Lockdown: Maul

by Star Wars

  “I can show you how it’s done,” Maul said. “But first I need the nuclear device delivered. And I need the explosives disarmed inside my chest—the droid from medbay can do that.”

  “What makes you think—”

  “There’s no time to argue. Do we have a deal or not?”

  Radique looked at him. The room gave another jerk, and Maul saw that several more of the workers had dropped to the floor on top of the bodies that were already there.

  He held out his hand.

  Switching off the lightsaber, Maul placed it in the other’s waiting palm.

  “The nuclear device is in that crate,” Radique said, giving a side nod to the large box strapped to the wall in the far corner of the shop. He hadn’t taken his red-eyed gaze from the lightsaber in his hand. “Over there. At the end.”

  “Come, boy.” Maul nodded at the crate. “We don’t have much time.”

  “Wait, what about the electrostatic charges in our hearts?” Eogan asked.

  “We’ll detour past the medbay,” Maul said, keeping his eyes fixed on the red-eyed man. “Mr. Radique will have the droid ready for us.”

  “How do we know—”

  “It’s in his best interest. If I’m dead, I won’t be able to show him what he needs to know about the lightsabers.”

  Without waiting for acknowledgment from Radique, Maul crossed over to the crate and unstrapped it. It was warm to the touch, and humming slightly from within.

  “Now, boy.”

  Reluctantly Eogan picked up his end and they lifted, carrying it out of the shop. One of Radique’s clawbirds flew in front of them, and they followed it down the concourse toward the upper levels of the prison.

  Not long afterward, they started to come across the bodies.

  68

  MALEFACTORS

  “Jabba,” Vosa said, staring into the hologram. “Why am I not surprised to find you in the middle of this?”

  The holovid of the Hutt perched above her, glaring down at her through baleful eyes. His henchmen—the remaining Gamorreans who hadn’t followed the newly released prisoners on a looting spree through Cog Hive Seven—aimed their blasters at the Bando Gora standing behind her.

  “Komari Vosa,” the crime lord snarled in Huttese, his no-longer-amused gaze traveling across the group of skull-masked Gora soldiers. “What are you and your brain-dead army of minions doing here?”

  “We were summoned here.” Vosa gestured across the hangar. “I trust you’ll let us pass?”

  Jabba cursed, uttering a phlegmy oath in Huttese. “You trust wrong, insect! I will crush you like the foul infection that you are!”

  “You’ll try.” Reaching down, Vosa withdrew the twin curved-hilt lightsabers that she wore at her hips, activating both blades simultaneously, filling the air around her with an electrifying vibrational hiss.

  The effect—even on Jabba himself—was immediate and impressive. The holo flickered, and when it returned, he gestured to the Gamorreans flanking him, grunting out an order of execution. “Dugway! Keepuna!”

  The Gamorreans opened fire from either side, but Vosa moved faster than they could shoot, faster even than the naked eye could see. Adapting the Form One style of Soresu, she whirled her lightsabers in front of her, their blades absorbing and deflecting the blasts easily from all sides.

  The outcome was never truly in doubt. Darting forward, she slashed the blaster directly from the hand of the nearest thug, piston-kicked him backward, and spun to bisect the Trandoshan behind her neatly at the waist. Throughout it all, the expression on her face—focused yet unhurried, almost relaxed—revealed virtually nothing about what was happening inside her mind, nor about the true purpose of her visit here.

  Heads down, Bando Gora soldiers charged forward to overtake Jabba’s entourage, their staffs blazing with greenish balls of fire that arced and exploded in the faces of the startled Gamorreans. Within seconds, they’d decimated the Hutt’s hired muscle, leaving their bodies splayed limp on the floor of the hangar.

  “Now,” Vosa said, deactivating the lightsabers as she made her way toward the holovid, “since we’ve dispatched with the unpleasantries, I take it you’ll allow me to complete my work here?”

  “You fight well for a Jedi whore,” Jabba told her, arms upraised in a gesture of mock surrender. “I see that you’ve lost none of your skills.”

