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

meant the prisoners on the wall, and all the Hutt’s treasures, and the things most important to it, like snacks. What was left of the cake the Hutt had been stuffing into its eternally-hungry maw now mixed with its blood to form a creamy, pink froth which coated Okkra’s face and torso. It almost looked comical, but Loic was in no mood for laughter.

 

As the first assassination shots were fired, smashing through Okkra’s bong mid-toke and connecting with his face, Bossk had rolled backwards over a bar, and he had come up behind it, with his pistols drawn like dragon wings, firing. He elbowed aside the protesting bartender droid and then, noting the highly-flammable alcohols soaking the bar’s worktop, he shot it, and a great wall of blue and green flames went up before him, creating his own forcefield. The flames obscured most folks’ vision, but the reptile was quite used to heat, he found the furnace comforting even, and it offered a perfect battlement from which he could penetrate the discombobulated mob with lethal artillery fire.

 

Bossk decided to up the ante. Cautious of a cave collapse or a landfill he set two thermal charges to a low setting, and he tossed them out into the crowd, one to the left, one to the right. His Trandoshan brethren had taken refuge behind separate bars on the opposite side of the chamber and were quite safe from the twin explosions. Many in the melee, however, were not so lucky…

 

…The Geonosians had hovered up to the domed corbel-vaulted ceiling on their insectivorous wings, and they were raining down laserfire like acid rain into the scrambling, shattered soiree below. The hired Colicoid had rolled into a corner, brandished their weapons, and made a point of aiming for any Gamorrean, Noghri or Nicto, they could see in the swarm, and executing them all one by one, knowing that it would thin out the herd of those most loyal to Okkra. The Hutt Lord’s criminal enterprise quickly descended into a state of pandemonium! Very few had their drunken wits together enough to react in time, those that did react swiftly were instantly targeted by the Trandoshans and their hired help and expertly dispatched.

 

The huge, fearsome Massassi had gone crazy from the start. It was swinging people around the room by the feet, and ripping extremities from sockets in great arcs of blood, and twisting the heads from the shoulders of anything that came within its radius. The rampaging beast was not discriminating among its victims at all, just running amok, drooling, roaring - lusting in a battle-fevered, berserker-brained bombardment of violence.

 

The first explosion from Bossk’s grenade turned the enormous Massassi into a fountain-like cloud of blood and viscera. Obliterated organs and liquified offal showered the confused masses, forcing them all to recoil, only to step back into a second blast from behind which further demolished their ranks, and redecorated the arena in a fresh coating of gore and innards. Bits and pieces of all manner of species had drastically renovated the décor. Limbs, tentacles and claws lay scattered, blood filled the holes in the floor like molten bronze into a mould, bone fragments littered the place like pottery shards at some archaeological dig. The rank, sulphuric smell of opened guts drenched the atmosphere in a dreadful pall.

 

The two bloodied and bludgeoned wookies had been about to engage, grabbing each other in a grappling hold, when the first blastershots had whistled over their head and plunged into Okkra, leaving a scorched, shimmering air in their wake and a badly-scarred howling Hutt in their midst. The wookies exchanged knowing glances and hunkered down as the chaos ensued.

 

Some of Okkra’s small army wandered around the battlefield, trying to find someone to surrender to, and, finding no-one, were being slaughtered in a crimson crossfire. A few of Okkra’s henchmen dropped into the pit and used it as a trench from which to send return fire, but they quickly realised they didn’t even know who they were firing at. Who was attacking who here? They weren’t even sure where the shots that had struck their boss had come from. All they knew is Okkra’s staff were dropping like doppleflies, and they became no exception, as the wookies approached from behind and corkscrewed their tormentors’ heads round, snap, snap, in stereo.

 

Maax had been slinking down in the depths of the mesa’s lowest tunnels when he had heard the first shots being fired. His plan had been lunacy, but it had been the only one he had come up with. Carefully noting the design and model of the Hutt’s mobile dais, he had correctly assumed it had a forcefield feature, and that it would inevitably have a control room located somewhere just underneath the worm baron’s throne. The Chiss had found only one guard manning the door, a half-asleep green-skinned Duros, he had been slow to react and the Chiss had snuffed him out as casually as one might extinguish a candlewick.

 

Inside the control room, he encountered a rusty guard droid, which he quickly hotwired and shut down. Once it was sleeping peacefully, he turned to the bank of controls. His plan was to activate the forcefield, it would create confusion, but it would also protect Monerat while he and his associates did their work. His co-conspirators had smuggled an explosive device into Okkra’s crumbcake. The one removed from the smuggler’s ugly stomach was back on the Hound’s Tooth, when Bossk presses the trigger, it will only serve to ruin the hull of his parked ship and startle some passerbys. Bossk would be pissed, Maax hoped that pissant human Loic was worth it.

 

Maax would activate the forcefield, that would be the cue for his companions to release their gasbombs. The gas from those grenades would not only cause a temporary smokescreen but its aftereffects were that of a very powerful hallucinogen; anyone who breathed it in would be quickly incapacitated. The Chiss of course, had masks.

