PART ONE

A short story C.T Herron & Greg Provan

 

Loic took a turbo lift right down to the poor sectors, down to the bottom where the buildings met the ground, as with most planets on the rim the higher you were situated the better the conditions, the poor sectors, however, had their uses. Loic felt more at home down with the criminals, thieves and poverty rather than the affluent flamboyance of the upper levels with the predictably materialistic denizens. Drops of rain found their way down to him and he walked, ground cabs came humming past and advertisements flashed on the huge wall boards attached to the immense buildings that stretched into eternity. It always seemed wet in the poor sector to Loic, wet and dark, as the tawdry artificial lighting gave off poor illumination.

 

He fingered the bejewelled stud in his ear, then had second thoughts, removed it deftly, and slipped it into his pocket, a beacon for would-be muggers in this downtrodden sector. Running a hand across his balding, glabrous head, his beady blue eyes flitted and flickered, seeking out the poorer quarters where the ragged people go, he had one aim in mind, one mission to accomplish, one of the only reasons one would venture so far down into the lower levels alone and unarmed, sweat lashed from his forehead and tickled his eyes, each bone in his body ached as though it were being crushed in a vice while being hacksawed simultaneously. He knew what he needed...

A soothing sibilant susurration somewhere in the Stygian alleyway to Loic Monerat's side, he shivered involuntarily, but padded forward with mock confidence nonetheless. His jittering fingers betrayed his angst, ceaselessly fingering his empty holster but a blaster wouldn't help him where he was headed, it would be rendered inoperable before he was twenty paces from the right door. One side of the damp street was lit by a weak neon glow, drinking houses, the other was framed in a rubicund tinge, a weak mist served as a screen to both fornicators and passing voyeurs. Such delights could wait though; ruefully Loic pushed passed a couple of ecclesiastics who were in a stake of sinful drunkenness. He picked one of their pockets on the way past, his fingers were still nimble despite his affliction...

 

...Mustn't think about the affliction, he thought. The sickness, like the azotic, unctious gunge of the streets, was settling in deep and visceral now, he could feel his stomach cramping up, sending retching, stabbing bolts through his insides, loosening his bowels in the process. He braced himself against the pain, as if to reassure this to himself, he pulled his collar round his neck. It was hibernal in the poorer quarters at this time of year, and the cold was only made fiercer by his infirmity.

The twenty credits he had just lifted from the passing dipsomaniacs, added to the thirty already in his possession, would get him in where he needed at the very least, then the real work began, he slipped the chips into his pocket with the others, his 'safe pocket', impossible to pick. Doing a job like this unarmed, seemed like lunacy, or impetuous suicide, but Loic knew weapons would only raise suspicion, put them on the defensive straight away, he had to go in surreptitiously, and when he struck, he had to strike swift and precise, alacritous like the slitherettes he used to see in the deserts of Tattooine. But the job was secondary on his mind, it could not even be attempted until he assuaged the aching in his bones and muscles, and only one thing would scratch that particular itch - spice - beautiful, golden, warming, healing spice, it was all he could focus on. Through the ethereal mist, glimmering darkness, and the blurring of his vision, his destination came into sight...a figure stood close by, his face seemed ugly, leering and reptilian in the Cimmerian shade...

 

The towering Trandoshan bouncer studied Loic through orbless inky black eyes, the alien gaze as unsettling as the creature’s hulking form. Trandoshans were a pitiless species devoid of morality and compassion, theirs was the rule of the gun. They regularly found work as bounty hunters, assassins or muscle. They possessed a certain low cunning, as Loic knew only too well. The famed bounty hunter, Bossk, had been on his tail since he bungled robbing that casino on Ventus 6. His stubborn pursuer somehow never seemed far behind despite Loic making every effort to disguise his movements.

 

As Loic reached the distance of a few paces the Tranodoshen’s mouth opened, a warning hiss, violence was now imminent. In a feat of prestidigitation he adroitly flashed a series of hand signals, communicating he was a spice runner and thieves guild ally. The brute moved aside. Loic was greeted by a wall of smoke; his seasoned eyes quickly took in his surroundings. As spice dens went it was perfunctory, the dimness was disturbed only by a single artificial flame, on makeshift pallets and rickety chairs a selection of miscreants, cut-throats and vagabonds were in various stages of torpor. Loic fingered his empty holster once more. There was a buxom serving wench in one corner behind a makeshift wooden counter. She ran a dirty cloth over the wooden top but served to only move the grime from one area to another.

“Spice and a drink.” Loic said to her, quiet and hoarse. She eyed him for a long second till he slid over a pile of credits. She took them with a disdainful snort of her porcine nose. Loic would have liked to have slapped her fat greasy face but instead meekly pocketed his spice and shuffled over to an empty booth, drink in hand. It was at last time..

 

...habitually he would sit behind a table, facing the door, back to the wall, with his hand circumspectly positioned on his blaster, but as this only served to remind him of his nakedness, he clasped the free hand on the cup of firewater. He didn't even need to smell the beverage to confirm it was firewater, that drink was the only drink that was ever served in spice dens. People weren't here for the drink anyway, a basic mixture of ethanol and octane, little or no flavouring or sweetener. Closing his nostrils he knocked the drink back with a grimace, the califacient slid down his throat, burning at his insides as it went, it served to settle his stomach and calm his tremulous hands.

He just needed them steady to do the spice, he'd been agonizing for this moment since his feet had touched down on Eriadu, the shavit-hole of a planet he currently occupied. The only thing this planet was famous for, was being the birthplace of that treacherous bastard Tarkin. It was about to become famous for something else though...but first, the spice, glorious spice.

He inspected his purchase, wrapped as it was in greasy, recycled loub paper. This is the lower levels of Eriadu's main port of trade, he wasn't exactly expecting glitterstim, what in fact he got, was a low grade cut of ryll, bastards, he'd have to double the dose, he did so and washed it down with the dregs of firewater.

 

The spice took effect almost immediately; everything took on a warm glow, as if the den was macerating in golden sunshine. As the toxins took course through his veins, he slouched back, savouring every second, luxuriating in its magical effects. His mind became focused now, no distractions, the spice hit massaged the knots out of his psyche and he felt reborn and rehabilitated, ready to take on anything, and he'd have to be. This self-appointed mission would earn him enough credits to pay off the Hutt cartel and clear his prodigious debt to them, the casino job was supposed to have done it, but that had gone wrong, horribly, horribly wrong. It seemed like lately, every time Loic fixed a problem, another two presented themselves. The spice had took the edge off the worry, but he had to act fast, now, while he was feeling confident, soon the effects of the ryll would wear off and the pain would return.

As he rose, a Trandoshan entered the den and his heart jumped a little, but he quickly noticed the yellowish hue to the creature’s scales and realised it wasn’t Bossk and relaxed, all these Trandoshans looked the same to him. He had impulsively reached for his blaster, once again noticing its absence…on his way past the bar he alleviated an Anomid and a Mirialan sitting there of their spice, nobody noticed and he put his head down and walked on, pocketing his prizes with a lopsided grin…

Satiated, Loic stepped through the puddles, through the endless disenchanted streetwalkers; pick-pockets, recidivists, the weak and unfortunate. Everyone had a story; always a great unfairness was dealt them by the sardonic gods, some or other fabled injustice. Loic blended in. People didn’t pay much attention to him and this served him well. The downpour steadily seemed to lessen. Gazing heavenward, Loic watched lairs of hover cabs line the sky nearly all the way to the top of the huge structures that made up the city. The poor sectors were somewhat deceptive, some of the richest business men in the city lived and worked in these parts and some of the most ostentatious and affluent houses could be found if only one knew where to look. The thing was; why would burglars and thieves look for game amid the poor districts? instead they would scale the heights to the real wealth. Also there was a certain honor among the thieves and scum of the poor districts, they preferred to steal from the rich, as they were the ones they hated. The higher you lived the more powerful you were and living with the street rats, scum and drug addicts reminded them of this feeding their impetus for revenge.

 

When Loic had been a spice smuggler, in the heyday of the Kessel mines (the misshapen, asteroid-like prison-planet where the galaxy’s chief supply of spice was mined) his constant dalliance with the drug, handling it, smelling it, seeing it, getting its fine dust on his clothes and in his hair, being surrounded by it on his ship every day, lead, he believed, to a propensity for the substance. He dabbled more and more in its intoxicating properties and found that mild doses of the drug took a lot of the pressure and stress off the often-tumultuous job of spice-running, it helped him keep his cool under duress, it focused his mind when navigating particularly tricky flight paths. Kessel was in a part of the galaxy that was perilous to fly through, in the outer rim territories, near Hutt Space, and the dangerous Celestial Maw, accidents can and will happen, and when your brains are fried on heavy spice addiction they are even more likely.

 

Loic had been spice-running for the Hutts about a year and he had been taking the spice himself for about three months when it happened. He was shipping some particularly pure grade spice from Kessel to a moon along the Trellius Trade Route. Foolishly not noting the purity of the spice he took a rather large hit and overdosed, passing out at the controls of his ship. Eventually the ship was clipped by an asteroid and was sent hurling on a collision course with the nearby planet Formus. Loic regained consciousness with just enough time to jettison his escape pod, the ship was a write-off and crashed with all its load into an ocean on the almost-deserted planet. The Hutt Loic was running this spice for was a particularly disreputable gangster by the name of Sarkraa, a rare female Hutt boss, Hutts are hermaphrodites but some seem more feminine and some seem more masculine, Sarkraa was feminine but no less lethal than any of her more masculine counterparts. Loic cost her over a million credits’ worth of spice, not even taking into consideration the street value of the drug. Hutts are not known for their forgiving nature and Loic had to steal a ship and flee, he was left destitute, impecunious and with a bad spice habit to try and kick.

He spent several months detoxing in self-exile on the isolated planet of Draethos, with its cragged mountains and deep cave systems it offered him refuge. When he finally returned to galactic civilisation many had suspected him dead. He kept a low profile, eking out a paltry existence picking pockets on the dusty and arid streets of frontier towns around the Tira Desert on planet Sorrus, he fell quickly back into the habit of using spice again as it was ubiquitous among the kind of company one keeps when making a living as a bandit, and it took the edge of the hard knocks of life on the street.

 

After about a year, somehow, somewhere, by someone, he had been identified, he didn’t know by whom, but it was obvious they had informed Sarkraa as she placed a bounty on his head that was big enough to choke a bantha, big enough in fact, to attract the attention of one of the galaxy’s most redoubtable bounty hunters, Bossk. Loic had barely escaped Sorrus with his life and Bossk had never been far behind him since…

 

He could make everything right, but it required credits, a lot of credits, more than a hundred years picking pockets in Tira could ever get him. There was something else though, if he could do something to appease the crime lord Sarkraa, then she may give him pass. There’s only one thing Hutts like more than food and credits and that’s power. Inner-fighting between Hutt clans was endemic, they are a war-like species and terrorists to many other planets, but they do as much killing over power-struggles within their own clans as they do capturing and enslaving colonies and planets. Sarkraa owns the second largest portion of Hutt Space, her stranglehold ranges from Cyborrea all the way to Nar Kreeta, her territory makes up a sizeable chunk of Hutt Space. Her province though, is not even half as big as a Hutt named Okkra’s, whose region of Hutt Space runs all the way from Keldooine to Ganath. Sarkraa had long been jealous of and hated Okkra’s superior wealth and dominance. With him out of the picture, she could govern the largest Hutt mafia in the known galaxy.

 

And that was when Loic had came up with his plan. If he did this favour for Sarkraa, took Okkra out of the picture, it would be worth more than twenty million times what she lost when Loic’s gaffe had caused the loss of a million credits’ worth of product. Loic wasn’t a killer, he wasn’t big and he wasn’t strong, he was more suited for stealth, wiry and short, but he was streetsmart, he knew how to handle a blaster and he usually managed to avoid trouble quite adroitly anyway. So it was a lot for him to take on, the assassination of a Hutt lord, but the famous Hutt Jabba was killed, it was rumoured, by a mere woman, if she could do it, so could Loic.

 

When he got to Eriadu last night he had lost his blaster in a game of Sabaac, it was an expensive custom made weapon and the pang of regret over its loss filled him again. He hadn’t bothered to replace it as he knew he would be disarmed before being allowed to enter the event he was en route to anyway, and he would be leaving in too much of a hurry to reclaim it at the door. So he would have to do this another way, he could get a blaster from almost anywhere once the job was done. The event he trudged along the pluvial streets to, was a dinko fighting arena, dinko fighting was a favourite gambling pastime of Okkra’s, it is a bloodsport in which small, but vicious reptiles are pit against each other and spectators bet on the outcome. He had information that Okkra was attending one such event here tonight, it was the only reason he had even come to this backwater rock in deep space, he had to get close enough to Okkra to kill him and get Sarkraa off his back, and therefore Bossk too. His nostrils flared as he inhaled a deep breath of the malodorous, still air, steeled himself, and crossed the dank street to the building where the vile and detestable Okkra should be…

The buildings dilapidated facade spoke little of the internal happenings, but the security crew outside certainly did. Hand signals and bluster alone couldn’t steer Loic past the barrel-chested Gamorean guards. The rough beasts frisked him with expert hands, robbed him of his meager supply of credits and all but hurled him forwards into a group of irate Nicto who had obviously taken umbrage at being disarmed. Loic robbed one of his money pouch on the way past, the Nicto would find, when it was too late, his blaster was not the only item to be taken from him. A raucous din was coming from down a steep passageway, there were a few people loitering around no doubt engaged in haggling, gambling and dishonest schemes. Loic ignored them and pushed forward till he reached a circular balustrade, filled with roaring degenerates impatiently shouting for the next two frenzied reptiles to be pitted against one another. Okkra, Loic could see, rested his elephantine enormity on a platform raised above the balustrade. He was flanked by mean-faced henchmen, and, of course nobody had asked them to give up their arms.No one man, certainly not Loic, was going to tackle a gaggle of goons and Okkra head on, blaster or not.

 

Secrecy not scandal was his best ally. He pushed further round the balustrade. There was a commotion below as two handlers prodded another two reptiles into the arena with cruel barbed spears. A gap-toothed reveler leaned precariously over the edge of the handrail, Loic nudged him guiltily on the way past. The man howled with terror on his way to the red sand below. The crowd roared with their amusement, as did Okkra, as the unfortunate new arrival was torn to pieces by the warring reptiles. Loic found what he was looking for, a narrow stairway, leading upwards.

 

The timeworn stairway led to a chamber where the scaffolding above the pit could be accessed. There was a sturdy oaken door blocking his access but the lock was no match for the veteran lockpick. Even in such an age of vaunted technological miracles the old arts still proved useful. Okkra was either foolish enough to leave the door unattended or more likely the guards were watching the blood sport below more concerned with their wagers.

 

No weapons were permitted into the premises tonight, but what of previous nights, where guests much less auspicious than a crime lord were the only concern for an underpaid and disinterested security? It had been little trouble for Loic to smuggle in a hand-held cross brow on one such night. The mechanical device was small but powerful; a well aimed bolt would puncture Okkra’s girth with ease. The bolts may have been small but they were cruelly designed and deadly.

 

Okkra knew he had enemies, he took precautions but he had grown sloppy, Loic could tell. He may have been safe in his own private palace, surrounded by yes men and sycophants but here Okkra should have been more aware of his surroundings. But instead the Hutt perpetually sucked greedily from his massive double-chambered spice-bowl. His prodigious spice habit had robbed him of his cunning and foresight, he was more concerned ordering around his minions to fetch him more drinks and delicacies than he was with security. He had a security team, the usual mercenaries and some former bounty hunters. Former bounty hunters likely more satisfied with a regular income than roaming the galaxy chasing dead-beat hustlers and ghosts. The spice didn’t help, they were all at it, and when the boss himself was perpetually imbibing it didn’t set much of an example to the rest.

 

Loic cut through the shadows like an ethereal wraith, he moved round a hoist wheel and climbed onto a scaffold walkway. Depending on what the premises were being used for there was sometimes stage-hands and performers using the scaffold, but this night Loic could see no other. He moved to a suitable vantage point where he had a good shot of Okkra. The bodyguards were scanning the crowd on the balustrade but none thought to look up. Loic fancied he could get a bolt right through one of Okkra’s half-shut eyes such was his marksmanship. One bolt could well be enough but he planned to send another into his skull to make sure. Loic felt a frisson of nervous energy flash down his spice-ravaged spine. Up until this point he had been calm, detached, the spice had seen to that, now faced with the prospect of murdering one of the most infamous crime lords in the galaxy he felt his bowels turn to water. Where his hand had been sure it was now unsteady, where his resolve had been strong it was now riddled with doubt.

 

He was a dead man unless he assuaged Sarkraa he reminded himself. This murderous act would certainly make up for his lost shipment, when he presented her with the murder weapon. Sarkraa was ruthless but a pragmatic creature she remained. Loic would be rewarded. He steadied his breathing, it was time, there was no turning back. He took aim with his crossbow and inhaled. Just then in the arch of his peripheral vision something moved. He sat up in alarm crossbow at the ready. But he was too late. A huge form landed next to him on the rickety scaffold walkway. An enormous scaled fist swatted the cross bow out his hand another seized him round the throat lifting him from the ground up to eye level with his assailant. Loic felt as if his windpipe would be crushed but through the pain he could make out the reptilian face of Bossk. He was wanted alive that was the only reason his head was still attached to his body. He tried to think fast before he lost consciousness, instead of using his two arms to grip Bossk’s great wrist - lessening the strain on his neck - he maneuverered his spark from his pocket. Heating pipes of spice were the only reason he carried the thing but in desperation he flashed it in front of Bossk's face. The grip was broken, the Trandoshan’s super-sensitive eyes were unsuited to such close brightness. Loic rolled from the scaffold struggling to breathe. He landed roughly on the chamber floor but he wasn't in a position to nurse his wounds. His trick had bought him but little time. Bossk was leaping from the scaffold, fast on his heels.

Loic was now faced with an unsavoury decision, it was much more than fight or flight, he had to decide very quickly whether to run, run from months and months of hard planning, smuggling the crossbow in weeks ago, paying for the information about Okkra’s plans to go to the dinko fighting, everything! These thoughts barely had time to formulate, something far deeper and colder resonated in the back of his head. Bossk landed with a heavy thud just a few feet from him, but he had been expecting that, what he hadn’t thought about was what was behind him, where had he landed, he didn’t even need to turn around to see, he could feel it instinctively, a strange, hot tickling sensation across his back as if it sensed danger regardless of the eyes’ input to the situation. He knew the situation was bad because Bossk hadn’t immediately advanced on him and it was reaffirmed by a low guttural growling, emanating, almost purringly, from just over his left shoulder. The two dinkos behind him circled round, observing their quarry.

 

Dinkos were small, when you compare them to something like, say a Krayt Dragon, but they were big enough that they could take a man’s head off with a bite – these particular dinkos were caged, tormented and starved, antagonized by their cruel owners in order to make them ferocious and brutal fighters. Okkra’s booming laughter echoed around the arena accompanied by the cackles and guffaws of his entourage. The Hutt lord’s spiced senses had been slow to catch on to what was going on, but now he realised he was getting a little extra bloodsport for his credits and he was delighted. Shoving another writhing, squirming, live squid-like creature into his drooling, crooked maw, his eyes twinkled from beneath hooded lids and he clapped his small chubby hands against his repulsive slug-like mass gaily.

It was all over. The last thing Loic saw was the dinko lunging on an undeviating trajectory for his throat. He didn’t run, he didn’t even try to dodge, he just clenched his eyes shut and froze in horror, a wamprat caught in the headlights.

 

Then there was the unmistakable sound of a blaster going off and the flash of it shined through his eyelids leaving fractals on his retinas. He opened his eyes; the dinko lay convulsing on the sandy floor, a charred blaster hole in the side of its neck, another shot from the blaster and the second dinko rolled to the floor to join its predecessor. Bossk has shot both Loic’s reptilian aggressors, of course, he wants me alive, thought Loic. He took too long to react to the new situation, and there was nowhere to run regardless, Bossk set his blaster to stun and the last thing Loic saw was a bright blue flash, before the all-encompassing blackness.

 

A long time appeared to pass in the black inky void of Loic’s subconscious.

 

His hearing faded in before he opened his eyes and he listened carefully to his surroundings to assess where he was. He could still hear the crowd at the fight, off in the distance, muffled through walls, he was obviously in some sort of back room. The fetid smell alone told him immediately that Okkra the Hutt was in close proximity, and sure enough the Hutt’s booming voice spoke out in guttural Huttese, which Loic understood perfectly from working with their kind for years.

 

“You mean to tell me that, this, this cretin was making plans to kill me?” Loic then heard Bossk reply in his hissing, sibilant, croaking snarl.

 

“He was, but I stopped him, he is my bounty so now I must leave with him.” It wasn’t so much a request as an affirmation.

 

“No, I’ll pay the bounty, plus a little extra to facilitate the deal, I have some fun torture methods in mind for this one.” The crime boss issued a declaration of his own.

 

“It’s not as simple as that.”

 

 

There was a silence that hung in the air before Okkra asked, simply, “Why?”

 

“The bounty for this one is high, over a million, an additional quarter if he is alive.”

 

“Really?” Okkra purred, there was a slobbering, he must have been stuffing something into his gluttonous mouth, Hutts never stopped eating. Loic dared not open his eyes for fear it would attract attention to him. His body ached in several places from the fall from the rafters.

 

“Who has posted the bounty?” Inquired the Hutt lord, another silence, before Bossk answered grudgingly.

 

“Sarkraa.” Loic fancied he could see Okkra’s rimy, slitted yellow eyes light up at the mention of a rival clan’s Hutt’s name.

 

“Is that soooooooo.” He held onto the last vowel and growled it out.

 

“Listen,” said Bossk, you could tell by the bark he said it with that he was through playing around, “you know, and I know, I am not leaving here without my bounty, I went through a lot of trouble to get him here, I saved your life, let’s call it quits.” Loic cringed, he was definitely stuck between a rock and a hard place here. Nobody messed with Trandoshans, they hunt Wookies for their pelt, who hunts Wookies for chrissake!? And Bossk wasn’t just any Trandoshan, he was the most notorious and feared of all Trandoshans, and one of the best bounty hunters in the galaxy. On the other hand, Okkra was a powerful and nefariously well-known crime lord, Loic doubted either would back down and he would be ripped to shreds in a tug of war between them, literally, like a toy torn between two fighting dogs, his future suddenly looked very short and bleak.

 

“I only have your word that he was trying to kill me,” said Okkra, “why would some scrawny humanoid from who-knows-where want to kill me? Tell me that and I’ll consider his release.” A low growl from Bossk told that he was running out of patience. He could kill Okkra in a heartbeat, right now, but Okkra was likely surrounded by at least sixty minions, a lot of whom were guards, of all species and skills, Loic knew that Bossk wouldn’t fancy fighting his way through that lot with a live hostage in tow.

 

“He was trying to get in favour with Sarkraa by assassinating you. He owes her a large debt. That is all.”

 

“You’re implying that Sarkraa wants me dead?” It was a loaded question, the Hutts were cutthroat among themselves, but they remained a united front against outsiders.

 

“Not actively, but this pathetic human decided it was what she would like and acted alone.”

 

“Well I can’t let this worm get away, an attempt on my life can not go unpunished, I must make an example of him, publicly, as a message to any other would-be assassin.”

 

“He’s only a would-be assassin because I stopped him, otherwise you’d be dead you fat oaf!” Loic felt the tension building, he didn’t need to open his eyes, it was palpable, he sweated and struggled not to move and betray his consciousness, he barely breathed, this squabbling over him like he was the last slice of roast shatual at a barbecue was driving him crazy, he wanted to scream but couldn’t, it wouldn’t help at any rate. All he could do was sit and speculate whether he’s to be fed to the dinkos by Okkra or to Sarkraa’s pet Nexu…

Now, this is one hell of a volatile situation, thought Loic, as he chanced opening his eyes to take in his surroundings. They were in some type of brick and marble antechamber, hexagonal pillars the same shape as the baronial wall. Bossk was not five paces from him with a blaster in one great fist; the blaster was more like a hand-cannon, It would have taken Loic two hands just to lift it to his chest. One shot from such a weapon would blast Okkra in half. Okkra knew this. Bossk had the drop on him, there was no way he could give the signal for his minions to take out the bounty hunter, despite how subtle, without Bossk getting a shot off first. Bossk was a ruthless battle-hardened killer, largely fearless, but even he knew the odds were stacked against him.

 

An entire posse of Okkra's remorseless killers nervously fingered their weapons. Bossk’s reputation would drive a little doubt into their heads, but their weight of numbers hold, one opponent against many. Surely there could be only one victor? They understood Bossk’s predicament. Bossk was duty-bound to take Loic back to his client. He may have listened to a payoff from Okkra, some deal, but bounty hunters worth their salt tried to avoid that where possible, you could easily get a reputation that you weren’t to be trusted to carry out a hunt to the end and were liable to change your outlook every time something enticing was dangled. Besides, Okkra wasn’t going to pay double, not at the exorbitant rate Bossk alleged. He would lose too much face in front of his goons and that couldn’t happen. Show weakness to your underlings and inevitably one or more of them start getting cute, thinking they can muscle you out or take you down. Also, Okkra wasn't prepared to pay an obscene amount of credits for a piece of space trash that had tried to kill him. Okkra wasn’t prepared to lose face, neither was Bossk. Something had to give.

 

Loic was crumpled on the floor, the pressure in the room was oppressive, it suddenly felt very hot. He felt like he was in an underground oven, right over hell’s kitchen. The most important thing was, despite being a little bashed around, he was fit enough to run. All he needed was an opportunity. The chamber housed two exits, one situated behind Okkra and his men, the other at the far side of the room, an archway leading to somewhere unknown. But unknown was better than stuck between Okkra and Bossk. Bossk maintained eye-contact with Okkra, starting to take slight side-ward steps toward Loic. His hand-cannon was centred always on Okkra's hide. Kneeling down the bounty hunter gripped Lioc round the back of the scruff of the neck.

“He’s mine, I’m taking him out of here.” Perhaps Bossk had the slight upper-hand, one Move from Okkra and he would be killed. But Okkra was notoriously stubborn.

 

“Don’t be a fool bounty hunter. You’ll never make it out of the building and you know it. You’re good but you’re no Boba Fett. How do you expect to get to ground level when I have men in every passageway? I’ll not hold a grudge Bossk, I may even have a bit of work for you. But right now you put down that gun do you understand?”

 

Bossk understood only too well, as soon as he dropped his blaster he would be vaporized by Okkra's trigger-happy henchmen. It was incredible one of them hadn’t opened fire unbidden. Okkra understood also, he knew Bossk had to pay for his audacity. He couldn't let the Trandoshan slight him like this and get away with it. Loic understood also, only too well. It was a lose-lose situation. He was as good-as-dead. That was why, with nothing left to lose, he decided to really add some fuel to the flames.

 

Loic felt like his head was on fire, sweat lashed from his bald pate, his neck encircled in Bossk’s terrible iron grip. The mighty cold-blooded reptilian could snap his neck like a matchstick, but Bossk had other concerns. Loic decided to add to them. In a blur of movement he reached to Bossk’s belt and snatched a grenade and rolled it along the floor towards Okkra’s goons. Everyone in the room froze for second, not quite taking in the enormity of the occurrence. As the grenade rolled ever closer to the gap-mouthed cut-throats Bossk was the first to react. He fired off his blaster into the midst of the assembled goons and dived for cover behind one of the pillars, dragging Loic with him in a severe headlock. The laser blast punched through several of Okkra's men leaving burning holes where their chests had been. The frag grenade detonated a millisecond later with a near deafening boom, immense heat washed over the room. Bossk hissed. Loic cursed his bald head covering its peeling flesh with red hands. Limbs, blood, and gore, sprayed in all directions.

 

The detonation had taken out a portion of Okkra's henchmen, but there was plenty left. Laser blasts started coming at them in small bursts, until a stream of fire ensued. The pillar protecting them wouldn’t hold out much longer. Bossk had one hand round Loic’s tunic, with the other, he unclipped another grenade and rolled it towards his assailants. A laser blast took him in the top of one his wrists but it wasn’t a direct hit. Nonetheless the Trandoshan howled in pain and anger. Loic thought then, through frustration alone, Bossk was going to bite his face off. Instead he fired a couple of shots off and when the grenade exploded he dashed for the exit at the far end of the room. Okkra's men were disorganised, disorientated, or dead. A couple of laser blasts came at Bossk and Loic but they made it to the other side of the room and through the archway. Bossk stole a glance in his retreat, hoping to see Okkra's corpse but it appeared that the Hutt had managed to slither off before the second grenade was unleashed.

 

“Move it, or die!” Bossk thrust Loic before him through a winding upward passageway. Loic obeyed. There was no telling if Bossk would at any minute decide the most important think was saving his own scales and liquidate Loic on the spot. The passageway branched out, neither of them knew exactly where they were going but it was obvious that they were below ground level. Bossk marched Loic before him by the nape of the neck, his claws dug painfully into Loic’s skin, drawing trickling rivulets of blood, but the trickster wasn’t in a position to moan about it.

