Welcome! This is my Christmas present to you, viewer! This might well be the largest chapter I have ever written, and it may have a few surprises in it ;)
Oh, FYI: Lifeday or Life Day is basically Star Wars Christmas.
Linebreak
I woke up to the almost-musical sound of Hera bustling about early in the morning. Quietly, not wanting to disturb Ezra, I slipped out of the large bed and dressed, throwing on a orange blouse and some dark blue jeans, before joining Hera in the large kitchen.
"Sabine, go look into your daughter's bedroom, and see if you find anything unusual," Hera said as I walked into the kitchen, where she was preparing a light breakfast. I raised an eyebrow and went to Mira's bedroom. Light came out from under the doorway, so I knew she was up. Gently, I pushed the door forward and stepped in.
The difference between the old room and Mira's new room was obvious. I suppose, in retrospect, I should have seen it coming; Mira had asked for my old paint applicator and black, orange, and blue paint. I gave them to her. And, she's my daughter. Of course she was going to create something huge and beautiful in a place that she shouldn't put it.
On the back wall of her room was a jumble of different black triangles, all joined together by orange and blue lines. But, the shapes were arranged in such a way that if one looked at it from almost any direction, it would form the shape of a phoenix in flight, rising from ashes.
"You like it?" Mira asked, sitting on her bed, paint applicator nearby. "It took me a really long time."
"You know, I'd scold you for writing on the walls, but this is beautiful," I responded. "But in the future, tell me before you do this, okay? Then we can do it somewhere that everyone can see it."
Mira had put her head down, but looked up after the word beautiful. "Deal."
"Alright. Now, what'cha working on?"
"A story for English. I'm supposed to write a story about an Imperial defector, but everyone else is coming up with really interesting things and I'm… not. It's irritating."
"Oh, I can help with that. Do you mind if I do something?"
"No, not at all." I accepted the datapad from Mira and brought up a story from my profile. I had written it about six years ago, when there was a minor Imperial faction that was trying to take over the planet and I had to lead the counterattack. (We crushed them.)
Linebreak
Operation Insolence
My small force of Lothalian defenders crouched behind the barricades we had set up. Some were praying. Others were sick with terror. Still more were aiming down their blasters at the stark darkness from which our enemies would charge.
I walked to the front of the line, holding my helmet by my side. Some fighters looked up at me, maybe a bit awestruck that the living legends Sabine Wren Bridger and Ezra Bridger would be fighting side-by-side with them. I looked up and down our defenses, seeing fighters in various states of readiness. In the center of the line were my steeliest fighters, handpicked veteran soldiers with tons of experience. Elsewhere, there were green newbies, freshly recruited, and there were fighters that had trained before but never actually fought live enemies.
"We are mothers," I shouted. The collective head of my warriors looked at me. "We are fathers. We are sons, and we are daughters. But all of us remember the Galactic Civil War, and some of the troopers here may remember the Battle of Anaxes." A small shout of yes came from the lines. "I was ordered to take a regiment of soldiers and play rearguard for the Alliance Army. We called it 'Operation: Suicide March.' And a general asked me, 'How long will you be able to delay the Imperials?' And, my AFC troopers, do you remember my reply? Because you came up with it: We'll fight them, sir, till the nine Corellian Hells freeze over. And then, sir, we will fight them on the ice."
A massive cry came from the troopers I was leading. Everyone took up a blaster and aimed into the darkness as a massive wave of white plastoid came rushing at us. "Pick your targets, troopers, and fire whenever you feel like it."
To prove my point, I took my blasters out and began spraying plasma everywhere. Stormtroopers dropped everywhere, but more came with a bloodcurdling scream and eventually they overran the trench and the fighting turned into a fierce melee, with fighters punching and kicking and stabbing and gouging. I dropped a vibroknife from my vambraces and punched it into a stormtrooper's abdomen before taking it out, ducking a haymaker punch from another trooper, and cutting that trooper's neck, then throwing the knife into another snowman. He dropped like a rock. I uppercut another trooper, before retrieving my knife and stabbing another stormtrooper in the gut.
Still more stormtroopers came. I slashed my knife through another stormtrooper, then ducked a straight punch and flipped the thrower, slicing my knife across his throat and stealing a knife from him, throwing it into a black-clad stormtrooper, who fell on top of one of my AFCs, or Advance Force Commandos. "Thank you, al'verde!"
