Death troopers pdf download

Part 22 Sep Part 21 Sep Part 20 Sep Part 19 Sep Part 18 Sep Part 17 Sep Part 16 Sep Part 15 Sep Part 14 Sep Part 13 Sep Part 12 Sep Part 11 Sep This level 4 DK Reader is for children who are reading alone. DK Readers are levelled into stages to help every child progress and become a confident reader. They feature engaging and highly illustrated topics with true kid appeal.

The story narrative is supported with interactive genre spreads and questions to encourage children to access information from a range of sources and develop comprehension skills.

The era of the Old Republic is a dark and dangerous time, as Jedi Knights valiantly battle the Sith Lords and their ruthless armies. Unlike those other Jedi sidelined to the Agricultural Corps—young Jedi whose abilities have not proved up to snuff—Hestizo Trace possesses one extraordinary Force talent: a gift with plants.

Suddenly her quiet existence among greenhouse and garden specimens is violently destroyed by the arrival of an emissary from Darth Scabrous. For the rare black orchid that she has nurtured and bonded with is the final ingredient in an ancient Sith formula that promises to grant Darth Scabrous his greatest desire. Now the rotting, ravenous dead are rising, driven by a bloodthirsty hunger for all things living—and commanded by a Sith Master with an insatiable lust for power and the ultimate prize: immortality.

In a tale of retribution and survival set before the events of The Phantom Menace, Darth Plagueis and Darth Sidious dispatch Sith apprentice Darth Maul on a secret mission to infiltrate a criminal empire operating from inside Cog Hive Seven--a hidden prison teeming with the galaxy's most savage criminals. There, he must contend against the scummiest and most villainous in gladiatorial death matches while carrying out his masters' clandestine commands.

Failure is not an option; success will ignite the revenge of the Sith against the Jedi Order. George Beahm, a former U. Army major, draws on his experience to discuss the military science of the sprawling Star Wars universe: its personnel, weapons, technology, tactics and strategy, including an analysis of its key battles to explain how the outmanned and outgunned rebels ultimately prevailed against overwhelming forces.

From Star Wars: A New Hope to Rogue One , this timely book demystifies the operational arts in an accessible and entertaining way for military personnel and civilians. Replete with a glossary of military terms, this book is supplemented with an annotated bibliography. The Star Wars novels have been expanding the universe of this popular epic for decades.

Now ten thrilling, action-packed classics have been collected in one convenient eBook bundle, a perfect introduction to the vibrant and varied eras of Star Wars history, past and future. With a rich cast of characters that includes beloved favorites—Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Princess Leia Organa—along with new villains and heroes, including the next generation of Jedi, these adventures will take fans for a breathtaking ride across time and space in the galaxy far, far away!

The Separatist forces have been smashed, the Jedi Council nearly decimated, and the rest of the Order all but destroyed. Now absolute power rests in the iron fist of Darth Sidious—the cunning Sith lord better known as the former Senator, now Emperor, Palpatine. But more remains to be done. Pockets of resistance in the galaxy must still be defeated and missing Jedi accounted for. Loved each and every part of this book. I will definitely recommend this book to media tie in, star wars lovers.

Your Rating:. Your Comment:. As much as Trig wanted to talk about what his brother had done-to thank him, to say something about it, to at least acknowledge the fact that it had happened-he didn't know where to start. So he, too, remained silent. Up at the end of the corridor, Trig saw another figure hunched in the control booth, this one wearing an orange isolation suit. The guard was hunched forward next to the release switch for the cells, the control he'd engaged to open up the wing.

Kale reached into the booth and touched his shoulder. His sagging lips hung open, encrusted with dried blood and mucus, and his upturned eyes were vacant.

Staring at him, Trig thought he saw a tremor, one last spasm passing through the shoulders and gut, but that, too, was probably just his imagination. Probably the last thing he did. They looked around to see Wembly's BLX unit standing in the corner of the booth. The droid stood awkwardly with its arms at its sides, looking utterly lost without its master.

I belong here. When we're rescued. The warden, or the guards? So unless you've got a better idea, you can help me find a way up there.

