Have no fear, chapter four is here!
Hearts of Iron: Chapter IV – Asparagus is unstable, and Lucchini makes things worse…
2/25/95, Switzerland – Third Allied Defensive Line, Fortification 144
Asparagus stared at the redheaded suck-up; Pekoe stared back, looking like she was trying desperately to figure out what she could respond with.
But she was having none of that today. "Explain this to me again Orange, why does Darjeeling want us to help the Italians?" She huffed at the shorter girl.
Pekoe, for her part at least had the self-preservation skills to look confused. "I'm not actually sure of that myself." The other girl answered nervously, eyes continually flitting in distraction to the monolithic structure that had fallen from the sky only a short time ago.
"Though I suppose we are not technically at war with them right now…" The redhead trailed off, and Asparagus had had enough of her excuses.
"Tojo, get me a line to commander Darjeeling!" She snapped at one of the Japanese soldiers idling near a nearby bunker door. The boy scowled at her, but he snapped to attention anyway and ran down into the trenches leading deeper into their own lines.
The sky buzzed as an entire flight of biplanes passed overhead, clearly heading in the direction of the landing zone.
And speaking of the landing zone, the fucking Macaroni in a German monoplane was still strafing it, despite the scattered blue tracers that intermittently pegged impotently at the sky.
It didn't matter; she wasn't risking her battalion over something like this without direct orders.
The Jap came back in a huff, wearing a backpack radio that she immediately swiped from him. "Commander Darjeeling?"
"Asparagus my dear, you rang?" The other woman's reserved voice crackled out of the radio, sounding for all the world like she had just called her up for a pleasurable conversation, and not because the tea slurping Brit had ordered her to do something unthinkable.
"Sir, I will not comply with these orders!" Asparagus shouted, and immediately calmed herself down slightly, realizing she had been shouting into the receiver. "You can't seriously be asking us to aid the enemy?"
The older woman replied more quietly, with an almost amused tone. "Dear, I am afraid I must insist. I need your unit's armor to accompany the infantry battalions that are being deployed to investigate that object."
And that was the crux of the issue wasn't it. That damned rocket ship that had parked itself in the center of the trenches, and if her latest report were to be believed, had started deploying infantry.
It wasn't just something they could easily ignore.
She snarled at the other people assembled in pure frustration. "Get the tanks started, we're moving out ASAP!" She jabbed her gloved hand at the various tank crews and technicians milling about. She hissed at no one in particular. "We will move out on your orders commander…" she paused, "I want it noted that I thought this was a bad idea."
She left the part about it all going horribly wrong unsaid, it was already implied.
"Consider your concerns noted Asparagus." Darjeeling replied, sounding more amused than worried.
The engines of fifty-five Renault ft-19s rattled to life, their tracks squelched into the muddy ground as they started moving forward. She shot Pekoe an expectant look.
The shorter girl shrugged helplessly. "I'm to lead our infantry units apparently."
She snorted. Then the other girl was worthless, after all it was armor that would always win them the day.
The cloudy blackness of the sky burst with light as a thundering boom echoed across the landscape. A glance up revealed the painfully brilliant ember of a star shell screaming into the foggy sky.
She ran into her tank, sliding onto the commander's position, and flipped her short-range radio on. "All armor move forward, we'll storm their trenches and grind them into dust!"
She felt a vicious grin spread across her lips at the chorus of "affirmatives" and "yes sirs" that echoed back as their column started clattering into the trench-lands.
Because while Asparagus might not have agreed with the orders and she certainly despised the people giving them, that didn't mean she wasn't going to let herself enjoy the moment.
And if a few of the pasta slurping micks got caught in the crossfire… well those things happened in the chaos of battle, didn't they?
Hardcell-class Interstellar Transport, "Salutation" – Somewhere on Aldebaran 4
Junior Major, Sila Wilik rushed down the ships hallways in a brisk march. Having already relayed an abridged version of Riker's orders over her helmet's comm unit, she decided that they needed troops on the ground as soon as possible.
Which meant getting down to the boarding ramps as fast as possible and that she was going to drag everyone she met along the way out with her.
