“Just Wall Bennis, the lab director.”
“Is he still—”
“Unconscious,” Emmert replied, “in the bacta tank. Our physicians estimate he’ll be awake in a day or so.”
“We can’t wait that long,” Trace said. “What about surveillance in the loading and landing facility?”
“Our sensors recorded the arrival and departure of an unlicensed ship early this morning.” Emmert glanced away, abashed. “It must have come in under some kind of cloaking device and managed to evade our detection … but we went back to the morning’s footage and found this.”
He reached into the pocket of his lab smock and pulled out a datapad, thumbing it awake. Trace looked at the screen. It showed a shot of the main hangar below, centering on an oblong vessel that looked as if it had been grafted together from scrap. Despite its ungainly shape, or perhaps because of it, the ship had a canting, rough-hewn meanness, a crude bulk that defied anyone to get too close, for fear of whatever might have been waiting inside. There was a series of partially worn numbers and letters on the side of the hull.
“Can you enhance this image?” Trace said.
Emmert pressed another button, magnifying the picture until Trace could read the name on the side: MIROCAW.
“We haven’t been able to fully identify the call letters yet.”
“That’s because they’ve been scraped off just enough to make them illegible. It’s an old smuggler’s trick.” Trace frowned a little. “You said it got through using some kind of cloaking device?”
Emmert nodded. “Yes, but …”
“What’s that?” Trace pointed at the screen, at a series of pale bluish green discolorations along the Mirocaw’s portside. The marks had an oddly phosphorescent glossiness, almost as if that portion of the ship’s outer plating had been streaked with a layer of iridescent oil.
“Carbon scoring?”
“No.” The Jedi Knight shook his head. “That’s Thulian vapor residue—it’s a galactic anomaly, a mixture of post-industrial airborne pollution and crystal fog. You only find it in about three places outside the Mid Rim.”
Emmert gave him a blank look.
“Have my ship ready,” Trace said. “I’m leaving in five minutes.”
Within the hour he’d confirmed his suspicion—the nearest Thulian cloud formations in existence cast a permanent shadow over Kwenn, a dreary post-industrial outpost along the outermost borders of Hutt space.
By day’s end, Trace had landed there. The Kwenn Space Station was a polluted sprawl of docking bays, warehouses and repair facilities, cantinas, and unlicensed gambling parlors. Without drawing undue attention, Trace walked through a dozen different establishments, talking to the pilots, fugitives, mechanics, and fringe dwellers that made up the station’s population. He bought rounds of drinks, fighting his own impatience, and listened to long, seemingly pointless monologues from barflies who hadn’t enjoyed such an attentive audience in years. In the end, it was a one-armed Bothan smuggler named Gree who told him what he’d needed to know—the former whereabouts of the Mirocaw’s owner, a Whiphid bounty hunter who went by the name Tulkh.
“Haven’t seen him around in a while,” Gree said, after Trace had bought him a series of drinks, including a local favorite called a Mind Eraser, and crossed his one remaining palm with a stack of credits. “Word is that he picked up a pretty sweet gig, nobody knows what.”
Trace met the smuggler’s gaze, holding it fast, feeling the Force flow through him into the Bothan’s mind, completing the task that the liquor had already begun. “Did he say anything about a flower?”
“A …” Gree’s face went smooth, all reluctance draining away from his voice so that the words came easily. “Yeah, that’s right—he was going after a flower. Tulkh wasn’t much of a talker, but we got liquored up one night and he started telling me about it.”
“Who hired him?”
“A Sith Lord named Darth Scabrous.”
Trace felt a sudden coldness pass through him. “Located where?”
“I don’t know … a Sith academy …?” Gree grimaced a little, struggling with the memory. “I want to say … Odacer-Faustin?” He blinked. “Hey, you think I could get another drink?”
But Trace was already gone.
12/Ingredient
STEPPING OUT OF THE TURBOLIFT, ZO FELT HER HOPE DWINDLING AWAY.
Escape was no longer an option, if it ever had been. The Whiphid had led her through the ruins of the academy, passing a few Sith students and Masters who had stared openly at them, their faces darkened with anger and determination. If the orchid registered any of this, it said nothing.
