Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights 01_ Jedi Twilight - Michael Reaves [60]
All of which was ample reason to send Xizor on a mission to find it and bring it back to Midnight Hall. Perhi had told Xizor that he was entrusting this task to him and him alone, because the Falleen prince was the most qualified of all the Vigo aspirants. If Xizor had a flaw that could be exploited, it was hubris. His pride demanded that he succeed. He would find this 10-4TO droid, there was little doubt of that, in Xizor’s mind. Or in anyone else’s, for that matter. And when he brought it back, he would be appointed Vigo.
But Xizor wouldn’t bring it back. That honor would belong to Kaird.
The Underlord had made it quite clear to Kaird that the droid’s retrieval would be considered a bonus. True, it might be a feather in their collective caps, but Xizor was the primary target. When Kaird showed Perhi proof of Xizor’s death, the Underlord would have what he wanted: immunity from a dangerously ambitious underling. And Kaird would have what he wanted: a pile of credits and the promise of safe conduct back to Nedij.
Everybody wins, he told himself. Well, except for Xizor.
His ship—a Surronian assault vessel, sleek and aesthetically pleasing as well as aerodynamic—was locked into a preset descent course for the Eastport landing field. There was nothing for Kaird to do except lean back and relax as the nav comp processed the incoming directions and adjusted the ship’s vector and delta vee accordingly. He hated to give up control of the sleek, dynamic craft, even for the few minutes it took for Spaceport Traffic to guide it in. He’d stolen the Stinger from the MedStar’s former commander Admiral Bleyd. Perhaps stolen was too strong a word; after all, he had killed Bleyd before he took his ship. Was it possible to steal from the dead?
The course took him in a long arc of descent from the south, passing over the Calocour Heights, and eventually, the Imperial Palace. There were still, he noted, huge craters punctuating the cityscape here and there, although the gigantic new construction droids that Palpatine had ordered built immediately after cessation of hostilities had already done a remarkable job of erasing the scars of war. Forty stories tall, these gargantuan machines were armed with huge shovel arms, wide-swath laser-mapping and destructive charged-particle beams, collapsed carbon battering rams, and other equipment that could tear down and chew up just about any structure. Within the huge construct, billions of nanodroids swarmed like microbes in the belly of a huge beast, disassembling the detritus, molecule by molecule, as it was ingested, and reassembling it with incredible speed into whatever purpose best suited the city’s architectural redesign: a road ramp, perhaps, or a clear crystasteel mag-lev tube, or a high-rise monad. Like enormous, mechanized slugs, the construction droids moved slowly and ponderously across the shattered streets, grinding up durasteel girders, plasticrete walls, and transparisteel windows all with equal appetite while they excreted brand-new structures and thoroughfares to take their places. In with the old and out with the new, Kaird thought. He could see one of the titanic droids now, silhouetted next to a broken building. It swung its wrecking ball like some giant in a child’s story might swing a mace, and shattered the remaining wall.
The Eastport docks served all manner of spacecraft, from the ubiquitous Lambda shuttles up to Victory-class Star Destroyers. Kaird’s ship settled down through several holding strata of smaller craft; his forged identity as a high-ranking member of the Mercantile Guild gave him priority clearance.
He’d arranged to have high-speed transportation waiting for him, and within minutes he was on his way again. The considerable data-tracking powers of Black Sun had been brought to bear