The hologram vanished, leaving us alone with the situation we had landed in.
Honestly, I was getting rather tired of this entire mess. First the Jedi on our tail, then the CIS, even though we were supposedly on the same side…
Ah, if we were planetside right now, I could have come up with something. Throw on a disguise, quietly "adjust" Grievous a little. If I blasted him with Force lightning at full strength, I could guarantee he would drop dead on the spot. But space…
There was not much to do out here. We would have to run again.
Unfortunately, I was not Starkiller. I could not drag a Star Destroyer down onto a planet. So all that remained was Plan B, which also stood for "bolt."
The radar blinked and updated the data on our opponents, displaying an unpleasant thirty red marks. Judging by the formation, that was only the vanguard, gradually spreading out to blockade the planet and completely seal every standard departure vector.
Oops. Looks like our ultra-secret Plan B had been uncovered. We needed to urgently find the spy responsible.
Heh…
Right. Nerves.
In any case, trying to take off now — or worse, activate the hyperdrive in the middle-upper layers of the atmosphere — would be suicide. Those Confederate cruisers had probably turned their tactical gravimeters up to maximum sensitivity. Activating our main drives would instantly reveal our location. Thanks to this ship's stealth technology, their scanners had not found us yet, but one should never forget that this marvel of high technology could still be spotted visually.
"So a quick exit is off the table…" Elara sighed sadly, apparently throttling the engines down to minimum so we would be harder to detect.
I stared grimly at the scanner display, where a whole scattering of smaller dots had appeared from the ships that had arrived first. Apparently, they had launched an entire swarm of Vulture-class droid fighters to deal with us. The things immediately began cutting methodical circles somewhere above, apparently waiting for the order to descend.
"The ion-masking coating on this ship is excellent at absorbing active radar beams," Elara said, noticing my puzzled expression and apparently deciding to play Captain Obvious. "But it is completely useless against mass sensors, which will instantly detect the artificial movement of a single object against the natural drift of the local debris."
I carefully leaned forward in my seat, trying not to bother my recently healed ribs any more than necessary, and studied the chaotic mess of wreckage from old ships that surrounded this junk world in a solid ring.
My limited technical knowledge suggested only one possible solution.
A risky one.
And one that required the pilot — fortunately, not me — to manage the controls with almost surgical precision.
"Look there. A little left and above." I pointed Elara toward a large gray marker slowly slipping downward from a circular orbit, dragging a trail of smaller metal debris behind it. "According to the sensor readings, that is the half-destroyed stern section of some old cruiser, probably left here after some ancient border skirmish. And judging by its vector, it is about to start falling into the denser layers of the atmosphere. You follow?"
Judging by the crooked grin, Icebreaker understood my idea instantly. She did not even bother asking unnecessary questions. Instead, she smoothly guided the controls, carefully and slowly approaching the falling chunk of warship debris while using the clouds to hide us from the Vultures flying somewhere above.
We managed to tuck ourselves almost flush against the wreck's shadowed side, matching our speed to its falling trajectory and shutting down every active onboard system except the most essential life-support nodes.
To the scanners, the ship practically merged with that multi-ton pile of scrap. The infiltrator's specialized coating reliably suppressed the residual heat emissions from the maneuvering nozzles, and our own gravitational trace dissolved completely into the colossal mass of the fragment that had once belonged to a fearsome warship.
It was already on the edge of orbital decay, but it was still drifting around the planet.
And we drifted with it, lying low and waiting for either an opening or a better idea.
As sheets of plating from our "steel shield" scraped against each other outside with an ugly metallic screech, tense silence settled inside the infiltrator's cockpit. It was broken only by the quiet rhythmic hum of the ventilation systems and Varja's muffled, slightly spiteful but also frightened breathing. She was still sitting on the floor in the far corner of the hold.
Apparently, the young witch had been driven into a genuine stupor by the sheer amount of technology she did not understand. The Dark Side was also likely telling her just how close to death we all were, so her former arrogance had evaporated completely, replaced by ordinary fear for her life.
Kem, on the other hand, sat on a cargo container by the bulkhead with the most unbothered expression imaginable, methodically wiping the broad blade of his sword with a greasy rag. Though from the look of him, he was ready to start complaining about space travel again at any moment.
And today, I would not even argue with him.
Elara, meanwhile, was not idle. For over ten minutes now, she had been glued to the modified communications terminal, using our still-valid access codes to quietly connect to the local command network of the Confederate blockade fleet. Thanks to her Icebreaker talents and the manual retuning of several of the infiltrator's frequency filters — as she proudly informed us — we managed to bypass the CIS's basic security protocols and pipe the encrypted audio feed of the enemy tactical group into our internal headsets in real time.
