Smight began to inch backward and realized that he was already pressed up against a wall. He wasn’t sure exactly when his heart had started pounding, but now it felt ready to explode. Rivulets of sweat trickled from between his shoulder blades and crept down the center of his spine, plastering his damp shirt against his skin, and he forced himself to take a low, shuddering breath.
Stay cool. They won’t see anything that you don’t show them. Hoping to disappear between the guards on either side of him, he realized there was nowhere else to go. Just breathe.
“So, Jabba,” Sadiki was saying from the front of the group, “I keep hearing rumors of you sending foot soldiers into my prison to work as guards. I’m hoping you can clear that up for me.” Waving her hand toward the nine guards in the ready room, she said, “Do any of these men look familiar?”
Smight didn’t breathe. None of the guards around him moved. On the holovid, the Hutt reclined, his slitted eyes moving languidly back and forth, taking in the room. At length he let out a slow, guttural laugh, the mocking ho-ho-ho that Smight had come to identify with a particularly unpleasant frozen sensation through his bowels. He had only heard that laugh once before, and it had been one time too many.
“You are wasting my time, Warden,” Jabba said, answering in the guttural Huttese that Smight’s ear translated effortlessly into Basic. “I recognize none of these swine.”
“Are you certain?” Sadiki asked. “Because I’ll be happy to return any of your own men to you unharmed in the spirit of maintaining peace with the Desilijic Clan.” A slight frown line formed over her forehead. “The ones that you don’t claim, well …” She glanced at ThreeDee. “Let’s just say they’re slightly more disposable.”
“Kill them all and toss their carcasses to swamp slugs,” Jabba said. “It is all the same to me.”
“I see. Well, perhaps I should ask the men.”
She pushed a button on the wall. Smight heard a faint whirring sound to his right and glanced over his shoulder. Across the ready room, directly opposite the holoprojection of Jabba, an oblong panel slid open to expose a recessed area that had not been there just a moment before—a result, he guessed, of this last reconfiguration. From this angle, Smight could not see inside it, but he had the sudden realization that whatever was back there had already started to move out.
“Gentlemen,” Sadiki said, “I’m sure you all know Mr. Nailhead and Mr. Strabo.”
A thin blade of silence sliced through the ready room. Then Nailhead and Strabo stepped into view, and Smight heard the other guards drawing back with sharp curses and sounds of disbelief, cramming into whatever space they could find, reaching instinctively for weapons and dropboxes that weren’t there.
“Wait a second,” Hootkins called out, somewhere off to Smight’s left, the fat guard’s suety voice now high-pitched with fear and panic. “Warden, what is this? What are you doing?”
Smight, for his part, could not move. He felt his whole body go strangely weightless. All at once his legs seemed to have disappeared; the same paralysis seized his chest, and he realized that he was physically incapable of drawing breath.
Sadiki just smiled. “It’s a simple question,” she said, stepping forward to fill the space between the Bone Kings and the guards. “Any of you working for Desilijic Clan please step forward.” She gazed at the guards. “No one? Are you sure?”
“Me!” Lodovik shouted from off to Smight’s left, and jumped forward, practically knocking down the men on either side of him. “Jabba sent us here to track down Iram Radique!”
“Ah,” Sadiki said. “And what were your orders exactly?”
“Jabba told us to find out everything we could. To ferret him out and drive him into the open.”
“Is there anyone else in this room that you would care to identify?”
“Crete! He’s part of it!” Logovik shouted, pointing at a tall, gray-haired guard on the other side of the room. All at once he couldn’t seem to get the names out fast enough. “And Galway! Tyson! Olyphant! McCane! Over there, Webberly! And”—his hand swung toward Smight—“that new guy, the rookie, I don’t know his name, Jabba sent him in, too. He forged the background check for all of us and told us we had to—”
“Scum.” From the holo, Jabba’s lazy smile had disappeared, overwhelmed by a vicious sneer of disgust. “You just signed your death warrant.”
If Logovik even heard the Hutt, he ignored him. His eyes flashed desperately from the Bone Kings back to Sadiki. “That’s it, that’s all of us! Can I go now?”
Sadiki gazed at him pityingly. “I’m sorry, Officer … Logovik, is it?” She gave a slow, sad shake of her head. “But I’m afraid your employer is right about one thing. I couldn’t possibly let you go now. And gentlemen …” She glanced back at Strabo, Nailhead, and the amalgamation of gang members, Bone Kings and Massives alike, that they’d led here. “Whatever happens next, you and your gang would do well to remember that the only dropbox in the room is strapped to my hip.”
