Star Wars: Death Troopers

Chapter 11 Red Map

Sartoris was dreaming when the knock on the door awakened him.

In the dream he was still wandering around the Destroyer, alone. The rest of his party-Austin, Vesek, Armitage, the engineers and troopers-was dead and gone. Something aboard the Destroyer had picked them off, one by one. Each man's departure had been marked by a scream, followed by a sickening crack that Sartoris seemed to feel as much as hear.

Sartoris kept moving, trying to ignore a nagging itch that had spread across the skin of his stomach like a rash. He knew it was only a matter of time before the beast, whatever it was, came after him. It wouldn't be long before he glimpsed its true face, if it had one. Maybe it didn't; perhaps it was simply sickness personified, a brainless and ravenous void that sucked in life.

A maze of hallways stood ahead of him, and Sartoris's pace faltered. He was lost and he knew it. He wasn't even sure if he was heading toward the thing or away from it. The skin around his abdomen itched worse and he stopped to scratch it and felt something impressed on the flesh itself, like a tattoo or a mesh of wrinkles. His dream-self tugged up his shirttail from his pants and he looked down at the skin of his side and saw that there was in fact something printed on his side, some kind of map-a map of the Star Destroyer. The diagrams disappeared into his flesh, and he realized he'd have to open himself up to read it. Steeling himself, he hooked the first two fingers of his right hand and raked them as hard as he could into the muscle above his hip, ignoring the dry-ice spike of pain and thrusting in deeper to peel back the outer tissue layer. The fat came loose from his flank with a sickening ease. Blood gushed out of his side, hot and steaming, running down his legs and filling up his boots.

When he woke up, a scream at his lips, the knocking had turned into pounding.

He sat up, shivered with a kind of all-over wetness, and for a queasy instant thought he was still bleeding. But the hot sticky moisture clinging to his skin was only perspiration-it pasted his hair to his brow and stuck his uniform to his back. The only part of his body that wasn't wet was the inside of his mouth; it was bone-dry.

Opening the door of his quarters he saw two guards in orange bio-hazard suits and masks standing there, looking like refugees from his interrupted dream.

"Captain Sartoris?"

He blinked. "What's this?"

"Sir, we've been instructed to bring you down to the infirmary."

"Why?"

A pause, then: "Orders, sir."

"Whose?" Sartoris asked, and made it easy for them. "The warden's or Dr. Cody's?"

The guards exchanged a glance. The glare off their face-shields made it hard to say which one responded. "I'm not sure, sir. But…"

"Who gave the order to gear up?" Sartoris asked, but he was already thinking about Austin's cough and Greeley's vomiting, and the others, all of them. Too late he wished he'd conferred with Warden Kloth about the other party before going back, to his quarters. It had been a small act of defiance that had blown up in his face, another poor decision in a long and self-destructive chain of questionable choices. He ought to have reported back first: swallowed his agitation and just done it.

"Better come with us, sir."

Sartoris took a step forward to try to identify the men inside the mask. "I feel fine," he said, and although this was the truth, it felt like a lie, maybe because of the guards' reaction-when he came forward, they both took one big step back.

"How are Austin and the engineer, Greeley?"

"Austin's dead, sir. He died about an hour ago."

"What?" Sartoris gaped at them, feeling gut-punched. "That's impossible. I was just talking to him." How long had he been up here sleeping? A new thought occurred to him then-a desperate realization of an eventuality that he might have to face, sooner rather than later. "What about Vesek?"

"I really couldn't say, sir. They're all in quarantine. I think. " The guard, whom he'd finally identified as a short-timer named Saltern, was taking another step backward. "Maybe you better just come up and talk to her yourself."

"Dr. Cody, you mean."

"Yes, sir."

Sartoris didn't ask any more questions. He came out, and felt the guards falling in a step behind him.

"I can find my way up to the infirmary, Saltern."

"We were ordered to go with you, sir."

In case I bolt, Sartoris thought, and then: Maybe I should.

But he had told them the truth-he did feel fine. Whatever had happened to the others up on the Destroyer hadn't touched him. It was a localized phenomenon, and he wasn't going to let it get to him.

You won't have a choice.

"Take me upstairs," he said. "I need to talk to Vesek."