Na’Sara sprinted across the starport floor, heading for her own docking bay with a speed only really available to a member of the Order who was truly feeling the urgency. With the Starsoul flowing around her, she never put a foot wrong; never zigged in the wrong direction to collide with anyone else; and, drawing on its power, she was more than capable of vaulting kiosks rather than diverting around them.

The flowing robes that proclaimed her an Order member to outsiders, as well as her head-fronds moved vigourously behind her, marking her progress for any hypothetical observer, or for the few dozen actual observers clogging up the starport’s main halls.

She came to a dead halt at the door to her hangar only because there had been no way to open it ahead of her arrival, but her handprint on the plate released the magloc and the door began to roll back mechanically. Impatient, Na’Sara took hold of it mentally now it wasn’t held in place and shoved it open at speed with a sweeping gesture of one hand, then plunged on in toward her ship, picking up speed again at a sprint as the landing ramp opened.

She half-leaped, half-dived through the ramp opening when the bottom of the ramp was still eight feet above ground level and slammed the button to reverse direction with an effort of will imposed upon the local Starsoul.

She was already on her way to her seat in the cockpit.

Only when docking clamps were disengaged, clearance to proceed to hyperspace jump distance had been secured, and the Hooded Hawk was actually on its way to the projected start of her jump did Na’Sara gather the Starsoul into herself and slow her heartbeat, steadying her breathing and generally calming her nerves.

She was more on edge than she usually would be, first of all; that much wasn’t just obvious, it was perfectly natural under the circumstances. Vasir’s mental link, borne by the Starsoul, had reached her mentor over interstellar distances with its cry for help. Such feats had been known only a handful of times in the entire existence of the Order. It took not just tremendous talent but raw power.

Truthfully, Na’Sara had been surprised that Vasir was capable of it, but that was by the by. For her to even attempt it spoke of grave danger, as did the fact her notoriously overconfident former student had felt the need to call for help from the one person she knew had the mind to hear the call and the willingness to answer.

Even then, Vasir would have to handle things herself for a while before Na’Sara’s ship resolved back into realspace in her destination system. Na’Sara knew she might simply be on a path for justice, not rescue, but she prayed that would not be so.

The jump itself ran through her, a light shiver as she remembered how deeply they had affected her under the control of the Shadow Order.

She started a sensor scan, calling up a record of the system. She’d never been here before, had been relieved to find it in her ship’s navigation database after Vasir’s call impressed the name into her thoughts.

They were back in the Fringes. System governors in these areas might or might not recognise a higher authority, but whether they did or not they operated with near-total autonomy in any case. The system had three habitable planets but only two inhabited, according to the system record. It would probably be thirty to forty years out of date, so there might be planetfall on the third, but Na’Sara doubted it.

Obirron was a Third Evacuation Wave founding system, the first wave of evacuation carried out in ships that could travel hyperspace paths. Like a slight majority of populated systems it had been founded through humanity’s desperate need to colour in more of the starmap, but by the Third Evacuation the ships were multispecies and took the Starsoul with them to each new settlement.

The Third Evacuation had been an overreaction in hindsight, Na’Sara knew; humanity and other aliens in a single galactic arm fearing the Steel Collective, a group artificial intelligence bent on the destruction of organic sentience, a tool of a long-gone hypothetical progenitor species, which awoke slowly when ansible communication waves were detected. Most living beings ignored it; some few prepared to stand their ground to flee, and a significant proportion set sights on areas of the galaxy they hoped were outside the Collective’s reach.

In the end, the Collective had been defeated by a small band of heroes, now the source material for dozens of cheap holo sagas, led by Commander Xelia Kody. The Order liked to claim lineage from her, though historians disputed this claim.

In addition to the two inhabited planets, there were a few dozen arcology-sized habitats in the upper fringes of the system’s gas giant, mining for vital elements. There were any number of places where Vasir might be; Na’Sara was hoping to see a reported ping from her craft’s transponder.

When the scan completed without one, Na’Sara frowned tensely. Order issued transponders were designed to be difficult to shut down or reprogram. A lack of a signal was a sign that either trouble was worse or Vasir had managed to escape the system. Na’Sara had been in the starport close to her own craft when the message had come through; she’d experienced no undue delay in launch, no traffic on the way to the jump point.

It was technically possible that Vasir had escaped and jumped outsystem in the time since sending a telepathic alert through the Starsoul, but Na’Sara didn’t find it very plausible. Not with the sheet amount of trouble she had to presume had caused the alert in the first place.

Deprived of her first clue, she prepared to reach out through the Starsoul herself and hope to find traces of Vasir’s mental presence.

