Swallowing, trying not to gag, Zo squirmed again and felt something slick and oily brush against the backs of her arms. Turning around, she saw that the entire wall behind her was lined with skins and hides, each one crawling with layers of tiny blind beetles industriously gnawing away. She watched, helpless, as they burrowed in and out of the hanging flank, hauling off chunks of grayish flesh.
“Boski scarabs,” a voice behind her said.
Zo snapped back around and saw the Whiphid standing in the doorway. His gaze was intense, corrosive, as if he could already see through her skin to the skeleton she would inevitably leave behind—bones he might boil out of her if she weren’t worth waiting for the natural decay process to do it first.
Zo moved her head slightly and winced at the pain in the base of her neck. She remembered those last few moments at the Marfa facility—the butt end of the Whiphid’s spear, a glassy rocket of agony, the blurry slither of the corridor as it warped past the lens of her ever-dimming consciousness.
And just before she’d blacked out, the hatchway.
Zo looked past the Whiphid, regarding her surroundings through this new, unwelcome perspective. The whine of turbines under the floorboards, the persistent shiver of the bulkhead—though the room was without any sort of viewport, offering no sight of their greater surroundings, she realized they had to be in flight.
“Is this your ship?”
The Whiphid nodded once. “The Mirocaw.”
“Where are we going?”
This time, he didn’t answer, lumbering instead over to the nearest of the pots. She watched as he lifted the lid and dipped in with an oxidized pair of tongs, hoisting a grubby clump of something that she realized was a type of shank. Bits of gristle and musculature, part of a leg, dangled from its lower edges. With an unimpressed grunt, the Whiphid dropped the part back into the pot and slapped the lid back down, then turned to walk out again.
“Wait,” she said hoarsely.
The bounty hunter didn’t stop.
The hatch slid shut.
A moment after he left, Zo found the orchid.
It was still inside the half-crushed specimen flask, strapped almost haphazardly between a cargo drop panel and a swing bin above the vats of limbs and skulls. Her captor had used the same greasy cable he’d strung through the skulls to tie the containment vessel into place. From where she stood below it, she saw that the orchid had flourished even while she’d lain here unconscious. Simple physical proximity seemed enough to keep it alive, despite the fact that for a good bit of the time she’d been out cold.
Zo looked at it.
Hello?
Nothing.
It’s me. Can you hear me?
The initial process of communication was never easy. At first it had felt almost unnatural. Yet with practice, through countless mornings spent sitting alone with the orchid, she’d soon reached a level of mastery that eased the transitory awkwardness into a smoother and more organic leap.
Are you there?
Within its glass vessel, the plant finally twitched, brightening slightly in recognition of her presence. Zo watched its dust-colored stem inclining toward her like a beckoning finger. At the same time she felt its life essence stirring within her, filling an almost physical void directly behind her breastbone and between her lungs, a place she thought of almost colloquially as her soul. At the same time she heard the first coarse whispers of its voice, gender-neutral, incoherent at first and then becoming clearer, like a foreigner adapting to the nuances of an entirely new language.
Zo? What happened? Are we well?
Zo gave a rueful smile, felt the lump on the back of her head. I wouldn’t exactly say that.
The orchid was silent a moment. Then: I sense that things … have changed.
“You can say that again,” she murmured aloud.
Repeat?
We’ve been abducted, Zo told it. Taken.
Another silence. Then: Yes, that is true. By this creature … Tulkh.
Her eyes darted back up to it. That’s his name?
The Whiphid? Yes. He’s a… Hunting for the correct phrase: What is it, this word …? One who takes people for money?
A bounty hunter, Zo said, and felt the orchid nodding in agreement.
Yes. Solitary, a bloodthirsty species, and aggressive.
Zo waited, processing the comment. The orchid had a gift for understatement, and she couldn’t help but wonder about the criteria for this assessment.
And a flower collector to boot, she told it.
If the orchid had an opinion on this, it didn’t voice it.
What does he want? she asked.
