Mack grunted, and she heard him get up and head toward the back of the ship, where their three remaining Blythes were tied up in the cargo hold.

“Ride the storm, Dent,” she whispered to herself. “Just ride the storm.”

Chapter Thirty-three

“So that’s what caused so much pain,” said Chancellor Lina Soh, from her offices on Coruscant.

She was looking at a hi-res holo projected by one of her comms droids, while Avar Kriss and others from the Emergences task force were watching a vidscreen in the Third Horizon’s briefing chamber—but the images were the same: the last thing the Legacy Run’s scanners saw before the ship tore itself apart.

That thing was a ship, blocky and ugly, with three bright, jagged stripes across its hull—exactly as described by Serj Ukkarian on the Panacea. Three lightning bolts, which Senator Noor’s people had confirmed as the insignia used by the Outer Rim marauders known as the Nihil. The vessel was moving through hyperspace, but not along the path of the swirling hyperspace tunnel, as had been the case with every ship Avar had ever seen. The Nihil ship was moving across hyperspace, at a right angle to the Legacy Run’s direction of travel, with strange red-and-gold turbulence rippling in its wake.

“I was given to understand something like this was impossible,” Lina Soh said, her left hand idly stroking the head of one of her two giant pet cats—Avar knew their names, Matari and Voru, they were famous throughout the Republic, but she didn’t know which was which.

The chancellor’s words were slightly delayed, a factor of the distance between Coruscant and the Outer Rim Territories. Senate-level comms were given the highest priority over the relays, but parsecs were parsecs. That would change, hopefully—improving the galactic communications network was one of Lina Soh’s planned Great Works—but not if they didn’t solve the issue at hand.

“It should be impossible, Chancellor,” Vellis San Tekka said, sitting at the table next to his partner, Marlowe, who nodded in agreement.

Avar sensed something there. Some unspoken communication between the San Tekkas. A careful choice of words.

Maybe Elzar was right, she thought. Maybe we should have pushed them a little harder.

Clearly he thought so. He was sitting across the table from her, and caught her eye. Nothing more than the tiniest glance, but she knew exactly what he was thinking, even without Force-related assistance.

She offered Elzar a tiny shrug. Whatever the San Tekkas knew, their help had been genuine and invaluable. Keven Tarr had told her there was no way he could have completed his navidroid array without their assistance. She didn’t know whether that was true—the Hetzalian engineer was clearly a genius—but the San Tekkas had certainly helped Keven finish the array more quickly, and speed was of the essence here.