by Джо Шрайбер
And then he'd seen it overhead, the open maw of the Star Destroyer's docking bay descending from above, as the pod rose up into it.
A tractor beam, he'd thought, as the shadows of the hangar engulfed him. That's why we couldn't keep going, even with the thrusters repaired: there was a tractor beam turned on. He remembered thinking that at a little over two hundred meters, the prison barge was too big not be pulled inside the hangar, but the Destroyer could have locked on after they had docked, holding it there with the tower connecting them. By the time the engineers figured out what was going on, it had probably been too late.
As the pod swung up inside the bay, he'd felt himself swiveling side-long, then a lurch and an abrupt bone-jarring smash. The pod sank a little, metal squealing against metal as if pinned between two larger object and then the sides began to crumple inward. Sartoris's leg gave a loud bray of pain as the navigation panel caved in around it. Everything jolted forward again. His head snapped face-first and hit something on impact.
The last thing he'd glimpsed before blacking out was the vision of his father, smiling beside him.
* * *
Now that he'd regained his bearings, Sartoris released the shoulder restraints and took in a deep breath, shoving all doubt aside. He was alive and that was all that mattered. Switching the internal locking system to manual, he bent his leg and shot it forward to kick out the door. It fell off its hinges, waffled through the air, then disappeared. A moment later, he heard it clatter distantly to the floor.
He stuck his head out and looked around. The pod had lodged between two other ships, an old X-wing fighter and an upended TIE fighter lying on one solar array wing. Lucky for him the pod had landed hatch-up; otherwise he would have been trapped in here permanently, imprisoned between two icons of the galactic power struggle. The notion of starving to death inside the pod, beating his shoulder against the hatch until he was too weak to move, didn't allow him to appreciate the irony of such a death.
Lowering himself, he stepped over onto the X-wing and paused a moment before dropping to the floor, looking around the hangar.
It was exactly the way he remembered it, mostly desolate with a handful of abducted ships strewn out across this end. Sartoris moved forward, mindful of his sore ankle, taking his time so he wouldn't slip and make things worse. The last time he'd passed through here, he'd ordered the rest of the boarding party onward without pausing for close inspection, but now he wandered among the vessels with the sharp eyes of a man evaluating his resources. Back in his early days they'd joked about the pilots who flew these smaller TIEs because of the high mortality rate on such missions-they called them coffin jockeys. Gazing up, Sartoris could sec how the hatches and canopies had been ripped open, sometimes with such force that they dangled on their hinges. He wondered if these particular coffin jockeys had been fighting their way out, or if some unknown predator from the outside had been trying to get in.
What sort of predator? It's deserted in here, remember?
As if in answer, a high, frantic chorus of screams rang out across the hangar, ripping a hole through the silence. It was so unexpected that Sartoris actually jumped and felt the skin on his back bristling upward over his shoulders and down his arms. His scalp abruptly felt too tight on his skull. For an instant he stood perfectly straight and still, feeling a leaden sense of profound and unreasonable terror bulking down in the pit of his stomach, and looked across the hangar but couldn't see anything.
Another mutated blast of screams, this one louder.
Straight out of childhood, another vision of his father flashed through his mind, for no good reason at all: the old man smacking his lips-the death sticks had always given him dry mouth. Sartoris never forgot the moist, soft smacking sound his father made as he slipped into his room to deliver the nightly beating.
"Get a hold of yourself," he muttered, heart thudding against his sore ribs, unaware that he was even speaking aloud. "Right now. I have
Then the scream came yet again, this time seeming to emanate from everywhere at once. It was cycling up and down, bouncing off the walls of the hangar like a living thing hunting for food.
Sartoris whirled around, now close to screaming himself. He couldn't see anything. The screams-there were more of them now, a cyclonic outcry of rage-kept rising up, filling the hollow docking bay with ear-shattering din. He wished he could have convinced himself that it was some kind of alarm, a leaky air lock, anything but what it was, a cacophony of human voices.
His eyes widened further, starved for input and seeing nothing. The gray crepuscular reaches of the main hangar just went on and on, an equation for which there was no final quotient. It occurred to him that they'd never found out what happened to the other boarding party, the ones that had disappeared up here. The screams he heard now didn't sound like anything he'd ever heard, except perhaps in his worst childhood nightmares. They were the screams of the dead, his mind babbled, corpses who didn't want to stay buried.
And they sounded hungry.
Suddenly he wanted to run.
Where?
That was when the shooting started.
Chapter 32.
Hate Trip
The first time she heard the blasters, Zahara jumped back away from the shaft on animal reflex. Then conscious thought took over, and she went back and grabbed Kale under the arms, dragging him away from the shaft. As she pulled him across the hangar floor, the weight of his damaged body sagged sideways in her hands, head lolling, but she saw that his eyes were partially open, a pinpoint of lucidity still buried deep inside there somewhere.
"Shooting.," Kale managed. "Why are they.»
His eyelids lifted a little, awareness dawning over his features, and he frowned. His mouth went up and down, trying to shape more words, a question she couldn't hear over the noise.
