Star Wars - Coruscant Nights 02 - Street of Shadows

by Michael Reaves

  "I came as you specified." Spreading his arms wide, Vader lifted his cloak. Darkness seemed to envelop the entire floor of the hangar. "Alone and unarmed."

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  It was time to trust in the small clump of mummi-fied skin cells resting in his pocket. Time to avenge the woman he'd loved.

  Time to strike.

  Typho stepped quickly from his place of concealment on the floor above Vader. He'd chosen the spot with care. Directly before him was a hole six meters wide, and framed squarely within it was the Dark Lord's back.

  Captain Typho raised his blaster and fired.

  At first he thought the ionized gas cartridge in his blaster had backfired. It was as if a giant, invisible hand had snatched him up and hurled him with bone-breaking force against the far wall. Stunned, in shock, he watched Vader's form levitate through the hole in the floor. The black boots touched down next to Typho's broken body.

  "How pathetic," the Dark Lord commented. He stood towering over his adversary. "Did you really think you had the faintest hope of assassinating me?

  It's been tried by far better than you."

  Typho coughed, feeling his insides grinding together like broken glass. Blood stained his shirt. "You lied," he said, feeling the words lodge like stones in his throat.

  "Did I? I told you I would come unarmed, and here I am," Vader told him. "You mistake the dark side for a weapon—something extraneous. It isn't—it is in-trinsic. I could no more shed it than I could go about without my support suit."

  He stepped closer. "I will give you one more chance," he rumbled, "to cease whatever game you're playing and provide me with Pavan's location."

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  "Or what?" Typho spat a mouthful of bright red blood. "You've already killed me."

  "True. You will not last long in any event. But don't underestimate the power of the dark side. It can ease your passage. There is still a little time—unless you squander it." Vader stepped closer, bent to peer into Typho's face. "Why have you made this foolish attempt on my life?" The deep synthesized voice echoed through the empty hangar level. "Not that a specific reason is required or expected. But I should like to know. Those who speak their last should speak something of value."

  He leaned closer at Typho's beckoning, to hear his final words. Typho was fading fast. He concentrated every fiber of his being on remaining conscious for one final act.

  "This ... is for Padmé," he rasped. And with a supreme effort, he spat a mouthful of blood directly into the surprised Dark Lord's mask.

  Vader's reaction was not what he'd expected. After a frozen instant, ignoring the bloody spittle running down one plasteel cheek, he knelt and grabbed Typho by the hair, lifting the latter's head and eliciting a cry of renewed pain from him.

  "What?" The flare in the Force that raced through the hangar was enough to shake the foundations of the building. The Dark Lord actually seemed to grow, to expand and become more terrible in his rage than Typho would have believed possible.

  "Padmé," Typho mumbled. "Padmé Amidala. The woman I loved from afar, for years." He coughed again, felt more red shearing in his chest. "She . . .

  never knew. She was too busy, too deeply engaged in Michael Reaves 285

  the . . . service of her people to notice me." Another bright scarlet flower bloomed from his mouth. "And I attended to my duty—I, Typho, captain of Naboo.

  But I . . . loved her. And now. . . now she's dead.

  Dead." Then, with an extraordinary rush of resolve, Typho managed to raise himself slightly, exerting himself through sheer force of will against Vader's anger.

  "You killed her, Vader. You! I know it!"

  Vader was silent and motionless again. When he spoke, his voice had the same deep inflection, the same synthesized thunder—and yet was somehow

  "You know nothing." Vader straightened, letting Typho's head fall. "You're not worthy of uttering her name." Raising his arm, he flexed his fingers at the helpless Typho. The captain's mouth opened and his eyes bulged slightly as the flow of air to his lungs was constricted. Far down in his mind, a remote part of him commented dispassionately that this was no doubt how his beloved had met her end. Astonish-ingly, he found he still was able to choke out a final sentence.

  "And you're responsible ... for the death of the Jedi. . . Anakin Skywalker as well!"

  The invisible, inexorable grip on Typho's throat momentarily relaxed as Vader drew back in slight surprise. That brief pause was followed by the horrible sound of a Sith Lord laughing. Three levels below, a pair of intoxicated humanoids heard just the echo of it and were immediately shocked into sobriety—the fearful clearheadedness that comes with realizing that untold terror lurks nearby.

  286 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows When Vader extended his arm downward the second time, his control was more precise, more deliberate. "Yes," the Dark Lord said, his tone one of grim amusement. "Yes, I killed Anakin Skywalker. I watched him die. He was weak, was Skywalker. In the end he could not rule himself, could not control his contemptible human emotions. Most of all, he did not understand or appreciate the true strength of the dark side. And so—he died. The galaxy is better off without him."

  The world was unraveling fast for Typho. The pain was going, finally, pouring out of him as fast as his blood. But he died with a smile on his face, for, although he did not understand the how or the why of it, he knew that dying with Padmé's name on his lips was a finer and deeper revenge upon Darth Vader than he possibly could have hoped for through confrontation. It was as if he could feel the man's heart and know that, somehow, he had ripped it open with her name alone.

  He also knew that living was a far worse fate for Vader than death.