Suddenly, the command terminal gave a quiet warning beep, signaling the passage of a closed transmission with the highest encryption priority. It had arrived on Grievous's flagship from somewhere in deep space, bypassing standard Separatist command channels.
"Looks like the general just received a direct directive from the center," Elara said tensely, quickly routing the intercepted audio track to the central panel. "And the sender code is protected with the kind of complex cryptography usually used only at the very top on Coruscant. They are reorganizing their search patterns and sending three reconnaissance flights of droids straight toward our current debris-fall sector."
Hearing the familiar sharp metallic rasp of Grievous over the speakers as he confirmed the new order, I cursed inwardly.
Obviously, this sudden interest in an ordinary hunk of space junk could not be a coincidence. Dooku was currently distracted by the false trail I had thoughtfully left him, and he was unlikely to start all this fuss right now. Which meant he had almost no reason to throw this much force into searching for our miserable infiltrator on a godforsaken junk planet.
That left only one viable option. One that sent an unpleasant chill down my spine.
Someone far more dangerous had taken an interest in our movements.
Someone with truly limitless resources.
It was obvious that Darth Sidious — or, at the very least, the Prophets under his command — had managed to detect the powerful disturbance in the Force that we had so carelessly raised during our stay on the planet's surface. My recent hurried ritual to heal my ribs, fueled by raw Dark Side energy, combined with the wild, chaotic waves of madness still radiating from the bound Darth Maul in the cargo hold, may very well have caught his attention.
Or maybe it was something else. Who knew what methods he had? Maybe he could peer into the future and saw something unpleasant there.
Not the point.
The important thing was that I had a rough idea of what was happening, and for now, that would have to be enough. Grievous himself was not Force-sensitive, obviously, but someone could absolutely be guiding him. Sidious, his Prophets, maybe even Ventress — though that last option sounded doubtful.
"All stations, this is General Grievous," the fleet commander's barking vocoder-distorted voice came through our headsets, accompanied by his characteristic dry cough. "High Command demands maximum vigilance during the sweep. Dispatch a reconnaissance group to Sector Seven-B immediately."
"Sir, there is nothing there but drifting ship debris," one of the droids reported in a nasal tone.
Grievous snarled in response.
"Begin dense visual-scan protocols on every large fragment. I want actual visual confirmation that nothing is there!"
I carefully leaned toward the side viewport of the cockpit. Through the thick veil of yellowish acid rain, I could clearly make out three elongated silhouettes emerging from the clouds one after another.
Hyena-class droid bombers.
They moved in an even formation, methodically probing the warped hull of the ship fragment beneath whose "wing" we had been hiding so reliably all this time with powerful clinical searchlights and optical sensors.
One precise sweep of a scanning beam at the right angle could instantly reveal the clean, too-perfect aerodynamic outline of the Sith infiltrator. Then everything would become very complicated.
Either we surrendered to Grievous's mercy, which would quite reasonably make Sidious even more suspicious of me than he might already be — and I absolutely did not need that. Not at this stage of the plan.
Or we would simply be torn apart by a pack of droid fighters.
Which was even worse.
The searchlight beams passed only a few meters from our port side, forcing Elara to clutch the yoke in a death grip and shut down even the auxiliary lighting on the instrument panel. We froze, barely breathing, while the heavy hull above us absorbed the bulk of the scanning radiation.
And then, at the worst possible moment, a dull vibrating impact came from the cargo hold.
Either because of the dense electromagnetic background generated by the sensors of the Confederate bombers passing nearby, or because of the simple instability of his own mind, Darth Maul began waking up rapidly. The Dathomiri witch's charms, which had held him in an artificial sleep until now, seemed to have finally burned out. From the hold came the loud screech of metal cables being torn apart.
In the same second, I felt my consciousness practically drown beneath a powerful, chaotic wave of pure, uncontrolled rage. The former Sith had begun unconsciously broadcasting it into the space around him.
For Darth Sidious, watching this sector of the galaxy through his channels in the Force, that sudden outburst of energy would have worked like a colossal signal beacon, instantly revealing our exact coordinates.
General Grievous's muffled cough over Elara's comms immediately became a furious, triumphant roar as the automatic systems of his flagship registered a clear anomaly in our exact grid.
