Igniting the Stars/Part 1

1,386 BBY

A scream jolted Boryn Thalsyk and turned his sprint into a bent-forward lurch; he hit a decorative credenza in the corridor and went down hard, gasping in pain and clutching his knee. As he rolled on the floor, tears in his eyes, he heard the report of heavy blasters behind—the screams continued, but they were getting quieter. It took a few seconds of whimpering pain before he realized that was because fewer voices were making them; the realization had a remarkable palliative effect on his knee, and he clambered to his feet, limping on.

It had admittedly been a good many years since Boryn had served in the Republic Navy, and if recalled to service he thought his fitness test prognosis would be grim and his uniform a few sizes too small. But he did not care to think of himself as a sedentary man, and abject terror had worked wonders for his ability to run besides. And so it was with considerable trepidation that he realized, even with half a dozen security guards fighting in the delaying action and no obstacles save stationary furniture to obstruct his sprint, he still might not make it.

The dark did not help, of course; the assassin had cut the power. Where alarms should have blared, only screams served as advance warning of the monster that had come among them. Then there was only one voice, half-scream, half-war cry of defiance that drowned even the blaster fire.

And then there was silence.

The tall windows ahead looked out over a river and a public park; in daylight it was a lovely view, and at night the riverwalk lights sparkled on the water. Granted, the view was lost on Boryn, but he found himself looking that way—and giving a shriek two octaves higher than he had ever known his voice could go—when one window shattered inward and two figures swung through on cables. Landing before him and unhooking themselves with professional ease, they drew long hilts from sheathes on their backs and, with synchronized presses of power studs, produced razor-sharp blades on both ends. The blades trembled, though whether from vibration or the heat that made them glow like flame, Boryn did not know.

Nor did he care. Accepting a hand up as the breeze ruffled his robe, he breathed freely at last. "Took you long enough! Where's the rest of the team?"

"Holding off the second intruder, sir," one of the silver-eyed Echani said. Like all his people Boryn had ever know, the mercenary had white hair, a svelte physique, and armor so light it seemed almost decorative. "Step aside, please."

Boryn hadn't known there was a second intruder, but he was no longer concerned. When the Chancellor's Office had rejected his request for a Jedi bodyguard—a request he now planned to renew, with what he thought was compelling new evidence—he had dipped into the fortune that years of service on corporate boards and in the advisory sector had amassed to hire bodyguards of his own. The Firedancers were said to be the last remnant of a sect so old it had become an archaism, but the same had been said of the Sith, and they seemed to be doing well enough for themselves.

Huffing as he jogged past his mercenaries, Boryn reached the turbolift, but of course the buttons were dead. He turned instead and saw the two Echani advancing, whirling their burning weapons like double-bladed lightsabers. At first he thought they were merely adopting a defensive position, but then he saw his pursuer had caught up—had, indeed, come within meters without making a sound. Boryn had time for a sliver of trepidation before the fight began.

All three of them whirled and spun with grace far beyond anything Boryn could've managed even in his Navy days. The Echani lived up to their name; they looked so balanced, so at ease, that they seemed to dance amidst the flames of their superheated blades. The dark-garbed, gray-skinned assassin moved with perfect control too, but no observer would have likened her movements to dance; there was just something too savage, too animalistic in the way she swung her curved swords. Dancing or not, there was no denying it worked; the assassin blocked or parried almost every strike aimed her way, and dodged around the rest.

A flash of steel, a gasp of pain, a splash of blood, and one of the Echani was fighting one-handed, clutching his split forearm to his chest as he retracted one of his firebrand blades and continued to slash one-handed with the other. His partner picked up the slack, and the assassin had to abandon a press toward the kill in order to defend herself. The Echani continued to complement one another, but Boryn found himself absently pressing the dead turbolift button anyway.

The Firedancers backed the assassin toward the broken window, and for a moment Boryn thought they would surely push her out to split her head like a melon on the duracrete courtyard five stories below. But the woman skipped onto the sill covering the corridor's radiators without a break in her rhythm, and the Echani were forced to cut at her legs while trying to protect their own heads; neither seemed willing to leap into the window frame alongside her, but their long-handled weapons and the unmaimed Firedancer's dual blades were far better suited to combat on even ground. The assassin parried for a few seconds, stabbing when she could, then seized an opportunity and swung her blade in a great curve.

