by Джо Шрайбер
The needle snapped and it sat up, no longer looking so weak, or so human.
It was grinning at her again.
Zahara realized whatever she'd done to it with the anti-virus had already run its course.
She looked down at the series of scratches that the thing had scraped into the floor, jagged letters like an erratic brainwave. It didn't make much sense, but had she honestly expected it to?
She was still mulling that over when the thing in the lab coat jumped on her, pinning her down.
* * *
She screamed. The thing clamped both hands around her throat and she felt its cold fingers slithering, squeezing, pinching, and choking off her scream at the same time that it lowered its mouth toward her gullet. She tried to push back against it but it was like struggling against iron manacles. The harder she fought to resist, the more constrictive its grip became. She was blacking out. What had her surgeon at Rhinnal always told her about oxygen deprivation? Time is muscle. Time is brain. She already felt the heavy penumbra of blackness crowding down on her vision, muffling her hearing, tightening into an indifferent, anesthetized nothing.
It ended with a metallic scraping crack, durasteel on bone, and cold, foul-smelling liquid splashed in her hair. The pressure on her throat went abruptly weak, the dead hands falling slack and sliding off to the side.
Zahara looked up, her vision coming clear. The thing's head was twisted sideways now, a surgical bone saw shoved through its neck, half buried in the gray flesh.
What…?
Hovering behind him was a flat metallic face she couldn't believe she was seeing, even now.
"Waste." Her voice was barely a whisper. "You. came back.?"
The 2-1B just looked at her. "I beg your pardon?"
"You saved me."
"Well, yes, of course," the surgical droid said, a bit puzzled. And seeming to remember that it was in the process of sawing the head off the thing in the lab coat, it thrust both the bone saw and the thing aside, dropping them to the floor. "That creature was attempting to injure you. And per my programming at the medical academy in Rhinnal, my prime directive is…"
"To protect life and promote wellness whenever possible," Zahara finished for him. "I know."
The surgical droid continued to look at her expectantly, as if awaiting orders. Zahara could already see that it wasn't her 2-1B, her Waste. but she nonetheless felt a throb of gratitude disproportionate to all reason. Of course a vessel this size would employ such a unit, and this lab would be the perfect place for it. Yet the tears in her eyes were not only tears of gratitude and relief but recognition of a friend she'd lost, but hadn't truly lost after all.
"Is there anything else I can do for you?" the droid asked.
"Can you. " She sat up, looking around the lab again with what felt like fresh eyes. "Can you tell me anything else about the research that was going on here?"
"Very little, I'm afraid. In a strictly scientific sense, I do know that my programmers were working on an easily conveyed chemical means of slowing the normal course of decay in living tissue. Ideally the virus would be able to take over nerve receptors and make the muscles fire even after clinical death has resulted."
Zahara thought of the corpses screaming at one another, linking up to form organized armies.
"Were there. military applications?"
"Oh, I really couldn't say. It was highly classified, and I'm strictly a surgical and scientific unit, nonpartisan in such matters and certainly not very knowledgeable when it comes to such clandestine weapons operations."
"Then do you know where I could find a workstation that might still be functional?"
"Oh, most certainly." The droid paused, and she could hear its components clicking and whirring busily beneath its torso cowling, a familiar noise that brought back another painful memory of Waste. "My sensors indicate that there seem to be several nondisrupted consoles available in the hangar control center. However, I am obliged to inform you that given the hostile environment, such an exposed area could prove particularly hazardous to you."
"I'm used to it."
"Very well. Would you like me to diagram the most direct route?"
"How about one that I can get to without going into the hangar itself?"
"Right away."
"And Waste?"
It eyed her again. "I'm afraid I'm…"
"Thank you," she said, and resisted the urge to take hold of its cool mental hand and kiss it.
Chapter 37.
Lifter
CRACK!
The next blast that slammed into the hull of the Imperial landing craft was no handheld weapon. Sartoris only realized this fact when the craft jolted suddenly upward and to the side, jerking him free from the two soldiers who'd come out of the cockpit, and launching him across the cabin headfirst into Gorrister.
The X-wing laser cannon, he thought wildly. Those things out there, they saw me use it-
And then:
I guess Gorrister was right after all. They can learn.
The commander stared up at him with an expression of perfect disorientation, like a man shaken from a particularly vivid dream.
"What. what's happening?" Gorrister's full attention was still riveted on Sartoris, then his eyes got even wider and he looked around the cabin at his starved men and the empty, folded uniform of the ones he'd killed and eaten. For an instant Sartoris thought he glimpsed total self-realization in the commander's expression, a revelation of the depthless depravity to which he'd sunk over the last ten weeks.
Sartoris reached up and punched the button over his head, deactivating the locking mechanism on the emergency hatch. Then, seizing Gorrister by the collar, he swung him straight upward, using his skull as a battering ram. It would never have worked with the lock still armed-there was a reason the transport had been able to keep out the undead for ten weeks-but now that the mechanism was disarmed, both the hatch and Gorrister's skull gave way on impact, the steel flap swinging open. Sartoris hoisted him outward, flung his limp body to the side, and reached down to grab another man at random, plucking him up under his arms. Starvation had made their bodies considerably lighter, and Sartoris managed to wrench him through the hatchway almost single-handedly.
