Chapter Text
It was as hot as the perpetual summer on Korriban's blasted surface inside the elevator, and it was getting hotter.
Vullen surreptitiously used the sleeve of his robe to mop some of the sweat from his brow, then glanced across at the foreman, who was staring straight ahead, pretending not to notice. Sith weren't supposed to sweat.
But then, you're not much of a Sith, are you, Vullen?
Despite the heat of the elevator, he felt his face grow even hotter as the remembered words rung in his ears; the parting remark of Darth Crucis, accompanied by a careless gesture of dismissal, with which he'd been sent on this mission. Vullen had long ago grown resigned to not being much of a Sith - 'living proof that the adage that only the strongest make it off Korriban alive is a fallacy', as Crucis had once described him - and since being Sith cut you off from being anything else, that made Vullen not much of anything. But coming from Crucis - or Torslan, as he had been known back in the days when they were acolytes together - the words would never lose their sting.
Vullen thought of Crucis as a friend, because a world in which Crucis was not his friend was a terrifying one.
Someone like him, too Force-sensitive to be ignored and yet unable to attain more than a rudimentary grasp of most of the Sith arts, should never have made it off Korriban alive. It was down to Torslan - Crucis - that he had. Everything that Vullen struggled hopelessly to perform, Torslan grasped with ease, gliding through the lightsaber forms as effortlessly as the rocks he lifted sailed overhead. The pureblood shouldn't even have deigned to dirty his blade with Vullen's internal organs; it would have been left to one of the weaker acolytes, jostling desperately for a position in the middle of the pack, to eliminate him as they all battled for the chance to become full Sith.
Fortunately for Vullen, his mother was a prominent executive at one of the Empire's bigger pharmaceutical corporations, and she was devoted to the cause of her son's survival. She had spent much of her fortune arranging for certain substances to be smuggled to Vullen on Korriban, and Torslan had been quick to grasp the possibilities. Even at the Sith Academy, the death of another acolyte by violence attracted some sort of investigation, but poisoning had such a pleasant plausible deniability about it. In exchange for free use of Vullen's stash of chemicals, Torslan had ensured Vullen's survival. Even now that Torslan was Darth Crucis, a rising star of the Sphere of Technology, he hadn't forgotten Vullen, and could always be relied upon to contact his old friend, should there be a certain kind of work to be done.
A task that shouldn't tax even your capabilities, Crucis had called it.
'Tell me again,' Vullen said now, breaking the silence in the thick, hot air of the elevator, 'how many men have died in the past three months.'
'Seventeen, lord.'
'And what is your usual rate of attrition when it comes to manpower?'
Vullen wasn't looking at the foreman, but he heard the unmistakable sound of someone trying to swallow without enough saliva. 'We average three deaths a month, lord. Unless there's a big cave-in, or an epidemic among the workers.'
'Has there been a cave-in or an epidemic in the past three months?'
'No, lord.'
Vullen knew that he didn't cut a particularly intimidating figure, with his Sith robes failing to conceal his ever-increasing girth and his plump face shining with sweat; he knew he looked more like a prosperous merchant than a feared agent of the Dark Council. Still, the fear was rolling off the foreman in waves. A Sith was a Sith, after all, and the foreman - what was his name? Meckley, that was it - knew how little room for manoeuvre there was in his agreement with the Empire. As long as the foreman kept the ebonium ore flowing, he had free reign on this infernal planet. But if that flow was interrupted - as it had been by the recent spate of deaths - then there was nowhere else for the blame to land.
Some Sith would have executed Meckley in front of his workers, promoted one of them to foreman in his place, and left without ever getting the hem of their robes dusty. But Crucis needed this problem to actually be solved, needed the ore to flow uninterrupted into the maw of his labs and testing centres. And failure was no more an option for Vullen than it was for the foreman.
Or rather, it carried the same penalty.
Vullen couldn't sense any guilt from Meckley, though - beyond the bedrock level of basic guilt that anyone emitted in the presence of a Sith, that was. It was possible that it was there and Vullen just wasn't sensing it, but it had never made any sense for the foreman to be involved in the deaths of his men. Nobody went into ebonium mining because they expected to live long - nobody went into ebonium mining if they had any other choice - but the work was dangerous and difficult enough without Meckley murdering his own miners.
