Star Wars: Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter

by Michael Reaves

  “You will find Dorvalla to be a much different landscape than Coruscant, Darth Maul.” Sidious turned slightly in Maul’s direction, appraising him from beneath the cowl. “I suspect that you will savor the experience.”

  “And you, my Master, where will you be?”

  “Here,” Sidious said. “Awaiting your return, and the news that your mission was successful.”

  It had taken two days to locate and exhume the guidance droids from the crashed shuttles, and it had rained the entire time. The soup in the shadow of the Castle was three meters thick. Bruit had insisted on overseeing the search-and-recovery operation. He wanted to be on hand when the droids were analyzed.

  Few of Lommite Limited’s employees had access to the launch zone, and fewer still had access to the mechanized shuttles themselves. Tampering of the sort that had brought down the crafts would have left characteristic signs of the computer slicer who had effected previous acts of terrorism and sabotage. Bruit’s sources had already established that the slicer was an agent of InterGalactic Ore, but the saboteur’s identity had yet to be ascertained.

  The team Bruit had assigned to the retrieval was a mix of beings from the relatively nearby star systems of Clak’dor, Sullust, and Malastare—that was to say, Bith, Sullustans, and transplanted Gran. All were suited up in goggles, respirators, and large-format footwear that kept everyone from sinking too deeply into the gelatinous mess the rain had made of the ore. All except Bruit, who was sporting thigh-high boots in an effort to stay clean.

  “No doubt about it, Chief,” one of the limpid-eyed Sullustans said, after running a series of tests on one of the R-series guidance droids. “Whoever sliced his way into this little guy is the same one who shut down the conveyors last month. I’ll stake my wages on it.”

  “Don’t bother,” Bruit said. “You’ve only corroborated what all of us already knew.” He gave his head an angry shake. “I want the launch zones shut down until further notice—off-limits to everyone. Then I want every member of the launch prep and maintenance crews brought in for questioning.”

  “What about the ore, Chief?” one of the Bith asked.

  “We’ll import temporary crews, even if we have to go to Fondor to stock the crews we need. Once we’re up and running, we’ll have to double the shuttle flights.”

  Knowing what doubling the flights would entail, everyone groaned.

  “What’s the boss going to say about this?” the Sullustan asked.

  Bruit glanced in the direction of headquarters. Arrant already knew that the guidance droids had been located, and was waiting in his office for Bruit’s report.

  “I’ll tell you when I get back,” Bruit said.

  He set off for the landspeeder he had left at the control booth, but he hadn’t gone ten meters when his left boot became hopelessly cemented in the mucky soup. He grabbed the thigh-high cuff of the boot, hoping he could simply pull it free, but he lost his balance and pitched to one side, sinking up to his right shoulder. He maintained that indecorous pose for some moments, while he daydreamed of what life might be like on Coruscant.

  “You were right about things getting worse,” Arrant said when Bruit entered the office, muddy and in his stocking feet.

  “I was also right about InterGalactic. The guidance droids show exactly what we expected to find.”

  A grim expression marred Arrant’s handsome face. “This has gone far enough,” he said after a moment. “Bruit, you know that I’m a patient man, and basically a peaceful one. I’ve tolerated these acts of vandalism and sabotage, but I’ve reached my limit. The loss of those two shuttles … Look. Corellian Engineering just turned to InterGalactic for a shipment we couldn’t provide—no doubt, just as InterGalactic anticipated would happen.”

  “It won’t happen again,” Bruit interjected. “I’ve shut down the launch zones, and I’m bringing in replacement crews.”

  “You have one day,” Arrant said.

  Bruit gaped at him.

  “Eriadu has placed major orders with us and InterGalactic,” Arrant explained. “We’re expected to deliver by the end of the week, which gives us just enough time to get the barges loaded and jumped to hyperspace. This is a make-or-break contract, Bruit, and Eriadu is going to award it to whichever one of us can deliver on time and without incident. LL needs to get there first, do you understand?”

  Bruit nodded. “I’ll have the shuttles up and running in one day.”

