• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

He pushed into the tunnel, senses groping before him as he moved. Once again, he suspected a trap, and once again he discarded the idea. He was, after all, effectively shielded from detection by his taozin-scale necklace.

The taozin were huge, segmented creatures that inhabited deep underground caverns beneath the planet-city and whose scales rendered their life force transparent to a Force-sensitive. Tesla’s synthsilk necklace didn’t possess enough of the rare and dangerously gotten substance to block him entirely from another Force-sensitive, but it was enough to scramble whatever emanations of the Force he leaked and render them almost unreadable. Jax Pavan—or any other trained Jedi—would have to work awfully hard even to get a fix on him.

He fingered the strand of synthsilk as he dived farther into the darkness of the passage, hastening toward its end. The rectangle of dim light grew ever larger. It was hypnotic, so much so that when he reached the aperture, Tesla very nearly stepped across the threshold to his death. The floor beneath his feet ended abruptly, and he had a momentry impression of a gaping chasm hemmed by unending walls and a drop into sheer nothingness.

His reflexes were such that he was able to catch himself, but it was the wind that saved him, not the Force. A veritable maelstrom spiraled up from the abyss, ripping his cowl from his head and lifting him bodily, tossing him backward into the tunnel like a piece of chaff.

He lay against the wall of the tunnel for a moment, heart hammering, breath coming in short, staccato bursts that echoed harshly against the stone of the walls. Then he picked himself up and approached the end of the tunnel with care. He poked his head through the door to nowhere and looked out.

Above was a pale blur of eternal twilight. Below, he could see the vertical flank of the cloudcutter through which the tunnel bore disappear into darkness. Hundreds of yards away across the chasm stood another cloudcutter, its broad flanks sweating dank grime.

There was no one in sight and no place anyone could have gone. Anyone except a Jedi.

He looked up, reaching out with his Force sense. He stretched across to the far building. He angled a look down.

And there it was, far below and to his right: that tiny point of light, the barest whiff of the perfume of power, the merest tinkle of sound. Hair rose up on his half-shaven head and down the backs of his arms. He smiled. Good try, Jedi, he thought, and stepped from the aperture into thin air.

The Force lowered him like an invisible turbolift. The violent updrafts of the abyss buffeted him occasionally, tearing at his robes, but still he rode silently, swiftly, his senses on that spot where one building ended and another began. The target had paused there below but suddenly began to move again, away from the chasm.

At the crumbling intersection of the two buildings—at a point where their buttresses seemed almost to intertwine—there was a gap. Just enough of a gap for a humanoid of Tesla’s size to pass through. Tesla jackknifed and threw himself through the air toward the gap, unclipping his lightsaber as he flew but not igniting it just yet. He erupted through the needle’s eye and into a cavern filled with rubble. His target had moved on ahead. He took only a moment to orient himself. The sheathing of the wall of the mammoth building on his right—the one from which he had dropped like a stooping raptor—had come away from the substrate and fallen in huge stone and duracrete panels against its nearest neighbor. What had once been a maintenance alley between the two had been transformed into a cavernous tunnel. But where the previous route had been narrow and human-sized with regular surfaces, this was a cave built by decay. Immense and asymmetrical, its ceiling ending in darkness far above his head, its uneven walls canted and uncertain, its floor littered with random chunks of rock and twists of durasteel eroded and fallen from the buttresses.

The wind sobbed inconsolably here, and the buildings