by Джо Шрайбер
"What's going on down here?"
"I'm Dr. Cody," she said, "chief medical officer. There's been…"
"So you didn't bring us dinner?"
"What? No." She'd expected hostility, confusion, or disdain, but the inmate's cavalier attitude already had her flustered. "I'm afraid there's been an incident." She raised the blaster, and the Wookiee threw back its head and let out a restless, deep-chested bray that seemed to shake the air around her.
"Okay, okay," the man said, "put the blaster down, huh? You're making Chewie nervous."
"Chewie?"
"Chewbacca, my copilot," the dark-haired man said, coming forward so she could see his face more clearly, the half smile quirked across his face. "I'm Han Solo."
Chapter 19.
Pod
By the time they found the escape pod, Trig was sure they were being followed.
He could hear breathing noises behind them, the occasional thumping footstep of something tracking them gracelessly through the central hallway of the admin wing, no longer bothering with stealth. Sometimes it made little scratching noises. Other times he could only hear it breathing.
He didn't even need to say anything about it to Kale. Kale knew it, too. Rather than bringing him comfort, the unspoken awareness between them had the paradoxical effect of accelerating the near panic building up in Trig's nervous system; it was as if he were dealing not only with his own apprehension, but Kale's as well.
Finally they saw the escape pod', just up ahead on the outer wall.
"There it is." Kale didn't bother hiding the relief in his voice as he lifted the hatch of the pod. "Go ahead, get in there."
Trig climbed in. "Not much room."
"Enough for us." Kale got in behind him and looked at the array of controls. "Now we just have to figure out how to get out of here."
"Can you work it?"
"Sure."
"You don't know what you're doing, do you?"
"Will you give me a second to think?" Kale made a fist and bit his knuckle, gazing at the instrumentation array. "I thought these things were automated, but…"
A voice behind them said: "What have we here?"
* * *
It was Sartoris.
He was standing there with blasters in both hands, looking just as unhappy to see them as Trig felt staring back at him. Intuitively, just from his posture, Trig understood that there was something between them and the man, something Sartoris knew about them or their father, although Trig didn't know what it was. But he felt it nonetheless, some deeply personal schism of unease, emerging across the guard's face and then vanishing again almost as quickly, like an exhaled breath across a pane of glass.
"Get out," Sartoris said flatly.
Kale frowned, shook his head. "What?"
"You heard me. Get moving." Sartoris twitched the barrel of one blaster rifle at Trig. "You, too."
"There's plenty of room for all three of us."
"Sure." Sartoris grinned without a trace of humor; it did nothing to improve the surliness of his expression. "And I'm sure we'd be very cozy together. But that's not the plan. Now get out of here." He was still aiming the blasters at them. "What are you waiting for?"
"You're just going to let us die here?" Kale asked.
"Boy, you can go running naked through the mess hall for all I care. The only reason I haven't already shot you is I'd have to drag your carcasses out of the escape pod. So why don't you save me the trouble?"
"You don't understand," Trig said. "There's something aboard the barge and it's still alive. It's been following us. If you leave us here…"
"Sonny, I am sick unto death of hearing you talk." Sartoris pointed the blaster at Trig's face, the hole in its barrel looming huge, black, and endless, and Trig felt his whole body just disappear. Faintly, from what felt like light-years away, he could feel his big brother's hand on his shoulder, tugging him back.
"Come on," Kale's voice said.
Still weightless, Trig allowed himself to be pulled backward, the rest of the way out of the pod. As he stumbled he saw Sartoris taking a flat black object from his pocket and slotting it into the pod's navigation system, the two of them already forgotten, a problem that no longer concerned him.
The hatch sealed shut with a barely audible whoosh. It was almost anticlimactic. There was a muffled thunk as the bolts blew and the pod was gone, ejected, leaving Trig and Kale standing there looking at the empty place where it used to be.
