Star Wars: Death Troopers

Chapter 8 Lung Windows

Armitace was an artist.

Back home on Faro, he'd delighted his younger brothers and sisters with countless airpaint murals, but his talent was largely wasted in Imperial Corrections-if anything, his co-workers requested countless renderings of the female form, or worse, machinery, their beloved speeders and flitters from back home. Armitage hated drawing machines. It was enough to put him off art altogether. and that was saying something for a kid who'd once dreamed of attending the Pan-Galactic Arts Conservatory on Miele Nova.

Once he glimpsed what was in the Destroyer's Bio-Lab 177, however, he knew he had to paint it.

He'd broken away from the troopers and the engineers, Phibes and Quatermass, down at the other end of the corridor, ostensibly to check the supply dump on sublevel twelve, happy for any excuse to get away from them. How long were you expected to stand around complaining about the mess hall food and speculating which body part Zahara Cody washed first when she took a shower? And if he didn't participate in this enlightened conversation, the troopers and guards started heckling him, asking what was wrong with him, didn't he like working there? Maybe he'd be happier helping the Rebels plan another of their cowardly attacks on the Empire?

Checking out the bio-lab, no matter how boring it turned out to be, would have to be an improvement on that.

But the bio-lab wasn't boring.

The first thing Armitage noticed as he'd stepped through the hatchway was the vat. In many ways it was the only thing he saw, because after that he simply stopped looking. Its contents were simply too overwhelming and-in a bizarre way-too beautiful to get past.

The vat itself was huge, wall-sized, filled with some sort of clear bubbling gel. Suspended inside were dozens of oddly shaped pink organism with wires and tubes running from them to a bank of humming equipment stacked beside the tank. Armitage, who had already stopped in his tracks, could only regard them in wonderment. From a distance the pink things looked like an unlikely hybrid of flowers, peeled fruit, and some species of embryonic winged animal whose like he'd never seen-they resembled a flock of tiny, skinned angels.

Then he came closer and realized what he was looking at.

They were sets of human lungs.

If he felt any tremor of disgust, it flicked through him so fleetingly that he scarcely noticed, and was supplanted immediately by a deeper and more fulfilling sense of artistic fascination. In each set, the entire respiratory tract had been carefully winnowed out to preserve the trachea and, above it, the larynx and all the more delicate organs of sound. Tubes were pumping oxygen into the lungs, causing them to expand and contract in their clear liquid bath.

Armitage realized they were all breathing together.

He counted thirty-three pairs of lungs in the vat before he gave up and stopped counting. Each was tagged with numbers and dates, part of some abandoned scientific experiment whose nature he could only guess at.

Some of the lungs were different. Their pink surface had gone a mottled gray in places, the muscle wall thickened with what looked like gray scar tissue. Armitage moved closer-he was no longer aware of himself at all now-and stared at them. Were they breathing more rapidly, or was that just his imagination? And was he breathing with them? It felt as though he'd been drawn into the larger, almost hypnotic tidal rhythm of their movement.

As always, when faced with something so innately striking, his first wish was to paint it, to capture what he saw in front of him. Not just the lung bath-not a bad name for a painting, he thought-but the emotion he'd felt when he'd realized what he'd been looking at. Awe. Shock. And ultimately a kind of unconscious familiarity, like something he'd once glimpsed in a dream.

He watched them sucking oxygen through tubes, and realized they were breathing more quickly and deeply. Somewhere on the other side of the vat, a machine beeped, and beeped again. Looking at them more closely, Armitage noticed for the first time the sets of rubber tubes that came braiding out of the lungs themselves. They seemed to be pumping some kind of thick gray fluid to a group of black tanks on the far side of the lab.

Lights flickered over the distant shoals of monitoring equipment on the other side of the vat. The lungs swelled and shrank, swelled and shrank, faster and faster.

Suddenly, at full inspiration, they stopped.

And, as one, they screamed through the tubes.

It was a high buzzing shriek that rose up and then sloped down, and it sent Armitage staggering backward with its intensity. Never in his life had he heard such a scream. He covered his ears, ducked his head, not wanting to be around this place anymore. The comlink in his headpiece crackled. some other guard's voice trying to reach him, and he could hardly convey what was happening. He wanted to run.

Inside the vat, the screaming noises shrilled on, up and down. The gray liquid was pumping faster now, siphoned off to the black tanks. Armitage realized that each one of the voice boxes had been wired with some kind of amplifier, making it even louder, and he wondered who was studying the scream-capacity of these lungs and why. Behind him a set of monitors showed the waveform of the scream, mapping it out as a series of mathematical functions.

He turned to the door.

And realized he wasn't alone.