8
War Boys
'Boxer, Boxer, say again, you're breaking up.'
'Gallant, we-' Static.
Gallant's comms officer shook his head, fiddling futilely with his instrument panel. 'It's no good, Captain,' he said.
'Sir,' the sensor officer added, 'I'm detecting fires and hull breaches breaking out across Boxer's hull. We'll lose them unless we do something soon.'
Grimacing, the heavy cruiser's captain weighed his options. The unspoken rule of the void was to rescue the crews of doomed ships, or at least provide damage control assistance. However, with news of Alliance starships operating on Adumar, he knew that other Alliance fleet assets would not be too far away. This could easily be a trap. He and his crew had all run the sims of 'damaged' ships breaking apart to reveal hidden starfighter squadrons.
'Dammit,' he muttered. 'Prep away teams. Engineers and marines. Helm, set a course to dock with Boxer.'
Boxer was a Mosel-class freighter, one of the Imperial Naval Supply Corps' workhorses until recently. Twelve hours ago, it had embarked from the great shipyards of Bastion, laden with starfighter munitions, replacement parts, and stealth plating for the Adumari garrison. It was set to rendezvous with another supply convoy in the Gajah Tun System. It never arrived.
Deep within its ruined holds, the warriors of Clans Ordo, Wren, and Fett lay in wait, weapons at the ready as Gallant approached for boarding. They had forsaken blasters, favoring armor-piercing kinetics and other exotic weapons that could crack the armor of today's infantry without fail. Materials science had advanced in leaps and bounds since the First Battle of Yavin. Laminate-C, Mandalorian steel, and a whole host of other alloys and compounds had entered the market in the past few decades, leading to widespread proliferation of blaster-resistant body armor. They needed something with a little more punch than the common E-35.
The first of Gallant's boarding detail entered the freighter, a stormtrooper fireteam clad in the latest armor variant to roll off the Empire's production lines. Mark XII armor was a notable aesthetic departure from the iconic Rebellion and post-Rebellion designs. Though still quite visibly 'stormtrooper,' it also drew upon antiquity, resembling a mix of ancient lorica segmentata and Old Jedi Order yoroi. The helmet had returned to the facial layout of phase 2 clone armor, though its overall shape more closely resembled a combination of an Old Republic galea helmet and Darth Vader's kabuto. These particular stormtroopers bore the markings and colors of Legio IV Ferrata, the Ironclad, famed for their role in the Kerassarian Genocide.
They were the first to die.
'We've lost contact with Two-One Alpha,' Corporal Jarek reported. The adjutant knelt by a heavy-duty comm backpack, fiddling with the dials to no effect. 'Trying to boost the gain but I'm getting nothing but static. Two-Three Beta reported a radiation leak in the engine bay which they claim may be the source of the interference.'
For the first time since his legion's assignment to this uneventful backwater system, Centurion Kaltas felt unease. His gut told him something was amiss, and it wasn't the rations this time.
'No, Corporal,' Kaltas said, 'I get the feeling this is something else.'
'Sir?'
'Humor me, Jarek,' the Centurion grunted, deactivating the safety on his blaster carbine.
There hadn't been time to hide the bodies. The moment Eirik Ordo's kill-team slaughtered the stormtroopers of Two-One Alpha, the sensing devices they'd planted in the cargo bay detected movement. When the Imperial officer discovered the corpses of his vanguard party, the Mandalorians struck. First blood went to Haru Fett.
Crouched behind a crate of stealth fighter parts, Fett remained invisible to the stormtroopers' proximity and thermal sensors as he moved in for the kill. He drew his spear, fashioned after the ceremonial taiaha wielded by Concord Dawn's old tribes and sheathed in a disruptive energy field. As the officer knelt to inspect the bodies, Fett impaled his adjustant, eliciting a strangled scream and a spray of blood. Eirik killed the centurion a few seconds later, ramming a powered crushgaunt into Kaltas' chest and crushing his heart.
'They'll know we're here,' Fett said, ripping his spear free of the stormtrooper's carcass. He gestured at Kaltas' helmet, adorned with inlaid bronze laurels and a gosk-hair crest. His breastplate, now ruined by Eirik's handiwork, had once resembled an idealized human torso, muscular and toned, unlike the unadorned banded lorica of his subordinates. 'Their officer's dead. They'll want to hear from him.'
'And now comes the fun part, Vod,' Eirik replied. 'All teams, go loud. Kill every single one of these shit-atins in the name of Mandalore.'
In starship interiors and other close quarters, violence of action was often the deciding factor in victory. Mandalorians excelled at violence. War was the heart and soul of their culture, and when the Mandalorian boarders broke stealth, they did so swiftly and mercilessly. False wall panels collapsed and jury-rigged smuggling compartments burst open, the warriors concealed within opening fire with magnetic rifles, flamethrowers, and flechette cannons. Plasma charges detonated, incinerating squads of stormtroopers and engineers as they tried to fall back to more defensible positions. And when the Imperials lived long enough to take cover and return fire, the Mandalorians responded with radiation and chemical bombs. Those unlucky enough to have their armor breached by errant gunfire died screaming as their bodies broke down at the molecular level. Then the Mandalorians waded in, close combat weapons bared. Eirik saw a man go down with a trench spike in his skull. Another stormtrooper dropped, head crushed by a pneumatic mace. Their weapons were designed to pierce the warplate of Mandalorian elites, not standard infantry armor. This was not war. It was overkill. It was slaughter.
