Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (21 page)

When Namir finished describing his encounter in the mess hall, the captain shook his head and offered a relaxed, mocking rebuke. “You can’t just tell these people they’re doomed. They ever wise up, I’m out of a job.”

“You a mercenary?” Namir asked.

“Something like that.”

“You must’ve wanted to take a swing at these guys once or twice …” The captain laughed. “I don’t bite the hand that feeds me. I don’t need to start a fight I can’t win, either.”

“I could’ve won,” Namir said.

“Then you sure didn’t try too hard.” The captain grinned and took another swig of the whiskey before passing the bottle. It wasn’t particularly good—both men had agreed on that after the first sip—but it was potent and, Namir suspected, the only drink of its kind on Hoth.

“Anyway, you’re too young to be this cynical,” the captain said. “How’d you even join up with that attitude?”

“Long story,” Namir said. “Kind of an accident. It wasn’t for the
cause
, at any rate.”

“I hear you,” the man said.

They drank in silence awhile, and it was the captain who spoke next. His voice was quieter, his speech a touch slurred. The lights of the hangar had dimmed with nightfall, and even with the bay doors closed the cold was creeping inside.

“You remember when that battle station blew up?”

“Before my time,” Namir said. “But I heard about it.”

The captain nodded. “After that—I didn’t notice at first, but for a while it felt like we could really end this war. You looked at those kids who shot down death … it didn’t make any sense if you thought about it, but it
felt
like we were going somewhere.”

“They all look like that,” Namir said. “Fresh recruits.”

“Not just fresh recruits,” the man said. “Not all of them.”

Again, there was silence. A red-and-white astromech droid rolled across the hangar floor, squawking at something unseen.

“Keeps us busy, though,” the man said.

“Bad wars are good business?”

“To hell with that—even I’m not that cynical.” The man shook his head vigorously. “But if it
did
end … you know the way we put up with them now? Even when they’re downright insufferable? How long you think they’d put up with
us
after?”

Namir nodded very slowly. “Not so long,” he said.

The captain didn’t answer. Namir held up the whiskey bottle, watched the amber fluid slosh against the glass. He laughed softly before speaking again. “I’ll say it if you won’t: The war’s damn well
better
for me. The minute we win, I’ve got nothing. So the idea that it’ll keep going on forever? That feels
right.
”

It does feel right
, he thought to himself. He felt warm as the notion of the ongoing war, never won and never lost, soaked into his bones, steady and comfortable. Even the fantasy, the briefest notion of a rebel victory made him queasy.

It had been that way for years, though he’d never said it aloud before. Never thought about it so consciously.

The captain looked troubled, however, as he wrested the bottle from Namir and drank with a grimace.

“If they knew you thought
that …
” the captain said, and trailed off.

Namir shrugged. “They don’t.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?”

“I’m here to protect them. Doesn’t matter what they believe.”

The captain lifted the bottle to his lips again. This time he didn’t drink. Instead, he breathed in the whiskey’s aroma, lowered the bottle, and pressed it decisively into Namir’s hands without turning his head.

“If it’s a job,” the captain said, “then it doesn’t matter, and neither do they. You do what’s right for you, you tell them what they want to hear, and you move on when the job’s done. Otherwise—” He seemed to wrestle with the words as if fishing them out of the depths of his cloudy mind. “Otherwise, if it’s more than a job, they deserve better. If you can’t get behind what they believe in, maybe it’s time to walk away.”

Namir held the whiskey bottle close to his chest and felt its rim rub against his chin. Something in the back of his brain warned him that the wetness it left might crystallize in the cold. “I’m not a rebel,” he said.

The captain said something as he stood and walked slowly, swaying, up the boarding ramp, but Namir didn’t hear what.

