Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (25 page)

“I’m not going to grovel,” she said. “I
like
my life, but you couldn’t humiliate me by exiling me to Haidoral Prime and I won’t be humiliated now. I made choices and I regret
none
of them. You were damn lucky to have me. You forced me into betrayal. If you want to execute me,
Lord Vader
, so be it.”

Vader no longer held the energy blade. He raised a black-gloved hand, palm out toward Chalis. The governor’s feet left the floor. Her legs were dangling in the air as the nightmare logic once again took effect.

Her eyes went wide. Vader’s hand closed into a fist, and Chalis began gasping and clawing at her throat.

For the first time, Vader spoke. His voice was metallic and deep and resonant, his breath a rasping hiss underneath the impact of his words.

“Where is Skywalker?”

Chalis’s head shook as she stared in bewilderment.

Namir repeated the words in his head, baffled.

There was a crackling sound like the branch of a green, healthy tree being twisted apart. Chalis kept clawing at her throat, her breathing increasingly ragged.

One of the stormtroopers approached Vader from behind, head tilted as if listening to his helmet comm. He hesitated, apparently uncertain whether to interrupt, then said, “Lord Vader. We’ve located the
Millennium Falcon
.”

Vader never looked toward the trooper, but he flicked his wrist again and Chalis struck the wall like a discarded toy before slumping to the floor. The stormtroopers responded by advancing down the corridor with their master in the center of a phalanx.

Namir closed his eyes and sought refuge from the nightmare.

ELOCHAR SECTOR

Zero Days After Plan Kay One Zero

The blast doors aboard the
Thunderstrike
were sealed. Brand saw that as a positive sign—an indication that the bridge crew was attempting to isolate the Imperial infiltration team—until she found Charmer, Roach, and a trio of noncombat personnel and fresh meat trying to burn through one door with a welding torch.

“We’re on our way to the command deck,” Charmer stammered out, swallowing half the words in frustration. “We don’t—don’t know—”

“It was the wounded crew,” Brand said. “They were Imperials. Must have slaughtered everyone on the
Trumpet’s Call
before coming to the flotilla.”

Roach was speaking rapidly into her comlink, but she seemed to be receiving no response.

Brand considered the situation. If the infiltrators had control of the blast doors, they’d probably taken the bridge. They would’ve taken internal comms offline already. They’d need time to take the better-secured systems—weapons, engine control, life support—but not a
lot
of time.

Brand eyed Charmer as he sheared through metal, sent sparks flying. There was no way he’d make it to the bridge quickly enough.

She’d already turned away and started down the passage when she remembered to say, “Keep going. I’ll try another way.” Even after all these years, teamwork still didn’t come easily to her.

But Roach was following her. She recognized the footsteps, swift and ungainly. “Gadren’s in the armory,” Roach called. “I was going to meet him.”

Brand glanced at the girl. “So?”

“That means he has guns. He can get out.”

Brand mentally reviewed the armory inventory. “Maybe,” she agreed. It wouldn’t be a fast or subtle escape, but he had a better chance than Charmer. “If you make contact, tell him to meet me at the bridge. I’ll wait as long as I can.”

Roach started to reply. Brand stopped her with a look.

She left the girl behind before retracing her route to the
Trumpet’s Call.
The damage to the light freighter was severe, but in some ways that was to her advantage: The main computer’s safety systems, had they been online, would have prevented what she was planning. She slid into the pilot’s chair in the dark of the bridge and transferred whatever power remained from life support to the engines. A warning light and a timer crystallized in one corner of her mask’s display, alerting her of exactly how long her suit’s emergency oxygen would last. The number wasn’t encouraging.

Her stomach lurched as the artificial gravity cut out. She fastened the chair’s safety harness over her chest and resumed work. Slowly, the
Trumpet’s Call
unmoored its docking clamps from the
Thunderstrike.
As Brand had expected, the
Thunderstrike
did not unclamp itself from the
Trumpet’s Call.

As she activated the ship’s thrusters, a dozen new lights appeared on the main console. Brand’s teeth were vibrating before she felt the freighter shake. Metal howled, echoing through the ship’s interior.

Brand wondered briefly which would tear apart first: the
Thunderstrike
’s clamps or the air lock of the
Trumpet’s Call
.

Then she had her answer. Following a sound like the shrieking of a thousand tormented droids, the ship jumped forward and the detritus of the bridge—a datapad, a ration pack wrapper, a stuffed bantha toy that must have meant something to a now-dead crew member—began swimming back into the main passage. The thin air remaining on the
Trumpet’s Call
was being sucked out of the damaged air lock, along with anything adrift in the zero-gravity environment.

It didn’t matter to Brand. She kept the freighter aligned with the
Thunderstrike
’s hull and steered it—painfully slowly, thanks to the freighter’s damaged thrusters and her own neglected piloting skills—in the direction of the corvette’s bridge. Her suit clung to her, warming automatically as the ship’s temperature dropped.

She barely noticed the freighter’s communications light blinking among all the flashing warnings on the console. She flipped a switch and listened to a voice garbled by static, barely decipherable. She heard “Lieutenant Sairgon,” “Empire,” and “flotilla.” She heard what sounded like a blaster shot.