Kale cleared his throat. After a long pause, he seemed to remember that Trig was standing next to him.
"Hey," he said. "It's going to be okay."
Trig looked up at him. He felt not only weightless now but transparent, barely there. It was as if somebody had hooked a vacuum to his soul and sucked all the hope out of it.
"Come on," Kale said. "I've got an idea."
Chapter 20.
Lifeday
It took Zahara less than a minute to realize that Han Solo, whoever he was, was one of the most unusual inmates she'd ever encountered. The realization struck her most forcefully when she tried to explain to him what had happened aboard the barge, and how critically he and the Wookiee needed her assistance if they were going to stay alive.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Han said, waving an impatient hand in her face. "You're saying everybody on this flying trash can is dead except for us?" He looked at the Wookiee standing next to him as if to confirm what his ears were telling him. "Are you buying any of this?"
The Wookiee gave a plaintive, honking growl. Zahara didn't know much Shyriiwook, but most of what she'd picked up had to do with vocal inflection, and Chewbacca's was incredulity, pure and simple.
"Yeah," Han said, "me either." He looked back at Zahara. "That the best you can do, Doc? Or you got another tale you want to try out?"
"You'll see for yourself soon enough. The infection-it's some kind of virus-has an estimated mortality rate of ninety-nine-point-seven percent."
"Sounds like somebody's been getting their statistics from a droid." Han took a step back, taking his first real look at her and breaking into an appreciative smile. "Although I must say, Doctor, all things considered, you seem to be in pretty good shape."
Zahara felt her cheeks redden. "I'm. immune."
"Well, I guess we must be, too, huh?"
"It's possible, but I doubt it."
"So how come we're still alive?"
"You've been sealed away in solitary. Now that you're out here and exposed, though, I need to inject you with the anti-virus." She took the syringe from her pocket along with the basic medical kit that she carried with her everywhere. "This will only take a second. I just need to see your arm, and…"
At the appearance of the needle, the Wookiee snarled at her, a noise that went right through Zahara's thoracic cavity, and for the second time she saw the glint of his teeth, the bright white incisors, and caught a whiff of something feral, from either his fur or his breath. She took a step back.
"You need this," she said, and turned to Han. "Both of you do."
Han shook his head. "Wookiees aren't too big on needles. Neither am I."
"I'm a physician."
"Yeah, well, you might want to work on that bedside manner." He glanced at the weapon still in her hand. "Or has blasterpoint medicine become standard operating procedure for the Empire?"
"This was just a precaution. We can't afford to stand around and discuss this. Too many people have already died."
"Listen, Doc, I.," Han said, and stopped. Glancing back, following his line of sight, Zahara saw that he was staring at the outstretched leg protruding from around the corner, one of the guards whose bodies she'd stepped over to get here. Han craned his neck further, and she knew that he could see some of the other corpses as well.
When he looked back at her, the defiance in his expression had faded, replaced with something else-not fear necessarily, but a kind of acute awareness of his surroundings. He looked over at Chewbacca, and the Wookiee sniffed the air
and let out a low, restless thragghh sound from somewhere deep inside his throat.
"Yeah," Han muttered. "Me, too." And then, begrudgingly, to Zahara, "I'm not crazy about my options here, Doc."
"Please," she said, holding his gaze. "You need this."
He reached down and pushed up his sleeve. Zahara realized that she wasn't going to be able to hold on to the blaster rifle and treat him at the same time. She set the blaster aside, kicking it out of the cell behind her, into the hallway, then took Han's arm, swabbed it, then slipped the needle in. Han winced as she pushed down the plunger.
"You tested this, right?"
"You're actually the first."
Han's eyes went huge. "What?"
"Relax," Zahara said. "How's your breathing?"
"I'll let you know in a minute," he said, "if I'm not already dead."
