Still, there wasn’t a whole lot of choice. They could keep the holocron and stay on Coruscant in the hope that giving it up would dissuade Monchar’s murderer from beheading them, as well. Or they could sell it and use the credits to flee—and hope they were not pursued.
Neither alternative seemed to offer much in the way of living to a ripe old age.
Lorn sighed and released the droid. “All right,” he said. “Let’s go meet the Hutt.”
Alone in his secret chambers, Darth Sidious meditated on this latest set of circumstances.
In many ways Darth Maul was an exemplary acolyte. His loyalty was unquestionable and unshakable; Sidious knew that, if he were to command it, Maul would sacrifice his life without a second’s hesitation. And his skills as a warrior were nonpareil.
Nevertheless, Maul had his flaws, and by far the largest of these was hubris. Though he had said nothing when given the assignment, Sidious knew Maul felt that such a job was beneath his skills. There were times—many times—when Sidious could see Maul’s aura pulsing with the dark stain of impatience. He wondered sometimes if he had inculcated too much hatred of the Jedi and their ways in his apprentice. Maul did tend to focus on their destruction at the expense of the larger picture.
Even so, Sidious had every confidence that Maul would accomplish the task he had been set. Complications and setbacks were to be expected, and would be dealt with. All that mattered was the grand design, and it was proceeding apace. Soon the Jedi would be put to the slaughter. That should make his impetuous subordinate happy.
Soon. Very soon.
Master Anoon Bondara sat in silence for several minutes after Darsha finished her report. They were, quite possibly, the longest minutes of the Padawan’s life. The Twi’lek Jedi sat with head bowed and fingers steepled, looking at the floor between them. There was no way to read his body language, to tell what he was thinking. Even his lekku were motionless. But Darsha had a pretty good idea that, whatever her mentor’s thoughts were, they did not bode well for her continued career as a Jedi.
At last Master Bondara sighed and raised his gaze to meet Darsha’s. “I am glad you are still alive,” he said, and Darsha felt a surge of gratitude and love for her mentor that was almost overwhelming in its intensity. Her safety had been more important to Master Bondara than the mission.
“Now tell me,” the Twi’lek continued, “did you see the Fondorian die?”
“No. But there was no way he could have survived such a fall—”
Master Bondara held up a hand to stop her. “You did not see him die, and I assume you did not feel any upheaval in the Force that could have meant his death.”
Darsha thought back to the nightmarish events of several hours previous. Scanning the waves of the Force for such a ripple of disturbance hadn’t exactly been uppermost in her mind at that moment. Would she have felt such an agitation, preoccupied as she had been with trying to save her own life? Her mentor would have, of that she was sure. But was she that finely attuned to the Force?
“I did not,” she said slowly, then felt compelled to add, “but, given the circumstances—”
“The circumstances were hardly optimal, I’m sure,” Master Bondara said. “But as long as the slightest chance exists that Oolth is still alive, we must pursue it. The information he had is that important.”
“You want me to go back and verify his death?” The thought of returning to the Crimson Corridor was enough to make her dizzy with revulsion. Nevertheless, if that was what had to be done, she would do it.
Master Bondara stood, his attitude and posture decisive. “We shall go together. Come.” He strode toward the door of his quarters, and Darsha hastened to follow.
“But what about the council? Should we not tell them—”
The Jedi stopped before reaching the door and looked back at the Padawan. “Tell them what? There is nothing definitive to report as yet. Once we know for certain whether the Fondorian is alive or dead, then shall we make our report.” He turned back to the panel, which slid open before him, and started down the corridor. Darsha followed, only gradually beginning to realize that there might be a chance, however infinitesimal, that her mission had not ended in failure. It was the lightest and most frangible of straws; nevertheless, as long as it hovered before her, she could do nothing else but grasp at it.
Maul kept his cowl up and his lightsaber clipped as he reentered the building. Fortunately there was a human officer at the checkpoint, asking those coming and going to state their business. It was ridiculously easy for Maul to cloak himself in the Force and thus slip by the dim-witted fellow.
