Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (48 page)

She imagined a list of the captain’s crimes: corruption, spice possession, assault, slave trading. Common among Imperial authorities. Not altogether unlikely.

She missed bounty hunting. But working alone behind enemy lines, eliminating the opposition one by one, was almost as good.

She was sandwiched into a narrow crevice, knees pulled to her chin while she waited for any pursuit to pass her by, when she heard a high-pitched hum beneath the sounds of the wind and distant plasma pulsers. Risking exposure, she lifted herself and scanned her surroundings for the source: a speeder bike flashing down the slope.

She blinked, magnified the vehicle on her mask’s display, compensated for its speed, and tried to track it. She recognized the pilot and swore inwardly before opening a comm channel.

“Sergeant,” she said. “Need to talk.”

She balanced her torso on the edge of the crevice, lodged her boots against the rock, and took aim with her rifle, trying to judge the speeder’s heading. It wouldn’t be an easy shot. She might still make it.

Namir’s voice came through a hiss of static. “We’re kind of busy up here,” he said. “You having fun?”

“Yes,” Brand said. “You’re missing Chalis.”

“What?”

She aimed down the slope from the speeder bike, steadied her rifle. Particle bolts moved swiftly, but so did speeders. She’d need to lead the target.

“She got out,” Brand said. “She’s got a full gear pack and a speeder bike. Don’t know how she passed the enemy front line.”

“You managed it,” Namir said.
Fair enough
, Brand thought. “She’s probably heading for the city.”

She kept her rifle positioned as it was, glanced at the speeder bike again. If she’d aimed correctly, she had four seconds until she needed to fire.

“Dead or alive?” she asked.

Three. Two. She began to pull back the trigger.

Namir said nothing. She liked Namir, but she couldn’t wait on him.

One.

She finished the pull, felt the rifle surge, saw the muzzle blaze.

Namir swore softly. “Let her go,” he said. “You’ve got other targets, and she doesn’t know our plan.”

The speeder bike and the particle bolt blurred toward convergence down the mountainside. The rock of the crevice bit into Brand’s chest as she stayed propped in place, watching.

The bolt missed. The speeder swerved awkwardly, too late, then regained equilibrium.

“Copy that,” Brand said. “Back to hunting.”

She turned off the comm, scolded herself for missing. She supposed it was for the best.

Still, she’d never trusted Namir’s judgment about the governor. He’d gotten too close, and he’d never really understood the crimes of the Imperial aristocracy.

PLANET SULLUST

Day Three of the Siege of Inyusu Tor

The Empire’s infantry and airspeeders kept their distance from the facility as the Star Destroyer descended. The reason why became obvious when the first emerald turbolaser blasts rained from the sky onto the mountainside, cratering the black slope and turning stone into cracked, sizzling glass. The few Twilight Company scouts and snipers who prowled about the peak’s upper reaches rapidly withdrew to the innermost perimeter or were disintegrated by the lasers’ atomizing spite.

Namir felt a wave of heat billow across his face and tried to shield himself with one arm. Even through his breath mask’s filter, the burning air smelled like sulfur and ozone. The emerald rain closed in on the troops, accompanied by the glowing spheres of guided proton bombs encircling the processing facility. How close could the enemy strike without destroying the compound? Namir wondered. How precise were a Star Destroyer’s targeting systems?

“They’re in position!” Hober yelled into Namir’s ear. He could barely hear the quartermaster over laserfire and shattering rock.

Namir saw a squad of soldiers nearby begin to back away from the crest, glancing toward the facility entrance.

“Hold the line!” Namir called.

If he’d judged wrong—if the Star Destroyer’s gunners could vaporize the troops without touching the facility—he would die with the rest of Twilight, and the battle would be over in an eyeblink.

But a moment later, the laserfire stopped.

Namir raised his gaze to the gray sky and laughed, the scorched air burning his nostrils.

