A squadron of TIE fighters launched from the Star Destroyer’s hangar. Some shot off toward the city, while others circled the vessel like bloodflies around a nerf. Ezra squatted to the deck floor as one fighter swooped close by. He doubted the pilot had seen him. TIEs were always zipping back and forth over the prairies, patrolling for rebel activity. Their constant presence required Ezra to dim the tower’s illumination so as not to attract attention.
The Star Destroyer’s bulk terminated in a set of conical ion engines. The brightness forced Ezra to shield his eyes. Nonetheless, it did not stop him from seeing the prospects that now lay before him. Whatever drew a warship of this size might not be positive, but it could be immensely profitable. There would be many Imperials running about, which would present lots of pockets—and helmets—to pick.
After his last botched effort, he wanted those helmets more than ever.
Ezra scrambled down the ladder, grabbed his backpack, and started his jump bike, his hunger forgotten.
Ezra hid his bike in a deserted alley and waded into the crowded city bazaar. There citizens of all stripes bustled and mingled, bartering for spare parts or scavenging discount bins for the best deals. Down row after row of stalls, merchants hawked a galaxy’s trove of goods, offering cut-rate prices on secondhand trinkets. For the famished, street cooks roasted sweetmeats on sticks and farmers sold their harvests of fruits and vegetables. More than one fat wallet stood out as an easy grab, but Ezra held back. He was searching for Imperials.
It didn’t take him long to find them. Ahead, a surge of market goers tried to leave. Imperials always caused that reaction in people.
He elbowed past two swine-snouted Ugnaughts, then crouched behind tall clay casks. Strutting past him in olive uniforms were a pair of Imperial officers whom everyone knew by name: Commandant Aresko and his lackey, Taskmasker Grint. Assigned to run Lothal’s Imperial Academy, the two spent their free time doing whatever they could to make life miserable for the inhabitants of the lower levels. Today their victim was Yoffar, an old Gotal who eked out a living peddling yesterday’s fruits.
“Your identification. Now,” Grint ordered, pushing his barrel of a belly near the Gotal’s horns.
Yoffar held up a plump specimen from his basket. “I’m just trying to sell a couple jogans here.”
“Did you say sell?” asked Aresko, who held his nose high like a prince. “You do realize that all trade must be registered with the Empire.”
The Gotal snorted. “By the time the Empire’s done, there won’t be any trade left.”
Grint stepped closer to Yoffar, sneering. “What did you say?”
Ezra felt sorry for Yoffar. Truthfully, he’d never liked the geezer. The white-furred fruit seller was a perpetual grump who always confused Ezra with the other street orphans and once had accused Ezra of nicking fruit, which Ezra hadn’t—not that day, at least. But no one, not even Yoffar for all his crankiness, deserved Imperial harassment for trying to get by. Perhaps there was something Ezra could do—or steal—to turn the tables.
If the Gotal felt harassed and intimidated, he didn’t show it. “I remember what it was like before your ships showed up, before you Imperials ruled Lothal like the rest of the galaxy.”
Grint glanced at Aresko. Neither could hide his glee. “Mister Grint,” Aresko said with a raised eyebrow. “That sounds like treasonous talk to me.”
“That it does, sir,” said Grint.
Aresko unclipped his comlink from his belt. It was one of the new Imperial editions, built to transmit across a range of frequencies, including coded military bands. Although it wasn’t a helmet, Ezra could make a nice chunk of credits pawning it and have some fun at the same time.
“This is L-R-C-zero-one,” Aresko said into his comlink. “I’m bringing in a citizen under suspicion of treason.”
A voice responded almost instantaneously, the same electronically modulated voice that could be heard across the galaxy—an Imperial stormtrooper. “Copy that, L-R-C-zero-one. Dispatch to cell block A-A-thirty-three.”
The clatter of boots prompted Ezra to glance behind him. Two white-armored stormtroopers marched through the market, already en route. This wasn’t some chance license check—this was a stunt, planned to demonstrate the Empire’s speed at responding to incidents in order to strike fear into the hearts of onlookers. Fear was how Imperials tried to handle everything.
Ezra wasn’t afraid.
