Star Wars: Death Troopers

Chapter 42 River

The kid stood no chance.

Even from here, Han could sec how it was going to play out, and if he and Chewie went out on the catwalk to try to help him, it would just mean all three of them would die together. It was a miserable thing to realize, yet there it was-a rock-solid certainty.

Chewie gave a long, mournful howl.

"Yeah, I know," Han shot back, hating himself all the more for having to say it out loud. "You got any better suggestions?"

Out on the catwalk, the kid was slipping off, the thing dangling stubbornly from his ankle, dragging him down. He might be able to hang on for another five seconds, certainly no more. In an act of pure desperation, Han leveled his blaster, knowing he had no shot-he could just as easily hit Trig from this distance, or miss altogether. But what else was he supposed to do?

Are you really going to sit this one out? Cash it in, go down without a fight?

Chewbacca was looking at him, awaiting the decision. At last Han nodded and lowered the blaster.

"Okay," he muttered, "on my signal, we go out, just try to grab him…"

Chewie gave another howl, this one more startled, and Han saw what he was looking at.

It was too late.

The kid had let go.

The kid was falling.

From the moment his fingers finally slipped off, some part of Trig felt nothing but pure weightless relief: after everything that had happened, just to give up and surrender himself to gravity and the void. As he fell, Myss still clinging to his legs, he looked down into the screaming faces coming closer and felt the full intensity of their wrath swallowing him up. He remembered hoping that he'd be dead by the time he hit, and guessed that probably wouldn't happen either, unless-

Something swooped underneath him, and he smashed into it, connecting with his right hip and shoulder and rolling backward, arms and legs flopping with the leftover momentum. A heartbeat later and his forehead ricocheted off the smoothness of cold prefabricated resin. He propped himself up, felt the speed accumulating around his face, pushing forward. He wasn't falling anymore-

But he was moving.

He realized that he'd landed inside some kind of hovercraft, a utility lifter, shooting across the empty space above the main engine turbine, still twenty meters above the deathscape of screaming faces.

Trig turned his head and glanced forward. There was a figure perched up at the steering console. He couldn't see who it was-

Except that the man seemed to be wearing an Imperial prison guard uniform.

The lifter tilted, arcing sideways over the abyss, and when the driver shot a glance back around, Trig got a look at his face. Not that it made any sense, but after two and a half months aboard the prison barge, he would have recognized Jareth Sartoris anywhere.

Sartoris banked hard and swung the lifter around toward the far side of the catwalk where Han and Chewie stood staring at it with a look of disbelief that matched Trig's own. The guard's voice was a hoarse croak above the screams and blasterfire.

"You coming?"

Han and Chewie dived in without a word. The lifter sank under the new weight, and Sartoris rammed the stick forward and up. Watching him wrestle with it, Trig noticed the deep bite on his forearm, the way the underlying tissue had already started to bulge and pucker from some gray squirming necrosis deep inside.

Sartoris was fighting more than just the throttle, he realized.

The lifter rocked sideways, straining to hold them above the mob below, faces lit up by steady, strafing blasterfire. Han and Chewie had already taken their positions over either side, shooting back.

"You're that pilot, right?" Sartoris shouted, not looking over. "Can you fly this?"

Han blinked at him. "You're gonna let me…"

"See this?" Sartoris held up his bitten arm, the exposed tissue squirming visibly now as though it had a series of small, electrically charged serpents writhing just below the flesh, trying to find a way out. "I don't have much time."

"Yeah, well…" Han leaned over and squeezed off another round of fire into the masses. "Chewie and I are a little busy right now."

Sartoris looked over his opposite shoulder. "What about you?"

"Me?" Trig squeaked.

"We're overloaded." Sartoris gestured over at the pitch and yaw alarms that had already started flashing faster on the main console, and Trig realized with horror that they were still going down, descending slowly but steadily into the shrieking morass below. Within seconds they'd be feeling the clutching hands thumping the underside of the lifter, yanking themselves onboard. "The hover won't take the weight."

"I don't think I can…"

"Time to learn." Sartoris took hold of the boy's arm and steered him forward past Han, planting him in front of the console. "Got it?"

"Where are we going?"

"There's an Imperial shuttle down in the hangar with some soldiers aboard. Look for a kid named White." Trig realized the captain of the guards was holding on to his shoulder, looking at him; the man's eyes burned through clear and bright. "You understand what I'm telling you?"

"But…"

Sartoris squinted, the vertical lines deepening on either side of his mouth, furrows that you could fall through if you weren't careful. "There's something you should know about your father."

"You knew him?"

"He was a good man," Sartoris said. "Unlike me."

Trig stared at him.

"He would've been proud of you. You ought to know that."

"How…" Trig started. He was still talking when Sartoris swung his legs over the lifter's side rail and jumped.

"Kid!" Han cried out. "Are you flying this thing or what?"

