(A/N)- A Sunday afternoon upload this week instead of a Saturday morning one because, funny story (not-so-funny actually), my computer decided to blip off and lose all my unsaved work while I was writing yesterday. And it was literally the last scene that I had to finish before uploading. So very frustrating, lemme tell you.
But in any case, it is here now! AND BOY I HAVE BEEN LOOKING FORWARD TO THIS ONE.
A little bit crowbarish, so warning for major and minor injuries and some blood, and general PTSD symptoms on Ezra's part.
Disclaimer: Disney won't let me hurt the kids in canon 'cause I down own it, so this'll have to suffice.
Ashes And Smoke
There was a persistent ringing in his ears as his head pulled out of the murky darkness.
He groaned, his skull throbbing, pain reverberating around inside him. It felt like someone had grabbed him by the ankle and shaken him like a ragdoll.
Slowly, his thoughts pieced together one by one.
His spine and shoulders hurt. Stabbing feeling in his arm. Smell of smoke tickling his nose. An insistent beeping that sounded concerned.
Mart pried his eyes open. His vision wouldn't unblur for a few moments; he blinked hard several times until the cockpit of his X-wing came into focus.
The dashboard was dead. The yoke was crooked, stuck at an awkward angle. Mart lifted his head, the movement making him ache.
The worried beeping came again, and he recognized that it was coming from the astromech socket behind him.
"Wrr-wr?" R3-A3 called to him.
"Yeah..." Mart replied, pressing a hand against his visor, willing the sparks dancing in front of his eyes to go away. "I can hear you."
Another anxious question from the droid.
"I'm okay. I think," Mart answered. He slowly tested his limbs out. "At least, nothing feels like it's broken." He hissed through his teeth. "Hurts everywhere though." He glanced up to continue assessing.
The nose of his craft was dug into the stones of the street, mangled from the impact. His windshield was cracked, and smoke still poured from the ruined engines. Flames were beginning to lick up the side of his craft.
It hurt to move, but Mart pushed past his discomfort, pushing up with his palms on the cockpit windshield and shoving it up, with effort.
Bits of transparisteel fell out as it locked into upright position.
"Come on," he urged R3, finding the rims of the cockpit and pulling himself out of it. "We gotta move. Stormtoopers'll be here any second."
R3 chirped in agreement, detaching himself from his socket and giving himself a little boost down to the street. Mart struggled to slide down the angled hull, carefully maneuvering himself down until he could drop.
His ankle buckled as he landed; Mart bit his lip and screwed his face, whimpering with a pained grunt. Definitely sprained. He couldn't tell if had happened in the crash or just now. He reached out a hand for R3, leaning on the droid's dome for support, as he looked quickly around at their surroundings.
The dimly-lit commercial street was deserted. Debris was scattered under the body of his crashed X-wing. The echoing voices of Stormtroopers were starting to filter around the corners, murmuring, undefined.
Mart picked a direction at random and stumbled away.
-SWR-
He stopped for a moment at a corner junction, scanning down each street. Smoke rose over the buildings from somewhere to his left, another crash site maybe. But the sound of tank repulsors was between him and it, and coming his way quickly.
Mart cast eyes about. There was one building with stark white light in its windows off a ways down the street; the rest were dark.
Mart squinted at it, then his eyes widened with a tingle, seeing the long antenna rising from the building.
An Imperial listening station.
He crouched down and singled to R3, pointing towards the open door of the building. The droid beeped a quiet affirmative and then both of them slunk low to the ground towards it, creeping, out of line of sight of the windows. Mart's ankle complained at him for every step but he set his teeth and ignored it.
R3 slipped inside first, and with a quick prod zapped the single attendant and stunned him into unconsciousness. The limp body fell out of its seat and onto the floor. Mart straightened up as he trotted in, head vibrating, hands flying across the console as he adjusted the broadcasting frequency, trying not to think about the fact that he was alone in hostile territory, that he didn't know where anyone else was or if they were still alive, that he could hear walkers and tanks patrolling nearby, that the inert technician lying prone on the floor couldn't have been that much older than him...
Nimble fingers worked at the panel and his throat tightened up on a breath as he opened the channel and prayed someone was listening.
A light on the dashboard blipped on to indicate the channel was open.
Mart took a shaky inhale.
"Ph-Phoenix Two to Phoenix Three, come in."
No response at first.
"Phoenix Two to Red Group," Mart called again, a little shriller. "Can anyone hear me?"
Wavering static on the line. Then—
"Mart?" a quivering female voice answered.
Relief sagged out of him in a shuddering, shaky breath, and Mart blinked away the blur he hadn't even noticed was gathering under his eyes. "Gooti..." he strained. "I'm... I'm so glad to hear you... Are you okay?" he asked.
"Yeah..." she wavered, a warble in her voice that could have been emotion, or maybe just the poor connection. "Jonner and I both made it to ground," she explained. "But he's hurt awful bad... I can't do much without bacta."
R3 whirred somberly. Mart reached over and pat the droid on his head in reassurance.
"Debris got me in the stomach," Jonner piped in, sounding labored and pained. "Not the worst injury I've had... Still not fun though," he managed to quip.
"Are we the only ones left?" Mart asked, looking up a moment out the window, leaning to listen out the door and check on the sound of the patrols.
"Red Six made it down, I think, a couple blocks from where I crashed," Gooti said. "But I think he got captured."
Mart adjusted a dial on the console, widening the range of transmission, trying to hook a particular coded frequency. "Where are you right now?" he asked, motioning for R3 to plug into the data port.
"Residential district, on the south side of the Dome. I think we're close to some kind of repair bay for landspeeders. Coordinates, uh..." She paused a moment as she checked, then rattled off the string to him.
Mart repeated the coordinates to himself inside his head, glancing anxiously out the window as headlights slowly turned around a corner into his street. "Okay, I think I broke past the Empire's jamming, sending your coordinates to anyone listening on the Lothal cell comms."
He nodded at R3, who beeped as the transmission was sent.
"We can't stay here, patrols are gonna come by any second."
One was gliding down the street right now where he was, in fact. Mart ducked a bit lower, trying not to be seen through the windows, whispering low into the open line.
"Okay, then... head for the outskirts," he told her. "Try and find a sewer access hatch, Ezra said they've been using those to sneak into the city."
"All right, we're moving," she promised. "Mart? Good luck."
"You too," he said, then switched off the transmitter. He leaned back on his feet, crouched behind the panel.
His toes scritched on the floor as he turned around and then froze.
The young technician was awake, sitting up and staring wide-eyed straight at him.
Panic locked Mart's limbs. His heart rattled inside his chest, knocking against his sternum with a heavy rhythm. The two boys stayed paralyzed in that moment.
Slowly, shaking the whole time, Mart began to raise desperate, placating hands.
The technician's eyes flicked towards the door, towards the patrol moving outside.
"Don't." The word came out as a rushed whisper, frantic and pleading. Mart fumbled under his chin a moment, grabbing the brim of his helmet and sliding it off, dropping it to the side as his head whispered Please please please. "Don't, see?" he said. "See? I'm not armed. I'm not gonna hurt—"
The other boy's head whipped towards the opening.
"Troopers!" he shouted. "Troopers, in here!"
The panic almost strangling him, Mart lurched up and stumbled out of the listening station, R3 on his heels.
He didn't get three steps before his ankle collapsed him to the ground, radiating pain through his leg that made him whimper. His hands pushed his torso up weakly as he looked up at the arriving patrol in dismay. One large floating troop transport hung in front of him like a looming predator.
R3 rolled protectively in front of him as a trio of Stormtroopers approached, electric prod out and brandishing threateningly.
"Wrr-wrr!" the little droid threatened, making jabbing motions towards the troopers' shins.
Mart shook as the troopers closed in.
"Capture the droid," one of them ordered another. "We need its memory banks."
R3 spat an insult at that, a binary curse Mart was pretty sure he'd learned from Chopper, the sparks from his prod arcing sharper and longer.
"Just immobilize it," the other trooper groaned in aggravation, pointing his blaster.
And then, before Mart's eyes, three blue stun shots were fired directly into the barrel of the astromech's chassis.
"No!" he cried as R3 shrieked with a dying binary wail, toppling over as the sparks shorted him out. Panels and tools popped limply open as the droid's display lights flickered off.
