Light of the Jedi(49)

“No shame…” he said.

Loden knew he’d fail from the beginning.

“I just don’t get why he won’t let it go,” he said. “I clearly can’t do this.”

“Because one day you’ll fall off a cliff for real, and he wouldn’t be doing his job if he didn’t try to keep you from dying when you do. Jedi fall off things a lot. You need to be ready.”

Indeera turned toward the path that led back up toward the outpost.



“Come on,” she said. “Porter is making breakfast. Nine-Egg Stew, and he told me he found some stone peppers, too.”

“You think Loden will let me eat before he throws me off the cliff again?” Bell said.

“I’ll insist,” she said. “No one should die on an empty stomach.”

“Wow,” Bell said, “so kind of you.”

He followed her up the path, Ember keeping pace at his side.



* * *





Ottoh lifted the single-lens ocular and set it against his eye. The device had a setting that allowed him to see through the walls to pick up heat signatures from outside—good, because the Nihil had already killed their homestead’s security cams. The monitors in the safe room were just throwing out static.

Now, not all the parts of the fancy security system they’d had installed when they moved out to the claim had failed. The automated reinforced durasteel shutters had worked as promised—slamming down over doors and windows as soon as the family was safely inside—but without the cams, they were almost blind.

All Ottoh had was the ocular, and the rough outlines it provided on its infrared setting. The Nihil showed up as purple-and-red outlines, with strange, misshapen heads. Ottoh had seen hundreds of different alien species in his day, but he’d never seen anything like the Nihil. It made him think they were probably wearing masks, which aligned with both the stories he’d heard and the fact that they used gas to hide their movements and incapacitate their prey. But knowing that didn’t make them any less threatening. They were monsters, looming up from nowhere.



The gas was definitely still out there, too, even if the ocular couldn’t pick it up. The family’s herd of steelees were all lying on their sides in their pen, unconscious or dead, and as far as he knew nothing had touched them.



“Will the seals keep out the gas?” Erika said, evidently thinking along the same lines.

“That’s what the company promised. The safe room’s supposed to be impervious to all but the highest levels of blasterfire, and impermeable to chemical and radiological weapons.”

“You didn’t say explosives,” his wife said. “What if they brought explosives?”

Ottoh didn’t answer.

“Well, whatever they brought, I’m ready to fight,” she said, and he set down the ocular and looked over at her.

Erika tapped her datapad one final time, then held it up for Ottoh to see, displaying the elements of the plan she had come up with.

“I think the speeder, right?”

“Yeah,” Ottoh said. “At the very least it’ll buy us time. Maybe someone will see the explosion, or maybe the Nihil will just leave.”

Now it was his wife’s turn to stay silent.

“Any luck, Ronn?” he called to his son, thirteen years old, with everything that came with that age. But now, no angst, no pushback, just doing exactly what he was asked to do in an effort to keep his family alive.

Ronn was using the family’s comlink, trying to reach someone in Ogden’s Hope who might be able to help. Their daughter, Bee, nine, was curled up against him for comfort, holding a stuffed varactyl toy she hadn’t touched for years, as far as Ottoh knew.

“I can’t get a signal through, Dad. I checked the weather, and there’s a big rust storm between us and Ogden’s Hope. It’s messing with the transmissions, I think.”

“Keep trying, son,” Ottoh said. “Your mother is going to buy us some time.”

A huge boom from below—not an explosion, but the sound of metal on metal. Ottoh looked through the ocular again, to see that a cluster of four Nihil had gathered around the front door to the house. They were positioned as if they were holding something, all four gripping it together, but the ocular’s heat setting couldn’t pick out the object. A battering ram made of cold durasteel, he guessed.



“They’re trying to break down the door,” Ottoh said.

Another boom.

“Now, Erika!” Ottoh said.

His wife pressed a control on her datapad.

Outside, Ottoh could see their four delving droids coming up out of sleep mode in the droid pen not far from the main house. Their outlines through the ocular were green and yellow—they put out a different kind of heat than the Nihil—but all were clearly visible.

The machines left the pen and moved quickly, accelerating through the yard. The delving droids were industrial machines, loud and powerful, designed to punch holes into hard ground and remove the resulting rubble. There was no way for them to move stealthily, even though the gas presumably still circulating outside probably gave them a little cover. The quartet of droids split—two heading for the group at the front door, and the rest toward the speeder.

Ottoh took a moment to appreciate the skill in what his wife was doing—simultaneously overriding the autonomous functions of four droids, taking control and making them operate in ways they were not designed to work, running them fast, guiding them via feeds from their monitor circuits on a tiny datapad display. All that complexity to manage, and each droid was moving in a straight line, unerring, right toward their targets.