فصل 28

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Hyperspace. The New Elite.

“You guys ready to ride the storm?” Kassav shouted.

He held up a bulb of smash, bright blue and soft, with a slim nozzle at one end, designed to make the drug accessible to just about every type of gas exchange anatomy in the galaxy. Whether you had a nose, a trunk, stomata, a proboscis, or just some weird hole in your face, you could use a smashbulb. Which was good, because his team had all those options and more.

The crew of the New Elite lifted their own bulbs, anticipatory grins on every face. Music vibrated every surface; big, booming wreckpunk, where every instrument the bands used was made from the re-forged wreckage of crashed starships.

Kassav took a good, long puff, and boom, his mind lit up.

Everything was sharper, brighter. He could do this. He could. He could do this. He could do it all.

He watched as his crew did the same—a few ran the smash straight into the gas filters of their masks, a neat trick that intensified the effects. Saw the energy ripple through them, that charge, that rush, that sugar candy hit that made everything glow and buzz and hiss. He dropped his empty bulb on the deck and grinned.

“Feels good, don’t it?” he shouted, spitting the words. “Feels like the Nihil, right?”

His people roared. Some were twitching in time to the music. Some were just twitching.

“Okay—you all enjoy—give it a minute, but then take the rounder.

We need to be sharp for this. Let’s ride the storm, not let the storm ride us, yeah?”

By way of example—you needed to provide an example from time to time as a leader—he reached into his tunic and pulled out a small orange-and-yellow pill. He held it up, showing it to his crew, then popped it into his mouth and bit down. Almost immediately, the smash high took on a new, swirling quality, like waves in a stormtossed sea. Huge, powerful, you needed to watch yourself—but these waves…you could surf.

It reminded him of hyperspace, a little. Not the normal kind, but the weird roads of Marchion Ro’s Paths. Kassav turned to look out the bridge’s viewport, watching as the hyperlane rolled on past. Tunnels built from endless ribbons of light, many colors, washing and tossing and weaving into one another. There was some meaning there, but he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out.

He had no idea where the Paths came from. Marchion Ro was cagey about it, never giving too many details, and his father had been the same way. Kassav sometimes wanted to find out the secret at blasterpoint or, even better, at the edge of a blade, but the Ros were not stupid people. Or at least, Asgar hadn’t been. He knew what he had with the Paths, and knew people would want it. And while Marchion Ro wasn’t his father, not even close, he’d inherited all the safeguards Asgar set up. The Gaze Electric, those gnarly guard droids he used…it was hard to get close to Marchion. He’d made it clear that the Paths themselves had their own safeguards, too. If he died, so would they.

That hadn’t happened when Asgar died, but then again, Marchion didn’t have a son to whom he could pass the family business.

But it wasn’t just starships and murder droids protecting Marchion Ro. It was also the structure his father had insisted the Nihil adopt when he’d brought them the Paths so many years ago. Before that, the group was much smaller, barely a gang, really. It kept its operations to a tiny corner of the Rim, close to Thull’s Shroud by Belsavis, pulling off whatever little jobs it could. Asgar Ro had shown up one day and offered them the Paths, in exchange for a third of the take of any operations that used them. But that wasn’t all—he wanted a vote, too.

Any jobs that used the Paths required a full vote of the three Tempest Runners, plus the Eye, and any tie vote went the Eye’s way. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, but it meant that he, Pan Eyta, and Lourna Dee were always against one another in a way, always courting the Eye’s favor to get Paths. In theory, they could all team up to try to go after Marchion, but there was too much bad blood.

Most of the time, Kassav could barely be in the same room with Lourna Dee and Pan Eyta, much less contemplate sharing the throne with them.

Marchion was all alone, and should be completely vulnerable…but somehow, he wasn’t. He was protected, by the system his much smarter father had set up. It was annoying…but it worked.

Hell, Kassav had copied a lot of Asgar’s ideas for his own Tempest.

Kassav had three Storms up at the top of his Tempest’s hierarchy: Gravhan, Dellex, and Wet Bub. They all wanted to be him, but they would never work together to get rid of him, because then none of them would be the Tempest Runner—they’d still just be three Storms sharing power. Yep. It was a good little system.

