"Resolve or Fear"
Radar Officer (1st Grade) Tass Nemi monitored the amber HoloScreens. The Empire still held air superiority over the Sienar fleet shipyards but the Rebels and their Corellian allies were matching them, ship-to-ship. The naval firefight had severed her link to the main Imperial fleet ten minutes ago. There would be no further updates from Admiral Tenvor or General Veers. The ground assault on the Corellian planet had begun.
The gunnery frigate Peregrine's Eye – her only link to the navy – was reporting heavy fire from Alliance and Corellian fighter craft. Its captain, Sy Flageran, had been promoted only days ago. The fallout of Endor still rippled across the Empire, Nemi thought.
The Navy's giving out battlefield commissions like candy during Empire Day parties.
"How goes the battle for the shipyards, officer?" Flageran inquired. His hologram flickered sporadically. His frigate was damaged, but operational.
Nemi paused. She didn't want to make a fool of herself, especially in front of an Imperial naval officer. She was Imperial Army to the bone and was proud of its rivalry with the flyboys of the fleet.
"The centre is holding firm," Nemi said. "Piett's Own just wiped out a company of Rebel commandos. Some payback for Endor, courtesy of the late admiral's Guards."
"And the right flank?" Flageran said.
"Lennox's legions have taken ground from Alliance forces. It's a melee, but the Rebels have yet to land a vessel there."
"Which leaves us with the left flank."
The left was the soft belly of the Imperial line, with mostly green troops and only the tough 99th Regiment and a small company of the 41st Guards of the Executor to keep them steady.
Nemi glanced at the left HoloScreen. The Alliance was slowly gaining ground and reinforcements continued to land.
"If the Alliance breaks through on the left," Nemi said, "they'll try to take down the ion cannon tower."
"I'll direct a few TIE squadrons to cover the left," Flageran said. He had to raise his voice throughout his report to be heard above the rumble of engines and laser cannon.
"Stay alive, Captain."
"We plan to. The Navy always saves the day. Can't have Veers thinking he won this battle all on his own."
Nemi shook her head at Flageran's carefree confidence. She knew it was for the benefit of his men aboard the frigate. Fear would be their greatest enemy in the next few minutes.
Her best friend, Lt. Vak Reksil, commanded the Imperial defense force against a numerically-superior, battle-tested Alliance army. That made her more nervous than the arrival of Ackbar's main armada less than an hour from now. It won't matter what ground we hold when that happens.
A Sienar Fleet Systems security officer, mid-thirties in a green uniform, scrambled over to Nemi's nav comm station.
"Will the left flank hold?" he asked. "If the Rebels destroy the ion cannon tower …"
"They won't fail us," Nemi said.
"You sure about that?" the officer said. He looked at the battlefield HoloScreen. "Maybe you should send another battalion over there, or something."
"Vak Reksil is commander," Nemi said in a tone that brooked no dissent. "If Lt. Reksil requests additional support, then I'll inform the proper authorities through the chain of command."
"Do you even know what you're doing, kid?" he said, exasperated. That remark stunned her. Before Nemi could answer, a stormtrooper put his hand on the SFS officer's forearm.
"Tass Nemi served with the Outer Rim fleet aboard the Vindicator," the stormtrooper said. "She's seen action against slavers, mercenaries and Rebel starships. She may be young, but Officer Nemi has earned more field experience in six months than many of your own men."
Without another word, the SFS officer shrugged and shuffled off.
"Thanks," Nemi said to the stormtrooper. "He's partly right, though. I'm just a technician – not a soldier." Although radar ops and intra-fleet communications were her specialties, she had volunteered to take additional military training (beyond the compulsory six-week boot camp course for Imperial techies) with the Vindicator's stormtrooper legion whenever possible.
The stormtrooper removed his helmet and held out his hand. "Somehow I doubt that. The name's Cpl. Viznik."
She noticed that the young corporal had a black cylindrical tube attached to his field pack. "Is that the legion flag of the 71st?"
Viznik nodded. "The honour of the legion, rolled up in a metal tube. And entrusted to someone like me. Scary, isn't it?"
"It's a tremendous privilege," Nemi said, hoping to ease his fears. "Sgt. Glaarin must have great faith in you."
"I hope to earn that faith today," Viznik said. "It's said that any Alliance solider who captures an Imperial battle flag is made a lieutenant on the spot."
"Maybe you'll be the one capturing a Rebel flag," Nemi offered. "Try not to worry." Viznik gave her a thumbs-up and returned to his platoon. Only a hundred troops guarded this station at the rear of the line. Either the Imperial fleet was confident that the Alliance wouldn't break the forward line, or they were under-manned and gambled that Reksil's paltry mix of vets and Academy grads was sufficient to prevent a humiliating rout.
It's definitely the latter, Nemi thought.
