Star Wars_ Darth Maul 01_ Saboteur - James Luceno [0]
Darth Maul Saboteur
James Luceno
Title Page
Also by James Luceno
Star Wars
About the Author
Copyright Page
Also by James Luceno:
The ROBOTECH Series (as Jack McKinney, with Brian Daley)
The Black Hole Travel Agency Series (as Jack McKinney, with Brian Daley)
A Fearful Symmetry
Illegal Alien
The Big Empty
Kaduna Memories
The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: The Mata Hari Affair
The Shadow
The Mask of Zorro
Rio Passion
Rainchaser
Rock Bottom
Star Wars®: The New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos I: Hero’s Trial
Star Wars®: The New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse
Star Wars®: Cloak of Deception *
Nearly every world in the Videnda sector had something to recommend it—warm saline seas, verdant forests, arable grasslands that stretched to distant horizons. The outlying world known as Dorvalla had a touch of all of those. But what it had in abundance was lommite ore, an essential component in the production of transparisteel—a strong, transparent metal used galaxywide for canopies and viewports in both starships and ground-based structures. Dorvalla was so rich in lommite that one-quarter of the planet’s scant population was involved in the industry, employed either by Lommite Limited or its contentious rival, InterGalactic Ore.
The chalky ore was mined in Dorvalla’s tropical equatorial regions. Lommite Limited’s base of operations was in Dorvalla’s western hemisphere, in a broad rift valley blanketed with thick forest and defined by steep escarpments. There, where ancient seas had once held sway, shifts in the planetary mantle had thrust huge, sheer-faced tors from the land. Crowned by rampant vegetation, by trees and ferns primeval in scale, the high, rocky mountains rose like islands, blinding white in the sunlight, the birthplace of slender waterfalls that plunged thousands of meters to the valley floor.
But what was once a wilderness was now just another extractive enterprise. Huge demolition droids had carved wide roads to the bases of most of the larger cliffs, and two circular launch zones, large enough to accommodate dozens of ungainly space shuttles, had been hollowed from the forest. The tors themselves were gouged and honeycombed with mines, and deep craters filled with polluted runoff water reflected the sun and sky like fogged mirrors.
The ceaseless work of the droids was abetted by an all but indentured labor force of humans and aliens, to whom the mined ore served as a great equalizer. No matter the natural color of a miner’s skin, hair, feathers, or scales, everyone was rendered white as the galactic dawn. All agreed that sentient beings deserved more from life, but Lommite Limited wasn’t prosperous enough to convert fully to droid labor, and Dorvalla wasn’t a world of boundless opportunities for employment.
Still, that didn’t stop some from dreaming.
Patch Bruit, Lommite Limited’s chief of field operations—human beneath a routine dusting of ore—had long dreamed of starting over, of relocating to Coruscant or one of the other Core worlds and making a new life for himself. But such a move was years away, and not likely to happen at all if he kept returning his meager wages to LL by overspending in the company-run stores and squandering what little remained on gambling and drink.
He had been with LL for almost twenty years, and in that time had managed to work his way out of the pits into a position of authority. But with that authority had come more responsibility than he had bargained for, and in the wake of several recent incidents of industrial sabotage his patience was nearly spent.
The boxy control station in which Bruit spent the better part of his workdays looked out on the forest of tors and the shuttle launch and landing zones. To the station’s numerous video display screens came views of repulsorlift platforms elevating gangs of workers to the gaping mouths of the artificial caves that dimpled the precipitous faces of the mountains. Elsewhere, the platform lifting was accomplished with the help of strong-backed beasts, with massive curving