Vader called on the Force, leapt, and propelled himself up to the mouth of the tunnel. Deez and the captain had both taken a knee, blaster rifles planted on their shoulders as they fired into the lyleks trying to advance down the tunnel toward them. Vader casually loosed a blast of power down the tunnel mouth, destroying the leading lyleks and pushing half a dozen more backward.
Seeing Vader, the captain shouted, “Where is the Emperor?” Deez just kept firing.
Vader turned and looked down to the floor below, where his Master, surrounded by a dozen or more lyleks, was spinning, whirling, leaping, his lightsaber moving so fast it blurred. He looked tiny amid their bulk but moved with preternatural speed, his blade stabbing and slashing and severing. He was laughing, the familiar cackle somehow audible above the sounds of the horde.
But then a score or more of lyleks lurched at him at once from all sides, leaping and climbing over one another, their tentacles a squirming net, their claws slashing, their massive chitinous bodies blocking him from Vader’s view.
A thought flashed through Vader’s mind, a stray thought, just for a moment: his Master dead, Vader ruling the Empire, the galaxy, unconstrained by the leash of an old man…
He killed the thought, leapt from the mouth of the tunnel, flipped in midair, and landed hard atop one of the lyleks. It bucked, tentacles squirming. He drove his blade down through its back and out its abdomen, killing it.
Tentacles reached for him from the left and right, and a third lylek reared up over its dead kin to get at him, but he vaulted from the carcass on which he stood and onto the back of another lylek a meter away. Again he drove his lightsaber down and through it.
“Master!” he shouted, still unable to see the Emperor in the press of the creatures.
A blast of power from somewhere under the throng of creatures drove four lyleks ten meters into the air, their bodies shattered by the force of the impact, limbs and tentacles showering down in a macabre rain. His Master stood in the center of the circle of surviving lyleks, his hair mussed, his robe torn, his lightsaber in hand, but otherwise seemingly unharmed.
Vader leapt down to his Master’s side. They took position back-to-back.
“Master,” Vader said.
“Lord Vader,” his Master responded, and chuckled. “Enjoyable, no? Did you consider allowing me to die to realize your own ambitions?”
Vader didn’t even attempt to lie. “I did, but only for a moment.”
“Good,” his Master said. “Very good.”
As if on command, the lyleks surged toward them from all sides. As one, Vader and his Master channeled the Force and unleashed blasts of power that slammed into the advancing creatures, shattering several and casting six or seven hard against the walls. Still the lyleks came on, chittering and grasping and slashing.
Vader and his Master stood back-to-back in the center of the press, their lightsabers murderous red lines that lylek limbs and tentacles and bodies could not pass. The carcasses piled up around them, a mountain of the dead, and still they came on. Soon both of them were covered in gore, lost in the Force, in their unbridled ability to kill.
Vader sensed a new danger a moment before it materialized: a lylek from somewhere in the rear of the surviving mass sprang high over the others toward him and his Master, chittering, the spikes of its legs aimed forward as though to impale. Vader answered the creature’s leap with a Force-augmented leap of his own, wielding his lightsaber in a two-handed grip, intercepting the creature in midair, and cutting it in two with the red streak of his blade.
He landed atop a dead lylek and immediately bounded back to his Master’s side. He hit the floor in a crouch, expecting to be swarmed by the remaining lyleks, but instead found them backing away from him. He soon saw why—they were making way for the approach of the queen.
“You perceived the smaller danger but not the larger,” his Master said. “Here it is now.”
—
The quiet of the forest unnerved Isval. It seemed the lylek horde had stripped it of life, or that all the creatures in it were waiting in pensive silence for whatever terrible thing might come next. The swath the lyleks had cut through the terrain would have struck her as impossible had she not seen it for herself. Uprooted trees, shattered trunks, undergrowth pounded into the dirt. And yet she knew that within a month it would be overgrown and gone, as if nothing had ever happened.
There were lessons in that, she thought.
She and Cham hustled along beside Goll, who covered ground rapidly with the path so easy to follow. Goll’s team trailed them, the sound of their bouncing gear and equipment loud in the quiet. Chewing up the kilometers gave Isval time to consider the endgame.