Namir grasped the bottle in one hand as he descended to the hangar, angling toward the exit into Echo Base proper. He thought about Brand and Charmer and Gadren and Roach, and Ajax and Fektrin and the comm tech who’d died on Asyrphus—the woman whose name Namir had pledged to forget. He even thought about Roja and Beak and cursed them for traitors under his breath. They were
Twilight
soldiers, and they should’ve loathed Echo Base as much as him.

But they didn’t, because they were also rebel soldiers. And so were Brand and Charmer and Gadren and Roach. So was the comm tech, underneath it all.

The freighter captain was right. They deserved better.

Namir woke up in a storage unit the next day with a whiskey bottle clutched to his chest, a pounding headache, cheeks numb from cold, and a mouth that tasted like Coyerti’s biotoxins. When he managed to rouse himself and locate the duty roster, however, he found that his punishment was over and he’d been reassigned to patrol the perimeter outposts.

A day in the cold didn’t seem like an improvement, but the other outpost personnel kept their distance and it gave Namir a chance to think. Two hours on scanner duty, two staring into the blinding whiteness of the horizon, and two on patrol, then back to the base to thaw. If he’d been able to wear the polarizing goggles on his broken nose, it would’ve almost been peaceful. Yet even with frost encrusting his eyelashes, he had the opportunity to dwell on thoughts that lingered from the night.

They deserve better.

In the evening, Roja and Beak found him—told stories about the incompetence of stuck-up base troops, mocked Alliance Special Forces. They didn’t explain or justify their change of heart. Together, they reminisced about Twilight’s battles on Mygeeto—before Namir’s time with the company—and Phorsa Gedd, which Namir remembered vividly. Namir wanted to send Roja and Beak away, but he appreciated their intentions, if not their presence. He could smile and enjoy the lies for one night.

So the days went, and Namir settled into a routine until the morning when he was summoned to a meeting with Howl and Chalis. He’d seen neither since before the incident in the mess hall, and he immediately knew what the summons meant: The strategy conference was over.

They assembled in one of the secondary tactical control rooms off the main command center. Howl and Chalis both looked at once exhausted and energized. Howl greeted Namir warmly, like an old friend reuniting with a lost comrade. Chalis said nothing, smirking from her seat and cupping a steaming metal thermos beneath her chin.

“Everything go as planned?” Namir asked as Howl waved him to a seat.

“We have a goal, and the means to achieve it,” Howl said. “Governor Chalis was the star of the show. Her information has proved invaluable.”

Chalis snorted and gestured dismissively with her thermos. “I sat in back and shot down all Rieekan’s dreams.”

“But you did it,” Howl said lightly, “with such
authority.
”

Chalis laughed but said nothing more. Howl’s voice dropped as he turned somber again. “We’ve been retreating for so long, it’s hard to think about striking back. But the Alliance is almost ready. We can win this war.”

The words made Namir wince. They were far too familiar.

Howl kept going. “There’s still much to do here, but my part is finished. Better minds than this one”—he tapped his left temple—“will work out the details, and I need to prepare Twilight. I’d like to depart on the shuttle tomorrow morning; Chalis will remain to advise High Command.”

“I’ll check the ship over this afternoon,” Namir said. “Make sure nothing’s frozen up.”

The thought of leaving Hoth should have elated him. Instead, it curdled in his gut.

They deserve better.

“There’s one other thing,” Howl said. “Chalis?”

“Captain Evon said I could make this a request, but not an order,” Chalis said. “So it’s your call.” Where steam touched her face, her skin gleamed as if she’d been sweating. “If I’m going to be stationed with Alliance High Command—on Hoth or wherever else they end up—I’m going to want my own staff. That includes security, and as we’ve already established there aren’t many people I trust not to stab me in the back.

“The job’s yours if you want it, Sergeant. You have until tomorrow to decide.”

Her expression was almost bored. Namir tried to read beneath the affect, see if there was something more to the offer, but he found nothing. Howl had set his face in stone.

The idea was tempting, in its way. Working with Chalis would be uncomplicated—free of unspoken debts and expectations.

