If this was a test, he thought, it was for keeps.

Several meters away, Talzin was flat on the deck with the two remaining Nightsisters unleashing a dark-side barrage of arrows, many of which were finding their marks.

Maul scanned the cargo bay. Having passed through this station on several occasions—typically en route to extrasystem contests arranged by Trezza—he knew that its cargo and passenger hubs were linked at several points by airlock corridors. If he could make it to the passenger pod, he could commandeer a drop ship and be back on Orsis before anyone even discovered that he was missing. But it would be easier said than done if he had to continue playing by the rules his Master had laid out.

He was preparing to make a break for the nearest hatchway when Mother Talzin called to him.

“Don’t leave us, Maul!”

He turned to see that she was on her feet, supported by one of the Nightsisters while the other was covering them.

“Maul!” Talzin repeated.

Confliction paralyzed him. Would his Master expect him to show sympathy? Even if the test had gone awry, Talzin might still be one of Sidious’ agents, and thus deserving of his help. Did the dark side of the Force ever permit self-sacrifice?

Cursing through his gritted teeth, he put his right arm through the bow and hooked it over his shoulder, then ran through a hail of blaster bolts to reach Talzin. Heaving her over his shoulder, he raced for the safety of the adjacent bay, the two Nightsisters steps behind.

“She’s dead,” one of the leather-faced Weequays reported as Warlord Osika Kirske approached the fallen Nightsister.

The Vollick’s massive right boot caught the lean humanoid under the chin and lifted the Weequay a meter off the deck.

“There were too many of them,” another Weequay tried to explain, only to take a gauntleted fist straight to the face.

Kirske then turned to the few soldiers who remained standing. “The Witch achieved the impossible: she made bigger idiots of you than even I believed possible!” His eyes went to the hatch through which Talzin and the others had fled. “They’ll attempt to reach their ship. Intercept them! And try to leave me with at least one witch in working order. We’ll rendezvous in the passenger hub.”

Close by, Meltch watched Kirske’s mercs hurry off. “I tried to warn you,” he said. “Now you’ve got a fight on your hands.”

The Vollick made a guttural sound. “We Rattataki live to fight.”

Meltch nodded. “One final piece of advice, then: send for reinforcements.”

“You’re leaving?” Kirske said to the Mandalorian’s back.

“I’ve done my part, Warlord,” Meltch said over his shoulder. “This is your mess to clean up.”

The entrance to one of the station’s cylindrical connectors was scarcely 50 meters away, but Maul and the three Dathomiri were pinned down behind a cargo container by fire from the Vollick warlord’s reinforcements.

“Our magicks don’t work in this sterile place,” Talzin said with abhorrence. “That’s why I could not sustain the illusion.”

Blaster bolts were ricocheting from the container. The two Nightsisters were returning fire.

“The illusion that nearly got all of us killed,” Maul said.

Talzin took her hand from the deep black-edged groove in her outer thigh and winced. Maul regarded the wound in stony silence. Black against red, like the zigzag markings on his face and head.

“On Dathomir I would be able to heal myself.”

“No one asked you to come here,” he said, even though that might not have been the case.

“We came for your sake.”

That much was a lie and he said so.

Talzin’s silver eyes flared. “You fail to grasp that you belong to a great heritage, Maul. That you were spirited away from Dathomir doesn’t alter the fact that you are a Nightbrother, and that your fate is joined with ours.”

He snorted. “Everyone has a plan for me.”

She searched his fearsome face for clues to his meaning. “I don’t understand,” she said at last.

But Maul had fallen back into silence.

In the empty space between the cargo container and the soldiers, a dozen automated load lifter droids were hauling similar containers to various designated areas on the burnished deck, unfazed by the firefight taking place in their midst. The containers were drifting into the bay on powerful tractor beams from a cargo ship too large to be berthed inside the station. The entire process was under the guidance of a computer housed in the bay’s upper tier control room.

Maul spent a long moment observing, then said: “We’ve one chance to make it through the connector and into the passager pod.” He fixed Talzin with a penetrating gaze. “I’m going to need one of your energy swords.”

