Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (42 page)

Roach stayed at Namir’s side more often than not. He wondered if Gadren had instructed her to do so or if she’d decided to play bodyguard on her own.

Once they were through the blockade, reaching the city was comparatively easy. Namir saw no civilian vehicles descending into the underground through the transport station, but a steady trickle of Imperial military vehicles and cargo carriers still flowed. In two teams of three, the rebels slipped aboard the carriers and squeezed between supply crates, letting the repulsorcraft carry them onto lifts dropping below the planet’s surface. Namir expected the air to grow thinner, to turn unbearably noxious in the bowels of Sullust, but instead it seemed to grow pure—fresher even than the stale air of the
Thunderstrike
, reminding Namir of the dewy atmosphere of Haidoral Prime. He removed his breath mask with cautious excitement.

Then the six travelers emerged furtively from the vehicles onto city streets, and Namir had his first glimpse of Pinyumb.

The city sat within a great obsidian cavern, its roof dimly gleaming with refracted iridescence from tower lights. Its buildings were sleek, tapered and curved instead of rigid, rising along turquoise waterways lined with footpaths and pedestrian bridges. The walkways, in turn, wove among rows of plants that glowed with phosphorescent bulbs and archways carved from the cavern stone. Namir caught himself staring in wonder. He wondered if his companions would scorn his reaction as naïve: the ignorant amazement of a child from a backwater world.

But Roach was grinning, unashamed, as she craned her neck and took in the cavern vista. That comforted Namir, even when Chalis murmured a warning to Roach and the girl’s face became stony.

“Why’s it quiet?” Twitch asked through her teeth.

Namir swore to himself and broke the city’s spell. Twitch was right: There was no traffic in the streets except the receding transports, no civilians using the walkways or the bridges. The buildings were lit, certainly, but no sounds arose from inside. He felt suddenly exposed on the street, as if marked by a sniper.

“The city is in lockdown,” Chalis said. “Typical procedure—it probably has been since we landed. Come on.”

Chalis led the way into an alley, and they started their journey through Pinyumb—once again in twos and threes, once again sending scouts at every junction. They soon discovered that stormtrooper teams were stationed on every major throughway. Floating, bobbing, cam droids combed the back ways. But the Empire seemed to be patrolling as a show of force, not actively searching, and the squad had no difficulty remaining hidden. Here and there, Namir did spot a civilian—always moving briskly but not running, always with one hand holding up a datapad that doubtless served as authorization for travel.

The squad’s destination, Chalis had explained, was an old resistance safe house mentioned in Howl’s files. “We won’t know if it’s still active until we get there,” she said, “but it’s our best lead.”

She navigated into a section of the city that appeared to have been erected in an earlier age. Among the metal structures were buildings made of stone, and the narrow streets were cracked and thick with yellow sulfur. The group descended a stairway into an alley beneath ground level and found a door built into the wall.

“An icehouse,” Chalis explained. Twitch began toying with the keypad. “This would’ve been a wealthy district, once. Primitives stored meat, milk, anything they wanted to keep cool here.”

The others looked puzzled, but Namir remembered the icehouses on his homeworld. He wondered if Chalis recalled such things from her childhood. She didn’t glance at him once.

Twitch made a triumphant sound. The door swung open and they proceeded inside. The building’s single room was devoid of life, furnished as a sparse apartment with a cot and stove and a portable sanitation station. “Someone’s been here,” Twitch said, scuffing the dust on the floor. Namir agreed with the assessment, though it was hard to guess whether the safe house had last been used hours, days, or weeks before.

A thorough search turned up scraps of food and medical supplies and nothing more until Roach—guided by some instinct Namir couldn’t even guess at—fished a datapad from one of the sanitation station’s filters. Chalis took possession of the prize, apparently untroubled by the bacterial slime clinging to the screen.

After a few moments of study, she looked pleased. “Someone was here,” she echoed, “tracking the coming and going of ships on Sullust. Presumably gathering intelligence for an attack on a spaceport. I can use this.”

