Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (44 page)

Disappointing or not, it was still a rescue. Namir pursued the creature as it dashed into an alleyway, scooped a duffel bag up from the ground, and began a dizzying series of turns. Hands still cuffed behind his back and his vision swimming, Namir had difficulty keeping up and at last—knowing it might be his death, but unable to control his body—slumped against a wall and began to retch.

The vigor that had come with the need to escape seemed to leave him along with his bile. He was in no shape to fight. He was certainly in no shape to battle his way out of Pinyumb, and after an hour his comrades were either out of the city, safely hidden, or dead. He barely kept himself upright, and was surprised when he felt a soft hand steadying him.

The Sullustan guided him back to a standing position and spoke in a language Namir couldn’t understand.

Namir didn’t dare shake his head for fear of vertigo. “There were others,” he said. “Others who came down here. Are they safe? Do you know where they are?”

The Sullustan replied swiftly and simply, in no more than a few alien words. It couldn’t have been anything but a
no
, but the creature watched Namir and seemed to see the incomprehension in his face. Carefully, with an exaggeration that suggested the gesture was unnatural to it, it shrugged its shoulders.

It—
he
, Namir supposed—didn’t know anything about the others. Maybe the Sullustan hadn’t even known they’d come, had only stumbled across Namir.

Maybe that was a good sign, as these things went.

“Could they be hiding? Maybe made it to another safe house?”

The Sullustan hesitated, as if he wanted to speak and offer some hope or explanation to Namir. Instead he shook his head in that same, exaggerated manner. Then, with one hand, he gestured broadly in the direction of the lifts out of the cavern city. Namir couldn’t tell if it was an explanation or an indication of hope.

“I should look for them,” Namir said.

The Sullustan took a step back and lowered his head. Refusal.

I could go alone
, Namir thought. Hobble his way through a city he didn’t know, searching for comrades who weren’t likely to be in reach in the first place. And if he found them—if against all odds he didn’t collapse on the way or get shot by stormtroopers less merciful than the first squad he’d encountered; if his friends had moved so slowly and hidden so poorly that a concussed and hunted soldier could find them—what
good
could he do? In his condition, he’d be more of a burden than an asset. He’d slow down any attempt at flight, and his brain was too much of a wasteland to let him formulate a plan.

He had no chance at all of making it to Twilight Company.

“Okay,” he said. “So where are we going?”

The Sullustan led him away. Namir thought of stopping him, asking the alien to at least remove his cuffs, but the only available tool for the task was the Sullustan’s blaster and a shot would be heard from blocks away. So instead they moved together, the Sullustan lending what support he could, through the shadows of towers and among stalagmites at the cavern’s edge. During the course of their journey, the towers’ lights turned bright, making Pinyumb’s evening seem like day. For the sake of the stormtroopers’ search, Namir assumed.

Now and then they heard shouts and screams, pleas to Imperial security agents as doors were forced open and citizens marched away. The roundups had begun. The Sullustan hesitated every time, and every time continued on.

They descended a short flight of steps hewn from the cavern rock and through the entrance of an unmarked building. Inside was a cantina, empty of customers and its chairs stacked atop tables, barely lit by a handful of emergency lights. The Sullustan drew Namir into a small kitchen and then down a second flight of stairs concealed behind a cooler.

In the basement of the cantina awaited a terrified crowd. They were mostly humans and Sullustans, crammed so tightly together that many stood instead of sitting. The youngest was a small child, but most were old: withered figures who had learned to face fear with dignity, whose uncertainty showed in their eyes and nowhere else. Namir noticed the uniforms of the processing facility workers on a handful.

When they recognized Namir’s companion, the crowd’s tension eased only slightly. The Sullustan descended the steps and spoke softly, soothingly, as he reached into his duffel bag and passed out foil-wrapped rations and palm-sized envelopes of medicinal bacta. The old men replied to Namir’s companion in his native language, their voices transparently grateful.

When Namir’s companion drew a blaster from his bag, however, and held it out in both hands, the crowd seemed to shrink back. He was insisting on something, arguing in the face of terse, bitter replies.

