The strands of muscle slithered between her fingers like taut damp cords of yarn. She could see them in her mind, feeling the abnormal heat beneath them, that intrusive presence, that thing, cutting its slickly twisting path upward. A whisper of motion brushed against her fingertips, and she seized it and squeezed. There was a sudden rupturing spurt and something beneath the muscle layer burst over her, a thick slimy pustule of nacreous liquid, coating her hands to the wrists.
The screaming coming from inside the shaft was beyond deafening now.
Zahara yanked her hands out and looked at them, staring at the way the clotted fluid first seemed to coagulate, then wiggled, and now actually appeared to crawl over her flesh like living gloves, looking for an opening, a wound it could use to get inside her. It stung worse with every passing second of exposure to the open air, and she wiped it off on her pants, forcing her gorge back down, telling herself if she lost her nerve now she'd never get it back.
Below her on the floor, Kale's face had gone pale, ashen. He was staring at her in a state of shock. She kept hoping that he'd pass out but so far he hadn't, though he'd at least stopped screaming.
"I have to go in again," she said, "I have to make sure I got it."
Before he could say anything she shoved her hand back through the incision, sliding in, feeling around, waiting for that little wiggling clot of activity against her fingers and not feeling it. When she looked down she saw that the grayish black rot color was still there, just above his waistline, but it hadn't come any farther up.
"I think we got it."
She took a deep breath and looked at Kale. He'd finally blacked out, eyes mostly shut, rolled to the side. She gathered up the shirt she'd ripped off him and started to fold it up, pressing it down over the wound to stanch the new bleeding she'd created. Sitting back, holding pressure, taking in breaths and letting them out, she willed her own heart rate to slow down to something approaching normal. Whether she'd done more harm than good, she wasn't sure, except now Kale was still alive and breathing and if she hadn't done anything, that might not have been the case.
It wasn't until later, when she'd finally calmed down a little, that she realized the docking shaft next to them had fallen totally silent.
The screaming in the shaft had stopped.
And then, from a great distance away, she heard another noise, some faint respondent roar.
Something on the other side of the Star Destroyer was screaming back.
Chapter 30
Black Tank Blues
Chewbacca was worried about the boy. Trig wasn't talking. Han wasn't, either, but Chewie was used to that, depending on the circumstances. The boy, though-that was something else. Young ones needed to express themselves. In the short time that the Wookiee had known him, he'd seen the boy dealing with things far beyond his age, and if he kept them bottled up inside, it could be very bad for all of them.
It had started when they'd heard Kale screaming on the other side of the hangar. Trig had wanted to go back and Han had to physically hold on to him to prevent him from running away.
"He'll be all right," Han had said, and although Chewie could tell he wouldn't, he knew what Han was doing-getting the boy as far away from the docking shaft as possible before those things broke through. Trig fought him anyway, fought hard, kicking and punching, trying to squirm away until Chewie had to intervene and physically pick the boy up and hold him back, not a hug this time, not even close. The boy was stronger than he looked. Chewie ended up carrying him for the next twenty minutes until Trig, in a low voice, had muttered, "You can put me down now."
It was the last thing he'd said.
As much as he understood the mission, putting distance between themselves and the shaft, Chewbacca didn't like venturing any deeper into the Destroyer. The long corridors, the vacant spaces they kept coming upon, turning corners and seeing nothing but random droids, the emptiness that didn't really feel like emptiness-who had designed all of this, and who had left it here? Had they all died, and if they had, what had happened to the bodies? Some of the avionics were still functioning, and they occasionally came across whole empty suites of blinking lights, navigation and atmospheric systems operating on and on endlessly without the influence of any living thing.
At the end of one hall they came across a stormtrooper helmet lying on its side like a broken skull. A second one dangled from a chain above it, its faceplate stained with dried blood. Han kicked the first helmet over and Chewie could smell something horribly rotten and sweet inside it: the plasteel mouthpiece had been carefully ripped out to expose the wearer's lower jaw. It looked like an artifact from an ancient civilization, a cannibal cult. Why would anybody have a thing like that?
It felt like they had been walking for a very long time, without even putting a dent in the distance that they still needed to travel. And what would happen when they did reach the command bridge? Despite his partner's bravado, Chewie wondered if they really would be able to fly the Star Destroyer.
They had found a second blaster-it was the one worthwhile discovery so far, and Chewie was glad to have one of his own, if only to better protect the boy.
"What's this?" Han said from ahead of them. "Chewie, gimme a hand with these, huh?"
Chewbacca looked back to make sure the boy was coming-he was, not looking up from his feet-and went to meet Han, who was pointing to a stack of shipping crates blocking the corridor. They appeared to have been shoved here by someone in a hurry to get on to other things. Chewie studied the writing on the side of one of the boxes.
IMPERIAL BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS DIVISION
When he glanced back up, Han was already hauling the boxes aside, trying to clear their path. A big crate on top fell over, and Chewbacca saw a red steel canister go rolling off to the side. It slammed into the wall with an empty clang, rebounded, and stopped under Han's boot.
"What were these creeps messing around with out here?" Han said, more to himself than Chewie, but the Wookiee gave his opinion anyway, which was that none of this made him feel any safer about their prospects.
"This one busted its pressure valve," Han said, inspecting the tank. "There's no markings on it at all, like the whole thing's just been painted red. You see any more of these lying around?"
"Up here," Trig called out. While Han had been talking, Trig had climbed on top of the next pile of crates, twenty or thirty at least, stacked two or three deep. The boy was nimble. It took Chewbacca almost twice as long to clamber up the stack next to him and yank off the top to look in.
The crates were full of cylinders, dozens of them, stacked in neatly ordered rows. There were a few loose red tanks up here, but all the rest-the ones that had been repacked with military precision-had been painted jet black. Chewbacca lifted one of the black ones and heard something sloshing around inside.
He held it up so Han could see it and spoke in Shyriiwook: It's still full.
"Different formula, maybe," Han said. "Different combustibility or something-who knows?" There was a whack as the bottom of the tank slipped from Chewbacca's grip and hit the others inside the crate. "Hey, be careful with that thing, will ya?"
Chewie put the black canister back in its place, noticing that the gauge readout already stood at maximum pressure. He wondered how long it would be before these tanks started leaking like the red ones and what would happen when their contents filtered into the Destroyer's atmosphere.
He didn't tell Han what he'd felt inside the tank that had made him almost drop it. The sloshing motion inside had kept moving back and forth, and in fact it felt like it was moving by itself. Like there was something slopping around inside the black tanks, dripping off its internal walls and trying to get out. Something alive.