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

but he had never been tortured, and he was scared, he didn't even have a very high pain threshold, he wasn't tough, he was just cunning and crafty, but you can be as cunning and crafty as you want, it's not going to help you when a Trandoshan has you strapped to the wall of his ship as he hurtles through hyperspace. What is it they say? In space no-one can hear you... "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" Loic didn't have time to finish the thought as Bossk stabbed a talon into his chin.

 

"Just checking you're awake," said Bossk in his harsh guttural tones, "screaming already? We haven't begun!" This offered very little comfort to Loic. Bossk removed his own boots, as if getting comfortable, and tick-tacked across the deck with his feet's claws tapping out a staccato rhythm on the steel. He approached the incarcerated wookie and pressed a button by its cell door, a high pitched tone started to pulse throughout the ship from hidden speakers. Bossk grinned a toothy grin as oleaginous as a Dagobah swamp and as wide as the Belgaroth Asteroid Belt. "They hate that noise, some frequency that hurts their ears, that will keep him busy while I do you". Do me? Loic had nothing left in this life to look forward to.

 

The worst thing was, Bossk wasn't seeking information, he wasn't looking for a confession, he was going to torture Loic simply for the pure enjoyment of it, if there was information to reveal or a confession to make Loic would be spilling his guts like a drunk pilot in a cantina, but rather Loic would probably just be literally spilling his guts. The reality of the situation caused his stomach to lurch and he threw up what was left of its frugal contents down the front of his tunic, a trail of yellow stomach acids.

 

"You see," rasped Bossk as the wookie wailed and the noise blared behind him, "there are many ways I like to torture captives. Take them down to a desert planet, put them in a wooden tub with just their head sticking out, smear kete nectar on their face to attract the sparkbees and zingbees to sting them and the kubindi ants to crawl on their face and bite them. The subject is also forcefed so that after a few days he is standing in his own excrement, after a few more days the maggots and the worms begin to devour their flesh, and then I can watch them slowly die, being eaten alive over a long period of time. I do enjoy watching a slow death, it's relaxing. Unfortunately spacebum, I can't kill you, your bounty is worth too much, and I only have until we arrive at Huttspace to deal with you, so we'll just do this the old fashioned quick way..."

 

Loic thought about how Jabba the Hutt used to impale his victims by making them sit on a sharp spike, then would allow their own body weight to slowly impale them over days, that was considered a bad way to go, at least Loic had one thing on his side, this was going to be quick, for some reason though, the thought didn't offer much comfort.

 

With a sharp hiss of metal a lethal-looking curved blade was unsheathed from a  scabbard on the wall. Bossk tested the edge with his scaled finger and satisfied turned back to the trembling spice smuggler who had fluids escaping from more than one source of his body. "Sakkra wants you alive, but she didn't say you'd have to have your arms and legs." Noting the fear welling up in the orbs of Loic's widening eyes Bossk added, "Don't worry, I'll start with the small stuff first, the ears, the teeth, the nose, the fingers, the toes, I'll work my way up to the arms and legs so that you can get used to it... And they say I'm not kind? Ha." Taking an ear between two clawtips Bossk stretched it out and prepared to slice it off.

 

"Your wookie's escaping." Said Loic, Bossk stopped, scowled and looked behind him to the wookie cage. Sure enough, the stress of the noise frequency being played was driving the wookie insane. Insane enough to bend the bars of its cage slightly, this required immediate attention from the Trandoshan, as left unchecked the wookie may escape and spoil his fun.

 

"Excuse me," said the bounty hunter acerbically and approached the cell. He started to unlock the barred door. "I'm moving you to a more secure cell, no funny business or I'll skin you and I'll go back to your tribe to wipe every single relative of yours off the face of Kashyyyk, same way I did to your wife over there." Gesturing to the wookie on the wall, the prisoner however was not listening, too concerned with the stabbing pain in his head caused by the noise.

 

As soon as the door was opened the highly-strung wookie pounced, but Bossk was ready and he sidstepped hip-tossing the creature across the room with apparent ease. The wookie landed and rolled, came back up flailing, and ran at Bossk with its arms windmilling. Bossk caught the beast square across the jaw with a rough backhander followed by a jab that floored the wookie again. It rose back to its feet, choking and clutching its throat where the jab had connected. "Suddenly you've got some fight in you!? At the most inappropriate time! How inconvenient." Snarled Bossk, he lifted the wookie with his crocodilian strength and went to launch him against the wall, but the wookie struggled and kicked and managed to connect Bossk with a blow above the eye. Dropping back to its feet the wookie wrapped both its huge furry paws round the lizard's thick branchlike neck and started to strangulate him. The bounty hunter rasped and gnashed as the oxygen was squeezed from his windpipe, his eyes bulged and his nostrils flared, his exophthalmic face took on an expression of choking horror.