Mart swallowed dryly, his hands hovering helplessly over his friend. A numb feeling was icing up the hollow spaces in his chest, leaving him feeling cold in his core.
One of the troopers came forward, voice and posture bored. "All right, stand up," he ordered, motioning with his blaster. He stood over the boy, still motionless over the body of the droid, his head down. "Put your hands behind your—"
Mart moved suddenly, a surge of adrenaline springing him to his feet. He grabbed the trooper's blaster in both hands, twisting the barrel away, bringing his knee up into the trooper's groin.
As the Stormtrooper grunted in pain and doubled-over, Mart shoulder-checked him, breaking his grip on his weapon, then drew his fist back and punched the man right in the ear of his helmet.
He crumpled, and the other two pointed their blasters, getting off a couple shots before Mart finished them off, one—blam! blam!—and then the other—blam!—not even flinching as a laser bolt tore through his left arm.
He turned his stolen sidearm on the troop transport, firing continually at the cockpit window until the bolts punctured through and sounded a dying cry from the pilot inside.
Mart panted heavily when it was over, the blaster sagging in his hands limply, body vibrating with trembles.
He pressed a palm over his bleeding injury and hobbled away, stumbling as fast as he could away from the scene.
-SWR-
"Receiving a coded transmission," Hera reported, her comlink held up close to her ear cone as she tried to listen.
Kanan tilted a listening ear towards her as he and Zeb attended the controls to the access hatch.
Hera took in the pattern of clicks and whistles, motioning with a hand for Chopper. "It sounds like... coordinates?" She bent down by the droid. "Chopper, tune into the secure channel, see if you can plot them."
Chopper's dish extended and whirred a moment, and then he blorted out a confirmation, holomap of Capitol City springing from his projector, two blinking dots appearing on the grid.
Hera stood back, fists going to her hips as she studied the map. "Looks like the last known locations of two of ours," she determined.
Kallus and Ezra both came over to look at the map with her. Ezra's eyes scanned over it quickly, and then he pointed.
"Here," he said, finding a spot on the grid relatively close to one of the blinking dots. "This is an auxiliary hatch I used to use a lot, comes up near an old fertilizer processing plant, so no one really watched it much."
"I'll take that one," Kallus volunteered.
"We'll take it," Zeb corrected, moving to stand by the agent's shoulder.
Ezra frowned down at the other blip. His hand hovered over the map, searching.
"Closest access is this one," he said. He grimaced. "But that's a main hub, on a busy market street. Troopers are definitely gonna be guarding that one." His finger traced down the holographic line of the street. "We'll have to come up from this one instead, circle along the back alleys."
"This is of course, all assuming that the Empire hasn't fused those access hatches shut," Kanan grumbled, coming up to the huddle.
Ezra held up his lightsaber with a cheeky grin, igniting the blade briefly for Kanan's benefit. "You say that like it would be an issue."
"Getting through the hatches doesn't worry me," Hera told them, frowning with scrunched eyes at the holomap, seeming to stare past it. "Getting through the waves of Stormtoopers, walkers, and gunships that we're sure to encounter does." Her head lifted, turning slowly over her shoulder to consider the Ghost behind them in the rocks. "We might need air support," she mused.
Coming to a decision she straightened, facing forward again.
"Ezra, Sabine, I want you to take the Ghost and harass that landing platform here," she ordered, pointing to a spot between and to the south of the two blinking dots. "With any luck, that will lure away any patrols between us and our people."
"Really?" Ezra asked, trying to smother the excitement that was pulling at his mouth. "You're letting me fly the Ghost?"
"She never said you would be flying it, you numbskull," Sabine protested, whapping him behind his head. "You're not that great a pilot."
He rubbed his head with an offended look but didn't argue. Kanan, on the other hand, moved immediately between the two teens and Hera.
"If anyone should be flying the Ghost it's you, Hera," he argued.
She shook her head, her lekku flapping. "I'm going with you."
His teeth clenched slightly inside his jaw. "Hera—" he started.
She grabbed his face, earnestly. "I'm not sitting back and waiting to see if you're going to come out alive," she said sharply. She didn't know how else to explain the cold dread that clutched at her stomach, the horrible feeling that if she let him out of her sight it would be the last she saw him. "We do this together."
Kanan's face strained with worry. "Hera if anything happens to you..." He trailed off, attention turning down towards her stomach.
Hera set her mouth grimly. Maybe it was a bit irresponsible to go into combat carrying an innocent life, especially when she was trying to shield Ezra and Sabine by shoving them back in the relative safety of the Ghost. A compromise then.
"I'll stay under and hold the access hatch, if that makes you feel better," she offered. Her hand stroked along the line of his beard, feeling the rough prickles. "But we all go into danger, and come out alive, or none of us do," she emphasized. She lowered her voice to a whisper, breathing the words along his nose. "This child doesn't have a future if the Empire wins today..." she said, "...and I'll be damned if I let that happen."
The aggravated exhale of breath against her face told her that Kanan had decided not to fight her on the matter, yielding to her stubborn nature. He pulled back from her hands with a quiet, "All right."
Straightening with authority, he addressed all of them.
"Keep your comms on, but don't make contact unless you have no other choice. We wait for Ryder and the others to start the diversion before we move." He looked in Ezra and Sabine's direction first, "Watch each other's backs," he ordered. His attention drifted in Kallus and Zeb's direction. "Keep each other safe."
Ezra nodded. "May the Force be with you," he said.
Hera motioned for Chopper to follow as she, Kanan, Kallus, and Zeb moved to the open access hatch. Chopper flicked off his map, rolling over the weathered grasses and the dirt until it turned into the smooth metal of the long highway, the overhead lights now bright in the deepening darkness.
The Spectres slipped into the hatch, vanishing into the shadows.
-SWR-
Sabine was ready to turn around, head up the hill into the pillars where the freighter was, but stopped when she realized Ezra wasn't immediately trailing her. She frowned, watching him. He seemed deep in thought, staring off towards the horizon, where Capitol City glimmered hazily through the smog.
"Are you coming?" she asked.
He stirred, angling towards her. "Hera's got the right idea about us needing air support," he said. Sabine could see the gears in his head turning, the pinch between his eyes as he puzzled something out. "But the Empire's got way more TIEs and gunships than I think even the Ghost can handle."
Sabine chewed on her lip. He had a point. Hera herself would be hard-pressed against the force the Empire was capable of sending at them, and though both Ezra and Sabine were decent enough pilots, they were nowhere near her skill level. "What are you thinking?" she asked him.
His gaze was slightly absent, staring over her shoulder at the parked freighter. "We need a better ship," he concluded. Meeting her eyes he asked, "Where was that landing strip Ryder said he thought they were testing the new TIE Defender prototype?"
-SWR-
The stench of human waste and acrid scrubbing chemicals might have been distracting in some other circumstance—stars knew Kallus had not enjoyed his last foray into the Lothal sewers, to clean up the mess Gall Travis had made of their up-til-then impressive Imperial trap—but the man couldn't even smell it as he and Zeb took the tunnels deeper and deeper into the network, their feet tapping anxious rhythms against the quiet metal halls.
Kallus's face was pinched tight, and Zeb could hear the man gripping and ungripping his fists as they went, smell the stress hormones coming off of him. He didn't have to ask to know what was on Kallus's mind. He'd seen it plenty of times before, with Kanan, with Hera. Hell, Zeb himself had more than one occasion gone through the same, as part of the Honor Guard and after, with the younger members of the crew.
He knew exactly what kind of crippling worry must be crawling around inside Kallus's chest.
They had paused a moment in a junction to look for the next starbird, Kallus swiveling his flashlight around anxiously. Zeb adjusted his bo-rifle in his hands, freeing one hand to land on Kallus's shoulder encouragingly.
"Hey," he called, "they'll be all right. They're tough kids." He stepped back again. "Clever," he added. "Resourceful."
Kallus gave a strained sigh, his shoulders dropping, eyes leveling at the base of the hall. "Will that be enough, I wonder?" he said. His face looked absolutely haggard, deep lines creasing his skin. "I shouldn't have blown them off, before," he said miserably.
"There'll be time for regrets later," Zeb grunted, to stop the man's spiraling. "Right now, let's just get up there and get who we can out, eh?"
Kallus took a long, deep breath, raising his head again, a little more collected.
