by Star Wars
Good-bye, Hootkins.
Smight kept staring. He seemed unable to look away. Right in front of him, a threesome of Massives and Bone Kings had gone to work on two other guards, Crete and a bald, broad-shouldered guy who might have been Webberly—from here it was impossible to say. Another one of the gang members had McCane up against a wall, tearing open McCane’s shirt and using a broken skull to scoop out his thoracic cavity, while Nailhead and his lieutenant, an animal named Massif, were holding on to the hands and feet of Olyphant, literally ripping him in two, bathing in his blood.
Good-bye, Olyphant.
Smight felt a kind of queer, fatalistic certainty take hold of him. If he stayed here another thirty seconds, the gang members would run out of guards to destroy and would find him. He couldn’t stay here.
He sat up.
Crash! The chair hit the wall just above his head, splintering to pieces. Logovik, the guard who had ratted them all out, the one who had brought all of this down on them, swung an arm down and picked up one of the chair fragments, jerking it up over his head like a makeshift weapon. Seeing him here spiked a sudden upsurge of anger into Smight’s brain, and in stark defiance of the fear he felt in his own chest, he grabbed Logovik by the ankle.
“Happy?” he shouted. “You did this to us!”
“You got what you deserve, maggot.” Logovik swung his elbow back, hammering Smight in the side of the face, and Smight’s eyes exploded in a supernova of bright white stars. When his vision cleared, he heard the unmistakable sound of Vas Nailhead unleashing a war howl, the inmate raising the sharpened femur gripped in his hands and bringing it down on Logovik’s skull with a brittle, pulpy crunch.
Good-bye, Logovik.
Logovik fell, but before he could even hit the floor, Nailhead seized him by the throat, swinging him back upward, and went to take a great, ravenous bite of the man’s face. Smight turned away. He didn’t feel bold anymore. Now he felt like he was going to be sick. A foot connected with his chest, driving the air out of him, imbedding the nausea more deeply in his guts. He was going to die here along with all the rest of them.
He writhed, squirming, and then he saw it.
The open panel from which the Bone Kings had emerged.
It was still open.
Chaos still gripped the ready room, which seemed absurdly cramped for the outburst of activity within it, but the one-sided assault was already losing momentum. On both sides, Nailhead, Strabo and their minions were merrily eviscerating the final remaining guards, years of compressed rage exploding out of them in seconds as they shredded the men and left their bodies impaled against the walls.
Amid it all, Warden Blirr looked on serenely. After another moment, she turned and walked out with her droid behind her, the hatch sealing shut.
Smight didn’t have much time.
Still on his hands and knees, he scampered forward as fast as he could between the bodies and under the broken remains of the table. Ducking his head low, he leapt through the open passageway into darkness.
38
ANTIDOTE
From twenty meters back, Maul watched Zero emerge through the line in the mess hall. He waited while the Twi’lek sat down, picked up his fork, and began, thoughtfully and deliberately, to eat.
Three bites. Four. Five.
Maul sat down across from him.
“Hello, Zero.”
The Twi’lek’s fork fell from his hand with a clatter. His jaw fell open to reveal the half-chewed mouthful of food he’d been in the process of swallowing. It wasn’t a pretty sight.
“Jagannath,” he whispered. “You’re supposed to be—”
“Dead?” Maul glared at him. “I can understand your confusion. When you left me on the factory floor, I was on the verge of being pulled to pieces. Yet here I am.”
The Twi’lek managed to swallow, but he still couldn’t speak. His eyes darted right and left, the muscles of his throat twitching visibly beneath his skin, as if he were struggling fruitlessly to digest the physical evidence of Maul’s presence here.
“You—you don’t understand,” he said. “You can’t be here. He thinks you’re dead.”
Zero started to stand up, and Maul’s hand moved faster than the eye could see, grabbing Zero’s fork and slamming it down so that it impaled the Twi’lek’s sleeve, pinning his arm to the table.
