Lockdown: Maul Read online

  “So you’ve never had an escape?”

  She cocked an eyebrow at him. “I thought we were discussing profit margins, Mr. Slipher.”

  “It’s a valid question. These inmates of yours have nothing to do all day but study their surroundings and isolate any vulnerabilities in your security systems.”

  “We’ve implanted every inmate with—”

  “I’m aware of the procedure,” the Muun said dryly. “Still, it occurs to me …” His voice trailed off. “Never mind.”

  “What?”

  “Well, you’ve given me an admirable demonstration of why your operation here continues to generate such fervent interest among gamblers and blood sport aficionados. But that’s only part of it, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not sure that I follow.”

  “Oh, I think you do.” His fingers knit themselves inward, pressing against his chest in thought. “In order for Cog Hive Seven to make the astronomical profit that it reports to my board of directors, you have to predict the winner of the bouts almost one hundred percent of the time.” He turned to her. “I don’t suppose you’d be interested in telling the IBC how exactly you do that?”

  Sadiki glanced back at the lift.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  7

  GRAVITY MASSIVE

  Maul watched the mess hall clearing out.

  After the other inmates left, he had remained standing against the wall, observing the guards along the upper perimeter as they went about their patrols. He marked their passage along with the servo droids that circulated in and out of the hall along with the other inmates. At first nothing seemed to have changed. In the glare of the overhead lights he watched how the guards and the droids and the inmates all interacted, how they moved among one another, observing their patterns. There were places that they moved and stood and waited, and there were gaps—openings in the gallery that led back to the cells, vacancies where no light fell.

  He’s been known to visit Ventilation Conduit 11-AZR.

  It smelled like a setup, pure and simple. Yet it might also be the opportunity that he’d been waiting for. Remembering what Coyle had said, Maul felt a sharp wedge of tension pressing low and tight beneath his sternum—a sense of urgency to go forward and assert himself among those who would try to cut him down, to betray him and undermine his mission here. It was what his Master would have wanted.

  You’ll go in as a criminal, Sidious had told him, and live among those animals, within the confines of your new identity of a mercenary and assassin, relying only on your own wit and cunning—not only for the purposes of the mission, but for your very survival. You must assume that every inmate will be looking for an opportunity to stab you in the back at any moment.

  Straightening up, Maul took one more look at the mess hall until he found what he was looking for. In his mind, an idea had already begun to take shape. It was primitive, but it would work.

  Off to his left, a crew of inmates that Coyle had identified as the Gravity Massive—perhaps six or seven in total, headed up by their Noghri and his Nelvaanian sidekick—had continued to loiter near the exit, all staring at him intensely. Maul stepped directly toward them. Drawing nearer, he saw all their exposed right arms beginning to tense and flex together, like the individual muscle fibers on a single organism. None of them took a step back.

  “Are you Strabo?” Maul asked.

  The Noghri didn’t flinch. “Who’s asking?”

  “The Bone Kings.” Maul glanced back at the other gang on the opposite side of the mess hall. “They want a meeting.”

  The inmate’s eyes narrowed. “What?”

  “That scum over there.” Maul turned and shot a glance across the mess hall to where the Bone Kings were standing on their side, glaring at him more intensely than ever. “They told me to give you the message.”

  “What kind of meeting?”

  “I don’t know,” Maul said, “and I don’t care.” He locked the Noghri in his glare, defying him to look away. “They said it’s happening in Ventilation Conduit 11-AZR.”

  Turning, he walked away, not bothering to look back. By the time he got to the exit, an inmate from the Bone Kings crew, the bearded human that Coyle had identified as Nailhead, was blocking his way. The man was a monster in human form, scars rippling across his forehead, with a sharpened fragment of bone rammed through his nose. There was dried blood in his beard, and his teeth were crooked yellow pegs set at uneven intervals in his mouth.

  “Hey, puke,” he said.

  Maul stared at him.

  “I’m Vasco Nailhead. I run the Bone Kings.” The man allowed a grin to flash across his face. “Suppose you tell me what you were saying to the Gravity Massive about us back there?”

