Athon-Emen had taken the Zabrak, with a reluctant teenage slouch that had not been present in her the first time they met, to the same place where she had been fishing on the previous day.
Maul would have thought that the chance encounter was very lucky if he had not both believed that there was no such thing as luck, only the Force, and also if he had not known that the town in which he found himself was a small community where a higher than usual number of citizens knew who the town council members were and not only recognized them on sight but expected to talk to them.
Both Motokos were walking toward the Glen from somewhere in town. Maul had not seen them pass him when he had walked this way hours earlier. After that it had all been hooks, lines, and reels, and the slimy guts of brightly colored fish with black Nautolan eyes.
The councilman was wearing a long blue coat, which looked unseasonably warm. The woman wore a tunic and businesslike pants. Athon-Emen turned to look at both of them as they passed. When the councilman smiled, she remembered that Maul was looking for him.
"Oh!" she said excitedly, breaking out of her prior lethargy. Her short head-tails bounced. "My friend is looking for you."
"Oh?" The councilman said. Maul looked up from where he had been skewering a fat, dead worm on a hook.
"I saw your grandma Katrak's latest sculpture at the Grove gallery," the woman said. "It's beautiful. I hear they have a buyer already."
"That's great," Athon-Emen said. "I didn't know. She'll be happy to hear that."
"Did you have a question for me?" The councilman asked.
"Yeah," Athon-Emen said. "He said so." She looked at Maul expectantly.
The Zabrak stood up and crossed the grassy riverbank to stand in front of the couple. He nodded, almost certain that a bow would be too formal for this circumstance. They were, after all, standing next to a river, and he had worm slime on his bare hands. "I knew your daughter."
The Nautolans didn't react strongly. They both bowed their heads slightly, one after another, but it was more acknowledgment than grief.
"When?" Her mother said, almost happily. She was looking for a story of her daughter that she had not yet been told, an anecdote that she had not before heard.
"When we were young."
Maul waited, let that suggestion become a playground or a neighbor's house in the mother's mind.
"So you know she was killed," the mother said.
Maul nodded. "I had heard."
"Do you need anything?"
He shook his head.
"Did you come here to see us?"
"Partially. I am glad that we met. But I am also traveling."
"You've gotten work, I see."
Maul nodded.
"Amon-Ethen and her grandmother are good people." She smiled. "My name is Laura." It was a human name, and Maul thought it was strange that she would have it, but he simply nodded. It wasn't important.
"Maul," he said. She kept smiling.
"I heard your husband is a councilman," Maul said.
"Yes." She looked at him.
"And yourself?"
"An accountant."
Maul looked at the husband. Rapid-firing questions now, burning to answer as many scattered queries as he could. Trying to find out why he was here. The words pressed up against his teeth, crackling as he let them out. "Is there much crime in this area?"
"Enough." Motoko said. He glanced at his wife. "The police handle it. To be frank, I don't have the constitution any more to talk a lot about it," the man said. "I do my job, though. I get by thinking that evil people can't sleep well at night."
What a strange concept of a pushy, insomniac justice, Maul thought.
The Motokos took their leave not long after. Maul watched them go, getting the feel of their Force signatures: both hiding something, both smarter than they looked - and they looked smart. They wouldn't have been out of place on Coruscant, and the city-smarts meant that they lived at a different pace than the residents of this small Glee Anselm city did.
Another Force signature interrupted them: Athon-Emen. She was radiating anger.
"They're wrong, you know," the girl said. Maul didn't turn around. The Nautolan couple were too far away for them to hear her when she was speaking at a normal level, and besides, she was speaking right at Maul's back, like she wanted the words to sink into the black fabric of his cloak.
"About what?" he said.
"About the crime. They won't say it, but the Liefsat are getting worse, not better. Grandmother says."
Maul looked at Athon-Eman. "What is the Liefsat?"
