Blue Ice, Red Ember

Prologue

A wind howled sharp enough to cut to the bone.

Nysthi drew her heavy black cloak tighter, its close-woven hem dragging over frozen ground, and pulled the hood low over her face. Unbidden, her thoughts went to her homeworld―that frozen, icebound place bathed in perpetual blue light, where the surface winds raged much the same. She had been made for cold like this. It was nearly the only mercy the last two rotations had shown her.

She lifted the macrobinoculars and swept the base and its surroundings once more. Nothing. No movement. The Separatist leaders who had arrived a few rotations back were still huddled deep inside the facility―cowards, every one, plainly shaken after the Geonosis fiasco. But the big fish, the one she had come for, had not yet shown.

He'll come. Soon, she told herself. All it takes is patience.

Patience, though, was hard to hold on to in the merciless cold of Cophrigin V. The fifth world of a system no one had any reason to remember―a nameless smudge in the Outer Rim's Ash Worlds, uninhabited, its thin air just breathable, its surface nothing but forested slopes and dead grassland. The kind of place chosen precisely because no one would ever look at it twice. Ideal for secrets, and for the men who kept them.

The base had held her watch for two rotations now. It sat ringed on three sides by high cliffs, a natural rampart of stone, and from the front it was all but invisible―its angular structures built to melt into the rock faces behind, as though the mountain had grown them itself. Only two things gave it away: a faint blue shimmer of energy shield stretched across its face, and the Separatist ships that slid in and out of it, now and then, when they thought no one was watching.

Poggle the Lesser. San Hill. Wat Tambor. Nute Gunray. Every one of them had come. Nysthi could not have cared less about a single one. They weren't the mission. They weren't the target.

He'll come, she reminded herself. And when he does, I'll catch him.