by Star Wars
We are you.
“No,” she managed, but it was too late.
It came at her again in one quick lunge, and Vosa reacted without thought, using an instinctive burst of Force push to drive herself backward up the corridor, opening up a twenty-meter gap between herself and the thing. It was enough time and space to allow her to hit the floor in a dead run and not look back.
Looking back on those vertiginous moments, when time itself had become a blur and conscious thought was utterly lost to her, Vosa remembered little. She had never fled from another opponent like that before, which was perhaps why it felt so utterly disorienting.
It wasn’t so much the worm that she was trying to outrun, but what the thing had promised her within itself—a final resting place where her identity would descend into the murk of murderers, crime lords, tyrants, and anonymous scum whose agonies would ultimately become as familiar to her as her own. In the end, she would be just another voice crying out from inside the great, swollen tube of the thing’s being.
At last her steps slowed down and she regained control over herself.
Resolve came quickly. No one would ever be allowed to know what had happened here. There was no reason to speak of it.
Coming here had been a mistake.
She was preparing to leave, to find her way back down to the ship, when she heard screams coming from up the corridor—and, in the silence that followed, the voice of the one she’d been sent to meet.
Maul.
71
THE SUM OF ITS PARTS
The medical droid was nowhere to be found.
“Wait,” Eogan was saying. He’d put down his end of the crate and was now pacing quickly through the medbay, searching for the GH-7, as if the droid might have gone into hiding somewhere. “You said that it could deactivate the charges. Where did it go?”
Maul said nothing. He’d assumed that Radique would meet them up here to use whatever inside influence he had to disarm the explosives in his chest—he knew from Radique’s expression that he wanted Maul’s insight on the lightsabers. Which meant the arms dealer needed to keep him alive, at least long enough to—
KRRRAACCK!
The walls shook hard enough that Maul had to steady himself against the hatchway. By now the entire prison was rocking steadily around them, the tremors coming with such violence and frequency that they never really seemed to stop. Gaps were opening in the joinery overhead, where exposed wires spat and fumed with sparks.
“Jagannath …”
Maul turned and looked over to where the boy had already stopped in his tracks, staring down at the scorched pile of processors and components scattered haphazardly across the floor. What was left looked so little like a droid that they’d stepped right over it before. The GH-7’s head and manipulator arms had been blasted off completely, and the rest of its circuitry seemed to have caught fire and melted into slag.
“What happened to it?” Eogan asked, his tone splintering with near-panic. “We have to fix it!”
“That’s impossible,” the low voice said behind them.
Maul and Eogan turned to look at the hatchway through which they’d entered. Radique was standing there, blue skin gleaming, staring at them coldly. Maul watched as Radique spread his arms wide, allowing his clawbirds to land on him, a dozen or more perched from shoulder to wrist on either side. The feathered black bodies and piercing soulless eyes were a visual echo of his own. They made low, restless, hungry sounds.
“What happened to the surgical droid?” Eogan asked him.
“Blasted to pieces by hostile inmates would be my guess,” Radique said. “Not that it matters now. You’re Inmate 10009, aren’t you?” Raising his face back up to meet Eogan’s desperate expression, Radique shook his head. “I think your number is up.”
“No!” the boy yelled, and swung out his fist at the weapons dealer, but the punch was wild, and Radique saw it coming with plenty of time to duck. The clawbirds on his arms took immediate flight, cawing and shrieking as they swept down on Eogan, going for his eyes. The boy swung his arms furiously, trying to ward them off, but there were too many of them. Over his shoulder Maul could hear the hungry, greedy noises they made as they pecked at the boy’s face and hands. All around them the medbay shook harder, as if stirred to life by the attack.
Maul’s arm shot out, grabbing Radique by his black tunic and jerking him close. “Call them off.”
Then he felt it—the lightsaber activating in Radique’s hand. Radique raised it up in front of him and swung it at Maul. Maul ducked, the blade humming over his head.
“One final match,” Radique said, stepping forward. “I think Warden Blirr would have approved, don’t you?” He paused to admire the blade in his hands. “You do amazing work, Jagannath, you know that? You must tell me your secret.”
“Come closer,” Maul said, “and I will.”
Radique’s lips quirked into a slight smile. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Maul just looked at him, into the red eyes, measuring the distance between them.
“When it comes to weapons,” Radique continued, “I am a proud man. But …” He turned the blade from right to left, inspecting it more closely from all angles. “I have no problem acknowledging the work of a fellow master’s hand when I see it. Surely it’s not just a matter of the geological compressor. So tell me, Jagannath. How is that you knew exactly what my synth-crystals required in order to become fully functional?”
Maul moved all at once. Gripping the bank of diagnostic equipment behind him, he leaned back and swung his right foot up, driving it hard into Radique’s chest.
With a sudden grunt, Radique flew backward, crashing into the far wall, the lightsaber spinning out of his hand. Maul caught it in the air and swung it around just as the clawbirds came at him from all sides, dive-bombing his face and throat, their talons and beaks assaulting him.
