Loic Monerat & The Lizard Brain Spice Smuggling Syndicate - Chris Herron, Greg Provan (red seas under red skies txt) 📗

it in you. You know the easiest way is just to trade the water, which is nothing to you, and you get the gem.’ Loic said all this smoothly.

Reluctantly, the jailor relented, and placed the tub at the bottom of the iron bars. Loic tossed the gem as promised but deliberately threw it over the guard’s stupid head so he had to turn and scrabble on the ground to claim his prize. By that time Loic had pulled the water into the safety of the cell. He knew the cruel brute would have delighted in kicking over the tub out of spite if only he had been in possession of the gem first. With the gem in his hands the jailor rushed away. Loic lifted the container to his dried lips, each gulp of warm dirty water an all but orgasmic miracle.

 

Satiated at last, the smuggler and rogue, Loic Monerat, turned his attention to breaking out of his cell. He laid out the possessions he had acquired from the security guard back in the finance sector: a pile of credits, a niggardly-small pile at that, just two casino plaques, worth fifty credits each, and a holo-recorder. There was not much to boast, but there was certainly enough to work with. Loic, learned long ago how to adapt, how seemingly useless items could serve a greater purpose than they were initially intended.

 

Peeking out from between the bars as much as he could muster, he could see the lever pulled down and held in place by a locking clip. He took off his blood-soaked shirt and took to rolling it lengthy and taut as though he was going to use it to whip a man’s back. He lifted the holo-recorder and activated the device. An empyreal image of a large-bosomed porcine-faced woman appeared, either the security guard’s wife, mistress, or whore. She would never see his like again. The woman had the buttocks of a mare. Absurdly Loic Felt the pulse of arousal. With practiced swift movements he disassembled the device getting to his prize – its electronic guts. From these innards he managed to fashion a rudimentary hook which, once attached to his shirt, would serve as a crude grappling hook.

 

It took several attempts to get the hook to land near the fastening hook. It took several more agonising attempts to finally get it to lift. Good, the lock is unfastened. Now just to free the bloody lever. Wary of the reappearance of his friend the jailor, Loic desperately attempted to lift the lever with his meagre equipment – but to little avail. Come on, think, damn you, man. You have got this far.

 

He looked round the cell in frustration. There was nothing more of worth. All he had was the empty tub of water, and his unfruitful possessions. The two rodents in the corner stopped gnawing on the bone to look at him warily. They were wise to be wary, Loic pounced on the creatures, one escaped darting under his legs, the other he caught by its tail, it bit him painfully in the thumb before he broke its neck. Tying the corpse along with the gnawed bone to the shirt, Loic crouched at the far side of the cell and started making some practice swings, getting a feel for the weight. If he could use the weight of the bone to strike the underside of the lever and mask the noise of the impact with the rodent’s corpse, he had a shot.

 

Buru held the violaceous stud of Amaralite up to the torchlight, congratulating himself on his cunning. He had always been the smartest of his siblings, his older brother had abused him and belittled him, he called him brainless, but Buru had slit his throat when he slept. When his mother had walked in on the scene and wailed, he dealt with her too. Kindness was a weakness. Only the strong survived, only the smart. He had fooled that bald prisoner and good. He would go back and torment him when he was ready, but right now, he couldn’t take his eye off the gem, how it twinkled in the flickering firelight. He was rich. He always knew he would be rich one day, it was his destiny. ‘Amaralite.’ He whispered to himself.

 

‘It’s fake.’

 

Astonished Buru turned, the heel of Loic’s hand took him in the nose and Buru’s head thudded against the chamber wall, he was dazed but still conscious. He leaned forwards trying to grab at the bare-chested smuggler, but the trickster brought his knee up savagely and Buru fell to the floor. Loic took the time to drag Buru to his old cell where he bound and gagged him. He did not need loose ends, he could have killed him, but with what was coming he did not want the murder of Sarkraa’s jailor to add to his burgeoning litany of sin.

 

Getting out the cell was the easy part. Even if he could escape the palace somehow, he was as good as dead. Alone on a notoriously inhospitable planet, bogs, marshes and noxious air, as well as predators and carnivorous plants, he would not last a day. And even if he negotiated the outside environment, Sarkraa would have a platoon of cut-throats and bounty hunters on his tail, not to mention Bossk. Loic was sure the cold-blooded Trandoshan would relish two bounties in one day. No, chicanery not evasion was his best ally now.

 

He had already begun to formulate a plan, when he was in the trance, but could it work? It was unlikely, but it was the only card he had left to play. The way he saw it, he had two options. The first; to present himself in the throne room before the Hutt, if he could speak, before he was killed, he could offer Sarkraa something she wanted more that his death – Okkra’s. That is what started this mess, he had bungled the job, but what if he could persuade Sarkraa that this time he would not fail? After the firefight at the arena, Okkra would have a bounty on his head the size of an asteroid, Okkra would also have doubled his security. But a bounty hunter… a bounty hunter could deliver Loic direct to Okkra, bypassing security and palace guards. It was then Loic could kill the bloated bastard once and for all. Of course, then he would be torn to pieces by Okkra’s goons, but that was a problem for another time. Priority one was getting out the palace alive, who knew what opportunities would present themselves along the way.

