"I had very little time," Bevel explained as they retraced Giran's steps back to the sublevel turbolift. "Whatever our prey is after, it's on Torque Highport. That's all I was able to extract from Lannik Mai."
"We've stumbled on something grave indeed," said Giran, almost to himself. "The Republic's only begun its incursion, but their spies have already penetrated deep enough to target a sector capital."
"Our continued trade with the Hutts is to blame. Those hyperroutes are not secure—an oversight that will be corrected soon, if our betters have any sense."
Giran frowned at the flippancy of that remark; any Sith who spoke that way in front of Headmaster Hoctu—or, Force forbid, the Exile herself—would be risking his life.
The actual point, however, did have some merit. After the Jedi Civil War, Revan's quarreling would-be successors had whittled her Empire down to a scant few sectors in the far Outer Rim. Meanwhile the Republic, itself having barely survived, hoped to starve its enemy with embargos. No spacer using a Republic-controlled hyperroute was allowed to travel to a Sith world for any reason, let alone for commerce or trade. The Remnant, in turn, kept its own borders with the Republic tightly controlled and monitored.
But southeast halfway down the galactic disk, the region of Hutt Space remained a major trade partner of the Sith Remnant—its sole one—linked by a tangle of hyperroutes that spanned the many independent worlds between them. This decade-long arrangement proved adequate, providing the Remnant with cheap goods and raw materials, not to mention slaves. But the lords of Hutt Space were vile, lawless creatures, and the smugglers, pirates, mercenaries, and other hirelings they employed were even baser and more deplorable.
Evidently the Dark Lords of the Sith, from Traya down to her last student, the Exile, had judged the Remnant's economic survival worth the price of allowing some rabble into their borders. After all, it was not as if there was no sizeable criminal element there to begin with. That agents of the Republic would make use of the same routes of entry as the Hutt-sponsored shipping, however, was clearly more than could be tolerated.
Yet even for all that, Giran was far more interested in discussing his prey. "At least two of them are Jedi," he explained when his companion asked how they had escaped. "At any rate, they had Jedi training. One of them, the girl, I saw her using a lightsaber to cut through a door."
"To cut through a door?" echoed Bevel. "Rather than fighting you with it?"
"Peculiar, yes. But I grew up among the Jedi, and I helped hunt them down during the Purge. The Force was within her, and she felt like one of them."
"Why did you not kill her?"
Giran scowled and brought a hand to the freshly-closed wound in his left forearm, which still occasionally announced itself with a sizzle of pain. Sith healing techniques left much to be desired. "One of her companions delayed me. He was a slippery one, more dangerous than he appeared at first. He had the Force too, but hid his training until the last moment. Caught me off-guard."
Bevel made no comment as they found and entered the turbolift.
"Lannik Mai and his late partner are of little consequence," Giran added, firming his jaw. "These ones, however—we must try to take one of them alive, if possible. No doubt the information you rip from them will prove much more interesting."
"Most likely. Did you see their ship?"
"Yes. A light stock freighter of some kind. Not sure of the class, but I would recognize it if I saw it again."
Nearly an hour had passed since Giran had descended to the labyrinthine sublevel to rendezvous with his partner. Upon returning to the main level, they found that Telthek Nest appeared to be deserted. Signs continued to glitter and flash in the wide concourses, but the storefront doors were all sealed and the only stragglers in sight were oblivious advertising droids. A stream of some boorish, ugly kind of music came from overhead speakers; Giran hadn't noticed it when the crowd was present.
Bevel's wristcomp repeatedly chimed with reports from his trio of seeker droids. Bits of holofeed footage showed bodies strewn about the tertiary docking bay corridors. From the looks of things, most of the rabble visiting Telthek Nest had made it back to their ships and left. Perhaps Kolzaar had decided he'd lost enough minions and simply let them go. From the fact that none of the mercenaries remained in the halls, it seemed likely they were holed up with their employer in some secure part of the shadowport. Giran made a mental note to contact the local garrison, as he had threatened to. Let the common soldiers deal with these common vermin.
Docking Bay 13 was deserted and, apart from the closed bay doors, seemed to be quite as they had left it. Giran's starship, the Dreamsnake, was an Arakyd-designed modern star courier. With segmented starfoils folded tight against its narrow, dagger-shaped fuselage like the wings of a Bacian bloodhornet, it looked swift and deadly, and was a design favored by Jedi and Sith alike since before the time of Revan's war.
