Loic Monerat & The Lizard Brain Spice Smuggling Syndicate by Chris Herron, Greg Provan (book club suggestions .TXT) 📖

beating in his chest, the blood was racing round his body so fast it made his ears buzz. He had come too far to let a couple of Weequay scupper him. He did not fancy a prolonged fist fight with one though, he would have to incapacitate his one quickly and hope his companion was also up to the task.

 

In position, Loic moved to give the nod to Buru to pounce, but Buru paid no heed, he shouldered Loic aside and ran round the corner. He swung the bar and took one Weequay over the back of the skull. The other pushed his chair back and reached for the blaster at his hip, it was too late. Buru speared the end of the iron bar into his face, bowling him over. By the time Loic took in the scene, one Weequay had been killed by a blow to the head, and Buru was splitting the other’s skull open as he brought the bottom of the bar up and down, time and again.

 

‘I think he’s dead,’ Loic said, Buru turned to face him, Loic did not like what he seen in those eyes. Buru wanted payback, no doubt, but was he prepared to endanger his escape by trying to kill Loic? The smuggler could see the hesitation play upon the Nicto’s face. ‘Look, I did what I had to do… to escape. You did what you had to do. Come on, let us get their blasters and get the fuck out of here, together,’ Loic offered.

 

‘Together,’ agreed Buru, picking up the blasters from the Weequays’ bodies and handing one to Loic.

 

‘Now how the hell do we get out of here?’

 

‘Follow Buru.’

 

Down in the dark, wormy earth, cold, heartless specks of fire lit the way. Loic followed the hornfaced Nicto, he seemed to know where he was going, in the deepening-darkness the creature scuffled, swinesnorts, stubby fingers scrabbled, rooted, griped, and wrestled, dragging itself through the foul gloom, its sowlike haunches waggling. Loic felt a new feeling burst in his chest, a spring of hope. Maybe this creature could get them the fuck out of here, sharply and swiftly, with his working-knowledge of the place’s innards and exits.

 

With a face like a rotten cluster of greengrapes, the Nicto turned and gestured to its new companion, this way, he indicated. Thank the moons of Coruscant! Thought Loic, as he felt the comforting breeze of an outdoor portal brush past his face, finally, nearly out of here, I’m starting to suffocate in these narrow, cursed tunnels. In the Hutt’s domain death lurked everywhere, fear and pain constituted the very cement of the building’s foundations.

 

As they rounded a corner, a large shadow loomed up before them, Loic’s heart stopped as he crashed into the back of his guide, who came to a screeching halt and squealed, Loic held his breath. Before them towered the Trandoshan, Bossk. He seemed even more huge in the constricted passageway. The persistent pursuer puffed a pungent, plumy blast of his rotten breath as he backhanded the Nicto, sending its blaster scattering, and thumping the bedazzled Buru into the padded-earth of the walls, concussing him. ‘Is there no escaping you you bastaaaa…’ Howled Loic as he raised his own blaster to fire, but his sentence was cut short as he received the same cruel treatment as his predecessor, the blaster shot went over Bossk’s scaly crown as he slapped Loic down and grappled his weapon from his feeble hands.

 

The Nicto rose and charged, but Bossk’s obsidian-bladed hunting knife snaked out of his belt, the sharp edge jutted out, hungrily tasting Nicto blood as it opened the brow of Buru’s bewildered face. Bossk pinned the squirming creature to the wall with one mighty limb as it gurgled and choked on its own lifefluid, which poured from the gash in its forehead and into its eyes and mouth. ‘Sarkraa wants a word with you,’ Bossk growled at his struggling captive.

 

Still holding the escapee pinned, the leviathan lizard turned its icy glare to the trembling smuggler. ‘You can’t escape me,’ hissed the monster, and it took Loic round the neck in one rough-scaled hand, the Nicto still in the other, and dragged them back up the corridors from whence they came; back towards Sarkraa’s audience chamber, back towards enslavement, terrifying torture, and certain death. Loic gave up all hope; a cold, uncaring, indifference took a tight hold of him, tighter even than the Trandoshan’s grip, and he didn’t even protest or struggle as Bossk hoisted them up the corridor like a couple of Sullustan ashrabbits, to be skinned, trimmed, and roasted like so-much meat.

In Sarkraa’s throneroom, the denizens seemed to have doubled from last time; the excitement and goings-on alerting perhaps even the most spice-addled junkies from their long slumbers in the deepest corners of Sarkraa’s shadowy citadel. Loic saw the faces of Evocci, Arconas, Whiphids and various other disreputable species flash-by, as he was carried through the milling, intoxicated crowd of revellers, rogues, and reprobates.

 

Even pirates and coldblooded killers stepped quickly aside for one such as Bossk, and they parted like a tide of filthy sewage as Loic and Buru were dumped brusquely at the foot of Sarkraa’s dais, containing her huge throne, backed as it was by a pile of skulls belonging to species the galaxy over; thousands of discarded craniums, a macabre collection of morbid trophies. The Hutt bitch boomed in a baritone belch; ‘Ah, here he is, my twice-disgraced jailguard, tut-tut, we will have to make an example of you this time brainless Buru. HO-HO-HAA’

 

Buru squawked in protest, as Loic was ushered to the side and pinned against a booth wall by Bossk’s brute strength, the Nicto was seized by Gamorrean pig-guards and dragged screeching to a large, rusted, bronze anvil, which had been placed in the centre of the Nexu trapdoor’s grate. Buru seemed to know exactly what was happening as his detainers stretched him over the anvil, and he cried in remonstration. Loic could only guess Buru’s fate, as he sweated in Bossk’s beastly grip.

