Maul moved across the prison mess hall like a predator recently released from its cage, passing sleekly through the mob, parting it with scarcely a glance. Some of the inmates took an uneasy step back to allow him to pass, while others simply froze in place. Heads swiveled to watch him as he went. The continuous ambient drone of voices dropped to whispers and the whispers lapsed into watchful, estimating silence as he made his way among them.
He walked to the last table and sat down.
On the other side of the table, two inmates who had been in the middle of an argument—one a pallid, frightened-looking human with a four-day stubble, the other a Gotal that appeared to be missing an eye—stopped talking, picked up their trays, and made a hasty departure.
Maul sat motionless, observing everything around him without giving any indication that he was doing so. Although his peripheral vision still hadn’t fully recovered from last night’s attack, he saw enough to realize that he had become the current object of everyone’s attention. Even the guards up in the catwalks overhead seemed to have gone on high alert, each with one hand on their blasters, the other resting on the small flat consoles that they wore on their belts. From both inmates and guards, Maul could smell a certain unmistakable commingling of fear, desperation, and the grinding monotony of paranoia that emerged when living things were penned up together in close quarters for indefinite spans of time.
Yet, for the time being at least, it was home.
He had stepped aboard this floating sewer less than twenty-four standard hours earlier, and in that time he’d come to understand all that he needed to know about the place. The rest of his time inside, he knew, would simply be a question of patience, of accomplishing his mission here without being discovered for what he truly was.
Neither of these things would be difficult for him.
They were simply the mandates of his assignment, and as such, beyond all question.
His arrival on Cog Hive Seven had come courtesy of the only transport of the day, a nameless prison barge with a stripped-down interior that reeked of high-carbon anthracite and unwashed flesh. The cargo hold was stocked with thirty-seven other inmates whose presence Maul barely registered after gauging none of them worth a moment of his time. They were a foul-smelling, nit-infested lot comprising a dozen different species, some clearly deranged and muttering to themselves, others staring blankly through the vessel’s only viewport as if something in the depthless black void might give perspective to their pointless and insubstantial lives.
Throughout it all, Maul had sat apart from his fellow inmates in absolute stillness. Some of them, apparently, couldn’t wait to start fighting. As the trip wore on, boredom became restlessness, and scuffles had broken out as sidelong glances and petty grievances erupted into acts of seemingly unprovoked violence. Several hours into the journey, an over-muscled ectomorph with bulging crab-stalk eyes had leapt up and lunged at a Rodian who’d somehow managed to smuggle aboard a whip-band that he’d sharpened and apparently planned to use as a makeshift vibroblade. The fight hadn’t lasted long, and only when the blade-bearer had accidentally bumped into him had Maul glanced up long enough to drive an elbow upward and shatter the Rodian’s lower spine. The guards onboard hadn’t even blinked as the Rodian pitched over sideways, wailing and paralyzed, to the deck, where he lay whimpering for the duration of the trip, gazing up through moist and pleading eyes.
It was the only time during the entire trip that Maul had moved.
When they’d finally docked, a retinue of fatigued-looking corrections officers had met them in the hangar, herding them down the berthing port with static pikes and go-sticks, running the biometric scans as the new inmates shambled forward, blinking, into the unfamiliar surroundings. Maul had seen more guards at this point in processing than anywhere else aboard the space station. At the end of the line, he stood motionless as a jumpy young CO whose ID badge read Smight swept a wand over him, scanning for infection and hidden weapons. There was no mistaking the tremor in the man’s hand as he passed the wand in front of Maul’s face.
“You know why you’re here, maggot?” Smight had asked, struggling to hide the quaver in his voice behind a pitiful note of bravado.
Maul had said nothing.
“Twenty-two standard hours a day,” Smight told him, “you’re free to roam the gallery and mess hall. Twice a day, when you hear the clarion call go off, you return to your cell for matching.” The guard swallowed, the bump in his throat bulging up and down. “Any attempt to escape results in immediate termination. Failure to report back to your cell for matching will be treated as an escape attempt and will result in immediate termination. You got that?”
Maul had just stared back at him, waiting for the guard to finish his business and back away. As he’d walked away, he heard the young CO find enough courage to snarl out one final declaration.
“You’ll die in here, maggot. They all do.”
Medbay had come next, an hour’s worth of decontamination and tox screens, neuro readouts and electroencephalograms administered by uninterested droids. After a long round of ultrasonic full-body scans, a refurbished GH-7 surgical unit had inserted a long syringe into Maul’s chest and then withdrawn it, only to plunge it back in again at a slightly different angle. A final scan had confirmed whatever the droid had done to him, and the CO at the far end of the concourse had waved him forward.
Afterward, two more officers armed with E-11 assault blasters had appeared and led him through a circuitous network of increasingly narrow concourses. The final walkway had led unceremoniously to his cell, a featureless, alloy-plated dome perhaps three meters in diameter. The carbon composite floor was the color of dirty slate. A single air vent whirred overhead. Stepping inside, Maul had sat hunched on the single, narrow bench, gazing at the only light source, an unremarkable panel of blinking yellow lights on the opposite wall.
“This is where you’ll come for lockdown and matching,” one of the guards had told him. He was a grizzled older man, a veteran whose ID badge identified him as Voystock. “You hear the clarion, wherever you are, you have five standard minutes to get back here before lockdown before you’re terminated.”
Maul looked at him coldly. “Terminated?”
“Yeah, I guess nobody told you.” The guard nodded down at the flat gray control unit strapped to his hip. “We call this thing a dropbox. Wanna know why?”
Maul just gazed at him.
