A/N: We're back!

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Disclaimer: Argh.


"Carth," Tarrah whispered. "Get the civilians out of here as quickly as possible."

"Where to? We'll never be able to fit them all on the swoop."

"Uh…"

Tarrah's mind raced; there was the ghost of a plan forming in her mind, something that could get the survivors to safety and get them access to the precious fuel and maybe get the Sith shapeshifter away from them, but so far, all she had were the bullet points. Actually filling in the blanks between those points would take a little effort, and probably a lot of improvisation… but right now, improvisation was all she had to rely on apart from her crew.

"Have them hook their landspeeder up to the swoop," she said, urgently. "It doesn't have enough fuel, but at least if we run out, we'll be able to tow them the rest of the way. Comm me as soon as you're done – we'll keep this thing busy in the meantime. Now get to it!"

Carth visibly braced himself for the worst, then hurried off towards the improvised sniper's nest, keeping his blaster at the ready as he did so. To Tarrah's intense relief, the Sith shapeshifter didn't so much as glance in his direction as he began ushering the survivors out of the stall; it only had eyes for her, after all.

"Query: what do we do, Master?"

"Just be ready to fight: the moment I try to move away, this shapeshifting critter is going to fly off the handle, so keep your flamethrowers warm."

She tapped her commlink, hoping against hope that it still worked at this distance. "Mission?" she hissed. "Are you there?"

There was a pause, as the Sith shapeshifter stirred and broiled as it waited for the object of its obsession to reply. And then…

"Reading you loud and clear, Tarrah. What's wrong?"

"How's your piloting these days?"

"Well, it's getting better and better. Zaalbar's better than me, though. Why?"

"…I'm going to need you to pilot the Ebon Hawk, Mission."

"First of all, no! We're not leaving you! Second, where would we even go?! We've only got enough fuel for a few hours within atmosphere and it'll probably be seen by every Sith on this side of the planet-"

"I know! And you're not going to be leaving us: you just need to get as far as the Matale Estate – we'll meet you there… and make sure you have enough fuel to hit the afterburners!"

And with that, she signed off before Mission could argue.

She glanced back at the improvised sniper's nest and saw – thank the Force – that Carth was already leading the civilians out of the stables, with Ahlan in the lead, Nurik bringing up the rear, and Rahasia shepherding the surviving farmers between them with the smallest of the children held tightly in her arms.

But even so, it wasn't until the last of them had vanished back up the ramp that Tarrah finally readied her lightsabre, looked the Sith shapeshifter square in the eye, and took a deliberate step away from it.

Immediately, the shapeshifter let out a furious hiss. "Nnnnnnnoooooo!" it howled. "Don't leeaaaaaave meeeeeee! Gave everryyyyyythiiiiing! Want to be goooooddddd Siiiiiiith!"

"Sorry," said Tarrah, as loudly and clearly as she could. "But no."

The Sith shapeshifter roared, every centimetre of flesh suddenly erupting in hundreds of tiny mouths like open sores. "NO!" it howled, thumping the ground with its many limbs like a tantrumming child. "LOVE YOU! HATE YOU! WANT TO EAT! WANT TO KEEP! WANT TO BE KEPT! GIVE MEEEEEEEEEE!"

Tarrah had just enough time to reflect that the shapeshifter hadn't been able to express what it wanted, right before the near-shapeless mass of flesh flung itself at them, missing her by the breadth of a hair. For something almost three metres tall and two metres wide, it was impossibly swift, as if its mass was made entirely of sinew and whipcord muscle, a living spring of ligaments with no bone structure to slow it down or anchor it in place.

No sooner had it landed, the Sith monster surged outwards at them, its body blossoming into a living thornbush of barbed tentacles, claws, quills, blades, even serpentine tendrils tipped with fanged mouths, reaching out to anything within reach. Driven by Force-enhanced instinct, Tarrah flung herself flat; taught by experience, Canderous dived to the left…

...and as for HK-47, he simply stood his ground and let the wave of living flesh sweep over him.

For one horrible moment, Tarrah thought the assassin droid was done for: the tide of protean muscle was already beginning to tighten around his body, constricting tighter and tighter until every last millimetre of 47's body stood out.

And then the shapeshifter let out a howl of agony as a white-hot cone of flame seared clean through its body, instantly withdrawing back into itself and unwittingly giving 47 the opportunity to zap it with the flamethrower a second time.

