Star Wars: Death Troopers

Chapter 29 Sine

Zahara jerked sideways and stared back at the docking shaft. The screaming coming from inside of the shaft was inhuman. It was shrill and sharp and hateful, comprising maybe hundreds of voices pitched up together-EEEEEEEEEE. It oscillated in a waveform that the mathematical part of her mind insisted on graphing, rising up to squeeze her eardrums, sloping toward silence, then coming up again to the same frequency of precision dynamics.

Kale groaned. He was muttering something. She leaned down to listen.

". ut it off.»

She looked at him, startled by what she understood him to be saying. And in case she didn't understand, he was fully awake now, staring at her, pointing at his bandaged leg.

"Doc, please. You have to."

Another scream Dopplered by, eeeEEEEeeee, and she waited until it ended.

"What?"

eeeEEEEeee -

"Cut it off."

eeeEEEEeee -

"That's not necessary," she said. "Not right now."

eeeEEEEeee -

"I can feel it coming up through me. You have to." His eyes were bright and scared and absolutely lucid. "Please, I don't care how much it hurts, just do it, cut it off."

eeeEEEEeee -

"I can't do that."

"Then kill me."

The screaming spiraled up again, louder than before, surging up and edging off in that same pattern. It continued throughout their conversation, and Zahara started shouting so she could be heard over it.

"Your brother went with Han and Chewbacca, they're on the way now to find communications and medical supplies. You're going to get through this, trust me. How bad is your pain?"

"There is no pain."

"What?"

"It's not like that. It doesn't hurt. I can just feel it, where my d- where it bit me." His eyes were very wide now, glittering like broken glass, and she could hear the whistle of air through his nose as he lost the battle to panic. "Unwrap it at least, so I can see it. I'll show you."

"I need to keep pressure on the…"

"It's coming through me!"

"Kale, don't!"

He sat up and grabbed the bloody tourniquets from his calf, ripping them off in layers. Zahara tried to stop him and he shoved her back without so much as a backward glance, intent on peeling away the canvas strips that she'd torn from her own jacket. The last of them fell away in a sodden red heap.

"See?" Kale's face was flushed with horrified triumph. "I told you."

Zahara stared at it. There was a fist-sized chunk of flesh missing from the meaty part of his lower leg, the exposed shinbone gleaming visibly through a web of the torn muscle and viscera. The puckered flesh around the wound had gone a bruised, gangrenous gray. She found herself watching in fascinated horror as that same gray hue began to reach up his leg, past his knee to his thigh, causing it to pulsate visibly with gelatinous vitality. It was like a hand sliding up underneath his skin, reaching eagerly upward toward his torso.

"Get rid of it!" Kale shrieked, his own voice high and reedy, slapping at himself as his voice joined those of the screamers inside the shaft. "Cut it out, get rid of it, get it out of me!"

Zahara felt the wheels of time grinding to a halt. Her mind flashed back to one of her teachers at Rhinnal, something he'd said once in the classroom: The day will come when you'll be faced with a situation you're completely unprepared for, both physically and emotionally. On that day you'll find out what kind of doctor you really are, by how much you give up to fear, and how much you remember your training.

She tore open the pocket of her cargo pants and pulled out her medical kit, breaking it open. Inside were scalpels, gauze, tape-the most rudimentary tools of her trade. Down in front of her, Kale kept screaming. The gray swollen pulsation she'd seen earlier had already crept up past his waistline, rippling inside his abdomen, turning pink skin into dull, mottled pewter. Seeing it made her sick-it was like watching meat rot from the inside.

He's dying. Or worse. So do something.

She took a scalpel from the kit and lowered its sharpened tip into the exposed flesh just below his belly button. For an instant Kale's screams of fear became screeches of pain and he gaped at her in total confusion as she widened the incision, fingers probing through a slick jacket of fat to the constricted abdominal muscle beneath. A cold sweat had broken out over her forehead and upper lip. She put it out of her mind, extinguished every detail except what was right in front of her.

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.