The elevator finally juddered to a halt with a lengthy shriek of tortured metal, and Vullen's anxiety jumped another notch. He was not particularly claustrophobic and caves had never frightened him much, but being five hundred feet beneath the planet's surface with the only route back to the surface a return trip in this dilapidated industrial elevator was nobody's idea of a good time.
Meckley stepped forward with a muttered apology, and began twisting the crank that would open the doors. There was another long, rusty protest from the mechanism, and the elevator doors slowly pulled apart, inch by unwilling inch.
Vullen stepped out of the elevator, drawing a deep breath - and immediately wished he hadn't.
As hot and airless as it had been inside the elevator, it was even worse down here. The air was scorching and foul-smelling, partly from the gases that seeped up from the planet's core through each tunnel they opened, but mainly from the stink emitted by the fifty or so humanoids who occupied the cavern.
Vullen had somehow imagined solitude, loneliness, down here in the dark, but the cavern boiled with people, too many of them, sweating and jostling each other like maggots breeding in a wound. Miners had been digging, ever deeper, for ebonium on this planet for centuries, and nobody was going to waste time hollowing out living space for those miners, even now that the diggings were far too deep for it to be an efficient use of energy to send anything besides ore up in the elevator. As a result, a cavern no more than thirty feet across at its widest point was being used as both a base of operations for mining and as living space - not that anything that could be done down here could really be called living.
A whistle sounded, oddly muffled as if the air choked noise along with everybody who breathed it, and the labourers left off what they were doing, scurrying to form ragged lines as if preparing for inspection. With the people clustered in the centre of the cavern, Vullen had a clearer view of the rest of it. The black mouths of tunnels yawned from the walls, surrounded by pulleys, chains and other machinery; two super-drills, easily recognisable from the cones that protruded from their bases, stood up against a wall, as smeared with grime as everything else. A line of carts, some filled already with ore, others waiting, stood near the elevator. There were no shelters, no tents, no furniture beyond what could be fashioned from crates; it would be too hot to sleep with a blanket, but he could see where the miners had laid out little spaces for themselves, demarcated by tools and pitiful little heaps of belongings. The air-circulation units kept the oxygen level and the temperature at levels which were just about liveable for most humanoids, but the rank smell of so many living in such a small space was so rancid, so potent it almost made Vullen gag.
And from this cavern, the miners probed their way deeper and deeper into the planet, hewing tunnels painfully into the rock, never knowing when a careless strike from a pickaxe might cause a cave-in or, worse, release a pocket of toxic gas. Or even ignite it; there had been explosions in the past which had killed as many as a dozen men at a time as deadly balls of burning air travelled along the passageways.
Constant threat of death. No light. No air. Barely any water. And no escape. The elevators were only authorised to carry humanoid personnel to the surface once a month, allowing the sick or injured - or more frequently, the dead - to be exchanged for fresh bodies.
Three men a month? Vullen found it hard to imagine humanoids surviving in this hell for three days. No wonder the Empire's hunger for slaves and indentured labourers was almost as insatiable as its need for the ore they dug.
He surveyed the miners drawn up in ragged lines in front of him. Many of them were human, he knew, but in the sickly light of the lamps, they all looked like filthy animals. He had thought Meckley's appearance horribly ragged when the foreman met him off his shuttle; now he realised that the man had actually dressed up for the occasion, compared to the threadbare garments of the labourers. What skin was visible beneath the thick crust of sweat and black dust bore livid red sores and wounds; many had rivulets of dried blood running from their nostrils or the corner of their eyes.
For a moment, Vullen thought he was hearing things - some kind of distant grating of rocks and metal, a rushing or sighing of the wind that never blew down here - and then he realised what he was hearing: Fifty pairs of lungs struggling and heaving to filter air through dust so thick and so abrasive they would bleed internally with every breath.
No wonder so many were dying. They should be ripping each other apart like animals down here. And yet ...
'Remind me how they died.'