  “That’s only the beginning,” Arrant said carefully. “It’s a sure bet you’re not going to root out the saboteurs by then, so instead of that I want you to arrange for us to reply in kind to InterGalactic’s actions.” He waited for Bruit to absorb his intent. “I want to hit them hard, Bruit. But I don’t want us to do the hitting directly.”

  Bruit considered it. “I suppose we could turn to one of the criminal organizations. Black Sun, maybe.”

  Arrant waved his hands in a gesture of dismissal. “That’s your area of expertise. The less I know about it, the better. I just don’t want us to be in a position where we can be blackmailed afterward.”

  “Then we’re better off using freelancers.”

  “Do whatever you need to do—and no matter what the cost.”

  Bruit took a breath. “I’ve a feeling that Dorvalla isn’t going to be the same from this point on.”

  Dressed in a lightweight utility suit and a black overcloak, its hood raised against teeming rain, Darth Maul strode down the main street of the company town Lommite Limited had assembled in the midst of what had once been a trackless tropical forest. Beneath the cloak, he wore his double-bladed lightsaber hooked to his belt, within easy reach should he need it. Dorvalla’s gravity was slightly less than what he was accustomed to, so he moved with an extra measure of grace.

  A grid of permacrete streets, the town was a warren of prefabricated domes and rickety wooden structures, many of them lacking transparisteel in their windows. Music spilled from the entrances to cantinas and eateries, and folks of all description meandered tipsily down the raised walkways. The place had the feeling of frontier towns throughout the outlying star systems, with the routine mix of aliens, humanoids, and older-generation droids; sterility and contamination; repulsorlift vehicles operating alongside four- and six-legged beasts of burden.

  The residents, all of whom either worked directly for Lommite Limited or were there to defraud those who did, projected the same mix of autonomy from the laws that regulated life on the Core worlds and enslavement to perpetual toil and poverty.

  Unlike Coruscant, where beings hustled to and fro with determination, here reigned an atmosphere of purposelessness, of accidental life, as if the pitiful beings who had been born here, or who had arrived for whatever reason, had resigned themselves to the depths. Like the bottom feeders who dwelled in the lawless bowels of Coruscant, they seemed to be going through the motions of living, rather than grasping life and turning it to their own purposes.

  The revelation fascinated Maul as much as it disheartened him. He decided that he needed to gaze beyond appearances.

  The air was thick with heat and humidity, and the buzzing and chirping sounds of the surrounding forest played at the edge of his hearing. He could sense the interplay of life there, the fights and flights, and the ongoing struggle for survival. And the forest had imparted some of itself to the town. For here lived beings who were not above hunting and killing to obtain the sustenance they required. A veneer of laws regulated such things, but beneath that veneer lurked a more base morality that allowed opponents to settle their matters without fear of intrusion by keepers of the peace, judicials, or even worse, the Jedi Knights.

  Life was cheap.

  Maul threw out his right hand and snatched a fist-sized insect in midflight. Dazed, the flitter lay in his palm, perhaps wondering on some primitive level just what make or manner of predator it had blundered into. The creature’s six legs wriggled and its pair of antennae twitched. Its twin eyespots and carapaced body glowed with a faint
ly green bioluminescence.

  Darth Maul studied the insect, then sent it on its way to rejoin the multitude that buzzed about the town.

  His Master had shown him many places, but always under escort, and now he was suddenly on his own, a stranger on a strange world. He wondered if he might have found his way to a place like Dorvalla had it not been for Darth Sidious and the life he had provided. He had been raised to believe that he was extraordinary, and he had come to accept that. But every so often doubt would drift in of its own accord, and he would be left to wonder.

  He shucked the mental intrusion and quickened his pace.

  His Sith training allowed him to spot weaknesses of character or constitution in each of the various beings he passed. He drew on his dark-side instincts to guide him to the best means of carrying out his mission.