Namir held out a hand. Chalis passed him the pad and he tried to make sense of it. He skimmed through lists and monthly reports, unsure what he was looking for. He wondered briefly if he was reading the data correctly: Surely there shouldn’t have been such a massive difference between departures and arrivals? It seemed like for every hundred ships that reached the planet, a thousand left.

He asked Chalis about the discrepancy. She shrugged and reclaimed the datapad. “Manufacturing,” she said. “Sullust isn’t Kuat, but it does handle small-scale production of starfighters and assault shuttles. Nothing important.”

“Thousands of ships a year is small-scale production?” he asked. His voice was low, but he felt the others glance his way.

Chalis didn’t even look up, her eyes on the pad again. She only grunted in acknowledgment, but he could hear the words she’d spoken to him once before:

You still think like a man from Crucival. You don’t understand the
scale
of the enemy.

No one else seemed worried. Even Roach looked more concerned about Namir than any revelation about Sullust. Namir supposed Chalis was right, though the thought bothered him for reasons he couldn’t place.

They decided to wait at the safe house for three hours to see if anyone from the Sullustan resistance appeared. After that, they would return to Twilight Company regardless of the outcome. Chalis sent two squad members to scout the Pinyumb spaceport—an underground facility connected to the surface by a kilometers-long shaft—while they waited. “I’d like to know our options,” she said.

That left Twitch, Roach, Chalis, and Namir in the cramped hideout. Chalis seemed content to study her datapad or stare at the wall, lost in thought. Roach chattered at Twitch as they guarded the door, describing in intricate detail the items she’d purloined from the workers’ lockers at the processing facility and what she imagined those items said about the workers’ personalities. Namir relieved Roach after half an hour, partly for something to do and partly out of pity for Twitch.

“When did she get so talkative?” he asked as quietly as he could, turning his snub pistol over in one hand. “She barely said a word in training.”

Twitch shrugged. Namir had been expecting derision, but Twitch seemed to take Roach’s attitude in stride. “After you left, I guess. She comes to the Clubhouse, lucks out at cards. Awful player. You get used to it.”

“Sorry I missed it,” Namir murmured, only half joking.

Thoughts of Roach drew his mind back to Haidoral Prime. It had been, what—two months ago? He felt the gap in time vividly. On Haidoral, Howl had still been in charge. On Haidoral, he hadn’t met Governor Chalis and she hadn’t yet fallen upon the company like a curse. He bitterly remembered the mission to her mansion, the opulence Gadren and Brand and Charmer had bristled at …

He stepped away from the door and waved Roach back into place. He spoke Chalis’s name, drew her to the far corner of the room where she looked at him questioningly.

“When were you on Sullust before?” he asked.

She cocked her head and let the hand holding her datapad fall to her side. “Why do you ask?”

“The statue,” he said. “The piece in that administrator’s office. It was yours.”

“I visited here, several times, during my apprenticeship under Count Vidian.” The words were flat and cold, a recitation of facts. “The bust was a gift to Administrator Luko Oorn,
of
Luko Oorn, in gratitude for his assistance implementing my designs.

“I imagine he saw fit to remove it after my betrayal. I put it back.”

Nothing about the explanation seemed less than sensible. Still, Namir felt unsatisfied. The gears of his mind were scraping and grinding, failing to produce the thought he needed. He spoke, knowing it wasn’t what he needed to say, knowing he sounded petulant. “What about Mardona Three? Or Nakadia? You visit there before, too?”

“No,” Chalis said. “But I helped make them what they are now.” She smiled, and it looked like a snarl. “Is this a surprise? That I was involved in building what we’re trying to dismantle? It’s possible my connections to our targets are what allowed Prelate Verge to predict we’d hit Sullust—and that much is unfortunate—but my intimate knowledge is why Howl wanted me in the first place.”

“It’s not—” He had to stop himself from arguing. Again, she was right. She was
always
right. Chalis was smarter than him and sculpted conversations like clay. But somewhere in his head, something still bothered him. Whatever it was, it had nothing to do with Prelate Verge.