“What do we expect to find here?” Isval asked Cham. “Bodies?”
Cham shrugged, looked to Goll.
“If the lyleks caught them, there won’t be anything left of the bodies,” Goll said. “But there will be signs of a feeding frenzy. That’ll tell us all we need to know.”
The thought of Vader and the Emperor being torn apart by a hungry pack of Ryloth’s chief predatory animal seemed fitting somehow. Still, Isval had seen the things Vader could do—things that no one should have been able to do.
“And if there was no feeding frenzy?” she asked. “If they escaped?”
“No one escapes on foot,” Goll said.
Isval was not so sure.
Within the half hour they found the first of the lylek carcasses. The huge body lay in the undergrowth, its head missing. Isval eyed the body, which seemed all edges and spikes and points, covered in a dry, chitinous exoskeleton that looked like weathered stone and was probably sturdier than armor. Its tentacles were rubbery lengths thicker around than her arm.
“Blaster shot,” Goll said, examining the stump of the lylek’s neck. “See the charring? ’Bout the only way a blaster brings one of these down.”
“If they killed the entire horde, could you pick the trail back up?” Cham asked.
Goll looked at him in disbelief. “Cham, killing one lylek is one thing. Maybe just a lucky shot. But wiping out a horde with a blaster while on foot? That’s like trying to kill a sandstorm. It’s a force of nature. It’ll consume you and barely know you’re there.”
“Could you pick the trail back up, Goll?”
“I…yes, I think. Lot of variables, of course, but—”
“Good,” Cham said.
Soon they found more carcasses, all of them headshot.
“Getting closer,” Goll said softly. “Stay sharp.”
They came to the edge of a ravine, and all three of them stopped cold. They looked down into it for a long time, staring in shocked silence. Goll broke the quiet with a soft curse.
Dozens of lylek carcasses lay scattered about the bottom and walls of the ravine. A number of them headshot, but some other force had destroyed the rest. Legs were broken and twisted, exoskeletons shattered and cracked. One carcass lay half buried in the hillside on the opposite side of the ravine. Goll surveyed the scene, the usual furrow back in his brow.
“The horde didn’t come out of the ravine,” he said. “Lyleks nest underground. This must be an entry point.” He didn’t sound certain to Isval. “Probably a lot of holes leading down to the nest all along that side of the ravine. But I don’t…”
“Was there a feeding frenzy here?” Cham asked.
Isval knew the answer before Goll said it.
“I don’t…no, I don’t think so,” he said. “Come on.”
Isval hesitated a moment as a mental image formed in her brain of lyleks bubbling up out of holes in the ground, trapping them in the bottom of the ravine.
“Stay up here and cover the approaches,” she said to Goll’s people, who lined the edge of the ravine, staring down in wonder.
“Stay sharp,” Goll ordered them, and started down the side of the ravine, using what remained of the undergrowth to keep his footing as he descended. Cham and Isval followed.
The creek that once ran th
rough the ravine had been churned into a paste of mud ichor by the lylek horde. Eyeing the carcasses of the dead, Isval could not imagine what Vader and the Emperor had done to break apart the lyleks so thoroughly.
“Grenades?” Goll asked, though Isval saw no sign of charring or burning.
“Must be something we haven’t seen,” Cham said.
“These are apex predators,” Goll said in disbelief. “We fortify our cities out of fear of facing a handful of these. And this group of four, facing a horde on foot? These are apex predators,” he repeated.
Vader is the apex predator, Isval thought but didn’t dare say aloud.
Goll studied the churned dirt around what appeared to be a collapsed tunnel entrance. A massive tangle of tree roots and the hind end of a lylek stuck out of the rubble, the rest of it buried under the collapse.
“A lot of activity around this tunnel,” Goll said, studying the ground. “Like they were trying to get at something in there. Probably Vader and his group retreated into this tunnel, then collapsed it behind them to cut off pursuit.” He backed off, looking up, left, and right. “There will be a lot of other tunnels nearby that lead down into the nest. The whole hill is probably riddled with them, going down a long way. They wouldn’t have escaped by collapsing this tunnel. The lyleks would have come at them from another tunnel.”
