فصل 27

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Elphrona.

“We’re going to be all right,” Erika said, looking her children in the eye as she said it—first little Bee, then Ronn.

Ronn was older, just a few years from being ready to go off on his own, but at that moment they both just looked like babies, terrified and desperate for reassurance from their parents.

The Nihil with them in the cart snorted.

“Yeah,” she said, “just fine.”

She wore a mask, like the others, but Erika knew she was

Trandoshan from the look of her arms—long in comparison to the torso, gray pebbled skin gleaming in the sun, ending in hooked white claws. A single line of jagged blue paint bisected her mask from forehead to chin. She held a rifle, and had a holstered blaster and the galaxy only knew what other weapons.

Erika and her family weren’t going to overpower this woman, even if all four of them managed to free themselves from the plasticuffs pinning their arms behind their backs. They were two miners and their kids, and Ottoh was barely conscious; he’d taken a nasty punch to the head when the Nihil finally pulled them out of their house.

No, they weren’t going to be all right.

But you didn’t say that to your kids.

“Just stay brave,” Erika said.

They were racing along a dirt track that curved between two sets of hills. Iron on the left, magnetite on the right, the field generated by the two part of the reason ships couldn’t fly through this part of Elphrona, and the reason they weren’t already in the Nihil’s starship headed offworld. With their speeder gone, the Nihil had decided to add livestock rustling to their list of crimes and stolen five of the Blythes’ herd of steelees to make their getaway.

The kidnappers had harnessed two of the creatures to pull the repulsorcart in which the family was currently riding. Another three kept pace alongside, one Nihil per mount. They were inexpert riders, Erika noted with contempt, slumping in the saddles, holding their weight all wrong. They kept digging in their heels and slapping the creatures’ haunches in an effort to coax out more speed, not realizing that if they would just sit on them properly, the steelees would move twice as fast.

Not that Erika intended to tell them that. The slower their party moved, the better. Because someone was coming after them, and the longer it took the Nihil to reach their ship, the better the odds the people behind them could catch up.

Ronn had noticed it first. He was sitting in the cart facing away from the direction they were moving, which meant he had a view of everything behind them.

Her son had gently nudged her leg with his boot. Three short taps— obviously a signal. She looked at him, mouthed a word: What?

He didn’t move, just cast his eyes to one side, looking past her, then back to her. Then back to looking past her, toward the path they had traveled, then back to her.

Ronn nuzzled up to Bee and said, loudly, “Don’t cry, Bee, this dumb lizard’s not going to hurt you,” which had earned him a kick from their Trandoshan guard that he bore in silence, her brave, brave son. It had also earned Erika a moment to turn her head and look behind them, where she saw what Ronn had seen—sparks, in the distance.

Not close, but not so far, either. She had looked several times since, taking any opportunity for a quick glance, and their pursuers were getting closer, moment by moment.

The sparks were identical to those kicked up by their own mounts every time a steelee’s hoof struck against a metallic rock—wild steelee herds running at night were one of the natural wonders of Elphrona.

They made a loud noise, too—a sharp, quick tchk—which helped to disguise what had to be similar sounds emanating from the riders coming up behind them.

Three, she thought. She couldn’t quite make out any details, but it seemed like three, riding side by side.

No one seemed to have noticed besides the two of them. Their

Trandoshan guard was keeping her eyes on her captives. And of course, the Nihil weren’t looking anywhere but dead ahead. They were hanging on for dear life, trying to stay in their saddles.

She gave Ronn a questioning look, and he responded with as much of a shrug as he could using just his eyes. He didn’t know who was on their trail, either—and Erika knew he hadn’t been able to raise help from Ogden’s Hope.

Maybe the settlement’s security squad had found their spines and sent a team out to help—but they’d be in a speeder, not as mounted riders.

It didn’t make any sense—but it was a little bit of hope, and hope was in short supply at the moment.

She risked another glance back, just to see if they were getting closer, and this time her luck ran out. The guard saw her doing it and looked, too. She saw their pursuers immediately—impossible to miss, now. The sparks were shooting up to either side like the people chasing them were riding along a road of flame.

The Nihil stood in the cart and yelled out to the rest of her crew.

“Trouble! We got people comin’ up behind, fast! Looks like three of —”

And then Ottoh, who as it turned out was not unconscious but merely pretending to be, waiting for a moment like this, holding his own hope in reserve, clicked his tongue sharply against the roof of his mouth three times. It was a loud sound, and all five of the steelees, well trained and well loved by her husband, knew the command and obeyed immediately.

They stopped, their duralloy hooves locking into the ground with the organomagnetic field that allowed them to climb even the steepest of Elphrona’s mountains—here, the maneuver simply removed all velocity cold, in one quick, snapping movement.

Velocity, but not momentum, not inertia. Three of the Nihil were thrown from their saddles, whipping forward at enormous speed.

Their guard, too, who was in the worst possible position when the steelees stopped—standing, unbalanced, in a fast-moving repulsorcart.

