Or rather, relative silence; there was an omnipresent background drone of machinery and ventilation equipment. She looked around, saw Lorn Pavan seated against a wall about a meter away, and I-Five standing next to him. They were in a large tunnel, dimly illuminated by photonic wall sconces set at wide intervals.
She realized where they were—in one of the countless service conduits that stitched Coruscant’s lowest levels, like the skein of blood vessels under living skin. Through these tunnels flowed an endless automated stream of vehicles hauling goods and materials from spaceports and factories to millions of destinations all over the planetwide metropolis.
“How did we get down here?” she asked. Even as the question left her lips she dimly recalled being dragged from the wreckage of the skycar and down the stairwell by the droid as the craft’s power cell exploded. He had undoubtedly saved both of their lives.
Pavan jerked a thumb at I-Five. “Thank Wonder Droid here,” he said. “Hadn’t been for him, we’d both be hash for the armored rats. Sometimes he’s almost worth having around.”
“Please, don’t gush,” the droid said. “It’s embarrassing.”
Darsha struggled to her feet. The planet skewed nastily on its axis for a moment, and the lights dimmed even more than they already were, but then things steadied again. She checked for her lightsaber and was relieved to find it hanging where it should be from her utility belt.
“Where’s the stairwell?” she asked. “I have to see if …” If Master Bondara is still alive, she finished to herself. She could not bring herself to say it out loud, for fear that one of them might tell her what she already knew.
Pavan pointed to an alcove about two meters away. “But the stairwell won’t do you any good. The skycar’s explosion brought about a ton of real estate down on it. We’ll have to find another way out.”
Darsha nodded. “Then we’d better get going. There has to be another access stairwell along this route.”
“Why not just call for help?” Pavan asked. “You’ve got a comlink, haven’t you?”
“I had one, but it was damaged earlier.” It occurred to her only now that she should have replaced it when she had been back at the Temple.
Pavan raised an eyebrow. “First time I’ve seen a Jedi who wasn’t prepared for everything.” There was a faint note of sarcasm in his voice.
Darsha bit back the retort that rose to her lips. It wouldn’t take much to put him on her list of least favorite people; after all, he was indirectly responsible for Master Bondara’s death. On the other hand, he had saved her from falling out of the skycar. “Don’t you have a comlink?” she asked.
Pavan looked uncomfortable and didn’t reply.
“Yes, he does,” I-Five said. “It’s in fine working order, too—except that the power pack is depleted and he can’t afford to replace it.”
Darsha said nothing to that; her silence was ample indication of how she felt.
Pavan stood up. “Might as well get moving,” he said, “before another—”
His words were drowned out by the passage of another transport. They shrank back against the curved wall of the tunnel as it hurtled by them. The automated conveyances were sleek, massive bullets that all but filled the shaft, moving in excess of a hundred kilometers an hour, propelled by repulsor drives.
As it disappeared into the distance Darsha said, “Let’s hurry. We’ll be deaf inside of an hour if we stay here.”
They moved quickly, single file, down the narrow sidewalk. It didn’t matter which direction they went at this point; the goal was just to get out of the transport tube as fast as possible. The droid led the way, as his photoreceptors were best able to adjust to the dim light.
They saw another recessed doorway ahead as the rumbling approach of a third transport began to build behind them. The door was locked, but I-Five’s finger blaster quickly removed that obstacle, and they hurried through it just as the freight vehicle blasted by.
Other than the fact that there were now no convoys thundering past, their new location was not much of an improvement. The transport tube had at least been reasonably clean and lit. Best of all, while it hadn’t led back to the surface, it had remained horizontal.
Now, however, they found themselves in another stairwell, only this one led down rather than up. There seemed to be little choice but to follow it. There were no lights; the only illumination came from a phosphorescent lichenlike growth on the walls, and this light was barely enough to let them see each other and the next few steps. The ferrocrete walls wept with a slimy discharge, and there was a faint scent of decay in the air.
