• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

His eyes darted back to the listening device and the security men. Creatures of habit, they probably occupied the same booth night after night, completely unaware that their conversations were being monitored. Such carelessness exasperated Maul to the point of fury. The men were deserving of whatever harm would surely come their way.

The three security men left the cantina on foot and wended their way to a ribbon of trail that wove through a dense stand of forest. Maul followed from a discreet distance, keeping to the shadows when Dorvalla’s moon came up, full and silver-white.

The trail eventually arrived at a tight-knit community of flimsy dwellings, many of them raised on stilts to keep them above pools of runoff water left by the rain. The humidity was oppressive.

The dwelling that was the trio’s destination was an elevated cube with a metal roof angled to channel rainwater into a ferrocrete cistern. The cube’s only door was accessed by means of a ladderlike stairway. A rusted landspeeder with a cracked windscreen was parked in a muddy front lot.

Maul kept to the trees while a thickly built human responded to the stout agent’s raps on the door frame.

“Come on up,” the man said. “Everyone else is already here.”

Bruit. Darth Maul waited until the three agents were inside, then he hurried from the shadows and planted himself under an open side window. Not content with his choice, he ducked beneath the house and clambered up one of the stilts to wedge himself between the floor joists of the front room. In the room above, someone was pouring liquid into several glasses.

Maul extracted a miniature recording device from the breast pocket of his utility suit and placed it against the underside of the rough-hewn floorboards.

“Here’s the long and short of it,” Bruit said while the glasses were being filled. “Arrant has decided that we need to level the playing field. We’re going to strike at InterGal at Eriadu. Our shipments will reach the planet, and theirs won’t.”

Someone whistled in astonishment.

“Does the boss realize what he’s letting loose?” perhaps the same man asked. “This is going to lead to a shooting war.”

“This comes straight from Arrant,” Bruit said. “He’s been in the trenches before. Those are his words, and this is his show.”

“His show and our livelihood,” someone pointed out. “There has to be a better way of settling this. What about petitioning the senate to intervene?”

“A cure that can be worse than the disease,” another answered, much to Maul’s amusement. “The senate will defer to committees run by corrupt bureaucrats. It will take months for it to get to the courts.”

“No senate, no courts,” Bruit said. “That much has already been decided. It’s up to us.”

“So what happens at Eriadu?”

“We’ve been able to learn the hyperspace route InterGal’s ships are going to take. They’ll arrive by way of Rimma 13, and are scheduled to decant from hyperspace at 1400 hours, Eriadu local time. The folks we’re employing to execute the strike will be able to calculate the precise reentry coordinates.”

“Who are we employing?”

“The Toom clan.”

Expressions of dismay flew from all corners.

“Cutthroats,” someone said.

“Exactly,” Bruit said. “But we need to team up to accomplish this, and Arrant’s willing to spend the necessary credits. By using them, no one will suspect us, and Arrant doesn’t care, because he doesn’t want to know any more than he has to. He wants to keep his hands clean while I make the connections. Besides, the Tooms have the means to get the job done.”

“And no scruples to stand in the way.”

“Have they agreed to terms?”

“At first contact,” Bruit said. “Although I have to say that I sometimes wish I could see both Lommite and InterGal brought down, so that someone with real foresight could build a better organization from the dregs.”

Several glasses clinked together.

“So what’s our part in this, Chief, if the deal has already been struck?”

Bruit snorted. “We need to prepare ourselves for InterGal’s counterpunch.”

Maul peeled the recorder from the floorboards and dropped down