by Джо Шрайбер
He'd never hated himself more than he did at that moment. It struck him that Kale would have gone out there without question, that his own life had been full of these failures of nerve, large and small, and that this was probably the most recent of many to come.
He stood at the edge of the abyss, for what felt like a very long time, waiting to hear Han call out, We're here, or We made it, from somewhere far off in the distance, but no such sound came to him.
Maybe they fell, a craven voice inside him whispered. But if they had, wouldn't he have heard them scream?
He sat down by the open hatchway, a careful distance from the edge, and stared down into it, listening to the sounds of his own breathing, the steady thud of his pulse.
Eventually he began to hear sounds from down inside the chamber. Low rustling noises from far below where he couldn't see.
It's them. They're down there.
He bounced to his feet, more startled by the thought than the popping sound that his knees made, and tried to look deeper into the pit. He'd heard that Star Destroyers carried a crew of eight thousand or more-suppose they'd all been infected? They would nest somewhere, wouldn't they, a place together in the dark? Maybe this was where the ones in the overhead ventilation shaft had come from, where they'd been waiting. And they were headed forward in the direction of the main hangar, as if summoned there by-
He turned around, struck by the feeling that he was being watched.
It wasn't just a feeling.
At the far end of the shaft, ten meters away, a face was peering at him out of the half-light, in three-quarter profile. Even at this distance, Trig recognized it instantly, though it took a moment to get the name out from his shock-numbed lips.
"Kale?"
His brother regarded him from the side without turning his head, as if in a trance. Then he reached out and pushed a button on the wall, and a door opened in front of him.
"Kale, wait! Don't…"
Kale stepped through the door and disappeared.
Trig chased after him, running back up the concourse, staggering a little, feeling pins and needles creeping up through his lower legs from all the time that he'd sat motionless-had he really been waiting there that long? His knees had the trembling, wrung-out feeling that made him wonder if they might actually buckle underneath him.
He got to the hatchway that his brother had opened and pressed the switch. The door that hissed open wasn't as big as the one that Han had discovered above the turbine. It was just a normal hatchway, and that somehow made him feel better, too.
He stepped through it.
"Kale? It's…"
His voice broke off with a choke.
The chamber was even darker than the concourse he'd left behind. At first glance it appeared as big as the abyss he'd refused to cross-but this was some type of main refuse depository. A mountain of trash rose up to the ceiling, and the fetid, brown, excremental stink simmering off its peaks was beyond nauseating.
Trig clamped his hand over his mouth and looked around through watering eyes, trying to keep from gagging. He couldn't see his brother in here, but Kale had just come inside, seconds earlier.
"Kale," he said again, strangely hesitant to shout out in here. "It's me. What are you doing in here?"
Behind him, the hatch sealed shut.
Chapter 34.
Skin Hill
It wasn't trash.
Trig came to this realization as he took another step toward the mountain, hoping to find some trace of Kale around the other side. That was when his toe struck something soft and yielding, and when he glanced down he saw it was a human leg.
Very slowly, he looked up.
The leg was connected to a torso, covered up by another, and another, the pile growing in front of him comprising what he realized was hundreds of dismembered corpses-heads, arms, legs, and whole bodies, bare bones, many of them still dressed in rotten Imperial uniforms and incomplete stormtrooper armor. The pile rose up to the ceiling. Details leapt out at him from everywhere. The bodies had been mangled like parts at an abattoir, some of them in handcuffs and manacles, others hacked recklessly to pieces, still others looking partially devoured, whole gobbets of flesh gnawed off. Many of the parts were bloated to the point where the skin itself had begun to split open like sausages, and Trig realized he was standing in a tacky puddle of whatever had leaked out of them to coat the floor.
He felt the room start to spin. A scream ballooned in his throat and died there, snuffed out by his own inability to open his lips and release it. Instead, he stumbled backward, trying not to look at what was in front of him, all around him, wanting it not to be there but unable to get away from it. Somewhere behind him was the door he'd come through, the hatchway that would get him out of here, but he couldn't find the switch to activate it. He began slapping the walls blindly at random, pounding them, and nothing changed.
At last the seal broke in his throat and he let out a shriek, a combination of «help» and "Kale," and that was when he heard the sounds, a soft, moist rustling noise from inside the mountain. Bodies shifted, shoved aside and rearranged by something within.
And then he saw the thing come burrowing out.
First the white head, maggot-white, then the rest of it, slithering through to emerge outward on the floor.
It rose to its feet, a figure in dripping, ragged clothes and a bloodstained stormtrooper helmet, staring at him. The black polarized lenses of the helmet were streaked and filthy, clotted with slime and gore. The breath filter had been broken off on one side, and Trig caught a glimpse of the scaly infected throat of the thing underneath it. There was blood caked around the mouthpiece, and it occurred to him that the thing might possibly have eaten its way out.
It staggered toward him.
Trig backed away, immediately tripped, and fell. Jumping up, lunging sideways, he started running around the edge of the mountain. He imagined that he heard the thing coming after him, but it might have just been his own heart hammering in his ears. He didn't dare look back. But he could feel it there, growing closer, a steadily intensifying presence like pressure buildup behind his eyeballs and chest cavity, pushing him onward, faster.
