The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  MAINTENANCE ACCESS SHAFT 223

  Kale placed the barrel of the blaster rifle against the spring-loaded panel and pushed it open to reveal the widemouthed shaft within. A gust of foul-smelling air rushed up into his nose and he groaned, almost gagging, covered his nose and mouth with his free hand, and leaned back into the ripe blackness, looking down.

  “Trig?”

  The sound of his voice reverberated down the metallic emptiness, ringing shapeless in the void. Kale thought back to what he’d seen when he’d gone through the doorway to investigate the alarm. It had been nothing special, nothing at all really, probably just a malfunction somewhere, although one particular aspect of it had stuck with him—a single bloody handprint on the wall, half smeared and still so fresh it was dripping. When he’d seen that, he’d realized it wasn’t a good idea to leave Trig alone, even for a few seconds, and that was when he’d come back to find this.

  He decided to try once more, leaning back into the shaft. “Trig, are you there?”

  His brother came vaulting up and out of the shaft with a scream. He smashed face-first into Kale, knocking him to his knees with a speed and momentum that probably saved his life. If it had happened any slower—if Kale had been given any time to get his blaster back up again—he probably would have shot his brother on pure reflex. As it was, Trig was already on top of him, still screaming, fists flying, clawing, kicking, and sucking in great drafts of air. He was crying, too, Kale could see, sobbing in a high, choking, desperately frightened voice that made him sound much younger than his actual age.

  “Easy,” Kale said, holding on to him, noticing now how badly torn Trig’s uniform was, like an animal had been at it—the collar ripped to expose Trig’s slight, hairless chest, one sleeve torn completely away to show his skinny arm. Parts of the cheap fabric were damp and clammy, like the inside of the escape pod hatch. Kale held on to him. He hugged Trig tightly to his chest until he started to feel, if not the fight going out of him, at least a kind of exhausted fatigue slowing the panicked thrashing, and kept holding on to him after that until Trig was quiet except for the occasional hitching breath.

  “It’s okay,” Kale said, and then drew back enough to get his first real look at Trig’s face. “What happened?”

  Trig just stared back at him with bloodshot eyes. If he’d been any paler his skin would have been translucent. Nothing moved in his face except for the slight tremble in his chin.

  “Did someone attack you?” Kale asked. “Inside the pod, was there …?”

  He waited, letting the question drift out to where Trig might pick it up and respond to it, but Trig didn’t. The longer he stared at Kale, the more Kale wondered if his brother was seeing him at all. He put his arms around his brother again and held him.

  “Listen,” he said, “it’s going to be okay. I won’t let anything bad happen to us, okay? I promise.”

  But the thought of the bloody handprint came back to him again, and he realized that for the first time in his life he’d made a promise to his brother that he knew he couldn’t keep.

  25/Deadlights

  “These thrusters are completely scragged,” Han said as he crawled up from a dislodged floor panel in the center of the barge’s pilot station, wiping the grit and reactor grease from his hands. “Whatever the engineers were trying to do down here, they didn’t get very far. We’re not going anywhere in this floating scrap pile.”

  “I got the escape pod open,” Zahara said. “Launch codes are—”

  “Dr. Cody?” Tisa’s voice broke in. “I’m picking up new life-form readings on the bioscan.”

  “New readings?” Han glanced at Zahara, frowning. “I thought you said everybody was dead.”

  “They are.” She looked at the bank of electronics. “Tisa, display all positive bioscan readings.”

  “Yes, Doctor.” In front of them an array of glowing pencil-thin lines began to shimmer into view, their intersecting geometry deliquescing once again to create the barge in miniature.

  Han said, “What the …?”

  The three-dimensional multilevel outline of the vessel—previously an empty, almost elegant intersection of clean, digitized spaces and lines—was now crawling with blood-red pinpricks of flashing lights. They were moving together, bunched and swarming up from the lower detention blocks en masse, advancing level by level toward the admin area. In the hologram, at least, they appeared to be seething forward at a disproportionate, insectile speed.

