dark to produce anything of value. By the time Darth Revan had brought him the body of Rulan Prolik, the conversions had been ready to begin for weeks, and they'd already seen more than enough confirmed successes in that field to justify continuing the process, albeit not without several hundred disastrous rejects and fatalities along the way. Now, all they needed to do was to produce as many stable shapeshifters as possible to justify Sith investment.

Every few days, hundreds of slaves were shipped in from secret Sith waystations across the Outer Rim Territories and funnelled into the laboratories of Kosytus Station for conversion. With all the material they had to work with, the experts from Khomm were able to ensure that the process could be completed within a day. By now, Hulas didn't even need to oversee the process… but he did so anyway, just for the thrill of it.

After all, a few of them were Jedi POWs and failed Sith, and nothing gave Hulas quite so much of a thrill as watching the mystically empowered elite of the galaxy being made to lick dung off the rocks just like Hulas had from his earliest years.

From the surveillance hub behind his desk, he watched through a dozen different cameras as, hundreds of metres below him, the next batch of slaves were brought into the gleaming white laboratory complex by armed GenoHaradan guards, all one hundred of them shackled and naked. They had been bathed scant minutes ago and checked for any signs of disease that might endanger their conversion, but they were all still a sorry sight: there were human, Gran, Wookiee, Twi'lek, Rodian, Chadra-Fan, Gamorrean, and so many others, but they were all pathetically weak, half-starved from meagre rations and terrorized into submission after weeks in captivity.

One by one, they were led into the conversion tanks, one for each of the ten subjects, each one with its own special life support chair for maintaining heartbeat, blood pressure, respiration, and rudimentary brain activity. And once life support was in place, then they were ready to be intravenously linked with the reservoir of special gene serums the Khommites had produced for the first stage of the conversion process. The subjects were allowed a few seconds in which to come to terms with their fate, as the tanks were sealed shut behind the exiting guards and the machinery began whirring to life.

Moments later, the gene serum began pouring into their veins.

And then the screaming started.

Under the circumstances, it was no surprise: the process was editing the simplest elements of their bodies, undermining every aspect of who they'd once been, from the colour of their eyes to how their internal organs functioned. Within ten seconds, their skin had begun to ooze and drip like molten tallow, their faces lost in a gurgling flow of liquid flesh, every species trait swiftly erased by the influx of the serum; within thirty seconds, their eyes had dissolved into a torrent of vitreous humour pouring down their cheeks; before long, they didn't even have fingers, only crude, vestigial mittens where fully formed beings had hands.

The tanks did little to muffle the screams, of course, but the subjects only screamed for about a minute before their vocal cords dissolved. By the time the first two minutes had elapsed, the only thing keeping the rapidly liquefying subjects from simply oozing out over the floor and pouring down the gutters of the tanks was gravitational pressure – that and the life-support systems: all that remained intact beneath their oozing skin were their vital organs, and even those would falter without constant stimulation from life support.

After precisely five minutes of exposure to the gene serum, the subjects had been completely rendered down to a featureless mass of protoplasm that just barely held a humanoid shape. The bodies looked more like wads of pallid grey dough than anything living, every last vestige of their original selves and species stripped away: no fur, no scales, no skin, just semi-gelatinous meat.

But even so, these blank slates still lived: with life support at least keeping their rendered-down respiratory systems intact, you could see them breathing ever-so-slightly, their chests slowly rising and falling, flesh rippling with the effort. There was even brain activity of a sort, but rarely anything more complicated than a vague dream: the trauma of having the brain's genetic structure wiped blank usually did serious damage to the subject's mental processes, and barely a handful of them had been able to retain the slightest trace of their former identities, but that didn't really matter to Hulas. After all, the less memories these subjects retained, the easier it would be to train them… provided they survived the next stage of the process.

