by James Luceno
Corran crossed to the cottage’s open doorway and crouched in the shadows. He’d have given his right arm for a blaster, but he stored his personal sidearm in Talasea’s flight center, along with his helmet, gloves, and other equipment. In my days with CorSec I wouldn’t have been caught dead without a gun of some sort. I don’t even have a vibroblade. Either I’m going to be very lucky here or very dead.
Any advantage he might have came from the basic appearance of the cottage itself. With an open doorway, unglazed windows, and sagging roof, the cottage hardly looked like the sort of place anyone, let alone pilots, would choose to live in. Unfortunately Ooryl and Corran had no choice since a windstorm had knocked a local kaha tree through the wall of their room in the pilots’ wing of the flight center. Unpowered and barely visible from the center of the compound, the cottage might go unnoticed.
Unless someone is being very thorough.
The unmistakable squish of mud beneath boot alerted Corran to the presence of someone just outside the cottage. Looking up he saw the snout of a blaster carbine poke through the doorway. A left leg encased in the slate-grey armor worn by stormtroopers on commando missions followed it. The gun’s muzzle moved to the right, away from Corran, and began a slow sweep of the room.
Corran exploded up from his crouch and slammed his left fist into the stormtrooper’s throat. Using his own body as a weapon, the Corellian smashed the stormtrooper against the doorjamb. Hooking his right hand through the armpit of the soldier’s armor, Corran spun and flung the man into the center of the cottage. Taking one step forward, Corran leaped up and landed with both knees on the Imperial’s stomach.
The stormtrooper retched and vomit squirted from beneath his helmet. Corran pulled the man’s blaster pistol from his holster, tucked it up beneath the trooper’s chin, and pulled the trigger once. A muffled squeak accompanied the reddish light flashing through the helmet’s goggle-eyes, then the body beneath him went limp.
Corran winced. He who carries a blaster set on kill dies by a blaster set on kill. He tossed the blaster pistol to the floor beside the carbine, then slid off the dead man’s abdomen. He unbuckled the dead trooper’s ammo belt. Tugging it free of the body, he noticed, in addition to the erg-clips for the blasters, a number of pouches, half of which were bulging. Opening one of them he saw compact silver cylinders and a new shiver ran through him.
Explosive charges! Some must already have been set.
A noise in the doorway made Corran spin. A stormtrooper stood there, staring down at him. Corran’s right hand groped for the blaster pistol, but he knew he’d never make it in time. Then he noticed the stormtrooper’s hands were empty and, more importantly, the man’s feet were two inches off the ground.
Ooryl cast the body aside and it crumpled to the floor. The Gand took a look at the stormtrooper on the ground, then nodded once. “Ooryl apologizes for having left you undefended. Ooryl was out walking when the presence of these interlopers became apparent.”
“How many?”
The Gand shook his head. “Two less. Ooryl saw four others at various points on the perimeter.”
“And our sentries?”
“Gone.”
“Not good. Stormtroopers travel in squads of nine—let’s figure two dozen with the crew of whatever brought them here.” Corran refastened the ammo belt and slung it across his body. Reholstering the blaster pistol he noticed that Ooryl had similarly appropriated his trooper’s weapons. “Is your boy dead?”
The Gand nodded and rolled his trooper onto his stomach. The trooper’s helmet had a blood-smeared hole in the back of it. The hole itself looked odd, and Corran knew that was because of its shape, not just the jagged outline from where the armor crumbled. Kind of a diamond shape …
He looked up. “Did you hurt your hand?”
Ooryl folded his three fingers into a fist with the wound’s peculiar shape. “Ooryl is not impaired.”
“Well, I am, by the night and the fog. You’ll be in the lead. We have to assume the others are rigging the flight center to blow.”
“No alarm?”
Corran hesitated. By rights raising an alarm would be the smart thing to do, but there were no troops to fight against the stormtroopers. Waking everyone up would be inviting them to get slaughtered as they ran about unarmed. The pilots would head toward their ships and the stormtroopers in the flight center would cut them down in seconds.
