Author's Note:
I'll be gone next week (again! I know, I'm always gone!) so the next chapter will probably take three weeks instead. But if I fit it into two weeks as usual, you'll be in for a treat.
Thank you so much, as always, for reading.
"Space Bound"
Chapter Twenty-One: Wretches and Kings
"Steel unload, final blow
We the animals take control
Hear us now, clear and true:
Wretches and kings, we come for you!"
-Linkin Park, "Wretches and Kings"
"Stage One is all planned out," came Aurra Sing's voice from the comlink.
"I'm listening," Cad Bane replied, staring into the dark.
"Banquet starts tomorrow night, twenty-two hundred hours on the dot. First, my team will send smoke grenades and thermal detonators on the right wing. Embo will take his group up the front and stir the pot there. I'll pick off leftover security and stragglers from a sniping position in the back tower. Your job is on the left flank during the evacuation. Garr Broxin will be there. Take out the target and bail out before the rest of security starts pouring in. Oh yes, and, fire at will. My employers are expecting a high body count."
"So—you plan to stage it as a political terrorist attack, or the like? Sounds like someone ticked off your boss." Suddenly he was very interested in just who was hiring Aurra Sing. But, unfortunately, his curiousity didn't make it his business.
"I like 'em runny and jumpy. They're more entertaining that way. Besides, it's not so simple as just, well, shooting a hole through Broxin's head from a hundred yards off. Is it? It's not just an assassination we want. My employers, and maybe even you—it's a statement, right? The fat cats need a splash of spoiled milk thrown in their faces."
Cad hesitated as he traced his finger around the comlink signal, stretching his legs out in the dimly-lit Sleight of Hand cockpit. Maybe he could tell Sing her guess was inaccurate with real honesty, had he had not already killed Orett Solarin. Back then, it had been just a kill. A shot through the head, a lucky payday. But now it couldn't be so simple. Either he had gone too far, or Broxin had gone too deep, or both. Either way, Sing was right. So he didn't tell her she was wrong.
"Just how much of this is for you?" he blurted out instead.
He heard her clear her throat, as if deliberately giving him the impression that she was nervous. It didn't cut it.
Cad added, "Nothin' to do with how much you hate 'de Jedi, right?"
"And what's that have to do with Garr Broxin?" asked Sing.
Huh. So she didn't know about the little 'agreement' between Broxin and the Jedi Order, then. Cad paused. Maybe it should stay that way, for a while.
"I heard a story once," Cad said, recovering quickly, "where you pay good credits for a kidnapped Padawan, so you can practice doing what you love to do best. That would be killing Jedi, of course."
"Where in..."
"So, you're not so solitary as I thought you were."
"When I need to be. You would know. You're not always such a lonely boy yourself. Why so interested in what I happen to hate?"
Damn. She must have had a hell of a day to be pouncing on things like this. Not that Cad minded when Slim cut herself some slack. Actually, she was more fun that way.
"Guest appearances, at the banquet tomorrow...did you read up on those yet? Four Jedi Padawans will be representing the latest news on the Republican victory on Kashyyyk, to honor the galactic military efforts, as the HoloNet put it. I do my homework too, y'know."
"Are you offering what I think you are? I thought you don't take prisoners, Bane." But he tasted a thirst in her voice, a thirst for blood. Jedi blood.
Cad personally didn't know the story, but somewhere along the way Aurra Sing had developed some unquenchable loathing for the Jedi Order. An old associate of hers Cad ran into at one point claimed that Sing had killed a Padawan for no payment at all, just for the fun of it. The more he thought about that story, the more Cad didn't want details or the reasons behind it.
After all, he had once held a bit of respect for the Jedi and their Force-tricks and 'mindful, negotiating' ways. But, not anymore. That respect had died by a lightsaber on Nal Hutta.
Shit, perhaps now he wasn't so different from Sing as he thought he was.
"If the plan asks for their death in the long run, I don't call 'dem prisoners," Cad answered.
"Sure, you don't," Sing cackled. "Give me time to chew on that offer. Depending on where Broxin's brains land tomorrow night, I might need to take it out on someone. Some Twi'lek Jedi took away my trophy lightsaber collection and I've been needing to pick it up again, anyway."
"I got a couple questions to ask you, too, face-to-face."
