Keeping Up the Attack
By Kudzu

"Revenge is a dish best served cold"
Sicilian proverb

He saw it happen.

Quick as a flash, the crawling artillery transport was converted into orange flames and screaming, and he could do nothing about it. Ballistic rocket mortars swung high in parabolic arcs from the tripod-mounted launchers of the droids over the ridge before dropping down with devastating explosive effect; hundreds flew, and those same hundreds fell. Bodies were thrown everywhere, and shattered blaster rifles flung themselves across the rapidly scarring ground. Aduwynn was struck directly by some chance of poor fortune and died instantly, ripped apart in fractional moments by the baradium-packed projectile driving itself at half the speed of sound into his chest. Chaos was everywhere.

Even as the three-decimeter-long rocket mortars roared down like miniature buzz bombs, fighters hard and shiny like the carapace of some giant and lethal beetle split the air above, spitting red plasma fire into the flying gunship cavalry that might have saved the day. The heavy armament of the open-air troopships could not save them; their thin fuselages were ripped apart, unprotected by any shields and vulnerable to the blazing lasers. They were as eggshells to the feet of a giant, shattered and broken as they tumbled from the sky like so many kroyies downed by the bowcaster of a Wookiee. Birds shot from flight; and that was what they were.

As sky and ground burned together and screams rent the air, unhampered by fierce discipline and deathless dedication to cause, he crawled, dropped onto knees and wrists, struggling across a fiery, ruined field of war as mortars whistled down and blew away dirt, metal, flesh, and bone for twice a man's height around where they struck, chanting a muttered lyric to himself and praying to deities he didn't think existed to live.

He didn't quite know what compelled him. He never quite learned that since. But he went on, desperate and numb and propelled by a dully pounding rush of adrenaline. Behind the anonymous mask that hid an anonymous face, his eyes were wide and unblinking, dazed and perhaps seeing, but not comprehending. Perhaps refusing to comprehend. He might have been in shock, and he no longer twisted around frantically when the loud tremor of a mortar blast split the air with white-hot noise. Perhaps he no longer registered what he heard. Blood trickled from one ear, but he paid it no mind and doubtful that he noticed it at all. The thin rivulet of crimson flowed into the centimeter-deep valley of a long scar down his cheek from a battle past before dripping down off his face onto his throat.

Breath didn't come difficultly for him; he just kept breathing in the same way that his heart kept beating, in the same way that he kept on crawling. His blind eyes saw orange and yellow blossom hugely before him, scattering the bloody pieces of a struggling squad of troops to the winds and scorching once-verdant deep green grasses into ashy oblivion, yet his dogged forward movement did not even flicker pause or hesitation nor did his eyelids flutter shut.

The afterimage seared into his retinas, though doubtful he took heed of the bright imprint on his vision, he moved on, unflinching and unblinking as a daggerlike shard of broken durasteel pierced all the way through his gauntleted right hand, unnoticing as his armored leg half-fell, half-dragged across an orphaned blaster pistol that placed a searing bolt through the white sheath over his left calf and burned deep into hard, conditioned muscle tissue. His leg did not even twitch.

All he needed to do was keep moving. His brain, if it was still consciously operating, was so entirely focused on this singular objective that it did not register anything happening in the living and dying world of terror and panicked determination around him. He didn't know or think to why he was crawling; he just was. His brothers and comrades-in-arms fell and died around him and terrible thunder too loud to hear split the air in five different places at once every second of those bloody minutes.

He kept on. He kept after his pointless objective without pause or panic. He just kept moving.

The smoothly stuttering undulation of destroyers wheeling onto the field of death was barely audible above the cacophony of merciless pyrotechnics, but the mechanical clicks that heralded their deploying was heard by all - not registered by some, but heard…

Blasterfire ripped through the bleeding air, cutting down running soldiers with their guns ablaze. Bolts as blue as the sun of Coruscant slashed through them, countered by the spears of red that they hurled with deadly and efficient precision, coldly slaughtering those who had escaped slaughter. Some were struck by friendly fire as the rocket mortars continued to dive into them, and most of these were shredded into unrecognizable droid parts, but those remaining blasted on, firing their deadly rays of vermilion energy into the hearts of the white-armored troopers.

