The doors closed and Han was off to save his friend. Qi’ra felt the smile fall from her face and she went to the corpse of her old master. Her eyes immediately found the aurodium ring he wore amid all of his opulence. She took his hand roughly, glad she didn’t need to coddle him anymore. With a twist, the ring came off, and she went to Dryden’s desk.
The ring fit perfectly into a slot, and she turned it, activating a communicator. A hologram shimmered in front of the desk, forming the image of a robed figure. She took a deep breath and faced him, back straight, ready to report.
The leader of the Crimson Dawn, the true leader whom Dryden Vos feared disappointing as much as Beckett feared disappointing him, raised his head. Red eyes glinted from beneath the hood. She’d never seen his face. “Yes?” he said, sounding as if she had interrupted something.
“I regret to inform you that Dryden Vos is dead,” Qi’ra said as if she reported to this figure all the time. In truth she’d only ever seen him once, and that experience had been terrifying enough. She soldiered on: “Murdered by the thief he hired to steal the coaxium shipment, his friend Tobias Beckett.”
Dryden Vos’s master was his opposite. Where Dryden would begin to pace around, raging, this figure simply said, “Is that so? Where is the shipment now?”
“Gone,” Qi’ra said flatly. “Beckett took it, slaughtered the others. I alone survived.”
“One man couldn’t have done this alone,” he said, agitation starting to bleed through his voice.
“I wasn’t there,” she said. “But if I had been, perhaps I could have saved him.”
The figure chuckled then, breaking the tension that had been strung tightly between them across light-years. He pulled back his hood and Qi’ra saw him for the first time. He was an older Zabrak, with scars and wrinkles on his red-and-black-lined face. His horns were short and surrounded his head like a crown. He shifted in his chair, and Qi’ra saw the metallic glint of an artificial limb under the robe.
“For now you will assume control over all Dryden’s territories and interests. Bring the ship and come to me on Dathomir, and you and I will then decide what to do with the traitor Beckett.” He spat the man’s name as if it were sour on his tongue. “…and his accomplices,” he added thoughtfully.
“I appreciate your faith in me,” Qi’ra said with a nod. “I’m on my way.”
“And Qi’ra?” he said, standing. He held out his empty hand, and a metal cylinder flew into it. The hologram wasn’t detailed enough for her to see what it was, but each end erupted into a glowing, red blade as if two lightsabers were held hilt-to-hilt. “You and I will be working much more closely from now on.”
His image flickered and disappeared, leaving momentary ghosts of those two red blades imprinted on her vision.
Only Jedi summoned things with the Force. Jedi and Sith Lords. She suddenly understood from where Dryden’s paralyzing fear of his master originated.
She fired up the ship’s engines from Dryden’s desk, thinking about Han. She’d been right when she’d told him there was no winning, just staying alive. And just as L3 had worked with a human even though she had no restraining bolt, Qi’ra would still work within Crimson Dawn. Even beholden to a new, terrifying boss, she still had more freedom and power now than she’d ever dreamed.
So this was where Dryden Vos had learned the art of Teräs Käsi.