  “Ask them yourself,” Maul said. He started to take a step, and the man’s hand stopped him.

  “I’m asking you.” The man leaned in close enough that Maul could smell the blood in his beard. His breath reeked like an open grave. From the cuff of his shirtsleeve, something sharp and yellowish gray gleamed, just barely visible at throat level, ready to slash. “Now, I’m gonna ask again, real nice. What did you say? Was it about what we done to them this morning?”

  “They want a meeting,” Maul said.

  “Is that right?” Nailhead licked his lips. “And just whereabouts did they say this little rendezvous was supposed to take place?”

  “Ventilation Conduit 11-AZR.” Maul leaned in close. “Oh, they told me one more thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “They said get ready to bleed.”

  8

  MUTE MATH

  The turbolift opened onto absolute silence.

  Stepping out, Sadiki led Vesto Slipher across the datacenter full of blinking consoles and cabinets of server racks whose sweeping ergonomic curvature filled the entire width of the viewport overlooking the prison’s central docking station.

  The entire room around them seemed to be holding its breath. Off to her right, Slipher opened his mouth to speak and then stopped, puzzled, when no sound came out. Sadiki tilted her chin up, indicating the crosshatched wedges of acoustical foam running perpendicular to one another, lining the walls and ceiling, absorbing every decibel of ambient noise.

  The Muun nodded in understanding. For a moment they just stood there watching the young man at the console going about his work, streaming the previous night’s data-flow, running diagnostics, making all the fine adjustments that constituted the fabric of his existence here.

  At last Sadiki tapped a switch and the foam wedges changed angulation ever so slightly, the eerie silence draining away as the datacenter filled with the buzz and rumble of ambient sound. At once, the whole room seemed to exhale around them with an audible sigh of relief.

  “Very impressive,” Slipher said when his voice returned. “White noise generators, I presume?”

  “Not entirely.” Sadiki nodded. “There’s a design component as well. The whole datacenter is an anechoic chamber.”

  “A soundproofed room?”

  “Both inside and out,” she said. “Do you know anything about tapered impedance?”

  “I’m afraid it’s rather outside my field.”

  Sadiki nodded at the walls. “Those foam wedges alternate at ninety degrees out of phase with each other. When they’re properly aligned, the pyramidical absorbers simulate a continuous change in the dielectric constant.” She shook her head. “It’s all been designed to create what my brother calls an absolute free-field open space of infinite dimension. It literally swallows sound waves.”

  “Your brother …” The Muun glanced at the young man seated in front of the command suite. “He sounds highly intelligent.”

  “He is.” She shuddered. “Personally, I find it all incredibly creepy.”

  “Ah.” The Muun gave her his smirk again. “You prefer noise?”

  Sadiki shrugged. “I prefer reality.”

  “In that, we find ourselves in agreement. Still …” The Muun
regarded the room with new respect. “You know, for a moment I couldn’t even hear my own heartbeat.”

  “I’ve never quite gotten used to it. Of course, I’m not the reason it’s been installed here.” Walking over to the young man in the gray tunic, Sadiki leaned down to brush her lips against his cheek. “Sleep all right?”

  He turned and glanced up at her, an abstracted, childlike smile rising over his face, this silent twin, her own personal ghost, as if she’d only just now wakened him from a pleasant dream. Knowing that the smile wasn’t for her didn’t make it any less endearing; Sadiki understood that her brother’s first and truest gratification in life had always come from his algorithm.

  “May I introduce my brother Dakarai,” Sadiki said. “Dakarai, this is Vesto Slipher from the IBC. He’s come to check up on us and make sure we’re not dipping into the till.”

  “Oh, now, really,” Slipher said, “I’d hardly phrase it that way.” He ventured nearer, approaching the cabinets of data storage and processing units. “So this is the famous Dakarai Blirr. I have heard so much about you, from many trusted sources.” He extended his hand. “The pleasure’s all mine.”