“Have to go silent on this one. We want to approach the flight center from the blind side.”
The Gand nodded and led Corran out into the misty darkness. Clutching the blaster carbine to his chest, a legion of conflicting thoughts and emotions flooded through him. With each step a new plan presented itself to him. There had to be better ways to handle the situation than slipping blindly through the night to go hunting stormtroopers. They had every advantage over him. Not only would their armor protect them, but the helmet enhanced their vision and the built-in comlink meant they could coordinate any efforts to hunt him down and kill him.
Thoughts shifted and ambition sparked dreams of glory. He saw himself as a hero of the Alliance for foiling the stormtrooper raid, yet that dream died quickly. As Biggs Darklighter and Jek Porkins had shown, most heroes of the Alliance were made heroes posthumously, and posthumous was the most likely outcome of the expedition. This did not suit Corran, but the sense of menace radiating out through the night made it hard to deny.
At the same time the knowledge that he was surely dead provided him with a sense of freedom. His goal shifted from staying alive to making sure his friends would stay alive. He wasn’t fighting for himself, he was fighting for them. He was the shield that would prevent the Empire’s evil from touching them. In this idea he found a haven from the sense of doom grinding in on him.
Ooryl stopped him with a hand pressed gently to his chest. The Gand held up one finger, then pointed straight ahead. He made a fist with his right hand, then signaled with his left in a looping motion.
Corran nodded and sighted the carbine along the line where Ooryl had pointed. The Gand slipped to the left and immediately disappeared in the fog. The Corellian waited, willing himself to be able to see through the fog to his target. He knew the chances of hitting anything were minimal, and he expected to aim at the source of any blaster fire he saw. Even so, he allowed himself to believe he could feel the soldier in a hard carapace standing twenty or so meters in front of him.
A wet crunch drifted to him through the fog. Corran moved forward, carefully pushing his way through the leafy plants and curtains of tendril-moss at the fringe of the compound. About where he had expected his target to be he found the Gand crouched over a prostrate stormtrooper. The helmet looked decidedly flattened on top and now rode low enough to hide the man’s throat.
Ooryl unfastened the last of the catches on the breast and stomach armor, then pulled it from the dead man’s body and handed it to Corran. “You shall have exoskeleton, too.”
The human pilot smiled. He removed his gunbelt and slipped the armor on. It was much too big for him, but he tightened the flank straps as much as he could and got a vaguely reasonable fit. Adding the trooper’s ammo belt to his own helped hold the armor in place, though the weight of two blasters—one on each hip—made him feel slow.
Ooryl hefted the other carbine in his free hand, then headed off into the night. Corran followed and quickly enough they came to the side of the flight center that faced away from the central compound. They made good use of the hole the kaha tree had made in the wall to slip back into the building. Light shone in beneath the edge of the door into the hallway and Corran took this as a good sign.
He pointed to it. “If the troopers were in this wing, they’d have killed the light because leaving it on means they’ll be silhouetted when they enter a darkened room. Gavin and Shiel are in the next room. Let’s get to them.”
The Gand nodded and opened the door a crack. He peered out, then waved Corran forward. Corran shut the door behind him and followe
d Ooryl through the next door down the hallway. The Gand crossed to where the Shistavanen lay while Corran approached Gavin’s bed. Shifting the carbine to his right hand, he crouched down and laid his left hand over Gavin’s mouth.
He felt the boy start. “Gavin, be quiet. It’s me, Corran. Be still.”
Shiel awoke with a low growl, but after taking a couple of healthy sniffs of the air, he stopped making any noise. He sat up, then slipped from the bed and crouched along with Corran and the Gand at Gavin’s bedside. “Troopers. Blood.”
Corran nodded. “We have stormies here in the base. They’re rigging it to explode—they’re in the hangar now, I think. We have three down and we’re guessing there were two dozen total.”
Ooryl handed the Shistavanen wolfman a carbine. “You know how to use this?”
Shiel’s whispered laugh sounded like a growl. “Death marks don’t come with the rain.”
