The Essential Novels

by James Luceno

  The hole in the shaft was big enough now that she could see them inside the shaft, leering out at her as their hands gripped the hot, twisted durasteel and tried to peel it back. They had packed the shaft with their bodies—prison inmates still in their uniforms, human and nonhuman alike, guards, administrators, no longer segregated but jammed together with a pressing, eager confederacy they’d lacked in life. She could already see their faces. Sagging lips. Wrinkled noses. Dead yellow eyes lit up with a kind of stupid animal cunning. A scaly green arm came out clutching a blaster rifle and fired a shot blindly across the hangar, the red streak fading off in the distance, slamming into something too far off to register. More blasters fired inside the tube, widening the hole they’d created, making it longer and bigger on all sides.

  Be careful, you can’t see where you’re going, if you go too fast—

  Even as she thought it, her feet tangled over each other and she went down hard, Kale’s body landing on top of her.

  Go, go, get up, now!

  She jumped back up, groping for Kale, struggling to haul him off the floor, and made the mistake of looking up one more time.

  They had started crawling out.

  The blaster-twisted hole they’d created in the shaft was jagged and they cut themselves along the way, twisted spikes of durasteel slashing their uniforms and gouging deep into the pouched sacks of rotten innards that were their bodies. One of them—a guard whose face she vaguely recognized from his visits to the infirmary—was instantly impaled and hung there flailing while the others scrambled over him.

  In her arms, Kale groaned, tried to straighten his body, writhing around to look at her, and then fell slack again. He was trying to talk to her, she realized; despite his injuries, he’d actually found the strength to shout, but she still couldn’t hear him over the blasters.

  She pulled him faster, moving blindly, taking shorter, quicker steps. His weight was slowing her down, and now the first few of the things were already making their way toward her. One of them was Gat, his once familiar face contorted into a hideously hungry grin. I am going to eat you, that grin said, and you are going to taste good to me.

  There was a brief moment of silence, an incidental lull, and although Zahara’s ears were ringing, she realized what Kale was shouting.

  “Let me go!”

  “No,” she said, not concerned with whether he heard her or not. The important thing was that she’d said it to herself—she wasn’t leaving him here. In front of her, perhaps six meters away, three dead guards and maybe a dozen inmates paused as if acclimating to their new environment. Then they broke into a loose, shambling, openmouthed run straight at her, arms swinging, legs clanging, firing all the way. They were already getting better at it. The shots were actually getting close to hitting her now.

  “Drop me!” Kale screamed. “Just go! Go! Run!”

  Shut up, she thought—her adrenaline hit hard, erupting through her skull base, and her backward run became a backward sprint, her legs not even feeling like part of her now, paddling the floor beneath her with a crazy, blurring speed. The things were receding, trying to run but not as fast as she was, she could outrun them all, even dragging Kale behind her, she—

  There was another metallic jolt, and Kale jerked violently in her arms and fell still.

  She stopped running, aware of a damp warmness spreading through her lower torso and legs. Everything below her waist was soaked in blood.

  She looked down.

  The right half of Kale’s face was gone, a pulped half-moon. The broken skull protruded from his scalp like shattered terra-cotta, the jawbone dangling crookedly on one hinge. He’d taken the shot that would have torn straight through her abdomen. His good eye rolled up, fogging over. Already she smelled the terrible sweet odor of cauterized hair and skin.

  As his head swung down, Zahara saw that the left side of his face was almost completely untouched, except for a single freckle of scarlet under his eye.

  There was a muffled snarl, and she looked up again.

  In front of her, the things were moving faster now, motivated by fresh bloodshed.

  Zahara dropped him and fled.

  33/Catwalk

  They were lost—Trig knew it.

