The Story of Star Wars: Death Troopers

the year is 2009. the world is neck deep in recession obama declares national emergency because of the h1n1 virus outbreak and zombies rule the world well the media world the 2000s were undeniably a renaissance of zombies reigniting the hype from george romero's films from decades ago and right as the zombie trend was really ramping up lucas licensing did their marketing research and struck while the iron was hot they had del rey publish a star wars zombie novel joe schreiber penned the story who had written a few horror novels already for del rey he was given creative power to do whatever he wanted essentially create original characters make gory scenes and even add existing characters given that they fit the canon timeline buzz for this book also started to ramp up when the cover was revealed and that grabbed everyone's attention real quick it conveyed that this was a star wars story you've never seen before so with the stage set let's get comfy and dive right into the story of death troopers these events took place one year before episode iv a new hope there was once an imperial prison barge called the purge that housed about 500 inmates as well as dozens of imperials and a ship doctor the purge was on route to deliver prisoners to a moon penal colony where they'd be staying indefinitely the inmates ranged from low-level grifters to rebel sympathizers and some of the most violent criminals in the galaxy the purge was a dreary vessel the engines rattled the floors constantly the durasteel ceilings dripped with condensation from whatever machinery kept it running and the cafeteria slop was enough to drive someone mad if the ship shut down suddenly and was lost in space forever the empire probably wouldn't have minded triglongo was a young teenage vagrant stuck in a cell in gen pop with his older brother kale longo they were picked up eight weeks prior by the empire with their father von longo these kids weren't murderers or rebels they were small-scale swindlers picked up on an imperial sweep trigg was easily intimidated by other inmates but kale his older brother would always stand up for him their dad vaughn was suspected by the empire to have rebel affiliation and he died two weeks prior while being brutally interrogated by the purge's captain of the guard jareth sartoris during his time on the purge trig memorized the hundreds of meters of narrow access routes sub-levels and concourses in gen pop on the purge there were six levels of gem pop actually with a cafeteria above all those levels and then admin and then the staff quarters and on the very top of the ship the infirmary and pilot deck deep down at the bottom of the ship was solitary for the worst inmates maniacs extreme flight risks one day after eating in the cafeteria trigg and kale slipped away to meet with the notorious delphinian face gang to trade some information for protection their dad had given them a location of a secret cache on board the purge that had blasters in it so the brothers decided they might be able to leverage this information to gain face with the face gang but instead of meeting the gang leader as planned another delphinian named r miss showed up to meet them revealing that he'd killed the leader and promised that his flunkies could kill the longo brothers for sport so kale lunged forward and ripped a series of rings out of armus's lip splattering blood everywhere and after a brief fight trig and kale escaped the gangsters and that's when they noticed something strange the ship's loud engines had completely stopped up in the ship's infirmary zahara cody chief medical officer tended to a dug prisoner who has the best name tugnut tugnut was one of the usual inmates who had feign illness just to hang out in the infirmary for a while she was friendly with most of the prisoners and really cared about her job she started work on the purge 13 weeks ago leaving her wealthy family behind her she wanted to become a doctor but in this galaxy doctors were considered a dirty profession something to be done by droids her family was a wealthy financing family and her parents crewmates and even the inmates sometimes saw her position on the purge as a temporary venture before returning to her luxurious life but when zahara went to medical school she had a fleeting romance with one of her professors who opened her eyes to the suffering of the galaxy and despite her issues with imperial rule she still joined the empire to help others as best she could but here on the purge she had seen too much corruption go on and she put in her two weeks notice especially since the whole deal with von lago getting beat to death and von became the patient she couldn't save thanks to jareth sartoris sartoris captain of the guard on the purge had a long questionable track record leading him to be stationed here on the purge sartorius was in his quarters when he also noticed the engine stopped they were still a week out from their destination so he went up to the warden's office along with three other officers to check out what was going on warden cloth told everyone that the thrusters were damaged beyond repair and without additional parts they were stranded out here on the border of the unknown regions however there was hope they detected a star destroyer nearby but it wasn't responding to communications they turned on some emergency sublight thrusters and ran a bioskin on the destroyer when they got close which showed only about a dozen life forms on board which is a far cry from the normal 10 000 or so