Star Wars: Red Harvest (11 page)

Meanwhile, the girl—the Jedi scum—was already gone.

Scabrous hadn’t seen her leave, but he’d known, of course, that she would try to flee the second she got the chance. That was a given. No matter—the orchid had done its job, and there would be plenty of time to catch up with the Jedi later. She would serve her purpose well enough when the time came.

At the moment he had more pressing matters to attend to. He continued
working, holding his emotions carefully in check. Critical thinking was what had gotten him this far with the project; his mind was an engine of clinical detachment and he had an absolute unwavering commitment to do whatever was necessary to make the experiment a success. The emotions that fueled that engine—ambition, boundless rage, a natural depraved indifference toward anything except himself—lay carefully insulated in the dark vessels of his heart, where they would not be permitted to distract him from his goal.

And yet, all the same, he hated her.

Hated her with the brutal, grinding hate of the entire Sith war machine; hated her with the blazing intensity of ten thousand dying suns—this Jedi, whose orchid was the linchpin upon which everything would revolve, and whose very presence here would allow him to see the project through to fruition.

And it was
good
to know that hate was there, where he could access it whenever he wanted, like a fine wine to be decanted and sipped sparingly. It would be good to find her and to—

Well, to finish things.

Hestizo Trace would die screaming.

And he would live forever.

Beep!
The one-minute mark. Scabrous flicked his eyes down to the auto-analysis unit. The blue numbers pulsed red. He frowned, just a little. Initial contamination levels were higher than expected: peaks and waves that the system was already rediagnosing, in order to isolate the specific antigen and lay the groundwork for the next step.

He couldn’t afford to wait any longer. The hemodialysis pump was portable by design, a flat shoulder pack that held six liters of fresh blood and a vacuum tube system. Sliding the straps over his shoulders, Scabrous attached the pump to the IV in his right arm and started the first infusion. A steady feeling of warmth crept up through his arm, filling his chest, loosening the tension, allowing him to breathe more deeply. He set the counters. At the current rate, the blood supply would last him six hours—assuming things didn’t change dramatically in the meantime.

Scabrous bypassed the turbolift, crossing directly toward the shattered window, casting his gaze out at the broken, snow-stricken terrain spreading out into the horizon. A feeling of confidence stirred within him, bringing with it a renewed sense of purpose. This was his academy, his planet—nobody knew it as well as he did. There was nowhere that the Jedi could hide that he could not find her.

Without a moment’s hesitation, he sprang forward and jumped out the broken viewport. He cleared it easily, plunging out into the night, knifing downward through the air, using the Force to guide his descent a hundred meters down. At the base of the tower, he hit the ground running. His mind was humming now, his body inhaling doses of fresh blood, sucking it down like pure oxygen, feeding muscle and brain.

Activating his comlink, he brought it to his ear and waited for the voice on the other end to respond.

“Query: Yes, my Lord?” the HK droid asked.

“Activate all outer perimeter barriers in all quadrants,” Scabrous told it. “Target is Hestizo Trace, the Jedi. Scan the lab for DNA and pheromone sample.” He paused, but only for a second, the wind blasting over him. “Use whatever means necessary. But I want her alive.”

H
ESTIZO
?

Zo was still running when the orchid’s voice rang through her head. It was enough of a surprise that she faltered, almost halting in her tracks.

She hadn’t stopped moving since she’d left the tower’s turbolift. Whether that was ten minutes ago or half an hour, she didn’t know. Time had become wildly subjective, a crazed and illogical sprawl, much like the landscape of the academy itself. Sprinting down between the gray, partially collapsed buildings and ruined temples, she’d focused on putting as much distance as possible between herself and the tower, but every time she looked back, the tower seemed to be in a different place.

Her head was swimming. She tried not to think about what had happened up there, but those thoughts kept seeping through her defenses like a cut that wouldn’t stop bleeding. She saw the face of the boy—was it a boy?—as he’d crawled out of the cage and jumped at
Scabrous, the way he’d smelled, the noise that he’d made. He’d been like an animal, but far worse.