  It had happened when they were running blindly from the other side of the hatchway that Han had blasted shut. Nobody had spoken up and said which way to go, they’d just gone, sprinting as fast as they could, away from the scratching, screaming things they’d left behind. They’d run for what felt like whole kilometers—impossible, he knew, but the subjectivity would not be argued with. Eventually, too exhausted even to breathe, they’d slowed down, gasping for air and still not speaking. That was the first time Trig thought Han had somehow gotten turned around and was now leading them in the wrong direction.

  Maybe back toward those things in the ceiling, maybe—

  Trig cut the thought off, refusing to give it any further credence. Better to concentrate on where they were headed. The long corridors and main transit shafts had long since become identical, air exchangers and manifolds all starting to look the same, and when they arrived at yet another bank of turbolifts that looked just like the last set, Trig couldn’t keep it to himself anymore.

  “We’re going in circles,” he said.

  Han didn’t say anything, didn’t even glance back at him. He was looking back and forth down the upcoming nexus of concourses, running the options in his head.

  Trig cleared his throat. “Did you hear me? I said—”

  “You think you can get us to the command bridge, kid?” Han snapped. His eyes looked hollow and deep-set. “Be my guest.”

  “I’m just saying—” He pointed the way that Han appeared to be favoring. “—this doesn’t feel right.”

  “Yeah, well, we’re on a Star Destroyer, being chased by the living dead. None of this feels right.” Han rubbed his hand over his face, and when he lowered his palm and looked at Chewbacca, his expression showed a deeper gradation of doubt. “We came back from that way, right?”

  The Wookiee gave a mournful, uncertain groan.

  “Great. You’re supposed to be the one with the keen sense of direction.”

  “I think if we just take this turbolift, you know, up—” Trig started.

  “We’re almost to the conning tower.” Han squatted down and touched his fingertips to the deck below their feet. “You feel how the floor’s vibrating?”

  Trig nodded tentatively.

  “We’re probably standing right on top of the primary power generator.” Han cocked a thumb off to the right. “It’s this way and then straight back, I can feel it. We’re almost there, right through this hatchway.”

  He palmed the switch on the wall. It hummed, the entire platform reverberating even harder under their feet, and a huge space gaped in front of them.

  Almost simultaneously, they all took a step back, staring down into the void.

  Sickish green and yellow lights illuminated it from above, and Trig leaned slightly forward, craning his neck as far down as he dared, but he couldn’t see the full dimensions of it. As his eyes began to adjust, he saw they were standing at a precipice overlooking a deep cavernous chamber that for a moment appeared to be nothing less than the atmospheric null set of space itself. He realized that his lungs were aching for air, and allowed himself to inhale a shaky breath.

  “See?” Han said, a little weakly. “Told you we were at the top.”

  Trig stared down at the massive cylindrical shape, only half visible, so far down, their voices sounding very small against the opening.

  “What is that down there?” he asked.

  “Main engine turbine, probably.”

  “It’s big.”

  “It’s a big ship, kid—the Empire likes ’em that way.” Han pointed to the other side, voice solidifying with all kinds of manufactured confidence. “See that square service shaft on the other side? That’s probably the main lift platform up to the bridge.”

  Trig s
quinted. He couldn’t see across, and he doubted that Han could, either. His attention kept getting sucked downward in the direction of the silent turbine. What would it be like to fall that far down? You would have a long time to scream, that was for sure—one endless, diminishing shriek as the darkness swallowed you up. He wondered what might happen if the lower part of the Star Destroyer was open and you fell through it—if it was possible to drop straight down into the hostile, icy bath of the galaxy itself.

  “How do we get across?”

  Han pointed. “You’re looking at it.”

  Trig frowned. The catwalk in front of them was so narrow that at first he thought it was just an extra contour of the wall. It ran along the edge, stretching out as far as he could see, presumably ending on the other side.

  “There’s no guardrail.”

  “Yeah, well, beggars can’t be choosers.”

  “There’s got to be a regular way of getting over there.”

  “I’m sure there is,” Han said. “Me, I don’t plan on standing around out here any longer than I have to.”

