Ship of the Line - The Death Star
Chapter 16
Disclaimer and Author's Note - Yes, it has been quite some time since the last update, but Musie just hasn't been very cooperative of late. I have said it before, I do not abandon my fics or my readership, so here's one more update to keep it going along. Oh, I do not own these characters.
Several months later
Buffy and Giles crept through the bushes near Restfield Cemetery, their wearable comlinks securely inserted in their ears and fingers resting lightly on the firing studs of their E-11s. Willow's intel indicated that about ten suckheads were due to rise tonight right here, apparently some wannabe Master's attempt to start a gang of minions. That plan had several flaws, though.
One - they were buried in a cemetery. Hallowed ground. That was prime real estate on a Slayer's patrol route, so that reduced their chances of surviving the night by a significant margin. The sire might have been better off dragging the corpses somewhere else so their chances of rising and finding prey were better, like one of the multiple warehouses that lined the docks in the industrial district. That was its first big mistake.
Two - they were all buried in the same cemetery. It might have worked if the sire was standing there waiting for them to dig their way out, providing security, but seeing as the sire most likely was trusting its new childes to utilize their new vampiric instincts, which for a childe were largely undeveloped, they would mainly know only their thirst and home in like a pack of wild dogs on the first prey whose scent they caught. Big mistake number two.
Three - there were more than one or two risers tonight. A smart vamp would have not tried to turn so many at once. It was overreaching, and it drew the attention of not only the Slayer, but the mundane law enforcement community as well. If the cops in normal towns unlike Sunnydale found out just what went grr in the night, normal mundane people would find out and then widespread panic would ensue, and that would ruin everyone's day. As the Slayer, Buffy couldn't stand for that, and that was why she was there, with a blaster in her hands and her Watcher in the bushes on overwatch.
Peering carefully through the scope of her blaster rifle, Buffy pressed the transmit button on her comlink. "Giles," she whispered, "I have eyes on the gravesite. Nothing's moving yet." She pressed the button again, cutting her transmission and allowing Giles to speak.
"The first two or three vampires should start rising in about two to three minutes," her Watcher's voice came in over the small speaker embedded in Buffy's ear. "You should probably fire as soon as you see their heads through the scope. Don't wait another moment, or you could lose your chance for a clean shot."
She nodded her head in reflex - Giles might not have been able to see her from his position three hundred feet away, but a question passed through Buffy's mind whether or not he knew she was doing it, or whether it was just generally understood that people did things like that. Pressing the transmit button again, she replied, "Will do, Watcher-mine." She pressed it again to end the transmission, then she settled in to wait, the scope of her E-11 trained in front of the first headstone. She occupied the next minute making little circles with the targeting reticle or just imagining that she was doodling, and then her patience was rewarded when the ground at the first gravesite started to shift with the effort of something trying to claw its way up. Her hand quickly and quietly went up to her comlink and pressed the transmit button.
"Giles, dirt moving at first gravesite." A press of the button cut her transmission, and she placed the barrel of her weapon back in her hand as she set in.
"Fire when ready, Buffy," he replied. She took a breath, let it out halfway and held it, relaxing as she did so to stabilise her aim. In seconds a hand emerged from the earth in front of the headstone, then another. The head finally emerged just as Buffy's heart rate had begun to increase, and a twitch of her finger on the firing stud sent a bolt of red plasma on its way to her target. In less time than it took to blink, it hit the vampire's head, making a large burnt hole halfway through. The only evidence of a clean shot produced itself when the rest of it crumbled to dust half a second later.
"Scratch one vamp, Giles," she commed him after toggling her comlink. "Giles, do you copy?" She asked when he didn't immediately reply. She pressed the button again to verify her signal and was immediately rewarded with her Watcher's concerned voice in her ear.
"-you copy? Buffy, talk to me!"
Cursing herself for an idiot for not having clicked off her comm, she clicked on and responded, "Yeah, I hear you. We seriously need to get some comm devices that you don't have to click off every time you wanna hear the other guy.". She then clicked off again to let him speak, and not a moment too soon, either.
"Shift right, Buffy, two more are breaching the surface just now," Giles commed urgently. Buffy clicked on to acknowledge his order, then clicked off and turned to the right, just past the gravesite where her first target met his rather swift demise, where two pairs of vampiric hands were attempting to move dirt away from two holes in the ground.
Buffy clicked on and reported her findings to Giles, then clicked off. His voice then came over the comm, "Take the one on the right, I have the one on the left."
"Copy that, Giles.". She then raised the E-11, placing the folding buttstock against the pocket of her shoulder and peering through the scope. Resting her finger lightly on the firing stud, she steadied her breathing and waited.
Her patience was rewarded when the first head emerged from the Earth. Buffy stopped her breathing and pressed the firing stud, sending a packet of plasma into its head. It hit him between the eyes and burned through into his brain, whilst Buffy shifted her aim to the target on the right. She was about to shoot it, except it was already crumbling into dust along with the rest of him from the hit it had taken from Giles's own blaster.