The ion cannon towers kept the Alliance's star-fighters at bay, while Reksil's forces were giving the Alliance vanguard a thrashing. Nemi forced her worries about the left flank aside. For the moment, the Imperial line was holding.
During brief lulls in the fighting, Nemi thought of her journey to this moment: on the frontlines of possibly the last decisive battle between the Galactic Empire and the Rebel Alliance.
It was worlds away from Ord Mantell: the planet of her childhood. Tass Nemi was an orphan when her parents found her in a Twi'lek-run foster home for displaced kids of the Clone Wars.
Her adopted father, Moren, was a metal processing engineer who worked on contract for one of the many commerce guilds in the Mid Rim. He had fought in the Army of the Republic during his youth and vowed to keep his family away from the horrors of war. When the Profiteer War broke out, it engulfed almost every planet in the Mid Rim. Moren quit his job with the Mining Guild and fled Ord Mantell forever.
I was only six years old, Nemi thought, but I can never forget the rust-like smog and industrial ruin of Ord Mantell. Her mother, Serii, was born on Naboo and could never adjust to living there. The war at least gave her family the opportunity to leave that wretched planet.
Moren always took short-term jobs, paid for in cash. During the war, staying in one place was a risk they couldn't afford. Those who couldn't escape either died in the crossfire or were sold into slavery when the pirates caught them. Always one step ahead of the commerce guilds' feuding armies and the parasitic raiders, they hopped from one planet to another.
Three years of hell, Nemi sighed.
Then the Empire came. Emperor Palpatine was constructing a fearsome new weapon – a Death Star – and the project required the raw resources of the Mid Rim. He sent in the Imperial Fleet and obliterated the mercenary armies of the commerce guilds in less than 10 months. The guilds soon sued for peace and granted the Empire preferential contracts to build the Emperor's "technological terror".
When Nemi saw wave upon wave of stormtroopers in their gleaming white armour, she knew what she wanted to do with her life. They had swept away the war that had been such a strain on her family and brought order to the galaxy. This New Order promised a future she could never have dreamed of.
"I'm joining the Imperial Academy," she had told her father one night after school in yet another refugee camp for persons displaced during the Profiteer War.
"No!" her father exclaimed. "I forbid it!"
"I'll be seventeen next year," she said. "You can't tell me what to do with my life!" She stormed out of the homestead, not returning until noon the next day. When she returned, she found her mother and father at the kitchen table.
"Tell her, Moren," her mother said.
Her father's shoulders heaved, as if he was relieved of bearing a heavy burden.
"I've never told you about your true family," he said. He rubbed his eyes wearily. "You've been wondering where you came from for sometime."
"What is it, Father?" Nemi asked. Then he told her: about the end of the Clone Wars, the infamous Jedi Purge that eliminated all the Jedi in the galaxy and the Empire's hunt for stragglers from the Old Order.
"Your uncle survived the initial purge," Moren said. "Boros Swil'yn was a great Jedi knight, a confidant of the Jedi Master Yoda. Boros' brother, Liramos, was to be an apprentice of one of the Jedi knights who had survived the attack on the Temple."
"I've had bad dreams for years," she had told them. "About fires and shadows in the night."
"You are Tass Swil'yn, daughter of Liramos," her mother said as she fought back tears. "Boros and Liramos died in battle during the second Jedi Purge. We found you in the foster home six months later. The Swi'lyns were strong with the Force. And so are you."
"And that is why we must hide," Moren said. In the hallway, she could see transport crates stacked atop one another. "We're leaving tonight. To the Outer Rim."
"To live as refugees again!" Nemi protested. She was tired of hiding and never saw her adopted parents again.
She tried to remember what had happened next, but the past had become a blur. The HoloScreens flickered, but Nemi may as well have been in the Imperial Archives because she was oblivious to them. She had left the refugee camp with two other orphans that night and within a year she had reinvented herself as Tass Nemi of Ord Mantell and joined the Imperial Academy's Naval Communications program.
She saw the irony in her arduous journey. I'm a junior naval officer with dreams of joining a snowtrooper legion. A Force-sensitive orphan who found a new family in the ranks of an Empire that once hunted down a father I never knew.
Hell, I joined an army to make peace. To find peace. Who knew?
The metal mug of coffee on her desk began to rattle.
No, not again, she thought. Not now.
The rattling became more violent. Coffee splashed about, spilling onto the floor.
A stormtrooper noticed the rattling. Nemi squeezed her eyes closed. She thought of her childhood in Ord Mantell, before the war. Playing hide-and-seek with the other orphans in the scrapyards near the foster home.
Make it stop. Please.
Slowly, the rattling became less violent. The coffee in the mug stopped burbling.
"The Alliance must have landed another transport nearby," the stormtrooper said.
