Chapter 24

Darth Maul advanced along the dark passage as fast as he dared. His sense of the Jedi and her companions grew stronger. Events had stretched out much longer than they should have; it was well past time to put an end to this.

Even so, he realized he was letting his eagerness overcome his caution. He deliberately slowed his pace, forcing patience. It would not do to be caught in some trap deep underground, to have half of the Sith in the galaxy lost due to carelessness.

He probed the darkness with renewed caution, sensing nothing dangerous ahead. The path of the Jedi was very fresh now; he could sense her presence. Not much farther.

And then he felt her find him. A clumsy probe it was, weak and hesitant. He was disappointed by it. It would be no real challenge to face someone so little steeped in the ways of the Force. Definitely not in the same class as her Master, the Twi'lek who had de‑ stroyed his speeder bike. He had been a worthy adver‑ sary. Not as good as Maul, of course, but that was to 'be expected.

He saw a faint light up ahead as he came around a curve in the tunnel. The echoes of his footsteps changed, and he realized he had reached a larger open space. He sent mental investigative tendrils of the Force outward, finding the boundaries of the ledge he stood on and the bridge just ahead. He sensed the Jedi on the bridge, perhaps halfway across, with Lorn Pavan and his droid just ahead of her, and beyond them.

Maul frowned. There was an odd quality ahead of them in the darkness‑ an empty spot in the mental topography of his probe. The light, which he now realized had to be from the droid's photoreceptors, gave him a brief glimpse of something huge and oddly insubstantial, like a weaving pillar of smoke ahead of the three on the middle of the bridge. Whatever it was he saw produced no corresponding vibration in the Force. This was most odd.

Curious, he tried again. And again his probe met with nothingness. No, not exactly nothingness‑ the sensation was almost like encountering a surface so slick that one could find no purchase on it. It was like trying to see something that radiated only ultraviolet light. A strange phenomenon, but one he paid little attention to, because he now noted that the Jedi and Pavan were coming back along the bridge toward him.

He was surprised‑ pleased, but surprised. Surely the Padawan knew she could not defeat him. What, then, was her purpose? Had the other human continued ahead he would have been certain it was a delaying tactic, such as the Twi'lek had attempted earlier. But no‑ Pavan was accompanying the Jedi, along with his droid.

Once again Darth Maul admitted to being impressed by his prey. They were brave enough to come back and face him, and smart enough to realize, finally, that it was pointless to keep running. Naturally they would die, but perhaps he would grant them some small measure of mercy, would be a trifle quicker in killing them than he had originally planned.

The woman had activated her lightsaber. As if that would make the slightest bit of difference, he thought.

He stepped forward onto the bridge and walked out to meet them.

Darsha had never seen anything like the creature that faced them on the bridge. It was huge, a great long body that stretched back at least as far as a hover‑ bus. As she watched, segment after segment wound over the side of the bridge, which shuddered in response as the motion brought the creature up from underneath and onto the structure with them. Its skin was composed of segmented overlapping plates, dotted here and there with small nodules that were perhaps two centimeters in diameter. Its head was capped by two great black eyes and a pair of curved mandibles, each easily as long as her leg. Below them were an array of small, clawed arms, and below that a series of short, thick legs.

The most amazing thing about it, however, was that its chitinous exoskeleton and internal organs seemed to be completely transparent. Apparently it had no internal skeletal structure, though how a creature that size could exist without the support of bones in a one‑ gravity field was beyond her understanding. Darsha saw a flash of reflected light from within its midsec‑ tion, a few segments back from the head, and stared in disbelief. Momentarily illuminated by I‑ Five's photoreceptors was a pile of bones‑ human bones‑ that shifted in the thing's gut as it heaved more of its quaking mass up onto the bridge. Also in the monster's digestive tract was a more recent acquisition‑ a partially digested Cthon. Thankfully, the droid's light failed to show it in great detail.

" Why didn't this thing show up on your sensors? " Lorn hissed at I‑ Five as the two backed hastily away from the giant beast.

" Perhaps you forget it was the less‑ expensive unit you had installed? Not the one with the extra sensitivity hi‑ band‑ something about saving money, as I recall…"

Those two would probably die arguing, Darsha thought as she backpedaled carefully, trying to keep her balance on the swaying bridge. The big question as far as she was concerned was why the Force hadn't warned her of this thing's presence. While it was true that sentient beings were on the whole easier to sense than nonsentient ones, a living creature this size and this close would have made a noticeable dent in the energy field even if it had a brain the size of a jakka seed.

As she retreated, Darsha sent a questing mental beam toward the creature‑ and felt it disappear. There was no psychic reverberation at all.

How could that be?