"You're right," he breathed. "This is no time for self-pity." He flicked his flashlight on the painted orange motif on the wall. "The access ladder looks to be that way," he said.
Zeb nodded and trotted along behind the man as he led the way around the corner to the alcove where the ladder up to street level was.
The alley above them sounded quiet. Hopefully it would remain that way.
-SWR-
Ezra's suggested exit point came up behind a low barricade, a wall cordoning off one section of the city from the other. Kanan, Hera, and Chopper stayed crouched behind it until they could hear distant explosions.
Several streets over, a patrol of Stormtroopers rushed quickly by, chattering into their comms about attacks on the city perimeter, multiple groups, on the south, the west, and the east.
Their footsteps faded as they hurried away, scrambling to reinforce the city borders.
Kanan turned his head towards Hera.
"For a cynic, Ryder's certainly putting a lot of effort into his distraction," he commented.
Hera smiled lightly, blaster in hand, pressing her shoulder against the barrier. "Coast is clear," she told him. She touched his shoulder briefly, a silent message to go. "Be safe," she said.
"I will," he promised.
Crouching low behind the barrier, Kanan moved off, slipping quietly through alleyways until he was out of her sight.
-SWR-
The Imperial hanger was a strange mix of frenzy and calm, the atmosphere one of tense concentration and clipped order. Pryce stood stiff-backed in the center of it all, observing walkers departing and the troop transports flitting in and out, and tapping a fist impatiently against her thigh as she waited for information to come in.
A transport's repulsors puttered to her left. She turned and watched the craft slow to a crawl and stop, the hatch popping open as it settled.
A thin, gnarled gray creature with spindly limbs and short spines going up from the bridge of its nose to its hairless head stepped out, pushing an alien Rebel pilot in front of him with a polearm. The creature was dressed simply, only gauntlets and a shoulder bandolier for armor, and had a twitchy, feral way of moving that unnerved her.
Pryce flattened her mouth into a thin line as the Noghri pushed the Rebel pilot to his knees in front of her, presenting him like a trophy. She had to begrudgingly admit that Thrawn's assassin was very effective. Still, resentment burned in her as she met Ruhk's eerie luminescent eyes. The Noghri betrayed no emotion, his face in a permanent scowl.
Swallowing her pride, she motioned for troopers to come forward and collect the prisoner. "Well done, assassin," she said.
Ruhk nodded and stepped back as the troopers moved to take the Rebel pilot away.
A harried officer ran up to her, saluting briefly before launching into his speech.
"Governor! There are reports of several insurgent incursions at the city's perimeter barricades," he told her.
Pryce's frown deepened. The gears turned inside her head. She was no great strategist like Thrawn, but even she could recognize a pattern. "It's a diversionary tactic," she spat. "They've done it before—they're trying to lure our forces away from the city center so they can infiltrate and rescue their pilots." Straightening, she addressed the junior officer. "Reinforce the line but keep your focus on securing those crash sites," she ordered sternly. "And tighten the patrols, nothing slips through, do you understand?"
"Yes ma'am!" he said, clipping heels and putting hands behind him.
He rushed off and Pryce turned her attention to the next Stormtrooper demanding her attention, pointedly ignoring Ruhk and the keenly interested way he tilted his head, listening in.
"Governor Pryce, we've located another downed fighter, three blocks from the last one. No sign of the pilot but they couldn't have gotten far, blood spatter in the cockpit suggests they were injured." The trooper shifted briefly before he continued. "And IS-Station-56 in the East District reported a Rebel sighting; the pilot used the communications equipment to send a distress signal."
She nodded. "Have ISB see if they can backtrace the signal. Lock down the district and start a systematic sweep until you locate the Rebels."
Her eyes swept towards the Noghri, landing on him with a sneer.
"I trust that won't be too difficult for you," she said, tone vaguely sweet and sing-song, heavily implying for him to take command of the search.
A single downward jerk of his head. "It shall be done, Governor," he replied, in his raspy guttural growl.
Pryce felt a bit of relief as he turned and padded off behind the trooper patrol now hurrying to carry out her orders, though she couldn't say why. Anxiety coiled tight around her, as she turned back to the hanger bay and watched gunships load up and take off. Despite the self-reassurances she whispered to herself, the words she repeated over and over inside her head, nothing could quell the snaking static tingling on her nerves.
It was irrational. The attack had been prevented. The TIE factories were secure and undamaged. This was rightfully her victory.
So why did it feel as though as everything was on a razor's edge of falling apart?
She picked up a datapad, just for something to hold and have in her nervous hands.
Perhaps Thrawn's paranoia was beginning to wear off on her, she thought with a rueful twist of her mouth.
No matter. She'd have the Rebels in hand soon enough.
-SWR-
Two shadows crept through the Lothal streets, one clinging to the other, skittering around the pools of overhead light that passed by with every sweep of the rumbling gunships.
Jonner's breathing was a strained wheeze in her ear. Gooti clung to his arm, her hand tight on his wrist, keeping him supported over her shoulder, but he was growing heavier and heavier on her, as they both lost strength.
Still, she persisted, keeping them moving forward, step by limping step, eyes fixed straight ahead and not allowing herself to think about anything except getting to an access hatch.
She panted softly, her breath freezing as she brought them up short, waiting for the sound of running footsteps to fade.
It seemed to take a horribly long time.
Releasing the breath she'd been holding, Gooti resumed her anxious pace.
Jonner let out a harsh couple of coughs next to her. "Gooti..." he strained, his voice sounding like it was raking through nails and wire. "I don't... I don't know if I can keep going..."
"Don't say that," she cut him off. Her eyes darted around the street, trying to decide which way wouldn't lead them into instant death. "We're—we're almost there. We're gonna get you some help." She said the words almost more to reassure herself, because the longer they stumbled from street to street the louder an alarm inside her head was ringing, the twitchier her nerves got, and the harder she startled at every small noise, every slight shift of light.
She turned in a slow circle, searching for starbird symbols. Nothing but plain tan walls surrounded them.
So she made them keep moving.
She squeezed them through a narrow gap between two market stalls, spotting a small courtyard up ahead. A vague acidic smell was starting to waft through her nose. Some kind of industrial plant?
Before they reached the courtyard, Jonner sagged, almost dragging her down with him as his legs collapsed.
Gooti grunted under his weight, turning around and grabbing him under both armpits now.
"No no no no, Jonner, c'mon!" she cried, trying to drag him along the ground now. "C'mon we gotta keep going! You can't die on me now! Don't you dare die on me now!" she said shrilly.
His heels made two long skids on the ground before she couldn't pull him anymore.
She panted hard, desperation tingling around her head. She looked around frantically, searching for a place to hide as the low sound of Stormtrooper comm chatter started echoing down the street.
Crouching low, she pulled Jonner underneath one of the market stalls, shoving aside the thick canvas tarp to stow them under the wood table. She dropped the tarp back in place, shrouding them in darkness, one hand reaching down to press on the bloody wound in his abdomen. Blood seeped through her pink fingers and she fought down the urge to scream.
"Sorry Gooti..." he wheezed, his face pale and gray. "Sorry..."
"Shh," she shushed him, pressing harder, furiously staunching the long slash. Her head was blaring with alarms as the comm chatter and the puttering sound of a gunship came closer and then... something else sounded.
Slow padding footsteps. Not booted, like the Stormtroopers. Soft. Beast-like. Low snuffles like the thing was... sniffing for them.
Gooti bit her lip until it turned white, arms tightening around Jonner, listening to it coming closer and closer.
The footsteps sounded heavily on the pavement. The sniffing continued, inching towards their hiding place like a slow portent of doom. Gooti's body trembled and shook. A shadow slanted across the narrow strip of light coming from underneath the tarp flap and she pressed a hand tight over her mouth to hold in a frightened whimper, quivering hard, squeezing her eyes closed, stilling her breath and begging whatever gods were listening for it to pass, Please please pass, she thought desperately. Please please please please...
The sniffing stopped sharply.
Gooti thought it was over for a moment but then—
A slow-growing engine roar screeched from a distance, moving fast, pitching higher and higher until turbolaser blasts erupted from somewhere close by.
The Stormtroopers shouted in alarm, barking orders at each other, and the shadow disappeared from the gap, running footsteps fading off down another street.
Gooti sobbed in relief, leaning over Jonner, her shoulders and chest shuddering.
