Star Wars: Red Harvest (6 page)

“Good morning, Hestizo.” Wall Bennis was the first actual voice she’d heard this morning. A tall, soft-spoken man with calm brown eyes, the Jedi ag-lab director was waiting for her behind the thick red stalks of a malpaso tree with an extra cup of caf. “Sleep well?”

“Until the orchid woke me.”

Bennis handed her the cup. “Any idea what’s going on?”

“I’ve got a pretty good guess.”

“You do?”

“Mm-hm.”

“That’s good, then.” He went distractedly back to his own work and then seemed to remember something. “Oh, and Zo? When you get a minute, would you mind taking a look at the pulsifarian moss colonies on B-Two? There seems to be some kind of secondary parasite growing in the soil.”

“You always save the glamorous stuff for me.”

“You’re the only one who can understand it.”

“The moss or the parasite?”

“Both, I think.”

“I’ll take a look.” She carried the caf across B-7 until she’d reached the private incubation chamber in the far corner of the room. Deactivating the air lock, she stepped inside, resealing the door behind her.

Finally
, the orchid burst out.
What took you so long?

You’re not the only plant on this level
. She took her time checking the temperature and moisture readouts on the wall unit, making incremental adjustments to both, and then walked over to the only plant in the chamber, a small orchid with black petals and a thin green stalk, its fronds seeming almost to quiver with impatience. For a moment she stood sipping caf and looking at it.

I was cold during the night. Exceedingly unpleasant
.

Actually, I turned the temperature down in your incubation chamber
, she told it.
Almost a full two degrees, on purpose
.

Why?

I’ve been telling you for ages that you’re a lot heartier than you thought. Now you know it’s true. Fact is, you could probably survive a twenty-degree temperature drop, maybe more, and you would have been just fine
.

That’s cruel to test without warning!

If I’d told you
, Zo replied,
then you would have gotten yourself all worked up over nothing
.

The orchid withdrew into sulky silence. As flora went, it was one of the most Force-sensitive species in the galaxy. The problem was that it knew it. Zo put up with it anyway, and most of the time she was happy to dedicate herself to studying its abilities and providing for its needs. Every so often, though, it needed to be reminded why it had endured for thousands of years: it was far more durable than it gave itself credit for.

Zo?
the orchid said now.

What is it?

Something’s wrong
.

What now?

Outside … something’s happening
.

Zo reopened the incubator’s hatchway and stepped back out. Standing motionless in front of the chamber, she realized several things simultaneously.

First, that the initial sense of wrongness she’d been experiencing up until now had nothing to do with her work here on Marfa. Contrary to what she’d initially supposed, the feeling was emanating from an outside source, an interloper, something that clearly didn’t belong here. It hadn’t been a dream; it was an alarm.

And second, despite the silence, she wasn’t alone.

Zo?
the orchid’s voice asked.
What is it?

Give me a second
. She listened to the entire greenhouse with her ears instead of her mind. She heard no audible voices, but that was to be expected. Her fellow Jedi often worked for hours among their individual species without speaking a word. Much of their daily routine was accomplished in absolute silence.

Pausing halfway down a long aisle overgrown with leafy stalks, Zo looked up. Far overhead, she found what she was looking for, an 800-year-old panopticon willow, a perfect specimen of organic surveillance, draping its limbs in a dense canopy of emerald-dripping lace. Each bud was tipped with a tiny golden eye.

Zo placed one palm flat against the shaggy trunk, allowing its root strength to pulse through her, aware at the same time that the tree was embracing her as an equal. She felt her ground-level perspective surging up through its branches, spreading out along colonies of sharply focused eyes. Her vision shifted, wobbled, and became clear again. She was now gazing down at herself and the entire floor from far above, from the willow’s point of view. The tree’s branches shifted and Zo felt a slight shimmer of cognitive dissonance as her perspective aligned itself and she saw the familiar robed figure of Wall Bennis leaning face-first against the sinuous, downy-tufted trunk of a Malpassian squid pine.

But Bennis wasn’t leaning.

