Getting the crate across the open area outside the mess hall took longer than Maul had anticipated.
They had to step over all the bodies.
The gallery was littered with them. Everywhere they looked, inmates of the Hive were sinking to the floor, faces gone slack and lifeless, landing unceremoniously on top of the dead prisoners who’d already succumbed to the electrostatic charges. The smell of death had begun to fill this place as the prison transformed itself into a vast, floating crypt. The clawbird that was leading them stopped occasionally to land on one of the bodies and pluck out an eye.
It wasn’t entirely silent. Off in the distance, from the long corridors leading to the cells, Maul heard occasional shrieks and cries for help—the pleas of those who hadn’t yet died, perhaps, or the primitive outcry of the new inmates that Jabba had released from the incoming barge, the ones without bombs inside their hearts. At one point, a spate of blasterfire rang out and ceased abruptly, followed by a wild, shrieking symphony of lunatic laughter.
Madness had triumphed in the final hours of Cog Hive Seven. Twenty meters in front of them, a group of prisoners—Maul realized that they were the last surviving members of the Bone Kings and Gravity Massive, brought together in the penultimate moments of their lives—came scurrying out of the mess hall carrying a tremendous steaming vat of stolen food. They walked past Maul and Eogan without so much as a sidelong glance. Nobody stopped them. The last remaining guards seemed to have gone into hiding.
Unless those were the screams Maul kept hearing. He wondered if the newly arrived inmates were holding the guards somewhere and torturing them slowly.
Or perhaps they’d met the worm.
As they approached the far side of the gallery, Eogan kept glancing down, trying to read the numbers on their uniforms, as if it could give him an idea of how far along the process was. Even Maul—despite his commitment to the task at hand—found himself wondering how much longer they had. There were to be no more matches to save him now.
“The medbay is just through here,” he said. “It’s not too late. The surgical droid can—”
Maul stopped walking—not out of uncertainty, but simply to stretch out with his feelings, to see if he could ascertain where the Bando Gora was at this precise moment. Somewhere in the outer reaches of his sensibilities, a pang of unease stung him, a twinge that he associated most closely with those moments at the top of the LiMerge Building, when he’d stared at the window of the Jedi Temple in the distance.
Vosa is here. Very close now.
He would finish his task for his Master, yes. But the possibility that he might drop dead from something as maddeningly trivial as an electrostatic discharge in his hearts before he could confront the filthy ex-Jedi who’d come here to face him was more than even Maul himself could bear.
In the end, that was what decided it.
“The medbay, then,” he said with a nod, ignoring the expression of relief that flashed across the boy’s face as he said it. “Quickly.”