Star Wars: Red Harvest (16 page)

As he arched forward, Trace saw a pair of hands shoot out from the broken wall behind him, gripping the Blademaster by the throat and jerking him backward. Shak’Weth slammed into the cracked stone hard enough to drop his lightsaber, and Trace saw a ghastly white face burst up through the open hole in the wall, a
screaming
face, suctioning down on the Sith Master’s right cheek and eye, teeth bared, gouging into his face.

Trace took a step back, still holding his own lightsaber up, watching the thing that hauled Shak’Weth through the hole in the wall where it could more easily devour him. Great arterial eruptions spurted from the ragged perforation in the Sith Master’s throat, spraying up over the wall and down into the snow and ice, painting the whole world red. Inside the wall, the thing lifted its face up and Trace saw its eyes—flat and without the slightest spark of life—yet they had once been human, even youthful. A Sith student, he realized—a teenager. What had happened?

The thing shoved its mouth back down into the ragged red cup that had once been Shak’Weth’s right eye socket, slurping noisily. When it paused a moment later, the noise that it made was a high-pitched, ululating scream, and Trace realized that there were other screams, countless screams, a threnody of them rising up along with it, coming from every direction at once.

The night was full of them.

Z
O AND
T
ULKH DUCKED THROUGH THE ENTRANCEWAY OF THE LONG, TUNNEL-LIKE
structure, and the bounty hunter stopped and raised his head, sniffing the wind as if picking up on some obscure scent.

“What was that out there?” Zo asked, gazing back out through the way they’d come. Her own voice sounded distant to her, and her ears felt as if they were plugged with soft wax from the force of the explosions outside.

“Turbolaser,” Tulkh grunted. “Heavy artillery.”

“It’s Scabrous, isn’t it?” she asked. “He’s looking for us.”

If the Whiphid heard the question, he ignored it; a moment later, he sidled on, deeper into the foul-smelling recesses of the building. Reluctantly, Zo followed. She was still processing the attacks, the laser cannon that had erupted up out of the ground, and the even more horrifying assault that had come before it—the screaming, undead things that had been intent on devouring them.

“The orchid,” she said, for want of a better place to start.

Tulkh said nothing, kept walking. The smell around them was getting decidedly worse with every passing step.

“It was the only reason I could fight those things off. It’s because of how Scabrous used it in that experiment. I think it’s inside their bodies somehow. I told it to grow. But …” Zo shook her head. “It’s not there anymore. Now I can’t get it to respond to me at all. It might be dead.”

The Whiphid responded to all of this with a grunt. “You finished?”

“I just thought you might want to know how I saved our lives back there. You were the one who asked me for an explanation, after all.”

“My mistake.”

“Really?” she said. “Oh, I’m sorry. Maybe you should have thought of that before you abducted me and dragged me out here to a planet full of walking corpses.”

No reply from the Whiphid.

“Where are we going, anyway?”

“Taking shelter. Waiting out the storm. In the morning, I’m going back to my ship.”

The conversation ended there. Almost without meaning to, Zo found herself reaching into the bounty hunter’s thoughts, tentatively exploring his mind for some idea of what he knew about where they were headed. Normally her telepathic abilities weren’t particularly strong when it came to non-plant life-forms, but the Whiphid was what she thought of as a relatively easy read. In fact, from within, his mind resembled nothing so much as the trophy room aboard his ship where she’d first awakened: a place of death, a de facto display space for grotesque trophies and old kills. Some were alien species that she’d never seen before. Others were human. All were brought together in universal expressions of pain, desperation, and helplessness that they’d worn as the bounty hunter had delivered the coup de grâce. His mind had become a storehouse of their dying moments. This crypt of suffering, this reliquary, wasn’t just what he carried around in his head every day—it
was
his head.

