Lockdown: Maul

by Star Wars

  Whether this was a mask or actually its face, Kloth had no intention of sticking around to find out, particularly as it became clear that the thing hadn’t come alone.

  The hole was full of floating blue eyes.

  They were making their way up into the Purge, and now Kloth saw that he had nowhere to go—and that, in all the time he’d had since waking up on the floor outside the containment cells, he’d failed to secure a weapon for himself, and now it was too late.

  The things moved toward him like an army of the dead, with terrible determination and strength. Kloth took a step back and stumbled over the body of a guard, failing to catch himself before toppling backward against something sharp and angular. When he looked up again, the skull-faced things had surrounded him.

  “Where is he?” a female voice asked.

  Kloth looked up at her. The woman in front of him had a shock of pure white hair that seemed to bristle straight upward from her forehead, which only accentuated the expression of dark intensity etched deeply across her face. She had weird, chemical-yellow eyes, the color of a dying, toxic sun. Under other circumstances, Kloth thought he might have found her striking, even beautiful, although right now he was sure—absolutely positive, in fact—that she could have murdered him without a qualm.

  “Who?”

  “The one I’ve come to meet.”

  “I don’t … I don’t know who that is,” Kloth managed. “I don’t know who you are.” Staring at her, he fought a wild, irrational impulse to try to explain how all of this must have been some terrible mistake, and how this woman and her skull-faced army must have been in the wrong place entirely. “This is just a prison barge, I’m only the navigator, I don’t know—”

  Crack! The slap across his face knocked him back to reality.

  “I am Komari Vosa,” the female said, “and this is the Bando Gora. We’ve come to acquire a weapon.”

  65

  AS BELOW, SO ABOVE

  “Which way is it?” Eogan asked.

  Maul didn’t answer. For the past five minutes they’d been heading down a concourse that had looked familiar, but the reconfiguration had changed everything. For all he knew, it wasn’t over, and the prison was going to continue rearranging itself until it ripped itself to pieces.

  Maybe that’s the whole idea.

  He threw back his head and made a sharp cawing sound, a sound that he’d now heard frequently enough to be able to mimic with some accuracy.

  “What are you—”

  Maul held up his hand for silence, cocked his head, and listened. The sound came back to him, an imperfect echo of the shrill cry.

  “Duck your head.”

  “What?” Eogan frowned. “Why—”

  A sudden flurry of activity came bursting down the corridor. Maul crouched down as a great dark cloud of clawbirds swept through the length of the corridor in an almost solid wave, cawing and shrieking as they came.

  He tucked the package under his arm and ran after the birds with the boy at his heels. The flock flew even faster as a collective unit, spiraling and diving downward through the newly reconfigured passageways of the lowermost levels, swirling like smoke through the chambers of some great mechanical nautilus.

  Maul could see where they were going.

  It was coming now, very near.

  He saw the door ahead of him. Watched the birds funneling down through it.

  Maul leapt through, the boy just behind him.

  They landed back in a familiar place: the weapons shop where he’d stood not long before. Coyle was still there, his rodent nose twitching anxiously. The blaster that he’d used to kill Dakarai Blirr was still gripped tightly in his hands.

  “Jagannath,” the Chadra-Fan said, eyeing the package under Maul’s arm. “We were beginning to worry you hadn’t been successful in your quest, weren’t we?” He glanced back over his shoulder, where a tall figure stood behind the counter.

  The tall man stepped into the light.

  “The outcome was never in doubt,” he said, and gazed at Maul. “Greetings, Jagannath. I’m Iram Radique.”

  66

  HUSH

  In the end, Sadiki had no choice.

  Yes, the escape pod was prepped and waiting for her. FourDee was already there, and perhaps Dakarai, too, if they’d found him. Communications were failing fast. Whole relay sections were going down. Radio transmissions had already been reduced to static.

  As much as she needed to get out of here, Sadiki knew that she had to go back to her office one last time. There was a final detail that needed taking care of.