 

They heard footsteps and guttural cursing coming from round the corner. Bossk palmed Loic back against the wall and waited. With the footsteps coming ever closer Loic could only wonder at what violence would be unleashed. His heart beat in his chest like a funeral drum. Terrified he could do nothing but impotently bare witness. Just then a trio of Gamorean guards rounded on them, Bossk used the moment of surprise and lashed out a huge fist. The first of them fell with half his face ripped off. Reputably fierce, fearless and powerful, to their credit the other two Gamorean’s didn’t miss a heartbeat. One of the green-skinned beasts swung his pike at Bossk’s head and the other swung a mighty blow to the bounty hunter's midriff. Their strength was prodigious. Bossk was unimpressed, the blows had no discernible effect on the Trandoshan except enraging him further.

 

Loic thought about running back the way they had come but knew Okkra's men were hot on their trail. In the moment he had wrestled with his indecision Bossk had dealt with the two Gamorean guards, one’s throat had been ripped-out and the other’s brain was smeared down the wall. A snarling, frenzied, blood-crazed reptilian face goaded Loic further into the labyrinth underbelly of the arena. Loic didn’t know how he was going to get out of this one. He had gotten himself in a few undesirable situations before but this was the pinnacle.

 

It was too soon yet for his life to flash before his eyes - but it seemed like it was, the early loss of his father Luc Courleciel Monerat, to the tail-end of The Hundred Year War and what brief and faded flashes of memory he still possessed of the man’s face, his uniform, his overstated moustache and goatee. Then thoughts flared to his ecumenopolis home planet, Coruscant, in the Core Regions, an incandescent planet, beautiful and visibly vibrating from outer space. His last thought though, before Bossk dragged them into a turbolift, was not of his mother’s sweet face, but of spice, beautiful, all-consuming spice, he thought hungrily of the two bags he had lifted from the patrons of the spice den, nestled in his ‘safe’ pocket, he wished he could just have one last hit before……that’s it!

…Bossk stabbed him into the turbolift and Loic stumbled and connected roughly with the wall inside. A laser blast came screaming forward, the dragon-like bounty hunter sensed it and crouched but Loic wasn’t so fast, the bolt seared past his ear, scorching his skin, already blistered from the grenade blasts, the shot hammered harmlessly into the wall behind him but it left him blinded and discombobulated for a few seconds. Bossk’s return fire was precise, cutting down three henchmen one after another, as the rest of Okkra’s motley mafia began to pile down the corridor they had just left. The turbolift doors started hissing closed and just as the gap was about to close Bossk fired off some cover shots and hopped back into the lift with Loic, leaving a grenade rolling down the platform as he did so. After a few seconds of the lift rising upwards, there was a muffled explosion from below and the elevator vibrated with the force of the shockwave, but continued upwards, seemingly undamaged. Bossk had hit the button for the docking bay – the basilisk-like bounty hunter was almost safe, Loic was about as safe as a wamprat in a Rancor pit, but the cunning captive had a plan…

 

…He had a plan, but did he have the mettle to execute it, now that they were in a confined space, Bossk was even more terrifying than ever, he looked as if he had grown an extra foot and his fangs an extra inch since they entered the lift. The sweat on Loic formed a thick, cold layer that stung his eyes and saturated his tunic. Terrifying tales of the treacherous Trandoshan told over tankards in taverns trickled through Loic’s memory now; Bossk, the name itself was Dosh for ‘Devours His Prey’, Bossk’s father had named him that after Bossk’s first act upon hatching was to devour each of his unhatched siblings. Bossk was possibly the only bounty hunter to have ever bettered Boba Fett in combat, and he was famed for his exploits throughout space; prowling the Kashyyyk system hunting Wookies, tracking down and destroying Jedis, and being personally hired by the likes of Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine to do their most important work.

 

Loic trembled hysterically, if he was going to do this he’d have to do it just right, as the doors opened, but what he was about to do was going to require a surplus of courage. Bossk’s repellent odour was by far the most pleasant thing about him; 6ft 3in, 113 kilograms, armoured green-hued scales, yellow eyes that gleamed, devouring everything in their field of vision with their pernicious gaze. Rows and rows of needle-like yellowed fangs, rotten with the decaying flesh of the Trandoshan’s meals, usually live victims. Three enormous claws on each hand that might as well have been daggers; a flick of one of Bossk’s overextended arms could disembowel a wampa. All this before you even get to the Relby-v10 micro grenade-launcher clutched to his chest, as well as his additional flamethrower, detonators, and standard-issue blaster, all situated about his person. Yes, this was going to take boundless bravery from the bedraggled, beaten, bloodied, barbecued and burned-out spice-bum Loic Monerat.

 

It was now or never, besides, what choice did he have, a ping and a green light indicated they had reached their floor, the docking bay where Bossk’s famous ship, a modified YV-666 Light Freighter named 'The Hound’s Tooth' would be situated. The Hound’s Tooth was a flying 4-man prison, Wookie slaughterhouse, and warship, famed and feared throughout the Galaxy, and that was going to be Loic’s current destination, where he would be locked up and delivered to Sarkraa. He could not let that happen, at all costs, even that of his life. Loic had been nervously fingering the two wraps of glittering spice in his pocket, briefly regretting the waste of spice, but recognising it as his only option, he waited as the doors slid open and Bossk turned to drag him out and then Loic let fly….

 

Twin bags of spice caught the Trandoshan tormentor squarely in both of his bulging, bloodshot, bug-eyes. The creature staggered back, clawing at his face, ululating agonizingly, spice burned like a motherfranger if it got in your eyes, Loic knew this, he darted beneath his oppressor’s wildly flailing and deadly-taloned Ophidian arms, and dashed out of the turbo lift, the outside air hitting his lungs like an elixir as he sprinted forwards, frantic, desperate freedom lay just ahead…

 

Loic bolted from the tormented Trandoshan as the scaled bounty hunter impotently padded rough useless hands to its burning eyes. Bossk cursed in a terrible sibilant voice, a soul-jarring howl which promised nightmare revenge. The docking bay was a half-open affair, about halfway-up one of the many great thrusting city spires, which like pins from some greats beast's back, stabbed at the misty sky. The surrounding towers gave a weak Loic an unwelcome vertiginous effect, bile roiled in his pigeon chest but sheer terror gave impetus to his suede and leather boots. The bounty hunter's ship was at the far end of the docking bay landing, somehow even it almost exuded an almost palpable alien malevolence. Bossk had acquired the ship, modified it suitably, after Han Solo and his wookie co-pilot, Chewbacca, had destroyed his previous ship. The Hound's Tooth sat like a sleeping creature of prey, dirty tan, reinforced armour plates bolted to an elongated hull. Who could guess at what horrors had taken place inside that hull? Bossk was famed for his hatred of Wookies, as were most Trandoshans, one of the few species to match them in strength. How many of the great proud beasts has Bossk skinned and tortured inside that hellish ship.

Loic had a decision to make. For some reason he remembered voyeuristically spying on his sister's amorous encounter with an impassioned rebel officer in the family mansion. It was strange that in situations of duress the brain would ponder unrelated fripperies. Loic had to make a split-second decision, a skilled thief, he could hot wire his way into most ships and cruisers but the Hound's Tooth was an unrealistic acquisition. If there was a chance he could steal it, given the ship's powerful engines, he could escape to the other side of galaxy before anyone knew it. But Bossk was a professional, before Loic had set foot on the ship's cargo ramp it would recognize an intruder and zap him with some-or-other cruelty. In fact, Loic noticed in horror, the ship was showing signs of life. Lights were coming on - no doubt Bossk had a voice activated control system - despite the Trandoshan's anguish he was moving to ready himself. On the other side of the hangar were some skiffs and light hovercrafts. These were Loic's only chance.

 

Just then, several things happened at once; The Hound's Tooth dropped a laser cannon which spun seeking Loic who had to dive bald-headfirst along the floor to avoid the fire; several of Okkra's guards had pushed through into the hangar, some firing on Bossk's ship redundantly, and the most quick-witted at Bossk himself, who was hissing behind a pile of palliated cargo crates. The Hound's Tooth advanced AI system registering blaster fire turned its gun onto Okkra's goons. Several were immediately consumed in bursts of conflagration. Bossk could dally no longer, still experiencing unutterable pain he forced himself forward, firing off blind shots behind him, towards the safety of his ship's hull. As the bounty hunter reached the entrance ramp a laser blast tore through his shoulder, spraying the outside of his ship with his pustulent oozy blood. Bossk rolled in unceremoniously and the blaster-immune door shut behind him. The ship made a light corkscrew, somewhat unsteadily, taking fire from an array of Okkra's goons. Their feeble blasters were no match for the Hound's Tooth's armour. If they had any cunning they would have bolted back inside and faced Okkra's wrath, as it was, Bossk sent them a volley of incendiaries killing them all instantly, turning the docking bay into a charred scrapheap.

 

Loic flew in between buildings on his stolen skiff. His shivering hands managed to get the light craft hot-wired just before the Hound's Tooth took to the air. Rain smacked down on his bald head and ashen face as he frantically tried to master steering the vessel away from the outsides of the great towers. In abject horror he stole a glance behind him to see Bossk wasn't far behind him. Loic's skiff was sleek, small and manoeuvrable, but Bossk was an expert pilot, it was only a matter of time before he was caught. In desperation he raced through a stream of hovercab traffic trying to cover his tracks. It was no doubt useless, as Bossk would have his vehicle's signature already identified and tracked, but it might buy him time. He made a couple of breakneck turns and dips, to mix up his trail. He heard a mighty crash as the Hound's Tooth scraped along the side of a tower, sparks poured off the ship's hull. Then Bossk came head-on into the stream of hover traffic. His laser cannons unloaded as he spun his ship in Loic's wake leaving a rain of smouldering carnage behind him. If the bounty hunter was angry before, his wrath would now be truly godlike.

 

In a few brief seconds, no more trickery could save Loic, the Hound's Tooth would be in a firing position. They were nearing a gap in city structures and no cover would be had. He could try dipping and spinning his craft, but Bossk, vision impaired or not, wouldn't be conned for long. Given Bossk's umbrage he wondered whether Bossk was now just out for revenge alone and would just blow him out the sky, probably not, but it was possible. But no doubt the Hound's Tooth would be equipped with a mini tractor beam of sorts and he would be pulled in. He also knew that once caught, Bossk would likely torture him in that hellship. Loic had gambled plenty so far, it was time for another roll of the dice. He careered straight into the side of one the great towers of the business and finance sector. He ducked behind the front of the skiff an clutched on in desperation, trying to hide his face from the falling shards of glass that came down like the descent of an attacking crystal insect swarm. The skiff spun and battered along the floor, smashing consoles and control panels till it eventually came to a rough halt in a midst of smoking wreckage and unfortunate employees. Somehow Loic was still alive, he didn't have the gumption to take stake of his wounds, his first thoughts were of the bounty hunter. The Hound's Tooth - too large to follow - hovered outside the breach. What would the Trandoshan do? Loic could only guess, but right now he had to flee with all due alacrity.

 

Shards of glass crunched under his feet like crystal snow, dazed he bounced from wall to wall trying to find an exit. More through luck than instinct he found a lift. He turned to look back through the breach in the building, a jagged maw of ruined glass. The scorched wreckage of his skiff lay wreathed in smoke and fire. Some of the sector employees were screaming, but mainly only the ones unharmed. Loic watched a man pull bleeding hands away from his glass-ruined face trying to make sense of the flaps of skin and blood. The lift doors opened and Loic fell in and mashed the buttons of the lower floors, but before the lift could descend a security guard blocked the door. ‘Hey, you!’

 

The guard was a sturdy brute, lantern-jawed and evil-eyed. Loic looked back at him through bloody vision, the guard inspired little fear in the degenerate smuggler, it was Bossk alone who fuelled his terror. The guard reached for a baton at his side. Loic feigned indolence. The guard swung the baton for a braining stroke but Loic blocked the blow and snapped the wrist behind it. Relieving the weapon, he gave a murderous blow to the guard’s temple with it, his body slumped to the floor. The lights in the lift were flashing red and amber, the audio system babbled something indiscernible, something about 'no turbo lifts to be used in emergencies'. How the hell-else are you meant to escape a situation on the 500th floor, use the fucking stairs? Loic cursed through gritted teeth, the smuggler’s feet started to feel wet, he looked down realizing it was the blood oozing from the guard’s caved-in skull. Loic took the firearm and emptied out the guard's pockets into his own as the lift descended. The doors slid open revealing an assemblage of concerned hirelings. 2nd floor.

 

‘Are you alright?’ Asked the first

 

‘What happened up there?’ Asked the second.

 

‘Get the fuck out of my way.’ Loic snarled at the third, levelling the blaster at their blinking faces. They shrieked and ran in indeterminate directions. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ Wailed Loic. Another guard was making his way along the corridor towards the commotion, weapon drawn but unaware of his imminent death. Loic hid in a doorway till he was satisfied the blaster was primed. As the guard approached he leaned out and fired. The laser bolt hit the guard square in the face, a gruesome sopping of brain and seared skull fragments splattered the walls.  He took his weapon too, now with a blaster in each hand, streaked in gore, striated with soot and oil,  he kicked open a door and made for the main stairwell to the foyer.

 

Loic eyed the scene, from his vantage point on the upper level, people bustling, rescue teams, law enforcement, evacuating employees. There was a grandiose stairway leading towards the foyer centre's ostentatious architecture, a manufactured permacrete monstrosity as soulless as the greedy employees and their slaves who bled their life away in tedium in its bowels. Loic was about to take the stairs but in his mania he had forgotten the sight of a bloodied and singed rogue with a blaster in each hand was not the best way to avoid attention. If he could just make it outside the main door, past the mesh of confusion he could easily hotwire a vehicle and elude the bounty hunter once and for all. But he knew he was foolish if he thought Bossk had given up in him. Driven by a depthless alien rage the Trandoshan colossus would be formulating a plan. Just what his methods were Loic couldn’t guess but he knew staying in the once place wasn’t wise. He heard the lift chime somewhere in the back of his awareness. He decided to ditch his blasters and wander down towards the main entrance and pass himself off as an injured employee. He turned and froze in bowel-quivering terror. It was Bossk! Somehow the creature had gotten himself into the upper levels, his bounty-hunting instincts bringing him to his prey. A medical team bearing a stretcher bumped Loic as they passed him at the top of the stairs, this nudge broke his shocked trance. He brought up the two blasters, he had been crippled by fear for too long, Bossk closed the gap between them with surprising speed and before Loic could get a good aim. A long arm took Loic in the chest, lifting him from the ground, his tattered shirt wrapped tight in black scales. Bossk threw his enfeebled junkie form, all but weightless to the Trandoshan, against the wall. The game was over. Loic was out cold.

 

An awareness of pain, disembodied, terrible, preceded a wretched awareness of self, before finally a cavalcade of broken nightmare memories came to the fore. In those terrible moments Loic realized he was doomed. He was being roughly dragged by a foot. He opened his eyes gingerly. Pain flared in his brainpan, the torture control room for all his injuries. He wanted to die. The haze left his vision. He tried to call out for aid but the sound caught in his dry throat. There was sky above him, titan red, a cool breeze caressed his face, a pleasurable sensation hidden and trampled over by layers of pain. He strained his neck for a view. Bossk looked down at him. Like a demon out of the pits of some reptilian hell. Absurdly Loic felt no fear as he studied his tormentor; olive green skin, scaled and rigged, snorting nostrils above a hungry cavernous mouth, a deadly nest of small sharp yellow teeth, and two black and yellow eyes, devoid of discernible or comparable emotions, such as compassion or mercy. Fear once again stopped Loic’s heart, when he spied what was behind the towering creature, The Hound’s Tooth.

 

‘No…No..No…’ He pleaded as his fate slowly began to dawn on his fractured consciousness. How Bossk had gotten him out of that finance building, past all the security and agents he couldn’t know. He probably blew a hole in the wall and just walked right out, with Loic over his shoulder. But that didn’t matter now. No. All that mattered was going into that ship. That hellship! The worst place in the universe. Loic fancied he detected a glimmer of depthless cruel satisfaction pass over those ophidian eyes as Bossk fed on his suffering. The blaster-battered thick armour door to the ship slid up and a ramp descended. 'No…I’ll do anything.’ Loic cried. Bossk reached down once more and gripped Loic’s leg. He dragged the smuggler into the ship. The door slid down once more. Sealing shut, sealing Loic inside before the ship took to the skies in a fiery blast from the engines.

The stench was unutterable. An inhuman fetor indescribable, stomach-churning, insufferable. Before he knew what was happening, the bounty hunter lifted him onto a wall brace and secured his arms in a cruciform position, there he hung for an indeterminate time as Bossk padded somewhere deeper into the ship no doubt setting his course. Loic shrieked and struggled as though he could wake himself from a nightmare but this was real. This was as real as it gets. You could walk through your life in a daze, be it apathetic or drug-induced, but there were moments of ice cold clarity, an elucidating awareness that everyone experienced, usually in dire circumstances. He wept as he scanned the chamber, an octagonal design. The dead body of a creature hung from the wall, a Wookie if Loic wasn’t mistaken, but the unspeakable treatments visited upon the once proud beast had left the fur piebald, the underlying skin flayed and corrupt. The other wall braces were empty but the floor reflected the litanies of Bossk’s trade. Layers of dried blood and fur, severed digits, effluvious gore and filth.

 

Just then, a glint in the shadows caught the smuggler’s eye. There was a tight cell in the corner of the chamber, there were two furry hands gripping the bars. Loic found two white eyes peering from the darkness. What Loic seen in those eyes crushed him utterly, it was soul shattering. In the shadows it was hard to say but the Wookie looking back at Loic was relatively unscathed thus far other than its capture, but the eyes told the real story of its excruciating ordeal. An abyssal misery of vanquished hope and resignation to hellish humiliation torture and death. Had the Wookie witnessed the demise of its friend, the ruined form hanging from the opposite wall brace? Yes. The eyes told the harrowing tale. The wookie would be next, or maybe Loic, but its time was nigh and hope had forsaken the creature. Loic, desperate, thought of escape, of combining forces with the wookie, some stunt or trick, but as though the creature were reading his mind Loic could see it had ceased such fantasies. It had seen too much, witnessed too much horror. Loic hung there, weeping, whimpering, till he eventually passed out. He woke up to the sound of his own screams…the torture had begun.

 

Bossk didn't just torture people, he injected a perverted sense of creativity into such activities, as Loic was about to find out. Now Loic had been through a lot in his life, a lot of pain, but he had never been tortured, and he was scared, he didn't even have a very high pain threshold, he wasn't tough, he was just cunning and crafty, but you can be as cunning and crafty as you want, it's not going to help you when a Trandoshan has you strapped to the wall of his ship as he hurtles through hyperspace. What is it they say? In space no-one can hear you... "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" Loic didn't have time to finish the thought as Bossk stabbed a talon into his chin.

 

"Just checking you're awake," said Bossk in his harsh guttural tones, "screaming already? We haven't begun!" This offered very little comfort to Loic. Bossk removed his own boots, as if getting comfortable, and tick-tacked across the deck with his feet's claws tapping out a staccato rhythm on the steel. He approached the incarcerated wookie and pressed a button by its cell door, a high pitched tone started to pulse throughout the ship from hidden speakers. Bossk grinned a toothy grin as oleaginous as a Dagobah swamp and as wide as the Belgaroth Asteroid Belt. "They hate that noise, some frequency that hurts their ears, that will keep him busy while I do you". Do me? Loic had nothing left in this life to look forward to.

 

The worst thing was, Bossk wasn't seeking information, he wasn't looking for a confession, he was going to torture Loic simply for the pure enjoyment of it, if there was information to reveal or a confession to make Loic would be spilling his guts like a drunk pilot in a cantina, but rather Loic would probably just be literally spilling his guts. The reality of the situation caused his stomach to lurch and he threw up what was left of its frugal contents down the front of his tunic, a trail of yellow stomach acids.

 

"You see," rasped Bossk as the wookie wailed and the noise blared behind him, "there are many ways I like to torture captives. Take them down to a desert planet, put them in a wooden tub with just their head sticking out, smear kete nectar on their face to attract the sparkbees and zingbees to sting them and the kubindi ants to crawl on their face and bite them. The subject is also forcefed so that after a few days he is standing in his own excrement, after a few more days the maggots and the worms begin to devour their flesh, and then I can watch them slowly die, being eaten alive over a long period of time. I do enjoy watching a slow death, it's relaxing. Unfortunately spacebum, I can't kill you, your bounty is worth too much, and I only have until we arrive at Huttspace to deal with you, so we'll just do this the old fashioned quick way..."

 

Loic thought about how Jabba the Hutt used to impale his victims by making them sit on a sharp spike, then would allow their own body weight to slowly impale them over days, that was considered a bad way to go, at least Loic had one thing on his side, this was going to be quick, for some reason though, the thought didn't offer much comfort.

 

With a sharp hiss of metal a lethal-looking curved blade was unsheathed from a  scabbard on the wall. Bossk tested the edge with his scaled finger and satisfied turned back to the trembling spice smuggler who had fluids escaping from more than one source of his body. "Sakkra wants you alive, but she didn't say you'd have to have your arms and legs." Noting the fear welling up in the orbs of Loic's widening eyes Bossk added, "Don't worry, I'll start with the small stuff first, the ears, the teeth, the nose, the fingers, the toes, I'll work my way up to the arms and legs so that you can get used to it... And they say I'm not kind? Ha." Taking an ear between two clawtips Bossk stretched it out and prepared to slice it off.

 

"Your wookie's escaping." Said Loic, Bossk stopped, scowled and looked behind him to the wookie cage. Sure enough, the stress of the noise frequency being played was driving the wookie insane. Insane enough to bend the bars of its cage slightly, this required immediate attention from the Trandoshan, as left unchecked the wookie may escape and spoil his fun.

 

"Excuse me," said the bounty hunter acerbically and approached the cell. He started to unlock the barred door. "I'm moving you to a more secure cell, no funny business or I'll skin you and I'll go back to your tribe to wipe every single relative of yours off the face of Kashyyyk, same way I did to your wife over there." Gesturing to the wookie on the wall, the prisoner however was not listening, too concerned with the stabbing pain in his head caused by the noise.

 

As soon as the door was opened the highly-strung wookie pounced, but Bossk was ready and he sidstepped hip-tossing the creature across the room with apparent ease. The wookie landed and rolled, came back up flailing, and ran at Bossk with its arms windmilling. Bossk caught the beast square across the jaw with a rough backhander followed by a jab that floored the wookie again. It rose back to its feet, choking and clutching its throat where the jab had connected. "Suddenly you've got some fight in you!? At the most inappropriate time! How inconvenient." Snarled Bossk, he lifted the wookie with his crocodilian strength and went to launch him against the wall, but the wookie struggled and kicked and managed to connect Bossk with a blow above the eye. Dropping back to its feet the wookie wrapped both its huge furry paws round the lizard's thick branchlike neck and started to strangulate him. The bounty hunter rasped and gnashed as the oxygen was squeezed from his windpipe, his eyes bulged and his nostrils flared, his exophthalmic face took on an expression of choking horror.

Sensing he was losing control Bossk lashed out with a talon that opened the creature at the throat, with blood cascading from the wound the wookie used its last dying minute to choke the lifeforce out of the Trandoshan, Bossk went limp and the wookie tossed him aside. Then he staggered towards Loic, apparently with the intention of freeing him, but he was losing blood fast, it formed in large puddles behind it as it staggered forward. A mere arms-length from Loic the large, grey-haired wookie finally succumb to its injuries and slumped to its feet below Loic, before rolling over, motionless, all animation had left the creature's soul, and it had that look of eternal peace on its face as it slipped into the netherworld and left its troubles and stresses behind.

 

This was frustrating, seconds from freedom Loic's luck had run out, the wookie lay pooling dark blood below his feet where he dangled, a few spasmodic twitches were the only motion left in the dead beast. Loic looked over to Bossk, his captor may be dead but he was still a captive until the unmanned ship inevitably left hyperspace and crashed. No sooner had Loic thought this than something caught his attention which curdled his blood, freezing it in his veins. A movement, almost imperceptible, but there nonetheless, the movement of Bossk's ribcage as he caught shallow intermittent breaths, the bastard was still alive, the wookie had sacrificed his life to kill the Trandoshan but he had only rendered him unconscious and prolonged Loic's sinister fate. Loic had preferred it when he thought the ship was going to hurtle uncontrollably into a collision, now the possibility of torture was back on the cards, and that was just a precursor to what Sakkra had in store for him. Not for the first time that day, Loic hung his head and wept like a brokenhearted child, the fat glistening globs of his tears, fell in what looked to Loic like slow motion, onto the blood-drenched carcass of the wookie below him.

 

Then, a buzzing replaced the high-pitched frequency that had drove the wookie crazy, the buzzing was an alarm, indicating they were approaching Huttspace, the wookie hadn't died in vain, it had bought Loic precious time and saved him from torture...

 

PART TWO ~ La Acte Définitif

Against the eternal, inky backdrop of godless space, floats a dirt-brown, greenish planet, ringed with a thin asteroid belt which begirdles a stormy, swampy world full of peat and bogs and greasy rain. The planet was Nal Hutta, it was situated in Hutt Space in the Galaxy’s Outer Rim Territories. The once-powerful Hutts had somewhat lost their grip on controlling this section of space since the Clone Wars and the subsequent demise of the infamous crimelord Jabba Desilijic Tiure. They still held a shaky control over a smattering of the planets hereabouts, but their mighty criminal empire had long since taken in water through the hole left by Jabba and sunk below the ruling waves.

A ship appeared, suddenly deposited from hyperspace into orbit around the ugly, unctuous native world of the Hutts. The ship was a strange-looking one, as ugly as the planet and the same ruddy-brown colour. A boxlike structure that slightly resembled a hand-cannon and gave the impression of some sort of flying prison complex. A polluted, dangerous planet orbited by a dirty, sinister-looking ship.

 

Onboard were four lifeforms, two dead, one unconscious, and the fourth barely-alive but awake. The fourth figure was Loic Monerat, ex-spicesmuggler, thief, spice-junky, spacebum. He had seen better days; he hung chained cruciform to a steel panel on the wall, what was left of his balding hair had been singed off leaving scorched tufts clinging to his head like the last dying bushes around a dried-up oasis. He bled from various minor lacerations and he ached in a plethora of bodily parts. His white shirt was shredded and black with grease and his hose and shoes were torn and scuffed and sooty.

 

Loic was currently stuck between a rock and a hard place, or more accurately, between a hard Trandoshan and the rock that was the Hutt’s marshy homeplanet. Bossk stirred on the ground, Loic’s muscles constricted in fear at the sight of the Trandoshan’s reptilian eye as it opened and swivelled to look at the smuggler. His eyes still burning from the spice Loic had thrown in them, a nasty blastermark on his wrist, and his throat crushed slightly from the wookie’s attempt to strangle him, Bossk clambered, snarling irascibly, to his feet, and stood to his full tremendous height to flip a few switches above him and cease the infernal racket of the ship’s systems telling him he was out of hyperspace and in orbit.

 

Once the ship was under control, Bossk strolled to where Loic hung, his claws tapping on the steel floor as he walked, and drew his face close to the captive’s, bathing him in bilious lizardbreath as he spoke a sibilant, rasping reprimand. ‘Fortuitous for you that that wookie caught me a lucky blow, or you’d be lacking the limbs to hang you on that wall right now.’ His hot, harsh breath like a stinging desert wind choked Loic as the creature continued, ‘suppose you think you’ve got off light because we’re at Nal Hutta? Well, though I may not have the time to enjoy torturing you, I’m still going to take a souvenir. An eyeball or two, a snack,  before I deliver you to Sarkraa.’ The bounty hunter extended the tip of his claw towards Loic’s bulging, watering eye, but before he could puncture it, the ship’s intercom started crackling. It was the spaceport of Nal Hutta’s moon Nar Shaddaa, they wanted to know his business at the planet.

 

The Hutts built very few spaceports on their homeworld, any business conducted with off-worlders was done so on the planet’s largest moon. Down on the planet’s hot, humid surface the wormlike creatures lived in pustule-like orbs on rare patches of solid ground, these orbs acted as their palaces. Down there in one of those palaces was Sarkraa, whom he needed to see about the small matter of this blasted bounty that had caused so much trouble for him already, far more than he had ever bargained for. Thankfully the prize was a great many credits, or Bossk would have ate the tasty parts of Loic and jettisoned the leftovers into deep space long ago.

Bossk sneered at the bedraggled smuggler as only a reptile could, with those glistening fangs, and he click-clacked over to the intercom where, holding the button with one hooked claw, he spoke, ‘The Hound’s Tooth requesting clearance for landing,’ he spoke in his stridulous voice, his obsidian eyeball swivelling to cast a sidelong glance at his wall ornament, which coughed and spat up some bloody phlegm.

