501st: An Imperial Commando Novel

by Karen Traviss

  Darman shoved Rede ahead of him as they followed Niner down the service area corridor, a dimly lit canyon of polished durasteel walls strung with cables, ducting, and pipes. Indicator lights and the glow of control panels provided the only illumination. As Darman jogged along, he could see the alarm system repeater panels flashing: the sensitive atmosphere monitors had detected particulates and ion emissions above a certain level—thanks to intervention by the station security team—and the automated system had shut down all traffic movements. It was routine, like setting off a domestic fire alarm by toasting breadmeal sticks a bit too long.

  “Aren’t the civvies going to rush into another sector and take Yelgo along with them?” Rede asked.

  “All we need do is corner him so he doesn’t end up in the service ducts,” Niner said. “Don’t worry. Keep an eye on him in your HUD feed. You can run and watch that at the same time, can’t you?”

  “I’m working on it,” Rede said.

  It took them minutes to run through the service area of the station and emerge into section A-15. The schematics said it was a passage, but Darman found himself in a wide, brightly lit plaza flanked by stores, tax-exempt boutiques, and eateries. Coth Fuuras was a popular stopover for passenger vessels as well as freighters. He could tell which beings were regular visitors and which weren’t by the level of anxiety as the public-address system told them to evacuate the section in an orderly manner. The pilots and stevedores in scruffy coveralls ambled along, munching snacks and slurping caf, and the tourists—regardless of species—all seemed to be trotting, not wanting to look panicked.

  A fire on a space station was as bad as things got. He couldn’t blame them for being worried. Nobody seemed to take any notice of three black-armored commandos. Maybe the civvies just saw them as more folks in uniform, part of the fire-control team. It was hard to tell.

  “Okay, find him,” Niner said. “Fan out.”

  Darman kept one eye on the HUD feed from the security cam, trying to work out where he was in relation to the shop fronts that Yelgo was passing. The Jedi—maybe twenty, human, with a distinctive break in his nose and a scattering of freckles—was walking at a brisk pace like everyone else, not looking over his shoulder. He didn’t need to, after all. He could sense his surroundings.

  “Isn’t his sense of danger going to kick in?” Rede said, keeping up with Darman.

  “Sometimes they can’t pick out one source of danger from another—like on a battlefield.”

  “But there’s no real danger here.”

  “Yeah, but the civvies don’t know that, and I bet they’re generating enough fear or whatever it is he picks up on to put him off his game.”

  Darman could see individuals pausing to try emergency doors and finding them locked. He was coming up to a crossroads in the station, where one passage crossed another like a street. The curved shape of the space station—a ring rotating around a central gravity core, like a giant fiber reel—created a weird horizon. It made Darman feel as if he were constantly running down a hill, and he could see farther than he would have been able to on the flat. In his HUD image, he saw Yelgo pause at one of the departure areas but turn away when he found it shuttered.

  He was a hundred meters from him, maybe less. Niner picked it up before Darman could.

  “Tapcaf,” he said. “Turn right at the intersection, follow the overhead sign for Departures Green Six, and look for the Cheery Traveler franchise. That’s where he is.”

  The crowd was walking briskly toward the A-5 bulkhead, which would seal behind them while the fire was contained—or so they thought. It wasn’t going to open. Shops were pulling down their shutters, staff filing out with irritated expressions that said they did this way too often and would have to work late to make up for lost time. Darman slowed to a fast walk so that he didn’t catch Yelgo’s eye.

  The evacuating crowd were all facing the same way now. They knew where they were going. Darman, lost in the sea of bodies, realized he had lost Yelgo. But he had to be close.

  “Come on,” Niner said. “Where’s he gone?”

  “He knows.” Rede appeared on Darman’s far left, moving ahead and looking back into the approaching stream of civilians. “He knows we’re here.”

  “Come on … c’mon, c’mon … ” Yelgo couldn’t get off the station, but he could cause a lot of strife while they hunted him. If only he’d turn around. If only …

  It was worth a try. Darman decided to give him a tap on the shoulder via the Force. If the Jedi’s senses were on alert, then he should have been able to feel hostility this close—targeted hostility. Darman visualized Yelgo’s face from the mug shots he’d memorized and the security cam images he’d seen, and concentrated on hate.