As soon as the doctors had confirmed that the subjects were stable, the next stage of the process began in earnest: in each of the conversion tanks, a long syringe-tipped cable rose from the floor and buried its tip squarely in the base of a subject's skull, instantly injecting the specially treated nanodoses of Rulan Prolik's DNA into the waiting blank slate. As it did so, chemical vapour was pumped into each tank from vents in the floor, flooding the chambers with a thick green mist formulated to stabilize the developing subject's vitality. Then, from above the tank, powerful lights were shone into the tanks, projecting spectrums of illumination visible only to a few species, to ensure that the DNA was fully integrated.

It took twenty hours for this stage of the process to be completed, so Hulas didn't need to watch the rest of it: he'd already seen how it had ended, anyway. At the end of it, the complete subjects would be disconnected from life support and tested to see if conversion had been successful.

Of all one hundred subjects, perhaps fifty of them failed to stabilize and melted in their chairs long before Rulan's DNA could be fully integrated; the resulting sludge would be allowed to flow away through gratings in the floor beneath the tanks, to be pumped directly to the lowermost levels of the lab complex where the Khommites would try to work out what went wrong and how best to prevent it from happening again.

Thirty would suffer catastrophic DNA rejection syndrome and die within seconds of being removed from life support, their bodies contorting in agony as their internal organs decomposed and their skeletons collapsed under their own weight; they too would be ferried to the lower levels for further study, usually by repulsorsled.

The remaining twenty surviving test subjects would be released from their tanks and shepherded out of the lab, groaning in confusion and barely conscious for walking, to be delivered to the test chambers one level down. Here, the nascent shapeshifters would be tested further to make sure that their conversion had not been defective, and here the true culling took place: fifteen of the subjects usually suffered from some genetic imbalance and could not control their powers, or were too rabid to cooperate, or were simply too weak to justify keeping them alive. Some had the capacity to remember their lives before they'd been converted, making them impossible to properly train. A few thankfully rare aberrant specimens even inherited a few of Rulan's lamentable personality defects, making them too dangerous to even attempt training, not after what had happened to the last stablekeeper who'd let his guard down around the damn things.

So, after a few samples were taken to correct the next conversions, these rejects were disposed of in the most expedient manner possible. Beforehand, that had usually involved arranging for the rejects to be fired into space in escape pods or dumped on backwater planets by the returning slave ships, but now that Kosytus Station now had a furnace large enough to accommodate the shapeshifters, a less-costly disposal program was in place. All the biologists had to do was lure the rejects through the open doors of the furnace with the offer of food, shut the door behind them, hit the ignition, and wait for the screaming to stop.

That left perhaps five shapeshifters with the power and the malleability to be used for Hulas' purposes. Over the course of the next eight days, they would be trained through a mixture of subliminal conditioning, posthypnotic commands, direct image implantation, sound response therapy, and good-old-fashioned discipline – along with exposure to genetic samples taken from a wild variety of dangerous species, from which they would learn the first of their new shapes. Only then would they be ready to serve as the assassins, bodyguards, and personal comforters they were born to be.

Five successes, out of a hundred subjects. Hardly working on an industrial scale: generally speaking, an industrialized process meant that most of the products on the assembly line were intact and ready for shipping. This was still so much of a crapshoot…

And yet, they were making progress. When they'd first started, they'd only been left with one survivor at the most. Now, after all the improvements they'd made, they could emerge with five successful conversions, and the Khommites promised that more improvements were in the works.

Indeed, one of the Khommite researchers – an especially sanctimonious bastard by the name of Darsk or Desk or something similar – had promised that it'd be possible to refine the conversion process down to a simple injection if given time. Ever since Hulas had given him permission to do that, the crazy schutta had holed himself up in his laboratory and hadn't emerged even for rations, and only the ever-present surveillance systems had given Hulas any insight into what was going on. For now, it seemed like Disk or Dork or whatever his name was had been finding considerable success in his innovations… but until they could confirm that with a trial on a viable sapient test subject, Hulas would stick to the methods that worked best.

