"You think you can get us to the command bridge, kid?" Han snapped. His eyes looked hollow and deep-set. "Be my guest."
"I"m just saying..." He pointed the way that Han appeared to be favoring. "...this doesn"t feel right."
"Yeah, well, we"re on a Star Destroyer being chased by the living dead. None of this feels right." Han rubbed his hand over his face, and when he lowered his palm and looked at Chewbacca, his expression showed a deeper gradation of doubt. "We came back from that way, right?"
The Wookiee gave a mournful, uncertain groan.
"Great. You"re supposed to be the one with the keen sense of direction."
"I think if we just take this turbolift, you know, up..." Trig started.
"We"re almost to the conning tower." Han squatted down and touched his fingertips to the deck below their feet. "You feel how the floor"s vibrating?"
Trig nodded tentatively.
"We"re probably standing right on top of the primary power generator." Han c.o.c.ked a thumb off to the right. "It"s this way and then straight back, I can feel it. We"re almost there, right through this hatchway."
He palmed the switch on the wall. It hummed, the entire platform reverberating even harder under their feet, and a huge s.p.a.ce gaped in front of them.
Almost simultaneously, they all took a step back, staring down into the void.
Sickish green and yellow lights illuminated it from above, and Trig leaned slightly forward, craning his neck as far down as he dared, but he couldn"t see the full dimensions of it. As his eyes began to adjust, he saw they were standing at a precipice overlooking a deep cavernous chamber that for a moment appeared to be nothing less than the atmospheric null set of s.p.a.ce itself. He realized that his lungs were aching for air, and allowed himself to inhale a shaky breath.
"See?" Han said, a little weakly. "Told you we were at the top."
Trig stared down at the ma.s.sive cylindrical shape, only half visible, so far down, their voices sounding very small against the opening.
What is that down there?" he asked.
"Main engine turbine, probably."
"It"s big."
"It"s a big ship, kid-the Empire likes "em that way." Han pointed to the other side, voice solidifying with all kinds of manufactured confidence. "See that square service shaft on the other side? That"s probably the main lift platform up to the bridge."
Trig squinted. He couldn"t see across, and he doubted that Han could, either. His attention kept getting sucked downward in the direction of the silent turbine. What would it be like to fall that far down? You would have a long time to scream, that was for sure-one endless, diminishing shriek as the darkness swallowed you up. He wondered what might happen if the lower part of the Star Destroyer was open and you fell through it-if it was possible to drop straight down into the hostile, icy bath of the galaxy itself.
"How do we get across?"
Han pointed. "You"re looking at it."
Trig frowned. The catwalk in front of them was so narrow that at first he thought it was just an extra contour of the wall. It ran along the edge, stretching out as far as he could see, presumably ending on the other side.
"There"s no guardrail."
"Yeah, well, beggars can"t be choosers."
"There"s got to be a regular way of getting over there."
"I"m sure there is," Han said. "Me, I don"t plan on standing around out here any longer than I have to."
Trig thought back to the turbolift he"d suggested they take, a few turns back. No doubt that had been the usual means of getting to the bridge. But did he want to go back there alone? Could he even find it at this point?
He glanced at Chewbacca, but the big Wookiee seemed unconcerned, and Han was already stepping out onto it. He put his back to the wall and crept forward, keeping his palms flattened on either side to maintain his balance. "Just keep your head up and don"t look down and you"ll be fine." He jerked his head at the Wookiee. "Well, what are you waiting for?"
With an unhappy yawp, Chewbacca stepped out after him, and Trig knew that it was his turn. He thought that Han was probably right about the conning tower-in his headstrong, c.o.c.ksure way, he did seem uncannily well informed about the general layout of the Destroyer- but as Trig approached and put his foot onto the catwalk, he felt his guts go loose and turn to water. His legs felt so weightless that his knees trembled all the way up to his thighs, and when his palms started sweating he was abruptly sure that this was how he was going to die, falling down into the pit. Any remaining sense of balance and equilibrium fled.
"I can"t," he mumbled.
Han turned and looked at him. He could feel the man"s eyes on him, making his face blaze up hot all the way to his hairline.
"Come on, we don"t have time for a pep talk here."
Trig tried to swallow but his throat was too gummy. He forced the words out. "There"s got to be another way. Maybe I"ll go back to the turbolift."
"Alone?" Han asked.
"Then I"ll wait for you here. Once you get the engines going again..." He bobbed his head up and down, selling the idea to himself. "I"ll just meet you back here, okay?"
Han looked at him one last time. The distance between them was already wide enough that Trig couldn"t make out the expression on his face, but some small and shameful part of him guessed it was probably a mixture of exasperation and maybe a little contempt.
