فصل 41

Chapter Forty-One

No-Space. The Gaze Electric.

Lourna Dee looked at the Jedi’s lightsaber. It was pretty, sort of, but it made her nervous to even hold the blasted thing. It was magic, they said.

I’m holding a magic sword, she thought. What the hell is going on?

“Give it to me,” Marchion Ro said, holding out his hand.

She handed it over, happy to be rid of it. Marchion gave it his own look, then began to tap it against his mask, the eye right in the center.

Tap.

Tap.

“You sure you want to do that?” Lourna said. “I mean, if it turns on…”

“It won’t.”

Tap.

They were in a cargo hold on the Gaze Electric, where Lourna had brought the last Blythe as well as their captured Jedi. She hadn’t caught either of their names. They were both still passed out from the gas, which made sense. She hadn’t wanted to take any chances with Jedi magic, and had dosed them again on the journey back from Elphrona.

“They work like this,” Marchion said, holding out the hilt.

He twitched his finger and the blade hissed into life, throwing the hold into golden relief.

He swung it a few times, like an experiment, seeing how it felt, listening to the humming, buzzing sound it made.

“I’m going to keep this,” he said.

Lourna Dee took an involuntary step backward, hating herself a little for it. But Marchion Ro was no Jedi. She wasn’t sure what he was these days, actually. He’d always had an edge, but he knew his place.

He was the Eye, and nothing more.

Now…all that was gone. He seemed…confident, in some new and deeply unsettling way. Like he had changed, grown, become something greater than he previously was.

Or, as she was beginning to suspect, this was always what he’d been, and he’d just decided to hide it from her and the other Tempest Runners. But they’d all known it, hadn’t they? Down on some instinctive level.

Marchion Ro was a predator.

He spun, swinging the lightsaber faster now, big, deadly sweeps.

Lourna stepped back again. She didn’t care if he thought she was a coward. If it slipped out of his hand, that thing could cut her in half with no trouble at all.

“Kassav’s Tempest encountered a trap set by the Republic, Lourna Dee,” Marchion Ro said. “A huge battle fleet. It was tragic. They all died. What do you think about that?”

“About Kassav?”

“Yes.”

Swing. Swing.

Lourna Dee didn’t respond, not for a long time.

“I think your spy in Senator Noor’s office told you the Republic already had the location you sent Kassav to. I think you knew that battle fleet would be waiting, and sent him and his Tempest there to die. So what I think…is that you just killed a third of the Nihil.” Marchion Ro stopped swinging the lightsaber, ending its arc so it was pointing directly at her.

“Look at you, Lourna,” he said, “Smarter than I would have guessed. The question is…what will you do now?”

Lourna Dee’s attention was completely focused on the tip of the lightsaber, hovering and humming just a few centimeters from her face.

“You could leave, I guess,” Marchion said, “but the Republic has all the specs for that beautiful ship of yours. Transponder signal and everything. You’d have to leave it behind, and you named it after yourself. That’d hurt, I bet.”

It took her a moment to understand the meaning of the words he’d just used. She shifted her gaze to look at his masked face, at the swirling storm carved into it. She knew he was smiling behind it. She could hear it in his voice.

“The flight recorder mission,” she said. “You gave the Republic the information on my ship. That’s how they found me. How they were able to attack me.”

“Technically, Jeni Wataro gave it to them—but I gave it to her.” “You wanted me to fail. Why, Marchion?”

“The Republic needed the flight recorder so they’d figure out where to send their fleet to look for us. If they didn’t have it, I wouldn’t have been able to sacrifice Kassav’s Tempest. Now they’ll think they destroyed us. They’ll relax for a while. They’ll stop hunting us.” Lourna Dee didn’t care that Kassav was dead. Not in the slightest.

But the audacity of what Marchion Ro had done, the casual way he had just sent a third of the organization to certain death…who was this man?

“You think that’ll work?” she said, her eyes returning to the lightsaber blade. Maybe she could throw herself backward, get her blaster out in time. Maybe.