Zahara tried not to let the worry show on her face. She'd trusted Waste's analysis of the anti-virus implicitly, but that didn't mean there couldn't have been some margin of error along the way, and who knew exactly how it would interact with any individual's unique chemical makeup? And what would it do to a completely different species, a nonhuman?
But the alternative was to allow Chewbacca to become infected. And she wasn't at all sure that the anti-virus could make a difference at that point.
She turned to the Wookiee. "Your turn."
Chewbacca put out his arm. Finding a vein on a Wookiee was always a challenge, but she felt one beneath the thickly matted fur, sliding the needle in. He growled but didn't move.
"There," she said, "now we can…"
The Wookiee screamed.
* * *
The first thing Chewbacca felt was the pain of the young ones. It came at him from everywhere at once, a threnody of wounded voices, assailing him from all sides. He didn't know what it meant except that something bad had happened here aboard the barge, and now it was happening to him, too. In a horrible way he felt as if he were part of it, complicit in these unspeakable crimes, because of the injection that the woman had given him. The sickness she'd implanted under his fur, under his skin, was alive and crawling through him, a living gray thing going up his arm to his shoulder to his throat, and the sickness clucked its tongue and whispered, Yes, you did those things, yes, you are those things.
Had he done it? Had he somehow hurt them?
But that couldn't be right. The doctor hadn't poisoned him; she'd injected him with a cure. Then why did it hurt so much, and why did he still hear the young ones screaming?
His skull felt like it was filling with fluid, blocking out his sense of smell. But his hearing was keener than ever. Voices were shrieking at him, no longer pleading but accusing him of unspeakable atrocities, and when he looked down at his hands he saw that they were dripping with blood while the rank, salty flavor of their blood was in his mouth.
And then the sickness was in him.
And the sickness wanted to eat.
He snarled louder, lashed out, wanting to make it go away, but it was too deep already, burrowing through his memory, bringing back details he hadn't remembered in nearly two hundred years. He heard old lifeday songs from Kashyyyk, saw faces-old Attichitcuk, Kallabow, his beloved Malla-except their faces were changing now, melting and stretching, mouths hooking into strange, contemptuous grins. His father's eyes lit upon him, saw all the shame he tried to hide. They knew what he was now that the sickness was inside of him and what the sick-ness would make him do to the little ones. They knew how he would slaughter them in their cells and feast upon their steaming entrails, shoving them into his mouth without bothering to chew, enslaved by the sickness and its appetite. They saw how the sickness could not be sated, how it wanted to keep on killing and eating until there was nothing left but blood that might be lapped up from the cold durasteel floors. They said, These are the true songs of lifeday, these songs are eat and kill, eat and kill.
No, it's not true. It's not.
Screaming louder, a deafening roar, at least in his own mind, he felt the oblivion of the sickness coming and was grateful for it, an opportunity to hide, to get away from the things he was experiencing. He did not try to escape; he ran toward it eagerly.
* * *
Zahara jumped back, instinctively ducking and flinging both hands up to protect herself. Chewbacca's arm swung out blindly, the syringe still protruding from it, and the needle sailed across the cell like a poorly thrown dart, hitting the wall and disappearing somewhere in the half-fight. If she hadn't dropped down when she did, the Wookiee's arm would have crushed her throat.
"Hey, pal, take it easy," Han said, reaching over to him. "Chewie, it's just…"
Chewbacca rounded on him with a full-throated howl, and Han jerked backward, frowned, and stared at Zahara.
"What did you do to him?"
"Nothing. He got the same thing you got."
"Maybe it works differently for his species, did you ever think about that?" He looked back at Chewbacca but the Wookiee's expression was completely alien now, unfriendly, no trace of recognition in his eyes. He seemed confused, frightened, and ready to attack whatever threat he perceived was nearby. The ripe, feral stink that Zahara had caught a whiff of earlier was back, stronger now, almost overwhelming, as if some aggression gland inside his metabolism had started spurting violent hormones through his brain. He was growling steadily now.
