by Various
We didn’t care.
It wasn’t our business.
This is what we knew: If nothing went wrong, we wouldn’t have anything to do. We’d cruise our station in the Ventran system for a week or two, then jump back for reassignment.
Something went wrong.
Our business was to get General Windu out again.
* * *
The moon-belt was where they were hiding. Waiting for us.
The whole system was a trap.
They must have been there for weeks, powered down, clamped to drifting asteroids. Undetectable. Waiting for a Republic ship to enter orbit.
Which the Halleck had just done.
Against the glittering weave of the belt, they were close enough to invisible that I couldn’t pick them out until Lt. Nine-Oh muttered from nav: “Hostiles incoming. On intercept. But not for us, sir! They’re after the Halleck!”
Lt. One-Four: “How many, nav?”
“Calculating. No. Sorry, sir. No hard numbers available. Sensors keep picking up more.”
“How many so far? What are we looking at?”
“Acceleration and drive output profiles indicate starfighters. Droid starfighters, sir.” Automated weapons systems directed by sophisticated droid brains. “Probably Geonosian. So far, I’m reading sixty-four.”
“Sixty-four!”
“Strike that. Ninety-one. One-oh-five. One-twenty-eight, sir.”
One hundred and twenty-eight droid starfighters streaked toward us: a vast array of crescent sparks haloed by blue-white ion scatter. Faster, more maneuverable, and more heavily armed than anything in our little twelve-ship flotilla—and the droid brains piloting those starfighters have reflexes that operate at the speed of light.
And the Halleck was directly in their path.
“Hear that, turrets? This will be hot space. Repeat: we are entering hot space.”
“Starboard reads, sir,” I told him as I charged my cannon. “And I am go.”
“Port reads, sir. Go.”
“Signal from the Halleck, sir!” Nine-Oh said. “Recall: All ships abort. The Halleck is under attack—she’s all alone back there, sir!”
“Not for long.”
Lt. Four-One spun our ship through a spiral that whipped us around and aimed us back toward the Halleck. The cruiser was a star-specked wedge of shadow transiting the grid of droid starfighter drive-streams. Now turbolasers started blasting out from that shadow toward the grid; from here the huge particle beams looked like hairlines of blue light. I worked my pedals and swung the fire-control yoke so that the turret’s servo-boom angled my weapon to bear on the grid-formation of starfighters.
I knew Eight-Three was doing exactly the same.
“Fire at will, turrets.”
They were still far beyond the effective range of my cannon. I squeezed the yoke anyway. Even through my armored gloves, the hum of the yoke buzzed up my arms as four arcs of electric blue energy joined in front of the cannon’s oval reflector-shield, then flashed away through the vacuum. I held the triggers down. Concentrating on evading the Halleck’s turbolasers, a droid starfighter might just blunder into one of my shots by accident. You never know.
The grid formation began to break up as the droids took evasive action. Our own starfighters—all six of them—flashed past us in pairs that swung and scissored and looped into battle.
We made for the Halleck as fast as our external drives could push us. Our gunship was never intended to dogfight against starfighters. That didn’t stop us. It didn’t slow us down. But we never got there.
They came out of nowhere.
The first I knew of the new ambushers was when our ship shuddered under multiple cannon-blasts. A droid starfighter flashed past not thirty meters from my turret. I twisted my yoke and the turret spun and my bolt caught one of the starfighter’s aft control-surfaces. It broke up as it spun, but I didn’t have time to enjoy the view because they were all over us.
Must have been at least half a wing: thirty-two ships. They were everywhere. Four-one had our gunship spinning and whirling and dodging side to side: from the turret it looked like the whole galaxy was yanking itself in random directions around me. All I could do was hold on to my fire-control yoke and try not to hit friendly ships. My cannon sprayed green fire and I scored on at least five hits—two of them kills—but there were always more incoming.