All three of those Storms were on the bridge of the New Elite, and they’d all blown smash right when he did. He didn’t know if they’d all taken the rounder, or if the Clouds and Strikes in their crews had, either…but that was all right. A little edge wasn’t such a bad thing. The Nihil were all about edge. It wouldn’t be a problem, as long as everyone did what they were told.

And everyone would. That was the other thing that made the Nihil such a great system, even if this particular truth was hidden down deep, making it hard to see unless you were near the top of the organization. On the surface, the Nihil were all about freedom, about breaking away from the galaxy’s systems of control. Forget the Republic, forget the Hutts, forget anything but doing what you wanted when you wanted. That was the sales pitch, how they got people to join up. Ride the storm, baby, ride that storm.

But once you were a Nihil, you still had a boot on your chest, even if you didn’t always feel it because of all of the burn parties and smash and the thrill of taking what you wanted, when you wanted. You still had to do exactly what your bosses above you said, and the bosses above them. If you didn’t, at best you didn’t get your share of the Rule of Three. At worst, you got a vibroblade in your neck, or you got thrown out of the Great Hall the hard way. Everyone had to stay in line, everyone paid their price. Well, everyone but Marchion Ro and the Tempest Runners—him, Lourna Dee, and that flashy brute Pan Eyta, did he even realize how stupid he looked, a Dowutin trying to be fashionable? Anyway.

The Nihil was just another form of control, an engine designed to roll credits up to the people at the top of the organization.

Yeah, good little system.

Kassav surveyed his crew, the upper echelons of his Tempest.

Gravhan, Wet Bub, and there was Dellex right up front, her one organic eye gleaming from the smash—oh yeah, she definitely hadn’t taken that rounder—and their crews arranged behind them.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” Kassav said. “We’re gonna string these jerks along, make them pay us so much money there won’t be more than two credits left in the whole blasted system. We’re gonna take ‘em for everything they’ve got, and they’ll be happy we did.” Everyone liked that—lots of savage grins and appreciative words from the crew.

“We’re about to drop out of lightspeed in this system called Eriadu.

They’re hurting pretty bad from the Republic’s hyperspace blockade— not enough food to go around down there. Word is the people are ready to overthrow the governors. So those guys are already in trouble, and they ain’t gonna want any more. Perfect for us.

“Everything will start to happen fast once we show up—we gotta cut this close because of the way the Emergences are lined up. Storms, you all got your crews briefed? Everyone knows their job?”

“Dunno about these other two jokers, Kassav, but my line knows their business good,” Gravhan said, fingering a tusk. He was a Chevin, mostly just one huge head to look at him, with wrinkled gray skin and wisps of long blond hair on his scalp. He looked slow and ponderous, and maybe he was, but Kassav had once seen him rip a security guard in half with his bare hands. They were robbing a bank in a tiny settlement on some backwater ice planet. Gravhan had just grabbed the guy, and…well, if Kassav’s Tempest had a motto, it would be something like Strength Wins, and Gravhan was the perfect example of that. Just ask that security guard.

“My people are ready, too, boss,” Dellex said. “I’ve been drilling them ever since you laid out the plan.”

“I bet,” Gravhan said, and a few of his Strikes chuckled, people too dumb to know that you didn’t want Dellex on your bad side.

Kassav had known the woman for a long time, even had a little thing with her a while back. He knew she thought she was ugly as sin, and that’s why she kept spending all her money on fancy mechanical upgrades. She was making herself beautiful, one shiny new body part at a time. But all that metal didn’t do her personality any favors. She was getting prettier, sure, but colder, too. Kassav had a feeling those chuckle-happy Strikes in Gravhan’s crew might find themselves with their skulls crushed some night soon.

Oh well. Not his problem. There were always more Strikes.

“Affirmative,” said Wet Bub, giving a thumbs-up from where he sat at the ship’s primary computer console.

Sometimes people figured Wet Bub was called that because he was a Gungan…but that wasn’t the only reason. Used to be, when he’d go on raids, he’d end up covered in blood, head-to-toe. Like, soaked.