"Keep your head in the game, Johnston!" I shouted back. I caught a stormtrooper's kick and threw it back, drawing my blaster and shooting them, before taking out my knife and throwing it again, this time at an enemy shock trooper. It stuck in his armor, so I took a tomahawk from a dead Lothalian and ran at the red-and-white shocker, dodging a few blaster bolts on the way and jumping for extra force before burying the tomahawk in his head.
I extracted my knife and whirled around, before taking a blaster bolt to the chest. Some people would have been put out of commission by it. I roared and shot the scout trooper who actually managed to hit something smaller than the side of a barn. Another scout trooper took a potshot at me, so I ducked and hid behind a rock before hurling a grenade into a group of stormtroopers. They flew as the massive yellow-and-blue explosion scorched their armor. The sniper, momentarily distracted, was hit by three bolts of plasma in the visor. The burn marks formed a loose triangle.
By the sunrise, I was one of the fifty-two surviving fighters on what would later be named Massacre Mountain. By the count of the clean-up-crew, we had killed almost a thousand Imperials with only 148 friendlies killed.
Linebreak
"Did you actually do this, Mom?"
"Yep. About four years ago."
"I… You actually did this."
"Yes. Your old mother still has a few stories to tell."
"Mom, you're thirty-nine. You're not old yet."
"Aww, thank you. Feel free to modify this for your needs. Um… Oh! Yeah, Jacen is in the courtyard if you want to mess around with him. I'm going to go help Hera make breakfast."
"Wait! After breakfast, can you… could you help me with something?"
"Yeah, sure! What is it?"
Mira got a mischievous look in her eyes, which made me think that it had something to do with Jacen. "I don't want to say yet."
That's not actually what she said, but what she asked me for advice on is something only a Wren can do. (I'd say a Bridger, but Ezra is too nice to do it.)
After breakfast and helping Mira with her task, I took to helping her with her tactics homework. (Both of them had gone in to the Tactics class at school, which I found… endearing.) The 'mission' they had been given was to take a four-hundred-strong army and defend a quarter-mile ridge with two primary entrances. Up against her was Jacen, who was taking a six-hundred-strong army on a mission to pulverize whoever got in his way. By chance, it was Mira.
The ridge that Mira was defending was a good position: there were only two readily-obvious ways to get up the barren cliffs. These were small passages with arches over them that looked like caves at first glance, but actually led to the top of the mesa. Mira had deployed one-hundred-fifty troops to each exit. The remaining troops she kept as a mobile garrison, to be sent to wherever there was a breach. These hundred troops were divided into 'squadrons' of twenty people, which were further divided into squads of five.
At the exits of the tunnels was a line of anti-tank 'hedgehogs' and behind that, razor wire. Repeating blasters had been set up above the exit from the hole, which would rake the enemies with blaster bolts, and sandbags had troopers hiding behind them on the sides. This became nicknamed Operation: Hell's Gate by her class, apparently, as the only way they could break through was with heavy bombing, air support, and artillery barrages. Well, Jacen actually did break through at one point, but Mira's mobile garrison force defeated them before they could get through and actually do anything.
Jacen, on the other hand, was in the tough spot of having to evict Mira with nothing but artillery and infantry, with no armor support. Through extensive scouting, he did manage to find a backdoor trail, but it only lead to another mesa. That particular mesa was a great spot for artillery, but the trail was too narrow to get any unit other than infantry up. A detachment of snipers did do some damage to one of the tunnel guards, but the other tunnel was out of range.
Frankly, even I had a tough time dealing with Mira's setup. What I ended up doing was shelling Mira into submission and then having my troops scale the cliffs. (Frankly, the simplest way to eliminate all enemy forces from the area was to have the ship that brought us, the Black Sparrow, bombard the area from orbit.)
Heck, even Hera had a hard time evicting my daughter from her mesa. She settled for my tactic of mass artillery as well.