Talzin returned the look. “You’ve no training in the use of that weapon.”

Maul shrugged out of the bow. “I’ll just have to improvise.”

Trezza and Sidious stood in the tall grass of the savannah where Maul had last been seen. The landspeeder that had carried them into the Gora was parked nearby. A strong wind tugged at their robes, and they had to converse loudly to prevent their words from being carried away.

“We were tracking him until the storm blew in and destroyed most of the remote cams,” the Falleen was saying. “By then he was close to the outpost, and we expected him to comm for evac before nightfall.” He paused, then added: “No one I’ve trained ever fared as well on a solo.”

“And yet Maul has vanished,” Sidious said.

“The search party I dispatched was able to track him to this point,” Trezza said, “but there’s no evidence of his trail from here on.”

Sidious scanned the savannah and the far tree line. “Maul wasn’t alone.”

Trezza followed Sidious’ gaze to areas where the grass had been disturbed and flattened. He nodded. “Llans made these. The trackers were able to identify the prints of four different beasts.”

Sidious turned slightly toward him. “Here … simultaneously?”

“Apparently.”

“You suspect that the llans had something to do with Maul’s disappearance?”

“There’s no evidence to confirm that. But there’s no arguing that Maul and the llans were here at the same time.”

The relationship between the Falleen and the human went back eight years, to when Sidious had executed Darth Plagueis’ order that Maul be relocated from Mustafar to the Orsis combat academy. That first visit, Sidious had come in disguise. Now he merely hid his visage deep within the raised cowl of the robe. Sidious trusted the Falleen implicitly, and saw no reason to doubt him now. Still, the idea that a quartet of llan beasts could overcome Maul was preposterous.

“When have you ever known llans to act in concert?”

“Never,” Trezza said.

Again, Sidious looked around, turning through a full circle. “This storm … ”

“Also something of an anomaly. Whipped up out of nowhere.”

Sidious was silent for a long moment. “Have any ships come or gone?”

“Not from the crater. The academy spaceport has seen the usual traffic.”

“Supply drop ships,” Sidious said.

“Precisely.”

“Are any other trainees or instructors absent?”

Trezza thought about it. “Meltch has been away on business for a standard week, but he’s expected to return later today.”

Sidious touched his cleft chin. “The Mandalorian.”

“Could Maul have fled?” Trezza asked carefully.

Sidious pivoted to face him, staring from the darkness of the hood. “How do you mean?”

“Could he have reached his limit with … the training?”

“And decided to cover his tracks after completing the most brilliant solo you have ever witnessed?”

Trezza looked away. “I’m only suggesting a possibility. Maul wouldn’t be the first to do so.”

“It’s unlikely that Maul would flee the only real home he has ever known.” Sidious lifted his face to the sky. “Tell your trackers to call an end to the search. I will pursue this matter personally.”

Short sword in hand and evading bolts from Weequay and Siniteen blasters, Maul sprinted for the control room bulkhead. For a moment it appeared that he intended to run up the wall, but instead he launched himself straight up from the deck when he was a few meters short of the bulkhead. At the same time he raised the sword over his head in a two-handed grip and plunged it into the control room’s broad transparisteel window. A normal blade would simply have bounced off the transparency, but energized by the dark side of the Force the Nightsister’s sword not only penetrated the pane the way a lightsaber would, but opened a vertical tear in the window as gravity struggled to return Maul to the deck. Dangling from the weapon’s hilt, he rode with it for a short distance, then swung his body up and around the sword, bringing his feet in front of him and slamming them against the pane. That the gambit worked, however, owed less to the amount of momentum Maul was able to supply, and more to the concentrated blaster fire provided by the Vollick’s warriors.