So far she had collected a sizeable compliment, more than fifty cadets in total, and fortunately everyone had already thought to arm themselves.
Though she worried that not all of their blasters would be functional, there would be time to figure that out after they had confirmed whether or not they were about to be overrun by a horde of hostile aliens.
"Sir, what's the rush." Anit Muu gasped out inanely, as they bust into the cargo hold. Anit was a tall, pretty girl. One which Sila had often thought might have been attractive, if it wasn't for her tendency to be annoying and ask too many questions.
She didn't reply immediately, taking in everything happening in the room first. "We are under attack." She answered and immediately everyone in the hold snapped up.
She slipped seamlessly into command. "Wiram I want those doors open now. Jaki get the E-webs out from storage, we need to reinforce the perimeter around the ship." The loading ramps dropped down with a slam, as cadets rushed around the room, grabbing weapons and unpacking the heavy-blaster cannons from their containers.
As they readied themselves for the dash out the loading ramps, a voice called out from the lift behind them. "What in the Seven Heavens is going on down here?" Sila turned to see Mikra Aluni, one of the members of the Xenology team, looking at them disapprovingly.
Anit, bring useful for maybe the first time ever, spoke up. "You need to leave ma'am." The buzz-cut blonde clipped out in an unusually curt tone. "This ship is under attack, and protocol demands that you be protected." She finished seriously.
The blue-skinned Mon-Calamari snorted, waiving at them dismissively. "Nonsense, if we are to understand the natives we will need to talk with-"
Sila cut her off. "Ma'am I must insist you leave, as we cannot insure your safety here. Go back to the upper levels and tell them to lock down the bulkheads." She waved the older woman back towards the lift.
"We can't just lock you all ou-"
There was a deep bang, followed by a string of cheerful popping noises from outside the landing ramps, and she decided the woman's fate would be in her own hands. "Alright everyone out, I want everyone to try and find cover and be ready to return fire!" She shouted, and they rushed out the door into the fog and darkness.
She tripped almost the exact instant that her feet left the boarding ramp, and she realized her helmet was malfunctioning in the same moment. Which was a pity, they were nicer helmets than most cadets at the academy had, but the fancy electronics in hers seemed to have been fried. The thought chilled her stomach, making her wonder if any of the orders she had shouted while running down the hallways had actually been heard by anyone.
And her foot was still stuck on something despite her worrying. Something that wrapped around her leg and dug through the fabric of her pants, which she couldn't see because the glass on her helmet refused to clear.
Then, there was another deep boom, and suddenly she could see the barbed metal wiring that had wrapped itself around her ankle.
"Major, enemy armor spotted on the horizon!" One of the nearby cadets shouted, from behind a rusty barrel.
"Sir, they're launching star-shells." A different cadet shrieked the obvious, and she growled, dug out her vibroblade and started slashing at the metal wire.
After each slash there was a flash of sparks that burned her retinas, but on the third slash the wire snapped and released her torn pant leg from its strangling grip. She stood, ignoring the sparks of pain from where the metal hooks had dug into her leg "Everyone get into cover, and someone set up those E-Webs!" She roared at them, over the buzzing from the sky.
Buzzing…
Her eyes shot up, and illuminated by the clouds was an alien flying machine, a propeller driven contraption that floated nimbly down on them from on high.
The aircraft's front end lit up with flashes of fire and invisible slugs started tearing the ground all around her, Wilik threw herself flat, shuddering as the spongy soil squelched beneath her and people screamed. She pressed her face-plate into the muck until she was sure that the pilot had pulled up and was speeding back out over the field.
Everyone around her had started shouting, some for orders, and others for medics or just the agonized shrieks that people made when they were dreadfully injured.
"Sith…" She swore, as a handful of brilliant blue sparks trailed after the infernal prop, only for it to flick slightly in another direction, and for the shots to whizz past it. It wiggled its wings as it flew away, and she realized that the thrice-damned pilot was taunting them.
