Instantly Maggs joined him and Kindra, and Ra’at pointed silently into a pool of shadow just beyond a bank of massive metal cases that looked as though they’d been turned into storage for droid parts. Something was moving visibly on the other side of the storage bins, and an instant later it came staggering into view.
“What in the name…,” Hartwig said. It was the first thing he’d said since the confrontation with Kindra over the lightsaber. “What’s wrong with him?”
“What’s wrong?” Maggs made a sick noise. “What’s right?”
Ra’at recognized the Sith acolyte making his way toward them, but only barely—he was the fifth-year known as Rucker. The left side of Rucker’s face had been ripped cleanly away to reveal the gleaming infrastructure of cheekbone and jaw. His gelid eyes quivered in their sockets like a pair of infected red eggs. He was naked except for a pair of black breeches torn open at the front, and the massive bulge of his swollen abdomen was so badly distended that he could hardly carry it forward.
He—it—stared at them for a long beat. Then it threw back its head, jaws wrenching open, and screamed.
“Kill it!” Hartwig said. “What are you waiting for?”
Still screaming, the Rucker-thing whirled and staggered toward the wall. Ra’at saw its mouth open even wider, the mandible popping loose from its hinges completely now, and the scream became a gargled gush as it disgorged a flood of reddish gray directly onto the barrier, its belly shrinking visibly as it did so.
Watching helplessly, Ra’at felt a nauseating roundelay of terror swerve through him, like the shadow of some far-distant flying object—a latecoming refusal, despite everything he’d seen so far, to fully accept this monstrosity at face value. Am I seeing this? he thought. Am I really?
Still dribbling, the thing flung its hands up to pack the mess together, working it tightly into the wall. Almost despite himself, Ra’at thought of the cosm-wasps he’d read about, and the way they built nests by filling their bellies and regurgitating the pulp.
We’re pulp, too, he thought, and the smell hit him in the most vulnerable part of his own stomach, making his gorge rise. The only thing that stopped him from losing total control of his gag reflex was the even more potent realization that the thing was swiveling back toward them, moving much faster now.
“Take him down,” he heard Kindra murmur, almost to herself, and she, Maggs, and Ra’at himself advanced in a single coordinated strike. Kindra sliced its head off with one sweep, while Maggs took out its legs. Ra’at’s blow slashed down the front of the body, cleaving it almost perfectly down the middle. Less than five seconds later the Rucker-thing’s corpse lay on the floor, drawn and quartered, still twitching.
“What happened to the others?” Maggs breathed, gesturing at the empty space.
“Good question,” Ra’at said. “It’s a dead end here. Where’d they go?”
“Forget it.” Kindra turned to the wall. “Let’s get to work on this.”
Ra’at nodded but didn’t move. His gaze went back to the steel droid bins, near the shadowy area where the thing had originated. He was still thinking about that scream it had let out, high and shrill, like the blast of a living air horn. What if it had been a signal to the others, some kind of—
One of the steel droid bins fell over with a clang.
And Ra’at saw.
The students of the Sith academy of Odacer-Faustin were gathered here after all, had been here the entire time. They’d just been waiting in silence, watching.
“How many?” Maggs murmured.
“Ten,” Ra’at said, “maybe twelve—”
The silence exploded in a scream, and the things came spilling forward in one coordinated wave, surging into the open tunnel like a single organism.
“Precision killing box,” Kindra snapped. “Right and left.” She flicked a hand at Hartwig and Maggs. “Get us through that wall.”
Ra’at broke right, as directed, letting his lightsaber lead him like a natural extension of his will. He pivoted and swung it down into the head of the first Sith-thing that he came to, splitting its skull down to the tonsils. But its hands flung upward blindly toward him like a pair of carrion birds, and it kept fighting. Turning, he came up from below and took out its legs just above the knees, leaving the thing in a slimy mess of its own dissolution. Two more came at him, and he chopped them down with an absolute economy of motion.
To the right. To the left. Behind. Move. Move. Move.
