Authors: David Sherman
“On the other side of this riverbed are the enemy’s positions, occupying this large, flat plain. This mesa, back here, is where the Intergalactic Communications Center is located. That was the enemy’s objective, and I’m sure he’s holding it in considerable strength. I’m sure that as members of General Khamar’s army you’re familiar with how this place is laid out. Whoever’s in command over there is smart. He tried six times to take us by storm and we beat him off each time. Not without losses on our side, but we cut his droids down by the thousands. He took Izable twice, and we took it back from him each time. Now he’s content to probe our lines looking for weak spots, attempting to outflank
us, and digging tunnels. Yes, he’s got one going right now, at a depth of about one hundred meters, headed straight toward Izable. When he gets there he’ll set off a mountain of explosives and blow Izable sky-high. So we’re digging a countermine to go under his and blow it before it reaches Izable. Be interesting to see who gets there first, won’t it?” Slayke grinned fiercely.
“What are our chances?” Erk asked.
“Before we attacked I sent a message to Coruscant asking for help. Maybe it’ll come in time, maybe not. Until then we’re on our own, but we’ve really messed up this guy’s timetable.” He gestured at the enemy positions on the holomap. “My guess is he’s waiting to be reinforced, too. Whoever’s opposing me over there was sent here to secure the center, not garrison it, so there’s got to be a large follow-on force coming along soon. If it gets here before we’re reinforced …” He shrugged.
“What are you planning to do until then, sir?” Odie asked.
“Do? Well, I’m going to kick them as hard as I can.” The officers standing around the map laughed. “And you two—I can always use a pair of gunners up at Izable. How about it?”
“Yessir.”
“Sergeant L’Loxx, get them fed, issue them some equipment, and get them up to Izable. They can report to Lieutenant D’Nore for further assignment. Good luck.” He held out his hand and they shook.
The meal they were given consisted of field combat rations designed to sustain life at a high rate of metabolism, not to satisfy epicurean tastes. When they were finished
eating, L’Loxx gave them each an equipment belt. “They’re standard infantry load-bearing equipment harnesses, but we’ve added some extra tools we’ve found useful in the field. Check out the pouches first chance you get and familiarize yourself with their contents. Could save your life in a pinch.”
Lieutenant D’Nore was a harassed Bothan struggling with the responsibility of maintaining his outpost on 100 percent alert. It was he who had led the assault party that had most recently recaptured Izable from the battle droids. Since then, the only sleep he’d been able to get was in brief snatches. “I’m not letting them retake Izable,” he told his two new fighters. “You’ll work in an advanced listening post covering sector five.” He didn’t bother to indicate where “sector five” in the outpost might be before he was off to confer with the soldiers in sector three, shouting over his shoulder as he left, “I’ll talk to you two more later. I had three people down there, but they were all wounded and evacuated. So whatever you do, don’t fire your weapon unless you’re attacked. I don’t want the enemy to know we’ve reoccupied the listening post.” With that he disappeared down a communications trench.
A sergeant standing nearby said, “Come on, you two, I’ll take you down. Be sure not to expose yourselves above the trench line, or you’ll get zapped for sure.” Crouching low, the pair followed him off in the opposite direction from the one the lieutenant had just taken. After some twistings and turnings, the trench ended at a fortified embrasure. “Sector five,” the sergeant announced. Bloodstains and shreds of clothing
marked the spot where medics had treated the last crew operating the gun.
“I’ve never even seen a weapon like this, much less know how to operate it,” Erk said, looking at the E-Web repeating blaster.
“I’ve been trained on all types of infantry weapons,” Odie replied. “I’ll fire the blaster, you monitor the power generator.” She turned to the sergeant. “When will we be relieved?”
“When you’re relieved, and I don’t have any idea when that will be,” he answered. He handed them each a ration packet. “Make them last—they’re all we have left. Sleep in shifts. One of you monitor the tactical net at all times. Comm check every thirty minutes. Don’t miss one. Fire your weapon only when you have a target. You aren’t down here to stop an assault, only to give us a warning if one comes and slow them down a little. When they start closing in, that’s the time to go back up that trench to the main defensive position as quick as you can. It’s up to you to decide when to bug out, but don’t wait too long. Your communications call sign is
Hope Five;
the command post is
Izzy Six
. Synchronize your chronos—it’s sixteen fifteen. Check in at sixteen forty-five.” With that, he scuttled back up the communications trench.
