by Джо Шрайбер
"You okay, pal?" Han asked, and when Chewie gave a quick bark of acknowledgment, he turned to Zahara. "Lady, you just got really lucky."
"Hopefully we all did," she said. "If that anti-virus works, you should both be protected."
They helped Chewbacca to his feet, a process that fully required both of their strengths. Han watched him closely, preparing for a relapse, but the Wookiee seemed steady enough once he was standing up.
"Think you can travel, buddy?" Han asked.
Chewie barked out another growl.
"Okay, all right," Han said. "Forget I asked."
* * *
"The turbolift's back this way," Zahara said, pointing around the corner. "We can go back through, just be careful you don't trip over the.»
They all stopped.
"What happened to the bodies?" Han asked. "The dead guards?"
Zahara blinked down at the floor where the corpses of the prison guards had been sprawled out. They'd all seen them.
But now they were gone.
"Maybe they weren't dead," Han said doubtfully.
"I examined them."
"So somebody came and moved them. I dunno, maintenance droids or something." He looked at her. "Is there a reason we're still standing here discussing this?"
Zahara thought about it. She wondered if maybe the 2-1B had come down to meet her and moved the corpses. But that just didn't make sense. The blasters were gone, too, she realized-including the one she'd just kicked out of the room.
Somewhere in the semidarkness she thought she heard something creak, some random self-activating servo coming to life inside the walls, and she jumped, startled. Suddenly she realized that Han was right. They had to get out of here, not soon but now.
"The turbolift's over this way," she said.
Han and Chewie followed her in, the doors closing as they glided upward. "Where are we going?"
"Medbay. I've got to talk to Waste."
"Who's Waste?"
"My surgical droid."
"And you call him Waste? Like waste of space?"
"Waste of space, waste of programming. " She shrugged, relaxing a little now that they were out of that damp, shadow-crawling lower corridor. "I started it as a joke and it just kind of stuck."
"He doesn't mind?"
"He thinks it's a term of endearment," she said, and upon saying so, realized it was true.
Han grunted as the lift reached the infirmary level and stopped. Zahara remembered the corridor vividly, how it had been littered with bloated corpses of guards and stormtroopers who had died waiting to get into medbay-dozens of them, sometimes stuck to one another with the fluid they'd been heaving up when they finally collapsed. The smell would have intensified, too, she knew. She expected Han would say something, maybe cover his mouth and stand there a moment taking it all in, the way that she had when she'd first laid eyes on it.
The turbolift stopped and the doors slid open on the hallway. Zahara braced herself for the shock-and looking out, felt a different kind of shock go through her, quick and jolting, making her legs feel heavy and weak at the same time.
All the bodies were gone.
Chapter 21.
They Woke Up
Han and Chewie followed Zahara down the corridor without talking. Han in particular didn't like it, nor was he crazy about the way the doctor kept glancing back over her shoulder. She was easy on the eyes, he had to admit, but fear didn't do much for her face. And she was keeping something from him. In his experience women and secrets mixed together to form something only slightly less volatile than an unstable fusion reactor.
"How much farther is it?" he asked.
She didn't answer or even look at him, just held up her hand, meaning either shut up, stop walking, or both. Han turned to glance at Chewie, wondering aloud how much longer they were supposed to put up with this.
It had been a while since they'd been free-weeks, he guessed, since the Imperials had boarded the Millennium Falcon and impounded the ship and her cargo. The shuttle had ferried them here to this barge, just another pair of anonymous smugglers whom the galaxy couldn't care less about.
And that would've been the end of it, if Han hadn't gotten impatient and tried to escape a number of days earlier during a well-choreographed mess hall riot. He'd clocked a prison guard, Chewie had thrown a stormtrooper across the table, and the next thing they knew everything went dark.
Very dark.
