Weapons
By Kudzu
"And let each man stand with his face in the light of his own drawn sword, ready to do what a hero can"
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
They rushed on, coming in droves, clad in silvery-white armor and appearing more machine than man. They were the Dark Knights in the armor of the Fair. It was Battle Perilouse, in life now; they were now just trying to stay alive.
Faster than any sharply spoken blank verse in dramatic production they came, rifles burning red ahead of them. The Armies of the Sith attacked amid the shouts and bellows of the Republic captains and soldiers now locked in desperate combat for their lives. They were bound to Coruscant, now. War flared between the Lord Darth Malak and the Galactic Republic's leaders and people.
Men fought men and men fought droids and men fought those who were more than just men.
Far more imposing, far more terrifying, far darker than the entire onslaught of Sith troopers bearing down on them and tearing the boulders they hid behind for cover into rock splinters with blasterfire marched a Warrior of Darkness. This was more than a mere soldier. This was beyond the shocktroopers of the Imperial army.
This was a Sith.
His black frame, hooded and garbed in the most midnight of fibers, loomed like a silhouette of an impossible doom against the indigo-blue sky. It dominated the trees and the ruined statues of Old Calypor; frightened the birds from the sky and chilled the hearts of the men before it. In his dark fist pulsed a blade of pure scarlet energy. The vermilion lance, the lightsaber, glowed bright-hot against the backdrop of summer day forest on the world of Enthronia. The former capitol of civilization for some ancient peoples whose time had gone by scores of millennia ago was nothing before the shadow of the Sith Empire.
Here was its Hand, the true Dark Knight…or one of them. Perhaps the most terrible thing about this bleak combatant was that hundreds, maybe thousands more of them were similarly under Malak's thrall. This was one among legions of the harbingers of evil and the Warriors of Darkness. This was just one Sith Knight.
For now, he was the only Sith Knight that Lieutenant Bërin Mairofak needed to be concerned with; he, and the dozens of armored soldiers charging in behind him. Somehow the unconcerned, unhurried, steady stride forward of the tall and broad-shouldered shadow warrior was more threatening than the dogged run of the silver-white centurions under his command. Bërin did not let this try to faze him. He raised his bulky blaster carbine, standard military-issue, and squeezed off a shot that burnt a hole through the desolately anonymous, opaque-black faceplate of one of the troopers.
His shot, though it shattered past the transparisteel mask, did not reveal the identity of its victim. It charred his face into something unrecognizable and destroyed.
This didn't concern him. He didn't need to fight men; he needed to fight the enemy. His enemies were not men for this moment. They were merely things to kill, things trying to kill him. Their identity was of no value or concern to him. If they were against him and if they fought him, they were just his enemies. The armor of the Sith troops made them less of men even outside the rush and fury of battle. They were just soldiers, hostile soldiers, and soldiers to be killed. The Sith did not prize the individuality of their men, and neither did Bërin or the Republic.
They were just warriors fighting for the wrong cause on the wrong side against the wrong people at the wrong time. For their folly of allegiance, they were only metallically clad moving targets.
But they were not helpless, as Bërin knew all too well. He was reminded of it with every shot they fired. One bolt shattered the top surface of the large rock he crouched behind, and he gritted his teeth as the hot shards of stone scattered upon and bit into his exposed arms like rounds from a flechette gun. He shot blindly back over it, two bolts, and didn't know if he'd hit anything. Another succession of enemy fire pulverized the side of the rock opposite him, and he somersaulted across to behind a decapitated wall of hewn stone just before a pair of high-charge bolts pulverized it completely, dealing wounds he knew at once would be mortal to the two soldiers under his command who had remained behind it, hesitating an instant too long to join him.
Sairrs and Venon Falconet. Two good men, two more good men destroyed by the war.
They were calling it a "Jedi Civil War", owing to the fact that Darth Malak and many of his Sith followers had once been Jedi and now fought against the Order, but it transcended the Jedi. Bërin had never so much as seen one of the mystical warriors. Perhaps they were just an invention of someone and a legend to keep up morale. This so-called Jedi Civil War wasn't about the Jedi at all to Bërin, or to Captain Farrig, or to Major Scots, or to nearly any of the men who fought and died in the Republic's service on Enthronia or at Telos or Felucia or Gala or any of the other worlds that had been touched and often scarred by the conflict.
It was about those who fought it; who really fought it. Those who fought in the trenches. Those who fought aboard starships. Those who fought from submersibles. Those who fought from the seats of starfighters. Those who fought on the field.
This was their war. Bërin Mairofak was fighting it too.
Another soldier behind the ruined wall looked briefly at him and breathed, "Damn Sith have us good."
"We're giving 'em fire and hell," Bërin growled, leaning up to take aim of an enemy soldier in his sights and then ripping a hole in him with three successive blaster shots to the chest.
"Yessir." The stubbly-chinned soldier armed a small frag grenade and lobbed it up over the short barricade, and it went off a second later in a contained boom of heat energy and shrapnel.