Then Zahara noticed the swelling. It was already affecting his throat, causing it to balloon up, and what she'd thought were growls had actually become a series of suffocated breaths.
"What is that?" Han asked. "What's happening to his neck?"
Zahara didn't answer. She couldn't make coherent sense of her own thoughts, except that somehow she'd managed to find some of the last survivors aboard the barge, only to help the disease do its job even more efficiently.
She pulled herself together, flashing through options: Somehow the anti-virus had either weakened the Wookiee's immunity to the pathogen, or the sickness itself had become more aggressive in the past few hours, shortening its incubation time from hours to minutes. Either way-
Chewbacca fell to his knees with a crash, clasping his arms over his head, and rocked back and forth with a diminishing series of horrible, gargling groans. When he lifted his head again, it was with monumental effort, and Zahara saw that the rage was draining away from his face. But this was only a side effect of oxygen debt, his gaze fogging over even as his enormous shoulders sagged forward, giving way to gravity until the entirety of his body slumped facedown to the floor.
Zahara squatted down. "Help me roll him over."
"What? Why?"
"Just do it."
Han grabbed Chewbacca's shoulder and Zahara lifted his hips, tilting the massive bulk of the Wookiee's body and tumbling him onto his back. She put her hand behind his furry head, down beneath his neck, and lifted upward.
"Find the syringe."
"Uh-uh, no way." Han shook his head. "You're not giving him another drop of that stuff."
"You want your friend to live? Find the karking syringe."
Han took a second to digest this and then went back into the far corner of the cell, muttering under his breath. Zahara understood that, right now, a huge part of saving the Wookiee's life was just a matter of making Han believe her. If he didn't, if he tried to interfere, there was nothing she could do except to make Chewbacca comfortable until he died.
Han came back a moment later with the syringe in his hand. "I hope you…"
Zahara grabbed it from him, squirted out the last of the anti-virus, and tilted Chewbacca's head back, palpating the clogged airway. Carefully avoiding the arterial passageways, she slid the empty needle in, felt the pop as it found the pocket of fluid, and pulled the plunger back. Droids still can't do this, she thought. There's not a droid in the world that would try this.
And probably for good reason.
Pinkish gray liquid began to fill the barrel of the syringe. Han didn't say anything, but she could hear the dry
click as he swallowed hard. She emptied the syringe, put it back in, and tapped the fluid again.
After three full syringes, the swelling began to go down.
* * *
The screaming in Chewie's head got louder.
What are the true songs of lifeday?
I am inside you, the sickness whispered, and you will sing the songs as I teach them and those songs are to kill and to eat. And you will sing them while I am still inside you. While I am still hungry and I am always hungry and you will sing my songs.
Yes, Chewbacca told it, his thoughts moving in the oddly formal way they sometimes did when he was thinking of things very seriously, yes, you are inside of me. I breathed you in when the prison door was opened just like Han breathed you in and you made him cough and start choking. But then the doctor gave us the medicine.
The sickness screamed at him and raged. But he didn't hear it anymore.
He felt the pressure loosening from his chest. He was breathing again, the stricture in his throat abating, allowing for the first tentative passage of air. Vision was clearing, too, becoming stable, allowing him to see Han and the doctor standing over him, their faces worried.
— those are the true songs of lifeday -
The strength coming back through him now was the strength of his family and homeworld. He sat up but did not try his voice. He didn't trust it yet. He looked down at his hands. They were clean. Relief sagged through him and it was like coming home to faces that recognized him and welcomed him in. There was no more screaming now. Inside the house where he had been born, someone was playing music.
* * *
"Easy." Zahara broke open a packet of bandages and adhesive and tried as best she could to dress the tiny pinhole incision she'd left on his throat. She couldn't see through all the fur, but her fingers knew instinctively where it was. "We'll have to clean that up as soon as we can. How do you feel?"
He gave a hoarse cry, then a louder one.
