Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (12 page)

“I don’t know when things went wrong. But as law came back to Tangenine, the Empire changed from what it was to … whatever it is we’ve got now. I brought a man in for stealing power converters and saw him jailed for life. I tracked down a gang leader, a spice dealer—the lowest of the low—and saw him pardoned because he bribed a magistrate.”

The words were simple and her tone was flat, as if she were describing horrors she didn’t want to relive. Namir saw Roach wanting to ask for more, for specifics, but she seemed to know better. Maybe she was afraid of what Brand would do if she pried.

But the pain and nausea in Roach’s face were gone.

Brand didn’t seem to notice the girl’s unasked questions. “A few years back,” she said, “I decided I needed a break. We’d finished rooting out one of the last big syndicates, and I was getting sick of the blood. Lot of people wouldn’t surrender, knowing what would happen in prison …” She trailed off, started again.

“I needed a break. So for my next job, I picked a target that would get me off Tangenine, out of the Core Worlds. Away from cities and crime and bureaucrats.”

“Captain Evon?” Roach asked.

“Captain Evon,” Brand said. “I hadn’t done much rebel hunting, but I figured it would keep me busy awhile.” A hint of a smile played across her lips.

“Tracking down Twilight Company took time,” Brand said, “but soldiers do stupid things when they’re on leave. Talk to the wrong people—”

“That’s a lesson for you,” Namir muttered in Roach’s direction, though he wasn’t sure she heard.

“—and get cozy, mention their next assignments. Wasn’t more than four months before I showed up at an open recruit on Veron and offered to join.

“I’ll skip the blow-by-blow. Short version is, I lied, I smuggled in my kit, and I waited for a clear shot at Howl and an opportunity to escape. By the time my chance came, I’d gotten to know the troops. Saw that maybe they had a point.”

“You changed your mind?” Roach asked.

Brand shook her head almost imperceptibly, as if anything more would send her spinning into oblivion. “Not until I had a gun to Howl’s head. Man didn’t seem scared, and we got to talking. He offered me a job, and I took it.”

Roach nodded, not quite meeting Brand’s gaze.

“No regrets,” Brand said. “Not about joining. Not about my old life, either.”

Namir buried himself in his bedroll and tried not to laugh.

Much later, in the dim light of predawn, Namir relieved himself in a gulch near the camp and made his way back toward his colleagues. Halfway there, he found Brand seated on a boulder, cleaning her knife. He sat down beside her.

For a while, Namir watched sunlight delineate the shadows. Finally he said, “How come you didn’t tell her the whole thing?”

Brand shrugged. “She’s too young,” she said. “Besides, we’ll all be dead in a few days. A few lies won’t hurt her.”

Namir nodded and dug into the dirt with the toe of his boot. Then he managed to smile. “If we’re all dead, who’s going to get revenge on Chalis?”

Brand shrugged again. “Far as I see, her information was good. We maybe saved a lot of people from—” She hesitated, then extended a hand and looked down at the palm. A rash was spreading up toward her wrist. “—this. Not her fault we weren’t careful enough.”

Namir’s own rash had begun low on his neck. He’d discovered it while shaving.

“Howl doesn’t know that,” he said. “If we’re lucky, Chalis will get blamed anyway. The troops could stone her to death.”

Brand flipped her knife over and sheathed it. “You’ve got a mean streak, Sergeant.” She wasn’t smiling. It made Namir laugh.

“When we’re dead,” he said, “I’m going to miss these talks.”

“Me, too,” Brand said. She still didn’t smile, but when Namir reached out his hand she took it and squeezed.

Two days later, the drop ship arrived.

Namir couldn’t remember much of what happened afterward. He remembered Gadren shouting and Brand firing her blaster into the sky to indicate the squad’s position. He remembered trying to crawl out of his bedroll toward the drop ship when the vessel landed and sent waves of dust and heat rippling his way. He remembered not quite making it; he was sure Gadren had been the one to scoop him up and carry him the distance.

He was reasonably certain he’d said unforgivable things to whoever tried to strap him into his seat. He’d found the strength to cinch himself into the harness and forced himself to stay conscious while being battered against the wall. Half dead or not, he refused to be the soldier who passed out during takeoff. That was Roach’s duty as fresh meat.

