"Republic ships, sir, " called someone from the bridge staff, proving her wrong. "Definitely Republic, and they're taking a hammering, sir. No other visible combatants, but there may have been launches from the ground. "

Darth Chratis grinned, and Ax grinned with him. The Republic had made its move and was being rebuffed. How much easier, then, to swoop in as the savior and "liberate" the planet, right into the Emperor's arms!

"Take us in, Colonel Kalisch, " Darth Chratis said. "Launch all fighters and prepare for battle. "

"At this distance, our fighters would not be able to break free of the black hole's gravitational pull" Kalisch said, smoothly countermanding the order. "The moment it is safe, my lord, I will launch them. "

"Very well, " hissed the Sith Lord. "That will have to do. " He wasn't used to anything as lowly as physics standing between him and his wishes.

"Full power, all engines, " Kalisch ordered the fleet. "Lock courses and prepare to engage!"

The Imperial fleet came about, straining to reverse the considerable momentum it had already gained just by being in the black hole's powerful gravitational field. The Paramount's engines roared and rumbled, casting a bright blue light across those ships coming up in its wake. The lighter cruisers fared better than the ma.s.sive bulk cruiser and its heavier support vessels. They caught up and began to draw ahead.

It soon became abundantly clear that Kalisch's original advice had been sound. Instead of picking up velocity as they whipped around the singularity's event horizon, propelled by freely available gravity, they would struggle to gain every drop of delta-vee, wrung out of the engines at great expense. Their progress was painfully slow. Ax could feel her Master's impatience growing-redoubled because he knew he could say nothing, threaten no one. This was his decision and his responsibility alone. The crew worked around him in perfect efficiency and with maximum effort. All knew that Darth Chratis would vent his frustration on the first person to fail him in the slightest possible way.

Ax watched the long-range telemetry closely, eager to learn anything she could about the planet's forces. What she saw puzzled her deeply. There were no ships apart from those belonging to the Republic. Furthermore, there was no obvious a.s.sault being conducted from the ground. It looked like the Republic fleet was fighting nothing at all.

Even stranger, the Republic ships appeared to be attacking one another. Half the fleet appeared to be retreating, while the other half either did nothing or actively impeded the rest. As she watched, one small cruiser suddenly switched its drives to full, propelling it wildly into another ship, disintegrating both. It was as though something had infected half the fleet, driving it mad.

Darth Chratis studied the same data with a deeply suspicious expression. Ax wondered if he thought it was a trap. But to what end? The Republic couldn't possibly benefit from the destruction of its own ships.

"Would you like me to hail either party?" the colonel asked.

"No, " said Ax.

Darth Chratis and Kalisch both turned to her in surprise.

"Master, I advise against explicitly indentifying us as servants of the Emperor, " she said. "Remember that we are the enemy in Lema Xandret's eyes. "

"Perhaps the traitorous harridan will change her mind, " said Darth Chratis, "now that these weak-willed fools have found her. "

With a blinding flash, the Republic's capital ship exploded, casting debris in all directions. Ax shielded her eyes against the glare.

"They're certainly not putting up much of a fight, " she said. Half the Republic ships had been destroyed or crippled. The rest were regrouping and recalling their fighters.

"Regardless, the situation is clear. Sebaddon is no longer a secret. Xandret must choose to bow to the Emperor's will or face the consequences. "

"She'll never agree to her own execution. "

Darth Chratis studied her with cold eyes. "Naturally I will say nothing of the fate in store for her. Cease your questioning of my orders. Colonel Kalisch, announce our presence to the citizens of Sebaddon and advise them that we will be taking possession of their world once we have cleared the skies of this Republic rabble. "

"Yes, my lord. "

Ax went back to studying the viewscreens. The firing pattern of the Republic ships looked wrong to her, although she couldn't quite put a finger on what disturbed her about it. Still no launches from the ground, although infrared showed numerous sites of activity. Cities and factories, Ax a.s.sumed, that would be bombed for certain if Xandret resisted. Ax's instincts told her that victory wasn't going to come as easily as an announcement of the Empire's intent to annex the world, but at the same time she couldn't see how a small, ground-based civilization could hope to prevail against the high ground of s.p.a.ce. Even if they did have a mysterious weapon that drove ships and their crews crazy...

