Lockdown: Maul
Page 23
“Do you ever stop talking?”
Slipher sniffed, seeming only moderately offended. “I was merely explaining how I ended up in this position.”
Maul kept his arms at his sides, but his fists were already clenched. Visions of leaving Slipher here in the turbolift with a broken neck were growing steadily more vivid in his mind.
“Your position here is hopeless, you know,” Slipher told him. “Even if you were successful in bringing them here, Radique will never do business with the Bando Gora.”
“We’ll see,” Maul said.
“And of course you know that Komari Vosa is in charge of the Gora now.” He tilted his chin slightly, raising the witch in his hand. “You are familiar with Vosa’s background, are you not?”
“More underworld scum. The galaxy’s thick with it.”
“Not quite. Vosa is the high priestess of the cult. I’m told that she maintains a fortified citadel on Kohlma and uses narcotics and advanced mind control to manipulate an entire army of operatives and assassins to do her bidding.” And then, almost as an afterthought: “And of course she’s still extremely lethal with a lightsaber.”
Maul shot the Muun a look of thinly veiled shock. “What?”
“Oh yes, she’s a former Jedi,” Slipher said casually. “Surely, given your background, I’m not telling you anything that you don’t already know.”
At first Maul said nothing. At his sides, his hands had already balled into fists, squeezing tightly until they began to tremble. “What else do you know of her?”
“Who, Vosa?” The Muun feigned innocence. “Oh, very little, I’m afraid. Her nearly psychopathic levels of aggression apparently prevented her from becoming a true Jedi Knight. Nonetheless, she joined a Jedi task force to stop the Bando Gora’s activities on Baltizaar.” His expression darkened. “Unfortunately, the mission proved a catastrophe. The cult abducted Vosa and dragged her off to the burial moon of Kohlma. What happened next …” The Muun shuddered theatrically. “Well, by all accounts, they tortured her to the very brink of madness—the point where she embraced the dark side of the Force, slaughtered those who had kidnapped her, and became the true leader of the Bando Gora.” Slipher glanced back at Maul. “She started out as a Jedi, however. Is that significant?”
Maul said nothing.
At last the lift came to a halt.
If they’re waiting to take us, Maul thought, this is where it will happen.
But as the doors slid open on Cog Hive Seven’s hangar bay, there were no guards waiting there to take him into custody, no armed corrections officers lying in ambush. The only activity in the bay came from a small detail of tactical landing technicians who were too busy wrestling with a pile of pallets and skids on the opposite side to take much notice of them.
“Relax,” Slipher said. “The landing techs aren’t armed. And they don’t carry dropboxes, so they can’t trigger the charges in your heart.”
“I wasn’t concerned.” Maul stepped out into the bay. The space was huge, erratically strewn with packing debris and empty shipping crates waiting to be returned on the next flight out. Across the open space, he saw the binary load-lifter that Slipher had spoken of, although the immediate mission seemed far from his thoughts.
She’s a former Jedi.
Had it not occurred to his Master to tell him of this? Or had its withholding been part of the larger challenge that he’d come here to face?
The realization that his mission on Cog Hive Seven would culminate in confrontation with a Jedi, albeit one whose powers had been corrupted into a life of organized crime and cult-based lunacy, plunged a dagger of bitterness deep into Maul’s brain. It would not be Vesto Slipher that Komari Vosa would be facing when she and the Bando Gora arrived here, Maul decided. Certainly his own Master intended for Maul himself to dispatch the Jedi scum personally.
Was that the true test?
Still seething, he slipped quickly across the hangar bay, moving through the shadows, leaving the Muun behind.
“What are you doing?” Slipher hissed as he hurried to keep pace. “You need to stay with me.”
“It’s been too long since I’ve killed something,” Maul said. “Be careful, or it might be you.”
“Don’t be a fool. Our mission here requires both stealth and my active participation, and you know it.”
