Star Wars: Death Troopers

by Joe Schreiber

  “Is he going to make it?” Sartoris asked.

  “Not for much longer. Not like this.” She turned to face him. “I need to speak to you.”

  “I was just leaving.”

  Zahara gave him an incredulous look. “Excuse me?”

  “I came to talk with Vesek.” Sartoris shot a glance at the tube taped into place around the guard’s mouth. “Not much chance of that now.”

  “You can’t leave.”

  “Who’s going to stop me?” His eyebrow hiked up. “You?”

  “You’re in quarantine because you’re one of the primary carriers of this infection,” Zahara said. “You need to stay here.”

  Sartoris eyed her levelly, taking her measure. The cold indifference in his face was unlike anything she’d ever encountered before, as if it were permanently etched beneath the features, across the very bones of his face.

  “I’m going to make this very clear,” he said. “You have no authority over me. And there’s nothing you can do for me or my men or any of these inmates. You’re useless, Dr. Cody, and you know it. If you were one of my guards, you’d be gone by now … if you were lucky. Otherwise you’d be dead.”

  “Look—” she started.

  “Save it for your precious inmates,” he said, standing up and starting to walk toward the sealed hatch. “I’ve already heard enough.”

  “Jareth, wait.”

  At the sound of his first name, he stopped in his tracks, and when he turned around and saw her expression, a grin twisted like barbed wire across his face. “You’re scared stiff, aren’t you?”

  “That’s got nothing to do with this.”

  “You ought to be. They’re going to remember you for this.”

  “What?”

  “You might think you’re through with the Empire, but they’re not through with you.” He glanced outside the bubble, where the 2-1B was hurrying from bed to bed as the alarms switched on, each one signaling cardiac and respiratory arrest. “Every exposed inmate and guard on this barge is going to die in the next few hours, while you stand there in your isolation suit with your tools and your droids. I hope you enjoy answering questions, because there’s going to be plenty of them waiting for you.” He reached out with one finger and very gently placed it against her sternum. “You’ll spend the rest of your life living this down.”

  “What did you and your men see up in that Star Destroyer?” she asked.

  “What did I see?” Sartoris shook his head. “Nothing—not a thing.”

  Sighing, she glanced at the monitor screens alongside the bubble’s inner membrane. “Your blood work is coming back clean. The infection doesn’t seem to be affecting you whatsoever.”

  “Benefits of clean living,” he said, and shoved past her. “If you think you can detain me, you’re welcome to try. Otherwise I’ll be up in the warden’s office. I’m sure he’ll be interested in hearing about how you and your staff are bearing up in this crisis.”

  Before she could move to stop him, he’d already walked out of the bubble and through the medbay. Something about his motives bothered her. There was no way he was going waste time talking to Kloth just to report on her inefficacy here. How much more trouble could she really get in now, anyway?

  Zahara started to follow him and paused, feeling momentarily light-headed. She stopped short, scrutinizing herself for any of the symptoms she’d seen in her patients. Her breathing was fine, she felt no pain or lethargy—was she just feeling the accumulated tension of the whole situation?

  “Waste?”

  “Yes, Dr. Cody.” The droid didn’t look up from the inmate whose bunk it was squatting over, administering some sort of IV injection.

  “I need you to run some blood and cultures.”

  “On what patient?”

  “Me,” she said, and held out her arm.

  The 2-1B looked at her. “But that would require me to violate the isolation barrier of your suit.”

  “The suits don’t work, anyway,” she said. “You said so yourself.”

  “I was speculating—”

  “Enough.” She peeled off the mask and tossed it aside, yanking off the gloves and pulling her sleeve up to expose her bare arm. From the nearby beds, the inmates gazed at her blankly.

  “Dr. Cody, please—” Waste’s synthesized voice was edging perilously close to panic. “—my theories regarding the efficacy of the barge’s isolation gear are hardly conclusive, and in any case, the prime directive of my programming plainly states that I am to protect life and promote wellness whenever possible.”

  “Just do it,” she said, and locked her eyes on the droid’s visual sensors, waiting for the needle.

