Джо Шрайбер - Star Wars - Death Troopers

"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.

The ventilation shaft hadn't been much wider than Trig's body when he'd first entered it, and now it seemed to be constricting as he squeezed through. Every few seconds a thick blast of humid air came roaring over him, buffeting his clothes and hair, and he heard metal clanking like a broken valve somewhere inside its endless length. How far it would take him, or where it ultimately let out, he didn't know-he could just as easily die inside here, lost and dehydrated, one more speck in the indifferent maw of the universe.

Then, up ahead, he saw the end of the shaft. Dim light from somewhere below cast a pale yellow rectangle on the top of the shaft-he wouldn't be able to go any farther.

Creeping closer, right up to the edge, he stuck out his neck and peered over.

He felt his stomach plummet down to his knees.

The vent emptied out into the same abyss that he'd labored so intensely to avoid earlier, the yawning pit with the long tube of the Destroyer's main engine turbine at its bottom. It looked even bigger from directly overhead. Immediately below him, less than a meter away, was the narrow catwalk where Han and Chewie had crossed, close enough that he could probably lower himself down onto it, if he absolutely had to. It would mean clinging onto the edge of the vent while he swung his legs down, dropping down onto the catwalk without losing his balance, and-

From behind him inside the shaft, something shifted.

Trig looked back.

Froze.

Wanted to scream.

The thing in the stormtrooper helmet was making its way up the went toward him.

No question about what was happening now. It was groping its way forward and looking at him intently through the soulless lenses of the helmet.

"No," Trig whispered. "Don't."

It kept coming, the oversized helmet wobbling on its head as it crept forward. Trig looked back over the edge of the vent again. He could feel his entire body shaking helplessly, his heart racing so fast and hard that he thought it might burst inside his chest.

You have to go down there, a voice said inside his head. You have to go to the catwalk. It's the only way, or else that thing, that thing-

I don't want to! I can't!

He glanced back at the thing crawling toward him. It ducked its head and started crawling faster.

That was when the helmet fell off.

Trig blinked, momentarily undone by shock and dismay so disorienting that he actually forgot where he was and what he was doing. In that second he could only stare at the face that had been revealed under the helmet, his brother's ruined grin, one entire side of his face destroyed beyond recognition, the gleaming socket and smashed bone.

And then he heard himself trying to speak, his voice rusty, scarcely a whisper:

"Kale?"

The thing looked at him and just kept coming.

"Kale. It's me-it's Trig."

It showed no sign of hearing him. Trig could see it salivating now, the drool mixing with runnels of blood dried to its face. He could hear it breathing, and the noise reminded him of the sound the air made as it whooshed through the vent. This was too much. It wasn't happening, and if it was, then it meant he'd gone mad, in which case-

It pounced forward, smashing him down against the vent at the very edge of the outflow lip. Trig opened his mouth to say something and burst into tears. This time he let them come out all they wanted, tears and snot and sobs and bawling, and why not? What possible difference could any of it make now?

Kale's mouth opened and closed, and Trig could smell the death that was locked in there, the death that had been dealt to his brother, the death that his brother was about to deal to him. Kale wasn't going to answer him, and he wasn't going to stop. Trig had loved his big brother more than anything else in the galaxy, and it didn't matter now.

"Kale?"

It gave a snarl and lowered its face to Trig's neck, the teeth and tongue sweeping over his throat, dripping hot breath that smelled like some ghastly, poisonous moss. Kale's hands felt both hot and cold at the same time, the dead flesh moist, sticky, and clutching. He'd climbed on top of Trig now, pressing down on him with his full weight.

With a cry of pain, Trig shoved him back. A white-hot spark of something he'd never felt before went sizzling across the pit of his stomach and landed on his heart, and a light went out inside him, followed by a dismal realization of what was about to happen. It was like a story he'd already heard, the ending written long before he ever got a chance to do anything about it.