The dark wedge of the Star Destroyer was beneath the cloud layer now, larger than Sullust’s dim and distant sun and close enough to display the lines of its metal underbelly. Red and green lightning flashed around it, but the weapons fire wasn’t targeting the ground anymore. Instead, the Star Destroyer was lashing at three new shadows descending through the clouds: one a sliver and two mere specks.

Apailana’s Promise
and its X-wings had returned.

“How long can they survive like that?” Namir asked Hober.

“Not sure,” Hober said. “We’ve been able to signal back and forth, but we can’t maintain a channel. My guess? Not long.”

“That’s all right,” Namir said. “We don’t have long down here, either.”

It wasn’t the sort of thing a commander should say, but Hober laughed bitterly.

The Imperial forces down the slope resumed their advance—alarmed, perhaps, by the company’s aerial reinforcements and concerned what other tricks the rebels might have planned. As stormtroopers marched over still-steaming rock, Namir walked the line and called out orders, bringing Twilight’s full firepower to bear against the foe. The Empire no longer held any part of its army in reserve, and as soon as troops died others took their place. A constant barrage of particle bolts flashed over Namir; he began to scurry about the Twilight positions on his hands and knees. Imperial mortar shells shrieked, some falling short of their targets and others ripping apart squads of Twilight soldiers. In return, red and orange streams of energy, explosive blasts, pulses of light, sparking missiles all poured down the mountainside from Twilight blasters and artillery.

On Crucival, such weaponry would have conquered the world. Here it wasn’t nearly enough.

The first Imperial troops crested the peak. Whatever fortune or skill preserved them through Twilight’s gauntlet failed to protect them long—Namir burned one through the chest, his first shot of the battle—but the inner line had begun to crack. Namir glanced toward Hober, who raised five fingers.

Five minutes. They needed to hold out another five minutes. Namir gestured the squads forward. Soldiers rose above the boulders they’d chosen for shelter or dashed a few meters down the slope. Some were cut down instants later, but the sudden offensive forced the Imperial infantry to halt its advance. Namir found himself shoulder-to-shoulder with Twitch, firing bursts from a rapidly heating rifle at stormtrooper teams suddenly caught in the open.

He risked a glance skyward, saw the continued flicker of laserfire between the Star Destroyer and the
Promise.
“If they survive longer than we do—” he began. He took another shot and felt his rifle pulse.

“Be humiliating. I know,” Twitch mumbled. The rest of her comment was lost—Namir only heard the word “navy” and a string of profanity.

The Twilight squads that had moved forward began to lose ground almost immediately. Namir allowed the company to abandon the meter it had seized. Any farther back and the squads would be on the slim shelf between the crest and the facility’s walls—at which point retreat to the facility itself would be the only viable option.

A deafening blast thrust Namir forward as a mortar shell exploded behind him. He fell against the stones, felt skin tear as his knees slammed onto the ground and he buried his head and helmet in his arms. He felt fortunate not to have broken his skull; he doubted he could survive another head wound.

Someone pulled him up by the shoulder. He didn’t see who, but he saw Hober in his peripheral vision offering a nod. “Do it,” Namir said.

He heard yells and cheers and screams and finally a roar of triumph. Dragging himself forward to look down upon the slope, he saw the mountain start to burn.

Namir had sent half a dozen dig teams into the mountain. They used the same vehicles they’d stolen days ago to infiltrate the processing facility, along with a handful they’d located in the facility itself. The engineers had warned him more than once that any tunnels they created would be unstable, prone to collapse if they drilled into the wrong type of rock, let alone if the mountain came under bombardment.

“It’ll work,” Vifra had promised him before he’d left for Pinyumb. “It’s not really that
difficult.
It’s what half the tools here are built for.”

“You don’t want to do it,” Namir had said.

Vifra had shrugged. “We built a defense against any Imperial dig team trying to come in like we did: Channel the magma, incinerate the foe. You told us to get ambitious, now we’re getting ambitious.

