by James Luceno
“I was wrong to leave him on Mustafar. I should have made sure he was dead.”
The Force will determine Anakin’s future. Obi-Wan: Luke must not be told that Vader is his father until the time is right.
“Should I take further steps to hide Luke?”
The core of Anakin that resides in Vader grasps that Tatooine is the source of nearly everything that causes him pain. Vader will never set foot on Tatooine, if only out of fear of reawakening Anakin.
Obi-Wan exhaled in relief. “Then my obligation is unchanged. But from what Yoda told me, I know that I have much to learn, Master.”
You were always that way, Obi-Wan.
Qui-Gon’s voice faded, and Obi-Wan’s fears began to dissipate, replaced by renewed expectation.
Returning to the dazzling light of Tatooine’s twin suns, he caught up with Owen, Beru, and Luke, and kept silent watch over them for what remained of the day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Luceno is the New York Times bestselling author of the Star Wars novels Dark Lord: The Rise of Darth Vader, Cloak of Deception, Labyrinth of Evil, as well as the New Jedi Order novels Agents of Chaos I: Hero’s Trial and Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse, The Unifying Force, and the eBook Darth Maul: Saboteur. He lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with his wife and youngest child.
By James Luceno
The ROBOTECH series
(as Jack McKinney, with Brian Daley)
The BLACK HOLE TRAVEL AGENCY series
(as Jack McKinney, with Brian Daley)
A Fearful Symmetry
Illegal Alien
The Big Empty
Kaduna Memories
THE YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES
The Mata Hari Affair
The Shadow
The Mask of Zorro
Rio Pasion
Rainchaser
Rock Bottom
Star Wars: CLOAK OF DECEPTION
Star Wars: DARTH MAUL, SABOTEUR (e-book)
Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos I: Hero’s Trial
Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: Agents of Chaos II: Jedi Eclipse
Star Wars: The New Jedi Order: The Unifying Force
Star Wars: LABYRINTH OF EVIL
Star Wars: DARK LORD—The Rise of Darth Vader
Star Wars: MILLENNIUM FALCON
Star Wars: Death Troopers is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2009 by Lucasfilm Ltd. & ® or TM where indicated. All Rights Reserved. Used Under Authorization.
Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
DEL REY is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2009.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79608-0
www.starwars.com
www.delreybooks.com
v3.1
To my children, J and V. Every day you amaze me.
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I want to offer my heartfelt thanks to Keith Clayton and Erich Schoeneweiss at Del Rey for planting this demented seed and making it grow, with a particular shout-out to Erich’s brother-in-law Andrew Goletz, who wrote the first outline for the project—the one that convinced everybody that it wasn’t just a crazy fever-dream. Dave Stevenson is the greatest art director in the world, the man responsible for the awesome-beyond-awesome jacket that grabbed the Internet by the throat. Ali Kokmen, Christine Cabello, David Moench, and Joseph Scalora are all mad and wonderful marketing and publicity geniuses, and they’ve been over-the-top enthusiastic and supportive of this project from the beginning. And of course, Shelly Shapiro, you are the absolute bomb.
At Lucasfilm, I want to express my deep and heartfelt gratitude to Sue Rostoni and Leland Chee for giving this lowly boogeyman a free pass to roam about the Star Wars galaxy.
Thanks as always to my agent, Phyllis Westberg, for helping it all come together.
To Michael Ludy, my best friend from middle school. Mike and I paid $2.50 to see Return of the Jedi the day that it opened and things have never been the same since.
On the topic of money, I want to thank everyone who has ever opened up his or her wallet and put down their hard-earned cash to buy my work. Simply speaking, without you, none of this would be possible. So thanks.
Finally, to Christina, who not only puts up with my mercurial author nonsense on a daily basis but put in the winning bid for a vintage 1979 Kenner Alien figure on eBay … pretty much making her the coolest wife ever.
Contents
Master - Table of Contents
Death Troopers
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Dramatis Personae
1. Purge
2. Meat Nest
3. Where the Bad Air Goes
4. Medbay
5. Word
6. Dead Boys
7. Destroyer
8. Lung Windows
9. Descent
10. Triage
11. Red Map
12. Big Midnight
13. Molecules
14. Bubble
15. VHB
16. In the Cage
17. Tisa
18. Solitary
19. Pod
20. Lifeday
21. They Woke Up
22. Bulkhead
23. Inside
24. Futureproof
25. Deadlights
26. Army of Last Things
27. Say It Three Times
28. Things You Don’t Forget
29. Sine
30. Black Tank Blues
31. Coffin Jockeys
32. Hate Trip
33. Catwalk
34. Skin Hill
35. The Whole Sick Crew
36. Lab Rat
37. Lifter
38. Bridge
39. Stop
40. Awakening
41. Blackwing
42. River
43. Death and All His Friends
44. Freebird
Epilogue
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Dramatis Personae
Aur Myss; prisoner (Delphanian male)
Jareth Sartoris; captain of the guard, Imperial Prison Barge Purge (human male)
Kale Longo; teen prisoner (human male)
Trig Longo; teen prisoner (human male)
Waste; 2-1B surgical droid
Zahara Cody; chief medical officer, Imperial Prison Barge Purge (human female)
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away …
1/Purge
The nights were the worst.
