Hello again my fair ladies and gentle beings, this is Jevia Cross of Radio Liberty and I've got some good news for you this time around. The Rebel Alliance has captured Dadgab, capital of the planet Qari. The rebels are helping to establish refugee centers for those Alderanians who managed to escape the Death Star's destruction. Personally, I think it would be fitting if we named the planet 'New Alderaan'. Despite what the Empire's propaganda may tell you, the Rebellion is still growing and even the factions who aren't officially a part of it are doing what they can to make the Empire miserable. We're talking strikes on troop convoys, supply raids, attacks on comms posts and my personal favorite kicking down the gates of every political prison they can. And guess what a lot of those ex-prisoners are doing? They're joining up, learning how to fight and doing it alongside their rescuers. It's such a wonderful cycle ain't it?
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Penn was a beautiful planet, very similar to Naboo. It was a planet of green fields and great lakes, with most of its settlements being small towns and villages. The sole exception was the planetary capital, Kroywen, a metropolis.
The Mandalorians were not going to give up this city without a fight. They poured warriors into it battle block by block, skyscraper by skyscraper. Crossing a street could be and often was worth a person's life. AT-STs came in and knocked houses flat and blasted the men who fled from the ruins. Then some Mandalorians they hadn't blasted threw an incendiary bottle grenade through its eye and turned an AT-ST into a durasteel coffin for the men inside. And then a counterattack went in and threw the Imperials back six blocks.
Somebody not far away started banging on a shell casing with a wrench or a hammer or whatever he had handy. "Oh, for Force sake!" Ezra Bridger said, and grabbed Revan's helmet, throwing the hood of his brown armored tunic over it. The weather seemed to have broken; it wasn't so hot as it had been. He loved Sabine for gifting the ancient outfit to him, and it was certainly more camouflaged than the orange jumpsuit that he had worn for most of the war, but the mask was never any fun. He'd sweat rivers in that even in a blizzard.
Imperial shells crashed down on the factories and steel mills ahead. The bursts sent up smoke that joined the horrid stuff belching from the tall stacks. Air in Kroywen was already poisonous even without phosgene and mustard gas and the nerve agents. They called the thick brown eye-stinging mix smog, jamming together smoke and fog. What they got was more noxious than the made-up word suggested, though.
Ezra wouldn't have wanted to work in one of those places with shells bursting all around. But the factories kept operating till they burned or till the stormtroopers overran them. Transport ships took steel and metalware of all kinds to planets east. Imperial artillery and TIE fighters made the Mandalorians pay a heavy price for what came out of the mills and factories. Some of it got through, though, and they thought that was worth-while.
AT-ATs ground forward. Telling streets from blocks of buildings wasn't so easy anymore. Kroywen was nothing but a rubble field these days. The whole city would look like that by the time Ezra's comrades finished driving out the Imperials…if they ever did.
A blaster-cannon fired at the AT-ATs from the cover of a ruined clothing-store. Plasma bolts sank into the machine's armor. Ezra didn't know why anyone bothered firing away at AT-ATs; they couldn't hurt them. But fire away they did, though.
Three of the AT-ATs turned their heads at the source of the attack, and fired together. More of the battered shop fell in on itself. But the blaster cannon opened up again, like a small boy yelling, Nyah! Nyah! You missed me! when bigger kids chucked rocks at him. The crew had nerve.
All they got for their courage was another volley, and then another. After that, the gun stayed silent. Had the AT-AT's put it out of action, or was it playing dead? Ezra hoped for the latter.
And then, for a moment, he forgot all about the blaster cannon, something a commander hardly ever did. But a rocket fired by a Mandalorian he hadn't seen slammed into the side of one of the giant death-machines. The AT-AT's front legs collapsed and it started to burn. Hatches popped open. Men dashed for cover. The Mandalorian was smart. They didn't blast them and reveal their position. They just waited.
The other two AT-ATs turned in the general direction from which that enemy projectile had come. Another rocket hit one of them in the neck, and killed it. This time, several stormtroopers pointed toward a figure that was obstructed from Ezra's view. By the time the last AT-AT brought its gun to bear, though, the Mandalorian had pulled back, judging from the "Don't let him get away!" bellowed by one of the stormtroopers. Ezra then saw the Mandalorian in question fly off in a jetpack.
Ezra was only half surprised when the blaster cannon in the ruined store opened up again. The stormtroopers were quick to take cover, too. None of them were hit.
The AT-AT sent several more rounds into the haberdashy. The blaster cannon stayed quiet. Ever so cautious, the stormtroopers inched closer. One of them tossed a grenade and went in after it. Ezra was glad that a flametrooper wasn't among them. A whole squad of them had terrorized the battlefield in the early days of the battle, but they had been incinerated a few days ago. No replacements for them had come forward yet.
