The docking shaft had delivered them into the durasteel cathedral of the Destroyer's cavernous main hangar, its vaulted ceilings and paneled walls soaring upward and outward in an ecstasy of forced perspective. As Sartoris stared down those long planes into some barely visible vanishing point, he reminded himself that he was looking at less than a tenth of the Destroyer's actual sixteen hundred meters. He needed to keep that figure in mind if he didn't want to spend his entire rime aboard wrestling with the enormity of it.
He took in a deep breath-the cold air tasted like metal shavings and the sterile, out-of-the-box smell of long-chain polymers-and let it out. For a man with a horror of right spaces, standing here should have been a tonic. But instead of relief he only felt some arcane new species of panic fluttering in the pit of his stomach, this time in reaction to the seemingly limitless rebate of pure space. He grunted at the absurdity of it. Apparently he'd gone from claustrophobia to ballroom syndrome in one quick leap, without any time to appreciate the difference.
"Ah, Cap?"
Sartoris didn't bother looking over. "What is it, Austin?"
"All due respect, sir, I think we're going to need more than an hour to look through all this."
"Stick to the plan," he said. "We'll start with an hour and check back then. Report anything out of the ordinary."
"Whole bloody place is out of the ordinary," Austin muttered, and one of the engineers, Greeley, he thought, let out a gruff chuckle.
"Come on," Sartoris said, "let's go. We're wasting rime."
"Hold up a second, Cap." Vesek pointed off in the opposite direction. "What's all that? Over there?"
Sartoris looked behind him and saw several of what looked like smaller attack and landing craft scattered across the hangar floor. "Spacecraft," he said. "TIE fighters, from the look of them."
"Yeah, but those don't all look like TIEs, chief."
Sartoris took a closer look and saw that Vesek was right. There were TIE ships there, but there were also four or five other craft mixed in- long-range freighters and transport shuttles, along with something that could've been a type of modified Corellian corvette.
"Captured enemy spacecraft," Sartoris said, masking his uncertainty with impatience. "Who knows?" He snapped a glance at Greeley. "Any of them have the parts we need?"
"Probably not."
"Then…" He stopped.
They all saw it at the same time. Something across the bay was moving behind the TIE fighters, its shadow bulking forward, slanting across the deck toward them. Behind him he was aware of the troopers already going for their blasters.
"What's that?" Austin whispered.
"No life-forms registering in the loading bay," Greeley said, voice trembling slightly. "I don't…"
"Hold it." Sartoris raised one hand without glancing back at them. "Wait here."
He took a step forward, wading deeper into the near silence, tilting his head to get a better look across the poorly lit hangar. His heart was beating too hard-he could feel it in his neck and wrists-and when he tried to swallow, his throat refused to cooperate. It was like trying to swallow a mouthful of sand. Only through sheer willpower was he able to avoid coughing.
Standing motionless, Sartoris narrowed his eyes at the things lurking in the shadows behind the TIE fighters. There were several of them, he realized now, stooping forward with gangling, flat-handed limbs, the familiar whine of servos accompanying their steady up-and-down gestures.
"Captain," one of the guards murmured behind him, "are they.»
Sartoris exhaled, and drew in a fresh breath. "Binary loadlifters," he said. "Still going about their routines."
Even as he said it, one of the CLL units stepped fully into view, facing them dully for a moment before pivoting and stomping back to the stack of crates rising up behind it. Moving the same stack from one side of the hangar to the other, Sartoris thought, back and forth endlessly.
He heard someone in the boarding party let out a sigh and a nervous chuckle. Sartoris didn't bother acknowledging it. It would have been too much like acknowledging his own sense of relief.
"We've wasted enough time," he said. "Let's move out."
They found the hovercraft on the far side of the hangar. It was the standard utility model, a balky thing with grappling servo-mech arms fore and aft, built for transporting fuel cells, but when they all climbed in, the thing sank to the floor. A pair of startled MSE droids skittered out from underneath, squealing anxiously, and disappeared into the gloom.
"Overloaded," Vesek said with just-our-luck exasperation. "Looks like we're hoofing it."
At first it wasn't bad. To get to the lower maintenance levels, they had to walk down a series of wide and silent corridors through the Destroyer's midsection, until they found their way to the cavernous storage bays beneath the primary power generator.
"Karking strange place," Austin muttered, his voice sounding alone down the long tunnel. "What do you think happened?"
"Who knows," Vesek said. "Whatever it is, the faster we're shut of it, the happier I'll be."
"Heard that."
"I'll tell you one thing, I'd hate to be anywhere near Lord Vader when he finds out they abandoned ship. How much you think it costs to replace a Destroyer?"
Austin snorted. "More credits than you and I'll ever see."
"I ever tell you I saw him in person once?"
"Who, Vader?"
Vesek nodded. "My transport was due for a routine inspection. All of a sudden my CO's having a major sphincter moment, scrambling us up to the flight deck, all spit and polish, making sure everything's extra shiny. Next thing I know, we're lined up in the hangar and his transport's landing and there he is."
"What's he like in person?"
Vesek considered. "Tall."
"Yeah?"
"And you feel something when you look at him. Like, I don't know. Cold inside." Vesek shuddered. "Kind of the way it feels in here, actually."
"All right," Sartoris said, "let's can the banter."
Ultimately the request for quiet turned out to be unnecessary. By the time they were amidships, the conversation had dried up completely and the men had lapsed into a glum and pensive silence.
Sartoris was deep in one of the lower maintenance levels when he realized that he simply wasn't going to get used to being here.
He and Vesek were loitering in one of the secondary corridors while the engineers dug through a power substation on the other side of the open hatchway. He could hear them in there, picking through parts and tossing them back. The other guard, Austin, had gone wandering through an adjacent series of interconnected chambers, rhapsodizing about how they seemed to go on forever, and Sartoris was forced to agree with him.
The vacancy of the Destroyer was both disorienting and nerve racking-they had already walked almost a kilometer of wide-open uninhabited gangways to get here, rounding each corner half expecting to find the last survivor staggering toward them, cackling. So far all they'd encountered was a menagerie of mouse droids and janitorial units, cleaning and installer droids, all going about their business as if nothing had changed. One of them-a protocol droid, a 3PO unit- had almost gotten blasted when it wandered out in front of the troopers with its hands in the air, babbling senselessly.
Sartoris kept thinking about what the engineer, Greeley, had said about ghost ships. Although the power was on, lights and instrument panels fully activated, there was no trace of any crew or the missing ten thousand troopers that should have been here. There was only silence, stillness, and emptiness, creaking softly around them in the void of space.