by Chuck Wendig
“I need you on target, Brand,” he growled into his link. “I need you here now.”
If anyone answered, he couldn’t hear it.
Now he glimpsed the stormtrooper carrying the missile launcher. The trooper was still reloading, which meant Namir had half a minute at most before the storefront came tumbling down on top of him. He took a few quick shots and saw one of the other troopers fall, though he doubted he’d hit his target. He guessed Charmer had found a vantage point after all.
Three stormtroopers remained. One was moving away from the alley while the other stayed to protect the artilleryman. Namir shot wildly at the one moving into the street, watched him skid and fall to a knee, and smiled grimly. There was something satisfying about seeing a trained stormtrooper humiliate himself. Namir’s own side did it often enough.
Jerky movements drew Namir’s attention back to the artilleryman. Behind the stormtrooper stood Gadren, both sets of arms gripping and lifting his foe. Human limbs flailed and the missile launcher fell to the ground. White armor seemed to crumple in the alien’s hands. Gadren’s makeshift hood blew back, exposing his head: a brown, bulbous, widemouthed mass topped with a darker crest of bone, like some amphibian’s nightmare idol. The second trooper in the alley turned to face Gadren and was promptly slammed to the ground with his comrade’s body before Gadren crushed them both, howling in rage or grief.
Namir trusted Gadren as much as he trusted anyone, but there were times when the alien terrified him.
The last stormtrooper was still down in the street. Namir fired until flames licked a burnt and melted hole in the man’s armor. Namir, Charmer, and Gadren gathered back around the bodies and assessed their own injuries.
Namir’s hearing was coming back. The damage to his helmet extended far beyond the visor—a crack extended along its length—and he found a shallow cut across his forehead when he tossed the helmet to the street. Charmer was picking shards of shrapnel from his vest but made no complaints. Gadren was shivering in the warm rain.
“No Brand?” Gadren asked.
Namir only grunted.
Charmer laughed his weird, hiccuping laugh and spoke. He swallowed the words twice, three, four times as he went, half stuttering as he had ever since the fight on Blacktar Cyst. “Keep piling bodies like this,” he said, “we’ll have the best vantage point in the city.”
He gestured at Namir’s last target, who had fallen directly onto one of the civilian corpses.
“You’re a sick man, Charmer,” Namir said, and swung an arm roughly around his comrade’s shoulders. “I’ll miss you when they boot you out.”
Gadren grunted and sniffed behind them. It might have been dismay, but Namir chose to take it as mirth.
—
Officially, the city was Haidoral Administrative Center One, but locals called it “Glitter” after the crystalline mountains that limned the horizon. In Namir’s experience, what the Galactic Empire didn’t name to inspire terror—its stormtrooper legions, its Star Destroyer battleships—it tried to render as drab as possible. This didn’t bother Namir, but he wasn’t among the residents of the planets and cities being labeled.
Half a dozen Rebel squads had already arrived at the central plaza when Namir’s team marched in. The rain had condensed into mist, and the plaza’s tents and canopies offered little shelter; nonetheless, men and women in ragged armor squeezed into the driest corners they could find, grumbling to one another or tending to minor wounds and damaged equipment. As victory celebrations went, it was subdued. It had been a long fight for little more than the promise of a few fresh meals.
“Stop admiring yourselves and do something useful,” Namir barked, barely breaking stride. “Support teams can use a hand if you’re too good to play greeter.”
He barely noticed the squads stir in response. Instead, his attention shifted to a woman emerging from the shadows of a speeder stand. She was tall and thickly built, dressed in rugged pants and a bulky maroon jacket. A scoped rifle was slung over her shoulder, and the armor mesh of a retracted face mask covered her neck and chin. Her skin was gently creased with age and as dark as a human’s could be, her hair was cropped close to her scalp, and she didn’t so much as glance at Namir as she arrived at his side and matched his pace through the plaza.
“You want to tell me where you were?” Namir asked.
“You missed the second fire team. I took care of it,” Brand said.
Namir kept his voice cool. “Drop me a hint next time?”
“You didn’t need the distraction.”
Namir laughed. “Love you, too.”
Brand cocked her head. If she got the joke—and Namir expected she did—she wasn’t amused. “So what now?” she asked.
“We’ve got eight hours before we leave the system,” Namir said, and stopped with his back to an overturned kiosk. He leaned against the metal frame and stared into the mist. “Less if Imperial ships come before then, or if the governor’s forces regroup. After that, we’ll divvy up the supplies with the rest of the battle group. Probably keep an escort ship or two for the Thunderstrike before the others split off.”
“And we abandon this sector to the Empire,” Brand said.
By this time Charmer had wandered off, and Gadren had joined the circle with Namir and Brand. “We will return,” he said gravely.
“Right,” Namir said, smirking. “Something to look forward to.”
He knew they were the wrong words at the wrong time.
Eighteen months earlier, the Rebel Alliance’s Sixty-First Mobile Infantry—commonly known as Twilight Company—had joined the push into the galactic Mid Rim. The operation was among the largest the Rebellion had ever fielded against the Empire, involving thousands of starships, hundreds of battle groups, and dozens of worlds. In the wake of the Rebellion’s victory against the Empire’s planet-burning Death Star battle station, High Command had believed the time was right to move from the fringes of Imperial territory toward its population centers.
Twilight Company had fought in the factory-deserts of Phorsa Gedd and taken the Ducal Palace of Bamayar. It had established beachheads for rebel hovertanks and erected bases from tarps and sheet metal. Namir had seen soldiers lose limbs and go weeks without proper treatment. He’d trained teams to construct makeshift bayonets when blaster power packs ran low. He’d set fire to cities and watched the Empire do the same. He’d left friends behind on broken worlds, knowing he’d never see them again.
On planet after planet, Twilight had fought. Battles were won and battles were lost, and Namir stopped keeping score. Twilight remained at the Rebellion’s vanguard, forging ahead of the bulk of the armada, until word came down from High Command nine months in: The fleet was overextended. There was to be no further advance—only defense of the newly claimed territories.
Not long after that, the retreat began.
Twilight Company had become the rear guard of a massive withdrawal. It deployed to worlds it had helped capture mere months earlier and evacuated the bases it had built. It extracted the Rebellion’s heroes and generals and pointed the way home. It marched over the graves of its own dead soldiers. Some of the company lost hope. Some became angry.
No one wanted to go back.