"I said the one on the right, Buffy…" said Giles reproachfully. "Still, these scopes are rather helpful, aren't they?"
Still giddy from the whole experience of using laser guns to off the dentally-challenged creatures of the night, Buffy clicked on her comlink and replied, "The nifty looking aiming arrows do help there, Giles. Plus, Stormtrooper guns!"
This time she remembered to click off to listen, Giles's next words being "In my experience the only stormtroopers we ever had to worry about in history were Germans in World War II. They used MG42 machine guns and were highly accurate in their use, so let us be glad for once that the Allies won the war when they did, or else it would be these E-11s that they'd be using. I, for one, do not particularly relish the idea of a blaster bolt penetrating my stomach."
Nodding her assent, Buffy replied in a rather atrocious rendition of a London accent, "Right, then. Shall we keep going, Rupert, old bean?"
"Bloody Colonials," he muttered…
Xander couldn't move. He couldn't speak or otherwise inform someone on the fully-staffed Overbridge of his predicament.
That wasn't entirely true - he could move, but he wasn't the one doing the moving. Some other force was working its will on him, and he wasn't exactly ecstatic about it, to say the least.
The worst part was where he found himself. He wasn't wearing his Grand Admiral uniform - he was a lowly technician, assigned there for the most heinous of tasks, and it didn't take a brain like Tarkin's to know what that task was.
The general staff were convened on the Overbridge, staring at the targeting screen before them, at an image of a planet's surface, and to Xander's horror he recognised the topography all too well as the area surrounding Sunnydale. He redoubled his efforts to speak, to make some small sound or move an arm or even turn his head away from the panel before him, but his efforts were for naught. He couldn't even blink his eyes when he wanted to. He had never felt so powerless in his life.
He saw Governor Tarkin there, resplendent in his Moff's uniform, and several other unknown ranking officers. All had a look of gleeful anticipation on each of their faces as they considered the California terrain below them, but what really struck a nerve was the presence of one particular officer, one whom Xander, or rather Tarkin, was certain had met his end on a particular jungle planet.
Orson Krennic was standing there with Tarkin, giving him the stink eye. He turned his weather-beaten face toward Xander and smiled, the smugness of his countenance grating at Xander's nerves as though he knew that what was down there was not just Xander's home, and Xander felt his blood turn to ice. It wasn't the fact that he knew Xander's home was there, but that Krennic knew what was really down there. And before Xander realised what he was doing, his hands began to move of their own accord, pressing buttons, closing contacts... preparing the superlaser to fire, and within Xander's mind, he was screaming to himself "WAKE UP, ASSHOLE! FIGHT!"
The problem was, he could no more fight than he could protest what was happening.
"Target Sunnydale," Krennic then commanded. "Prepare a single-reactor ignition."
Xander tried to scream then, he really tried, but his voice only betrayed him when instead he replied, "Weapon ready." He couldn't even close his eyes…
"FIRE!" barked Krennic then, and Xander's hands moved again against his will, and he input the final sequence that released the firing actuator. His hand rested but for an instant before it pulled the lever down…
A bright green lance shot out from the superlaser dish and contacted Sunnydale below. It made the briefest of contacts, almost as though it were a lover's gentle touch, light as a feather. And then a fireball erupted from the point of contact, in an instant engulfing the town and expanding to the size of Los Angeles in less than a second. The assembled officers on the Overbridge viewed the spectacle in rapt attention, enamoured by the sight of the deadly flower blooming from the California coast. Their voices were hushed, fearful of uttering anything more than a whisper, as though a raised voice would cheapen the experience.
The flower continued to blossom, already expanding to the size of New York City and growing ever further, reaching higher, as though the last remnants of the Hellmouth were eager to seize the Death Star's trigger man and enfold him in its vengeful embrace. Xander found himself peering into the centre of the fireball, as the Earth's crust began to peel outward with the force of the fireball's detonation, the pressure wave pushing and ploughing up first coastal terrain, then the surrounding desert, the ash cloud only now beginning to spread across the Earth. And still the flower of destruction grew, traveling upward, reaching for the Death Star…
And as it made contact with the battle station, it superheated the quadanium steel shell, peeling away the armour like the rind of an orange, exposing deck after deck to the inferno, until it reached the Overbridge. The deckplates began to blister with the sudden heat, and then to sizzle and melt, as system after system registered complete failure before the fire claimed it. And as Xander's flesh sizzled and cracked, caressed by the flames, his last thought was -
Waking up in a cold sweat and hyperventilating, Xander sat up in a flash. Frantically, he cast his gaze to and fro just as he began to realise he had only been dreaming. He could practically hear his heart beating the rhythm of a pneumatic hammer, could feel it threaten to burst its way out of his chest like one of those damned Aliens from the films, and he silently thanked the Powers That Be that he hadn't dressed up as Kane from the Nostromo. As his breathing began to slow down and steady itself, he looked around, at the windows of his room overlooking the warehouse where his Lambda-class shuttle sat hidden, at his fiancée sleeping peacefully beside him, and whose very presence was a great comfort to him, at his desk where he kept all his important documents…
Where someone sat in the shadows, watching him. He reached for Willow, to shake her awake -
"Don't bother trying, you're still dreaming, Xander," a cultured, elderly and very familiar voice emanated from the shadowed figure.