  15/VHB

  SARTORIS WALKED BACK UP THE CORRIDOR TOWARD THE WARDEN’S OFFICE WITH A PAIR OF E-11 BLASTER RIFLES, THEIR STOCKS COLLAPSED SO HE COULD HOLD ONE IN EACH HAND. He’d taken them off two of the stormtroopers in the hallway—one of them, right outside the infirmary, had attempted to shoot him with it. The guard in question, a man that Sartoris had known for years, had staggered toward him with his helmet in his hand and blood in his eyes, coughing and ranting at the top of his lungs. He didn’t seem to have any idea where he was but kept insisting he get medical care. He said his lungs were filling up with fluid and he couldn’t breathe, he was drowning from the inside but they wouldn’t let him into the medbay. Sartoris tried to shove past the man, and the guard pulled the blaster and pointed it at him. When he finally realized who he was about to shoot, the trooper stopped and swayed sideways against the wall.

  “Cap, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—”

  Sartoris grabbed the E-11 from him, switched it to stun, and shot him point-blank. Twenty meters later, another stormtrooper came at him, and Sartoris had been faster this time, dropping him on sight. It had been like that the rest of the way up. Guards and troopers in ineffective infection-control gear stumbled up and down the hallway, coughing and puking blood into their masks, reaching out to him for help and begging him for answers to what was going on. Many of them had already collapsed and lay facedown on the floor. The farther he went, the more bodies lay in his path. Sartoris stepped over them when he could; other times he stepped on top of them. With every passing meter, the musty fug of bile and stale sweat hanging in the air grew more oppressive. He had never smelled anything like it. If things were this bad up here in the administration level, he couldn’t imagine how bad it was down in Gen Pop—it would be a nightmare down there. He wondered if the warden had already pulled all the remaining guards up from the detainment levels entirely, sealed the whole thing off, and was waiting for the inmates to die.

  Reaching Kloth’s office, he pressed the call-switch and waited for an acknowledgment, but the warden’s voice didn’t answer back.

  “Sir, it’s Captain Sartoris. Open up.”

  No reply, but Sartoris knew he was in there. Historically the warden had faced all crises big and small from the sanctity of his office—today would be no different.

  And the warden had something that Sartoris needed.

  The access codes to the escape pods.

  Maintaining the pods had been one of the duties of ICO Vesek, and Sartoris knew that Vesek had the launch codes to activate the pods. And so he had sat next to Vesek’s bunk in the quarantine bubble, staring down into Vesek’s hallucinating expression, those disoriented rolling eyes, asking him over and over for the launch codes. But Vesek had been less than forthcoming. Eventually Sartoris had lost patience with the guard—he could be forgiven for that, couldn’t he? Wouldn’t it make sense that eventually he’d need to apply a bit more pressure, to help Vesek focus on what he was asking?

  He hadn’t meant to pinch Vesek’s nose shut for as long as he had. If Vesek had cooperated, simply snapped out of it for a moment and given him the codes, none of that would have been necessary. All Sartoris had needed was information, the same way he’d wanted information from that old inmate Longo, but the old man hadn’t been very forthcoming, either, and this was
a prison barge, after all, wasn’t it?

  Accidents happened.

  But Vesek wasn’t an inmate, a voice inside Sartoris’s head whispered. Vesek was one of your own men, and you—

  “He was on his way out, anyway,” Sartoris muttered, and turned his attention back to the task at hand. Warden Kloth was in there, and he needed to talk to him more urgently than ever. Sartoris was going to convince Kloth that they needed to get off the barge now if there was any chance of staying alive. There was plenty of room in the escape pod for both of them—or just himself, if Kloth didn’t see things his way.

  “Warden?” Sartoris shouted.

  Still nothing from the other side of the door. Sartoris glanced down at the blasters in his hands, and back at the door. It was probably blastproof, and shooting his way in would only start a volley of ricocheting bolts that might end up killing him. But he needed to get the access codes, sooner rather than later, if—

  Then the door slid open, all by itself.

