Lockdown: Maul

by Star Wars

  Not anymore.

  Something changed inside him, something deep and final. Without even being aware that he was doing so, he leapt forward and felt his body—his muscles and his adrenaline and the very blood in his veins—flying into motion, launching into a series of lightning-fast strikes.

  Every part of him was in motion at once, fists and feet swinging out, delivering a blizzard of punches and kicks that seemed to connect with the six blind men simultaneously in a blur of speed and shattering bone. They were falling at either side of him now, their blades clattering to the cell floor, and Eogan knew that up until this moment, if he’d ever attempted such an assault, he almost certainly would have died. It was nothing like what he’d imagined—as if he’d given up his body and had been brought back to life by something profoundly faster and more powerful than himself, resurrected for a singular moment of triumph.

  When it was over, he dropped his fists to his sides and stood gasping amid a pile of bodies, his arms soaked in blood to the elbows.

  A voice from the middle of the pile: “Eogan?”

  “Father.” He came forward and yanked one of Radique’s men to the side. The old man’s body was there, horribly chopped and hacked, but somehow still clinging to the last scraps of consciousness.

  Artagan held up one bloody hand. He was smiling.

  “The Fifty-Two Fists,” he managed.

  Eogan felt the walls of his throat swelling. He couldn’t speak.

  “I’m so proud of you.”

  The boy dropped to his knees and embraced him. Even now, there was thunder in the old man’s chest, the battered heart pounding defiantly even as it came to the final moments of his life.

  He held the old man like that until the thunder stopped.

  Some uncertain amount of time later, he heard footsteps again, entering the open hatchway. Looking around, Eogan saw Jagannath standing there. The Zabrak was staring at the pile of bodies strewn throughout the cell, the makeshift weapons and slowly drying blood. At last the eyes of the red-skinned inmate came to meet Eogan’s.

  “You did all this?”

  The boy said nothing.

  “Your father—”

  “Dead,” Eogan said.

  The Zabrak nodded, as if he’d expected nothing less. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The cargo bay.”

  Eogan frowned. “The—”

  “I have unfinished business there.”

  61

  PRESSURE AND TIME

  Even before the lift door opened on the hangar, Maul heard the blasters going off in a steady volley of explosions. Eogan stared at him, the whites of his eyes gleaming in the recessed lights. “What’s going on out there?”

  “A firefight,” Maul said. He hadn’t expected it, but at this point, nothing came as a surprise. “Keep your head down.”

  The lift opened and a blaster bolt exploded inside it, decimating the control panel behind his head. Eogan let out a startled shout. Ignoring the boy, Maul dropped into a defensive crouch and stared out at the hangar, giving himself five seconds to analyze everything that was going on in the cargo bay.

  Two distinct groups were staging a pitched battle on either side of an open five-meter gap that divided the hangar floor in half. On the side nearest where they stood, a small group of Cog Hive Seven guards was exchanging fire with what appeared to be a much larger mob of prisoners, all of whom seemed to have more powerful weapons.

  The prisoners were clearly winning.

  Not only were they having a far better time of it—some of them, Maul noticed, were actually laughing as they fired on the guards—but they’d very nearly managed to manipulate a long docking gangway over so that it spanned the open chasm in the hangar floor, allowing them complete access to the entire hangar.

  Maul wondered fleetingly why the guards didn’t simply trigger the bombs implanted inside the inmates’ hearts, and then realized that the men that he was seeing must have been the incoming prisoners.

  A screaming guard ran across the floor. His face was literally on fire, his features melting even as he ran.

  Things were falling apart on Cog Hive Seven.

  “What do we do now?” Eogan shouted.

  Maul ignored him. Great rafts of blaster smoke and burning metal hung in the air. The guards were running low on ammunition, and there didn’t seem to be any backup coming. In the midst of all this, Maul saw the enormous holovid of a Hutt perched on a repulsor platform, rolling his eyes and chortling with delight.

  Jabba.

