Title: Orders
Character: CT-65/91-6210, a.k.a. Clone Captain Deviss, K Company, Hawkbat Battalion
Setting: The battle on the plains of Geonosis immediately after the arena battle.
Summary: A good soldier follows his orders, even bad ones. An excellent soldier never abandons his men in the face of bad orders. Deviss is an exceptional officer.
"Move, move, move!" CT-65/91-6210 shouted to his troops as the gunships' doors slid open, revealing the dust caked world to K Company for the first time. So this was Geonosis. This was what he had been bred for. The captain looked to his men, and seeing the last of them off, looked up to the gunship pilot and waved him off. Flipping a thumbs up, the pilot took off with the rest of the gunship wing. They flew right into the sights of a light anti-air battery. Three of the LAAT/I gunships crashed to the ground in flames before they had even gained any altitude.
"Squads 3 through 5, check for survivors on those birds." He knew it was most likely futile, but he had been trained not to leave men to die. Sadly, his prediction proved to be true. The two man flight crews of all three gunships had been blasted apart by the flak rounds from the Confederacy anti-air positions. Minutes later, K Company had set up a temporary command position on the sandy plains, waiting for further orders.
Another group of gunships arrived shortly. Only one landed, and even then it only disgorged one man and a small group of clones. The man didn't wear any armor other than a torn, dust caked brown tunic and robe. Clearly, the man was one of the fabled Jedi- the protectors of the galaxy that would be commanding K Company and the rest of the GAR.
"Who's in charge here?"The Jedi boomed over the hum of engines
"Sir!" He spun about and snapped a salute to the Jedi.
"Your name, soldier?"
"CT-65/91-6210, sir. Reporting for duty, sir."
"I said name, soldier. There are a million CT-whatevers on this planet, and I'm willing to bet that quite a few of them are captains."
"My brothers call me Deviss, sir." The bulky Jedi nodded in satisfaction, and looked out over the troops lined up behind the sparse cover of rocks on the plain.
"What's the status of the unit?"
"Full combat strength, sir. We lost three gunships and their flight crews, though." The Jedi took this in stoically, nodded once, and looked out towards the droid lines across the plains.
"Do we have any intelligence on the enemy?"
"Sir, we spotted several hangars and factories across the plain. I would guess heavy weapon plants. They also have some light anti-aircraft defenses in place." That much was evident from the downed gunships, but the Jedi seemed frazzled enough from the battle in the arena to have possibly not noticed the wreckage before. In fact, the Jedi blinked once and his eyes widened in realization as he saw some of the first casualties of war.
"Then air support is out of the question," the Jedi, who still hadn't given his own name, put his thumb and forefinger across his chin and stroked his ragged, singed goatee. As he was thinking, a trooper ran up to the two commanding officers.
"Sirs!"
"At ease, soldier," Deviss said when it was apparent that the Jedi had no clue about military protocol, "What've you got?"
"Activity across the plain, sir. Those hangars are spitting out heavies. You might want to see for yourselves."
"Lead the way, then, soldier." The Jedi spoke this time, and motioned for Deviss to follow.
"There, sir, grid Two-oh-Five." He handed the Jedi a pair of macrobinoculars.
"By the Force, those are some monsters." He handed the binoculars to Deviss. Sure enough, the enemy lines were beginning fill out with a column of OG-9 spider droids. "Captain, what heavy weapons do your men have?"
"Sir?" surely the Jedi didn't expect the company to take the spider walkers head on… did he?
"Heavy weapons, Deviss. How many and what kind?"
"Mostly thermal detonators; possibly a few Plex launchers, but this is a recon battalion, sir. We aren't outfitted to take on tanks head on."
"Could you bring down one of those things with a detonator?"
"Yes sir, but that would mean getting right up on its arse."
"I saw some speeder bikes around here when I landed. Get some men together and have the troops pool their grenades. We're taking those walkers down."
"Sir, yes sir!" This Jedi was either a tactical genius, or the man who was about to get all of them killed. Deviss sincerely hoped for the former.
