Star Wars - Darth Plagueis

toward the cockpit. Only after he’d nearly cleared the cargo bay did it register with him that he wasn’t hearing the whir of turning gears.
    He whirled around, cursed.
    In his haste, he’d missed the button to raise the landing ramp.
    He heard shouts from outside and dared not go back. He could close the bay from the control panel in the cockpit. But he had to hurry.
    He pelted through Fatman ’s corridors, shouldered open the door to the cockpit, and started punching in the launch sequence. Fatman ’s thrusters went live and the ship lurched upward. Blasterfire thumped off the hull but did no harm. He tried to look down out of the canopy, but the ship was angled upward and he could not see the ground. He punched the control to move it forward and heard the distant squeal of metal on metal. It had come from the cargo bay.
    Something was slipping around in there.
    The loose container of grenades.
    And he’d still forgotten to seal the bay.
    Cursing himself for a fool, he flicked the switch that brought up the ramp then sealed the cargo bay and evacuated it of oxygen. If anyone had gotten aboard, they would suffocate in there.
    He took the controls in hand and fired Fatman ’s engines. The ship shot upward. He turned her as he rose, took a look back at the island.
    For a moment, he was confused by what he saw. But realization dawned.
    When Fatman had lurched up and forward, the remaining straps securing the container of grenades had snapped and the whole shipping container had slid right out the open landing ramp.
    He was lucky it hadn’t exploded.
    The men who had ambushed him were gathered around the crate, probably wondering what was inside. A quick head count put their number at six, so he figured none had gotten on board Fatman . And none of them seemed to be making for Arigo’s ship, so Zeerid assumed they had no intention of pursuing him in the air. Maybe they were happy enough with the one container.
    Amateurs, then. Pirates, maybe.
    Zeerid knew he would have to answer to Oren, his handler, not only for the deal going sour but also for the lost grenades.
    Kriffing treadmill just kept going faster and faster.
    He considered throwing Fatman ’s ion engines on full, clearing Ord Mantell’s gravity well, and heading into hyperspace, but changed his mind. He was annoyed and thought he had a better idea.
    He wheeled the freighter around and accelerated.
    “Weapons going live,” he said, and activated the over-and-under plasma cannons mounted on Fatman ’s sides.
    The men on the ground, having assumed he would flee, did not notice him coming until he had closed to five hundred meters. Faces stared up at him, hands pointed, and the men started to scramble. A few blaster shots from one of the men traced red lines through the sky, but a blaster could not harm the ship.
    Zeerid took aim. The targeting computer centered on the crate.
    “LZ is hot,” he said, and lit them up. For an instant pulsing orange lines connected the ship to the island, the ship to the crate of grenades. Then, as the grenades exploded, the lines blossomed into an orange cloud of heat, light, and smoke that engulfed the area. Shrapnel pattered against the canopy, metal this time, not ice, and the shock wave rocked Fatman slightly as Zeerid peeled the ship off and headed skyward.
    He glanced back, saw six, motionless, smoking forms scattered around the blast radius.
    “That was for you, Arigo.”
    He would still have some explaining to do, but at least he’d taken care of the ambushers. That had to be worth something to The Exchange.
    Or so he hoped.
    DARTH MALGUS STRODE THE AUTOWALK , the steady rap of his boots on the pavement the tick of a chrono counting down the limited time remaining to the Republic.
    Speeders, swoops, and aircars roared above him in unending streams, the motorized circulatory system of the Republic’s heart. Skyrises, bridges, lifts, and plazas covered the entire surface of Coruscant to a height of kilometers, all of it the trappings of a wealthy, decadent civilization, a sheath that sought to hide the rot in a cocoon of duracrete and transparisteel.
    But Malgus smelled the decay under the veneer, and he would show them the price of weakness, of complacency.
    Soon it would all burn.
    He would lay waste to Coruscant. He knew this. He had known it for decades.
    Memories floated up from the depths of his mind. He recalled his first pilgrimage to Korriban, remembered the profound sense of holiness he had felt