Star Wars: Death Troopers

by Joe Schreiber

  His skull felt like it was filling with fluid, blocking out his sense of smell. But his hearing was keener than ever. Voices were shrieking at him, no longer pleading but accusing him of unspeakable atrocities, and when he looked down at his hands he saw that they were dripping with blood, while the rank, salty flavor of their blood was in his mouth.

  And then the sickness was in him.

  And the sickness wanted to eat.

  He snarled louder, lashed out, wanting to make it go away, but it was too deep already, burrowing through his memory, bringing back details he hadn’t remembered in nearly two hundred years. He heard old lifeday songs from Kashyyyk, saw faces—old Attichitcuk, Kallabow, his beloved Malla—except their faces were changing now, melting and stretching, mouths hooking into strange, contemptuous grins. His father’s eyes lit upon him, saw all the shame he tried to hide. They knew what he was now that the sickness was inside of him and what the sickness would make him do to the little ones. They knew how he would slaughter them in their cells and feast upon their steaming entrails, shoving them into his mouth without bothering to chew, enslaved by the sickness and its appetite. They saw how the sickness could not be sated, how it wanted to keep on killing and eating until there was nothing left but blood that might be lapped up from the cold durasteel floors. They said, These are the true songs of lifeday, these songs are eat and kill, eat and kill.

  No, it’s not true. It’s not.

  Screaming louder, a deafening roar, at least in his own mind, he felt the oblivion of the sickness coming and was grateful for it, an opportunity to hide, to get away from the things he was experiencing. He did not try to escape; he ran toward it eagerly.

  Zahara jumped back, instinctively ducking and flinging both hands up to protect herself. Chewbacca’s arm swung out blindly, the syringe still protruding from it, and the needle sailed across the cell like a poorly thrown dart, hitting the wall and disappearing somewhere in the half-light. If she hadn’t dropped down when she did, the Wookiee’s arm would have crushed her throat.

  “Hey, pal, take it easy,” Han said, reaching over to him. “Chewie, it’s just—”

  Chewbacca rounded on him with a full-throated howl, and Han jerked backward, frowned, and stared at Zahara.

  “What did you do to him?”

  “Nothing. He got the same thing you got.”

  “Maybe it works differently for his species, did you ever think about that?” He looked back at Chewbacca but the Wookiee’s expression was completely alien now, unfriendly, no trace of recognition in his eyes. He seemed confused, frightened, and ready to attack whatever threat he perceived was nearby. The ripe, feral stink that Zahara had caught a whiff of earlier was back, stronger now, almost overwhelming, as if some aggression gland inside his metabolism had started spurting violent hormones through his brain. He was growling steadily now.

  Then Zahara noticed the swelling. It was already affecting his throat, causing it to balloon up, and what she’d thought were growls had actually become a series of suffocated breaths.

  “What is that?” Han asked. “What’s happening to his neck?”

  Zahara didn’t answer. She couldn’t make coherent sense of her own thoughts, except that somehow she’d managed to find some of the last survivors aboard the barge, only to help the disease do its job even more efficiently.

  She pulled herself together, flashing through options: somehow the anti-virus had either weakened the Wookiee’s immunity to the pathogen, or the sickness itself had become more aggressive in the past few hours, shortening its incubation time from hours to minutes. Either way—

  Chewbacca fell to his knees with a crash, clasping his arms over his head, and rocked back and forth with a diminishing series of horrible, gargling groans. When he lifted his head again, it was with monumental effort, and Zahara saw that the rage was draining away from his face. But this was only a side effect of oxygen debt, his gaze fogging over even as his enormous shoulders sagged forward, giving way to gravity until the entirety of his body slumped facedown to the floor.

  Zahara squatted down. “Help me roll him over.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Han grabbed Chewbacca’s shoulder and Zahara lifted his hips, tilting the massive bulk of the Wookiee’s body and tumbling him onto his back. She put her hand behind his furry head, down beneath his neck, and lifted upward.

  “Find the syringe.”

