Borrowed Weapons, Borrowed Lives
The Blastech E-11 rifle was the weapon chosen by the Galactic Empire for its elite Stormtrooper Corps. It was not the best unit on the market, the lightest, the most damaging, or even the cheapest. In fact, though reliable and versatile, it was not standout in any particular way, but it soon became the most feared standard issue infantry armament in the galaxy. Such was the reputation and skill of the men who wore the white armor.
Only here, Scour thought grimly as he fired into the trees again at vague glimpses of targets in dark green uniforms, they look at it like a cheap child's toy.
Red bolts burst from the barrel of the stubby rifle, producing a sound known across ten thousand worlds. Yet here the shots sang their plasmatic song of death accompanied by an eerie harmony instead. No other blasterfire joined the stormtroopers attack, instead the air was torn by pops, roars, and thwacks as slugthrowers hurled their charges of metal into the night air.
Green-clad attackers fell back before the barrage, but not before Scour methodically gunned down eight in a series of practiced motions, jerking his aim from target to target almost on reflex. The forest shade worn by Irishin Alliance fighters provided solid camouflage against the naked eye, but was useless against the light amplification and thermal imaging systems rigged to Scour's helmet.
As the enemies scurried away down slope behind cover the stuttering screams of slugthrower fire pursued them, continuing even when they fell out of practical range.
"Tar it!" the stormtrooper barked. The expletive was local, not Imperial, but he'd taken a liking to it. "Save your ammunition! They'll be back, this was just a probe."
Fire ceased immediately. The twenty-odd Narat Kingdom soldiers stationed to this little outpost might not yet properly respect the Empire or recognize Scour's advanced tactical training and vast combat experience, though he was certain they would soon enough, but they were suitably terrified of the stormtrooper to obey instantly. He'd take it, for now.
"I want more warning before the next attack," Scour ordered, knowing it would be soon. "One of the riflemen, go down five hundred meters and place a light at eye level in a tree." When no one stepped forward the stormtrooper slowly passed the merciless gaze of his helmet over the little outpost, mostly a collection of sandbags, tents, and equipment trunks, letting everyone feel his demand. "Ella, you do it," he ordered one of the young women, the fastest of them he thought.
The poor girl, she was only seventeen, cringed, but she grabbed one of the battery-powered floodlights and started jogging down the hillside, her rifle in the other hand. The brown uniform she wore did not blend as well as the green of the enemy, but it had protective plating draped over critical areas, though only lightly, riflemen being prized for mobility.
"Do you really think she'll make it back?" a throaty voice, not disapproving really, in frightful fact almost amused, questioned from the stormtrooper's left.
Scour didn't turn, keeping his attention focused on Ella. With the stabilizing and enhanced optical technology he possessed he had just as much range and accuracy as the pair of snipers posted with this little unit. He couldn't cover the girl all the way, the terrain was far too rough, but he would do everything available. "So long as they fell back at least a kilometer, which I'm sure they did since it's a klick and a half to the nearest road, which is where they'd have to gather to mount any significant assault."
"Probably," the remark was a smirk. "No one ever said Irishin scum are smart."
It would be funny if it was not so critical and so depressing. "Jane," Scour cautioned the assault trooper, though his voice was the same steady synthesized dispassion it always was through the vocoder. "Hate them all you want, but the second you let your judgment falter you'll be dead." He hoped she'd listen, the stormtrooper rather liked Jane.
"I'll do whatever it takes to kill as many of them as possible," the woman answered, voice husky. "Don't worry about me."
He looked the trooper up and down, partly out of duty and partly because the heavy armor plates covering critical areas didn't fully obscure a fine, highly athletic figure. Scour didn't meet many attractive women in his line of work, but aside from the pale complexion and little patches of dark pigment around the eyes, something the stormtrooper actually found rather fetching, the residents of Avnarad were completely human. Jane's militant mindset, and though the tech level on Avnarad was certainly primitive they trained good soldiers, also matched his own views. Focused behind his helmet on her tragically lovely face and finely framing back hair Scour wished she wasn't quite so obsessed with the miserable little war.
