The screech of overloaded magnetic stabilizers is the last thing you want to hear while sitting in a ship fleeing pursuit through a hyperspace tunnel.
The blue haze beyond the infiltrator's armored viewport jerked violently, and a vibration ran through the hull so hard that my barely healed ribs immediately started aching.
Damn the acid rain of Lotho Minor. As it turned out, it had done more than scorch the protective coating. That filth had managed to eat through the seals of the external technical circuit. Judging by Elara's comments — mixed generously with curses — at super-high speed, the internal pressure had simply blown the plugs out, and concentrated coolant had begun evaporating directly into the left main engine's assemblies, shorting out the hyperfield stabilization system.
"We have resonance in the third circuit!" Elara shouted, holding the controls with all her strength as red indicators lit up one after another across the console. "The navicomputer is throwing a critical error! The hyperdrive is melting!"
At that same moment, the instrument panel began shrieking, warning us of another problem. The safety automation had detected a gravitational anomaly ahead.
"There's some kind of mass ahead!" I barked, grabbing the handrail. "Pull us out before the emergency circuit blows itself apart!"
Elara yanked the forced reversion lever hard. The ship shook so violently I nearly plowed my face into the console. The blue tunnel outside collapsed into a scatter of motionless stars, but that did not make things any better.
The infiltrator was spat out of hyperspace right on the edge of the Corporate Sector. Our lifesaving jump had lasted maybe five minutes, and we had not gotten far from the scene of the original mess.
Directly ahead, the radar registered a chaotic mass: a dense, dead asteroid belt, and in the middle of it, a massive gray structure drifting in space. As our all-knowing Icebreaker helpfully informed me, judging by the characteristic angular shape and the surviving logos on the half-ruined fuselage, it was an old automated InterGalactic Banking Clan station, abandoned back during previous territorial disputes.
"Life-support systems have switched to backup batteries," Elara reported grimly, flipping switches. "The main generator is dead. Cloaking is gone, radar is offline, and… we are completely without power. If we do not find somewhere to dock in the next twenty minutes, we simply suffocate out here."
"Drift this tub into the station docks on inertia," I ordered, feeling the cockpit begin to grow cold fast. "Do not touch the engines, or they will seize up completely. Use the maneuvering thrusters. We should still have an emergency gas reserve."
I could not resist showing off my slowly expanding knowledge of local technology.
With a look on her face that clearly said I know that without you, Elara silently nodded and began carefully aligning our course.
The ship slowly, almost ruler-straight, drifted toward the open doors of the abandoned base's main hangar. A heavy silence settled inside the cockpit, broken only by the quiet hiss of oxygen masks, which we had prudently pulled over our faces.
At that very moment, I felt the Force background in the cargo hold shift sharply.
The green mist of Dathomiri magic, which until then had kept Darth Maul in an artificial coma, finally dispersed.
I had expected the former Sith to start shouting, smashing bulkheads, or trying to tear the hydraulic locks apart the moment he woke up. Instead, there was absolute silence.
Our "patient" had finally regained consciousness, it seemed.
His presence in the Force was no longer a chaotic burst of rage, as it had been on the junk planet. It had become cold, concentrated, and frighteningly focused.
The Zabrak was probably sitting quietly in the darkness of the hold, wondering where he was.
The problem was that this icy concentration of his worked in space almost like a powerful transmitter. For Palpatine, or any other strong Force-user currently combing through this sector, Maul had become a bright, shining living beacon — like a certain huge man sitting on a Golden Throne for ten thousand years.
"Brutus, we have problems," Elara's tense voice sounded. "My passive sensors picked up a signal. A large object just dropped out of hyperspace behind us. Big."
I leaned close to the armored viewport.
From the gray haze of space, carefully maneuvering around the larger asteroids, the massive silhouette of a Confederate heavy cruiser emerged. As far as I could tell, it was the Prevailer — General Grievous's flagship.
