He had no idea where the Paths came from. Marchion Ro was cagey about it, never giving too many details, and his father had been the same way. Kassav sometimes wanted to find out the secret at blasterpoint or, even better, at the edge of a blade, but the Ros were not stupid people. Or at least, Asgar hadn’t been. He knew what he had with the Paths, and knew people would want it. And while Marchion Ro wasn’t his father, not even close, he’d inherited all the safeguards Asgar set up. The Gaze Electric, those gnarly guard droids he used…it was hard to get close to Marchion. He’d made it clear that the Paths themselves had their own safeguards, too. If he died, so would they. That hadn’t happened when Asgar died, but then again, Marchion didn’t have a son to whom he could pass the family business.

But it wasn’t just starships and murder droids protecting Marchion Ro. It was also the structure his father had insisted the Nihil adopt when he’d brought them the Paths so many years ago. Before that, the group was much smaller, barely a gang, really. It kept its operations to a tiny corner of the Rim, close to Thull’s Shroud by Belsavis, pulling off whatever little jobs it could. Asgar Ro had shown up one day and offered them the Paths, in exchange for a third of the take of any operations that used them. But that wasn’t all—he wanted a vote, too.

Any jobs that used the Paths required a full vote of the three Tempest Runners, plus the Eye, and any tie vote went the Eye’s way. It didn’t seem like such a big deal at the time, but it meant that he, Pan Eyta, and Lourna Dee were always against one another in a way, always courting the Eye’s favor to get Paths. In theory, they could all team up to try to go after Marchion, but there was too much bad blood. Most of the time, Kassav could barely be in the same room with Lourna Dee and Pan Eyta, much less contemplate sharing the throne with them.

Marchion was all alone, and should be completely vulnerable…but somehow, he wasn’t. He was protected, by the system his much smarter father had set up. It was annoying…but it worked.

Hell, Kassav had copied a lot of Asgar’s ideas for his own Tempest.

Kassav had three Storms up at the top of his Tempest’s hierarchy: Gravhan, Dellex, and Wet Bub. They all wanted to be him, but they would never work together to get rid of him, because then none of them would be the Tempest Runner—they’d still just be three Storms sharing power. Yep. It was a good little system.