Star Wars: Red Harvest (14 page)

The others.

Six of them.

Sith students, she saw, the fronts of their uniforms caked in gore, clustered together, their gray faces upturned to show eyes that glittered with that same shared intensity of appetite. When they screamed, they screamed together. One of them was a Zabrak. The others were—had been—human.

Zo snapped a glance back at the corpse whose leg was trapped under the rock.

It’s calling them
—the orchid’s voice broke through in her mind—
summoning them up here, Hestizo—

When the scream ended, she heard an eager scratching noise. The other students had already shoved forward, grabbing the ragged surface in front of them, clawing at it.

They began to climb.

W
HERE IS EVERYBODY
?

That was what Kindra had asked Ra’at when they were outside, and he’d blown it off, or pretended to, because he didn’t have an answer—or because the answer he had was too deeply disturbing to vocalize. But the question returned to him now, down in the dorms, as they went through room after room, finding nothing but empty, silent bunks and vacant corridors.

They had been running for some time, but Kindra didn’t even sound as if she was out of breath, and Ra’at realized that he was starting to feel better, too—moving around had helped clear his head, steadying him. Even his arm didn’t hurt as much anymore. Being young had its advantages.

Going low had been Kindra’s idea, a means of buying time until they figured out what they were up against, and despite Ra’at’s avowed intention to go to the infirmary and get checked out, he’d followed
her—for now, anyway. They’d run inside a long utility corridor to a place where it branched off in a three-pronged intersection. The permasteel ceiling oozed condensation just above him, and the long tube-lamps embedded in the walls let off a pale, achromatic glow in the hanging clouds of moisture. The opposite end of the corridor intersected another group of dorms, and that was where they’d run into two other students—Hartwig and Maggs.

“What are you two doing down here?” Hartwig asked. He frowned at Ra’at. “Dag, man, what happened to your arm?”

“Training accident,” Ra’at said evenly.

Hartwig smirked. “Fail.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning
that”
—Hartwig pointed at the wound—“doesn’t look like any training accident I ever saw. What did you do, fall on a vibroblade or something?”

“I was in the pain pipe.” Ra’at held Maggs and Hartwig in the same regard that he did the rest of his classmates, with a kind of suspicious indifference. Their motives were purely selfish, as were his; he had no intention of sharing information that didn’t somehow improve his own situation. At this point they all knew something had gone very wrong, contaminating the academy or the entire planet; for the moment they were allies of opportunity. “Have you guys seen anything else down here?”

“What do you mean, anything?” Hartwig asked.

“Or any
body
.”

“No.” Maggs cracked his knuckles nervously. “Not yet. Weird, huh? It’s pretty early for it to be so quiet. I heard there was some kind of assembly earlier, but Wig and I missed it.”

“If we’re going any farther,” Kindra cut in, “we’re going to need weapons. Our best bet is dividing up”—she pointed up ahead, where the corridor pronged into three separate halls—“searching these hallways, in groups of two, and—”

“Wait a minute,” Hartwig said. “Who put
you
in charge?”

“In
charge
?” Kindra turned, and Ra’at saw that she was staring directly at Hartwig, her gray, almost translucent irises like newly formed frost. “Nobody asked you to tag along.” Her eyes flashed off Ra’at.
“Any
of you.”

Hartwig shrugged uneasily. “I’m just saying …”

“What?”

“We all feel something kind of bad in the air, right? Like maybe some kind of a … disease. But who’s to say it’s not just one of Scabrous’s drills?”

Kindra’s eyebrows went up. “Excuse me?”

“For all we know he started this himself.”

“Why?”

“Maybe it
is
a training exercise,” Maggs put in. “Or maybe he’s culling the weak students. It’s happened before. Remember the unakki eye spiders?”

“This is worse,” Kindra said.

“Don’t be so sure,” Hartwig said. “Eleven students went blind. Two of them died. Remember Soid Einray?”

“Soid Einray was a defective already.”

“Maybe, but he still hung himself afterward. And then we found out that Scabrous had reactivated the fertilized spider eggs from the pathogen bank as a nerve-reflexivity drill.” Hartwig refused to lower his stare. “I still wake up with blood in my eyes sometimes.”

Kindra’s expression didn’t change. “What’s your point?”

