THE SIGHT OF A distinctively rounded, low-chinned helmet brought Larin to an abrupt halt. With an urgent wave of her hand to signal to Shigar to stay under cover, she backpedaled into a crowded corridor and stayed there until the Mandalorian went safely by.
A second glance told her that it wasn’t Dao Stryver. This one’s armor was silver and blue, not gray and green, and Stryver was both taller and more massive. People moved out of the way.
She grabbed a passerby at random. “Who was that?” she asked, indicating the receding helmet.
“Only Akshae Shanka,” said the mousy Evocii, as though she were an idiot. “Stay away from him, if you know what’s good for you. He’s come second in two separate Great Hunts.”
“And I bet that hasn’t improved his mood,” Larin muttered as the slave hurried away. While the Mandalorians waited for the next big war to break out, they amused themselves by ritual fighting among themselves, drawing in anyone foolish enough to show an interest in their violent ascendancy games. They were dangerous and unpredictable in all things except one: having returned to the galaxy during the Great War, they weren’t going to slink away again anytime soon.
Larin waited a full minute to make sure Shanka didn’t come back, then she moved back out into the flow of the main branch and waved for Shigar to follow.
They were following information gleaned from one of the palace’s chefs. Two high-security visitors—the Republic and Imperial envoys, Larin and Shigar assumed—were being housed in one of the luxury wings deep in the heart of the rambling structure. It was difficult to get into those parts of the palace, but they’d learned of a shaft connecting the underlying service routes—like the one they were following at the moment—and the high-security basements. Getting from one to the other was taking time, but thus far it wasn’t proving to be especially difficult.
Larin led the way, following the map she had memorized and keeping her eyes firmly forward. Shigar was hard on her heels, somewhere; she was sure of that, although she couldn’t see him. He walked as lightly as an Alderaanian swan and vanished into a crowd like a puff of smoke. When she stopped at the next junction to check her bearings, he simply appeared beside her, as if from nowhere.
“Almost there,” he said. “I’ll take point for the next leg.”
“All right,” she said. “But I’ve been thinking: why are we going this way in the first place? Shouldn’t our priority be the vault?”
“It would be, if we knew where it is. When we reach one of the envoys, then we’ll have our guide. We know they’ve both seen it. Asking the right people is always better than asking at random.”
She heartily agreed with that. They’d learned a lot by mingling with the palace’s downtrodden staff, but every important piece of information they had gathered came with a wealth of worthless trivia. Sorting the one out from the other had taken more time than either of them would have liked.
“After you,” she said, waving him ahead of her. It was her turn to trail after now. A pair of people walking side by side always drew more attention than individuals in a crowd. Surrounded by unknown serfs and servants, they blended in, passed by, and were instantly forgotten. That was something Akshae Shanka would never manage.
THEY REACHED THE ENTRANCE to the subterranean shaft without incident. There, Larin tripped a passing Gamorrean into a heavily laden Evocii, and during the resulting distraction Shigar activated his lightsaber and cut through the door’s massive security bolt. Rusty hinges groaned as he swung the door open; no one noticed over the shouts and recriminations. The argument was barely reaching its peak when Larin crept in after him. Together they pulled the massive door closed.
It was much quieter on the other side, and darker, too. Shigar took a deep breath, glad to be out of the multispecies press and the poverty they endured. He had glimpsed the luxuries lavished on those at the top of the social pyramid on Hutta. He knew what privileges they enjoyed. All around him was the cost, in filth and sentient misery.
That the underbelly of Coruscant was exactly the same gave him some pause in blaming the Hutts. Perhaps it was simply the nature of things. Perhaps Master Nobil’s rebuke was well earned. How could the Jedi Order change something that had endured for millennia? It wasn’t the Council’s brief, not when the Emperor’s wolves were snapping at the galaxy’s throat.
A faint yellow light flared into life. “Straight ahead, then left, wasn’t it?”
Larin’s voice echoed sibilantly in the miles of metal pipe ahead of them. By the light of her blaster rifle’s utility torch, he raised one finger to his lips and nodded. She rolled her eyes and said, “There’s no one down here. That’s what we were told.”
