Life Debt Read online

  Sinjir holds up an emergency beacon—the one that came with their ship, the Halo, for use in case it ever crashes—and he gives it three quick pulses. Red light flashes in quick succession.

  Moments pass. Then, through the mist—

  Three more red flashes in return. These come from the base of the rock mountain underneath the fortress. “Jas, you glorious spiky-headed freak,” Sinjir says, cackling and clapping his hands.

  Norra shushes him and fires the grappling spike toward the space where the three flashes lit up the mist. The gun is quiet enough. It barks out a paff! sound as it goes off. The cable looped under the raft whizzes and spins as the spike zips through the air.

  In the distance: clink. Pay dirt.

  Jom grabs the cable and pulls the raft now in a new direction—not toward the gates of the fortress but to its underbelly. Out there should be a breach in the mountain, which their intel marks as Slussen Canker’s hroth-beast feeding room. The awful things have wings and like to hunt in the air a few times a day—and that is their staging point. The mountain breach is open to the air, with a ledge beneath it, and the hroth-beasts are kept inside by another crackling laser portcullis. Except, right now, that portcullis is down thanks to Jas, who came here several days ago. The signal pulsing through the darkness is clear: The way is open.

  “Told you she’d do us right,” Sinjir whispers in Jom’s ear.

  Jom’s only reply is a dubious grunt.

  The raft eases through the mist. Ahead, the way into the mountain comes more clearly into view: It’s like a yawping mouth with stalactite and stalagmite fangs waiting to swallow them up. No red glow, though. The gate is down. The way is truly clear. Jom pulls the raft over, cinches the cable up, and loops it around one of the rocks. One by one they step off the raft and into the cavernous space.

  The smell hits them hard. Along the wall are metal bins heaped high with dead things: birds plucked of feathers and missing their heads, gobbets of rotten meat from who-knows-what-animal, hoofed legs, quivering offal. Clouds of hungry gnats swarm in the air in the space above. This must be food for the hroth-beasts, Norra thinks. Given the red splatters along the dry rocky ground, she surmises that someone stands here and throws the meat out into the air—and the beasts go flying to catch it.

  Sinjir says, “I am quite seriously considering throwing up.”

  “That smell,” Jom says, making a face. “It’d knock a monkey-lizard sideways.” He frowns. “Where’s Jas?”

  “She must be farther in,” Norra says. “Come on.”

  The plan is simple enough: Jas Emari snuck in here days before under the auspices of being a bounty hunter looking for work. Which is true enough, and her reputation surely has preceded her by this point. Crime lords attract bounty hunters the same way these piles of carcass-meat attract flies: Hunters are hungry for work and crime bosses are quick to supply it.

  She opened the gate for them. And now the work begins. They already have a layout of the fortress, thanks to the holo-cron supplied by (well, stolen from) Surat Nuat, the Akivan boss who had been keeping tabs on the connections between Imperials and the criminal underworld in case he one day needed the leverage. They’ve been mining that data cube for information—it served, in fact, as a springboard to launch their little team.

  Once they leave the feeding room (an exit that cannot be quick enough for Norra’s nasal passages), it should be a short skip down a long tunnel to a lava tube that runs up the length of the fortress. Of course, the tube also leads down into the belly of this slow-simmering volcano, which means they should be careful not to fall. Climb up to the south tower, wait for Gedde to emerge from or head to his chambers—then bag him, tag him, and drag him. The goal is to get him onto the raft and out of the palace before anybody even notices. Then they’ll serve him up to the Republic Tribunal. Justice comes to the Empire. One war criminal at a time.

  Then Temmin will bring in the ship and hopefully they exit the atmosphere before anyone even knows Gedde is gone.

  Temmin. Her thoughts turn to her son. Poor, fatherless boy. He’s part of this team and not a day goes by without her fearing he shouldn’t be. He’s too young, she tells herself, even though he proves himself every day. He’s too precious, she thinks, which is more true than the other thing—now that she and her son are reunited, she is reminded how vulnerable he is. How vulnerable all of them are. Dragging him along for the ride seems entirely irresponsible of her as a parent, and yet a greedy, selfish part of her offers the cold reminder that the only other option would be to once more discard him. Leaving Temmin behind again would kill her. But what other choice would she have? Retire? Give up this life?