  “Uh-uh, no way.” Han shook his head. “You’re not giving him another drop of that stuff.”

  “You want your friend to live? Find the karking syringe.”

  Han took a second to digest this and then went back into the far corner of the cell, muttering under his breath. Zahara understood that, right now, a huge part of saving the Wookiee’s life was just a matter of making Han believe her. If he didn’t, if he tried to interfere, there was nothing she could do except to make Chewbacca comfortable until he died.

  Han came back a moment later with the syringe in his hand. “I hope you—”

  Zahara grabbed it from him, squirted out the last of the anti-virus, and tilted Chewbacca’s head back, palpating the clogged airway. Carefully avoiding the arterial passageways, she slid the empty needle in, felt the pop as it found the pocket of fluid, and pulled the plunger back. Droids still can’t do this, she thought. There’s not a droid in the world that would try this.

  And probably for good reason.

  Pinkish gray liquid began to fill the barrel of the syringe. Han didn’t say anything, but she could hear the dry click as he swallowed hard. She emptied the syringe, put it back in, and tapped the fluid again.

  After three full syringes, the swelling began to go down.

  The screaming in Chewie’s head got louder.

  What are the true songs of lifeday?

  I am inside you, the sickness whispered, and you will sing the songs as I teach them and those songs are to kill and to eat. And you will sing them while I am still inside you. While I am still hungry and I am always hungry and you will sing my songs.

  Yes, Chewbacca told it, his thoughts moving in the oddly formal way they sometimes did when he was thinking of things very seriously, yes, you are inside of me. I breathed you in when the prison door was opened just like Han breathed you in and you made him cough and start choking. But then the doctor gave us the medicine.

  The sickness screamed at him and raged. But he didn’t hear it anymore.

  He felt the pressure loosening from his chest. He was breathing again, the stricture in his throat abating, allowing for the first tentative passage of air. Vision was clearing, too, becoming stable, allowing him to see Han and the doctor standing over him, their faces worried.

  —those are the true songs of lifeday—

  The strength coming back through him now was the strength of his family and homeworld. He sat up but did not try his voice. He didn’t trust it yet. He looked down at his hands. They were clean. Relief sagged through him and it was like coming home to faces that recognized him and welcomed him in. There was no more screaming now. Inside the house where he had been born, someone was playing music.

  “Easy.” Zahara broke open a packet of bandages and adhesive and tried as best she could to dress the tiny pinhole incision she’d left on his throat. She couldn’t see through all the fur, but her fingers knew instinctively where it was. “We’ll have to clean that up as soon as we can. How do you feel?”

  He gave a hoarse cry, then a louder one.

  “You okay, pal?” Han asked, and when Chewie gave a quick bark of acknowledgment, he turned to Zahara. “Lady, you just got really lucky.”

  “Hopefully we all did,” she said. “If that anti-virus works, you should both be protected.”

  They helped Chewbacca to his feet, a process that fully required both of their strengths. Han watched him closely, preparing for a relapse, but the Wookiee seemed steady enough once he was standing up.

  “Think you can travel, buddy?” Han asked.
<
br />   Chewie barked out another growl.

  “Okay, all right,” Han said. “Forget I asked.”

  “The turbolift’s back this way,” Zahara said, pointing around the corner. “We can go back through, just be careful you don’t trip over the …”

  They all stopped.

  “What happened to the bodies?” Han asked. “The dead guards?”

  Zahara blinked down at the floor where the corpses of the prison guards had been sprawled out. They’d all seen them.

  But now they were gone.

  “Maybe they weren’t dead,” Han said doubtfully.

  “I examined them.”

  “So somebody came and moved them. I dunno, maintenance droids or something.” He looked at her. “Is there a reason we’re still standing here discussing this?”

  Zahara thought about it. She wondered if maybe the 2-1B had come down to meet her and moved the corpses. But that just didn’t make sense. The blasters were gone, too, she realized—including the one she’d just kicked out of the room.

  Somewhere in the semidarkness she thought she heard something creak, some random self-activating servo coming to life inside the walls, and she jumped, startled. Suddenly she realized that Han was right. They had to get out of here, not soon but now.

