Star Wars - Darth Maul - Shadow Hunter

by Shadow Hunter (by Michael Reaves)

  The Force confirmed it, as if there were any doubt. Darsha Assant was dead.

  Obi-Wan Kenobi stood quietly, looking at the hilt in his hand.

  There is no emotion; there is peace.

  How he wished it were so.

  CHAPTER 33

  Lorn stared up at the brightest light he had ever seen.

  He felt... brittle, as though he might crack into countless pieces if he tried to move. There was a strange ringing in his ears, an odd smell in his nostrils.

  His eyes refused to focus. Everything seemed dream-like. He had no idea where he was or how he had gotten there.

  Abruptly the light-which he now realized was the sun-was blotted out by a familiar face.

  "Good-you're awake. How do you feel?" Lorn moved his jaw experimentally, found that he could speak without too much difficulty. "Like a battle dog's chew-toy." He sat up, his vision still blurred, a multitude of aches trying to drag him down. "What happened?" I-Five didn't reply for a moment. "You don't re-member our recent... situation?" Lorn looked around him. He and the droid were on a small setback roof about halfway up the side of a building. The last thing he remembered.

  He turned and looked in another direction. Perhaps fifty meters away was the building they had been trapped in by the Sith. He remembered Darsha opening the door, remembered seeing the Sith framed in the doorway-but nothing more than that. He said as much to I-Five.

  The droid nodded. "Loss of short-term memory. Not surprising, given the trauma of recent events and the carbon-freezing." He helped Lorn to his feet. "Can you walk?" Lorn tested his balance. "I think so." "Good. The authorities will no doubt be here soon, but with any luck Tuden Sal will arrive before they do." Tuden Sal. For some reason the name triggered more flashes of memory. "You froze us in carbonite." I-Five nodded. "The waste-treatment chamber we were in was set up to contain volatile materials for transport. It was simply a matter of readjusting the parameters for-" It hit him then, like a stun grenade at close range. "Darsha!" The sunlight, so much brighter than he was accus-tomed to, faded momentarily back to the grayness of downlevels. I-Five's mechanical hand gripped his upper arm, steadying him.

  Darsha, the Jedi Padawan, the woman with whom he'd shared the last tumultuous forty-eight hours- the woman who'd come to mean, in that short and I intense time, more to him than anyone except Jax and I-Five-Darsha was dead.

  No. It couldn't be. The droid and he had managed to cheat certain death; surely there had been some way that she, too, might have.

  He looked desperately at I-Five. Saw that the droid knew what was going through his head. And read, somehow, in the other's metallic, expressionless face, the truth.

  They had escaped because she had bought them time-had bought it with her own heart's blood.

  That part came back, too. She was... gone.

  "What happened?" he asked dully.

  "She managed to stack some of the flammable con-tainers together during her battle and ignited them as she was struck down." Struck down.

  Lorn was quiet as they made their way to the roof's edge.

  "Why aren't we dead?" "Carbonite is extremely dense. It survived the ex-plosion, and since we were encysted within it, so did we. There was a process timer, which I set to thaw us after a half hour. Then I thought it prudent for us to relocate." Lorn nodded slowly. "What about the Sith? Did he survive, or did he die with-" He could not bring him-self to finish the sentence.

  "Unknown. If he did survive-which, were we dealing with anyone else, I would deem extremely unlikely-then in all probability he thinks we're dead. The carbon-freezing lowered all biological and elec- tronic processes to a level far too faint for even a master of the Force to detect." Lorn stretched his arms and twisted cautiously from side to side. Other than a major headache, he seemed to be experiencing no adverse effects. All in all, he'd had hangovers that were worse.

  A pinging sound came from I-Five's midsection. "That would be our ride," the droid said, pulling the comlink out of his torso compartment and activating it.

  He confirmed their location and toggled it off.

