Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber Page A

eyes that bespoke nothing less than utter madness. On closer examination Zo saw a vine-like tangle of plastic tubes sprouting directly out from the young man’s back, where they seemed to have been implanted into his spine and the base of his skull. Thick yellowish red fluid crept sluggishly back and forth through the tubing. Zo followed the lines across the floor to where they connected to an electronic pump with a large glass cylinder on top. A ghastly kind ofcircuit had been created here, she realized, a hybrid between human and machine.
    Scabrous made an adjustment to the pump. The fluid in the tubes moved faster. The boy went rigid and then began pounding his face against the cage, over and over, with a terrible kind of rhythmic intensity. The cage clanged with the crash of impact until the boy’s face began to ooze blood, trickling scarlet from his nostrils and lips and the corners of his eyes. Still the boy did not stop. He was beating himself senseless, Zo realized, trying to knock himself unconscious or perhaps simply to kill himself, ending whatever torment was yet to come.
    “Stop!” Zo stared back at Scabrous. “What
is
this?”
    “Watch and see.”
    “What are you doing to him?”
    Scabrous didn’t answer. A moment later he opened the top of the cylinder of reddish yellow fluid and dropped the orchid inside.
    Jura Ostrogoth witnessed the whole thing.
    He’d slipped inside the tower when the Whiphid had stepped out, not giving himself time to deliberate. Experience had taught him that such opportunities ought not to be wasted. And so he had gone.
    Ever since Nickter’s disappearance the previous day, the academy’s rumor mill had been humming along at lightspeed about Darth Scabrous and what might be going on up in his lab. Earlier this morning, Jura had overheard Pergus Frode, a technician at the academy’s hangar, telling one of the other Masters that Scabrous had had visitors—two bounty hunters—who hadn’t returned to their ship last night. And now Kindra had told Jura that she’d seen two more off-worlders, a Whiphid and a girl, heading into the tower. They were carrying something with them, Kindra said. Nobody knew what.
    It was only a matter of time until someone came out.
    After lightsaber training, Jura had gone off by himself and crouched down underneath the snow-encrusted stones of a half-collapsed ruin facing the tower’s main entrance. The cold hadn’t bothered him in theleast. It had given him time to think, to clear his head. He had already decided that he wasn’t going to spend his life worrying about being exposed by Scopique. If he was going to escape from underneath Scopique’s thumb, he needed to change the game. Of course he couldn’t counterattack now—having just cornered him, Scopique would be expecting retribution—but once Jura found out what was happening inside the tower, he decided, he would arrange a private meeting with the Zabrak. He would tell Scopique everything, confide in him. Gain his trust. And when Scopique was off guard, gloating, Jura would … what?
    Kill him?
    Maybe.
    Or perhaps just humiliate him, the way that Scopique had humiliated Jura.
    In any case, things were about to be
very
different.
    How different, Jura could never have guessed twenty minutes earlier, as he had slipped out of the turbolift and made his way across the open laboratory at the top of the tower. Candles and torches dotted the room with flickering, intermittent light. He’d been worried that he might be heard—the lift was hardly silent—but even before the doors opened, he’d heard someone screaming and a metallic crashing noise. The sound bounced off the windows and stone ceiling, blocking out everything else.
    Jura slunk through pools of shadow, making his way between the clusters of equipment until he could make out the unmistakable shape of Lord Scabrous and someone else, a girl, standing next to what looked like a caged animal: the source of the crashing and the