Rex pulled back hard on the throttles, his TIE Interceptor screaming down through the Endor atmosphere, his barely functional navigational system showing him his ship was on a fairly straight orbit course to crash land somewhere near the shield generator base supplying the orbiting Death Star with its protective orb against the Rebel assault. Raking closer and closer to the treetops of the primitive and gigantic forest below, the pilot's eyes scanned frantically for a safe landing spot to steer his damaged ship towards. The Interceptor, due to its incredible speed and powerful engines, was going to be a real bitch to land, Calhoun realized with grim anxiety. There! The navigation map had found a clearing somewhere near the predicted impact point of the fighter. Now all he had to do was get there and pray the nav. computer stayed online for the next two minutes it would take to get the failing ship there.
"Damn it!" Rex screamed at the screen as it suddenly blinked and lost power. "Don't do this to me, baby!" He slammed a gloved fist into the screen, surprising himself as the thick glass blinked back into life, showing the predicted landing area almost directly ahead. He was there!
His hands barely got back down to the controls to jerk them sharply downwards towards the sudden opening in the trees. Here's where he put his training to the test; he'd never actually crash landed before, but after a couple of rocky simulator rides, the pilot had earned his wings with good enough marks on his emergency maneuvers tests. The controls buckled hard under him as he hit the brakes hard and sudden, pushing forward on the accelerator switch to kill the engines almost all at once before bringing them back to half power and cranking them down gradually but firmly, at the same time pulling down on the controls and squinting his face up under his helmet in anticipation for the impact the system told him should have happened three seconds ago. Then he hit. At about 65 mph, (which for a TIE Interceptor was incredibly slow,) the pointed wings ground hard into the earth, flipping the light craft over itself and knocking the pilot around horribly despite his emergency buckles and braced posture. He heard and saw chaos, the rumbling and screeching of metal on ground and rock with the metal losing under the solid ground; he heard a steadily rising drone as his ship flipped and bumped over and over along the ground, gradually slowing to an upside down stop near the tree line. It was only then did he realize the steady drone wasn't the ship; he was screaming at the top of his lungs, and his helmet was rattling loosely on his shoulders, the air tubes from his chest life support system both ripped clear of their holster in his helmet and were spewing compressed air all about the also smoking and fizzing cockpit. He stopped screaming, ripped his helmet off and worked frantically with the roof latch.
Five minutes later, the dazed pilot was throwing up that morning's Captain's rations and Imperial coffee on the soft, upturned and in some places smoldering ground of the crash site. He sat up a moment later, pulling himself weakly away from the mess for fear of the sight of his revisited eggs and hash browns, and decided he was having a bad day. After pulling from the wreckage of his once beautiful and deadly ship the emergency rations and survival tools every pilot had stored in their craft, the stormpilot checked his blaster and wrist mounted navigation computer and set off into the woods in front of him. Almost immediately the pilot was lost; he had, like most pilots and Imperial soldiers in general, received a few courses in survival in various habitats and worlds, from poison gas worlds to woods and deserts like Tatoinne, the pilot had run shifts on all sorts of systems and visited the bases on most of them on leave from his Star Destroyer. About twenty minutes later, and Rex was beginning to wonder just how accurate his computer had been in calculating his orbit in conjunction with the Endor moon base, and he was just about to begin voicing his opinion to the useless guidance watch against a nearby jutting rock when he heard a far away but still quite distinct sound. An explosion, and very distant blaster fire.
A crunching in the underbrush at the top of the hill he faced brought Rex out of his stunned silence, and his blaster pistol swung up with a soft click.
"Holy hopping Hutts!" cried a voicebox-filtered voice from the ridge, "How the hell did you end up out here, pilot?" and Rex received not the first surprise of the afternoon when a pair of scoutroopers stepped out of the woods above him, blaster rifles up and at the ready.
"Oh man am I glad to see you guys," Calhoun exclaimed, "Safety and a new ship down here on solid ground!" The two scouts shared a look that Rex was sure would have been withering if they hadn't been wearing white helmets.
"Nobody could really see it coming." The first one said cautiously.
"Who knew the Rebels could get by our security in such numbers?" The second one agreed, and Rex's shoulders slumped not for the first time.
"The Rebels are attacking the base?" He didn't need an expression from the faceless visors to know the truth. "How many of them are here?" Another look shared.
"The Rebels? Not many," began the first scout.
"But they've got a little bit of help from some of the locals …" the second man finished. Rex didn't understand.
"What, I didn't think any humanoids had any bases here!" He said, "The Rebels have had a base here the whole time?"
"Not exactly, flyboy,"
"Well, what then?"
"There's these sort of, uh, sort of fuzzy little teddy bear things that apparently live here on the moon," the scouts explained.
"They're about this tall," The first man told the pilot, indicating a height just under three feet, "At the very tallest, but they've proven to be quite determined little warriors, a couple of guys from our unit went after the tribe, and we haven't heard from them since. We're here trying to round them up and take control of the woods around the base perimeter, but we think something's happened to the base, so we were heading back when we heard your footsteps."
The Stormpilot could barely believe his ears at the crazy seeming story, but he quickly decided that he'd probably seen and heard enough crazy things in his tours around the galaxy to give some credit to the insane tale of the scout troopers. How did the Rebels find out about the base, or even better yet, get a sizable force onto the planet through the empire's massive net of security. How did they even find out about the new Death Star?
"Tell me have an extra speeder bike lying around?" He tried after a few seconds contemplation. The two scouts shared a third look.
"Actually, I think we do." The second man spoke up in a tone that made Rex think perhaps there was a catch.
"Our commander from Unit 227 took a bit of a spill a little ways back and we managed to get his bike stabilized a few miles back, we left it out in a clearing, so you can hop on with one of us and we'll get you to her if you know how to ride."
"Sure, how dangerous could it be?" Still another look.
"Well, you see that's the funny thing …" chuckled the first scout, "That's exactly what our Unit commander said."
"And where is he? You got him back to the medical section, right?"
"He's sort of dead, man." The scouts replied.
"Oh," Rex grimaced, "Wonderful."