  He registered the crime lord’s virtual presence here and in the same moment dismissed it as irrelevant. Whatever Jabba the Hutt was doing here in the middle of Cog Hive Seven—in person or by proxy—was a complete enigma, but it had nothing to do with his own mission.

  Keeping his head down, Maul bolted across the hangar to the CLL binary load-lifter blundering heedlessly back and forth among the fray. Judging from the carbon scoring along its armored carapace, it hadn’t been completely successful in avoiding stray blasterfire. Exposed wiring and circuitry dangled from the central processor, fuming with sparks and contrails of pale gray smoke.

  “Droid!” he shouted.

  The thing pivoted and regarded him dully through the yellow haze.

  Maul cast his mind back to the last time he’d been here with Slipher, remembering what the banker had said. “IBC yellow card security variant 377055.”

  “Voice-verify?”

  “Vesto Slipher,” Maul told it. “There’s a package arriving here. You’re holding it for me. Where is it?”

  The droid didn’t budge. “Voice-verify?”

  Rather than answering it, Maul swung himself up onto the back of the droid, casting a quick glance across the wires of the thing’s processor. His experience hacking into systems was limited, but it was sufficient to identify the manual override on the load-lifter’s primitive security system. Redirecting wires into the remaining circuits, he snapped them back into place.

  The low, unwavering hum that followed seemed to take an eternity. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Eogan racing toward him, dodging a hailstorm of shrapnel and landing next to the CLL unit. The boy glanced at the ongoing firefight, up at the droid, then finally back to Maul.

  “What’s it doing?”

  “Giving me what I came for.”

  “We can’t stay here.” Eogan pointed across the hangar to where the gangway had finally bridged the gap. “They’re already coming over.” With a roar, armed prisoners started storming into the hangar as the last of the guards turned to flee. “They’ll kill us!”

  “They’re indifferent to us,” Maul snapped, not sure why he was bothering to answer. He hadn’t expected the boy to survive this long, certainly not by following him across the hangar. Inmates were streaming past them on both sides, chasing the guards, heading for any still-functional turbolifts. Less than a meter away, he saw one of the corrections officers turn to glance back—just in time to catch a red bolt of energy directly in the throat, flinging him into the wall, a smoking corpse. The boy stared and made a noise like he was going to be sick.

  “We have to get out of here!”

  “Run if you want,” Maul told him, “or stay and die. It makes no difference to me.”

  Eogan stared at him, opened his mouth, and shut it again. The thunderclap of the blasterfire had begun to recede. Maul turned back to the hangar, where the last of the prisoners were swarming their way toward the prison’s upper levels.

  “Mr. Slipher,” the droid said, “here is your package.”

  Opening its housing, the thing reached inside itself and handed over a featureless black shipping crate.

  Maul took it from him.

  It was time to go.

  62

  READY APPLIANCE

  “Warden, they’ve breached the hangar containment barriers.”

  Sadiki glanced up from the medbay support console to the guard whose name she couldn’t recall at the
moment. Stretching the mechanized ortho-prosthesis that the GH-7 had just finished stat-grafting onto her ankle, she winced with pain. The initial round of medication was already wearing off, but that was good—she could feel her mind clearing.

  “How many are there?”

  “Forty-two.”

  “Including Jabba’s own bodyguards?”

  The guard nodded. “All still heavily armed.” The guard stole a furtive glance at her foot, then looked back up at her face. “We’ve sealed off the main level, closed the cellblocks, and put genpop into lockdown, but—”

  “But what?”

  “Well, that last reconfiguration sequence that you ordered …” The guard hesitated. “It opened up a whole wing of unfinished throughways, and some of those places aren’t secure.”

  “No hatchways?”

  “No hatchways, no airlocks. Some of the guys are saying they don’t even have surveillance out that far.”

  “They’re right,” Sadiki said. Withholding the truth now wouldn’t help any of them. “How many of our people are left?”

