Star Wars: Red Harvest (7 page)

“Why would you assume that?” Trace asked.

Norch narrowed his eyes as if reassessing the Jedi Knight’s trustworthiness. “The Republic has been evaluating this planet as a possible defense stronghold in the Arkanis sector—that’s strictly confidential, of course.”

“And?”

“And when I contacted the Jedi Council, they informed me that you were in possession of certain telemetric abilities that might clarify our enemy’s underlying intent.”

“That’s true.”

“Well, in any case.” Now Norch was giving him the Full Scowl—out of impatience or the simple exertion of shouting out over the flapping tent, Trace couldn’t be sure. At last the lieutenant cleared his throat and found some speck out on the horizon to stare at. “It was my personal understanding that upon arriving here, you would use your particular, ah … abilities to assist us in our investigation.”

“And it was
my
understanding,” Trace said, “that I would be given complete authority here to perform my investigation, without any outside interference.” He was still looking down into the great smoking hole, at the warship and the colossal planetary bullet wound that its impact had created. It was even deeper than he’d initially suspected, and he could already hear the subtle, lethal whisper of escaping pressure.

“What exactly do you want from me?”

Trace looked up at him. “Get your men and clear out.”

“From the tent?”

“From the planet.”

One eyebrow arched up, a trick the lieutenant had been saving until now: “I beg your pardon?”

“It’s not safe.”

“We’ve already reinforced the ground around the site for a kilometer in every direction—”

“I’m not talking about the ground.” Trace allowed his voice to become slightly sharper. “Do you hear that hissing sound? The warship struck a subterranean gas deposit, a big one by the sound of it, and the underground gases here on Geonosis are notoriously unstable. If it sublimates while your men are around, you won’t
have
men anymore.”

“Listen here. I’m in charge, and—”

“Then you’d do well to listen to what
this
man says,” a new voice cut in.

Trace turned to see a female Republic officer, perhaps in her early thirties, dark-haired, and attractive, smiling at him. From Norch’s salute, she clearly outranked him, but she didn’t even acknowledge the response.

“Rojo Trace? I’m Captain Tekla Ansgar. Welcome.” Her pale blue eyes glimmered at him, sharp and confident. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I certainly hope you won’t judge your experience here on the basis of one unpleasant conversation.”

“Frankly,” Trace said, “my own experience here couldn’t matter less. I’m here to do a job.”

“Oh, I’m sure there’s more to it than that.” She stepped toward him, casually brushing his arm with her own. “I have to confess, I’ve always admired the Jedi Order, but I’ve never had the opportunity to get to know a Jedi Knight personally.”

“I’m afraid that’s not going to happen today,” Trace said.

She frowned a little. “But—”

Before she could continue, Trace moved past her, turned, and jumped straight into the crater.

The plunge took the better part of thirty seconds, but to Trace it seemed both instantaneous and, in an unreal way, much longer. Shearing downward through the chasm, he summoned the Force, generating a cushion of resistance beneath him until he felt his free fall slackening, the crater walls slowing down, individual molecules meshing
to buffet his descent. Now, with a little bit of concentration, he could see every crack and divot in the rock as it passed.

By the time he noticed the rest of the warship lodged at the bottom of the pit, he’d decreased his rate of descent to the point where he could reach out and catch hold of the broken fuselage. Cold durasteel slapped his hands. Swinging his legs around, Trace dropped through a ragged gash in the hull, boots thumping off a narrow band of twisted metal that had once been part of a catwalk.

He took a breath and looked around.

Even from here, the warship was a predictably ugly thing, inelegant and utilitarian, the work of a culture that saw nothing of beauty in the galaxy. The impact of the crash had actually improved its aesthetics, giving it some makeshift degree of originality. Standing here, he could feel the hulking weight of the craft tipping unsteadily around him, the wreckage still settling, rocking into place. Sharp edges rasped and scraped against the deep sedimentary layers, carving random glyphs into the soft sandstone. Beneath it all, omnipresent and lethal, was the stealthy
whoosh
of escaping gas. He didn’t have much time.