 

Having gained clearance Bossk opened a portal to one of the many corridors in his complex ship and set about dragging the wookies’ bodies away to some unseen freezer facility, or waste jettison. Loic marvelled at the apparent ease with which the bounty hunter manhandled the deadweight of those two enormous beasts, leaving behind two wine-dark patches of blood where they had been. A wave of nausea passed over the smuggler, accompanied by the constant gnawing pain of his injuries and his withdrawal from the spice kicking in. These two things conspired to put him into a deep, troubled sleep as he passed-out into an all-encompassing world of blackness and vivid feverish dreams. 

 

It was the clunking bone-jarring thud of the Hound’s Tooth landing that pulled Loic from the merciful bliss of unconsciousness. How long he had been out this time he did not know. It did not matter. Nothing mattered anymore. He was doomed. Doomed to torment and torture, death would be the only release. Circulation had been cut off to his arms, a crusted patina of filth had formed between his nose and upper lip, dehydration maddened him, he had fouled himself – countless times. The Wookie’s eviscerated cadavers, the gore-stained walls, his own wretched plight, it was all too much to bear. He wanted to weep but tears would not be bidden. The doorway whooshed open and there was Bossk, his cruel reptilian face hidden by a penumbra cast by the all-too-bright overheard light.

 

‘Kill me…’ Loic rasped, his throat raw, his breathing ragged. Bossk moved to stand before him, fastened to the wall as he was, their faces were level. ‘Kill me you fuck.’ The reply was an unintelligible low guttural gargling. Agony exploded in Loic’s mind as the bounty hunter unchained him. He fell to the floor unceremoniously. A rough grip took him round the nape of his neck, he was lifted as though he weighed little more than a child’s doll.

 

Bossk marched him out the chamber into a foul-smelling corridor as Loic’s tiptoes sought purchase, his puny human fingers ineffectively scrabbling at the powerful claws gripping his neck like a trap. As they moved towards the cargo doors Loic realised he had given up hope. There was no more trickery left to save him, no more aces up his sleeve. Like the poor Wookie before him he was beaten, humiliated and dead inside. Life was little more than a pile of injustices, cruelties, and ineffective whirling from one hell to another. He should have stayed at home. He should never have left…

 

…But it was guilt that had driven him into the galaxy. The irreconcilable inescapable guilt of an incestuous voyeur. How many times had he secretly watched his sweet sister and her Rebel lover? He had wanted her; she should have been his, not some battle-scarred muscled soldier’s. The Rebel had used his sister roughly, sometimes he wept as he took her no doubt haunted by all he had seen in the wars he had endured. But even as his sister had squealed and moaned Loic did not intercede. He watched and he watched, and he watched… He deserved his fate he knew. It was that act of sibling treachery that had sealed his fate. Whatever gods had been watching would not forgive, would not forget…

Bossk produced a set of wristcuffs, attached them to his captive. The cuffs held Loic’s hands tightly in a palm-to-palm fashion. Bossk had obviously not forgotten Loic’s stunt with the frag grenade. He lifted the cuffs attaching them to a rail which ran the length of the dingy, unkept cargo area. He left Loic once again hanging painfully. When the Trandoshan returned he was wearing an arsenal of weapons. There was an absurdly large rifle strapped across his back, a hand-cannon strapped to his leg, and an assortment of cruel explosives fastened to his orange jumpsuit.

 

Bossk moved past him several paces to the cargo doors which slid open. Light flooded into the cargo hold but Loic was left in shadow unable to see outside. He knew it was unlikely Bossk had been given permission to land on Nal Hutta itself. The Moon was as far as visitors got, at least in their own crafts. A gang of rogue mercenaries had previously taken umbrage with the Sarkraa’s swindling and tried to obliterate her place from the safety of several thousand feet. They failed and were subsequently destroyed, but the wary Hutt had learned the lesson. Bossk walked down the ramp out of view but not out of earshot.

 

‘Ah, Bossk, noble Sarkraa has instructed me to take charge of the smuggler, Monerat. I will deliver him to the surface. I suspect you will be wanting your payment. What was the price, one million, and another quarter if alive I believe?’ The voice was smooth and refined. It felt somewhat out of place, as though it belonged in a courtroom or a parliament building.

 

‘I’ll see Sarkraa myself,’ hissed the Trandoshan.

 

‘The exalted one will not be receiving guests, even ones as esteemed as you.’ The smooth voice was now curt.

 

‘She will receive me.’

 

‘Listen to…’ The reply was cut short and replaced with the unmistakable sound of a man gasping for air. Loic knew that predicament well. He heard blasters being pulled from holsters.

 

‘What is the meaning of this?’ Came a booming voice.

 

‘The Trandoshan is demanding to see Sarkraa, he seized me. Kill him now and we’ll take the smuggler.’ The first voice answered.

 

‘You will be silent. Leave us.’

‘But…’

 

‘It’s said the Nexu hasn’t been fed in weeks. Perhaps I will watch him crunch your bones. Leave us! I am Maax, Sarkraa’s new majordomo. Forgive my underling. I will deal with him later. You say you want to meet with Sarkraa, why?’ The newcomer asked the bounty hunter.

 

‘I want two million.’

 

‘It was already a generous bounty. Why should we entertain paying more?’

 

‘Okkra is enraged, blaster fire, explosions. I’ve lost good business.’

 

‘You’re doing? So, you have fell afoul of Okkra’s wrath? They say bounty hunting is a dangerous profession. You will inevitably make enemies. Tell me, who hunts the hunter? I would not expect many to be daring enough to pursue you. Very well. You can accompany us to the surface. But, of course, not on this ship – oh, she’ll be quite safe here I assure you. A prisoner transport will be leaving presently. In the palace you can tell us about your proceedings with Okkra, a fascinating tale, I am sure. Where is your prize?’

 

Bossk came back up the ramp accompanied by a blue-skinned humanoid dressed in a black gem-encrusted armour. He was a Chiss, Loic realised. He had never encountered their race before but there were many stories told over cups of firewater in spice dens the galaxy over. It was said they were dangerous secretive creatures who largely kept their own council. Loic dangled from the rail wretchedly as they examined one another. The Chiss’ skin was the colour of sapphires, his pitiless eyes the dark crimson of summer wine. Maax clicked his fingers and two brutish hatched-faced Weequay came up the ramp. ‘Take him to the transport.’ He told the two leather-skinned criminals.

When Loic had self-exiled, on Draethos, there had been very little to do during his detox but meditate in caves, climb mountains, think, and read. With his pocketsized electronic encyclopaedia he had used it as a guide to the galaxy and studied all the many species of the cosmos. He knew of all their categories and quirks; he knew for example that the two spindly creatures detaining him were Weequay. Spindly these particular two may be, but Loic knew they were among the toughest sentient beings in the Outer Rim; their homeplanet Sriluur was a desert planet of such hostile , merciless conditions that it had evolved these tough-skinned hides Weequays had, which were basically blasterproof. They looked like living mummies, all leatherskinned and wrinkled and wrapped in bandages, not much call for armour with hides like that! A Weequay is notoriously hard to kill, and virtually impervious to pain, as well as possessing a nimble strength that belied their size, like a desertsnake often does - and so Loic made no argument as they jabbed and bustled him onto the prisoner transport.

 

With tear-rimmed blue eyes he glanced over his shoulder and saw Bossk disappearing into a separate ship with the Chiss, and he silently cursed the foul lizard for dragging him here and being so fucking relentless about it! Loic had had a few chances to escape now, all quashed by that bastard Trandoshan, one-by-one, mercilessly, completely. Despair swirled in the smuggler’s guts like a bad Joganfruit pie, bile rose in his throat as he watched the ramp to the prisoner transport lower. The light-spacecraft was a 14 metre JX-09, an insectlike vehicle with space for up to twenty prisoners, but when Loic was shoved onboard he was all alone, just him, the droid pilot, and the Weequays. Not for the first time today he was chained to a wall, and the ship took off with the familiar whirring of repulsorlift engines. Loic closed his eyes and dreamed of better days, in his simpler youth, in the arms of past lovers, drinking firewater at sabacc tables with friends, or enfolded in the warm embrace of spice as he lay back on pillows and rugs in cosy, firelit drugdens on obscure worlds.

 

The trip to the fetid, humid swampworld of the Hutts was a short uneventful one. Loic had tried to make conversation with his guards, maybe talk his way out, maybe strike a deal, but he knew it was futile, they just stared ahead blankly, no expression in their dark, narrowed eyes. Weequay were dominated by the Hutts and the Hutts alone, a few had defected to the Rebellion, but it was rare. As the ship landed with a bump and a jostle, they unhooked him and dragged him, protesting pathetically, out into the stagnant atmosphere of Nal Hutta.

 

The stench hit Loic like a brisk slap to the face, he almost upchucked in the first instance, the vile, heavy, clingy atmosphere of the place crawled into his eyeballs, forcing them to overproduce tears, which slimed down his throat, causing him to balk. He could barely see as he staggered forward between the two gruff guards, clasping an arm each. It was very, very rare for anyone other than a Hutt or their staff to be allowed on to the planet’s surface, Loic realised it must be because they didn’t intend for him to leave again, and that Sarkraa would probably want to keep him close-by, like a pet, to torture at her will. This unpleasant thought caused him to lurch once more, and the detainees shoved him forward roughly, unsympathetic to his plight.

 

The beaten and bloodied smuggler looked around at a planet rarely glimpsed at surfacelevel, at what would probably be the last place he ever saw. The sky scudded with almost-golden clouds that fringed with a fiery-red anger in places, sparking and spitting with the occasional flash of lightning, a perpetual drizzle hung in the air. The stench was that of peat, sulphur, and bogs, it blitzkrieged the senses like a battalion of tiefighters on full throttle. The conditions reminded Loic of a rainforest planet he had visited once; hot, humid, exploding with biodiversity and all manner of venomous, dangerous creatures. None more dangerous perhaps than the one whose palace he was being escorted to right now.

It was a short trip by hovercraft to Sarkraa’s abode. The only Hutt palace Loic had seen was Jabba’s on Tatooine, it had been derelict and disused when Loic had seen it, shortly after the gangster’s demise, and this one looked no different in structure. A stocky, oxidised building, with a main rounded body and some minarets poking up from it like antennas. The building reminded Loic of a squat, disgusting Klatooine Toad sitting on its sowlike haunches, belching. The Weequay entered through a tradesmen’s entrance round the side and Loic was escorted immediately to the dungeons, to await his audience with Sarkraa. Before locking him in his cell they delivered him a fearsome blow to the back of the neck and he was rendered unconscious, spreadeagled on the straw-covered, dusty floor. In the abysmal void of his subconscious Loic swam through a black ocean of memories, dreams, visions, all aswirl in his head like the mottled stars of hyperspace.  

  

‘Now hold the gun steady, aim, breathe, relax, fire.’ Luc Courleciel Monerat told his scrawny, bony, trembling son as the child raised a training-blaster, pointed, and obliterated a holographic tin can from atop the garden wall. ‘Good shot Loic! We’ll make a soldier of you yet!’

 

Laid out all grey and ashenfaced in his coffin as young Loic followed the funeral procession, an entourage of weeping, desolate mourners, his mother wailing at his side clutching his newborn little sister. His father floated up ahead in his casket as it proceeded to the crematorium, he was resplendent in his uniform with medals and insignia and his walrus-like white moustache was trimmed and combed. He looked peaceful, it was the first time Loic had seen him without a frown, all the wrinkles and furrows had magically left his face. Soldiers lined the sides at the cremation, he was given a military send-off and Loic could still hear the cacophony from the 100-blaster salute ringing in his ears, and his sister’s baby sobs, wrapped in their mother’s arms.

 

His sister, the soldier on top of her, rutting away, Loic, watching, ashamed by his own tumescence, peering guiltily through the gap, sweat stinging his eyes. Her cries punctuating the constant hum of the nightly traffic of the city. The grunting of the trooper, pants round his ankles, belt uncoiled like a bullwhip, trailing across the floor, a battlecry as he unloaded his clip into Loic’s sweet, sweet sister as she wracked and convulsed.

 

The hermit on Draethos, Jaster Durane, the runaway royal from the planet Csilla, he had spent decades living in those caves, he had shown Loic the ropes, where to find food, what plants to avoid eating, how to dodge the predatory, bigtoothed, endogenous Draethos inhabitants. Loic saw Jaster now, in his humble cave, seated around a campfire, wrapped in his furs and blankets, smoking from his potent hookah. He had introduced Loic to all manner of psychoactive plants which grew on that planet. The dimexymethelene bark, which, when dried and smoked produced dimension-hopping powerfully-intoxicating effects, could even make you force-sensitive for a very limited time!

 

Jaster, with his smooth bald head and forked red beard, took a deep, long inhale of his hookah and, after holding it a while, blew the smoke out in vermillion-coloured rings that danced in the heat of the fire and dispersed in shimmering ethereal cobwebs. Jaster looked directly at Loic with his piercing blue eyes and flashed a yellow-toothed grin in the firelight, ‘Loic,’ he said gently, ‘Loic, it’s time to wake up. Come on, we’ve got to go…’

He woke face down on a urine-soaked floor. As he pushed himself to his feet pain engulfed his bruised frame. Mercifully, he was no longer cuffed. His primary concern, even more so than escaping imprisonment - and an inevitable gruesome death - was dehydration. Was there a better sensation than quenching thirst? Loic did not think so. He took stock of his cell; cold, dank, dark stone, no bed to speak of, no company but two rat-like creatures who fought over a maggot-ridden bone in one corner. The front of his cell was rows of bars and a door presumably latched from the outside.

 

The time for self-pity was over. Yes, he had endured a lot, He could forgive himself his recent decent into despair. Perhaps a breakdown was unavoidable, no man should face the Hound’s Tooth, but Loic was not prepared to give in. His father had endured myriad unutterable sanity-shattering plights in the wars he had faced, and he had faced them like a man. While he would never reach the heights of honour scaled by his vaunted father, a Monerat he remained. There had to be a way out. There was always a way through, that is what Jaster told him as they played Dejarik, but the lesson was not only applicable to holo-chess, but life itself.

 

He needed to calm his mind. Sitting cross-legged on the musky floor he closed his eyes and began the breathing exercises Jaster had taught him. His chaotic mind railed against his efforts. How long had he been unconscious? Why hadn’t he been brought before Sarkraa by now? And the constant torment of his parched throat. He let these thoughts roll past his mind like clouds scudding past a blazing sun. He had to go deep, deeper than dehydration, deeper than panic and fear. Slowly his muscles relaxed, and he fell into a trance.

 

The fire moved as though in slow motion; the flames cast no heat. Jaster sat across from him robed and hooded. ‘This isn’t real.’ Loic whispered in his mind.

 

‘No, of course not. But what did I teach you when we ingested the bark? When we left our bodies to visit the edge of human mortal cognizance, we shared the same rapture, the same reverie. Now part of me will be with you always.’

‘I’m in a right pickle this time.’

 

‘Yes, but if you are smart, quick-witted, you will find a way through. Time has little meaning here,’ he ran a calloused hand though the sluggish flames, ‘think…’

 

Loic opened his eyes and got to his feet. First and foremost, he needed water. He could not think, or act, while dizzy and lightheaded. He moved to the bars and called through, ‘guard?’ Again he called, but no-one came. There was a cell directly across from him, empty. There were more cells further down the passageway but whether they were occupied with other unfortunates he could only guess. He could not remember, when the Weequay dragged him to his cell whether they had passed a jailor. He should have paid more heed. There was always an accursed jailor, surely? He called again, ‘hey guard, get down here you scum!’ The act of shouting was like rubbing sandpaper on his moistureless throat.

 

‘No more noise.’ Loic could hear steps coming down the passageway. He sighed, inwardly congratulating himself. ‘I’ll beat you bloody.’ A grey-faced Kadas‘sa’Nicto slid into view brandishing a cruelly-barbed spear. Loic knew the race well, ill-tempered, cruel, and slow-witted. Every Hutt crimelord in the galaxy had dozens of them in their employ. ‘One more noise I spike you.’ Loic, did not doubt the creature. Gibbous obsidian eyes, a face of protuberant horns growing in seemingly random directions, flattened scaled nostrils that flared angrily, not the most amiably-faced fellow Loic had ever dealt with.

‘Friend, I need water.’ In reply the guard smacked his spear against the bars, but Loic had been expecting such a manoeuvre and moved his fingers in time. The viscous brute was not stupid enough to poke his weapon into the cell.

 

‘Another noise I’ll gut you sore.’ As the guard moved back up the passageway Loic called to him.

 

‘Don’t you want this?’ The guard stopped but did not turn. ‘It’s Amaralite. It is yours. All I want is water.’ The jailor turned, suspiciously. Loic stretched his arm through the bars and presented a glittering purple gem between thumb and forefinger. That got the jailor’s attention. he shuffled back, warily fearing a trap.

 

‘Amaralite?’ He quizzed sceptically.

 

‘Amaralite.’ Loic agreed.

 

‘Give me. I get water.’ Loic was expecting that response.

 

‘Water first.’

 

‘No deal.’ The guard moved as if to walk away but Loic knew he had him.

 

‘Hold on. Look, you do not like me, I know that, Sarkraa does not like me. But all I want is some water before I die. This Amaralite here,’ said Loic, holding the gem up to the feeble light, ‘it is yours. It is no good to me where I’m headed. You may as well have it, all I want is water. This was my father’s stud, he was a great man, like you a great warrior, I will give it to you just for some water, that’s all I want.’

 

‘Give here I give water,’ the jailor insisted stubbornly.

 

‘Now look, I know the game, I have been locked up before, many times. I’ll give this to you and you’ll come back with a bucket of piss. Look, you bring water and leave it at the door, and I’ll toss you the gem. No tricks.’

 

‘No tricks?’ The Nicto wanted to believe.

 

‘No tricks,’ Loic promised solemnly. The guard nodded and stepped out of sight. His brief solitude in the cell had given Loic time to take stock. He remembered pocketing his ear stud as he entered the spice den back on Eriadu – it seemed like a lifetime ago. He also remembered, as he brained the security guard in the turbolift, he helped himself to the contents of his pockets. It was instinctual, he had not given it much thought, until now, as he cast his gaze over the purloined items satisfactorily.

 

He realised Sarkraa had been sloppy. She should have had her guards search him before throwing him in the cell. She was also sloppy enough not to upgrade the centuries-old dungeon under her palace. Bossk had never thought to search him, but the Trandoshan had delivered him now and was no doubt haggling with Sarkraa upstairs - perhaps that was why Loic was afforded this time to hatch his escape. He heard the iron-shod boots of his newfound friend returning, and with those steps the paradisal noise of water slopping.

 

‘Now, give me the Amaralite.’ The jailor was standing with a dubiously-dirtied container. But Loic could see through the plastic that it was indeed filled with water.

 

‘Come now friend, we had a deal. Leave the tub at the bars and I’ll toss you the gem.’

 

‘I can get gem when Sarkraa kills you.’ The Nicto persisted. Loic would have loved to dash the brute’s stupid head off the walls till his thick skull cracked open, but instead he smiled.

 

‘Maybe, if one of your men don’t see you take it from my dead body and fight you for it. Or maybe Sarkraa will feed me to the Nexu. You could pick through mountains of shit and you may get the gem, but you will need to get into the Nexu’s pit to find it. But you are a crafty warrior, the canniest Kadas‘sa’Nicto of all time, I can see it in you. You know the easiest way is just to trade the water, which is nothing to you, and you get the gem.’ Loic said all this smoothly.

Reluctantly, the jailor relented, and placed the tub at the bottom of the iron bars. Loic tossed the gem as promised but deliberately threw it over the guard’s stupid head so he had to turn and scrabble on the ground to claim his prize. By that time Loic had pulled the water into the safety of the cell. He knew the cruel brute would have delighted in kicking over the tub out of spite if only he had been in possession of the gem first. With the gem in his hands the jailor rushed away. Loic lifted the container to his dried lips, each gulp of warm dirty water an all but orgasmic miracle.

 

Satiated at last, the smuggler and rogue, Loic Monerat, turned his attention to breaking out of his cell. He laid out the possessions he had acquired from the security guard back in the finance sector: a pile of credits, a niggardly-small pile at that, just two casino plaques, worth fifty credits each, and a holo-recorder. There was not much to boast, but there was certainly enough to work with. Loic, learned long ago how to adapt, how seemingly useless items could serve a greater purpose than they were initially intended.

 

Peeking out from between the bars as much as he could muster, he could see the lever pulled down and held in place by a locking clip. He took off his blood-soaked shirt and took to rolling it lengthy and taut as though he was going to use it to whip a man’s back. He lifted the holo-recorder and activated the device. An empyreal image of a large-bosomed porcine-faced woman appeared, either the security guard’s wife, mistress, or whore. She would never see his like again. The woman had the buttocks of a mare. Absurdly Loic Felt the pulse of arousal. With practiced swift movements he disassembled the device getting to his prize – its electronic guts. From these innards he managed to fashion a rudimentary hook which, once attached to his shirt, would serve as a crude grappling hook.

 

It took several attempts to get the hook to land near the fastening hook. It took several more agonising attempts to finally get it to lift. Good, the lock is unfastened. Now just to free the bloody lever. Wary of the reappearance of his friend the jailor, Loic desperately attempted to lift the lever with his meagre equipment – but to little avail. Come on, think, damn you, man. You have got this far.

 

He looked round the cell in frustration. There was nothing more of worth. All he had was the empty tub of water, and his unfruitful possessions. The two rodents in the corner stopped gnawing on the bone to look at him warily. They were wise to be wary, Loic pounced on the creatures, one escaped darting under his legs, the other he caught by its tail, it bit him painfully in the thumb before he broke its neck. Tying the corpse along with the gnawed bone to the shirt, Loic crouched at the far side of the cell and started making some practice swings, getting a feel for the weight. If he could use the weight of the bone to strike the underside of the lever and mask the noise of the impact with the rodent’s corpse, he had a shot.

 

Buru held the violaceous stud of Amaralite up to the torchlight, congratulating himself on his cunning. He had always been the smartest of his siblings, his older brother had abused him and belittled him, he called him brainless, but Buru had slit his throat when he slept. When his mother had walked in on the scene and wailed, he dealt with her too. Kindness was a weakness. Only the strong survived, only the smart. He had fooled that bald prisoner and good. He would go back and torment him when he was ready, but right now, he couldn’t take his eye off the gem, how it twinkled in the flickering firelight. He was rich. He always knew he would be rich one day, it was his destiny. ‘Amaralite.’ He whispered to himself.

 

‘It’s fake.’

 

Astonished Buru turned, the heel of Loic’s hand took him in the nose and Buru’s head thudded against the chamber wall, he was dazed but still conscious. He leaned forwards trying to grab at the bare-chested smuggler, but the trickster brought his knee up savagely and Buru fell to the floor. Loic took the time to drag Buru to his old cell where he bound and gagged him. He did not need loose ends, he could have killed him, but with what was coming he did not want the murder of Sarkraa’s jailor to add to his burgeoning litany of sin.

 

Getting out the cell was the easy part. Even if he could escape the palace somehow, he was as good as dead. Alone on a notoriously inhospitable planet, bogs, marshes and noxious air, as well as predators and carnivorous plants, he would not last a day. And even if he negotiated the outside environment, Sarkraa would have a platoon of cut-throats and bounty hunters on his tail, not to mention Bossk. Loic was sure the cold-blooded Trandoshan would relish two bounties in one day. No, chicanery not evasion was his best ally now.

 

He had already begun to formulate a plan, when he was in the trance, but could it work? It was unlikely, but it was the only card he had left to play. The way he saw it, he had two options. The first; to present himself in the throne room before the Hutt, if he could speak, before he was killed, he could offer Sarkraa something she wanted more that his death – Okkra’s. That is what started this mess, he had bungled the job, but what if he could persuade Sarkraa that this time he would not fail? After the firefight at the arena, Okkra would have a bounty on his head the size of an asteroid, Okkra would also have doubled his security. But a bounty hunter… a bounty hunter could deliver Loic direct to Okkra, bypassing security and palace guards. It was then Loic could kill the bloated bastard once and for all. Of course, then he would be torn to pieces by Okkra’s goons, but that was a problem for another time. Priority one was getting out the palace alive, who knew what opportunities would present themselves along the way.

 

Would Sarkraa even consider his offer? Loic did not believe so. Loic also knew that talking of murdering one of Sarkraa’s kin in open court would send every loose-tongued, disgruntled cut-throat scurrying this-way-and-that, looking to buy favour and allegiance with Okkra. Sarkraa would have no choice but to kill him there and then. Secrecy, not scandal, was the key. With Okkra’s throne room undoubtably perpetually full of ears and eyes, Loic had to take this offer to someone else. Someone with intelligence, someone who would look at the bigger picture. But who?

 

His mind turned to the Chiss, the majordomo Maax. It was said some majordomos were the real power behind their Hutt masters. Perhaps if he could corner the Chiss – when he was alone – he could make him listen. He would need to find a blaster and stick it in that blue face of his, then of course the Chiss would agree, Loic would turn over the gun, and he would be dead. What other choice did he have? Brave the outside world? He thought of escaping on the hovercraft that delivered him, but was that even still here? And how far would he get in that? One thing was for certain, Sarkraa could send guards down to his cell to fetch him at any second, and when all they found was Buru gagged, there would be hell-to-pay.

 

Slime trickled down the mossy walls which Loic leaned against, barebacked without his shirt, pigeon-chested. He hadn’t eaten in a long while, and now that his thirst had been slaked, his stomach protested to him with a gurgling knot which rumbled in his guts. He looked to the guard’s stool, next to it was a small wooden table with a large, smoky waxcandle burning in its centre, stashed beneath the table was a cloth knapsack.

 

Staggering on weak legs Loic lurched over and obtained the booty. Inside the bag was half a stale loaf of breadroot and a crumpled book, the book was written in the guard’s language, an ugly-looking alien dialect, scribbles, he tossed it aside. The escapee devoured the bread like a voracious lothcat, it was smeared with some unidentifiable paste but Loic didn’t care if it was Banthashit, he was eating it. Brushing crumbs from his thin goatee, and retrieving the barbspear, he started to head down the torchlit cavernous tunnel.

 

The meditation techniques Jaster had taught him had focused his mind, gave him clarity, even assuaged the aching pain in his injuries, along with the bread and water it rejuvenated the wiry, weasel-like figure; an energy boost which propped up his weary mortal remains for one last attempt to save his worthless hide. Plan A was messy, complicated, too much to go wrong. Plan B was straightforward, run. He decided to head for the hovercraft, despite the fact he did not know the way, or if it’d be there, wherever there was. Disorientated, he cursed himself for not paying attention earlier. He should have meditated on the prisonbarge, then maybe he would have been more focused, instead he had panicked and stood wetting his hose! Pathetic, he cursed himself.

 

The stench of death and torture hung morbidly in the still air of the tunnelled complex. Somewhere in the distance, muffled by the packed earth, was the sounds of clattering, like that of the kitchen staff maybe, working diligently and tirelessly round the clock to feed the Hutt’s neverending rapacious appetite for food. Somewhere even farther off were the sounds of pain and torture, harrowed drifting drawn-out screams. Loic had no choice but to forge on, burrowing deeper into the palace’s grimy underbelly.

 

The torches were becoming less frequent and so he lifted one from its rung and, sweating in its intense heat, he stumbled blindly into dark recesses and winding corridors. The occasional thick-wooded door presented itself, but it was always locked. After a while, he came to the conclusion the torch was more blinding than illuminating, plus it gave him away, better to adjust his eyes to the dark and sneak. He cast the flames aside and journeyed onwards, in the terrifying blackness, which swamped him till he was but a shadow, a wraith, moving surreptitiously through the Hutt Lady’s fuliginous basements and cellars.

 

Finally, he came to a small door which was unlocked, outside of it sat a wooden bucket, battered, bloodstained, and empty. Loic pushed through the portal and entered a wide hollow chamber, maybe forty foot high, maybe thirty wide, the length was indeterminable as the far side was cast in shadows. Somewhere high above, through the ceiling in another part of the palace, was the muffled clamour of activity and voices. A cool air blasted his face from somewhere in the dark alcoves, and along with it came a peculiar odour, a musty, sweaty odour; a fishbreathed, feline musk.

 

Loic sniffed the air and the piriform cortex in his brain scrabbled through olfactory memories to identify these strangely-familiar scents. Before his greymatter presented a theory, his ears were offered some additional information; a low, grumbling growl, ascending, into a throaty, dangerous snarl that immediately raised Loic’s heckles and caused his heart to do a quick doubleskip. He wondered if he would suffer a cardiac arrest before he even set eyes on his aggressor, he hoped so. His eyes, watering from the information they had gathered from the nose and the ears, observed a feeding trough in the far-corner, it was reddened with stale blood, and on it were scrawled the words ‘BAD KITTY’.

