Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (34 page)

“More than fine!” came the call. “We’ll be majestic! Laughing seahawks diving for prey.”

Commander Tohna was a transfer from the
Promise
—a squat ball of muscle and a former helmsman who’d arrived to take charge of the bridge crew and run the
Thunderstrike.
He’d come with high praise from the
Promise
’s officers, but Namir didn’t yet know what to expect from the man. It had been Tohna and the
Promise
crew who’d devised the insertion onto Mardona during the planning meetings, after Chalis had assured them that no warships would be present and that Twilight’s largest worries would be ion cannons on the surface and satellite defenses in orbit. Thus, the plan to accelerate rapidly toward the planet and dive swiftly into Mardona’s atmosphere over water—beneath the satellites and out of range of the continental cannons.

Something metallic rumbled in the hull, but Tohna didn’t seem concerned. “We’ve outrun most of the fighters,” he said. “Drop ships can go on your command.”

“Go,” Namir snapped. The men and women at the bridge stations tapped at their consoles or spoke into their links. The
Thunderstrike
rumbled again as its hangars opened onto Mardona’s gray storm clouds.

Chalis unlooped her arm from the rail and stepped closer to Namir, lowering her voice. “Your squads know the mission,” she said. “If we don’t make it down, the operation won’t be compromised.” Between her rasp and the ship’s roar, he struggled to comprehend her words.

“I know,” he said. “We’re going anyway.”

Mardona III was—by Chalis’s scorn-ridden description—a warehouse world. Not a bustling trade port or a production facility, but a place for the Empire to stockpile equipment and materials for delivery to nearby systems in times of need. The warehouse worlds were part of a larger Imperial initiative to allow for rapid reallocation of resources and to eliminate dependency on outdated trade routes. More important, they were a vulnerability the Alliance hadn’t yet learned to exploit.

The mega-spaceport that served as Mardona’s primary warehousing hub consisted of dozens of enormous black metal buildings that rose from the rocky surface. They were almost crystalline in design, cuboids with their sides perfectly sheared at odd angles. The buildings extended deep underground, where the main storage facilities were contained and where an elaborate system of tramways allowed automated transfer of goods according to shipping schedule and projected needs. The entire mega-port was large enough to house millions, but its systems were largely mechanized; a few hundred thousand dockworkers and administrators and droid controllers were enough to keep the warehouse world running.

If Twilight Company could disrupt the planet’s operations—upend Mardona’s ability to supply its neighbors—the Empire would have no choice but to make new accommodations, scramble for other ways to maintain the flow of resources. Personnel and security would need to be reallocated to conventional trade routes. Chalis had shown Namir schematics, star charts, explained how a pebble could become an avalanche. The moffs themselves wouldn’t recognize the Kuat shipyards’ degradation until it was too late; but Chalis knew the workings of the machine.

“Efficiency,” she’d said, “is predictability. The Empire is nothing if not efficient.”

War, however, was neither efficient nor predictable.

After the drop ships had landed and the
Thunderstrike
had fled the star system, the company’s first twelve hours on Mardona were spent descending from the surface and stealing through the tram tunnels. Once the squads had entered the underground, they made no attempt to hold open routes to the surface; instead, dozens of strike teams sabotaged tramways, disabled surveillance equipment, and ambushed security forces independently, spontaneously splitting and merging and regrouping. They were rats infesting the machinery, too dispersed to exterminate easily. When the Empire shut down power to the underground in a five-block radius, forcing the soldiers to switch to night-vision goggles and personal respirators, it was a temporary measure only; Twilight’s attacks continued elsewhere, and shutting down a whole section of the spaceport inhibited the Empire as much as it did the enemy.

Namir fired his weapon only once, when his two escort squads were ambushed by a swarm of spidery maintenance droids—each a fist-sized sphere with magnetized legs and a welding torch. The machines scuttled over rails and across ceilings, racing to sear their victims. Aside from a few minor burns and the promise of a sleepless night, the squads emerged from the ambush intact.

During the next twelve hours of the company’s attack on Mardona, the real work began.

