Star Wars: Knight Errant (10 page)

Already dizzy, Narsk shook his head. How did Daiman’s followers stand such doubletalk?

“Uleeta!” Daiman called. “Is the connection ready?”

Beneath, the Woostoid spoke. “As my lord knows, the heretic Bactra awaits on the priority channel.” The woman, Narsk saw, never faced Daiman when addressing him. Instead, she craned her neck and directed her bulbous ebony eyes toward the skylight, as if Daiman were living in the rafters somewhere.
Well, he kind of is
, Narsk thought.

Uleeta glanced at her handheld control pad and looked up again. She spoke cautiously, as if fearful to offend. “Bactra … likes to be called
Lord
. As my—”

“What he likes is pointless. Activate it.”

“Activating. Should we remove the prisoner?”

“No.”

The answer sent a chill shot back down Narsk’s back. Whatever was about to happen, it didn’t matter if he knew about it. He was still dead.

The rafters of a Sith Lord’s entry hallway were not the place to be pawing at one’s armpits. And yet, Kerra couldn’t stop herself. It was good that getting inside the Sanctum Celestial was so easy, because she’d had to fight a small war just to get into the stealth suit.

The skintight garment was functioning properly; it had gotten her past eight sentry posts so far. But there wasn’t anything comfortable about it. The planners at Cyricept had thought of a lot of things, but making one size fit all species and genders wasn’t among them. The Bothan had been slightly shorter, and while Kerra wasn’t overly endowed, she’d had to take extreme measures to get the fasteners closed. If she had to die somewhere, she’d already be mummified.

On the other hand, there was too much room in the mask, where the Bothan’s hairy snout had been. She’d folded part of the fabric inside and pinned it in order to cinch the mask closed, leaving a bizarre chevron-shaped beak above the mouthpiece. She was positively thrilled no one could see her.

Now, as Kerra crept from alcove to alcove, every step reminded her why Jedi didn’t wear bodysuits. Her regular clothes, stuffed in the tote bag just beneath the explosives, were loose fitting and comfortable. Kerra doubted she’d have wanted the suit even if it were in her size, but she also knew she never would have gotten far without it. She’d broken into Sith strongholds before, but keeping Daiman and his Correctors from noticing her through the Force took extra concentration. The suit was her edge.

She just wanted her edge to stop digging into her midsection.

Kerra had only ever seen Daiman’s stronghold from a distance, its obsidian walls tracing long lines around Xakrea’s centermost point. Tall pylons flanked a gateway on each of the seven sides; Kerra had simply picked the nearest. She’d wondered once why Daiman didn’t have some towering, vertical roost from which to survey his surroundings, as he had on Chelloa. A co-worker at the plant had explained that since Daiman had created Darkknell, he had no need to look down on it. Kerra had barely stifled her laughter then.
So he’s got a wall. If we don’t exist, why does he need it?

She’d imagined the walls enclosed some kind of open space—perhaps a courtyard or a lake, with a smaller castle somewhere within. Instead, she’d found that the great gateway was actually a door. The walls weren’t a divider, but the outsides of the largest building she’d ever encountered.

The structure was recent, raised in the few years since Daiman’s ascension to power. Kerra was flabbergasted. So much of Xakrea was old, dating back to previous Sith Lords and before. What had Daiman put his building resources into? The biggest shrine to arrogance ever, easily surpassing for scale and gaudiness any of the industrialists’ mansions she’d visited when raising money for Vannar. Those people’s homes were temples to their own achievement, but only in a figurative sense. Daiman’s actually came with bas-reliefs of himself creating the universe.

And yet, changing her route to avoid yet another hall of mirrors—no telling what those would do to the stealth suit—Kerra found the place strangely empty. It was a temple without worshippers. Enormous ballrooms and dining halls had clearly never seen a dancer
or a diner. If Daiman wanted ostentation, he seemed not to understand what it was for.