Even before his father’s death, Trig Longo had come to dread the long hours after lockdown, the shadows and sounds and the chronically unstable gulf of silence that drew out in between them. Night after night he lay still on his bunk and stared up at the dripping durasteel ceiling of the cell in search of sleep or some acceptable substitute. Sometimes he would actually start to drift off, floating away in that comforting sensation of weightlessness, only to be rattled awake—heart pounding, throat tight, stomach muscles sprung and fluttering—by some shout or a cry, an inmate having a nightmare.
There was no shortage of nightmares aboard the Imperial Prison Barge Purge.
Trig didn’t know exactly how many prisoners the Purge was currently carrying. He guessed maybe five hundred, human and otherwise, scraped from every corner of the galaxy, just as he and his family had been picked up eight standard weeks before. Sometimes the incoming shuttles returned almost empty; on other occasions they came packed with squabbling alien life-forms and alleged Rebel sympathizers of every stripe and species. There were assas
sins for hire and sociopaths the likes of which Trig had never seen, thin-lipped things that cackled and sneered in seditious languages that, to Trig’s ears, were little more than clicks and hisses.
Every one of them seemed to harbor its own obscure appetites and personal grudges, personal histories blighted with shameful secrets and obscure vendettas. Being cautious became harder; soon you needed eyes in the back of your head—which some of them actually possessed. Two weeks earlier in the mess hall, Trig had noticed a tall, silent inmate sitting with its back to him but watching him nonetheless with a single raw-red eye in the back of its skull. Every day the red-eyed thing seemed to be sitting a little nearer. Then one day, without explanation, it was gone.
Except from his dreams.
Sighing, Trig levered himself up on his elbows and looked through the bars onto the corridor. Gen Pop had cycled down to minimum power for the night, edging the long gangway in permanent gray twilight. The Rodians in the cell across from his had gone to sleep or were feigning it. He forced himself to sit there, regulating his breathing, listening to the faint echoes of the convicts’ uneasy groans and murmurs. Every so often a mouse droid or low-level maintenance unit, one of hundreds occupying the barge, would scramble by on some preprogrammed errand or another. And of course, below it all—low and not quite beneath the scope of hearing—was the omnipresent thrum of the barge’s turbines gnashing endlessly through space.
For as long as they’d been aboard, Trig still hadn’t gotten used to that last sound, the way it shook the Purge to its framework, rising up through his legs and rattling his bones and nerves. There was no escaping it, the way it undermined every moment of life, as familiar as his own pulse.
Trig thought back to sitting in the infirmary just two weeks earlier, watching his father draw one last shaky breath, and the silence afterward as the medical droids disconnected the biomonitors from the old man’s ruined body and prepared to haul it away. As the last of the monitors fell silent, he’d heard that low steady thunder of the engines, one more unnecessary reminder of where he was and where he was going. He remembered how that noise had made him feel lost and small and inescapably sad—some special form of artificial gravity that seemed to work directly against his heart.
He had known then, as he knew now, that it really only meant one thing, the ruthlessly grinding effort of the Empire consolidating its power.
Forget politics, his father had always said. Just give ’em something they need, or they’ll eat you alive.
And now they’d been eaten alive anyway, despite the fact that they’d never been sympathizers, no more than low-level grifters scooped up on a routine Imperial sweep. The engines of tyranny ground on, bearing them forward across the galaxy toward some remote penal moon. Trig sensed that noise would continue, would carry on indefinitely, echoing right up until—
“Trig?”
It was Kale’s voice behind him, unexpected, and Trig flinched a little at the sound of it. He looked back and saw his older brother gazing back at him, Kale’s handsomely rumpled, sleep-slackened face just a ghostly three-quarter profile suspended in the cell’s gloom. Kale looked like he was still only partly awake and unsure whether or not he was dreaming any of this.
“What’s wrong?” Kale asked, a drowsy murmur that came out: Wussrong?
Trig cleared his throat. His voice had started changing recently, and he was acutely aware of how it broke high and low when he wasn’t paying strict attention. “Nothing.”
“You worried about tomorrow?”
“Me?” Trig snorted. “Come on.”
“ ’S okay if you are.” Kale seemed to consider this and then uttered a bemused grunt. “You’d be crazy not to be.”
“You’re not scared,” Trig said. “Dad would never have—”
“I’ll go alone.”
“No.” The word snapped from his throat with almost painful angularity. “We need to stick together, that’s what Dad said.”
“You’re only thirteen,” Kale said. “Maybe you’re not, you know …”
“Fourteen next month.” Trig felt another flare of emotion at the mention of his age. “Old enough.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
“Well, sleep on it, see if you feel different in the morning …” Kale’s enunciation was already beginning to go muddled as he slumped back down on his bunk, leaving Trig sitting up with his eyes still riveted to the long dark concourse outside the cell, Gen Pop, that had become their no-longer-new home.
