Maul’s first impression of the weapons shop was that it was more of a surgeon’s operating room than a workspace—a long, brightly illuminated theater of apparent sterility whose every surface seemed polished and clean. At the moment, however, he was more preoccupied with the identity of the one who’d beckoned him inside.
“Come in,” the Muun said, still standing inside the open hatchway. “I just got here myself.” He smiled thinly. “We’ve both certainly earned a look around, to say the least.”
Maul regarded him coldly. Whatever else he might have been, the individual standing in front of him clearly wasn’t a prisoner of the Hive. His uniform was IBC standard fiduciary garb, the green tunic and trousers exactly what one would expect of a galactic financial executive. The Banking Clan’s presence here in an illegal weapons operation in the middle of a prison raised more questions than it answered.
“I’m Vesto Slipher,” the Muun said, and then, as if reading Maul’s thoughts, he added: “Believe it or not, my purposes here aren’t entirely at odds with yours—not as much as you might think. But please, step inside.”
Maul entered the chamber and looked around, his mind quickly absorbing and processing a dozen different details simultaneously.
The shop was swarming with activity. Inmates he’d never seen before, human and nonhuman alike, stood in rows before the assembly tables, sorting components from different crates, passing them back and forth among themselves, putting them together by sense of touch. Maul stood observing them for a long moment, trying to process what it was that bothered him about them. They functioned in nearly total silence, but there was something peculiar about them that he couldn’t quite put his finger on—until one of them raised his face in Maul’s direction.
And then he saw.
They had no eyes.
Their empty eye sockets were caves of blindness, raw and dark and hollow. After a moment, the inmate who’d been facing Maul turned back down to the partially assembled weapon in front of him and returned to his work.
“Radique removes the eyes,” Slipher said conversationally. “Apparently it’s a prerequisite to working down here. Another safeguard, I suppose—a means of preserving absolute secrecy.”
Maul said nothing. He was remembering his very first day in the mess hall, the blind inmates that he’d noticed sitting off by themselves, groping with their food and utensils. That was how they lived. Now, except for the soft click and snap of assembled parts, the only sound was the faint rustle of the clawbirds, who had settled into the far corner of the room, into a kind of makeshift nesting area.
What are they still doing here if Radique is dead? Don’t they know?
A flicker of motion caught his attention from the far end of the shop. There was someone in the corner, his wrists and ankles bound—a guard that Maul recognized. The one called Smight. He’d been gagged, but his eyes were huge, gleaming with a mixture of anger, fear, and confusion.
“Ah, yes,” Slipher said, noticing that Maul was looking at the guard. “Apparently we’re not the only ones who found ourselves down here. I’m quite sure Mr. Radique would not like the idea of an intruder ransacking his arsenal, would you? Particularly someone as unsavory as Mr. Smight here.”
“Radique is dead,” Maul said. “I killed him.”
“Dead?” Slipher glanced at him for a moment, then laughed. “That’s funny,” he said. “You know, for a moment I almost believed you.”
“Oh no, Iram Radique is very much alive, I assure you. The Weequay that you killed in that last bout was a proxy. Radique has a dozen of them in circulation at any time to ensure his own safety.”
“How do you know?” Maul asked.
Instead of answering, the Muun turned to look at the rows of blind inmates as they painstakingly assembled the components on the tables in front of them. “Do you know what they’re building?”
“Weapons.”
“Not just weapons,” Slipher said. “Lightsabers.”
Maul felt something go tight in his chest. “What?”
“Synthetic lightsabers—Radique’s newest innovation. A radical departure from anything that’s been accomplished up to this point. Apparently it works on a synth-crystal—” The Muun walked over to the end of a long counter and picked up a sleek red gem, holding it up admiringly to catch the light. “They’re baked in a geological compressor. Can you imagine the power inside just one of these?”
“Ah.” A voice spoke from behind him: “But power is in the eye of the beholder, is it not?”
Maul knew who it was even before he turned around and looked down. Coyle was standing there, peering up at him. “What are you doing here?”
“I called him down,” Zero said as he stepped through the hatchway and sealed it shut behind him. “After I sent a message summoning Mr. Slipher. I felt like it was time we all met face-to-face.”
Maul stared at him. “The poison—” he began, and then he remembered the one who had first told him about it. Coyle smiled and gave him a slight, apologetic shrug as if to say, What is life but a riddle that none of us can answer?
“You really think you could’ve slipped anything remotely dangerous into my food without my being alerted about it first?” Zero asked. “Jagannath, you continue to surprise me.”
Maul looked at their faces, from Zero to Coyle to Slipher, and then back to Zero again.
“You’ve found your way to Radique’s inner circle,” Zero told him. “The backbone cabal, if you like. The clawbirds recognized it when they brought you here …”
Zero reached down into the crate behind him, drawing a blaster rifle from inside it and pointing it at Maul’s chest.
“Unfortunately, this is where it ends for you. You’ve seen too much. Mr. Radique would never allow you to leave.”
Maul looked back at the rows of eyeless inmates, hunched before the workstations, silently assembling the weapons. A possibility had taken shape in his mind without his realizing it, but he saw it now, clearly.
