Jareth Sartoris

Jareth Sartoris was the son of thief and death sticks addict Gilles Sartoris. A violent man, Gilles frequently beat his son. At the age of 16, Jareth ended this situation by killing his father and abandoning the corpse in an alleyway. He then made his way through enlistment into the Imperial Army and as time passed joined the Imperial Corrections Service.

Captain Sartoris was the officer in command of the Imperial Corrections Officers aboard the Imperial Prison Barge Purge . When the thrusters broke down aboard the Purge, he was part of a salvage team sent to check out a derelict Star Destroyer, the Vector. The team returned with the parts needed to repair the ship, but they inadvertently brought with them a horrible disease. After most members of his party began to show symptoms of an unknown disease, the med-bay was quickly overrun with sick inmates, stormtroopers, and Imperial personnel. On order of Dr. Zahara Cody, he was put into a quarantine bubble. Instead of waiting to die, he decided to leave the bubble and go to Warden Kloth's office to get the launch codes to launch the escape pods.

When he got up to the office, he found that Warden Bissley Kloth was already showing signs of an advanced infection. After he extracted the code from Kloth, he killed him in cold blood. Two troopers witnessed the killing and Sartoris shot one but let the other one go free. He traveled to the escape pods and found that Kale Longo and Trig Longo had also been trying to gain access to the pods, but were unsuccessful because they were without the codes. The brothers pleaded for Sartoris to take them with him, but Sartoris refused. He then opened up the pods and kept Kale and Trig at bay with a blaster. Sartoris blasted off the barge into what he thought was safety.

Jareth Sartoris would arrive on the derelict Star Destroyer after trying to escape the Purge in an escape pod. What Sartoris didn't realize was that the Vectors tractor beam was turned on. Instead of drifting through space, he ended up in the main hangar of Vector. He was quickly attacked by the reanimated corpses of the crew of the Purge. After using a derelict X-Wing fighter's armament to temporarily evade the zombies, he took refuge inside a Sentinel-class shuttle. Inside, he was introduced to Commander Gorrister and five others, survivors of the crew of the Star Destroyer Vector. Gorrister explained to him how they had survived for ten weeks, by eating the other surviving crewmates. After narrowly escaping a murder attempt by the survivors, Sartoris grabbed Gorrister and the two other men that were holding him and hoisted them out into the crowd of the undead. As Sartoris was about to throw out the rest of the survivors, he stopped when he saw the faces of the three young men, White, Tanner, and Pauling. He spared the three soldiers and left the shuttle in an attempt to disable the tractor beam. At that moment, Jareth Sartoris realized that he had been bitten. He would go on to look for the other survivors of the Purge.

After commandeering a service hovercraft, Sartoris searched the Star Destroyer for the other survivors of the Purge. He found Trig Longo, Han Solo and Chewbacca in one of the main engine wells of the ship, arriving just in time to save Longo from certain death. After picking up Han Solo and Chewbacca, Sartoris headed for the main hangar. The combined weight of all the survivors, however, exceeded the hovercraft's capacity, so Sartoris decided to sacrifice himself by jumping down to a crowd of zombies, giving the rest of the survivors a chance at escaping the Vector.

• The Essential Reader's Companion