Star Wars Infinities: The Warrior
By Christopher W. Blaine (darth_yoshi@yahoo.com)
DISCLAIMER: The characters and situations contained in this story are ©2002 by George Lucas and are used herein without permission for fan-related, non-profit entertainment purposes only. This original work of fiction is ©2002 by Christopher W. Blaine and may not be reproduced in part or as a whole without the express permission of the author.
CHAPTER 1
The Corellian sat back, watching the cantina from behind a mug of ale. It was flat, but one didn't expect quality liquor from a hole in the wall such as this. You didn't come to this place to drink; you came not to be noticed. Finishing the drink, he motioned to the waitress, a pretty young thing who would be old before her time if she stayed on Tatooine, to bring him another.
His partner came across the floor, two figures in tow. No doubt these were the people who were looking for transport off of this rock and if the pilot was lucky, he's make just enough money to get Black Sun off of his back. It was funny that he was here of all places, the former Imperial proving grounds, especially when it was the Imperials he also hoped to avoid. There was that little business about the death warrant on him.
The planet had pretty much reverted to the dustball it had been prior to the Empire, prior to the day when Lord Vader had assumed control of the world after killing Jabba the Hutt. After that, Moff Tarkin had transformed it into a weapons development area. The entire system had been off limits for over a decade and then suddenly, two years ago, that changed.
If the Empire had ever been here in force, it didn't show. It was almost as if an entire world of stormtroopers and guys in funny green uniforms had been put into one big ship and flown away. There were rumors, of course, about secret experiments and moons that never set, but there was no hard evidence. The pilot figured it was a training base for desert combat soldiers and it just became too expensive to keep shipping supplies out here.
Like armored rats drawn to a corpse, the scum of the universe had raced back to Tatooine, a home away from home. The formal government even closed down and went away. It didn't matter much; without military money flowing in, the planet couldn't survive without crime.
Which brought the pilot, his partner and their battered old freighter here, looking for any kind of cargo they could find. Word was that there were several hidden caches of Imperial weapons all over the Dune Sea and the growing rebellion against the New Order was hot to buy them. Of course, they said that the spirit of Darth Maul paced through the desert at night as well.
The waitress dropped off the drink, along with a note with directions to her flat. The pilot grinned and gave her a wink. If he was lucky, he could drop by before having to leave. If not, then he'd drop her an electronic note so she wouldn't think he wasn't interested. He took another look at her was she walked away and figured she should be at home with her parents.
Tatooine, however, was not the place to suddenly develop morals.
His partner eased into the seat beside him and grabbed his drink. The pilot gave him a wary look and then turned his attention to the two persons seated in front of him. One was a middle-aged man, with a gray beard and clad in a brown desert cloak. Next to him was a much younger man, probably not much older than the waitress the pilot hoped to bed. "My partner tells me you're looking for transport off of Tatooine."
"Yes," the older man said, keeping his hood up. The younger one kept looking around, trying to see if anyone was watching them. The pilot noted the boy's eyes and saw that he was doing his best not to look scared. He also noted that both men kept their hands below the table. "We would like to arrange for transport to Corellia and would like to avoid any Imperial entanglements."
The pilot leaned in close, casually dropping his hand down to the blaster on his hip. "That's the real ticket, isn't it? I mean, anyone can get transport to the Core, but avoiding the Imperial patrols takes some doing? Let me ask you, what's so important that you want to get back home?"
The older man didn't bother to look surprised. "I take it our accents gave us away?"
The pilot shrugged it off, indicating that it didn't really matter to him where they were from. "All I care about is the payment."
"We can provide two thousand now, plus fifteen once we reach Corellia," the older man said. The pilot's partner kicked him in the shin. It was a good deal provided that the couple could actually pay once they got to Corellia. More than once the pilot had been the victim of a dishonored contract.
"Seventeen, eh?" the pilot remarked, scratching at his beard stubble. "Okay, you've got transport."
The older man nodded. "Where and when do we meet?"
"Docking bay 94 in two hours; don't be late. The sooner we're off the planet, the sooner we can get by the Imperial patrols." That wasn't exactly a true statement as there were no Imperial ships in the Tatooine system any longer, but you never knew when you might come across a roaming corvette or star destroyer.