I saw the lander crack open and then explode: huge chunks of its armor spun out like ship-sized shrapnel to crush two of the starfighters that had blasted it. I saw another LAAT/i drifting through a slow barrel-roll, its engines dark, sparks spitting out through the twisted blast-gap where its cockpit used to be. One of its bubble-turrets was shattered; in the other, a trooper struggled with the turret’s access hatch. I never got a chance to see if that gunner made it out; another flight of enemy fighters swarmed around us, and I was too busy shooting to watch.
Then I felt a shock that bounced my turret. The spin of the galaxy changed, and I knew I was in trouble.
That last shock had been a cannon-blast hitting my turret’s servo-boom. It had blown my turret right off the ship. Now it wasn’t even really a turret anymore. It was just a bubble.
Spinning lazily, I drifted through the battle.
I didn’t have any illusions about surviving. Turret-gunners don’t wear repulsorpacks; no room in there. My emergency repulsorpack was back in the troop bay of my gunship. If my gunship even existed anymore.
From inside my slowly spinning bubble, I saw the rest of the battle. I saw the Halleck absorb blast after blast, until a pair of droid starfighters streaked in and rammed the bridge. I saw the other nineteen landers undock from the cruiser and lumber through the swarm of hostiles. I saw the cruiser streak away into hyperspace.
I saw landers peeled like meatfruit, spilling troopers into orbit. These were the heavy infantry and the RP troopers—the repulsorpack men. They knew they were going to die. So each and every one of them decided to die fighting. How do I know that?
They are my brothers. And that’s what I would do.
The heavy infantry opened up on the droid starfighters with their hand-weapons and small arms; some of them scattered miniature minefields of magnetized proton grenades. Others had shoulder-fired light missile launchers. Some of the RP troopers had nothing but their DC-15 blaster carbines, which couldn’t put much of a dent in a starfighter, so they used their repulsorpacks to deliberately move themselves into the paths of streaking enemy ships. At orbital combat speeds of thousands of kilometers per hour, a starfighter that strikes a combat-armored trooper might as well be flying straight into the side of an asteroid.
The landers did what they could to help us out; those chaff guns they carry shoot out huge clouds of durasteel fragments, intended to confuse enemy sensors and interfere with enemy cannonfire. Those fragments don’t have the velocity to penetrate the armor of drifting troopers, but any enemy ship whipping through a cloud of them at a couple thousand KPH just comes apart.
But the landers hadn’t come out there to fight for us; General Windu had ordered the whole regiment down to the surface. I imagine you’ve already heard about the Battle of Lorshan Pass, and the firestorm in Pelek Baw, and everything else that happened planetside.
I wasn’t in any of that.
Though I did fire the last shot in the orbital battle.
Most of the landers broke through, and pretty much all the droid starfighters followed them in. After that, things got pretty peaceful there in orbit.
Most of us were dead.
RP troopers flew from one drifting body to the next, gathering those who’d survived and salvaging life-support packs from the armor of the corpses. A couple of the RP troopers stopped by my bubble; they managed to halt my spin, but there wasn’t much else they could do for me, and we all knew it.
I was headed down into the atmosphere.
That was when we saw the last of the starfighters, heading right toward us. It was pursuing what was, to me, the single m
ost beautiful thing I should ever hope to see: battered, shot full of holes, one wing gone, limping along on a single engine at half-power, one bubble turret missing, the other smashed: an LAAT/i.
My LAAT/i.
Missiles exhausted, it was trying to hold off the droid starfighter with pinpoint fire from its antipersonnel turrets, without much luck.
But I had a surprise. Bubble turrets pack powercells to maintain weapon-charge for short periods if all enginepower is shunted to maneuvering.
I still had a couple of shots left.
The RP troopers who had stabilized me rotated my turret and steadied it for the shot, and I led the enemy ship and squeezed the fire-control yoke—
And it flew right into my shot.
I enjoyed the explosion.
Between the RP troopers and my ship, we collected every single one of the drifting survivors. The gunship was in no shape for atmospheric flight, so we limped out to the moon-belt and docked on to an asteroid. The lieutenants put me in for a commendation.
