"What is this trap you have led us to?" the Vagaari demanded, his tone sending a shiver through Car'das's body.
"I don't understand," Car'das protested. "Did your people get the wrong coordinates from the transport's computer?"
"We have been brought too soon into crawlspace," the Miskara bit out. "The stolen ship net has been used against us."
Behind Car'das came the subtle clicking of locks as someone prepared to open his prison. "But how could the Chiss have planned such a thing?" he asked, fumbling to get the words out before the door could be opened. If he was brought before the Miskara now, he was likely to die a quick and very uncomfortable death. "They must have been using it on someone else, and we just happened to run into it."
"With all of space to choose from?" the Miskara shot back. Still, Car'das thought he could hear a slight dip in the other's anger level. "Ridiculous."
"Stranger things have happened," Car'das insisted, feeling sweat breaking out on his forehead.
Behind him, the hull cracked open. Car'das tensed, but the Vagaari outside merely thrust a set of macrobinoculars from the Chiss shuttle into his hands. "Look forward," the Miskara's voice ordered. "Tell me the story of this vessel."
The door was slammed shut again behind him. Exhaling some of his tension, Car'das activated the macrobinoculars and scanned the sky in front of him.
The object of the Miskara's interest wasn't hard to locate. It was a set of six ships, big ones, arranged around a cylindrical core with tapered ends.
It was Outbound Flight.
He took a careful breath. "I've never seen anything like it," he told the Miskara. "But it matches the description of a long-range exploration and colony project called Outbound Flight. There are fifty thousand of my people aboard those ships, with enough supplies in the storage core to last all of them for several years."
"How many fighting machines will they have?"
"I don't know," Car'das said. "There'll be some, certainly, mostly those bigger tripod-type droidekas to be used as colony boundary guards. Probably a few hundred of those. Most of their droids will be service and repair types, though. They probably have at least twenty thousand of those types."
"And these mechanical slaves will have the same artificial brains and mechanisms as the fighting machines?"
Car'das grimaced. It was pretty clear where the Miskara was going with this. "Yes, they could probably all be adapted to combat of some sort," he agreed. "But the people there aren't going to just hand them over to you. And those Dreadnaughts pack alot of firepower."
"Your concern is touching," the Miskara said, his voice thick with sarcasm. "But we are the Vagaari. We take what we want."
There was a click, and the comlink shut off. "Yes," Car'das murmured. "So I've heard."
"There," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said, pointing out theSpringhawk 's canopy. "You see them, Commander?"
"They're a little hard to miss," Doriana ground out, his throat tight as he gazed at the hundreds of alien ships that had suddenly appeared at the edge of Mitth'raw'nuruodo's gravity-field trap. "Who the blazes are they?"
"A nomadic race of conquerors and destroyers called the Vagaari," Mitth'raw'nuruodo told him.
"What are they doing here?" Kav demanded, his voice shaking. "How did they find us?"
"I would imagine we have Car'das to thank for that," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said calmly. "As it happens, this system is on a direct line between the last known Vagaari position and my Crustai base."
Doriana stared at the other. "You mean Car'dasbetrayed you?"
"Car'das has his own concerns and priorities." Mitth'raw'nuruodo lifted his eyebrows pointedly at Doriana. "As do we all."
There was no real answer to that, at least none that Doriana was interested in voicing. "What are we going to do about them?" he asked instead.
"Let us wait and see their intentions," Mitth'raw'nuruodo said, turning back to gaze out the bridge canopy. "Perhaps they will be cooperative."
Doriana frowned. "Cooperative how?"
Mitth'raw'nuruodo smiled faintly. "Patience, Commander. Let us wait and see."
"They arrived quite suddenly," C'baoth's voice came from Lorana's comlink, calm but with an edge to it she'd seldom heard before. "Some ploy of the Chiss, I imagine."
"What are they doing?" Lorana asked, keeping her voice down as she gazed ahead of her at the line of men, women, and children walking alongside the stacks of storage crates toward the Jedi training center. There was no point in worrying these people any more than they already were.
"So far, just waiting," C'baoth told her. "Captain Pakmillu informs me that their ship design is radically different from that of the Chiss, but of course that means nothing."
"Have you asked the commander about them?" Lorana asked. Uliar, walking at the end of the line of prisoners, glanced over his shoulder and started to drift backward toward her. "Maybe they have nothing to do with him."
C'baoth snorted. "With all of space for them to fly through? Please."
"What's going on?" Uliar asked softly.
Lorana hesitated. But all of Outbound Flight was in this together. "An unidentified fleet has arrived," she told him. "Over two hundred ships, at least a hundred of which seem to be warships."
"Who are you talking to?" C'baoth asked.
"We're trying to figure out whether they're Chiss ships, Chiss allies, or someone else entirely," Lorana continued, ignoring the question.
"What are their reactor emissions like?" Uliar asked. "Is it a similar spectrum to Mitth-whatever's ships, or something different?"
"Whois that?" C'baoth demanded. "Jedi Jinzler?"
"Reactor Tech Uliar says we might be able to deduce their identity or affiliation from their reactor emission spectrum," Lorana said.
"And what precisely is Reactor Tech Uliar doing out of the imprisonment I ordered for him and his fellow conspirators?" C'baoth asked acidly.
"We're on our way there," Lorana said, feeling her resolve eroding beneath the weight and pressure of his personality. "I thought that since he's an expert in these things-"
"We have experts up here, too," C'baoth cut in. "Loyalexperts. You concentrate on putting Uliar where he can't do any more harm and leave the alien fleet to-"