  He was content.

  Now he could go and find Padmé ...

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  twenty-eight

  The package came by courier just as Jax, I-Five, Laranth, and Den were leaving Poloda Place to rendezvous with Dejah and escort her to her ship. The Whiplash, aided by the Cephalon's prognosticative powers, had at last succeeded in securing a berth for her aboard the Green Asteroid, a trader in the Pole-sotechnic League. It would take her, over the next several months and by a roundabout route, to the pleasure planet of Zeltros. Dejah Duare was going home.

  Rhinann had, as usual, elected to stay behind, citing "unfinished research."

  Jax accepted the package, which was about thirty centimeters by two, from the delivery droid. There was no return address. He looked at his friends, who appeared just as baffled as he. He shrugged and started to open it.

  Den backed hastily away. "Are you sure that's a good idea?"

  "I don't sense anything negative or dangerous about it." Actually, that wasn't entirely true. The enigmatic parcel had definite vibes, though nothing about them indicated imminent danger. Instead, it 288 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows seemed steeped in evil, marinated in blood. Whatever it was, death had not been far from it.

  When he opened the package, he understood why.

  It was a lightsaber.

  A holocard projected a message inscribed in simple cursive: a jedi should not have to rely on an inferior weapon, good luck. It was signed, a fellow revolutionary.

  Jax examined the weapon. The hilt's design was elegantly simple, consisting of an ambidextrous grip of molded silver duralumin, with a locking activator similar to the one he'd lost in the Factory District.

  Good, he thought wryly, because you never know when you'll have to overload another nuclear reactor.

  He wondered what color the blade was. There was no way to know without activating it, which, given their location on a public street, seemed a trifle rash. He knew it was functional, however. He could feel the Force coiled within it.

  Den, standing on tiptoe, was able to read the missive. "Well," he said. "That's serendipitous. Weren't you just trying to build one of these?"

  I-Five took the card and l
ooked at it. "A standard onetime holoproj chip," he said. "Nothing remarkable about either the writing style or the delivery mechanism." He cocked a photoreceptor at the Jedi.

  "I assume this comes as unexpected largesse?"

  "You might say that. I can't imagine who could've—" Jax stopped abruptly, remembering the man he'd met yesterday at the Whiplash assembly.

  What had his name been—Typhon? About all Jax recalled of the man was that he'd sported an eye patch.

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  Could this have come from him? He'd shown interest in the Velmorian weapon, after all.

  "I met a man yesterday," he said slowly, "who might be—" He stopped abruptly, struck momentarily silent by a sudden turmoil in the Force. Its origin was a psyche he'd encountered before, of that he was certain, even though he'd only experienced it indirectly. No Jedi—no one, in fact, with more than a smattering of midi-chlorians—could forget the impact of a will that strong.

  Jax said, "Vader's nearby."

  Den looked nervously around the crowded street, craning his neck in a futile attempt to see better.

  "Where?"

  " Nearby is a relative term," Laranth said. "But I'd put the probability of his being in a ten-square-kilometer radius at pretty high." She gestured south.

  "In that direction."

  "Okay," Den said. "So we'll be going that way, right?" He pointed north.

  Jax and Laranth both stood quite still; then Jax said, "He's pretty upset. Not bothering to cloak his feelings at all."

  "Intriguing," Laranth said.

  "Not a word we want to be using right now," Den said. "Shouldn't we be pulling in our antennae, looking for a metaphorical rock to crawl under? Or maybe even a real rock? Instead of standing around here sticking out like a bunch of naked Jawas?"

  "Don't worry," Jax said. "We're not pushing. And he's far too troubled to be aware of us." He hesitated, then added, "It does make me wonder what could disturb the Dark Lord to such a degree."

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  "Fine," Den said. "Wonder while we wander north."

  With Volette's murderer finally identified—and conveniently self-immolated—Den was looking forward to events taking a more leisurely pace, for a time at least. One very large pressure had already been lifted from them for the foreseeable future: Dejah had insisted on continuing their stipend indefinitely.

  "I insist," she'd told Jax, forestalling any protests he had been about to make. "You've set my mind easy insofar as Ves's murder is concerned. He has left me more credits than I know how to spend—and coming from a Zeltron, that's saying something. It would be my honor to subsidize you and the work you do."

  Jax, typically, had done his best to talk her out of the deal, but Dejah, bless her, had been adamantine.

  And when faced with the persuasive power of her biochemical and telempathic arsenal, his resistance, he'd admitted, had been pretty pathetic. So she had gone back to her conapt to pack before meeting them at the local spaceport, and Jax had gone back to the others with a bemused look on his face.

  Thus they had "creds and a shed," as the Ugnaughts put it, for the foreseeable future. And they had more than enough work to keep them occupied, between the UML and the investigations that Jax would no doubt keep getting them involved in. Den sighed. The chances of Vader locating Jax and bringing his booted heel down upon them all were still much higher than the Sullustan would have liked, Michael Reaves 291

  which meant spacing as soon as possible was still the only sensible option. But he'd come reluctantly to realize that, for all their boasting of rationality, humans were most comfortable living in the nexu's den. Actually, he thought, make that the nexu's mouth. He'd come to terms with the lifestyle—mostly, at least—and it wasn't like they didn't have some firepower on their side. I-Five and Laranth were still spot-on deadly with their lasers and blasters, and Rhinann, he had to admit, could slice past any database, Imperial or otherwise, and leave not a single ion to trace, slicker than supercooled Tibanna condensate. Maybe he wasn't the most convivial of comrades, but Den could overlook that.

