"You are strong in the Force, and you have rejected the Jedi and their teachings. You are intelligent and resourceful. But your potential is unfulfilled. You have not dedicated yourself to the dark side. In your quest for the talismans of the ancient Sith you are like a child playing with his toys.
"You have no thoughts of the future. No ambition. No plan. No vision. That will change if you agree to be my apprentice. Join me and I will show you your destiny."
"My destiny?"
"For thousands of years the Jedi and Sith have waged an endless war against each other. The Jedi believe the war is over. They think the Sith are gone. But we still exist in the shadows, planning our revenge.
"With patience and cunning, we are laying the seeds of our ultimate victory. Generation after generation our power and influence will grow until one day we will destroy the Jedi, and the Sith will rule the galaxy."
Set wasn"t interested in ruling the galaxy. Or destroying the Jedi. It sounded like a lot of work.
It"s not like you"ve got a lot of options. She"s not going to just let you walk away if you refuse.
Aloud, he said, "The Rule of Two dictates there can only ever be two Sith, so how can you take me as an apprentice if your Master is still alive?"
"If you accept my offer, you will accompany me as I go to face my Master," Zannah explained.
"But you must not interfere. If he falls, then I will take you on as my apprentice."
"What happens to me if you fail?" Set wondered.
"If I die, my Master will need a new apprentice. If he judges you worthy, then you will replace me. If not..."
There was no need for her to finish the thought.
Set wasn"t crazy about the deal, but he understood the position he was in. Refuse, and she would kill him. Accept, and there was a good chance he would die anyway if Zannah proved weaker than her Master. And even if she was victorious, he would be returning to the life of an apprentice...a life he had been eager to escape while he was with the Jedi.
But there was one thing worthwhile in Zannah"s offer. He had been given a glimpse of what she was capable of during their one-sided battle in his living room. It might be worth a few years of following orders and calling her "Master" if he could learn to command that kind of power for himself.
"You said you can help me reach my full potential. Teach me how to unlock the true power of the dark side."
"If you follow me," Zannah promised, "you will become more powerful than you ever imagined."
Zannah could sense Set Harth"s reluctance to become her apprentice. He lacked the burning hatred of the Jedi and what they represented; he had little interest in embracing the greater destiny of the Sith. But it was also obvious that he was tempted by her promises of individual power.
Set cared only for himself. He would accept her offer only because he saw it as a means to an end, a way to make himself stronger. Zannah knew this, and she was prepared to accept it. She would have preferred to find an apprentice eager to learn the Sith philosophies Bane had imbued in her, but in the lack of a better option she was willing to work with what she had.
She understood the risks, but nothing of importance had ever been accomplished without risk.
Over the first few years of his training, she would keep a close eye on Set. She would be wary of treachery and deceit as little by little she exposed him to the greater truths Bane had taught her.
She would use his l.u.s.t for personal power as the bait to draw him deeper and deeper into the ways of the Sith.
In time Set would come to accept the teachings and philosophies as she had done. As his understanding of the dark side evolved, he would gain the vision to see beyond his own petty wants and desires. He would recognize their need to destroy the Jedi and he would embrace the ultimate destiny of the Sith.
And if he did not, then she would destroy him and find another to serve her.
All this was running through her mind as she watched the silver-haired Jedi rubbing his chin, contemplating the prospect of becoming her apprentice.
"I accept," he said at last. "And I am honored you have chosen me."
"No, you"re not," she said. "But someday you will be."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN.
We should have force pikes for this job," Captain Jedder grumbled. "They"ve got twice the juice of these kriffing stun rifles."
"Force pikes can kill if you"re not careful," the Huntress reminded him, though she was only half paying attention to the conversation. "The princess wants him taken alive. Besides, you"d never get close enough to use them."
They were inside the mansion of Sepp Omek, though the Huntress doubted that was the man"s real name. Not that it mattered. She hadn"t needed a name to track him here to the estate on Ciutric IV. The Sith Lord had covered his tracks well, hiding his true ident.i.ty behind layers of middle-beings and go-betweens and making it virtually impossible for anyone to connect him to the events on Ambria through normal methods. But all his careful preparations couldn"t guard against the Iktotchi"s unique powers. Guided by the images in her dreams and her infallible instincts the Huntress had found her quarry, as she always did.
"How long till he gets here?" Captain Jedder wanted to know.
"Soon," she replied. "Tell your team to get into position."
Her visions had shown her the house would be empty when they arrived, just as they had shown her that the owner would be returning this very same night.
"Can you be more specific?" Jedder asked. "Twenty minutes? An hour? Two?"
"It doesn"t work that way," she muttered absently, her eyes picking out locations for them to set their trap.
She had already scouted out the estate in detail, committing every room to memory as she had gone through and disabled every alarm and anti-intruder system on the grounds. She had even managed to slice her way past the security panel on the small building at the rear of the grounds.
