Before they had time to recover from their surprise, Maul leapt forward, skewering first one and then the other with quick, deadly thrusts. The lifeless Gamorreans sagged to the floor, and Maul wheeled quickly about to deal with the Hutt.
Despite his bulk, Yanth could move quickly when he had to. He slithered off the dais and grabbed up the force pike dropped by the Chevin. He hurled it at Maul, who slashed it in two with a sweep of his own weapon. The generator in the pike’s shaft shorted out in a shower of sparks.
Yanth had not waited to see the results of his attack. His massive bulk moved rapidly, slithering through the singed and blackened credit notes that littered the floor, the holocron crystal still clutched in one hand. He had almost reached the exit when Maul leapt, executing a twisting forward flip that covered the length of the large chamber and deposited him directly in front of the Hutt.
Before Yanth could recover from his surprise, Darth Maul plunged one of the lightsaber’s blades deep into the Hutt’s chest. The stench of burning flesh and blubber filled the room. Yanth died with a croaking gurgle, the gelid mass of his body sagging bonelessly to the floor.
Maul deactivated both blades. He reached out with his free hand, and the holocron leapt from the dead Hutt’s grasp into his own. Stuffing it into a belt compartment, he turned and ran from the room. At the top of the stairs he plunged recklessly through the gambling chamber, hurling guests and workers aside with savage Force-laden gestures.
He reached the street and paused, looking first one way, then another for his prey. Pavan and the droid were not in sight. Maul gritted his teeth. They would not be permitted to slip away again! One way or another, he was determined to end this chore. It had already gone on far too long.
He sought the dark side once more, bade it illuminate the path his quarry had taken. Then he began to move, shoving his way through the hapless press of street people.
Though his appearance alone was enough to cause most of the hard cases on the street to give him a wide berth, his progress was still too slow. Enough of this! Maul thought. He unleashed the dark side, using the Force like a battering ram against those who got in his way.
Maul angled to the middle of the narrow avenue. His speeder bike was parked not far away; he could activate the slave circuit by remote control and have it here within a few minutes at most. But there was an even quicker way to overtake them. He called upon the Force, moving easily five times faster than a human could travel at a dead run. There was no way they could escape him now.
Within moments he was in sight of his quarry. Another few seconds and he would catch up to them—and then the lightsaber would do its work once more, slashing through metal and flesh, and at last bringing this dreary task to an end.
He grinned and lengthened his gargantuan stride even further, sailing over the fire-blackened husk of a parked landspeeder. Pavan and the droid looked back and saw him coming; he could see the fear in the human’s face. It was most satisfying to witness.
One more leap, and both of them would be his.
And then an invisible hammer struck him in midleap, pounding him to the ground. What was this? Who dared to interfere? Maul looked up, saw a skycar settling to the ground alongside Pavan and the droid. The repulsor beams from its undercarriage had struck him down when the vehicle passed directly over him. The skycar was less than five meters away; he could see the driver and his passenger clearly.
They were Jedi.
Darsha had sensed the disturbance in the Force at the same time as Master Bondara. They had almost reached the cloud level when they felt the dark vibrations from below; they stared at each other simultaneously in shock, and then the Twi’lek put the skycar in a steep dive back down toward the street.
Neither spoke; Darsha wasn’t sure how the blast of hatred and destruction reverberating from below had affected her mentor, but she had been left shaken and nauseated by the intensity of the empathic burst. Someone down there was well-versed in the use of the Force and powerful to boot. There had been several deaths already, and more intended, no question about it. She didn’t know who had died or who was in danger, but they could not ignore such a strong and savage use of the Force. They had to find out who was responsible, and stop him, her, or it if they could.
Master Bondara leveled off at twenty meters above street level, moving as fast as was prudent through the urban maze. The skycar’s headlights illuminated the narrow thoroughfare, and as they rounded a corner they saw, perhaps a hundred meters ahead, the one who had to be responsible for the pulsation they had felt: a tall biped in dark robes, covering ground in a series of gigantic strides that had to be Force-assisted.