At last they reached the bottom of the stairwell, which opened into a small chamber lit by one flickering photonic sconce. In the wall opposite the stairwell were openings to three branching tunnels. Signs mounted above each one supposedly gave directions, but they had been reduced to illegibility by successive layers of graffiti.
“My locator was in my comlink,” Darsha said. “I have no idea which way to go.”
“Fortunately, I have a built-in global positioner,” I-Five said. “To orient ourselves toward the Jedi Temple, we would be best served by taking that one.” He pointed to the leftmost tunnel.
“That’s a good argument for taking the right-hand tunnel,” Pavan muttered. Darsha looked at him; he met her eyes for a moment and then looked away.
“I’m trying to get you back to a safe haven,” she told him. “If you’d rather take your chances with our friend up there, that’s fine with me. I can tell the council about the impending blockade as easily as you can.”
He turned back to look at her again. “Hey, the Sith was probably vaporized along with your Jedi buddy,” he said. “And good riddance to both of ’em.”
Darsha felt herself go cold with anger. Without taking her gaze away from his, she said, “I-Five, what do you think the chances are that the Sith’s dead?”
“Given the fact that, in our brief peripheral acquaintance with him, he has already survived several attempts on his life and killed quite a few beings, as well, I wouldn’t count him out until I saw his dead body,” the droid said. “And even then I’d want him frozen in carbonite just to make sure.”
Darsha nodded. “I agree. But you’re entitled to your opinion, Pavan. Maybe it’ll be safer if we all go our separate ways; after all, you seem to be the one he’s looking for.”
Even as she said this, she realized it was a mistake. She didn’t need to see the look that passed between the droid and Pavan to know that she couldn’t play one off against the other. Whatever bond they had was strong enough to unite them, even in a situation like this.
I-Five said to Pavan, “She’s right about you being the primary target. Sanctuary from the Jedi may be your only option. Are you willing to accept that?”
“Of course,” Pavan replied with a scowl. “I’m not stupid. But that doesn’t mean I have to be happy about the situation.”
“True,” Darsha said. “But you could at least try being congenial. If we’re going to be stuck with each other for a while, we might as well try to make it pleasant.” She turned to face the left-hand tunnel, took a few steps toward it, then turned back to him and added, “Anoon Bondara died saving your life. I don’t want to hear any more disparaging remarks about him.”
Neither Pavan nor I-Five made any reply to that as she started down the tunnel. After she had taken a few steps they fell in behind her.
There is no emotion; there is peace. Well, maybe someday. After all, she wasn’t a full-fledged Jedi yet, and the way things were going, it didn’t look like she ever would be. But some truths you didn’t need the Force to see. Like the fact that one Anoon Bondara was worth a fleet of Lorn Pavans.
Lorn didn’t like the Jedi Padawan. This fact would hardly be surprising to anyone who knew him even casually—which was how pretty much everybody knew him, these days—as he was not reticent about his feelings when the subject of the Jedi Knights arose. He had stated on more than one occasion
to anyone who would listen that he considered them on a par with mynocks in terms of parasitic opportunism, and a notch or two beneath those energy-sucking space bats on the general scale of galactic evolution.
“Shooting’s too good for them,” he once told I-Five. “In fact, dumping them all in a Sarlacc’s pit to marinate in gastric juices for a thousand years is too good for them, but it’ll do until something worse comes along.”
He had never told anyone why he felt this way. In his present circle of acquaintances only I-Five knew, and the droid would never divulge the secret of Lorn’s bitterness to anyone.
And now, thanks to a truly ironic twist of fate, here he was almost literally stun-cuffed to a Jedi and dependent on her to save him from the murderous intentions of a Sith—a member of an order sprung from the Jedi millennia ago. It seemed that, no matter which way he turned, the self-styled galactic guardians were there to complete the ruination of his life that they had started.