  “Wait a second,” Han said. “What are those things?”

  She shook her head. “Life-forms.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” he said. “Got anything more specific, or are we supposed to just fill in the blanks?”

  Zahara stared at the clusters of tiny lights, each one an independent organism. They were moving faster than she could believe, coming up stairwells, ventilation ducts, and utility shafts. “That’s impossible. They weren’t there before. Tisa, how come you didn’t pick up on them earlier?”

  “There were no positive life-forms earlier, Dr. Cody.”

  “Where did they come from?” As she watched, more red lights began to appear in the lower levels, seeming to spontaneously generate out of nowhere. Her thoughts flashed back to what Waste had told her about the molecular behavior of the virus, how it masked its lethality until it had reproduced to a level that the host could no longer successfully fight it—quorum sensing, he’d called it. Abruptly she felt as if two tight iron bands had closed around her, one blocking her throat, the other clamping down over her chest, freezing her breath.

  “How many ways are there out of here?” Han asked, and she realized he was shaking her. “Hey, Doc, I’m talking to you.”

  “Just—” She pointed to the hatchway and the stairwell they’d taken up from admin. “—just the way we came in.”

  “Any other escape pods?”

  “Only the one we left behind.” Zahara stretched out one hand and pointed one level down, to the west admin wing. It was already totally overrun by colonies of red lights. That was the last place she’d seen Trig and Kale. She didn’t want to think about where they were now.

  The diagram of the barge showed a wide stairway leading up from the admin level to the bridge. And now the red lights—deadlights, Zahara’s mind gibbered frantically—were moving in that direction.

  “Great,” Han muttered, raising his blaster and turning to face the door. “Looks like we’re gonna be shooting our way out. Again.”

  Chewbacca growled, shook his massive head, and brandished the rifle, looking profoundly unhappy about the odds.

  “Wait,” Zahara said, pointing to the tower protruding from the top of the hologram, and then turned behind her, across the bridge itself. “About twenty meters behind us, on the opposite end of the flight deck, there’s a docking shaft that goes straight up.”

  Han gaped at her in disbelief. “What, into the Star Destroyer?”

  “It’s our only chance.”

  “Yeah, well, where I come from, they’ve got a saying—out of the nexu’s den and into its mouth.”

  “Whatever those things are, there have to be hundreds of them. How long do you think your power packs will hold out?”

  Then she heard them coming.

  It was a thunderous, bullying shriek, charged with rage and hunger and condensed down into a solid wall of inhuman noise. It stiffened the blood in her veins. They were rising up from the admin level, pounding up the steps. Zahara looked forward to where she knew the docking shaft stood. As she whirled back to look in the direction of Han and Chewbacca, yelling that they needed to get out of here, now, she saw Kale Longo burst through the half-open hatch leading up from the admin level, hauling his younger brother’s body in his arms.

  “Run!” Kale shouted, and he himself was running so hard, so frantically, that his feet barely seemed to touch the ground. His head was on some kind of loose pivot, spinning to look everywhere at once, and his eyes were almost perfectly round with dread. Trig flopped and j
ostled in his arms. Zahara thought she’d never seen someone look so terrified in her life.

  “Where’s the other blaster, kid?” Han shouted.

  “I had to drop it to carry my brother—”

  “Well, shut the door behind you!” Han’s voice rang out, but Kale was already bolting away from the door, across the bridge. Han braced himself to yank on the sliding hatchway. “Chewie, give me a hand with this, will you?”

  The Wookiee fell to work alongside Han, both of them forcing the panel closed again.

  “This way,” Zahara shouted, and broke left, she and Kale sprinting almost shoulder-to-shoulder across the bridge in the direction of the docking shaft. Up ahead she didn’t see anything between the banks of instrumentation panels except for a single open hatchway.

  It better be in there, she thought. Please, let it be where Tisa says it is.

  Looking back, she saw Han and Chewbacca charging to catch up. Ducking through the hatch, Zahara could see the docking tower doorway in front of them now, the turbolift open and ready.

