“Sample is clean,” the HK reported dutifully. “She’s uninfected.”
The Whiphid didn’t say anything, just grunted and made the shrugging gesture of one who’d expected no less, then hoisted himself up and began to lumber away.
Zo levered herself up on her elbows. “Tulkh?” she managed. Her voice was hoarse; she could scarcely produce more than a scraped-out-sounding whisper. “Tulkh?”
He stopped without turning around, looking slowly back over his shoulder.
“Thanks.”
Another shrug. “Wasn’t my idea.”
“Yeah, I bet.” Zo let out a breath, allowing herself to sink back down against the cool metal skin of the Mirocaw’s hold. The HK was still hovering over her, its visual receptors pulsing and blinking in the half-light of the glowing maintenance arrays.
“Who’s flying this thing?” Zo asked.
“Someone named Pergus Frode. He—”
“Who?”
The HK didn’t respond right away.
“I’m picking up some form of contamination,” it said. “Very close by.”
Zo stared at it. “I thought you said I was clean.”
“You are.” The whirring sound had grown louder; now it sounded alarmed. “But something else onboard this vessel is—”
The ship slammed sideways, tilting hard to port, throwing Zo backward against the bulkhead. Klaxons blared and whooped up above, accompanied by the wild swirl of blue lights. She sat up just in time to see the HK rounding the corner, heading for the steel rungs that led upward through the oval hatchway to the main flight deck.
“Wait, what’s happening?”
The droid didn’t answer, even as she chased it upward, following it through the gangway and into the cockpit. By the time the second explosion struck the Mirocaw, she didn’t need an answer. She already knew.
They were under attack.
44/Raw Feed
THE BROWN-HAIRED, HAGGARD-LOOKING MAINTENANCE ENGINEER IN THE PILOT’S seat had both hands locked on the ship’s controls, his expression stretching somewhere between worry and outright disbelief. Outside the Mirocaw’s hull, another blast rocked the vessel backward. Over the shrill whooping of the ship’s collision alarms, Zo heard steel splintering off the underside of one of its wings.
“What’s shooting at us?” she asked.
“Scabrous’s perimeter cannons,” the man shouted, jerking his head forward. Red and white emergency beacons pulsed off his face. “Down below.”
Zo gripped the back of the pilot’s seat and stared out through the canopy’s viewport. What she saw below was enough to freeze her blood. They were still hovering over the planet, no more than half a kilometer above the blizzard-smothered surface of Odacer-Faustin. Between the fallen temples and stone buildings, the heavy guns that had come thrusting up out of the ground itself were turreting back around, tilting upward, energy beams hammering the ship in heavy bursts of artillery.
“Get us out of here!” Zo shouted.
“It’s not that simple! They’re laying down a solid wall of restraining fire across the upper horizon!”
“What?”
“They don’t want us to leave!” Frode whipped back around and met her gaze. His eyes were surprisingly blue. “And I can’t maintain the deflector shields on this piece of junk!”
“Where’s Tulkh?” Zo asked.
“Who?”
“The Whiphid! The guy that owns the ship!”
The HK didn’t respond right away. Zo fought the urge to grab the thing by its processors and shake it. She couldn’t imagine the Whiphid idly standing by while Sith cannons blasted his ship to pieces, but she hadn’t seen him since he’d stalked off, and if the droid knew something about that—
“Can you deactivate the cannons?” she asked.
The HK emitted a low, resigned buzz. “Not by remote … not anymore.”
“How can we stop them? They’re going to blow us out of the sky!”
“The main control system is inside the tower,” the droid said. “I might be able to override the system manually. But that would mean—”
BOOM! Another fusillade of blasts, the biggest yet, hammered the Mirocaw from below, almost hurling it sideways. Zo toppled into the copilot’s chair and strapped herself in, fastening the restraining web around her shoulder and waist. She saw whole rows of durasteel turrets protruding up from the snow now, their cannons flinging wave after wave of red pulses up at the ship.