Namir edged around the crowd to the nearest other human, a green-eyed woman with callused hands. “What are they saying?” he asked.

The woman looked at him askance. Maybe she thought Namir should have known the language. Or maybe it was his cuffs. Finally she said, “If the stormtroopers come, carrying weapons will only make things worse.”

“They’re already going door-to-door,” Namir said. “They’re rounding up people out there. I’m not sure how much worse it can get.”

It wasn’t advice. Namir had no stake in these people’s choices. Maybe that was why the woman studied him, nodded, pushed forward, and accepted a blaster.

Namir wanted to ask questions about his rescuer and about the city, but his companion drew him back toward the stairs long before the duffel bag was empty. The Sullustan took a moment to shoot through Namir’s cuffs before leading the way out of the cantina. The bracelets remained on Namir’s wrists but the stun mechanism seemed disabled. Namir’s arms and shoulders ached as they walked.

Their second stop of the evening was the dormitory of a housing block, where a similar crowd sheltered. Once again, Namir’s rescuer meted out emergency goods that were accepted with a mix of gratitude and reluctance. This time, however, they were interrupted when the door opened to admit another half a dozen civilians: men and women whose faces were swollen with fresh, purple bruises, who limped and sucked breath between their teeth. One man’s upper arm was burned through; Namir recognized the effects of a blaster bolt immediately.

“We were in the Swift Market—we ran out of food,” one of them said. “When the stormtroopers came, they said we should’ve been at home …”

Namir’s rescuer glanced between the wounded and the door, as if torn between the refugees before him and other huddled crowds he’d intended to visit. Then he began searching his bag for bandages, bacta, and salves. He looked to Namir and over to the man with the burnt arm, waiting expectantly.

Namir wasn’t a medic, but he knew what needed to be done.

Namir spent the next hour applying bandages and disinfectant to the wounded, smearing bacta over scorched flesh and checking for broken bones. He told each of his patients—even the ones who couldn’t speak his language seemed to understand—that his ministrations were a stopgap at best. No one seemed troubled. “You think we have a lot of alternatives?” the man with the burnt arm asked. “You think the Imperial clinic will fix me up?”

“Point taken,” Namir said.

After Namir and his companion had tended the worst of the injuries, they moved on to their third stop of the night. In a public bathhouse where wretched and moaning victims lay along the edges of a bright-blue pool, they went to work again. For the first time, Namir felt unwelcome; he listened and wrapped a boy’s bleeding leg and heard a voice asking why the
rebels
were allowed to help. The rebels who had caused the Empire to work Sullustans like slaves. The rebels who were responsible for all the pain in Pinyumb.

He kept his eyes on his patient until he heard footsteps approach him from behind. He turned and stood, ready for a fight, and looked into the eyes of a broad-shouldered, leathery-faced man who scowled angrily. “You heard me,” the man said. “You shouldn’t be here. Not the rebels, not the Cobalt Front, none of it.”

“We didn’t do this,” Namir said.

“You are to blame,” the man said.

Namir recognized the man’s stance. He looked for it in every recruit who asked to join Twilight, rarely saw it in anyone under forty years of age. The man had the carriage of a trained soldier.

Namir braced himself for a punch that didn’t come. The leathery-faced man turned away. Namir wanted to say:
This isn’t the Clone Wars. These people are fighting for the likes of
you.

He even believed it, in a way. This wasn’t his father’s war. It wasn’t the war of Crucival. He’d seen dark and terrible things the last time he’d been concussed underground, in a cave watching his friends die. The Empire really
was
a different sort of enemy.

But not so different that he’d changed the way he fought.

He resumed his work, accepting that he was responsible in some way for the wounds he bound—responsible for the plan that had driven the Empire to desperation, reassigning overseers and stormtroopers from the shipyards of Kuat to worlds like Sullust. He felt no guilt, but neither could he deny the accusations of the Sullustans.

Namir and his companion continued their rounds over the course of the night. Whenever they walked the street, they kept to the shadows; they watched the march of stormtroopers and heard distant blaster shots as the Empire’s roundups and searches went on. At each site they reached, they saw the number of wounded grow and the desperation of the people increase. They did what they could and moved on.

