SHE CAME TO HIM IN DARKNESS, AS HIS TORMENTORS ALWAYS DID, A cold malevolence waiting at the foot of his cot. Wynn Dorvan did not move, did not change his breathing, did not even test the restraints holding his limbs splayed and immobile. He merely closed his eyes and willed himself to escape into sleep.

“Come now, Wynn.” The voice was female and familiar, a voice he had heard before. “You know you won’t be rid of me that easily.”

The cell grew bright as the illumination panels activated overhead, and Wynn squeezed his eyes shut against the brilliance. It was impossible to mark the passing of time in the ceaseless darkness between torture sessions, but the pain stabbing through his head suggested it had been many days since his last interrogation.

“Wynn, you mustn’t keep me waiting,” the voice said. Something cold and slimy slithered around his bare ankle. “Not your Beloved Queen of the Stars.”

Wynn’s eyes popped open, filling his head with an explosion of pain and light, and he raised his head. Standing at the foot of his cot he saw two silhouettes, one a female human and one … something else.

“That’s better.” The voice seemed to be coming from the silhouette on the left—a hideous, sinuate thing with tentacles instead of arms, with blazing white stars where there should have been eyes. Abeloth. “I was afraid you were going to make me summon Lady Korelei.”

The memories of his recent Force torture only grew stronger as time passed, and the mere mention of Korelei’s name sent an electric bolt of fear shooting through his body. He ignored it—just as he ignored the inner voice telling him to scream and beg for mercy. The slightest hint of weakness would only bring Korelei back all the sooner, to pry from him the few secrets he had not yet surrendered—his most important secrets, the ones he was determined to carry into oblivion with him.

And so Wynn said the only thing he could say, the one thing that just might get him killed before Korelei returned: “Are you real?” He let his head drop back to the cot. “You can’t be real. You’re too blasted ugly.”

The silhouette remained silent for a moment, and had Wynn been a Jedi, he was fairly certain he would have felt her anger building in the Force. But when Abeloth spoke, her voice remained cool and in control, and Wynn knew he would not escape his torment so easily.

“I am very real, Wynn—more real than you can know,” she said. “And I grow weary of your tricks, as do the Sith. Lady Korelei is ready to employ the necromantic option.”

Wynn managed a sort of nod. “Let her.” As he spoke, the light started to grow less painful, and when he glanced toward the silhouette it began to seem less hideous and sinuate—more substantial and vaguely human. “If Lady Korelei could get truth from a dead man, she wouldn’t be wasting time trying to extract it from a living one.”

“So you have been lying to her?”

“No one can lie to a Sith Lord,” he said. “That’s what she keeps telling me.”

“You might be an exception,” the woman said. “You are certainly not telling her what the Sith wish to know.”

Now that Wynn’s vision was clearing, he could see that his visitor had changed from the hideous tentacle-armed Abeloth into an elegant, blue-skinned Jessar female. There was a slight bulge to her eyes, and her face looked as though it were starting to peel from a bad sunburn. But anyone with access to the HoloNet would have no trouble recognizing her as Rokari Kem, Chief of State of the Galactic Alliance.

“You might suggest that she ask nicely,” Wynn said. “Really, who wants to cooperate with someone who keeps blasting Force probes through his mind?”

“Then perhaps we should try something else,” Kem suggested. “How would you like to be released from this cell?”

Wynn raised his head as high as was possible. “You must know how very silly that question is.”

Kem’s only response was a series of soft clicks as the cuffs around Wynn’s wrists and ankles fell open. The tension vanished from his arms and legs, and when he tried to pull his pain-numbed limbs in toward his body, they actually moved.

More suspicious than surprised, Wynn struggled into an upright position and was finally able to get a good look at Kem’s companion. Dressed in the gray jumpsuit of a GAS prisoner, the woman had blond hair, narrow eyes, and a hard, familiar face that Wynn knew he should have recognized, but could not quite place in his current condition.

