Lockdown: Maul Read online

  Maul held absolutely still.

  “The way he sees it, there’s only one reason that somebody like you would come out to the far corner of the galaxy and start asking for him,” the guard continued. “You came here to kill him. Am I right?”

  Maul waited. The CO had stopped looking from side to side now. His eyes were riveted to something straight ahead of him.

  The droplet fell from Maul’s chin and hit the guard’s helmet with a soft but audible plop. The CO stiffened, tilted back his head, and looked straight up at Maul, the whites of his eyes reflecting yellowish red in the light spill.

  “I thought so,” he said. “You know what? I don’t even need this blaster to take care of you.” He indicated the dropbox strapped to his belt. “I got your numbers plugged in already, maggot. I touch this button, set off those bombs inside your chest, you’re dead before you hit the floor.”

  “Where’s Zero?” Maul asked.

  “You’re kidding, right?” His fingers flickered over the switches of the belt console, and Maul was almost positive that he hadn’t yet heard the noises at the far end of the walkway, whispers and footsteps that had become steadily more audible over the past few seconds. “You actually think he’d let you get the drop on him like this?” Now the CO’s entire demeanor had changed, developing an edge, losing whatever playfulness it might have had. “You never had a chance.”

  “I don’t think so,” Maul said.

  The distant sounds were clearer now, the whispering no longer bothering to keep itself stealthy, the footsteps no longer muffled. Maul watched as the CO started to react, the man caught completely by surprise by what was happening, but it was already too late. A storm of stomping feet came thundering down through the passage, an avalanche of noise clanging off the metal and shaking the length of the corridor from end to end. From either side of the walkway below, the sudden roar of inmates’ voices filled the closed space with howls and bellows of rage.

  “What—?” The guard swiveled around, not sure where to look first.

  They hit him from both sides at once. From where he was positioned overhead, Maul had a perfect view of the carnage below. A wall of bald human inmates burst forward, the Bone Kings barreling down one end of the walkway, while a second mass of bodies, the Gravity Massive, led by the Noghri Strabo, came stampeding from the opposite direction to meet their enemies head-on. The guard disappeared between them, immediately trampled underfoot.

  Maul waited, timing his response to an internal clock whose nuances were a matter of pure reflex. The prisoners were already screaming. In the closed space above, he heard bones snap, the brittle crunch and crackle of cartilage being crushed, bodies flattened underfoot.

  Now.

  Hanging by his legs, extending both arms just above the battle, Maul thrust both hands down into the fray. He seized the guard by his helmet strap and yanked him upward, using his helmet like a battering ram to smash open the maintenance hatch and shove the man up inside. Alarms began to beep and wail from all sides.

  Maul scrambled into the utility shaft alongside the guard, his hand locked around the CO’s throat.

  “Switch those off,” he ordered.

  “Can’t,” the guard panted. “It’s not—”

  Maul pushed the guard back toward the open hatchway. “Turn them off or I’ll throw you down to them. They’ll rip you to pieces in a heartbeat.”

  “I’m telling you, I can’t! Alarms have to be deactivated by central control! I swear!”

  Maul took hold of the man’s right hand, pinning it down on the chain coupling where the hatch cover fit into its housing, and slammed the hatch down on it hard. The guard shrieked, his voice shattering as it reached the upper registers.

  “Where’s Zero?” Maul asked softly in his ear.

  “I don’t know!” The guard’s face had gone terribly pale except for two bright spots of red high up in his cheeks. Tears of pain stood out in his eyes. “Nobody knows!”

  “How can that be? There are cameras everywhere.”

  “Not on him! He comes and he goes! Even the guards don’t see where or how he gets in and out!”

  “Then why did the Chadra-Fan send me here?”

  “I told you, Zero thought you were here to kill him!”

  “You tell him that I’m looking for him,” Maul said. “You tell him I want a real meeting, not a setup.”

  “He doesn’t work that way!”

  “Where’s his cell?”