"Attention, all first-line vessels. Target located in Sector Seven-B," the Separatist command channel exploded with urgent orders, and the markers of the heavy cruisers on the tactical display instantly shifted formation. "Rotate main batteries to the indicated coordinates and open suppressive fire for destruction. Do not allow the unidentified object to reach safe orbit."
Realizing we had only seconds before the Confederate orbital batteries turned this chunk of scrap — and our infiltrator along with it — into atomic dust, I hurriedly unfastened my safety harness and, ignoring the dull ache in my ribs, rushed into the cargo hold.
The scene before me looked truly awful.
Maul had already pinned Kem beneath him, and his massive mechanical legs were smashing the hold plating with terrifying force, ripping out bundles of high-voltage wiring by the roots. Varja had curled up in terror beneath a technical overhang, still not recovered from her recent use of the artifact, while the Dashade desperately tried to block another steel limb, risking having his arms crushed beneath that hydraulic press.
"Knock him out as fast as possible! For the Matriarch's spell to work, he has to stay unconscious for at least a few more hours!" the "witch" said, circling the struggling fighters in the center of the hold and clearly searching for a chance to hit Maul over the head.
Stepping forward, I focused the Force hard around the convulsing Zabrak's neck, completely cutting off the flow of oxygen to his lungs while simultaneously compressing the carotid arteries to trigger immediate ischemic unconsciousness. The former Sith tried to shift his feverish yellow gaze toward me. One of his mechanical legs even managed to tear through the metal floor a few centimeters from my boots. But the critical lack of air quickly did its work.
A moment later, his heavy body went limp. The mechanical actuators vented pressure with a hiss, and the colossal background of his rage in the Force vanished instantly, leaving only a faint numbness in my fingers.
"Brut, get back to the cockpit. They are already bringing the turbolasers to bear. A little more and they will annihilate us. Come on, captain, give the order!" Elara's tense voice came through the internal speaker. She was already warming up the infiltrator's maneuvering microthrusters. "Stealth will not save us anymore. They are firing by area, based on the last detected flare. We urgently need a serious decoy for their tactical gravimeters."
I rushed back into the cockpit, throwing a quick glance at the viewscreen. Directly ahead of our movement drifted a massive five-ton fragment of the same ship's main reactor — the one whose wreckage we had been using as cover.
When I nodded toward it for Icebreaker, she frowned slightly. Apparently, she thought I was about to surrender after all, or at least open a channel to Grievous, rather than risk my own hide. Still, she followed my instructions.
"All right. Since we have decided to run… I suggest the following plan. I will release the lock on the turrets and send a short high-frequency pulse directly into the central core of that drifting scrap to ionize its surface as much as possible," Icebreaker said quickly, confidently flipping toggles on the right-hand panel. "Your job is to use telekinesis to shove that reactor chunk sharply in the opposite direction from our movement vector and make it look like a ship making a break for it."
Gritting my teeth against the rising strain, I reached into the Force and mentally seized the colossal mass of rusted iron beyond the viewport, pouring all my strength into one powerful directed push.
Under the telekinetic impact, the reactor fragment suddenly accelerated, shooting toward open space. In the same instant, the infiltrator's laser cannons, under Elara's control, fired a precise energy burst into its plating. The superheated metal of the decoy instantly flared on our scanner — and, I hoped, on the Separatist scanner as well — as a powerful thermal and gravitational object imitating a smuggler transport trying to break through the blockade.
The automatic targeting systems of the Confederate fleet reacted flawlessly.
Then space around us was torn open by the salvos of hundreds of heavy guns.
The first shots from the main turbolasers shredded the remains of the unknown ship into splinters, creating a colossal expanding sphere of white-hot plasma, gas, and iron vaporized in a single instant. The massive shockwave caught our infiltrator and hurled it from side to side like a chip of wood in a stormy sea, but Elara only tightened her grip on the controls and deliberately drove the ship straight into the heart of that raging plasma hell.
That maneuver was what saved our lives.
The white-hot gases completely blinded the visual and optical sensors of the reconnaissance droids, while our specialized ion coating reliably concealed the ship's real silhouette amid the storm of electromagnetic interference. The infiltrator tore through the smoking veil at insane speed, its outer hull scraping and blackening with soot while emergency sensors screamed about critical damage to the protective lacquer from the aggressive acidic vapors of Lotho Minor.
At last, we burst into a relatively clear sector of space, where Elara's navigation computer immediately displayed the long-awaited green readiness line for the hyperdrive.
Icebreaker sharply pulled the acceleration levers back, and the stars beyond the armored glass stretched into familiar lines before becoming the smooth gray-blue tunnel of hyperspace. Relative silence and calm returned to the long-suffering cockpit.
