by Star Wars
He lifted himself up and stood erect. His chest burned, his muscles ached, his head throbbed, and there was a low rattle in his lungs.
Master. I dedicate myself to you.
The hatchway slid open. Maul stepped through, and that was where they were waiting for him, just inside the open concourse. Caught utterly off guard, he scarcely had time to comprehend what was happening.
What—?
A huge black and red explosion went off in front of his eyeballs, and he knew no more.
32
WHITEOUT
Maul awoke to blinding lights, a blazing firestorm of incandescence that seared his eyes, obscuring whatever stood just behind them. He tried to move and discovered that he couldn’t. His arms and legs were lashed and stretched spread-eagle, and he hung suspended in midair, above … what? It was impossible to say.
What had they shot him with? Some kind of stun weapon, powerful enough to knock him completely unconscious. Whoever was responsible was clearly prepared to evade the surveillance cameras as well—it would explain the painfully intense lights, bright enough to mask whatever they were planning on doing to him.
At length he heard a sound coming from off to his left, someone laboring to breathe. Incoherent words. Croaking noises. The rasping harshness of respiratory distress. Maul was still listening to it, trying to process the details of his circumstances, when he picked up the creak of approaching footsteps.
“Where’s the old man?” a voice asked.
“In the corner,” a second, more familiar voice answered. “Next to the baler.”
“Has he said anything significant?”
“He’s delirious.” The familiar voice was calm but not dispassionate, colored with an overtone of what might actually have been sympathy. “He contracted blood poisoning after he lost his leg. The infection’s already spreading to his brain.” From directly in front of him, the one who had spoken most recently leaned in close enough that Maul could make out his features. “Hello, Jagannath.”
Maul squinted up at the face of the Twi’lek above him. “Zero?”
Zero gazed at him. “You’ve caused quite a stir around here,” he said. “You really shouldn’t have killed Rook. Mr. Radique was paying handsomely to keep him safe from being matched.”
“So you do know him.”
“Sending the Nelvaanian to hack into the algorithm was your first mistake.” The Twi’lek’s expression was slightly puzzled now, as if he couldn’t quite figure out what had driven Maul to such a grave misstep. “There have already been repercussions, you realize. Severe repercussions.”
Reaching down, he hoisted a limp corpse and lifted it close enough that Maul could see it.
It was Izhsmash. The Nelvaanian’s broken jaw hung slack on its hinges. His mouth and eye sockets were stuffed with scraps of broken circuit board and twisted wire—a message for whoever found the body.
There was a faint, throat-clearing noise somewhere off to the left. Maul jerked his head up, struggling to pull himself free from the thick web of cables that lashed his arms and legs to walls that he couldn’t see.
“Is he here with you?” Maul asked. “Is Radique here?”
Zero ignored the question. “The guards and inmates will find your body next to the Nelvaanian’s,” he said with that same puzzled empathy. “They’ll know what happened. Such warnings must be sent from time to time. It is his will.” Leaning in close enough that he could lower his voice, he spoke almost apologetically: “No one threatens Mr. Radique, Jagannath. You understand, don’t you? It’s just business.”
“I have business with him,” Maul said. “Tell Radique—”
“Good-bye, Jagannath,” the other voice said. It was the first time that Maul had heard it. “It’s a pity you have to end your time in Cog Hive Seven as a cautionary tale. You were an intriguing specimen while you lasted.”
“Wait.” Maul lifted his head again and caught sight of the figure next to Zero—it was a Weequay, one he’d never seen before. Or had he? The craggy, sun-baked face was raked back in a speculative frown, his high forehead crowned with a topknot, and Maul remembered the inmate that he’d seen on his first day here.
The clawbird was perched on his shoulder.
“Repercussions, Jagannath.”
Without another word, the Weequay glanced at Zero, and the two of them turned and left the room.
There was a jolting, mechanized clamor of heavy machinery being throttled reluctantly to life. Force-feedback servos chugged and became a steady pulsating drone. Maul thought of the factory floor.
Before he could comprehend what that meant exactly, he felt the cables around his wrists and ankles beginning to draw tight, pulling him in four different directions.
As suddenly as they’d appeared, the blinding lights went out, burying him in utter darkness.
Maul jerked and yanked at his restraints, but the cables around his arms and legs only pulled tighter, stretching the sockets of his shoulders, cranking tension into hips and knees. He fought to pull himself free, but the restraints held fast. Something popped in his right wrist. Every joint began to burn. They were going to rip him to pieces.
From above him, above the hum of the machinery, he heard a brisk flapping of wings.
In the darkness, the wheezing noises began again. Labored words.
“Going … to kill us both,” a voice rasped.
Now Maul recognized the voice. The old man was in here with him, Eogan’s father—the one who’d lost his leg to Voystock’s blaster. He searched his memory for the old man’s name, and it came to him almost at once.
“Artagan?”
“Never should have … saved his life,” the old man’s voice said. “Should have stayed with the Bando Gora. Too late now, I suppose.”
