Star Wars: Red Harvest

by Joe Schreiber

  And looking closer, he saw the girl.

  She was standing at the bottom of the gangway amid a shifting prison of red blades, surrounded by the rotting corpses of her classmates, their hands clutching her arms and legs, holding her captive. Lightsabers crisscrossed in front of her, hovered over her head, immobilizing her. One of the things had its open mouth pressed up against her bare throat. Another’s teeth were bared and ready to attack a small, exposed part of her shoulder. A third and fourth stood waiting behind her, their jaws open so wide that it almost seemed like they could have devoured her entire head in one huge, all-consuming bite.

  “I did what you wanted!” Kindra shouted at them. “He opened it! Now let me go! Let me—”

  The things fell upon her, the red blades slashing her to pieces as they ripped her apart. Even from where Frode stood, the crunching noises were thick and juicy and glottal, like the sound of someone biting into a particularly ripe apple. Several of the corpses broke free from the group and started thundering up the gangway, toward the open hatchway, just as Frode slammed it shut again.

  He decided he could fly the ship without the flight computer after all.

  39/Down in It

  ZO AWOKE TO A TIGHT BAND OF PAIN ACROSS HER CHEST AND SHOULDERS, TWISTING in her joints like ground glass. When she tried to shift her position to alleviate the pain, she realized that she couldn’t move at all.

  The pit where she lay was settled at the bottom of a deep shaft, its high onyx-colored walls shining up as far as the eye could see, in some unfathomable expanse of glassy black. Her head spun. She realized that she had been tied down here, strapped to a large stone slab by wide leather bands and iron rings that crisscrossed her chest and looped over her wrists and ankles, pinning them in position. Torches burned on either side of her, rows of them in the hundreds, leading upward, flickering up over the walls, gleaming off tiny, ornate lines of script and filigree that moved across it like rows of programmer’s code.

  She breathed, coughed a little, and tried to summon moisture onto the back of her tongue. The air down here tasted metallic, dusty, and very old. It was like inhaling through a hole in some archaic stone tablet. Oily tallow from the torches dripped on the floor around her, and the greasy black smoke wafting up from their flames only made her throat feel more parched.

  From somewhere behind her, she heard movement, the scuff and rustle of footsteps, the soft clink of objects being arranged outside her peripheral vision.

  “Look up,” Scabrous’s voice croaked.

  Zo turned and moved her neck, straining to tilt her head as much as the straps would allow. The Sith Lord was gazing down. The decay process had accelerated drastically since she’d last looked at him. The Sickness had taken over his face completely now, remaking it into gelid, shapeless soup from which two bloodshot eyes gleamed at her with terrible scrutiny. Gray strips of gristle quivered from the exposed bone of his skull, and when he spoke she saw the tendons swing inside his throat.

  He was holding a sword.

  Not a lightsaber, but an actual Sith sword. Its shining blade seemed to have been forged from the same black durasteel as the walls around them, and stretched as long as Scabrous’s arm. As the Sith Lord raised it up, Zo realized that the designs from the walls of the pit had been echoed along the blade’s entire length, great thorny rows of script and inscription gleaming in the torchlight. The resulting weapon seemed almost to blur and merge with its surroundings, its lethal edge shimmering and disappearing again as the Sith Lord swung it overhead.

  “This blade,” Scabrous said, “belonged to Darth Drear. It was forged exclusively for him, to ensure his immortality. So today, in accordance with his legacy, I will use it to slice out your living heart, and devour it while you watch.”

  Zo tried to answer—with no idea of what she might say—but the knot in her throat blocked out all speech. Terror, bright and uncontrollable, had fastened itself over her conscious mind, and she could not stop staring at the sword. At this moment, nothing in her past, her training, or her aspirations for the future seemed as real to her as its blade, the inarguable geometric equation that connected its edge to her flesh.

  Hestizo—

  There was nothing she could do.

  The sword plunged down.

  40/Wet Work

  “THERE’S ONE,” TULKH SAID. “BEHIND THAT WALL. SEE HIM?”