Maul silenced him with a glare—but not just a glare. For the slightest of moments, he allowed himself to reach out with the Force. The Muun faltered in his steps, mouth opening just wide enough to emit a glottal clicking cough, taken aback by the invisible vise grip of pressure taking hold around his neck and chest, choking as he labored to draw breath.
Maul found the sharp expression of shock and fear on the banker’s face only mildly gratifying, given these extenuating circumstances. He kept Slipher there for a split second, prolonging the sight of the Muun’s eyes bulging in their sockets. Then, leaning forward, he spoke in a whisper.
“Komari Vosa,” he said quietly, “is not the only one with the skills you mentioned. You would do well to remember that.”
“Wh-what?” Slipher’s face tightened in an ecstasy of disbelief. “You …?”
Maul squeezed harder. Perhaps it was the explicit mention of the Jedi, or simply his own inability to hold back any longer, but suddenly all he wanted was to snap the neck of this insect and finish what he’d started. Only then did he realize the sheer magnitude of his transgression—a betrayal of his purpose here, the one thing that he’d sworn not to do.
Releasing Slipher, pushing him away, he pivoted and approached the larger of the binary load-lifters, stepping around behind the droid to avoid being seen by the hangar’s crew members, then cast a glance back at the Muun. “Is this the one?”
“Y-yes.” Slipher reached up and touched his throat, still badly shaken. He kept his distance, eyeing Maul as one might regard a vicious animal whose true nature had suddenly become abundantly evident. “I have to give my authorization first.”
“Then do it. We’ve wasted enough time.”
Slipher turned to face the droid’s photoreceptors, looking deeply grateful to have something else upon which to focus his attention. “IBC yellow card security variant 377055,” he said. “Voice-verify consultant Vesto Slipher.”
“Verifying,” the droid echoed back, joints creaking with a series of soft hydraulic noises as it straightened up. “Command prompt?”
“Access analytical upgrade subroutine 1188. I’m here to pick up a package.”
“Accessing.” Another muffled hissing noise. “Input data format?”
The CLL unit muttered something in binary that came out sounding like a series of mismatched tones ending with a defeated electronic gurgle. Then its photoreceptors went dim and it dropped both of its flat spatulate arms to the floor with a sharp metallic clang that rang out through the hangar like blasterfire.
“You!” On the far side of the hangar, Maul saw the crew of cargo technicians turning from the empty stack of packaging cartons to stare across the open space at them. “Identify yourselves. What are you doing down here?”
“Don’t come any closer,” Slipher called back. “He’s going to kill me!”
The crew members froze and drew back. Glancing quickly at Maul, the Muun threw his hands into the air.
“My name is Vesto Slipher. I’m a field support analyst for the IBC.” He cast a fearful glance at Maul. “This prisoner, Inmate 11240, abducted me from my quarters and brought me down here as a hostage. He’s trying to escape on the freight barge when it arrives. Alert the warden.” Then, casting his eyes at Maul once more, the banker couldn’t seem to repress a small smile. “I suppose you ought to have killed me when you had a chance.”
“Who says it’s too late now?” Maul asked.
“Tell me how to fix the lightsabers,” Slipher murmured, “and I’ll do whatever I can with Warden Blirr to see that you walk away from all of this. Otherwise there is nothing that I can do to guarantee your safety.”
<
br /> Maul felt the space around him closing up like a trap. “Where’s the geological compressor?”
“It must not have arrived yet.” Raising his voice again, Slipher called out to the men across the bay. “You men, stop wasting time! Hurry, before he—”
“Shut up.” Reaching outward, Maul snatched the blue witch from the Muun’s grasp, then turned to the gathered crew members, who were staring at him from across the bay. Slipher’s moronic outburst hadn’t left him much to work with, but it was enough.
“Don’t come any closer,” Maul said. “Stay right where you are.”
“Inmate 11240,” one of them shouted back, “what’s that in your hand?”