The room spun around him. Trig jerked his head right and left. The door, wherever it had been, was utterly lost to him now. Fear had robbed him of all sense of direction. He didn't even remember where he'd come from.
As he bolted around the edge of the pile, lunging over three corpses that appeared to have been bundled together, wrists and ankles bound with cords, something caught his eye from up above-a glint of light.
Looking up, he saw the open ventilation shaft in the ceiling, at least ten or fifteen meters up, maybe more.
He finally stopped and looked back, saw the thing in the trooper helmet coming around behind him. It was moments away.
This time Trig didn't give himself time to think.
He started climbing.
* * *
It was even worse than he'd expected. The huge pile of dismembered parts and severed heads made up a loosely knit, constantly shifting terrain, moving and tumbling down as he clawed his way up and over it. The stench only seemed to thicken as he uncovered submerged levels of decay that hadn't yet been exposed to air. Struggling against his gag reflex was a nonstop battle, one he didn't always win, and the wobbling sensation of continuous near nausea only made climbing more difficult.
He tried to focus on the vent shaft, forcing himself to think only of getting out. Every few seconds, though, he did look back-he couldn't help it.
The thing in the helmet was climbing up after him.
It crawled with the steady relentlessness of something out of one his nightmares. And in fact, even in the depths of his own scrambling climb, Trig couldn't help but flash back to the voice of Aur Myss from the cell next to theirs, how he had promised to come for him and his brother. Was that an undead version of Myss behind him now? How had it gotten here to this part of the Destroyer before him, and what had
it been doing inside this heap of human rubble? None of those questions even rose into his mind-only that it had followed him here to satisfy whatever undying urge drove it forward.
Rage.
Murder.
Hunger.
Something moved underneath him in the mountain.
It's just another body part, don't think about it, don't let it -
He felt a scabby, clay-cold hand reaching up out of the pile to seize his ankle.
Trig let out a painful squeal of fright and wrenched his leg free, almost losing his balance and falling. He was struck by the vision of his small, helpless frame bouncing back down the slope of corpses, as hands and arms and mouths lunged out, ripping off pieces of his flesh, until they'd finally added his own bleeding carcass to the mountain.
Instead he climbed faster, forced himself to dig in, yanking himself upward, dumping down bodies as he went. He was close enough to the top now that he could actually see inside the vent, the oversized duct that had been exposed there.
Go. Just go.
With what felt like enormous effort, he thrust his entire body upward. His brain had shut down completely at this point. He no longer smelled the room or even truly felt its awful, gelid presence sticking to him. He was aware only of what lay ahead, and how much he needed to get there, and the last few moments, as he got to the top of the pile, left no imprint in his memory whatsoever-they might as well have happened to someone else entirely, a stranger.
Consciousness snapped back through him as his fingers scraped cold metal, the blessed solidity of the ductwork's outer rim, and he levered his upper body through it with a gasp, jerked his legs up behind him and only then allowed himself to breathe. The vent was not much bigger than his shoulders, but it was large enough.
Trig looked around in a kind of mild hysteria. His heart was slamming, trying to smash a hole through his chest, the muscles in his throat working up and down wildly.
I'm going to start bawling again. Well, go ahead and cry. I suppose you've earned it.
But he realized his eyes were dry. At last, at the top of a pile of human bodies, he had arrived at a place beyond tears.
There was a whistling, breathing noise below him, and when he looked down he saw that the thing in the trooper's helmet was still climbing up the mountain of bodies.
Trig looked back and forth through the open duct. Then he picked a direction and began to crawl.
Chapter 35.
The Whole Sick Crew
Across the main hangar, Sartoris watched dark figures moving toward him.
He'd first seen them coming right after all the shooting had died down, only a handful at first, then more, now dozens-traveling en masse, a single organism made up of countless smaller components. They were close enough now that he could make out individual faces, men he'd worked with for years on the prison barge, guards he'd called by their first names, soldiers who had followed his command with the utmost unquestioning loyalty, prisoners who had once shuddered in fear at his passage. They traveled together now, their swollen, disease-ravaged bodies pressing against one another, death as the final brotherhood.
They were coming for him.
Behind him, there was a sharp clank of metal on metal. A low, collective groan escaped the shadows, deep and ravenous, and Sartoris spun around and looked through the captured ships to catch a flicker of movement beneath the X-wing. Somehow they had slunk around behind him, too. He could see them down there, huddled in the shadows, watching him.
Where did they come from?
That was Lesson One from Imperial Corrections playbook, one you never forgot-never turn your back on the cons. Now Sartoris realized it was too late. The certainty of his death filled his belly like a big gulp of contaminated ice water. Droplets of sweat began to trickle down his spine, creeping between his shoulder blades and down into the waistband of his pants.
