Dark Disciple

by Christie Golden

  Ventress was done with Moregi. Vos could feel it through the Force coming off her in waves, a grim, frightening determination that made him glad he was not the primary target of it. He slid the speeder bike, highly maneuverable despite its overmuscled appearance, underneath the larger vehicle, then rose right in front of it. Moregi gasped. Ventress leapt as smoothly as an airdiver, her long, lean body arcing perfectly. She was a thing of beauty as her arms struck Moregi in the chest and she pulled, her momentum carrying both of them off the speeder to tumble onto the pavement below.

  Moregi rose and turned to flee, but Vos was there, blocking his way. Whimpering, the Volpai turned to see Asajj Ventress triumphant, a glowing yellow lightsaber humming in her right hand.

  “Hands up,” she demanded, adding, “All four of them.”

  Like a cornered animal, even now Moregi tried to escape. He turned and ran—right into Vos’s powerful punch. The force of the blow spun the Volpai around and he fell to the ground. He started to rise, only to find himself staring at a lightsaber and a blaster, both centimeters from his face.

  “It’s over, Moregi. We’ve got you.”

  Moregi looked at them, anguished. He tried a final time. “Please—my family needs me. I’ll give you triple what they’re paying you.”

  “I already told you, it doesn’t work that way,” Ventress said. Her eyes narrowed. “And you’ve wasted my time making me run around this city. Triple won’t even cover my fee.”

  “Our fee,” Vos reminded her. “Let’s go.”

  —

  “Not to cast a shadow on this spectacular capture, but let’s talk payment.”

  Vos lounged against the side of Ventress’s Banshee, peering up at her as she descended. When she’d told him the name of the vessel, he’d been amused that she had obviously heard the term “banshee” applied to herself and had decided to embrace the reference. Banshee the ship was a flat, disc-shaped pursuit craft. Its two engine nacelles were powerful, but with a snub-nosed cockpit bristling with weapons, it was not particularly aesthetically pleasing. It sported a turret-mounted triple blaster atop it, and the cockpit had two anti-personnel blasters and two heavier laser cannons. The Banshee was made for two purposes—hitting hard, and getting away fast—and that was enough for her.

  Moregi had offered no further resistance and now sat in the hold, trussed up and broken. Ventress simply could have retracted the ramp and taken off, but instead she found herself eyeing the interloper.

  “I reckon it’s an even split,” Vos continued. He gave her one of his winning smiles. “After all, we do make quite a team.”

  She slitted her eyes and scrutinized him, thinking. He was quite attractive, but many men were. He was strong and fast—but he could be stronger and faster. He was genuinely amusing, which was rare, and she suspected that he was more intelligent than her private nickname for him—Idiot—reflected. And he wasn’t easily discouraged. In the field of bounty hunting, that counted for a lot.

  So instead of flat-out refusing again, Ventress planted her hands on her hips and asked, “Why are you so hot to be part of a team? Need someone to pick up your slack?”

  His brown eyes widened and he placed a hand on his chest.

  “Me? Are you kidding? I do the heavy lifting.”

  She waited.

  “Well, it’s a lot of work for one person,” he said. “Even you have to admit that.”

  Ventress remained silent. His smirk, which had been perpetual until this point, slipped a little and he looked away. “It’s just…I’m getting tired of being a loner. If that makes any sense.”

  Unexpectedly, memories flooded Ventress. Most of her life, she had been with someone, only to inevitably lose them in the cruelest of ways. First her Master, Ky Narec, then Mother Talzin and her sisters. Dead now, all of them; they had loved her, and they were slain.

  Dooku had not loved her. She had thought he had—not as a woman, of course, or even as a daughter, but as an apprentice. Someone who showed promise, whom he enjoyed training and shaping. How eager she had been to learn, to serve him, to obey, and how quickly he had discarded her. She had meant something to him only when he could use her. There was, Ventress thought bitterly, something terribly askew with a universe in which, out of all her allies and mentors, Dooku was alive and the others breathed no more.