He whirled, the red blade becoming a blur, cutting the birds down around him as they screamed and cawed and swooped. Within seconds the air was full of black feathers drifting downward. Maul kicked their bodies aside and brought the tip of the blade down to where Radique was sprawled on the floor, head to the side, exposing the throbbing vein in his neck.
“Jagannath,” another voice managed, and from somewhere behind him, Maul heard a soft thud.
Keeping his blade close to Radique’s throat, Maul glanced around where Eogan had fallen. The boy’s once-smooth face was a crosshatched nightmare of cuts and scratches from the birds’ attack, but that wasn’t what had killed him. He lay motionless on the floor, not far from the disassembled droid that could have saved him.
It was over for the boy, Maul saw. Eogan’s eyes were still open, but their whites were already beginning to glaze. His lips were slightly parted, as if he’d still been trying to say something, make some final pronouncement or plea, when the charges had finally gone off in his heart.
“Too bad.” Radique shook his head. “Not that he didn’t deserve it. His father was a worthless waste of skin, and so was he.” His raised his head back up to Maul. “Shall we continue our fight?”
Maul looked down at Eogan’s body one last time. In the end, he felt no obligation to the boy himself; compassion and pity were as alien to him as they’d ever been. Yet Eogan had stood with him to the end, and something about his death needed to be set to rights.
He brought the lightsaber closer to Radique’s throat. “This match is over.”
Radique grinned. “Not yet.”
Maul didn’t see the blaster until it went off in Radique’s hand. It was a pocket model, small enough that Radique must have been able to hide it in his sleeve. The shot caught Maul point-blank in the meat of his right shoulder, ripping through the muscle and knocking him backward into a wild sunburst pattern of his own blood.
“The lightsaber,” Radique said. “Give it back to me. Now.”
Maul tried to move his right arm, flexing his fingers. With the tissue and nerve damage in his s
houlder, he was not at all sure that he could get the lightsaber out and cut Radique down before he fired again. At this distance, one shot was all he’d need.
“Suit yourself.” Radique leveled the blaster at his face. “Then I’ll take it off your corpse.”
Maul saw his grip tighten on the weapon, the knuckle constricting visibly behind the trigger guard, and heard a sudden grunt as the boy sprang up from the floor and threw himself at Radique. The arms dealer hadn’t seen him coming from that angle, and Eogan was fast enough to knock him flat, holding him to the floor while he groped for the blaster, twisting it around in his hand.
“No!” Radique snarled, trying to elbow him off and push him away without releasing the blaster. “No! No!”
The boy didn’t bother wasting his breath, nor did he try to take the weapon from Radique. Jaw set, lips clamped tight, his bloody eyes fixed on the task at hand, Eogan simply kept twisting the blaster until Maul heard the bones in Radique’s wrists crack, until the barrel was pointed straight back up at his face—
—and it went off in a single blinding flash.
Radique’s head jerked sideways and disappeared in a cloud of blood and cranial matter that evacuated itself across the wall behind him. His corpse slumped sideways into a sagging pile, the boy pulling himself away from it, then drawing himself upward into a standing position, wiping his hands on his pants. He drew in a low, shuddering breath.
“So now …” He turned to Maul. “I guess we’re even.”
Maul glanced at the boy’s chest, and Eogan shrugged. “In the medbay the first time, when my father and I tried to escape, the droid put a needle in my chest. It must have been enough to deactivate the charges.”
“You knew?” Maul asked.
“I wanted to be sure.” Eogan reached down and picked up the blaster from Radique’s broken and stiffening fingers. “How’s your shoulder?”
Maul said nothing, and the boy tilted his chin upward, glancing abruptly behind him. That was when Maul became aware, suddenly, of another presence standing in the door of the medbay, watching them. Her arrival had eluded him until this very second, but now he recognized it fully.
“Komari Vosa.” The name twisted from his lips like a curse. “You have come.”
72
STICK IT OUT
“Maul,” Vosa said, stepping into the medbay with a glance at the arms dealer’s body and the boy standing over it. “Am I interrupting something?”
Ignoring the question, Maul glanced at the curve-handled lightsabers that hung from her belt. “You wear your heritage on your hips.”
“Not my heritage,” she said. “My livelihood.”
“My Master specifically ordained for us to meet,” Maul said. A new species of tension was taking shape in his chest, filling his lungs and spreading outward into his extremities as the fullness of the dark side made itself manifest. “We have business, you and I.”
Vosa stood her ground, feet planted, face attentive, body poised to strike. “The only business that we have is your imminent destruction.”
Charging at her, he sprang up, swinging his lightsaber in a swooping hum to meet her in midleap. Vosa was ready for him, and their blades clashed together, her initial defensive pose absorbing the momentum of the attack and pushing him backward. From the corner of his eye, Maul saw Eogan raise Radique’s blaster pistol, and before he could utter a word, Vosa stretched out her hand and knocked it from his grasp with a burst of Force push, slamming the boy to the floor.
“Stay out of this,” she told him. “You’ll—”
The room reverberated with a massive, crackling boom, followed by a series of low-level aftershocks. It was as if Cog Hive Seven, having lost interest in all the routine reconfigurations, was now determined to shake off entire layers of itself.
