“If we’re going any farther,” Kindra cut in, “we’re going to need weapons. Our best bet is dividing up”—she pointed up ahead, where the corridor pronged into three separate halls—“searching these hallways, in groups of two, and—”
“Wait a minute,” Hartwig said. “Who put you in charge?”
“In charge?” Kindra turned, and Ra’at saw that she was staring directly at Hartwig, her gray, almost translucent irises like newly formed frost. “Nobody asked you to tag along.” Her eyes flashed off Ra’at. “Any of you.”
Hartwig shrugged uneasily. “I’m just saying …”
“What?”
“We all feel something kind of bad in the air, right? Like maybe some kind of a … disease. But who’s to say it’s not just one of Scabrous’s drills?”
Kindra’s eyebrows went up. “Excuse me?”
“For all we know he started this himself.”
“Why?”
“Maybe it is a training exercise,” Maggs put in. “Or maybe he’s culling the weak students. It’s happened before. Remember the unakki eye spiders?”
“This is worse,” Kindra said.
“Don’t be so sure,” Hartwig said. “Eleven students went blind. Two of them died. Remember Soid Einray?”
“Soid Einray was a defective already.”
“Maybe, but he still hung himself afterward. And then we found out that Scabrous had reactivated the fertilized spider eggs from the pathogen bank as a nerve-reflexivity drill.” Hartwig refused to lower his stare. “I still wake up with blood in my eyes sometimes.”
Kindra’s expression didn’t change. “What’s your point?”
“You want weapons? I might know where we could find some. But I’m not gonna risk getting in trouble with the Masters if nobody’s actually seen anything.” Hartwig waited for a response, looking at Kindra, then at Ra’at, and finally let out a derisive snort. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He turned to go. “I’ll see you pus-bags around.”
“Wait,” Ra’at said. “I saw something.”
Hartwig stopped and turned to look at him. Ra’at saw Kindra’s tongue come out and moisten her upper lip, listening expectantly.
“Two bodies fell out of Scabrous’s tower,” Ra’at said. “They hit the ground. I saw them hit, and I heard the noise they made—they were dead.” He swallowed; his throat was suddenly very dry. “But then they got up.”
Maggs and Hartwig were both staring at him now with various degrees of skepticism and outright disbelief. Ra’at discovered that he didn’t care. Let them doubt; it would only make them better cannon fodder when the time came.
“Were you all alone when you saw this?” Kindra asked.
“I was sparring with Lussk.”
Maggs blinked at him, and Hartwig’s eyes grew wide. Maybe it was just Ra’at’s imagination, but he thought the mention of Lussk’s name brought a paradoxical shiver of credibility to the moment. It was too unlikely a detail to be made up.
“One of the ones who fell was Wim Nickter,” Ra’at said. “After he hit the ground, he got up and attacked me. He was dead, but he was … still alive. I had to pin him under a pile of rocks to get away.” Out with the rest of it, then, he decided. “That Sickness in the air that you’re talking about—that’s Scabrous’s doing, up in the tower. I think …” He swallowed again, and this time his voice was steadier. “… I think he’s bringing the dead back to life.”
There was a sharp rattle of footsteps from somewhere in front of them.
Ra’at felt a sudden feeling of coolness rising up inside him, as if his skin were being stretched by gallons of cold water. When he spoke, his voice seemed to be transmitting from somewhere far away. “Which way is it coming from?”
Cocking her head, Kindra pointed up ahead, where the main corridor divided into three subcorridors, to the one that branched on the left. “Up there,” she whispered. “You hear it?”
Ra’at’s ears strained for sound. At first, he heard nothing. Then they all did—a dragging, grating clank. It was advancing down the walkway with a graceless lack of stealth, growing steadily louder with every passing second.
Ra’at began concentrating solely on himself and his own survival, forgetting all the others. The Masters at the academy had trained them to fight as a unit when necessary, but a Sith warrior’s true strength lay in his or her own personal will to power. When you could trust no one, fighting alone was axiomatic, a natural state.
