Star Wars_ Darth Maul 02_ Shadow Hunter - Michael Reaves [59]
The skycar was empty.
It was possible that the explosion had flung them clear before the debris collapsed. If so, their bodies might have been dragged away by those who scrounged the streets. But he wasn’t certain that was what had happened. Given the kind of luck the Corellian had had so far, Maul knew he would have to see Pavan’s dead body—preferably after his head had parted company with his shoulders, thanks to Maul’s lightsaber—before he would feel comfortable reporting to Lord Sidious that the problem was at last resolved.
Maul was actually starting to feel something of a grudging respect for this Lorn Pavan. Although some of the hustler’s continued avoidance of his fate could be ascribed to luck, some, the Sith apprentice had to admit, was due to Pavan’s survival instincts. Of course, he would not have lasted as long as he had downlevels if he had not had a roachlike ability to sense and avoid danger. Nevertheless, Maul was slightly impressed. Not that it mattered. His quarry’s skill at staying alive would just make Maul’s inevitable triumph all the more satisfying.
He began to search the area, questing along the filaments of the dark side, seeking the route they had taken. He saw the kiosk almost immediately. Even without the Force to guide him to it, he knew this could be the only logical escape route. Unfortunately, the skycar’s explosion had covered the underground entrance with debris.
Maul was running out of patience. Five meters farther up the street he spied a ventilation grid that appeared to open onto the same underground conduit as the kiosk. He lit one end of his lightsaber and jabbed it into the grid. The blade sliced easily through the metal slats. In a second the grate had dropped down into the conduit, and Darth Maul followed it.
He landed lightly. The entire tunnel was shaking as with the roar of some titanic beast. Maul looked up to see a driverless freight transport bearing down on him at better than one hundred kilometers an hour.
Anyone else, even a trained athlete raised in a heavier gravity field, would have been crushed to paste. But Maul seized the Force, let it whip him up and to the side as if he were attached to a giant elastic band. The metal behemoth missed him by millimeters.
Maul found himself standing on the narrow lip of a walkway that ran along one side of the conduit. He looked about, questing with his eyes and his mind. Yes—they had escaped down here. The trail still remained.
They could run, but they couldn’t hide.
Darth Maul resumed the hunt.
Lorn’s first thought as he returned to partial consciousness was to wonder why someone had gone to the trouble to kidnap him off Coruscant and drop him on one of the galaxy’s gas giant worlds—Yavin, possibly. Obviously this was what had happened, because gravity and atmospheric pressure were slowly crushing him into a boneless putty. His head, particularly. And whatever it was that he was breathing, it wasn’t anything close to a comfortable oxygen-nitrogen mixture.
Or maybe he’d been parked in a too-close orbit around the event horizon of a black hole, and the tidal forces were pulling him apart. That would explain why his head hurt so abominably, and why he couldn’t feel his hands and feet.
Lorn blinked, then saw dim light the color of verdigris. He realized he was lying on a cold stone floor, his arms and legs bound. The light, faint and sickly though it was, was still too much for his headache to deal with. Must’ve really tied one on this time, he thought. Maybe I-Five’s right about those liver cells, not that I’d ever admit it to him.
But something was still wrong with this picture. He knew he could be a fairly obstreperous drunk on occasion, but he’d never reached the