Incoming transmission...
Welcome back, ladies, gentle beings, and droids to Voice of Liberty. I'm your host Jevia Cross and I hope that whenever it is, you're hearing this, day, or night, I hope you're having a good one.
A rather interesting development has come to light. The rebels have won an astounding victory over the Empire at Naboo.
In other news, the Empire has begun an offensive against Lothal, recently liberated by the Mandalorians, and has burned several towns…
—
Second Lieutenant Valen Jasaad wasn't even a bulge in his father's pants when the Clone War ended. He was just out of the Imperial Academy, and so new an officer he squealed. He really did squeak; he had a thin tenor voice that often didn't seem to have finished breaking. He went tomato-red whenever something he was saying came out especially shrill.
First Sergeant Keevan Tragor hadn't expected anything different, so he wasn't disappointed. The recruiters back on Coruscant had as much told him this is what he would be doing. Veteran noncoms held pipsqueak officers' hands until the pipsqueaks either figured out what they were doing or got wounded or killed. In the first case, the blooded officers commonly won promotion. In the second, they left the platoon for less pleasant reasons. Either way, the platoon got a new, green CO, and the first sergeant's job started all over again.
At the moment, Lieutenant Jasaad's platoon sprawled on the ground under some oaks not far outside of Tuomlaf, Lothal. On the other side of the river, the Mandalorians held Osap Le. Scuttlebutt said General Bular's next try at dislodging the enemy from his defenses in front of Capital City would go through the Mandalorians here.
"What do you think, Sergeant?" asked Dealura Pelkros, a corporal who led one of the squads in the platoon. "Are they going to send us over the river?"
"I have no idea," Tragor answered. "I hope they do not. I do not like getting shot at better than the next guy."
"Yes, well, that is on account of you have got your head screwed on tight," Pelkros said. He was more than twenty years younger than Keevan, but he had been in the Army for a while. "Some people…" He did not go on.
He did not need to, either. Lieutenant Jasaad was telling anybody who would listen what a howling waste they were going to make out of Osap Le and its Lothalite defenders. Since he outranked everyone close by, people had to listen. Whether they believed him was liable to be a different story.
"Our bombardment will stun them. It will paralyze them," Jasaad burbled. "They will never know what hit them. We will get over the river without the least bit of trouble."
Pelkros's grunt was redolent of skepticism. So was Keevan Tragor's. He had seen lots of bombardments, which Valen Jasaad plainly had not. Not even the fiercest one knocked an enemy altogether. As soon as the bombing and the shelling let up, the survivors ran for their blaster cannons and popped up out of their holes blaster rifles in their hands.
The noncoms in the platoon all plainly knew as much. But rank had its privileges: no one told Jasaad to shut up. Keevan thought about it. He would have been more diplomatic than that if he'd decided to do it. In the end, he kept quiet with the rest. The young lieutenant was heartening new men who hadn't been through the mill yet. That counted for something.
But when Valen Jasaad said, "We ought to be in Capital City a week after we break through at Osap Le," Keevan cleared his throat. For a wonder, the lieutenant noticed. "You said something, Sergeant?"
"Well, no, sir. Not exactly sir." Keevan knew he had to be polite to the snotnose with the three red squares on his rank insignia plaque. He was not convinced Jasaad deserved such courtesy, but the military insisted on it. "Only, sir, it might be better if you do not make promises we cannot keep."
Jasaad stared at him. Failure had plainly never crossed the shavetail's mind. He said, "Sergeant, once we cross the river, we will go forward." He might have been propounding a law of nature.
He might have been, but he wasn't. Keevan knew it too well. "Yes, sir," he said, meaning, No, sir.
Maybe Jasaad was not altogether an idiot. He heard what Tragor was not saying. Stiffly, he said, "When the order comes, Sergeant, we will go forward."
"Oh, yes, sir," Keevan agreed—he could not quarrel with that, not without ending up in big trouble himself. But he did want to persuade the lieutenant not to take on faith everything his superiors told him. "Sir, when you were at the Imperial Academy, did you study the battles on the Ruusan front?"
"Sure." Jasaad chuckled. "All twelve or fourteen of them, or however many there were."
To him, those fights were just things he had studied in school. He could laugh about them. Keevan could not. His memories were too dark. "Sir, I was there for the first six or eight—until I got wounded. I was lucky. It was just a hometowner. But before every attack, they told us this would be the one that did the trick. Do you wonder that after a while we had trouble jumping up and down when they told us to go over the top?"
"I hope we have gotten better at what we are doing since then." By the way Valen Jasaad said it, it was a forgone conclusion that the Army had.
"So do I." By the way Keevan Tragor said it, it was anything but.
The bombardment started on schedule, regardless of Tragor's opinion. It did not go on for days, the way it would have during the Clone War. The men in charge of the guns had learned something. Long bombardments did more to tell the enemy where the attack was coming than it did to smash him flat. Make him keep his head down, then strike hard—that was the prevailing wisdom these days.
