Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (38 page)

Namir knew only what he was told and what he read in the
Thunderstrike
’s spotty computer records. He’d never seen a Sullustan before. Or maybe he had and just didn’t realize it.

The day before the
Thunderstrike
was scheduled to arrive at Sullust, he made another effort to contact Alliance High Command. The farther Twilight Company encroached into Imperial territory, the more difficult it would be to open a secure channel; this was, so far as Namir was concerned, the last opportunity to find another path forward. After this, the company was truly committed.

No
, he thought as he toyed with Roach’s gold in his quarters and stared down at his terminal. That was what he could tell Chalis, but it wasn’t the truth. This wasn’t the last opportunity for Twilight. It was simply the last opportunity for him to sidestep his promise.

If you can’t get behind what they believe in, maybe it’s time to walk away.

He’d decided to give Twilight what it wanted: a fighting chance against the Empire’s evil. Only the Rebellion could relieve him of that responsibility now.

After two hours of waiting, the
Thunderstrike
received a reply from a rebel relay station. When the hologram flickered into existence at Namir’s desk, he frowned at the woman who appeared in the image, trying to remember where he’d seen her face before. “Careful what you say,
Thunderstrike
,” the woman said, “and make it fast. This channel may not be secure.”

Hoth.
Namir had met her on Hoth. He’d argued with her and Kryndal; she’d punched him in the jaw. He wanted to laugh, but he suppressed it and merely smiled instead. He wondered if she recognized him.

“Understood,” he said. “We may be out of contact awhile and we haven’t received new orders. Anything we should know?”

“Final orders still stand,” the woman said. “High Command has
not
regrouped. Vader is still leading the hunt.” She scowled a moment, seemed to consider how to phrase her next thought. “Do you still have your … cargo?”

Namir cocked his head before the meaning hit him. Apparently she recognized him after all.

“Safely aboard,” he said. “Why do you ask?”

The woman paused again. The hologram flickered. Namir wondered if the communication had been cut off, but then she spoke, voice distorted by static. “No reason,” she said. “General Bygar had high hopes, was all.”

The general who’d welcomed Namir and Chalis to Echo Base. The man who’d kept Namir’s “discipline problem” from Howl.

“But Bygar’s dead now,” the woman continued. “So is the old plan. You’re on your own,
Thunderstrike.
”

“Aren’t we all?” Namir asked, and the hologram abruptly flickered out.

The
Thunderstrike
and
Apailana’s Promise
jumped out of hyperspace less than half a million kilometers from Sullust—so close that, upon the vessels’ entry into realspace, the sudden clench of the planet’s gravity nearly tore both ships apart. Namir lurched forward in his seat restraints in one of the
Thunderstrike
’s drop ships and heard metal pop in the hangar bay. Emergency klaxons blared. An instant later, the voice of Commander Tohna came over the comm roaring laughter and triumph.

Sullust’s orbital defenses were too formidable to risk facing in a straight-up fight; that was the only thing Twilight’s senior staff had managed to agree on. Tohna’s “solution”—jump in barely a stone’s throw from the planet, deliver the drop ships, and jump out before the defenders could coordinate a counterattack—had possessed the potential to obliterate the company in a nanosecond if the jump were miscalculated, but Namir hadn’t heard any better alternatives and approved the plan anyway. There were many fates worse than a quick and foolish death.

The other downside to Tohna’s approach was that it left no time for a first wave of ground teams to clear a beachhead. The drop ships would descend together, and Namir and Chalis and the medics and engineers would arrive alongside the company vanguard. Word was that Hober had sent armor and fatigues to Chalis’s quarters with a note reading, “Not available in black.”

Namir had no complaints. He’d assigned Chalis to a separate drop ship—better to spread the risk—and he felt almost comfortable sandwiched between his colleagues’ armored bodies, their rifles clacking together as the ship’s thrusters discharged and its occupants swayed. This was planetfall in all its dangerous, sweaty, nauseating glory, as he’d experienced a hundred times before. He had to fight to avoid blacking out as they struck Sullust’s atmosphere.

