"What's that supposed to mean?"

Kale started to say something and that was when a high, shrill squeal cut through the hallway from the other side of a sealed doorway, some kind of localized alarm system. They both jumped and Kale swung the blaster rifle around a bit too brazenly, Trig thought-he was getting used to carrying a weapon.

"What is that?" he asked.

"Wait here," Kale said. "I'll be right back."

Before Trig could argue, his brother started down the corridor, the blaster held up by his chest. The sealed doorway in front of him opened with a soft hydraulic gasp and Kale stepped through it, paused there, and threw one last look over his shoulder at Trig. "Stay where you are," he said, and the doors sealed behind him.

A moment later the alarm fell silent. It was like something at the end of the hall had woken up crying, eaten Kale, and fallen back to sleep again. Trig shuddered at the image, trying to shake it out of his head and having no luck. He stood with his ears ringing, wondering what he was supposed to do, how he was even supposed to mark the time that everyone was away.

Restless, trying to keep his mind occupied, he turned back to the escape pod. The little red light was still on, but he tried the hatch anyway, tugging on it just in case Dr. Cody had already sprung it by remote. It didn't open. What had he expected? He put his nose to the viewport again, cupped his eyes, and squinted, trying to see if anything had changed in the arrangements of the glowing instrument panel, but he couldn't make anything out clearly.

Then, inside the pod, something moved.

Trig jerked his head back, his entire body stiff with shock, and he stumbled backward on unstable legs. His nerve endings seemed to have been replaced with thin hot copper wires, pulse racing so he could hear it clicking in his gullet. I didn't really see that, his brain whirred, the lights inside are just making it look like I did, but- He held his breath, listening.

There was a faint scratching sound coming from inside the pod.

Trig took another step back, until he felt his shoulders make contact with the opposite wall. His eyes rolled over to the doorway that Kale had gone through a few minutes earlier, but Kale wasn't back-there was no sign of him. And the scratching sound inside the pod was only getting louder, an irregular but insistent sc.r.a.pe of fingers-or claws- against the inside of the hatch. As Trig listened he realized it was becoming faster as well as louder, more eager, as if it knew he was out here and wanted to get out with him.

Trig realized he was squeezing the comlink hard enough to make his hand cramp. He lifted it up and thumbed the power switch. "Dr. Cody?"

There was a long pause, and then her voice came back, clear and strong. "Trig?"

"Yeah."

"We're up on the bridge now. We're still looking for the override to open the pod. It shouldn't be much longer."

"Wait," Trig said. "Hold on. There's something inside the pod already."

"What's that?"

"There's something in it. I can hear it scratching."

"Hold on, Trig." Another long silence, this one stretching out until Trig thought he'd lost the signal. Then at last, Dr. Cody's voice said, "Trig? You there?"

"Still here."

"I've got the bioscan running up here for the entire barge."

"Yeah?"

"We're not picking up any life-form reading inside that pod."

Trig stared at the hatch, where the sc.r.a.ping had become maniacal clawing, and he could hear something else along with it, a wet, s...o...b..ring, toothsome sound, as if whatever was inside was almost trying to gnaw its way out.

Should have asked her about the dead bodies, he thought again, a little hysterically. Yeah, that probably would have been a good idea.

The words drifted out of him like smoke: "There's something in there."

"Missed that, Trig." "I said..."

"Okay," Dr. Cody's voice said, "here we go, I found the lock over-ride."

"No, hold on, wait..."

There was a click and the hatch swung open.

Chapter 24.

Futureproof When Kale came back, Trig was gone.

The hatch to the escape pod stood open, and he crouched down and crawled inside, the green display lights glowing across his face.

"Trig?"

His brother wasn't in there, either, but the ga.s.sy, festering smell was bad enough that Kale didn't linger for a closer look. It reminded him of some kind of predator's den, the kind you might find littered with the picked-clean bones of its last meal. He supposed he'd have to put up with it if the pod was their only means of getting out of here, but for now he had to find his brother.

Stepping back out, he b.u.mped his foot against a small flat object. It let out a little electronic gurgle. He looked down and saw that it was the comlink Zahara had given Trig. Kale frowned. It wasn't like Trig to leave something like that, any more than it was like him to wander off for no reason.

He picked up the comlink and switched it on. "Dr. Cody? This is Kale."