Again Bërin popped up over the brim of the wall, this time with his gun already singing, and this time blasted several of the enemies. He wasn't sure how many of them he hit, or how many (if any) were dealt fatal shots, but it hardly mattered.
They were outnumbered, and the thrum of a swinging lightsaber and the screams of butchered soldiers told him that the Sith Knight had already advanced upon the forward rows of hunkering men. The battle wasn't over, but their odds were not looking quite favorable yet. He didn't consign himself to death just yet, but the reality of the moment was that they were in trouble.
He'd take down as many as he could. For in his heart, Bërin Mairofak was afraid to die.
He didn't know what would come next. Darkness? Eternal void? Nothingness? An ethereal paradise, a reunion with lost loved ones and comrades-in-arms like Sairrs and Venon Falconet who'd been killed by the rages of war before he finally fell into death's abyss? What if that wasn't it? What would it be like for his soul to be annihilated and for his living consciousness to cease altogether?
He would be gone.
He couldn't handle the thought of simply not being anymore. Of not existing anymore. Just gone, no longer here or there. Nowhere. Nothing.
He didn't want to die.
With a yell of defiant rage, he surfaced again to pelt the Sith aggressors with blasterfire. They were nearly passing them now, running around or vaulting over the wall to riddle them with energy beams at close range, ferreting them out. He turned his attentions to felling the very closest ones rather than selecting and firing at random.
He burned down a soldier mere meters from himself, his head missing a flying round by the breadth of his palm. He blasted another at the kneecaps, then had to duck down again because his gun was overheating.
A Sith trooper leapt over him, gun pointed down and firing into the dirt next to him, and with a strangled cry Bërin rolled down onto his back and blasted straight up right between the armored soldier's akimbo legs, still off the ground. The Sith infantryman screamed and hit the ground hard; just to avoid listening to his agonized keening, Bërin dumped a bolt into the base of his neck - a waste of blaster gas, in all likelihood - and then turned the carbine back to shoot another soldier coming over the wall in the breast, and he collapsed backwards with a gurgled cry.
They were coming on too hard, too fast, and too strong for Bërin and the other soldiers entrenched there to handle. They fought bitterly against the tide of faceless silver shocktroopers assailing them, but they were being rapidly overwhelmed.
And destroyed.
The grizzled man whom Bërin had exchanged words with earlier cursed as two of the Sith troops sprang over the low wall towards him, then took a blaster bolt from each into his torso and was felled. Bërin straightened to a full standing position and, firing all the while even with smoke curling from his carbine's muzzle, began to run sideways and backwards, throwing himself behind a nearby tree and exchanging fire around its dull-brown trunk. Flames exploded across its base where the enemy's bolts caught it, and the crackle of burning wood sounded in the lieutenant's ear.
The thud of a grenade hitting the ground caused him to back up so fast that he tripped across an exposed root and fell heavily backwards; he crawled in reverse as quickly as his raw hands and booted feet could take him. The tree trunk exploded spectacularly in a burst of red-orange flame, sending burning splinters of wood everywhere. The old thing groaned as it began to topple over towards Bërin, its base all but destroyed and now entirely incapable of keeping it upright. He leapt to his feet, body spurred on by pounding adrenaline in his veins, and dashed out of the way and behind a long-abandoned free-standing column of granite.
He caught his breath briefly, wiped intermingling sweat and blood from his forehead, then raised his gun again to fire at enemy soldiers passing him sidelong at a good distance of about fifteen meters, taking at least one of them down. Bolts whined and crunched into the ruin that now covered him, and with a moan of exhaustion he escaped from behind it and splashed clumsily through a shallow stream, blaster blazing as he staggered sideways through the forest terrain. More of the enemy troops were felled, taken with lucky headshots or dual bursts into the gut and chest.
The fight raged on like a wrathful panthac fighting to defend her nest, but with greater vengeance and infinitely larger scope. Bërin's desperate brown eyes saw more of his fellow soldiers fall, avenging their deaths as often as he could, jamming power pack after power pack into his carbine as he kept depleting its stores of blaster gas. He found refuge beneath an abruptly terminating slope with another group of soldiers, clambered up on the cliff face of it to haul himself up onto the partial hill. More of his attacks killed his enemies, and he lost track of the time as this location too was overrun and he fled to another.
Once he was surrounded in a grove of ancient trees by four of the rifle-toting troopers and three brandishing sharp-edged vibroswords. Two of his fellow Republic fighters came to his aid, yelling to add to the distraction of their ambush and taking down four of the Sith legionnaires in a split-second. Bërin shot one at point-blank range, then wrested control of the vibroblade of another and split its former master's throat open with just a touch of it before ramming it through the last one's helmet and skull.
Unfortunately, his saviors lay dead, slain by blasterfire from the startled trooper he'd taken too long - a full second and a half - to kill with the vibrosword, and he had to again continue alone. Every now and then as he ran, he caught sight of the ominous, lightsaber-swinging Sith warrior slashing through the Republic soldiers in his path; he sent a couple of shots at him when he got a clear opportunity, but had to presume that they missed their mark when the slaying continued absolutely unabated afterwards.