Made himself say, "Okay. Most of the bodies they ran across were like the inmates on his level, corpses in bunks, corpses on floors, corpses curled up in corners, arms already stiffening around their folded knees as if somehow balling themselves up could stave off the eventuality of death. There were suicides-one inmate had hung himself from the bars, another had wrapped a bag around his head. Kale collected blasters from two of the bodies, but Trig could tell just by the way he carried them that he wasn't entirely comfortable with the weapons, although he tried to act casual about it.

They saw other things as well. Outside one cell, a dead guard lay with his back against the bars. Trig saw that he'd been tied by the wrists and around the neck by the two dead inmates inside the cell.

The inmates had since died of the disease, but that hadn't been what killed the guard. The cons had somehow lured him close enough to bind him there and then tortured him to death, stabbing, slashing, and mutilating him with the crude, sharpened instruments that were still clutched in their dead hands.

They saw an inmate, an alien species that Trig didn't recognize, comprising two conjoined bodies, one twice the size of the other.

The smaller body had already died and fallen limp, while the larger one cradled it weakly like its own child, weeping and trying to breathe. It didn't even look up at them as they walked by. They saw a maintenance droid carrying on a cheerful, one-sided conversation with a dead stormtrooper. They saw two Imperial guards slumped dead over a dejarik holo-chess table while the figures on the table lumbered aimlessly around the board awaiting instruction.

There was a pair of dead guards inside, both of them armed, slouched in opposite corners, their torsos torn apart and scorched by blaster bolts, as if, in the final throes of delirium, they'd turned against each other. Kale hoisted them by their biohazard suits and dragged them out of the lift, and Trig was glad his brother didn't ask him to help.

Looking at the bodies was one thing but touching them, lifting them up. What if one of their cold dead hands was to reach up and grab hold of him? Would he even be able to scream? There was a clicking sound behind them, and Trig glanced back over his shoulder.

He thought about Myss in the cell next to theirs, the cell that had been empty when he'd looked. Myss must have run out immediately after Wembly had sprung open the doors for them.

Did that mean Myss was immune, too? Trig wondered if he was following them. Just because he didn't see anything didn't mean it wasn't there.

On the uppermost level of detention they heard a faint mewling sound like something crying. It was plaintive and child-like, with a despondency all the more resonant to Trig because he recognized it in his own heart.

He stopped and looked in the direction of the noise. Kale kept the blasters half raised at his sides. The mewling noise grew louder until Trig stopped and stared into the final cell in the line. A young Wookiee was crouched inside the cell. He was much smaller than Trig, probably not much more than a toddler.

He was crouched down over the bodies of what had to be his family, two adults and an older sibling, clutching their hands to his face and holding their arms around himself as if to simulate a hug.

Trig saw what his brother was pointing at. The sickness had affected the dead Wookiees differently. Their tongues had swollen until they dangled like grotesque, overripe fruit from their mouths, and their throats had ruptured completely, splitting open to expose deep red musculature within.

When the young one looked up and saw Trig and Kale standing outside the cell, his blue eyes shone with fear and dread. The bars rattled open, and he went back to where his brother still stood, looking in at the young Wookiee. It wasn't even making the crying sound anymore, but somehow its silence was worse. That was a lesson Trig was already learning-the silence was always worse.

Trig waited to see if anything was going to happen. In the end, though, the youngster just bent forward and picked up the slack arms of its parents and pressed them to either side of its small frame.

It wouldn't look up at Kale and Trig again, not even when they turned and finally walked away. They were at the far end of the corridor when they heard it start to scream. Trig froze, the fine hairs prickling all down his back. Just the sound made him feel as if his entire body had been coated with a layer of slick, half-melted ice.

His breath lodged inside his lungs, caught just below his throat. The screams stopped, but the grunting eating sounds continued, greedy and breathless, slurping and crunching. His mind flashed to Aur Myss in the cell next to theirs, the whispering and giggling and the sensation that it had been following them. But that's impossible. Myss is dead. You saw it yourself. In the end it happened very quickly.

About half of them had been human, the others different alien species, but it didn't make a difference. In the last moments some of the nonhumans had reverted to their native languages, some had clutched her hand and talked to her passionately-if brokenly, through uncontrollable coughing-as if she were some family member or loved one, and she'd listened and nodded even if she didn't understand a word of it.

