Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (47 page)

For long minutes, the battle seemed frozen. The advance proceeded imperceptibly gradually, like the movement of a shadow at dawn; only when Namir forced himself to register the passing of time did he see the incremental changes at play. The Empire was closing in on the trench despite the rain of blaster bolts, and a hundred fallen stormtroopers made no difference when more could follow.

Yet the Empire
did
pause, perhaps fifty meters from the trench line. Namir didn’t understand the decision until he saw the lower sections of the army part, making way for a dozen two-legged scout walkers that sprinted up the rocks. Only one was downed by artillery fire before making it to the trench. A second was caught in the blast of an ion mine. The others swiftly wreaked havoc among the troops, and Namir swore to himself as squads pulled into the open, evading the walkers only to be cut down by stormtroopers.

“Tell the inner artillery units to fire. I want the walkers
gone
,” he said.

“What about the trench teams?” Hober asked.

“They’ll survive,” Namir said. “Some of them. Order a withdrawal to the perimeter.”

The artillery teams didn’t hesitate. Namir was proud of them for that. Cannon fire streamed into the trench, followed by crackling plasma pulses and the trails of mortar rounds. Walkers screamed as metal buckled and cracked, and those that endured fled either down the slope or up toward the facility to their destruction. But the cost was high: Namir swept his macrobinoculars across the rocks and saw whole squads burned and torn on the ground. How many of them had died under Twilight’s own firepower instead of the walkers’ he didn’t dare guess.

He adjusted the settings on the macrobinoculars and studied the Imperial forces. The infantry was moving in to secure the swath of ground leading to the trench, but it wasn’t yet making a final push toward the facility. That made sense. Regroup, reassess. So far as their commanders were concerned, time was on their side.

“I’m heading down,” Namir said. “From here on in, we may as well watch in person.”

The wounded were packed tight in Von Geiz’s makeshift field hospital, but they weren’t so many that the facility cafeteria couldn’t hold them. That didn’t surprise Namir. The sort of combat taking place on the mountain didn’t leave many wounds: It left people unscathed or it left them dead. He warned Von Geiz that the battle would be coming to the gates soon, and to keep a weapon close at hand. The old medic only nodded and went back to his patients.

Outside, Twilight soldiers were huddled tight around the walls of the processing facility, taking cover behind jagged rocks and split boulders. Red particle blasts—suppressive salvos by Imperial troops—streaked over Namir’s head as he walked the line. Often a Twilight soldier would return a quick volley down the mountainside or call in a location to a nearby sniper. Plex-armed anti-air gunners kept a wary eye on the sky, firing at any Imperial airspeeder that dared make a pass. Namir knew the gunners had to be running short on missiles, but there was no point conserving ammunition.

The troops’ mood seemed tense but not grim. Carver had somehow acquired an enemy’s belt laden with grenades, and he grinned as he passed out bombs like holiday treats. Commander Tohna, lacking a ship to captain, had organized the
Thunderstrike
’s bridge crew into a team of runners carrying supplies to squads in need of water or fresh blaster packs; along with the supplies, he bore boasts and challenges and obscene jibes from team to team, creating ad hoc competitions among the soldiers. Namir hadn’t seen Gadren, but word was he’d been singing in the trenches as the bombs fell.

Occasionally Namir stopped to speak with the men and women of the company. Corbo, the fresh meat who’d brought a knife to Chalis’s air lock after Haidoral Prime, asked if the company was really fighting for the benefit of the Sullustans.

“The city under the mountain is in lockdown,” Namir said. “Every stormtrooper out here is one who’s not rounding up the locals.”

“Good,” Corbo said. “That’s what I signed on for.”

As one of Vifra’s engineers updated Namir about the timetable for the next stage of the defense, Namir spied a figure skulking alone among the ranks, her hands clasping an assault rifle behind her neck. He excused himself and hurried toward her.

“Twitch?”

Twitch pulled the rifle over her head, toyed with it in both hands. “I’m not sorry,” she said. “Had to go after my team.”

She’d abandoned him in Pinyumb, raced off to save her scouts who’d almost certainly been dead already.

“Forget it,” Namir said. “How’d you even get back?”

She shrugged. Her knuckles were scraped and her breath mask was covered in yellow dust, but she looked otherwise healthy. “What’s Twilight Company do best?” she asked.

Namir laughed, loud enough to draw glances from the squads nearby. He didn’t mind. “Survive,” he said. He could have stopped there, but it felt right to finish the sentiment. “Whatever meat grinder we walk into, win or lose. Twilight Company—”
Howl’s Twilight Company.
“—always survives.”

“Damn right,” Twitch muttered, and resumed her aimless march. Yells of approval rose from nearby.

Namir was glad to see Twitch alive. He tried not to wonder about Gadren. Counting the dead could wait.

He continued his rounds, chatting about tactics or long-lost friends or Sullustan weather along the way. He felt at ease; as if he were in the Clubhouse, watching debates and laughter and card games. He hoped the company shared that sense.

Eventually the suppressive salvos increased in speed, but the air-speeders held back. He checked his rifle’s power levels and returned to Hober’s side, looking up into the dreary gray Sullustan sky.

At the limits of his vision, he made out a wedge-shaped shadow among the clouds, ever-so-slowly increasing in size. “They’re coming for us,” he said, and smiled grimly. He spoke so only Hober could hear. “Who needs airspeeders when you’ve got a Star Destroyer?”