  “It’s on Level 8, Cell 22. Around the far corner—you have to look for it, but it’s there, I swear. Now please just let me go!”

  Maul decoupled the hatch and let it hiss open. The guard groaned, withdrawing his fractured arm with a shuddering whimper, cradling his hand and wrist like a small dead animal dangling limply from his sleeve. Slowly he looked at Maul. Something savage had trickled into his eyes, filling them with rage.

  “Inmate 11240,” he said, resting his good hand on the activation stud for the dropbox. “You’re as good as dead, maggot.”

  Maul studied him. “We’ll see.”

  The CO hit the button.

  And nothing happened.

  10

  SKIN IN THE GAME

  “You spared him,” Vesto Slipher said, careful to keep his tone casual. “Why?”

  Neither of the Blirr siblings answered him. From behind the console, Dakarai inclined slightly forward in his chair, his right forefinger still pressed tightly to the remote deactivation switch for the guard’s dropbox.

  Sadiki leaned down over her brother’s shoulder for a better view. All five of the screens closest to Dakarai’s workspace had been redirected to display the maintenance shaft from different angles, providing multiple views of the Zabrak and the guard whose wrist he’d just shattered.

  Dakarai tapped another button, keying in the initiation sequences.

  “What’s going on?” Slipher asked. “Is it—”

  All at once, the very air around them took on a low and sonorous hum. A time code blipped into view in the corners of all the screens, counting down from five minutes. Slipher heard a burst of static, and a split second later, a clarion erupted out of the framework of the space station, filling what felt like the entire world with one long, oscillating blast.

  Dakarai winced. The tremors grew more violent, rhythmic, throbbing like the adrenalized heart of some colossal creature shocked into life. Ripples appeared at the surface of his coffee cup, and he reached over to steady it without taking his eyes from the screens.

  “What is all this?” Slipher asked. He’d already surmised exactly what was happening, but he’d long ago discovered the value of asking obvious questions at the right moment. He turned to Sadiki, speaking loudly to be heard over the alarms. “What’s going on?”

  “My brother’s algorithm has selected the next two combatants.” The warden smiled at one of the monitors. “We’re matching them now.”

  “Inmate 11240,” the Muun read as the profile appeared on-screen. “That’s the Zabrak?”

  “Jagannath,” Sadiki said. “Right.”

  “And that’s why …?”

  She nodded. “We’ll only override a guard’s authority to activate the electrostatic detonator if the inmate in question is already scheduled for a fight.” She nodded at the bank of monitors. “In this case, 11240 has been selected again.”

  “Who are you pitting him against?”

  “Wait and see,” Sadiki said. “I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

  Slipher glanced around at the other screens, where inmates throughout Cog Hive Seven were scurrying down the corridors and back to their cells for lockdown. The entire space station was shaking hard enough that he had to brace himself against the wall and wrap his thin, slender fingers around the buttress for support. He could feel the whirring and clicking of Cog Hive Seven’s interior clockwork through the floor beneath his feet, reverberating up through his ankles and knees.

  “Is it always this loud?” he shouted. “It
feels like the whole space station is shaking.”

  “Only about eighty-five percent of it.” Sadiki pointed to the space just above the monitors, where a high-resolution ray-tracing of the space station’s layout was displaying the reconfiguration in real time.

  Slipher gazed at the rendering in fascinated silence. Numbers had always been his language of choice, data patterns his poetry, but what was happening here was equally captivating—the ray-tracing showed entire wings and cellblocks changing position, pulling themselves around, reformatting the very architecture of the prison itself.

  “And here’s our new contender,” Sadiki said, pointing at the monitor in front of her.

  Slipher looked at what had appeared on the other monitor. “That’s what 11240 is fighting?”

  Sadiki nodded. “We’ve never matched it,” she said. “A couple of freelance bounty hunters brought it in from an abandoned spaceport in the Anoat system, along the Ison trade corridor.” She checked the screen. “We think it’s been used in previous illegal gladiatorial fights. It’s called—”

  “I know what it is,” the Muun said.

