The Old Republic Series

by Sean Williams

  Shigar turned and ran back the way he had come, Stryver’s massive form five long steps ahead of him.

  LARIN STEPPED GINGERLY onto the pool of molten metal that had once been the vault’s door. It was still hot. She could feel the heat even through her insulated boots. But it was solid, and her soles held. The body of the droid killed by the cannon lay nearby, its eight legs splayed out and its double body inert.

  She quickly surveyed the antechamber and found it to be empty. What had once been white walls were now blackened and scarred, but the other three vaults remained tightly sealed. There was a depression in the center of the room that looked like a tunnel mouth. Re-solidified ferrocrete sealed it shut, however, followed by a layer of molten door metal.

  Satisfied that nothing was going to jump her from behind, Larin approached the door itself. Her rifle was cocked and ready, and she had armed backup. Potannin’s squad members were tight-lipped and efficient. Most important, they were following her orders.

  The interior of the vault was lit by a single flickering globe. Via the flashes of light it provided, she at last saw with her own eyes the object Potannin had described: a low, domed cylinder made of gleaming silver. The image of a battle-scarred soldier standing low behind her weapon was reflected in its curved front. In the irregular light, she looked both menacing and hesitant.

  Gesturing economically, she ordered Potannin’s squad members in past her. They went in separate directions, coming around the object to cover it from every angle. One of them stepped on a long glass tube that shattered with an alarming sound. Nothing sinister, she noted with relief.

  There was no sign of the navicomp.

  “Destroy everything you find,” Stryver had told her, and she had come armed with grenades to do just that. But she wasn’t about to do anything rash. Who knew what valuable information might disappear forever if she acted precipitously? She may have been dumped from the Republic Special Forces, but that didn’t mean she was about to take orders from a Mandalorian without question.

  Larin came forward a step. The toe of her boot caught on something, and when she looked down she saw more of the shining silver threads running across her path.

  It came to her in a flash what they might be, and she reached for her comlink to call Shigar.

  With a crack, the top of the silver object snapped open. From it issued another droid. She dropped the comlink and fell to one knee, her rifle rising to fire. The droid was coming right for her, legs flailing and screeching like a mad thing. Its wild shape was frozen in a flash of light, silhouetted like a bug on a window. She registered five arms of varying length, and patches in its body that light shone right through. The shots from her rifle tore more holes in its hide and knocked it backward. It flailed and screamed.

  She backed away, her heart pounding, pouring round after round into the droid and the object from which it had emerged. This droid wasn’t entirely complete. That much was obvious, even from the brief glimpse she’d received. If it had been, she’d be dead now. It was new, made from scratch inside the object pulled from the Cinzia. As the others had been.

  The droid stopped moving. She signaled for a cease-fire, and was grateful for the sudden silence. The air was thick with smoke and static discharges. The tick-ticking of cooling metal was the only sound.

  She moved closer to the blaster-scarred droid and the object that had made it. Standing warily over the latter, she pointed her rifle into its gaping maw and peered inside. She saw a mass of silver threads and slender manipulators, still moving despite the damage inflicted upon it. She fired two shots into the maw, and the swirling mass grew frantic. Half a droid foreleg appeared, stunted and deformed. A black sense organ came and went.

  Larin knew what it was now. It was a compact droid factory, and it had been busy ever since the Hutts placed it here, sending out tiny threads in search of metals and power, infiltrating security systems and taking everything it needed. Hence the threads she and Shigar had stumbled across under the vaults. Hence the lack of alarms.

  She bet herself that if she took a knife to the metal walls of the safe, she would find them barely flimsi-thin—enough to fool a casual glance, but otherwise utterly plundered, dissolved, and removed, ion by ion, for use in the factory’s secret work.

  Building vicious, determined, reticent droids that wouldn’t take orders.

  Why?

  That was a whole other mystery. But the thing was still moving, still functioning. Given enough time, she bet it would repair itself and start all over again. No wonder Stryver wanted it destroyed.