Her eye happened to fall on the summary of other data from the scan as she did so. Two transponder pings on the uninhabited planet jumped out at her; seasoned instincts which might be described as Order training but which had as much to do with intuition told her these were her destination.

She punched up an overlay on her cockpit window, confirming the two pings as being adjacent to each other on the planetary surface. To Na’Sara this was as good as a confirmation. Pushing her thrusters to full, she descended on the location as quickly as possible, the threat to Vasir’s life uppermost in her mind.

*

Obirron II was the closest of the system’s habitable planets to its sun, and while breathable, the atmosphere was thick and retained all of that heat.

Na’Sara hesitated on departure from the Hooded Hawk before leaving behind her robe, knowing exactly how uncomfortably heavy and prickly she would soon be if she tried to continue wearing it. Her armoured bodystocking, without her robes of state above it, looked more like something a gangster would wear, although its deep unpatterned grey was a little too dull for most.

She clipped her blade hilt to her belt, checked the power to the personal grapple she kept on it, and stepped quickly down the ramp.

She had set down one clearing across from the other landed ships, not so they wouldn’t notice here - there was little to no chance her approach had gone unnoticed - but simply so she could get away from her craft without being attacked, if she needed to.

Reaching out to the Starsoul, she winced almost immediately. There was a murky unpleasantness to it that put her in mind of her encounter with dark sorcery some few years previous; the Starsoul was tainted in a way that took intelligent life to achieve.

All the same, she did sense some intelligences. It didn’t appear that they’d moved far from their ships. She unclipped her hilt and held it ready, proceeding cautiously. A shadowy Starsoul might mean a delay in how quickly she realised danger was present, and she wanted to do everything possible to avoid that.

The vegetation still looked healthy, she noticed; this place couldn’t have had a tainted Starsoul for all that long, which made her wonder how the taint could possibly be so strong already.

The clearing she expected to find two ships in in fact contained three, and she recognised the third instantly as Vasir’s craft Cometsong, even if a chunk of the plating of its underbelly hung down loose, with damaged components scattered on the muddy ground below and a number of dangling, sparking cables hanging from the opening.

The others were typical craft for something that didn’t carry many people but were jump-capable; like most such vehicles they’d been modified after purchase, weapon systems and engines being the most common additions, but nothing had been done to them that stood out.

Na’Sara would have relaxed, if she didn’t remember the fear in her former student’s mind when the distress call had been sent.

Just who were these others? And how many of them were there?

The ground was somewhat disturbed; she could see signs by the edge of the clearing of a scuffle, and as she approached it, she saw two shallow grooves extending from it into the woodland proper.

Someone had been either killed or subdued and was now being dragged, she diagnosed. It didn’t take much insight to realise that,

It also gave her a direct trail to follow, which might or might not be a trap, but which she knew she had to walk in either case. Following the drag marks, she opened herself up to the Starsoul; tainted or otherwise, it was the best tool she had for knowing what she needed to know and staying safe.

Up ahead were a number of different tangling emotions, with one entity strongly projecting glee while another emanated mental whimpers of exhaustion. Na’Sara picked up the pace, following along the trail at a run.

Up ahead was a clearing that had been made by people, not by chance movement of seeds through animals and weather. There were stumps that bore the blackened tops to indicate energy blades had been used in their construction; the felled trees themselves were gone, despite the effort it would have taken to move them.

At the centre of the wide clearing someone had unearthed a massive slab of rock and driven one end into the ground so that it rose vertically upward, a stone knife ten feet in height stabbing into the sky.

Vasir had been lashed to it, stout ropes around her wrists and ankles spreadeagling her. The armoured bodystocking all Order members wore as a protective measure was missing, and a thin line of blood at an angle across one shin suggested it might have been cut off. She was still wearing her robes, though, and while they were ragged and had the blackened, burned edges to slashes which signified combat with energy blades, they provided her with some little modesty, her head slumped forward.

Na’Sara drew heavily on the Starsoul to contain the heat of her rage. Whatever else this was, it was clearly a trap, and she knew she needed to be ready for it.

She reached out around the clearing with the Starsoul, looking for any signs of intelligence, but also seeking any echoes of intentionality, any resonances that might suggest a mechanical trap had been set up and was now waiting.

Nothing.

She didn’t trust it; didn’t in any case trust the situation. It was possible Vasir had been prepared as a sacrifice or something and left there until local midnight or some other sorcerously propitious time, but it didn’t make sense, and sure, sorcerors often did things that didn’t make sense, but it still didn’t ring true.