Bit by bit, they were building up a stable of them: in total, there were thirty-five shapeshifters, but fifteen of their very best specimens were being sent to Darth Malak today, just to prove that his investment had been a worthwhile one.

Five others were still being properly conditioned and not allowed to leave their sleeping quarters. The remaining fifteen were fully trained, and though they weren't all as mature as the ones that were being sent to the Sith, they had two of Hulas' best specimens in the lead: Subject Alpha and Subject Beta – his attack dog and his body double. These two were to be his trusted sword and shield in the likely event that Malak turned on him… or his GenoHaradan operatives decided to question their loyalties. Until the other thirteen matured to the necessary level of strength, they were only foot soldiers, with Subject 3 having the most potential to learn from Alpha's example and achieve its level of strength. However, if worst came to worst, all twenty could be sent into the field to protect the station… and for a being in Hulas' position, it paid to prepare for the very worst.

Right now, Hulas had Subject Beta at his side, currently in the form of a human dressed in the uniform of a Sith officer, the better to impress the Sith guests. According to the tests, the shapeshifters were capable of accurately mimicking sapient beings, shaping their bodies into weaponry, and even assuming the forms of a wide variety of dangerous animals, though they weren't quite ready to ascend to the grandeur of Rulan Prolik's mastery: they weren't up to mimicking baby rancors or posing as trees, nor could they hold a library of a thousand different faces…

…but what did it matter? They were making progress by the day, and according to genetic analysis, they'd all inherited Rulan Prolik's potential for longevity. In time, they would be capable of anything, and they had all the time in the world.

And there was still the promise of what Dork or Dross or whatever his name was had promised, though Hulas had to admit to some scepticism over how quickly that could be implemented.

And if all else failed, there was still the Box…

There was a low beeping from the control panel in front of him, the intercom letting out the first of many signals demanding his attention. Hulas briefly considered ignoring it so he could focus on a full surveillance check, only to disregard the idea almost as quickly as it occurred to him: he needed to be ready for the inevitable call from the Sith visitors. Sighing, he tapped the intercom. "Yes?" he hissed.

"The Sith delegation have arrived at the shapeshifter quarters, Overseer," came the reply from Senni, his personal assistant. "They've already seen the footage of the last conversion, and now they're ready for the demonstration of our operatives' powers."

"And?"

"Well, they want you to handle the demonstration, sir."

"I'm pretty sure I already gave them my terms and conditions-"

"They said they would only be willing to provide full payment once you have shown your face and confirmed the full potential of the shipment's power. Uh, their words, not mine."

"What?"

"They're not even allowing our teams to load the shipment until we can confirm that it's worth their while and has your personal stamp of approval."

Hulas' mind raced. This would be the most dangerous step if he was to take it: if the Sith were disappointed in the demonstration, there would almost certainly be a price to pay on the horizon; they might even execute him for failure and put a Sith operative in charge of the operation… but there was the distinct possibility that they were planning on doing that anyway. Why else would they have demanded that he show his face now, of all times? It made sense: they wouldn't have to pay for the shipment if the production line was entirely Sith-owned.

On the other hand, refusing to show himself could be taken as a sign of defiance, and the Sith didn't like defiance from anyone, not even their tentative allies. Refusal might just mean execution as well. From the looks of things, he might not have much of a choice… or so it seemed.

"Tell them I'll be there shortly," he said at last.

"Er, they also wanted to take a look at the manufactory showroom, sir. They made it very clear that they wanted to see what your idea of a fully industrialized process might look like… and they wanted you and the science team to explain how it would work, as well."

Hulas sighed. "Very well, then. Have the researchers meet me outside the manufactory; I expect all of them to be there by the time I'm finished demonstrating the shapeshifters."