He shook his head and indicated that it was her turn to lead. Better not to take any chances, he thought.
Larin moved off at a cautious lope through the tunnel. The pipe was dry and empty, and easily large enough for them to stand upright. They could have run side by side if they’d wanted to. Occasionally the ceiling was interrupted by pipes and clusters of cables, forcing them to duck, and on two occasions they had to jump across a shaft, but apart from that there were no interruptions.
They reached the junction in fifteen minutes. As Larin approached, Shigar reached out for her shoulder. With a firm grip, he pulled her to a halt.
She looked at him inquiringly. He put one hand over the rifle’s lamp, extinguishing the light.
All was black for a moment; then a dull glow appeared. The sound of faint movement echoed around them. Someone was in the tunnel, just around the corner.
Shigar moved forward, hardly daring to breathe. Through the Force, he sensed three organisms in a cluster, but not clearly enough to identify their intentions. If they were lying in wait, why the light? If it wasn’t a trap, why the silence?
He eased his head around the corner. Three large, horned figures stood in a cluster around a lamp, looking up at the ceiling and scratching their heads. They were clearly Hortek, which explained why they weren’t talking: they were telepathic. Furthermore, the thick work uniforms they wore and the tools scattered at their feet explained what they were doing in the tunnels. They were a maintenance team, and therefore perfectly innocent.
Shigar took a moment to reassure Larin, then closed his eyes. His telepathic powers were modest at best, but they had been enhanced under the Grand Master to the point that she could convey simple concepts to him without speaking. The Hortek were receptive to outside thoughts and vulnerable to Force persuasion. If Shigar could combine the two, he could easily get rid of them.
He found the focus required with surprising ease. The practice on the way to Hutta had done him good. Within moments, the Hortek picked up their tools and moved off.
“Nice one,” whispered Larin when the sound of heavy footsteps faded away. She eased around the corner and flicked the light to its lowest setting.
“It gets tougher from here on,” Shigar said, unhitching his lightsaber hilt. “Let’s not get complacent.”
“Hey, look at this.” Larin had the light aimed up at the ceiling, where the Hortek had been working. Something had burst through the shaft’s metal wall, melting it. Several silver threads dangled down like strands of web. Larin blew gently on one of them. It swayed stiffly from side to side. “That looks like wire.”
“It can’t be,” said Shigar. “It’s getting longer.”
Larin pointed the light at the bottom of the thread. Its terminus was visibly extending lower.
“Growing,” she said, “or extruding?”
“Doesn’t matter, either way,” he said. “What’s going on up there is none of our business.”
“In a Hutt’s palace,” she said, “I’d call that a lifesaving philosophy.”
THE FIRST SECURITY drone they encountered was a metal sphere that dropped whirring out of a chimney, sprouting weapons as it came. Larin downed it with one shot, beating Shigar by a bare millisecond.
She blew imaginary smoke from her blaster. “You’ll have to do better than that to beat, uh, me.”
She’d almost said to beat the Blackstars, but caught it in time. She didn’t want him to wonder what one of the Republic’s elite commandos was doing skulking about with him in the bowels of Tassaa Bareesh’s stronghold. Just thinking about telling that story punctured her confidence. Still, what they were doing felt like old times, and the mental state was surprisingly easy to fall into. The brashness, the boasting, and the belligerence—alongside the running around dark places and shooting things.
“Stay alert,” said Shigar. “There’ll be more of those.”
“I was born alert,” she said, not ready to abandon the old-time feeling just yet.
The second security drone whizzed out of a side tunnel, flashing its lights and issuing a warning to stand still. Shigar caught this one, spearing it through the middle with the blade of his lightsaber.
“Not so fast that time, were you?”
She smiled.
They moved cautiously. Drones were a danger, but their presence meant that they were nearing their objective. The luxury wings were almost as heavily protected as Tassaa Bareesh’s sleeping chamber.
The shaft began branching and doubling back on itself. Shigar navigated them unerringly—she hoped—as drones converged on them like millflies. Their reaction times improved with practice until the drones barely had time to appear before being destroyed.