Vasir wasn’t secured how you’d usually secure a member of the Order, Na’Sara decided; that was the problem. If she stirred back to consciousness, the Starsoul would help her break free of her bonds in very little time.

Well, nothing had truly changed except that she now had to work to negate her anger. She had known this would be a trap; the fact she now had proof wasn’t relevant.

She couldn’t see the mechanism of the trap, so there was nothing for it but to set it off and trust to her training and experience in order to overcome whatever lay ahead.

Taking a deep breath, she centred herself, sharpened her perceptions with the Starsoul, and ignited her energy blade.

Then she walked boldly out into the clearing and right up to the rock where Vasir was secured.

Two quick cuts removed the bonds around Vasir’s ankles. Another one released one of her wrists, and Na’Sara paused for a moment as her former student’s body shifted position on the rock. She settled her shoulder against the human woman’s abdomen, slipping her free arm under and around her body, before raising her blade to cut the other wrist free, not wanting to simply drop her unconscious friend into the mud.

The hiss of a blade activating behind her caused her to hesitate before making the cut. Still holding onto Vasir, she turned on her feet, blade held in high guard, to see what the trap was made of.

The clearing was darker than it had been, somehow, and Na’Sara had the distinct sense that the woman who had entered it - she was fairly confident it was a woman, though in the shadows she wouldn’t be willing to commit to a species - was the reason for it. She seemed to stand in darkness, illuminated by the coruscating magenta glow of her blade.

It was obvious who this was. Na’Sara cut the last rope free of Vasir with a backward flourish, guided by the Starsoul, and lowered Vasir to the ground gently so she wouldn’t be encumbered during a fight. “You will not take her,” she said, her voice taut from the control she was exercising. She felt like she was face to face with something worse, somehow a more primal evil, than anything she had encountered before.

“We already have her.” The response was cool, dispassionate, but there was so much assurance in her tone. She started to move around Na’Sara in a wide arc.

Almost immediately, Na’Sara glanced off to the other side, and she was rewarded by seeing movement in the shadow; it hesitated, and another hiss led to the ignition of another blade shining bone-white, revealing a muscular figure.

“She has good instincts,” the woman said.

“Yes, Master,” said the other.

“They both do,” the woman said.

“Yes, Master.”

“They will both fall regardless,” the woman said, and the despair surrounding Na’Sara intensified at that moment.

Her attention sharpened. Experimentally, rather than mute her response to it, she pushed it back, and it retreated.

She was not despairing, she realised. These two were simply tricking her into believing she did.

The darkness…

As she turned her attention to it, the darkness shrouding the two figures lifted. That sense that they were of a deep, primal nature that put them beyond other things she’d encountered melted away.

Mental trickery. Her head-fronds danced fiercely as her anger returned.

“Oh,” the woman said admiringly. “That’s new. Well done.” It was the kind of compliment that felt more like a slap in the face.

Na’Sara waited.

The first cut came from her right, where the man gave in to his impulse, slashing up from below in a cut designed to make the most of his speed and power.

It was exactly what she’d hoped for.

She took a half-step forward, just enough to avoid the cut, and with her own hilt held loosely, a flick of her wrist with Starsoul-perfect timing drove her blade into the hilt of his, which sparked and blinked out for a few moments before flaring back.

Na’Sara had used the time to pivot more fully, driving a kick into the side of his knee. The sudden jolt to the system meant he wouldn’t be calling on the Starsoul himself when she thrust out her hand, pushing him back and sending him flying.

She was already using the momentum from the push to spin back, where her raised blade swatted aside an exploratory cut from the woman. They were face to face, their eyes meeting, and she saw a light of amusement in the other woman’s face.

The Elder feinted, and as she did Na’Sara tasted Vasir’s tongue against her own. With a jolt she remembered the exact memory, remembered the pair of them being used together by their Shadow Order handler, remembered how much bliss they had had together, how good it had been to serve together…

Na’Sara shuddered in ecstasy. She caught another cut on her guard only through instinct, not even seeing the other woman, relying entirely on the Starsoul. No part of her mind noticed that the shift from reality to memory made no sense, nor really registered that one did not pass between the two in times of heightened awareness.

She felt hands exploring her body - no; hands familiar with her body making treks across all the most responsive, shivering, squirming parts of her - and knew they were Vasir’s. Someone attempted to tug her hilt from her hand with the Starsoul, and again it was only hard-drilled combat trained reflexes that allowed her to clamp down and hold it to her before it was lost.

