Star Wars: Red Harvest (10 page)

But the worst were the tubes.

They ran directly out of his back, long, pipe-like conduits from his spine, leading to a machine with a large transparent cylinder mounted on top. Scabrous was doing something to the machine, holding up some object that Jura couldn’t identify, putting it inside the cylinder. The fluid inside it began roiling, changed color, became suddenly, remarkably incandescent, pulsing through the tubes into Nickter’s vertebrae.

The screaming stopped.

Jura watched Nickter collapse to the floor of the cage, motionless and silent, mouth half open, eyelids sagging. Now the only sound was the high, steady drone of a heart monitor in flat line. Jura let out the breath that he’d been holding in his lungs for the last ten seconds.

He didn’t need to get any closer to see that Wim Nickter was dead.

Zo stared at the dead Sith student in the cage. His eyes were still open, glassy and lifeless. His mouth sagged, a bloody spit bubble clinging to the corner. A waxy pallor had already begun to spread over his cheeks, turning his skin a pale shade of gray.

In her mind, the orchid was still screaming.

She couldn’t move, couldn’t think. Nothing in her experience at the Marfa facility or before had prepared her for this. In the past forty-eight standard hours, the routines of her daily existence had become a blood-soaked travesty of reality.

Her eyes flashed up to the glass cylinder where Scabrous had dropped the flower. It wasn’t there anymore—the fluid seemed to have absorbed it, dissolving it in chunks—but she could still hear it, wherever it had gone, whatever had happened to it, crying out, begging her to do something, to help it, to stop the pain.

Burning, Zo, it’s burning, it’s BURNING—

Scabrous was watching the cylinder.

In the cage, the dead boy sat up.

J
URA NEVER SAW THE DOOR BLOW OFF THE CAGE
.

It happened so quickly that the only thing his mind registered was the wire mesh flying across the lab, slamming into a vented power-cell housing that protruded down from the ceiling. Metal struck metal with a flat, declarative clang that reminded him somehow of the sound of training blades clashing at the top of the temple. It was a noise that said:
Things have been put into motion, and whatever happens next, there will be no going back
.

From his hiding place, Jura stared, crouched in the shadows as if welded to the spot. He saw Scabrous and the girl staring at the cage, neither one of them moving.

The thing that crawled out of the cage wasn’t Wim Nickter.

It was draped in Nickter’s skin, yes, and it wore some version of Nickter’s face, but the eyes were ovals of smeared glass behind which pupils darted back and forth in the torchlight, like tiny black insects
trapped inside a dirty bottle. It cranked its head to the right, and the yellow grin that wrinkled its lips back was unlike anything Jura had ever seen. Watching it, he felt himself melting inside, a breathless terror invading him, stripping away strength, reducing him to a shuddering pool of nerves. The intuitive voice of the Force was shouting at him now,
Wrong, wrong, wrong
, but he couldn’t seem to move.

The Sith Lord gazed upon his creation. A terrible, prescient smile crept across his face.

“Nickter,” he said. “Come to me.”

The thing shuffled another step forward, and Scabrous held out one hand, beckoning it forth like an animal.

“Yes. That’s right.”

All at once Nickter sprang forward with an entirely different kind of urgency, the tubes ripping out of its back, flailing free, leaving a row of raw-looking open wounds down its spine. Reddish yellow stuff splashed and spewed from the open tubes, spraying out into the air. From his hiding place, Jura saw the Sith Lord rear backward, his arms in front of his face, as the thing that had once been Wim Nickter landed on top of him and without hesitation sank its teeth into Scabrous’s face.

Scabrous swung one arm upward, and the thing flew back across the lab, its body reduced to a momentary blur, flailing into a tall rack of unused flasks and beakers not far from where Jura was still crouched. The rack exploded in a deafening cacophony of shattered glass, the thing tumbling over the floor, and Jura saw it push itself upright, its cheeks and forehead glittering with broken shards like dragon teeth. Astringent smells of alcohol and ammonia and carbolic acid filled the air.

Jura saw the girl stand up and run for the turbolift. She never looked back, not even as the doors sealed shut behind her.

A roar of fury shook the chamber around him, loud enough that Jura felt it reverberating in the hollow of his chest. On the opposite side of the lab, Scabrous rose up. The right half of his face hung down
in a pale bloody flap. Above it, his eyes coruscated with anger so ferocious that it looked like something entirely different, something dangerously close to madness.

