Джо Шрайбер - Star Wars - Death Troopers

"White."

"Does this ship still fly, White?"

"The sh-shuttle?" The soldier's head went up and down. "Well yeah, but that tractor beam…"

"Let me worry about that. I might be back and if I am, you and your buddies…" Sartoris flicked his eyes off in the direction where he'd thrown Gorrister."…we understand each other, White?"

"Yessir."

"I'm gonna make a break for it, and I recommend you use that opportunity to get this vessel locked down the best you can."

Without waiting to see if the kid got the message, Sartoris released his collar, allowing him to slide back down inside the shuttle, and gazed back across the hangar, his mind instinctively calculating a trajectory between the diversions he'd created when he'd thrown the other bodies out. It was a simple mathematical equation, and he'd always been good at math.

Turning hard, head down, he went pounding down the other direction, toward the bow of the shuttle, leapt off, and hit the ground running. Instantly a throng of the things came slamming toward him, arms outstretched and grasping. Sartoris plowed into one of them, skidded in a pool of blood, and felt an abrupt slash of pain across his left forearm but didn't stop to look at it.

He ran on, making a hard dash for the back of the hangar. The salvaged vessels behind him might be his only way off the Destroyer but they were no good to him unless he could disable the tractor beam, and that would mean getting himself to the command bridge first, and then -

There was a doorway at the far end of the hangar and as he ran through it, he heard an electronic beep go off-probably just a simple light sensor registering traffic through the walkway.

He looked around but didn't see anything. If one of those things had followed him back here, it was hiding from him now, which didn't make sense. At what point, he wondered, did fear itself become so redundant that it atrophied and dropped off entirely like an unnecessary, evolved-away appendage? Or would his species always find a use for fear, no matter how extreme the circumstances?

Sartoris took another look at his empty hands. Never in his life had he wanted a blaster as much as he did right now. The idea of venturing unarmed through the Destroyer was practically unthinkable. But if he stayed here, death was a guarantee.

It is anyway. The only question is when.

Walking backward, trying to see everything at once, he bumped into something hard and felt it recoil against him, jostling on a cushion of air.

Sartoris turned around and looked at it, unable to keep the half smile from spreading over his face.

It was the hoverlifter they'd come across earlier, the one they'd left here because it couldn't hold all of them.

Maybe my luck's finally starting to turn.

He took a breath and reached up to pull himself aboard the lifter- and noticed the bloody gash just below his right elbow.

That was how he realized he'd been bitten.

"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.