PLOT
The three are brought into the cleanup of Naboo to take a look at the sliced body of Darth Maul and to penetrate the secrets on his ship before the great celebration.

    The torch fire took hold of the slain jedi's robe almost immediately, and all eyes present turned to watch Qui Gon Jinn's funeral pyre.
The Jedi masters Yoda and Mace Windu gazed at their fallen comrade, feeling as much sadness as the Jedi Code allowed them.

As golden fire reached to the dark blue heavens, Windu faced his diminutive colleague, commenting: "There is no doubt. The mysterious warrior was a Sith."
"Always two there are: a master and an apprentice." countered the wizened green imp. "But which one was he?"
"The student, apparently." said Adi Gallia, approaching the pair. She was another high-level member of the Jedi order. Grey sensory tentacles adorned her neck, complementing the dark brown skin.
She bowed her head to the two. "My team has confirmed that."
"Are they certain?" Mace asked her.
"They are still making enquiries, but as sure as they can be." Gallia waited patiently for the ceremony to reach completion, then filled her two peers in on the developments following Qui-Gon's death and the routing of the invasion forces.

- - - - - - - - - -

Ignoring appreciative glances, Sounil Mistry followed the coveralled power engineer down into the depths beneath the Palace of Theed.
She marvelled at the vertical columns of light that crossed perpendicular to many maintenance walkways such as the one beneath her boots. Strangely, the immense cavern absorbed any sound that they created by their passage.

It was in these quiet moments that the Twi'lek female could reflect how strange her life had turned out. A world-class martial arts competitor on her home planet two years before, she had lost out to the champion, and missed out on million credit sponsorship, and the system-wide fame and fortune that her opponent had reaped.
That failure aside, she was still a twenty-something with intelligence, determination, and the physical capability to do things that would break a mortal man. Her current career move provided her with sufficient purpose to keep herself sated, sanctioned by the Jedi Order to flit around the galaxy checking for signs of Dark Side activity in such picture postcard locales as Krath temples in the Empress Teta star system.
True enough that the last Sith magics had been put to rest four millennia ago, but Sith-I-5 (Sith Investigations: Five) readily admitted that it counted a caretaker function amongst it's many duties.
She was vaguely aware that she was part of a team, but she didn't have much contact with them.

In time, she could see the first red-tinged power-gate leading to where the slain jedi Qui-Gon Jinn still lay, mostly undisturbed.
A polite whistle drew her attention to a blue and white astromech droid in front of the gates, and it revolved it's silver dome at her approach.
"That's Artoo Detoo." indicated the engineer, "Open them up, Artoo."
The half dozen consecutive energy barriers all disappeared as the robot interfaced with the control panel.
"Stay here, both of you." she ordered, then moved forwards herself, acknowledging the Artoo unit with a pat on it's dome.

The grief was palpable as soon as she entered the room on the other side. To her right lay Qui-Gon, and meditating beside the body, his apprentice Obi-Wan Kenobi. Untouched food bowls were nearby.

Kenobi snapped his eyes open, staring at the intruder as she sank to one knee next to him.
Sith Investigator and Jedi Padawan regarded each other steadily.
She, slim-built female Twi'lek in a belted thigh-length silk robe that reflected blue in many hues, gold symbol over her left breast, tanned bare legs, dark ankle boots. Lightsabre and blaster pistol on her belt.
He, slim built male human, wearing light brown tunic and trousers, the latter tucked into dark brown shin boots that were crossed under his butt. Lightsabre in lap with hands clutching it.
The Padawan had dark rings under both eyes, and his face was pale.

"Obi-Wan?" Sounil started carefully. "Hey." She waited, thoughts silent. The surviving half of a Master/Padawan duo sometimes sat in vigil over their vanquished companion, and reacted negatively when disturbed.

What could have happened, if Obi had gone postal. Meridean Jitsu 3 step plan to surviving a lightsabre attack: 1. Ignite 2. Parry 3. Scarper

