Star Wars: Knight Errant (30 page)

Waiting on the cargo deck, Rusher stared blankly as the image came up on the monitor. Defying all sense, they’d crossed over kilometers of ocean back to the mesa where the Dyarchy airspeeders had come from. And there, below, was Beadle Lubboon, sitting in the middle of an airspeeder and waving to the sky like a castaway outside a life pod.

Rusher looked over to Dackett, standing by at the drop-gate. “Now if we only had audio, we could hear your savior yelling like an idiot.”

Dackett rolled his eyes. “Are we clear to open or not?”

“Oh, by all means,” Rusher said, patting the master’s shoulder and stepping to the other side of the cargo door. “But remember, if you want to keep him, he’s your responsibility.”

Ignoring his elder aide’s response—something about brigadier generals and their mothers—Rusher flipped the switch to lower the ramp.

The Duros stood, alone, in an airspeeder floating just outside the speeder bay. No one contested his presence; in fact, nothing had impeded their own approach. From their level, they could see the Sullustan girl sitting on the ledge of the landing port, kicking her legs.

“Why didn’t you pick up the girl?” Rusher yelled down to the bobbing airspeeder.

Beadle gestured meekly toward the vehicle’s steering yoke. “I started the speeder before she got in,” he said. “I only know forward and stop.”

Directing his bridge crew to bring
Diligence
down closer to the sea, Rusher started to concoct a response. But the ship’s master got his attention first.

“Great suns, Brigadier. Look!”

Bodies littered the garage behind the nonchalant Sullustan. At least a dozen of the scarlet-clad sentries, like those who had hassled them at the dock, all chopped down at various points in the huge room. Here and there, wrecked airspeeders still burned, remnants of a colossal melee.

Dackett looked down at Beadle, struggling to climb the line they had dropped to him. “Do you think he fought all those people to get her out?”

“I haven’t got the slightest idea.” Rusher looked at Dackett—and in unison, they both pulled on the rope, hauling up the wayward Duros.

“Where’s your headset, recruit?” Rusher asked, watching him clamber onto the ramp. “You see what comes of going out without your comlink.”

“Begging the brigadier’s pardon, Brigadier,” Beadle said, “but if the brigadier recalls, the brigadier gave it to the Jedi.”

Rusher pursed his lips. “Oh.” He looked back into the airspeeder bay, and the corpses strewn across the floor. “You did this?”

“Kerra Holt came after us,” the Sullustan yelled from her perch.

Rusher stepped aside so two of his troopers could leap down into the floating airspeeder. “Look—what’s your name?”

“Tan!”

“Tan, we’re going to back this speeder up to you so you can get on. My ship can’t land here, and we can’t get any closer.” The airspeeder bay was meters below, and cargo ramps would never reach it without the stowed cannon barrels jabbing the cliff wall. “Hop in when they get to you!”

“No!”

“No?”

“She’s here inside the mesa, somewhere. You have to go in after her.”

Rusher looked at Dackett.
I’m going to die
, he mouthed.

“I’m sorry, kid,” Rusher said, looking down and attempting to appear kindly. “We just don’t know where she is. This is a huge place, and we don’t know how much time we have to go searching for—”

Suddenly scrap metal struck
Diligence
from above, ricocheting off the starboard cargo assembly and raining down past Rusher.

He was almost afraid to ask. “What was that?”

“Droids, sir.” Dackett pointed to more of the stuff, coming down. Arms. Legs. The odd torso. All were part of a larger shower of transparisteel shards, falling from the cantilevered facility atop the mesa.

“She’s up there, Brigadier!” Tan squealed, standing on the ledge and jumping up and down. She pointed to the building, hundreds of meters above.

Rusher straightened. “I stand corrected. Just stop jumping, before you fall in!” He glowered at Dackett. “Or before I
jump
in.”

Another locker opened—and another droid launched forward, hurtling toward Kerra. As she had with the last five, she used the Force to hurl the bulbous thing through the shattered window.