“It will, Lourna Dee. I’ve got it all figured out.”

He deactivated the lightsaber, and she said a silent prayer of relief.

Not that he couldn’t just turn it on again. She knew she remained in extreme danger. What she was realizing was that she always had been, from the moment Marchion Ro—and his father, for that matter—had come to the Nihil.

“We are all the Republic,” he said, spitting out the words. “Whether we like it or not, eh?”

He looked at her, the eye in his mask seeming to glow.

“I never told you much about my family, and I doubt I ever will— but I came from something I wanted to escape. This ship was part of it, actually, until it all went bad. My father and I both got out. We worked hard, and we had a plan…for the Paths, for the Nihil…for all sorts of things.”

He gestured at his mask.

“It was always gonna be like this. Since the day I was born. I thought I escaped. I didn’t, though. Not really.”

Lourna Dee shook her head. She just…

“I don’t understand why you sent me out there after the flight recorder, Marchion. If you wanted the Republic to have it, why did I have to go after the damn thing?”

“So your Tempest would see you fail, Lourna Dee, and start thinking about new leadership,” Marchion said. “And so you’d have nowhere else to go. I’m going to need you, I think.”

“For what?”

Marchion Ro tilted his head, and she knew he was smiling again.

“You’ll find out,” he said.

She had to get away, to think. It felt like Marchion had trapped her in a box, and she could barely understand its shape. It was like the Great Hall—the walls were invisible, but it didn’t mean they weren’t there.

“Look, Marchion,” Lourna said. “I’m gonna get back to my people.

They had some questions—like why you sent my whole Tempest to rescue a few Strikes and a Cloud. Kind of like overkill, you know?” She pointed her thumb at the homesteader, the man they’d grabbed, the one remaining family member from the group Dent’s Cloud had grabbed. He was still unconscious, ankles and wrists all lashed up in binder cuffs, propped up against a crate in the hold.

“My feeling is that it has something to do with that guy. Fine, whatever—you don’t need to tell me why he’s so valuable. You can even run the ransom, if you want. I don’t care about the Rule of Three.

You can have it all. Maybe just throw some of the proceeds back down my way so I can spread them around to my people.”

Marchion Ro walked across the hold, the sound of his boots echoing off the durasteel walls.

“This guy?” he said, looking down at Ottoh Blythe.

He pulled the lightsaber from his belt again, igniting it and bringing it down in the same motion, a golden slash right across the man, dead in an instant, cut apart.

A weird smell filled the hold, and Lourna Dee wanted to get away from that particular odor as quickly as she could, but she was frozen.

Marchion’s lost his mind, she thought. His entire mind.

“I don’t care about that guy,” he said. “Never did.”

Marchion Ro shifted the lightsaber, pointing its blade a meter or so to the left, at the other person Lourna Dee had pulled from the ship above Elphrona. The owner of the weapon Marchion had just used to murder someone.

The dark-skinned Twi’lek Jedi.

He was bound even more thoroughly than the Blythe—triplestrength binders, chains, stun-packs, and a gag. She was glad, too, because the man’s eyes were not friendly. She’d heard a lot of stories about Jedi; everyone had. She didn’t know which were true, but she could now verify that at least one was false. Clearly, the Jedi could not shoot death-beams from their eyes, because if they could, then Marchion Ro would be stone-dead.

She couldn’t believe Marchion had taken the man’s weapon and used it to kill someone right in front of him. It seemed like tempting fate, even with the Jedi all tied up. You never knew what they could do.

“I didn’t give your crew Paths to run that job on Elphrona to bring me a family of miners, Lourna Dee,” Marchion Ro said. “I did it because that planet has a Jedi outpost. I figured there was at least a chance your crew might be able to bring me a Jedi. Why not try, right?

Lo and behold, now I have one. Which is good, because a Jedi…” He deactivated the lightsaber, and very ostentatiously hung it on his belt.

“…is just what I need.”