"Um." She hesitated. "It's like the Black Sun? Do you know what that is?"
"Organized crime." He made sure not to be emotive about his recognition of the name. If he looked too shocked, it would make her think about why. Better take his cue from a droid, and simply acknowledge the name as existing in his memory banks.
She nodded. "They used to be a problem around here. Some people say they still are, but they mostly work in the larger cities. And they're not as grandiose as they used to be. Some of them use their money and get big houses and all, but a lot of them just sit in cellars with water up to their knees and hide, because they don't want people to find them and take away their millions of credits. That's what they say."
"Is that what happened to your parents?"
Her head-tails twitched, five of them in concert, and she glared, the skin between her eyes wrinkling. "You know, you might want to not just ask people things like that. I could be sensitive."
"Are you?" Maul said.
"No."
"Who do you know who's sensitive?"
"You ask a lot of questions," Athon-Emen said.
"Is someone?"
"My classmate lost her mom a few weeks ago, okay? We're all on eggshells about it. And she wants us to be. You should be on more eggshells."
"What happened to your parents?"
"Nothing. They're still alive. Just when I was four they had so much spice in the house that the government took me away. My mother still lives in a house full of spice. My father comes around every once in a while. He's trying to find his feet. He's been trying to find his feet for fourteen years."
Mauk picked up the fishing rod.
They kept fishing.
"This is the easy stuff," Athon-Emen told him halfway through the afternoon, when her grandmother brought them sandwiches filled with some leafy plant thicker than lettuce. "I'll teach you where you to find the bigger ones when you're ready."
"When will I be ready?" Maul said, glancing aside at the basket of fish they had already caught today: nine fat ones, and they had tossed back three or four fingerlings. He meant it as a joking sentence, but realized that it had probably come out flat. He was not practiced at expressing humor to other people.
Athon-Emen was better at jokes. She adopted an administrative scowl. She looked between him and the fish with exaggerated judgement. "Almost."
Maul went back to his ship after an afternoon of fishing. Athon-Emen had kept up her authoritative ruse to the extent that he did not know exactly how well he had done compared to her usual catch, but the bucket of fish could, he thought, feed both the girl and her grandmother for at least a few days. In exchange, her grandmother gave him forty credits. It wouldn't always be this much, she said. It depended on how well the sculptures of water had sold. But sometimes it would be more.
He slept curled up, his back pressed against the walls of Kasen's bedroom, one cheek flat against the pillow. By now, the ship smelled like him instead of Kasen and the statue of the goddess was fuzzy with dust. Maul slept soundly.
His alarm went off at seven.
He dressed quickly, looked at the money that he had placed in a drawer, and realized that he would need to buy new clothes tomorrow. He should have enough credits for at least a pair of pants.
For now, though, he needed to go to the Red Curtain.
He debated on whether to keep his blaster. He had no holster, and it would not fit in his boot. His belt had worked well so far, but he had no idea what sort of fight he might get into at the cantina, and if there was a weapons-check policy he could end up making more noise than he wanted to before he had begun. A weapons-check policy would also make it very easy for him to see where almost all of the other weapons in the establishment were, though, and in the end he decided on holstering the blaster, not steathily, in his boot.
The cantina was on the outskirts of the part of town that had grown up outside the spaceport. It looked too dingy to be popular with tourists, but the bouncer wasn't a Nautolan. He was another aquatic species, and Maul thought that he might have been one of the downtrodden Anselmi. While Nautolans had councils, Anselmi were relegated to reservations. Maul had been under the impression that they were all under water, but this person with red skin and wide pink gills on his neck was a good candidate for Anselmihood.
He barely looked at Maul as the Zabrak opened the cantina's narrow door and went inside.
The floor was damp. A full half of the room was under water. What looked like a large pool to Maul's right was in fact a dance floor. Splashes came up from the surface, and Maul could see Nautolans moving in the shadows. Lights set into the metal walls changed color every few seconds, green to blue to red to orange.
