So he had a place to bring them. If he could find them. So far he hadn’t had the best of luck.
He hadn’t been able to discover more than hints here and there. Hints of a large-scale operation with no name. And a snare operation called Twilight that he suspected was targeting … a planet? An organization? Something big. He had to keep going, had to find out what the Emperor was planning, if he could.
He walked through the hallway of the Imperial garrison on Bellassa. Thanks to the Emperor’s promise, he no longer had to travel with stormtrooper escorts. Darth Vader had been reassigned to a different garrison, one the Empire was building in the mountain area that had been giving them so much trouble. There was no danger of running into him here. Ferus didn’t want to run into him.
Not until he was ready.
Ferus accessed the door panel to the training room. It was empty, as it often was at this hour. He had just had a holographic meeting with the Emperor that morning. He had been given his first lesson.
It’s easier than you think, Palpatine had said. Oh, later there will be techniques to study, exercises to complete. But to start, you must do what you were taught never to do as a Jedi. Feel your anger, but do not let it So. Feed it. Anger wants to grow. As Jedi, you fought anger’s nature. It is why you lost. So this is your first lesson, Ferus. Give in to your anger. Don’t let it go.
Palpatine had smiled. No lightsaber necessary.
Ferus walked to the middle of the room, his boots striking the hard permacrete. In order to do this, he would have to revive his worst memory. The one he tried to bury.
In his mind, the image flicked on.
The lightsaber. The point of impact. Roan’s face when the lightsaber made contact.
The jolt of the impact, the way Roan’s arms went out, the way his body folded in half.
Darth Vader standing, not looking at Roan, not caring. Looking at Ferus. Killing Roan just to get at him. Eliminating a person with blood and bone and memory and laughter and vision and love, just… to rile a rival. As a game. As a sport.
The anger was a roar inside him. He didn’t turn away. He felt it move and he brought back the same image again, brought it back so that it was imprinted on the back of his eyeballs, until he screamed out loud with his pain.
Something ripped from the wall and rocketed across the space. A brace that held up an exercise bar. Ferus opened his eyes and concentrated his gaze on that bar, heavy durasteel two meters thick. It, too, ripped from the wall and flew across the space. It smashed into the wall, and a sizeable chunk of it fell away. He felt a flood of satisfaction move through him.
He turned. A chair resting against a wall shot forward. Another. He held the objects in the air. Then he focused his anger like a laser and felt it build and build until the objects smashed together and fell, broken, to the floor.
He wasn’t finished yet. Not with his anger, not with this room. This room, these objects, could be smashed and broken, and if anyone cared and came after him, they would be smashed, too, because his anger was that huge.
The floor under his feet began to crack. A chunk of ceiling fell and wires spilled out, and still Ferus kept turning, his eyes burning and the anger now a rolling ball of flame inside him until he couldn’t see anything but red. Red was the color of destruction.
“What’s going on here?”
The Imperial officer stood in the doorway, his eyes wide.
Ferus came back to himself. He looked around. The room was destroyed.
He had never been able to do such a thing before. He was panting. The dark side of the Force had entered him, and the pleasure he’d felt was frightening. Frightening … and satisfying.
Giving the officer a look of contempt, he walked out the door. The officer scurried backward in fear. Ferus enjoyed his fear.
It was the first time since Roan’s death he did not feel pain.
CHAPTER THREE
Flame paced back and forth in the front room of the safe house. Time was running out on this mission. She had the resistance leaders of significant Core and Mid-Rim planet systems in her movement. The Outer Rim was too unsettled, too insignificant to worry about yet. What she really needed was for Bellassa to join Moonstrike. Even if the resistance here had become fractured, it could rise again in a heartbeat. And the symbolic weight of the Bellassan Eleven was huge. That would keep the others close.
Bellassa first. Then Coruscant. Moonstrike would be complete. Her job would be done. She would have linked the resistance movements of the most important planetary systems in the galaxy. No one thought it could be done, and she had done it.
She had come a long way from Acherin. She had thought only a few years ago that the Clone Wars wouldn’t touch her. She’d thought that her comfortable life would last. She hadn’t been able to imagine her world destroyed, her wealth in danger, her family dead. She had to remake herself. She had to become a warrior. She had to use all her cunning, all her will, to do it. She had succeeded. Now the one important thing in her life, the only important thing, was her mission.