He clicked off the intercom, stood up from his desk, and took an unnecessarily deep breath. He would get through this meeting with little difficulty: the showroom would be easy to demonstrate, given that it was still a hypothetical at this stage, and likely wouldn't see any real use for at least a few months at the very least. All he needed to do was illustrate how grand it would be when it operation, and they'd be satisfied.

True, they would no doubt spend most of this meeting belittling him, of course, as Sith always did: they didn't like being given a deliberate advantage by a nonhuman, for even though he'd remained masked and obscured whenever he'd needed to contact the Sith, they could sense he wasn't a human. But Hulas could tolerate that. The difficult part would be tolerating the obvious shows of superiority from the Dark Jedi, in knowing that every sweep of their cloaks and every gleam of the lightsabre was calculated to make him feel lesser, to make himself feel as if they somehow deserved their power.

But he would make them pay for that insult in time, and not just by having them enslaved and converted when the day came for the inevitable coup d'etat. He would ensure that no Sith or Jedi dared to parade their advantages over him ever again.

As soon as the conversion method was perfected and could be enacted without damaging the subject's brain, he would learn how to replicate Force-sensitivity and make it the next great power to bestow upon his own troops. With one swift stroke, he would make the Jedi and the Sith obsolete forevermore. He'd even give himself that same power, taken from Malak himself – or even Revan, if he got hold of the smug little bitch again. And by then, with the conversion completed, Hulas would have already imbued himself with the power of shapeshifting and the seeming immortality of Rulan Prolik. Between that and the power to wield the Force, he would become something more than Jedi, Sith, Shapeshifter, or Overseer.

With all these enhancements and more, what else could he call himself but God?

Hulas shivered in anticipation and tried to tell himself that these steps and all were still in the future. He still had to complete the work to get that far, but even if the work failed, there was always Donk or Disk or whatever-his-name's portable conversion process… and the Box.

In the meantime, he had a presentation to deliver to one of the most dangerous audiences he'd ever faced in his career. He needed to be ready, especially if this was the start of a Sith attempt to seize his process for themselves; if they were here to betray him, then his own coup would have to begin very soon, no doubt with these very Sith being replaced by the latest batch of shapeshifters. But all that could be managed, given a little fakery and some suitably convincing alibies. Either way, he could deal with it.

After all, he already had a bodyguard that was more than a match for any ordinary Dark Jedi.

Reaching out for the Overseer's robe hanging by the door, he paused just long enough to double-check the layer of body armour he wore under his tunic and make sure that he had a sidearm at the ready, before slipping the robe on and posing for a moment before the mirror.

Showtime, he thought.


Across Kosytus Station, a handful of counter-assassins were suddenly leaving their assigned patrol duties. Nobody noticed it at first, given the population of the station, and with so much attention being afforded to the Sith visitors still touring the facility, nobody noticed them at first. Those who did had a surprising tendency to find themselves being dragged into blind spots on the cameras and beaten until they stopped getting up.

In hindsight, Tarrah had been incredibly lucky to arrive at the same time as the Sith delegation: all security was focussed entirely on them and the areas they were closest to, just so that problems didn't occur within earshot of the Sith – or so the Sith couldn't betray them without immediately being detected. It wasn't that they were complacent, though admittedly, none of them expected to have been boarded by enemy infiltrators; it was just that they were focussing on the wrong threat.

As such, nobody noticed the teams making the way across the base until it was too late.

Down in the crew quarters, HK-47 went from cabin to cabin, silently eliminating one GenoHaradan enforcer after another with precise, suppressed blaster bolts to the skull, most of them never even waking long enough notice the intruder in their quarters. In the event that the targets were awake enough to put up a fight, 47 simply sprayed them down with enough paralytic toxins to smother their screams and moved swiftly on to the next room. Common rooms and cantinas were bombarded with gas grenades, anyone trying escape the billowing clouds being instantly cut down with any melee weapon 47 had at hand. Once again, security remained oblivious, partly because 47 had already carved his way through most of the local security offices, but mostly because T3 had sliced the alarm systems and deactivated the cameras within minutes of his arrival. Bit by bit, the two droids were making their way out of the crew quarters and slowly progressing towards the security teams who were already on duty, and from there, towards the records sector…