crew that a star destroyer needs to operate some of the officers scoffed and suspected equipment malfunction but sartorius felt something in his gut deep down that whatever was on that destroyer they wanted no part of either way cloth decided to send sartorius and the other officers up to the destroyer to salvage for parts to fix the thrusters all while cloth stayed in his sterile clean office much to sartorius chagrin he really hated the warden and the warden really hated sartorius so sartorius a few officers engineers and stormtroopers took a docking shaft elevator up from the purge to the derelict star destroyer the elevator ended up in a massive dimly lit hangar bay in the hangar were a couple of x-wings tie fighters a corellian freighter some escape pods and a sentinel-class imperial shuttle there were some droids moving crates back and forth stuck in some broken routine otherwise there was no trace of the crew at all but the officers still intended to complete their duty so they got to work they found a hover lift that they wanted to use to get around the ship but there were simply too many of them to take the hover lift in order to better search more parts of the ship they split up into two groups group one was made up of the officers sartorius austin vesek and two engineers group two had one officer armitage the couple of engineers and stormtroopers they were to rendezvous back at the docking shaft in one hour sartorius group headed out and found a storage bay and had the engineers collect the parts they needed after a while officer vesek calmed group 2 for a situation report but the comms just kind of sounded like a strange static but he did hear the words medlab quadrant 17 and a vat group one finished salvaging parts and as they headed back to the hangar officer austin let out a sharp cough so while group one was scavenging for parts group two was out scavenging for some supplies and armitage stumbled across a bio lab what he found shocked him a massive wall-sized vat filled with clear bubbling gel and dozens of strange pink organisms to him it looked like a crossbreeding experiment of some exotic flowers and peeled fruit but as he got closer he saw what they actually were dozens of sets of human lungs breathing in sync together they were all hooked up with tubes one pumping oxygen in and another tube draining gray fluid out and into black tanks that were behind the vat armitage stood in awe of this clandestine experiment when suddenly each set of lungs all started screaming together [Applause] that was the moment that vesic was trying to calm armitage so the comms weren't distorted by static armitage was being drowned out by a cacophony of screams when he tried to run out of the room he saw that he had visitors group one got back to the docking shaft but group two was nowhere to be found sartorius now annoyed by austin's bronchial coughing he assumed group two already went back down to the purge so they returned to the ship as well on the ride down one of the engineers dropped to his knees and vomited and his skin turned a sickly green color once they all reached the purge vesic and the other engineer started coughing as well sartorius went back to his quarters to sleep while the others went to medbay to be treated by zahara cody and waste her 2-1 b droid while zahara tried to treat them vesek started having a violent seizure his eyes rolled into the back of his head his skin went gray and he started shaking so bad that waste had to hold him down to keep him in his bed geysers of blood spewed out of his mouth and all over the joint after that zahara put all four patients into a quarantine bubble a couple hours passed and back down in gen pop the majority of the inmate population became terribly ill as well there was screaming and fights throughout the ship the purge eventually had a nearly 100 infection rate the med bay quickly filled to capacity and people died and at an alarming rate waste ran some tests on the disease and discovered that the cells of the virus could hide themselves within the patients and actually communicate with other cells throughout the body through a process called quorum sensing the virus would lay dormant until it realized a point where the host wouldn't be able to fight off an infection and that's when it struck it wasn't any known disease in the databanks and biosuits didn't seem to work either it spread through the air and permeated most materials seemingly while waste was describing all this to zahara dozens of patients in the infirmary all suffered violent seizures at the same time screamed and then died zahara was asymptomatic so she had a blood test done to check if she even had the virus sartorius was escorted to quarantine because he was part of the boarding party and despite him being asymptomatic he was still forced into the bubble he knew that the purge was likely a lost cause at this point so he decided that he'd evacuate the ship before people started hogging all the escape pods they knew that only two people knew the escape pod codes warden cloth and vessek he pinched vessek's nose shut torturing him and demanding the codes he tried to disregard his conscience killing a fellow officer saying that vesek was about to die anyways once sartorius came back clean from the virus he left quarantine and headed to the warden's office with two e-11s in hand at this point the staff quarters were littered with dead imperials but he walked by them and he got to the office and cloth was on the ground laying in a puddle of blood and gray fluids sartorius put a