The above-water section of the cantina had a bar and several tables, many of which were empty. An identical bar stretched across the right-hand wall, but because it was under water Maul could only identify it by the strip of yellow lights along the counter, and the faint outline of shining reflections on bottles. He hoped that the meeting he was here to overhear took place in air that he could breathe.
A Nautolan emerged from the underwater portion and walked across the room right in front of him, dripping. Maul growled and was ignored. The movement made him realize that he needed to stop standing in the doorway, though, or someone would start to notice. There was a back stairway that appeared to be set into the natural curvature of the land. The cantina had, Maul noticed from the outside, a small hill behind it. That was unusual for this flat seaside community, and Maul wondered whether it was man-made. He crossed the room toward the stairway, which was made of a sort of turf or peat moss that gave slightly under his boots but kept its shape enough for walking not to be difficult. He presumed that since no one had asked about his weapon yet, that either blasters were allowed or no one had noticed. Frankly, it was not a place that looked like it allowed blasters. The atmosphere was relaxed, perhaps edgier under the water than above it, and the clientele looked to be, in general, younger than the Motoko couple and far younger than their co-conspirator.
The upward slant of the building gave him an idea, though, and Maul quickly turned and walked out of the cantina again. Once outside, he examined the lay of the land outside. On the right hand side the sea encroached on the building, and it looked deep. There were three motorized surf boards moored to one ring at the back. The underwater bar was on that side, and probably drew water from that very sea. Maul thought about wading into it and simply swimming around to the upper room, then grimaced, remembering the last time that he had assumed he could swim. He would have to find another way.
On the left hand side of the building, the land sloped upward in a hill of dark, wet grass. Maul walked up there. Some windows on that side of the bar were open, and Maul could hear the two people at the occupied table in the dry-land portion talking. Once beyond it he saw the hump of the upper room. It was partially sunk into the ground, with the water at mid-level on the right side. The sea was deep here where it butted up against the small hill behind the bar. Designing the place must have been a nightmare, unless they channelled the water around it after it was built. Luckily, there was one small window on the landward side. More of a vent than an actual aperture for viewing, it was a tiny rectangle of grass set into the grassy wall. The hill had grown right over the bar, and the tiny window inside it glowed.
Maul moved to the back of the bar and laid down in the grass. The moisture in it immediately soaked the front of his tunic in unpleasant cold, which he tried to ignore. He could sense people inside the upper room, but could not see them. The window had a latch right inside it, a mechanical swinging bar that was easy to manipulate with the Force. Maul pushed it. The window would only crack open, and it was not nearly large enough to drop through and interrogate the Motoko conspirators inside the room, but it permitted sound to exit the room.
His timing was good. The Motokos were inside, and must have started their meeting slightly early. Maul's mistaken entrance into the bar had given them time to finish their small talk. Now, they had gotten right to the point - and the point was exactly what he wanted to hear.
The point was about him.
"There's a newcomer in town," he heard the councilman say. "A Zabrak. I think he knows that Kilindi went to the Orsis Academy."
"So what? It was a training school," said the older man. Maul leaned in as he kept speaking. "No one knows it was for killers unless they are one. Maybe he thinks that she was there to learn kriffing decorum."
"I don't think so. He didn't explicitly say that he attended, but it was...something like that," Motoko said.
"Hmm." The older man muttered.
Motoko said, "Are you just going to make noises? No one in town was supposed to know anything about that except me or you or my wife."
Laura Motoko hadn't spoken yet, and Maul wondered whether she was even in there. He could not sense her, but she and Motoko shared very similar Force presences. He blinked and concentrated. It was very likely that she wasn't in there. Which meant she was somewhere else, but knew that this meeting was happening and what it was about. He would have to keep an eye out for an ambush.
"Then we get rid of him," the older Nautolan said.
"That would require bringing in a different assassin."