At Rhinnal they taught her death was something you got used to. Zahara had met plenty of physicians who claimed to have adjusted to it and they always seemed eerie to her somehow, more detached and mechanical than the droids that served alongside them. She tended to avoid such doctors and their cold, clinical eyes.

Waste brought the news of the final deaths with a neutral tone that she'd never heard before, a lack of affect so peculiar that she wondered if it had been programmed for the worst eventualities.

Perhaps it was what passed for sympathy in the droid world. Then, in an almost apologetic voice, the B added: "I've finished the analysis of your own blood as well. What I meant was that I believe I've had some success in analyzing the immunity gene within your own chemical makeup and synthesizing it. She should have felt some kind of relief. And later, perhaps, she might. But her first reaction to the news- if there are any survivors aboard the barge-was a profound sense of personal failure, manifesting itself as a sandbagged heaviness in the legs and belly.

The health of the barge and its inmates and staff had been her responsibility. What had happened here over the last few hours was unthinkable, a collapse of such glaring magnitude that she couldn't look at it except through the filter of her own personal culpability.

Sartoris might have been taunting her, but he was right. She would never live this down. There's no time for self-pity, a voice inside her head said. You need to find out who's left, sooner rather than later.

As usual the voice was right. To her mild surprise, it collapsed, or rather burst like a bubble. I need to run a bioscan on the barge and locate any survivors. She stepped over and around the bodies, breathing through her mouth when the odor became too much.

Almost immediately she wished she'd allowed Waste to come with her. The droid's prattling would've made everything else easier to take. She arrived at the pilot station and slipped through the doors, braced for what she found there.

The Purge's flight crew had not abandoned their posts, even in death. The corpses of the pilot and copilot, a couple of rough-hewn Imperial lifers she'd never really gotten to know, slouched backward in their seats, mouths gaping, algae-gray flesh already beginning to sag from their bones. As Zahara approached them, the barge's instrumentation suite recognized her immediately, panels blinking, and a computerized voice cut in from some hidden speaker.

Word was that on the longer flights, various guards had been caught up here after hours, chatting her up. Awaiting orders. Running bioscan. Imperial Prison Barge Purge, previous inmate and administrative census five hundred twenty-two according to the Scan parameters are continuously recalibrated to incorporate the physiological traits of every member of the inmate population.

In fact, current calibration standards reflect accurate life-form census with a point- zero-zero-one percent margin of It looked much cleaner in miniature, etched out with fine, straight lines, a drafter's dream of perfect geometry.

The pilot station occupied the uppermost level. On one end of it, rising like a periscope, stood the retractable docking shaft that still connected them to the Destroyer. On the other end of the pilot station, a wide descending gangway lead downward to the conjoining administration level, flanked on port and starboard sides by the barge's escape pods.

Any farther down, Zahara knew, and you'd find yourself amid a series of beveled hatches giving way to numberless sublevels, including the bottommost holding cells. In all she counted the six tiny blips of red light distributed throughout it. She hadn't even thought about that until now.

Reserved for the worst and most dangerous inmates on the barge, a haven for maniacs and extreme flight risks, it was the one place where the sickness might not have had an opportunity to spread.

The question was whether she should risk going down there alone. Of course there were plenty of weapons lying around, but she didn't relish the idea of letting two of Warden Kloth's worst inmates free only to blast them into oblivion when they attacked her. Still, what choice did she have?

At one corner of the screen Zahara saw Waste walking from bed to bed, removing monitors from the last of the dead, gathering up old IV lines and ventilator tubing.

Was the bioscan a success? Can you meet me down there? I see. I suppose I'll meet you down there then. Chapter 18 Solitary Zahara left the pilot station and took the turbolift straight down to the barge's lowest inhabited level.

She almost never descended this deep into the barge, had maybe been down twice since she'd started here, to treat inmates who were too sick or dangerous to come up to the infirmary. The only thing that lay beneath it was the mechanical and maintenance sublevel, the cramped domain of eyeless maintenance droids that never saw the light of day. The lift doors opened to release her into a bare hallway with exposed wires dangling from the overhead girders.