He was slouched forward, motionless, his torso hanging at an unnatural angle, arms dangling at his sides, impaled by the spear that had been slammed through his back into the trunk of the tree. A long dagger-shaped bloodstain ran from between his shoulder blades down his back, soaking through his belt. The cup of caf he’d been holding lay on the floor between his feet.

Zo realized that she could see Bennis’s face. It hung ashen and slack, a dangling meat-mask from which all life had fled. His blood spilled down the spear’s rough-hewn shaft, and Zo watched, with the willow’s unblinking acuity, as a droplet formed at the end, grew heavy, and fell into the already congealing pool on the floor by his feet.

Plip
.

Something rustled behind her in the leaves.

Spinning around, her consciousness dropping back from the willow’s branches into her own optic and auditory nerves, Zo realized too late that she’d let her guard down. On the other side of the tree, somewhere just inside the thick green canopy, the rustling grew louder, closer. A branch snapped. Twigs crackled, trampled underfoot. Zo felt the presence of this new thing, whatever it was, making its way directly toward her, no longer bothering to be quiet or stealthy.

Fear took hold of her, vacuuming the air from her lungs. The buzz of plant emotion had fallen quiet—even the orchid was still—and the entire research level felt far larger and more desolate than it had just moments before. Glancing around, hearing only the faint click of her own throat, she suddenly wanted more than anything to run, but she was no longer sure which direction to go. The noises she’d heard on the other side of the tree now seemed, impossibly, to be closing in from all sides. She felt helpless, isolated, alone, except for the buzzing weightless swarm of her own terror.

A shape burst out of the green, into full view, two meters tall. The bulky, fur-shrouded torso stood well above her. The long, squinting face was inhuman: cheekbones and brow jutted forward; a pair of
stained tusks pushed upward from the lower jaw; the eyes that glinted from beneath its forehead were shining and intent. It was a Whiphid, Zo realized—the biggest she’d ever seen. Somewhere in his chest, he gave a thick grunting sound that might have expressed anything from appreciation to disinterest.

Zo turned and fled. She had taken three steps when an arm the size of a load-bearing girder slammed sideways against her skull, spraying bright fragments of pain through the right side of her head. Her vision shattered into a wide field of star-rattled blindness.

When the blindness cleared she was on the floor, neck-deep in pain, looking up at the Whiphid, the underside of one horned foot plunging down to smother her face. She could smell him now, his pungent and claustrophobic-inducing stench like mildew and death. This time it occurred to her that the death she smelled might be her own.

Pressure engulfed her skull, squeezing agonizingly, as the mottled flesh of his foot covered her nose and mouth. A vacuum of fetid-smelling blackness sealed tight. Muffled, from far away, she heard his voice for the first time.

“The orchid.”

Zo squirmed and felt the weight lift ever so slightly to allow her to answer. “What?”

“The Murakami orchid.” The voice from within the broad, tusked mouth was low and hoarse, more of a growl. “Where is it?”

“Why?”

The eyes narrowed. “Don’t waste my time, Jedi, or you’ll end up a corpse like your friend.” He leaned down until she could actually
feel
the fetid stench of his breath seething through the slits of his nostrils. “Where. Is. It?”

“It’s … in the primary incubation cultivator.” Zo sat up just enough to nod to the left and felt a bright sliver of spun glass shoot through her brachial plexus where the Whiphid had pressed his weight. “Over there, behind you. But you can’t just—”

“Show me.” Grabbing her arm, he dragged her behind him. Zo
caught a glimpse of the longbow and the quiver of arrows strapped across the muscled hump of his back, the tangles of its gray-golden mane swinging back and forth. Small bones, some decidedly humanoid, mandibles and phalanges, were tied and braided into the ends of its hair where they clicked against one another. Whiphids, if she remembered her taxonomy right, were born predators—they lived to hunt and kill. Those venturing from their homeworld found good work as mercenaries and bounty hunters, or worse.

The Whiphid swung her forward by the neck and slammed her against the door of the incubator. “Open it.”

“You just have to push the air lock.”

