Star Wars: Red Harvest (27 page)

“Get in here,” Tulkh’s voice growled.

Zo opened her eyes and saw the Whiphid crouched down in front of her, squatting on his haunches, face half hidden in shadow. On the other side, a droid—Darth Scrabrous’s valet, the HK, she realized—was peering at her with that incurious, analytic gaze unique to highly developed artificial intelligence.

“She seems all right,” the HK said. “I need to run a diagnostic scan on her to make sure she’s not infected.” It paused, and a small steel panel slid open in its breastplate, extruding a slender syringe. “This might sting a bit.”

Sting? Zo would have laughed if she weren’t so completely undone by terror and exhaustion. After everything she’d been through, the needle hardly registered. She allowed the droid to draw its blood sample, and for a moment there was no sound except for the whir of its processors and the low steady rumble of the ship’s turbines.

“Sample is clean,” the HK reported dutifully. “She’s uninfected.”

The Whiphid didn’t say anything, just grunted and made the shrugging gesture of one who’d expected no less, then hoisted himself up and began to lumber away.

Zo levered herself up on her elbows. “Tulkh?” she managed. Her voice was hoarse; she could scarcely produce more than a scraped-out-sounding whisper. “
Tulkh
?”

He stopped without turning around, looking slowly back over his shoulder.

“Thanks.”

Another shrug. “Wasn’t my idea.”

“Yeah, I bet.” Zo let out a breath, allowing herself to sink back down against the cool metal skin of the
Mirocaw
’s hold. The HK was still hovering over her, its visual receptors pulsing and blinking in the half-light of the glowing maintenance arrays.

“Who’s flying this thing?” Zo asked.

“Someone named Pergus Frode. He—”

“Who?”

The HK didn’t respond right away.

“I’m picking up some form of contamination,” it said. “Very close by.”

Zo stared at it. “I thought you said I was clean.”

“
You
are.” The whirring sound had grown louder; now it sounded alarmed. “But something else onboard this vessel is—”

The ship slammed sideways, tilting hard to port, throwing Zo backward against the bulkhead. Klaxons blared and whooped up above, accompanied by the wild swirl of blue lights. She sat up just in time to see the HK rounding the corner, heading for the steel rungs that led upward through the oval hatchway to the main flight deck.

“Wait, what’s happening?”

The droid didn’t answer, even as she chased it upward, following it through the gangway and into the cockpit. By the time the second explosion struck the
Mirocaw
, she didn’t need an answer. She already knew.

They were under attack.

T
HE BROWN-HAIRED, HAGGARD-LOOKING MAINTENANCE ENGINEER IN THE PILOT’S
seat had both hands locked on the ship’s controls, his expression stretching somewhere between worry and outright disbelief. Outside the
Mirocaw
’s hull, another blast rocked the vessel backward. Over the shrill whooping of the ship’s collision alarms, Zo heard steel splintering off the underside of one of its wings.

“What’s shooting at us?” she asked.

“Scabrous’s perimeter cannons,” the man shouted, jerking his head forward. Red and white emergency beacons pulsed off his face. “Down below.”

Zo gripped the back of the pilot’s seat and stared out through the canopy’s viewport. What she saw below was enough to freeze her blood. They were still hovering over the planet, no more than half a kilometer above the blizzard-smothered surface of Odacer-Faustin. Between the fallen temples and stone buildings, the heavy guns that had come thrusting up out of the ground itself were turreting back
around, tilting upward, energy beams hammering the ship in heavy bursts of artillery.

“Get us out of here!” Zo shouted.

“It’s not that simple! They’re laying down a solid wall of restraining fire across the upper horizon!”

“What?”

“They don’t want us to leave!”
Frode whipped back around and met her gaze. His eyes were surprisingly blue. “And I can’t maintain the deflector shields on this piece of junk!”

“Where’s Tulkh?” Zo asked.

“Who?”

“The Whiphid! The guy that owns the ship!”

The HK didn’t respond right away. Zo fought the urge to grab the thing by its processors and shake it. She couldn’t imagine the Whiphid idly standing by while Sith cannons blasted his ship to pieces, but she hadn’t seen him since he’d stalked off, and if the droid knew something about that—

“Can you deactivate the cannons?” she asked.

