Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (5 page)

“Uncle!” Thara called in the direction of the bar. “I’m here to spoil you.”

The man who looked up from the array of nozzles behind the bar and started Thara’s way looked old enough to be her grandfather rather than her uncle, and if his hair had ever matched her bright-blond locks, the color had faded long ago. He clapped her on the shoulders as other heads turned and aged lips smiled at the young woman.

The voices around the holotable lowered.

“The only person getting
spoiled
is you,” Thara’s uncle said before accepting the leather bag from her hands. “Working half as long as the rest of us, and paid twice as much! But let’s see what you’ve got anyway.”

He placed the bag on an empty table and began to rummage through its contents. First out was a tube of ocher gel. Thara’s uncle turned it in his hands, then shouted over his shoulder, “Myan! Got another tube of burn salve. Boys in dorm four still hurting?”

Thara remembered the accident with the dorm four workers. They’d been scalded badly when the steam pipes in the magma extractors had broken. Some of the workers still hadn’t returned to duty. Soon they’d be evicted from their residence.

Myan, a diminutive Sullustan, hobbled over to the table. He spoke in his native tongue—too quickly for Thara to fully understand, but the tone sounded grateful—and carried the salve away.

“Good start,” Thara’s uncle said. Thara smiled at him wryly and nearly caught him smiling back. One by one he pulled Thara’s donations from the bag—extra food credits, flu tablets, mask filters for the men working in the deepest ore processors—and, calling his customers to the table, meted out gift after gift. Some of the recipients clasped Thara’s hands, praised her and her family. Others refused to look at her.

As her uncle continued sorting through the bag, she drifted away and studied the nozzles on the wall behind the bar. He uncle had been repairing them, she saw now—replacing a fluid valve. He’d left his tools on the floor. She picked them up and started working, the way she remembered doing as a teenager.

“My son gave me a flyer the other day. Says he’s thinking about joining.”

Thara was close enough to the holotable now that she could hear the older workers’ hushed voices. She didn’t want to hear. She hadn’t intended to eavesdrop. But she wasn’t going to leave, either.

“After the accident with the magma release, he said maybe the Cobalt Front was right. Maybe we do need to stand up for ourselves.”

“The Cobalt Laborers’ Reformation Front,” a second voice sneered, “is a band of terrorists. They probably caused the accident in the first place.”

There was murmuring, reluctant agreement. “Protests are one thing. Riots are another.”

Thara screwed the new valve into place. Cobalt Front members
were
terrorists according to Imperial decree. It was a pity; she thought they might have done some good if they’d stuck to talking about safety procedures and factory conditions.

“Is it our fault?” the first voice asked. “I know I protected mine. I didn’t tell my son what we saw in the Clone Wars.”

The third voice laughed. “Of course you didn’t. Your kids would’ve never slept.”

The first man continued. “But they would’ve
known.
They’d see why even a hard peace is better than—better than the alternative.”

“Just pray the Rebel Alliance never notices Sullust. You think things are rough now …”

Thara tested the attached nozzle, caught a trickle of something green and sweet smelling in her palm.

“
No
,” a new voice said in slow, ragged Sullustan, deliberately loud. Thara recognized the rasp of toxin-afflicted lungs; the condition was becoming increasingly common among the workers.

Someone tried to shush the new speaker as Thara rose from behind the bar. The toxin-afflicted man—a withered Sullustan with drooping ears and jowls—kept going. “This is not
peace.
We are
all
slaves, every one of us, and the Emperor forges stronger chains every year.”

Thara’s uncle was hurrying to the holotable. He squeezed the withered man’s arm as the Sullustan propped himself against the tabletop and continued to speak. “I don’t care who hears me,” the withered man snapped. “What Nunb said was true: We traded our lives to buy a thousand years of darkness. The Empire runs on the blood of our grandchildren!”

Thara’s uncle forced the man back into his seat. Thara looked around the table. The workers were all staring at her, silent.

