“Warden,” Dragomir Chlorus said, “you still don’t seem to understand the gravity of your situation.”
“Really?” Sadiki Blirr sank back with a silent groan, rotating her fingertips against her throbbing temples, where the first vestiges of a killer migraine were slowly making themselves known. This conversation with the gaming commissioner had been one of the longest in recent memory, and there was still no end in sight. “Then you’d better run through it again. After all, I’ve already got an IBC representative onsite auditing my whole operation, but I suppose I’m just too dense to figure out what that means.”
Chlorus sighed. “It’s not the IBC that you need to worry about. The Desilijic Clan has taken an interest in your operation. And it’s been going on for quite some time.”
“The Hutts?” Sadiki gave a weary laugh. “I expect I would notice if I had a problem with them, don’t you think?”
Chlorus’s face remained grim. “Well, they’ve certainly noticed you. And they haven’t taken fondly to the way that Cog Hive Seven has eaten away at their revenues.”
“That’s preposterous,” she said. “Their gambling operations are more lucrative than ever.”
“I’m not just speaking of gambling, Sadiki.”
She peered up at him warily. “What else do you think we do around here, moisture farming?”
“You understand this is strictly off the record.” The commissioner leaned in closer, lowering his voice. “I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors about Iram Radique. The weapons dealer said to run his operation from somewhere within Cog Hive Seven.”
“Oh no.” Sadiki’s migraine jumped from nascent to fully formed in one breathtaking instant. “Not that old wheeze again.”
“Yes, you’ve told me, Radique isn’t in your prison, if he even exists at all. But the Hutts aren’t so sure. In fact, they’ve apparently decided to see for themselves.”
“What do you mean, see for themselves?”
“I simply mean that—”
The signal froze. In the background Sadiki heard a steady, low-frequency tone begin to pulse as a panel of red and yellow alarm lights sprang up along the top of the console. She straightened. “Look, Dragomir, I’ve got a situation here. I have to go. We’ll talk again.”
“Sadiki, wait—”
Cutting the call short, she jumped on the comm and tapped into central control for the prison’s main power station.
“Control, do you copy?” she asked. “This is Warden Blirr. I need a status report for Section 1212.”
“Copy that, warden,” the guard’s voice drawled back with a maddening lack of concern. “Looks like a minor malfunction down in medbay.”
Sadiki hit the acknowledge button on the warning alarms, silencing them. “Minor malfunction? From my side it looks like the whole level’s gone down.”
“Stand by for confirmation.” The readout along the comlink’s display identified him as CO Madden. “Yeah, roger that, Warden. Looks like it’s just a transient fault. We’re resetting it now.”
Sadiki brought up the surveillance screens for the medbay, but the monitors were solid blue across every frequency. “Where’s my backup power?”
“Must’ve gone down with the primary.”
“So you’re telling me we’ve got nothing in there right now?”
“Negative. Ah, I mean, affirmative. That’s—” Now Madden actually sounded a little nervous, which Sadiki would have found gratifying if he hadn’t been expected to perform competently under these circumstances. “No worries. We’re patching all surveillance through to the GH-7 surgical droid onsite. Should have audiovisual back up in just a second.”
“Who’s in medbay now?”
“Stand by.” There was the chirp of an electronic tablet being nudged to life. “No organic life-forms. Currently it looks like it’s just the GH-7. And …” A pause. “Hold it.”
“What is it?”
“Thermal sensors are picking something up.”
“Who is it?” Sadiki felt her migraine spilling over, sending sharp pains down the back of her neck.
“Might just be a faulty reading,” Madden said. “Stand by.”
His voice cut out. With a grimace, Sadiki turned and tapped in a series of commands, bringing up a current list of admissions to the prison’s medbay. According to the current census, it should’ve been empty in there.
She hit the comm again, harder than she intended.
“Madden? Do you copy?”
A blast of static and then Madden came back, sounding faint: “Copy.”
“Where’s my surveillance?”
“Still recalibrating off the main grid.” There was a hurried clicking noise of many different switches being thrown to no effect, and the guard muttered something that she couldn’t hear. “External network’s not coming back up for some reason. We’re going to have to do a black start, bootstrap it back up. It’ll take fifteen minutes, then we should be good.”
“What about those other life-forms in medbay?” Sadiki asked. “How many are there?”
“I’ve got a squad heading down there now—that must be what we’re seeing. I’ll let you know the second we’re back up.”