Happened enough times that people got to calling him that, and he never killed anyone who said it, so he must have liked it. Hard to tell what Wet Bub did or didn’t like, sometimes.

Bub was also a slicer, though. A damn good one—he’d been breaking into computer systems ever since he was a kid, and now he used that skill to do all sorts of ugly things in his personal time.

Intrusive, cruel things.

Also not Kassav’s problem.

“Let’s do this,” he said.

The New Elite fell out of hyperspace into the Eriadu system. Not much starship traffic on the scopes—not surprising. The planet hadn’t gotten much in the way of fuel shipments recently, not with the blockade on. The lack of traffic also meant the system’s monitoring satellites had probably already spotted them. That was fine—they weren’t here to hide, and if the Eriaduans wanted to send out a few patrol ships to take a poke at them…well, that was where Dellex and Gravhan came in. Their gun crews were tight.

“Wet Bub…go,” Kassav said, pointing at his lieutenant.

Bub set to work, accessing the system’s communications network, pushing on through whatever access codes and security measures were in place, going higher and higher, until he found what he was looking for.

He tapped a few last buttons, then gave another thumbs-up.

“You’re in, bossman,” he said.

A voice came over the bridge’s speaker system, raspy and sibilant and cold. The voice of someone powerful, who wasn’t used to things happening that she hadn’t ordered.

“Who is this? This is a restricted comm network,” said Mural Veen, current planetary governor of Eriadu. “And what the hell is that… music?”

Oops, Kassav thought.

He tapped a control, and the wreckpunk volume dropped to a whisper.

“Hi there, Governor,” Kassav said. “I’m your new best friend.” Silence from the other end of the line. She was waiting to see what he wanted.

“You might have seen a ship drop out of hyperspace out near the edge of the system. That’s me, and all you need to know about us is that I can get through Chancellor Soh’s hyperspace blockade when no other ship can do it. So, that’s the first thing you should keep in mind as this little chat moves along. I can do things no one else can.” “Let me guess,” the governor said. “You sneaked through the blockade, and now you’re going to offer to sell us food at some ridiculous rate? I don’t respond well to extortion.”

“That remains to be seen, ma’am,” Kassav said, putting an emphasis on the last word, getting a little chuckle out of the Nihil on the bridge, all listening like this was the best holoplay they’d ever seen.

“But I’ll tell you one thing,” he went on, “I am offended that you think we’re just ordinary smugglers. We’re much more than that.” “Then who the hell are you?” she said.

“I told you. I’m your new best friend. Your savior, in fact.”

A silence.

“I might not know who you are, but I know where,” Mural said. “My teams just pinpointed your location. I’m ending this call and sending out security cruisers to bring you into custody. I don’t know your game, but you can explain it from inside a cell on Eriadu. If you resist, we’ll blow you into atoms.”

“You sure you want to do that?” Kassav said, teasing it out.

“Absolutely. Goodbye. I don’t have time for this.”

“Actually,” he said, “I agree. Three Emergences are headed for your system. They’ll be here soon. We know where they’ll happen, and when. We can stop them for you, if you pay up.”

“What are you talking about? No one can predict the Emergences.” “And no one can fly in hyperspace in the Outer Rim, either.”

“I’ve heard enough. We’re sending the cruisers. You can tell my interrogators what you know.”

“If we see your ships heading our way, we’ll leave, and you’ll be the reason billions of your people die.”

Kassav grinned. The rounded-off smash high was getting better by the second. He felt like he was flying, pushed along by the crest of the drug’s wave, arms extended, unstoppable. He knew all along this was a good plan. He’d gone over the list of Emergences that Marchion Ro had given the Tempest Runners and seen this opportunity right away.

It was an opportunity so good, in fact, that he had forgotten to mention to Marchion or the other Runners that he was intending to take advantage of it. Oops. What a shame. No Rule of Three was gonna carve up this score, no way.

Kassav realized he hadn’t yet told this stuffy governor woman what he was asking for. He shook his head. He really needed to stay focused.