  It wasn’t hard.

  He thought of Etain, and what she’d been robbed of—a future, a normal life—and imagined Yelgo being responsible for that. He thought of Geonosis, where the rest of his first squad and half the commandos deployed had been killed in the first few hours of fighting, because Jedi had never had to fight an infantry war before, and squandered lives through sheer ignorance and panic.

  I don’t have to be reasonable. Or realistic. I just have to radiate hatred. Make it personal. Ugly, savage, and personal.

  It wouldn’t get any more personal than what was about to happen to Borik Yelgo.

  You shabuir …

  Darman didn’t even know him. It didn’t matter.

  Die, Jedi. Whoever you are.

  And a head turned. Just for a moment, someone ahead in the crowd looked back over his shoulder, and a moment was all Darman needed. The nose, the freckles; him, it was him—and if Darman hadn’t been wearing a helmet, they would have made eye contact for a split second.

  “Got him!” Darman charged through the crowd. It was better to knock folks aside and give them a fright and maybe a bruise than let them get in the way of blasters. “Rede, you got him?”

  “I see him.”

  “Got him,” Niner said. Suddenly his voice boomed from his helmet’s loudspeaker. “Armed Imperial forces! Get down! Everybody down!”

  Predictably, almost everyone froze and dropped. Most folks here had just lived through a shooting war. They knew what down meant. It gave the commandos a second or two as Yelgo bolted and everyone else dithered, not knowing where to go next. In those few moments, the crowd—like a flock of birds, like a shoal of shanjifins—reacted as one animal, saw the moving threat, and then moved away as if they’d taken an instant vote on the best place not to be when the shooting started.

  Darman, Niner, and Rede ran into the gap. Most of the civvies were behind them: Yelgo was in front. And the only exit he could reach was now being cut off by the safety bulkhead, dropping from the deckhead like a guillotine. In the holovids, the hero always managed to skid under the thing in the nick of time and escape, but that was just fiction, and this was reality. The Jedi didn’t make it. He came up a couple of meters short and turned to face the commandos, eyes scanning for a way out.

  Jedi were pretty good. But they weren’t that good.

  “Ever seen an akk herding nerfs?” Niner said. “Well, it’s just like this.”

  The squad had separated Yelgo from the flock, akk-style. His chances of getting off the station were slim. For most beings it would have been zero, but this was a Jedi, and Darman took nothing for granted.

  Niner aimed his Deece at Yelgo. “I don’t suppose you’re going to surrender.”

  “Would you?” Yelgo asked, reaching for his lightsaber.

  He was a Knight, low enough on the league table to be a dead-or-alive job. Imperial Intel wanted Jedi they could turn, their word for an agent they could threaten, torture, brainwash, or—just sometimes—persuade by rational argument to come over to their side.

  “Probably not,” Darman said. “So, the easy way or the hard way, Jedi?”

  It was too much to hope that Yelgo would fall on his lightsaber or accept a quick end with a round from a Deece. Yelgo looked at Rede fo
r a moment as if he’d identified him as the squad’s weak link. “You could walk away from this, you know.”

  “Not this time,” Darman said, and opened fire.

  Yelgo batted away the stream of bolts with his lightsaber and spun to deflect Niner’s shot. Then he took a run at the side wall. As soon as his boot hit it, he flipped himself over in a back somersault, dodging Rede as he moved in for a point-blank shot, and landed ten meters away as only a Force-user could. Rede spun around, firing. And that was probably what Yelgo wanted: to make them empty their magazines. The commandos had twenty seconds continuous fire and then they had to reload, so if Yelgo timed it right, he could grab the seconds he needed to leap over them, Force-rip a door open, and vanish into the bowels of the station.

  But Rede paused and just held his aim.

  Darman thought it was a stoppage, that the Deece had frozen on him. But Rede didn’t look troubled. He was definitely just aiming. Darman and Niner took up the slack, too stunned to yell at him for a moment.

  He’s too green. He’s going to get killed. Idiot. Stupid kid.

  “Rede!” Niner barked. “Move!”

