by Star Wars
Maul looked at him coldly. “Terminated?”
“Yeah, I guess nobody told you.” The guard nodded down at the flat gray control unit strapped to his hip. “We call this thing a dropbox. Wanna know why?”
Maul just gazed at him.
“Oh, you’re a hard case, right?” Voystock snorted. “Yeah. They all start out that way. See, every inmate that comes through medbay gets a subatomic electrostatic detonator implanted in the walls of his heart. Both your hearts, since apparently you’ve got two of ’em. What that means is, I type in your prison number here, 11240”—he ran his fingers over the dropbox’s keypad—“those charges go off. And that’s when you drop. Permanently.”
Maul said nothing.
“But hey,” Voystock said with a crooked grin, “a tough guy like you shouldn’t have any problems here.” He reached up and patted Maul’s cheek. “Have yourself a nice day, right?”
They left the hatch open behind them, but Maul had stayed in his cell, crouched motionless, allowing his new surroundings to creep in around him in the slow accretion of physical detail.
There were words scratched on the walls, graffiti in a dozen different languages, the usual cries of weakness—pleas for help, forgiveness, recognition, a quick death. The bench was equipped with handgrips, their surface worn smooth by hundreds of palms, as if the inmates who’d occupied this cell before him had all needed something to hold on to. Maul had dismissed this detail as irrelevant.
Until the clarion had sounded.
Then he had sat up, snapped into total alertness, as the panel of yellow lights in front of him stopped blinking and turned solid red. The signal keened for five minutes. From outside, Maul had heard voices along with the frantic scuffle and clang of footsteps on floorboards as inmates hurried back to their cells. As the alarms cut off, he heard the sounds of cells around him sealing shut.
The walls had started shaking. Complicated scraping noises came from somewhere deep inside the prison’s infrastructure itself, gnashing together in complicated arrangements of pneumatics. Reconfiguration. Maul looked down. The floor beneath him had already begun to bow downward into a bowl shape as the dome became a perfect sphere.
And the cell had begun to turn.
Only then had the well-worn handgrips on the bench made sense. He’d taken hold of them for support, hanging on as his cell rotated completely upside down and backward again, then barrel-rolled sideways like a flight simulator with a broken oscillation throttle. Throughout it all, the metallic clacking and clanging continued as the various plates of his cell reshaped themselves around him.
When the rotation stopped, a recessed hatchway had hissed open into what appeared to be another empty cell, thick with shadow and little else. At first Maul had simply stood gazing into it. Then he’d taken a step inside. By the time he’d picked up the presence of another life-form behind him—the warrior with mismatched arms and the weird, living staff—the first blow had already come.
And now.
Sitting in the midst of the mess hall, feeling the eyes of the other prisoners upon him, sensing the slow accumulation of tension gathering around him like an electrically charged flow of ionized particles, Maul realized that the inmates of Cog Hive Seven, both individually and collectively, were already planning his demise.
Let them. It will only make your task easier.
From everything he’d gleaned so far, the prison was an open sewer, its circular layout fostering an illusory sense of false-bottomed freedom among the incarcerated. In actuality, the prisoners’ ability to roam unimpeded between fights only heightened the steadily percolating sense of animosity among them, the willingness to rip one another to pieces at the slightest provocation.
Maul allowed his thoughts to cycle back to the electrostatic detonators that the droid had implanted in the chambers of both his hearts, tiny seeds of death that the population of Cog Hive Seven carried around with them every day. In the end, for all of these pathetic creatures, freedom was nothing but the promise of oblivion. No matter what they’d done to land themselves here—whatever they were running from or dreamed of or hoped to achieve—those detonators, mere microns in diameter, represented the totality of their lives, and the ease with which they could be taken away.
You are to locate Iram Radique, Sidious had told him back on Coruscant during their final moments together. And then, perhaps sensing the physical reaction that Maul himself had not quite been able to suppress, the Sith Lord had added, It will not be as easy as it sounds.
