• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

That special, long-ago moment had seemed as if it would go on forever. Until Aunuanna, desperate for spice, had dropped her child to the slimy wet pavement as she raced to meet her dealer.

Left behind, forgotten, a lump of organic trash abandoned on the pavement, the child who would become Aurra Sing had cried alone for hours in terror and pain. Eventually, emotionally and physically exhausted, she had crept beneath some stinking rags at the side of the lane. There she had lain, whimpering. It had been nearly dawn before Aunuanna’s dust-besotted brain had cleared enough for her to remember her abandoned child, and another hour before she managed to locate her.

Sing shook her head slightly, the movement amounting to little more than a twitch of irritation. As a neglected child, she had felt terrified and alone on countless occasions. As an adult she had turned such memories into a perverse kind of gratitude. Without knowing it and certainly without intending to, the addict Aunuanna had taught her youngling the basic lesson of survival, and taught it well: Trust no one, and look to no one but yourself for survival.

Sing studied the endless streams of aerial traffic flowing below her. Vehicles crisscrossed, sank, and rose in a complex three-dimensional dance that, thanks to omnipresent navigational and speed control nodes, hardly ever resulted in a crash or spatial gridlock. It really didn’t matter who her designated target would be. A Sakiyan warrior bound on redeeming his clan’s honor, a Weequay on a blood quest, a Januul in a scalp-taking fury: nothing could be more debilitating than feeling her lungs being eaten away by zenium dust in the stone guts of a forgotten planetoid.

Nothing.

She leaned back into the soft luxury of the limo’s seat, literal as well as metaphorical parsecs away from her former quarters, and smiled to herself.

Expecting to be taken to Imperial City for her meeting with Vader, she was somewhat surprised when the skylimo suddenly dipped down and exited the VIP lane without a government building in sight. The powerful craft went into a steep descent that plunged into a narrow abyss between equatorial cloudcutters. Overhead, it was early afternoon, with the sun still halfway between zenith and horizon. Down where she was being taken, it was night.

Down here, she knew, it was always night.

The unmarked limo came to a stop, hovering half a meter above a narrow, trash-strewn street. On either side, cyclopean towers rose from massive foundations sunk deep into the planet’s crust, their flanks vanishing into the mist and gloom above. Her surroundings were eerily familiar; it was almost as if, after all these decades, she were back on Nar Shaddaa. She saw no entrances or windows and no signs of habitation. In fact, there was no indication of life at all—not even any vehicle or pedestrian traffic.

She stepped from the limo, which rose to hover perhaps a dozen meters overhead. The fire-blackened, gutted husk of a landspeeder rested where it had no doubt crashed against a huge ferrocrete block that formed part of a skytower’s foundation. Save for the almost inaudible thrum of the limo’s repulsors, the silence was complete.

No, she realized—not complete. There was another sound, a sound she had never heard before, yet one that struck her as oddly familiar. A regular, measured susurration, growing gradually louder.

Whipping her lightsaber from its hook and activating it in a single movement, she whirled. The red glow of the shaft illuminated an alcove in the base of the building closest to her, and illuminated as well the tall, black-clad figure that emerged from it.

Before she could determine whether his intentions were malign or benign, he extended one black-gloved hand toward her. Her lightsaber leapt from her grasp, its fire extinguishing as it did so. It flew across the intervening space and slapped into Vader’s hand.

He had been quick enough and powerful enough to take her primary weapon from her before she had even realized she was in danger of losing it. A striking