by Jeff Grubb
“Little brother, I think we’ll be lucky if we don’t end up on the menu.”
Trig gave him a bleak look. “Don’t give ’em any ideas.”
“Hey, lighten up.” Kale wiped his mouth on his sleeve and grinned. “Little guy like you, they’ll probably just use you for an appetizer.”
Trig put his fork down again with a snort to show that he got the joke. Although he couldn’t have articulated it, his big brother’s easygoing bravado—so obviously inherited from their old man—made him downright envious. Kale wasn’t wired for fear. It just didn’t stick to him somehow. The only thing that ever really seemed to trouble him was the prospect of not getting another helping of whatever the COO-2180s behind the lunch counter had been slopping onto the inmates’ trays.
Out of nowhere, from the ridiculous to the sublime, Trig found himself thinking about his father again. Their final conversation hung in his memory with stinging vividness. Just before he’d passed away in the infirmary, the old man had reached up, clutched Trig’s hand in both of his, and whispered, “Watch over your brother.” Caught off-guard, Trig had just nodded and stammered out that he would, of course he would—but soon afterward he realized that his dad, in his final moments, must have been confused about which son he was talking to. There was no reason he’d ask Trig to look after Kale. It would be like assigning the safekeeping of a wampa to a Kowakian monkey-lizard.
“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” Kale asked from across the table.
“I’m fine.”
“Come on. ’Fess up.”
Trig pushed the tray aside. “I don’t see how they can serve us this stuff day after day, that’s all.”
“Hey, that reminds me.” As if on cue, Kale flicked his eyes over at Trig’s tray. “You gonna eat that?”
When the alarm shrilled out the end of the meal, he and Kale stood up and slipped through the mess hall along with the sea of other inmates. From overhead observation decks, a retinue of uniformed Imperial corrections officers and armed stormtroopers stood watch, observing their passage into the common area with soulless black eyes.
Down below, the prisoners sauntered in packs, muttering and laughing among themselves, deliberately dragging out the process as much as possible to exploit whatever small amount of leniency the guards granted them. There was a sticky, smelly closeness to their unwashed bodies, and Trig thought of the phrase meat nest again, and felt a little nauseated. This whole place was a meat nest.
Little by little, with studied casualness, he and Kale slowed down, falling farther back from the crowd. Although he didn’t say a word, a subtle change had already worked its way through Kale’s posture, straightening his spine and shoulders, a serene vigilance moving over his face, supplanting the old insouciant gleam. His eyes darted right and left now, never stopping anywhere for longer than a moment or two.
“You ready for this?” he asked, barely moving his lips.
“Sure,” Trig said, nodding. “You?”
“Full on.” Nothing about Kale’s face seemed to indicate that he was speaking at all. “Remember when we get down there, it’s gonna be close quarters. Whatever you do, always maintain eye contact. Don’t look away for a second.”
“Got it.”
“And if anything starts to feel wrong about it, and I mean anything whatsoever, we just walk away.” Now Kale did glance at his brother’s face, perhaps catching a whiff of his apprehension. “I don’t think Sixtus would try anything, but I can’t vouch for Myss. Dad never trusted him.”
“Maybe …” Trig started, and stopped himself. He realized that he was about to suggest calling off the whole deal, not because he was nervous—although he certainly was—but because Kale seemed to be having second thoughts, too.
“We can do this,” Kale went on. “Dad taught us everything we need to know. The whole thing should take no more than a minute or two, and we’ll be back out of there and back in full view. Any longer than that and it gets dangerous.” He jerked his head around and looked hard at Trig. “And I go first. Clear?”
Trig nodded and felt a hand drop on his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.
3/Where the Bad Air Goes
TRIG TURNED AND LOOKED UP AT THE FIGURE STANDING in front of him.
“You.” It was a piggy-eyed guard whose name he didn’t remember, peering back at him through a pair of tinted, decidedly nonregulation optic shields. “What are you doing all the way back here?”
