Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (3 page)

He knew they were the wrong words at the wrong time.

Eighteen months earlier, the Rebel Alliance’s Sixty-First Mobile Infantry—commonly known as Twilight Company—had joined the push into the galactic Mid Rim. The operation was among the largest the Rebellion had ever fielded against the Empire, involving thousands of starships, hundreds of battle groups, and dozens of worlds. In the wake of the Rebellion’s victory against the Empire’s planet-burning Death Star battle station, High Command had believed the time was right to move from the fringes of Imperial territory toward its population centers.

Twilight Company had fought in the factory-deserts of Phorsa Gedd and taken the Ducal Palace of Bamayar. It had established beachheads for rebel hovertanks and erected bases from tarps and sheet metal. Namir had seen soldiers lose limbs and go weeks without proper treatment. He’d trained teams to construct makeshift bayonets when blaster power packs ran low. He’d set fire to cities and watched the Empire do the same. He’d left friends behind on broken worlds, knowing he’d never see them again.

On planet after planet, Twilight had fought. Battles were won and battles were lost, and Namir stopped keeping score. Twilight remained at the Rebellion’s vanguard, forging ahead of the bulk of the armada, until word came down from High Command nine months in: The fleet was overextended. There was to be no further advance—only defense of the newly claimed territories.

Not long after that, the retreat began.

Twilight Company had become the rear guard of a massive withdrawal. It deployed to worlds it had helped capture mere months earlier and evacuated the bases it had built. It extracted the Rebellion’s heroes and generals and pointed the way home. It marched over the graves of its own dead soldiers. Some of the company lost hope. Some became angry.

No one
wanted to go back.

When the civilians came out of hiding and into the plaza, the open recruit began.

Sergeant Zab’s squad—the squad Namir had once called, in a moment of pique, “morons who could make a hydrospanner backfire”—had somehow smuggled an astromech droid into the city surveillance center. From there, they’d accessed the public address system and broadcast the captain’s message: Twilight Company would soon depart Haidoral Prime. Those on Haidoral who shared the Rebellion’s ideals of freedom and democracy could remain to defend their homes, or they could sign on with Twilight to take the fight to the enemy. To go where the Rebellion was needed most. And so forth.

The captain recorded a new broadcast every time Twilight went looking to bolster its ranks, tailored to the needs and the circumstances of the local population. To Namir, all the messages sounded alike.

Open recruitments were technically against Rebel Alliance security policy, but they were a Twilight Company tradition and the captain was insistent the practice continue. So long as the Rebellion sent Twilight into hell time and again—and so long as Twilight
survived
—the company would replenish its losses from the ranks of the willing. On Haidoral Prime, seven Twilight soldiers had died. Namir hadn’t yet seen their names. Twilight would need seven newcomers to balance those losses, and still more to make up for those who’d died elsewhere in recent weeks.

Dozens of men and women trickled into the plaza over the space of an hour, hand-checked by Twilight “greeters” for weapons and concealed explosives. Not all of them were there to be recruited: Barefoot women with callused hands begged Twilight to stay; hunched, elderly men screamed for the company to leave. A disorganized band of locals voiced their desire to keep fighting the Empire on Haidoral—these were given what few weapons Twilight had to spare and sent away with meaningless well-wishing and invocations of “the cause.”

The genuine recruits were a motley assortment of young and old, pampered and desperate. Namir paced among them, watched their eyes, and passed his assessments on to the recruiting officer. A bearded and bedraggled man had the look of a street person but the carriage of a bureaucrat; Namir pegged him as an Imperial spy. A pug-nosed woman shifted her eyes to an escape route when Namir casually moved his weapon from one hand to the other; a petty criminal looking for an easy way off the planet, he thought.

That day’s recruiting officer—Hober, a withered and creak-kneed quartermaster with a knack for card games—took Namir’s recommendations with a shrug. “You know Howl’s orders,” he said.

Namir did. Captain Evon—“Howl” when outside earshot—liked to err on the side of welcome. He and Namir had spoken at length about that particular policy.

“Just keep an eye out,” Namir said. “You have to be a special kind of crazy to jump aboard a sinking ship.”

Hober snorted and shook his head. “Say that louder, and we can close up early.”