After Mira's homework was done, she began playing some game on her holoscreen. It was called something like Operation Wind Bastion. Or was that the update for it? Maybe the game was called Rainbow Six. Yeah, it was called that, but it had something after it that I don't remember. Anyways, I took advantage of my time to myself to go to Lothal's open air market, which had basically everything you could want on Lothal. I looked over the throng of people from a tapcaf nearby, mentally making a shopping list of things to buy and musing about the differences between my daughter and Hera's son. Mira was a technologically inclined warrior, who used her wits to her advantage. If the need arose, she was also a capable martial artist who could do serious damage to any opponent. She was unquestionably strong, too. I had seen her punch through a small slab of duracrete (it's actually easier than it sounds). Plus, she had potential as a Jedi, but she had confided in me that she didn't want to be a Jedi or anything like that.
Jacen, on the other hand, was a silver-tongued charmer able to talk his way out of a lot of situations. Hera, Ezra, and I had grown immune to his sweet-talking very early on. He was reasonably fit, too, but I didn't think that he would be setting any strength records without some serious training. He could still hold his own in a fight, though, and he was Force-Sensitive. From what I could tell, he enjoyed using the Force to do basic things.
As I looked over the crowd, though, I saw something not so nice: two men, in black suits, who had hands hovering over their hips as they talked to a lady and, presumably, her child. One of them put a hand inside his coat and flicked something free. I stood up as the lady and the kid went rigid, then put their heads down.
"Hey! What's going on?" I asked as I neared the group. One of the men looked at me with a death glare.
"Nothing, citizen. Move along."
"No. I want to know what's happening. Why are you taking this lady and a kid?"
The black-suited man shoved me backwards. "You must leave."
"Oh, you are asking for a beatdown," I muttered. The black-suit man threw a punch at me. I danced to the side and kicked his leg. He stumbled and fell. His friend threw a clumsy haymaker punch at me. Had it hit me, it would have been an instant knockout.
But the thing is, if you put all your power into a haymaker, you sacrifice balance. Expecting to meet resistance, the guy throwing the haymaker stumbled as I stepped to the side. Then, I kicked his back, sending him crashing to the ground. Bad Guy Numero Uno came charging at me, before throwing a jab and a straight punch. The first I dodged, and the second I deflected and twisted behind his back, spinning him to the ground. His friend tried to kick me, but I rolled to the side and stood up, kicking Bad Guy number 2 square in the chest, sending him down to one knee, before kicking him in the jawline and knocking him out. The other guy had gotten to his feet by now, but I kicked him in the shin and then punched him in the jawline, knocking him out as well.
I looked up from my preoccupation to find three other men in black staring at me. "Oh, for the love of gods..."
Two of them came at me with punches at the same time. I tripped one, sending him flying into his friend, and then kicked him in the crotch. The third opponent tried to clock me in the jaw. It didn't work. I responded with a devastating right hook punch to the jawline, which knocked the SOB down instantly, snuffing him like a candle. The second attacker slowly got to his feet and launched a torrent of strikes at me, which I blocked easily before planting my foot into his chest. He fell like a stone before I kicked him in the side and probably shattered his ribs.
Another three men in black took out vibroswords. A small crowd began to gather.
"Could you three, like, go away?" I asked. They shook their heads, so I ran at them, jumping and kicking one of them in the chin. They dropped like a rock. I took up their vibrosword and blocked a slice from one of my attackers before thrusting the sword into his abdomen. I left it in him to give him a better chance for survival and rolled to the side of a sword slice before spinning myself and sweeping the legs out from under my opponent and kicking his face savagely.
I looked up and found no remaining enemies, so I strode over to where the lady and the kid were. "Are you two okay?"
"Oh, my gods thank you! I thought we were dead!" the lady gushed. I smiled.
"Who were those guys?" I asked next.
"Bad guys," the kid supplied.
"Kidnappers," the lady replied.
"Well, they hopefully won't bother you again," I said. "Now, I have something to look for."
I walked over to one of the fallen enemies and rifled through his pockets. "Looks like you have some flimsi. Let's see what you're hiding… for fek's sake!"
I held a copy of guess who's holo number? Josh fekking Vanderbleid. So, he was dabbling in slave trading now. Good to know; that would be another charge to convict him of. That is, if he didn't die from bleeding out first, the chaakar little demagolka.
