“Hmmm,” Harra the Hutt hummed.
“Getcha thinking?” Dec prodded.
The Hutt was silent for a long while. Dec thought maybe she’d fallen asleep. It was hard to tell with her heavily lidded eyes, big and yellow as they were. Thinking perhaps he’d pick up the conversational thread when she awoke, Dec leaned back against the wall himself and prepared to snooze. But no sooner had he closed his own eyes than Harra the Hutt said softly, in a voice like traipsing over marbles, “I like animals.”
“Yeah?” Dec replied, not wanting to push her too hard to tell more.
She sighed. “I like animals. I like watching them.” She heaved heavily and said in a quavering voice, “My pets.”
“We met some of your pets,” Dec told her. “They didn’t seem glad to see us.”
“Some of them like to fight,” Harra admitted, smiling. “Rancors, tawds, my sarlacc.” She laughed as she spoke of her precious pet who’d tried to eat Dec and his friends. He found less humor in the mention, but didn’t tell Harra as much. “When they like to fight, I let them fight. You can’t betray someone’s nature.”
“That is true.” Dec nodded. He really did agree with her. Animals, people—they are what they are. It’s pointless, even cruel, to force them to be otherwise.
Harra grinned and stuck her tongue out guiltily. “I like to pet them,” she admitted. “I like to hug them, when I can.”
There was something childlike about her admission, even though the Hutt was probably hundreds of years old.
“When they fight, I never let them kill. They know better. When the First Order took my palace, they loosed my pets. Now, they’re all in the wild. Probably acting wild again, too. They don’t know better,” she told Dec. “I’m sorry they tried to eat you.”
“Me too.”
“Vodran isn’t too near to Hutt Space,” Harra said. Dec shrugged. He figured Hutts were anywhere they wanted to be. “I was like you,” she offered, trying to clarify. “I wasn’t the same. I loved my pets so much, but loving pets…that isn’t what a Hutt does.”
“Oh.” Dec understood. She was different from her kind as well. It had made her an outcast.
“But I was still a Hutt,” Harra continued. “And I was good at bossing. So they gave me Vodran. We Hutts made a great show of enslaving the natives of Vodran, but I tried to give them good work in my palace.”
“You’re a complicated woman, Harra,” Dec said, raising an eyebrow.
“And when others were brought to me, I tried to treat them well. To let them play or fight or gamble as they wished. I was, perhaps, too generous. Some of my followers were not so kind, and they took advantage of my generosity. They were mean to my animals. They were cruel to each other. I put an end to that cruelty. The cruel ones did not last in my palace. Once, a Gand bounty hunter who had made a lot of money at my gaming tables drank too much jet juice and took away a waif from Genhu. He gave her to my bor gullet, and the bor gullet took her memories away.” Harra shook her head at her own memory. “It was a shame. But my prize rancor ate well that day, and I lost no money to that Gand bounty hunter.”
“That was nice of you,” Dec said, trying to find something positive to say to the Hutt who’d fed a bounty hunter to a rancor.
“It was the least I could do for that poor Vasselian,” Harra admitted.
Dec thought he ought to change the subject, so he asked, “Did you have a favorite pet?”
“They are all my favorites,” Harra replied.
“Aw, c’mon. It’s hard to hug a sarlacc, right?”
This made her laugh. “Yes,” she agreed.
“And a tawd is pretty disgusting.”
“Tawd is disgusting, yes,” she said with a chuckle.
“So, there must’ve been one you doted on. Me? I had me a little ferin used to come round our place every day. I fed her and let her lounge on our ol’ porch with me.” Dec hadn’t thought about that ferin in a long time. He hoped his parents had continued to feed her once he left for the Resistance.
Harra smiled, thinking of her secret favorite pet. “I had one,” she conceded. “A nanak.”
“Aw, those woolly little fellas? You’re a softie, Harra, you know that?”
Harra giggled again in a way that sounded like a tawd choking on gravel. “I do miss him. Little Gherd.”