  “The turbolift’s over this way,” she said.

  Han and Chewie followed her in, the doors closing as they glided upward. “Where are we going?”

  “Medbay. I’ve got to talk to Waste.”

  “Who’s Waste?”

  “My surgical droid.”

  “And you call him Waste? Like waste of space?”

  “Waste of space, waste of programming …” She shrugged, relaxing a little now that they were out of that damp, shadow-crawling lower corridor. “I started it as a joke and it just kind of stuck.”

  “He doesn’t mind?”

  “He thinks it’s a term of endearment,” she said, and upon saying so, realized it was true.

  Han grunted as the lift reached the infirmary level and stopped. Zahara remembered the corridor vividly, how it had been littered with bloated corpses of guards and stormtroopers who had died waiting to get into medbay—dozens of them, sometimes stuck to one another with the fluid they’d been heaving up when they finally collapsed. The smell would have intensified, too, she knew. She expected Han would say something, maybe cover his mouth and stand there a moment taking it all in, the way that she had when she’d first laid eyes on it.

  The turbolift stopped and the doors slid open on the hallway. Zahara braced herself for the shock—and looking out, felt a different kind of shock go through her, quick and jolting, making her legs feel heavy and weak at the same time.

  All the bodies were gone.

  21/They Woke Up

  HAN AND CHEWIE FOLLOWED ZAHARA DOWN THE CORRIDOR WITHOUT TALKING. Han in particular didn’t like it, nor was he crazy about the way the doctor kept glancing back over her shoulder. She was easy on the eyes, he had to admit, but fear didn’t do much for her face. And she was keeping something from him. In his experience women and secrets mixed together to form something only slightly less volatile than an unstable fusion reactor.

  “How much farther is it?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer or even look at him, just held up her hand, meaning either shut up, stop walking, or both. Han turned to glance at Chewie, wondering aloud how much longer they were supposed to put up with this.

  It had been a while since they’d been free—weeks, he guessed, since the Imperials had boarded the Millennium Falcon and impounded the ship and her cargo. The shuttle had ferried them here to this barge, just another pair of anonymous smugglers whom the galaxy couldn’t care less about.

  And that would’ve been the end of it, if Han hadn’t gotten impatient and tried to escape a number of days earlier during a well-choreographed mess hall riot. He’d clocked a prison guard, Chewie had thrown a stormtrooper across the table, and the next thing they knew everything went dark.

  Very dark.

  Down in the hole, he’d spent most of his time speculating about what was going to happen next—who, if anyone, he and Chewie could rely on for a rescue. A smuggler’s friends were few, and those who would actually stick their necks out for the likes of Han were effectively nonexistent. For the first time he had begun to wonder if he and Chewie were destined to spend whatever remained of their lives in some cramped and poorly lit Corrections dungeon.

  In front of him, the doctor stopped walking again, turned, and looked through an open hatchway. Though he’d never been up here before, Han figured it was the medbay. He came up alongside her and peered inside, then back at the doctor. From the expression on Zahara’s face, Han guessed this wasn’t how it had looked when she’d left it.

  Every bed was empty.

  All the medical equipment, monitors, and medication pumps were active, blinking and twittering to themselves, but the IV lines, tubes, and cords dangled loose, some of them dripping liquid medication in puddles the size of small lakes. Bedsheets and blankets hung in twisted disarray, stained with sweat and blood, dragged across the floor and left there. Han realized the silence was making his shoulders tighten up and his right hand feel particularly lonely where his blaster ought to have been. He made a quick but conscious decision to calm down.

  “Busy place,” he remarked.

  She shook her head. “It was full when I left.”

  “No offense, Doc, but maybe this sickness is affecting you, too.”

  “You don’t understand,” she said, “they were all dead—twenty or thirty of them, guards, inmates, plus the ones lying on the floor, I wouldn’t have left them here if there was something I could still do to help.”

  “Where’s your droid?”

  “I don’t know.” She raised her voice. “Waste?”

