Light of the Jedi(67)
Now what? she thought.
Erika had an unconscious husband and two children to save somehow, and—
She remembered their pursuers. Help, maybe, and on its way.
She reached up to grasp the edge of the cart and pulled herself up, looking back. Surely they had to be close—and they were. The delay from Ottoh’s trick with the steelees had done its job. They couldn’t be more than five hundred meters back.
She could see them now—three figures, riding well, riding fast—these were experienced wranglers, nothing like their captors.
Erika wanted to yell out, to tell them they were riding into a trap, but she didn’t think they could hear her, and didn’t want to do anything that would cause the Nihil to decide a seventy-five percent profit margin would be fine after all.
Then something happened.
Three lines of light blossomed from the riders coming up fast behind them: one gold, one blue, one green, and Erika realized what was happening, who these people were.
“By the light,” she breathed. “They’re Jedi.”
“You guys ready to ride the storm?” Kassav shouted.
He held up a bulb of smash, bright blue and soft, with a slim nozzle at one end, designed to make the drug accessible to just about every type of gas exchange anatomy in the galaxy. Whether you had a nose, a trunk, stomata, a proboscis, or just some weird hole in your face, you could use a smashbulb. Which was good, because his team had all those options and more.
The crew of the New Elite lifted their own bulbs, anticipatory grins on every face. Music vibrated every surface; big, booming wreckpunk, where every instrument the bands used was made from the re-forged wreckage of crashed starships.
Kassav took a good, long puff, and boom, his mind lit up. Everything was sharper, brighter. He could do this. He could. He could do this. He could do it all.
He watched as his crew did the same—a few ran the smash straight into the gas filters of their masks, a neat trick that intensified the effects. Saw the energy ripple through them, that charge, that rush, that sugar candy hit that made everything glow and buzz and hiss. He dropped his empty bulb on the deck and grinned.
“Feels good, don’t it?” he shouted, spitting the words. “Feels like the Nihil, right?”
His people roared. Some were twitching in time to the music. Some were just twitching.
“Okay—you all enjoy—give it a minute, but then take the rounder. We need to be sharp for this. Let’s ride the storm, not let the storm ride us, yeah?”
By way of example—you needed to provide an example from time to time as a leader—he reached into his tunic and pulled out a small orange-and-yellow pill. He held it up, showing it to his crew, then popped it into his mouth and bit down. Almost immediately, the smash high took on a new, swirling quality, like waves in a storm-tossed sea. Huge, powerful, you needed to watch yourself—but these waves…you could surf.
It reminded him of hyperspace, a little. Not the normal kind, but the weird roads of Marchion Ro’s Paths. Kassav turned to look out the bridge’s viewport, watching as the hyperlane rolled on past. Tunnels built from endless ribbons of light, many colors, washing and tossing and weaving into one another. There was some meaning there, but he wasn’t smart enough to figure it out.
He had no idea where the Paths came from. Marchion Ro was cagey about it, never giving too many details, and his father had been the same way. Kassav sometimes wanted to find out the secret at blasterpoint or, even better, at the edge of a blade, but the Ros were not stupid people. Or at least, Asgar hadn’t been. He knew what he had with the Paths, and knew people would want it. And while Marchion Ro wasn’t his father, not even close, he’d inherited all the safeguards Asgar set up. The Gaze Electric, those gnarly guard droids he used…it was hard to get close to Marchion. He’d made it clear that the Paths themselves had their own safeguards, too. If he died, so would they. That hadn’t happened when Asgar died, but then again, Marchion didn’t have a son to whom he could pass the family business.
But it wasn’t just starships and murder droids protecting Marchion Ro. It was also the structure his father had insisted the Nihil adopt when he’d brought them the Paths so many years ago. Before that, the group was much smaller, barely a gang, really. It kept its operations to a tiny corner of the Rim, close to Thull’s Shroud by Belsavis, pulling off whatever little jobs it could. Asgar Ro had shown up one day and offered them the Paths, in exchange for a third of the take of any operations that used them. But that wasn’t all—he wanted a vote, too.
Any jobs that used the Paths required a full vote of the three Tempest Runners, plus the Eye, and any tie vote went the Eye’s way. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, but it meant that he, Pan Eyta, and Lourna Dee were always against one another in a way, always courting the Eye’s favor to get Paths. In theory, they could all team up to try to go after Marchion, but there was too much bad blood. Most of the time, Kassav could barely be in the same room with Lourna Dee and Pan Eyta, much less contemplate sharing the throne with them.
Marchion was all alone, and should be completely vulnerable…but somehow, he wasn’t. He was protected, by the system his much smarter father had set up. It was annoying…but it worked.
Hell, Kassav had copied a lot of Asgar’s ideas for his own Tempest.