Star Wars: Death Troopers

Chapter 38 Bridge

"I don't know about you, pal, but I was hoping for better."

That was Han Solo, as he finally set foot inside the command bridge of the Star Destroyer. He'd been around a long time and seen a great deal of strange things, but if he survived this he'd definitely have people buying his drinks for a long time to come.

The catwalk had-well, to be honest, it had almost been more than he could handle. Crossing over had been difficult enough, weaving their way along through open space with nothing to hold on to, the bowel-churning vertigo as his center of gravity whirled like a gyro with a broken ball-and-socket.

He hadn't wanted to look down. But once the things down in the pit started shooting, he didn't have much choice.

They fired randomly, like they hadn't had much experience with blasters, but that was little reassurance when Han saw the sheer number of them. Firing back would have been a waste. There could have been thousands-at this distance it was impossible to say. It occurred to Han that they still seemed to be waking up, roused to consciousness by the presence of fresh meat, and their aim was poor, though by the end it had seemed to be improving. More than once the blasts had come close enough that he'd tasted ozone.

And if he'd lost his footing-if he'd slipped and fallen down into that sea of hungry bodies-

With deliberate effort, he forced himself back into the present moment. They were inside the command bridge, faced with the expanse of low-slung computer modules and navigation equipment with which the entirety of this kilometers-long miracle of interstellar destruction was steered.

It was smashed almost beyond recognition.

The screens had been punched through, banks of circuitry and sophisticated sensor arrays blasted, shattered, or yanked completely loose from their moorings, most of them flattened as if under some unthinkably heavy boot. Every step they took announced itself with the muffled crumple of broken glass.

"Looks like we finally found somebody that hates the Empire more than we do, huh?" Han asked, shaking his head. "You try the navicomputer yet?"

Chewie barked without bothering to look around.

"Okay, I'm just asking. Can't blame a guy for hoping, right?" He sighed and brushed debris from a seat facing one of the less thoroughly demolished consoles, plopping down. "Only thing still running is the tractor beam, huh? What kind of encryption we looking at?" He reached for a working keyboard and punched in a series of keystrokes. "Guys who designed this stuff weren't all that bright. How hard can it be?"

Something in the console chirruped, and crystalline patterns began to coalesce on the cracked screen, clarifying and sharpening into lines of navigational code.

"Hey, Chewie, I think I got something here…"

Beneath him, in response to his directive, the entire Destroyer tilted slightly on its axis. Han, who'd never flown anything remotely this big in his life, felt a kind of fatalistic good humor taking root in the floorboards of his psyche. What would the Imperial High Command have to say about this, he thought, seeing a lowly smuggler with a price on his head sitting behind the controls of a Star Destroyer?

"See, what did I tell you?" He tapped in another set of instructions, not looking up. "Hey, did you get a chance to look inside those hyperdrive systems?"

Everything jolted hard and Han sat up fast, trying to figure out what he'd done and how to undo it. It felt like the Destroyer was listing slightly, and one of the consoles had begun to emit a low, steady whine. Lines of text were crawling across the broken monitor.

"Chewie?"

The Wookiee was gone. Han stood up, looking across the empty bridge. He listened, holding the blaster he'd found at waist level. The space around him suddenly felt very large, and absolutely silent, except for the faint click of data emerging on the screen. His eyes flicked down to it again with increasing impatience. Whatever encryption had locked the tractor beam into place was still active. It was awaiting a password.

Then, from one of the adjoining spaces, he heard it-a faint growl.

"Chewbacca?"

Finger on the trigger, he crept across the bridge, following the sound, and found himself looking into a subchamber he hadn't noticed until now. It was lined floor-to-ceiling with backup systems, whole panels of pulsating lights. The Destroyer tilted again, not dramatically but enough that Han could definitely feel the shift in equilibrium, and he wondered if he'd done something to destabilize its processing systems. The last thing they needed was for this entire vessel to go belly-up on them in the middle of nowhere.

He looked inside the subchamber. "Chewie? What's going on in there?"

Chewbacca was crouched in the semidarkness, looking at something. When he rose up, Han saw he was holding a small, hairy body- another Wookiee, Han realized, very young. It was wearing a tattered prison uniform.

"How'd he get in here?''

The young Wookiee gave a weak bleating cry. Chewbacca gazed at him and then back up at Han.

"Great." Han sighed. "Anybody else we're supposed to rescue while we're here?"

Chewie uttered a warning grunt.

"Okay, okay, bring him out," Han muttered. "You put yourself on the line once and all of a sudden everybody's got their hand out."

Chewbacca carried the small Wookiee out, and Han got a better look at the youngster's face. His eyes were reddish and cloudy; his throat was swollen so badly that he seemed to be having trouble breathing. The tongue protruded thickly from his throat. "Where's the rest of your family?"

The Wookiee bleated again and Han saw where he was pointing: to another hatchway on the opposite side of the command bridge.

"They're in there? What are they doing, hiding?"

Chewbacca carried him over, shifted his weight to one arm, and reached out to open the hatchway. As he did so, the Destroyer yawed slightly again. Han saw a trickle of blood come oozing out from underneath the door and across the tilting durasteel floor toward them.

"Whoa," Han said, and nodded down, where the trickle had become a steady stream. "What is that?"

Chewbacca made a quizzical grunt and looked back at the young Wookiee, who sat up with a sudden burst of energy and pushed the button himself to open the hatch.

There were three full-grown Wookiees in prison uniforms hunched together in the corner, squatting together, sloshing around in what looked like an entire ocean of blood. Han could see that the fur of their faces was slathered in gobbets of meat, and they were snorting and smacking and breathing heavily as they tore into a pile of human remains sprawled around them. The corpses they were devouring appeared to be wearing Imperial guard uniforms.

Han breathed, "What the…?"

All at once they looked up.

It happened instantaneously-a blur of bloody hair and hot, shaggy musculature jolting toward him faster than his eyes could process. Han's reflexes took over and he opened fire on the closest one, the point-blank assault tearing the Wookiee's chest apart, laying it out flat on the floor where the thing flopped and coughed and tried to right itself. The one behind it went pinioning sideways and landed on its side, scrambling to get up while the third trampled over it. Han shot it in the face, snapping it backward. Then he opened on the one that had been trampled, blasting it until he'd reduced it to a mangled heap of trembling fur.

Next to him, Chewbacca appeared to have frozen, as if utterly detached from the situation. As Han took a step backward, he felt small sharp hands hooking into the hollow of his neck and looked around to see the young one's mouth snapping at him. He tried to shove it off, but the thing had attached itself to him with its arms and legs, its frantic, overheated body squirming against him like a giant rat.

A deafening explosion went off next to him and the young Wookiee's head burst apart. As it slumped off him and hit the floor, Han saw Chewbacca lowering his blaster.

"Thanks," Han said. "Nice of you to join in."

Chewie didn't say anything. He was still looking at the body on the floor.

"Let's get out of here, huh? Check the hyperdrive."

Eventually, with what seemed like great difficulty, Chewie turned away.