“I can make the mountain spill its guts all over the place. But I don’t think half the dig teams will survive. I think you’re asking them to die, and they’ll die pretty horribly. They’ll be buried alive. Or caught in the flow.”

“Will they do it?” Namir had asked.

Vifra had nodded. The decision was made.

On the mountain, Namir watched lava seep from the mouths of freshly dug tunnels and trickle into the open. Most of the lava streams emerged below the level of the Imperial army, but that was to be expected. Fire rose where the streams touched scrub grass or corpses. Transport vehicles, stationed behind the bulk of the enemy force, rapidly turned aside. Soldiers higher on the slope shouted panicked warnings, fled the heat into the blazing weapons of Twilight Company.

The lava would encircle the upper reaches of the peak almost entirely. The Imperials would be left with nowhere to fall back to. They would be demoralized, terrified, and they would strike at Twilight Company with renewed fury because of it. It might ultimately prove to be in the Empire’s favor.

But trapping the enemy army in with Twilight wasn’t the lava’s only purpose. Additional streams would spring out closer to the mountain’s base, and Twilight Company’s dig teams weren’t the only dig teams operating.

Nien Nunb’s rebel cell hadn’t had much in the way of weaponry or manpower. But it had possessed mining vehicles. Submerging half a dozen Imperial guard stations in lava seemed like a fine way to start a revolution.

Namir hoped the rebel cell truly could rally the people of Pinyumb. He wondered if he’d survive to learn whether that part of the plan worked.

Twilight’s celebration ended as the Imperials redoubled their attack. Stormtroopers vaulted over rocks at the crest, struck Twilight soldiers with the butts of their rifles before being shot down themselves. The press of bodies became too much for the company; blaster rifles drew too much power, overheated too quickly to stop every enemy who reached the top of the slope. Namir signaled the retreat, and squads abandoned portable artillery and dying comrades to back toward the facility entrances and navigate the company’s maze of barricades.

It was as orderly as a swift retreat could be. The squads knew a withdrawal was part of the plan, knew who could afford to leave first and who would stay behind to provide cover. They did their duty as white-armored troops tossed grenades and Imperial flame units sprayed death in an effort to force Twilight to scatter.

Namir separated from Hober somewhere in the retreat, caught his breath behind an overturned loadlifter used to block the cavernous mouth of the facility’s eastern entrance. He was toward the back of the maze, and he watched squads filter through and take up stations while others found perches on the rooftop. He was swapping out his rifle’s power pack when a mighty hand clasped his shoulder and a voice declared in a deep bellow, “When nature itself turns against our foes, how can we lose?”

He turned to see Gadren standing above him and grinning broadly. Roach stood behind the alien, one shoulder inexplicably covered by a stormtrooper’s pauldron. She was shifting her weight rapidly from one leg to the other, her smile far more slight.

“Let’s try not to find out, huh?” Namir asked, and gave Gadren’s side a solid smack. His eyes, however, were on Roach. Part of him wanted to offer her a chance to run, to hide deep in the facility until the battle was over; but that wasn’t what she needed, and he suspected it wasn’t what she wanted. “You’ll do good, both of you,” he said.

“Any word from Pinyumb?” Gadren asked.

“No,” Namir said, “but we weren’t expecting any. We’ve given them all the support we can—we’ve melted their jailers and we’ve trapped the local army up here. If they can’t pull off a rebellion now, they’ve only got themselves to blame.”

Gadren nodded. Roach took one of his arms and tugged gently. “We going?” she asked.

“We’ll see you after,” Gadren said to Namir. “Stay safe, my friend.”

“You, too,” Namir said.

Roach led Gadren away into the ranks. Namir watched the two go and worked to steady his suddenly ragged breathing and his trembling hands.

Then, as the pair nearly disappeared from sight, Roach glanced back at him. He made himself smile tightly, offer a nod of encouragement.