The Phantom Menace (39 page)

As the shadow of the Trade Federation spreads over Naboo, a streak of darkness cuts through the Federation’s heart.

For Darth Sidious has sent his apprentice to oversee the annihilation of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, plunging the galaxy into war and announcing the presence of the Sith to the Jedi.

The balance between dark and light is on a precarious edge, and for Darth Maul, the beginning may actually be the

END GAME

A new Darth Maul short story by James Luceno

The Sith Infiltrator was in hyperspace when Darth Maul engaged the autopilot to give himself time to think. Reflection was so foreign to him that the impulse to look inward left him momentarily astonished—though not enough to keep him seated at the ship’s controls. Shrugging out of the acceleration chair’s harness, he rose and paced from the control console to the aft arc of passenger seats; then from the entrance of the lift to the power-cell array access panels. Though Tatooine was light-years behind him, he couldn’t shake the planet from his thoughts, and despite the
Scimitar
’s speed and cloaking ability, it was as if the sleek ship, too, were incapable of outracing the past.

If I had it to do over again
…

In his thoughts he was dropped into the speeder bike’s open cockpit, racing across Tatooine’s desolate landscape; in the next moment, executing an impromptu though acrobatic leap that carried him to the yellow ground, his lightsaber in hand, its energy blade meeting that of the Jedi Master whose name he had since learned was Qui-Gon Jinn.

Probe droids Maul had dispatched upon landing on Tatooine had located the bearded human Jedi in the stands of the Podrace stadium and later in the settlement known as Mos Espa. One of the trio of Dark Eyes had also discovered the Queen of Naboo’s starship where it had put down in the wastes of the Xelric Draw. Intent on availing himself of every advantage, Maul had waited for Qui-Gon to set out on foot for the gleaming ship before launching his surprise attack. Qui-Gon and a human slave boy had hurried across the oven-like wastes while Maul watched from the padded comfort of the speeder’s seat. Maul’s eyes were better adapted than human eyes to the glare of Tatooine’s twin suns, his lithe body better suited than the Jedi heavyweight’s to fighting in soft sand …

And yet nothing had gone as planned.

Somehow Qui-Gon heard the sibilant whine of the speeder’s repulsorlift and had whirled aside at the last instant. With some 250 meters separating Qui-Gon and the slave boy from Queen Amidala’s vessel, Maul would have had time to whip the speeder through a turn and make a second pass. Instead, in his eagerness to face off at last with a celebrated Jedi lightsaber Master, he had leapt into action …

Qui-Gon’s shrewd readiness had almost taken Maul off his guard. But the first ferocious clash of their blades had told him that the Jedi was equally surprised. And why shouldn’t he be—about being attacked not only by a Dathomiri Zabrak who had appeared out of nowhere, but also by one trained in the dark arts and wielding a crimson-bladed lightsaber? Regardless, Qui-Gon had quieted his mind and brought his imposing might to bear against Maul’s agility. He had matched Maul’s furious strokes with a disciplined intensity all his own. In the midst of their no-quarter contest the Jedi had even managed to order the slave boy to flee for the safety of the waiting ship, where Maul had nearly forgotten all about him.

The Force favors this Jedi!
Maul recalled thinking.

After all the droids, assassins, gangsters, and soldiers he had vanquished, finally a worthy opponent. Not since he had fought and been defeated by his own Master, Darth Sidious, had Maul been so committed to a challenge.

Then, just when Qui-Gon’s stamina was beginning to flag and the fight was tipping in Maul’s favor, the incomprehensible had occurred:
Qui-Gon had fled
. Instead of standing fast and fighting to the finish, he had bounded onto the lowered boarding ramp of the Royal Starship as it was lifting off, leaving Maul—sandblasted as much by disenchantment as raw anger—to watch the craft disappear into Tatooine’s blue sky.

Many a being had run from Maul, but never a worthy one.

When, on orders from his Master, he had single-handedly butchered the trainers and trainees at the Orsis combat academy five years earlier, not a being had fled. Not the Mandalorian Meltch nor his pair of lethal Rodians; not Trezza or his well-trained Nautolan ward, Kilindi. All had stood their ground and died with honor. Spinelessness was something that had never entered Maul’s imaginings. What, then, was he now supposed to think of the Jedi, whom he had been raised to hate since infancy?

