I slowly lowered the hand holding my lightsaber hilt, but my finger remained on the ribbed activation button.
The cylindrical body of the weapon pleasantly cooled my palm, damp with sweat. My ribs, which after the rushed ritual on Lotho Minor were barely holding together on faith alone, reminded me of themselves with a dull, nagging pain at even the slightest turn of my torso.
I studied Maul's face carefully.
The familiar yellow, poisonous Sith glare had vanished completely from his eyes, replaced by deep, utterly black pupils. It looked eerie, but there was no longer any blind madness in that gaze, which was at least somewhat reassuring.
Three meters of open space remained between us.
A laughable distance for a Force-user of his level.
Even unarmed, in his current lousy condition, the Zabrak remained a dangerous opponent…
Except he did not know that himself, because I was doing everything I could not to show weakness, while also pressing lightly on his mind through the Force.
Khem was currently stuck at the opposite end of the infiltrator, where he and Varja were trying to patch the hole in the external technical circuit with a hand welder.
I mentally calculated the timing.
If Maul rushed forward now, I would have to shout into the comlink. The Dashade would need about four seconds to drop the tool, sprint down the narrow corridor to the hold, and knock the blast door open.
In those four seconds, Palpatine's former apprentice could snap my neck three times with his bare hands, especially considering my broken bones.
Cold, dry calculation said my chances were not great. So I had no intention of taking my finger off the button.
And the focusing unit was ready too.
"I am not going to lecture you about the Light Side of the Force or the long road to redemption," I said dryly, narrowing my eyes slightly. "Let us get straight to the point. A temporary alliance against Sidious? Our interests fully align there. I have no need for his future Empire, and from what I understand, you are not especially pleased to realize you were thrown away like garbage. But let us clarify the rules of the game aboard this vessel right now. If you try to play great Sith Lord, start throwing your weight around, or sabotage anything here, I will not fence with you. I will simply cook you with a good burst of lightning. I am sure you know firsthand what that feels like. Our cooperation lasts exactly as long as it benefits both of us."
To my surprise, Maul did not flare up and did not even twitch.
Not a drop of the theatrical malice Sith spewed in the films I knew appeared on his tattooed face. He merely gave a short, quiet laugh and leaned back more comfortably against the dented frame of the broken medical isolator.
"Oh yes. I know very well," the Zabrak answered quietly, and unusually calm, hissing notes slipped into his voice. "My former teacher was excellent at teaching lessons for disobedience. But in a way, I am even grateful to you. Had some Master from the Council been in your place, he would already be giving me stupid lectures about harmony and offering me the mercy of Republic justice… You think in the right categories, Brutus."
He slowly leaned forward, placing his elbows on his knees, while his black pupils focused on me.
"Do you truly expect to defeat the Sith Lord with your wandering… hm… troupe?" Open sarcasm entered his voice. "Look at yourself. You can barely breathe after our little skirmish. Your entire army is one half-trained Dathomiri witch who can only ruin droid wiring, an old gray cannibal, and a frightened girl at the controls of this wreck. Sidious is not merely a strong old man who can throw lightning from his fingers in dramatic fashion. Oh no. He is something more. Trillions of credits turning through Corporate Sector accounts. The entire Senate of the Republic, the full High Command of the clone army, endless factories on Geonosis, and a spy network wrapped around every corner of the galaxy. He holds a colossal resource in his hands. Right now, to him, we are insects on the windshield of an airspeeder. To survive once he turns more serious attention toward us, we need an army. Far greater strength, supply lines, heavy weapons, and hidden bases. Without that, you are simply a dead man with large ambitions. Exactly like I once was…"
I silently bit my lip.
His words fell directly onto my own far-from-bright thoughts.
The Zabrak was completely, one hundred percent right.
The devil was in the details: trusting Maul's word would be the height of idiocy. A Sith remained a Sith, even with his mind cleared of madness. He remained a cruel, calculating egoist who would hand me over to Palpatine or Dooku the second the scales tipped in their favor, or the second they offered a better price for my head.
But right now, his existential thirst for revenge against his former teacher was the only working lever keeping him from attacking.
Elara decided to interrupt our theological conversation.
The internal speaker above the hold's blast door hissed violently, spat out a short burst of static, and then Icebreaker's alarmed voice came through.
"Brutus! Leave that cyborg and drag your ass up here! We have some total nonsense on the tactical screens!"
"Khem, drop the welding. Watch the guest. If he moves, strike to kill," I quickly snapped into the comlink at my collar and turned toward the exit.
I had to move in short, careful steps, holding my right side with my palm. Every sharp movement sent pain through me as if someone had shoved a heated piece of rebar under my skin.
The infiltrator's cockpit smelled strongly of burned copper and overheated plastic.