Salvaged life-support packs kept us all breathing for two standard days—which was when the Republic task force arrived.
The first thing they did was pick up survivors.
Because we are equipment, too.
As long as the Republic takes care of us, we’ll take care of it.
The Clone Wars: The Pengalan Tradeoff
January 27, 2006
By Aaron Allston;
Illustration by Tommy Lee Edwards
The bang beneath his feet was strong enough to bounce Joram Kithe up onto his tiptoes. He came down off-balance and was afraid that he’d pitch out the open starboard side of the gunship, onto the rocky terrain rolling by at 500 kilometers an hour. But the vehicle’s inertial compensator kept its grip on him, restoring his balance.
Joram glanced at the other men in the troop hold. Most were staring out the starboard access. There weren’t as many as there had been four hours ago, when the gunship, part of the complement of the assault ship Sea Legacy, had set down on Pengalan IV. Then, they’d been a full platoon—plus Joram. Now, there were perhaps 15 left, men with heat-scarred clone trooper armor, expended ammunition clips, injuries ranging from minor to life threatening.
Not that they complained. Clone troopers didn’t complain. At least, they didn’t in the presence of observers.
The platoon’s lieutenant, his armor distinguished by the blue stripes of his rank, leaned back through the hatch that led into the forward compartments. His voice crackled through Joram’s headset. Joram pressed the headset tighter to his ears; he was in civilian dress, so he didn’t have a helmet to cut down on the sound made by the wind.
“Our comlink is damaged,” the lieutenant said. “Sea Legacy is still not receiving us. But we’re receiving them. We’ll reach them in time for extraction.”
“What was that last bang?” Joram asked.
“Missile impact from a ground station.” The lieutenant’s tone suggested that he was unconcerned. “The warhead didn’t detonate. The pilot says the impact changed our performance characteristics. Either an engine is failing or the missile is still protruding from our underside, increasing drag.”
“Wonderful.”
Scuttlebutt aboard Sea Legacy had it that the last transmission of a Republic Intelligence agent on Pengalan IV reported that Count Dooku’s Confederacy was set up here, manufacturing experimental diamond boron missiles designed to shoot down Republic starfighters. These missiles could tip the balance of power toward the Confederacy in this new war. Sea Legacy’s sensors had shown a long-decommissioned manufacturing plant, the world’s most significant industrial site, to be operational, its furnaces fired up and internal machinery working. . . and its exterior protected by shield projectors that were distinctly inappropriate for a civilian industry. So, four hours ago, the assault ship had set down on the planet’s surface and its scores of gunships had deployed toward the facility.
The platoon Joram was assigned to was one of the advance forces. Its gunship had set down within walking distance of the facility an hour before dawn. The platoon, separated into squadrons, had gone on foot to the plant, silently scouted the site, found the points where the overlapping shields gapped to allow plant workers easy access, and communicated its findings to the rest of the troops. Demolitions experts from an engineering unit had arrived and crept into the site, planting their explosives, getting clear, setting them off—
Certainly, the shields had gone down. Certainly, the Republic gunships had roared in to finish the job. But everything had gone wrong.
The shields had sprung to life again. Joram, from his position of relative safety near the gunship, had watched in disbelief as missiles and turret lasers had stopped mid-flight, blunted by shimmering air. The foremost gunships, too close to maneuver, had crashed into those energy barriers, crumpling or exploding.
Joram, although no soldier, hadn’t needed a military advisor to grasp what was happening. The shield projectors destroyed by the engineers had been secondary projector terminals slaved to complete units elsewhere on the facility. It was a trap, and the trap was fully sprung when the pair of Geonosian-built corvettes—bronze-skinned, with a pointed prow split like a set of tweezers, characteristic of the Geonosian engineers—rose from one of the world’s numerous canyons and opened fire. Trade Federation droid starfighters had roared in, strafing.
It had been a slaughter. Gunship after gunship had gone down.
