Everything was going fine until the kell dragons broke loose.
When the shooting had started, Sadiki hadn’t wasted any time on incredulity. In her experience, it was what she’d always thought of as the “idiot beat”—that shocked, stubborn moment when the human brain refused to accept the obvious, even when it was happening right in front of your face—that got you killed. Her instincts took over. Crawling across the floor on her knees and elbows, keeping her head down, she’d found immediate cover behind one of the unused load-lifter droids while the initial volley of blasterfire had overtaken the cargo hold. That had been the worst of it.
“Bo shuda, Warden Blirr,” Jabba’s voice called out through the holo-projector’s recessed speakers. “Ohta mi marvalec fiz plesodoro.”
Translating the words effortlessly, Sadiki understood the message perfectly in Basic. Hello, Warden Blirr. Let me see your beautiful face.
She’d peered out from behind the droid and seen his image hovering there, a full stereo projection, larger than life, borne forward on a repulsor platform drawn by the two enormous kell dragons. Of course Jabba would never risk coming down here himself. She could only assume that he was safely ensconced on his space yacht, far enough away to remain unharmed, not so distant that he’d miss out on any of the fun.
As imposing as he was, the arrival of the Hutt, in person or virtually, hadn’t really been much of a surprise. By this point Sadiki had already figured out most of what was happening and why, and when her ears stopped ringing from the firefight, she’d come around from behind the load-lifter, stepping fully into view.
“Jabba,” she said, hands up, stepping closer, picking her way among the bodies of fallen guards and deck crew members. The survivors, apparently, had already retreated from the hangar. “Welcome to the Hive. I take it that I’ve done something to provoke your ire?”
The Trandoshans and Gamorreans swung around to point their blasters at her, but Jabba’s holo gestured at them to lower their weapons. The platform where the image projector sat shuddered visibly, with the dragons yanking hungrily on their leashes.
“Warden Blirr,” Jabba answered, continuing in Huttese, “I thought we were friends.”
“Hmm.” Fearlessness, she realized, or at least the appearance of it, would be the key to surviving the next five minutes. She glanced at the smoking carcasses of her own people littered across the floor and shrugged. “Apparently not. To what do I owe the pleasure of this visit?”
“You executed my foot soldiers.”
“Then I guess we’re even.”
“As if that weren’t bad enough,” Jabba continued on blithely, “you allowed them to be eaten by this inmate scum that you pit against one another for sport.”
“A nice touch, don’t you think?”
“You know me well.” He chuckled and shook his head. “Under normal circumstances I would applaud such butchery, but you don’t seem to grasp the basic elements of respect.”
“Respect?” Sadiki cocked her eyebrow. “So you’re here to school me on the fine art of diplomacy?”
“Among other things.”
“Sorry, Jabba, but it won’t wash,” she said, taking another step forward, hands still up where he could see them. “And besides, you told me explicitly that those weren’t your men. I gave you every opportunity to take them back, and you denied knowing every one.”
“Sadiki, Sadiki …” The Hutt narrowed his eyes. “We’re both businesspeople. Let’s stop wasting each other’s time.”
“By all means.” She’d ventured close enough now that she could see into the crate where the Trandoshan was standing, a snarl twisted over his face, the WESTAR rifle still gripped in his claws. At her feet, the body of one of the guards was twitching, his static pike still clutched loosely in one hand, as the last of his life drained from him. “Just tell me what you want.”
Jabba peered at her from beneath wrinkled eyelids. “What I want?”
“This is how this works, isn’t it? You send in a handful of hired muscle and I get all intimidated and fork over whatever it takes to make them go away. So what do you want?”
“How about your pretty head?” Jabba told her. “Mounted on my palace wall, where I can admire it for all eternity.”
Sadiki smiled coldly. “I’m afraid that’s not on the table for negotiation.”
“How disappointing. Then how about a quick meal while I’m here?”
She glanced at the holovid, perplexed. “A meal?”
“Yes.” Jabba cast his eyes down at the creatures leashed to the front of his platform. “For my little pets.”
At once, both dragons sprang forward and came barreling toward her, lunging over the bodies of the fallen, while Jabba’s entourage stepped back to give them all the room they needed to finish her off.