Aboard the
Thunderstrike
, he tried to report the destruction of the Distillery to any medic who would listen, then realized that Gadren was still alive and could do the job just as well. He suffered days of tests, which he was later assured had taken only hours, and he remembered being told that he’d been exposed to only minuscule amounts of unrefined, unweaponized biotoxin. The effects were easily treatable.

Namir and his team were going to be fine.

The Coyerti campaign was over.

“The walker is staring us down, the X-wings can’t get low enough to hit the cannon, and then we start hearing this drumbeat.” Ajax smacked his palm against the dented metal tabletop, producing a hollow ring.

“Play your cards,” Brand said.

Ajax ignored her. “But it’s not a drumbeat—it’s a whole blasted army of
Coyerti.
We hadn’t even
seen
the things before, but I figure that whole ‘reproductive season’ thing must be over because they’re
swarming.
Ten minutes later, the whole garrison is on fire and the lieutenant is begging us to stop lobbing grenades. ‘We won, we won—save some for the next mission!’ ”

Half the Clubhouse laughed with Ajax while the other half scoffed. Gadren playfully slapped Ajax between the shoulder blades. “Maybe the Coyerti will invite you, their mighty savior, to the festivities next time.” His voice became more somber as he continued, “May they continue their fight with skill and fortune.”

“And without
us
,” someone called. Namir didn’t see who. He couldn’t disagree with the sentiment, but he wouldn’t have voiced it aloud in present company. Gadren frowned, as did—to Namir’s surprise—Brand.

“So long as we’re done with the jungle,” Namir said instead. “I still smell it on all of you, and I swear there are gnats in the barracks now.”

There was a round of agreement, and the card game resumed. Namir kept half an eye on the game while he read through post-conflict reports and counted up the dead and wounded. The relatively few who’d fallen on the front lines, fighting with the bulk of Twilight, had been mourned already. No one would mention them while sober; not for a while. The tally of the wounded was more severe. Namir dreaded the task of reassigning squad members to compensate.

All thirteen of the fresh meat assigned to the ground had survived. They’d acquitted themselves adequately, for the most part: Corbo, who’d brought the knife to Chalis’s prison, had half a dozen confirmed kills. The bedraggled man Namir had pegged for a potential spy at the open recruit had taken a grazing blaster shot protecting a Coyerti native. Namir had seen only two reports of recruits freezing up entirely. Better than usual, really, and a hopeful sign that Twilight might rebuild its ranks in time for the next major offensive.

“So, Sergeant,” Ajax called, after pushing a pile of credits over to Gadren. “Any news from Fisheye Company?”

Namir frowned. “What’s Fisheye have to do with anything?” Fish-eye was the Alliance’s Sixty-Eighth Infantry, aquatic division. Twilight had crossed paths with the company once before, but Namir hadn’t heard anything about it in months. Then again, he was still catching up on the day’s rumors.

“Missed the big announcement in all the puking and hallucinating,” Twitch said with a smirk, in an almost incomprehensible mumble.

Ajax laughed before explaining, “Turns out Coyerti wasn’t the only target this week. Rearguard actions across the board … the Twenty-First was on Bestine. Bitter Pill Company was on some trash heap of a planet; lost their troop transport but got a replacement.”

“Then it was coordinated?” Gadren said. “One final effort to allow the fleet to complete its withdrawal from the Mid Rim …”

Twitch was still muttering. “Battleships aren’t running fast enough? Toss your ground troops in the furnace. That’ll fix ’em up.”

The news of a coordinated action didn’t surprise Namir. He hadn’t expected it, but he
should
have—one company on one planet wouldn’t ever be enough to distract the whole Imperial fleet. Still, something rankled him about the news, even if he couldn’t say what.

“I’ll check with the captain about Fisheye,” he said, and stood with a groan. “I’m meeting with Howl in an hour, and I’m sure he’ll be happy to share.”

Namir’s meeting was with Lieutenant Sairgon, not Howl, but he bullied his way into the captain’s office anyway to deliver his report on the fresh meat’s progress. He kept it short, and Howl appeared attentive throughout. But then, Howl treated everyone as if they were endless fountains of profundity, always worthy of patience and consideration regardless of what idiocy they were spewing. It irritated Namir to no end.

“And your team?” Howl asked when Namir finished. “You’re feeling well again?”

