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

he frantically tried to master steering the vessel away from the outsides of the great towers. In abject horror he stole a glance behind him to see Bossk wasn't far behind him. Loic's skiff was sleek, small and manoeuvrable, but Bossk was an expert pilot, it was only a matter of time before he was caught. In desperation he raced through a stream of hovercab traffic trying to cover his tracks. It was no doubt useless, as Bossk would have his vehicle's signature already identified and tracked, but it might buy him time. He made a couple of breakneck turns and dips, to mix up his trail. He heard a mighty crash as the Hound's Tooth scraped along the side of a tower, sparks poured off the ship's hull. Then Bossk came head-on into the stream of hover traffic. His laser cannons unloaded as he spun his ship in Loic's wake leaving a rain of smouldering carnage behind him. If the bounty hunter was angry before, his wrath would now be truly godlike.

 

In a few brief seconds, no more trickery could save Loic, the Hound's Tooth would be in a firing position. They were nearing a gap in city structures and no cover would be had. He could try dipping and spinning his craft, but Bossk, vision impaired or not, wouldn't be conned for long. Given Bossk's umbrage he wondered whether Bossk was now just out for revenge alone and would just blow him out the sky, probably not, but it was possible. But no doubt the Hound's Tooth would be equipped with a mini tractor beam of sorts and he would be pulled in. He also knew that once caught, Bossk would likely torture him in that hellship. Loic had gambled plenty so far, it was time for another roll of the dice. He careered straight into the side of one the great towers of the business and finance sector. He ducked behind the front of the skiff an clutched on in desperation, trying to hide his face from the falling shards of glass that came down like the descent of an attacking crystal insect swarm. The skiff spun and battered along the floor, smashing consoles and control panels till it eventually came to a rough halt in a midst of smoking wreckage and unfortunate employees. Somehow Loic was still alive, he didn't have the gumption to take stake of his wounds, his first thoughts were of the bounty hunter. The Hound's Tooth - too large to follow - hovered outside the breach. What would the Trandoshan do? Loic could only guess, but right now he had to flee with all due alacrity.

 

Shards of glass crunched under his feet like crystal snow, dazed he bounced from wall to wall trying to find an exit. More through luck than instinct he found a lift. He turned to look back through the breach in the building, a jagged maw of ruined glass. The scorched wreckage of his skiff lay wreathed in smoke and fire. Some of the sector employees were screaming, but mainly only the ones unharmed. Loic watched a man pull bleeding hands away from his glass-ruined face trying to make sense of the flaps of skin and blood. The lift doors opened and Loic fell in and mashed the buttons of the lower floors, but before the lift could descend a security guard blocked the door. ‘Hey, you!’

 

The guard was a sturdy brute, lantern-jawed and evil-eyed. Loic looked back at him through bloody vision, the guard inspired little fear in the degenerate smuggler, it was Bossk alone who fuelled his terror. The guard reached for a baton at his side. Loic feigned indolence. The guard swung the baton for a braining stroke but Loic blocked the blow and snapped the wrist behind it. Relieving the weapon, he gave a murderous blow to the guard’s temple with it, his body slumped to the floor. The lights in the lift were flashing red and amber, the audio system babbled something indiscernible, something about 'no turbo lifts to be used in emergencies'. How the hell-else are you meant to escape a situation on the 500th floor, use the fucking stairs? Loic cursed through gritted teeth, the smuggler’s feet started to feel wet, he looked down realizing it was the blood oozing from the guard’s caved-in skull. Loic took the firearm and emptied out the guard's pockets into his own as the lift descended. The doors slid open revealing an assemblage of concerned hirelings. 2nd floor.

 

‘Are you alright?’ Asked the first

 

‘What happened up there?’ Asked the second.

 

‘Get the fuck out of my way.’ Loic snarled at the third, levelling the blaster at their blinking faces. They shrieked and ran in indeterminate directions. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ Wailed Loic. Another guard was making his way along the corridor towards the commotion, weapon drawn but unaware of his imminent death. Loic hid in a doorway till he was satisfied the blaster was primed. As the guard approached he leaned out and fired. The laser bolt hit the guard square in the face, a gruesome sopping of brain and seared skull fragments splattered the walls.  He took his weapon too, now with a blaster in each hand, streaked in gore, striated with soot and oil,  he kicked open a door and made for the main stairwell to the foyer.

