"You're positive? The signal's strong."
"No, it's just an empty hallway, I-hold it."
He put the comlink down and raised the blaster, walking over to the wall for a closer look. In front of him, at shoulder level, he saw a separate wall panel and the words:
MAINTENANCE ACCESS SHAFT 223
Kale placed the barrel of the blaster rifle against the spring-loaded panel and pushed it open to reveal the widemouthed shaft within. A gust of foul-smelling air rushed up into his nose and he groaned, almost gagging, covered his nose and mouth with his free hand, and leaned back into the ripe blackness, looking down.
"Trig?"
The sound of his voice reverberated down the metallic emptiness, ringing shapeless in the void. Kale thought back to what he'd seen when he'd gone through the doorway to investigate the alarm. It had been nothing special, nothing at all really, probably just a malfunction somewhere, although one particular aspect of it had stuck with him- a single bloody handprint on the wall, half smeared and still so fresh it was dripping. When he'd seen that, he'd realized it wasn't a good idea to leave Trig alone, even for a few seconds, and that was when he'd come back to find this.
He decided to try once more, leaning back into the shaft. "Trig, are you there?"
His brother came vaulting up and out of the shaft with a scream. He smashed face-first into Kale, knocking him to his knees with a speed and momentum that probably saved his life. If it had happened any slower-if Kale had been given any time to get his blaster back up again-he probably would have shot his brother on pure reflex. As it was, Trig was already on top of him, still screaming, fists flying, clawing, kicking, and sucking in great drafts of air. He was crying, too, Kale could see, sobbing in a high, choking, desperately frightened voice that made him sound much younger than his actual age.
"Easy," Kale said, holding on to him, noticing now how badly torn Trig's uniform was, like an animal had been at it-the collar ripped to expose Trig's slight, hairless chest, one sleeve torn completely away to show his skinny arm. Parts of the cheap fabric were damp and clammy, like the inside of the escape pod hatch. Kale held on to him. He hugged Trig tightly to his chest until he started to feel, if not the fight going out of him, at least a kind of exhausted fatigue slowing the panicked thrashing, and kept holding on to him after that until Trig was quiet except for the occasional hitching breath.
"It's okay," Kale said, and then drew back enough to get his first real look at Trig's face. "What happened?"
Trig just stared back at him with bloodshot eyes. If he'd been any paler his skin would have been translucent. Nothing moved in his face except for the slight tremble in his chin.
"Did someone attack you?" Kale asked. "Inside the pod, was there.?"
He waited, letting the question drift out to where Trig might pick it up and respond to it, but Trig didn't. The longer he stared at Kale, the more Kale wondered if his brother was seeing him at all. He put his arms around his brother again and held him.
"Listen," he said, "it's going to be okay. I won't let anything bad happen to us, okay? I promise."
But the thought of the bloody handprint came back to him again, and he realized that for the first time in his life he'd made a promise to his brother that he knew he couldn't keep.
Chapter 25
Deadlights
"These thrusters are completely scragged," Han said as he crawled up from a dislodged floor panel in the center of the barge's pilot station, wiping the grit and reactor grease from his hands. "Whatever the engineers were trying to do down here, they didn't get very far. We're not going anywhere in this floating scrap pile."
"I got the escape pod open," Zahara said. "Launch codes are…"
"Dr. Cody?" Tisa's voice broke in. "I'm picking up new life-form readings on the bioscan."
"New readings?" Han glanced at Zahara, frowning. "I thought you said everybody was dead."
"They are." She looked at the bank of electronics. "Tisa, display all positive bioscan readings."
"Yes, Doctor." In front of them an array of glowing pencil-thin lines began to shimmer into view, their intersecting geometry deliquescing once again to create the barge in miniature.
Han said, "What the…?"
The three-dimensional multilevel outline of the vessel-previously an empty, almost elegant intersection of clean, digitized spaces and lines-was now crawling with blood-red pinpricks of flashing lights. They were moving together, bunched and swarming up from the lower detention blocks en masse, advancing level by level toward the admin area. In the hologram, at least, they appeared to be seething forward at a disproportionate, insectile speed.
"Wait a second," Han said. "What are those things?"
She shook her head. "Life-forms."
"Thanks, Doc," he said. "Got anything more specific, or are we supposed to just fill in the blanks?"
Zahara stared at the clusters of tiny lights, each one an independent organism. They were moving faster than she could believe, coming up stairwells, ventilation ducts, and utility shafts. "That's impossible. They weren't there before. Tisa, how come you didn't pick up on them earlier?"
"There were no positive life-forms earlier, Dr. Cody."
"Where did they come from?" As she watched, more red lights began to appear in the lower levels, seeming to spontaneously generate out of nowhere. Her thoughts flashed back to what Waste had told her about the molecular behavior of the virus, how it masked its lethality until it had reproduced to a level that the host could no longer successfully fight it-quorum sensing, he'd called it. Abruptly she felt as if two tight iron bands had closed around her, one blocking her throat, the other clamping down over her chest, freezing her breath.
"How many ways are there out of here?" Han asked, and she realized he was shaking her. "Hey, Doc, I'm talking to you."
"Just…" She pointed to the hatchway and the stairwell they'd taken up from admin."…just the way we came in."
"Any other escape pods?"
"Only the one we left behind." Zahara stretched out one hand and pointed one level down, to the west admin wing. It was already totally overrun by colonies of red lights. That was the last place she'd seen Trig and Kale. She didn't want to think about where they were now.
The diagram of the barge showed a wide stairway leading up from the admin level to the bridge. And now the red lights-deadlights, Zahara's mind gibbered frantically-were moving in that direction.
"Great," Han muttered, raising his blaster and turning to face the door. "Looks like we're gonna be shooting our way out. Again."
Chewbacca growled, shook his massive head, and brandished the rifle, looking profoundly unhappy about the odds.
"Wait," Zahara said, pointing to the tower protruding from the top of the hologram, and then turned behind her, across the bridge itself. "About twenty meters behind us, on the opposite end of the flight deck, there's a docking shaft that goes straight up."
Han gaped at her in disbelief. "What, into the Star Destroyer?"
"It's our only chance."
"Yeah, well, where I come from, they've got a saying-out of the nexu's den and into its mouth."
"Whatever those things are, there have to be hundreds of them. How long do you think your power packs will hold out?"
Then she heard them coming.
It was a thunderous, bullying shriek, charged with rage and hunger and condensed down into a solid wall of inhuman noise. It stiffened the blood in her veins. They were rising up from the admin level, pounding up the steps. Zahara looked forward to where she knew the docking shaft stood. As she whirled back to look in the direction of Han and Chewbacca, yelling that they needed to get out of here, now, she saw Kale Longo burst through the half-open hatch leading up from the admin level, hauling his younger brother's body in his arms.