Case in point, resting on its landing gear beside the Dreamsnake was a craft of the same class. The two were not twins, however; Bevel's Havazo One had a rugged and more ponderous appearance, with extra plates of quadanium-reinforced armor sheathing its main hull, and additional modules protruding near the stern like boxy tumors. Since Bevel's preferred mission profile seemed to be geared toward long-term solo assignments, Giran supposed the craft's modifications were suited to such.
The seeker droids floated ahead of them and weaved like Corellian wine-bees about the two ships, scanning for signs of tampering and chattering amongst themselves. Meanwhile the fingers of Bevel's left hand danced across his wristcomp, keying in the coded signal to unlock Havazo One's boarding ramp. As it did so, a smaller slotted compartment opened in the star courier's belly, and the droids began to file inside—except for one which paused a meter away, emitting a shrill tone that echoed through the hangar.
Bevel stepped beside the dismayed droid, his eyes zigzagging their way down the starboard side of Havazo One's hull. Keeping a hand close to his lightsaber, Giran moved to catch up and sharpened his Force sense, but felt nothing out of place.
The wound in his arm flared again, craving a kolto patch, and his patience thinned. "What is it? What's the matter?"
Mumbling under his breath, Bevel shed his outer cloak, dropped to his knees, and rolled into the narrow space between the ship and the hangar floor. Half-hidden by the joint of a folded starfoil, he seemed fixated on a rectangular gadget mounted on the edge of its underside. Slightly larger than a toolbox, it was rather unremarkable except that its color, a dull brown, clashed with the steely gray of the rest of Havazo One.
Giran's face spasmed with dismay. "A bomb!"
"Merr-Sonn Munitions, Onith-series TD5 det-charge. Thorium-based," his partner specified, tracing one of the metal box's edges with a finger.
"Thorium?!" Out of the litany of jargon that Bevel had just spouted, that word was the only one that meant anything to Giran—but it meant more than enough to make up for the rest.
With unconcerned speed, Bevel's hands went to his belt and came away with a micro-probe and a guided autowrench—specialized tools that Giran rarely if ever used. "Timed detonation, magna-locked to the hull. I'll have to disarm it."
"What about my ship's hull?!"
There was a tinny pop as Bevel worked a section of the bomb's casing loose. Even as he peered into the exposed circuitry by way of the micro-probe's illuminator, he replied, "One charge this size will be enough for both ships. Besides, if there was another one, the droids would've spotted it."
Irrationally, Giran took a step back, as if that would do him any good in the event of a detonation. His eyes darted about between the imperiled ships and the rest of the hangar, and new anger blazed within. After all the supposedly hardened killers he had struck down in this place, the inhabitants of Telthek Nest were still determined, in their crude and bumbling way, to contend with the Sith.
Vaguely, however, Giran was aware that some of his ire was directed toward Bevel as well. The way the man remained so calm, even glib, while probing the insides of a device which could reduce them both to less than ash in under a nanosecond… Having seen his share of combat, Giran respected a man who could face danger or even death without fear—and from a fellow Sith he expected no less—but somehow he found his partner's manner infuriating.
Without taking an eye off his work, Bevel added, "The bay doors are still closed. You should be able to open them from up in that control room…"
Give me an errand to go on, will you? Giran thought scathingly—but at the same time he felt charged with an urgent need to do something, even just move, and moving even a slight distance away from the live explosive was not something he could find it within himself to object to. "I'll be back," he said, reining in his anger, and started for the little stairway leading up to the control room.
A moment later he returned, and his temper with him. As he neared, his partner was just starting to roll out from under the folded starfoil. "The bay door controls are locked. I can't—"
"RUN!"
Bevel Zanatsu's seemingly implacable calm was nowhere in his tone now; notwithstanding, the Near-Human retained his usual eerie grace as he scooped up his discarded cloak and sprang to his feet. Whipping around, Giran sprinted alongside him, using the Force to reach ahead to the hangar exit, which had closed behind them. Servomechanisms squealed as the door was thrust into its alcove. Side by side, the pair burst out into the hall, slowing only just enough to turn the corner.
The explosion lifted both men off their feet. Ahead, Giran saw his shadow and Bevel's, painted black and sharp against a wall that now glowed a magnificent, fiery gold.