The Sith Lord flung out his right hand, palm raised, in the direction of Nickter’s corpse. The corpse jerked back again, tumbling like a thing on wires, and this time Jura Ostrogoth realized that he was the one crouched directly in its path.

The realization came too late to save him. Nickter’s corpse collided with him, knocking him off his feet and pounding the air out of his lungs, hurling both of them backward into one of the wide curved viewports that formed the tower’s wall. Jura’s final impression—that the entire world was bursting apart around him in a brittle, deafening explosion—was not altogether wrong.

Then he fell.

“L
USSK
.”

Rance Lussk stopped walking, paused a moment, and turned around. He had been on his way to the academy’s library for an afternoon of solitary meditation and study when the voice piped up behind him.

It was Ra’at.

The smaller, wiry-framed apprentice stood with both hands behind his back, gazing at him defiantly through the veil of falling snow. He looked radically different from the last time Lussk had seen him—something changed in his posture, his bearing, the way he held his shoulders. Even his voice was bolder, more direct and confrontational. His eyes were polished stones, filled with a new and willful sense of determination.

“What do you want?”

“You weren’t at lightsaber practice this morning.”

Lussk didn’t even bother to shrug, communicating his indifference solely through lack of expression. Everyone at the academy knew that he only attended training sessions when he felt like it, when he wanted to test himself or prove a point to one of the Masters. He took a step closer to Ra’at. They were alone here behind the library’s immense sprawl, the academy’s Masters and students otherwise engaged in training or the rigors of midday study. Above them, the tower stood, its shadow banded across the walkway like premature twilight, and it occurred to Lussk that this, too, might have been deliberate on Ra’at’s part. Perhaps he had hoped Lord Scabrous might happen to be looking down.

“Well, what is it?”

Ra’at brought his hands out from behind his back, revealing what Lussk had already guessed would be there: a pair of training lightsabers glinting in the gray afternoon light.

“Does Blademaster Shak’Weth know that you ran off with two of his toys?” Lussk asked.

Ra’at didn’t smile; the intensity of his expression never wavered. “I challenge you.”

Cocking an incredulous eyebrow, Lussk asked, “Now?”

“Now.”

For an instant, certainly no longer, Lussk almost considered it. Then he shook his head. “You don’t want to do that.”

“What are you afraid of?”

“From you?” Lussk blinked lackadaisically. “Boredom, for a start.”

“Then I’ll be sure not to bore you,” Ra’at said, and tossed one of the blades in Lussk’s direction. Lussk caught it on reflex but lowered it to his side.

“I’m busy right now,” he said. “If you’re determined to humiliate yourself, you’ll have to do it publicly in front of the—”

Masters
, had been the last word of that sentence, but Lussk didn’t get a chance to say it before Ra’at jumped at him, his feet hardly seeming to touch the ground. As opening salvos went, it was brutal but effective, a move whose grace would have been easier to admire if it
hadn’t ended with Ra’at’s blade thwacking him across the chest, raising a hot streak of pain just below his collarbone.

Lussk spun back, blade up, aware now that he was in this whether he wanted to be or not. And with Ra’at, he realized, it wouldn’t be as simple as flattening him—an example would need to be made, or else every student would be out here trying him. More than anything, Lussk felt a kind of exasperation. Hadn’t Nickter been enough of a lesson? Was Ra’at suicidal, or simply insane?

He dived forward with his own blade, tensed for impact, but Ra’at wasn’t where he’d been just a second before, seeming almost to have vanished in a cloud of snow. Lussk looked up. The other apprentice was somersaulting directly over him, spiraling down, and Lussk’s instincts flung him out of the way a split second before Ra’at landed.

“Your Ataru has improved,” Lussk grunted. “You’ve been practicing.” Pivoting hard, he brought his own blade around where he predicted Ra’at would be, and this time he was right. When Ra’at looked up, he found himself facing the tip of Lussk’s blade. One stroke would finish the duel; two would kill him.

But there was another option.

“Now,” Lussk said, meeting the other apprentice’s stare and letting the Force flow through him like an electric current. “Drop your blade.”

Ra’at held his mouth taut until the tendon stood out in his jaw. His arm quivered, but he didn’t release the blade.

