Star Wars: Red Harvest (24 page)

The hangar was largely empty and presented extremely limited possibilities for protection. Acting on his gut, he’d reared around toward the nearest vessel—the cruiser that those two doomed bounty hunters, Dranok and Skarl, had arrived in—and went bolting up the still-extended landing ramp, reeling around to slam the ship’s hatch shut behind him.

Frode had piloted his share of ships before becoming a mechanic, and this one looked like as good an escape vehicle as any. Whatever the
thing was that had tried to attack him, he had no intention of sticking around to fight it. No job was worth that.

He’d started to power up the ship, ready to activate the flight computer, and realized his error.

The hole in the instrumentation panel gaped at him like a slack, empty mouth.

No
, he thought, remembering the components that he’d yanked out with such enthusiasm just an hour or so before. The flight computer was still sitting on the counter in his booth, and he couldn’t fly without it, any more than he could—

The thing landed on the cockpit in front of him, grinning hideously, and began pounding and scratching at the transparisteel. Frode screamed. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t think he’d ever screamed that loud in his life, certainly not in his
adult
life, but terror was booming through him now in big, wide, frantic waves. He felt dizzy with it.

And then he saw something worse.

Outside, the hangar bay was filling with the living dead.

Sith students—Frode realized only now how much he truly hated them—were shambling in the direction of the ship from all sides, jerking and scrambling and lurching forward, their mouths scooped open in big shovel-faced grins. Behind them, a sprawling, gangling thing that looked like a living tree was dragging a long mesh of dripping black roots and branches toward him. Its eyes reflected only madness. As Frode—who’d never once set foot in the academy’s library, and would never have recognized the infected remains of its arboreal curator—stood crouched in the cockpit, one of the branch-arms had swung up and slapped at the transparisteel viewport. It connected hard enough that, for a second, he almost thought he’d heard the port crack. Impossible, but…

That was when he’d run back into the rear of the ship, down a landing ramp, through a hatch, until he’d landed here, in the safest place that he could find, the smuggler’s bin, and curled here, and hadn’t moved since—

“Pergus?”

He sat up a little, uncertain if he’d heard the voice or simply imagined it. He was not a particularly imaginative person, and the voice—a female—sounded very real. After a moment he realized it was coming from the comlink mounted above his head. Frode reached up and keyed the mic.

“Pergus?”

“Who are you?” he asked aloud. “How do you know my name?”

“Kindra.”

“How come I can hear you—”

“The Force, Pergus. You’re up there. I know.”

Frode listened to the voice. There was something unsettling about it, as if the speaker, Kindra—whoever
that
was—was trying very hard to sound calm and easygoing, as if nothing was wrong. Underneath it, though, he detected a strong undercurrent of … what? Fear? Terror?

“Where are you?” he muttered.

“Hangar,”
the voice said. “Get out. Get me out.”

“What about those things? Aren’t they still out there?”

No answer. He wondered if it was because something had happened to her that he couldn’t hear her talking anymore.

“Kindra?”

“Just … open the hatch of the ship, Pergus. Open up and let me in. I’ll be quick. We’ll both fly out of here together. We can’t stay here. But hurry. I’m right outside.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I took out the ship’s flight computer … it can’t navigate without it. We wouldn’t make it three klicks in this weather. We’ll crash right back into the snow.”

“I’ll … I’ll help us. We’ll get away somehow, I promise. Please, Pergus. Just … let me in … please. Hurry.”

Frode grimaced. One of the reasons he’d ventured all this way to the far end of the galaxy was his rotten luck with women, specifically his inability to deny them anything. Yet here he was again. Hating himself already, he stood up inside the storage bin, lifted off the steel plate, and crawled up onto the main landing ramp. In truth, he wasn’t sure why he was doing it. He
knew
it wasn’t right—there was definitely
something wrong about opening the hatchway—yet the voice, the girl’s pleas, her desperation, motivated him forward, drew him along in a way that he couldn’t quite comprehend, and maybe she could help get them out of here, maybe …

The Force
, a faint voice of reason piped up deep inside him, from somewhere hopelessly deep within himself,
she’s using the Force on you, to manipulate your actions
, and although he knew it was true, he still couldn’t quite seem to resist.

