Maul saw the likely cause of Kasen's charity as soon as he walked onto the small ship. It was a freighter, cross-shaped, with the bridge before and the ramp behind, living facilities on one side and storage on the other. It was remarkably plain. Like nearly everything else that Maul had seen since the sides of the jail ship came into view, it was dull brown in color.

The inside, though, was a chaos of red and blue decorations that appeared to have a religious significance. A tapestry of a six-armed, dragon-headed goddess was hung on one wall above a rickety table holding candles and beads set on top of a thin, gold-flecked, dark green cloth.

Kasen just glanced at it as Maul walked in. "You'll be bunking in the living room. The couch has seen better days, but, I gather so have you."

Maul felt like he should be putting a bag down, but he had nothing. He also felt like he should be killing this woman, attacking her and taking her ship the instant the launch codes had been typed in - but why? Maul was so used to secrecy because Sidious' life was secret. Maul's did not have to be. He had gained a certain measure of notoriety among the Mandalorians and the Death Watch, but that conflict, as massive in scope as it had seemed to Obi-Wan Kenobi and the others involved, had been tiny on the galactic scale and only affected a certain demographic of people. Maul knew that the galaxy at large confused Death Watch with Mandalorians or the other way around and probably couldn't name anything about either except that they had once, and perhaps did not any more, wear functional armor.

Kasen was not a liability because there was no one for her to tell anything to. Sidious clearly did not care whether Maul lived or died. Maul wouldn't have been entirely surprised or unsatisfied if Sidious, in the tradition of the Sith, had wanted his once-apprentice dead, but the Sith Lord had shown his apathy to be even greater than that on the jail ship. Sidious truly didn't differentiate, or he would have killed Maul himself instead of tossing him into a situation that was as likely to end in chaos and death on the jail ship than in Maul's immediate demise.

What a gulfing apathy that would be. All that Sith power and planning. Sidious planned everything. There had never been any room in that dejarik-master brain to not care about something.

Until now.

That fact worried Maul more and more as he stopped pushing back at it, as he looked into the empty space between two of the dragon goddess's upraised arms.

"Have you heard of Ralima?" Kasen said.

Maul shook his head.

"Kriffing good goddess she is. Doesn't outlaw anything that isn't wrong. She doesn't have her eye turned to one kriffing mining planet right now though." She sighed.

"She doesn't mind you swearing, does she?"

Kasen laughed in a short burst. "I'm not karking taking her name in vain. Those other words belong to somebody else."

Maul nodded. "I see."

"Settle down. The bridge isn't big enough for two. Put the transceiver on if you want. There's probably somebody screaming about InterGalactic Ore that has some interesting analysis." She turned away to head to the bridge. The small door leading in that direction was draped with rust-red beads that looked like the same kind as on the alter.

"You said you wanted me to do something for you in return."

Kasen stopped, turned half way away. "Yeah. I'll figure it out. It takes, what, two days to get to Orsis?" She let the silence linger for just two heartbeats before giving a stronger indication that she wanted actual feedback from Maul. She, Maul realized, assumed that the Zabrak knew where he was going. "What?"

"Two days," Maul parroted. That sounded right.

He would need to kill something after this. The lack of direction was beginning to infect him. Soon his thoughts would get fuzzy and all he would be able to do was parrot.

Until he had a mission again. Whether that mission lasted for months or weeks or the time it took to fight a wild beast away from his throat didn't matter.

"I'll figure it out," Kasen said.

As it turned out, Kasen did figure it out. She had not been exaggerating about putting her passenger to work washing the dishes: her food processor, she said, had broken a long time ago, so the galley was primitive. She had a sonic scrubber but no dish washer, so Maul hosed down the dirtied dishes after the five fully-home-made meals they had together. The trip did indeed take two days. Kasen's eating schedule was almost like clockwork, except that on the second day she slept in, seemingly having over the one night previous gained the confidence to believe that her guest would not murder her in her sleep.

Kasen prayed once a day, in the evening, casually pushing the rickety alter aside (it looked like it had been set up on a sabacc table that had not been intended for use on a spaceship - most of her furniture was, unusually, not bolted down - ) and opening a drawer at the base of the Ralima statue. From the drawer she took a small, dedicated datapad and meditated on the text within. The meditations were short, lasting no more than a few seconds. Maul was still curling his lip at them by the time the ship began orbiting Orsis.

Throughout the trip, Kasen talked almost constantly, but said remarkably little about her own past. She said in passing that she had a sister, and also referred to going home to see her family for a week-long holiday that Maul had never heard mentioned before. Other than that, her conversations were mostly about the Orsis-Bandomeer situation and how it affected InterGalactic Ore's various other holdings and her own business.