“Governor, it’s easy. If you give me fifty million credits, no one has to die. I can stop the Emergences, and you’ll save your people’s lives. I can make it real simple for you, too…”

He lifted a finger, and Wet Bub sent over the encrypted banking information that would allow Governor Veen to untraceably deposit the cash directly into a darknet account controlled by Kassav. Not a Nihil account—this was one of Kassav’s own.

“You’re insane,” the governor said.

“You’re skeptical. I get that. Here. Let me help you out.”

Kassav lifted a second finger, and Wet Bub sent over another short string of information.

“You just received the coordinates for the first Emergence. Not too far from my ship, as a matter of fact. We picked this spot for a reason.

Check it out.”

Kassav held up a third finger, and chopped his arm downward toward Gravhan, who nodded and turned to his gun crew at their weapons stations.

“Any moment now…any moment…” Kassav said.

A piece of the doomed Legacy Run dropped out of hyperspace about thirty light-seconds from the New Elite, exactly where Kassav had predicted it would. Thank you, Marchion Ro and the Paths and whatever mastery of hyperspace allowed him to know the routes all the fragments would take—it was about to earn Kassav millions of credits.

He glanced at the targeting holos projected on the vidwall on the bridge, which had already locked onto the fragment. It looked like a compartment, intact. He’d heard that some of these things had people on board, settlers who had been aboard the ship before it disintegrated.

Oh well. Not his problem, either.

“Fire,” Kassav said.

Gravhan’s team was very good. A spread of laserfire and torpedoes shot out from the New Elite’s weapons array, headed straight for the fragment. They all impacted at once, hard, and the compartment vaporized, vanishing from the battle array on the vidwall. Perfect shot.

Of course, they’d known what they were aiming at ahead of time, and had planned this all out…but still, it had to look impressive.

“There,” Kassav said, turning back to look out the front viewport where, somewhere sunward, Governor Mural Veen was probably feeling a bit less sure of herself. “Now you see that I’m on the up-andup.

Two more Emergences coming. Next one’s in ninety seconds. You have the account information. Pay up, or face the consequences.” “You bastard,” Governor Veen said.

“Could be,” Kassav said. “Never knew my mom or my dad, though.

Don’t think it matters. What matters are the choices you make in your life, not where you come from. Like the choice you need to make right now, Governor.”

The seconds ticked by. Kassav glanced over at Wet Bub, who shook his head. No transfer yet. A bit disgusted, Kassav gave him a go-ahead gesture.

Another set of coordinates was sent, with twenty seconds to spare before the Emergence. The New Elite wasn’t close enough to this one to get there in time. This time, the Emergence was going to happen, and nothing was going to stop it. But still…it could serve a purpose.

“You just got the coordinates for the second Emergence,” Kassav said. “You could have stopped what happens next, Governor.

Remember that.”

Another piece of the Legacy Run flashed back into realspace, moving too fast for anyone to react.

Eriadu had one primary export—lommite, a mineral used in creating transparisteel, the alloy that formed the main component for starship viewscreens and portholes. When Chancellor Soh put her blockade in place, the cargo transports heading offsystem with full loads of lommite were stuck with nowhere to go. Those transports had clustered together in an open space not far from the nearest spot where it was safe to enter hyperspace, waiting for the moment the lanes reopened.

The fragment ripped through one of them, causing it to detonate immediately—and the shock waves took out four other vessels before they got their shields up.

“Ouch,” Kassav said. “That was a few hundred crewmembers, easy…not to mention all that lommite. What’ll that cost your system, Governor? Big money, I bet. Now you’re in a worse spot than you were before. And remember, one more Emergence on the way. You’ve got about four minutes. And this time it won’t be hundreds dying. It’ll be billions. Even you, probably. You’ve got the account information.

Don’t wait too long.”

“This is evil,” the governor said. “You realize that, don’t you?” Kassav turned to face his Tempest and rolled his eyes—more laughter.

“You’re laughing?” came the incredulous words over the comm.

“You’re laughing?”

“Yeah, Governor. It’s funny, that’s all. It’s not evil. It’s business.” “You’re sending these Emergences somehow, aren’t you? You’re doing this. It’s the only way it’s possible.”