She shot up and out, as if fired from her own rifle.

A moment later, a thick, hard sound, between a snap and a thud, the sound of something very hard breaking when it hit something even harder.

Erika didn’t see it happen, because she, along with the rest of her family, was pressed together against the front edge of the repulsorcart, a tangle of limbs and pressure and future bruises. Despite that, she was fairly sure she now knew what it sounded like when a

Trandoshan’s skull split open against hard ironstone.

And good bloody riddance.

“Is everyone all right?” Erika said.

“I’m okay,” Bee said. Tough little kid.

“Hurt my hand, but it’s nothing too bad,” Ronn said.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t warn you,” Ottoh said, pulling himself out of the tangle. “It wouldn’t have worked if it didn’t surprise them. “Now try to do what I do.”

He rolled himself onto his back, then pulled his legs up close to his chest and extended his arms as far as they would go, trying to get his cuffed wrist out and over his feet, so at least he’d be able to use his hands again.

Erika got ready to repeat the maneuver herself. If they could use their hands, maybe they could find a way to get free, or at least to run.

The butt of a rifle slammed down on Ottoh’s head, and he slumped.

His eyes went blank and dazed. He was alive, but Erika didn’t know how much of him was left just then. Her husband wouldn’t be cooking up any more surprises, of that much she was sure.

The Nihil weren’t gone. They had fallen, some had fallen hard, but they were still there, and they still had guns, and now they were very angry. The one who hit her husband lifted his rifle for another crack, and she knew this one would most likely crack his skull for good if the first blow hadn’t.

Erika lunged forward, covering his body with hers, trying to intercept the blow.

“No!” she cried.

The rifle hit her in the side, and she curled up against the pain, which was immediate and immense. But better her than Ottoh.

“Move or you die, too,” the Nihil growled, its voice low and strange.

Someone else outside the cart grabbed the attacker and pulled him back. Erika was struggling to breathe, but she could still hear.

“Don’t kill any of them.”

“Asaria’s dead. She’s dead.”

Asaria, Erika thought, what a lovely name.

“These stupid miners killed half of us already, Dent.”

“Damn right,” she heard Ronn whisper.

“It’s time for some payback.”

“I said no. Every one we kill, that’s twenty-five percent of our take.

I’m not worried about the people we lost—it doubles our share. But we lost a speeder, too, and that means we’re in the red on this. We need every credit we can get. Don’t kill any of them. You’re just a Strike. I’m the Cloud. You do what I say.”

A long moment of silence, and Erika knew that the lives of her husband and maybe the rest of her family were dependent on how much respect this Strike had for his Cloud, whatever that meant.

“Fine,” the first Nihil spat, and she heard him walking away.

Erika exhaled slowly.

“Ottoh,” she said.

No answer. She decided she would just believe he was still alive.

Hope was a choice—and not unwarranted, either. In the distance, she could hear a sound. Hoofbeats. Their pursuers were catching up.

“We need to kill whoever’s coming after us,” the Nihil’s leader said to the rest of her crew—a Cloud, she had called herself. “Egga, Rel, get up in the hills, on either side. Find spots where you have a good view of the canyon. Mack, Buggo, and I will keep going for the ship. We’ll take the family with us, so they’ll have to come this way. Take them out.”

Erika listened as these arrangements were put into play, and with a jerk, the cart began moving again, rapidly picking up speed.

But now there was no guard, and she was able to complete the maneuver her husband had shown her, getting her hands in front of her as opposed to stuck behind her back. First, she felt Ottoh’s pulse— steady and strong. He was unconscious, but maybe that was all. Her husband attended to, Erika turned to her children. She touched Bee’s face and kissed her, and then took Ronn’s hands in hers.

“You’re both being so strong, so brave. We’re so proud of you.” “Is Dada all right?” Bee asked.

“He will be. Don’t worry about your father. Just stay calm, and be ready to do whatever I ask you to do, when the time comes. For now, try to get your hands out in front of you, like I did. You’re a little wriggly worm. You can do it, I know you can. You, too, Ronn.” She watched as both her children contorted themselves as she had requested.

Now what? she thought.

Erika had an unconscious husband and two children to save somehow, and—

She remembered their pursuers. Help, maybe, and on its way.

She reached up to grasp the edge of the cart and pulled herself up, looking back. Surely they had to be close—and they were. The delay from Ottoh’s trick with the steelees had done its job. They couldn’t be more than five hundred meters back.

She could see them now—three figures, riding well, riding fast— these were experienced wranglers, nothing like their captors.

Erika wanted to yell out, to tell them they were riding into a trap, but she didn’t think they could hear her, and didn’t want to do anything that would cause the Nihil to decide a seventy-five percent profit margin would be fine after all.

Then something happened.

Three lines of light blossomed from the riders coming up fast behind them: one gold, one blue, one green, and Erika realized what was happening, who these people were.

“By the light,” she breathed. “They’re Jedi.”