Smight crawled out of the conduit and fell on the floor.
He didn’t remember how he’d gotten there, how long he’d been fumbling along in the dark, trying to find his way through a steadily narrowing capillary bed of ventilation shafts and pipelines that fed the prison its continuous ration of power and water and heat. His brain had long ago stopped recording outside stimuli. All his more sophisticated sensory and analytical skills had reduced themselves down to a nearly primordial state.
He’d seen too much.
It had started with the worm. Watching the enormous white thing in the tunnel eat the Bone Kings had been bad enough. If Smight lived to be a hundred, he knew he’d never forget the way that Strabo and Nailhead and the others had disappeared, sucked upward from the floor of the tunnel directly into the hideous, Y-shaped mouthparts as they wrapped themselves around the inmates. But it was the sound that would stay with him most—the suppurating, slurping noise that the thing had made, not quite loud enough to cover the high, keening peals of their screams. And the wet slap and clomping sounds of the jaws as they snapped shut.
It made him sick to think about it.
The thing had devoured them wholesale, leaving Smight—sprawled low on the floor of the shaft where he’d fallen—just enough time to scramble backward, while the white worm finished consuming its prey. He was afraid that if he ran, it would sense him; if he made too much noise, it would hear.
And so he’d crawled.
Silently.
Agonizingly.
Slowly.
He’d crawled.
The rattling tattoo of his heart, the pounding in his skull, had made it impossible to say whether the thing was still pursuing him or whether it had stayed where it was to digest the feast, and at this point Smight had discovered that he didn’t much care. If it got him, then it got him; if it didn’t, he’d spend the rest of his life having nightmares that it had. Neither prospect was particularly tempting.
Now, having finally stumbled and fallen through an errant hatchway leading from the tunnel where he’d spent an unknown stretch of time, he lay motionless against the cold smoothness of some unfinished stretch of floor, his hands and knees aching from the long, endless trek.
For a long time he didn’t dare to open his eyes, certain that when he did, the worm would be there waiting for him, coiled above him, its gasping sucker poised ready to strike. After a moment he became aware of bright lights shining through his eyelids and the acerbic stench of unfamiliar chemicals. Ultimately, curiosity got the best of him.
He opened his eyes.
What …?
The spotless, brightly lit space that surrounded him was like no other area of the prison that he’d seen before. It was part warehouse, part laboratory. Long tables held scientific equipment whose names Smight didn’t know—glass crucibles, slender tubes, and exotic-looking flasks, strangely elegant in shape and size, lined up alongside a miniature cityscape of mixing and spinning machines, instruments for heating and cooling.
Along the far wall, stacks of shipping crates, all different sizes, stood in neat rows with various destinations and manifests stenciled on their sides.
Not sure where he was going or why, Smight paced among the boxes and circled back to the lab equipment. None of it made any sense, nor did he expect it to. He’d long ago come to terms with his own limitations when it came to matters of science and intellect.
But beyond it, on the far side of the lab, he saw something more familiar. The entire second half of the room was a different kind of workstation, equipped with state-of-the-art grinding and boring tools, fabricating machines, metal shears, drills, and precision calibration devices.
Smight stared at them. He’d had an uncle who’d worked in the yards at BlasTech, and he knew these things.
They were weapon-making tools.
The realization of what he’d stumbled across dawned in his mind like the warmth of a new sun rising, and for a moment he couldn’t quite believe the magnitude of what was happening.
It’s here. This is it. I actually found it.
He stepped back, taking in the entire space around him—the lab, the packaged crates—in light of this new revelation.
Radique’s operation. It’s here.
When Jabba had dispatched him to help infiltrate Iram Radique’s operation inside Cog Hive Seven, Smight had gone in with a certain degree of incredulity. Like everyone, he’d heard the stories of the enigmatic arms dealer operating under any number of aliases, and like most thinking people, he’d already decided there was a good deal of folklore mixed in with the truth. Why would any self-respecting gunrunner, especially one as successful as Radique, ever choose to hide out inside a prison, particularly one in which he’d have to fight other inmates as a condition of his stay?