Who—or what—could he be? Not a Jedi, that much was certain. He wielded the Force with the surety of a Master, but no Jedi ever gave off such darksome emanations.
There was only one explanation—but even as the thought occurred to her, Darsha felt her mind flinching away from it. It couldn’t be. It was impossible.
She had no time to wonder about it. Up ahead they could see the two who were the dark one’s targets; that much would be obvious from their terror-stricken flight.
The dark one would reach his prey in one more gargantuan leap. Darsha could think of only one way to stop him, and it was evident from the direction in which Master Bondara was taking the skycar that he had thought of the same tactic.
The skycar passed right over the robed figure at a height carefully calculated to deliver a force from the repulsors sufficient to stun but not kill. It worked; as the vehicle lurched and moved on, Darsha looked behind them and saw the mysterious assailant lying in the street, the fuliginous robes a darker blot against the general darkness. Then Master Bondara brought the skycar to a stop near the two fugitives. Darsha noted with surprise that one of them was a droid.
“Get in,” Master Bondara said to the human. “He’s unconscious, but I don’t know how long he’ll be—”
“Not long,” the droid said, and pointed back toward the pursuer.
Darsha glanced back and saw to her astonishment that the dark one was already rising to his feet. She could scarcely believe he had recovered from the repulsors’ hammering so fast.
“Get in!” Master Bondara shouted. “Now!”
The human, who had been staring at Darsha and her mentor with a strange expression—mingled relief and revulsion—seemed to wisely decide that they were by far the lesser of two evils. He vaulted into the skycar’s backseat, followed by the droid. Darsha cast another glance behind her and saw the dark one leaping toward them. This close, she could see his face, and a more fearsome visage she could not recall ever having encountered. Then her neck was jerked painfully as Master Bondara hit the ascent control and the skycar rocketed upward.
But not swiftly enough. The vehicle shuddered from a blow delivered to the stern undercarriage, and then lurched to one side. As Master Bondara fought the controls, Darsha saw a black-gloved hand catch the cockpit’s rear gunwale.
He must have used the Force to help him jump, she thought, as the skycar was already a good ten meters off the ground. Even as the thought went through her mind, she thrust out both hands in a pushing gesture, hurling an invisible but nonetheless powerful blow concentrated at that hand. It lost its grip, and the craft jerked again as the dark one fell back to the street.
“Let’s get back uplevels!” she shouted. But even as the words left her, she saw the look on Master Bondara’s face.
“We can’t,” he said.
Darth Maul’s fury at seeing Pavan and his droid snatched from his clutches yet again was almost mitigated by the realization that the Jedi had entered the picture. Finally, a foe that might be worthy of his attention—someone who could truly test his mettle! Shrugging off the effects of the repulsor field, he charged after the rising skycar, igniting his lightsaber and slashing at the drive mechanism that made up part of the vehicle’s undercarriage. His blow did some damage—that he could tell by the way the craft pitched to one side. Gathering th
e Force around him, Maul leapt and managed to seize the gunwale with one hand. Before he could heave himself into the cockpit, however, he felt the younger Jedi strike out at him with considerable power, enough to cause him to lose his hold and plummet back to the street.
He landed lightly, the Force cushioning his fall. Even before his boots touched the ground he had his wrist comm activated and was speaking into it the code command that would activate his speeder bike and bring it homing in on his signal. As he did this, he watched the skycar stabilize and then shoot forward. In the space of a second it had rounded a corner and disappeared from view.
No matter, he told himself as he awaited the speeder bike’s arrival; the skycar would be easy enough to track via the Force, especially with the Jedi on board. Pavan and his droid had had more than their share of luck this day. But now their luck had most definitely run out.
“The vertical adjustment on the repulsor array has been damaged,” the Jedi piloting the craft said.
“What does that mean?” the woman asked. She was younger than her companion; younger than Lorn, too.