And that was when a concentrated blast from Canderous' blaster hit it square in the back, tearing loose a sizable chunk of flesh and exposing a pulsating mass of oozing blood vessels. Bellowing, it gathered the shredded pieces of itself back into its body, then clumsily refined its mass again, this time into a gigantic fleshy quiver of bone arrows and harpoons.

Just as Canderous was readying a shield, Tarrah darted in from the left with her lightsabre at the ready, slicing through the first of the bolts and tearing deep into the shapeshifter's malformed bulk. The Sith monster howled again and launched itself at her all at once, a living hail of bone quills lancing down at her from above – but to Jedi reflexes, the attack was telegraphed so far in advance it might as well have happened an hour ago: Tarrah simply swatted the storm aside with the Force, and tore into the monster's purulent mass with her lightsabre, slicing open its flank and sending a reeking garland of diseased-looking internal organs oozing across the stable floor.

The shapeshifter howled in agony, clawing at the ground with dozens upon dozens of freshly sprouted limbs, looking for all the world like it really was about to keel over dead on the spot. Then, it gritted its teeth, rabid threads of saliva oozing from its malformed lips, and lunged forward over the spilled organs, instantly reabsorbing them into its mass once again – and a split-second later, it was on the attack once again.

For seventy-five nerve-shredding seconds, the four of them surged back and forth across the stables, the shapeshifter oozing over everything like an oversized amoeba, greedily slurping up the remaining Nerf corpses and crushing any stalls left in its path, the three defenders darting hurriedly around the wreckage of the stables and attacking whenever they could find the opportunity.

There was no art or finesse in the shapeshifter's assault, only wild explosions of teeth and tentacles and whatever other pseudopods could be conjured, bony armour-plates blossoming across its bulk in response to every shot that impacted its warped flesh… but frankly, that was all it needed. More than once, Tarrah was forced to dive across the stables with one almighty leap to avoid a tsunami of flesh that would have crushed her to pulp if she'd reacted a millisecond too late; more than once, Canderous had to ward off the monster with a hail of grenades just so its teeth-studded pseudopods didn't reach him. Once, all three of them had to fall back as the monster began forming crude glands and spraying them with venom, caustic ichor, and a whole host of other things that began boring holes in the duracrete floor.

And though Tarrah's lightsabre could easily tear through its thickest armour and 47's flamethrower could burn away almost everything the shapeshifter could conjure, there was always more matter it could draw from: every time Tarrah sliced away a limb, it simply scooped the fallen appendage off the ground and absorbed it back into its body. Every time 47 blasted it with his flamethrower, it writhed in agony for a few precious seconds, then extinguished itself with a furious roll across the floor. For every devasting burn that it couldn't heal on its own, it snatched up a Nerf carcass from the ground and devoured it whole, instantly slathering its wounds in fresh biomass… and there was only so much fuel in 47's flamethrower.

It's vulnerable to fire like Rulan, Tarrah thought wildly. We've got that much on our side. We just need to deprive it of biomass to regenerate with. We just need to get it away from fresh meat.

And then, as if someone on high had finally decided to grant one of her desperate wishes, the commlink chirruped:

"The speeder's ready and we're all aboard!" Carth hollered.

"What about Juhani and Shen? Are they with you?"

"Yes! We're all ready to go! Now get the hell out of there, NOW!"

"We'll be there in a few seconds: keep the swoop's engines ready!"

She turned to Canderous and 47. "You two, get out there on the double – I'll cover you!"

Immediately, the two retreated to the ramp, the shapeshifter making no effort to stop them in any way – for once again, it only had eyes for her. Seeing that she was alone, it surged towards Tarrah in an undulating wave of oozing, writhing, bulging, mutating flesh, its body puckering with new mouths, grey-lipped and glistening with slobber, each one disgorging a long, putrid black tongue that licked the air as the shapeshifter zeroed in on her.

But instead of waiting for it to get within lightsabre range, Tarrah reached out with the Force: every broken-down door, every collapsed stall, every wrecked weapon, every bit of collapsed roofing, every piece of junk that the monster had created over the course of its rampage now rose into the air and began catapulting themselves in the creature's direction all at once in a storm of debris.

None of it did much in the way of permanent damage, most of it being barely enough to break the monstrous creature's skin, but it still hurt like hell: every single missile that hit home sent it reeling back in pain, screaming incoherently as it tried to swat away the debris like a swarm of insects – but without success. It was trying to swat its way through a blizzard, for every second it was preoccupied, Tarrah was able to back a little closer to the exit.