-SWR-
"What in the world?" Hera blurted, looking up over the city skyline to see the darting shape spinning and diving through the night air, dodging easily around the distant hovering gunships, flashes of green sparking around it.
Chopper made an analysis and then helpfully informed Hera of his conclusion.
"They stole the TIE Defender?!" Hera repeated incredulously. She stared wide-eyed in disbelief as the distant blip swerved and dodged around obstacles, moving faster than any fighter she'd ever seen. That's the opposite of what I wanted them to do! she thought furiously.
Chopper made a nonchalant suggestion.
Hera let out a grumbling exhale, conceding to the droid's logic. They did stand a better chance against the Empire's TIE fighters in the Defender.
Still, she didn't have to be happy about it.
"When we get out of this, they are grounded for a month," she grouched to herself.
-SWR-
Sabine shrieked as another tight barrel roll knocked her against the roof and sides of the Defender, bruising her arms and legs as she tumbled.
The fighter straightened out and she pulled her head up from where she had sprawled.
"You know, if you get the whole ship blown up, I won't have to deactivate the transponder!" she shouted towards Ezra's back.
"Why are you worrying about the transponder?!" he yelled back, glancing back from the pilot's chair. "It's not like we can hide from them now!"
"I'm sorry, I assumed we didn't want to be tracked back to the Capitol by a trio of ace Interceptors!" she sniped, as the aforementioned ships started buzzing the Defender's rear deflectors.
"Just see if this thing has a kill switch or something!" Ezra snapped, gripping the yoke tightly and sending them into a sheering turn. "I'll worry about the Interceptors!"
Sabine rolled her eyes but obediently got down into the workings of the ship. "Stay focused this time!" she complained at him, her hands pulling aside a panel. "You've been getting distracted ever since we set foot on that landing strip!"
Ezra chewed his lip, biting his tongue. He didn't know how to explain to her the weird sensation that had come over him as he'd set eyes on the Defender. The strange splintering energies around the ship and the flashes of vision that had passed through his head, like he was flashing back to a memory.
The Imperial shuttle descending like a circling raptor, Thrawn coming down the ramp, Ezra's body freezing in place as terror strangled him, turning him to a fear-filled stone—
But Thrawn wasn't there. There were only irritated Stormtroopers, who had opened fire after stumbling across him standing dumbly in front of the ladder, lost in the odd visions.
It didn't make sense. The flashes couldn't have been memories, because they had never happened. And they weren't as detailed or immersive as his occasional Force-assisted glimpses of the future.
The energies were still around the Defender now, whispering tendrils of the Force wafting like air currents through the metal and transparisteel, though they were fading fast, stilling into silence.
He was so busy puzzling it all out that he was numb to what he was doing for a moment.
The ship shuddered from a hard hit.
"Ezra!" Sabine growled indignantly. "What did I just say?!"
Ezra shook himself, dispelling the feeling, regripping the yoke. "Sorry!" he blurted. He braked hard, letting the other fighter streak past him. "I got it!" he promised.
He opened fire, turning the Inteceptor quickly into smoking metal and fire.
-SWR-
Pryce stared furiously through the macrobinoculars, her fingernails digging into the edges as she watched the prototype fighter fly circles around the Imperial Interceptors.
She yanked them down from her face, whipping around and stalking straight for the nearest comm station, grip tight on the casing.
"Get me Landing Pad 327A!" she barked out in a sharp order, and the techs scrambled to comply, shying from her anger. Pryce tossed the macrobinoculars on the console, almost throwing them, then leaned hands on the dashboard, hovering over an underling's shoulder and waiting for her hail to go through.
"Governor Pryce!" The reedy voice of Lieutenant Lyste came through the channel as soon as it was open. "Rebel insurgents have stolen the TIE Defender Elite prototype!"
"I can see that!" she snapped, turning her head to look out the hanger. Her eyes burned at the craft, almost invisible in the deepening night, only the bright green laser barrages betraying its position. "Who is in that Defender, Lieutenant?!" she demanded.
"It—It was the Mandalorian girl and the Jedi boy!" Lyste stammered out. "They caught us off guard!"
"Bridger," Pryce hissed. Her nails curled, scratching the console. "Activate the anti-theft countermeasures, now!" she ordered.
"At once, Governor!" he promised.
Pryce reached over the technician's shoulder, pressing a few buttons to switch channels. Grabbing up her handheld comlink, she spoke quickly into the receiver.
"Ruhk," she said. "That fighter above the industrial sector is being piloted by Rebel insurgents. I have activated its kill switch. Once it goes down, you are to proceed immediately to the crash site and secure it. If there are any survivors, you are to capture them alive, at any cost," she emphasized.
"Understood, Governor," he acknowledged.
Pryce leaned back with a breathless exhale, her anger still tingling inside her.
Collecting herself she swiveled about and snapped, "Get me walkers!" as she stalked deeper into the hanger.
-SWR-
Ezra yelped in alarm as two of the TIE Defender's wings suddenly sheered off.
"Sabine! What happened?!" he cried, slightly panicked. "I've only got one wing!"
"We're lucky to still have that!" she told him, emerging from the ship's innards, having sabotaged the detaching mechanism on their last wing. She gripped the back of Ezra's seat tightly. "They hit the kill switch! Brace for impact, we're going down!"
Ezra's jaw clamped, teeth grinding and clenching as he hung onto the steering column for dear life, all his strength and focus going into holding the dropping fighter in the least severe descent angle he could.
The Force screamed in warning and he jerked the yoke hard to the right, avoiding a building, as they continued to drop.
-SWR-
Blasterfire crisscrossed over his head as Ryder peeked out from cover to deliver a few shots. Behind the barricade, he glimpsed a Stormtrooper jerking back and falling over, but another had soon taken up his place, keeping the defense line strong. Underneath the cacophony of the firefight, the slow mechanical steps of a chicken walker marched inexorably towards them. Ryder could see it on the main Lothal highway, approaching like a hellish specter of doom.
"We won't last long against that once it gets in range!" Jai pointed out, crouched next to him behind his own cover, eyes focused over his blaster.
Ryder looked past the walker towards the city. He couldn't see the swooping TIE prototype anymore; hopefully whoever was inside it had made it down safely.
He made his way backwards toward his speeder, giving Marida a steel look.
"We've done all we can," he grunted. "Fall back!"
She stopped firing her blaster a moment, holding up her arm and opening a channel with her wrist comlink.
"Fall back!" she repeated, relaying the order. "All Rebels, full retreat."
Ryder paid one last grim look towards the city as his forces withdrew, fleeing back towards the empty grasslands.
Good luck, he thought, towards their unseen companions within.
-SWR-
The ship screeched as it skidded across the pavement, and Ezra let go of the steering column and flung up his hands, calling the Force to him to try to slow them down.
He pushed on the street, on the buildings in front of them, shoving with telekinetic power at whatever his mental hands could grab to halt their skid.
Metal rent with a hideous roar as the Defender scraped to a halt.
The jolt as they stopped broke his focus, and Ezra fell face-first into the front window, which held his weight for only a moment until Sabine crashed into his back, and then it shattered, dumping the two teens out into the street.
Ezra lay there for a moment, dazed, his head still ringing from the impact. After a long minute he was able to force his aching limbs to move, and sat up slowly, leaning against the the strut of their last wing.
"Ow..." he groaned.
A body stirred softly next to him. Ezra's eyes flicked over and he saw Sabine picking herself up, pushing up on her palms and coughing lightly from the disturbed dust.
"Ezra?" she strained, turning around and leaning against the wing with him. "Let's never do this again," she begged.
Ezra let a grin creep onto his face for a few seconds, before a warning spike on his senses had him lunging forward, pushing her head behind cover.
"Get down!" he cried.
A blaster shot sizzled in the space where her hair had been. Ezra shifted, kneeling up on his legs, pulling out his blaster and sending fire back at the Stormtroopers now emerging from the alleyway to their side.
Sabine found her helmet and shoved it on, and soon had her own pair of blasters out, spewing rapidfire shots at the troopers moving in.
There seemed to be an abnormal number of them, pouring in from every direction. Ezra stood, his lightsaber flashing out, deflecting blaster bolts and forming a cover shield for Sabine.
"We're outnumbered!" he called back to her.