Hestizo
, the orchid’s voice cut in,
stop. Stay. Crouch
.

Zo looked around. She was standing in front of an enormous statue of some ancient Sith Lord that had fallen over on its side, so that the right half of its features had been worn smooth, abraded by decades of wind and snow. Sinking to her knees, she heard other voices—several of them—talking among themselves from the far side of the monument.

She peered over.

A group of students was making their way down a walkway, twenty meters in front of her. An older man, a Master, she presumed, strode in front of them. His long gray hair was pulled back from his face in a single silver braid, accentuating the angular, hawk-like structure of his nose and forehead. The late-afternoon light threw his shadow straight ahead across the crisp, freshly fallen snow, the black outline of his robe making it look as though he had wings.

How many?
the orchid murmured in her mind.
How many, Hestizo?

She counted twelve, eighteen, twenty-four, and then looked again, across a hillock of rock and ice, where a second, much larger group of students had gathered with two or three other Masters in attendance, the group too large to count. Apparently some kind of outdoor assembly or group meditation was in progress. For a moment Zo just watched. Despite the fact that they walked together, some of them even talking among themselves in low voices, she had never seen a group of individuals so utterly detached from one another. When they exchanged glances, she saw only coldness in their eyes, as if they were sizing one another up, trying to find some advantage over the others.

“Attention.” The Master’s voice was flinty and sharp, one hand upheld. “Silence.”

The students down on the other side of the walkway fell silent, many of them drawing in closer to listen.

“For those of you who just arrived, I will explain this only once.”
The words were strident, rising up effortlessly over the windy terrain. “Although in truth, I shouldn’t have to explain it at all. Your own Force sensitivity ought to be sufficient for you to realize that we’re dealing with an unforeseen development at the academy—a chain of events that, at this point, is still unclear.” He squared his shoulders and faced the group. “Most of you have already detected a disturbance in the normal daily routine. At this point, we suspect that the academy has been targeted by some form of sabotage, and that it may have spread outward from the tower.”

Despite herself, Zo found herself listening, and as she did, she realized that the group of students had grown. Now there appeared to be several hundred of them, perhaps the majority of the entire student body, all looking up in the Master’s direction.

“As a precaution, we are suspending all lessons and drills until further notice. Evening meal will be served as usual. Otherwise you are to return to your dorms for private study and await further instructions. One of the Masters will be in contact when our course of action changes.”

Zo realized as she listened that she could hear a slight but unmistakable tremor of concern in the Master’s tone. He was doing everything he could to cover it up, and perhaps the students were fooled, but to her mind he might as well have been wearing a placard:
I’M DOING MY BEST TO SPIN A SITUATION THAT I HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO ABILITY TO COMPREHEND, LET ALONE CONTROL, AND
—

Hestizo!
The orchid’s voice was urgent, alarmed.
Get down, now!

She turned her head to the right, and realized that one of the students at the edge of the group was staring straight at her.

The student’s name was Ranlaw. Like the rest of his classmates, he’d been feeling increasingly jumpy this entire afternoon, and he didn’t know precisely why—it had affected his sparring performance earlier, and he was still angry about the black eye it had cost him. But something had gone wrong here at the academy. The Force was telling him
to watch his back, and the Masters’ calling them to convocation only affirmed it.

When he saw the girl looking at him from behind the statue, he’d stopped walking and gazed back at her, sensing that she had something to do with it.

She’s a Jedi
.

That realization was all it took. Ranlaw felt a bright spark of violence leap up in his chest. Whatever purpose the Jedi girl had for spying on them, he’d drag her to the Masters himself, and they could beat it out of her.

The rest of the group was listening to Master Traan, no one noticing that Ranlaw had been looking the other way. That was fine with Ranlaw, who fully intended to get all the glory of this discovery. In a single leap he sprang up over the fallen statue, tackling the girl and throwing her to the ground, pinning her by her wrists. She was easy prey—almost too easy.