  We’re going to make it, she thought.

  That was when the sliding door that Han and Chewbacca had just pulled closed exploded wide open.

  26/Army of Last Things

  Kale jumped inside the docking tower with Trig still in his arms, followed by Dr. Cody. He looked back and saw Han Solo and Chewbacca still halfway across the pilot station, the Wookiee firing back at whatever was coming their way. Kale couldn’t see what that was, nor did he particularly want to. He could hear it, though, and hearing it was enough.

  “Hurry!” Dr. Cody shouted back at Han and Chewie. “I have to close off the shaft!”

  From where Kale was crouched with his little brother in his arms, all he could see was the medical officer reaching up to seal off the lift doors, and then Solo and the Wookiee diving inside, Chewbacca still shooting, the volley of blasterfire ringing in his ears.

  Suddenly Trig sat up, eyes wide. “Dad?”

  Kale stared at him. “Trig, what—”

  “It’s him.” The younger boy had already pulled free from his arms, twisting sideways past Han and Chewbacca, crawling back out of the docking shaft turbolift to the pilot station. “Dad’s out there!” he shouted. “I saw him! He’s—”

  Kale sprang out after him. He flung out one arm as far as it would go and grabbed Trig’s pant leg, hooking his fingers around the cuff. He felt a low, dull thud as Trig fell to the floor, then got his other hand up around Trig’s waist and began dragging him back into the docking shaft.

  Then he looked up.

  And saw his father.

  Von Longo was staggering toward them in a shambling half run like something that been wrenched three different ways at once—wrenched and broken at the hips and shoulders. He was surrounded by a group of prisoners and guards.

  Except, Kale saw with dawning horror, they weren’t prisoners and guards anymore, not exactly, and neither was the old man. His dead yellow skin was mottled with two weeks’ morgue rot, his skull grotesquely swollen and partially collapsed on one side so that Kale could see, very clearly, the grinning hinge of the old man’s jaw clicking in its socket.

  Kale couldn’t move. For what felt like an eternity he watched his father stagger-swaying toward him with that horrible, clutching gait, his face lit up with a kind of drooling familiar eagerness.

  At last Kale broke out of his paralysis and screamed. Scrambling to his feet, propelling himself back in the direction of the shaft, he saw Solo and the Wookiee pulling Trig inside, but they were looking over and beyond him, into the corridor from which the noise was coming. As if in a dream he saw that Dr. Cody’s face had gone completely white with fright. Kale saw the doctor reach up and cover Trig’s eyes with her hands.

  Then he felt something grab his leg.

  He didn’t even hear himself scream.

  27/Say It Three Times

  When Kale came to, he was sprawled on his back, Dr. Cody kneeling beside him. There seemed to be a great deal going on around him that he couldn’t see. Zahara’s hands moved with easy efficiency, wrapping a blood-soaked strip of fabric around his lower leg, once, twice, pulling it snug, tying it off. Kale hissed through his teeth, cold strange air that tasted like iron shavings, and felt his guts recoiling.

  Where are we?

  “It’s all right,” her voice was saying from across a great distance. “We made it. We’re up inside the Destroyer’s landing bay.”

  Kale rolled over and tried to look around. The pain in his calf was incendiary, intense enough that for a moment he didn’t trust himself to speak. He sipped in a shallow, tentative breath and held it until he thought he probably wasn’t going to be sick, then glanced up at Dr. Cody again, the scope of his vision broadening a little. Behind her, Han and Chewie stood outside the sealed docking hatchway.

  “Where’s my brother?” Kale asked hoarsely.

  “He’s right over there,” Dr. Cody said, “he’s fine. Just try not to move.”

  Kale craned his neck and saw Trig sitting on the floor against the docking shaft’s outer wall, curled up with his chin resting on his knees, rocking back and forth, staring at nothing. He didn’t look fine. Kale thought of Trig’s stunned voice saying: Dad’s out there, seeing the eager thing that had come after him, and wondered if his little brother would ever be fine again.