  Rede darted behind Yelgo. And just as Niner ran out of ammo, Rede opened fire. The kid wasn’t so dumb after all. Yelgo was still forced to fend off two streams of fire. If he’d been an ordinary being, someone would have got a shot past him sooner or later and brought him down. But he was a Jedi. He could spin and bat away bolts with the accuracy of a slingball practice droid. This firefight was like finishing off a dying kellerbuck, knowing that its horns could still rip you open if you got too close.

  Maybe we should have brought a fourth man after all.

  The dapp-dapp-dapp of rapid fire from three Deeces sent the civvies screaming for cover. The sealed-off corridor was all white-hot staccato light, noise, and the flashing green beam of the lightsaber leaving afterimages in a blurred wake behind it. Ricochets from the lightsaber spat everywhere, searing the walls and scorching black patches on the synthmarble floor.

  He could leap over us, try to rip out a side door. No problem. But then he’ll be deep in a crowd of civvies.

  Is he going to bank on us not shooting?

  The crowd at Darman’s back, trapped by the other emergency bulkhead at the far end of the shopping arcade, could only watch—and scream. Shab, they didn’t stop. Darman hoped they stayed put and didn’t run, because the only place they could go was back into the squad’s arc of fire. Yelgo was edging away a step at a time toward the transparisteel wall of a snack bar. This had to be a trick. He was going to pull something out of the bag.

  Darman reloaded, snapping a clip out and in again in seconds. He tried to anticipate what Yelgo would try next. He saw the Jedi’s left arm go out to the side as if he was holding something back, then Rede reloaded, and Niner ran across to the far wall firing as he went.

  Grenade round? Risky. Too confined.

  Rede got his clip back in. Darman had one eye on the transparisteel wall, one huge transparent sheet decorated on the inside with a glittering green foil logo from floor to ceiling. Rede moved closer, taking out his sidearm and firing the Deece one-handed. Nobody could say those Spaarti instant-jobs didn’t have guts.

  Darman saw Yelgo close his eyes—still fending off shots with the lightsaber. The transparisteel wall started to shiver, then vibrate. Darman could guess what was coming next. He’d seen Jusik bring down whole buildings with the Force.

  Oh, shab—transparisteel.

  Seven meters by four meters, two and a half kilos per square meter per millimeter thickness—that’s—

  Nearly two tons of razor-sharp shards were about to hit Darman at explosive velocity, Force-smashed, Force-channeled into a tidal wave that would miss the crowd but slice through the squad.

  And Yelgo. Yeah, he’s dead, too, but he doesn’t care now.

  “Dar, Rede!” Niner yelled. “Down!”

  Rede suddenly swung his aim a meter above Yelgo’s head and emptied his clip into the bulging transparisteel. Maybe it was the enormous stresses the sheet was now straining under; maybe Rede was a genius at calculating weak points. Either way, the wall shattered and fell, raining glittering fragments like an avalanche of diamonds instead of blowing outward toward them. Yelgo lost concentration at the premature collapse of the wall. Rede was on him in a heartbeat. He rammed into him, inside the sweep of the lightsaber. His fist punched down and in. The moment seemed to drag on forever, but it was a blink, a second, and Yelgo was on his knees, staring at the dark blood welling from his tunic as Rede staggered back a pace and then fired twice into the Jedi’s head.

  And it was all over: done and dusted.

  The silence was one communal gasp. Then it broke, and there was more screaming. No, firefights never ended like that in the holovids. Civvies were always shocked to discover that.

  “Rede,” Darman said. “Rede, ner vod, I’ll never say a bad word about you instant troopers ever again. That was ori’kandosii.”

  The emergency bulkheads lifted, and station security guards appeared to usher the civilians away. Rede scuffed his boot on the ground, trying to get rid of broken transparisteel that had embedded itself in the tread.

  “I take it that means I did good,” he said.

  “Shabla brilliant, kid.” Darman felt suddenly old, as old as Kal’buir and just as responsible for a young commando. “You can stay.”

  The security chief, a tubby Sullustan, crunched across the carpet of fragments and surveyed the damage. “Could have been worse, I suppose. Nobody else hurt.”

  “Charge it to the Emperor’s account,” Darman said. He went over to Yelgo’s body and picked the lightsaber out of the debris. Yeah, some things were worse than being dead. He couldn’t imagine what Palps did to Jedi he caught and that scared him, because Darman had seen enough in the war to imagine more than was good for his peace of mind.

