by Джо Шрайбер
Are you really going to sit this one out? Cash it in, go down without a fight?
Chewbacca was looking at him, awaiting the decision. At last Han nodded and lowered the blaster.
"Okay," he muttered, "on my signal, we go out, just try to grab him…"
Chewie gave another howl, this one more startled, and Han saw what he was looking at.
It was too late.
The kid had let go.
The kid was falling.
* * *
From the moment his fingers finally slipped off, some part of Trig felt nothing but pure weightless relief: after everything that had happened, just to give up and surrender himself to gravity and the void. As he fell, Myss still clinging to his legs, he looked down into the screaming faces coming closer and felt the full intensity of their wrath swallowing him up. He remembered hoping that he'd be dead by the time he hit, and guessed that probably wouldn't happen either, unless-
Something swooped underneath him, and he smashed into it, connecting with his right hip and shoulder and rolling backward, arms and legs flopping with the leftover momentum. A heartbeat later and his forehead ricocheted off the smoothness of cold prefabricated resin. He propped himself up, felt the speed accumulating around his face, pushing forward. He wasn't falling anymore-
But he was moving.
He realized that he'd landed inside some kind of hovercraft, a utility lifter, shooting across the empty space above the main engine turbine, still twenty meters above the deathscape of screaming faces.
Trig turned his head and glanced forward. There was a figure perched up at the steering console. He couldn't see who it was-
Except that the man seemed to be wearing an Imperial prison guard uniform.
* * *
The lifter tilted, arcing sideways over the abyss, and when the driver shot a glance back around, Trig got a look at his face. Not that it made any sense, but after two and a half months aboard the prison barge, he would have recognized Jareth Sartoris anywhere.
Sartoris banked hard and swung the lifter around toward the far side of the catwalk where Han and Chewie stood staring at it with a look of disbelief that matched Trig's own. The guard's voice was a hoarse croak above the screams and blasterfire.
"You coming?"
Han and Chewie dived in without a word. The lifter sank under the new weight, and Sartoris rammed the stick forward and up. Watching him wrestle with it, Trig noticed the deep bite on his forearm, the way the underlying tissue had already started to bulge and pucker from some gray squirming necrosis deep inside.
Sartoris was fighting more than just the throttle, he realized.
The lifter rocked sideways, straining to hold them above the mob below, faces lit up by steady, strafing blasterfire. Han and Chewie had already taken their positions over either side, shooting back.
"You're that pilot, right?" Sartoris shouted, not looking over. "Can you fly this?"
Han blinked at him. "You're gonna let me…"
"See this?" Sartoris held up his bitten arm, the exposed tissue squirming visibly now as though it had a series of small, electrically charged serpents writhing just below the flesh, trying to find a way out. "I don't have much time."
"Yeah, well…" Han leaned over and squeezed off another round of fire into the masses. "Chewie and I are a little busy right now."
Sartoris looked over his opposite shoulder. "What about you?"
"Me?" Trig squeaked.
"We're overloaded." Sartoris gestured over at the pitch and yaw alarms that had already started flashing faster on the main console, and Trig realized with horror that they were still going down, descending slowly but steadily into the shrieking morass below. Within seconds they'd be feeling the clutching hands thumping the underside of the lifter, yanking themselves onboard. "The hover won't take the weight."
"I don't think I can…"
"Time to learn." Sartoris took hold of the boy's arm and steered him forward past Han, planting him in front of the console. "Got it?"
"Where are we going?"
"There's an Imperial shuttle down in the hangar with some soldiers aboard. Look for a kid named White." Trig realized the captain of the guards was holding on to his shoulder, looking at him; the man's eyes burned through clear and bright. "You understand what I'm telling you?"
"But…"
Sartoris squinted, the vertical lines deepening on either side of his mouth, furrows that you could fall through if you weren't careful. "There's something you should know about your father."
"You knew him?"