  The HK pivoted unhesitatingly, firing two quick blasts at the openmouthed Sith-thing as it stalked around the corner in front of them, arms thrown open. It went down screaming.

  “Your turn,” the HK replied. “To your left.”

  The Whiphid turned and flung his spear into the space between the building and the statue rising before it. An instant later, a Sith student lunged out, the spear embedded in its chest, roaring toward them until Tulkh fired an arrow into its head.

  “Nicely done,” the droid said. “But it’s still coming.”

  With a grunt, Tulkh ambled forward and picked the Sith student up by the spear hanging from its ribs. Lifting the thing completely off its feet, he wrenched it around sideways and hammered it into the stone wall alongside them. The tip of the spear twisted loose, and he used its serrated edge to rip off the thing’s head.

  He held the head out on the end of the spear, offering it to the droid.

  “Keepsake?”

  “No.”

  “What happened to No thank you, sir?”

  The droid gazed at him. “Look out behind you,” it said drily. “Sir.”

  Tulkh looked back at the side of the structure where he’d just beheaded the Sith-thing. The ground began to tremble. He saw a flash of motion inside the half-open hatchway, something big, and heard a scream … a great torrent of gargling screeches. It didn’t sound like the ones that he’d heard before. But the smell was hideously familiar.

  “Watch out,” he said. “This is gonna be bad.”

  The first undead tauntaun came charging out, smashing the door of the hatchway completely out of its housing with the bulk of its body. From here Tulkh could see that half its thoracic cavity was ripped away, the remains of its internal organs flapping from its ribs. A large section of its head was gone as well, but it was still screaming as it flung itself toward them. Its eyes were clouded and pinkish, like milk mixed with blood.

  “Burn it,” Tulkh said.

  The droid’s flamethrower roared across the open ground, and the bounty hunter saw the snow lizard’s oily pelt come alive with flames. Howling, the thing spun around, trampling furiously, rolling in the snow, trying to extinguish the fire, and the HK fired into it, blasting its carcass to shreds.

  “You have anything bigger than a laser?” Tulkh asked.

  “Mortar rounds. Why?”

  The Whiphid gave a nod back at the open paddock. The herd of infected tauntauns was already thundering out, half a dozen or more, all producing that same indefinable shrieking noise. The front-runner had a gaping hole in its flank, the ragged edges of the wound quivering as it galloped so that the hole slapped open and shut like a second, stammering mouth. Something was wrong with its upper torso—

  Tulkh could see a heavy shape writhing around inside the snow lizard’s belly.

  He slammed his spear into it, and the thing burst open in a thick welter of fluid. From inside, the blood-soaked form of a Sith student came spilling out into the snow. The Sith-thing stood up grinning from inside its sticky web of blood, shook its head from side to side violently, and screamed.

  Tulkh speared the Sith student, ramming its body back into the snow lizard’s carcass and pinning it against the thing’s spinal column. He looked back at the droid. “They’re hiding inside the tauntauns,” he shouted. “They—”

  The hard metal of the HK’s arm swung back and shoved him over, forcefully enough to knock him down in the snow, just as a slick bullet of bloody spit flew out of the infected tauntaun’s mouth. Another centimeter to the right and it would have hit Tulkh directly in his open eye; as it was, the gobbe
t of mucus stuck to the side of his head and clung there. Looking up, Tulkh saw the animal’s gore-soaked muzzle puckering, summoning up another mouthful.

  “They’re notorious for their aim,” the droid said.

  “Thanks.”

  “I suggest another plan.”

  “They’re faster than us.” Tulkh saw the other undead tauntauns behind the one he’d gutted, their hollowed-out chests and underbellies swelling and bulging with the Sith students hiding inside. Already he could imagine what it would be like, the snow lizards pounding up behind him at fifty kilometers per hour, only to eject their flesh-starved passengers on top of him. “Any ideas?”

  “Only one,” the droid said.