Trig tried to answer but found his reply lodged somewhere just beneath his gullet. Kale stepped in, offering up an easy, disarming smile. “Just walking, sir.”
“Was I talking to you, convict?” the guard said, and without waiting for an answer, pivoted his attention back to Trig. “Well?”
“He’s right, sir,” Trig said. “We were just walking.”
“What, you’re too good to move along with the rest of the scum?”
“We try to avoid scum whenever possible,” Trig said, and then added, “Sir.”
The guard’s eyes slitted behind the lenses. “You yanking me, convict?”
“No, sir.”
“ ’Cause the last maggot that yanked me’s doing a month in the hole.”
“Understood, sir.”
The guard glowered at him, twitching his head slightly to one side as if searching out some angle at which Trig’s unblemished teenage face might somehow become threatening, or even make sense, amid this larger mass of incarcerated criminals. Watching his expression, Trig punished himself by imagining a glimmer of recognition in those squinty eyes, and for an instant he thought how bizarre it might be if the guard had said, You’re Von Longo’s boys, aren’t you? I heard what happened to your father. He was a good man.
But of course no guard on this barge thought Longo had been a good man, or even bothered to learn his name, and now he was dead and already so completely forgotten that he might as well have never lived, and the guard just shook his head.
“Move along,” the guard muttered, and walked away.
The moment they were out of earshot, Kale elbowed Trig in the shoulder.
“We try to avoid scum whenever possible?” A tiny grin dimpled the corners of Kale’s mouth. “What, did you just make that up on the spot?”
Trig was unable to restrain a smile of his own. It felt liberating, probably because he couldn’t remember the last time he’d allowed himself anything less than a troubled grimace. “You think he bought it?”
“I think you almost bought it.” Kale reached up without looking over and tousled his fingers through Trig’s hair. “Keep smarting off like that, convict, and you will be down in solitary with the real dangerous types.”
“I hear there’s a couple of hard guys down there now locked up tight,” Trig said. “Could be our future customers.”
Kale favored him with a glance of approval. “You’ve got a lot more of Dad in you than I thought,” he said and, with one last look at the prisoners in front of them, nodded ever so slightly to the left. “Come on, follow me. And don’t get crazy, okay?”
“Sure.” Trig sensed Kale slowing his pace, dropping back several strides, scarcely enough to be noticed, and adjusted his step to match his brother’s. Up ahead the main concourse broke off into three prongs, branching off into a series of lesser throughways that crisscrossed the detention levels at every imaginable vector and angle.
During his time aboard, Trig had made it his business to learn as much about the Purge’s layout as possible. Eavesdropping on conversations between guards and maintenance droids, he’d learned early on that there were six main detention levels, each one housing about twenty to thirty individual holding cells. Above that was the mess hall, followed by the admin offices, prison staff quarters, and the infirmary. Nobody talked much about solitary, down at the bottom of the barge—nor was there much speculation about the literally hundreds of meters of narrow access routes, sublevels, and dimly lit concourses that honeycombed every level.
Falling into single file
, Kale and Trig slipped through an open gateway, striding along the damp prefab walls, down a flight of steps, deeper in the jaundiced subcutaneous bowels of Gen Pop. The air down here immediately became thicker, darker, and dramatically less breathable, on its way to an array of refurbished air scrubbers before circulating back through the barge.
“Well, well,” a voice said. “The Longo brothers ride again.”
Trig caught a quick breath, hoping it didn’t sound like a gasp. In front of him, Kale froze, instinctively extending a hand behind him, and both of them peered into the open space that made up their immediate future. It took no extra time for Trig’s vision to adjust. He could already make out the forms of several inmates, all members of the Delphanian Face Gang, and in front of them, Aur Myss.
Whether Myss’s nearly vertical sneer was a genetic accident or the result of one of his legendary knife fights was a matter of perpetual speculation among the other inmates. Below the flattened suede accordion of his nose, a row of mismatched tribal piercings dangled from the drooping lower lip, collected like trophies from all the other crew leaders while Myss and his boss, Sixtus Cleft, had slowly consolidated the Face Gang’s position as the Purge’s preeminent prison crew.