The Republic forces must have been taken by surprise. So she was forced to a.s.sume. Colonel Kalisch would be sure not to make the same mistakes they had.

No response came from the ground to the Paramount hail. Apart from garbled transmissions on Republic frequencies, the bands were empty.

"They ignore us, " said Darth Chratis, "at their peril. "

"Launching fighters in two minutes, my lord, " said Kalisch.

Ax was already heading for the exit from the bridge. "Ready my interceptor, " she called behind her. "I'm going to take a closer look. "

It took her a minute to descend from the bridge to the hangar deck, but it felt like forever. Her Mk. VII advanced interceptor had been shipped from Dromund Kaas with the rest of Darth Chratis's materiel and kept fully fueled in case a fast launch was required. The ground crew had it warming up and ready for her by the time she got there. Its familiar jutting vanes rea.s.sured her in a way that no amount of deceptive diplomacy could. Forgoing a full flight suit, she slipped a helmet over her dreadlocks, climbed aboard, and activated the internal navicomp. It showed her the projected course for the many wings about to launch around her. She switched that off and mapped out her own trajectory.

The hangar crews retreated as fighters began to stream out of the cruiser. The launches were clean and well timed, despite their pilots' eagerness to engage. Ax slipped into their formation with ease, a sleek black predator surrounded by willing but lesser packmates. She listened to the comms as she monitored the fleet's disposition, but didn't respond.

Wave after wave of angular black ISF interceptors streamed away from the Paramount and its ancillary vessels. They were easily a match for the XA-8 and PT-7 starfighters the Republic had launched. Ship-mounted cannons selected targets and prepared to fire on the Republic craft. The range was slightly long, but the still-stately pace of the capital ships ensured a solid base to fire from. A lucky shot or two wasn't impossible.

Ahead, the vast field of wreckage left by the destruction of the main Republic cruiser was spreading at speed. Only as she neared it did Ax realize what had troubled her about the Republic ships' behavior.

The surviving ships were firing into the cloud, not at their own renegade vessels.

She peeled away from the wing she had been shadowing and headed directly for the cloud.

"Your primary targets are the damaged vessels" came the orders from the Paramount. "Enemy fighters secondary. We will engage the rest. Fire at will. "

The sky lit up as a smaller Republic ship exploded.

Against that cruel light were silhouetted thousands of floating objects, suspended in s.p.a.ce. Some were spinning circles; others were edge-on lines. All were instantly recognizable as hexes, the droids Ax had fought on Hutta, their regular hexagonal bodies identical and faceless apart from the utter blackness of their sensory pods. As she flew among them now, they reached for her with spider-like legs, firing bolts of plasma from their hand weapons to propel them forward.

In that instant, she understood.

"Paramount, recall the fighters immediately. Get them away from that debris field. It's full of hexes!"

She fired as she flew, destroying one hex with every pulse from her fighter's ion cannon. For every one she killed, however, three more appeared in her scopes.

"They're only droids" came back the reply from the Paramount. "What harm can they do against starfighters?"

"Put me through to Darth Chratis, " she snapped. Someone's head would roll for this. "Master, the Republic ships have been infected with hexes. That's why they're self-destructing and turning on one another. I don't know how the infection occurred, but the debris field is full of hexes. Our targeting priority should be them first, then the fleeing ships. "

"You want us to abandon a golden opportunity to rout the Republic in order to play target practice against a handful of machines?" Darth Chratis's reply was full of contempt. "Colonel Kalisch's orders stand. "

Ax heard one of the bridge crew call out in the background: "Launches!" She looked at her telemetry and saw what the Paramount had detected.

Four missiles were rising from the surface of Sebaddon. Full of hexes, she bet, not conventional explosives. Plus, all of the infected Republic ships still capable of controlled flight were abandoning their chase of the others and coming around to ram the Imperials.

The colonel's imperious broadcast to the citizens of Sebaddon hadn't been ignored at all.

"Move the fleet, " she told her Master. "You'll be caught between them if you continue on that course. "

The Paramount neither responded nor changed course. A wave of anti-missile fire was streaking out to intercept the ascending threats. She could only hope it would be enough.