At the next table, three big inmates rose to their feet and started toward Maul.
Without taking his gaze from the Twi’lek, Maul spoke, just loud enough for Zero to hear. “Tell them to sit back down.”
Zero looked up at his bodyguards. “It’s all right,” he said in a thin voice. “Go sit down.”
The inmates returned haltingly to their meals.
“It’s an interesting thing,” Maul said softly. “Whom we serve and why. At first you told me that Iram Radique doesn’t exist. The next thing I know, you’re working for him.”
“You have no idea—”
“I took the old man with me when I walked out of the factory floor,” Maul continued. “He’s not doing well. That blood infection’s going to kill him. But he did tell me something interesting before he became completely delirious. He told me that you answered to a different name.”
Zero’s face showed no expression. “Which is?”
“That’s what you’re going to tell me.”
“Jagannath, please.” The Twi’lek’s voice was low and urgent. “You must listen to me. I’ve been in this place from the beginning. There’s a reason I’ve survived this long.”
“Right before I killed Rook,” Maul said, “I asked him if there was someone else—someone above him, who worked directly with Radique. He drew something with his finger. At the time I thought it was just a circle. But it wasn’t.” He leaned in closer, until his face was almost touching the Twi’lek’s. “It was a zero.”
“Rook?” The Twi’lek shook his head. “Rook was just—”
“A decoy,” Maul said, and nodded, his voice holding no inflection whatsoever. “I see that now. Handing him over was your way of taking my attention from where it should have been the whole time.” He glanced at Zero’s tray, where the Twi’lek’s special meal sat half eaten. “You know, I noticed that you always enjoy a better quality of food than the other inmates. One of the benefits of being the one who can smuggle things into the prison, I assume. Unfortunately, it also makes you far more vulnerable.”
“To what?”
“I slipped a crushed gram of white metaxas root into the vat just before you came through the line today,” Maul said, in that same dispassionate voice. “Coyle tried to give it to me earlier. Fortunately, he still had it when I came back and asked for it again. I’m told that it’s odorless and flavorless, but fast-acting.” He glanced down at the half-finished meal. “And you’ve already eaten enough to kill you.”
Zero stared down at the tray in dawning horror, and then shoved it away from him, as if mere physical proximity might be enough to stop what had already begun. “Wh-why …?”
“There is an antidote,” Maul said, opening his hand to show Zero a small clear vial of gray powder. “Something I lifted from medbay. If I give it to you in the next thirty seconds, you’ll survive.”
“I already told you—”
“I’ve seen Radique’s face,” Maul said. “Now I need to make arrangements with him. I’m willing to pay three hundred thousand credits for a proscribed nuclear device—I have the money here. I will make contact with the buyers personally and arrange for their arrival to take possession of the weapon.”
“He …” Zero’s hands had begun trembling. He gazed at them in terrified wonder, then back up at Maul. “He’ll never agree to the deal.”
“Why not?”
“He knows the Bando Gora. They tried to kill him once already. They are sworn enemies. He’s made a blood oath never to do business with them.”
“Then you’ll have to change his mind, won’t you?”
“You—fool—” Zero’s
entire body had begun to shake. When he spoke again, his voice was trembling, the words spilling from his lips in halting bursts. “You have no idea—what you’ve done—”
His head fell to the table with a crash.
With a grimace of irritation, Maul hoisted Zero’s face out of his food, inspected his eyes, and let his head drop again.
He left him like that and walked out of the mess hall.
39
CRAWL
Smight ran.
By the time the screaming in the ready room finally trailed away to silence, he was on his feet, barreling full-tilt down the maintenance shaft, sprinting headlong through the near-darkness. He didn’t know where he was going or what he would do when he got there, but right now that wasn’t as important as putting as much distance as possible between himself and the gang members who had pursued him.
