Star Wars - Gathering Shadows - The Origin of the Black Curs - Unpublished

by Kathy Burdette

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “What was it that you focused on? What image came to your mind?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then think! Come on! Was it a person?”

  “Yeah, it…” Jai stopped herself. “Yeah!” she said. “It was my little sister.”

  Harkness shifted around. “You’re somebody’s older sister?”

  “You sound like you think that’s funny.”

  “No, no. I can just imagine you ordering some six-year-old around.”

  “Well, she’s a little older than that. She’s a major in Special Ops.”

  “So she gets to order you around.”

  “She wouldn’t dare.”

  “Major Raventhorn,” said Harkness. “That name sounds familiar.”

  “’Course it does,” she said.

  “When’s the last time you saw her?”

  “I don’t know.” Jai’s brain clouded up as easily as it had cleared, and she felt a throbbing tightness all the way from her shoulders up into the back of her head. “I thought I hadn’t seen her since she was about twelve. But I can see her with an adult’s face… l thought I just talked to her a few months ago… or last week…”

  “Keep thinking,” said Harkness.

  “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “No, the other beat-up merc across the room. How come you didn’t talk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Keep thinking,” Jai said, with more than a trace of sarcasm.

  “No, really, I can’t… but I feel like I knew a minute ago…”

  “I’d love to know what they did with our heads,” Jai said irritably. She found that she could lift her arms now, and kept trying to massage the tension out of her shoulders with one hand. After a while she began to notice that the pain wasn’t just in the muscles but in the skin, and her hand came away wet. She forgot all about the tension and felt the burning all across her shoulders and her back.

  Suddenly Harkness yelled, “Dirk!”

  Jai felt her whole body tighten. If she could have sprung to her feet, she would have. “Who? What? Who?”

  “Dirk! That’s my first name!”

  Jai’s body relaxed, and her limbs shook from the tension release. “Will you quit screaming out like that?”

  “Dirk Harkness,” he said. “I’m Dirk Harkness.”

  “Dirk Harkness?” Jai finally said, primarily to get him to stop chanting it. “What kind of name is that? You don’t sound like a Dirk.”

  “So don’t call me Dirk.” He made some shuffling noises again; Jai imagined that he was lying on his side now.

  “Fine, Harkness,” she said. “If you remember your first name, then tell me what kept you from talking.”

  Dirk was silent.

  “Well?”

  “I think,” he said, “it has something to do with this humming in my head.”

  “Well, well, well,” Platt said, peering over the ridge. “Our boy Harkness certainly knows how to sniff out Imperials.”

  “How many?” Tru’eb asked. He was a short distance below her in the gully.

  Platt slid down the steep rock wall and handed him the macrobinoculars. “Look for yourself. I make it about two, maybe three. See them?”

  Tru’eb got a foothold in the crags and hoisted himself up into the thick, tufted grass on top of the ridge. “I can’t see anything,” he said. “The fog is even worse over there.”

  “The yellow switch polarizes the lenses. See the hill directly across from us? It runs into that cliff, you can’t miss it. Now look at the a ledge sticking out of the cliff, out over the hill. You see the Imperials?”

  “No… Just trees and plants…”

  “They’re sitting in a dugout under a camouflaged lean-to.”

  “Ah, yes,” Tru’eb said alter a moment. “Army scouts. But I don’t see a garrison.”

  “I don’t even see any valley,” Platt said.

  Nonetheless, Platt’s chrono indicated they were some 1,200 meters above sea level. This neck of the mountains was permeated by rocky ground and sheer cliffs topped with conifer trees. The Bare Forest, the locals called it. Or at least that was what their guide had called it before he had bolted with the repulsorlift a day earlier. At least he had left them some supplies and a one-person emergency inflation shelter, the latter of which had been an awfully tight fit last night.