  She picked up the comlink.

  “Shigar, I’m in the vault,” she told him. “You need to see this.”

  “What is it?”

  “I don’t know. It—”

  Something red flashed in front of her eyes. A searing pain struck the hand holding her comlink. She stared down in horror at the terrible cauterized wound where her fingers had once been.

  Over the humming of her crimson lightsaber, the Sith said, “Give me the navicomp or it’ll be your head you lose next.”

  ULA CRANED TO SEE what was going on inside the vault. He and Jet stood in the antechamber and had been just about to venture in after Larin when the sound of blasterfire brought them up short. Bright flashes of light lit up the cramped space. Larin and her two companions were shooting at something. But what? Not another droid, surely!

  Ula and Jet dived for cover just in case, and kept their heads down until the rattle of weapons-fire died away.

  Ula looked up. He could just see Larin’s silhouette leaning over the object Yeama had shown him. Its top was open, and she fired twice into it.

  He was about to clamber to his feet when his eyes caught something out of place among the bits of stone and other rubble on the floor.

  It was the navicomp.

  One of the hexes must have knocked it out when they emerged to do battle. He scrambled for it before someone else saw and took it. Its transparisteel container was intact, and the device itself looked no worse than it had before.

  A feeling of triumph filled him. If he could open the case and get the thing itself free, he could smuggle it under his cloak without anyone else seeing. But first he had to distract Jet. If the smuggler saw it, there was bound to be another fight over it. The whole extended disaster could start all over again.

  Footsteps crunched behind him, and he turned, fearing that his find had already been discovered.

  It was the red-haired Sith. She was heading for the vault, not him.

  His relief was short-lived. The Sith’s lightsaber flashed and Larin gasped with pain.

  “Give me the navicomp or it’ll be your head you lose next.”

  Ula froze in horror.

  “I don’t have it,” Larin said, voice tight.

  “I don’t believe you.”

  One of Larin’s companions fired at the Sith. She easily deflected the bolt back into his throat. He went down kicking then fell still.

  “I’m telling the truth.”

  “I’ll count to five. Then I’ll start hacking up your friend here. And then it’ll be your head, I promise.”

  The Sith approached the last surviving member of Ula’s security detail. He backed nervously away.

  “One.”

  The box containing the navicomp was in Ula’s possession. All he had to do was surrender it to the Sith and Larin would be saved. And he would safely deliver the information to the Empire. It was a simple solution to all his problems.

  “Two.”

  But Ula couldn’t move. The Sith and the Empire weren’t the same thing. Oh, to trillions they were inseparable—the Emperor himself was the Sith to whom all others deferred!—but to him they were very different. On the one hand, the Empire offered a society of rules and clearly defined justice that could, if allowed to do so, bring peace and prosperity to every planet in the galaxy. On the other, oppression and constant conflict. Could he in good conscience give any advantage to the followers of th
e latter? Would Larin want him to?

  “Three.”

  If only he could deliver the navicomp to the Minister of Logistics. With it in her hand, she could surely find a way to turn it to their advantage. The Empire was so huge it wouldn’t miss this world’s resources, for all the squabbling over them now. All Ula wanted was the chance to prove the rightness of his principles. He didn’t mind the existence of the Sith, but they shouldn’t be allowed to run roughshod over everyone else.

  “Four.”

  Yet there was no point dreaming. The Minister of Logistics might have been in another universe entirely. He could no more give her this vital piece in the puzzle than he could stand up to the Sith himself and survive. He was just a pawn in a game much larger than he could imagine. He was insignificant and disposable. How foolish to think that he could ever have changed the way this would turn out! The navicomp had been earmarked for the Sith the very moment she arrived.

  “Five.” The Sith moved in to start slashing.

  “Wait!” he called out.

  All eyes turned to him. The Sith glared at him with hateful eyes. Jet looked as shocked as though Ula had sprouted wings and flown up to the ceiling. Larin’s expression was hidden by her helmet, and that was the one he most wanted to see.