 

The Nexu stepped into the dim light, hissing, grinning, the face of a spider, the striped body of a big cat, it slobbered and drooled as its four red eyes locked on Loic, two of those eyes possessed excellent dayvision, and the other two could track you in the dark by your bodyheat, Loic knew all about them from his days of reading, studying the galaxy’s inhabitants on Draethos. Twin whiplike tails curled around its flank, its mane of sharp quills positively bristled, it eyed Loic with the cold lust with which one eyes a banthaburger after a three day fast! How could he be so stupid, he had stumbled into the exact place he was trying to avoid all along! He clutched the spear tightly, but he knew it was useless against this beast, like bringing a vibroblade to a blasterfight. 

He turned to run, but the door had swung shut by itself and Nexus were fast, catlike predators; it pounced and swatted Loic with its paw, slamming him against the wall. He took it in the shoulder and rolled to the floor with a nimble dexterity that could only be the result of pure adrenaline, his weapon clattered off into the shadows though. Groaning, he clambered to his feet, the first blow had been playful, testing its prey, the next strike would be the deathstroke. Loic could only shut his eyes and wince.

 

A grating sound from above, a rumbling of steel, a trapdoor was opened, the ceiling of the Nexu’s den was the trapdoor floor of Sarkraa’s throneroom; electric light spilled down from above, voices clear and loud now. The Nexu was only distracted for a few seconds, it quickly turned its greedy gaze back to the quivering snack cowering in its corner. A brightly-feathered dart whistled through the air and stuck into the beast’s rippling-muscled neck. It reared back, locked on its target, Loic, and just as it pounced, it stumbled, staggered, and crashed facefirst to the floor, unconscious, tranquilised. All the water Loic had gorged in his cell emptied into his already-soaked Corellian-fibre trousers.

 

‘OH-HO HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!’ Came a croaking, bass-heavy laughter which chilled Loic with its familiarity. ‘OH-HO-HA-HA-HAAAAA!’ The last syllable wretched out like phlegm. ‘Look, look everybody, that bossuk-roach of a smuggler has found his way into Bad Kitty’s lair! OH-HO-HO-HO-HO-HAA! Are you trying to do my job for me Monerat!? I will not have you meet your fate so quickly spice-runner scum. I have plans for you!’ Loic squinted up into the bright lights of Sarkraa’s audience chamber, but they blinded him, and he could only make out silhouettes of a small entourage surrounding a hazy, hulking Huttlike shape. Two Gamorreans, gooseturd green, came bustling and grunting into the Nexupit, and Loic was once again clasped in binders and frogmarched away.

 

They traversed a few meandering passageways and reached an ancient turbolift, barely functioning, it took them up a few levels and spat them out into the entrance to Sarkraa’s lair. Rescued from a Nexu to be slowcooked by a Hutt, what fucking luck this!? Thought Loic, angrily, he found himself wishing the creature in the pit below had opened his throat and been done with it.

 

He was prodded forward into the main chamber, a large cave-like room, booths at the sides, a firepit burned away, roasting some unidentified large animal on a slow-spit. A bar in the corner, well-lit and well-stocked with various wines, koja-rums and Jawa beers, among them Loic glimpsed a familiar-shaped blue bottle, the name written on the label in High Galactic, ‘Domaine de la Maison sur de Lac’, his father’s favourite tipple. Funny how you notice the strangest details in the moments before your death, time seemed to slow down, the brain focused on the most mundane things.

 

The trapdoor floor before the Hutt’s dais was now closed, and Loic feared to look up and meet Sarkraa’s gaze, he knew she would be staring at him with those blazing green eyeballs. Instead, he scanned the chamber, reminding himself he needed to be more mindful of his surroundings in case of escape chances.

 

The smoke in the room filled his nostrils, both from the firepit and the cigaara fumes hanging in the air. He clocked Bossk seated in a booth out of the way, the bastard was devouring a huge nerf steak, raw, the blood dripping with each fang-filled crocodile-sized bite. He paid no mind to the passing prisoner, he just masticated with his eyes half-lidded, trancelike as he feasted, like he was ready to shed his skin or lay some eggs or some shit. Putain de lézard, thought Loic, bitterly. Finally, he was brought before the Hutt and thrusted down to his knees. He looked up at her through bleary eyes and her grotesque mass came sharply into focus.

 

Loic often described her, privately, in his head, as a sunbleached turd. Sarkraa was not just rare in that she identified as a female, but she was also albino and her skin had the alabaster tone of beachwood, but mottled with hairy brown moles and purulent warts, and decorated with dinner-medals, and trails of green ooze from whatever wriggling creature she had last stuffed into her hideous, chevron-shaped maw. She observed her captive with large heavy-hooded eyes, they were daubed with crude thoadeye make up, badly applied, and her long dry lips were lined with a faint trace of red lipliner. Hutts always seemed to need to eat before they had the energy to speak, and she stuffed a handful of pickled sandmaggot kidneys into her trap from a sloshing jar at her bulging side.

‘Finally, we have you,’ she muttered, gleefully, between mouthfuls. ‘You have caused a lot of trouble Monerat. The casino job, the cargo you lost me, attempting to assassinate Okkra, and in my name!’ She shook her mighty head, her dangling earrings swaying, and tutted. Loic wondered why a creature with no ears to speak of would want to wear earrings and it made him think of his own bejewelled stud, and how he had used it to coax the guard, he found himself smiling, despite his dire situation, this enraged Sarkraa. An imperceptible finger-twitch and Loic was clouted round the ear roughly by the Gamorrean pig-guard. ‘Smiling I see. Well, we’ll see how much you’re smiling when you wake up from your scheduled surgery.’ With that bewildering statement, she cackled harshly, and another handful of fodder went into the hatch, slobbering, choking, chuckling.

 

‘Surgery?’ Said Loic, his voice quavering, an eyebrow cocked, the recalcitrant smile a distant memory. Sarkraa grinned, Loic’s heart lowered into his stomach cavity and hid. Somewhere behind Loic, Bossk spat out a bone, or some gristle, then proceeded to slurp noisily on some marrow.

 

Unlike Jabba’s notorious swinging palace, which was a very populous partyplace at the height of his reign, Sarkraa’s was almost empty, minimalist, you might say lonely. A couple of Weequays loitered, and Loic identified a trio of Noghri clustered at the bar. The blueskinned Chiss Maax was seated in a dark booth, invisible in the shadow but for his glinting eyes, his glittering rubystudded slippers crossedlegged neath the table, and a blue hand coiled round a glass of Gardulla.

 

‘Yes, surgery,’ spat the giant slug Sarkraa, ‘you’re so intent on assassinating Okkra for me sobeit. We’re sending you back with Bossk, and he’s going to drop you off, you’ll have  a little gift for my treacherous cousin Okkra…’ She nodded and a medical droid came trundling forward on its wheels, brandishing a syringe which it plunged suddenly into Loic’s buttock.

 

‘No, wait, I’ve got a better idea, why don’t we shpeeeeee…’ He felt his words slurring and all he could manage was a measly, whimpering ‘nooooo-nooooooo.’ The room spun like a clipped X-Wing. As he slumped down to the hay-covered floor he tried to count how many times he had been rendered unconscious in the last twenty-four hours, but that just made him pass out even quicker. The medical droid carried Loic’s sleeping form to the operating table in a backroom. While Loic was anesthetized the droid did its work, and in his mind’s dreamscape he once again encountered his friend and mentor, Jaster Durane.

 

Jaster peered at Loic through his glareshades; his bald head ringed by red hair, which grew into a long braided singular pigtail at the back, and his long rust-coloured beard forking down into two points at his torso, where he tucked it into his belt under his round belly. They were casting fishingpoles into a pumping, thumping, cascading waterfall, attempting to snare ubrufish for supper. ‘So you’re leaving then?’ Jaster asked as he flicked his line out.

 

‘Yes,’ replied Loic, his own beard overgrown and scraggly, ‘next few days, maybe the third moon.’

 

‘Shame.’ Jaster speared a writhing fish and they cheered, he tossed it into the makeshift basket, woven of leaves and vines. ‘I was just getting used to having someone around...’

 

‘I only see you once every four standards or so! You’re more elusive than a glooth!’

 

‘Still. We’ve learned a lot together, experimenting with the plants.’

 

‘You’ve taught me much.’

 

‘The plants have taught us both much.’ Jaster spiked another fish, he was so much better at this! ‘What will you do?’

 

‘I think I’ll head to Sorros, it’s close enough to civilisation but still obscure enough for me to keep a low profile. I need to figure out a way to pay off the Hutts, once I pay off Sarkraa for the cargo lost I can be free.’ Loic and Jaster ruminated for a while as they watched the waterfall for anymore telltale flickers of fins. After five minutes, Jaster caught another one, a big one, that was enough for both their suppers. ‘How are you so good at it this?’

 

‘Practice of course,’ then he smirked, mischievously.

 

‘What?’

 

‘And something else.’

 

‘Something else?’

 

‘Yes, pollyroot, when taken in very, very small amounts, can increase visual acuity and reflexes, jedi-like reflexes you might say!’

 

‘Your brain is an incredible encyclopaedia pharmacopoeia of the plants of this planet!’

 

‘Plants can do a great many wonderful things. They bring us life, nourish us, enlighten us - in many ways they are our gods.’

 

‘Maybe,’ mused Loic, taking a swig from his water canteen, ‘when I get the Hutts off my back I can come back here and gather some of that dimexy-erm-meth-stuff…’

 

‘Dimexymethelene?’

 

‘That’s the one, we need nicknames for these plants.’

 

‘Gather it for what?’

 

‘Maybe synthesise it. Don’t you think there would be less evil in the galaxy if more people had the spiritually-enlightening journeys we have undertook in the spell of these hallucinogens? It makes you realise there’s more to life, it makes you… I dunno’… Feel the force I guess…’

 

Loic was brought abruptly out of his sweet reverie by another sharp injection, he was on his back, naked, on a cold operating table, a bright white light blared into his eyes and he could hear the medical droid whirring around the room, the tinkle and rattle of equipment being replaced, disposed of… What had happened?

 

Loic tried to lift himself from the operating table but he was strapped. He turned his head as much as his bindings would allow. The medical droid was scooting around going about its business paying him little heed. He strained his neck, scanning the room, it was less of a sickbay and more like a grimy back-alley Eriadu surgery, where unhinged disbarred criminal doctors would remove tracking chips and change facial features for a few credits. There were nameless ill-maintained pieces of machinery scattered around the chamber, even a battered bacta-tank in one corner. Hooks chains and barbs hung from the ceiling – surgery or torture chamber? On a metal bench, past Loic’s feet, were the droid’s tools, wicked knives, scalpels, and handsaws, some darkened by rust and dried blood. The surgery door whooshed open, positioned as he was, Loic could not see who entered. ‘What have you done to me?’ Loic asked the droid.

 

‘Take the prisoner back to his cell. See he doesn’t escape this time.’ The droid said in a garbled electronic utterance. Two burly, viscous-looking, brown-skinned ogres took to the unstrapping, Gamorrean guards.

 

‘Wait, I’m going to be sick,’ Loic vowed.

 

‘Nausea is to be expected,’ the droid told him. One guard undid the leg braces and the other pulled him off the table, Loic vomited over his hog-like face. The Gamorrean rubbed his eyes squealing. His grip on Loic’s arm loosened for a split second and Loic fell headfirst onto the tray with the medical droid’s equipment. Loic landed sorely on the floor with the clang and clatter of the sharp tools falling around him. ‘Dizziness is also to be expected.’

The Gamorrean with sick on his face pulled Loic up by the neck and began to strangle him, his companion winded Loic with a meaty fist to the midriff and pulled his arm back for another blow. ‘Stop! Take him to his cell… Alive.’ The beating stopped and they dragged the smuggler away, cursing angrily in their guttural primitive alien dialect.

 

Buru stood before Sarkraa’s palanquin. The audience chamber was full of cruel eyes and the air was rich with sardonic laughter. He had been pulled from the dungeon where he was found bound, gagged, and disgraced. It was the doing of that wretched smuggler. Buru knew how Sarkraa rewarded those who failed her. Her girthsome belly expanded as she inhaled greedily from her multi-chambered hookah. Upon exhalation a rank miasma obscured her for several heartbeats.

 

‘Sarkraa, I beg you….’ Buru’s pleas were subsumed by a roiling belch from the corpulent crime lord. She stuck a greedy, slimy hand into a cauldron by her side and pulled out a shrieking paddyfrog which she tossed into her cavernous chasmal mouth. The assembled goons, lickspittles, and hired killers, roared with laughter and glee. They wanted blood, Buru’s blood. Bastards. Buru had drunk with them all only yesterday, now he was friendless and doomed.

 

‘How could you be fool enough to let the smuggler escape?’ It was the blue-skinned majordomo who spoke. He stood at Sarkraa’s side, his baleful red eyes glowing through the smog. He had not been serving Sarkraa long Buru knew, loyal Buru had served her far longer. But Maax was her new favourite and most were just as fearful of him as they were of their bloated mistress.

 

‘He tricked me. He took me by surprise.’

 

‘You let a skinny human best you?’ Buru did not need to turn to recognize the voice of his own cousin, Vatu. Was it not Buru who had got his cousin a place at Sarkraa’s palace? If it were not for Buru, he would still be shovelling dung on his arid little farm. Vatu had repaid him with treachery.

 

‘I have always been loyal to you Mistress Sarkraa,’ Buru pleaded - beseeching mercy.

 

‘You have always been stupid,’ berated Maax, ‘I thought you may have been at least capable of watching over beaten and half-starved prisoners. Evidently not. I put far too much faith in you.’ The audience chamber roared in laughter, a full gaggle of villainous miscreants baying for blood, each drunker than the next.

 

‘Buru the brainless!’ Vatu shouted. More laughter and backslapping followed. Buru snapped. He made to charge at his cowardly cousin, but a Gamorrean guard pinned his arms behind his back.

 

‘I’ll kill you with my bare hands. You are weak Vatu, you have always been weak and timid. You always ran from a fight.’

 

‘Lies,’ Vatu sneered, elbowing his way to the front of the throng. ‘The human was too much for you, Buru the brainless.’ He gave Buru a backhanded slap.

 

‘Maybe I am stupid. Maybe I die today. But I am clever enough to take you with me to hell.’ Buru turned to Maax, ‘majordomo, before you kill me let me fight him – to the death.’ The mob roared their approval. Buru could read the fear in his cousin’s face and he was also aware how much Sarkraa liked her blood sport. Vatu was nothing to her, Buru knew, and the crowd were hungry for entertainment. The throne room fell silent, all eyes darted from Maax, to Sarkraa, and back again.

 

‘So be it!’ Sarkraa boomed. Everyone rushed for a better view, even those who had indolently lazed in the narcotic-tinged booths at the back. Even Ulf, the malodorous barman jostled for position. It took four herculean Gamorrean guards with their pikes to clear a decent sized ring atop the Nexu’s pit. ‘To the death!’ Sarkraa commanded as her clammy glutinous hand dipped once more into her cauldron.

 

Buru had nothing to lose. He was as good-as-dead one-way-or-another, and this knowledge released him from the icy grip of fear. He lunged at Vatu, but his smaller cousin was swifter and nimbly ducked under his grasp. Off-balance, Buru turned, but Vatu kicked him squarely in the chest and sent him backwards. Vatu leaped, his scaled forehead slamming into Buru’s nose. Buru fell, Vatu straddled his chest and peppered Buru’s face with savage blows. In desperation, Buru tried to buy room, room enough to find his cousin’s eyes. He grabbed Vatu’s head, his palms pressing on the ears, and dug his thumbs into Vatu’s eyes. Vatu screeched pathetically and pulled away. This was the chance Buru needed. Seizing the upper-hand, he rose and sent a straight left at Vatu’s face, and a right cross which span his cousin on his heels. Buru took Vatu’s neck in the crook of his elbow swung him over in a reverse hiptoss. Vatu hit the ground hard, he tried to push himself up but was too disorientated. Buru booted the side of his head as though he was kicking a ball, Vatu rolled over helplessly in a spasm. Buru proceeded to stomp open his skull and did not stop till the brains and gore dripped through the cracks onto the Nexu’s prone form forty-feet below. Maax raised his hand, silencing the crowd.

 

‘Congratulations, you have won yourself a few more hours of life. I suggest you make peace with whatever gods you pray to,’ scoffed Maax. ‘Take him to the cells until the Nexu wakes.’ With the bloodlust and the taste of murder upon him, Buru would have charged at that blue-skinned devil and bashed his head in, but he had been restrained by two Gamorrean guards, and he was dragged from the chamber.

As they got to the dungeon, Buru noticed with distaste two Weequay playing knuckle-dice on his old table. One got up and stood before Buru, ‘thanks for the new job,’ he rasped, then laughed in a gravelly snicker. Buru tried to get at his tormentor, but the brutes held him like a trap. The Weequay hit Buru in the gut and again in the face.

 

Buru was dragged back to the to the dungeons, the Weequay opened a cell door, and they launched him inside with such force that he bounced off the back wall. He writhed on the floor, dazed. He lay for some minutes until he thought back to killing Vatu. It was glorious. He could now die with honour. That gave him some small measure of solace. It gave him the strength to roll to his feet. It was then he looked across the passageway to the opposite cell, there, standing with his hands round the bars was the bald smuggler, Monerat. The bastard who had cost Buru everything.

 

The erstwhile jailor’s rage was impressive, thought Loic, as he watched the scale-faced cut-throat fume and spit. The Weequay had to call down with various gruesome threats before he would settle somewhat. Good, thought Loic, as Buru limited his murderous hatred to a stone-cold gaze from his shiny, nebulous eyes. That’s right, calm the fuck down. Now you have been thrust upon me again I am going to have to use you in my latest deception.

 

Loic gestured to Buru with his finger. You and me. Did the dolt understand? It was impossible to know. All he did was stare back, his mouth twitching with anger. Loic gestured again, he pointed to Buru, then himself, then pointed his finger up the passageway. You and I are going out. It took a few more times before Loic was satisfied the Nicto understood. The last thing Loic needed was this oaf in the cell across from him, but it was clear the Nicto was now firmly out of favour with Sarkraa, and it looked like he had taken quite a beating for his trouble. The only reason he is still alive is because the Nexu is out cold.

 

Loic raised a finger over his lips asking for silence, Buru nodded. Loic held up a silver object and activated it, a spiderweb-thin orange beam appeared. It was a small laser-cutter, used to slice open fresh cadavers, Loic had managed to pick it up when he had feigned dizziness and fell into the tray full of the medical droid’s instruments.

 

The new jailors, the Weequay, had added more bolts to the latches outside the cell door once they had eventually figured out how he had originally escaped, but once again nobody had thought to search his safe pocket. Keeping the small device palmed and out of sight of the Gamorrean guards had been child’s play to the gambling cheat and sneaky smuggler. Loic had already sliced through the bottom of one bar and was halfway through the top, with the bar removed it would give him enough room to wriggle out.

 

He had not been expecting his old friend Buru however. He knew the enraged ex-jailor would summon the guards if Loic tried to escape without him, out of spite alone. He was now bound to the creature. Buru watched with grim fascination as Loic severed the top of the bar and gently laid it on the cell floor. He was fearing another trick Loic knew. Loic gestured to Buru that he was going to slide over the laser-cutter, Buru nodded. Typically though, he did not toss the device over far enough, and even reaching through the bars Buru could not grab it. Loic had to assuage him with another diatribe of hand signals before he risked squeezing out his own cell, padding over to the laser-cutter - watching for the guards - and tossing it to Buru.

 

Out in the open now, Loic decided to get back in his cell. All he could do was wait for Buru to cut a bar loose. It gave him time to wonder what that droid had done to him. He had been violated in some way. There was a thin scar along his belly and when he prodded the region gingerly, he could feel something in there. The droid had probably used the same laser-cutter on his gut that he just passed to the Nicto. There was not time to ponder Sarkraa’s latest cruelty. All he knew was that he was booked to travel on the Hound’s Tooth again, and the destination was right into Okkra’s hideous gob. Why he was taken back to the cell and not ferried to the moon’s spaceport already he did not know. Trandoshans were notoriously stubborn, most likely Bossk had not finished haggling. This time he meant not to stumble into the Nexu’s lair upon his escape. Perhaps his former jailor could be of some use after all, he knew the bowels of the palace better than Loic ever would, maybe, just maybe, he could get them to a ship.

 

Buru at last severed the bar, Loic gestured for him to settle it down gently. The next part was to deal with the two Weequay. There was nothing else for it but to try and get them off-guard and attack. Loic gestured to Buru to make sure he understood and then they were both wriggling out of their cells. Buru pulled the bar out with him, it took Loic a moment to realise why, maybe he was not so stupid after all. They could hear the Weequay arguing with each other absorbed in their petty gambling.

Thankfully, if they hugged one wall, they were out of sight most of the way. Loic could feel his heart beating in his chest, the blood was racing round his body so fast it made his ears buzz. He had come too far to let a couple of Weequay scupper him. He did not fancy a prolonged fist fight with one though, he would have to incapacitate his one quickly and hope his companion was also up to the task.

 

In position, Loic moved to give the nod to Buru to pounce, but Buru paid no heed, he shouldered Loic aside and ran round the corner. He swung the bar and took one Weequay over the back of the skull. The other pushed his chair back and reached for the blaster at his hip, it was too late. Buru speared the end of the iron bar into his face, bowling him over. By the time Loic took in the scene, one Weequay had been killed by a blow to the head, and Buru was splitting the other’s skull open as he brought the bottom of the bar up and down, time and again.

 

‘I think he’s dead,’ Loic said, Buru turned to face him, Loic did not like what he seen in those eyes. Buru wanted payback, no doubt, but was he prepared to endanger his escape by trying to kill Loic? The smuggler could see the hesitation play upon the Nicto’s face. ‘Look, I did what I had to do… to escape. You did what you had to do. Come on, let us get their blasters and get the fuck out of here, together,’ Loic offered.

 

‘Together,’ agreed Buru, picking up the blasters from the Weequays’ bodies and handing one to Loic.

 

‘Now how the hell do we get out of here?’

 

‘Follow Buru.’

 

Down in the dark, wormy earth, cold, heartless specks of fire lit the way. Loic followed the hornfaced Nicto, he seemed to know where he was going, in the deepening-darkness the creature scuffled, swinesnorts, stubby fingers scrabbled, rooted, griped, and wrestled, dragging itself through the foul gloom, its sowlike haunches waggling. Loic felt a new feeling burst in his chest, a spring of hope. Maybe this creature could get them the fuck out of here, sharply and swiftly, with his working-knowledge of the place’s innards and exits.

 

With a face like a rotten cluster of greengrapes, the Nicto turned and gestured to its new companion, this way, he indicated. Thank the moons of Coruscant! Thought Loic, as he felt the comforting breeze of an outdoor portal brush past his face, finally, nearly out of here, I’m starting to suffocate in these narrow, cursed tunnels. In the Hutt’s domain death lurked everywhere, fear and pain constituted the very cement of the building’s foundations.

 

As they rounded a corner, a large shadow loomed up before them, Loic’s heart stopped as he crashed into the back of his guide, who came to a screeching halt and squealed, Loic held his breath. Before them towered the Trandoshan, Bossk. He seemed even more huge in the constricted passageway. The persistent pursuer puffed a pungent, plumy blast of his rotten breath as he backhanded the Nicto, sending its blaster scattering, and thumping the bedazzled Buru into the padded-earth of the walls, concussing him. ‘Is there no escaping you you bastaaaa…’ Howled Loic as he raised his own blaster to fire, but his sentence was cut short as he received the same cruel treatment as his predecessor, the blaster shot went over Bossk’s scaly crown as he slapped Loic down and grappled his weapon from his feeble hands.

 

The Nicto rose and charged, but Bossk’s obsidian-bladed hunting knife snaked out of his belt, the sharp edge jutted out, hungrily tasting Nicto blood as it opened the brow of Buru’s bewildered face. Bossk pinned the squirming creature to the wall with one mighty limb as it gurgled and choked on its own lifefluid, which poured from the gash in its forehead and into its eyes and mouth. ‘Sarkraa wants a word with you,’ Bossk growled at his struggling captive.

 

Still holding the escapee pinned, the leviathan lizard turned its icy glare to the trembling smuggler. ‘You can’t escape me,’ hissed the monster, and it took Loic round the neck in one rough-scaled hand, the Nicto still in the other, and dragged them back up the corridors from whence they came; back towards Sarkraa’s audience chamber, back towards enslavement, terrifying torture, and certain death. Loic gave up all hope; a cold, uncaring, indifference took a tight hold of him, tighter even than the Trandoshan’s grip, and he didn’t even protest or struggle as Bossk hoisted them up the corridor like a couple of Sullustan ashrabbits, to be skinned, trimmed, and roasted like so-much meat.

In Sarkraa’s throneroom, the denizens seemed to have doubled from last time; the excitement and goings-on alerting perhaps even the most spice-addled junkies from their long slumbers in the deepest corners of Sarkraa’s shadowy citadel. Loic saw the faces of Evocci, Arconas, Whiphids and various other disreputable species flash-by, as he was carried through the milling, intoxicated crowd of revellers, rogues, and reprobates.

 

Even pirates and coldblooded killers stepped quickly aside for one such as Bossk, and they parted like a tide of filthy sewage as Loic and Buru were dumped brusquely at the foot of Sarkraa’s dais, containing her huge throne, backed as it was by a pile of skulls belonging to species the galaxy over; thousands of discarded craniums, a macabre collection of morbid trophies. The Hutt bitch boomed in a baritone belch; ‘Ah, here he is, my twice-disgraced jailguard, tut-tut, we will have to make an example of you this time brainless Buru. HO-HO-HAA’

 

Buru squawked in protest, as Loic was ushered to the side and pinned against a booth wall by Bossk’s brute strength, the Nicto was seized by Gamorrean pig-guards and dragged screeching to a large, rusted, bronze anvil, which had been placed in the centre of the Nexu trapdoor’s grate. Buru seemed to know exactly what was happening as his detainers stretched him over the anvil, and he cried in remonstration. Loic could only guess Buru’s fate, as he sweated in Bossk’s beastly grip.

 

In that ill-furnished temple, where many diabolical things had been witnessed over the centuries, there was much talk of the relish Sarkraa took in the ritualistic sacrifice of any of her staff caught deceiving or disobeying her in any way. In that dangerous dwelling many a sacrificial victim/traitor had been brutalized, flayed, and dismembered. Some deaths were immediate and absolute, some were long-drawn-out excruciating affairs, which could last for days at Sarkraa’s behest and no-doubt ecstatic pleasure. She adored nothing more than murdering her enemies in a multiplicity of malevolent methods.

 

The azure-skinned Maax materialised out of the bloodthirsty throng and shuffled up to the anvil in flowing black and gold gowns, around his neck was a necklace fashioned from linked jawbones, still with their victims’ fangs and teeth attached. Buru’s captors held arms and legs each and stretched him over the anvil, his back arched, his paunch protruding upwards, bloated, fishbelly-white. Prone and exposed, he screamed, but he was gagged, he wriggled, but he was struck.

 

Maax drew a stone knife from a sheath with a slither and in an eyeblink he had plunged it into Buru’s chest cavity with a great thrust, and a subsequent crunch. Removing the stony blade, the majordomo reached into the incision it had left and pulled out the Nicto’s still fiercely-pumping heart, holding it up at once as an offering to almighty Sarkraa. The disembodied heart throbbed between bluefingers drenched in blood which dripped steadily to the floor in great wet spats.

 

The overfed Hutt crimeboss nodded satisfactorily, with heavy-lidded eyes and a wide oily grin, drool collected at the corners of her sadistic mouth as she motioned with her knobbly hand. Loic barfed a streak of yellow vomit down his bonyribs and swollen stomach, it clung to the scraggly hairs of his torso. The weary smuggler had witnessed Buru’s wretched death in graphic detail, his vision had gone superfocused and high-definition, he was unsure why. He should have closed his eyes but he hadn’t been able to tear his gaze away from the gruesome scene unfolding.

 

In all its gory detail he had balked as his brain recorded the minutiae of the wretched Nicto’s heart forever. Bile stung Loic’s throat as Buru’s heart was torn through the ribcage and out his chest cavity, he was still alive the poor bastard. The miserable Monerat gawped helplessly as Maax presented the throbbing heart to his delighted gangsterboss, then tossed it on the floor. It pulsated and quivered on the ground with so much force left in it, that it lifted completely up two or three times, like a riverbanked fish, before finally running out of blood and growing limp and eventually cold on the grey flagstone.

 

A small, imperceptible nod from Sarkraa, and the disembodied organ, a pale pink in colour, flecked with bluish veins, was scraped up off the floor and tossed nonchalantly into the firepit, where it hissed and sizzled until crisp and burned. The spicy stench of burned offal filled the room, and then the charred heart was transferred to the Hutt’s grateful maw. She chomped down on it once and swallowed it whole like a barbecued twenchok. Buru’s body finally stopped kicking and was dumped down a chute to the Nexu pit, the pet would no doubt be ravenous when it came round from its anaesthetic.