“Wait,” Maul said. “I summoned you here to take possession of a weapon. Not to—”
But Vosa was moving again, whirling backward, spinning and evading, and no matter how he tried to defend against her, his blade met open air. The awareness of what she was doing, drawing on the Force and her own repulsive relationship with it, only made him more determined to end this battle decisively.
“You’re weak,” she goaded him, dropping back and making him come to her. “Your right arm is slowing you down. Even your weapon is betraying you.”
Maul kept coming, relying more and more on his left arm, saving the right for when he’d need it most. But Vosa seemed to anticipate everything he was doing, dropping low and then springing up and outward into an open space along a row of diagnostic machinery in the corner of the medbay.
Maul’s lower lip drew back to reveal his teeth. If defeating Vosa was what he needed to do in order to get the weapon in the hands of the Gora, so be it. Gripping the lightsaber’s hilt, he squared his shoulders and swung again, thrusting his blade at her in a series of perfectly angled slashes. Vosa came back at him on the offense, both blades spinning.
“Jar’Kai,” Maul snarled, deflecting her assault on reflex. “Predictable.” He swung the lightsaber down, but at that moment the corridor shook again, jerking sideways, throwing them both off. Vosa recovered first, darting back, again too quick, and the speed with which she evaded his attack only inflamed the rage inside Maul’s mind, stoking his wrath until it crystallized into a kind of malignant grace.
Now he gripped the lightsaber in both arms, forcing his damaged right arm into service and gripping the hilt of his saber with his full strength. It was time for Juyo, the Way of the Vornskr—the last of the Seven Forms. He seized upon it eagerly, allowing himself to be swept up in the chaotic frontal assault of thrusts, slashes, and jabs.
“Maul—” A tremor of new fear pulsed across Vosa’s face, disrupting her composure, as if she’d finally recognized the true ferocity of his purpose.
Darting backward into a desperate evasive measure, Vosa whirled one of her blades behind her, hacking loose a massive shelf of surgical instruments from its place on the wall, and with a swing of the hand she used a Force push to fire them at him in a glinting storm of steel.
Maul ducked the flying instruments and bobbed back up with a silent snarl. In his mind, the duel was all but over—his opponent was now dragging out the inevitable moment of defeat in a series of small humiliations. By turning to such diversionary tactics, Vosa had all but admitted that she was no match for the erratic staccato blows that he was delivering, seemingly from everywhere, all at once.
Kill her. Kill her now. Then you may deliver the weapon to any of the Bando Gora who remain.
Pivoting easily, he swung out at her, the dark side streaming so powerfully from him now that it seemed to be pouring forth in great, explosive torrents. His blade was moving almost too fast to see, cutting great fan-shaped swaths in the air around him. All around them, the whole world seemed to be blowing itself to pieces.
Vosa went low, swinging out one leg in a last, fruitless attempt to catch him off balance, and he brought the lightsaber down in a great, hungry arc, holding off just long enough to savor the expression on her face.
“Now. Plead for your life.”
“Sorry.” She tilted her chin up at him, wiped the blood from her lip, and grinned. “You’re going to have to try a lot harder than that.”
Before he could respond, she rammed the top of her skull into his shoulder, head-butting the open wound. A rocket of white-hot fury sizzled inside Maul’s forebrain, all but obliterating conscious thought. He let out a roar and prepared to finish her off.
That was when the floor erupted beneath them, the alloy plates bursting open to reveal something so vast and incomprehensible that Maul didn’t recognize it until it tried to bite his leg off.
With a jolt of shock, he saw that the thing that had exploded upward had already taken his foot into the hideous suction cup of its mouth.
The worm.
Its appearance here provided Komari Vosa the last opportunity she needed to right herself and make her escape, leaping upward and then
bounding off the wall console behind her.
Coward, a voice shouted from inside Maul’s brain, weakling, Jedi scum. It is exactly like your kind to flee at the first sign of—
In that split second, the thought broke off as he realized that she wasn’t running away.
She was coming at the worm.
73
THE WRECKERS
Lightsabers alive and oscillating in front of her, Vosa landed astride the thing, her feet finding their balance with preternatural ease, hacking downward through the upper part of its head.
Down below, Maul yanked himself from the worm’s mouth, scrambling back to right himself. He heard a cry, and looked over his shoulder to see that the thing, in all its massive weight and appetite, had turned, writhing sidelong to pin Vosa beneath it.
The worm turns, and there are always more bones.
It was coiling the full extent of its hideous body in an attempt to simultaneously hold her down and devour her. On the far side of the medbay, Eogan was struggling to fire on it with the blaster that he’d taken from Radique’s hands, but none of that was going to have any effect on what was happening to Komari Vosa.
The worm was going to eat her alive.
Maul met Vosa’s eyes. Yet even now, he saw, in what was surely her final moment of life, there was no surrender in her response, no hint of fear in the way she fought it. Watching her, Maul felt a realization stirring beneath the rage to which he’d given himself over, an unfamiliar sense of connection, primitive and undeniable.
She was no Jedi.
She was no Sith.
She was something completely other, and the idea of giving this worm the privilege of ending her life now was not to be tolerated, not by Maul, not today.