It seemed like ages or half a second until the welcome beams of bright-green death jackhammered into the formation of mortar battle droids over the pristinely grassy ridge, pulling chunks of brown earth away and breaking it into crumbling nothing with the sheer force of the megajoules concentrated into each powerful hit. From the epicenter of each strike, accurate as only lasers could be, dust and fragmented droid and weapon rippled out, kicking the ground out from beneath it as it moved, causing the world to quake even beneath his desperately unresponsive knees and wrists, plodding on regardless and unnoticing of the blessed apocalypse beyond the peaking slope that now fell away as colossal landslides from the tremulous blows of turbolaser cannons unloading their destructive energy into single targets on the once-grassy landscape cascaded down, swamping jagged debris and living soldier alike.

The craggy foothills were crumbling. Past he who crawled came a tide of white, roaring battle cries in more languages than Basic and unloading clip after clip of small-arms fire into an even more massive, less organic army of assaulting tan, brown, silver-chromium, and grey. Blasters loosed red and blue, felling many on both sides; when the masses collided, warriors pulled vibroswords and hacked through their foes, occasionally clashing them against pike-wielding battle droids, standard guard units pressed into service in offensive attack roles. The tightly packed multitudes dispersed, spreading out more along a front. The Human troops dove for cover, using the bomb- and turbolaser-devoured terrain to their advantage. Grenades clinked and bobbed before bursting in chemically eruptive blasts of heat energy that tore infantry asunder.

Then came the hovertanks, gliding smoothly over the devastation, laser cannons methodically pounding out shots into the hordes of the enemy, targeting each other after tearing up columns of diving troops and beating heavy stripes of plasma color through their adversaries' thick armor plating. One bulky assaulter behind the advancing droids was penetrated, cracked and combusted. It blew apart spectacularly in a flood of bright fire.

Two-legged, four-legged, six-legged, and eight-legged arrived the mechanical walkers, bearing yet more troops and firing yet more rounds. With a sort of caution, the sentries pivoted, walking sideways to strafe and riddle the ranks of combat droids with blasterfire. He crawled on.

And crawled, and crawled, and finally when he reached the front lines, his dry eyes blinked. He sprang to his feet, bleeding from multiple wounds incurred from his trek across the treacherous field and disregarding - or not noticing - them all. The soldier nearest him fell with a cry as a triple shot from an armored super battle droid punched through his chestplate; he caught his fallen brother's long-stocked rifle before it hit the ground, ignoring his stabbed-through hand, and raised it immediately and instinctively to fire, taking his dead comrade's place and in fact stepping into the imprint in the earth that marked where his boots were planted, replacing him.

That was what clone troopers did: all identical, all faceless, all equally loyal, all equally ready to serve and die at a moment's notice.

A new flight of attack gunships swept in from the south, to their backs. They unleashed a withering barrage of various armaments, crumbling the center ranks of the Separatist force. Clones in their white armor swept in through the hole, moving sideways and backwards, constantly firing into the mass of droid troops until their rifles overheated and began to smoke or until their power packs were depleted, at which point (if they were still alive and standing) they flung their bulky weapons into their enemies to pin as many as they could before whipping out their sidearm and snapping off shots with that.

The Battle of Moonus Mandel came and went. The foothills of Amaggies Mootmo were laid bare and wasted. Those wounds would heal in time - but they would leave deep and unlovely scars behind them.

It was the same way with all of them - all who survived. Out of 9,216 clone personnel in the first group to fatefully pass by that ridge, less than 300 had survived. Senior Commander Aduwynn had been among the first casualties. Every single vehicle in the battle group had been damaged beyond repair or utterly obliterated. The ground upon which they had tread by that ruined slope might never grow grass again.

Deep and unlovely scars.

"It hurts, ner vod, I know," CT-78/992 "Nyu" said, a touch of sympathy in his voice.

"I saw them die. I saw them die."