He slinked along the line of clay casks, judging the best way to approach Aresko. The commandant had reattached the comlink to his belt. Ezra could pinch it if he came from the side. He slipped behind the stormtroopers and used them as cover.
Grint took a fruit from Yoffar’s basket. “By Imperial authority, we hereby confiscate your goods.”
Old Yoffar’s bravado became slack-jawed terror when he saw the stormtroopers approaching him. “Take him away,” ordered Aresko.
The troopers grabbed the Gotal and began to drag him off. Yoffar clutched the fruit basket to his chest. “You can’t do this!”
Grint took a bite of the jogan he’d stolen as he and Aresko followed the stormtroopers. “Yeah? And who’s gonna stop us?” He pointed at other merchants around them. “You? You?”
The merchants looked away, some packing up their merchandise. Ezra sidled up to Grint. “Hey, mister, spare a jogan?”
Both Imperials turned and Ezra reached toward Aresko’s belt. His fingers made the lightest touch on the clip release, and the comlink was in his possession in less than a second.
“Scram, urchin. Those jogans are Imperial property,” Grint said.
“Sorry, sorry. Not looking for trouble, sirs.” Ezra lowered his head so they couldn’t see his face and hurried away. “But it sure has a way of finding me,” he said under his breath. Because he wasn’t done with them. He still had to have his fun.
He set the comlink to loudspeaker broadcast and cleared his throat. “All officers to the main square.” He spoke into the comlink, impersonating the pompous adult voice from the holopad advertisements. “This is a code red emergency!”
Ezra kept walking, head low, and glanced back. The Imperials had stopped, clearly annoyed by the orders. Grint spit out jogan seeds. Aresko gave Yoffar an arrogant glare. “It’s your lucky day, Lothal scum.” He motioned to the stormtroopers. “You two, come with us. Leave that nonhuman stinker in the dirt where he belongs.”
The stormtroopers dropped Yoffar and rushed off with the officers toward the square. Once they were gone, the entire market let out a sigh of relief. Business returned to usual.
Yoffar picked up himself and his fruit basket. Ezra approached, his stomach reminding him of his hunger. He spoke into the comlink again so the Imperials wouldn’t return soon. “Stay on alert! Repeat, this is code red.”
Yoffar saw him with the comlink, and instead of giving his usual grumpy frown, he smiled. He offered Ezra a jogan. “Thank you.”
“No, thank you.” Ezra opened his backpack and packed it with jogans from the basket.
Yoffar’s smile vanished. “Wait, wait. What are you doing?”
Ezra heaved his backpack over his shoulder and winked at the old grump. “Hey, a kid’s gotta eat.”
He stepped onto a nearby crate, climbed up a support beam, then leapt onto the rooftop of a building. “Who is that kid?” he heard the Gotal say.
Ezra grinned. Maybe now Yoffar wouldn’t confuse him with the other orphans.
With his heavy pack bouncing on his back, Ezra hopped over several chimneys to cross the roof. From the other edge, he could peek down into the city’s main square. He was curious to see how the Imperials would react to his little ploy on the comlink.
Down below, Supply Master Lyste addressed a group of stormtroopers as they grav-chained hover crates to several speeder bikes. “Make sure the repulsors stick to the bikes,” Lyste said, doing none of the lifting himself. “I don’t want to lose any of those crates.”
The two stormtroopers from the market arrived w
ith Aresko and Grint in tow, both out of breath. “What’s the emergency?” Aresko wheezed.
“Emergency?” Lyste asked.
On the roof, Ezra grinned, seeing the outcome of his comlink prank. From every adjoining street and alley came stormtroopers, stampeding into the square like herds of prairie squirrels in the mating season. Lyste, Grint, and Aresko looked about, utterly perplexed.
Grint leveled a glare at Lyste. “You called a code red.”
“I-I’m not sure what you mean,” Lyste stammered. “My orders are to get these crates to the Imperial Portal.”
“Well, get them loaded, then!” Commandant Aresko said, reddening with anger.