Feet first, Maul flew through the smashed window into the control room, with dozens of blaster bolts following him through and ricocheting wildly. Several devices in the room were struck, and, as circuits fried, the small space began to fill with acrid smoke. Crawling below the ruined opening, Maul moved to the computer’s main control board and began doing input on a touch screen. He was by no means an expert slicer, but Trezza placed as much importance on computer skills as he did on poison production and assassination techniques. More important, slicing into the programs that oversaw Orsis’ automated cargo transfer system didn’t require the skills of an expert.

With bolts continuing to streak into the room, Maul worked his way into the program that managed the tractor beam array and retasked it. The system kept asking him if he was absolutely certain that he wanted the changes applied, but once he had convinced it, the consequences were almost immediate.

Where moments earlier cargo containers had been floating gently into the bay, they were suddenly soaring in at rapid speed. The large vessel parked outside the station was unaffected by the increased pull of the tractor beam, but the containers themselves were arriving too quickly for the load lifters to handle. Instead, they were piling up on the deck, erecting what amounted to a towering wall between the mercenaries and the Nightsisters, though without preventing the latter from being able to reach the connector leading to the facility’s passenger hub.

Grasping the eventual outcome, several of the soldiers broke from cover in an attempt to make it to the far side of the cargo bay, only to end up crushed by incoming containers. A couple of the load lifters also wound up hemmed in, becoming part of an impromptu partition that was close to spilling out of the pressurized bay.

With enemy attention diverted to the wall, Maul was able to leap safely from the control room to the deck and return to Talzin’s side.

“Technological magic,” she said, though not without a hint of appreciation.

Maul helped her to her feet and wrapped his left arm around her waist.

With the Nightsisters bringing up the rear, the two of them hurried into the corridor and through the first of several hatches: Maul using the Force to open it as they approached, Talzin using the Force to close it, and the pair of Nightsisters using their energy quarrels to destroy the control panel. All the way through the connector, their teamwork was repeated. Maul wasn’t sure if his actions would ultimately be seen as inspired or ill-conceived. But his belief that he was being tested was given credence as he and Talzin were passing through the final hatch and into Orsis Orbital’s passenger hub, and the revelation was so powerful it stopped him in his tracks.

“Why are you waiting?” Talzin said. “Our ship isn’t far.”

“You can stop pretending,” he told her.

She gave her head a confused shake. “About what?”

“About Dathomir, the Nightbrothers, and the rest. I know that you were sent by my Master.”

She stared at him in puzzlement.

“I know, because I perceive him. My Master is here.”

Sirens wailed throughout the passenger hub, and emergency lights brought a scarlet glow to some of the concourses and hangars.

Sweating profusely beneath his body armor, Warlord Kirske paced behind the soldiers he had deployed in a bay at the far end of the connector his four quarries were said to have entered. Other soldiers had been ordered to engage station security, and a contingent of Weequay mercenaries had been dispatched to secure the Nightsisters’ ship, just in case Talzin and the rest made it that far. That left a mere skeleton crew aboard Kirske’s own starship.

Considering the ruination the Dathomiri Zabrak had engineered in one of the cargo bays, Kirske had begun to wonder if it was he who had been set up. Meltch had been almost dismissive about the so-called Nightbrother, and yet Trezza’s Dathomiri trainee was proving to be more dangerous than Mother Talzin herself. Could the Mandalorian have cut a separate deal with some other Rattataki warlord to draw him into a trap? Certainly Kirske had no shortage of enemies on the contested world.

Kirske glanced in the direction of the connector egress and whirled on one of his Siniteen lieutenants. “What’s taking them so long? Why haven’t they exited? And why is it so kriffing hot in here?”

Carefully, he wedged a clawed finger into the ring collar of his tunic and gave it an outward tug, hoping to release some of the heat that was building up under his breastplate. The leathery scalps of the Weequay nearby were beaded with sweat.

“My lord, our forward scouts report no sign of them,” the Siniteen said at last.

Kirske tried to sharpen his view of the connector egress, but found his distance vision slightly blurred. To his eyes, the far side of the bay looked as if it were obscured by fog. The optical illusion may have been the result of sweat running into his eyes. Or perhaps not. Just in case, he made note of the location of the nearest bay egress.