Ra’at unplugged his mind and let his training take over. It was just like the drills in Master Hracken’s pain pipe. He’d already begun to see the fight through the mirror-bright lens of a warrior, reducing the battle to a sequence of movements, like a series of doors he had to pass through to get to the other side.
The things were screaming around him again, that pulsing, deliberate scream. Like the smell, it blanketed everything and made his skull feel as if it was going to pop. As he chopped another of the things in half, a white-hot shock of pain sprang up through his right shoulder. His hand went numb, just like that, the last three fingers dead around the handle of his lightsaber, and he spun around, snatching it from the air with his left hand before it hit the floor. Everything was happening with crazy tricked-out speed, and he both saw and didn’t see the thing that had attached itself to his biceps, grinning up as its incisors raked his flesh. Blood splashed around its lips like tawdry lipstick.
Kindra flashed into his peripheral vision and thrust her blade crosswise through the thing’s upper thorax, slashing it down in a meaty spray. Its jaws stayed locked onto Ra’at’s arm, until Ra’at swung his own blade down on top of it, working left-handed, cutting the thing’s head apart. Across the tunnel he glimpsed Maggs hacking his own hole through the group, his blade a fan-like blur, but the tide of bodies was too thick. If they kept coming like this, the things would have him cornered. Ra’at saw the black oval of Maggs’s mouth shouting something, but he couldn’t make out what it was.
We’re losing, Ra’at thought, and then: How can we be losing?
A sudden crash of electricity exploded across the cave. Ra’at saw one of the Sith things go rag-dolling backward into the wall as if it had been jerked away on invisible wires. Now Ra’at could smell the ozone in the air, along with the unmistakable smoky odor of burned hair and skin.
In front of him, Hartwig lunged into view, eyes bulging, his forehead a map of veins, but the look on his face was pure confusion.
That’s not possible, Ra’at thought, only Sith Masters can use Force lightning, how—
“Stand back!” a voice shouted, and when Ra’at looked behind Hartwig he saw Master Hracken standing there. Hracken’s arms were thrust out, with both hands extended. “Down, now!”
Maggs and Kindra had taken down three more of the things between them, and stepped over the bodies as the Combat Master flung his hands up and outward, hurling out streams of Force lightning. The tunnel shuddered, erupting with an electrical firestorm so intense that for an instant Ra’at couldn’t see past it. He smelled his own scorched eyelashes. Even after he shut his eyes, the afterimage of the cave, the bodies, and the others lay imprinted on his corneas in bleeding plaid patterns of red and black.
The Sith Master kept his hands in front of him, muscles straining, jaw clenched with fury. For a moment he disappeared yet again behind a vast crackling hood of electricity. It shattered the length of the tunnel with a massive, ear-rending KRACK that rocked the entire structure to its foundation and sent loose particles of building materials skittering down the walls.
Ra’at rubbed his eyes, waiting for what he saw to make sense. Part of the permasteel ceiling above his head was torn loose by electrical shock and dangled on a slew of cables. All around him, the floor was filled with smoking corpses, severed limbs and heads, still writhing as if trying to find a means of knitting themselves back together. Some of them were actively on fire. Others lay blind, their eyes cooked in their sockets. The heat from the Force lightning had litera
lly melted off their skin, leaving webs and rivulets of liquefied tissue trickling from piles of blackened bones while the things shifted and squirmed, tried to stand and collapsed back into their own murk.
In front of the foul-smelling wall, Hracken stood trembling. A tendon twitched and jigged in his jaw, and Ra’at saw that the Sith Master had bitten his lip hard enough to draw blood.
“Through this way,” he said.
Kindra pointed to the wound on Ra’at’s arm. “How bad is it?”
“Not bad.”
“Did one of those things do that to you?”