To Ezra’s delight, Lyste lent his own hands in lifting a heavy crate. Grint and Aresko muttered to each other while the other stormtroopers bumbled about, testing their helmet comlinks, looking nothing like the crack troops they were supposed to be. Ezra almost felt bad for the whole bunch. Almost.
His gaze fell on the hover crates Lyste’s contingent attached to the speeder bikes. Three troopers remained to the side, guarding the two largest crates of the cluster. It was hard to tell from Ezra’s vantage point what the crates could possibly hold, but a guard that strong probably meant whatever was inside was valuable. He stepped toward the roof’s edge for a closer view and crouched, careful not to be seen.
In the center of the square stood a ponytailed man in a collared olive tunic that was tucked into sleek gray pants. Dark green armor plated his right shoulder and matched the gauntlet around his forearm below. His back was toward Ezra, but he turned to look up at the rooftops, as if he had felt Ezra’s gaze. The man’s chin sported a sharp goatee, yet his blue eyes were even sharper, cutting through everything he looked at.
Weirded out, Ezra stepped back from the edge, where he could still see the man, but where the man hopefully couldn’t see him.
The man looked away from the roof to a muscular nonhuman who stood nearly a meter taller than everyone else in the square. Ezra couldn’t identify the being’s species, but whatever he was, Ezra didn’t want to get on his bad side.
The ponytailed man tapped his thigh twice, to which the nonhuman responded by turning into an alley. The man then approached a girl wearing outrageously colored Mandalorian armor and again tapped his thigh. The Mandalorian repeated the tap on her leg while heading in the opposite direction. All three were now on the move.
Interesting. Was what they had tapped a secret code? Ezra looked back at Supply Master Lyste and the stormtroopers. They had finished loading all the hover crates and didn’t notice the Mandalorian walking close to the furthermost speeder bike. She slid her hand under the bike and pressed a blinking round object to the chassis.
Ezra knew immediately what that object was. He covered his ears. The object stopped blinking and the speeder bike exploded.
The shock wave knocked Lyste and his troopers backward. The once-puzzled stormtroopers in the square rushed to the scene, now having a purpose. Lyste crawled up and pointed at the other parked speeder bikes.
“Get those crates out of here,” he yelled. “Keep them secure, at all costs!”
At all costs. Ezra liked the sound of that. It meant he was right about the crates being valuable. He rose from his crouch and dashed across the rooftops, searching for the quickest way down.
He wasn’t going to make it. A stormtrooper jumped onto the speeder bike with the two largest crates and took off toward a side street. Even with his knowledge of the rooftops, there was no way Ezra could outrun a speeder bike.
The speeder bike didn’t make it out of the square, though. Its rider screeched it to a halt to avoid colliding with a landspeeder that was backing out from a side street. The rider gestured for the landspeeder to clear, which its driver seemed to interpret as a greeting. “How’s it goin’?” asked the ponytailed man, leaning out of the driver’s side window.
Ezra stopped on the roof above, seeing more stormtroopers arrive on foot and on the other crate-loaded speeder bikes. It was now clear that this ponytailed man also wanted those crates. But confronting a stormtrooper squad was madness. The hammer of the Empire would nail this man’s coffin shut.
The prospect of death didn’t seem to scare this man, though. He sprang out of the landspeeder and ran straight at the Imperials.
With one booted foot, the man kicked the lead rider off his bike, then spun, blaster drawn, and fired at the oncoming squad. Some troopers went down, but more came to take their fallen comrades’ place and return fire.
The man had reinforcements of his own. The burly nonhuman lumbered out from an alley and demonstrated why Ezra was correct in not wanting to cross paths with him. The bruiser picked up a stormtrooper from behind and threw him into another trooper. Both soldiers crumpled to the ground from the teeth-rattling impact.
Ezra scanned for the third member of this team, the one in the Mandalorian armor. She was nowhere to be seen. What was her role in all this, other than setting the speeder to blow? The man and the bruiser didn’t have trouble dealing with the squad by themselves. They only had to finish off a few more stormtroopers before they’d be in possession of the speeder bikes and the hover crates.
The crates—they were the fulcrum of this whole altercation. If these strange people were willing to risk their lives against such ridiculous odds to gain them, Ezra could only wonder what treasures they contained.