  “Jedi?” Vosa frowned, a single wrinkle creasing her forehead, as if the word itself triggered its own private dose of pain. “That word is blasphemy to me.”

  “Is it?” Jabba chuckled, probing more deeply. “And what of your beloved Master Dooku? Surely as his former Padawan, there must be a lingering warmth in your heart for him still, after all that he did for you?”

  “Dooku.” Vosa’s lips tightened, and all the easy confidence that she’d displayed just seconds earlier began to ebb away. The tightness that replaced it made her face appear angular, and her yellow eyes blazed. “You dare not speak that obscenity before me now or ever.”

  “Ah.” Emboldened by her response, Jabba pushed on. “And yet I wonder. Have you considered that he may yet harbor feelings for you? That in time, he could possibly come and join you to lead your army of—”

  “Enough!” The word burst from Vosa’s lips, and in a fusillade of inarticulate pain and rage, she lunged forward, swinging both lightsabers outward at the holovid, the blades sweeping through his image.

  The Hutt chuckled with appreciation. “You do contain great depths, Komari Vosa. Perhaps you would consider an alliance?”

  “The Bando Gora allies with no one.”

  “You’ve associated with Gardulla Besadii in the past. Help me get rid of her, and perhaps I’ll let you leave this prison alive.”

  Vosa shook her head. “Never.”

  “Foolish to the last.” The Hutt nodded, unperturbed. “Make no mistake, scum. I will exterminate you in due time. Just not this time.”

  “Or ever.”

  “We’ll see.” Waving one hand at the berthing dock from which Vosa and her army had emerged, Jabba’s holovid image settled back on the repulsor platform with a faint smirk. It was the indulgent expression of a singularly untrustworthy uncle whose favor was merely an indication of profound treachery to come. “My business here is through. Be on your way.”

  But Vosa was already gone, storming across the hangar, followed by her army, toward what awaited them on the upper levels. She moved quickly, as if there were something else pursuing her, something that she alone could see.

  And so it was.

  Ensconced in her private darkness, Vosa had always moved with a speed and purpose unmitigated by the weakness of human emotion. Back in the hangar, the holovid image of the Hutt had touched upon it briefly but agonizingly, with his flagrant evocation of the Order and the one whose name still caused her unspeakable pain.

  Vosa hated herself for the way she’d responded. Her first and most enduring instinct—to bury that pain, sinking it so deeply into her unconscious mind that it could no longer touch her—had not worked as it should.

  It wasn’t supposed to hurt like this anymore.

  Making her way up through the empty corridors of Cog Hive Seven, she felt cracks forming in her resolve.

  Press on.

  Yes. That was all that mattered. The Order was dead to her now, a crumbling artifact of her distant past. As was her former Master, her sworn enemy, whom she now thought of only as an abomination before everything that mattered … although the memory of his face and their times together still held powerful sway over her. When she thought of him, Vosa felt something moving inside her chest, a gravitational shift that took hold of her most basic emotions. Curse the Hutt for mentioning him, dredging those thoughts up now.

  But it was too late to stop. With an uncharacteristic twinge of masochism, Vosa allowed herself to think on the name consciously, touching on it like the tip of the tongue to an infected tooth, just once—Dooku—and pushed it aside.

  Glancing back at the
captain who’d followed her with unfailing loyalty and the skull-masked fighters gathered behind her, Vosa reassured herself that this was right. She had a new alliance, new blood oaths, as leader of an unstoppable army of fighters who would willingly lay down their lives for her.

  It was enough.

  69

  LOW NUMBERS

  Getting the crate across the open area outside the mess hall took longer than Maul had anticipated.

  They had to step over all the bodies.

  The gallery was littered with them. Everywhere they looked, inmates of the Hive were sinking to the floor, faces gone slack and lifeless, landing unceremoniously on top of the dead prisoners who’d already succumbed to the electrostatic charges. The smell of death had begun to fill this place as the prison transformed itself into a vast, floating crypt. The clawbird that was leading them stopped occasionally to land on one of the bodies and pluck out an eye.