“Take us down,” she shouted at Frode, pointing across the landscape where Scabrous’s tower rose up like a single black accusatory finger stabbing back at them. Frode, for his part, didn’t argue, ramming the stick hard to the side so that the Mirocaw shot down and over, dipping across the academy’s buildings and then angling upward again. For an instant the top of the tower appeared beneath them like a flat black disk encircled in lights from below, and there was a sharp, scraping cough of metal on metal as the Mirocaw’s landing gear settled on its roof. Another round of blasterfire strafed the air directly in front of them, the last of the bolts slamming into the ship’s side, ricocheting off. There was a new, steady, high-pitched whine siphoning down to silence as the last of the deflector shields failed.
“Hurry,” Frode snapped grimly. “We’re not going to last another thirty seconds up here.”
The HK had already disappeared from the cockpit, angling back down the hatchway to the hold below. A moment later, an alarm shrilled, announcing an open hatchway, Zo and Frode stared out of the cockpit at the top of the tower.
“No,” she rasped.
“What?”
Zo pointed, a terrible coldness spreading over her as her throat tightened with revulsion. Gazing out into the first tremulous gray swirls of dawn, she could already see the first of the things crawling up from inside the tower’s upper chamber onto the roof, squirming through the broken windows of its top level, closing in on the ship. The tower was infested with corpses, she realized, packed solid with them. Her mind whirled back to what the droid had said.
“Is there anybody else aboard?”
“Just that Whiphid bounty hunter,” Frode scowled. “Why?”
“The HK said there was an infection aboard.”
“What?” He looked down at himself, hands patting his flight suit as if searching for some indication of illness. “Where?”
“It didn’t say, but—”
THOOM! A massive blast of energy smashed into the side of the Mirocaw, hard enough to knock it off its landing gear and send it skidding crookedly across the roof of the tower, right toward the edge. Through the cockpit, Zo saw the front end of the ship spin forward, slashing into the mob of corpses clustered in front of it, shoving them off the roof and sending them spilling down off the roof of the tower in waves. The ship kept sliding, lurched, tilted, and dropped nose-first into free fall.
Suddenly Zo realized she was looking straight down at the surface of the planet hurtling up toward them.
We’re going down, her mind cried out, we’re going to—
Frode punched the engines and Mirocaw swung violently upward at the last possible second, skimming off the rocky outcropping of Sith architecture and pulling up, streaking skyward.
Spinning in her seat, Zo looked back at the tower, clearly visible now in the morning light. Its roof was crawling with the Sith-things, every student at the academy who had been infected, seething up from the windows and surging forward to fill the empty space where the Mirocaw had just been. They were out there, openmouthed, screaming together, and although Zo couldn’t hear their cry, some part of her could feel it resonating through her chest cavity, through her mind and heart. She knew it would be a long time before that scream faded completely from her memory, if it ever did.
“The droid must have gotten to the main controls,” Frode said, pointing down. “Look.”
Zo turned to see Scabrous’s ground-based turbolasers pivoting back around. At first she thought they were targeting the ship again; then she re
alized they had continued to rotate, until at least a dozen of the cannons had trained their digital crosshairs on the same central target.
The tower.
The droid, Zo thought, the HK, it’s still up there—
The laser cannons fired together, each one of them spitting a solid beam of energy directly at the top of the tower. The blasts collided simultaneously, and the tower exploded in a blinding spray of shrapnel and flame, a vast cloud of secondary combustion spreading out from inside, widening in a vast, all-consuming ring as the main and secondary reactors blew.
The report was colossal, world-shattering. Up in the cockpit, Pergus Frode, who knew precious little about combustion or reactors, but grasped the fundamentals of self-preservation on a very personal level, had the presence of mind to open the Mirocaw’s thrusters all the way. It was the only thing that kept the ship from getting sucked back into the shock wave, and it was enough.
Hitting escape velocity, penetrating Odacer-Faustin’s atmosphere and already preparing herself for the jump to lightspeed, Zo could still feel the tremors shuddering through the ship. When she looked down at her fingers, she saw that she was gripping the armrests of the copilot’s seat hard enough to blanch her knuckles white. With some deliberate effort, she let go, cleared her throat, and held out one hand to the man flying the ship.