“It’s a plasma detonator.” Maul held up the blue witch just high enough that they could see it, raising his voice to be heard across the hangar. “High-grade industrial munitions.”
“Doesn’t look like any detonator I’ve ever seen.”
“Take another step and you’ll see all you need of it,” Maul said. “Who wants to be first?”
“Don’t be a fool,” Slipher murmured. “You can’t—”
Maul shoved him away, in the direction of the other men. “You’ve done enough.”
“You’re cutting me loose?” The Muun reared back, incredulous. “That’s insane. They’ll kill you in seconds!”
“I’ll take my chances.” Jamming the blue witch in his pocket, where its glow could be seen through the fabric of the uniform, Maul turned back to the load-lifter that stood behind them. Taking hold of the thing’s manipulator arm, he swung himself upward onto its main control console.
“Inmate 11240, what are you doing?”
Maul ignored them, focusing his attention on the load-lifter. The thing’s processor cowling was a single metal plate, and he pried it open, popped the bolts, and yanked it off to expose its central processor. Thanks to Trezza’s instruction back on Orsis, he’d had some experience slicing into the basic motivator drives of labor droids. They all were built relatively the same.
“Inmate 11240—”
“Stay back.” Working instinctively, he found the thing’s upgraded cognitive drive and isolated the wiring that he needed to reprogram it manually. It wouldn’t cause the load-lifter to do anything more than malfunction, but right now a malfunction was all he needed.
The droid lurched forward, jerking its right leg up, manipulator arms raised above its head. The load-lifter’s great gyro-stabilized joints slammed past Slipher as it stormed headlong across the open landing deck, instantly colliding with a stack of shipping cartons.
Crates fell. Pallets crashed. Maul had already jumped back down, landing on the floor in a tuck and roll, as one of the load-lifter’s enormous flat manipulators swung in a huge arc, upending a ten-meter-high stack of pallets and skids in front of it. The empty skids tumbled, crashed, and splintered in every direction.
Then it pivoted and started off in the direction of the loading crew. The men scattered, most of them heading for cover while the deck supervisor ran for the communications center overlooking the cargo hold. Across the hold, blue strobes began swirling on both sides, splashing the walls with light, as the load-lifter pivoted and began scooping up what it had knocked over, only to dump the pallets on the opposite side of where it stood.
“Fool,” Slipher’s voice sneered behind him, and Maul glanced back over his shoulder to see that the Muun had already gotten to his feet. “Did you actually believe you could abandon me here?” He thrust out his hand. “Give me back the blue witch.”
Maul said nothing, but it didn’t matter. The banker was talking again, caught up in his own outrage and oblivious to the load-lifter advancing behind him.
“My intellect is vastly superior to yours in every imaginable capacity,” Slipher sneered. “Even if there was any chance that you could—”
Those were his last words. All at once, from less than a meter behind him, the load-lifter’s flat manipulator arm came arcing upward. It caught Slipher at neck level at a perfect forty-five-degree angle, severing his head neatly in one easy slice and sending it spiraling through the air. The entire action was almost silent. For a split second, his decapitated body seemed to hang there on its own, and then it crumpled to the floor of the hangar bay as the load-lifter’s right foot came down on top of the body, crushing it beneath the full tonnage of its weight.
It was an unceremonious death for Vesto Slipher, arguably one of the IBC’s brightest young minds, dispatched without fanfare by a machine as brainless as he was brilliant. And in the end, no one in the known galaxy seemed particularly to notice.
Maul, for his part, didn’t even bother looking back. Through the chaos, on the far side of the bay, he saw the lift that he and Slipher had come from. He could make it from where he was in less than five seconds as long as none of the loading crew had blasters, which he doubted.
He ran.
52
PURGE
“I don’t like it.”
The prison barge Purge’s newly appointed navigator and second-in-command, Bissley Kloth, was at the bridge, still engaged in the process of hailing the gaudily arrayed space yacht that had positioned itself directly in front of him, when the entire console erupted in a storm of proximity alarms.
