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

still there watching him from fiery, lidless eyes, but Bossk would not yield. This was a cowardly substance designed to unravel a mind through its own fear. Bossk would not bow to fear, Bossk would never bend. He was an agent of terror, and when one day he died, he would face Skarzgoz’ak head-on. He would make the God of Death his slave and take his place in the labyrinthine corridors of the Underworld. Bossk would never surrender. He blinked several times trying to clear his thoughts, settling his mind. Around him everyone else was stricken by horror, but they had not tasted true terror yet, for it was Bossk who would visit death upon them.

 

The black hole was no longer visible at the opposite end of the hall, though the God of Death still looked down, perhaps weighing his subject’s worthiness. Let him watch. His vision still swam, colours merged and mutated, shadows danced, the flickering torchlight now sentient fire elementals, taking on demonic faces urging him to murder. The carvings on the walls took on new significance, runes pulsated with phosphorescent hues and shades unnameable. This was never a temple of worship – it was a shrine of sacrifice! Death is coming for you all! Bossk snatched his rifle from the ground and ran forwards…

 

Krang chased several of Okkra’s cowardly merrymakers into the passageways where they thought to vanish. It was their dumb luck to choose a dead end. They looked back up the corridor with the fear of death etched on their leathery Nicto faces. The Trandoshan levelled the flamethrower as the Nicto pushed and shoved each other to the front, trying to shield from the inevitable behind their friends. It mattered not, the spewing jet of flame took them all.

 

Krang doubled back, darting through the gloom, seeking more game. His search took him deeper into the underbelly of the temple. As he rounded a corner, he found himself in the arena holding area, a row of cells, packed with involuntary gladiators, lined one wall. When they saw the Trandoshan and the flamethrower, they cowered out of site as best they could. An unarmed Gamorrean came dashing round the corner as though a devil were at his heels. He stopped in his tracks when he registered the disfigured Trandoshan, Krang roasted him alive.

 

He was about to turn his attention to the trapped gladiators, but at the opposite end of the passageway two blue-skins rounded the corner. The first – a female – fired her blaster, the laser stretched down the hall and tore through Krang’s collar. He hissed in pain, but nonetheless activated the flamethrower which lanced towards the Chiss. Pathetically, they sought to curl up at the last second, wrapped in their cloaks as though that would save them. Krang compressed the trigger till he was satisfied, though when the flames and smoke dissipated, they had vanished. Good, another chase.

 

Krang moved to pursue, but was set upon from behind by a vice-like furry grip. The wookie was choking him and at the same time bashing him from one wall to the next. Enraged, and with no room to manoeuvre, he dropped the flamethrower and dipped forward, flipping the wookie over his back. As he broke the grip of the first however, another took its place. A powerful blow sent him careering face-first into the bars of a cell door. The prisoner gladiators cheered wildly. Krang took some backward steps, the two wookies were unarmed, Krang was not. He reached for the blaster strapped to his leg but the wookies charged; their combined force drove him backwards where they smashed through a wooden gate. They found themselves on the blood-stained sands of the arena killing floor.

 

There was mayhem all around them. Frenzied chitinous Colicoid brutes killed indiscriminately with their massive blaster-brandishing claws and lashing stinger tails. Nicto and Weequay had fled the murder-shoot of the hall above, only to jump from the frying pan into the fire – they fought tooth and nail with buzzing Geonosian.

Random blasterfire came from everywhere at once, and a vile mauve mist haunted the air. One wookie had landed on Krang’s chest and its grip sought his throat as he kicked back his feet, propelling the wookie back through the smashed gate. He spun at the next assailant with his blaster, but it smashed the weapon out his grasp. The wookie brought his fist down like a hammer, but Krang sidestepped the blow, unsheathing a dagger from his leg, he drove the blade into the Wookie’s belly then cruelly tugged the blade to one side in a disembowelling cut.

 

A growl of depthless anger came from behind. Enraged by the death of its companion the surviving grey-furred wookie charged with a berserker’s zeal. Wookies were formidable opponents, but Krang had never feared them – until now. The hirsute beast suddenly inspired a hitherto unknown dread in the veteran Trandoshan. Trembling, Krang backed away, trying to muster his senses. The wookie mutated before his eyes, its body now made of shadow, a white fire shone from its eyes, extra arms sprouted from its side and instead of hands they brandished curved scythe-like blades. Time had ceased to function – he was now in the ultra-present. The arena and the butchery had been forgotten, only the demonic wookie remained. Krang ran for the ruined gate while he still trusted his limbs to function, he needed to find the darkest underground tunnel in the palace, and from there, burrow himself deep in the earth till the End of Time.

 

Ecto, the Sarkan, had fled the Great Hall, he had been here before, he knew there were secret passages deep in the earth, they would bring him to safety. He had come for the feast as an honoured guest. Okkra was always gracious enough to provide a stocked bar on his lavish birthday celebrations. And there were the whores of course. He had looked forward to the whores being sent in once the joys of the fighting pit had begun to bore. But what had transpired had been inconceivable – Trandoshan killers, nameless creatures, fire, and blood. He was just a merchant trader – he wanted no part in bloodshed. Aye, he knew of the Hutts and their cruelty, but they paid so well! And who was a poor humble trader to stand up to hardened criminals? No, he had never been a brave man, but he was proud to have provided for his children and his seventeen wives. So long as he was in favour with the Hutts, he was untouchable – even on a lawless planet such as this.