Muu ran up to her. "Sila, I'm starting to think we might be in the middle of an active battlefie-" The other teen's panicked speech was cut off by a series of cheerful warbles as the Crab Droids started firing into the field.
"Everyone in the trenches and Jaki where in the Force are those damn E-webs!" She roared over the chirps of blaster fire and the deeper coughs of alien weapons. Sliding herself down into one of the many gashes cut into the marshy landscape, she swore again, sinking up to her ankles in the slime that coated the bottom of the trench, while the cuts in her leg screamed "infection!" at her.
"Jaki is dead sir!" Anit screamed in panic, as something nearby exploded fantastically.
Sila ripped the face section off of her helmet and tossed it as hard as she could. Then she took a deep breath and started counting. Trying as hard as she could to calm down, and resist the panic that was rapidly overtaking everything in her mind.
"I can't believe this is happening." A nearby private moaned from a hole nearby, where he had wedged himself, up to his chest in water.
She felt herself relaxing slightly. "Who still has their binos?" She called breathlessly down the trench; feeling more calmed after her quick little panic attack.
Another twiggy private, whose identification patch was freshly obscured with slime, raised his hand. "Give me those." She asked, and the boy tossed them to her, then he dove for the dirt as the buzzing started up again, but this time from multiple directions.
She slid her rifle off of her back, setting it against the wall, as she peeked over the trench. The Droids had opened fire earlier, but she could see the tanks and the swarms of humanoid silhouettes following them were still advancing, despite several tanks she could see leaking a thick oily smoke in the background.
The wrecked hulks of the droids between the enemy and her own forces sparked in time with the oily flames, and it gave the whole scene a gut-churning feel.
There was still a lot more armor and infantry closing on their position than she had hoped there would be. A lot more infantry than she had hoped.
They slid swiftly, ducking in and out of trenches and craters with a practiced ease, and she realized that she had started trying to count them unconsciously.
Still, it was the tanks that really worried her. They were petite little things, smaller than the landspeeder her father had on their homestead. But they still sped closer at a rapid pace, their tracks throwing mud into the air as their turrets scanning the terrain with their pointy little cannons, clearly still cautious even after the droids had been dispatched.
She slid down from the lip of the trench to see three cadets wrestling with an E-Web. They carefully slipped the barrel over a dip in the edge of the trench, and one of them saluted her, wiping mud off of his grey uniform. "We've got six in place sir. Should we open fire?" The boy asked in a thick Corellian accent.
"That you Lask?" She probed the familiar voice, unable to identify him under the fresh coating of mud.
The boy nodded, and she continued. "Alright, I want everyone to hold your fire until they close in. And while you're at it, smear some more mud on your uniform so you'll blend in better." She said, addressing everyone.
Another massive boom sounded, and another brilliant white coal shot into the sky.
"That fighter is back!" Someone shouted from a position nearby, maybe noticing the intensifying in the buzzing. "And he brought friends!"
2/25/95, Switzerland –Above the Landing Zone
Lucchini was doing what she did best. She was flying, fighting and annoying the shit out of literally everyone around her.
All in all, she thought to herself as she maneuvered for another strafing run, the day had improved substantially since she had first taken off.
The enemy even had the courtesy to be firing tracers at her, extremely slow tracers at that, and they didn't seem to have any idea how to lead a target either.
Actually, she had noticed that they didn't seem to have anything other than their weird glowy bolts. The scuttling things she had taken a pot-shot at earlier, that had gone on to duke it out with the tanks had been firing those too. She wondered about it, and then stopped because the Allies were back, and mocking the French girl from earlier was too easy.
"Hey… Hey Frenchman I'm hungry, do you have a baguette I could by?" She taunted over the radio, as she spun her nimble fighter within six feet of the Bulldog formation. Squealing to herself, as their formation broke to dodge her. "I'll trade you a pack of cigs, I know how you guys like to smoke."
The Frenchman… Frenchwoman? In question shouted a stream of creative curses into her radio, none of which Lucchini could understand, but the sound they made left her smiling regardless.