Meanwhile, in the station's midsection, Juhani and Mission were making their way towards the gene storage vault where Rulan Prolik's mortal remains had been hidden. It wasn't too hard to see where it was, because the vault was connected directly to the labs a few levels above them by an internal pipeline of sorts, ferrying the precise mixture of extracted DNA and the replication serum that they'd been cultivated in up into the conversion tanks. All the two infiltrators needed to do was follow the pipes across the ceiling until they snaked back into the vault.

Once again, security was lax: Hulas had directed all the organic guards to the Sith emissaries and their ship, entrusting that electronic security would be more than enough to take care of any potential intruders, and to his credit, the security office on this level was guarded by a small army of battle droids.

Unfortunately, he hadn't counted on Mission having a GenoHaradan stealth unit.

One overloaded power conduit took out most of the droids guarding the office, and Juhani's own Force-aided invisibility allowed her to silently eliminate the others. From there, with the cameras offline and the alarms deactivated, it took only a few moments to reach the multi-layered durasteel sarcophagus protecting the cannister in which Rulan Prolik's body was suspended. Unfortunately, the access panel for the door had been specifically designed so it wasn't compatible with computer spikes and could only be opened with a very specific kind of passkey held only by Hulas and the station's chief scientist, and with the bulkheads thick enough to withstand a direct hit from a proton torpedo, there'd be no chance of getting through with explosives or even Juhani's lightsabre.

But in another stroke of bad luck for Hulas, he hadn't counted on any saboteur having the knowledge or the patience to just hotwire it.

It would take some time to rewire everything, especially since the design specs indicated that there were at least seven sarcophagi to unlock, each one contained inside the previous one like nesting dolls… but Mission at least had Juhani to watch her back as she went to work on the wiring.

One floor above them, the scientists were already making their way to the showroom level at Hulas' request, leaving only the security droids at the door. As soon as the departing researchers were out of hearing range, Zaalbar and Carth tore their way through the mechanized defenders in seconds and went to work on the laboratory. In short order, explosives were placed around every single piece of equipment, ion mines and thermal detonators connected to the laboratory computers, plasma grenades were bundled around the still-occupied conversion tanks, fire suppression systems were forcibly deactivated, and any machines that could be altered by hand were sabotaged. On occasion, an absent-minded scientist would re-enter the room in search of a forgotten file, only to be immediately thumped over the head by Zaalbar and stuffed into one of the storage lockers outside.

As per the plan, they held off on detonating the bombs for as long as possible until Tarrah gave the order over the commlink; after all, even with security on the level dealt with, detonation would get the attention of everyone in the base and probably do some serious damage to the floor directly above them too.

And at the apex of Kosytus Station, Tarrah, Jolee, and Canderous arrived outside Hulas' office – only to find the door left unlocked.

By itself, this wasn't entirely suspicious, given that Tarrah had needed to slice the elevator just to get this far. After all, with two layers of passkey-activated security to protect the man at the tip of this particular pyramid, it wouldn't have been unusual for someone in the Overseer's position to leave the other layer open and unguarded. But by now, Tarrah knew Hulas well enough to know that this wasn't in character for him: Hulas liked to take precautions, to hide behind proxies and multiple layers of security, even in locations where he was supposedly safe. In all the time she'd believed they were allies, he'd only let his control slip once, and that was because his transport had been delayed and he'd made the reasonable assumption that Tarrah wouldn't return to Manaan; he wasn't likely to be that reckless ever again.

If the door had been left unlocked, it was because Hulas wasn't in his office. Either he'd beaten them to the punch, in which case there was probably an ambush waiting for them, or Hulas had simply left for other reasons. Either way, their luck had once again plunged into a canyon.