He shifted his gaze back to Kem. “Well, that was easy,” he said. “What’s the catch?”

“Catch?” Kem asked. “Ah—what I want in return. That would be your help.”

“My help?” Wynn echoed, still trying to work out the second woman’s identity—and what she had to do with his own captivity. “To do what?”

“Help me rule,” Kem replied simply.

Now Wynn was surprised. “You want me to help you rule the Galactic Alliance?”

“You would help me run the government, yes,” Kem confirmed. “You would be saving lives, Wynn—a great many lives.”

Keenly aware that there had to be a trap—with Abeloth and her Sith, there was always a trap—Wynn fell silent and did his best to sort through priorities with his torture-raddled brain. His most important goal was to protect the informal intelligence network he had been operating with Admiral and Eramuth Bwua’tu. By now, the two Bothans knew of his capture, and they had undoubtedly taken precautions to protect themselves. But the network itself would be vital to the Jedi when they returned to liberate the planet, and so far he had managed to avoid revealing its existence to Lady Korelei and her assistants.

But Wynn knew he could not put that off much longer. He had run out of unimportant details three sessions earlier and begun to feed his tormentors small scraps of more valuable information. Now they were beginning to put together a more complete picture of the secret workings of the Galactic Alliance government—a picture that was leading them closer to Club Bwua’tu all the time.

“Is it such a hard decision, Wynn?” Kem asked. “You can save lives and escape your torture. Or you can condemn thousands to die … and remain here to feed Lady Korelei’s appetites.”

Of course, it wasn’t a hard decision at all—and that’s what made Wynn hesitate. Rokari Kem—or Abeloth, or whatever she called herself—was not only the new leader of the Galactic Alliance. She was also the secret leader of the Sith, and Sith cared nothing about the lives they took or the harm they caused. They cared only about their own power. If Abeloth was willing to forgo the secrets that her torturers were slowly prying from his mind, then it could only mean she saw a more valuable way to use him—a way that would allow her to do even more damage to the Galactic Alliance.

But Abeloth didn’t know everything, and one of the things she didn’t know was that Wynn just needed to buy time—time for the Jedi to arrive before he broke. Finally, he looked up and met Kem’s gaze.

“You’d move me out of this cell?” he asked. “And keep me away from Lady Korelei?”

“Of course,” Kem assured him. “As long as you continue to serve me, you’ll be safe from Lady Korelei.”

“I won’t be your mouthpiece,” Wynn warned. His demands, he knew, would mean nothing to her—but he had to make them, or she would grow suspicious of his true motives. “And I won’t feed you the names of beings who stand against you.”

“I expect nothing of the sort,” Kem assured him, smiling broadly and warmly. “I have enough names to last a standard year.”

Wynn allowed his discomfort at the assertion to show in his face, but asked, “Well then, what do you expect from me?”

“Nothing but what you gave Chief Daala,” Kem said. “By all accounts, you’re an excellent administrator and a capable adviser.”

“You want my advice?” Wynn began to think he was hallucinating—that he had finally broken under Korelei’s attentions and lost his mind. “You can’t be sincere.”

“But I am … so very sincere.” Kem reached for the arm of the woman she had brought along, then pulled her forward to stand next to the cot. “I’m sure you remember Lieutenant Lydea Pagorski?”

Pagorski—of course. She was the Imperial intelligence officer who had perjured herself at Tahiri Veila’s murder trial. Wynn nodded and turned to the woman.

“I do,” he said. “I’m sorry to see you here, too.”

Pagorski’s face grew even paler, and she cast a nervous glance toward Kem.

Kem merely rolled her eyes. “There’s no need to feel sorry for the lieutenant,” she said. “The Empire wants her returned, and I’d like to know whether to grant their request.”

“You’re asking me to make the decision?” Wynn asked, more suspicious than ever.

“To give me your opinion, yes,” Kem said. “You won’t be making any decisions yourself.”

