Dark Disciple Read online

  Boba Fett was young, looking to be only in his late teens. “Rookie?” Fett snorted. “Don’t you believe it. That woman knows exactly what she’s doing.”

  “And what she’s doing is…”

  “Conning people. Why do you want to know, anyway?” Fett scowled into his drink, refusing to elaborate. Clearly, Ventress was a touchy subject. Vos was unsurprised.

  “Like you, I got cheated out of a couple of big payouts,” he offered.

  “She didn’t cheat us,” Latts Razzi piped up. She swirled her cocktail, her eyes twinkling with humor as she peered up at Vos. “We got our pay. Just…not how the Boss here likes it.”

  “True enough,” muttered Fett, “but I don’t like her style.” He drained his drink for emphasis.

  “Agreed,” Vos said mildly. He didn’t attempt to directly influence any of the bounty hunters. They hadn’t gotten their reputations by being weak-minded. He simply stood, exuding good cheer—which wasn’t a pretense.

  Fett looked Vos up and down. “You think you can give her a run? Make some trouble for her?”

  “I’m certain of it.”

  Fett nodded, seemingly satisfied. “All right. I got a tip she took a job on Pantora, chasing down a Volpai named Moregi.” He removed a holoprojector from his pocket, and the small image of a four-armed humanoid sprang to life on his outstretched palm. Fett’s expression darkened as he regarded the figure. “I was going to take that job myself until I heard she got involved. You think you can handle her, be my guest.” He tossed the holoprojector to Vos as if it were a discarded sabacc chip. Vos caught it deftly.

  Bossk grinned at him. “Let’s hope you’re man enough.”

  Vos flipped the holoprojector in his palm, winked, and left. But not before he heard what Boba Fett doubtless thought was the final word on the subject: “He has no idea what he’s getting himself into.”

  True enough, Vos thought with a mental shrug. I never do.

  And that was half the fun.

  —

  Pantora was the primary moon in orbit around the planet Orto Plutonia. The moon was as temperate as the planet was icy and hostile, and had an elegant cityscape with the repeating pattern of domes shaped like teardrops—or, less poetically, onions. The Pantorans, for whatever reason, seemed inordinately fond of building on multiple levels. Parks, walk-ways, and other varieties of decorative architectural constructs adorned what on other worlds would be unremarkable rooftops.

  Asajj Ventress was not a poetic woman, and the architecture of Pantora concerned her only inasmuch as it was making it difficult for her to track down her quarry. At the present moment, she stood atop a flattened version of such a tear-shaped dome, vision-enhancing goggles whirring and clicking as they readjusted.

  She’d gotten a tip that her quarry preferred this part of the capital city, coming here to simply wander. A specific site would have been more helpful—a bar, a brothel, even a particular statue—but Ventress had learned to cultivate patience in the last several months.

  Her augmented gaze traveled over the decorative buildings and multicolored trees that broke up the expanses of the red stone with which the Pantorans seemed to like to decorate their public spaces. The day was a pleasant one, and many Pantorans were out enjoying the sunshine. Speeders zipped overhead, though without the frantic urgency of those navigating the skylanes of Coruscant. There were clusters of family units, from adults to infants, setting out picnics in the shade of the trees while their younglings ambled about happily. Young lovers were here, too, strolling with their heads bent close to each other.

  Ventress’s gaze lingered a moment on a family—a male and female Mirialan with three younglings of various ages. The male was giving one of them a ride on his back, and the boy was clearly delighted. The adult female, presumably the mother, looked on, smiling fondly.

  With a muttered oath of self-chastisement, Ventress returned to her search. But she couldn’t shake the image. Once, she had belonged to a family—a sisterhood, strong and proud. Now they were dead, and she would never hold a sister’s child, all because of Dooku.

  Those Mirialans were fools. They did not understand how easily and completely a single moment could destroy everything. Let them laugh in their ignorance and play with their spawn while they could.

  Slowly, Ventress moved her head, covered now with short, pale-blond hair, tracking along the open areas. A few lonely citizens sat on the steps of various buildings, eating their lunches. Some threw pieces of their meals to various small creatures, which survived by looking appealing to bored sentients who—

  Ventress paused, adjusting the electrobinocular goggles slightly, and a smile curved her lips.