It pained her to see it all now, to think of the people whose lives were wasted in erecting the place. Kerra had forgiven the lip service given in public to Daiman’s creatorhood, but she’d never understood why so many people she’d met also did so in private. Gub, for one. He was more than twice the Sith Lord’s age. She wondered if there was a specific day on which everyone on Darkknell stopped rolling their eyes when they spoke of Daiman’s myth. It must have been some long time earlier. It always confused her. If no one else but Daiman existed, as his thinking went, why would he go to the trouble to indoctrinate anyone? Why would he care?

She’d only met Daiman once, but she knew enough from their short exchange to guess. Daiman could see into the minds of others using the Force, but he didn’t take that for proof that they were independent beings. He assumed that any contrary thoughts in their heads were part of the galactic puzzle he’d created for himself to correct. It was just one more thing to fix, another victory condition to satisfy. He wanted the droids around him to
know
they were droids: organic or otherwise. And if that meant spending five years building an atrium that took five minutes to traverse—so be it. Even if the builders were the only others who would ever see inside.

Interesting as Daiman’s home was as a psychological study, it was ruination for Kerra’s plans. Feeling for the baradium nitrite in the pouch, she looked around in exasperation. Even if she could find Daiman, she’d need a shuttle of the stuff to bring this place down!

Hearing activity atop a stone staircase, Kerra slipped over the banister and dropped into a crawl space. They weren’t sentries, this time, but soldiers. About a dozen figures of various species, all in different forms of military
dress, followed a protocol droid down the steps into an atrium.

Certainly not Daiman’s usual high-fashion troopers
. Kerra gawked, unseen, at the ragtag bunch. What would possess any band of mercenaries to work for a schizophrenic monomaniac? It didn’t matter. Inside the mask, she smiled.
Take me to your leader
.

“Nice to see you through something other than a rangefinder,” Rusher said, jabbing the Toong with a gloved hand. “Eating pretty well over on the Gevarno Loop, I see.”

Olive and ovoid, Mak Medagazy smirked. “Haven’t had to face
you
in a while, R-r-rusher,” he said, massive belly wobbling as he extended a long, thin arm to the brigadier. “Kept the replacement costs d-d-down.”

Having spent their working lives trying to kill one another, not all the militia leaders in the subsector got along. But Mak was easy to like. Because he was a droid-runner, casualties were never personal for him. And perhaps to avoid the characteristic Toong nervous stutter, he always kept his remarks short, offending few.

Not so for some of the others in the party, Rusher saw. Like Kr’saang the Togorian, who insisted on being called that, as if anyone could miss a two-and-a-half-meter mound of hairy anger. The feral-looking mercenary insisted on pushing his way to the front of the group, nearly bowling over their electronic guide in the process.

“What’s the hurry, Tog?” Rusher asked again. The Sith Lord’s house was endless; the meet could be kilometers away.

Kr’saang snarled, whiskers flaring on either side of his angular muzzle. “Waste your own time, human—not mine!” Leader of a brigade of shock troops, Kr’saang complained again about being called to a briefing in person. “Foolishness.”

“Then why are you here? Got to be other Sith Lords who can keep your muzzle full of chow.”

Several mercenaries edged back from Rusher, in case the black-furred giant snapped. But Kr’saang kept walking. “My business.” Emerald eyes glared back at Rusher. “I sure know why
you’re
here, rock-thrower. Daiman won’t fight Bad Brother Odion one-on-one. He’s looking for somebody even more gutless to make him look good.”

“Well, he has you there,” Mak said, giant lip curling.

Rusher didn’t push it. He already knew why most of them were there. Several of the indies had lately come from the service of the other side. The brigadier had been smarter than they were in that regard. It was Odion-avoidance that had sent Rusher into business for himself, years earlier.

Beld Yulan had been everything a mentor should be. A fine artilleryman, he’d also cultivated an interest in military history among his recruits. Young Rusher had learned not just about the engagements, but the reasons why they were fought—and how, in many cases, the decisions of a single person could have led to different outcomes. Rusher would’ve stayed aboard
Perspicacity
forever, had Yulan not lost his children to the plague on Fostin IX. The general’s mourning became depression, culminating with a “religious conversion”: he’d become an Odionite, a member of the dread Lord’s death-seeking cult.

