A/N: We're back!

Read, review, and above all, enjoy!


The first blast shook the entire station, hurling everyone in the manufactory to the deck and sending a long, jagged crack racing down the nearest of the showroom windows.

The second blast erupted through the deckplates and up into the manufactory, tearing a massive gash through the floor, wide enough to span the length of the chamber. Any machinery that wasn't caught in the fireball rising from below was left wobbling helplessly on the spot as the deckplates threatened to collapse entirely, and anything unlucky enough to be too close immediately began to slowly topple into the yawning chasm that had appeared beneath them.

Unfortunately for the GenoHaradan and Sith alike, that included the support columns for a good deal of the walkway.

Instantly, the showroom platform lurched forward as half of its columns suddenly sank into the abyss, sending everyone in the room on a slow plunge towards the cracked window. Tarrah, Jolee, Canderous, the body double, the Sith officer, and all three Dark Jedi were able to scramble up the embankment and into the still-horizontal corridor, but the rest weren't so lucky. Three Sith troopers fell against the cracked glass in unison, splitting the window open and tumbling to a fiery death far below, and at least three more went sliding helplessly after them, accidentally collecting four GenoHaradan operatives along the way. The rest were barely able to find a grip on the floor and begin trying to claw their way up the near-vertical showroom towards the door.

Back in the corridor, Tarrah finally managed to find balance and saw that Hulas had already recovered his footing and was once again sprinting down the corridor with all the speed he could muster with the corridor listing diagonally.

Swearing, she flung herself after him, but the body double beat her to the punch: slithering across the ceiling as a living carpet of flesh, it dropped down from above and landed right in front of her, instantly sprouting blade-tipped tendrils agleam with cortosis weave as it moved to block her pursuit.

Behind her, the three Dark Jedi ignited their lightsabres and zeroed in on Tarrah's undefended back, and only Jolee's own lightsabre and a hail of blaster fire from Canderous kept them at bay long enough for them to lose their forward momentum.

Realizing she only had a moment to seize the advantage, Tarrah ducked under a wild swing of the body double's tentacles, and spun around just in time to catch the nearest Sith apprentice off-guard: lashing out with all the power of the Force she could muster, she dealt him a sledgehammer blow to the chest that flung him off his feet, off the deck, out of the corridor, right back into the horizontal wreckage of the showroom – where he immediately plunged through the broken window and into the inferno below, instantly silencing his final bloodcurdling scream.

Meanwhile, the Sith officer, realizing that he was outmanned, outgunned, and surrounded by people who couldn't have given a damn if he lived or died, decided that discretion was the less insulting term for cowardice and ran like hell, frantically screaming orders into a commlink as he did so.

Suddenly finding themselves evenly matched, the remaining master and apprentice resumed their attack with more caution, darting swiftly towards Tarrah with whiplash strikes and withdrawing before she could counterattack, advancing whenever the body double's wildly-lashing tendrils forced her to back away.

Unfortunately, they hadn't been counting on the presence of Jolee Bindo; one outstretched foot was enough to send the apprentice crashing facefirst to the floor, and when the apprentice rose, broken snout oozing blood, Jolee countered his wild swing with a duck that sent the scarlet lightsabre sizzling through empty air, following up with a feint to the left and a lightning-fast knee to the groin that folded the Dark Jedi in half with a sound like a collapsing set of bellows. Squealing on the floor in impotent rage, the apprentice tried to lash out with the Force, only for Jolee's lightsabre to slice through his outstretched hand and his undefended face.

Meanwhile, Canderous opened fire on the troops that had been clawing their way back into the corridor, shredding the unprepared troops with gleeful abandon, and while a few GenoHaradan operatives managed to scramble their way into close range by using the Sith as human shields, the old Mandalorian would not be deterred. Crushing an operative's skull with the butt of his repeater, he set the massive gun aside and swapped for a Gamorrean-style axe, then threw himself into the fray, easily carving his way through GenoHaradan enforcers who'd made the mistake of thinking that he would literally stick to his guns at such close range.