  The 2-1B didn’t answer. Han and Chewie walked around her on either side, looking at the rows of empty beds. Chewie growled, and Han murmured, “Yeah, me, either.” He stepped over a bloody hospital gown that looked as though it had been ripped in half, then looked back up at Zahara. “Say you’re right and there’s nobody else left alive. How are we going to get out of here?”

  “There’s the Star Destroyer.”

  Han was sure that he’d misheard her. “Excuse me?”

  “Up above us. Apparently it’s a derelict. The barge docked on it to scavenge for parts for the thrusters—that’s when everything really started going wrong. I have no idea whether the engines were repaired before the maintenance team died. Otherwise …”

  “So this contagious disease came from the Destroyer?”

  She nodded.

  “Sounds like a good place to keep clear of.”

  Zahara didn’t answer him. She had bent down to study a patchy streak of bloodstains from under one of the beds. Reaching under, she touched something—Han couldn’t tell what it was—and dragged it slowly into view.

  “What is that?” Han asked, and then he saw.

  The hand was human, and had been ripped free by sheer force, the bones of the forearm cracked and severed by some blunt object. Two of the fingers were missing, plucked from the knuckle. Zahara looked at it with no particular emotion evident on her face.

  “It belonged to a guard,” Zahara said.

  “How do you know?”

  She pointed out the signet ring. “ICO ACADEMY.” She dropped it, and it landed with a soft thud.

  Behind her, on the other side of that row, Han heard Chewbacca growl.

  “Uh, Doc?” Han said. “I think we found your droid.”

  Zahara looked, and as soon as she did, she realized that some small, dismal part of her had been expecting exactly this outcome, from the moment she’d arrived in solitary and Waste had not been there.

  The 2-1B lay in pieces across the floor behind the last of the beds. Its arms, legs, and head had all been systematically dismantled and crushed, its torso beaten so the instrumentation panel flickered listlessly, erratically, beneath the cowl.
It was still trying to talk, making garbled noises through its vocabulator.

  “Dr. Cody?” it said.

  “Waste, what happened?”

  “I’m sorry. That test pattern wrote on the owl wall. It was marvelous. Would you like to taste it again?”

  “Waste, listen to me,” she said, crouching down next to it. “The patients, the bodies, where did they go?”

  “Look, Doc,” Han said behind her. “Let’s get out of here, huh? This whole place—”

  “Shh,” Zahara said, not looking back, keeping her attention on the droid. “The corpses, Waste,” she prompted. “Did someone take them?”

  “I’m sorry. There isn’t any left. It doesn’t walk without three and the two places. I’m sorry. Every reasonable attempt was made.” The 2-1B clicked and something sparked and clanked deep inside its lower processors. “We must uphold the sacred oath of …” It stopped, hiccuped, and seemed to regain some sense of what she’d asked it. “An amazing thing. They’re miracles, really. Marvelous.” And then, with terrible brightness: “They woke up!” There was one last small internal click, although this one sounded more jarring, broken, and when it spoke again its voice sounded thick and sluggish. “They just … eat.”

  “What?”

  The components in the droid’s torso flickered again, but it didn’t say anything else. “Hey,” Zahara said, turning around to Han and Chewbacca, “do either one of you know anything about droids?”

  But Han and Chewie were gone.

  22/Bulkhead

  THE GRAFFITI SCRAWLED ON THE INNER BULKHEAD WAS WRITTEN IN DELPHANIAN, BUT TRIG COULD GUESS WHAT IT MEANT. Face Gang. Keep out. Blood toll.

  “Will you relax?” Kale said. “Myss is dead. They all are.”

  It didn’t make Trig feel any better. At first all the corpses had frightened him, but there was something worse about not seeing them. They hadn’t seen any more dead people since Sartoris had chased them away from the escape pod. Now they were traveling crosswise through the admin level, in accordance with Kale’s plan. Trig had initially thought that it was because of the hidden route they were using, down these tight passageways, alongside conduits within the walls, but now he wondered why they hadn’t seen a single body.