"YOU LITTLE SHIT!" The other girl roared in Latin, which she actually did understand. "Stop buzzing my plane and get back here so I can tear you a new asshole!" She gunned her Bulldog's over-sized engine and Lucchini slammed her flaps in response, dropping behind the other girl who sped past her, immediately going into a dive towards the ground.
She buzzed close over Allied army, close enough to make out the painted symbols on the French armor, counting on the other girl to value the lives of her countrymen over revenge.
The Bulldog swept down after her, but as she shot across the fields heading straight for her own lines, and her own Triple-A cover, the angry girl broke off her pursuit.
She grinned, taking altitude again over the massed friendly armor. A few infantry waved at her from the backs of the CV35's as they trundled towards the landed ship.
Then her blood ran cold as her radio exploded. "Francesca Lucchini, what in God's name have you done!" The voice of her Flight Lieutenant, Giuseppina Ciuinni roared over from the speaker, with all the furious authority of the Caesar herself.
Lucchini pulled her plane back into the sky. "It wasn't me this time, I swear." She ran desperate damage control, not looking forward to cleaning toilets for the next month.
"Bullshit!" Ciuinni clearly didn't buy it.
"But it wasn't!" Lucchini found herself whining into her radio in reply.
She could hear the other woman's teeth grinding. "You had one fucking job Lucchini, one fucking job!" She growled.
"Lucchini if I find out this is your fault; I promise you they will never find your body." The woman hissed into her radio. "Because I will murder you and FORGET where I hid it!" She roared again.
Federica butted in before their superior could go on another tirade. "Did you at least get the booze Lucchini?"
"Yeah!" She grinned, happy for the change in subject, as the rest of the Italian air forces in the area began forming up around them.
"Then I forgive you." The other woman finished, sounding completely unconcerned.
Giuseppina groaned into the radio, the stress of handling an entire flight of green pilots clearly straining her. "Alright you idiots form up on me and get ready to run close air support."
2/25/95, Switzerland – First Allied Defensive Line
The Renaults clattered across the trenches. Their skids keeping them from getting stuck, but that didn't block the mud they flung as they roared full speed across the cratered landscape.
Orange Pekoe wiped the grime from her face for the fourth time since they had set out, gritting her teeth in frustration. She hated infantry duty and she hated the trenches, but Darjeeling always said that they had to keep a stiff upper lip, and so she wouldn't complain.
But her insane commander didn't have to drag a bunch of stir-crazy, French and Japanese troops across the no-mans-land… in the dark.
Of course the artillery positions were launching the star-shells, but between the low cloud cover and the fog, they were still left with a visibility of around pea-soup.
Which wasn't much worse than a clear morning in England, but the rest of her forces were more used to fog-less skies.
So no one noticed the mechanical monstrosities, which didn't open fire on the tanks, until they had almost trundled past them.
A bunch of four-legged, crab-like machines burst over-top of the trenches they had hidden in. Dual guns mounted on their bellies spitting bolts of blue fire at them as her infantry dove for cover.
Three of the lead tanks were hit immediately from multiple angles, and skewed over into the dirt, smoke belching from their burning hulls. Pekoe ducked behind a nearby tank as the bolts of energy screamed past, fingering the radio to call in their support. But it was an unneeded gesture, because for all of her faults, Asparagus was actually fairly competent under the right circumstances.
The armor column slewed to a stop immediately, turrets turning and returning fire as they began methodically picking off targets.
Fortunately for them all, the machines didn't seem to be very smart either. They simply skittered across the broken landscape wailing some horrible alien language. And the crabs didn't seem to be really aiming at anything in specific either, with most of their brilliant blue shots going screaming in the general direction of their forces but missing, or coming close but not close enough that they couldn't be easily ducked by the advancing infantry.
It was a rather odd way to start an ambush in her opinion. "I want all squads on high alert." She sighed as something in the distance exploded, and tapped the little command radio built in to her helmets. "I'm almost entirely certain this has to be some kind of diversion."
"What are you rambling about?" Asparagus's crackly voice hissed into her ear piece.