  It wasn’t entirely silent. Off in the distance, from the long corridors leading to the cells, Maul heard occasional shrieks and cries for help—the pleas of those who hadn’t yet died, perhaps, or the primitive outcry of the new inmates that Jabba had released from the incoming barge, the ones without bombs inside their hearts. At one point, a spate of blasterfire rang out and ceased abruptly, followed by a wild, shrieking symphony of lunatic laughter.

  Madness had triumphed in the final hours of Cog Hive Seven. Twenty meters in front of them, a group of prisoners—Maul realized that they were the last surviving members of the Bone Kings and Gravity Massive, brought together in the penultimate moments of their lives—came scurrying out of the mess hall carrying a tremendous steaming vat of stolen food. They walked past Maul and Eogan without so much as a sidelong glance. Nobody stopped them. The last remaining guards seemed to have gone into hiding.

  Unless those were the screams Maul kept hearing. He wondered if the newly arrived inmates were holding the guards somewhere and torturing them slowly.

  Or perhaps they’d met the worm.

  As they approached the far side of the gallery, Eogan kept glancing down, trying to read the numbers on their uniforms, as if it could give him an idea of how far along the process was. Even Maul—despite his commitment to the task at hand—found himself wondering how much longer they had. There were to be no more matches to save him now.

  “The medbay is just through here,” he said. “It’s not too late. The surgical droid can—”

  Maul stopped walking—not out of uncertainty, but simply to stretch out with his feelings, to see if he could ascertain where the Bando Gora was at this precise moment. Somewhere in the outer reaches of his sensibilities, a pang of unease stung him, a twinge that he associated most closely with those moments at the top of the LiMerge Building, when he’d stared at the window of the Jedi Temple in the distance.

  Vosa is here. Very close now.

  He would finish his task for his Master, yes. But the possibility that he might drop dead from something as maddeningly trivial as an electrostatic discharge in his hearts before he could confront the filthy ex-Jedi who’d come here to face him was more than even Maul himself could bear.

  In the end, that was what decided it.

  “The medbay, then,” he said with a nod, ignoring the expression of relief that flashed across the boy’s face as he said it. “Quickly.”

  70

  THE KILLING MOON

  Wait.

  Vosa held up her fist without glancing back at the Bando Gora warriors who stood behind her, and they came to a halt.

  They’d made their way up from the hangar toward the prison’s main holding level, encountering almost no resistance from the remaining residents of this place. Not that she’d expected any. These inmates seemed to be dying faster and faster around them—dropping to their knees without so much as a whimper. The corpses, the smell of them, reminded her of Bogden, the burial moon where so much had changed for her.

  Of the handful of armed maniacs they’d confronted in the prison’s utility corridors, only one or two had presented the slightest challenge to her soldiers. Using their staffs, the Gora had gutted them and ripped them to shreds, accomplishing Vosa’s bidding with the mindless, unwavering obedience to which she herself had enslaved them. It had happened quickly: a streaking storm of violence, then stillness.

  Watching them go about their dark and bloody work brought her no sense of pride, although it did appease some dark and atavistic hunger within her—a need to establish dominance over the situation and impose her will upon it. For her, stability and power would always be a matter of conquest, the relentless commitment to absolute mastery. After what had happened with the Jedi and her former Master, she would never allow herself to feel out of control again. It would be a form of suicide.

  Now she stood motionless, her mind reaching out into the rippling currents of the Force until she became aware of its most pronounced disturbance.

  Maul was here.

  Closer than she’d hoped.

  And after she had found him and taken possession of the weapon that she’d been summoned here to acquire, she would kill him.

  Gladly.

  This way, she instructed them, giving the order silently, a telekinetic command that sent them down a corridor. Her heart was beating faster now, driving her forward. And it might have been that sense of reckless urgency that allowed her to walk into what happened next.

  Rounding the corner, she saw it—the thing to which her Force sensibilities had somehow been blinded.

  On either side, her warriors froze in their tracks.

  The creature in front of them was a colossal, gelid horror, its engorged presence filling the entire concourse in front of them. Vosa realized that it was some kind of roiling white worm, five meters high and perhaps three times as long, its hooked, leech-like mouth currently filled with the still-squirming bodies of the inmates it had just devoured.