I sagged weakly against the back of my seat, feeling the adrenaline drain from my body and leave only dreadful weakness behind, and began analyzing what had happened.
We had managed to preserve our secret. To Grievous and the CIS, we remained nothing more than an unnamed Republic spy who had presumably burned in the fire of an orbital barrage.
But now I faced a much more serious problem.
Palpatine was searching for a disturbance in the Force. Or he had seen some future…
In short, something that specifically involved me.
That meant everyone had to stay on high alert. And our ship was badly damaged, in need of a full overhaul. Performing that overhaul at any official Confederate base right now would be the height of madness.
So we urgently needed to find the most hidden, safest refuge possible.
Somewhere the long arms of the future Emperor — hopefully not yet Emperor — could not reach.
XXXXXXXXXX
Interlude
The high stone arches of the Jedi Temple's western gallery gradually sank into the evening chill as Master Yoda walked slowly along, the tip of his cane tapping hollowly against the smooth granite floor, polished to a mirror shine. At this late hour, there were almost no living souls here, apart from the occasional Temple Guard, whose masked, motionless figures were barely visible in the deep shadows of the massive support columns.
During his recent meditation, the old Jedi had felt a brief but deeply painful jolt somewhere on the very edge of the civilized sectors of the Outer Rim, forcing him to break his contemplation. It did not feel like the unfortunately familiar death of another military garrison, nor like the destruction of a peaceful colony. Rather, it was as if an old wound had opened in space for a single instant, leaking pure fury, only to be roughly and forcibly cauterized at once, made to fall completely "silent."
The Grand Master stopped beside a panoramic window, gazing at the orderly multi-level streams of traffic flowing through the capital, and sighed heavily as the familiar weight of exhaustion settled onto his frail shoulders.
From a deep pocket of his loose robe, he slowly drew an encrypted datapad. On its screen glowed the latest reports from Keiro Vind, one of the most experienced operatives among the Jedi Shadows. Some time ago, the Council had sent him to Mandalore with one specific mission: eliminate a dangerous Sith. Reality, however, had followed a very different and entirely unforeseen path.
Instead of a dry report confirming the successful removal of the target, as had happened in the past, Keiro had sent a plan so risky it bordered on madness: a covert infiltration into the upper ranks of the so-called Revolutionary Galactic Alliance, whose agent the Sith he had been pursuing had turned out to be.
Vind himself claimed in his reports that the idea had come to him spontaneously while assessing the changing situation. But Yoda, wise with centuries of experience, saw much more from his side. This entire "infiltration" plan was not in Keiro's usual style, with all due respect to him. It was too precise, too…
Because of this, the Jedi Council would now have a constant, if deeply concealed, source of information on the true intentions of the R.G.A.'s leaders. Their internal structure differed fundamentally from the familiar slogans of the Confederacy, and so far, they had shown no aggression toward the Jedi. Though, in theory, considering one of their agents was a Sith, the opposite should have been expected.
In Keiro's report, he described a strange collectivist order in which the entire economy was subject to strict control by a single center, while financial fraud was punished with military ruthlessness. And it sounded very… familiar. As if Yoda had heard something like it not long ago.
Thinking about it, the old Jedi involuntarily recalled a sunny day in a small Coruscant park, and his conversation with an ancient Force-sensitive who had called himself Taales. That strange being, who seemed to have come from the depths of the ages, had stated plainly that if the current corrupt "Senate snake pit" was not reorganized in the harshest possible way, the coming changes would simply destroy the Jedi Order, leaving not even a memory behind.
Back then, among the artificial holographic trees, Yoda had sensed neither deception nor greed in the stranger's gaze. The unknown man truly believed in his frightening "prophecies" of the Republic's inevitable collapse, prophecies backed by cold, hard facts.
That was precisely why the Grand Master had once made a highly controversial decision and sent Keiro to meet this being — one who had attempted to preserve his anonymity, yet remained entirely recognizable. If Yoda's intentions had been different, he could have insisted that an entire punitive detachment be sent to Mandalore for a purge. Instead, he had agreed to send only one.
And later events had confirmed his suspicions.
He had not told anyone his plan then, and it was still too early to do so now. But the information he could obtain — information that, thanks to the Force, he knew to be true — was worth the risk. Even so, that did not mean he would not verify everything he could by every available method.
That, lately, was precisely what he had been doing.
Yoda switched off the datapad's flickering screen, once again plunging the gallery into its familiar evening half-darkness, and tiredly closed his eyes, weighing every possible risk of his temporary noninterference.