 

Bossk dragged Loic forward, tears filled the smuggler’s eyes, hopelessness spread through his body like a fastmoving cancer, he was presented to the Huttlady like a Manaan Slider on a garnished platter. ‘Foolish, foolish smuggler,’ grumbled Sarkraa, ‘will you never learn, look at Buru there, look what happens when you cross me. How many times have you crossed me now smuggler? What do you think I should do with you?’ Loic looked on forlornly, he knew she already had her plan, he could feel something stitched into his stomach below the skin, he didn’t know what, but something, some subcutaneous nightmare lurking there ready to reveal a mysterious and no-doubt deadly surprise. Sarkraa was building up to the big reveal.

 

‘You will go with Bossk to the planet Florrum, where Okkra is currently celebrating his 776th  birthday with his closest cohorts. You will be dropped off by the bounty hunter as a gift from me for the Honourable Bloated One, Okkra, on this, his special anniversary. He will not suspect that there is a detonator stitched into your intestines, UH-HUH-HUH-HUH-HAAAAAA…’

 

Sarkraa took the time to chuckle herself into a wracking, coughing-fit, which she cleared with a long drag from her multichambered hookah. Still snickering through the shimmering smoke, she continued unveiling her devious plan to a quivering Loic Monerat, who now observed his surgical scar in wide-eyed abject horror.

 

‘My faithful majordomo Maax will accompany Bossk, to keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t attempt any more of your foolish escape plans, amusing though they have been; your pisspoor attempt to assassinate Okkra, your blunder in delivering yourself to Bad Kitty like an appetiser, chuckle, then attempting to flee with a dumb nerfherder like Buru, OH-HO-HO-HAA. Foolish, foolish little man. Please, do give my best regards to that dear, dreaded cousin of mine.’ And with a flick of her stubby little arm and a spasm of her grotesque tail, the Queen’s speech was over, and they were dismissed. Bossk hauled the smuggler off his feet and out the cavernous chamber of the host worm. Maax the Chiss washed his hands of Buru’s blood in a drinking fountain and scurried after them, pulling his swirling robes about him as he went, slinking into the shadows stealthily.

 

Nobody ever wanted to find themselves on the Hound’s Tooth once in their lives, nevermind twice, and that is where the unlucky Loic once again found himself, a return-ticket to hell. A short trip on the transport back to the planet’s moon (closely-guarded by Bossk, Maax, and two heavily-armed Nictos, he was getting the royal treatment this time!) He wondered idly if the Nictos were relatives of the recently-deceased, but they were emotionless beings, their eyes gave away nothing if they did feel anything. Maax and Bossk were equally detached. Loic found himself filling with despair as the tanks filled with fuel, and the Nictos left to return to Sarkraa. He was shepherded into the Hound’s cargo area and hurled into a dank, small cell; three-foot by three-foot, high-tech electrocuting-vibrobars, a dismal bloodsmeared space on the cold floor for Loic to squeeze uncomfortably into.

 

On this dreaded ship, many souls had been extinguished, fumigating whatever Gods-of-Fire Bossk acknowledged, if any. Everything on the Hound’s Tooth was so clotted with blood, the ship’s metal positively rusted with it, that rubicund tinge to the walls, that slaughterhouse stench, that urticating atmosphere of death that lingered forevermore. In Loic’s cell he had just enough space to sit down cross-legged, encircled by vibrobars, and meditate. Perhaps learn to calmly accept his stark fate, look into the netherworld of the mind for some sort of hint, suggestion, of an afterlife, and therefore solace. A scraping sound caused him to open one eye, it was Maax, as the ship’s engines kicked in and stuttered to life, the Chiss pulled a short, ensanguined stool up to Loic’s cell and sat down.  

Loic attempted conversation with the majordomo a few times, but the response was dead-eyed silence, Loic might as well have been a ghost, the grubby smuggler went unacknowledged, he didn’t even warrant a glance. After a while Loic gave up attempting to engage the Chiss and he settled back down to his meditation, the gentle vibration of the Hound’s engines helped him to drift into a steady pattern of breathing that then allowed his mind to focus deeply. But sometimes it wandered, sometimes it recalled memories that floated into his dreamscape like starcruisers coming into dock around the orbit of his Mind’s Eye.

 

On the planet Draethos, in the jungleworld, the sun was an hour from setting and a noisy bustle of animal activity chirped and chimed through the trees as creatures hurried about their perfunctory business before darkfall. The twin moons could be seen cresting the horizon and two figures emerged from the deep, tangled undergrowth. It was a summer month, and they were dressed appropriately, in vests and loincloths, thin diaphanous robes shrouded their shoulders. They both clutched hiking staffs and vibro-machetes as they emerged from the jungle, covered in twigs and leaves, which they plucked from their person as they surfaced, blinking, into the bright, golden-evening candescence.

 

The stout, rounded figure with the braided red hair and forked beard was Jaster Durane, runaway royal and reclusive hermit. The short, nimble, demon-faced figure was Loic Monerat, thief, pickpocket, failed-spicerunner, also a runaway, on the lam from the Hutt cartel. They looked out over a lush green valley, but that wasn’t the most striking feature, which Jaster gestured to now, with a magnanimous sweep of his hand. Loic peered across the valley in awe at the sight.

 

Opposite the two temporary troglodytes, across the verdant valley, was a magnificent, pulchritudinous spectacle that caused Loic to gasp. Standing firm and erect, maybe 500 feet high, was an almighty stone pyramid. Five-sided, and straight as a die, it peaked in a sort-of antenna which bristled from its golden capstone, the mesmerising material of which flickered in the waning sunlight. ‘Wow,’ breathed Loic, as Jaster gulped from a water canteen, ‘how have you never shown me this before? What is it?’

 

‘A pyramid,’ some water sloshed down his fiery-red beard and he wiped his mouth with his wrist and sniffed.

 

‘I can see that! But, who, when, what is it for?’  

 

‘To those questions, nobody knows the answer, though many have speculated. It was here when the galaxy was colonised, it’s been here for who-knows-how-long!’

 

‘But if it was here back then, well that means it predates the Old Republic, even the Twelve Kingdoms Era,’ he thought for a second, ‘it could predate…’

 

‘It could predate hyperspace travel itself,’ asserted Jaster, ‘come let’s take a look.’

 

An hour and a half later they had crossed the treacherous valley, sidestepping the snapping bites of a few disgruntled clawfish, which festered in its swampy trenchbottom. After a short but arduous climb up the other side, Loic stood, sweating, as he ran a hand over the first stone on the corner of the first step of the towering prehistoric pyramid. Age and wisdom seemed to somehow resonate off the very stone. Loic noted the size of these monolithic blocks in amazement and passed the comment to Jaster.

 

‘Some of these building-blocks are enormous,’ the weasel-faced smuggler noted as he stroked one’s smooth-hewn surface. Jaster was opening up a clothbundle, laying out their lunch on it which had been wrapped up inside of it. Lunch was an assortment of local treefruits, rootveg and bushberries, unnamed, unidentified, but Jaster knew them all, which were safe to eat, and which were not, ‘all fruit is edible,’ he would say, ‘but some fruit is only edible once!’ Jaster informed Loic of what he knew of the pyramid as they devoured their multicoloured snacks, which flowed with exotic juices down their mouths and hands, dying their skins bright purples and reds.

 

‘Hmmm, yeah,’ sniffed Jaster Durane as he swallowed a mouthful of yellow berries, ‘I’ve studied this strange monument for many nights in the past, and the more you learn about it, the more enigmatic it becomes. For example, the biggest block I could find and measure, was in excess of some 20 feet high, so,’ he paused to pick a pip from his teeth, ‘could weigh anything up to a hundred tons or more! Furthermore, they are hewn from a type of stone called lavenderstone, which changes colour, but the only source for this stone is a quarry on the other side of the planet. So somehow they’ve transported it thousands of miles, in an age supposedly preceding modern technology, then they’ve lifted them all up into this shape here, and fitted them, loosefitting, no calcite-cement, to within a thousandth of a degree of accuracy!’ He paused to pop another berry into his mouth.

 

‘The big question,’ Jaster continued, ‘is how, when there was supposed to be no sentient species out here at that time, did whoever achieved this, transport these immense stones such vast distances, and hoist them so precisely into place? The whole structure seems to be astronomically-aligned too, and contains all sorts of sacred geometry.’ Loic pondered Jaster’s intriguing information as he shovelled a green leafy vegetable into his bearded mouth and savoured its salty, piquant taste.

 

‘There’s only two ways this could have happened,’ declared the disgraced smuggler, chewing thoughtfully. Jaster cocked a quizzical eyebrow at his companion and awaited a response with bated breath. ‘Giants,’ said Loic, ‘there must be a race of giants hereabouts, such as those that inhabit the Vagadarr System, living-stone giants they have there, said to be as big as mountains!’

 

‘If there were any such species hereabouts Loic, I’m sure I would have noticed them, or somebody would have mentioned them by now.’ Scoffed Jaster, picking a berry seed from his beard and flicking it away.

 

‘Okay then, the force.’

 

‘What?’

 

‘The force must have been used, to transport the stones, to put them in place, Jedi powers, levitation. Yes, Jedis must have built this monument, maybe it’s imbued with the force.’

 

‘Possibly,’ mused Jaster, ‘though the Jedis weren’t this far out from The Core that long back in time, but who knows, it’s a mystery for sure.’

 

‘Have you ever been inside?’

 

‘I don’t know if there even is an inside, is it hollow, or solid? I cannot find an entrance and even if I did, whoever-built-it probably has it cursed at worst, boobytrapped at best! Only a fool would go poking about in ancient tombs or temples or whatever-they-may-be!’

 

‘Let’s climb it then.’

 

‘Ha!’ Cackled the ginger-haired recluse, abruptly. ‘Are you mad? My old bones won’t get me up there, I’m already exhausted from the trek here. If you want to climb it, go ahead, Old Jaster will wait here and digest my meal and watch the moons rise.’

 

‘Maybe you’re right, it is awfully tall!’ Loic dismissed the idea and joined his friend seated on the first step of the mighty stone structure. ‘Do you have any of that lunaweed you harvested last season left?’ Jaster cast Loic an impish smile with a twinkle of the eye, as he produced a small leaf from his robe’s recesses. They chewed the lunaweed and watched the double moons rise as its delirious effects took hold of their senses, enveloping them in fits of laughter with intermittent flights of euphoria.

Once they had sobered up again, an hour later, they set up a makeshift camp for the night at the foot of the enigmatic pyramid. The great monolith seemed to glow slightly in the dark, as if bound by some unseen energy, some mystical force. They set a fire and put some water to boil which Jaster Durane mixed with ground-up vinebeans to produce a hot beverage which caused a pleasant drowsiness in the consumer. As they supped their steaming-hot drinks carefully, Loic asked Jaster about his background, and about his icy winterbound homeplanet.

 

‘What’s to tell,’ said Jaster, dreamily, as he prepared to doze, ‘I was born a prince of the planet Csilla, of the Royal House of Elgoid. My home is a snowball floating in space, a frigid freezing world of the Unknown Regions. When I was the edge of seventeen years old, I wasn’t expecting to inherit the crown for at least another few decades, my father was only in his twenties when I had been born, he was still young-ish and healthy when he died, seventeen years later, he had a few more decades rule in him yet.’

 

'How did he die?' Asked Loic. Jaster looked wistfully at the firelight, flashing flames cavorted in his black pupils as the eyes remembered, they peered sightlessly back into the crawling mists of his memories.

 

‘My father died unexpectedly, his royal barge crashed one day, a malfunction they said, no suspicious circumstances. Suddenly the crown was thrust upon me, I was never suited to it, I never wanted to rule, I just wanted to travel the galaxy, explore distant planets and moons. No, my two younger brothers were much more suited to the position, they craved it in fact, but we couldn’t change centuries of tradition, so I had to accept the responsibility.’ He paused to flick a branch onto the fire and drain the last of his nightcap.

 

‘So I left, I came here, and that’s that. I’m much happier here than I would’ve been there, without a doubt, they can keep their kilted kings and crumbling castles, I prefer this, it’s a lot warmer for a start, and certainly a lot less responsibility!’ He gestured around him to the darkening wilderness of the surrounding forests and mountains.

 

They spent some time gazing at the stars which pinpricked into view in the night sky one-by-one. Loic watched a small point of distant light, a pale blue dot, become visible, in a faraway galaxy, and he turned to Jaster and asked, ‘do you think there are galaxies out there where evil doesn’t exist? I mean, do you think other galaxies have evils as bad as the Empire in them?’

 

‘Evil must exist, there cannot be light without dark.’

 

‘I think if people, evil people, like the Empire, genocidal despots, destroyers-of-worlds and the ilk… If those people imbibed some of that dimeth…erm, stuff, you found, they couldn’t remain on the dark side, not in the face of such an enlightening, beautiful, spiritually-awakening journey, could they?’

 

‘Maybe,’ mused Jaster, ‘the ego is a very powerful thing.’

 

‘But what about a superstrong dose, like many times what we took that night, when it made us force-sensitive, what would happen if…’

 

Loic was roused from his meditative remembering as a door whoosed open and Bossk entered the cargohold, his foul stench preceded him. Paying no heed to the smuggler he approached the cobalt-skinned Maax, who was filing his long nails with an air of superiority, an unusual attitude to have around one as ferocious and terrifying as the Trandoshan, but the majordomo seemed unruffled by the burly bounty hunter.

 

‘I must sleep,’ Bossk informed the Chiss in a husky whisper, ‘I will arise when we exit hyperspace, hit the alarm if you need to wake me for anything.’ Maax just nodded curtly and continued his manicure. ‘Keep an eye on this one,’ croaked Bossk, with a flick of his forked tongue. And with that, the coldblooded reptile slunk off to his heatmat and basking lamp, to get some rest and restore his body temperature to its comfortable setting.

 

After some time, and once he was satisfied that they would not be disturbed, the Chiss stood up from his stool, and, looking at Loic for the first time since they boarded the ship, he approached the bars. ‘You’re a pickpocket,’ he whispered through the green, shimmering vibrobars, ‘so you must have a secret pocket of some sort, one that is undetectable by a simple patdown, correct?’ Loic just observed the blue alien angrily and suspiciously through slit eyes and said nothing.

 

‘Nevermind, I assume the answer is yes, do you still have the laser-cutter you used on the bars at the palace?’ Loic’s heart sank sorrowfully, the Chiss somehow not only knew about his safepocket but also about its fucking contents. The laser-cutter was useless against vibrobars, but it would serve to reopen Loic’s surgical wound and remove the bomb. Being a multifunctional medi-tool it would also serve to cauterise the wound and replace the stitching, so nobody was any-the-wiser. He had only been waiting for a moment of privacy to implement the first steps of his plan, but some-fucking-how this blueskinned bastard was a few steps ahead of him!

 

‘Just kill me,’ whined Loic, ‘I’m through trying, just end it now. Just fucking put a blastershot in my brain, please.’

 

‘Listen,’ said Maax, ignoring Loic’s despondent whimpers, ‘here’s what you’re going to do. Remove the detonator then stitch yourself back up. I’ll plant the device on this ship, when the bounty hunter is a safedistance away and he presses the remote-device to detonate the bomb designed to eliminate Okkra, he will detonate only himself. Meanwhile, I will rescue you from the Hutt lord. Understand? You just need to hold out till then, I know you’ve been through so much, but here is the light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel.’

 

‘Why,’ asked Loic, ‘why would you do this? I don’t understand.’

 

‘It pays to have friends in highplaces,’ replied the Chiss. Loic just fixed him with a puzzled expression. ‘His Royal Highness, The King, His Exalted Majesty,’ Loic still stared blankly, the Chiss sighed, ‘Jaster Durane of the House of Elgoid, of Sacred Csilla.’ Loic startled at this new information.

 

‘But… Jaster… He’s not…’

 

‘Blue? No. of course not, much like the accursed Sarkraa, he is an albino. The prophecies said a white-skinned, red-haired Chiss would be the mightiest ruler of his people that the Galaxy would ever see. But alas, the Chosen One absconded.’ He glanced at Loic who still looked bewildered. ‘Nevertheless, I am still bound in his service. He got a message to me some time ago, pre-empting your imprisonment at the hands of Sarkraa, he had me positioned there in her vile service, I’ve been through a lot to be here for you. But at last, here you are.’

 

A new hope burst forth in Loic’s battered chest cavity, beneath the gnawing pain that indicated he had a broken rib or two, a wonderful feeling of relief washed over him, as a way out of this sordid mess finally presented itself, and an escape plan began to formulate. The last-ditch attempt, the finale, do or die Loic, do or die.

 

Fuck.

 

The Hound’s Tooth, a beacon of agony, drenched in misery; for the enchanters of Sacred Csilla would oft say that a man leaves little pieces of himself wherever he travels, little echoes of his soul song that float off him like speckles of dust. Maax could sense these echoes, prickling the edges of his awareness like scurrying insects, unutterable, torturous, soul-jarring vibes, forever encased in this monstrous ship. The cargo hold was void of comfort, but there was a small viewport on one wall. Maax gazed into the nacreous chaos flux of hyperspace, an iridescent veil masking the nebulous infinity of the void. When he was a youngster, his biggest fear was space itself. The enormity of the universe was wondrously petrifying. With horror he imagined floating in space, disembodied, being driven mad by the vastness, the opposite of claustrophobia.

 

The smuggler was curled in his wretched little cell, unconscious, his sweaty face milk-white. The removal of the detonator from his insides was an unwelcome, gruesome, and delicate task, but it was done, and the smuggler slept. The small man had endured much. What madness had driven him to try and assassinate Okkra? The act of a desperate man, a man so twisted and narcotized to have shattered his eggshell-grip on reality. A man who became lost to all but danger, deceit, and despair. To the damned, tumbling into the seductive abyss of spice addiction was as irresistible as an ardent lover’s velvet embrace. What had his rightful king seen in such a man to warrant such elaborately-designed rescue plans? Though, it was not his job to ponder the why, but rather only the execution of those plans.

 

Maax – of course not his real name – had infiltrated Sarkraa’s palace with ease. He undermined the previous majordomo at every turn while cementing his importance in Sarkraa’s circle. When his predecessor had been fed to the Nexu, Maax had been the only choice to fill the vacuum. It was an unusual assignment to be sure. Maax had infiltrated institutions which dwarf back-water spice-syndicates, from governments hellbent on bloody internecinal civil wars, to corrupt bureaucracies, and even the galactic Empire itself. He was a spy, shock troop, diplomat, assassin, saboteur, ghost… whatever he needed to be. And what he needed to be now, was patient.

 

The Chiss were the galaxy’s hidden hand, working from the shadows, their aims shrouded from outsiders, forever weaving intricate, delicate webs of intrigue and subterfuge. There was no potential gain to seeing what else the ship had to offer, only the likelihood of a torture chamber and the singularly terrifying prospect of Bossk finding him snooping around. Maax had been trained to master and mask fear, he had braved peril many times and faced long odds alone on alien worlds, but he knew the Trandoshan would make a peculiarly formidable foe.

 

Bossk was intelligent for his species, possessing a serpentine cunning, utterly ruthless, skilled in battle, physically indomitable. Bounty hunters were a-dime-a-dozen the galaxy over, only a scant percentage of them were decent hunters, fewer still were top tier. Bossk made the cut and more, he was uncommonly successful among the uncommonly successful. His reputation was fearsome and legendary.

 

That was why Okkra had to know Bossk had collected the bounty on Loic Monerat, Bossk always collected. He had blasted his way past a host of Okkra’s henchmen specifically to collect that bounty. The Hutt would then want to know why Sarkraa had not killed the smuggler. It was Maax’s job to convince him that she was gifting Loic to him as a gesture of goodwill – to highlight that the smuggler’s failed assassination attempt was not sanctioned. As majordomo, Maax’s presence would lend weight to this claim. He would assuage Okkra with words of peace, of desire for uninterrupted business, and Okkra would listen. Why? Because he would want to believe. He knew Sarkraa had more muscle behind her, more ships, but prolonged strife between them would benefit neither. Profits would disintegrate, mercenaries would flit from one camp to the other, or disappear altogether seeking easier-gotten spoils. He would throw in some fanciful talk of fruitful joint criminal ventures to come, and greed would sway Okkra’s spice-addled mind.

 

Getting Loic into the palace would be easy, getting him out was another matter. And moreover, there was the Bossk situation. Not even Maax was allowed into the private antechamber in Sarkraa’s palace as she had haggled with Bossk. The increased bounty the Trandoshan had demanded had been the easiest thing to cede, but why had Bossk allowed Sarkraa to corrupt his mind until it eventually unravelled. They both wanted Okkra dead! If the incendiary device failed to kill him, Bossk was the backup plan. Who knew what exorbitant rate they had agreed on for Okkra’s murder? Afterwards, Maax counselled Sarkraa that he was better carrying out the mission alone - that Bossk was too much of a wildcard - but she had insisted, stubbornly and foolishly. For there was, of course, the small matter of Bossk and Okkra’s recent enmity.

 

The likelihood of the whole situation descending into bedlam was an itchy trigger finger away. Bossk was to pretend to be there to end hostilities, a peace offering, accompanied by Sarkraa’s own majordomo, to vouchsafe for an end to the madness the smuggler had caused. It was conceivable, Bossk was a valuable asset to both Hutt crime syndicates and a seasoned-killer like him going rogue was no good for anyone. Bossk too would benefit, for he could get back to working for Okkra again. On the surface Okkra would not see anything too out of the ordinary. Fallouts and feuds between such villains were commonplace, usually Okkra would just hire killers, but few would be daring enough to hunt Bossk. And if Okkra was actively seeking Bossk’s death who is to say the Trandoshan would not eliminate him first? Some bounty hunters were simply too damned dangerous. It was delicately poised.

 

Why the hell Bossk was wanting to go the palace at all was the biggest source of consternation for the Chiss. Why risk it? The detonator could be activated from the safety of the Hound’s Tooth. Maax had - more than once - offered to go alone, drop the smuggler in Okkra’s clutches, and return to give the signal to Bossk. The stubborn brute had always refused, saying he wanted to look in Okkra’s eyes. It did not make sense.

Ultimately, Maax just had to rescue Loic, but Bossk would be watching him closely. Maax had acted offended when Bossk had not permitted him to bring weapons onto the Hound’s Tooth, ‘you’re coming to talk, not fight,’ the bounty hunter had said. Maxx’s protestations were cut short by a menacing snarl. And so it was, his mission grew more convoluted at each turn. He hoped the smuggler was worth it.

 

Loic slowly returned to consciousness, voices muffled by his drowsiness became clearer and much more frightful as his wits returned. Bossk and the Chiss were arguing in the cargo hold – about him no less. ‘We can’t allow him to talk,’ Bossk hissed.

‘I will not see you rip out his tongue,’ Maax said.

 

‘Why? He could give us up at any moment. He has nothing to lose?’

 

‘Okkra will want to hear his screams. A mute man, well, there is little fun in that.’

 

‘Stand aside,’ Bossk warned, ‘I’ll tear it out myself.’ The Trandoshan loomed over the Chiss threateningly. Violence was imminent. The Chiss stood his ground looking into Bossk’s saffron eyes.

 

‘This is your ship, bounty hunter. But it is not your mission. It is Sarkraa’s. I am Sarkraa’s voice. I am majordomo. I will not have this wretch tongueless – Okkra is not the fool you take him for, he will sense something amiss. I will not risk it. There must be another way, gag him if you must, or mask him.’ It was a bold gamble on the Chiss’s part. Bossk could break his neck like a toothpick, but the bluster paid off.

 

‘So be it,’ Bossk relented, ‘we will be landing soon. A hangar has been assigned to us.’ Bossk moved to return to the cockpit.

 

‘Yes, Sarkraa has sent word. We will be received and taken to the palace. Though I still do not know why you wish to attend? You are better remaining in the ship. Okkra may still harbour ill-feeling, you said so yourself. I will return once the smuggler…’ With terrifying speed, the Trandoshan dashed forward, his smooth black claws tearing the garish robes off the Chiss and slamming him hard against the bulkhead. Maax’s feet dangled helplessly as he desperately fought for purchase against Bossk’s iron grip.

 

‘Enough of your talk! I am tired of your pretty words!’ Bossk snapped his fangs a hair’s breadth from Maax’s nose then tossed him onto the floor. ‘Make preparations for landing. And see that your pet is silenced.’ The Trandoshan stormed through to the cockpit.

 

Maax got to his feet rubbing his throat thoughtfully. Loic waited for him to regain his composure. The Chiss approached the bars, his voice a hoarse whisper, ‘looks like our strategy will need to be modified as we go.’ Loic could see a deep anger boiling behind his red eyes, and no little resentment. Loic understood, the Chiss was dutybound to try and save him, but he did not have to like it, and he did not have to condone it.

 

‘What’s our play?’ Loic asked fearfully.

 

‘I had hoped to convince our friend to stay on the damn ship. As far as he would be aware, I would drop you off and return to give him the signal. Then he would detonate his own ship with him on it. But he insists on accompanying us. I don’t think he trusts me.’

‘Maybe he just doesn’t know you as well as I do.’

 

Ignoring the sally, Maax said, ‘now we take you to Okkra, once Bossk leaves the palace I will spring you. We will not have much time I fear, but I will be an honoured guest and will be able to move freely. With the revelry and celebrations going on hopefully it should not be too difficult.’

 

 

‘What if Okkra decides to kill me right away, or I’m not taken to a cell and thrown into a pit instead?’ Loic offered tremulously.

 

‘Then you die, but that is where I come in, it will be my job to keep you alive. If Okkra wants to make a show of you there and then I will need to fabricate an excuse as to why you should be kept alive for questioning.’

 

‘It’s not much of plan!’

 

‘It’s the best one we’ve got. And I have been playing this game longer than you know. Bossk has scuppered…’ The noise of the engines slowing broke the Chiss’ train of thought, they were about to land.

Loic had never expected to return to Florrum, he thought, ruefully. An arid desert planet, full of scavengers and thieves. Whoever the original inhabitants once were they had long ago been chased away or murdered by pirates and criminals who were fleeing the law. It was a perfect nest for Okkra, it was situated far enough out on the rim to avoid too much unwanted attention from the authorities who travelled regularly through the common galactic-hyperspace circuits.

 

Last time Loic was here he had barely gotten out alive. Part of him was surprised to hear Okkra was lavishing himself with a birthday celebration on Florrum; the Hutt lord had become increasingly more reclusive and paranoid. But a show of strength – especially after Loic’s failed assassination attempt – would quell any talk of weakness. For Hutt lords who ruled through fear, it was crucial to maintain a façade of might, would-be usurpers grew like weeds.

 

Maax had fitted him with chains which attached to the binders at both his ankles and wrists. Half his face was now covered in a rusty, metallic mask that bit maddeningly into his skin, making speech impossible and his breathing laboured. The crude mask stank, who, or what, had been the previous owner Loic could only guess. ‘It’s better this than Bossk taking your tongue,’ Maax had insisted. The cargo doors opened and Bossk gestured for them to descend the ramp.

 

The hangar Bossk had secured was not empty. There was a small craft of a triangular design Loic had never encountered. A door slid open from its side and out stepped another Trandoshan in black body armour. Bossk approached the newcomer and they spoke briefly in their garbled language. Maax’s eyes met Loic’s for a swift glance, Loic thought he saw shock and disconcertion in that gaze.

 

The mysterious Trandoshan was even larger than Bossk, though he was blind in one eye, the bulging orb the colour of curdled milk. That side of his reptilian face was blackened by burn marks and horribly scarred. He, like Bossk, was carrying enough firepower to hold off an entire battery of stormtroopers. What the hell is Bossk up to? Bossk called to them, ‘we have transport outside.’ And so, they left the hangar, into a steaming sandcruiser driven by a sour-faced Snivvian. The battle-scarred Trandoshan remained behind.

 

Loic sat upfront, next to the diminutive pig-faced Snivvian, who studiously ignored him. Maax and Bossk sat side-by-side in the backseat. It took a while to negotiate their way through the bustling lawless township. Pirates and mercenaries from every lowborn-race ever discovered went about their nefarious business. Drunkenness and brawling took place at every turn, half-clothed children played in the Bantha dung with the dogs, while behind, tawdry, veil-painted whores plied their trade in their dingy booths. Once out in the open desert the Snivvian increased the speed. ‘How long to the palace?’ Maax shouted over the din of the engine.

 

‘Not far,’ the Snivvian grunted.

Loic had to screw up his eyes for protection against the displaced red sand. It was late in the day and the sun was at its weakest, though it beat down mercilessly on Loic’s bald bonce, frazzling his skin. There was nothing to see but oceans of sand dunes, and a harsh, cloudless sky. The planet’s weighty gravity was not best-suited to humans, Loic’s stomach churned. ‘I didn’t know you were expecting a guest at our landing.’ He heard Maax quiz the Trandoshan.

 

‘Another job,’ was the curt reply. Loic’s accursed mask was worrying his skin. He tried to bring his face towards his cuffed hands to adjust it. Bossk demanded him to ‘be still’ in his customary beastly fashion. How the hell did it all come to this? Thought Loic wretchedly.

