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By Root 525 0

gotten out once before, just after the cessation of hostilities on Drongar. He and his two hench-beings, the Falleen Thula and an Umbaran named Squa Tront, had seized upon one of the last of the viable bota shipments. Kaird had hoped that, by giving his portion to Black Sun, he could engender enough good will among the Vigos to be allowed to go his way—that, plus the fact that he already knew where a great many bodies were buried. But he never got the chance to find out. The two grifters had double-crossed him, absconded with the entire bota shipment, and left Kaird sitting in space on a bomb, which he’d discovered barely in time.

The ruff of feathers around his neck bristled at the thought of that. The loss of the bota had meant putting aside his dreams of Nedij for an indefinite future, because without it his position wasn’t strong enough to allow him to go. He still firmly believed that revenge was for amateurs, but if that pair of rogues ever crossed his path again, he just might make an exception.

His chrono chimed softly. It was almost time for his meeting with the Underlord. It wasn’t one-on-one, sadly; he had to share it with two of the appointed Vigos. A pity. There was so much he could accomplish toward his purpose, if he could just have some uninterrupted face time with Underlord Perhi …

He sighed. You could only do your best, and hope for a strong tail wind to waft you faster to your destination. Until then, you played the game, kept your tongue civil, and spoke favorably of your enemies when either they or their spies might overhear.

Still, they couldn’t read his thoughts. And so it didn’t hurt, and it certainly improved his mood as Kaird walked to his meeting, to think of more different and imaginative ways to kill Prince Xizor.

seven

In a part of Coruscant where just glimpsing the sun could be an occasion to tell one’s grandchildren about, it seemed odd that true darkness never really came at all. But such was the case; the pulse of the city-planet’s downlevel slums acknowledged neither day nor night. With few exceptions, those beneath, on, or near the surface lived in a perpetual gloaming of electroluminescence. The chromatic signatures of neon, argon, and other ionized gases lit the Blackpit Slums’ streets at all hours, and very few beings acknowledged the schedules of the world above. Many businesses could be found open at any time of the twenty-four hour cycle, and most species followed their own circadian rhythms, however esoteric they might be.

As a result—for Nick Rostu, at least—the downlevel world always seemed slightly unreal. There was a phantasmagorical quality that he found at times fascinating, and at times frustrating. Sometimes he felt as if he were wearing a dermpatch of dreamspice, or some other mild psychedelic, all the time.

The feeling was particularly strong now as he piloted his ground skimmer down a narrow street. His chrono told him that it was 0342, but that was uplevel time, where day and night signified something. Down here, in the never-ending electric twilight, time had a different meaning altogether. It wasn’t something to be scheduled, something to be quantified in terms of seconds, minutes, or hours. It was measured much more simply: you either had enough, or not enough. And these days, it seemed to Nick that there was never enough.

Master Piell, with his dying breath, had explained to him the urgency of his mission, and had also told him whom it had to be entrusted to: his erstwhile Padawan, Jax Pavan, who had graduated to Jedi Knighthood only a few months before the war ended. It was Pavan whom Master Piell had been searching for, and it was Pavan whom Nick now had to find.

On the face of it, this seemed utterly impossible. How to go about finding one man in a city the size of a planet? Fortunately, Nick had known Pavan slightly before the disbanding of the Order, and one of the databases the Whiplash was assembling was designed to keep track of the few Jedi still on Coruscant. They didn’t have a specific location for Pavan, but Nick had been able to ascertain