  She stepped through the hatchway and paused long enough to look across the office. Even now, in the midst of everything that was happening, Sadiki felt a creator’s wistful appreciation for the prison: the project that she and her brother had designed together, the algorithm into which Dakarai had breathed life, and the sheer elegance of the plan itself. It had been almost perfect. Only the persistent rumors of the existence of Iram Radique—that incorporeal galactic bogeyman whose base of operations was allegedly somewhere inside the prison—had marred the otherwise perfect machine of money and violence that was the Hive.

  Not that it mattered now. The experiment had served its purpose. Soon everyone inside would be dead. Then she would head for the escape pod to depart with Dakarai, leaving Cog Hive Seven to tear itself to pieces. There would be other opportunities, other worlds.

  Tapping in the command for inmate population control, Sadiki watched as a long list of digits scrolled across the screen in numeric order, each one representing an active prisoner here. There were a little over four hundred of them currently—the scum and filth of the galaxy, none of which she ever wanted to run into again.

  She selected the entire list and clicked a single command: Terminate.

  One by one, numbers began to disappear off the top of the list.

  For a moment she sat there, watching them vanish. It would require some time to complete, she realized—she didn’t want to overload the system at this critical juncture, and she would rather be sure that every single inmate was dead before she ventured down below again. Besides, the process wouldn’t take too long. Perhaps only thirty minutes or so, until it reached the highest numbers.

  She was rising to leave the datacenter when something inside the wall moved.

  Stepping back, pushing her chair out of the way, Sadiki gazed up uncertainly at the wall in front of her, above the monitor displays. At this point her sensibilities were so keenly attuned to the screens and keyboards and numbers that the unexpected presence of something living, rustling, so close to her caused the small hairs on the back of her neck to prickle.

  Her thoughts returned to the prison’s most recent reconfiguration, initiated in her desperate last-ditch bid for self-preservation. It had been a drastic move, and if she had planned on spending any more time aboard Cog Hive Seven, it would have been catastrophic. Instead, she simply didn’t care. Except—

  Except that it had resulted in some unwelcome alterations in the prison’s infrastructure. Subtle, nagging changes. For example, staring at the wall in front of her, Sadiki noticed a slight gap, perhaps two or three centimeters wide, where the pressure-treated plates hadn’t joined together properly. It was a small thing, but—

  Something was moving inside the gap.

  Retreating swiftly from it, Sadiki walked across the chamber and reached into the wall cabinet on the opposite side, pulling out the KYD-21 blaster pistol that she’d stashed there and had never actually planned on using. This particular model, fabricated in hadrium alloy with a guardless trigger, was one of her personal favorites. It had heavy-duty stopping power despite its size, and its cool ridged handgrip felt good in her grasp.

  Sadiki pointed it at the gap between the walls.

  “Who’s there?” she said aloud, suddenly disliking the sound of her own voice. The quivering of her diaphragm gave it a kind of quailing tremor that she’d always found so repellent in others.

>   A wild possibility flicked through her mind, and she took a step closer to the gap between the wall plates.

  “Dakarai?” she said loudly. “Is that you?” Extending her arm, she tightened her finger on the trigger. “Jagannath? Have you found your way back up? You’ll regret it, I guarantee that.”

  She listened but heard nothing. Closer now, cocking her head slightly, Sadiki leaned in toward the narrow opening and held her breath.

  She waited.

  All at once something huge and white exploded from the wall, unfathomably large and faster than she could see, lashing outward toward her face, striking straight for her eyes. It was so big that Sadiki’s first impression was that the wall itself had somehow burst to life in front of her.

  Then her vision disappeared in a liquid swarm of reddish black, and a jagged corkscrew of pain went curving down to the very base of her skull, twisting down her spine to encompass her entire body.