"I don't think this is the enemy's main force." She slid, crouching in a mud filled crater as the energy-weapon fire slackened rapidly under the tanks cannons. "Sodoko, have your forces met the Germans yet?"
"They Krauts are still slacking and… IT. IS. SONO!" The other girl screamed, and Pekoe slapped at the volume knob on the side of her mask.
"My apologies Sono, from the way the rest of your unit addresses you I had assumed-"
The other girl cut her off. "Don't remind me!" She snapped hotly, but Pekoe's attention had already shifted as she could hear at least one of the planes above them going into a dive close nearby.
About five seconds later German monoplane, with pizzas painted on its wings, shot by her at full speed. Screaming swiftly past her, not ten feet from the ground and barely twenty feet in front of where she was crouched.
And a second later, a Bulldog roared past in hot pursuit, and her radio exploded with French curses. She slapped the volume button again; the things would have to be sent back to the labs for tweaking.
She ignored whatever idiocy the pilots were up to, waving her squad into a trench. The massive ship loomed overhead, windows occasionally lighting up from inside.
She hoped the enemy didn't think to place a sniper… or worse a few machine-guns in those windows. The towering vehicle would give an incredible vantage point and make a direct assault with infantry a suicide mission.
Fortunately, their enemy didn't seem to feel the need to succumb to sense. Her troops rushed down the trenches, bayonets fixed and trench knives out, but they were met with nothing at all.
As she rushed with them she found it was almost… dare she even think the word boring? Normally a mission like this would have been a hell-storm of blood and violence already. With seas of poison gas billowing over slime choked trenches, brutal close quarters combat and split-second shots at point-blank range.
They didn't call it the "Meat Grinder" for nothing.
This was boring… a waste of everyone's skills.
That was not a good sign in her experience. When soldiers were bored, ten ton tanks found their way up trees, and mysteriously there would be no one who would know how it got there.
"Everyone on your toes, the enemy could be anywhere." She ground out the instructions into her radio as she slid down a ramp deeper onto the trench.
Then she slammed bodily into something that sent her flying backwards.
For a split second in her mind she panicked. She knew she wasn't exactly a light person, as Asparagus had often reminded her when they weighed in, despite being small she had been built to be a loader after all.
So she wasn't an easy person to toss around, and anyone who could do that to her would need to be taken seriously.
She realized she had run straight into a German at about the same moment as her wires wrapped around his gun. He blinked at her from behind his gas-mask, and stared almost cross-eyed at the almost invisible lines of silver, her eyes glancing at the bayoneted rifle caught pointing between her breasts.
There was a moment then, when the uneasy peace that had been established between their nations was almost broken, as her squad and his both barreled around their respective corners and weapons instantly snapped up at each other.
Everyone stood still for what felt like hours to her, but was probably only a few seconds in reality. Pekoe found herself marveling, suddenly realizing that she had never been this close to a German before without killing them.
That was the thought that brought her back to reality, and a flicker of her will sent the threads of instant dismemberment sliding back into her gloves. "S- Sorry about that…" She blurted out uneasily.
There was a bout of nervous chuckling from the Germans, as weapons slowly lowered all around. "Danke…" The boy who had run into her said quietly, while his unit eyed her warily.
She did know a little German, but figured that they would have their own business under control. She tipped the brim of her brodie helmet at him politely, and waved her troops to follow her.
They hopped over the brim of the trench, and she looked up to see the spaceship looming darkly over them all.
Then the real shooting started.
Rapid bolts of green energy started flying from the trenches below the ship. Pekoe threw herself into a crater. German shouts echoing from somewhere behind her as the squad they had left in the trench opened up with a light machine-gun, returning fire.
Pekoe instantly regretted not bringing a firearm as she crawled towards the fire. Her wires were deadly, but they needed a clear line of sight to actually work.
And she doubted throwing her binoculars would do any good. Though the battery-pack for her radio would likely make a deadly projectile, God knew it was doing enough work on her spine without any additional velocity.
"Grenades!" She called to the rest of her squad, who had crawled up with her. A flurry of mill-bombs, and a few stielhands, flew into the nearby trenches. And there was a rapid series of explosions, followed by an above usual level of screaming.
