فصل 40

Chapter Forty

Deep Space. The Kur Nebula.

“How are they doing this?” Admiral Kronara shouted, watching the green lights signifying his fighters blink out across the tactical display—blue lights, too, and those were Jedi.

The Nihil ships, all but the capital ship, were doing something unfathomable. They were disappearing and reappearing all across the battlespace, flickering in and out of existence. The Republic pilots couldn’t keep up, and the Nihil were making the most of it, knocking his Longbeams and Skywings down one by one.

It didn’t seem entirely controlled, however—the Nihil ships could and did appear directly in the path of Republic and Jedi ships…and even their own. The result was utter mayhem. Explosive, murderous mayhem.

“Cloaking fields?” he called out.

“Doesn’t seem to be, Admiral,” one of his bridge officers responded.

“Scans suggest they’re jumping in and out of hyperspace. Tiny little leaps, sometimes as short as a kilometer.”

“That’s not possible,” Kronara said.

The officer did not respond, wisely enough. Obviously it was not impossible—the blasted ships were doing it there, right in front of his eyes.

Another Longbeam exploded—that was three good people lost, minimum. Some ships in that class held as many as twenty-four.

This was…how could you fight something like this? It was like battling chaos itself. Like trying to shoot down…a storm.

On the Ataraxia, Avar Kriss hovered in the air, listening to the song of the Force. She was attempting to focus only on the notes of the Nihil ships as they dipped in and out of hyperspace, using their bizarre tactic to deadly effect. The Nihil were just one thread in the great melody of the battle, however, and challenging to isolate. Choppy, staccato, disappearing and reappearing. Difficult to follow.

She frowned.

It did not help that her mind rang with the absence of the Jedi they had just lost. The great Jora Malli, but so many others. An accident, impossible to foresee, but that did not lessen the tragedy.

There.

There.

She had it. The Force had shown her the song of the Nihil, how they were flying and fighting. She could hear it clearly—and that meant she knew not just what was happening, but also, to some small degree, what would.

Avar reached out to the Jedi fighting in their Vectors through the net she created, giving them guidance, helping them hear what she heard, so they could anticipate where the Nihil ships would appear— and end this fight once and for all.

Elzar Mann flew his Vector, diving and weaving through the battle, moving from target to target, taking shots as they presented themselves. The Drift had disintegrated after the collision with the Nihil vessel took out more than ten of their ships, and now every Jedi found their own path through the fight.

Avar was there, of course, in the back of his mind, holding all the Jedi together, helping and guiding as she always did. He did not quite understand what she was doing—the information she was passing along was diffuse—but he was hitting his targets, every bolt finding a Nihil ship, often just as it fell from hyperspace.

It almost didn’t matter what Avar was doing. He just liked having her in his head.

Less appealing was the feel of the Nihil. They seemed to be creatures composed entirely of rage and fear. Strange beasts crawling along the very bottom of the Force sea in which all things swam.

Elzar Mann dived deep, hunting them one by one. It was amazing.

They were so easy to find. Their anger made them vulnerable. The thing they thought made them strong, dangerous…it made them weak.

He fired again, and another Nihil ship vanished. He flew through the debris cloud, already seeking his next target.

“Are we…winning?” Dellex said from her monitoring station, trying to track the incomprehensible activity of the battle raging in space around the New Elite.

Kassav had no idea how to answer her question. Marchion Ro’s Battle Paths, whatever they were, seemed to have taken control of his Tempest’s ships through their Path engines, whipping them in and out of hyperspace, a new leap every few seconds. It was making them almost impossible for the Republic ships to hit, but it was unclear whether it was giving them any real advantage, either. The few communications they’d received from Strikes and Clouds out in the battle suggested confusion, even terror.

“Another message from the Eye,” Wet Bub called out. “Your private channel, Kassav.”

Marchion Ro, Kassav thought. Marchion blasted Ro.

He activated his comm and didn’t wait for Marchion to speak.

“What is this?” he said.