 

Maax and his blue-skinned brothers would easily be able to extricate Monerat from the situation with everyone under the influence of the psychoactive toxins, and anyone that got in the way would be easily eliminated. Even a Trandoshan was less formidable when it can’t distinguish reality from hallucinations, and it is confronted with the greatest fear of any individual – coming face-to-face with one’s very soul. These drugs would turn a Krayt Dragon into a pussycat!

 

Maax was startled to hear the gunfire in the room above at first, but then dismissed it as a drunken brawl. Once he heard the second round of fire though, and the clamouring and commotion that followed, he decided it was time to act and activated the forcefield. Just then, the door to the control room hissed open and Maax spun around, it was the Abednedo, Gravi Nido.

In Okkra’s annihilated amphitheatre, some of the more hardened bounty hunters and combat veterans among the crowd were not about to meet their fate in a birthday bloodbath at Okkra’s enemies’ hands. And so, they had formed a resistance. A few of the more sharp-minded among them had identified the main assailants as the Trandoshans in the crowd. They knew those motherfrangers would pitilessly put-to-death everybody at this party, they would not want to leave survivors to this hostile takeover, if that’s what it was, maybe it was just a paid assassination attempt, or some kind of revenge, but either way they would not be leaving witnesses.

 

A group of guerrillas huddled behind some upturned tables and they sent artillery fire at Bossk, Gragg and Drozsk. They were just beginning to weaken their defences a little, when a fourth Trandoshan burst through the entranceway; black-scaled, scarred, a trail of dead Nicto in its wake, and a flamethrower in its scaly talons, issuing forth a bloodcurdling battlecry as it plunged into the fray…

 

Gravi Nido padded into the control room. ‘What are you doing here?’ He asked the Chiss interloper. Maax’s face was expressionless.

‘What am I doing? I am doing your job. There is an assassination attempt afoot – Okkra is not safe. The forcefield will offer protection till we get him to his ship.’ Gravi Nido cocked his head, indeed there was muffled blaster fire to be heard through the walls, and screams. He was torn, mired in hesitation whether to race back to his master or interrogate the Chiss.

 

‘You were seen sneaking around. I have eyes everywhere. Assassins you say, how did you know?’

 

‘There were Trandoshans in the crowd, they were out of place, in my experience it’s enough to warrant caution. Let us go, we are losing time, Okkra is in danger.’

 

‘There were Chiss too, in the crowd, out of place, perhaps they are with you, perhaps the assassination attempt is yours and you are trying to blame the Trandoshans. What proof do you have?’ Its mouth tendrils were waggling frantically.

 

Maax snapped. ‘You don’t need proof when you have intuition! We have no time for this.’ Maax moved towards the majordomo, who turned his back on the Chiss as if he agreed. ‘To Okkra.’

 

But it was a trap to lure Maax in close, and Gravi spun on his heel, his staff burring through the air. Maax was expecting such treachery and ducked the blow. The majordomo was in perpetual motion however, he gripped the staff at its centre, the lethal edges whirring the air in a tracer-weaving blur. With cat-like reflexes, Maax evaded and dodged, waiting for an opening. ‘I am not the enemy you fool.’ Unarmed as he was, he could still plant doubt in his opponent’s mind, a split second of hesitation oft decided a confrontation.

 

Nido was too canny however, he moved with the fluidity of a dancer, Maax eluded the pulsating edges of the wicked staff, but a spinning kick was executed with such swiftness he did not register the attack till he was flying back into a console. Nido span forth, capitalising on the upper hand. Maax watched him come, and when the distance between them shrank enough, he pounced, rolling into the arc of the staff, rendering its blow harmless. His spinning elbow took the Abednedo on one its bulbous side-facing eyes.

 

Next, he gripped Nido by his robes, a handful behind his neck and another at his waist, and propelled him forward, ramming his globose head through a console. The Abednedo screeched pitifully as he pulled his head free from the broken glass, but by then Maax had the staff. With a swift gruesome blow he brained the majordomo, leaving the corpse slumped over the control panel.

 

He spun as the turbodoors opened, expecting an enemy, but it was Nilita – the female of his three Chiss allies who had inveigled themselves into the place. Maax had been orphaned at a young age, the Chiss government did not seek new parents to raise orphaned children, instead they were given to a covert branch of military to turn into weapons – the younger the better. Maax had been trained in numerous skillsets; languages, espionage, economics, rudimentary weapon skills, and hand-to-hand combat techniques. Nilita had been orphaned too, taken-in and trained, but her skills were focused primarily on one objective – killing. ‘Drop the forcefield – it’s time,’ she ordered. Her dark crimson eyes exuded at once both depthless malice and bewitching beauty.

 

An assemblage of Okkra’s host had upturned tables and furniture, seeking cover from the laser blasts coming from the back of the hall. Krang had took them from behind, his flamethrower spewing a molten stream. With a murderer’s satisfaction he had watched the flesh melt off a squid-headed goon’s face like tallow dripping from a candle. They thrashed, flame-enveloped, running in heedless indeterminate directions before they dropped. Some had dived into the arena to escape the conflagration; others ran under the many archways adjoining the great hall. It mattered not, there was no escape.

 

Dinivian Da’Raa stole a glance from the tunnel from whence they had entered. Chaos had won the day, blasterfire came from all directions, along with it the screams