Now, it was Jolee and Tarrah against the Dark Jedi master and the body double: one armed with two scarlet lightsabres, the other with a wild assortment of blades, claws, bludgeons, tentacles, webs, poison glands; one moving with deadly grace, using both lightsabres and the Force with the kind of terrifying coordination brought about through years of training – the other a living tidal wave of protean flesh with no finesse, no tactics, no patience, just raw instinct-driven violence.

For perhaps twenty seconds, Tarrah and Jolee held their own, one with well-worn technique and guile, the other with raw power and artistry, but both seemingly evenly matched. The Dark Jedi master matched Jolee blow for blow, one dodge being rewarded with a feint, one elegant riposte being parried with another, while the near-liquid shapeshifter hammered itself against Tarrah defences with every kind of appendage and shape it could conjure, surging back from every blast of the Force and reattaching every limb she sliced off.

Then, without warning, Tarrah shouted "swap!"

With one burst of movement, the two exchanged places, and the two combatants were caught completely off-guard by the sudden change in tactics: suddenly, the body double found itself lashing wildly out at a target that refused to parry and seemed determined not to be there when the attack finally landed, leaving it exhausting itself against empty air. Meanwhile, the Dark Jedi master, too used to countering Jolee's feints and dodges, swung in the wrong direction with one lightsabre and completely missed with the other, giving Tarrah exactly the opening she'd been waiting for: her own lightsabre sliced neatly through the Dark Jedi's right hand, sending his lightsabre clattering to the deck, and as he reared back with a howl of pain and his mental defences open wide, Tarrah grabbed him in a crushing telekinetic grip and flung him spine-first into the ceiling. For good measure, as he flopped to the deck, she delivered a cannonball blast to his chest that catapulted him back down the corridor, over Canderous' head and into the horizontal showroom, down into the flaming wreckage below.

Now it was two against one.

Though the body double was a formidable foe, it wasn't Rulan Prolik: not only did it not have the experience or the well-matured strength of the legendary Faceless One, but it also didn't have his cunning or creativity. It didn't assume a specific form or adopt a specific weapon that could give it the advantage; it simply oozed forward as a blistering thornbush of tendrils and spines and jaws and stingers and whatever else it could conjure up, no thought afforded to tactics or caution, no attempt to rethink approaches, nothing but wild, unfocused frenzy. Maybe that was why this one was a body double instead of an assassin. One way or the other, Jolee and Tarrah had the advantage… and then Canderous finished killing the remaining Sith troops, and suddenly it was three against one.

Baffled by the opposition, the shapeshifter began to slowly back away, millipede-like legs subtly carrying it away from the fight as it struggled to conjure something that could match its opponents, eventually settling on the projectile-launching tail of the Klatooinian Spitting Scorpion – and in that moment, the three made their move.

Canderous shattered the glass walls of the corridor with one well-powered blast, Jolee reached out with the Force to subtly tip it down the listing floor until it was sliding towards the edge of the abyss, and Tarrah booted it over the edge with one meteoric flex of power, sending it plummeting into the firestorm that the showroom had become.

For a split-second or two, it clawed wildly at thin air, frantically shapeshifting in a desperate attempt to withstand the flames, but nothing it had been taught of could resist a few thousand degrees of heat, and as the split-second passed, it simply vanished into the flames.

Barely giving herself a moment to get her breath back, Tarrah scanned the manufactory for any sign of Hulas, and after a few tense seconds, finally caught a brief glimpse of a door at the far end of a partially collapsed corridor, opening just in time to admit a familiar figure in dark green robes before slamming shut. Hulas must have spent the last minute or so trying to reach the exit, struggling to navigate the walkway even as it collapsed around them, and had only just gotten as far as the door.

Meanwhile, the Sith officer had already successfully made his own escape.

Silently weighing her options for a few precious moments, Tarrah pondered whether to focus on Hulas or the Sith. In the end, it was distressingly easy for her to make up her mind, if only because it came down to giving Hulas the opportunity to restart the project or allowing the Sith to get away with a grand total of fifteen shapeshifters.

Tapping the commlink, she shouted, "Anyone not busy with sabotage, listen up! Hulas is westbound along lab access passage A3, probably heading for the executive hangar bay on level 23; if you can get there before him, intercept him at any and all costs! If he escapes, this whole thing could start up all over again!"

