“How long until we clear the badlands?” Ro asked, resting a gauntleted palm on the back of Dis’s seat.

“Just a few minutes, my …”

Dis swiveled in his chair to face his leader. “I still don’t know what I should call you. My Eye? Sir?”

Ro’s thin lips curled at the obvious distaste in Dis’s voice, his dark eyes glinting in the red light that streamed in through the viewport.

“You can call me … Marchion.”

Dis’s chest swelled. He had never been one for the chain of command, which was probably why he had stayed a Strike for so long; that and the fact he’d spent most of the last decade in a reedug stupor. But now look at him, on first-name terms with Ro himself. No one called the Eye Marchion, not even Pan.

“I still think it would’ve been easier to use a Path,” Dis said, finally bringing the Spider out of the ice field to slingshot around Rystan’s weak star.

Ro walked over to the vacant gunner’s station to recover his mask, which had remained on the console ever since they had left the Great Hall.

“But then I wouldn’t have seen a master at work,” the Eye replied, wiping the mask’s frosted visor with his sleeve. “You’re every bit as impressive as your heritage suggested you would be, especially now that you’re free from your … affliction.”

Yeah, he was free all right. Ro had made Dis throw what little remained of his stash into a trash compactor back on board the Gaze. His mind was clear for the first time in years, his connection to the Force stronger than ever. There was no way he could have made it through the ice field when he was on reed. He owed Ro so much.

“And to think we had a Force-user in our midst all these years …” Ro continued, checking the filters of his mask. “Scarspike was a fool. I’m glad he’s dead.”

You’re not the only one, Dis thought, but kept the thought to himself as the Spider dropped into Rystan’s thin atmosphere.

“Have you ever been to a tidally locked world?” Ro asked.

Dis shook his head.

“They’re fascinating,” the Eye told him. “One face constantly angled toward the sun, its surface little more than charred desert.”

“While the other’s a frozen wilderness,” Dis said, the blasted terrain not inspiring much confidence. “So where do we land?”

Ro pointed at a band of barely habitable land that ran between the two extremes. “There.”

“Is there a spaceport?”

“Not exactly.”

Ro directed them to a patch of barren ground, clumps of rollweed tumbling across the wasteland.

“Are you sure this is the place?” Dis asked as the landing gear deployed. “There’s nothing here.”

Ro merely smiled as he slipped his mask over his head. “Oh, you’ll be surprised …”

CHAPTER TWO

The Cyclor Shipyards