Джо Шрайбер - Star Wars - Death Troopers

"How many's a handful?" Vesek wanted to know.

"Ten, perhaps twelve."

"Ten or twelve?" Vesek shook his head. "Sounds like a scanner issue. Destroyers can carry a crew often thousand or more."

"Thank you," Kloth said drily. "I'm well aware of the standard Imperial specs."

"Sorry, sir. It's just, either our equipment is undergoing some serious malfunction, or.»

"Or there's something else going on up there." It was the first time Sartoris had spoken in the office, and he was surprised at the hoarseness in his voice. "Something that we don't want any part of."

The others all turned to look at him. For what felt like a long time after that, no one spoke. Then the warden cleared his throat. "What are you saying, Captain?"

"There's no reason the Empire would just abandon an entire Star Destroyer out here in the middle of nowhere without a good reason."

"He's right," Austin said. "Maybe…"

"Internal atmosphere diagnostics show no sign of any known toxin or contamination," Kloth said. "Of course it's always possible that our instruments are misreading how many life-forms are on board. We screen for numerous variables, electrical brain activity, pulse, motion, any number of those things could skew the reading. In any case. " He smiled-a wholly unconvincing dramatization that ought to have involved invisible wires and hooks on either side of his mouth. "The most critical factor is that we may be able to salvage equipment for our thrusters and get back on course before we're completely behind schedule. To that end, I'll be sending a scouting party up-Captain Sartoris, along with ICOs Austin, Vesek, and Armitage and the mechanical engineers, to see what they can salvage. We anticipate docking within the hour. Questions?"

There were none, and Kloth dismissed them in the usual fashion, by turning his back and letting them find their own way out. Sartoris was about to follow them when the warden's voice stopped him.

"Captain?"

Stopping in the doorway, Sartoris drew a breath and felt the ache in his head become a deeper, more impacted pounding, like a gargantuan infected tooth somewhere in his frontal sinus. The door closed behind him, and it was just the two of them in what felt like an increasingly shrunken space.

"Am I making a mistake, sending you up with these men?"

"Excuse me, sir?"

"Sir." Kloth's smile rematerialized, a wisp of its former self. "Now, that's a word I haven't heard from you in a long time, Captain."

"We haven't seen each other much lately."

"I'm aware that this voyage has been particularly. challenging for you personally," Kloth said, and Sartoris found himself hoping fervently that the warden wouldn't start stroking his chin again. If he did, Sartoris wasn't sure he could rein in the urge to punch him straight in his pompous and disaffected face. "After what happened two weeks ago, in many ways I expected your resignation right alongside Dr. Cody's"

"Why?"

"She saw you kill an inmate in cold blood."

"It was her word against mine."

"Your antiquated interrogation techniques aren't appropriate any-more, Captain. You're costing the Empire more information than you're retrieving."

"All due respect, sir, Longo was a nobody, a grifter…"

"We'll never know now, will we?"

Sartoris felt his fists clenching at his sides until his nails burrowed into his palms, delivering stinging pain deep into the skin. "You want me off your boat, Warden? You just say the word."

''On the contrary. You may consider this mission an opportunity to redeem yourself. If not in my eyes, then certainly in the eyes of the Empire to which we both owe so very much. Is that understood?" "Yes, sir."

Kloth turned and scrutinized him as if for any sign of sarcasm or mockery. In his decades of service, Jareth Sartoris had been to the very edges of the galaxy, living under conditions he wouldn't wish on his worst enemy. He'd had to sleep in places and commit unspeakable deeds that he would've given entire body organs to forget. That simple yes, sir didn't taste any worse than any of the rest of it.

"So we're clear, then?" Kloth asked.

"Crystal," Sartoris replied, and when Kloth turned to show him his back, it wasn't a moment too soon. The warden's office was bigger than any other on the barge but it was still too small for Sartoris, and as the cooler air of the outer corridor hit him he realized he'd sweated through the armpits of his uniform completely.

"You keep looking out there," Kale said, "sooner or later you're going to see something you won't like."

"I already have." Trig was stationed in his usual spot in the detention cell, gazing through the bars. Across the hall, directly opposite them, the two Rodian inmates who'd been there ever since he and Kale and their rather had been brought aboard stood glowering back at him. Sometimes they muttered to each other in a language Trig didn't recognize, gesturing at the brothers and making noises that sounded like laughter.

Now, though, they just stared at him.

At least two hours had passed since the Purge had gone into total lockdown. Trig wasn't sure when all this had happened. It was one of the first things the Empire took from you when they took your freedom: the sense of passing time. It was information you didn't deserve. As a result, Trig relied on his body to tell him when it was time to eat, sleep, and exercise.

Now it was telling him to be afraid.

The noise from the rest of the hall was louder than he expected. Standing here next to the bars, Trig could make out individual voices, prisoners bellowing in Basic and a thousand other languages, demanding to know why the barge had stopped and how much longer it was going to be until they got going again. The deviation from routine had left them restless and giddy. Someone was screaming for a drink of water, someone else wanted food-another voice shouted and spluttered with hysterical, gibbering laughter. There was a sonorous, deep-chested growl, probably a Wookiee, Trig thought, though for the most part the ones he'd seen on board kept to themselves unless threatened. Someone else kept hammering something metallic against the wall of their cell, a steady, methodical wham-wham-wham. You could go crazy listening to something like that, Trig thought; you could go right out of your mind.

"All right, that's enough!" a guard's voice broke in. "The next maggot that makes so much as a peep goes straight down to the hole!"

Silence for a moment, yawning. and then an anxious titter. It brought another, followed by a wild yodeling shriek, and the entire detention level erupted in an avalanche of chatter, louder than ever. Trig put his hands to his cars and turned back to the corridor. Then he jerked backward in surprise.

"Wembly," he said. "You startled me."

"Two dead boys," ICO Wembly said, with real regret. "And I liked you guys, too. Decent fellas. Not that it counts for much aboard this rotten bucket of garbage, but. " The guard sighed. He was a fat man in his late fifties, with a loosely knit face, veins on his nose, and lines cut deeply beneath his watery eyes-eyes made for crying, a mouth made for laughter, shoulders made for shrugging, Wembly was a walking miracle of compulsive self-expression. "I sure am gonna miss you, tell you true."

"What are you talking about?" Kale asked.

There was a click, and a synthesized voice buzzed from somewhere behind Wembly's head. "You haven't heard? Aur Myss just put a ten-thousand-credit bounty on your heads."

Trig glanced at the BLX unit standing behind Wembly's shoulder. For some reason, the labor droid had adopted the guard, following him everywhere, and for reasons equally nebulous Wembly allowed it. As one of the senior corrections officers aboard the Purge, he was technically permitted a droid assistant, though Trig knew of no other guard, including Captain Sartoris himself, who actually tolerated one.