STAR WARS: DEATH TROOPERS first look excerpt

Excerpt from
Star Wars: Death Troopers
By Joe Schreiber
Published by Del Rey, On sale 10/13/09

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 assassins 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 increasingly 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 redeyed
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,
bris tling 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 known, 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.