Reaching out with the Force, Tarrah and Jolee confirmed that the palatial quarters were empty, so at least they knew that Hulas didn't know they were loose in his base. But that still left the question of where the hell he was: his security network couldn't tell them anything, monitoring comm chatter turned up nothing, and even Tarrah's growing powers couldn't distinguish one overambitious mercenary scumbag from an entire station of them plus the visiting Sith.

But then Tarrah remembered the Sith – and knew at once there was only one place an overambitious mercenary scumbag would be when he had guests he wanted to impress.

She tapped her commlink. "T3," she hissed, "I'm going to need all information on where that Sith delegation is right now."

There was a muffled beeping from the other end of the commlink, as T3 began collecting data, before eventually replying with an urgent-sounding trill.

"Oh for… into the elevator, everyone! Zaalbar, maintain position and keep those explosives on standby: if they're as powerful as we hoped, we may need them very soon…"


Hulas muttered a few choice Rodian expletives.

"Where's Diff or whatever his name was? I specifically requested that all our scientists should be here with us for the demonstration."

"Dr Dorsk is busy aboard your ship, Overseer – something about needing to use the biochemical lab there to refine the conversion process further." Senni offered a pained smile visible even behind his mask, and added, "Between you and me, sir, I think he's a bit anxious around the Sith."

"It'll be coming out of his pay, then. But otherwise, fair enough. We may as well keep him in reserve: we don't want the Sith to know that we might not even need this station if his research is successful, after all."

"He also taken several samples from the lab and copied almost the entirety of our research data from the records computer to your ship's data storage."

"As I recommended some time ago. Admittedly, he's probably doing it so he can continue his research while he's busy hiding from the Sith, but I can tolerate that if he can actually get tangible results from his malingering. Make sure that the data goes no further than my ship and make sure that the ship has at least a few guards aboard in case Dr Dort gets cute with us, and that will be all: we have some various serious public speaking to do, and I'd rather not be bothered until we're finished."

"And, uh, what about your bodyguard?"

"He'll be centre stage for this performance, just as he has been for every other stage of this performance. You'd know that if you were actually here instead of trying to manage my affairs at close range; that kriffing datapad is there for a reason, in case you forgot. Now, kindly get out of sight before the delegates start asking questions."

As Senni scurried away, Hulas adjusted his mask, straightened his robe, tapped his commlink headset, made sure he had sufficient cover, and then began in earnest.


It took far too long for Tarrah to finish slicing the laboratory showroom door, and by the time she managed to get it open, Hulas was already in the middle of his introductory speech. It took every last grain of willpower left in her body not to hurry as the three of them made their way into the showroom; instead, she forced herself to move as steadily and nonchalantly as possible – enough to be mistaken for a regular patrol.

As it turned out, the showroom consisted of a huge factory-style facility dominated by a long, reinforced glass tube threading its way around the unfinished hulks of gene-splicing machines and half-assembled conveyer belts, and it was through this shielded walkway that Tarrah, Jolee, and Canderous found themselves creeping through as they made their way towards the distant ripple of Hulas' voice. All around them, the unfinished manufactory towered above them like the skyscrapers of some vast and silent city; most of the machines couldn't even be recognized except for the stadium sized seating arrangements positioned directly beneath clusters of ceiling-suspended conversion tanks like oversized chandeliers.

But even if Tarrah didn't know what most of it was for, she knew it couldn't mean anything good: from what little information that T3 had been able to extract through the many layers of encryption, the laboratory only had enough conversion tanks for perhaps a hundred specimens at a time, and judging by the notes, most of the nascent shapeshifters would be lost to various foibles in the creation process. From what she could see, there were enough seats and tanks for a thousand specimens at the very least. And from what Zaalbar had reported while tearing the lab apart, there'd already been efforts to improve survival rates and general intelligence levels. Combine that with the mass conversion tanks, and Hulas wasn't thinking of augmenting his forces with a few hundred shapeshifting assassins: he was gearing up to build an entire army of the damn things.