The damn cyborg turned out to be far smarter than I had thought.
Most likely, he had not searched every system. He had simply calculated the only viable vector a damaged ship could take after leaving Lotho Minor and jumped after us.
The infiltrator scraped into the dark mouth of the abandoned station's hangar, landing hard on its belly without deploying landing gear. Metal dragged across metal, throwing showers of sparks until the ship finally froze deep inside the half-ruined dock.
"Out of the ship, now," I ordered, pulling the hilt of my lightsaber from its mount on my belt. "Khem, Varja, with me. Elara, stay in the cockpit. Try to use the infiltrator's engineering console to connect to this tin can's backup power. We need working turrets, or at least sealed blast doors. And also… if everything goes completely bad, bring up the information we recently dug out. You understand, right? And one more thing: search the station for repair droids. Pull them to the ship so they can patch us up as fast as possible."
We rushed onto the service ramp.
The air inside the station was stale and cold, but still breathable. The Banking Clan's old passive filtration systems were somehow still holding pressure.
We had not even taken ten steps toward the main control corridor when a deafening metallic impact came from the external docking locks. It seemed the CIS boarding party had landed on the station's hull.
Soon, the first wave rolled out of the corridor darkness, red photoreceptors flickering.
These were not the usual flimsy B1 tin cans you could cut down by the hundreds. Advancing in a steady line were IG-100 MagnaGuards — the General's personal guard. Their electrostaffs hummed with high voltage, throwing violet sparks across the wall joints. Behind them, heavy B2 assault droids marched forward and immediately opened suppressing fire with the blasters built into their arms.
The corridor filled at once with the scream of ricochets and the smell of burned wiring.
"My prey!" Khem Val roared, his massive body launching forward like gray lightning, completely ignoring the suppressing fire.
The Dashade took the first plasma shot straight into his shoulder guard without even flinching and brought his heavy vibroblade down with all his strength onto the lead MagnaGuard's head.
The droid's metal crunched, but the enemy's response mechanism worked perfectly. A second guard intercepted with its staff and jabbed Khem directly in the exposed neck.
An electrical crack sounded. The Dashade growled deeply, losing coordination, but he did not give up the position. He jammed the corridor shut with his own body.
Varja, taking cover behind a protruding bulkhead, quickly whispered some Dathomiri spell. Her fingers were wrapped in a dim greenish glow, and she thrust her hand forward, trying to direct a clot of energy into the joints of the advancing assault droids.
One B2 did jerk. Its left arm began smoking, and it started firing wildly into the ceiling, cutting down chunks of cable. But three more immediately stepped into its place.
The witch's magic worked too slowly against pure metal that had no nervous system or mind vulnerable to fear.
I activated my saber, and the orange blade hissed as it cut through the frosty air.
There was no time — and no desire — for elegant spins. The corridor's narrow space limited movement too much. I had to work with short thrusts and hard blocks, deflecting plasma back into the droids.
One bolt struck a B2 directly in the chest plate, sending it toppling backward, but the CIS numbers were pressing harder and harder.
The trap was closing, and with every step, we were methodically forced backward into the station's depths.
The droids came in a solid stream, and eventually, I was simply pushed away from Khem and Varja.
I had to retreat backward down a narrow technical ramp until my shoulder blades hit the half-ruined protective casing of the station's main reactor. The massive thing took up nearly half the hall and apparently was still working — or Elara had already managed to restart it.
Thin violet threads of static electricity lashed out in every direction from holes in its casing, while inside the exposed circuit, an unstable plasma core flickered. The protective fields had long since failed, so the room smelled sharp and acrid, and the air was so hot that sweat instantly broke across my face.
Every deep breath sent a sharp, cutting pain through my right side.
My rushed ritual back on Lotho Minor had only pulled the tissue together a little. It had not worked a miracle. The moment I turned too sharply, something inside me audibly shifted.