“You want weapons? I might know where we could find some. But I’m not gonna risk getting in trouble with the Masters if nobody’s actually seen anything.” Hartwig waited for a response, looking at Kindra, then at Ra’at, and finally let out a derisive snort. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.” He turned to go. “I’ll see you pus-bags around.”

“Wait,” Ra’at said. “I saw something.”

Hartwig stopped and turned to look at him. Ra’at saw Kindra’s tongue come out and moisten her upper lip, listening expectantly.

“Two bodies fell out of Scabrous’s tower,” Ra’at said. “They hit the ground. I saw them hit, and I heard the noise they made—they were
dead.”
He swallowed; his throat was suddenly very dry. “But then they got up.”

Maggs and Hartwig were both staring at him now with various degrees of skepticism and outright disbelief. Ra’at discovered that he didn’t care. Let them doubt; it would only make them better cannon fodder when the time came.

“Were you all alone when you saw this?” Kindra asked.

“I was sparring with Lussk.”

Maggs blinked at him, and Hartwig’s eyes grew wide. Maybe it was just Ra’at’s imagination, but he thought the mention of Lussk’s name brought a paradoxical shiver of credibility to the moment. It was too unlikely a detail to be made up.

“One of the ones who fell was Wim Nickter,” Ra’at said. “After he hit the ground, he got up and attacked me. He was dead, but he was … still alive. I had to pin him under a pile of rocks to get away.”
Out with the rest of it, then
, he decided. “That Sickness in the air that you’re talking about—that’s Scabrous’s doing, up in the tower. I think …” He swallowed again, and this time his voice was steadier. “…  I think he’s bringing the dead back to life.”

There was a sharp rattle of footsteps from somewhere in front of them.

Ra’at felt a sudden feeling of coolness rising up inside him, as if his skin were being stretched by gallons of cold water. When he spoke, his voice seemed to be transmitting from somewhere far away. “Which way is it coming from?”

Cocking her head, Kindra pointed up ahead, where the main corridor divided into three subcorridors, to the one that branched on the left. “Up there,” she whispered. “You hear it?”

Ra’at’s ears strained for sound. At first, he heard nothing. Then they all did—a dragging, grating clank. It was advancing down the walkway with a graceless lack of stealth, growing steadily louder with every passing second.

Ra’at began concentrating solely on himself and his own survival, forgetting all the others. The Masters at the academy had trained them
to fight as a unit when necessary, but a Sith warrior’s true strength lay in his or her own personal will to power. When you could trust no one, fighting alone was axiomatic, a natural state.

Flattening himself to the wall, he felt the Force’s dark side coursing through him, a crackling electric chill that rendered fear and apprehension obsolete, and welcomed it. In that moment, he felt only a ready vigilance, weightless and unrelenting. Since arriving here on Odacer-Faustin, it was the closest to happiness that he dared let himself experience. Yet in so many ways it was superior to any happiness he’d ever encountered. It made traditional happiness look anemic by comparison.

All at once he realized that he could see what was coming, not with his eyes but in his mind.

“Relax,” he breathed. “It’s okay.”

Kindra wrinkled her forehead, about to reply, when the droid rattled from the end of the tunnel, stopped, and regarded them dully. It was a bare-bones Sigma series training unit, eight-armed, with belt treads and a force-feedback intelligence implant so rudimentary that it was practically a piece of furniture. Ra’at hadn’t seen one like it since he’d run newbie lightsaber drills, not long after his arrival here. Its copper-blue chassis was a dented utility cabinet carbon-scored with hundreds of old marks from countless years of clumsy rookies.

Heaving a sigh, Hartwig came away from the wall, watching the others emerge into view around it.

“What’s that thing doing so far down here?” Maggs muttered.

The droid clicked and produced a series of broken-sounding whirs, its equivalent of speech. Equipping such a unit with a vocabulator would have been pointless.

Ra’at reached down and grabbed a loose strip of alloy sealant dangling from its undercarriage, pried it off, and wedged it directly underneath the thing’s bulky central processor. He jammed the strip in as far as he could and twisted.

“What are you doing?” Kindra asked.

The processor cowl came loose with a snap. “If I remember right,” he said, “this thing’s still got a visual mapping system.” He eased his right hand between two hot layers of components. “Which means it should still have a playback function. And whatever it’s seen lately should still be stored somewhere in its memory bank.” He didn’t glance up. “Master Yakata used to make us watch our old drills this way, remember?”

