“Good.”
“Statement: Our midrange scout systems report that she and the Whiphid bounty hunter are traveling together, headed northwest toward the tauntaun paddock in that near vicinity. They are still on foot and in all probability seeking immediate cover from the initial attack.” The HK made a clicking sound, awaiting orders. “Query: Shall I reactivate the perimeter cannons in that quadrant, set for stun?”
Scabrous didn’t answer right away, thinking about the terrain that the droid was describing. The tower itself wasn’t far from there, of course, and—
And the library.
“That won’t be necessary,” Scabrous said. “I’ll handle it personally.”
“Statement …” The droid sounded more tentative now. “There is … something else.”
“What is it?”
“Several local sensors are reporting unverified cluster activity in various quadrants around the academy in general. It’s unclear exactly what the source of the activity is. Biorhythm diagnostics aren’t reporting any verifiable vital signs.”
“Then fix it.”
“Clarification: The electronics themselves are online and functioning normally. It’s the activity—it shows no sign of life, body temperature, respiration, heart or brain activity.”
Scabrous stopped and gazed thoughtfully at the Mirocaw’s dented metal bulkhead in front of him. For a moment the only sounds were the low, steady hum of the hemodialysis machine pumping fresh blood through his body, and the susurrus of fluids whisking through tubes, feeding him the cocktail of antiviral drugs.
“How much activity?” he asked.
“Response: Unclear at present,” the HK’s voice said. “But it seems to be—”
“What?”
“Well, it seems to be spreading, sir.”
“I see.” Scabrous thought of the apprentice, Nickter, or the thing that had once been Nickter, crawling out of its cage despite the fact that all vital signs registered negative. He thought about how the thing had lunged at him and then gone after Jura Ostrogoth; the appetite that the thing had brought to bear. At that moment, Scabrous had assumed that what he’d seen was a kind of exaggerated nervous twitch, a biochemical accident that the drug and the orchid had triggered inside Nickter’s body. But now—
It seems to be spreading, sir, the HK had said.
—he began to reconsider.
“My lord?” the droid prompted.
“Never mind that now,” Scabrous said. “I’m going directly to the library. There will be no more need for lasers. Hestizo Trace will meet me there personally, and we shall finish our business together, she and I, as it was meant to be. Have my own ship prepared for immediate departure afterward.”
“Yes, sir, but—”
Scabrous cut off the transmission and strode through the Mirocaw’s open hatch, down the landing ramp, and out into the snowy night.
26/Subzero
IN THE FIRST HOUR THAT TRACE PASSED THROUGH THE COLLAPSED WALLS AND stone temples of the academy, the blizzard around him only worsened. It was as if the planet itself had read his arrival as a kind of infection on the cellular level and was fighting him off however it could. The temperature, already freezing, continued to plunge until his throat and lungs burned with every breath. The wind roared between the massive boxy shapes of the buildings and substructures, the great slabs and half-submerged corridors. Its scream was wraith-like, endless, the cry of something hungry for more than simple meat. Even the pellets of snow themselves felt sharper, jagging into his skin like tiny bits of shrapnel from an endlessly recurring explosion.
In his peripheral vision, a shadow twitched and slithered.
Trace stopped, hand reaching back for his lightsaber, and that was when he saw the man stepping out of the arched doorway to his left. Even before Trace glimpsed the man’s face, he sensed the thin, bitter smile twisted over his lips, the threat of violence in those half-lidded eyes. The man’s tunic and cloak blew out behind him, snapping whip-like in the irregular gusts of wind, and his voice, when it came across the broken landscape between them, was a low snarl.
“You landed on the wrong world, Jedi.”
Trace turned and faced him directly. The man was a Sith Master; that much was readily apparent—perhaps an instructor at the academy.
“I am Shak’Weth, Blademaster here on Odacer-Faustin. I can only assume that you came here seeking humiliation and an unpleasant death.”
“I’m here on other matters.”
“Ah?” The Blademaster cocked his head slightly, looking marginally intrigued. “But you’ve found me instead.”
