36: Chiyo Decides

The Imperial Stormtroopers were the most effective and feared fighting force in the galaxy. They were a tide of white-armored death that had rolled over countless worlds, grinding even the mightiest of armies, human and alien, into the dust. Wherever you saw their skull-like helmets, you knew that the Empire either ruled, or would very shortly.

The Endorians were less than impressed.

One trooper looked up from firing at the rebels gathered around the bunker to notice the little furry native standing at his elbow. "Hey, hey, Mark?" he asked the trooper next to him, "Is that one of the- AAUGHH!" He fell to the ground, trying to pry the creature from his neck.

The next trooper stood and another native performed the "Devil's Forehead" technique to his solar plexus. "Ghuhh!" All up and down the Imperial lines, lithe, dangerous felines were descending on the soldiers and bringing them to heel. The trooper on the very end stood and started to back away. I lucked out! he thought happily.

Then, with a feral yowl, Maya tackled him from behind.


"You can run, Takino, but you can't hide!" the Sombra bellowed. Then, after a brief pause, "Hey, where'd she go?"

"Wh… the little coward!" Yomi cried, backing away from him. She had already loosed three quarrels into the machine, but they had only splintered against his armor. The mighty robot advanced ponderously, scraping his blades together in showers of sparks.

Kagura took careful aim and tried to shoot his visor out, but her bolt spattered off harmlessly. "Don't worry, Yomi," she said, "He'll never catch us at the rate he's going."

"That is true," the Sombra said, coming to a stop. The blades retreated into his forearms and a pair of gatling-blasters popped out in their place.

"I am such a moron." Kagura shot a glance at the Valerian. "So… this is where I'm supposed to say I always loved you."

"What?"

"Just kidding…" she stopped backing up when she noticed that her jagged hair was being ruffled by a repulsor field. As one, the two women turned and beheld the second hover tank, drifting right behind them. "Oh, this is just perfect!"

"Ha ha! Wonderful!" the Sombra raised his arms. "Nothing in the galaxy is more enjoyable than human despair! On the count of three, tank commander! One… two…"

Tomo popped out the hatch, Wicket riding on her shoulders. "So are you guys gonna get out of the way, or what?"

"Takino?" the Sombra yelped. Perhaps yelp wasn't the best term; in his synthesized voice, it was more of a squawk. Kagura and Yomi dove to either side and the tank zoomed between them, plowing full bore into the mechanized bounty hunter. He caught its fender in both hands and skidded backwards almost gracefully until it drove him up against the bunker wall with an earsplitting bang.

"Ha!" Tomo crowed, "You never were a match for me after all!"

"Cheater!" the Sombra called back before the turret came 'round and stopped right over his head. "Hold on a second… I was just kidding! Ha ha! That whole vendetta thing was just-!"

BOOM! The tank was thrown away by the force of its own blast, front crumpled and flaming, to crash in a semicircle and roll over on its side. It had fared better than the Sombra, though, who was now a great scorch mark on the otherwise pristine bunker wall. After a second or two of silence, Tomo tumbled out of the tank, rose unsteadily and rushed to Yomi, grabbing her arms.

"Did you see that?" she cried happily, "I whaled on him! I've been scared of that guy for years and he was nothing! I am so awesome! Can you believe it? YEAH!"

"Uh…" Kagura put a hand to the back of her head and watched a squad of the natives spill out of the fallen vehicle and stagger about dazedly. "We, ah, we could have used that tank."

"Oh… sorry…" Tomo laughed nervously. "I didn't think that out too carefully, I guess. But still, oh, my God, he was all like 'Don't make me destroy you,' and I was like…!"

Kagura tuned out her babbling and stared at the bunker. There had to be a way to… "Major!" Captain Kitamura came hobbling up, waving the key card triumphantly over his head. "Sorry I'm late."


Compared to the messy, bungling battle outside, the taking of the bunker went like clockwork. The only hitch came just outside of the control room, as Kagura was nearing with a pair of commandoes. An unarmored Guardsman (she recognized their day uniforms) stood at their approach and raised a blaster towards them.

She snapped off a quick shot at him but he was already back behind cover. "Is that you?" he called in surprise.

"What?"

"You're Kagura, class of '93, Delnor Academy?"

"Uh…"

"I can't believe it!" he came back out, still holding the blaster on her but with a totally different bearing. "It's me, Tarvis Narr! I wondered what happened to you…"

"Narr?" Kagura asked blankly.

"Er… yeah, we were rivals, remember?"

So this is what Sakaki had felt like… "Nope, sorry. Now get out of my way."

"Well, I can't do that…" he grinned challengingly and gestured to the side with his blaster. "Wanna see how it goes without these guns, though?"

