Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company (28 page)

So
many
kinds of death.

In the trench, as Hazram patted himself down and felt for blood or injuries, he realized he no longer carried his particle blaster.

He laughed with a hoarse and queasy sound. The blaster had run out of power on the first day of fighting. It had been his payment—a clean and polished weapon to rival anything built on Crucival—for signing on to aid the tower-masters, the offworlders who called themselves the First Galactic Empire.

It hadn’t seemed a poor bargain then. He’d fought for so many masters: the Warlord Malkhan and his clan; the Opaline Creed, with its hundred doctrines and righteous fervor; the Lady of Coins and her dust-shrouded acolytes; and more besides, all with their own labored reasoning as to why they, and only they, could justly claim Crucival as their own. But he couldn’t remember the last time he’d cared about his masters’ justifications for war, or believed Crucival under one ruler would be different from Crucival under another. When emissaries of the Empire had emerged from the tower for the first time in years, declaring that a foe was coming to the planet and that they would arm anyone who pledged to fight, it had seemed like one more opportunity. The best opportunity Hazram had seen in ages.

He was too old to keep joining the factions of Crucival one after the next. He was no longer a child, eager to pledge life and spirit to a cause. His past loyalties made him suspect or a pariah. He had few paths left, and if he could arm himself and his allies the way Malkhan had, found a faction of his own with power to spare—

—well, there were possibilities. And the Empire had only asked for one battle.

He’d brought Pira with him. Pira, who’d been at his side since the Creed; Pira, who was family. He recruited others like Tar and Mishru: men he had fought against before they’d lost their own masters. He’d found them in the city streets, hiding their brands and robbing passersby. Hazram’s band had been nearly a dozen in total, soldiers ready to stop drifting from war to war.

When the Empire’s troops in white had handed them their rifles, told them to defend the tower against rebels from the sky, Hazram had looked at his band and seen
survivors.
He’d seen the greatest warriors on Crucival.

They’d nearly all died in the first wave.

The tower-masters and their white-clad troops had withdrawn under the dome and let their mercenaries face the rebel vanguard. The Empire must have known the people of Crucival couldn’t prevail. The mercenaries were fodder. At best, they were a delaying tactic. A thousand soldiers and a thousand particle blasters were nothing against the offworlders’ arsenal.

Hazram hadn’t seen it soon enough, and he cursed himself.

He climbed out of his trench, resumed his crawl across the battlefield and away from the tower.

He heard a low humming behind him. Over his shoulder he spied a metal sphere the size of a human head floating above the wreckage, its lone red eye flicking back and forth. It belonged to the Empire, not the rebels, but Hazram knew what it would do. When it saw something move, it stared. Where it stared, a flier would soon follow. With the fliers came a rain of destruction.

Against his better judgment, Hazram ran. A flier’s bombs would leave nothing but a crater and dust. Not even ruins would be left.

He tripped once, again, catching himself both times. After the agonizingly slow crawl, he’d forgotten his own fatigue. Even before the battle, he’d barely been eating, stealing what he could from war camps or trading trinkets with the merchants of the city. He felt simultaneously light,
too
light, and as heavy as a mountain. When a long stride took him over the crest of a hill, he was in midair before he saw the sheer drop below him. He tumbled three meters down the face of an escarpment, landed hard, releasing a strained, breathy moan as his ankle turned beneath him.

He couldn’t run again. He pulled his legs to his chest and edged backward against the escarpment, into a narrow ditch at its base. He heard the noise of thunder up the hillside and clouds of dust washed over him.

At least he’d survived the flier. They rarely bothered with a second pass.

“Hazram?”

The voice was small and confused, like a child’s.

He let go of his legs, rested his ankle on the cool dirt. So long as he didn’t move it, it didn’t sting. He looked down the ditch and saw a figure stretched out a few meters away, shivering on her side.

Pira had changed since her days with the Creed. Hazram had watched her transform from a small, tough, long-haired girl to a tall, lanky, underfed woman who shaved her head to deny any handhold to an enemy. Her face was full of scars, and she’d taken a brand around her mouth during the year she and Hazram had spent separated. He couldn’t see the brand now, thanks to the red crust covering her lips and chin.