According to Sidious, Radique was a highly reclusive arms dealer, legendary throughout the galaxy, a ghost whose base of operations was located somewhere within Cog Hive Seven, although no one, even Sidious himself, could confirm this fact.
Radique’s true identity was a closely guarded secret. As an alleged inmate in the prison, he operated exclusively behind a constantly shifting palimpsest of middlemen and fronts, guards and inmates and corrupt officials, both inside and outside its shifting walls. Those who served him, directly or indirectly, might not know whom they were working for, or if they did, they could never have identified his face.
You will not leave Cog Hive Seven, Sidious told him, until you have identified Radique and met with him face-to-face to facilitate the business at hand. Is that understood?
It was. Maul looked around the mess hall again at the hundreds of inmates who were now staring at him openly. At the next table, two human prisoners—they appeared to be father and son—were sitting close together, as if for mutual protection. The older one, a powerfully built, scarred-looking veteran of a thousand battles, was holding a piece of string with knots tied at carefully measured intervals, while the younger one looked on in mute fascination.
Three tables down, a group of inmates hunched over their trays, groping with utensils. When one of them lifted his head, Maul realized that the man’s eyes were missing—as if they’d been gouged out of his skull. Had that happened in one of the matches? The man’s hand found his fork and he began, tentatively, to scoop food into his mouth.
Across the room, another inmate, a Twi’lek, was glaring directly at Maul. Beside him, a Weequay with a sunbaked face like a desert cliff and a half dozen topknot braids stood expressionless. Watchful. Any of them could have been Radique, Maul thought, or none of them.
Maul scanned the rest of the mess hall, absorbing all of it in a single sweeping glance. There were a hundred alliances here, he sensed, gangs and crews and whole webs of social order whose complexity would require his close attention if he was going to find his way among them to complete the mission for which he’d been dispatched. And time was not something he had in unlimited quantities.
It was time to get to work.
Picking up his tray, he dumped the remains of his meal in the nearest waste bin and cut diagonally across the mess hall. There were groups of inmates clustered around the exit, and he turned left, following the wall to a hatchway in the corner, from which the smell of cheap prison food came wafting out, mixed with the stench of cleaning solution.
Exactly what he was looking for.
He slipped inside.
4
COYLE
The prison’s kitchen was like every kitchen Maul had ever been in, frantic and noisy and breathless, clamoring with enough inmates and service droids that he could slip among them without attracting much notice. Every surface was cluttered with bulk food and utensils—massive blocks of half-thawed bantha patties dripped from the counter; enormous pots boiled on the stove. The sticky air reeked of cheap synthetic protein, gravy, and starch, all of it billowing in the steam of the massive industrial-sized dishwasher bolted to the floor in the corner, where endless rows of trays juddered through the scalding spray on an automated belt.
Maul approached the dishwasher, studied it for a moment, and then picked up a large, unused pressure cooker from the cabinet behind him. Next to it, he found a bottle of ammonia-based cleaning solution and silica bicarbonate, poured them in together,
and sealed the pressure cooker, placing it onto the conveyer belt among the trays and sending the whole thing directly into the four-hundred-degree heat of the machine.
“Hey, buddy,” one of the inmates said. “What’s your business here?”
“Trouble.” Maul turned around and stared at him. “You want some?”
The inmate went pale so quickly that his face almost seemed to disappear. “Hey, you’re right,” he said, hands raised, voice shaking. “I didn’t see anything.”
Maul waited as the inmate back away, then turned and walked out. Reentering the mess hall, he leaned against the wall and waited.
Ten seconds later, a loud metallic bang erupted from inside the kitchen, followed by shouts of surprise.
The noise had an immediate effect on the mess hall. Maul watched as two gangs of inmates jumped instinctively together in response to the sound, gathering on either side. In the middle of the room, the older human fighter he’d noticed earlier swung out one hand in a protective gesture around the boy. Three inmates sprang forward, seemingly out of nowhere, placing themselves in protective stances around the Twi’lek inmate whom Maul had seen studying him earlier.