"Really?" she drawled, as if bored. "Well, now that you mention it. Tomorrow afternoon, we're assembling at a cantina near the main hangar to review the plan, and so you can meet the rest of the team."
"You and cantina meetings..." he purred.
"Oh yeah, and one more thing. I was going to bring it up to Embo, but..." her voice trailed—a bit odd for her. "You know that 'warning' we were getting, or thought we were getting from our employer Lord Sidious, a few weeks back?"
"Sure. Why?"
"Let's stay light on our toes tomorrow night. I got this...this feeling."
"Like what?"
And he never had, nor never would again, hear Aurra Sing confess,
"I don't know."
Embo shook his head in reply when Aurra Sing offered him a drink. He had never been a drinking man, nor thought he could afford to be, as a few too many shots could turn even the deadliest and well experienced mercenary into a stooping Bantha-fodder fool. Not to mention a decent reputation that was at stake.
She second-glanced at him, but said nothing.
"We will rendevous at twenty-one-hundred hours at the hangar and proceed to the airspeeders. Final preparations and our own personal maps will be handed out. Then at exactly ten minutes after the twenty-second hour, we hit the Opera House," Sing said to those assembled.
Those gathered around the table nodded. The group was huddled in a back corner of the small, dusty, Coruscant cantina. Most were barely armed save a small blaster or dagger for protection, but one or two including Sing had a rifle slung over their back. Cad glanced over the collection of ragged-looking gunman in either Embo or Sing's team—a few humans, Zeltrons, a Devaronian, a couple Pantorans, even an adolescent Noghri. Those Embo had recruited concealed their usual wear with dark ponchos, some adding a tortilla-shaped black hat to the apparel. They looked green, but not unintelligent, the quiet and brooding type silently sipping at their Membrosias. Sing's hired hands, however, huddled in place with tightly-gloved hands folded in their laps, eyes cast to the ground. Not only did they look green as well, but young, skinny. Maybe even afraid. Like they had come straight out of a Tattooine orphanage.
An interesting mix.
"It will be staged as a protest—or a terrorist attack out of political biases," Embo added, folding one thumb over the other.
Cad Bane stole an ever-so-slight gesture at Sing, who sat two seats down. She dipped her chin. He let out a nasty cough before his breathing tubes helped him recover, then said,
"You new recruits should know the rules. Everything goes according to the plan. Nothing spontaneous or funny. Anybody who runs off on their own scheme and blows our cover won't come out alive. That's a guarantee. Hope you figured out we're not here to play games or shit around. Understand?"
The younger-looking recruits nodded feverishly, while the others cast their gaze down. Cad Bane gave a brief survey over each of their faces. Fresh. A few, like the Noghir and most of the humans, would barely qualify as adults. Possibly had yet to break into their new outfits. He noticed how they stared up at the three bounty hunters. In their eyes, the Kyuzo, the Duros, and the female hybrid were probably about as veteran as you could get.
Shit. New kids on the block with those round eyes staring up at him like he were a fucking god. He didn't like it. He looked away and ignored them.
But they all smelled the same to him—timid, and afraid. Definitely afraid, and mentally promoting him to the rank of a god.
"Any questions?" asked Sing.
Cad began tapping his index finger on the rim of his empty glass. At this hour of the night, traffic in the cantina was slower, and raising one's voice above normal speaking level would be the loudest sound in the room. Nothing could be heard but the surrounding clinking, scraping, murmuring of conversations, and the faint commotion from the far back as was expected. There was a pause at the table, like a hiccup.
"Fine. We'll see you on the other side," Sing snapped.
The group, individually, rose to depart. Cad did not glance around the cantina—he was pretty damn positive he had held off the Corrino's and Dio's at least for the moment. They would come for him to keep the game going, but it was a dying game. Everybody knew that.
A deathstick—a deathstick—he could save one for the apartment, later, with Blythe. He'd suffice with just a smoke or a toothpick for now, and then a deathstick, just one.
As Sing walked past him to walk into the hangar, she shot him a look—a very Aurra-esque arch of one eyebrow and a gnarled twisting of the other, in addition to a nibble on the inside of the right cheek. It was as if she had just read his thoughts. Before Cad could respond, he noticed one of the fresh, younger recruits was standing in front of him to the side. It was a young human girl with a padded vest much like Sing's, a question stuck to her pale tongue.
