Lockdown: Maul

by Star Wars

Plagueis.

  Darkness closed in, and when he awoke in the medbay, bathed in sweat, his fingers were gripping the cot, curled around the emptiness of the cylindrical shape that was not there.

  46

  HANGAR

  “Slipher, huh? How long you been with the IBC?”

  Vesto Slipher glanced at the prison guard standing in front of him, stationed just outside Cog Hive Seven’s main hangar bay. He didn’t particularly want to get into a lengthy conversation with the man, whose ID badge read Dawson, but at the moment he seemed to have little choice. The guard was bored, starved for conversation. He was balding, with a wispy gray mustache that stood in marked contrast to overgrown eyebrows whose wiry, rebellious hairs seemed to enjoy a prehensile life all their own.

  “I’ve been with the Banking Clan for a substantial period of time,” Slipher said, choosing for the moment to indulge the guard. “Since the bank has held the loan on your operation here. Hence my inspection of the entire facility.” And then, nodding at the hatchway that led to the loading bay: “Now, if you don’t mind?”

  “Hang on,” Dawson said, swiping his badge and tapping in an access code. The hatch slid open. “You want to watch your step in there. Landing crew’s prepping for a bunch of new meat showing up in the next hour or so, so you’re probably gonna have to make it fast.”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Just give a holler when you’re ready to come out,” Dawson said, and as Slipher stepped past him, he took hold of the Muun’s shoulder. “Oh, and hey.”

  Slipher stopped, a bit taken aback. “Yes?”

  “You catch that last fight?” A broad grin spread over the guard’s face. “Jagannath taking on that Weequay and his clawbird?”

  “I missed it, sadly.”

  “Sadly is right,” Dawson said. “Best match I’ve seen in a while. Won three hundred credits on that red-skinned rimmer.” He beamed. “I tell you, this might not be the safest job in the world, but you get some nice perks along the way.”

  A thought occurred to Slipher. “You’re a gambling man yourself, are you, Mr. Dawson?”

  “Me?” The guard sniggered. “You kidding? Does a sarlacc live in a pit?”

  “Perhaps a sporting man such as yourself could use a little extra money from time to time. I could make it worth your while.”

  Dawson regarded him suspiciously. “What are we talking about here?”

  “Nothing that would get you into any trouble, of course. Simply keeping certain information to yourself and performing an errand for me later, if you have time.”

  “What kind of errand?”

  “I’ll let you know when the time is right,” Slipher said, waving the question away. “How often do you receive supplies here? Weekly?”

  “Usually, yeah. They offload them with the new inmates.”

  “And the binary load-lifter droids that do the work, they’re all networked with the prison’s main datacenter?”

  “Well, yeah.” Dawson pushed one hand up beneath his cap to scratch his head. “I mean, we’ve got a couple of refurbished CLL-8s that the docking crew needs to access directly, but everything else gets run by remote from upstairs.” He squinted at Slipher. “Why?”

  “Just trying to get a better gasp on how things run day to day,” Slipher said, and stepped through the hatch. “Thank you, Officer. You’ve been very helpful. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh.”

  The cargo bay yawned out before him, a cavern made of steel.

  Moving through it, Slipher sidestepped the chief gantry officer and various members of the ground crew scurrying around to prepare for the incoming arrival, his breath emanating visibly from his mouth in a foggy cloud. The air in here had become significantly colder, with a pervasive chill that seemed to rise up from the steel floors. Buttoning his tunic around his neck, Slipher kept moving. Workers on either side glanced up in his direction, but none of them questioned his presence. He supposed that word had already spread among them that an IBC consultant was making an onsite audit, and such interference was nearly always met with a combination of indifference and anxiety.

  It took him almost five minutes to walk across the bay. The big binary load-lifters that Dawson had mentioned stood idly on the far side, two of them lined up against the far wall, three meters high, awaiting instructions. Neither of them looked like newer models, although Slipher himself had only limited experience with such units.