“Little Gherd,” Dec repeated. When Harra didn’t say anything more, just looked off to an upper corner of the room forlornly, Dec’s mind raced. He knew he’d be able to improvise a solution. And an idea snapped into his brain like a ship jumping to light speed. “You know,” he said, as if the thought were just occurring to him, “all of those animals survived.”
Harra looked down at him and narrowed her eyes. “Yes?” she asked.
“Yeah. We saw a whole lot of ’em. Big’uns. Little’uns. Your favorite pet, the nanak—”
“Gherd.”
“Yeah, Gherd. He could still be down on Vodran.”
“He could be?”
“Yeah. Could even still be in your old palace, just waiting.” Dec let that sit there a moment.
“Waiting for what?” Harra the Hutt asked.
“Waiting for you to come back.”
Harra pulled herself up to her full height. She suddenly filled so much of the room. Her eyes darted to and fro, looking for what, Dec didn’t know, but he liked that her brain was working.
“We have to go,” she told Dec urgently.
“We’re stuck here.”
Harra the Hutt pounded the pillow beside her. It was a resolute, though noiseless, action. “We are not stuck here! The droids here on Kufs are my friends.” Dec believed her. If she was good to animals and people (the ones she wasn’t feeding to rancors), she was probably good to her droids, too. And they repaid her with loyalty. “These droids have ships.”
“So what’re we gonna do?” Dec asked, standing.
“We’re going to return to Vodran,” Harra the Hutt answered. “And we’re going to save my nanak!”
WHEN MATTIS AWOKE, bleary-eyed and aching from the shock, he found himself back in his cell with Lorica and Cost.
“Where’s Jo?” was the first thing he asked.
“They took him.” Lorica sat in her bunk across from Mattis, her head resting on her fists. Mattis got the impression she’d been waiting for him to wake.
“How long was I unconscious?” he asked.
“Long enough for me to not want to kill you anymore,” Lorica told him.
Mattis shook the cobwebs from his brain, trying to understand. “Huh?”
“I could have freed us!” she finally yelled.
“I didn’t know,” Mattis admitted. Everything was so confusing. Had Mattis acted irrationally when he told Ingo that Lorica was only using him? Or was it better to face that truth because her plan wouldn’t have freed them before the First Order took Jo away? Mattis didn’t know. Logic went out the bay doors when it came to Lorica.
“We have to go,” Cost told them. Where had Cost been during their escape attempt? Had she followed them out of the cell? Mattis didn’t think so. He thought she’d just stayed put. Maybe she was smarter than they gave her credit for. After all, she’d avoided getting electro-shocked.
“How?” Lorica snapped.
“The tunnel,” Mattis said, hoping to get back in her good graces. “We can work on the tunnel.”
“They’re shipping Jo to the First Order today,” she countered. “Unless you’ve dug more than that little hole out, we’re not going anywhere in time to save him. Cost can’t even fit in there. Not that we’re necessarily taking her with us.”
Cost sobbed again, hurt.
“She’s coming with us,” Mattis said. “No one deserves to stay here.”
“I know,” Lorica sighed. She fell back onto her bunk. “I’m just being mean. What will we do, Mattis? We’re stuck. We’re doomed.”
He’d never seen her so despondent. He felt a tug over his whole body; it was the overwhelming feeling that
he wanted to make her happy again. He knew it was at least in part because of her Zeltron abilities, but Mattis knew, too, that part of it was the honest affection he felt for Lorica and the desire to make his friend happy.
“We can get help,” he whispered, as if a louder sound might scare away the emerging idea.
Lorica cocked an eyebrow at him.
“There’s Gherd. He lives in the walls.”
“Don’t talk crazy, Mattis,” Lorica warned.
“I’m not. I met him. He belonged to Harra the Hutt. Neither of us were crazy,” Mattis said, looking sympathetically at Cost, who was sitting cross-legged on the top bunk, bonking herself in the head.
“I was. Still am,” she said earnestly, adding, “Jelly monster.”
“Gherd knows about the secret passages,” Mattis told Lorica. “He can dig from the other side, and he can help us get out.”
“That won’t work.” The voice came from behind them. All three turned quickly to see AG-90 standing on the other side of the cell doors.
“Why not?” Mattis challenged.
