Star Wars: Death Troopers

Chapter 31 Coffin Jockeys

When Jareth Sartoris opened his eyes, he was still strapped inside the escape pod. His skull felt like it had been split down the middle with a gaffi stick, and his right leg was twisted around sideways, pinned down by the partially collapsed front panel.

Cautiously, with great effort, he managed to extract it, sliding his knee up and rotating the ankle slowly, steeling himself for the sharp slash of pain and not feeling it.

Nothing broken.

He breathed in, exhaled a sigh of relief, his senses still coming back to him a little at a time. Was he in space? How long had he been blacked out?

He glanced down at the pod's navigational display and checked the counter, still ticking off minutes and seconds since his departure from the barge. According to the readout, he'd ejected almost four hours earlier, which meant he'd been unconscious since-

He turned his head and looked out the shattered viewport.

Then he remembered.

The pod had ejected from the Purge as planned, leaving the Longo brothers standing there with matching looks of anguish stamped across their faces. The slight twinge that Sartoris had felt at that moment had actually caught him by surprise. Had they really expected that he'd take them with him?

No, of course not. Imperial Corrections had a saying: There are no children here. They were inmates, convicts, nothing less than enemies of the Empire, and whatever had happened between him and their father-Sartoris had already started thinking about Longo's death in the vaguest of generalities-had nothing to do with anything now.

Still, that voice spoke up within him, faint but implacable:

You killed their dad and now you're leaving them to die.

Okay. So what? The galaxy was a hard place to grow up. Sartoris's own father, a petty thief and death stick addict, had beaten him savagely throughout his childhood, sometimes stopping only when he was afraid he'd killed the boy. One night when Jareth was sixteen his dad had come after him with a rusty torque-bludgeon; for the first time the boy had stood his ground, ripped the weapon away from him, and bashed in his father's skull. He'd never forget the old man's face as he died, his expression of abject bewilderment, as if he couldn't understand why his son had turned on him. Afterward Jareth dragged the body out of the hovel they shared and abandoned it in an alleyway. The local law enforcement would simply assume the old man fell victim to the latest of his countless bad decisions. The next day Jareth had lied about his age, joined up with the Empire, and never looked back.

To this day, Sartoris had never fathered any children of his own- none that he knew of, anyway, and that was a mercy. Throughout his adult life he'd rarely wasted a thought on the roaring, chaotic creature that had once called himself his father, let alone the prospect of his own fatherhood. But as the pod blasted off from the prison barge leaving Trig and Kale Longo behind, Sartoris realized he'd been remembering the old man more vividly than he had in years. In fact, remembering was too sentimental a term for it. It was almost as if Giles Sartoris were sitting next to him, beaming in approval at the way his son-after a lifetime of misdeeds-had finally lived up to his own full destiny. Just because Jareth Sartoris never spawned offspring, it hadn't stopped him from relegating another man's sons to permanent darkness.

He'd been thinking all of these things, four hours ago, when he'd realized something was wrong before the klaxons started blaring inside the escape pod-something inside the guidance system had gone seriously wrong. Rather than spiraling off into space, he had felt its trajectory curving back upward, pitching around on its side, rising up alongside of the barge. He'd stared up through the viewport-

And then he'd seen it overhead, the open maw of the Star Destroyer's docking bay descending from above, as the pod rose up into it.

A tractor beam, he'd thought, as the shadows of the hangar engulfed him. That's why we couldn't keep going, even with the thrusters repaired: there was a tractor beam turned on. He remembered thinking that at a little over two hundred meters, the prison barge was too big not be pulled inside the hangar, but the Destroyer could have locked on after they had docked, holding it there with the tower connecting them. By the time the engineers figured out what was going on, it had probably been too late.

As the pod swung up inside the bay, he'd felt himself swiveling side-long, then a lurch and an abrupt bone-jarring smash. The pod sank a little, metal squealing against metal as if pinned between two larger object and then the sides began to crumple inward. Sartoris's leg gave a loud bray of pain as the navigation panel caved in around it. Everything jolted forward again. His head snapped face-first and hit something on impact.

The last thing he'd glimpsed before blacking out was the vision of his father, smiling beside him.

Now that he'd regained his bearings, Sartoris released the shoulder restraints and took in a deep breath, shoving all doubt aside. He was alive and that was all that mattered. Switching the internal locking system to manual, he bent his leg and shot it forward to kick out the door. It fell off its hinges, waffled through the air, then disappeared. A moment later, he heard it clatter distantly to the floor.

He stuck his head out and looked around. The pod had lodged between two other ships, an old X-wing fighter and an upended TIE fighter lying on one solar array wing. Lucky for him the pod had landed hatch-up; otherwise he would have been trapped in here permanently, imprisoned between two icons of the galactic power struggle. The notion of starving to death inside the pod, beating his shoulder against the hatch until he was too weak to move, didn't allow him to appreciate the irony of such a death.

Lowering himself, he stepped over onto the X-wing and paused a moment before dropping to the floor, looking around the hangar.

It was exactly the way he remembered it, mostly desolate with a handful of abducted ships strewn out across this end. Sartoris moved forward, mindful of his sore ankle, taking his time so he wouldn't slip and make things worse. The last time he'd passed through here, he'd ordered the rest of the boarding party onward without pausing for close inspection, but now he wandered among the vessels with the sharp eyes of a man evaluating his resources. Back in his early days they'd joked about the pilots who flew these smaller TIEs because of the high mortality rate on such missions-they called them coffin jockeys. Gazing up, Sartoris could sec how the hatches and canopies had been ripped open, sometimes with such force that they dangled on their hinges. He wondered if these particular coffin jockeys had been fighting their way out, or if some unknown predator from the outside had been trying to get in.

What sort of predator? It's deserted in here, remember?

As if in answer, a high, frantic chorus of screams rang out across the hangar, ripping a hole through the silence. It was so unexpected that Sartoris actually jumped and felt the skin on his back bristling upward over his shoulders and down his arms. His scalp abruptly felt too tight on his skull. For an instant he stood perfectly straight and still, feeling a leaden sense of profound and unreasonable terror bulking down in the pit of his stomach, and looked across the hangar but couldn't see anything.

Another mutated blast of screams, this one louder.

Straight out of childhood, another vision of his father flashed through his mind, for no good reason at all: the old man smacking his lips-the death sticks had always given him dry mouth. Sartoris never forgot the moist, soft smacking sound his father made as he slipped into his room to deliver the nightly beating.

"Get a hold of yourself," he muttered, heart thudding against his sore ribs, unaware that he was even speaking aloud. "Right now. I have

Then the scream came yet again, this time seeming to emanate from everywhere at once. It was cycling up and down, bouncing off the walls of the hangar like a living thing hunting for food.

Sartoris whirled around, now close to screaming himself. He couldn't see anything. The screams-there were more of them now, a cyclonic outcry of rage-kept rising up, filling the hollow docking bay with ear-shattering din. He wished he could have convinced himself that it was some kind of alarm, a leaky air lock, anything but what it was, a cacophony of human voices.

His eyes widened further, starved for input and seeing nothing. The gray crepuscular reaches of the main hangar just went on and on, an equation for which there was no final quotient. It occurred to him that they'd never found out what happened to the other boarding party, the ones that had disappeared up here. The screams he heard now didn't sound like anything he'd ever heard, except perhaps in his worst childhood nightmares. They were the screams of the dead, his mind babbled, corpses who didn't want to stay buried.

And they sounded hungry.

Suddenly he wanted to run.

Where?

That was when the shooting started.