Incoming transmission…
Hello again, ladies, gentle beings, and droids and welcome back to Voice of Liberty with your host Jevia Cross. Got a lot of good news for ya today and some not so good news as well.
We have some good news today. The Mandalorians have defeated the Imperials at Elttaes and they now march on Revuocnav.
Not everything has been going great for the Rebel Alliance though. The Empire is on the verge of recapturing Hosnian Prime from the Rebel Alliance. This comes in the midst of a string of victories won by the Empire, no doubt due to the leadership of a certain cybernetic Sith Lord.
—
There had always been a danger in going on the offensive in the Core Worlds. They only had enough troops to capture a couple planets, and Hosnian Prime was a magnet for Imperial ambitions. Darth Angral had threatened it in the Great Galactic War; a better general likely would have taken it then.
And now… Now Jevil Doljah was red hot, almost white hot, with fury, but not even his unending, unyielding rage could stiffen the Rebel armies north of the city-planet. "God damn it to hell!" he screamed at Degrall. "We need to bring more men and women into the line up there!"
"Sir, we haven't got any more men and women to move," Degrall replied.
"Get 'em from somewhere!" Jevil said.
"Where do you recommend, sir?" The Rebel Alliance commander asked. "Shall we pull them out of Amabala?"
"No! Force, no! Doljah exclaimed. "The fucking offensive will fall apart if we do." The offensive was falling apart anyway, but he knew it would fall faster if he pulled soldiers away from the sectors where they were fighting hardest. "What we got left on Sanilorac?"
"What was there is either up here or down in Agroeg," Degrall replied. "It has been for weeks." He paused, then licked his lips and asked, "Are you sure you aren't overworked, General?"
"I'm tired of nobody doin' what needs doin'—I am tired of that," Jevil growled.
"That's…not quite what I meant, sir." Degrall licked his lips again. "Don't you think the strain of command has been a little too much for you? Shouldn't you take a rest, sir, and come back to duty when you're refreshed and ready to face it again?"
"Well I don't rightly know," Doljah said slowly. "Do you really reckon I'm off?"
"The battle hasn't gone the way we wish it would have, and that's a fact." Degrall sounded relieved—and surprised—that Jevil wasn't hitting the armored ceiling in fourteen different places. "Maybe somebody with a fresh slant on things can stop the Imperials, or at least get a peace we can live with out of them."
"I suppose it's possible, but I wouldn't bet on it." Under the desk, out of the commander's sight, Jevil's hand hesitated between two buttons. The first one, the closer one, would send the nearest guards rushing into the office. But the commander clearly had a mutiny in mind. If he hadn't suborned those guards, he wasn't worth the paper he was printed on. "Who do you have in mind to take over afterwards? You?" Keep the son of a bitch talking. Jevil's hand came down on the other button.
"The battle, possibly the entire war, is lost, General. We must surrender to the Empire. They'll go easy on the low-ranked soldiers." He was keeping Jevil talking, too, waiting til his men got here to back his play.
You stupid piece of shit. Only way to get me out of this chair is to murder me. Doljah let a little anger show, but only a little—the sort he might show if he was thinking of stepping down.
Degrall's eyes kept slipping toward the door and then jerking back to Jevil. The Rebel general wanted to look that way, too, but he didn't. He had more discipline in his pinkie than Degrall had in his entire worthless carcass.
"So who all figures the army'd be better off without me?" Jevil asked. "Nod must be on this, too, right? How about Rettop? He's a fellow with pretty fair judgment—always has been." He was also a fellow Doljah had suspected for years.
To his surprise, Degrall shook his head. "As a matter of fact, no. He thinks you're the best war leader we've got. I used to think so, too, but—"
He broke off. There was a commotion outside, shouts and screams and then a couple of blaster shots and more screams and shouts.
An instant later, the door flew open with a crash. Four soldiers in camouflage uniforms burst into the General's office. Jevil and Degrall pointed at each other. "Arrest that man!" they both yelled.
Four blaster muzzles bore on the commander. So did the .44 Jevil Doljah plucked from a desk drawer. "Hold it right there, traitor!" one of the soldiers roared.
"Freedom!" the other three shouted. Degrall's face turned gray as tobacco smoke. Jevil Doljah watched with almost clinical interest. He'd never seen a man go that color before—not a live man, anyhow.
"How—?" Degrall gasped. That used up all the breath he had in him. He might have been a hooked crappie, drowning in air he couldn't breathe.
"What? You reckon I've only got one set of guards round this place?" Jevil said. "You might be dumb enough to do something like that, but I sure ain't." He turned to the men who'd rescued him. "Make sure everything's secure down here. You find anybody you don't figure you can rely on, grab the son of a bitch. We'll sort out who's what later on. In the meantime, we squeeze answers out of this asshole. He'll sing. He'll sing like a fucking bird."