 

The Snivvian was true to his word, they were soon approaching their destination. What began as an inconsequential speck on the horizon, soon grew into an enormous sun-streaked mesa. Long ago, before the Hutts seized ownership, some ancient race had hewn deep into the rock itself, it may have served as their base or temple, now it was a holiday home for Okkra and his murderous syndicate.

 

Loic let his eyes run up the steep, jagged lines of the escarpment towards the flat top of the isolated butte where a ship blasted off almost vertically, the engines leaving a fleeting tail of smoke and fire. It would be the perfect place for Okkra to land, not too far to slither. There were likely many ships stationed up there, Okkra’s trusted would not be required to land miles away in the township. Perhaps that was where he could find means of escape. If he ever got that far.

 

The sandcruiser skirted the edges of a winding crevasse, its true depth hidden by perpetual shadow. Loic had the curious urge to plumb those depths and leap from the cruiser into the chasm, but the cruiser coming to a halt dispelled his macabre fancy. A band of fearsome, lupine-faced Shistavanen stood by waiting for them to alight, they openly bared their canine teeth as ropey saliva collected on their matted black fur. Okkra had certainly beefed up his security, few races were more spine-chillingly intimidating. Bossk was unfazed. The bounty hunter leaped from the backseat towards them as Maax pulled Loic from the cruiser.

 

‘No weapons inside.’ The common tongue clearly a great effort to verbalise. The Shistavanen’s clawed hands twitched at his side, he was unarmed, though the bevy behind him all had blasters and rifles.

 

‘Weapons inside,’ Bossk gurgled, taking a step forward.

 

Loic watched with grim curiosity as the inevitable happened. The Shistavanen reacted with a flash of movement, daggerlike claws glinting in the final lament of the dying sunlight. Before the blow could land Bossk drove the butt of his rifle over its snout. It fell to the ground with a growl, and when it moved to pounce once more, Bossk brought his arm down like a guillotine on its collar bone.

 

The Shistavanen yelped piteously and curled its arms to protect its feral face. The rest of the posse had their weapons trained on Bossk, but with their leader whining on the red sand, they eyed one another hesitantly. They had obviously been sent to receive Bossk – and they would be all-too-aware of his lethal reputation –something had to give. Had Okkra really been naïve enough to expect Bossk to give over his weapons? It was probably worth a try, Loic mused. Maax capitalised on the indecision.

 

‘We are here, as esteemed guests, on most-pressing business, concerning Okkra and Okkra alone. It would be an insult to ask any Trandoshan to give up his arms, more-so one such as Bossk. Accompany us if you must, but I assure my friend here has no ill intent.’ His hypnotic voice smooth and mellifluous was never raised.

 

‘Come with us,’ one of the beastmen spat angrily.

 

‘You’re not much of a negotiator, are you?’ Maax asked Bossk quietly. Loic stepped forward, if only to avoid Bossk manhandling him. The Shistavanen flanked them as they started towards the great rune-etched ramp that led into the hollowed mesa. Loic stole a last regretful glance over the vast chasm to the setting sun, which spilled its orange guts over the vista as though it had been punctured. It was time to face his fate.

Up on a blustery buff, some distance away, the black-scaled, dark-armoured, battlescarred-Trandoshan, Krang, lay supine at the crest of a pointed rock crag. He peered down the telescopic scope of his E11s sniper rifle with his one good eye. Before him, the arid desertland stretched out infinitely; the sun let forth one last perishing plasma burst and then dipped behind the horizon leaving a crimson-fingered sky in its wake which would soon plunge to black.

 

Across the acid flats and sulphuric geysers of this infertile planet blew a hot zephyr, and the coldblooded lizard absorbed it and relished it. He knew it would get very cold in the desert after sundown, but he had his heatvest attached, below his onyx armour with the white cloak and gilded edges, the vest served to keep his temperature balanced but was also stabproof and relatively-blasterproof.

 

He had made his way to Okkra’s in a separate transport from Loic and co. and now he merely watched, awaiting communication from his only nephew, Bossk. Krang would have had more nephews and nieces, but Bossk had eaten all his siblings upon hatching from their eggs. Krang smiled at the touching memory.

 

A movement to his left, the unmistakeable undulating of a sidewinder as it made its way across the dunes. Krang’s long limb flashed out with alarming alacrity and seized the serpent around the base of the neck, just behind the triangular, hooded head. Using one of his sharp claws he slit the beast down its long black and white-striped belly, and in one quick yank he removed its entire skin and tossed it aside.

 

A smattering of blood soaked into the golden sand and left a dark patch. He sat back again and chewed and sucked thoughtfully on his newly-acquired snack. He watched with his working eye as another ship folded its wings and floated down to the plateau atop Okkra’s current residence, landing softly.

 

Licking the snakeblood from his lips with a darting blue tongue, he hefted his huge rifle again and his beady yellow eye looked through the scope. The white ship looked Chiss in design - this was confirmed when he saw a small group of the cobalt-skinned humanoids emerge from it, to be greeted by a droid, and enter the Hutt’s domain through the roof entrance. More revellers for the celebrations no doubt, ships had been coming and going all day.

 

Krang had been on stakeout monitoring the Hutt for the past two nights, he had a fairly accurate bodycount of the place’s occupants in his head, maybe a hundred, or slightly less, were currently inside. He sat back and waited patiently, observing, with a stillness rarely achieved by anything other than a lizard stalking prey. The day faded to black quite suddenly, as the last of the sunset’s lingering colours leeched from the sky and the stygian reptile blended into the shadows seamlessly.

Inside the venue, Loic was being led down a cramped entry corridor lit by a string of electric bulbs overhead. The stench and bulk of Bossk created a wall in front of him, and Maax sleeked behind them, his Aeiensilk robes whispering, as they entered Okkra’s temporary desert realm. Two wolflike Shistavanen led the way; balls of scraggly black fur adorned with red scars, bulging muscles, and bristling with teeth and claws, and packing a musk almost as overpowering as the Trandoshan’s in these close quarters.

 

The tension was palpable, not least for Loic, who had been passed around Hutts lately like the last hit left in a spiceden full of desperate junkies. His own gnawing craving for spice had somewhat been drowned by the more pressing matters of the pain he was in, and the bleakness of his current situation - but he would still take a hit right now, he would love a hit at this moment, it might numb him to the reality of his terrible fate.

 

Still, there was optimism, maybe this Chiss could pull it off for him. If Jaster trusted him then Loic trusted him. The devil-faced smuggler reflected on his rotten luck of the last forty-eight hours and whether it was about to change for the better or the worse. Had it been forty-eight hours? He couldn’t tell, he had no way of knowing how long he had been unconscious on the Hound’s Tooth the first time, or how long he had been anaesthetised during his surgery at Sarkraa’s, or how long he had been out on the return journey, when the Chiss had guided him in removing the bomb. He didn’t want to think about it, but the memory vomited itself into the basin of his thoughts in disturbing vivid technicolour.

 

‘This is going to hurt, but I did bring something that might help.’ Maax tossed a small brown leaf wrapped in paper through the gaps in the vibrobars and Loic took it in cupped hands.

 

‘What is this?’

 

‘A plant, from my homeplanet, known to dull pain. Chew it for a half a minute, spit it out, count to thirty, then you should feel a numbness spreading through you.’ Drugbent Loic didn’t have to be told twice to consume a narcotic, and he did exactly as he was instructed. After a couple of minutes, a tingling sensation was propagating through his body and then a prickly numbness took hold.

 

‘Right,’ instructed the Chiss, ‘now listen very carefully, you need to quickly open the cut and, without hesitating, you must reach inside, feel around, locate the device, and slowly remove it, very slowly. And then you must use the tool to cauterise and stitch yourself, but you must act quickly, for a variety of reasons; bloodloss, the painkiller doesn’t last long, or Bossk might…’

 

‘Right, right, okay, I get it, thanks,’ said Loic, testily. He wanted to get this over with, he wasn’t planning on dilly-dallying, he didn’t relish the prospect of self-surgery, but he relished the prospect of having an explosive in his guts even less, particularly when the detonator was hooked up to an angry Trandoshan! He flicked the tool on and braced himself. Its gossamer-thin orange laser opened his surgical wound neatly, with a hiss and a tendril of smoke, producing a small gulley of red blood which trickled over the smuggler’s trembling hands.

 

Though the plant medicine was masking most of the pain, the sight of it still made Loic almost pass out, he fought against the dizziness and with a deep breath managed to stay conscious. Noting that the power light was flashing on the gadget, indicating it was running out of charge, he had to act fast, faster!

 

He plunged his probing fingers into the squelching laceration, and he grimaced and grunted and sweated as he prodded around inside, blood bubbled out and formed a pink froth. The Chiss watched, almost unemotional, but Loic thought he saw a slight twitch in that steely cerulean expression now and then.

 

After half a minute he located the small-but-powerful marble-sized explosive and, taking a deep breath, he pulled it free. He blacked-out for a nanosecond, but the vibrobars quickly shocked him back awake as he drooped over. Clearing his groggy head with a shake, he switched the tool’s operating mode and rapidly cauterised the gash, sealing the blood in. Luckily, Loic’s fresh stains simply blended in with the already bloodsoaked floor of his tiny circular cell, unnoticeable after a few minutes drying. The gizmo fired several stitches in to Loic’s stomach, he prayed to whatever gods were listening that it didn’t run out of power before completing the job, wincing with every suture going in.

 

The very second Loic had put the last stitch in, he lost consciousness, remaining upright and crosslegged, because of the electric bars, but out-cold nonetheless. So, it was up to the Chiss to slide his long, clever fingers through, and retrieve the tool and the liberated bomb. He stashed these things in his robes, washed his hands of Loic’s blood, and returned to the stool, where he meditated, preparing himself for the turbulent task ahead, focusing his energies, relaxing his tense muscles.

 

Loic could feel the stitches in his stomach stinging and straining as he was briskly propelled through Okkra’s underground tunnel. How long have I been without a blaster!? He found himself wondering. Probably the longest time ever in his life! He had been born with a blaster in his hand, his dad may have failed to fashion Loic into a soldier, but he did mould a perfect marksman.

 

The smuggler from Coruscant felt a pang as he remembered the custom blaster, inherited from his dead father, which he had lost gambling, what seemed like a lifetime ago now, but was only a few nights. He had obtained a blaster very briefly in Sarkraa’s with Buru, but Bossk had stymied that rather quickly. It seemed every turn Loic tried to make that treacherous Trandoshan was there to block his way, all the way back to training that crossbow on Okkra on Eriadu. If only he’d made that shot, if only Bossk hadn’t found him. How had he known I was there!? Someone must have informed him somehow. Loic had no more time to ponder this as Okkra’s goat-faced majordomo appeared at the end of the steep entrance tunnel.

 

Loic recognised the species immediately, an Abednedo. A common humanoid mammalian species. It had an elongated head with protruding eyes at either side, dangling mouth tendrils that flapped and wriggled when it spoke, and two slitted fleshy nostrils that huffed and snorted, dribbling mucus constantly. This one’s flesh was a tan colour, his scraggly head hair a wintry grey. He was dressed in the customary religious garb of his species; brown robes, khaki cloak, and open-toed boots from which three bulbous toes protruded. On the majordomo’s head he wore the traditional fez of his kind, and in his bony hand he clutched an electroripper staff. The Abednedo approached the Chiss and they both bowed to one another respectfully.

 

Like any mafia, the Hutt clan had to have their rules, laws, and governance, to prevent it from descending into chaos. Though the Hutts squabbled a lot, they did answer to the Hutt Council, and they more-often-than-not respected their own personal laws, beliefs, and codes of conduct, even if they had no regard whatsoever for any other species’ similar traditions. One golden rule was nobody fucked with a Hutt’s majordomo. These people were appointed positions of great power, they were considered to be the ambassador of their chief, the Voice of God so-to-speak, and could even negotiate on their master’s behalf. A slight against a Hutt’s majordomo was an insult against that Hutt themself, those who were assigned this influential position were treated gingerly, and with the greatest respect, at all times.

 

There wasn’t much discussion, the majordomos paid their respect to one another and then they were all guided into a huge hallway, which acted as a foyer, and told to wait there with the Shistavanen. As always in times of imminent death, for some reason, Loic’s mind focused intensely on the minutiae. He stared upwards at the spacious room’s grand, ancient designs which flowed across the walls in veins of gold, describing mystical journeys of rebirth and resurrection it seemed.

 

From the outside, Okkra’s abode had just looked like some steep cliffs and a sandy plateau with some obscure intermittent hieroglyphs here and there. Inside however, once through the roughly-hewn earthy tunnel, was a completely different story. Whatever race had occupied this space in previous millennia had obviously venerated it as some sort of sacrosanct area, perhaps a temple of some kind, perhaps a palace for initiation ceremonies, something special anyway, because the architecture was truly divine.

 

Similar in its grandeur to the pyramid Loic had seen on Draethos, it had the same kind of attention to detail and mathematical preciseness, but a completely different style. Whoever had occupied this complex had obviously been obsessed with, maybe worshipped, a species called the Columi, long extinct, but which Loic recognised the bug-eyed, large-brained, short-bodied characteristics of from his history studies. In the sculptures adorning the walls of Okkra’s dwelling the Columi’s orb-like gaze stared down from every corner and crevice, carved from stone, but with gemlike eyeballs that felt like they were really watching you. Lichen-covered goddesses adorned mighty pillars that supported an ornately-painted ceiling, now chipped and worn and partly-collapsed, but still radiant in its splendour and cosmic in its scope.

 

Carvings of celestial Twi’lek dancers lined the walls, insects and lizards were sporadically sculpted into the designs too, as well as creatures Loic did not recognise, possibly native to Florrum. He gawped through his mask at giant, stone-carved, two-headed serpents which coiled round the columns, and strange six-legged, triple-humped beasts etched into mosaics, the frescoes of which had long-since fragmented and left only bits and pieces of imagery behind. Everywhere were hieroglyphs in a dead language which probably nobody alive today could decipher. Sometimes Loic could make out the shape of saucerlike starships among the symbols, and sometimes humanoid sticklike figures, a few of the glyphs resembled constellations or starcharts which were familiar to him, but nothing else was recognisable, just obscure alien symbols.

 

In the distance, Okkra’s party was in full swing, they could hear it, extremely muffled through the walls which were thick and solid, so nothing specific could be made out - just the inkling of some great feast or celebration somewhere in the distance - murmurs and vibrations. Bossk stood and eyed the Shistavanen ominously, and they returned the gesture. They were not happy with Bossk’s treatment of their packleader, but they would not attack a consort of another Hutt’s majordomo without permission from their own commander, and certainly not when that consort is the fearsome, famed bounty hunter Bossk Craddosk.

 

Maax, as usual, seemed unphased, he was calmly inspecting the statues of a pair of Columi, depicted holding bowls on their large round heads, with apparent keen interest; but he was obviously acutely aware of his surroundings, the Chiss had that aura of omniscience somehow. The bowl-headed statues he inspected looked like they had been designed to carry fresh water into the underground tunnels at some point long ago, before this entire planet dried up into one big giant dustbowl.

 

Loic caught a glance of himself in a cracked and cobwebbed reflecting surface, what a miserable sight he was to himself. His Correlian trousers and his expensive boots had held out well, scraped and torn but holding together, apart from that, he was in rags; topless, his xylophone ribs exposed, his pale flesh was oil-smeared, bloodsoaked, and vomit-flecked. He shuddered as he looked at the ugly jagged scar across the side of his potbelly. The dirty-beige mask they had put on his face only completed the look, giving him the appearance of some insane, cannibalistic criminal, in need of immediate muzzling.

 

This had definitely been the roughest week of his life, he just hoped it wouldn’t be the last week of his life, or if it was, he prayed at least for a quick death, not slow torture at the hands of a hedonistic Hutt, please gods, no.

 

The doors opposite the ones they had entered, and which the majordomo had vanished through, swayed open again, and the Abednedo was back, accompanied by a protocol droid and two more Shistavanen, an orange-furred one and a shit-furred one. The new guards bared their teeth as they entered the room and their heckles rose, low growls, gnashing their fangs. It occurred to Loic that they were speaking in their own tongue, some unutterable canine language, they were probably talking about Bossk, weighing him up against the four of them.

 

‘His Distended Highness Okkra will see you now’, announced the ram-faced majordomo, and beckoned for them to follow. For the umpteenth time in the smuggler’s rapidly-diminishing life, Bossk grasped Loic by the back of his neck, and with the reptile’s sharp claws digging into his flesh he was shoved forward. He stumbled, fell, scuffed his knee, then got back to his feet and limped out the room pathetically. As he ungracefully exited, he stole a glance at the dragon-shaped golden carvings on the doubledoors as they passed through, noting his tear-rimmed blue eyes in the reflection of the metal, noting the sunburned flesh peeling from his bald scalp, and the bags under his eyes so black above the mask that wrapped around his mouth so tightly he could barely breathe, let alone speak.

 

Okkra had been in a depressed funk the past few days, so to cheer himself up he had decided to go all out for his 776th birthday by hosting a tournament - nothing pleased the big orange slug more than bloodsports. He had crimelords from local sectors select the best fighters from among their slaves and each one was pitted against the other, one after another, in battles to the death, until one remained standing, that slave would be rewarded with freedom. Some slaves even trained for it, and their owners ensured they were well-fed and well-rested by the time of the battle royal, after all there was a cashprize for the master whose slave was the victor.

 

In the beating heart of Okkra’s murderous mesa was a small amphitheatre, left behind by the original inhabitants, and which served the Hutt and a hundred-or-so of his closest allies and staff as an arena for the day. And it had been a long day, in the morning, after second breakfast, they had pitted wild beasts against each other in the fighting pit and bet on the outcomes. At first lunch, they ate whole roast spitmeats and watched as some of Okkra’s enemies, people who had crossed him or been disloyal, were brought before the Hutt as sacrificial gifts. They were flayed alive while he ate his gravy-covered ribracks and laughed enthusiastically. Then, post-prandially, the prisoners were dismembered and crucified, before finally being set alight to act as torches to illuminate the room, burning cadavers on flaming wooden crosses; a sick, gruesome, circus of death.

 

By late afternoon, the stench of death and burning flesh was so putrid in the small arena, and with the desert heat, that some droids were deployed to sprinkle the place with perfume, but it did very little to mask the obscene stench, which seeped into the fabric of your clothes and soaked into your skin and crawled down your throat, gagging.

 

After pre-supper snacks, Okkra was presented with birthday gifts from his guests. At the foot of his overstuffed auburn belly was piled trinkets and treasures from the galaxy-over; pouches of precious pyronium gems, clothsacks of exotic rainbow-coloured foodspices, overflowing bags of Ahch-To seasalt and Kashyyyk wheat, and barrels of finest Bespin Port, soft fur pelts for rugs, and rare silken materials from distant moons for drapes. The Huttlord drooled and lavished over them all as he slurped greedily from his druglaced punchbowl and sucked on his oversized, opulent hookah, carved from Chammian ivory in the form of a Hutt’s head, no doubt another gift.

 

Plumes of fire erupted sporadically and theatrically into the air from pyros positioned in every corner. A wooden banqueting table lay pregnant with food; fruits, seeds, nuts, and unidentifiable marinaded and cured animal meats from every corner of the Rim Sectors. The crowd writhed and bulged in a riotous rabble, inebriated, bloodthirsty, fights broke out here and there. Gamorrean bouncers tried to maintain order but the crowd was lively and barely-contained. The clamour of voices, the thudding of feet, occasional screams of victims punctuated with whoops of joy from aggressors. Hoots, snorts, whistles and whines of every kind of creature.

 

All manner of scum the galaxy over was crammed into this joint; horned Devaronians leered from alcoves, quarrelsome Quarren rolled dice with lapin-faced Squib. A huge red Massassi loomed over a Sabacc table watching a flock of Geonosians shuffle cards. Even a pair of Trandoshans lurked in the shadowy fringes. The species within this domicile were myriad and heterogenous, every pirate, spicebum, bounty hunter or gangster that was ever affiliated with Okkra’s criminal schemes, and had not been murdered by him yet, was present. Everyone was heavily-armed, and everyone was imbibing narcotic substances and strong liquors.

Sunset meant the beginning of the tournament. Okkra wriggled and convulsed on his perch, surrounded by sycophants and servants, the crimelord licked his grotesque warty lips as the first contestant was brought to the fighting pit. It was a dishevelled wookie, scabrous, clumps of fur missing, a haunted expression on its hairy face. The wookie made short work of the Iktotchi that was thrown in to face it; grabbing the creature by its horns, putting its foot against the chest, and ripping the horns clean out of the Iktotchi’s red-scaled skull as the sufferer screamed and howled. The wookie wasted no time in using the newly-acquired weapons to frantically beat its opponent to death. Okkra guffawed, delighted at the irony of being bludgeoned to death with your own horns.

 

The battered corpse of the wookie’s victim was tossed by its defeater into the baying crowd, where a cluster of Jawas relieved it of its garments, which they scurried off with. The hornless Iktotchi’s naked red body was scooped up and tipped down a stone well to some unseen depths below the arena. A new opponent was shoved in with the victorious wookie, a sullen-looking Dug. Still clutching a horn in each hand, the wookie made that peculiar battlecry they make and rushed to meet its opponent head-on.

 

Okkra was still bellowing a throaty laughter at the demise of the previous entrant, when the main doors opened and his majordomo entered, flanked by the guards. Trailing behind them was the scuttling service droid, the terrible Trandoshan, the cyan-skinned Chiss, and the dismal Monerat, who hobbled forward in his chains and looked at the wild mob with woeful wet eyes. The reek of slaughter invaded his nostrils as it crawled through the breathing slits in his face-covering, the smoke from the fires stung his eyes, the alluring scent of spice pricked his senses, but above all, a cold and familiar feeling of dread settled in the smuggler’s stomach like a lump of Keshirian concrete and loosened his bowels…

 

Okkra’s majordomo padded forward with slow graceful steps, the careful footsteps of a being who seldom hurried. Maax sensed the Abednedo could use that staff of his well, though it was his counterpart’s wits that gave Maax pause. The Chiss had learned what he could about his opposite number before he departed Sarkraa’s palace. Grav Nedi, a dangerous individual apparently, fiercely intelligent, subtle, his sharp mind worth a hundred of Okkra’s thugs. Was he the puppet master behind Okkra’s rapacious business ventures? Like Maax he had not been in his position long, details were scarce. It seemed the vaunted position of majordomo did not yield a high life expectancy.

 

Shutting out the obscene din, the Chiss’s ruby eyes observed the situation; how many heads were awash in the tide of crapulence, possible escape routes, weapons, watchful sober-eyed sharpshooters. There was roaring laughter as Okkra’s unsavoury guests gambled and cheered at the happenings in the area. He let his gaze fall to the fighting pit as he passed by, idly curious to what was the source of such boisterous hilarity. A long-tormented wookie chased a cowardly, strangely-shaped creature who darted hither and tither always seeming to evade capture by inches.

 

It did not happen immediately, but eventually the hall fell as silent as a crypt. Conversations died, cut short mid-sentence, drunken criminals would stop mid cheer and poke their comrades to look at the new arrivals. The change in atmosphere was so palpable, the crowd fortunate enough to be afforded seats in the amphitheatre forgot the wookie and came up for a better view, even the dubiously talented musicians ceased their sonorous dirge. For it was Bossk the bounty hunter, Bossk who had blasted a squad of Okkra’s goons in half. As Maax and his companions moved to Okkra’s dais, the throngs inched slowly behind them, encircling them, none wishing to miss what happened next. Grav Nedi nimbly ascended the stairs and perched at Okkra’s side.

 

‘Maax Da’Viore, majordomo to Sarkraa the Exquisite.’ The Abednedo announced theatrically. Okkra cast his rheumy baneful gaze down upon the newcomers. And what a sight they made: a scarlet-eyed, stern-faced Chiss, his glittering gaudy robes more brazen than even the sight of his vulgar blue skin; their prisoner, the would-be assassin and failed smuggler, Monerat, who stood chained, masked and shivering, and towering behind them the undaunted, troublesome Trandoshan, the aweless Bossk. Maax stepped forth and offered a flashy ostentatious cape-swirling bow.

 

‘Exalted Okkra, I have come here at the behest of your beloved cousin, Sarkraa the Illustrious. She sends depthless tenderness and devotion on this your 776th birthday. She has sent a gift,’ Maax swung his arm towards Loic, ‘the vile and treacherous, Monerat. In her wisdom she ceded that you would devise a more fitting punishment for this cur than even her most audacious cruciation.’

 

Okkra returned the empty platitudes with more of his own, weary of dreary Huttese customs depriving him of important seconds he could instead spend gormandizing. ‘My cherished kinswoman will forever be my heart’s treasure. I thank her for her kindness and wisdom. Now, tell me truly, why does the smuggler still yet live.’ The crimelord, who fancied himself a demigod, asked in Huttese.

 

‘This foolish wretch, a man alone, with no friends and no succour, took it upon himself to weave the vilest of all malefactions,’ Maxx said, and slapped a balled fist into his palm for emphasis, ‘a cowardly attempt to bring harm to you, and the nerve to blame my venerated mistress. The bounty she placed on his head has been honoured though, as a gesture of goodwill she offers him to you, to punish as you see fit.’ Okkra’s heavy eyelids narrowed.

 

‘He will face agonies of mythical proportion,’ he replied. This brought cheers from the audience, whose quenchless bloodlust was never satiated, so long as it was not their own blood at stake. Maax looked to Loic with pitiless eyes noticing how the smuggler’s own eyes bulged with terror-stricken hysteria.

 

‘Sarkraa believes the time has come for expansion,' continued Maax, 'that new opportunities are ripe. I have many proposals to make at a suitable…’

 

‘And what of the bounty hunter?’ Interjected Okkra, his gaze meeting Bossk’s own for the first time. Maax could imagine a hundred hands moving slowly to their holsters. This was a delicate situation, the moment Maax had played over in his mind’s eye trying to conceive of every possible outcome.

 

‘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 their dim-witted stares to the darkened firmament.

 

Krang dropped in on a jetpack, and before the lousy guards could react, he had felled the first one with a meaty forearm blow and gashed the second’s flabby throat with a flashing talon, its vomit-green blood gushed all over its corpulent belly. The second two tusk-faced soldiers raised their vibrolances, but the tank-like Trandoshan brushed this meagre weaponry aside. He speared an eyeball with a pointed claw, penetrating a vapid pig-brain, flicking a twitching carcass aside, instant death. No blasters yet, too noisy, stealth was still the watchword.

Trandoshans believed you could imbibe the power of your enemies by imbuing yourself with their blood. There was nothing to be had from a gormless gaggle of gammon, but the snake he had devoured in a sacred ceremony at sunset, he believed would give him the speed of a serpent. Maybe so, because the time in which he dispatched of the four armoured bouncers couldn’t have been more than ten seconds at the most.

 

A virtuoso of violent velocity in peak flow, vivified by the vanquishment of his victims. The final guard had made the mistake of cowering, and the callous reptile warlord caved his thick skull in with his fallen companion’s helmet, it only took one hefty overhand blow. Krang surveyed the wreckage. Just in case the first one he felled woke back up, he stuck the point of its own lance in its jugular and gladly left it burbling. Bossk’s uncle licked his lips, gnashed his needlelike teeth, delighting in the kill.

 

He stashed his boosterpack neath a bundle of oil-rags, and having removed one sentry’s cardkey, he unlocked the rooftop doorway of the golden tower and was inside. The four pig-creatures lay at their post, firepit burning, their blood mingling into one great ghastly puddle, gruesomely reflecting argent light from Florrum’s singular moon.

 

Inside the doorway, after a short winding staircase, Krang encountered a Hutt Snake Droid. The startled serpentine robot he swiftly beheaded with his club, before it could make a move, he had dealt with those droids before, antiquated as they were, he knew their weak-points, where to strike them.

 

The lizard slithered further down into the slug’s lair, with the taste of blood in his mouth and the scent of prey in his flaring nostrils. A barbaric euphoria pulsated through his battle-hardened old frame and awoke a dragon inside, long-dormant. He paid no heed to hieroglyphs which flashed by. He stalked inwards like a silent storm infiltrating the ship’s belowdecks.

 

Krang had done exactly as his nephew had asked, he had went outside the clan to employ two unrelated Trandoshans. So as not to be connected to the family in any way when they weaselled their way into Okkra’s confidence a while ago. A few successful bounties delivered, and they were Okkra’s new favourite hunters, fickle as the Hutt was. Gragg and Drozsk were young Trandoshans, but they were strong, supple, ruthless, keen-minded, ambitious – all the qualities that make a great future clan leader. Plus, they have the sprightliness of youth on their side, thought Krang, as an old injury in his elbow flared up out of nowhere, perhaps recoiling from the prospect of imminent battle. He cursed the weakness and plodded on, ignoring his age, which groaned at him, like the atavistic walls that surrounded him groaned with earth and history, both sagging under their weight.