Eirik laughed as he and his team overran a heavy repeater nest. His voice was a mechanical rumble, emitted through the vox-grille of his snarling helmet, forged in the likeness of a predator from Mandalore's arctic reaches. For years, the Alliance and Shattered Clans had fought a shadow war on the fringes of the galaxy. A hit-and-run here, some assassinations there. Nothing even remotely like the kind of warfare he and his kind were meant for. But now, the Alliance had taken its first step to open war and the Shattered Clans were all too happy to join in. They needed this. He needed this. Blood fizzled and evaporated on his crushgaunt's power field and his mag-pistol thundered as his battle-brothers chanted hymns of war.
It felt good to be back.
By the time Gallant's bridge crew had cleared up the signal interference originating from Boxer it was already too late. The net was a mess of panicked screams, desperate orders, and gunfire. The captain cursed his folly, running through the datafeed on the ship's CIC, sending rapid-fire messages to his ship's myriad stations as his vessel's emergency klaxons blared.
'Gunnery, fire on that damned freighter now! Full broadside!'
'Sir, the damage from that range-'
'It'll be far less than the damage we'll sustain fighting a boarding party,' the captain roared, slamming a fist on the hololith table. 'Now get those guns firing or I'll find someone who will!'
'Aye, sir,' the gunnery officer muttered.
'Centurion Fodrek, what's the status on our remaining marines?'
A hiss of static, then the centurion's voice, a machine-rasp courtesy of his augmetic voice box. He had suffered a grievous throat injury during the purging of Sorenga IX. 'We stand ready to repel boarders, Captain. Nearly a full century, plus the majority of our heavy weapons and a quaternion of Phase V Dark Troopers.'
'Give them hell, Centurion. And will someone shut off that fucking alarm?' the captain yelled.
By the time Gallant had blasted Boxer free from its docking clamp, the majority of the Mandalorian warriors had already made it aboard the heavy cruiser. Gutted and burning, the freighter broke apart under point-blank turbolaser bombardment. The unfortunate few who were too slow to escape the ship in time would be mourned in time, along with all the other lost souls left on Botajef and countless other battlefields. They were awaited in the Manda. They would ride eternal, shiny, and beskar.
This time, they did not face an unprepared, disorganized foe. Centurion Fodrek's remaining marines had set up defensive positions and readied themselves for the coming horde. Unfortunately for them, this resistance only escalated the Mandalorians' bloodlust. They did so love a good scrap. Their taunts and jeers, incredibly offensive when translated into Galactic Basic, made it abundantly clear that they were having the time of their lives.
'C'mere, atin! I'll fuckin' glass yer shabla planet, I swear on me mum!'
'Fuck off, pig-fucking Imperial hut'uun!'
And these were some of the more polite lines. Every single one seemed to have something creative to say about the Imperials' spouses and female relatives, as well as an encyclopedic knowledge of profanity. And their fighting was every bit as brutal and savage as their banter. One stormtrooper suffered a point-blank headshot from a flechette gun, his skull little more than a bloody ring of laminate. Another fell, chest split open by by an energized vibroblade. Smoke wafted from the wound, the air filling with the stench of cooked meat as his killer spread-eagled him. They ripped and tore, ripped and tore their way through the ship's guts.
Then the Dark Troopers arrived. Their armor, gilt-trimmed and black, was a scaled-up copy of stormtrooper Mk XII yoroi. Engraved onto their armor were the names of the worlds on which they had campaigned, starting at the gorget and snaking down the cuirass. These machines bore the names of dozens of planets, seeing action at the front lines of the Sith-Imperial war's opening campaigns. Tall, bulky, and solid, the Dark Troopers weathered the storm of gunfire, tower shields raised as they advanced. Integrated weapon systems blazed away. Gravity cannons and meson beams turned the fearsome Mandalorians into piles of pulverized meat and metal. The lead Dark Trooper spotted another fireteam, spooling up its rotary autolaser and cutting them down as they tried breaking cover. Blaster-resistant armor, not blaster-proof.
Without anti-tank weapons, the Mandalorians were forced to fall back, the bulk of their heavy equipment still in transit with the main Alliance fleet. Slowly but surely, the Dark Troopers pushed the main force towards the hangar bays, cutting off the kill-teams that had been sent to the engineering decks and communications systems. Desperate and out of options, Battlemaster Kheran Ordo led the counter-charge.
'To me!' he roared, calling his loyal huscarls to his side. They were the old guard, veterans of dozens of campaigns, their armor and oblong boarding shields festooned with trophies and battle-scars. Battlemaster Ordo was resplendent in his armor-scaled cloak and burnished plate, helm forged as a howling burial mask. He raised a falx encrusted with old Mandalorian runes, one of the few relics salvaged from the sacking of Clan Ordo's fortress on the homeworld, rallying his forces as he split the lead Dark Trooper's shield, slagging the war-droid with a blast from his fusion pistol. Their shield wall broken, the Dark Troopers became easy prey, overwhelmed as Clan Ordo's huscarls and shock troopers pushed through the gap and destroyed them. With their trump card lost, the rest of the Imperials became easy prey. Centurion Fodrek was the last combatant to fall, killing two of the Battlemaster's bodyguard before falling to Ordo himself in single combat. He had fought valiantly. He would be commended to the Manda. The bridge crew surrendered soon after, leaving the ship in Mandalorian hands.
'Arteo, Eirik, report,' the Battlemaster ordered.
'Engineering is under our control,' Gann replied, his voice tinged with static. Reactor radiation, probably.
'Comm array disabled,' Eirik said shortly after. 'No outbound messages detected either.'
'Good. Very good, vode. That gives us room to improvise. All units, reconvene at the hangar deck for the next phase of the operation. I'll brief you all there.'