 

Would Sarkraa even consider his offer? Loic did not believe so. Loic also knew that talking of murdering one of Sarkraa’s kin in open court would send every loose-tongued, disgruntled cut-throat scurrying this-way-and-that, looking to buy favour and allegiance with Okkra. Sarkraa would have no choice but to kill him there and then. Secrecy, not scandal, was the key. With Okkra’s throne room undoubtably perpetually full of ears and eyes, Loic had to take this offer to someone else. Someone with intelligence, someone who would look at the bigger picture. But who?

 

His mind turned to the Chiss, the majordomo Maax. It was said some majordomos were the real power behind their Hutt masters. Perhaps if he could corner the Chiss – when he was alone – he could make him listen. He would need to find a blaster and stick it in that blue face of his, then of course the Chiss would agree, Loic would turn over the gun, and he would be dead. What other choice did he have? Brave the outside world? He thought of escaping on the hovercraft that delivered him, but was that even still here? And how far would he get in that? One thing was for certain, Sarkraa could send guards down to his cell to fetch him at any second, and when all they found was Buru gagged, there would be hell-to-pay.

 

Slime trickled down the mossy walls which Loic leaned against, barebacked without his shirt, pigeon-chested. He hadn’t eaten in a long while, and now that his thirst had been slaked, his stomach protested to him with a gurgling knot which rumbled in his guts. He looked to the guard’s stool, next to it was a small wooden table with a large, smoky waxcandle burning in its centre, stashed beneath the table was a cloth knapsack.

 

Staggering on weak legs Loic lurched over and obtained the booty. Inside the bag was half a stale loaf of breadroot and a crumpled book, the book was written in the guard’s language, an ugly-looking alien dialect, scribbles, he tossed it aside. The escapee devoured the bread like a voracious lothcat, it was smeared with some unidentifiable paste but Loic didn’t care if it was Banthashit, he was eating it. Brushing crumbs from his thin goatee, and retrieving the barbspear, he started to head down the torchlit cavernous tunnel.

 

The meditation techniques Jaster had taught him had focused his mind, gave him clarity, even assuaged the aching pain in his injuries, along with the bread and water it rejuvenated the wiry, weasel-like figure; an energy boost which propped up his weary mortal remains for one last attempt to save his worthless hide. Plan A was messy, complicated, too much to go wrong. Plan B was straightforward, run. He decided to head for the hovercraft, despite the fact he did not know the way, or if it’d be there, wherever there was. Disorientated, he cursed himself for not paying attention earlier. He should have meditated on the prisonbarge, then maybe he would have been more focused, instead he had panicked and stood wetting his hose! Pathetic, he cursed himself.

 

The stench of death and torture hung morbidly in the still air of the tunnelled complex. Somewhere in the distance, muffled by the packed earth, was the sounds of clattering, like that of the kitchen staff maybe, working diligently and tirelessly round the clock to feed the Hutt’s neverending rapacious appetite for food. Somewhere even farther off were the sounds of pain and torture, harrowed drifting drawn-out screams. Loic had no choice but to forge on, burrowing deeper into the palace’s grimy underbelly.

 

The torches were becoming less frequent and so he lifted one from its rung and, sweating in its intense heat, he stumbled blindly into dark recesses and winding corridors. The occasional thick-wooded door presented itself, but it was always locked. After a while, he came to the conclusion the torch was more blinding than illuminating, plus it gave him away, better to adjust his eyes to the dark and sneak. He cast the flames aside and journeyed onwards, in the terrifying blackness, which swamped him till he was but a shadow, a wraith, moving surreptitiously through the Hutt Lady’s fuliginous basements and cellars.

 

Finally, he came to a small door which was unlocked, outside of it sat a wooden bucket, battered, bloodstained, and empty. Loic pushed through the portal and entered a wide hollow chamber, maybe forty foot high, maybe thirty wide, the length was indeterminable as the far side was cast in shadows. Somewhere high above, through the ceiling in another part of the palace, was the muffled clamour of activity and voices. A cool air blasted his face from somewhere in the dark alcoves, and along with it came a peculiar odour, a musty, sweaty odour; a fishbreathed, feline musk.

 

Loic sniffed the air and the piriform cortex in his brain scrabbled through olfactory memories to identify these strangely-familiar scents. Before his greymatter presented a theory, his ears were offered some additional information; a low, grumbling growl, ascending, into a throaty, dangerous snarl that immediately raised Loic’s heckles and caused his heart to do a quick doubleskip. He wondered if he would suffer a cardiac arrest before he even set eyes on his aggressor, he hoped so. His eyes, watering from the information they had gathered from the nose and the ears, observed a feeding trough in the far-corner, it