Flattening himself to the wall, he felt the Force’s dark side coursing through him, a crackling electric chill that rendered fear and apprehension obsolete, and welcomed it. In that moment, he felt only a ready vigilance, weightless and unrelenting. Since arriving here on Odacer-Faustin, it was the closest to happiness that he dared let himself experience. Yet in so many ways it was superior to any happiness he’d ever encountered. It made traditional happiness look anemic by comparison.
All at once he realized that he could see what was coming, not with his eyes but in his mind.
“Relax,” he breathed. “It’s okay.”
Kindra wrinkled her forehead, about to reply, when the droid rattled from the end of the tunnel, stopped, and regarded them dully. It was a bare-bones Sigma series training unit, eight-armed, with belt treads and a force-feedback intelligence implant so rudimentary that it was practically a piece of furniture. Ra’at hadn’t seen one like it since he’d run newbie lightsaber drills, not long after his arrival here. Its copper-blue chassis was a dented utility cabinet carbon-scored with hundreds of old marks from countless years of clumsy rookies.
Heaving a sigh, Hartwig came away from the wall, watching the others emerge into view around it.
“What’s that thing doing so far down here?” Maggs muttered.
The droid clicked and produced a series of broken-sounding whirs, its equivalent of speech. Equipping such a unit with a vocabulator would have been pointless.
Ra’at reached down and grabbed a loose strip of alloy sealant dangling from its undercarriage, pried it off, and wedged it directly underneath the thing’s bulky central processor. He jammed the strip in as far as he could and twisted.
“What are you doing?” Kindra asked.
The processor cowl came loose with a snap. “If I remember right,” he said, “this thing’s still got a visual mapping system.” He eased his right hand between two hot layers of components. “Which means it should still have a playback function. And whatever it’s seen lately should still be stored somewhere in its memory bank.” He didn’t glance up. “Master Yakata used to make us watch our old drills this way, remember?”
“Yeah,” Maggs said, “but—”
The space in front of them flickered and brightened with a cone of holographic blue light, the image sharpening, gaining resolution and depth. They all stood back looking at it, pale blue reflecting off their faces, none of them speaking.
At first Ra’at didn’t quite realize what he was seeing. Maggs was the first to break the silence. He sounded hoarse, as if he was still trying to whisper but needed to clear his throat.
“What is that?”
Nobody answered. The hologram showed an area somewhere deep inside the tunnels where an indistinct mob of figures was teeming not-quite-randomly in the foreground. From their uniforms, Ra’at realized that they were Sith acolytes—
But there was something wrong about the way their bodies moved, a jolting, uneven pace, and he couldn’t see their faces. From this angle it was impossible to tell how many there were. All he could see was that they were hunched together, working over what looked like a massive pile of debris, shoving and piling and dropping it into place in the corridor ahead of them. Within just a few moments the pile in the tunnel had grown noticeably higher. The light on the other side was narrowing to a thin band.
“What are they doing?” Maggs asked.
Ra’at’s voice was a nonspecific whisper. “Building a wall.”
“Maybe it’s some kind of barricade,” Hartwig said
. “So they can hold off whatever’s out there.” He caught his breath. “It must be—”
“Look.” Ra’at pointed at the hologram. “The angle’s changing.”
“Maybe they’ve got weapons we can use.” Maggs was sounding excited now. “Yeah, look, that one’s got a lightsaber.” He was already heading up in the direction that the droid had come. “Let’s move.”
“Wait,” Ra’at said.
“What?” Maggs turned around, frowning. “What’s wrong?”
Ra’at was still looking at the hologram. The droid had broadened its field of view, dumping on bandwidth, and the image’s signal-to-noise ratio had improved dramatically. Now the blue light-cone showed a huge mob of bodies, dozens of them, more than he could even count, crammed together in front of the barrier. It looked like half the students at the Academy were packed into that part of the tunnel.
Ra’at pointed.
“Their faces.”