Having grabbed what I needed, I paid a call to Tosh. Remember him? He's the guy at the LDC. Anyways, Tosh said he'd send a team down to clean up the mess. Sure enough, three minutes later, a forensics team, accompanied by a SPDF (Small-Perimeter Defense Force) and I left the area, entering the market, looking around for the little gilded charm that had caught my eye a few minutes before, along with a dragon scarf that Mira had said she wanted for Life Day. I found the dragon scarf easily enough; It certainly stood out. (Then again, so did Mira. She was not one for covert ops.) I fingered the gauzy fabric, running a hand along the carefully embroidered, almost serpentine design of the fire-breathing animal. It was beautiful. Even if it looked a tiny bit tacky to me. But I could see why Mira wanted it so much.
I checked the price tag, on the other side of the scarf. It was surprisingly cheap for the quality of the work. I payed for it and with the purchase got a synthsilk bag to put it in for free. I doubted that I would use it for anything but Lifeday shopping, though. To this day (thirteen years later) I have only used it for Lifeday.
A few meters away, I saw the little gilded charm. It was a little charm of a Special Forces operator from the Jednostka Wojskowa 2305, better known as the JW GROM, an elite unit in the Rebellion known for being both experts in field medicine (specifically, surgery in the field) and surgical strikes against hardened targets.
A/N: The JW GROM is actually a real Special Forces unit. Think of them as the Polish answer to the American Navy SEALs or the US Army Delta Force, or the Canadian JTF2. They're on the same level.
The actual operator was a mysterious figure, with a mask and a helmet covering most of his face and a blaster rifle slung across their back, with a blaster pistol held in two hands in front of them. Their cloak, whirling around their back, had two twin black lines down the left side and their torso had a blaster-resistant armor on their torso that held extra magazines and what looked like a pistol holder and a knife, although their waist had a pistol holster riding it on the left. Maybe it had a pistol in it. I couldn't tell. The operator's legs had nothing noteworthy on them, but there was something that looked like a boot spike on the operator's boots, probably to make kicking an opponent more effective. I had poisoned ones, as a matter of fact, and they were some first-class weapons.
I bought the charm and received a small box with paper stuffed inside to cushion the bauble. The little box had a little 'P' with what looked a bit like a grappling hook at the bottom of it. It was the official logo of the GROM. I think that it
Very Important Linebreak
Sabine looked up suddenly from her datapad, looking out the window as a siren sounded and a planetary shield activated. The blue energy field swallowed the sky.
"What in haran?"
Sabine left her datapad on the table, still running, and walked into the large courtyard of the house, looking up to see five dark, imposing triangles hovering over Lothal's atmosphere. "Kurwa. Ezra! Hera! Come quick."
The two other parents heard Sabine's cry and walked to the courtyard. Sabine pointed upwards once both of them were there.
"Oh, no," Hera breathed. "Those are ISDs."
Sabine nodded grimly. "I'm willing to bet they're First Order ISDs. They must be massive to be visible from down here."
"Should we scramble fighters?" Ezra asked. "Our Defenders have enough firepower to break through their shields. Probably."
"It's the probably that worries me," Hera said. Sabine opened up an encrypted holochannel with Tosh, the leader of the Lothal Defense Force, and Ciena Ree, the leader of the Defense Force's Fighter Wings.
Both answered the comm channels in record time. "You seeing what I'm seeing?" Sabine asked.
"If you see FOSDs, yes," Ciena responded. FOSD meant First Order Star Destroyer. "I'm scrambling Warwolf Wing right now to check their intentions and readying Cobalt, Siren, and Wraith Wings. Have either of you received any contact from Thane?" She was referring to Thane Kyrell, her husband. "I sent him to check five hyperspace signatures at J3, and he hasn't responded."
"No, I haven't," Tosh said. Sabine shook her head negative. Ciena's head sank before she gasped.
"Hang on," she said, her holo deactivating for a few seconds. Her image reappeared after seven seconds of silence, this time bringing Thane Kyrell, leader of Light Wing, the most prestigious of all the Defender Wings on Lothal.
"Sorry I couldn't get here earlier," he said sheepishly. "Damn FOR jammed my teams comms. They're aggressive, too. They shot down Light Seven after we established comms and asked for their IDs, then sent fighters after us. They have no missile-defense capability, but they can fire missiles. Apparently, the idea of chaff and flares didn't occur to them. But my wing is out of flares and chaff and we're running out of missiles and gas. Can you open up a hole in the the shield on the North side, sector K5?"