At first she had thought it might be some kind of a.r.s.enal or weapons bunker, but once she managed to open the door she realized it was a library. Instead of datapads or holodisks, however, the shelves had groaned under the weight of ancient leather-bound books and scrolls of yellowed parchment.
There was something else inside the building that had given her pause, however. Resting on a pedestal near the back of the library was a small, four-sided crystal pyramid. The Huntress had no need to steal from her victims; she had ignored the priceless works of art and other valuables scattered around the mansion. But there was something oddly compelling about this piece.
Unsure what it could be, she had somehow felt drawn to it, and she"d slipped it into one of the pockets beneath her robe before continuing her investigation of the grounds.
Once she was done she had signaled for Jedder and the others that it was safe to come in and begin their preparations.
"Something wrong?" the captain asked.
"No," she replied, annoyed at herself for getting distracted. "Just looking for places to set your team up."
This job was unlike any the Huntress had ever taken before. It wasn"t simply the mercenaries she was working with, or the fact she was supposed to take her victim alive. Ever since she had visited the small camp on Ambria, the tall, bald man and the blond woman had haunted her dreams. Some of what she had seen had helped lead her here to Ciutric, but there were other images, too: bewildering, troubling visions that she was unable to decipher.
She had been witness to dozens of battles between the pair. She had watched the man kill the woman, yet she had also seen the woman kill the man. She understood these were visions of the future, each a possible reality that might or might not come to pa.s.s. Usually when she caught glimpses of the future, however, there was purpose or meaning behind them. The visions would help direct and guide her actions. Yet this seemingly random collage of images did nothing but confuse her, and so she had done her best to ignore them and focus on the job she had been hired for.
The princess had offered her twenty well-trained mercenaries for the job, and she had been as good as her word: twelve men and eight women, all with prior military experience, had accompanied the Huntress to the world.
She had also sent along Captain Jedder, a senior member of the Doan Royal Guard. The Doan n.o.ble houses had a long history of supplementing their numbers with hired soldiers for particularly dangerous missions, and Jedder had handpicked this particular team from crews he had worked with in the past.
Technically, the mercs answered to Jedder, though he, in turn, answered to the Huntress. That was fine by her. Mercenaries had been known to cut and run if things went bad on a job, but if they had worked with the captain in the past they were more likely to stick with the battle plan right to the end.
The front entrance to the mansion was open and s.p.a.cious. The door opened onto a large foyer, which flowed into an oversized sitting room furnished with two couches and a large gla.s.s table.
A spiral staircase led off to one side, curling up to a balcony that overlooked the sitting room.
"We should try to take him here, when he first comes in," she said. "He"ll sense that something is wrong right away, so we need to hit him fast."
"Set up a pair of sonic detonators on either side of the door," Jedder said into his radio. Instantly two of the soldiers ran over to comply with his orders.
"I fought against the Sith, you know," Jedder told her as the Huntress turned slowly in place, scoping out the rest of the room. "Twenty years ago. During the war. I was barely more than a kid."
"That"s probably why the princess sent you along," the Iktotchi replied absently.
"I"m surprised she didn"t send Lucia with us," Jedder noted. "She fought for the Sith during the war. Probably knows their tactics better than anyone."
She cares for Lucia, the Huntress thought. the Huntress thought. She knows how dangerous this mission will be. She"s She knows how dangerous this mission will be. She"s not expendable like the rest of us. not expendable like the rest of us.
Out loud she told him, "Position two of your team with the stun rifles up on that balcony at the top of the stairs. That should give them a clear shot down here into the foyer."
"I wish we had carbonite guns," Jedder lamented. "Freeze him solid."
The Huntress had already considered and discarded that idea.
"Same problem as the force pikes. You have to get in too close for them to be effective. And the carbonite will only freeze him for a few minutes. What are we supposed to do when he thaws out?"
"The tangle guns aren"t any better," he countered. "A lightsaber will slice through the webbing like it was made of flimsi."
"They aren"t meant to hold him," the Iktotchi explained. "They only have to slow him down long enough for me to administer the senflax."
She held up a long, thin blade to ill.u.s.trate her point. The edge was coated with the potent neurotoxin. According to the princess, any wound deep enough to draw blood would get the poison into his system.
"After the toxin is introduced, we"ll have to keep the pressure on," she reminded the captain. "If we even give him a chance to breathe, he"ll recognize that the drug is in his system. He might have some way to counter it with the Force."
"How long after you cut him before that stuff starts to take effect?"
"Thirty, maybe forty seconds." a.s.suming Serra knows what she"s talking about. a.s.suming Serra knows what she"s talking about.
"That"s a long time for a bunch of soldiers to go toe-to-toe with a Sith."
There really wasn"t anything she could say to rea.s.sure him, so she didn"t bother with an answer.