Down in the hole, he'd spent most of his time speculating about what was going to happen next-who, if anyone, he and Chewie could rely on for a rescue. A smuggler's friends were few, and those who would actually stick their necks out for the likes of Han were effectively nonexistent. For the first time he had begun to wonder if he and Chewie were destined to spend whatever remained of their lives in some cramped and poorly lit Corrections dungeon.
In front of him, the doctor stopped walking again, turned, and looked through an open hatchway. Though he'd never been up here before, Han figured it was the medbay. He came up alongside her and peered inside, then back at the doctor. From the expression on Zahara's face, Han guessed this wasn't how it had looked when she'd left it.
Every bed was empty.
All the medical equipment, monitors, and medication pumps were active, blinking and twittering to themselves, but the IV lines, tubes, and cords dangled loose, some of them dripping liquid medication in puddles the size of small lakes. Bedsheets and blankets hung in twisted disarray, stained with sweat and blood, dragged across the floor and left there. Han realized the silence was making his shoulders tighten up and his right hand feel particularly lonely where his blaster ought to have been. He made a quick but conscious decision to calm down.
"Busy place," he remarked.
She shook her head. "It was full when I left."
"No offense, Doc, but maybe this sickness is affecting you, too."
"You don't understand," she said, "they were all dead-twenty or thirty of them, guards, inmates, plus the ones lying on the floor, I wouldn't have left them here if there was something I could still do to help."
"Where's your droid?"
"I don't know." She raised her voice. "Waste?"
The 2-1B didn't answer. Han and Chewie walked around her on either side, looking at the rows of empty beds. Chewie growled, and Han murmured, "Yeah, me either." He stepped over a bloody hospital gown that looked as though it had been ripped in half, then looked back up at Zahara. "Say you're right and there's nobody else left alive. How are we going to get out of here?"
"There's the Star Destroyer."
Han was sure that he'd misheard her. "Excuse me?"
"Up above us. Apparently it's a derelict. The barge docked on it to scavenge for parts for the thrusters-that's when everything really started going wrong. I have no idea whether the engines were repaired before the maintenance team died. Otherwise.»
"So this contagious disease came from the Destroyer?"
She nodded.
"Sounds like a good place to keep clear of."
Zahara didn't answer him. She had bent down to study a patchy streak of bloodstains from under one of the beds. Reaching under, she touched something-Han couldn't tell what it was-and dragged it slowly into view.
"What is that?" Han asked, and then he saw.
The hand was human, and had been ripped free by sheer force, the bones of the forearm cracked and severed by some blunt object. Two of the fingers were missing, plucked from the knuckle. Zahara looked at it with no particular emotion evident on her face.
"It belonged to a guard," Zahara said.
"How do you know?"
She pointed out the signet ring. "ICO academy." She dropped it, and it landed with a soft thud.
Behind her, on the other side of that row, Han heard Chewbacca growl.
"Uh, Doc?" Han said. "I think we found your droid."
* * *
Zahara looked, and as soon as she did, she realized that some small, dismal part of her had been expecting e
xactly this outcome, from the moment she'd arrived in solitary and Waste had not been there.
The 2-1B lay in pieces across the floor behind the last of the beds. Its arms, legs, and head had all been systematically dismantled and crushed, its torso beaten so the instrumentation panel flickered listlessly, erratically, beneath the cowl. It was still trying to talk, making garbled noises through its vocabulator.
"Dr. Cody?" it said.
"Waste, what happened?"
"I'm sorry. That test pattern wrote on the owl wall. It was marvelous. Would you like to taste it again?"
"Waste, listen to me," she said, crouching down next to it. "The patients, the bodies, where did they go?"
"Look, Doc," Han said behind her. "Let's get out of here, huh? This whole place…"
"Shh," Zahara said, not looking back, keeping her attention on the droid. "The corpses, Waste," she prompted. "Did someone take them?"