  Still, Harkness had left a trail of blaster-charred trees and discarded rations. Those clues led Platt and Tru’eb straight into the remains of the Rebel camp—a flat, razed area with scattered ashes, melted tent frames, and smashed comm equipment. The trees were bent and broken, probably crushed by AT-ATs. Platt was hard-pressed to imagine where one of those would have come from. All around was the acrid smell of burned flesh and spent blaster packs; Platt had to avert her eyes from the scattered bodies. Most of them had been shot in the back, Tru’eb told her. The rest were charred beyond recognition.

  “Those scouts have an E-Web, did you notice?” Tru’eb said, adjusting the sights. “But there are, let’s see, 130 meters between us and them. I doubt they would be able to see us from there.”

  “They wouldn’t, if I wasn’t wearing red. Duck back down.”

  “You really ought to re-think your wardrobe one of these days, Platt,” Tru’eb said dryly.

  Platt grinned. “I thought you appreciated my keen fashion sense.”

  “I do. It’s my whole reason for living.”

  Platt took back the macros. Then she looked up at the murky sky. “Say, Tru’eb…”

  “Yes?”

  “Did everything around here just go really quiet, or is it me?”

  They listened, and looked at each other. All morning there had been a constant chattering and hissing of birds, which had suddenly stopped. Platt pulled out her blaster.

  “Did our Green Boys notice us?” she whispered.

  “Let me have a look—”

  Something came crashing through the underbrush behind them. Platt and Tru’eb spun around, but when the thing came out of the mist, they just stood where they were, frozen.

  It was a Sullustan in New Republic military fatigues. But something about him was not quite right, and horribly surreal: his eyes were a milky gray and his head tilted at a grotesque angle. His arms hung at his sides, waving around slightly at each step as the head jarred and bobbed.

  “Walking Dead!” Tru’eb hissed, backing away from the Sullustan, who seemed to be headed purposefully toward him.

  Platt fired a blue stun-bolt into the Sullustan’s chest. He gave a wild spasm and then flopped to the ground.

  Silence. Platt and Tru’eb looked at each other.

  “Was that real?” she whispered, and looked at the ground again. The Sullustan still lay there with his face in a mud puddle. In his back was a week-old blaster wound.

  Platt scrambled up the ridge again. One of the guards was situated at the front of the dugout, leisurely wiping down the barrel of the E-Web; the other sat off to the side, staring into space, waggling his foot. Occasionally he would lean out and look up at the gray afternoon sky.

  “Doesn’t look like they heard,” Platt said.

  Tru’eb gingerly approached the Sullustan. He fumbled for a pulse, and then stepped back.

  “Come look at this, Platt. It’s incredible.”

  Platt gave the guards a final look before sliding back down.

  “What?” she asked.

  “Look,” he said, pointing.

  The Sullustan lay twitching, but not breathing. On closer inspection he turned out to be completely immobile; the appearance of twitching was caused by the presence of hundreds of tiny wormlike creatures swarming around the hole in his back.

  Platt felt her gorge rise. She backed away, but there was no escaping the stench of the body or the memory of the worms: she leaned against a tree and vomited.

  Then she stood up and coughed a couple of times. “Thank you, Tru’eb. Thank you for sharing that with
me. I’m just going to go far away from you right now.”

  She ventured a little ways into the woods, until the smell dissipated somewhat. Tru’eb followed her. “But don’t you see?” he said. “This is the source of the Walking Dead illusion. Some parasites can release enzymes which provide electrical stimulation to the brain of a dead host. So this fellow may be biologically deceased, but there are artificial signals going out to his body.”

  Platt turned around. “Get outta here.”

  “Do you have a better explanation?”

  “Worms operating a complex bio-electrical system? You’re making that up.”

  “All right, so I’m just guessing. But you know,” said Tru’eb, studying a worm perched on the tip of his index finger, “I have actually heard about a similar incident. Do you remember when I was working on Big Quince’s ship?”

  Platt rolled her eyes. “You think I could ever forget?”

  “This was before I met you. I was not privy to a great deal of information, of course, but I recall a story that was going around. Apparently some Imperial friends of Big Quince’s were quite traumatized after seeing a squadron of dead stormtroopers stagger across a battlefield. At the time I assumed that the storytellers were spiced. Now I wonder.”