 

He rounded a corner and almost collided with a feathered Talortai. He had not seen one of those in a long time! Maybe it would have once been a formidable opponent at one time, but this one was old and frail, and missing a limb. It was little effort to smother the creature’s beak and suffocate it. Krang stared hard and fiercely into its panic-stricken birdlike eyes as it kicked and struggled. The reptilian strength of the Trandoshan was too much for the aged brittle being. Krang hurried proceedings along by gripping the beak tighter and bending the neck until he heard the satisfying pop and crunch of its vertebrae fragmenting. The old Talortai slumped against the wall, its dead eyes stared into infinity, its neck at  a jagged angle - it had seen its last sunset. Nothing to be gained from the knave, so Krang moved on.

 

Bossk had done the Cradossk family proud, he was probably the most feared bounty hunter in the galaxy, him and that Mandalorian who wouldn’t last twelve parsecs in a straight-up fight with his nephew. Krang had seen that boy manhandle wookies like they were ewoks! Krang fancied even he himself, in his prime, might have been surpassed by his nephew in hand-to-hand combat, though it had never been tested obviously, and he would never admit that suspicion to anyone, ever.

 

Yes, they could rely on the two younglings, Gragg and Drozsk, especially with Bossk alongside them. Still, four Trandoshans against a whole Hutt menagerie was madness, even to ones as fearless as the Cradossks. But Krang recalled the family motto, and its coat of arms with the lizard devouring the snake. The first rule of the Cradossk Clan is ‘don’t enter a battle unless you know you can win’. Which is why Krang had also hired some Geonosian gunslingers and some extremely dangerous Colicoid mercenaries to be in place when the time came.

 

As the ancient Trandoshan made his way down the descending tunnel, senses alert and blaster poised, the sound of Okkra’s celebrations faded into hearing, although he had smelled it before he heard it; the tantalising perfume of spilled blood and the unmistakeable foetor of death. Krang checked his weapons, adjusted his armour, hugged the wall, and advanced – natural slit-eyed nightvision served him well in these unlit sections of the tunnels.

 

Two measly Noghri protected the torchlit door to the junction that led to the amphitheatre. Easy pickings, thought Krang, and crept forward, a black lizard in the dark shadows, stealthy, deadly. He just had to dispatch of these two and then wait for the inevitable boom sound, which would be his signal to move in.

The dishevelled wookie slave, named Katakkaa, had beaten off an Iktotchi and a Dug so far. The sneaky Dug had given him the runaround, tired him out, then pounced. It had been beating him half-to-death with its powerful hind legs when he mustered one last ounce of savage strength, and he ripped those offending limbs from their sockets. Bastard.

 

Hair matted with blood, eyes filled with haunted despair, the wookie  now lay in a corner and licked its wounds. The next combatant was prodded into the pit, and now the wookie faced the ultimate indignation; he would have to betray his own kind. Another wookie was lined up against him; older, grey-haired, but fresh - their captors sniggered.  Katakkaa was beaten and bloody, he didn’t fancy his chances against the elder kin. The appearance of Bossk and a bounty had caused a welcome distraction momentarily, but now all eyes were back on the two wookies, reluctant to participate, but being prodded forward by spears clutched by impatient pitmasters, and observed with avaricious eyes from the surrounding spectators.

 

…Click. Nothing. Bossk pressed the device again. Click. Nothing. What the frag!? Splenetic Bossk snarled and checked the device to ensure it was primed correctly, it was. Drat! It was either a dud, or it had been removed. But it couldn’t possibly have been removed, the smuggler was locked in the cell. Unless… There was one way it could have been removed - if he had received help. And the only person who…

 

Bossk’s malevolent eyes flitted round the miniature coliseum for the blue skinned bastard. He saw only the Chiss who had come in separate. He wondered if they were associates. A female and two males. They had presented the Hutt lord with a gift of a birthday cake, made from a Hutt favourite, Kowakian crumbcake, as well as a pricelessly-sized bar of precious chromium, which had lit up in the druglord’s bulging eyes as his tail waggled enthusiastically, slapping off the dusty ground, thud, thud, thud. Like a fucking dog. The Chiss newcomers had then moved to an alcove and Bossk could see no sign whatsoever of that dratted Maax.

 

Screw it. Maybe the bomb was a dud. He could still go ahead with the plan. The explosive had only been an appetiser to the main course, and an unplanned one at that, an unexpected gift from Sarkraa. The Trandoshan had enough explosives about his person to bring down a battleship, he was only robbed of the joy of detonating that smuggler and Okkra together, but his strategy plan was unaffected.

 

Bossk glanced at Monerat where he hung melancholy and mangled like a grisly ornament on Okkra’s wall. The smuggler did not meet his gaze, unconscious again maybe, weak humanoid. Bossk gave the signal to Gragg and Drozsk, an imperceptible flick of the tongue, but in their own lizard language it spoke volumes, and they knew what to do.

 

Orange-scaled Drozsk, in his custom chainmail vest and Trandoshan chainmail head-covering, flicked another morsel of spiced Karkan Ribene at his mouth where his tongue flashed out and caught it, devouring it. He had enormous fangs for his species, and they were flaxen, tipped with a red tinge. He stood watching the squirming, slime-gored crimelord Okkra with undisguised disgust in his green eyes. His brother Gragg lounged a few paces from him, he was monitoring Bossk, waiting for the signal. Gragg was well-built, a hulking muscular dinosaur, a spiked back, his scales gleamed iridescently in the flaming-corpse-lit arena, Gragg’s muscles swelled with excitement at the prospect of bloodshed.

 

Bossk’s tongue tasted the air and the sign language was clear, now. Their orders were to eliminate Okkra first-and-foremost, cut the head off the snake before it has a chance to bite and administer its venom, then they could deal with the fallout. Meantime, Bossk, Krang, and some hired-geeks, would be covering their scaly hides. Drozsk knew his brother had received the signal because he saw Gragg activating his weapon and at that precise second Drozsk was already pulling his own trigger, firing upon a surprised Okkra…

 

…The first scarlet lick of laserfire took Okkra across the face, permanently disfiguring him. The second volley, from Gragg, smashed into his throat, cutting his wails off midsentence. The third round came simultaneously from both brothers and peppered the Hutt’s chest and bulbous, ballooned belly. Still, this was not enough! It took a lot to penetrate a Hutt’s thick hide with all that lard - the next barrage however would finish him off. Gragg and Drozsk primed their weapons, targeted the Hutt’s eyes, discharged -  the killshot.

 

Or it would have been, but something unexpected happened, either the Hutt, or one of his cronies, had activated a secret emergency trigger. A blue, see-through, forcefield arose and surrounded the Hutt in a glowing nimbus of bombproof, blasterproof, laserlight - impenetrable. The Hutt was wounded, but not so badly it didn’t manage a defiant cackle as the lethal laserfire that would have ended the slug’s life glanced harmlessly off the corona encircling him and frittered out.

Loic, as he often did in times of great pain and stress, had lost consciousness. Hanging, once again, pathetically, on a wall. In a hypnogogic fantasy and half-waking reverie, he was roused from his narcolepsy by the noise of blasters. The light of the lasers had blinded his eyes, closed though they were, as they shot past and slammed into the Hutt’s thick, sand-coloured hide, scorching it, lacerating it. The smell of singed flesh invaded Loic’s mask, the flash left sparkling fractals behind his eyelids.

 

Sightless, he heard more blasterfire, and then suddenly everything became muffled. When his vision unblurred he was wreathed in a glowing blue light. He decided he must have died. But then he heard Okkra, choking, gurgling, forcing laughter, coughing-up blood, and he realised he was still in hell. He had however, been spared some of the carnage unfolding outside the forcefield.

 

The electrical protective barrier had encased Okkra and everything in his general vicinity, and that had meant the prisoners on the wall, and all the Hutt’s treasures, and the things most important to it, like snacks. What was left of the cake the Hutt had been stuffing into its eternally-hungry maw now mixed with its blood to form a creamy, pink froth which coated Okkra’s face and torso. It almost looked comical, but Loic was in no mood for laughter.

 

As the first assassination shots were fired, smashing through Okkra’s bong mid-toke and connecting with his face, Bossk had rolled backwards over a bar, and he had come up behind it, with his pistols drawn like dragon wings, firing. He elbowed aside the protesting bartender droid and then, noting the highly-flammable alcohols soaking the bar’s worktop, he shot it, and a great wall of blue and green flames went up before him, creating his own forcefield. The flames obscured most folks’ vision, but the reptile was quite used to heat, he found the furnace comforting even, and it offered a perfect battlement from which he could penetrate the discombobulated mob with lethal artillery fire.

 

Bossk decided to up the ante. Cautious of a cave collapse or a landfill he set two thermal charges to a low setting, and he tossed them out into the crowd, one to the left, one to the right. His Trandoshan brethren had taken refuge behind separate bars on the opposite side of the chamber and were quite safe from the twin explosions. Many in the melee, however, were not so lucky…

 

…The Geonosians had hovered up to the domed corbel-vaulted ceiling on their insectivorous wings, and they were raining down laserfire like acid rain into the scrambling, shattered soiree below. The hired Colicoid had rolled into a corner, brandished their weapons, and made a point of aiming for any Gamorrean, Noghri or Nicto, they could see in the swarm, and executing them all one by one, knowing that it would thin out the herd of those most loyal to Okkra. The Hutt Lord’s criminal enterprise quickly descended into a state of pandemonium! Very few had their drunken wits together enough to react in time, those that did react swiftly were instantly targeted by the Trandoshans and their hired help and expertly dispatched.

 

The huge, fearsome Massassi had gone crazy from the start. It was swinging people around the room by the feet, and ripping extremities from sockets in great arcs of blood, and twisting the heads from the shoulders of anything that came within its radius. The rampaging beast was not discriminating among its victims at all, just running amok, drooling, roaring - lusting in a battle-fevered, berserker-brained bombardment of violence.

 

The first explosion from Bossk’s grenade turned the enormous Massassi into a fountain-like cloud of blood and viscera. Obliterated organs and liquified offal showered the confused masses, forcing them all to recoil, only to step back into a second blast from behind which further demolished their ranks, and redecorated the arena in a fresh coating of gore and innards. Bits and pieces of all manner of species had drastically renovated the décor. Limbs, tentacles and claws lay scattered, blood filled the holes in the floor like molten bronze into a mould, bone fragments littered the place like pottery shards at some archaeological dig. The rank, sulphuric smell of opened guts drenched the atmosphere in a dreadful pall.

 

The two bloodied and bludgeoned wookies had been about to engage, grabbing each other in a grappling hold, when the first blastershots had whistled over their head and plunged into Okkra, leaving a scorched, shimmering air in their wake and a badly-scarred howling Hutt in their midst. The wookies exchanged knowing glances and hunkered down as the chaos ensued.

 

Some of Okkra’s small army wandered around the battlefield, trying to find someone to surrender to, and, finding no-one, were being slaughtered in a crimson crossfire. A few of Okkra’s henchmen dropped into the pit and used it as a trench from which to send return fire, but they quickly realised they didn’t even know who they were firing at. Who was attacking who here? They weren’t even sure where the shots that had struck their boss had come from. All they knew is Okkra’s staff were dropping like doppleflies, and they became no exception, as the wookies approached from behind and corkscrewed their tormentors’ heads round, snap, snap, in stereo.

 

Maax had been slinking down in the depths of the mesa’s lowest tunnels when he had heard the first shots being fired. His plan had been lunacy, but it had been the only one he had come up with. Carefully noting the design and model of the Hutt’s mobile dais, he had correctly assumed it had a forcefield feature, and that it would inevitably have a control room located somewhere just underneath the worm baron’s throne. The Chiss had found only one guard manning the door, a half-asleep green-skinned Duros, he had been slow to react and the Chiss had snuffed him out as casually as one might extinguish a candlewick.

 

Inside the control room, he encountered a rusty guard droid, which he quickly hotwired and shut down. Once it was sleeping peacefully, he turned to the bank of controls. His plan was to activate the forcefield, it would create confusion, but it would also protect Monerat while he and his associates did their work. His co-conspirators had smuggled an explosive device into Okkra’s crumbcake. The one removed from the smuggler’s ugly stomach was back on the Hound’s Tooth, when Bossk presses the trigger, it will only serve to ruin the hull of his parked ship and startle some passerbys. Bossk would be pissed, Maax hoped that pissant human Loic was worth it.

 

Maax would activate the forcefield, that would be the cue for his companions to release their gasbombs. The gas from those grenades would not only cause a temporary smokescreen but its aftereffects were that of a very powerful hallucinogen; anyone who breathed it in would be quickly incapacitated. The Chiss of course, had masks.

 

Maax and his blue-skinned brothers would easily be able to extricate Monerat from the situation with everyone under the influence of the psychoactive toxins, and anyone that got in the way would be easily eliminated. Even a Trandoshan was less formidable when it can’t distinguish reality from hallucinations, and it is confronted with the greatest fear of any individual – coming face-to-face with one’s very soul. These drugs would turn a Krayt Dragon into a pussycat!

 

Maax was startled to hear the gunfire in the room above at first, but then dismissed it as a drunken brawl. Once he heard the second round of fire though, and the clamouring and commotion that followed, he decided it was time to act and activated the forcefield. Just then, the door to the control room hissed open and Maax spun around, it was the Abednedo, Gravi Nido.

In Okkra’s annihilated amphitheatre, some of the more hardened bounty hunters and combat veterans among the crowd were not about to meet their fate in a birthday bloodbath at Okkra’s enemies’ hands. And so, they had formed a resistance. A few of the more sharp-minded among them had identified the main assailants as the Trandoshans in the crowd. They knew those motherfrangers would pitilessly put-to-death everybody at this party, they would not want to leave survivors to this hostile takeover, if that’s what it was, maybe it was just a paid assassination attempt, or some kind of revenge, but either way they would not be leaving witnesses.

 

A group of guerrillas huddled behind some upturned tables and they sent artillery fire at Bossk, Gragg and Drozsk. They were just beginning to weaken their defences a little, when a fourth Trandoshan burst through the entranceway; black-scaled, scarred, a trail of dead Nicto in its wake, and a flamethrower in its scaly talons, issuing forth a bloodcurdling battlecry as it plunged into the fray…

 

Gravi Nido padded into the control room. ‘What are you doing here?’ He asked the Chiss interloper. Maax’s face was expressionless.

‘What am I doing? I am doing your job. There is an assassination attempt afoot – Okkra is not safe. The forcefield will offer protection till we get him to his ship.’ Gravi Nido cocked his head, indeed there was muffled blaster fire to be heard through the walls, and screams. He was torn, mired in hesitation whether to race back to his master or interrogate the Chiss.

 

‘You were seen sneaking around. I have eyes everywhere. Assassins you say, how did you know?’

 

‘There were Trandoshans in the crowd, they were out of place, in my experience it’s enough to warrant caution. Let us go, we are losing time, Okkra is in danger.’

 

‘There were Chiss too, in the crowd, out of place, perhaps they are with you, perhaps the assassination attempt is yours and you are trying to blame the Trandoshans. What proof do you have?’ Its mouth tendrils were waggling frantically.

 

Maax snapped. ‘You don’t need proof when you have intuition! We have no time for this.’ Maax moved towards the majordomo, who turned his back on the Chiss as if he agreed. ‘To Okkra.’

 

But it was a trap to lure Maax in close, and Gravi spun on his heel, his staff burring through the air. Maax was expecting such treachery and ducked the blow. The majordomo was in perpetual motion however, he gripped the staff at its centre, the lethal edges whirring the air in a tracer-weaving blur. With cat-like reflexes, Maax evaded and dodged, waiting for an opening. ‘I am not the enemy you fool.’ Unarmed as he was, he could still plant doubt in his opponent’s mind, a split second of hesitation oft decided a confrontation.

 

Nido was too canny however, he moved with the fluidity of a dancer, Maax eluded the pulsating edges of the wicked staff, but a spinning kick was executed with such swiftness he did not register the attack till he was flying back into a console. Nido span forth, capitalising on the upper hand. Maax watched him come, and when the distance between them shrank enough, he pounced, rolling into the arc of the staff, rendering its blow harmless. His spinning elbow took the Abednedo on one its bulbous side-facing eyes.

 

Next, he gripped Nido by his robes, a handful behind his neck and another at his waist, and propelled him forward, ramming his globose head through a console. The Abednedo screeched pitifully as he pulled his head free from the broken glass, but by then Maax had the staff. With a swift gruesome blow he brained the majordomo, leaving the corpse slumped over the control panel.

 

He spun as the turbodoors opened, expecting an enemy, but it was Nilita – the female of his three Chiss allies who had inveigled themselves into the place. Maax had been orphaned at a young age, the Chiss government did not seek new parents to raise orphaned children, instead they were given to a covert branch of military to turn into weapons – the younger the better. Maax had been trained in numerous skillsets; languages, espionage, economics, rudimentary weapon skills, and hand-to-hand combat techniques. Nilita had been orphaned too, taken-in and trained, but her skills were focused primarily on one objective – killing. ‘Drop the forcefield – it’s time,’ she ordered. Her dark crimson eyes exuded at once both depthless malice and bewitching beauty.

 

An assemblage of Okkra’s host had upturned tables and furniture, seeking cover from the laser blasts coming from the back of the hall. Krang had took them from behind, his flamethrower spewing a molten stream. With a murderer’s satisfaction he had watched the flesh melt off a squid-headed goon’s face like tallow dripping from a candle. They thrashed, flame-enveloped, running in heedless indeterminate directions before they dropped. Some had dived into the arena to escape the conflagration; others ran under the many archways adjoining the great hall. It mattered not, there was no escape.

 

Dinivian Da’Raa stole a glance from the tunnel from whence they had entered. Chaos had won the day, blasterfire came from all directions, along with it the screams of the dying, burned, and maimed. The fighting would soon find its way into the maze of passageways leading from the hall – it was time to introduce the weaponised hallucinogen. He hurled a grenade down into the arena where many were seeking to flee the crossfire, and another into a huddle of mercenaries who had dug themselves in and were sniping Okkra’s disorganised guards. He knew Vries was placed at the back of the hall in a booth – it was he who would flush out the Trandoshan renegades with grenades of his own. As terror engulfed their feeble serpent minds Vries would liquidate them with ease.

 

A laser hit the column from which he kept cover, the blast punched a hole through the ancient rune-etched stone. The shot had come from the air – pesky winged aliens adding to the disarray. He replied with his blaster, his precise aim dropping the creatures to land upon the heads of the beastly mercenaries below. He looked over to the human dangling helplessly from the wall. The force field should be down any moment. The crazed pandemonium born from psychotomimetic shock would be the perfect veil to mask his movements. He risked a glance from behind the column – the blaster fire had begun to lessen - the gas was taking affect.

 

The air hung heavy with the stench of burned flesh, the winged creatures that remained had ingested the hallucinogen – one flew right into a pillar at break-neck speed, others flapped to the ground confused. Some of the mercenaries ran into the archways seeking safety in shadows. Others grappled with one another, their fractured drug-crazed minds turning friend to foe.

Loic had watched the bedlam unfold. Laser blasts had peppered the forcefield, ceaselessly streaming sparks into the air. Okkra had been wounded but not mortally – a gaggle of lickspittles fawned over his girthsome form, seeing to his wounds. Obscenely, the Hutt still fed. He was trying to wriggle to-and-fro – surely the obstinate Hutt realised it was time to flee – he could not hide behind the forcefield forever. It was then Loic realised that Okkra was in too much pain to move unaided. From a secret passageway directly behind his throne appeared several of the wolf-faced guards who had greeted them so affectionately outside the temple. It took all their brute force to slide Okkra’s cumbrous frame even a few feet.

 

The crime lord squealed in pain at each pull and prod, his hide weeping from burning lacerations, the side of his face mangled by blaster-fire. A series of blaster shots came from the tunnel leading to the entrance ramp. From the shadowed torch-flickering recess behind a pillar, Loic espied one of the Chiss emissaries. He took aim at the flying creatures that buzzed hither-and-tither, as he ducked behind the pillar once more his eyes moved upwards to Loic. It was then that Loic knew that the three Chiss were a plant. There was no other reason the blue-skinned man would be studying Loic so closely – why else would a random prisoner warrant such attention? But with Loic masked as he was, all he could do was nod his head to one side to warn the Chiss what was sneaking up behind him – a Shistavanen – the one Bossk had beaten bloody…

 

Some instinct made the Chiss turn just as the beastly thing pounced, but it was upon him – razor sharp claws digging into his face, fangs darting towards his throat. In desperation the Chiss fired his blaster at close range, the laser exploded through the Shitavanen’s side. It howled as it fell but pulled the Chiss down with it, still trying to savage him with its fangs. Loic’s gaze was pulled from the pair by a pain-wracked groan from Okkra. The Hutt’s eyes bulged for a briefest of heartbeats, the cavernous feckless mouth agape, horror stricken.

 

For what Okkra knew Loic did not, that a device had been activated deep in his bloated olive-green belly. Okkra exploded! The Hutt’s great mass came apart in a blinding flash. A grisly-blistering shockwave of searing heat washed over the smuggler, singing his skin raw. When he could at last chance opening his eyes, Okkra was no more but frazzling remains sprayed every which way.

 

The forcefield buzzed angrily as innards and bile and gore frazzled up and down its length. The Shistavanen guards had died with their employer, their body parts scattered around as though a mad hulking Rancor had torn them to shreds. Some of the bilious filth from Okkra’s immolation had splattered the smuggler – stomach acids and filth tormenting his exposed flesh.

 

Then the low thrum of the forcefield ceased, and a tide of festering, smouldering gore slopped to the floor. Loic turned his desperate gaze back to the Chiss – he had slayed the Shistavenen, but at what cost? Flesh hung from his mauled bloody face, claw marks covered his head and neck. One eye was awash with blood, but he determinedly crawled towards Loic, still intent on executing his mission.

 

Bossk picked out head shots from his nest of flames. Drozsk and Gragg were about fifty paces ahead, to the left and right of the hall respectively, also firing from cover. Okkra had survived but was wounded. Bossk observed through the rifle scope lupine-faced bodyguards trying to drag their master to safety. The forcefield had taken a battering, in parts it shimmered and faded. It would fail, and Bossk’s next head shot would be Okkra’s forehead.

 

A movement to his side caught his keen reptilian gaze, a furtive shift in a darkened booth. Before Bossk could react, a gloved hand rolled two grenades from the shadows towards his kinsmen. Hued smoke erupted from the devices. It was too late to warn his allies, but he turned his rifle towards the booth and waited. A masked Chiss slid from the shadows, blaster in hand, he took aim at Gragg, but Bossk fired first and the Chiss was blown back into the booth with a hole in his back. Accursed Chiss! Gragg was on all fours and Drozsk was stumbling against the wall, both disorientated by whatever noxious substance the grenades had ejected.

 

There was a great boom at Okkra’s end of the hall. When the smoke cleared Bossk realised, with astonishment, Okkra was no more. Perhaps a grenade launcher had found its way through a gap in the forcefield. No time to ponder. Okkra had been eliminated, his guardsmen killed with him.

 

Throughout the hall madness ensued, Bossk watched the remaining survivors who had seemingly lost their minds, some darted in random directions, others clawed at their own faces blinding themselves in fits of lunacy, others writhed on the floor heedless of the dangers surrounding them. A vague, peculiarly-familiar stench floated into his nostrils – and with it, the alien emotion of fear. He had been poisoned with the same airborne substance that had afflicted his fellow Trandoshans!

 

His vision swam in warped mutation – where Okkra’s throne had been, now swirled a coruscating singularity – a black hole! And it wanted Bossk’s soul. It called to him telepathically in a malevolent alien dialect. It could not be disobeyed! Bossk shambled forth, his rifle forgotten. He spasmed, his back arching, his gaze now heavenward. There was no longer a ceiling above him but rather a sanity-shattering sight. Against the nebula-clustered backdrop of space loomed a giant Trandoshan face, coronas burned round its deathless eyes, yellow blood dripped from its elongated, gore-flecked fangs, excrescences of crackling unreality shimmered round the titan’s form.

 

Bossk was mewling and quivering, for it was Skargoz’ak – The Trandoshan God of Death. He had come for him – come to claim Bossk’s cowardly soul because he was unworthy. A great clawed grasp reached down from the heavens, the scaled arm wreathed in purple flame. Bossk scrambled away in terror, but in his blind panic he ran back into the flaming bar. Wood splintered as his great frame crashed through the erstwhile serving area. Flame and heat engulfed him, but with the heat came a kernel of clarity – for the stench was familiar to him for a reason – he had tasted it before. Yes, yes…

 

Zuckuss, the insectoid, appeared from the mist, dragging his bounty – a Jedi. Fearsome foes it was said, capable of dark thaumaturgical abilities. ‘They can break into your mind – control you!’ Zuckuss had warned him in the Mist Hunter cockpit.

 

It had been a joint venture. Even the best bounty hunters had to team up from time to time depending on foe. But Bossk much preferred working alone. Usually, if he needed extra muscle, he would use other members of his own race. He had to admit though, the enigmatic Gand would make a lethal enemy. Even one as grudging as Bossk had to afford this strange individual respect.

 

Their quarry – the Jedi – was able to manipulate a sorcerous power to heighten her senses and abilities. Zuckass explained that he too was sensitive to that power - to a smaller degree, but it would be enough help them snare the Jedi.

 

Bossk flushed out the prey with powerful explosives and Zuckass moved through the mist like a wraith. It was the Dark Lord Darth Vader himself who had put up the reward, a substantial bounty. The wounded Jedi had cowered in a warren of caves and tunnels. Bossk covered the mountainside with detonators, blew all exits except one. When the Jedi had no choice left, she came out fighting, her fiery sword singing in the air. But Zuckass had been waiting, and he brought the mist with him. Even the Jedi could not focus shrouded in a hallucinogenic mist summoned by the Gand. She fought with her own mind leaving no reserves of lucidity to face her hunters.

 

Zuckass had zapped her with a stun beam. He dragged her back to the Mist Hunter where Bossk was waiting – beyond the miasma of diabolic mist. But as they made their long journey back to Vader, Bossk had slept, and his dreams were troubled. Nightmares, of the most visceral unsettling nature imaginable, he near lost his mind. Zukkus explained that Bossk had inadvertently ingested miniscule amounts of the substance lost in the eddies of the winds. Bossk did not want to imagine what mental horrors the Jedi must have endured as enveloped in the mist as she was.

 

‘You are either an agent of terror or a victim of terror. I am terror given form.’ The mysterious Gand stood over Bossk’s prone form observing him from unreadable compound eyes, its voice grated, the insect mouth hidden by a circular respirator mask. Bossk realised that with ease the creature could eliminate him and take the bounty for himself. Vader would not care if only one of them made it back, so long as he had his prize. Bossk realised guiltily it is what he would have done had the tables been turned. Bossk despised weakness – only strength held sway in Trandoshan society. Yet this realisation galled him as he wrestled with his own fear. Zuckass unscrewed his respirator and let it fall to the floor, the insectoid mouth revealed, a hole of spiky barbs and mandibles. Mist began to form as though exuding from the Gand himself. And with the mist came fresh horrors flashing through Bossk’s mind.

 

‘No,’ Bossk begged, ‘not more.’

 

‘You must conquer your fear. I am terror. Where I walk terror walks. You are an agent of terror or its victim. Conquer terror – become terror, or forever you will be its victim. What are you Bossk, a slave to terror, or its right hand?’

For the first time Bossk realised he had been drugged, the effects were so potent that his sanity and sense-of-self had hung by a cobweb. But the knowledge of what he had experienced on the Mist Hunter before gave him resolve. He had mastered his fear then, with the tutelage of the enigmatic Gand. He looked to the heavens – the Death God was 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 of sacrificial offerings, and to channel the bloodflow, which on equinoxes could run into the hundreds of litres.

 

The deaths may have been in their countless numbers millennia ago, ignorant cultures sacrificing their own kin to appease imaginary deities, but the temple of priests and martyrs had lay dormant for many centuries without bloodshed. That is until Okkra’s foul hoard had taken it over for their sick sports on his final birthday. The body count in the shrine, as with long epochs ago, was running high once again, and the raging, drug-crazed Bossk intended to increase it tenfold.  

 

Bossk’s species are rarely considered beautiful, but a bent mind would have found a certain poetry in the way he weaved through opponents in full battleflow. The tumultuous Trandoshan fired upon anything that moved. His shot at Monerat had missed, and the smuggler had scarpered behind the rancid blasted corpse of the Hutt. His next shot, however, did not miss - the last Geonosian’s exoskeleton exploded in a shower of purples and pinks and shards of chitinous flesh as Bossk hit it mid-air with a belt of laserfire.

 

A bat-faced Kaleesh rushed past, bolting, and Bossk caught it by the throat with a taloned hand and chokeslammed it to the carrion-littered floor. He aimed his blaster at its face, its last sound was a high-pitched wail before the laser turned its entire head into a smear of red across the bricks. A wisp of smoke curled from his barrel, Bossk grinned toothily, looking down it.

