Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (37 page)

“Let’s just make sure that when the fleet comes back, we’ve given the Alliance an edge.”

It was the best he could come up with, and he couldn’t tell if the stern nods and raised fists he got in response were genuine signs of enthusiasm or concessions to a commander’s authority. Maybe it was best not to know.

Maediyu was among the first casualties on Nakadia. Namir stayed by her side in the medical tent as she sweated and bled, thrashed and stank. Bright, blotchy rashes covered her face, and she insisted Namir was her mother, didn’t remember his name when he told her he wasn’t. Eventually he gave up on the truth and stroked her hair as her organs slowly liquefied. He left her alone only twice, both times to empty his stomach and wipe the bile from his lips.

Namir had known Nakadia would be difficult. He hadn’t expected the deaths there to be so horrible.

The planet was an agricultural world of boundless hills and neck-high stalks of stiff, leafy flora. Twilight had come to devastate Nakadia’s plastoid factories, where millions of tonnes of farm crops were processed into armor-grade polymers and synthetic resins. Namir hadn’t realized such conversions were possible—he couldn’t imagine how plants could be transmuted into industrial materials—but no one else seemed surprised and he’d kept his questions to himself. Looking stupid in front of his colleagues wouldn’t inspire confidence.

He’d left Governor Chalis behind on the
Thunderstrike
and joined the squads in the initial wave of assaults. They struck covertly under cover of night, advancing and retreating invisibly through the forests of stalks. It was a good strategy, but it was grueling for troops who’d barely had time to rest since Obumubo. It required men and women with barely treated injuries to march sleepless through difficult terrain.

And then Maediyu and the others had returned from a sortie, staggering and bloody-eyed. The medics had recognized what was happening, but they didn’t confirm Namir’s suspicions until after Maediyu was dead.

“These aren’t pesticides. They’ve got military bioweapons,” Namir told the squad leaders that morning. He kept his voice calm, despite the boiling fury in his guts. “Be careful.”

Sixteen other soldiers fell to airspeeders spraying toxins before a scout team located their point of origin. Gadren, Mzun, and a dozen other alien soldiers accompanied Namir—who’d wrapped himself in as much protective gear as he’d been able to scrounge—to a launch pad and warehouse high in the hills. They burned the warehouse to the ground, watched metal blacken and curl and listened to poison sizzle inside.

Twilight Company won Nakadia, too.

When Namir returned to the
Thunderstrike
, he marched directly to Chalis’s quarters, not stopping to remove his armor or stow his rifle. He knocked on the door and didn’t wait for a reply before keying it open. If it hadn’t been unlocked, he might have blasted the control panel.

“It was the same toxin,” he snarled.

Chalis sat on her bunk, sketching something on a datapad. She made a few strokes across the screen, considered her work, and set the device down before looking up at Namir. “Give me context,” she said. Her voice was calm, but her eyes were hard. “You’re talking about the bioweapons on Nakadia? I heard—”

“The bioweapons,” Namir said, “that came from Coyerti. We destroyed the Distillery. We destroyed the stockpiles. That stuff should be
gone
, and instead my people are dead.”

“Sit down,” Chalis said. Namir made no motion to do so, and she shrugged. “I’m sorry for your losses—”

“You aren’t.”

She shrugged again. “I’m not in
favor
of them. Are you going to listen, Sergeant? Our next planetfall is in three days, so if you’re just going to vent I’ll get back to work.”

“Talk.”

She closed her eyes and pressed her forefinger to one of her temples, as if massaging a headache. She spoke slowly, cautiously, apparently constructing an argument as she went. “You’re a fine commander. You’re a good judge of what your people need and what they can accomplish. But you still think like a man from Crucival.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning you don’t understand the
scale
of the enemy. It took me—it took me longer than it should have, too. I don’t fault you for it.”

Namir’s ire had drained from him. The strap of his rifle felt too heavy around his neck. His bitterness remained, however, and every word Chalis spoke grated.

“We—you and your squad—destroyed enough biotoxin to save millions. Maybe more. But the Empire has been building its arsenal for decades. How much do you think is stored in dusty armories and warehouses across the galaxy?

“If I’d known there was
any
present on Nakadia, I might have chosen a different target. I didn’t. We’ll be better prepared next time.”