The pilot noted that the boy was eyeing him very carefully, but decided not to say anything about it. He supposed that the younger man had the right to be suspicious, considering that his partner had just placed their lives in the hands of someone with a death warrant on their head. "We'll be there; are Imperial credits sufficient or do you prefer Corporate Sector vouchers?"
The pilot's partner's eyebrows twitched slightly. Something wasn't quite right about this. If the old man had access to Corporate Sector vouchers all the way out here in the boonies of the galaxy, then they were much more than simple travelers. "We'll take the vouchers," the pilot responded. They could drop the profits, after they paid Xizor, the head of Black Sun, into their accounts in the CSA, where they would draw more interest than in a standard Imperial bank. Trying to convert from Imp Script would require payment of a healthy fee, so the vouchers made the most sense.
The two passengers nodded together and stood up, pulling their robes around themselves as they left. The pilot watched them go and as soon as they were out of earshot, he turned to his partner. "Where did you find these two, Lando?"
The handsome, dark-skinned man flashed a million credit grin. "They found me, I swear! I was just standing at the bar, trying to find out of there was any local sabbac action…"
The pilot shook his head. "That's what put us in debt to Xizor in the first place! You and your damn sabbac!"
"That game was rigged!" Lando offered in protest. "There was no way that senator could have won!"
"You should have known better than to sit down at a game with someone who Xizor is patronizing!"
"Aw, you're just mad because you can't play worth a…"
"Get back to the story," the pilot said, cutting his friend off. "You say they came up to you?"
Lando nodded. "Asked me if I was a pilot and I gave them the sales pitch. I didn't even have to haggle or anything." Lando turned and motioned for a drink. "You know," he said returning back to conversation, "this will give us more than enough money to cover our debt to Black Sun…"
"Your debt."
Lando's smile never faltered. "Our debt, need I remind you this is a partnership?"
The pilot sighed and rolled his eyes. "Fine; if it's a partnership, then you go and prep the Outrider."
The barmaid put Lando's drink on the table and walked off. "Come on, Dash; you know that will take over an hour by myself."
Dash watched the waitress saunter off. "Yep, well I fly the ship remember?"
"A ship I bought…"
"With my money…"
"That I won in a sabbac game…"
"That was rigged! You cheated and you know it," Dash said. Lando started to speak, but thought better of it. It was the truth, but the circumstances had been accidental, not intentional. "Just get the ship warmed up; I have some business to attend to."
Lando saw where his gaze went to. "A little young don't you think?"
"Not to me; maybe to you, old man, but then you always did go for the geriatric crowd." He put a hand on Lando's arm. "Believe me, she is old enough; the pretty ones just like me more."
"Must be your child-like demeanor," Lando chided as he stood up. "Don't be late; we really need these credits." Dash didn't reply and instead finished Lando's drink as his friend exited the cantina. He took a deep breath and stood up. He straightened his gun belt and started to head over to the waitress, coming up with a story to hurry their encounter.
A Rodian stepped in front of him with a blaster and poked him in the chest. It spoke to him in accented Huttese. "Going somewhere, Rendar?"
Dash slowly sat back down, unclasping the restraint over his weapon as he did. "Hello, Greedo, how's it going?"
"You have a price on your head, Rendar; an Imperial death warrant worth fifty thousand credits," the alien said. Dash looked uninterested but kept an eye on Greedo's trigger finger. Rodian's were hard to read with their long snouts and large eyes, devoid of pupils.
"You know, you can just walk away from this. Real bounty hunters have come after me and failed." He moved his non-gun hand up to the wall, where he pretended to pick at something stuck there.
"I am a real bounty hunter, you mercenary scum. You deserted from the Imperial army, they don't take kindly to that. You're also suspected of having rebel sympathies. Nobody would blame me for putting a hole in you right here." Greedo chuckled as he spoke what he thought would be the obituary for his quarry. "When you get to hell, tell them I sent you."
Dash threw him a Corellian curse and pulled the trigger on his own blaster. The coherent light beam blew through the table top and punched into Greedo's chest. Charred heart and lung material blasted out the alien's back and showered onto a drunk pair of Jawas. As Greedo fell dead, Dash slowly stood up. The waitress ran over, as did the barkeep.
Dash grabbed the girl by the hand and threw the owner a bag of solid credits. "Sorry about the mess."
The barkeep opened the bag and looked inside. Satisfied, he shrugged and barked some orders to the bouncers while Dash and the waitress exited the cantina.
