Клаудия Грэй - Into the Dark

Reath froze—except for his eyes, which looked up to see Nan standing there, her blaster aimed directly at him.

The strangest part was that Nan looked so very much the same. Despite the fact that she wore a coverall instead of her colorful patchwork dress, that her bared arms turned out to be thick with tattoos, and that the blue streaks in her hair were matched by lines painted down her face, no great transformation had taken place. Her behavior before hadn’t been a disguise, Reath decided, just another facet of her personality. She was both Nihil warrior and lonely young girl.

Which side of her would win out?

The only reason Reath didn’t assume it would be the Nihil warrior was the simple fact that she’d gotten the jump on him, yet he remained alive.

No point in bothering with preliminaries. “Everything you told me was true, wasn’t it?” he asked. “The wreck, your parents, all of it. You just left out the part about being rescued by the Nihil.”

“Close, but not quite,” Nan said. Her face was blank, unreadable. Her grip on her blaster remained steady. “Our family joined the Nihil together. They offered us the chance for a better life than we could ever have had otherwise. My mother and father were proud of their choice. I’m proud of their choice. When they died in a raid, I was taken in by Hague. By then I knew I’d always be small—that I’d have to learn how to fight smarter, since I’d never be stronger. That I’d need strategic skills. Who better to teach that than a man who can no longer fight with his body and has to use his brain?”

The sureness in her voice—the clarity of absolute conviction—unnerved Reath. He was used to hearing Padawans speak that way, or Coruscant Patrol starfighter cadets. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone could still believe in violence as a creed, at least not by taking such pride in it. While he’d known such mindsets weren’t just artifacts from history, this was his first encounter with one. He longed to talk about this with her in depth, to understand the Nihil on their own brutal terms.

Getting into a philosophical discussion with a zealot was probably a mistake, though, especially when the zealot was holding a weapon on you.

“Makes sense.” Reath adjusted his stance slightly, as though moving his weight from one leg to another, hoping she wouldn’t realize he was triangulating their positions versus the nearest exit. “I can tell you’re a great strategist already. You got enough information out of me.”

The self-deprecating joke was meant to get Nan off her guard. It didn’t work. “I can’t claim any credit for that. You were overflowing with explanations, because that was your job, right? To tell the desperate frontier folk how glorious their lives will be now that the Jedi have come?”

“I don’t remember promising anyone glory,” he pointed out.

Nan shrugged, like, Fair enough . “You can stop looking for your escape route. I don’t intend to kill you.”

“Your blaster aim suggests otherwise.”

“You could deflect any shots,” she said, nodding toward the lightsaber he still hadn’t drawn from his belt. “Hand to hand versus a Jedi? Useless. That’s one more thing you taught me. When I kill a Jedi, it’ll be with my ship.”

Reath considered this. “You could’ve killed me when my back was turned. You didn’t.”

“No. I haven’t forgotten that you saved me from being kidnapped. You returned me to my fleet. That earns you one chance to walk away.” Nan’s finger massaged the trigger of her blaster. “ One .”

Thanks , Reath nearly replied, before deciding he really shouldn’t have to thank anyone for not blowing him to pieces. “Did you enjoy it? Pretending to be helpless?”

“It’s loathsome. I don’t intend to make a habit of it.”

“I can respect that.”

“You will respect us,” Nan said. “In time, you will bow before the Nihil.”

“And here I thought this station was as screwed up as it could possibly be before we even docked,” Leox muttered to himself as he stepped over smoldering wreckage from the explosion. Affie had done a number on the place, that was for sure.

The main thing was to make sure the Nihil didn’t do a number on her.

Sounds echoed from farther down the corridor—footsteps, something else. Leox figured that was the Nihil; the Jedi moved as quiet as tooka cats. Quickly he ducked behind the nearest large piece of debris—a couple of beams that formed a nice solid barrier between him and any marauding warriors. Always good to put something between yourself and negative energy , he thought. Especially armed negative energy.

Despite his lackadaisical habits and disheveled appearance, Leox Gyasi had a sharp mind when he cared to employ it. With near-eidetic precision, he called to mind the layout of the station as they’d previously mapped it, then overlaid Affie’s plan for scouting the code. From there it was relatively simple to figure out how far along in the upper rings she would’ve gone before the Jedi found themselves in trouble, and therefore where she would’ve headed back to after the explosion’s aftermath.

This, naturally, would require Leox to somehow get past both the Nihil and the idol-controlled area that contained the Drengir.

But he wouldn’t have had it any other way. How was he supposed to give Affie a proper guilt trip later if it wasn’t difficult as hell to get her out?

Grinning, Leox waited for his opening, then darted into the station’s inner darkness.

A voice rang through the station. “Nihil, you are summoned!”

Reath turned, startled; Nan bit her lower lip, then said, “If you want to walk away from this alive, I suggest you do so now. The others are coming. I owe you something, but they don’t.”

The Nihil wouldn’t consider themselves bound by a kindness to one of their own , he thought, filing that away for future reference. “Got it.”

He dashed for the nearest doorway, not bothering to glance behind him. If Nan hadn’t shot him in the face, she wouldn’t shoot him in the back.

As soon as Reath had made it to safe cover, however, he ducked and angled himself to see inside the central globe chamber as best he could. Nan stood exactly where he’d left her, but she wasn’t looking after him. Her attention was all for the other Nihil.

They didn’t wear uniforms, exactly, though there was a sameness to their garb: dark, padded, covered in strips or panels of safety material that would be impervious to water, maybe to fire, as well. Their telltale helmets and breathmasks hung around their necks or from utility belts, which suggested a gas attack wasn’t imminent. As far as Reath could read their expressions, they seemed neither exultant nor discouraged. That suggested his fellow Jedi remained alive…but the Nihil still felt they could accomplish their goals.

“Cloud,” said this Nihil group’s leader, a Trandoshan male, “we have a way to prove ourselves to the Tempest Runner.”

Grins and a few cheers answered this. They seem to use weather imagery, storm imagery , Reath reasoned.

“This station gives us the power to reach any place in the galaxy within moments,” said the leader. “Only our people, not our ships—but our people can make the way ready for the attacks to come. Take down shields, create distractions, send homing beacons…anything and everything we need to become the dominant power in this part of the galaxy.”

“No!” shouted someone in the back. “In the entire galaxy!”

This won more cheers, and the leader smiled. “We thought we would not be able to make up for failure to enter the action. But when we reveal this station—and reveal that by taking it, we have humiliated the Jedi ?—we’ll be in his favor. The best raids, the best position within the Tempest…all of it will be ours.”