Cover Artist: Indika

Trig Longo is a young inmate on the Imperial prison barge Purge with his older brother Kale. They had been picked up sometime earlier, along with their father Von, but he had been killed a couple weeks before by an overzealous prison guard named Jareth Sartoris. Trig and Kale are trying to avoid trouble, but after an encounter with a particularly nasty inmate named Aur Myss, they find themselves with a large bounty on their heads when the barge develops engine trouble before reaching the prison colony. With the Purge essentially floating derelict, the warden is surprised to see an apparently abandoned Imperial Star Destroyer in the same system. He sends Sartoris and a team into the Destroyer to salvage the parts they need to repair their ship. In the Destroyer's hangar bay, Sartoris divides the team in half, hoping to get what they need quicker that way. Sartoris' group finds what they need and they return to the Purge, assuming that the other group already returned. A couple of his team became violently ill, so they were sent to Zahara Cody, the ships doctor, who is unable to do anything for them before they die horribly. A plague quickly spreads through the Purge eventually killing most of the people on board. Zahara discovers that she is immune to the illness, but when she scans the ship for lifesigns, she finds only 6 survivors, two of which are in solitary confinement. Going to find them, she releases a smuggler named Han Solo and his copilot Chewbacca and gives them a vaccine made from her own blood. Back in the normal cells as everyone else died around them, Trig and Kale were released by a sympathetic guard, and they were immediately attacked by Myss. Fighting him off and killing him, the two then make their way to the escape pods where they are prevented from escaping by Sartoris, and he takes the pod they were going for. They make their way to the other pod, noticing that all the bodies had disappeared, where they are intercepted by Han and Chewie, who are going to take the last pod when Zahara tells them it won't work because they control codes are gone. Han, Chewie and Zahara go to the bridge to hopefully unlock the pod, leaving Trig and Kale alone to let them know if it worked. Kale hears something and goes to explore, when they manage to open the pod, but one of the recently dead lunges out at Trig from the podand chases him. Trig is found by his brother and they run to the bridge with the dead chasing them. The survivors use the docking setup to escape into the Star Destroyer, but Kale is bitten by the body of his father, so he and Zahara wait in the hangar while Han, Chewie and Trig make their way to the bridge to see if they can escape from there. After they leave, the dead manage to learn how to use blasters and shoot their way into the hangar. Kale tells Zahara to leave him, and when she won't, he saves her from a blaster bolt even though it kills him, and she escapes to find the research lab. Sartoris wakes up in his escape pod to find himself in the hangar bay of the Destroyer, having been caught by a tractor beam. Surrounded by living dead, he runs to a captured X-wing and climbs in, shooting some of the dead before he needs to escape from there to a stormtrooper transport. Climbing inside, he finds several survivors from the Destroyer who have been there for ten weeks. They attack him to avoid starvation, but he fights them off after the transport is shot by a starfighter. He throws several of the survivors to the dead, and then spares a couple, telling them to get the transport ready to fly while he turns off the tractor beam if he can. Han, Chewie and Trig find access to the bridge over a long narrow catwalk, but Trig doesn't have the courage to cross it so Han tells him to wait there while they go to the bridge and try to find an escape for them. While he is waiting for them, he sees his brother and follows him into a room filled with corpses and body parts. One corpse wearing a trooper helmet sees him and chases him, and Trig gets lost. He sees a light on the ceiling and decides the only way to get away is to climb the pile. He does soand escapes into a vent with the corpse chasing, and flees until he reaches an opening in the vent, right over the catwalk. Losing heart he turns around and realizes he's trapped. He kicks the corpse, causing it to lose the helmet, and realizes he has been chased by his dead brother. He fights him off and throws him out of the vent before falling himself. He catches himself on the catwalk and realizes that more corpses followed him as they start jumping out to try and catch him. The last one who jumps is Aur Myss, who catches his ankle. The two fall, but Trig is caught by Sartoris who picks up Han and Chewie and turns them back to the hangar. He explains that he has been bitten and that if he stays they won't make it. He tells Trig that his father was a good man and then jumps out of the speeder. Zahara is saved in the research lab by a medical droid who directs her to a working computer at her request. She learns that this virus is part of a project named Blackwing, which is a virus that learns and delivers itself to where it is needed, but then notices that an X-wing has been maneuvered into position to shoot her location. Han, Chewie and Trig arrive at the hangar and see the destruction. Realizing they can't save Zahara because she is apparently already dead, they board the transport and take off while dead bodies cram themselves into fighters and leave as well. Before they get away though, they are attacked by a corpse that managed to get on their transport. It kills the remaining Imperials and attacks Han, but he is saved by Zahara, who was saved by the Imperial that Sartoris saved. She explains that the plague will never spread beyond the Destroyer, because the virus can't survive too far away from the source. The four survivors sell their transport and Han and Chewie go to buy back the Millennium Falcon, leaving Zahara and Trig. They track down the wife of one of the guards on the Purge and Zahara gives her a note that she found, which gives the woman some peace, and she invites them in for tea.