And then, less than two metres from the door, she realized that Carth was screaming for her attention.

"But where are we even going?!"

"I'll tell you once I get out there, Carth! Just have your guns at the ready! I'll just be-"

But Tarrah had been distracted for a second too long: a tentacle the size of a tree trunk swept in from the right and caught her square in the chest with a muffled crack, sending her sliding helplessly across the duracrete for a good ten metres. By sheer dumb luck, she managed to avoid cracking her head open on the opposite wall, only rolling to a stop scant centimetres from one of the broken stalls, but she could tell at once from the wrenching pain in her chest that she'd probably suffered a few broken ribs.

And then the shapeshifter loomed over her, its face a mask of rabid slobber. "No escaaaaaaape," it slurred, its many hundreds of tiny mouths oozing towards her on a mass of tendrils. "You're miiiiiiiiiinnnnee-"

There was a berserker scream from the door.

"I WILL BE YOUR DOOM!"

Several dozen pairs of orange eyes looked up at once in surprise, just in time for Juhani to dive in from above and slice the shapeshifter clean in half at the waist.

Immediately, the shapeshifter fell in on itself in a frenzy of pain and regeneration, howling in rage as it struggled to reattach its fallen torso to the rest of its shapeless body with clumsy, rapidly mutating limbs. As it did so, Juhani reached down and hauled Tarrah to her feet.

"When this is over," she grumbled, as she grabbed Tarrah by the arm, "You and I are going to have a serious talk about this risk-taking behaviour. Now run!"

"Promises, promises," Tarrah shot back, but she broke into a run anyway.

As one, they shot up the ramp and galloped out into the night, the shapeshifter's furious howls following them every step of the way. Not too far from the stables, the swoop was ready to go, the farmers' rustbucket landspeeder hastily connected to the left flank, and the survivors had already piled into the back of it, with Rahasia and Shen in the pilot and copilot's seat, and Ahlan and Nurik stationed at the rear with rifles at the ready… and thank the Force, Carth, Canderous, and 47 were already in their seats and ready to go.

"Where the hell are we going?" Carth shouted at them, as Tarrah and Juhani hastily dived into the swoop's cockpit.

Behind them, there was a deafening crash as the Sith shapeshifter tore its colossal bulk free of the barn entrance, tearing off what little remained of the gate in the process.

"Hang on!" Tarrah screamed back, and gunned the swoop's engines; on her signal, Shen Matale hit the accelerator on the landspeeder as well, sending the cojoined vehicles lurching down the dirt road at a speed that would have won them the acclaim of every swoop gang on Taris if only any of them had been alive to see it.

Howling, the Sith shapeshifter flung itself after them, sculpting its body into a pair of gigantic batlike wings and flapping after them with terrifying force, its massive bulk just leaving the ground as it sped after them. It obviously didn't know the first thing about flying under its own power, but it was learning rapidly, improving its skeleton with every fall, and rising faster every time it hit the ground. Tarrah saw the monster hurtling after them in the rear-view scanner, now little more than a gigantic pair of jaws framed by wings and crowned by a shrunken humanoid torso, and immediately hit the afterburners; ahead, a bend in the road neared, and Tarrah swung the controls around with all her might, getting ready for the fastest turn she'd managed in her entire career on the track.

Unfortunately, the swoop hadn't been designed to carry the weight of an entire second vehicle, even after all the modifications, so it turned like a garbage scow driving through wet duracrete: when Tarrah swung the controls around for what she'd hoped would be a precise turn, the swoopspeeder barely budged; instead, it lurched up the embankment bordering the road, crested the hill, went airborne for a heartstopping second or two, everyone aboard screaming in mingled terror and exhilaration, before the combined mass of the two vehicles finally crashed back down on the prairie below with a spine-jangling thud.

There was a muffled cough from the engines, and then both swoop and speeder ground to a halt.

It only took three heartstopping seconds before Tarrah and Shen were able to kick them back to life again, and by the time the swoopspeeder was beginning to pick up speed again, the Sith shapeshifter had reached the top of the hill and was careering towards them, tendrils reaching out to seize the rear of the swoopspeeder-

-only for a hail of blaster fire from the backseat of the landspeder to shear the nearest of the tendrils clean in half.

"How do you like that, ya bastard?!" whooped Nurik.