Then a drone three times as large as the others hummed down the shaft toward them, shooting rapidly. Shigar spun his lightsaber like a shield, reflecting its own fire back at it. Gesturing with his hand, he brought down part of the ceiling and crushed the drone under rubble.
“We don’t want to do that very often,” he said when the dust cleared.
“People are bound to notice when the floor caves in under them.”
They picked their way over the pile of fallen masonry.
“Up here,” said Shigar, spying something ahead.
She followed close behind him. There was a ladder mounted firmly in the wall, leading up into a vertical shaft.
“You’re sure this is the one?” she asked.
“As sure as I can be.” He tested his weight on the rungs. They held without complaint. “I’ll go first.”
“Don’t kill anything until I get there,” she said.
THE SHAFT LED to a basement filled with barrels of oil buried under two centimeters of insect shells and dust. It looked as though they hadn’t been touched for decades. Shigar moved lightly through them, leaving barely a footprint. Larin was nearly as stealthy, and she was a sharp shot with that snub rifle of hers. Several times he had been tempted to ask why she had been wasting her time in Coruscant’s old districts, but he didn’t want to pry. Behind the banter, she was tight-lipped. If there was something he needed to know, she would tell him eventually, he was sure.
Be kind, Master Satele had said. He had thought very carefully about that instruction. It had to apply to Larin, the young woman he had already rescued once, from the Mandalorian. Was it a kindness, though, to be ripped out of your home and plunged into the middle of someone else’s war? Some would have thought not. But he sensed in Larin a corrosive rootlessness that could poison her if it wasn’t counteracted. On Coruscant she was just another disenfranchised person caught up in food riots, separatist uprisings, and corruption. What she needed was direction, a purpose. He could give her that much, temporarily, if she wanted it.
The basement of barrels delivered them to a door that had been welded shut. His lightsaber soon disposed of that obstacle. They entered a narrow, musty stairwell that led them up, level by level, to a cellar that was currently in use. A team of Evocii was busy unloading crates of delicate foodstuffs into an expansive cool room. They were far too busy to notice the fleeting figures that ran past them, into the kitchens.
Larin found a closet, and Shigar lured a relatively well-dressed slave in after them.
“We are guests of your mistress,” Shigar told her, encouraging her acceptance of the lie by means of a gentle nudge through the Force. “Obviously, we’ve lost our way.”
“You’re a long way from the throne room, sir.”
“Do you know where the two envoys are quartered?”
“Yes, sir. I work in the laundry detail and am frequently called upon to attend those areas.”
“You’ll be happy to remind us how to get there.”
The Evocii provided a detailed description of the two suites. They were practically side by side, with entrances facing in opposite directions. The suite belonging to Envoy Vii of the Republic was closer.
“Ever heard of this Vii fellow?” Larin asked him in an aside.
Shigar had to confess that he hadn’t. “Politics is my Master’s business.”
“It should be everyone’s business.”
“Between you and me, I agree completely.”
Shigar interrupted the slave, who had descended to ridiculous detail in her efforts to help. “You’ll give us access codes to the secure areas, too, in case we’ve forgotten them.”
“Yes, sir, but not to the suites themselves. I don’t know what they are. The guards can help you with that when you get there, I expect. They will know you, of course …?”
“Of course,” Shigar reassured her. “You don’t need to worry about that.”
“No, sir. I don’t need to worry about that.”
The Evocii obediently gave them all she knew, and Shigar committed it to memory.
“Before you go,” he said to her, “I want you to know that it’s unsafe down here today. Find somewhere to hide, and stay there until the fuss dies down. You don’t want to get hurt.”
“I don’t want to get hurt.”
“That’s right.”
The slave left the closet and hurried off to obey his command.
“Ready?” he asked Larin.
“I was born ready.”
“You’ve already done that one.”
“I have? Well, you’d better tell me where to shoot before I embarrass myself further.”