 

In that ill-furnished temple, where many diabolical things had been witnessed over the centuries, there was much talk of the relish Sarkraa took in the ritualistic sacrifice of any of her staff caught deceiving or disobeying her in any way. In that dangerous dwelling many a sacrificial victim/traitor had been brutalized, flayed, and dismembered. Some deaths were immediate and absolute, some were long-drawn-out excruciating affairs, which could last for days at Sarkraa’s behest and no-doubt ecstatic pleasure. She adored nothing more than murdering her enemies in a multiplicity of malevolent methods.

 

The azure-skinned Maax materialised out of the bloodthirsty throng and shuffled up to the anvil in flowing black and gold gowns, around his neck was a necklace fashioned from linked jawbones, still with their victims’ fangs and teeth attached. Buru’s captors held arms and legs each and stretched him over the anvil, his back arched, his paunch protruding upwards, bloated, fishbelly-white. Prone and exposed, he screamed, but he was gagged, he wriggled, but he was struck.

 

Maax drew a stone knife from a sheath with a slither and in an eyeblink he had plunged it into Buru’s chest cavity with a great thrust, and a subsequent crunch. Removing the stony blade, the majordomo reached into the incision it had left and pulled out the Nicto’s still fiercely-pumping heart, holding it up at once as an offering to almighty Sarkraa. The disembodied heart throbbed between bluefingers drenched in blood which dripped steadily to the floor in great wet spats.

 

The overfed Hutt crimeboss nodded satisfactorily, with heavy-lidded eyes and a wide oily grin, drool collected at the corners of her sadistic mouth as she motioned with her knobbly hand. Loic barfed a streak of yellow vomit down his bonyribs and swollen stomach, it clung to the scraggly hairs of his torso. The weary smuggler had witnessed Buru’s wretched death in graphic detail, his vision had gone superfocused and high-definition, he was unsure why. He should have closed his eyes but he hadn’t been able to tear his gaze away from the gruesome scene unfolding.

 

In all its gory detail he had balked as his brain recorded the minutiae of the wretched Nicto’s heart forever. Bile stung Loic’s throat as Buru’s heart was torn through the ribcage and out his chest cavity, he was still alive the poor bastard. The miserable Monerat gawped helplessly as Maax presented the throbbing heart to his delighted gangsterboss, then tossed it on the floor. It pulsated and quivered on the ground with so much force left in it, that it lifted completely up two or three times, like a riverbanked fish, before finally running out of blood and growing limp and eventually cold on the grey flagstone.

 

A small, imperceptible nod from Sarkraa, and the disembodied organ, a pale pink in colour, flecked with bluish veins, was scraped up off the floor and tossed nonchalantly into the firepit, where it hissed and sizzled until crisp and burned. The spicy stench of burned offal filled the room, and then the charred heart was transferred to the Hutt’s grateful maw. She chomped down on it once and swallowed it whole like a barbecued twenchok. Buru’s body finally stopped kicking and was dumped down a chute to the Nexu pit, the pet would no doubt be ravenous when it came round from its anaesthetic.

 

Bossk dragged Loic forward, tears filled the smuggler’s eyes, hopelessness spread through his body like a fastmoving cancer, he was presented to the Huttlady like a Manaan Slider on a garnished platter. ‘Foolish, foolish smuggler,’ grumbled Sarkraa, ‘will you never learn, look at Buru there, look what happens when you cross me. How many times have you crossed me now smuggler? What do you think I should do with you?’ Loic looked on forlornly, he knew she already had her plan, he could feel something stitched into his stomach below the skin, he didn’t know what, but something, some subcutaneous nightmare lurking there ready to reveal a mysterious and no-doubt deadly surprise. Sarkraa was building up to the big reveal.

 

‘You will go with Bossk to the planet Florrum, where Okkra is currently celebrating his 776th  birthday with his closest cohorts. You will be dropped off by the bounty hunter as a gift from me for the Honourable Bloated One, Okkra, on this, his special anniversary. He will not suspect that there is a detonator stitched into your intestines, UH-HUH-HUH-HUH-HAAAAAA…’

 

Sarkraa took the time to chuckle herself into a wracking, coughing-fit, which she cleared with a long drag from her multichambered hookah. Still snickering through the shimmering smoke, she continued unveiling her devious plan to a quivering Loic Monerat, who now observed his surgical scar in wide-eyed abject horror.

 

‘My faithful majordomo Maax will accompany Bossk, to keep an eye on you, make sure you don’t attempt any more of your foolish escape plans, amusing though they have been; your pisspoor attempt to assassinate Okkra, your blunder in delivering yourself to Bad Kitty like an appetiser, chuckle, then attempting to flee with a dumb nerfherder like Buru, OH-HO-HO-HAA. Foolish, foolish little man. Please, do give my best regards to that dear, dreaded cousin of mine.’ And with a flick of her stubby little arm and a spasm of her grotesque tail, the Queen’s speech was over, and they were dismissed. Bossk hauled the smuggler off his feet and out the cavernous chamber of the host worm. Maax the Chiss washed his hands of Buru’s blood in a drinking fountain and scurried after them, pulling his swirling robes about him as he went, slinking into the shadows stealthily.

 

Nobody ever wanted to find themselves on the Hound’s Tooth once in their lives, nevermind twice, and that is where the unlucky Loic once again found himself, a return-ticket to hell. A short trip on the transport back to the planet’s moon (closely-guarded by Bossk, Maax, and two heavily-armed Nictos, he was getting the royal treatment this time!) He wondered idly if the Nictos were relatives of the recently-deceased, but they