It was midafternoon when they reached the tower.
An HK droid had met them at the entryway. It confirmed Tulkh’s identity with a retinal scan that left the Whiphid blinking and wiping his eyes in annoyance, and escorted them through. The turbolift had sucked them upward and dispensed them here.
Into this room.
For a moment Zo could only stare at it. A laboratory like nothing she’d ever encountered in years of research sprawled out to fill the space in front of her. She could hear small things shifting and moving in the corners. It seemed, in some horrible way, to be an insidious dark analogue of the plant lab on Marfa, its instruments designed not to foster life but to inflict and sustain dosages of pain on whatever might still be alive here. There was something rustling in a cage in the shadows, making little smacking noises with its mouth.
“Do you have it?”
With an involuntary breath of surprise, Zo turned and looked back. In the center of the lab, a tall man in a dark robe stood watching them, his face a chiseled amalgam of shadow and bone, the cheek structure cruelly sharp, the hollows of his eyes like the sockets of a skull. Zo felt a thin wire of fear probe downward through her chest and into the pit of her stomach, where it dangled, twitching in the darkness. She thought of the name that Tulkh had mentioned on their way here: Darth Scabrous.
The Sith Lord was staring at her, his expression inscrutable, although the raw intensity in his stare was unmistakable. It was as if he was looking at something that he wanted simultaneously to possess and to destroy.
Without a word, the Whiphid took the orchid from Zo’s hand. He walked over to where the Sith Lord stood and held the flower out to him.
“This is it.”
Darth Scabrous took the flower, giving it only the most cursory of glances before returning his attention to Zo. There was a glimmer in his eyes that hadn’t been there before.
Tulkh stood waiting. “My money,” he said.
If the Sith Lord heard him, he showed no sign. He was still staring at Zo.
“Her name’s Hestizo Trace,” the Whiphid said. “She’s the orchid’s keeper. It needs her to—”
“Survive,” Scabrous said. “I know. That’s how I knew you were bringing me the genuine article.” He reached up and touched her face, his gloved hand cold against her cheek, like leather wrapped around an iron rod. “It was the one piece of information that I withheld about the orchid.”
“Then our business here is finished,” Tulkh said.
The Sith Lord nodded. “My droid will pay you on the way out.”
The Whiphid nodded and walked away.
“No,” Zo called out after him, watching him go, “wait!” She felt a steel band of panic tighten around her chest, pressing painfully inward, crowding out her breath. She heard his footfalls growing quieter down the long stone corridor, then the faint hydraulic whoosh as the lift doors opened and shut again.
Then he was gone.
The Sith Lord was still looking at her. A new silence spread out, seeming to fill the lab with a stinging mist of cold, dry air. Zo was aware of the orchid making anxious noises inside her mind, a soft, irregular click of nervous energy awakening to what might happen next. Although she knew she was the only one who could hear the sounds, she still felt an irrational impulse to hush it.
“You are a Jedi,” Scabrous said.
“I am.” She braced herself for his contempt, even rage, but the Sith Lord simply nodded as if he’d expected nothing less than her appearance here—had, in fact, anticipated it. He reached out with one hand, not quite touching her, and she felt a certain heaviness underneath her left breast, as if his palm were pushing directly against the muscle of her heart.
Then he lowered his hand, and the pressure disappeared. He picked up the flower and carried it across the laboratory to the place where Zo had heard the soft lip-smacking noises.
What she saw inside made her stomach do a slow, nauseated barrel roll. The teenage boy in the cage was staring up at her with bright, unblinking shoe-button eyes that bespoke nothing less than utter madness. On closer examination Zo saw a vine-like tangle of plastic tubes sprouting directly out from the young man’s back, where they seemed to have been implanted into his spine and the base of his skull. Thick yellowish red fluid crept sluggishly back and forth through the tubing. Zo followed the lines across the floor to where they connected to an electronic pump with a large glass cylinder on top. A ghastly kind of circuit had been created here, she realized, a hybrid between human and machine.