Corran stripped off one of his gunbelts and shoved it at Gavin. “You can fire a blaster?”
The youth nodded, his face pale in the light from beneath the door. “Don’t know if I’ll hit anything, though.”
“Point and shoot. And shoot. And shoot.” Corran looked over at the two aliens. “Since you both can navigate in the dark, and since your coloration makes you hard to spot, I think you should head out and around to the hangar.” He passed Shiel two of the spare clips from his belt. “We’ll work our way in through the center here and try to attract their attention. If you get a clue to where their ship is …”
The hall light went out.
“Uh-oh.” Gavin shucked the pistol from its holster and the power selection lever clicked.
“Leave it on kill, kid.” Corran pointed to the window. “Go, you two. Flank them.”
Wordlessly Corran turned and scuttled over to the door. Reaching up he turned the knob and opened it a crack. He couldn’t see anything in the dark, but he did hear the squeak of hinges farther along the hallway. He touched the medallion he wore once for luck, then pulled open the door, stepped into the hallway, and fired a burst.
Two bolts caught one stormtrooper in the chest and tossed him backward into another trooper. The dead man’s finger jerked his carbine’s trigger, sending a line of bolts down the hallway. Corran dove to the right, slamming his shoulder into the wall avoiding them. Red light flashed back out of the doorway near the head of the hall, reminding Corran of the flare in the eyeplate of the first trooper he had killed. In an instant the Corellian knew the room contained a third stormtrooper and that at least one of the squadron’s pilots lay dead in bed.
Corran’s second burst knocked down the stormtrooper emerging from beneath the Imp corpse. Corran thought he went down hard enough to be dead, but the little votive fires lit in the floors and walls by the stray blaster bolts didn’t supply enough light for him to be certain. Then the trooper in the room at the head of the hallway emerged and, as if the trooper’s mirror image, Gavin came through the doorway of his room.
“Gavin, no!”
The farm boy triggered one shot while the trooper filled the hallway with a steady stream of fire. Corran hit his trigger and scythed the muzzle back and forth across the hallway. He heard Gavin grunt and fall behind him. His own shots cut the legs out from under the stormtrooper. The last bolt blasted through the square eyeplate and bubbled the armor at the back of the man’s head.
The doors all along the hallway swung open. Nearest to him Corran saw the Twi’lek. “Gavin’s down. Help him. Stormtroopers are here in the base.”
Nawara Ven stared at him. “How did they find …”
“I don’t know. The place is rigged to blow. Get everyone clear.” Corran sprinted down the hallway, leaping over the trio of dead stormtroopers. He stripped the power pack from the carbine and slapped a new one into it. As he neared the hangar he heard plenty of blaster fire. The semitransparent plastic strips hung over the doorway showed a lot of shots heading out to converge on two points in the darkness, which told Corran that Shiel and Ooryl had attracted plenty of attention with their flanking maneuver. Shooting coming from either side of the door, too.
Corran fished one of the explosive cylinders from a belt pouch and set the timer for five seconds. He punched his thumb down on the arming button. Glancing up he located what he saw as the largest concentration of shots heading out at his comrades. Six. Looks good to me.
Corran stepped through the plastic curtain and let the arming button come up, starting the timer. He slid the explosive cylinder across the smooth ferrocrete surface toward the knot of commandos. Three, two, one!
The explosion scattered the soldiers, casting two up and over the generator cart they’d been using as cover. Before they hit the ground, Corran turned and thrust his blaster carbine at the stormtrooper hunkered down to the left of the door. The burst of laser fire burned through the torso armor, blasting the man out from behind a breastwork of crates.
Spinning, Corran sprayed scarlet blaster darts over the stormtrooper on the other side of the doorway. The shots hit him in the chest and legs, somersaulting him back through the plastic sheet and out of the hangar. Continuing his spin, Corran snapped shots off at various muzzle flashes, backing and turning, picking up speed and allowing himself to drift almost at random.