The Echani who had been fighting with one hand was no longer fighting at all, but clutching his throat as he sank to his knees; blood poured through his fingers, and in the moonlight Boryn saw the red ends of the cut beneath both the man's ears. Boryn flattened himself to the wall as the second Firedancer launched an all-out attack; the assassin wobbled for balance, but at the last second she vaulted off the sill and over the Firedancer's head. He caught the cut she aimed at his head in midair, but as they dueled around the dying man, Boryn began to suspect he might not live to share his "I told you so"s with the Chancellor's Office and the Jedi Council after all. The Firedancer was still all grace and speed, his burning blades a halo of fire around him, but the gray-skinned woman struck harder still, and slowly but surely she took command of the fight.

Then she stopped in mid-lunge and almost missed a block; she caught the fire brand centimeters from her face and the impact of the blades spat sparks onto her cheeks, but she looked not at the Echani but at the shattered window. Boryn followed her gaze on reflex, and a second later a man leapt onto the sill, more broken glass crunching under boots and knee as he landed in a crouch. Boryn's first thought—What fresh hell is this?—was subsumed at once by the gut-wrenching realization that the man had leapt up to the sill, with nothing below but smooth walls before the ground five stories down.

The man raised his head out of what might have been a pile of dirty laundry; Boryn thought for one instant of Jedi robes, but these were much too dark, not to mentioned ripped beyond even the pretense of being cared for and stained with Boryn didn't care to think what. Matted, greasy hair hung to the man's shoulders, and a scraggly beard draped his hard jaw; twisted wires of moustache flared out from the edges of his upper lip, but the bulk of his upper lip was bare, leaving no obstruction to the broad, flared nostrils that sniffed at the air like an animal's. There was a dark scar on the man's left cheek, and a charred mess over much of what had once been his right, as if that side of his face had been pressed into a fire…or perhaps that image simply came to mind because, even with his back to the moonlight and the inner lights dark, Boryn could see the man's bright red and yellow eyes, rimmed by bruised and darkened flesh.

He looked first this way, then that, and when his tilted head caught some moonlight through the ragged curtains of hair, Boryn saw his flesh was a dull gray too. He knew a moment of fear—his surviving Echani was hard-pressed as it was, the last thing the assassin needed was backup—but even as his heart rose into his throat, the look on her face sent it plummeting back down whence it came and farther on to his stomach for good measure. She lurched back from the Echani, eyes wide and nostrils flared with obvious terror, and when she raised her curved swords to guard they trembled.

"V-Vandak!"

He looked at her and bared his teeth, then leapt from the sill. By the time he touched down he had two lightsabers in hand—lightsabers with crimson blades. Boryn was no Jedi, but he knew what that meant, and he slapped the turbolift controls again.

Vandak—Darth Vandak, Boryn realized—went in swinging, and by unspoken consensus Boryn's Echani bodyguard and the woman here to kill him joined forces against the larger threat. Certainly Darth Vandak showed no interest in their allegiances, hacking and slashing at both with his lightsabers. The Echani dodged the first of Vandak's strikes, but when he blocked the second, the blade of his fire brand steamed and emitted a puff of foul-smelling smoke. He leapt back and looked at the weapon—the blade had half-melted and was now pointed at a useless angle; it would be deadlier to wield than to face.

In that moment of facing a single enemy, Vandak went hard at the assassin; she blocked his double downward blows with her own swords, but her elbows buckled under the strain, and she dropped to one knee, her face rigid with effort. Vandak kicked her and she came off the ground, hit the wall, broke through the paneling, and dropped back to the floor. She raised one sword in a shaking arm, but Vandak abandoned her to return his lightsabers to his belt and stalk down the Echani.

The Firedancer threw himself at his partner's dropped weapon, but Vandak waved a hand and the Echani flew back. Even in the end the mercenary's courage did not fail him; he threw his own mangled weapon at Vandak, then came in with a knife from his belt. Vandak caught the fire brand in one hand and the stab in the other, then wrenched the Echani's wrist until he cried out and dropped the knife. Vandak kneed the Echani in the stomach, and as he sank to the ground, the Sith Lord studied the brand.