Tragor would have liked it better if they had not had to throw bridges across the river before they could cross. He and the rest of the platoon—the rest of the regiment—waited by the river for the engineers to do their job. Tragor liked and admired military engineers. They were good at their specialized trade, and when they had to they made pretty good combat soldiers, too.
They did their damnedest on the river, but they never had a chance. Even though Imperial artillery kept pounding Osap Le, Mandalorian blaster cannons and rockets started pounding the engineers right back. Guns up in the hills behind the town, guns that had stayed quiet so the Imperial cannon would not spot them and knock them out ahead of time, added their weight of metal to the countershelling.
And they added more than metal. The Imperial guns had thrown poison gas at Osap Le along with everything else, and the Mandalorian artillery replied in kind. Tragor was wearing his mask well before the order went out to put them on. He had seen mustard gas the last time around. He had not seen what they called nerve agents—those were new. But he did not want to make their acquaintance the hard way.
TIE Defenders—now exclusively used by the Mandalorians on Lothal—swooped down on the bridges. These days, the TIE Fighters were not the symbol of terror they had been when the war was new. They were slow and ungainly; TIE Defenders hacked them out of the sky with ease when they ventured into airspace where the Galactic Empire did not have air superiority. But they still had a role to play. The Defenders screamed down, destroyed three of the bridges, and zoomed away just above treetop level.
"I hate those bastards, but they have guts." Because of Corporal Pelkros' mask, his voice sounded distant and otherworldly.
"You want to know what I think, I think we have to be mad to try to cross here at all," Tragor said. Pelkros did not argue with him. He wished the other noncoms would have.
Stormtroopers in rubber boats tried crossing the river to quiet the mortar crews and blaster cannons and riflemen on the other side. Despite smoke screens and heavy Imperial fire, a lot of the boats got sunk before they made it to the south bank of the river. The stormtroopers who managed to cross no doubt did their best, but Keevan could not see that Mandalorian fire diminished even a little.
About every half hour, Lieutenant Jasaad would say, "We will get the order to cross any minute now, men," or "It will not be long!" or, "Be ready!" Knowing how stubborn the high brass could be, Keevan feared the platoon leader was right, but kept hoping he was wrong.
The order never came. Towards evening, the units that had been pushed forward drew back out enemy artillery range. Tragor wondered how many casualties they had taken, and how many they had inflicted on the Mandalorians. He would have bet the first number was a lot bigger than the second one.
"Don't worry, men," Valen Jasaad said, invincibly optimistic. "We will get them soon, even if we did not get them today."
Keevan had never known a common soldier who worried about not going into battle. No doubt such men existed. You heard stories about them, stories often prefaced, There was this crazy bastard who… But he had never run into any himself.
Like other lower forms of life, second lieutenants were too dumb to know better. Keevan thought some more about telling this particular lieutenant to put a sock in it, but refrained. Jasaad had a job, too. He was supposed to make soldiers enthusiastic about going out there and getting maimed. Having led that company in the Clone War, Keevan knew what a nasty job that could be.
At the moment, he worried more about whether the regiment would get its field kitchens set up after all the marching and counter-marching it had done. He was not especially surprised when it did not. "Canned rations," he told the men of his platoon. (Valen Jasaad had a different idea of who's platoon it was, but what did second lieutenants know?)
"That shit again?" somebody said. It was not the only grumble sullying the sweetness of the evening air. Canned rations ranged from boring to actively nasty. The labels peeled off, too, so you did not know ahead of time whether you were getting spaghetti and meatballs—tolerable—or chicken with stewed prunes—disgusting. As with men who liked combat, there were a few who liked the chicken concoction and would trade for it, but Keevan did not think any were in his platoon.
Dealura Pelkros plopped down beside him. "How is that going to look on the HoloNet, Sergeant? 'Imperial Army Pulls Back from Osap Le! Does Not Cross!'" He made the headlines very convincing.
Keevan opened his can. It was hash—not very good, not very bad. He dug in. After the first mouthful, he said, "They can post that if they want to. I do not care. As long as they do not say 'Imperial Army Massacred at Osap Le!' I am not going to worry about it."
"You have a good way of looking at things," Pelkros said. "Better than some people I could name—that is for damn sure."
"He is nothing but a puppy," Tragor said, identifying one of those unnamed people without undue difficulty.
"You know what a puppy is?" the corporal said. He waited for Keevan to shake his head, then answered the rhetorical question: "Just a little son of a bitch."
"Ouch," Keevan said. To his own surprise, he found himself defending Lieutenant Jasaad: "He is not so bad. He just needs experience."
"He needs a good, swift kick in the arse," Pelkros said.
"Odds are he will get one. Let us hope he lives through it," Keevan said.
"Yeah." Pelkros nodded. "Let us hope we do, too."