“How many more
next times
should we prepare for?”

Chalis rose slowly from the bunk and met Namir’s gaze. He saw her chest heave as she suppressed a cough. “You’ve seen the plan,” she said. “It won’t be long until Kuat.”

“I really hope not,” Namir said. “I think Hober’s tired of conducting funerals.”

Namir found a speech had been added to his datapad an hour before the ceremony in the vehicle bay. It talked about how Twilight Company would honor the squads’ sacrifices; about how Nakadia was a reminder of the depths the Empire would sink to; about how on a world that could have fed trillions, the enemy had chosen to deploy poison.

He didn’t read the speech at the funeral. Instead, after Hober wrapped up the usual proceedings and Namir did nothing, Chalis strode to the fore and recited it herself. The reaction seemed largely positive, which didn’t especially surprise Namir. It was a good speech. The governor was winning the company over one day at a time, and the troops were getting used to her proclamations.

He visited neither the Clubhouse nor Chalis that night. Instead he laid in his bunk—Howl’s bunk—wondering what the captain would have done differently. Whether the captain would have done
anything
differently, or whether Twilight was the same as it had always been—bleeding, fighting, desperate to win but losing just as often—and it was just Namir’s perspective that had changed.

He regretted arguing with Chalis, and it troubled him to think that she was, in fact, the only person on the ship who understood his position. The thought of telling her as much flitted across his brain before he swatted it away. Chalis was not his friend, and whatever warmth there had been between them had frozen over on Hoth.

That thought, too, seemed
off
somehow, but it was close enough to the truth.

Over the following week, Twilight Company fought two more battles—in the mountains of Naator and the miasmic canyons of Xagobah. The company won. Soldiers died. The grueling pace continued, and even Chalis agreed that a day spent resting and resupplying was in order. Chalis and Von Geiz proposed that the
Thunderstrike
would put in overnight at Heap Nine—a junker world beneath the notice of the Empire, where scavengers picked at the garbage piles of a long-dead civilization.

As shore leave went, it wasn’t much. Namir anticipated that much of the company would choose to remain aboard the ship. But he nonetheless found himself in an open-air cantina with a handful of his colleagues, drinking noxious local brew and trying to flirt with a green-skinned woman who seemed unimpressed by his lies about life as a meteor miner.

Gadren found him three drinks after the woman had left. “You made a fine effort,” he said, “but now is the time to acknowledge defeat and regather your dignity.”

Namir tried to straighten in his seat and discovered he was still slouching forward. “I’m betting you didn’t tell that to Brand.”

Gadren cast a glance toward the far end of the cantina. Namir hadn’t seen Brand for a good hour. “That is because she is better at this than you,” Gadren said. “And no one is troubled if she looks the fool.”

Namir barked a laugh and pushed his drink away. “Subtle. Fine. Howl never sat around looking like an idiot—”

“—in public,” Gadren said, his tone patient and conciliatory. He slipped an arm under Namir’s shoulder, pulling him to his feet. “What Howl did in private is another secret he will take with him, but I have no doubt he was as flawed and foolish as the rest of us.”

Namir grunted. Gadren left an arm around him, half supporting Namir as they walked together along the main street of the settlement—a dirt road flanked on both sides by junk shops and scrap traders—and ignored the shouts of hawkers and thieves. “You remember the fighting on Dreivus?” Namir asked. “The way we celebrated after?”

Gadren made a hollow sound of amusement. “I remember. You made an impression on the fire dancers.” He paused, scratched at his wattle with one hand. “Twitch brought up Dreivus the other night. We miss you at the Clubhouse.”

Namir didn’t answer. Gadren kept talking. “There is another campaign that has been recurring in my memories. This one was before your time—before Brand’s, before even Lieutenant Sairgon joined us. Have I spoken of Ferrok Pax?”

Namir thought about nodding, making his excuses, and slipping away. He enjoyed Gadren’s company, but he wasn’t sure how long he could bear it. Still, there was nowhere to go. The drop ships wouldn’t return to the
Thunderstrike
for hours yet. “I don’t think so,” Namir said.

Gadren nodded sagely. “I was new to the company, barely able to hold a blaster without singeing my fingers.” He wiggled meaty digits, as if inspecting them for scars. “We were barely two hundred strong, and we marched for days through the ruins of a proto-species kingdom in an effort to flank our foe.

