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  Since the start of his eavesdropping, Amidala and Boss Rugor Nass had cemented their alliance. Responding to a covert signal, several dozen members of the underground had streamed into the ruins, and the Queen’s chief security officer, Panaka, had returned from a scouting mission in Theed. Maul wasn’t surprised that Panaka had been able to infiltrate the city despite increased security—anyone schooled in military tactics could have done so simply by spending a few moments observing the routines of the battle droids, and then working around them.

  Maul hadn’t bothered pointing out the weaknesses to Gunray, because he now wanted the Neimoidians to fail, despite his Master’s plan.

  But the Gungan force was not without its weaknesses.

  Amidala’s plan called for the use of the Grand Army as a diversion to draw battle droids from Theed to engage the Gungans on the grassy plains. At the same time, she and her elite team would penetrate the Theed Palace and capture Gunray. The Queen was correct in assuming that the droid army would collapse without sentient leadership, but she was mistaken in her belief that Gunray would have to shunt battle droids from Theed. Clearly she had no real awareness of the size of the Neimoidian army. Amidala’s only shot at victory rested with the pilots of the Naboo Space Fighter Corps, who would have to take the fight to the Droid Control Ship in stationary orbit above the planet.

  But Maul was left to wonder how Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi figured into Amidala’s plan, since they were supposedly not allowed to intervene in the battle. Certainly they would accompany Amidala into Theed, but would they remain by her side while she attempted to slip into the Palace?

  Maul wondered, too, to what degree his Master would want him to intercede. Was he obliged to notify Gunray of Amidala’s plans? Should he attempt to lure the Gungans into a slaughter in Theed? There was still time to sabotage the berthed N-1 starfighters he had found in Theed’s main hangar …

  This will work to our advantage, Darth Sidious had said on learning of the Queen’s ploy to ally with the Gungans.

  Did Sidious mean to his and Maul’s advantage, or to Sidious and Hego Damask’s advantage?

  If Sidious and the Muun had designs on Naboo, then the greater the carnage the greater the sympathy for Senator Palpatine in the coming election. Whatever the reasons, Maul’s task remained as before: to kill two Jedi. The rest of it—the blockade, the invasion, the counteroffensive—was nothing more than theater. So what if the Trade Federation lost its army and ten thousand Gungans died? Who cared, after all, about Naboo or its young Queen?

  The real war was, as ever, between the Sith and the Jedi.

  The deaths of Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan would send a message to the Jedi Council that the Sith had returned and the days of the Order were numbered.

  Maul decided that if he never saw Naboo’s grasslands again it would be too soon. But the long ride back to Theed—made all the more circuitous because of Gungans perched in the treetops with macrobinoculars—gave him time to formulate a plan of his own.

  He took the speeder bike directly to the hangar, where close to four hundred B1 droids were patrolling the area. That was far too many to be easily defeated by Amidala and her handful of security officers and pilots. With help from the Jedi it was possible that the Naboo could eventually overcome the battle droids, but Maul wanted to ensure that Amidala’s small force would be able to move on to the Palace without encountering too much resistance. More important, he didn’t want Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan worrying too much about her safety.

  In the small plaza that fronted the hangar he searched out the droid in charge of security.

  “What are your orders, Commander?” the droid said.

  “Redeploy your troopers,” Maul told it. “Leave sixty droids to defend the hangar and send the rest to reinforce the platoons safeguarding the Palace.”

  The droid took a moment to process the change in orders, though it was the control ship computer that asked: “Will that not leave the space force hangar vulnerable to attack, Commander?”

  “I will personally make up for the reduced count.”