And with that, she flung herself through the shattered glass of the walkway, soaring high across the abyss to land heavily in the opposite corridor, scant metres from where Hulas had exited. Behind her, Jolee and Canderous made for the other exit, leaving Tarrah to charge down the corridor after the fleeing Overseer alone.

She'd made it as far as this little corner on the edge of infinity just to correct this latest mistake.

She wasn't going to give up now.


Across Kosytus Station, chaos reigned.

From one end of the facility from the next, alarm klaxons blared, the smell of smoke and burning industrial chemicals filled the air, and in the longer corridors and elevator shafts, the glow of fire could be glimpsed in the distance, drawing closer with every passing second.

With the local fire suppression system deactivated, the inferno in the labs raged unimpeded, flames pouring down the corridors from the detonate site and licking greedily at the manufactory upstairs, sending a wave of structural collapses through every single floor it touched. Eventually, a CO2 sprayer in one of the neighbouring corridors began dousing the oncoming fire with all the gas in its tanks, but by then the conflagration had grown too aggressive and too powerful to be suppressed: it was like trying to put out a bonfire with an eyedropper, and everyone in the vicinity knew it too.

More importantly, they knew it was only a matter of time before someone decided that the only way to smother the flames would be via venting the affected areas into space.

Caught between facing down the demented assassin droid killing its way through the guard patrols and risking asphyxiation, the GenoHaradan operatives took the third option by running for their lives. They didn't even spare a glance for the astromech droid slicing its way through the main computers, much less try to stop it; they simply took to their heels and made for the hangar bay.

In their absence, the droids aboard took up the slack, but without much success: there were simply too few of them to manage the fire and too many afforded to security, and Zaalbar's sabotage didn't help. Whenever the firefighter droids tried to prevent the inferno from spreading any further, the security droids got in the way, performing orderly searches of every single room even as they burned to nonfunctional slag – for they'd been programmed to be thorough and efficient, not fireproof. But then, sabotage to fire suppression hadn't been considered; Kosytus had been expecting a devastating attack from outside, not from within, and certainly not from the kind of entourage that Darth Revan travelled with these days.

Elsewhere in the base, Mission had just finished putting the final touches on her attempts to slice through the defences in specimen containment, and with power being redirected to anything that might spare Kosytus Station any further damage, it didn't take too much effort to bypass the final layer of security and trigger the unlocking sequence.

Before her eyes, the sarcophagus at the heart of the room cracked open like an egg, leaving Mission eye to eye with the bisected carcass of Rulan Prolik, his hideous face still frozen in a mocking near-skeletal grin.

Mission calmly placed a plasma grenade in the dead shapeshifter's mouth, hit the timer switch, and retired to a safe distance to watch as Rulan's mortal remains vanished in a searing orange fireball that instantly incinerated every last remaining atom of viable DNA left in the corpse, and if there was anything left of the body itself after that, a sizeable chunk of the roof came crashing down on the smouldering flesh, pulverizing it entirely.

"Well," said Mission, sighing in relief. "What now?"

"I suggest we try to cut off Hulas' path to the hangar bay," Juhani replied. "If we move quickly, we may be able to-"

But before she could finish her sentence, the sound of footsteps suddenly sounded over the roar of alarms, and a moment later, two GenoHaradan operatives appeared from around the corner, skidding to a halt less than two metres from Mission and Juhani. For a moment, the sight of the Twi'lek slicer and the Cathar Jedi caught them completely off-guard; then they glanced at the empty space between the two assassins, as if they'd expected someone to be among them. Then, belatedly remembering their jobs, they drew their weapons and charged.

The first, a lumbering Whiphid with muscles that would have made Zaalbar look a tad underweight, made the mistake of thinking that Mission was the easier target and lunged at her with his vibroblade drawn, only for Mission to duck out of the way and deal him a swift jab to the side with her own vibroblade – the poisoned GenoHaradan model. Startled, he spun around, swinging wildly over the place where Mission had once been, but Mission was already aiming for his legs, lacerating him neatly across the right ankle and stabbing deep into his left thigh as she darted past him. Already overbalanced, the pain in his legs sent him stumbling over, and Mission took the opportunity to slash him across the back, and by the time the Whiphid recovered from that, the poison was already flooding his veins and creeping up the length of his spine. Frothing at the mouth, he collapsed.

