Lockdown: Maul

by Star Wars

  She stopped arguing, allowing the droid to lift her up so that she could lean on it. ThreeDee’s arms were surprisingly strong, and she was grateful for their stability, because the narcotic was working fast, already taking away whatever remained of her equilibrium. Limping, she started back toward the turbolift.

  “This way,” ThreeDee said. “I’ve already communicated with the GH-7. He’s waiting for you in medbay.”

  Sadiki blinked, trying to see clearly. In front of her, the lift was open and waiting. There was a rumbling behind her, a thunder that had nothing to do with the reconfiguration.

  She glanced back toward Jabba’s side of the hangar.

  Behind her, on the far side of the five-meter gap, newly released prisoners—the thirty or so inmates that she’d initially expected—were spilling out of the Purge’s berthing port, shrieking and howling at their unexpected freedom. Like Jabba’s entourage, they couldn’t get across the opening in the hangar floor, not yet. But it didn’t stop them from grabbing up blaster rifles and sidearms from the weapon crate on their side and opening fire in every direction.

  In the few seconds they’d been out, Sadiki saw that five of the inmates had already yanked loose the long berthing platform from the Purge’s port and were dragging it over to bridge the open space. It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes, she realized with a kind of dazed certainty, before they’d be scattering throughout the cargo bay and then upward into all levels of the prison.

  And unlike the current inmates, none of them had electrostatic charges implanted in their hearts yet.

  You’re losing control here. It’s all slipping away.

  “No,” she muttered aloud. “Not yet. Not like this.”

  But a profound heaviness had already settled over her, weighing her down. She was losing consciousness as well. Fading fast. Watching the prisoners pushing the gangway across the open gap, she felt her final thoughts rising back faintly like an echoing voice from the bottom of a deep and hollow well.

  How many more guards do I have left? Thirty? Forty at the most?

  The droid’s grip tightened on her arm. “I have already activated all emergency alarms.” ThreeDee was urging, lifting her now, carrying her forward. “Armed guards and support crews are on their way down now. They will stabilize the situation. Come along.”

  “We have to get down …,” Sadiki heard herself saying, “down below … to check on …”

  “Yes. Later.”

  She nodded foggily, the very final dregs of consciousness draining away. The last thing she saw before her eyes sank shut was the binary load-lifter that she’d been hiding behind earlier, making its way across the floor, toward the gap in the floor. With one great step, it breached the open shaft and made its way to the weapons crate. It reached down inside, oblivious to everything that was going on around it, and pulled out a medium-sized black box from the very bottom of the crate. Sadiki watched all of this with glazed fascination.

  A final dazed question swirled through her mind.

  What’s it doing in there?

  Then blackness.

  58

  THE DARK BACKWARD

  Maul was a hundred meters up the lift shaft, groping his way upward through unrelenting blackness, when the Hive started changing shape around him.

  Another reconfiguration? Now?

  He’d never been this deep inside the prison when the process had occurred. From here everything seemed to be happening faster, on a cataclysmic scale. It was like being trapped inside the works of the galaxy’s biggest and most deadly clock. Gaps opened in the walls, and the walls themselves broke apart and began to rotate and realign. Steel scaffolding swung and clanged on its hinges. Within seconds the entire infrastructure was buckling and oscillating in a thousand independently governed directions, flinging whole levels of itself at him, articulated vent shafts and automated platforms pivoting and swinging around him with mechanical abandon—as if this entire world, no longer content with simple reconfiguration, was determined to tear itself apart. From the left, a thick bundle of electrical conduits erupted out of a newly formed gap in the opposite walls. Maul ducked as the pipeline sailed by his scalp, slamming into the wall that had just risen off to his left. Another panel swung open to his right and extruded a meshwork of strut channels that swiveled through a shaft on the opposite side.

