In the Shadows

The second air-speeder lurched away from palace and into the night. Dropping onto the balcony , a cloaked figure watched with unblinking eyes as the two speeders dropped below the roof lines to avoid Imperial sensors. Tracking them now was out of the question, with the chaos that lingered about the palace, but the watcher did not need a homing beacon to know they were racing towards Rabblo's compound in the Warrens. So be it. The traitorous Moff and the greedy Hutt would share their doom together.

The watcher turned from the balcony and swept past the unsettling stares of the Moff's grotesque sculpture garden. He angrily kicked aside bits of ruined battle droid and reflected grimly on his failure to influence this fight. His master would not be pleased, though perhaps the uncertainty in Gadj's fate could be used to some advantage. Kidnapped by rebels worked as well as killed by them. It would be an easy enough story to tell, with the pitiful remains of so many battle droids here and the bloody carnage wrought in the ballroom below. Of course the Moff's protectors must be dealt with, they could not be allowed to contradict that story. A direct raid on the Warrens would likely be necessary, and soon-- before Rabblo's loyalists could completely unravel the treacheries spun around them. No doubt the Hutt himself would sense the web tightening around him even now.

From the chambers below came the amplified shouts of stormtroopers, finally alerted to the Moff's predicament. It would not do to be seen by them now. The watcher slipped out onto one of the secondary balconies - and from there it was an easy leap back to the rooftop. Soon, the Moff and the Hutt would be dead and Ranjahr would be in the hands of those to whom it truly belonged....