“I thought the fliers got you,” she said.

“Same here,” he answered.

Pira didn’t move closer. Hazram slowly dragged himself to her side, propping himself up. Pira didn’t rise. She smelled like every wrong a human body could suffer.

“We lost pretty awful, didn’t we?” she asked.

Hazram nodded. He saw that one of her legs was a mess of blood and cloth. “I made a bad call,” he said.

Pira laughed. “You really, really did,” she said. “But you weren’t the only one.”

He tried to shift closer, adjust himself so that he could get a better look at her leg. She pushed him away without force. “It’s past infected,” she said. “Unless you can amputate and cauterize, it’s not going anywhere good.”

Hazram swore quietly, without ire. “We can wait for a break in the fighting,” he said. “Escape together.”

“That was my plan,” Pira said, and smirked. “Glad you figured it out.”

They sat together, listening to the distant squawking of particle blasters and the rumble of bombs. Part of Hazram’s brain—the part that had been fighting for the better part of a decade, starting barely after he’d hit puberty; the part that knew how to ambush an enemy camp at midnight and slit a sentry’s throat, or find the weak point of a blockade—ran scenarios, tried to determine what it would take to carry Pira to safety and a surgeon.

The rest of his brain struggled with what to say while Pira was still alive.

“We should’ve gotten out a long time ago,” Pira said quietly. “Whatever more there is, it can’t be worse than this.”

“Next time,” Hazram said.

“Next time,” Pira agreed.

The last thing they talked about before Pira fell asleep was bread pudding: the kind the Creed had made on holy days, with sweet fruits and a charred crust. That was when the sect had possessed gold and food to spare. Pira had adored the Creed’s pudding, despite how it made her itch the morning after. Hazram had shared his bowl with her on the eve of the Hieroprince’s Ascension, when Pira had been blindfolded and forced to abstain as punishment for misreciting the doctrines.

In the pre-morning light, Hazram left Pira in the ditch and resumed his crawl across the dewy battlefield. He told himself he would return if he could—if he could find medicine for the gangrene or a cart on which to carry her. By the time he left the hillsides behind, he still believed he had a chance.

That night, from the ruin of the Creed’s cloister outside the city, he watched the hills burn. Then he knew he would not return after all.

The tower fell the next day. Victory, then, for the rebels. The Empire’s soldiers in white had claimed the tower was a transmitter, that it communicated somehow with other planets; that was why they had wanted it preserved. Hazram wondered if the Empire would be back to build another, or if its rulers would give up on Crucival altogether. It was an idle, dispassionate sort of wonder.

Hazram’s comrades were dead. He was weaponless and had no warband to protect him, no clan or faction to feed him. He spent the days following foraging for food—the birds nesting in the cloister had left a few eggs, enough to sustain him—or sitting in the weeds and grass in a weary haze. Now and again, his thoughts drifted to what he might do next: If he returned to the city, he would be recognized as a failure—as the man who had killed his allies chasing false hope, proving himself without value as a leader or a fighter. If he was fortunate, he might not be hunted and killed for his past associations. He would be able to eke out a living as a beggar or a thief.

Or he might become his father, an ex-soldier-turned-coward shunned or pitied by the city’s other residents. He could die stabbed in the gut by a child, like his father finally had.

He could not return to the city.

Almost a week after the tower fell, his head throbbing from a lack of food and sleep and his unwashed clothes stinking of sweat, Hazram spotted a trickle of men and women leaving the city and walking the path toward the tower’s ruins. Many were armed, but they didn’t march as if to war—they were alone and in groups, as cautious as any prudent travelers but unafraid of being seen. Hazram watched them from a distance and trailed them without thinking. He had nothing else to occupy himself except survival.

They reached the battlefield by noon. The hills had already been picked clean by scavengers—humans stealing weapons from the fallen, scrap metal from machines; animals feasting on carrion—so Hazram was unsurprised when the line of travelers skirted around the destruction. Hazram thought of peeling off then, of searching for Pira and the others. But he’d seen enough of his dead to know it would give him no pleasure. He would find no satisfaction in revisiting the site of his failure.