  Within seconds a large black skycar with a canopied roof and dark windows dropped toward them, its side doors opening when it reached their level. Lorn looked in and saw that Tuden Sal himself had come to pick them up.

  "I'm wondering what you two have gotten your-selves involved in this time," Sal said as the chauf-feured skycar lifted away from the scene. He glanced out the tinted window at the destruction below. "But given what I see down there, I'm not sure I want to know." "A wise decision," I-Five said, as he leaned over to look out the side window.

  "The less you know, the less they can indict you for." The skycar was drifting higher, heading toward a traffic lane that would take them to Eastport, where one of Sal's restaurants was located. I-Five tapped Lorn on the arm and pointed out the side window.

  "You may not want to see this," he said.

  Lorn looked out the window and saw a tiny figure in black striding along one of the elevated walkways below. He felt his insides ice over as if he'd been plunged once more into carbonite. He got only a glimpse of the figure, who was pretty far away, but it looked like- His throat was dry; he had to swallow twice before he could speak. "Got enhancers on this crate?" he asked Tuden Sal, who was slouched on the cushioned bench across from him.

  The restaurateur was a Sakiyan-short, stocky, and possessed of skin that looked like burnished metal. He nodded and tapped a control alongside the window panel.

  The aircar was the epitome of plushness: tiny drink dispenser, high-powered comlink, and an inter-species climate control. Instantly, in response to Sal's command, the tiny figure below became much larger, zooming to fill up half the window. His cowl was up, covering his face, and the enhancement threatened to break up the image into component blocks of digital artifacting, but Lorn recognized him nonetheless.

  It was the Sith.

  As he watched, the cowled killer pulled something from his belt compartment and held it up to look at. A request to Sal caused the enhancer to focus on it. Lorn wasn't surprised to see the holocron in the Sith's hand.

  "Friend of yours?" Sal asked.

  Lorn shook his head. "Not at all. But I'd like to keep track of him. Do you mind if we take a little detour?" "No problem. I owe you, Lorn." "Keep the enhancers at full, and stay as far back as you can," I-Five advised.

  Sal toggled a switch and gave the droid chauffeur the instructions. They began to follow the cowled figure at the maximum visible distance, just barely keeping him in sight.

  Darth Maul reined in his connection to the dark side and made his shadow within it as small as he could. His master was right: it would not do to suc-ceed in silencing the enemies of the Sith only to reveal himself to others of them through a mistake.

  The apprentice hailed a cab. With his speeder bike destroyed and the one he'd taken from the patrol no doubt dangerous to use by now, he needed transporta-tion to take him nearer to the abandoned monad where his ship was located.

  As the air taxi lifted off, its driver having been given directions, Maul kept an eye out for followers. It was unlikely there would be any, since almost all who had seen him had died, or were ten or more levels below- but his master had ordered stealth, and thus it would be.

  Lorn and I-Five watched the dark figure alight from the cab and walk toward the upper entrance of an abandoned monad. They watched for a few more minutes until the Sith reappeared on the rooftop.

  A few seconds later they saw him step into thin air and vanish.

  "Nice trick," Tuden Sal said.

  Lorn just stared, completely baffled for the moment, not sure whether to believe his eyes. Was this some new arcane power of the murdering Sith? But then he heard I-Five say, in answer to Sal's comment, "He must have a high-grade cloaking device. Probably crystal based." Of course. Their nemesis had gotten into a cloaked spaceship. It made perfect sense, Lorn thought. The Sith had accomplished his mission; he had gotten the holocron and, as far a
s he was concerned, killed everyone who knew anything about it. He was no doubt preparing to leave Coruscant.

  Only I'm not dead, you murderer. You think I am, but I'm not.

  The question was, what was he going to do now?

  For the first time since this nightmare had begun, he was safe. The Sith thought he was dead. All Lorn had to do was lie low and the demonic killer would pass out of his life forever. He and I-Five could get off Cor-uscant and pile as many parsecs between them and the hub of the galaxy as they deemed necessary. They wouldn't be rich, but they'd be alive.

