Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [13]
Well, good riddance to them. The only regret Sing had in that regard was that there were precious few left for her to hunt down and kill these days.
As she approached one of the ancillary shafts that connected with the surface, she began to see other beings. All were engaged in some aspects of zenium mining. An inescapable corollary of the activity was that none of them looked good. Even with the osmotic filters, zenium dust eventually found its way into respiratory systems—be they lungs, stomata, trachea, or whatever. Breathe it long enough and you came down with pyroliosis, or “firelung”—a condition that literally consumed you from the inside. In humanoids it ate up the aveoli like so much dry acid: an extremely painful way to die.
This was one reason only the most incorrigible criminals were sent to Oovo 4. Outside the occasional Podrace to blow off steam, the daily routine stopped only when the prisoner died.
Ironically, the mines on Oovo 4 were among the few labor camps in the galaxy in which organics actually outlasted droids. Despite shielding, the zenium dust affected droids’ perceptor systems almost immediately, causing them to crash into the mining equipment and one another. In contrast, it took the more resilient organics several years to wear out. Their presence in the mines was a matter of cost-effectiveness, not ethics.
She saw Karundabar, an old Wookiee who had been down in the hole for so long he had forgotten the crime that had initially landed him here. He was nearly bald, his hair having fallen out over most of his body through the years. She watched him dump a pile of ore plates into a lift tube that would take it to Receiving on the surface. Almost blind, to judge by the cataracts that filmed his eyes, he had followed the route so often that he didn’t need to see to do the job.
As Sing dumped her own load of plates into another tube, she kept her senses on full alert. Her connection to the Force would warn her of any imminent assault, sometimes even before it was initiated. That, and her deadly reputation, had kept her alive all these months in this rancor pit. Both would continue to do so.
Or so she thought …
The attack, when it came, was thus doubly surprising—first that anyone would dare attack her at all, and second because the Force had not warned her of it. Fortunately, that enigmatic energy was not her only ally. Even though the misbegotten Jedi flooz Aayla Secura had cut the antenna of her biocomputer implant, it still was capable of sensing danger at close range. That was what warned her now, barely in time, of the Trandoshan with the shiv who was lunging at her from behind.
Sing sidestepped, knowing from long practice just how much movement was necessary to allow the thrust to miss. The sonic blade slipped by less than a centimeter from her alabaster skin; she could feel the breeze it generated. As the big reptilian stumbled, thrown off-balance by missing his target, Sing caught him in an armlock and snapped his elbow.
True to his heritage, the scaly creature did not lose more jagannath points by screaming. Internalizing the pain, he hissed in anger. But he could not keep from gasping as Sing swung the broken arm up, dislocating his shoulder joint, and simultaneously used her leg to sweep her assailant off his feet. The Trandoshan hit the rocky floor of the shaft with a sickly thud. Snatching the shiv from his nerveless hand, Sing dropped to one knee beside him and prepared to drive the blade into his throat.
“Enough.”
A life-sized three-dimensional image appeared before her. It was the projection of a human: a man sheathed in what appeared to be black armor, wearing a helmet of strange design and enfolded in a black cloak and tabard. At first sight Sing thought that everything about the image was unrelievedly black. Then she saw he wore a small chest panel with blinking red and green