  Sadiki glanced at him, clearly impressed. “You’ve seen the species before?”

  “Not exactly,” Slipher told her. “The IBC was briefly involved in arbitrating a former client’s involvement in a black market fur-trading operation in the Outer Rim. Nothing we were personally involved in, of course, but apparently poachers and big-game hunters had been tracking those creatures for decades.” He shook his head. “Mortality rate among the poachers was often worse than the creatures themselves. You’re talking about a predator two and a half meters tall, sometimes weighing two hundred kilograms or more, with razor-sharp teeth and claws. They’re singularly vicious creatures.”

  “So you don’t like the odds?” Sadiki asked.

  “That thing against the Zabrak?” the Muun blinked. “It hardly seems fair.”

  “You haven’t seen 11240 in a fight.”

  “Respectfully, Warden, I don’t believe that I have to.”

  “We’ll see.” Sadiki indicated the overhead consoles, where whole lists of newly formatted data were streaming live through the galaxy. “As always, bookmakers and casino bosses have the standard five-minute window to evaluate the odds. We’ll see what they think of the match in the offworld gambling combines.” She watched as the displays showed bets, millions of credits pouring in on either side. “Looks like most of them agree with your assessment.”

  “And you?” the Muun asked. “How will the esteemed facilitators of Cog Hive Seven be betting?”

  “We bet what the algorithm tells us.”

  “Always?”

  “Without fail.”

  “And the algorithm is never wrong?” Slipher asked.

  Sadiki turned to Dakarai. Her brother tapped in a series of commands and waited for the system to generate its verdict.

  “You’re right,” she said. “It’s going to be no contest.”

  11

  FROM THE LAND OF THE ICE AND SNOW

  Maul got back to his cell with seconds to spare.

  The hatch slammed shut behind him, its magbolts clamping tight with a vacuum-sealed thump. The panel of yellow lights had begun blinking red. All around him, the cell had already begun changing shape, the floor bowing below his feet, wall plates sliding together with a now familiar grinding of alloy against alloy, constricting upward to merge with the ceiling.

  He breathed slowly, in and out, and took a moment to review what had just happened. None of it made sense. Not that he’d expected it to.

  The ventilation duct ambush had worked as he’d expected—up to a point. He’d gone in fully anticipating a setup, and in this the guard had not disappointed him. A man like Iram Radique hadn’t survived this long without amassing an army of foot soldiers and lookouts, both inmates and guards, to mislead those who came looking for him. Was Zero working for Radique? Could it be that simple?

  And there was the more immediate question of why he hadn’t been killed when the guard had activated the implanted charges in his heart. Had the dark side itself somehow intervened at the last second to save him?

  The implications of this possibility made Maul catch his breath. For all Darth Sidious’s talk of his role as his apprentice and eventual successor, Maul still felt precious little connection to the Sith grand plan for the galaxy and his place within it. At the Dark Lord’s command, he’d spent years training on Orsis and then on Coruscant in the LiMerge Building, enduring years of privation and the harshest imaginable discipline while awaiting his Master’s visits. And it was true—Sidious had spoken at length, intoxicatingly, about the dark side and its power, and more vaguely about the role Maul would play as he continued in his study of the Sith arts. In his most solitary moments, Maul had dared allow himself to hope for that moment when the Force would announce itself within him fully, intervening in a way that could not be mistaken for anything but sheer destiny.

  Could this be that moment?

  If that’s true—

  There was a sudden lurch and everything jerked forward on its axis. Maul seized the handgrips on either side of the bench, wedging himself in place, feeling hydrostatic pressure building in his face and neck as the entire chamber turned upside down, then tumbled sideways, pitching first to the left, then to the right. The cell spun, jerked left, barreled forward, jerked right again. Equilibrium abandoned him momentarily and he tightened his grip.