The forensics droids were laser-scanning the cubicle when he arrived. There were a couple of criminologists, one Mrlssi and one Sullustan, as well. He stayed in the hallway and listened to what scraps of conversation he could. He heard no mention of a holocron being found. Carefully he probed and prodded first the Mrlssi’s mind, then the Sullustan’s, and detected nothing about the crystal in their thoughts. Still cloaked in the dark side, he stole past the entrance of the cubicle, glancing at the open safe as he did so. The holocron was not there. Maul pondered the possibilities. If it was gone, then someone other than the security forces must have taken it. And who might that have been? Obviously, the buyer Monchar had been expecting momentarily—the human known as Lorn Pavan. He was going to enjoy taking that one’s head.
Darth Maul turned and headed for the exit.
Now he had a double incentive to find the human and his droid. The first place to check, of course, would be their pathetic subterranean cubicle. It was not far from here; only a few minutes’ walk.
Which, with any luck, would be the same few minutes Pavan had left of his life.
On the whole, Lorn did not consider himself to be overly xenophobic—after all, given the way he had been making his living for the last half decade, to be prejudiced against other species was not only bad for business, it could be downright dangerous.
But he hated dealing with Hutts.
On a purely physical level, everything about the giant invertebrates repulsed him: their huge, reptilian eyes, their slithering method of locomotion, and, most of all, their slimy mucosal skin. Just having to be in a room with Yanth sent a wave of horripilation over him that he was hard put to quell.
Yanth was young as Hutts go—less than five hundred standard years old. Even so, he was smart and cagey, and working his way up through the underworld ranks rapidly. Though Lorn could barely stand to be in the same room with the overgrown slug, he had to admit a reluctant admiration for the young Hutt’s amoral cunning and craftiness. No one could figure the angles as quickly and completely as Yanth could.
Now he reclined on a dais in his subterranean headquarters, desultorily puffing on a chakroot hookah while he examined the holocron crystal. A couple of Gamorrean bodyguards stood nearby, watching Lorn and I-Five.
“Why did you not go directly to the Jedi with this?” he asked Lorn, his rumbling basso profundo setting off unpleasant vibrations in the human’s gut. “They would seem the logical ones to approach.”
Lorn saw no reason to elaborate on his own personal distaste for the Jedi to Yanth. “They claim to have very little discretionary funds for this sort of thing,” he said. “Besides, I wouldn’t put it past them to use their mind tricks to force me into handing it over for free.” He glanced surreptitiously at his chrono and said, “So, are you interested or not? I can always take it directly to the Naboo representative here on Coruscant.”
Yanth waved a pudgy hand in a placating gesture. “Patience, my friend. Yes, I am interested. But—and please don’t take this as a reflection on you—I would be a fool not to test its authenticity before handing you a stack of credits.”
Lorn kept his face carefully expressionless. If Yanth suspected the time crunch they were in, the Hutt would have no compunctions about using it as leverage to gouge a cheaper price. On the other hand, time was most definitely running out. “And just how do you plan on doing t
hat?” he asked the Hutt.
Yanth simply smiled and slid several facets of the crystal aside at various angles, manipulating it much as one might a child’s geometric puzzle. After a moment a beam projected from the holocron’s uppermost surface, resolving into a midair display of glowing words and images that slowly curtained up the length of the holographic frame before vanishing. Lorn was too far away to read the text—not only that, but he was behind the display, so that the words and alphanumerics appeared reversed to him. The text seemed to be in Basic, however, and the images looked like schematics for Naboo N-1 starfighters and Trade Federation ships.
Yanth rotated a facet, and the images cut off. “Opening one of these holocrons can be somewhat tricky,” he said. “Neimoidians as a species are not overly clever.”
I-Five said, “Excellent. Now you know the article is genuine. We are asking a million credits.”
“Done,” Yanth replied, much to Lorn’s surprise. “It is worth ten times that.” The Hutt turned to a control console near at hand and pressed a button.