  “Here,” he told the Sith, holding up the navicomp. “Take it. Just leave her alone.”

  The girl’s expression became hungry, triumphant. Ula didn’t want to get any closer to that blade than he had to. He hefted the box and tossed it to her.

  At the height of its arc, a gleaming web reached in and snatched the box clean out of the air.

  “What—?” Ula spun around.

  The Mandalorian caught the box neatly in one hand and tossed something back to Ula in return. He caught it automatically. It was a heavy metal sphere with a blinking red light.

  “No!” screamed the Sith, robbed of her prize.

  Stryver was already moving, rising up on his jetpack and heading for the exit.

  “Chuck it!” yelled Jet to Ula. “That’s a thermal detonator!”

  Ula hurled the sphere away from him as hard as he could. It went up, and kept going up as Shigar, the Jedi, used the Force to sweep it away. The tactic wasn’t entirely defensive. The detonator exploded high in the creaking scaffolding that had once been the security air lock’s roof, directly above Stryver’s escape route. The statue of Tassaa Bareesh toppled and fell. Yet another avalanche came crashing down after it, burying the Mandalorian and a herd of palace guards that had come to quell the disturbance.

  The floor gave way, and kept giving way as Stryver fired downward, riding the tide of collapse into the palace’s deeper levels.

  Snarling, the Sith girl went after him, determined not to lose her prize. She vanished into the roil of stone and ferrocrete, and didn’t reappear.

  Ula took one step toward Larin, but Shigar beat him to it.

  “Are you all right?” the Jedi asked her.

  She was leaning against the outside of the vault with her crippled left hand compressed under her armpit. With her right hand, she tugged off her helmet. Her face was white and pinched.

  “I’ll live,” she said. “Meanwhile, it’s not over. Stryver will head for his ship first chance he gets. You have to cut him off and get the navicomp back, any way you can. Do you think you can do that without me?”

  Shigar nodded, tight-lipped, and loped off across the shattered floor to the hole in the wall, leaping gracefully from girder to girder.

  Larin held her grin until Shigar was out of sight. Then she slumped in pain.

  Ula’s pain was different but no less real. It was clear that Larin had a close connection with Shigar. The Jedi even had tattoos similar to hers. It was some kind of cultural thing, surely. Perhaps they were married. The thought made his chest ache.

  He knew it was ridiculous to feel this way. He knew it was based on nothing at all. He knew he had built it all up in his own head, and that made him an idiot of the highest order. He had more important things to worry about than this.

  The battle for the navicomp was over. Tassaa Bareesh’s palace security forces would be converging on the site to clean up and make accusations. He didn’t want to be there when that happened. His loyalties were so compromised, he wasn’t sure he could convince anyone that he wasn’t guilty of everything.

  “Stryver will be going for his ship, like she said,” he told Jet, “but he’s going the wrong way around. I’ll head him off and see if I can salvage something. Tell her—tell the others I’ll meet them at the shuttle.”

  The smuggler studied him closely, and then simply said, “All right, mate. I might need a lift myself.”

  “Isn’t your ship—?”

  “Impounded and crewless.” He shrugged. “And what’s a freight captain without his ship? Guess I’d better start thinking about a normal job.”

  Ula patted him on the shoulder with what he hoped was appropriate bonhomie, because it was utterly genuine. A normal job. Those three words had struck him with the force of one of Stryver’s thermal detonators.

  He hurried off, following with infinitely greater clumsiness Shigar’s route across the shattered floor. He ignored the shouts and screams coming from the levels below. He ignored the shaking of his hands. He kept his mind firmly on its goal.

  There was an Imperial ship in the palace’s dock. That was where he was headed. If he could get there before it left, he could reveal his true identity and claim amnesty. He could escape with the Sith and the navicomp when she returned from hunting Stryver, and he could finally report to his superior.

  He could relax the disguise, and speak freely, without lies or deceptions.

