Free End Game by James Luceno Page B

returned him to the world of his birth, Dathomir, but he had foiled the designs of his Nightsister abductors and pledged never to give thought to the life he might have led had he not been raised and trained by Sidious. As far as he was concerned, his homeworld was volcanic Mustafar, where he had fittingly been forged in fire.
    Integral to his Master’s plan, the Trade Federation’s blockade of Naboo had been in the works for several years. The plan had required positioning Viceroy Nute Gunray as director of the shipping cartel, and manipulating the Republic Senate into allowing the Neimoidians to defend the enormous ships of their fleet with combat automata and other war machines. But the Senate had yet to learn the lengths to which the Trade Federation had gone to arm itself. The blockade had been in effect for some time when Sidious had ordered the Neimoidians to invade and occupy the planet, in response to the Jedi Order’s attempt to intervene in the dispute. Attempts had been made on the lives of Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi, but the Neimoidians had proved no match for the Jedi, and so the Forceful duo had managed to spirit Queen Amidala safely off Naboo.
    The blockade had initially numbered hundreds of vessels, but Maul realized on arriving at Naboo that the Neimoidians—ever fretful about diminished profits—had since returned almost all of their ships to the business of intergalactic transport. Well, they were nothing more than merchants, he reminded himself, but their greediness offended him almost as much as Qui-Gon’s cowardice.
    At Tatooine it hadn’t been necessary to employ the Scimitar ’s cloaking capabilities, but Maul did so now in order to maneuver the ship into the core of what remained of the Trade Federation armada, which consisted of half a dozen freighters and a single ring-shaped Lucrehulk -class control ship, which oversaw all elements of the Neimoidians’ droid army. Though formidable, the control ship was not impregnable, and the shoddiness of the operation sickened him. A stealth team made up of agents of the sort Trezza had trained on Orsis would have been able to infiltrate the vessel easily and destroy it from within, essentially paralyzing the Trade Federation’s entire force.
    Maul was certain he could penetrate the ship on his own, and was sorely tempted to, if only to rub Gunray’s muzzled face in the flaws of his strategy. But he contented himself with piloting the Infiltrator to well within firing range of the control ship and a squadron of drone starfighters, without the Neimoidians even being aware of his presence.

    Maul took the Scimitar through a low and slow orbit around Naboo, studying aerial close-ups of the northern continent’s grassy flatlands, lush hills, and extensive swamps and lakes. The galaxy boasted many such scenic wonders, but what made Naboo unique—and had in some sense doomed it—was the planet’s plasma core, and the maze of underground tunnels and caverns the seething magma had fashioned. Those corridors, however, were not visible from above, save for various entry points to underground oceans that were allegedly rife with behemoth aquatic creatures, and home to an indigenous species of amphibian humanoids who resided in bubble cities maintained by plasma technology.
    Once Darth Sidious had issued the command to invade Naboo, the assault and subsequent occupation had happened quickly—in part because of Queen Amidala’s unwillingness to fight back.
    Not, in any case, that Naboo’s small space force would have stood a chance against the Trade Federation army. Amidala may have been convinced that the Neimoidians were bluffing—which they certainly would have been without the goading of a Sith Lord—but even when the first landing ships had begun to disgorge antigrav tanks and thousands of infantry droids, the young Queen had ordered the Naboo Royal Security Forces to stand down and surrender. Only Viceroy Gunray’s concern for the Trade