Brand considered Sairgon a friend. Early in her tenure with the company she’d intruded on his privacy, dug around and learned who he had been before the war. He was an actor, a musician, a historian—a man of a hundred talents, none of which he ever admitted to in front of Twilight. She respected him for that.

She was glad to see the rest of the flotilla understood his message and his sacrifice. One by one, the dots on the scanner indicating other rebel ships disappeared until only the
Thunderstrike
and
Apailana’s Promise
—loyal until the end—remained. The rendezvous had been compromised. Those able had fled to hyperspace.

That still left Twilight Company to save.

When the
Trumpet’s Call
had crossed the bulk of the
Thunderstrike
from aft to fore, Brand returned to the freighter’s ruined air lock and peered through the jagged hole left after the ship’s violent unmooring. The hull of the
Thunderstrike
filled her view, smooth metal interrupted by sensor dishes and power distributors and ablative plating, like the circuit-etched surface of some strange machine moon.

Her mask filtered the shapes, magnified her vision. She knew the interior of the
Thunderstrike
as well as she’d known the streets of Tangenine. She had painstakingly memorized every deck, planned ambushes and escape routes in case of disaster. She felt a fool for not studying the exterior more closely.

She intended to correct her error if she lived through the day.

She spotted the object of her search: a maintenance hatch, built for droids but wide enough, she hoped, to admit a human. She didn’t hesitate to push off the wall of the air lock and propel herself into space.

She plunged through the void between ships, into a sliver of blackness between two gray skies. In that void, she had time to wonder about the rashness of her actions. If she’d launched herself with too much velocity, she would rip her suit when she struck
Thunderstrike
’s hull. Even a microscopic tear in her gloves would mean her death. Yet she had jumped without fear or anxiety, without picturing her comrades or envisioning the infiltrators disintegrated by her hand. Even Namir, she thought, jaded as he was, would have admitted a thrill.

She felt nothing. All she had was a job and a purpose and a system.

She twisted her body to orient the soles of her boots toward the hull. When they struck metal, a sharp pain ran through the ankle she’d sprained on Coyerti—but though her whole body felt the jolt, neither bone nor combat suit broke. She leaned forward as she ricocheted back into space, stretched to grasp at the rim of the hatch and dig her fingers under a metal joint. Her arms ached as she held herself against the
Thunderstrike
, her velocity draining away.

Once she’d tentatively secured her position, she forced the hatch open with two disruptor shots. She had to wriggle to lower herself inside, but she was able to fit—the space was designed for an astromech unit, broad if not tall. Once again, her foremost worry was for the suit; a tight squeeze had the potential to shred the fabric.

As she descended, she spared one last glance at the void. The inertia of the
Trumpet’s Call
had carried the freighter away, exposing the endless blackness and a thousand stars to her sight. She’d never been outside a starship so far from a planet before; a part of her wanted to linger, to achieve a sense of solitude that seemed just out of reach.

Then a new star winked into being, swiftly growing brighter: a ship arriving out of hyperspace. She magnified it through her mask, over and over, until she could make out its shape.

She wanted to be surprised. She wasn’t.

The ship was an Imperial Star Destroyer.

PLANET HOTH

Zero Days After Plan Kay One Zero

For some unknowable time, Namir could not tell the difference between reality and dreams.

Intellectually, he understood the distinction—knew it was imperative that he sift one from the other, knew his life and the lives of others were at stake. But what he clung to as fact seemed gossamer, prone to dissolve at a touch, while what he tried to discard as nightmare seemed fixed in his memory.

There were certain truths he was confident of: He was lying on the ice-slick floor of a half-collapsed passageway, drifting in and out of consciousness. He believed Echo Base had fallen—that he’d fought stormtroopers with his friends and lost.

He was less certain whether his friends had died. He had seen the bodies of Beak and Brand, could picture images of slaughter—of an Imperial walker crushing Roach, of a blade of energy bisecting Roja—but were they real? He remembered climbing out of the rubble once, twice, only to be struck down again.

Namir recalled something Gadren had told him shortly after he had joined Twilight Company. The alien had taken it upon himself to educate Namir about the nature of the universe—about hyperspace and comets and stellar masses—and he’d spoken of a singularity in the galactic Deep Core. In the middle of everything, Gadren said, there was a black hole that devoured all light and energy, exerting a gravitational pull more powerful than a thousand suns. The entire galaxy rotated around this crux of darkness.

Namir remembered a man in black armor who could not be killed.

Darth Vader.

In time, Namir defied a pressure upon his back, rose onto his hands and knees, and felt a ripple of nausea. He didn’t believe he had ever felt nauseated in dreams, and took that as a reason to stand. He nearly fell, caught himself, and stepped forward. His chest heaved, but nothing emerged from his lips except his steaming breath. His ribs were sore where his rifle had lain beneath him.

He crossed the corridor to test his balance. He found Beak dead, cut in two.

Beak had been the one killed by Vader. Not Roja. Memories began to align.

Vader was real.

Namir leaned against the wall.
Stay awake
, he told himself.
Unconsciousness is death. Staying here is death.
Then he let the chill surface guide him several meters down the passageway. There he found Roja, a hole burned in his jacket over his heart. Roja lay atop Howl, who was cold when Namir knelt to touch him.