“Drop your blade,”
Lussk repeated.

Still Ra’at didn’t move. Lussk felt real anger taking hold of him, the kind of rage he rarely experienced. Without hesitation he thrust his own blade at his opponent. If Ra’at was so determined to die like this, out here behind the library, then Lussk would oblige him.

As he swung forward, he heard a window shatter overhead.

Looking up, he saw something explode out of the top of the tower, momentarily arrayed in a glinting halo of broken glass. At first Lussk thought it was some kind of alien species—it had too many arms and legs—and then he realized he was actually seeing two people, one wrapped around the other.

The drop from the tower had to be a hundred meters or more. They fell together, twisting midair, plummeting downward, slamming into the rocky, snow-covered walkway with a sickening, meaty crunch.

Despite his reputation for toughness, Lussk had to look away. Gravity had made a meal of the corpses, contorting them into unfamiliar shapes. Broken bones punctured the flesh. One of them—a shirtless, blood-smeared sack of leaking viscera—lay at such an angle that Lussk could see its right eye protruding from the socket.

Then it sat up.

Lussk gaped at it, paralyzed by a dozy wave of perfect awe.
That’s impossible
, he thought.
Nobody survives a fall like that. Nobody—

His thought, whatever was left of it, broke off cleanly. The blood-smeared one was looking straight at him with its one good eye, a savage, inhuman smirk swimming over what remained of its face. Besides knocking the eye out, the fall had done something to its spine and shoulders, wrenched them around sideways, jamming the clavicles outward, shoving the bone of his arm up through the skin. It looked like a suit of flesh-colored clothes that had been recklessly draped on its hanger.

Yet it was still moving.

Its broken arms grabbed the other corpse, scooping it up in one flopping, eager gesture, and raked it toward its mouth, and that was when Lussk realized that behind the broken bones and layers of blood, he was looking at the mangled bodies of Wim Nickter and Jura Ostrogoth.

The thing that had been Nickter bobbed its head and buried its teeth in the pulpy remains of Ostrogoth’s face. Almost immediately Lussk could hear the noises, a series of greedy, slobbering grunts. Ostrogoth—what was left of him—made no move to resist.

“What is
that?”
Ra’at’s voice was murmuring behind him.
“What is that thing?”

Lussk shook his head, stepping back. He had no idea what he’d just seen—this would all take time to process, to decide how he was going to fight it or use it to his own advantage—but for the moment, he’d take it on its own terms.

“You figure it out.” Tossing his blade aside, Lussk turned on Ra’at and grabbed the smaller apprentice by the tunic with both hands, yanking him forward hard enough to snap Ra’at’s teeth together like castanets. Ra’at’s shock had left him vulnerable, an easy target. Ra’at’s own blade slipped from his hand, clanking off rocks before it stuck in the new-fallen snow.

“Wait, what are you doing?” Ra’at asked. “You can’t—”

Lussk spun him around and shoved him backward, as hard as possible, in the direction of the slobbering, eating thing that was crouched over Jura Ostrogoth. Ra’at squealed, arms pinwheeling as if something in the air could hold him up. Almost immediately his feet tangled beneath him and he stumbled, staggered, slid, and finally fell, landing first on his knees, then on his back.

The Nickter-thing lifted its head. Fresh blood drizzled from its jaw, dripping off its lips. Its one functional eye shivered like a raw egg in a cup. It thrust Jura’s corpse aside and devoted its full attention to Ra’at with the appetite of a creature being offered live meat.

“No,” Ra’at was saying, scrambling upward, or trying to. “No,
no—”

Lussk turned away, legs already tensed to run. The last thing he heard, the moment before he bolted into the library, was Ra’at’s scream.

I
T TOOK
S
CABROUS LESS THAN THIRTY SECONDS TO FLUSH THE WOUND ON HIS FACE
with saline, start an IV on himself, and activate the auto-diagnosis cuff. Everything was exactly where he’d left it. He worked steadily, without the slightest hesitation, the swift and practiced smoothness of his movements betraying none of the anger that sat in his chest like a scalding red lump of coal.

There was a faint electronic beep from his right wrist, denoting the thirty-second mark. He checked the cuff’s glowing blue readout and saw that it was still calibrating the initial blood sample.