He didn’t know whether he succeeded in staying conscious throughout the flight. All he was sure of was that the drop ship eventually slowed and the thunder of its engines quieted. He was the last man onto the surface, dropping two meters from the bay doors onto a slab of cracked and yellow-stained obsidian. A cloud of ocher motes rose where his boots impacted and he tasted ash through the filter of his breath mask.

The drop ship soared back into the blue-gray sky, pursued by dark specks—other drop ships or enemy aircraft, Namir wasn’t sure. He surveyed his surroundings and saw that he stood on a narrow shelf jutting from a massive black slope; the shelf faded into the distance on either side, apparently wrapping around the mountainside. Below him, shallow crevices led down the slope like riverbeds to distant metal structures embedded in the base of the mountain—bunkers and transport stations, he thought.
Secondary targets and potential threats.

Above Namir, the slope rose and became increasingly sheer toward the mountain’s apex. Gripping the peak of the mountain was another metal structure: a compound of spires and support frames like a parasite feasting on the mountain’s skull.

Comm signals cut through static, announcing other squads’ safe arrival. Namir waved the other soldiers from his drop ship to gather as they finished scanning the perimeter. “We’ve got twenty-four hours before pickup,” he called. “Don’t plan on eating, sleeping, or emptying your bladders—we’re in hostile territory and I need you ready to work.”

Someone shouted, “Yes, Captain!” and Namir winced. Were they all calling him that now?

He bent down, scooped up a shard of obsidian, and tossed it overhand down the slope. “Down there,” he called, “buried underneath the enemy camps, is a Sullustan city. If you end up there, turn around and start climbing. You won’t need maps for this mission.

“Up top,” he continued, and turned to look toward the peak, “is the Inyusu Tor mineral processing facility. That’s where the Empire burrows into this mountain and extracts ore from the magma inside. This facility supplies almost ten percent of the raw manufacturing resources for the planet, so … it’s big. It’s important. It’s our target.”

He looked around and saw heads nodding. In the distance, around the shelf, other squads were approaching. He cinched his rifle strap and smiled like a soldier ready to die for an idiot commander.

“Let’s go get it,” he said.

Even unprepared for an attack and only lightly guarded, the processing facility should have been unassailable by infantry. Ground forces would need to trek up the unforgiving rock while enduring a barrage of blasterfire from above. Move too swiftly and the squads were sure to be slaughtered. Move too slowly and the Empire would have time to scramble air support.

Upon reaching the apex, the teams would need to force their way inside the facility itself. Breaching a wall would be too time consuming with the tools Twilight had available—the facility was built to withstand volcanic heat—which left only the main entrances. These would be protected by the entirety of the facility’s security force; at best, Twilight Company could expect a standoff until additional Imperial units arrived from below the mountain.

Nonetheless, Namir sent all but four squads, a team of engineers, a rearguard selection of scouts and sentries, and a handful of medics to attempt the assault.

He observed with Chalis from a mobile camp less than fifty meters downslope from the fighting. It was a place the injured could retreat to and a command hub for senior staff out of the fray. It was not a site for squads to withdraw to when hard-pressed; twice, Namir had the grim task of informing squads that there could
be no withdrawal.
He watched the crimson flash of blasterfire sizzle in volleys against mountain obsidian, saw his colleagues desperately taking cover behind stones smaller than speeder bikes. He lifted his macrobinoculars high and saw stormtroopers and fleet troopers lined neatly before the processing facility walls, ready to move to shelter the moment the rebels closed in.

As the squads climbed upward—ten, twenty meters over the course of an hour—the camp moved with them. The scouts reported Imperial airspeeders rising from the garrisons below, and Namir sent word down the chain of command:
Advance.
Get closer. If the squads were near enough to the apex, the airspeeder pilots would be reluctant to drop sweep bombs for fear of damaging the processing facility. That wouldn’t save the squads from the speeders’ blaster cannons, but with luck, cannon fire could be evaded.

The teams climbed the mountain. The enemy began to withdraw to the facility entrances. As the airspeeders flitted into view, Namir—crouched as low to the ground as he could manage—signaled to one of the medics. “Get me the Plex,” he called.

