"Of course," Arrant answered confidently. "It's simply a matter of expanding our operations." He turned and tugged Patch Bruit into the conversation. "Bruit, here, is our field supervisor, among other things. He has just notified me of a rich find, not a hundred kilometers from our present headquarters."
Bruit nodded. "Our survey teams" he started to say, when one of LL's security agents cut him off.
"Chief, I'm sorry to bust in, but we need to talk in private."
Arrant watched worriedly as Bruit allowed himself to be led away.
"What's going on?" Bruit demanded when he and the security man were just out of earshot.
"Something has yanked the barges out of hyperspace short of their reentry coordinates. We don't know the cause. It might be a problem with the hyperspace generators, or maybe an uncharted mass shadow."
Bruit heard people gasp behind him. When he turned, everyone's attention was fixed on the huge monitor screens that displayed views of the orbital shipyards. Some distance from the shipyards, and way off course, several lackluster space barges were reverting to realspace.
"Bruit, are those our vessels?" Arrant asked in mounting concern.
"Yes, but there has to be a good reason for their decanting early."
"This is most unexpected," Tarkin remarked. "Most unexpected."
The well-bedecked crowd gasped again. Bruit watched in shock as a second group of ships began to emerge from hyperspace.
"InterGalactic," his security man said in disbelief.
"They're going to collide!" someone said.
"Bruit!" Arrant screamed, as the color drained from his face. "Do something!"
What Bruit did was look away.
The screams and cries, the groans and sobs, the strobes of explosive light flashing across the polished floor of the habitat's esplanade deck told him everything he needed to know. LL's and InterGal's barges had been manipulated into mass collisions. Without looking, Bruit could see the lommite ore streaming from fractured hulls, turning local space as white as the molten anger that seethed behind Bruit's tightly shut eyelids.
"The Toom clan," he barked to his security man. "They've double-crossed us."
Someone collided with Bruit from behind. It was Jurnel Arrant, backing away from the display screens in numb horror.
"We're ruined," he mumbled. "We're ruined."
Bruit cleared his head with a shake and clamped his hands on the shoulders of the security man. "Send a message to Caba'Zan at InterGalactic," he ordered. "Tell him that we need to meet as soon as possible."
***
Lovingly crafted, the listening device was a perfect facsimile of a fire flitter. It sat between Bruit and Caba'Zan on a low table in Bruit's living room, singing its song:
"Here's the long and short of it. Arrant has decided to move against InterGalactic Ore shipments. No petitioning the senate. He's letting loose a shooting war. That much has already been decided. "
Caba'Zan ran a hand over his bald pate. "Strange. It almost sounds like your voice."
Bruit squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them and looked the Falleen in the eye. "That's because underneath the warping, it is my voice. I spoke those wordsmost of them anywayright in this room."
Caba'Zan's forehead wrinkled. "I don't understand."
"I was briefing my men about the plan for InterGal's ships at Eriadu. Someone recorded the conversation."
"One of your men?"
Bruit shook his head in dismay. "I don't know."
"One of the Toom clan, then."
Bruit took his lower lip between his teeth. "Then why the need to warp the recording, and put on a song-and-dance show for your people in the cantina? Besides, there's no way the Tooms could have gained access to LL's database and gotten the reentry coordinates for our ships. They're not that clever. It has to have been one of your men."
"They're not that clever," Caba'Zan said. "Or that industrious. We wouldn't have known anything about your plans if it wasn't for the bug."
Bruit silenced the facsimile flitter and worked his jaw in vexation. "I'll figure out who it was later on. After I deal with the Toom clan."
Caba'Zan narrowed his eyes. "They played us both for fools, Bruit. If you're implying vengeance, I want some of the action."
Secreted beneath the stilted dwelling, Darth Maul smiled to himself, dropped to the ground, and hurried into the darkness.
***
Maul never doubted that the Toom clan would enter into contracts with both mining companies. Nor did he think that the clan would fail to deliver on its promise to sabotage the ships. Thus he had had no need to go to Eriadu to witness the fatal collisions. Instead he had passed the time watching members of the Toom clan shut down and abandon the base on Dorvalla. Surmising correctly that their betrayal would unite LL and InterGal against themeven brieflythe mercenaries had decided to abscond while they could.
Maul had trailed them to Riome, a small, ice-covered world deeper in the Dorvalla system, where the clan already had established a secret base.
A more astute group of outlaws might have elected to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Dorvalla. But perhaps the Toom clan was convinced that even the combined security forces of Lommite Limited and InterGalactic Ore wouldn't be a match for them. Whichever, Maul's next task was to make certain that Bruit learned the location of the Riome sanctuary by planting evidence at the site of the clan's former base.
***
Maul spent a full day in frigid temperatures and howling winds, waiting for Bruit and his men to arrive. Armed with blasters and an assortment of more powerful weapons, they raced from the shuttle that had delivered them from Dorvalla's equator and stormed the underground base. Accompanying them was a male Falleen and several aliens who answered to him, including the four saboteurs Maul had deceived in the cantina.
Frustrated to find the base deserted, they began a search for clues as to the mercenaries' whereabouts. For too long Maul was convinced that he would have to intrude on their sloppy search and rub their noses in the evidence he had so artfully sown. But ultimately they discovered it on their own.
Maul was inside his ship when Bruit and the rest reboarded the shuttle and launched, presumably for Riome. The thought of the impending contest invigorated him. He thrilled at the prospect of being able to participate.
***
Riome loomed white as death in the blackness of space.
In his smaller and faster craft, Maul arrived ahead of Bruit's mixed squad of would-be avengers. His ship hugged the snow-covered terrain, racing over rolling foothills and skirting the edge of a turbulent gray sea studded with islands of craggy ice. Maul had seen no sign of the clan's Interdictor ship in orbit, and assumed that the mercenaries had concealed it in the asteroid field coreward of Riome.
In establishing a base, the mercenaries had found the warmest spot on the small world. It was an area of active volcanism, with immense glaciers pocked with ice-blue light, and patches of coarse grassland, through which bubbled dark pools of magma-heated water. The base itself was a series of interlinked semicylindrical bunkers that had once sheltered a team of scientists. Through the long intervening years, the scientists' abandoned droids and equipment had become outlandish ice sculptures.