He went to the roof’s edge. The lead speeder bike hovered a few stories below, riderless, its two large crates tempting him. If he dropped onto its seat, the bike’s repulsor should absorb the shock of his fall.
Thinking no more about it, lest he get cold feet, Ezra closed his eyes and stepped off the roof. His stomach seemed to go first.
He landed in the seat with a butt-numbing wham. The bike bounced on its repulsors, and he caught the steering rods to prevent himself from being thrown off. He opened his eyes to see the ponytailed man and the nonhuman bruiser sprinting toward him.
“Thanks for doing the heavy lifting,” he said, and kicked the bike into gear.
Ezra swerved around the bruiser, ducking his wild swing, and sped into an intersecting street. He waved good-bye to the two as more stormtroopers charged.
Those troopers didn’t delay either of them for long. Soon they both trailed Ezra on separate speeder bikes. And since he couldn’t figure out how to operate his bike’s blaster cannon, he had to rely on losing them in the maze of the city streets.
He drove through broken windows of an abandoned warehouse, then knifed through a narrow alley. Whenever there was a quick turn, he made it, tearing through clotheslines and skimming the tops of trash bins. But he couldn’t ditch his pursuers; they were gaining. The contents of his bike’s crates must be slowing him.
He slowed even more when something dropped and landed on his bike’s crates. “Pretty gutsy move, kid, jumping without a jet pack,” said the girl in the paint-splattered Mandalorian armor. Her helmet filtered her voice but didn’t re-modulate it like with the stormtroopers.
Ezra revved the bike to shake her off. She did the job herself, firing a blaster at the couplings that held one of the hover crates. It detached from his bike.
“If the big guy catches you, he’ll end you!” she yelled, falling away on the crate. “Good luck!”
Ezra glanced back to see her hop off the hover crate and push it into an alley. He considered turning around, until the ponytailed man and the bruiser zipped past her, right on his tail.
He jammed his heel against the pedal. With one less crate, the bike accelerated faster. His vision narrowed. Walls and buildings blurred by him. He veered around a statue, dove under an arch, and darted down another alley, letting his instincts guide him more than his eyes.
As good as his instincts were, they didn’t help him avoid the troop transport that blocked the mouth of the alley. Stormtroopers were posted on the ground, ready to fire at him.
All he could do was bob, weave, and hope he wasn’t hit. A single, well-placed bl
aster bolt was all it would take to end his short career.
That one bolt never came—not to him, at least.
A stream of heavy fire from behind blasted the transport, scattered the troopers, and cleared the way for Ezra. He zoomed out of the alley, looking at his two pursuers, astonished by what they had done. Only the Empire’s best troopers could shoot with that kind of skill on speeder bikes.
Who were these guys?
Who was this kid?
Kanan had asked himself that question many times on this crazy chase. Either the boy had military training of the highest caliber, or his talents stretched beyond the ordinary. There was no other explanation as to how he could avoid being caught by them and the Imperials.
The chase would end shortly, however. They’d reached the outskirts of Capital City, where there weren’t as many alleys or obstacles the boy could use to elude them. Kanan and Zeb gave their bikes an extra kick and zeroed in on the kid’s back.
High-pitched whines made both look behind them. Three stormtroopers on speeder bikes now pursued them.
Kanan shook his head. Imperials always had to make things more difficult.
The kid sped toward the freeway that funneled traffic in and out of the city. Kanan and Zeb shifted their bikes to follow, as did the troopers. Stop signs on the freeway entrance ramp slowed no one. Fortunately, there wasn’t much traffic on that section of the freeway.
Kanan wrenched his bike to the side, dodging the troopers’ shots while turning in the saddle to respond with his own blaster. He hit one trooper in the chest, causing both man and bike to fall off the freeway.
But another trooper’s blasts found the boy’s bike. Sparks sizzled and a repulsor flap blew off. The kid lost control. His bike careened over the divider into the opposite lane.
The troopers’ fire made it impossible for Kanan to veer into the other lane without getting toasted. Kanan signaled to Zeb that they had to take out their pursuers.
Star Wars Rebels Page 3