Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (41 page)

He felt simultaneously hollow and heavy, a shell of a body wearing skin of lead. Men and women hurried to his side as he walked under dim yellow lighting through the main access corridor. None brought him water or food or a change of gloves. Instead, they burdened him with reports and updates about
Apailana’s Promise
, which appeared to have fled Sullust intact; a team was attempting to make contact and determine the gunship’s position. They told him about Imperial infantry forces circling the base of the mountain and slowly closing the noose. They guessed at the likelihood of repairing the
Thunderstrike
—not inconceivable with the proper resources, but impossible under fire—or what could be stripped and salvaged from it instead.

Namir tried to absorb it all, comprehend the reports and provide direction when required. When the last of the urgent demands on him had been addressed, he pulled aside one of the Haidoral recruits whose name he couldn’t recall. “What do you need, Captain?” the man asked.

Namir didn’t correct him. “I want to see the field hospital,” he said. “I want water. And I want to meet with Governor Chalis.”

After he’d drunk his fill, after he’d stilled his stomach after breathing in the vile odors of the aid station, he found Chalis in the administrator’s office. The vast space had been hastily ransacked—likely by the administrator when Twilight had first arrived—and niches on the wall that might once have held plaques or awards were now empty. An upholstered couch was scorched on one end, and beside it a stack of boxes held facility records. Chalis sat at a desk apparently carved from a single piece of mountain stone, gripping the edge of the rock with her fingers as if she expected to crush it into dust.

“Someone planned this,” she said, voice taut and bitter. She didn’t bother to ask Namir about the rescue operation. “The moment we landed they were preparing to cut off our escape.”

And whose fault is that?
Namir wanted to ask. But he didn’t want to know the answer. It hardly mattered now.

“So what comes next?” he asked instead.

“Our enemy—for the sake of convenience, we’ll assume it’s Prelate Verge—brings reinforcements to annihilate us. I’d expect a Star Destroyer in-system shortly. Just one should be enough.”

“One would’ve been enough for Hoth, too.” He dropped himself on the couch. “How fast do those things move?”

“Faster than a stripped-down rebel corvette past its prime. I wouldn’t give us more than a day or two at most.”

He wanted to drift off, stop
thinking
for a moment. He made himself speak. “Then we get off the planet first, somehow. Head farther into the Outer Rim, lick our wounds—”

“What?” Chalis’s tone was suddenly sharp. Namir straightened in his seat.

“They
know
,” he said, frustration giving him strength again. “The prelate figured out the plan. You said over and over that if that happened—”

“No one knows what we’re doing,” she said. She started to continue, then began to cough, chest heaving and head bent forward. Namir wanted to avert his eyes but Chalis never turned from him, as if trying to hold him in place until she could resume. When the fit subsided she spoke slowly and hoarsely. “Even if the prelate saw some pattern,” she said, “that doesn’t mean he knows our goals. We can adjust. We can survive one loss. The window of opportunity is still open.”

Namir watched her. Her hands still clutched the stone of the table.

“Unless,” she added, and smiled a forced, deathly smile, “you want to announce to the company that we’re giving up?”

Namir began to laugh.

He couldn’t have justified why. It wasn’t a raucous or a joyous sound, and he tasted ash rising from his lungs, gritty on his lips. Chalis maintained her frozen rictus, and finally he shook his head. “You’re the one who likes giving speeches,” he said. “If it comes to that, maybe you should tell them yourself.”

They watched each other. Eventually Chalis’s smile faded. She stood from the desk and walked to a table in the corner of the office where a tin pitcher sat. She lifted it, glanced about, then shrugged and brought the pitcher to the couch. Namir took it and drank gratefully. The lukewarm water tasted bitter; it reminded him of the well water of Crucival.

“As I see it,” Chalis said, “we have two challenges ahead. First, we need to survive the coming siege and—if we can’t avoid it—whatever blow Verge’s reinforcements deliver. Second, we need a way off Sullust.

“I
suggest
—and I’m open to alternatives—that you take care of the former. Devise a way for us not to die. I’ll get to work on the latter.”

She still stood over him, above the couch. Namir drew himself upright and set the pitcher on the desk. “Fair enough,” he said. “Does that mean you have a plan?”