"Then get ready," the stormtrooper remarked, sliding a fresh power back into his Blastech. "They'll be back soon, and since they know I'm here they'll surely bring tanks."
"Bring 'em on," she replied eagerly, shouldering her own weapon, a fully automatic slugthrower, a light machine gun in the parlance of this world's military. "I'll be glad to get action in at this post."
"You've got your wish I think," Scour noted as Ella came scrambling back up the hillside. "Report, rifleman," he ordered.
"The light's up sir," she spoke between big gulps of breath, obviously having run back as fast as she could uphill. "And I could hear engine noise." She saluted nervously.
"How many sources?" tanks were a problem, even when the term referred to primitive tracked vehicles with chemical-explosive cannons.
"Three sir, maybe four," she twitched nervously. "I didn't get close."
"Fine, get back in position," Scour grimaced, but with his face hidden by his helmet no one was able to see it. So, he pushed his mind through quick estimates. They really have committed up here. The plan's working; pity it could get us all killed.
Avnarad was originally settled as a penal colony, one human government dumping tens of thousands of prisoners onto a world they considered worthless. The ancient overlords had long since been crushed by someone else, in a fashion typical of the endless cycle of violence inherent in the Unknown Regions, but their prison world had prospered, and now held three hundred million inhabitants. The Narat Kingdom controlled most of them, but it was old, complacent, and backed by a lethargic aristocracy. The Irishin Alliance was a conglomerate of border states and malcontent provinces. Narat was willing to allow the Empire of the Hand to recruit soldiers here and gradually establish factories to produce the military hardware they desperately needed. Irishin had objected.
Now Irishin was trying to conquer Narat. Scour didn't know the details, he was just a stormtrooper, but he would have bet a year of his absurdly low pay Intelligence had staged the war somehow. Goad the objecting side into attacking the other, and then crush them with a little well-placed Imperial support. Instantly make the Empire of the Hand everyone's best friend.
Deep down Scour truly and resolutely believed in the mission of the Empire of the Hnad. The Unknown Regions needed law and order worse than a desert needed a rainstorm, and it needed it fast. The Vong were coming, the brass might not talk about it but everybody knew. He'd seen their scout forces, even lived through a few minutes of engagement with those things. It's win or die, the stormtrooper affirmed, there's no such thing as fighting dirty.
Still, as he stole a last glance at Jane, he felt a vast wave of anguish burst upon his breast. Her mother, her father, and two younger brothers had died in one of the initial border attacks. The war had been created out of necessity, but that only made it all the more hideous.
The Empire of the Hand did not have the resources of Palpatine. They could not place a Star Destroyer above Avnarad and simply blast the Irishin Alliance into submission; such resources were needed for other conflicts, more critical than this. Lesser force would serve here, and would also provide for the revitalization and militarization of Narat in the process. The cold calculus of Intelligence weighed and spent lives, the lives of men like Scour and women like Jane. The stormtrooper tried not to think about it.
To insure the Narat Kingdom victory a few hundred stormtroopers and a handful of ground vehicles had been dispatched. Scour's role was simple, something he was grateful to recognize. He and the others in his unit had been given command over small squads. They'd moved up into the hill country, logging terrain thick with coniferous forest, and set up little defensive camps. Then they'd let the enemy see them. Irishin command believed the stormtroopers would never leave the Narat main army. They thought the deployment meant a move through the rugged hills. By the time they figured out the deception it was too late.
Scour grinned to think about the Narat main army cruising through lightly defended territory and smashing the Irishin heartland, the stormtrooper was always glad to know a plan had succeeded. This war would be short and swift and final. There was only one small problem.
The Irishin Army, instead of rushing home too late to defend their homes, was going to try and accomplish what their foes had merely made a ruse of attempting.
If they make the end run through these hills, Scour recalled as the first glimmers of the attack, distant thermal plumes from as yet unseen tanks, emerged in his perception. They can move and plunder through Narat land for months, strengthening resistance in the Alliance heartland. The war could go on for years. He also knew there was no good way out of this territory, the Irishin advance could be blocked and pinned down by a much smaller force. Victory would be certain.