Even discounting the ongoing repairs to the
Thunderstrike
, Twilight’s engineering crew had been busy since leaving Ankhural. Each squad had come to Mardona armed with two dozen ion mines: crudely improvised explosives mass-produced by the crew from batteries, motion sensors, and whatever casings were available. The mines came in duffel bags and sheared-off piping, in food containers and cracked helmets. They were, in Brand’s words, “glue for Mardona’s gears.”

The squads planted the devices at junctions, along kilometer-long tram lines, and at the entrances to underground warehouses. It was one duty Namir could participate in without taking on more risk than his subordinates would suffer. He listened to the distorted sound of blaster shots echo in the tunnels as Maediyu—the woman who’d treated him with almost unbearable deference since he’d saved her from burning to death outside Chalis’s cell—gripped the soles of his boots and boosted him to the level of the tunnel’s lower pipework. With a graceless grunt, he clambered onto a broad metal conduit and reached down as Maediyu passed him a tattered backpack and a roll of adhesive tape.

“Here?” he called toward Chalis, who watched with arms folded a dozen paces and a short fall away.

“Farther down,” Chalis said. “Let the tramcar build speed.”

Namir shrugged and crawled along the length of the pipe. Maediyu followed directly below, holding her rifle at the ready.

When Namir and Chalis had linked up with her squad, she’d appointed herself their personal bodyguard. She was attentive and cautious, good at her job. Namir missed Gadren and Roach and Charmer and Brand, but Charmer had his own squad full of fresh meat now. The others were needed on the offensive—striking at security posts, keeping the Empire distracted while the mines were planted.

Namir looped the tape around the bag, tried to keep it out of view from the track. He jostled it, made sure it was secure, then slipped a hand into the bag and felt for a button. He pictured a tramcar turning the corner and the mine detonating as it passed below. Ion mines didn’t deliver much concussive force, but the explosion would fry any circuits in the car and the surrounding tunnel. The vehicle might derail or not. Either way, it would block the route until a maintenance crew removed it.

By the time Twilight Company was off Mardona, there would be thousands of ion mines planted through the tram network. It would take months for the Empire to clear them all—and during that time, the whole system would need to be shut down.

It was a clever plan, devised by Chalis and the engineers and the squad leaders. But “clever” could go wrong very fast.

On the second full day of Twilight’s attack on Mardona III, Namir ordered the squads to cluster in the tunnels below one of the megaport’s housing blocks. Reports had come in overnight of Imperial armored vehicles descending into the tramways, sweeping through whole sectors. Any squad caught in such a sweep was doomed; Twilight couldn’t afford to stop mining, but teams in the field needed a fallback position.

A housing block was a safe choice, a
reasonable
choice, likely to contain food, water, and computer resources a warehouse would not. Namir listened to Gadren and Mzun’s and Zab’s concerns about risking civilian lives and chose to proceed anyway.

A dozen squads poured into the block at once, surrounding the perimeter and demanding the residents retreat to their apartment pods. There was no resistance; the civilians were unarmed and unprepared for an attack, and those too stunned to react were ushered back into their homes by Twilight soldiers. With the halls cleared, the squads sealed off all but a handful of entrances and posted sentries down the tunnels. Charmer’s team was the first to venture back out.

Chalis volunteered to speak to the residents while Namir saw to the block’s defenses, setting up barricades and kill zones. “I’m used to dealing with people like this,” she said. “Just give the word.”

“If I put you in charge of civilians,” Namir said, “the recruits from Haidoral will beat me to death in my sleep. I’ll handle it.”

Chalis didn’t argue, and he was grateful.

One resident from each floor was brought from his or her pod to the block’s education center, where the meeting could be broadcast to every apartment. When Namir arrived, half the civilians began shouting as soon as he walked in; the others stared in horror or whispered to their neighbors to be silent. When he started to talk, however, they all listened. Having Maediyu at his back, rifle in hand, likely helped.

“We’re not here to hurt you,” he said. “Believe me when I say you’re the least of our concerns. Tomorrow morning, anyone who wants to leave will be escorted into the tunnels. Trams are shut down, but hopefully your governor will accommodate you.

“If you don’t want to brave the tunnels or your family isn’t up for the trip, we won’t force you out. If you want to stay, keep your pod doors sealed. Don’t attempt to communicate with the outside. And we won’t be responsible for your safety if the Empire attacks.”