"I hear you, Kale," she said.

"Listen, something happened to my brother."

"Say again?"

"An alarm went off and I went to go check it. When I came back, he was gone. The pod hatch is open, but he's nowhere in sight."

"Just a second, Kale. Let me check something."

Kale waited, and looked back down at the inner wall of the escape pod door. It was scored with dozens of scratches, some of them deep enough to gouge into the metal itself. He reached down to touch it and discovered it was wet. When he drew back his fingers, they were dripping with blood and something sticky and warm. He wiped it off on his pant leg with a shudder of revulsion.

"Kale, the scanner's showing a life-form about fifteen meters up the corridor to your immediate right. Do you see it?"

He turned around but there was nothing but the same dirty familiar walls, dim lights, and low cramped ceiling, yellowing and dingy, as if stained by the doomed and hopeless breaths exhaled by thousands of inmates over the years. "No," he said, "there's nothing here."

"You're positive? The signal's strong."

"No, it's just an empty hallway, I-hold it."

He put the comlink down and raised the blaster, walking over to the wall for a closer look. In front of him, at shoulder level, he saw a separate wall panel and the words: MAINTENANCE ACCESS SHAFT 223.

Kale placed the barrel of the blaster rifle against the spring-loaded panel and pushed it open to reveal the widemouthed shaft within. A gust of foul-smelling air rushed up into his nose and he groaned, almost gagging, covered his nose and mouth with his free hand, and leaned back into the ripe blackness, looking down.

"Trig?"

The sound of his voice reverberated down the metallic emptiness, ringing shapeless in the void. Kale thought back to what he'd seen when he'd gone through the doorway to investigate the alarm. It had been nothing special, nothing at all really, probably just a malfunction somewhere, although one particular aspect of it had stuck with him- a single b.l.o.o.d.y handprint on the wall, half smeared and still so fresh it was dripping. When he'd seen that, he'd realized it wasn't a good idea to leave Trig alone, even for a few seconds, and that was when he'd come back to find this.

He decided to try once more, leaning back into the shaft. "Trig, are you there?"

His brother came vaulting up and out of the shaft with a scream. He smashed face-first into Kale, knocking him to his knees with a speed and momentum that probably saved his life. If it had happened any slower-if Kale had been given any time to get his blaster back up again-he probably would have shot his brother on pure reflex. As it was, Trig was already on top of him, still screaming, fists flying, clawing, kicking, and sucking in great drafts of air. He was crying, too, Kale could see, sobbing in a high, choking, desperately frightened voice that made him sound much younger than his actual age.

"Easy," Kale said, holding on to him, noticing now how badly torn Trig's uniform was, like an animal had been at it-the collar ripped to expose Trig's slight, hairless chest, one sleeve torn completely away to show his skinny arm. Parts of the cheap fabric were damp and clammy, like the inside of the escape pod hatch. Kale held on to him. He hugged Trig tightly to his chest until he started to feel, if not the fight going out of him, at least a kind of exhausted fatigue slowing the panicked thrashing, and kept holding on to him after that until Trig was quiet except for the occasional hitching breath.

"It's okay," Kale said, and then drew back enough to get his first real look at Trig's face. "What happened?"

Trig just stared back at him with bloodshot eyes. If he'd been any paler his skin would have been translucent. Nothing moved in his face except for the slight tremble in his chin.

"Did someone attack you?" Kale asked. "Inside the pod, was there . . . ?"

He waited, letting the question drift out to where Trig might pick it up and respond to it, but Trig didn't. The longer he stared at Kale, the more Kale wondered if his brother was seeing him at all. He put his arms around his brother again and held him.

"Listen," he said, "it's going to be okay. I won't let anything bad happen to us, okay? I promise."

But the thought of the b.l.o.o.d.y handprint came back to him again, and he realized that for the first time in his life he'd made a promise to his brother that he knew he couldn't keep.

Chapter 25.

Deadlights "These thrusters are completely scragged," Han said as he crawled up from a dislodged floor panel in the center of the barge's pilot station, wiping the grit and reactor grease from his hands. "Whatever the engineers were trying to do down here, they didn't get very far. We're not going anywhere in this floating sc.r.a.p pile."

"I got the escape pod open," Zahara said. "Launch codes are..."