Kloth snapped them off briskly, taking control of the situation with a quiet confidence that belied his age. At twenty-two, he was still a young man, but he’d already been working aboard the Purge for five years, since he was old enough to hire on for a full share. Hauling convicts and local scum out to various detainment stations and galactic penal colonies including Cog Hive Seven wasn’t the easiest way to earn a living. Yet he’d quickly gotten used to it—most of it, anyway—including the occasional unwanted encounter with tramp vessels adrift in the Outer Rim. And although the Purge was really no more than a garbage barge retrofitted with holding cells and a makeshift medbay, Kloth had a vision of one day transforming it into a floating prison of its own, one in which he might even someday be in charge. He would be Warden Kloth.
Today the Purge was carrying forty-six inmates, human and nonhuman alike.
“Mr. Kloth.” That was the Purge’s captain, Wyatt Styrene, limping across the bridge toward him, his pale blue eyes alight with reckless enthusiasm. A former smuggler himself, Styrene knew these uncharted systems as well as anyone Kloth had ever met, and he’d never run from a fight. “What’s the word?”
“Proximity alarms from that space yacht.” Kloth nodded, indicating the luxury ship that had still not responded to their call. “I’ve got it under control. It’s not—”
A sudden volley of explosions slammed into the Purge, rocking them hard enough that Kloth had to grab the console in front of him and hang on. Checking the screens before him, he saw for the first time what he’d somehow overlooked until it was too late—an attack swarm of Z-95 Headhunters closing in from below them, firing on their underside in a steady volley of concussion missiles. The alarms screamed.
“Where did they come from?” Kloth shouted, unaware for the moment that he was asking the question aloud. Of course the Headhunters had been the ones that had triggered the proximity alarms he’d foolishly attributed to the space yacht in front of them—a ruse that he couldn’t believe he’d fallen for, although Styrene’s expression seemed untroubled. In fact, Kloth could’ve sworn the old pirate had a wry grin on his face.
“They want to tussle, we’ll give ’em a tussle.” Without glancing back at Kloth, he powered up the full retinue of the Purge’s weapons suite. “Go secure our cargo, Mr. Kloth.”
“Captain?”
“Go on, I’ve got the bridge. Besides—” He gestured toward the hatch. “It’s almost feeding time for them, innit?”
Kloth strode quickly back through the Purge, nodding at the guards on either side as he opened the hatchway leading to the vessel’s main hold.
“Everything secure down here?”
“Locked down,” the guard shouted back. “What’s going on topside?”
“Tell that to them,” the guard said, pointing down into the hold, where the Purge had been outfitted with its containment cells.
Kloth could already hear the convicts down below, some of them screeching, shouting, or demanding answers in the near-darkness. Typically the inmates they brought out to Cog Hive Seven had lapsed into a silent stupor of boredom by this point in the voyage, but the blasterfire had stirred them up, and Kloth heard them calling out to find out if the ship was under attack.
“I’m going down to check the main cargo hold,” Kloth told the guard. “Who else is down there?”
“Carrier and Hayes.”
Two good men, Kloth thought, or at least battle-tested. He nodded, already ducking forward. “Tell the captain that if I’m not back up in five minutes—”
Thwam!
Something broadsided the vessel from amidships, heavier than a turbolaser, almost like they’d been struck by an asteroid, or another ship. Kloth was already halfway down the gangway amid the holding cells when it struck, and the impact pitched him back into the console wall behind him. It was followed by an unfamiliar high-pitched grinding noise from somewhere below, like an oscillating blade shearing through steel.
The guard beside him hoisted his blaster, checking the cartridge, his face drawn tight with nerves. “What the kark is that?”
“It feels like—” Kloth began, and the words snapped off in his throat.
It feels like we’re being boarded.
Seconds later, from down below, he heard it.
The voices of the prisoners had fallen absolutely silent.
53
IS THERE A GHOST