Star Wars: Knight Errant (2 page)

He quietly thanked Daiman for that. At sixty, Gub was lucky to be of any service—especially after losing the use of his legs in a vat collapse during Lord Chagras’s reign. That should have been the end of his usefulness. But years earlier, Gub had worked in a bioweapons factory, injecting spores with poison. It had been a short step from that
meticulous work to using a chemical stylus—and such a skill was always handy on Daiman’s capital world.

On taking power, Daiman had ordered the Aurebesh letters that spelled his name altered to reflect his mark on existence. Two flag-like strokes would be added to the characters not just when they were written in the future, but also everywhere they had previously appeared. And
altered
wasn’t the right word, because—as Daiman had put it—the “new” characters had always existed. Mere organics simply couldn’t see them. Making them visible now wasn’t alteration—it was
revelation
.

The change was instantaneous for the vast majority of written words in Daiman’s domain, all electronically stored. But manual attention was required for signs and labels—as well as for the relatively few physical documents the culture had generated. Thus, Gub and thousands of craftsbeings like him on Darkknell and elsewhere had been tasked with “revealing” the letters that had always been there.

It might have been easier simply to destroy the earlier materials; most flimsiplasts dissolved eagerly in water. But Gub knew that wasn’t the point. If, as Daiman’s Sith adepts said, the universe had been created twenty-five years before, when Daiman was born, all “older” matter must have been created by him, as well—including this advertisement. If a ragged sheet depicting pictures of shoes held within it the marks of Daiman, then it was not an advertisement, but a holy artifact. Destroying it would be sacrilege worthy of the Great Enemy.

Daiman’s signature was everywhere in the galaxy—even in the sky above. The pages from the past were just another piece of that ubiquity. They had to look the part.

Zeroing in on the circular, Gub found one of the letters he was seeking in the caption for a gray boot. Another
aurek
. Gub sighed and rubbed the electrostatic pen against
his knee to charge it. He knew the importance of his job, but he still tired of seeing the pesky vowels. The added flags—his supervisor called them
kerns
—that created the holy letter
aurek-da
flew to the left of the character, almost always butting up against the adjacent figure. But if Daiman didn’t intend for the characters to run together, then Gub must do his best to see that the transformed, revealed characters didn’t, either.

In matters of creation, neatness counted.

And so, the old Sullustan sat in his tiny apartment in the Iridium Quarter, his day a slurry of
dorn-da
s and
enth-da
s that often stretched far into night, as it had to-night. Gub seldom wondered what happened to the reams of completed flimsiplast he’d returned over the years. He assumed the documents went right back to where they’d been found, although he could tell from the stains and smell that some of them had been in landfills, waiting for expulsion into the nearest star. Who kept track of what needed to be returned where? What kind of a job must
that
be? Gub couldn’t imagine.

It didn’t matter, so long as he’d done
his
part for divine revelation. His work concerns were only in meeting his quota and pleasing a passive-aggressive inspector. His real worries he saved for his dwindling food ration, forced to serve three, and for his orphaned granddaughter Tan, sleeping in the other room, her future unknown.

And increasingly, he worried over the caregiver he’d recently hired for the two of them. Unreasonable, brash—and, unbeknownst to him, at that moment across town working toward the ultimate destruction of Lord Daiman, forger of alphabets and creator of the universe.

In Sith space, everyone is a slave
. It was a funny thing about a bunch whose credo included a line about their “chains being broken,” Narsk thought. They were always careful to leave plenty of chains intact for everyone else.

Still, some people were more enslaved than others. It paid to be special, to be good at something. Life was less unpleasant then. And for the
really
special? One had one’s choice of masters—not that the options were that appealing.

Narsk Ka’hane’s own specialty had brought him to Darkknell, seat of power for Daiman, self-declared Sith Lord and would-be godling. Narsk had first used a stealth bodysuit to harvest rimebats from caverns on Verdanth, and what he was doing now wasn’t much different. True, the Bothan couldn’t imagine anyone back home clinging upside down to a rope in a high-security tower’s ventilation system—but then, not everyone could be special.

What
was
different now was the stealth suit. The Sith warring in the region hadn’t focused much on advancing stealth technology over the last few decades; they were only after bigger explosions. That was fine with Narsk. The bodysuit he wore was the top of a Republic line never seen in the Grumani sector. He didn’t know how his supplier had acquired a Cyricept Personal Concealment
System, Mark VI—or even whether the previous five versions were any good. Narsk just knew he’d never gotten so far on an assignment so easily.

Almost a shame, given all the preparation he’d put in. He’d arrived in Xakrea, Darkknell’s administrative capital, weeks earlier to establish his cover identity. Locating the target was simple enough; the lopsided pyramid known colloquially as the Black Fang was visible from most of town. He’d carefully studied traffic patterns around the obsidian edifice and noted the shift changes of the sentries guarding the few openings. Within a month, he’d located every route into and out of the colossal house of secrets.

And then he had walked right in.

The Mark VI could do for tradecraft what hyperdrive did for space travel, Narsk thought. Electronic baffles worked into the suit’s skin at a molecular level warped and bent electromagnetic waves around the wearer. Sound, light, comms—the Mark VI dodged them all. And Cyricept had thought of everything. A breath filter matched exhalations to room temperature and humidity. Special goggles permitted Narsk to see out, despite the fact that no light was reaching his eyes. They’d even supplied a similarly cloaked pouch for carry-along items. If Narsk wasn’t exactly invisible, he took an attentive eye to spot, especially in the dark.