“By the way,” she said, in a shaky voice, “I’m Hestizo Trace.”
“Pergus Frode.” He let out a breath and took her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”
“Nice flying.”
“I’ve done a bit of it in my time,” he said, and a faint frown line appeared above his right eyebrow. “Wait, where are you going?”
“Back into the hold,” Zo said. “I need to go check on something.”
45/Mazlot
SHE STEPPED SLOWLY INTO THE TROPHY ROOM, PAYING ATTENTION TO EVERY DETAIL. The chamber where she’d first awakened was just as she remembered it—the bones and pelts, the skulls on the wall, the Whiphid’s arrays of kill-trophies, all surprisingly ordered and organized despite the ship being slammed and tossed by blaster attack. It was as if someone, or something, had just come through and straightened everything up. The closed-in air was thick with the stink of spilled liquid fat, oily fires, and the cloying, constant reek of dried blood.
She took another step, ducking under a row of rusty meat hooks dangling from pulleys over her head, and paused, staring deep into the far corner. There was something huddled there, crouched away from the light, a low, bulky form whose outline eluded shape or detail. She could hear it making low breathing sounds.
“Tulkh?”
The form shifted, squirming slightly, just enough that Zo glimpsed one of the glassine eyes looking up at her. The Whiphid, she realized, had bolted himself to the wall, clamping himself into an array of heavy chains and cables, with an additional metal brace—a type of slaving collar, it looked like—pinned around his massive neck. Thick red clots and seeping sores had already taken root in the fur around his face.
“What happened?” she asked.
Tulkh snorted, raised his head, jaws creaking open. “What’s it look like?”
Zo drew in a sharp breath. Despite everything she’d seen so far, she felt a thin stiletto of shock slide through her at the sight of the Whiphid’s ravaged face. The right eye, the entire right side of his head, had swollen up horribly, ballooning with infection and necrotic tissue working busily within. Weeping pustules across his brow and cheek trickled with syrupy-thick discharge down the front of his chest. Even the tusk that jutted up from the right side of his jaw had turned a sickly yellow shade, like a cavity-rotted tooth.
“You?” she asked.
Tulkh made a guttural croaking noise, gesturing at the restraints that he’d placed on himself. “Locked myself in,” he managed. “I can feel it. It’s coming on.”
“How did—”
“Snow lizard.”
“What?”
“Infected one. It spat on me.” Tulkh made a rueful sound that might actually have been a wry chuckle. “Must have gotten blood in my eyes. After everything else that’s happened …”
“Maybe …”
“Here.” He raised one hand, and Zo saw that he was clutching the broken end of his spear, the one that he’d been carrying with him. Perhaps half a meter of the shaft remained, tipped with a flinty arrowhead edge that looked just as razor-sharp as it had the first time she’d seen it. “Keep that. Might bring you luck.”
“Listen,” she said. “The sickness affected you differently. You’re still alive. Maybe there’s a way we can—”
“Mazlot.”
“What?”
He jerked his head back at the two-meter wall to which he’d bolted himself, and Zo saw the black rubberized seal encircling it, its outer edges slightly rounded like the curves on an old-fashioned monitor screen. “This whole back panel drops away. Blow the seal with that switch on the far wall.”
Zo glanced back at the switch plate that the Whiphid had gestured to, on the opposite side of the hold. She remembered seeing it the first time she’d been here, seeing the writing but being unable to make it out under the scrum of moss that had grown over it. The moss was thinner now, and she could see the single word in all-capital sans serif letters:
MAZLOT
“It means ‘air lock,’ ” Tulkh said, nodding. “Go ahead, do it.”
“Maybe—”
“Now.” Tulkh lunged forward hard enough to make the chain snap tight, the bolts creaking in their studs. He thrust the spear at her, business-end-first this time, hurling it, and Zo dodged out of the way as it clattered off the far side of the chamber, then fell to the floor amid a pile of skulls.