  It was already taking aim. An instant later the HK’s mortar round flew directly into the center of the herd. At close range, its twenty-meter blast radius was a sight to behold, even to Tulkh, who had seen the end result of such weapons many times before. He shielded his eyes as chunks and fragments of cold tauntaun fat, human flesh, and bone came raining down on top of them.

  “Is there anything else we can kill?” the droid asked.

  “Ourselves, if we don’t move.”

  The HK turned to regard the landscape where they stood. Something inside its processor made a low, steady whirring noise, as if it was processing the recent developments, or experiencing a memory. When it spoke again, its voice was unhurried, almost introspective. “Have I told you how much I hate the Sith for enslaving me here for so long?”

  “Only about twenty times.” Tulkh stepped around the still-twitching tauntaun hindquarters, idly admiring the knob of exposed hip joint. As trophies went, it would have made a fine addition to his collection, but it was going to have to stay here. He sighed. “Let’s go.”

  They turned and started walking. The Whiphid’s fur was wet and dirty from the snow, and it clung to the side of his head in thickly plastered strands that made his flesh both clammy and numb. He was exhausted and distracted and more than ready to get out of here. Neither he nor the HK noticed the bloody, gelatinous glob of infected tauntaun sputum that the snow lizard had fired at him, but it was still there, still trickling steadily down the side of his brow, making its way toward the corner of his eye.

  Arriving at the Mirocaw, Tulkh saw something that stopped him cold. There was a second ship—one that he didn’t recognize—crashed forty or so meters away from his own, its nosecone crumpled, half embedded in the snow.

  The HK beeped. “That’s Dranok’s ship.”

  “Who?”

  “Another bounty hunter.”

  “What’s it doing all the way out here?” Tulkh asked.

  “According to my scanners, there are no life-forms on board,” the droid said. “But—”

  “Let me guess.” The Whiphid raised his spear. “You’re picking up a positive reading in my ship.”

  “How did you know?”

  Tulkh pointed at the tracks leading across the snow in front of them, from one crashed ship to the other.

  “Come on,” he muttered. “Looks like we’ve got at least one stowaway to scrag before we get out of here for good.”

  41/World’s End

  SCABROUS SWUNG THE SITH SWORD DOWNWARD. WITH THE FIRST CUT, THE BLADE slashed through the dirty outerwear and animal skins that Zo had been wearing since her arrival here, exposing bare skin. She looked down and saw the shallow white trough that the sword had gouged through her flesh, a pale streak of pain, the cut turning red as it filled with blood.

  Scabrous grinned at her, staring down at the wound, actually salivating now as he raised the sword a second time, extended high over his head, clutching its handle with both hands for maximum leverage, angling its tip directly toward her chest. His eyes rolled madly, utterly lost to the Sickness that had overtaken them. Zo went rigid, yanking at the straps, knowing even as she did it that there was no way she could get loose.

  Not with your muscles, Hestizo. Reach out with the Force.

  It was the same voice that had called out to her just a moment before. She drew in a breath and fell absolutely still, closing her eyes, surrendering her mind to the moment so that time itself seemed to fall motionless, settling down around her like silt. And when she raised her arms up again, in one smooth motion this time, the bindings fell loose beneath her—it was as if she’d passed through the leather straps without a whisper of resistance. Her wrists swung outward, her torso and legs suddenly, shockingly free.

  Snapping upright, Zo swung her body off to one side of the slab.

  “No!” Scabrous roared from the other side, the blade still held up high in the air above him. His voice was shrill, and as he shouted, Zo realized that she was hearing two voices, one forming the words in her ear while the other emitted the piercing, ululating scream in her mind. “You shall not! You dare not!”

  She scrambled farther back. She was upright and on her feet for the first time, and the confines of the temple where she stood were only now beginning to register to her—an oblong room centered on the sacrificial altar, the stone floor beneath her cluttered with braziers, casting shallow pools of shifting firelight.