Scabrous made an adjustment to the pump. The fluid in the tubes moved faster. The boy went rigid and then began pounding his face against the cage, over and over, with a terrible kind of rhythmic intensity. The cage clanged with the crash of impact until the boy’s face began to ooze blood, trickling scarlet from his nostrils and lips and the corners of his eyes. Still the boy did not stop. He was beating himself senseless, Zo realized, trying to knock himself unconscious or perhaps simply to kill himself, ending whatever torment was yet to come.
“Stop!” Zo stared back at Scabrous. “What is this?”
“Watch and see.”
“What are you doing to him?”
Scabrous didn’t answer. A moment later he opened the top of the cylinder of reddish yellow fluid and dropped the orchid inside.
Jura Ostrogoth witnessed the whole thing.
He’d slipped inside the tower when the Whiphid had stepped out, not giving himself time to deliberate. Experience had taught him that such opportunities ought not to be wasted. And so he had gone.
Ever since Nickter’s disappearance the previous day, the academy’s rumor mill had been humming along at lightspeed about Darth Scabrous and what might be going on up in his lab. Earlier this morning, Jura had overheard Pergus Frode, a technician at the academy’s hangar, telling one of the other Masters that Scabrous had had visitors—two bounty hunters—who hadn’t returned to their ship last night. And now Kindra had told Jura that she’d seen two more off-worlders, a Whiphid and a girl, heading into the tower. They were carrying something with them, Kindra said. Nobody knew what.
It was only a matter of time until someone came out.
After lightsaber training, Jura had gone off by himself and crouched down underneath the snow-encrusted stones of a half-collapsed ruin facing the tower’s main entrance. The cold hadn’t bothered him in the least. It had given him time to think, to clear his head. He had already decided that he wasn’t going to spend his life worrying about being exposed by Scopique. If he was going to escape from underneath Scopique’s thumb, he needed to change the game. Of course he couldn’t counterattack now—having just cornered him, Scopique would be expecting retribution—but once Jura found out what was happening inside the tower, he decided, he would arrange a private meeting with the Zabrak. He would tell Scopique everything, confide in him. Gain his trust. And when Scopique was off guard, gloating, Jura would … what?
Kill him?
Maybe.
Or perhaps just humiliate him, the way that Scopique had humiliated Jura.
In any case, things were about to be very different.
How different, Jura could never have guessed twenty minutes earlier, as he had slipped out of the turbolift and made his way across the open laboratory at the top of the tower. Candles and torches dotted the room with flickering, intermittent light. He’d been worried that he might be heard—the lift was hardly silent—but even before the doors opened, he’d heard someone screaming and a metallic crashing noise. The sound bounced off the windows and stone ceiling, blocking out everything else.
Jura slunk through pools of shadow, making his way between the clusters of equipment until he could make out the unmistakable shape of Lord Scabrous and someone else, a girl, standing next to what looked like a caged animal: the source of the crashing and the screaming.
Jura stopped again, narrowed his eyes, looked more closely.
The caged animal was Nickter.
Nickter was thrashing in his little prison, shrieking and writhing and blubbering out noises that sounded only slightly like words. There was blood running down his face, sticking and clinging to his cheeks, as if he’d been sitting under a melting red candle. He was half naked, his exposed torso gleaming with sweat.
But the worst were the tubes.
They ran directly out of his back, long, pipe-like conduits from his spine, leading to a machine with a large transparent cylinder mounted on top. Scabrous was doing something to the machine, holding up some object that Jura couldn’t identify, putting it inside the cylinder. The fluid inside it began roiling, changed color, became suddenly, remarkably incandescent, pulsing through the tubes into Nickter’s vertebrae.
The screaming stopped.
Jura watched Nickter collapse to the floor of the cage, motionless and silent, mouth half open, eyelids sagging. Now the only sound was the high, steady drone of a heart monitor in flat line. Jura let out the breath that he’d been holding in his lungs for the last ten seconds.
He didn’t need to get any closer to see that Wim Nickter was dead.