Xander froze in his attempt and sat upright. He knew that voice very well, even before Halloween, and better still since the man had begun to share headspace with him.
"Tarkin," he spoke at last. "What's going on here? Why this?"
"If you're referring to the nightmares you've begun to experience, my dear Grand Admiral," and here he allowed himself a slight chuckle, "they are a message from your Powers That Be, as you call them. They're preparing you for what's to come. As for why I'm sitting here, in this dream of yours, I'm not only in your head just now, but the Powers have chosen my avatar as their conduit to pass on their message."
Xander leaned forward in his bed, then, at once nervous and suspicious at this bolt out of the blue message, but still very much interested in its contents. "OK, I'll bite. So what's the message?"
"There are powerful forces aligned against you that are preparing to make their move. In order to protect your assets here on the Hellmouth and also on the Death Star - "
"Vigilant Watcher."
Tarkin paused in mid-sentence, a brief smile only just reaching his eyes. "Very well, the Vigilant Watcher, then. It suits you. To protect your assets here and on the Watcher, you should begin to gather your forces to counter any efforts on their behalf to co-opt the station for their own purposes."
"We're in the middle of building the first ship in Earth's defence fleet, but we're gonna need more ships and more fighters if we're to stand a chance when Apophis comes for revenge. Plus the new crews are gonna need fresh training with all the new equipment. Simulation studies are gonna have to be done, shakedown cruises for all the new Star Destroyers, touching up on the final design specs of the next generation Destroyers - the Resurgence-class looks promising, but I have to change one or two things, the most obvious being the conning tower. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want something that someone could ram an A-Wing into and blow up the whole ship."
Tarkin nodded, "I never was an engineer, that was Krennic, the loathsome prima donna, but I would agree with you, that conning tower does make a rather tempting target. But I didn't come here to discuss engineering flaws in your ships, Xander…"
"You're not Tarkin, either, I'm assuming. You're clearly not in my head, even though you've taken his form, which means you're some sort of shapeshifting demon," Xander reasoned.
"Just so," 'Tarkin' acknowledged.
"You're Whistler, aren't you?" The purported Balance Demon nodded in response. "So what happened to the old look?"
"I felt it relevant to assume a form familiar to you, something that would play to your sensibilities and send a visual message along with the one your Powers That Be have sent me to relay to you."
Xander groaned. It seemed that the Universe had always sought to make him its butt monkey, yet he always managed to come out ahead. This, however, was something new to his ears. He had had it drilled into him from the cradle that only one God ever existed, but this so-called demon, if he could even be called that seemed content with merely passing messages back and forth between these so-called Powers That Be and mortal humanity.
"Who are these Powers That Be?" Xander asked, giving voice to his curiosity, "Are they gods?"
"Of a sort," Whistler admitted. "They govern the balance between good and evil, light and dark, life and death. The duality of the Universe is their purview and their remit, and they strive to preserve that balance when and where they may do so. One of their tenets is to never intervene in the affairs of mortals, allowing free will to hold sway wherever possible. When something upsets the balance, however, they take action."
Xander took all this in with an open ear and a quick mind, arriving at the point of the conversation quicker than Whistler had anticipated. "So you're here, basically, because something has visibly upset the balance, and now they want to correct it, and they need my help to do it."
Balance. Correction. Equilibrium. Xander mulled these words over in his mind, and it didn't take long to come to at least a tentative conclusion…
The Halloween incident. So much power had been poured into the Chaos spell, so much that was needed to create the Vigilant Watcher, and now the balance had been upset and needed to be corrected if the Universe were to return to some semblance of equilibrium. To balance against the power of the Death Star, something else had to be inserted into the equation. And then Xander remembered a dream about blowing up the Earth after some...two HUNDRED... Hellmouths opened on a certain day. He didn't know which day that would be, but he had the feeling that it was a number of years into the future.
Time enough, if the dream could be trusted, to build his fleet and lift the totality of humankind off the planet before the final Apocalypse was triggered. It just wouldn't happen without help. He needed to contact General Hammond and see what assets that good man could bring to bear towards his objective.
The next thought in Xander's head, however, was not so easy to dismiss. In securing the aid of the SGC, he would also be stepping into a political role, as he would also have to avoid the machinations of that odious Senator from Indiana, Robert Kinsey. On the one hand, it would have been sorely tempting to simply secure the Senator and lock him up in the same cell in AA-23 as their Goa'uld prisoner. Problem was, a clandestine rendition of the Senator would open up a whole 55 gallon drum of worms that wouldn't close. Abducting senior members of Congress, last Xander heard, was a major felony, and he was still a California citizen, damn it! But to stymie him...to stay one step ahead at all times...ah, there was the challenge. Politics wasn't the same thing as a space battle, but strategy was still called for here.
Xander discussed all this with the Tarkin avatar in his dream at length, and when a plan finally formed, a smile could be found on the old Moff's face.