Read Online Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Joe Schreiber
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the orchid, hoping for an explanation, a means of understanding what she felt.
Something’s gone wrong out there
, she thought.
Can you feel it?
Across the room, the vacuum-sealed gasp caught her by surprise. The Whiphid was standing in the open hatchway again, clutching his spear in one hand and a bunched-up bundle of furs and hides in the other. He tossed the furs at her feet.
“Put those on.”
Zo didn’t budge. “What are we doing here?”
“Get the plant.”
“Are you going to answer me?”
He turned and stalked out again, this time leaving the hatch open behind him, an unspoken demand to follow. Was there some other component to his brusqueness besides just impatience? Was the bounty hunter as uneasy as she felt?
Zo looked down at the pile of furs and pelts. They had been stitched into crude mittens, boots, a hat, and what looked like a kind of cloak. Squatting, she pulled the boots over her feet and found that, despite their bulkiness, they fit well enough when she lashed them tight around her ankles. They were recent kills, she realized—she could still feel the residue of the lives that had worn them as skin. It was like strapping on restless layers of ghosts.
Picking up the cloak, she slung it around her shoulders and reached up to the sealed transparent lab packet containing the orchid, slipping it free from the cable that pinned it down. The orchid seemed to shiver and flattened its petals against the wall of the chamber closest to her hand as if drawn to the warmth. It was murmuring to itself, not out loud but in her mind, in one of a thousand languages that she didn’t understand, an obscure tongue of hums and hisses.
She stepped out into a long, narrow corridor lit by irregular panels of interior lights and followed it forward, through another open hatch. Here the walkway narrowed even further, the ceiling lowering until she thought she’d somehow gone the wrong way.
Hunching her shoulders to negotiate a turn, Zo realized how truly cold it was. An abrupt blast of arctic air slashed across her face and forearms and she turned, openmouthed and startled, tasting the first iron-flecked coldness in the back of her throat. White flakes swirled up the landing ramp, and in the sickish pale green glow of the landing lights she got her first look at where they’d settled.
They weren’t sitting on any kind of pad—if it was out there, they’d missed it completely. The landscape outside the ship presented little more than a broad snow-seething steppe of white on white. The wind brought a thin film of tears to her eyes, and Zo wiped them clear. In the distance, across the void, she could just make out the jagged peaks cutting upward like a black spinal column. There was something both erratic and oddly deliberate in the outline of those mountains.
An instant later she realized what it was.
They weren’t mountains at all.
She tried to swallow and felt no moisture in her throat. The freezing dry air had sucked it away, eliminated it entirely. In her arms, tucked against her, the orchid had started to make the same repetitive clicking sound over and over again, as if it were stuck on a thought, a compulsive stammering noise that she didn’t like at all.
The tip of a spear touched the back of her neck, just above the rough hem of the collar.
“Move,” Tulkh’s voice said from behind her.
Zo’s feet wouldn’t budge. They seemed to have been riveted in place.
“Wait,” she said, not turning around. “Those black shapes out there in the distance, they’re—”
“I know what they are.”
“Which planet is this?” she asked thinly. “Ziost?”
The spear tip slipped a little against her skin, but it didn’t hurt. She was far too lost in what lay in front of them to feel the pain.
“We shouldn’t have come,” she said. “There’s a toxicity level that I can’t account for. It’s—”
“Move.”
“Do you have a droid you could send out to sample the atmosphere, just to
Something’s gone wrong out there
, she thought.
Can you feel it?
Across the room, the vacuum-sealed gasp caught her by surprise. The Whiphid was standing in the open hatchway again, clutching his spear in one hand and a bunched-up bundle of furs and hides in the other. He tossed the furs at her feet.
“Put those on.”
Zo didn’t budge. “What are we doing here?”
“Get the plant.”
“Are you going to answer me?”
He turned and stalked out again, this time leaving the hatch open behind him, an unspoken demand to follow. Was there some other component to his brusqueness besides just impatience? Was the bounty hunter as uneasy as she felt?
Zo looked down at the pile of furs and pelts. They had been stitched into crude mittens, boots, a hat, and what looked like a kind of cloak. Squatting, she pulled the boots over her feet and found that, despite their bulkiness, they fit well enough when she lashed them tight around her ankles. They were recent kills, she realized—she could still feel the residue of the lives that had worn them as skin. It was like strapping on restless layers of ghosts.
Picking up the cloak, she slung it around her shoulders and reached up to the sealed transparent lab packet containing the orchid, slipping it free from the cable that pinned it down. The orchid seemed to shiver and flattened its petals against the wall of the chamber closest to her hand as if drawn to the warmth. It was murmuring to itself, not out loud but in her mind, in one of a thousand languages that she didn’t understand, an obscure tongue of hums and hisses.
She stepped out into a long, narrow corridor lit by irregular panels of interior lights and followed it forward, through another open hatch. Here the walkway narrowed even further, the ceiling lowering until she thought she’d somehow gone the wrong way.
Hunching her shoulders to negotiate a turn, Zo realized how truly cold it was. An abrupt blast of arctic air slashed across her face and forearms and she turned, openmouthed and startled, tasting the first iron-flecked coldness in the back of her throat. White flakes swirled up the landing ramp, and in the sickish pale green glow of the landing lights she got her first look at where they’d settled.
They weren’t sitting on any kind of pad—if it was out there, they’d missed it completely. The landscape outside the ship presented little more than a broad snow-seething steppe of white on white. The wind brought a thin film of tears to her eyes, and Zo wiped them clear. In the distance, across the void, she could just make out the jagged peaks cutting upward like a black spinal column. There was something both erratic and oddly deliberate in the outline of those mountains.
An instant later she realized what it was.
They weren’t mountains at all.
She tried to swallow and felt no moisture in her throat. The freezing dry air had sucked it away, eliminated it entirely. In her arms, tucked against her, the orchid had started to make the same repetitive clicking sound over and over again, as if it were stuck on a thought, a compulsive stammering noise that she didn’t like at all.
The tip of a spear touched the back of her neck, just above the rough hem of the collar.
“Move,” Tulkh’s voice said from behind her.
Zo’s feet wouldn’t budge. They seemed to have been riveted in place.
“Wait,” she said, not turning around. “Those black shapes out there in the distance, they’re—”
“I know what they are.”
“Which planet is this?” she asked thinly. “Ziost?”
The spear tip slipped a little against her skin, but it didn’t hurt. She was far too lost in what lay in front of them to feel the pain.
“We shouldn’t have come,” she said. “There’s a toxicity level that I can’t account for. It’s—”
“Move.”
“Do you have a droid you could send out to sample the atmosphere, just to
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