Star Wars_ Darth Maul 02_ Shadow Hunter - Michael Reaves [74]
This thing had made the bridge.
Something about all this seemed familiar, but she couldn’t recall how or why. A vagrant stream of the silk drifted toward the Padawan, and without thinking, she moved her lightsaber to intercept it. The silk burned as it hit the yellow energy beam, vaporizing into a cloud of smelly vapor.
The three got to their feet and started moving quickly back down the bridge toward the tunnel. Behind them the monster hitched itself forward, its multiple legs clinging to the silken bridge.
Well, I-Five’s blasters hadn’t worked, Darsha told herself. Let’s see how well it stands up to a lightsaber.
Lorn was really wishing he had a weapon right about now. Forget hand blasters—he was far past desiring something that small. Maybe a tripod-mounted V-90, or a few plasma grenades. As long as he was wishing, how about a ship-mounted turbolaser—with him safely inside the ship.
Where had this creature come from? One minute they were walking along the bridge, the next it was just there.
Retreat was the obvious choice. But just before this thing reared its ugly head, hadn’t he heard Darsha say something about the Sith being right behind them?
Talk about being trapped between the Black Hole of Nakat and the Magataran Maelstrom.
At that moment he realized what the creature was.
When Lorn had worked for the Jedi he’d had access to a lot of literature about them and many related topics. After he’d learned that Jax was off-limits to him he’d spent weeks studying everything he could about the Jedi: their history, their powers, their strengths and weaknesses. He hadn’t found anything that could help him, but he had come across some interesting and esoteric bits of knowledge—including, in one old text, stories about a supposedly extinct species of giant invertebrates that could, after a fashion, hide from the Force. What had it been called?
Taozin—that was it.
Apparently they weren’t extinct.
At that moment Darsha dived past him and I-Five toward the monster, her lightsaber flashing.
“Darsha! Stop! It’s a taozin!”
Darsha came out of her forward roll near the base of the creature, lightsaber extended. She thrust forward, angling the cut of the weapon to carve out a huge chunk of the monster’s belly. Let’s see how hungry you are after your prey bites back, she thought.
She executed the move as perfectly as she ever had in practice; Master Bondara would have been proud. The only problem was that it didn’t work.
She watched in disbelieving shock as the yellow glow of her blade diffused as she sank it into the creature, losing its coherency and radiating in all directions. Darsha dodged back, narrowly avoiding the backsplash of her own weapon. The blade regained its congruency as she withdrew it from the creature’s abdomen. The beast spasmed and roared angrily, its translucent flesh rippling in reaction; the strike had evidently hurt it, though not nearly as much as she had anticipated.
Darsha was so astonished by the result of her attack that she almost let the beast seize her with those sharp mandibles and pull her into the mouth that gaped overhead. At the last moment she scrambled back, waving the lightsaber to evaporate the gout of wet silk that it vomited toward her. At least the energy blade was good against that. She noted that the silk expellant became opaque only after it left the thing’s mouth.
She realized belatedly that Lorn had called out something to her a moment ago. It hadn’t registered at first, but now it did.
A taozin?
She remembered a few references to the beasts in her first history class. Thought to be extinct, they had been one of the few living creatures ever encountered that could not be perceived through the Force.