Lorn felt the bitterness growing within his breast as he trudged along through the subterranean tunnel following I-Five and Darsha Assant. It certainly hadn’t taken her long at all to settle into that sanctimonious holier-than-thou attitude that he despised so much. They were all alike, with their sackcloth fashion sense and their austere asceticism, mouthing empty platitudes about the greater good. He much preferred dealing with the street scum; they at least were villains without the taint of hypocrisy.
Lorn was under no illusions about the treatment he would receive when he once again entered the Jedi Temple. Forget about any sort of reward; he and I-Five would be lucky to get protection against the Sith while the council debated how they could best make use of this windfall of information. He had no doubt that they would find a way to make it serve their purposes, as they were able to do with everything they came in contact with.
Everything and everyone.
This underground passage they were traveling was no more dark and torturous than the labyrinth of his memories and hatred. He wondered for the dozenth time why he hadn’t just let Assant fall when the speeder bike explosion had hurled her from the skycar. He couldn’t even excuse it on the grounds that he had needed her to pilot the vehicle; I-Five was perfectly capable of that. No, it had been that most pernicious of impulses, one that Lorn thought he’d managed to eradicate within himself long ago: a humanitarian motive.
The memory of what he had done bothered him immensely. He had made it a policy during the last five years to stick his neck out for nobody, with the exception of I-Five. The mordant droid was the closest thing to a friend that he had. What made him such a good friend, in Lorn’s opinion, was very simple: he asked for nothing back. Which was good, because Lorn had nothing to give. Everything that had made him human had been taken from him five years ago. In a very real way, he realized, he was no more human than the droid who was his companion.
He forced his thoughts away from memories; he knew of no more certain way to plunge himself into a black depression. This he could not afford to do; he had to keep his wits about him if he was going to get out of this situation alive. He couldn’t count on the Jedi for help; he trusted them about as far as he could throw a ronto. He refocused his attention, not without some effort.
The weak glow of the ancient photonic sconces had petered out about half a kilometer back. The only light source they had now was the droid’s illuminated photoreceptors, which were capable of casting twin bright beams as strong as vehicle headlights. They revealed what was directly before or behind them, depending on where I-Five turned his head, but from all other sides the darkness pressed in avidly. Lorn was becoming claustrophobic. It wasn’t just the pervasive gloom; he could feel the incalculable weight of the structures overhead pressing down on him. Coruscant was a tectonically stable planet—that and its location had been the main reasons for it having been chosen the galactic capital—but even though there had not been a major quake anywhere on it for thousands of years, he found himself vividly imagining his probable fate should one occur while he was wandering around in the bowels of the planet.
It was hard to tell in the gloomy murk, but judging by the echoes of their footsteps, the tunnel seemed to be widening out somewhat. For the last couple of hundred meters they had been passing what seemed to be branching passageways—nothing more than clots of darkness in the walls—and Lorn’s imagination had no problem supplying those side tunnels with all kinds of nasty inhabitants. Armored rats the size of skycars was one image he could happily have done without. Life on the upper levels of Coruscant was a joy to experience, because such problems as environmental pollution had been largely eradicated centuries before. But there was always a price to be paid for the benefits of technology, and while the upper levels didn’t have to pay it, the lower levels did. Down here below the planet’s cityscape it was one huge, pulsing malignancy of industrial waste and carcinogenic chemicals. The more sensational news programs on the HoloNet were always full of stories about dangerous mutations being found in the sewers and drainage systems—stories that, at the moment, Lorn had no problem whatsoever believing. He was sure he could hear ominous slithering sounds from either side, the slow step-and-drag of some murderous bipedal beast following them, the stealthy breathing of something huge and hungry about to pounce. Stop it, he told himself sternly. It’s nothing but your imagination.
“Did you hear that?” Assant asked.
The three stopped. I-Five probed the darkness in various directions with his eye beams, which revealed nothing more than ancient, moss-covered walls. “My audioreceptors are set at maximum. I hear nothing that might indicate danger. In addition, my radar detects no movement in the vicinity.”