If she had been thinking more clearly or linearly, she likely would have had a moment of pride as she overcame a distraction she’d used to beat her male attacker, but that incident seemed hours ago now. Now was the victory celebration, a very private celebration, and she was so happy to have Na’Sara’s hands on her, taking control of the situation, taking ownership of her on behalf of their true owners. It was so like a celebration they’d had before, when they had owners, where beforehand they had been compelled to open a channel on the comms and transmit their performance in detailed holo.

She was so happy to let go and simply let herself be used, and Na’Sara’s fingers were so skilled-

The illusion shattered as she realised she was not feeling something new nor even revisiting her own memories, but she was, instead, being shown one of Vasir’s favourite memories of her as a way to mislead and trick her.

Crying out with primal fury, Na’Sara dismissed all echoes of the memory, even the slothful sluggishness of her limbs in their blissful loving state, and pushed out with the Starsoul, driving her opponent back several steps.

She mastered her rage, compressing it and tucking it to one side so she could use it as fuel without being driven by it, and she unleashed a flurry of cuts, but the other woman danced back and Na’Sara was not willing to press the advance, since that would involve abandoning Vasir.

She met the recovered male Elder with a parry as he scurried in, ducking away from his second cut, and went for a disabling strike - but unlike some others in the Order, she wasn’t an expert at removing a hand. And besides, by then he was gesturing, and the power of the Starsoul was employed in phantom hands groping her breasts below her bodystocking.

She couldn’t stop the moan before it got going; the hands were too good. They knew her too well. And this was no memory - this was something one of the Elders was imposing on her with their well, not simply by dropping something into her mind but by pushing the Starsoul to affect the physical universe. It took strength of will to do at all and practice to do delicately, and there was precision to this.

Indeed, it was precisely the way Vasir had touched her. Like the memory, she suddenly realised, it could only have come from one place, from one mind…

She turned her head and saw Vasir rising unsteadily to her feet, her long legs already straight, her spine slowly straightening from having been bent forward, her arms jerkily moving by her sides. Na’Sara had an immediate impression of a marionette being drawn up by its strings, and she shock of it chilled her, but could not override the sensations her body was flooding her with, the teasing and arousal.

Nor could she muster the concentration and the will to mute those pleasures. She thought, fleetingly, that at least she had practice in enjoying these pleasures; there were ascetics among the Order to whom this kind of assault would overwhelm even more. But she could not feel too proud of her resistance, which extended just far enough to show her the fall of her student and not far enough to prevent it.

The woman spoke, and Vasir’s lips moved in echo of her words, spoke them in her own voice in time with the other, and Na’Sara was in no doubt whose words they might be.

“You have lost already,” the woman said. “You may as well enjoy it. We have such pleasures in store for one of you.”

Na’Sara raised her energy blade in refusal. The woman gestured, and Vasir unclipped her own, hidden beneath what remained of her robes, drew it and ignited it.

The two Elders fell back, and Vasir advanced.

Na’Sara stared at her.

“We will fight,” Vasir’s lips said, with the woman’s words, “and one of us will slay the other and become a worthy vessel, if you wish it, and the sacrifice, whichever of ours it is, will have gained nothing but a death.

“But if you surrender to her, we shall not fight, and we shall live. And perhaps,” the tone grew mocking, “there will be a chance, later, to overthrow these monsters, where there is no chance now.”

Na’Sara tried to raise her blade against her former student, but she faltered, and Vasir took two steps forward, moving less and less like a puppet with every action until her body language echoed the language of the young Marshal Na’Sara had trained with dedication and hope for some years. She assumed an aggressive combat stance.

Now was the time, Na’Sara thought. If she was going to defy their captors, now was the time.

Vasir took her hilt from her and shut down both blades.

Na’Sara swallowed.

*

She had just been leaving Obirron III, had in fact slipped past the planet’s gravity well just thirty seconds beforehand, when the distress beacon flashed up on her comm screen. Obirron II wasn’t populated yet, she knew, though the investigation she’d been wrapping up had found corruption and grifting in the funds designed to make it ready for settlement. These hadn’t been at the heart of her investigation, simply information she’d gathered while sifting for more relevant clues, but the knowledge came back to her in that moment.

There would be no emergency services on the planet, and likely official system support wasn’t close either. By rights, Vasir could ignore a distress beacon, as these were not an official duty of a Marshal of the Order.

By long custom, the Order did not ignore such calls unless to do so would jeopardise the success of an investigation. Vasir’s had just concluded.

She turned her craft toward the empty planet.

She was within the planet’s atmosphere when the controls started fighting her.

It was as if they had a will of their own; they were moving under her hand, in spite of her attempts to keep them straight and the physical strength she could bring to bear to hold on.

