Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (50 page)

When the light faded, spots of green and red floated across Tabor’s eyes and he blinked harshly to clear them. Somehow words came to him as his stunned, aging brain realized what had occurred.

“An ion bomb,” he murmured.

The deck shuddered beneath him and the hull of the
Herald
seemed to groan.

“About twenty of them,” Chalis said. She was on her hands and knees, slowly climbing to her feet. Her voice was suddenly desiccated. “Everything Twilight had left.”

The deck shuddered again. Verge glanced about, legs gently bowed for balance and lips twisted into a sneer. “This is an Imperial Star Destroyer. All vital equipment is shielded. Even twenty bombs will do nothing.”

But that wasn’t true. Tabor shook his head, trying to organize his thoughts.
Why
wasn’t it true?
Think, Tabor.

“We’re in atmosphere,” he said, embarrassed at his own urgent tone. “We need full power to stay aloft. Any disruption at all—” Star Destroyers were extraordinary vessels, capable of razing mountains and carrying armies. But their mass was measured in millions upon millions of tonnes, and their energy requirements were vast.

He made an effort to compose himself, to speak in a manner befitting an Imperial captain. “We must withdraw immediately,” he said. He tapped his comlink. “Transfer all weapons and auxiliary power—anything we can spare—to the engines. Get us back in orbit.”

In return, he heard only Chalis’s guttural laughter.

Of course. The
Herald
’s systems were largely shielded, but his comlink had been disabled along with anything in the hangar more complex than a light fixture. He turned to the guards, ordered the message carried to the bridge. They ran together to the hangar door, which did not open.

Tabor spat a curse. The guards set to removing the control panel and searching for the override. Verge stood unmoved, staring at Chalis, as if the ion blast had broken him, too.

Why did you do this?
Tabor wanted to shout at Chalis.
What do you gain aside from bloodshed?

Did she really mean to give her life for the rebel cause?

“Still think you’ve won the Emperor’s favor?” Chalis asked, eyes locked with Verge’s.

“You still belong to me,” Verge said, though he sounded uncertain.

“And in capturing me you’ve put one of Sullust’s most important assets in the hands of the Rebellion.” She shook her head slowly. “Not in a calculated trade, either—but in a bungled act of ego and idiocy.”

The deck lurched, sending Tabor hard onto his knees. A sharp pain burst up his legs, and he wondered how much damage he’d done to his bones. He glanced to the guards, who were sprawled on the ground with the door only open a crack; to Chalis, who was kneeling once again.

Only Verge had retained his balance. As klaxons began to sound outside the bay, he lunged forward, grasping Chalis by the chin and striking her across the face. Again, she did not struggle, only turning to ease the pain of the blows as they came in a swift, repeating blur. When Verge—blood speckling his knuckles and his face, his eyes wide as a rabid animal’s—paused to catch his breath, the governor laughed again.

“I’ve seen Vader,” she said, a red smile on her lips. “Next to him, you really are pathetic.”

Verge froze with one hand curled like a claw above Chalis’s eyes.

“We’re through!” one of the guards called. The other was attempting to squeeze into the narrow gap they’d created between door and frame.

“Stop,” Verge said, his voice almost gentle. “We will not withdraw from the battle.”

Tabor was too confused to protest.

Verge kept speaking. “The Emperor will not forgive this failure, nor should he. Have the bridge direct all firepower at the rebel army. Destroy the processing facility if you must. But we will not allow Sullust to fall.”

Implications crept over Tabor much too slowly. “Prelate—” he began sharply, scolding. He forced himself to moderate his tone, but he could hear his own strain. “Sullust will not be lost. We can fight the battle another day. To sacrifice our men and the men on the ground …”

The
Herald
had a crew of thousands. They had given everything to Verge, but this was too much.

This was madness.

Why did you do this?

“Do not question my orders, Captain,” Verge said. His voice remained childishly gentle. “We have
all
failed, and we are
all
responsible. We will fly this vessel into the mountain before we suffer another defeat.”

Then Chalis struck Verge while his head was turned and he could argue no more. The two grappled fiercely—the boy in his prime against the governor twice his age. Yet sheer savagery offered her an edge Verge could not easily overcome. Tabor called to the prelate, but his voice was lost in the struggle and the klaxons.

The guards stood where they were, unsure of what to do. But they were good men, dutiful. In a moment, they’d accept their prelate’s orders and head for the bridge.

Tabor cursed and drew his sidearm, leveled it at the fighting pair. His pistol was a Merr-Sonn B22, mechanically activated. It might still be capable of firing after the ion blast. If he could end the fight, he might be able to talk sense into the prelate, and the
Herald
might yet escape.

His hands were trembling as he squinted, tried to acquire his target. In the back of his mind, he considered what he could say to sway Verge, what argument he could make to demonstrate that the deaths of so many good men were unnecessary.

He searched his memory, sifted through conversations with the boy over breakfast and while observing interrogations. He tried to fit the pieces of Verge’s crazed philosophy together, to find something in his vision of the Empire that Tabor could use.

He imagined the crew of the
Herald
dying for the boy’s passion.

He pulled the trigger. The hold-out pistol’s muzzle flashed red. The combatants separated, and Verge looked at Tabor with wide, mystified eyes—the look of a hound cruelly struck by its master—before falling to the ground. Flames licked at the hole in his chest.

