Star Wars_ Fate of the Jedi 08_ Ascension - Christie Golden [239]
Now he was peeling not a fruit but an entire moon.
The flesh under the rind of the moon’s crust—the Lignan they were mining—would ensure a Sith victory in the battle for Kirrek and improve Saes’s place in the Sith hierarchy. He would not challenge Shar Dakhon immediately, of course. He was still too new to the Sith Order for that. But he would not wait overlong.
Evil roots in unbridled ambition, Relin had told him once.
Saes smiled. What a fool his onetime Master had been. Naga Sadow rewarded ambition.
“Status?” he queried his science droid, 8K6.
The fires in the viewscreen danced on the anthropomorphic droid’s reflective silver surface as it turned from its instrument console to address him.
“Thirty-seven percent of the moon’s crust is destroyed.”
Wirelessly connected to the console’s readout, the droid did not need to glance back for an update on the information as the cruisers continued their work.
“Thirty-eight percent. Thirty-nine.”
Saes nodded, turned his attention back to the viewscreen. The droid fell silent.
Despite Harbinger’s distance from the surface, the Force carried back to Saes the terror of the pre-sentient primates that populated the moon’s surface. Saes imagined the small creatures fleeing through the trees, screeching, relentlessly pursued by, and inevitably consumed in, fire. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Their fear caressed his mind, as faint, fleeting, and pleasing as morning fog.
His fellow Sith on Harbinger and Omen would be feeling the same thing as the genocide progressed to its inexorable conclusion. Perhaps even the Massassi aboard each ship would, in their dim way, perceive the ripples in the Force.
Long ago, when Saes had been a Jedi, before he had come to understand the dark side, such wholesale destruction of life might have struck him as wrong. He knew better now. There was no absolute right and wrong. There was only power. And those who wielded it defined right and wrong for themselves. That realization was the freedom offered by the dark side and the reason the Jedi would fall, first at Kirrek, then at Coruscant, then all over the galaxy.
“Temperature in the wake?” he asked.
The science droid consulted the sensor data on its compscreen. “Within the tolerance of the harvester droids.”
Saes watched the cruisers slide through the atmosphere and light the moon on fire. He turned in his command chair to face his second in command, Los Dor. Dor’s mottled, deep red skin looked nearly black in the dim light of the bridge. His yellow eyes mirrored the moon’s fires. He never seemed to look up into Saes’s eyes, instead focusing his gaze on the twin horns that jutted from the sides of Saes’s jaw.
Saes knew Dor was as much a spy for Naga Sadow as he was an ostensible aide to himself. Among other things, Dor was there to ensure that Saes returned the Lignan—all of the Lignan—to Sadow’s forces at Primus Goluud.
The tentacles on Dor’s face quivered, and the cartilaginous ridges over his eyes rose in a question.
“Give the order to launch the harvester droids, Colonel,” Saes said to him. “Harbinger’s and Omen’s.”
“Yes, Captain,” Dor responded. He turned to his console and transmitted the order to both ships.
The honorific Captain still struck Saes’s hearing oddly. He was accustomed to leading hunting parties as a First, not ships as a Captain.
In moments hundreds of cylindrical pods streaked out of Harbinger’s launching bay, and hundreds more flew from her sister ship, Omen, all of them streaking across the viewscreen. They hit the atmosphere and spat lines of fire as they descended. The sight reminded Saes of a pyrotechnic display.
“Harvester droids away,” 8K6 intoned.
“Stay with the droids and magnify,” Saes said.
“Copy,” answered Dor, and nodded at the young human helmsman who controlled the viewscreen.
The harvester