The ship didn't appear to have any mining equipment on it, or space for such. The engines rumbled nearby as Maul slept on the couch just to the side of the statue of Ralima, and the section where Kasen slept was, if Maul's assessment of the ship's size from the outside had been correct, a space hardly larger than a couch itself, located on the opposite side of the kitchen.

During the days Kasen listened to the transmissions she had talked about, although in hyperspace she had to make do with recorded ones that would be a day or two out of date now. She seemed to live, breathe, and eat the idea of mining without actually doing any. Nor was it an academic interest: Kasen was more likely to rattle off a list of types of ore and what machines were used to dig them up than to talk about the socio-political factors among the people and businesses that used Bandomeer's soil. Kasen thought about the planet before the people, but not in an environmentalist way. She had the mind of someone who worked with her hands, not a pundit.

On the other hand, she didn't seem to be affiliated with any company or to have a job that she found worth talking about. She didn't even complain about her circumstances specifically, although once Maul found her muttering about what it cost to put fuel in the tanks. Maybe Ralima was one of those deities that encouraged helping others at the expense of oneself.

Kasen hadn't seemed to notice that Maul had mechanical limbs, or if so, hadn't mentioned it. It wasn't an unusual thing to have prosthetic legs, not even two, especially among a society in which a lot of people worked for industries involving human interaction with large, dangerous, low-tech machinery. The fact that the prosthetic extended up past Maul's hips was unusual, but Kasen never found herself in a circumstance where she would notice that.

Maul finally brought Kasen's occupation up as a conversation topic one day when the human was sitting a pillow she had taken from the couch, sipping from a cup of caf on the evening of the first day.

Maul was sitting on the couch. He had stayed there for most of the trip, sometimes meditating and sometimes also listening to the transmissions that so entertained Kasen, pretending that he understood more than he did and learning what he could.

"It doesn't look like you could mine much using this ship," Maul said.

"I used to be a miner," Kasen replied. "Back then I had a bigger ship. But I sold it. I kriffing told you, ExtraGalactic Ore bought out all the little guys."

She hadn't told him that in such precise terms, but Maul nodded.

"I'm between jobs now. I pick up freelance things here and there but everything's either taken by droids or somebody's nephew or InterGalactic's crack team of Being Resources barves. They've got excluding honest workers down to a science."

"Do you have a family?"

"My daughter is in school on Alderaan. My son lives with his father."

The intricacies of divorce were of profound disinterest to Maul; he had simply wanted to know exactly how desperate Kasen was. Not desperate enough to not go out of her way for a lost traveller, apparently, maybe because she only had one mouth to feed most of the time.

There was a silence that could have been interpreted as awkward if either one of them had shown more interest in continuing the discussion. Kasen did, but with an air of boredom. "What about you? Family?"

Maul shook his head.

"And..."

Maul shrugged.

Kasen narrowed her eyes again. She was suspicious of Maul's label as 'mercenary,' he knew.

However, she had let Maul carry a blaster into his ship. Maul had barely thought about that until he was lying awake, sensing that Kasen was asleep in the other room, and he had put the blaster under the alter to the goddess just to have somewhere to set it that wasn't out in the crowded open. Kasen didn't seem to have a weapon. Maybe she couldn't afford one.

They still had this cordial standoffishness between them when Kasen brought the ship out of hyperspace and into a low orbit around the planet Orsis. The surface of the planet had more varied shapes and colors than Maul had expected, although he remembered such varied areas as jungles, lava plains, and ocean shores from during his time training there. The planet had scattered continents, with the largest showing a blob of green forest next to a similar-sized blob of brown desert.

"Where exactly to you want to go on this kriffing lump of dirt?" Kasen said. She had been looking around nervously at the stars, and as Maul edged into the crowded bridge he saw why. Just over Kasen's left shoulder he saw a two-dimensional screen showing what other ships were in the area, and four large vehicles were labeled with the words "InterGalactic Ore." It was funny, Maul thought, that he was going to have another run-in with them. He did not doubt that Kasen would find some way to get him in trouble with the mining company before the day was through - that was how missions tended to go whenever Maul deigned to get another person involved. He would know all about this planet in a matter of days.

Every time he blinked it was as if he switched between looking at Orsis with adult eyes and looking at it with child's eyes.

Maul did not have any great fondness for the Orsis Academy, but he had done a lot of learning and a lot of growing up there. It had been one of the first places, too, in which he had actively taken part in Sidious' practice of wiping any trace of Maul's presence in the galaxy out of existence. The galaxy was a big place if someone really wanted to hide, but it was remarkable how many people who wanted to hide frequented the common stomping grounds for criminals, like Nal Hutta or Coruscant.

Instead of taking risks and potentially getting the highly communicative galactic criminal underworld talking, Sidious had simply ordered Maul to kill everyone in the Academy.

So that was what he had done.