  And then there was Jax. The Jedi was, he had to admit, growing into his role of a hero rather well. If he continued to survive Vader's intermittent attention, not to mention the thousand and one other dangers that loomed downlevel every day and night, he just might become a force—no pun intended—to reckon with. He had a good enough support group, although there did seem to be subtle changes in the overall group dynamic over the past couple of days between him and the others. Particularly as far as Laranth was concerned, though the Jedi was as blind as a space slug if he couldn't see how the Twi'lek felt about him. But there was a certain amount of tension between him and I-Five that was new as well. What was up with that, Den wondered. Hard to tell if anything was different as far as Rhinann was concerned; the dour Elomin kept interactions between himself and others at a minimum. And of late he'd become even more immersed in the HoloNet than usual.

  292 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows Den shrugged. Well, after all, what family didn't have its bickerings and quarrels? It was important to remember that, because that was what they were—a family, albeit a pretty dysfunctional one at times. The important thing was that they all came together when needed to make a good team.

  Jax watched their client approach the spaceport's entrance, noting with relief that she'd changed into traveling wear that was far less riot inciting than last night's attire. As she drew closer, he realized that she'd damped her pheromones and mental lures as well.

  Good. Now let's get her onboard and offplanet before anything else can go wrong.

  He felt slightly ashamed of his attitude—but only slightly. Though he had grown fond of Dejah, he was more than happy that she was moving on. Frankly put, she was trouble, even without the chemical and psychic come-ons.

  Spaceport Nine was a large mass of surging, pushing, irritated, hurrying, frantic beings representing every species that was used to traveling between the stars. Which was to say that it was no different in design from any of the other many large spaceports on the capital world. What made navigating Nine a little more confusing, a little more difficult, and considerably more frustrating than working one's way through, say, Spaceport Eight or Ten, however, was the fact that Nine was undergoing a complete makeover under the supervision of the Imperial Spaceport Authority. Old structures were being demolished, new Michael Reaves 293

  ones erected, traffic rerouted, and what was left still had to function, somehow, as a fully operational port.

  In such circumstances, the needs of machines invariably took precedence over those of organics. Station, crew, and maintenance workers—not to mention travelers—all found themselves squeezed into smaller and smaller corridors and forced to take directions from programs or service droids that were themselves subject to minute-by-minute updating. It all made finding one's destination an exercise akin to negotiating the lowermost underlevels of the city itself.

  Surrounded and delayed by agitated panglossia in dozens of tongues, the unavoidable reek of too-close-packed bodies, and the overriding cacophony of nonstop construction, one determined small group continued to force its way toward one of the farther launch pods. I-Five used a directed hypersonic pulse to ensure that his words would be heard over the din of the crowd. "Turn down the corridor to the left,"

  the droid said. "It's a temporary elevated accessway that will let us bypass much of the major construction."

  Jax noticed glowing letters floating above the entrance, along with a multilingual glyph for "danger."

  "It says construction personnel only," he said.

  "That's us," responded the droid. "We're constructing a faster way to our destination."

  Jax hesitated, but only until they entered the corridor. It was nearly deserted, and for the first time since arriving at the port they could actually advance unimpeded. Jax took a deep breath and relaxed.

  Or rather, he tri
ed to.

  Now that they had temporarily bypassed the pan-

  294 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows demonium, he realized that the Force was trying to tell him something. Actually, that was much too mild a phrase. It was more like being grabbed by the lapels and shaken violently. Before he realized it, the hilt of his newly acquired lightsaber was in his hand. He didn't ignite it yet, however; they were still in an all-too-public place.

  A quick glance at Laranth confirmed that she had been warned as well; both hands were hovering near the twin DL-44s holstered on each hip. Jax looked warily about but saw nothing amiss. A few other species—mostly Niktos—walked or rode the slide-walks as well, but it made perfect sense that he and his cronies wouldn't be the only ones to risk a fine by making use of the construction accessway.

  Den said, "Now what?" in a tone of voice usually only heard from H'nemthe grooms on their wedding nights.

  "Hush!" It was menacing—that much was certain.

  But where was its source?

  The relative quiet of the accessway was suddenly shattered by a loud throbbing, fluttering noise. Then an ornithopter rose nearby, its wings thrashing the air. At the same time Laranth shouted "Look out!"

  and shoved him to one side. Jax barely avoided being hit by a slashing emerald blade.

  Laranth didn't.

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  twenty-nine

  Jax landed on his side, rolled, and came to his feet in a single smooth motion, letting the Force do most of the work. At some point during the move he activated the lightsaber, though he couldn't have said when. The blade—crimson, a remote part of his mind noted—boiled out to its full length in a heartbeat.