Star Wars_ Millennium Falcon - James Luceno [20]
“But Neimoidians begin life as grubs. There's common ground.”
Lu San waved his small hand in a dismissive gesture. “The Colicoids are well known to feast on even their own kind.”
Taunt's ample mouth twitched. “Ever see one of them ball up— like the droidekas?”
“Once only,” Lu San said. “In the presence of a hueche—their onetime predator on Colla Four.”
“Couldn't we have gotten one of those, just in case?”
“The Colicoids are thought to have eradicated them. Perhaps from a cloner if there had been time.”
Taunt stood up and paced across the main hold. “What else do I need to know?”
Lu San's bulging, saurian eyes tracked him. “Protocol dictates that you keep your chins down.”
Taunt, who had almost as many rolls of fat under his mandible as the pregnant females of his species had breasts, pressed his chin against his upper chest. “Like this?” he managed to say.
“That will do. What's important is that you refrain under any circumstance from showing your neck.”
Taunt shifted his gaze to Lu San's spindly, ring-encased neck. “You're not worried?”
The Gossam indicated himself. “Not nearly enough meat on my bones.”
“You'd better hope.”
* * *
Staggering through the ring corridor while the Second Chance raced away from the Tion planetoid at full speed, Taunt tried in vain to get control of himself. In his years on Nar Shaddaa, he had witnessed the brutal executions of collaborators and betrayers; he had seen would-be defectors fed to rancors and traitors tortured at the hands of droids programmed for sadism. But he would be lucky to erase the Colicoids from his memory.
Emerging like a sudden plague from the burrows that hollowed the planetoid, slavering while the rapid-thawed and microwaved eopie meat was being off-loaded from the ship, tearing into it with such abandon that blood misted in the thin air and collected like dew on Taunt and Lu San, Viss and Heet as they deboarded the ship …
The Colicoids were so stimulated by the feeding frenzy, Taunt was certain that he and his entire party would be ripped limb from limb and consumed live before Lu San could close the deal for the buzz droids.
Somehow, though, the Gossam had made it happen, and the spherical droids had been moved with due haste into the same holds that had held the meat. But then poor Viss, lost in the effort of loading the cargo, had stretched out his neck to work kinks from his shoulders and the feeding frenzy had recommenced. Half a dozen of the barbarous insectoids pounced on him and stripped his bones of meat and flesh faster than Taunt could comprehend … Taunt tucking his chins against his chest the whole while, and Lu San, poor Lu San, ineffective in preventing the tragedy and paying dearly for it when he tried to intervene. Smelling the sudden fear coming off him, the Colicoids had sliced and diced the Gossam like raw filleted fish, indifferent to whether he constituted a meal or a snack, and not a scrap was left behind.
Taunt shuddered.
Two circuits through the ring corridor and he was still shaking uncontrollably. Two more and he finally began to calm down, the YT gaining speed and distance for the jump back to Nar Shaddaa.
That they had come away from the horror with their cargo intact was nothing short of a miracle. The sabotage droids were piled a meter high in the cargo holds—unsecured and rolling around like ball bearings in a duratin can—and a Colicoid Creation Nest computer sat in the number two hold, capable of tasking them for their eventual chop shop duty.
Lumbering into the main hold, Taunt lowered himself onto the acceleration couch, waiting for the pilot to announce that the ship was ready to make the jump to lightspeed. But when after too long there was no word, he called forward.
“What's the delay in going to hyperspace?”
The response was a worrying moment in coming. “The navicomputer says that the hyperdrive isn't responding.