Meckley was beside him. 'Uh - we don't know?' He cast a frightened glance at Vullen and hurried on. 'That is, we know - we think we know that three of them were struck on the head by rocks.'
'Falling rocks?'
'No, lord - hit on the head by someone else. The men they were working with. They all confessed, but they said they didn't remember doing it. It was like someone controlled them, they said.'
Vullen nodded. He had already been given this information, and he knew that all three men had been taken up to the surface and executed weeks ago. At least they had got to see the sky again before they died - but there was now no chance of excavating their memories of the murders, of figuring out whether they had indeed been somehow controlled or possessed. Of course, if that had been a real possibility, Crucis would have come himself, or at least sent someone a lot more skilled than Vullen.
One of the nearest miners mumbled something.
'Speak up, man,' Vullen ordered.
'I said there's something down here with us.' The man's eyes were blue, an incongruous sight amidst the grime and blood that smeared the rest of his face. 'Something that shouldn't be here.'
'It whispers in the dark,' another man volunteered, the rest of the miners nodding in agreement. 'It gets to you in your dreams.'
'You can almost see it, but not quite.'
'It only shows itself when it's marked you for death.'
Any other place and time, and Vullen would have dealt summarily with this kind of superstitious, deranged nonsense. But down here in the dark and the heat, breathing the foul air pumped out hoarse and stinking from the air-circulation machines ...
Besides, seventeen men were dead.
Vullen, like any graduate of the Sith Academy, knew very well that there were things that lurked in dark tunnels which could drive men to madness and murder. But this wasn't Korriban, nor any stronghold of the ancient Sith; there had never been life on this planet until the Empire arrived to mine. None could thrive.
'How did the others die?' he asked. He had all this information already, but there was a benefit to making Meckley tell him out loud in front of all his miners, ramping up the pressure on a guilty conscience. If the culprit was among the labourers. 'The other fourteen.'
There was another ripple of muttering from the miners; Meckley spoke loud and fast to drown it out. 'We don't exactly know, lord. They just -'
'Dropped,' one of the men put in, and the others nodded, eyes glittering in their grimy faces.
'Right in front of our eyes.'
'One second upright, the next a corpse.'
Meckley snarled at the miners to silence them, then turned back to Vullen. 'There was a doctor here two weeks ago, sent by Lord Crucis. He examined the freshest bodies. He said they had brain haemorrhages but he didn't know why.'
What the doctor had actually said was interruption to the blood flow to the autonomic regions of the brain. But it was true that he hadn't known why. Nor had the scientist who accompanied him been able to pinpoint any environmental causes. Yes, the conditions down here were hellish, but if they killed a man, they did so in months or weeks. Not seconds.
Vullen had studied the autopsies, at least what he could make sense of, and then gone over them again with the doctor, trying to understand. The best explanation that the medical expert had been able to offer was that the artery which supplied all the blood to the autonomic regions of the brain - the part that kept hearts beating and blood flowing and nerves travelling up and down spines - had somehow been blocked or pinched closed for a couple of seconds. Interruption to the blood supply to those parts of the brain; instant death.
What nobody had been able to explain was how that could happen without external trauma, or any sign of damage to the artery at all. In each man, the blood had flowed, and then it just … stopped.
'And there are no other people on the planet?' he asked Meckley, dragging his attention back to the present. 'No other life forms at all?'
Meckley shook his head. 'No, lord.'
Vullen pointed to his left. 'Then what are they?'
Meckley turned in the direction indicated by Vullen, to see two small figures huddling in the shadow of one of the mine carts. They shrank back from Vullen's pointing finger and Meckley's gaze, so that it was hard to make them out; their bodies seemed curiously shrunken, and were those bandages wrapped around their heads?
'Oh, them? The eyeless brats?'
Vullen recoiled. 'Children? You have children down here?'
'Just aliens,' Meckley said, looking slightly puzzled. 'When we're opening up new seams and galleries, we - we need to know if it's safe on the other side, see? If it's safe for the men to breathe? The gnats, they can squeeze through the smallest spaces. So we send them through first.'
Vullen felt dizzy; it seemed to get hotter down here by the second, and the foul-smelling air seemed devoid of oxygen. 'Gnats?' he repeated absently, staring at the shrunken figures.
