Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (4 page)

Up the stairs. Two guards, neither in full armor. Local security. Brand stepped out of the mouth of the stairwell and Namir heard sizzling as the electrified knife found its first target. Namir charged forward, body low, looking for the patrol. Charmer would know to take the second guard behind him.

The sentry on patrol was less than five meters away, and Namir felt his guts clench when they spotted each other. An Imperial stormtrooper. The trooper was still turning to face him—Namir had time to close the distance—but the stun baton would be useless against that white armor.

He should have asked to borrow Brand’s knife when he’d had the chance.

Namir raised his shoulder as he charged; he slammed into the stormtrooper and spun him to face the stairwell. Now at the trooper’s back, Namir clung to the armor’s cool surface and tried to pin the man’s arms, prevent him from getting off even one shot with his blaster.
That
noise would alert the entire mansion, and their attempt at stealth would be compromised.

The stormtrooper reacted swiftly, competently. He threw his head back, grazed Namir’s scalp where Namir’s abandoned helmet should have protected him. If Namir had been standing straight instead of bending his knees, he would have taken the hit between the eyes. After a moment he smelled burning metal and plastoid, and the stormtrooper went limp as Brand twisted her knife under the rim of his helmet.

Namir tried to guide the body in a slide onto the floor, but it clattered more loudly than he’d intended. Charmer stood between the two security guards, both dead on the ground. Brand had already cleaned her knife by the time Namir said, “Keep moving.”

The message warning Twilight about the governor’s captives had included a rough map of the mansion. The hallway the team found itself in now was, at Namir’s estimate, less than fifty meters from the captives’ supposed location. If there was an ambush waiting, they’d be walking into it soon. Namir gave the rifle slung on his back a quick feel, confirmed he hadn’t somehow lost its comforting bulk during the fight. Stealth would only take them so far, and he wanted to be ready.

Charmer took the lead next. Namir didn’t correct him—somehow Charmer always wound his way to the front when an ambush seemed imminent, for reasons Namir couldn’t understand and couldn’t bring himself to ask about. Losing his face hadn’t broken Charmer of the habit. Namir certainly wouldn’t be able to.

Onward, down a cramped passage into a supply pantry that smelled of citrus. Namir assumed the scent was artificial until he saw that there was fruit—real fruit—casually stocked with the rest of the governor’s boundless wealth; he drew one long breath of the aroma and then shook off the distraction. Past the pantry was a kitchen, sleek and metallic and packed with long-limbed droids nestled in their power stations. Charmer paused at the narrow door leading farther into the mansion and shrugged. The map indicated the captives were in the next room.

Namir glanced at Brand as she took a position across the door-frame from Charmer. “If anyone’s been saving a flash-bomb,” Namir said, “now’s the time to speak up.”

No one did.

Fine
, Namir thought.
No smoke cover, no flash. We breach the old-fashioned way.

It didn’t bother him. The old ways were what he knew best.

He clipped the stun rod to his belt, took his rifle in both hands. Charmer and Brand mirrored him. Namir nodded; Charmer hit the door’s keypad and they surged inside together.

What they found was a dining hall—or what
had
been a dining hall, now so strewn with printouts and holodisplays and maps and portable screens that it resembled the inside of a bureaucrat’s skull. Standing amid the makeshift workstations were half a dozen Imperial Army officers—caps doffed, expressions haggard, sweat staining their black uniforms—who were so intent on their work that it took half a second before they looked up at Namir and his squad. Namir took aim at the first man to reach for his sidearm—a sharp-nosed colonel who’d been pacing alongside the dining table—and watched the rest of the group hesitate.

Brand and Charmer swept their rifles in steady arcs while Namir kept his eye on the colonel. “Prisoners,” he said. “Where are they?”

“What prisoners?” the colonel asked.

Namir’s muscles were taut. He kept his voice calm. “The ones you captured,” he said. “Or the ones you
claimed
you captured.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the colonel said. His right hand began to edge toward his belt. Namir cocked his head. The colonel froze again.