“Victory,” Marchion Ro said. “A long time coming. The first of many.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“You killed my father, didn’t you?”

Kassav hesitated. Not long, but probably long enough.

“What are you talking about, Marchion? We’re dying out here!” “I don’t know for sure it was you,” said the Eye of the Nihil, “but I’m choosing to believe it was. And if it wasn’t, well, Lourna Dee and Pan Eyta…their time will come. Goodbye, Kassav, and thank you. You and your Tempest are about to save the Nihil. We thank you for your sacrifice.”

The connection ended, and Kassav looked out the viewport at the battle. He saw what was happening, and so did everyone else on the bridge.

“What are they…doing?” Gravhan said.

The ships of Kassav’s Tempest had changed tactics again. No longer just leaping from place to place through tiny hyperspace jumps, now they were actively targeting the Republic ships—leaping into them, colliding directly in the case of the smaller vessels and jumping inside the shield barriers of the larger cruisers and impacting against their hulls with massive blooms of fire and debris.

“Disconnect the Path engine!” Kassav shouted. “Right now!”

The Third Horizon shuddered as another Nihil craft exploded against its hull.

“Damage report!” Admiral Kronara called out.

This latest attacker had used the same trick a few others had managed—skipping out of lightspeed inside the Third Horizon’s shields.

“Breach on decks three and four, but it was a non-essential area, Admiral—we’ve got emergency crews on the way, but it won’t affect any significant systems.”

He’d never seen anything like this. The Nihil weren’t fanatics, as far as he knew. They were just marauders. What would compel these people to kill themselves like this? They had to know the Republic would take them prisoner if at all possible. None of these people had to die.

“Send another transmission to the flagship,” he ordered. “Reiterate that we will accept their surrender, and they will all be treated humanely. There’s no need for this.”

Whatever he had imagined this engagement would be, it was not this. This was…slaughter.

The song had become sad, and Avar Kriss no longer wanted to listen to it. From what she could sense, the Nihil had become like small, wild creatures trapped in a cage, desperate to escape, doing anything they could, even if it hurt them.

Even if it killed them.

Such a terrible waste.

They’ve gone mad, Kronara thought.

He truly believed himself to be a man of peace, despite his profession. The cliché of a military man, delusional in almost every case. But not in his. Kronara knew there was a time for war, but it was to be as brief as possible, and no more destructive than necessary.

These Nihil, though…they were fighting when they did not have to.

Dying when they did not have to. Suicide attacks—it was hard to imagine what would drive thinking beings to such tactics. There were not many left now, compared to their original numbers. He had recalled most of his fighters to the capital ships. It was mostly just the Jedi out there on the Republic side. The Vectors, and their pilots, had the maneuverability and reflexes to stay ahead of the Nihil’s hyperspace microjumps.

The area around the nebula was littered with slowly expanding debris clouds. A graveyard. The flagship was the only significant enemy vessel that remained, and so far it did not seem inclined to follow the smaller ships in a doomed ramming attack.

Mad beasts. They needed to be put down.

Kronara hated the thought. But he did not think he was wrong.

And as if on cue, a transmission came through to the bridge of the Third Horizon. A cold voice, but not emotionless. No, there was rage behind that tone, but controlled, focused like a diamond drill.

The commander of the Eriaduan phalanx. Governor Mural Veen.

“Admiral Kronara,” the woman said. “We acknowledge that the

Republic takes first position in this engagement, but we would request the courtesy of being allowed to take the Nihil flagship, considering the injustice these creatures visited upon our system.”

“Fine, Governor,” he agreed. “Be my guest.”

He didn’t even have to think about it. If the Eriaduan contingent wanted to attempt a boarding assault against the sort of enemy the Nihil had proven to be, more power to them. He suspected they would enjoy it, would find it a way to balance the scales.

And once they had the ship subdued, they could, perhaps, get some answers. There had to be a person in a position of power on the Nihil flagship. There was so much the Republic didn’t know about this organization and desperately needed to.