  He held on tight to the rungs he’d been climbing. The shaft wall that he’d been scaling just moments before jolted stammeringly into motion, clanking and scraping, rising at an angle and then turning on itself, twisting until it was perpendicular to its original orientation, and he was hanging from the rungs, his body dangling straight down above an open abyss whose depths he couldn’t gauge.

  It seemed that Warden Sadiki had lost patience and decided to conduct the next bout without him.

  Maul stared straight down. An updraft of air rose from the void. Far below, hundreds of meters down, a series of levels dilated open like the valves and chambers of some colossal mechanical heart at the bottom of the shaft, and for an instant, he thought he glimpsed it—the throbbing turbines at the very center of the prison, the great gnashing driveshaft upon which all the clockwork turned.

  At last, with a final clattering slam, the prison fell still again.

  Maul hung there, waiting.

  The silence came next.

  It was suddenly very cold in the updraft, and he was aware that his shoulders were aching, that he couldn’t hang on here forever. But he no longer had the slightest sense of direction—only that Cog Hive Seven’s artificially generated gravitational field was already sucking him irrevocably down toward the void, where the gears at the heart of this place would no doubt grind him to a paste.

  He reached out with his feelings, trying to get a sense of where he needed to go, the nearest exit, even the nearest wall.

  Something brushed against the back of his neck, soft and sticky.

  Looking up, he saw that the open spaces around him were webbed with a filmy, gossamer substance, dangling in threads. At one point the strands might have been nests, but when the prison had reconfigured itself, they’d been torn apart, and now they rippled in the currents of air rising from below.

  Maul narrowed his eyes. The webworks twitched and seethed, bundles of tiny living things, their white bodies squirming in the silken strands. They looked like—

  All at once, the rungs in his hands began to vibrate.

  Maul gripped them tighter, feeling the entire surface shaking over his head. Unlike the mechanized uproar that he’d just experienced, this was a singular, living presence, slithering its way through the steel panel that had once been a wall, the one from which he was currently dangling. Its weight caused the support armature itself to sag and buckle below it.

  The Syrox. The Wolf Worm of Cog Hive Seven.

  The clamor must have roused it, brought it here, where it would have to be reckoned with.

  It was already very close. Maul realized that the Hive’s most recent reconfiguration had probably thrust him directly into its nesting grounds, where it spawned its sucklings, such as they were. Had the Warden done this on purpose? Was this to be his next fight after all?

  Accidental or on purpose, it hardly mattered. He could feel the thing itself passing through the tunnel directly above him in an oozing, peristaltic wave.

  Maul squinted straight ahead into the darkness, focusing until he could make out the vague shape of what he hoped was another wall, fifteen meters in front of him. Clutching the rungs overhead, he began to work his way hand over hand to the far wall. He had no sense of what he’d find there exactly, only that he couldn’t linger directly underneath the weight of this thing above him, which felt like it might tear through the passageway overhead and come spilling down on top of him at any second.

  Above him, the repulsive weight of the worm slithered along at the exact same pace, as if it sensed his proximity. Maul knew where it was because of the way the groaning steel protested louder than ever, bol
ts and rivets popping free now, whole panels bulging and snapping out of place.

  What do you want?

  The thing paused again, searching.

  Stretching out with his feelings, Maul heard a tangle of voices exploding in his mind, hundreds of them stitched together in an irrational patchwork of agony and confusion.

  Inmates.

  All the ones that the worm had devoured since its arrival here. Shrieks. Mad, inarticulate laughter. Oaths of vengeance never to be exacted. Pleas for mercy never to be granted. It was as if the door to an asylum had been flung open inside his skull, allowing a wave of incoherent screams, individual cries, and desperate fragmented phrases into his mind.