But if there was contempt, it wasn"t evident in the man"s voice. "All right," he said. "We"ll come back for you." Then he and Chewbacca turned back in the opposite direction and continued to pick their way along the catwalk.
Trig stood staring at the two shadowy forms advancing deeper into the shadows until he wasn"t sure he saw them anymore. Then they were gone, and he was standing there all alone.
He"d never hated himself more than he did at that moment. It struck him that Kale would have gone out there without question, that his own life had been full of these failures of nerve, large and small, and that this was probably the most recent of many to come.
He stood at the edge of the abyss, for what felt like a very long time, waiting to hear Han call out, We"re here, or We made it, from somewhere far off in the distance, but no such sound came to him.
Maybe they fell, a craven voice inside him whispered. But if they had, wouldn"t he have heard them scream?
He sat down by the open hatchway, a careful distance from the edge, and stared down into it, listening to the sounds of his own breathing, the steady thud of his pulse.
Eventually he began to hear sounds from down inside the chamber. Low rustling noises from far below where he couldn"t see.
It"s them. They"re down there.
He bounced to his feet, more startled by the thought than the popping sound that his knees made, and tried to look deeper into the pit. He"d heard that Star Destroyers carried a crew of eight thousand or more-suppose they"d all been infected? They would nest somewhere, wouldn"t they, a place together in the dark? Maybe this was where the ones in the overhead ventilation shaft had come from, where they"d been waiting. And they were headed forward in the direction of the main hangar, as if summoned there by- He turned around, struck by the feeling that he was being watched.
It wasn"t just a feeling.
At the far end of the shaft, ten meters away, a face was peering at him out of the half-light, in three-quarter profile. Even at this distance, Trig recognized it instantly, though it took a moment to get the name out from his shock-numbed lips.
"Kale?"
His brother regarded him from the side without turning his head, as if in a trance. Then he reached out and pushed a b.u.t.ton on the wall, and a door opened in front of him.
"Kale, wait! Don"t..."
Kale stepped through the door and disappeared.
Trig chased after him, running back up the concourse, staggering a little, feeling pins and needles creeping up through his lower legs from all the time that he"d sat motionless-had he really been waiting there that long? His knees had the trembling, wrung-out feeling that made him wonder if they might actually buckle underneath him.
He got to the hatchway that his brother had opened and pressed the switch. The door that hissed open wasn"t as big as the one that Han had discovered above the turbine. It was just a normal hatchway, and that somehow made him feel better, too.
He stepped through it.
"Kale? It"s..."
His voice broke off with a choke.
The chamber was even darker than the concourse he"d left behind. At first glance it appeared as big as the abyss he"d refused to cross-but this was some type of main refuse depository. A mountain of trash rose up to the ceiling, and the fetid, brown, excremental stink simmering off its peaks was beyond nauseating.
Trig clamped his hand over his mouth and looked around through watering eyes, trying to keep from gagging. He couldn"t see his brother in here, but Kale had just come inside, seconds earlier.
"Kale," he said again, strangely hesitant to shout out in here. "It"s me. What are you doing in here?"
Behind him, the hatch sealed shut.
Chapter 34.
Skin Hill It wasn"t trash.
Trig came to this realization as he took another step toward the mountain, hoping to find some trace of Kale around the other side. That was when his toe struck something soft and yielding, and when he glanced down he saw it was a human leg.
Very slowly, he looked up.
The leg was connected to a torso, covered up by another, and another, the pile growing in front of him comprising what he realized was hundreds of dismembered corpses-heads, arms, legs, and whole bodies, bare bones, many of them still dressed in rotten Imperial uniforms and incomplete stormtrooper armor. The pile rose up to the ceiling. Details leapt out at him from everywhere. The bodies had been mangled like parts at an abattoir, some of them in handcuffs and manacles, others hacked recklessly to pieces, still others looking partially devoured, whole gobbets of flesh gnawed off. Many of the parts were bloated to the point where the skin itself had begun to split open like sausages, and Trig realized he was standing in a tacky puddle of whatever had leaked out of them to coat the floor.
He felt the room start to spin. A scream ballooned in his throat and died there, snuffed out by his own inability to open his lips and release it. Instead, he stumbled backward, trying not to look at what was in front of him, all around him, wanting it not to be there but unable to get away from it. Somewhere behind him was the door he"d come through, the hatchway that would get him out of here, but he couldn"t find the switch to activate it. He began slapping the walls blindly at random, pounding them, and nothing changed.