Nyu nodded. "I know," he replied simply. "UT-AT, hit by a rocket mortar, direct to the propulsion engines. The engineers surveyed the wreckage."

"I could have been in there with them. Then I wouldn't be here now."

Nyu changed to a conciliatory, probing tone of voice. "What force compels you, ner vod?"

"I crawled…" He swallowed. "I crawled across the field. I wanted - I needed to get away, to stay down. Nothing else mattered. I didn't feel."

"Mm. And what would you give for that numbness now, Foron?"

Foron, CT-78/641, looked up. "Numbness?" he repeated.

"Lack of feeling," Nyu clarified. "Numbness. As if you've been injected with an anesthetic."

"It wasn't numbness," Foron said slowly, shaking his head. "It was just…nothing. Nothing at all. I felt nothing at all."

The other clone trooper frowned. "What would you give for it now?" he asked again.

"I'd give -" Foron broke off and laughed bitterly. "Fierfek. I don't know what I'd give. Maybe nothing."

"Nothing at all, right?"

"I -" Foron looked up, a look of emotional pain etched on his face. "I don't know," he confessed. "I don't know anymore."

"You miss them."

"Yes…" His voice cracked. "I miss them," he whispered.

Nyu nodded again, more slowly this time. "I know," he replied softly. "I know you do." He sighed. "It's a void that will never be filled," he said abruptly. "Idiots and fools - ignorant fools - claim that we're replaceable. That one of us is the same as another.

"We're not, ner vod. You know this. We're not all the same. Same features -" he pointed to his own face, then nodded slightly towards Foron's "- same genetics. All the same man, biologically speaking. But," he paused, "we're not. We live complex lives, Foron…and I think only we can truly appreciate that."

"Appreciate?" Again, Foron let out a harsh bark of laughter. "I'm not feeling overly inclined to be appreciative of much right now."

"And you won't, for some days or weeks." Nyu stood up and began to pace back and forth across the small quarters aboard the assault ship. The rest of their roommates were in the mess hall right now, eating a dinner of prepackaged, dietary-supplement rations. Truth be told, Nyu thought he'd rather be here than there.

"You see," he continued, "your brothers - my brothers as well - are gone. Do you know how they died?"

"Yeah," Foron said bitterly. "Bunch of rocket mortars dropped on them and -"

"No."

He stared at the other trooper, who was now scowling darkly at him.

Enunciating every word meticulously and deliberately, Nyu said, a firm edge to his voice, "They died serving the Republic. They died for you and for me and for us and for this -" he gestured to indicate the ship's quarters "- and for everything that we fight for and believe in. They died," he said, dark eyes flashing as they bored into Foron's, "for the greatest of all causes. They died in service."

"And what did their deaths accomplish?" the clone retorted, fiercely wiping away threatening tears. "We're going along on our merry way when suddenly BAM! An explosive shell comes dropping out of nowhere and blows them to bits! Where's the glorious service in that, Nyu?"

"You know where those shells could have fallen instead?" Nyu shot back by way of answer. "Coruscant. That's where they could have fallen. They could have fallen straight through the roof of some apartment complex instead. Our brothers, ner vod, died so that they didn't. They laid their own lives down to save the lives of those who aren't ready to die."

"And they were?" Foron asked, cold sarcasm giving his tone an edge hard as a neutron star.

Nyu didn't even blink. "Their lives had all been leading up to that moment. They spent every moment of their lives since being taken out of that incubator getting ready to die for the Republic. And guess what?"

"They did," Foron said before Nyu could answer his own question.

He nodded again. "That's right. They did."

"And so what am I supposed to do?"

"Be glad for them. Their lives have been fulfilled. Their oaths have been fulfilled. They have been released."

"Glad?" he cried. "How can I be glad? They're dead!"

"Mourn them too," Nyu said seriously. "Grieve for them. No more tinnies in their crosshairs. No more thrill of battle. No more serving the Republic."

Foron snorted. "There's some romantic notions. Glory in battle. The thrill of the fight."

"You're right, ner vod. But we don't consider them romantic."