The lone warrior stood at the gate to the landing pad and stared out at the Lambda-Class shuttle that sat there under heavy guard. Twelve armed stormtroopers, the white-armored elite soldiers of the Empire, guarded a tight perimeter, surrounding the warrior's only hope of escape.
His mother laid a hand on his shoulder, but he did not turn. She was, in theory, the warden of this prison facility, yet she was as much a prisoner as the political dissidents that Emperor Palpatine placed here. Dathomir was a planet far away from anything, a lush jungle world that had never been formally settled by any civilization.
The native species were mostly reptilian and the humans that were considered indigenous were really the descendants of dark Jedi refugees. That only accounted for half of his heritage. His mother, Gethzerion, was the most powerful Nightsister on the world, the official representative of the witch clans before the Emperor. His father, however, had been a powerful Dark Lord of the Sith.
Darth Maul.
Malakie shook his head at the futility of his existence. He was the inheritor of the title that his father had once possessed; yet he was exiled to this world because Palpatine feared the power of the Nightsisters. At the same time, they were allies that he could not afford to lose either. So, he and his mother's people were regaled to glorified prison guard duty while the warships of Admiral Zsinj's stood protective watch in orbit, preventing Malakie from simply taking the shuttle and going in search of his destiny.
"Your thoughts form a dark cloud over you, my son," Gethzerion said. He turned to regard her and felt his heart sicken at the sight of her. Once, she had been a woman of great beauty. So fair was she to gaze upon that she was able to seduce a Dark Lord. The years of constant exposure to the power of the Dark Side had eaten her away from the inside out. Smooth skin had pruned and exotic eyes had sunken to become dark orbs.
Malakie was fortunate that he had his father's alien blood running though his veins, for it granted him the constitution to not only withstand the Dark Side power he possessed, but it also made him physically stronger than the average human. He looked very human except for the blood red iris's that gave him his unique beauty. His white hair, a gift from his mother, was pulled back into a long ponytail and allowed to hang over his black robes, another gift.
"What would you expect of me, mother? You promised me that one day I would be taken before Palpatine to assume my father's place. Yet, here I stand in the rain watching as inferior beings deny me my birthright." He turned his gaze back to the stormtroopers. It would be so easy to kill them, but once he did, then what? He did not know how to pilot a shuttle and even if he did, he had no chance of getting through the naval blockade. "I have no place in this universe so long as I stay here on this wretched planet."
"You need to have patience, my son, for your time draws near," Gethzerion said in a soothing voice.
"My time should be now," was the quick reply. "Patience is the credo of the Jedi; patience becomes complacency which leads to weakness. Weakness leads to decimation."
"You quote the teachings of the Sith quite well, as always," Gethzerion complimented.
"We only had one holochip that referenced the Sith at all," he said, recalling his early education. Gethzerion had secured several holochips of Jedi teachings that had come from a wrecked starship in the swamps. Malakie had found most of the lessons boring, except those that taught offensive skills. Through the whole of the lessons, however, the holographic instructor had warned of the Dark Side and the dangers that lay in following its path.
Malakie had forsaken the lessons several years prior and had instead worked on developing his own Force-techniques. Because he had no worthy opponents, he had no way of verifying whether or not he had been successful. "It is my own philosophy, mother."
"You sound so much like your father," she lamented. He thought of reminding her that her relationship with Darth Maul had lasted only one night and he had left without a second thought the next morning. He didn't though as he understood that his mother had truly loved his father even if the feelings were never returned. When she spoke like this, he knew she was speaking more from wishful thinking than anything else. "He would be proud of you."
"He would call me a failure for not taking matters into my own hands. One does not become a Dark Lord by waiting for destiny to come to you. A Dark Lord must be willing to seize the galaxy by the throat and squeeze it into submission." He turned completely around and the flashing lightning only served to make his red eyes stand out from under his hood. "I do not wish to go before Palpatine as a simple jungle-bred fool. I need to be trained properly in the Sith arts."
Gethzerion spread her hands. "How? Where would you find a master to apprentice to? Palpatine has an apprentice already, Darth Deceptra."
"That bitch…she was a party to my father's murder, I know it," Malakie said in disgust. The official story was that Darth Maul and Darth Vader, Maul's apprentice, had died battling the Jedi on Korriban. Only Vader's apprentice, the former Padme Amidala Skywalker, had survived to inform the Emperor of the demise of his two most loyal subjects. Shortly afterwards, the bride of Darth Vader had been elevated to the status of Dark Apprentice, though she was most often referred to as a Dark Lady of the Sith.