'Just what the men call them. They whine and whine, see?'
'Until you squash them,' a voice called out from the back of the miners' lines, and there was a rumble of what might have been - in a fresher air, under a kind of sky, on a different world - laughter.
Vullen ignored Meckley's sheepish grin, still transfixed by the diminutive shapes almost swallowed by the gloom. It was an old idea, as old as miners, as old as humans; sending in small animals, tiny birds in cages, to see if the air was safe to breathe. But there were devices now, technology to do this job ...
Children are cheaper, drawled Crucis's voice in his ear.
'Bring them out here,' Vullen ordered, praying his voice didn't shake. 'All of them.'
Meckley shrugged and gestured to one of the miners, who blew a whistle hanging round his neck. Two notes this time.
In a halting fashion, as if they feared what was going to happen to them if they left their hiding places but also feared the consequences of disobedience, the two children Vullen had seen before stepped out from behind the mine cart. Two more appeared from behind one of the drills, and another, which Vullen had taken to be a mere crumpled piece of cloth, unfolded itself. Contracting into a tight knot, they drifted across the cavern towards Vullen, Meckley and the miners.
They made almost no noise as they moved, which contributed to their eerie appearance. As they drew closer, Vullen saw that their feet were either bare or wrapped in rags, and that they were one and all so thin - emaciated even - that he didn't think their footfalls could have sounded above a whisper if they tried. It was impossible to tell their sex or even make out much of their features, but Vullen estimated them at around eight or nine years old, perhaps the tallest as old as ten. And all of them, whatever rags they wore, whatever blood or sores were visible elsewhere on their grimy, stick-thin limbs, had cloth wrapped around their heads, covering their eyes.
Or rather, where their eyes should have been.
Miralukans. Vullen controlled the instinctive shudder of repulsion at the very thought of what was underneath those blindfolds.
'How did they come to be here?' he asked.
Meckley shrugged. 'It was before my time, lord. The way I heard it from Welck - he was foreman before me - a ship of the fleet took a refugee transport, back around the time Coruscant was sacked. Someone thought the little grubs would be good for mining work. They don't need light to see, see?'
Vullen nodded. It made sense. It was sensible. This was the proper place for the eyeless, yes, grubs, blind and groping in the dark.
And yet ... He tried not to notice the ribs clearly visible through the pallid skin, the livid bruises. He had wondered why the miners didn't tear each other apart like animals down here. He should have realised it could only be because they had something else to rip into.
Around the time of the Sacking of Coruscant ... They must be considerably older than they looked. 'Six years, they've been here?'
'Give or take. There were around twenty at first, I'm told.'
Vullen was horrified to find himself almost impressed at the tenacity it must have taken for any of the little slaves to cling on to life in such conditions. He had to assert his will on this situation, get a grip on Meckley and the others; he was here to solve a problem.
But if the children - the aliens were sent in first, wriggling deeper into the planet than any of the miners, they might know something. He stepped closer to them.
'I am here to investigate the deaths in this mine over the past months,' he intoned, striving to balance authority and approachability. 'If you know how any of the miners came to die in the tunnels, you must tell me now.'
He was prepared for them to look blankly at him, to shake their heads, or to fail to acknowledge his words completely.
He was not prepared for one of them to step forward, look up at him and ask: 'Are you a Sith?'
'What?'
'Are you a Sith?' the thing repeated, turning its blindfolded face up to his.
Vullen drew himself up. 'I am a Dark Lord of the Sith, here on the authority of Darth Crucis himself. If you have information -'
'I know what happened to those men.' She - he thought it was a female now - spoke in a high-pitched yet oddly harsh voice; years in the tunnels must have roughened her lungs. But there was no hint of fear in her voice, nor in what he could see of her face below the ragged blindfold.
Meckley scoffed beside him; Vullen raised a hand to silence him. 'Then you must tell me.'
It was odd, he could not see anything of her eyes beneath the blindfold, two torn patches of cloth held in place by a band, all of it twisted together with what looked like wire. But he could feel them, somehow, could feel them on his face. They burned. 'Show me first.'
'Show you?' Vullen frowned. 'Show you - show you my power?'
