34/Reboot
IN THE END, IT TOOK TULKH LESS THAN A MINUTE TO REALIZE HOW MUCH TROUBLE he was truly in.
The Whiphid had never believed in fate or any kind of mystic galactic justice: in his experience, whatever happened, happened. The innocent suffered while evil thrived, and to the victors went the spoils. Even so, when his own personal circumstances went from bad to worse, he couldn’t help wondering if this were some kind of cosmic comeuppance for abandoning the Jedi at the library.
She’d been so certain that the flower was summoning her from inside there. Maybe it had been, but Tulkh saw no advantage in going in after it, not when he could return to his ship and put this whole forsaken planet in the past. And so he’d let her go alone. After all, he owed the Jedi girl nothing. All right, she had saved him, but he’d saved her at least once as well and that made them even, didn’t it?
A new kind of darkness had risen up from the landscape now like some night within the night, so that the academy’s snow-swept ruins glowed faintly in what little light emanated from within them. In the distance, Tulkh heard screams. They were not random, these screams—they rose up and swooped down, oscillating in the wind, rising from different directions.
Yet it was the silence in between that made him the most uneasy.
He thought about the things that had dropped from the tower, and how many more of them seemed to be out there now, screaming into the storm. Tulkh gripped his spear, checked his bow, counted his arrows, and listened to the screams grow louder—closer. With numbers like those, he couldn’t help but wonder how many he would encounter on his way back to the Mirocaw.
He didn’t have to wait long.
He was detouring around a long, curved, hangar-like structure on the western outskirts of the academy’s grounds when they came at him.
Crushing waves, one from either side, poured in on his right and left. Tulkh smelled them, heard their screams, the lurching stomp of their advance, seconds before they would have ripped him limb from limb.
He’d already kicked open the hatchway behind him and dived inside, pivoting to get his first look at the high, brightly lit curved-rib structure that surrounded him. The students must have used this place, he thought—some wit had left a handmade sign painted over the entranceway. It read:
WELCOME TO THE PAIN PIPE
Tulkh looked around. It appeared to be some kind of training simulation chamber, a wide, high space full of elaborately machined devices that protruded from the floor and walls, even down from the ceiling—pillars, pinions, retracted coils, and battering rams. But that quick impression was all that Tulkh was able to absorb before the hatch burst open behind him, allowing the flood of bodies to come spewing into the space with him.
The Whiphid’s evolutionary process had optimized his killing skills. Now he called upon the full extent of his genetic heritage. The hatchway forced the things to enter singly, and Tulkh brought the first and second ones down with arrows, firing point-blank into the space between their eyes with enough force to embed their skulls directly into the walls. The arrows alone didn’t stop them, but they held the things down long enough that he could charge forward and gouge their heads off with his spear. The headless corpses dropped to the floor with a gurgle while the heads hung in place from the walls, gnashing and twitching and rolling their eyes like hideous masks from some dark gallery of death.
That was when he’d looked around and realized how many more had come in.
Dozens.
Teenage Sith zombies, Tulkh thought—how in the moons of Bogden had it all started? Every so often, the universe must just get bored and decide to really cut loose. Like the corpses that had come after them from the tower, most of them had already started to rot. Others were missing whole pieces of their faces and outer musculature, turning them into walking pathology lessons without the common courtesy to lie down and die. All of them surged forward with the lurching, eager speed of things whose appetite—for flesh, or for death—would never be fully slaked.
Tucking his spear into the quiver on his back, Tulkh jumped for one of the overhead support struts and swung himself up onto it, shimmying toward the control booth that he’d noticed up above. Anything that could climb to the top of the Tower and crawl over the glass would have no problem scrambling up one of these girders. But he had noticed something else up here, and although it probably wasn’t enough to tip the battle in his favor, it might give him the edge.
And the edge was all he needed.
Tulkh punched one claw through the booth’s viewport, gouging out a hole large enough to drag himself through, and turned around to face the wide, curved instrumentation panel that he assumed controlled the entire training facility below.
The dead things were swarming in even more thickly now, crawling all over one another in an attempt to move forward. Some of them had already started trying to grapple their way up into the booth after him. Tulkh reached for the simulator controls, found one labeled SWING-ARM 17-155, and hit the switch.
The simulator responded instantly. Two massive pillars swung down from either side of the ceiling, slamming straight into the swarm of bodies, smashing them aside and sending them flying. Tulkh grunted, not entirely satisfied with the result. This wasn’t his favorite way to hunt, but the numbers were against him and he needed every advantage he could marshal in his defense. He activated another sequence, choosing one at random. Slots opened up along the ceiling, spitting loops of razor wire from both sides of the room, stretching out as the things staggered and stumbled and caught themselves, screaming.