The second, a glittering-eyed Gand with a cortosis-weave polearm, was much more careful. As soon as he saw the lightsabre in Juhani's hand, he avoided strikes on her upper body and tried to jab at her legs with his polearm, trying to bypass her lightsabre and take her out at the knees, and to his credit, he held out for a good eight seconds before Juhani knocked him flat with the Force and sliced him down the middle.

"What do you suppose they were doing here?" Mission asked, once she'd gotten her breath back.

Juhani looked around with a look of dawning dread slowly creeping across her face. "I believe they were bodyguards," she said quietly.

"For who, though? There was nobody else in the corridor, right?"

"As far as we could see. But then, you have a GenoHaradan stealth unit: you know it's not as simple as what the eye can see."

"You mean-"

Juhani scanned the area, focussing her powers on perceiving as much of the surrounding area as possible. "Yes," she said at last. "Hulas just ran right past us."


Kriff, kriff, kriff, kriff…

Hulas had almost run out bad language by the time he reached the emergency stairs, and the fact that the Twi'lek runt and the Cathar whore had seen him leaving and were right on his tail didn't help his mood. This little detour had been meant as an opportunity to collect as much of Rulan's DNA as possible if he ever had a chance to continue the experiments, but now all he had was ashes. No, it was actually even worse than that: all he had was ashes and a duo of misfits chasing after him, with another gang of misfits following hot on their heels!

How the hell was any of this happening? He'd been so careful! He'd taken every possible precaution, countered every possible plan of attack, worked and slaved and prepared for every eventuality… so how was it possible for Revan to have gotten this far? Was it something she'd seen during their final encounter on Manaan? Was it something she'd learned through slicing computer networks? Had she pieced it together from available evidence? Or had she just cheated her way to victory like all the Jedi did, guided by intuition that didn't belong to her?

Yes, yes, that had to be the answer: that was how everyone worked around him. Everyone had unfair advantages, everyone cheated and swindled and seized upon the loopholes that the scummy little bastards were born with and hadn't done anything to earn. It was always the same, always the same! His enemies would always be those who succeeded through luck, connections, corruption, and accidents of birth, always oozing ahead of him while he did his level best to achieve his full potential through nothing but hard work, hard-won skill, and sheer force of intellect. He was the only player in the field that actually dared to play fair, the only deserving winner. Everyone else cheated, everyone else fell back on their unfair advantages, everyone else exploited what should have been his all along.

Even now that he'd won everything, the parasites were here, boring holes in his victory. They'd undone in seconds what had taken years to build, and now Kosytus Station was on fire, impossible to repair with the Sith breathing down his neck, impossible to restart production with his partners demanding their share, and one measly shipment of shapeshifters would not be enough to satisfy them. But that was the way, wasn't it? No matter how high Hulas rose, the undeserving would always be trying to drag him back down so those with "natural" talent and privilege could take his place. It was just like the time he'd tried to bolster the GenoHaradan's finances with artworks painted by droids armed with algorithms based on the most successful artistic trends, and every single gallery had turned him down just because he had the intellect to see what those so-called artistic minds couldn't, claiming that his masterpieces were "unimaginative", "bland," and "had too many fingers for the species" – and Rulan had laughed at him for it! It was the same thing all over again, only worse!

But he'd show them. He'd show them all. They'd be sorry for pretending to be better than him. He'd find a way to recover from this; if he had to hide in the shadows until the end of his natural span, he'd do it. He still had a few precious shapeshifters on his side. He still had a few scientists who weren't dead or running for their lives. He had the technology of conversion on his side, enough to make him virtually immortal once he'd gotten the process right… and he still had the Box.

The Box was waiting for him, ripe with the promise of true power, and all he had to do was get there in one piece.

The floor shook beneath him, nearly budging him off his footing as he sprinted around the next corner; no doubt the fire was spreading through the chemical stores now. The station might not be beyond repair by the end of this, but it wouldn't mean anything now that the Sith had seen the gap in his security. He'd have to tackle this problem alone, and that would have to include security.

He tapped the commlink at his collar. "I want the Equus Albus ready to depart within the next five minutes!" he screamed into the microphone. "I need at least twenty operatives aboard on the double. Is Dorsk still onboard?"