“They’re not functioning properly, are they?” he asked.
Zero hesitated. “What?”
“Radique’s synthetic lightsabers. The crystals aren’t working like he thought they would.”
“How did you—” Slipher began, but Zero silenced him with a look.
“We’re having no such problems.” Tucking the blaster rifle under his arm, Zero walked over to the workspace, reached into the packing crate, and pulled out a long cylindrical shaft, holding it up for inspection.
“Then you won’t mind a demonstration,” Maul said. “Go ahead.” He took a step forward, tipping back his head to expose his throat. “Use it on me.”
For a long moment Zero didn’t move or speak. Then, with the lightsaber still in one hand and the blaster in the other, the Twi’lek turned to look across the workspace to where the guard, Smight, was still glaring at them with a gag in his mouth, his hands and ankles bound.
“Bring him over here,” he said.
Coyle walked over to Smight and, with strength that belied his size, he picked up the guard and slung him over his shoulder like a sack of laundry, carrying him over to Zero.
“Cut him loose,” Zero said, and when the Chadra-Fan hesitated: “Go ahead. He’s not going anywhere.”
Shrugging, Coyle plucked a sharpened question-mark-shaped object from his back pocket—some claw or tooth from some lesser species, no doubt scavenged for one of his sculptures—and hooked it through the plastic restraints on the guard’s wrists, snapping them free. Zero turned to Smight.
“Take this,” Zero said, handing the lightsaber to the guard and nodding at Maul, “and kill the Zabrak.”
Smight stared at the lightsaber. The gag was still over his mouth, but Maul could see all kinds of things going on in the guard’s face: anger, humiliation, uncertainty, and ultimately a kind of murderous resolve.
He flicked the switch.
A narrow red beam shot out from the lightsaber’s hilt. The beam was thinner than any that Maul had seen before, and instead of humming, it crackled and hissed unsteadily from base to tip. Weird oscillating skeins of plasma writhed up and down the length of the beam like hundreds of semitransparent serpents. On the whole it looked even more unstable than the man holding it.
“Go ahead,” Zero said.
A terrible kind of righteousness came over Smight’s face, as if—in grasping this weapon, even in its most bastardized state—he’d arrived at a moment of supreme, almost sacred self-actualization. He lifted it up over his head, preparing to bring it down on Maul’s exposed throat.
He was still swinging it down when the blade arced sideways, looping back on itself. Maul saw it slash around like the tail of a scorpion, something alive and venomous, hooking through Smight’s face and carving it cleanly in half, then jerking sideways. The guard didn’t have time to scream. His right arm hit the floor, the red blade still flicking and leaping erratically from his limp fingers, chopping what remained of Smight’s body to pieces before it finally crackled and died out in a spreading lake of dark arterial blood.
They all took a step back from what remained of the corpse. Coyle mumbled something under his breath. Zero was staring at the malfunctioning lightsaber, his face unreadable. Slipher looked as if he was going to be sick.
“Well.” Maul nodded at the synthetic lightsaber. “Mr. Radique won’t be pleased with that.”
With a grunt, Zero brandished the blaster rifle he’d picked up earlier. “Forget that. We don’t need it to kill you.”
“I could help you with your problem,” Maul said.
Slipher was watching him very closely now, alternating glances between him and Zero. “How?”
“When I was a mercenary, I assassinated a Jedi once,” Maul said. “It gave me the opportunity to study his lightsaber closely, to disassemble it. I was able to reverse-engineer the components themselves, to study its design. I could fix what’s wrong with these.”
“You’re lying,” Zero said. His finger tightened on the blaster’s trigger. “You’ll say whatever you have to in order to save your skin, and now you’re—”
“Stop.”
The voice on the intercom was not one that Maul had heard before. It rang out through the shop, clear and deep and resonant, filling all available space. At the sound of it, every one of the blind inmates at the long counters stopped what they were doing and turned their faces upward, as if they could somehow see who was addressing them.
Zero too was looking up at the recessed speakers in the ceiling of the room, though he still kept the blaster trained on Maul. “Mr. Radique …”
“Let the Zabrak speak.”
Maul bent down and picked up the blood-soaked lightsaber from the disfigured corpse that had once been CO Smight. Working quickly, without speaking a word, he snapped open the latch on the hilt and tipped it forward, allowing the various microcomponents to slide out into his hand. It took less than ten seconds for him to sort through them, plucking out the synth-crystal and holding it up for inspection.
“This is worthless.” Maul dropped the crystal to the floor and crushed it under his heel. “Your process is flawed. It’s too unstable. It’s possible that your geological compressor isn’t generating sufficient heat and pressure to fully fabricate the proper crystalline structure. All these lightsabers are going to do is kill their users.” He lifted his head upward in the direction of the voice. “I can make them function properly.”
There was silence in the room. It seemed to go on for a very long time.
“But I need something from you in return,” Maul said. “You know what it is.”
The silence came again, longer this time. Unbearable.
Maul waited.
An eternity.
And another.
“Kill him,” the voice said.
And Zero pulled the trigger.