Zahara squinted, trying to make out the details. Apparently the main power circuitry didn't work so well down here. Somewhere above her a steam vent hissed out a steady current of moist, rancid-smelling air like the stale breath of a terminal patient. She didn't see any sign of the 21B anywhere and wondered whether she should go any farther without it. It didn't really matter, if there were no other survivors except"Oh!

She'd tripped on the bodies of the guards in front of her. She counted five of them, sprawled out in a harrowing tableau. They were all wearing isolation suits and masks except for one, a younger guard whom Zahara recognized from a month or so earlier, when he'd come to the infirmary complaining of some minor skin irritation. She'd liked him well enough, and had fallen easily into conversation. She remembered him talking about his wife and children back on his homeworld of Chandrila.

Looking down at his body, Zahara saw a sheet of flimsiplast curled in his hand. She knelt down to pick it up and started reading.

Kai: I know I told you and the kids I would be home after this run. But that is not going to happen. I am sorry to say that something has gone wrong on the barge. Everybody is getting sick and nobody knows why.

Almost everybody has died so far. At first I thought I was going to be okay but now it looks like I have it, too. I am sorry, Kai. I know this is going to be hard on the boys. Will you please tell them their daddy loves them? I am so sorry this is how things turned out, but tell them I served to the best of my abilities and I was not a coward and never scared.

And I love you with all my heart. At the bottom the guard had attempted to write his name but the letters had come out so crooked and helpless, probably from his trembling hand, that the signature was little more than a scribble. She slipped the keycard from the guard's uniform and turned toward the sign marked solitary. Then she stopped.

Where was Waste? She'd given the B ample time to get down here, and usually he was so promptSomething happened to him. It was that voice again, the one inside her head, the one that was never wrong. She wondered if she should go, if she even should have come down here to begin with. You came this far. With real reluctance she bent down and picked up one of the blasters from a dead guard's hands.

It was cold and felt heavier than she remembered. Zahara had received the requisite weapons training before signing on and was able to locate the safety mechanism and switch the blaster over to stun. There were three separate cells. Each had a solid metal door, dull gray and coffin-sized, with a control pad and a slot for the keycard mounted up and to the right.

Zahara stepped up to the first door. She realized she'd stopped breathing. Her body felt weightless, as if her legs had simply vanished beneath her. Faintly she could smell the hot coppery scent of her own fear coming off her body, an unpleasant, unnecessary reminder of how little she really wanted to be doing any of this. You don't have to. Yes, I do, she thought, and brought the keycard to the slot. The door began to slide open. She jerked the blaster up, pointing it into the semidarkness.

Light from the outside cast her silhouette into the cell like an outline cut crisply from black fabric with very sharp scissors. Squinting in, she could make out an empty bench, a table-but the silent two-by-two cube was otherwise absolutely empty.

There was no one here. She stepped back and turned to the second cell, slotted the card, andThe noise from inside the cell sounded like a snarl of surprise and rage. Zahara lurched backward, the blaster suddenly loose and clumsy in her hand, somehow unable to find the trigger as the cell's occupant charged toward her.

The thing was huge, big enough that it had to duck and twist its shoulders to fit through the cell doorway, with sharp white teeth and eyes that shot back splintered gleams of intelligence.

Stumbling backward, Zahara tried to say Hold it, but the words got clogged up in her throat. It was like trying to cry out in a dream, struggling to push words through strengthless, suffocated lungs. The thing stopped directly in front of her and lifted its shaggy head, perhaps seeing the blaster. It was a Wookiee, she realized, and at the same time she was aware of a pounding noise from the last remaining cell, a muffled shouting on the other side of the wall. She aimed the blaster upward.

Zahara raised the keycard and wondered how she was supposed to hold both convicts at bay with one blaster. But it was too late now. The last cell door rattled open to reveal the figure standing immediately inside. Zahara flicked her eyes back at the Wookiee, but he hadn't moved from his spot.

Glancing back at the other convict, she realized she was looking at a dark-haired man probably in his late twenties, dressed in an ill-fitting prison uniform. He was staring at her with dark and questioning eyes. Cody," she said, "chief medical officer. There's been You're making Chewie nervous.

He could hear breathing noises behind them, the occasional thumping footstep of something tracking them gracelessly through the central hallway of the admin wing, no longer bothering with stealth.