He reached the main hatchway, placed his hand on the lever, and turned it, pushing it forward.

“Look,” he started, “I don’t think this is—”

And stopped.

Beyond the hatch, the hangar was completely dark.

Frode stood clutching the bulkhead behind him, pupils dilating, trying to make out even the vaguest of shapes, but without success. It was as if whatever was out there had destroyed the lights and ripped out the power, burying the vast space around him in utter blackness.

But he could hear them.

Holding his breath, he could hear the sounds of many bodies rustling together, the faint moist sound of their shoulders and arms and torsos packed together in the dark. They weren’t breathing, but they were making hollow rasping noises that could have been some obscene attempt at speech.

Then, all around him, the lightsabers started coming on.

They activated individually and in clusters, red humming spikes of light, dozens of them, shooting upward, filling the air with a low, oscillating hum that shook Frode’s molars in the back of his mouth. His eyes began to adjust, and at length he began to make out the blades shining off the starved dead faces of the students that held them upright, their blank expressions, the bleak and rapacious eyes that gaped back at him. Drool gleamed on their lips. Dried red gore encrusted their teeth and lips.

No, Frode thought.
Oh no
.

Staring out at the things, he felt something inside him loosen, turn
to liquid, and swirl away, something both abstract and at the same time terribly visceral, like the blood supply to his heart. Everywhere he looked, more scarlet streaks continued to crosshatch on top of one another, springing up in all directions, as if something were clawing its way out of the dark and the dark was bleeding.

And looking closer, he saw the girl.

She was standing at the bottom of the gangway amid a shifting prison of red blades, surrounded by the rotting corpses of her classmates, their hands clutching her arms and legs, holding her captive. Lightsabers crisscrossed in front of her, hovered over her head, immobilizing her. One of the things had its open mouth pressed up against her bare throat. Another’s teeth were bared and ready to attack a small, exposed part of her shoulder. A third and fourth stood waiting behind her, their jaws open so wide that it almost seemed like they could have devoured her entire head in one huge, all-consuming bite.

“I did what you wanted!”
Kindra shouted at them.
“He opened it! Now let me go! Let me—”

The things fell upon her, the red blades slashing her to pieces as they ripped her apart. Even from where Frode stood, the crunching noises were thick and juicy and glottal, like the sound of someone biting into a particularly ripe apple. Several of the corpses broke free from the group and started thundering up the gangway, toward the open hatchway, just as Frode slammed it shut again.

He decided he could fly the ship without the flight computer after all.

Z
O AWOKE TO A TIGHT BAND OF PAIN ACROSS HER CHEST AND SHOULDERS, TWISTING
in her joints like ground glass. When she tried to shift her position to alleviate the pain, she realized that she couldn’t move at all.

The pit where she lay was settled at the bottom of a deep shaft, its high onyx-colored walls shining up as far as the eye could see, in some unfathomable expanse of glassy black. Her head spun. She realized that she had been tied down here, strapped to a large stone slab by wide leather bands and iron rings that crisscrossed her chest and looped over her wrists and ankles, pinning them in position. Torches burned on either side of her, rows of them in the hundreds, leading upward, flickering up over the walls, gleaming off tiny, ornate lines of script and filigree that moved across it like rows of programmer’s code.

She breathed, coughed a little, and tried to summon moisture onto the back of her tongue. The air down here tasted metallic, dusty, and very old. It was like inhaling through a hole in some archaic stone
tablet. Oily tallow from the torches dripped on the floor around her, and the greasy black smoke wafting up from their flames only made her throat feel more parched.

From somewhere behind her, she heard movement, the scuff and rustle of footsteps, the soft clink of objects being arranged outside her peripheral vision.

“Look up,” Scabrous’s voice croaked.

Zo turned and moved her neck, straining to tilt her head as much as the straps would allow. The Sith Lord was gazing down. The decay process had accelerated drastically since she’d last looked at him. The Sickness had taken over his face completely now, remaking it into gelid, shapeless soup from which two bloodshot eyes gleamed at her with terrible scrutiny. Gray strips of gristle quivered from the exposed bone of his skull, and when he spoke she saw the tendons swing inside his throat.

