38/Cold Caller

ALTHOUGH HE’D NEVER CONSIDERED HIMSELF A LUCKY MAN UNDER THE BEST OF circumstances, Pergus Frode had had the presence of mind over the past several hours to realize that he was very fortunate indeed.

The cargo hold of Dranok’s cruiser, where he was hiding, had obviously been built to smuggle contraband. All around him, in the half-light, empty swing-bins and hidden storage spaces stood open, exhaling the damp and fragrant residue of illegally transported spices that had been piled up here over the years.

Frode squirmed a little, lifting his head, stretching his legs and back, allowing himself to straighten up just enough to restore circulation to his extremities. There was tingling through his feet and toes, pins and needles as the leaden heaviness of numb muscle tissue began, reluctantly, to reawaken. He was going to need the full use of his feet, he knew, in case he had to run again.

He hoped it wouldn’t come to that. He’d run enough tonight already. Although it certainly did beat the alternative.

It had started hours ago. How many? He wasn’t even sure now. He’d just finished removing the flight computer from Dranok’s ship, and had hauled it back into the shop to run some basic diagnostics on it. All that time, his unconscious mind had been wrangling with the issue of how he was going to handle the incoming heat signature from the unknown vessel heading straight for Odacer-Faustin’s landing hangar.

To inform Darth Scabrous, or not to inform him—that had been the question he’d been pondering when a bloody palm had slapped and squeaked off the control booth’s glass.

Jarred out of his thoughts, Frode had sat up and spun around just in time to see something—it might once have been human—in the process of ripping the hatch off the booth. That face was like something out of a nightmare, a gray and grinning mask: whole chunks of viscera had begun to pucker and peel around its lips. Staring at it, Frode’s brain had flashed back to a corpse that he and another mechanic had once stumbled across inside the cockpit of a speeder they’d been salvaging.

Except this corpse’s eyes were wide open, and staring at him hungrily.

If he’d stopped and given it even an instant’s thought, Frode would already have been dead. Luckily for him, rumination was not his natural tendency—his first reaction was to run. He got one leg free and kicked out the front plate above the booth’s instrument panel. The plexi popped loose and he’d gone slithering out, hitting the hangar bay and running faster than he’d ever run in his life.

The hangar was largely empty and presented extremely limited possibilities for protection. Acting on his gut, he’d reared around toward the nearest vessel—the cruiser that those two doomed bounty hunters, Dranok and Skarl, had arrived in—and went bolting up the still-extended landing ramp, reeling around to slam the ship’s hatch shut behind him.

Frode had piloted his share of ships before becoming a mechanic, and this one looked like as good an escape vehicle as any. Whatever the thing was that had tried to attack him, he had no intention of sticking around to fight it. No job was worth that.

He’d started to power up the ship, ready to activate the flight computer, and realized his error.

The hole in the instrumentation panel gaped at him like a slack, empty mouth.

No, he thought, remembering the components that he’d yanked out with such enthusiasm just an hour or so before. The flight computer was still sitting on the counter in his booth, and he couldn’t fly without it, any more than he could—

The thing landed on the cockpit in front of him, grinning hideously, and began pounding and scratching at the transparisteel. Frode screamed. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t think he’d ever screamed that loud in his life, certainly not in his adult life, but terror was booming through him now in big, wide, frantic waves. He felt dizzy with it.

And then he saw something worse.

Outside, the hangar bay was filling with the living dead.

Sith students—Frode realized only now how much he truly hated them—were shambling in the direction of the ship from all sides, jerking and scrambling and lurching forward, their mouths scooped open in big shovel-faced grins. Behind them, a sprawling, gangling thing that looked like a living tree was dragging a long mesh of dripping black roots and branches toward him. Its eyes reflected only madness. As Frode—who’d never once set foot in the academy’s library, and would never have recognized the infected remains of its arboreal curator—stood crouched in the cockpit, one of the branch-arms had swung up and slapped at the transparisteel viewport. It connected hard enough that, for a second, he almost thought he’d heard the port crack. Impossible, but…

That was when he’d run back into the rear of the ship, down a landing ramp, through a hatch, until he’d landed here, in the safest place that he could find, the smuggler’s bin, and curled here, and hadn’t moved since—

“Pergus?”

He sat up a little, uncertain if he’d heard the voice or simply imagined it. He was not a particularly imaginative person, and the voice—a female—sounded very real. After a moment he realized it was coming from the comlink mounted above his head. Frode reached up and keyed the mic.