“Does it matter? Time’s wasting, Governor. Two minutes.”

Kassav was getting a little nervous, truth be told. They needed to move, fast, to get in the path of the third Emergence, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to stop it—and he figured it was important that they did stop it, otherwise, well, this scam might not work so well next time, would it? He wasn’t even sure he’d go back to the Nihil at all after this, not with fifty million credits in his account and an entire Tempest loyal to him, and a list of all the other Emergences he could exploit.

Yep, Marchion Ro was absolutely not his father, just handing out valuable information like that. The man had this weird sense of loyalty to the Nihil. He thought they were something more than they were.

The Nihil were a gang of criminals, and if there was one thing Kassav knew about criminals, it was this: You couldn’t trust them.

He was a perfect example.

Ninety seconds.

“Governor, you’re running out of time.”

“You’re monsters.”

“So are you, if you don’t save your people.”

“Fine,” Governor Veen spat. “The funds are being transferred now.” He looked at Wet Bub, who gave him another thumbs-up. Kassav pointed at Dellex, who fired up the engines for the burn that would put them in the path of the third Emergence just as it appeared.

Gravhan’s gun crew got to work again, preparing the salvo that would destroy the final fragment and earn them their pay.

“You should know,” Governor Veen’s voice came over the speaker, “I’ve been transmitting our conversation to Senator Noor, who will spread it along the entire Outer Rim. We’ve also sent along a scan of your ship, even matched its silhouette in the databases—the New Elite, owned by Kassav Milliko—that’s you, I presume. You got your payday, Mr. Milliko…but I think your troubles are just beginning.”

“Troubles? What troubles? We’re saving lives. We’re the heroes, Governor.”

Kassav spoke for the benefit of the Nihil around him listening to every word, but his stomach felt a little…Maybe he hadn’t thought this through all the way. Oh well. Nothing to be done about it now.

“Go,” he said, pointing at Dellex.

She nodded, and the ship jumped, but the timing was tight. So tight that Gravhan’s crew would have to fire the very second the burn ended. That was okay, though. They had time.

But they didn’t. The third Emergence occurred just as expected, and yes, the Legacy Run fragment was headed straight for Eriadu’s inhabited moon, estimated population one point two billion.

Gravhan’s team fired their weapons exactly as scheduled, right on time.

Except the target wasn’t there. The New Elite had miscalculated its microburn, and had hugely overshot the spot they were aiming for.

They were nowhere near the Emergence, and the laser blasts and torpedoes flashed out, hitting nothing.

Kassav realized immediately. He shot a glance at Dellex. She knew it, too. She was looking right at him.

“Boss, I must have…I must have screwed up the nav calculation. I don’t know how it happened.”

Kassav had his suspicions. Her one organic eye was still glinting, awash in the smash, and he knew for sure she hadn’t taken that rounder. It didn’t take much to mess up a nav calculation, and Dellex was normally a champion at it because of her mechanical components, but this time…this time…

The Legacy Run fragment smashed into the moon. Everyone on the bridge saw it happen. It was projected up on the vidwall, clear as day.

Big debris cloud mushrooming out from the surface, shock waves starting to roll across the little world, lots of fire and those dark clouds you got with the really huge explosions. Like a storm, kind of.

A voice came over the comm, echoing out across the now utterly silent Nihil. No chuckles from them now. Just silence.

“You will pay for this,” said Governor Mural Veen, her voice maybe the coldest thing Kassav had ever heard. “This I vow: vengeance. The people of Eriadu are hunters. You and all the monsters with you have now become our pr—”

Kassav tapped a console, and the voice went silent.

He looked at his Tempest and knew what they were thinking.

One point two billion people.

Oh well.

Not his problem.

“Get us out of here,” he said.

“Where?” said Dellex, her voice uncharacteristically subdued.

Kassav thought. These people on Eriadu knew his name. Knew his ship. He had their money, but he didn’t like the sound of what that governor was saying. She didn’t seem like the type to let things go.

He’d need protection. Needed to be part of something bigger.

Needed…

“Back,” he said, resigned. “Back to the Nihil.”