By sunrise, they’d found a clearing, halfway down the mountain, dotted with wild grasses. Life was everywhere in the galaxy, even here. It was the first good sign. Above, Omencontinued to burn. No need to wonder where above them the ship was, Korsin thought. Not while they could follow the smoke.

Now, walking back into the afternoon crowd—less an encampment than a gathering—Korsin knew he never need wonder where his people were, either. Not while his nose worked. “Now I know why we kept the Massassi on their own level,” he said to no one.

“Charming,” came a response from over his shoulder. “I should say they are not very happy with you,either.” Ravilan was a Red Sith, pureblooded as they came. He was quartermaster and keeper of the Massassi, the nasty lumbering bipeds that the Sith prized as instruments of terror on the battlefield. At the moment the Massassi didn’t seem so formidable.

Korsin followed Ravilan into the fiendish circle, made even less pleasant by the stench of vomit. Florid mon-

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sters two and three meters tall sprawled on the ground, heaving and coughing.

“Maybe some kind of pulmonary edema,” Seelah said, passing around purified-air canisters salvaged from an emergency pack. Before connecting with Devore and securing a place on his team, she’d been a battlefield medic—though Korsin couldn’t tell from her bedside manner, at least with Massassi. She barely touched the wheezing giant. “We’re no longer at elevation, so this should subside. Probably normal.”

To her left, another Massassi hacked mightily—and mutely regarded the result: a handful of dripping scar tissue. Korsin looked at the quartermaster and asked drily, “Is that normal?”

“You know it’s not,” Ravilan snarled.

From across the clearing, Devore Korsin charged in, shoving his son into Seelah’s hands before she was done wiping them. He seized the brute’s massive wrist, looking for himself. His eyes flared at his brother. “But Massasi are tougher than anything!”

“Anything they can punch, kick, or strangle,” Korsin said. An alien planet, however, was an alien planet.

They hadn’t had time to do a bioscan. And all the equipment was high above. Devore followed Seelah, backing away from the sickly Massassi.

Eighty of the creatures had survived the crash. Korsin learned that Ravilan’s assistants were burning a third of those survivors, even then, over the hillside. Whatever unseen thing it was on this planet that was killing the Massassi, it was doing it quickly. Ravilan showed him the stinking pyre.

“They’re not far enough away,” Korsin said.

“From whom?” Ravilan responded. “Is that depression a permanent camp? Should we remove to a different mountain?”

“Enough, Rav.”

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“No witty comeback? I’m surprised. You at least plan thatfar ahead.”

Korsin had fenced with Ravilan on earlier missions, but now wasn’t the time. “I said, enough.We’ve sur-veyed below. You saw it. There’s nowhere to go.” There were beaches at the bottom of the bluff, but they terminated against the oily cliffs that began the next mountain in the chain. And going farther along the chain meant trips through tangles of razor-sharp bram-bles. “We don’t need an expedition. We’re not staying.”

“I should hope not,” Ravilan said, his own nose turned by the smell of the fires. “But your brother—I mean, Captain Korsin’s other son—feels we shouldn’t wait to return.”

Yaru Korsin stopped. “I have the transmitter codes.

It’s my call to make.” He looked up at the second, more distant smoky plume far above. “When it’s safe.”

“Yes, by all means. When it’s safe.”

The commander hadn’t wanted Devore on the mission. Years earlier, he had been relieved when his half brother had abandoned a naval career, drifting into the Sith’s mineralogical service. Power and riches were more easily had there, searching for gems and Force-imbued crystals. With their father’s sponsorship, Devore had become a specialist in using plasma weapons and scanning equipment. The recent conflict with the Jedi found him in high demand—and assigned, with his team, to Omen. Korsin wondered whom he’d played a joke on to deserve that. He’d been told Devore officially answered to him, but that would have been a first.

Not even Sith Lords were that powerful.

“You should have kept us in orbit!”

“We were never inorbit!”

Korsin recognized the voice of the navigator, Marcom, coming from over the dusty rise. He already knew the other one.

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The old man was trying to push his way out of the crowd when Korsin topped the hill at a full run.

Devore’s miners weren’t letting Boyle go. “You don’t know my job!” he yelled. “I did all that I could! Oh, what’s the use talking to . . . ”

Just as Korsin reached the clearing, the crowd surged forward, as if pulled down a drain. One sickeningly familiar crackle followed another.

“No!”

Korsin saw the lightsaber first, rolling toward his feet when he breached the crowd. His father’s old helmsman lay ahead, gutted. Next to Seelah and Jariad stood Devore, his lightsaber glowing crimson in the lengthening shadows.

“The navigator attacked first,” Seelah said.

The commander gawked.

“What differencedoes it make?” Korsin charged into the center, lifting the loose lightsaber into his hand with the Force. Devore stood his ground, smiling gently and keeping his lightsaber burning. His dark eyes had a wild look, a familiar one. He was shaking a little, but not from fear—not fear Yaru Korsin could feel. The commander knew it was something else, something more dangerous. He turned Marcom’s unlit weapon tip-down and shook it.

“That was our navigator, Devore! What if the star charts don’t work?”

“I can find our way back,” Devore said smartly.

“You’ll have to!” Korsin grew conscious of the mix around him. Gold-uniformed miners in the circle, yes, but bridge crew, too. A red-faced Sith—not Ravilan, but one of his cronies. He was undeterred. “This is not going to do any good, any of you. We wait here until it’s safe to return to the ship. That’s all.”

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child wailed. “How long must we last—until it’s safe enough for you?”

Korsin stared at her and breathed deeply. He threw Marcom’s lightsaber to the ground. “Tell Ravilan there’s one more for the pyre.” As a begrudging crowd gave him room to exit, he said, “We go when I say. That ship blows up, or tips into the ocean, and we really will have prob-lems. We go when I say.”

The world spun. As Korsin stepped backward, Gloyd stepped forward, keeping a wary yellow eye on the grumbling masses. He’d missed the fun.

“Commander.”

They looked past each other, watching Sith in all directions. “Not really happy here, Gloyd.”

“Then you’ll want to hear this,” the hulking Houk rasped. “As I see it, we’ve got three choices. We get these people off this rock in whatever will fly. Or we look for cover and hide until they all kill one another.”

“What’s the third choice?”

Gloyd’s painted face crinkled. “There isn’t one. But I figured it’d cheer you up if you thought there was.”

“I hate you.”

“Great. You’ll make someone a fine Sith someday.”

Korsin had known Gloyd since his first command. The Houk was the kind of bridge officer every Sith captain wanted: more interested in his own job than in taking someone else’s. Gloyd was smart to spare himself the trouble. Or maybe he just loved blowing things up too much to want to leave the tactical station.