*Author's note: This story is the third in the Midnight series. In chronological order: Masters of the Game, What Lies Beneath, this story, then Midnight in the Garden.
Light your lasersword again, Lord Sidious … please!
He remembered being twelve years old and fascinated with the glowing red saber in his mother's bower on Dathomir. Can I have one someday?
The memory came back to him suddenly, in the ocean bar at the beach in Worlport, Ord Mantell.
The place turned into a laser light show at sunset. Water speeders zooming to and fro offshore lit the showy waterspouts that arced into the air behind their engines. Each waterspout shone a different neon hue, bright pinks, greens, yellows, purples, oranges.
They looked like deformed Jedi lightsabers streaming out behind as their humanoid riders gunned the engines, skimming to and fro, bobbing across the ocean, completely in keeping with this sector's claim as the "Bright Jewel Sector."
The Falleen and one Bith were out there somewhere, riding the water back and forth, whooping and shouting. The other Bith, the Human, and the Rodian loitered beside him at the bar over drinks, watching the females watch Maul.
All Rodians looked alike, and they had no facial expression, yet disappointment tinged the Force around the Rodian. No Rodian females had entered the bar tonight.
Long, thin searchlight beams of red laser light swept the skies around Allure, the focal restaurant and bar, piercing the pink, orange, and blue sunset and then sweeping across the horizon, calling all fun-loving tourists to this section of the beach. They looked like immense, proud Sith sabers, in contrast to the drooping Jedi sabers offshore.
The comparison brought a quick smile to Maul's lips. A group of Human females at a nearby table all returned the smile, and then leaned conspiratorially over their drinks and laughed. That was the advantage he presented to the two Bith, the Human, the Falleen, and the Rodian: he got the attention, then the other males had an excuse to invite the females over.
Lord Darth Maul was not there for the tourists. His current companions—and he did use the term loosely—all worked nearby in the hangar of one Buyo Wabo, an Aqualish arms manufacturer who had found favor in the highest echelon of the Trade Federation and was soon to accede to its Directorate.
But not if the Order of the Sith Lords could help it.
His name, for this mission, was Cathal.
"Cathal," whispered the Human. "Smile at that blonde one more time."
Maul complied, and the girl smiled, tittered, and turned away, flipping her hair over her shoulder. The Human took that as his cue to approach their table and speak.
The Rodian muttered something under his breath in his native tongue. Maul glanced at him and raised a brow; the Rodian said, "A wonder you come here at all. I never see a Zabrak in here. It's a bad night for me, too."
Maul leaned back against the bar, displaying his muscular chest. "Some of us are accepting of a wider range of species."
"And attractive to them, too." The Rodian was a short, scrawny little thing even for a Rodian; Maul could have snapped him in half like a twig. It did him little good to be seen next to anyone. "So Wabo isn't returning after this trip? Will you be jobless and dateless?"
"He isn't, and I don't know. I imagine he will keep his estate here, but will he need all of us to maintain a fleet he isn't using? He's going to be living inside the Trade Federation compound for a while, at least until he finds another estate to buy. We might all be looking for jobs next week."
This was not good news.
Wabo was a bit too honorable for the Sith Lord Darth Sidious. Preliminary approaches by their associate Sate Pestage indicated that Wabo accepted higher taxes as a cost of doing honest business and would never support using Trade Federation forces to blockade a planet, much less put himself at the disposal of a Dark Lord of the Sith.
Therefore, room simply had to be made for someone who would.
The assassination had to be clean. It had to look like a simple mechanical failure. Hence Maul's intention to get himself hired, however briefly, to work inside that hangar. And, hence the need to accomplish it when Wabo left Ord Mantell.
There would be no second chances, not for an indefinite length of time.
A Sith Lord had some degree of mechanical expertise by the time he finished his training—one needed it in order to build a functional lightsaber—and Maul had memorized the technical blueprints for the Luxury 3000 yacht Wabo was to board for the trip to Cato Nemoidia to assume his seat.
