Loic Monerat & The Lizard Brain Spice Smuggling Syndicate by Chris Herron, Greg Provan (cat reading book TXT) 📕

scalped the cobalt being and then the basilisk bounty hunter pressed his blaster’s barrel to the back of its blue head.

 

That would have been the end of Maax if the beautiful female Chiss angel had not descended, seemingly from the heavens, and struck Bossk with both feet in a missile dropkick. She landed in a crouch and extended her blaster, it fired in a green flash. Maax’s whip was still coiled around the bounty hunter’s wrist and Bossk lashed it out, striking the blonde-haired, red-eyed woman across the face, drawing blood just as her gun went off. Nilita’s first gunshot burst out in a streak of emerald fire and took the Trando in the shoulder, the second shot would have took his head clean off but he ducked the bolt and swiped the weapon out of her hands with a mighty open-palmed uppercut which also sent her crashing into Maax.

 

Maax shoved her aside and, limping on his injured ankle, the majordomo speared the reptile in the midriff headfirst, both of them crashed back against the stone well which dead bodies had been getting deposited down during Okkra’s birthday tournaments. Bossk lifted the Chiss in a powerbomb position and hurled him at Nilita, sending both the indigo-skinned beings collapsing in a tangled blue heap together once again.

 

Bossk reached out with his long limb and grabbed Maax by the ankle, the good one, and pulled the Chiss towards him. The Trandoshan pulled a wicked-looking curved sabre from some unseen sheath on his jumpsuit. The sword’s sharp metal blade made a slithering hiss as it was unsheathed. Still holding Maax by the ankle he brought the weapon down in a chopping motion and removed the Chiss’s slender leg at the knee. As the majordomo sat bolt upright in agony and shrieked, Bossk casually sliced the top of his head off with a backhand swipe of his sword. Max was knocked back with a frozen expression of terror on his startled face. The top of his skull lay some distance away.

 

Loic had been lying blinded by the lasershot that sliced his ear and pissing his hose, quivering in abject horror. He wondered, with absurd timing, why he had been unaffected by the Chiss’s drugged gas, but quickly realised he had built up a strong tolerance to most Csillan drugs during his time with the albino hermit Jaster, who had brought cuttings from his homeplanet and cultivated patches of the stuff on Draethos, which Loic had imbibed freely and readily and often. What he wouldn’t give to be back there now.

 

Monerat’s vision cleared, his muscles ached as he stood up and gained his sight just in time to see Bossk removing the Chiss’s skullcap with the sabre, exposing the grey brain beneath, its folded layers glistening. Loic swallowed the bile that rose in his throat back down, wincing, his eyes stung and watered.

 

The Trandoshan stepped over Maax’s convulsing form and bore down on the female Chiss as she untangled herself from the floor. Loic crawled to where Maax lay and cradled him, the majordomo tried to speak but his voice didn’t function. He just gripped Loic’s hand tightly as he died, jerking and spasming, his red eyes rolled back into their head and his grip loosened, his jaw hung slack. An enormous puddle of blood surrounded them like a moat from where the majordomo’s severed leg had bled out. Loic rose to his feet, enraged, his cheeks wet with tears. How many have to die!?

 

Nilita was also engorged with rage, Maax Da’Viore had been like an older brother to her. She had just watched him die. Her eyes, once beautifully red like carbuncle jewels, now bristled with a flaming fury, her skin like oceanwater, now stormy with loathing. As Bossk closed in on her, his sword raised above his head ready to slice her in two, she quickly tossed a handful of sand in his eyes, the second the sand connected she was airborne, both her feet barrelled into his chest and sent him staggering backwards. She moved like a blue blur, back to her feet, and suddenly Maax’s whip was in her hands and she struck without hesitation; its long leather coil lassoed the bounty hunter’s throat and in a flash of movement she had thrown herself down the shaft of the deep stone well.

 

The whip-noose tightened round Bossk’s throat, electrocuting him, and the Chiss’s suspended weight dragged him to the well’s wall which he thumped into, and he remained stuck there for a few seconds as she choked him dangling from the whip in some unseen depth down the wellhole.

Loic took action, leaving Maax’s slain form he rushed forward for Bossk’s oversized rifle, which the reptile had dropped in the struggle. The gun was heavy but using all his reserves of strength Loic managed to heft it and aim it roughly at the Trandoshan, the smuggler’s legs wobbling slightly under the weight, Bossk had now reached down the well’s pit and was trying to pull the dangling Chiss back up by the cord with which she was choking him to death. Finally! A blaster in my hand! Thought Loic, euphorically, and he aimed carefully, and pulled the trigger…

 

…As he did so, a huge shape collided with him and knocked him off his feet, sending the shot too wide. It was now, at this crucial moment, that Drozsk had finally come to his senses, shaken off the effects of the psychotropics, and waded in to help his kinsman. The chainmailed Trandoshan sent Loic flying as they connected…

 

The human dropped the rifle as Drozsk shoulder barged him with the force of a cannon ball. The Trandoshan lifted the weapon but was torn, Bossk was almost fully in the well now, the buzzing whip pulsing and searing the scales of his neck cruelly. Drozsk took a shot at the human but he had rolled behind a pile of corpses and the blast merely sent a stream of lightless ash and blood into the air like dust motes.