The orchid stayed silent. Staring at it, Zo began to realize how her fully wakened presence had already affected the trophy room’s biosphere. The naturally occurring moss on the ship’s ceiling had started spreading at a noticeably accelerated pace, sprawling to swallow up the exposed bolts and seams in the interior walls. There was some kind of switch plate just above her head with a sign written in another language—the Whiphid’s mother tongue, she assumed—but it was already so moss-covered that she couldn’t make out the letters. Scraps of green rot within the skulls had begun extending their first initial tendrils up as well, reaching outward through eye sockets and trepanned holes. Simply by being here, she’d jump-started the growth of the Mirocaw’s incidental flora.
Do you at least know where he’s taking us?
Again, no immediate reply from the orchid. Zo wondered if she’d reached the outer limits of the flower’s knowledge.
Then she felt the spacecraft jerk hard to one side, the nearly subsonic whine of the turbine pitch-shifting into afterburner mode, and realized she was about to get the answer for herself.
What’s going on? Are we crashing? she asked.
Going down, the orchid said.
Where?
Silence again, then:
The worst place in the galaxy.
10/Strapping on Ghosts
THE IMPACT KNOCKED HER SIDEWAYS AGAINST THE WALL OF SKINS, AND ZO RECOILED, found her equilibrium, and brushed off the scuttling, hard-shell beetles that clung to her skin before they could sink their hungry little mouthparts into her. The things fell to the deck, scuttled blindly for an instant, and then vanished between the cracks, as if the Whiphid’s ship were just another corpse for their investigation.
Below her feet, the engines had fallen silent. In the stillness, she sensed the Mirocaw resigning itself to gravity, redistributing the vicissitudes of torque through its thousand tiny joists and connectors with a deep and exhausted sigh.
Zo still couldn’t tell if they’d crashed, or if it had just been a rough landing. She waited, scarcely breathing, as the thrusters cooled, ticking and ultimately falling silent. From outside, she could hear the wind. The sound brought with it a kind of alien desolation that seeped in from somewhere outside the durasteel-reinforced hull. She felt the skin on her back tightening with a shiver. It felt as if they’d landed in some windowless crawl space in the bottom of the galaxy, a place inexplicably devoid of entrances and exits. Her gaze flicked back to the orchid, hoping for an explanation, a means of understanding what she felt.
Something’s gone wrong out there, she thought. Can you feel it?
Across the room, the vacuum-sealed gasp caught her by surprise. The Whiphid was standing in the open hatchway again, clutching his spear in one hand and a bunched-up bundle of furs and hides in the other. He tossed the furs at her feet.
“Put those on.”
Zo didn’t budge. “What are we doing here?”
“Get the plant.”
“Are you going to answer me?”
He turned and stalked out again, this time leaving the hatch open behind him, an unspoken demand to follow. Was there some other component to his brusqueness besides just impatience? Was the bounty hunter as uneasy as she felt?
Zo looked down at the pile of furs and pelts. They had been stitched into crude mittens, boots, a hat, and what
looked like a kind of cloak. Squatting, she pulled the boots over her feet and found that, despite their bulkiness, they fit well enough when she lashed them tight around her ankles. They were recent kills, she realized—she could still feel the residue of the lives that had worn them as skin. It was like strapping on restless layers of ghosts.
Picking up the cloak, she slung it around her shoulders and reached up to the sealed transparent lab packet containing the orchid, slipping it free from the cable that pinned it down. The orchid seemed to shiver and flattened its petals against the wall of the chamber closest to her hand as if drawn to the warmth. It was murmuring to itself, not out loud but in her mind, in one of a thousand languages that she didn’t understand, an obscure tongue of hums and hisses.
She stepped out into a long, narrow corridor lit by irregular panels of interior lights and followed it forward, through another open hatch. Here the walkway narrowed even further, the ceiling lowering until she thought she’d somehow gone the wrong way.
