Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [12]
Anakin Skywalker was still alive.
five
Death came for her in the mining tunnels of Oovo 4.
Aurra Sing was working in one of the branch tunnels, a narrow fissure in the black rock, barely wide enough for her to stretch one arm straight from the shoulder. The vein of zenium she’d been following for the last three days was running dry; she estimated that in less than a meter it would diminish to the point that it would no longer be cost-effective to keep mining.
She lowered her protective faceplate. Except for the dark gray-black circles around her eyes that made them appear deeper than they were, the skin of her face and body were as pure white as the veined marble the miners occasionally encountered in their digging. The single thick shock of long reddish-brown hair gathered together by a band at the top of her skull was stunning by comparison.
She aimed the gasifier at the left side of the rock face, through which the lode of zenium stitched like a frozen bolt of purple electricity. The high-energy beam turned the rock into plasma almost instantaneously, and the incandescent gas was sucked away through a hose woven of carbonite nanofibers, to be vented through shafts that perforated the strata between where she stood and the surface.
Sing gasified the remaining rock that encased the zenium. She struck the exposed sheet—which, though only a couple of centimeters thick, was as tall as she was—with a small sonic tool, finding the cleavage lines with skill born of years of practice. The zenium fractured into several smaller, roughly hexagonal pieces. These she gathered up and stacked in the ore carrier. Disconnecting the gasifier line, she loaded it into the carrier as well, then stepped on the plate and activated the repulsor.
As the carrier zoomed soundlessly back toward the main shaft, passing through brief flickering pools of light cast by sconces that alternated with stretches of utter darkness, Sing wearily checked her rebreather’s status. The filter’s diffusion index was still green, she noted, although it had long since declined from optimal.
She tried to remember how the galaxy’s Outer Rim had looked from the observation deck of the pirate ship, so long ago. It had been many years. How many, Sing herself wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure of a great many things about herself, including her age and her species. She knew her mother had been human, but her father’s ancestry was a mystery. Those she had worked for, including Wallanooga the Hutt, had speculated that he had been Qiraash, Rattataki, Umbaran, perhaps even Anzati. Never mind that none of these could interbreed with humans without a certain amount of genetic tinkering, and that none of those genomes could account for her longevity. So her origins remained a mystery, even to herself.
The past held no interest for Aurra Sing. All that mattered was the now.
Over the course of a long and eventful life Sing had learned to conserve energy and bide her time when the situation she happened to find herself in was less than satisfactory. In this respect her longevity served her well. She had survived onerous conditions before, and would again. If she could not shoot or fight her way out of a situation, then she would simply and patiently outlast it.
After all, one did not become known as a hunter of Jedi by being reckless.
It was hard to believe that she had once nearly embraced the Jedi Code. The Jedi Master known as the Dark Woman would never know how close she had come to converting her headstrong young Padawan. Had she not been kidnapped and taught the truth by the pirates—a rich irony, that