He opened his mouth to respond, not sure what he was going to say, when a rebel soldier burst into the room half out of breath. She straightened and saluted as Howl and Chalis turned toward her.

“The Empire’s found us,” she said. “We’re starting plan kay one zero. Total evacuation.”

ELOCHAR SECTOR

Two Days Before Plan Kay One Zero

Brand was restless.

Thunderstrike
and
Apailana’s Promise
had reached their rendezvous with the rebel flotilla ten days earlier, joining a dozen other ships in the void of deep space. Since then, the
Thunderstrike
’s crew had been working nonstop under Commander Paonu to repair or refit every square meter of the battered vessel. Parts and equipment were delivered by flotilla cargo haulers daily. Corridors had been sealed off, stripped of floor plating, and exposed to vacuum. Droids and engineers crawled like rats through ducts and tubes, welding panels and ripping out wires.

Meanwhile, with the crew busy, the soldiers of Twilight could only get in the way. In Howl’s absence, Lieutenant Sairgon did what he could to occupy the troops—he devised training exercises and war games, granted squads “shore leave” to visit other ships in the flotilla—but without anywhere to land, there simply wasn’t enough room for either work or recreation.

Still, most of Twilight’s soldiers had developed a tolerance for boredom. Brand was an exception.

Not that boredom was a problem for her per se. She’d been a bounty hunter. She’d once spent eight days in the back of an abandoned land-speeder used by the Black Sun syndicate as a dead drop; she’d worn an environment suit built for intravenous feeding and waste elimination, exercised by tensing her muscles without changing position, and staved off hallucinations by mentally reciting half-remembered poetry. When her target had finally arrived to pick up a package of death sticks, she’d almost fallen over when she rose to stun and cuff him, but she’d
done the job.

All she needed to overcome boredom was a goal. Something to focus on. Aboard the
Thunderstrike
she didn’t have anything of the sort. She’d agreed, at Sairgon’s urging, to act as the target of a training manhunt, but even that had ended when she’d elbowed one of the fresh meat in the ribs with too much force.

“You could talk to them,” Gadren said one night. She’d gone to the Clubhouse with a vague notion of winning Twitch’s stash of credits in a card game. Instead, she’d found the place crawling with fresh meat and encountered Gadren on her return to the corridor.

“I’d rather not,” Brand said.

“You have training to offer, experience to impart—”

She cut him off. “There’s a whole flotilla here. More than enough soldiers to coach them better than me.”

“Perhaps,” Gadren conceded. “Then join me and Roach awhile? Captain So-Hem of the
Sixmoon
has invited members of Twilight Company to visit his ship.”

Brand stared at the Besalisk, who stood patiently awaiting her reply. She’d already decided to refuse, but she searched for a reason—a convenient lie, an existing commitment she could use as an excuse. She had no interest in an evening spent socializing with strangers.

Even Gadren must have known that by now.

“I don’t need company,” she said. “I need work.”

Brand waited as long as she could for an answer—a second, or perhaps two. Then she marched down the corridor again, toward the port boarding pod array. The whole section was under reconstruction, which meant she could sit on the edge of the scaffolding as long as her suit’s oxygen held out, alone except for the scurrying repair droids.

She had tremendous respect for Gadren, on both a personal and a professional level. She was in his squad—Namir’s squad—for a reason. But he insisted on an
intimacy
with his comrades, wanted to tend to whatever personal troubles he imagined bothered them. Ordinarily, Twilight was too busy surviving for that to perturb her; and ordinarily, Gadren could turn his prying onto Namir, who tolerated it better.

No easy escape today.

How much longer, Brand wondered, until the flotilla received new orders?

A strict routine kept Brand sane. Every morning, she woke up in the tool closet she’d converted into her private quarters. She exercised for two hours—first a jog through the ship, then training in the weight room. Then breakfast. Target practice. Equipment maintenance. One task after the next, productive or not, just to keep her hands and brain busy. It was a trick she’d learned during the four months she’d spent in a detention center.