This was getting old.

Kerra had followed the Krevaaki upstairs in a service turbolift. She wasn’t about to follow in the same car. It didn’t seem likely that the Krevaaki would kill her with a booby-trapped lift, but she wasn’t willing to put it past him.

Stepping out of the lift had confirmed her location. The room was vast, easily the full diameter of the squashed dome she’d seen from outside; spacious living quarters perched high above the bay.
They always nest on the top floor
, she thought. You could usually tell a Sith Lord by the real estate.

An opaque dome rising nearly to the ceiling sat in the room’s center, well away from her. The curved window went all the way around the pent house, its path interrupted every twenty meters by small rooms jutting inward. Some held nothing but multicolored storage bins neatly shut and stored away. Others held banks of lockers—and as soon as she passed, she learned what was in them.

Nanny droids
. Big, chubby spheres-on-spheres, tumbling around on their repulsorlift bases. She’d seen their like before, in the Republic; the BD series had cared for generations of aristocratic young, teasing and tending with metal tendrils not unlike the Krevaaki’s.

And like the Krevaaki, they had thrown themselves at her in a most un-tender fashion. As each locker burst open, its metallic occupants sailed into the room, encircling the colossal upside-down bowl at its center in a whirlwind of protection. The droids were unarmed, but at a hundred kilograms each, the hurtling mamas were weapons themselves. With every step Kerra took into the room, another droid broke from the swarm, throwing itself at her. She’d beheaded the first three with her lightsaber—and while she kept it handy still, she had long since lost patience with this game. Now, when one
lunged, she simply waved her free hand, angling the writhing projectile through the windows. If the living occupants of the room were here, they wouldn’t be able to miss the noise.

With the last droid tumbling down into the bay outside, Kerra surveyed the room. Still no Krevaaki; just the strange onyx hemisphere, a dozen meters across, sitting silently. The room around it had a playroom feel, but it seemed long since out of use. Brightly colored furnishings peeked out from beneath drab sheets. All the toys were tucked away. It reminded Kerra of the spare room in a neighbor’s house in Aquilaris, years before. A child had lived there, but childhood joy did not.

Instead, she only felt the angry presence of the dark side. She’d felt it elsewhere in the facility, but here in the loft—that was a good name for it, she thought—it permeated everything. And it was more than anger, she realized; it was
furor
. Furor over being trapped. Over the loss of something never known. Whoever lived here had sat on that resentment, letting it grow into a thick hate that made her heart sink with every step.

And at its center: the black dome. Lightsaber at the ready, Kerra circled it. Was it a prison? Or a
lid
? She heard rustling from within. Wrecking the place hadn’t drawn anyone out. Would anything?

Then she noticed a slightly raised platform in the shape of a diamond, just steps away from the dome. The carpet leading to it was worn; whoever stood there only ever approached from the outside, facing the dome. Gritting her teeth, she did the same.

As soon as both her feet were on the dais, Kerra saw the half orb ahead shudder. Recirculated air whooshed from its base as a gap opened between it and the floor. It
was
a lid, rotating on a horizontal axis and sinking back into the floor behind. A raised round stage sat within—but
this was no amphitheater. Light from the shattered windows fell across a mass of orange cushions, piled high in the largest bed-fort she’d ever seen.

Near the center sat two teenage humans. A boy rocked with his hands around his knees, glancing furtively at Kerra and then looking quickly away. For someone just a few years younger than she was, Kerra thought he dressed younger still, sitting in bedclothes in the middle of the day. But his dark eyes looked old, set back in his bald head above heavy bags.

He, at least, seemed to notice her. The blond girl beside him sat endlessly brushing her hair, paying Kerra no mind whatsoever. Kerra wondered for a moment whether the well-fed pair were indeed the Krevaaki’s prisoners—until she realized that they were the focus of the dark side energy she’d felt. She looked up at the lid, tilted backward. A meditation chamber, the largest she’d ever seen.