Sadiki figured she was close enough by now, and she was right. In a quick jackknifing motion she grabbed the static pike from the limp grasp of the guard on the floor, turned, and thrust it into the neck of the Trandoshan, jamming the electrically charged tip into his reptilian skin and delivering a massive, heart-stopping shock. As the ’Shan jerked and shuddered with the current pulsing through him, she grabbed the WESTAR from his hands, wheeled around, and fired a series of blasts directly into the face of the first kell dragon.
The dragon caught the high-energy particle beam straight between the eyes at less than a meter away, the impact pulverizing its bony calvarium and frying its lizard brain in its skull, but not entirely stopping it. Skidding sideways on its claws, captive of its own momentum, the thing floundered headlong into the crate where the Trandoshan had collapsed and slammed into it, still twitching. Its scaly body landed in a bulky heap at Sadiki’s feet.
She pivoted, finger on the trigger. The second dragon circled around behind her with a guttural hiss. Tensing, she pointed the WESTAR at it and squeezed off a round, but she was too late. In a flash the thing was on her, knocking her flat. Squirming beneath it, Sadiki drew up her legs, fought to pull herself away—
—and that was when she felt its jaws clamp down around her right calf, teeth ripping through her leather boot, deep into the flesh and muscle, grinding down toward bone.
She screamed. Agony like nothing she’d ever experienced came spilling out to engulf the entire lower half of her body, swelling in a bright balloon of pain that threatened to overtake reality itself. She arched her back, her fingers groping blindly for the WESTAR, drumming the floor of the hangar, but the blaster rifle was gone, lost where she could never find it.
Crack! Something in her lower leg came loose with a brittle snap, and her vision doubled, then tripled, as tears of pain spilled up from her eyes.
“Easy, sweet one,” Jabba’s voice growled at the dragon, “take your time.” Faintly, from somewhere far beyond the pain, Sadiki heard him laughing, that hollow, orotund ho ho ho that nearly everyone who heard it associated with impending death. “You see, Warden, I like to starve my precious dragons, to build their appetite.” Squirming on the holovid, tail twisting with delight, the Hutt sat back and splayed his fingers over the great sac of his bloated stomach. “But I also train them to eat slowly, to keep you alive as long as possible. So she works her way slowly upward, a little at a time.”
Writhing upward, blinking back tears, Sadiki stared down with a mixture of horror and disbelief at the stump where her right foot had been. It was gone—torn off completely. The splintered nubs of tibia and fibula protruded visibly from the tattered pantleg. From directly above it, the kell dragon leered up at her, face and teeth smeared bright red, its eyes alive with unslaked appetite. As the lizard nudged its way closer, snuffling eagerly, Sadiki could smell the thing’s breath seething from its nostrils, a noxious jungle stench of stomach bile and rancid meat mixed with the fresher coppery smell of her own blood.
Anger cut a white streak across the cloud of impending shock, and she knew what she had to do.
“ThreeDee?” She twisted backward, her eyes flicked across the hangar until she found what she was looking for: the administrative droid, standing along the far wall. “ThreeDee?”
“Yes, Warden?” The administrative droid looked back at her from the wall of the hangar.
“Initiate reconfiguration series 121, immediately.”
“Yes, Warden.”
“Jabba,” Sadiki shouted, forcing her voice to remain steady. From where she lay with the kell dragon standing over her, she was unable to make eye contact with the Hutt, but she knew he was there. “Jabba, can you hear me?”
“Of course I can,” he said. “Do you think I would miss the sound of you begging for your life?”
Sadiki managed to shake her head. “Call it off,” she said, through gritted teeth. “This is your only chance. The rest of your men, now, tell them to stand down.”
“Or?”
“Your people will all die here. I swear it.”
“You swear it?” Jabba sat back and roared with laughter, his massive bulk shaking with the force of it. “You are in no position—”
She closed her eyes as the entire hangar began to shudder around her with a deep metallic tremor, the clockwork of Cog Hive Seven going through what would be its final reconfiguration. To Sadiki, the tremor was reassuringly familiar, the stirring of a great hydraulic giant whose sole purpose now was to save her life. Dismissing the sight of the dragon, pushing past the shock of blood loss and the trauma, she reached back with both hands as far as she could. There was a long metal tube welded to the wall at her back, and she seized hold of it as the floor panels below dropped suddenly open below her.
With a shriek, the dragon plunged into the shaft, gone.