Physically, I could not hold out in a prolonged close-quarters fight right now.
Heavy, measured footsteps sounded from the direction of the broken blast doors.
The deck plates groaned beneath the weight of the massive cyborg.
General Grievous himself stepped out of the steam.
His bone-colored mask looked gray in the dim reactor light, and the internal indicators in his eye sockets burned a steady yellow. He was in no hurry. On the contrary, he walked with the obvious superiority of a predator that knew perfectly well its prey had nowhere left to run.
"And here is our little upstart," he rasped, clearly not recognizing me. The sound was followed by a heavy, dry cough somewhere inside his mechanical chest. "Did you think your cheap disguise would save you from the fleet of the Confederacy? Count Dooku has tolerated your tricks for too long."
For a second, the thought flashed through my mind: pour every last scrap of Force I had left into one concentrated burst of lightning straight into his chest plate, right where his remaining organic parts were hidden behind the armor.
Yes, his cybernetics would fry beautifully, and his servos would lock solid.
But I immediately glanced behind me at the pulsing reactor core.
An ionized arc of that power would inevitably catch the exposed cables and disrupt what remained of the plasma containment. The station would be blown apart instantly.
Along with me, Elara, Maul, and the rest of our half-broken squad.
I had maybe three seconds while the cyborg slowly came closer and closer.
I needed to change the rules of the game and strike where this iron machine still had a vulnerable organic point.
His memory.
Grievous sharply raised his arms.
With a dry click, two mechanical limbs split lengthwise into four. Four lightsaber hilts slid from magnetic clamps straight into his clawed fingers. Two green and two blue blades snapped to life, slicing the air and filling the hall with colored reflections.
The cyborg began spinning his wrists rapidly, creating a solid wall of glowing plasma before him. The air around him practically sang from the rising hum.
He lunged forward.
The first two blades came diagonally, aiming for my neck and thigh.
I had to catch my saber in both hands and meet the terrifying force of the blow in a hard block. The metal of my boots scraped across the smooth deck, leaving deep grooves.
The mechanical pressure was so great that my half-healed ribs shifted again. My vision darkened for a moment, and the distinct salty taste of blood appeared on my lips.
Grievous was already bringing his remaining two sabers in, ready to simply impale me.
The distance between us had shrunk to half a meter. Heat from his blades and the smell of overheated machine oil from his joints washed across my face.
"Kimaen jai Sheelal!" I shouted with everything left in my lungs, finally managing to fish his real name out of my battered memory.
The spinning blades slowed.
The two others, which he had been about to drive into me, froze barely five centimeters from my chest, scorching the fabric of my suit.
The cyborg's optical sensors clicked and focused on my face, narrowing to tiny points. Something inside his chest switched noisily, as if a processor had run into a system error.
"How… do you know that name? Did Dooku tell you?" His voice dropped into a hissing, guttural whisper, all mechanical swagger gone from it.
Carefully, trying not to make any sudden movements, I lowered my blade slightly to the side, but I did not deactivate it. My chest burned mercilessly with every breath, and I had to spit the blood that had gathered in my mouth onto the metal floor between us.
"I know much more, General," I said, holding his gaze. "For example, that you are currently fighting for the very people who turned your life into hell. You still think the Jedi blew up your shuttle, the Martyr, on Kalee? You still think the Republic made you a cripple?"
Grievous lurched forward, his heavy mask almost touching my forehead. I heard his claws tighten around the saber hilts so hard the metal casings creaked.
"Silence, Sith worm!" the cyborg roared, and the shout dissolved into a furious cough. "The Jedi destroyed my people! They supported the insects! They condemned Kalee to starvation! And the Republic signed that cursed order!"
"The Republic is a pile of corrupt sellouts. I will not even argue with you there," I answered dryly, quietly moving my left hand behind my back and feeling for the comm switch at my collar. "But they did not blow up your ship. You were too proud, General. You refused to serve the InterGalactic Banking Clan on their terms. You wanted to return to your planet and continue the war, didn't you? But Chairman San Hill needed the perfect commander for a future droid army. A living tactical genius, stripped of weakness, who could be controlled easily."