Lorn permitted himself another glance at his timepiece. They could still reach the spaceport, if everything continued to proceed smoothly. In another hour Coruscant, the mysterious Sith killer, and the police would be vanishing into the void behind them.
Darth Maul neatly and quickly excised the lock on the underground cubicle with one blade of his lightsaber, as he had earlier at Hath Monchar’s building. He stepped inside quickly, letting the door slide closed behind him. Harsh glow lamps flickered on automatically, illuminating a living space even smaller and tawdrier than the one the Neimoidian had rented. The compartment was empty; the only possible place where someone might hide was the refresher, and it was the work of only a few seconds to make sure that was empty, as well.
Maul stepped to a section of wall that held a vidscreen and message unit. He activated the latter. An image formed in midair; the image of a Hutt. He recognized the creature: Yanth, an up-and-coming gangster in the Black Sun organization—one of the few who had survived the slaughter Maul had recently unleashed.
The Hutt’s image spoke. “Lorn, I thought we were going to meet sometime today, to discuss a certain Holocron you wished me to look at. It’s not polite to keep buyers waiting, you know.”
Maul turned and strode out of the cubicle, moving quickly.
All too soon, Darsha Assant found herself back in the underbelly of Coruscant.
When she had escaped the area earlier that day, she had estimated that by now she would have been stripped of her rank and reassigned to the agricultural corps. She had envisioned herself in the process of packing her belongings and saying her good-byes. That she might instead be returning to the scene of her disgrace with her mentor had certainly never occurred to her.
And yet, here she was, seated beside Anoon Bondara in the latter’s four-person skycar, heading back toward the Crimson Corridor and the monad where she had lost the Fondorian and nearly lost her life, as well.
The ways of the Force were nothing if not unpredictable.
“That’s the one,” she said, pointing toward the tower that rose up ahead, stark against the afternoon sun. “Down there.”
Master Bondara said nothing as he angled the skycar out of the flow of traffic. They slipped into a vertical descent lane and began dropping.
The mist that seemed always present around the hundred-meter mark, demarcating the thriving upper levels from the slums below, wrapped around them momentarily and then faded away, to be replaced with an aerial view of the dark streets. Though it was still daylight above, down here it was at best a dim perpetual twilight.
She watched the wall of the building slip past, and pointed out to her mentor the ascension gun’s grapnel, still hooked to a ledge. They followed the cable into the miasmic depths.
When they were ten meters above the pavement, Master Bondara turned on the landing lights. The section of street below them was illuminated. Darsha, looking over the side, could see shadowy figures, long conditioned to prefer darkness to light, scuttling away.
There was no sign of the Fondorian. In all probability his body had been dragged away by scavengers. There was, however, a smear of purplish blood on the pavement and, nearby, the body of a hawk-bat, its neck broken in the fall. Master Bondara trained one of the lights on that and looked at it. His lekku slumped slightly, along with his shoulders. And, watching him, Darsha realized that her last hope of salvaging the mission was finally, irrevocably dead.
“What shall we do now?” she asked him softly.
He was silent for a long moment. Then he sighed and said, “Return to the Temple. We must report what has happened to the council.”
So there it was, she thought. Oddly enough, now that she knew hope was dead, she did not feel the crushing sorrow that she had anticipated. Instead she felt a surprising sense of relief. The worst had happened, and now she would find a way to deal with it. As with most looming disasters, the reality was almost anticlimactic compared to the dreadful anticipation.
Up to this point her concern about the mission had left little room for her to feel sympathy for Oolth the Fondorian. Now, however, looking at the stain of his blood on the walkway, she felt compassion well within her. He had been an obnoxious poltroon, and no doubt a conscienceless criminal, but few people deserved a death as horrible as his had been.
Master Bondara fed power to the repulsors, and the skycar began to rise.