And what if that army got hold of the Star Forge? The single biggest obstacle that might stand in Darth Malak's path to galactic domination was in staffing, if only because his army was so often culled for failures or misdemeanours: organic personnel were the only thing that the Star Forge couldn't churn out, and there were limits to what droids could do. But if he perfected the conversion process, all Hulas needed was a few thousand captives at a time and he would soon have an army capable of running a fleet just like Malak's. And then…

Tarrah shivered and forced herself to look straight ahead. She couldn't get sidetracked now, not when they were so close.

In the distance, she could hear Hulas' voice echoing across the tubular walkway, the familiar well-spoken tones announcing the first of many sycophantic dedications to the Sith for agreeing to participate in this grand experiment… though this time around, Tarrah couldn't help but notice just how forced the pleasantries sounded, how insincere the courtesy. Had he always sounded so openly dishonest? Had Tarrah been too preoccupied with obtaining GenoHaradan resources to notice the smarminess? Or he had he just been more careful when he'd met her, more inclined to hide the oiliness and ambition?

Whatever the case, with so much noise being made, it didn't take much effort for Tarrah and the others to navigate the forking paths all the way to an observation dome perhaps a hundred metres above the entrance, overlooking the entire manufactory.

This was the real showroom, and it was here that Hulas stood on a small stage in front of an audience consisting entirely of Sith, recognizable even beneath the featureless green mask he wore; there was no mistaking the distinctive sucker-tipped Rodian fingers, or the faint orange blush to his green skin.

In total, there were ten Sith in the showroom: one Sith officer, one Dark Jedi master, two apprentices, and six troopers. And there were at least twelve GenoHaradan operatives sharing the room as well, all of them masked just like their boss – though given that the Sith troops all wore face-enclosing helmets and the Dark Jedi were all hooded and wearing kerchiefs, it wasn't as if wearing a mask was particularly unusual. If anything, the visiting officer was the odd man out. As such, Tarrah, Jolee, and Canderous slid easily into the room without stirring so much as a ripple: with their GenoHaradan uniforms and masks, they were just another security detail keeping an eye on the proceedings.

Hopefully, the fact that there were only a few Sith here meant that the rest were being kept in reserve back aboard the ship, which would at least delay any efforts to summon backup. If not, then this was going to get difficult very quickly.

Meanwhile, Hulas was still talking, and for the first time, Tarrah realized how much he'd changed since their last meeting on Manaan: gone was the simple-but-respectable travelling gear; gone was the green leather jacket that was once his only nod to extravagance. Now, Hulas wore a sumptuous robe of deep green shadowsilk that almost completely hid the white silk waistcoat and trousers he wore beneath, not to mention the shoes that could only have been made from Rancor-hide. Even his mask was made of silver-plated durasteel and studded with emeralds. About the only thing that kept the ensemble from being just as obscenely decadent as Ithorak Guldar's getup was the fact that Hulas had at least had the taste to try for darker hues: in the pale lighting, the green silk robe looked so dark it seemed as black as ink at some angles.

However, there was something else about him she couldn't put her finger on: she could sense that Hulas was definitely here in the room with them, but at the same time, a quick peek through the Force told her that there was something different about the Rodian standing before. Unfortunately, concentrating on it was a little difficult, if only because Hulas wasn't in the mood to shut up.