Elara sat in the pilot's chair, frantically entering commands into the flickering terminal of the tactical holotable, where markers of foreign ships were jumping chaotically.
"What happened?" I asked, lowering myself into the copilot's seat with difficulty and trying not to bend at the waist.
"Look at this sector." Elara jabbed a finger at the central part of the three-dimensional map, which showed the area around the abandoned Banking Clan station. "Grievous's cruiser, the Prevailer. They stopped firing on the Separatist supply transport that tried to escape. But instead of leaving or finishing the cleanup, the ship has just frozen in the middle of the asteroids. And look at the internal logs I pulled from their local network using your access codes. This makes no sense at all."
I leaned closer to the screen, reading through the running lines of encrypted traffic and telemetry.
The situation really did look awful.
The heavy B2 assault droids and standard B1 tin cans aboard Grievous's flagship had suddenly divided into clear tactical groups. But they were not storming the station docks, nor were they taking defensive positions.
Instead, deck by deck, they were systematically blocking off the key nodes of their own ship: the bridge, engine room, generator compartments, and hangars.
"They are isolating all organic personnel," I said quietly, feeling an unpleasant chill inside as I understood the full picture. "They are no longer obeying commands from the bridge. The droids have turned against Grievous."
"What do you mean, they are not obeying?" Elara turned her pale face toward me in surprise. "He is their supreme commander. His command chip is written into every executive circuit of the CIS army! How can the machines turn against him?"
"To those iron cans, he is commander only until a higher-priority signal arrives from central office on Coruscant," I said angrily, slamming my fist against the armrest and immediately grimacing from a flare of pain in my ribs. "Darth Sidious has what you might call a master code. The main switch for the entire damned Separatist war machine, and not one general knows about it, including Grievous himself. Looks like Palpatine already knows his pet cyborg has slipped the leash… and he does not need an uncontrollable commander breaking the whole Clone Wars script. So he simply activated another hidden directive. Right now, the droids aboard the flagship will surround Grievous, shoot what remains of his Kaleesh guard, and clear the ship. After that, the cruiser, under central-computer control, returns to the CIS line as if nothing happened."
"Can we… help him somehow?" Elara snapped around toward me, her fingers frozen above the touch panel. "From what I understand, it is useless. This is a closed CIS military protocol. We are not even in the same system as their cruiser anymore, and I do not have access codes at that level to override an order from Coruscant. If I try to go in directly, the Prevailer's security systems will block our incoming signal before it even reaches them."
I rubbed my temple, trying to force my head to work when, after the jump, it buzzed like a faulty transformer.
Sidious, the old fox, had calculated almost everything.
But he did not know exactly who he was dealing with.
During my work inside Confederacy structures, I had managed to speak closely with many interesting people. Including Senator Mina Bonteri. At one time, she had dug very deeply into the financial fraud of the InterGalactic Banking Clan and, without realizing it, had passed me detailed technical specifications of their closed infrastructure.
In this quadrant, right in the middle of the asteroid belt, there was a network of automated Banking Clan reserve relays.
The corporates used them to push encrypted financial logs and closed security orders. The architecture of those communication nodes was tied to general CIS military frequencies. The Separatists used ready-made towers so they would not have to waste money laying new lines.
Lately, I had gotten pretty good at local technology, so I had a few thoughts on the matter.
If we entered the cruiser's network not from outside, through standard communication ports, but from the inside — through one of those old nodes, using Bonteri's engineering backdoors — we could wedge ourselves into the data stream before the droid tactical processor handled it.
But then another problem appeared, and it was much more serious.
"Elara, if we try to throw a blocking data packet through the local relay, we will have to crank the infiltrator's transmitter to full power." I looked at the tactical display, where the scale of our power grid blinked. "Cloaking is dead. The moment we emit a focused beam of that strength, our ship lights up on sensors like a signal bonfire. Sidious's automated tracking stations — the so-called Hounds stationed on sector borders — will immediately record the anomalous spike. They will calculate our exact coordinates in seconds."
"And then it will not be Grievous's droids coming after us, but the personal liquidation teams of your kind and understanding superiors," Elara finished grimly, crossing her arms. "Our left engine is held together with spit and luck. We cannot outrun a real pursuit. Wonderful choice: either we sit quietly and save our own skins while Grievous is turned into a pile of scrap, or we risk everything, expose ourselves to attack, and keep the cyborg in the game. You have forty seconds to decide, Brutus. According to my AI assistant's calculations, after that, the droids on the cruiser finish locking down the bridge."
I looked at my fingers, still trembling from tension.
Hide in the farthest corner of the galaxy and wait while Palpatine cleans up every loose end and brings the CIS fully back under his control?
But without Grievous, the Confederacy would become an obedient herd led to slaughter exactly according to the canonical script. And then they would find us anyway. It was only a matter of time.