Around her, hexes swarmed and clutched at the Imperial fighters. Some had linked arms to form wide nets and webs across the sky. Any ship that strayed too close was bound up and crushed. Other hex groups formed whips capable of slinging individual hexes to incredible speeds. Ax herself missed two such wriggling projectiles by only small margins. Other pilots weren't so lucky.

"Target the larger concentrations, " she advised those fighting around her. "Ignore the infected ships. If they blow, we'll only have more hexes on our hands. "

She received no official acknowledgment of the orders, but they were obeyed. Squadrons disrupted by the unusual and hostile nature of the debris field re-formed to strafe the densest concentrations of hexes they could find. Ax joined them, taking grim satisfaction every time her cannon blew such an agglomeration to pieces.

Part of her mind paid attention to the wider battlefield. The missiles had performed a startling maneuver in mid-burn by breaking up into four smaller pieces, each capable of independent flight. Now numbering sixteen, they slipped through the first wave of defensive fire. Six mini missiles were taken out in the next wave, and five more in the third. That left five to hit the fleet unharmed.

Ax winced as they struck. There were no explosions, as she had predicted. The Paramount was untouched, fortunately, but four of the larger support vessels were likely to turn, if the hexes gained control. There might be only a couple of dozen in each mini missile, but that could be enough, particularly if they infiltrated the ships' control systems.

In retaliation, the Paramount launched a series of ground strikes against the origin of the missiles. Ax had expected this, too. Instead of saving the munitions for fending off the hexes they already had, they were potentially being wasted on the people who had sent them. Punishment could wait, in her opinion. Better to be alive and angry than dead.

She turned her attention back to the fighters. The debris field was much clearer than it had been, with only a random scattering of individual hexes left. The infected Republic ships had come around and were accelerating headlong for the Imperial fleet, doing what she had feared they would do once the second fleet was identified. To the people on Sebaddon, to Lema Xandret, the Empire was enemy number one; everyone else had to wait their turn.

"Target the drives, " she ordered the fighters. "Only the drives. We don't want to break them up, whatever you do. We have to avoid creating another debris field for the fleet to wander into. "

"How do we destroy them, then?" asked one of the pilots.

"We let gravity do it for us, " she said. "Once they can't maneuver, either the planet or the hole will drag them in. "

"They're not the orders I'm receiving from Colonel Kalisch, " protested a squad leader.

"I know that. " The Paramount was still worried that the approaching ships were intending merely to ram them. "I'm the only authority you need to worry about, out here. The first pilot who punctures the hull on one of these ships will get a torpedo up their afterburner. Understood?"

"Understood. All right, you have your orders, people. Let's get to it. "

The fighters peeled off to pursue their new objectives.

Meanwhile, the first infected Imperial ship was beginning to behave erratically.

"Master, I urge you again to move the Paramount to a safe distance. " Where reason had already failed, she attempted flattery. "Were the unthinkable to occur, we would be left without your leadership. "

"Perhaps that would be prudent, " Darth Chratis agreed.

Ax barely heard him. In the background, filling the bridge of the Paramount, a familiar voice was shrieking.

She switched channels to the one Colonel Kalisch had used to broadcast his message to the ground.

"We do not recognize your authority!"

For an instant, Ax thought that her mother was broadcasting to the Imperial ships. Then she realized-with something that might have been a twinge of disappointment-that the voice had the slightly wooden quality of a droid. Why a droid and not Xandret herself?

While the fighters attacked the infected ships and the Paramount slowly ascended out of danger, Ax considered the pros and cons of broadcasting a message herself. It might give her mother cause to hesitate before launching more hexes at the Imperial fleet. But what could she possibly say to this woman she hardly remembered, if she was alive at all? I'm a Sith now. I have no family. That certainly wasn't going to help.

The retaliatory strikes launched by the Paramount detonated on the surface of the world far below. What had already been a bright hot spot suddenly became a whole lot brighter, and Ax wondered if the question of her mother's survival was now completely moot.

Two more missiles launched from a different hot spot entirely.

Then the first of the infected Imperial ships exploded, spreading hexes all through the fleet. With the survival of her own kind now at stake, she forced herself to concentrate on what really mattered.

CHAPTER 29.

The Auriga Fire's tri-laser cannon emplacements were to port and starboard, just forward of its hyperdrives. They angled out slightly so they could cover every inch of the ship and were accessed by two tight tunnels that smelled of grease.

