As Inhered cleared the hanger doors, the blue expanse of Bestine came into view. The planet's surface was his only chance to escape in order to tell the council of his discovery. He needed to find transport to Coruscant before the Sith could catch him, so he set a course for the nearest spaceport and put full power to the engines.

Just as the autopilot engaged, Inhered shut it off again, pulling the ship into a steep climb away from the planet not a second too late, as two red streaks of light shot past, where his ship had been only a moment before. He pulled the small ship around to look for his attacker, but found nothing except for the cruiser he had just left, but his sensors told him that the shots had definitely not come from it. Then it hit him- the cloaked ship. Somehow his sensors had not picked up the weapons it carried. The Sith must have cloaked again, just after he had fired.

There is no way that ship is more manoeuvrable than this, Inhered thought. It was at least three times as big, so I will just wait for him to uncloak again and then see if I can disable that cloaking device.

He pointed his ship in the general direction that the shots had come from and waited.

Maul looked at the sensor readout, yes, just as he'd predicted, the Jedi was waiting for him to uncloak again. He moved his ship into an attacking position below the Jedi's small ship, but just as he was about to uncloak and fire, the Jedi's ship started to rotate quickly towards the Scimitar.

Instead of firing from where he was positioned, Maul engaged the forward thrusters and when the distance between them had been reduced to a half, he uncloaked and fired a few shots from two of his hidden cannons.

The Jedi's reactions were very good, only one of the shots made contact, skimming the underside of the ship, and straight away the Jedi was back on course sending a volley of blue laser bolts across the nose of the Scimitar.

Maul quickly set the two cannons he has just used to register as damaged if scanned, and decided to leave the ship uncloaked for now to let the Jedi think he had done some damage. He then pushed the throttle lever forward and sped past the Jedi. He could see on the readouts that the Delta-7 was coming about for another shot, so he cut the engines and engaged his manoeuvring thrusters at full power, spinning his ship around to face the Jedi.

He was now in a position to shoot the Jedi scum from space whilst still moving at a good speed away from him. He locked on all six of his cannons at full power (enough to vaporise the small ship) and prepared to fire. The Jedi still thought he had no weapons but that was about to change.

Inhered pulled the ship around, in as tight an arc as the ship would allow. Suddenly, alarms started going off on the console in front of him. He was being shot at, but how? He increased his speed to avoid the lasers and when he was finally facing the strange ship he saw it to be firing rapidly at him from six cannons, which must have been hidden from sight and from sensors.

He spun and rolled the ship, pulling up and diving, banking to the left and to the right, just to avoid getting hit by the barrage of laser fire. He managed to squeeze off a few shots when the assailant's ship flashed past his view port, but couldn't see if any of them hit the target. The Sith's ship was surprising in every way. It could out-manoeuvre the Delta-7 and out-gun it. He would need something very special to come out of this battle alive.

Suddenly there was an explosion on the side of his ship and the controls froze- everything was shutting down and the ship came to a stand still. The larger, faster, more powerful ship pulled up in front of him and the comm light started flashing. The comms and life support systems were wired to an emergency power source, set behind the pilot's seat which could only be turned off by destroying the whole ship.

He pressed the comm switch but nothing happened.

"Hello?"

"Revenge shall be ours!"

"Wha-?"

The comm channel closed and there was silence again. Then there was a bright flash and then, nothing.

The Scimitar turned and headed back to the cruiser to finish the errand Maul's Master had sent him on.

A/N – That's it finished except for a short epilogue which I hope to write soon. Hope u all enjoyed it.