  Sadiki screamed in pain and fell to her knees, then scrambled backward across the floor. Her finger squeezed the trigger, firing off shots at random, and behind the cloak of blindness, she heard metal screeching and twisting around her, as if something bigger than she’d ever seen was dragging itself out of the wall.

  Then she knew what it was.

  The Wolf Worm.

  Clutching the blaster in her right hand, she wiped her left wrist across her eyes in an attempt to clear her vision, but she still couldn’t see. If anything, the blindness had become more pervasive, overtaking whatever remained of her vision and stranding her in total blackness.

  Backing her way into the far corner, extending the blaster outward in her trembling grasp, she held her breath and listened for the thing’s approach, tracking its advance purely by sense of sound. She could hear it, the massive weight of the thing, the sticky squelching of its advance toward her across the floor of the datacenter.

  Sadiki fired again, three times in quick succession, and tried to remember how many rounds she’d already squeezed off. The KYD held seventy-five shots, so there was no immediate threat of running out of ammo … but who knew how long this would be her only weapon?

  Somewhere in the enervated darkness, the thing in front of her moved again. For an instant Sadiki almost considered making a blind run for the hatchway on the opposite side of the room—she thought she could find it from memory, but if she was wrong …

  She listened, visualizing it.

  And then all sound disappeared.

  She squeezed the blaster’s trigger again, felt it recoil slightly, but heard nothing. Her entire universe became one of pin-drop silence. It was as if she’d gone deaf as well as blind, all her most vital sensory organs abandoning her at the moment she needed them most.

  And then Sadiki realized what was happening.

  Somehow the sealed datacenter had put itself into silent mode.

  “No!” she cried into the void, but the soundproof systems devoured her voice, swallowing it whole, along with every other sonic disturbance. She had no sense of where the thing was now, how close or far away, whether it was hovering just centimeters from her face, its maw open and ready to latch onto her.

  Panic seized her, and she started firing randomly into the great expanse of darkness, swinging the weapon back and forth, strafing the space around her as if she could somehow shoot a hole through it, penetrating the thick layer of isolation that had left her utterly exposed here.

  At last the blaster stopped recoiling, and she realized it was empty.

  “No,” Sadiki croaked again, but heard nothing. “No.”

  This wasn’t happening. Couldn’t be. Not now, after she’d come so far and worked so hard to build her empire. From the beginning, she’d taken every precaution, calculated every risk, considered every angle. For all of it to end up here, with her crouched in some remote corner, blind, deaf, and mute …

  Tears formed in her sightless eyes, and her body started trembling, the imperfect balance of sanity tipping away from her in increments. Knees drawn up against her chest, arms extended, she gripped the useless weapon in both hands, as though if she held on to it tightly enough, it might yet save her.

  She was still sitting like that when it fell upon her.

  67

  THE MAN COMES AROUND

  Maul looked at Radique for a moment in silence. After searching for him for so long, the sight of him standing less than two meters away brought with it a distinct tremor of unreality, as if this too might be little more than a dream.

  Radique was a tall near-human with blue skin, gleaming black hair, and glowing red eyes. He was dressed in black robes, with black gloves and boots fashioned from the same thick, well-polished reptile skin. His face was lean and cold, as if carved from a solid block of Vardium steel. Crimson eyes gazed back at Maul, and his lips twisted with a kind of quiet arrogance that spoke of a thousand enemies vanquished, a thousand attempts on his life survived.

  The clawbirds had settled around behind him, gathered at his feet.

  “I see you found my pets,” Radique said. “Or they found you.”

  “You knew they would,” Maul said. “You sent them for me.”

  “Perhaps I did.”

  “We have to go,” Maul said. “The Bando Gora is already among us.”

  “The Gora.” Radique’s face tightened with the briefest flicker of pain. “You’ve made a grave mistake bringing those vermin here.” He glanced at Eogan. “The boy’s father paid for it with his life. Now it seems that your life too shall be forfeit because of them.”

  Maul didn’t move.

