They didn’t have long to wait. Completely surrounded, the Nihil had no alternative but to scrap their way out. Stellan felt the gunners scramble for their posts long before the turbocannons fired. Now they could act.

“All units, move in,” Stellan said as calmly as he could into the comm. “The Force is with us.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

The Gaze Electric, above Grizal

“Are we ready for the final test, Ro?”

Were they? Ro wasn’t sure. He had planned this for so long, studying the texts he had found in his father’s collection, texts the old tyrant had forgotten, gathering dust in the Gaze library. The great Asgar Ro, the man who had remade himself, remade the Nihil. The man whom Marchion had found bleeding out in the Great Hall.

Help me, Marchion … please.

Such a fall from grace. In life Asgar had never treated his son with kindness, never treated him with respect. It was somewhat fitting that, bleeding out in his quarters, he was forced to beg that same son for help.

Ro hadn’t even crouched down, standing over his father. “Who did this to you?”

Blood had spilled from Asgar’s mouth as he replied. “I … I don’t know.”

“A shame,” Ro had said. “That at least would have been useful.”

The first kick had dislocated the dying man’s jaw; the second fractured his cheek. The third had probably killed him, but there was no way to be sure. As for the fourth and the fifth and the sixth and the seventh, well, they’d just been for fun.

He’d stood there for an hour, not out of respect, but to commit the scene to memory. This was how he would remember Asgar Ro, not the larger-than-life despot who had made his life a misery, but a battered slab of meat.

“Marchion?”

Kisma Uttersond was eager. Ro could understand that. He should have felt the same, but something was holding him back, his father’s voice in the back of his mind. Even after all these years, it was as if the old man was standing at his shoulder, his face little more than pulp.

Why are you doing this, Marchion? Do you really know? Don’t you realize how much will change? Are you ready?

He looked up, meeting the imprisoned Jedi’s bloodshot eyes through the laboratory window.

Look at him, Marchion. He knows. He knows how weak you are.

“Shut up!”

“What?”

Ro snapped around. Uttersond was staring at him. Confused. Concerned. “I only asked.”

“We are ready when I say we are ready.”

That had been foolish. The last thing he wanted was for the Chadra-Fan to think that he was talking to dead men. Asgar was gone. This was his moment now.

The Jedi’s eyes burned into the back of his head.