But attentiveness, Narsk had found, was not a gift that “Lord Daiman, creator of all,” had seen fit to bestow on his sentries. As elsewhere, the peculiar Lord’s adepts had rounded up menacing-looking characters and proceeded to overdress them. There wasn’t a bruiser so tough he couldn’t be made to look silly when strapped into gilded armor and wrapped in a burgundy skirt. One poor Gamorrean—his squat, lumbering green body particularly at odds with his finery—across town had looked ready to cry.

So while Narsk had brought his needler and extra rounds on every trip to the research center, he’d never needed them. The Mark VI had gotten him to the door, but the sentries had actually opened it for him, allowing him inside when they entered themselves. “When your job’s to make sure nothing ever happens,” he’d once heard, “you begin to see nothing happening even when something’s going on.” By now, his thirteenth and final trip inside, Narsk believed it. Many of the secrets of the Black Fang—officially, the Daimanate Dynamic Testing Facility (Darkknell)—rested comfortably in the memory of the datapad in his pouch.

Lord Odion would be pleased.

That wasn’t always a good thing, Narsk knew: Daiman’s older brother got most of his thrills from death and destruction. The whole sorry war smacked of a psychological study. Daiman was the spoiled kid who thought he was the only person in the universe who mattered; Odion was the jealous sibling, reacting to his loss of uniqueness by trashing the playpen. If Daiman thought he created everything, Odion believed it was his destiny to destroy everything. Half of Odion’s adepts were part of a death cult, flitting around his evil light hoping to cash out in his service. Ralltiiri glowmites were less suicidal.

Fortunately, Narsk didn’t have to adopt their ways to take their assignments. Not many of them, anyway.

Reaching a juncture in the ventilation system, Narsk felt the whole building wheeze around him. Frigid air chuffed past, cooling the facility for today’s big test. The Mark VI responded, matching the surrounding temperature while somehow keeping frost from accumulating on the suit’s surface. The Republic designers were good, Narsk thought.
Too bad they can’t fight. Or won’t
.

Cutting the cable, Narsk settled gently onto the vent cover. The main testing center below was the only important room he hadn’t entered, if only because his quarry
hadn’t been moved here yet. But there it was, its metallic bulk just visible through the icy slats at his feet.

Convergence
.

In Daiman’s conflict with Odion, the great capital ships that once dominated Sith battles with the Republic had sat largely out of play. Neither had a clear idea how many great ships his brother had, and while Odion would have happily taken his chances in a huge engagement, Daiman was unwilling to oblige. The result had been a series of strokes and counterstrokes, where the winning factor wasn’t the amount of firepower as often as it was the ability to project different kinds of strength quickly. The field of battle changed constantly.

The Convergence Tactical Assault Vehicle had chucked thousands of years of military science in favor of Daiman’s idea of the moment: one-ship-fits-all. Like Narsk’s stealth suit,
Convergence
was intended to do everything. Twice the size of a starfighter, the craft served as a small troop transport, capable of delivering eight to ten warriors through hyperspace. It also sported weapons systems allowing it to play the role of fighter or bomber depending on the situation. Daiman foresaw a time when millions of the vessels would propel him to his rightful place, ruling the galaxy.

Daiman’s engineers, meanwhile, had foreseen only a never-ending nightmare. And their prediction, spoken only to themselves, had thus far come closest to reality. Peering down into the chamber, Narsk could see why. Mounted onto a colossal testing arm was the ugliest contraption he’d ever seen.
Convergence
was a hundred-ton expression of one man’s moods, changeable and conflicting.

Daiman had demanded that the vessel keep to the tri-pronged dart aesthetic of his starfighters, but the wings and color scheme were about all that the pregnant monster had in common with those sleek ships. Designers
had saddled the forward section with a hulking crew compartment that was still less than comfortable: room for nine passengers, but only if six stood the entire way. The engines, enlarged on two earlier occasions, seemed nonetheless outmatched. A missile battery pointed nowhere in particular. And a massive nacelle ran along the underside, last vestige of an earlier plot to convert the ship into a tracked vehicle for use on land. Narsk imagined they still kept the wheels somewhere in the building, anticipating Daiman’s frequent changes of mind.

Endless engineering for an endless war
. Narsk thought it something a child would design. Yet despite it all, there was still something worth stealing. For all their troubles, Daiman’s designers had lucked upon some worthwhile advances. Some of the composite work on the hull had shown fruit, and the turbolaser energy efficiency was as good as anyone in the sector had seen.

Useful facts, especially to his employer. Self-styled though he was, Lord Odion was a proper mimic when it came to technology. Narsk had been assigned to pick
Convergence
’s secrets clean. With any luck, Odion’s massive floating factory, The Spike, would soon be churning out better weapons systems using the ideas.

Narsk had stolen most of the data at his leisure, thanks to Daiman’s sudden decision to add riot-control features to the ship. Now he was back for the last morsel: the energy shield package. Over the past week, Daiman’s researchers had exposed its shields to sonic waves, electronic emissions, and blazing heat, adjusting the ship’s software package as needed. This test, designed to evaluate shield performance in atmospheres, was the one Narsk had been waiting for. The
Convergence
prototype had been married to a huge rotating arm, a centrifuge designed to simulate performance at sublight speeds. On less secret vehicles, this kind of testing was done in the air—but, Narsk imagined, the researchers probably worried the thing would
never fly anyway. He was glad he hadn’t been ordered to steal the ship itself!