  The painful reverie lasted but a moment. Ventress knew her weaknesses, and knew how to bypass them. They were liabilities she had run across more than once in her solo career as a bounty hunter; once with Pluma Sodi, a young Kage girl who had been abducted from her family to be an unwilling bride, and again whenever a bounty’s family had muddied the waters, as had happened earlier.

  She should say no to the amusing idiot who stood before her; keep well away from partners, and entanglements, and trust.

  Instead, Ventress found herself saying, “Fine. I’m game. We’ll split it.”

  Vos’s composure slipped. Adroit as she had seen him be earlier today, he actually slid a little where he leaned against the curving metal. He caught himself quickly. “Really?”

  At his unabashed delight and surprise, a warning flare went up somewhere deep inside her: Guard yourself. It was too late now, though. Her voice was hard as she replied.

  “But there’s no way I’m carrying you.” She shoved a stiffened finger pointedly into his broad chest. “If you want to partner with me, you’ve got work to do. This isn’t playtime—this is a job. You’re going to need to learn how to run faster and fight harder. No foolish errors. No lost quarries because you want to make a grand gesture. I won’t tolerate laziness or stupidity. Got it?”

  Surprise, quickly hooded, flashed in his eyes. The grin reemerged in its dazzling brilliance.

  “Always feisty. But you might make a decent partner yet.”

  “You could use a little bit more training.” She strode up the ramp and started to climb up the ladder.

  He followed. “I think you’ll find I’m…up to the task,” he said. Ventress glanced down at him to notice he was appreciatively eyeing her derriere.

  “That won’t be happening,” she said drily. “I don’t mix business with pleasure.”

  “You don’t know what you’re missing,” he insisted.

  “Then I’ll have to remain happily ignorant. And you’ll remain alive. For now, anyway. If you’re going to get half the pay, you’ll need to do half the work—and we’ll need to line up twice as many jobs. Come on.”

  “Okay, partner!”

  As she climbed quickly with Vos behind her, Ventress found herself hiding a smile.

  Vos had thought Ventress had been teasing him with the whole run faster, fight harder, you need training bit. So when, within the first hour of their partnership, she handed him a list of running times to beat, weights to lift, and insisted on a regimen of daily hand-to-hand combat—with her—he’d laughed out loud.

  “You’re taking the joke too far,” he said, tossing the pad back to her. She caught it and threw it back.

  “I seldom joke.”

  Vos peered at her. “I thought my ‘audition’ with Moregi went pretty well.”

  “It did. That’s why I agreed to take you on at all. But you’ve got a few things to learn before you’re ready to play the part.” He did not like her choice of words, as they hit too close to the truth. Vos had been careful not to use the Force around her, but he had been in physical training since he could walk. Was Ventress attempting to assert herself over him, as Kenobi had warned she might, or did she really just not see how good he was?

  Or did she already suspect that he was a Jedi?

  “I’m fine, thanks,” he said.

  Ventress folded her slender arms. “Tell you what. If you can knock me out, you can skip the extra training.”

  Oh, there is no way this is going to end well. “I don’t like hitting a woman.”

  “Then every woman you fight is going to win. An enemy is an enemy, Vos, regardless of size, species—or sex.”

  Th
ere was no getting out of it. While the Banshee bore them through hyperspace, they went down into the cargo hold. Vos limbered up, cracked his neck, and while he was settling into position, she sprang. He darted to the right, his hand closing on her ankle. Deftly, she twisted in midair. Vos almost dodged her other foot as it descended onto his face, but reminded himself to be slower than usual and not use the Force. He did, however, turn his head so her kick struck his cheek and not his nose. His stumble was exaggerated, but the grunt of pain was not.

  Ventress “let him catch his breath,” and they circled. “Quick reaction, grabbing my foot,” she said, grudgingly. Inwardly, he grimaced that it hadn’t escaped her notice. Kenobi had said she was sharp.

  He smirked, hoping he looked overconfident. “See? I’m better than you th—” He blocked the lightning-fast punch, but pulled his own. This was turning out to be more challenging than he’d expected. How hard was too hard to punch her? Should he really try to knock her out? While Vos was pondering, drawing his fist back for another blow, Ventress seized his other arm and pulled. Vos decided to let the whole mess conclude and permitted himself to be thrown. Honestly, he had to admit, it wasn’t that hard; Ventress was unobtrusively using the Force. An ordinary opponent would never have noticed it.