Her actions were known as 'First Contact', and she was the team specialist. All that aside, sometimes a familiar face helped.
Kenobi's gaze seemed to gain some focus, and for the first time, he really looked at the girl. She was curiously alluring, but he sensed no Force ability in her.
"I know you, don't I?" he asked slowly, eyes roving over her features.
"Library on Ossus." she supplied, referring to the largest jedi academy outside the galactic core.
"Long way from your books and tapes, aren't you?"
Her smile lit up her eyes. "It was a summer job, what can I say. I got my private investigator's licence by correspondence course, and now I report to Jedi Gallia. Ever notice how she never has a padawan learner shadowing her? She's running a team looking into potential Sith activity across the galaxy. But while I'm here; you have any books you haven't returned?"
"You serious?" Kenobi countered.
"Well not about the books. But the clock is running, Obi-Wan. Tell me what happened here?"
The surviving combatant ran his fingers through his hair, sighing while he collected his thoughts: "Qui-Gon and I were helping the Queen to capture the Viceroy. We had reached the hangar bay to get Naboo pilots to their ships when we encountered the Sith warrior."
Sounil felt her next query a silly one, but it had to be asked. "How did you know this assailant was a Sith?"
"Trained in the Jedi arts, but using techniques the like of which I have never seen, and clearly drawing on his anger and fury to use the Force." Kenobi's mouth turned down with barely contained anger at the memory. "But I took him down. I avenged my master."

No mean reader of emotions herself, Sounil's lekku brain tails twitched as she felt the agitation streaming of him.
"Sorry, but I have to ask. This blood on the wall, it belong to Qui-Gon or your Sith?"
"That'd be the Sith's. Qui-Gon took it through the sternum. Completely carbonised."
Rising to her own feet, she extended a palm to the young man.
"Come on. Your job here is done. You avenged Master Jinn, and kept vigil until we could get here. But now you have to let us take over. And I'd watch that moody, king of pain guano around Master Yoda; he'll start thinking maybe you used the Dark Side to triumph."
"Hehe, maybe I tapped into it just a bit."
"Tapped?" the Twi'lek snorted, "Kid, from where I'm standing, you shipped in drill equipment and mined into that bad boy."
A wry grin broke across Kenobi's dark countenance, cheering the investigator. She watched, impressed, as he uncrossed his legs and rose easily to his feet, way too easily for someone seated the way he had been for the best part of two Standard Days.
"Where are we going?" Kenobi asked as he followed the sashaying Twi'lek through the humming gates.
"Queen Amidala has prepared quarters for you. You need proper rest now. Master Jinn will be taken care off. The engineer here will take you up."

--------------------

Streaking through Naboo's upper atmosphere, the diplomatic-red Republic Cruiser left the city behind, heading towards the thick forests.
A hundred and fifteen metres of Corellian Engineering ingenuity, the top front deck consisting of cockpit, crew stations and quarters, moving back into three decks of passenger and utility areas, and then the back third expanded into a horizontal spread of sublight and hyperdrive engines.

Inside, Gallia strode towards the main conference chamber in the Salon Pod right below the cockpit. As she entered she took in the circular holo-table surrounded by sixteen highbacked chairs. Pop-up screens were set into the polished surface in front of each seat.
She had done research in this very chamber since she had been put in charge of this latest Sith-hunting project.
Her diverse team consisted of a Bomar Monk, basically a sentient alien brain in a cybernetic arachnoid exoskeleton; a former Trade Federation battledroid, and the three beings seated, standing, or laying before her.

Adi Gallia	Sounil Mistry	Det. Hardcastle	Security	Vessel

Going across the jedi's field of vision, those worthies consisted of the Detective Jawa's manservant, a native of Commenor going by the unlikely name of Formby. Conservatively dressed in a slick ankle-length robe of dark colour, he stood looking at the being he served with as much reverence as he could muster.
In front of her, spreadeagled on the table surface and swamped in the green-tinged semi-transparent holo-images of the forests ahead, lay Hardcastle, oversized orange-brown hood covering the small investigator's head.
Tatooine scavenger in race only, the jawa detective muttered distractedly to itself, "Ibana, ibana. A beton nya mombay m'bwa!"
Last, Sounil was seated at the table. While the jawa had the intellect, sometimes you needed someone willing to go confront the big bad, and the Twi'lek was that someone.
And what is going on here? Gallia wondered, irritated at being left out of the information loop. It was a common occurrence though when around a genius at work.