She paused a moment in shooting, one hand diving into her belt and pulling out a handful of her miracles. "I can thin them out!" she told him.
She picked a direction and tossed her grenades.
They popped with several bright explosions, throwing bodies aside and up into the air. Stormtroopers screamed as they were sent flying, as shrapnel and debris hit them.
Sabine grabbed back for his wrist, catching him and holding on tightly.
"C'mon!" she urged, running into the smoke left behind and pulling him along with her.
Ezra stumbled a little as he ran with her, the black mist curling all around him, shrouding them in an obscure haze for a moment before they emerged into the clear, on the other side of the slowly tightening winch of troopers.
Their reprieve didn't last long; as the smoke cleared the troopers realized they were gone, and turned around to shoot at their backs. Ezra and Sabine rushed away from the crash site, their feet pounding, the street they were running down turning into a deadly gauntlet of blaster bolts.
"What do we do now?!" Ezra asked, firing back with one hand.
"I'm thinking!" she answered, her gauntlet's energy shield powering up, bouncing laserfire off of its blue surface.
"Think faster!" Ezra growled, turning and stowing his sidearm, taking a stance with both hands on his saber to meet the next volley.
Two deflected shots and a Stormtrooper went down; Ezra spun back around to keep running after Sabine.
"I'm open to ideas!" she told him in aggravation.
Ezra's head twisted this way and that. He panted heavily as his eyes searched, shins vibrating from his heavy footsteps.
He pointed. "There!" he said. "Get up on top!"
Sabine nodded, scrambling up the low archway over a nearby door and ascending quickly up to the roof.
Ezra's legs coiled and the Force pooled into his leap. He landed roughly a step or two behind Sabine, and now they were running across the rooftops, the crossfire thinning as the Stormtroopers were forced to angle their shots upwards and work around the building edges.
Sabine was wheezing through her helmet, her exhausted breaths filtering through the vocodor. "Now what?" she asked. Troopers were already starting to climb up to the roof level with them.
Ezra thought fast. He laid out his mental map of the city inside his head. "Nearest sewer access hatch is a couple blocks over," he said. He searched over the roofs briefly. "Uh... that way!" he told her.
Sabine's eyes squinted a moment through her helmet as she checked her own mental image and her memory of the holomap. "Isn't that the one you said was a main hub and probably guarded?"
Ezra shook his head, teeth pinched. "Doesn't matter now!" he pointed out.
"Okay!" She dispelled her shield, reaching for his hand. "Grab on!"
His hand clasped around her wrist, holding tight.
She engaged her jetpack.
"Woah!" Ezra flailed a bit as he was pulled off his feet.
He held on as Sabine rocketed them over the Lothal boulevards. When they were close, she dropped them back down to the street, and they wobbled a moment before resuming their frantic pace.
The hatch was guarded by a clutch of Stormtroopers, as they had suspected, but they still had surprise on their side as they charged forward.
Ezra heard an ignition from his left and Sabine pushed forward ahead of him, swinging the darksaber across the breastplates of the forwardmost troopers, felling them.
The others startled back, not expecting that from the Mandalorian, and Ezra was able to rush in and finish them off, his emerald blade flashing.
There was no time to breathe though, no time to move towards the hatch controls—a troop transport was squealing to a stop in the junction to their right, and the Stormtrooper pursuit was catching up to them from the other streets.
Sabine turned, brandishing the darksaber, her back against Ezra's as they faced the threat. His arms were in constant motion as he blocked shots. Sabine deflected more awkwardly, one hand fumbling in her belt for another explosive, flinching from shots that got too close. Ezra quickly nudged her behind him with an elbow push, so she was facing the wall and he was facing the attackers, buying her time. His hands gripped tighter around his hilt and his knees locked as his feet rooted.
A warning tingle from the Force shot through him.
Ezra whipped eyes up at the unloading troop transport. He had time for a glimpse of eerie eyes and rock-gray skin before a squat shape was leaping towards him.
The boy yelped, ducking.
The thing flew over his head, colliding with Sabine and knocking her down. Ezra straightened, gaping in horrified disgust at the creature.
"What is that?!" he cried.
"Ugly!" Sabine shouted, grappling with it as it tried to lay hands on her. "Get it off me!"
Ezra rushed to her aide, prying its spindly fingers off her right wrist and yanking. The thing was strong; it pulled free of Ezra's grip quickly and snapped back, gaining space.
Ezra raised his saber grimly. The creature's expression lit up with a creepy excited glee, its long hands reaching back to grab a thin polearm, which it brandished in front of it.
"Jedi," it hissed, its voice a guttural masculine growl, the ends of the stave sparking up with crackling purple energy.
Ezra froze for just a moment, just a horrible split second of static filling his brain as he stared at the lancing energy.
The creature rushed him and Ezra forced the flash of panic down before it could overtake him, bringing his lightsaber up in defense. Several rapid blows exchanged as Ezra danced back away from the sizzling weapon.
The other troopers were still coming.
Sabine heaved up from the ground and threw her grenades, the devices scattering more haphazardly than she'd intended.
BLAM!
One group of advancing troopers knocked back.
BLAM!
A wall next to them exploded apart, collapsing debris onto another pair.
Sabine staggered upright, gripping the darksaber, sending a kick into the chest of a Stormtrooper. He fell back into one of his companions, tripping and toppling over, but not downed for good.
Sabine moved in.
While she dealt with them, Ezra was still clashing with the gray creature, lightsaber almost a blur of bright green as it spun and twisted, blocking and blocking and locking with the sparking ends of the stave, deflecting attacks that came on with a speed and ferocity that reminded him uncomfortably of Maul.
Ezra found a gap and thrust a palm out.
The Force Push bowled into the creature, stunning it for a moment as it was flung back. It somersaulted quickly, digging fingers into the ground and stopping itself on all fours. Ezra narrowed his eyes as he put his guard up, and none too soon, for the thing came at him again, whirling its polearm in a blur of motion.
Crashing blows split the air. Ezra went on the offensive, lunging in and grabbing hold of the creature's weapon, twisting it up and back to smack into its own face.
It snarled furiously, shoving him off with a push of the polearm, before whirling to face an attack from Sabine.
She yelled as she slashed the darksaber heavily, missing her opponent as it side-stepped. Sabine followed up with a diagonal sweep that knocked the polearm akilter. But the next second it had slipped around behind her and struck her in the small of her back.
She went down hard, splaying on the pavement. The creature raised the polearm with both hands but immediately had to contend with Ezra, who forced it to back away from Sabine. Ezra pressed his charge, striking with a quick rhythm—one, two, three, sweep—and was rewarded with a satisfying rend of metal as his saber slashed through the center of the thing's weapon.
It growled low, eyes flashing with anger as it slowly backed off, looking at the broken pieces of its stave. With a creepy smile though, it dropped them, and reached over and pressed a button on its gauntlet.
Its form shimmered and disappeared.
Alarmed, Ezra cast his senses about, feeling its presence move around him. Sabine appeared at his shoulder, her rangefinder down, searching.
"There!" she pointed.
The shimmering patch of air rushed in and Ezra felt a blow slam into his stomach. He doubled over, and Sabine lunged past him, striking at the air, her fists and feet occasionally meeting resistance as she made contact.
Ezra straightened and tried to join in, straining to see the visual distortion that dodged and weaved around them.
It struck Sabine; she stumbled and couldn't recover, overbalancing, falling down. Ezra glimpsed a Stormtrooper running in and grabbing her arm, and her yanking him down to smash his faceplate into her knee, before a rush of air and pattering footsteps behind him warned him of the creature's presence.
Ezra stabbed out, but hit nothing, and felt a thin but powerful arm wind around his neck, pulling his head back with the creature's weight. Ezra choked slightly, stumbling. The creature continued dragging him backwards, trying to topple him, its other hand grasping at his face. Ezra felt cold tendrils of panic stab into his mind and desperately shook his head, twisting in the creature's grip, trying not to lose himself in flashes of tattooed hands grabbing his chin, fingers digging into his cheeks, mashing against his lips, Maul's breath threatening and hot behind his ear.
He screamed at his own mind not to dissolve. He couldn't lose focus now.
Stay in the moment, stay in the moment! he told himself, his breaths shortening, his mind beginning to loosen and drift.
Break out of it, the notion came to him, and impulsively he shoved back hard with his heels, sending the both of them straight into the nearest wall.
