At that same second Kale's body hit the turbine and bounced, flop-ping off the side and disappearing into the teeming mora.s.s of bodies The resulting sound was an even louder scream, like a single ent.i.ty awakening and achieving a kind of brute ma.s.s-consciousness, awareness that hardly progressed beyond the immediate physical needs. Their breathing wafted up toward him in invisible gradations of damp warmth, their hunger seeping through the air like thermals rising before a storm.

They see me.

Already they began to reach up toward him, the moaning noise becoming more aggressive, rising in pitch and volume to find that steady, now familiar waveform. Shifting and swaying, some of them began attempting to climb up the sides of the turbine itself, in an effort to get closer to him. Some appeared to be holding things, but at first Trig didn't know what the objects were.

Just as he started pulling himself back into the vent, thinking he could at least backtrack far enough to evaluate his options, the blasters started firing.

They were shooting at him, and their aim was deadly accurate. Before he could start crawling inside, Trig felt the vent shaft jerk and burst open in front of him, squealing free of its soldered housing and dumping him straight out. He toppled out the end without being able to grab on to anything, and for a moment he was falling through s.p.a.ce, one final trajectory echo of his big brother.

He hit the catwalk hard and it doubled him up upon impact, chiseling shards of pain up through his ankles and legs. Trig grabbed it and held on, fingers curled into the cold latticework, clamping down on it with his entire body. He could both hear and feel the blaster bolts resonating through s.p.a.ce around him. One of them was going to hit him, and he could only hope the blaster killed him before he fell into that far-off ma.s.s of outstretched hands and gnashing mouths.

He wanted to be dead before that happened.

All around him the catwalk shook and bonged with the impact of the blasters. Chips of durasteel streaked past his cheek, tiny cold specks of pure velocity. He wasn't thinking clearly at all anymore, and that might have explained why he didn't react immediately when he saw Han and Chewie at the far end of the catwalk, staring back at him.

They must have just come back down from the command bridge, Trig's mind droned dazedly. I guess things didn't work out so well up there, either.

Han could definitely see him, Trig knew-he was waving at him frantically, either to move forward or stay down, Trig wasn't sure. Meanwhile, what exactly was the plan? Both Han and Chewie had blasters, but two weapons hardly mattered against the blitz of firepower below them-they might as well have been as unarmed as Trig himself. And neither of them appeared willing to venture back out onto the catwalk in the middle of all this, not that Trig blamed them.

Trig narrowed his eyes. Han was gesticulating even more desperately now, shouting at the top of his lungs. He was pointing up, up. and when Trig tilted his head straight up he saw the last section of the vent shaft dangling loose from above, swinging back and forth.

Hands were reaching out of it.

Trig thought of the mountain of corpses on the other end of the shaft, how it had started coming to life as he'd climbed it.

They followed me down the shaft.

He watched in mute and suffocating terror as the owner of the hands slithered out. It was an Imperial soldier, its dead face lit with urgency. Clamoring for Trig, it rocked back and forth inside the dangling vent, lost its balance, and then fell out, hands scrabbling furiously as it fell past him, plummeting down into the blackness. Three more Imperials squirmed free after that, spilling out like hideous, fully formed offspring from some unthinkably fertile ovipositor.

The vent section swung back again, and this time Trig realized that whatever was inside it was actually waiting for the vent to are forward before it jumped, so it could use that last ounce of forward momentum to grab him as it sprang free from it. The corpse launched itself at him, too fast for Trig to see its face, and he plastered himself to the wall, feeling claw-like fingers sc.r.a.pe and smear across his torso.

The thing snapped its fist around his leg.

And this time, it held on.

Trig looked down. For an instant the only thing he could see was the limp sac of bruise-colored flesh that had once been its face, staring up at him, the place where the piercings had been ripped out, the gaping, leech-maw of its mouth. When the mouth opened Trig could still see the glint of steel piercing up through his gullet, the blade that Kale had shoved up through there, what felt like a thousand years ago.

It was Aur Myss.

Chapter 41.

Blackwing Zahara tried three keyboards before she found one that worked. Fingers trembling, she jacked it into the secondary workstation and held her breath, waiting to see if they were compatible.

The 2-1B had declined to accompany her up to the hangar control room, electing instead to stay in the bio-lab, "in case I'm needed." But the droid's directions had been flawless. He had sent her through a Byzantine maze of walkways that delivered her to a service lift, and she'd taken it straight up to the pilots' ready room, through another set of doors that opened on hangar control itself.