She pulled him along faster, running backward so she could keep an eye on the shaft. At that moment the first bolt of blasterfire pierced the docking shaft's outer shell. She simultaneously heard and felt it recoiling through the durasteel floors, a sizzling crack that left a black gash in the wall of the tower like a crooked, idiot grin, admitting a tiny puff of smoke. Then another explosion burst through it, and another, the smell of cooked metal already wafting through, the ozone smell and acrid smoke that she associated with broken machinery. There was another series of blasts, even bigger, some heavier-gauge artillery, followed by a swarm of shrapnel spitting through the air in front of her face.
She kept moving backward, not looking away.
The hole in the shaft was big enough now that she could see them inside the shaft, leering out at her as their hands gripped the hot, twisted durasteel and tried to peel it back. They had packed the shaft with their bodies-prison inmates still in their uniforms, human and nonhuman alike, guards, administrators, no longer segregated but jammed together with a pressing, eager confederacy they'd lacked in life. She could already see their faces. Sagging lips. Wrinkled noses. Dead yellow eyes lit up with a kind of stupid animal cunning. A scaly green arm came out clutching a blaster rifle and fired a shot blindly across the hangar, the red streak fading off in the distance, slamming into something too far off to register. More blasters fired inside the tube, widening the hole they'd created, making it longer and bigger on all sides.
Be careful, you can't see where you're going, if you go too fast -
Even as she thought it, her feet tangled over each other and she went down hard, Kale's body landing on top of her.
Go, go, get up, now!
She jumped back up, groping for Kale, struggling to haul him off the floor, and made the mistake of looking up one more time.
They had started crawling out.
The blaster-twisted hole they'd created in the shaft was jagged and they cut themselves along the way, twisted spikes of durasteel slashing their uniforms and gouging deep into the pouched sacks of rotten innards that were their bodies. One of them-a guard whose face she vaguely recognized from his visits to the
infirmary-was instantly impaled and hung there flailing while the others scrambled over him.
In her arms, Kale groaned, tried to straighten his body, writhing around to look at her, and then fell slack again. He was trying to talk to her, she realized; despite his injuries, he'd actually found the strength to shout, but she still couldn't hear him over the blasters.
She pulled him faster, moving blindly, taking shorter, quicker steps. His weight was slowing her down, and now the first few of the things were already making their way toward her. One of them was Gat, his once familiar face contorted into a hideously hungry grin. I am going to eat you, that grin said, and you are going to taste good to me.
There was a brief moment of silence, an incidental lull, and although Zahara's ears were ringing, she realized what Kale was shouting.
"Let me go!"
"No," she said, not concerned with whether he heard her or not. The important thing was that she'd said it to herself-she wasn't leaving him here. In front of her, perhaps six meters away, three dead guards and maybe a dozen inmates paused as if acclimating to their new environment. Then they broke into a loose, shambling, open-mouthed run straight at her, arms swinging, legs clanging, firing all the way. They were already getting better at it. The shots were actually getting close to hitting her now.
"Drop me!" Kale screamed. "Just go! Go! Run!"
Shut up, she thought-her adrenaline hit hard, erupting through her skull base, and her backward run became a backward sprint, her legs not even feeling like part of her now, paddling the floor beneath her with a crazy, blurring speed. The things were receding, trying to run but not as fast as she was, she could outrun them all, even dragging Kale behind her, she-
There was another metallic jolt, and Kale jerked violently in her arms and fell still.
She stopped running, aware of a damp warmness spreading through her lower torso and legs. Everything below her waist was soaked in blood.
She looked down.
The right half of Kale's face was gone, a pulped half-moon. The broken skull protruded from his scalp like shattered terra-cotta, the jawbone dangling crookedly on one hinge. He'd taken the shot that would have torn straight through her abdomen. His good eye rolled up, fogging over. Already she smelled the terrible sweet odor of cauterized hair and skin.
As his head swung down, Zahara saw that the left side of his face was almost completely untouched, except for a single freckle of scarlet under his eye.
There was a muffled snarl, and she looked up again.
In front of her, the things were moving faster now, motivated by fresh bloodshed.
Zahara dropped him and fled.
Chapter 33.
Catwalk
They were lost-Trig knew it.
It had happened when they were running blindly from the other side of the hatchway that Han had blasted shut. Nobody had spoken up and said which way to go, they'd just gone, sprinting as fast as they could, away from the scratching, screaming things they'd left behind. They'd run for what felt like whole kilometers-impossible, he knew, but the subjectivity would not be argued with. Eventually, too exhausted even to breathe, they'd slowed down, gasping for air and still not speaking. That was the first time Trig thought Han had somehow gotten turned around and was now leading them in the wrong direction.
Maybe back toward those things in the ceiling, maybe -
Trig cut the thought off, refusing to give it any further credence. Better to concentrate on where they were headed. The long corridors and main transit shafts had long since become identical, air exchangers and manifolds all starting to look the same, and when they arrived at yet another bank of turbolifts that looked just like the last set, Trig couldn't keep it to himself anymore.
"We're going in circles," he said.