"Yes, Overseer, he's still in the biochem lab. I'm looking at him right now, and the guards aren't letting him leave."

"Good. Now, signal the active units: I want Subject Alpha and at least two other subjects on the ship before I get there!"

"But Overseer, the shapeshifter quarters have only just been evacuated! Reaching their personal commlinks with the internal network in shambles may be-"

"JUST DO IT, YOU SLIMY SPINELESS WORM-HEADED TWI'LEK GASH!" roared Hulas. "I NEED THOSE SHAPESHIFTERS ABOARD YESTERDAY! FAIL ME IN THIS AND I'LL LEAVE YOU BEHIND TO BURN WITH EVERY OTHER USELESS SACK OF GARBAGE ON THIS STATION AND I WILL RECORD YOUR DEATH SO I CAN SEND IT TO YOUR FAMILY TO WATCH! NOW GET MOVING!"

There was a pause, as Senni digested this. "Yes, sir," he said meekly, and hung up.

Behind Hulas, there was a chorus of expletives as the Jedi and the urchin began catching up. A quick glance over his shoulder revealed that Juhani had hoisted Mission onto her shoulders and was now giving her the fastest piggyback ride in the history of the galaxy, hurtling down the corridors at Force-enhanced speed with the Twi'lek hanging on for dear life.

At that rate, they'd catch up with him at any minute… but Hulas had prepared for this eventuality: he'd known that with the company he kept, he could be attacked in the corridors at any time, especially if his body double wasn't at hand… and with fourteen other shapeshifters at his disposal, there was always the opportunity for at least one or two of them to lie in wait at certain pre-planned points.

"Subject 8!" he hollered. "Subject 9! Defend me! Stop them!"

There was a whirring from the walls, and a moment later, something dark and nearly-liquid dropped from above in a whirl of tendrils and claws. On the wall nearby, another shapeshifter flickered into view and lunged at the pursuers, swiftly joining its sibling in driving Juhani and Mission in the opposite direction.

There, Hulas thought wildly. That buys me a little time. Just a little more time to escape. Just a little more time to take back what they want to steal from me. Just a little time is all I need against the undeserving. I'll show them. I'll show them all.


"Go, go, go, dammit!"

With most of the upper levels of the station ablaze and the chemical stores rapidly going up in smoke, most of the station was wracked with tremors as successive explosions shook Kosytus to its very core. Tarrah, Jolee, and Canderous had barely managed to descend to a safe level before deckplates began giving way overhead, forcing them to take the stairs to the level below, and then the level below that as well.

By now, the turbolifts were not responding to hails, and so the only way to clamber down to the next level was by the stairs, in part because using the turbolift shaft in this particular crisis would have been nothing short of suicidal. And unfortunately, Hulas had a thousand-metre headstart on all of them, and it was only growing wider with every explosion that wracked the facility.

Amidst the smoke and tremors, Tarrah paused for a moment to catch her breath, trying to review her hastily memorized map of the station, and in that moment, the commlink rang.

"Statement: Master," HK-47 called, voice raised slightly over the sounds of blaster fire and explosions, "the cowardly meatbag Hulas has been sighted fleeing along the corridor south of the computer core. Psychological analysis suggests he was attempting to retrieve research data from the computer so he could ensure continuity of experiments. Addendum: at least, before he saw us. He is now on a southerly trajectory towards the executive hangar."

"Aren't you trying to stop him?"

"Statement: we are attempting to do so, Master, but unfortunately, he has deployed two clone shapeshifters against T3 and I." There was a bloodcurdling howl from the commlink, followed by the sound of 47's flamethrower roaring to life. "We are currently attempting to subdue the opposition, but we will not be able to catch up with Hulas in time."

The commlink chimed again, and now the speaker rang with the sounds of wild thumping and crunching, followed by the shriek of a bowcaster and the thunder of explosives detonating in quick succession.

"This is Carth," shouted the voice on the other end. "We're just a few halls away from the executive hangar, but Hulas just slipped past us: he's deployed about three shapeshifters against us. I think one of them might be on fire-"

There was a skin-crumpling howl of pain in the background, followed by an explosion loud enough to leave Tarrah's eardrums throbbing in pain.

