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And Murtog had every reason to feel threatened. He had failed to find those behind the assassination attempts on his liege. Scourge’s arrival was a direct challenge to his competence as security chief. What better way to eliminate a potential rival than to expose his incompetence by killing him in a staged assassination attempt? That could explain why Murtog refused to let Scourge in when they’d first arrived, and why Murtog’s soldiers had killed the female mercenary just when she’d been on the verge of surrendering.

However, Murtog wasn’t Scourge’s only suspect. Sechel had similar self-preserving motives. If Scourge succeeded in his mission, he would likely be rewarded with a permanent position that would surely rank above the servile Sith adviser in Darth Nyriss’s hierarchy. Sechel had managed to find himself a niche in Sith society by clinging to his role as an adviser to Nyriss. It made sense to assume he would do anything in his power to remove an individual he viewed as a threat to his own position of power.

Scourge had witnessed Sechel speaking to the mercenaries at the spaceport earlier. At the time it had seemed he was shooing them away out of respect for a high-ranking Sith Lord newly arrived on the planet. Now Scourge wondered if he had been giving them last-minute instructions. The fact that Sechel had survived the battle in the courtyard was also suspicious. It was possible he was just lucky or had the highly evolved survival skills of a true coward, but it was also possible the mercenaries had been careful not to fire anywhere near him.

Murtog rounded another corner. The pain in Scourge’s shoulder was becoming more intense as his armor rubbed against the wounded flesh. Yet he kept pace with the stocky human, refusing to show any sign of weakness.

The hall came to a dead end against another imposing door. This one, closed like all the others, was flanked by Sith apprentices. He doubted Nyriss would have made the Sith answer directly to a human, so they were probably not under Murtog’s direct command. But based on the fact that they made no move to challenge the security chief as he approached, it was clear to Scourge that Murtog enjoyed a privileged position in Nyriss’s household.

Murtog stepped forward and rapped his knuckles gently on the door, then took a step back and stood at attention.

While they waited for an answer to the knock, Scourge realized there was a third possibility: Murtog and Sechel might have been working together to plan the attack in the courtyard. At the Academy, lesser students would sometimes conspire together to bring down a more talented individual. It wasn’t hard to imagine the same kind of thing happening outside the facility’s walls, as well.

For the moment it wasn’t possible to know which of his theories—if any—was correct. But Scourge knew he’d have to watch his back.

The door opened to reveal a young Twi’lek. She was clad in black robes, with Nyriss’s four-pointed star emblazoned in purple on both the chest and back, surrounded by a red circle. A shock collar was fastened securely around her neck, but even without it, her status would have been immediately obvious simply because of her species.

When the Sith had fallen into full retreat during the last days of the Great Hyperspace War, they had taken with them a number of prisoners captured during their early victories over Republic worlds. Those prisoners—mostly humans and Twi’leks—had been condemned to a life of slavery.

By the Emperor’s order, no slave could ever be granted his or her freedom, and the status of the parent would be passed down to the child generation after generation. Because of this directive, there was never any doubt about the role of any Twi’lek in the Empire—they were and always would be slaves, descended from ancestors too weak to save themselves from the Sith invaders.

The slave bent to one knee and kept her eyes to the ground as Murtog, Scourge, and Sechel stepped through.