Trig leaned forward, grappling clammy-palmed with the throttle, barely keeping them from colliding with the wall. The turbine and its abyss were behind them now, shearing off at some unlikely angle. Everything in front of him was coming at him too fast, a smear of reckless velocity.

Twenty meters below, in the concourse leading forward, the original inhabitants of the Destroyer were still shooting, and climbing the walls trying to get them. They were packed together, thousands of them, a solid river of recking and deteriorated flesh. As one, they threw back their heads and let out another group scream. It was answered by another scream from far away.

"You know where you're going?" Han shouted.

Trig glanced down at the layout on the lifter's navigational screen, the blip showing where they were among the labyrinth of midlevel passageways. He felt sweat dripping under his armpits and over his ribs.

You can do this.

The lifter jerked. Something was climbing up from the underside. He could feel the lifter tipping. Han leaned over, trying to see what it was, and shook his head.

"I can't get a shot!"

Trig looked forward again. He brought the throttle down as low as he dared, until he saw the exhaust manifold rising up from the corrugated floor. Holding his breath, he nudged the stick forward, dropping them another fraction of a millimeter. It was pure seat-of-your-pants speculation-the sort of thing his father and his brother would have excelled at, but he was the only one left to do it.

"Trig, what…"

Wham!

The corpse underneath the lifter slammed into the manifold, scraped off, and went pinwheeling sideways, headless now, down into the masses that had spawned it. Han threw him an appreciative glance.

"That's more like it."

Careering around a corner, Trig steered them down the slightly wider throughway, dull yellow lights whickering past like his own wildly careering thoughts. He kept going back to what Sartoris had said just before jumping off the lifter.

He was a good man. I'm not.

It had been a generality, spoken by a man who knew he was going to his death. Why had it sounded like he'd been confessing to killing Von Longo?

A burst of static broke from the lifter's comlink, a voice rising from its speaker.

"Hello, is anyone there?"

Han's arm shot past his face to grab the link, flicking it on. "Who's this?"

"…Cody…" the voice cut in."…hangar control…"

"We're on our way now," Han said.

"…no-stay away…"

"Say again."

"Under attack…"

The comlink sputtered, Zahara's voice reduced to a warble. Trig thought he heard blasters in the background, the twang and crash of catastrophic wreckage. He watched as Han changed frequencies, trying to home in on the signal.

"I'm losing you, Doc," Han said. "Just hang on, okay?"

". too many of them. " Zahara's voice was drifting, lost between clouds of heavier static. Trig thought he heard the words "laser cannon," and then the link broke off entirely. Han dropped the comlink and checked the lifter's digitized schematic.

"It's okay, we're almost there, right?" he said. "That's the entryway straight ahead."

Trig eased the stick back and then let it go forward, getting a feel for it at last, now that the trip was all but over. The lifter blurred through the end of the corridor, toward the hatchway where Han was pointing. Despite the fact that they were almost there, Trig felt an odd tug of apprehension, a sense of having made the wrong decision about something so long ago that there was no way to correct it now.

Chewie growled, and Han's nostrils flared. He looked worried.

"Yeah," he said. "I smell it, too."

Trig glanced over. "What?"

"Smoke."

The hangar wall was on fire.

Through the smoke Trig could see the army of the dead pouring through, headed to the far end of the hangar. The X-wing that had evidently attacked the wall was still pointed at it, its laser cannons tilted upward with random blocks of salvaged equipment. Trig glanced back up where flames had overtaken the west end of the hangar, obscuring everything in a wall of thick, oily smoke that smelled like burning copper wires and charred durasteel.

"Where did Dr. Cody say she was?" he shouted.

"Main hangar control," Han said.

"Which is.?"

Han pointed directly into the flames. Trig pulled back on the stick, angling the lifter up into the choking black wall. Instantly his eyes, nose, and throat started stinging, tears streaming down his face. He could hear Han shouting at him, and Chewbacca let out a loud, angry-roar that broke off in a burst of deep coughs.

"What are you doing?" Han said. "You want to get us killed?"

"I'm not leaving her."

"If she's up here she's already dead!"

Trig brought the lifter upward until he was staring through the flames into what was left of the main hangar command. Melted computers and consoles lay bubbling across the warped durasteel floorboards like a surrealist nightmare of Imperial technology.

She's not in there, he thought. She made it out. Maybe-

The thought snapped off cleanly in his mind.

It was a small shape, dwarfed by the oblong slab of charred components that had toppled over to crush it. Trig looked at the slender hand protruding outward from underneath the pile, remembered how it had looked resting on his father's shoulder in the infirmary. He felt the last of his breath evaporate from his lungs, leaving him absolutely still.

"Kid." Han's voice was far-off, and from the sound of it, Trig knew he'd seen her, too. "We have to go."

Trig opened his mouth to speak but nothing came out. He turned the lifter away, and down.