So he wandered closer to the travelers, joining them on the path they beat through the yellow grass. As they crested a rise, he saw their destination: a circle of tents and generators and mechanical vehicles. It was an offworlder camp, and since Hazram saw no soldiers in white he presumed it belonged to the rebels. The group descended the rise, past the eyes of sentries who only scowled or smiled, looking the pilgrims over and waving them on. No one stopped until the camp proper; there, the travelers were approached, one by one, by rebels who took them among the tents to converse.

Hazram hadn’t seen the rebels up close before. Their clothes were clearly of offworld design—they were perfectly sewn from brightly dyed, tough-looking fabrics—but they were stained and torn nonetheless. Some of the rebels wore helmets or heavy vests, while others barely seemed ready for battle, carrying only their sidearms. Those not engaging the travelers murmured to one another and laughed, or sat near their tents chewing on cakes in silver wrappers. They had the proud, weary look of soldiers after victory.

They looked too ordinary to have slaughtered Hazram’s comrades so swiftly.

“Next?” The voice was powerful, resonant as a bomb blast. Hazram realized he had found his way to the fore of the line. Approaching him was a monstrous, four-armed alien with a demon’s head—a brown, bulbous, widemouthed mass topped with a crest of bone. One of its arms gestured Hazram forward, its nightmarish head smiling toothily, its eyes shining with impatience.

Hazram’s comrades were dead. He could not return to the city. He stepped forward, and the alien led him between a pair of silver-green tents.

“We prefer to conduct these within a settlement,” the creature said, “but we were warned our approach might be viewed as aggression. I promise you, we have no designs on Crucival.”

“Not a lot here worth taking,” Hazram said. He glanced about the camp, idly noting escape routes. He did not know what the alien expected or wanted. He did not especially care.

The creature shook its head with a wince, but left whatever troubled it unspoken. Instead it lowered itself to the dust, sitting cross-legged with a sigh. When Hazram had joined it, the alien asked, “So: Why do wish to join the Rebellion against the Empire?”

Was that why the camp was here? Hazram felt a fool for not realizing it earlier. They were recruiting.

He could have turned and walked away. Instead he stared at the alien for a while and finally said, “The Empire killed my friends.”

It was true, in its way. Hazram held no grudge against them, but the tower-masters had arranged the execution even if they hadn’t pulled the trigger.

The creature nodded slowly. Two meaty hands wove together. “You seek revenge, then?”

Hazram watched the alien and let the question tumble in his skull. He could get revenge. He could wrest a blaster from one of the rebels, shoot everyone in the camp before he was overwhelmed. He pictured it, worked the scenario. There was no pleasure in it.

“Not really,” Hazram said.

“Good,” the creature said, and again offered that toothy smile. “Revenge is a fuel that burns too swiftly. But I will tell you this much: Should you join us, we, too, will mourn your friends.”

Hazram barked a laugh. The creature clapped its lower hands together, as if pleased, before launching into an explanation of its warband’s place in the galaxy.

It claimed to represent “the Rebel Alliance’s Sixty-First Mobile Infantry,” a company of troops that moved from star to star at the whims of its superiors. Its unit had fought the Empire on a thousand battlegrounds across a hundred worlds. It was bloody work, the creature said, and the rewards were few. But when Hazram asked, it assured him there was sufficient food and clothing and arms for all, “save in the most dire circumstances.”

“How often are circumstances dire?” Hazram asked.

The creature chuckled softly. It sounded like a drumbeat. “More often than we’d like,” it admitted.

It went on to question Hazram about his combat experience. Had he fought in a unit before? Could he use a blaster? “So young,” it said with a shake of its head when Hazram told it a second time—it seemed not to hear him the first—how long he’d been killing. When the questions were done, the alien spoke lovingly of exotic sights—endless deserts, planets of islands adrift on clouds, countless species—that the company had been privileged to encounter. It cautioned Hazram as well that the company rarely retraced its path. If he signed on, he would not find it easy to return to Crucival, though he would be permitted to depart the company if he wished.