Maul heard the older Nautolan's head-tails shift. "Humf."
"I don't like that tone, Janus," Motoko said.
"You don't have to like it. Neither do I."
"No assassins. Not yet. I don't know how much he knows, or even how much it matters."
"That's true. It would only have mattered if she was still alive. I imagine that's cold comfort." Janus's gravelly voice actually sounded pitying.
"It's been a long time," Motoko said. "That doesn't make it better. But it makes whether it mattered or not...matter less."
"Okay. We'll move beyond it for now."
For about fifteen minutes they talked about other things, enough that Maul was sure they were in, or were the entire membership of, the Liefsat that Athon-Emen had mentioned. Motoko would give money to one councilwoman's charity in order to gain her trust and to encourage the members of that charity to vote for Motoko when the next election came around. Maul was bored. The cold grass kept him too uncomfortable for falling asleep to be a concern, so he simply lay there, eyelids drooping, letting the words flow in and out of his consciousness while he waited for any that were relevant to him. His own name or Kilindi's, or even a mention of the Republic or InterGalactic Ore, would bring him out of the trance. But for now, it was almost comforting to lay here and wait.
Then the clinking of glasses changed, and Maul blinked out of his cold stupor. He was almost shivering.
"I'll let you know when would be best to meet next," Janus was saying.
There was a rustling sound like the two men were putting on coats. "I'll see you at the ball game next week right?"
"Ah yes." Janus sounded warm again. "My boy is coaching a good team."
They started to walk down the stairs. Maul could hear their feet hitting the packed dirt. He pushed himself off the grass, feeling his tunic sag unpleasantly heavy with dew, and ran to the bottom of the hillside.
He entered the bar just as the two men were coming down the stairs. He recognized Motoko- he was even wearing the same coat from before - and immediately pegged the second one as the older man the couple had been speaking to in the house. Nautolans didn't go gray, but they got more wrinkled and more spotted, and the man was both. He also had an elaborate series of rings on one of his head-tails, making him look vain and even more piratical than his coat had the previous evening. He was still carrying his weapon, and Maul was almost certain now that it was a shock-stick. A tamer cousin of the lightsaber, the shock-stick could be electrified along its entire length besides the handle. It was also only illegal in certain areas, since, the argument went, it was technically only as dangerous as a broken commlink with an exposed wire.
The towns that had lax rules about shock sticks often also had councilmen like Motoko.
As soon as Maul walked through the door, with his head bare and his chest stained darker black by the dew, the two Nautolans recognized him. They didn't bother to disguise their shock. Head tails whipped the air, and Janus raised his shock stick. He made the movement look more like an avuncular old man wagging a cane harmlessly at a disobedient child than like a warrior taking a fighting stance.
That triggered the urge to fight in Maul again. There was nothing else for it now. They knew he had gone to the academy. They knew he knew what Kilindi had been. Maul felt no dislike for the Liefsat or pity for the town's citizens, but he also, ever since Sidious had taught him about the Black Sun, viewed organized crime as something to disdain. People who couldn't use the Force banding together to attempt evil on a grand scale was like ants trying to wage war against the owner of the ant farm.
Maul charged toward the two Nautolans.
With a gleam in his eyes, Janus shifted the stick to a more aggressive stance, holding it in front of him like a sword. Maul couldn't see any electricity manifesting in sparks or light on the gray baton, but he heard a slight hum in the air and saw that Janus' finger was on the trigger. The weapon was active.
Even as he ran, Maul clenched his fist and rotated his hand like he was turning a gear. He slashed the shock stick toward Janus, lashing the man across the face with it. Janus screamed, but Maul didn't have time to see what damage he had done. He tossed Janus and the stick both into the underwater portion of the cantina.
The stick immediately electrified the water, creating sparks and waves and sending a scream into the Force as the Nautolans inside were scorched.