“I will,” Chalis said curtly, and it sounded like an oath.

The company worked through the night readying the facility for attack. Namir toured the processing center, walked among the ranks, offered his strength or advice where he could be useful and stepped back when he was unwanted.

On the lower levels, the engineers scrambled to undo the adjustments they’d made to the magma extractors. Flooding the facility was no longer one of Twilight’s short-term objectives, but the molten rock might prove integral to the facility’s defense: If the Empire tried to imitate Twilight’s previous strategy of sending in burrowing vehicles below the compound, the attackers would find Twilight ready to rechannel the magma flow.

It was the sort of dirty trick that won wars—unpredictable, unfair, and deadly. Namir smiled grimly when Vifra—Twilight’s new head of engineering since M2-M5’s destruction—described what she had in mind, and he challenged her to take it a step farther. “Were you here for the fighting on Cartao?” he asked.

Vifra flinched and glanced toward her comrades as they dismantled a control terminal. She seemed to be seeking support. “I really just got here,” she said. “I joined six months ago, off Phorsa Gedd.”

Namir had probably been there for her recruitment, he realized. But she was an engineer and so he’d never trained her, never called her fresh meat. She must have been blasted good to rise so swiftly through the ranks, even considering the company’s rapid attrition. He made a note to get to know her.

“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Keep us alive, and I’ll tell you about Cartao after.”

When Namir returned to the upper floors, the distant thunder of Imperial bombs made the facility sound as if it were weathering a storm. On a lookout post above the main wall, he could see flashes all about the peak of the mountain, see streaks of light in the sky where the bombers passed. The Empire wasn’t attempting to destroy the facility—it still wanted to preserve the infrastructure—but it was doing all it could to contain Twilight Company.

Still, Namir thought, that meant more time to prepare.

The barricade mazes at the facility entrances had been transformed over the past few hours, reorganized to funnel enemies into kill zones and allow snipers a line on attackers. The mazes were works of art—a junkyard of sabotaged loadlifters and spare parts and toppled beverage dispensers—but Namir ordered most of the soldiers constructing them to another task. “If the enemy gets this close,” he told one group, “we’re bound to lose anyway. I want squads around the perimeter in positions they can
hold.
Keep the Empire down the slope, make them fight for every meter they climb.”

That meant, of course, digging trenches and assembling artillery pieces near the sites of the bombings, hoping dust and night and caution gave enough cover for safety. Namir didn’t ask for volunteers or offer the troops a chance to back out. He saw that they were afraid—the young and old, veterans and fresh meat. Yet the job had to be done, and they went without complaint.

He felt a mixture of pride and guilt as he continued his tour. He saw the soldiers put their losses—the deaths of their colleagues and the destruction of their vessel—to one side, determined to do their part in an impossible situation. If they survived, there would be trauma and grief. Some of them would break: They’d put themselves in the line of fire, request noncombat duties, or walk away on a mission and never return. Yet he trusted all of them to hold together until the battle was over.

He’d led them to Sullust with a promise to strike against the Empire. He was responsible for their fate. But if they could hold together, he could, too.

A gray dawn arrived, and Namir met briefly with the squad leaders and senior staff, sketching a plan of battle for the coming siege. Hober and Von Geiz had counted the dead and wounded, quantified the company’s capabilities as well as they could. It hardly seemed to matter in the face of a planet’s worth of attackers, but Namir and Carver and Gadren and Mzun and the others pretended the battle was winnable anyway.

“Should Chalis be present?” Von Geiz asked abruptly. He’d cleaned the blood from his face and wrapped white gauze at an angle over his forehead and left eye. The others looked to Namir, who shook his head.

“If she had a plan ready, she would be here,” he said. “Let her work.”

He’d seen bitterness and fury in her during their meeting, but not the despair he’d witnessed on Ankhural. He trusted she would do what she could.

He had no choice but to believe she would hold together, too.

Namir slept on the floor of one of the upper-level offices, leaving instructions with Hober to wake him if anything happened. No more than two hours passed before a runner arrived with a tray of food and the news that Chalis wanted to see him.