“I’ll be back next week,” she said quietly. “If you need something, tell my uncle. I’ll try to help.”

No one spoke as she left the cantina.

She walked briskly down the street, as if she could pound her frustrations into the stone, sweat them out through the soles of her feet. She tried to put what she’d heard out of her mind, concentrate on the evening ahead. She was nearly late for her shift as it was; she couldn’t afford to go on duty distracted.

She marched to the door of a sleek industrial building, looked into the mechanical eye of the scanner so that it could identify her. Past two more checkpoints and on to her locker, where she finally began to relax.

Donning her uniform always calmed her. She’d learned to dress and attach its components in less than a minute, but she preferred to go slowly, first stripping down and removing, one by one, the garments of Thara Nyende of Sullust and stowing them in the locker. Next, she pulled on her new skin—a tough black body glove that sealed itself as she climbed in, too hot to be comfortable until the smart material adjusted to her body heat and the temperature of the room.

She slid her feet into her white synth-leather boots and then—always left first, then right—snapped her plastoid greaves onto her legs. The soft click and hum of mechanisms assured her she’d attached the pieces correctly, and their perfect sculpt felt far more natural than anything she could buy as a civilian. Belt and crotch plate came next, then the torso piece—locked into the belt, finally making her feel clothed.

Shoulders, arms, and gloves came after the torso. Most days, she’d already forgotten her ordinary troubles by this point. Sometimes she noticed her breathing had steadied, her muscle tension drained into the support of the bodysuit and plastoid. She could have attached the arm sections faster with the help of a droid or a colleague, but this was
her
ritual. She liked doing it alone.

Finally, the helmet.

She took it from its place in the locker and lowered it onto her head. For an instant, she was in total darkness. Then it clicked into place, the lenses polarized, and the heads-up display blinked to life. Targeting diagnostics cycled over her view of the locker room, power levels and environmental readings blinking at the corners of her eyesight.

Like that, Thara Nyende faded into the background. A stronger woman, a better woman, stepped into place to do her duty.

She was SP-475 of the Imperial Ninety-Seventh Stormtrooper Legion.

KONTAHR SECTOR

Day Eighty-Five of the Mid Rim Retreat

“You have no idea how the Empire really works.”

The Rebel Alliance military transport
Thunderstrike
was not designed for comfort. Its corridors were lined with pipes and panels, and its doors were bulky and cumbersome, plated with heavy durasteel. Over the years, Twilight Company had stripped down and reconfigured the aging Corellian corvette, partitioning and repartitioning the ship’s few open spaces until barely a square meter was left unused.

Thus, when Howl ordered the prisoner brought to his storage-unit-turned-office for questioning, the meeting was an intimate one. On one side of Howl’s flimsy folding desk sat the captain himself, flanked by Lieutenant Sairgon and Chief Medic Von Geiz; while Sairgon stood stiff as ever, like an ancient and gnarled tree, Von Geiz had propped himself atop an offline holoprojector. Facing Howl and leaning back in her chair with exaggerated ease was Governor Chalis, smiling like an empress. Behind Chalis stood Namir, who watched the governor’s hands as if she might be about to reach across the desk and strangle the captain.

“I’m not saying that to be insulting,” Chalis went on. “But if you think Haidoral Prime was anything more than a backwater, you’re operating under dearly mistaken assumptions. My appointment there was a
punishment
, not an elevation.”

She spoke in a low voice, full of bored confidence. In the safety of the ship, her Coruscanti accent—the accent of the Imperial elite, of propaganda broadcasts and rebel satire—seemed overly enunciated to Namir’s ears.

“And why did you deserve punishment?” the captain asked.

Chalis cocked her head as if surprised by the question. “When your Rebellion started encroaching on the Mid Rim, the Emperor set his dog loose. You heard about the deaths of Moff Coovern and Minister Khemt?”

