Star Wars: Red Harvest Read Online Free PDF

him, growing more potent, stronger than the reek of dead flowers: an aroma of roasting meat that had slowly begun to fill the air. Despite the tension, he felt his mouth beginning to water. It had been a while since he’d eaten. His stomach gave a noisy growl.
    “You have failed me,” Scabrous said.
    “
What
?”
    “That is not the Murakami orchid.”
    “How can you tell? You haven’t even looked at it!”
    Scabrous lifted his head slowly. His entire body appeared to stiffen, to grow taller somehow—an illusion, certainly, but Dranok still felt himself taking a step back, like an unruly child being taken to task, spreading his hands out in supplication. “Now, wait a second—”
    “Sit down.”
    Dranok felt his knees buckle involuntarily, and he dropped down hard on the stone bench that he hadn’t realized was there.
    “Despite your failure, your payment awaits you.” Scabrous gestured behind him, to an arched doorway that Dranok hadn’t noticed before, and the HK droid stepped out pushing a cart with a huge silver tray ontop. The droid wheeled the cart to the table and set down a plate and utensils in front of Dranok, along with a cup and a pitcher. “Help yourself.”
    Dranok shook his head. Whatever was underneath the lid of the silver tray, he wanted no part of it. And he realized now, with the merciless clarity of hindsight, how everything he’d done—taking the job, trusting the shady fence who had sold him the orchid, coming back up here alone—had all been links in some colossally ill-advised chain of disaster leading up to this penultimate moment of reckoning. Yet he could not stop his hand from stretching forward toward the platter.
    And reaching out, he lifted the lid.
    He stared at what lay underneath, sudden horror piling up inside his throat like a clogged siphon. It took less than a second to realize that the shaggy thing in front of him was the severed, stewed head of his partner, Skarl. The Nelvaanian’s mouth had been pried open wide enough to accommodate the ripe red jaquira fruit that had been thrust between its jaws. Dead, boiled eyes gaped up at him with what almost looked like accusation.
    “What’s wrong?” Scabrous’s voice intoned, from what sounded like very far away. “You fully intended to betray him, did you not? I simply saved you the trouble.” And then, leaning forward: “A traitor and an incompetent. One wonders how either one of you managed to survive this long.”
    Dranok tried to stand up and discovered that he couldn’t lift his weight from the chair. Suddenly every part of him seemed to weigh a ton.
    “Let me go.”
    “Every traitor makes a meal of his allies.” Scabrous held up a knife and fork in front of the bounty hunter’s face. “This is your last meal, Dranok, and you must eat it, every morsel. That is the offer I present to you. If you can do that, I will allow you to walk out of here alive.”
    Dranok recoiled, struggling harder to pull himself free. But the only part of his body that he could move was his right hand, the one that Scabrous was allowing him to lift in the direction of the dining utensils.Jaw clenched, he grasped the knife from the Sith Lord’s hand—and then thrust it forward, as hard as he could.
    The knife didn’t even get close to its intended target. Scabrous flicked his own hand in the bounty hunter’s direction, a simple, almost offhand gesture, an act of disinterested dismissal, and Dranok felt his throat pinch shut, his windpipe siphoning down to a pinhole. A sharp and immediate weight seemed to have clamped down over his lungs. Tears of panic flooded his eyes, and his heart started pounding as he thrashed frantically in the seat, blackness already closing in around the edges of his vision. All at once everything seemed to be happening from a great distance away.
    As Scabrous released him, allowing him to slump down from the seat to the floor, the last thing Dranok heard was the sound of some kind of creature shuffling