blaster to cloth's head and cloth gave him the escape pod codes afterwards cloth scolded sartorius and started reciting sartorius's psychological results back to him but he was interrupted when sartorius blasted his head wide open genpop was silent now and the place smelled of death kale and trigg thought they were the only ones left alive trigg yelled for help and then suddenly the bars of every cell opened up when they walked out armis attacked trig and pinned him down kale took a shiv and shoved it through the back of armus's head and threw his mouth killing the gang leader while the longo brothers headed to an elevator shaft to leave gen pop they found a cell with a wookie toddler inside huddled over its dead parents the dead wookies tongues were swollen with their throats bursted open the disease apparently had different side effects on different races the brothers tried to coerce the wookie toddler to come with them but it refused and it stayed with its dead parents to mourn when the brothers started leaving they heard the wookie child start screaming followed up by groaning slurping and crunching until the screams stopped kailyn trigg left promptly up in med bay the last of zahara's patients died in just a few hours everyone infected was dead but waste was able to synthesize an antivirus created from zahara's immune blood cells so zahara took the antivirus and went up to the pilot station to run a bioscan for any survivors to give the antivirus to it showed six life forms her in the pilot deck one in admin sartorius two in gen pop kale and trigg and two more at the bottom of the ship locked in solitary blaming herself for failing as the ship's doctor she was determined to save literally anyone she could so she took the turbolift down to solitary she found corpses of a couple guards one with a note in hand it was a note to his wife and kids on the planet called chandrala she pocketed the note and took a key card and a blaster set to stun she went to the solitary cells and opened one a wookie snarled and charged out at her but it stopped once it saw the blaster she opened another cell the coffin sized door opened up to a man in his late 20s with dark hair who asked zahara what's for dinner today he asked her to lower the blaster because it's scaring chewy it was han solo and chewbacca they'd apparently been here for weeks since imperials boarded the millennium falcon and impounded the ship and her cargo they were smuggling on the side alright han coughed sharply as he came out of his cell and once zahara felt safe around the two she put the blaster on the floor kicked it behind her and gave han a shot of the antivirus then she injected chewbacca who felt immediate excruciating pain not physical but mental and emotional he had nightmarish visions and heard demonic voices in his native tongue of sriwok telling him that he'd done horrible things on this ship eating wookie children killing innocent people he wanted to feast chewie started having distorted flashbacks to his childhood hearing life day songs he saw faces of his family and his beloved wife mala melting and grinning at him these are the true songs of life day these songs are eat and kill eat and kill zahara noticed a welt and chewie's throat start to boil up she took a syringe and extracted gray fluid from it clearing up chewy's throat and the visions and voices eventually disappeared the antivirus had won they all headed back to the turbolift to go back up to piloting when zahara noticed that the corpses of the guards weren't there anymore along with zahara's blaster they eventually took the turbo lift back up to the infirmary and the dozens of bodies that previously lined the corridors disappeared there as well zahara searched for waste only to find him completely smashed spouting gibberish with its damaged servos only one sentence seemed clear they woke up they just just eat eat eat kaelin trigg had took the turbo lift up from gem pop to the admin level and found an escape pod they tried to open it up when sartorius held them up with two e11s sartorius got into the pod with the escape codes and launched off escaping the purge kail and trigg searched for another escape pod and found one while also running into han chewie and zahara they all agreed to work together to escape they headed up to piloting to release the manual lock on the escape pods when they noticed something on the ship's bioscanner hundreds of new life forms started appearing a bunch of red lights lit up on the 3d holo map of the purge the red lights started moving up through the ship at a high speed from gen pop deck by deck through the vents hallways and the turbolift shaft heading directly up to the pilot station they could hear the rumbling and screaming coming from below them apparently just like the virus hid inside the body and struck when it was at its most virulent whatever these creatures were were doing the same thing but instead to a body they were doing it to the purge the horde of undead arrived in the piloting station chasing the group towards the docking shaft the creatures stampeded behind them like a swarm of insects on the ground walls and ceiling the group ran and shot back at the mass but it made no difference they had no choice but to escape up into the derelict star destroyer once they got to the docking shaft the longo brothers looked back and saw their father vaughn with two weeks of morgrot grinning at his sons menacingly as if it knew the psychological pain it was currently inflicting on them trigg completely froze up at the site forcing kale