"Make that two shapeshifters!" Carth muttered. "Long story short, we won't be able to get to the hangar in time. I think it might be down to you, Tarrah!"

A power conduit to the left of Tarrah's head let out a low groan and exploded, spraying the corridor with shrapnel and a blast of heat that sent Jolee and Canderous darting backwards across the corridor to escape the hail of fire and debris. But for once, Tarrah couldn't afford to wait for them to catch up. After all, she could already see another shapeshifter loping after them, and as Jolee turned to face it, she knew at once that the two of them would be too busy to keep up anyway.

Instead, she summoned up all the power of the Force she could muster and all but catapulted herself down the corridor towards the nearest staircase.

Just a few minutes, she thought desperately. There's only one more level down from here, so I just need a couple more minutes or so. Please, just give me that much time. Just enough to set things right…


"Where the hell is everyone?!"

"Someone decimated the sleeping quarters before the bombing began, Overseer: these six were the only operatives that could make it to the hangar bay alive. The rest are either fleeing aboard their own ships or already dead."

"Six operatives. Plus the guards, that's eight. Plus the crew, that's eleven. Well, at least we have Subject Alpha and, er… Number 3. At least that one's been learning from Alpha, so it can learn more on the way. Dorsk!"

"Yes, sir!"

"Get to work on replicating Alpha's DNA. I want as much of this project salvaged as possible."

"But, sir, there's something that I need to-"

"NOT NOW! We need to cast off, as soon as possible: Senni, get the pilot to pick up the pace, and tell him that if he dares delay a moment longer, I'll have him flung into space and fried with the engines of his own damn ship!"

"Overseer, the pilot says we're still plugged into the hangar bay computer port. We were calculating the shortest route to the destination with the aid of the docking computer, and if we unplug now, there's a chance we'll leave traces in the-"

"IT DOESN'T KRIFFING MATTER! IF WE DON'T LEAVE NOW, WE'LL ALL BE DEAD! NOW JUMP TO IT! GET THIS SHIP MOVING THIS VERY INSTANT!"


No sooner had she reached the final landing, the walls around Tarrah began to ooze and warp as three shapeshifters dropped down around her, their protean faces shifting wildly from canine to reptile to mollusc as they sculpted their appendages into weaponry and began closing in.

But for once, Tarrah wasn't in the mood for anything close to a real fight, and in her rage and desperation, she lashed out with all the power that Darth Revan had once been known for.

Lightning poured from her fingertips, knocking the first shapeshifter off its feet and slamming it hard against the wall as the electricity charred its flesh to a smoking, bloodied mess, contorting it in a thousand different directions at once as it struggled to withstand the voltage. Too badly hurt to heal itself at short notice, wounded shapeshifter mewled in pain and tried to crawl away; it only got as far as the nearest door before Tarrah reached out with the Force and slammed it shut, hacking the clone neatly in half and leaving the half that still had a functioning brain still trapped on the other side.

The second erupted across the corridor with a pair of enormous batlike wings and launched itself headlong towards Tarrah, its talons stretching towards her as twin dragon's heads on long, elastic stalks, spiting acid and caustic vapours. Reaching out to every pipeline and power cable in the surrounding walls, Tarrah shattered them with all the power she could muster, spraying the corridor with white-hot gasses and electrical shocks and leaving the oncoming shapeshifter trapped in hallway of burning, searing pain. With no biomass to replenish itself with, it crashed to the deck less than three seconds, its body lost in a shroud of fire.

To its credit, the third tried to be cunning. It tried to slip past her as its compatriot burned alive and attack her from behind… but Tarrah's mind was alive with a power over the Force that she hadn't known in all her conscious days.

When she turned around to retaliate, it wasn't Tarrah that did so, but Darth Revan.

And it was Revan who reached out with the Force and snatched the shapeshifter from the air, crushing it to bloody pulp with all her might and flinging it into the blazing wreckage of the corridor.

She took a moment to collect herself as the final shapeshifter died: she was Tarrah, not Revan. She needed to keep that in mind; she needed to remember who she really was, or it wouldn't matter who won or who lost this war – if Revan emerged as the victor over Tarrah's mind, even if all that remained of her were instincts and nothing else, everyone would lose.