Hunching her shoulders to negotiate a turn, Zo realized how truly cold it was. An abrupt blast of arctic air slashed across her face and forearms and she turned, openmouthed and startled, tasting the first iron-flecked coldness in the back of her throat. White flakes swirled up the landing ramp, and in the sickish pale green glow of the landing lights she got her first look at where they’d settled.
They weren’t sitting on any kind of pad—if it was out there, they’d missed it completely. The landscape outside the ship presented little more than a broad snow-seething steppe of white on white. The wind brought a thin film of tears to her eyes, and Zo wiped them clear. In the distance, across the void, she could just make out the jagged peaks cutting upward like a black spinal column. There was something both erratic and oddly deliberate in the outline of those mountains.
An instant later she realized what it was.
They weren’t mountains at all.
She tried to swallow and felt no moisture in her throat. The freezing dry air had sucked it away, eliminated it entirely. In her arms, tucked against her, the orchid had started to make the same repetitive clicking sound over and over again, as if it were stuck on a thought, a compulsive stammering noise that she didn’t like at all.
The tip of a spear touched the back of her neck, just above the rough hem of the collar.
“Move,” Tulkh’s voice said from behind her.
Zo’s feet wouldn’t budge. They seemed to have been riveted in place.
“Wait,” she said, not turning around. “Those black shapes out there in the distance, they’re—”
“I know what they are.”
“Which planet is this?” she asked thinly. “Ziost?”
The spear tip slipped a little against her skin, but it didn’t hurt. She was far too lost in what lay in front of them to feel the pain.
“We shouldn’t have come,” she said. “There’s a toxicity level that I can’t account for. It’s—”
“Move.”
“Do you have a droid you could send out to sample the atmosphere, just to make sure—”
The spear tip pushed harder.
Insisting.
Hurting now.
Zo started down the landing ramp.
Fresh kills or not, she was immediately grateful for the boots and skins, the heavy fur pelt piled around her shoulders and around her neck. The snow wasn’t deep—in many places its crust was firm enough that they actually walked on top of it—but the wind was surgical, a precision instrument with needles for teeth, and it found even the tiniest exposed places on her skin, attacking them. In minutes her face was a numb mask, her cheeks heavy and lifeless.
She fixed her stare on the black crooked spine of peaks on the horizon. They were closer now, and any initial resemblance to mountains had long since vanished. The ruins and escarpments had a crudely mechanized appearance, and the resulting sprawl looked as if the massive skeleton of some ancient machine—city-sized, planet-sized—had been half buried here, abandoned while it was still alive enough to dig itself out.
In the midst of it, like some pivot upon which it all turned: a great black tower.
It rose up crookedly, a sloping monolithic pile constructed of sleek black rock, the grave marker of some long-dead deity. Even from here, its height dwarfed the half-ruined complex below: a good pilot could have parked a long-range freighter atop its flat roof. Red lights swarmed and shimmered inside its upper levels, their erratic patterns flooding the cloud of snowfall in a deep arterial glow. It was like watching a digitized readout of a brain going insane and dying.
The crunch of Tulkh’s footsteps faltered and slowed to a halt, and Zo lowered her gaze to what lay immediately before them. Twenty meters ahead, the ground dipped and a kind of crude gateway rose up, webbed with clots of ice. She was aware of a silence here, the wind shearing abruptly away, leaving them in a pocket of utter quiet. Zo took a breath and held it, then finally spoke aloud the words that had been haunting her since she’d first emerged from the bounty hunter’s ship.
“This is a Sith academy.”
The Whiphid marched on, the unspoken silence of his confirmation hitting her even harder than she had anticipated.
“What planet is this?”
He ignored her.
“Why are we here?”
He skulked past her to the gate. Despite his size and imposing stature, there was a hesitation to his approach, as if he didn’t know quite what to expect beyond this point.
“It’s the orchid, isn’t it?”
Tulkh turned back to her, spear in hand. She saw knots of ice dangling from his hair. His eyes were lost in shadow.
