"Well, would you look at the time? Time to do what I do best."
Lord Grathan's estate was an example of the sheer incompetence of the Sith Empire. Accessible via a single bridge leading to a narrow pass into the valley containing the massive compound of research buildings, barracks, and air-defense batteries, it was a mere stone's throw away from Kaas City.
Prime real estate and it had been allowed to fall into the hands of an absolute lunatic. Worse, into the hands of a lunatic who thought he had the power to become the thirteenth member of the Dark Council. Ignoring his blatant disregard of the source of the Dark Council's legitimacy and power – meaning the Emperor – he had also been a Lord. Not a Darth, but a Lord.
And somehow, he was still around. Still surrounded by an army of mercenaries, battle droids, and turrets he had bought for himself in the most defensible location on the planet.
Or so I thought, at first. Because as I had discovered, those hills that forced everyone to enter through a narrow pass accessible via a small bridge were very manageable to climb. That I was wearing clothes better suited to a ballroom than a battlefield did not matter, that it was still raining did not matter, those hills were eminently climbable.
From their peak, I saw a flurry of activity. A squad of armored men and droids charged south, never once bothering to look up. A turret blazed merrily away in that direction, tinting the surrounding landscape with a rapidly flashing red. It appeared that someone else was providing a convenient distraction for me.
That suited me just fine.
Surveying the area for a brief moment longer, I saw two things of interest. First, a cluster of landing pads was on the far side of the valley. Three of them still had ships on them, each and every one with oversized engines and hefty undersides. Blockade runners, light freighters, or something of that sort. The kind of ship that smugglers favored.
Which made them perfect for my task.
Unfortunately, I also saw a rather impressively large gun battery that was situated very close to me. Judging by the number of barrels and the fact that it was facing up towards the sky, I was willing to wager that that was an anti-aircraft weapon. Fortunately, there was a sturdy-looking metal structure right next to it. With guards. Hopefully, I could disable the gun from in there and secure my exit strategy.
Then all I had to do was steal a massive amount of arms and armor from people who were no doubt singularly unwilling to part with them. But that was a problem for Future Nestor, or whatever identity he would be using then.
I would be using then, I corrected myself.
Checking to see that nobody nearby was watching me, I leaped through the air. Assisted by the Force, I easily made it to the gun emplacement, catching myself on the massive barrels and spinning down at a leisurely pace. Somewhere below me came a shout of alarm, I stopped indulging my inner child with these acrobatics and set to work.
Pushing off, I landed squarely on the shoulders of one guard. Judging by his face, he had gone under the knife for some cybernetic enhancement. Judging by the crunch I felt even through my shoes, that enhancement did not reinforce his shoulders to take another hundred sixty pounds moving at appreciable velocity.
Kicking off, the guard collapsed in a screaming mess while I sailed through the air until I landed behind a pale blue-grey droid. The vaguely human-shaped construct smoothly turned, never letting off the trigger as bright green bolts of plasma flew through the air.
Naturally, I used the Force to throw it into the final guard who was still bringing a communicator to her mouth. Both went down in a clattering heap as I retrieved the droid's weapon. Setting it to stun, I blasted both organic guards before putting a proper bolt through the droid's midsection.
Before I had a chance to congratulate myself for a job well done, a fourth person marched out of the heavily reinforced metal shack attached to the giant gun. A person wearing an armored bodysuit and carrying a bright red lightsaber.
Yeah, I probably should have expected this.
"I don't suppose we can talk about this?" I asked. Forgetting that I was standing over his defeated allies, holding the smoking weapon I had used to defeat them, and very readily identifiable as not on his team, it really should not have come as a surprise when the Sith charged me.
A broad diagonal cut forced me to dodge backward. The follow-up turned that dodge into a graceless scurry backward as I desperately tried to figure out how I would get out of this one. By the third slash that very nearly turned my chest cavity into something resembling hamburger meat, I had had most of an idea.
Using the Force, I pulled the disabled droid towards me. At the speed it was going, however, it might have been more appropriate to say I launched it toward me. Or, more accurately, towards the Sith that was only a few seconds from pinning me into a corner.