Despite her brave words, Odie hadn’t trained exhaustively with the E-Web repeating blasters, and it took her several minutes of examination to refamiliarize herself with the system. When she felt confident enough, she began explaining it to Erk.
“This blaster should be connected to the other ones in the outpost by its built-in long-range secure comlink,”
she said, pointing out each component as she mentioned it. “That means if we come under attack, the targeting systems on the other blasters will automatically zero in to give us supporting fire and vice versa.” She rapidly checked the comlink. “Good, it’s working. Everything’s still powered up, so we don’t have to go through that sequence—that can take up to fifteen minutes.”
“What’ll this thing do?” Erk asked, looking at the blaster. He unfastened his equipment harness and tossed it in a corner.
“Might want to keep that on, Erk,” she warned. “You never know when you might need something in there.”
“Yeah, I’ve glanced at it—mostly groundpounder beauty aids, most of which I don’t even know how to use. So what’s in those pouches?”
“Neat stuff. I haven’t had a chance to inspect everything yet but—”
“I want you to teach me how to use this blaster, Odie. I don’t need all that junk slung over me to do that—it’ll only get in the way. You tell me if there’s anything hanging on here I might need, all right?”
“Sure. Well, this blaster, see, it’s a pretty deadly anti-personnel weapon. Its effective range is only two hundred meters, but its maximum range is out to half a kilometer. With the interlocking fields of fire, I don’t think any droids will get through. Your job will be to monitor the power flow so the gun doesn’t overheat during action. If I get disabled, just switch to the power generator’s preset mode—this switch here. That’ll prevent dangerous surges, but it also reduces the weapon’s
rate of fire considerably. I’ll teach you everything you need to know about how to use it, then we can spell each other.”
“How’d you learn all this stuff?”
“Recon troopers are infantry, too,” Odie answered, “so I’ve been trained on weapons, even if I don’t carry a blaster rifle.”
The embrasure had been drilled out of the rock in a way that allowed for plenty of overhead and flank protection. Forward observation was through narrow slits cut in the stone. Erk peered through one of the viewing ports. In the fading light he could still clearly make out the blasted ground between sector five and the dry riverbed, which was littered with destroyed droids. He wondered what had happened to the defenders of this position when it had been overrun. For the first time, a feeling of hopelessness began to possess him. How could anyone expect them to survive in this position? “We’ll have to sleep with our headgear on,” he remarked, “since we’ll need infrared capability once it gets dark.”
“Right. The blaster has an infrared target acquisition system. Before it gets too dark to see, I’ll show you some more things about it.”
The night passed quietly. The lines were probed in other sectors, resulting in intermittent blasterfire. At those times the tactical communications net came alive with reports and orders, and both Erk and Odie became fully alert, but once the shooting died down they took turns trying to catch some sleep. They divided the night into two-hour watches. Odie had taught Erk enough about their weapon that he could operate it by
himself and deliver immediate fire if anything moved in their sector. Even watching through his night-vision devices, Erk’s eyes played tricks on him: irregular mounds seemed to move if he stared at them long enough. He found himself rubbing his eyes and shaking his head frequently to clear his vision. He fought to stay awake. As a fighter pilot he knew very well how fatal inattention could be, but he wasn’t in a high-performance fighter now, he was sitting in a damp, rocky crypt that smelled of blood and feces, hunger gnawed at his stomach and made him faint, he hadn’t slept in ages, and he ached all over. His knee, in particular, throbbed painfully.
He sighed, shook himself, blinked. First light would be in a few minutes, then dawn. Usually he loved this time of day, before the rest of the world was awake, and everything was quiet, clean, peaceful. He shivered. The nights in this part of Praesitlyn were very cold and the days scorching hot. He looked down at Odie. She had drifted off to sleep as soon as it was her turn. He smiled. She could’ve been out there with the recon troopers, doing what she did best, riding free like the wind, but instead she had volunteered to stay with him, and here she was in this hole, the only thing between her and the invading army a thin wall of rock. When they got out of this mess …
Erk’s heart fluttered. Something out there had moved! His palms on the aiming handles suddenly grew sweaty. He nudged Odie with his toe, and she snapped awake instantly.