  He stopped in front of the less battered-looking droid, gazing up at its single photoreceptor.

  “Are you equipped with a standard analytic drive?”

  The load-lifter made a grunting noise in assent.

  “I’m expecting a special package with today’s shipment,” Slipher said. “It will be addressed to me directly—Vesto Slipher. Its contents are highly confidential and shall not be subject to any of the routine screening and security processes. I will require immediate notification when it arrives. Do you understand?”

  Another digitized grunt from the load-lifter.

  “You will keep this information to yourself and not report it to your dock supervisor,” Vesto said. “This command is authorized by IBC yellow card security variant 377055. Is that understood?”

  The droid straightened up immediately. Something clicked inside its circuitry and its photoreceptor brightened noticeably. The automated voice from the thing’s articulator drive sounded rusty but coherent.

  “Affirmative.”

  “Good,” Slipher said. “I’ll expect to hear from you soon.”

  47

  AIRBORNE

  Maul awoke to a prevailing sense of doom.

  Rising on the slow dark tide of consciousness, he felt remembrance of what he’d done settling over him like another form of gravity, heavier and more oppressive than the prison itself. For a moment he just lay there staring up at the medbay’s ceiling, its austere rectangles outlined by the recessed lighting of sleeping diagnostic equipment.

  Why was he still alive?

  The meaning of the dream was clear enough. He’d failed his Master, failed his mission. Ultimately he’d been betrayed, not by some foreign enemy, but by his own survival instincts. But what else could he have done? Dying here would have accomplished nothing.

  Still, he could not shake the feeling that this had been a test and he had failed.

  There was nothing left for him now.

  Thoughts began to organize themselves in his brain. He would need to get back to the transmitter in the morgue and contact his Master, to explain his position—if Sidious would even speak to him. In all likelihood the chain reaction of plausible deniability had already been initiated. His Master could very well have decided to leave him here to rot, or—

  All at once, Maul heard a noise above his head, a brisk whirring sound that he guessed was the surgical droid. The thing would be here to change out his IV tubing, to check the readings of the instruments wired to his skull and chest.

  Looking over, he saw something completely different: a clawbird perched on the end of the table, staring at him.

  Maul scowled at it. I killed you, bird. Ripped you to pieces. Left you broken on the cell floor next to your master. What are you still doing here?

  While he was looking at the thing, trying to work out the details of its miraculous resurrection, a second bird swept down and landed next to it, and then a third.

  Sitting up, Maul looked around.

  The room was filled with birds.

  With a faint croak, the first bird hopped from the end of the table to Maul’s leg, and then up to his shoulder, where it settled itself. He turned his head to gaze at it. At the knotted khipus wound around its legs.

  Of course.

  Their former master would have needed more than one bird to pick up the different weapons parts and drop off the payment. And now that Maul had killed him—

  He was their new master.

  Yanking the monitor wires and tubing away from his body, Maul tossed it all to the
floor and swung his legs around. Standing up, he discovered new strength that he hadn’t known was there.

  All around him, clawbirds seemed to sense this renewed purpose. They’d already begun to flap their wings, rising into the air, preparing to take flight.

  Maul nodded.

  “Let’s go.”

  Following the birds was easier this time.

  They flew just ahead of him in a black and rustling cloud, leading him through the main concourse, where the other inmates drew back in obeisance, stepping away, some of them even lowering their heads as if recognizing some newly coronated ruler.

  Maul pursued them downward through a labyrinth of passageways. When the path became narrow, the flock flattened itself out, and when it opened again, they spread again to fill the available space. They went on like that for what felt like a very long time, deeper down than he’d imagined the prison ever went, although it was difficult to gauge distances and depths in a world that was constantly changing.

  A stillness came over the world, a sense that he was venturing where few had gone.

  At last Maul stood before a closed door.

  The hatchway opened.

  “Jagannath,” a voice said from inside. “Welcome to the inner circle.”