Shoving her aside, he kept his right hand around her neck while his left hand gripped the latch and disabled the lock. The door opened and he pulled her in, keeping her at arm’s length while groping around the incubator. Zo tried to tilt her head upward to take the pressure off her throat, but he was holding her almost half a meter off the floor … she couldn’t touch, even with her tiptoes. From the far corner she heard an explosion of electronic components bursting apart. Something heavy toppled over and crashed to the ground. When the Whiphid’s hand came back, his fingers were wrapped around the orchid’s stalk, the flower already beginning to wilt in his grasp.

“What’s wrong with it?” the Whiphid asked.

“It’s special,” Zo managed. “It can’t survive out of the incubator, it needs—”

“What?” he demanded, relaxing his grip just enough that she could finally slide down and touch the floor.

She forced the word, hating herself for it: “—me.”

“What?”

“If it’s out of the incubator, I can’t be more than a meter away from it. I need to be close. Or else it loses its powers.”

Zo looked out of the incubator, back in the direction from which she’d come. Her gaze flashed across the lab floor to the body of Wall Bennis. No longer pinned to the tree, his corpse lay in a crumpled
heap, one palm open as if grasping for some final, unavailable lifeline that had failed to appear. The spear that had impaled him against the tree had been yanked free.

Zo had just enough time to wonder when the Whiphid had pulled it out when she saw the butt end of it flying downward toward her face, slamming her in the right temple and plunging her deep into a wide and starless night.

T
HROUGHOUT ITS HISTORY, THE ROCKY DESERT WORLD OF
G
EONOSIS HAD SUFFERED
its share of catastrophes and mass extinctions, including the rogue comet strike on its largest moon that had very nearly wiped out the planet’s entire population. Taking into account the resulting debris field, the flash floods, and the random solar radiation storms, it wasn’t difficult to see why the ancient Geonosians, what remained of them, had moved underground.

Not much had changed since then.

Standing here amid the caverns and rock spires of whatever remained, Rojo Trace realized that the Republic officer in front of him had finished talking, or had at least paused for breath. The officer’s name was Lieutenant Norch, and despite the fact that he was staring Trace directly in the eye and almost shouting to be heard above the wind, he still managed to sound both officious and insincere in his delivery. In other words, a perfect product of the bureaucracy to which he’d sworn allegiance.

“Furthermore,” Norch continued, “on behalf of the Republic’s military and security divisions, we appreciate the Order’s timely response.” The lieutenant gestured at the huge polyskin tent spread out in front of them, half a kilometer of rippling silver micropore, flapping and popping in the wind like the sail of a ship going nowhere. “Given the nature of our discovery here, I’m sure you understand the urgency of our request.”

Trace nodded, wincing a little at the grit that blew into his face. He was a dark-haired man of unremarkable build and complexion, tall and steady and vaguely handsome in a way that didn’t draw attention to the unshaven jawline, the green eyes, and the faintly smiling lips. Yet for every moment that he stood motionless outside the tent—perhaps listening, perhaps not—a sense of intensity seemed to gather around him, a sense of acute psychological awareness of its own rarefied state.

“We got the initial report of it last night,” Norch said, raising his voice even louder over the baked-dry wind. “Independent long-range hauler on its way through the Outer Rim picked up on an unfamiliar heat signature. They thought it was a distress signal. But when they landed they saw this.”

And with a gesture no doubt intended to be dramatic, he turned to the tent and flung back the flap, allowing Trace inside.

Trace ducked under the polyskin, glad to be out of the wind, and stopped, looking down. The crater was still smoking, but he could see the wreckage piled up inside, perhaps one hundred meters down, where it had punched a hole and permanently altered the landscape. Peering down into it, he was aware of the lieutenant watching him intently with a sense of barely reserved judgment, until he was no longer able to contain himself.

“Well?” Norch asked. “What do you make of it?”

“It’s a Sith warship, obviously. The five engine pods, the boxy design …”

The lieutenant shook his head. “With all due respect, you mistake my meaning. We’re
aware
that it’s a Sith warship. We saw our share of them in the sacking of Coruscant.” And then, puffing inside his uniform:
“The question is what caused it to crash here on Geonosis, and whether its arrival here ought to be considered an act of deliberate aggression.”