  “I spoke to Captain Garvey five minutes ago. He’s reporting heavy losses from the hangar—”

  “How many?”

  The guard swallowed. “Thirty-six guards that we know of, maybe more if they haven’t had a chance to respond.” His face became pale. “And we’re running low on firepower.”

  “Where’s my brother?”

  “Nobody’s seen him for several hours.”

  “Get a search party together.” Sadiki rose to her feet. “Contact me as soon as you find him.”

  “Warden? Where are you going?”

  “Get the escape pod ready,” she said. “Tell him that I’ll meet him there.”

  63

  SOJOURN

  “Your delivery has been received,” 11-4D said.

  Darth Plagueis turned to look back at the droid. “The replacement geological compressor?”

  “That’s right, Master.”

  Somewhere beneath the transpirator mask that covered his mouth, Plagueis permitted himself a smile. He and the droid were making their way through the cold stone research chambers where he’d spent whole months of his time, working with unwavering purpose among the various species that he kept caged up.

  “Thank you, FourDee.”

  Plagueis focused his attention on the vat in front of him where the remains of the Bith Sith Lord, Darth Venamis, floated in a semitransparent bath of preserving fluid. Venamis’s corpse was still animated and twitching spasmodically with the last dregs of life that Plagueis invested in it, only to snatch it away again. He had been working for almost twenty uninterrupted hours on this particular project with limited success, and the notification from his droid signified a welcome diversion.

  “Did Slipher confirm its arrival?” he asked.

  “Not exactly, Master,” the droid replied.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it appears that Mr. Slipher is dead.”

  “Oh?” Plagueis pondered the news for a moment, before turning to face the droid. “Did Maul kill him?”

  “No, Master. From what I was able to glean from surveillance uploads from the prison, Mr. Slipher was killed instantly when a CLL binary load-lifter decapitated him.” The droid paused. “And then crushed him underfoot.”

  “A humble end for such a promising mind.”

  FourDee let out a small electronic gurgle. “I’m not sure that I take your meaning.”

  “It’s unimportant,” Plagueis replied, and scratched his chin in thought. “A droid, you say?”

  “Yes. I’m sure it was accidental. It was the same droid, in fact, that you had tasked to deliver the package directly to the Zabrak.”

  “Ah.” Plagueis beamed with pleasure. “So Maul has everything he needs to facilitate his mission, then. You’re sure?”

  “I’ve confirmed it through surveillance holofootage,” 11-4D said, and then paused for a moment. “If I may inquire, what was the purpose of keeping this information from Master Sidious?”

  “That is an excellent question, FourDee,” Plagueis said. “I suppose you could say for the purpose of strengthening our relationship.”

  “Sir?”

  “Between Lord Sidious and myself.” Plagueis returned his attention to the Bith in the vat before him, although his thoughts were now far away from the resurrected Venamis. “The Zabrak’s assassination mission inside the prison is of great interest to me. As you know, I have extended a great deal of latitude to Lord Sidious in the past.”

  Reaching out with the dark side, Plagueis watched in a distracted way as Venamis’s lifeless face stirred in the viscous chemical soup, one eye opening and rolling up to gaze at him. Then he continued. “Especially now, as we approach the pivotal moment in our plans for Palpatine’s impending chancellorship, I find his increasing tendency toward self-reliance to be disturbing. Of course the time will come when I will let him know that I was the one who provided Iram Radique with the fully functional geological compressor that he needed—and thus allowed Maul to complete his mission. But the moment of revelation is not yet ripe.”

  64

  THE TOMBS

  Alarms were going off everywhere.

  Beaten unconscious and left for dead by Jabba’s men in the alley adjacent to the Purge’s holding cells, Bissley Kloth finally opened his eyes and staggered to his feet, stirred by the shattering klaxons that were ringing out from somewhere in the ship’s bridge. He drew a breath and summoned his resolve. His last memory had been of coming down to check on his thirty-nine passengers, who had fallen so ominously silent. Now he found himself staring down at the ragged semicircular hole that had been cut through the vessel’s lower hull, leading to the interior of a completely unfamiliar and ornately designed space yacht.

