Chapter 55

Shili – Valley of the Lost

"So, we are being hunted now!", Trav-iss' voice echoed around the trees, carrying across the wind. "I cannot believe that you were clumsy enough to not cover our trail!"

Talos buried his head in his hand. His words hissed through his teeth as he tried to supress the urge to shoot the Senator for being who he was. "Perhaps you could be quiet and not let whoever is following us know exactly where we are!"

At least that quietened the Senator's voice, if not his rage. "I came on this trip because it was supposed to be safe! The Jedi were supposed to protect me! Instead, we are stranded on a planet without any way to contact my people, and most of my consortium is dead or injured. Worst of all, I am being hunted down!"

"We are all being hunted, you idiot.", Talos bit out. The malice was gone from his voice. Instead he just felt bitter. "You are not the centre of the galaxy. You aren't even the centre of your own solar system."

Trav-iss' eyes turned and focussed on the Senate Guard, their yellow iris focussed with fire. "How dare you! How dare you think that…"

"You may be right, Senator.", Stass' voice was far calmer than Talos thought it could be. He was struggling to keep his cool, and he had trained to deal with Senators his entire life. The Jedi noticed his expression. She fixed him with a wink before she returned her attention to Trav-iss, "But are you going to bemoan what we did and did not do, or are you going to keep moving so the rest of these Trandoshans don't find us so easily?"

Again, the Senator looked suitably chastised. He huffed away, exaggerating his limp. Talos' opinion of the man was simple. He had an ego the size of his home-moon and expected everyone to wait on him hand and foot. Talos was not going to let that happen.

He hefted his pack back on and hurried over to grab one end of the stretcher. Luuna was awake, he saw. Good. When he had been carrying her before, all he had heard were incoherent mutterings of a woman in mild unconscious state. Now there was life back in her eyes. She smiled weakly, painfully, at him. "Hey."

"How are you feeling, Luuna?", he asked, his eyes flickering across her weak and pale form.

"Not great.", she tried to shrug, but her face contorted with the pain of movement and she slumped back down into the cloth bed again. "How much farther?"

"I'm not sure.", Talos replied, glancing around. "We are apparently being hunted."

"I heard.", Lunna replied. "Trav-iss' screams kind of woke me up. They've gotten shriller than normal."

The Senator was just starting to limp back towards them, and he was bee-lining straight for the Jedi again. "So how do you expect to keep them off us, Master Jedi? How do you expect us to survive the night?"

Stass regarded him for a moment, gently tapping her lightsaber to the hardened ridge of her headdress. Bending down, she pointed across at the wreckage. "I'm heading to the wreckage."

"This is no time for sightseeing, Jedi!"

"Wow, you really are an idiot, aren't you, Senator?", chuckled Mark, frown where he was repacking their food supplies beside Riyo, "That is where the other hunters came from. No doubt their friends will be coming that way too. Master Allie wants to catch them in the act."

"But… but why?", Trav-iss seemed appalled by the idea. "You are supposed to be protecting me!"

"I can slow them down.", Stass smiled at him. "Trandoshan's are crafty hunters. But I have fought them before. Talos, can you lead the group while I am gone?"

He nodded. "We'll keep moving upwards, Master Allie. I will send the droids before us as scouts."

Lieutenant Lawell spoke up, and all eyes turned to her now. "Stass and I will be the rear guard. Mark, you guard the delegation. Both of you", she fixed Mark and Talos with a glare, "stay in contact with us."

Stass nodded at to them. "Now go. I already have an idea to help us a little."

Telle hefted her pack and glanced at the Jedi beside her. The rest of their group had left about ten minutes earlier, and now Stass was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the clearing, eyes shut and breathing shallow. Rumour said that the Jedi frequented mediative states. Telle assumed one such state would look like this.

"I never said that I needed help.", Stass said suddenly.

Telle looked up, "You also never stopped me from joining you."

"I appreciate it.", Stass opened her eyes. "You understand why we are going to the wreckage?"

"If I had to guess, you want information.", Telle nodded, checking her blaster over. "We can find the number of hunters, the weapons or the survivors of the aft half of the ship. My father has a saying: Information is the most powerful thing one can hold over you."

And Stass' eyes flickered over to her. "Exactly."