  48

  WATCH THE THRONE

  The customized Ubrikkian space yacht dropped out of hyperspace, flanked by a complement of six Z-95 Headhunters, all of them materializing at once into the void immediately outside the short-range detection systems of Cog Hive Seven.

  For a moment, nothing seemed to move. The Minstrel-class yacht, christened Star Jewel, appeared to hang suspended almost lazily in space, as if evaluating its options. Opulent to the point of obscenity, the Jewel was as lethal as it was extravagant. Its optimized CL-14 hyperdrive motivator had made the journey from Hutt space through the Triellus trade route almost too swiftly for the purposes of its owner, who had expressed emphatic interest along the way in building an even greater appetite in the kell dragons he’d kept chained in his throne room. When they’d left Nal Hutta, the dragons were already hungry. By the time the hyperdrives settled into silence, the creatures were literally drooling on the throne room floor.

  Now, seated before the great transparisteel dome in all his vast, draconian majesty, Jabba Desilijic Tiure turned from his beloved dragons to gaze outward into the vast expanse of nothingness, none of which belonged to him, although he felt right at home here. It hadn’t been too terribly long ago—really just a few short centuries—since he’d relocated his base of operations to the B’omarr Monastery on Tatooine, and he was still young enough that such unexpected jaunts across the galaxy appealed to the daring side of his nature.

  Everything had gone as expected. There was no sign of the target that had brought them here, not yet, although there was no rush. The Jewel’s crew, the usual entourage of slave girls, carnivorous pets, and cutthroat enforcers (Trandoshans, Gran, and Gamorreans), made the final preparations for their own dark business here—an opportunity that Jabba, having come so far, had no intention of letting slip away.

  “Ramp down the turbolasers.” He activated the comlink to the Jewel’s bridge, where his pilot and second-in-command, Scuppa, had sequestered himself for the duration of the trip. “Power all systems down to silence. I want no detectable heat signature from the ion engines until my signal.”

  The order had the expected results: seconds later, Scuppa himself appeared in the throne room, expressing himself with characteristic bluntness. “I don’t like this.”

  “Scuppa, my boy, come closer and join the party.” Beckoning the pilot toward himself and the rabble surrounding him, Jabba grinned. “Surely you don’t think you’re better than us?”

  “I never said—”

  “Good. Squeamishness is for the weak.” Jabba waved him over, taking perverse delight in the pilot’s reluctance. It wasn’t that Scuppa had any qualms about mingling with the exotic concubines, hired muscle, or low-level hangers-on that were currently amusing themselves taunting the kell dragons; he simply wasn’t comfortable being away from the ship’s navigational system when they were this far off the trade route. After all, one never knew what trouble one might run into in the Outer Rim. “We won’t have to wait long now.”

  “It’s a mistake to power down the turbolasers,” Scuppa said. “If the prison barge gets the drop on us …”

  “They won’t.” Jabba reached down for the bowl beneath his hookah and drew out a Klatooine paddy frog, dropping the unfortunate creature live and squirming into his mouth. “I’ve already dispatched the Star Jewel’s guard to locate them before they find us.”

  “Another bad idea.” Scuppa’s lower lip reshaped itself into an even more displeased moue. “With the Headhunters gone, we’re already more exposed than ever.”

  “Relax, Scuppa. It’s almost time. Sit down, enjoy the show.”

  He gestured to the open area directly below his throne. The pilot remained standing in the open hatchway while two of Jabba’s bodyguards—a psychopathic Gamorrean war criminal and a dwarf Oskan blood eater—thrashed in mortal combat across the floor in front of where Jabba himself was seated, just outside the reach of the kell dragons. Within a few seconds, the blood eater had slashed open the Gamorrean’s face and latched on to him to feed. Already Jabba felt himself growing bored, restless in the way that all too often characterized the final moments before he allowed himself the full gratification of settling the business at hand.

  Today that business was revenge.