On Coruscant, before leaving for Tatooine, Maul had found it impossible to contain his enthusiasm.
At last we reveal ourselves, Master
, he had said to Sidious. And in the end that long-awaited moment of revelation had led to nothing more than disappointment. Watching the departing starship, Maul had wondered: Could he succeed in tracking the Jedi and the Queen a second time? How would his failure impact the overall mission?

At the time he had tried to make excuses for himself, blaming his inability to overpower Qui-Gon on the leg wound he had sustained during his brief capture by Togorian pirates. Or the slave boy might have been to blame—a seeming nexus of Force energy, the boy had somehow abetted Qui-Gon in the fight. But Maul had known better than to make excuses to his Master, or even mention the run-in with the Togorians.

But
if
he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t make it a challenge.

Even if that meant depriving himself of the thrill of combat and the pleasure of seeing the pained surprise in Qui-Gon’s eyes when Maul’s blade pierced him. He would simply race in at top speed with his lightsaber already ignited and decapitate Qui-Gon Jinn where he stood. That way he might also have been able to pilot the speeder through the ship’s open hatch, kill Qui-Gon’s Padawan, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and capture the Queen …

How his Master would have praised him then! Instead Maul had been forced to weather Sidious’s obvious disenchantment in abject humiliation. Darth Sidious had dismissed the setback, almost as if attributing Maul’s failure to—what? Surely not
fate
, since his Master was as much as overseeing that. That left only Maul’s lack of ability.

His
weakness
.

Currently the two Jedi, the Queen, and her entourage of handmaidens and protectors were on Coruscant, and Maul had been ordered to Naboo to assist the loathsome Neimoidians in rooting out possible pockets of resistance while Sidious modified the plan.

Even Sidious despised having to deal with the Neimoidians. So the assignment to advise them felt like a punishment, as had happened following Maul’s massacre of the leaders of the Black Sun crime syndicate. Then Maul had been banished from Coruscant after confessing to Sidious that he had identified himself as a Sith Lord to one of the crime bosses before killing him.

In previous missions undertaken for his Master, Maul had felt allied to the dark side, but something had changed since Tatooine. Was he now in some sense engaging the Force itself, through its proxies, the Jedi? Should he have been more circumspect and lured the Jedi to him instead of initiating the attack?

Would his Master even allow him a second chance?

He wouldn’t have believed that his hatred for the Jedi could deepen, but it had—for making him appear ineffectual in the eyes of Darth Sidious and for putting him in such an untenable fix …

Enough thinking
, Maul commanded himself.

The solution was that he couldn’t allow himself to fail again.

Convinced that he had put the past to rest, Maul came to a halt in the Infiltrator’s cabin. However, as if his legs had a will of their own, he was suddenly back in motion, pacing from the control console to the acceleration chairs.

If I had it to do over again …

Holoimages of Naboo didn’t do it justice.

A blue-green gem in an otherwise lackluster star system, the planet was one of the most pristine Maul had ever seen. This was as it should be, being the homeworld of Darth Sidious in his guise as Senator—perhaps soon to be Supreme Chancellor—Palpatine. Years earlier Maul had fallen prey to a plot that would have returned him to the world of his birth, Dathomir, but he had foiled the designs of his Nightsister abductors and pledged never to give thought to the life he might have led had he not been raised and trained by Sidious. As far as he was concerned, his homeworld was volcanic Mustafar, where he had fittingly been forged in fire.

Integral to his Master’s plan, the Trade Federation’s blockade of Naboo had been in the works for several years. The plan had required positioning Viceroy Nute Gunray as director of the shipping cartel, and manipulating the Republic Senate into allowing the Neimoidians to defend the enormous ships of their fleet with combat automata and other war machines. But the Senate had yet to learn the lengths to which the Trade Federation had gone to arm itself. The blockade had been in effect for some time when Sidious had ordered the Neimoidians to invade and occupy the planet, in response to the Jedi Order’s attempt to intervene in the dispute. Attempts had been made on the lives of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, but the Neimoidians had proved no match for the Jedi, and so the Forceful duo had managed to spirit Queen Amidala safely off Naboo.