  Dakarai just gazed at the hand, his expression inscrutable, then turned instead and reached for the white ceramic coffee cup with the stylized CH7 logo emblazoned on the side.

  “You’ll have to excuse my brother.” Sadiki watched as he lifted the cup with both hands like a child, bringing it up to his lips. “He hasn’t spoken aloud to anyone in ten years.”

  “Really?” the Muun asked. “Not even you?”

  “Not a word, I’m afraid,” Sadiki said, gazing down at her brother with what might have been a hint of melancholy—real or artificial, even she wasn’t sure. “At this point I don’t think I would even recognize the sound of his voice.”

  Dakarai looked back up at her. Above the rim of the coffee cup, his programmer’s eyes shimmered, pale blue and slightly watery, lit from deep within. In the ambient monitor glow Sadiki sometimes thought their irises appeared almost liquid-crystal gray, like beads of condensation, deeply set in the smooth, pale face whose high forehead and patrician nose were so strikingly an evocation of her own. Like her, he wore his jet-black hair just slightly shaggy, the chopped bangs tumbling over the brow in an errant simulation of serrated recklessness.

  “Not a word in ten years,” the Muun reflected, looking back at Dakarai as if seeing him in an entirely different light. “Is it a vow of some sort?”

  “Nothing so monastic, I don’t think,” Sadiki said, running her fingers fondly through her brother’s hair. “Dakarai’s a connoisseur of soundlessness. The last time we spoke, he told me that he found the silence of the algorithmic certainty to be the closest thing to pure joy that he ever heard. Everything else, including his own voice, is just a distraction.”

  “I see.”

  “Math is music, he told me once, and it’s perfect, so why should we think that we can somehow improve on it with our grunts and howls?”

  “Math is music,” the Muun reflected, visibly pleased with the phrase. “Again we find ourselves uncannily like-minded. And speaking of mathematics …” He turned back to the consoles. “I assume that this is where you run the software? The systems that arrange all the fights, correct?”

  “That’s right,” Sadiki said. “Dakarai wrote all the code himself. After he finished upgrading the Ando Overland Podracing course for the Desilijic Clan five years ago, he got the idea to create a completely new piece of software—” Seeing Dakarai wince at her choice of words, she corrected herself. “Excuse me, an algorithm, that could analyze all the data from every potential contestant in a closed gladiatorial environment to create the closest and most exciting competitions in the history of galactic pit fighting.”

  “So,” the Muun said, leaning in, “from this suite you can monitor—”

  “Every aspect of every inmate’s behavior,” she said, “yes, that’s correct. Everything from weight gain to heart rate to the constantly changing alliances among prisoners and gang allegiances that might factor into the outcome of a bout. The algorithm analyzes all of it and generates two sets of inmate numbers for two matches, every day.”

  “Two?”

  “We’re considering adding a third.” Sadiki’s eyes flicked back to the monitor screens again, scanning them more carefully. “Anything new to report?”

  Dakarai paused, steepled his fingertips on either side of the bridge of his nose, and shook his head. Frowning a little, he tapped in another series of commands, waiting while the data washed up over the screen, and then squinted at what he saw there.

  “What is it?” she asked him.

  When Dakarai’s frown didn’t change, Vesto Slipher leaned in, glancing at one of the monitor screens on the far right of the console, where a Zabrak inmate with an array of horns on his head was moving away from the crowd in the gallery, cutting down one of the concourses into the shadows.

  “If I’m not mistaken,” the Muun said, “that’s your new champion, is it not?”

  “He did win last night, yes.”

  “Quite spectacularly, if I recall.” Slipher turned to Sadiki. “Where is he going?”

  “Wherever it is,” Sadiki said, checking her chrono, and the most recent data that had just come streaming across Dakarai’s inflow monitor, “he won’t be there long.”

  “Why not?”

  She cast him a wry half grin. “You’re about to find out.”