Rusher had begun to suspect when the general started throwing caution to the wind, committing squads to ever-more-dangerous assignments. The force’s “lurch ratio,” or percentage of warriors left stranded, had gone skyward, with hundreds of troops abandoned to their fates. Finally, when Yulan announced that the brigade would be taking a job from Lord Odion, Rusher had seen enough. At least Daiman believed in a tomorrow—if only so he could have a chance to take credit for its ar
rival. If even steely operators like Kr’saang were coming to that realization, things must be getting bad indeed on the other side.

“Hold here,” the droid said, pausing in a chandelier-filled room. Gilded double doors sat beneath a marbled arch in the eastern wall. “His Lordship is in conference with his other creations, but your time will come.”

Sad Toong eyes rolled toward Rusher. “G-g-good to know,” Mak said.

“Yeah, I feel blessed.”

The mercs had stopped short of the grand entryway, jabbering and drooling at the riches of the anteroom. Statues, paintings, chandeliers: surely more wealth than they had ever seen, Kerra figured. Still, they’d brought her to the right place. She’d been cautious not to dip into the Force for anything, but she couldn’t miss the evil taint that lay ahead. It could only be Daiman and his closest aides.

But there was no easy frontal assault, not with the crowd of warriors and sentries lingering there. Slipping past the rearmost member of the party—a fortyish red-bearded human in a trench coat, not entirely oafish looking—Kerra made for a narrow spiral staircase at the left side of the room.

Upstairs, the steps finished in a candlelit hallway, leading toward a bright opening. Hearing voices, Kerra edged toward it, cautiously.

There he was, at the end of a long, crystalline catwalk: Little Daiman himself, announcer for the morning rush hour. It looked like his rumpus room on Chelloa, only grander—and suspended above the ground by pathways that formed a seven-pointed star. It was, by far, the strangest room she’d seen in the building.

And
what
was he wearing?

Kerra knelt in the doorway and breathed lightly. Her
respiration didn’t make the slightest difference inside the Mark VI, but it didn’t matter. She’d found the center of the madness, right where she left it, with Daiman. And for a change, Daiman’s taste in architecture would serve her. If she could walk to the central platform, Kerra thought, her homemade bomb might have more than its explosive impact. It might well churn the crystal catwalk and platform into a million splinters. The shape of the room and ceiling might well focus the impact, giving her a running chance to escape.

That was worth the risk.

Reflexively, she looked to see who else was present. The aides she expected, of course, all slavering below. And just to the right of her catwalk something else floated: the Bothan spy, strapped to a rotating wheel. She’d expected to find him here, although she was surprised to see that he still seemed to be in one piece.

For a while, anyway.
Tough week to be you
.

There was something else, just on the far side of Daiman’s perch, that had his full attention. With a start, she recognized the hologram: another Sith Lord! The Quermian, Lord Bactra, towered in the life-sized image, his shriveled white head craning on his long, narrow neck. She’d studied him, back in the Republic. What did Daiman have going on with someone like Bactra?

Whatever it was, it wouldn’t be going on for long. Steeling herself, Kerra stood and took a step onto the catwalk.

“It is refreshing to see the Lord Daiman again,” the flickering Quermian said, “especially after the troubles you’ve described.” The image of Lord Bactra brought his azure fingers the meter and a half up to his lofty chin and smiled. The skinny titan kept his second pair of arms within the folds of his rich cloak.

For one of the sector’s smarter Sith Lords, Narsk
thought, Bactra was doing a good job of playing dumb. So far, in this conversation, he’d professed to know nothing about the destruction of the testing center on Darkknell. That surely wasn’t so. The mess at the Black Fang could have been seen from orbit, Narsk guessed, and even Sith who weren’t open enemies kept an eye on one another’s affairs. “I assume the figure I see there is the perpetrator?”

“The saboteur is here.” Daiman directed the hovering holocam to take a shot of Narsk in his spinning prison. “Do you recognize him?”