The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  It felt like they had been walking for a very long time, without even putting a dent in the distance that they still needed to travel. And what would happen when they did reach the command bridge? Despite his partner’s bravado, Chewie wondered if they really would be able to fly the Star Destroyer.

  They had found a second blaster—it was the one worthwhile discovery so far, and Chewie was glad to have one of his own, if only to better protect the boy.

  “What’s this?” Han said from ahead of them. “Chewie, gimme a hand with these, huh?”

  Chewbacca looked back to make sure the boy was coming—he was, not looking up from his feet—and went to meet Han, who was pointing to a stack of shipping crates blocking the corridor. They appeared to have been shoved here by someone in a hurry to get on to other things. Chewie studied the writing on the side of one of the boxes.

  IMPERIAL BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS DIVISION

  When he glanced back up, Han was already hauling the boxes aside, trying to clear their path. A big crate on top fell over, and Chewbacca saw a red steel canister go rolling off to the side. It slammed into the wall with an empty clang, rebounded, and stopped under Han’s boot.

  “What were these creeps messing around with out here?” Han said, more to himself than Chewie, but the Wookiee gave his opinion anyway, which was that none of this made him feel any safer about their prospects.

  “This one busted its pressure valve,” Han said, inspecting the tank. “There’s no markings on it at all, like the whole thing’s just been painted red. You see any more of these lying around?”

  “Up here,” Trig called out. While Han had been talking, Trig had climbed on top of the next pile of crates, twenty or thirty at least, stacked two or three deep. The boy was nimble. It took Chewbacca almost twice as long to clamber up the stack next to him and yank off the top to look in.

  The crates were full of cylinders, dozens of them, stacked in neatly ordered rows. There were a few loose red tanks up here, but all the rest—the ones that had been repacked with military precision—had been painted jet black. Chewbacca lifted one of the black ones and heard something sloshing around inside.

  He held it up so Han could see it and spoke in Shyriiwook: It’s still full.

  “Different formula, maybe,” Han said. “Different combustibility or something—who knows?” There was a whack as the bottom of the tank slipped from Chewbacca’s grip and hit the others inside the crate. “Hey, be careful with that thing, will ya?”

  Chewie put the black canister back in its place, noticing that the gauge readout already stood at maximum pressure. He wondered how long it would be before these tanks started leaking like the red ones and what would happen when their contents filtered into the Destroyer’s atmosphere.

  He didn’t tell Han what he’d felt inside the tank that had made him almost drop it. The sloshing motion inside had kept moving back and forth, and in fact it felt like it was moving by itself. Like there was something slopping around inside the black tanks, dripping off its internal walls and trying to get out. Something alive.

  “Whose idea was it to come aboard this thing anyhow?” Han asked with disgust, not awaiting an answer. He’d already climbed up the makeshift barricade of crates, following Chewbacca and Trig down the other side. Chewbacca had the best hearing of the three of them, and he could have sworn as he walked away that he heard something start hissing.

  Han froze in his tracks.

  “What’s that?”

  Chewie stopped and cocked his head, and then looked up with a growing feeling of apprehension. He could hear something overhead, he realized—a rising scream. It was accompanied by a rumbling sound, some gargantuan, many-legged thing plodding heavily directly above the durasteel-paneled ceiling.

  Han pointed in the direction they were headed. “It’s coming from that way.”

  Chewbacca saw the boy’s mouth fall open in shock. The lights started shaking and the Wookiee heard the creak and pop of metal overtaxed with the weight of whatever was approaching.

  “Get back, kid,” Han said, pushing Trig aside as he aimed the blaster up. “I think it’s gonna—”

  The ceiling buckled, twisted, and split open. Through the hole Chewbacca glimpsed a solid mass of dark-eyed faces, arms and legs already trying to push through. Some wore Imperial uniforms; others were dressed in stormtrooper armor, a leg piece here, a shoulder piece there, or wearing broken helmets. Only then did he get a true sense of how many there were up there, perhaps hundreds, maybe more—an entire army of the dead. They were reaching down for him.

  Reaching down for the boy.

  Chewie wasn’t sure who fired first. One of them, he or Han, or maybe both of them at the same time, squeezed off a round of blasterfire into the tangled mass of squirming bodies. After that it didn’t matter: some vital piece of infrastructure inside the ceiling gave a sharp pop.

  It was as if a hole had been torn open between the worlds of the living and the dead. Bodies came spilling down in front of them, an avalanche of stinking yellow flesh and broken armor, grasping hands and shrieking mouths. Some of them landed on their feet; others hit the ground with all fours and stayed that way like animals, grinning up at them, baring their teeth. Their eyes were flat and lifeless and hideously hungry.

  “Get behind me!” Han shouted.

  Trig didn’t move—paralyzed, Chewbacca thought, grabbing Trig by the arm and yanking him around behind him as he and Han turned and opened fire.