"You lie!" Grievous jerked his right arm, and a green blade scraped across the reactor casing, throwing sparks. "Count Dooku personally saved me from the wreckage! He brought me to Geonosis!"
"Elara, now," I said quietly into the mic. "Display the Project Vanguard files on the hall's central terminal. Decryption under my personal key."
The old wall monitors in the reactor hall, covered in a thick layer of dust, blinked several times.
The station systems that Icebreaker had managed to access through our ship's engineering console groaned and produced a dim blue glow. Lines of technical logs, diagrams, and medical specifications in Huttese and Basic began crawling across the screens.
I knew what to look for.
In my old world, the story of Grievous's cybernetic conversion had not been a secret, and here, in this universe, the Banking Clan had still kept duplicates of its financial and engineering reports from that time.
If you knew what to search for and whom to ask…
You could learn a great deal.
"Look at the screens, Kimaen," I said harshly, taking half a step back to move out from between his blades. "Pay attention to the dates."
Grievous slowly turned his head toward the nearest terminal, as though his servos had suddenly filled with sand.
His yellow organic eyes, visible through the slits of his mask, began darting quickly across the lines of text.
On the screen glowed a detailed three-dimensional diagram of his own skull integrated into a duranium frame. Beside it was a financial report listing the total development cost of the cybernetic body.
The most interesting part was at the bottom of the page.
There was San Hill's personal digital signature and a CIS secrecy mark.
The date authorizing the technical assignment and allocating funds from the Banking Clan budget preceded the crash of the shuttle Martyr by exactly three months.
They had designed his iron cage before he ever boarded that cursed ship.
"This… is a technical error. A Republic forgery," Grievous rasped, but his voice shook noticeably. The sabers in his hands began to tremble, and the indicators on his chest panel flashed an anxious red.
"There is an audio recording farther down," I finished him off, feeling the adrenaline slowly begin to fade, replaced by dull exhaustion. "An intercepted report from San Hill to Count Dooku. Your shuttle was rigged by their own engineers on direct orders from your current political leader. They only needed your brain and your eyes. Everything else, they considered useless scraps. They cut away what made you inconvenient, General, sealed you in armor, and made you hate the people they needed you to hate."
The cyborg's organic brain apparently could not handle the volume of incoming information.
White coolant hissed from the vents on his shoulders. Something inside his body clicked madly as the processors overloaded under a cascade of contradictory commands.
The existential shock of realizing that his years of revenge had been staged by his own masters transformed into pure, uncontrolled rage.
Grievous growled.
The sound no longer seemed human or mechanical. It was the roar of a wounded beast.
He abruptly turned his back to me, losing all interest in me, and brought all four lightsabers down onto the central terminal's control panel. Plastic and metal instantly became a mess of melted slag, but the screens on the walls continued displaying blue lines of documents, mercilessly illuminating his humiliation.
Losing focus from the pain in my ribs, I leaned one hand against the cold wall and began slowly moving toward the exit.
The fuse had been lit, and right now, it was better not to stand too close to this powder keg while it exploded.
And oh, it exploded.
In the next instant, all four of Grievous's blades slammed into the central console with a heavy hum, turning the electronics into a slurry of melted plastic and smoking circuit boards. Drops of heated duranium scattered in every direction. A few burned my neck, but I did not even flinch.
The cyborg howled.
The sound came from deep within his iron chest, no longer like a human voice — more like the roar of a jammed industrial tunnel drill.
He ripped the sabers free from the smoking remains of the terminal.
Two green blades scraped across the reactor casing, leaving deep torn grooves.
The General turned toward the station's internal communication unit mounted on the bulkhead and drove his mechanical claw straight into its iron casing, tearing out the heavy military comm headset.