"They're getting closer," Nemi said. She took a deep breath. This was the first "episode" – she had given her Force outbreaks that moniker at the Academy – in more than three weeks. Her first episode was when she was thirteen. She had managed to survive four years at the Academy with less than a dozen involuntary episodes, all while keeping it a secret from her classmates.
And from Vak Reksil.
He was a sophomore, already on the fast-track to the elite Intelligence Corps when she enlisted. They bonded during blaster training and all-nighters poring over Intergalactic Politics and the Palpatine Doctrine: 201 notes for the final exams. Assignment to the Star Destroyer Vindicator, together, was beyond anything they imagined.
There's another irony, she thought. Vak, a loyal intelligence officer, is best friend to the spawn of some dead Force user. Someone he would be sworn to destroy. It would be silly if it weren't so terrifying.
She had no love for the Rebel Alliance. Her father's war-weary upbringing had bred into her an innate contempt for idealists who claimed that revolution would solve all things. The Techno Union, Mining Guild and their ilk made those same claims – before they pillaged and exploited the people they pretended to defend.
Nemi believed in her heart that only the Empire stood for order. She'd had enough of chaos in her life.
She had spent her adolescence denying her affliction – the nightmares, the tremors, all of it. She treated her Force episodes like teenage acne: cover them up and they'll go away in time. But they didn't.
And they're becoming more frequent now.
The HoloScreens flashed a dozen alerts. Without warning, the centre screen with the naval display had evaporated.
"Peregrine's Eye, do you copy?" Nemi said into her station comlink. "Imperial frigate respond!"
"I'm hit!" the frigate's pilot said.
"The captain?" Nemi said. Several stormtroopers and SFS personnel had gathered around her.
"Dead." The pilot's hologram materialized once more, before fading into nothingness. In the distance, a terrible explosion rocked the foundations of the shipyards.
On the battlefield HoloScreen, a ball of flame swept up into the ion cannon tower on the left flank. Where there had once been a towering symbol of Imperial defiance, there was now rubble, ash and death. Nemi could see the left flank faltering on-screen. The steady 99th were holding their ground, but just barely.
There are too few of them (and too many boys and girls like me), she thought. Green, giddy and naïve. By the Maker, the choral Imperial anthems For the Empire and The New Order Forever at commencement are still ringing in our ears! The horrors of the front never get into the lyrics.
'Fresh from Imperial City, rotten by breakfast'. That was how the Imperial veterans mocked the short life a new Imperial Academy graduate. She resented that Endor had proven that maxim.
The young stormtrooper Viznik rushed towards her. "Sir – uh – miss? We've lost contact with TIE Command. We're blind in the sky!"
"The battle's not over yet, corporal," Nemi said, with more confidence than she felt. "The enemy will want to finish the job and smash the left flank. They'll cut all communications next, throwing our forces into confusion. The centre and right will collapse if that happens. Tell Sgt. Glaarin to assemble a defensive –"
"Glaarin's dead, miss. Corellian sniper got him. With respect, command falls to you now."
Nemi's jaw dropped. She wanted to object. I'm just a technician. But she was also a recent graduate – the chain of command was clear. She was only a junior officer aboard a Star Destroyer: dozens of lieutenants, commanders and senior technical officers outranked her.
But here – in this pitiful reserve guard of 100 souls – she outranked Cpl. Viznik and held the status of an Army sergeant in the field.
Her training kicked in. She jabbed a finger at the battlefield HoloScreen.
"Assemble a defensive line here. I want snipers here and here. Deploy the scouts as skirmishers, they can think on their feet. Take the fight to them. We'll serve those Corellians a BlasTech brunch!" The stormtroopers erupted into laughter.
The amber hologram of the 99th Tactical Regiment's troops stood firm with the company of Piett's Own, but other stormtroopers and black-shirted Navy troops streamed in flight around them like wamp rats in a sand pit.
The roar of descending X-Wings became louder as laser fire blistered throughout the shipyards' streets and avenues. The rapid pat-a-pat of an E-Web's heavy repeating lasers echoed everywhere.
If the left flank breaks, Nemi thought, the hordes will come here. She had been an orphan all her life: foster child, war refugee, Force-sensitive in the heart of the Empire.
Now, she was cut off from her own army and from her best friend. Was Reksil still in the vanguard holding the centre? Withdrawing with the 41st? Dying on the front, alone?
"Stay alive, Vak," she said. Stay alive.
NEXT: A rival claimant for the Imperial throne has emerged: Tharsen Meridius, the Emperor's secret apprentice. With Moffs and governors jockeying for power, Commander Knessel and her crack squadron arrive in an Outer Rim ablaze with dissention – even treason.
The Outer Rim legions must choose: bend the knee to this self-proclaimed Prince-Regent who promises victory, or pledge allegiance to Veers and a military council on the brink of defeat?