Lorn watched as one of the Hutt’s flunkies delivered a large case to his master. Yanth opened it, and Lorn grew dizzy at the sight. It was filled with crisp Republic credit standards in thousand-denomination notes. Yanth turned the case toward him, displaying the wealth, and Lorn could feel his fingers twitching with the desire to take possession of it. He hadn’t seen that much hard cash in—he had never seen that much cash in one place before.
“One million nonsequential Republic credits,” Yanth said, as casually as if he was discussing the weather. “You take them—I keep this.” He held up the holocron. “Everybody’s happy.”
Lorn didn’t know or care about everybody, but he was sure of one thing—he was happy. He watched, still hardly able to believe this was happening, as I-Five stepped forward to take possession of the money that would transform their lives. He glanced at his chrono. Just enough time to get to the spaceport, if they left now.
I-Five was reaching for the case when the door behind them suddenly flew open. A Chevin bodyguard staggered backwards into Yanth’s sanctum, a force pike dropping from his nerveless fingers. It clattered across the floor to the foot of the dais. The leathery-skinned being looked down at his chest, in the middle of which was a smoking hole, and then collapsed.
Through the door stepped a nightmare.
Lorn stared in shock at the apparition. The Chevin’s killer was almost two meters tall and dressed entirely in black, including hooded cloak, boots, and heavy gauntlets. He carried a lightsaber unlike any Lorn had ever seen: It boasted not one but two energy blades, emanating from either end of the hilt. But as intimidating as his weapon was, it was his face that struck true horror into Lorn’s heart. The killer pulled back his hood, revealing a countenance that was a sinister variegation of red and black tattoos around gleaming yellow eyes and blackened teeth. From the bald scalp sprouted ten short horns, like a demonic crown. He stared balefully at the others in the room, then spoke in a guttural voice.
“None shall survive.”
Lorn was completely frozen to the spot, unable to offer any resistance, as the killer stepped toward him. His eyes shone like twin suns as he raised the lightsaber.
I-Five grabbed the case full of money from Yanth and hurled it between Lorn and his attacker just as the latter swung the lightsaber in a flat arc that would have separated the Corellian’s head from his neck. The case intercepted the blade’s swing; the plasmatic edge sliced through the case, scattering burning credits everywhere. The force of the blow was so strong that it probably would still have decapitated Lor
n, but its momentum was slowed just enough to give the droid time to dive forward, knocking his friend out of harm’s way. Lorn felt the heat as the blade’s incandescent tip seared through his hair.
The Sith—for there was no doubt in Lorn’s mind that he was facing one of those legendary Dark Lords out of the mists of the past—recovered almost instantly and swung around to attack again. But by this time both Gamorrean guards had pulled their blasters and were firing. The Sith spun the double-bladed weapon before him, deflecting the blasterfire back at the guards. That was all Lorn had time to see before I-Five yanked him to his feet and pulled him through the doorway.
They fled down the narrow corridor that led from Yanth’s sanctum, passing several more dead guards and two piles of melted, twisted metal that had once been droids. Yanth’s headquarters was beneath a nightclub he owned called the Tusken Oasis; Lorn and I-Five stumbled up a short flight of stairs and burst out into a blue-lit chamber full of sabacc tables, dejarik game boards, and scantily clad females of various species dancing on pedestals. They hurtled through the room and out the entrance.
“Where are we going?!” Lorn shouted as they ran down the street.
“Away from there!” I-Five shouted back.
Lorn wanted to protest that it wouldn’t make any difference; he had looked into the eyes of the Sith, and he had seen his doom there, as plainly as the tattooed whorls that surrounded those eyes—an implacable fate that would hunt him down no matter how far and how fast he ran. But he had no breath in him to speak, no breath left for running either, but the fear of what he had seen in those eyes kept him running anyway.
Maul saw his quarry slip past him, but could do nothing to stop their flight while his attention was occupied by the two Gamorreans. Using one hand to spin the lightsaber in a blazing pattern that blocked the particle beam bursts, he gestured with his free hand, plucking the invisible lines of the Force and sending reverberations that caused the blasters to fly from the surprised guards’ grips.
Star Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter Page 10