  That seemed to satisfy the commander, and it lifted its arm in salute. “Copy, copy.” Instantly, and without a word, droids began to gather in the plaza, where they fell into formation and marched off in the direction of the Palace. Maul watched them go, then hurried into the cavernous building. There he spent a short time imagining Amidala’s arrival, the ensuing firefight, the starfighter pilots racing for their astromech-outfitted ships and launching out over the escarpment, the Queen and Panaka setting out for the Palace …

  Maul’s gaze swept the hangar’s broad entrance. A tunnel linked the hangar to the Palace, but Amidala would certainly assume that it had been booby-trapped, and would likely lead the Jedi and her infiltration team across the eastern fork of the Solleu River and through the narrow paths and across the skybridges of the Vis district. But a lightsaber duel fought along that route or in the woods that surrounded the Palace would be difficult to control. Somehow he had to waylay the Jedi before they exited the building. Again he scanned the dim interior, and his gaze fell on the tall blast doors that separated the hanger from the contiguous power generator building. On his earlier visit to the hangar he had done little more than peer into the plasma power station, but now, eager to know what lay beyond the blast doors, he hurried through them.

  A short walk took him to the edge of a curved inspection platform flanked by circular engineering consoles. A catwalk extended from the platform across a deep and wide circular extraction shaft studded with towering acceleration columns, within which plasma energy was intensified before refinement and storage. The flashing columns were linked at various levels by service catwalks no wider than the central walkway, which terminated at a narrow door on the far side of the shaft. Maul paced halfway to the door, then returned to the inspection platform and paced it a second time, marking the length and calculating the distances between it and the catwalks above and below. Several times he leapt to higher or lower catwalks. Once he had committed the arrangement to both mental and muscle memory, he walked all the way to the far door and through it.

  The door opened on a soaring security hallway, interrupted at regular intervals by laser gates that sealed themselves in response to power outputs of the plasma activation process. Initially the firings seemed to occur randomly, but after he passed through the gates several times in both directions—cautiously at first, then as quickly as he could—Maul began to discern a subtle pattern.

  The pattern was by no means foolproof, and twice he came close to being fried by the firings, but in the end he had learned enough about the timing of the gates to provide himself with a slight advantage.

  Beyond the final gate, the walkway broadened to encircle a narrow-mouthed plasma slough core of indeterminable depth. In an upper-tier maintenance station he found a hydrospanner and dropped it into the core.

  If indeed the heavy tool hit bottom, the noise never reached him.

  Maul paced the circular rim of the core, gazing down into the blackness; then he turned from the view to imagine and direct how the lightsaber duel would unfold. He would use the laser gates to separate the Jedi. He looked around. Yes: he would kill one of them just there. As for the other …

  Well, he’d allow himself a surprise or two.

  Confident that his actions would please his Master, he raced to the Palace to await word that Queen Amidala and the Jedi had entered the city.

  A short time later, in the depths of the power generator, Maul had savored the pained surprise in Qui-Gon’s blue-gray eyes as the crimson blade ran him through. Now he paced the rim of the slough core, dragging the blade of his sundered lightsaber along the impervious metal. A dark side anointment, sparks showered down on Obi-Wan Kenobi, who dangled two meters below, with both hands clenched around a nozzle that projected from the core’s inner wall.

  Sweat dripped from Maul’s fearsome face, and hatred radiated from his yellow eyes. He snarled at the young Jedi with the long
Padawan braid, but Obi-Wan wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of looking at him, or acknowledging his death at the hands of a superior opponent.

  In the split second it took Maul to realize that Obi-Wan was actually gazing at Qui-Gon’s lightsaber—where it had come to a rest on the inspection platform—and that Maul had sabotaged himself by drawing out his moment of victory, Obi-Wan leapt straight out of the core and somersaulted in midair, so that he was facing Maul when he landed behind him, with Qui-Gon’s Force-summoned weapon in his hand.

  As the green blade went through him, bisecting him at the hips, Maul had a fleeting memory of his life on Orsis, and of performing the same feat Obi-Wan just had, the first time he had used the Force among beings others than his Master.

  The power of the dark side had played a cruel trick on him. And that it had, said it all.

  Sidious is rid of another problem, for I am not yet a true Sith.

  Cut in two and falling, Maul thought: If I had it to do over again, I would keep that fact foremost in mind.

  But he was determined to be more lenient with himself than Darth Sidious would be. He would survive his defeat, and grant himself yet another second chance.