Then he was on his feet and facing Aurra Sing.
Though he'd never met her before, her appearance left him with no doubt of her identity. He would have little time for doubt in any case, because her blade was already whistling toward him. It was a green lightsaber, and its glow painted everything the same shade of corroded brass. Everything, that is, except the Twi'lek's green skin—that it rendered the deep gray-green of ripe chee nuts.
Jax had just time enough to register that Laranth was either grievously wounded or already dead, and that she was directly in the path of the blade's second downward arc, before he lunged in a desperate attempt to block it.
He did, but just barely. The clashing blades crackled, the air was rent with ozone, and the two lightsabers rebounded. Sing's blade had been de-
296 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows fleeted just enough to miss Laranth. It sheared through the suspended floor of the elevated walkway, cutting supports. Jax backflipped and came down on the still-supported section, his lightsaber ready for another attack.
Behind him, his comrades fell into the abyss.
No time for even the briefest of reactions, as Sing was leaping at him again. Several meters below, an emergency-response tractor field automatically activated by the disintegration of the corridor caught his tumbling companions. They would slow-fall, but he didn't have time to watch; he barely had time to breathe. She rained down on him a fury of blows almost as vociferous as the oaths and curses that accompanied them.
"Fear me, Jedi! I am Aurra Sing, Nashtah, scourge of your kind! I haunt your darkest dreams! I drink Jedi blood; I nest in their guts! Your nightmares now have a name, hierophant, and that name is Aurra Sing!"
He felt the Force flowing around her. There was considerable might to it, but it was wild and undisciplined and, as such, difficult to anticipate. He'd never before felt anything quite like it, and he'd certainly never heard anything like it.
At last she paused for a moment in her tirade. Raising his lightsaber, he slid his right leg back and lifted the humming beam over his head.
"You'd be the bounty hunter, then," he said.
Hefting her own weapon, the woman grinned a feral grin at him. Externally, she was beautiful; even without an endocrine advantage, she could give Dejah a run for her credits. What Jax sensed within Michael Reaves 297
her, however, utterly obliterated any outward impression. She had an ugly soul.
"You handle a lightsaber well, prey." Suddenly she leaned forward, and her crimson eyes narrowed. Then rage filled them—or at least, he thought, topped off the last little bit of sanity; it's not like there was a whole lot to begin with—and she snarled, "Where did you get that?" She indicated his lightsaber.
He told her the truth: "An acquaintance sent it to me." He shrugged. "I guess he didn't want it any-more."
She came in, and she was incredibly fast; faster than anyone he had ever encountered. Only the Force allowed him to anticipate her reactions; otherwise he would have surely lost limbs in the first minute of action. It was all he could do to parry the hurricane of blows she threw at him: cut-cut-cut-thrust-diagonal-cut—!
He leapt backward to escape, felt the heat of her lightsaber singe his right foot as it cut through his boot and sliced off part of the heel.
Maybe needling her into losing control wasn't such a good plan after all. ..
As he flew backward, Jax slashed behind himself with his weapon. A newly installed transparisteel pane shattered under the impact of his lightsaber, just in time for him to sail through unharmed. He landed on his feet on the roof.
In an instant, Sing followed. She flew through the opening, eyes narrowed, her arms held wide for balance. Her lightsaber was a viridian shaft in the semi-darkness.
She cut downward, hard, so fast! Without the 298 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows Force, he would have been bisected. Instead, before he could think, his body moved on its own, wrapped in lines of power. Unbidden, his hand snapped up to block her blade with his. Scarlet and emerald lightning once again blinded them both momentarily.
Coupled with the force of her descent, her strike knocked him backward again, across the roof construction. He nearly fell off the far edge.
Behind him, several massive automata were hard at the business of demolition and construction. At a comfortable control station somewhere, a supervi-sory sentient was probably kicked back in a form-chair, watching as the gigantic machines did all the work. Would he or she glance at a screen, take notice of the fight amid all the heavy work, set down the in-evitable cup of caf and notify security? Would the fight even last long enough for help to arrive?
She came at him again. She was fast, strong, and good, but she was also reckless. She had said it herself: her passion lay in hunting Jedi, not fighting them. She was used to striking hard and fast, a streak of scarlet in the night. She wasn't used to fighting skilled opponents for any length of time.
Jax kept backing away, parrying, letting the Force completely control him. A wrong move and he would be chopped down. His best bet was to wait, to let her wear herself out before trying to take her down. Assuming he could outlast her. She was humanoid, but not human; there might be different rules for her kind. He was already certain that her fast-twitch muscle percentage was far higher than his. He was getting tired, and she seemed as fast and strong as when they'd started.
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They were among the machines now. Heavy lifters and composite depositors, link checkers, emitters, and synthesizers whirred and hummed and rumbled all around them. Sing continued to push him back, back, always back. Jax went with it. He wanted her to be sure that she was winning.
Maybe she was . . .
At least she's stopped her diatribe. I was beginning to think she was trying to talk me to death.