"Over the top!" A nearby sergeant screamed as the light from the nearest star-shell dimmed, Pekoe she made sure she was the first over.
It was a short run to the base of the ship, and nearly the entirety of the forces deployed were following closely behind.
She stood, cautious of the possibly unstable ground and the heavy weight of the battery-pack on her back.
The fire had completely stopped as they approached the trenches. She could see a few figures struggling back towards the ship. "Hande-Hoch!" A nearby German roared, and half of the figures simply flopped down.
Then there was a flurry of motion and something that sounded like artillery exploded against the ship's hull. Several indistinct shapes slammed into the ground and when the dust cleared someone stood up.
Something deep inside Pekoe's mind slammed into itself. The figure moved in a manner that some animal part of her brain recognized was subtly wrong, and while the outline was generally humanoid, there was definitely something off with its general shape.
Closer inspection showed the figure was dressed in what was probably a nice white dress at some point in the past, nut was now smeared with mud and torn in several places.
But what really caught everyone's attention was the fact that it had a bloody fish head. She figured it was even more surprising considering that all the remaining figures in uniform were visibly human.
They were tall, wide eyed, and covered in trench muck, but still unmistakably people.
And then a series of figures in robes leapt in front of the blue fish creature, and ignited bloody laser swords.
Her wires came out all on their own, not heading towards the figure but unraveling between the remaining enemy's and her own troops. Darjeeling's earlier orders, to take as many prisoners as possible, coming back into her thoughts.
"Hold your fire!" Her troops lowered their weapons slowly but the Nazi's didn't.
Then some idiot launched another star-shell, there were gasps from the Germans as they saw the long strands of garrote wire flashing in the light. Then they started screaming at everyone and Pekoe had, had enough.
In the Trenches – Somewhere on Aldebaran 4
She had been expecting a lot. Mikra Aluni had known better than to think it would be easy, she had known that before that had left Dorin. But nothing in her Xenology studies had prepared her for this.
She had never heard of a planet being this hostile before. Sure there was the occasional misunderstanding or hostile outbreak, but it was almost always was resolved quickly.
The idea that it was the massive technological edge usually held by the Republic that was usually what quelled natives didn't even occur to her.
Her dress kept getting caught on the wooden boards that lined the trenches, and it slowed her progress. But Aluni just told herself that the natives needed her, that she would need to be as fast as she could to preempt the diplomatic disaster that the cadets seemed to be intent on creating.
"After all, it could only be a good thing to help them." She muttered to herself quietly, ripping her once white dress free single-mindedly, while the explosions and sounds of war from all around her became more intense and frequent.
She nearly went slipping on a patch of mud, but a firm hand on her shoulder stopped her from getting even dirtier than she already was.
She spun in place, her heart in her throat. "Oh, thank the stars it's you…" She gasped at the green-skinned Jedi.
Barriss Offee gave her a nonplussed look, and she spent a second envying the Jedi's calm demeanor. "You are supposed to be inside… where it is safe." The teen said in what passed for an annoyed tone for a Jedi, motioning for her to follow.
"But I can get through to them, I know I can." She pressed the other woman. "They just need an explanation, a show of good faith, something to show them we're not hostile!"
Something far away exploded fantastically, and the Jedi frowned. "I very much doubt we will be able to reason with them. These trenches predate our arrival, and we have clearly interrupted something already unstable." Her hand fell to her lightsaber and she pulled them into a concrete door slot cut into the side of the trench. "The best thing we can do right now is get the ship back into orbit and alert the Republic."
There was a clatter nearby, and the Jedi slapped her hand over her mouth, pulling them deeper into the shadow of the abandoned bunker. Her free hand rose to her lips, signaling for her to be quiet.
There was a moment of awkward silence, punctuated by the sounds of far off blaster-fire, and then she heard several people chuckling nervously.
The teen ripped them both from the doorway and started running back towards the ship, dragging her along unwillingly through the maze of trenches as the roar of battle started up in earnest.