The creature grunted, its hands losing their grip on him as the blow rattled through its body. Ezra wrestled free, almost falling forward, turning around and raising his saber.
The distortion in the air was quick, too quick—Ezra felt a hand closing on his throat and fingers gripping his sword-arm wrist.
He was on his back, pinned down before he could react, and scratching with his free hand at the face of his invisible attacker. The hands squeezed his neck and wrist, his lightsaber was useless against the ground, a weight was on his chest, he couldn't see where Sabine was and—
The creature yelped as a blaster shot popped against its back, and Ezra felt the Force swell around a newcomer to the battle.
"Hey!" Kanan's voice barked sharply in outrage. "Get off him!"
Running footsteps and the sharp hum of a swinging lightsaber, and then the weight on him was gone.
Relief tingled through his head as he watched Kanan battle against the creature.
-SWR-
"How much further to the coordinates?" Zeb asked in a hushed whisper.
Kallus checked the small holomap of the city he'd brought with him. "Five blocks," he replied. "But with the troop movement in this sector I doubt anyone's there now." He stowed the device, looking back up. "A better bet would be to search along these streets."
"If we're that close," Zeb mused, ears twitching and alert, "we should try comming them."
Kallus pressed his mouth flat for a moment, considering. "All right," he decided.
He pulled out his comlink, adjusting the knob for the frequency with shaky fingers. He and Zeb kept walking, kept creeping down the alley in slow caution, as he opened the channel.
"This is Captain Kallus of the Lothal Cell, calling any attack team survivors."
No response save for quiet static, at first.
Pulse prickling, Kallus repeated, "This is Captain Kallus. Is anyone out there?"
Zeb stopped suddenly, his ears picking up a soft sound. A noise like a strangled breath. "Wait," he called to Kallus. His hand raised as he listened harder, ears turning to try and pinpoint the origin. "I hear something."
He listened a long moment and then pointed.
"That way."
Both men trotted out towards the larger street, Kallus continuing to hail the Rebel frequency.
"Calling any members of the Yavin attack team," he said, stress in every syllable. "Can you hear me?"
There was a cry from somewhere to their right, immediately drawing their eyes to the market stand where a pink arm had pulled back the heavy tarp.
"Kallus!" came the young female cry, voice strained with relief and trembling.
The man gasped through his teeth, surging forward. Zeb jogged to keep up with him. Kallus was already kneeling down, gently pulling Jonner's head from Gooti's lap, settling the boy down carefully. Gooti was sobbing, the breath heaving in and out of her and Kallus moved aside so Zeb could take his place, the medkit already out, grabbing for her arm and gently pulling her away.
"Are you hurt?" he asked anxiously.
She couldn't speak, crying too hard, flinging herself into his arms and clinging to him hysterically. It caught him by surprise for only a moment before he returned the hug.
"It's all right," he breathed. "It's all right. I'm here."
He held her as Zeb attended to Jonner. The boy coughed weakly, eyes pinched closed as Zeb quickly wrapped bandages around his torso.
"Hey... Captain..." he whispered thinly.
"Try not to talk too much," Zeb chided. "You'll aggravate your wound."
Another soft cough. "Oh," he said.
Zeb patted his shoulder as he finished, and then his hands carefully slipped under Jonner's back and legs, lifting the boy up lightly in his arms. "Hang tight, kid. We've got ya now," he promised.
Kallus had managed to pull Gooti to her feet, and was switching comm channels.
"Captain Syndulla," he reported in, "Garazeb and I have located Ensign Terez and Ensign Jin. Ensign Jin is injured. We are withdrawing immediately to get him medical attention."
"Understood," she acknowledged. "That's good to hear."
Kallus stowed his comlink, the static anxiety in his head finally beginning to diminish a little
Gooti had shimmering eyes, her loosely-fisted hands shaking by her sides as she took a deep breath.
"Mart made it down too," she explained. "I... I don't know where he is."
He placed a reassuring hand on her shoulder. "We've got his last known coordinates," he said, even though he had no way of confirming that. "Don't worry," he told her. "We'll find him."
She took a shaky exhale, calming down.
Kallus glanced inwards towards the city center as the began to turn back, sending a silent entreaty towards the others, hoping against hope that his words would prove prophetic.
-SWR-
His head was swimming, delirious from exhaustion.
Mart pulled his head up wearily, gaze locking on his new location.
A large open courtyard lay before him, gated on either side by high thick duracrete walls. Giant metal spheres clustered beyond, towering above the walls, resting on solid metal struts and girders.
Mart stared a moment, his tired mind not comprehending.
He stirred.
The fuel depot, he realized, his nose catching the faint chemical whiff of processed gas. In his limping, directionless flight from discovery by the Empire, he had stumbled across it. Or perhaps this had always been his heading, some part of him recognizing it as the only familiar landmark he could head to.
He leaned against the nearest wall, in a slight daze. He didn't know where to go now. The City outskirts were miles away and he had no idea where the nearest sewer hatch was. He had seen no painted starbirds to guide his way. And Stormtroopers had dogged him around every corner.
He was out of options. Except...
Mart reached down towards the pocket pouch on his thigh, hesitating, considering. It held a distress flare gun, for emergency use.
It only had one shot, and Mart knew that as soon as he sent it up he would immediately telegraph his position to every Stormtrooper, pilot, walker, and transport in Capitol City.
His fingers fumbled with the pocket snap, reaching in and closing around the enamel hilt. He drew out the flare gun, just holding it in his hands a moment, looking at it.
He didn't know whether it was from desperation or foolish hope that he gripped the hilt, pointed the flare gun up towards the sky, and pulled the trigger.
His hand jerked from the recoil and a brilliant red rocket streaked up towards the hazy stars.
-SWR-
From behind the two pilots, Pryce's attention immediately pulled to the red light she could see through the AT-AT's windows.
Her eyes tracked the flare as it rose up above the buildings, curling higher and higher, the scarlet shade matching the gleam of anger burning hot in her eyes, her mouth agape at the audacity of the Rebels to broadcast themselves so openly.
And the she realized where the signal flare was coming from.
Her nails dug into the pilots' seats.
"They're at the fuel depot," she growled. "Full advance!"
The walker groaned as its lumbering pace increased double-time.
-SWR-
The tide of the skirmish had quickly turned around in their favor with Kanan's arrival. Now having to contend with two Jedi and a Mandalorian, all with lightsabers, forced all but the Noghri out of close quarters, and it was all too easy for Kanan and Ezra to block the blasterfire while Sabine shot back.
Still, the numbers remained against them. Reinforcements continued to arrive. And the invisible assassin was no combat slouch. He circled around Kanan, looking for an opening. Kanan tracked him with his ears, barely moving, calmly waiting until the creature telegraphed his incoming attacks.
Quick strikes, quick blocks, and then the dance began anew. Kanan kept up with the Noghri's savage slashes like a placid stone standing against turbulent water. That his opponent was camouflaged was no hindrance to him—between the Noghri's growls and puffing breaths, the scritch of his feet against the ground, and Kanan's Force Sense, Kanan could picture exactly where the assassin was.
A downward strike hit something solid. There was a screech of plasma on metal and the snap of sparks, and the creature drew back with a furious hiss, flickering back into view.
Ezra quickly stepped up next to his master, throwing a hand out.
Their opponent was blown back into the far wall, and Sabine followed up with a grenade that burst open the building, spilling debris down on his head. He gawped, yelping as he disappeared from view.
That settled for the moment, the three closed ranks to face the oncoming Stormtroopers. Kanan could sense Ezra and Sabine's nervous energy as they clustered close to him, their rising grim resignation.
There were just simply too many. If they didn't break away from this fight and find an opening to escape soon... but there were troopers on all sides, blocking every exit and avenue. The Empire had them dead to rights and would surely be moving in to finish them off.
Which was why it was a surprise when the troopers all froze, the blasterfire going silent for a moment, petering out as helmets turned up towards the sky behind them in confusion.
They heard it; the whistling whine of a distress rocket going up. Ezra and Sabine whipped around, gaping as the red flare popped several hundred miles above their heads, a beacon calling them, a cry for help.
Kanan was the first to shake out of his stupor. "Sabine," he barked quickly, and she took the hint, pulling out the last explosives she had and sending them rolling along the ground towards their enemy.