The blockade had initially numbered hundreds of vessels, but Maul realized on arriving at Naboo that the Neimoidians—ever fretful about diminished profits—had since returned almost all of their ships to the business of intergalactic transport. Well, they were nothing more than merchants, he reminded himself, but their greediness offended him almost as much as Qui-Gon’s cowardice.

At Tatooine it hadn’t been necessary to employ the
Scimitar
’s cloaking capabilities, but Maul did so now in order to maneuver the ship into the core of what remained of the Trade Federation armada, which consisted of half a dozen freighters and a single ring-shaped
Lucrehulk
-class control ship, which oversaw all elements of the Neimoidians’ droid army. Though formidable, the control ship was not impregnable, and the shoddiness of the operation sickened him. A stealth team made up of agents of the sort Trezza had trained on Orsis would have been able to infiltrate the vessel easily and destroy it from within, essentially paralyzing the Trade Federation’s entire force.

Maul was certain he could penetrate the ship on his own, and was sorely tempted to, if only to rub Gunray’s muzzled face in the flaws of his strategy. But he contented himself with piloting the Infiltrator to well within firing range of the control ship and a squadron of drone starfighters, without the Neimoidians even being aware of his presence.

Maul took the
Scimitar
through a low and slow orbit around Naboo, studying aerial close-ups of the northern continent’s grassy flatlands, lush hills, and extensive swamps and lakes. The galaxy boasted many such scenic wonders, but what made Naboo unique—and had in some sense doomed it—was the planet’s plasma core, and the maze of underground tunnels and caverns the seething magma had fashioned. Those corridors, however, were not visible from above, save for various entry points to underground oceans that were allegedly rife with behemoth aquatic creatures, and home to an indigenous species of amphibian humanoids who resided in bubble cities maintained by plasma technology.

Once Darth Sidious had issued the command to invade Naboo, the assault and subsequent occupation had happened quickly—in part because of Queen Amidala’s unwillingness to fight back. Not, in any case, that Naboo’s small space force would have stood a chance against the Trade Federation army. Amidala may have been convinced that the Neimoidians were bluffing—which they certainly would have been without the goading of a Sith Lord—but even when the first landing ships had begun to disgorge antigrav tanks and thousands of infantry droids, the young Queen had ordered the Naboo Royal Security Forces to stand down and surrender. Only Viceroy Gunray’s concern for the Trade Federation’s galactic reputation had kept the invasion from turning into a slaughter. And only a fluke had allowed Amidala’s starship to breach the blockade.

Maul flew the invisible ship over several sprawling makeshift detention centers, where the entire populations of some of Naboo’s compact cities were now imprisoned and forced to answer to battle droids. Employing coordinates furnished by Darth Sidious, he set the
Scimitar
down outside the principal city of Theed, in a private hangar Sidious had assured him was secure.

Maul used his wrist link to program his trio of probe droids to monitor the hangar, then extracted the horseshoe-shaped speeder bike from its proprietary enclosure in the underside of the forward port-side cargo hatch. Clothed in black robes and a hooded field cloak, he straddled the speeder and aimed it for Theed.

The deserted city of stately domes and elegant spires struck him as an artifact—or perhaps a quaint historical replica closed for routine maintenance. Squads of B1 battle droids armed with blaster rifles patrolled the narrow streets and stood sentry outside the Theed Palace and other major buildings. Evading them effortlessly, Maul timed the patrols, made note of their numbers, and used the Force to create sounds that tricked the droids into moving in one direction or another. The idea of using droids as combatants annoyed him, for droids were only as good as their programming, and the bipedal, slender-headed B1 had limited skills and no ability to perform autonomously. Only the fact that the droids, too, were integral to his Master’s more far-reaching plan kept Maul from revulsion. The deeper he ventured into the galaxy, the less honor he found. But the Sith would redress that deficit once the Jedi were exterminated and the Republic brought down.

Maul stowed the speeder in an alley that ran alongside Theed’s space force hangar, which was perched on the edge of an escarpment. Inside the domed building he took stock of Naboo’s smart yellow-and-chromium Nubian fighters, neatly arranged in berths on several tiers, with an R2 astromech droid assigned to each ship. Despite the success of the occupation, the Neimoidians would have been wise to disable the fighters, but they were apparently incapable of tampering with anything of value. As with the control ship, Maul was tempted to show them the error of their ways, but again he did nothing.