Sounil Mistry nodded a greeting from where she sat, a less than happy look on her face.
"Report." Gallia snapped, noting that the girl appeared to have injured her knuckles, flexing them and favouring them with an ice-pack.
The Twi'lek met her chief's gaze. "Can I just say that the whole team may have been compromised by your bringing us to Naboo. Three days ago, no-one outside the Council knew of our existence, and this vessel served as a secret headquarters under a mountain on Coruscant. All our records-"
"Your opinion is noted, agent. And frankly I agree with you, but even I answer to higher authority."
Sounil sighed, "Well anyway...I've been busy. Got the Padawan billeted, and walked the Qui-Gon crime scene, bagging and recording physical evidence. That includes one half of the suspect's lightsabre, plus samples of his blood."
Gallia nodded at this. "You check for a midichlorian count?"
"Yes Ma'am. Certainly enough for qualify as a Force Sensitive."
"We got anything else to go on?"
"I grilled the Federation Viceroy. After some initial stonewalling, he admitted the Sith who fought Master Jinn wasn't here at the start of the operation, but was brought in later when the Queen ran the blockade, and he subsequently tracked the Royal Starship to Tatooine. The Viceroy also seemed to think the Senate would declare his invasion legal."
"He's got to be tripping." the Jedi mused. "No way would that happen."
The Twi'lek was less sure. "Your basic Nemoudian is a coward. For Gunray to resist as long as he did, he must have thought he had major backing somewhere."
"That when you hurt your hand?"
Sounil managed a lopsided grin. "I had to move onto aggressive questioning."
"Ouch."
"Yeah, that's what he said."

Gallia turned to Formby, and the jedi could see perspiration glistening on his face. The crew kept the non-crew areas of the ship warm enough to keep the detective comfortable, he being from a planet with two stars and all.
"The young master has detected the Sith warrior's vessel. Hidden in the forest close by. We are heading there now to check it out for clues."
The four looked up as the captain announced the ship was ready to descend, and all felt the timbre from the engines change now that the ship was decelerating.
The investigator, Hardcastle, noticed Gallia's presence and met her gaze. As was typical with the sandcrawler jockeys, all under the hood was in darkness apart from the glowing eyes, and she could not tell the detective's mood apart from the tone in his voice, and mostly she had to rely on her Force-enhanced senses and the reactions of Formby to have an idea of what the jawa felt.
At the moment though, she was able to detect a strong emotion of self-satisfaction. More than the usual anyway.
"Utoo nye usabia speeda?"
In spite of her own passing knowledge of the jawa dialect, she glanced at Formby for the translation that she knew would be instant, not to mention better than her own.
"Want to buy a used speeder?" the smiling human intoned.
Gallia stepped aside from the doorway, gesturing with her hand. "After you, sir."

With the quasi-human scurrying ahead of them, Gallia and Formby entered the starship proper, and made their way to the lower deck.
On the way, the aide explained how the jawa had examined the halved and exsanguinated corpse of Darth Maul at the bottom of the ventilation shaft, and found a device which indicated the presence of a personal starship.
"The master identified our boy as Zabrakan, which gels with the blood sample that Sounil came up with. We put a call into the Zabrak Office for Public Order, but I don't think we'll get a match with the limited data we have. Naturally we are cross-referencing with the nine jedis known to have left the Order."

Gallia watched Hardcastle scoot along with a faint but kind smile. Through observation, she had noted the same facts that most intelligent people did when around Jawas for any length of time.
Natural reaction was to compare the scavengers with rodents, as was their manner, but most citizens of the Republic railed mentally against treating them as sentient beings on the same footing of civilization, and even the Jedi female had found herself thinking of Hardcastle as a precocious, highly intelligent child.

The ramp was already open and settled onto the clearing when the three reached it. Gallia had her lightsabre, but Hardcastle had snagged his long-barrelled personal ion blaster and secreted it within his cloak, and Formby had some kind of harnessed revolving barrel contraption that she only tentatively identified as a Dra Industries chain gun.
Gallia raised a surprised eyebrow when she absorbed the sight of the twenty Royal Security troops waiting for them by the ramp. Their body armour consisted of brown leather shoulder pads, forearm bracers, boots and torso, back and groin guards.
It went with their yellow uniform coveralls, but it all looked more ceremonial than combative.

The Security officer in charge spoke up as the group approached.
"The area outside has not been secured. I cannot let you go out there until we have ensured that it is safe."
Glancing over, the jedi examined the young Naboo volunteer. He was a rosey-cheeked individual whose eyes matched those of the rest of his fellows. Looks that Gallia recognised.
These men, old and young, were embarrassed with how easily the Trade Federation's droid army had taken their civilisation hostage, and were damn well going to assert some authority on their own planet!
"Your Queen ordered full co-operation with my team, did she not?"
Lieutenant Rason sighed and nodded. "Yes, that is true. But out here, I am responsible for your safety."
The jawa pushed determinedly against the young man's legs, trying to force his way past. The soldier used gentle force on the jawa's shoulders to turn it in a different direction other than the ramp.
Hardcastle feinted to one side, and used the opening to surge outside and down the ramp.
"Ashuna! Ashuna!" echoed up toward them as the detective bolted into the leafy undergrowth.
The soldier in charge growled in frustration and addressed his small force: "Damn it, go with him."

