Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [26]
As she dropped into a low fighting crouch, both hands seized the twin r’rüker’at knives secured at her waist. Her blasters would be futile, she knew; he could easily deflect the bolts with the lightsaber. Her only chance was to do the unexpected, and that meant getting in close enough for blade work. Forged by Alwari smiths in the jungles of Ansion, the knives were designed to be hidden in plain sight as part of the complex intaglio carved into her belt. Four rings allowed four fingers an unbreakable grip on each, and she had never let go before until the blades had finished their work.
Instead of following up his first move with a direct assault, however, Vader did something completely unexpected. He just stood there, ignoring her as casually as if she didn’t exist. As she stared, he inspected her lightsaber thoughtfully; then, holding it out at arm’s length, he reactivated it. The crimson spire of destructive energy pointed straight up from his gloved fist. At first, nothing seemed to be happening. Then Sing realized that the shaft was getting brighter. Its brilliance intensified until she had to raise a hand to shield her eyes from the all-but-blinding scarlet radiance. The refulgence dazzled her eyes, overwhelming everything else; the street, the buildings, the wrecked landspeeder. Only Vader remained somehow visible; standing there, holding the weapon easily, seemingly unaffected by the blade’s terrible radiance. The familiar deep hum that was the weapon’s identifying sound rose in pitch, higher and higher, until it tore at her hearing. And then, in a final burst of screaming incandescence, the lightsaber’s shaft vanished.
Sing stared in sheer disbelief. Her eyes were capable of adapting much more rapidly to changes in ambient light than were a human’s. A couple of blinks and the afterimages cleared, normal vision returning almost immediately. Vader stood motionless, the weapon’s hilt still gripped in his outstretched fist. She could see a tiny wisp of smoke curling from the emitter.
He had overloaded the lightsaber’s energy crystal through the Force. Sing prided herself on her knowledge of weaponry and their individual strengths and weaknesses. It was her profession, after all. But she had never seen or heard of such a thing before.
The Dark Lord opened his hand. Reduced to a cylinder of useless metal, composites, and components, the now harmless weapon clattered onto the pavement.
“As I told you back on Oovo Four,” he said, “I have a job for you. Take up a weapon against me again, even reflexively, and I’ll have you on the next prison barge offworld. Do I make myself clear?”
Slowly Sing returned the knives to her belt, folded her arms, and regarded him levelly. “I’m listening,” she said.
The cul-de-sac known as Poloda Place was one of the few locations downlevel that still retained a glimmer of respectability. The buildings, rococo resi-blocks for the most part, were packed close together. What narrow, winding passageways once connected the plaza with the rest of the underground had long ago been mortared up or otherwise sealed off. The only means of ingress or egress was a serpentine lane with the picturesque, not to mention evocative, name of Snowblind Mews. Den had wondered more than once how it had come to be named that, since snow had not fallen anywhere on Coruscant save in recreational areas specified by WeatherNet for many thousands of years.
Due to the combination of cheap rent, spacious living areas, and a spurious sense of safety, Poloda Place had acquired something of a reputation as an artists’ colony. It was here, over twenty years earlier, that the novelist Kai Konnik had written his award-winning tale Beach of Stars. The Fondorian composer Metrisse had crafted his famous Études of Time and Space while sojourning there, and the notoriously decadent Twi’lek Dreamdancer Nar Chan had held her infamous, weeklong bacchanals in the