When The Cauldron slipped out of hyperspace, Moff Harsh felt a certain relief.
The man hadn't been sure everything would go according to plan.
But it had worked out as well as it possibly could.
The Star Destroyer had completed its jump.
And now it was slowly approaching the endless stream of space boulders.
Colors from the Chiloon Rift nebula spilled into the bridge, shimmering along their path.
Anyone who made it to this cherished stretch of the galaxy, lying beyond the borders of the known galaxy, couldn't miss the chance to enjoy the play of every color known.
As a human, Moff Harsh had no doubt that some exotics, whose vision worked in a different spectrum, could see far more.
But this was enough for him.
For a long time, he watched the beauty of this nebula.
He flew from one asteroid to another, overseeing the miners working this vein of ore or that one.
He wasn't a scientist and couldn't guess how many celestial bodies had died here to form such a dense and unpredictable, practically impenetrable asteroid field.
A region generously laced with gas clouds and plasma formations, not to mention the hated rocks, ranging in size from a finger phalanx to small planetoids.
Hundreds of pilots had died exploring these asteroid fields, unable to handle the controls in this endless flow of dangers.
Only the most experienced and most capable pilots could survive and work here.
The mortality rate was such that even TIE fighter pilots, dying on every fifth combat sortie, would be considered a model of survivability here.
The Chiloon Rift.
"Navigators have plotted a course to the base, Moff," the executive officer reported to Harsh.
In effect, the second man aboard The Cauldron after the former ruler of the Bosph sector himself.
"Proceed," the Moff ordered at once. "I want to get back to base as soon as possible."
There was too much that needed doing.
Getting rid of the unfriendly Zann Consortium military, for instance; taking control of every one of the dozens of extraction platforms so the slaves wouldn't dare to revolt.
A lot of work lay ahead.
Yes, there were no manufacturing facilities in the Rift—only a small number of smelters, whose task was to melt the ore into ingots that would be convenient to transport.
But that had been before.
Back when Harsh worked for Tyber Zann.
Now he had chosen his own path, and he had no intention of leaving it.
True, he'd been helped into it.
The Moff cast a sidelong glance at the silent figure of a young woman, a pair of lightsabers dangling from her belt.
She and her brother never called each other by name in front of others, addressing one another only as "Sister" and "Brother."
In the Moff's opinion, it was a rather silly bit of conspiracy theater, especially given that both of them had been whispering in Harsh's ear from practically the first day they appeared aboard The Cauldron.
But if the man had managed to keep his own incognito, Harsh had managed to learn the girl's name.
Freymis.
"Brother" and "Sister"-Freymis.
Short, slender—one might even say shapely.
Dark gray hair framing an unsmiling face, most of the time wearing a haughty expression.
Driven.
Cunning.
Ruthless.
Like her brother, she was a former Inquisitor—who had dropped onto his, Harsh's, head like snow out of a clear sky.
It had happened a few months ago, shortly before The Cauldron and the few remaining Ulan-class frigates the Moff still had were sent to the Chiloon Rift to mine the resources the Zann Consortium needed so badly to build a new fleet.
How many warships Zann already had in service was known only to the organization's wing commander, Admiral Jerid Sykes.
For obvious reasons, he didn't talk about it much.
But if Harsh understood anything, it was that the Zann Consortium intended to build a gigantic fleet.
Well, at first he'd even wanted to help them.
Now, with both Inquisitors saying they saw his destiny at the head of his own Empire, any desire Harsh had to help those criminal scum was gone.
He had to think about himself, not about someone else.
At the moment he had only one Star Destroyer and five Ulans at his disposal.
Better not to remember the TIE fighters at all—there were only a little more than a hundred left, and even those were on the planetoid base.
That was enough to guard the Rift against invasion, especially since the astrogation here was such that even the most persistent enemy would suffer enormous losses trying to get inside.
Of course, if they didn't know the fairway through the asteroid field.
Or rather—two fairways.
One from the Bosph sector side, the most dangerous and unpredictable, like the hyperspace route leading to the Chiloon Rift itself.
The moment the journey ends, the ship drops into an asteroid field where it's practically impossible for an unprepared pilot to survive.
The second was calmer, and it was the one The Cauldron was using now, completing its transit from the Mierukar sector.
Now the Moff was thinking about what he needed to do next.
At the base there were a large number of mercenaries, loyal exclusively to the Zann Consortium.
At first he had intended to destroy them using his stormtroopers, and now, having returned "home," he hadn't changed his mind.
The lack of long-range communications in the system allowed the mercenaries to be kept in the dark about the Moff's betrayal of Tyber Zann's interests.
But at the same time, they were dangerous.
Especially the "Vultures," who commanded the base's remaining infantry combat detachments.
The "red-and-blacks," as the organization's senior officers called the Zann Consortium's elite troops behind their backs, were supremely motivated.
And if it was still possible to negotiate somehow with the infantrymen, who were essentially mercenaries (Harsh didn't keep information about aurodium deposits on several large asteroids secret for nothing), then that wouldn't work with the "Vultures."
"The Vultures need to be killed first," Harsh said, addressing the woman.
"Sister" looked at him as if he'd said something utterly absurd.
"The red-and-blacks won't follow my orders if they learn I betrayed the organization," Harsh explained.
"Then they will die," Freymis replied calmly. "Brother and I will make sure they don't become a problem."
"Be my guest," the Moff sneered. "Hope you have enough experience to kill those soldiers."
"Don't worry," Freymis advised. "Those soldiers won't be a problem for us."
"It would be nice to believe your words match your actions," Harsh grumbled angrily. "Because I've been given plenty of promises, but so far not a single one has been fulfilled."
"I wouldn't advise doubting our capabilities, Moff," "Sister" said in an icy tone. "The last one who did died by our blades."
"The last one who let me down burned in The Cauldron's reactor," Harsh shot back, looking at the woman with defiance.
Beautiful, but far too bitchy.
Looks like it was her little brother who used to keep the nasty side of this harpy in check.
And now, when he preferred to sit out in his quarters, her ambition and insolence were crawling out of every crack.
"I doubt you'll be able to deal with me and Brother," she said challengingly.
"Don't be so sure your glow sticks will beat my stormtroopers' blasters," Harsh said, searching with his eyes for the commander of the ground forces.
The officer was standing by the tactical terminal, studying something on it while technicians repaired equipment that had failed.
Just as Harsh opened his mouth to call to him, the officer sneezed deafeningly.
And he accompanied the act with a short stream of profanity muttered under his breath.
In doing so, he also frightened the young junior specialists nearby, and kicked up a cloud of dust from the guts of the terminal, which hadn't been serviced in a long time.
Yes—Harsh was in "serious trouble" when it came to spare parts.
He had to pull decommissioned equipment from The Cauldron's stores and, out of several consoles, repair one, stripping old parts for the components needed by the active installations.
"Sister" looked at the Moff's stormtrooper commander with inexplicable interest.
He pretended nothing had happened.
"Commander!" Harsh said with a wince. "Will your stormtroopers deal with a couple of Inquisitors if they decide to do me some harm?"
"Without a doubt—yes, sir," the stormtrooper commander reported. "All we need is your order!"
"Don't wait for it if you see Sister decide not to carry out my orders," Harsh said with an ominous smile, staring hard at the woman.
In her eyes he saw only a yellow-orange glint of molten metal that supposedly symbolized her fury.
"The same goes for her Brother," the former Imperial Moff added with no small amount of pleasure.
Nothing more than ordinary prevention, the kind that must be done with subordinates so they don't forget their place.
And meanwhile, The Cauldron moved through realspace, threading past stone boulders drifting in the void.