Namir didn’t say it louder. A bit of crazy wasn’t always a bad thing. Still, he needed recruits he could train, not deserters or unhinged killers.

The line moved slowly. Hober engaged the potential recruits with questions, chatted about their pastimes and families as much as their combat experience. Hober was good at his job, good at judging who would last and who would panic and get someone killed. Namir paced and tried to stay out of the way; intellectually, he knew what the recruits felt like, knew they’d be more likely to come clean when relaxed. He’d been in their position less than three years before. But at the moment, he couldn’t muster either interest or sympathy.

Someone in the line shouted. Namir turned to see three locals grappling with one another. Two of them were cursing and striking the third—a pale, gangly girl with a bolt of red hair. The apparent victim went down four times in as many seconds, popped back up after each hit, and seemed ready to keep brawling. Not a good fighter, but Namir gave her credit for persistence.

He fired three shots above the trio. They went still. The red-haired girl couldn’t have been more than a teenager, and the other two looked scarcely older.

“Do I need to care what’s going on here?” Namir asked, then cut the air horizontally with his hand before anyone could answer. “We’ll all be happier if you say no.”

The three youths shook their heads.

“Fight on my ship, and you’ll be sealed in a maintenance closet until you starve to death,” Namir said. “I won’t waste blaster bolts on you. I won’t waste oxygen shooting you out an air lock. You’ll die slowly because I
don’t care.
”

Namir lacked both the callousness and the authority to carry out that particular threat, but the would-be recruits didn’t know it. One of the older pair hesitated, then turned and stalked away. The other two lowered their eyes.

“How old are you?” Namir asked the red-haired kid.

“Twenty,” she said, jerking her head back up.

That didn’t seem likely, but there was no time for background checks. Nor would she be the first sixteen-year-old to enlist in the Alliance.

Namir turned and nodded his approval to Hober. The old quartermaster looked skeptical. Namir wondered if Hober would admit the girl into the ranks of Twilight’s fresh meat, but he suspected the man would do so against his own better judgment.

It wasn’t about being
welcoming.
These days, Twilight Company couldn’t afford to be choosy.

Three hours into the open recruit, word came down that Namir’s squad was needed outside the governor’s mansion. It was a welcome distraction.

Twilight had locked down the mansion during the first day of fighting. The compound of multi-tiered domes was on the outskirts of the city, impractically far from the center of Imperial power but possessed of an impressive view of the crystalline mountains. After the initial skirmishing, Captain Howl had ordered half a dozen rebel squads stationed around its perimeter, within a stone’s throw of its scorched but intact outer wall. No attempt to capture it had been made; with its occupants contained, the mansion itself had seemed strategically insignificant.

Since then, the situation had evolved.

“Mouse droid rolled out through a side entrance half an hour ago,” Sergeant Fektrin said. “We figured it was rigged to blow. Turned out clean. It was carrying a written message from a ‘rebel sympathizer’ inside the mansion.”

Namir, Gadren, Charmer, and Brand stood across from the mansion wall. The others rechecked their equipment as Namir and Fektrin spoke. Periodically, one of the mansion’s windows slid open, spat a volley of hissing red particle bolts onto the street, then shut again. Fektrin’s team barely seemed to notice.

“What’d the message say?” Namir asked.

“That Governor Chalis’s men are holding captured rebel soldiers inside. Our anonymous tipster—and I quote—‘fears for their safety.’ ”

Namir spat onto the road and watched his saliva sizzle where the bolts had impacted. “They know we’ve accounted for everyone, right? Do they think we’re that stupid?”

“I told Howl the same thing,” Fektrin said, “more or less.” The ridges of his face crinkled in discomfort and the tendrils dangling from his cheeks and chin seemed to curl. Namir thought of those tendrils as a sort of beard, though he’d never asked if they were present on the women of Fektrin’s species. “But the captain’s worried the governor might have grabbed some locals. Wants it checked out.

“Besides,” Fektrin went on, “if it’s a trap, then what’s the
point
? We lose a squad in there, we don’t exactly lose the war.”

Namir stared at Fektrin with as much skepticism as he could muster. “So the captain’s theory,” he said, “is that he can afford to gamble away our lives on the off chance we’ll save a few civvies.” Fektrin’s tendrils twitched, but Namir kept talking. “Do I have this right?”

