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

of sacrificial offerings, and to channel the bloodflow, which on equinoxes could run into the hundreds of litres.

 

The deaths may have been in their countless numbers millennia ago, ignorant cultures sacrificing their own kin to appease imaginary deities, but the temple of priests and martyrs had lay dormant for many centuries without bloodshed. That is until Okkra’s foul hoard had taken it over for their sick sports on his final birthday. The body count in the shrine, as with long epochs ago, was running high once again, and the raging, drug-crazed Bossk intended to increase it tenfold.  

 

Bossk’s species are rarely considered beautiful, but a bent mind would have found a certain poetry in the way he weaved through opponents in full battleflow. The tumultuous Trandoshan fired upon anything that moved. His shot at Monerat had missed, and the smuggler had scarpered behind the rancid blasted corpse of the Hutt. His next shot, however, did not miss - the last Geonosian’s exoskeleton exploded in a shower of purples and pinks and shards of chitinous flesh as Bossk hit it mid-air with a belt of laserfire.

 

A bat-faced Kaleesh rushed past, bolting, and Bossk caught it by the throat with a taloned hand and chokeslammed it to the carrion-littered floor. He aimed his blaster at its face, its last sound was a high-pitched wail before the laser turned its entire head into a smear of red across the bricks. A wisp of smoke curled from his barrel, Bossk grinned toothily, looking down it.

 

A long-haired, tusk-faced, Ugnaught tried to limp out a side passage, but the truculent Trandoshan aimed down his scope, sent a barrage of laserfire its way, and reduced its bones to carbon ashes. A movement to the left caught his eye; an injured Gamorrean trying to crawl pitifully across the floor towards the exit. Bossk approached it, lifted its struggling form into the air, and threw the guard overhead like a javelin with his colossal strength. Its thick head collided with the hard wall and its neck broke in a sickening series of rapid crunches, its pig-corpse hit the floor with a dull thud and rolled over. Bossk no longer feared anything, not beast, not man, not even the Trandoshan God of Death. Bossk had become the Eater of Worlds. Bossk was a dragon, his blaster breathed his fire.

 

A Colicoid rolled up to the bounty hunter, it unravelled, and aimed its rifle at him, it was supposed to be on Bossk’s side but both parties were too disorientated by hallucinogenic gas to know or care. The resilient reptile ducked the insect’s volley of fire and sent back one of his own. The barrage exploded the creature in a cloud of green mist and white gunk. In its death throes its stinging-tail lashed out at its killer, but the Trandoshan caught the offending whip-like limb and bit clean through it with his sharp fangs, removing the poisonous barb at the tip, spitting out blood, and tossing the twitching tail aside. Baleful Bossk marched on, seemingly unstoppable.

With every victim claimed, a Trandoshan believed he equipped his soul with immortality. Bossk was beyond blood and bone now, he was the Shadow of Death itself, and indeed, The Great Reaper of Souls, Skargoz’ak, still loomed above him. The transcendent Trandoshan god looked down with eyes like cratered moons, pleased with Bossk’s murderous orgy, dripping venomous saliva as it grinned in psychostasia. The rampaging bounty hunter grabbed a defecting Rodian by its botuliform face, and his sharp talons removed the flesh from its skull and left it writhing in pain on the death-drenched ground.

 

The bastard Bossk, lasers blazing, roared in defiance of death, and he extended his talons to the manifest god above. HOW DO YOU LIKE ME NOW!? Bossk’s forked tongue tasted the metallic aroma of blood gleefully, it hung in the air above like a crimson thundercloud, encasing the Trandoshan in its foul misty rain. Bossk saw flickers of lightning dancing before his vision, and he aimed his gun and fired through them, across the room his bolt obliterated a service droid into a shower of molten embers and oily smoke.

 

Bossk’s shot earlier had tickled past Loic’s skinhead as he had dived for cover. He now sniper-crawled along behind the sparking, smoking wreckage of the Hutt’s dais. Where Okkra’s party had once bubbled with the sound of dozens of alien languages, it now boiled with the groans of the dying and the cries of the survivors as Bossk mowed them down one-by-one. The killing spree was a timely distraction for the lizard which the thankful smuggler utilised by scavenging among the treasures the crime boss had stashed behind his doomed throne.

 

Loic had a fine coating of Okkra on him, it was hardening on his skin. Bits of Okkra were in his mouth, between his teeth, remnants of the Hutt’s innards complete with its half-digested food were smeared across his emaciated frame. All that was left of the Hutt was a giant yellow pizza where he had once sat; the sauce his unctuous blood, the base his charred flesh, the toppings were slices of organs and sprinklings of bone fragment.

 

Loic crawled through the slimy Hutt pizza and located a fur tunic which he slung over his shivering, exposed, naked frame with its ugly belly scar. He also placed a dead Gamorrean’s squat helmet on his bald bonce to protect from any stray blastershots that might come his way. He should be escaping mortal danger while the death-dealing Trandoshan was preoccupied, but the thief in Loic stopped wide-eyed at a large copper plate full of sparkling rubies, one of Okkra’s birthday gifts, and he filled his tunic’s pouch with the shining gems. The junky in Loic stopped at the Hutt’s spicebowl, which lay shattered, and filled his trouser pockets with as much of the expensive glitterstim as they would hold, while also shovelling a handful up his nose. Fuck it, if you’re going to die anyway! He snorted vigorously.