Motoko drew a tiny holdout blaster. Maul kicked it out of his hand, so that Motoko drew his wrist away and clutched it. Maul stepped on the blaster and crushed it, scattering tiny pieces across the floor.
He picked Motoko up by his throat.
The Nautolan struggled, kicking. His first few kicks found Maul's nerveless, mechanical legs, but then his knee hit Maul's gut and hurt. Maul heaved Motoko toward the bar, but the man was making it difficult, bending over Maul's arm, pushing down as much as he could toward the floor. He was tall, too, taller than Maul, and his strategy was working.
As soon as Motoko's feet touched the floor he had the weight advantage. Maul's arm was burning with the strain.
So he let go. In the moment of weightlessness he picked Motoko up with the Force and slammed him against the bar. The Nautolan, caught between the bar and a stool, tried to scramble on top of the counter. Maul let him, followed him, landed on the bar with both his feet slapping the plastic surface at the same time. Motoko scrambled backwards and Maul grabbed for his neck again. Motoko slapped him away, looking surprised that he had done it, and whipped a punch around. It hit Maul's chest, but he didn't let it bother him. He had been hit harder. He grabbed Motoko's wrist, pinned it between his own forearms, and twisted: the wrist didn't quite snap, but Maul heard a crack and saw Motoko go limp for just a moment.
Maul Force-choked him, whipped his head around like a bantha straining at a chain. Controlling a Force-choke from a distance was hard.
All those fiddly pipes in the throat...
Motoko writhed.
The bartender, a tattooed Nautolan woman who Maul thought might or might not be the bar owner Rakosh, ducked as the people at the tables ran for the door. Behind Maul, he could hear splashes and imagine the white froth on the dark green water as the people in the underground portion struggled to get out of the electrified pool, lapsed in and out of consciousness, and realized something was going on above.
Motoko was starting to try to breathe through his gills now. Dry pink gashes opened up where his neck met his shoulder.
Maul pushed him up against the shelf behind the bar, the plastic compartments with neat ranks of full bottles.
"You said you didn't have the constitution."
"I don't." The Motoko patriarch struggled. Behind him, Maul heard a wet slap of bodies on the floor as the Nautolans closest to the surface heaved themselves out of the water, like beached whales, like performing animals. Bottles snapped behind Motoko. "I just do things for them sometimes," Motoko babbled. "To make the council run more smoothly. Our - there are others, more involved than me."
"Your wife."
"No!"
Maul pressed the man further into the broken shelf, the mess of jagged glass. "No!" Motoko's face wrinkled up, his eyes not squeezing shut like Maul imagined a Zabrak's would under such pain, but widening until they seemed to take up half of his face. He was lying: Maul could sense it. He had also prepared himself for holding out against torture in order to protect his wife.
The situation was not unlike that which had lead to Maul's capture of Satine. Maybe he could do the same here.
"Come with me," Maul said, and pulled Motoko off of the wall. The Nautolan gasped; some of the glass shards had lodged in his back, and blood fell in lazy clumps against the wall of the bar as Maul pulled him away.
Then he sensed Laura behind him. He had been too focused on Motoko to see - but she wasn't even inside the bar yet. In a few steps she would be, and bringing danger with her.
Maul flung Motoko over the bar, entangling him in the stool again for a moment before he painfully wriggled free and eased onto the floor. These Nautolans were flexible: Maul could have sworn that Motoko hadn't curved his spine that way before.
Laura came in holding a blaster as long as one of her head-tails. The thick body of the gun glowed blue and fired, shooting a circular bolt - a stun bolt - right past Maul's head and nearly hitting Motoko.
"Don't move," she shouted, eyes blazing and head-tails whipping behind her. The ones hanging over her shoulders she kept still. Maul could see from all the tension in her frame and in her hands that she was making an effort, probably to keep them out of her line of sight. Her anger was thin and vicious, but he could sense that she was willing to talk as well. She braced in the doorway, both hands hefting the blaster.