“You were right to be afraid,” she said. “Whatever’s inside there is worse than you can possibly imagine. I’m only trying to warn you,” she went on. “You know I’m a Jedi. I can feel—”
Something happened then, some truncation of motion, as if time itself had been tricked, cheated out of its rightful due. Before she knew it, an icicle of pain, a single radial spike, jagged upward into the underside of her chin, and when Zo opened her eyes she saw Tulkh standing directly in front of her, the sharp part of the spear thrust upward into her flesh, biting in, drawing blood. He had moved faster than she’d ever imagined, faster even than her enhanced powers of perception could quite register.
Zo pulled back, freeing herself. “What do the Sith want with the Murakami orchid?”
Tulkh blinked at her once, slowly, the blink of a creature that preferred to spend its time alone.
“You can tell me now,” she said, “or you can kill me. But I’m letting you know, I’m not going another step without knowing what’s waiting for me in there.” She thought about everything she’d heard of the academies, hives of darkness so black and toxic that they blazed with their own special kind of evil, unimaginable to those who’d never witnessed it firsthand. Even those darkest of places seemed clean compared with the rancid feeling of contamination wafting out from in front of these peculiar half-ravaged structures, their slabs and the black tower overhead. “But you already know the orchid can’t live without me.”
For a long time, Tulkh didn’t answer—so long, in fact, that Zo wondered if he planned on ignoring her entirely.
A moment later, though, he spoke.
“Have you heard of Darth Scabrous?”
Zo felt something clenching deep in her chest. It was familiar, this tightness, like an emotional echo of some long-forgotten childhood fear. She remembered feeling it the moment the ship landed. And now it had a name.
Darth Scabrous.
She felt her gaze sucked inexorably back toward the tower.
“He wants the plant,” Tulkh said. “I’m bringing it to him. That’s the job I was hired to do.”
“I see.”
“No,” Tulkh said, “you don’t.” He shook his head. “But you will.”
Zo tried to speak, but all that came out was a croak.
Tulkh stared at her from the other end of the spear, the inarti
culate ultimatum communicating more than words ever could.
A moment later she stepped through the gateway.
11/Mind Eraser, No Chaser
“ROJO TRACE, WELCOME TO MARFA. I’M NILES EMMERT. WE WERE TOLD YOU WERE coming.”
The silver-haired agricultural-lab attendant stood with his hand extended. Trace paused just long enough to give it a perfunctory squeeze, his eyes already scanning the area, taking in everything at once as they walked across the landing bay. The ship he’d commandeered was a generic midsized star skiff, big enough for a crew of eight, small enough to escape scrutiny, retrofitted with ion engines and a Class One hyperdrive for long-range travel. He traveled alone.
“I want to see the research level.”
“Of course.” Emmert nodded. “The incubation chamber is on B-Seven. That’s where your sister took care of the orchid.”
The lift was waiting. Ten minutes later Emmert guided him between the rows of plants and vegetation, heading for the chamber’s air lock. The panel hung open, and Trace looked in at the broken electronics equipment inside, squatting down to place both hands directly on the dirty, scratched surface of the chamber floor.
“As far as we can tell,” Emmert said, “Hestizo was—”
Trace cut him off with a gesture, not bothering to glance up. A flurry of activity surged through him: he heard Zo’s voice, and saw the face of her attacker—it was a Whiphid, he realized, the biggest one he’d ever seen—yanking her and the orchid out of the chamber. Trace felt his sister’s surprise blurring into pain as the blunt end of the Whiphid’s spear slammed her in the head. He felt the blinding impact as she jerked back, slumping unconscious to the floor, the flower tumbling from her grasp. The Whiphid bent down, hoisting her over his shoulder and grabbing the orchid at the same time before he turned and lumbered away.
“He came for the flower,” Trace said.
Emmert nodded. “The Murakami orchid is renowned for its Force abilities. It possesses power, but it requires a keeper, someone with an equally high midi-chlorian count, to keep it fully alive.”
“Was there anyone else in this part of the facility at the time?”
Star Wars: Red Harvest Page 6