Sensing he was losing control Bossk lashed out with a talon that opened the creature at the throat, with blood cascading from the wound the wookie used its last dying minute to choke the lifeforce out of the Trandoshan, Bossk went limp and the wookie tossed him aside. Then he staggered towards Loic, apparently with the intention of freeing him, but he was losing blood fast, it formed in large puddles behind it as it staggered forward. A mere arms-length from Loic the large, grey-haired wookie finally succumb to its injuries and slumped to its feet below Loic, before rolling over, motionless, all animation had left the creature's soul, and it had that look of eternal peace on its face as it slipped into the netherworld and left its troubles and stresses behind.

 

This was frustrating, seconds from freedom Loic's luck had run out, the wookie lay pooling dark blood below his feet where he dangled, a few spasmodic twitches were the only motion left in the dead beast. Loic looked over to Bossk, his captor may be dead but he was still a captive until the unmanned ship inevitably left hyperspace and crashed. No sooner had Loic thought this than something caught his attention which curdled his blood, freezing it in his veins. A movement, almost imperceptible, but there nonetheless, the movement of Bossk's ribcage as he caught shallow intermittent breaths, the bastard was still alive, the wookie had sacrificed his life to kill the Trandoshan but he had only rendered him unconscious and prolonged Loic's sinister fate. Loic had preferred it when he thought the ship was going to hurtle uncontrollably into a collision, now the possibility of torture was back on the cards, and that was just a precursor to what Sakkra had in store for him. Not for the first time that day, Loic hung his head and wept like a brokenhearted child, the fat glistening globs of his tears, fell in what looked to Loic like slow motion, onto the blood-drenched carcass of the wookie below him.

 

Then, a buzzing replaced the high-pitched frequency that had drove the wookie crazy, the buzzing was an alarm, indicating they were approaching Huttspace, the wookie hadn't died in vain, it had bought Loic precious time and saved him from torture...

 

PART TWO ~ La Acte Définitif

Against the eternal, inky backdrop of godless space, floats a dirt-brown, greenish planet, ringed with a thin asteroid belt which begirdles a stormy, swampy world full of peat and bogs and greasy rain. The planet was Nal Hutta, it was situated in Hutt Space in the Galaxy’s Outer Rim Territories. The once-powerful Hutts had somewhat lost their grip on controlling this section of space since the Clone Wars and the subsequent demise of the infamous crimelord Jabba Desilijic Tiure. They still held a shaky control over a smattering of the planets hereabouts, but their mighty criminal empire had long since taken in water through the hole left by Jabba and sunk below the ruling waves.

A ship appeared, suddenly deposited from hyperspace into orbit around the ugly, unctuous native world of the Hutts. The ship was a strange-looking one, as ugly as the planet and the same ruddy-brown colour. A boxlike structure that slightly resembled a hand-cannon and gave the impression of some sort of flying prison complex. A polluted, dangerous planet orbited by a dirty, sinister-looking ship.

 

Onboard were four lifeforms, two dead, one unconscious, and the fourth barely-alive but awake. The fourth figure was Loic Monerat, ex-spicesmuggler, thief, spice-junky, spacebum. He had seen better days; he hung chained cruciform to a steel panel on the wall, what was left of his balding hair had been singed off leaving scorched tufts clinging to his head like the last dying bushes around a dried-up oasis. He bled from various minor lacerations and he ached in a plethora of bodily parts. His white shirt was shredded and black with grease and his hose and shoes were torn and scuffed and sooty.

 

Loic was currently stuck between a rock and a hard place, or more accurately, between a hard Trandoshan and the rock that was the Hutt’s marshy homeplanet. Bossk stirred on the ground, Loic’s muscles constricted in fear at the sight of the Trandoshan’s reptilian eye as it opened and swivelled to look at the smuggler. His eyes still burning from the spice Loic had thrown in them, a nasty blastermark on his wrist, and his throat crushed slightly from the wookie’s attempt to strangle him, Bossk clambered, snarling irascibly, to his feet, and stood to his full tremendous height to flip a few switches above him and cease the infernal racket of the ship’s systems telling him he was out of hyperspace and in orbit.

 

Once the ship was under control, Bossk strolled to where Loic hung, his claws tapping on the steel floor as he walked, and drew his face close to the captive’s, bathing him in bilious lizardbreath as he spoke a sibilant, rasping reprimand. ‘Fortuitous for you that that wookie caught me a lucky blow, or you’d be lacking the limbs to hang you on that wall right now.’ His hot, harsh breath like a stinging desert wind choked Loic as the creature continued, ‘suppose you