Lockdown: Maul

by Star Wars

  “Strength and discipline, huh?” Still grinning, Voystock tucked his thumbs into his belt and rocked back on his heels. “I like that. Remind me to have it engraved on your dad’s corpse as an inspiration to others.”

  “My father could tear a man like you to pieces without breaking a sweat.”

  A little bit of the guard’s smile faded. “Forget it, junior. I don’t fight the elderly.”

  “He held the Blasko Title for three straight seasons, did you know that?” Eogan took a step toward him. “Without that switch on your hip, you wouldn’t last five seconds against him.”

  “Don’t push it, boy. Remember who you’re talking to.”

  “I’m almost ready. Tell him, Father.”

  “Right.” Voystock laughed, but there was no humor in it, only the brittle exasperation of a man whose patience was being sorely tried. “Kid, you wouldn’t last five seconds in a fight. Even your old man knows it.” Reaching up, he ran one hand over his stubbled jawline. “Why do you think he’s paying me to help you two bottom-feeders bust out of here?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You don’t believe me? Ask your dad. What do you think I’m doing down here, breathing in all this metal dust for my health?”

  The boy fell silent. His eyes shifted from Voystock to his father, and then he said, in a very quiet voice: “Is it true?”

  “Eogan—”

  “Is it true?”

  “Son,” Artagan said, “we’ll both die here if we—”

  “You said I was strong enough! You said that I was ready to fight!”

  Artagan closed his eyes. This was going to be harder than he’d expected, he realized, and infinitely more painful. He drew his hands out of his pockets so that Eogan could see how badly they trembled. “Son, it’s over for us here.”

  “Don’t say that. It’s not true!”

  “You’re already stronger and faster than I am,” Artagan continued, “but you’re not a killer.” He steadied his hand and placed it on the boy’s bare shoulder, felt the tension that had gathered there, twisted into knots of postadolescent indignation. “There’s deep steel in you, yes, but there is also great mercy. Kindness.” He drew in a deep, resigned breath. “This is no place for a boy like you.”

  Boy. That single word seemed to lie more crushingly upon Eogan than any of the weights he’d had to lift. “Then why did you bring me here?” he asked.

  Artagan looked away. It was the one question he couldn’t answer. “It was … a mistake.”

  “A mistake?”

  “I miscalculated. Relied on salvation from a man who could not provide it.” He moved past his son, shifting toward Voystock. “Can you get us into medbay?”

  Voystock gazed at him for a long moment. “When?”

  “Right now.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “I would prefer not to linger here any longer here than we absolutely have to.” Artagan realized that he was clenching his fists and forced himself to open them. His fingernails had cut tiny red half-moons into the lines of his palms. “Yes or no?”

  The guard sighed and nodded. “Yeah,” he said, and checked the chrono strapped to his wrist. “I can disrupt the primary and auxiliary feed to the medbay. When the power doesn’t come back on the grid, maintenance will have to run a black start. It will take fifteen minutes to bootstrap the main server arrays back online.”

  “But if you disrupt all the power, then how—”

  Voystock held up one hand to stop him. “At that point, our standard protocol is to reroute all power through the GH-7 so they can patch surveillance through the droid’s photoreceptors—that’s when you’ll make your move.”

  “All right.”

  “You realize they’ll see your faces. You’ll have to do something about that.”

  “It’s not a problem,” Artagan said.

  “You’ve got fifteen minutes. If the droid hasn’t deactivated the electrostatic charges in your hearts by then, there’s nothing else I can do.”

  “I understand.”

  “I mean it.” Voystock locked eyes with him. “You’re on your own. We’re not friends, which means you and your boy are a couple of hard targets just like any other runaway. I don’t know how you’re going to get out of medbay and I don’t care. Anybody asks me if I’ve seen you, I tell them everything.”

  “Then let’s go.”