"Are you Cad Bane, sir? The real Bane?" she asked.
At that, Sing's look vanished, and she took off after Embo. Cad Bane wanted to growl in contempt.
Hell to that screwy dame. Setting me up with kids. Human kids at that.
Cad crossed his arms, loosely replying the kid's gaze. Again, he could pick up the smell of fear and timidity even from the way she leaned against the wall.
But everyone has fear, and it is only a matter of admitting you have it at all, like a cartoon porn holovid.
"I don't rightly believe that's the real question you have in mind, little lady," he purred.
"Any advice when we get out there?" she asked. Then, as if to clear some confusion, the kid added, "It's my first time. I've never done this before."
"Here's 'de best piece I got that's still free," he said slowly, despising every second of it. "The better you are at something, 'de less you can enjoy it."
Before the kid could ask anything more, Cad slipped to the side, but not before tipping his hat at her and saying,
"Know how you'll always know that it's me? It's 'dis hat. Nobody else has a hat like 'dis one."
As he walked away, leaving the kid to tag along for her team leader, he had a discontented and sickening thought. It was the same jab of uneasinesss that snagged him after Solarin let him purchase Blythe for thirty-thousand credits—the thought that Solarin had almost wanted to give her up and deliberately gave in like a cheap little shit.
Now it felt as if somebody, somewhere, for some reason, wanted them to pull off this stunt and take down Garr Broxin. Somebody was letting, maybe even pushing, for these things to happen and fall into place. Like tomorrow night was just another piece on a gameboard, another card in a sabaac hand. Was there an audience, watching? Was there a deliberate motive behind it all?
He did not know where in the hell that thought had come from.
This time, it did not go away as easily as before. It stuck, just like the headache.
When Cad Bane left to meet with his new posse, as he had dubbed the group, Blythe found herself alone and hiding back in the small apartment he had dubbed Number 1, telling herself over and over not to be frightened.
She knew there was little to fear. Cad had been certain no one saw them enter or exit the apartment, except for one poor soul in the wrong place at the wrong time who had recieved a subtle shot to the head. The door was sealed, the windows closed. A long night of waiting had swallowed her.
Aside from those reasons to fear, and even in spite of them, she felt very afraid.
And helpless.
Perhaps Blythe did not enjoy the idea of being left alone, even for one night, just her and the five-month old child. Left alone to her and her thoughts and fears.
"You're coming back for me, right, Cad?" she had asked him.
He had pulled out one of his blasters and set it rather roughly on the table as a reply, before snapping on his hat.
"Now you'll know for sure," he had replied.
So Blythe was left to wait and ignore the images that increasingly seemed to pop out from the shadows—of the day she was sold on Duro, of the day Broxin gave her the initiation, of all her dances in places like Mos Eisley, Glee Ansom, Nar Shaadaa, and countless more without daring to look at the ravenous faces of the men and occasional women. How long she had been able to ignore them.
Ghosts. They all jus' ghosts.
Ghosts with voices. Ghosts with fingers. Ghosts that played a game of pazaak on your chest until your throat bled from screaming.
No, she wasn't alone. She had the ghosts.
Don't you remember, Blythe. Don't you dare remember, because if you do it will hurt more than anything you could imagine. The memories we've taught us how to forget will kill you. Just don't think about it. Keep going. Keep letting your Bane Cad do what he wants even if it means letting yourself do what you want. Just don't think.
She leaned on the side of the bed. She wished she knew any sort of lullaby so she could sing to him—or her—but any she had learned before had been learned out of her. So instead, she sat, quietly, humming a meaningless melody over and over. At the worst moments, she looked up at the blaster he had left behind and reminded herself he would come back. Blythe hummed all night long until her throat ran dry, and then she kept humming, caressing her womb.
Not knowing what was going to happen.
But if he came back, that was all that mattered to Blythe. Nothing else.
So she remained with the ghosts and their voices and fingers, facing the long night ahead, as lightyears away a final battle raged on the Utapau system between a Jedi Master and a Separatist cyborg.
"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part - you can't even passively take part - and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!"
-Mario Savio, Berkeley 'Gears' Speech, 1964
It was night in the Coruscant underworld. These bottom levels of Coruscant never saw real daylight, only a few glimpses here and faint traces there, but even those were sometimes just illusions of another unattainable reality.
