Chapter 40: The AU Advantage
In an AU, you can do things like have Kit Fisto versus an AT-AT...Thanks a lot to all the people who have stuck with this 'fic so long. You're brave and persistent and make me feel loved. Luke thinks he has a plan, but it's really the Force's...
The snowfields of Hoth reminded Kit Fisto of the red and dusty plains of Geonosis in the midst of war; great animal-shape machines plodded and rained destruction down on orderly, running and dying men. But the color of things was white snow, white cloud, white armor and gray mammoth walkers. Gray sky. Red blood. The Rebels were dressed in whatever they had, so it was dull rainbow streetclothes with patchy armor and patchier weapons. Green skin. The air smelled of metal, water, ozone-ion, and blood-heat.
Kit jogged past the friendly emplacements, where Bade the Kel Dor leaned up out of a trench with a T-21 repeating blaster, keeping stormtroopers and two-legged walkers off his makeshift field hospital. The ion cannon the Jedi had...reactivated the generators for pumped deadly energy into AT-ATs, with young Raylsk still at it's bunker-shielded controls.
For a moment Kit kneeled down just beside Bade, the Force cascading around like it had since the time he closed his eyes for seconds on the Millennium Falcon. It had given nearly everything back; he let it spill down into the trench without thinking about it.
Bade looked up into the sky for a second. "No reinforcements. Yet."
"The Bothans spoke of them?"
"Aye."
"Bade, tell the gunners to leave me an AT-AT."
"Ah, yes sir."
Kit Fisto grinned. "Good reply."
The Empire had a Destroyer's load of ground troops, ten AT-PTs and four AT-ATs, plus the occasional feline machine nicknamed AT-AR, the gara-katte. The Rebels had about one, two hundred ground troops, one ion cannon, fifteen working snowspeeders, and one Jedi Master.
There was an AT-AT making its slow way toward the ion cannon, the plated head dipping to track speeders that fired uselessly at the heavy round feet. Kit came beside it as a foot stomped down and the speeders peeled off. No Imperial mind turned toward him. Behind the arch of the walker's underside and back legs that even now shifted, swinging one foot forward, a snowspeeder fishtailed around an AT-AP and shot the legs from under it. The cockpit crumpled backwards; Kit felt the pilots burst confidence outside, scream, but soldier's resolve remain. The Rebel would have to finish them as they lay, and he did, and hated himself.
This story of personality was the precursor to the plunge. In memory of the great focusing point of the Temple--
--the Force took him. His consciousness became the AT-AT, its metal skin and synthetic fluid blood, the snow at his feet, the wind that slid over the sensitive surface of the top of his head. It erases the "yourself" that was capable of hurting, thinking and worrying about the passage of time, and it offers you your strengths with infinite energy-possibility behind them.
The complex, tiny mechanisms of Kit's grappling hook had been ruined in water weeks ago, but the principle worked. he got the hook to catch the walker's first leg joint, the knee ten meters up, and the tension held just a moment before--
The walker's foot picked up, and Kit jumped with it. He climbed the joist quickly. The legs were very thin compared to the rest of the machine, and therefor about twice the Jedi's own width. The leg swayed under his feet and the rope chafed his tired hands as he pulled. He reached the knee and the foot came down with a shudder and thud of compressed, snow-packed ground.
He dug into the shallow handholds of the leg joint and threw the grapple again. This time it caught on just a planned wrinkle in the walker's vertical skin, and Kit pushed away from the leg before he could think enough to fear the possibilities.
Quick visual of snow flying beneath his feet in an arc, then -now- and the grapple line went slack, the hook slipping off its dangerous purchase. Kit backflipped up with the momentum of the swing and landed on hands and feet on top of the walker's head unit where the frigid metal was flat, and the Imperials with their slitted viewscreen were still unaware of her existence. He could feel himself shivering, dressed still in his Jedi's robes from inside the station and with bare head and hands. The wind blew beside the sounds of shouts, deep engine growls, laser shrieks. In another step that smoothly propelled the head forward the walker stepped closer to Raylsk's ion cannon, and Kit moved in a crouch toward the back of the giant head.
The rubbery substance of the neck, similar to that used in a ship's umbilical, contained among other things the rerouting "brain" of the walker, less a droids' motivator/servobrain than a speeder's transmission, though more like in structure to the former. Kit Fisto had never been trained in the mechanics of these, but the Force bound him to the various mechanisms and spoke of their importance. He came to the nape of the neck and activated his lightsaber, than spiked the black down into the metal. Sparks skittered around the breachpoint and pressures pulled at the blade as he sheared it through and out the side of the neck. With all communications severed, gyros and legs left to their own devices and gravity's whims, the great metal body began to fall.
Kit retracted and resecured the lightsaber as the walker head began to tilt down and forward, cold air still gaping empty to either side. The walker fell slow until gravity completely took the legs still completing their movements and had it trip itself, and then it met Hoth in a sliding crash. Kit moved from a low balanced stance into a Force-held fall. He landed a recovery roll right in front of the two Imperials, one human officer and an armored snowtrooper, who argued over their controls being alive and their transport very dead and beginning to accumulate snow around its lower edges as the plumes settled.
Kit activated his lightsaber again, for the drama and fun of it. Let the enemy know what they were up against, though said Jedi was exhausted, his hands rope- and ice-burned and gills reflexively gasping, aching. He savored the fear from the AT-AT and did not let it touch him.
The Imperials called for reinforcements. Another AT-AT, one of three, began to stride in that direction where they had just seen one of their number utterly incapacitated by one man--that is, one alien.
Imagine their surprised then, their added fear and shaken confidence, when a gara-katte came out of the sky and crouched, and despite the allied craft the one that came out was a second and fresh Jedi, weilding a red lightsaber.