Chapter 8.

Lung Windows Armitace was an artist.

Back home on Faro, he'd delighted his younger brothers and sisters with countless airpaint murals, but his talent was largely wasted in Imperial Corrections-if anything, his co-workers requested countless renderings of the female form, or worse, machinery, their beloved speeders and flitters from back home. Armitage hated drawing machines. It was enough to put him off art altogether . . . and that was saying something for a kid who'd once dreamed of attending the Pan-Galactic Arts Conservatory on Miele Nova.

Once he glimpsed what was in the Destroyer's Bio-Lab 177, however, he knew he had to paint it.

He'd broken away from the troopers and the engineers, Phibes and Quaterma.s.s, down at the other end of the corridor, ostensibly to check the supply dump on sublevel twelve, happy for any excuse to get away from them. How long were you expected to stand around complaining about the mess hall food and speculating which body part Zahara Cody washed first when she took a shower? And if he didn't partic.i.p.ate in this enlightened conversation, the troopers and guards started heckling him, asking what was wrong with him, didn't he like working there? Maybe he'd be happier helping the Rebels plan another of their cowardly attacks on the Empire?

Checking out the bio-lab, no matter how boring it turned out to be, would have to be an improvement on that.

But the bio-lab wasn't boring.

The first thing Armitage noticed as he'd stepped through the hatchway was the vat. In many ways it was the only thing he saw, because after that he simply stopped looking. Its contents were simply too overwhelming and-in a bizarre way-too beautiful to get past.

The vat itself was huge, wall-sized, filled with some sort of clear bubbling gel. Suspended inside were dozens of oddly shaped pink organism with wires and tubes running from them to a bank of humming equipment stacked beside the tank. Armitage, who had already stopped in his tracks, could only regard them in wonderment. From a distance the pink things looked like an unlikely hybrid of flowers, peeled fruit, and some species of embryonic winged animal whose like he'd never seen-they resembled a flock of tiny, skinned angels.

Then he came closer and realized what he was looking at.

They were sets of human lungs.

If he felt any tremor of disgust, it flicked through him so fleetingly that he scarcely noticed, and was supplanted immediately by a deeper and more fulfilling sense of artistic fascination. In each set, the entire respiratory tract had been carefully winnowed out to preserve the trachea and, above it, the larynx and all the more delicate organs of sound. Tubes were pumping oxygen into the lungs, causing them to expand and contract in their clear liquid bath.

Armitage realized they were all breathing together.

He counted thirty-three pairs of lungs in the vat before he gave up and stopped counting. Each was tagged with numbers and dates, part of some abandoned scientific experiment whose nature he could only guess at.

Some of the lungs were different. Their pink surface had gone a mottled gray in places, the muscle wall thickened with what looked like gray scar tissue. Armitage moved closer-he was no longer aware of himself at all now-and stared at them. Were they breathing more rapidly, or was that just his imagination? And was he breathing with them? It felt as though he'd been drawn into the larger, almost hypnotic tidal rhythm of their movement.

As always, when faced with something so innately striking, his first wish was to paint it, to capture what he saw in front of him. Not just the lung bath-not a bad name for a painting, he thought-but the emotion he'd felt when he'd realized what he'd been looking at. Awe. Shock. And ultimately a kind of unconscious familiarity, like something he'd once glimpsed in a dream.

He watched them sucking oxygen through tubes, and realized they were breathing more quickly and deeply. Somewhere on the other side of the vat, a machine beeped, and beeped again. Looking at them more closely, Armitage noticed for the first time the sets of rubber tubes that came braiding out of the lungs themselves. They seemed to be pumping some kind of thick gray fluid to a group of black tanks on the far side of the lab.

Lights flickered over the distant shoals of monitoring equipment on the other side of the vat. The lungs swelled and shrank, swelled and shrank, faster and faster.

Suddenly, at full inspiration, they stopped.

And, as one, they screamed through the tubes.

It was a high buzzing shriek that rose up and then sloped down, and it sent Armitage staggering backward with its intensity. Never in his life had he heard such a scream. He covered his ears, ducked his head, not wanting to be around this place anymore. The comlink in his headpiece crackled . . . some other guard's voice trying to reach him, and he could hardly convey what was happening. He wanted to run.