He simply needed to slip into the ship … then out again.
Which made this bunch a good crew to know. They arrived at just about this time every night, fresh from work, to drink and to survey the shapely female hominids who played in the pool each night just outside the open-air bar, periodically climbing out, dripping wet, to prowl to the bar for drinks.
And company.
The restaurant rose next door, a white, cone-shaped structure with a huge gazebo at the top, a pleasing, pale contrast to the rest of the concrete forest that made up coastal Worlport. Lights and laughter, music, and the tramp of dancing feet drifted to his ears from above, drowning out the rhythmic lap of the waves on the shore. Delicious smells wafted on the breeze, braised mollusk, grilled fish, fried tubers and other vegetables.
Maul had never climbed the stairs to the restaurant, although the thought of availing himself of one or more of the local beauties had occurred. Master had never expressly forbidden it; in fact, he tacitly encouraged it. Never let it interfere with your mission, Apprentice.
But then again, Master had the ultimate combination of business and pleasure.
That was why Maul tended to stay in the bar, shirtless, generally. His tattoos and his physique attracted the attention of female hominids like a beacon, which drew male hominids in their wake. Especially these five; none would consider any of them a particular prize of their species.
One of them would hire him on as a temp mechanic for a week or two.
Maul had made sure they had an opening.
Offshore, a waterspeeder with a green tailspout and one with an orange tailspout dueled in the water, making runs at one other. Speeders close by bobbed about and nearly capsized; shouts floated in over the waves and the music. Probably the Falleen and the other Bith; they had an orange and a green, didn't they? Along with a concurrent lack of brain capacity.
The two waterspeeders made a run at each other again, heading right for each other. This time, neither one turned aside. Cries of alarm rose from the beach as the orange and the green drew close, closer … All the other colored waterspouts turned tail and fled.
At the last moment, the green waterspout turned suddenly at a hard right angle and sped straight for shore. Weak echoes of fear tingled in the Force as every being that blocked any part of Maul's view turned. Feet pattered on the packed wet sand, as they scattered like startled gulls.
The waterspeeder headed straight for the bar.
Piercing female screams cut the night air as the speeder rose out of the water, its motor suddenly deafening, and cut a trench in the sand. The green light behind it lit a plume of wet sand as it rose into the air. The engine choked and sputtered. On and on it came, like a great hawkbat out of the darkening sky, headed straight for the bar. Chairs scraped the floor; people rose to their feet and ran.
Maul, glancing about to check that all eyes remained on the incoming speeder, put out his hands—everyone was—and subtly directed the Force to slow it down. It slid to a stop two meters from the pool.
A wide swath of bare sand surrounded the trench it made on its way in. It zippered closed as curious onlookers, emboldened in safety, fell in behind the speeder to see what had happened and who was driving. Behind the bar, the bartender, a gray Gotal, stood frozen with his own hands up, the whites showing around his scarlet eyes.
Maul slammed his drink down and strode out of the bar. Sure enough, the idiot Falleen sat behind the controls, blinking.
"Cathaa-aal" he said in a drawl that strongly suggested he was drunk. "Looks like I kriffed up my engine." He let out a theatrical belch.
"Get out," said Maul. "Only don't fall in the pool."
The pool had a hose dangling into it and was filling with water anyway. Maul lifted the speeder—with only a little help from the Force—and balanced it on the edge of the pool, holding the intake valve into the water. The local lovelies all retreated to the opposite end.
"Reach in and turn on the engine," said Maul. "Look out!"
With a terrible grinding noise, the engine slurped up pool water that mixed with imbibed sand in a slurry that sputtered, then shot, out of the back spout. In a few moments the water ran clear and the grinding stopped. Maul lowered the speeder level and reached in and cut the engine.
The Falleen stared at him, blearily closing one eye. "Chuuuba," he said.
"We're one man short at work," he said, and belched again. "You free for a job for a couple of weeks?"