"No more involved than I am," Motoko said. He leaned himself against the bloodied bar stool, pulled unsteadily to his feet, and, stumbling, backed away.
She shot the stun bolt again, aiming to miss. She spared a glance for the people still climbing out of the pool. Some were now going in for fallen friends, the bar lights still changing from one neon color to the next.. "I had a feeling you would be here. We've been waiting, you know. Waiting for someone to remember. The Orsis Academy can't have erased all the records."
Maul latched on to that. "Why...would they..."
"I haven't a kriffing clue. But I know how organizations work. It was someone's advantage to kill kids - one hundred kids who were working there."
She doesn't know, Maul thought. She thinks it was an inside job. I can use this.
He began to consider when it would be best to tell the Motokos that he had killed their daughter. That there had been no hard feelings about it, not really. Even less for her than for others. He had enjoyed killing the occasional one, the bullies who weren't even skilled at bullying or the ones who put up a good fight.
It was Sidious' instinct, imparted to Maul, to wait for the right moment to tell the Motokos that Maul had killed her, that her death was part of a force beyond anything they could understand. That it wasn't about money, or power. That it was about keeping Maul safe.
Protecting someone else's child.
She pointed the blaster at him. "Evil people can sleep well at night. People who mourn can't."
Maul didn't think that it mattered. He shrugged, waited a moment for her to make a move. Instead, she spoke.
"So who do you work for? Black Sun?"
He snarled.
"Freelancer?"
He gave her no response.
She fired. He drew his blaster and shot back, filling the room with confusing lines of light. He ducked behind a bar stool next to the moaning Motoko for a moment, noted that the stool was screwed in to the floor, and jumped over it at her. He landed solidly, but as soon as both feet hit the floor one blaster bolt hit him, sending a prickling feeling all along his right arm and shoulder, threatening to freeze him entirely. He lifted his left hand. She lifted her right as if to block a punch, shoving the blaster against her hip to precariously hold it pointing upward, and he wrenched the big blaster out of her left hand with the Force.
He kicked her knee, then hooked his foot around the back of her leg and toppled her. She grabbed for the blaster, wriggled across the floor in that odd Nautolan movement, and gripped the gun again. "Jedi?" She said. She was more hurt than surprised. Despite her connection to the underworld, she had a firm belief in Jedi as good guys.
He kicked her in the stomach, and she doubled over and screamed. She fired as she did so, in more a reflex than an attack, and he called upon the Force to lean just to the side of the wild blaster shots. He saw the blue lines streak past him out of the corner of his eyes.
She curled around herself, still gripping the blaster but clearly weakened by the kick from a metal foot. "Do you sleep well at night?"
Again, it wasn't worth the breath to answer her. No matter how many times he risked himself this way, though, he couldn't help but stop to hear her last words before he killed her. He was still holding his blaster. It wouldn't be difficult just to shoot her in the head. He was stepping over other bodies now as he circled her: people still stunned by the electric blast in the water.
"What you do is cruel." She laughed derisively. He could imagine all the things she was accusing him of: naiveté, ignorance, not enough want of money. She did not know what he was, so she could pretend all she wanted that she was safe, that she knew anything about him.
(Obi-Wan had been the one who had known the most, after Sidious. Even Savage had not known the most important chapter of Maul's life. Everything after Sidious, no matter how long it dragged on, had just been a coda to that mission on Tatooine and Naboo. The fact that Sidious might know more about Dathomir and the Nightbrothers than Maul did appalled him. Obi-Wan had nearly sent everything crashing down when he said "I know what you are" to Maul in the Mandalorian throne room.
Of course, Maul would never let the Jedi know how close he had come to unravelling Maul's history.
It shouldn't have been such a sore spot, Maul had thought many times afterward. He was not an animal any more - and had never really been. The witches had revived him and in the process had taken away his sanity, and the witches had given it back. Maul was done with them now.