Chalis watched him from her position flat on the ground. She said nothing. Maybe she didn’t understand what he was doing, or she knew he needed a distraction to maintain his sanity. Maybe she didn’t care.

The PLX-1 was a cumbersome weapon, bulky and weighty and half as tall as a man. The control labels had long since worn off the Plex that Namir accepted from the medic; Namir imagined it as the sole survivor of Twilight’s earliest incarnation, when Howl and a handful of others had first been tasked by the Rebellion. He didn’t need the labels to adjust the settings or confirm its payload.

With the Plex hoisted on one shoulder, Namir rose to his feet and marched down the slope, away from the camp. He heard the shouts of his soldiers over the comm and tuned them out, kept his head turned away from the flickers of crimson. As he lifted his weapon’s barrel toward the gray sky, he smiled as he was briefly left alone in the world.

An airspeeder soared into view. As Namir had predicted, it veered toward him. He was an obvious target, the lone man standing in view on the mountain slope. He turned toward it, pulled the trigger on the Plex, and felt his shoulder snap back as a rocket roared into the air reeking of exhaust and accelerant.

The airspeeder tried to swerve, firing its cannons as it did so. Shards of stone stung Namir when blaster bolts impacted nearby. Then the airspeeder was gone, consumed in a ball of flame and black smoke. Namir drew a breath, turned back up the slope, and tapped his comm.

“Where do we stand?” he asked.

“Ready for phase two,” Chalis said.

Namir couldn’t feel the mountain shake beneath him when the tunneling crew entered the processing facility. Intellectually, he knew it wasn’t
possible.
But he thought he felt a tremor in his soles anyway when the designated moment arrived, and he clenched a fist in triumph.

While the bulk of the company had been climbing toward the apex, four squads and a team of engineers had descended to the transport stations embedded in the mountain’s base. There, they’d stolen a pair of mining vehicles and proceeded to burrow their own way beneath the slope, up the mountain, and into the facility.

Later, the burrowing squads would talk of tearing their way through an underground wall and terrifying the Sullustan workers. At the appointed time, Namir ordered the aboveground squads to press forward, and shocked Imperial security teams and stormtroopers found themselves trapped between enemies both inside and outside the facility.

Once again, Twilight Company won.

It had been Chalis’s plan, and Namir had doubted it—doubted that the mining vehicles would be stored where she claimed, doubted the machines could burrow their way up the mountain fast enough to win the battle. But Chalis had had faith in the systems of the Empire and the reliability of its quartermasters. She’d been able to access Imperial stock records and provide Twilight’s engineers with vehicle schematics.

“You were right,” Namir said. They stood together in the security office, looking down through the window at the workers marching out of the facility toward the industrial lifts and tramways that led down the mountainside. Twilight soldiers kept the Sullustans moving at gunpoint.

Chalis nodded. Her chest heaved as she suppressed a cough. Namir wondered how she was handling the air supply; the facility filtered the atmosphere, making the breath masks unnecessary indoors, but the smell was still sulfurous and foul.

When the last of the workers were gone, the transports were disabled and the squads finished scouring for any remaining resistance. Then the engineers began their second task of the day: programming the magma extractors to flood the facility interior. The new program would be run after the drop ships arrived to exfiltrate Twilight, at the last possible minute. The facility would be utterly annihilated as the
Thunderstrike
fled back into deep space, and the Empire would be deprived of one of Sullust’s most valuable resources.

Until then, Twilight’s soldiers had roughly twelve hours to pass. Namir assigned patrols both in and out of the facility. He kept a comm channel open and listened to sentries report—with perfect regularity, every thirty minutes—Imperial airspeeders passing overhead. He wasn’t overly concerned. The Empire had no interest in destroying its own investment, and it didn’t know what Twilight was planning.

Late at night or very early in the morning, he paced across one of the walkways overlooking an exposed magma stream. The flow smelled noxious even through the shimmering heat shield and cast everything in a lurid red glow. When Namir noticed that Brand had arrived at his side, her skin looked like polished bronze.

“Final numbers?” she asked.

“Four dead, sixteen injured,” he said. “We were lucky.”