Sleep on it, he thought, and in that exact moment, miraculously, as if by power of suggestion, sleep actually began to seem like a possibility. Trig lay back and let the heaviness of his own fatigue cover him like a blanket, superseding anxiety and fear. He tried to focus on the sound of Kale’s breathing, deep and reassuring, in and out, in and out.
Then somewhere in the depths of the levels, an inhuman voice wailed. Trig sat up, caught his breath, and felt a chill tighten the skin of his shoulders, arms, and back, crawling over his flesh millimeter by millimeter, bristling the small hairs on the back of his neck. Over in his bunk the already sleeping Kale rolled over and grumbled something incoherent.
There was another scream, weaker this time. Trig told himself it was just one of the other convicts, just another nightmare rolling off the all-night assembly line of the nightmare factory.
But it hadn’t sounded like a nightmare.
It sounded like a convict, whatever life-form it was, was under attack.
Or going crazy.
He sat perfectly still, squeezed his eyes tight, and waited for the pounding of his heart to slow down, just please slow down. But it didn’t. He thought of the thing in the cafeteria, the disappeared inmate whose name he’d never know, watching him with its red staring eye. How many other eyes were on him that he never saw?
Sleep on it.
But he already knew there would be no more sleeping here tonight.
2/Meat Nest
In Trig’s old life, back on Cimarosa, breakfast had been the best meal of the day. Besides being an expert trafficker in contraband, a veteran fringe dweller who cut countless deals with thieves, spies, and counterfeiters, Von Longo had also been one of the galaxy’s greatest unrecognized breakfast chefs. Eat a good meal early, Longo always told his boys. You never know if it’s going to be your last.
Here on the Purge, however, breakfast was rarely edible and sometimes actually seemed to shiver in the steady vibrations as though still alive on the plate. This morning Trig found himself gazing down at a pasty mass of colorless goo spooned into shaved gristle, the whole thing plastered together in sticky wads like some kind of meat nest assembled by carnivorous flying insects. He was still nudging the stuff listlessly around his tray when Kale finally raised his eyebrows and peered at him.
“You sleep at all last night?” Kale asked.
“A little.”
“You’re not eating.”
“What, you mean this?” Trig poked at the contents of the tray again and shuddered. “I’m not hungry,” he said, and watched Kale shovel the last bite of his own breakfast into his mouth with disturbing gusto. “You think the food will be any better when we get to the detention moon?”
“Little brother, I think we’ll be lucky if we don’t end up on the menu.”
Trig gave him a bleak look. “Don’t give ’em any ideas.”
“Hey, lighten up.” Kale wiped his mouth on his sleeve and grinned. “Little guy like you, they’ll probably just use you for an appetizer.”
Trig put his fork down again with a snort to show that he got the joke. Although he couldn’t have articulated it, his big brother’s easygoing bravado—so obviously inherited from their old man—made him downright envious. Kale wasn’t wired for fear. It just didn’t stick to him somehow. The only thing that ever really seemed to trouble him was the prospect of not getting another helping of whatever the COO-2180s behind the lunch counter had been slopping onto the inmates’ trays.
Out of nowhere, from the ridiculous to the sublime, Trig found himself thinking about his father again. Their final conversation hung in his memory with stinging vividness. Just before he’d passed away in the infirmary, the old man had reached up, clutched Trig’s hand in both of his, and whispered, “Watch over your brother.” Caught off-guard, Trig had just nodded and stammered out that he would, of course he would—but soon afterward he realized that his dad, in his final moments, must have been confused about which son he was talking to. There was no reason he’d ask Trig to look after Kale. It would be like assigning the safekeeping of a wampa to a Kowakian monkey-lizard.
“What’s wrong with you, anyway?” Kale asked from across the table.
“I’m fine.”
“Come on. ’Fess up.”
Trig pushed the tray aside. “I don’t see how they can serve us this stuff day after day, that’s all.”
“Hey, that reminds me.” As if on cue, Kale flicked his eyes over at Trig’s tray. “You gonna eat that?”
When the alarm shrilled out the end of the meal, he and Kale stood up and slipped through the mess hall along with the sea of other inmates. From overhead observation decks, a retinue of uniformed Imperial corrections officers and armed stormtroopers stood watch, observing their passage into the common area with soulless black eyes.
Down below, the prisoners sauntered in packs, muttering and laughing among themselves, deliberately dragging out the process as much as possible to exploit whatever small amount of leniency the guards granted them. There was a sticky, smelly closeness to their unwashed bodies, and Trig thought of the phrase meat nest again, and felt a little nauseated. This whole place was a meat nest.
Little by little, with studied casualness, he and Kale slowed down, falling farther back from the crowd. Although he didn’t say a word, a subtle change had already worked its way through Kale’s posture, straightening his spine and shoulders, a serene vigilance moving over his face, supplanting the old insouciant gleam. His eyes darted right and left now, never stopping anywhere for longer than a moment or two.