BAM! BAM-BAM!
Smoke and flame filled the space between them. Shouts rang out. The blaster volleys resumed.
"Come on!" Kanan called, leading the way into the smoke cover. He kept track of Ezra and Sabine by the light tempo of their footsteps, one hand out and reaching low, searching. Trying to remember where he'd heard the two speeder bikes parking...
His hand brushed a handle and he wasted no time, throwing a leg over the seat. Sabine and Ezra stumbled to the one next to it, Sabine wrapping arms around Ezra's waist as they took command of it, gunning the engine.
Kanan leaned heavily into the Force and accelerated forward.
Smoke and dust filled his nose as the speeder rocketed away.
-SWR-
They stopped when they were convinced they'd lost the troopers—at least temporarily.
Ezra slumped forward over the handlebars, panting from the exertion and adrenaline still coursing through him. A slight tickle of thirst was at the back of his throat, and the edges of his skull still tingled with uncomfortable anxiety—Breathe breathe breathe breathe, he told himself, You're okay, you're not hurt—but his frantic heartrate was starting to come down.
Sabine dismounted from the speeder a moment, shielding her faceplate and squinting towards the smoke trail left behind by the flare.
"That signal flare came from the fuel depot," she said, slightly astonished.
Kanan turned his head towards her. "Are you sure?" he asked.
Ezra pulled his head up, mentally tracing the city streets in his head. "She's right," he confirmed. He stood up as well, coming to stand by her shoulder. "We're not even three blocks from it."
"Which direction?"
Ezra screwed his face, remembering.
"One left, then a right, and then it's pretty much a straight shot." He faced Kanan, concern growing on his expression. "What's the plan?"
Kanan was silent for a long moment, thinking.
"Can you find your way back to the other access hatch?" he finally spoke up and asked. "The one I came up through?"
Ezra nodded. "Yeah."
His master's hand landed softly on his shoulder. "Then I want you take Sabine and go. Hera and Chopper are waiting at that extraction point. I'll zip in, grab our people, and meet you there."
The words were confident and calm, but as Ezra looked up at Kanan, he felt a sudden spike of anxiety shoot through him.
The energies were back. Strange distortions swirling around Kanan, eddies that flashed inside his head with images of burning, burning, screams, a rending splitting apart his mind—
Ezra gasped softly, sharply, through his teeth. His head was ringing. The eddies followed Kanan as he got on the other speeder, and coils of panic started to creep up Ezra's lungs.
"Wait—" he blurted, reaching out a hand. "Kanan!"
What did it mean? What was he even sensing?!
"I'll be back," Kanan assured him, squeezing the handlebars and leaning onto the pedals.
The speeder shot forward, and the energies went with him, fading out from his vision and senses and leaving him wide-eyed and bewildered in the middle of the street.
Sabine was tugging at his arm, but an impulse inside him drowned her out. The Force was screaming, calling to him, tingling on his arms and legs and spine, trying to get his attention.
He ripped himself from her hands, running after the speeder, arms and legs pulsing and pounding in a heavy rhythm.
"Go, Sabine!" he shouted back at her.
"Ezra!" Her yell was exasperated, tainted with complaint.
"Go!" he told her again.
His lungs were already shrieking as his frantic dash through the street flared his adrenaline back up into a rapid tempo that beat in time with his knocking heart.
-SWR-
It was looking and sounding increasingly likely, from the security sirens now wailing on the walls and the echoing bark of filtered voices, the heavy footsteps of walkers, that the Empire would be the first to find him.
Mart heard the rustling agitation and sighed. It had been a long shot, but it was worth a try.
He pushed off from the wall with his shoulder, slowly limping across the open courtyard, his footsteps awkward as he gingerly stepped on his injured foot.
What did he have to lose at this point? he thought. He headed straight for the closest fuel pod, gripping his arm as blood trickled down from the blaster wound, the vague notion of a last stand forming in his head. He was here. Maybe there was still something he could do to finish the mission.
He paused under the shadow of the fuel pod, craning his neck up, and up, eyes narrowed. He passed his stolen blaster from his injured hand to his good one, lifting it and taking potshots at the pod, pulling the trigger with rigid, precise squeezes.
Blaster shots popped off the thick metal, pinging away, loud in the empty space.
Mart kept firing, oblivious to most everything else until a sharp command from behind rang out.
"Don't move!" an Imperial-sounding voice barked.
The young Rebel turned around slowly, meeting the uniformed officer with a firm glare. The black-clad man had his pistol leveled at Mart, and was flanked by a pair of troopers, rushing in to take position.
Anger and defiance burned in Mart's eyes. His shoulders squared, chin straightened, and he pointed his blaster, preparing to go out like his father, like Uncle Jun, thumbing his nose to the Empire until the very end.
No shots came.
Instead, the whine of a speeder, coming impossibly fast, grew louder and louder behind the Imperials until all three of them were bowled over in a metal blur.
Mart blinked as the back end of the speeder spun around, the craft shuddering to an awkward stop. And perched atop it was a very familiar sight.
His chest shuddered, the anger leaving him for cold relief.
"Kanan!"
The Jedi twisted in his seat, beckoning for him with an arm. "C'mon kid! Let's go!"
Mart couldn't hobble fast enough towards the speeder, the little pings of pain from his ankle inconsequential now.
"Is it just you?" Kanan asked, as Mart awkwardly reached to get on the seat.
"Yeah," the boy confirmed, settling in, scooching his legs up.
Kanan smiled. "Hold on tight, okay?" he instructed gently.
Mart nodded, grabbing onto the man's middle. "Okay."
Before Kanan could gun the throttle, a shadow fell across their heads. Mart gasped, his face startling up and stomach plummeting at the sight of the AT-AT walker hovering at the gate of the depot.
-SWR-
Ezra skidded around the corner, his chest tight, lungs hurting, and froze at the horrifying scene before him.
The walker looming over his master, canons pointed straight down. The eddies had moved off Kanan and were now around the cockpit, vibrating, fritzing off and coalescing like some kind of eldritch thing. There was a strange energy to the whole area, and the buzz of the Force was loud in his ears and head.
Ezra flashed a hand up, focusing on the walker, frantically searching for weak points. Critical wiring. Support bracers. Pellets of tibanna gas he could squeeze.
He found a few, but also, as he concentrated, everything seemed to come into hyper-focus. The Force cleared, time almost turning to glass, and the eddies around the walker revealed themselves as tiny cracks.
He stared through the Force, in a daze. His wide, bewildered eyes fixated with a dizzying clarity.
The AT-AT didn't just have shatterpoints, he realized with a sudden jolt, it was a shatterpoint. The whole place was a convergence, threads of destiny tangling together, splitting off in different directions. Not just the walker, or the depot, but the whole planet. All of Lothal.
Ezra's head floated, the vision almost too much for him, too big for him to comprehend.
Break the problem down.
He tried to narrow his focus to the spot right there, right in front of him. The cracks around the AT-AT. The timelines splitting off from this moment, right now.
If he put pressure on just the right point...
-SWR-
"They do not escape!" Pryce bellowed, jabbing a finger past the pilot's ears, down at the Rebels. She was livid, spitting her words furiously. "Fire!" she ordered.
The pilot stirred in concern. "But Governor, if we're not careful we could hit—"
"Fire!" she screeched again.
-SWR-
Time started to move again.
The walker's guns slowly ratcheted up, taking aim.
Ezra's heart was in his throat as he jolted, unfreezing, focusing his mind and concentrating harder. His splayed hand trembled as he focused intensely through the Force, feeling out, following the cracks around the walker to the center, the shatterpoint. He pushed, putting pressure on the weak spot, throwing all his will against it. A little more... a little more...
Tension strained against his mind as the cracks splintered, scraping against his thoughts like glass.
Just... a little bit... more... he thought.
-SWR-
Pryce gasped and flailed back as the floor buckled beneath her feet.
The pilots yelled in alarm as something in the neck joint of the AT-AT snapped, loosing the whole head from its bearings. The cockpit jostled hard, tilting, its shots going awry, angling up and away as the head came to dangle off its supports.
Pryce gripped the back of the seat, glaring out the window at the orange-clad figure she could glimpse standing outside, but then her eyes widened in terror as she tracked the path of the cannon shots, as if in slow motion, and saw them streaking across the open space of the courtyard towards the fuel pod.