“He really doesn’t,” a voice replied, warm and resonant in the dining hall. Namir wanted to turn to look at the speaker, but taking his attention from the colonel would mean death. He kept his rifle aimed, kept his body turned toward his opponent, and trusted that Brand or Charmer would cover the remainder of the room.

The new speaker slowly resolved in his peripheral vision. She was emerging from one of the side entrances to the hall, a human woman whose olive-skinned visage was lined just enough to add gravitas to a once-youthful face. Her black hair was threaded with gray and white, and she wore a dark, formal suit trimmed with red and clasped with silver buttons. In contrast with the suit’s obvious expense was a worn and stained duffel bag she’d slung over one shoulder—the kind a rebel soldier or a vagabond might carry.

“I’m the captive here,” she said with bored disdain. “The fact the colonel doesn’t realize it—”

As the woman spoke, she let the duffel bag slide from her right shoulder and land heavily on the floor. The words kept coming with that same, idle tone as, while the bag fell, she drew a blaster pistol from her left pocket. “—shows how little he pays attention.” The blaster flashed red, and Namir’s target fell to the dining table, a hole burned between his shoulder blades.

Namir wasn’t sure who fired next. The sound of one bolt merged with another, and another after that. He dropped to his knees, swung to acquire a target, saw an officer with a something—maybe a weapon, maybe a comlink—in his hand and shot him. Flecks of stone spilled onto Namir’s hair as someone blasted the wall above his head.

He scrambled forward, took shelter under the table, reached up and over, and fired wildly. The dead colonel’s legs obscured his view of the other side of the room. The bolts slowed. He rolled out from under the table and loosed a volley at the first black-clad form he saw.

After that, only one officer was left. Namir didn’t understand what the Imperial was aiming for, at first—the man had backed himself into a corner and his blaster was low, pointed toward the floor. Then Namir saw the pile at the officer’s feet. Charmer was kneeling on the ground, moaning in pain, both hands clasped to one of his hips.

Namir began to turn his rifle on the officer, but the woman in the suit killed him first with a snarl and a flick of the blaster in her hand. Namir ignored her and hurried to Charmer’s side.

Gently, he peeled back Charmer’s hands and examined his right hip. The material of his pants was scorched through, the fibers melted into blackened skin. The injury wasn’t fatal, but it had to hurt and Charmer wouldn’t be walking out of there.

Namir bared his teeth in what he hoped was a smirk. “Quit moaning,” he said. “It’s already cauterized—you want it to bandage itself, too?”

Charmer laughed hoarsely and croaked an obscenity.

Brand methodically secured each door to the dining hall as Namir stood and looked to the woman who’d claimed to be the “captive.” She was standing at the dining table, pouring a pitcher of water over her hands as if to clean them—not of blood, as Namir thought at first, but of caked-on dirt like clay. Her weapon sat beside the pitcher.

“Who are you?” he asked.

The woman barely glanced toward Namir as she wiped her hands dry on her hips. “My name is Everi Chalis,” she said. “Governor of Haidoral Prime, emissary to the Imperial Ruling Council, and, of course—” Here her lip curled up, as if at a private joke. “—local artist-in-residence.”

She began walking among the bodies, nudging each with the toe of her boot as if to confirm that it was dead. “Declaring myself a
captive
may have been an exaggeration,” she went on, “but I needed your attention.” When she came to the colonel, still sprawled across the table, she leaned in close, hoisted him by his hair, and spat between his unseeing eyes.

“Glad you’re so loyal to your staff,” Namir said, slow and cautious. When Chalis turned around, he had his rifle aimed at her chest.

She didn’t seem bothered. “They weren’t mine,” she said sourly. “
My
staff—my advisers, my bodyguards, my
chef
—were taken away months ago. These men were here to
police
me at the behest of the Emperor.”

Charmer was trying to stammer something; Namir only heard the word
chef.
Brand glanced from a side door to Namir, and then to the governor. “Shoot her,” she said. “Haidoral deserves that much.”

Namir scowled. The pieces weren’t coming together, and he suddenly felt the weight of days without sleep, the thirty hours of fighting. “
Why
did you need our attention?” he asked.