Malakie had always suspected that Deceptra had engineered Maul's death so that she could take his place next to Palpatine. Even her marriage to Vader had been a sham, if the rumors the Imperial officers within the prison facility were true. It was said that she shared the bed of Palpatine on the colder Imperial Center nights. Some even said that her son, Luke Skywalker, the so-called Emperor's Fist, was really the fruit of Palpatine's labors and not Vader's.
"Regardless, she is the Dark Apprentice and unless she is removed, then you have no master," Gethzerion said matter-of-factly. "Come, let us go in where it is warm; my old bones do not care for these rainy nights."
"Even if I did eliminate Deceptra, her son would move into the coveted position," Malakie said, not moving from the spot he been standing in for hours. "I think that perhaps the adage of 'one master, one apprentice' is outdated."
Gethzerion shook a finger at him. "You're father did not think so! You speak just like Palpatine…"
"How would you know, mother? How many times has Palpatine deemed you worthy to even speak to? He directs you through his Admiral's and adjutants." Malakie closed his eyes and swallowed his anger. His mother was only trying to show him the true path of the Sith as it had been handed down over the centuries. The problem was that the Nightsisters had been formed by dark and fallen Jedi, not true Sith and so their perceptions of the Dark Side were awry. "The tradition was established, I believe, because the ranks of the Sith had been thinned by constant in-fighting. By having only two persons in charge, it made it easier to control the Sith."
"It made it easier for them to hide from the Jedi, you mean," she retorted. She flashed him a jagged smile of yellowed teeth. "You are such a thinker; how I had such high hopes for you. You are right, perhaps patience is not what we should have. Perhaps it is time that the two of us took our leave of this world."
Malakie threw his head back in mirth. "How, mother? How do you propose that we leave this place? Use the Force to float away on dark hopes and black dreams?"
"We will take the shuttle and we will use the Force to make them let us through the blockade."
Malakie shook his head. "I have thought of that, mother; I do not believe either one of us is strong enough to influence the mind of Admiral Zsinj. He is a competent and greedy officer who wishes to remain in Palpatine's good graces. He would shoot us from the sky before I could ever hope to influence his mind."
"You will influence it from here, then," she snapped. "You speak about power, so show me what real power you have. Believe me when I say that distance is not a factor when you are using the Force, my son. If you are truly the heir to Darth Maul's title, then you should be able to do it."
Malakie was taken slightly aback by his mother's pronouncements, but he knew that she spoke true. He could feel the small tendrils in the Force that Palpatine sent out to his various commanders, unifying them in a sort of hive-mind. Great was Palpatine's control over the Force, but it was tied to his overblown ego. In truth, Malakie despised Palpatine for what he saw as the ultimate betrayal: bedding the killer of Darth Maul.
Given the chance, Malakie would plunge a dagger into Palpatine's chest and would seat himself upon the throne of the galaxy.
Gethzerion saw the glimmer in her son's eyes and realized that the plan she had spoken of was now beginning to come together. The voice that had spoken to her, the voice of the long-dead Sith Lord Exar Kunn, had told her what she needed to do. Kunn required an apprentice who would not only carry on his name, but help him find a suitable container to hold his spirit so that he may walk again with mankind. In exchange, he promised to train her son and grant her the youth that had been stolen from her by her inadequate frame.
Malakie nodded. "A worthy challenge to my abilities, mother, and right you are to give it to me. If I cannot get us off the planet by my will alone, what right do I have to believe I could rule the galaxy?"
She reached out her hand and for the first time in many months, he took it. She led him back into the warmth of the prison. "Yes; we will make haste to leave this place and perhaps I will find you a master worthy of training you."
He smiled, perfect teeth glistening in the artificial light of the passageway. His good looks had garnered him the favors of most of the warrior witches in the prison and all of the female Imperial clerks assigned to Dathomir. "Something tells me that you have done more than just listen to my complaining, mother; have you been visiting the Imperial prison library?"
It was a foolish notion, of course; Gethzerion could not read Basic, but she went along with the ruse for now. "Or something like that. Regardless, my son, you get us away from here quietly and in secret, like a true Sith, and I will take care of the rest."
She cackled. "After all, have I not always taken care of you?"