They eased out of the closet and hurried through the well-appointed corridors. It made a pleasant change not to be kicking up dust and running through cobwebs. Instead, fragile vases and statues lined the corridors, and Shigar took great care not to damage anything unnecessarily. Someone had made these things. The preservation of culture was among a Jedi’s many missions.
They came to the checkpoint the Evocii slave had described. Five Houk sentries guarded the entrance to the Republic guest quarters. That was more than expected. Larin took in the situation at a glance, and communicated her strategy to Shigar with a series of brisk, concise hand gestures. He nodded, happy to take her lead.
She rolled out from cover and came up on her knees, firing into the shoulders of two of the Houks. They toppled backward. Shigar leapt past her, using his blade to defend both of them. A third Houk went down, struck by a bolt from his own weapon, deflected back at him from Shigar’s lightsaber. That left two. Larin took a close burn from one of them and retaliated with two shots to the chest. Shigar sliced the remaining one’s arm off.
He stood still in a defensive pose in the curling smoke, ready to strike again if any of the fallen so much as twitched. Larin moved lightly to his side, unhurt by the near-miss, although her shoulder now boasted a new charcoal patch.
“No alarm,” she said with satisfaction. “We got them all in time.”
“The door will be locked. See if you can get through without triggering anything.”
She knelt down by the lock and took off her helmet while he kept an eye out for passersby. A stream of precision tools came out of the left thigh hatch of her armor. She applied them one by one to the lock mechanism, humming softly as she worked. Shigar was about to ask how much longer she would be when she pocketed the tools, stood up, and touched the access panel.
The door slid open, surprising two Houks on the other side. Shigar deflected their blasterfire while Larin neatly dealt with them. Then they hurried into the suite and closed the door behind them.
The scene awaiting them was utterly unexpected.
A gaudily dressed Twi’lek was standing over the bodies of a Republic security detail. He reached for a communicator, but Shigar whisked it out of his grasp with a quick Force pull.
“What’s going on here?” Larin asked in crisp, commanding tones. “What have you done with the envoy?”
“I?” The Twi’lek looked mortally affronted. “These creatures came to harm through no action of my own. They were found this way, drugged, in a cantina. The envoy is missing.”
Larin pressed the barrel of her rifle under the Twi’lek’s chin. “You’re lying.”
“The envoy is an honored guest, invited here solely to do business! We bear him no ill will!”
“He’s got a point,” Shigar said.
“That doesn’t mean I have to like it.” She reversed the rifle and clubbed the Twi’lek across the head. He dropped like a stone. “You stay there while I double-check your story.”
Shigar closed the door behind them and locked it again. Larin pulled one of the fallen bodyguards up to a couch and lightly slapped his face. “He’s got a pulse. That’s a start.”
Before she could do the man any serious damage, Shigar came to help, lowering the bodyguard’s head onto a cushion before trying to wake him up.
One hand stayed on the cushion. The other cupped the bodyguard’s forehead. Concentrating, Shigar nudged the flow of the Force through his body, encouraging wakefulness.
The bodyguard twitched and opened his eyes in alarm. There was a tearing sound as all the spines on his scalp shot out. The cushion absorbed them all.
“I’m sorry to startle you,” Shigar said in calm voice. “You’ve been drugged. My name is Shigar Konshi. This is Larin Moxla. Grand Master Satele Shan sent us to aid you.” That wasn’t entirely true, but as an explanation it would do.
The man pushed him away and sat up. He ran his hand across his scalp and cleared his throat.
“My apologies for attacking you. I am Sergeant Potannin. Where is Envoy Vii?”
“We don’t know,” said Larin. “We were hoping you could tell us.”
Potannin shook his head. “We must have been ambushed. Envoy Vii was talking to a man who works for the Hutts. His name is Jet Nebula. And there was someone else—a Mandalorian.”
“What Mandalorian?” Larin asked, leaning close. “Do you have a name?”
“I don’t remember.” He looked at Larin and Shigar in appeal. “We have to find the envoy.”
Shigar nodded. An active Dao Stryver on Hutta would be an unexpected complication, but it wasn’t necessarily a disaster. The primary mission could still continue.