  Maul came to a halt at the entrance to a noisy cantina. It was the sort of place where anyone who entered would be appraised by the clientele within, so he moved quickly—a blur to most; to others, just another laborer hurrying in out of the rain. He slid onto a stool at the bar, keeping his hood raised and his face in profile when the human female bartender approached.

  “What can I get you, stranger?”

  “Pure water,” Maul growled.

  “Big spender, huh?”

  Maul made a negligent motion with his fingers. “You’ll bring my drink and leave me alone.”

  The muscular, tattooed woman blinked twice. “I’ll bring your drink and leave you alone.”

  Maul expanded his peripheral vision to take in the two adjoining rooms. He made use of the mirror behind the bar to see what his eyes could not, and he drew on the dark side to fill in the rest.

  The cantina had an air of benign neglect, a smell of liquid inebriants and greasy food. The lighting was deliberately low. Flying insects of various sizes circled the illuminators, and children of several species ran in and out. Males and females fraternized openly, with a sense of levity or abandon. Music was provided by a ragtag band of Bith and fat Ortolans. Along the length of the bar Weequays conversed with Ugnaughts, Twi’leks with Gands. Maul was the only Iridonian in the place, but he was not the only sole representative of a species.

  If some of the residents he had passed on the street were the hunters, the manka cats, here were the nerfs the cats fed on—the ones who gave themselves over to intoxicants and games of chance and other vices. It was the sheer absence of discipline that sickened him. Discipline was the key to power. Unflinching discipline was what had forged him into a sword master and warrior. Discipline was what enabled him to defy gravity and slow the inrush of sensory input, so that he could move between the moments.

  Maul sharpened his faculties, extending the range of his hearing to monitor nearby conversations. Most were as prosaic as he had expected them to be, revolving around gossip, flirtation, petty complaints, and future plans that would never be realized.

  Then he heard the word sabotage, and his ears pricked up. The customer who had uttered it was a stout human, seated off to Maul’s right in a booth along the cantina’s rear wall. Another human sat opposite him, tall and dark complexioned. Both men wore the gray lightweight coveralls that were standard issue for employees of Lommite Limited, but the lack of lommite dust in their hair or on their clothes made it clear that they weren’t miners.

  A third man, straight-backed and robust-looking, approached while Maul watched out of the corner of his eye. Maul took a sip of water and turned slightly in the direction of the booth.

  “I figured I’d find you two here,” the new arrival said.

  The stout one smiled and made room on the padded bench seat. “Step into our office and we’ll buy you a drink.”

  The third man sat, but declined the offer with a shake of his head. “Maybe later.”

  The other two traded looks of surprise. Maul read the lip movements of the taller one: “If he’s not drinking, then something serious has come up.”

  The third man nodded. “The chief has called a special meeting. He wants us at his place in half an hour.”

  “Any idea what it’s about?” the stout one asked.

  “It has to be the shuttle crash,” the man opposite him surmised. “Bruit probably has a line on the culprits.”

  Maul recognized the name. Bruit was Lommite Limited’s chief of field operations. The three men were probably security personnel.

  “Like there was any question about the culprits,” the stout one was saying.

  “It’s bigger than that,” the third man said, lowering his voice almost to the point where Maul had to strain to hear him. “Word has come down from Arrant on how we’re going to respond.”

  The stout man sat away from the table that bisected the booth. “Well, it’s about time.”

  “I’d say that calls for another round of drinks,” his partner said.

  Maul continued listening, but his eyes were no longer fixed on the men but on something he had glimpsed on the wall above the booth. It resembled the bioluminescent flitter he had captured earlier on. This one, however, wasn’t moving from its spot on the wall. The reason became apparent once Maul probed it through the Force. Not only was it a fabrication, it was also a listening device.

  Maul scanned the room, then turned to face the mirror. The device wasn’t very sophisticated; its large size was evidence of that. Even so, that didn’t mean that whoever was eavesdropping on the security men had to be inside the cantina. But Maul suspected that they were. Without looking at it, he focused his attention on the artificial flitter and screened out all extraneous sounds—the pulsing music, the dozens of separate conversations, the noises of glasses clinking or being filled with one inebriant or another. Once he could discern the muted beeping of the device’s transmitter, he listened for signs of the receiver with which it was in communication.