Cantoni swiped aside another branch of the constant undergrowth, following Tar and his brothers as they marched towards the locator beacon Espoit had dropped at the crash site. The Ishi Tib's amphibian composition was struggling in the humid temperature. She carried double the water rations of the more hardy Trandoshans, but was already sweating like a Roonatay in a desert. They had left Drussels back at the ship to monitor their vitals and relay any more information that came through. DRK-4 probe droids had been deployed to blanket the forest canopy, looking for anything from scouts to starships. Their readings would go straight to the Aki-Aki's datapad, which she could view on her ocular implant at a thought.

She hadn't yet told the rest of the crew about Lane and Espoit. They didn't need to know yet. She would tell them once they reached the ship wreckage and searched it. Anything that they could find would be helpful in tracking survivors. One of the Haxion Brood's mottos was 'knowledge is power'. She continued to believe that to this day.

The group trekked behind Nathan, who was the best tracker out of the Trandoshan's. Young and thin, Nathan was always able to sense where traps would be placed, and where larger creatures were hiding. He had already saved them from a pack of Gundarks, a strange phenomenon even on this world. Cantoni was beginning to suspect that the young lizard might be a Force-sensitive forgotten or overlooked by the Jedi. Not many beings had senses this finely tuned.

The brute Nardath and RIGGA-98, the Pa'lowik droid, followed closely behind the slim tracker. They were both heavily built, stocky and well-armed. More importantly, they were able to help disarm explosive devices, or to detonate them as required. They were heavy hitters, used to charging in and smashing anyone to pieces. Nardath wielded a machete, and busied himself with widening the path Nathan was creating.

Behind the two hulking brutes was Lissa. She was the only woman, besides Cantoni, on the crew, a fact she was extremely proud of. According to Tar, she was one of the most flexible Trandoshans he had ever met. That made her useful as a hand to hand combatant. Lissa was not only an agile assailant thought. She was also a heavy ordinance specialist. Two bronze knives hung below the heavy rocket launcher slung around her shoulder, and a pack of difference ordinance was strapped to her belt. Whether such measures would be needed was unclear to Cantoni, but Tar was in charge of this hunt, not her.

The leader himself was their sniper, and firmly believed that leading from a distance was the best way to cover his people. He had climbed the trees early, and could be seen leaping from trunk to trunk, his climbing claws scratching above. With him was Liam and Bryyt, both young men who looked up to their leader like an older brother. They were not snipers, but scouts, and used a series of eyes pieces and wrist devices to scan for anything their heat-sensitive vision couldn't see.

"Captain.", Drussels' distorted voice came over the commlink, and Cantoni fiddled with the dial until the man's hologram solidified. She clamped her beak together with a loud clomp , and nodded for him to go ahead, "One of the probes in sector five went down. I have reviewed the footage, and it would seem that you not only have those gundarks around you, but also a few Rudugaffa hidden amongst the trees."

"Understood!", she replied, and she passed the information onto the rest of the hunters.

"We do not need to worry about that for much longer, Captain.", Nathan told her, pointing ahead, "We have arrived."

The jungle opened up, light suddenly beaming down at the hunting party. Full, warm sunlight. A light breeze blew here, and Cantoni closed her eyes in relief. Then she opened them once more and looked around the crash site.

The trees had been snapped and twisted apart. In their place was the twisted and ripped rear half of the Republic transport. Cantoni studied it, then looked down at the rest of the wreck, nearly a dozen kilometres further down the valley. Her beak quivered in anger. Lane and Espoit had not mentioned they would only find half their quarry here. But perhaps they had been killed before they could mention that.

Tar and his two scouts thumped to the ground beside them. "Your gunners did good work, Captain."

"Thank you, Tar. Tatsu is one of the best in the biz.", she accepted the compliment. "Now find me any survivors. Find me tracks. Find me information. We need that Senator alive."

An hour of searching later, and they had only covered about half the ship. In that time, there had been three survivors found, and a huge crate in the cargo hold had been classified as 'priceless' by Lissa.

The survivors were a short Pantoran female, badly bruised and battered from the crash, a mechanic named Joel, and half a droid who identified as TeeThree. Cantoni sat before them on a bent and broken chair. She looked each in the eyes and sighed. "Do you know why I want to speak with you?"

"I assume to torture us.", Teethree replied, though his tone was bored instead of frightened. Cantoni usually only met quivering protocol units who tried to beg for their circuits. This droid sounded almost cynical.

"I simply want to know where the Senator is.", she said. "Tell me where he is and we skip the torture."