In war, the one who keeps the strategic initiative wins, even if doing so means risking his life.
Especially if it means risking his life.
And in the end…
Something inside me still kept repeating, like a slogan, like a purpose, like something that had become my very essence:
The harder, the better.
"I have decided," I ground out through my teeth, shifting my grip on the edge of the console with my left hand so I would not collapse from another spike of pain. "We risk it. If we die, at least we make the old prune's life interesting on the way out."
Elara only exhaled sharply, muttering something like, "I hope the saying about fools being lucky is true," then slammed the forced-transmitter activation switch.
The infiltrator's cockpit immediately filled with a low, vibrating hum. Two fuses popped out with a click on the panel above our heads, and a thin stream of foul-smelling gray smoke curled from the slot.
"Voltage is jumping!" Elara shouted, her fingers hammering across the input keys. "Starboard transformers are not holding the load! We do not have enough power to punch through the Banking Clan encryption!"
At that moment, Varja appeared in the cockpit doorway.
Her Dathomiri bodysuit was stained with machine oil, and a fresh scrape marked her forehead. She quickly assessed the situation, took two steps forward, and placed her palms directly onto the exposed copper busbars of the distribution panel beneath the ceiling.
Her fingers were immediately wrapped in dense, dull-green Dathomiri magic.
This was not some dramatic trick for style. The witch was literally using her internal energy as a living conductor, stabilizing the jumping voltage and forcibly evening out the current parameters in the ship's onboard network.
"Hurry up. I will not be able to hold this flow for long. My teeth are already locking up, and you will owe me for this," she said hoarsely without turning around.
I pulled the terminal keyboard closer and, checking against a pre-saved diagram, began entering hexadecimal bypass algorithms I had once copied from Bonteri's datapad.
My side throbbed mercilessly, and gray spots kept flashing before my eyes, but I forced myself to concentrate on every line of code.
Line. Space. Semicolon. Banking Clan reserve-gateway identifier.
Completely nullifying Sidious's order was impossible. We simply did not have administrator rights to the Confederacy core, which the old man kept on his protected terminal on Coruscant.
But we did not need that.
My task was far more practical: send a corrupted update packet to the Prevailer through the relay backdoor.
I formed a data array containing a critical error in the time-synchronization protocol.
In plain language, I forced the droids' internal processors to think they had received two opposite orders at the same time, with a difference of one millisecond.
"Packet formed," I reported hoarsely, wiping sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. "Elara, send it by focused beam straight to the cruiser's central antenna."
Icebreaker yanked the lever.
The ship jolted as if we had hit an invisible wall.
The cockpit lights went out completely. Only the dim red indicators of emergency systems remained.
Outside, a few kilometers from us, a powerful communication emitter on the gray bulk of the automated Banking Clan station flashed and immediately scattered into sparks. The parabolic dish had simply burned out from the amount of power we had pumped into it.
I instantly shifted my gaze to the tactical monitor.
The droid markers aboard Grievous's flagship, which until then had been advancing toward the bridge in clean coordination, froze in perfect unison.
Our digital "infection" had worked perfectly.
The electronic brains of the B2 assault droids and MagnaGuards looped, turning them into immobile statues stuck in an endless cycle while they waited for a response from a nonexistent server.
That window should be more than enough for Grievous.
Now, while the tin cans froze, he could personally carve the boarding squads into little pieces with his four sabers and regain physical control over the bridge and steering systems.
"Good. First one done," I exhaled, but it was too early to relax.
The communication channel we had fought so hard to punch through was still active, though the infiltrator's hardware was already beginning to melt openly.
"Now the second phase. Elara, switch the encryptor to the old Shadow frequency. We need Keiro Wind."
"The channel is unstable, Brutus! Our transmitter will die in half a minute!" she shouted, holding the jumping subspace toggle with one hand.
I grabbed the comm headset, clamped it over one ear, and waited until the distant, dry voice of the former Jedi Shadow cut through the solid white noise.
The connection was terrible, but I had no time for polite greetings.
"Keiro, this is Brutus," I spoke as quickly as I could, trying not to waste precious seconds on unnecessary words. "Listen and do not interrupt. The Separatists in the Corporate Sector are in total collapse and civil conflict. General Grievous has rebelled against his own leadership and is currently pinning down the Banking Clan in the asteroid field of system L-46. Their flagship is isolated, the droids are partially locked, and there is a slaughter going on across their decks."
I paused briefly to breathe, and pain cut through my side again.
"Pass this information to the Jedi Council immediately. Have Coruscant raise the sector's standby fleet right now and send heavy cruisers to these coordinates. If the Republic ships can exit hyperspace within the next half hour, they can crush the heart of the CIS in one strike while they are busy destroying each other. This is the perfect chance. There will not be a second one. And also, try to send our people there too. If you can pick up Grievous… I think he could become a serious ally for us. That is all. Ending transmission."
