He looked around but didn't see anything. If one of those things had followed him back here, it was hiding from him now, which didn't make sense. At what point, he wondered, did fear itself become so redundant that it atrophied and dropped off entirely like an unnecessary, evolved-away appendage? Or would his species always find a use for fear, no matter how extreme the circ.u.mstances?

Sartoris took another look at his empty hands. Never in his life had he wanted a blaster as much as he did right now. The idea of venturing unarmed through the Destroyer was practically unthinkable. But if he stayed here, death was a guarantee.

It is anyway. The only question is when.

Walking backward, trying to see everything at once, he b.u.mped into something hard and felt it recoil against him, jostling on a cushion of air.

Sartoris turned around and looked at it, unable to keep the half smile from spreading over his face.

It was the hoverlifter they'd come across earlier, the one they'd left here because it couldn't hold all of them.

Maybe my luck's finally starting to turn.

He took a breath and reached up to pull himself aboard the lifter- and noticed the b.l.o.o.d.y gash just below his right elbow.

That was how he realized he'd been bitten.

Chapter 38.

Bridge "I don't know about you, pal, but I was hoping for better."

That was Han Solo, as he finally set foot inside the command bridge of the Star Destroyer. He'd been around a long time and seen a great deal of strange things, but if he survived this he'd definitely have people buying his drinks for a long time to come.

The catwalk had-well, to be honest, it had almost been more than he could handle. Crossing over had been difficult enough, weaving their way along through open s.p.a.ce with nothing to hold on to, the bowel-churning vertigo as his center of gravity whirled like a gyro with a broken ball-and-socket.

He hadn't wanted to look down. But once the things down in the pit started shooting, he didn't have much choice.

They fired randomly, like they hadn't had much experience with blasters, but that was little rea.s.surance when Han saw the sheer number of them. Firing back would have been a waste. There could have been thousands-at this distance it was impossible to say. It occurred to Han that they still seemed to be waking up, roused to consciousness by the presence of fresh meat, and their aim was poor, though by the end it had seemed to be improving. More than once the blasts had come close enough that he'd tasted ozone.

And if he'd lost his footing-if he'd slipped and fallen down into that sea of hungry bodies- With deliberate effort, he forced himself back into the present moment. They were inside the command bridge, faced with the expanse of low-slung computer modules and navigation equipment with which the entirety of this kilometers-long miracle of interstellar destruction was steered.

It was smashed almost beyond recognition.

The screens had been punched through, banks of circuitry and sophisticated sensor arrays blasted, shattered, or yanked completely loose from their moorings, most of them flattened as if under some unthinkably heavy boot. Every step they took announced itself with the m.u.f.fled crumple of broken gla.s.s.

"Looks like we finally found somebody that hates the Empire more than we do, huh?" Han asked, shaking his head. "You try the navicomputer yet?"

Chewie barked without bothering to look around.

"Okay, I'm just asking. Can't blame a guy for hoping, right?" He sighed and brushed debris from a seat facing one of the less thoroughly demolished consoles, plopping down. "Only thing still running is the tractor beam, huh? What kind of encryption we looking at?" He reached for a working keyboard and punched in a series of keystrokes. "Guys who designed this stuff weren't all that bright. How hard can it be?"

Something in the console chirruped, and crystalline patterns began to coalesce on the cracked screen, clarifying and sharpening into lines of navigational code.

"Hey, Chewie, I think I got something here..."

Beneath him, in response to his directive, the entire Destroyer tilted slightly on its axis. Han, who'd never flown anything remotely this big in his life, felt a kind of fatalistic good humor taking root in the floorboards of his psyche. What would the Imperial High Command have to say about this, he thought, seeing a lowly smuggler with a price on his head sitting behind the controls of a Star Destroyer?

"See, what did I tell you?" He tapped in another set of instructions, not looking up. "Hey, did you get a chance to look inside those hyperdrive systems?"

Everything jolted hard and Han sat up fast, trying to figure out what he'd done and how to undo it. It felt like the Destroyer was listing slightly, and one of the consoles had begun to emit a low, steady whine. Lines of text were crawling across the broken monitor.

"Chewie?"

The Wookiee was gone. Han stood up, looking across the empty bridge. He listened, holding the blaster he'd found at waist level. The s.p.a.ce around him suddenly felt very large, and absolutely silent, except for the faint click of data emerging on the screen. His eyes flicked down to it again with increasing impatience. Whatever encryption had locked the tractor beam into place was still active. It was awaiting a pa.s.sword.

Then, from one of the adjoining s.p.a.ces, he heard it-a faint growl.

"Chewbacca?"

Finger on the trigger, he crept across the bridge, following the sound, and found himself looking into a subchamber he hadn't noticed until now. It was lined floor-to-ceiling with backup systems, whole panels of pulsating lights. The Destroyer tilted again, not dramatically but enough that Han could definitely feel the shift in equilibrium, and he wondered if he'd done something to destabilize its processing systems. The last thing they needed was for this entire vessel to go belly-up on them in the middle of nowhere.

He looked inside the subchamber. "Chewie? What's going on in there?"

Chewbacca was crouched in the semidarkness, looking at something. When he rose up, Han saw he was holding a small, hairy body- another Wookiee, Han realized, very young. It was wearing a tattered prison uniform.

"How'd he get in here?''

The young Wookiee gave a weak bleating cry. Chewbacca gazed at him and then back up at Han.

"Great." Han sighed. "Anybody else we're supposed to rescue while we're here?"

Chewie uttered a warning grunt.

"Okay, okay, bring him out," Han muttered. "You put yourself on the line once and all of a sudden everybody's got their hand out."

Chewbacca carried the small Wookiee out, and Han got a better look at the youngster's face. His eyes were reddish and cloudy; his throat was swollen so badly that he seemed to be having trouble breathing. The tongue protruded thickly from his throat. "Where's the rest of your family?"

The Wookiee bleated again and Han saw where he was pointing: to another hatchway on the opposite side of the command bridge.

"They're in there? What are they doing, hiding?"

Chewbacca carried him over, shifted his weight to one arm, and reached out to open the hatchway. As he did so, the Destroyer yawed slightly again. Han saw a trickle of blood come oozing out from underneath the door and across the tilting durasteel floor toward them.

"Whoa," Han said, and nodded down, where the trickle had become a steady stream. "What is that?"

Chewbacca made a quizzical grunt and looked back at the young Wookiee, who sat up with a sudden burst of energy and pushed the b.u.t.ton himself to open the hatch.

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 b.l.o.o.d.y hair and hot, s.h.a.ggy 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 a.s.sault 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-cl.u.s.tered 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.