  He was hunched over, four eyes blinking slowly, one hand holding a sandwich. A second arm held a cup, while the other two were plucking a crust to toss to the small, rodentlike creatures, whose tails flickered energetically as they consumed the food.

  Moregi. “There’s my Volpai,” Ventress said softly, her voice a satisfied purr. She quickly calculated the best approach, fired a cable of plasma energy from her current rooftop to a lower one, then hooked the bow over it and slid down.

  She landed gracefully and straightened, gazing down at her quarry. As if sensing her, the Volpai froze in his actions of feeding the animals and slowly turned his head.

  Their eyes met. Ventress was unconcerned that she had been made. No bounty yet had escaped her. She dropped to the pavement and walked toward him casually, smiling as he leapt to his feet, bellowed at her, and took off.

  Let the chase begin.

  Moregi slammed deliberately into passersby, sending them tumbling behind him to block Ventress’s pursuit. Four arms lent him extra dexterity as he leapt onto statuary, swung from overhangs, and frightened various mounts and their riders. While the chaos prevented Ventress from getting the clear shot she wanted, which would have ended the hunt in record time, she was not averse to giving chase. The Force buoyed her and guided her, and the prey was not so clever as to be entirely unpredictable to her keen senses. Moregi had to utilize his sheer physicality to shove his way through the crowd; Ventress, whose friend was the Force, conserved her energy for the final capture by simply soaring over the crowds of frightened, fallen pedestrians with a few well-timed leaps.

  She thought she had him when the Volpai ran out of rooftop. Moregi hesitated, glancing over his shoulder at Ventress. Then he took a running jump and somehow made it to the next rooftop.

  “Not bad,” Ventress granted him, effortlessly making the leap herself. She let the Force tell her what Moregi would do next, and followed its guidance when she lost sight of him briefly. She cut a corner on one of the rooftops when he sought to throw her off by racing along the streets. She smiled to herself as she saw him emerge, and, arcing her body, she dived atop him.

  They slammed hard to the ground. The impact forced her to tumble away from him, and she leapt lightly to her feet, facing him. The bounty was higher if she brought him in alive, so as Moregi stared at her, panting, Ventress was calculating the best way to bring him down.

  Suddenly she caught a flurry of movement out of the corner of her eye and a figure sailed across her field of vision. Her Volpai went down beneath it.

  Ventress was so taken aback she simply stared in astonishment as the two grappled. Recovering, she demanded, “What is this?”

  The dark-haired humanoid, struggling with his two arms to pin down the arms of a being who had four, turned his head and shot her a grin. “It’s called a ‘tackle.’ ”

  Fury surged within Ventress and her voice dropped to its lowest, most dangerous timbre. “Who. Are. You.”

  Moregi was still straining against the interloper. The man, though, again grinned up at Ventress. “Relax. I’ve got this one, honey.” And he actually winked.

  “Honey?”

  Asajj Ventress stepped forward, yanked the laserbrain off her bounty, and punched him soundly in the jaw.

  With a satisfying grunt, he went sprawling, starin
g up at her incredulously as his hand went to his mouth. Moregi, equally incredulous, stared wildly from Ventress to the intruder. Then, with a delighted cackle, he sprang to his feet and was off again in a heartbeat.

  Ventress set off in pursuit, her outrage lending her speed. She didn’t spare the interloper another glance. Whatever the idiot’s goal had been, be it a serious attempt to steal her bounty or simply an excessive and ill-advised display of perceived masculine superiority, he had only delayed the inevitable.

  Moregi had a couple of seconds’ lead on her now. An ordinary tracker would have lost him amid the unnecessary and vexing rooftop architecture, but Ventress was able to keep him in sight until he darted into a cluster of trees in yet another park area. She halted, catching her breath, trying to reach out in the Force to find him, but there were so many life-forms in close proximity that it wasn’t possible. Silently, she moved around, senses alert. She was fairly certain he hadn’t leapt to another forested rooftop; the gap would be too large for any non-Force-user to bridge without tools, and the Volpai had none.