  Looking down into it, Kloth seized upon the full extent of what had happened with a dreadful clarity. The ship that had attached itself to the Purge was the same yacht that he’d spotted in the middle distance during their approach to Cog Hive Seven. They’d been boarded, which meant the passengers had come with the explicit purpose of facilitating a breakout of—

  He swung around, pushing his way through the open hatch leading to the holding cells themselves.

  They stood empty.

  The prisoners were out.

  No.

  Kloth’s burgeoning sense of dread only seemed to amplify the alarms in the Purge’s flight deck. Shaking off the last of his disorientation, he flung himself up the steps through the gangway and nearly tripped over the corpse of one of the crewmen sprawled in front of him in a pool of his own blood. The other guard lay facedown two meters farther up the corridor.

  Kloth ran the rest of the way to the bridge and stopped in his tracks. Here the ship’s interior reeked of blasterfire and overheated wires. In front of him, the Purge’s captain, Wyatt Styrene, sat harnessed into the swivel seat in front of the ship’s command suite, his head bowed in apparent contemplation of their fate.

  “Captain,” Kloth said, grabbing Styrene’s shoulder, and Styrene’s head tilted back to reveal his slashed throat. It was only the harness itself that had kept him from tumbling out of his seat.

  Kloth’s reflexes took over. Hardly pausing to consider what he was doing, he unbuckled Styrene’s body and dragged it away from the Purge’s controls. He seated himself in the pilot’s chair and glanced at the screens in front of him, gazing at the prison’s cargo bay, to which the prison barge was still attached.

  What he saw on the monitors made his heart vault up into his throat. Although he could make out very little from this angle, it appeared as though the entire hangar was littered with dead prison guards, dozens of them. In the midst of it, somewhere in the foreground, a shape—Kloth thought it was a Hutt—sat atop a repulsor platform, gesturing at two Gamorreans as they gathered up weapons from the floor.

  What was going on?

  There was a sudden concussion from below, like an echo of what had happened earlier. Something el
se hit the Purge, slamming into it hard enough to shake it from its mooring, and in an instant, all the barge’s controls and monitors went dead, plunging Kloth into blackness.

  Reaching forward, his hands scrambled blindly for the controls, struggling to reactivate them, but it was pointless.

  The Purge creaked around him. From down below the barge’s hull came the brittle snapping noises of steel valves being ripped away, followed by an enormous whooshing pop as the vacuum-sealed suction-coupling mechanism broke completely open. Kloth’s thoughts flashed to the space yacht that had affixed itself to their hull like a parasite, the pirates who had cut their way into the hold.

  Then he knew.

  Dropping to his hands and knees in the darkness, he fumbled his way out of the bridge and down toward the concourse below, moving more quickly now, going purely by memory and sense of touch. By the time he’d reached the corpses of the guards, he sensed that he was very close indeed.

  Kloth stopped, adrenaline flooding through his body, trying to catch his breath. Slowly he rose to his feet. Sickly green auxiliary lights illuminated the ragged hole in the Purge’s lower level, but when Kloth looked down through the hole, he no longer saw the lavishly appointed interior of the space yacht.

  It simply wasn’t there anymore.

  Something, or someone, had pried it away, leaving only the ragged hole.

  But the hole wasn’t empty.

  Kloth stepped back, feeling a low, atavistic horror crawling its way from his belly up into the pit of his throat.

  Something was coming up through the hole, dragging itself toward him, a figure like nothing he’d seen before, even among the inmates and wildly varying galactic scum he’d transported from every system imaginable.

  Kloth stared at it for a moment, held rapt by a power he could neither identify nor resist. The thing’s head was covered with a skull, with long, sharpened horns protruding out from either side. The hollow sockets where its eyes should have been shone with a primordial blue light.

  That’s madness, the color of madness—