In two standard days that very necessary holding force would be in place. Even pushing unopposed the attackers would need a day to get across the hills. All Scour and the five riflemen, five assault troopers, four rocket gunners, two machine gunners, two combat engineers/medics, and two marksmen who crouched with him on their little hilltop, along with another two hundred or so smaller groups needed to do was delay an enemy vanguard ten times their number for twenty-four hours.
He almost wished he shared Jane's obsessive fatalism.
Fixed on the pale electro-chemical light in the distance Scour waited as night fully enveloped them. A low red light, reflected from Avnarad's pair of highly ferrous moons, remained. It bathed the dark forest in an appropriately bloody cast. He knew the tanks were coming very soon. The enemy could not afford to wait.
Warning came when the light in the distance suddenly vanished, destroyed by the advancing enemy. "Everyone to defensive positions," Scour ordered, even as he listened for the rumble of the tracked vehicles' engines. "Rocket gunners to fire only at tanks," he reminded the troops. "Concentrate your fire on one target at a time. I want confirmed kills. Everyone else, destroy the infantry. This is the critical assault!" He had no time to explain in detail, but even though the troops were all conscripts, save a few like Jane who possessed reason enough to volunteer, they'd understand.
Ultimately this position was untenable, but it didn't matter. What mattered was resisting the frontal attack. We force them to bring up artillery or go about and flank us, the troops knew. Then withdraw and trade fire as we retreat all night, with them forced to walk.
The Irishin were good soldiers too, they knew the score and had their own plans. One assault to overrun the position, scatter the stragglers, and then have the troopers ride the armor and run the whole night through.
If we're just run over, we lose.
If they have to stop and throw a punch, we win.
Scour, like many stormtroopers, liked to keep his strategy in simple terms.
Come on, let's see you, he waited, light magnification on, for the first foes to appear. Maximum visual range was only about two hundred and fifty meters due to the slope, well within firing range for the defenders and the enemy. The automatic machine guns of the assault troopers had limited accuracy at such a distance, but everyone else could shoot just fine.
The first shot came from an enemy, a rifle bullet slamming into a tree branch at least three meters above the ground. The firing to follow built gradually as each defender sought and then engaged their first targets. The enemy scurried from cover to cover, firing as they charged. Soon the noise was murderous, the churning burst of guns firing, bullets slamming into every object the forest possessed, men screaming, and the destructive noise of a Blastech E-11 in the hands of an expert.
When the tanks appeared the resulting volume made the cacophony preceding them seem a whisper by comparison.
A high explosive shell launched with substantial velocity from a barrel one hundred millimeters wide landed less than two meters from Scour. Shrapnel slammed into the sandbags in front of him and some glanced off his back armor, but he was unharmed. Thank the Empire for their inaccuracy, he said silently. At this range the guns on an AT-ST would have laughed at their defenses and cooked them solid in moments.
Nevertheless, primitive or not those tank guns had plenty of force, and would soon be close enough to add a stream of large belt-fed slugthrower bullets to the storm of metal. They had to be destroyed, fast.
There were four tanks, two of the light infantry-support type, one of their mid range assault models, and a heavy tank-killer unit. The last was a behemoth of metal plating, and would be a challenge to destroy, but was actually the least dangerous.
Scour's troops were well coordinated. The four rocket gunners launched their simple but powerful tube-mounted missiles as one. Three hit one of the light tanks. One smashed into the tracked treads, rendering the tank nearly immobile but otherwise unharmed. The other two struck the main turret.
There was a titanic wrenching burst of noise, and the tank came apart in a storm of flaming metal.
One down, but now the gunners had to reload. The stormtrooper had one other resource to use in destroying the metal-plated engines of destruction: himself. Scour switched from troops to tanks in the instant those targets appeared.
Ruby bolts lanced from the E-11 into the armor plating around the main turret of the medium tank. Where slugthrower bullets would ricochet harmlessly the energy of the blaster poured into the metal, a material considerably less durable than durasteel. It began to glow and run after even a few shots. Sustained fire would be able to reduce the whole turret to slag in seconds, superheating the air within and killing the men inside.