The beginnings of a late-night banquet outside the Galactic Opera House stirred to life. Illumination banks were lit, surrounded by changing-color sun-globes. Republican guards straightened to protect the VIP's who began to exit their skyhoppers and tread the red carpet toward the main source of life at the banquet hall. In the corner, a musical band kicked off the night with a smooth jazz rendition of the song, of all songs, "Jedi Rocks". From a cluster of neatly organized dining tables rose the aroma of an array of foods, a feast for the full—sweetcakes, white dwarf gravy, Orange-Madeira sauce, deep-fried meattail and yobshrimp and ashkar, Likryt stew, and the finest of imported Corellian cuisine. Near the food were even more wines of all sorts of flavors from the Alderaan, Bothan, and Mandalorian systems. Small clusters of audiences made their way around the hall as the conversations came and went, applauding softly like a contagious ripple spreading throughout. Males were dressed in their finest garments with silk robes decorated in the fashion of their native system, and females were adorned with layers upon layers of gold and silver jewelry that covered their arms and faces, and makeup that hid their true appearance.
Above it all, the old song continued, and sang out into the dazzling Coruscant night. A calm, bright night filled with food and drink, music, laughter and cheer, and many a raved-about guest appearance at the banquet, including at least a dozen Senators and Representatives from the neutral systems, as well as one or two Jedi Padawans to comment on the war victories. There Garr Broxin would be, bloating his stomach with the delicacies laid out before him, flowing in and out of the chit-chat and the crowds, for everyone was aware he was an entrepeneur of some sort—but nobody wanted to talk about what exactly he was an entrepeneur of. There Garr Broxin would be, waiting for the calm and the bright to all come to one sudden halt. And sparks would fly. A fire ignited.
While miles below, Cad Bane knew Blythe lay on some level of pain in the Number 1 apartment, mumbling to herself or swallowing another handful of pills. She might stare up at the blaster he left behind and hope he would come back as he said he would. She might be remembering things. Who knows? What would happen to her if he never did come back?
This machine that churned in the upper levels of Coruscant—and every other 'non-physical' upper level on any other system—could no longer operate in this way. It would not tonight. Tonight, that was going to change. They would get a taste of the oil that dripped from their mechanical gears onto the levels below. They would see what happens when they supported men like Orett Solarin and Garr Broxin. Bodies thrown upon the gears, upon the wheels, and the apparatus of this machine.
The moment was reminiscent, for Cad Bane, of an earlier time months ago. Force, that would have been way back when he still clung to some level of respect for the Jedi Order, and was still able to look on them with some concept of dignity. Which, he was now certain, had also been burned to death down to the Nal Hutta Hell, buried next to the body of the Jedi Master.
May Garr Broxin lie with it before the sun rose again.
The time for order and plans was not now. Now, chaos was being called for.
Cad Bane could be a catalyst for chaos when the situation called for such measures. No, even better—an agent of chaos.
Behind where he sat in the co-pilot seat of the airspeeder, Aurra Sing's team of recruits fidgeted. One of them, the human who cornered him in the cantina, was gripping her DC-10x sniper rifle as if her life depended on it. Sing herself piloted the airspeeder, staring straight ahead with no exception of remarks, smirks, or glances. Traffic lights and neon beams from the moving billboards were reflected on their newly-cleaned blaster rifles and the thermal detonators across their belts. Cad began stroking his left breathing tube again.
Blythe will be all right, he told himself.
As the illumination banks poured light overhead, Sing landed the airspeeder down on a landing platform below the Galaxies Opera House banquet hall. Darkness suddenly swept them, save for a faint glow from a turbolift on the opposite side of the platform. "Jedi Rocks" shifted into the chorus overhead, and clapping erupted once again from the banquet guests. Two more airspeeders behind Sing's followed her lead. Even before they had touched down, the recruits jumped out and hurried to their positions. The younger and fresher of Sing's team stumbled once or twice, slinging their rifles over their backs and doing their best to steady their breathing. Embo followed last, taking off his shield-hat—probably so as to not be known as associating with this so-called staged terrorist attack—which, on the record, could be a good or bad thing in the long run.
Bane kept his hat on.
Garr Broxin was going to know his killer by name.