Inside the vat, the screaming noises shrilled on, up and down. The gray liquid was pumping faster now, siphoned off to the black tanks. Armitage realized that each one of the voice boxes had been wired with some kind of amplifier, making it even louder, and he wondered who was studying the scream-capacity of these lungs and why. Behind him a set of monitors showed the waveform of the scream, mapping it out as a series of mathematical functions.

He turned to the door.

And realized he wasn't alone.

Chapter 9.

Descent "I don't get it, cap," Vesek said. "Where'd they go?"

Sartoris's party had just crossed the gleaming steel prairie of the main hangar and arrived back at the docking shaft, but Armitage and his team were nowhere to be seen.

Behind him, the captain heard Austin coughing again-the snotty, bronchial hacking noise was really starting to get on his nerves-and decided enough was enough. He c.o.c.ked one thumb at the shaft.

"Must have gone back down without us," Sartoris said. "Let's go."

Vesek and Austin climbed back inside, onto the waiting lift, and Sartoris went in after them, followed by Greeley and Blandings with the box of scavenged components. The shaft sealed behind them and the platform began its slow descent. Austin kept coughing. Sartoris tried to ignore him. He was going to have to report back to the warden about the Star Destroyer and wasn't looking forward to it. No doubt Kloth would have all kinds of irrelevant questions about the ship and what they saw up there, every minute of it an endurance test for Sartoris's patience. Asking unnecessary questions was one of the war-den's nervous tics when he felt pressed to make a decision, and- "Oh no ," Greeley said.

Sartoris glanced up. "What's wrong?"

The engineer started to say something, then dropped the box of parts, clutched his stomach, and bent over with a hoa.r.s.e croak. Sartoris realized the man was throwing up, shoulders clenching in great involuntary spasms. Blandings and the other guards all backed away from him, muttering with surprise and disgust, but there wasn't much room in the shaft and within seconds the smell had filled it entirely.

"I'm sorry," Greeley said, wiping his mouth. "Lousy mess hall food, you can't .

"Just stay there." Sartoris held up his hands. "You can get cleaned up when we get back to the barge."

"I feel fine, I just..." The engineer swallowed and took in a deep breath. His eyes and nose were streaming tears, and Sartoris could hear a faint chest-rattle as he sucked in a shallow breath. Over his shoulder he heard Austin starting to cough again.

"Captain." Blandings's voice was small as he glanced back up in the direction they'd come. "You don't think there was something up "Contamination diagnostics checked out negative," Sartoris shot back-too quickly, he realized. "That's what you said, isn't it, Greeley?"

Greeley gave a weak nod, tried to answer, and thought better of it. His skin had taken on a decidedly green shade, and it shone with a thin, oily layer of sweat. A moment later he sank down to his knees next to the box of electronics and lowered his head until it was almost touching the floor.

By the time they arrived back on the barge, Vesek and Blandings had started coughing as well.

Chapter 10.

Triage "Hang on, i'm coming." Zahara followed the 2-1B through the medbay to the bed where a guard named Austin crouched with his head between his knees. He'd come in along with another guard and a pair of maintenance engineers. Waste had triaged his new patients expertly, a.s.signed them beds, and started working up Austin, who appeared to be the worst off.

"Thanks,'" Zahara told the 2-1B. "Go check on the others." Sitting down on the bed next to Austin's, she didn't wait for the guard to acknowledge her. "How are you feeling?"

He looked up at her stonily. "I want to talk to the droid."

"My surgical droid is otherwise engaged with your co-workers," Zahara said. "What happened to you up there?"

"What do you care?"

"It's my job. How many people were up there with you?"

Austin didn't respond. Twin rivulets of thick yellow snot were leaking out of his nose, down either side of his upper lip, and he smeared them away with his sleeve and started coughing again into his fist, a loose, rib-racking hack.

"Look," Zahara said, "I've got other sick inmates to look after. So how about dropping the att.i.tude so we can focus on getting you bet-"You're a piece of work," Austin said, "you know that?"

"I've been called worse."

"You and your sick inmates. I bet you . . ." He broke off into another coughing fit, Zahara leaning back as the guard sprayed the air around him with microscopic droplets, then pivoted his head to glare at her again. "... I bet .

. . you probably . . ." More coughing, thicker now. "You're nothing but a . . ."

"Tell you what," she said, "you'll have plenty of time to call me names later. How about lying back and letting me have a look at you."

Austin shook his head. "Send the droid. I don't want you touching me."