Twisting his entire body as far as the cables would allow, Maul turned his head in the direction of the old man’s voice. By now the tension in his extremities had transcended pain, catapulting him into an entirely new realm of consciousness. Again he thought, almost instinctively, of using the Force, of calling upon strength and ability whose magnitude could almost certainly save him from death. Surely such things had been placed at his disposal for a reason, a larger purpose, hadn’t they?
From the hinterlands of conscious thought, he heard his Master’s voice ringing out in his mind.
There are aspects of who we are, Sidious had once told him, that can only be revealed to us in the deepest pit of intolerable suffering, in those moments when all else is torn away—when we stand at the very brink of eternity itself and stare death in the face.
Maul didn’t breathe. Sweat poured from his face. Still facing Artagan, he managed to catch the old man’s eye. “What did you say?”
“Bando Gora,” Artagan muttered. “All hail the skull …”
“You were in the Bando Gora?”
“… were going to kill Radique.” Somewhere in the darkness, the old man mumbled something else, an incoherent slur of consonants, then he became lucid again. “I betrayed them, saved Radique from them. They’ve been hunting me down … ever since.”
For a moment Maul didn’t speak. Beneath the pain and the rattling of the machine that was about to rip him to pieces, a new revelation had already begun taking shape in his mind. “That’s why you brought your son here to Cog Hive Seven.”
The old man grunted in assent. “Radique swore … he’d protect me …”
Maul felt himself measuring what the old man said against whatever he knew to be true. The realization—a piece of the puzzle abruptly snapping into place—brought a sudden upsurge of determination.
Summoning up all that remained of his strength, he wrenched his right arm as hard as he could away from the cable, dislocating his shoulder from its socket with an audible pop. A loopy, over-elasticized numbness spilled through the joint on a wave of pins and needles, threatening to render his entire arm useless, but the move brought just enough slack to the cable so that the binding slipped free around his right
wrist.
Jerking his arm loose, he reached across with a hand that was already rapidly going numb, fumbling with his left wrist. It seemed to take forever, but at last the left hand came free as well. Only after he’d gotten his ankles loose did he slam his upper torso against the floor, knocking the right shoulder back into place.
There.
He rose and crossed the room, his eyes fully acclimated to the darkness now. This was the factory floor, as he’d expected—the bulky machinery, Coyle’s bone sculptures hulking in the background like an inevitable reminder of where they were all destined to end up. If Zero had brought him here, along with the Weequay—
“The Weequay,” he said aloud. A half dozen steps later, he’d reached the spot where the old man lay on the floor, hideously diminished by his wounds, burning with fever. Maul could feel the heat radiating up from him like a blast furnace, could smell the sickness on him. “The one that was here with Zero. That’s him, isn’t it? That’s Iram Radique.”
A foggy groan that might have been acknowledgment came from the old man. “Radique …,” he managed.
“I need to find him. What was his connection to the Gora?”
“Can’t … tell … you.”
“Why not?”
“… only tell Eogan …”
Maul reached down and lifted Artagan Truax up, hoisting him over his shoulder.
“… you doing?” the old man asked. “Where you taking me …?”
“Out of here,” Maul said. “We’ve got things to discuss.”
33
RECONFIG
“Warden?” ThreeDee said. “They’re ready for you.”
Finishing her coffee, Sadiki rose from behind her desk and directed her attention to the bank of holoscreens overhead. The monitor on the far right displayed the guards’ ready room, where a group of Cog Hive Seven’s off-duty COs, nine in all, were gathered around a long table. Some of the men stood silently or leaned against the wall; others sat upright nursing tumblers of Rancor Aid, casting anxious glances at the hatchway. Even out of uniform, the men had a visible tension that seemed to radiate from them in waves.
“Warden?” the droid prompted.
“I heard you,” Sadiki said distractedly, not taking her eyes from the screen. She’d called the meeting two hours earlier, switching out the second-shift duty roster at the last minute to ensure adequate coverage throughout the gallery and the cells. “Do me a favor and raise the temperature in there by five degrees.”
“May I ask why?”
“I’d like them to see them sweat a bit.” She turned back to the droid. “Have you reached my brother yet?”
“Master Blirr is not in his quarters, nor is he in the datacenter,” ThreeDee answered. “In all honesty, I have no idea where he might have gone.”
“Keep trying.” She glanced at the chrono. “We’re only two hours away from the next match. I’d like his input on the combatants.”
“Combatants?” ThreeDee swiveled around to face her. “Respectfully, Warden, weren’t we specifically ordered by Gaming Commissioner Chlorus to suspend all bouts, pending—”
“Dakarai’s algorithm has already made its selection,” Sadiki cut in, “and the last time I checked, current betting activity for this next match was already in the millions of credits. Apparently the galaxy’s casinos and high-stakes gamblers have already forgiven us for what happened.”
“But the Gaming Commission—”
“They can fine me.” Sadiki raised her coffee cup and drained it. “As Dragomir himself said, I’ve got more important things to worry about.” An errant realization occurred to her, and she smiled. “And so does he, I think.”
“They could shut us down completely!”
“I doubt that very much,” a voice said from behind her, and Sadiki turned to see Vesto Slipher striding into her office.
“Slipher,” she said, not bothering to hide her surprise. “How did you get in here?”