Trace nodded. Actually it was only stillness that had found him, clarity of thought, and it came as a blessing. The cold, the darkness, the stinging wind—all of these outside factors had simply ceased to exist. His entire world had shrunk to the exact distance between him and the man who stood before him, an obstacle in the way of finding Hestizo. Trace felt everything inside him beginning to relax and flow smoothly as the Force spread through his nerves and muscles, generating a kind of weightless balance between action and intent. He drew his own lightsaber, felt it blaze to life in his grasp, a perfect extension of himself.
The Sith Master’s response was immediate. With a harsh grunt of fury, he flew at Trace, vaulting upward in the wind and angling the blade down with both hands, ripping through the ground where Trace had just been standing. The execution was flawless, a thing of almost organic brutality, as if the Blademaster had become a force of nature, another component of the blizzard that roared around them.
Yet he was still too slow.
Leaping sideways, Trace had spun around with his own lightsaber extended in front of him in a sweeping blow. The Sith Master was there, deflecting the attack and charging him again, hammering him backward with a vicious series of piercing thrusts and jabs, offering no quarter. Twice the blade came close enough to Trace’s face that he could smell the scorched stubble on his cheek; the third slash came within millimeters of taking off his head.
Trace realized that regardless of what Shak’Weth had said a moment earlier, the Blademaster didn’t intend to humiliate him, to toy with him or prolong the duel any longer than necessary. At this point, the Sith Master was attacking for the most primitive reason imaginable—to slaughter Trace and leave his steaming carcass in the snow. In that split second Trace saw the rest of the duel playing out in two distinct ways, neither of which would last long. Death was hovering over them now like a scavenger, close and claustrophobic—he saw it reflected in the Sith Master’s eyes.
When the red blade came at him again, Trace jumped upward. He put everything he knew about Form V’s Djem So variation into that jump, leaping over Shak’Weth, spiraling through the flying snow, landing on the other side, and twisting around instantly, keeping his lightsaber at throat level with the intention of finishing the duel in a single stroke.
Shak’Weth laughed—a bone-dry chuckle—and deflected the maneuver with mocking ease. He swung at Trace, and this time the Jedi felt a hot, bright stab of pain as the lightsaber seared through his cloak and tunic, slashing into the flesh along his rib cage. Drops of blood fell into the snow, disappearing as they melted.
“Too easy, Jedi.” Now the Blademaster’s shoulders and back were braced against the slouching stone wall behind him, its outer surface cracked and half collapsed, and he tensed to spring forward. “Now I shall finish you.”
As he arched forward, Trace saw a pair of hands shoot out from the broken wall behind him, gripping the Blademaster by the throat and jerking him backward. Shak’Weth slammed into the cracked stone hard enough to drop his lightsaber, and Trace saw a ghastly white face burst up through the open hole in the wall, a screaming face, suctioning down on the Sith Master’s right cheek and eye, teeth bared, gouging into his face.
Trace took a step back, still holding his own lightsaber up, watching the thing that hauled Shak’Weth through the hole in the wall where it could more easily devour him. Great arteria
l eruptions spurted from the ragged perforation in the Sith Master’s throat, spraying up over the wall and down into the snow and ice, painting the whole world red. Inside the wall, the thing lifted its face up and Trace saw its eyes—flat and without the slightest spark of life—yet they had once been human, even youthful. A Sith student, he realized—a teenager. What had happened?
The thing shoved its mouth back down into the ragged red cup that had once been Shak’Weth’s right eye socket, slurping noisily. When it paused a moment later, the noise that it made was a high-pitched, ululating scream, and Trace realized that there were other screams, countless screams, a threnody of them rising up along with it, coming from every direction at once.
The night was full of them.
27/Paddock
ZO AND TULKH DUCKED THROUGH THE ENTRANCEWAY OF THE LONG, TUNNEL-LIKE structure, and the bounty hunter stopped and raised his head, sniffing the wind as if picking up on some obscure scent.