The large enclosed booth stood at least thirty meters off the docking floor. From her current vantage point she could see everything- the six or so random ships that the Destroyer's tractor beam had sucked in on one end, and on the other, the half-destroyed docking shaft that had brought them up here from the barge.

The things were down there, too.

Hundreds of them, or perhaps thousands, swarmed the different damaged ships, teeming so thickly that Zahara couldn't begin to estimate their numbers. More were pouring in constantly through various hatchways and doors, a nonstop flood of bodies crawling over one another toward the different vessels. Every few seconds they screamed together, that same sonic waveform, and that only seemed to accelerate the arrival of others.

How was she going to get down there? And if she did, how could she possibly hope to get inside one of those captured s.p.a.cecraft without- First things first.

The screen in front of her blinked obediently on, awaiting the pa.s.s-word. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard for a moment, and then she typed in the word she'd read scrawled across the floor of the biolab: blackwing There was a long pause, and the screen went completely blank. Then, abruptly, across the top: Pa.s.sword accepted.

Enter command?

Zahara let herself exhale a sigh that seemed to loosen every muscle in her chest, shoulders, and back. She typed in: Access master control to Star Destroyer tractor beam.

After a split second the response came back: Master control to tractor beam is accessed.

She typed: Disable tractor beam.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then the computer responded: Unable to complete command.

Zahara scowled.

Explain inability to complete command.

Immediately: Tractor beam has already been disabled.

She sat back and looked at the screen with a slight frown remaining on her forehead. Had Han and Chewie actually managed to switch the thing off from the command deck? If so, then they should be on their way back now, a.s.suming the plan was still to get out of here on one of the scuttled ships.

She looked back down at the heaving ma.s.s of bodies that filled the hangar floor. Hopefully Han and the Wookiee had found some more firepower along the way.

Leaning forward, she typed: What is blackwing?

The system replied: Blackwing: Imperial bioweapons project I71A. Galactic virus dissemination and distribution algorithm .

CLa.s.sIFIED: TOP SECRET.

Project status: In progress.

"Distribution algorithm?" She looked back out at the bodies in the hangar, now packed so densely that in many places she couldn't even see the floor. Every few seconds, they released another version of that ringing, rhythmic scream, and when she listened she could hear the other scream reverberating back from somewhere in the Destroyer. It only made them move more urgently.

But they weren't just milling around anymore.

The corpses were climbing into the different s.p.a.cecraft, the X-wings, the landing shuttles and transports, the freighter in the far corner of the hangar. Still others were streaming back into the half-blasted docking shaft leading back down to the prison barge. Zahara saw that they were lagging something on their backs.

She looked more closely.

Black metal tanks.

She glanced back at all the different vessels in the hangar, thinking again about the distribution algorithm, a coordinated means by which the Empire could spread the virus everywhere it wanted across the entire galaxy. Distractedly, she watched a group of the things lined up alongside an X-wing, working together to turn it around, pointing it up toward where she was standing.

Her mind went back to what Waste had told her about quorum sensing, the way the disease worked.

They don't do anything until they can all do it together -when it's too late for the host organism to fight it-but why?

Then it hit her, and she spoke aloud without realizing it.

"They're leaving."

Down below, the X-wing was aimed straight up at her. What had that other 2-1B said about being exposed up here?

A blinding column of flame tore across the hangar, hurtling straight for her.

Chapter 42.

River The kid stood no chance.

Even from here, Han could sec how it was going to play out, and if he and Chewie went out on the catwalk to try to help him, it would just mean all three of them would die together. It was a miserable thing to realize, yet there it was-a rock-solid certainty.

Chewie gave a long, mournful howl.

"Yeah, I know," Han shot back, hating himself all the more for having to say it out loud. "You got any better suggestions?"

Out on the catwalk, the kid was slipping off, the thing dangling stubbornly from his ankle, dragging him down. He might be able to hang on for another five seconds, certainly no more. In an act of pure desperation, Han leveled his blaster, knowing he had no shot-he could just as easily hit Trig from this distance, or miss altogether. But what else was he supposed to do?

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 acc.u.mulating 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 s.p.a.ce 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 hoa.r.s.e 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 ma.s.ses. "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 mora.s.s below. Within seconds they'd be feeling the clutching hands thumping the underside of the lifter, yanking themselves...o...b..ard. "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.