"I'm sorry. There isn't any left. It doesn't walk without three and the two places. I'm sorry. Every reasonable attempt was made." The 2-1B clicked and something sparked and clanked deep inside its lower processors. "We must uphold the sacred oath of. " It stopped, hiccupped, and seemed to regain some sense of what she'd asked it. "An amazing thing. They're miracles, really. Marvelous." And then, with terrible brightness: "They woke up!" There was one last small internal click, although this one sounded more jarring, broken, and when it spoke again its voice sounded thick and sluggish. "They just. eat."
"What?"
The components in the droid's torso flickered again, but it didn't say anything else. "Hey," Zahara said, turning around to Han and Chewbacca, "do either one of you know anything about droids?"
But Han and Chewie were gone.
Chapter 22.
Bulkhead
The graffiti scrawled on the inner bulkhead was written in Delphanian, but Trig could guess what it meant. Face Gang. Keep out. Blood toll.
"Will you relax?" Kale said. "Myss is dead. They all are."
It didn't make Trig feel any better. At first all the corpses had frightened him, but there was something worse about not seeing them. They hadn't seen any more dead people since Sartoris had chased them away from the escape pod. Now they were traveling crosswise through the admin level, in accordance with Kale's plan. Trig had initially thought that it was because of the hidden route they were using, down these tight passageways, alongside conduits within the walls, but now he wondered why they hadn't seen a single body.
"Hold this for me." Kale handed him the blaster rifles he'd been carrying. "Here we go." He removed a loose panel from the wall, reached inside, and slid out a pair of power packs. "Right where Dad left them." Sticking his hand deeper, he groped around for a moment and came up with another blaster, a pistol. "Here, you take this one."
"I don't want it."
"Did I ask if you wanted it?"
Trig realized his brother was right. Whether or not there still was something following them, he was going to need a weapon. He inserted the power pack into the blaster, clicked it home, and tried to find a way to carry it that didn't feel awkward or self-conscious before realizing that there was no way of doing that. His father's voice spoke to him: When you're carrying a blaster, whatever else you're doing comes second.
Kale gestured forward, up the walkway. "Let's go find that other escape pod."
"How do you know there is a second escape pod?"
"It's here because we need it to be here."
Trig just shook his head. Circular logic: their father would be proud. "Seriously, though."
"Seriously?" Kale said. "The Imperials build everything symmetrically. They're not creative enough to do anything else. So where there's one, there's got to be another, same location, opposite side." He shrugged. "I don't know, what do you want me to say?"
Trig just nodded. He'd liked the first explanation better.
* * *
Fifteen minutes later, Kale let out a small but energetic whoop. They had reached the opposite side of the barge's admin level. "What did I tell you?"
The pod looked exactly like the one that Sartoris had taken. Trig wondered how they were going to activate it without the launch codes, but he didn't want to puncture Kale's enthusiasm. It was nice to see his brother smiling again. He walked over to the pod's hatch and put his face against the viewport, peering into a darkly luminous chamber of softly glowing lights.
He felt a wave of coldness slip over him and turned around fast.
There was someone coming up the hall.
It wasn't his imagination this time, no chance; Kale heard it, too, Trig saw it in his brother's face, both of them registering the deep-chested growling noise getting louder as whoever it was rounded the corner.
"Stay behind me," Kale murmured, raising both his blasters up to chest level. "If anything happens, shoot first and then run, got it?"
"Wait," Trig said, fumbling with the pistol, "where's the stun switch?"
Kale said something in an even lower voice, but Trig could hardly hear him over the beating of his own heart. He realized he was about to fire a blaster for the first time and his life would depend on how well he used it. If it was another guard they might have to kill him. This was why he hadn't wanted to carry a blaster in the first place, but that didn't seem to make a difference now, because-
A man in an orange inmate's uniform came around the corner with a Wookiee next to him.
"Hold it!" Kale shouted.
When the man and the Wookiee saw them they stopped walking, but neither of them appeared particularly surprised. The man raised his hands, but the Wookiee growled louder, shoulders hunching up, looking like it still hadn't ruled out attack as a possible response.
"Easy, kid, put the blasters down."