Wynn began to feel a little better about the arrangement. Kem and her Sith were, after all, practically strangers to the galaxy at large. It made sense that they might need someone like him to help sort through the thousands of diplomatic petitions that came through the Chief of State’s office every day.

“What did the Empire offer in return for Lieutenant Pagorski’s release?” he asked.

Kem frowned. “Nothing.”

“Not even a task force port call?”

“Nothing at all,” Kem said. “I’ll deny the request.”

Wynn shook his head. “You should grant it.”

“I should grant it, when they offer nothing?” Now that the possibility of payment had been raised, Kem seemed offended that none had been offered. “And if they had offered something, what should I have done? Taken only half?”

“No,” Wynn replied. “You should have refused to return the lieutenant at all, then moved her into a military interrogation facility before they could assassinate her.”

Kem looked truly confused. “Because the offer was an insult?”

“Because it would have meant that Lieutenant Pagorski was valuable to them,” Wynn explained. “And before you even considered releasing her, you would want to know the nature of that value.”

“And because they offer nothing, she has no value?”

“That’s right—the request is merely routine.” Wynn turned to Pagorski. “You have family on Bastion, don’t you? Someone important?”

Pagorski’s eyes widened. “My father is an admiral in Fleet Provisions,” she said. “How did you know?”

“He’s putting pressure on the diplomatic corps,” Wynn replied. “They made the request so they could tell him they’re doing something.”

“I can’t grant such a request,” Kem objected. “It will diminish my stature.”

Wynn shook his head. “You’re forgetting your public persona,” he said, surprised that the leader of the Sith would make such a mistake. “You’re supposed to be Rokari Kem, a wise and compassionate leader from B’nish—not Rokari Kem, a greedy and power-hungry Sith overlord.”

“Yes, I see your point,” Kem said, her eyes flaring at the terms he had used to describe her. She sighed and turned to Pagorski. “I cannot allow you to return to the Empire knowing my true—”

“I won’t tell anyone!” Pagorski interrupted, clearly terrified. “I give you my word as—”

“If your word had any value, you wouldn’t have been in a GAS detention center in the first place,” Kem retorted. “But there’s no need to kill you. I’m just going to use the Force to wipe away some of your memories.”

Relief flooded Pagorski’s face. “I understand,” she said, visibly relieved. “Feel free.”

“I wasn’t asking, Lieutenant.”

Kem placed her hands on the sides of Pagorski’s head, then looked into the woman’s eyes and locked gazes. For a moment, nothing seemed to happen, and Wynn thought the mindwipe might be as painless as it was mysterious.

Then the air between the two women began to shimmer. Pagorski’s eyes opened wide, and her face twisted into a mask of horror. Rokari Kem’s fingers grew long and thin, and suddenly her arms dissolved into gray slimy tentacles, and in the Sith’s place stood the hideous thing that Wynn had glimpsed on waking, a slender sinuate form with coarse yellow hair and a mouth so broad that it reached from ear to ear.

Abeloth.

Pagorski’s jaw fell open in a wordless scream. The tentacles shot down her throat, into her ears and nostrils, and began to pulse. Horrible gagging noises erupted from her mouth. Her entire body went limp and hung, convulsing, by the ropy tendrils that had been inserted into her head.

Finally, Pagorski’s expression went blank. Her complexion grew so pale and translucent that Wynn could see the tentacles throbbing inside her face, pumping something dark and viscous into her sinuses and her ears and down into her trachea. He began to scramble back, pressing himself against the wall behind him so fiercely it seemed to yield. The cell reverberated with a loud, growling howl that he did not recognize as his own voice until he found himself crouching in the corner, gnawing at his knuckles and banging his skull against the durasteel.

The thing turned its gruesome head toward Wynn’s corner, then fixed its blazing white eyes on him and smiled a grin as deep and dark as the Maw itself.

“Now that you’ll be serving me, you should know this about your Beloved Queen of the Stars,” Abeloth said. “She is so much more than a Sith.”