“What’s your business here, Jedi?”

She glared up at him, breathless and furious. “Let me go.”

“Right.” Taking one hand off her wrist, he grabbed her hair and jerked her upright. “Let’s see what the Masters have to say about you.” Ranlaw rose to his feet, dragging her with him, and took in a breath to call down to the others.

He was still in the process of inhaling when a clawed hand clamped down over his lips, silencing him. Ranlaw tried to squirm free, and the back of a wooden spear slammed across the top of his skull with a sharp crack, dropping him sideways.

Zo saw the Sith student tumble forward, his grip falling slack, releasing her hair as he fell. In the place where he’d been hunched over, she saw a great three-fingered hand gripping her shoulder and forcing her back down out of sight, and she realized that she was looking at Tulkh. His shoulders were arched enough that she could see the quiver of arrows strapped to his back.

Spinning the spear easily around, the Whiphid raised the business end again, swung it around, and thrust its point directly in Zo’s face, close enough that she could feel it pressing against her cheek. All of this was accomplished in absolute silence.

“What are you doing?”

Tulkh didn’t budge. His expression was stone. “There’s something I need to show you.”

“I don’t—”

“Move.”

T
HE LIBRARY WAS SILENT
.

To her knowledge, Kindra was the only student in the academy who came here on any kind of a regular basis. Without exception, it was the largest and oldest structure on Odacer-Faustin, predating the tower itself, which also meant that it was in the worst condition. Centuries of hostile weather and shifting planetary tectonics had savaged its stacks, closing off entire chambers, stairways, and corridors under tons of snow and ice. From within, it resembled nothing so much as a grand monument that had suffered a head-on collision with something even bigger than itself, crumpling it badly at both ends and the middle.

She sat in the southwest wing, at one of the long stone tables under the cracked cathedral ceiling, staring at the most recent sections of Sith scrolls that she’d uncovered. The inscriptions were archaic, and she’d been working most of the afternoon on translating them. The process was slow but gratifying—yielding ancient secrets that she knew would only help her advance faster through the ranks of her fellow students.
There were rumors that Darth Scabrous himself had come here, that he had found something, a relic of almost immeasurable power, hidden in one of the secluded rooms. Whether that was true—an object like a Sith Holocron wasn’t outside the realm of possibility—Kindra had already found enough to make her research here worthwhile.

She paused, her index finger marking a spot halfway through a long intaglio of etchings, and cocked her head slightly.

Something was wrong.

It wasn’t as obvious as a noise or even a vibration; more like an intuitive sensation of disquiet that settled into her stomach and emanated out through her chest, as if millions of tiny cilia had extended from within her, shivering with unease.

She stood up, the scrolls forgotten.

“Who’s there?”

Her voice rang out in the emptiness, hollow and fading into silence. There was no reply, and a moment later she realized that she hadn’t truly expected one. It wasn’t that kind of feeling; it was more abstract, like a suddenly remembered nightmare whose full contents she couldn’t quite summon up.

What is that? What’s happening?

She drew a shaky breath, not comprehending this inexplicable mutiny of her nervous system. Studying to be a Sith warrior was about engendering fear in others, not oneself—yet her palms had begun to sweat and her heart was beating twice as hard as it normally did. All at once she wanted to be out of here, in less confined quarters. She looked back at the tall staircase leading upward to the gallery and the concourse beyond it, the one that would lead her out.

She stuffed her notes into her bag, grabbed her cloak, and turned to go.

From above her, the broken ceiling let out a long creaking noise, and when she looked up she saw one of the cracks splitting wider.

“Who is it?” she said, louder. “Who’s there?”

Now the chasms had spread open enough that she could see something stretching out inside them, uncoiling in the ceiling’s depths to
expose a series of long, clutching branches. They forked downward, snake-like, showering bits of grit and rock as they insinuated farther through open space. A moment later, Kindra saw the great wooden face of the librarian, a Neti, staring down at her.