"There are the ruins of a training academy on the shore of the eastern sea." Maul pointed, nearly shoving Kasen's shoulder in the process. "You will see a perimeter fence, if it is still standing."

"How long ago were you here?"

"A long time."

Kasen scoffed.

"Perhaps ten years."

Was is that long? That short? Maul had committed to memory what year it was, but when he thought back and tried to trace what he had experienced in those intervening years, Lotho Minor still got in the way.

It didn't matter. Kasen wouldn't know enough to correct him. Maybe the fallen walls of the academy would correct them both. How much overgrowth could grow in ten years?

"Whatever. Did you just kriffing point at the planet and tell me to land there? I need coordinates. We've gotta go through kriffing clouds and drek."

Maul sighed, but very quietly.

Kasen didn't seem to notice. Instead she changed the small 2-D screen to a more complex map of the planet. She pressed buttons, swiping through different views until she found one that showed the numbers pinpointing what she thought might be the right location. "Look, barve, if we come down right here we can go along the coast until you see your kriffing perimeter fence. You sure you don't want go to a city, or something? Some nice diner?"

"Yes."

"Do you expect me to wait for you here?"

"No."

Maul was not actually sure how he expected to get off Orsis, but it didn't matter. He could survive a good long time in this woods. He knew. He had done it as a teenager.

And there was something he needed to find here. The fact that he didn't know what it was exactly may or may not have meant that it didn't want to be found.

Without any other mission, he had all the time in the world.

"Take me to the place I pointed out."

"I'm not sure you've washed enough dishes for this, barve."

Maul did not reply to that. The bridge was small and cramped, so he left.

A few minutes later, Kasen yelled for him to come back and look out of the viewport. The ship had broken the cloud layer and was soaring over a beach on a blue-sky day. The jungle on the other side of the narrow, sandy shore was tangled and deep, the plants mostly a dark green with the occasional purple or orange flower poking up like a gaudy neon advertisement. "Does this look karking familiar enough for you?" Kasen said.

"Not yet," Maul said.

Kasen almost repeated the words. Maul saw her rolling them around in her cheeks.

Maul was beginning to become unhappy with Kasen's impatience. The Zabrak leaked anger into the Force, but it was no good: Kasen could not feel it. There would be no satisfaction there. Again, Maul considered killing the woman and taking her ship. But part of him did not want it to be easy for him to leave Orsis. He had to do something here. It was something best done once he was out from under the staring eyes of the many-armed goddess. Let Kasen go back to her mundane life, to the bills she paid and the out-of-work miners whose company she was probably more accustomed to hosting.

He saw a conning tower rising up out of the jungle and almost slammed his hand into Kasen's shoulder. He only stopped himself because her hand was on the yoke. "There," Maul growled.

Kasen didn't hesitate to reply. "I'm gonna have to put down on the beach, because I don't exactly see a landing pad around here."

"There were."

The landing pads, Maul knew, were actually one of the more intact parts of the academy when last he left it. Sidious had picked him up there.

Kasen's ship had by this time passed the conning tower. The human brought them in over the jungle for a view of the place. It looked overgrown in parts, and the outline of the wall was barely visible over all the plants that had climbed over it, using it to hoist themselves closer to the large, yellow sun. There were signs of recent habitation, too, and as soon as Maul saw them he knew that his idea of a mediative visit focused on his past (was that what he was here to do? was he looking backward?) would not come easy. There were two pre-fab buildings and a machine almost as large as them, with a scoop on one side and a drill on the other. In a clearing between the prefab buildings, Maul could also see small, silver metallic shapes that could either be droids or simply accumulated supplies or piles of trash. Someone was scouting out the site.

"Blast it. Someone's already here." Kasen sounded surprisingly level as she brought the ship back around to the beach. "They've probably seen us."

"If they have scanners," Maul cautioned her.

"They could just kriffing look up. They probably heard the engines. I thought you said this place was deserted."

"Put down on the beach."

"I bet those are InterGalactic Ore guys scouting this out as a place to put a mine."

"I said that you didn't have to have anything to do with my..." Maul hesitated. His mission? His what? "...time here."

Kasen swore again, this time harsher. "Yeah. And hey, I can confirm that karking news report."

"Land."

"Don't get so huffy about it."

Maul nearly growled at her.

As the ship hovered over the beach, Maul began to sense some hesitation. He had drifted back into the corridor from the living quarters to the bridge, but now stomped back. Kasen told him what was wrong before he asked.

"I don't think I can do it."

Maul tipped his head. "Do what."

"The landing. The sand is too...sandy."

It would be so easy for Maul to just raise his fist and hit her. Kasen had probably seen something to that effect in Maul's expression, because she aimed the ship back out at the waves and looked back at her passenger. "Look, this ship has narrow little legs." She gestured with her hands for emphasis. "It's good for landing on landing pads, tarmac surfaces. I could even do crowded city streets. My old ship, now that had special legs for landing on rocky surfaces. Such as mines." She was clearly talking to Maul as if the Zabrak was a child, and hamming it up too. "But I can't afford that any more. We have to put down on the landing pad or else I'll sink in and flop over and fall into the sea."