“Tragic accidents, as I recall,” Howl said.

“According to my sources, both died at the hand of Darth Vader. Emperor Palpatine decided that incompetence at the highest ranks was to blame for the destruction of his Death Star, and from there began a culling.

“There were other deaths, less public,” she added with a shrug. “I was spared out of acknowledgment for my past contributions, and because I had enough sense to limit my involvement with the battle station. Exile to Haidoral Prime was the best I could hope for under the circumstances.”

Von Geiz peered at Chalis as if inspecting the skin of her forehead. “And that’s when you chose to defect?” he asked.

Namir suspected Von Geiz was present to put a kind face on the company. He’d begun the meeting by checking Chalis over, asking about aftereffects of the stun bolt, while Howl had waited patiently and Lieutenant Sairgon had scowled. Von Geiz was a smart man, and he knew the role he’d been asked to play—kind, fatherly, sympathetic. But Chalis barely looked at anyone but the captain.

“Don’t be absurd,” Chalis said. “Even on Haidoral, I had time to read, time to sculpt … I had money for occasional luxuries.” She turned in her chair and reached down to where Namir had placed her duffel bag. He’d already inspected it for weapons, though he’d only delivered it to the office under protest.

Unlike Von Geiz, Namir wasn’t in the room to ask questions or manipulate the governor. Howl hadn’t said as much, of course, but Namir knew he was present as muscle. Chalis’s capture was being kept a secret; as first sergeant, Namir was a high-ranking grunt, authorized to witness senior staff discussions and duty-bound not to do a thing about them.

“And speaking of luxuries,” Chalis said, “you’ve been more than hospitable and I’ve been ungracious.” From the bag, she retrieved a glass bottle filled with a translucent violet liquid adrift with gossamer white threads. She turned it in her hands, set it on the desk with a heavy
thunk
, then withdrew a handful of yellow fruit, which she placed beside the bottle. “A gift from Haidoral to my hosts: local brandy and native figs. Something to celebrate our new relationship.”

The lieutenant looked questioningly at Howl. Howl lifted one of the fruits and, with a smile, began peeling it as Chalis uncapped the bottle. “Normally when a recruit smuggles alcohol aboard, she knows better than to share it with the senior staff,” Howl said, though his tone was light.

“Then you should vet them for better manners,” Chalis replied. “Cups?” None were forthcoming, and with a shrug she took a sip directly from the bottle. When she removed the brandy from her lips and slid it across the table to Howl, she tilted her head to look up at Namir. “Perfectly safe,” she said.

The thought of poison had crossed Namir’s mind. He cursed himself for being transparent enough to show it, and Chalis for seeing through him.

The others passed the brandy bottle as Chalis started on the fruit, continuing to speak between bites. “So as I said, an exile to Haidoral was far from the worst fate. Then you came to my planet, and I realized I was doomed.”

“Your mansion wasn’t a target,” the lieutenant said.

Chalis laughed bitterly. “Being shot by
rebels
wasn’t my worry. Who do you think will be blamed for the failure of Haidoral’s defenses? Who will be held responsible for the raid on her city, the theft of Imperial supplies? I could argue I worked
miracles
, holding your men off with a legion of stormtroopers spread across three continents; I could argue Haidoral was an obvious target
months
before I even arrived, and that I did all I could to shore up its defenses.

“But Darth Vader,” Chalis continued, her patter slowing, her eyes intent on Howl again after dancing about the room, “doesn’t take to rational,
reasoned
arguments. My reputation was already blemished. The moment your ship arrived in orbit, my life in the Empire ended.”

“Too bad you didn’t ask to defect
then
,” the lieutenant said. “Would’ve saved us some trouble.”

Namir choked back a laugh. Howl bit into his fruit and said nothing.

“Some men delude themselves all their lives,” Chalis said. “I feel no shame in taking twenty-four hours to reconcile with reality. What’s past is past—it’s time we discussed our future together.”