“Pergus?”

“Who are you?” he asked aloud. “How do you know my name?”

“Kindra.”

“How come I can hear you—”

“The Force, Pergus. You’re up there. I know.”

Frode listened to the voice. There was something unsettling about it, as if the speaker, Kindra—whoever that was—was trying very hard to sound calm and easygoing, as if nothing was wrong. Underneath it, though, he detected a strong undercurrent of … what? Fear? Terror?

“Where are you?” he muttered.

“Hangar,” the voice said. “Get out. Get me out.”

“What about those things? Aren’t they still out there?”

No answer. He wondered if it was because something had happened to her that he couldn’t hear her talking anymore.

“Kindra?”

“Just … open the hatch of the ship, Pergus. Open up and let me in. I’ll be quick. We’ll both fly out of here together. We can’t stay here. But hurry. I’m right outside.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I took out the ship’s flight computer … it can’t navigate without it. We wouldn’t make it three klicks in this weather. We’ll crash right back into the snow.”

“I’ll … I’ll help us. We’ll get away somehow, I promise. Please, Pergus. Just … let me in … please. Hurry.”

Frode grimaced. One of the reasons he’d ventured all this way to the far end of the galaxy was his rotten luck with women, specifically his inability to deny them anything. Yet here he was again. Hating himself already, he stood up inside the storage bin, lifted off the steel plate, and crawled up onto the main landing ramp. In truth, he wasn’t sure why he was doing it. He knew it wasn’t right—there was definitely something wrong about opening the hatchway—yet the voice, the girl’s pleas, her desperation, motivated him forward, drew him along in a way that he couldn’t quite comprehend, and maybe she could help get them out of here, maybe …

The Force, a faint voice of reason piped up deep inside him, from somewhere hopelessly deep within himself, she’s using the Force on you, to manipulate your actions, and although he knew it was true, he still couldn’t quite seem to resist.

He reached the main hatchway, placed his hand on the lever, and turned it, pushing it forward.

“Look,” he started, “I don’t think this is—”

And stopped.

Beyond the hatch, the hangar was completely dark.

Frode stood clutching the bulkhead behind him, pupils dilating, trying to make out even the vaguest of shapes, but without success. It was as if whatever was out there had destroyed the lights and ripped out the power, burying the vast space around him in utter blackness.

But he could hear them.

Holding his breath, he could hear the sounds of many bodies rustling together, the faint moist sound of their shoulders and arms and torsos packed together in the dark. They weren’t breathing, but they were making hollow rasping noises that could have been some obscene attempt at speech.

Then, all around him, the lightsabers started coming on.

They activated individually and in clusters, red humming spikes of light, dozens of them, shooting upward, filling the air with a low, oscillating hum that shook Frode’s molars in the back of his mouth. His eyes began to adjust, and at length he began to make out the blades shining off the starved dead faces of the students that held them upright, their blank expressions, the bleak and rapacious eyes that gaped back at him. Drool gleamed on their lips. Dried red gore encrusted their teeth and lips.

No, Frode thought. Oh no.

Staring out at the things, he felt something inside him loosen, turn to liquid, and swirl away, something both abstract and at the same time terribly visceral, like the blood supply to his heart. Everywhere he looked, more scarlet streaks continued to crosshatch on top of one another, springing up in all directions, as if something were clawing its way out of the dark and the dark was bleeding.

And looking closer, he saw the girl.

She was standing at the bottom of the gangway amid a shifting prison of red blades, surrounded by the rotting corpses of her classmates, their hands clutching her arms and legs, holding her captive. Lightsabers crisscrossed in front of her, hovered over her head, immobilizing her. One of the things had its open mouth pressed up against her bare throat. Another’s teeth were bared and ready to attack a small, exposed part of her shoulder. A third and fourth stood waiting behind her, their jaws open so wide that it almost seemed like they could have devoured her entire head in one huge, all-consuming bite.

“I did what you wanted!” Kindra shouted at them. “He opened it! Now let me go! Let me—”

The things fell upon her, the red blades slashing her to pieces as they ripped her apart. Even from where Frode stood, the crunching noises were thick and juicy and glottal, like the sound of someone biting into a particularly ripe apple. Several of the corpses broke free from the group and started thundering up the gangway, toward the open hatchway, just as Frode slammed it shut again.

He decided he could fly the ship without the flight computer after all.