"What makes you think that we know?", Joel asked, looking up at her. "The other half of the ship contains the main barracks. That's where the Senator was."

Cantoni turned and stared at the man. He seemed like he was telling the truth. Quickly, she reconfigured her eye to scan his pulse, his pupils and his breathing, watching for any tendency for him to lie. There was no indication that he was actively lying. So she pulled out her blaster and shot him.

"No!", Teethree cried, raising his metallic hands.

The Pantoran girl raised her hand timidly. "He was telling you the truth. We don't know where the Senator is. However, I do know what is in that crate, ma'am."

"You do?", the pirate captain studied the crate. Lissa had said that her internal scanners had found large amounts of gold and dolovite inside, but hadn't been able to discover what the contents actually was. If this girl was telling the truth…, "And what is that?"

"It's what my Master sent me on board to find."

That caught Cantoni's attention. She studied the crate. It was definitely large and intimidating. The crate itself seemed to be made of some form of red-tinged doonium, one of the rarer metals in the galaxy. What was in this crate that was so very precious?

"And who is your Master?", she croaked out, tapping at her beak as she studied it. Already her cybernetic eye was busy at work, entering the girl's face into the Information Database. Whoever she was, whoever she claimed to be, it would be collaborated.

The woman laughed sardonically. "I am simply an aide of Trav-iss Torn. But my master, oh he is far more powerful."

"Traitor!", Teethree muttered quietly. The droid raised a hand towards the aide, long fingers coiled to strangle her. For a moment, Cantoni was tempted to watch. Maintenance droids weren't supposed to have programming that allowed them to kill. In fact, it was nearly impossible to find a droid who's programming was malleable enough to add killer instincts. She raised her blaster again, and shot a steaming red hole through his chest.

"Are you a Senator's aide, or are you a spy?", Cantoni mused to the girl before her tapping a button on her right gauntlet. Inside the prosthetic eyepiece, a tiny screen opened up, the information she had requested already available in her vision. "Your name is of course, Taroshi, is it not? Your financials seem to indicate several large payments, wired through several accounts with the Banking Clan, the Trade Federation… whoever was paying you set up at least five different companies to launder your money through. As they say, though, all hyperspace lanes lead to the Deep Core. This path seems to end with a small firm in the political sector of the city Fortress, Pantora."

Taroshi seemed a little taken aback by how much Cantoni knew. The Ishi Tib smiled at her. Knowledge was power, and the power was hers once more.

"So tell me, Taroshi.", she placed a hand against the crate's cold side, "Shall we crack this baby open and see what it is that is so valuable that you think it might save you?"

"Do you recognise her?", Stass passed her small microbinoculars to Chan.

They were huddled on the edge of the wreckage, thankfully far from the Trandoshans and the Ishi Tib hunters. Stass had warned her to keep her voice down, as she doubted her Jedi Mind Trick would affect some of the hunters. Something about their craftiness making their minds too strong.

Telle stared through them, focussing on the handmaiden. Eyes narrowed in concentration, she went through her memory, carefully studying the list of the people she had been transporting. It always paid to memorise such things. "Her name is Espella. A replacement after one of Trav-iss' girls got ill yesterday morning."

"Are you sure?", Stass asked.

"Indeed I am.", Telle said. "I had to do a lot of last minute changes to accommodate the replacement. It was a hassle."

"They are calling her Taroshi.", the Jedi mused. Telle looked beside her, seeing the Jedi's eyes closed.

"You can hear them?", she asked, then realised that probably wasn't important. Of course a Jedi could hear that far. They could probably fly if asked. "She is using a fake name? Maybe she just wants to try and stay safe."

Stass seemed to consider this. "That is a possibility, but apparently this particular handmaiden was hired to grab whatever is in that box."

"By who?", Telle asked.

The Jedi shook her head, "They haven't said. They just want to open the box."

"Perhaps they already know who hired her. Could be the same person who hired them to shoot us down.", Telle pointed out. It was a wild theory, but all her exhausted brain could come up with.

Surprisingly, Stass nodded. "Time to leave. Each of those prisoners are dead, and we can't carry TeeThree's corpse with us. We need to set up some traps back along the trail."

A loud crack sounded as the side of the crate suddenly exploded outwards, and both women felt a rush of excitement rush over them, though for very different reasons. Standing where the crate had been a second before was a glorious, gold statue. A statue of a man. Then Telle felt her anger return. It was a statue of Trav-iss Torn.

