"I came to talk with Vesek." Sartoris shot a glance at the tube taped into place around the guard's mouth. "Not much chance of that now."
"You can't leave."
"Who's going to stop me?" His eyebrow hiked up. "You?"
"You're in quarantine because you're one of the primary carriers of this infection," Zahara said. "You need to stay here."
Sartoris eyed her levelly, taking her measure. The cold indifference in his face was unlike anything she'd ever encountered before, as if it were permanently etched beneath the features, across the very bones of his face.
"I'm going to make this very clear," he said. "You have no authority over me. And there's nothing you can do for me or my men or any of these inmates. You're useless, Dr. Cody, and you know it. If you were one of my guards, you'd be gone by now. if you were lucky. Otherwise you'd be dead."
"Look…" she started.
"Save it for your precious inmates," he said, standing up and starting to walk toward the sealed hatch. "I've already heard enough."
"Jareth, wait."
At the sound of his first name, he stopped in his tracks, and when he turned around and saw her expression, a grin twisted like barbed wire across his face. "You're scared stiff, aren't you?"
"That's got nothing to do with this."
"You ought to be. They're going to remember you for this."
"What?"
"You might think you're through with the Empire, but they're not through with you." He glanced outside the bubble, where the 2-1B was hurrying from bed to bed as the alarms switched on, each one signaling cardiac and respiratory arrest. "Every exposed inmate and guard on this barge is going to die in the next few hours, while you stand there in your isolation suit with your tools and your droids. I hope you enjoy answering questions, because there's going to be plenty of them waiting for you." He reached out with one finger and very gently placed it against her sternum. "You'll spend the rest of your life living this down."
"What did you and your men see up in that Star Destroyer?" she asked.
"What did I see?" Sartoris shook his head. "Nothing-not a thing."
Sighing, she glanced at the monitor screens alongside the bubble's inner membrane. "Your blood work is coming back clean. The infection doesn't seem to be affecting you whatsoever."
"Benefits of clean living," he said, and shoved past her. "If you think you can detain me, you're welcome to try. Otherwise I'll be up in the warden's office. I'm sure he'll be interested in hearing about how you and your staff are bearing up in this crisis."
Before she could move to stop him, he'd already walked out of the bubble and through the medbay. Something about his motives bothered her. There was no way he was going waste time talking to Kloth just to report on her inefficacy here. How much more trouble could she really get in now anyway?
Zahara started to follow him and paused, reeling momentarily lightheaded. She stopped short, scrutinizing herself for any of the symptoms she'd seen in her patients. Her breathing was fine, she felt no pain or lethargy-was she just feeling the accumulated tension of the whole situation?
"Waste?"
"Yes, Dr. Cody." The droid didn't look up from the inmate whose bunk it was squatting over, administering some sort of IV injection.
"I need you to run some blood and cultures."
"On what patient?"
"Me," she said, and held out her arm.
The 2-1B looked at her. "But that would require me to violate the isolation barrier of your suit."
"The suits don't work anyway," she said. "You said so yourself."
"I was speculating…"
"Enough." She peeled off the mask and tossed it aside, yanking off the gloves and pulling her sleeve up to expose her bare arm. From the nearby beds, the inmates gazed at her blankly.
"Dr. Cody, please…" Waste's synthesized voice was edging perilously close to panic."…my theories regarding the efficacy of the barge's isolation gear are hardly conclusive, and in any case, the prime directive of my programming plainly states that I am to protect life and promote wellness whenever possible."
"Just do it," she said, and locked her eyes on the droid's visual sensors, wailing for the needle.
Chapter 15
VHB
Sartoris walked back up the corridor toward the warden's office with a pair of E-11 blaster rifles, their stocks collapsed so he could hold one in each hand. He'd taken them off two of the stormtroopers in the hallway-one of them, right outside the infirmary, had attempted to shoot him with it. The guard in question, a man that Sartoris had known for years, had staggered toward him with his helmet in his hand and blood in his eyes, coughing and ranting at the top of his lungs. He didn't seem to have any idea where he was but kept insisting he get medical care. He said his lungs were filling up with fluid and he couldn't breathe, he was drowning from the inside but they wouldn't let him into the medbay. Sartoris tried to shove past the man, and the guard pulled the blaster and pointed it at him. When he finally realized who he was about to shoot, the trooper stopped and swayed sideways against the wall.
"Cap, I'm sorry, I didn't realize…"
Sartoris grabbed the E-11 from him, switched it to stun, and shot him point-blank. Twenty meters later, another stormtrooper came at him, and Sartoris had been faster this time, dropping him on sight. It had been like that the rest of the way up. Guards and troopers in ineffective infection-control gear stumbled up and down the hallway, coughing and puking blood into their masks, reaching out to him for help and begging him for answers to what was going on. Many of them had already collapsed and lay facedown on the floor. The farther he went, the more bodies lay in his path. Sartoris stepped over them when he could; other times he stepped on top of them. With every passing meter, the musty fug of bile and stale sweat hanging in the air grew more oppressive. He had never smelled anything like it. If things were this bad up here in the administration level, he couldn't imagine how bad it was down in Gen Pop-it would be a nightmare down there. He wondered if the warden had already pulled all the remaining guards up from the detainment levels entirely, sealed the whole thing off, and was waiting for the inmates to die.
Reaching Kloth's office, he pressed the call-switch and waited for an acknowledgment, but the warden's voice didn't answer back.
"Sir, it's Captain Sartoris. Open up."
No reply, but Sartoris knew he was in there. Historically the warden had faced all crises big and small from the sanctity of his office-today would be no different.
And the warden had something that Sartoris needed.
The access codes to the escape pods.
Maintaining the pods had been one of the duties of ICO Vesek, and Sartoris knew that Vesek had the launch codes to activate the pods. And so he had sat next to Vesek's bunk in the quarantine bubble, staring down into Vesek's hallucinating expression, those disoriented rolling eyes, asking him over and over for the launch codes. But Vesek had been less than forthcoming. Eventually Sartoris had lost patience with the guard-he could be forgiven for that, couldn't he? Wouldn't it make sense that eventually he'd need to apply a bit more pressure, to help Vesek focus on what he was asking?
He hadn't meant to pinch Vesek's nose shut for as long as he had. If Vesek had cooperated, simply snapped out of it for a moment and given him the codes, none of that would have been necessary. All Sartoris had needed was information, the same way he'd wanted information from that old inmate Longo, but the old man hadn't been very forthcoming, either, and this was a prison barge, after all, wasn't it?
Accidents happened.
But Vesek wasn't an inmate, a voice inside Sartoris's head whispered. Vesek was one of your own men, and you -
"He was on his way out anyway," Sartoris muttered, and turned his attention back to the task at hand. Warden Kloth was in there, and he needed to talk to him more urgently than ever. Sartoris was going to convince Kloth that they needed to get off the barge now if there was any chance of staying alive. There was plenty of room in the escape pod for both of them-or just himself, if Kloth didn't see things his way.