  At this point, Sartoris hadn’t been expecting it, and he actually hesitated for a moment, peering inside the chamber. Kloth’s office appeared empty—the holomural desert scene, an abandoned console, the view outside unobstructed.

  Sartoris stepped inside, and the smell hit him hard. It was the same ammoniac odor that had accumulated in the corridors outside, only a more concentrated version, and he cupped his hand over his nose and mouth, laboring to suppress his gag reflex.

  “Captain,” something gargled from the other side of the console. “How nice to see you.”

  Sartoris took another step and looked forward, then down. Warden Kloth was lying on the floor below his console, curled on his side in the fetal position, in a pool of something grayish red. When he saw Sartoris standing over him, he lifted himself up on both elbows and took a raspy, shaking breath. Webs of sticky fluid dribbled from his nose and chin. The sickness had stripped away any remaining affectation of toughness and cruelty, leaving only the trembling, skinned thing that Sartoris had known was inside him all along.

  “I’ve been watching the monitors,” he said. “This infection from the Star Destroyer—” He coughed again. “It’s spreading too quickly to stop. Would you agree?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Then we’re left with only one choice …” Kloth sucked in another labored, snorkeling breath. “We have to abandon ship.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  “You’ll help me to the escape pod,” he said between hacking coughs. “That’s SOP. I’ll make … my full report from there. Imperial … Corrections won’t question my decision—they can access all the data from the infirmary afterward—they’ll see I had no choice—”

  Sartoris had to smile. Even in extremis, the man was still thinking about how to cover himself in front of his superiors.

  “You have the access codes for launch?” he asked.

  Kloth coughed and nodded, and coughed harder, the force of it making veins bulge like twisted blue worms in his temples.

  “I think,” Sartoris said, “that you should tell me now.”

  The warden stopped coughing. His eyes narrowed, then widened. Sartoris was pointing both of the E-11s at Kloth’s face, close enough that he knew Kloth would be able to smell the tinge of ozone that still clung to their barrels, and see that Sartoris had switched them back to kill.

  “You’re an animal,” Kloth said. “I should have relieved you from duty when I had the chance.”

  “It’s not too late,” Sartoris said, holding the blasters steady. “You could make it your last official act as warden.”

  “Put those down. You’ll need both hands to help me to the pod.”

  “I think I can manage,” Sartoris said. “After you give me the codes.”

  “I don’t have much choice, do I?”

  Sartoris regarded him blandly. “I suppose you could try lying to me. But I deal with liars and con artists every day, so under the circumstances I wouldn’t recommend it.”

  “The codes are already imprinted here. I couldn’t alter them if I tried.” Kloth handed him a datacard, his hand trembling only slightly, and held Sartoris’s gaze steadily as he did so. “Captain?”

  “Yes?”

  “There’s a subsection of the Imperial Corrections Psychological Profile Exam known as the Veq-Headley Battery. It’s specifically skewed to indicate any underlying psychopathological attitudes in the applicant … with the understanding that such things might come in handy in service to the Empire.” His tongue came out and moistened his upper lip. “Would you like to know how you scored on your VHB, Captain Sartoris?”

  “I think we both already know the answer to that, sir,” Sartoris said, and squeezed both triggers.

  The effect at close range was nothing short of spectacular. Warden Kloth’s entire cranial vault sheared away in a dense cloud of scarlet, gristle, and bone. His neck and shoulders flopped sideways, torqued on some invisible axis with the leftover momentum of the energy blast, and then landed with a wet splat, skidding backward in the spattered reservoir of blood.

  Sartoris pocketed the datacard and turned to face the still-open door. That was when he saw the young guard in the isolation suit standing out in the corridor, staring at him slack-jawed, his fever-blotched face gone abruptly pale so the blisters stood out like stars. When the guard realized that Sartoris was looking at him, he jerked both hands up and backed into the hallway behind him, his chin going up and down trying to yammer out words.

  “Captain? You j-just shot Warden Kloth.”

  “Did him a favor,” Sartoris said, taking note of the guard’s runny nose and the fever sores clustering around his lips. “You want one?”