Maggs came back, hardly paying attention. “I don’t see what—” he said, and stopped. “Oh no.”
Several of the Sith students in the hologram were turning and looking directly back at the droid. Their faces were slack and vacant, devoid of any emotion—it was the exact same way that Nickter had looked, up on top of the overhang. Ra’at saw that some of them had wounds on their faces and necks, and their uniforms were badly torn, hanging from their torsos like bloody sails. He watched as one of them, a student whose name he couldn’t remember, brought his face directly up to the droid’s holocam, a sly grin peeling over his lips.
“Like Nickter,” Ra’at murmured, and felt Kindra stiffening next to him, in his peripheral vision.
Hartwig said, “What …?”
“There’s light on the other side of that barricade,” Ra’at said. “But that’s it.”
“So what are they doing?”
Ra’at looked back at him. “They’re walling us in.”
24/Seed
IT WAS THE ORCHID THAT SAVED THEM.
Looking back, Zo hadn’t even been aware of exactly what she was doing, although that by itself shouldn’t have been a surprise—a good deal of a Jedi’s power was instinctive, a function of the Force. But it didn’t make the situation any less disturbing.
The things beneath them had started clamoring up the rock face with a kind of manic agility, clawing their way toward her and Tulkh in spastic bursts of movement. The Whiphid reacted first, drawing his spear and thrusting it straight at the first one, impaling it through the chest and then hauling it upright, using the thing’s own weight to drag it down and finish the job. Tulkh swung the spear around with the corpse still on it, bludgeoning the others, driving them back with a series of vicious thrusts.
The plan went wrong almost immediately. Despite the fact that it had been run through completely, the thing at the end of the spear wasn’t stopping—it wasn’t even slowing down. And Zo realized the other corpses had changed their approach, climbing up onto the overhang from the other side while Tulkh was still struggling to kill the first one. They can’t be killed, a voice whispered from the back of her mind, they’re already dead, look at them. At first she thought she was hearing her own thoughts, and then she realized it was the Murakami orchid, roiling in its own guilt and misery, yammering out words that she alone could hear. Dead but alive, Hestizo, dead but alive, I did this to them, it was my fault, when Scabrous put me into that horrible vat, and now I’m inside them—
Zo stiffened. That must have been when she made the connection, on some level at least, because a moment later she was staring straight at the dead thing wiggling on the end of Tulkh’s spear. Except it wasn’t really at the end anymore; it had pulled itself forward until it was almost close enough to grab the Whiphid’s face.
I’ve got an idea, she told the orchid. Grow.
What?
You’re in them now, she said, aren’t you? You’re a part of them. You said so yourself.
Yes, but—
Then grow.
I can’t just—
Don’t argue with me! Just GROW.
It might have been that last command, the desperate vehemence of it, that stirred the orchid to action. Zo saw the thing at the end of Tulkh’s spear stiffen and then fall abruptly motionless, as if it had just realized something profoundly unwelcome was taking root inside it. An instant later a thin green tendril began to wind itself out of the thing’s right ear, extruding a vine that grew steadily thicker as it looped downward. Another vine appeared inside its left nostril, and then a third and fourth—stalks and runners were snaking busily out of both ears now, some of them bearing small clusters of leaves, others tiny black flowers. The corpse’s mouth opened, and another stalk, this one as big around as Zo’s finger, burst outward from its bloody throat.
Hestizo this hurts, this hurts me—
Grow, she told it. Grow, just keep growing, just GROW—
Looking around, she saw the others were experiencing the same effect, sprouting stalks and stems from every visible orifice. Their faces squirmed with thin, wiggling plant life just underneath the skin. Zo knew that it was working now. The orchid was in them, and the orchid was growing. She concentrated harder—she could actually see the flora growing inside the things now, driving it harder, farther, faster from within, even as the orchid began crying out, begging her to stop, telling her that this hurt, it couldn’t do it anymore—
She ignored it and stared straight at the thing on Tulkh’s spear.
She thought the word again; thought it with all the intensity and determination she could muster, over and over in a smooth and solid thought-wave.
