by Джо Шрайбер
There were three full-grown Wookiees in prison uniforms hunched together in the corner, squatting together, sloshing around in what looked like an entire ocean of blood. Han could see that the fur of their faces was slathered in gobbets of meat, and they were snorting and smacking and breathing heavily as they tore into a pile of human remains sprawled around them. The corpses they were devouring appeared to be wearing Imperial guard uniforms.
Han breathed, "What the…?"
All at once they looked up.
It happened instantaneously-a blur of bloody hair and hot, shaggy musculature jolting toward him faster than his eyes could process. Han's reflexes took over and he opened fire on the closest one, the point-blank assault tearing the Wookiee's chest apart, laying it out flat on the floor where the thing flopped and coughed and tried to right itself. The one behind it went pinioning sideways and landed on its side, scrambling to get up while the third trampled over it. Han shot it in the face, snapping it backward. Then he opened on the one that had been trampled, blasting it until he'd reduced it to a mangled heap of trembling fur.
Next to him, Chewbacca appeared to have frozen, as if utterly detached from the situation. As Han took a step backward, he felt small sharp hands hooking into the hollow of his neck and looked around to see the young one's mouth snapping at him. He tried to shove it off, but the thing had attached itself to him with its arms and legs, its frantic, overheated body squirming against him like a giant rat.
A deafening explosion went off next to him and the young Wookiee's head burst apart. As it slumped off him and hit the floor, Han saw Chewbacca lowering his blaster.
"Thanks," Han said. "Nice of you to join in."
Chewie didn't say anything. He was still looking at the body on the floor.
"Let's get out of here, huh? Check the hyperdrive."
Eventually, with what seemed like great difficulty, Chewie turned away.
Chapter 39.
Stop
The ventilation shaft hadn't been much wider than Trig's body when he'd first entered it, and now it seemed to be constricting as he squeezed through. Every few seconds a thick blast of humid air came roaring over him, buffeting his clothes and hair, and he heard metal clanking like a broken valve somewhere inside its endless length. How far it would take him, or where it ultimately let out, he didn't know-he could just as easily die inside here, lost and dehydrated, one more speck in the indifferent maw of the universe.
Then, up ahead, he saw the end of the shaft. Dim light from somewhere below cast a pale yellow rectangle on the top of the shaft-he wouldn't be able to go any farther.
Creeping closer, right up to the edge, he stuck out his neck and peered over.
He felt his stomach plummet down to his knees.
The vent emptied out into the same abyss that he'd labored so intensely to avoid earlier, the yawning pit with the long tube of the Destroyer's main engine turbine at its bottom. It looked even bigger from directly overhead. Immediately below him, less than a meter away, was the narrow catwalk where Han and Chewie had crossed, close enough that he could probably lower himself down onto it, if he absolutely had to. It would mean clinging onto the edge of the vent while he swung his legs down, dropping down onto the catwalk without losing his balance, and-
From behind him inside the shaft, something shifted.
Trig looked back.
Froze.
Wanted to scream.
The thing in the stormtrooper helmet was making its way up the went toward him.
No question about what was happening now. It was groping its way forward and looking at him intently through the soulless lenses of the helmet.
"No," Trig whispered. "Don't."
It kept coming, the oversized helmet wobbling on its head as it crept forward. Trig looked back over the edge of the vent again. He could feel his entire body shaking helplessly, his heart racing so fast and hard that he thought it might burst inside his chest.
You have to go down there, a voice said inside his head. You have to go to the catwalk. It's the only way, or else that thing, that thing-
I don't want to! I can't!
He glanced back at the thing crawling toward him. It ducked its head and started crawling faster.
That was when the helmet fell off.
Trig blinked, momentarily undone by shock and dismay so disorienting that he actually forgot where he was and what he was doing. In that second he could only stare at the face that had been revealed under the helmet, his brother's ruined grin, one entire side of his face destroyed beyond recognition, the gleaming socket and smashed bone.
And then he heard himself trying to speak, his voice rusty, scarcely a whisper:
"Kale?"
The thing looked at him and just kept coming.
"Kale. It's me-it's Trig."
It showed no sign of hearing him. Trig could see it salivating now, the drool mixing with runnels of blood dried to its face. He could hear it breathing, and the noise reminded him of the sound the air made as it whooshed through the vent. This was too much. It wasn't happening, and if it was, then it meant he'd gone mad, in which case-
It pounced forward, smashing him down against the vent at the very edge of the outflow lip. Trig opened his mouth to say something and burst into tears. This time he let them come out all they wanted, tears and snot and sobs and bawling, and why not? What possible difference could any of it make now?
Kale's mouth opened and closed, and Trig could smell the death that was locked in there, the death that had been dealt to his brother, the death that his brother was about to deal to him. Kale wasn't going to answer him, and he wasn't going to stop. Trig had loved his big brother more than anything else in the galaxy, and it didn't matter now.
"Kale?"