"All Confederate units in the sector!" His rasp through the damaged microphone broke into a whistle, and the station speakers answered with a horrific burst of feedback. "Abort the pursuit! Lock down the flagship immediately! Turn weapons on the Banking Clan transport!"
For a second, he fell silent, his artificial lungs groaning as they pumped air through the armor.
"I will deal with that slug personally. I will tear San Hill apart myself. Every last one of them…"
Grievous hurled the twisted headset underfoot. Metal crunched beneath his heavy jointed foot.
The cyborg sharply flipped a switch on his wrist panel, forcibly disconnecting the local tactical-droid network being relayed from his cruiser.
Outside, in the corridor, everything immediately went quiet.
The dense roar of blaster fire cut off so suddenly it was as if someone had pulled the plug from the wall.
The MagnaGuards and heavy B2 droids that, a second earlier, had been pressing my squad, lowered their weapons in perfect unison and entered standby mode, staring blankly at the walls with their metal faces.
The information strike had worked perfectly.
The CIS central command chain in this place had turned into mush.
The General headed for the reactor hall's exit.
His massive five-fingered feet slammed into the deck plates, leaving dents behind. He passed half a centimeter from me, washing me in a heavy wave of overheated machine oil and burned insulation, but he did not even turn his head in my direction.
To him, in that moment, I had simply stopped existing.
Sith, Republic, espionage — all of it had fallen into the background before the prospect of crushing the chairman of the Banking Clan.
I waited until the sound of his steps faded into the depths of the technical corridor, and only then allowed myself to lean my shoulder against the wall.
The hand gripping my saber hilt was trembling slightly.
I deactivated the violet blade, and the hall sank into a dim purple haze coming from the damaged core.
"Brutus, are you alive over there?" Elara's tense voice sounded in my earpiece. "Sensors show the CIS landing fleet in orbit has started maneuvering chaotically. Their cruiser is turning its bow toward its own rear supply transport. What did you do in there?"
"Gave the General his personnel file from his previous job," I answered dryly, swallowing thick saliva with difficulty. "Khem, Varja, come to me. The tin cans have frozen solid. We have a few minutes while their flagship sorts out its internal chain of command. Back to the ship, now."
The Dashade appeared in the doorway first.
His gray shoulder guard had been completely sliced away by a blaster volley, and dark blood seeped from a deep scratch on his forearm, but he looked quite pleased.
Varja followed behind him, breathing heavily and holding her left arm — apparently she had taken a nasty backlash from her own spell while trying to short out an assault droid.
"The machines no longer want to fight," Khem Val rumbled, disappointedly kicking the nearest frozen MagnaGuard in the metal leg. "Boring battle."
"Be glad you are alive," I snapped, forcing myself away from the wall.
Every movement sent a sharp flash through my right side. My ribs had clearly shifted even worse after I blocked Grievous's strike.
"We need to get out of this system before the cruiser captain realizes their General has gone insane."
We moved quickly back through the smoke-filled corridor. Frozen droids stood along the walls like gray tombstones, their red photoreceptors blinking in system-error mode.
The infiltrator's open ramp was already waiting for us in the hangar.
Elara sat in the pilot's chair, her fingers flying across what remained of the control panel. The ship's left main engine rumbled dully, coughing flakes of black soot from the nozzle.
"I managed to power the maneuvering systems from the station's emergency circuit while you were negotiating," she shouted without turning. "But the left engine will die if we try to push it too hard. The asteroid-field density here is high. On the way out, the cruiser's radars will eat us alive if they repair their network."
"Forget stealth," I dropped into the seat beside her, trying not to bend at the waist. "Start prelaunch pressurization. Khem, grab a welding torch from engineering. We need to weld the external hatch of the left circuit shut, or we will be sucked into vacuum at the first overload. Varja, help him hold the hull plate. Move!"
Unfortunately, repair droids were not a miracle cure. We would have to do some of the work by hand too.