Edging his way deeper into the vessel—bulkheads shifting even as he passed through—Trace paused, expanding his senses to draw in any indication of any remaining life aboard.

There was nothing.

Up above in the tent, the military officer had told him that the initial bioscan had come back negative … though he feared that a handful of Sith survivors might somehow be jamming the reading, preparing an ambush.

Trace could have told him already that was not going to happen. But he’d come this far, and simple curiosity drew him onward. Dropping farther, taking his time, he clamored through the main flight deck and groped in the dark until his fingers brushed against something smooth, damp, and still faintly warm. There was a soft organic pulpiness to it. Without needing to look, he knew he’d come across the first corpse.

Slowly his eyes began to adjust. The remains of the Sith flight crew lay smashed and bleeding, burned, skin bubbling over exposed bone and melted into the fabric of their uniforms. Fire and impact had fused several of the bodies into a single twisted mass of faces and broken limbs embedded into the seats where they’d died.

He could smell the gas now, its sulfuric rotten-egg fumes trickling into his lungs, and knew time was short. He closed his eyes again but didn’t remove his hand from the mass of dripping flesh and bone. Proximity was important; physical contact was even better. Beneath the inner geometry of his own thoughts, he began to hear the curses of the crew as the ship’s navigational system failed, felt their dawning horror as they realized the engine pods were going to bury them deep below the planet’s crust. In the end, the impending inevitability of death had reduced them to something as brainless and scurrying as Mustafar lava fleas, their faith in the dark side, their sworn oath to the Sith Lords with their incantations and ancient sigils, stripped away in a final spasm of animal panic.

And then silence.

Always silence.

Trace exhaled, reminded now of other terms he’d heard used to describe the Republic’s role in crash sites like this. The officers might call them investigators, but the enlisted men on the ground had other names. Names like
corpse counters
and
dirt tourists
.

The nicknames meant little to him. That was the job; everything else was a distraction, including female officers who wanted to get to know him personally. He was aware of his reputation for being cold and impersonal: it didn’t bother him in the least.

He withdrew his hand, preparing his ascent to the surface—

And sucked in a quick breath between his teeth. The bright lancet of sudden overwhelming fear that he’d just experienced had nothing to do with the warship or the remains of its crew.

Something else was happening, somewhere far distant.

Something far worse.

He saw his sister’s face.

There could be no doubt about it. It was Zo and she was screaming in a frenzy of pain and helplessness. And although Trace couldn’t see her attacker clearly, he realized from the erratic sunbursts of her thoughts that she had no defense against the thing that loomed above her, dragging her out of the Jedi Agricultural Corps facility, toward—what?

He stopped, frozen, his current locale utterly forgotten, blindsided by a storm of disjointed images: the shaft of a spear, dripping with blood; a flash of green; a whiff of something rancid and feral. His nostrils burned with the stench of a place that had been bottled up too long, a place of death and solitude and agonized last breaths. He could feel her confusion and apprehension pumping through his own circulatory system, as if they shared the same heart. For a moment he could feel the presence of her abductor.

Listen to me
, Trace told him.
I don’t know who you are, but I am in possession of a very special set of skills. If you bring my sister back right now, unharmed, then I’ll let you go. But if you don’t, I promise you, I will track you down. I will find you. And I will make you pay
.

Of course there was no response.

From beneath him came a stuttering, squealing lurch, then a deafening crash as the fuselage of the crashed Sith warship swayed under his feet and abruptly gave way in a waterfall of sparks. There was a sudden
whoosh
and a plume of flame as a gas pocket blasted open from the wall.

The explosion rocked the crater to its depths. Snapping around, Trace felt huge slabs of scorched rock scaling loose, tumbling down toward him. On reflex, he threw up a solid bubble of air, pressing it outward to ensure enough breathable oxygen—too little and he’d suffocate inside here, a bug in a jar.

The bubble did its job. Debris hammered down on top of it, shale bouncing and skittering across the dome. Trace scarcely noticed. He cast his thoughts back toward Zo, back to the place in himself where he’d seen and felt the final compulsive timpani of her distress, straining for any hint of where she might be, where her captor was taking her.