  Why is that not an option for you? she asks herself.

  Now is not the time to ponder it. They have work to do.

  She heads toward the tunnel, Jom and Sinjir following close behind—

  A lightning crackle rises behind them. Followed by a red glow.

  The portcullis is back. A mesh of lasers, crackling against one another. The searing red cuts through the cable mooring the raft to the rock, and it suddenly drifts into the mist. “No!” Jom cries out.

  Ahead of them, the scuff of heels.

  Figures and forms fill their escape. The fortress guards—thugs of varying size and breed, heads hidden behind rusted faceplates. Four of them stand there, blasters pointed. Jom draws. So does Sinjir. Norra’s about to reach for the pistol at her own hip—

  A loud throat-clearing comes from behind the guards.

  A Vorlaggn steps out. Skin like the cracked char on a piece of fire-cooked meat. Clear fluid suppurating from between those fissures, fluid he dabs at with a filthy brown rag. He blinks his three hollow-set eyes.

  Slussen Canker.

  His tongue clicks and clucks and when he speaks, his voice is wet and rheumy, as if the words must push their way past some kind of bubbling clot. “I see you thought to intrude upon the peace established by His Venomous Grace, Slussen Canker. Slussen does not like you here. Slussen finds your trespass very rude, in fact.”

  Norra thinks for a moment that this isn’t Slussen, then, but something Jas said pings the radar of her memory: The Vorlaggn speak in the third person, don’t they? Strange habit.

  Jom keeps his pistol up. “We’re not here for you.”

  “We’re here for Gedde,” Sinjir says. “Just toss him our way and we’ll stop intruding upon this lovely ordure pile you call a palace. Hm?”

  The Vorlaggn gurgles. “Slussen will give you nothing. Gedde?”

  From around the corner, their target emerges. The vice admiral himself. A man also said to have been in charge of one of the Empire’s more brutal biological weapons programs. Testing various ancient diseases on captive worlds, raining sickness from the battleships above.

  He is thin everywhere but for the pale belly pooching out from his unbuttoned—and filthy—gray shirt. His skin is the sallow and pitted flesh of a spice addict. A man lost to his addiction.

  Gedde is not alone.

  He yanks someone hard toward him—

  It’s Jas. He has her by the back of the neck, a pistol held to her temple. She wrenches her head away, but he wrenches it right back.

  “Slussen has captured your bounty hunter. If you do not drop your weapons, Slussen will have your bounty hunter’s head perforated by blasterfire, and her brains will go to feed the hroth-beasts.”

  Sinjir sighs. “Blast it.” His pistol clatters to the floor.

  Norra gently unsnaps her holster and lets it fall.

  Jom keeps his pistol up. “I don’t surrender my weapon. In SpecForces, we learn that our weapon is who we are. I can no more surrender it than I can surrender my own arm or my—”

  The hand moves fast—Sinjir grabs the gun from the top and wrenches it out of Jom’s hand, flinging it against the wall. “They’ve got Jas, you oaf.”

  The guards creep into the room and fetch the weapons.

  Gedde licks his lips and grins. “You rebel fools. We�
�ll sell you to the Empire and I’ll buy myself a full pardon—”

  Irritated, Jas pulls away from him and bats the gun from her head. “I think you can stop pointing that at my skull now.”

  At first, Norra thinks: Here’s our chance. Jas is free. But her freedom came easy. Too easy. No fight at all except the irritation on her face. The realization hits her like a wall of wake turbulence: Jas betrayed them.

  Jas steps away from Perwin Gedde, her hands tucked casually in her pockets. “Sorry, team,” she says, that last word spoken with a special kind of sarcasm. “Can’t change my horns, can’t change my ink, can’t change who I am.” She shrugs. “They offered a better bounty. In fact, this deal is a pretty good one—” She pulls out a datapad and tosses it to Norra.

  Norra catches it.

  With trembling fingers she lights the screen:

  On it, she spies a bounty.

  It’s their bounty. She sees their faces. Her son’s face among them.

  “You conniving little bilge-bug,” Barell seethes. “I trusted you.”

