“Maul,” Vosa said, stepping into the medbay with a glance at the arms dealer’s body and the boy standing over it. “Am I interrupting something?”
Ignoring the question, Maul glanced at the curve-handled lightsabers that hung from her belt. “You wear your heritage on your hips.”
“Not my heritage,” she said. “My livelihood.”
“My Master specifically ordained for us to meet,” Maul said. A new species of tension was taking shape in his chest, filling his lungs and spreading outward into his extremities as the fullness of the dark side made itself manifest. “We have business, you and I.”
Vosa stood her ground, feet planted, face attentive, body poised to strike. “The only business that we have is your imminent destruction.”
Charging at her, he sprang up, swinging his lightsaber in a swooping hum to meet her in midleap. Vosa was ready for him, and their blades clashed together, her initial defensive pose absorbing the momentum of the attack and pushing him backward. From the corner of his eye, Maul saw Eogan raise Radique’s blaster pistol, and before he could utter a word, Vosa stretched out her hand and knocked it from his grasp with a burst of Force push, slamming the boy to the floor.
“Stay out of this,” she told him. “You’ll—”
The room reverberated with a massive, crackling boom, followed by a series of low-level aftershocks. It was as if Cog Hive Seven, having lost interest in all the routine reconfigurations, was now determined to shake off entire layers of itself.
“Wait,” Maul said. “I summoned you here to take possession of a weapon. Not to—”
But Vosa was moving again, whirling backward, spinning and evading, and no matter how he tried to defend against her, his blade met open air. The awareness of what she was doing, drawing on the Force and her own repulsive relationship with it, only made him more determined to end this battle decisively.
“You’re weak,” she goaded him, dropping back and making him come to her. “Your right arm is slowing you down. Even your weapon is betraying you.”
Maul kept coming, relying more and more on his left arm, saving the right for when he’d need it most. But Vosa seemed to anticipate everything he was doing, dropping low and then springing up and outward into an open space along a row of diagnostic machinery in the corner of the medbay.
Maul’s lower lip drew back to reveal his teeth. If defeating Vosa was what he needed to do in order to get the weapon in the hands of the Gora, so be it. Gripping the lightsaber’s hilt, he squared his shoulders and swung again, thrusting his blade at her in a series of perfectly angled slashes. Vosa came back at him on the offense, both blades spinning.
“Jar’Kai,” Maul snarled, deflecting her assault on reflex. “Predictable.” He swung the lightsaber down, but at that moment the corridor shook again, jerking sideways, throwing them both off. Vosa recovered first, darting back, again too quick, and the speed with which she evaded his attack only inflamed the rage inside Maul’s mind, stoking his wrath until it crystallized into a kind of malignant grace.
Now he gripped the lightsaber in both arms, forcing his damaged right arm into service and gripping the hilt of his saber with his full strength. It was time for Juyo, the Way of the Vornskr—the last of the Seven Forms. He seized upon it eagerly, allowing himself to be swept up in the chaotic frontal assault of thrusts, slashes, and jabs.
“Maul—” A tremor of new fear pulsed across Vosa’s face, disrupting her composure, as if she’d finally recognized the true ferocity of his purpose.
Darting backward into a desperate evasive measure, Vosa whirled one of her blades behind her, hacking loose a massive shelf of surgical instruments from its place on the wall, and with a swing of the hand she used a Force push to fire them at him in a glinting storm of steel.
Maul ducked the flying instruments and bobbed back up with a silent snarl. In his mind, the duel was all but over—his opponent was now dragging out the inevitable moment of defeat in a series of small humiliations. By turning to such diversionary tactics, Vosa had all but admitted that she was no match for the erratic staccato blows that he was delivering, seemingly from everywhere, all at once.
Kill her. Kill her now. Then you may deliver the weapon to any of the Bando Gora who remain.
Pivoting easily, he swung out at her, the dark side streaming so powerfully from him now that it seemed to be pouring forth in great, explosive torrents. His blade was moving almost too fast to see, cutting great fan-shaped swaths in the air around him. All around them, the whole world seemed to be blowing itself to pieces.
Vosa went low, swinging out one leg in a last, fruitless attempt to catch him off balance, and he brought the lightsaber down in a great, hungry arc, holding off just long enough to savor the expression on her face.
“Now. Plead for your life.”
“Sorry.” She tilted her chin up at him, wiped the blood from her lip, and grinned. “You’re going to have to try a lot harder than that.”
Before he could respond, she rammed the top of her skull into his shoulder, head-butting the open wound. A rocket of white-hot fury sizzled inside Maul’s forebrain, all but obliterating conscious thought. He let out a roar and prepared to finish her off.
That was when the floor erupted beneath them, the alloy plates bursting open to reveal something so vast and incomprehensible that Maul didn’t recognize it until it tried to bite his leg off.
With a jolt of shock, he saw that the thing that had exploded upward had already taken his foot into the hideous suction cup of its mouth.
Its appearance here provided Komari Vosa the last opportunity she needed to right herself and make her escape, leaping upward and then bounding off the wall console behind her.
Coward, a voice shouted from inside Maul’s brain, weakling, Jedi scum. It is exactly like your kind to flee at the first sign of—
In that split second, the thought broke off as he realized that she wasn’t running away.
She was coming at the worm.