“Wanten caught Gherd. Don’t know what he’s doing with him, but that critter ain’t gonna help.”
“You’re lying,” Mattis said, standing opposite his former friend.
“Haven’t lied to you yet, man. I mean, not exactly.”
Mattis seethed. He knew it wasn’t AG’s fault that he’d been reprogrammed, but that didn’t make it easier to face him.
“Anyway, we can grab Gherd when we rescue Jo. Then we’ll all of us get outta here. How’s that sound?”
“Like another lie,” Mattis retorted, then realized what AG had said. “What?” he asked, unable to process AG’s words.
“I said,” AG reiterated, punching a code into the keypad and watching the cell door slide open, “let’s get y’all outta here.”
Jo and AG had been working on the plan since they’d been captured. All of it was risky. There was every chance that Wanten, who so hated droids, would decide just to turn AG-90 into scrap or to jettison him into space as he had Harra the Hutt’s metal coterie. It was up to Jo to make the case that AG was worth reprogramming and allowing to serve the First Order, and he had done it admirably. Of course, then they ran the risk that Wanten would order someone besides Jo to reprogram AG, but Jo had smooth-talked some stormtroopers into letting him carry out the order himself. Smooth-talking was not Jo’s forte, but, again, he’d gotten the job done.
After that, the plan was simply for AG-90 to pretend to work for Wanten and the First Order while he and Jo worked out how to free their friends, steal a ship, and get off Vodran. Of course, all that was cut short when Wanten grew more suspicious of Jo, took advantage of Cost’s addled mental state, and made arrangements to ship Jo to his parents. AG couldn’t hide in plain sight forever—things were moving quickly now—and he had to reveal the truth to his friends.
He filled them in as they made their way down the corridor.
“I can’t just let y’all run out free into the swamps,” AG explained. “We can’t even get to the hangar where all of the First Order ships are, not without revealing ourselves.”
“So where are we going?” Mattis asked. He tingled with a tornado of relief and excitement. His friend was still his friend and they were really getting out.
“Here,” AG said, and stopped them in front of another cell. He punched numbers on the lock-pad and the bars slid open. Ymmoss the Gigoran stood waiting for them.
“Ymmoss!” Mattis cried, and took a stumbling step back. The action was automatic. Fear and self-preservation kicked in.
The Gigoran roared.
“She’s really mad you’re in her cell,” Cost translated. “She’s going to eat you.”
Ymmoss grumbled. AG said, “That ain’t what she said at all. Cost, you don’t speak Gigoran, do you?”
“What’s Gigoran?” Cost smiled big, displaying all her pointed teeth.
“Yeah.” AG nodded. “That’s what I thought. Mattis, your friend here is a little bit completely bananas. She thinks she’s been translating, but she ain’t.”
“So, Ymmoss doesn’t want to eat me?”
The Gigoran growled and shook her head.
AG laughed that robotic chirrup like he used to. “No, man! She’s a friend. I been tryin’ to get y’all together.”
That explained the day Mattis had found the cylinder out at the perimeter fence. He’d needed a distraction to pick it up, and Ymmoss, by starting a fight with Patch, had given him one. Even the brawls Ymmoss had started with Mattis under the guards’ watchful eyes had been for show. He wanted to hug the big, filthy Gigoran, but he was still a bit too afraid to get so close. Instead, he just said, “Thanks.”
She purred.
“Ymmoss has been working on a tunnel from her cell, too, and hers is a good one,” AG told them. “’Course, she’s got them claws for digging, and you just had—”
“This pipe,” Mattis admitted, showing AG the junk cylinder he’d salvaged. He’d grabbed it on his way out of the cell, thinking perhaps it could be used as a weapon. But with Ymmoss on their side, it seemed they already had a living weapon.
“Yeah. Good for diggin’, I guess, but slow, huh?”
Mattis admitted it was.
“Well, anyway, the time for collaboratin’ and long-term plannin’ is gone. We’re goin’ out the Gigoran’s tunnel.”
Ymmoss gave a soft growl of approval. It was all they needed to scurry under her bunk and worm their way into the tunnel she’d dug.
