Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (24 page)

“Vader is here,” Chalis whispered, and it sounded like an accusation. “Vader is
here.
”

ELOCHAR SECTOR

Zero Days After Plan Kay One Zero

There was no light aboard the
Trumpet’s Call
except the dim glow of the secondary bridge console. Brand preferred it that way. The enhanced optics of her pleximetal mask allowed her to pick out bloodstains and electrical circuits in the dark, and the shadows would give her cover in case she wasn’t alone.

She’d boarded the vessel after the last of the injured had been evacuated to the
Thunderstrike.
She still wasn’t certain what troubled her about the scenario, and she was well aware she might be looking for problems where none existed—occupying her mind through paranoia. In that case, she was wasting nothing but her own copious free time. But if the
Trumpet’s Call
had been tracked to the flotilla somehow? Tagged with a homing beacon or sabotaged by a spy or blackmailed into reporting its position? She was prepared to deal with those possibilities, too. She was well acquainted with the extremes to which men and women—Imperial and otherwise, human or nonhuman—would go to accomplish their goals.

She’d swept for beacons already, found nothing but the bodies of more crew members. Most appeared to have suffocated. A few had burned to death. She couldn’t determine when the ship’s life support had lost primary power—onboard diagnostics were garbled, and while she might have been able to run the numbers based on the number of survivors and the oxygen supply remaining, she’d need a droid for the math. In the meantime, there were other avenues open to her through the main computer.

Its hyperspace jump logs were consistent with the crew’s statements. The
Trumpet’s Call
was a light freighter assigned to passenger transport and cargo duty. It had been operating among the purse worlds as a trading vessel, changing its identity records and name—
Eyesore, Careful Buyer
—whenever the Empire began to suspect something. Apparently
Trumpet’s Call
was past due to be retired as an alias, as the ship had been attacked sometime in the last several days.

That was neither surprising nor suspicious. The crew had done a good job forging records, but the Empire was growing better at identifying fraud every year. Maybe, Brand thought, she’d retired at the right time; who needed bounty hunters when the Imperial security state ran so smoothly?

Regardless, the jump log neither confirmed nor alleviated her suspicions. She began attempting to access other computer files one by one. Many of the files were corrupt. Others were encrypted; another task for a droid aboard the
Thunderstrike.
Still, there was enough data to keep her occupied: cargo records, maintenance reports, a crew roster, personnel files …

She pulled up the roster and opened the captain’s entry, only to immediately recognize him as the dead body she’d stepped over to reach the bridge. She skimmed the details—no personal history, just name and age and homeworld and visas and vaccination history, half of it likely faked—and opened the next record. She skimmed each dossier in turn and looked for something
off
—something that suggested tampering or a vulnerability the Empire had taken advantage of. She found nothing that indicated the men and women of the
Trumpet’s Call
were anything other than victims.

Then she reached the last record. She stared at the screen.

Before she’d even finished her mental re-creation of the attack, she was running toward the air lock.

Earning a living as a bounty hunter meant learning to pick out and memorize faces. Surveillance was part of the game, and technological enhancement—cybernetic eyes, image-matching lenses—couldn’t make an oblivious tracker observant. Brand’s strengths weren’t with people, but she’d compensated by training, running through black-market versions of the Coruscant underworld police recruitment test. She’d honed her mind, rewired her brain until it worked the way she needed.

She rarely doubted her memory. She didn’t now.

None of the faces from the ship’s personnel records matched the patients transported to the
Thunderstrike
’s medbay.

Whoever was aboard the
Thunderstrike
, it wasn’t the crew of the
Trumpet’s Call.

She tried to open a link to the
Thunderstrike
’s bridge through her mask’s comm as she tapped at the air lock control panel and watched the circular metal door roll open. No answer. She stepped into the air lock, waited for the pressure to equalize with the
Thunderstrike
’s interior, and tried her squad frequency. No response from Gadren, Roach, or Charmer, either.

Her mask’s display told her the exact time of day. That was how she knew it took a full minute for the exterior door to open and admit the piercing sound of klaxons. As she raced aboard the
Thunderstrike
, she wondered if that minute could have made any difference.

Twilight Company had been infiltrated, and Brand was too late to stop it.

PLANET HOTH

Zero Days After Plan Kay One Zero

Beak and Namir fired in unison, hefting their rifles and sending red streaks down the corridor toward the gleaming figures in white and black. Roja joined the assault barely a second later; he was behind Namir, but Namir could hear his swift, ragged breathing and his boots shuffling on snow.

One stormtrooper fell. The others were parting almost before Namir had fired, scattering to the sides of the corridor and taking cover behind mounds of stone and ice and metal support beams.

Darth Vader stood untouched in the center of the passageway.

The black-clad figure resembled the bust from the Haidoral governor’s mansion in the arc of his helmet and the mad angles of the polished mask. But the bust hadn’t conveyed his height or the amorphous billow of his cloak. Red and green lights winked from the chest piece of his armor, making him resemble something built rather than born.

Yet he moved like a man: There was flesh beneath the armor, and flesh could be made to burn.