The boy looked again at Kerra, eyes searching for familiarity. Just as Kerra started to speak, the girl noticed her, too, dropping her brush and speaking to the air. “Regent will address the Jedi-aspect.”

A strange statement from a stranger source. The girl dressed in the oversized nightshirt was well on her way to womanhood, and yet she had the wide eyes of a youngling.

“You are in the presence of the Dyarchy” came a voice from behind the round lid. The Krevaaki emerged from behind the half dome, bearing his four shortened lightsabers. His stump of a tentacle hung, limp and unbandaged. “This is Lord Quillan,” he said, gesturing to the boy, “and his sister, Lord Dromika.”

Kerra remained on the dais, looking warily at the pair. “And I call you—?”

The Krevaaki seemed to stall, fumbling for words.
Looking back at the human couple, he finally answered. “I am regent here.”

The scheming regent
, Kerra thought, remembering Rusher’s joke. But it wasn’t clear who was in charge here. “You’ve taken my friends,” she said. “I’ve ordered them freed.”

Quillan simply bobbed back and forth and looked away, while his sister looked angrily at Kerra. Dromika seemed eager to blurt something—but, glancing back at her brother, she said nothing.

“The Lords do not understand what you speak of,” the regent said. “They do not interact with the universe as you and I.”

Looking to the siblings and receiving no rejection, the Krevaaki explained. Twin children of a powerful Sith Lord, Quillan and Dromika had never perceived reality as others did. Quillan lived entirely inside his expansive mind, sensing other organics as phantasms moving in his personal dreamworld. No one could contact him, save Dromika, connected to him on a level no Sith scholar or physician understood.

But she, too, had a unique situation. Since learning to speak, Dromika’s only form of communication had been Force persuasion. And her talent for it was immense, acting on levels beyond the vocal. Even in infancy, before she knew the word for hunger, Dromika had possessed her human caretakers to get whatever she and her brother needed. “Now we use droids for their immediate needs when I am not present,” the regent said. Dromika’s power had been so great that she burned out less prepared minds.

They had Daiman’s problem, Kerra realized—only worse. Much worse. Daiman had come into his Force powers and his Sith philosophy at a later age, after he’d already been socialized to some degree. He may not have
believed
that others were sentient beings with free will—and he certainly perceived the environment around him through a strange prism. The universe was the playing field of some game on an astral plane. But Daiman at least interacted with that environment; he understood it, and accepted it as a given. The twins only acted
through
their environment, making other beings extensions of their own will.

It was exactly, she realized with horror, what Daiman had been trying to accomplish back in the camp with the Woostoid aide.

“I have been asked to explain this so you will cease your activities and submit to inclusion,” the regent said.

“Inclusion?”
Kerra stepped down from the dais and walked, wary of coming too close to the now-watchful twins. “Like you included the Celegians? Did they ask to be part of this?”

“They were useful. They needed to be first.”

“First of how many?” Kerra waved toward the window and Hestobyll, across the harbor. “You’ve already got a planet in thrall. How long are you going to let this go?”

They’re Sith
, she realized, answering her own question. But could you be
born
Sith?

She faced the Krevaaki again and pointed to the siblings. “Listen, Regent—how is it they came to be the center of all of this? Why isn’t someone trying to help them?”

“I
am
trying to help them. I … have orchestrated all this. I have built it for us all. We will realize our destiny—as one.”

To the side, Quillan glowered at the Krevaaki. His sister followed suit. The regent seemed to shrink under their gaze.

Kerra noticed. “I don’t think they feel your role is as central as you do,” she said. “You’re just another Sith flunkie—just another tool.”

The regent shuddered with rage. “You will join us—join
them
—or be destroyed.”

“No.”

Expecting an attack from the Krevaaki, Kerra was startled to see movement from another quarter. The boy knelt atop the pillows and shakily raised his hand. The child had never exercised, she thought—if he had even left the room at all. But with his feeble motion, his sister stood and raised her hand.