Foron looked back at him.

"We," he continued, "consider them essential. We consider them life."

"You're crazy," muttered Foron, shaking his head.

Nyu chuckled. "No. Just a warrior. Just a -"

"You aren't going to say 'hero', are you?"

"I'm no hero," said Nyu, "in the most romantic of senses."

"But -"

"We don't consider them romantic. That's right."

"I don't get what you're trying to tell me," Foron said quietly, desperately.

Nyu looked at him pityingly. "Yes, you do," he replied, tone gentle. "You just don't want to admit it yet."

"I wish it had been different," said the clone trooper, brushing away more tears and audibly trying to suppress the lump in his throat. It was a familiar feeling for Nyu. He'd once been this clone, or not. Just another one in a similar situation. They could never be one another. Only idiots and fools - ignorant fools - would claim that they could.

"How?" Nyu prompted.

"I wish I wasn't a clone. I wish there were no Wars. I wish I was just an ordinary person, Nyu. No armor. No rifle. No fighting."

He was taken aback. He had never heard or thought this before. This was his life. Even in his most depressing moments, he'd never dreamed of wanting to be something else.

But it would pass in time, he thought. "And what would your life be, no armor, no rifle, no fighting?" he asked.

"I -" Foron broke off. "I don't know. I'm not sure."

And for once, Nyu thought that maybe uncertainty was appropriate. His help could only go so far. The rest of the journey, Foron had to make himself, alone and unaccompanied, a man versus his own self - himself, actually, not just another man who looked like him, shared his genetics. He'd have to get through it on his own, and he would need to decide.

For now, let him be, he decided. "Find your own way, Foron," he said softly. "Just don't forget what I just told you."

Foron nodded, as if he understood that this next part in his own story he would have to author himself, make it through without anyone else to offer support. There was no assistance or comfort that could now be provided. And the look in his eyes and across his face seemed to say that he accepted responsibility of this task now; that he was going to undertake the next stage knowing all that it entailed. Ready for it, perhaps not, but prepared to venture into his own soul and make his own trek? Nyu could read the answer in him as clearly as any legible text could provide it.

The time had come.

Prepared to be moving on.

"Go, go, go!"

The troopers surged forward, sweeping around to outflank the cornering lance battalion of Mist Riders on their venom-fanged dragon steeds, opening fire into the bodies of the armored cavalrymen to send them tumbling off. Commerce Guild support - a few spindly-legged homing spider droids craning above the rock formation beyond to aim solid red lines of laserfire into the legion of clone troopers - was not enough to save the indigenous warriors. The tradition of Hamynsylos burned under the guns of the disciplined clone troopers. Hamynsylos had chosen the wrong side.

Droidekas barreled down straight into the thronged group of clone soldiers, deploying and raising their shields as quick as lightspeed before rattling off blaster flame into the troops. Those hit cried out and fell, toppled by the force of each shot into their bodies. The rest turned to return fire point-blank, eating up the limited shielding before cracking through the droid carapaces.

More of the Confederacy infantry machines poured down, and fighting grew thick and fierce. A platoon of soldiers armed with Plex missile launchers straggled over to fire over the rock formation into the bothersome spider tanks.

A clone captain drilled two shots into a super battle droid, then swung his rifle and bashed in the slender head of another. He bounced back to reload behind his company's lines and was met by Lieutenant Dash, CT-164/8050.

"Sir!" Dash saluted as he fired blindly over the heads of the boiling rush of his fellow soldiers into the droids beyond.

"Report, Lieutenant?"

"Our fire's bringing down the tinnies five down, sir," he said, referring to the number of platoons down the way from them. "Heading up for ammo."

"Very good, Lieutenant," he replied. "Anything getting hit too hard?"

"No, sir," Dash said, and he knew that behind the new Phase II faceplate the lieutenant must have been grinning triumphantly. "Think you did pretty nicely, Captain Foron."

And vengeance continued its exaction. This was how a clone trooper who'd lost everything chose to respond to his brothers' passing. This was the last part of his story.

He didn't give up. He was just keeping up the attack.