Undaunted, Zo plumbed deeper and realized that, with some effort, she was able to pass through these thoughts into another chamber of the Whiphid’s consciousness, into his more distant memories. She saw faces rising up around her, others of his species, family perhaps, early enemies from his home planet of Toola. The atmosphere here felt very still and long undisturbed, almost as if it were hermetically sealed, and she wondered if she’d arrived in some part of Tulkh’s past that he himself rarely visited. Certainly she had such places in her own mind, aspects of her life she’d walled off in vain hopes they’d die of suffocation or neglect. Zo could almost feel the membrane that enveloped this part of his thoughts beginning to constrict over her.

Then she heard breathing.

There was something alive in here.

She shifted her focus away from the older memories and saw the man gazing down at her, utterly calm and pleasant. His gray eyes were clear, sparkling with intellect. Wide, almost sensuous lips seemed perpetually on the verge of speaking, but instead they only twisted into a bemused smile. It was the Sith Lord.

“Get out of my head, Jedi!”

Tulkh’s snarl boomed through the memory-caverns around her with devastating force. Zo recoiled, drawing back, staggering as she retreated, and, looking around, saw that they were standing in a wide, bare-metal chamber facing a series of tunnels that branched off in different directions. Icicles spiked down like semi-translucent stalactites from the long, low ceiling. She couldn’t breathe. It took a second to realize why. The Whiphid had one hand locked around her throat, clamping her airway shut between his thumb and forefinger. His tusked face loomed just centimeters from her own.

“The next time I catch you in my head,” he said, “you’ll lose yours. Is that clear?”

Zo nodded, and he released her, allowing her to stumble backward, regaining her bearings. Somewhere across the room, in one of the adjoining tunnels, she could hear a high-pitched whining beep going on
and on, not an alarm necessarily, but some incidental mechanism, maybe as simple as a light that had already started overheating and would eventually burn out.

Right now, however, this area was still brightly lit. Presumably that was why Tulkh had chosen it. As far as temperature went, the space was an ice locker, but at least she could see what was around and between each of the broad utilitarian pillars holding up the ceiling.

The Whiphid turned, head cocked and listening as he lumbered back up the corridor. Zo, who at this point had spent a good deal of time looking at his back, noticed a difference in his gait, the way he carried his shoulders: they were stiffened, tense with anticipation. Without breaking stride, he reached for his bow and started to draw an arrow from his quiver.

“Is this the way we came in?” Zo asked.

“What do you think?”

“I think you’re not sure. And you’re trying to cover for it.” She paused and sniffed the air; the feral, ammonia-foul odor was growing thicker around her. “Are we staying down here all night? What’s that
smell
?”

No answer from Tulkh … at this point, had she really expected one? She went after him, down the concourse, in the general direction of the exit. The lights were trembling even more erratically here, spluttering on and off for a second or two at a time.

The acrid stench had become eye-wateringly intense. Zo covered her nose and mouth. It didn’t help at all.

“This isn’t the way we came in.” She coughed. “I would have remembered—”

Tulkh stopped. Off to their right, she saw a row of stalls. Something inside one of the stalls was swinging itself around, chuffing out volumes of air. Listening, Zo heard it let out a low, restless groan. There was a silence, then a sound of feet rustling, followed by a bronchial squabbling honk.

The Whiphid replaced the arrow that he’d taken out, and took a step forward.

The thing inside the stall let out another nasal, braying squawk and thrust its long head outward. Its muzzle drew back and Zo saw two pairs of nostrils, large and small, flaring to let out another blast of moist breath. It swung its shaggy head sideways, its curved horns nearly gouging Tulkh’s face before he drew back.

“Are they …”

“Tauntauns.” The Whiphid made it sound like a bad word about somebody’s mother. “At least it explains the sm—”

A thick gobbet of spit hit him squarely in the face, and Tulkh lunged forward, wiping it off, meeting the tauntaun eye-to-eye. He and it were almost the same height. The snow lizard’s lips were already working up another load of saliva—Zo thought the thing actually looked like it was smirking at him—when Tulkh abruptly broke into a grin. It was the first time Zo had seen him express anything other than impatience and indifference, and the effect was disconcerting.

“Good girl.” Tulkh brushed one hand over its snout, ruffling the fur beneath one of its horns. “I bet there’s probably some mook fruit for you around here somewhere.” Then, glancing back at Zo, his smile faded.
“What?”