I tore the headset from my head and threw it onto the console.
At that exact second, the infiltrator's engineering panel spat a dense shower of blue sparks and finally died. The focused beam vanished.
We were once again left in total darkness and silence, broken only by Varja's heavy, rasping breathing as she slid down the bulkhead to the floor, utterly drained after the energy overload.
The two-vector information strike had been delivered.
Now all that remained was to wait and see whose nerves broke first: Palpatine's, or the Jedi Council's.
The last surviving terminal aboard the infiltrator blinked green once, printed a purple line of critical interface error across the screen, and went dark for good.
In that same instant, a heavy, muffled impact came from somewhere in the stern, accompanied by an ugly metallic scrape.
The ship pulled sharply left, throwing all of us in our seats. The safety straps dug painfully into my chest, making me clench my teeth again from the sudden flare in my ribs.
The left main engine, which had already been working on luck and stubbornness alone, finally gave up the ghost.
Another turbine had simply seized from the enormous overload when we squeezed the last drops of energy from the generator for the focused transmission.
The cockpit sank into gloom.
The main lights shut off with a click, leaving only dim crimson strips of emergency lamps along the bulkheads. The room became so quiet I could clearly hear excess pressure hissing from the damaged cooling circuit in the corner.
Elara frantically flipped several switches on the panel, shifting systems to backup life-support batteries.
"That is it. We are done," she said dully, wiping black soot from her face with the sleeve of her jumpsuit. "Port side is dead. We are drifting on inertia."
I looked into the wide viewscreen.
The ship was slowly, silently being pulled deeper into the thick asteroid field on the system's very edge. Huge fragments of silicate rock, covered in cosmic dust, drifted lazily around us.
Right now, this was our best natural concealment.
Without functioning engines, with active electronics fully shut down and the reactor dark, our infiltrator had become an ordinary piece of cold metal. Finding us here with standard thermal scanners or long-range radar was technically impossible unless someone visually stumbled into the hull.
The only problem was life support…
Carefully, trying not to make sharp movements, I leaned back against the hard copilot's seat.
Every deep breath brought dull, breaking pain through the right side of my chest. Then I gently felt my side through the dense fabric of my jacket. The ribs were crooked, but at least there was no open fracture, and my mouth was not drying out with the taste of blood.
That meant my lungs were intact.
I could live.
Though for the next few days, I would be moving strictly at the speed of an old turtle.
Despite my generally lousy physical condition, I felt cold satisfaction inside.
We had managed to do the most important thing.
Sidious's perfectly calibrated plan for the quick and silent liquidation of a cyborg who had started playing independent had just gone to hell.
Right now, General Grievous, taking advantage of the temporary stupor of his assault droids, was probably already cutting his way toward the Prevailer's main bridge terminal. Four lightsabers in the hands of a furious Kaleesh were a weighty argument against the looped electronic brains of B1 and B2 machines.
The cyborg had received his chance to survive and was now locked firmly inside a two-front war.
And considering Keiro Wind should already have passed the exact coordinates of the fracture to the Jedi Council by now, in fifteen or twenty minutes, heavy Republic Star Destroyers should emerge from hyperspace into this quadrant.
Behind me came the quiet, measured sound of footsteps on the metal deck.
I did not turn sharply, not wanting to disturb my broken bones again. I only shifted my eyes toward the mirror-like surface of the dead side monitor, which reflected the rear of the cockpit.
Maul slowly appeared in the doorway.
His movements were smooth, almost silent, despite his generally battered state after the tank chamber.
Right behind him, nearly scraping his powerful shoulders against the low upper frame of the doorway, loomed Khem's massive figure.
The Dashade held his heavy vibroblade lowered toward the floor, but his thick finger rested directly on the activation trigger. One extra or suspicious movement from the tattooed Zabrak, and the gray giant would simply cut him in half without thinking about the political consequences.
But Maul did not even glance back at his escort.
He stopped at the very edge of the tactical table, where the last holographic radio-frequency markers were slowly fading.
Narrowing his completely black pupils, the Zabrak carefully studied the few movement-vector trajectories of the Republic fleet that our onboard computer had managed to record and cache before the power failed completely.
Something like cold technical respect appeared on his face, now free from the blind rage spasms Sith usually wore.
He slowly turned his gaze to me, tilting his head slightly to one side.
"Beautifully done for someone whose name I first heard less than a day ago," Maul said quietly.
There was no mockery in his voice.
Only a little cynicism.
"If you can break my former teacher's game so easily…
Then it is time to think about where we will get that army I mentioned.
And I have one idea…
How about a trip to Dathomir?"