Star Wars: Knight Errant Read Online Free PDF Page A

neighborhood for as long as she’d resided there, now the hulking guard staggered about, screaming in pain. Kerra froze for a moment, unsure of what to do. Evil minion or no, the creature was suffering.
    She stepped into the street, only to be knocked aside by the advance of three of his fellow sentries. Remembering her cover identity, Kerra began to exhale, relieved that someone else had gone to help him.
    Nope, they shot him . Seeing the thug fall dead at his would-be rescuers’ feet, Kerra rolled her eyes and retreated into an alley. Sith space was like this everywhere: a place of sudden violence—almost completely devoid of compassion or remorse. She’d never understand it. But she didn’t have to understand it to win her fight.
    And now she had a stealth suit.
     
    A cracked window heaved upward. Lithely, Kerra slipped back into her home of the past few weeks. The only things inside were a pair of bedrolls, her duffel, and a stand for the portable glow lamp she had to share with Gub Tengo’s young granddaughter. From the look of the crumpled blankets in the corner, Tan was already gone for the morning. The room wouldn’t have been big enough for a closet back in the Jedi academy, a place where the students were preparing to live with no possessions. Here on Darkknell, it had to accommodate two.
    Setting down the Bothan’s pouch, Kerra peeked through the open doorway into the main room. The old Sullustan was there, asleep in his chair again before a mass of documents. His arm stuck out at a right angle, his worn hand shaking as his fingers clutched an invisible pen.
    Kerra edged into the room long enough to douse the glow lamp and push him back from the table. Flimsiplast cels fluttered to the floor. Kerra winced. Every part of Gub’s job was insane. Not just what he had to do—but how much of it he had to do. On other worlds with long rotational periods, societies made some allowances for species that were used to standard-length days. Not so for Daiman’s realm. The Sith Lord saw a day with thirty-two hours as a chance to get in another work shift.
    Stealing back into her chambers, Kerra hung the ragged sheet that served as a door and reached for the gold-stained bag. For all the technology it contained, the Bothan’s bodysuit had folded up nicely. The label was just inside the seam. CYRICEPT .
    Kerra hadn’t been gone that long from Republic space, but somehow, seeing something as simple as a familiar commercial trade name felt refreshing. And a stalwart firm, at that. As the Sith had advanced farther on the Outer Rim, other corporations had tried to deal with the new “locals,” usually to their ultimate regret. The more vital to Republic security a company was, the more the Defense Ministry usually had to cajole it to relocate. But Cyricept had repeatedly pulled its operations back from the frontier without being asked. Maybe it was because their whole stealth-systems business was about staying low and keeping out of trouble. What ever the reason, Kerra was overjoyed to see the suit now, even in its despoiled condition. Her supplies from the Republic were limited to the clothes she wore and the lightsaber in her knapsack.
    That was never supposed to have been the case. Jedi Master Vannar Treece’s venture into Daiman’s space was supposed to have been a surgical strike: short and well supplied. An inspiring figure, Treece had led volunteers into Sith space several times, taking upon himself missions the larger Jedi Order could no longer perform. TheSith in the outer reaches had grown so robust that the Republic, already weakened by the Candorian plague, had largely written off everything beyond an inner security cordon. It had even deactivated the interstellar relays that allowed communications with the outside. Whole swaths of space lay abandoned.
    The Republic government and the Jedi Order weren’t against Treece’s raids. The need for them was obvious. But the woman who headed both bodies,