Two Naboo volunteers followed hot on the jawa's heels, taking care not to overtake him, blaster rifles clutched to their chests, eyes darting everywhere.
Their fellows spread out in a wedge to either side of the central pair. Each man was glad to be doing something. They didn't particularly care what Rason had meant. He hadn't actually told them to retrieve the jawa, but to take care of the little fart.

Drawn by a cordite smell that made the nose-hairs twitch, it wasn't long before they came upon another clearing filled with flattened grasses and little else.
The jawa detective stopped at the near edge, kneeling and lifting his right arm in a fist. "Sabioto."

As one entity, the Security troops closest to Hardcastle froze. Language unknown of course, but all recognised the raised fist, universal military hand-signal for stay still and shut the frag up. Around them, their colleagues followed suit.
Hardcastle's glowing eyes roved across the empty space in front of him. His practiced vision picked out squashed vegetation ahead, cracked branches on trees around the edges. Something HAD happened here.
The detective pulled the device he had appropriated from the fallen Sith. Turning it over in his hands, he studied and pressed some of the coloured buttons.
Sudden darkness made the jawa look up in surprise. The Sith craft had become visible, it's bulk shading the team from the sun..
He thought it was an ugly looking ship - sleek lines that made it look like the sector's biggest spatula, with angled solar panel wings. At the rear, a globular section sat between folded solar fins. Bearing in mind though, Hardcastle thought a rust-encrusted sandcrawler was a sweet piece of kit.

"Utinni!"
The detective rose and moved forwards, his Security platoon starting to follow and caught wrong-footed, skidding on the grass as the Jawa suddenly held up a hand of warning, "Hamana!"
Several metres behind, Formby caught Gallia by the arm of her robe and bore her bodily to the ground, pain flaring in his own ribs as he landed on his weaponry.
"Lie still," the assistant urged. "We have serious incoming."

Three blurred black hoops rolled from another part of the forest with a grinding metallic sound and stopped between the intruders and the Sith vessel to raise themselves on triple segmented legs, extending photoreceptors and laser cannon. Destroyers!!!
Someone yelled for the troops to fall back, but Hardcastle did the opposite, pulling his ion blaster and firing upon the nearest droideka.
His blue energy pulse slammed into the mechanical, causing it to falter and topple as lightning arced around it. The droid valiantly attempted to rise, but got beaten down as slugs from the flame-spitting barrel of Formby's chain gun threw up turf around it. There was a high-pitched whine then a sustained fiery explosion that stunned the diminutive investigator.
The other two droideka expanded globular force fields and sat smugly, spearing the Naboo forces with retaliatory energy fire. Fatally hit Security volunteers fell back into the undergrowth and charred foliage as accurate lasers sliced through ceremonial armour.

The farthest droideka found itself doing a one-on-one with Adi Gallia as she stood before it, bravely spinning her lightsabre to block its shots and return them through it's shield energy. This took it out of the fight temporarily since it couldn't quite get a lock on her.

The remaining Security volunteers kept up a steady fire fight with the centre droid, shots crisscrossing between them while the Twi'lek's cerulean blur bounded from tree to log, grabbing abandoned blasters for a Blue Peter project she was working on.

The Naboo lieutenant took a shot in the arm that spun him and his field of fire to the right, cutting across the starship's silver hull and towards his fellows.
Instantly, a panel hummed open on the vessel's armoured underside, allowing an innocent black cylinder the size of an adult human's forearm to lower into view, and swivel towards Rason.
Crimson energy fire sliced through him like a hot knife through butter, dropping him in three separate directions.

"Auto-laser!" Sounil cautioned the men. "Watch your backdrops." She referred to the areas behind and beyond their targets.
Gallia somersaulted over her opponent, towards the Sith craft, the warning giving her an idea. The tripodal machine continued tracking her, its laser bolts missing the jedi and carbonizing a near horizontal streak along the ship's flanks as she ran past it.
The vessel's auto-laser coughed a response, scattering scraps of twisted droid in all directions.