  Trig thought back to the turbolift he’d suggested they take, a few turns back. No doubt that had been the usual means of getting to the bridge. But did he want to go back there alone? Could he even find it at this point?

  He glanced at Chewbacca, but the big Wookiee seemed unconcerned, and Han was already stepping out onto it. He put his back to the wall and crept forward, keeping his palms flattened on either side to maintain his balance. “Just keep your head up and don’t look down and you’ll be fine.” He jerked his head at the Wookiee. “Well, what are you waiting for?”

  With an unhappy yawp, Chewbacca stepped out after him, and Trig knew that it was his turn. He thought that Han was probably right about the conning tower—in his headstrong, cocksure way, he did seem uncannily well informed about the general layout of the Destroyer—but as Trig approached and put his foot onto the catwalk, he felt his guts go loose and turn to water. His legs felt so weightless that his knees trembled all the way up to his thighs, and when his palms started sweating he was abruptly sure that this was how he was going to die, falling down into the pit. Any remaining sense of balance and equilibrium fled.

  “I can’t,” he mumbled.

  Han turned and looked at him. He could feel the man’s eyes on him, making his face blaze up hot all the way to his hairline.

  “Come on, we don’t have time for a pep talk here.”

  Trig tried to swallow but his throat was too gummy. He forced the words out. “There’s got to be another way. Maybe I’ll go back to the turbolift.”

  “Alone?” Han asked.

  “Then I’ll wait for you here. Once you get the engines going again—” He bobbed his head up and down, selling the idea to himself. “I’ll just meet you back here, okay?”

  Han looked at him one last time. The distance between them was already wide enough that Trig couldn’t make out the expression on his face, but some small and shameful part of him guessed it was probably a mixture of exasperation and maybe a little contempt.

  But if there was contempt, it wasn’t evident in the man’s voice. “All right,” he said. “We’ll come back for you.” Then he and Chewbacca turned back in the opposite direction and continued to pick their way along the catwalk.

  Trig stood staring at the two shadowy forms advancing deeper into the shadows until he wasn’t sure he saw them anymore. Then they were gone, and he was standing there all alone.

  He’d never hated himself more than he did at that moment. It struck him that Kale would have gone out there without question, that his own life had been full of these failures of nerve, large and small, and that this was probably the most recent of many to come.

  He stood at the edge of the abyss, for what felt like a very long time, waiting to hear Han call out, We’re here, or We made it, from somewhere far off in the distance, but no such sound came to him.

  Maybe they fell, a craven voice inside him whispered. But if they had, wouldn’t he have heard them scream?

  He sat down by the open hatchway, a careful distance from the edge, and stared down into it, listening to the sounds of his own breathing, the steady thud of his pulse.

  Eventually he began to hear sounds from down inside the chamber. Low rustling noises from far below where he couldn’t see.

  It’s them. They’re down there.

  He bounced to his feet, more startled by the thought than the popping sound that his knees made, and tried to look deeper into the pit. He’d heard that Star Destroyers carried a crew of eight thousand or more—suppose they’d all been infected? They would nest somewhere, wouldn’t they, a place together in the dark? Maybe this was where the ones in the overhead ventilation shaft had come from, where they’d been waiting. And they were headed forward in the direction of the main hangar, as if summoned there by—

  He turned around, struck by the feeling that he was being watched.

  It wasn’t just a feeling.

  At the far end of the shaft, ten meters away, a face was peering at him out of the half-light, in three-quarter profile. Even at this distance, Trig recognized it instantly, though it took a moment to get the name out from his shock-numbed lips.

  “Kale?”

  His brother regarded him from the side without turning his head, as if in a trance. Then he reached out and pushed a button on the wall, and a door opened in front of him.

  “Kale, wait! Don’t—”

  Kale stepped through the door and disappeared.