  Worms inside your armor. Platt felt her entire body start to pucker.

  “Supposedly,” Tru’eb went on, “each corpse walked around aimlessly for a while, then went back to the place where it had been killed.”

  “And this guy here was walking toward the Green Boys over there.”

  “That does not necessarily mean he died there.”

  “No, but something’s definitely up with those guys,” Platt said. “I mean, look at them. If it weren’t for the fog, they’d have the best vantage point in the whole mountain range. You wanna tell me they’re just sitting around guarding nothing?”

  Tru’eb held up his hands. “Furthest thing from my mind.”

  Platt looked at the Sullustan again. For a moment she thought she was going to vomit again. But instead, she stopped herself and broke into a slow grin.

  “Hold on just a second,” she said. “I have an idea.”

  When Harkness opened his eyes this time, it was still dark, but his body felt almost weightless. Not dizzy and thick, not drugged; just light. It was because there was less pain in his body now.

  He didn’t feel as though he could sit up yet, but at least the possibility of moving didn’t fill him with trepidation anymore. And the humming sound lingered at the back of his head in a muted, almost pleasant way. He entertained the idea that it might be a fraction of a song Chessa used to sing; she had been on his mind for what seemed like hours now, although he couldn’t remember her ever singing in front of him.

  “Hey,” he said. His voice was stronger, clearer. “Hey, Sarge.”

  “What?” said Jai, still across the room.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Better, I guess,” she said.

  “Me, too. I don’t know why.”

  “How long have we been here?”

  “Dunno. A few days. Maybe a week.”

  “Maybe an hour.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Has this… uh… ever happened to you before?” she asked.

  “Getting captured? Yes,” he said. The memory of it appeared out of nowhere and surprised him; nothing about his current ordeal had seemed familiar until now.

  “Oh,” she said.

  He expected her to ask if that was how he had lost his eye, and then remembered that she still couldn’t see his face. In all the time they had been there, their eyes still had not adjusted to the darkness.

  “Did they work you over that time?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Worse than this.”

  “Can’t imagine that.”

  “Well, maybe not by much,” he said. “Is that what you were thinking about over there? My prison record?”

  Suddenly he recalled something he had said earlier, regarding the gray boys in the interrogation room. Living their lifelong dream of making an Infiltrator scream. Maybe Jai had been done the same way as he had, and then again—

  “Jai?” he said tentatively. “Do you—still have both eyes?”

  “Huh?”

  “I mean… did they put your eyes out?”

  Jai laughed, a surprising, loud, sardonic cackle. It took her a couple of minutes to rein it in, and then she said, “Hey, Dirk—who can tell?”

  Harkness felt his lips twitch slightly.

  Then he heard more laughter, both of their voices, ringing off the walls, choking through the pain, and eventually dying down to a few stuttering gasps. When it was over, his ribs ached and his throat hurt, but he felt an unfamiliar satisfaction.

  “Why’d you ask me that, anyway?” asked Jai around a final chuckle.

  “Forget it. Long story.”

  “Oh, well, you better not get started. I have to be somewhere in ten minutes.”

  “Yeah, I have a date myself.”

  It occurred to Harkness that he did have someplace to be, and people to be with. But where, and whom? When the walls stopped ringing, the humming came back.

  Is that what you’ve been thinking about?” asked Jai. “My eyes? If it makes you feel better, Harkness, I’m told they’re stunning.”

  “No,” said Harkness, and he sobered. “I was actually thinking about Chessa.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “My girl.” Harkness thought about her face the last time he had seen her. It was a nice, normal day, full of routines, loading the ship, the two of them flirting over the cargo load. But he had known, somewhere on the odd fringes of his mind, that she was about to die. He always knew when somebody was about to die. There was a softness to his or her features on those days. He would see it all through his stint in the Alliance, and he saw it for the first time in Chessa, standing there in the docking bay.