  “Father, no!” Eogan wheeled around, and now all his renewed anger and disbelief were focused where Artagan had been expecting it all along—directly on him. “He’s setting us up, can’t you see that? He’s just going to steal every credit you have, drain the accounts, and send us right back into the cells again! He’ll betray us the first chance he gets!”

  “Eogan, he’s our one hope of getting out. And we have to go now.”

  “I can learn the Fifty-Two Fists! I just need more time!”

  Artagan took hold of his son, clasping him in a sweaty embrace. The boy squirmed, pushing back, fighting to resist. He was stronger than Artagan now, and under any other circumstances he would have broken the hold, but his arms were tired, the muscles spent from lifting.

  At last he collapsed into Artagan’s arms, glaring up at his father in impotent fury.

  “That’s why you worked me so hard,” he said tonelessly. “So I couldn’t stop you.”

  “Stop us,” Artagan corrected, and flicked his gaze at Voystock, narrowing his eyes. “Are you ready?”

  Voystock nodded. “Just waiting on you. Let’s go.”

  17

  GHOST VOLTAGE

  An hour after he’d stashed the transmitter and left the prison morgue, Maul was circulating silently among Cog Hive Seven’s genpop. He’d dispatched another message through a maintenance droid—the same one he’d used to summon the gangs down to the prison laundry—and was waiting to hear back from the inmate he’d contacted.

  In the meantime, he stood and watched the crowds of prisoners moving about their business. There was, as always, a kind of heightened sensitivity that came whenever he’d spent any significant time with his Master—an increased awareness of things both hidden and exposed, the crackling prescience of latent energy fields that he’d come to think of as ghost voltage. Even here, among the dregs of the galaxy, Maul found it revelatory and exhilarating.

  He was crossing the gallery outside the mess hall when he spotted the inmate called Izhsmash through a crowd of inmates. The Nelvaanian’s expression did not change, but the recognition in his eyes told Maul that he’d received the message Maul had sent earlier.

  Without a word, Maul pivoted, heading down the corrugated durasteel ramp through the narrow passageway that led into the maintenance tunnels below. Bare electrical fixtures threw their flat, declamatory glare across the floor beneath his feet, outlining his silhouette as crisply as a shape cut from the blackness of the universe itself. Twenty meters down, he stopped and ducked deeper into the shadows, listening for approaching footfalls.

  After a moment, Izhsmash spoke, his voice hushed. “I came alone,” he said. “What do you want?”

  Maul turned and stepped into view. “Information.”

  “You can threaten me all you want. I won’t talk about Ra—” Catching himself, he stopped. “I won’t talk about that individual.”

  “That’s not why I asked you here,” Maul said. “In any case, I doubt you know anything about Iram Radique that I haven’t already found out.”

  Izhsmash frowned. “Then why …?”

  “Strabo told me why you were sentenced to this place,” Maul said. “You’re a renegade programmer. A data thief. Word is that you wrote the original cryptoviral code for that attack on the Phage Network.”

  “That’s never been—”

  Maul held up his hand. “I need you to hack into the prison database. Get me information about all the inmates and their criminal history. I need a complete list.”

  “It’s going to take time.”

  “I know something ab
out slicing into systems myself,” Maul said, his mind cycling back to what felt like a lifetime ago, when the one known as Trezza had taught him computer saboteur skills during part of his time on Orsis. “But right now I don’t want the exposure. Let me know when it’s finished.”

  The Nelvaanian cocked his head. “Anything else?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Izhsmash nodded and turned to go, and all at once the lights above them flickered and dimmed. Maul glanced at him, immediately aware of the inmate’s reaction.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “Some kind of brownout. Felt like a power outage.”

  “It’s uncommon here?”

  “Very.” Izhsmash shook his head. “There’s too many backups and auxiliary relays. The last time it happened …” He glanced over his shoulder, then back at Maul. “It was an escape attempt.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was about a year ago. A couple of the cons got wise and tried to override the prison’s main power grid from the medbay and reprogram the surgical droid to disarm the charges so they could get out.”

