Free Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 03 - Paragon by John Jackson Miller Page A

the minders recycle the water.”
    “Relax, Tilden—I
want
to go out,” she said, pinning back her dark hair with a sculpted bone clip, a gift from some local noble she couldn’t remember. She paused in the polished doorway. “But have the team step up the water deliveries—and have them bring it in from the far side of the mountain range. It’s better for the skin from over there.”
    Seelah yawned. It wasn’t even high sun and the daily pantomime was already well under way. Commander Yaru Korsin, the Keshiri’s savior from above, sat in his old bridge chair, listening just as he used to on the command deck of
Omen
. But now the shattered wreck of the vessel lay behind him, sheltered in a part of the sturdystructure not used for habitation, and his battered chair was incongruously plopped in the middle of a marbled colonnade, stretching out hundreds of meters. Here, high in the open air of the Takara Mountains—recently renamed for his precious mother, wherever in blazes she was—Korsin held court.
    The architecture and location made for a good show for the Keshiri townsfolk who occasionally flew up here. That was according to design. But it was also big enough to accommodate every foolish supplicant that Korsin wanted to cram into his day. Seelah saw Gloyd the gunner, Korsin’s “giant friend,” at the front of the line as usual.
    The lumpy-headed Houk’s jowls quaked as he presented his latest crazed idea: using one of the surviving boring lasers that still had a charge to fire signals into space.
Boring
seemed the right word to Seelah—and Korsin didn’t appear enthralled, either. How long must Gloyd have been prattling before she arrived?
    “It’ll work this time,” Gloyd said, mottled skin sweating. “All we’ve got to do is get the attention of a passing freighter. An observatory.
Anything
.” He wiped his forehead. Seelah never thought the genetic lottery had been kind to Houks to begin with, but now it looked as if age and sun were causing Gloyd’s hide to melt from his skull.
    “The intensity will dissipate to the inverse of the square of the distance from Kesh,” came a human voice from behind Korsin. Parrah,
Omen
’s relief navigator and now their main science adviser, stepped forward. “It’d be just more cosmic background noise. Didn’t they teach you anything where you came from?”
    Probably not
, Seelah mused. Gloyd had been a castaway even before he joined the
Omen
crew. While other outsiders avoided the Stygian Caldera, Gloyd’s team of brigands had figured something truly amazingmust be there. There was: the Sith Empire. Few of Gloyd’s companions had survived the discovery. But as gunner and foot soldier, he’d done combat with Jedi plenty of times in his earlier life, making him useful to Naga Sadow and, later, to Yaru Korsin.
    But lately? Not so much. “I don’t think it’s going to work, old friend,” Korsin said, spying Seelah out of the corner of his eye and winking. “And we just can’t run the risk of burning out any more equipment. You know the score.”
    They all did. Even as they built their stone shelter for
Omen
in the months after the crash, the crew had steadily brought out equipment. Some of it they expected to restore to life with a few fabricated parts; the rest was immediately usable. And used.
    That had been a mistake. It turned out there wasn’t any metal to be found on Kesh. The Sith had ripped and clawed at the surface, expending most of their surviving munitions to no avail. Above, Kesh was pleasing to the eye—but below, it appeared to be little more than a dirtball. Much equipment running on internal power sputtered and died. Worse, something in Kesh’s electromagnetic field was playing hob with everything from radio waves to electrical generation. The lightsabers still worked—thank the Lignan crystals for that—but the castaways, intrepid as they were at cannibalizing, weren’t going to be able to reinvent everything. The tools simply