The spider walkers lumbered across the plain in a relatively well organized column. They were not majestic, they were not fast, but they were definitely deadly. They had a very limited intelligence, but all of it involved killing things in very thorough was. Specifically, Unit OG-9 273-8472.847351 had been programmed by a particularly bitter Nemoidian who liked to stomp on things. 273-8472.847351 had been looking forward to, if a droid could ever look forward to anything, stomping on a soldier just to see what the organics' fascination with the process was. As if to grant the behemoth's wish to crush a little meat-sack into the ground, a line of the white armored men appeared on its optical scanners. Oh what joy! They were even riding directly towards it, a perfect test for the shining walker's legs, asking to just be crunched into little bitty pieces! Oh, how 273-8472.847351 wanted to crush one! Just one, and then it would activate its heavy cannon and sweep the rest from existence. It lifted its right-fore leg towards the white armored figure's path. Dropping the leg in triumph, 273-8472.847351 expected to feel a satisfying and resounding crunch beneath its metal appendage, but rather felt its proximity sensors activate to tell it two things.
First, the soldier had changed his course, taking his speeder bike directly under 273-8472.847351's bulbous armored control module. Second, the sensors told 273-8472.847351 that there was now a foreign object clinging to the very same armored control module. Its size, shape, and contents narrowed it down to one of two things: a child's candy dispenser with a strip of bond-o-everything attached or a military grade explosive with more than enough power to rip its delicate computer apart even through its armored hull.
273-8472.847351 recalculated to find the best course of action to take should a child's candy dispenser become attached to its hull, and finding none, moved on to the scenarios of an explosive becoming attached to its armor. The search turned up one result in its local database: a phrase in Nemoidian with an obscene implication. 273-8472.847351 accessed the program. For a millisecond, every circuit in its body echoed the one phrase, "Well, son of a…"
The thermal detonator exploded before a bored programmer's dark humor could be fully revealed to its disappointed creation.
Deviss weaved his 74-Z speeder bike through the forest of spider droids, tossing detonators left and right onto the stupid hulks. Other officers from the unit were busy doing the same throughout the rest of the column, but they simply weren't able to hit them all. Most continued to walk on towards the rest of K Company and the rest of Hawkbat Battalion marching under General Tevnek's – the Jedi who had taken command of K Company and the entire rest of Hawkbat- command straight into the walker's path. The man was expecting a handful of officers with grenades to be able to thin out a column of heavy walkers before they could close the gap and get into firing range of the battalion. Speeder bikes or not, it was suicide for the battalion. Deviss followed orders, though. It was what he had been raised to do, after all.
The only reconciliation that could be had was that he was able to make as much scrap out of these shabla tin cans as possible. If they were able to thin them out enough, there might be a chance for the rest of the infantry to get to the factory and be slaughtered by stupid decisions there. The Jedi was proving himself to be quite the rookie field commander, after all. At the worst, they would all die in the first shabla battle of the war.
Deviss finished his pass through the lines, and noticed a target of opportunity. The lone flak gun defending the hangars and factories was sitting immediately behind the column of walkers, and immediately in front of him. Gunning the bike, Deviss decided to take the long way around in getting to his second pass and reached down to prime a detonator with his right hand. He passed by the battery at first, and hooked a sharp turn several hundred meters behind it. Any farther, and he could have parallel parked the speeder bike at the sealed hangar that had earlier disgorged the spider droids that had now gotten in range of Hawkbat. Snarling inside his helmet, Deviss opened up the throttle and disengaged the air brake, bringing the speeder out of its one-handed power-slide and sending him rocketing forward. He tossed the grenade with an almost casual, but precise manner over the wall of the flak gun's open top control station. He was half a kilometer away and gaining speed when the detonator blew only seconds later, and he primed another for a pass through the spider walkers while activating his helmet radio via his jaw switch.
"General, that AA battery is offline, could we get some air support in here?"
"Copy that, Captain. I'll try and get some in here. Resume attacking the spiders at will."
"Sir, yes sir!" Deviss signed off and would have spat if he had not been wearing a helmet.
Evidently, Tevnek had managed to get a few local gunships on the comm., and he had even managed to get them to make a pass over the column of spiders. Missiles volleyed down as Deviss completed another pass. He was nearly out of grenades now, and Hawkbat was being visibly beaten back by the still numerous spider droids. The gunship strike had helped a good bit, but they couldn't waste all of their ordinance in one place, after all. All told, the enemy was probably only down to about 50% of their original numbers. And Deviss was running out of grenades. Then, as if to make his day just that much better, Deviss's comm. clicked on and a transmission came in through the company channel.