"He was a good man," Sartoris said. "Unlike me."
Trig stared at him.
"He would've been proud of you. You ought to know that."
"How…" Trig started. He was still talking when Sartoris swung his legs over the lifter's side rail and jumped.
* * *
"Kid!" Han cried out. "Are you flying this thing or what?"
Trig leaned forward, grappling clammy-palmed with the throttle, barely keeping them from colliding with the wall. The turbine and its abyss were behind them now, shearing off at some unlikely angle. Everything in front of him was coming at him too fast, a smear of reckless velocity.
Twenty meters below, in the concourse leading forward, the original inhabitants of the Destroyer were still shooting, and climbing the walls trying to get them. They were packed together, thousands of them, a solid river of recking and deteriorated flesh. As one, they threw back their heads and let out another group scream. It was answered by another scream from far away.
"You know where you're going?" Han shouted.
Trig glanced down at the layout on the lifter's navigational screen, the blip showing where they were among the labyrinth of midlevel passageways. He felt sweat dripping under his armpits and over his ribs.
You can do this.
The lifter jerked. Something was climbing up from the underside. He could feel the lifter tipping. Han leaned over, trying to see what it was, and shook his head.
"I can't get a shot!"
Trig looked forward again. He brought the throttle down as low as he dared, until he saw the exhaust manifold rising up from the corrugated floor. Holding his breath, he nudged the stick forward, dropping them another fraction of a millimeter. It was pure seat-of-your-pants speculation-the sort of thing his father and his brother would have excelled at, but he was the only one left to do it.
"Trig, what…"
Wham!
The corpse underneath the lifter slammed into the manifold, scraped off, and went pinwheeling sideways, headless now, down into the masses that had spawned it. Han threw him an appreciative glance.
"That's more like it."
Careering around a corner, Trig steered them down the slightly wider throughway, dull yellow lights whickering past like his own wildly careering thoughts. He kept going back to what Sartoris had said just before jumping off the lifter.
He was a good man. I'm not.
It had been a generality, spoken by a man who knew he was going to his death. Why had it sounded like he'd been confessing to killing Von Longo?
A burst of static broke from the lifter's comlink, a voice rising from its speaker.
"Hello, is anyone there?"
Han's arm shot past his face to grab the link, flicking it on. "Who's this?"
"…Cody…" the voice cut in."…hangar control…"
"We're on our way now," Han said.
"…no-stay away…"
"Say again."
"Under attack…"
The comlink sputtered, Zahara's voice reduced to a warble. Trig thought he heard blasters in the background, the twang and crash of catastrophic wreckage. He watched as Han changed frequencies, trying to home in on the signal.
"I'm losing you, Doc," Han said. "Just hang on, okay?"
". too many of them. " Zahara's voice was drifting, lost between clouds of heavier static. Trig thought he heard the words "laser cannon," and then the link broke off entirely. Han dropped t
he comlink and checked the lifter's digitized schematic.
"It's okay, we're almost there, right?" he said. "That's the entryway straight ahead."
Trig eased the stick back and then let it go forward, getting a feel for it at last, now that the trip was all but over. The lifter blurred through the end of the corridor, toward the hatchway where Han was pointing. Despite the fact that they were almost there, Trig felt an odd tug of apprehension, a sense of having made the wrong decision about something so long ago that there was no way to correct it now.
Chewie growled, and Han's nostrils flared. He looked worried.
"Yeah," he said. "I smell it, too."
Trig glanced over. "What?"
"Smoke."
* * *
The hangar wall was on fire.
Through the smoke Trig could see the army of the dead pouring through, headed to the far end of the hangar. The X-wing that had evidently attacked the wall was still pointed at it, its laser cannons tilted upward with random blocks of salvaged equipment. Trig glanced back up where flames had overtaken the west end of the hangar, obscuring everything in a wall of thick, oily smoke that smelled like burning copper wires and charred durasteel.