"…these first fifteen shapeshifting operatives we have provided you with will only be the first of many. They may be few in number, but their strength more than compensates – as does their obedience: they are perfectly conditioned to obey all orders once you have been designated the primary master, and will not think of disobeying, no matter how poorly they are treated. Rest assured, honoured guests, nothing short of direct mental interfacing can break their loyalty. By now, my operatives have already loaded the shipment aboard your vessel, and they will be more than happy to remain dormant there until such time as you designate a primary master. As for what they can actually do, you all witnessed the demonstration-"

Hulas continued rambling for a time, but Tarrah had already heard enough: if the Sith already had the shapeshifters aboard their ship, then it was almost certainly too late to do anything about it. The only thing they could possibly do was to stop the delegation from sending word to cast off, because short of finding a ship in the hangar that could catch up with them or blasting the corvette out of the sky with the station's turbolasers, there was nothing that could be done to stop them from leaving with the precious cargo, and so far those two options weren't looking very likely unless Tarrah could run all the way down to the hangar bay in time. Fifteen shapeshifters weren't that many, but even if Darth Malak couldn't reverse-engineer the damn things, even if he only used them as shock troops and not as assassins, they would still be a menace in battle.

Tarrah frantically reviewed the situation: either they could call off the assassination now so they could deal with the shipment and risk giving Hulas time to get to somewhere more defensible, or they could kill Hulas right now and risk letting the Sith ordering their corvette to leave with the shipment. On the one hand, Hulas could have defences in his office that they hadn't detected and getting in a second time would be impossible, but on the other hand, it would take the Sith a grand total of three seconds to send a cast-off alert to the corvette.

What the hell could she do?

And then, just as she thought the situation couldn't get any worse, Hulas happened to glance in their direction, and suddenly stopped in mid-speech.

In that moment, even though everyone in the room was wearing masks, she knew at once that the Overseer had just recognized her.

Maybe it was something about her stance, maybe it was because the mask was equipped with a GenoHaradan visor that had picked out all the details, or maybe she was staring just a little too intently and holding too still to be an ordinary GenoHaradan operative on guard patrol – and none of that mattered in the slightest, because what it added up to was blown cover.

Hulas was muttering into a commlink headset behind his mask, the other GenoHaradan guards were starting to turn in her direction, and the Sith were already beginning to follow their lead.

In that moment, Tarrah resorted to the second-oldest expletive she knew of.

"Fuck it," she muttered.

And with one flex of the Force, her lightsabre was in her hands and ignited, and before Hulas could react, she'd flung it straight at him. The lightsabre soared through the air in a deadly arc, soaring high over the heads of the guards, the Sith troops, the Dark Jedi, and even the clueless-looking Sith officer, and finally slicing neatly through the masked Rodian's throat.

A split-second later, the lightsabre was back in Tarrah's hand, and Hulas' severed head had hit the stage with a muffled thud.

There was a deathly silence, as everyone in the room looked from her to the headless body in utter astonishment. By then, Jolee and Canderous had already drawn their weapons and were ready for a fight, but while Tarrah still had her lightsabre at the ready, she found her attention once again drawn back to the now-headless Hulas.

For some reason, the decapitated Rodian hadn't yet fallen. He wasn't even showing signs of pitching forward, much less going weak at the knees. He was still standing on stage, frozen in his last pose, looking more like a broken statute than anything else, and that impossible sight alone seemed to have taken the fight out of everyone in the room including the Sith.

Then, before the stunned eyes of everyone in the room, Hulas reached down with oozing hands and picked up his own head.

And as the suddenly boneless-looking Hulas fitted the severed head back on his neck, a figure suddenly flickered into view; up until, he'd been huddled in a corner on the other side of the room, hidden beneath what could only be a GenoHaradan stealth unit, but now he went hurtling down the corridor so quickly that Tarrah swore she actually heard a sonic boom.

"Security alert!" the fleeing figure howled in a voice that could only belong to Hulas. "SECURITY ALERT! It's Revan! Revan's here, you idiots!"

Tarrah had just enough to realize that she'd just decapitated a shapeshifter before everything seemed to happen at once: the body double on the stage erupted into a mass of tentacles, the Dark Jedi ignited their lightsabres, the troopers and the GenoHaradan operatives raised their rifles, and alarm bells began to ring all over the station.

But Tarrah already had her commlink ready.

"Zaalbar, detonate – now!"


A/N: Up next - the first chapter of a most unconventional ending!