Star Wars_ Darth Bane 01_ Path of Destruction - Drew Karpyshyn [119]
Subtlety was something Kaan lacked. If he had been smart, he would have sent Kas’im to Lehon in the guise of a disgruntled follower. The Blademaster could have arrived with a tale of how he had turned his back on the Brotherhood. Bane would have accepted him as an ally. He would have been suspicious, of course, but over time his vigilance would have waned. Sooner or later he would have let his guard down, and Kas’im could have killed him. Assassination was quick, clean, and effective.
Instead, Kas’im had come and issued an open challenge, following the rules of some foolish code of honor. There was no honor in his end; there was no such thing as a noble death. Honor was a lie, a chain that wrapped itself around those foolish enough to accept it and dragged them down to defeat. Through victory my chains are broken.
Bane followed the rancor’s trail through the trees without incident; the denizens of the jungle steered well clear of him. He caught a brief glimpse of a pack of six-legged felines scavenging the corpse of a rancor along the path, but they scattered at his approach. They waited a long time after he was gone before slinking back to continue their meal.
By the time he arrived at the beach he had devised his plan. Kas’im’s ship was sitting on the sand beside his own, and he quickly stripped it of supplies, including the message drones. He lugged them over to his own vessel, then made a quick inspection of the Valcyn. Finding all systems in working order, he boarded. Before liftoff, he programmed a course into the message drone using coordinates he had downloaded from Kas’im’s ship. A few minutes later, the Valcyn launched from the Unknown World’s surface, climbing higher and higher until it broke through the atmosphere into the black void of space. Bane punched in the hyperspace coordinates of his destination, then discharged the message drone.
The drone would reach Ruusan within a few days, offering Kaan a truce and delivering a gift—a gift he suspected Kaan would be too foolish and vain to recognize for what it really was.
The Brotherhood would never defeat the Jedi. And as long as they existed, the Sith would be tainted, befouled like a well poisoned at the source. Bane had to destroy them. All of them. To do that, he’d have to use the weapons Kaan had been too proud or too blind to use against him: deception and betrayal. The weapons of the dark side.
“I don’t like splitting our squads like this,” Pernicar whispered, following closely at Lord Hoth’s heel. The general looked back along the ragtag line of soldiers trudging through the forest. Fewer than a score in total, half starved, most wounded and ill equipped, they looked more like refugees than warriors in the Army of Light. They were carrying supplies from the drop point back to the camp, as were two other caravans taking different routes.
“It’s too dangerous to travel in one large group,” Hoth insisted. “We need these supplies. Splitting us into three caravans gives us a better chance that at least some of them will make it back to camp.”
Hoth glanced back along the path they had come, wary of signs of pursuit. The rains had stopped nearly a week earlier, but the ground was still soft. The passing of his troops left deep impressions in the loamy ground.
“Even a blind Gamorrean could track us now,” he grumbled. Silently he wished for a return of the concealing rains he had so often cursed these past few months while sitting huddled and shivering beneath inadequate shelters fashioned from leaves and fallen branches.
Yet he knew it wasn’t trackers they had to worry about. He cast out with the Force, trying to sense hidden enemies lying in wait in the trees ahead. Nothing. Of course if there were any Sith, they would be projecting false images to conceal themselves