“What was that out there?” Zo asked, gazing back out through the way they’d come. Her own voice sounded distant to her, and her ears felt as if they were plugged with soft wax from the force of the explosions outside.
“Turbolaser,” Tulkh grunted. “Heavy artillery.”
“It’s Scabrous, isn’t it?” she asked. “He’s looking for us.”
If the Whiphid heard the question, he ignored it; a moment later, he sidled on, deeper into the foul-smelling recesses of the building. Reluctantly, Zo followed. She was still processing the attacks, the laser cannon that had erupted up out of the ground, and the even more horrifying assault that had come before it—the screaming, undead things that had been intent on devouring them.
“The orchid,” she said, for want of a better place to start.
Tulkh said nothing, kept walking. The smell around them was getting decidedly worse with every passing step.
“It was the only reason I could fight those things off. It’s because of how Scabrous used it in that experiment. I think it’s inside their bodies somehow. I told it to grow. But …” Zo shook her head. “It’s not there anymore. Now I can’t get it to respond to me at all. It might be dead.”
The Whiphid responded to all of this with a grunt. “You finished?”
“I just thought you might want to know how I saved our lives back there. You were the one who asked me for an explanation, after all.”
“My mistake.”
“Really?” she said. “Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe you should have thought of that before you abducted me and dragged me out here to a planet full of walking corpses.”
No reply from the Whiphid.
“Where are we going, anyway?”
“Taking shelter. Waiting out the storm. In the morning, I’m going back to my ship.”
The conversation ended there. Almost without meaning to, Zo found herself reaching into the bounty hunter’s thoughts, tentatively exploring his mind for some idea of what he knew about where they were headed. Normally her telepathic abilities weren’t particularly strong when it came to non-plant life-forms, but the Whiphid was what she thought of as a relatively easy read. In fact, from within, his mind resembled nothing so much as the trophy room aboard his ship where she’d first awakened: a place of death, a de facto display space for grotesque trophies and old kills. Some were alien species that she’d never seen before. Others were human. All were brought together in universal expressions of pain, desperation, and helplessness that they’d worn as the bounty hunter had delivered the coup de grâce. His mind had become a storehouse of their dying moments. This crypt of suffering, this reliquary, wasn’t just what he carried around in his head every day—it was his head.
Undaunted, Zo plumbed deeper and realized that, with some effort, she was able to pass through these thoughts into another chamber of the Whiphid’s consciousness, into his more distant memories. She saw faces rising up around her, others of his species, family perhaps, early enemies from his home planet of Toola. The atmosphere here felt very still and long undisturbed, almost as if it were hermetically sealed, and she wondered if she’d arrived in some part of Tulkh’s past that he himself rarely visited. Certainly she had such places in her own mind, aspects of her life she’d walled off in vain hopes they’d die of suffocation or neglect. Zo could almost feel the membrane that enveloped this part of his thoughts beginning to constrict over her.
Then she heard breathing.
There was something alive in here.
She shifted her focus away from the older memories and saw the man gazing down at her, utterly calm and pleasant. His gray eyes were clear, sparkling with intellect. Wide, almost sensuous lips seemed perpetually on the verge of speaking, but instead they only twisted into a bemused smile. It was the Sith Lord.
“Get out of my head, Jedi!”
Tulkh’s snarl boomed through the memory-caverns around her with devastating force. Zo recoiled, drawing back, staggering as she retreated, and, looking around, saw that they were standing in a wide, bare-metal chamber facing a series of tunnels that branched off in different directions. Icicles spiked down like semi-translucent stalactites from the long, low ceiling. She couldn’t breathe. It took a second to realize why. The Whiphid had one hand locked around her throat, clamping her airway shut between his thumb and forefinger. His tusked face loomed just centimeters from her own.
“The next time I catch you in my head,” he said, “you’ll lose yours. Is that clear?”
Zo nodded, and he released her, allowing her to stumble backward, regaining her bearings. Somewhere across the room, in one of the adjoining tunnels, she could hear a high-pitched whining beep going on and on, not an alarm necessarily, but some incidental mechanism, maybe as simple as a light that had already started overheating and would eventually burn out.