Zo stared at the dead Sith student in the cage. His eyes were still open, glassy and lifeless. His mouth sagged, a bloody spit bubble clinging to the corner. A waxy pallor had already begun to spread over his cheeks, turning his skin a pale shade of gray.
In her mind, the orchid was still screaming.
She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Nothing in her experience at the Marfa facility or before had prepared her for this. In the past forty-eight standard hours, the routines of her daily existence had become a blood-soaked travesty of reality.
Her eyes flashed up to the glass cylinder where Scabrous had dropped the flower. It wasn’t there anymore—the fluid seemed to have absorbed it, dissolving it in chunks—but she could still hear it, wherever it had gone, whatever had happened to it, crying out, begging her to do something, to help it, to stop the pain.
Burning, Zo, it’s burning, it’s BURNING—
Scabrous was watching the cylinder.
In the cage, the dead boy sat up.
13/Dragon Teeth
JURA NEVER SAW THE DOOR BLOW OFF THE CAGE.
It happened so quickly that the only thing his mind registered was the wire mesh flying across the lab, slamming into a vented power-cell housing that protruded down from the ceiling. Metal struck metal with a flat, declarative clang that reminded him somehow of the sound of training blades clashing at the top of the temple. It was a noise that said: Things have been put into motion, and whatever happens next, there will be no going back.
From his hiding place, Jura stared, crouched in the shadows as if welded to the spot. He saw Scabrous and the girl staring at the cage, neither one of them moving.
The thing that crawled out of the cage wasn’t Wim Nickter.
It was draped in Nickter’s skin, yes, and it wore some version of Nickter’s face, but the eyes were ovals of smeared glass behind which pupils darted back and forth in the torchlight, like tiny black insects trapped inside a dirty bottle. It cranked its head to the right, and the yellow grin that wrinkled its lips back was unlike anything Jura had ever seen. Watching it, he felt himself melting inside, a breathless terror invading him, stripping away strength, reducing him to a shuddering pool of nerves. The intuitive voice of the Force was shouting at him now, Wrong, wrong, wron
g, but he couldn’t seem to move.
The Sith Lord gazed upon his creation. A terrible, prescient smile crept across his face.
“Nickter,” he said. “Come to me.”
The thing shuffled another step forward, and Scabrous held out one hand, beckoning it forth like an animal.
“Yes. That’s right.”
All at once Nickter sprang forward with an entirely different kind of urgency, the tubes ripping out of its back, flailing free, leaving a row of raw-looking open wounds down its spine. Reddish yellow stuff splashed and spewed from the open tubes, spraying out into the air. From his hiding place, Jura saw the Sith Lord rear backward, his arms in front of his face, as the thing that had once been Wim Nickter landed on top of him and without hesitation sank its teeth into Scabrous’s face.
Scabrous swung one arm upward, and the thing flew back across the lab, its body reduced to a momentary blur, flailing into a tall rack of unused flasks and beakers not far from where Jura was still crouched. The rack exploded in a deafening cacophony of shattered glass, the thing tumbling over the floor, and Jura saw it push itself upright, its cheeks and forehead glittering with broken shards like dragon teeth. Astringent smells of alcohol and ammonia and carbolic acid filled the air.
Jura saw the girl stand up and run for the turbolift. She never looked back, not even as the doors sealed shut behind her.
A roar of fury shook the chamber around him, loud enough that Jura felt it reverberating in the hollow of his chest. On the opposite side of the lab, Scabrous rose up. The right half of his face hung down in a pale bloody flap. Above it, his eyes coruscated with anger so ferocious that it looked like something entirely different, something dangerously close to madness.
The Sith Lord flung out his right hand, palm raised, in the direction of Nickter’s corpse. The corpse jerked back again, tumbling like a thing on wires, and this time Jura Ostrogoth realized that he was the one crouched directly in its path.
The realization came too late to save him. Nickter’s corpse collided with him, knocking him off his feet and pounding the air out of his lungs, hurling both of them backward into one of the wide curved viewports that formed the tower’s wall. Jura’s final impression—that the entire world was bursting apart around him in a brittle, deafening explosion—was not altogether wrong.
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