"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, cocksure 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 button 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.