He ate hastily—pooled in the tray’s compartments was some sort of noodle soup apparently scrounged from a worker’s locker—and tried to gauge his strength. The rest had boosted his energy levels, and the food would do so as well; but the boost would fade fast, and his legs were still sore and throbbing from marching to and from the
Thunderstrike.
He almost hoped to see combat. At least adrenaline might carry him through the day.

Chalis had rearranged the administration office, moving the couch and boxes to one side and tiling the floor with maps of the mountain and its vicinity. In one of the niches now rested a bronze bust of a stern-looking man. Namir didn’t have time to examine it before Chalis picked her way across the floor to his side.

“I want to go to Pinyumb,” she said.

Namir frowned, tried to place the name—all Sullustan names sounded the same—and cursed his sluggish mind. Finally he found what he sought. “City at the base of the mountain?” Chalis didn’t correct him, so he assumed he’d guessed correctly. “What for?”

“We know there was a resistance on this planet,” Chalis said. That was true: The files aboard the
Thunderstrike
had indicated as much, though Alliance High Command didn’t know, or didn’t care to share, more than the bare bones. “Luko’s records show they attacked this facility recently and are active in the city.”

“Luko? You on a first-name basis with the ex-administrator here?” Namir asked, glancing toward the box of records again.

Chalis seemed inured to the joke. “I’ve had time on my hands. We can’t maintain a channel to the
Promise
for more than a minute without being jammed, which makes formulating an extraction plan difficult. Not that the
Promise
has room to take us aboard, but we’ll need a defense when we manage to get offworld—”

“I get it,” Namir said. “What do you think the resistance can do for us?”

“Just about anything would help.” Here, she did smile—a bitter, nasty twitch of her lips. “I’m not expecting a starship, but even information would be an asset.”

“Fine. Pick a squad, grab any vehicle in the hangar, but be prepared to slip through the perimeter on foot—”

“I’d advise you to come along,” Chalis said. “All you can do here is wait, and if we
do
locate anyone you might want a word with our potential reinforcements.”

Namir grimaced. He didn’t like the thought of leaving. “You might be overestimating the strength of the resistance. If we haven’t heard from them by now …”

Chalis stepped to the door and looked over her shoulder at Namir. “You can’t win this battle,” she said. “Our only hope is an exit strategy. Take whatever chance you can get.”

It was a blunt argument, but she wasn’t wrong.

Together with the three surviving members of Twitch’s squad, Namir and Chalis climbed into a boxy Imperial troop transport that hummed softly out of the hangar and toward the facility’s main entrance. It was one of a handful of vehicles Twilight had made operational since the
Thunderstrike
’s crash. It nearly ran over Roach as she hurried to wave it down and pulled herself up and through the hatch. “Gadren sent me,” she told Namir, squeezing onto the bench beside him.

He frowned. “That leaves Gadren with, what—just Brand?”

Roach shrugged. “Said you needed protection.” She wasn’t wearing her helmet. Namir noticed a patch of her scalp was bare, as if the hair had been burned or cut away to treat a wound.

“All right,” Namir said. Another set of eyes could be useful, and Roach was skinny and quick. Useful on a stealth mission.

She nodded firmly, adjusted her comlink in one ear, and retrieved a second earpiece from her pocket. She inserted it deftly, and a moment later Namir could hear the muffled, tinny sounds of music accompanying the transport’s voyage down the mountain.

Toward the base of the mountain, they abandoned the vehicle and changed into ill-fitting civilian clothing—whatever garments the workers at the processing facility had left behind during the evacuation. They stashed their rifles with the troop transport, switching to knives and snub pistols small enough to conceal in boots and under vests. Comlinks were deactivated and stowed in pockets. Any close inspection would give Namir and the others away, but from a distance they might pass as Pinyumb locals.

First, however, they had to
reach
Pinyumb. It was dusk when they began creeping down the slope, half squatting and half crawling as the terrain permitted. The Empire’s perimeter was intended to stop infantry units and speeders, not catch lone travelers, but scouting a path was neither swift nor safe. Twice, Namir came within a stone’s throw of a stormtrooper patrol and had to wait for the enemy to move on. The rebels scattered and regrouped over and over; apart, they would draw less attention, but they were vulnerable alone.