The attackers reacted quickly to this new threat, cannons traversed to converge on Scour's position. Only a moment before the tank fired he rolled backwards and to the side, crawling away from the imminent blast.
Sand bags shattered and the explosive force rolled the stormtrooper over. Thankfully the breathing equipment in his armor spared him from trying to cough through the nasty dust suddenly filling the air, but he had to keep rolling to avoid being blasted to pieces. Scrambling to reacquire the target Scour returned fire, tracing a line of molten metal spots along the glistening carapace before regaining his bead on the turret.
Long seconds stretched as Scour poured sustained fire into the tank. The turret tried to turn, but molten metal blocked the movement, and then the once powerful vehicle stopped moving entirely.
Two were down, but heavy fire from tank-mounted slugthrowers laced through the camp, accompanied by less powerful but more numerous infantry fire. The Irishin assault troopers had closed into accurate range, the next few seconds would hold every life in the balance.
The stormtrooper had a few tricks left. He switched his E-11 to his left hand, laying down inaccurate suppressing fire, and pulled a grenade from his belt. It was time to see just how much of a tech difference there really was.
The little cylindrical object left the white-armored hand just as the rocket gunners managed to take down the second light tank, though it cost two their lives as they went down full of holes for the crime of standing in the firestorm. The grenade sailed slowly through the crowded night air, eventually striking the sloped turret of the heavy tank.
Then it went off.
A powerful explosive discharge swept about the churning behemoth, knocking down a pair of Irishin troops who had dared stand too close, one to stay down, but it did not punch a hole in the armor. Heavy sloped sheets of metal were sufficient protection against a device designed to shred flesh, not plating. Scour was sure this would mean the end.
Then the treads slowed in their progression, and slowly the mighty vehicle came to a stop. It did not fire again.
Not daring to question his good fortune the stormtrooper simply loosed another pair of grenades among the enemy and then returned fire as fast as he could find targets.
It would only be many hours later, when a pause in the fighting provided time to think about what had occurred that Scour managed to solve the puzzle. His grenade had not destroyed the armor, but shards of shrapnel from the casing had shot out with sufficient force to pass through the metal plating and kill the crew inside.
Even without their tanks the Irishin soldiers came on, desperate to overrun the outpost. Surrounded by enemies Scour rose to his feet, laying down a torrent of fire, knowing it was now or never. The likely loss of his own life meant nothing in service to the Empire.
Shots grazed the stormtrooper, and then a bullet slammed into his shoulder. The bullet failed to penetrate the tough plastoid composite of course, but the force of the hit spun his body about. He spun back, found the shooter, a young man surely not even twenty, and put two blaster bolts into his chest. There was no regret, only war.
More men and women fell, as the stormtrooper switched out power packs and slammed his targeting reticule from one target to the next. The Irishin soldiers could not match his speed, accuracy, or stopping power.
But they too had grenades.
It landed at his feet, a well-placed throw. Scour noted it in some deep recess of his mind and his body lurched backward, though he never stopped firing.
White-armored feet managed two steps before the explosive went off.
Scour was sure he didn't black out, but darkness and confusion enveloped him. He couldn't see and everything was impossibly loud. The air was bad, he couldn't breathe!
You idiot, his mind answered. Your helmet's busted, take it off, now!
Grabbing awkwardly with both hands, aware his whole body was complaining, Scour wrenched away the ruins of his helmet, knowing it had saved his life.
For maybe three seconds, he thought with depressing irony as an Irishin soldier leveled a rifle at his head. I'm not even holding my gun, what a disgrace.
The man in green lined up his weapon.
A ruby beam slammed into his back.
They struck all around Scour, dropping and scattering enemies. Not comprehending, he fell back on training, seizing the moment, rolling in the roots and needles. He grasped a fallen gun and with some seeking found the trigger. Wheeling it into line with the nearest foe he slammed it down.