  The Sith Lord charged at her, angling the sword downward, its blade whickering past her so closely that Zo heard the steel hissing crosswise through the air, shearing molecules from their bonds. It clanged off the wall and he spun around with sickening, eye-watering speed, slicing sideways for her.

  Hestizo, it’s me—

  The voice in her head again, the one that she still couldn’t identify, although its words continued to waft upward through her mind, resonating outward, ripples in a pond. Even as she lurched backward again, the corner of the temple pressing into her back so that there was literally nowhere left to turn, she heard it calling out.

  Hestizo—

  Where are you? her brain cried back. Who are you? A remote possibility, wild but somehow impossible to ignore, burst into her mind fully formed. Rojo? Is that you?

  “Jedi trash.” Scabrous appeared in front of her, raising the sword between them, the sticky ruin of his face glinting off the engraved steel. He moved forward to administer the death blow but in that same moment a crash erupted behind him, clanging deafeningly across the temple, followed by the rolling tinny clatter of an upset brazier.

  The Sith Lord whirled, sword still raised, lips drawing backward, and glared at the man standing before him. The man wasn’t even looking at Scabrous. He was looking at Hestizo.

  “Get behind me,” Trace told Zo. “Now.” Not waiting another instant for her reaction, he sprang upward, arcing around and landing on the floor in front of Zo so that he was face-to-face with Scabrous, locked directly into the Sith Lord’s stare. His lightsaber pulsed to life, its beam humming. “This is over.”

  Scabrous’s answer came in the form of a scream. The Sith sword slashed downward in his right hand while his left swung upward, gripping his own lightsaber. He flung himself forward, both blades whirring in front of him, spinning outward, flashing steel and pure blood-red energy lashing out, the long, terrible scream still stretching from his jaws.

  From the first thrust, there was no art to his attack, no evidence of grace or form. It was already too late for that, and both Trace and Scabrous seemed to know it. They went at each other viciously, head-on, like animals with no air between them, slashing and blocking, edging around the open place in the floor. Every time their blades crashed together Zo felt it in the hollow of her chest and the roots of her teeth.

  She watched as Trace probed the Sith Lord’s weak places, or where he must have hoped they’d be, but Scabrous seemed to anticipate each move. The Sickness had made him incredibly fast, insurmountably strong. For every attack that her brother made, one of Scabrous’s two blades had an effortless reaction, as if he already held the outcome of the duel in the palm of his hand.

  Yet for some reason he was still allowing Rojo to force him backward, across the temple, back toward the sacrificial altar, his movements almost ethereal behind the constant r
eckless smear of blue and red and steel blades all carving through the air.

  Scabrous was poised in front of the altar now, standing before the slab where he’d laid Zo out for her sacrifice. He stepped lithely between the braziers, even the one that Rojo had knocked over when he’d landed, maneuvering without the slightest effort past the rising bank of flames where the fire had started to spread. It was climbing the black wall, orange peaks and tongues flickering upward, rising.

  Zo watched her brother press forward again, keeping the duel tight and close, but the Sith Lord made no move to back away any farther now. Even as he continued to deflect Trace’s blade, his lips were moving. Zo couldn’t make out what he was saying, and when Rojo brought his lightsaber up for a final attack, she saw that Scabrous wasn’t just smiling; he was actually laughing.

  Trace swung down again, one final blow, the coup de grâce that was intended to finish things between them permanently. Just then, Scabrous glanced up and gestured, a small, insignificant flick of the fingers in the direction of Trace’s lightsaber.

  There was a slight airborne tremor in the space above his arm.

  And Trace’s lightsaber went out.

  “Did you really think,” Scabrous’s voice was saying, “that after all that, I would trust the outcome to a duel?”

  Trace didn’t even bother looking at the deactivated lightsaber in his hand. He tossed it aside and pivoted backward as Scabrous’s blade slashed across the open space where he’d been standing a split second earlier. The red blade crashed into the floor, shaking it under Trace’s feet.

  Everything had gone wrong. The Sith Lord had laid a trap, and he’d walked right into it.