Tulkh glanced back down at the controls. The monitor screen to his right was glowing bright green, outlining the entire suite of possibilities for him in a clean, ray-traced diagram, the cursor awaiting its next command. Tulkh chose one called PONJI STICK and tapped the EXECUTE key.
The right half of the floor whipped open and a spring-loaded row of gleaming hydraulic rods burst up from below, where—by all rights—they should have rammed the Sith student-things straight backward, or possibly impaled them through the feet.
But something else happened instead.
The things jumped back, en masse, just a split second before the rods had burst up. It was like watching a single prescient organism reacting to a perceived threat. They moved with unbelievable speed and agility, as if they’d known exactly what Tulkh was going to do, even before he’d known he was going to do it.
Tulkh gaped down in disbelief.
Are they using the Force? Or their version of it?
The question didn’t have time to percolate long in his mind. Now the things were swinging up the pendulum arms that Tulkh had released, dodging the obstacles from both directions—they knew he was up here, and were intent on finishing him. Even the ones that he’d knocked aside had already recovered, and they seemed to have done so with unprecedented speed. Tulkh’s frown deepened. For the first time in memory, he actually felt his confidence waver.
He took a step back, evaluating his options, and felt something strike his shoulder from behind. Pivoting, already prepared to rip apart whatever had snuck up behind him, he saw the bright metallic eyes fixating on him from the chromium casing of their processors. It recoiled with an electronic burble of surprise, and Tulkh realized that he was looking at Scabrous’s HK protocol droid.
“What are you doing up here?”
“Response: Excuse me, sir, I certainly didn’t mean to disturb you, I merely—”
“Shut up.”
“Acknowledgment.” The droid’s yellow photoreceptors swiveled with recognition. “Tulkh the Whiphid?” The droid’s vocabulator expressed a mixture of surprise and confusion. “It was my impression that Lord Scabrous already dismissed you quite some time ago. Did you have difficulty finding the exit?”
“You could say that, yeah.”
“Clarification: It’s just across the—”
The Whiphid let out a low growl, grabbed the droid’s arms, and pulled it to the viewport overlooking the simulator below. “Look,” he said, pointing: “You see what’s down there?”
The droid’s head pivoted toward the open space below, seething now with hordes of undead Sith students. They were all attempting to scale the support struts, swinging their arms up. The closest ones were near enough now that Tulkh could smell them.
“Response: Indeed sir,” the droid said dutifully, “but I hardly see what—”
“Your boss is the reason why all this went haywire in the first place.”
“Here’s why.” Tulkh wasn’t bothering to look at the HK’s photoreceptors anymore. His attention was completely devoted to the components on its breastplate. “You’re an HK model.”
“Confirm: A Czerka Corp HK series, yes, sir, but—”
“You know what HK stands for?”
“Response: It’s an industry term, sir, but—”
“Hunter-killer.”
The droid made a scandalized chirp. “Correction: Respectfully, you’re mistaken, sir. I am a protocol droid. Proficient in millions of galactic languages and—”
“Czerka built you special to get around local laws banning assassin droids.” Tulkh was gritting his teeth now. “Those flip shields over your eyes—that’s a combat modification. When Scabrous brought you here, he put a restraining bolt on you, but if I do this—”
He yanked the bolt off. There was a brief, hissing sizzle as the HK’s processor muzzle shorted out. Tulkh felt his skin tighten, his fur standing on end. He cast a grim look at the droid. “Remember now?”
The HK didn’t bother to answer. Weapons slots opened on its forearms to reveal an augmented laser array bristling from both limbs. A second later the control booth came alive with blasterfire. The Sith-things recoiled, spun backward, pitched, and pivoted off their feet by what appeared to be a nonstop fusillade of hot plasma. Somewhere to the left, Tulkh ducked as the HK completed a full circle, laying down a line of fire so fast and dense that it seemed to create a single ballistic wave. He jerked his head back as a laser bolt ricocheted off the wall, then bounced past him in the opposite direction.
“Stand aside,” the droid said, having apparently abandoned its customary method of speech along with its former programming.
“What—”
Its left leg rotated outward to reveal a wider-barreled object extruded from the port. A massive jet of blue flame roared straight across the room, igniting several of the Sith-things, and they staggered, blazing, screaming as the flamethrower erupted a second time.
Through the sea of burning corpses, Tulkh could see a clear corridor to the exit at the back of the simulator. One of the Sith-things was slashing its way toward him, jaw sagging hideously, its face on fire. Tulkh yanked his spear from where it was still strapped against his back and rammed it as hard as he could into its wide-open mouth.
Jerking the spear back, the Whiphid glanced in the opposite direction.
“Where are you going?” the droid asked.
“Back to my ship.” Tulkh was already halfway across the floor. He turned and looked back at the droid. “You staying here?”
“Here? With them?” The HK didn’t hesitate. It followed the Whiphid down through the simulation chamber, out of the pain pipe, and into the snow.