  “No, you didn’t,” Jas says. “And you shouldn’t have. I’m going to do very well with this. Not only is Gedde paying me for alerting him to the attempt to capture him, the Vorlaggn here is going to pay me a twenty percent finder’s fee—”

  “Slussen said fifteen.”

  “Well. A girl can try. A fifteen percent finder’s fee for your bounty.”

  “Jas, don’t do this,” Norra pleads.

  Sadness crosses Jas Emari’s face. “I’m sorry. But I have bills to pay. Bills that are coming due, and the Republic just isn’t keeping me flush.” Then she gives a flip little salute and says: “It was fun while it lasted.”

  Jas exits the room.

  Gedde laughs. “Let’s get you into some cages, shall we?”

  —

  Sinjir is not fond of cages. Especially ones that dangle over an open precipice, regardless of whether it’s here on Vorlag or back on Akiva in Surat Nuat’s dungeon. These cages are boxy things like caskets stood on their end, hanging from black rock outcroppings not far from the gateway to the hroth-beast feeding room. Mist gathers. Fungal light crosses beneath them in sharp, bright lines.

  “Still feeling good about your friend?” Jom calls. His cage hangs from another overhang about ten meters away. “Still think I should trust her?”

  “I do,” Sinjir says, thrusting his chin out defiantly.

  And that surprises him more than a little.

  He doesn’t trust anyone. And yet here he is, certain as the stars that this is all part of some secret plan, one the others just don’t see.

  A little voice tells him it’s because he’s so very good at reading body language. It’s his job to dissect people with but a glance, cutting them down to all their treacherous little atoms. And another competing voice warns him that maybe, just maybe, he missed something about Jas Emari.

  But that doubt is drowned in a washtub of his own confidence, and he feels oddly sure about her. So he says as much to them: “She’ll get us out of this yet, wait and see.”

  Jom grunts. “Keep dreaming, Imperial.”

  “Whether she’s playing us or playing them, we can’t count on her to save us,” Norra says. Her cage hangs on the other side of Sinjir’s and she wraps her fingers around the iron. “We have to get out of here ourselves. They’re going to sell us to the Empire. We can’t let that happen.”

  “I think we already let that happen,” Jom grouses. Then he leans forward against the cage, staring out. “What even is the Empire anymore? Who controls it? Who will pay for us?”

  That is a question Sinjir has been asking himself. At first, it surprised him how swiftly the Imperial forces crumbled. Though over time it puzzled him less and less. The unity of the Empire existed because all its chains and threads were held fast in a singular grip: the hand of the Emperor. With the Emperor gone, who was to hold it all together? Rumor said Vader had been taken out, too. So who then? The admirals? The moffs? They were always rats kept in line by the cats, and now there are no cats.

  No clear chain of succession was evident. Palpatine had no family of which to speak, at least as far as anyone knew. Vader didn’t have family, either (and for all Sinjir knows, wasn’t even human anymore). And with two Death Stars gone, a significant portion of the Empire’s best and brightest were snuffed out, too. The New Republic seized that opportunity. The Rebellion was gone, and a new government grew swiftly—if clumsily—in its place.

  That left the Empire scrambling in survival mode. No clear leadership because, most likely, they were fighting over it. And day by day, the Imperial forces peel away—defeated, destroyed, abandoned, or stolen.

  Sinjir imagines that the Empire as a whole was not all that different from how he himself was on the forest moon of Endor that fateful day—dizzied, bloodied, surrounded by bodies. Unsure of where to go next or what to do or what by all the stars even to believe in anymore.

  A crisis of faith and purpose. That’s what it is.

  Sinjir still suffers his crisis. The New Republic has not been an answer. This team has been an answer, somewhat, though now with his friend’s betrayal he feels back on the edge of things. The question of faith and purpose is left hanging. And no answer is easily seen.

  The Empire will need its answer, too—and if it doesn’t find one in time, it will be destroyed. Deservedly, he decides.

  I need a drink, he also decides.

  Not far away, the familiar buzz of the laser gate suddenly goes silent—leaving everything eerily quiet. But only for a few moments.