"No need to die," she said, as if reading his mind.
She threw a fast series of choppy attacks, none designed to do major damage, but rather to set him up for the killing stroke.
"Really? What do you think your boss plans to do with me? Buy me lunch?"
"Not my concern, Jedi. Surrender now and maybe you can negotiate something with him. Don't, and I kill you now. An iffy future is better than none, don't you agree?"
She charged in without waiting for an answer, and her attack sequence was too fast for him to follow consciously. The Force answered, its strings manipulating him like a marionette's, but his body wouldn't be able to keep up much longer. He blocked, counter-attacked, was parried, and ducked just in time as she tried to take his head off.
This was not going well. He needed to do something, and soon, or—
Sing was growing impatient. The blasted Jedi refused to capitulate, even though the Force was all that was holding him up at this point.
She wasn't sure how he'd come upon her light-
300 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows saber; most likely he'd had an encounter of some sort with Typho. The particulars didn't concern her—she was intent on getting it back, and she wasn't too particular about how. If it meant prying it from the cold, dead fingers of his severed hand, she was sure Lord Vader would understand. But she wanted this to be over, and soon. Her stamina would outlast most humanoid sentients, but when it faded, it faded fast.
Even acknowledging the possibility of failure was not an option. She would defeat this upstart Jedi.
Anything else was unthinkable.
Movement out of the corner of his right eye caught Jax's attention. The energy of their lightsabers clashed and sizzled yet again, and he allowed the blow to send him staggering back toward the activity he had sensed. All he had time for was a quick look.
He couldn't fight any harder. He had to fight smarter.
The machine was a large reposticator, or fabber. It chewed up raw material that looked like sand from a hopper, then laid a sheet of translucent plate onto the roof for a hard, weatherproof coating. The hopper had a safety field that glowed a pale blue,
to keep things from falling into the raw-materials bin. Wise, because the fabber would ingest anything that fell into it and restructure the material into its extrusion.
A desperate plan popped into his head.
He tried an attack, a basic, simple Form II series he had learned early on. Not really much of a threat; the moves were designed as defense against an opposing lightsaber.
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Sing did just that, easily blocking the attacks. She laughed.
"A defense unworthy of a Padawan? Come on, you can do better than that, can't you?"
"Not really," he said. But all he wanted was a little running room, which the moves had given him. He turned, sprinted three steps, and leapt with every bit of the Force he could muster, managing to land on the control bar above the fabber, arms windmilling in a charade of seeking balance—
Sing would be right behind him, he knew; he wouldn't even have time to turn and face her, and she would use the field guarding the raw-materials bin as a step before launching into a lunge that would easily unbalance him from his narrow perch.
He felt for her, using the Force—
The flashing red button on the control panel was just next to his damaged boot. Jax waited until he felt Sing land on the field—
Then he stepped on the button.
The field shut off.
Sing screamed as she fell into the churning sand.
Her lightsaber cut a swath of molten energy through it, fusing the sand into lumpy green glass—then was snuffed out as she lost her grip on the hilt.
Sing looked up at him as she sank beneath the sand. It churned while it was sucked into the machine. The last he saw of her was a splotch of red hair.
He turned and started toward a nearby drop-tube, realizing that his friends should have reached the ground by now . . .
302 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows thirty
Jax had two bombshells dropped on him in quick succession soon after he got to the medcenter.
The first was from Dejah. She had checked out fine, her medscan showing no aftereffects from the fall.
"We Zeltrons are a hardy breed," she said with a grin. She seemed quite a bit more cheerful—so much so, in fact, that Jax asked her what good news she must have received while in care.
"It's a decision I've made," she replied. "I'm staying here on Coruscant instead of returning to Zeltros.
I want to be part of the resistance movement."
"What?" For a moment he wasn't sure he had heard her correctly. "You mean, after all the work and risk that members of the Whiplash took on to ensure your safe passage, that—?"
"I'm staying. Yes. I regret the trouble I've caused, but I think that, if you consider what I have to offer, you'll realize it's the best choice." She ticked off the reasons on her fingers as she spoke. "I'm basal humanoid, which means that with minimal cosmetic and prophylactic disguises, I can be a human, a Mirialan, or even a Twi'lek. I've got the whole pheromonic-telempathic thing going for me, which lets me manip-
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ulate a roomful of people without their suspecting a thing. And I'm rich and beautiful, which gives me access to some corridors of power. Face it, Jax—your group needs me."
He couldn't argue with that. She was headstrong, willful, accustomed to having her own way; in short, a real handful—and she was right. She could be an asset, no question about it.
He hoped Laranth wouldn't mind.
As it turned out, he didn't get a chance to ask.
She was in a private recovery room, he noted with surprise; unusual for someone with no grid references. He suspected that Dejah had worked her money and manipulation abilities already to get the Twi'lek the best possible care.