"Roger. Be there in thirty seconds or you're not getting through."
"Roger. I signal when we're safe."
Thane's image fizzled and died. Ciena breathed a sigh of relief. Tosh shook his head.
"Sabine, can you organize a defensive line for the city?" Tosh asked. "I've got my hands full with reports from around the sector that FO ships are breaking in."
"Of course. Send me troop counts, likely areas for attack, and anything else that might help."
"I'll get someone on that right away," Tosh responded. "Is Hera with you?"
"Yes, I'm here," Hera said. "I'll help Sabine."
"Alright. Good. Also, make sure Ezra and Ahsoka follow Code Thirteen."
"Copy. Ezra! Code Thirteen."
Ezra nodded and sprinted away to find Ahsoka. Sabine looked back to Tosh, who looked at the holo with absolute conviction.
"Sabine. Hera. If you lose your grip on the city center, fall back to the spaceport and call in Code One. If we lose the spaceport, call Code Two."
Code One was a call for the total evacuation and subsequent destruction of Lothal. It was an absolute last resort. Code Two was a gradual, covert evacuation of Lothal, in case of occupation. "Rendezvous on Haven?"
"Correct."
Ciena spoke up again. "Light Wing is safe and returning. I'm sending Warwolf Wing and Wraith Wing to harass enemy landers. Siren and Cobalt Wings are going to see if they can't take down any of the SDs and I'm readying Yamamoto Wing for evac escort, if need be."
"Alright," Tosh said. "If the First Order wants a war, let's give them one."
One hour later, Sabine ducked under a barrage of blaster fire. Her section of AFC troopers was all that was holding the Azadi Bridge, the final checkpoint before anyone could enter Lothal City. A large river ran around the city, which was both a beautiful tourist attraction and a terrific chokepoint. Barricades and burning repulsor tanks covered the road, with broken corpses scattered in between. Almost every surface had some sort of blaster mark on it. These were most obvious on the bright, almost blinding white of the First Order stormtroopers, but if one looked close enough, one could see the burns on the AFC troopers that had fallen in defense of the Azadi Bridge. Their black armor provided a stark contrast to the white enemy troopers.
Red blaster bolts criss-crossed the bridge and soldiers cried out in pain. There were occasional explosions as fighters tore apart the skies above. Ezra stood on the bridge, lightsaber flashing, deflecting shots from stormtroopers. A AFC trooper threw a grenade, which blew several stormtroopers hiding behind a destroyed tank high into the air and revealed an enemy armor unit.
"Enemy armor!" a soldier cried out. Sabine responded.
"I see it. Cover me!"
Sabine vaulted the cover she was hiding behind and began a mad dash from cover to cover, squeezing off a few blaster shots at targets as she ran. Closing to just a few feet, the jumped onto the tank and opened a hatch.
A First Order tanker looked up at her. She smirked under her helmet.
"Hold this," Sabine said, priming a grenade and tossing it in before kicking the hatch closed and running back to cover. The tank exploded violently behind her.
An especially lucky stormtrooper scored a lucky shot. Sabine fell to the ground hard, not forgetting to shoot the stormtrooper that shot her in the forehead as she fell, before quickly examining her wound. Gritting her teeth to ease the pain, she dragged herself to cover before applying a bacta patch, then attempting to stand and falling back down.
"Medic!" someone shouted. A AFC trooper with a medical badge ran over to her and opened a small medkit as blastershots pinged off the durasteel barricade. A TIE fighter streaked overhead, rolling and diving, trying to shake off the Defender behind it. The Defender was holding onto the TIE's tail tightly, though, and was matching all of it's moves. Eventually, the TIE dropped towards the bridge, aiming to maneuver under it tightly. The Defender matched the move and soared underneath the Azadi Bridge before firing it's wingtip cannons. The shots ripped into the TIEs wing, causing severe damage and making it catch fire. The TIE began to spin in circles before colliding with the ground, the frame shattering and cartwheeling before staying in the ground, the pilot certainly dead. The Defender ascended to the sky, twirling before coming back down and strafing the First Order lines. But it wasn't enough. An AFC trooper fell next to Ezra, his helmet cracking in half as he hit the ground. Another soldier was shot in the chest and dropped to the floor, dead before he hit the ground. Yet another trooper primed a grenade before being shot in the arm. He dropped it, but by some miracle another trooper grabbed it and threw it. The explosion was far too close for comfort and took out the wounded trooper and sprayed shrapnel across the second thrower and a third trooper. All three were now out of the fight.
