Loic Monerat & The Lizard Brain Spice Smuggling Syndicate, Chris Herron, Greg Provan [drm ebook reader txt] 📗

‘I give it to you true exalted one, the bounty hunter is blameless.’ He let the gasps and whispers die down before continuing. ‘It was Bossk who scuppered this would-be assassin’s plans. And it was not Bossk who drew first blood. He is stubborn, it is true, and he is loyal to a fault for he acted under the directive of Sarkraa alone. I remind you that it was Monerat the Damned who snatched the Trandoshan’s grenade. It is his doing and his alone. What transpired afterwards was unfortunate, and poorly handled by all parties. Sarkraa wishes to see this sorry business brought to an end. Bossk has long been an asset to both our houses, exonerate him, and let business resume. Let us waste no more blood on account of this doomed smuggler who it was that hatched this perfidious treason. This is Sarkraa’s humble request.’

Maax dropped to one knee to hear Okkra’s verdict. Gravi Nido whispered in his master’s ear for some moments, as Okkra took a prodigious suck of his hookah. He eyed the Chiss for several heartbeats, deliberating, while his ulcer-ravaged pink tongue darted in and out of his void mouth like a curious but wary invertebrate.

‘I have long been known as Okkra the Merciful,’ the Hutt quipped to everyone’s merriment. Everyone was laughing except Loic, and Bossk… Bossk was not laughing. Okkra had to tread carefully, Maax knew. Disarming the situation with humour was an astute move. The Hutt could ill-afford to look weak. Yet the headstrong Trandoshan was infamously volatile. Bossk may have been outnumbered a hundred-to-one but he was too crafty not to have a trick up his sleeve.

‘Sarkraa’s gentle wisdom is a boon to us all. The smuggler is to blame. Go in peace Bossk, feast, and when you’ve had your fill, I have more work for you,’ ruled the Hutt. The stiff-spined bounty hunter gave a curt nod. ‘And as for you Monerat, you will die a thousand deaths before I suck the marrow from your bones. Hang him with the others!’

Loic’s bindings were removed and instead replaced with wires which looped round his ankles and wrists. He was hoisted in place and hung from the wall to the delight of the baying horde. But the crowd were soon bored, and their attentions returned to the arena. Loic did not know how many more deathmatches were planned, but he was in little doubt his torture was the next course on the menu. Maax had until then to figure out how to free him. If he had been taken to a cell, they would have stood a better chance, but here in full view of Okkra he failed to see how the Chiss could engineer a rescue. Maax was a talker, an accomplished diplomat no doubt, but how the hell was he going to pull this off?

There were two other unfortunates hanging next to him: a Gamorrean whose barrel chest and upper torso was criss-crossed with weeping lacerations, both eyes had been put out, leaving gaping bloodstained cavities. Next to him, was a dead-eyed blonde-haired human, whose tattered rags did nothing to cover his emaciated frame. He had been starved, Loic realised with horror, noting the gaunt pinched face and cadaverously-wasted skeletal frame. What crime had this man committed? Perhaps he had been late with a payment, or maybe his shipment of illicit goods had been seized by the authorities. It did not matter. No, it did not matter. There was no viable reason for such a heinous deliberate degradation of another living being. The damned Hutts! For too long they had tormented the weak, bullied and murdered, pillaged and raped. They had to be stopped.

Loic strained in his bindings with such fervour his wrists bled anew. An all-consuming rage took him, and he swore an oath to whatever Gods cared to heed his call – if he got loose, he would kill Okkra. He would kill that fucker by whatever means necessary, even if it meant his own life. If he survived that, he would take down Sarkraa too, and then every other Hutt he could find. He wished the bomb were still in his belly. It would be worth it. Let it detonate and blow Okkra to pieces, let the roof come down and crush and entomb them all.

A part of him realised his vehement fumings were the bedfellows of a delirious mind. How much could a man endure and still insulate his own sanity? He scanned the crowd for the Chiss. At least his vantage point afforded him a full view of the Great Hall. The degenerate killers, the wookie being bludgeoned to death in the arena below, Okkra wriggling on his palanquin sucking greedily on his hookah. The acrid caustic whiff of burnt spice assailed his nostrils. He longed to ingest the accursed substance once more, its sweet caress both blessing and bane.

In a galaxy full of wondrous destructive miracles, devilish technologies capable of destroying planets, surely a device to administer narcotics by thought alone would not be too much of a stretch? Loic imagined an implant on his cerebral cortex, where, with a mere flicker of thought, or a turn of a dial, he could administer a dose of spice, or whatever drug took his fancy. Perhaps that painkilling herb Maax had given him would be prudent. He could envisage Okkra’s displeasure as his goons flayed Loic only to find he was beyond the reach of pain. It would be a victory of sorts - he could smile back and laugh as they skinned him alive.

He was beginning to go mad he realised, as he convulsed. Unbidden his stomach tried to evacuate its meagre contents, but the mask blocked its flow and he chocked, desperately trying to breathe through his nose till the vomit slid back downwards. Where the fuck is Maax? At first, he thought he located the Chiss and was seeing triple, though sadly it was only more gift-bearers approaching Okkra’s dais. The three Chiss were flamboyantly dressed in garish, purple, fur-lined cloaks, their crimson body-armour studded with topaz and lapis lazuli. One presented the majordomo with a case which he held up to Okkra with satisfaction. What they were gifting Okkra he could not determine. He did not care. Where the fuck is Maax! he screamed in his head.

