• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Monchar looked up from his supine position. There was an instant of hope in his eyes, but it died when he read his fate in Maul’s expression.

Maul drew his lightsaber. “Time to die,” he said.

“Wait!” The Neimoidian’s voice was a bleat of fear. “I can pay you—every credit the human gives me will be yours! Please—”

“Stand up,” Maul said. “You can at least meet your fate without groveling.”

But Monchar was too palsied with terror to comply. Maul felt a wave of disgust for the cringing creature. With his free hand he made a sharp upward gesture, and the Neimoidian was lifted like a puppet on strings. He hung, helpless, in the Force’s grasp.

“Nooo—”

Darth Maul lit one blade of the lightsaber and swung it laterally, cutting off the Neimoidian’s final wail, along with his head. He then released the lines of Force that held the twitching body and watched it crumple.

There was a durasteel safe on the floor behind the body. Maul opened it with a careful swipe of his lightsaber. Ah—there was the holocron crystal of which Monchar had spoken. He extinguished his lightsaber, hung it on his belt, and bent to pick up the holocron. Before his fingers touched it, however, he sensed that he was not alone.

“Don’t move!” came a voice from the door even as he realized this. “You so much as breathe deep and I’ll fry you where you stand!”

Maul glanced at the doorway. A tall human female in shell spider silk armor stood there, aiming a pair of blasters at him.

Maul realized that this was the same being he had sensed following him earlier. His lips twitched in annoyance. He tried a quick mental probe, but the bounty hunter—for surely that was what she was—was too sharp, her attention too focused, to fall for mind tricks.

Maul considered his options. He would never reach his lightsaber fast enough, even as quick as he was. He might be able to dodge a single blast, maybe even two, but hemmed in as he was in this small cubicle against a woman who could likely put a dozen bolts into the air from two semiautomatic blasters in half a second, he would have to have a distraction.

Near his feet lay the Trandoshan’s blaster. It would serve nicely.

Using his control of the Force, Darth Maul gripped the weapon in a dark tentacle of energy and hurled it at the bounty hunter’s face, hard.

The woman was fast. She dodged the blaster, firing a bolt at it. She missed and recovered, but the distraction had served its purpose. Before the weapon had bounced off the wall and landed on the floor, Maul had the lightsaber in his grasp. He thumbed on both blades as the next blaster bolt and half a dozen more came his way in rapid succession. The Sith apprentice’s hands were a blur as he let the dark side take him over completely, giving in to its power and allowing it to control and manipulate him.

Blaster bolts struck the lightsaber’s spinning blades and were deflected into the walls, the ceiling, the floor. No time to aim, though a bolt or two did hit the bounty hunter without apparent effect. Her armor was apparently state-of-the-art.

The bounty hunter dropped her useless blasters and reached for one wrist, where she wore a rocket launcher. The fool! Maul thought grimly. If a rocket exploded in here, it would kill them both!

There was no time to try to stop her. Maul slipped along the lines of the Force, moving at unnatural speed as he spun toward the nearest wall, a cheap plastic panel, twirling the lightsaber in a cutting pattern. The plastic shredded easily before the blades’ superhot plasmatic edges, and Maul ran through the wall, leapt over a chair in the next room—which, fortunately for its tenants, was deserted at the moment—and stabbed downward with one blade of his lightsaber, shearing a ragged oval in the floor. He dropped through the ceiling of the cubicle below just as the rocket struck the wall of the Neimoidian’s room and exploded.

Lihnn had never seen anybody move like the man with the horned and tattooed head. He wasn’t dressed like a Jedi, but his expertise with the double-bladed lightsaber