She nodded.
'Insolent -' Meckley started forward, hand raised; the child took a step backward, but she did not flinch.
Vullen raised his own hand, which was enough to stop the foreman in his tracks, but did not look away from the child's face. He could still feel those burning eyes.
The back of his neck itched.
Usually, he was wary of displaying any of his so-called Sith powers. The bureaucrats and merchants he generally dealt with on his indolent, backwater world had never demanded that he do so; he had the title and the robes and could do a half-decent impression of the manner, and any doubters knew that he had the backing of Darth Crucis, and that was more than enough. He tried to give the impression that intervening in their petty affairs would be beneath his dignity, and that worked for everybody; Ceridu preferred a lazy Sith to the alternative. The real reason, of course, was that he didn't want anyone to see him struggle.
For some reason, though, he felt inclined to grant the child's request. What was the harm? Let her glimpse power for once. It was not as if she would know the difference between someone like Vullen and someone like Crucis.
Vullen drew a deep breath and stretched out his hand. Without taking his eyes off the child, he focused his mind on a lump of ore perhaps twice the size of his head which lay atop a heap nearby.
Peace is a lie; there is only passion.
His peaceful life on Ceridu was the lie, the pleasant lie in which he wallowed. Sweating in this infernal cavern, choking on the air rank with acrid fear and the smells of excrement, doing Crucis's bidding in places the Darth would never deign to tread - this was his truth.
The ore wobbled.
Crucis had always said he lacked passion, even back in the days when he was Torslan and Vullen was less than nothing. He could see Torslan the acolyte standing over him now, arms crossed over lithe chest, red skin kindled to flame by the surly Korriban sunrise while Vullen fought to throw off the chains of another sweaty, fitful night. You don't even crave pleasure, Vullen. Just comfort.
The familiar shame writhed in his belly, but beneath it ... Beneath it, hate yawned acidly.
Through passion, I gain strength.
The heavy lump of ore rose slowly into the air.
Glad that the heat provided him with an excuse for the sweat pouring off his brow in rivulets, Vullen gritted his teeth and coaxed the ore over towards the gathered men in a slow, ungainly arc. It moved in fits, jerkily, listing from side to side, as he grappled to find the elusive balance between himself and the Force, straining to tap into the power but battling to keep from clutching too hard, from letting the ore slip through his fingers like soap from between wet hands ...
He would need to bathe for days to get the stink and filth of this miserable place off his skin.
He could bathe for days, once he got this sorry business over with.
Through strength, I gain -
He fumbled, clutched, lost his grip. The ore plummeted to the rocky floor and shattered, spilling its glimmering black insides over the ground between himself and the child.
It had looked rather dramatic, actually. No reason for anybody to think he hadn't done it on purpose.
'Now,' he said into the silence, trying to keep the breathlessness out of his tone. 'Information.'
The child looked down at the ore, and then back up at Vullen, as if trying to decide whether or not that had been impressive enough for her purposes. Then she shrugged slightly and said: 'I killed them.'
'You - what?'
'I killed them.'
'You lying little -' Meckley raised his fist again, lunging forward, but once again Vullen's upraised hand forestalled him. Balked, the foreman swung round on him. 'My lord, forgive this waste of your time -'
'Silence.' Vullen had not once looked away from the child, nor had she looked away from him.
It was nonsense, Vullen knew that at once. It had to be a lie. It was certainly possible for an untrained Force user to kill, but anybody powerful enough to do so would have stood out like a beacon in the Dark Side, one even he would have felt from the moment he set foot on the planet.
If the alien child could have done what she suggested, she should have flamed in his sight. She did not. But there was still something about her ... something just on the edge of perception. It was as if he could not quite bring her into focus; as if, no matter how he narrowed his eyes and squinted to see her clearly, something about her slipped away.
Miralukans, he knew, were able to 'see' through the Force without necessarily being Force-sensitives. Perhaps that was what he sensed.
It had to be a lie. But it was the only lead he had.
'You hit them over the head with rocks?' he asked, allowing his tone to drip with scepticism.
'I made their friends hit them. But only at first.'
'How could you make their friends hit them?'