“You’re right on time,” Myss said, piercings jingling as he spoke.
Kale nodded. “We’re always prompt.”
“An admirable trait for a prison rat.”
“That’s why you chose to do business with us.”
“One of many reasons,” Myss said, “I’m sure.”
Kale smiled. “Did you bring the payment?”
“Oh yes.” Myss produced a sibilant gurgle that might have been laughter, and extended one spade-claw hand, pointing down at the empty floor in front of him. “It’s right there in front of you. Don’t you see it?”
Trig sensed, or perhaps only imagined, his older brother stiffening, preparing for trouble, and willed Kale to stay calm. It appeared to work. For the time being at least, Kale kept his posture erect and didn’t look away, careful to keep his own voice steady and calm. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“Perhaps.” Myss looked at the Delphanian foot soldiers standing on either side of him, grinning and sniggering. “Maybe you just don’t share our sense of humor.”
“Our deal with Sixtus—”
“Sixtus is dead.”
Kale stared at him. “What?”
“A terrible tragedy.” Myss was almost whispering and the mushy sibilance in between words, Trig realized, was definitely laughter this time, accompanied by the faint metallic jingle of his piercings. “ICO Wembly found him in his cell this morning with his throat slashed. I’m the new skipper now.” He stopped, and then his voice abruptly frosted over. “And alas, the terms of our deal have changed.”
“You can’t do that,” Trig cut in, unable to hold back any longer. “Sixtus and our dad—”
“No, it’s all right,” Kale said, still not taking his eyes off Myss, and when he spoke again he sounded absolutely calm. “I’m just sorry things worked out this way.”
Myss appeared genuinely curious. “Oh?”
“None of this is necessary.” Kale’s voice was so casual it was almost like listening to their father talk, that same mellifluous we-can-work-this-out inflection that had gotten them out of so many dicey exchanges in the past. “We’ve built a mutually beneficial relationship here, and it’s crazy to jeopardize it with rash decisions.”
“Rash decisions?”
Kale waved a hand in the air. “Of course we’ll be happy to tell you where the blasters and power packs are hidden, free of charge. Take them with my compliments. Consider it my gift to you as the new leader of the Face Gang. And everyone walks out of here to do business another day.”
“A generous proposal.” Myss seemed to consider the idea for a long moment. “There’s only one problem.”
“What’s that?”
Myss glanced at the Delphanian inmates slathering next to him on either side. “I already promised my men that they could kill you.”
“I see.” Kale hove up a dramatic sigh. “In that case, I guess we don’t have a deal, huh?”
“No.”
“I suppose there’s only one thing left to do.”
Aur Myss tilted his chin upward slightly. “And that would be?”
At first none of them moved, and Trig had no idea what was going to happen. Then, before he realized it, Kale’s hand blurred forward, moving faster than Trig could even see, his fingers hooking down to rip the piercings out of Myss’s face.
The Delphanian shrieked in surprise and pain and one of his hands flew up to cover his wounded, spurting lips and nose. Simultaneously the two inmates who had been flanking him burst forward in a rush, and Kale grabbed his brother’s shoulder, spun him hard around, and thrust him back in the direction they’d come.
“Run,” Kale shouted, and they did, Trig first, Kale behind him, both of them flying back up the corridor they’d just come down. Behind them the Delphanians’ boots clanged off the metal floor, and Trig could hear them shouting, coming closer. There was no way he and his brother could possibly outrun them. And even if by some quirk of fate they did escape, Aur Myss would be waiting for them tomorrow and the next day and—
Rounding the bend, Trig almost collided with a guard standing directly in front of him. The ICO put up both hands in a reflexive warding-off gesture, and the sudden stop that kept Trig from slamming into him was followed an instant later by Kale hitting him from behind.
“What’s going on here?” the guard asked.
“Nothing, sir, we just …” Trig started, and it occurred to him that there was no reason why the guards should be this far down the walkways to begin with.