“All right,” he said. “You and Larin look for the envoy. If the Twi’lek is telling the truth, the Hutts will help you.”
“And you?” asked Larin.
“I’m going to check out that vault. What you can’t learn from the envoy, I’ll find out there. Sergeant Potannin, will you give me directions?”
Potannin provided a comprehensive description of the route from the luxury suite to the vault, via a security air lock. Shigar committed it to memory.
“Did you see what was in there?”
“There’s the Cinzia’s navicomp and an artifact Envoy Vii couldn’t identify. Made of some weird metal.” Potannin looked apologetic. “I’m sorry, but that’s all I know.”
“No matter.” Shigar wished Potannin had learned more. Ancient Sith and Jedi relics could sometimes be identified by their markings. “I’ll take a look myself and see if I can figure it out.”
“Are you sure you want to do this alone?” asked Larin before he set out.
“I have my comlink,” he said. “I’ll call you if I get into trouble.”
“You’d better.” She touched his arm briefly, and then pulled away. “See you later, either way.”
Shigar left her and Sergeant Potannin to wake the others. With lightsaber at the ready, he eased back into the ebbs and flows of Tassaa Bareesh’s palace and counted off the intersections, one at a time.
DARTH CHRATIS’S VOICE carried faintly across the thousands of kilometers separating him from his apprentice.
“Did you see any Jedi in the Republic envoy’s party?”
“None at all, Master.” Ax could hear the disappointment in her own voice. She’d been looking forward to fighting something more challenging than the inept palace guards. “If they’re here, they’re maintaining a very low profile.”
“It’s clear, then, that they plan to steal the artifact before us. Otherwise they would be visible. Your orders are unchanged. You must move quickly to ensure you get there first.”
“It will be difficult, Master. The doors are massive, and there are bound to be alarms—”
“That’s for you to worry about. Fail me and you will report to the Council yourself.”
The line clicked shut, and Ax smiled in the darkness. Darth Chratis was as transparent as glass. If she succeeded, he planned to take the credit; if she failed, the blame would be hers. But some of the tarnish would inevitably rub off on him if she did fail, halting his plans for advancement. It was amusing, therefore, to keep him nervous. That made him predictable.
Barely three minutes had passed since she had set the charges. They were old, leftovers from a mining expedition that had abandoned its gear in one of the palace’s three warehouses, but she had taken enough of them to knock a small chunk out of a hill. If the timers worked properly, Tassaa Bareesh’s guards would soon have something to occupy their attention.
Meanwhile, she had crawling to do. Plans of the vaults sliced from the palace’s mainframe showed that they were freestanding structures with their own power and air supplies. Surrounding all of the broad durasteel boxes was a meter of clear space, filled with laser trip wires. If anything got past the trip wires and simultaneously touched both box and wall, a circuit would trip, sounding an alarm loud enough to wake the Emperor himself on Dromund Kaas.
The plans also showed that the vault was held in place by a series of repulsors, powered by induction coils at the base of a ferrocrete cradle. Ferrocrete was relatively easy to cut through with a lightsaber. Ax wormed her way through tiny crawl spaces to a position directly under one corner of the vault containing the remains of the Cinzia. Wiring schematics showed no cables at that point. All she would have to do was wait for the distraction, cut her way upward, disable the trip wires, and leap across the gap. Within the hour, she hoped to be touching the outside of the vault with her bare fingertips. From there, she would play it by ear.
She slithered like a rat through spaces that were barely large enough for her to breathe, angling awkwardly around sharp corners and edging with her toes and fingertips. She held her lightsaber ahead of her, ready to cut through any serious obstacles. The air was thick with dust and smoke. She blinked frequently to clear her eyes.
A subsonic boom came through masonry surrounding her, followed quickly by another. She held her breath as the palace shook, and pressed outward with the Force, just in case something heavy shifted into her. A series of smaller booms reverberated when the charges triggered a chain reaction in the palace’s primary reactor, as she’d hoped they might. She imagined the Hutts and their slaves scurrying to find out what had happened. Whether they did or not didn’t matter to her. Neither did she care if the secondary reactor restored power immediately. The vault was self-contained. Keeping her hosts distracted was her primary objective.