Han didn't say anything, didn't even glance back at him. He was looking back and forth down the upcoming nexus of concourses, running the options in his head.
Trig cleared his throat. "Did you hear me? I said…"
"You think you can get us to the command bridge, kid?" Han snapped. His eyes looked hollow and deep-set. "Be my guest."
"I'm just saying…" He pointed the way that Han appeared to be favoring."…this doesn't feel right."
"Yeah, well, we're on a Star Destroyer being chased by the living dead. None of this feels right." Han rubbed his hand over his face, and when he lowered his palm and looked at Chewbacca, his expression showed a deeper gradation of doubt. "We came back from that way, right?"
The Wookiee gave a mournful, uncertain groan.
"Great. You're supposed to be the one with the keen sense of direction."
"I think if we just take this turbolift, you know, up…" Trig started.
"We're almost to the conning tower." Han squatted down and touched his fingertips to the deck below their feet. "You feel how the floor's vibrating?"
Trig nodded tentatively.
"We're probably standing right on top of the primary power generator." Han cocked a thumb off to the right. "It's this way and then straight back, I can feel it. We're almost there, right through this hatchway."
He palmed the switch on the wall. It hummed, the entire platform reverberating even harder under their feet, and a huge space gaped in front of them.
Almost simultaneously, they all took a step back, staring down into the void.
Sickish green and yellow lights illuminated it from above, and Trig leaned slightly forward, craning his neck as far down as he dared, but he couldn't see the full dimensions of it. As his eyes began to adjust, he saw they were standing at a precipice overlooking a deep cavernous chamber that for a moment appeared to be nothing less than the atmospheric null set of space itself. He realized that his lungs were aching for air, and allowed himself to inhale a shaky breath.
"See?" Han said, a little weakly. "Told you we were at the top."
Trig stared down at the massive cylindrical shape, only half visible, so far down, their voices sounding very small against the opening.
What is that down there?" he asked.
"Main engine turbine, probably."
"It's big."
"It's a big ship, kid-the Empire likes 'em that way." Han pointed to the other side, voice solidifying with all kinds of manufactured confidence. "See that square service shaft on the other side? That's probably the main lift platform up to the bridge."
Trig squinted. He couldn't see across, and he doubted that Han could, either. His attention kept getting sucked downward in the direction of the silent turbine. What would it be like to fall that far down? You would have a long time to scream, that was for sure-one endless, diminishing shriek as the darkness swallowed you up. He wondered what might happen if the lower part of the Star Destroyer was open and you fell through it-if it was possible to drop straight down into the hostile, icy bath of the galaxy itself.
"How do we get across?"
Han pointed. "You're looking at it."
Trig frowned. The catwalk in front of them was so narrow that at first he thought it was just an extra contour of the wall. It ran along the edge, stretching out as far as he could see, presumably ending on the other side.
"There's no guardrail."
"Yeah, well, beggars can't be choosers."
"There's got to be a regular way of getting over there."
"I'm sure there is," Han said. "Me, I don't plan on standing around out here any longer than I have to."
Trig thought back to the turbolift he'd suggested they take, a few turns back. No doubt that had been the usual means of getting to the bridge. But did he want to go back there alone? Could he even find it at this point?
He glanced at Chewbacca, but the big Wookiee seemed unconcerned, and Han was already stepping out onto it. He put his back to the wall and crept forward, keeping his palms flattened on either side to maintain his balance. "Just keep your head up and don't look down and you'll be fine." He jerked his head at the Wookiee. "Well, what are you waiting for?"
With an unhappy yawp
, Chewbacca stepped out after him, and Trig knew that it was his turn. He thought that Han was probably right about the conning tower-in his headstrong, cocksure way, he did seem uncannily well informed about the general layout of the Destroyer- but as Trig approached and put his foot onto the catwalk, he felt his guts go loose and turn to water. His legs felt so weightless that his knees trembled all the way up to his thighs, and when his palms started sweating he was abruptly sure that this was how he was going to die, falling down into the pit. Any remaining sense of balance and equilibrium fled.
"I can't," he mumbled.
Han turned and looked at him. He could feel the man's eyes on him, making his face blaze up hot all the way to his hairline.
"Come on, we don't have time for a pep talk here."
Trig tried to swallow but his throat was too gummy. He forced the words out. "There's got to be another way. Maybe I'll go back to the turbolift."
"Alone?" Han asked.
"Then I'll wait for you here. Once you get the engines going again…" He bobbed his head up and down, selling the idea to himself. "I'll just meet you back here, okay?"
Han looked at him one last time. The distance between them was already wide enough that Trig couldn't make out the expression on his face, but some small and shameful part of him guessed it was probably a mixture of exasperation and maybe a little contempt.
But if there was contempt, it wasn't evident in the man's voice. "All right," he said. "We'll come back for you." Then he and Chewbacca turned back in the opposite direction and continued to pick their way along the catwalk.
Trig stood staring at the two shadowy forms advancing deeper into the shadows until he wasn't sure he saw them anymore. Then they were gone, and he was standing there all alone.