Kale's mouth opened and closed, and Trig could smell the death that was locked in there, the death that had been dealt to his brother, the death that his brother was about to deal to him. Kale wasn't going to answer him, and he wasn't going to stop. Trig had loved his big brother more than anything else in the galaxy, and it didn't matter now.
"Kale?"
It gave a snarl and lowered its face to Trig's neck, the teeth and tongue sweeping over his throat, dripping hot breath that smelled like some ghastly, poisonous moss. Kale's hands felt both hot and cold at the same time, the dead flesh moist, sticky, and clutching. He'd climbed on top of Trig now, pressing down on him with his full weight.
With a cry of pain, Trig shoved him back. A white-hot spark of something he'd never felt before went sizzling across the pit of his stomach and landed on his heart, and a light went out inside him, followed by a dismal realization of what was about to happen. It was like a story he'd already heard, the ending written long before he ever got a chance to do anything about it.
Look after your brother.
"Kale, I'm sorry."
As Kale pushed in on him again, more hungrily now, Trig straightened his knee under his brother's torso and rammed it upward, momentarily lifting his brother's body off him. Throwing Kale to the side, Trig twisted around, grappled with his wrists, and levered his brother backward to the edge of the vent.
Then he pushed him over.
Chapter 40
Awakening
Kale fell without a sound.
Trig watched him drop, growing smaller, a teardrop against the expanse. As the semidarkness swallowed him up, the silhouette only partially illuminated by the faint lights surrounding the engine turbine, Trig saw what he hadn't seen earlier, down below.
Upturned faces.
Thousands of them.
They were-as they always must have been-clustered down at the bottom, on either side of the turbine, as if drawn to the ghost of its now absent hum. Even through his veil of shock, the delayed reaction to what had just occurred, Trig knew what he was looking at.
It was the original crew of the Star Destroyer.
They were screaming up at him as one.
At that same second Kale's body hit the turbine and bounced, flop-ping off the side and disappearing into the teeming morass of bodies The resulting sound was an even louder scream, like a single entity awakening and achieving a kind of brute mass-consciousness, awareness that hardly progressed beyond the immediate physical needs. Their breathing wafted up toward him in invisible gradations of damp warmth, their hunger seeping through the air like thermals rising before a storm.
They see me.
Already they began to reach up toward him, the moaning noise becoming more aggressive, rising in pitch and volume to find that steady, now familiar waveform. Shifting and swaying, some of them began attempting to climb up the sides of the turbine itself, in an effort to get closer to him. Some appeared to be holding things, but at first Trig didn't know what the objects were.
Just as he started pulling himself back into the vent, thinking he could at least backtrack far enough to evaluate his options, the blasters started firing.
They were shooting at him, and their aim was deadly accurate. Before he could start crawling inside, Trig felt the vent shaft jerk and burst open in front of him, squealing free of its soldered housing and dumping him straight out. He toppled out the end without being able to grab on to anything, and for a moment he was falling through space, one final trajectory echo of his big brother.
He hit the catwalk hard and it doubled him up upon impact, chiseling shards of pain up through his ankles and legs. Trig grabbed it and held on, fingers curled into the cold latticework, clamping down on it with his entire body. He could both hear and feel the blaster bolts resonating through space around him. One of them was going to hit him, and he could only hope the blaster killed him before he fell into that far-off mass of outstretched hands and gnashing mouths.
He wanted to be dead before that happened.
All around him the catwalk shook and bonged with the impact of the blasters. Chips of durasteel streaked past his cheek, tiny cold specks of pure velocity. He wasn't thinking clearly at all anymore, and that might have explained why he didn't react immediately when he saw Han and Chewie at the far end of the catwalk, staring back at him.
They must have just come back down from the command bridge, Trig's mind droned dazedly. I guess things didn't work out so well up there, either.
Han could definitely see him, Trig knew-he was waving at him frantically, either to move forward or stay down, Trig wasn't sure. Meanwhile, what exactly was the plan? Both Han and Chewie had blasters, but two weapons hardly mattered against the blitz of firepower below them-they might as well have been as unarmed as Trig himself. And neither of them appeared willing to venture back out onto the catwalk in the middle of all this, not that Trig blamed them.
Trig narrowed his eyes. Han was gesticulating even more desperately now, shouting at the top of his lungs. He was pointing up, up. and when Trig tilted his head straight up he saw the last section of the vent shaft dangling loose from above, swinging back and forth.
Hands were reaching out of it.
Trig thought of the mountain of corpses on the other end of the shaft, how it had started coming to life as he'd climbed it.
They followed me down the shaft.
He watched in mute and suffocating terror as the owner of the hands slithered out. It was an Imperial soldier, its dead face lit with urgency. Clamoring for Trig, it rocked back and forth inside the dangling vent, lost its balance, and then fell out, hands scrabbling furiously as it fell past him, plummeting down into the blackness. Three more Imperials squirmed free after that, spilling out like hideous, fully formed offspring from some unthinkably fertile ovipositor.
The vent section swung back again, and this time Trig realized that whatever was inside it was actually waiting for the vent to are forward before it jumped, so it could use that last ounce of forward momentum to grab him as it sprang free from it. The corpse launched itself at him, too fast for Trig to see its face, and he plastered himself to the wall, feeling claw-like fingers scrape and smear across his torso.
The thing snapped its fist around his leg.
And this time, it held on.
Trig looked down. For an instant the only thing he could see was the limp sac of bruise-colored flesh that had once been its face, staring up at him, the place where the piercings had been ripped out, the gaping, leech-maw of its mouth. When the mouth opened Trig could still see the glint of steel piercing up through his gullet, the blade that Kale had shoved up through there, what felt like a thousand years ago.
It was Aur Myss.
Chapter 41
Blackwing
Zahara tried three keyboards before she found one that worked. Fingers trembling, she jacked it into the secondary workstation and held her breath, waiting to see if they were compatible.
The 2-1B had declined to accompany her up to the hangar control room, electing instead to stay in the bio-lab, "in case I'm needed." But the droid's directions had been flawless. He had sent her through a Byzantine maze of walkways that delivered her to a service lift, and she'd taken it straight up to the pilots' ready room, through another set of doors that opened on hangar control itself.
The large enclosed booth stood at least thirty meters off the docking floor. From her current vantage point she could see everything- the six or so random ships that the Destroyer's tractor beam had sucked in on one end, and on the other, the half-destroyed docking shaft that had brought them up here from the barge.