  Say it, he told himself, and thought back to an old superstition he’d heard as a very young child. Say it three times and make it real.

  “It bit me,” Kale said, “didn’t it?”

  She tightened the makeshift dressing. “Is that too tight? I have to stop the bleeding.”

  “It bit me.”

  “They’re crawling up the shaft,” Han Solo muttered, taking an uneasy step back, and glanced back at Dr. Cody and Kale. “How soon can we get going?”

  Kale could hear it—the scraping. It was coming from inside the docking tower. Hands pounded and scratched on the other side of the shaft. Gnawing sounds. Those things down in the barge had climbed right up after them, he realized, up the tower. Right now they were breaking their brittle fingernails and teeth inside that metal tube, trying to get out. He thought about what he’d seen when he’d looked back into the barge’s pilot station. It wasn’t possible but it was true. The sound of their hunger and anger, along with the stinging pain in his leg, made the memory real.

  The corpses of the prison barge had come back to life and his father was among them.

  His father had bitten him.

  Kale felt his mouth flood with coppery spit and leaned forward, opening his lips to vomit, but nothing came out. His stomach wouldn’t quit trying, though, wouldn’t say die, as his dear old dad might have said. Dead old dad, his brain blathered, and his diaphragm kept jerking and heaving spasmodically with the awful insistence of an involuntary muscle twitch.

  “Look, kid,” he heard Solo’s voice saying, its impatience penetrating the thick cloud of horror that had accumulated around his thoughts. “We gotta go.”

  “Which way do you suggest?” Dr. Cody asked.

  “If we can find our way back to the Destroyer’s command bridge, maybe we can actually get this big beast moving.”

  Chewie gave a dubious growl.

  “It’s a ship, isn’t it?” Han said. “You’ve flown one, you’ve flown ’em all. We just gotta get past …” He gestured vaguely. “… all this.”

  Kale wiped his eyes and took his first real look around at where Han was indicating. The main landing bay and hangar that surrounded them was an endless durasteel desert whose perimeters stretched out so far that they seemed to elude the eye. Even now, the notion of crossing it was more than he could fathom. And yet …

  “Help me up,” he said.

  Dr. Cody reached down. He took her hands and lifted himself, straightening his back as she guided him. At first he thought it was going to work—he actually might be able to put weight on the other leg as well.

  “Take it easy,” she said. “We don’t have to
rush.”

  The pain hit hard, and Kale fell back to the floor with a silent cry that came out as little more than a groan. He looked down. Blood was spurting recklessly from the wound in his leg, soaking the tourniquet and turning it dark red. He saw Trig staring at him but didn’t know if his brother was worried about him, or about what he’d seen down below. Did it matter? It was all one thing now, their situation spelled out around them in spilled blood.

  “You can’t travel like that,” Dr. Cody said.

  “Just give me a second.”

  “You’ll bleed out before we make it across the landing bay.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  She stared at him, then leaned down, close enough to whisper. “Listen to me. I want you to understand this. If we try to move you now, you’re going to die.” Without moving her head, she indicated Trig, hunched over. “And he’ll have to watch that happen. Is that what you want?”

  Kale shook his head.

  “I’ll stay here with you,” she said, loud enough for the others to hear. “Han, you and Chewie can take Trig and head for the command bridge.”

  At the mention of his name, the younger boy jerked as if shocked and sat up straight, shaking his head. “No.” He stared at his brother. “I want to stay with Kale.”

  “Come here,” Kale said.

  The younger boy stood up and walked over.

  “I told you I wouldn’t let anything happen to you,” Kale said, “and I won’t. But to keep that promise I need you to go with the others, right now.”

  Trig shook his head again, violently, tears filling his eyes. He spoke in a fierce whisper. “I’m scared,” he said. “Dad’s face—”

  “Listen to me,” Kale said. “That wasn’t Dad.”

  Trig stared at him.

  “That was something else. We know what Dad was like. We remember him from before, and that wasn’t him.” He waited. “Right?”