"Don't be an idiot. You're..."

"Send the droid."

Enough was enough; Zahara stood up. "Suit yourself."

"Captain Sartoris was right about you, you know," he said as she walked away.

"Excuse me?"

"You're sweet on cons. I'll bet that if I were some low-life Rebel sc.u.m you'd treat me like your only patient. Every sob story that comes along, you're ready with a sympathetic ear."

"Wow." She almost felt obliged to respond with some representational show of anger. "Your captain really knows me well, doesn't he?"

"He's a good man."

"Sure," she said easily. "Killing inmates is a real feather in his cap."

Austin gave a quick series of explosive coughs, then cleared his throat and whooped out a ragged breath. "That wasn't your call to make."

Zahara turned around to face him again. "Let me tell you some-thing about your heroic captain. He was in trouble long before what happened with Von Longo-even the warden knew it. Regardless of what he might have once been, he's now a burned-out wreck of a human being, a claustrophobic sociopath with ..." She broke off when she realized Austin was grinning at her, a narrow, vulpine grin- she was only confirming everything he'd suspected about her. "What Captain Sartoris did to Longo here in my medbay was just the end product of a long and messy downward slide."

"And that's when you really started to like him, right?" Austin asked, that hard smile still wrapped across his otherwise sickly face. "You like 'em hurt and needy. That really flicks your switch, doesn't it?"

She felt her neck beginning to turn red and was suddenly sure that Austin could see it, too. "If you say so."

"I'm not the only one."

"Dr. Cody?" a synthesized voice called out. "Are you available?"

She turned and saw the 2-1B gesturing to her from the other side of the infirmary. On the bed beside it, one of the new patients-she thought it was the other guard, Vesek-appeared to be having a seizure. The two engineers and the trooper who had accompanied him were all sitting up watching with a mixture of dismay and revulsion.

"On my way."

By the time she arrived at his bedside, Vesek had started to slide off his mattress despite the surgical droid's efforts to restrain him. The guard's face had gone a nearly translucent shade of pale and his eyes were rolled back in his head while the rest of his body flopped and twitched erratically as if responding to some high-voltage electrical current. Then without any warning he fell on his back, his mouth bursting open to emit an uncertain urk sound, followed by an almost solid spray of bright arterial blood that shot straight up into the air like a geyser.

"Watch out." Zahara raised her hands to shield herself and the engineers sitting next to her. On the other side of the bed, the 2-1B continued to hold Vesek in place. When it looked up, she saw that its cowling and visual sensors were covered with blood. Vesek collapsed backward on the stained sheets, as if the act of vomiting had drained all the fight from him.

"Get him in the bubble," Zahara said. "All of them, the guards, engineers, whoever came off that Destroyer, get them sealed off from the other patients-now."

The 2-1B's sensors had already cleared themselves and reflected back at her attentively. "Yes, Dr. Cody."

"Run labs on them, a full tox screen, find out what they were exposed to up there."

"Anything else?"

She forced herself to stop and think, taking inventory in her mind. "We better let the warden know what's going on. He'll want updates."

"Right away."

"Wait," Zahara said, "I'll take care of that myself." She didn't wait around as the surgical droid started giving instructions to the engineers. Their faces were freckled with Vesek's blood, and they looked frightened now, more scared than sick.

"You," she said, looking at the name on his badge, "Greeley, how many men went aboard the Star Destroyer?"

"Two teams of five," Greeley said, "but..."

"Where are the other five men?"

"They came back before us."

On the bed, Vesek made a throaty groaning sound and shifted his weight, rolling onto his side so that his back was to them. The other two men stared at him with matching expressions of encroaching panic as the droid led them away.

"Hey, Doc, what's the good word?"

She turned and saw that Gat, the Devish, had left his bed and made his way over to see her. He was gazing at the guard on the blood-stained bunk, fingering his broken horn with the unconscious compulsions of someone prodding a loose tooth with his tongue.

"Nothing you need to worry about."

"I heard you say something about the bubble."

"I'm just playing it safe," Zahara said, "until we get a better handle on things."

The Devish c.o.c.ked his head and then nodded. "If there's anything I can do, let me know, okay?"

"Thanks, Gat. I'll keep that in mind." Without thinking, she put one hand on his shoulder and felt another pair of eyes on her from across the room.

Austin was glaring at her.

And smiling.