It gave a snarl and lowered its face to Trig's neck, the teeth and tongue sweeping over his throat, dripping hot breath that smelled like some ghastly, poisonous moss. Kale's hands felt both hot and cold at the same time, the dead flesh moist, sticky, and clutching. He'd climbed on top of Trig now, pressing down on him with his full weight.
With a cry of pain, Trig shoved him back. A white-hot spark of something he'd never felt before went sizzling across the pit of his stomach and landed on his heart, and a light went out inside him, followed by a dismal realization of what was about to happen. It was like a story he'd already heard, the ending written long before he ever got a chance to do anything about it.
Look after your brother.
"Kale, I'm sorry."
As Kale pushed in on him again, more hungrily now, Trig straightened his knee under his brother's torso and rammed it upward, momentarily lifting his brother's body off him. Throwing Kale to the side, Trig twisted around, grappled with his wrists, and levered his brother backward to the edge of the vent.
Then he pushed him over.
Chapter 40.
Awakening
Kale fell without a sound.
Trig watched him drop, growing smaller, a teardrop against the expanse. As the semidarkness swallowed him up, the silhouette only partially illuminated by the faint lights surrounding the engine turbine, Trig saw what he hadn't seen earlier, down below.
Upturned faces.
Thousands of them.
They were-as they always must have been-clustered down at the bottom, on either side of the turbine, as if drawn to the ghost of its now absent hum. Even through his veil of shock, the delayed reaction to what had just occurred, Trig knew what he was looking at.
It was the original crew of the Star Destroyer.
They were screaming up at him as one.
At that same second Kale's body hit the turbine and bounced, flop-ping off the side and disappearing into the teeming morass of bodies The resulting sound was an even louder scream, like a single entity awakening and achieving a kind of brute mass-consciousness, awareness that hardly progressed beyond the immediate physical needs. Their breathing wafted up toward him in invisible gradations of damp warmth, their hunger se
eping through the air like thermals rising before a storm.
They see me.
Already they began to reach up toward him, the moaning noise becoming more aggressive, rising in pitch and volume to find that steady, now familiar waveform. Shifting and swaying, some of them began attempting to climb up the sides of the turbine itself, in an effort to get closer to him. Some appeared to be holding things, but at first Trig didn't know what the objects were.
Just as he started pulling himself back into the vent, thinking he could at least backtrack far enough to evaluate his options, the blasters started firing.
They were shooting at him, and their aim was deadly accurate. Before he could start crawling inside, Trig felt the vent shaft jerk and burst open in front of him, squealing free of its soldered housing and dumping him straight out. He toppled out the end without being able to grab on to anything, and for a moment he was falling through space, one final trajectory echo of his big brother.
He hit the catwalk hard and it doubled him up upon impact, chiseling shards of pain up through his ankles and legs. Trig grabbed it and held on, fingers curled into the cold latticework, clamping down on it with his entire body. He could both hear and feel the blaster bolts resonating through space around him. One of them was going to hit him, and he could only hope the blaster killed him before he fell into that far-off mass of outstretched hands and gnashing mouths.
He wanted to be dead before that happened.
All around him the catwalk shook and bonged with the impact of the blasters. Chips of durasteel streaked past his cheek, tiny cold specks of pure velocity. He wasn't thinking clearly at all anymore, and that might have explained why he didn't react immediately when he saw Han and Chewie at the far end of the catwalk, staring back at him.
They must have just come back down from the command bridge, Trig's mind droned dazedly. I guess things didn't work out so well up there, either.
Han could definitely see him, Trig knew-he was waving at him frantically, either to move forward or stay down, Trig wasn't sure. Meanwhile, what exactly was the plan? Both Han and Chewie had blasters, but two weapons hardly mattered against the blitz of firepower below them-they might as well have been as unarmed as Trig himself. And neither of them appeared willing to venture back out onto the catwalk in the middle of all this, not that Trig blamed them.
Trig narrowed his eyes. Han was gesticulating even more desperately now, shouting at the top of his lungs. He was pointing up, up. and when Trig tilted his head straight up he saw the last section of the vent shaft dangling loose from above, swinging back and forth.
Hands were reaching out of it.
Trig thought of the mountain of corpses on the other end of the shaft, how it had started coming to life as he'd climbed it.
They followed me down the shaft.
He watched in mute and suffocating terror as the owner of the hands slithered out. It was an Imperial soldier, its dead face lit with urgency. Clamoring for Trig, it rocked back and forth inside the dangling vent, lost its balance, and then fell out, hands scrabbling furiously as it fell past him, plummeting down into the blackness. Three more Imperials squirmed free after that, spilling out like hideous, fully formed offspring from some unthinkably fertile ovipositor.
The vent section swung back again, and this time Trig realized that whatever was inside it was actually waiting for the vent to are forward before it jumped, so it could use that last ounce of forward momentum to grab him as it sprang free from it. The corpse launched itself at him, too fast for Trig to see its face, and he plastered himself to the wall, feeling claw-like fingers scrape and smear across his torso.