“As you know, the IBC enjoys yellow-card access to the security codes within most of its subsidiaries,” the Muun said mildly, raising one eyebrow. “Surely that’s not a point of contention.”
“Not at all. I just assumed you were leaving us.” She put on a smile. “I’m pleased to see you’ve changed your mind.”
Slipher pursed his lips with distaste. “If it were up to me,” he said, “I would have left already. But my employer has asked me to stay on for a day or two while we get these … complications with the Gaming Commission sorted out.”
“I appreciate their concern.”
“Believe me,” Slipher said, “it’s not my idea. I don’t understand it myself, and I’d hardly choose to remain in this cesspool a moment longer than necessary.” The Muun nodded at her desk. “But you seem to have gotten Commissioner Chlorus into quite an uproar. The IBC is simply protecting their investment in Cog Hive Seven.”
“Of course.” Sadiki looked across the bank of holoscreens, taking in the full sweep of Cog Hive Seven, a view that she never found boring. The mess hall, the metal shop, the factory floor, all components of some infinite sociological experiment in galactic natural selection. Although she hadn’t ventured down among the inmates themselves since the prison had opened, she recognized almost all their faces and, in some cases, knew their daily routines better than they themselves did.
“Now,” she said, “if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a meeting with the guards.”
“So I see.” Slipher looked at the screen, where he could see the guards loitering in the ready room. “Staffing problems?”
“Simple housekeeping issues, really.” Sadiki tapped a command into the keypad at her desk, initiating remote access to the prison’s datacenter. Glancing over her shoulder, Slipher watched the monitors as the digitized three-dimensional ray-tracing of Cog Hive Seven took shape, complex arrays of intersecting green and red lines rearranging themselves outside the officers’ ready room. Seconds later, there was a distant, lurching groan from beyond the walls of her office.
“You’re reconfiguring the prison now?” the Muun asked. “But the next bout isn’t scheduled to start for two hours.”
“Simply changing some details around,” Sadiki said. “It’s one of the benefits of our station’s modular structure. There’s really nothing that can’t be rearranged.”
“I see.”
“I’m going down to the ready room.” She turned to the droid. “Keep an eye out for my brother.”
“Of course,” ThreeDee chirped.
“On second thought …” She paused to consider. “Perhaps you’d better join me after all. Just to be safe.”
“As you prefer.”
Without another glance at the screens or the Muun, Sadiki left the office and went down to meet the men.
34
HOOLIGANS
When the back panel of his cell slid open, Vas Nailhead assumed that he was dreaming.
Unlike most of the inmates here, Nailhead spent a good deal of his time alone in his cell. After a lifetime in various prisons around the galaxy, he had no real interest in mingling with the rest of the inmates. As purported head of the Bone Kings, he still continued his reign of terror—but with the Zabrak, Jagannath, in charge of both gangs now, Nailhead’s title had become largely symbolic.
Nothing excited him anymore. He still ate flesh, but he didn’t enjoy it like he used to. These days he spent most of his day brooding over fan mail and endorsement offers or lapsing in and out of shallow, unsatisfying sleep. More and more, he found himself thinking of his home planet, his family, the offspring he’d left behind. His fellow Bone Kings still swore an oath of loyalty to him, but secretly Nailhead wished that the algorithm would pit him against one of them, just to change things up.
He dreamed of leaving here, but like every inmate, he knew the only way out was through the floorboards.
He dreamed of the worm.
This time, when the prison had started shifting around him with the familiar rumble and clang of reconfig
uration, Nailhead simply assumed that he’d drowsed through the clarion call and that the next fight was about to begin. It had happened from time to time. He lifted his head and glanced around, wondering not quite idly if he might be selected for a match, perhaps against Jagannath himself in a battle that—if Nailhead won—might restore some of the excitement and glory to his life. But as consciousness cycled back to him, he realized that the door of his cell was still open, and there was none of the usual clamor of inmates returning to lockdown.
So what was happening?
That was when the panel slid open behind him.
“Nailhead,” a voice said.
Vas Nailhead stared at the Noghri stepping into his cell. It was Strabo, his sworn enemy, who until very recently had been head of the Gravity Massive. Yet here he was standing in front of Nailhead with a glint of bemused disbelief, as if Strabo himself couldn’t quite believe he’d come here.
“What’s this about?” Nailhead growled.
Strabo said nothing. And then Nailhead saw them, the other inmates, gathered behind the Noghri—a ragtag mixture of Bone Kings and Gravity Massive members standing side by side. The Massives were armed with their cable darts and melee weapons. The Kings were all carrying bones, sharpened and studded with metal tips and scraps, specialized modifications that they’d added.
“Somebody let us out,” Strabo said.
“What?”
“Reconfigured our cells. Opened up a back passageway for us.”
“Why?”
“Who knows?” Strabo shrugged. “All I know is, things used to be different around here. Maybe not great, but at least they made sense, you know what I mean? Before that red-skinned freak came in and changed everything …”
“Uh-huh.” Nailhead found himself nodding. “Back when we were in charge,” he ruminated, and glanced up at Strabo. “So you think …?”