  “Did it work?”

  Izhsmash shook his head. “They died in the medbay.”

  “The guards caught them?”

  “It wasn’t the guards.”

  “Who then?”

  Izhsmash licked his lips. His eyes fell to the floor, then rose to meet Maul’s, and his voice was just the ghost of a whisper. “Radique.”

  “Why?”

  “He never lets anyone leave. Any inmate who’s ever worked for him in any capacity, who might know anything about him, who might be able to provide his enemies with the slightest hint of his whereabouts. That’s why he’s based his operation in a prison where nobody survives. If they try to escape—”

  Maul felt something quicken within him. In some deeply intuitive way that defied all logical explanation, he already knew that he’d found what he was looking for, the next step toward his mission here. Whether this was the dark side at work, as Sidious had promised, or something as random as pure chance, it scarcely mattered.

  Before Izhsmash had finished speaking, Maul was already moving back up the ramp and across the gallery toward what awaited him on the far side of the prison’s main level.

  Toward medbay.

  18

  BLACK START

  “Warden,” Dragomir Chlorus said, “you still don’t seem to understand the gravity of your situation.”

  “Really?” Sadiki Blirr sank back with a silent groan, rotating her fingertips against her throbbing temples, where the first vestiges of a killer migraine were slowly making themselves known. This conversation with the gaming commissioner had been one of the longest in recent memory, and there was still no end in sight. “Then you’d better run through it again. After all, I’ve already got an IBC representative onsite auditing my whole operation, but I suppose I’m just too dense to figure out what that means.”

  Chlorus sighed. “It’s not the IBC that you need to worry about. The Desilijic Clan has taken an interest in your operation. And it’s been going on for quite some time.”

  “The Hutts?” Sadiki gave a weary laugh. “I expect I would notice if I had a problem with them, don’t you think?”

  Chlorus’s face remained grim. “Well, they’ve certainly noticed you. And they haven’t taken fondly to the way that Cog Hive Seven has eaten away at their revenues.”

  “That’s preposterous,” she said. “Their gambling operations are more lucrative than ever.”

  “I’m not just speaking of gambling, Sadiki.”

  She peered up at him warily. “What else do you think we do around here, moisture farming?”

  “You understand this is strictly off the record.” The commissioner leaned in closer, lowering his voice. “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors about Iram Radique. The weapons dealer said to run his operation from somewhere within Cog Hive Seven.”

  “Oh no.” Sadiki’s migraine jumped from nascent to fully formed in one breathtaking instant. “Not that old wheeze again.”

  “Yes, you’ve told me, Radique isn’t in your prison, if he even exists at all. But the Hutts aren’t so sure. In fact, they’ve apparently decided to see for themselves.”

  “What do you mean, see for themselves?”

  “I simply mean that—”

  The signal froze. In the background Sadiki heard a steady, low-frequency tone begin to pulse as a panel of red and yellow alarm lights sprang up along the top of the console. She straightened. “Look, Dragomir, I’ve got a situation here. I have to go. We’ll talk again.”

  “Sadiki, wait—”

  Cutting the call short, she jumped on the comm and tapped into central control for the prison’s main power station.

  “Control, do you copy?” she asked. “This is Warden Blirr. I need a status report for Section 1212.”

  “Copy that, warden,” the guard’s voice drawled back with a maddening lack of concern. “Looks like a minor malfunction down in medbay.”

  Sadiki hit the acknowledge button on the warning alarms, silencing them. “Minor malfunction? From my side it looks like the whole level’s gone down.”

  “Stand by for confirmation.” The readout along the comlink’s display identified him as CO Madden. “Yeah, roger that, Warden. Looks like it’s just a transient fault. We’re resetting it now.”

  Sadiki brought up the surveillance screens for the medbay, but the monitors were solid blue across every frequency. “Where’s my backup power?”

  “Must’ve gone down with the primary.”

  “So you’re telling me we’ve got nothing in there right now?”