Then, she took off running towards the hangar, hoping against hope that she'd reach the ship in time, hoping that her chance to set things right hadn't passed her by.

But no sooner had she skidded to a halt just inside the hangar, she saw at once that the biggest ship in the room had already finished tearing itself out of its moorings and was accelerating rapidly out of the executive gateway.

It was a huge, ungainly-looking lump of alabaster-painted durasteel, the kind of space-yacht built exclusively for the noveau riche of the galaxy, a luridly grandiose pleasure cruiser that had clearly borrowed elements from better-designed ships with nothing to guide the designer other than what was the most popular in the fashionable periodicals of the day. From the looks of things, all those borrowed elements had been implemented with none of the grace, precision, or creativity found in more tasteful shipbuilders, all of them adding up to a crude crossbow-like shape surmounted with a bridge that looked like a crown, the name Equus Albus emblazoned across the hull in neon green letters.

A few other ships were creeping away alongside it, but none of them were bound in the same direction, and besides, Tarrah could already sense the presence of Hulas in that ugly crown-shaped bridge… and he was already out of reach: however tasteless this Equus Albus was, its engines were put together by professionals. Before Tarrah could even make a dash for the hangar bay turbolaser controls, the ship was already lancing through space, out of range of cannon or tractor beam, already darting past the fading light of the white dwarf star and into the darkness of space.

And just like that, it was gone.

Tarrah was left panting on the deck, too exhausted to even scream, too tired to feel the rage and misery at having gotten so close to ending the nightmare, only to see Hulas slip through her fingers at the last minute.

And in the meantime, Kosytus was in ruins, the GenoHaradan operatives either dead or fleeing in all directions, and the chances of this operation being restored were nothing short of astronomical, but even so, the Sith had gotten away with fifteen of the shapeshifters for their own army. If they couldn't spare the time to try to replicate the GenoHaradan's experiments, then all was well for the time being, and all the Republic needed to worry about were the assassins and body doubles that were already in Sith employ. If not, then the war might just be about to get very complicated indeed… and that was assuming that Hulas couldn't worm his way back into Darth Malak's good graces somehow.

And then, just as she was starting to feel the first terribly inklings of despair, she found herself looking over the wreckage of the Equus Albus' mooring lines… and realized with a jolt of excitement that, up until a few seconds ago, the ship's navigation computer had been hooked into a local system.

"Oh, please," she hissed, as she dashed towards the tattered length of cable, datapad at the ready. "Give me this. Just this one, please…"

For one horrible moment, she thought the hangar computers were too damaged to cough up some answers, but then, her data spike finally interfaced successfully… and a moment later, the Equus Albus' destination was clearly outlined across the star charts.

One last time, then, she thought.


All was quiet aboard the Equus Albus.

Hulas was too enraged to spare a word for anyone, Senni was hiding under his seat, the shapeshifters barely understood enough Basic to make conversation, the crew were too busy to spare a moment on anything other than navigating the ship, and the surviving operatives knew better than to provoke their Overseer's temper.

So, it was Dorsk, the lumpy-headed Khommite scientist, who finally broke the silence.

"Sir."

"…what?"

"It is accomplished, sir.

"Clarify at once, Dorsk, or I'll have Alpha eat you feet-first."

"The injectable conversion method, sir. It's ready, sir."

An astonished pause blossomed across the interior of the ship.

"You did WHAT?"

"As I promised, sir: the conversion method has been refined to a simple injection. I was working on this project alongside all the, uh, pedestrian work, so I was able to improve my work with the failures of the other team-members. With this simple compressed variant on the common formula, I can accomplish the metamorphosis into a fully-fledged shapeshifter within an hour, with one injection and no sterile environments necessitated."

Hulas thought carefully. "What of survival rates?"

"Uh… 50%."

"Good enough. We'll have all the possible converts we'll ever need where we're going. Granted, I'll be busy acquiring that additional cargo from Motta the Hutt, but you and the others can convert as many test subjects as you like: the more the merrier, that's what I'll say. If nothing else, we'll be defended if Revan comes after us again."

"If I might ask, sir, where are we going?"

Hulas smiled, proboscis twisting into a manic grin. "Tatooine, dear doctor. Tatooine is where it all shall end!"


A/N: Up next...

Guess.