  He landed on the hard metal of the cargo floor and her knee was on his throat. Ventress rolled her eyes, then extended a hand to haul him to his feet.

  “I guess I don’t get to skip the extra training,” Vos said, massaging his throat.

  “You performed better than expected” was her reply. She picked up the pad with her instructions and tossed it to him. “But you can do better.”

  —

  So now Quinlan Vos, Jedi Master, was once again in training. After the first few sessions, he found himself actually glad of it. Not only did Ventress fight dirty and ruthlessly, but she fought extraordinarily well. He’d seen a lot of it in their first hunt together, but that had only been the tip of the iceberg. Vos supposed it was only to be expected from someone trained by Count Dooku. He had wondered how it was that both Kenobi, a superb fighter, and Anakin, who was also excellent though a bit reckless, had been unable to take her down. Now he understood.

  Vos made a point of utilizing the moves she had taught him on their next couple of hunts, so she’d see how much he’d “learned.” The jobs were not particularly interesting in and of themselves; the usual routine of one rotten underworld sleemo putting a bounty out on another rotten underworld sleemo. Still, Vos discovered that hunting alongside Ventress—and showing her all the things he had “learned”—was a great deal of fun.

  There had only been one time when he’d come close to blowing his cover. They’d been after a bounty, chasing him through the dark, dangerous, and very dirty streets of Coruscant’s Level 1313, when they’d been ambushed. Well, Ventress maintained they’d been ambushed. Vos privately wondered if some of the denizens of the underworld were just bored that night.

  It wasn’t so much that their attackers were excellent fighters, but that there were simply so many swarming out of the shadowy corners. Vos and Ventress had their hands full, and at one point Vos had noticed that a leathery-faced Weequay whom Ventress thought she’d eliminated had woken up and was training a blaster on her.

  Vos had no choice. He used the Force to knock the weapon out of the Weequay’s hand, simultaneously leaping to close the distance between himself and the attacker. When Ventress turned around, Vos was in close enough proximity to later claim that he’d kicked the blaster away. Ventress had looked at him narrowly, but she made certain this time that the Weequay was dead, and had not asked Vos about it again. Since then, she had repaid the favor—more than once.

  Vos was alternating between handstand push-ups and one-hand balancing—focusing on not using the Force—when he heard the ramp extend. He didn’t stop his workout as he called, “Hey, got anything for us yet?”

  Ventress came into view, upside down from his perspective, and peered at him critically. “I might,” she said. “Let’s try this with a little bit more weight.” She grasped his feet and began to transfer her weight to her hands, bending her knees and leaning into the movement. He grunted, his legs quivering. “Oh, come on, I’m not putting that much weight on you. Keep going.”

  “Uhhhhhgggh,” he said, but obeyed, still not using the Force.

  Ventress grinned wickedly down at him, her short tuft of blond hair falling slightly into her face. “We’ll be working with pirates,” she said.

  “With them?” he grunted, managing another push-up. “Is that wise?”

  “I’ve worked with this one before. She’s got her own code of honor—and nothing in the galaxy can help you if you violate it.” Ventress put more of her weight into her hands. If Vos had been able to use the Force, she could have done handstands of her own on his feet, but of course he had to use muscles alone. His arms were burning as he dipped again.

  “She?”

  “Don’t tell me you’ve never heard of Lassa Rhayme?”

  “…nope?”

  “The Blood Bone Order?”

  “Oh…them, I’ve heard of. So that’s Rhayme’s crew?”

  “It is. It’s very egalitarian. She was voted into the position, and can be voted out at any time. No one has, so far, nor is likely to.” Abruptly, Ventress put almost all her weight on his feet for a moment. Vos made a choking sound. “Keep going,” she instructed, but eased off. For the moment. “She divides everything into equal shares. No cheating among the crew, no fighting on the ship. They’ll follow her anywhere.”

