Free Star Wars: Knight Errant by John Jackson Miller

what to do with it all, before the other day. Daiman himself had given her the key, in his vain insistence that everyone hear his voice daily. On one other world, she’d heard his message declaring the sunrise. Listening again the last two days, she’d heard it again: the same phrasing as offworld, except for the parts about the day’s duration. Surely, he didn’t record different ones for every world he held—and she wasn’t aware of any communications network in Sith space that equaled the one that the Republic had deactivated on the Outer Rim. Both meant that Daiman’s voice was being simulated, and simulated locally on each world.
    Obvious, really, but she’d never thought about the corollary. If Daiman vanished tomorrow, the rival Sith Lords whose rampage she feared might not find out about it for a long time. Daiman’s Correctors would want to keep their jobs, which meant they would pretend nothing had changed.
    But in fact, something would have changed, Kerra thought as she refilled the bag and cinched it shut. Life wouldn’t improve dramatically, but a Daimanate without a Daiman would be something that would help many people at once.
    Kerra took a last look around the room and stood to depart. Daiman would vanish tomorrow.
    And it was about blasted time.
     
    There were worse things than death.
    Narsk’s aunt had told him that, raising him alone on Verdanth. Near the juncture of three sectors and situated on a major hyperspace lane, the planet was desired by many a petty princeling. Indeed, several had declared themselves Sith Lords immediately upon taking the green world, as if the title conqueror of Verdanth meant anything. It usually didn’t. Verdanth’s masters seldomlived long. But they always survived long enough to do serious damage to the population of the world, a diverse patchwork of transplanted peoples.
    The Bothan community on Verdanth had suffered less than others, if only because of the species’ penchant for intrigues. More stubborn races had refused to submit when the Sith first invaded; their survivors saw each successive wave as something to be resisted with all means. A noble thought. But ownership of Verdanth was changing almost annually. Defiance of all invaders earned only extinction. The Bothans, meanwhile, submitted freely to whichever Sith warlord they estimated had the upper hand. Their instincts were so good, observers said, that one could track the balance of power in the system simply by looking at who had the most Bothans in his or her camp.
    Being on the losing side meant death. But that wasn’t the worst part, as his aunt had put it: it meant that you’d guessed wrong .
    Understanding the relationships between others and accurate reckonings of power and where it lay: these were the things that made one a Bothan. Narsk’s aunt once described a tribe of feral Bothans, found untold years after a crash on a deserted planet. They had no spoken language, but they could rank with exactitude the numbers of various kinds of predators in their surroundings. To be a Bothan was to be always on the lookout.
    Narsk had taken those lessons to heart. While a slave for successive Sith Lords on Verdanth, he’d managed to find chores that bettered his perceptions. The sloppy job of harvesting rimebats led to assignments tracking escapees. Those led to missions as a nonmilitary scout and, finally, a saboteur. All the time, he’d kept his eyes on the Sith players, in the best traditions of his people.
    The quandary came when two particularly pugnacious rivals chose to settle the ownership of the planet in a duelthat left them both dead. The resulting power vacuum put many Bothans off kilter. There was no reason to expect Verdanth would stay free from Sith rule for more than a few weeks at most, and yet the planet-bound Bothans had no real way of gauging the relative strengths of powers yet unseen. The only real way to know which Sith Lord to back was to strike out into space personally