  The dead things recoiled as if they hadn’t expected blasters. Chewie sprayed them point-blank, watching stormtrooper helmets explode and burst to reveal swollen, half-decayed faces whose only expression was a kind of cheated rage. Next to him, Han was shouting something, but Chewbacca couldn’t hear it over the blasters. The corridor in front of them was filling with smoke. Distantly, from what felt like the other side of space, he could feel Trig gripping him tightly, the boy’s fingers digging into his arm, clinging for dear life.

  In front of them and up above, more of the things were tumbling down, half falling, half jumping, fresh corpses piling on top of the ones already there. Chewie realized that it didn’t matter how long or hard they pounded the bodies with blasterfire; they were just going to keep coming. He growled loudly.

  “I know, I know!” Han’s fingers gripped his arm. “Go on, I’ll cover you!”

  He saw Han pointing to another hatchway at the end of the corridor. Scooping up the boy, Chewie pivoted and broke for it, diving through the hatch without a look back. An instant later Han leapt through behind him, slammed the console on the other side, shutting the door, and fired a round into it. Chewbacca realized he could already hear them on the other side, attacking the door, screaming.

  He and Han exchanged a glance, and Chewbacca saw something on his friend’s face that he hadn’t seen in a very long time—true fear. For a moment Han was so pale that the scar on his chin stood out in bold relief. It was like watching him age prematurely, twenty years in an instant.

  Han opened his mouth to speak, and then something hit the other side of the hatch with unthinkable weight and force. It was as if everything that was inevitable about their future, however brief it might be, had just arrived outside that hatchway with a gullet full of gleaming yellow teeth.

  They ran.

  31/Coffin Jockeys

  When Jareth Sartoris opened his eyes, he was still strapped inside the escape pod. His skull felt like it had been split down the middle with a gaffi stick, and his right leg was twisted around sideways, pinned down by the partially collapsed front panel.

  Cautiously, with great effort, he managed to extract it, sliding his knee up and rotating the ankle slowly, steeling himself for the sharp slash of pain and not feeling it.

  Nothing broken.

  He breathed in, exhaled a sigh of relief, his senses still coming back to him a little at a time. Was he in space? How long had he been blacked out?

  He glanced down at the pod’s navigational display and checked the
counter, still ticking off minutes and seconds since his departure from the barge. According to the readout, he’d ejected almost four hours earlier, which meant he’d been unconscious since—

  He turned his head and looked out the shattered viewport.

  Then he remembered.

  The pod had ejected from the Purge as planned, leaving the Longo brothers standing there with matching looks of anguish stamped across their faces. The slight twinge that Sartoris had felt at that moment had actually caught him by surprise. Had they really expected that he’d take them with him?

  No, of course not. Imperial Corrections had a saying: There are no children here. They were inmates, convicts, nothing less than enemies of the Empire, and whatever had happened between him and their father—Sartoris had already started thinking about Longo’s death in the vaguest of generalities—had nothing to do with anything now.

  Still, that voice spoke up within him, faint but implacable:

  You killed their dad and now you’re leaving them to die.

  Okay. So what? The galaxy was a hard place to grow up. Sartoris’s own father, a petty thief and death stick addict, had beaten him savagely throughout his childhood, sometimes stopping only when he was afraid he’d killed the boy. One night when Jareth was sixteen his dad had come after him with a rusty torque-bludgeon; for the first time the boy had stood his ground, ripped the weapon away from him, and bashed in his father’s skull. He’d never forget the old man’s face as he died, his expression of abject bewilderment, as if he couldn’t understand why his son had turned on him. Afterward Jareth dragged the body out of the hovel they shared and abandoned it in an alleyway. The local law enforcement would simply assume the old man fell victim to the latest of his countless bad decisions. The next day Jareth had lied about his age, joined up with the Empire, and never looked back.

  To this day, Sartoris had never fathered any children of his own—none that he knew of, anyway, and that was a mercy. Throughout his adult life he’d rarely wasted a thought on the roaring, chaotic creature that had once called himself his father, let alone the prospect of his own fatherhood. But as the pod blasted off from the prison barge leaving Trig and Kale Longo behind, Sartoris realized he’d been remembering the old man more vividly than he had in years. In fact, remembering was too sentimental a term for it. It was almost as if Gilles Sartoris were sitting next to him, beaming in approval at the way his son—after a lifetime of misdeeds—had finally lived up to his own full destiny. Just because Jareth Sartoris never spawned offspring, it hadn’t stopped him from relegating another man’s sons to permanent darkness.

  He’d been thinking all of these things, four hours ago, when he’d realized something was wrong before the klaxons started blaring inside the escape pod—something inside the guidance system had gone seriously wrong. Rather than spiraling off into space, he had felt its trajectory curving back upward, pitching around on its side, rising up alongside of the barge. He’d stared up through the viewport—

  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 to 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 sidelong, then a lurch and an abrupt bone-jarring smash. The pod sank a little, metal squealing against metal as if pinned between two larger objects, 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 see 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 to—”

  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 farther, 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.r />
  And they sounded hungry.

  Suddenly he wanted to run.

  Where?

  That was when the shooting started.

  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.