The Eriaduan vessels did not hesitate. As soon as authorization was given, they began to dart in, stabbing inward toward the Nihil flagship like the spear tips they resembled.

Kronara had seen a reek hunt once, on Ylesia. It had been like this.

It wasn’t one big wound that killed the massive beast, but many small attacks, bleeding it out, until in the end, the huge creature had just lain down on the ground and died.

Every attack by the Eriaduans disabled one of the Nihil vessel’s systems. Propulsion, weapons bays, shields…one by one, they fell. The ship was crippled, now just a hulk floating in the void.

Kronara watched as the largest of the Eriaduan ships approached the dead Nihil vessel, in preparation for docking and boarding.

He did not envy any Nihil left alive on that ship. Not even a little bit.

Kassav sat in his command chair on the bridge of his once-beautiful ship. The music had stopped—just static coming from the speaker systems now. The deck was full of smoke from fried systems, but his mask filtered it out and left him able to see.

For instance, he could see the battle display screen, which showed him that his strong, powerful fleet was all but gone. A few little ships here or there, still valiantly fighting to the last…but that was all. What was left was no Tempest, and certainly not a Blaze. Barely a Strike, really.

Marchion Ro and his father had given the Nihil the Paths. Every last ship was equipped with a Path engine, directly connected to the hyperdrive and control systems. That machine let them do incredible things—ride along hidden roads behind the fabric of space, perform feats no other ships could match.

The Paths made the Nihil strong. And, as Kassav had realized too late, far too late, the Path engines made them weak. Marchion had simply…taken control. Put the ships where he wanted them. He didn’t know why—revenge, certainly, and some sort of power play, but there had to be more than that. The complexities were beyond him just then.

Honestly, it didn’t matter anymore.

He heard the sounds of combat behind him and realized that soon enough, the last of the thousand or so fools who had decided to follow his leadership would be dead. His Storms, Gravhan, Dellex, and Wet Bub…all gone.

Kassav decided to tell the Eriaduans everything he knew. He could make a deal. He was good at that. There was so much he could tell them—about Marchion Ro and the other Nihil. Things they’d want to know.

“You are in command of this ship?”

Kassav spun his command chair, to see the Eriaduans. They wore battle armor and stood ramrod-straight, and made Kassav wish very much that he had chosen a different system from which to extort fifty million credits.

At the front was a gray-haired, blade-thin woman, and Kassav now realized he had no chance of surviving this. Not because of her imposing physical presence, or the blaster in her hand, or the blood spattering her armor to which she paid absolutely no mind.

No, his time was up because Kassav thought he recognized the

woman’s voice, and if he was right, there was no deal to be made here.

No way. But he had to try.

“I can help you,” he said. “We should talk. Seriously. Let’s make a deal.”

“I know what your deals are worth, Kassav Milliko,” replied Mural Veen, planetary governor of Eriadu, the very woman to whom he had made promises he had not fulfilled, and stolen from, and—

She shot him.

Admiral Kronara stood in silence on the bridge of the Third Horizon.

None of the other crewmembers said a word, either.

They all just watched as the final Nihil ship, a small attack vessel of some kind, like a patched-together little freighter with no hope of doing any damage whatsoever to an Emissary-class Republic Cruiser, flew into the path of the Third Horizon’s laser batteries and exploded.

The green light of the Kur Nebula illuminated a scene of utter destruction. Pieces of starships of all sizes drifted free across the battlespace. Most were Nihil, but the RDC task force had taken horrifying losses, especially when they had expected to be facing no more than a skirmish against an undisciplined bunch of raiders. The remains of two Pacifier-class cruisers and all their crews floated out there, too, along with far too many Longbeams, Skywings, and

Vectors. And of course, their pilots.

If there was any consolation—and it was small solace indeed—it was that Kronara was absolutely certain, without any doubt, that the Nihil was a threat that needed to come to an end. Now…it had.

Whatever the Nihil were doing here, whatever this group had

been…it was over.