Namir’s fatigue was profound. His nausea and vertigo came and went. At certain moments, he believed he was still rescuing his comrades from the wreckage of the
Thunderstrike.
At others—in the city, when he sucked in the pure alien air of the cavern and let the gratitude and terror and resentment of the civilians wash over him—older memories flickered to life in his brain. Memories of Crucival and memories of Howl.

He should have been guarding his companion, watching for troops or cam droids. Instead he was merely intent on staying upright. He barely noticed when the Sullustan led him inside a mining hangar built into the cavern wall, or wove between vehicles toward a back office. There, however, he forced himself alert.

He’d been expecting another civilian shelter. Instead, only three people sat in the office—all human, or close enough to pass—each with a blaster in his or her lap. They jumped to their feet as Namir and the Sullustan entered, but the tension swiftly vanished.

“Took you long enough,” a brown-haired woman said before embracing the Sullustan and clapping him on the back. “Who’s the guest?”

A rapid-fire exchange ensued, half in the Sullustan’s language and half in Basic. Namir’s companion appeared to be explaining the night’s events. The woman finally turned to Namir and asked, “You’re with the rebels up the mountain? The ones who took the processing facility?”

“We planned to destroy it and evac,” Namir said. “We hit a snag. Who are you?”

“I’m Corjentain. This is Nien Nunb,” she said, gesturing toward the Sullustan. “He’s in charge of the cell. Until you came along, we were it for the Rebellion here.”

Namir looked among the four. They looked weary but unhurt, welcoming but cynical. They were dressed as civilians, yet even their disguises were ragged and dirty. They smelled as if they hadn’t washed in days.

“I thought there was a resistance movement,” he said.

A young man with skin the color of chalk answered. “The Cobalt Front hasn’t ever been much of a resistance,” he said. “Their heart’s in the right place, but …”

“Sit down,” Corjentain said. “You look like garbage. We’ll swap stories.”

So Namir sat, and as he drank a foul greenish liquid the young man assured him would help his head, Corjentain explained the rebel cell’s activities with occasional, incomprehensible additions from Nien Nunb. The cell had come to Sullust in the hope of formally allying the Cobalt Front—a workers’ association that had become increasingly anti-Imperial—with the Rebel Alliance. Instead, they’d found the most militant members of the Cobalt Front already imprisoned and the remainder reluctant to take up arms.

“I’m
from
Sullust,” Corjentain said. “So is Nien. No one likes the Empire here, but you can’t force frightened people to revolt. So we figured we’d help Pinyumb how we could—smuggle in supplies the locals can’t afford, medicine the Empire won’t allow. If that won people over, got them thinking the Rebellion was worth something, great. If not, we were still doing good. The Empire wanted us dead, but we could handle that.”

Namir smiled bitterly. “Then the Empire decided to make up for production losses elsewhere. It increased the workload and security on Sullust, and you were in over your heads.”

Corjentain didn’t seem to register his tone. “The Empire was going to work people to death sooner or later anyway. That wasn’t the big problem. Dropping your ship here, though … that’ll have consequences.”

“The second we find a way offworld,” Namir said, “we’ll be out of your way.”

Corjentain swore softly and shook her head. “Right. Bit too late. The crackdown’s happening, and I’ll bet good credits that after they arrest anyone who’s ever said an unkind word about the Emperor, they’ll implement mass reprisals. Permanent curfews, workers separated from their families … anything it takes to quell the
possibility
of a future uprising.”

It wasn’t anything that surprised Namir. He’d heard enough stories at night in the Clubhouse. Imperial crackdowns were why recruits joined Twilight Company.

Instead of offering condolences, he told the rebels Twilight’s story. He kept the company’s ultimate goal oblique, made no mention of Chalis, but talked about Twilight’s campaign along the Rimma hyperlane and its intentions on Sullust. “My squad came down to the city looking for support,” he finished. “Doesn’t look like you’re in any shape to give it.”

“Not really,” Corjentain agreed. Nien Nunb spoke rapidly, and the two conferred before the woman continued. “We can try to get you back to the facility at daybreak, though. Least we can do.”