Star Wars_ Coruscant Nights II Streets of Shadows - Michael Reaves [35]
Her following move was just what he expected—and had hoped for. She chose the easiest way to avoid the thrust, which was simply to duck and allow his clumsy attack to pass over her head and hair. An instant later her triumphant grin turned into a rictus of agony. Spasming once, she collapsed to the littered floor and lay there unmoving. She was either unconscious or dead; Typho couldn’t tell which, and did not particularly care. Her weapon extinguished itself as her grip went slack. He staggered back, looking at the supine form. In the dim light he could barely see the tiny wisp of smoke that curled from the blackened tip of her biocomp antenna where he had grazed it with the lightsaber. The resulting biofeedback shock had done the rest.
Peering harder, he could make out the slight puffs of fog caused by her breath meeting the cold night air. Not dead then. Only unconscious. He had no desire to still be in her vicinity when she recovered from the shock. Already her lithe body was starting to twitch with the beginnings of a return to awareness. And, he told himself, it could all be a sham. She could be playing half dead, her intent being to lure him close.
Of course, the sensible thing to do would have been to run her through while she was on the ground, but he could not bring himself to do it. His uncle Panaka, who had been Padmé’s bodyguard when she was Queen, had taught him to show mercy whenever possible. To do less, Panaka had warned, was to risk becoming a monster like the ones often faced in the line of duty.
Typho could not have that. His intent, his desire, his mission, was to avenge Padmé, but not at the expense of a blot on her memory. Criminal though she might be, slaughtering the woman now lying stunned would do his cause no honor. His probity was on shaky ground as it was. He was here in this place under false pretenses, had come with vigilante justice on his mind and dominating his thoughts. Under such circumstances, it could be argued that he had more in common with the bounty hunter than with the strict military code of Naboo. She sought money, he sought revenge. Who could say which, in the end, was the more honorable? Surely he, in his current state of mind, was not one to render such a judgment.
Her purpose in stalking the heart of the Temple had been to find a Jedi named Jax Pavan. It had not been to challenge the wandering Captain Typho. Were that the case, he was certain she would have said so. They had met by chance; now they would part in equal ignorance.
And so he left Aurra Sing lying unconscious in the rubble of the Jedi Temple, and continued onward into the night in his quest to determine if the Jedi Anakin Skywalker still lived.
ten
—Servant. Aide?
As usual, the polite brevity of the Cephalon’s question took Den by surprise. The Standardized Basic translations that appeared on the monitor screens next to the tank showed its sub-brains all quietly humming away like banks of compartmentalized computers, each busily parsing its particular outlook on reality. Somehow these various disparate takes were codified into coherent thought—or what seemed to be to the Cephalon coherent thought—and used by the central brain, the one that was capable of abstract conceptualizing. Den did not pretend to understand how it worked. He had enough problems trying to make the single brain he’d been born with operate. The thought of having to handle input from various semi-autonomous sub-brains made him dizzy.
But such concepts and imaginings were at worst merely confusing and irritating compared with the Cephalon’s appearance. It loomed hideously out of the sulfate-laden cloud in the tank, its great sessile mass distorted by the thick