The Last Brigade

by Jack Parker

In the Outer Rim, Terros Ryker fights a vicious army as it sweeps down upon the planet he has adopted as his own. His brigade is the last line of defense, so far from the core that they cannot count on help from the fledgling New Republic. However, he fears that the true threat lies deep within his own mind, with the voices he hears speaking there in the dark. Serial project.

1. Chapter 1

Star Wars: The Last Brigade

1

As he ran through the desert, tasting the thick red dust coating the inside of his mouth, burning down into his lungs, Ryker could feel the planet's core tearing itself apart. The ground shaking as if something deep below had been woken from an ancient sleep, rising now in fury. Cracks running across the parched landscape. Far to the west, a mountain crumbled, great avalanches sliding down its sides, so far away that they were silent despite the huge clouds of rolling dust and earth that took to the air.

At the foot of that mountain had been a town, but he didn't have time to think about things like that. Not if he wanted to live.

He could see the ship ahead of him, sitting in the wide expanse of red. A Corellian ship, so heavily modified over the years that it no longer looked like the sleek vessel it had once been. Long and slender, the bow reaching forward almost like a needle, a gun turret rising from the top. The wings retracted now but ready to spring out when needed, tucked into the slots in the hull so that the craft looked like a hornet crouched and poised for flight. The ship was bouncing slightly as the earth moved below it.

Ryker kept running, flat out. He could barely breathe. He was about two kilometers past the point where he could no longer feel the burning in his chest, his legs, because everything was numb. It was just running on autopilot now. If his body gave out, there wouldn't be anything he could do. He willed it along. Dying with the ship this close would be worse than dying in the town as those dark mountains came down.

With a sudden lurch, the ground came up in front of him. Or it dropped off before him. It happened so fast that he couldn't tell. One minute he was running on hard-packed red dirt and the next he was sprinting over a ten-foot ledge, boulders and dust pouring down all around him, flailing his arms to keep his balance or break his fall as he went over. As tired as he was, he had time to curse in Correllian, a word his grandfather had often loved years ago when he was still alive, and then he hit the ground.

It was like there was no air in the world. It had all been stripped away. He gasped, opening and closing his mouth, pushing himself to his feet and staggering forward even though he couldn't breathe. Telling himself it would come back, it would come back. He tripped, fell, and picked himself up again, now drawing in ragged breaths. His whole body coated in the red dirt over his sun-darkened skin. In his hair.

The ship was still there. Closer now. The sun glinting on its surface, shining on this world as it had done for millennia, unaware that there would not be another morning, another sunrise. That tomorrow there would be nothing here at all but swirling rock and the bodies of the dead as they froze in vacuum. If those bodies even had the good fortune to be so preserved.

They might be nothing more than ash and memory.

Refusing to look anywhere but at the ship, Ryker ran flat out, the desert writhing about him in the throes of death and the agony of destruction. Deep in the back corners of his mind, he could hear someone laughing.