The sun fell behind the trees, and the fighting continued. It seemed as if their task force had been abandoned. The flares of blaster bolts and the helmet lamps of the Republic troops - along with, of course, the red lightsaber of the Sith - became all that lit the night, and they grew thin now.
Somehow, the odds had been evened, and the remainder of the infantry now dwindled in number as one. They died soldier for soldier, exchanging mortalities at a one-to-one ratio.
The sound of Bërin's own breath was loud in his ears. The quiet burble of the brook he had splashed through on occasion throughout the thick of the fight added a white noise background to its ragged rhythm. The bar of bright energy that marked the presence of the Sith Knight was now regularly visible, cutting down the last few dozen of the helmet lights methodically and reflecting their blaster bolts into nearby earth and vegetation.
He was weary, and invited it: stepping towards the blade in bold recognition of the superiority of the foe he now meant to challenge, he lost sight of his own horizons.
"There is a time to live," he whispered, planting his feet for a second to take a clear shot into the helmet of a roaming Sith soldier, "and there is a time to take life. A time to everything, and to all ends."
Battle Perilouse. The stage play had remained within him since he had first seen it seven years ago, in the Grand Theater House on Coruscant with a few of his military buddies. All of them were dead now, two killed in action on Felucia, one killed at Malachor V during the Mandalorian Wars, and the last few died just the last week - he'd heard that their assault lander had been hit by enemy fire and plowed into a mountain range on Beriwald.
The verse of the dramatic production had deeply affected him. He went back to it a dozen times after that, nearly exhausting his funds until he had to borrow money from his father. He was in prison now; caught piloting an airspeeder while drunk, with a stash of deathsticks and glitterstim in a cargo pouch and a pile of stolen identichips from various nightclub bouncers tucked beneath one of the speeder seats. His sentence had been extended when he'd punched his attorney during the defense trial. His father was never half the man that Bërin could call himself.
His father wouldn't be marching towards a Sith Knight of Darkness under the moonless sky of Enthronia in his Republic military-issue combat boots.
He was not his father. He was not that sort of man.
He recited the last words of that verse from that stirring, classic stage production: "A time when all eventually ends.
"There is a time to die."
Lieutenant Bërin Mairofak faced the Sith beneath the tall and elderly trees of an elderly and bygone world, blaster held unflinchingly before him.
Battle Perilouse, Sochrianus Vuus. For heroes, there is no turning away. There is no shying back, no shirking destiny.
Bathed in the red glow of his lightsaber, the Sith's lip curled in derision. He was mistaken. He faced no mere soldier, but a man of the rank of hero.
Bërin knew what he was facing. He knew that he invited almost certain death. But he wouldn't turn away, and he wouldn't shy back, and he wouldn't shirk destiny. This thing, called more than just a man, had the blood of hundreds of his comrades-in-arms on his blade. He was a cruel, warped individual and Bërin's now-mortal enemy.
It was a collision course with fate. Its mass shadow had loomed against the lifeless energy of hyperspace before him, and he was ready to greet it. Whatever it brought was what he was meant for.
He'd stumbled through an evil forest, filled with blood and death, fighting a war with his feet constantly in motion. He had fired aimless bolts in desperation, combating anonymous soldiers - and they were men, regardless of how the galaxy tried so hard to deny it - with his only objective to stay alive and keep fighting. This was now his confrontation.
How could a weary soldier ascend from the rank of lieutenant to the rank of hero?
It had happened, and now his sneering adversary struck out towards him. Seeing as if in slow motion, and moving as reflexively as if someone was controlling his body for him, Bërin ducked the swipe of the bloody-crimson energy blade and pointed his gun calmly up to aim beneath the Sith warrior's chin.
His finger squeezed the trigger.
Bërin Mairofak was not just a man who had slain a Sith. He was a man who had walked up to death, stared it in the face, and then bested it. He was a man whose head had reverberated with the constant and memorized monologues of Battle Perilouse until he'd discovered what they truly meant to him.
Seize the moment, Atalanon Deusus whispered into his ear, for if you do not, it will pass far too quickly and you will not have a chance to see it a second time.
Six hundred and thirty-two Republic soldiers of the 190th Brigade had crouched behind the boulders, trees, and ruins of the hill at Kele Barin on Enthronia. Twenty-eight soldiers and one hero walked away from it, leaving the troops of the Sith Empire smote upon the forest floor behind them. The leaves would change soon, and fall to bury the scuffed but shiny armor. The bodies would decay away and become fused into the soil.
The lightsaber, Bërin Mairofak took with him. It was neither trophy nor proof of his deeds, but a reminder to himself of what transformation he had undergone. He had walked up to death, stared it in the face, and then bested it.
He realized about halfway to the pickup point they'd been assigned that he didn't need a mere thing to remember. He took the deactivated hilt in his dominant right hand, hefted it, then brought his arm back across his chest before he swung it to send the metal cylinder flying away into the dark night. It crashed softly through the unseen underbrush and was not picked up again, for heroes need no reminders of their heroism and dead men can wield no weapons.