Larin had taken the port turret and eased herself into the cracked leather seat with easy familiarity. The prosthetic glove on her left hand was just sufficient to wrap around the cannons hand grip, while her right hand handled the delicate movements required to target and fire. The cannon itself operated smoothly, swinging freely on its gimbals as though fresh out of the factory.

It wasn't the first time she had noticed the mismatch between the Auriga Fire's appearance and its capabilities. Another concerned its compact tractor beam facility, recessed behind a hatch in the ship's broad belly. It was a wildly nonstandard feature for a ship of this size. She was curious to know how often it came in handy in the pursuit of Jet's normal job, but didn't really think Jet would admit to anything. For the moment, the flash and pound of the cannons was all that concerned her.

A quick depression of the trigger and a web of wriggling hexes vanished in a ball of gases.

"This is as easy as shooting stump-lizards on Kiffex, " she called to Shigar over her head-mounted comlink.

"Watch that trio coming in from above" was all he said.

Larin swung the tri-laser and blasted them into atoms.

"Don't worry about the Grand Master, " she told him. "We'll find her. "

He had been subdued ever since the Corellia had detonated, shooting hexes with lethal speed and accuracy. Two-thirds of the cruiser's escape pods were now accounted for, but Master Satele wasn't in any of them. Shigar had tried broadcasting over all channels, but the electromagnetic spectrum was a mess. What wasn't jammed by the black hole, Imperials, or panicked chatter was full of the hexes screeching. It was all the new Republic commander could do to coordinate the larger ships into safely picking up the escape pods without picking up hexes by accident as well.

"Dead ahead, " said Jet from the c.o.c.kpit. An escape pod had collided with two hexes that were in the process of cutting through the pod's thin hull. The Auriga Fire swooped in to help.

"One each, Hetchkee, " Larin said as the tractor beam wrenched invisibly at the hexagonal droids. "Favoritism is strongly frowned upon back here. "

She wondered if the former security guard knew she was joking. One hex tumbled away to port, for Shigar to shoot, while the other, after a protracted struggle, wriggled into Larin's sights. Then it was up to Ula to give the pod's panicked occupants coordinates for the rendezvous point.

"Stay in the channel we've cleared, " he told them. "Don't take any shortcuts. "

"It was horrible, " babbled a young midshipman on the other end of the line. "There were suddenly so many of them, and they moved so fast..."

"You're safe now. Just stay in the channel and do what Captain Pipalidi says. "

"Yes, yes-and thank you. Another few seconds, we'd have been holed for sure. "

The pod fired up its retro-rockets and headed off in the right direction. Larin hoped its occupants would be okay now. Several had been rescued and then fallen afoul of the hexes again, through either bad luck or poor judgment. One had stopped to rescue another pod in distress, only to be overwhelmed by hexes hiding inside. The Auriga Fire had been too far away to help, but the screams had carried.

Captain Pipalidi, the Anx in charge of the Commenor and by default what remained of the fleet, had a difficult job ahead of her, distributing the traumatized survivors through the remaining eight ships at her disposal. Larin didn't envy her that job at all, with long-range comms scrambled and nothing larger than a light a.s.sault cruiser to fill the place of the Corellia. But at least the lesson had been learned: the hexes might not look like much individually, but they were tough, and in large numbers were to be taken very seriously indeed.

"There's another pod at the other side of the web ahead, " said Jet. "Do you think you can get us through?"

Larin peered through the scope. The web was one of the densest they'd seen so far, with hundreds of the hexes linked in a multilimbed structure vaguely reminiscent of one individual hex, spinning slowly against the backdrop of the planet below. The limbs whipped and snapped, flinging hexes at tar-off targets and scooping up replacements from the debris cloud around it. The pod Jet had spotted was drifting behind the main body, its retros damaged. The interior light flashed rapidly on and off, spelling out a call for help in Mon Calamari blink code.

"Easily, " said Larin, knowing nothing would make Shigar happier than killing more hexes. Except, of course, finding the Grand Master.

"See those concentrations near the center?" Shigar said. "That's the best place to hit. Take them out and the structure will tear itself apart. "

"Affirmative. " Larin flexed real and prosthetic hands around the cannon grips, ready for action.