  Over the past three years, the credits that he’d lost to Iram Radique’s arms sales had metastasized from a minor annoyance to an intolerable insult. Even so, Jabba had been prepared to absorb a certain degree of indignity, at least temporarily—in his almost six hundred years of experience as a crime lord, he’d discovered that men like Radique rarely lasted long enough to bother with. Even when they took ingenious measures to protect themselves, like disappearing into the woodwork of Cog Hive Seven, as Radique had, it was simply a matter of time before they backed the wrong army, allied themselves with the wrong crime syndicate, sold guns to the wrong separatists. After a meteoric rise in reputation, they invariably disappeared without a trace, never to be spoken of again. Jabba, in his great leniency and mercy, had decided that he would stand by and allow Radique to fall victim to his own success. For the time being, he would continue to send his men into the prison as guards to discover the arms dealer’s identity, but nothing more.

  But things had changed on Cog Hive Seven.

  As of yesterday, they had changed very quickly indeed.

  Of course, Jabba hadn’t been personally attached to any of the lackeys he’d sent into the prison undercover—but to stand by and allow his own people to be slaughtered, ripped apart, and devoured by the inmates of the prison, while the prison’s female warden stood by grinning like a monkey lizard, was an affront to the very pillars of his authority.

  Watching his foot soldiers being destroyed, Jabba had made up his mind that if he couldn’t put Iram Radique out of business, then he would simply destroy Cog Hive Seven completely. Ultimately it would prove both simpler and far more gratifying. And he’d realized immediately how to do it.

  An alarm sounded on the control panel beside his throne, the signal of an incoming transmission from the pilot of one of the Headhunters.

  “Transport ship in sight,” the pilot reported back. “We’re closing in on her now.”

  Jabba saw Scuppa straighten up in anticipation, while down below the throne, the blood eater finished its meal to the scattered applause of the others. The Gamorreans and Trandoshans were as eager as he was to get on with their true business at hand.

  “Get to the armory,” Jabba told them. “Suit up.” He turned to Scuppa. “You should be relieved, my friend. I’m going to let you reactivate your turbolasers.”

  Within minutes, the prison transport barge Purge had drifted into attack range, although Jabba had ordered Scuppa to ignore any request from th
e Purge’s captain to identify himself. Failure to respond to the prison barge’s hailing frequency had resulted in the anticipated result—the barge had brought its own weapons systems online, under the assumption that the Star Jewel was a pirate vessel, or worse.

  “I’m speaking to the captain of the unidentified space yacht.” The voice of the Purge’s captain through the intercom sounded strained with impatience. “You are in a designated approach corridor for prison transport to Cog Hive Seven. Identify yourself at once or you will be fired on.”

  Scuppa’s voice, equally anxious, crackled through the Jewel’s comm-link. “Jabba, how much longer—”

  “Easy, friend.” Jabba waited, a smile writhing over his lips, saturating his entire face with the pleasure of impending attack. Silently counting off the seconds, he peered out the dome, yellow eyes gleaming with excitement as he gazed out on the Purge. Down below, the Trandoshans and Gamorreans had gone to the armory to suit up and prepare the weapons.

  The throne room was almost empty.

  Except for the dragons.

  49

  CABAL

  Maul’s first impression of the weapons shop was that it was more of a surgeon’s operating room than a workspace—a long, brightly illuminated theater of apparent sterility whose every surface seemed polished and clean. At the moment, however, he was more preoccupied with the identity of the one who’d beckoned him inside.

  “Come in,” the Muun said, still standing inside the open hatchway. “I just got here myself.” He smiled thinly. “We’ve both certainly earned a look around, to say the least.”

  Maul regarded him coldly. Whatever else he might have been, the individual standing in front of him clearly wasn’t a prisoner of the Hive. His uniform was IBC standard fiduciary garb, the green tunic and trousers exactly what one would expect of a galactic financial executive. The Banking Clan’s presence here in an illegal weapons operation in the middle of a prison raised more questions than it answered.