The shapeshifter roared and lashed out with a wild flurry of jaws and fangs erupting from its misshapen bulk, only for a sniper shot to nail it squarely between its main pair of eyes. Howling in fury, the shapeshifter forced itself to slow just long enough to piece its ragged skull back together again, even as Ahlan reloaded, but that was all Tarrah needed to gun the engines and speed onwards, still pelting the pursuing shapeshifter with blaster fire even as they sped away.

On and on they went, with Canderous hammering the monstrosity with concentrated bolts, Carth strafing it with his twin blasters, 47 frying it with his flamethrower, and Juhani darting out of her seat to slice entire limbs away with deft swings of her lightsabre.

But somehow, no matter what they hit it with, the shapeshifter always pieced itself back together again, its skin rippling with new flesh as it digested another lump of Nerf devoured back at the stables, its tentacled immensity snatching up fallen limbs and incorporating them back into its mass. Whatever had been done to it, the poor creature was simply too distorted and twisted to experience or even acknowledge ordinary biological weaknesses: its body was eating itself alive in its frenzied efforts keep up with its own monstrous regeneration, but it couldn't stop itself from ploughing onwards heedless of injury.

No matter the pain and the torment it suffered, it just couldn't die.

And as they sped on, Tarrah prayed to the Force and everything born from it that the plan she was working on could work and hit the accelerator with renewed strength. It took astronomical effort to steer the swoopspeeder around the sharp turns in the road, and more often than not, they missed, lurching up embankments and crashing back down on the other side with a colossal wrench of controls and the ear-splitting shriek of metal under strain, but somehow, she just managed to keep the vehicular catastrophe on an even keel.

Just a minute longer, she told herself, as the Sith monstrosity howled in rage scant metres from them. We just need to keep this hybrid mess powering onward for sixty seconds, and then we'll see if this plan was worth the effort. Just one more minute….

Then, with a terrible whine of spluttering engines and faltering mechanisms, the landspeeder's tank ran empty at long last. Immediately, the swoopspeeder slowed to a crawl as the swoop found itself suddenly towing more than half a ton of dead weight with no other engine to spur it along. Behind them, the Sith hooted and gibbered in delight as it saw its prey beginning to falter ahead of it, and in the rearview scanner, Tarrah saw it forming almost indescribable appendages of fang and flesh as it lunged towards them.

But Tarrah's eyes were focussed on the road ahead, on the ziggurat-like shape rising from the earth less than twenty metres ahead of them: the Matale Estate stood before them, somehow still standing despite all the abuse the Sith had heaped upon Dantooine in the last few days, an implacable bulwark that nothing could erode or obliterate in spite of all the horrors of the galaxy at war. And sitting scant metres away from that, yes, thank the Force and all that watched over the needy, the Ebon Hawk was siting in readiness.

And just as Tarrah had ordered, the ship's engines were still glowing, still warm enough to take off within a split-second.

In that moment, Tarrah smacked the commlink and gave the only warning she'd have time to provide:

"Mission!" she howled. "Brace for impact!"

And then, she swung the swoopspeeder around at the most brutal turn they'd yet achieved, only managing the swerve through sheer Force-guided manoeuvring.

The swoopspeeder hurtled to the left, just past the Matale Estate, even as every capable and chain connecting swoop to speeder screamed with the effort of withstanding the forces that threatened to snap them in half… but the Sith shapeshifter, bigger and even clumsier than the swoopspeeder, was too slow to turn, too massive to hit the brakes at its current speed.

Unable to stop, it simply hurtled to the right like a runaway train jumping the tracks and cannoned headlong into the Ebon Hawk's rear end at high speed.

For a few seconds, the shapeshifter was left floundering in a fleshy tangle of shapes as it struggled to extricate itself from the ship's engines. It was hard to make sense of what it was doing or thinking, but it seemed almost concussed by the impact, trying to figure out which direction was up or down as it clawed itself free of its inanimate tormenter.

Then, it finally realized its prey was moving in the opposite direction, and not even the combined firepower of the Matales and the Sandrales could keep it from following them

"DARTH REVAN!" it howled at the top of its rapidly reforming lungs. "MY LIFE FOR YOU! MY LOVE FOR YOU! I GIVE MY FLESH! GIVE MEEEEEEEE! WANT! WANT! WANT! BE MINE!"

The swoop gently thudded into the side of the Matale Estate's perimeter wall, and Tarrah knew that there was nowhere else to go, not with the speeder out of fuel and turning capacity dead in the water. If this was the time to launch a surprise attack, it was quite literally now or never.