Bane looped his thumb under the string of smoke grenades slung over his shoulder, as he pulled out his remaining blaster. He was about to hop out and follow the others, when he heard Sing speak up. Just by the tone of her voice, he knew she was addressing him. He hesitated.
"Chess ko, Bane," she murmured, hands glued to the dashboard.
Good luck.
As Bane jumped out and landed on the platform, he scanned his gaze over hers. The faint sounds of the banquet hummed far above—cheering, laughing, and music, a delightful melody ridden with the smells of wine and most expensive of clothing.
"Don't pretend you care, Slim. It's not good for your health," he said.
"Then maybe you should." Sing's eyes turned to lime-green ice. "I know about the girl. Blythe."
Cad's eyes flickered, but nothing else on his face changed. He couldn't let it.
"I'll see you on the other side." Then Sing, turning away to stare straight ahead, pulled the airspeeder away from the platform. One lone recruit, another sniper, sat behind her. He watched her go, inwardly rounding off the first dozen or so curses that came to mind, to start off.
Blythe. What exactly was Sing threatening? That Blythe wasn't safe?
What did someone like Aurra Sing know about safe, anyway?
"Let's keep moving," Embo muttered in his own tongue.
"The party ain't going nowhere." But Cad Bane walked alongside him as Embo's ear comlink indicated the time was seven minutes after twenty-two hundred hours. The other mercenaries followed behind the two bounty hunters to form a triangular group, approaching the designated turbolift without breaking a stride. The glow of upper-level Coruscant nightlife illuminated their silhouettes. In front of them, none but blackness. In the shadows, they were concealed completely save for the rare glint from a weapon, as well as an ever present pair of glowing red eyes faded in saturation around the edges.
Two Republican guards in front of the turbolift, suddenly wide awake, raised their rifles at the sound of approaching footsteps.
"Halt! Stop!"
"Bang," a young male human whispered, squeezing his smoke grenade.
Embo shot the first. Bane the second. Both guards fell to the ground silently as the echo of the blasts rang throughout the open hangar. There was not so much as another glance towards them as the group walked on, stepping over the bodies. The bomb and detonator specialists, faces hidden by tortilla hats and dark ponchos, entered the turbolift first, followed by the extra rifleman, and finally the two lone veterans. Yet even when the door hissed shut, that music could still be heard from above. That beautiful, well-rehearsed, lighthearted music.
Bane reviewed the schedule mentally. In twenty seconds, Sing and the other sniper would be in position. In forty seconds, the turbolift would stop on the floor of the Opera House's banquet hall.
And, he thought with a growing inward smile, in forty-one seconds...all hell was going to break loose.
Come down to hell with us, where everything burns.
The turbolift gave a slight groan, and then began to rise up through the shaft, humming peacefully. The recruits in the back held still and readjusted their ponchos to better fold over their arms. Two peach-fuzz for extras who were apparently Bane's cover stood behind his shoulders. He could actually hear their shins knock against the inside of their boots, and their slippery fingers coil over the triggers of their weapons. Both were young males, possibly Mandalorian, fresh out of some underground academy or scraped up out of a juvenile detention center—he knew the type. Bane had to wonder if it was Sing or Embo who dared stick them in, but there was no time for that.
He slowly tightened his grip on the cold blaster. Twenty seconds. Aurra was in her position by now, peering at many an offical or VIP through the scope of her DC-16x rifle. The youngest in the group were breathing heavily, swallowing fist-sized lumps in their throats. They looked like explosives themselves that would blast into oblivion if someone so much as tapped their shoulder.
Ten seconds.
Embo, at Bane's side, turned and gave him the slightest glance of acknowledgement. Mercenary to mercenary, as if. But Bane did not return it.
Broxin was here. Kill Garr Broxin. Show his enemies what he was made of. Show what even one man could do when he had seen the things a man like Broxin does.
We are coming for you.
The doors hissed open, the loudest sound they had heard that night. Before them lay a sea of oily laughter, brilliant colors worn in layers by the richest officials, numerous sickly-sweet scents from the tables of food and wine, and the final notes to "Jedi Rocks".
A Republican security staff, who had been stationed in front of the turbolift, turned around and saw them. Then he hesitated in oblivious confusion at the new 'guests' who had just arrived.
