A hot, dry wind howled across the barren sands of Ponemah, rattling the rusty shutters of the Weathered Worm Cantina. The building stood alone on a rocky outcrop, one of the rare
stable points on the planet's shifting dunes. Actual settlements were few and far between here, for there was little decent ground to support them. But few people made permanent homes here anyway. This was the near-lawless edge of Alliance space, the last stop before the Mawite frontier. Only the planet's irrelevance, lacking resources or any significant population, had spared it from the war raging only a few systems away. Something for the local scavs and pirates to be grateful for.
For them, the war was
opportunity. Every battle left behind drifting wrecks, full of scrap to be scavenged and resold. Every Alliance military unit deployed to combat the Brotherhood's relentless advance meant fewer defenders for merchant ships and isolated colonies, easier prey now for marauding freebooters. And every patrol focused on preventing Mawite raids was one less out looking for smugglers. Business was good, and the Weathered Worm was unusually crowded, all manner of unsavory characters populating its smoky booths and rickety tables. Most of them were just simple men and women trying to make their way in the universe. Others came with more
sinister purpose.
At one of the back booths sat Onas Korv, a heavily-tattooed Shorak mercenary. She nursed her tankard of... whatever this
swill was, just sipping the stuff so that she could stay alert. Onas was here because she could go where cowled Heathen Priests and war-painted tribal marauders could not; she wasn't obviously Mawite, and that allowed her to blend into this crowd of scum. She didn't mind the errand, a chance to get out of Brotherhood space. All the dark temples and blood sacrifices and fanatical chanting got to be a real
drag after a while. It was nice to be around people who'd kill you in order to steal your boots, rather than because their dark gods said so.
Setting down the watery drink, Onas drummed her fingers on the grimy table. Her contact was
late, and that was irritating. Every minute that ticked by increased the chance that one of these drunk sleemos was going to come make a pass at her, and then she would have to break his fingers, and probably his head for good measure. She'd enjoy that
tremendously, but she wasn't supposed to call attention to herself, and starting a barfight might scare off the smuggler she was supposed to meet. If the guy was ever going to show up
anyway, that was. The Shorak leaned back in her rusty chair, apparently relaxed... but under the table she had one hand on her blaster.
If this took too much longer, she was going to start some trouble just for fun, to keep this from being a wasted trip.
The lone door scraped open, its servos whining loudly - someone
really needed to grease those things, but it was probably never going to happen. A cloud of sand and a wave of arid heat drifted inside, along with a tall, lanky figure - a Muun, dressed in typical spacer's garb. Nobody looked up as he walked in; nobody here wanted to be noticed, so nobody here put any effort into noticing anybody else. Onas leaned forward again, setting the front legs of her chair back down on the ground. This was her guy; apparently he'd finally decided to pull his thumb out of his... whatever sphincter Muuns had and show up.
About time. Onas watched him make his way inside.
The smuggler gave no sign that he'd seen her. He strolled over to the bar and ordered some bizarre cocktail off the scrawled list of specials, no doubt some watered-down crap that didn't actually contain any of the advertised liquors, and slapped down a handful of wupiupi; Alliance credits were no good out here, or so many of the locals would tell you, but just about any
hard currency would do. The grizzled old Devaronian bartender bit the coin to make sure it was real, then grunted and shoved the drink across the bar. The smuggler took a swig, made a face, and then set it back down. He waited a few moments longer, lounging against the counter, before looking over at Onas.
"This seat taken?" he asked, sidling over to her table. He sat down before she had a chance to answer.
"You're late," the Shorak told him, fixing him with the glare that had made many a would-be suitor chit his britches. The Muun shrugged. "Can't rush perfection. Patrols may be thinner out here, but they're thicker than sand flies on a bantha back in the Core. And it's not like I'm moving death sticks here. This is
serious contraband." Opening his jacket in the gesture typical of street spice dealers all over the galaxy, the smuggler produced a thin package wrapped in brown paper. "It's not every day I move something that was stolen from the fething Jedi Temple."