In the Republic forces’ retreat, Joram had seen acts of bravery and skill he considered extraordinary. Some of the combat engineers who had destroyed the false shield projectors had penetrated deeper into the facility; before being killed, they reported that there were no missile fabrication systems here, just machinery made active to provide distant sensors with a suspicious signal to detect. Gunship pilots had swooped down to make daring rescues of clone troopers. Whole units remained behind to provide covering fire for escaping craft. The retreat was not as orderly as the approach had been, but it was nearly as efficient.
Ironically, Joram’s personal mission had been a success. He’d seen the troops operating at the height of chaos and had found them to be courageous and effective, everything the Republic could hope for in its new army. He thought he had enough data for his report.
Another impact hurled Joram upward. This time he crashed into the ceiling of the troop bay and was held there, sharp pain cracking through his head. In his peripheral vision, he saw the aftmost portion of the bay filled with blinding brightness that consumed the trio of clone troopers who had been standing there.
The landscape outside the starboard access was rotating, a dizzying vision like something from an amusement facility’s thrill ride. Distantly, dimly, he heard someone shout, “Eject! Eject!” “Negative, we can bring it in—” “Initiating uncontrolled touchdown procedures.” Finally, most ominous of all: “Brace for impact.”
* * *
Joram awoke with the sun in his eyes.
It seemed that all his 80 kilos of mass had just spent hours being tenderized by a chef. Where he didn’t ache, he cramped, and his first, foolish attempt to sit up caused his back to arch in a spasm that nearly made him black out again.
“Civilian’s awake.”
“Good.”
Joram didn’t know which clone was speaking; he couldn’t recognize their voices. Actually, that wasn’t true—but they all had the same voice. They pitched their voices differently for different situations—louder and deeper when exerting authority or dominance, quieter when acknowledging orders, a sort of bland neutrality when seeking to conceal their thoughts—but every one of them sounded the same.
Joram merely grunted, and as the spasm ebbed, he tried again to sit up, this time using his arms for support. It worked and he came upright.
Forty meters or so ahead of him lay the ruins of the gunship. Once a long boxy thing with stabilizing wings, it now looked like something a giant had drunk from and then crumpled into a loose ball. It lay at the bo
ttom of a cliff, and Joram could see a corresponding cliff about half a kilometer to his left. They’d crashed into one of Pengalan’s numberless canyons.
He could see living clone troopers nearby, at the wreckage, and beyond. Joram counted six of them. Good. He could still count. Counting was what he was good at. The troopers had laid out the bodies of their fellows in a straight line only a few steps from where Joram sat. Some of the survivors were picking among the gunship ruins; others were ranging farther down the canyon or using field shovels to dig graves nearby.
The gravediggers had their helmets off, revealing identical features—dark, brooding, dangerous-looking. Joram had been put off by their looks until he’d realized just how passive most of them were when not engaged in battle. “What’s our situation, Trooper?” Joram asked the nearest.
The trooper straightened from his task. He was a moment in replying. The clone troopers always seemed to take a moment when answering Joram, or any civilian.
“Seven of us still alive,” the trooper answered. “Plus you. One has damage that will limit his mobility. The gunship’s a loss. All weapons systems out. Repulsorlifts inoperable. Speeder bikes wrecked. Medical droid destroyed.”
“Or so we think,” the other gravedigger corrected. “We can’t get to the compartment where it was stowed, but it was pretty thoroughly crushed.”
Joram managed to get to his feet and stood on wobbly legs. “Is anything still working?”
Both men nodded in unison. “The inertial compensator,” said the first one. “It can still run off battery power. It’s what kept us alive during the crash. And during the roll down the cliff.” With his shovel, he gestured up the cliffside. Fifty meters up there was a clear burn mark to indicate where the gunship had hit.
“Did the lieutenant make it?”
The first gravedigger shook his head.
“Who’s in charge, then?”
Both troopers shook their heads. “We’re still working that out, sir. There are only privates left. The procedures say that the oldest has seniority, but we’re all the same age. We then default to the trooper with the highest educational level, but no one has a clear advantage there.”