“I’m fine.” Ra’at tore a scrap of his pant leg loose and started hurriedly tying it around his upper arm as a makeshift tourniquet. But the blood was already soaking through the fabric, sluicing down his elbow to his forearm with alarming eagerness. Kindra was looking at that, too, along with Maggs and Hartwig and Master Hracken, and Ra’at realized the power dynamic of the group had already shifted. As quickly as the battle had ended, he, Ra’at, had become a liability. Weight to be carried.
Or cut loose.
Out of the game, just like that.
“I can fight just as well with my left,” Ra’at said weakly. “You saw. You all did.”
Kindra just nodded, her face inscrutable, a map of unspoken strategy. Master Hracken said nothing, didn’t even seem to be paying attention. None of the others spoke, either. Ra’at ignited his lightsaber again in his left hand and swung it down on top of the wall that the things had built here, slashing deep into the pile of scrap metal and congealed viscera, driving it home, carving out a massive chunk of debris and kicking it loose. It dropped to the floor with a soggy clank.
“See?” he said.
None of them commented. Next to him, on either side, Kindra and Maggs also fell to work, cutting into the wall. Ra’at attacked his part of it as if he were still working alone. The smell of cooked meat was stronger than ever, and the pain in his right arm had become a dull, pounding drumbeat. He tried to put it all out of his head, to no avail. He thought of Nickter, how fast he had changed after Jura had bitten him. They would leave him behind, too, unless he showed them that he could still fight.
Use the Force. Let the dark side strengthen you.
Yet at the same time, something cautioned him about using the Force in his current state of mind. Something told him it was a bad idea. No, not just bad—a terrible idea. Who knew what he might be invoking if he summoned it now?
What is your state of mind right now? a voice inside asked.
Dying. I’m dying.
No, that was crazy. It was a flesh wound. He’d lost some blood, yes, but he was young and strong. Trained. Conditioned. He’d suffered worse injuries in the pain chamber, for that matter, even today.
What if those things were infected?
Ra’at realized that he was too dizzy to stand. A clammy layer of sweat had already crept over his forehead, one or two drops venturing down the small of his back. His vision broke into a series of yellowing ocher bands and shadows, streaking through everything, staining it. He couldn’t breathe. It felt as though someone had slammed a durasteel restraining band across his chest, the pain shooting down his left arm.
Gasping, he fell to his knees. Shut his eyes. There was the desire to scream, but he couldn’t muster a breath. Helpless, no longer having a choice, he invoked the power of Sith alchemy, the Force itself.
Abide in me now. Fill me with the strength to stand and fight, to—
It smashed into him at full volume, a vast black wave, torrential beyond all reckoning. Too late Ra’at realized what he’d invited into his brain.
It might have learned to mimic the Force.
It might have answered as the Force.
But it was not the Force.
Ra’at shuddered. The others were all staring at him now. It didn’t matter. In a penultimate moment of clarity, he could actually see a skeletal black fist clamping over his heart, squeezing it until the muscle burst. He could feel his body shutting down, whole systems crashing, blood pressure and respiration failing, as this contaminated version of the Force took over.
Mine now, the Sickness said. Mine body and soul.
Not killing him.
Transforming him.
Ra’at felt a dark, orchestral surge of relief rushing through him. Released, he felt weightless, towering, god-like. A horrific smile gnarled over his face. He began to weep—big bloody tears of gratitude running down his cheeks and dribbling off his chin.
I can scream now, he thought. Oh thank you, I will scream and they will hear me, bless you, I can scream and they will know how it feels to have an entire galaxy spread out like an open grave at my feet.
The thing that had been Mnah Ra’at jerked its jaws wide. In that instant he saw, of all things, a pyramid, as black as the tide that had obliterated all conscious thought, a thing resting in a pair of pale hands.
All at once he knew his place in the galaxy.
He knew everything.
And he screamed, and as he did, he saw Combat Master Hracken standing directly in front of him with his hands outstretched.
“Good-bye, Ra’at,” Hracken said.
Ra’at lunged forward. A white-hot explosion of Force lightning exploded through him, and he knew no more.