“Oh, you’re a hard case, right?” Voystock snorted. “Yeah. They all start out that way. See, every inmate that comes through medbay gets a subatomic electrostatic detonator implanted in the walls of his heart. Both your hearts, since apparently you’ve got two of ’em. What that means is, I type in your prison number here, 11240”—he ran his fingers over the dropbox’s keypad—“those charges go off. And that’s when you drop. Permanently.”
Maul said nothing.
“But hey,” Voystock said with a crooked grin, “a tough guy like you shouldn’t have any problems here.” He reached up and patted Maul’s cheek. “Have yourself a nice day, right?”
They left the hatch open behind them, but Maul had stayed in his cell, crouched motionless, allowing his new surroundings to creep in around him in the slow accretion of physical detail.
There were words scratched on the walls, graffiti in a dozen different languages, the usual cries of weakness—pleas for help, forgiveness, recognition, a quick death. The bench was equipped with handgrips, their surface worn smooth by hundreds of palms, as if the inmates who’d occupied this cell before him had all needed something to hold on to. Maul had dismissed this detail as irrelevant.
Until the clarion had sounded.
Then he had sat up, snapped into total alertness, as the panel of yellow lights in front of him stopped blinking and turned solid red. The signal keened for five minutes. From outside, Maul had heard voices along with the frantic scuffle and clang of footsteps on floorboards as inmates hurried back to their cells. As the alarms cut off, he heard the sounds of cells around him sealing shut.
The walls had started shaking. Complicated scraping noises came from somewhere deep inside the prison’s infrastructure itself, gnashing together in complicated arrangements of pneumatics. Reconfiguration. Maul looked down. The floor beneath him had already begun to bow downward into a bowl shape as the dome became a perfect sphere.
And the cell had begun to turn.
Only then had the well-worn handgrips on the bench made sense. He’d taken hold of them for support, hanging on as his cell rotated completely upside down and backward again, then barrel-rolled sideways like a flight simulator with a broken oscillation throttle. Throughout it all, the metallic clacking and clanging continued as the various plates of his cell reshaped themselves around him.
When the rotation stopped, a recessed hatchway had hissed open into what appeared to be another empty cell, thick with shadow and little else. At first Maul had simply stood gazing into it. Then he’d taken a step inside. By the time he’d picked up the presence of another life-form behind him—the warrior with mismatched arms and the weird, living staff—the first blow had already come.
And now.
Sitting in the midst of the mess hall, feeling the eyes of the other prisoners upon him, sensing the slow accumulation of tension gathering around him like an electrically charged flow of ionized particles, Maul realized that the inmates of Cog Hive Seven, both individually and collectively, were already planning his demise.
Let them. It will only make your task easier.
From everything he’d gleaned so far, the prison was an open sewer, its circular layout fostering an illusory sense of false-bottomed freedom among the incarcerated. In actuality, the prisoners’ ability to roam unimpeded between fights only heightened the steadily percolating sense of animosity among them, the willingness to rip one another to pieces at the slightest provocation.
Maul allowed his thoughts to cycle back to the electrostatic detonators that the droid had implanted in the chambers of both his hearts, tiny seeds of death that the population of Cog Hive Seven carried around with them every day. In the end, for all of these pathetic creatures, freedom was nothing but the promise of oblivion. No matter what they’d done to land themselves here—whatever they were running from or dreamed of or hoped to achieve—those detonators, mere microns in diameter, represented the totality of their lives, and the ease with which they could be taken away.
You are to locate Iram Radique, Sidious had told him back on Coruscant during their final moments together. And then, perhaps sensing the physical reaction that Maul himself had not quite been able to suppress, the Sith Lord had added, It will not be as easy as it sounds.
According to Sidious, Radique was a highly reclusive arms dealer, legendary throughout the galaxy, a ghost whose base of operations was located somewhere within Cog Hive Seven, although no one, even Sidious himself, could confirm this fact.
Radique’s true identity was a closely guarded secret. As an alleged inmate in the prison, he operated exclusively behind a constantly shifting palimpsest of middlemen and fronts, guards and inmates and corrupt officials, both inside and outside its shifting walls. Those who served him, directly or indirectly, might not know whom they were working for, or if they did, they could never have identified his face.
You will not leave Cog Hive Seven, Sidious told him, until you have identified Radique and met with him face-to-face to facilitate the business at hand. Is that understood?
It was. Maul looked around the mess hall again at the hundreds of inmates who were now staring at him openly. At the next table, two human prisoners—they appeared to be father and son—were sitting close together, as if for mutual protection. The older one, a powerfully built, scarred-looking veteran of a thousand battles, was holding a piece of string with knots tied at carefully measured intervals, while the younger one looked on in mute fascination.
Three tables down, a group of inmates hunched over their trays, groping with utensils. When one of them lifted his head, Maul realized that the man’s eyes were missing—as if they’d been gouged out of his skull. Had that happened in one of the matches? The man’s hand found his fork and he began, tentatively, to scoop food into his mouth.
Across the room, another inmate, a Twi’lek, was glaring directly at Maul. Beside him, a Weequay with a sunbaked face like a desert cliff and a half dozen topknot braids stood expressionless. Watchful. Any of them could have been Radique, Maul thought, or none of them.
Maul scanned the rest of the mess hall, absorbing all of it in a single sweeping glance. There were a hundred alliances here, he sensed, gangs and crews and whole webs of social order whose complexity would require his close attention if he was going to find his way among them to complete the mission for which he’d been dispatched. And time was not something he had in unlimited quantities.
It was time to get to work.
Picking up his tray, he dumped the remains of his meal in the nearest waste bin and cut diagonally across the mess hall. There were groups of inmates clustered around the exit, and he turned left, following the wall to a hatchway in the corner, from which the smell of cheap prison food came wafting out, mixed with the stench of cleaning solution.
Exactly what he was looking for.
He slipped inside.