“Yeah,” Maggs said, “but—”

The space in front of them flickered and brightened with a cone of holographic blue light, the image sharpening, gaining resolution and depth. They all stood back looking at it, pale blue reflecting off their faces, none of them speaking.

At first Ra’at didn’t quite realize what he was seeing. Maggs was the first to break the silence. He sounded hoarse, as if he was still trying to whisper but needed to clear his throat.

“What is that?”

Nobody answered. The hologram showed an area somewhere deep inside the tunnels where an indistinct mob of figures was teeming not-quite-randomly in the foreground. From their uniforms, Ra’at realized that they were Sith acolytes—

But there was something wrong about the way their bodies moved, a jolting, uneven pace, and he couldn’t see their faces. From this angle it was impossible to tell how many there were. All he could see was that they were hunched together, working over what looked like a massive pile of debris, shoving and piling and dropping it into place in the corridor ahead of them. Within just a few moments the pile in the tunnel had grown noticeably higher. The light on the other side was narrowing to a thin band.

“What are they doing?” Maggs asked.

Ra’at’s voice was a nonspecific whisper. “Building a wall.”

“Maybe it’s some kind of barricade,” Hartwig said. “So they can hold off whatever’s out there.” He caught his breath. “It must be—”

“Look.” Ra’at pointed at the hologram. “The angle’s changing.”

“Maybe they’ve got weapons we can use.” Maggs was sounding excited now. “Yeah, look, that one’s got a lightsaber.” He was already heading up in the direction that the droid had come. “Let’s move.”

“Wait,”
Ra’at said.

“What?” Maggs turned around, frowning. “What’s wrong?”

Ra’at was still looking at the hologram. The droid had broadened its field of view, dumping on bandwidth, and the image’s signal-to-noise ratio had improved dramatically. Now the blue light-cone showed a huge mob of bodies, dozens of them, more than he could even count, crammed together in front of the barrier. It looked like half the students at the Academy were packed into that part of the tunnel.

Ra’at pointed.

“Their faces.”

Maggs came back, hardly paying attention. “I don’t see what—” he said, and stopped. “Oh no.”

Several of the Sith students in the hologram were turning and looking directly back at the droid. Their faces were slack and vacant, devoid of any emotion—it was the exact same way that Nickter had looked, up on top of the overhang. Ra’at saw that some of them had wounds on their faces and necks, and their uniforms were badly torn, hanging from their torsos like bloody sails. He watched as one of them, a student whose name he couldn’t remember, brought his face directly up to the droid’s holocam, a sly grin peeling over his lips.

“Like Nickter,” Ra’at murmured, and felt Kindra stiffening next to him, in his peripheral vision.

Hartwig said, “What …?”

“There’s light on the other side of that barricade,” Ra’at said. “But that’s it.”

“So what are they doing?”

Ra’at looked back at him. “They’re walling us in.”

I
T WAS THE ORCHID THAT SAVED THEM
.

Looking back, Zo hadn’t even been aware of exactly what she was doing, although that by itself shouldn’t have been a surprise—a good deal of a Jedi’s power was instinctive, a function of the Force. But it didn’t make the situation any less disturbing.

The things beneath them had started clamoring up the rock face with a kind of manic agility, clawing their way toward her and Tulkh in spastic bursts of movement. The Whiphid reacted first, drawing his spear and thrusting it straight at the first one, impaling it through the chest and then hauling it upright, using the thing’s own weight to drag it down and finish the job. Tulkh swung the spear around with the corpse still on it, bludgeoning the others, driving them back with a series of vicious thrusts.

The plan went wrong almost immediately. Despite the fact that it had been run through completely, the thing at the end of the spear wasn’t stopping—it wasn’t even slowing down. And Zo realized the
other corpses had changed their approach, climbing up onto the overhang from the other side while Tulkh was still struggling to kill the first one.
They can’t be killed
, a voice whispered from the back of her mind,
they’re already dead, look at them
. At first she thought she was hearing her own thoughts, and then she realized it was the Murakami orchid, roiling in its own guilt and misery, yammering out words that she alone could hear.
Dead but alive, Hestizo, dead but alive, I did this to them, it was my fault, when Scabrous put me into that horrible vat, and now I’m inside them—