to run up and toss trig up into the elevator and vaughn managed to dive onto kale and bite his leg and for kale everything turned gray [Music] kale eventually woke up and they were in the large dimly lit hangar of the star destroyer han chewie and zahara were coming up with a plan and trig was still in shock the undead from the purge were still below them but they had crawled up the docking shaft under the elevator they were scratching and breaking their teeth on the metal below they decided that han chewie and shrig would head to the bridge of the star destroyer to see if they could get it moving while zahara stayed to treat kale's bite trigg didn't want to leave kale behind but everyone knew that kale might not make it and trigg didn't need to see two dead relatives in one day so han chewie and trig left and zahara extracted some gray matter from kale's wound the grey goo started to move on its own it tried to crawl up her arm looking for an entry wound before she destroyed it when she did the creatures from below screamed in synchronization from the docking shaft what zahara would describe as a precise sine wave but filled with hatred kind of like trigonometry class the screaming from the shaft below stopped and was responded to by a massive roar coming from deep within the star destroyer han chewie and trig were walking for about 20 minutes when they came upon a stormtrooper helmet hanging from a chain with dried blood and another helmet on the ground with the mouthpiece ripped off exposing where the jaw would be they also came across a bunch of shipping crates labeled imperial biological weapons division inside were red tanks but some were painted black the black tanks were full of some liquid that seemed to be moving on its own inside of them all of a sudden a gargantuan roar came from above them in the durasteal ceiling the vents broke open revealing a mass of bodies with black-eyed faces stormtroopers officers and other imperials it was a malevolent synchronized army of the dead they poured out the ceiling and chased the group through a hatch which they locked behind them out in space sartorius woke up in his escape pod hours after ejecting from the purge and he was actually reflecting on how he left the longo brothers to die especially after killing their father as well he kept trying to rationalize it in his head and he thought back to his own abusive father a death stick addict who he'd killed once he turned 16 and then joined the empire to start a new life still trying to justify his actions internally he noticed the trajectory of his pod was curving he looked at the viewport and saw a star destroyer coming into view in shocked disbelief he also saw the purge and he surmised that he was somehow being pulled by the star destroyer's tractor beam his pod was pulled up into the hangar and got lodged in between an x-wing and a tie fighter he opened the pod's door and down below he saw the docking shaft where he originally came into the star destroyer he also heard blaster fire coming from inside of it down below zahara and kale also heard the blaster fire they're right next to the shaft they saw a hole start to burn open from the inside the creatures from the purge had learned to use weapons heavy blasters even and were using them to burn through zahara grabbed kale and ran kale implored her to drop him and let him go but she refused and then a heavy blaster bolt caught kale in the right back side of his head blasting it open his head rolled back and his left eye looked up at zahara drenched in blood she dropped him and ran the other three found themselves at the ship's main power generator a large cylindrical room with a dark pit connected to the generator room was a large tunnel that led all the way back to the hangar there was a narrow catwalk that hung along the rim of this room and they had to get across it to get to a turbolift that went up to the bridge han and chewie settled along the catwalk nervously but trigg was too afraid to go reluctantly han let trigg stay while they went up to the bridge while trigg was waiting he saw kale down a corridor and he followed him into a dark room the door locked behind him in the middle of the dark room was a colossal mound of half-eaten rotten corpses and severed limbs that had been dumped in through a trash chute coming from the top of the room a stormtrooper emerged from the pile and charged at trigg chasing him around the hill of flesh the only way out that trigg could see was the chute at the top of the pile so he started climbing followed closely by the skittering stormtrooper back in the hangar sartorius was looking below at all the zombies that had poured out from the purge and they were looking back up at him he jumped into the x-wing cockpit and fired turbolasers at the zombies and the x-wing recoiled backwards slamming into the imperial sentinel shuttle zombies started climbing onto the x-wing so sartorius jumped out got onto the imperial shuttle and fell into the hatch when he looked up he saw that he was surrounded by four emaciated imperial officers commander gorister was the leader here and he revealed to sartorius that 10 weeks ago this star destroyer vector was sent by lord vader to deliver experimental weapons to a testing base at some point an experimental weapon leaked unknown if it was an accident or a secret controlled experiment the infection began their scientists tried to examine it and learn about it before it spread but they couldn't stop it some imperials were immune and they synthesized an antivirus which the crew on