'I can make people do things.'
Vullen raised his eyebrows. 'Show me.'
He would have expected bluster, or a show of fear. Instead, the blindfolded head turned this way and that, as if she was looking at all the assembled miners. Eventually she said, 'I can only do it if they're distracted. But they're looking at me.'
They were that; Vullen could feel the disbelief, the unease, the anger, a queasy mixture roiling in the thick air.
'At first I just killed the worst ones,' she went on. 'But then I heard him -' she pointed at Meckley, and Vullen saw with a surge of revulsion that her finger was missing a nail, the tip ragged and bloody - 'say that if men kept dying, they would send a Sith to come and investigate. And I remembered what the Sith do. They come, and they take you away to Korriban.' She said the words as if it was something learned by rote but half-remembered, perhaps dredged up from her early childhood before the Empire took the refugee ship.
Perhaps her parents had told her that if she was bad, the Sith would come and take her away, Vullen thought, half-hypnotised by the utter assurance with which she was telling her tale. 'How did you kill the others?'
She hesitated, but not as if she was stumped by the question, more as if she was trying to decide how best to explain something very obvious to someone very stupid. Then she said: 'I looked inside, and I found the right place, and I touched them.'
In his mind’s eye, Vullen had a sudden, vivid image of an artery pinched closed.
But he had never heard of anybody killing that way. There was a reason that the Sith closed fists of Dark Side-fury around throats, or used the Force to toss bodies across rooms or off cliffs. To reach inside someone's body, to pick out something miniscule yet physical, and manipulate it … Nobody untrained had that kind of fine control. Nobody. And nobody could see inside another person like that.
But she was Miralukan, and he had heard that Miralukan made fine Jedi ... And those men had died ...
He opened his mouth, and realised his throat was too dry to speak; he had to force himself to swallow several times before he said, 'Show me.'
Her head turned slightly, the blindfolded gaze travelling from him to Meckley. She began to smile.
'No,' Vullen interrupted. 'Not him.'
She pouted slightly, and turned in the other direction, looking past Vullen and the spellbound foreman to the lines of miners.
They drew back, looking apprehensive, as the child's head slowly turned, surveying the lines. A part of Vullen thought how ridiculous this was, a crowd of grown men shrinking in fear from a starving little girl.
But the rest of him was caught up in the spell, and he watched with bated breath as the girl's head stopped, her blind gaze fixing on a man in the back row.
The miners on either side parted as she took a step forward,
The man she had singled out was braced on his back foot, a ghastly grin stretching his features as his eyes flicked from side to side, clearly not wanting to show fear in the face of a small child's outlandish threat but feeling wary and isolated all the same.
The Miralukan girl's face, or what he could see of it beneath the blindfold and the grime, showed nothing. Slowly, she raised her hand from her side so that it was pointing at the man, fingers pressed together, thumb poised as if ready to grab at something.
Vullen reached out with the Force for any sense of the girl, any intimation that she was doing something, but he felt nothing. But then, what did it take to pinch an artery? Not much power, perhaps. But control ...
Although the cavern was filled with the sound of labouring lungs, it seemed that all he could hear was the condemned man's quick, harsh breathing. And still Vullen felt nothing from the child.
Then, without warning, she twisted her wrist so that her palm faced upwards, and Vullen saw her thumb press against her gathered fingertips.
He felt the faintest stir in the Force, like a single strand of spider-silk brushing against his face.
And without a sound, the miner collapsed to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut.
The silence was broken with several cries of rage and alarm. The miners stepped back from the fallen man, jostling to get away from him but without going near the child. Meckley brushed past Vullen, swearing, and went to one knee beside the felled miner, bending to check for a pulse although Vullen could tell that he knew it was useless. The man had died in an instant, between one heartbeat and the next. Although his last moments had been filled with fear and confusion, the death itself had been merciful enough in its way.
Somehow he was sure that was not a consideration the child cared much for.
She hadn't moved, except to turn her blindfolded gaze up to Vullen's face again, as if waiting for his reaction.
Vullen realised that he was breathing fast, almost panting. Absentmindedly, he mopped the sweat from his brow, registering the scrape of gritty dust on his skin as his mind raced.
