Джо Шрайбер - Star Wars - Death Troopers

It ended with a metallic scraping crack, durasteel on bone, and cold, foul-smelling liquid splashed in her hair. The pressure on her throat went abruptly weak, the dead hands falling slack and sliding off to the side.

Zahara looked up, her vision coming clear. The thing's head was twisted sideways now, a surgical bone saw shoved through its neck, half buried in the gray flesh.

What…?

Hovering behind him was a flat metallic face she couldn't believe she was seeing, even now.

"Waste." Her voice was barely a whisper. "You. came back.?"

The 2-1B just looked at her. "I beg your pardon?"

"You saved me."

"Well, yes, of course," the surgical droid said, a bit puzzled. And seeming to remember that it was in the process of sawing the head off the thing in the lab coat, it thrust both the bone saw and the thing aside, dropping them to the floor. "That creature was attempting to injure you. And per my programming at the medical academy in Rhinnal, my prime directive is…"

"To protect life and promote wellness whenever possible," Zahara finished for him. "I know."

The surgical droid continued to look at her expectantly, as if awaiting orders. Zahara could already see that it wasn't her 2-1B, her Waste. but she nonetheless felt a throb of gratitude disproportionate to all reason. Of course a vessel this size would employ such a unit, and this lab would be the perfect place for it. Yet the tears in her eyes were not only tears of gratitude and relief but recognition of a friend she'd lost, but hadn't truly lost after all.

"Is there anything else I can do for you?" the droid asked.

"Can you. " She sat up, looking around the lab again with what felt like fresh eyes. "Can you tell me anything else about the research that was going on here?"

"Very little, I'm afraid. In a strictly scientific sense, I do know that my programmers were working on an easily conveyed chemical means of slowing the normal course of decay in living tissue. Ideally the virus would be able to take over nerve receptors and make the muscles fire even after clinical death has resulted."

Zahara thought of the corpses screaming at one another, linking up to form organized armies.

"Were there. military applications?"

"Oh, I really couldn't say. It was highly classified, and I'm strictly a surgical and scientific unit, nonpartisan in such matters and certainly not very knowledgeable when it comes to such clandestine weapons operations."

"Then do you know where I could find a workstation that might still be functional?"

"Oh, most certainly." The droid paused, and she could hear its components clicking and whirring busily beneath its torso cowling, a familiar noise that brought back another painful memory of Waste. "My sensors indicate that there seem to be several nondisrupted consoles available in the hangar control center. However, I am obliged to inform you that given the hostile environment, such an exposed area could prove particularly hazardous to you."

"I'm used to it."

"Very well. Would you like me to diagram the most direct route?"

"How about one that I can get to without going into the hangar itself?"

"Right away."

"And Waste?"

It eyed her again. "I'm afraid I'm…"

"Thank you," she said, and resisted the urge to take hold of its cool mental hand and kiss it.

CRACK!

The next blast that slammed into the hull of the Imperial landing craft was no handheld weapon. Sartoris only realized this fact when the craft jolted suddenly upward and to the side, jerking him free from the two soldiers who'd come out of the cockpit, and launching him across the cabin headfirst into Gorrister.

The X-wing laser cannon, he thought wildly. Those things out there, they saw me use it-

And then:

I guess Gorrister was right after all. They can learn.

The commander stared up at him with an expression of perfect disorientation, like a man shaken from a particularly vivid dream.

"What. what's happening?" Gorrister's full attention was still riveted on Sartoris, then his eyes got even wider and he looked around the cabin at his starved men and the empty, folded uniform of the ones he'd killed and eaten. For an instant Sartoris thought he glimpsed total self-realization in the commander's expression, a revelation of the depthless depravity to which he'd sunk over the last ten weeks.

Sartoris reached up and punched the button over his head, deactivating the locking mechanism on the emergency hatch. Then, seizing Gorrister by the collar, he swung him straight upward, using his skull as a battering ram. It would never have worked with the lock still armed-there was a reason the transport had been able to keep out the undead for ten weeks-but now that the mechanism was disarmed, both the hatch and Gorrister's skull gave way on impact, the steel flap swinging open. Sartoris hoisted him outward, flung his limp body to the side, and reached down to grab another man at random, plucking him up under his arms. Starvation had made their bodies considerably lighter, and Sartoris managed to wrench him through the hatchway almost single-handedly.

Outside, the mob of the undead had surrounded the landing craft on all sides, a sea of hungering faces: inmates, guards and the original crew of the shuttle. As Sartoris had predicted, one of them had already clambered into the X-wing next to the shuttle and was groping desultorily at the controls. The cannons weren't pointed at the shuttle-had the thing inside the cockpit somehow banked a lucky shot off the hangar wall into their hull?

Then he saw the other X-wing, forty meters away, pointed straight at him. One of them was inside there, too.

Are they all climbing into ships?

Sartoris reached down, plucked another soldier from the transport, and heaved him out into the mob. The things fell on him instantly, grabbing his arms, legs, and head, ripping him to pieces while he was still alive. Despite his attempts to look away, Sartoris caught a glimpse of the man's face stretched wide in a silent scream as one of the undead popped his shoulder cleanly from the socket. The thing next to him took an enormous bite that removed one of the soldier's arms, waving it at the others, wielding it like a club.

Sartoris swung back down through the emergency hatch into the some kind of primitive melee weapon in his fist, some truncheon or knife. Sartoris yanked him through in one thoughtless, adrenaline-fueled gesture. There was a third man behind him, and Sartoris grabbed him as well, under the arm and beneath his scrawny shanks, and hauled him up onto the shuttle's hull, the starved soldier gaping up at him from a place beyond all helplessness.

"Please," he said. "Please, don't."

Something about the voice stopped him and Sartoris looked into his face, and saw that underneath the filth and hunger and fatigue, the soldier was just a boy, an adolescent thrust into service of an Empire whose only enduring purpose was death.

"You don't have to do this."

Looking out on the soulless, shambling things, Sartoris saw them devouring the bodies he'd thrown them, waving severed limbs, fighting over the last ragged bundles of shredded viscera. Then he looked down at the young soldier again, the sunken face and terrified eyes. The boy was watching them, too. He looked like he was about to pass out from sheer horror. Sartoris could hear the air scraping in and out through his throat, the hollows of his lungs. For a moment Sartoris was completely transported back to the last seconds of Van Longo's life, the upturned face, the beseeching eyes peering into him for some trace of mercy.

"What's your name?" Sartoris asked.

"S-sir?"

"Your name. Your parents gave you one, didn't they?"

For an instant the kid seemed to have forgotten it. Then, tentatively: