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

her taxonomy right, were born predators—they lived to hunt and kill. Those venturing from their homeworld found good work as mercenaries and bounty hunters, or worse.
    The Whiphid swung her forward by the neck and slammed her against the door of the incubator. “Open it.”
    “You just have to push the air lock.”
    Shoving her aside, he kept his right hand around her neck while his left hand gripped the latch and disabled the lock. The door opened and he pulled her in, keeping her at arm’s length while groping around the incubator. Zo tried to tilt her head upward to take the pressure off her throat, but he was holding her almost half a meter off the floor … she couldn’t touch, even with her tiptoes. From the far corner she heard an explosion of electronic components bursting apart. Something heavy toppled over and crashed to the ground. When the Whiphid’s hand came back, his fingers were wrapped around the orchid’s stalk, the flower already beginning to wilt in his grasp.
    “What’s wrong with it?” the Whiphid asked.
    “It’s special,” Zo managed. “It can’t survive out of the incubator, it needs—”
    “What?” he demanded, relaxing his grip just enough that she could finally slide down and touch the floor.
    She forced the word, hating herself for it: “—me.”
    “What?”
    “If it’s out of the incubator, I can’t be more than a meter away from it. I need to be close. Or else it loses its powers.”
    Zo looked out of the incubator, back in the direction from which she’d come. Her gaze flashed across the lab floor to the body of Wall Bennis. No longer pinned to the tree, his corpse lay in a crumpledheap, one palm open as if grasping for some final, unavailable lifeline that had failed to appear. The spear that had impaled him against the tree had been yanked free.
    Zo had just enough time to wonder when the Whiphid had pulled it out when she saw the butt end of it flying downward toward her face, slamming her in the right temple and plunging her deep into a wide and starless night.

8/Polyskin
    T HROUGHOUT ITS HISTORY, THE ROCKY DESERT WORLD OF G EONOSIS HAD SUFFERED its share of catastrophes and mass extinctions, including the rogue comet strike on its largest moon that had very nearly wiped out the planet’s entire population. Taking into account the resulting debris field, the flash floods, and the random solar radiation storms, it wasn’t difficult to see why the ancient Geonosians, what remained of them, had moved underground.
    Not much had changed since then.
    Standing here amid the caverns and rock spires of whatever remained, Rojo Trace realized that the Republic officer in front of him had finished talking, or had at least paused for breath. The officer’s name was Lieutenant Norch, and despite the fact that he was staring Trace directly in the eye and almost shouting to be heard above the wind, he still managed to sound both officious and insincere in his delivery. In other words, a perfect product of the bureaucracy to which he’d sworn allegiance.
    “Furthermore,” Norch continued, “on behalf of the Republic’s military and security divisions, we appreciate the Order’s timely response.” The lieutenant gestured at the huge polyskin tent spread out in front of them, half a kilometer of rippling silver micropore, flapping and popping in the wind like the sail of a ship going nowhere. “Given the nature of our discovery here, I’m sure you understand the urgency of our request.”
    Trace nodded, wincing a little at the grit that blew into his face. He was a dark-haired man of unremarkable build and complexion, tall and steady and vaguely handsome in a way that didn’t draw attention to the unshaven jawline, the green eyes, and the faintly smiling lips. Yet for every moment that he stood motionless outside the tent—perhaps listening, perhaps not—a sense of intensity seemed to gather around him, a sense of acute psychological awareness of its own rarefied