  Right call, Yelgo.

  Darman handed the lightsaber to Rede. “Don’t cut yourself,” he said. “If you were a Mando’ad, you’d wear that on your belt to show how ori’beskaryc you were.”

  “I can work that one out, too,” Rede said, admiring the weapon. Darman thought it would be a nice touch if Melusar let the kid keep it and wear it. Inspirational for everyone. He’s doing okay for a one-year-old. “Niner? I’m just sloping off for a while. Back in fifteen.”

  Niner knew what he planned to do. And out here, nobody was watching the chrono or wondering where the squad was.

  “In your own time,” Niner said, and walked off with Rede. “We’ll be in the security office drinking their caf.”

  Darman strolled along watching the stores and booths reopening now that the emergency was over, looking for a quiet spot. Eventually he found a janitorial closet and bypassed the lock. In the sealed environment of his suit, it didn’t actually matter where he made comm calls, but he felt self-conscious and needed to hide.

  What do I say to him?

  Kad was a baby. He just needed to hear his dad’s voice. Was it the middle of the night at Kyrimorut? Too bad. If Darman woke everyone, they’d understand. He spent a few moments calming himself with deep breathing before finally selecting the Nulls’ secure channel on his HUD with a couple of blinks.

  Jaing—or that droid buddy of his—knows what he’s doing. This comm can’t be traced.

  There was no flashing icon to indicate the status of the comlink, another hallmark of Jaing’s caution. Anyone casually picking up the helmet wouldn’t see anything different from the standard issue.

  Darman waited.

  Eventually, he heard a pop of static and a voice he recognized.

  “Dar, that had better be you.”

  “Ordo? Did I wake you up?”

  “Not exactly. Where are you?”

  “Coth Fuuras station. Just caught a Jedi.”

  Ordo didn’t answer for a moment. “Which one?”

  “Borik Yelgo. Hey, can I talk to Kad? To Fi? Any of the vode?”

  “How long have you got?”r />
  “Fifteen minutes or so.”

  “Wait one.”

  Ordo sounded as if he moved away from a mike, all scuffing noises and the occasional distant thump. Darman found himself drumming his fingers on his thigh plate. Eventually, someone came back and picked up the comlink with a loud scraping noise.

  “Dar? How are you, vod’ika? It’s me—it’s Fi.”

  Fi sounded different. The last time Darman had seen him, he was starting to come out of a deep coma. It didn’t matter. This was his brother. Shab, he’d missed him. He felt his eyes sting with tears.

  “Fi, it’s good to hear you.”

  “It’s going to be all right, Dar. When you come home, you’ll see.” Fi gulped in a breath. “I’m sorry about Etain. I don’t know what else to say. I’m so sorry.”

  Another voice interrupted. “Dar! Stop slacking, you lazy shabuir, and come home. The roba need mucking out.” It was Corr. “How are you doing?”

  “I miss you guys. Come on, where’s Atin?”

  “He’s getting Kad up to talk to you.”

  “What’s he like? Is he growing fast? Is he—”

  “Dar, this is Atin. Here’s your son. He wants to say a few words.” Darman heard Atin whispering. “Kad’ika, that’s Dada. He’s talking to you from a long way away. Say hi to Buir.”

  Darman shut his eyes to concentrate, trying to imagine what his son looked like now. When he heard his voice, it almost stopped him breathing.

  “Boo. I want Boo.” Kad was still getting to grips with Buir. “Where’s Boo?”

  “I’m here, son,” Darman whispered. He wasn’t sure how much a toddler could understand. He realized how little he knew about nonclone kids. “Dada loves you. I’ll come home as soon as I can.”

  There was a long silence. Atin sounded as if he was encouraging Kad to go on, but getting nowhere.

  “I think he’s gone all shy,” Atin said. “But he knows it’s you. He’s grinning from ear to ear. When are you coming back, Dar? Don’t wait too long.”

  “Things to do first.”

  “Uthan’s working on the aging thing,” Fi said. “You’ll never believe it, but we’ve got a thousand-year-old aiwha-bait Jedi here, and the doc’s working out how they engineered her. And guess who showed up the other day? Zey. That’s right. Maze didn’t cap him after all.”