Tulkh slumped backward, seemingly exhausted by the effort. When he raised his head at her again, light had shifted in his eyes, thin and slanting, a shade that she didn’t recognize. A burbling snarl escaped his lips.
Backing off, Zo went to pick up the broken spear, bent down and curled her fingers around it, and returned her attention to the air lock switch. There was precious little mercy shown here in the past day. If the Whiphid asked her for a quick death, she thought she’d seen enough to grant it. But—
The shriek came from behind her, a deafening blast.
Spinning around, she saw the thing in the doorway of the trophy room lunge at her. A Sith student, one she’d never seen before, was flinging himself at her, its corpse-mouth gaping open in an oval rictus. The thing’s eyes were bright green and wild, like emeralds on fire, and long strings of orange-red hair dangled back over its shoulders, swinging and snapping wildly around its face as it tried to bite her. Its academy tunic was a stiff apron of gore.
Thwack! Zo slammed the spear into its face, driving it backward, but not nearly far enough. The thing bolted at her a second time, and when it screamed Zo could hear Tulkh screaming behind her in exactly the same pitch and volume. The Sickness, she knew, was fully awake inside him; there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.
Use the Force … It was the orchid’s voice in her head, faint but distinct, guiding her. Focus, Hestizo.
She nodded to herself, her hands already moving up, reaching forward the way they sometimes did when she was deeply attuned to the great energy field surrounding her. The Sith-thing—she somehow knew that its name had once been Lussk, and that it had been promised this ultimate role by the Sickness that had overtaken him—rammed into her. Zo grabbed it by the front of its blood-stiffened uniform and thrust the body straight upward, into the air. She swung him up and over, face-first, into the meat hook dangling over her head, so that the underside of his jaw dropped straight down onto the hook’s rusty barb, impaling him up through the mouth.
The Sith-thing twitched and thrashed in the air, legs kicking furiously, arms jerking but unable to get itself free.
Now, Hestizo. Now!
She circled behind it, got her footing, and shoved. The hooks and their pulleys were on tracks running from one side of the hold to the ot
her, and the Sith-thing went careening forward across the hold, still dangling by its jaw, and crashed directly into Tulkh. The Whiphid yanked one arm free, threw back his head, and screamed again.
Now—
Zo threw one arm up, found another cable dangling from above, and wrapped it tight around her arm. With her free hand she reached backward, fingertips extended toward the plain rectangular switch plate.
MAZLOT.
There was a sharp whooshing hiss, like a canister of compressed air being ripped open, and the entire back wall of the hold blew off, the sealed panel vanishing, just gone, sucked out in the void. The Whiphid and the Sith-thing went flying out with it in a frantic cyclone wash of skins, pelts, and bones spilling out into space. Zo held on. The cable bit into her forearm. Behind her a cauldron of liquefied fat sloshed over sideways, spraying along the floor, and her feet slipped, legs whipping forward toward the open air lock. She held on. Gripping tight, she pulled herself back until she touched the hatchway leading out of the Mirocaw’s hold and levered herself through it, then managed to hit the console outside, sealing it shut.
Her last glimpse of the hold was a bare metal chamber, its contents gutted in a matter of seconds by the vacuum of space. Every scrap of the Whiphid’s gruesome trophy collection was gone, along with the vegetative growth that had marked her brief stay here—all of it sucked clean into the relentless and insatiable void.
In the end, Zo wasn’t surprised.
The galaxy, she had learned, could be a very hungry place.
46/All Down the Line
WHEN SHE ARRIVED BACK ON MARFA, BENNIS WAS WAITING FOR HER ON BETA LEVEL Seven, standing behind a copse of Onderonian bamboo. “Hestizo, welcome back.” He smiled when he saw her approaching, stepped away from the pale pewter-colored stalks rising up from the growth lights overhead, and held out his hand.
Zo hugged him instead, probably too tightly, and released when she felt Bennis wince a little. “Sorry. It’s good to see you again.”
“You as well,” he said, patting his chest. “Remind me to show you my scar when the bandages come off. It’s quite impressive.”
Star Wars: Red Harvest Page 21