But there was nothing there now, only dead air as deep and final as that which followed the crash of the warship where he now stood.

And awful silence.

Rising upward with the bubble, Trace made for the surface of the crater, the light from above growing brighter, broadening to illuminate the deep frown etched onto his face.

Z
O AWOKE STARING INTO THE EMPTY SOCKETS OF A SKULL
.

Not human—it was a misshapen thing, one eyehole appreciably larger than the other, and a third gaping just above it, its gap-toothed grin seeming to welcome her into some murderous new realm where proportions were a joke and nothing made sense. There was a dusky blue sapphire, probably fake, embedded in the thing’s one remaining incisor. The skull’s current owner had strung several lengths of thick cable through its facial sinuses so that it dangled like a grotesque bead on a string, and when Zo sat up and tried to move away from it, the fullness of the chamber where she’d awakened came into view.

She was inside a kind of trophy room.

The cable ran from one side of the room to the other. Rows of similar skulls hung on either end, dozens of them, grouped together in clusters while others were set apart in twos and threes to create a kind of ghastly abacus. Beneath it, an irregular array of vats and stained crucibles bubbled steadily over heating elements. In them, Zo saw more
bones and shanks of raw-knobbed limbs protruding upward, some sheathed in yellow fat and sinew while others seemed to have boiled down to the marrow. Moss and mildew covered the ceiling, years of lichen and mold, colonies of life competing for airborne fat molecules coming off the pots. The smell of scalded viscera hung permanently in the air.

Swallowing, trying not to gag, Zo squirmed again and felt something slick and oily brush against the backs of her arms. Turning around, she saw that the entire wall behind her was lined with skins and hides, each one crawling with layers of tiny blind beetles industriously gnawing away. She watched, helpless, as they burrowed in and out of the hanging flank, hauling off chunks of grayish flesh.

“Boski scarabs,” a voice behind her said.

Zo snapped back around and saw the Whiphid standing in the doorway. His gaze was intense, corrosive, as if he could already see through her skin to the skeleton she would inevitably leave behind—bones he might boil out of her if she weren’t worth waiting for the natural decay process to do it first.

Zo moved her head slightly and winced at the pain in the base of her neck. She remembered those last few moments at the Marfa facility—the butt end of the Whiphid’s spear, a glassy rocket of agony, the blurry slither of the corridor as it warped past the lens of her ever-dimming consciousness.

And just before she’d blacked out, the hatchway.

Zo looked past the Whiphid, regarding her surroundings through this new, unwelcome perspective. The whine of turbines under the floorboards, the persistent shiver of the bulkhead—though the room was without any sort of viewport, offering no sight of their greater surroundings, she realized they had to be in flight.

“Is this your ship?”

The Whiphid nodded once. “The
Mirocaw
.”

“Where are we going?”

This time, he didn’t answer, lumbering instead over to the nearest of the pots. She watched as he lifted the lid and dipped in with an oxidized
pair of tongs, hoisting a grubby clump of something that she realized was a type of shank. Bits of gristle and musculature, part of a leg, dangled from its lower edges. With an unimpressed grunt, the Whiphid dropped the part back into the pot and slapped the lid back down, then turned to walk out again.

“Wait,” she said hoarsely.

The bounty hunter didn’t stop.

The hatch slid shut.

A moment after he left, Zo found the orchid.

It was still inside the half-crushed specimen flask, strapped almost haphazardly between a cargo drop panel and a swing bin above the vats of limbs and skulls. Her captor had used the same greasy cable he’d strung through the skulls to tie the containment vessel into place. From where she stood below it, she saw that the orchid had flourished even while she’d lain here unconscious. Simple physical proximity seemed enough to keep it alive, despite the fact that for a good bit of the time she’d been out cold.

Zo looked at it.

Hello
?

Nothing.

It’s me. Can you hear me?

The initial process of communication was never easy. At first it had felt almost unnatural. Yet with practice, through countless mornings spent sitting alone with the orchid, she’d soon reached a level of mastery that eased the transitory awkwardness into a smoother and more organic leap.