Star Wars - Lost Tribe of the Sith 01 - Precipice

impaling him on the remaining shards of the smashed viewport. Gloyd and Marcom strained to move toward him, but
Omen
was still on the move, clipping another rocky rise and spiraling downward. Something exploded, strewing flaming wreckage in the ship’s grinding wake.
    Agonizingly,
Omen
spun forward again, the torpedo doors that had been their makeshift airbrakes snapping like driftwood as it slid. Down a gravelly incline it skidded, showering stones in all directions. Korsin, his forehead bleeding, looked up and out to see—
    —nothing.
Omen
continued to slide toward an abyss. It had run out of mountain.
    Stop.
Stop!
    “Stop!”
    * * *
    Silence. Korsin coughed and opened his eyes.
    They were still alive.
    “No,” Seelah said, kneeling and clinging to Jariad. “We’re already dead.”
    Thanks to you
, she did not say—but Korsin felt the words streaming at him through the Force. He didn’t need the help. Her eyes said plenty.

Chapter Two
    Omen
’s permanent crew came from the same human stock as Korsin: the debris of a noble house, launched skyward centuries before in the whirlwind that formed the Tapani Empire. The Sith had found them, and found them useful. They were skilled in commerce and industry, all the things the Sith Lords needed most but never had time for with their world-building and world-destroying. His ancestors ran ships and factories, and ran them well. And before long, mingling their blood with that of the Dark Jedi, the Force was in his people, too.
    They were the future. They couldn’t acknowledge it, but it was obvious. Many of the Sith Lords were still of the crimson-hued species that had long formed the nucleus of their following. But the numbers were turning—and if Naga Sadow wanted to rule the galaxy, they had to.
    Naga Sadow.
Tentacle-faced, Dark Lord and heir to ancient powers. It was Naga Sadow who had dispatched
Omen
and
Harbinger
in search of Lignan crystals; Naga Sadow who needed the crystals on Kirrek, to defeat the Republic and its Jedi.
    Or was it the Jedi and their Republic? It didn’t matter. Naga Sadow would kill Commander Korsin and hiscrew for losing their ship. Seelah was right about that much.
    Yet Sadow need not lose the war, depending on what Korsin did now. He still had something. The crystals.
    But the crystals were high above at the moment.
    It had been a night of horrors, getting 355 people down from the lofty plateau. Sixteen injured had died along the way, and another five had tumbled into the darkness from the narrow ledge that formed the only apparent way up or down. No one doubted that evacuation had been the right call, though. They couldn’t stay up there, not with the fires still burning and the ship precariously perched. The last to leave the ship, Korsin had nearly soiled himself when one of the proton torpedoes had disengaged from the naked tube, tumbling over the precipice and into oblivion.
    By sunrise, they’d found a clearing, halfway down the mountain, dotted with wild grasses. Life was everywhere in the galaxy, even here. It was the first good sign. Above,
Omen
continued to burn. No need to wonder where above them the ship was, Korsin thought. Not while they could follow the smoke.
    Now, walking back into the afternoon crowd—less an encampment than a gathering—Korsin knew he never need wonder where his people were, either. Not while his nose worked. “Now I know why we kept the Massassi on their own level,” he said to no one.
    “Charming,” came a response from over his shoulder. “I should say they are not very happy with
you
, either.” Ravilan was a Red Sith, pureblooded as they came. He was quartermaster and keeper of the Massassi, the nasty lumbering bipeds that the Sith prized as instruments of terror on the battlefield. At the moment the Massassi didn’t seem so formidable. Korsin followed Ravilan into the fiendish circle, made even less pleasant by the stench of vomit. Florid monsterstwo and three meters tall sprawled on the ground, heaving and coughing.
    “Maybe some kind of pulmonary edema,” Seelah said, passing around purified-air canisters salvaged from an emergency pack. Before connecting with Devore and securing a place on his team, she’d been a battlefield medic—though Korsin couldn’t tell from her bedside manner, at least with Massassi. She barely touched the wheezing giant. “We’re no longer at elevation, so this should subside. Probably normal.”
    To her left, another Massassi hacked