The stormtroopers moved with the surety of professional soldiers, returning fire as soon as they’d exited the kill zone. Namir ordered his own team to cover and dived behind a curtain of dangling, broken piping and a massive block of ice. He was shooting again before he’d checked the status of Beak or Roja or Chalis. Or Howl. But the captain, dead or alive, couldn’t be Namir’s priority.

The stormtroopers began to advance, dashing across the space of the passageway two at a time while the rest of their squad kept Namir and the others pinned. One took a bolt in the stomach, though Namir couldn’t guess who made the kill. He managed to spare a glance to one side and saw that Beak had ended up opposite him, while Roja, Chalis, and Howl were huddled together a short distance to his rear.

He looked back to the corridor. The figure in black raised a hand as a crimson bolt flashed toward him. The bolt hit his hand and bounced off like a tossed pebble, striking the corridor wall and sending flakes of ice crumbling to the floor.

“Force field!” Namir called.

He’d never seen one built into armor before. Yet force fields could be broken.

The stormtroopers halted their advance long enough for Darth Vader to claim the vanguard, taking long, unhurried strides like an Imperial walker disdainful of the stings of rebel snowspeeders. He made no effort to find shelter. He held no weapon Namir could see. In the back of his brain, a voice told Namir that Vader wasn’t a threat—he was a bogeyman, built and dressed to intimidate instead of fight—yet the front of his mind screamed not to let the armored figure close in.

“Concentrate fire!” Beak yelled. His voice was forceful but shaking, as if he was trying to convince himself. “Burn the shield out!”

“Don’t.” Namir heard Chalis’s voice through the sound of rifle fire. “We need to go
now.
”

The stormtroopers were advancing again behind Vader. Turning and retreating would leave Namir and the others exposed; pushing forward would kill them even faster. Beak’s plan was their best chance.

Namir swung his rifle toward Vader and pulled the trigger, holding it down and gripping the weapon’s barrel with his free hand. The rifle tried to leap with every shot and the barrel grew hot against his gloved fingers. Between the dimness of the corridor and the red bursts before his eyes, Namir could barely make out his target.

Beak was shooting, too—Namir could hear the sound of energized particles scorching cold air across the hall, but he didn’t dare look. Vader didn’t hesitate or fall. Instead, something appeared in his hand between the pulses of crimson light and suddenly he
was
holding a weapon, a blade of coherent energy that danced with a twist of his wrist. If Vader had been protected by a force field, it appeared no longer necessary: His energy blade deflected bolts impossibly swiftly, humming and buzzing and crackling as it swept aside a storm of fire.

The temperature monitor on Namir’s rifle blinked as the power pack began to overheat. He squeezed the trigger harder and the weapon flashed a dozen more times before shutting down with a mechanical click. The stream of bolts from Beak cut off an instant later.

Vader had advanced a dozen meters during the attack. Time seemed to stop as Namir saw a single snowflake, carried down the length of the corridor in the breeze, loop around the armored man’s energy blade and vanish in the heat of the weapon.

Then Vader leapt forward and, in a single motion, landed before Beak and bisected the Twilight soldier with a swing of his blade. For a moment, the air smelled like burning fabric and plastic and muscle.

Namir was aiming his rifle again when he heard Roja shout an oath. A chrome cylinder just smaller than Namir’s fist arced through the darkness toward Darth Vader: a fragmentation grenade.

Namir barely had time to hope before Vader lifted his blade and gestured to one side. Toward Namir. Like an obedient droid, the grenade adjusted its trajectory in mid-arc. The events seemed to follow the logic of a nightmare—Vader’s capabilities seemed limited only by their horrific implications.

The grenade struck the wall behind the curtain of pipes, two meters down the passageway from Namir. He heard metal shriek and twist beneath the sound of the blast itself, felt something smash into his ribs. A rain of debris fell onto his shoulders and head. His chin was touching the ice of the floor, though he didn’t remember falling. The back of his neck was pleasantly warm with what he realized had to be blood.

The rest of the world was darkness and noise.

Namir focused on his own body, listened to his heartbeat and began testing his limbs. He didn’t try to stand or move—that was impossibly beyond him—but he could try to flex muscles, confirm whether he could feel his arms and legs and hands and feet at all. He was relatively sure he hadn’t lost any limbs.

Nor had he lost his eyes, but his sight was slow to return. He saw shapes, but they refused to resolve into images he could recognize, as if he were a blind man suddenly cured and learning
depth
and
shape
and
color
for the first time. Some calm, cold part of him reminded Namir that this was normal. He’d been badly hurt before. His vision would return, unless someone killed him first.

Five more heartbeats. No one had killed him yet.

Someone had killed Roja, though. The first sight he recognized was his colleague’s body on the ice a dozen strides away. Between Namir and Roja were six white-clad legs and two black ones. Stormtroopers, he thought. Stormtroopers and Vader.

He tried to scramble upright and felt something heavy shift on top of him. The world seemed to tilt. He wasn’t going anywhere.

“You found me,” a voice said. “Congratulations.”

It was a woman’s voice, in a strange, overly enunciated accent.
Chalis.

“Did you follow my shuttle to Hoth? Or did you pick up my trail later? Not that it matters, really …”

She was standing a short distance in front of Vader, neck tilted back slightly to meet the masked gaze of the Emperor’s hound. Her hands were clasped together behind her head.