Another minute’s crawling brought her to the place she needed to be. The crawl space was broad enough for her to squat, and she did so, holding her lightsaber pommel before her. Closing her eyes, she ignited it and raised the blade slowly into the ceiling above her. Ferrocrete bubbled and hissed; stinging flecks struck her skin. When the hilt was flush with the ceiling itself, she stopped and closed her eyes.
The power of the dark side flowed through her, raising the temperature of the ferrocrete to scalding. She breathed lightly through her nose, not caring if she was scalded. A red glow surrounded her, radiating from the surface above. She maintained her concentration, forming a self-protective bubble about her as the ferrocrete became molten and began to drip.
The bubble rose gently through the lava, delivering her without further effort to the space under the base of the vault. When the bubble broached the top of the molten ferrocrete, she lowered her lightsaber and opened her eyes. By the red glow she made out the durasteel vault through the top of the bubble and a tangle of cables that was part of the ferrocrete structure around her. They remained entangled as the lava cooled. Not one of the cables had been cut, so in theory no alarms should have sounded.
Almost there.
Only the trip wires remained. She raised her head carefully out of the cooling bubble, but didn’t see any sign of lasers anywhere. They should have been clearly visible in all the smoke, but not one glowing line broke the view.
Intrigued, she placed her gloved hands on the still-warm lip of the bubble and raised herself bodily into view.
No alarms. None other than those caused by her explosions, anyway. Against all expectations, the vault’s external security system appeared to be disabled.
Could the Jedi possibly have beaten her to the prize?
She crouched in the space under the vault, next to one of the repulsors holding the massive structure above her head, and reactivated her lightsaber. By its ruddy glow, she made out the lenses of the laser system staring blindly at her. They hadn’t been physically interfered with, at least. She reached up and touched the base of the vault. No footsteps or other obvious movements from within. That was another positive sign.
An unexpected detail gave her further reason to be cautious. The midsection of the vault had been physically connected to the cradle beneath by a series of silver wires. She approached them, careful not to snap them. Their purpose was unknown, as was the way they had prevented the second alarm system from going off. As soon as the vault was penetrated, all of Tassaa Bareesh’s palace should have known.
Something unexpected was going on, and she didn’t like it.
Ax deactivated her lightsaber and sat cross-legged on the hot ferrocrete. If someone deactivated the repulsors, she would be squished like a bug. Quashing that thought as best she could, she cast her feelings out into the space around her, searching for signs of anything out of place.
The vault, first of all, was uninhabited, apart from the faintest glimmer of biological activity inside the anomalous artifact recovered from the Cinzia. She took the opportunity to examine it this way, and felt a rare shiver race down her spine. What was in there? The tiny life signs were clustered in four groups, but they didn’t feel like minds, exactly. And something about them made her instincts recoil.
My mother made this, she couldn’t help but think. My mother, who should be dead.
Putting all speculation on that front firmly from her mind, Ax examined the antechamber and the other three vaults, next. It was possible, albeit exceedingly unlikely, that an entirely independent thief had targeted something in one of the other vaults, shutting down hers in the process. A quick scan proved that theory false. There was no one out there at all.
Almost she gave up there, chiding herself for overreacting. The distraction she had created wouldn’t last forever. And she didn’t want Master Chratis to worry too long. Part of the point of telling him that the mission would be difficult was to surprise him when she pulled it off quickly. The thought filled her with anticipatory satisfaction.
Before rising, she cast a quick mental look through the circular security air lock outside the antechamber.
Her face twisted into an immediate scowl. Jedi! She would recognize that humorless and inhibited mental stench anywhere. A single specimen had bypassed the alarms and burned through the locks on the outer door. That was impressive work, but he wasn’t moving fast enough. She could cut her way under the vault and up into the antechamber long before he had the inner door open. And then, when he did, he would get a whole lot more than he bargained for.
Grinning, she moved from cross-legged to a crouch, and began melting her way through the last barrier standing between her and her enemy.