"All units, pull back," Tevnek said in a bitter deadpan. Finally, he seemed to have realized that the plan would never work. "Repeat, Hawkbat fall back. Full retreat." Deviss's helmet readouts showed the confirmed vitals of his company as a whole. K Company had 63% confirmed dead, 11% wounded, and 8% unknown. Compared to the HUD readouts for the rest of the battalion, K Company seemed to be getting lucky. Tossing his second to last detonator onto another spider, Deviss headed back towards the main body of white clad soldiers in retreat. Then, everything when even more wrong than it had before. A squad of troopers that had previously been the point men of the broken battalion were spotted by a spider, which promptly fired a blast from its heavy cannon. The entire squad flew like rag dolls.
Enraged, Deviss armed the final detonator and brought his speeder bike to a screeching halt immediately in front of the offending droid. He threw the grenade with a fiery vengeance, and proceeded to haul his DC-15 and saddlebags off of the speeder. He threw the bags behind him, and threw himself into a crater created by the earlier airstrike. The pressure of the detonation was strong enough to press down on his chest even through his armor. Looking up, he realized that he had landed directly in front of the charred remains of one of his brother's blasted arm. He moved slowly with shell shock, and dared to crouch up and look over the lip of the shallow crater. Spider droids still lumbered around him, but his speeder bike had been wrecked in the explosion.
It didn't matter, either way. Deviss had intended to stay and keep any of his vode he could alive. They couldn't have all been killed by that blast; it had been too indirect to do more than kill the men closest. One by one, he leaned out and pulled the four men back into the relative safety of the crater. One was dead, and another was on his way, but two more had only been incapacitated by the blast. Deviss asked the name and number of his dying brother, and rummaged through the saddle bag's emergency medical kit for the strongest sedative he could find, and gave Stone, CT-47/24-1228 a large enough dose to ease his passing before he tended to the other two soldiers as more spider walkers passed overhead, oblivious to the rescue mission going on beneath them.
"Cap'n?" the conscious clone, Blink, strained to say.
"Yeah, Blink?"
"Gunships say anything yet?"
"They've got their hands full right. We could be here a while."
"I'm not going anywhere." It was true: the blast had mangled Blink's leg, and he wouldn't walk again without major surgery, cybernetics, or both. Deviss had managed to stop the bleeding from the leg, and his medical kit was nearly out of both painkillers and bandages. Still, Blink was better off than Stitch, the unconscious trooper beside him. The man had takenshrapnel to the chest in the form of blown off chunks of Blink's leg armor. He was alive, but had passed out from blood loss. Honestly, Deviss thought that Stitch was lucky that he hadn't had a major blood vessel punctured. Deviss had to remove his chest plates to stabilize him, though. Anything could very easily kill a soldier with armor. Less could kill a soldier without armor.
"They'll be here, Blink. Count on it." Damn it, they better be here. It had been three hours since he had pulled Blink and Stitch into the hole in the ground. As soon as Blink settled back into resigned waiting, Deviss attempted to do the same only to hear the familiar static of his comlink activating. Hope brimming in him, he answered the link.
"Copy, this is Angel 7, Captain Deviss, report. We are inbound on your position. Do you copy."
"Affirmative Angel 7, I have two wounded at grid Two-oh-Four, Sierra seven-by-three. Copy?"
"Acknowledge, Captain. Prep for a hot extraction. We're going to thin out those last few spiders a little."
"Much appreciated, Angel 7. Do you need target designation?"
"Negative, hold position and prepare the wounded to move." Rockets whined over the gusts of the plains to punctuate the LAAT pilot's words. Two gunships made a high speed pass over the crater, focus beams blazing down the column of spider walkers. A third gunship slowed and touched down practically on top of the crater as the rockets impacted the six closest spider walkers.
Deviss wasted no time; he scooped up Blink and practically tossed the man into the gunship as two medics jumped out and lifted Stitch in a practiced way that was delicate and lightning fast at the same time. Deviss reached down to grab his rifle and boarded the gunship at the exact moment the two medics had Stitch safely situated to lift off. The pilot wasted no time in punching it, and the hellhole Deviss had spent the last three hours in became just another bomb crater on a scarred landscape.