by James Luceno
Sartoris thought of the screaming that he’d heard, the weird cyclic quality of it, back-and-forth call-and-response in the hangar.
“And that way they are all able to adapt at the same time,” Gorrister said, “as one, like a kind of systemwide upgrade, do you see?”
Sartoris shook his head. “What are you talking about, designed? You mean somebody created all this on purpose?”
Gorrister studied him in silence for a moment, with what might have been the tiniest of smirks.
“Naïve, aren’t you?” he asked. “I told you we were carrying top-secret weapons. How long have you served the Empire?”
Sartoris didn’t bother to provide an answer. He’d noticed something else that bothered him even more than that smirk on the man’s face. Throughout the course of their conversation, his fellow soldiers had begun edging slowly closer to him, and they were licking their lips compulsively, over and over.
Sartoris squirmed back a little farther. For the first time his gaze fell on the stack of uniforms folded neatly on the seat in the corner.
“What happened to the rest of your men?” he asked.
“You must understand.” Gorrister’s voice was soft now, no longer mocking; in fact it was nearly sympathetic. “We had ample water here inside the shuttle but precious little food, and it’s been ten weeks. It was nothing more than a simple matter of survival. We were starving, you see.”
Sartoris frowned. The men were getting to their feet now. It suddenly occurred to him that they might have been sitting here saving their strength until this moment.
“Hold it.” He stood up, backing away, and felt his shoulders hit the wall behind him. “We’re not like them.”
“Of course not,” Gorrister murmured, dismissing the idea. “We drew lots. To keep things fair. We gave each man a quick, humane death. At first we threw the remains out there …” He nodded above, at the emergency hatch. “… to those things, as if that might somehow satisfy them. But it only made them come back. So we ate the remains, too. In the end we sucked the marrow from the bones. But none of my men felt any pain, I promise.” One emaciated hand slipped into his uniform jacket and produced a small transdermal patch. “And neither will you.”
“What is that?”
“Norbutal,” Gorrister whispered. “A paralytic. You’ll just go to sleep. And when we’re rescued, the Emperor will recognize your sacrifice with the highest of honors.”
Sartoris started to say something else.
He realized that the commander had told him there were six other men and he only saw four of them.
Then he felt a pair of hands grabbing him from behind, pinning his arms behind his back.
36/Lab Rat
Zahara wasn’t sure how long she’d been running. Lactic acid cramped her thighs and calves, oxygen debt reaching the point where it cried out, no longer able to be ignored, and she’d lost track of where she was—the end of another protracted corridor somewhere deep in the Star Destroyer’s main hangar level, but farther back. With no sense of direction and no destination, she guessed it was just a matter of time until something caught up with her.
She stopped and leaned against the wall, temples throbbing, and whooped in a series of deep breaths. Her throat and lungs ached, and the root of her tongue had that sprained, dizzy feeling it got when she’d overtaxed herself. Counting her heartbeats, she made herself calm down, calm down, just calm down.
She held her breath and listened for screams. Heard none.
The corridor was absolutely silent.
Up ahead, blocking the way, were what appeared to be stacks of crates. She started walking toward them, feeling marginally steadier now that she’d taken a rest, and stopped at the hatchway on her left, looking at the sign posted over it.
BIO-LAB 242
AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY
Zahara glanced down at the security pad that someone had pried from the wall, dangling on stalks of variegated wires. With the strong sense that what she was about to do was not at all wise, she put her elbow to the hatch itself and forced it open.
At first the lab was almost reassuringly familiar, a research area, a clinical space designed for the usual flights of emotionally detached observation and interpretation. It was a great gleaming dome, white-walled and blazing with overhead fluorescent lights, the walls honeycombed into dozens of empty, glass-enclosed cells.
Each cell was equipped with its own research and observation workstation—not that any of them seemed to be actually working. The entire chamber smelled powerfully like antiseptic and chemicals, with an undertone of hot copper wiring. Giant ventilation fans stood in the walls, but they were all motionless, which probably explained the stillness of the stagnant air.
Walking forward, Zahara noticed the dead computer terminals, broken doors, and abandoned keyboards, the individual keys scattered across the high-impact durasteel floor like loose teeth. She saw a protocol droid standing in the corner, a 3PO unit, apparently broken, one golden eye flickering spastically, fingers twitching. As she got closer, she heard a low, almost inaudible whine escaping from its vocabulator.
Next to it, an overturned chair lay on top of a demolished rack of syringes and vials, and she noticed a human-sized bloodstain on the wall, arms upraised, like a spirit painted in red. The workstation in front of it appeared to be operational, however, the screen half filled with lines of text and a blinking cursor awaiting reply. It was the first functional indication she’d seen of possible communications.
Tentatively, she bent forward and tapped a key.
More data washed up instantly over the monitor, skimming past too fast for her to read. Then it stopped again, cursor ticking, and the wall in front of her clicked and peeled open to reveal a thick pane of glass beneath it.
On the other side of the glass was another hive-cell.
But this one wasn’t empty.