  Trig chased after him, running back up the concourse, staggering a little, feeling pins and needles creeping up through his lower legs from all the time that he’d sat motionless—had he really been waiting there that long? His knees had the trembling, wrung-out feeling that made him wonder if they might actually buckle underneath him.

  He got to the hatchway that his brother had opened and pressed the switch. The door that hissed open wasn’t as big as the one that Han had discovered above the turbine. It was just a normal hatchway, and that somehow made him feel better, too.

  He stepped through it.

  “Kale? It’s—”

  His voice broke off with a choke.

  The chamber was even darker than the concourse he’d left behind. At first glance it appeared as big as the abyss he’d refused to cross—but this was some type of main refuse depository. A mountain of trash rose up to the ceiling, and the fetid, brown, excremental stink simmering off its peaks was beyond nauseating.

  Trig clamped his hand over his mouth and looked around through watering eyes, trying to keep from gagging. He couldn’t see his brother in here, but Kale had just come inside, seconds earlier.

  “Kale,” he said again, strangely hesitant to shout out in here. “It’s me. What are you doing in here?”

  Behind him, the hatch sealed shut.

  34/Skin Hill

  It wasn’t trash.

  Trig came to this realization as he took another step toward the mountain, hoping to find some trace of Kale around the other side. That was when his toe struck something soft and yielding, and when he glanced down he saw it was a human leg.

  Very slowly, he looked up.

  The leg was connected to a torso, covered up by another, and another, the pile growing in front of him comprising what he realized was hundreds of dismembered corpses—heads, arms, legs, and whole bodies, bare bones, many of them still dressed in rotten Imperial uniforms and incomplete stormtrooper armor. The pile rose up to the ceiling. Details leapt out at him from everywhere. The bodies had been mangled like parts at an abattoir, some of them in handcuffs and manacles, others hacked recklessly to pieces, still others looking partially devoured, whole gobbets of flesh gnawed off. Many of the parts were bloated to the point where the skin itself had begun to split open like sausages, and Trig realized he was standing in a tacky puddle of whatever had leaked out of them to coat the floor.

  He felt the room start to spin. A scream ballooned in his throat and died there,
snuffed out by his own inability to open his lips and release it. Instead, he stumbled backward, trying not to look at what was in front of him, all around him, wanting it not to be there but unable to get away from it. Somewhere behind him was the door he’d come through, the hatchway that would get him out of here, but he couldn’t find the switch to activate it. He began slapping the walls blindly at random, pounding them, and nothing changed.

  At last the seal broke in his throat and he let out a shriek, a combination of “help” and “Kale,” and that was when he heard the sounds, a soft, moist rustling noise from inside the mountain. Bodies shifted, shoved aside and rearranged by something within.

  And then he saw the thing come burrowing out.

  First the white head, maggot-white, then the rest of it, slithering through to emerge outward on the floor.

  It rose to its feet, a figure in dripping, ragged clothes and a bloodstained stormtrooper helmet, staring at him. The black polarized lenses of the helmet were streaked and filthy, clotted with slime and gore. The breath filter had been broken off on one side, and Trig caught a glimpse of the scaly infected throat of the thing underneath it. There was blood caked around the mouthpiece, and it occurred to him that the thing might possibly have eaten its way out.

  It staggered toward him.

  Trig backed away, immediately tripped, and fell. Jumping up, lunging sideways, he started running around the edge of the mountain. He imagined that he heard the thing coming after him, but it might have just been his own heart hammering in his ears. He didn’t dare look back. But he could feel it there, growing closer, a steadily intensifying presence like pressure buildup behind his eyeballs and chest cavity, pushing him onward, faster.

  The room spun around him. Trig jerked his head right and left. The door, wherever it had been, was utterly lost to him now. Fear had robbed him of all sense of direction. He didn’t even remember where he’d come from.

  As he bolted around the edge of the pile, lunging over three corpses that appeared to have been bundled together, wrists and ankles bound with cords, something caught his eye from up above—a glint of light.