Sadiki sat back and forced herself to be patient. Waiting around for information wasn’t exactly her specialty, and in the past—working in casinos and managing large-scale offworld resort operations—her inability to suffer fools had served her well. But all too often, when power fell off the grid in Cog Hive Seven, there was nothing to do but wait.
The truth was, she was as much to blame as anyone.
Even before the sheer mathematical elegance of the algorithm had brought it to life, her brother’s original designs for Cog Hive Seven had been beautiful, a seamless installation of utilitarian art. Redundant power backups and secondary electrical relays were all supposed to have been installed as part of Cog Hive Seven’s initial construction—along with the metal shop, the factory floor, and a half dozen other independently sealed sublevels. But there had been construction delays, bureaucratic wheels to be greased, permits to be secured, and impatient investors demanding to see quarterly profit-and-loss statements. And in the end, they’d cut a few corners.
A lot of them, actually.
As much as Sadiki couldn’t tolerate weak-minded excuses among underlings, she loathed them most vociferously in herself. The truth behind what had really happened here came down to far more than just a few loose ends. The truth was that when Dakarai’s algorithm had started paying out and the money had come pouring in, she’d more or less completely abandoned any further construction inside the prison.
Given a choice, she knew that the IBC would have extended her time and credits enough to finish the space station properly according to the original specs. But it was Sadiki herself who had pushed it prematurely into its fully operational status, knowing full well that Cog Hive Seven’s wiring, surveillance feeds, and power grids were substandard and, in some cases, virtually nonexistent. And it was Sadiki who had allowed herself to become overconfident about the implanted cardiac electrostatic charges inside the inmates’ hearts, telling herself that as preventative measures went, it was more than enough of a deterrent.
But there had been other compensations. Some of them very lucrative indeed.
“Warden?” Madden’s voice came back through.
“We’ve got visual in the medbay coming on now. It’s all low-light through the GH-7’s photoreceptors, but—”
“Just patch me through,” Sadiki snapped, and turned to the screens in front of her.
There was a sharp hiss, and a turgid upswell of white noise droned across the monitors. As it cleared, she found herself looking down through the surgical droid’s floating perspective, drifting into the medbay, its walls and ceiling a green-tinted field of indistinct image-intensified blobs. Unfamiliar voices crackled through the droid’s auditory sensor.
“Father,” one of the voices was saying, “you know we can’t trust him. Why would you—”
“He’s the only one who can help us,” a man’s voice cut in. “We need him.”
“But what if it’s a trap?”
“Better listen to your old man, kid,” a third voice growled. “I’m the only chance you’ve got.”
Sadiki sat bolt upright in her seat. She recognized that voice.
Voystock.
She slapped the comm again, actually cracking the stud with the palm of her hand. “Madden, there’s a guard in there!”
“Copy that, Warden, we just—”
“He’s helping them escape, you idiot! Where are your people?”
“Say again?”
“The officers on duty, Madden. Where are your men?”
“I don’t—” Madden’s voice blipped out, then came back again. “Whoever’s in the medbay has it sealed down from inside.” Now he sounded like he was trying very hard not to start stuttering, but he wasn’t doing a very good job. “I don’t know how it happened, we were just—”
“Get in there now!”
“You want us to blast it open?”
“Whatever it takes.”
“But—”
Sadiki cut him off and turned back to the screens, her headache utterly forgotten, superseded now by the pounding of her heart and the realization that she’d actually broken a sweat. Time itself seemed to have crystallized around her. On-screen, through the droid’s photoreceptors, she could make out the forms of two inmates, an older man and a boy not more than sixteen, both clearly visible as they leaned in. CO Voystock stood in the background, making an adjustment to one of the control modules. The GH-7’s manipulator was extending something—it looked like a hypodermic needle—toward the boy’s chest.
In the distance she could hear the voices of guards outside the medbay, shouting commands and trying to get through the blast-doors.
And implacably, above it all, the mocking voice of the IBC’s finest, Vesto Slipher, echoing in her head: You’ve never had an escape?
Of all the times for the IBC to be conducting an impromptu audit, Sadiki thought, and fought the urge to drive her fist into the console in frustration. She tapped in a command and brought up the holofeed of the datacenter, hoping to find Dakarai, but her brother wasn’t there. Where was he?
Outside the medbay, the sound of blasters filled the audio track, distorting through the droid’s aural pickups.
And for the first time, Sadiki Blirr realized that she was in real trouble.