Light of the Jedi(34)
Another flash from the cloud, then another, and now it was impossible to think of them as anything but lightning strikes—huge blasts of energy at a scale difficult to process. Each of these two last strikes found a target in Garello’s convoy, but by now the shields were up, and while they didn’t cripple the vessels the way the first against the Maree’s Diligence had, both ships’ defenses took a significant hit.
But each flash of light had illuminated the cloud from the inside, and for just a moment, the beings aboard the convoy had seen what was waiting for them. Ships. Many ships.
As if the third and final strike was a signal, the vessels hiding in the strange cloud shot out, a buzzing, whipping swarm. They were ugly, blocky things, with spikes protruding from them in no discernable pattern. They looked like tools designed for beating someone to death. Most were sized for one or two pilots, but some were larger, and in the center of the cloud a much bigger vessel waited. It was at least equal in size to one of the convoy’s freighters, but this was no cargo ship. This was a cruel thing, built for war, for destruction.
All of the ships had two things in common, no matter their size or design—three bright slashes down their sides, like war paint, and a strange attachment to their engines, a metal lattice like a half-moon filled with rippling green fire, of unknown purpose.
Laser bolts began to lance out from the convoy’s freighters, anemic and thin in comparison with the threat they faced. There were…so many.
Word began to spread among the people of Garello Technologies and the convoy’s crews. Hope died, replaced with panic and terror. They had seen the lightning strikes, and the insignia on the ships. They believed they knew who was attacking them.
The Nihil.
Captain Odabba gave the order to run, to turn and race back to Ab Dalis. He knew it was futile, but less so than fighting, and perhaps some of the ships might somehow reach safety.
The Nihil. A year ago, neither Larence Garello nor anyone in his employ had even heard the name. But in the past months, the word had taken on an almost talismanic quality across the Outer Rim, like a plague, or a hunting beast that could not be escaped or fought.
The Nihil were raiders, thieves, murderers, kidnappers. They could be anywhere, at any time, appearing from nothing. They worked in space, on planets, in cities, in the wilderness. They moved like spirits and killed like devils. Whether they were actually monsters or just acted with monstrous savagery was unclear. What was known about them was dwarfed by what was not.
The most important things known about the Nihil were these: They took what they wanted and destroyed what they didn’t, and while occasionally you heard a story about someone surviving an encounter with the Nihil, you never heard a story about someone fighting them off.
A large segment of the enemy ships surrounded the disabled Maree’s Diligence, swirling around it in a manner chaotic but somehow aware, like winged insects swarming a corpse but never colliding with one another.
Projectiles fired from each of the Nihil attack ships. Not laser blasts or missiles. These were something like harpoons, and each dug deep into the hull of the unshielded, defenseless freighter.
As one, the Nihil vessels rotated 180 degrees, so their engines faced the Maree’s Diligence, and then those engines fired. Long tendrils of flame shot out from each ship, and the Nihil vessels strained at the cables attaching them to the freighter.
From the bridge of the Arbitrage, Larence Garello watched in horror, thinking of the people on that ship, the thousands of people on that ship.
Their families. He had told them to bring their families, that he would keep them safe.
The Maree’s Diligence ripped apart.
It did not explode, other than a few flickers of flame here and there. Presumably this was due to the fact that the ship’s systems were largely inert after the Nihil’s first strike. Whatever the cause, it shattered and tore, its inner passageways and compartments venting to space. Smaller objects and bits of debris came spiraling out into the void, and Larence Garello, chief executive of Garello Technologies, knew that some of those objects were his people.
“Keep firing!” Captain Odabba shouted to his bridge crew. “I’ve called for assistance from Ab Dalis, and they’ll send what they can. We just need to hold on.”
Larence was not a military man, but even he knew these words rang hollow. Ab Dalis was consumed with a planetwide catastrophe. Their government was corrupt and ineffective after generations of catering to all those oligarchs and trillionaires, and might not send anyone to help even if they could.
Another blast fired from the lightninglike weapon, emanating from the largest vessel in the Nihil force, the warship at its center. It hit one of the other freighters, which went cold and dead, as had the Maree’s Diligence. Everyone left in the convoy assumed that this ship, too, would shortly be ripped apart and plundered by the Nihil corpse-flies.
Indeed, enemy ships surrounded the disabled freighter, and the cables shot out again…but this time something different happened. Perhaps the freighter’s reactor was not completely inert, or some other error was made, but the cargo ship exploded. A ball of white light enveloped the Garello Technologies vessel as well as many of the swarm of Nihil surrounding it, and while Larence Garello’s heart ached at more of his people lost, he felt a beat of savage triumph at the thought that at least they had taken some of the bastards with them.