The thing snapped its fist around his leg.
And this time, it held on.
Trig looked down. For an instant the only thing he could see was the limp sac of bruise-colored flesh that had once been its face, staring up at him, the place where the piercings had been ripped out, the gaping, leech-maw of its mouth. When the mouth opened Trig could still see the glint of steel piercing up through his gullet, the blade that Kale had shoved up through there, what felt like a thousand years ago.
It was Aur Myss.
Chapter 41.
Blackwing
Zahara tried three keyboards before she found one that worked. Fingers trembling, she jacked it into the secondary workstation and held her breath, waiting to see if they were compatible.
The 2-1B had declined to accompany her up to the hangar control room, electing instead to stay in the bio-lab, "in case I'm needed." But the droid's directions had been flawless. He had sent her through a Byzantine maze of walkways that delivered her to a service lift, and she'd taken it straight up to the pilots' ready room, through another set of doors that opened on hangar control itself.
The large enclosed booth stood at least thirty meters off the docking floor. From her current vantage point she could see everything- the six or so random ships that the Destroyer's tractor beam had sucked in on one end, and on the other, the half-destroyed docking shaft that had brought them up here from the barge.
The things were down there, too.
Hundreds of them, or perhaps thousands, swarmed the different damaged ships, teeming so thickly that Zahara couldn't begin to estimate their numbers. More were pouring in constantly through various hatchways and doors, a nonstop flood of bodies crawling over one another toward the different vessels. Every few seconds they screamed together, that same sonic waveform, and that only seemed to accelerate the arrival of others.
How was she going to get down there? And if she did, how could she possibly hope to get inside one of those captured spacecraft without-
First things first.
The screen in front of her blinked obediently on, awaiting the pass-word. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment, and then she typed in the word she'd read scrawled across the floor of the biolab:
blackwing
There was a long pause, and the screen went completely blank. Then, abruptly, across the top:
Password accepted.
Enter command?
Zahara let herself exhale a sigh that seemed to loosen every muscle in her chest, shoulders, and back. She typed in:
Access master control to Star Destroyer tractor beam.
After a split second the response came back:
Master control to tractor beam is accessed.
She typed:
Disable tractor beam.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then the computer responded:
Unable to complete command.
Zahara scowled.
Explain inability to complete command.
Immediately:
Tractor beam has already been disabled.
She sat back and looked at the screen with a slight frown remaining on her forehead. Had Han and Chewie actually managed to switch the thing off from the command deck? If so, then they should be on their way back now, assuming the plan was still to get out of here on one of the scuttled ships.
She looked back down at the heaving mass of bodies that filled the hangar floor. Hopefully Han and the Wookiee had found some more firepower along the way.
Leaning forward, she typed:
What is blackwing?
The system replied:
Blackwing:
Imperial bioweapons project I71A. Galactic virus dissemination and distribution algorithm.
CLASSIFIED: TOP SECRET.
Project status: In progress.
"Distribution algorithm?" She looked back out at the bodies in the hangar, now packed so densely that in many places she couldn't even see the floor. Every few seconds, they released another version of that ringing, rhythmic scream, and when she listened she could hear the other scream reverberating back from somewhere in the Destroyer. It only made them move more urgently.
But they weren't just milling around anymore.
The corpses were climbing into the different spacecraft, the X-wings, the landing shuttles and transports, the freighter in the far
corner of the hangar. Still others were streaming back into the half-blasted docking shaft leading back down to the prison barge. Zahara saw that they were lagging something on their backs.
She looked more closely.
Black metal tanks.
She glanced back at all the different vessels in the hangar, thinking again about the distribution algorithm, a coordinated means by which the Empire could spread the virus everywhere it wanted across the entire galaxy. Distractedly, she watched a group of the things lined up alongside an X-wing, working together to turn it around, pointing it up toward where she was standing.
Her mind went back to what Waste had told her about quorum sensing, the way the disease worked.
They don't do anything until they can all do it together — when it's too late for the host organism to fight it-but why?
Then it hit her, and she spoke aloud without realizing it.
"They're leaving."
Down below, the X-wing was aimed straight up at her. What had that other 2-1B said about being exposed up here?
A blinding column of flame tore across the hangar, hurtling straight for her.
Chapter 42.
River
The kid stood no chance.
Even from here, Han could sec how it was going to play out, and if he and Chewie went out on the catwalk to try to help him, it would just mean all three of them would die together. It was a miserable thing to realize, yet there it was-a rock-solid certainty.
Chewie gave a long, mournful howl.
"Yeah, I know," Han shot back, hating himself all the more for having to say it out loud. "You got any better suggestions?"
Out on the catwalk, the kid was slipping off, the thing dangling stubbornly from his ankle, dragging him down. He might be able to hang on for another five seconds, certainly no more. In an act of pure desperation, Han leveled his blaster, knowing he had no shot-he could just as easily hit Trig from this distance, or miss altogether. But what else was he supposed to do?