One of the lead gunman stabbed him in the solar plexus with a rifle, which wringed out a loud cry of shock and pain. Bane, Embo, and the rest jumped out of the turbolift before the guard had so much as hit the ground and ate a laser bolt to the forehead. But the crowds scattered at the Galaxies Opera House banquet hall could not even turn their heads in the direction of the sudden noise. There was that little time.
The song ended. The smallest silent whisper of a gasp as the guard keeled over and the crowd just began to turn.
Then, the lead detonator specialists tossed back their ponchos, hurtling their smoke grenades in the air towards the right wing. The silent whisper touched the roof of Bane's mouth like a butterfly wing, and his throat went dry.
The first shot fired by one of Sing's recruits. The first smell of burning flesh. The first scream. The first catalyst of what was to become chaos.
And, in light of what it was staged to be, the younger recruits began a furious chant as they ran along the side of the hall, holding out their weapons.
"The Senate is corrupted! The Senate is self-serving! Remember your citizens!" A false cry either Sing or Embo must have come up with before the mission, Bane figured. But how real it sounded.
Another round of grenades were thrown into the crowd, followed by feminine screams from both genders. Explosions ensued that, any stronger, would have rattled Bane's teeth out of his mouth. They were that startling, and yes, chaotic.
As Bane turned, his shoulder brushing Embo's when the detonator specialists raced in front of them, he saw the first official—a disgustingly-obese Togrutan with a velvet purple robe—fall dead.
That was when hell broke loose.
Smoke, putrid pale smoke, jetted into the air, clotting the light from the sun-globes suspended above. Shots penetrated the crowds. Almost instantly following were shrieks of confusion and utter horror. Nothing but those screams filled the air, no longer such a sweet melody. And always, following it, the chant against the Senate.
"The Senate is corrupted! The Senate is self-serving! Remember your citizens!" How real it sounded.
Bane sprinted for the left flank. Blocking his path ahead were dozens of people, runny and jumpy, racing for the exit. He flinched as detonators took out the far corner, destroying the turbolift. Embo, meanwhile, led his team in the opposite direction, as they tossed thermal detonators at the fleeing crowds. An explosion sounded that blew a table piled high with Alderaan, Bothan, and Mandalorian wine to bits. Glass shards were hurtled in all directions. Another explosion shattered the right wing's illumination bank. Staying light on his feet, Bane slank out of one of the smoke grenade fumes and shot at a small cluster of fleeing guests that would have gotten in his way.
The faces of the artificially enraged and half-concealed, and the terrified and pitied, the wounded, the suffocated, and the first round of dead carpeting the ground, flashed around like in that of a drug-induced nightmare. Chaos. Hell. Everything on fire. But it felt good to burn.
Even as Bane, scanning the VIP entrance for the face of Garr Broxin he had studied hours ago, he had to pause, and take in a brief delight.
He smiled at the sound of civilian screams, at the aroma of sweetcakes and Corellian cuisine burning to tasteless ash, at the sight of wine and glass and blood spraying a marble floor once so clean you could see your own reflection. It was too beautiful. The confusion over what the hell was happening. The terror of how is this happening to us, the ignorance of why this is happening to us. It all smelled as sweet to Cad Bane as the fresh air after stepping out of that dump for a slaughterhouse on Ryloth.
As Bane rang alongside the two Mandalorians, who covered him by firing at the stationed Republican guards, he took in a shallow breath through his breathing tubes.
Shit. It smelled so good. He had almost forgotten how much he loved chaos.
No longer a catalyst of it, but an agent. A bearer. A creator.
We are coming for you and your kind, Garr Broxin. We are coming to rattle you out of your money beds and wake you up to a thousand screaming faces. We will no longer take part in this cat-and-mouse hunt you treat as a game. Our only audience is ourselves. Our only goal is to prevent your little machine from working at all. We will simply stand back and ask you how it feels to be the one burning.
For the second and last time, Cad Bane wanted to see what it was like to make a kill out of vengeance. A beautiful, sweet vengeance.
"The Senate is corrupted! The Senate is self-serving! Remember your citizens!" the recruits cried. This time, the chant was spread out among both the left and right wings of the banquet hall. It was as if the crowds were being surrounded by it.