Her surprise nearly caused her to topple into the abyss. Her eyes told her the monster was there before them, her body felt the bridge swing and vibrate as it raised more of its bulk up out of the depths, but as far as sensing it via the Force, she felt nothing.

This was impossible. Maybe she wasn't an adept in the same league as Masters Yoda or Jinn, but she'd have to have zero‑ point‑ zero midi‑ chlorians in her bloodstream not to get some kind of reading on something that huge!

The creature reared up, some of its legs quivering in the light of I‑ Five's photoreceptors. There was a sound, a kind of dry rasping, which it seemed to make by rattling its segmented chitinous plates. It towered over them and opened its mouth.

Darsha activated her lightsaber as the droid fired both finger blasters, hitting several pairs of legs and scarring the creature's torso. It shrieked and slammed the upper length of its body back down on the bridge, nearly shaking the group off. They had to drop prone to keep from falling‑ which was lucky, because the stream of fluid that arced from the dark rictus of its mouth passed over their heads instead of coating them. Even as she clung to the metal plank beneath her, it was clear to Darsha that the stuff being spat by the monster was the same substance that made up the gray silken material of the bridge.

This thing had made the bridge.

Something about all this seemed familiar, but she couldn't recall how or why. A vagrant stream of the silk drifted toward the Padawan, and without thinking, she moved her lightsaber to intercept it. The silk burned as it hit the yellow energy beam, vaporizing into a cloud of smelly vapor.

The three got to their feet and started moving quickly back down the bridge toward the tunnel. Behind them the monster hitched itself forward, its multiple legs clinging to the silken bridge.

Well, I‑ Five's blasters hadn't worked, Darsha told herself. Let's see how well it stands up to a lightsaber.

Lorn was really wishing he had a weapon right about now. Forget hand blasters‑ he was far past desiring something that small. Maybe a tripod‑ mounted V‑ 90, or a few plasma grenades. As long as he was wishing, how about a ship‑ mounted turbolaser‑ with him safely inside the ship.

Where had this creature come from? One minute they were walking along the bridge, the next it was just there.

Retreat was the obvious choice. But just before this thing reared its ugly head, hadn't he heard Darsha say something about the Sith being right behind them?

Talk about being trapped between the Black Hole of Nakat and the Magataran Maelstrom.

At that moment he realized what the creature was.

When Lorn had worked for the Jedi he'd had access to a lot of literature about them and many related topics. After he'd learned that Jax was off‑ limits to him he'd spent weeks studying everything he could about the Jedi: their history, their powers, their strengths and weaknesses. He hadn't found anything that could help him, but he had come across some interesting and esoteric bits of knowledge‑ including, in one old text, stories about a supposedly extinct species of giant invertebrates that could, after a fashion, hide from the Force. What had it been called?

Taozin‑ that was it.

Apparently they weren't extinct.

At that moment Darsha dived past him and I‑ Five toward the monster, her lightsaber flashing.

" Darsha! Stop! It's a taozin! "

Darsha came out of her forward roll near the base of the creature, lightsaber extended. She thrust forward, angling the cut of the weapon to carve out a huge chunk of the monster's belly. Let's see how hungry you are after your prey bites back, she thought.

She executed the move as perfectly as she ever had in practice; Master Bondara would have been proud. The only problem was that it didn't work.

She watched in disbelieving shock as the yellow glow of her blade diffused as she sank it into the creature, losing its coherency and radiating in all directions. Darsha dodged back, narrowly avoiding the backsplash of her own weapon. The blade regained its congruency as she withdrew it from the creature's abdomen. The beast spasmed and roared angrily, its translucent flesh rippling in reaction; the strike had evidently hurt it, though not nearly as much as she had anticipated.

Darsha was so astonished by the result of her attack that she almost let the beast seize her with those sharp mandibles and pull her into the mouth that gaped overhead. At the last moment she scrambled back, waving the lightsaber to evaporate the gout of wet silk that it vomited toward her. At least the energy blade was good against that. She noted that the silk expellant became opaque only after it left the thing's mouth.

She realized belatedly that Lorn had called out something to her a moment ago. It hadn't registered at first, but now it did.

A taozin?

She remembered a few references to the beasts in her first history class. Thought to be extinct, they had been one of the few living creatures ever encountered that could not be perceived through the Force. Apparently someone had imported one to Coruscant some time in the past.

There was an old Jedi adage that Master Bondara had been fond of quoting: Any enemy may be defeated‑ at the right time.

This, Darsha realized, was not the right time.

She retreated toward Lorn and I‑ Five, who had gained another few meters. The taozin sprayed more webbing at them. Darsha pushed with the Force, deflecting the flow of sticky fluid when she could and vaporizing it with her lightsaber when she couldn't. There was nothing else to do but keep retreating‑ back into the clutches of the Sith.