Taking a deep breath, she tapped the commlink again.

"Mission," she said gravely. "Hit the forward decelerators. Divert all power to the engines. Ignite."

And godsbless her, Mission didn't question a single word of the order. From the other end of the commlink, there was only the frantic hammering of buttons and switches as the parked ship went through the effort of accelerating while still fully parked.

Then the engines roared to life, disgorging an undiluted beam of searing heat directly into the Sith shapeshifter's undefended body.

Suddenly ablaze, the shapeshifter howled in agony, trying in vain to extinguish itself, but try as it might, it couldn't smother the flames beneath waves of flesh or replenish its mass with cannibalized meat. It had no reserves left, no corpses within reach to fuel its regeneration with. Fire was too basic, too destructive to recover from, even for its horribly simplified biology. All it could do was sit there and burn as the flames washed over it in a mighty torrent of blazing engines.

But somehow, it was still alive.

Even as it burned, it was still transforming wildly, trying to find a shape that could help it endure to torment and failing with every single shape it assumed. Before Tarrah's eyes, it went from shapeless protoplasmic carnage to rigidly defined chitinous exoskeleton, to a thick pachyderm hide of leathery armour and muscles like the cables of a suspension bridge, to a vast semi-gelatinous mantle of mucous-shrouded meat like a slug, to a sprouting fibrous bulk like a tree… but nothing could stop the fire, and nothing could stop the pain.

"REVAN!" howled the monster, its voice almost coherent in its dying agonies. "HELP ME! SAVE ME!"

And in spite of all her horror and disgust, Tarrah found herself clambering out of the pilot seat, lightsabre at the ready.

"MY NECK," wailed the shapeshifter, deaf and blind to all other threats. "MY NECK MY NECK MY NECK THEY DID SOMETHING TO MY NECK THEY PUT SOMETHING IN MY FLESH PLEASE TAKE ME BACK I WANT TO GO HOME REVAN I LOVE YOU YOU'LL TAKE ME HOME MAMA REVAN MASTER HELP-"

Tarrah's lightsabre sliced through the air in a deadly arc, shearing through skin, flesh, bone.

For a moment, the shapeshifter swayed on the spot in a drunken stupor, as if unable to comprehend what had just been done. Then, its head peeled away, severed just below the shoulder. Left behind, the rest of the body went still and was instantly consumed by the flames, dissolving into a shapeless mass of sizzling meat.

"This… apprentice... is… glad… to have… served…" croaked the severed head.

And then it died.

There was a terror-stricken pause, as the defenders belatedly realized that the Sith shapeshifter's body was no longer moving.

Then, almost as one, everyone aboard the swoopspeeder collapsed in exhausted relief; judging by the excited noises issuing from the back seat, it was all the Sandrals and the Matales could do to stop themselves from screaming with joy, though if those frenzied embraces were any evidence, Shen and Rahasia might just be ready to conceive their first child.

Tarrah clapped her hands briskly for attention.

"Okay, people!" she barked. "No time to celebrate! We need to get the Ebon Hawk fuelled and ready for a proper take-off on the double! We got lucky today, but the Sith almost certainly saw and heard everything we just did: we were making enough noise for everyone this side of the Enclave ruins to notice, so we need to get off this planet before they investigate! Ahlan Matale, I'm going to need to code to your fuel depot – and while you're at it, I recommend gathering up everything you need from the estate, because we'll be leaving as soon as this ship is fuelled! NOW JUMP TO IT!"

There was a pause, and then she added, "And 47, could you retrieve that thing's head? I need to investigate something once we're off-planet."

"Statement: you are becoming delightfully macabre, master. I like it."


Less than thirty minutes later, the Ebon Hawk was fuelled and ready to leave, the depot of the Matale Estate emptied in the process, with any excess fuel pumped into as many barrels as the Hawk could hold.

"You might as well have it all," Ahlan grumbled, as he hobbled towards the ramp. "I'm not leaving it for the Sith – or anything else in this house, for that matter."

"But where are you planning on going, then?" Tarrah asked. "I don't think Dantooine's going to be safe to return to for quite a while."

"Ah, just drop us off at Ahto City. With the money we've made these last few years, Nurik and I will be able to book passage to a planet where our families can settle down again."

"Chandrilla sounds nice," Nurik chimed in. "From what I hear, it sounds just like Dantooine, but a little bit livelier, but not quite as busy as Alderaan."

