Star Wars: Knight Errant Read Online Free PDF Page B

forgotten that he could be surprised, too.
    Only Kerra had survived, with none of the weapons, medicine, or supplies she had so carefully gathered. They, and the starship they’d arrived in, had disappeared into a sea of fire. Kerra didn’t even know how to get home. She’d memorized the hyperspace route they’d taken into Daiman’s territory, but that terminated at the planet they’d raided, a place now under such heavy guard she could never return to it.
    She’d been tempted to end her own journey soon afterward. Residents lived in constant despair, and meeting both Daiman and Odion confirmed for her that things could never improve. Death was better than survival for those living underfoot—and, perhaps, for a Jedi alone. Better to go down fighting.
    It had taken making friends here—including one surprising, selfless individual—to change Kerra’s trajectory. “You’re no good to us dead,” Vannar had always told her. That applied, too, to the people living under Sith rule. She was no good to them dead, either. Suicide-by-Sith wasn’t the answer. She had to live.
    In a curious way, Kerra’s change of heart had been like another Vannar Treece raid. It stabbed into the darknessthat had clouded her soul and offered hope. Defeating the Sith wasn’t the point; helping the people was. Fighting Sith was certainly one way the Jedi could help the downtrodden, but it wasn’t the only way. Yes, the people needed bold, dramatic acts of the Vannar variety, but they also needed more than gestures. They needed things that did immediate good: a tall order for a team of Jedi, much less one acting alone. She’d have to manufacture her own opportunities. That required a plan.
    Planning, she was good at.
    Kerra was already in Daiman’s realm; he became the first target. Her feelings against Odion were stronger, but for that reason she didn’t trust them. Anger over her childhood’s premature end had already led her astray once. Daiman was younger, and while he wasn’t as physically powerful as his monstrous sibling, he was, in his own way, just as much of a threat.
    Daiman was a creature utterly without empathy. At the academy, Kerra had studied the notion of solipsism as it related to Sith teachings; none other than Darth Ruin had expounded upon it years before. Sith philosophy promoted the glorification of self and the subjugation of others. The young lord took it to a deranged extreme, declaring that existence was some game constructed by—what? Some version of himself on a higher plane, pitting Daiman’s mortal body against artificial obstacles it had dreamed up, like physics, and evil siblings. Daiman’s empire depended on the labor of others, but the lives of the others didn’t matter to him.
    The parasite needed to be separated from the host. But first, its spread had to be contained.
    Kerra found a good target in the munitions industry, which allowed Daiman both to wage war and to oppress people on multiple worlds at once. It was better than striking at the military directly. Even if she somehow found a way to land a devastating blow, her worry wasthat Odion or another opportunistic neighbor might pour across the cosmic border, hurting more innocents still. Better to rot Daiman’s system from within, leaving the illusion of strength to his peers but an empty shell inside. By the time the regime collapsed, she hoped, most of the civilians would be out of harm’s way.
    Her weeks since losing her Master on Chelloa had included strikes against weapons plants on a string of worlds. In some cases, she’d been able to free the slave laborers and their families, but those opportunities had grown less frequent as she’d approached the center of Daiman’s realm. In the metropolis, there was no wilderness into which freed natives could flee. But Darkknell was obviously her ultimate goal. By striking Daiman’s military research efforts here, she could still factories on a dozen worlds at once.
    She’d arrived on