  He could be himself. And then …

  A normal job?

  Nothing at that moment appealed to him more.

  AX FELT LIKE she was being swallowed whole by a space slug. Even through the Force barrier she threw around herself as protection from the tumbling surf of rock, every sharp edge and crushing pressure squeezed the breath utterly from her. Almost instantly she gave up trying to guide her descent.

  She consoled herself with the knowledge that Stryver had to be faring just as badly. Escaping this way was the height of desperation. She admired his guts even while she despised him for capturing the navicomp out from everyone else.

  It wasn’t over yet, though. She would find him, no matter what it took. There was absolutely no way she was going to report to her Master empty-handed.

  The rough-and-tumble finally eased off, and she was able to make her way through the debris, using the Force to help shove aside rocks and gravel, cutting through larger obstacles with her lightsaber if she had to. At every pocket of air she stopped to breathe, grateful for every single lungful of oxygen. It was almost completely dark, but very noisy. When the debris itself wasn’t groaning and grinding around her, she could hear voices crying for help.

  Finally one arm emerged into free air, then her head. A trio of dusty Evocii grabbed her armpits and began to pull. She shrugged them off and got herself out. At the sight of her lightsaber, they squealed and ran.

  Ax dusted herself down.

  Now, Stryver.

  She had emerged in some kind of dormitory, with bunks lining two walls and the rest crushed under the avalanche. The true extent of the collapse was hard to measure. She could have fallen a dozen levels or just one. Judging by the relative poverty she saw around her, however, she guessed that she was a long way from the luxurious upper floors. These were the beds of slaves, not valets.

  Stryver would be farther down, and he would want to go up. His ascent, no doubt, would not be a quiet one.

  She closed her eyes and tuned out the screams, the settling debris, the occasional blaster shot. She was looking for one particular sound out of the multitude surrounding her. It would be faint, but it would definitely be there.

  The whine of Stryver’s jetpack.

  There.

  The moment she had it, she swung her lightsaber in a
circle around her feet. The floor fell out from under her, and she arrived with perfect poise in the middle of an attempt to rescue a Hutt slave driver’s tail from its squashed position under a fallen wall.

  She ignored everyone involved, crossed to the nearest wall, and slashed an impromptu doorway through that in turn. This led to a torture hall, where indolent or disobedient slaves were publicly punished in order to serve as examples to others. Again, Ax didn’t stop to admire the techniques of the Dug in charge. She noted only that many of the screams she had assumed to be caused by the collapse of the building actually emanated from here.

  Through another wall, and Stryver’s jetpack was definitely sounding louder. She could also distinguish the dull booming of his assault cannon from the welter of other sounds. Like Ax, he was using the weapons in his arsenal to blast a way through the palace. Where doorways or corridors didn’t exist, he wasn’t above making his own.

  Ax skirted the edge of a deep rancor pit. The massive beasts snapped and roared at her, enraged by all the commotion. The handlers did their utmost to restrain them, using chains, hooks, and heavy weights, but the rancors’ wild natures weren’t so easily subdued. The truncated scream of one of the handlers followed Ax as she Forceleapt across the enclosure in pursuit of her quarry.

  The jetpack was close enough now that she could smell its exhaust.

  Through a junkyard, a cantina, and a Tibanna gas containment facility, at last Ax had reached Stryver’s trail.

  It was instantly recognizable. His assault cannon had blasted a tunnel diagonally upward through every structure in his way. The series of holes led through walls and floors in a perfectly straight line. At the end of it, Ax could see a glimmer of bright light: the jetpack’s fiery wash.

  Baring her teeth in anticipation, she set off after him. Each leap took her one step higher on the long ad-hoc staircase. The surfaces she landed on were unreliable. Sometimes they crumbled beneath her; sometimes they slipped, still molten from the heat of the cannon. Sometimes people fired at her, made trigger-happy by the Mandalorian’s violent passage. Ax kept her footing and deflected every shot. She didn’t stop for anything or anyone.