They were navigating her toward a different point on the planet, a densely wooded area on the second largest land mass. In time, she attempted to force her controls back into position with the Starsoul, drawing on it in the unpleasant, tainted state the local Starsoul had and infusing the air around the control stick with her will. That was how she discovered the reason for the control issues; the Starsoul was already being used against her.

Vasir stopped struggling immediately. Her lips set in a thin line, she slipped out of the pilot’s chair and made her way back to the boarding ramp, her blade hilt in hand. If she couldn’t stop them from bringing her to them in her ship - and she assumed she was being brought to somebody; it seemed an elaborate extra effort if they’d just wanted her out of the way - she could at least be ready to strike when she reached her destination.

She leaped out of Cometsong at speed before the ramp was fully lowered, hilt blazing into life with its energy blade, reaching out through the Starsoul to track the other minds in the area.

There were two of them, waiting for her, a predator aspect to each one. They were close by. She changed direction in mid-air, angling toward them, and she was spinning balletically before she hit the ground, her sword extended. They were - they had proven themselves by the stunt with Cometsong’s controls - more dominant over the Starsoul than she was. Her hope was that if she hit aggressively and swiftly enough she could overwhelm them with vigour.

It was, she knew, a gamble. But she’d gambled on herself often, and she was used to coaxing victories out.

The male figure tried to disarm her, but she was faster. In a move she’d learned from her mentor, she kicked out at his knee before shoving him away with the Starsoul, knowing that at the point she pushed he wouldn’t have the focus to stop her. She came up at the other with an underhand cut.

It crossed her mind briefly that she should probably offer them both a chance to surrender. But they had clearly entrapped her, they had energy blades and a connection to the Starsoul of their own, there was too much malicious intent and purpose to their doings for her to believe a surrender was possible.

Her cut glanced away after a brisk parry, but as their wrists passed she felt a tingle on her wrist, as if someone had nuzzled at the bare, sensitive skin of her inner wrist.

Vasir tried to press the advantage, and her opponent parried each strike in turn, and each time the lingering, erotic tingle of lips crept further inward, from her wrist up her inner arm to her elbow, and then swiftly up her outer arm to her shoulder.

She gasped in unexpected excitement, a wave of pleasure stimulus washing over her, and did the only thing she could think of to bring her cut discipline back to acceptable levels; camouflaging the move with a feint, she tossed her hilt from one hand to the other, quietly thanking Na’Sara’s insistence that she do her combat drill with each hand. The same heartbeat she caught it she’d thumbed the control stud again, re-igniting a blade that had vanished the moment it was out of her hand.

After a renewed burst of offence, she now simply had two arms which ached with a frustrated arousal from phantom lips and teeth, and her opponent, cloaked in shadow, smiled. “My turn,” she informed her.

She went for an overhand strike that Vasir needed both hands on the hilt to block, and immediately fiery, blissful kisses and bites coated her collarbones. Her vision swam, her eyes briefly crossing, and she lost her grip on the hilt.

The blade thankfully winked out of existence before it could drop in front of her, where it might have cut her in half, but Vasir was heedless of the danger she’d exposed herself to. Her defences were crumbling mentally, and her knees were about to give way when her opponent caught her at the chin.

Vasir didn’t drop any further but she went almost limp in the other woman’s grip. She felt the Starsoul, under the other woman’s control, seeping into her thoughts and identity and couldn’t muster the will for a coherent struggle against. Her.

The woman withdrew her hand and Vasir hung limply in the air by her chin, her mind twisting and shifting, thoughts braiding themselves into whatever shape the Elder wanted them to be. She whimpered and moaned.

“Kneel,” she was told in tones that brooked no disagreement, and kneel she obediently did. “Crawl,” she was told, and the woman turned and walked away, Vasir crawling on hands and knees behind her, eyes glassy, pleasure echoing through her body to the exclusion of free will.

She had just enough awareness left to have a bad feeling about this.

Behind her, she heard the other Elder taking his blade to the underside of Cometsong, shredding her much-loved personal starship. But her rage was trapped behind a wall of obedient bliss, especially as biting kisses seemed to her to twine up around her neck.

She was taken to a clearing with a tall stone, where she stood mute and motionless, allowing them to cut her bodystocking from her and remove it, and then to fasten her to the stone.

The woman then pushed even further into her head, driving with the Starsoul like she was fucking her mind, until she found the controls she needed to scream into the void for help. Vasir was unable to stop her, silent and helpless.

The Elders left her there and went to wait, and Vasir’s thoughts seemed to jolt to a halt. She knew no more until Na’Sara walked into the clearing.