37/Lifter

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 uniforms 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 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 shuttle and grabbed the next man, who had been coming at him with 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:

“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.