The HK emitted a low, resigned buzz. “Not by remote … not anymore.”

“How can we stop them? They’re going to blow us out of the sky!”

“The main control system is inside the tower,” the droid said. “I might be able to override the system manually. But that would mean—”

BOOM!
Another fusillade of blasts, the biggest yet, hammered the
Mirocaw
from below, almost hurling it sideways. Zo toppled into the copilot’s chair and strapped herself in, fastening the restraining web around her shoulder and waist. She saw whole rows of durasteel turrets protruding up from the snow now, their cannons flinging wave after wave of red pulses up at the ship.

“Take us down,” she shouted at Frode, pointing across the landscape where Scabrous’s tower rose up like a single black accusatory finger stabbing back at them. Frode, for his part, didn’t argue, ramming the stick hard to the side so that the
Mirocaw
shot down and over, dipping across the academy’s buildings and then angling upward again.
For an instant the top of the tower appeared beneath them like a flat black disk encircled in lights from below, and there was a sharp, scraping cough of metal on metal as the
Mirocaw’
s landing gear settled on its roof. Another round of blasterfire strafed the air directly in front of them, the last of the bolts slamming into the ship’s side, ricocheting off. There was a new, steady, high-pitched whine siphoning down to silence as the last of the deflector shields failed.

“Hurry,” Frode snapped grimly. “We’re not going to last another thirty seconds up here.”

The HK had already disappeared from the cockpit, angling back down the hatchway to the hold below. A moment later, an alarm shrilled, announcing an open hatchway, Zo and Frode stared out of the cockpit at the top of the tower.

“No,” she rasped.

“What?”

Zo pointed, a terrible coldness spreading over her as her throat tightened with revulsion. Gazing out into the first tremulous gray swirls of dawn, she could already see the first of the things crawling up from inside the tower’s upper chamber onto the roof, squirming through the broken windows of its top level, closing in on the ship. The tower was infested with corpses, she realized, packed solid with them. Her mind whirled back to what the droid had said.

“Is there anybody else aboard?”

“Just that Whiphid bounty hunter,” Frode scowled. “Why?”

“The HK said there was an infection aboard.”

“What?”
He looked down at himself, hands patting his flight suit as if searching for some indication of illness. “Where?”

“It didn’t say, but—”

THOOM!
A massive blast of energy smashed into the side of the
Mirocaw
, hard enough to knock it off its landing gear and send it skidding crookedly across the roof of the tower, right toward the edge. Through the cockpit, Zo saw the front end of the ship spin forward, slashing into the mob of corpses clustered in front of it, shoving them off the roof and sending them spilling down off the roof of the tower
in waves. The ship kept sliding, lurched, tilted, and dropped nose-first into free fall.

Suddenly Zo realized she was looking straight down at the surface of the planet hurtling up toward them.

We’re going down
, her mind cried out,
we’re going to—

Frode punched the engines and
Mirocaw
swung violently upward at the last possible second, skimming off the rocky outcropping of Sith architecture and pulling up, streaking skyward.

Spinning in her seat, Zo looked back at the tower, clearly visible now in the morning light. Its roof was crawling with the Sith-things, every student at the academy who had been infected, seething up from the windows and surging forward to fill the empty space where the
Mirocaw
had just been. They were out there, openmouthed, screaming together, and although Zo couldn’t hear their cry, some part of her
could
feel it resonating through her chest cavity, through her mind and heart. She knew it would be a long time before that scream faded completely from her memory, if it ever did.

“The droid must have gotten to the main controls,” Frode said, pointing down. “Look.”

Zo turned to see Scabrous’s ground-based turbolasers pivoting back around. At first she thought they were targeting the ship again; then she realized they had continued to rotate, until at least a dozen of the cannons had trained their digital crosshairs on the same central target.

The tower.

The droid
, Zo thought,
the HK, it’s still up there—

The laser cannons fired together, each one of them spitting a solid beam of energy directly at the top of the tower. The blasts collided simultaneously, and the tower exploded in a blinding spray of shrapnel and flame, a vast cloud of secondary combustion spreading out from inside, widening in a vast, all-consuming ring as the main and secondary reactors blew.