  The guard looked as if he’d just lost control of his bladder and bowels simultaneously.

  “Get out of here.” Pointing with one of the blasters: “Go that way.”

  The guard nodded, turned, and fled, boots clattering, rasping audibly for breath. Sartoris wished him well. He went the other direction, and started making his way to the escape pod.

  16/In the Cage

  ALTHOUGH THERE WAS NO LONGER ANYONE ALIVE TO MONITOR IT, THE SURVEILLANCE SYSTEM OF IMPERIAL PRISON BARGE PURGE DID AN EXCELLENT JOB RELAYING THE CONVERSATION BETWEEN TRIG AND KALE LONGO IN THEIR CELL IN DETENTION LEVEL FIVE. The screens, now playing to a retinue of Imperial guard corpses in the barge’s main surveillance suite, showed the brothers’ faces peering from between the bars. And although the audio systems were perfectly calibrated to capture the slightest conspiratorial whisper, there was very little sound coming through the speakers. In fact, all throughout the detention level, it was quiet. The last of the screaming and coughing noises had already stopped, leaving only a vacant, sucked-out silence that went on and on.

  Then, softly, the audio sensors picked up Trig’s voice:

  “They’re all dead. Aren’t they?”

  And Kale, falteringly: “I don’t know.”

  “Whoever’s left alive, they’re already gone, they just left us here. We’re going to die in here, too.”

  “You need to stop talking like that,” Kale said. “Right now. You understand?”

  Trig didn’t reply. Not long ago, he had watched the Rodians die in the cell across from them. In the end, they’d coughed themselves to death, hacking and choking up pieces of their strange gray organs until they’d finally just writhed silently on the floor of their cell, twitching and whining and—after what felt like an eternity—falling still. Now the bodies had started to smell. Of course there was no way the surveillance system could capture that, just as there was no way for anyone who was actually in the area to avoid it.

  Trig told himself the decay process shouldn’t be happening so quickly, but the smell was there just the same. Maybe it was how the sickness interacted with the individual alien chemistry. It was everywhere, creeping up and down the corridors, trickling through the bars. He imagined rows of cells filled with corpses, dead inmates slumped on their bunks and sprawled on the floor, li
mp arms hanging through the bars, hundreds of them, gray and seeping, up and down the corridors of the different sublevels. The barge had turned into an immense floating crypt.

  So why weren’t he and Kale dead … or even sick? Trig wondered if they were destined to survive through some rare quirk of genetic immunity, only to die of starvation or dehydration like neglected animals, here in the cage. He thought of something his father had always said: The universe has a sense of humor, just not a nice one.

  “What happens next?” he asked.

  Kale went to the bars, cupped both hands around his mouth. “Hey!” he shouted. “Is there anybody out there?” His voice was surprisingly loud, ringing through the emptiness. “Hello! We’re alive in here! Hey!” He took in a deep breath. “We’re alive in here! We’re—”

  There was a loud clank, and the cell doors up and down the corridor all began to rattle open at once. Kale turned and glanced back at his brother.

  “Somebody heard us.”

  “Who?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kale said. “Right now we have to—” He stopped.

  Trig watched him. “What is it?”

  Kale held up one hand, inclining his head to listen. Whether or not Trig actually heard a noise from the cell next to theirs, he couldn’t be sure—his imagination, always active, was now working overtime to pluck something of substance from the void. “Stay there,” Kale whispered, leaning out of the cell and looking around. Then he gestured Trig forward.

  They went out together, Trig just half a pace behind Kale, and then he remembered—

  “Wait!”

  It was too late. The figure in the next cell burst out at him, scrambling forward with a snarling howl of rage. Trig saw Aur Myss fall on top of his older brother and drive him into the opposite wall, limbs flailing, hands slashing, already going for Kale’s eyes.

  Kale collapsed, caught completely off-guard, and for an instant Myss’s body covered his entirely, his entire torso struggling spastically for air. The Delphanian seemed to be laboring equally hard to rip Kale’s face apart and draw in another breath.