"You bet, boss." One of the Rebel Alliance soldiers—a troop leader— grinned a sharp-toothed grin. "Once we get going, we can make a rock sing."
Doljah laughed. "He won't be a rock," he predicted. Part of him wanted to laugh at what an amateurish excuse for a mutiny Degrall tried to bring off. Talking him into stepping down of his own accord! If that wasn't the dumbest thing in the world, Jevil didn't know what would be. "Your granddad'd be ashamed of you," he told Degrall.
"Great-grandfather. And no, he wouldn't—he didn't like humans any better than I do," the suddenly former Rebel commander replied. He could talk a good game, but some games weren't about talk, and he'd never figured that out.
"Take him away," Jevil said. He didn't want to argue with Degrall, and he didn't have to, either. But the other man hadn't the least idea what he meant. If his great grandfather planned a coup, he would have done it right. This smudgy carbon copy—hardly a Degrall at all in looks, except for the eyes—didn't know the first thing about how to manage one.
Away he went, perhaps too numb to realize yet what kind of hell he was heading for. Well, he'd find out pretty damn quick. The only thing that excused a plot was winning. Failure brought its own punishment.
Jevil went out into the antechamber. Lulu sat at her desk as calmly as if two Rebel men didn't lie dead not ten feet away. "I knew you'd take care of that foolishness, General," she said. "Shall we call somebody to get rid of this carrion?"
"Mm—not quite yet," Doljah answered. "Let me bring in some more men I'm sure I can count on." The worst thing about having somebody mount a mutiny was being unable to trust the people around you afterwards.
But if he couldn't count on his own troopers, he couldn't count on anybody—and if he couldn't count on anybody, Degrall's strike would have worked like a charm. Jevil went back to the holo-projector on his desk. Had Degrall had the brains to suborn the operator and keep the general from getting hold of loyal troops? That might make things dicey, even now.
But no. Within a minute, Dojah was talking with a regimental commander named Wilcy Hoyt, who promised to secure the Rebel Headquarters grounds with his troops. "Freedom!" Hoyt said fervently as he rang off.
Would the men who backed Degrall fight? Would they try to take Jevil out, reckoning it was their best chance? In their shoes, Dojah would have done that. He still had his .44. But the pistol was there to protect him against a visitor who turned out to be an assassin. It wouldn't help much against a squad of soldiers determined to do him in.
As soon as he got off the hologram call with Hoyt, he went out and grabbed a blaster rifle from one of the dead guards. Even that wouldn't do him as much good as he wished, but it was better than the pistol. If he had to go down, he aimed to go down fighting.
"Will there be more shooting, General?" Lulu asked.
"Well, I don't know for sure, but there may be," Jevil answered.
"Hand me that other blaster, then," his secretary said.
Dojah stared at her as if she'd suddenly started speaking Shyriiwook. "You know how to use it?"
"Would I ask if I didn't?" she said.
He gave her the rifle. She could handle it, all right. And two blaster rifle's blasting anybody who tried to break in were bound to be better than one. "Where the hell did you learn something like this?" Jevil inquired.
"A women's self-defense course," Lulu answered primly. "I thought I'd be shooting at Imperials, though, not traitors."
"Blaster rifle works the same either way," Jevil said, and she nodded. He supposed she'd feared assaults on her virtue. His own view was that any Stormtrooper who tried to take it would have to be desperately horny and plenty nearsighted, too. He would never have said anything like that, though. He liked Lulu, and wouldn't hurt her for the world—which he wouldn't have said about most people he knew.
But the people who showed themselves at the doorway to the outer office were Rebel fanatics. Jevil had the first few come in without their weapons and with their hands up. They obeyed. The obvious joy they showed at seeing him alive and in charge of things left him with no doubt that they were on his side.
When they'd set up a perimeter outside the office, he began to feel more nearly certain things were going his way. "Get me another outside line," he told Lulu. She nodded. Jevil snorted in soft contempt. No, Degrall hadn't known thing one about running a mutiny. Well, too goddamn bad for him. Jevil got down to business: "Put me through to Sabine Wren."
"Yes, General," Lulu said, and she did.
"Wren? This here's General Dojah " he rasped. "Can you record me over the holonet? We've had us a little commotion here, but we got it licked now."
"Hold on for about a minute and a half, sir," the Mandalorian girl replied. "I need to set up the apparatus, and then you can say whatever you need to." She took a bit longer than she'd promised, but not much. "Go ahead, General."
"Thank you kindly." Jevil paused to gather his thoughts. He didn't need long, either. "I'm Jevil Dojah, and I'm here to tell you the truth. Truth is that a few damn fools reckoned they could do a better job of running our Core Worlds offensive than me. Other truth is that the traitors were wrong, and they'll pay. Oh, boy, will they ever…"