Star Wars_ Darth Maul 02_ Shadow Hunter - Michael Reaves [101]
“Family squabble?”
“Something like that. I need one more favor,” Lorn said. “Deliver this bucket of bolts to the Jedi Temple. He’s got information they’ll want to hear.”
Sal nodded. He picked I-Five up under the arms and dragged him over to his skycar. Lorn watched for a minute, then turned and boarded the ship.
Lorn could honestly say that he wasn’t frightened at the thought of facing the Sith alone. Frightened was far too mild a word. He was terrified, paralyzed, totally unmanned by what he was contemplating. He knew he was pursuing a suicidal course of action, and for what? Some quixotic notion of revenge for the death of a woman he barely knew? It was madness. I-Five was right: His chances for survival were so long that the odds were up in the purely theoretical number range.
As the Thixian Seven lifted away from the spaceport, Lorn felt himself on the verge of hyperventilation. Every nerve in his trembling body was on fire with adrenaline; every brain cell still functioning after his periodic bouts of alcohol abuse was screaming at him to leave orbit and just keep on going. Instead, he instructed the nav computer to plot the possible trajectories of a ship coming from the surface grid containing the abandoned monad.
Within far too short a time the computer had identified a craft in low orbit, thirty-five kilometers away. Lorn put it on visual, since the readout said that the stealth mechanism had been deactivated. He stared at the computer-enhanced image of the Sith’s vessel. With long nose and bent wings, it was a sleek craft, nearly thirty meters long; the scan readout didn’t specify armament, but it looked mean.
Below him, Coruscant looked like a gigantic circuit board laid across the planet’s surface. It was a spectacular sight, but Lorn wasn’t in any mood for sightseeing. He settled into an orbit below and well behind his enemy’s ship. He didn’t know how much protection—if any—the taozin nodule would grant him, and he wasn’t going to press his luck. He was going to need plenty of luck as it was.
Lorn wished I-Five was with him. He was painfully aware that since this nightmare had begun, every time his life had been in peril it had been either the droid or Darsha who had saved him. Some hero, he thought.
He missed Darsha, as well, although he didn’t wish she was with him. He wished she were still alive and far away from here, safe on some friendly planet that had never heard of either the Sith or the Jedi. He wished he was there with her.
The nav computer beeped softly to get his attention, and displayed a course vector overlay on one of the monitors. The Sith’s ship had changed course; it was now headed for a large space station in geosynchronous orbit over the equator.
His mouth dry as paper, Lorn instructed the autopilot to follow. He had no idea what he was going to do when he got there. All he knew was he had to try, somehow, to stop the Sith.
For Darsha’s sake.
And for his own.
Tuden Sal loaded the deactivated I-Five into his skycar and instructed the droid chauffeur as to their destination. The vehicle lifted away from the spaceport, sliding smoothly into the airborne traffic lanes.
He felt sorry for Lorn. His friend hadn’t told him very much about the situation he was in, but from the few hints he had dropped and from the look of the goon he was chasing, Sal figured his chances of survival were not great. That was too bad. He’d always thought Lorn had potential, even though he came across as a chronic underachiever. One rogue can always recognize another.
But in all probability, Lorn was going to die on this crazy quest of his. A shame, but it really wasn’t any of Sal’s business. He was far more concerned about the droid.
The Sakiyan had never really understood how Lorn could treat I-Five as an equal—even going so far as to call him a “business partner.” Droids were machines—clever ones, to be sure, and able in some cases to mimic