"No way." Kale shook his head. "What are you doing here?"
Han's eyes flicked over to the escape pod. "Looks like we both came looking for the same thing."
"There's not enough room," Kale said. "So why don't you and your friend turn around and go back where you came from."
"What are you guys, brothers?" Han didn't move, but he shifted his attention to Trig, the corners of his mouth twisting upward in an odd grin, crooked but genuine. "You ever use one of those things before?"
Trig didn't know if he was talking about the blaster or the pod, so he just nodded. "Sure."
"Yeah, I bet. Come on, kid, give up the heat, huh?" Stretching out both hands, that casual, crooked smile on his face, he started sauntering toward them again, as if he'd already decided how all of this would transpire and it was only a matter of going through the motions until everybody else realized it, too.
"You take another step and I'll shoot!" Kale cried out in a voice that broke high at the end, but by then it was too late. Both he and Trig bad been watching the man when they should have been watching his partner.
The Wookiee made it look easy, closing the gap in what felt like no time at all, plowing straight into Kale and knocking him flat, both blaster rifles clattering to the floor, rolling and pinioning one huge furry leg out so that it caught Trig in the side. Trig heard himself make a noise like uff! and felt all the air leave him like it had been sucked out of a vacuum. He went down, too, hand at his side, and realized he'd dropped his blaster. It had somehow already materialized in the man's hand.
The Wookiee kept the blaster rifles pointed at them, and Trig felt the last vestige of hope draining out of him like dirty water from a bathtub. What had ever convinced them that they could hold off a pair of career criminals with nothing to lose?
The man, meanwhile, walked over to the escape pod. "Well, we'd love to take you boys along, but as you pointed out, space is at a premium, so…"
"You'll never make it," a voice said.
Trig looked around and saw the woman standing there. It took him a moment to realize it was Dr. Cody, the Purge's medical officer. He hadn't seen her since the day their father died, but now her pretty face-normally smiling, usually amused about something or other-
looked gray and strangely lifeless, aged twenty years since the last time they'd met. Even her voice had changed. It lacked that easy, pleasant twinge of irony that he'd heard before, that tone of I'm working on an Imperial prison barge, how much worse can it get? Now she only sounded tired and resigned.
"What do you mean?" Han said.
"Go ahead," Dr. Cody said, in that same oddly inert and shrugging voice, "try to get inside."
The man pulled on the escape pod hatch, but it didn't open. "What, it's locked? How do you know?"
Zahara pointed at the steady red light next to the security system activated sign by the pod's hatch. Trig hadn't noticed it until now, either. "It's locked down."
"So how do we get in?"
"There's a manual override up in the pilot station." Dr. Cody turned to the Wookiee. "And enough with the blasters, all right? I hardly think either of you has anything to fear from a couple of teenage grifters."
"Hey, they pulled 'em on us," Han protested, and the Wookiee barked out a contentious whinnying rejoinder, but both lowered their weapons.
"The pilot station's directly above us," Dr. Cody said. "I'll go up and see about unlocking the pod."
"Chewie and I'll go up with you, take a look at the thrusters." Han glanced at Kale and Trig. "You kids tagging along?"
"We'll stay here," Kale said, "you know, stand watch."
Han shrugged. "Suit yourself."
"What.?" Trig glanced at his older brother, uncertain, but felt Kale reaching down to squeeze his arm gently yet firmly.
"Here." Dr. Cody handed Trig a comlink. "I'll call when I get it open so you can check it before we come back. We'll come back as soon as we can."
"Leave us the blasters," Kale said.
Han snorted. "Yeah, right."
"Go ahead," Zahara said, "you can spare one."
Han looked expectantly at Chewie. "What? He's not taking mine," but the Wookiee just continued to stare back at him. "Great," Han muttered, thrusting the weapon back at Kale. "Here you go, boy. Try not to shoot off your own foot."
Kale took it and nodded, and Han, Chewbacca, and Dr. Cody started to walk away.