  And the rankweed sucker who had killed Darsha would get away with his crime.

  Lorn knew he could go to the Jedi and tell them what had happened. They would no doubt mobilize their ranks and start hunting for the one who had killed two of their order. Even though Lorn and they had some bad history, there would be no problem convincing them to believe him-one of the few ad-vantages of dealing with a fraternity of Force users.

  But the wheels of any organization, no matter how self-consciously benign, turn slowly and ponderously. Even now, the Sith was no doubt getting ready to raise ship. Could even the Jedi find him once he fled this world?

  Lorn stared out the window. Before him, spread from horizon to horizon, lay Coruscant in all its tes- sellated splendor. More than just about anybody else, he felt he could say that he had seen the best and the worst the capital planet had to offer. He had led a life that had been by turns dangerous, frustrating, terri-fying, and heartbreaking. There had been little joy in it. Still, he was reluctant to do anything that might re-sult in his losing it.

  He had never wanted to be a hero. All he had wanted was to live a quiet, normal life with his wife and son. But his wife had left him, and the Jedi-those whom the galaxy looked upon as heroes-had se-duced him into giving them his son.

  He would never have called any Jedi a hero-until he met Darsha Assant.

  He took a deep breath and looked at Tuden Sal. "We need a spaceship," he said.

  His friend nodded. "I-Five told me. No problem. Where do you want to go?" Lorn looked back down at the roof of the monad, where the Sith had been visible until a moment ago.

  "Wherever he's going." CHAPTER 34

  Darth Maul settled into the pilot's chair. He pressed his hand to a sensor plate on the console be-fore him, and the hemispheric control chamber filled with various hums, tones, and vibrations as the Infil-trator powered up. A quick outside scan revealed nothing in the immediate area that would interfere with his launch. Maul nodded in satisfaction.

  His mission was nearly over at last. It had taken far longer than anticipated and had led him into dark corners of Coruscant he had not even known existed.

  But now his assignment was almost accomplished. Everyone whom Hath Monchar had spoken to, every potential information leak, had been stilled. Darth Sidious's plan for the trade embargo, and eventually the destruction of the Republic, could now proceed unchallenged.

  Maul pulled the holocron from one of his belt com-partments and looked at it.

  Such a small item, and yet the repository of so much potential power. He re-turned it to the compartment, then activated the ver-tical repulsor array. He watched on the overhead monitors as the monad's rooftop fell away from the ship. The Infiltrator's nav computer began plotting di-rectional and velocity vectors that would take him to the rendezvous point specified by his master. There he would deliver the holocron to Darth Sidious, and then his mission would be complete.

  Within a matter of minutes he was high above the clouds, the curve of the planet revealing itself. It would take a little time to reach his destination; the orbital shells surrounding Coruscant were nearly as congested as the traffic strata on or near the surface. Once he was in orbit he would have to disable his in-visibility field; otherwise it would be too difficult to avoid a collision with one of the myriad satellites, space stations, and ships that circled the planet.

  Maul took the ship off autopilot and fed minimal power to the ion drive. The autopilot was more than capable of delivering him to his destination, but he preferred to be in control.

  As he settled the Infiltrator into low orbit, barely skimming the tenuous gases of the upper ionosphere, Maul thought about his battle with the Jedi Padawan.

  She had certainly been smarter and more resourceful than he had given her credit for. So had her com-panion, for that matter. They had led him on quite a merry chase. He mentally saluted them both. He ad-mired courage, skill, and brains, even in an enemy. They had been doomed from the start, of course, but at least they had fought their fate instead of submit-ting meekly to it, like that cowardly Neimoidian who had caused all this trouble to begin with.

  He wondered what his master had in mind for his next mission. Something relating to the Naboo block-ade, most likely. He hoped there would be more Jedi involved.

