Part 39 (2/2)

”You will obey my order, Jedi Jinzler,” C'baoth said. His voice was quiet, but Uliar could hear the weight of will and age and history behind it. ”Between the Chiss and whatever game this Sidious impostor is playing, Outbound Flight has no time right now to deal with internal dissent.”

And as Uliar watched, Jinzler's brief flicker of defiance faded away.

”Yes, Master C'baoth,” she murmured.

With one final look at the people still lined up on the deck, C'baoth turned and strode away. ”If you please, Uliar?” Jinzler said quietly, her eyes avoiding his.

Uliar gazed across the hangar at C'baoth's receding back. Someday, he promised himself Someday. ”You heard our beloved Jedi slave master,” he growled. ”Everyone back in the shuttle.”

The pulsating hypers.p.a.ce sky flowed past the Vagaari wars.h.i.+p, closer and more vivid and more terrifying than Car'das had ever seen it. With only a single layer of thin plastic between him and the waves, he couldn't shake the sensation that at any moment they might break through and s.n.a.t.c.h him away from even the precarious safety of his hull bubble, leaving him to die alone in the incomprehensible vastness of the universe. He tried closing his eyes, or turning around so that his face would be to the hull. But somehow that just made it worse.

And it would be a six-hour journey back to the Crustai base, six hours of uncertainty and mental 'agony along with the emotional strain of the hypers.p.a.ce sky beating against his transparent coffin. More than once he wondered if he would make it with his sanity still intact.

He never had the chance to find out. Less than two hours after leaving the Geroon homeworld, the hypers.p.a.ce sky suddenly coalesced into starlines and collapsed back into stars. There was a click from somewhere beside him ”Human!” the Miskara's voice snarled into his ear.

Car'das jerked, banging his head on the cold plastic. What in the worlds- ?.

”Human!” the voice came again.

And this time he realized it was coming from the diamond-shaped device he'd puzzled at earlier. The Vagaari version of a comlink, apparently.

Reaching awkwardly over his shoulder, he grabbed it. ”Yes, Your Eminence?”

”What is this trap you have led us to?” the Vagaari demanded, his tone sending a s.h.i.+ver through Car'das's body.

”I don't understand,” Car'das protested. ”Did your people get the wrong coordinates from the transport's computer?”

”We have been brought too soon into crawls.p.a.ce,” the Miskara bit out.

”The stolen s.h.i.+p net has been used against us.”

Behind Car'das came the subtle clicking of locks as someone prepared to open his prison. ”But how could the Chiss have planned such a thing?” he asked, fumbling to get the words out before the door could be opened. If he was brought before the Miskara now, he was likely to die a quick and very uncomfortable death. ”They must have been using it on someone else, and we just happened to run into it.”

”With all of s.p.a.ce to choose from?” the Miskara shot back. Still, Car'das thought he could hear a slight dip in the other's anger level.

”Ridiculous.”

”Stranger things have happened,” Car'das insisted, feeling sweat breaking out on his forehead.

Behind him, the hull cracked open. Car'das tensed, but the Vagaari outside merely thrust a set of macrobinoculars from the Chiss shuttle into his hands. ”Look forward,” the Miskara's voice ordered. ”Tell me the story of this vessel.”

The door was slammed shut again behind him. Exhaling some of his tension, Car'das activated the macrobinoculars and scanned the sky in front of him.

The object of the Miskara's interest wasn't hard to locate. It was a set of six s.h.i.+ps, big ones, arranged around a cylindrical core with tapered ends.

It was Outbound Flight.

He took a careful breath. ”I've never seen anything like it,” he told the Miskara. ”But it matches the description of a long-range exploration and colony project called Outbound Flight. There are fifty thousand of my people aboard those s.h.i.+ps, with enough supplies in the storage core to last all of them for several years.”

”How many fighting machines will they have?”

”I don't know,” Car'das said. ”There'll be some, certainly, mostly those bigger tripod-type droidekas to be used as colony boundary guards.

Probably a few hundred of those. Most of their droids will be service and repair types, though. They probably have at least twenty thousand of those types.”

”And these mechanical slaves will have the same artificial brains and mechanisms as the fighting machines?”

Car'das grimaced. It was pretty clear where the Miskara was going with this. ”Yes, they could probably all be adapted to combat of some sort,”

he agreed. ”But the people there aren't going to just hand them over to you. And those Dreadnaughts pack a lot of firepower.”

”Your concern is touching,” the Miskara said, his voice thick with sarcasm. ”But we are the Vagaari. We take what we want.”

There was a click, and the comlink shut off. ”Yes,” Car'das murmured. ”So I've heard.”

”There,” Mitth'raw'nuruodo said, pointing out the Springhawk's canopy.

”You see them, Commander?”

”They're a little hard to miss,” Doriana ground out, his throat tight as he gazed at the hundreds of alien s.h.i.+ps that had suddenly appeared at the edge of Mitth'raw'nuruodo's gravity-field trap. ”Who the blazes are they?”

”A nomadic race of conquerors and destroyers called the Vagaari,”

Mitth'raw'nuruodo told him.

”What are they doing here?” Kav demanded, his voice shaking. ”How did they find us?”

”I would imagine we have Car'das to thank for that,” Mitth'raw'nuruodo said calmly. ”As it happens, this system is on a direct line between the last known Vagaari position and my Crustai base.”

Doriana stared at the other. ”You mean Car'das betrayed you?”

”Car'das has his own concerns and priorities.” Mitth'raw'nuruodo lifted his eyebrows pointedly at Doriana. ”As do we all.”

There was no real answer to that, at least none that Doriana was interested in voicing. ”What are we going to do about them?” he asked instead.

”Let us wait and see their intentions,” Mitth'raw'nuruodo said, turning back to gaze out the bridge canopy. ”Perhaps they will be cooperative.”

Doriana frowned. ”Cooperative how?”

Mitth'raw'nuruodo smiled faintly. ”Patience, Commander. Let us wait and see.”

”They arrived quite suddenly,” C'baoth's voice came from Lorana's comlink, calm but with an edge to it she'd seldom heard before. ”Some ploy of the Chiss, I imagine.”

”What are they doing?” Lorana asked, keeping her voice down as she gazed ahead of her at the line of men, women, and children walking alongside the stacks of storage crates toward the Jedi training center. There was no point in worrying these people any more than they already were.

”So far, just waiting,” C'baoth told her. ”Captain Pakmillu informs me that their s.h.i.+p design is radically different from that of the Chiss, but of course that means nothing.”

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