"Where did Dr. Cody say she was?" he shouted.
"Main hangar control," Han said.
"Which is.?"
Han pointed directly into the flames. Trig pulled back on the stick, angling the lifter up into the choking black wall. Instantly his eyes, nose, and throat started stinging, tears streaming down his face. He could hear Han shouting at him, and Chewbacca let out a loud, angry-roar that broke off in a burst of deep coughs.
"What are you doing?" Han said. "You want to get us killed?"
"I'm not leaving her."
"If she's up here she's already dead!"
Trig brought the lifter upward until he was staring through the flames into what was left of the main hangar command. Melted computers and consoles lay bubbling across the warped durasteel floorboards like a surrealist nightmare of Imperial technology.
She's not in there, he thought. She made it out. Maybe-
The thought snapped off cleanly in his mind.
It was a small shape, dwarfed by the oblong slab of charred components that had toppled over to crush it. Trig looked at the slender hand protruding outward from underneath the pile, remembered how it had looked resting on his father's shoulder in the infirmary. He felt the last of his breath evaporate from his lungs, leaving him absolutely still.
"Kid." Han's voice was far-off, and from the sound of it, Trig knew he'd seen her, too. "We have to go."
Trig opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He turned the lifter away, and down.
Chapter 43.
Death and All His Friends
In the final moments before leaving the Star Destroyer, Trig Longo saw things he knew he'd never forget, no matter how much he wanted to. Later, when he tried to put the pieces together and make sense of it, the words weren't there, and he found himself sifting through jumbled images, raw memories and feelings that still frightened him as badly as they had when he'd first experienced them.
He was still reeling with shock over what he'd seen up above. After losing Kale, he'd figured his capacity for grief and pain had been exceeded-but the knowledge that Dr. Cody was gone, too, was almost more than he could stand. It left him grief-stricken and miserably nauseated, as though he might vomit up some small bitter piece of his own heart.
Down below, on the hangar floor, the things inside the hangar had stopped screaming and were focused only on packing every remaining spacecraft. Watching them, Trig saw that there was no longer any question of priorities. They wanted off the Destroyer as badly as Trig, Han, and Chewie did.
He hated them.
Hated them worse than he'd ever hated Sartoris or Aur Myss or anything in his life. Hated them with an intensity he'd never imagined himself capable of. It was as if all the molten fear he'd suffered up till now had hardened into glassy black peaks of pure rage.
His eyes flicked forward. The landing shuttle that Sartoris told him about was already airborne. Hardly thinking, Trig swung the lifter alongside it. He saw the emergency hatch pop open and Han looked around at him hesitantly.
"You sure about this? That's an Imperial shuttle."
Trig pointed. "Look."
A skeletal arm waved from the hatch, gesturing them inside, and Trig didn't wait around to argue. He brought the lifter up, flipped it into auto-hover, and climbed over the transom.
* * *
It was darker inside the shuttle's cabin but easier to breathe without the smoke. The Imperial soldier standing in front of them had a pale, starved expression that immediately made Trig ill at ease; when the soldier smiled it was like watching a skull stretching through a thinly knit web of yellow flesh.
"You're White?" Trig asked.
"Tanner." The skeleton shook its head. "White didn't make it. It's just me and Pauling, up in the cockpit."
"Yeah, well," Han said, and cleared his throat. "We planning on leaving now, or are we taking up permanent residence?"
"As soon as…"
The whole world started shaking.
* * *
"What's going on?" Trig asked.
Han shot a glance up to the shuttle's cockpit, where another cadaverous Imperial soldier-Pauling, he assumed-was fumbling with the controls, hands dangling from his emaciated, stick-like wrists, all of which seemed to be under the control of some ridiculously inept puppeteer.
"What is that?" Pauling croaked, head jerking from side to side. "What's happening down there?"
"Hangar bay's opening," Han said. "I figured you boys were doing it."