“Had we taken to the skies, our attempts at stealth would have been futile. But we left behind a trail of soldiers who could no longer walk or whose hunger ravaged their bodies as our supplies dwindled. We lost brave men to dreadful beasts; others vanished, consumed by alien technology we lacked the knowledge to defend against.

“Then came the battle. We won that day, against a laughing menace and her fiendish warriors, and we extracted the rebels we had been sent to save. But only thirty-seven Twilight soldiers survived the clash.”

Rough even by Twilight standards
, Namir thought. “Which would be why I haven’t heard the story before,” he said. “There aren’t many left to tell it. Not exactly uplifting.”

“No,” Gadren said. “It is not. But it is etched in the history of our company—Howl’s company. He led those two hundred to their deaths, and he led those who lived in the aftermath. He rebuilt the company from the ashes of its sacrifice.”

Namir straightened and looked into Gadren’s alien eyes. He smiled, but he heard a challenge in his voice. “And you think, what—I’m leading the company into another massacre?”

“No,” Gadren said again. “I think you fear the sacrifices we have made, and the sacrifices to come. Howl felt the death of his men as keenly as any of us, but he never grew hard or distant. I told you at his funeral that I cannot explain him; yet I know he believed sacrifice was the
strength
of Twilight, and he wielded that strength to good purpose.”

“If I were afraid of sacrifice,” Namir said, “I never would have agreed to Chalis’s plan in the first place.”

“As you like,” Gadren said. “But we follow you, not Chalis. And we will gladly give you what you need to reach the shipyards of Kuat.”

After the respite of Heap Nine came the asteroid mines of the Kuliquo belt. Namir planned the attack personally, selecting the twenty soldiers he trusted most to sabotage machinery in an airless, lightless death trap. At Gadren’s urging, he agreed to send Roach. She returned from the mines with a hunk of gold the size of her fist and presented it to Namir as a gift.

He placed it on the desk in his quarters and later toyed with it in both hands as Chalis briefed him on the situation at Kuat. She’d been recording Imperial comm traffic, decrypting low-priority signals in the evenings, and she seemed pleased with the results of Twilight’s actions. “The One-Oh-Seventh Stormtrooper Legion specializes in putting down slave revolts and worker uprisings. Three full battalions have now been pulled from stable, predictable Kuat and reassigned elsewhere, thanks to us. And”—she added swiftly, raising a finger—“thanks to the reliable idiocy of so many old friends on the Imperial Ruling Council.”

“
Reliable idiocy
,” Namir echoed. “It wasn’t long ago that you were desperately worried about our plan being discovered.”

“By intelligence analysts, absolutely. But by the people I worked with for a decade, and who decided I wasn’t a
threat
after I left? No, I’m really not concerned with what they think now.” There was no lightness in her tone, no attempt at charm. There rarely was when she and Namir were alone.

“So what’s next? If we hit many more targets, we’ll be in no shape to take on the shipyards no matter how weak they are.”

“Two more stops,” Chalis said, “though resistance will be heavy. We’re moving toward the heart of Imperial space—if half the enemy fleet weren’t still chasing Alliance High Command, we couldn’t even get close. As it is, we need to hit fast enough and hard enough that the Empire can’t surround us.”

“Two more,” Namir repeated. He rolled it around in his head as if the number meant something real, as if opposition and battleground and days in combat versus days in motion didn’t matter at all. “I can give you two more.”

“Good,” Chalis said. “Because this opportunity disappears as soon as the Empire regroups. We take Sullust next, then Malastare. When those are done, Kuat falls. Victory is in sight, Sergeant—we just need to reach for it.”

Sullust was a mining and manufacturing center for the Empire, a once-proud and influential member of the Republic that had been reduced to the position of a scrabbling vassal—a source of fuel for the Imperial machine, and little more. Its cities were buried like gemstones below the scorched and blasted surface, housing billions of native Sullustans and generations of immigrants from offworld.

Seated alone in the
Thunderstrike
’s mess hall, Namir listened to talk about the coming battle. Zab, of all people, spoke the Sullustan native tongue. Hober had heard rumors of movements to resist the Empire emerging on the planet over the years, quashed by the Imperials every time they began to blossom.