  Did any world really need this many trees on its rooftops? If it hadn’t been for the stranger’s interference, she’d have had Moregi three times over by this point. Granted, she’d been the one to lose her temper and surrender to the impulse to punch the cocky fool.

  She sensed a presence behind her and closed her eyes, gathering strength.

  “Do you normally go around stealing other people’s bounties?” she snapped as the dark-haired idiot slipped in beside her, a blaster drawn. “Or was this just my lucky day?”

  He stepped forward, moving with grace and skill as he peered around the trees. “Bounties are fair game. You must be new at this.”

  She arched a brow. He grinned. “Play nice, you may get lucky later!”

  The flirtation attempt was so atrocious that Ventress couldn’t even find it in her to be offended. “You’re lucky I don’t kill you right now,” she muttered, slipping around a tree trunk. No Volpai.

  “Luck is exactly what you’d need to kill me,” he replied.

  Crunch.

  It was a faint sound, but both of them tensed. Moregi must have thought that they were so engaged in exchanging quips that he could sneak past them. Ventress’s respect for the unnamed bounty-stealer went up a small notch. Few ears were sharp enough to have detected the soft noise. It was time to end this, and her patience—both with the Idiot and with the bounty—had worn out.

  Ventress homed in on the source of the sound, extended a hand, and casually uprooted the tree behind which Moregi had been hiding. He stared at her, four eyes wide with shock, then fled toward the edge of the rooftop.

  Ventress followed, and so did the Idiot. She shoved him aside in irritation. “Don’t even think about it,” she snapped. “He’s mine.”

  She wondered what Moregi had in mind, if anything. He wouldn’t be able to leap to the next rooftop, and the fall was—

  He jumped.

  Ventress and the Idiot slid to a halt at the edge and peered over to see the Volpai swinging nimbly from the hanging signs of various shops, putting his extra two arms to exceptional use. With the skill of a Wookiee, he went from OGGSOR’S FINE MILLINERY to FASHIONS BY F’JLK to A FIT FOR ALL FEET while Ventress and the Idiot paced him atop the roof. The chase had brought them from the public parks into what was clearly a high-fashion merchant area, and Ventress spared a moment to be amused at the looks of the wealthy, well-groomed Pantorans peering nervously up at the gymnastic Volpai.

  Moregi hung from the swinging sign that proclaimed THE PAISLEY PIKOBI, having run out of convenient handholds, and as he hesitated about where to leap next, Ventress dived straight for him. Her hands closed on his shirt. Her momentum carried them forward, crashing through another sign with a depiction of various desserts.

  Ventress shot out a hand and grabbed hold of a pipe that ran the width of the building. Moregi’s shirt tore and he slipped from her grasp, but she reached out a second time and seized his hand. He clung to it, ready to take his chances with her rather than fall several stories to the unforgiving pavement.

  Using the Force to lock her fingers in place on the pipe, Ventress tightened her grip on Moregi’s hand. But his palm was sweaty from the chase, and he began to slide inexorably downward.

  “You slippery, four-armed slimeball!” she shouted.

  He fell, six limbs waving frantically like an insect, his mouth open in a scream.

  Ventress was already moving her fingers to catch him with the Force when Moregi thumped down on the hood of a passing speeder. She gaped, stunned at the Volpai’s impossibly good luck, as he clambered for a better grip aboard the vessel. He craned his neck and lifted one of his arms in a rude gesture.

  “Me juuz ku, wermo!” See you, suckers.

  You have got to be kidding me, Ventress thought. Unbelievable. Well, there was nothing for it but to start the chase. For the fourth time. Ventress dropped lithely to the street level and began to run. She was strong and fit, but she was beginning to think that this might be an exceptionally long chase and so emulated her prey by hopping onto the back of a bright-red vessel as it whisked past. She kept her gaze focused on the blue airspeeder to which her bounty clung like a burr on a bantha.

  As it rounded a curve, the speeder disappeared from Ventress’s view for the space of a heartbeat, and when her “own” speeder made the turn, the shiny blue surface of the vehicle was noticeably devoid of a Volpai hitchhiker.

  Her gaze flickered to the sidewalks, where she caught some movement, and she nimbly leapt from the back of her hijacked speeder. But by the time she had rolled back to her feet, her quarry had disappeared into the crowd.