It wasn’t an inspiring speech, and it wasn’t intended to be. Namir needed the civilians out of the way and at least a little cowed—if they tried to sabotage Twilight’s operation from inside the apartment block, the situation would turn messy fast.

There were questions—practical ones, mostly, about access to food and medicine. A withered, yellow-bearded old man wanted to know if residents could speak to their neighbors within the block. A squat young woman eloquently described how she’d come to Mardona on the promise of work and good pay, and begged the Rebel Alliance to leave for a world where it was
wanted.
A stern, balding dockworker wanted to know what would happen to residents who hadn’t been home during the attack, who might try to return. “My son is out there,” he said. “Do you plan to shoot him when he comes for me?”

Namir answered as well as he could for half an hour before a runner informed him he was needed elsewhere. He waved away the remaining questions and had the civilians escorted back to their pods. He didn’t intend to ignore them, but he still had a company to run and a planet to ruin.

By the fourth day of the attack, Namir was stewing irritably in the claustrophobic embrace of the housing block. While the squads slipped out through maintenance shafts and air ducts to continue mining the tramways, or defended the barricades against periodic Imperial assaults, he was stuck in the administrative office Twilight had converted into a command center. He studied maps and datapads and listened to sentry reports, and kept his muscles busy by pacing a meter from Chalis’s desk.

The governor seemed untroubled by her surroundings. More than untroubled, at times—when they were alone together, Namir sometimes saw her staring, apparently oblivious to the world, into a blank screen. Those were the only moments he remembered the husk she’d been after returning from Hoth, and she always returned to her more vibrant self as soon as she sensed his attention.

Those moments, and whenever he saw her suppress a cough.

The civilians who’d chosen to remain proved a persistent distraction. Barely an hour went by when Namir wasn’t forced to deal with a resident sneaking between apartment pods, or requesting additional food supplies, or reporting a neighbor for possessing a blaster. One of Twitch’s team members was caught stealing jewelry and loose credits from an abandoned pod; Namir didn’t especially care, but he scolded the man publicly for the sake of keeping peace. A family that had come to blows—Namir had no idea why—needed to be forcibly separated and locked in separate pods. “We’re not your blasted
police
,” he muttered more than once.

Yet the overall operation was proceeding apace. Every day, the Imperials sealed off more entrances into the tunnels, and every day Chalis discovered alternatives in city blueprints or Brand scouted fresh routes. The housing block was buried deep enough to be defensible against heavy vehicular attacks, and if the Empire used large-scale weapons against the block, it would collapse half the mega-port’s tunnels in the process. Squads continued their minelaying every hour, returning to the block exhausted and filthy and eager to resupply.

Namir took satisfaction in that. He tried not to show it.

At the end of the fourth day, Namir was picking at the contents of a meal tray (some sort of mashed tubers, flavorless but superior to the
Thunderstrike
’s fare) when he was summoned to one of the block’s upper floors to deal with a “discipline problem” involving a squad member in an empty pod.
Another looter
, Namir thought, and dragged himself through the block’s mazelike passages. The only decorations were whatever tiny portraits or icons or sprigs of plant life the residents dared post on their pod doors. Life under the Empire was bleak, Namir supposed, but it didn’t look uncomfortable.

The source of the “discipline problem” became obvious as soon as he reached the twelfth floor. A rhythmic bass caused the walls to thrum, and he followed the noise down a hallway and around a corner. Gadren, smiling toothily, stood across from a pod door.

“You called your commanding officer here for
this
?” Namir asked. He had to nearly shout to be heard over the pounding.

“She is your protégée,” Gadren said, and shrugged his massive shoulders. “Your squad may now belong to me, but I did not wish to overstep.”

Namir glowered at Gadren, then stepped to the entryway. When the door slid open, the hall flooded with sound—not just the bass, but eerie notes spawned by instruments Namir couldn’t imagine, human and alien voices mixed in incomprehensible song. Namir’s bones ached at the vibrations, and as he walked into the apartment, over the stained yellow rug and past a table covered in glass animal statuettes, he saw the woman responsible.