• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The gate retracted into the floor. “We’re in.”

Loor shifted in his seat in the back. “Does it bother you, Iella, to be shielding me this way?”

“No more now than it did the first time you asked the question, Loor.” She moved the vehicle forward into the darkened parking area, and midway between the gate and the lift doors, she slung it around, swapping it end for end, so the nose pointed back out toward the exit. She let the speeder drift to a stop approximately twenty meters from the lift. “Does it bother you having to depend upon me?”

Loor shook his head. “Not at all, my dear. You have a facility for loyalty—I don’t imagine you are wasting it on me—and to your mission you will be true. Your job is to deliver me to court, then watch me walk away, shedding my crimes like a Trandoshan shedding skin.”

“Reminding me that you let the Trandoshan who murdered Corran’s father go isn’t the way to get me to feel good about helping you.”

“No, I suppose it isn’t.” Loor sighed nonchalantly. “I’ll have to trust you’ll want Corran’s betrayer more than you want me dead, won’t I?”

“That you will.” Iella cracked her door open and emerged from the speeder. She took a quick look around, saw nothing, then rapped on the top of the car. “Come on out. It’s clear.”

As the other two left the vehicle, Iella pulled out her blaster and checked the power cell. Full charge, good. “Let’s go. We get to the lift, I input the code, we head down and through the prosecutor’s office. Simple, swift, and no one will get hurt.”

Loor pulled up the hood on his cloak. “After you.”

Iella growled at him and moved toward the elevator, taking up a position on the right side of the group. She held her blaster in two hands, up by her face, with the barrel pointing toward the ferrocrete ceiling. As she walked toward the lift she kept looking about, backward, forward, and side to side, trying to pick up on any movement, anything out of the ordinary. Across from her, unarmed though he was, Nawara looked about vigilantly as well.

Between them, his cloak billowing out to inflate his silhouette to the size of his code name, Loor strode confidently. Though she could not see his face, his stance and stride indicated he was blithely amused by her caution. The grant of immunity has made him feel invincible.

Iella felt the slick caress of a strand of webbing brush against her right cheek. She swept it away with her left hand and heard it snap near her ear. That struck her as odd, then sinister, as she saw Nawara bat at a similar thread with one of his brain tails.

The lift doors, barely ten meters away, opened with little more than a whisper.

As the lift doors parted, Loor felt his pulse quicken. Time slowed until nanoseconds took hours to pass. His emotions spiked, fear braiding itself together with triumph. The fear came from the realization that he might die, for surely an assassin or assassins lurked in the lift. I could well be dead before those doors close again.

The triumph that wove in with the fear came from the realization that Ysanne Isard saw him as enough of a threat to kill him. She had always dismissed him before, patronized him, used him, and threatened to discard him. Now she saw how truly powerful he was. The desperation that marked this attempt on his life gave full measure to her concern over what he could do to destroy her.

Loor began to smile. In this you show me I have won!

Iella began to turn toward the unlit box, her blaster coming down as she squared her stance. Something black moved within the lift, a shadow that resolved itself into the form of a man dashing forth, a blazing blaster held in each hand. “Die, Derricote, die!” he screamed.

Scarlet bolts of blaster energy burned toward the trio. One caught Nawara Ven on the right hip. It spun him around and flung him through the air.

Before the Twi’lek could hit the ground, a pair of blaster-bolts lanced through Kirtan Loor’s chest. The first, which drilled him high on the left side of his body, lifted