Star Wars: Death Troopers (звездные войны)

by Джо Шрайбер

"It's not like that. It doesn't hurt. I can just feel it, where my d- where it bit me." His eyes were very wide now, glittering like broken glass, and she could hear the whistle of air through his nose as he lost the battle to panic. "Unwrap it at least, so I can see it. I'll show you."

  "I need to keep pressure on the…"

  "It's coming through me!"

  "Kale, don't!"

  He sat up and grabbed the bloody tourniquets from his calf, ripping them off in layers. Zahara tried to stop him and he shoved her back without so much as a backward glance, intent on peeling away the canvas strips that she'd torn from her own jacket. The last of them fell away in a sodden red heap.

  "See?" Kale's face was flushed with horrified triumph. "I told you."

  Zahara stared at it. There was a fist-sized chunk of flesh missing from the meaty part of his lower leg, the exposed shinbone gleaming visibly through a web of the torn muscle and viscera. The puckered flesh around the wound had gone a bruised, gangrenous gray. She found herself watching in fascinated horror as that same gray hue began to reach up his leg, past his knee to his thigh, causing it to pulsate visibly with gelatinous vitality. It was like a hand sliding up underneath his skin, reaching eagerly upward toward his torso.

  "Get rid of it!" Kale shrieked, his own voice high and reedy, slapping at himself as his voice joined those of the screamers inside the shaft. "Cut it out, get rid of it, get it out of me!"

  Zahara felt the wheels of time grinding to a halt. Her mind flashed back to one of her teachers at Rhinnal, something he'd said once in the classroom: The day will come when you'll be faced with a situation you're completely unprepared for, both physically and emotionally. On that day you'll find out what kind of doctor you really are, by how much you give up to fear, and how much you remember your training.

  She tore open the pocket of her cargo pants and pulled out her medical kit, breaking it open. Inside were scalpels, gauze, tape-the most rudimentary tools of her trade. Down in front of her, Kale kept screaming. The gray swollen pulsation she'd seen earlier had already crept up past his waistline, rippling inside his abdomen, turning pink skin into dull, mottled pewter. Seeing it made her sick-it was like watching meat rot from the inside.

  He's dying. Or worse. So do something.

  She took a scalpel from the kit and lowered its sharpened tip into the exposed flesh just below his belly button. For an instant Kale's screams of fear became screeches of pain and he gaped at her in total confusion as she widened the incision, fingers probing through a slick jacket of fat to the constricted abdominal muscle beneath. A cold sweat had broken out over her forehead and upper lip. She put it out of her mind, extinguished every detail except what was right in front of her.

  The strands of muscle slithered between her fingers like taut damp cords of yarn. She could see them in her mind, feeling the abnormal heat beneath them, that intrusive presence, that thing, cutting its slickly twisting path upward. A whisper of motion brushed against her fingertips, and she seized it and squeezed. There was a sudden rupturing spurt and something beneath the muscle layer burst over her, a thick slimy pustule of nacreous liquid, coating her hands to the wrists.

  The screaming coming from inside the shaft was beyond deafening now.

  Zahara yanked her hands out and looked at them, staring at the way the clotted fluid first seemed to coagulate, then wiggled, and now actually appeared to crawl over her flesh like living gloves, looking for an opening, a wound it could use to get inside her. It stung worse with every passing second of exposure to the open air, and she wiped it off on her pants, forcing her gorge back down, telling herself if she lost her nerve now she'd never get it back.

  Below her on the floor, Kale's face had gone pale, ashen. He was staring at her in a state of shock. She kept hoping that he'd pass out but so far he hadn't, though he'd at least stopped screaming.

  "I have to go in again," she said, "I have to make sure I got it."

  Before he could say anything she shoved her hand back through the incision, sliding in, feeling around, waiting for that little wiggling clot of activity against her fingers and not feeling it. When she looked down she saw that the grayish black rot color was still there, just above his waistline, but it hadn't come any farther up.

  "I think we got it."

  She took a deep breath and looked at Kale. He'd finally blacked out, eyes mostly shut, rolled to the side. She gathered up the shirt she'd ripped off him and started to fold it up, pressing it down over the wound to stanch the new bleeding she'd created. Sitting back, holding pressure, taking in breaths and letting them out, she willed her own heart rate to slow down to something approaching normal. Whether she'd done more harm than good, she wasn't sure, except now Kale was still alive and breathing and if she hadn't done anything, that might not have been the case.

  It wasn't until later, when she'd finally calmed down a little, that she realized the docking shaft next to them had fallen totally silent.

  The screaming in the shaft had stopped.

  And then, from a great distance away, she heard another noise, some faint respondent roar.

  Something on the other side of the Star Destroyer was screaming back.

  Chapter 30.

  Black Tank Blues

  Chewbacca was worried about the boy. Trig wasn't talking. Han wasn't, either, but Chewie was used to that, depending on the circumstances. The boy, though-that was something else. Young ones needed to express themselves. In the short time that the Wookiee had known him, he'd seen the boy dealing with things far beyond his age, and if he kept them bottled up inside, it could be very bad for all of them.

  It had started when they'd heard Kale screaming on the other side of the hangar. Trig had wanted to go back and Han had to physically hold on to him to prevent him from running away.

  "He'll be all right," Han had said, and although Chewie could tell he wouldn't, he knew what Han was doing-getting the boy as far away from the docking shaft as possible before those things broke through. Trig fought him anyway, fought hard, kicking and punching, trying to squirm away until Chewie had to intervene and physically pick the boy up and hold him back, not a hug this time, not even close. The boy was stronger than he looked. Chewie ended up carrying him for the next twenty minutes until Trig, in a low voice, had muttered, "You can put me down now."

  It was the last thing he'd said.

  As much as he understood the mission, putting distance between themselves and the shaft, Chewbacca didn't like venturing any deeper into the Destroyer. The long corridors, the vacant spaces they kept coming upon, turning corners and seeing nothing but random droids, the emptiness that didn't really feel like emptiness-who had designed all of this, and who had left it here? Had they all died, and if they had, what had happened to the bodies? Some of the avionics were still functioning, and they occasionally came across whole empty suites of blinking lights, navigation and atmospheric systems operating on and on endlessly without the influence of any living thing.

  At the end of one hall they came across a stormtrooper helmet lying on its side like a broken skull. A second one dangled from a chain above it, its faceplate stained with dried blood. Han kicked the first helmet over and Chewie could smell something horribly rotten and sweet inside it: the plasteel mouthpiece had been carefully ripped out to expose the wearer's lower jaw. It looked like an artifact from an ancient civilization, a cannibal cult. Why would anybody have a thing like that?

  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 t
o 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 blaster-fire 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.

  Chapter 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 Giles 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-