“You’re telling us Vader is underground?” Cham said.
“I’m telling you he went underground,” Goll said. “Probably the rest of the horde did, too.”
“What remains of it,” Isval said, looking at the carcasses.
“If they come out,” Cham asked, “will they have to come out here?”
“That’s a big if, Cham.”
“But if they do?” Isval persisted.
Goll shook his head. “I’ve seen computer models of lylek nests. They’re labyrinthine. There are scores of entry and exit points. If the Emperor and Vader somehow manage to stay alive down there, they could come out anywhere within, say, a ten-kilometer radius of here. Sorry, Cham. I think we just lost them.”
Cham’s skin darkened, a sign of his frustration. Isval was clenching a fist.
Cham activated his comlink. “Kallon, Faylin, we think Vader and the Emperor are underground. They may come up anywhere within a fifteen-kilometer radius of our current location. Get up in the air and start a scan. You find anything at all, sound off immediately.”
“If there are any ships out here, they could detect us,” Kallon told him.
“I know,” Cham said. “But do it.”
After Kallon and Faylin acknowledged the order, Cham took the encrypted comlink he used with Belkor and repeated the same thing. Isval could only hear Cham’s half of the conversation.
“They could be, Belkor, but I doubt it.” Cham looked at the many dead lyleks, the collapsed tunnel. “You’re not seeing what I’m seeing here. Just get up in the air and scan. I know. Just do it.” He cut the connection.
“They could already be out and on the move, Cham,” Goll pointed out. “That ten-klick estimate is just an estimate.”
“I realize that,” Cham said, and cleared his throat. “Options? What else do we have?”
Goll shrugged.
“We could go down after them,” Isval offered.
“That is not an option,” Goll said.
“We don’t have gear for that, and it’s too dangerous,” Cham said.
“None of us would come out,” Goll said. “I guarantee that.”
Isval’s irritation with the situation boiled over into anger at Goll. “Are you also guaranteeing that Vader won’t come out, then? That they’re dead down there?”
Goll put his hands on his hips, looked around at all the dead lyleks, and shook his head. “Not after seeing this, no. I don’t know what could kill them, if not this.”
His admission deflated the bubble of Isval’s anger.
Goll looked up at the sky through the openings in the forest’s thick canopy. “Wind’s bringing rain. Smell it?”
As if on cue, thunder rumbled.
“What kind of men are we after here, Cham?” Goll asked. “This is like nothing I’ve ever seen, or even heard of.”
Cham just shook his head, lekku waving. Isval had only the one answer, and she still wouldn’t say it out loud.
Apex predators. That’s what kind of men they were after.
—
Vader and the Emperor stood in the shadow of the queen’s towering form. Her respiration was audible in the sudden lull, loud and wet. Each of her six legs was a meter and a half in circumference, and the spikes they ended in looked like sword blades. Her squirming tentacles—four instead of two—were ten meters long, as thick as a man’s waist, and ended in glistening points of chitin that leaked some kind of ichor, or perhaps poison. Her mouth could easily bite a person in half.
She advanced slowly, tentacles squirming, the ends of her legs striking the ground with a clipped, staccato rhythm. She lowered her head and hissed as she came on. Her mandibles worked the empty air.
Vader’s Master wore the same knowing half smile he seemed always to wear. “Shall we begin, Lord Vader?”
Vader answered only with the sound of his breathing.
The queen exploded into motion and so, too, did Vader and the Emperor. A tentacle lashed at Vader and he leapt over it, sidestepping a second tentacle, and chopped down with his blade. He missed as the queen snapped the tentacle back, his blade putting a charred furrow in the stone of the floor. He leapt high over her, flipping at the apex of his trajectory, and as he descended he took his blade in a two-handed grip and pointed it downward to impale her.
She lurched sidewise and lashed out with a tentacle, which struck him squarely and knocked him to the floor. She turned as though to advance on him, but his Master sprang before her, jumping, twirling, and ducking under the rapid swings of her tentacles and the spikes of her legs. His lightsaber slashed rapidly at every opening, striking the tentacles but scarring them only, not severing them.