  “No desertions allowed, I take it?”

  “On the contrary. Anyone’s free to leave, but most know a good thing when they see it. Our quarry, shall we say, left on a bad note.” Again, she increased her weight.

  “Oh? Uh—Ventress…”

  “Her first mate—literally and figuratively—ran away three days ago with Rhayme’s last intended target.”

  “The haul?”

  “The haul, and the heiress they intended to take it from.”

  “I see. Ventress—”

  “Captain Rhayme is taking this all very personally. So much so that there’s quite a lucrative bounty on his head.” Ventress appeared ignorant of Vos’s imminent collapse.

  “What will…uhhng…happen to him?”

  “Even I don’t particularly care to find out. Think pirate justice combined with jilted lover.”

  “I get the picture. Ventress, you really should—”

  She let go, but not without yanking on his foot first. With a yelp, Vos collapsed into a heap. “Ouch,” he said.

  “Better do a few more.”

  “You just like watching me,” he said, untangling himself.

  “Never said I didn’t,” she replied.

  “You could do more than watch,” he said, and winked. For a terrible moment, she didn’t reply, and he thought she was calling his bluff.

  Then she rolled her eyes. “Since you brought it up…it’s time I familiarize you with a new strategy. It’s an easy one. This former lover of Rhayme’s has an eye for women. So, we bait him.”

  It took Vos a second to figure out what she meant. “You mean…you?” As soon as he’d said it, he realized it could have sounded like an insult, which was not at all what he’d meant. Fortunately, Ventress appeared to let it slide.

  “I have two approaches I like to employ,” she continued. “The subtle one I call the nod and the wink. That’s for the more sophisticated target—or one who wants to be discreet. The other’s the full-on gambit, which is an obvious invitation. I’ve always been more than able to handle them alone, but with this approach, having a partner will make it even easier.”

  “Gotcha,” he said, nodding.

  Ventress eyed him thoughtfully. “You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

  Vos scoffed. “ ’Course I do. Hey, I bet I’d be great at this kind of thing,” he said with feigned casualness.

  A smile played on h
er full lips. “You think so?”

  “Sure I do.”

  “All right, let’s give it a shot, then.” Uh-oh, Vos thought as a sense of panic rose in him. It was one thing to verbally flirt. What Ventress was proposing was entirely different.

  “First, the nod and the wink.” Ventress shifted her weight so one hip was slightly higher than the other. Casually, she ran a hand down her waist, along her thigh, then looked up at him from under her lock of blond hair. Her lips curving in a smile, she gave him a barely perceptible nod and closed one blue eye in a wink.

  “Now you try,” she said, dropping the seductress pose like a cloak. It was the Ventress he knew standing before him.

  “I surrender,” he said, putting his hands up. His cheeks were hot. He thought he would rather face a session with a torture droid than attempt what she had so easily demonstrated. “I can’t top that.”

  “You haven’t seen the full-on gambit yet.”

  “Don’t have to.”

  She laughed and patted his cheek, offering him a genuine smile. “Your virtue is safe with me. Your discomfort is rather charming, actually, but I’m sure you’ll get over it.”

  He had no response to her first comment and said instead, “I’ll let you handle this, if you really think it’s necessary.”

  “For this one? Absolutely. A good bounty hunter uses whatever tools best suit the job. Sometimes it’s a lightsaber, sometimes it’s a sucker punch, and sometimes it’s a nod and a wink. The idea is to catch our bounty effectively and in a timely manner, without unnecessary complications. Trust me, in this case, it’s the perfect strategy.”

  They got the mark in fifteen minutes flat.

  Ventress didn’t even have to use the full-on gambit.

  —

  Ventress settled into the cockpit, with Vos in the seat behind her, and she found herself smiling. This mission had been an unqualified success. The bounty had been hefty, and having Lassa Rhayme’s gratitude was no small thing. Vos had given up on his overdone persona, which was a blessing, and had relaxed into someone who was, actually, naturally appealing. She was glad he’d pushed his way into a partnership with her; not once had he given her cause to regret her decision.