 

Loic eyed the scene, from his vantage point on the upper level, people bustling, rescue teams, law enforcement, evacuating employees. There was a grandiose stairway leading towards the foyer centre's ostentatious architecture, a manufactured permacrete monstrosity as soulless as the greedy employees and their slaves who bled their life away in tedium in its bowels. Loic was about to take the stairs but in his mania he had forgotten the sight of a bloodied and singed rogue with a blaster in each hand was not the best way to avoid attention. If he could just make it outside the main door, past the mesh of confusion he could easily hotwire a vehicle and elude the bounty hunter once and for all. But he knew he was foolish if he thought Bossk had given up in him. Driven by a depthless alien rage the Trandoshan colossus would be formulating a plan. Just what his methods were Loic couldn’t guess but he knew staying in the once place wasn’t wise. He heard the lift chime somewhere in the back of his awareness. He decided to ditch his blasters and wander down towards the main entrance and pass himself off as an injured employee. He turned and froze in bowel-quivering terror. It was Bossk! Somehow the creature had gotten himself into the upper levels, his bounty-hunting instincts bringing him to his prey. A medical team bearing a stretcher bumped Loic as they passed him at the top of the stairs, this nudge broke his shocked trance. He brought up the two blasters, he had been crippled by fear for too long, Bossk closed the gap between them with surprising speed and before Loic could get a good aim. A long arm took Loic in the chest, lifting him from the ground, his tattered shirt wrapped tight in black scales. Bossk threw his enfeebled junkie form, all but weightless to the Trandoshan, against the wall. The game was over. Loic was out cold.

 

An awareness of pain, disembodied, terrible, preceded a wretched awareness of self, before finally a cavalcade of broken nightmare memories came to the fore. In those terrible moments Loic realized he was doomed. He was being roughly dragged by a foot. He opened his eyes gingerly. Pain flared in his brainpan, the torture control room for all his injuries. He wanted to die. The haze left his vision. He tried to call out for aid but the sound caught in his dry throat. There was sky above him, titan red, a cool breeze caressed his face, a pleasurable sensation hidden and trampled over by layers of pain. He strained his neck for a view. Bossk looked down at him. Like a demon out of the pits of some reptilian hell. Absurdly Loic felt no fear as he studied his tormentor; olive green skin, scaled and rigged, snorting nostrils above a hungry cavernous mouth, a deadly nest of small sharp yellow teeth, and two black and yellow eyes, devoid of discernible or comparable emotions, such as compassion or mercy. Fear once again stopped Loic’s heart, when he spied what was behind the towering creature, The Hound’s Tooth.

 

‘No…No..No…’ He pleaded as his fate slowly began to dawn on his fractured consciousness. How Bossk had gotten him out of that finance building, past all the security and agents he couldn’t know. He probably blew a hole in the wall and just walked right out, with Loic over his shoulder. But that didn’t matter now. No. All that mattered was going into that ship. That hellship! The worst place in the universe. Loic fancied he detected a glimmer of depthless cruel satisfaction pass over those ophidian eyes as Bossk fed on his suffering. The blaster-battered thick armour door to the ship slid up and a ramp descended. 'No…I’ll do anything.’ Loic cried. Bossk reached down once more and gripped Loic’s leg. He dragged the smuggler into the ship. The door slid down once more. Sealing shut, sealing Loic inside before the ship took to the skies in a fiery blast from the engines.

The stench was unutterable. An inhuman fetor indescribable, stomach-churning, insufferable. Before he knew what was happening, the bounty hunter lifted him onto a wall brace and secured his arms in a cruciform position, there he hung for an indeterminate time as Bossk padded somewhere deeper into the ship no doubt setting his course. Loic shrieked and struggled as though he could wake himself from a nightmare but this was real. This was as real as it gets. You could walk through your life in a daze, be it apathetic or drug-induced, but there were moments of ice cold clarity, an elucidating awareness that everyone experienced, usually in dire circumstances. He wept as he scanned the chamber, an octagonal design. The dead body of a creature hung from the wall, a Wookie if Loic wasn’t mistaken, but the unspeakable treatments visited upon the once proud beast had left the fur piebald, the underlying skin flayed and corrupt. The other wall braces were empty but the floor reflected the litanies of Bossk’s trade. Layers of dried blood and fur, severed digits, effluvious gore and filth.

 

Just then, a glint in the shadows caught the smuggler’s eye. There was a tight cell in the corner of the chamber, there were two furry hands gripping the bars. Loic found two white eyes peering from the darkness. What Loic seen in those eyes crushed him utterly, it was soul shattering. In the shadows it was hard to say but the Wookie looking back at Loic was relatively unscathed thus far other than its capture, but the eyes told the real story of its excruciating ordeal. An abyssal misery of vanquished hope and resignation to hellish humiliation torture and death. Had the Wookie witnessed the demise of its friend, the ruined form hanging from the opposite wall brace? Yes. The eyes told the harrowing tale. The wookie would be next, or maybe Loic, but its time was nigh and hope had forsaken the creature. Loic, desperate, thought of escape, of combining forces with the wookie, some stunt or trick, but as though the creature were reading his mind Loic could see it had ceased such fantasies. It had seen too much, witnessed too much horror. Loic hung there, weeping, whimpering, till he eventually passed out. He woke up to the sound of his own screams…the torture had begun.

 

Bossk didn't just torture people, he injected a perverted sense of creativity into such activities, as Loic was about to find out. Now Loic had been through a lot in his life, a lot of pain,