  The thing rounded on them, raising its hideous blind head with a sudden jerk that caused the severed lower half of the torso it had been eating to fall back out on the floor. When it lunged forward, mouthparts peeling back, the Gora attacked it with their staffs, strafing it with balls of energy that exploded off the worm’s slick and pulsating skin without stopping it.

  It recoiled, flattening itself against the floor, then shot forward again with speed that defied its great, dripping bulk. Before Vosa could command her soldiers to step back, the worm opened its mouth, sucking two of the warriors into its maw.

  Vosa activated her lightsabers and dove at it. Slashing both blades across the thing’s flesh, she carved deep lacerations into its underside. Pale yellow fluid came trickling out, sticky and viscous, and with it, Vosa realized that she could hear the voice—or voices—of the worm inside her head, a tangled litany of threats and pleas for mercy.

  Jedi—Jedi is here—

  Kill us, Jedi—

  Set us free—

  —rip your lungs from your chest—

  —tear the scream from your lips—

  Devour you whole—

  Vosa sprang at it again, her blades coming to life in a blinding, gyroscopic storm of Jar’Kai technique that had served her so well in the past. Spinning both blades in the rising-whirlwind maneuver, she launched a frontal attack on the worm’s underbelly. Its innards spilled out, layers of pulsating fat and vessel sluicing outward to fill the open corridor around her ankles. Throughout it all, Vosa didn’t yield or even slow her attack; rather, she gave herself over to it completely, allowing the killing rage to transport her into a state of weightless abandon.

  Badly wounded, the thing reared back again, as if what she’d done had introduced it to pain that it had never known before. It jerked sideways and went slithering quickly backward through an open hole in the wall behind it.

  For a moment Vosa stood with both lightsabers still activated and her army behind her, all of them waiting for what might happen next. Had the thing run off somewhere to die? In that instant she allowed herself to think
that the battle—this part of it, at least—might be over.

  Then the ceiling moved above her.

  Her soldiers, as one, lifted their heads and looked up.

  When the ceiling blasted open, the worm came spilling down on top of them with a deafening crash, flattening the warriors in an avalanche of its flesh. At once Vosa knew she’d underestimated the thing’s cunning, and now she understood what those tangled voices in her head had represented—the conflagration of inmate sensibilities, survival skills, and pure, vicious instinct that comprised its hive mind. The last of the Bando Gora warriors edged back, clutching their staffs, momentarily shaken and awaiting new orders.

  Vosa waited, facing off against the thing herself. The worm lifted its head, its mandibles clicking and snapping audibly with a spastic, giddy eagerness. From this distance, Vosa could see that the cuts she’d inflicted on it had already begun to crust over and heal.

  Then it opened its mouth, unhinging its jaws to the widest possible extent.

  The result was hideous. In that moment, the thing actually seemed to become all mouth, until the entire front of its head was nothing more than an enormous, gaping black hole that—for an instant—loomed as wide as the corridor itself.

  This time even the Bando Gora were not fast enough.

  Sucking in, the worm inhaled them all in a great, slurping vacuum, clearing the space around Vosa in the space of a heartbeat.

  Yet she stood her ground, lightsabers ready, reaching out to the thing, or whatever element of sentience it might have possessed.

  “What are you?” she asked aloud, startled by the sound of her own voice, and although she’d hardly expected an answer, one was forthcoming, put forth in an outburst of varying tones and inflections.

  We are—

  —that which—

  —you fear—

  —most—

  Vosa drew in a breath. A terrible coldness spread through her like nothing she’d felt since her early days on Bogden, when the Gora torturers had worked day and night to break her spirit, crush her body, and drive her to the brink of insanity, and ultimately beyond, into what she’d become now. The moment was excruciating. It was like looking in a mirror and seeing her two selves: who she had once been under Dooku and the Jedi Council, and what she’d become, her own pitiless face reflected back at her in the soulless, grasping mandibles of this blind and unstoppable predator.