He knew he should be terribly frightened, but since he had decided he was as good as dead before, fear could find no purchase on his soul. He viewed his situation with an emotional detachment that surprised him. It allowed him to see his entry into the hangar much as he had seen diving into the cloud of TIEs at Hensara. I can shoot at anyone—they have to take care.
Corran’s gun came up and the muzzle tracked strobing laser fire over the silhouette of a stormtrooper up on the hangar’s catwalk. The trooper straightened up and twitched, then slowly began a backward spin toward the floor that Corran found incredibly graceful. His landing, which was all broken and herky-jerky, ruined the beauty of his fall and brought Corran back to the hideous reality in which he was enmeshed.
A laser bolt caught him in the right breast and pitched him into the shadows. He landed hard against a wall of wooden crates and stars exploded before his eyes when his head hit something solid. He heard wood and glass break and a gurgle of a vessel emptying. He hoped it wasn’t his body emptying of blood, but the shooting pains in his chest and the fire radiating out from the wound all but guaranteed he was the source of the sound. A sickly sweet scent mixed with the stink of burned flesh and Corran knew he was dying.
That smells like Corellian whiskey. His mind flashed back to the endless rounds of drinks at his father’s wake. Each one punctuated a toast or a testament to his father by members of CorSec, from the Director on down to Gil and Iella to the rookies his father had taken under his wing. At that time Corran had thought having such a wake would be the grandest sendoff possible. And now I hallucinate the smell of it.
A jolt of pain left him a moment of lucidity in its wake and Corran clung to it. His vision cleared and he saw laser bolts burning in all directions through the darkness. He tried to lift his own carbine, but he couldn’t feel its weight in his hand. He decided to draw the blaster pistol, which was when he discovered his right arm wasn’t working so well.
That realization came a second or two before the laser fire silhouetted a stormtrooper seeking cover nearby.
Corran willed his body to sink into the ferrocrete, but nothing happened.
The stormtrooper swept something aside with a foot and Corran heard the clatter of the carbine against an unseen crate. He tried to lever himself up with his left arm, but the pain in the right side of his chest stopped him. He found himself short of breath. My lung. Collapsed.
The stormtrooper lowered his carbine, giving Corran a good view of the muzzle. “It’s over for you, Rebel scum.”
“You, too, little stormie.” Corran raised his left hand but kept his thumb pressed on the end of the explosive cylinder he’d eased from the pouch on his belt. “I die and it blows.”
The st
ormtrooper hesitated for a second, then shook his head. “Nice try. You’re holding the wrong end.”
Blaster whine filled the crate-lined cul de sac and Corran flinched involuntarily. He thought flinching was a bad way to die, then he realized that the dead are seldom that vain. Above him the stormtrooper’s body wavered, then buckled at the knees and crashed down beside him. The hole in the back of his armor sparked and smoked.
Wedge came running up and dropped to one knee beside Corran. “How are you doing, Mr. Horn?”
“Parts of me don’t hurt that much.”
Wedge smiled. “Hang tight. The stormies are withdrawing. Medic!”
“Bombs.”
“I know. We’re finding and disarming them.”
Corran smiled and tried to take a deep breath. “Gavin?”
“Bad, like you. We’re already getting set to evacuate.”
“I’m as good as dead.” He winced. “I’m so far gone I smell Corellian whiskey.”
“You do smell Corellian whiskey, Corran. You’re lying in a puddle of it.” Wedge frowned. “The crate that broke your fall is full of Whyren’s Reserve.”
“What? How?”
Wedge shook his head as Emdee droids toddled over. “I don’t know. Consider solving that mystery your assignment while you recover from your wounds.”
19
Wedge Antilles watched as Gavin Darklighter and Corran Horn floated all but lifeless in bacta tanks. Seeing them there brought back memories of the time he had spent in such a tank—it hadn’t been aboard the Reprieve but on Home One, Admiral Ackbar’s flagship at Endor. He’d been barely conscious during his time in the tank, which he saw as a blessing. Being awake and thinking while being able to do nothing would have driven him insane.