“Wait!” Logovik managed. All the remaining color had drained out of his face, leaving it sickly and pale. “But—”
“Best of luck, gentlemen. And I thank you for your candor.”
Sadiki stepped back, clearing the way for the Bone Kings.
For an instant there was silence, and within that split second, Smight heard it: a low, snarling chuckle.
Then it happened.
It might’ve been the glitterstim, but Smight experienced the events of the next few seconds in what felt like sickening slow motion.
As one, the gang members burst forward across the ready room with a deafening howl, overturning chairs and leaping across the table, attacking the guards in a solid wave. Smight was knocked to the side and the table landed on top of him, temporarily blocking him from view, although he could still catch a glimpse over the top of it with agonizing clarity.
In the space between seconds, the entire room had already exploded in a mass of activity, swinging bones, flashing teeth, and crashing fists. All around him, the guards tried to scatter, but there was nowhere to go. The gang members’ angle of attack had blocked the only possible path to the chamber’s main entryway, and they piled on top of the guards, overwhelming them easily.
Pressed between the overturned table and the wall, Smight dropped to his knees and then to his stomach, as if there might be some way that he could crawl across the floor and find his way out without being detected. He already felt his grasp on reality skidding, slipping perilously away. All around him, guys he’d come to know on a first-name basis were screaming, squirming in every direction, scrambling for a way out.
From this angle, he could see Hootkins trying to jump over him, the fat man shoving belly first, fighting desperately to plow a path between two of the Bone Kings, making a last-ditch run for the exit. His face was a blur of terror. After two steps, Hootkins stumbled and lost his balance, and two of the Kings grabbed him and slammed him to the floor, impaling him with sharpened ribs that they’d lashed to their wrists like claws and ripping him to pieces.
Good-bye, Hootkins.
Smight kept staring. He seemed unable to look away. Right in front of him, a threesome of Massives and Bone Kings had gone to work on two other guards, Crete and a bald, broad-shouldered guy who might have been Webberly—from here it was impossible to say. Another one of the gang members had McCane up against a wall, tearing open McCane’s shirt and using a broken skull to scoop out his thoracic cavity, while Nailhead and his lieutenant, an animal named Massif, were holding on to the hands and feet of Olyphant, literally ripping him in two, bathing in his blood.
Good-bye, Olyphant.
Smight felt a kind of queer, fatalistic certainty take hold of him. If he stayed here another thirty seconds, the gang members would run out of guards to destroy and would find him. He couldn’t stay here.
He sat up.
Crash! The chair hit the wall just above his head, splintering to pieces. Logovik, the guard who had ratted them all out, the one who had brought all of this down on them, swung an arm down and picked up one of the chair fragments, jerking it up over his head like a makeshift weapon. Seeing him here spiked a sudden upsurge of anger into Smight’s brain, and in stark defiance of the fear he felt in his own chest, he grabbed Logovik by the ankle.
“Happy?” he shouted. “You did this to us!”
“You got what you deserve, maggot.” Logovik swung his elbow back, hammering Smight in the side of the face, and Smight’s eyes exploded in a supernova of bright white stars. When his vision cleared, he heard the unmistakable sound of Vas Nailhead unleashing a war howl, the inmate raising the sharpened femur gripped in his hands and bringing it down on Logovik’s skull with a brittle, pulpy crunch.
Good-bye, Logovik.
Logovik fell, but before he could even hit the floor, Nailhead seized him by the throat, swinging him back upward, and went to take a great, ravenous bite of the man’s face. Smight turned away. He didn’t feel bold anymore. Now he felt like he was going to be sick. A foot connected with his chest, driving the air out of him, imbedding the nausea more deeply in his guts. He was going to die here along with all the rest of them.
He writhed, squirming, and then he saw it.
The open panel from which the Bone Kings had emerged.
It was still open.
Chaos still gripped the ready room, which seemed absurdly cramped for the outburst of activity within it, but the one-sided assault was already losing momentum. On both sides, Nailhead, Strabo and their minions were merrily eviscerating the final remaining guards, years of compressed rage exploding out of them in seconds as they shredded the men and left their bodies impaled against the walls.
Amid it all, Warden Blirr looked on serenely. After another moment, she turned and walked out with her droid behind her, the hatch sealing shut.
Smight didn’t have much time.
Still on his hands and knees, he scampered forward as fast as he could between the bodies and under the broken remains of the table. Ducking his head low, he leapt through the open passageway into darkness.