A few minutes later, a rusty metal plate was shunted aside and Twilight stumbled shakily from the underground. An old smuggling tunnel constructed by one of the spaceport’s many past owners, it had been used for years to discretely move merchandise of the less than legal variety out of the port without risking a customs inspection. It was musty in the extreme but still serviceable. Most importantly, it led easily past the emerging Imperial cordon.

“Dawn!” a familiar voice yelped.

Before Twilight had had a chance to do more than blink, she found herself enveloped in a surprisingly powerful bear hug.

“Thank the Force you’re alright! I thought that crazy talking Dewback might have killed you!” Kersh said almost breathlessly as he squeezed her tight.

“What are you doing here?!” Twilight hissed. “I told you to get away like we planned! In the speeder, remember?”

“And leave you here, with her and him? After you saved my life back there? Are you insane?”

“I didn’t save your life so you could throw it away for no reason!” she countered. “One dead man is far too many already!”

“I had a very good reason!” Kersh said, a little indignantly. “Neither of your ever gave me the codes to the speeder!”

“Oh,” Twilight blinked, suddenly remembering exactly why they’d declined to do so. “Alright, forget about it, let’s just get out of here before they realize they’re combing and empty building. I’ll drive.”

It didn’t take them long to find the latest used speeder exactly where they’d left it, half-buried in miscellaneous junk and concealing tarp in run-down shed near the back end of a bad district. Clearing it off by hand was difficult and inconvenient with only one and a half sane people to do it, but better that than flash magic for any passing back-alley tramp to see. It took a few minutes, but soon enough the two of them were on the road again, zipping away from Crullov City and the ever-expanding ISB net as fast as the princess judged they could without being obvious.

“I think it’s time we got off this planet,” she said. “They were trying to be subtle before, but who knows what kind of crackdown that… woman will order after tonight?”

“Don’t think she’ll be very happy,” Kersh nodded in a sage manner. “Say, what was that thing you did back there? The purple… energy stuff.”

“Just… a neat trick I learned somewhere.”

“Like where, the celestial realms?” He looked the bloody, dusty princess up and down. “You some kind of angel or something?”

“Don’t I wish,” Twilight muttered. “That would make things so much easier.”

There was a moment of quiet, only the winds whipping by.

“That means no.”

“Ah, well, if you ain’t an angel, then I guess this might be something you could use,” Kersh pulled back the bag he always carried, revealing the blue-gold holocron, somehow still shining resplendently. “He says he thinks so too, and he’s always right.”

“Put the bag back on that thing!” Twilight’s eyes flew to the air, uncomfortably aware of just what could be up there even now. “Not while we’re still on the planet!”

“So that’s a no?”

“When we’re not in danger of being picked up, dragged off and tortured until we become like her? I think I’ll take you up on that.”

Maul crept through the shadows with a grace and stealth that should not, by all logic, have been possible. After the electrocution, his legs were in critical condition and would need an extensive refit to return to full working order. They wobbled and jumped unevenly beneath his weight, the joints sometimes failing to bend or open when they ought to. And yet the Force was his ally and his tool, and he had been well-trained in the Sith arts of clouding the perceptions of others. He had trod on Coruscant under the collective nose of both Jedi and Sith at one time or another, and compared to that blinding a few weak-minded Imperial lackeys to his presence had been no challenge at all.

As he walked, slowly but surely, towards his ticket off this planet, he considered the evening. It had gone much worse than he’d expected… but perhaps also better. He’d been planning on a simple massacre of smugglers, a quick transfer of cargo, and then a flight to the furthest reaches of Wild Space to rest and regroup. Instead, he’d lost a fight, his lightsaber, and the greater portion of the artifacts he’d spent so much effort to attain. And yet, perhaps he had gained something even more valuable.

Maul was under no illusions about his ability to face Darth Vader. He’d seen the aftermath of the Sith’s sacking of the Jedi Temple – a role that should have been his – and read more than a little about the monstrous cyborg’s confrontations with surviving Jedi and other malcontents afterwards. He had always taken great pride in his prowess in hand to hand fighting, but equally important was knowing one’s own limitations. The whole reason he’d risked an appearance in the first place so deep into the Core Worlds was to deny Vader the opportunity to widen that gap yet further, and perhaps use the knowledge of the ancient Sith to even the odds.

Yet instead of treasure, he was leaving with the knowledge that there was another embedded in the Imperial hierarchy that hated his replacement almost as much as he did. In that, at least, he had sensed no deception from her. The little Sith in denial really did loathe Vader and his master with all her being, and would fight to see them both cut down. And yes, she had been wielding a surprising strength in the Force, but it was raw. Her training, whatever she had gotten from the Inquisitorius and amongst the tombs Sith past, was far from complete.

Could she really do what she claimed? Perhaps. Could she be trusted? She certainly had been prepared to take a risk to begin a partnership, but that didn’t mean she didn’t ultimately plan to use and discard as Sidious once had. Treachery was innate to the Sith, after all. And her feeling when relating how she had allegedly eliminated the group that had destroyed his hard-won treasure had been… conflicted, at best. He didn’t know much about her, not even her species or name. But he would find out. He would not go into battle blindly with such a foe as Vader as their enemy. It might take weeks or months or even years of digging, but he would know more of his would-be “partner” and where she had come from.

And in the meantime, he thought as he clutched the Sith holocron close, there would be plenty of interesting things to learn.

His course decided, Maul vanished into the Corulag night.

Far above the planet’s surface, Luna returned to the Starry Night in a sour mood. Things had not gone as planned tonight, not in the least. She had expected to leave with a horde of Sith treasures to present to Vader, along with either a powerful ally in her back pocket or an impressive trophy to show the black cyborg. Instead, she had only the barest fraction of his property to return, and a well-rehearsed story she fervently hoped would be enough to sate him,

After ensuring that the ISB’s cordon had no chance of actually catching either Maul or Twilight, she had retired from the hunt, citing exhaustion and the need to report in. The Imperials would undoubtedly expand their sweep after a time, arresting and possibly torturing anyone with even a tenuous hope of having seen anything, but that was no concern of hers. They wouldn’t find anything that would lead them to Equestria, and the former Sith apprentice knew well how to vanish from sight.

Luna sighed wearily. Now all she had to do was rest, recuperate, make herself look presentable, and make certain the ISB had arrived at the correct conclusions. Once that was done… she would have to contact Lord Vader.