 

Droszk darted to the well. Bossk’s tormentor was obscured by a veil of inky obscurity. He blindly fired three volleys from the power assault rifle – the flashes momentarily lighting the cobbled sides of the well as they passed. The grip on the whip ceased. Bossk rolled out to safety, frantically scrabbling at his throat. Drozsk turned the barrel of his rifle to find the other human. He saw him behind a blasted pile of ruined furniture and charred bones scrabbling for a blaster. Drozsk detached a grenade from his side. Back on his feet, snarling with rage, Bossk snatched back his rifle.

 

Loic was pinned down, he could see through the cracks, Bossk’s cohort had pulled a grenade from his hip. He was as good as doomed. Then the impossible happened – the female Chiss made a reappearance. She came leaping out the well, tumbling in the air, over the backs of the Trandoshans. She landed lithely; gleaming, glass-bladed daggers sprung from each sleeve. Only momentarily surprised, the Trandoshans attacked with their customary fury, but they could not land a blow on the female assassin, their great heavy fists always missing by inches.

 

The Chiss’s blows were more accurate, green blood oozed from ruptured scales as she weaved and span, her movements an artful expression of violence. Loic watched, mouth agape, as she corkscrewed on one heel, her spinning blades slicing into Bossk’s thigh. The enraged bounty hunter swung the rifle as though he was batting a ball, but the blow only took Drozsk in the face by mistake, sending him to the floor. Loic had never imagined such liquidity, such deadly, instinctual, rhythmic grace of movement.

 

Drozsk got back to his feet. Bossk signalled him to spread out, he recognized the exceptional skills of the Chiss female. Such fighters as her were scarce throughout the galaxies, brute force would yield little against her nimbleness. But where she had had already cut and sliced, she had merely wounded the Trandoshans. Bossk knew he only needed one clean blow to incapacitate her. She was much too fast to shoot, they had to move in from the sides, trying to trap her. Drozsk feinted a long jabbing arm, the Chiss replied with a viscous spinning kick, even her boots were knifed. Bossk tried next, but again she ducked his rifle swing.

 

From a crouching position she drove her dagger point to Bossk’s gut. There was split second of resistance before the blade pierced. It was enough. Bossk caught her with a glancing blow, she stumbled. With the speed of a striking serpent, Drozsk capitalised with a backhanded swipe, knocking her back head over heels. The upper hand now belonged to the lizards Loic realised, horrified. He had prised a blaster from the clutching stubborn fingers of a dead Weequay, but he dare not risk a shot lest he hit the never-still Chiss. As she rolled to her feet their eyes met.

 

Get in there and get ready to cover me, she commanded, telepathically, Loic obeyed. He jumped to the corpse-strewn sands of the arena floor once again and ran to the splintered gate. The Chiss was in next, her spinning leap evading a volley of rifle fire. As she landed, she rolled towards the smuggler. Loic fired some blaster shots over the edge of the pit to give the Trandoshans something to think about.

 

They backed into the passageway with no other thought than to flee their Trandoshan tormentors. Loic could not of imagined the retch-inducing horror that greeted them. There were three cells stuffed with gladiators who would never now prove their might before Okkra. Instead, packed in as they were, when the mind-bending hallucinogenic mist had reached them, they became mad, murderous. They had turned on one another tooth and nail. Many had died, ripped apart, cannibalised. The survivors begged for freedom.

 

‘Free us! I beseech you. Open the gates!’ As they passed the third and final cell, the lone surviving occupant greeted them with a malicious sharp-toothed grin. A huge, green-skinned, bull-necked Devaronian. The race had always terrified Loic, horned heads, the faces of devils pulled from some or other hell. The hulking hellion gripped the bars of his cell with gory, shit-caked fingers. ‘Free me,’ he said, mockingly. Loic looked to the Chiss, she nodded.

 

‘You want freedom? That way,’ said Loic, pointing to the arena. The Chiss pulled the levers and the gates from all three cells slid upwards. Some ran into the arena where Bossk and Drozsk had just leaped. Mayhem ensued. The Devaronian and several others started towards the opposite direction, towards Loic, murder in their eyes. Loic fearfully levelled his blaster at them. The Chiss pushed the smuggler aside and faced the devilish countenance of the gladiator, her lustrous carmine eyes unblinking.

 

‘You want your freedom? Earn it.’ She pointed down the passageway. Amazingly they obeyed. The Devaronian led the charge, dropping his horns as he entered the fray. It was the chance they needed. ‘The drug makes them suggestible still. Fast.’ She darted into the network of passageways.

 

Nilita had memorised the tunnels previously. They made it back to the Great Hall with little incident, save despatching a few dazed wanderers haunting the corridors. The sounds of havoc could be heard from the arena. The smuggler looked to her pleadingly. She knew what he wanted – to go and take the Trandoshans unaware, to blast them from above. It was a risk she was not prepared to take. Her duty was to save him, not to gamble further.

 

Perhaps the smuggler would never sleep peacefully again knowing his hunters were still breathing. The restfulness of his sleep was not her concern. She led him behind the dais, heedlessly stepping through the slimy faecal tide of Okkra’s remains. An open torchlit passageway led upwards, towards the mesa’s plateau, and her waiting ship.

 

The Devaronian charged out of the tunnel headfirst, goring Drozsk in the chest with such force, even the towering Trandoshan warrior was lifted from his feet. Chainmail armour turned the horns somewhat, but