The queen lunged toward his Master and he flipped backward, landing a few paces away. Vader jumped to his feet, spinning out of the way of her attempt to stab him with the chitinous spike at the end of one of her tentacles. He found himself face-to-face with five lyleks, all of them hissing, tentacles squirming. He stabbed one through the head, back-flipped high over another, hit the ground, and severed its rear legs.
To his right his Master gestured and, with the Force, lifted two of the lyleks from the floor. Vader and his Master exchanged no words, but each knew precisely what the other intended. With a casual throwing motion, the Emperor flung the two lyleks in Vader’s direction, their legs and tentacles squirming, bellies exposed. Slashing and turning a rapid spin, Vader bisected both of them; the four gory pieces that remained fell to the floor in a heap.
From above, blaster shots slammed into the lylek that remained before him, with several shots bouncing off its carapace before one finally caught it in the head and put it down. Vader glanced up to see Deez kneeling in the tunnel’s mouth, blaster rifle lowered, firing down into the melee.
Vader reflexively slashed with his lightsaber as another lylek scrabbled toward him. The blade took off the legs and left the creature squealing and spasming. He saw his Master dodging the rapid, repeated strikes of the queen’s tentacles. The Emperor twisted and spun and leapt, slashing with his lightsaber where he could, and where the blade bit into the thick tentacles it opened black gashes that leaked a thick ichor. The pain seemed only to make her angrier.
Vader leapt high and landed at his Master’s side. The queen roared and loosed a flurry of strikes. Working in tandem, they parried her blows, counterstruck, opened dozens of holes in her tentacles, their blades spinning blurs before them. Her very bulk slowly pushed them backward, and from time to time they had to turn their attention to a lylek that rushed them or tried to jump them from the side. Moving almost as one, the two Sith Lords turned and spun around an unspoken central point, parrying, slash
ing, killing. Frustrated, the queen rushed toward them with surprising speed. Her huge body slammed into them both, knocking them backward. Quick as a lightning strike, she struck with snapping mandibles…
The Emperor fell flat to the floor to avoid the bite and she slammed her legs down at him like so many pikes, each blow chipping the stone of the floor. He rolled and spun underneath the mountain of her body while Vader slashed at her tentacles, the ichor from her many wounds spraying in all directions. She was trying simply to smash his Master with her mass, but Vader perceived her intent, raised a hand, and held her up, straining, grunting for the fraction of a moment that it took for his Master to roll out from under her. And then they were at her again, their blades humming and cutting. She hissed, wounded tentacles flailing, legs stomping, and bounded backward in a crouch.
“Emperor!” Deez shouted from above, and fired at the queen as rapidly as he could pull the trigger.
The shots bounced off her carapace and ricocheted wildly around the chamber. Vader used his lightsaber to deflect one into the face of the lylek nearest him, killing it. Beside him, his Master split the head of a lylek that lunged at him. Vader decided to finish matters.
“Master,” he said, and nothing more.
“Go,” the Emperor said.
Vader sprinted forward and leapt high. The moment he reached the apex of his jump, his Master seized him with the Force and flung him the rest of the way so that he landed atop the queen’s back.
Immediately she bucked, tentacles flailing, and he drove his lightsaber down into her back. To his surprise, the blade only bit partially and then slipped to the side. She screamed and hissed with agony. He grasped it two-handed again, preparing another blow, but she reared up hard, bucking, and flung him to the floor. He landed near his Master, who grabbed him by the arm and heaved him to his feet with uncanny strength.
She whirled around at them and whipped her tentacles at Vader and his Master, following with a lunge forward and a vicious bite at Vader. They sidestepped her attacks, once more falling into their usual rhythm, and crosscut at her head with their lightsabers. Both blades struck home. The Emperor tore a long gash in the armored exoskeleton of her head, and Vader destroyed one eye. She shrieked and reared backward, eye socket leaking gore, tentacles whipping wildly. Deez continued to pour down fire at her, but the shots appeared to do her little or no harm. Still, the distress of their queen drove the remaining lyleks into a frenzy, and they charged from all sides.