She was conscious when he entered, having just un-dergone extensive bacta tank regeneration. Her right arm had been almost completely severed, and the lightsaber had caused a grievous wound in her right side as well, damaging her liver and pancreas. Were it not for the cauterization that the energy blade's intense heat had caused as it did its damage, she would have bled to death before she'd hit the ground.
He looked at her face again, and was surprised to see her awake and watching him. Her gaze seemed even bleaker than usual. She didn't respond to his greeting; instead she said, simply, "I'm leaving."
"Leaving?"
"Your group. I've decided that I can accomplish more on my own, without the distractions of attempting to solve mysteries best left to the sector police." She raised her good hand to forestall any objections or questions. "I'll still be around, Jax. I'm 304 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows sure our paths will cross. But I think it's best that we go our own ways."
Jax, still mentally reeling from the news that Dejah had just given him, found himself totally at a loss for words. He stood there, mouth agape like a Padawan who'd just seen his first Force demonstration. At last, unable to think of any other course of action, he sent his Force lines to her, questing for her feelings, expecting nothing more than the usual impenetrable armor in which she shielded herself.
To his shock, he found her wide open.
Hesitantly, he pushed farther. She still offered no resistance. She's not exactly welcoming me with open arms, either, he thought. Still, he knew it took an enormous amount of courage for the Paladin to go as far as she had.
Such trust demanded reciprocity. He opened himself, laid bare his inner feelings, his secrets, as best he could; he hadn't had much practice in self-examination and -realization, either. They were precepts he'd been learning as part of his adult training, before the Temple had been shattered. Nevertheless, he now stood as close to naked before the Force as he was capable of.
He felt her probe him, felt her mind within his; hes-itant at first, but then with greater confidence, and finally with reckless abandon. She was looking for something ...
He realized what it was just as he encountered the same emotion in her. She wasn't hiding it, though.
Cautiously, tentatively, she was displaying it, like a war-torn pennant atop a battlement.
The revelation stunned him.
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I— I never thought of you that way, he said mentally, letting the Force convey the essence of the message without unnecessary words.
Nor I you. But things change. She looked at him, and even though the tone of her thoughts was cool and controlled, the sense he received through the Force was anything but. It had all the truth and intensity of her passion for freedom and justice. And even as he felt its heat, he could feel it starting to wane, could feel its fires being brought under control.
Wait, he said, but it was too late. Her defenses had slammed back into place—that heavy mental armor, designed to contain the emotional equivalent of a thermal detonator, was aligned and seamless once more. She looked away from him. "As I said," she told him, "I'll be around. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm tired." Her head lowered to the pillow as her eyes closed.
Jax left the room and wandered for a while, trying to cope with the change in personnel. He felt like a fool—but how was he to have known? His life inside the Temple had afforded him little opportunity to investigate the fairer sex and, while his life outside had offered opportunities aplenty, the class of beings he now ran with either weren't interested or used sex the same way they used everything else: as a bargaining chip, or a weapon.
He'd looked upon Laranth Tarak as a comrade in arms, but not in every possible sense of the phrase.
Jax abruptly understood the Twi'lek's increasing moodiness and antipathy toward Dejah Duare. There was no way she could compete with the other woman; even without her extensive psychochemical 306 Star Wars: Coruscant Nights II: Street of Shadows arsenal, the Zeltron was a formidable opponent. She had money, beauty, and a fashion sense that made the top clothiers on the planet lick their chops like starving nexus. Compared with Dejah, Laranth was out-classed on every level.
All she could do was fight. All she had to offer wa
s a heroic heart. All she gave was—everything.
"Something troubling you, Jax?" I-Five's voice broke into his thoughts.
"He means," Den's voice piped in, "that you look spacier than usual."
Jax blinked. He was down in the waiting area, which at the moment was giving half a dozen or so humans and humanoids places to wait—either for treatment or for news of others in worse shape than they. Den had gotten off with merely a long gash on his right ear, and the droid had sustained no damage at all.
Jax said, "I just saw Dejah and Laranth. They—"
"We heard the startling news from Dejah," I-Five said. "How is Laranth?"
"Alive and getting well," said Jax. "That's the good news."
As he continued to tell them of Laranth's decision, a realization struck him with such force that he stopped midsentence and laughed.
"Something funny that we're missing?" Den wanted to know.
"You might say that," Jax said. He composed himself, then said in sonorous tones, "Prioritize discreet vigilance anent fugitive recovery operation."
"That sounds familiar," Den mused. "Hey, wait a minute—that's the last thing the Cephalon told us."
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"Exactly," Jax said. He shook his head. "It was trying to warn us about the bounty hunter. About Aurra Sing. We just figured it out a little after the fact." He laughed again.
"I thought this was supposed to be a grim and cheerless job," said a feminine voice from behind them. They turned as one to see Dejah Duare descending a nearby lift tube. She landed and walked toward them. She was wearing a dress that had something in common with the cloud dress of last night, only this one was in more of a liquid state. It was blue, and little wavelets began at her right shoulder and rippled across its length, to stop at her left hip and immediately begin again.
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