Клаудия Грэй - Into the Dark

Still, Dez hadn’t moved. Maybe a gesture would be easier to understand. Reath held out his hand to Dez.

Finally, Dez took a step toward Reath and the transport pods. The Drengir made no move to stop him. Reath knew that could only mean bad news. Just a few minutes in these creatures’ company had taught him that they weren’t the type to let their victims walk away.

“This one?” Dez said, slurring his words.

“Yes,” said the Drengir leader. “That one. Kill him, and go free.”

Reath had no time to process what he’d just heard because even in that instant, Dez was leaping toward him, lightsaber blazing.

“Who are you?” Cohmac demanded.

The plant creatures ignored him. In the heart of the Amaxine station, they surrounded the Jedi. They always had, Cohmac realized.

He also recognized the oppressive weight settling over them, not so different from the uncanny sensation that came before a groundquake or cyclone. The dark side held power there, power that had been unleashed.

“Your ancestors were imprisoned here,” said Cohmac. “Ages ago. They were held in place by the idols. Am I correct?” Even with his lightsaber in hand and facing down enemies, he wished to remain a scholar.

That the plants heard, or at least didn’t bother pretending not to hear. The plant creatures made a hissing sound of pure contempt. “Not our ancestors. We were imprisoned here. A simple trick, we see now—but we did not see then. It will not be so easy to capture the Drengir again.”

Hadn’t the idols been in place for centuries? But Cohmac vaguely remembered that some forms of plant life could go dormant in hostile environmental conditions, “sleeping” for months, years, or even longer. These beings known as the Drengir must have similar capabilities. In any other situation, it might have been fascinating.

“They are the descendants of the ones who put us here,” snarled another of the Drengir. “Look at their weapons, the ones that glow. They are the same.”

Jedi trapped the Drengir there? Before Cohmac could open his mouth to speak of it, the Drengir leader said, “Not the same. The other weapons were red.”

Orla and Cohmac exchanged quick glances. They each knew what that could mean.

Sith.

A shiver crawled up Cohmac’s back as he realized that the Drengir must have fought, and been captured by, the ancient Sith. If the Drengir were deep enough in the dark side to have presented a challenge to the Sith themselves…

Then the Drengir leader said, with a widening grin, “Time to eat.”

Cohmac responded to the motion before he’d even truly seen it, a slash-flash of movement at the corner of his eye. His lightsaber blade sliced through what he could only call a whip of thorns, as thick around as a human’s forearm. It flopped to the floor, then kept thrashing, bending, almost slithering.

But there was no more time to analyze what it was or what had happened, because the Drengir were upon them.

Cohmac reached out with the Force, working to sense his opponents’ moves before they made them, which gave him time to dodge one of their whips. For her part, Orla leapt up over them in a wide arc, flipping head over heels to land behind the Drengir leader. Both blades of her lightsaber sparked as they pierced the creature’s trunk with two rotating slashes, bright white spears emerging through its bark skin.

Instead of collapsing, the Drengir laughed. It pulled forward, free of the saber, and turned around to slash its thorn whip at Orla. Cohmac realized that the trunk was already healing itself—growing new tissue to replace what had been lost.

Damn and damn , Cohmac thought. How do you kill an enemy who can’t be injured?

The situation wasn’t quite as dire as that, as she proved an instant later when she severed the lower tentacles of a Drengir, who collapsed, alive and conscious but unable to regenerate quickly enough to get back into the fight. Those tentacles must be critical to their balance , Cohmac reasoned. At least they knew one vulnerability to strike at.

But even those injures were only temporary. More and more Drengir emerged from the vines, revealing that the Jedi were not fighting a mere armed group—but, yes, an army.

Dez’s ears rang. His head ached. The thing in front of him held a fiery saber like his own and kept shouting something Dez couldn’t understand. Only one word made sense: his name.

He didn’t want to hear his name anymore. He didn’t want to hear anything anymore. Dez simply wanted to make everything stop. They said if he killed this thing, it would.

With all his might, he brought his lightsaber down on the other. They crashed together, sending a vibration through his hands and arms. His opponent stumbled backward. Through the rush of blood in his ears, Dez heard the Drengir laughing. He wanted that to stop, too.

For an instant he was able to focus on his opponent—someone young. Someone vaguely familiar. A voice called, “Dez, why are you doing this?”

It made no difference. The opponent had to die.

On her belly, Affie crawled between the layers of storage bins, in search of more of the code. She’d recorded a fair bit of it, but she felt like she needed absolutely everything written on the Amaxine station to prove her case.

And maybe, just maybe, she’d find something else about her family…even something her parents wrote themselves.…

She startled at more sounds below. This wasn’t the loud grinding from before—not nearly as thunderous as that—but still counted as what Leox would term “a ruckus.” Thuds from things or people hitting the floor, the hum of lightsabers, and for some reason a whole lot of rustling from the plants…

Affie grabbed her comlink. “Leox, come in.”

“ Something the matter, Little Bit? ”

She had bigger problems to deal with than that stupid nickname. “The Jedi are making a whole lot of noise down in the central chamber. No idea why, but they are. If I can hear it all the way up here, I guarantee you Nan and Hague can hear it, too.”

“ Hang on just a sec, let me check something— ” Leox went silent for a moment, then quietly muttered a rude word he’d never spoken near her before. “ Yep, the Nihil know they’re not alone. ”

Affie’s hand tightened around the comlink. “How can you tell?”

“ I can tell because they’re no longer orbiting the station. The warship’s assumed a locked position. Which means we have to stop orbiting, too, or else they’re going to see us in about…two minutes. ”

“Get out of here,” she said. Maybe it was wrong, making a decision like that without the Jedi’s input—but there was no time to waste, and the Jedi were the ones who had caused this problem in the first place. “You and Geode. Just go. Save yourselves.”

“ Calm down. All we have to do is slam on the brakes. Maybe we can even link up to one of the airlocks, make ourselves available to help you guys if the situation gets worse. ”

“Good,” Affie said. The crashing and yelling from below grew louder. “Because I’m pretty sure it’s going to.”

Lightsaber dueling was widely considered the coolest class at the Jedi Temple. (Reath preferred Ancient History, but he was in an extremely small minority.) All the emphasis on dueling obscured one simple truth: this was a situation a Jedi would almost certainly never encounter even once in a lifetime of service. Only other Jedi carried lightsabers; Jedi did not fight each other in the field or anywhere else, for that matter. Ergo, dueling was effectively useless except as exercise.

So Reath had argued, and he still felt like he was right in principle. At the moment, however, dueling practice was the only thing keeping him alive.