A massive explosion rocked the bridge, tossing a few troopers out of cover and knocking them out. The AFC troopers were now reduced to twenty-three hardened veterans. These fighters, veterans of battles from Sernpidal to Kintooine, may have had experience on their side, but numbers were beginning to give too much of an advantage.
Multiple TIEs now streaked over the bridge. The beleaguered Defenders in the sky fought them valiantly, but for the AFC troops on the bridge, it wasn't enough. Their position would fall soon, but all of them were determined to die at their guns. First Order walkers began to advance on the bridge, the ground trembling beneath their footsteps-
"Reinforcements! Reinforcements have arrived!"
The cry, shrill and piercing, cut through the haze of adrenaline that all the New Republic soldiers felt. Several looked back to see a brigade of T7-B tanks rolling towards the bridge, weapons ready to incinerate anything that stood in their way. Several anti-armor missiles streaked away from them, crashing into the walkers, sending them spinning and twirling to the ground. Once deadly instruments of destruction, they were now nothing but scrap metal.
The T7-Bs continued their advance on the bridge, spraying blaster fire at the now-retreating stormtroopers. The AFC troopers paused for only a second before adding their own fire with a cry of pure hatred that sent shivers down the spines of the stormtroopers. The AFC troopers vaulted their cover and ran forward, screaming as they collided with the First Order troopers.
It was anarchy. Everywhere, the fighting broke down into scores of individual combat, with AFC troopers sometimes taking on two or three times the amount of stormtroopers and winning easily. Ezra made his blade dance as he fought fifteen stormtroopers, the emerald saber slicing through their armor and weapons like a hot knife through Dantooine butter. A stormtrooper threw a kick at him. He danced to the side and blasted three troopers with the Force, sending them crashing into double their number with minimal effort. He ducked and spun, killing two more stormtroopers as he did so, before reversing his grip and plunging the verdant sword into another snowman, dropping him instantly. He pulled the blade out and sliced the arm of another trooper, making them drop to the ground in agony, sobbing in pain.
It was too much for the stormtroopers. They broke and ran, leaving almost three-fourths of their men lying on the field dead. Out of fifteen officers, two lived, and both were severely wounded.
It was a crushing defeat for the First Order.
The battle for Lothal still raged in the atmosphere. Defenders twirled and dove with amazing agility as TIEs took brutal hits and stayed in the air. In space, the three remaining First Order Star Destroyers fired anti-fighter guns at the multirole bombers that flew in random patterns, supported by T-70 X-Wings that rolled and climbed and wove around reinforced durasteel pillars.
Light Wing ascended through the cloud-cover, breaking through the atmosphere. Ciena Ree sucked in a breath at the battle above the clouds.
"Well, that's where the assistance call came from," Thane said, over comms. "Let's see if we can't help."
"Of course," Zane Lathal responded. Zane, a fighter ace from Corellia that became disillusioned with the Empire at age 18 and enlisted with the Rebellion, had participated in the battles of Coruscant and almost all of the battles in between, had earned the nickname 'Lethal' when a fellow pilot had mispronounced his last name.
This would be the last time that name was used in a combat situation.
Light Wing, emerging from the atmosphere, was an easy target for the veteran TIE pilots of Dark Squadron. The leader of Dark immediately pressed down the trigger on his joystick, spitting green bolts at Zane. The Corellian's wing was sheared off almost immediately and gravity took hold of his craft, sending it back down to the planet below. Almost a second later, Light Wing took evasive maneuvers, flipping their crafts around to face the new threat. Lasers began to split the sky apart.
Ciena made her fighter roll to the side and dropped in behind an enemy TIE, blasting the cockpit apart. A laser blast pinged off her shields, and Ciena quickly adjusted her fighter, swerving around and shooting down her attacker.
"Ciena, behind you!" Thane called, and not a second too soon. As Ciena threw her fighter into a steep dive, laser blasts cleaved through the space she had been filling nearly a millisecond before.