"Dr. Cody?" Tisa's voice broke in. "I'm picking up new life-form readings on the bioscan."

"New readings?" Han glanced at Zahara, frowning. "I thought you said everybody was dead."

"They are." She looked at the bank of electronics. "Tisa, display all positive bioscan readings."

"Yes, Doctor." In front of them an array of glowing pencil-thin lines began to shimmer into view, their intersecting geometry deliquescing once again to create the barge in miniature.

Han said, "What the ... ?"

The three-dimensional multilevel outline of the vessel-previously an empty, almost elegant intersection of clean, digitized s.p.a.ces and lines-was now crawling with blood-red pinp.r.i.c.ks of flashing lights. They were moving together, bunched and swarming up from the lower detention blocks en ma.s.se, advancing level by level toward the admin area. In the hologram, at least, they appeared to be seething forward at a disproportionate, insectile speed.

"Wait a second," Han said. "What are those things?"

She shook her head. "Life-forms."

"Thanks, Doc," he said. "Got anything more specific, or are we supposed to just fill in the blanks?"

Zahara stared at the cl.u.s.ters of tiny lights, each one an independent organism. They were moving faster than she could believe, coming up stairwells, ventilation ducts, and utility shafts. "That's impossible. They weren't there before. Tisa, how come you didn't pick up on them earlier?"

"There were no positive life-forms earlier, Dr. Cody."

"Where did they come from?" As she watched, more red lights began to appear in the lower levels, seeming to spontaneously generate out of nowhere. Her thoughts flashed back to what Waste had told her about the molecular behavior of the virus, how it masked its lethality until it had reproduced to a level that the host could no longer successfully fight it-quorum sensing, he'd called it. Abruptly she felt as if two tight iron bands had closed around her, one blocking her throat, the other clamping down over her chest, freezing her breath.

"How many ways are there out of here?" Han asked, and she realized he was shaking her. "Hey, Doc, I'm talking to you."

"Just..." She pointed to the hatchway and the stairwell they'd taken up from admin. "...just the way we came in."

"Any other escape pods?"

"Only the one we left behind." Zahara stretched out one hand and pointed one level down, to the west admin wing. It was already totally overrun by colonies of red lights. That was the last place she'd seen Trig and Kale. She didn't want to think about where they were now.

The diagram of the barge showed a wide stairway leading up from the admin level to the bridge. And now the red lights-deadlights, Zahara's mind gibbered frantically-were moving in that direction.

"Great," Han muttered, raising his blaster and turning to face the door. "Looks like we're gonna be shooting our way out. Again."

Chewbacca growled, shook his ma.s.sive head, and brandished the rifle, looking profoundly unhappy about the odds.

"Wait," Zahara said, pointing to the tower protruding from the top of the hologram, and then turned behind her, across the bridge itself. "About twenty meters behind us, on the opposite end of the flight deck, there's a docking shaft that goes straight up."

Han gaped at her in disbelief. "What, into the Star Destroyer?"

"It's our only chance."

"Yeah, well, where I come from, they've got a saying-out of the nexu's den and into its mouth."

"Whatever those things are, there have to be hundreds of them. How long do you think your power packs will hold out?"

Then she heard them coming.

It was a thunderous, bullying shriek, charged with rage and hunger and condensed down into a solid wall of inhuman noise. It stiffened the blood in her veins. They were rising up from the admin level, pounding up the steps. Zahara looked forward to where she knew the docking shaft stood. As she whirled back to look in the direction of Han and Chewbacca, yelling that they needed to get out of here, now, she saw Kale Longo burst through the half-open hatch leading up from the admin level, hauling his younger brother's body in his arms.

"Run!" Kale shouted, and he himself was running so hard, so frantically, that his feet barely seemed to touch the ground. His head was on some kind of loose pivot, spinning to look everywhere at once, and his eyes were almost perfectly round with dread. Trig flopped and jostled in his arms. Zahara thought she'd never seen someone look so terrified in her life.

"Where's the other blaster, kid?" Han shouted.

"I had to drop it to carry my brother..."

"Well, shut the door behind you!" Han's voice rang out, but Kale was already bolting away from the door, across the bridge. Han braced himself to yank on the sliding hatchway. "Chewie, give me a hand with this, will you?"

The Wookiee fell to work alongside Han, both of them forcing the panel closed again.