Hober nodded slowly. “Do we pull inside?”

“Not yet,” Namir said. “I talked to the engineers. Just a little longer, now. But do call our friends upstairs.”

The streams of blaster bolts overhead intensified. Namir pulled Hober into a crouch and watched the squads steadily return fire. A calm, unembellished exhilaration began to fill him.

He’d been off the front lines for too long. And live or die, the battle felt right.

PLANET SULLUST

Day Three of the Siege of Inyusu Tor

Images of the firefight still flashed inside Thara Nyende’s skull: rebel spies, caught surveilling the Pinyumb spaceport and tracked to their hideout; wild shots in deserted and silent city streets; a prisoner dredged up from rubble in the aftermath.

She remembered the speeder humming beneath her, its gentle vibrations causing her kneecaps to buzz through her armor. Her helmet had been damaged by a stray bolt, causing the vocalizer to cut out. In frustration, she’d taken it off, tried to find out what the rebels were planning. “Don’t get everyone caught in the crossfire,” she’d said to the prisoner, trying to sound reasonable, trying to appeal to the compassion of a criminal and a killer. “You people signed up to die. The rest of this city didn’t.”

There were career interrogators at the holding facility, middle-aged men and women with bloodshot eyes and soft-spoken demeanors who never associated with the troopers. There hadn’t been time for their methods—not when roundups had already started and shots were being fired. Not when the rebels could move at any time.

“Even if we were planning something,” the prisoner had said, twisting his bloody lips in a sneer, “I still wouldn’t tell you.”

She’d wanted to scream at him,
Everyone who dies tonight dies because of you.
She’d wanted to show him the scar on her forehead, list the stormtroopers who’d been torn apart in the explosion aboard the rebel ship. She’d wanted to blame him for her uncle, still in a holding cell somewhere, probably forgotten in all the chaos.

It wouldn’t help. She’d forced herself to stay calm. She’d told herself she would find a way to make things right. That was her duty as a stormtrooper, as SP-475.

Then the sniper had started shooting.

She remembered all this because it was easier than thinking about the pain.

The sniper’s blaster bolt had just missed her right lung, fusing plastoid and bodysuit mesh to her skin. A medevac team had retrieved her within minutes and moved her to the garrison’s emergency ward. There, she’d spent the early morning twitching anxiously, terrified of death and pain, as droids cut away at the wound and administered bacta and anesthetics. She’d whimpered and begged one of her comrades to stay with her, but no one could be spared from the patrols and arrests and roundups in the city. She’d been left to the machines and her nightmares.

At some point, she’d been placed on a gurney and moved to a civilian clinic. She knew she’d asked why, but she couldn’t recall the droids’ answer—something about new wounded incoming, about a battle on the mountain. The painkillers were warping her memory. Now she sat on the crinkling sheets of a hard mattress in a room lit by rows of blue-white bulbs. She was shivering, goose bumps sensitizing her bare arms; on her top, she wore only a bandage wrapped around her chest. No one had bothered to remove her armor below the waist.

The clinic was staffed by a skeleton crew of Sullustans and humans. Any droids would have been transferred to the garrison months earlier, and the remaining workers were surely locked in their housing blocks. Still, a young Sullustan checked over Thara’s bandage once an hour, and she could hear voices in the corridor.

She’d been listening as much as she could while drifting in and out of lucidity. The voices were the only source she had for news regarding the lockdown, the roundups, and the rebels. They spoke about distant sounds and blaster shots, about emerald fires burning along the riverbank. They seemed to know little more than she did.

“I want to
do
something,” a woman’s voice said. “Before they come for us.”

“There is nothing to do,” the young Sullustan replied.

“You’re lying,” the woman said.

The voices faded away. Thara closed her eyes and tried not to feel the ache of every heartbeat.

When the building shook, she woke up from a dream in which she was lying on the ground repeatedly taking shots from a sniper. She’d felt quakes before, tremors through the caverns, and this one was minor; but she pushed herself upright, caught herself on the edge of the bed, and focused as if it meant the end of civilization.

The medics in the corridor were speaking again.

“You knew Corjentain,” said the woman.

“Yes,” came the Sullustan’s reply.

“We’re not doing this anymore,” the woman said. “We’re not sitting this out. Get a message to her, tell her the clinic is open to anyone who—”

Thara swayed when her boots hit the ground, balanced herself with a light touch to the bed. She forced herself to move into the corridor, one hand unclipping the blaster from her belt and bringing the cool metal in contact with her bare shoulder and chest. No one had taken her weapon away. No one
dared
to take a stormtrooper’s weapon away.

The blue-white light on the metal walls made the corridor look like a hologram. The two speakers, the human woman and the Sullustan, stood at the far end. Thara licked her dry lips and hoisted her weapon.

“I don’t care what’s going on out there,” Thara said. The two medics turned, terror plain on their faces.

She tried to sound as authoritative as she could, half naked and drugged and unsure of her own identity.

“So long as this place is under my protection,” she said, “it still belongs to the Empire.”

PLANET SULLUST

Day Three of the Siege of Inyusu Tor

Brand looked at the magnified face of the Imperial Army captain—young, black-haired, blue-eyed, soft-featured—and pulled the trigger of her sniper rifle. The rifle transmitted its scope data to her mask and, superimposed over the mountain vista, she watched the captain’s head burn. By the time anyone returned fire she’d already dropped off her boulder perch and scrambled to a new hiding place.