board this shuttle had taken while gorster told this story they noticed that the zombies outside were shooting the shuttle but eventually stopped they started looking for another way in the purge zombies and star destroyer zombies started to mix together and they were screaming back and forth to each other synchronizing their information gorister revealed that his crew in the shuttle originally consisted of about 30 men over the past 10 weeks they had all been drawing straws to see who would get eaten for survival the group was about to tackle sartorius when the shuttle got rocked from the outside the undead had gotten into the x-wing themselves and shot the shuttle after seeing sartorius do it sartorius used the distraction to fight off the scrawny men open the hatch and threw commander gorster into the undead horde below starting a bloody feast one of the imperial men white begged for his life and agreed to pilot the shuttle for sartorius if sartorius could disable the tractor beam sartorius agreed and told the remaining men to stay put while he headed to the bridge to turn off the tractor beam still using the distraction of commander gorister getting eaten by a bunch of undead sartorius jumped down barged through a bunch of undead and found the hover lift that he originally saw when he came onto the star destroyer he was only one person so now he could use it that's when he felt something was off he looked down and his leg had been bitten zahara had ran through the star destroyer for who knows how long at this point she stumbled across a medical research lab she found corpses hooked up to black tanks as if somebody was collecting the gray fluid that was coming out of them then she was attacked by an undead researcher she stabbed the zombie with a nearby syringe on the floor which miraculously had an antivirus in it the zombie had a strange moment of clarity they grabbed the syringe out of its head and started scratching a word on the floor blackwing after that zahara decided to find a workstation and look for clues related to that phrase there was a 2-1 b droid nearby that assisted her in locating the nearest workstation and gave her directions to the hangar control room back to han and chewie they were still crossing the catwalk in the massive generator room and when they looked down into the dark pit they actually noticed movement there were thousands of undead in the pit of the power turbine likely a large chunk of the original star destroyer crew the undead looked up and screamed at the sight of them and pulled out blasters and started shooting up at them han and chewie finally got off the catwalk and took the turbo lift up to the bridge nearly every panel on the bridge was completely smashed but han managed to find a working one he got the star destroyer to tilt and move but the hyperdrive wasn't accessible in a side room from the bridge chewie found a wookie child prisoner from the purge with a lump in their throat and a long lumpy tongue as chewie approached it the child rushed over to a hatch and opened it and out jumped three undead wookies covered in blood and gray matter han killed three of them with his blaster but the young wookie jumped on han's back about to bite him after some hesitation chewie finally shot the child down to save han back downstairs trigg was still crawling through the vents with the stormtrooper right behind him trigg came to an opening in the vent a dead end that emptied out right into the circular generator room from before trigg looked behind him and the stormtrooper's helmet slid off it was kale but with the right half of his head completely obliterated kale had the same menacing stare that von longo did back when they escaped the purge trigg froze up in fear and was about to be bitten by kale but he finally snapped out of it trigg put his knees up and launched kale behind him out the vent and into the pit as kale fell into the pit the thousands of zombies looked up and screamed shooting their blasters at trig causing him to fall trick barely grabbed onto the catwalk and was hanging there when another zombie came out from the vent jumped out and grabbed onto trigg's leg it was the old gang leader r miss even in death he still wanted revenge back at the hangar zahara made it to the control room there was a window where she could look down on the hangar and it was swarming with zombies and surmised that the tractor beam was on somehow she went to a nearby console and entered a password blackwing this gave her administrative access so it's pretty terrible password she tried to turn off the tractor beam but saw that someone else had actually recently turned it off she then accessed an entry log imperial bioweapon project 171a galactic virus dissemination and distribution algorithm classified top secret status in progress the words distribution algorithm stuck out to her as she looked back down in the hangar the thousands of undead were all over the captured ships they were learning how to pilot them and were even packing the black tanks full of grey liquid into the ships it seemed like they were preparing another viral attack on a new host the rest of the galaxy she looked over and saw some undead moving in x-wing to aim up at her in the control room and it fired its turbo lasers han and chewie took the lift down from the bridge and back to the generator room they saw trigg hanging onto the catwalk with armist hanging onto his leg and then trigg fell but suddenly trigg slammed onto a hoverlift as our miss went tumbling into the pit it was sartorius piloting sartorius