And then, between the pounding rhythm of his own heart, he realized something else.
The Purge had fallen absolutely silent.
The vibrations that had unsettled him, broadcasting their emanations up through the bones of his feet, ankles, and knees, had gone completely still.
For the first time since he’d come aboard, the engines had stopped.
Introduction to the OLD REPUBLIC Era
(5,000–33 YEARS BEFORE STAR WARS: A NEW HOPE)
Long—long—ago in a galaxy far, far away … some twenty-five thousand years before Luke Skywalker destroyed the first Death Star at the Battle of Yavin in Star Wars: A New Hope … a large number of star systems and species in the center of the galaxy came together to form the Galactic Republic, governed by a Chancellor and a Senate from the capital city-world of Coruscant. As the Republic expanded via the hyperspace lanes, it absorbed new member worlds from newly discovered star systems; it also expanded its military to deal with the hostile civilizations, slavers, pirates, and gangster-species such as the slug-like Hutts that were encountered in the outward exploration. But the most vital defenders of the Republic were the Jedi Knights. Originally a reclusive order dedicated to studying the mysteries of the life energy known as the Force, the Jedi became the Republic’s guardians, charged by the Senate with keeping the peace—with wise words if possible; with lightsabers if not.
But the Jedi weren’t the only Force-users in the galaxy. An ancient civil war had pitted those Jedi who used the Force selflessly against those who allowed themselves to be ruled by their ambitions—which the Jedi warned led to the dark side of the Force. Defeated in that long-ago war, the dark siders fled beyond the galactic frontier, where they built a civilization of their own: the Sith Empire.
The first great conflict between the Republic and the Sith Empire occurred when two hyperspace explorers stumbled on the Sith worlds, giving the Sith Lord Naga Sadow and his dark side warriors a direct invasion route into the Republic’s central worlds. This war resulted in the first destruction of the Sith Empire—but it was hardly the last. For the next four thousand years, skirmishes between the Republic and Sith grew into wars, with the scales always tilting toward one or the other, and peace never lasting. The galaxy was a place of almost cons
tant strife: Sith armies against Republic armies; Force-using Sith Lords against Jedi Masters and Jedi Knights; and the dreaded nomadic mercenaries called Mandalorians bringing muscle and firepower wherever they stood to gain.
Then, a thousand years before A New Hope and the Battle of Yavin, the Jedi defeated the Sith at the Battle of Ruusan, decimating the so-called Brotherhood of Darkness that was the heart of the Sith Empire—and most of its power.
One Sith Lord survived—Darth Bane—and his vision for the Sith differed from that of his predecessors. He instituted a new doctrine: No longer would the followers of the dark side build empires or amass great armies of Force-users. There would be only two Sith at a time: a Master and an apprentice. From that time on, the Sith remained in hiding, biding their time and plotting their revenge, while the rest of the galaxy enjoyed an unprecedented era of peace, so long and strong that the Republic eventually dismantled its standing armies.
But while the Republic seemed strong, its institutions had begun to rot. Greedy corporations sought profits above all else and a corrupt Senate did nothing to stop them, until the corporations reduced many planets to raw materials for factories and entire species became subjects for exploitation. Individual Jedi continued to defend the Republic’s citizens and obey the will of the Force, but the Jedi Order to which they answered grew increasingly out of touch. And a new Sith mastermind, Darth Sidious, at last saw a way to restore Sith domination over the galaxy and its inhabitants, and quietly worked to set in motion the revenge of the Sith …
If you’re a reader new to the Old Republic era, here are three great starting points:
• The Old Republic: Deceived, by Paul S. Kemp: Kemp tells the tale of the Republic’s betrayal by the Sith Empire, and features Darth Malgus, an intriguing, complicated villain.
• Knight Errant, by John Jackson Miller: Alone in Sith territory, the headstrong Jedi Kerra Holt seeks to thwart the designs of an eccentric clan of fearsome, powerful, and bizarre Sith Lords.
