Star Wars: Red Harvest (5 page)

Up above, Sith Combat Master Xat Hracken sat back inside the control booth, one hand resting on the wraparound suite of controls. Though he was human, Hracken was built more like an Aqualish, bald, bulky, and broad across the shoulders, his wide, olive-skinned face pinched into a perpetual scowl like stapled bundles of oiled suede. The hour was late, and he and Ra’at were the only ones in the simulator. Hracken, like Blademaster Shak’Weth, had been teaching here at the academy for decades, and he had seen students like Ra’at come
and go—acolytes who seemed to require little or no sleep, who insisted on continuing their training late into the night, sometimes into the morning—and he’d seen how it caught up with them in the end. After a moment’s consideration, he tapped the intercom.

“That’s enough for tonight,” Hracken said.

“No.” Ra’at glowered up at him with red and baleful eyes. “I want to go again.”

Hracken rose from behind the control deck and stepped forward so that the apprentice could see him through the transparisteel window. “You defy me?”

“No, Master.” Ra’at’s tone was only slightly mollified—a symbolic obeisance to the Master’s authority. “I only wish to train under the same regimen as Rance Lussk.”

Hracken nodded to himself. He’d expected as much. From the moment he’d arrived here, Lussk had set the pace for the academy’s most driven pupils, all of whom wanted to fight, train, and study as intensely as he did. What none of them seemed to understand was that there could only be one Lussk, and those who challenged him found themselves sharing the fate of Nickter, among others.

Still, Master Hracken had to admit that he found Ra’at’s ambition intriguing. Ra’at was easily the smallest in his class, wispy-haired and fine-featured, and two years of training hadn’t added more than a few ounces of muscle to his spindly frame. But he had deep steel in him, a kind of gritty, semi-psychotic rage, and a will to power that drove him to do whatever was necessary to get ahead. He also had some very peculiar ideas. It was Ra’at, after all, who had started the rumors that Darth Scabrous himself was abducting students and taking them up to the tower in an effort to find one powerful enough to succeed him. He’d argued the case so successfully that some of the students—and even a few of the Masters—wondered if he might be right.

Now Hracken wondered if he had finally grasped Ra’at’s ultimate goal.

He touched the intercom again. “All right, then, once more.”

Without so much as a nod of acknowledgment, Ra’at dropped back into fighting stance, shoulders squared, jaw set. It was as if he’d known all along that the Master would acquiesce.

All right then
, Hracken thought,
let’s see how good you really are
.

He tapped in a sequence of commands and watched the simulator come to life below him. An automated series of heavy swing-arms arced out from either side, each one of them two meters wide, closing in so that Ra’at had to jump to avoid being crushed. He dived between them easily before going into a tuck-and-roll, successfully dodging the third obstacle, a spring-loaded picador pike, five meters long, that thrust itself unexpectedly downward from the ceiling. Hracken nodded again. It had been the pike that had caught Ra’at last time. Now he was faster.

Are you fast enough, though? That’s the question, isn’t it? How about when you can’t see?

Picking up a pair of thermal lenses from the counter beside him, Hracken adjusted them over his eyes, then reached over and switched off the lights. Darkness swallowed the room, vast and total. Hracken flicked on the goggles. His vision helioscoped into a hundred brilliant variations of fluorescent green before resolving itself into focus, and he leaned forward with keen interest.

Down below, the now-blind Ra’at stopped in his tracks, processing what had just happened, and in that second the wall behind him burst open in a whistling array of heavy rubber whips, slashing into the air. Ra’at jerked forward, but it was too late—the whips drove him to his knees. Hracken saw the apprentice’s face clench, his lips drawn back in pain.

It’s over
, he thought, and reached to switch the lights back on.

But it wasn’t.

Ra’at was on his feet again instantly, jumping clear of the whips. Hracken immediately realized that the apprentice was no longer hampered by vision, or lack thereof: now he was relying entirely upon the Force. When the swing-arm came down again, Ra’at reached up, grabbed it, and actually held on—a move that the Sith Master hadn’t seen before, even from Lussk—riding it all the way up to the ceiling. At
the apex of its arc, he let go, twisting and launching himself headlong through open space to catch hold of the spring-loaded rod as it came spiking out of the wall.