“Good enough,” Namir said. “Wish we’d known what we were dying for, though.”

It wasn’t what he had intended to say. It wasn’t even what bothered him, though it was close enough.

“How do you mean?” Howl asked.

Now he was committed. “ ‘We’re going to provide cover for our retreating fleet.’ ‘We’re going to save the Coyerti.’ ‘We’re going to test the governor’s information at the Distillery.’ Those are all nice, clear mission parameters, but they’re not the same. Now we come home and learn the first explanation was the real one. Only it’s
not
—not entirely—because it turns out we’re only one part of a larger operation.

“You know I’m not one to question the grand strategy. I fight because Twilight fights. But I don’t like to feel
used
, either.”

Howl maintained that same, tolerant look. “We can’t have more than one reason for what we do?”

“Not if we want to win,” Namir said. “You pick a goal, and your troops get it done.”

Howl started to reply, then raised a finger as if to silence himself. He squeezed his eyes shut, reopened them, and began again. “Our goal isn’t conquest, but alchemy,” he said. “The transmutation of the galaxy. We are a catalyst; where Rebellion comes into contact with Empire, change must occur. The substance of oppression becomes the substance of freedom—and as with any such change, terrible energies are released: war, victory, and defeat.

“But the alchemist’s concern isn’t those energies. They’re a by-product,
not
the means of transmutation itself. The alchemist’s concern is the purity of the catalyst. The rest will take care of itself.” He shrugged then, and smiled. “Mostly, anyway. If we maintain the strength of our principles, the rest will follow.

“Your death on Coyerti wouldn’t have halted the process. If all of Twilight Company had died, would the fleet have failed to escape? Would the Coyerti have been wiped out? Would we know any less about Governor Chalis’s intent?”

The words meant nothing to Namir. He shook his head and grimaced. “I want to give my people a mission they can count on. Not a philosophy of war. Something that keeps them focused.”

Howl smiled. “I think you underestimate your people. But we’ve had this discussion.”

They had, beginning on Blacktar Cyst and recurring on and off since then. It never turned out satisfactory, but there were days that Howl’s madness—his willingness to sacrifice Twilight to achieve his peculiar definition of victory—troubled Namir more profoundly than others.

Late that night, Namir went searching for Roach. She hadn’t been at the Clubhouse. He hadn’t seen her since they’d left Coyerti, though the medics assured him she was healthy.

One of Sergeant Fektrin’s men pointed Namir in the right direction, and he eventually found her in a cramped cargo bay, back pressed tight against the bulkhead and arms wrapped around her knees. She was shivering and rocking gently, and she stared bitterly at Namir when he walked inside.

“You still sick?” he asked.

“No,” Roach said.

Namir picked his way around the clutter of crates and spare engine parts and put his own back to the wall beside Roach. He didn’t join her on the floor. Roach glanced up, then back to her knees.

“It’s just the fighting,” she said. “It was my first fight. First time I killed someone.”

“And you’re all broken up about the guy you shot?”

“Yes,” Roach said.

Namir snorted. “That’s garbage.”

Roach looked up again. Namir shook his head. “Lot of people get messed up when they shoot people,” he said. “Not you, though. Later, maybe; right now you’ve got bigger issues.”

Roach kept staring.

Namir slid down the bulkhead next to Roach and stretched his legs. He tapped his heel against the metal floor, listened to the barely resonant thud.

“How long have you been clean?” he asked.

Roach was watching his foot. He saw her expression twist as indecision came and went on her face before she finally whispered, “Since Haidoral. Not much before.”

“That why you were in a detention center?” Namir asked. “Spice addiction?”

Roach nodded. “Basically.”

Namir kept his tone casual. “I probably should’ve seen it then. You’d think I’d know the difference between ‘sweaty and nervous’ and ‘going through withdrawal’ by now.”

Again, the long silence. When Roach spoke, the words were stilted as she forced each to emerge. “I’m clean now. I’m here to fight. I won’t mess up.”

“Yeah, you will,” Namir said. “That’s okay, though. We’ve all got problems.”

Roach smiled weakly—an uncertain smile, an obligatory smile at her commander’s sad little joke.

Namir reached over and took Roach’s chin in his hand. Her skin was cool and damp. He turned her face toward his. “We protect our own. You understand?”

She nodded. Namir let go. She didn’t understand.