Thane, seeing Ciena's craft drop, thought she had been killed by the laser blast. Almost instantly, he was on the shooter, who was incidentally the leader of Dark Squadron. The TIE was rocked by point-blank laser blasts and it's wing was sheared in half before the cockpit was obliterated.
Ciena, not one to miss the action, came back up from the bottom and let a flurry of plasma loose as well, shattering the cockpit from the bottom.
And, just like that, the battle was over as quickly as it had begun.
"Light Wing, call in," Thane said. Lights 1, 2, 4, 5, and 7 all reported in. Light 3 and Light 6 had both fallen under Dark Squadron's onslaught.
Thane hung his head in shame. That had been his fault. If he had just thought that maybe someone had seen them coming up and scrambled an intercept party, then maybe-
"Thane, shut up."
It was Ciena, on a private channel between them. He could almost see her beautiful face screwed up with irritation at the fact that he was angry at himself.
"Ciena, just once, let me take the blame."
"No. Not allowing that."
"Ciena…"
"Still not allowing you, Kyrell."
Thane shook his head ruefully before turning his attention to the battle unfolding before his eyes.
"Alright, let's join Monarch Wing," he said, over comms, making his fighter race towards the combat zone, the rest of Light Wing following close behind. Monarch Wing was the best space-bound wing, so it had been one of the first fighter wings to head up and fight. As Light Wing got closer, they could see evidence of the fighting: destroyed TIEs, floating in the dark matter of space (surprisingly, scientists still couldn't figure out exactly what space was full of) and TIE interceptors, as well as wrecked landing craft.
Laser blasts and specks circled the massive star destroyer in the distance, rapidly getting bigger as Light Wing approached the battle, ready to fight. Thane looked down at the planet and took comfort in the solid energy bubble that covered Capital City, making it almost impervious to any orbital bombardment.
He thought it was his vision that failed for a second.
To his horror, it wasn't his vision.
The shield bubble around Capital City flickered and failed, it's blue hue falling within three seconds. To everyone watching, it felt like an eternity, as if time had slowed down. But just as soon as time stopped, it started again. Turbolaser blasts began to fall onto the urban center, causing untold devastation. A burst of panicked comm chatter came from Monarch Wing, Light Wing, and the ground-pounders below.
Thane shook his head to clear it and took charge of the situation. "All wings engaging FOSDs, refocus fire to turbolasers, priority one."
In Basic, that meant everyone in a fighter attacking the star destroyers should immediately switch their fire to the turbolasers firing on the surface of Lothal and destroy them. High power, anti-armor missiles streaked away from wingtips, crashing into the massive cannons and destroying vital firing systems. One particularly lucky pilot scored a hit that exposed a vital gas line that was ignited by the explosions of the missiles. The Star Destroyer was rocked by a massive explosion that tore through the ship, igniting it's reactor and sending the ship into a massive fireball. The humongous ship was torn apart by fire and explosions that sent it falling from orbit into Lothal's fields.
"Someone figure out what just got hit!" Monarch One shouted over comms. "And once you do that, hit it more!"
"Monarch Lead, it looks like it was an explosion that ignited tibanna gas and created a chain reaction to the core," Monarch Two, real name David Pierce, said. A graduate of the Imperial Academy on Lothal a year before it closed down, he had been the most intellectually astute of his class and showed great promise in the starfighter corps. Then, he had seen a mass execution ordered by the Empire, where three TIEs were ordered to clear 90,000 refugees from a road. He was behind the controls of a X-Wing less than a week later.
The twisted, broken bodies were a subject he wanted to forget and remember, at the same time. It made him sick, but it gave him the drive to head forward.
Less than an hour later, three Star Destroyers had been scrapped.
Sabine sat down at a desk and looked over her memoirs of her life that she had been writing. She had already published the first volume, about her time as a part of the Rebel Alliance. It had been called Rebels. She had been writing a second volume, about the rest of her life after finding her husband. But now….
Now, she had something else to write about. She tapped the title of the story and looked over the Mando'a lettering that carefully spelled out Searching For My Love.
It was time for a change.
She wouldn't change what she had already written, of course. Too many hours had been sunk into the original story to just be deleted. But there would be thirteen years of emptiness.
She was Sabine Wren. She was forty-one. She was a mother, a wife, and a Mandalorian commander in the Resistance. And now, she was the author of Resistance.