  “Negative. Ah, I mean, affirmative. That’s—” Now Madden actually sounded a little nervous, which Sadiki would have found gratifying if he hadn’t been expected to perform competently under these circumstances. “No worries. We’re patching all surveillance through to the GH-7 surgical droid onsite. Should have audiovisual back up in just a second.”

  “Who’s in medbay now?”

  “Stand by.” There was the chirp of an electronic tablet being nudged to life. “No organic life-forms. Currently it looks like it’s just the GH-7. And …” A pause. “Hold it.”

  “What is it?”

  “Thermal sensors are picking something up.”

  “Who is it?” Sadiki felt her migraine spilling over, sending sharp pains down the back of her neck.

  “Might just be a faulty reading,” Madden said. “Stand by.”

  His voice cut out. With a grimace, Sadiki turned and tapped in a series of commands, bringing up a current list of admissions to the prison’s medbay. According to the current census, it should’ve been empty in there.

  She hit the comm again, harder than she intended.

  “Madden? Do you copy?”

  A blast of static and then Madden came back, sounding faint: “Copy.”

  “Where’s my surveillance?”

  “Still recalibrating off the main grid.” There was a hurried clicking noise of many different switches being thrown to no effect, and the guard muttered something that she couldn’t hear. “External network’s not coming back up for some reason. We’re going to have to do a black start, bootstrap it back up. It’ll take fifteen minutes, then we should be good.”

  “What about those other life-forms in medbay?” Sadiki asked. “How many are there?”

  “I’ve got a squad heading down there now—that must be what we’re seeing. I’ll let you know the second we’re back up.”

  Sadiki sat back and forced herself to be patient. Waiting around for information wasn’t exactly her specialty, and in the past—working in casinos and managing large-scale offworld resort operations—her inability to suffer fools had served her well. But all too often, when power fell off the grid in Cog Hive Seven, there was nothing to do but wait.

  The truth was, she was as much to blame as anyone.

  Even before the sheer mathematical elegance of the algorith
m had brought it to life, her brother’s original designs for Cog Hive Seven had been beautiful, a seamless installation of utilitarian art. Redundant power backups and secondary electrical relays were all supposed to have been installed as part of Cog Hive Seven’s initial construction—along with the metal shop, the factory floor, and a half dozen other independently sealed sublevels. But there had been construction delays, bureaucratic wheels to be greased, permits to be secured, and impatient investors demanding to see quarterly profit-and-loss statements. And in the end, they’d cut a few corners.

  A lot of them, actually.

  As much as Sadiki couldn’t tolerate weak-minded excuses among underlings, she loathed them most vociferously in herself. The truth behind what had really happened here came down to far more than just a few loose ends. The truth was that when Dakarai’s algorithm had started paying out and the money had come pouring in, she’d more or less completely abandoned any further construction inside the prison.

  Given a choice, she knew that the IBC would have extended her time and credits enough to finish the space station properly according to the original specs. But it was Sadiki herself who had pushed it prematurely into its fully operational status, knowing full well that Cog Hive Seven’s wiring, surveillance feeds, and power grids were substandard and, in some cases, virtually nonexistent. And it was Sadiki who had allowed herself to become overconfident about the implanted cardiac electrostatic charges inside the inmates’ hearts, telling herself that as preventative measures went, it was more than enough of a deterrent.

  But there had been other compensations. Some of them very lucrative indeed.

  “Warden?” Madden’s voice came back through.

  “I’m here.”

  “We’ve got visual in the medbay coming on now. It’s all low-light through the GH-7’s photoreceptors, but—”

  “Just patch me through,” Sadiki snapped, and turned to the screens in front of her.

  There was a sharp hiss, and a turgid upswell of white noise droned across the monitors. As it cleared, she found herself looking down through the surgical droid’s floating perspective, drifting into the medbay, its walls and ceiling a green-tinted field of indistinct image-intensified blobs. Unfamiliar voices crackled through the droid’s auditory sensor.