“It means,” I-Five said, before the Jedi could answer, “that while we can move laterally and descend, we can’t rise above this level.”
Lorn glanced over the side. It was hard to estimate their altitude in the pervasive gloom, but it looked to him that they were about twenty meters above the street. The skycar was moving at a fast clip. There was little air traffic at this level, which was fortunate, given the limited room for maneuverability granted by the narrow, twisting streets.
He looked at the Jedi. He was a Twi’lek who appeared to be in his mid- to late forties. Lorn could not recall having seen him around the Temple. Of course, that meant nothing; there were plenty of Jedi with whom he had had little or no contact.
The irony of it all would have made him laugh, if it wasn’t still so blasted terrifying. To be rescued from the deadly grasp of a Sith by a Jedi! Still, he had to admit it was providential that they had come along when they did. Since it looked like he and I-Five wouldn’t be heading offworld any time soon, the Jedi Temple was probably the safest place for them now—though it galled him to admit that, even to himself.
So much had happened within the last few minutes—and practically all of it disastrous—that he hadn’t even begun to come to grips with it yet. The Jedi shot around another corner, and Lorn felt inertia press his body against the low-powered tractor field designed to prevent injury in the case of accidents.
“Take it easy!” he said. “There’s no way he can catch up with us on foot now.”
“He’s not on foot,” the woman said tensely.
Darth Maul leapt onto the speeder bike as it flashed past him. He wrapped both hands around the acceleration grips on the handlebar and opened them up. The repulsor engine’s hum climbed as the speeder shot forward. Maul leaned into the turns as the speeder zoomed around corners.
There was no need to activate the heads-up tracking display. The Jedi and his quarry gleamed like twin beacons in his mind; he could feel them in the skycar ahead of him. The speeder bike was moving at half again their speed. He would overtake them in mere minutes.
Maul grinned savagely. It would be the work of a moment to dispose of Pavan and the droid. Then he would see just how good the Jedi were. It had been far too long since he had felt his lightsaber clash against another, had heard the grating scream of energy blades in conflict, had smelled the ozone tang. Far too long.
“Why is the Sith after you?” Master Bondara shouted over the slipstream’s howl.
Though Darsha had come to the same conclusion, it was still shocking on a very deep level to hear Master Bondara articulate her thoughts. She had learned much about the Sith during her studies, of course, but all of the lectures and data seemed unanimous in the conclusion that the ancient dark order was no more. And yet, what else could he be, this creature of the night who even now pursued them? He was adept in the use of the Force, but it was quite obvious he was not a Jedi. That didn’t leave a whole lot of choices.
She saw the human and the droid look at each other, and realized they had come to a silent agreement about something. Then the droid spoke.
“We are information brokers,” he said, and something—or rather, the absence of something—in the timbre of his voice surprised Darsha. She could hear none of the built-in obsequiousness that droids, particularly those of the protocol series, evidenced as a rule. He had a confidence in his tone and manner that was startling enough for her to notice, even given the duress of the moment.
“I am known as I-Five, and my associate is Lorn Pavan,” the droid continued. Darsha saw Master Bondara glance quickly at Pavan, and then return his attention to piloting.
He knows the name, she thought.
“We were recently contacted by a Neimoidian named Hath Monchar, who wished to sell us a holocron containing details of a trade embargo to be imposed on the planet Naboo by the Trade Federation.”
Master Bondara said nothing in reply for a moment. Then he asked, “Is this in retaliation for the new tax recently imposed by the Republic Senate on the Trade Federation?”
“Yes,” Pavan replied. “The Federation fears the new tax will cut into their profits.”
“Naboo is highly dependent on imports to maintain its way of life,” Master Bondara said. “Such sanctions could prove devastating to its people.” He steered the skycar around another corner. Pedestrians, knowing the potential danger from the repulsor beams of a vehicle traveling this low, scattered left and right. “That doesn’t explain why the Sith is trying to kill you,” Master Bondara continued.