"Faster, the cadets can only hold them for so long." The Jedi said hurriedly, as a flurry of blaster-bolts screamed over the top of the trench they were rushing through.
"No one had to die here!" She gasped out in frustration and disgust, almost stumbling over her own tired legs as they rushed back towards the ship. "We could have tried talking to them."
Barriss stopped, and gave her a thin-lipped look. "Talking only works if people are willing to listen…." She trailed off, but something in the way she said it hit Mikra like an out of control speeder.
There was a sense of horror, and she suddenly felt incredibly guilty, almost physically ill. It didn't take much imagination to understand where the teen might have learned a lesson like that; they were standing at the bottom of the chasm as it was.
They had sent children to war. It was an ugly truth that nobody in the Republic wanted to talk about. First there had been the clone army that had appeared from nowhere, and the Kaminoans had shown absolutely no shame when asked about the actual ages of the troopers being sent to die by the hundreds of millions across the galaxy.
But the clones were one thing, they certainly acted like grown men and they had only been intended as a stopgap anyway, just something to stem the bleeding until a real army could be amassed. It had been ignorable, but the Jedi were involved too. And they took their apprentices with them everywhere, including the thick of battle.
And now the cadets were being blooded.
Aluni was no fool. Everyone knew on some level, that the only reason that organizations like the Republic Cadets would be created in the first place was if the Senate thought they might be needed, but she had always ignored that stuff when it came on the news. She had figured that no matter who ended up winning the war, there would always be a need for Xenologists. That it wouldn't matter in the end.
It was a growing feeling of repressed self-loathing that was bearing down in her. Offee almost certainly felt it, but was too busy keeping them both alive to tend to her little pity-party.
The Jedi wordlessly flung them both over the side of the trench and she rolled with the motion, suddenly feeling dizzy, until her eyes returned to focus. The massive hulk of the Hardcell loomed over her, like some monolithic reaper ready to judge.
There was screaming and the thunder of alien weapons and a series of explosions that tore at the ship's hull, knocking deactivated Vulture Droids free, and she found herself suddenly flung back into a nearby crater as they slammed into the ground.
She stood on unsteady legs, surrounded by the bodies of children in uniforms. Then something in her brain ground to a halt.
The fifteen odd cadets that were still alive, had dropped their weapons, and most were kneeling with their hands behind their heads.
It was because they were completely surrounded, that much was obvious, but most of the aliens were shorter than they were. There were gasps of shock, and suddenly every alien weapon present was pointing at her.
The Jedi padawands leapt in front of her, Offee igniting her emerald blade alongside her three fellow apprentices, as Aluni's stomach lurched in terror.
A woman… no a child a mere girl really, in a stiff looking uniform walked up. She straightened a button on her shirt and waved her hand in a dismissive gesture, saying something she didn't understand.
Half of the troops assembled lowered their weapons into an at rest position, but an argument seemed to be ensuing with the remainder. Who she noticed was dressed in different uniforms than the first half. Grey and Red glared at each other for a moment arguing and jabbing fingers at herself and the Jedi.
The argument was interrupted by another deep boom, and suddenly the leading girl turned into some sort of winged sprite. Slivers of shimmering wire wrapped around her back and looped towards those nearby.
Whatever they were debating was quelled instantly, the half that had refused to lower their weapons leaping back in fear the second the brilliant coal of fire plunged into the heavens and illuminated the shining threads.
One of the padawans gaped, and leapt ten feet at the other girl.
And a curious thing happened in that next instant. There was a blur, as the wings of silver flashed, and the redhead sidestepped the flying pile of dismembered body parts had had been a padawan only a second before.
Almost two days later Mikra Aluni would wake up, hog-tied and surrounded by armed guards in a rapidly moving train making a one way trip to Berlin.
So that was chapter 4… Only a little later than I had hoped, but was moving apartments so I had less time to write recently.
It was shorter than the last one, and the next chapter, which will be finishing up the stuff with the Barriss and the Cadets, will be about the same length.
It was also a little darker than I expected.
So Next Time on Hearts of Iron: Bariss breaks things!