Sometimes it made little scratching noises. Other times he could only hear it breathing. He didn't even need to say anything about it to Kale.

Kale knew it, too. Rather than bringing him comfort, the unspoken awareness between them had the paradoxical effect of accelerating the near panic building up in Trig's nervous system; it was as if he were dealing not only with his own apprehension, but Kale's as well. Finally they saw the escape pod', just up ahead on the outer wall.

He was standing there with blasters in both hands, looking just as unhappy to see them as Trig felt staring back at him. Intuitively, just from his posture, Trig understood that there was something between them and the man, something Sartoris knew about them or their father, although Trig didn't know what it was.

But he felt it nonetheless, some deeply personal schism of unease, emerging across the guard's face and then vanishing again almost as quickly, like an exhaled breath across a pane of glass.

Kale frowned, shook his head. Get moving. But that's not the plan. Now get out of here. The only reason I haven't already shot you is I'd have to drag your carcasses out of the escape pod. So why don't you save me the trouble? It's been following us. If you leave us here Faintly, from what felt like light-years away, he could feel his big brother's hand on his shoulder, tugging him back. Still weightless, Trig allowed himself to be pulled backward, the rest of the way out of the pod.

As he stumbled he saw Sartoris taking a flat black object from his pocket and slotting it into the pod's navigation system, the two of them already forgotten, a problem that no longer concerned him. The hatch sealed shut with a barely audible whoosh. It was almost anticlimactic. Kale cleared his throat. After a long pause, he seemed to remember that Trig was standing next to him. He felt not only weightless now but transparent, barely there. It was as if somebody had hooked a vacuum to his soul and sucked all the hope out of it.

The realization struck her most forcefully when she tried to explain to him what had happened aboard the barge, and how critically he and the Wookiee needed her assistance if they were going to stay alive.

Zahara didn't know much Shyriiwook, but most of what she'd picked up had to do with vocal inflection, and Chewbacca's was incredulity, pure and simple. Or you got another tale you want to try out? The infection-it's some kind of virus-has an estimated mortality rate of ninety- nine-point-seven percent. Now that you're out here and exposed, though, I need to inject you with the anti- virus. I just need to see your arm, and She took a step back.

Neither am I. Too many people have already died. Glancing back, following his line of sight, Zahara saw that he was staring at the outstretched leg protruding from around the corner, one of the guards whose bodies she'd stepped over to get here. Han craned his neck further, and she knew that he could see some of the other corpses as well. When he looked back at her, the defiance in his expression had faded, replaced with something elsenot fear necessarily, but a kind of acute awareness of his surroundings.

He looked over at Chewbacca, and the Wookiee sniffed the air and let out a low, restless thragghh sound from somewhere deep inside his throat. Zahara realized that she wasn't going to be able to hold on to the blaster rifle and treat him at the same time. She set the blaster aside, kicking it out of the cell behind her, into the hallway, then took Han's arm, swabbed it, then slipped the needle in. Han winced as she pushed down the plunger. She'd trusted Waste's analysis of the anti-virus implicitly, but that didn't mean there couldn't have been some margin of error along the way, and who knew exactly how it would interact with any individual's unique chemical makeup?

And what would it do to a completely different species, a nonhuman? But the alternative was to allow Chewbacca to become infected. And she wasn't at all sure that the anti-virus could make a difference at that point. She turned to the Wookiee.

Finding a vein on a Wookiee was always a challenge, but she felt one beneath the thickly matted fur, sliding the needle in. He growled but didn't move. It came at him from everywhere at once, a threnody of wounded voices, assailing him from all sides. He didn't know what it meant except that something bad had happened here aboard the barge, and now it was happening to him, too.

The sickness she'd implanted under his fur, under his skin, was alive and crawling through him, a living gray thing going up his arm to his shoulder to his throat, and the sickness clucked its tongue and whispered, Yes, you did those things, yes, you are those things. Had he done it? Had he somehow hurt them? But that couldn't be right. The doctor hadn't poisoned him; she'd injected him with a cure.

Then why did it hurt so much, and why did he still hear the young ones screaming? 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 Mallaexcept their faces were changing now, melting and stretching, mouths hooking into strange, contemptuous grins.