He was holding a sword.

Not a lightsaber, but an actual Sith sword. Its shining blade seemed to have been forged from the same black durasteel as the walls around them, and stretched as long as Scabrous’s arm. As the Sith Lord raised it up, Zo realized that the designs from the walls of the pit had been echoed along the blade’s entire length, great thorny rows of script and inscription gleaming in the torchlight. The resulting weapon seemed almost to blur and merge with its surroundings, its lethal edge shimmering and disappearing again as the Sith Lord swung it overhead.

“This blade,” Scabrous said, “belonged to Darth Drear. It was forged exclusively for him, to ensure his immortality. So today, in accordance with his legacy, I will use it to slice out your living heart, and devour it while you watch.”

Zo tried to answer—with no idea of what she might say—but the knot in her throat blocked out all speech. Terror, bright and uncontrollable, had fastened itself over her conscious mind, and she could not stop staring at the sword. At this moment, nothing in her past, her training, or her aspirations for the future seemed as real to her as its
blade, the inarguable geometric equation that connected its edge to her flesh.

Hestizo—

There was nothing she could do.

The sword plunged down.

“T
HERE’S ONE,
” T
ULKH SAID
. “B
EHIND THAT WALL
. S
EE HIM
?”

The HK pivoted unhesitatingly, firing two quick blasts at the openmouthed Sith-thing as it stalked around the corner in front of them, arms thrown open. It went down screaming.

“Your turn,” the HK replied. “To your left.”

The Whiphid turned and flung his spear into the space between the building and the statue rising before it. An instant later, a Sith student lunged out, the spear embedded in its chest, roaring toward them until Tulkh fired an arrow into its head.

“Nicely done,” the droid said. “But it’s still coming.”

With a grunt, Tulkh ambled forward and picked the Sith student up by the spear hanging from its ribs. Lifting the thing completely off its feet, he wrenched it around sideways and hammered it into the stone wall alongside them. The tip of the spear twisted loose, and he used its serrated edge to rip off the thing’s head.

He held the head out on the end of the spear, offering it to the droid.

“Keepsake?”

“No.”

“What happened to
No thank you, sir
?”

The droid gazed at him. “Look out behind you,” it said drily. “Sir.”

Tulkh looked back at the side of the structure where he’d just beheaded the Sith-thing. The ground began to tremble. He saw a flash of motion inside the half-open hatchway, something big, and heard a scream … a great torrent of gargling screeches. It didn’t sound like the ones that he’d heard before. But the smell was hideously familiar.

“Watch out,” he said. “This is gonna be bad.”

The first undead tauntaun came charging out, smashing the door of the hatchway completely out of its housing with the bulk of its body. From here Tulkh could see that half its thoracic cavity was ripped away, the remains of its internal organs flapping from its ribs. A large section of its head was gone as well, but it was still screaming as it flung itself toward them. Its eyes were clouded and pinkish, like milk mixed with blood.

“Burn it,” Tulkh said.

The droid’s flamethrower roared across the open ground, and the bounty hunter saw the snow lizard’s oily pelt come alive with flames. Howling, the thing spun around, trampling furiously, rolling in the snow, trying to extinguish the fire, and the HK fired into it, blasting its carcass to shreds.

“You have anything bigger than a laser?” Tulkh asked.

“Mortar rounds. Why?”

The Whiphid gave a nod back at the open paddock. The herd of infected tauntauns was already thundering out, half a dozen or more, all producing that same indefinable shrieking noise. The front-runner had a gaping hole in its flank, the ragged edges of the wound quivering as it galloped so that the hole slapped open and shut like a second, stammering mouth. Something was wrong with its upper torso—

Tulkh could see a heavy shape writhing around inside the snow lizard’s belly.

He slammed his spear into it, and the thing burst open in a thick welter of fluid. From inside, the blood-soaked form of a Sith student came spilling out into the snow. The Sith-thing stood up grinning from inside its sticky web of blood, shook its head from side to side violently, and screamed.