He saw the attack coming- or felt it coming, rather, but the difference is moot. He turned to cut down whatever dared interrupt his killing of me. Except that this was a person-sized hunk of metal. It got cut in half with no difficulty, of course, but that just meant there were two chunks of metal half the size of a person flying towards him.
With red-hot edges.
Because he had used a lightsaber.
Disappointingly, my opponent did not get crushed beneath the hunks of metal. He dodged one, but the other – consisting of the battle droid's legs – smacked into him. The Sith stumbled, and I took advantage of that gap by blasting him.
With stun rounds.
Still, the toroidal bolts of energy struck the slightly distracted Sith, and he folded like a cheap camping table.
I took the opportunity to double-check that he was, in fact, stunned before relieving him of his weapon. A plain dark grey cylinder it was, with some perpendicular ridges along the bottom two-thirds to give it a better grip. No fancy shroud, no additional settings, just a single red on-off button.
And I was going to disassemble it the moment I had some peace and quiet to make my own weapon functional.
For now, however, it went on my belt and I went into the actual structure itself. That gun wasn't going to disable itself, after all, and I still needed to fly out of here once I had managed to scrape together enough loot.
Inside the structure, there was a single console surrounded by bare metal walls and flooring. A proper bunker, this was not. Still, it did not need to be in order to keep the gun running. Case in point, I managed to navigate the archaic command line interface until I found the shut-down controls. While not a self-destruct, it would more than suffice for my purposes. With a press of a button, the system acknowledged my command. For a heart-pounding few moments, the display displayed a stand-by screen before confirming that the power to the weapon had been shut down.
Five seconds later, I plunged my borrowed lightsaber into the console. With a few broad strokes and slashes, all that remained was a smoking, sparking pile of slagged metal and ruined electronics. Satisfied with my work, and ready to disable that gun in a third way, I strode out…
And ended up face-to-face with a creature out of a child's nightmares. A beast made of pallid flesh studded with cybernetics and splotches of red paint and blood crouched over the Sith I had taken down and paused as soon as I stood in the empty doorway. Its craggy head twisted around displaying jagged teeth the length of my index finger before breaking out into a feral grin.
The fact that I knew exactly who and what that thing was did not make it any less disheartening to personally encounter.
So frightening was the sight that I barely noticed the tell-tale hum of a lightsaber off to my right until it disappeared with an electronic squeal. Turning my head revealed yet another Sith. A human, startingly slight in build, with dark hair and a face dominated by an old slave brand. But his lightsaber was off, so this meeting was already going splendidly.
"I'm sorry, but I've already reached my 'getting ambushed' quota for this month," I said dryly. "Can we reschedule?"
"Stand down, Khem," the newcomer said, clearly addressing the lumbering beast that was looming over me ominously. "I don't think he's one of Lord Grathan's apprentices."
The towering beast's visage turned to a scowl that seemed to fit him far better than the hungry grin he had sported earlier. His answer, if it had been an answer, came out as an unintelligible rumbling that I could best compare to angry hissing, but several octaves lower.
And I now had everything I needed to know exactly whom I was dealing with.
"Neither are either of you, I presume," I said, before deciding to cut to the chase. "No, scratch that, I know who you are. You're Lord Zash's newest apprentice and the legendary Dashade Khem Val."
"And you're the Sith from the tabloids," the apprentice said, not missing a beat. Clever kid. "Lord Nestor, was it?"
Behind my mask, I suppressed the urge to grimace. Of course, that was how I would be known.
"The title is a bit premature," I said, choosing not to verbally react to my reputation. "Pending paperwork. You know how bureaucracy is."
"Never had to worry about it before," the apprentice deadpanned. "But since I have you here, perhaps we could be of assistance to each other."
"That depends," I said, very carefully not moving my head while I glanced at the monstrous Shadow Assassin with no concept of the rights of sapient creatures. "Feel like robbing Lord Grathan blind?"
"I can absolutely do that."
...
if you want to read ahead of the public release, you can join my p atreon :
p atreon.com/Darkness013