And after all that, taking care of Laura Motoko would be easy.
He could afford to savor this.)
"Do you know why we started this?" Laura Motoko said. She sounded tired, hurt, hesitant. Her words tripped over one another and merged together like small, white-capped waves. "My grandfather was poor. Very poor. He was a fisherman. Later we learned that all the money he...he had earned had come from the Liefsat. He would run spice from one island to another when the catch was down. But one day the police caught him. The Liefsat, they didn't have any use for him any more once he said that he wouldn't risk ..." She released a sigh, almost a cough. "Getting caught again. He was a good man. He knew that a lot of people can't leave at that stage. They get caught again and again, thrown into jail for a while, and go back to drug running. But they also usually end up destitute in the end. My grandfather saw that in his future and didn't want it. Instead, he became a penniless penitent. His choice didn't make the fish flock to his waters. He was a poor, good man, just like he wanted to be. A hungry good man.
"So when I needed it, I went to the Liefsat. My husband and I could provide more secure services for them: accounting, business here and there. Paying off the kind of lawyers that put my grandfather in jail the first time."
Maul glanced to the side. The Force had shown him something more interesting.
Janus had dragged himself out of the water, into the pile of unconscious and moaning people. His hands were scorched black, and Maul's initial strike with the shock stick had raised green and pink welts across his face. His right eye was bloodshot. On the left, the shock stick had grazed his cheek.
Laura glanced at him, then - she was going to draw a thermal detonator out of her pocket. They were going to throw it and leave out the back to escape. Maul saw it as clearly as if it had already happened.
Laura also knew that he was something like a Jedi, though. It rankled him that her mind had jumped to the Jedi immediately, although of course it had - the Sith were hidden, and they had always intended to be hidden.
Janus dashed across the room to grab Motoko. It was a move that would have been self-sacrificing if this was actual war, if Janus had any hope. Laura took the opportunity to throw herself across the room, stumbling once, then dove neatly into the entrance to the underwater cantina, from which the electricity had faded, hardly making a splash.
The thermal detonator she had dropped on the way rolled across the floor. Maul pushed backwards toward the door, but the shockwave from the thermal detonator still caught him and pushed him to the ground outside the bar. Luckily, the door had been open. The wet front of his tunic was also unexpected luck: tiny flames danced on his left sleeve, and he slapped them away, but most of his tunic was unharmed because it had already been damp from the grass and the splashes inside.
Two of the walls of the cantina sagged. If the woman who may or may not have been Rakosh hadn't escaped, she was seeing her business and/or place of employment fall down around her gills now.
He could sense that the three Nautolans had dashed back into the upper room. Maul followed.
The pool and poolside were empty. Presumably everyone there had escaped into the water. Maul realized that he wouldn't be able to come back to this town now: too many people had seen his face. Too many would connect him to the councilman. It was likely that Janus was a well-known public figure too.
He almost felt bad for Athon-Emen.
The blast had shattered the bottles that he hadn't broken under Motoko.
The thermal detonator hadn't touched the upper room. The room was lavish, with a long table covered with an expensive-looking red cloth and covered with plates of food, cups, and bottles. A small door to the right lead out to the black ocean.
The Nautolans were still there. Janus and Laura were each on their own motorized surf board, leaning into the swell fifteen feet out into the gently rocking sea. Motoko was closer, struggling around his limp wrist with the leg straps of the third board. The salt smell of the sea seemed to reach up and smack Maul.
Why was he doing this?
To find out where Motoko had come from, yes. And now he knew - she was going to be trained to work for the Liefsat. She would propel her family even further into their life of crime.
He couldn't have just asked. He had to shock the family into admitting that they knew.
Now, Maul was just fighting because his victims were fighting back.
He was all right with that. He had already electrified a bar full of people and seen a hole blown in the wall of a popular cantina. There was no going back to Athon-Emen without an explanation now.