Power. It was real, there, contained in the child standing quietly in front of him; not power as he knew it, but undeniable and deadly.
Power the Sith must have. There were still those who would have cut her down without a word rather than allow her to pollute the halls of the Academy. But times were changing. The call had gone out, urgent, winging its way from Dromund Kaas to every planet, station, outpost and ship in the Empire: Find Force-sensitives. Find those who have the potential to swell the ranks of the Sith, and you will be rewarded.
This Miralukan slave-child didn't have the usual kind of potential they looked for. He doubted she could lift anything much heavier than a feather or raise so much as a spark of lightning on the end of one finger. But what she did have was precision, of a kind he had never dreamed of. Somehow, she could not just see inside bodies - brains - but was able to spin and direct the Force into the narrowest of needles, thinner and sharper than a thought.
Not just a new potential Sith. A new kind of Sith.
They come and they take you away to Korriban ...
For the briefest second, he considered doing it himself. Putting the child on his shuttle and heading straight to Dromund Kaas and the Sith Enclave.
But the vision faded before it took shape. He knew he needed Crucis. Despite the new edict opening up the Academy to aliens, half the Sith - maybe more than half - would rather quietly murder a prospective acolyte from one of the lesser races. Especially one who didn't present the usual forms of power. If he took the child, she would probably be killed before he got the chance to demonstrate what she could do, and himself along with her for presumption, more than likely.
Crucis had the power. Crucis had the clout. Crucis would also get the credit - but he would owe Vullen, too.
'You will come with me.'
The blind face tilted. 'To Korriban?'
For a second, he forgot himself and asked in disbelief, 'You want to go to Korriban?'
She raised one thin shoulder in a kind of half-shrug.
Vullen recollected himself. Of course she wanted to go. She didn't know what it was like there.
And with what he had seen of what it was like here ...
There was a splutter behind him; Meckley, still kneeling beside the body, had twisted to point an accusing finger at the child. 'She - she - little alien witch killed seventeen men!'
'Eighteen,' Vullen corrected coldly. It was only after he'd done it that he realised he had stepped in front of the girl, interposing his bulk between her and the outraged foreman. 'And now that she is leaving with me, I expect ore production to return to its former levels and remain there. Or Darth Crucis will be most displeased.'
It was on the tip of his tongue to tell her to gather her things and say her goodbyes when he came to his senses; what things could she have to gather? As for goodbyes, he supposed it was possible she could want to say them to the other Miralukan children - but he couldn't help but notice that they didn't seem to want to stand anywhere near her, any more than the miners did.
'Are you ready to go, child?'
She held up one dirty finger.
Vullen frowned. 'You want to - one thing - oh.' He felt a slight chill in his blood, despite the hellish temperature down here. He glanced from the small face with its ragged blindfold to Meckley; foremen were replaceable. Children so strong in the Force were not.
Besides, he wanted another look at what she did.
He nodded.
'Lord?' Meckley had got to his feet now. The men on either side of him were shrinking away, leaving him stranded in a widening circle. 'My lord?'
Vullen realised that he himself had stepped away from the child, who stood clear of his bulk, her small figure revealed.
'My lord, you can't ... You can't let her ...' Meckley's voice was shaking; Vullen could see his knees trembling. He took a tentative step towards the child, as if contemplating rushing her, but looked between her and Vullen and stopped, moaning in despair.
The child raised her hand.
Vullen reached out with the Force, straining to get a sense of what she was doing. There was something, like the ghost of movement in the air ...
'I've s-served well, m-my lord,' Meckley whispered. 'I've served f-faithfully ...'
There it was, the sticky whisper of the web-strand against his face, just for a second, but more than one this time, as if the web itself clung damply to his skin.
Again, the child rotated her wrist, her thumb pressing against her fingers.
The children were all so thin, it barely made a sound when they hit the rocks.
Vullen whirled, robes clinging damply to his legs, to see the other Miralukans unmoving on the ground.
He looked back at Meckley’s stricken, disbelieving face, and then at the unreadable one the child turned up to him.
He should not hope that it had been mercy. Not when he knew what Korriban was like.
But he did.