“Maybe you’ve got radar,” Assant said, “but I’ve got the Force, and right now it’s telling me that we’re not alone.”
“Impossible,” Lorn said. The Jedi were always playing the Force as a hole card, using it as an excuse to justify all kinds of actions and opinions. Not that Lorn had any doubt that the Force existed and could be manipulated by them; he’d seen too many examples of it. But he felt that their use of it was largely just another way to justify questionable actions.
He continued, “You think something that lives down here could have access to a radar jammer?” He was about to enumerate several sarcastic reasons why this was a ludicrous idea when something whistled out of the darkness and struck him in the head, and he lost interest in the conversation for a while.
Darsha jerked her lightsaber from its clip and activated it. She had no idea what sort of threat was impending, but whatever it was, it was all around them. She and the droid positioned themselves back-to-back, with Pavan’s unconscious form lying between them. I-Five had both hands up, the index fingers extended, like a child pretending to point a pair of blasters. He swiveled his head slowly through 360 degrees, illuminating their surroundings. There was a branch corridor on their left and two more on their right. Nothing moved. There was no indication of where the weapon that had laid Pavan low had come from. It was a curved throwing stick; she could see it lying on the floor at her feet.
“We’re too exposed here,” she said in a low voice. “Pick up your friend and let’s at least get our backs against a wall.”
The droid did not answer. Keeping his left finger blaster extended, he reached down with the other arm and hooked it around Pavan’s waist, lifting the unconscious human as easily as Darsha might lift a small child. They began to move cautiously toward the nearest wall.
The attack came from the one direction they had not expected: above.
Without warning, a net of fine mesh dropped down on them. Darsha sensed it settling from overhead and slashed at it, only to have the lightsaber’s blade screech and emit a shower of sparks. She realized too late that the net was charged with some kind of power field. She felt a bolt of energy slam through her, and then for the second time in as many hours darkness engulfed her.
Discipline.
Discipline is all. It conquers pain. It conquers fear
.
Most important of all, it conquers failure.
Discipline is what allowed Darth Maul to survive a thirty-meter fall into a pile of rubble and debris: the discipline of his teräs käsi fighting skills, which gave him complete control over his body, allowing him to utilize midair acrobatics to direct his fall and so avoid striking ornamental projections, ledges, and other potentially lethal obstructions; the discipline of the dark side, which let him manipulate gravity itself, slowing his descent enough to hit the ground without becoming a lifeless bag of broken bones and ruptured organs. Even half stunned by the unexpected explosion of his speeder bike, Maul was able to aim his falling body in such a way as to survive.
But even someone in as superb shape as Maul could not come out of such an explosion and a fall completely unscathed. After the impact he lay, semiconscious, in the debris, remotely aware of a second explosion some distance away as the skycar blew up.
He lay there, and he remembered.
There is no pain where strength lies.
To Darth Maul, it seemed that his master had always been there, a part of his life—implacable, indomitable, inexorable. Since before Maul learned to walk, discipline had been his guiding beacon. Darth Sidious had molded him from a weak, puling child into the ultimate warrior, sculpting his body and his mind as a seamless weapon. Maul was willing to die for him, without question and without hesitation. Lord Sidious’s goals were the goals of the Sith, and they would be achieved, no matter what the cost.
Maul’s entire existence had consisted of training, of exercise and instruction. Early in his life, before his voice had deepened, Maul had learned the intricate movements and forms of the teräs käsi fighting style, the patterns of movements based on the hunting characteristics of various beasts throughout the galaxy: Charging Wampa, Rancor Rising, Dancing Dragonsnake, and many more. He had practiced gymnastics in environments ranging from zero-g to gravity fields twice that of Coruscant’s. He had mastered the intricate and dangerous use of the double-bladed lightsaber. And all for one purpose: to be the best possible tool of his master’s will.
Star Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter Page 13