In the midst of everything, only one inmate—a diminutive Chadra-Fan, his growth so stunted that he scarcely stood three feet tall—never even looked up. Throughout it all, he continued happily eating his lunch, picking out the small bones, humming to himself as if nothing had happened.
As order returned to the mess hall, Maul walked over to him and sat down directly across from him.
“Hello, brother.” The Chadra-Fan glanced up, grinning, his large front incisors fully exposed, rodent-like ears twitching as his flat, slightly upturned nose wiggled as if trying to catch a better whiff of Maul. Or perhaps he was still sniffing his breakfast, the putty-colored block of gelatinous synthetic protein clutched in his free hand. Reaching into it, he pulled out a small, thin bone and held it up appreciatively. “The greatest treasures are found in the unlikeliest of places, don’t you think?”
“Who are you?” Maul asked.
The Chadra-Fan responded with a humble nod. “Coyle’s the name. But I’m just a microbe here, a nobody among nobodies, aren’t I? You don’t want to waste your time with me, brother.”
Maul leaned forward to speak into his ear. “You’re the only one who didn’t jump when that explosion went off,” he said. “Why?”
Coyle smiled shyly. “Noticed you slipping into the kitchen, didn’t I? Already stirring the pot a little? Did you get the information that you were looking for?”
“Who’s the Twi’lek?” Maul asked. “The one those other inmates moved in to protect?”
The Chadra-Fan ignored the question, sizing Maul up from across the table. “Big one, aren’t you? A lot bigger than you looked on that holovid.” He crammed the remains of his meal into his mouth, chewed for a moment, and then stopped, fishing out another bone and placing it on the growing collection in the corner of his tray.
“I’m looking for someone,” Maul said.
“Aren’t we all?” Coyle asked pleasantly enough, brushing the last of the crumbs from his whiskers. “Quite a brawl last night, wasn’t it? Offed that ugly tosser in less than five standard minutes, didn’t you? Brother needs some wicked fierce skills to fight like that, doesn’t he, then? And we asks ourselves, who trains the wrecker to do his wrecking?”
“I’m looking for Iram Radique.”
“Radique, then, is it?” Coyle narrowed his eyes and scratched the tuft of hair between his ears. “Nope, can’t say I know that name, do I? Never heard of him, not around here, not likely, no sir.”
Maul shifted his gaze across the mess hall to the two gangs that had come together when the explosion had gone off in the kitchen. In the ensuing moments they’d loosened up and spread out again slightly, but the social fabric was still clear enough. One crew had gathered in the far right corner, near the place where inmates had come spilling into the hall from the cafeteria line, maybe two dozen in all. This group was all human, their heads shaved, their ears and noses pierced with what looked like bits of bone. Maul could tell just from the way they were standing that they were holding something hidden in their uniforms, inside their sleeves, tucked up into their tunics. Something sharp and secret.
Across the room, a second group stood, a human and nonhuman mix with a vicious-looking Noghri positioned in front of them, clearly their leader. They’d all cut the right sleeves off their uniforms to expose a series of matching tattoos that spiraled from wrist to shoulder. At first glance they were a more random, ragtag group, and it made them look primitive and dangerous. Their gaze shifted from Maul to the other group and back to Maul again.
“What about them?” Maul asked.
“The two crews? Bone Kings and the Gravity Massive. Vas Nailhead runs the Kings”—he nodded at an enormous, thickly bearded human with sharpened incisors—“and the Gravity Massive answers to Strabo over there.” He switched his attention to a hairless, gray-skinned Noghri on the opposite side, accompanied by an attentive Nelvaanian sidekick. “Me personally, I wouldn’t go messing with none of them, brother. Don’t know much besides killing, do they? And even that’s a stretch for most of them, isn’t it?”
“And the Twi’lek,” Maul said. “What’s his name?”
“Twi’lek?” Coyle blinked. “Got no name, doesn’t he? Not one I’ve heard. We just call him Zero, doesn’t we?”
“Zero?”