The report was colossal, world-shattering. Up in the cockpit, Pergus Frode, who knew precious little about combustion or reactors, but
grasped the fundamentals of self-preservation on a very personal level, had the presence of mind to open the
Mirocaw
’s thrusters all the way. It was the only thing that kept the ship from getting sucked back into the shock wave, and it was enough.

Hitting escape velocity, penetrating Odacer-Faustin’s atmosphere and already preparing herself for the jump to lightspeed, Zo could still feel the tremors shuddering through the ship. When she looked down at her fingers, she saw that she was gripping the armrests of the copilot’s seat hard enough to blanch her knuckles white. With some deliberate effort, she let go, cleared her throat, and held out one hand to the man flying the ship.

“By the way,” she said, in a shaky voice, “I’m Hestizo Trace.”

“Pergus Frode.” He let out a breath and took her hand. “Pleased to meet you.”

“Nice flying.”

“I’ve done a bit of it in my time,” he said, and a faint frown line appeared above his right eyebrow. “Wait, where are you going?”

“Back into the hold,” Zo said. “I need to go check on something.”

S
HE STEPPED SLOWLY INTO THE TROPHY ROOM, PAYING ATTENTION TO EVERY DETAIL
. The chamber where she’d first awakened was just as she remembered it—the bones and pelts, the skulls on the wall, the Whiphid’s arrays of kill-trophies, all surprisingly ordered and organized despite the ship being slammed and tossed by blaster attack. It was as if someone, or something, had just come through and straightened everything up. The closed-in air was thick with the stink of spilled liquid fat, oily fires, and the cloying, constant reek of dried blood.

She took another step, ducking under a row of rusty meat hooks dangling from pulleys over her head, and paused, staring deep into the far corner. There was something huddled there, crouched away from the light, a low, bulky form whose outline eluded shape or detail. She could hear it making low breathing sounds.

“Tulkh?”

The form shifted, squirming slightly, just enough that Zo glimpsed one of the glassine eyes looking up at her. The Whiphid, she realized,
had bolted himself to the wall, clamping himself into an array of heavy chains and cables, with an additional metal brace—a type of slaving collar, it looked like—pinned around his massive neck. Thick red clots and seeping sores had already taken root in the fur around his face.

“What happened?” she asked.

Tulkh snorted, raised his head, jaws creaking open. “What’s it look like?”

Zo drew in a sharp breath. Despite everything she’d seen so far, she felt a thin stiletto of shock slide through her at the sight of the Whiphid’s ravaged face. The right eye, the entire right side of his head, had swollen up horribly, ballooning with infection and necrotic tissue working busily within. Weeping pustules across his brow and cheek trickled with syrupy-thick discharge down the front of his chest. Even the tusk that jutted up from the right side of his jaw had turned a sickly yellow shade, like a cavity-rotted tooth.

“You?” she asked.

Tulkh made a guttural croaking noise, gesturing at the restraints that he’d placed on himself. “Locked myself in,” he managed. “I can feel it. It’s coming on.”

“How did—”

“Snow lizard.”

“
What
?”

“Infected one. It spat on me.” Tulkh made a rueful sound that might actually have been a wry chuckle. “Must have gotten blood in my eyes. After everything else that’s happened …”

“Maybe …”

“Here.” He raised one hand, and Zo saw that he was clutching the broken end of his spear, the one that he’d been carrying with him. Perhaps half a meter of the shaft remained, tipped with a flinty arrowhead edge that looked just as razor-sharp as it had the first time she’d seen it. “Keep that. Might bring you luck.”

“Listen,” she said. “The sickness affected you differently. You’re still alive. Maybe there’s a way we can—”

“Mazlot.”

“What?”

He jerked his head back at the two-meter wall to which he’d bolted himself, and Zo saw the black rubberized seal encircling it, its outer edges slightly rounded like the curves on an old-fashioned monitor screen. “This whole back panel drops away. Blow the seal with that switch on the far wall.”

Zo glanced back at the switch plate that the Whiphid had gestured to, on the opposite side of the hold. She remembered seeing it the first time she’d been here, seeing the writing but being unable to make it out under the scrum of moss that had grown over it. The moss was thinner now, and she could see the single word in all-capital sans serif letters: