Star Wars_ Tales From the Mos Eisley Cantina - Kevin J. Anderson [215]
“Use the shuttles to collect the ore,” he said to Dor. “Omen’s, too. We take as much as we can as quickly as we can.”
“Copy.”
Several standard hours later, Phaegon III’s smoking moon and all its inhabitants were dead. The mining cruisers, having finished their work, had jumped out of the system. A steady stream of transport shuttles traveled between the moon and Omen and Harbinger’s cargo holds, filling both ships with unrefined Lignan ore. The presence of so many crystals so near caused Saes to feel giddy, almost inebriated. Dor and the other Force-sensitives aboard Harbinger and Omen would be feeling much the same way.
“Extra discipline with the Massassi,” Saes said to Dor. The Lignan would agitate them. He wanted to head off outbreaks of violence. Or at least he wanted the violence appropriately directed.
“I will inform the security teams,” Dor said. “Do you … feel that, Captain?”
Saes nodded, drunk on the dark side. The air in the ship was alive with its potential. His skin felt warm, his head light.
With an effort of will, he regained his focus. He had little time before he would rendezvous with Naga Sadow and the rest of the Sith force moving against Kirrek. He opened a comm channel with Omen.
“An hour more, Korsin,” he said.
“Agreed,” Korsin answered, and Saes felt the human’s glee through the connection. “Do you feel the power around us, Saes? Kirrek will burn.”
Saes stared at the incinerated moon in his viewscreen, spinning dark and dead through the void of space.
“It will,” he said, and cut off the connection.
Relin stared out of the large, transparisteel bubble window that fronted the cockpit of his starfighter. Beside him, his Padawan, Drev, tapped hyperspace formulae into the navigation computer. Drev’s body challenged the seat with its girth. His flight suit pinched adipose tissue at neck and wrist, giving his head and hands the look of tied-off sausages. Still, Drev was almost thin by the standards of Askajians. And Relin had never before met an Askajian in whom the Force was so strong.
Their Infiltrator hung in the orange-and-red cloud of the Remmon Nebula. The small ship—with its minimal, deliberately erratic emission signature, sleek profile, and sensor baffles—would be invisible to scans outside the swirl.
Lines of yellow and orange light veined the superheated gas around them, like terrestrial lightning frozen in time. Relin watched the cloud slowly churn in the magnetic winds. He had been across half the galaxy since joining the Jedi, and the beauty it hid in its darkest corners amazed him still. He saw in that beauty the Force made manifest, a physical representation of the otherwise invisible power that served as the scaffolding of the universe.
But the scaffolding was under threat. Sadow and the Sith would corrupt it. Relin had seen the consequence of that corruption firsthand, when he had lost Saes to the dark side.
He pushed the memory from his mind, the pain still too acute.
The conflict between Jedi and Sith had reached a turning point. Kirrek would be a fulcrum, tilting the war toward one side or the other. Relin knew the Jedi under Memit Nadill and Odan-Urr had fortified the planet well, but he knew, too, that Sadow’s fleets would come in overwhelming force. He suspected they would also strike Coruscant, and had so notified Nadill.
Still typing in coordinates, Drev asked, “We will be able to pick up the beacon’s pulse once we enter hyperspace?”
“Yes,” Relin said.
At least that was the theory. If they were right about the hyperspace lane Harbinger and Omen had taken; if Saes had not diverted his ship to another hyperspace lane; and if Harbinger and Omen remained near enough the hyperspace lane for the beacon’s signal to reach them.
“And if the agents did not place the hyperspace beacon? Or if Saes located it and disabled it?”
Relin stared