Outside, the mob of the undead had surrounded the landing craft on all sides, a sea of hungering faces: inmates, guards and the original crew of the shuttle. As Sartoris had predicted, one of them had already clambered into the X-wing next to the shuttle and was groping desultorily at the controls. The cannons weren't pointed at the shuttle-had the thing inside the cockpit somehow banked a lucky shot off the hangar wall into their hull?
Then he saw the other X-wing, forty meters away, pointed straight at him. One of them was inside there, too.
Are they all climbing into ships?
Sartoris reached down, plucked another soldier from the transport, and heaved him out into the mob. The things fell on him instantly, grabbing his arms, legs, and head, ripping him to pieces while he was still alive. Despite his attempts to look away, Sartoris caught a glimpse of the man's face stretched wide in a silent scream as one of the undead popped his shoulder cleanly from the socket. The thing next to him took an enormous bite that removed one of the soldier's arms, waving it at the others, wielding it like a club.
Sartoris swung back down through the emergency hatch into the some kind of primitive melee weapon in his fist, some truncheon or knife. Sartoris yanked him through in one thoughtless, adrenaline-fueled gesture. There was a third man behind him, and Sartoris grabbed him as well, under the arm and beneath his scrawny shanks, and hauled him up onto the shuttle's hull, the starved soldier gaping up at him from a place beyond all helplessness.
"Please," he said. "Please, don't."
Something about the voice stopped him and Sartoris looked into his face, and saw that underneath the filth and hunger and fatigue, the soldier was just a boy, an adolescent thrust into service of an Empire whose only enduring purpose was death.
&nbs
p; "You don't have to do this."
Looking out on the soulless, shambling things, Sartoris saw them devouring the bodies he'd thrown them, waving severed limbs, fighting over the last ragged bundles of shredded viscera. Then he looked down at the young soldier again, the sunken face and terrified eyes. The boy was watching them, too. He looked like he was about to pass out from sheer horror. Sartoris could hear the air scraping in and out through his throat, the hollows of his lungs. For a moment Sartoris was completely transported back to the last seconds of Van Longo's life, the upturned face, the beseeching eyes peering into him for some trace of mercy.
"What's your name?" Sartoris asked.
"S-sir?"
"Your name. Your parents gave you one, didn't they?"
For an instant the kid seemed to have forgotten it. Then, tentatively:
"White."
"Does this ship still fly, White?"
"The sh-shuttle?" The soldier's head went up and down. "Well yeah, but that tractor beam…"
"Let me worry about that. I might be back and if I am, you and your buddies…" Sartoris flicked his eyes off in the direction where he'd thrown Gorrister."…we understand each other, White?"
"Yessir."
"I'm gonna make a break for it, and I recommend you use that opportunity to get this vessel locked down the best you can."
Without waiting to see if the kid got the message, Sartoris released his collar, allowing him to slide back down inside the shuttle, and gazed back across the hangar, his mind instinctively calculating a trajectory between the diversions he'd created when he'd thrown the other bodies out. It was a simple mathematical equation, and he'd always been good at math.
Turning hard, head down, he went pounding down the other direction, toward the bow of the shuttle, leapt off, and hit the ground running. Instantly a throng of the things came slamming toward him, arms outstretched and grasping. Sartoris plowed into one of them, skidded in a pool of blood, and felt an abrupt slash of pain across his left forearm but didn't stop to look at it.
He ran on, making a hard dash for the back of the hangar. The salvaged vessels behind him might be his only way off the Destroyer but they were no good to him unless he could disable the tractor beam, and that would mean getting himself to the command bridge first, and then -
There was a doorway at the far end of the hangar and as he ran through it, he heard an electronic beep go off-probably just a simple light sensor registering traffic through the walkway.
He looked around but didn't see anything. If one of those things had followed him back here, it was hiding from him now, which didn't make sense. At what point, he wondered, did fear itself become so redundant that it atrophied and dropped off entirely like an unnecessary, evolved-away appendage? Or would his species always find a use for fear, no matter how extreme the circumstances?
Sartoris took another look at his empty hands. Never in his life had he wanted a blaster as much as he did right now. The idea of venturing unarmed through the Destroyer was practically unthinkable. But if he stayed here, death was a guarantee.
It is anyway. The only question is when.
Walking backward, trying to see everything at once, he bumped into something hard and felt it recoil against him, jostling on a cushion of air.
Sartoris turned around and looked at it, unable to keep the half smile from spreading over his face.
It was the hoverlifter they'd come across earlier, the one they'd left here because it couldn't hold all of them.
Maybe my luck's finally starting to turn.
He took a breath and reached up to pull himself aboard the lifter- and noticed the bloody gash just below his right elbow.
That was how he realized he'd been bitten.
Chapter 38.
Bridge
"I don't know about you, pal, but I was hoping for better."
That was Han Solo, as he finally set foot inside the command bridge of the Star Destroyer. He'd been around a long time and seen a great deal of strange things, but if he survived this he'd definitely have people buying his drinks for a long time to come.