GROW-GROW-GROWGROWGROW—
The corpse’s entire cranial vault exploded in a colossal splat of red and black and green. In the place where its skull had been, a bright spray of leaves flapped and writhed, winding outward, spilling down, to encompass the entire upper half of the thing’s torso. The body fell limp, sagging on the spear.
Tulkh dumped the thing with a brisk shoveling gesture, kicking it so that it barrel-rolled over the edge, and then glanced back at Zo. “You did that?”
“Me, and the flower.”
“You better do it again.” The Whiphid pointed over the edge of the overhang at the other things. They were still sprouting, Zo saw, but not as quickly, clawing back upward toward them.
Hestizo, please—the orchid sounded weaker now—no more, not now, I can’t, it hurts …
“You have to,” Zo said, unaware that she was speaking out loud. “You have to do it, because if you don’t they’re not going to stop. They’re going to kill us, they’re going to kill me, do you understand?”
So sorry, Hestizo …
Silence.
And it was gone.
A hand closed around her ankle, jerking her forward from below. Zo started to fall, landing on her side just as one of the things lurched upward, fully into view. She tried to pull away but couldn’t budge.
Grow, she pleaded with the orchid, grow, GROW NOW—
But the flower, wherever it had gone, whatever its abilities had been just moments before, was of absolutely no help to her now. She couldn’t even hear its voice anymore. And the writhing, rippling movement under the other things’ faces seemed to have stopped. There was nothing more they could do about them now. The orchid was tired, or absent—or dead.
The thing on her leg was dragging her closer.
“What are you doing?” Tulkh shouted. He was stabbing furiously at the others, without much effect. “Stop them!”
“I can’t!” Zo shouted back. “The orchid’s not there anymore!”
All at once something huge burst up out of the ground in front of them—a monolith, black and featureless, hurling up an enormous corona of rock and ice in its wake. From what Zo could make out, it looked like a turret made of stone and durasteel, taller than the rocky outcropping where she was currently fighting for her life. Lights pulsed within it. As its domed upper mounting swung toward them, she saw the gleam of a heavy turbi
ne—
The blaster pulsed twice, and the corpse in front of her disappeared in an acrid spray. Zo blinked, wiping her eyes, and a massive amount of strength and momentum slammed into her from behind—the Whiphid, she realized—knocking her off the top of the overhang just before the third blast pulverized it completely.
They landed face-first in the dirty snow, Zo’s ears ringing, her head splitting from the fusillade of laser blasts behind them. Massive hunks of smoking boulder and snow were showering down from above. Zo stared back at the crater where they’d just been standing.
“Run!” Tulkh ordered.
“What?”
“That way.” He jerked his arm toward the long, hollowed-out, tube-like structure twenty meters in front of them, and when she didn’t move, the Whiphid shoved her forward just as the laser cannon pivoted again, tracking straight for her.
25/Positive ID
“STATEMENT,” THE HK’S VOICE CRACKLED, FROM INSIDE THE COMLINK. “SIR, WE located Hestizo Trace.”
The Sith Lord paused and adjusted the frequency until the connection became clear. He was standing in the bulkhead of the Mirocaw, having just finished a complete inspection of the vessel from top to bottom. Locating the bounty hunter’s ship had not been difficult—the tower’s sensors had found it crash-landed two kilometers outside the academy, tracking it from the heat signature, and Scabrous had approached it with absolute stealth, on the off chance there might be someone aboard. But there was no sign of the Jedi or the Whiphid who had brought her here. The craft had been abandoned.
“Where is she?” he asked.
“Response: Initial perimeter scan reports positive identification on the northeast quadrant. Scanners registered a ninety-eight point three percent positive pheromone match.”
“How long ago?”
“Response: Ten standard minutes, sir. Coordinate vector twenty-seven by eighteen, order of magnitude—”
“Is she dead?”
The slightest of pauses: “Response: Negative, sir, per your orders.”
Star Wars: Red Harvest Page 11