The infiltrator lifted from the hangar floor with a metallic scrape.
The ship pulled hard to one side. The stabilization systems worked at their limit, compensating for the lost thrust.
The massive gate doors of the abandoned base drifted past the armored viewport, and we were back in open space.
The tactical-display screens were a complete mess.
The CIS heavy cruiser Prevailer, instead of catching us, had opened fire with its forward batteries and was deliberately burning through the hull of its own supply shuttle, which was trying to escape into hyperspace.
Apparently, Grievous had already reached the bridge and begun imposing his own order among the personnel.
"Corporate Sector straight ahead," Elara reported, bringing up the navigation grid. "Thirty seconds to the edge of the safety zone. The computer will not have time to calculate an exact jump vector. The left injector parameters are unstable."
"Jump blind," I ordered, squeezing my eyes shut against another flare of pain in my side. "Any short microjump toward neutral space. We just need to disappear from their locators for half an hour."
Elara silently yanked the lever.
The ship shuddered. The left engine produced a horrible metallic shriek, but space outside still stretched into familiar blue lines. We were thrown into subspace.
Judging by the steady, strained hum of the hull, our emergency welding was holding pressure for now.
I sat in the chair for another three minutes, staring blankly at the hyperdrive indicator.
The adrenaline finally faded, leaving behind wild exhaustion and the persistent feeling that I was carrying a snake in a backpack behind me, and that it could bite at any moment.
In short, my danger sense was howling like a siren.
I needed to deal with the last problem from this insane raid.
Maul.
With a quiet sigh, I stood, holding my ribs with one hand, and slowly trudged toward the cargo hold.
Because of the overall power failure aboard the ship and the emergency switch to backup batteries, the force fields in the isolation compartment might have weakened. Leaving Sidious's former apprentice unattended in that state was the height of idiocy.
The heavy blast door to the lower level opened with a hiss, releasing a stream of cold air.
Inside the hold, only emergency lighting remained. Sparse red lamps under the ceiling cast a dim, dirty light, leaving the corners of the room in complete darkness.
It smelled of dampness and burned plastic.
I took three steps forward and froze, instinctively lowering my hand to my lightsaber hilt.
The central medical container where the Zabrak had been lying was open.
The heavy magnetic restraints meant to hold prisoners had not merely been disabled — their steel clamps had been twisted out of place as if something had torn them apart with hydraulic force.
Strips of insulating tape and torn sensor wires lay across the floor, mixed with spilled gel.
Darth Maul himself was not trying to hide in the shadows or prepare an ambush by the door.
He was sitting directly on the dirty metal floor, his back against the broken casing of the isolation unit. His black-and-red tattooed head was lowered, and his hands rested calmly on his metal knees.
The lightsaber I had personally placed on the upper technical shelf against the opposite wall still lay there untouched.
The Zabrak had not even tried to retrieve his weapon.
I slowly shifted my grip on my saber hilt, ready to block an attack at any millisecond, and narrowed my eyes slightly.
"Maul," I called quietly, keeping three meters of distance. "I see you are feeling better?"
The Zabrak slowly raised his head without a single unnecessary movement.
The red light of the emergency lamp fell across his face.
I had expected to see the familiar, mad yellow glare of Sith eyes, full of blind hatred, bloodlust, and the desire to tear me apart.
But his eyes were different.
The yellow of the Dark Side had vanished from them completely.
Maul's pupils were now completely black, deep and frighteningly calm.
As if Varja's Dathomiri magic had burned out not only the madness, but everything Palpatine had spent years hammering into his mind.
He looked straight at me.
A faint, hard smirk appeared on his bitten lips.
"I know myself, Brutus…
That is your name, is it not? I heard them call you that," he said quietly, without his old theatrical growl or threats.
It was the voice of a calculating, grounded survivor who had finally assessed the situation with clear eyes.
"And I do not think we are enemies."