Bossk made a show of mixing with the crowd, he knew there were eyes still on him. He feigned interest in the pathetic contests in the arena. If he were in those sands, they could send in the whole assemblage one after another and he would slay them all. Bossk was tired of the petty squabbling between the Hutt syndicates. He was tired of being used as their huntsman because they were too sluggish and helpless to stalk their own prey. The Hutts hid behind superstition and carefully engineered idolism. They were ruthless, but they used terror to mask their own prostrate ineffectual impotence, manipulating the weak-minded and unambitious.

Bossk had amassed a greater fortune than he could ever hope to spend on himself – but he had loftier plans than petty, personal, financial wish-fulfilment. He had enough riches and the formidable reputation to step into the vacuum left when he liquidated Okkra and Sarkraa. He would take control of the syndicate for himself, murder for sale, spice-running, aggressive take-overs. He would crush every criminal enterprise he came across and subsume them into his own collective. The survivors would join him or die. Perhaps he would claim this ancient temple as his base and hang the skulls of the Hutts behind his throne.

Florrum was the perfect, warm, planet to establish his cartel. The most able Trandoshan killers would flock to his banner. He would assemble the best bounty hunters the guild had to offer; Dengar, 4-Lom, Zuckas, the Kadian twins, rogue pariah Mandalorians, and he would strike at every crimelord simultaneously. By the time the dust settled he would be enthroned, Bossk would be the “Exalted Illustrious One”. Slowly he wound his way towards the back of the hall, he took a plate of gooberfish eggs from the buffet and helped himself to a tankard of burshka juice - just a tired, travel-weary bounty hunter, looking for replenishment before his next galaxy-stretching assignment.

A few former associates and other bounty hunters offered hollow banalities as he passed, though often enough the crowd swiftly parted to allow him passage. He found himself a shadowed booth and took stock of the hall. Fortunately, Okkra liked to keep his captors close. The smuggler hung from a rack not twenty paces from the dais. The explosive in his guts was a modified photonic charge. The device was of imperial design, reliable, upon activation the whole upper half of the great hall would be immolated.

Bossk’s two Trandoshan plants were already in place. One was at the bar at the opposite end of the hall from Okkra’s throne, the other at the Sabacc table, both outwith the blast radius. With Okkra blown up, chaos and confusion would ensue. Bossk and his henchmen would throw concussion grenades into the melee and then mow down as many of the stunned revellers as need be. Afterwards they would bend the knee or die.

Bossk tossed some eggs into his mouth enjoying the delectable succulence on the back of his throat. Under the table, from a pocket in his jumpsuit, he removed the detonation trigger and primed it. He took a last look towards the front of the hall, the smuggler was still hanging on the wall, Okkra was still on the dais consuming and ingesting whatever was within reach of his meaty hands – it was time. He pressed the trigger…

Okkra’s compound, out on the Windblown Edge of Nowhere; a great, once-sacred complex enclosing many inner structures. Local legend has it the sanctuary was once the scene of an extraordinary symbolic intercourse between an Intergalactic God and a Cosmic Serpent. On the plateau’s flat top was a single golden tower, standing in the centre; the Hutt’s minions had fashioned the tower into a rooftop entrance to the makeshift citadel. Its original gilded column formed a nine-headed snake writhing around a feminine-like humanoid body carved into the natural rock’s peak. Perhaps once serving as an observatory to the stars, pictograms smothered the serpent’s scales and they seemed to depict eclipses of the moon and the sun, graphic symbols in stone texts.

The snake effigy’s multitudinous gem-encrusted coils enveloped a ten-chambered tower, a dark bronze in the night but radiant gold by day, an artificial hill at its base, a miniature capstone at its peak, dimly green-glowing. The whole facility was a primeval temple maybe - used to worship celestial gods long-since forgotten. This obelisk crowning it, a sacred monument possibly, huge, heavy blocks of stone, inexplicably hoisted into position by archaic architects, pre-technology. Towers drowned in untended verdure. Sarsens of stone standing sentry in an otherwise barren desert.  

Atop Okkra’s windswept, sand-covered plateau, on his 776th birthday, the chilly, mute, desert night had well-and-truly enveloped the land in its unforgiving obscurity. Four fat Gamorreans gathered round a firepit, fashioned from an old oil barrel, and did their best to keep warm against plummeting temperatures. Warming their blubber with outstretched stubby digits; shuffling, snorting, oinking in their grotesque language. The party was receiving no more guests, it was locked down for the night, the festivities inside were well underway and the top entrance was barred, off-limits.

To a Trandoshan however, there is no such thing as off-limits, if they want to enter a place they will do so, by cunning, or by brute force, but either way... A Gamorrean glanced up from the fire which had held it hypnotised. Its slow wits tried to articulate what it was seeing; a star from the night’s canopy seemed to have detached itself and was wandering down towards them. He blinked and rubbed his eyes and pointed, alerting his grunting co-workers, who also turned