"Nooo- "

Darth Maul lit one blade of the lightsaber and swung it laterally, cutting off the Neimoidian's final wail, along with his head. He then released the lines of Force that held the twitching body and watched it crumple.

There was a durasteel safe on the floor behind the body. Maul opened it with a careful swipe of his lightsaber. Ah- there was the holocron crystal of which Monchar had spoken. He extinguished his lightsaber, hung it on his belt, and bent to pick up the holocron. Before his fingers touched it, however, he sensed that he was not alone.

"Don't move!" came a voice from the door even as he realized this. "You so much as breathe deep and I'll fry you where you stand!"

Maul glanced at the doorway. A tall human female in shell spider silk armor stood there, aiming a pair of blasters at him.

Maul realized that this was the same being he had sensed following him earlier. His lips twitched in annoyance. He tried a quick mental probe, but the bounty hunter-for surely that was what she was- was too sharp, her attention too focused, to fall for mind tricks.

Maul considered his options. He would never reach his lightsaber fast enough, even as quick as he was. He might be able to dodge a single blast, maybe even two, but hemmed in as he was in this small cubicle against a woman who could likely put a dozen bolts into the air from two semiautomatic blasters in half a second, he would have to have a distraction.

Near his feet lay the Trandoshan's blaster. It would serve nicely.

Using his control of the Force, Darth Maul gripped the weapon in a dark tentacle of energy and hurled it at the bounty hunter's face, hard.

The woman was fast. She dodged the blaster, firing a bolt at it. She missed and recovered, but the distraction had served its purpose. Before the weapon had bounced off the wall and landed on the floor, Maul had the lightsaber in his grasp. He thumbed on both blades as the next blaster bolt and half a dozen more came his way in rapid succession. The Sith apprentice's hands were a blur as he let the dark side take him over completely, giving in to its power and allowing it to control and manipulate him.

Blaster bolts struck the lightsaber's spinning blades and were deflected into the walls, the ceiling, the floor. No time to aim, though a bolt or two did hit the bounty hunter without apparent effect. Her armor was apparently state-of-the-art.

The bounty hunter dropped her useless blasters and reached for one wrist, where she wore a rocket launcher. The fool! Maul thought grimly. If a rocket exploded in here, it would kill them both!

There was no time to try to stop her. Maul slipped along the lines of the Force, moving at unnatural speed as he spun toward the nearest wall, a cheap plastic panel, twirling the lightsaber in a cutting pattern. The plastic shredded easily before the blades' superhot plasmatic edges, and Maul ran through the wall, leapt over a chair in the next room-which, fortunately for its tenants, was deserted at the moment-and stabbed downward with one blade of his lightsaber, shearing a ragged oval in the floor. He dropped through the ceiling of the cubicle below just as the rocket struck the wall of the Neimoidian's room and exploded.

Lihnn had never seen anybody move like the man with the horned and tattooed head. He wasn't dressed like a Jedi, but his expertise with the double-bladed lightsaber far exceeded the skill of any Jedi Lihnn had ever heard of. He knocked blaster bolts away as if swatting flies! And if he could do that, Lihnn couldn't stop him. He would use that double- bladed lightsaber to slice her apart.

Desperate, she reached for her wrist launcher. Her only chance was to hit the horned one squarely and hope that the explosion would be contained enough by the other's body to allow Lihnn to survive. But as she triggered the launcher the tattooed man seemed to disappear in a blur. All of a sudden there was a hole in the wall where an instant ago it had been solid.

Too late, Lihnn tried to stop the rocket from firing, but the reactionless motor flared and the missile leapt from her wrist. She tried to jump back into the hallway.

Lorn was almost to the room where he was supposed to meet the Neimoidian when a sudden explosion hurled him backwards a good three meters, impacting against the wall of a T intersection. As the shock wave lifted him he caught a glimpse of what looked like an armored human flying across the hall just ahead of him and smashing halfway through the wall. Then he hit the far wall himself and didn't think about anything for a time.

He was out for only a minute or two; when the corridor swam back into focus the smoke was still swirling and debris was still settling. There was a ringing in his ears that was a result of either the blast or the dozens of residential alarms activated by it, or both. Lorn managed to get to his feet, pulled his blaster, and edged unsteadily forward. All he could see of the body was a pair of legs, unmistakably female, sticking out of a hole in the wall, so thinking of her as dead seemed a pretty safe bet.

He turned and peered into the blackened cube. What looked like the remains of four bodies lay scorched and smoking on the floor. He took a few steps into the chamber. One of the smoldering corpses looked like Monchar, but it was hard to be sure- given that it was headless.

Lorn felt his guts churn, both at what he saw and what it meant: Hath Monchar wouldn't be making any more deals with anybody. He was quite seriously dead, and Lorn and I-Five might as well be, too, if they didn't get off Coruscant in the next hour or so. The whole bank-fraud escapade had been for nothing!

Damn!

Lorn turned to run. Even in this sector an explosion like the one that had just happened would bring the security forces in to investigate. He had to get out of there, and fast. But as he started to move he noticed a glimmer of light in a corner of the room and reflexively glanced at it.

What he saw brought him skidding to a stop.

Could it be? It seemed too much to hope for. But when he bent down and looked closer, he realized that maybe the game wasn't over yet.

The holocron crystal lay in the half-open safe, which had no doubt protected it from being destroyed by the explosion. Lorn grabbed it up, holding it tightly in one hand and the blaster in the other, and now he did run, as fast as he could, down the corridor, past the confused and frightened faces of tenants who had cautiously emerged to investigate, and toward the stairwell. There was still a chance-a very sum chance-that he and I-Five could yet turn this fiasco into a winning situation. But doing so meant getting far away from here as fast as possible.