"Seriously?", Cantoni yelled at the statue. It did not answer her.

"That is a lot of gold.", Tar whistled from beside her. "Might be worth a lot of credits to the right person."

Cantoni turned towards him. Could he really be that stupid? "That 'right person', Tar, happens to be our damn TARGET!"

He flinched at her tone, but sheepishly nodded, "You're right, ma'am. Of course you're right."

But the pirate captain had already turned her fury to the handmaiden again. "You are pointless and useless, girl. You expect me to believe that this statue is what you were after?"

The handmaiden seemed terrified by the Ishi Tib, and she spluttered her objections, "That is what I was hired to tag. My employer's men would grab it once we got to Coruscant. My Master said that it could turn the politics of Pantora in his favour."

Cantoni rolled her eyes, then pulled one of her blasters from her belt. In a flash of harsh ruby light, her final prisoner slumped to the side, a ragged, burning hole in her chest. Turning to her crew, she pointed to a nearby track leading away from the crashsite. "Come on. We need to get back on the trail."

They continued on for a few minutes along the path, occasionally slowing when Nathan found something of note. They had just entered a tiny clearing surrounded with Togrutan statuettes when a loud snap echoed around them. The canopy rustled loudly and a loud boom echoed through the trees. Seemingly from out of nowhere, one of the trees toppled over, showering them with a hailstorm of splintered chunks and spikes. As the debris dissipated, Cantoni looked around them. To her dismay, and to the horror of those around them, Nathan was dead.

Somehow, he had been sent flying through the air. His body now hung from a stump poking through the middle of his chest, partway up a neighbouring hardbark tree. The impact had broken the Trandoshan's jaw. She could only imagine one of the tree's branches slamming him aside, almost like a huge hand flicking a bug. The impact against the tree had been worse, and they could see the shattered bones beneath the scaly skin. She watched as his limp body was helped to the ground by his fellow hunters. Everyone stared at the corpse with mouths open in muted horror. Nathan had been the most optimistic of the Trandoshans. He had been young, carefree and likeable. Now he was dead.

Cantoni felt her beak drop open in disbelief. In all her time as a privateer, she had never seen such a brutal, yet effective, attack. Was it some sort of trickery? The wizardry of some mystic? She swung her head around the massive tree which had fallen and found a huge log hanging from a series of vines. She gestured Lissa forward, and the agile girl gingerly stepped about for a few minutes. When she found something, she motioned them forward also. At her feet, right where Nathan had been standing, was a rope of twisted grass, snapped in the middle.

"A rather simple tripwire trap.", Lissa mused, "Whoever made this wanted it to look like an accident."

"The poor man's security system.", Nardath agreed with a solemn growl.

Both Trandoshan's gripped their weapons a little tighter, heads swivelling for anything else amiss. Cantoni leant down and studied the trap. Her eye, the cybernetic apparatus, followed the entwined grass to the edges of the clearing. This was a brutal way to die. But her fury was not directed at the boy's death. They could die at any time. That was the life of a pirate.

No, this meant that the Senator knew they were hunting him. More importantly, whoever was travelling with him was clever enough to set a trap. In her opinion, a lofty man from the Coruscanti Senate would have near to no knowledge of the hardships of the jungle. There was either a soldier or someone even more dangerous protecting him. Perhaps it was a member of the Galactic Law Enforcer's, mercenaries hired to protect highly confidential cargo, or a judicial officer. The worse-case scenario was that the mysterious passenger was actually a Jedi! But they had shot the Jedi pilot down!

She shuddered slightly, her eye stalks quivering in excitement. She had never taken down a Jedi before. "Everyone. Listen up."

Every eye was on her within seconds.

"We need to be smarter now. These travellers have a protector. I am hoping they are only a scout or a soldier, but from now on, we travel as though we are facing a battalion. Be prepared, every one of you. Watch for tripwires, snares, anything that looks even slightly out of place!"

Mumbles of affirmation rumbled amongst the troops. They were still shaken by the death of Nathan, but her words had given them a little additional resolve.

She hefted her weapon and grinned at them, "Now, let us hunt!"

What she didn't see, what she would never see, was the faint silhouettes of figures in the shadows of the jungle. She would not see the eyes of the people study each of her hunting party carefully and mark down exactly how they armed themselves. And she would not see the thin, amused smile that crept along the face of the one on the right, a young Republican officer. It was a smile that never quite reached the determination of her eyes.