Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 01 - Precipice Read Free Page A

Jedi.
    Or was it the Jedi and their Republic? It didn’t matter. Naga Sadow would kill Commander Korsin and hiscrew for losing their ship. Seelah was right about that much.
    Yet Sadow need not lose the war, depending on what Korsin did now. He still had something. The crystals.
    But the crystals were high above at the moment.
    It had been a night of horrors, getting 355 people down from the lofty plateau. Sixteen injured had died along the way, and another five had tumbled into the darkness from the narrow ledge that formed the only apparent way up or down. No one doubted that evacuation had been the right call, though. They couldn’t stay up there, not with the fires still burning and the ship precariously perched. The last to leave the ship, Korsin had nearly soiled himself when one of the proton torpedoes had disengaged from the naked tube, tumbling over the precipice and into oblivion.
    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,
Omen
continued 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 monsterstwo 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.”
    “No witty comeback? I’m surprised. You at least plan
that
far ahead.”
    Korsin had fenced with Ravilan on earlier missions, but now wasn’t the time. “I said,
enough.
We’ve surveyed below. You saw it. There’s nowhere to go.” There were beaches at the bottom of the bluff, but they terminated against the