His skull was pounding; his lungs blazed. Rounding a corner, unable to go another step without resting, he sagged against the cold wall and sucked in a deep, ragged breath. The glitterstim had worn off completely now, and he felt wrung out and edgy, shaking so hard that he could scarcely stand up, his knees threatening to betray him at any second.
Look at the facts.
Fact #1: He was an unarmed guard trapped inside a prison full of homicidal monsters, any of whom would relish the opportunity to kill him.
Fact #2: He couldn’t go back to Jabba for help, even if there was some way of contacting him.
Conclusion: He was a walking dead man.
Smight fought the almost irresistible urge to weep, to scream, to collapse. None of those things would help him now. A tiny voice inside him whispered that if maybe he could sneak back to his quarters and score a little bit more of the stim that he kept tucked away among his personal items, it might help clarify things, but even that seemed hopeless. Coming down from the spice’s euphoria only made him more aware of how much he’d depended on it up till now. He didn’t know where he was or where he was going.
He felt his gorge rising with disgust. Self-pity wrapped itself around him like a damp, familiar cloak. Having failed in his mission for Jabba, he’d validated everything about himself that he’d secretly suspected to be true—cowardice, inadequacy, incompetence. What, then, was the point of going forward?
Then, in the tunnel ahead of him, something moved.
Smight listened. There was a muscular enormity to it, a great slithering massiveness like nothing he’d run across inside these walls. He could actually hear the sticky, clicking snap of its mouthparts.
The Wolf Worm.
He’d heard the stories of the Syrox—they all had. A thing that lived inside the pipes and ducts of the prison, that fed and grew sleek and fat on the blood of the matches. Some of the other guards even swore they’d seen it, although there was never any hard evidence of its existence.
That was when he heard something else. Not out loud. In his mind.
Voices—
—helphelp—
—the words—
—murderkillyoustrangleyouall—
—emanating through his brain.
—outletusoutletusFEED—
Smight inclined his head more closely toward the wall, captivated in spite of himself. He wasn’t imagining it. The voices emanating through his brainpan were a tangle of horrors, a braided skein of a thousand different tongues, human and nonhuman, all shrieking and begging and snarling and roaring for mercy, deliverance, revenge.
Smight was not a particularly intelligent man by nature, but he knew enough to trust his perception, even when it flew in the face of what he thought to be true. And his perception on this matter was crystal clear.
The Syrox was not only real, it was sentient.
Its mind was a threnody of violence and pain, stitched together from every inmate whose body the thing had devoured during its time squirming through the guts of the prison. Their collective minds, though dead, were somehow still living inside it.
Glancing up, he caught just a glimpse of something so thunderously huge and fat that it filled the entire passageway, gleaming and pale and blind-eyed, surging toward him with its mouthparts peeling open like the petals of some hideous albino flower. Smight glimpsed pink and a dozen rings of teeth. The smell that came pouring out from inside it was wretched beyond description, the stink of a mass grave.
His heart sprang up to the pit of his throat and clung there, cowering.
He turned and fled.
Fear made him weightless, boiling him down to his most essential reflexes. The overall effect made the stim seem weak by comparison. Strength that he’d never imagined exploded through his legs, pumping him in the opposite direction, adrenaline pounding hard through every synapse.
He could hear the thing squeezing through the corridor behind him, surging forward faster now, closing the distance with every passing second. He kept his head down and doubled his pace, navigating the twists and turns purely by instinct, the gray walls flying by in a blur. Off in the distance, the thunderous approach of the thing disappeared beneath the steady pounding of his heart, its rhythms optimized for bare-bones survival.
He ran harder. He could run forever if he had to.
Swinging around the corner, he slammed headlong into something solid but not as hard as a wall. It knocked him flat, and he looked up to see Vas Nailhead squinting down at him. The inmate, like the Bone Kings gathered behind him, was drenched from head to foot in blood.
“Well, well.” Nailhead stood there with Strabo alongside him, the Bone Kings and Massive clustering closer. “I guess there’s no end to what you’ll run into down here, is there?”