He wasn't sure whether he planned on killing the Liefsat members when he caught them.
But once Maul got on a scent, he didn't let go. And they had tried to kill him, now. That got his blood boiling. That made it even.
Motoko's engine roared, and the three took off.
Maul leapt. He landed on Motoko's surf board right next to the man, immediately weighing it down. The motorized surfboards were more like small boats, though, and somehow, Motoko kept it afloat, wrestling with foot pedals and a tense rope, wildly shifting his balance in movements that looked erratic but somehow turned into smooth adjustments that enabled them to stay upright.
Maul teetered, grabbed onto the steering rope. Motoko elbowed him in the face. Maul's stomach churned as the ocean plunged out from underneath them as they reached the top of a swell and slid down into the open ocean, or what passed for it -
The water here was as broken up as the land around town. Flat-topped islands of brown and black rock were the most common obstacles, although there were some dangerously pointed-looking spikes of rock as well. All in all the impression was of a sunken city, although the landscape of waves rolling over rocks was surely a result of erosion and flooding rather than disaster.
Motoko struggled, hitting Maul with his elbows, terrified but both erratic and unfailingly solid on the board. The Nautolan succeeded in hitting Maul in the face, hard: he felt his teeth clamp together, and for a moment felt himself reeling backwards.
Maul thought that he would fall into the water. He imagined the miles of clear blue water closing over him, looking as frail as cloth even though, piled one molecule over another, it was as dangerous as if he had been cast into deep space. Janus and Laura's surfboards kept going, almost out of sight now, cutting wide white trails in the water.
Maul still had his blaster in hand. He had hardly thought about it after the thermal detonator went off. He fired twice, hitting Motoko in the stomach.
The man screamed, let go of the steering rope.
Motoko grabbed Maul's talisman.
It had come free from under his tunic some time during the fight, and now the Nautolan had both hands on the blue circle. The cord bit into the back of Maul's neck, causing him for lurch forward in pain even as he was glad that it wasn't the more sensitive front of his neck that was being garroted. He used his own momentum to lessen the strain, moving toward Motoko, the surf board rocking back and forth as a wave rose up underneath them. It was a big one, larger than any other Maul had seen this far out. Bubbles and bits of ocean life churned inside it in crazy spirals.
The talisman snapped. Motoko fell backward onto a wave-washed cliff just as the wave was sucking outward, suddenly picking the surfboard up underneath Maul and leaving an open trough of air where Motoko had been a moment ago. Maul crouched, slipping on his hand and knees on the wet, rough-skinned board. The talisman fell right in front of him, struck the board, and began to slip. The Nautolan's body struck the previously submerged mass of rock spread-eagled, with a jolt that Maul imagined broke most of Motoko's bones. He felt the man's Force presence, frightened and conniving but also full of sadness and love for his family, wink out.
Maul teetered. A moment later the board started to slide down the wall of wave toward the open ocean, in a smoother ride but one likely to end in the same fate as the Nautolan's. The wave might curl over under its own weight, or the rock floor become so shallow that the surf board couldn't ride over it any more without scraping the bottom, and send Maul into an uncontrolled spin with an unknown number of other huge waves surely on the way right behind him.
He grabbed for the talisman, suddenly worried that the last proof he had of his brother's existence would be snatched away by the waves. Slick and sliding, he nevertheless grabbed the small disk.
By the time he straightened up, the other two Nautolans were gone, even their ocean trails fading into the blue.
What would Athon-Emen do now?
What would Maul do?
And Savage. His brother's death had been lurking in the background all along. So much of this was about Savage, and Maul wanted to throw that misguided affection away.
He keyed the motor and slowly moved back to the spaceport.
It was not a good idea to try to go to Athon-Emen right now. It wouldn't be any great difficulty for the old man Janus and crafty Laura to paint themselves as the victims. He would have to take off again.
It would be easy. The ship was right there.