 

The deeper he sunk into the underbelly of the temple, something troublingly curious took effect, something inexplicable. Instead of feeling safer away from the fighting his unease only magnified. The darkened corridors whispered to him, there were skeletons down here, ghosts, he could sense them sneaking up behind him, and just as their bony fingers touched his back, he would turn, but see only the gloom. They were toying with him, feeding off his fear with a vampiric delight.

 

He could not go back, backwards to the fighting meant certain death, but these lonely black corridors were becoming unbearable. He had found himself crawling through quicksand convinced he was being sucked into the earth, submerged and subsumed, but when he came to his senses, he was only writhing on the dry sandy floor screaming to himself. He could not go on – he was being driven mad, yet he could not go back. ‘Somebody, help me!’ He called out desperately to his gods.

 

And his prayers were answered, for coming towards him were two angels. Their eyes burned like molten rubies; their divine flesh pulsed with the radiance of a sapphire ocean. They would protect him from the skeletons, he could see into their divine souls through the ethereal vitreosity of their aura-enchanted frames. They will be my salvation. The female of the two extended her arm, and from it sprang a bolt of glorious entrancing light.

The wounded Chiss, Dinivian, at last made it to Loic and cut his bindings with a dagger. Loic slid to the hall floor with a sore thud. He frantically slipped the cords from his wrists and ankles. Unstaunched blood oozed from the Chiss’s face, his lips and chin covered by a respirator. They helped each other up to a standing position. ‘Come – down the passageway, the way we came,’ Loic urged, guiltily wanting to push his saviour away and run for the exit.

 

‘Maaasssk, you... maassk.’ The mutilated Chiss was fumbling in his robes for something. Loic was too manic to care. Something about a mask? With his hands now free, at last Loic rid himself of the accursed face covering Maax had gifted him on the Hound’s Tooth.

 

‘Okay. Now, let us go while we have the chance.’ The Chiss’s chest seemed to implode through a will of its own. Black arterial blood burst from the chest cavity splattering Loic’s face. The Chiss dropped dead to the floor and as he fell it afforded Loic a sight of his killer. Bossk!

 

The Trandoshan strode through the surrounding slaughterhouse with the assurance of an invulnerable fiend, his long rifle gripped in only one powerful clawed fist. Loic ducked as Bossk fired another shot, brickwork exploded behind him. He longed to dart for the passageway leading to the temple’s entrance, but it was too far to risk open ground. He had no choice but to turn the other way and seek cover behind Okkra’s gore-soaked dais.

 

Nilita advanced up the tunnel with Maax, heading back to the decimated amphitheatre, to Loic, their mission, and to regroup with Vries and Dinivian. Although they had telepathically sensed something was amiss with their companions and they were concerned for them. As they rounded a corner, curved walls dripping in petroglyphs, they almost collided with a scuttling, scurrying, snivelling, Sarkan. The creature seemed to be pursued by ghosts judging by the expression on its crusty, vermicular face.

 

The scaly, bony, yellow-eyed Sarkan looked pleased as it noticed the two Chiss. ‘My saviours!’ It rasped in a hoarse voice and dropped to its knees with its hands steepled before it. Nilita extended her blaster and fired without skipping a beat. A lance of white laserlight caught Ecto square between the eyes. The insides of his skull splashed down the wall leaving a trail of brainmatter and mucus.

 

The Chiss advanced stealthily, weapons poised, wary of any more miscreants fleeing the scene. Nilita’s thin blonde dreadlocks were flecked with blood from her targets, Maax’s robes were torn and singed a little from his scuffle, but they were both relatively uninjured, if only the same could be said for their brethren. Vries lay slain in a booth with a smoking blasterburn in his back, Da’Raa mauled by a Shistavanen, his features unrecognisable, and then blasted clean in half by Bossk’s handcannon. Maax and Nilita were about to discover their fallen comrades, as they entered the tunnel leading to Okkra’s tomb.

 

This ancient complex hewn into the stone of the desert cliffs had indeed been a place of worship, and its monuments did mirror and venerate the stars, but Bossk was right, it had also been a place of sacrifice. The extinct unknown people that had built this tribute to the gods in a time before technology, had believed that without a sacrifice before dawn each day, and a sacrifice before dusk each day, the sun would not rise and would not set. On full moons and eclipses special child sacrifices were required.

 

Some of the unseen hieroglyphs in the underground depths of the mesa’s many passageways told the story of infanticide. Babies strangled to death and then their bodies tossed onto hot coals, a burnt offering to the Sun God, sizzling. The earthenware bowls sculpted into the walls and the piped drains that criss-crossed the place were not used to filter in water from some ancient aqueduct or well source, as Maax had supposed, but to hold extracted hearts