The remaining war machine decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and tried edging away from Sounil and the men that rallied to her enthusiasm.
The Twi'lek enforcer had not been idle, quickly observing that the droideka shields were too strong for blasters, and immediately switched to Plan C (Plan B had involved a frying pan, which she didn't have anyway, and the less said about it the better) bundling several blaster powerpacks and setting them to overload. The whine coming from the clutch had started to rise in pitch by time she dropped them from her hand, brought a foot round and booted them towards the mechanical.
"Fire in the hole!" yelled the former librarian, diving to the floor and covering her ears. The muffled thump scattered droideka into the surrounding woodland.

The Security team surged forward in triumph, while Sounil stood and exhaled, feeling as if she had not breathed for a month. Watching her new followers regroup and move to secure the area, she brought up her wrist-communicator.
"Ran into heavy resistance. Need medical assistance and reinforcements." She gave an account of their situation, rattled off location cooridinates, and put her arm down, rolling her eyes as the jawa brushed past her, scurrying for the scarred vessel's open and possibly booby-trapped ramp.
Time stopped for the investigator. Latin had a term for this moment - carpe jawa.
She sprang after the cloaked investigator, gripping the material at the nape of Hardcastle's neck to keep him at the base of the ramp, her own blaster and gaze aiming towards the vessel's shadowed interior.
The hooded creature looked up at her, arms spread in indignation as it gabbled an incoherent protest.
"Yeah, you and whose army?" countered the Twi'lek, noting that she and the jawa were alone with the ship.

Turning her gaze up towards the giant fin towering over them, Sounil towed the detective around the right side of the craft, towards the long silvery prow.

Although they were technically part of the same team, she did not work at their base that often. They had not had much chance to bond before, and his enthusiasm around the Sith vessel was doing little to endear him to her.
Although they had to look up to see the hull, two bays or trays had been lowered to the clearing floor, a shallow ramp granting access to their treasures.
Sounil easily identified where the occupant's hover-bike would have been, and on both sides twin rows of light grey strong-boxes which invited investigation. Moving towards the ones on the right, something further in caught the investigator's eye.
"Um, Detective? Think you can get in there, take a look?" Sounil indicated what had attracted her attention.
Hardcastle picked up the hem of his cloak and scurried over the ridged ramp into the darker recesses of the external hold. He needed both hands to hold aloft the prize, bringing it into the light for the Twi'lek's inspection.
"Remote probe droid, huh?" Sounil contemplated the spherical machine. "That won't help us get inside, put it back."
She turned to the nearest strongbox, and tugged ineffectively for a moment.
"Okay. Pass me a hairpin." The Twi'lek held a manicured hand out to the jawa.
Hardcastle just stared at her as if to say, "I'm a jawa. What the frag would I be doing with a hairpin?"
Sighing, she nosed her blaster against the external lock, and fired.
Sounil was just starting to pick through the phials and instruments inside, when she noted Gallia arriving at her shoulder.
"Hey." She greeted.
The jedi looked over Hardcastle to make sure that he was okay, and then extinguished her weapon, returning it to her utility belt. "I heard a shot. Was there a problem?"
"Yeah, couldn't get into the case here."
Gallia ran a practiced eye over the contents. "Sith torture and interrogation equipment. What are you looking for?"
The Twi'lek nodded towards the ship. "I'm betting the owner will have secured the vessel somehow. I'm looking for a way to get us in without further casualties."
Gallia led the way back to the entry ramp. "Oh I can help there. Follow me."

Allowing her gaze to penetrate the gloom, Gallia felt confident enough to proceed, rising and stepping onto the ramp proper, testing it with her weight and fully prepared to dive clear at the first sign of trouble.
Nothing.
"Jedi Gallia, you sensing any life-forms aboard?" The Twilek enquired.
"Nope. And you can knock off the formality."
"Okay, Gee. At least that means we don't have to go through the 'come out with your hands up' rigmarole. That always sucks."
With a glance towards her two subordinates, Gallia took careful step after step, taking herself up and into the courier craft's interior. It was quite dark, but the daylight streaming in from behind the intruders provided enough to see by.
The area was clean and sterile, nothing marring the rounded walls and deck apart from the vertical cylinder of a lift-tube moulded into the right-hand wall.
Her casual two-finger parody of a military salute towards the lift tube drew aside the door.
"This area is clear." she announced, turning to her companions, "I shall stay here on guard."

