Rule of Two by Drew Karpyshyn Page A

Brotherhood had lost its way. They had fallen from the true path of the dark side. All the study and training Qordis put prospective students through at the Academy was worthless .
    “If that was true,” the apparition countered, answering his unspoken arguments, “then how do you explain your current mission? Your claim to reject my teachings, yet I was the one who discovered the location of Freedon Nadd’s lost tomb.”
    You didn’t discover anything. You’re just a hallucination. And Qordis may have stumbled on this information, but he didn’t know what to do with it. A true Sith Master would have left Ruusan to seek out Nadd’s tomb. Instead he decided to stay and help Kaan play army with the Jedi .
    “Excuses and justifications,” the spirit replied. “Kaan was a warrior. But you would rather hide from your enemies than fight them.”
    Bane gritted his teeth as the Valcyn hit the turbulence of Dxun’s heavy cloud cover. The ship was still going too fast, forcing him to clutch the steering yoke so hard to keep his craft on course that his knuckles turned white. He heard the creaks and groans as the over-stressed hull sliced through the thick atmosphere.
    “You betrayed us,” Qordis said again.
    Bane swore under his breath, doing his best to ignore the ramblings of the image conjured up by his own mind. How many times had he heard this exact conversation in the past day? Fifty? A hundred? It was like listening to a busted holoprojector repeating the same message over and over.
    “You destroyed the Brotherhood, you brought victory to the Jedi. And now you flee the scene like a craven thief in the night.”
    “Shut up!” Darth Bane screamed, no longer able to contain his rage. “You’re not even real!”
    He lashed out with the Force, releasing an explosionof dark side energy inside the cockpit, determined to blast the offending vision into oblivion. Qordis did vanish, but Bane’s victory was short-lived. Emergency lights began flashing inside the ship, accompanied by the shrill whooping of a critical failure alarm.
    The ship’s console had been fried by the burst of power he’d unleashed. Cursing Qordis and his own reckless display of emotion, Bane began a desperate struggle to somehow bring the vessel in for a safe landing. From all around him he could hear the ghostly, mocking laughter of Qordis.
    The Valcyn was in free fall, plummeting straight down toward Dxun’s heavily forested surface. Bane yanked back on the yoke with all the strength of his massive frame, managing to redirect the ship into a shallower angle of approach. But if he didn’t find some way to decelerate, it wasn’t going to matter.
    He punched at the controls, trying to restart the engine thrusters with one hand while the other still struggled to keep the yoke steady. Getting no response, he closed his eyes and reached out with the Force, digging deep into the burned-out circuits and melted wires of the ship.
    His mind raced through the labyrinth of electronics that controlled all the Valcyn ’s systems, reassembling and rerouting them to find a configuration that would restore power to the dead ignition switch. His first attempt resulted in a shower of sparks shooting up from the control panel, but his second effort was rewarded with the roar of the thrusters coming to life.
    Bane managed to get the engines into full reverse only a few hundred meters above Dxun’s surface. The ship’s descent slowed, but didn’t even come close to stopping. A split second before the Valcyn slammed into the forest below, Bane wrapped himself in the Force, creating aprotective cocoon he could only hope would be strong enough to survive the unavoidable collision.
    The Valcyn hit the treetops at a forty-five-degree angle. The landing gear sheared off on impact, tearing loose with a thunderous crack. Wide gashes appeared in the sides of the ship, the hull hurtling into thick branches and boughs with enough force to tear through the reinforced