  9

  STRAPHANGER

  Cutting sideways along the well-lit expanse of the prison’s central gallery, Maul glanced up at the ventilation shafts that ran overhead, each one stenciled with call signs and architectural designations. A series of worn letters were faintly visible overhead: VC 09-AMA.

  He kept walking, fingertips tracing the beads of condensation from the walls, feeling it growing colder to the touch. The ceiling was sloping downward, the walls closing in as he made his way forward. Air filtration systems, atmospheric reprocessing units with fans the size of starship turbines, roared out their incessant threnody overhead, but the noise wasn’t enough to block out the sound of the prison’s gallery behind him. In between slabs of machinery, black lenses gleamed, following his every step. When the walkway ended in a T, he turned right, passed by the first corridor, and checked the shaft above him: VC 11-AAR.

  Closer, then.

  The big fans had gone quieter, and now Maul could hear his own footsteps echoing down the passageway. He stopped and sniffed the air, smelling stale water and engine lubricant. The cameras would still be watching him here, of course. That didn’t matter. If the prison administrative staff wanted to stop him, they could have shut down the concourse in front of him at any time.

  He moved on, checking the ventilation markings every few meters now. When he reached 11-AZR, the walkway intersected with another passage. Maul stopped, turned right, and took three steps until he came across a series of curved steel rungs bolted into the wall, leading up to a maintenance hatch.

  He froze.

  Behind him, in the direction from which he’d come, something was coming, making a steady pounding noise. Maul held his breath and listened.

  It sounded like wings.

  Glancing up, he saw it coming, a black shape flying straight at him down the passageway. He ducked just in time, and it brushed past his face close enough that he felt the oily, musky-smelling slickness of its black feathers against his cheek. Pivoting in midair, the thing flapped its wings, settling itself on an electrical conduit, staring down at him with black, incurious eyes.

  Maul looked up at it.

  It was a clawbird, almost a half meter high, small for its breed. Maul had seen holos of them hunting womp rats on Wayland, with claws like vibroblades and a serrated beak that could rip through flesh like butter. But what was a mutated avian species from an Outer Rim planet doing in a prison?

  Still staring at him, the clawbird opened its mouth and emitted a harsh, scolding caw. It sounded like l
aughter. The cry rattled down the length of the corridor. Maul scowled at the thing. It was making too much noise, and he couldn’t hear anything else over the din.

  “Get out of here,” Maul told it. “Go.”

  The bird stayed and croaked louder than ever, as if determined to betray Maul’s location to anyone in the area. Bending down, he found a loose metal bolt on the floor and pitched it at the bird, sending it upward with a startled croak. It flew away down the passage.

  In the silence, Maul cocked his head, listening again. Now he could make out what he’d come to hear.

  Footsteps.

  Rapid but not panicked, coming faster now. Big, by the sound of it, but not clumsy or uncertain. Boots. Authoritative.

  Maul climbed up the steel rungs toward the ceiling of the shaft. Bracing his feet against an overhanging electrical switchplate, he gripped the edge of the maintenance hatch and drew himself up until he disappeared into the shadows. He kept his body absolutely rigid, every muscle locked in place, staring straight down at the intersection of the two passageways below.

  Directly below him, a figure emerged into view. The faint glow of equipment illuminated the helmet and face shield, the heavy broadcloth fabric of his uniform rustling as he approached.

  A guard.

  Maul found himself staring down at the top of the corrections officer’s helmet. From here it was impossible to see his face. Not that it mattered.

  “I know you’re out there,” the CO said, looking from side to side. His hand was resting on his belt, not on the blaster but on something else, a flat black console of the dropbox strapped to his hip, with a green-glowing display that Maul couldn’t read from this angle. “Why you looking for Zero?”

  Maul gripped the hatch in front of him more tightly, allowing himself one deep breath. A drop of moisture, ice cold and oily, fell from one of the overhead condenser units. It struck the top of his head, rolled down between his horns and off his scalp, and slithered down the side of his face to his chin.

  “Zero already knows you’re different,” the CO was saying. “Heard you’re an assassin. Saw you fight. You’re not here by accident.”