  At a round table in the adjoining room sat a Rodian and two Twi’leks, ostensibly engaged in a game of cards—sabacc, in all likelihood. Maul watched them for a moment. Their playing was desultory. He observed their facial expressions as the security agents continued to converse. When one of the men said something of interest, the Rodian’s faceted eyes would flash and his short snout would curl to one side. At the same time, the Twi’leks’ head-tails would twitch and their pasty faces would flush ever so slightly.

  The Rodian’s left ear was sporting an earbead receiver, while the Twi’leks’ receivers took the form of dermal patches, disguised as lekku tattoos.

  Maul was certain that the trio were in the secret employ of Lommite Limited’s onworld competitor, InterGalactic Ore. He recognized the Rodian from the disk Sidious had given him. It was possible that they were the saboteurs themselves.

  His eyes darted back to the listening device and the security men. Creatures of habit, they probably occupied the same booth night after night, completely unaware that their conversations were being monitored. Such carelessness exasperated Maul to the point of fury. The men were deserving of whatever harm would surely come their way.

  The three security men left the cantina on foot and wended their way to a ribbon of trail that wove through a dense stand of forest. Maul followed from a discreet distance, keeping to the shadows when Dorvalla’s moon came up, full and silver-white.

  The trail eventually arrived at a tight-knit community of flimsy dwellings, many of them raised on stilts to keep them above pools of runoff water left by the rain. The humidity was oppressive.

  The dwelling that was the trio’s destination was an elevated cube with a metal roof angled to channel rainwater into a ferrocrete cistern. The cube’s only door was accessed by means of a ladderlike stairway. A rusted landspeeder with a cracked windscreen was parked in a muddy front lot.

  Maul kept to the trees while a thickly built human responded to the stout agent’s raps on the door frame.

  “Come on up,” the man said. “Everyone else is already here.”

  Bruit. Darth Maul waited until the three agents were inside, then he hurried from
the shadows and planted himself under an open side window. Not content with his choice, he ducked beneath the house and clambered up one of the stilts to wedge himself between the floor joists of the front room. In the room above, someone was pouring liquid into several glasses.

  Maul extracted a miniature recording device from the breast pocket of his utility suit and placed it against the underside of the rough-hewn floorboards.

  “Here’s the long and short of it,” Bruit said while the glasses were being filled. “Arrant has decided that we need to level the playing field. We’re going to strike at InterGal at Eriadu. Our shipments will reach the planet, and theirs won’t.”

  Someone whistled in astonishment.

  “Does the boss realize what he’s letting loose?” perhaps the same man asked. “This is going to lead to a shooting war.”

  “This comes straight from Arrant,” Bruit said. “He’s been in the trenches before. Those are his words, and this is his show.”

  “His show and our livelihood,” someone pointed out. “There has to be a better way of settling this. What about petitioning the senate to intervene?”

  “A cure that can be worse than the disease,” another answered, much to Maul’s amusement. “The senate will defer to committees run by corrupt bureaucrats. It will take months for it to get to the courts.”

  “No senate, no courts,” Bruit said. “That much has already been decided. It’s up to us.”

  “So what happens at Eriadu?”

  “We’ve been able to learn the hyperspace route InterGal’s ships are going to take. They’ll arrive by way of Rimma 13, and are scheduled to decant from hyperspace at 1400 hours, Eriadu local time. The folks we’re employing to execute the strike will be able to calculate the precise reentry coordinates.”

  “Who are we employing?”

  “The Toom clan.”

  Expressions of dismay flew from all corners.

  “Cutthroats,” someone said.

  “Exactly,” Bruit said. “But we need to team up to accomplish this, and Arrant’s willing to spend the necessary credits. By using them, no one will suspect us, and Arrant doesn’t care, because he doesn’t want to know any more than he has to. He wants to keep his hands clean while I make the connections. Besides, the Tooms have the means to get the job done.”