Seemingly affronted by her own dramatic telling, Kasen sat back in her seat from where she had been leaning and gesturing dramatically.

"You said you could do this," Maul said.

"I thought you were going to a city! Like a...kriffing...city person."

"Then set down on the landing pad."

It will be harder for you to leave than for me, now, Maul thought.

"I don't know, bro. What am I going to tell them? 'Yeah I'm just dropping this barve off, he doesn't know where he's going and didn't tell me, I just work here?' Except," she added as an aside, "I don't because you took all the jobs."

"I'll jump down. Open the ramp."

"Are you sure?" Kasen said flatly. "Also, that is not going to be much more subtle."

"Do it."

"They might see me. There are security forces out here, even if we can't see them - "

The endless circling had finally gotten to Maul. His fondness for Kasen was wearing off. "Do it!" He gripped her shoulder, and leaned down. "Would you rather I crash the ship?"

"What?"

Maul grabbed Kasen's neck, pressing against her jugular with his forearm. "Open the ramp."

"It's there...it's there." She struggled, pointing toward a lever on the other side of the cockpit. It would have been easy for her to reach over if Maul wasn't keeping her pinned to the chair from behind.

Maul had a momentary flash of vision: not precognition, although maybe a tinge of the Force warning him of betrayal. He simply imagined what might happen if he let Kasen go. Kasen might move toward the lever and then push back, attacking, wasting precious time -

And part of Maul wanted to let her.

"Are you kriffing serious? You'll die if you jump out -" Kasen said.

But it was so much faster for Maul to just flip the switch with the Force. He heard the chunk of metal separating from metal behind him, beyond the room where he had slept, and red lights sprouted up all over the console as the ramp lowered into thin air too fast for the pressure inside and outside the ship to stabilize. He heard more crashing sounds as things inside the living area - maybe the alter - fell over.

Maul said, "Good."

He released Kasen's neck.

As soon as he did, she turned around, livid. Maul backed the few steps out of the bridge, waiting to see if Kasen would do anything. The most foolish move she could make would be to close the ramp.

"Kark it, get out, you crazy barve," Kasen said. "See if I care if you break your neck."

Maul stomped across the living room, securing his blaster more tightly to his waistband as he went. "You're a terrible dishwasher anyway!" Kasen yelled from behind him.

A moment later, as Maul reached the ramp and the wind started swirling around him from the speed and the engines, Kasen started to follow him. Maul heard the footsteps, sensed the woman's fear. She was too nice, Kasen was. She worried too much. Maybe she wasn't corrupt enough to be a Bandomeer miner.

"Listen, I'd rather land than you kriffing threaten to kill yourself - wait! The kriff did I get myself into?"

The ship was over the ocean. Orsis was a prettier planet than Bandomeer, at least right now: the sun, slightly larger than Bandomeer's but the same yellow color, was shining over the calm, blue ocean. The ship was on a straight course perhaps one hundred feet from the beach, probably not out past the continental shelf.

Maul stomped down the ramp and launched himself into the air, gathering the Force around him as he did.

Air rushed around him. It was disorienting that the blue horizon didn't appear to be moving, but then the sound of Kasen's ship's engines rushed past him. A few seconds later Maul could sense the surface of the water. He curved the surface of the sea like it was a bowl, the waves frothing white at the tops.

He wished that he could just fly over the surface. For a moment, he tried. But that was not one of the capabilities of the Force. Instead he dropped gently into the ocean just as the rounded top of a newly forming wave was lifting up the entire bowl of water, which propelled him another tiny distance toward the shore. The water was cold, and the salt stung his eyes where it splashed from both his landing and the natural waves. He started to kick toward shore.

Kasen's ship trawled across the sky overhead. The fact that it was already moving probably meant that Kasen had gone back to the bridge. She would see Maul swimming, would see him climb up on shore if she waited long enough. Then she could leave Maul alone.

The Zabrak was halfway to the beach, soaked through, when he realized how much he was struggling against the weight of his legs. He had buoyed himself up with the Force for some time, but then had naturally relaxed it: and now he felt himself starting to sink toward the sea floor. It was only about twenty feet down now, what should have been a simple swim, but his legs were nearly solid metal.

This would not be a rightful place to die.

Maul growled, but he was weakening, and water sloshed up against his face. He took a deep breath, wondered if he could move the water around him with the Force. He tried, but it was under too much pressure and not solid enough for him to get the mental equivalent of a grip on the particles that comprised it.

The water covered his mouth, filling it with the taste of brine and fish. This, Maul thought, had been a terrible idea.