Kagura shrugged. "Sure."

So they both threw their blasters aside and Tarvis rushed forward—as a second gun popped out of her sleeve and went off into his thigh. The leg folded under him and he stumbled right into Kagura's side-kick. As he doubled over, Tarvis heard a faint whoosh—but couldn't react before the axe-kick slammed his face into the floor. "That's how it goes without those guns," Kagura said coldly, and moved on. Who had time for drawn-out, dramatic confrontations, anyway?


Chiyo stood stock-still, holding the crimson lightsaber out before her. Her eyes were wide and angry, bearing a reddish tinge that Yukari honestly hoped was from the weapon's light. There was not an ounce of mercy in her expression, made especially frightening by her round, childish face. There was no reason in the universe that such a face should wear such an expression… this was obviously a person that had been pushed to her very limit.

What did I ever do to her? The Empress wondered.

"Do you know the names of Owen and Beru Lars?"

Yukari shook her head.

"You should… Your Empire killed them. It's killed millions of innocent people like them."

"But I didn't—"

"You allowed it. You allow everything that happens; you're responsible for this monstrosity of a government, and you've done nothing to improve matters since your father's days. Knowing about the prison camps, the executions, the suppression… you sat on your throne and did nothing. I don't know if it's apathy, laziness, selfishness or what, but now your reign is going to end."

"Hey! I thought you Jedi were all about mercy! If you kill me in cold blood, won't you, like, fall to the Dark Side or something? For all your talk, you're not a Sith yet!"

"Empress… I killed at least twenty stormtroopers on my way here. I think I'm as consumed by the Dark Side as I can be. Why should I have mercy on you after all that? Why are you any more important?"

"Because… uh, I'm the Empress?"

That was enough. Chiyo sprang forward, drawing the humming blade back for a titanic thrust. Before her was the woman responsible for everything she had gone through, for who knows how much agony and terror the galaxy over. But now it was over! Now it would end!

Yukari gasped as the saber's tsuba pressed into her chest. But when her shock cleared, she realized that the blade was unignited. A triumphant smirk formed on her face even as she was flung to the ground by the Force. "I knew—oof!—you couldn't do it! You're just a k-!"

She shut up as the reignited blade stopped an inch from the bridge of her nose. "Now order your forces to surrender, or I will kill you, whatever comes of it."

A war was fought within the Empress, a bitter conflict between cowardice and stubbornness, but in the end, the victor was decided by the tip of a lightsaber resting between her eyes. The communicator flew from her pocket and activated. "Give up! Surrender! Call it off! Ack!"

"Surrender?" Kimura asked, "In our moment of triumph?"

"DO IT, DAMN YOUR EYES!"

"At-at once, my Empress!"

The saber's tip poked into the communicator and the weapon was extinguished. Chiyo stepped back unsteadily and put a hand over her eyes. "I can't believe…" wobbling, she pointed with both hands to her right and said, "I'm… I'm going over here… don' follow me or I'll, uh, I'll kill you… or something…" With that, she fainted.

The Empress looked at her in disbelief, then over at Mito. "Last woman standing!" she said proudly. She started to rush off to find another communicator and call off the surrender, but the deck suddenly rocked under her feet and threw her to the ground. "What the shit?"


As Yukari had predicted, Kurosawa did indeed have an ace-in-the-hole for this conflict. As soon as the Death Star's shields fell, a cluster of stations, towed in on the far side of Endor's sun during their battle, dropped missiles in extremely short hyperspace arcs, carefully calculated to bend around the sun's gravity.

The surrender came just moments too late to cancel their deadly flight.

The schematics that had been so much trouble to get to the Professor showed no glaring weak points. No vents that a single torpedo could hit the reactor through, no exposed shield generators or important conduits--but there was one weakness that all unshielded vessels shared…

Resting on a lawn chair in the middle of their makeshift field hospital, Kagura raised a solo cup of ale to the metanuclear detonations that blossomed in Endor's darkened sky.


It took three tries for Yukari to get the keypad combination right, but when she did, the door whisked open on her personal escape shuttle's hangar. She blinked at the sight of it; weren't the mechanics supposed to hammer all those dents out of it, or however they got rid of them? Still, it wasn't terribly important that the ship looked good; this was a practical vehicle for emergencies.

And it was truly a dire emergency that would require the Empress to fly a vehicle herself. Almost tripping on her dress, she ran to the shuttle's entrance and started in on its combination. Just as the hatch slid open, though, a violet lightsaber ignited across the doorway ahead of her.

"You're forgettin' someone," Ayumu said with a smile, supporting a still-mostly-insensate Chiyo. Yukari was about to protest, but another detonation rattled the station sickeningly around them. "B- dammit, just get in!"