Right now, however, this area was still brightly lit. Presumably that was why Tulkh had chosen it. As far as temperature went, the space was an ice locker, but at least she could see what was around and between each of the broad utilitarian pillars holding up the ceiling.
The Whiphid turned, head cocked and listening as he lumbered back up the corridor. Zo, who at this point had spent a good deal of time looking at his back, noticed a difference in his gait, the way he carried his shoulders: they were stiffened, tense with anticipation. Without breaking stride, he reached for his bow and started to draw an arrow from his quiver.
“Is this the way we came in?” Zo asked.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re not sure. And you’re trying to cover for it.” She paused and sniffed the air; the feral, ammonia-foul odor was growing thicker around her. “Are we staying down here all night? What’s that smell?”
No answer from Tulkh … at this point, had she really expected one? She went after him, down the concourse, in the general direction of the exit. The lights were trembling even more erratically here, spluttering on and off for a second or two at a time.
The acrid stench had become eye-wateringly intense. Zo covered her nose and mouth. It didn’t help at all.
“This isn’t the way we came in.” She coughed. “I would have remembered—”
Tulkh stopped. Off to their right, she saw a row of stalls. Something inside one of the stalls was swinging itself around, chuffing out volumes of air. Listening, Zo heard it let out a low, restless groan. There was a silence, then a sound of feet rustling, followed by a bronchial squabbling honk.
The Whiphid replaced the arrow that he’d taken out, and took a step forward.
The thing inside the stall let out another nasal, braying squawk and thrust its long head outward. Its muzzle drew back and Zo saw two pairs of nostrils, large and small, flaring to let out another blast of moist breath. It swung its shaggy head sideways, its curved horns nearly gouging Tulkh’s face before he drew back.
“Are they …”
“Tauntauns.” The Whiphid made it sound like a bad word about somebody’s mother. “At least it explains the sm—”
A thick gobbet o
f spit hit him squarely in the face, and Tulkh lunged forward, wiping it off, meeting the tauntaun eye-to-eye. He and it were almost the same height. The snow lizard’s lips were already working up another load of saliva—Zo thought the thing actually looked like it was smirking at him—when Tulkh abruptly broke into a grin. It was the first time Zo had seen him express anything other than impatience and indifference, and the effect was disconcerting.
“Good girl.” Tulkh brushed one hand over its snout, ruffling the fur beneath one of its horns. “I bet there’s probably some mook fruit for you around here somewhere.” Then, glancing back at Zo, his smile faded. “What?”
“If I’d known that spitting in your face was the key to your good graces,” Zo said, “I would have done it a long time ago.”
Ignoring her, Tulkh returned his attention to the creature. “You’re a foul old girl, aren’t you?” he said affectionately. “I used to hunt with one like you, back on Toola.” He glanced at the thick harness tethering the thing in its pen, and turned to look up ahead at the source of another noise, lower and more dissonant.
Listening, Zo heard it, too. The stalls in front of them were full of an increasing din—braying and squabbling—getting louder every second.
“Something’s got them spooked,” she said.
“Yeah.” Awareness dawned in the Whiphid’s face. “I think you’re right.”
In the stables, the tauntauns sounded as though they were screaming now, stomping in their paddocks.
The lights went out.
* * *
The blackness that engulfed them was crushing and total. Zo felt Tulkh’s hand reach out and seize hold of her arm, just below the shoulder. “Stay close,” his voice rumbled in her ear, and she heard the creak of the leather quiver on his back. “Keep back.”
Zo felt her vision adjusting, straining after whatever slender traces of light she might find at the other end of the paddock, but there was precious little available, and what there was only created a myopic swamp of deep gray shadow. She could feel her senses reaching out into the recesses, pinging off the walls and ceiling. Her pupils ached from trying to pull something of substance out of the darkness. Immediately in front of her, she heard Tulkh suck in a sharp breath of air.
Star Wars: Red Harvest Page 12