 

Satisfied with his loot, emboldened by the spice hit, and with the smell of Okkra’s sizzled viscera still permeating his nostrils, the smuggler continued clambering. Up ahead, a sight made him stop in his tracks and accelerated his pulse somewhat. Across the way, Bossk was removing a Devaronian’s face with a gunshot, but in front of Loic, behind the dais, was one of Bossk’s compadres - a slinking herpetic Trandoshan, crawling, with a look of panic in its slitted green eyes.

 

It was the big, muscular one with the golden scales, and when it spied Loic its expression changed from one of panic to one of a predator viewing its prey. The lizard lunged and Loic eloped. Darting back the way he came, back to Bossk. Along the way, to avoid a groping talon from Gragg, Loic threw himself down into the fighting pit with his pursuer close on his heels.

 

In the pit, a wookie was watching another Trandoshan, an older one, as it disappeared in the opposite direction. The last they saw of Krang was his black tail flashing as he vanished down an exit tunnel, wailing, retreating in fear from a many-armed wookie-god, and closely-pursued and tormented by the ghosts and ghouls of everyone he had ever killed.

 

The wookie turned as Loic entered the pit in a cloud of dust with Gragg snapping at his back. A stiff clothesline from the wookie felled the Trandoshan as Loic scampered past with his assailant in blind pursuit. Gragg lunged back to his feet and caught his attacker in a crocodile’s deadly embrace, then he bit into its furry face deeply with his daggerlike fangs, the wookie yelped in excruciating pain.

Loic fled in the direction in which Krang had absconded, and he was fully intent on leaving the wookie and Gragg to their fate, when he clocked a flamethrower lying discarded in the sand. An ear-splitting, crooked-toothed grin spread across his angular face, and he hefted the weapon in his hands and turned running back towards the two fighters. The scruffy smuggler was just in time, the hulking, scaled dinosaur had the hairy beast pinned and was about to deliver a fatal bite to its exposed neck. Loic planted his feet firmly and squeezed the trigger.

 

The Trandoshan-weary smuggler from Coruscant took undisguised delight in watching Gragg’s scales melt like molten gold as the flamethrower’s unforgiving column of fire submerged its screaming victim. Gragg dropped to the floor and writhed, but Loic did not depress the trigger, he kept the flames burning until the Trandoshan had been liquidated!

 

Nought remained of Gragg but a puddle of dark oil and some blackened bones, a disgusting reek, a smouldering ribcage, fossil fuel. Some of the flames had caught the wookie’s grey bodyhair and it patted them out quickly, then it nodded at Loic who was grinning wolfishly, and clapped him on the back affectionately. The wookie now owed Loic a lifedebt, it would be his loyal partner till death.

 

At that precise moment, Bossk dropped into the pit and clobbered the wookie with a doublehanded blow from above. Loic’s new friend went down in the dust with a thunk. Bossk put a foot on its chest and opened its face in a blossom of burnt fur and splattered gore as his blaster obliterated its cranium at close range. The bounty hunter then turned to Loic who aimed his flamethrower directly at Bossk and pressed the trigger. ‘BURN YOU MOTHERFUCKER!’ Screamed the smuggler as he looked to make a Trandoshan toasting.

 

But nothing happened, the weapon’s fuel must have depleted because the flame it projected at Bossk wouldn’t have sufficed to light a cigarra nevermind barbecue a bounty hunter! Loic choked, Bossk smirked. The Trandoshan lurked forward and slid a rough-scaled fist around the bony human’s puny neck. It lifted him clear off the ground, gurgling, asphyxiating, and launched him out of the pit. Loic landed and rolled with a weighty thump, his helmet rolled off with a clatter. The Trandoshan stalked him, leaping up out of the hole, it landed smartly and advanced on its quarry. Bossk scooped Loic off the floor like he was a bundle of laundry and lobbed him again.

 

This time Loic connected, flailing, with a glass table, and smashed clean through it, sending shards and contents scattering. There he lay, wounded and badly winded, gasping for air, bleeding from minor cuts, as Bossk’s menacing hulk loomed over him once more. ‘No more chances,’ barked the hunter, ‘this is the end for you pathetic human. And not soon enough if you ask me.’ The fearsome reptile extended his blaster and put it pointblank to Loic’s cringing face. The smuggler’s vapourised brains would go completely unnoticed when added to the surrounding entrails, and Loic clenched his eyes and accepted his fate with a resigned nasal whine. The scarlet burst of laser went off abruptly and his pathetic life flashed before his eyes.

 

An electric whip snaked out and coiled around Bossk’s wrist. As well as giving him a jarring electric shock it also yanked his arm so that his aim was off and the blastershot scorched past Loic’s cheek, only removing part of his ear, rather than his whole head. The whip belonged to Maax and the Chiss yanked on it to tug the Trandoshan closer to him where he delivered a blinding roundhouse kick to  Bossk’s temple, dazzling the bounty hunter. A second kick caught Bossk in the ribs and dropped him to one knee, a third boot clubbed his throat. The whole perfectly-executed combination was rapid and over in seconds, leaving Bossk crumpled.

 

Unfortunately, a Trandoshan doesn’t stay crumpled for long, and a talon shot out and gripped Maax’s ankle mid-kick before a fatal fourth blow could be delivered to the recumbent reptile. A quick twist broke the Chiss’s ankle with a harsh snap, and twisting the ankle round even more, Bossk spun him facedown onto the floor. Bossk crawled onto Maax’s back, dug his claws in under the Chiss’s nostrils, and pulled his nose back, blood poured, Bossk pulled until he had