"Negative." Pauling jerked one crooked thumb out the canopy. "I think they are."
Down below, Han could see the bottom of the Star Destroyer sliding open to reveal the void of space. Off to the right he thought he glimpsed the bow of the Prison Barge Purge, appearing very small at the end of its docking shaft, a tiny footnote dangling from the bulk of the saga of Imperial dominance.
As the bay came wide open, the captured ships began flying out- a pair of TIE fighters, the freighter, an Imperial shuttle, and the X-wings-spewing outward in all directions, scattering into space like flies off a corpse. As one of the smaller craft flew past them on its way out, Han glimpsed the sallow faces of the dead peering out at him from the cockpits, crammed in so tightly that their rotted flesh was pressed against the glass. Were some of them actually licking it?
"Let's go," Han said. "What are we waiting for?"
Pauling punched in a series of commands and the shuttle started vibrating, then jolted hard to port and stopped moving.
"What's wrong?"
"I don't know," Pauling stammered, "the thrusters.»
"Get up," Han said, practically jerking the Imperial soldier from his seat and shoving him back toward the cabin. "Chewie, we're gonna have to do this ourselves." He looked around. "Chewie?"
No answer came back, and Han didn't have time to go looking for him. He reset the navigational systems to manual and brought the throttle straight up, nosing the shuttle around and angling down until he saw the open bay below him. The galaxy was out there, wide open, just where he'd left it.
He punched it.
* * *
The shuttle shot downward from the Star Destroyer's hangar, rocketing past the prison barge and into space, and for that moment, Han Solo felt the surge of adrenaline he always got when whatever ship he was piloting began living up to her potential.
He didn't want to think about the lady doctor, what it must have been like for her in the end when those things had opened up on her with the X-wing's laser cannon.
But he knew he would eventually.
Couldn't be helped.
Concentrate on what you're doing. Don't get stupid now. We're not out of this yet.
He was starting to recalibrate the hyperspace navigation system when he first heard the screams.
"What's happe
ning back there?"
There was a thump, and Pauling came staggering back into the cockpit. Deep red arterial spray was jetting from the stump where his arm had once been. His face had gone an even paler shade of gray, his mouth gawping open in amazement.
"Those things…"
Then his voice stopped. The screams back in the cabin were only getting louder, and Han stared as Pauling did a weird, wandering pirouette back around and flung his remaining arm in that direction, as if to tell Han about what was going on.
Then something grabbed him and jerked him away.
Han flicked the guidance systems on remote and groped instinctively for his blaster. What had he done with it? Laid it aside when he'd taken the throttle, but where had it gone?
Standing up slowly, he peered around the corner.
One of the things from the Destroyer's hangar was standing in the cabin. It had removed its broken stormtrooper helmet to eat. How it had managed to get inside the shuttle before takeoff, Han didn't know, and it didn't matter-its mouth was buried in Pauling's throat and it was busily slurping his blood, ripping off huge gobbets of his flesh. Han looked down and saw its white-booted foot planted on the chest of the other Imperial soldier, Tanner, or what was left of him- not much more than a heap of bloody refuse, a black uniform packed with seeping meat, one eye rolled completely backward.
Han's gaze swept the cabin. On the other side he saw Chewbacca and Trig crouched at the end of the row of seats, staring back at him. Han mimed the word blaster, and both of them shook their heads.
What am I supposed to do here? he wondered. I'm not the hero. How many more miracles do these people expect from me anyw-
He stopped.
The trooper-thing was looking up at him.
And grinning.
Strands of Pauling's flesh were dangling from its teeth. It lurched for him, arms outstretched, howling loud enough that, inside the confines of the cabin, it made Han's ears ring.
He tried to dodge backward into the cabin, but his foot caught on something-Pauling's severed arm. As his legs went out from under him and he fell, the last thing he saw was the thing in the stormtrooper uniform dropping on him with his frill weight.