"Son of the Sith!" the gun kicked him in the ribs worse than a ronto. It leapt from his grasp as if trying to fly. Only iron-hard training allowed him to keep his grip on the stock and wrestle the thing into line. The noise was unbelievable. Scour put his back to a tree trunk and focused on firing towards any enemy he could make out in the dim red glow.
Soon they were all down or fleeing. No a moment too soon the stormtrooper realized as the gun clicked empty. He had only a vague idea of how to reload it.
The noise dissipated rapidly, but the stormtrooper knew his ears would be ringing for some time.
"I see your armor Sarge," he heard a voice he thought must be Jane's, it sounded different without the filters, and unfairly relaxed. "Guess you're still alive then, huh?"
He turned, squinting in the shadows of dust and smoke. Yes, it was Jane over there. Walking toward her, feeling suddenly very weary even as he knew the night was yet young he thought she looked better than ever splattered with dirt and blood. It suited the murderous grin on he face. A moment later he noticed she was the one holding his Blastech!
With a crooked smile the assault trooper held out the stubby rifle. "Feels like a toy," she spoke with a lurid twinkle in her eye. "But it works great. Don't suppose I could get one of my own?"
"When this war's done," he muttered as he took back the rifle. "You can sign up for the whole rig," she'd be a fabulous stormtrooper, he was absolutely certain of it.
She laughed a grim, ghostly sound full of wrath mixed with pleasurable satisfaction. "I'll keep that in mind."
"How many are left?" Scour got back to business, knowing it would be grim.
"Twelve can walk," Jane's face hardened to ice. "Two can't."
Those two would be propped up, to fight until the enemy got to close. Then they would hope surrender would be honored. Scour had his doubts about that, tonight.
"Let's gather equipment and get moving," he ordered. "Jane, find someone to take point, Ella if she's still alive. They'll start shelling this sector soon and we need to be ready to hold them up elsewhere."
"We'll get moving," she returned. A weak chorus of assents came from the others.
"Hey," Scour was seized by an impulsive burst for an instant. "Take care of yourself Jane; it'd be a shame to lose you."
She looked back at him for a long, slow second. "You too Scour, you're actually pretty handsome without your helmet."
Stunned the stormtrooper was stock still for a good fifteen seconds before he recalled just where he was.
Then he got back to work, it was going to be a long, bad night.
Thirty-six hours later, with only seven men and women still under his command, Scour crossed the advanced defensive line of the holding force. The enemy was still behind them. They had succeeded.
Out of two hundred stormtroopers posted to the hills thirty-three had died. Twenty-one hundred fifty-five Narat Kingdom soldiers died and three hundred ten were captured, out of a total of four thousand. They had trapped an Irishin Alliance army of two hundred thousand. The war would be effectively ended by this action.
Avnarad became an Empire of the Hand signatory, though direct technological intervention was not part of the arrangement.
Over half of those who fought in the hills with the Stormtroopers, more than one thousand in all, later joined Imperial service. Jane Quellstrad was among them.
It was never revealed to anyone on Avnarad or any soldier who fought there how Imperial Intelligence had manipulated the Irishin Alliance into starting the war, though it was considered a textbook intelligence success.
Story Notes:
Scour's Name: While officially Stormtroopers are acknowledged only via ID code, they usually utilize names when not under heavy scrutiny. Empire of the Hand stormtroopers use their names primarily, a consequence of the more pragmatic command structure of that Empire. Scour is not a Jango Fett clone, so he does have a real, actual name as opposed to the callsign Scour he uses as a stormtrooper, but it is not revealed here because security would prevent him from doing so.
Yuuzhan Vong Reference: Outbound Flight establishes that Grand Admiral Thrawn knew about the coming Yuuzhan Vong invasion decades before it happened and so did Emperor Palpatine. Anecdotal evidence indicates that the Empire of the Hand did indeed fight Yuuzhan Von scout forces on a number of occasions and at least the upper level brass were aware of the greater scope coming. I have chosen to have scuttlebutt filter this down so even rank and file soldiers like Scour have at least some idea of what is hanging over their heads.