  There was a sharp clank and the chamber jerked to a halt. Something hissed, a hydraulic hatchway on the other side of one of the walls, but the hatch in front of him remained sealed.

  Then, through the wall, he heard it.

  A low, bronchial growl.

  Maul closed his eyes and listened. Whatever was on the other side of that hatch sounded bigger and hungrier than the creature he’d fought earlier. The growl had a sonorous, barrel-chested timbre that shook the air itself. He caught himself stretching out with his feelings and forced himself to withdraw, his Master’s voice burning in his ears from their final meeting on Coruscant.

  If at any point you reveal your true identity as a Sith Lord, Sidious had told him, the entire mission will be worthless, do you understand? You must not ever use the Force, no matter what the circumstances, or all will be lost. Do you grasp the magnitude of responsibility with which you are being trusted?

  Maul did. All too well.

  He continued to hold absolutely still, listening, attuned to this moment. When the growl came again, it had risen in volume and intensity and was now a thick snarl of fury. Metal chains clanked, rattling audibly, and something slammed against the wall with a sudden, deafening crash that shook the very bulkhead in front of him. There was another bellow, even louder than before, that he could feel in the hollow of his chest. The thing on the other side of the wall could smell him now, he was sure of it. It wouldn’t be long now.

  The blinking lights went solid red.

  And the hatch opened.

  Maul remained motionless for a long moment, looking at it.

  The wampa was in chains, bolted to the floor of its cell with heavy Nylasteel manacles around its legs, wrists, and throat. It stood almost three meters tall, its thick fur matted with filth, grease, and blood. One of its horns had snapped off midshaft, creating a jagged ocher-colored dagger that curled only halfway around the right side of its head. Across its chest and abdomen, great swaths and patches of its white pelt had been ripped away to expose a puckered landscape of scar tissue—no doubt the results of previous battles. Its lips wrinkled back to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth, and spittle flew as it unleashed a bellow of hungry, frustrated rage and jerked at its restraints.

  Maul stood his ground. He gave himself a few seconds to evaluate the space where they would be fighting—the height of the ceiling, the diameter of the chamber—before turning back to stare the thing straight in its yellow, semi-sentient eyes.

  Come, then.

  As if hearing his thoughts, the wa
mpa leaned down, gathering its strength, and at that moment the manacles fell away. Maul never heard them hit the floor.

  The thing came at him.

  Maul leapt upward, dodging the initial attack—but the creature’s massive arm swung around as it passed, its claws raking his back, ripping through flesh to gouge deep into the muscle along his spine. Maul felt his breath sucked from his lungs. A cruel, hot spike—even now he refused to think of it as pain—took hold of that entire side of his body, settling deep inside his nerve endings. The sudden smell of his own blood, sharp and coppery, filled the cell.

  Ducking low and then jumping for the ceiling, he felt hot liquid splashing down his leg, streaking the floor beneath his feet. He skidded, colliding with the wall in front of him. Was the cell actually smaller than it had been a moment ago? Had they already changed the shape of it around him?

  Maul took a breath and centered himself. Things were happening too quickly. He needed to slow it down. But the wampa was already lunging again, its long, apelike arms swinging, claws carving shadow, smashing him back into the curved steel wall as its jaws snapped inches away from his face. Maul slid down through the pool of his own blood, rolled free, and sprang up behind the thing faster that it could turn. Cocking back one arm, he tensed his shoulder and snapped his elbow into the base of the creature’s skull, putting every ounce of upper body strength into a blow that should have shattered its neck.

  Nothing. It was like launching an elbow strike against solid stone covered with a layer of thick fur. Now the creature rounded on him again, arms upraised, towering to fill what felt like the entire cell. This time when it roared, the noise was more like a scream—a broken, phlegmy, bronchial shriek—as if the beast itself were somehow being tortured into attacking him. A flicker of realization passed through Maul’s mind.

  Something’s wrong with it. It’s not—

  The wampa’s claw shot forward, slashing diagonally across Maul’s face.