The figures in front of him had jerked closer, seeming to advance in the interstitial space between moments, like footage from which the transitions had been removed. Their eyes never left his, and there was a slinking, primitive slyness to their movement; he wondered if they were still sizing him up, or if they just derived some atavistic pleasure watching him squirm. Within seconds it wouldn't matter-they'd be close enough to launch themselves at him and tear him apart. They could even shoot him now if they wanted. They were all carrying blasters.
The things behind him hooted out a scream.
The inmates and guards in front of him screamed back, a call-and-response. Sartoris saw ropy strands of drool swinging from their mouths, human and nonhuman alike. There was a group of Wookiee prisoners with what looked like whole waterfalls of saliva pouring down between their fangs and slopping over their chins, soaking their fur. They looked like they'd eat him alive instead of blasting him- maybe they preferred their meat uncooked.
"Come on, then," he said grimly. "What are you waiting for?"
As if awaiting the invitation, they broke ranks and charged, and Sartoris, who up till that moment had had no idea what his next move would be, looked around at the abandoned X-wing and grabbed the fighter's wing, lifting himself up and onto it. He made his way with a jouncing, bandy-legged run up the wing toward the cockpit canopy, pivoted, and dropped down into the pilot's seat, reaching up to try to seal it shut, but the canopy was broken and wouldn't close.
Within seconds every flaw in his reckless plan became glaringly apparent. He could already feel both groups of the things moving below the X-wing, their thudding collective strength and hunger surging as they rocked the fighter back and forth underneath him, trying to flip it over, while others climbed up the nose cone in front of him. The three Wookiee prisoners he'd glimpsed earlier had already taken hold of the canopy and were trying to rip it loose, or maybe just haul themselves up high enough to attack him where he sat. He could picture their three woolly bodies hunched over the stump of his exposed torso, ripping and tearing whatever was left inside the kettle of blood that had once been the X-wing's cockpit.
For the first time his eyes flashed down at the avionics display. The instrument panel held the milky glow of sleeping electronics, but it was brightening slowly now as if activated by his arrival. Just above the throttle, the green targeting scope blinked steadily, and Sartoris saw switches for weapons activation, laser cannons, and proton torpedoes coming online.
From above, several hands reached down at once and sank their claws into his neck. He could smell them now, the infected Wookiees, the salivating, bronchial snorts of their hunger as their breath drew closer. Wet hot saliva dribbled down over his face and he felt the press of something sharp and hard.
Sartoris squeezed the trigger.
His whole world jolted backward. The laser bolt burst from both sets of cannons at once, a blinding muzzle flash that vaporized the mob of inmates in front of him even as it threw him into reverse. The Wookiees that had been reaching for his throat disappeared, jerked away with a howl of anger and shock, and Sartoris realized the X-wing was still skidding, propelled along the hangar floor by the recoil. It all ended abruptly with a jarring crash, the thrust engines of the ship hammering into something even bigger than itself, probably the hangar wall.
He lunged up and out of the seat and saw he'd collided with an Imperial landing craft, a Sentinel-class shuttle that looked like it had been sucked in by the tractor beam and dropped flat on the deck.
There's an emergency hatch here somewhere. Where is it?
He vaulted onto the shuttle's hull, ran up and felt the craft lurch underneath him-they were already down there, waves of them, and that screaming noise was cycling up again. When they hit the underside of the shuttle he lost his balance completely and fell forward, through the hatch.
What came next was blackness.
* * *
With a silent groan, Sartoris opened his eyes. He was lying on his back in the shuttle's darkened cabin, the corrugated steel pressing against his neck. Outside the reinforced durasteel hull he could h
ear them faintly, scratching, slapping, pounding. There was a brief pause. Something much heavier slammed into it, an explosion-blasters again, he thought wearily, and wanted nothing more than to just black out.
"Did you bring them with you?" a voice croaked in the darkness.
Sartoris jumped a little and stared up at several sets of eyes peering down at him. As his vision adapted he realized he was looking at a group of men in ill-fitting Imperial uniforms leaning over him from seats mounted to either side of the shuttle's cabin walls. Reacting without thinking, he jerked backward and tried unsuccessfully to scramble away.
"It's all right," the voice said. "We're not infected."
Sartoris examined them more closely, his heart still wedged up in the right pocket of his throat. Even amid everything else that was happening outside, the appearance of the men remained a shock. Their starvation-ravaged faces were little more than skulls with parchment-yellow skin stretched over them, lips drawn back in permanent sneers, cheekbones bulging grotesquely outward. One of them attempted what Sartoris supposed was a smile.
"I'm Commander Gorrister," the man said, clearly waiting for Sartoris to introduce himself. When he didn't, Gorrister sank back with a sigh and continued, "From what's going out there, I can only surmise that you ended up here the same way we did."
Sartoris grimaced. "Something like that."
Gorrister started to say something and a sharp slamming noise cut off his words. Outside the ship, the blasterfire continued, smashing and pounding against the armored hull. The commander waved it away with scarcely a glance.
"They'll give up after a moment," he said. "It's really just a reflex on their part…"
Sartoris raised an eyebrow. "Reflex?"
"Mm. Certain learned behavior patterns are difficult to unlearn, even when grossly ineffective."
Another round of explosions slammed into them, the firing intensifying.