Gadren was frowning. Fektrin took it in stride. Namir had never seen Fektrin smile, but the alien had a deadpan sense of humor.

“
You
want to take it up with Howl?” Fektrin asked.

Namir swore and barked a bitter laugh. “Fine,” he said. “But if we die, we’re taking the whole mansion down with us.”

Charmer came up with the squad’s approach. Climbing the wall or besieging the main entrance would draw too much opposition; Fektrin would prep a frontal assault, but only for use as a last resort. Instead, Namir, Brand, and Charmer made their way to the rooftop garden of one of the neighboring residences. The occupants were more than cooperative after Namir burned three blaster holes in their custodial droid, and stayed out of sight while Charmer secured a magnetic grappling gun in one of the flower beds.

Brand watched the governor’s mansion through the lenses of her armored mask. On her signal, Charmer fired the gun and sent the grapnel soaring through the resurgent rain. It struck the wall abutting one of the mansion’s lower balconies, attached, and pulled the line taut. Namir traversed the gap first, sliding down the line and landing with a jolt on the damp stone.

Charmer came next, then Brand. Brand severed the line with a curved knife that she pulled from her jacket. The blade hummed softly with electricity.

“Where’d you get
that
?” Namir asked.

“Confiscated,” Brand said.

Namir glanced at Charmer, who pulled a stun rod from his belt and extended the baton. It looked like it would snap in two with a bit of effort. He passed it to Namir, who shook his head until Charmer pressed the weapon into his palm. “I have my own knife,” Charmer said, forcing the words past his stutter. “You need an edge.”

Namir scowled but didn’t argue. It was true he didn’t have the taller man’s reach.

“We’re heading in,” he said, tapping his comlink. “You hear screams, you know what to do.”

Gadren’s deep voice came through mixed with static. “I will weep at your funerals, and after grieving I will requisition a grapple that can support my mass. Many lives will be saved in the future.”

“That’s the spirit,” Namir said.

Together, the three proceeded into the mansion. The rooms were dark and spacious in the Imperial style, appointed with lush carpets and glittering holographic mobiles that rotated and pulsed with the movements of the squad. Namir led the way through connected suites and into a tall, narrow hallway carved from mountain crystal. There, bronze busts and statuettes sat in niches along the wall.

Namir didn’t recognize most of the subjects. The men and women in the statuettes nearly all wore Imperial military uniforms or robes of state. A bust of an elderly man with cheeks like melted wax and thinning hair bore a resemblance to the Galactic Emperor—Namir had seen him before in rebel propaganda videos. A horned figure might have been the Emperor’s aged vizier. Namir dredged his memory for the name:
Mas Amedda.

Charmer and Brand seemed more familiar with the lineup. Charmer scowled at a middle-aged man whose bulbous, alien eyes were set in a human face and whose neck was braced by a thick metal collar. The round collar gave the bust the appearance of a grotesque potted plant. Brand paused before the re-creation of a misshapen helmet of curves and angles and skull-like eyes.

“You know him?” Namir asked.

“Not personally,” Brand said.

“Darth Vader,” Charmer said. He didn’t stammer.

The Galactic Emperor’s personal enforcer: hound of the Rebel Alliance, born from the embers of the Clone Wars, perpetrator of every horror and atrocity known to civilization. So the stories went, anyway.

“Right,” Namir whispered. “Can we get on with it?”

To Namir’s surprise, Brand looked at him and spoke in a low, somber tone. “You should know these people,” she said. “Darth Vader. General Tulia. Count Vidian. Look at their faces, and memorize every one.”

Namir returned Brand’s stare, cool and calm. Brand didn’t back down.

“I get it,” Namir said softly. “I do.”

“You don’t,” Brand said, and began to walk again.

Charmer, three steps ahead, gestured before the stairway at the end of the hall. Two fingers raised, thumb moving across the palm. Two guards stationed at the top of the stairs, one patrolling.

Brand went first. In his darker moments, Namir resented the older woman’s capacity for stealth—but not today, not when his own wet boots squeaked like rats on the polished floor. He followed her, tightening his grip on the stun baton, with Charmer so close behind he could feel the man’s body heat.