“Tell the bridge to pull out. All power to the engines,” Tabor said. He heard the guards moving, scraping through the crack in the doorway.

They were good men. He could count on them.

Chalis’s face was a mask of blood. He aimed the pistol at her breast. She was smiling.

Why did you do this? Out of spite? Out of rebel loyalty?

“Captain Seitaron,” she said. “Tabor.”

“You are responsible here,” Tabor said. “Not the boy, whose madness was given to him, not chosen.” Dead, Verge no longer seemed threatening or unpredictable: He was a victim of circumstance, a brilliant mind and an eager patriot.

Verge had believed he was doing Tabor a kindness, bringing the old captain out of retirement.

Tabor found his vision blurring. He prepared to fire.

“One question first,” Chalis said.

“One question only,” Tabor snarled.

She shrugged, as if she’d expected that answer.

“Tell me,” she said. “If I shot the prelate while you and your guards were trapped outside, how could I then shoot myself in the chest with my own pistol?”

Tabor stared at Chalis as if she’d gone mad.

PLANET SULLUST

Day Three of the Siege of Inyusu Tor

When the Star Destroyer withdrew above the clouds, Twilight Company cheered over the sounds of explosions and blasterfire. Why it happened, no one could guess: The odds that
Apailana’s Promise
had defeated the
Herald
seemed nil, and no weapons fire streamed skyward from Pinyumb to suggest Nien Nunb’s cell had captured the city defenses. But whatever the reason, it was a welcome gift and seemed to inspire the rebel troops as much as it demoralized the Imperial infantry.

Yet the fighting at the gates of the processing facility dragged on—would have to drag on, Namir knew, until the Imperial Army had been reduced to chaff. He’d lashed the two forces together, bound them in chains of lava, and one would be completely destroyed before the day was over.

Namir fired his rifle until his fingers cramped, until his hips grew sore from crouching. As afternoon approached evening, he fell back with the squads into the facility depths, until the mouth of the entryway was a distant spot of daylight. The metal floor that stretched before the company was littered with debris from broken machines once used as barricades; with the bodies of stormtroopers and Twilight soldiers; with broken guns and discarded power packs and cracked helmets.

And still the foe came. Sometimes by tens and twenties, sometimes in smaller teams augmented by portable cannon fire and repulsor vehicles. Namir saw friends and comrades rent by blaster bolts, immolated by flamers, pierced by shrapnel. A stormtrooper drew a line of blood across his chest with a vibroblade; someone else wrestled the trooper away, gave Namir the chance to bind his shallow wound and return to the fight. He had no idea who’d saved his life.

Occasionally a voice would speak in his ear through his link, reporting on how the fight proceeded at the other facility gates. Namir sent reinforcements where they were needed, called for aid when the fighters at his entrance were hard-pressed. But for the most part, the tactics both sides employed were simple. The time to be clever had ended on the mountainside.

Once, during a lull between attacks, Namir saw a body move beside him and moan. In a haze of exhaustion, he didn’t realize the wounded woman was an Imperial until after he had passed her his canteen. She crawled away, only to be shot by a Twilight sniper.

But as evening turned to night, the lulls between attacks became steadily longer. Nearly an hour passed after one furious assault, and Namir and the others glanced uncertainly at one another, unwilling to leave their posts and afraid to break the spell. They no longer heard distant shouts or the rumbling of explosions. The gateway to the mountain was dark. In the silence of the battlefront, the truth eventually became obvious:

Twilight Company had won.

PLANET SULLUST

Two Days After the Siege of Inyusu Tor

Thara Nyende should not have been alive.

Being transferred from the garrison’s emergency ward to the civilian clinic for recuperation was the only thing that had saved her. She’d held the medics at gunpoint throughout the day while hunching forward on a chair, allowing them to treat the handful of stormtroopers and civilians who trickled in but ensuring they couldn’t join the uprising. Too exhausted and pained to hold back, she’d wept when news arrived that the garrison had been flooded by lava. If she’d had the strength, she might have joined the security forces in the street. As it was, she could only watch from the sidelines and listen to the raucous celebrations that told her Pinyumb had been captured.

Captured by the same people she’d been trying to protect and clothe and feed.

She didn’t understand. When the time came, she surrendered to the rebels without a fight.

Now, two days after the fighting had ended, she was officially a prisoner of the Rebel Alliance. Due to the number of captives taken during the uprising—everyone from Imperial administrators to security force members to civilian overseers of Pinyumb’s industrial enterprises—she’d been permitted to serve in a limited work-release capacity with the supervision of an authorized volunteer.

Unofficially, she was working at her uncle’s cantina.

The cantina itself had become a refuge in the aftermath of the crisis. When Thara’s uncle had been released from holding, he’d immediately begun using it as a distribution point for donated supplies; while some of Pinyumb’s residents were untouched by the revolution, others had seen their housing blocks burned and their possessions confiscated. They needed help that other residents were glad to give. And as volunteers flocked to the cantina, it also became a place to exchange information about Pinyumb’s rebuilding, to organize meetings and discussions on how the city would run without the Empire. It was busy at all hours, and therefore Thara was busy, too. She tracked goods as they came in and out, repaired broken machines, passed along messages. She served drinks.