Yet Smight had taken the job—of course he had. As an opportunity to work his way up in the Desilijic Clan, the assignment had been impossible to turn down. Falsified ID and background papers in hand, he had arrived onsite to confer with the other foot soldiers that Jabba already had working undercover as guards, gathering information from the inmates and reporting back whatever he found. The stim had helped to take the edge off, and the matches had made it interesting, but he’d never really expected—
The crates. He needed to check them. Smight crossed hurriedly to the nearest steel box, popped open the steel fasteners, and leaned forward to peer inside, sucking in a breath of whistled appreciation at what he found there.
Like most of Jabba’s hired hands, he prided himself in knowing about weapons. Consequently, although he might not have actually fired a J8Q-128 Finbat missile before, he recognized it immediately from its listing in Gundark’s Gear Catalogue. The Finbat was a portable, shoulder-fired concussion warhead, precision-tooled to penetrate the armor plating of military-grade vehicles.
Reaching down, Smight lifted the launch tube from its packaging, hoisting it up to his shoulder, feeling the heft and power of the thing as he lowered his head toward the sight. His finger gripped the trigger. The weapon’s silent promise of death spoke directly to the remnants of panic and fear still rattling around inside him from his encounter with the worm. One blast from the Finbat would annihilate anything in a five-hundred-meter radius, including the worm. For one completely irrational moment Smight almost considered bringing it back into the tunnel to go after the creature himself, although of course such an idea was madness—detonating a concussion missile inside a space station was suicide. But he would’ve loved to splatter that thing’s guts all over the ventilation shaft.
He set the Finbat aside and went on to the next crate, exploring its contents, already wondering how he was going to tell Jabba about what he’d found, and how he could use it to maximize his position here. Just moments earlier he’d assumed he was a dead man—if, by some miracle, he managed to get out of here alive, Jabba would track him down and treat him like any other loose end, chopping him off.
But now—
He imagined the conversation, how he would tell his boss he’d discovered the very heart of what he’d been sent to find. How best to execute such a plan?
While thinking it over, Smight did a quick inventory of the crates. Among many other items, he found a proton missile launcher, a pulse cannon, an entire box of Mandalorian assault rifles, flechette launchers, and something that he was pretty sure was an LS-150 heavy accelerated charged particle repeater gun. There were several packages of explosives, including a crate of breaching grenades, anti-starfighter cluster bombs, and a carefully packaged selection of freshly manufactured thermal detonators. Upon further reflection, Smight realized that none of the weapons were technically up to factory spec—Radique had assembled them here, making subtle improvements in their precision and firing capability.
He reached the last crate and stopped.
Unlike the others, this one was locked. Although it was smaller than the others, it was also considerably heavier. There was no type of writing or information on it whatsoever. Even the most cursory inspection revealed that its shell was constructed of something far more formidable than durasteel.
Smight placed his hands against it.
The case was warm.
No, check that—the case was hot.
It also seemed to be humming.
Right away, even before he’d detected the vibrations inside it, Smight knew whatever was in the last crate was different, far more valuable and potentially dangerous than anything else down here—something special. Radique would never leave it here alone for very long, and he sensed that a man of Radique’s intellect and experience wouldn’t want to hold on to it any longer than he absolutely had to.
Which meant he would be back soon.
Good, a voice inside him whispered, and the idea rose into his mind unbidden.
That was how Augustine Smight, once just another lackey among thousands in Jabba’s army, first realized that he was destined for greatness: by the ease with which he adapted to his situation and turned it to his advantage.
There wasn’t much time. He went back around to the guns and artillery that he’d sorted through, handpicking the weapons that felt most comfortable in his grasp. In the end he settled for a DT-12 heavy blaster pistol like one that he’d first used when he’d learned to shoot, and—because he’d always wanted to try them—a pair of flechette gauntlets.
And so it was that he found himself strapping the holster to his belt and the gauntlets to his wrists, positioning himself against the last crate in the room, and engaging in the one activity that he’d never expected to do while he was here—smiling.
“I don’t think those belong to you.”
Startled, Smight stared at the figure standing in front of him. “What—” He swallowed and found his voice. “What are you doing here?”
He jerked the DT-12 upward, but it was already too late. A shattering blow struck him in the side of the head, just above his right ear, and he knew no more.