"Warden?" Sartoris shouted.
Still nothing from the other side of the door. Sartoris glanced down at the blasters in his hands, and back at the door. It was probably blast-proof, and shooting his way in would only start a volley of ricocheting bolts that might end up killing him. But he needed to get the access codes, sooner rather than later, if-
Then the door slid open, all by itself.
At this point, Sartoris hadn't been expecting it, and he actually hesitated for a moment, peering inside the chamber. Kloth's office appeared empty-the holomural desert scene, an abandoned console, the view outside unobstructed.
Sartoris stepped inside, and the smell hit him hard. It was the same ammoniac odor that had accumulated in the corridors outside, only a more concentrated version, and he cupped his hand over his nose and mouth, laboring to suppress his gag reflex.
"Captain," something gargled from the other side of the console. "How nice to see you."
Sartoris took another step and looked forward, then down. Warden Kloth was lying on the floor below his console, curled on his side in the fetal position, in a pool of something grayish red. When he saw Sartoris standing over him, he lifted himself up on both elbows and took a raspy, shaking breath. Webs of sticky fluid dribbled from his nose and chin. The sickness had stripped away any remaining affectation of toughness and cruelty, leaving only the trembling, skinned thing that Sartoris had known was inside him all along.
"I've been watching the monitors," he said. "This infection from the Star Destroyer…" He coughed again. "It's spreading too quickly to stop. Would you agree?"
"Yes, sir."
"Then we're left with only one choice…" Kloth sucked in another labored, snorkeling breath. "We have to abandon ship."
"My thoughts exactly."
"You'll help me to the escape pod," he said between hacking coughs. "That's SOP. I'll make. my full report from there. Imperial. Corrections won't question my decision-they can access all the data from the infirmary afterward-they'll see I had no choice…"
Sartoris had to smile. Even in extremis, the man was still thinking about how to cover himself in front of his superiors.
"You have the access codes for launch?" he asked.
Kloth coughed and nodded, and coughed harder, the force of it making veins bulge like twisted blue worms in his temples.
"I think," Sartoris said, "that you should tell me now."
The warden stopped coughing. His eyes narrowed, then widened. Sartoris was pointing both of the E-11s at Kloth's face, close enough that he knew Kloth would be able to smell the tinge of ozone that still clung to their barrels, and see that Sartoris had switched them back to kill.
"You're an animal," Kloth said. "I should have relieved you from duty when I had the chance."
"It's not too late," Sartoris said, holding the blasters steady. "You could make it your last official act as warden."
"Put those down. You'll need both hands to help me to the pod."
"I think I can manage," Sartoris said. "After you give me the codes."
"I don't have much choice, do I?"
Sartoris regarded him blandly. "I suppose you could try lying to me. But I deal with liars and con artists every day, so under the circumstances I wouldn't recommend it."
"The codes are already imprinted here. I couldn't alter them if I tried." Kloth handed him a datacard, his hand trembling only slightly, and held Sartoris's gaze steadily as he did so. "Captain?"
"Yes?"
"There's a subsection of the Imperial Corrections Psychological Profile Exam known as the Veq-Headley Battery. It's specifically skewed to indicate any underlying psychopathological attitudes in the applicant. with the understanding that such things might come in handy in service to the Empire." His tongue came out and moistened his upper lip. "Would you like to know how you scored on your VHB, Captain Sartoris?"
"I think we both already know the answer to that, sir," Sartoris said, and squeezed both triggers.
The effect at close range was nothing short of spectacular. Warden Kloth's entire cranial vault sheared away in a dense cloud of scarlet, gristle, and bone. His neck and shoulders flopped sideways, torqued on some invisible axis with the leftover momentum of the energy blast, and then landed with a wet splat, skidding backward in the spattered reservoir of blood.
Sartoris pocketed the datacard and turned to face the still-open door. That was when he saw the young guard in the isolation suit standing out in the corridor, staring at him slack-jawed, his fever-blotched face gone abruptly pale so the blisters stood out like stars. When the guard realized that Sartoris was looking at him, he jerked both hands up and backed into the hallway behind him, his chin going up and down trying to yammer out words.
"Captain? You j-just shot Warden Kloth."
"Did him a favor," Sartoris said, taking note of the guard's runny nose and the fever sores clustering around his lips. "You want one?"
The guard looked as if he'd just lost control of his bladder and bowels simultaneously.
"Get out of here." Pointing with one of the blasters: "Go that way."
The guard nodded, turned, and fled, boots clattering, rasping audibly for breath. Sartoris wished him well. He went the other direction, and started making his way to the escape pod.
Chapter 16
In the Cage
Although there was no longer anyone alive to monitor it, the surveillance system of Imperial Prison Barge Purge did an excellent job relaying the conversation between Trig and Kale Longo in their cell in Detention Level Five. The screens, now playing to a retinue of Imperial guard corpses in the barge's main surveillance suite, showed the brothers' faces peering from between the bars. And although the audio systems were perfectly calibrated to capture the slightest conspiratorial whisper, there was very little sound coming through the speakers. In fact, all throughout the detention level, it was quiet. The last of the screaming and coughing noises had already stopped, leaving only a vacant, sucked-out silence that went on and on.
Then, softly, the audio sensors picked up Trig's voice:
"They're all dead. Aren't they?"
And Kale, falteringly: "I don't know."
"Whoever's left alive, they're already gone, they just left us here. We're going to die in here, too."
"You need to stop talking like that," Kale said. "Right now. You understand?"
Trig didn't reply. Not long ago, he had watched the Rodians die in the cell across from them. In the end, they'd coughed themselves to death, hacking and choking up pieces of their strange gray organs until they'd finally just writhed silently on the floor of their cell, twitching and whining and-after what felt like an eternity-falling still. Now the bodies had started to smell. Of course there was no way the surveillance system could capture that, just as there was no way for anyone who was actually in the area to avoid it.
Trig told himself the decay process shouldn't be happening so quickly, but the smell was there just the same. Maybe it was how the sickness interacted with the individual alien chemistry. It was everywhere, creeping up and down the corridors, trickling through the bars. He imagined rows of cells filled with corpses, dead inmates slumped on their bunks and sprawled on the floor, limp arms hanging through the bars, hundreds of them, gray and seeping, up and down the corridors of the different sublevels. The barge had turned into an immense floating crypt.
So why weren't he and Kale dead… or even sick? Trig wondered if they were destined to survive through some rare quirk of genetic immunity, only to die of starvation or dehydration like neglected animals, here in the cage. He thought of something his father had always said: The universe has a sense of humor, just not a nice one.