Smight didn’t move. Couldn’t breathe.
“What’s the matter, maggot?” Nailhead wiped his mouth with his wrist, smearing the scarlet streak of gore sideways across his beard. “No blaster you can point at me? No dropbox you can punch my numbers into?” He grabbed Smight and yanked him to his feet. “What’s wrong, bro, you got nothing you want to say to me?”
“Well,” Smight managed, in a voice that didn’t sound remotely like his own. He could hear it coming again, the noise getting louder as it moved up the passageway. “There is one thing …”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
He pointed up the corridor. “You better watch out.”
Nailhead tilted back his head. Behind him, Strabo was also staring. As their expressions changed, Smight himself became aware of something—the presence returning, huge and warm and terribly eager.
And then the screaming started.
40
NOBODY’S HERO
Maul elbowed his way deeper into the crowd outside the mess hall. He’d left Zero in the mess hall, slumped over in his food, having gained nothing from their last exchange. As he’d stood to go, the three inmates who’d approached them earlier had grabbed the Twi’lek and carried him off, no doubt rushing him to medbay. Maul doubted they would make it in time, but he supposed it was possible, if they hurried.
Right now he had more pressing business to take care of.
He found the boy in the cell, sitting next to his father’s body. The old man lay motionless on the bunk, breathing shallowly. His skin was mottled with a sallow, blotchy cast.
“Jagannath?” Eogan asked. “What—”
“Pick him up,” Maul said. “We need to move.”
“Where?”
“Follow me.”
Gently Eogan leaned down and gathered his father’s body in his arms.
The morgue was as silent as Maul remembered it. They stepped through the hatchway single file, the boy shifting his father’s weight to his shoulder in order to get through the entrance.
“What are we doing here?” Eogan asked uneasily.
Maul didn’t look back. “Lay him down there,” he said, nodding to indicate one of the empty tables extending from the wall.
“You still haven’t told me what—”
“Has he said anything else about the Bando Gora?” Maul asked. “Anything at
all?”
“No, I told you, he’s—he can’t talk. The infection, it …” The boy swallowed, unable to complete the thought. “He needs medicine.”
Maul said nothing, reaching down beneath the lowermost console to retrieve the holotransmitter from where he’d stashed it, pressing in the code to activate its primary drives. Then he turned to face Artagan Truax.
“Old man.”
The eyelids lifted slightly, regarding him dully. Cracked lips moved but made no sound.
“I need you to enter the hailing frequency for the Bando Gora,” Maul said.
Artagan Truax managed to shake his head. “Don’t remember … anything.”
“You’re going to have to remember,” Maul said. “Or I’m going to kill your son.”
Eogan turned to stare at him. The old man tried to sit up.
“The frequency,” Maul said. “Put it in.”
After what seemed like forever, Artagan Truax began to type. His fingers clicked shakily across the key controls, stabbing in coordinates in uneven bursts. Finishing, he sagged backward into silence.
“Is that it?”
The old man said nothing. Maul was still watching him when he became aware of the boy’s eyes, fixed on the passageway outside.
“Do you hear that?” he asked. “It’s the clarion call.”
Maul listened. Eogan was right.
“Leave me,” he said. “Now.”
The boy glanced at his father. “Where should I—”
“It doesn’t matter. Take him away. Back to your cell,” Maul said. “Just go.”
When Eogan had lifted his father in his arms and carried him off, Maul switched out the hailing frequency for the holotransmitter and activated the device again. He knelt before it, his head lowered, waiting.
Within seconds Darth Sidious appeared in front of him. This time he didn’t bother with the formalities.
“You have news?”
“I do, my Master,” Maul said.
“What is it?”
“Iram Radique,” Maul said. “I found him.”
Moments later, Maul was back down on the factory floor, making his way through the bone statues, searching the shadows for the one who could help him advance to the next stage of his search.
