Star Wars: Red Harvest Read Online Free PDF Page B

and breathing and making a noise that sounded oddly like laughter.

5/Pain Pipe
    “M ASTER , I AM READY TO BEGIN AGAIN. ”
    Seventeen-year-old Mnah Ra’at stood in the center of the academy’s combat simulator, the one the students called the pain pipe, wiping the blood from his split and swollen lip. He felt no pain now, only a burning desire to attack and avenge what had been done to him. The fact that the damage had been inflicted by an automatic system as part of his training didn’t matter at all to Ra’at. He was angry, and his anger made him strong.
    Up above, Sith Combat Master Xat Hracken sat back inside the control booth, one hand resting on the wraparound suite of controls. Though he was human, Hracken was built more like an Aqualish, bald, bulky, and broad across the shoulders, his wide, olive-skinned face pinched into a perpetual scowl like stapled bundles of oiled suede. The hour was late, and he and Ra’at were the only ones in the simulator. Hracken, like Blademaster Shak’Weth, had been teaching here at the academy for decades, and he had seen students like Ra’at comeand go—acolytes who seemed to require little or no sleep, who insisted on continuing their training late into the night, sometimes into the morning—and he’d seen how it caught up with them in the end. After a moment’s consideration, he tapped the intercom.
    “That’s enough for tonight,” Hracken said.
    “No.” Ra’at glowered up at him with red and baleful eyes. “I want to go again.”
    Hracken rose from behind the control deck and stepped forward so that the apprentice could see him through the transparisteel window. “You defy me?”
    “No, Master.” Ra’at’s tone was only slightly mollified—a symbolic obeisance to the Master’s authority. “I only wish to train under the same regimen as Rance Lussk.”
    Hracken nodded to himself. He’d expected as much. From the moment he’d arrived here, Lussk had set the pace for the academy’s most driven pupils, all of whom wanted to fight, train, and study as intensely as he did. What none of them seemed to understand was that there could only be one Lussk, and those who challenged him found themselves sharing the fate of Nickter, among others.
    Still, Master Hracken had to admit that he found Ra’at’s ambition intriguing. Ra’at was easily the smallest in his class, wispy-haired and fine-featured, and two years of training hadn’t added more than a few ounces of muscle to his spindly frame. But he had deep steel in him, a kind of gritty, semi-psychotic rage, and a will to power that drove him to do whatever was necessary to get ahead. He also had some very peculiar ideas. It was Ra’at, after all, who had started the rumors that Darth Scabrous himself was abducting students and taking them up to the tower in an effort to find one powerful enough to succeed him. He’d argued the case so successfully that some of the students—and even a few of the Masters—wondered if he might be right.
    Now Hracken wondered if he had finally grasped Ra’at’s ultimate goal.
    He touched the intercom again. “All right, then, once more.”
    Without so much as a nod of acknowledgment, Ra’at dropped back into fighting stance, shoulders squared, jaw set. It was as if he’d known all along that the Master would acquiesce.
    All right then
, Hracken thought,
let’s see how good you really are
.
    He tapped in a sequence of commands and watched the simulator come to life below him. An automated series of heavy swing-arms arced out from either side, each one of them two meters wide, closing in so that Ra’at had to jump to avoid being crushed. He dived between them easily before going into a tuck-and-roll, successfully dodging the third obstacle, a spring-loaded picador pike, five meters long, that thrust itself unexpectedly downward from the ceiling. Hracken nodded again. It had been the pike that had caught Ra’at last time. Now he was faster.
    Are you fast enough, though?