"Keep your voice down, fool," Onas hissed. The Alliance SIS had eyes and ears
everywhere.
The Muun just grinned. "Relax. I activated a
sheer silence bubble as soon as I sat down. I'm a
professional, remember?" He set the package down on the table, sliding it toward Onas. "Go ahead. Take a look." The Shorak merc reached over and carefully picked up the package, untying the twine that held the paper in place with cautious fingers. The contents were
incredibly old, and her employers would quite literally kill her if they were damaged. The paper fell away, revealing an actual paper
book, a rarity in the modern galaxy. It was only a copy of the original text, which dated back more than
thirty-five thousand years, but it was an impressively ancient copy.
Emblazoned on the cover was the long-winded title:
The Gree, and Everything I Have Found of Them In the Old City.
"Took a while to track down," the smuggler said, wearing an (admittedly well-earned) chit-eating grin. "A lot of relics were lost
when the Mawites sacked the temple on Coruscant, buried under a few hundred tons of duracrete and dead padawans. Fortunately for you, it's
Coruscant. Plenty of local
entrepreneurs blended in with the disaster crews when the raid was over, grabbed whatever they could from the ruined bits. And that's how I was able to track down this little beauty." Onas nodded.
"You did good. You'll be well-paid for this." And he
would, well enough to buy himself a whole new ship if he wanted. The Maw took good care of its smugglers.
They
needed to, since being at war with the whole galaxy pretty much ruled out all legitimate trade.
"Those are the magic words," the Muun replied, showing off his
very white teeth. "What you want this old book for, I can hardly even imagine. Maybe your prophet is writing a dissertation on early Je'daii history, or something." Onas carefully placed the book in the airtight document case she'd brought with her, then slid that into her unremarkable leatheris satchel. Better not to draw any attention to her precious cargo.
"I have no idea," she told him, standing to leave,
"and I don't care. What matters is that my bosses want it, and we got it for them. That's as far as my interest goes." The smuggler shrugged. "Fair enough. Just one more galactic mystery, I guess."
"We'll be in touch when we need you again," Onas said. The door squealed open for her, and she was gone.
On the far southern edge of the continent of
Talss, thousands of miles from the ruins of Kaleth, mountains and rolling plains gave way to the bleak expanse of the Red Desert. Here the wind scoured the land of all plant life as a lash scours a man's back of flesh, leaving only an endless plain of sun-baked sand. Precious little could live in this wretched place - only burrowing things and cave-dwellers, for any creature that spent its days exposed to the full force of the wind and the roasting heat, so intense that some sections of sand fused into
glass, would surely perish. Unless, of course, they came equipped with
DuraShelters and
coolth backpacks, and traveled mostly by night.
That was the strategy Sarnai and her scouts had adopted, anyway. They had been wise choices for this mission. Long before she'd fought as a rough rider, long before she'd become
a veteran of the brutal Battle of Nirauan, Sarnai had wandered the far western steppes of
Tiantang with her Kagan-Jin clan. These harsh steppes lay along the edge of the nigh-impenetrable Takalim Desert, and that had become their refuge of last resort. Whenever their raids pissed off the Jin Empire enough that they had to disappear and lay low for a while, the clan rode straight into the dunes of the Takalim, where sandstorms would choke the repulsorlift engines of their pursuers and cloud their sight.
The Red Desert was not quite like the Takalim, though. The heat was even more intense, the air even drier, the land barren of even the hardy cacti and lichens upon which the clan had relied to survive. Their orbaks wouldn't have lasted a day here; their wooly coats would have condemned them to a swift death by heat exhaustion. Not that they could have gotten orbaks here anyway. Sarnai and her scouts had slipped in during the Battle of Teta, joining the general coreward press of refugees, then masquerading as pilgrims en route to the holy sites of
Tythos Ridge. Taking animals along would have raised too many questions, so they'd had to leave their mounts at home.
They hadn't bothered purchasing vehicles, either. Speeder engines tended to
explode in this heat, or clog with sand.