"Discount cortosis," he sneered. His voice was closer to a bestial growl than Human speech; there was something wet and throaty about it. "An inferior alloy, unworthy of its wielder. Had you lived to see them again, you should have taken your superiors to task, Echani."

He threw the brand aside, picked the Echani up by his armored shirtfront, and raised him until they were face-to-face. Vandak opened his mouth as if to spew foul breath in the Echani's face, but instead he breathed not out but in, a ragged, swampy mouth-breathing inhalation. The Echani jerked, clawing at Vandak's forearms, but Vandak just sucked down one phlegmatic breath after another, and the Echani's twitches grew feebler. At last he slumped, head lolling back, and with one final suck, Vandak threw the corpse to the ground.

The dead Echani landed only a meter from where Boryn stood. His legs would not carry him away—paralysis worked its way from the fear centers of the brain to his muscles with astonishing alacrity—but his eyes were still mobile, and they followed the movement to note with befuddlement that the Echani had apparently aged a decade or two in the last few seconds. Wrinkles creased his hollow cheeks and furrowed his high brow; where the mercenary had been pale, his skin was now almost translucent, blue veins spidering across his face.

Vandak stood trembling, taking breaths through his broad nose. Then he roared aloud; by the time Boryn's sluggish muscles conjured enough energy to jump in surprise, Vandak had already grabbed another credenza and hurled it through a second window.

"It's not the same!" he bellowed, punching through a wall. "It's not the SAME!"

The assassin had gotten up to her elbows and watched the entire affair with what looked like horrified fascination, but when Vandak turned on her horror won out quickly. She seized her swords and lurched onto the attack. As Vandak drew one lightsaber and they dueled, Boryn had a moment to wonder whether it was suicidal bravery, or just the realization that she would never win playing defense against this mad juggernaut of destruction. Boryn suspected she wasn't going to win either way, but he somehow did not feel his usual sense of satisfaction upon being proven right when Vandak hacked off one of the woman's arms and backhanded her into the wall; she dropped her other sword as she screamed.

Vandak stuck his lightsaber hilt through his belt and caught the woman by the face, a mockery of how a man might hold his lover—she screamed in agony, and Vandak's thumbs dug into the bones of her face just below her eyes.

"SOUP!" he roared with a snorting, choke suck through his nose. "I can SMELL IT! GIVE IT TO ME!"

"No!" she shrieked. "You can't—I don't—STOP! NO, PLEASE!  STOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!"

Blood was pouring over Vandak's thumbs and their tips starting to dig up into her eyes when sympathetic pain squeezed Boryn's shut, but the hands pressed over his ears could not suppress his hearing quite as well as the lids over his eyes. He heard Vandak's roars and the woman's shrieking wails…right up until he heard the moist crack and crunch of bone and the squish of what lay beneath. Boryn shuddered, daring to wonder if the worst was over until a hideous slurping brought at least two courses of his dinner up into the back of his throat; he made that same sound himself when he sucked the last of a viscous drink up through a straw.

Vandak's bellow made Boryn open his eyes in spite of himself, just in time to see the Sith Lord cast aside the pulped remains of the assassin. Blood covered his hands and fluid gleamed in the moonlight where it coated his lips and dribbled down his chin. Vandak swallowed and Boryn wretched, but a growl started in the back of Vandak's throat, building toward a roar of rage. He beat at the wall, cracking the paneling and snapping the reinforcing woods behind; he swung wildly around and everything on that side of the corridor—the furniture, the weapons, and the three dead bodies—flew through the air. The Echani who died first sailed right out the window.

Vandak whirled around to Boryn, and there was more animal than man in that twisted face. Boryn's bladder and bowels evidently agreed, for they both opened at once. Vandak was upon him before he could even process the dampness or the reek, and Boryn's hands shot up to protect his face. The Anzat slammed him against the wall; Boryn's legs went numb, but he heard more than he felt the crack somewhere around the small of his back. The aftereffects reverberated up what was left of his spine, though, and his arms spasmed away from his face. He endured one terrifying moment, staring into the face of naked madness, before the world spun and he was flying.

Glass lacerated his flesh and a cold breeze skinned his cheeks before he really understood what had happened; by that time he was halfway to the ground. The time left was not enough to summon up a scream, but, increasingly high above, Vandak was screaming enough for the both of them.