Star Wars - Fair Prey by Daniel Wallace

Author:Daniel Wallace [Wallace, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2000-09-30T22:33:43+00:00

Rocks. First grassland, then forest, now a vast tumble of ruddy boulders, some the size of a cargo freighter. Scrub vegetation peeked out between the sheltered cracks and occasionally a hardshelled arthropod flashed from a tiny bore-hole. Noone had long since given up estimating how much money it would take to terraform a region to such a degree. One point three million was loose change, he fumed. The cheapskate.

The makeshift bandages wrapped around his shoulder, hastily crafted from the ragged strips of his jacket sleeves, were black with encrusted blood. His boot soles scraped against the stony surface as he tried to summit a gargantuan slab, a task made all the more difficult with only a single functional arm.

Noone reached the zenith, looked down at a sheer three-meter drop, and jumped. He hit the surface and a chuff of air involuntarily escaped his lips. Strangely, the ground looked artificially smooth and sounded hollow. Noone advanced several paces, saw another, shorter drop, and hopped down.

He’d been standing on a cage. The solid durasteel sheets composing the rear and sides were partially buried, but the front - a wide panel of tightly meshed squares - was fully exposed. Realizing he had to keep moving but curious in spite of himself, Noone placed his face up to the grid and peered inside.

Something slammed against the door with a crash and a sizzle. Terrified, Noone took a step backward, tripped on a stone, and landed flat on his backside. The thing retreated into the darkness at the rear of the box as angry yellow sparks played across the surface of the mesh.

A force cage. Designed to deliver an incapacitating stun shock to any prisoner who attempted escape. Noone had seen plenty of them throughout his lifetime and had even been locked inside one during a disastrous early burglary. The standard factory installed locks were fairly easy to defeat.

He stood and placed one hand safely against the interlacing bars. The shock charge in a force cage was projected across the interior surface only. The caged beast stirred and turned its head - if one could call it a head - in his direction.

It was a lamproid. The other lamproid, Noone reminded himself, the female that Viveca was arrogantly saving for future venery. The primitive creature was utterly hideous, a parasitic intestinal worm that nature had insanely blessed with a colossal frame and a predator’s instincts. Its oily gray skin was blemished with crosshatched electrical burns. The floor of the narrow enclosure swam with fetid animal waste, blood, and bile.

The lamproid drew its barbed face up to the mesh, across from Noone’s palm. The metallic grid began to hum dangerously but the creature stopped short of the crippling stun field. A tiny wet filament curled from between two yellowed fangs and quivered in the air as if sampling Noone’s scent. Abruptly the appendage retracted. The beast reared back and seemed to take careful stock of its visitor.

A bothersome itch attacked the nape of Noone’s neck. He raised his good arm to scratch until he realized the tickle was emanating from inside his skull.

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