The shots tore straight through with a horrible screech and rend of metal.
-SWR-
KABLAM!
Ezra's head snapped back as everything went white, light and heat searing into his eyes. The force of the blast slammed into him with a furious weight, striking him hard across his face, blowing him away.
He was airborne, his eyes catching a glimpse of orange flames, the walker shuddering, the speeder upending, its occupants tumbling through the air, before his head crashed against the hard ground and everything went black.
-SWR-
The darkness was ringing, a loud angry sound in his ears. But at the same time his hearing seemed... oddly muted.
He drifted. Awareness came back slowly to him, piece by tiny piece, pulling from the void.
Roaring in his ears. That loud, persistent ringing. A dazed sense of shock.
He wandered through the black, his awareness starting to form, starting to function.
Lying on his back. The ground underneath him hot and gravelly. Solid... solid earth. He used that to orient himself in the blank space.
Arms splayed. Legs flush against the floor. Unpleasant sticky sensation behind his head.
Feeling started to come back to his body and the first thing he became aware of was hurt.
Razor stabbing in his head, sharp and uncomfortable, most prominently. A popped sort of harsh pressure in his ears, under the ringing. A dull, flush ache radiating all through his chest and limbs.
The pain grew stronger and stronger as his head gradually swam back into his body. He shifted, and a groan pulled immediately from him, even that small movement igniting fire and pain on nerve endings all along his skin.
Ezra pinched his eyes tightly, then slowly blinked them open.
An orange and white haze filled his vision. The stars above were gray, veiled by smoke.
Ezra lay there staring up a moment. He reached up, gingerly, pressing a hand to his head as he tried to get his bearings.
The walker... he thought in a daze. I was trying to stop the walker... and...
He raised his head, looking down his body.
All he saw was a wall of flames, and slumped shadows on the ground.
An urgency moved through him, peeling his body up from its prone position. Ezra barely felt the pang of protest that rang through him, stumbling up, hands fumbling on the ground.
A cold trickle trailed down his neck. The sharp knot of pain back there throbbed horribly. Ezra pressed his hand against the center of the feeling with a hiss, feeling wetness through his fingers, clumped in his hair.
His palm came away red.
Shaking himself, Ezra pushed awkwardly up with his knees, nearly falling over before his feet somewhat steadied beneath him. He ignored the hulking shape of the walker, rooted in place, its metal sides scorched. He ignored the wall of heat burning on his front, the awful brightness of the fire and explosions still pluming out from the ruined fuel pod.
He limped towards the fallen human lump on the ground. A vague notion of panic and fear tingled through his head. He hurried, his bumbling pace growing more frantic.
"Kanan!" he called. His voice sounded dull and muted in his own ears. "Kanan!"
The mangled frame of the speeder had landed to the side. His master was lying face-down and prone, curled over Mart as though shielding him from the blast, his back scorched, clothes black and burning. Mart was laying on his palms in shock, eyes wide, trembling as if afraid to move and confirm the body above him was only a corpse.
Ezra's heart was clenched and squeezing as he ran up, his voice shrill.
"Kanan!"
The body atop Mart gave a groan, and Ezra shivered with relief, the tension inside his head unwinding in a rush. He toppled to his knees besides Kanan, slapping out the little tongues of flame creeping on his clothing before tugging up on his arm.
"We gotta go!"
He lifted the man up just enough for Mart to be able to wiggle out from underneath him, and then both boys grabbed under Kanan's armpits, hauling him forward. His mask had come off and his glassy sightless eyes blinked in slow and dull confusion. Ezra didn't let himself think about the mangled mess Kanan's back was, flesh twisted and burned, the stench of it horrifying in his nose.
"We gotta go, come on!" he repeated urgently, maneuvering under his left arm to support him.
Kanan was heavy, even with Mart's help, and the three stumbled, Ezra steering them towards the toppled speeder. He reached out and grabbed the handlebars, turning it over, setting it back upright.
"That's not meant to hold three..." Mart rasped, knees straining to keep Kanan supported.
"I know. But it'll have to," Ezra said. His hearing was still dull, but the ringing was beginning to fade, the roaring of the flames replacing it. The fire had spread to the other fuel pods and they were buckling, cracking under the heat.
This was not a place to be.
They hauled Kanan's limp form up onto the speeder with them, limbs awkward and seating unsteady. He whispered suddenly, his voice hoarse in Ezra's ear.
"Lightsaber..." he groaned.
Ezra was too busy powering up the speeder's engine, eyes down and concentrating, flipping the switches on the repulsorlift controls to try to compensate for the added weight, so Mart was the one who looked back.
He spotted Kanan's lightsaber quickly, and the hand that reached out of the orange haze for it. Flaming fingers grabbed around the hilt, the burning form of the Imperial officer screaming wretchedly as he was immolated.
Mart flinched, his whole face wincing from the horrible sight, quickly facing forward again. "We're gonna have to come back for it," he told the Jedi in a small voice.
The speeder sputtered underneath them, puttering, belching, the engine turning over several times until it revved, shorted, revved again and surged them forward.
Ezra pressed his feet flat on the accelerators the whole time, straining the vehicle for all it was worth as the speeder moved in short jolts and stops away from the conflagration.
The fuel depot continued to explode behind them.
-SWR-
Ezra took back alleys and narrow service corridors. It made the trip harrowingly longer, and more than once they had to stop entirely to let a squad of Stormtroopers pass through, their boots racing frantically as they converged towards the fuel depot.
Faces poked out of doorways and windows, and as they got further from the center, the whole city seemed to wake up, civilians pouring out into the street and staring towards the plumes of smoke rising from the factory district.
Ezra didn't know who started the first riot, only that when they finally made it to Sabine, Hera, and Chopper, pacing anxiously at the extraction point sewer access hatch, all of Capitol City seemed in violent upheaval. Running bodies dashed to and fro. Things toppled over. Blaster shots rang out from all directions. A hysterical Hera grabbed Kanan from him and Ezra stood there in a daze, listening to the cacophony in his muted ears until Sabine latched onto his wrist and pulled him down into the safety of the sewer tunnels, the discordant chaos cutting out as the thick tunnel walls muffled them.
The noise took forever to fade as they fled the city into the wilds.
(A/N)- MADE YOU WORRY FOR A MINUTE THERE, DIDN'T I? Lol.
1. Yes, when bullet-pointing the outline for this chapter, my gremlin brain was apparently all, "Hurt the kids." and who am I to resist? Spread it out a little this time though, and didn't single-focus on Ezra, which I'm sure he's grateful for.
2. Kallus continuing to be Stressed Rebellion Dad, because I'm terribly soft for it.
3. The chapter got a little bit self-indulgent I admit, with the #married Sabezra banter and them getting to be Battle Couple. I make no apologies.
4. A little trippy Force sequence! Ezra's been practicing the Shatterpoint technique so much he's unlocked the clairvoyant elements of it, also amplified by the nature of Lothal itself and its status as gateway to the World Between Worlds. Basically, shatterpoints aren't just weak spots in physical items, they also exist within the fabric of the Force itself, manifesting as a cluster of possible outcomes that can be influenced and directed in different directions by someone Force Sensitive and skilled enough to perceive them. Ezra might not be quite on the level of skill needed to fully sense shatterpoints of that nature, but his strong connection to his home planet gives his abilities enough of a boost for him to see them, for just a short few seconds.
5. Kanan lives! This is a plot point and AU change that I was kind of just going to summarize and gloss over in the last fic, "Swept Pieces", but apparently I can't do that, apparently I really really needed to actually write it out and have it happen "onscreen" and explore the full impact of it happening in the moment it happened. I mean, kind of an inevitable storytelling choice given where things were headed and the fact that I was covering the equivalent events of the "Rebel Assault" episode and basically smashing "Jedi Night" into it too. But no matter how we got here, here we are. You're welcome.
6. I think I did manage to recapture the feel and specific imagery-heavy diction I'd had in the first draft that got deleted, so minor setback aside I'm pretty happy. But definitely being a paranoid saver from this point.
Whew! Nearly thirteen-thousand words later and I am exhausted but so satisfied.
We'll be wrapping things up soon, cleaning up from the fallout of this heavy and loooooong chapter, and all I can say is that Pryce's day gets infinitely worse lol.
Review my lovelies!