Darth Plagueis - James Luceno [116]
Sidious and Sate Pestage, in whose hands a repeating blaster fashioned a hell of its own, a barrage of light that separated limbs from torsos, hooded heads from cloaked shoulders. Hurrying to Plagueis’s side, Sidious lifted him upright, and in unison they brought swift death to the rest.
In the stillness that followed, 11-4D, glistening with leaked lubricant, reenabled itself and walked stiffly to where the two Sith were standing, syringes grasped in two of its appendages.
“Magister Damask, I can be of service.”
Plagueis extended his arm toward the droid and then lowered himself to the floor as the drugs began to take effect. He lifted his gaze to Pestage, then glanced at Sidious, who, in turn, showed Pestage a look that made abundantly clear he had become a member of their secret fraternity, whether he wanted to or not.
“Master, we need to leave at once,” Sidious said. “What I felt, the Jedi may have felt, and they will come.”
“Let them,” Plagueis rasped. “Let them inhale the aroma of the dark side.”
“This carnage is beyond explanation. We can’t be here.”
After a moment, Plagueis nodded and summoned a gurgling voice. “Recall the Sun Guard. When they’re done here—”
“No,” Sidious said. “I know where the Gran are. It won’t be business as usual this time, Master.”
The Malastare ambassador’s residence occupied three mid-tier stories of a slender building located at the edge of the government district. The front of the residence looked out on the stand-alone Galactic Courts of the Justice Building, but the rear faced a narrow canyon that was more than fifty levels deep and off limits to traffic. Following directions furnished by Pestage, Sidious rode turbolifts and pedestrian walkways to a meager balcony ten levels above the upper story of the residence. His fury notwithstanding, he would have preferred to linger until nightfall, which came early to that part of Coruscant, but he was certain that the Gran were expecting word that the Maladians had satisfied the terms of the contract, and he couldn’t risk having them flee for the stars before he got to them. So he lingered on the balcony until it and the walkway in both directions were unoccupied, then jumped from the overlook and called on the Force to deliver him safely to a narrow ledge that ran beneath the lowest floor of the residence. There he perched only for the time it took to activate the lightsaber he had retrieved from Plagueis’s starship and use it to burn his way into a wide maintenance duct that perforated the building at each level.
Crawling to the first egress—a distance of scarcely ten meters—he lowered himself into a murky storage room and once more called the weapon’s crimson blade from the hilt. Constructed to fit the Muun’s large hand, the lightsaber felt unwieldy in Sidious’s, so he switched to a two-handed grip. Moving with a caution that belied his murderous intent, and on the alert for cams or other security devices, he eased out of the room into a tight corridor and followed it toward the front of the building. There, in a formal entryway, two Dugs were standing guard in a desultory way. Moving quickly, a blur to human senses, he caught them by surprise, splitting open the chest and abdomen of one and beheading the other while the first was attempting to prevent his entrails from spilling onto the glossy mosaic floor. A brief scan of the foyer revealed the presence of cams installed in the walls and high ceiling. He wondered how the killings appeared to anyone monitoring a display screen. It must have seemed as if the two Dugs had been butchered by a phantom.
Still, all the more reason to hurry.
He sprinted up the stairs to the next floor, where he heard a cacophony of human voices muffled by the thick door to a nearby room. Blowing the door inward with a Force push,