  Killing the Padawan had only whetted his appetite.

  The ship Tuden Sal provided for Lorn and I-Five was an ARE Thixian Seven-a four-passenger modi-fied cruiser. The craft had definitely seen better days, Lorn thought as the skycar settled down next to the ship's berth at Eastport, but that didn't matter. As long as it could fly and shoot, that was all he cared about.

  As Tuden Sal arranged for launch clearance via his comlink, Lorn turned to I-Five and said, "Give me the blaster." I-Five returned the Raptor's weapon to him. "As long as you're not planning on trying to shoot me with it again," the droid said.

  "I wouldn't have shot you." I-Five made no reply to that.

  "Listen," Lorn continued, "I don't expect you to go with me. In fact, it makes more sense for you to go to the Temple and tell the Jedi what's been happening.

  That way there'll be a backup plan if I fail." "Oh, please," I-Five said. "You take on the Sith alone? You've got about as much chance as a snow-ball in a supernova." " It's not your fight." "Finally, something we agree on. Nevertheless, I'm not letting you go up there alone. You're going to need all the help you can get. Which reminds me-" The droid pulled from his chest compartment what looked like a small white ball. He handed it to Lorn, who looked closely at it. It was semitransparent, roughly spherical, about half the length of his thumb in di-ameter, and apparently made of some organic material.

  "What is it?" "A skin nodule from the taozin. They're made of specially adapted cells that block receptivity to the Force." Lorn regarded the ball askance. Now that he knew what it was, he felt revulsed by its touch. "You're saying if I have this, the Sith can't use the Force on me ?" "I'm saying it may shroud your presence long enough for you to sneak up on him unnoticed. It won't protect you from his telekinetic powers, and it certainly won't do anything about his fighting skills. But it's better than nothing. Now I suggest we raise ship." So saying, the droid turned toward the ramp of the Thixian Seven.

  Lorn let him get two paces ahead of him, then reached out and deactivated the master switch on the back of I-Five's neck. The droid collapsed, and Lorn caught him, settling him to the ground. He turned to see Tuden Sal watching.

  "Family squabble?" "Something like that. I need one more favor," Lorn said. "Deliver this bucket of bolts to the Jedi Temple. He's got information they'll want to hear." Sal nodded. He picked I-Five up under the arms and dragged him over to his skycar. Lorn watched for a minute, then turned and boarded the ship.

  Lorn could honestly say that he wasn't frightened at the thought of facing the Sith alone. Frightened was far too mild a word. He was terrified, paralyzed, to-tally unmanned by what he was contemplating. He knew he was pursuing a suicidal course of action, and for what? Some quixotic notion of revenge for the death of a woman he barely knew? It was madness. I-Five was right: his chances for survival were so long that the odds were up in the purely theoretical number range.

  As the Thixian Seven lifted away from the space-port, Lorn felt himself on the verge of hyperventila-tion. Every nerve in his trembling body was on fire with adrenaline; every brain cell still functioning after his periodic bouts of alcohol abuse was scream
ing at him to leave orbit and just keep on going.

  Instead, he instructed the nav computer to plot the possible trajectories of a ship coming from the surface grid containing the abandoned monad.

  Within far too short a time the computer had identi-fied a craft in low orbit, thirty-five kilometers away. Lorn put it on visual, since the readout said that the stealth mechanism had been deactivated. He stared at the computer-enhanced image of the Sith's vessel. With long nose and bent wings, it was a sleek craft, nearly thirty meters long; the scan readout didn't specify ar-mament, but it looked mean.

  Below him, Coruscant looked like a gigantic cir-cuit board laid across the planet's surface. It was a spectacular sight, but Lorn wasn't in any mood for sightseeing. He settled into an orbit below and well behind his enemy's ship. He didn't know how much protection-if any-the taozin nodule would grant him, and he wasn't going to press his luck. He was going to need plenty of luck as it was.