It was a move of unprecedented grace and absolute precision. Ra’at spun himself around the rod once, twice, three times, building speed, and fired himself directly at the window of the control booth.

Master Hracken jerked backward. Ra’at slammed into the transparisteel with both hands, actually clinging there for a split second, long enough for Hracken to see the student’s face staring straight in at him.

Then he dropped.

Hracken whipped off the goggles and turned on the lights. Light roared across the room, filling every corner. He saw Ra’at standing down below, his face flushed, shining with sweat, shoulders rising and falling with the effort of catching his breath. Despite his obvious exhaustion, the apprentice’s face was almost incandescent with leftover adrenaline. When he saw Hracken coming down the stairs, his eyes filled with expectation, awaiting the Sith Master’s judgment.

“Interesting,” Hracken said. “Tomorrow we’ll see if you can do it again.”

Ra’at blinked at him. “Master?”

Hracken looked around. “What is it?”

“Lussk … in combat simulation, has
he
ever …?”

The Sith Master waited for Ra’at to finish the sentence, but in the end the apprentice simply nodded and looked away.

“Tomorrow,” he said.

Walking back to the dorm with his cloak drawn up over his shoulders and his wounds throbbing in the frigid night air, Ra’at stopped and glanced back at the simulation bunker. He was aware of what the other students and Masters said about him—how he was too small, too weak, in thrall to his own paranoid delusions—and he didn’t care. Tonight he’d shown Hracken what he was capable of. Soon the rest would see.

He stepped over a high snowdrift that had formed outside the library, making his way around the eastern wall of the building until he found himself in the shadow of the tower. It was snowing steadily, but Ra’at could still make out the tracks leading up to the tower’s main entryway, two sets of prints along with the familiar tracks of the HK droid.

Ra’at felt the requisite twinge of jealousy. The tracks in the snow meant that Lord Scabrous had brought visitors here, very recently. The Sith Lord had invited them into his sanctum, and they had stepped inside. Ra’at, who had never been inside the tower and could only imagine its secrets, wondered who the visitors had been. Lussk? Nickter? One of the Masters?

Slipping off his glove, Ra’at placed one bare hand directly on the closed hatchway, imagining for a moment that he could feel the power pulsating out from inside, power that he would do anything to possess.

Someday
, he thought,
I’ll go through there myself
.

Until then, he would keep practicing.

I
T WAS AFTER MIDNIGHT IN THE ACADEMY’S MAIN HANGAR
. F
INISHING UP THE LAST
of his maintenance chores, Pergus Frode found himself glaring at the Corellian cruiser still taking up space in the corner of the landing pad. He’d refueled the craft and kept its engines hot, as its pilot had demanded, but that had been several hours ago and there’d been no word from the bounty hunters. Now it was late and he wanted nothing more than to shut things down, go back to his quarters, and collapse into his bunk.

With a sigh, he went back to the hangar’s control booth and sealed the hatch behind him. At least it was warm in here, a haven away from the wind. When he’d first taken over the job almost ten standard years earlier, Frode had retrofitted the booth to meet his needs, installing a personal thermal convection unit for hot meals along with a datapad for his favorite holobooks and holomags. As a hired hand, he had no Force powers and no particular allegiance to the Sith per se; he’d only encountered Darth Scabrous on a handful of occasions. But the last
and only time that he’d ignored orders to stay up and wait, he’d spent a week in lockup icing a broken jaw.

Settling back with a reheated cup of Javarican espresso and a well-worn holo of
Hot Ships
, Frode saw something flicker past the booth. He sat up and wiped a hole in the steamed-up glass, peering out. The HK was standing there, its photoreceptors focused in on him.

Frode stood up and opened the hatch. “Hey.”

The HK turned and looked back at him. “Query: What is it, sir?”

“How much longer are those guys going to be in the tower?” Frode pointed at the cruiser. “I mean, their ship’s just sitting there, eating our fuel.”

“Response: I suppose you ought to shut it down.”

“But that guy Dranok said—”

“Statement: He won’t be coming back, sir. He, or his partner.”

Frode blinked. “What, you mean, like, ever?”