“If I’d known that spitting in your face was the key to your good graces,” Zo said, “I would have done it a long time ago.”

Ignoring her, Tulkh returned his attention to the creature. “You’re a foul old girl, aren’t you?” he said affectionately. “I used to hunt with one like you, back on Toola.” He glanced at the thick harness tethering the thing in its pen, and turned to look up ahead at the source of another noise, lower and more dissonant.

Listening, Zo heard it, too. The stalls in front of them were full of an increasing din—braying and squabbling—getting louder every second.

“Something’s got them spooked,” she said.

“Yeah.” Awareness dawned in the Whiphid’s face. “I think you’re right.”

In the stables, the tauntauns sounded as though they were screaming now, stomping in their paddocks.

The lights went out.

*  *  *

The blackness that engulfed them was crushing and total. Zo felt Tulkh’s hand reach out and seize hold of her arm, just below the shoulder. “Stay close,” his voice rumbled in her ear, and she heard the creak of the leather quiver on his back. “Keep back.”

Zo felt her vision adjusting, straining after whatever slender traces of light she might find at the other end of the paddock, but there was precious little available, and what there was only created a myopic swamp of deep gray shadow. She could feel her senses reaching out into the recesses, pinging off the walls and ceiling. Her pupils ached from trying to pull something of substance out of the darkness. Immediately in front of her, she heard Tulkh suck in a sharp breath of air.

“What?” she whispered.

He jerked her forward so hard that her teeth snapped together and all at once she was moving blindly, half running, half dragged through a black and sightless sea. The bounty hunter’s grip on her arm was like a manacle. Swinging forward, losing her equilibrium and then regaining it, she felt the floor skid out from underneath her feet. She wondered how he could see at all, or if he was navigating by sense of smell, or plain dumb luck.

Then she felt them, coming up from behind.

One or many, she didn’t know, but the presence felt massive, an unwelcome intrusion of breath and motion and stinking flesh that bulked through the dark corridor, filling it.

She heard a scream, a sound like she’d never heard before.

—EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—

It rose, a piercing shriek, pressurized and skating upward into the highest registers of audible sound, thousands of vibrations per second, until she expected it to burst apart, splintering into ragged strands and threads of individual voices. But instead it held together, compressing somehow, overwhelming the cries of the tauntauns and everything else.

—EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—

Zo sensed a probing, almost prehensile quality to that note; it was the echo-locating noise of something—some
things
—investigating the blackness around them with a desperate, mindless voraciousness.

As quickly as it had started, the scream broke off. The tauntauns’ cries had strangled away as well, leaving a void of utter silence in their wake. Zo drew in a breath, summoning the Force. What came next was a mental image, no longer than a second or two at the most, like a flash grenade exploding in her head. In that moment she glimpsed the perimeter in front of them, the stalls, and the space behind them. She had just enough of a view to sense what she had to do, now.

She swung one leg in front of Tulkh’s ankle, planted her foot, and felt him trip over it, tumbling sideways with a snarled curse into an empty tauntaun stall to their immediate right. Zo collapsed on top of him. The night vision that the Force had given her was already gone. She felt something long and smooth jabbing painfully against her cheek and realized later that it must have been one of the Whiphid’s tusks.

“What—” he snapped, and this time she took hold of him, squeezing hard, digging her fingers as hard as she could into the bounty hunter’s scaly, sweat-slick hide. In surprise, or maybe realization, he went quiet.

The events of the next few moments weren’t simply a matter of sound or smell but some collusion of both sensory and extrasensory perception. With the Force guiding her, Zo realized that she could
feel
the stalls alongside them, still pitch black, filling with the noxious stirring of many bodies, packed close together, piling past.

Searching.

At one point, Zo sensed them lumbering by so closely that if she’d reached one hand out of the stall, she could have touched them.

And they could have touched her.

They weren’t screaming now, weren’t even breathing. Instead the things, whatever they were, made little incidental grunting noises, the sound of bodies pushing themselves along for the simplest of motives—hunger, hatred, rage.

She held her breath, didn’t move.