Jedi Trial (17 page)

“Yessir. How much movement before we kill him?”

Tonith shook his head in desperation. “If he tries to, oh, get up, kill him. Otherwise I don’t care if he scratches his back all day long. Oh, and B’wuf, while
you’re over there, keep your blasted mouth shut. Now move.”

White-faced, B’wuf trudged over to the corner and sat down. The two droids placed themselves directly in front of him. Slowly, B’wuf raised a hand to his head and scratched. Nothing happened. He sighed.

Tonith strode into the center of the control room. “You heard my orders. Carry them out. As of right now I am taking personal control of all operations. Now press on, press on! Never mind casualties. A little more effort and we’ll crack their lines. Victory is almost ours!”

A serving droid rolled up with a pot of tea. Eagerly, Tonith poured. “A spot of tea, anyone?” he asked, holding out the pot to the technicians at their arrays. Everyone pretended to be busy. “Very well.” Tonith shrugged and sipped from his cup. He grinned. His teeth were as purple as ever.

“
Eeeeyaaaaaa!
Get some, get some! Come on, get some!” Erk yelled, firing indiscriminately through the bunker ports. He couldn’t miss. Every shot disintegrated an infantry battle droid. But they kept on coming, rank after rank. Artillery lanced into them, but they just closed ranks and marched forward, firing at the muzzle flashes ahead of them, laying down a withering field of fire as they advanced.

“Erk! We have to go! They’re overrunning us,” Odie screamed, but Erk just shook his head as if she were an annoying insect and kept on firing. He had never seen such a target-rich environment, and it drove him into a frenzy of wild destruction.

She seized him by the shoulder and tried to pull him away from the blaster. He bounced her off with his hip and kept firing.

She could see hundreds of droids surging around their bunker. “They’re flanking us! Get off that blaster and get your belt on. We’ve got to get out of here,” she shouted. Scrabbling noises came from the bunker entrance. Odie snatched up her weapon and ran to the entrance just in time. Two droids came clanking down the short steps; she blasted them both. Erk never noticed. He yelled and cursed and fired and fired and fired.

“Tank droids,” Odie shrieked. “Tank droids!” She could see two of them through the firing ports, lumbering along behind the infantry. The tank droids—“crawlers,” because they moved so slowly over the surface of the ground—were heavily armored, fully automated tracked weapons platforms used to support infantry in combat. Their two synchronized forward-mounted blaster cannons had a 180-degree arc of fire and were used with deadly effect on troop concentrations, vehicles, and bunker complexes. Dorsal anti-aircraft weapons and grenade launchers supplemented the cannons. Ideally they were employed in echelon, like a set of stairs, as they moved forward, the machines farther back protecting the flanks of the ones farther forward.

The ground shook beneath the tank droids as they rolled toward the bunker.

Odie could see the energy bolts of Slayke’s artillery being deflected off the behemoths. “Cease fire,” she yelled, beating her fists on his helmet as hard as she
could—but he remained impervious to her warnings. He fired on the nearest tank droid. Immediately its blaster module swiveled in the direction of the bunker, but before it could unleash a devastating bolt, the ground behind it erupted upward and flipped it forward to land on its back on top of the bunker.

The countermine Slayke had ordered dug beneath the Separatist mine had intersected its target and gone off just in time to break the tank droid charge.

The last thing Odie heard before everything went dark was someone screaming.

Slayke looked at his staff officers. “Time is very short,” he began. “I shouldn’t waste it on speeches. You all know what to do; we planned for a last stand from the beginning.” He paused. “Well, this is it,” he told them, but it was obvious to them all that their situation was desperate. Izable, Eliey, and Kaudine had fallen, and the forward artillery had been withdrawn, along with the survivors of the overrun outposts, to a line centered on Judlie, behind the main command post. This was the plan that had been prepared even before Slayke had landed on Praesitlyn. The enemy had temporarily halted their assault to straighten their line and bring up reinforcements.

“That’s the only break we’re going to get,” Slayke said. “We’ll have time to form a last line of defense at Judlie. Withdraw your remaining forces there immediately.” He grabbed his blaster and turned away from the chart table.