Not enough reinforcements of any kind were coming forward. Little by little, the legions were melting away. Ezra hoped that they would just give up and end the bloodshed, but he didn't think that would happen anytime soon. The Imperials needed Kroywen. They had already put just about everybody available up at the front.
After a minute or so, the stormtrooper came out of the wreckage with his thumb up. There was one Mandalorian blaster cannon that wouldn't kill anybody else. Thankfully, Ezra knew that there were hundreds, maybe thousands more waiting in Kroywen. The thought gave him hope.
A blaster shot rang out. A plasma bolt struck sparks from the bricks just behind the head of the stormtrooper who'd thrown the grenade. He hit the dirt. Three other stormtroopers pointed in three different directions, which meant nobody had seen where the shot came from. The blaster cannon might be gone, but the Mandalorians hadn't given up the fight for this block. It didn't seem as if they would until they were all dead.
Ezra ducked down into a shell hole to shed his mask and smoke a cigarette—he didn't turn blue and keel over, so it was safe enough. And much better to not let the lighter or the coal give the Imperial sniper a target. He was glad Imperial propaganda wasn't true. Kroywen would have fallen long since.
His fiance came running back to him, calling his name. "Here I am!" he shouted, not raising his head. "What's up?"
"Love, there's an Imperial with a flag of truce right up at the front," Sabine replied. "Wants to know if he can come back and make a truce for the wounded."
The last time an Imperial officer proposed something like that, he'd scouted out the Mandalorian positions as he moved with his white flag. The Empire kept the truce, but they knew just where to strike after it ended. Ezra threw down the half-finished smoke. "Let's meet the son of a bitch at the line," he growled and put his mask and hood back on.
He made his own flag of truce from a stick and a pillowcase, then ran up with Sabine. The truce already seemed to be informally under way. Firing had stopped. Mandalorians were swapping cigarettes for Imperial ration cans. Both sides deplored that. Neither could do anything about it. Commerce trumped orders. The Imperials had better canned goods, worse tobacco, the Mandalorians the opposite.
An Imperial captain in a dirty uniform waited for Ezra. "I could have come to you."
Ezra smiled a crooked smile beneath his crimson helmet. "I bet you could," and explained why he didn't want the Imperials back of his lines.
"I would not do a thing like that," the Imperial officer said, much too innocently. "And I am sure you wouldn't, either."
"Who, me?" Ezra said with another smile like the first. The Imperial captain matched it. They'd been through the mill, all right. Ezra got down to business: "Is an hour long enough, or do you want two?"
"Split the difference?" Sabine suggested, and the two nodded. The captain looked at his watch. "All right. Truce until 1315, then?"
"Agreed." Ezra stuck out his gloved hand. The Imperial captain shook it. They both turned back to their own men and shouted out the news. Corpsmen from both sides came forward. Ordinary soldiers did some more trading. Somebody had a football. Imperial and Mandalorian soldiers tossed it back and forth. Ezra remembered a similar truce during the failed Imperial invasion of Krowest.
Corpsmen poked through the rubble. They called outside of smashed houses. Sometimes they got answers from smashed people trapped inside. Soldiers helped move wreckage so the medics could do their job. When the Mandalorian corpsmen found wounded stormtroopers, they gave them back to the Imperials. Imperials returned the favor for the Mandalorians.
Ezra and the officer in gray—his name was Valen Rudor—hadn't agreed to that, but neither of them tried stopping it. "Won't change how things end up one way or the other," Rudor remarked.
Ezra agreed. He'd handed Captain Rudor a few packs of cigarettes, and was now the proud possessor of two cans of deviled ham, a delicacy esteemed on both sides of the front. His mouth watered. If he could scrounge up some eggs… Even if he couldn't, the ham would be a treat.
"We might as well be comfortable as we can while we slaughter each other," Rudor said.
"We're enemies," Ezra said simply. "You won't make me believe the Empire wants to do anything but squash galactic freedom, and I don't expect I can persuade you the Empire isn't full of villains."
"It would not matter if you did," Rudor answered. "As long as you've got villains at the top, all they have to do is shout loud enough to make everybody else go along."
"Who's a villain and who isn't depends on how you look at things," Ezra said.
"Sometimes,"Valen Rudor replied.
They shook hands again when the truce ended. Corpsmen disappeared. Men and women got back under cover. Almost ceremoniously, a Mandalorian warrior fired a DC-15A to warn anybody who hadn't got the word. In that same spirit, a stormtrooper answered with one round from a E-11.
Then another stormtrooper squeezed off a shot from his blaster rifle. A Mandalorian blaster cannon opened up. Ezra sighed. The little peace had been nice while it lasted.