  “You don’t believe me? Or you don’t believe in the power that I wield?”

  “Neither.” Maul stepped forward. “I’ve simply been given no choice in the matter, and neither have you.” He cast his gaze across the weapons shop. Of the assembly line of eyeless inmates that had been laboring over the different gun parts and components the last time he’d been here, fewer than half remained. The ones that were left sat rigid in front of partially assembled weapons, gripping the table with white knuckles. Were Radique’s people deserting him, fleeing during these final moments? Or was there some deeper mutiny taking place?

  “You’re mistaken,” Radique said.

  Maul looked back at those red eyes. For a long moment neither of them spoke. Then all at once the entire prison gave a violent, galvanic shudder, hard enough to shift the racks and rows of crates strapped down against the back wall. Radique never lifted his gaze from Maul.

  “It’s all coming to an end,” Maul said. “If we don’t act now, we’ll all die here.”

  “We’ll die regardless.” Radique pressed his finger into Maul’s chest. “You still carry an explosive in your heart, Jagannath, don’t forget. And your time is running out.”

  He nodded down to the floor beneath the workspace, and Maul looked down to see where the other prisoners had gone. They lay dead under the table, their eyeless sockets upraised into whatever version of oblivion had overtaken them.

  “What happened?”

  “If I had to speculate,” Radique said, “I believe that Warden Sadiki has launched the Omega Initiative. It’s a fail-safe mechanism designed to systematically trigger the electrostatic charges in the hearts of all the inmates here.”

  “Including you?”

  “Well.” Radique’s smile was razor thin. “I’ve got what you might call a special dispensation.”

  “Wait,” Eogan said. “So you mean—” He glanced at Maul, then back at Radique, his voice going higher in pitch. “How much time do we have?”

  “That depends on your number. Lower ones go first. But you’ll get your turn, I’m sure.”

  “Then we have no time to waste,” Maul said. “Somewhere in your shop you’ve got a proscribed nuclear device. You’re going to help me deliver it into the hands of the Bando Gora. That’s all.”

  The room shook again, harder. On the floor, the piles of the eyeless dead shifted and twitched together like a deputation of spastics.
>
  “Why would I defy a lifelong oath never to do business with a cult of criminal thugs who tried to kill me?” Radique asked.

  Without answering, Maul pushed past him toward the table, where a half-packed crate of Radique’s synthetic lightsabers sat open, forgotten by the inmate who’d been working on it. He reached in and took one of them out, popped open the hilt, and withdrew the crystal.

  “Boy,” he said, “open the package.”

  Eogan blinked and then dropped to his knees next to the parcel that they’d brought up from the loading bay. Peeling back the outer shell, he withdrew an oblong console, laying it out on the floor. The compressor unit itself was sleek and nearly featureless, with the exception of a small transparent dome on top.

  “You recognize the new geological compressor,” Maul said. “You were expecting its arrival—you sent Slipher to go retrieve it.” Without waiting for Radique’s response, he lifted the lid and dropped the synth-crystal inside.

  He closed his eyes, placing both hands on the compressor, letting the power of the dark side move through him as the console warmed beneath his palms. He could feel the crystal changing inside it, its very atoms shifting, the lattice tightening and binding together into new molecules, becoming something utterly different beneath the applied pressure of the Force.

  Opening the compressor, he removed the crystal and held it up. It looked different now—darker, heavier, its facets gleaming with a deeper shade of red.

  Maul slipped it back into the lightsaber, reassembled the components, and held the weapon up, flicking the switch.

  The beam sprang to life in his hand, filling the shop with the familiar oscillating hum that he would’ve recognized in his sleep. The blade was solid, straight, and true. Maul could feel the power of the thing vibrating through the bones of his forearm, a natural extension of his own innate strength.

  Extending his arm to its full length, he waited while Radique examined it. The arms dealer’s bluish face had changed color in the light of the beam.

  “Remarkable,” he whispered.