Inside it, two yellow human corpses dangled in front of her at face level, webbed to the ceiling by thick networks of wires, feeding tubes, and monitoring equipment, a pair of hideous puppets. They were both badly decayed, facial features rotted beyond any recognition, eye sockets empty, and Zahara wondered if she was looking at volunteers who had been abandoned here after whatever happened aboard the Destroyer. What would it have been like, she thought, being trapped in there while everyone on this side of the glass ran away?
Something clicked in front of her and began to whir steadily—one of the big ventilation fans in the wall above the glass. Zahara braced herself for the blast of foul air from inside, then realized that she could feel her clothes and hair actually being sucked away from her skin.
The fan was pumping air into the cell … and that made more sense. They’d have to deliver oxygen to the research subjects while they were still alive. Those chambers were probably airtight, and without the fans running, they’d suffocate in there, which was probably exactly what happened, she guessed, once the research staff had decided to abandon the lab.
One of the corpses lifted its head.
Zahara felt the room stretching around her, all sense of perspective seeming to elongate on gluey strings. On the other side of the glass the thing gaped up at her with its sagging, grinning face, moving the rotten stumps of its legs, swaying back and forth.
The air that went in, she thought, it carried my smell in to them and woke them up—
The other corpse had already awakened next to it. Its face twitched up and down as if sniffing her through whatever remained of its nose. Zahara started backing away as it lifted one tattered arm to grapple with the lines and wires that held it suspended from the ceiling. Sensing her standing there, both of the bodies started to do a jittering, swaying dance. One bumped into the other, and they both swung forward, arms outstretched. Back and forth, higher and higher. Some of the monitoring wires had already pulled off, but there was one particular tube leading straight from their chests that was still connected. The gray liquid oozing inside the tube reminded her of the substanc
e that she’d tried to dig out of Kale Longo’s abdomen. She followed the tube with her eyes and saw that it connected to a set of black tanks.
They were collecting it, Zahara thought. That’s what this is all about, their bodies actually produce that stuff and—
Behind her, a footstep scraped inside the lab.
She spun around and stared across the white space, the path between dead research workstations, and saw nothing. Her gaze fell to the broken rack of vials and syringes on the floor, only six or seven meters away, close enough that she could probably reach it before—
Before whatever came in here has a chance to get its hands on you? Do you really think so, Zahara? At the rate those things move when they’re hungry?
A shape emerged between two of the workstations, a foot crunching something beneath it. Zahara glimpsed it, and then it was gone again. She looked back at the syringes—her only weapon. The muscles in her calves and thighs felt so tight she thought they’d snap, the tension rising upward to grip the bones of her spine.
Wham!
With a cry of fright, she whirled around and looked back. One of the research-subject corpses had managed to slam itself into the glass, leaving a red smear, a streaky imprint of its face and hands. She watched as it arced backward in its harness of monitoring equipment while the other corpse swung forward, smacking the glass hard with its face and hands, then shoving off again.
Get to the syringes and get out of here—now.
She bolted, crossing the distance in what felt like three big leaps. Grabbed a needle in both hands. Started to stand up.
And felt something move in behind her.
A rich smell of decay blew in over her shoulder, like wind from a grave.
She spun around and it grabbed her.
Zahara looked into its face.
The sickness hadn’t rotted the researcher away as badly as the corpses in the containment chamber. She could still see some of the features the way they’d looked pre-infection—the silvery gray hair, the aquiline nose, the deep, distinguished creases of the face. A man of science. It wore a blood-grimed lab coat, one sleeve torn away at the wrist. There was a soft click as it opened its mouth and lunged for her.
She rammed the syringe into its eye, and jammed another into the side of its head, depressing both plungers at once.
The thing went rigid, mouth wide open, and screamed. Its legs went out from under it, its entire body collapsing.
As it fell writhing to the floor, Zahara moved for the exit. She was almost there when the screaming dwindled and she heard its voice behind her, a rasping gurgle.
“Frrrng unn ufff …”
It was trying to talk.
Hating herself for it, she looked back. The thing in the lab coat was crawling blindly toward her now, both needles still protruding from its head. Somehow the injections had restored some fragile measure of its former humanity, enough for it to try to make contact.
Its mouth moved up and down, making more garbled sounds she couldn’t translate—pathetic attempts at speech. It raised one hand beseechingly. It was doing something, trying to tell her—
“What happened here?” she asked. “What did you do?”
The thing in the lab coat produced the same mucilaginous noises, more urgently. Its face worked strenuously, and it swung its arm toward the console behind her.
“Thrggh uff usss …”
“What?” she asked.
It made the noises again, swung its hands with evangelical fervor, and fell over. It growled and beat its fists on the floor. Its fingers crawled and prodded, and she realized it was miming the act of writing.
Gradually, with great effort, it reached up and pulled one of the syringes from its eye socket, jammed the spike against the durasteel, and started dragging it back and forth, etching out some crude type of ideograph. It made a high, desperate squealing sound as it did so, grinding the needle’s tip harder into the reinforced plating.
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 th
at 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 metal hand and kiss it.
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 uniforms 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 single-handedly.