The five of them—Mattis, Lorica, Cost, Ymmoss, and AG-90—crawled to freedom through a tunnel of swamp-smelling foulness that they had never before encountered or imagined. Head to toe, head to toe, like a disjointed snake, they wriggled and inched their way through the mud for over five hundred meters. Five hundred meters…that was the length of nearly ten grav-ball courts. It was full dark by the time they squirmed from the underneath, so dark that they didn’t know if it was just the mud in their eyes until a few faint, blurred stars blinked at them from high above the low fog. They fell out of the muck, one by one, catching their breath and knowing they were safe, for now, coated in the planet’s mud, invisible against its surface.
Then the alarms sounded.
“How could they know?” Mattis stood, dripping mud, looking around furiously. “How could they know?”
“They couldn’t!” AG-90 hollered back. He added, “Ugh, I got mud in my danged gears here.”
“Well, someone knows,” Mattis countered.
They were still inside the detention center perimeter, though at the fence. Lights came on across the palace, but the area where they were remained dim, for the moment.
“To trip the alarms, a prisoner would have to break through a fence or open his cell without the codes somehow,” AG explained. “Jo and I had it all worked out so that wouldn’t happen. That’s why the tunnels. This is—” He thought about it and was unable to find an explanation. “This is somethin’ else,” he finally said.
“We should go,” Lorica told them. “We don’t have time to waste. Brush it off and let’s get moving.”
She was back to being the old Lorica, Mattis was glad to see. She was a natural leader.
“Hang on,” AG said as they started slogging through the muck away from the detention center. “Hear that?”
“I don’t hear—” Mattis began, but then he did. A whizzing sound punctuated by a mechanical cricket-like chirp: chk, chk, chk. It grew closer and closer.
Against the illuminated backdrop of the detention center where, even five hundred meters away, they could hear the alarm and the call to search for escapees, they saw the vehicle slice through the fog.
“I didn’t think they made wheel bikes anymore,” Lorica said as the buzzing vessel came into view.
“Tell you what,” AG replied. “When the stormtrooper driving it catches up to us, you can ask him where he got it.”
“Let’s run,” Mattis said, and they did. All five of them
sloshed through the bog, trying to move fast, but the weather and terrain fought against them. It wasn’t more than a moment before the wheel bike was upon them.
“Wait!”
The voice of its driver was familiar. Thank the Force. It was Jo. It was Jo!
“How did you get free?” Mattis was overjoyed. He ran up to his friend and only stopped himself from hugging him at the last moment. Jo wasn’t a hugger.
“I fought,” Jo said. He was out of breath. “Your boyfriend didn’t take it well,” he grumbled to Lorica, meaning Ingo.
“He was a dope of the First Order,” Lorica spat. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“How’d you get out of the cuffs, though?” AG asked. He side-eyed Jo. It occurred to Mattis that maybe even this was a dishonesty. Maybe Jo really was working for the First Order, and this was a ruse to bring them back to the detention center. Mattis shook the thought from his head.
“I had help,” Jo admitted. He opened his jacket to reveal Gherd, huddled in a filthy cottony ball against Jo’s torso.
“Gherd got free, too!” Gherd cried. He leaped from Jo, shook himself, and scurried up to Mattis. “You’re covered in mud,” he told Mattis.
“So are you, Gherd,” Mattis said. “I’m glad you’re okay, though.”
“I know all the secrets!” Gherd yelled, tickled with himself. “I run into a wall and go upways and downways. This time, I’m gonna leave. But then I see Mattis’s friend. Hi, friend.” Gherd punctuated his words with a wave to Jo. “Knew sad boy Mattis wanted his friend free, so Gherd set him free.”
“He came out of nowhere,” Jo admitted, shaking his head with disbelief. “But I’m sure glad he did. We fought off Ingo, then Gherd took me to the vehicle bay. This old wheel bike was the only transport I could get started. I—” Jo took in the group, how many of them there were. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We’ll never get us all out of here on just one wheel bike.”
“We gotta get to the hangar,” AG said. “Get us a shuttle or somethin’ and hightail it.”
“Now-like,” Lorica said. “Those stormtroopers will be here any—”
Escape from Vodran Page 16
