Star Wars: Red Harvest by Joe Schreiber Read Free Book Online Page A

floor between his feet.
    Zo realized that she could see Bennis’s face. It hung ashen and slack, a dangling meat-mask from which all life had fled. His blood spilled down the spear’s rough-hewn shaft, and Zo watched, with the willow’s unblinking acuity, as a droplet formed at the end, grew heavy, and fell into the already congealing pool on the floor by his feet.
    Plip
.
    Something rustled behind her in the leaves.
    Spinning around, her consciousness dropping back from the willow’s branches into her own optic and auditory nerves, Zo realized too late that she’d let her guard down. On the other side of the tree, somewhere just inside the thick green canopy, the rustling grew louder, closer. A branch snapped. Twigs crackled, trampled underfoot. Zo felt the presence of this new thing, whatever it was, making its way directly toward her, no longer bothering to be quiet or stealthy.
    Fear took hold of her, vacuuming the air from her lungs. The buzz of plant emotion had fallen quiet—even the orchid was still—and the entire research level felt far larger and more desolate than it had just moments before. Glancing around, hearing only the faint click of her own throat, she suddenly wanted more than anything to run, but she was no longer sure which direction to go. The noises she’d heard on the other side of the tree now seemed, impossibly, to be closing in from all sides. She felt helpless, isolated, alone, except for the buzzing weightless swarm of her own terror.
    A shape burst out of the green, into full view, two meters tall. The bulky, fur-shrouded torso stood well above her. The long, squinting face was inhuman: cheekbones and brow jutted forward; a pair ofstained tusks pushed upward from the lower jaw; the eyes that glinted from beneath its forehead were shining and intent. It was a Whiphid, Zo realized—the biggest she’d ever seen. Somewhere in his chest, he gave a thick grunting sound that might have expressed anything from appreciation to disinterest.
    Zo turned and fled. She had taken three steps when an arm the size of a load-bearing girder slammed sideways against her skull, spraying bright fragments of pain through the right side of her head. Her vision shattered into a wide field of star-rattled blindness.
    When the blindness cleared she was on the floor, neck-deep in pain, looking up at the Whiphid, the underside of one horned foot plunging down to smother her face. She could smell him now, his pungent and claustrophobic-inducing stench like mildew and death. This time it occurred to her that the death she smelled might be her own.
    Pressure engulfed her skull, squeezing agonizingly, as the mottled flesh of his foot covered her nose and mouth. A vacuum of fetid-smelling blackness sealed tight. Muffled, from far away, she heard his voice for the first time.
    “The orchid.”
    Zo squirmed and felt the weight lift ever so slightly to allow her to answer. “What?”
    “The Murakami orchid.” The voice from within the broad, tusked mouth was low and hoarse, more of a growl. “Where is it?”
    “Why?”
    The eyes narrowed. “Don’t waste my time, Jedi, or you’ll end up a corpse like your friend.” He leaned down until she could actually
feel
the fetid stench of his breath seething through the slits of his nostrils. “Where. Is. It?”
    “It’s … in the primary incubation cultivator.” Zo sat up just enough to nod to the left and felt a bright sliver of spun glass shoot through her brachial plexus where the Whiphid had pressed his weight. “Over there, behind you. But you can’t just—”
    “Show me.” Grabbing her arm, he dragged her behind him. Zocaught a glimpse of the longbow and the quiver of arrows strapped across the muscled hump of his back, the tangles of its gray-golden mane swinging back and forth. Small bones, some decidedly humanoid, mandibles and phalanges, were tied and braided into the ends of its hair where they clicked against one another. Whiphids, if she remembered