He stopped and turned back to his officers. “We all knew this might happen when we intervened. I’m sorry
it did. I thought Coruscant would come to our aid. Maybe they’re on the way. No matter. We’re here, they aren’t. When help does arrive we’ll have worn these nerfs down to the point where a single Jedi Padawan will be able to kick them to pieces.” He paused. “Surrender is no option for us, not against this army, we all know that.” There was one more thing he had to say to his comrades. “If we’ve got to die, this is as good a place as any. I am proud to have had the privilege of leading you, of sharing your hardships and your friendship, and I am blessed to have people like you accompany me into the next world. Let’s not go easy.”

The dozen officers gathered around the chart table snapped to attention, raised their right fists, and shouted,
“Oooorahhh!”

Erk slowly became aware of an enormous pressure squeezing down on him. He opened his eyes, but couldn’t see anything. Was it was pitch dark, or had he been blinded? Fighting panic, he managed with difficulty to free his arm from the debris pinning it to the bunker floor and brought his wrist in front of his eyes. His chrono glowed comfortingly in the dark and he sighed in relief—he hadn’t lost his sight. It was difficult to breathe with that weight pressing down on him. He moved, and the load shifted and groaned. It was Odie—she slipped off to one side, and the two or three large rock fragments that had been pinning her onto him rolled to the floor.

“Oof.” He could breathe again.

Odie groaned. “Th-thanks for getting us killed,” she gasped at last.

At first Erk didn’t know what she meant. Then: “Oh, yeah. I got a lot of them, didn’t I?” He flexed his arms and legs and sat up. Despite multiple bruises and contusions he was still in fighting order. He felt around in the dark, found Odie, and lifted her by her armpits. “Where are you hurt?”

“Uhn. I have a big, er, feels like a big bruise on my hip. Otherwise—” She ran a hand through her hair and over her head. “—I think I’m all right.” What felt like blood crusted one side of her face. With her fingers she could feel a big gash on that side of her head. “We must’ve lain here for a while,” she said, experimentally feeling the gash. “The blood’s clotted.” She felt around her equipment belt and unhooked the glow rod fastened to it. She pressed the activation stud, and the bunker filled with blessed bright light. That was the good news. The bad news was that the blast had caved in the front of the bunker and loosened a huge slab of rock in the ceiling that had broken into two fragments when it fell, imprisoning the pair inside a space that tapered, like a rocky tent, to about two meters high and three meters wide at the floor. Odie pressed a hand against the rock. “It’s as solid as—rock,” she said. “We’re lucky it didn’t fall right on top of us, or we would have been squashed.” She pressed her hands against one slab and pushed. “It seems solid enough now, though. Must be gravity and resistance are keeping them upright.”

“Well, we’re not squashed. We have air, and we’re secure and comfortable in this rocky bower,” Erk commented wryly.

“Seems we’re spending a lot of time underground together recently.”

“Yeah. That’s the only way I can manage to find some time alone with you. How long will that glow rod last?”

Odie shrugged. “It runs on power cells. I recharged it maybe ten days ago, and I don’t think I’ve used it much since. I should be good for seventy-five or a hundred hours.”

“We’ll be out of here long before then.” He picked up his helmet and tried to put it on. No good: when it had been knocked off his head, debris had smashed it. He shook it experimentally, then turned to Odie. “Try yours.”

“I would, if I could find it.” She looked around the confined space. “It’s probably under that rock somewhere. Fine. We’re without communications with the command post. If it still exists.”

“It does. Count on it. All right, you’ve kept me in suspense long enough. What’s your plan for getting us out of here?”

She sniffed. “Well, we both start whistling as loud as we can, and when we reach the right pitch of sympathetic vibration the rock will just crack open and we’ll emerge into the sunlight, like insects coming out of a chrysalis.”

Erk stared at her for a moment and then broke into laughter. She joined him. They laughed until the dust floating in the air made them cough.

“I’m scared,” Odie confessed after a while. “We’re trapped in here for good, aren’t we?”

Erk didn’t answer immediately. She had expressed
his own fears. “Well, I guess we
are
sealed in here,” he said after a slight pause, as he pressed a hand against the rock slab.

“The Republic never did send anyone, did they?” Odie asked, not really expecting an answer.