In a utility room below the bay in which Kirske’s soldiers were deployed, Maul and the Nightsisters stood on a maintenance gantry several meters above the room’s flooded deck. The deluge owed to ruptures in the broad pipes that coursed overhead, opened by slashes from Maul’s Dathomiri blade. As fast as the water gushed from the pipes, Talzin—motioning broadly with her arms—was turning most of it to steam, and clouds were beginning to rise through the slotted deck plates of the bay above.

“It won’t be as powerful as the storm I conjured on Orsis,” Talzin said, “but it should do.”

Like Maul and the two Nightsisters, she was wearing one of the emergency respirator masks Maul had snatched from a nearby airlock after he and Talzin had both sensed the ambush awaiting them at the end of the connector. They had picked their way down into maintenance corridors that ran beneath the passenger hub’s concourse level. Where earlier Talzin had been unable to bring her magicks to bear, her powers to alter water were apparently unaffected by the techno-sterility of the rest of the station.

Talzin continued to make magical passes with one hand, while the other dug deeply into a pocket in her robe. Mumbling in Dathomiri, she extracted a crystalline ampoule and began to fling its amber contents in the clouds of superheated steam. Motioning with both hands she swirled the clouds, directing them to rise more rapidly, as if blown upward by powerful fans.

The four of them waited until they heard coughing and retching sounds from above; then made their way to the end of the gantry and ascended a ladder that accessed the upper bay.

Victims of Talzin’s soporific and near-impenetrable fog, the warlord’s soldiers were stumbling about as if inebriated or bent over and vomiting onto the deck. The two Nightsisters waded into their midst with swords flashing. The few Weequays and Siniteens who hadn’t succumbed fully to Talzin’s strange brew opened fire with their blasters, but were quickly cut down. Leaving the swordplay to the masked Dathomiri, Maul tore into the Vollick’s rear guard with fists and feet, bruising bodies and breaking bones as he fought his way to the warlord himself. Out of the fog came a hail of fire from the Vollick’s close-in defenders, forcing Maul to hit the deck, bleeding from a bolt that had grazed his upper right arm. Clambering to his feet, he resumed the charge, but by then the warload and his top lieutenants had beat a retreat through one of the exits. Only Talzin’s voice kept Maul from giving pursuit.

“Our ship!” she called.

Waves of her hands caused the spreading mist to coalesce into a liquid sphere, which she then burst with a single magical pass, showering the deck with water. Yanking the respirator from her face and hurling it aside, she gestured in the direction in which the ship was berthed.

“Quickly!”

* * *

 

Talzin hadn’t expected Maul to heed her command, and wondered as she ran why he was running with them. Did he actually intend to accompany them to Dathomir? She had begun to doubt that she had the power to subdue him a second time, or to persuade him to come. So what had changed? Had combat forged a primal connection of some sort? Or was he now prepared to accept his fate, despite what he had said about having perceived the presence of his Master?

Racing into the hangar, they saw that the deck was littered with fallen Weequays. None of the discolored bodies showed evidence of obvious wounds, but to a soldier they were dead. Clearly the Vollick had deployed them to keep Talzin and the rest from reaching the starship. Could they have turned on one another? She scarcely had time to consider it when she saw Maul come to an abrupt stop and drop to one knee with his head bowed.

“Master,” Talzin heard him say.

A human male stepped into view. Of average height, he wore a dark robe whose hood was raised over his head, concealing his face. Talzin could feel his power, not only in the Force, but in the dark side, as it was known to some. Even the Nightsisters could sense the man’s strength, and fell back a step in uncertainty, their energy bows aimed at the deck. For a long moment, he and Talzin regarded each other in portentous silence. Then the robed man gestured to Maul.

“This one does not belong to Dathomir,” he said in Basic, his words heavy with meaning. “He is mine.”

Talzin recalled what Nightsister Kycina had said about having given infant Maul to a distinguished, powerful human. “Then you didn’t merely abandon him to the Falleen.”

“On the contrary,” he said.

She glanced at Maul. “You have trained him well.”