  —swear I will—

  —kill you and rip your karking face off it—

  —hurts me it’s eating my—

  —skin when it burns you can’t—

  —save me this place is like—

  —blackness, it’s a pit, I can’t—

  —run anymore there’s no end to this pain when it’s—

  —bleeding me dry I can’t feel my hands and I’m—

  —blind my eyes are rotting in my—

  —skull what’s that thing in my—

  —brains we shall eat—

  —WE SHALL EAT—

  Maul reached the far wall and swung himself forward. In the darkness, his feet found a narrow toehold at the edge of a scaffolding perhaps three centimeters wide, but sufficient to steady his weight.

  Pressing his back to the wall, arms outstretched for balance, he stood there for a long ten-count as the worm above him slithered slowly out of range, hauling its albino bulk along behind him with the unhurried determination of a thing that knew its ultimate role here, and saw no need to rush.

  He let out a breath and took a closer look at where he was standing. The scaffolding where he stood wrapped itself around an oblong recessed platform that had recently been formed by three intersecting walls, each one on hinges. He pressed his weight tentatively against them. None of them looked particularly solid.

  Enough of this.

  Kicking the panel in the middle, he watched as it swung open to reveal a low, arched doorway through which a faint orangish yellow glow emanated, hazy in the cold metallic dust.

  He swung himself inside it and hit the floor running.

  59

  SYROX

  The worm knew about darkness.

  Blind from birth, void of consciousness in any traditional sense of the word, it did not know that it was also called the Syrox. Nor did it have any sense of how far it had traveled from home. On its native planet, Monsolar, where its species had been revered for thousands of years, it had been worshipped as a god and dreaded like the plague, its silken bag-tents clustering in the high branches and filling the nightmares of the local tribes.

  For generations the elders and priests had spoken in hushed and reverent tones of the swollen, pale Wolf Worm that lived in the remote jungles. Their culture was embroidered with the graven images and death songs of a thing whose hive mind was informed by all the spirits of those it had devoured, their souls trapped for an eternity of undying torment, while fueling its unending hunger.

  The worm knew about hunger.

  Given the dread that it evoked among those who knew it best, its origins were ignominious in comparison. Each year, its newly hatched pupae swarmed in their countless trillions within the silken treetop bagtents. Growing, they soon fell from the nests into Monsolar’s unfiltered rivers, streams and swamps, destined to colonize the stomachs and intestinal tracts of anyone foolish enough to drink the unfiltered water. Gestation time could be slow, sometimes years, as the worm grew stronger in the bowels of its host.

  It was in the small intestine of an otherwise forgotten inmate and Monsolarian named Waleed Nagma that the Wolf Worm had first arrived at the Hive, three years ago. Nagma had died unremarkably, seconds into his very first fight, but the Syrox larvae inside his gut—only a few millimeters long at the time—had survived. It had, in fact, already absorbed Nagma’s consciousness in the few seconds immediately following his body’s death, so he became the first of what would eventually become hundreds of tenants trapped inside the Wolf Worm’s mind.

  Soon there would be more. So many more.

  As the Wolf Worm found a home here, fattening its body on the blood of dead inmates, its mind had become a chamber of horrors, a prison within the prison where all the sentient and nonsentient beings that it had eaten were doomed to measure out an eternity by the yardstick of endless torment. It had spawned countless larvae of its own, and they had continued to breed down here, hungering and growing larger, but none had ever approached the size of the Wolf Worm itself.

  Now, still as sightless as it had been on the day it had hatched, the worm was aware of its own existence only as a vast and endlessly renewing collection system of screams and agony. It thought of itself—in the rare moments that it thought at all—in the collective sense, not as “I” but as “we,” not as “mine” but as “ours.” Sleepless and restless, it knew nothing but the unending torment of those whose blood had fortified its continuous, slithering tour of these reconfiguring shafts and tunnels.

  And hunger.

  Always hunger.

  60

  CLOSING TIME

  “Eogan.”

  The boy looked at his father, sprawled on the bunk of his cell. It was the first time the old man had spoken since the boy had carried him back from the morgue. His voice, though weak, was surprisingly clear.

  “He’s coming.”

  “Who is?”