“Response: That is my understanding, sir, yes.”

Pushing back his mission cap to scratch his head, Frode turned his attention speculatively back to the bounty hunter’s vessel. “You know,” he remarked casually, “a ship like that’s gotta carry a pretty sophisticated flight computer.”

“Statement: I’m sure I wouldn’t know anything about that, sir. The equipment of such vessels is not part of my programming, and—”

“You don’t think Lord Scabrous would mind if I yanked her out, do you?”

The HK regarded him blankly.

“You know, set it aside. Scrap-market value on that thing’s not too shabby.”

“Statement: I’m sure you could help yourself,” the droid said, with bottomless indifference, already turning away to go about its business.

Settling his cap back on his head, Frode nodded and got his tools, whistling a little under his breath as he did so.

Maybe, he thought, tonight would turn out well after all.

H
ESTIZO
T
RACE ROLLED OVER, DREW IN A DEEP, RESIGNED BREATH, AND LIFTED HER
head from the pillow. The small, nondescript sleeping chamber where she’d awakened had already begun to fill with soft artificial light. Although she was all alone here, she could feel the orchid waiting for her down below, some two hundred meters away but close enough to hear its voice quite clearly in her mind.

Hestizo! Emergency!

She sat up, pushing off her covers.
What is it? What’s wrong?

My incubation chamber! Come quickly!

Realizing now what the voice must be referring to, she relaxed back down.
Oh
.

“Oh?”
Alarm flashed through the flower’s tone.
This is serious!

I’ll be down in a second
.

Hurry, please!

Okay
, she told it,
all right. Hold on to your petals. I’ll be down there in a minute
.

The orchid retreated in her mind, only marginally placated, as if still awaiting a formal apology. Honestly, Zo didn’t mind its presence in her thoughts; the bond that they shared was, after all, part of her identity, a Jedi in the Agricultural Corps, one of the talented handful whose psychic green thumb kept her here in the nurseries and labs of the Marfa facility.

Marfa was a hothouse, its varying atmospheres, temperatures, and moisture levels all carefully maintained to foster the widest variety of interstellar fauna in this part of the Core Worlds. But it was the Force sensitivity of Zo and her fellow Jedi that drove the different species to their fullest potential. At twenty-five, Zo understood that there was innate value, even a kind of nobility in such things, nurturing every form of botanical life and encouraging every facet of its development and exploration.

Rousing herself fully from the last lingering vestiges of sleep, she slipped into her robe and headed up the corridor to the refresher. The faint sense of unease followed her, an unwelcome remnant of some other unremembered dream. She dressed for the day, choosing her lab frock and hood from a rack of identical uniforms, attributing the tinge of restlessness to that same nameless malaise that sometimes waited for her upon awakening here on Marfa.

Opting out of breakfast, she followed the concourse up to Beta Level Seven. Marfa’s planetary status was constantly shifting with the position of solar activity and galactic cloud patterns, but B-7 was currently the busiest and most vibrant of the various cultivation and growth bays honeycombing Marfa’s surface. Usually most of her fellow Jedi could be found there in the mornings, starting their day with de facto meetings to update one another on progress and research, and share their immediate plans for the future.

The turbolift doors opened on an eye-watering expanse of green, and Zo stopped there as she always did, letting the great familiar cloud of humid warmth wash over her. The smells of countless different plants competed for her attention—sap, fruit, and flower mingling in a mind-boggling banquet of fragrances.

Tilting her head back, she looked up on 150 standard meters of high-ceilinged vines and dangling root systems. All around were narrow, self-sustaining forests of succulents and subspecies and high trellises overrun with loops and whorls of growth so varied in color and size that only through sheer day-after-day familiarity was she able to process it all.

She could already feel them.

Her mind tuned instantly to the internal hum of hundreds of different vegetative life forces, each vibrating according to its own particular emotion, some low and oscillating, others pulsing high and bright to match the explosions of flowers that sprang from their stems. Many of the plants were local enough that she recognized their greetings in her mind, as she passed by. Zo walked among them, allowing their rustling enthusiasm of leaves and stalks to distract her from the nagging tug of unease that had followed her up from below.