“They sure weren’t here when we needed them.”

“We’re going to die in here, aren’t we?”

“Sure looks like it.” With a sigh, he reached down and took her hand.

“We’ll die of thirst before we starve, won’t we? To think of all we came through to end it like this.” She couldn’t keep the bitter taste of despair out of her voice. She turned the glow rod off to preserve its power.

Hours passed in the darkness. They whiled away the time reminiscing about better times, friends and relatives, music they liked, their homes, fine meals they’d eaten. Erk was the more experienced in the world through his travels, and he was a good raconteur: he made Odie laugh with his wild tales. They ate the remainder of the small allotment of rations the sergeant had given them when he’d dropped them at the bunker. At least they each still had a full canteen of water.

They were quiet for a time after they ate and quenched their thirst. Then Erk drew Odie closer to him and kissed her. They held each other tightly, until fear and exhaustion overcame them and they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

When Erk awoke at last his chrono told him it was late at night. He swallowed a mouthful of water from his canteen, then nudged Odie awake. “We missed supper,” he told her. She sat up and ran her hands
through her hair. “Odie, I am not going to die in here! You hear me? We are not going to die in here!”

“How are we going to avoid it?” Odie pressed her hand against the rock. As before, it was still solid to the touch.

“I don’t know, but we will!”

Daylight was fading fast now. With the exception of just a few weapons—no more than a battery—Slayke’s heavy artillery pieces had all been knocked out. His aircraft had all long ago been destroyed; he didn’t even have a shuttle craft to get back up to what was left of his fleet in orbit, not that anybody was thinking of going anywhere. The enemy’s troops had paused after taking over the forward positions in Slayke’s defensive line, ostensibly to consolidate their position and shorten their lines for the final attack and to bring up reinforcements for the final, overwhelming push. It could be only minutes away now. That was the only break Slayke had been given since the assault began. It would give him the time he needed to prepare for a last stand.

Slayke sat with his eyes glued to the optics that gave him a 360-degree surveillance of the terrain in front of Judlie.

“Sir, here are our dispositions.”

A staff officer handed him a display, and he glanced at it quickly. “Tell all commanders to hold their positions at all costs. But tell them I give the ranking soldier in each unit permission to disperse before being overrun. If there’s any chance for our troops to scatter and escape into the desert, they can try it. Make that
clear.” The officer saluted and turned to the communications console.

Slayke thought they’d only die out in the desert, but even so, he consoled himself, they might live a while longer.

A long, rolling artillery barrage began to envelop their positions, shaking the ground around them.

“When that stops, they’ll be coming,” Slayke said to his command staff. “When they overrun us, anyone who wants to try can attempt a breakout. No way am I going to stay here and fry.”

The optics were no use now; the ground between the two armies was being churned and battered into dust, making it impossible to see anything. He turned to his staff. Their cheeks and eyes were hollow and their faces drained of blood, but each still attended to duty, some talking to the infantry and artillery units, others checking weapons, equipment, water, and rations. Dust from near hits hung suspended in the close, humid air around them; an enormous blast shook the bunker and some officer shouted, “Missed again!” and several of them laughed. Someone coughed. The officers muttered among themselves, going through the motions of leading an army that virtually no longer existed.

An enormous ripping, tearing roar engulfed them, distant and muted at first, but rising quickly to a deafening crescendo so profound it made their guts vibrate. It was clearly coming from somewhere behind them. Slayke pounded a fist into his forehead. Nobody had any doubt what it meant: it was their death knell.

“He’s been reinforced!” Slayke said. “Grab your weapons and equipment.”

“Lay on!” an officer shouted as the staff scrambled for the bunker exit. “At least we’ll die fighting!”

Slayke raised a blaster rifle over his head. “Follow me!” he ordered.

A
nakin paced the bridge of the
Neelian
, clenching and unclenching his fists as he observed the battle cruisers deploy into attack formation. “I should be out there with them,” he muttered.

“No, you belong here,” Grudo answered. “That’s the plan; everyone agreed to it—
you
agreed. Commanders, too, must follow orders. Once the battle plan is approved, everyone must follow his or her orders. That way, everything works according to the plan. Please, sit. You’re making the crew nervous.”