  “Radique.” With what seemed like tremendous effort, Artagan Truax lifted himself up onto his elbows and faced his son. “Coming … to … kill me.”

  “But I thought you saved his life.”

  “Doesn’t matter.” The old man shook his head. “Since I helped the Zabrak summon the Bando Gora here …”

  “But—”

  “Quiet, boy.” Artagan’s voice grew firm, edged with a vestige of its former strength. “There’s something else … I need to tell you. Something I’ve never said before.”

  Eogan waited.

  “Before you were born … your mother and I were … both part of the Bando Gora. Thought they held the secrets of the galaxy. It was the wrong road, but … we didn’t know it at the time. Even when …” Artagan took in a shuddering breath. “Even after she died. I stayed with them. You were just a baby. There was no way out.”

  There was silence in the cell.

  “The day came, sixteen years ago … I heard them plotting to kill Radique. To ambush him, hijack his weapons shipment. Radique was powerful, even then. I saw my chance for both of us. I thought if I broke with the Gora at that moment … saved Radique’s life … earned his trust … then at least you’d have an advocate, somebody to watch over you …”

  Artagan broke off into a coughing fit, then gradually regained his voice.

  “At first the plan worked. When the shooting started, I had a ship ready. We got away with Radique. He left us at the first spaceport—promised he’d be in touch. To repay his debt. But …” Artagan drew in a sharp, painful breath and released it. “I didn’t hear from him for years. We traveled … you and me. Holding fights for money. I knew it couldn’t last forever. Kept waiting to hear back. Finally, years later, a message arrived. It was him. Told me that he could help us. Here …”

  “So you brought me back,” Eogan said. “To this place.”

  The old man nodded. “When we first got here, I sought him out. And I found him—or he found me. Within the first month, he made contact. Offered me a job helping him build weapons here. He offered me protection. For myself, and for you. All I had to give him … were my eyes.” Artagan shook his head. “I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t be blinded for him. So he disappeared again. Until now. When I sent for … the Bando Gora. And now. He’s coming … to finish me.”

  Eogan stood up.

  “I won’t let him.”


  “Doesn’t matter. I’m … already dead anyway.”

  “Not like this,” Eogan said, taking his father’s hand and squeezing it.

  “Sorry, boy,” a voice said behind him. “But it’s going to be exactly like that.”

  Eogan turned around. A half dozen inmates—humans and non-humans alike—were standing there blocking the entryway. It took less than a second for Eogan to register that none of them had eyes. How had they found their way up here?

  Then he saw the birds. One of them opened its beak and let out a shrill, croaking caw.

  The birds had led them here.

  “Mr. Radique sent us,” the blind man said. He was clutching two long shafts of sharpened steel in both hands, long and gleaming like a pair of homemade machetes. All the others were similarly armed. “To deal with the old man for summoning the Bando Gora to the Hive.” He shook his head. “Our actions have consequences, don’t they? Just as all rivers lead to the sea, their paths may differ, but the end result is never in doubt.”

  “No.” Eogan stepped toward them. “You can’t—”

  The blind man loosed a keening shriek and flung himself at Eogan, both arms spinning. Eogan ducked and lunged for the man’s knees, and felt a wave of muscle slam into his cheekbone, driving him to the floor. His thoughts sucked down a star-shot funnel of half-conscious agony.

  Feet were trampling him, stomping him down. From somewhere on the other side of the cell, his father was trying to talk, struggling to make himself heard. Eogan put up his hand. It was hopeless.

  “Father, no!”

  Lifting his head, Eogan saw them surrounding his father, swinging the blades down onto him, flinging up great gaudy fans of blood as they hacked away at what remained of his body. They attacked like animals, as if their lack of sight had somehow blinded them to any sort of human mercy.

  In the midst of it all, the Zabrak’s words comparing him to his father echoed through Eogan’s mind: You don’t have his heart … you’ll never be half the man he is.

  Eogan shook his head.