A heavily-clothed Pantoran woman, at least a foot shorter than Bane, leaped out into his path. In an attempt to escape the smoke and main source of destruction in the hall, she had separated from her associates. Her ten or so layers of jewelry jingled and tingled like goddamn music. Her face was plastered with makeup that complimented her natural beauty.
She looked up and saw the Duros bounty hunter with the wide-brimmed hat, and she let out a raw cry of fear.
Still smiling, Bane snatched her by a handful of her jewelry, then coiled his fingers around her throat. He clenched his jaw and slowly curled his upper lip, revealing a dark yellow fang. Her big, round, doll-like eyes stared up at him, horrified.
"What's de' matter, pretty-face?" he snarled, holding up his blaster in his other hand, as his gaze turned cold. "Never seen a dead body before? Hm? Never smelled it?"
Too exhilerated by other ideas of kill, Bane threw her to the ground and lazily shot her in the head. She gave a little twitch and nothing more.
Find Garr Broxin. Kill Garr Broxin. Kill.
Foreign shots—from weapons he was certain none of them had brought with—filled the air. One of the poncho-dressed figures was hit in the back. The two Mandalorians disappeared in the smoke and faded in with Sing's team, leaving Bane out in the open and surrounded by the shrieks of the crowd that scattered like terrified red ants. His head swam but for now the headache would be merciful, and left him in an underwater dance submerged in blood. Not that he minded. No, he'd rather take Broxin all to himself. Sharing was never fun. He shot a haggled, bruised, and bloody officer in the chest as he fumbled for his weapon. Then a straggler, an escort of some sort who almost barreled right into Bane's side in the rush.
"The Senate is corrupted! The Senate is self-serving! Remember your citizens!"
Yes. It smelled so good. So good, and sweet...
"Bane. Bane, come in."
From the comlink on his wrist gauntlet, Aurra Sing's voice crackled. Bane, ducking his head to avoid another round of shots from the guards, slipped behind a table that had been toppled over. In a split second he realized he had knelt down in a colorful rainbow mess of spoiled rich food, still steaming. Some unlucky Ithorian's scattered brains had landed in the Orange-Madeira sauce—my, what a shame.
"Come in, Bane!"
Sing sounded as if she had just been shot.
"Talk to me," Bane hissed, pulling down on the rim of his hat. Three detonators—one, two...and three—rattled the left wing, further driving the remaining crowd into a series of terrified squeals.
Black smoke suffocated the last of the sun-globes. Arms of fire were already raging not too far from the turbolift. Some guest with a high-pitched voice was being burned alive, writhing on the marble floor.
"Broxin's not here. He's not here."
"What...?"
No Broxin? The fuck—
Security sirens began to wail in the distance, as a trio of GAR skyhoppers appeared around the bend.
"The Senate is corrupted! The Senate is—"
"Broxin cancelled his appearance at the banquet. He's not here."
I'm not going to believe that...
And something snapped inside Cad Bane.
"You said he would be here," he muttered dryly into the comlink, flinching as another table was toppled over in the hellish scramble. "You said he'd be at the banquet, he was going to be here, he's the only reason we came at all. No, he is here. He had to be here."
"Goddamnit, Bane, a hologram message was just hacked back at the hangar. Broxin canceled his appearance and left two hours ago." She hesiated, probably to fire her rifle—for an instant he shut his eyes and pictured her talking to him, staring into the scope as she picked off stragglers and officers. "Bane, you have to find Embo. You have to get out of there. Right now."
But that's the thing about chaos. Once you let it off the leash, it was impossible to stop it, or hinder it, or so much as keep up. You don't 'back away' from chaos. You just stand back and watch the world burn. Maybe even catch on fire yourself.
Then, Bane heard the sound that, in the back of his mind, he had been expecting to hear all the while. It was a sharp hiss, followed by a shrill hum that cut through the air not even from five yards away. A youth's scream followed—one of Sing's fresh recruits.
A lightsaber. The Jedi guests had finally arrived.
Jedi—a word as disgusting as Broxin's very name.
Again, it was as if Sing read his thoughts.
"Go for it," she said. "Broxin's off the menu. Jedi is on."
"Steel unload, final blow
Filthy animals beat them low!
Skin and bone, black and blue
No more the sun shall beat onto you!"
-Linkin Park, "Wretches and Kings"