At last the seal broke in his throat and he let out a shriek, a combination of "help" and "Kale," and that was when he heard the sounds, a soft, moist rustling noise from inside the mountain. Bodies shifted, shoved aside and rearranged by something within.
And then he saw the thing come burrowing out.
First the white head, maggot-white, then the rest of it, slithering through to emerge outward on the floor.
It rose to its feet, a figure in dripping, ragged clothes and a bloodstained stormtrooper helmet, staring at him. The black polarized lenses of the helmet were streaked and filthy, clotted with slime and gore. The breath filter had been broken off on one side, and Trig caught a glimpse of the scaly infected throat of the thing underneath it. There was blood caked around the mouthpiece, and it occurred to him that the thing might possibly have eaten its way out.
It staggered toward him.
Trig backed away, immediately tripped, and fell. Jumping up, lunging sideways, he started running around the edge of the mountain. He imagined that he heard the thing coming after him, but it might have just been his own heart hammering in his ears. He didn"t dare look back. But he could feel it there, growing closer, a steadily intensifying presence like pressure buildup behind his eyeb.a.l.l.s and chest cavity, pushing him onward, faster.
The room spun around him. Trig jerked his head right and left. The door, wherever it had been, was utterly lost to him now. Fear had robbed him of all sense of direction. He didn"t even remember where he"d come from.
As he bolted around the edge of the pile, lunging over three corpses that appeared to have been bundled together, wrists and ankles bound with cords, something caught his eye from up above-a glint of light.
Looking up, he saw the open ventilation shaft in the ceiling, at least ten or fifteen meters up, maybe more.
He finally stopped and looked back, saw the thing in the trooper helmet coming around behind him. It was moments away.
This time Trig didn"t give himself time to think.
He started climbing.
It was even worse than he"d expected. The huge pile of dismembered parts and severed heads made up a loosely knit, constantly shifting terrain, moving and tumbling down as he clawed his way up and over it. The stench only seemed to thicken as he uncovered submerged levels of decay that hadn"t yet been exposed to air. Struggling against his gag reflex was a nonstop battle, one he didn"t always win, and the wobbling sensation of continuous near nausea only made climbing more difficult.
He tried to focus on the vent shaft, forcing himself to think only of getting out. Every few seconds, though, he did look back-he couldn"t help it.
The thing in the helmet was climbing up after him.
It crawled with the steady relentlessness of something out of one his nightmares. And in fact, even in the depths of his own scrambling climb, Trig couldn"t help but flash back to the voice of Aur Myss from the cell next to theirs, how he had promised to come for him and his brother. Was that an undead version of Myss behind him now? How had it gotten here to this part of the Destroyer before him, and what had it been doing inside this heap of human rubble? None of those questions even rose into his mind-only that it had followed him here to satisfy whatever undying urge drove it forward.
Rage.
Murder.
Hunger.
Something moved underneath him in the mountain.
It"s just another body part, don"t think about it, don"t let it - He felt a scabby, clay-cold hand reaching up out of the pile to seize his ankle.
Trig let out a painful squeal of fright and wrenched his leg free, almost losing his balance and falling. He was struck by the vision of his small, helpless frame bouncing back down the slope of corpses, as hands and arms and mouths lunged out, ripping off pieces of his flesh, until they"d finally added his own bleeding carca.s.s to the mountain.
Instead he climbed faster, forced himself to dig in, yanking himself upward, dumping down bodies as he went. He was close enough to the top now that he could actually see inside the vent, the oversized duct that had been exposed there.
Go. Just go.
With what felt like enormous effort, he thrust his entire body upward. His brain had shut down completely at this point. He no longer smelled the room or even truly felt its awful, gelid presence sticking to him. He was aware only of what lay ahead, and how much he needed to get there, and the last few moments, as he got to the top of the pile, left no imprint in his memory whatsoever-they might as well have happened to someone else entirely, a stranger.
Consciousness snapped back through him as his fingers sc.r.a.ped cold metal, the blessed solidity of the ductwork"s outer rim, and he levered his upper body through it with a gasp, jerked his legs up behind him and only then allowed himself to breathe. The vent was not much bigger than his shoulders, but it was large enough.
Trig looked around in a kind of mild hysteria. His heart was slamming, trying to smash a hole through his chest, the muscles in his throat working up and down wildly.
I"m going to start bawling again. Well, go ahead and cry. I suppose you"ve earned it.
But he realized his eyes were dry. At last, at the top of a pile of human bodies, he had arrived at a place beyond tears.
There was a whistling, breathing noise below him, and when he looked down he saw that the thing in the trooper"s helmet was still climbing up the mountain of bodies.