The catwalk had-well, to be honest, it had almost been more than he could handle. Crossing over had been difficult enough, weaving their way along through open space with nothing to hold on to, the bowel-churning vertigo as his center of gravity whirled like a gyro with a broken ball-and-socket.
He hadn't wanted to look down. But once the things down in the pit started shooting, he didn't have much choice.
They fired randomly, like they hadn't had much experience with blasters, but that was little reassurance when Han saw the sheer number of them. Firing back would have been a waste. There could have been thousands-at this distance it was impossible to say. It occurred to Han that they still seemed to be waking up, roused to consciousness by the presence of fresh meat, and their aim was poor, though by the end it had seemed to be improving. More than once the blasts had come close enough that he'd tasted ozone.
And if he'd lost his footing-if he'd slipped and fallen down into that sea of hungry bodies-
With deliberate effort, he forced himself back into the present moment. They were inside the command bridge, faced with the expanse of low-slung computer modules and navigation equipment with which the entirety of this kilometers-long miracle of interstellar destruction was steered.
It was smashed almost beyond recognition.
The screens had been punched through, banks of circuitry and sophisticated sensor arrays blasted, shattered, or yanked completely loose from their moorings, most of them flattened as if under some unthinkably heavy boot. Every step they took announced itself with the muffled crumple of broken glass.
"Looks like we finally found somebody that hates the Empire more than we do, huh?" Han asked, shaking his head. "You try the navicomputer yet?"
Chewie barked without bothering to look around.
"Okay, I'm just asking. Can't blame a guy for hoping, right?" He sighed and brushed debris from a seat facing one of the less thoroughly demolished consoles, plopping down. "Only thing still running is the tractor beam, huh? What kind of encryption we looking at?" He reached for a working keyboard and punched in a series of keystrokes. "Guys who designed this stuff weren't all that bright. How hard can it be?"
Something in the console chirruped, and crystalline patterns began to coalesce on the cracked screen, clarifying and sharpening into lines of navigational code.
"Hey, Chewie, I think I got something here…"
Beneath him, in response to his directive, the entire Destroyer tilted slightly on its axis. Han, who'd never flown anything remotely this big in his life, felt a kind of fatalistic good humor taking root in the floorboards of his psyche. What would the Imperial High Command have to say about this, he thought, seeing a lowly smuggler with a price on his head sitting behind the controls of a Star Destroyer?
"See, what did I tell you?" He tapped in another set of instructions, not looking up. "Hey, did you get a chance to look inside those hyperdrive systems?"
Everything jolted hard and Han sat up fast, trying to figure out what he'd done and how to undo it. It felt like the Destroyer was listing slightly, and one of the consoles had begun to emit a low, steady whine. Lines of text were crawling across the broken monitor.
"Chewie?"
The Wookiee was gone. Han stood up, looking across the empty bridge. He listened, holding the blaster he'd found at waist level. The space around him suddenly felt very large, and absolutely silent, except for the faint click of data emerging on the screen. His eyes flicked down to it again with increasing impatience. Whatever encryption had locked the tractor beam into place was still active. It was awaiting a password.
Then, from one of the adjoining spaces, he heard it-a faint growl.
"Chewbacca?"
Finger on the trigger, he crept across the bridge, following the sound, and found himself looking into a subchamber he hadn't noticed until now. It was lined floor-to-ceiling with backup systems, whole pan
els of pulsating lights. The Destroyer tilted again, not dramatically but enough that Han could definitely feel the shift in equilibrium, and he wondered if he'd done something to destabilize its processing systems. The last thing they needed was for this entire vessel to go belly-up on them in the middle of nowhere.
He looked inside the subchamber. "Chewie? What's going on in there?"
Chewbacca was crouched in the semidarkness, looking at something. When he rose up, Han saw he was holding a small, hairy body- another Wookiee, Han realized, very young. It was wearing a tattered prison uniform.
"How'd he get in here?''
The young Wookiee gave a weak bleating cry. Chewbacca gazed at him and then back up at Han.
"Great." Han sighed. "Anybody else we're supposed to rescue while we're here?"
Chewie uttered a warning grunt.
"Okay, okay, bring him out," Han muttered. "You put yourself on the line once and all of a sudden everybody's got their hand out."
Chewbacca carried the small Wookiee out, and Han got a better look at the youngster's face. His eyes were reddish and cloudy; his throat was swollen so badly that he seemed to be having trouble breathing. The tongue protruded thickly from his throat. "Where's the rest of your family?"
The Wookiee bleated again and Han saw where he was pointing: to another hatchway on the opposite side of the command bridge.
"They're in there? What are they doing, hiding?"
Chewbacca carried him over, shifted his weight to one arm, and reached out to open the hatchway. As he did so, the Destroyer yawed slightly again. Han saw a trickle of blood come oozing out from underneath the door and across the tilting durasteel floor toward them.
"Whoa," Han said, and nodded down, where the trickle had become a steady stream. "What is that?"
Chewbacca made a quizzical grunt and looked back at the young Wookiee, who sat up with a sudden burst of energy and pushed the button himself to open the hatch.