Jabba’s yellow eyes widened. In front of him, the Trandoshans and Gamorreans backed away while the great walls began collapsing around them, the ceiling buckling, the entire hangar folding up from the top down while newly revealed gaps and shafts yawned open on either side of the Purge’s docking port. On his hovering repulsor platform, the Hutt’s expression had already changed from shock to startled outrage.
“Presumptuous wench!” Spittle flew from Jabba’s lips, and his entire face seemed to swell and bulge with contempt. “I will have you brought before me. I will devour your flesh! I will wallow in your blood!” His slitted yellow eyes gleamed and rolled back at the Gamorrean nearest the Purge’s port. “Signal Scuppa! Turn them loose! Turn them all loose!”
The holovid disappeared.
All around them, indifferent to events within it, the cargo bay continued to reconfigure. The shaft that had opened up to swallow the kell dragon now stood five meters wide, too far for any of Jabba’s henchmen to jump across, but Sadiki had a feeling that it wouldn’t stop them for long.
“Warden,” a voice said behind her, and she glanced up to see ThreeDee standing over her, gripping her arm. “I’ve got you. Let me help.” Leaning forward, the droid’s breastplate opened to extrude a slender manipulation tool with a hypodermic gripped in its articulated pincers.
“Where … did that come from?”
“You had it installed in me personally during the initial upgrade. Three years ago.”
“I don’t remember that at all.”
“It doesn’t matter.” The needle slid into her arm, and an instant later, Sadiki felt the pain beginning to ebb. It was still there, but whatever the droid had injected into her had created a feeling of welcome detachment, as if she were observing it from a great distance. “We need to get you out of here right away.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Eventually, yes. Right now you need immediate treatment.”
She stopped arguing, allowing the droid to lift her up so that she could lean on it. ThreeDee’s arms were surprisingly strong, and she was grateful for their stability, because the narcotic was working fast, already taking away whatever remained of her equilibrium. Limping, she started back toward the turbolift.
“This way,” ThreeDee said. “I’ve already communicated with the GH-7. He’s waiting for you in medbay.”
Sadiki blinked, trying to see clearly. In front of her, the lift was open and waiting. There was a rumbling behind her, a thunder that had nothing to do with the reconfiguration.
She glanced back toward Jabba’s side of the hangar.
Behind her, on the far side of the five-meter gap, newly released prisoners—the thirty or so inmates that she’d initially expected—were spilling out of the Purge’s berthing port, shrieking and howling at their unexpected freedom. Like Jabba’s entourage, they couldn’t get across the opening in the hangar floor, not yet. But it didn’t stop them from grabbing up blaster rifles and sidearms from the weapon crate on their side and opening fire in every direction.
In the few seconds they’d been out, Sadiki saw that five of the inmates had already yanked loose the long berthing platform from the Purge’s port and were dragging it over to bridge the open space. It wouldn’t take more than a few minutes, she realized with a kind of dazed certainty, before they’d be scattering throughout the cargo bay and then upward into all levels of the prison.
And unlike the current inmates, none of them had electrostatic charges implanted in their hearts yet.
You’re losing control here. It’s all slipping away.
“No,” she muttered aloud. “Not yet. Not like this.”
But a profound heaviness had already settled over her, weighing her down. She was losing consciousness as well. Fading fast. Watching the prisoners pushing the gangway across the open gap, she felt her final thoughts rising back faintly like an echoing voice from the bottom of a deep and hollow well.
How many more guards do I have left? Thirty? Forty at the most?
The droid’s grip tightened on her arm. “I have already activated all emergency alarms.” ThreeDee was urging, lifting her now, carrying her forward. “Armed guards and support crews are on their way down now. They will stabilize the situation. Come along.”
“We have to get down …,” Sadiki heard herself saying, “down below … to check on …”
“Yes. Later.”
She nodded foggily, the very final dregs of consciousness draining away. The last thing she saw before her eyes sank shut was the binary load-lifter that she’d been hiding behind earlier, making its way across the floor, toward the gap in the floor. With one great step, it breached the open shaft and made its way to the weapons crate. It reached down inside, oblivious to everything that was going on around it, and pulled out a medium-sized black box from the very bottom of the crate. Sadiki watched all of this with glazed fascination.
A final dazed question swirled through her mind.
What’s it doing in there?
Then blackness.