had been there disabling the tractor beam and when he saw trigg in trouble he reacted to save him which shocked even himself then he went to go pick up han and chewie to escape but the four of them on that hoverlift surpassed the weight limit and they started descending into the pit of zombies while han and chewie tried to shoot down at the zombies who were shooting up at them sartorius told trig about the people in the imperial shuttle in the hangar and when they got there to ask for the officer white he also told trigg that von longo was a good man unlike himself and revealed that he was bitten and already sick after that sartorius hoisted himself over the handrail and threw himself into the swarm of undead below after that the lift was able to fly upwards again and trigg flew the hoverlift through the concourse tunnel back to the hangar over a river of zombies when they got to the hangar there was no sign of zahara and it was swarmed with zombies they looked up and saw the hangar control room was completely ablaze trigg flew them up there and looked for zahara all he found was a feminine hand sticking out from the rubble dead they located the sentinel shuttle that sartorius told them about and it was already taking off so trigg piloted over and they all jumped onto the shuttle climbing into the hatch they met the imperial survivors who revealed that white wasn't there anymore he went up to the hangar control room to try to save the woman who was up there he was inspired by sartorius who turned off the tractor beam to save them the zombies outside opened the hangar doors packing their bodies into all the captured ships and flew away from the destroyer in every direction han got into the pilot seat and punched it leaving the hangar bay of the destroyer as well while han calibrated the hyperdrive a zombie snuck out from a hidden compartment on the shuttle and bit both of the remaining imperials to death the zombie have been waiting weeks and weeks for the right moment to strike a calling card of how this virus likes to operate han chewie and trigg didn't have their blasters on hand and when the zombie lunged at them in the cockpit a blaster bolt came from the back of the shuttle and struck the zombie down it was zahara cody as it turns out the dainty hand that trigg saw in the hanger control room was whites not zahara's white sacrificed himself to save her the zombie was on the ground writhing in pain on the floor almost crying they deduced that when the virus was too far from the horde it couldn't survive the zombies were trying to reproduce gray fluids and packing them inside the ships for this reason to sustain themselves and feel like the horde was nearby long enough to get to civilization and reproduce the group looked outside the shuttle's viewports and saw that the ships the zombies had taken were already spiraling out of control crashing into each other or veering off with no semblance of piloting anymore the infected were finally dying off and while han showed trigg some piloting controls zahara revealed the name that white gave to the sentinel ship free bird [Music] two days later they landed on a planet called galantos where han sold the free bird to black hammer pirates and they all split the money evenly they all sat down at a tap calf and discussed their futures trying to ignore what they just went through han and chewie would go off and search for the impounded millennium falcon and try to win it back in some imperial auction zahara took trig for a trip to the planet chandrala the two headed there and went to a farm town of the dead purge officer's family that zahara found a note on she gave his wife the note who ended up in tears she offered zahara and trade to come inside for some tea and that is where our story ends the account was run by a storm trooper tk329 stationed aboard the star destroyer vector these tweets gave a narrative build up to something horrible breaking out on the ship all from the perspective of a promising young stormtrooper who hoped to become a red guard one day there were also a number of letters that were sent to star wars fan sites to hype up death troopers these letters called recovered messages from the purge were from the characters of the book to other characters they know family co-workers and enemies [Music] there was also a prequel novel released the next year also written by joe schreiber it goes into the origin of the blackwing virus dating back to the old republic and it involves jedi and sith be sure to subscribe and click the bell for notifications so you can catch when this video goes up for red harvest and thank you for watching what'd you think of star wars zombies was it scary fun lackluster let me know in the comments if you liked the video consider sharing it with a friend it really helps the channel out shout outs to the patrons for making this video more possible than ever before and special shout outs to the master tear heliomorpha uninvited haggis jordan rowe and jw and i'll see y'all in the next video peace the legend will never die

Channel: Saintmillion

Views: 1,572,794

Keywords: saintmillion, saint million, star wars, death troopers, star wars lore, star wars legends, star wars legends lore, attack of the legends, legends lore, saintmillion star wars, star wars death troopers, red harvest, blackwing virus, black wing virus, blackwing, black wing, star wars zombies, zombies, zahara, trig, han solo, chewbacca, kale, sartoris

Id: U8jilipRXxY

Length: 34min 8sec (2048 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 21 2022