  Soon a new sound arises: chuffing snorts and moist gibbers. Out of the yawning mountainside opening, gobbets of meat launch out into the mist.

  Hroth-beasts follow fast. Red, leathery creatures with long wings and a dozen legs leap into the void, chasing the falling offal. Ducking and diving. Their faces are hardly faces at all: just squirming, eyeless piles of polyps and tubules. A fleshy mass that looks more like fungus and less like anything you’d find attached to an animal. Out there, a trio of the things swoop and roll, catching meat thrown to them. And then soon, the meat stops.

  But nobody brings the beasts back inside.

  The hroth-beasts soar higher. Still hungry, maybe.

  Or worse, Sinjir thinks: They’re bored.

  And we may make very good playthings.

  As if on cue, one swoops down right toward Sinjir’s cage—and wham, it slams into it with the weight of a flung vaporator. The beast clings to the side of the cage, pressing its tentacular mess through the grate. Sinjir has just enough room to stab out with his foot—and the tendrils grab his boot and suck it right off his foot. The beast makes greedy nursing noises as it tries to…eat the boot? Disgruntled, the creature mewls and gurgles, flinging its head to the side. The boot sails into the vapor.

  Jom yells through cupped hands: “Don’t let it touch you. Those things on its face are full of stingers. You’ll go numb.”

  Blast. Sinjir presses himself against the back of the cage as the thing probes and bangs its head and fore-claws against the metal.

  As its teeming masses of tendrils push through the grates like worms, Sinjir spies something shiny under its neck. Something hanging there by a chain. It looks like—

  A key. A dark metal octagonal key. Just like the one used to lock them in here in the first place.

  Well, that’s curious.

  Suddenly the creature flies away, sailing once more into the mist.

  No, no, no!

  That key—

  Certainly Slussen’s men didn’t put it there, did they? They don’t seem smart enough for such cruel games. Which means the key is secret, but intentional. Which means the key is from someone who wants them free.

  “Jas,” Sinjir whispers under his breath, suddenly giddy. It’s just like in Surat Nuat’s dungeon—him trapped and her acting as the one to free him yet again. An oddly comforting pattern, that. A classic move! Sinjir moves to the front of the cage and press
es his hands through the tight spaces—his arms will fit through up to the elbow, and he waves his appendages around like an animal in distress. “Hey! Hey! You flying sacks of slime! Here, here! Don’t I look delicious? Mmm. Don’t I look like a tasty—”

  Whonnnng. The same one swoops up from below, unseen. Tubules gather around his left arm, and it’s like being electrocuted—the limb tingles at first and then suddenly feels like a thousand little pins are pricking it all at once. Sinjir screams, but maintains. With his free hand, he darts out and snatches the key from around the thing’s neck with pinching fingers, then wrenches his hand out of that writhing mass of tentacles.

  Whining through gritted teeth, he quickly peels back the now ragged tatters of his sleeve—the arm is red, blistering, swelling up.

  And, as Jom predicted, totally numb. He shakes it, trying to urge feeling back into the limb.

  Sinjir resists the desire to immediately unlock the cage and—

  Well, then what, exactly?

  Leap into the void?

  Jump onto one of these things and try to ride it?

  Those sound like very good ways to die. And Sinjir is all about not dying. He’s not entirely sure what he’s living for, not yet, but not dying is a very fine start. He whispers to himself: “Patience, old boy. Patience.”

  He waits. The beasts harass Norra and Jom, too, slamming into the cages, the metal banging against the mountainside behind them. Sinjir wants to yell to the others to check for keys—but Slussen’s guards, the beast-keepers, could be listening. Eventually, the hroth-beasts tire of trying to eat the wriggling meat inside the unyielding metal exoskeletons, and soon the beast-keepers offer a shrill whistle. The beasts leap and swoop back into the cave from whence they came.

  And then the familiar buzz of the laser gate returns.

  Now is the time.

  Sinjir thrusts his one good arm outside the cage, the key held firm in his grip. It takes a bit of fumbling, but he manages to spin the key around and get it in the lock—a quick turn and the door springs open.

  Its hinges squeak as the cage hangs in open air. Now what?

  “Uhh,” he says, clearing his throat. “Some help here?”