“Something’s out there,” he whispered. He was fully alert now, as every fiber in his body reacted to the
adrenaline surging through him. He was surprised to hear himself chuckling in anticipation. “Come on, come on,” he whispered, focusing the gun’s optics, impatient for the action to begin. He could see as clearly as day through the sighting system. Then the entire field of vision through the firing port seemed to heave up and come at him.
“Izzy Six! Izzy Six! Hope Five. Here they come!” he said urgently.
Erk began firing into the mass of oncoming battle droids. He was aware of Odie at his side, monitoring the power surges as the blaster roared.
A tiny voice inside his helmet asked, “Hope Five, Izzy Six here. What is the enemy strength? Repeat, what is the enemy strength? Over.”
“Thousands of them,” Erk shouted. “Thousands!”
M
y Dearest …” No, that wouldn’t do, too impersonal. He started over. “My love …” No, no, too, too ordinary. He thought uncertainly about what to say next. Try this: “I miss you more than I can say. My heart is overflowing with love for you, my dearest, sweetest …” He wrote in this vein for a while on a sheet of flimsiplast, then paused and reread the paragraph. No, no, no, he sounded like a lovesick adolescent! This was his wife, a Senator, a heroine, a woman who was the life mate of a Jedi Knight, or a man who soon would be one—or dead.
Anakin Skywalker sat in his cabin on board the
Ranger
. In a few hours he would transfer from the
Ranger
to the
Neelian
, a corvette accompanying the transports. Halcyon would remain on the
Ranger
to lead the attack while Anakin commanded the landing force. Then Halcyon and the heavy cruisers would smash a hole in the enemy blockade, a hole through which Anakin and the ground forces would make planetfall on Praesitlyn. They knew through IFF—identification-friend-or-foe—systems unaffected by the communications blackout that at least some of Slayke’s
fleet had survived the initial contact and were still in orbit around Praesitlyn, in contact with the remaining Separatist ships.
When Slayke had been pardoned for raising his own force to attack the Separatists and commissioned to act on his own as a privateer, he had been given his own set of IFF codes. These codes contained all the information on file about each ship in his fleet, its name, class and armaments, ship’s complement, and so on. Each ship had been equipped with a transponder that, when queried with the appropriate IFF code, would respond with its proper identification, thereby establishing that it was a friendly vessel, hopefully avoiding the kind of “friendly fire” incident that all too frequently occurred in the heat of battle. Halcyon was confident that once the attack commenced, Slayke’s vessels would join them, and together they’d overwhelm the blockading force. So far the cordon placed around Sluis Van did not appear to have been disturbed. If those ships moved to participate in the battle, things could get complicated.
The landing zone on Praesitlyn had already been marked out: a piece of rugged terrain behind a dry riverbed on the plain just below the plateau where the Intergalactic Communications Center sat. Halcyon had picked that spot rather than one on the plateau itself because he felt a pitched battle that close to the center would be more likely to result in its destruction and the death of the technicians who were presumed to be prisoners of the Separatists.
Halcyon, Anakin, their commanders, the troops, and the crews who staffed the fleet had done all they could
to prepare for the coming battle. Now it was time to rest. In a few hours the fleet would arrive at its initial point, the sector of space surrounding Praesitlyn that the captains had selected as the area where they would bring their ships into attack formations. The enemy fleet had to know they were coming by now; they had been inside the dead zone where communications had been cut off with the rest of the galaxy for some time. In fact, Halcyon had been in the middle of a report to the Jedi Council when the equipment had gone dead, a sure sign that they had entered the hostile zone of influence.
Anakin crumpled the flimsiplast and fed it into the shredder. He pulled out another. A Jedi did not feel fear, despair, loneliness. He knew that the coming battle would be won and that his division would acquit itself well: Grudo had told him so many times, and Grudo knew armies and commanders. In fact, Anakin had been a phenomenally quick study in the art of command, throwing himself into the task every waking hour of each day the fleet was in transit. He had immersed himself enthusiastically in all aspects of military management, as well. Neither did he feel despair; he looked forward to the coming battle. They had right and justice on their side, and they would prevail. He eagerly anticipated meeting the legendary Captain Slayke. And he didn’t feel lonely, either. His relationship with Halcyon, who treated him like a younger brother, had grown even closer. And Grudo, the faithful, solid, reliable old Rodian, had stuck so close to him during the voyage that they had become inseparable companions.