So they'd entered the desert on foot, carrying packs full of survival rations and water, wearing suits that recycled their perspiration. Ordinarily this would be a fool's errand. The Je'daii Frontiersmen of old had scouted the desert tens of thousands of years ago, and they had found little that was worth venturing into this deadly land for. The only site of interest, ancient even in
their time, was the
Old City... but that had quickly been declared to be forbidden ground by the Je'daii Council, with further exploration of it prohibited. Only one scout had dared, one who had been labeled a madman by his peers:
Osamael Or. He'd vanished in the ruins, but his account of his travels had survived.
That account was called
The Gree, and Everything I Have Found of Them In the Old City.
And a copy of that account was clutched in Sarnai's hand.
How the Prophet had become aware of the book and the secrets it contained, Sarnai did not know. It was rumored that he had once studied the Jedi arts, long before the Avatars had bestowed their revelation upon him. Perhaps he had learned of it there, or perhaps the gods themselves had whispered it in his ear. Whatever the truth, the Dark Voice had spared no expense in obtaining a copy of Or's ancient book. For the Je'daii Frontiersman had uncovered something in the depths of the Old City, something even more special than the ancient structures of the Gree. In his time, the
Stargazer cult were the only ones to recognize its significance, until they were stopped by Je'daii Rangers.
He called it a "step to the stars", but Sarnai knew what that really meant: a functional Gree Hypergate.
It had taken them two weeks of wandering through the desert, weathering the intense heat and wind, fending off attacks by vicious flocks of leather-winged
blood spites, but they had found the ruins. Or's account had guided them, telling them where to begin and where to travel. They had let the stars guide them, just as he had, since the shifting sands contained virtually no landmarks... and even fewer that had endured for more than thirty five thousand years. More than once they'd strayed off course, and it had taken days to find their way again. But the ancient and colossal ziggurats of the lost Gree city now rose up before them. They'd found it in time to carry out the Mawite plan.
Of course, a hypergate would be of no use to them without a way to activate and control it. The technology of the Gree was so ancient and complicated that even their own descendants had forgotten how to operate it, and the Stargazer cult had ultimately failed in their quest to use it to escape Tython. The Brotherhood had no idea of its original destination, or how to link it to the ancient network. But that was not Sarnai's problem to solve, so she put it out of her mind. She did not -
could not - know that the Mawites did not even intend to
try to activate the gate in the traditional way. They had a secret weapon to control and link hypergates, one they'd tested on Teta.
One that, back on shadowed Mar'Zambul, had just been reforged and reawakened.
"Now we just have to make it past the Je'daii Council's traps and find the gate itself," Sarnari murmured. The sheer
scale of the city filled her with awe. Without Or's book as a guide, they could have spent
months wandering through the place, lost among its towering pyramids and infinite, winding corridors. But they did not have time to waste. In just two weeks, the Mawite invasion of Tython would begin, and they needed to have made all the necessary preparations by then. If they failed, the Brotherhood would fail also; they would never have the reinforcements they needed to protect the Dark Voice's holy ritual. But if they succeeded, well... surely glory would be heaped upon them.
"Into the ruins," Sarnai commanded, and her weary team of scouts obeyed.
The chanting of
Darth Ptolemis
and the strange digital chime mingled for a moment, one frequency in the Force finding another, even across countless light years of distance. In the vast expanse of space, even one as powerful as a fallen Angel of Omni needed help finding a single destination world amid the endless void. But now the distance had been judged, the endpoints established. Far from the battlefield, far to the south, ancient ruins that had long lain silent thrummed with power for the first time in millennia. The connection between two disparate points in spacetime was slowly gaining strength, building and building like a tidal wave.
And soon, very soon, that wave would
crest... and with great violence break upon the shore.
Vorm
's dishonorable conduct, she would have been needed to do so instead; it was best that a vod took advantage of the opportunity to engage in battle with such a creature, however.
Sergeant Omen
|
Romul Saxon
|
Varik Awaud
|
Gwyneira Vizsla
|
Vulcan Krayt
|
Fenn Stag
|
Shakka Bralor
| Kaz Krayt 
SCAR
|
Kralmus Orr
|
Onrai