Darsha admired the Jedi’s equanimity; he might have been having this conversation in one of the quiet, comfortable reading chambers of the Temple instead of in a damaged skycar traveling a dangerous route at maximum velocity.
“You can see why the Neimoidians don’t want this information to get out,” I-Five said. “We’re not sure why or how the Sith are involved. But Hath Monchar was killed by the one who’s now pursuing us.”
“What happened to the holocron?” Darsha asked.
“We were in the process of selling it to a Hutt named Yanth,” Pavan replied, “when the Sith broke in. My guess is that the Hutt is dead, and the Sith either destroyed the crystal or has it with him.”
“This information must be brought to the council immediately,” Master Bondara said. “You two will be kept safe until the threat of the Sith has been dealt with.”
Darsha glanced at Lorn Pavan and saw mingled frustration and resignation in his expression.
“Jedi,” he muttered to himself. “Why did it have to be Jedi?”
She looked behind them. Their circuitous route had brought them into a somewhat less dark area of the city now, and she could plainly make out the shape of a speeder bike behind them. Even without the Force to confirm it, she would have been sure that it was the Sith pursuing them.
“Here he comes,” she said. “He’s gaining fast.” She saw that Pavan’s face had gone pale, but that he didn’t seem to be panicking. Good; the last thing they needed to deal with was another Oolth the Fondorian.
She looked at Master Bondara and saw his jaw muscles clench in determination.
“Take the controls,” he told her.
His order surprised her, but his tone of voice brooked no questioning. She slid over as Master Bondara pushed himself up and back, then swung his feet over the back of the padded crossbar separating the front and rear seats. She looked at the rear vidscreen and saw that the Sith was not more than five meters behind her. He drew his lightsaber, activating the twin crimson beams.
“Get them back to the Temple!” Master Bondara shouted at her. Then, before Darsha could even realize what he intended, much less protest or try to stop him, the Jedi stood up on the rear seat between Pavan and I-Five. He activated his lightsaber, took two steps up onto the rear engine compartment—and leapt from the speeding skycar.
The Twi’lek Jedi’s leap,
guided by the Force, landed him squarely behind Maul on the rear engine housing of the T-shaped bike. The action took Maul by surprise; he had not expected such a courageous, if foolhardy, deed.
Unexpected as the move was, however, Maul was still able to block the slash of the other’s lightsaber with his own energy blade. He quickly activated the speeder’s autopilot, then twisted around in the saddle, thrusting his weapon at the Jedi’s chest. The Jedi blocked the blow and countered with another.
Maul knew the battle could not continue this way. The speeder bike’s autopilot was not sophisticated enough to chart a safe course at high speed through the torturous windings of the surface streets. He grabbed the handlebar and jerked the speeder toward a docking platform on a nearby building, about thirty meters above the street. They shot by the skycar, which had slowed after the Jedi left it, and rose toward the shelf. As the ledge came within range of the autopilot’s sensors, the speeder slowed, then settled down to a landing on the extruded slab of ferrocrete.
The Sith and the Jedi leapt from the speeder bike onto the platform to continue their battle. The docking ledge was only about ten meters by fifteen, barely enough room to maneuver in. Maul knew he had to dispatch the Jedi quickly, before Pavan once again vanished into the labyrinth of Coruscant’s downlevels. He pressed the attack viciously, blocking and thrusting, the twin radiant blades spinning a web of light about him.
The Jedi was obviously a master of the teräs käsi fighting arts, as well, judging by the smooth way he parried and counterattacked. Still, within the first few moments of the engagement, Darth Maul knew that he himself was the superior fighter. He could tell that the Jedi knew it, too, but Maul also knew that it didn’t matter. The Jedi was committed to stopping the Sith, or at the very least slowing him down enough to let the others get away, even if it meant giving his own life to do so.
Maul bared his teeth. He would not lose his quarry again! He doubled his efforts, pressing the attack hard, hammering away at the Twi’lek’s defenses. The Jedi gave ground, but Maul was still unable to slash through his guard.
Star Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter Page 11