“As in Inmate Zero, on account of he’s been here from the beginning.”
“Why is he protected?”
Coyle gave him a shrug. “Zero’s always been the one who can get things.”
“What things?”
“He’s the one with three I’s.”
Maul frowned. “Three eyes?”
“Items. Influence. Information.” Another shrug from the Chadra-Fan, who was back to sorting through his collection of small bones. “Always been that way, hasn’t it? Least since I’ve been here.”
Maul turned to direct his stare at the place the Twi’lek had been standing when the explosion had gone off in the kitchen. Now he was gone, as if he’d simply vanished amid the rest of genpop.
“If I wanted to find him again, where would I look?”
“Who, Zero?” The Chadra-Fan considered. “Oh, I suppose he’s been known to visit Ventilation Conduit 11-AZR, is maybe one place he’s been known to entertain visitors, from time to time. Of course that’s just hearsay, isn’t it? Nothing guaranteed, is there?”
“Conduit 11-AZR,” Maul repeated.
“That’s right, but—”
Maul had already turned to walk away.
5
KNOCKOUT MOUSE
“That’s him,” Eogan whispered. “He’s the one, isn’t he?”
The man leaning against the wall next to him with his hands in his pockets didn’t have to look up to know whom his son was referring to. Even if the boy hadn’t been talking about the new champion all morning, ignoring his breakfast and then loitering shamelessly around the gallery in hopes of catching a glimpse of the red-skinned newcomer, it would have been obvious.
Upon reflection, it struck Artagan Truax that from the moment they’d come to Cog Hive Seven, his sixteen-year-old son’s day-to-day existence here had always been focused on the prison’s current champion, either fearing the day that he’d have to fight him or idolizing him from afar. Or perhaps both.
“Yes, that is the one,” Artagan said, still not raising his eyes as the new inmate strode past them, twenty meters away. “As you well know.”
“I hear he answers to Jagannath,” Eogan said. “A mercenary and hired killer wanted in a dozen different systems. They say it means—”
“The Tooth,” the man said with a nod, bemused at the boy’s enthusiasm. “Yes, I have heard that as well.”
“Do you think …” The question trailed off as Eogan struggled to phrase it in some way that sounded off-hand. “I mean, just supposing, if I had to—if it cam
e down to it in a match, if I kept up my training … you think I could ever …?”
Artagan didn’t respond right away. He had never enjoyed withholding the truth from his son, and before the two of them had come here, he’d sworn an oath to always be absolutely honest with him—he owed the boy that much. After dragging Eogan from one end of the galaxy to the other, making him stand at the edge of the crowd watching as Artagan took punch after punch, night after night, in an endless series of pit fights and loading-bay brawls, the truth was the least he could offer.
Yet again, today, he found himself incapable of speaking it.
We fail ourselves again and again, he thought. Every day—it’s what we do.
“You’re almost ready,” he said, reaching out to toss the boy’s fine reddish brown hair. “Another month or two of training—heavy training, mind you, with no backing down when it becomes difficult—ought to do the trick.”
Eogan’s face lit up, and he turned to his father, hope shimmering in those pale green eyes. “Really?”
“No doubt in my mind,” Artagan said, putting on what he hoped was a reassuring smile. Unable to sustain the artifice any longer, he turned his attention back to the throng of inmates all around them. “Go down and wait for me in the metal shop. You’ll chase rats today.”
“Yes, sir.” Eogan smiled. “I’ll meet you there.” He turned and walked away, edging through the crowds of prisoners.
Artagan watched him go, the smile fading from his face.
No doubt in my mind, he’d said.
But there were doubts.
All kinds of them.
It had been almost a year since they’d first arrived here, father and son, scooped up alongside a handful of counterfeiters and low-level street enforcers and plunged unceremoniously into Cog Hive Seven’s festering soup of sociopaths, killers, and thugs. But regardless of what the boy thought, it had not been an accident.
Such was the deal that Artagan Truax had made with the shadowy hand of the galaxy.