“Thanks to the Rebellion, my days with the Empire are numbered.” The governor smiled, but her tone was acid. “I understand you’re recruiting. I want to join your company in return for asylum.”

Namir took aim with his rifle. He wondered how many more guards were in the mansion and how long he had before they showed. He tried to guess how much Charmer’s injury would slow down the squad’s exit. He didn’t have time to parse the lies at play.

Then came a low electric warbling and an oscillating flash of blue light. The governor’s lips parted, but she said nothing. Her limbs stiffened, and she fell to the floor beside her bag.

Namir swung about. Standing in the last of the unsecured doorways was Gadren, two arms clasping his weapon and aiming the barrel toward where the governor had stood. He was breathing hard, enormous shoulders rising and falling. “We lost contact,” he said. “I thought there was trouble. I am pleased to see I overreacted.”

Brand eyed the fallen governor. “She’s still breathing,” she said. “Why a stun shot?”

Gadren crept to Charmer’s side, pausing to assess the scarred man’s injuries before gently lifting him from the floor and cradling him in two arms. Not until Charmer was secure did Gadren say, “I feared for the captives. A blaster bolt could have killed one.”

“No captives,” Brand said. Gadren nodded—not in comprehension, but in recognition that now was not the time for questions.

Namir stalked to the governor and checked the body. She was breathing steadily. No spasms, no choking, no irregular heartbeat. Stun bolts weren’t reliable, but this one seemed to have done its job. Which meant the governor was still Namir’s problem.

“We’ll pack her up, take her to Howl”—he nodded toward Gadren—“if you’ve got room for one more. No need to be gentle.”

Gadren roughly grabbed the governor by her collar and threw her over a shoulder, using one hand to keep the body in place. Namir wondered if Brand would argue, but she was lifting the governor’s bag as she said, “They say kidnapping an Imperial is bad luck.”

Namir couldn’t tell if she was joking. “
Bad men crave bad luck
,” he replied. It was a saying he’d learned long ago on a more primitive world. “Now can we get off this planet?”

He was ready to be done with the rain. He was ready to sleep. He was ready to forget the piles of dead civilians and the opulent mansion filled with aromatic fruit and busts of murderers. The attack on Haidoral Prime hadn’t been a failure, but it had been laden with troubles.

Now he was taking one of those troubles home.

PLANET SULLUST

Day Eighty-Five of the Mid Rim Retreat

As evening approached in Pinyumb, the obsidian of the cavern roof slowly lost its refracted iridescence. The great towers of the city, rising from the cave floor like stalagmites, dimmed their upper lights until the dome was lost to blackness. The yellow sulfur that clung to the cavern walls seemed to turn sickly pale. The rustling of ash angel wings came and went as the creatures returned from foraging to nest.

With the ash angels came the people of Pinyumb, arriving in lifts and shuttles from the factories of the surface or departing their housing blocks for the night shifts. There were dark and pale humans, gray-skinned Sullustans, and rarer species, too. Pinyumb was cosmopolitan in its way—those willing to toil were welcome, and all others were outcasts.

Thara Nyende didn’t linger in the streets or stroll along the turquoise streams that flowed by Pinyumb’s walkways. She didn’t stop to pick out familiar faces from the commuter crowds. Like everyone else, she had errands to run before curfew. She did, however, take the time to nod firmly in the direction of the stormtroopers posted at every shuttle and intersection. Only twice did the men or women inside the armor nod back.

Thara passed squat, steel-gray buildings that bore no signs but that she knew well—a public bathhouse, a hospice, a café—and then descended a short flight of steps hewn from the cavern rock to an unmarked door. She hoisted the leather bag slung over her shoulder and pushed inside, where her eyes slowly adjusted to the dim cantina lighting. No more than a dozen customers were present—nearly all men and nearly all old, no matter the species. They were broad-shouldered and wrinkled, sturdy and scarred from years of work in the Inyusu Tor mineral processing facility. Most were gathered about a holotable displaying an offworld sporting event, but they spoke to one another loud enough to drown out the soft holocast.