“How much of this plan,” he began, fumbling with each word that emerged, “and I mean all of it, from Ankhural to Kuat—how much of it is about you taking back what you gave the Empire? How much is this all just revenge for you not getting the respect you wanted?”

Chalis drew in a breath that sounded wet and rough. Namir could see the pulse in her neck. He kept talking, unsure he wanted to hear himself, let alone any answer.

“You keep telling me that I don’t understand the Empire, that I don’t understand the scope we’re operating on. So fine, you’re right. But is Kuat going to be any different? If we make it that far, if we live through everything and destroy the shipyards, does it even
matter
to the war? Because this is feeling more and more like a suicidal vendetta.”

The governor stood before Namir, her expression severe and unchanging, her chest heaving as she seemed to force down a fit of coughing by sheer willpower. “It will matter,” she said, “as much as
anything
we could do would matter. As for my
motives
, those are my own and have no bearing on our success or failure.” She seemed to flinch, and her voice became smaller as she added, “I would have expected that question from a rebel. From you, I expected more.”

Namir had no answer to that. Chalis saved him from trying. Suddenly she sounded confident again, as matter-of-fact as she became when briefing the senior staff or as she’d been during her first meeting with Howl. It was a voice of impersonal charm, and Namir felt strangely hurt that she would use it on him. “Besides,” she said, “I already have an idea of how to get us off Sullust intact. I’m not the sort of woman who would martyr herself.”

They were interrupted by the buzzing of their comlinks. Namir frowned, retrieved his from a pocket, and reset it in his ear. The others were doing the same.

“Get out,” a voice whispered harshly. One of Twitch’s scouts. “They’re right outside the safe house. Get out now!”

Twitch struck the door controls with a palm and moved outside, followed instantly by Roach. Namir glanced at Chalis and pulled her toward the alley.

Crimson particle bolts struck the top of the alleyway, sending sparks and flecks of stone onto Namir’s face. He tried to get a look at the attackers and couldn’t. Instead, he saw Twitch and Roach on the stairway at the alley mouth, crouched low and firing potshots with their snub pistols. Twitch was yelling something. All Namir heard was “faster” and some swearing.

He dragged Chalis to the stairs, grabbed Roach’s wrist, and put her hand on Chalis’s arm. “Head for shelter,” he spat. “We follow.” Roach turned toward him—
Focus on the fight
, he wanted to say—as if to protest, but he cut her off. “Twitch and I can cover you better.”

He assumed as much, anyway. Roach might have become a chatty, reliable part of the team while he wasn’t looking, but he was still a better shot than she. She took off with Chalis, and Namir took Roach’s place, firing in the direction Twitch had targeted.

“On three?” Namir said.

Twitch nodded, and after another few shots they ran, back the way they’d first come through the city. Across a street and down an alleyway, blaster bolts still streaming toward them. Namir spotted glimpses of white armor when he glanced back but couldn’t pinpoint the foe. He fired wildly, one-handed, in the hope of slowing pursuit. He didn’t see where Roach or Chalis had gone.

He swung around the wall of a stone building and nearly bowled into Twitch, who had stopped running and was looking toward the safe house. She shoved him aside roughly. “Keep going. Catch up in a bit.”

Namir cursed and sputtered. “What are you
thinking
?”

Twitch smiled her nasty little smile—the one Namir had seen on occasion in the Clubhouse before she took a swing at a fellow soldier. “My team,” she said. “Still back there.”

“Those two are dead,” Namir snapped. “You
are
your team.”

“Go to hell, Captain,” Twitch said, and charged past him back into the fray.

He told himself he couldn’t have stopped her. He felt for her. He wanted to chase her—but Roach and Chalis needed him just as much. “Good luck,” he muttered, and sprinted away from the stormtroopers.

When he tried to cross the next street, he didn’t hear the grenade until his body was in the air, burning and aching in every muscle as if he’d slammed into a steel wall. Then he hit the road and blacked out.