  Ventress sighed. Slowing her pace to a less-attention-grabbing walk, she moved through the throng, constantly searching for Moregi. It seemed there was a street festival of some sort in the area today, if the profusion of vendors and the appetizing smell of food were reliable indicators.

  She emerged into the city’s main square, the center of which was dominated by an enormous statue. The bearded man with a kindly, paternal face had struck a dramatic pose atop a pillar. Four stone narglatches, fearsome predators with a mane of fleshy spines, roared silently at the base.

  Ventress sensed the annoying interloper behind her again and, folding her arms, turned to regard him. He was easy on the eyes, with that mane of black dreadlocked hair, strong features with an unusual tattoo of a yellow stripe, and a lithe but muscular body. His pleasant looks didn’t lessen her ire one whit, however.

  “You just don’t know when to quit, do you?”

  “You know, this would be a lot easier if we worked together,” he said, as if she hadn’t even spoken. He extended a hand, ready to shake hers. She batted it aside and pushed forward.

  “I work alone.”

  “Okay, partner!” he replied cheerily.

  “I am not your partner!” she retorted, steaming ahead of him and jumping onto the topmost step of the monument. She scanned the crowd.

  “You sure are dedicated,” he said behind her.

  Ventress pointed a stiff index finger directly into his face. “Don’t. Test. Me.” She held his gaze for a moment, then turned back to her search.

  “Look, it’s not my fault you lost him.”

  That did it.

  She whirled and clamped her hand over his mouth. “Stay out of my way,” she warned. She felt his lips move against her hand and tightened her grip, shaking him by the jaw like a dog she was muzzling. “I mean it.”

  Again the lips moved, but his eyes weren’t on her and he lifted a hand to point. “Mmphrr,” he said.

  She turned to see that Moregi had caught yet another ride. Still gripping the Idiot’s mouth closed, Ventress said, “Looks like you’re useful after all.” She shoved him backward, leapt onto the back of a stone narglatch, and then sprang onto an idling single-seat speeder. The Rodian driver protested, but Ventress kicked him in the chest and he fell to the pavement, recovering sufficiently
to curse her as she took off after her quarry.

  She closed the gap between them quickly. Before he could leap to another vehicle, Ventress rose in her seat and nocked her bow. Even moving, she couldn’t miss at this range.

  Moregi shocked her by not fleeing: He leapt directly at her. Ventress found herself flat on the back of a narrow vessel careening at full speed with a four-armed Volpai atop her, trying to crush her trachea with her own bow. They tumbled off her stolen speeder onto the hood of another one. Ventress grunted, air knocked out of her lungs yet again by the bulk of the surprisingly vigorous Moregi. She shoved upward, but he yanked the bow from her grip and tossed it away.

  Ventress was done with finesse—that bow had been given to her by her fellow Nightsisters. Snarling like an animal, she used the Force to augment her own not-inconsiderable strength, flipped the Volpai over, and straddled him. She had two arms pinned, but the second pair and his powerful legs worked together to first seize her and then kick her over his head.

  She nearly slid off the vessel—whose Pantoran driver was more than likely desperately regretting his decision to venture forth this morning—but levitated herself back onto it. A Volpai leg kicked at her, and as she rolled out of the way one of two flailing lower arms smacked her in the ribs; only her sharply honed instincts allowed her to pull back enough to take the worst out of the blow. Shooting to her feet, she followed with a good uppercut, but even using the Force to anticipate Moregi’s moves, she was at a disadvantage fighting someone who had four fists. Ducking to avoid another punch, she reached for his shoulder to unbalance him—and was rocked by a left hook that connected solidly with her jaw. As she struggled to regain her balance, tightening her grip on him, she felt a piece of his shoulder plating come loose in her hand—and then she was falling.

  Air whooshed by her. Her head still spinning from Moregi’s blow, she reached out to the Force to slow her fall…

  …and was caught by a strong hand that shot out of nowhere.

  Dangling a few meters above the street, Ventress peered up to see the Idiot gazing down at her from another speeder. Deftly he lowered the vessel, releasing her to drop safely onto the pavement, and brought his stolen speeder to the ground.