It was a short journey in the elevator carriage. One floor actually.
The door slid aside with a hiss, revealing a room warmed by recessed lights.
Hardcastle and Sounil consciously swallowed to clear their bunged ears, as the pressure equalised. They exchanged uncomfortable glances.
There was an odd metallic taste to the air, as if it was being ionised, and looking down, she could see the hairs on her arms standing to attention.
The Twi'lek squinted, something ahead catching her attention. "Something odd..." She stepped forward for a closer look, and Hardcastle barrelled her to one side before she could step through.
The former librarian winced as she felt the lift interior scrape her back through the fabric of her robe. Her snub-nosed blaster was out in an instant.
"What is your fragging problem?!" She demanded angrily.
The jawa's hands shot towards the ceiling. "Sabioto! Ny shootogawa!"
Already knowing that the first word meant 'stop', it wasn't hard to realise what the rest of the sentence meant, plus the popular surrender sign was a clue.
Sounil stood, her fury dissipating. "Okay, I won't shoot, but stop attacking me."
Then she allowed her mind to work. "Clearly you didn't want me entering the room...but why?"
Hardcastle brought something from one of his bandolier pouches, and tossed it nonchalantly onto the cabin floor.
Scarlet beams of hot laser light criss-crossing the entrance fractured the object before it hit the deck and skittered across the clearly electrified floor.
"Sneaky son of a Bith." The tone in her voice could have been grudging admiration, but even she wasn't sure. "Someone was concerned about security."
Hardcastle nodded. "Ibana." The jawa's speech was husky, almost as if he was breathing the word. Whispering.
"We should count ourselves lucky that there isn't a fraggin' dianoga pit in there." She paused, then continued half seriously, "You don't think there is one, do you?"
The jawa's hood shook side to side. "Nyeta."
"Good, well fire your ion blaster already and let's get in there."
The jawa smacked a palm to it's forehead, as if perturbed that it hadn't thought of this before. It brought the wide-barrelled weapon up and fired.
"Tripika!" Hardcastle played an intense wash of blue-white energy liberally over the floor, illuminating the room with a scary collection of silhouettes and shadows as the cabin lights gave up the fight. When he finally let up, acrid smoke filled the now darkened room, haunted by the fitful crackle of burnt wiring and vision-searing sparks.
The Detective glanced up at his colleague, gesturing for her to lead the way. "Ashuna."

Sounil stepped through, minimal visibility maintained by diffused grey light spearing down from twin transparisteel slashes in the ceiling.
The cabin was domed and round, a reclining pilot chair forward and to the right, close to a bank of navigation and tactical computers.
The investigator swept her gaze to the left, spying a big cylindrical apparatus in the middle of the deck, and at the back of the room, a semi-circle of straight backed seating for passengers. They looked pretty solid and moulded into the inside bulkhead, so she guessed that there was storage space beneath the seat cushions.

Hardcastle followed hard on the enforcer's heels, making his own assessments of the cabin and it's contents.
The Twi'lek moved for the control panels, running her eyes across the myriad of blinking and still lights, looking for the ships log. Behind her, Hardcastle's methods seemed to be more tactile, running covetous hands across the central barrel-like cylinder that rose directly from the charred deck ceramic.
The rounded doughnut of metal capping the artifact at waist height, was itself topped by a transparent glassy dome.
"Glad you're here." Sounil admitted grudgingly. "Otherwise it would have been a One-Eight-Seven on an undercover cop." She continued, soto voce: "And we know a song about that, don't we chil-"

At the edge of hearing, there were multiple pftttt noises near the ceiling somewhere, sounds that took her back to dank, stone-lined corridors laden with the detritus of several millennia, in fact almost every Krath temple that she had ever visited.
Blow-darts!
Dragging a handful of Hardcastle's hood, she dove for the charred deck, heading for the shelter between the base of the silvery barrel and the back of the pilot chair, hugging the stunned jawa to her breast as she tucked in her own legs.
A spread of small metal darts embedded themselves into the floor around them, and into the back of the pilot seat with meaty chuunk sounds.
Without hesitation, the enforcer fired her blaster pistol up and back into the darkness, a greasy yellow explosion of flame her reward. A second shot ninety degrees to the right was similarly rewarded.
Sounil pulled her gun arm back to safety, waiting a beat before waving a hand in the open as bait: "Peekaboo!"
Nothing speared her hand, and Sounil exulted at the Detective.
"Ooh yeah! Now that was traditional Krath anti-intruder. You can dress up your security system with energy beams and electrified floors, but the mynock who owns this ship is most definitely a darksider, if not a fully-fledged Sith Lord."
She stood, lifting Hardcastle under the arms, and settling him into the reclining pilot's chair.
"Call it in. Vessel is secure for transport back to Coruscant."