 

A long-haired, tusk-faced, Ugnaught tried to limp out a side passage, but the truculent Trandoshan aimed down his scope, sent a barrage of laserfire its way, and reduced its bones to carbon ashes. A movement to the left caught his eye; an injured Gamorrean trying to crawl pitifully across the floor towards the exit. Bossk approached it, lifted its struggling form into the air, and threw the guard overhead like a javelin with his colossal strength. Its thick head collided with the hard wall and its neck broke in a sickening series of rapid crunches, its pig-corpse hit the floor with a dull thud and rolled over. Bossk no longer feared anything, not beast, not man, not even the Trandoshan God of Death. Bossk had become the Eater of Worlds. Bossk was a dragon, his blaster breathed his fire.

 

A Colicoid rolled up to the bounty hunter, it unravelled, and aimed its rifle at him, it was supposed to be on Bossk’s side but both parties were too disorientated by hallucinogenic gas to know or care. The resilient reptile ducked the insect’s volley of fire and sent back one of his own. The barrage exploded the creature in a cloud of green mist and white gunk. In its death throes its stinging-tail lashed out at its killer, but the Trandoshan caught the offending whip-like limb and bit clean through it with his sharp fangs, removing the poisonous barb at the tip, spitting out blood, and tossing the twitching tail aside. Baleful Bossk marched on, seemingly unstoppable.

With every victim claimed, a Trandoshan believed he equipped his soul with immortality. Bossk was beyond blood and bone now, he was the Shadow of Death itself, and indeed, The Great Reaper of Souls, Skargoz’ak, still loomed above him. The transcendent Trandoshan god looked down with eyes like cratered moons, pleased with Bossk’s murderous orgy, dripping venomous saliva as it grinned in psychostasia. The rampaging bounty hunter grabbed a defecting Rodian by its botuliform face, and his sharp talons removed the flesh from its skull and left it writhing in pain on the death-drenched ground.

 

The bastard Bossk, lasers blazing, roared in defiance of death, and he extended his talons to the manifest god above. HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW!? Bossk’s forked tongue tasted the metallic aroma of blood gleefully, it hung in the air above like a crimson thundercloud, encasing the Trandoshan in its foul misty rain. Bossk saw flickers of lightning dancing before his vision, and he aimed his gun and fired through them, across the room his bolt obliterated a service droid into a shower of molten embers and oily smoke.

 

Bossk’s shot earlier had tickled past Loic’s skinhead as he had dived for cover. He now sniper-crawled along behind the sparking, smoking wreckage of the Hutt’s dais. Where Okkra’s party had once bubbled with the sound of dozens of alien languages, it now boiled with the groans of the dying and the cries of the survivors as Bossk mowed them down one-by-one. The killing spree was a timely distraction for the lizard which the thankful smuggler utilised by scavenging among the treasures the crime boss had stashed behind his doomed throne.

 

Loic had a fine coating of Okkra on him, it was hardening on his skin. Bits of Okkra were in his mouth, between his teeth, remnants of the Hutt’s innards complete with its half-digested food were smeared across his emaciated frame. All that was left of the Hutt was a giant yellow pizza where he had once sat; the sauce his unctuous blood, the base his charred flesh, the toppings were slices of organs and sprinklings of bone fragment.

 

Loic crawled through the slimy Hutt pizza and located a fur tunic which he slung over his shivering, exposed, naked frame with its ugly belly scar. He also placed a dead Gamorrean’s squat helmet on his bald bonce to protect from any stray blastershots that might come his way. He should be escaping mortal danger while the death-dealing Trandoshan was preoccupied, but the thief in Loic stopped wide-eyed at a large copper plate full of sparkling rubies, one of Okkra’s birthday gifts, and he filled his tunic’s pouch with the shining gems. The junky in Loic stopped at the Hutt’s spicebowl, which lay shattered, and filled his trouser pockets with as much of the expensive glitterstim as they would hold, while also shovelling a handful up his nose. Fuck it, if you’re going to die anyway! He snorted vigorously.

 

Satisfied with his loot, emboldened by the spice hit, and with the smell of Okkra’s sizzled viscera still permeating his nostrils, the smuggler continued clambering. Up ahead, a sight made him stop in his tracks and accelerated his pulse somewhat. Across the way, Bossk was removing a Devaronian’s face with a gunshot, but in front of Loic, behind the dais, was one of Bossk’s compadres - a slinking herpetic Trandoshan, crawling, with a look of panic in its slitted green eyes.

 

It was the big, muscular one with the golden scales, and when it spied Loic its expression changed from one of panic to one of a predator viewing its prey. The lizard lunged and Loic eloped. Darting back the way he came, back to Bossk. Along the way, to avoid a groping talon from Gragg, Loic threw himself down into the fighting pit with his pursuer close on his heels.

 

In the pit, a wookie was watching another Trandoshan, an older one, as it disappeared in the opposite direction. The last they saw of Krang was his black tail flashing as he vanished down an exit tunnel, wailing, retreating in fear from a many-armed wookie-god, and closely-pursued and tormented by the ghosts and ghouls of everyone he had ever killed.

 

The wookie turned as Loic entered the pit in a cloud of dust with Gragg snapping at his back. A stiff clothesline from the wookie felled the Trandoshan as Loic scampered past with his assailant in blind pursuit. Gragg lunged back to his feet and caught his attacker in a crocodile’s deadly embrace, then he bit into its furry face deeply with his daggerlike fangs, the wookie yelped in excruciating pain.

Loic fled in the direction in which Krang had absconded, and he was fully intent on leaving the wookie and Gragg to their fate, when he clocked a flamethrower lying discarded in the sand. An ear-splitting, crooked-toothed grin spread across his angular face, and he hefted the weapon in his hands and turned running back towards the two fighters. The scruffy smuggler was just in time, the hulking, scaled dinosaur had the hairy beast pinned and was about to deliver a fatal bite to its exposed neck. Loic planted his feet firmly and squeezed the trigger.

 

The Trandoshan-weary smuggler from Coruscant took undisguised delight in watching Gragg’s scales melt like molten gold as the flamethrower’s unforgiving column of fire submerged its screaming victim. Gragg dropped to the floor and writhed, but Loic did not depress the trigger, he kept the flames burning until the Trandoshan had been liquidated!

 

Nought remained of Gragg but a puddle of dark oil and some blackened bones, a disgusting reek, a smouldering ribcage, fossil fuel. Some of the flames had caught the wookie’s grey bodyhair and it patted them out quickly, then it nodded at Loic who was grinning wolfishly, and clapped him on the back affectionately. The wookie now owed Loic a lifedebt, it would be his loyal partner till death.

 

At that precise moment, Bossk dropped into the pit and clobbered the wookie with a doublehanded blow from above. Loic’s new friend went down in the dust with a thunk. Bossk put a foot on its chest and opened its face in a blossom of burnt fur and splattered gore as his blaster obliterated its cranium at close range. The bounty hunter then turned to Loic who aimed his flamethrower directly at Bossk and pressed the trigger. ‘BURN YOU MOTHERFUCKER!’ Screamed the smuggler as he looked to make a Trandoshan toasting.

 

But nothing happened, the weapon’s fuel must have depleted because the flame it projected at Bossk wouldn’t have sufficed to light a cigarra nevermind barbecue a bounty hunter! Loic choked, Bossk smirked. The Trandoshan lurked forward and slid a rough-scaled fist around the bony human’s puny neck. It lifted him clear off the ground, gurgling, asphyxiating, and launched him out of the pit. Loic landed and rolled with a weighty thump, his helmet rolled off with a clatter. The Trandoshan stalked him, leaping up out of the hole, it landed smartly and advanced on its quarry. Bossk scooped Loic off the floor like he was a bundle of laundry and lobbed him again.

 

This time Loic connected, flailing, with a glass table, and smashed clean through it, sending shards and contents scattering. There he lay, wounded and badly winded, gasping for air, bleeding from minor cuts, as Bossk’s menacing hulk loomed over him once more. ‘No more chances,’ barked the hunter, ‘this is the end for you pathetic human. And not soon enough if you ask me.’ The fearsome reptile extended his blaster and put it pointblank to Loic’s cringing face. The smuggler’s vapourised brains would go completely unnoticed when added to the surrounding entrails, and Loic clenched his eyes and accepted his fate with a resigned nasal whine. The scarlet burst of laser went off abruptly and his pathetic life flashed before his eyes.

 

An electric whip snaked out and coiled around Bossk’s wrist. As well as giving him a jarring electric shock it also yanked his arm so that his aim was off and the blastershot scorched past Loic’s cheek, only removing part of his ear, rather than his whole head. The whip belonged to Maax and the Chiss yanked on it to tug the Trandoshan closer to him where he delivered a blinding roundhouse kick to  Bossk’s temple, dazzling the bounty hunter. A second kick caught Bossk in the ribs and dropped him to one knee, a third boot clubbed his throat. The whole perfectly-executed combination was rapid and over in seconds, leaving Bossk crumpled.

 

Unfortunately, a Trandoshan doesn’t stay crumpled for long, and a talon shot out and gripped Maax’s ankle mid-kick before a fatal fourth blow could be delivered to the recumbent reptile. A quick twist broke the Chiss’s ankle with a harsh snap, and twisting the ankle round even more, Bossk spun him facedown onto the floor. Bossk crawled onto Maax’s back, dug his claws in under the Chiss’s nostrils, and pulled his nose back, blood poured, Bossk pulled until he had scalped the cobalt being and then the basilisk bounty hunter pressed his blaster’s barrel to the back of its blue head.

 

That would have been the end of Maax if the beautiful female Chiss angel had not descended, seemingly from the heavens, and struck Bossk with both feet in a missile dropkick. She landed in a crouch and extended her blaster, it fired in a green flash. Maax’s whip was still coiled around the bounty hunter’s wrist and Bossk lashed it out, striking the blonde-haired, red-eyed woman across the face, drawing blood just as her gun went off. Nilita’s first gunshot burst out in a streak of emerald fire and took the Trando in the shoulder, the second shot would have took his head clean off but he ducked the bolt and swiped the weapon out of her hands with a mighty open-palmed uppercut which also sent her crashing into Maax.

 

Maax shoved her aside and, limping on his injured ankle, the majordomo speared the reptile in the midriff headfirst, both of them crashed back against the stone well which dead bodies had been getting deposited down during Okkra’s birthday tournaments. Bossk lifted the Chiss in a powerbomb position and hurled him at Nilita, sending both the indigo-skinned beings collapsing in a tangled blue heap together once again.

 

Bossk reached out with his long limb and grabbed Maax by the ankle, the good one, and pulled the Chiss towards him. The Trandoshan pulled a wicked-looking curved sabre from some unseen sheath on his jumpsuit. The sword’s sharp metal blade made a slithering hiss as it was unsheathed. Still holding Maax by the ankle he brought the weapon down in a chopping motion and removed the Chiss’s slender leg at the knee. As the majordomo sat bolt upright in agony and shrieked, Bossk casually sliced the top of his head off with a backhand swipe of his sword. Max was knocked back with a frozen expression of terror on his startled face. The top of his skull lay some distance away.

 

Loic had been lying blinded by the lasershot that sliced his ear and pissing his hose, quivering in abject horror. He wondered, with absurd timing, why he had been unaffected by the Chiss’s drugged gas, but quickly realised he had built up a strong tolerance to most Csillan drugs during his time with the albino hermit Jaster, who had brought cuttings from his homeplanet and cultivated patches of the stuff on Draethos, which Loic had imbibed freely and readily and often. What he wouldn’t give to be back there now.

 

Monerat’s vision cleared, his muscles ached as he stood up and gained his sight just in time to see Bossk removing the Chiss’s skullcap with the sabre, exposing the grey brain beneath, its folded layers glistening. Loic swallowed the bile that rose in his throat back down, wincing, his eyes stung and watered.

 

The Trandoshan stepped over Maax’s convulsing form and bore down on the female Chiss as she untangled herself from the floor. Loic crawled to where Maax lay and cradled him, the majordomo tried to speak but his voice didn’t function. He just gripped Loic’s hand tightly as he died, jerking and spasming, his red eyes rolled back into their head and his grip loosened, his jaw hung slack. An enormous puddle of blood surrounded them like a moat from where the majordomo’s severed leg had bled out. Loic rose to his feet, enraged, his cheeks wet with tears. How many have to die!?

 

Nilita was also engorged with rage, Maax Da’Viore had been like an older brother to her. She had just watched him die. Her eyes, once beautifully red like carbuncle jewels, now bristled with a flaming fury, her skin like oceanwater, now stormy with loathing. As Bossk closed in on her, his sword raised above his head ready to slice her in two, she quickly tossed a handful of sand in his eyes, the second the sand connected she was airborne, both her feet barrelled into his chest and sent him staggering backwards. She moved like a blue blur, back to her feet, and suddenly Maax’s whip was in her hands and she struck without hesitation; its long leather coil lassoed the bounty hunter’s throat and in a flash of movement she had thrown herself down the shaft of the deep stone well.

 

The whip-noose tightened round Bossk’s throat, electrocuting him, and the Chiss’s suspended weight dragged him to the well’s wall which he thumped into, and he remained stuck there for a few seconds as she choked him dangling from the whip in some unseen depth down the wellhole.

Loic took action, leaving Maax’s slain form he rushed forward for Bossk’s oversized rifle, which the reptile had dropped in the struggle. The gun was heavy but using all his reserves of strength Loic managed to heft it and aim it roughly at the Trandoshan, the smuggler’s legs wobbling slightly under the weight, Bossk had now reached down the well’s pit and was trying to pull the dangling Chiss back up by the cord with which she was choking him to death. Finally! A blaster in my hand! Thought Loic, euphorically, and he aimed carefully, and pulled the trigger…

 

…As he did so, a huge shape collided with him and knocked him off his feet, sending the shot too wide. It was now, at this crucial moment, that Drozsk had finally come to his senses, shaken off the effects of the psychotropics, and waded in to help his kinsman. The chainmailed Trandoshan sent Loic flying as they connected…

 

The human dropped the rifle as Drozsk shoulder barged him with the force of a cannon ball. The Trandoshan lifted the weapon but was torn, Bossk was almost fully in the well now, the buzzing whip pulsing and searing the scales of his neck cruelly. Drozsk took a shot at the human but he had rolled behind a pile of corpses and the blast merely sent a stream of lightless ash and blood into the air like dust motes.

 

Droszk darted to the well. Bossk’s tormentor was obscured by a veil of inky obscurity. He blindly fired three volleys from the power assault rifle – the flashes momentarily lighting the cobbled sides of the well as they passed. The grip on the whip ceased. Bossk rolled out to safety, frantically scrabbling at his throat. Drozsk turned the barrel of his rifle to find the other human. He saw him behind a blasted pile of ruined furniture and charred bones scrabbling for a blaster. Drozsk detached a grenade from his side. Back on his feet, snarling with rage, Bossk snatched back his rifle.

 

Loic was pinned down, he could see through the cracks, Bossk’s cohort had pulled a grenade from his hip. He was as good as doomed. Then the impossible happened – the female Chiss made a reappearance. She came leaping out the well, tumbling in the air, over the backs of the Trandoshans. She landed lithely; gleaming, glass-bladed daggers sprung from each sleeve. Only momentarily surprised, the Trandoshans attacked with their customary fury, but they could not land a blow on the female assassin, their great heavy fists always missing by inches.

 

The Chiss’s blows were more accurate, green blood oozed from ruptured scales as she weaved and span, her movements an artful expression of violence. Loic watched, mouth agape, as she corkscrewed on one heel, her spinning blades slicing into Bossk’s thigh. The enraged bounty hunter swung the rifle as though he was batting a ball, but the blow only took Drozsk in the face by mistake, sending him to the floor. Loic had never imagined such liquidity, such deadly, instinctual, rhythmic grace of movement.

 

Drozsk got back to his feet. Bossk signalled him to spread out, he recognized the exceptional skills of the Chiss female. Such fighters as her were scarce throughout the galaxies, brute force would yield little against her nimbleness. But where she had had already cut and sliced, she had merely wounded the Trandoshans. Bossk knew he only needed one clean blow to incapacitate her. She was much too fast to shoot, they had to move in from the sides, trying to trap her. Drozsk feinted a long jabbing arm, the Chiss replied with a viscous spinning kick, even her boots were knifed. Bossk tried next, but again she ducked his rifle swing.

 

From a crouching position she drove her dagger point to Bossk’s gut. There was split second of resistance before the blade pierced. It was enough. Bossk caught her with a glancing blow, she stumbled. With the speed of a striking serpent, Drozsk capitalised with a backhanded swipe, knocking her back head over heels. The upper hand now belonged to the lizards Loic realised, horrified. He had prised a blaster from the clutching stubborn fingers of a dead Weequay, but he dare not risk a shot lest he hit the never-still Chiss. As she rolled to her feet their eyes met.

 

Get in there and get ready to cover me, she commanded, telepathically, Loic obeyed. He jumped to the corpse-strewn sands of the arena floor once again and ran to the splintered gate. The Chiss was in next, her spinning leap evading a volley of rifle fire. As she landed, she rolled towards the smuggler. Loic fired some blaster shots over the edge of the pit to give the Trandoshans something to think about.

 

They backed into the passageway with no other thought than to flee their Trandoshan tormentors. Loic could not of imagined the retch-inducing horror that greeted them. There were three cells stuffed with gladiators who would never now prove their might before Okkra. Instead, packed in as they were, when the mind-bending hallucinogenic mist had reached them, they became mad, murderous. They had turned on one another tooth and nail. Many had died, ripped apart, cannibalised. The survivors begged for freedom.

 

‘Free us! I beseech you. Open the gates!’ As they passed the third and final cell, the lone surviving occupant greeted them with a malicious sharp-toothed grin. A huge, green-skinned, bull-necked Devaronian. The race had always terrified Loic, horned heads, the faces of devils pulled from some or other hell. The hulking hellion gripped the bars of his cell with gory, shit-caked fingers. ‘Free me,’ he said, mockingly. Loic looked to the Chiss, she nodded.

 

‘You want freedom? That way,’ said Loic, pointing to the arena. The Chiss pulled the levers and the gates from all three cells slid upwards. Some ran into the arena where Bossk and Drozsk had just leaped. Mayhem ensued. The Devaronian and several others started towards the opposite direction, towards Loic, murder in their eyes. Loic fearfully levelled his blaster at them. The Chiss pushed the smuggler aside and faced the devilish countenance of the gladiator, her lustrous carmine eyes unblinking.

 

‘You want your freedom? Earn it.’ She pointed down the passageway. Amazingly they obeyed. The Devaronian led the charge, dropping his horns as he entered the fray. It was the chance they needed. ‘The drug makes them suggestible still. Fast.’ She darted into the network of passageways.

 

Nilita had memorised the tunnels previously. They made it back to the Great Hall with little incident, save despatching a few dazed wanderers haunting the corridors. The sounds of havoc could be heard from the arena. The smuggler looked to her pleadingly. She knew what he wanted – to go and take the Trandoshans unaware, to blast them from above. It was a risk she was not prepared to take. Her duty was to save him, not to gamble further.

 

Perhaps the smuggler would never sleep peacefully again knowing his hunters were still breathing. The restfulness of his sleep was not her concern. She led him behind the dais, heedlessly stepping through the slimy faecal tide of Okkra’s remains. An open torchlit passageway led upwards, towards the mesa’s plateau, and her waiting ship.

 

The Devaronian charged out of the tunnel headfirst, goring Drozsk in the chest with such force, even the towering Trandoshan warrior was lifted from his feet. Chainmail armour turned the horns somewhat, but Drozsk was winded, bruised and dazed. Bloodthirsty gladiators fell upon his prone form and started to tear him to shreds like a pack of wolves. The Devaronian turned his attention to Bossk who was also fighting several foes at once.

 

Bossk gripped a yak-faced warrior by the throat, with a powerful yank of his free hand, he decapitated the creature. Erupting blood spouted as though from a geyser. As Bossk swiped his claws he left bloody mists in the air, then the Devaronian charged into his side, Bossk thudded into the arena wall as his ribs were crushed. The Devaronian and the remaining ferine gladiators, drunk on death, assailed the Trandoshan hunter all at once, clubbing and beating and goring with claw, fist and horn.

 

Racing upwards through the hewn stairway Nilita paused mid-step. ‘What is it?’ Quizzed Loic fearfully.

 

‘Silence,’ she whispered. The Chiss took the blaster from Loic and peeked round a turn in the stairway. The smuggler looked on with frustrated bemusement. Freedom was within their grasp, they were nearly at the top of the temple, but laser blasts hit the walls around them. Nilita returned fire. She pointed to Loic to keep moving. The smuggler chanced a glance back down the stairway, his curiosity a morbid thirst never slaked. There in the flicker of torchlight he could see the glimmer of Trandoshan scales, an open-mouthed repulsive lizard face with one blind white eye. Its baleful, avid hissing filled the corridor, masked only by the crack of lasers.

 

Loic made it to the end of the passageway, pulling open the door with the strength of a mad man. Blessed clean air enveloped him as he took in a breath-taking panorama. The sun was rising in the distance, the surrounding serene landscape peaceful and radiant. Nights were very short on Florrum, but he had endured many hours of torment. There was the sound of more blasterfire, before the Chiss appeared slamming the door behind her. ‘It’s still alive. To the ship.’ Loic did not know to whom she referred, or to which ship she referred. There were several small crafts on the plateau, he merely followed her, once again naked of a blaster with a Trandoshan on his heels, as always.

 

Krang booted the door off its hinges with one firm kick. He took cover behind the stonework for a heartbeat, expecting returning fire, but all he heard was the sound of a ship’s engine powering up. He dashed out into the open ground, blaster in hand, but he was too late. The oval, chrome-finished ship was now off the ground and beginning to rise. A laser cannon dropped from its belly and swivelled in his direction, he had to roll quickly to avoid the spray of laser fire.

 

As the ship powered into the sky, he ran to his stashed turbo-pack, quickly slung the strap round his frame, and donned his helmet. He ignited the boosters and blasted after them. One Trandoshan with a boosterpack against a ship was a fool’s errand, but Krang did not seek a firefight. No, his quarry would escape, that was inevitable, but he still had time to accomplish something of worth. If a crafty bounty hunter could not pursue his quarry, he would track them, nonetheless. He fumbled in his jump suit for a homing beacon. He had to be quick before the ship reached the upper atmosphere where he could not follow. He just needed one clean shot…

The Chiss had harshly demanded Loic use the shower stall thoroughly before he was permitted to lounge around the ship. It had been the greatest shower of Loic’s life though, re-born was he beneath those jets of hot water. Afterwards, he was provided with a gown, and he looked around; it was not a large vessel, little more than engines and a cockpit, though there was a small vestibule seating area.

 

After dressing his wounded ear, disinfecting and picking the glass out of a few cuts, and reattaching a couple of the stomach stitches which had come loose, she prepared him a hot drink – its tasted extremely bitter, but apparently it would calm his nerves. His nerves were indeed ravaged. What he endured would take much time to digest and most likely haunt him the rest of his days. One puny smuggler against crime syndicates, bounty hunters, killers... Bossk and Okkra and Sarkraa fought over him in an eternal tug of war, and when his limbs came apart, they tore his soul to shreds and feasted on the remains.

 

The Chiss studied him with unreadable crimson eyes. Guilt and shame washed over him. Her companions had died so he might live, what were brave men to one drug-addled conman? They had died, the hard way, butchered, bleeding, agonized, alone. ‘What is your name?’ He asked of her.

 

‘Nilita.’

 

‘I am sorry that your people died. I am sorry that they died…’ He choked, ‘for me.’ Was all he could offer, lamely.

 

She nodded. ‘They would still be alive if they had adapted to the situation. Dying in the service of the King and Sacred Csilla is the greatest honour one can be afforded. They will be rewarded kindly in the netherworlds.’

 

‘What are you, assassins? Soldiers?’

 

‘We are the Children. We are trained sometimes from birth,’ she said, in a formal matter-of-fact fashion.

 

‘Trained to do what?’

 

‘It varies. Matters of statecraft, war, subterfuge, combat. I am from the Black Tears, we are the fighters, the one you knew as Maax, he was from the Purple Glove, they are the spies.’

 

She was almost robotic. She lacked any of Maax’s subtlety, cunning, or oral acrobatics. Despite her undeniable youthful beauty, Loic could only see her for what she really was, a trained unthinking killer, a force to be unleashed by her superiors. He sensed she was neither good nor evil, merely a product of her programming. Assuming you outranked her, you could order her to do anything; kill by strangulation, shoot someone in the head at point-blank range, bash a skull in with a rock, it didn’t matter, she would merely carry out her tasks dispassionately, her body simply moving through the series of movements her training had ploughed into her brain.

 

‘Do you know Jaster?’

 

‘I know he broke with tradition by mustering us to rescue you. We – the Children – must never be quested for matters of a personal nature, like rescuing a friend from witless spice-runners half a galaxy away. We live solely to benefit the interests of the Chiss people. Civil war is coming.’

 

‘Civil war because he sent you to rescue me?’ For half a heartbeat she looked as though she would giggle, seeming little more than a spritely young lady, her pretty face flanked by an avalanche of rebellious blonde curls, now she had loosened her dreads, heart-warming in her naivety. But her face hardened once more, and the killer was back.

 

‘No, not just that, though his enemies will use that against him too. He is now King once more. When he returned to his throne – dragged to his throne – he robbed his brothers of their power. Now the dark times will return; political chicanery, double-dealing, nihilistic conspiratorial machinations... And you will get to witness it all first-hand, for I will deliver you to the King himself.’

 

Loic pondered a second. ‘He is my friend, but I can’t fathom why he went to all this trouble over me.’ He met her gaze, ‘you don’t approve?’

 

‘I carry out the instructions which I am given. The Children take no part in intrigue. We are a military branch and behave accordingly.’

 

Loic nodded. ‘Okay, now what happens to me once I get to King Jaster.’

 

‘Oh, I imagine you will be an honoured guest. Fear not, you will be quite safe, I am sure, at least for a time.’

 

THE END. EPILOGUE

 

Krang One-Eye made his way back to the crumbling Great Hall. He stepped over mounds of eviscerated, blasted bodies. The temple was now a charnel house, a silent tomb. The screams of the dying had ceased, the clattering racket of battle no longer echoed from the lofty domed ceiling, all was as hushed as a crypt.

 

Krang moved stealthily as he padded over the carrion, for he suspected rogue survivors ready to pounce from each shadowed alcove. But all had been slain. All but Bossk. Bossk had perched himself atop Okkra’s dais on a throne fashioned from bones. Ichor and green slime oozed from a great many wounds over his colossal frame. At his feet lay the severed head of a Devaronian, the mouth open in a silent scream, the yellow eyes gazing sightlessly into the abyss.

 

‘A Chiss female and the smuggler have fled. I am tracking their ship.’ Krang offered the statue-faced Bossk, whose murky maniacal gaze chilled even the taller Trandoshan to the bone.

 

Bossk remained silent. The smuggler was nothing to him. The bounty on him had long been collected. But chasing paltry bounties was no longer his intention. The temple would serve as his base. He would summon the finest most ruthless Trandoshan warriors to his banner, assemble every first-rate bounty hunter, assassins, and guns-for-hire, the rim worlds had to offer. He would destroy Sarkraa, crush her pitiful host, and take her riches and resources, adding them to his own collective. He would build an army and terrorise the galaxy. They would kneel before him, for he was Bossk, the Trandoshan God of Death incarnate. He gripped the decapitated head at his feet by a horn and stood thrusting it towards the heavens with an ululating screech that split the desert lands asunder.

 

Krang knelt.

AUTHOR'S NOTE:

 

Several years ago, Greg announced offhandedly, and drunkenly, that our mutual friend Loic Monerat had a very Star Wars-sounding name (pronounced mono-ray). Gregg is a good writer, and our styles mesh well, and he proposed we write a Star Wars story based on Loic. We decided to do a page or two each then just pass it back without conferring, or conspiring, or planning any plot. This proved to be a fun method because it kept the writing fresh, the writer finds himself in the unique position of not actually knowing which way the story is going to turn, or what's going to happen next to the protagonist. It also means you're constantly striving to do good writing if the last writer's piece was really good. It also adds a loose deadline, providing me with something I severely lack, motivation. We did part one and got bored and wrote 'to be continued'. Seven years later, a month ago, we picked it up again, and within a few weeks, using the same method, we had wrote a novella for part 2 and completed the tale. Anyway, that's the story behind LM&TLBSSS, we hope you have as much fun reading it as we did writing it.

Cheers.

 

P.S We know how pedantic Star Wars fans can be, because we are two of them, and so we have done our best to ensure we remain true to the actual SW Universe, and I'm confident we have managed that, but feel free to pedant away anyway.

 

C.T Herron

 

*All images randomly swiped from Google image. Credit to the respective artists.

 

**Cover image swiped from Stoner Days.

 

***No actual wookies were harmed during the making of this tale.

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Tag der Veröffentlichung: 03.03.2021

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