"Now there's an idea! You're not totally stupid, you know that?"

"Don't get soft on me, Ahlan. I expect your insults to be sharpened and ready for the years ahead, especially with all the rebuilding we need to do."

"Hah! As if I'd ever give you the satisfaction."

Smiling in spite of herself, Tarrah ushered the squabbling patriarchs aboard, followed closely by Shen and Rahasia, the young refugees from the farm, and the remaining members of her crew. Seconds later, they were blasting off, roaring away from the ruined nightscape of Dantooine and back into the blessed obscurity of deep space.

For the next few hours, life aboard the Ebon Hawk was busier than it had ever been: up until then, the crewmembers had mostly kept to themselves when they were aboard except when Tarrah had approached them for a chat; now it seemed as if the simple presence of civilians had brought life into the quiet corridors. Nurik quickly developed a taste for Pazaak and insisted on challenging Mission, Zaalbar, and even T3 to regular games. Ahlan got into a heated debate with Jolee over the finer points of covert travel that carried on so spectacularly that even Canderous and 47 had to start spectating after a while. The older kids, awestruck by being offworld for the first-time, wandered from room to room, asking the functions of every little thing, with Carth run ragged trying to explain everything. And as for the younger children, they quickly latched on to Juhani as the only unoccupied crewmember and began clinging to her for hours on end until they finally drifted off into a troubled, haunted sleep.

Not that Juhani seemed to mind. Indeed, the fiery spark within her seemed to instantly calm as the children gathered around her, leaving her capable of holding the two youngest children in her arms while allowing a third to snuggle up on her lap. It was odd, because Juhani had never seemed especially maternal, but perhaps it was that inner peace she'd seemingly found here in the ruins of Dantooine that gave them comfort. After all, people looked to the calm and collected in times of crisis.

Petty I can't manage the same thing, Tarrah thought bemusedly.

Meanwhile, the only passengers that weren't making a nuisance of themselves were Shen and Rahasia, who'd been given Bastila's old quarters so they could at least some privacy. Granted, it was an extremely noisy kind of privacy, but then again, the two lovebirds had just narrowly escaped death: relief at still being alive was one of the most powerful aphrodisiacs in the galaxy.

As for Tarrah, she spent most of the flight to Manaan dissecting the shapeshifter's head in the medical bay. Of course, the remains didn't tell her much; the organic wreckage the poor creature had left behind were a bewildering jumble of organs copied from at least a dozen different species. But then, she wasn't looking for a clue in its physical makeup. Instead, she was following a clue that the Sith had left behind in its final words.

They put something in my flesh, it had said. They did something to my neck.

So, she burrowed deep into the poor creature's flesh with a laser scalpel, carefully prospecting until she finally found what she was looking for: a single transparent subcutaneous identification chip implanted deep inside the shapeshifter's malformed flesh, right next to the spine.

Tarrah had seen this sort of thing before.

In biotechnology experiments throughout the galaxy, it was common for subjects to be tagged with an ID chip to make sure that they could still be recognized no matter how far the operations and mutations twisted them out shape. It was clear that this was part of an experiment, but whatever they'd hoped to achieve, it wasn't being run by the Sith. After all, Malak's Empire couldn't resist putting its insignia where anyone could see it, and the marks on the chip were clearly nothing to do with the Sith, Czerka, the Exchange, or any of the other organizations tentatively loyal to Malak.

Sighing, Tarrah ran the chip's markings through the Ebon Hawk's database, hoping that Davik Kang or one of the other former owners might have encountered this sort of thing before. For hours on end, she trawled through the exhaustive lists of freeports and illegal outposts where Davik's smugglers had been able to ply their trade, hoping that the insignia on the chip might match one of the documented emblems.

But it wasn't until she'd found herself trawling through a list marked Potential Investment Opportunities that Tarrah found a match: the insignia belonged to an obscure planet in the Deep Core known simply as Khomm.

Khomm.

Hulas had mentioned that just before their final meeting, but why? What was going on there, and how was it connected to the Sith monster they'd just encountered?

Tarrah continued reading… and a moment later, her eyes lit up in amazement.

Then, on instinct, she began checking the news.

Suddenly, the pieces of the puzzle, so scattered and disconnected, now flowed together into one cohesive picture.

She knew what the New GenoHaradan would be. She knew what Hulas was planning.

Question was, how could she stop him?


A/N: Do you have any idea what Hulas is planning and how the monster of this chapter was involved?

Let me know!