  “Do you think about her a lot?” Jai asked.

  “She’s dead,” said Harkness in his usual blunt, conversation-ending tone. Dirk, how’s Chessa doing these days? She’s dead. Oh. They always changed the subject after that.

  But not Jai. “I know,” she said.

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “Yes, I did. It’s the way you said her name.”

  Harkness didn’t know how to respond to that. Jai had spoken with such confidence, and he hated it when people thought they could dissect him. Like all those Alliance counselors he never wanted to go to.

  “How did I say her name?”

  “Like it was sacred.”

  “So what? That’s how you said your sister’s name.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  Jai broke off, so abruptly that Harkness thought she had disappeared altogether. In her place Harkness imagined a deep black hole generating silence, threatening to suck him through, too. Harkness could actually hear it. ringing, clouding his ears.

  Then his mind cleared out and he realized what he had said. And what it had meant.

  “Sarge?” he said.

  “Yeah.” Her voice took on a heavy, listless resignation that was very familiar to Harkness. He wished that she had the energy to crawl across the floor and smack him across the face. Or that he had the energy to do it for her.

  “When?” he asked.

  “Two months ago.”

  Endor. No wonder the name had sounded familiar. Harkness remembered briefly meeting a tall, dark-haired officer named Morgan Raventhorn shortly before the battle. A kid, really. He imagined that girl lying on the floor across from him, with a slightly older face.

  Jai remained quiet, but her breathing hadn’t changed. She wasn’t crying. He wondered whether she had cried over her sister at all, and if not, whether she would anytime soon. That idea puzzled him; up until that moment, he had guessed that Jai’s mind worked much the way his did, and that their experiences were similar. But he had never been so numb he couldn’t mourn.

  Harkness’ usual course, as a practiced loner, was to
give other loners a fairly wide berth. If they wanted to be left alone, he knew it, and he would honor it. But Jai was different. Certainly Harkness had lost his faith in the New Republic, had lost his faith in love, and sometimes had lost faith in himself and his purpose. But he couldn’t imagine what you did when you lost your faith in everything all at once.

  “Chessa was killed by a bunch of stormtroopers,” he told her. “All she was doing was loading crates, but they started a firefight with her. They knew she was a Rebel sympathizer.”

  Jai was silent. Harkness went on, “I had been thinking about marriage at the time. I was an idiot, you know, I was young, I thought I could have everything.”

  “I had a fiancé myself,” she said.

  “What was his name?”

  “Krul.”

  She said it the way she had said Morgan’s name.

  Harkness didn’t think he should say anything else after that. He felt embarrassed at having told Jai so much about himself. Even after four years in the Alliance, among people he trusted without question, he had not told anyone about Chessa. To those who had known her, he never talked about what she meant to him.

  The silence seemed to fill up all around him like some invisible snow, and he thought about the absolute last time he had seen Chessa. Pasty, bleeding. Not even a person, really. Some dead people looked like they were sleeping; Chessa’s expression was frozen, her eyes staring up at the docking bay ceiling, surprised and horrified. He shook that image away and pictured her alive and healthy. Then he pictured her lying in a dark cell with a bloody nose and nothing to live for.

  At that moment, Harkness came across a part of himself that he did not like to acknowledge, and his stomach tightened. It was the part that had already begun to dissolve the security of his prison, and his sense of unparalleled freedom. It was the entire reason the interrogation officers had seen fit to beat him. He had yet again discovered, to his dismay, the part of himself that wanted to survive. Whole. Undefeated.

  Harkness sighed heavily. Well, it was cozy while it lasted. He shut his eyes and took a few deep breaths, willing his body to heal itself, willing the pain to stop. It wasn’t that he had any flair for manipulating the Force or anything like that; he just knew that the reason he had survived all the injuries and setbacks and impossible missions that had marked his military career was because he had willed it. And that was why he wasn’t going to die in this cold, rank little cell. Just by wanting to heal, willing himself to live, he’d find some way to save himself from whatever the Imperials had planned for him.