"Make sure your unit remembers that this is a two-stage attack," she told him. "The first stage needs to distract him long enough to give me an opening. After that, hit him with everything we"ve got."
"Can you really see the future?" the captain asked after pa.s.sing on her instructions to the team.
"Sometimes. The future is always in motion. It"s not always clear."
"Are we going to get out of this alive?"
"Some of us might," she replied, not mentioning the vision she had of Jedder"s broken body lying lifeless on the mansion"s marble floor.
When Bane returned to Ciutric, he was surprised to find Zannah"s ship still gone, but he was grateful that she wouldn"t be waiting for him back at the mansion. He was in no shape to do battle with her now; he was even too tired to come up with a lie to explain his absence without raising her suspicions. Yet as his airspeeder approached his mansion on the horizon, he knew that even if Zannah had been waiting for him, his journey would still have been worthwhile.
Andeddu"s knowledge was his now; over the past few days his brain had processed the raw information he had stolen to the point of full comprehension. He fully understood the ritual of essence transfer; he had learned the techniques that would allow him to move his consciousness from his own failing body into another. He just needed to select an appropriate victim.
Finding a new body to inhabit was the most difficult part of the ritual. He needed someone physically strong enough to withstand the ma.s.sive quant.i.ties of dark side energy he would call on over the coming years, but at the same time he needed someone mentally vulnerable enough for him to overpower their will. The best candidate would be an engineered clone body, an empty sh.e.l.l with no thoughts or ident.i.ty of its own. But creating a suitable clone could take years, and Bane wasn"t convinced he had that much time left.
He would have to try to possess the body of a living victim...a very dangerous course of action.
He would only have one chance: no matter the outcome, his own body would be destroyed in the process. And if his target possessed a will strong enough to resist his a.s.sault, the attempt would fail, banishing his spirit to the void for all eternity.
He brought the airspeeder in for a landing and climbed from the vehicle, pausing only to grab his travel pack-a simple duffel bag with the Holocron tucked safely away inside. With slow, heavy steps he approached the front door of the mansion.
Has to be someone young. Under thirty.
He opened the door and stepped inside, letting it swing shut behind him.
Naive and inexperienced. Maybe- He froze. Someone else was in the mansion. He could feel the intruders everywhere: hiding around corners in the hallways, crouched on the stairs, ducking behind the furniture, perched on the balcony above.
All this flashed through Bane"s mind in less than a tenth of a second-just enough time for it to register before the sonic detonators on either side of him went off.
Their earsplitting shriek staggered Bane, causing him to stumble forward into the room and away from the door and possible escape. His hands instinctively flew up and clutched at his ears, his travel pack dropping to the floor. And then the enemy fell upon him.
They poured out like a swarm of insects, bursting into view from every side. Four soldiers armed with stun rifles sent a barrage of bolts raining down from the balcony; Bane-still reeling from the sonic detonators-barely had enough time throw up a protective barrier to shield him from the a.s.sault.
As he did so, he felt something fighting him. Some power was trying to block his ability to call upon the Force to shield himself. It wasn"t strong enough to stop him, but it did hinder his efforts just enough so that a flicker of energy pa.s.sed through the barrier.
His muscles seized as he was. .h.i.t; his back arched and his arms and head were thrown back.
Every nerve in Bane"s body lit up as if it were on fire. The pain lasted only an instant, but it was enough to knock him to the floor in a crumpled heap.
He didn"t stay down, however. He sprang back to his feet, simultaneously drawing his lightsaber with his right hand as he sent a blast of lightning out from the fingertips of his left. The violet bolts should have incinerated all four of his targets on the balcony, yet again the strange power interfering with his ability to draw upon the Force hindered his efforts.
Three of the victims were electrocuted, dying before they even had a chance to scream. The fourth, however, managed to throw herself back from the balcony"s edge, evading the deadly attack.
Bane never got a chance to finish her off. A pair of soldiers emerged from a hallway on the left, and three more appeared from the hall on the right. They opened fire with tangle guns, sending out long streams of sticky, synthetic webbing.
The soldiers were smart; they coordinated their efforts. Two fired at his feet, looking to glue him to the floor. The others aimed for the chest and torso, looking to pin his arms to his sides with the viscous strings. But Bane wasn"t about to let himself become immobilized.
Leaping up, he grabbed onto the chandelier hanging from the ceiling, holding himself with his free hand. Swinging his legs to build momentum, he launched himself up over the railing and onto the balcony, giving him the advantage of higher ground.
He came down with a heavy thud, the inexplicable power that still impeded his connection to the Force robbing him of a graceful landing. The bodies of the three dead soldiers were scattered about him. To his right were the stairs leading back down to the foyer; straight ahead was a long hall leading to another wing of the mansion.
A female Iktotchi stood at the far end of the hall, a long, thin knife held in each hand. She grinned at Bane, and in that moment he knew who was interfering with his ability to use the Force.