34/Reboot
IN THE END, IT TOOK TULKH LESS THAN A MINUTE TO REALIZE HOW MUCH TROUBLE he was truly in.
The Whiphid had never believed in fate or any kind of mystic galactic justice: in his experience, whatever happened, happened. The innocent suffered while evil thrived, and to the victors went the spoils. Even so, when his own personal circumstances went from bad to worse, he couldn’t help wondering if this were some kind of cosmic comeuppance for abandoning the Jedi at the library.
She’d been so certain that the flower was summoning her from inside there. Maybe it had been, but Tulkh saw no advantage in going in after it, not when he could return to his ship and put this whole forsaken planet in the past. And so he’d let her go alone. After all, he owed the Jedi girl nothing. All right, she had saved him, but he’d saved her at least once as well and that made them even, didn’t it?
A new kind of darkness had risen up from the landscape now like some night within the night, so that the academy’s snow-swept ruins glowed faintly in what little light emanated from within them. In the distance, Tulkh heard screams. They were not random, these screams—they rose up and swooped down, oscillating in the wind, rising from different directions.
Yet it was the silence in between that made him the most uneasy.
He thought about the things that had dropped from the tower, and how many more of them seemed to be out there now, screaming into the storm. Tulkh gripped his spear, checked his bow, counted his arrows, and listened to the screams grow louder—closer. With numbers like those, he couldn’t help but wonder how many he would encounter on his way back to the Mirocaw.
He didn’t have to wait long.
He was detouring around a long, curved, hangar-like structure on the western outskirts of the academy’s grounds when they came at him.
Crushing waves, one from either side, poured in on his right and left. Tulkh smelled them, heard their screams, the lurching stomp of their advance, seconds before they would have ripped him limb from limb.
He’d already kicked open the hatchway behind him and dived inside, pivoting to get his first look at the high, brightly lit curved-rib structure that surrounded him. The students must have used this place, he thought—some wit had left a handmade sign painted over the entranceway. It read:
WELCOME TO THE PAIN PIPE
Tulkh looked around. It appeared to be some kind of training simulation chamber, a wide, high space full of elaborately machined devices that protruded from the floor and walls, even down from the ceiling—pillars, pinions, retracted coils, and battering rams. But that quick impression was all that Tulkh was able to absorb before the hatch burst open behind him, allowing the flood of bodies to come spewing into
the space with him.
The Whiphid’s evolutionary process had optimized his killing skills. Now he called upon the full extent of his genetic heritage. The hatchway forced the things to enter singly, and Tulkh brought the first and second ones down with arrows, firing point-blank into the space between their eyes with enough force to embed their skulls directly into the walls. The arrows alone didn’t stop them, but they held the things down long enough that he could charge forward and gouge their heads off with his spear. The headless corpses dropped to the floor with a gurgle while the heads hung in place from the walls, gnashing and twitching and rolling their eyes like hideous masks from some dark gallery of death.
That was when he’d looked around and realized how many more had come in.
Dozens.
Teenage Sith zombies, Tulkh thought—how in the moons of Bogden had it all started? Every so often, the universe must just get bored and decide to really cut loose. Like the corpses that had come after them from the tower, most of them had already started to rot. Others were missing whole pieces of their faces and outer musculature, turning them into walking pathology lessons without the common courtesy to lie down and die. All of them surged forward with the lurching, eager speed of things whose appetite—for flesh, or for death—would never be fully slaked.
Tucking his spear into the quiver on his back, Tulkh jumped for one of the overhead support struts and swung himself up onto it, shimmying toward the control booth that he’d noticed up above. Anything that could climb to the top of the Tower and crawl over the glass would have no problem scrambling up one of these girders. But he had noticed something else up here, and although it probably wasn’t enough to tip the battle in his favor, it might give him the edge.
And the edge was all he needed.
Tulkh punched one claw through the booth’s viewport, gouging out a hole large enough to drag himself through, and turned around to face the wide, curved instrumentation panel that he assumed controlled the entire training facility below.
Star Wars: Red Harvest Page 15
