Incoming transmission…
This is Jevia Cross for the only news you need: Radio Liberty!
Rebel forces throughout the Outer Rim have intensified their crusade against major weapons manufacturers supplying Imperial forces throughout the galaxy. Numerous factories have already been eliminated by preemptive strikes with thousands of factory workers arrested. While Rebel Intelligence has been unwilling to provide details of future plans, they assure us that the time for the galaxy's largest factory to fall is fast approaching.
We will continue in a moment after these messages.
—
Penn's sun shone on the snowy, soot-streaked disaster that had been Kroywen.
The last Imperial pocket on the North Side had surrendered, or was supposed to have surrendered, an hour earlier. Ezra Bridger hadn't made it this far by being trusting. He had a round of HE in the tank's cannon. If any of the men going into captivity felt like getting cute, he would do his damnedest to make sure they couldn't.
Sabine stood up in the cupola. She had a much broader view of the devastation than Ezra did. She said something in Mando'a. "What was that, my love?" Ezra asked.
His fiance laughed self-consciously.
"Mando'a, Ezra. From Tacitus, the Mandalorian historian. 'They make a desert and they call it peace.' "
"Oh." Ezra weighed that. He approved of the sentiment, taken all in all. But he was not the sort of man to resist discordant details: "It's sure as hell a desert out there, Sabine, but we don't have peace."
"Not everywhere," Sabine agreed. "But nobody's shooting at anybody in Kroywen anymore."
After another moment of judicious consideration, Ezra nodded. "Well, no, 'Bine. Nobody's shooting right here." And if anybody in an Imperial army uniform tried shooting right here, Ezra would shoot at them right back.
"Here they come!" Sabine squeaked in excitement.
Ezra peered through the gunsight, his reticulated window on the world while he was in the tank.
The Imperials were a sorry-looking lot. Out they came, a long, draggling column of them, from the last few square blocks of Kroywen they'd held. Their breath smoked in the chilly air. None of them was smoking a cigarette, though. The Mandalorians guarding them had no doubt already relieved them of their tobacco. Lucky bastards, Ezra thought without rancor.
The Imperials were skinny and dirty and hairy. They'd been living mostly on hope the past few weeks. Ezra had heard of raids with the sole aim of stealing Mandalorian rations. If that wasn't desperation, he didn't know what was. When you were empty, any food looked good.
The Empire had stopped sending stormtroopers to the planet seven months ago. All new Imperial troops in Kroywen lacked the armor, training, and rations of the stormtroopers. A lot of the Imperials looked miserably cold. Their issue greatcoats were thin. Others wore a variety of captured civilian coats on top of or instead of their greatcoats. They didn't have good winter boots, either. Those needed to be oversized, to allow for extra padding. They needed to be, but the Imperial's weren't.
"There they are," Sabine said. "Sheev Palpatine's supermen. They don't look so tough, do they?"
"Sabine, if they aren't tough, what have we been doing here for a year?" Ezra asked. Sabine didn't answer.
A Holonews crew cranked away, filming the enemy soldiers' trudge into captivity. Maybe the Imperials would look like beaten men on the Bijou screen in St. Paul.
Well, they were beaten men—now. Ezra knew the way propagandists' minds worked, the holonews would make the Imperials out to be weaklings and cowards. If they were, though, how had they fought their way into Penn in the first place? The holonews wouldn't talk about that. And most people, unless Ezra was wildly wrong, would never think to ask.
"I wonder where we'll go from here," Sabine said.
"Wherever it is, I don't think it'll be as tough as this," Ezra answered.
It had better not be, or there's no way I'll live through it.
How many Imperials were holed up in that pocket? More than he'd figured. Some of them helped wounded men along. Others carried stretchers. How many unburied dead lay in the pocket?
"Those damned foot soldiers will plunder the bodies. We won't get a crack at 'em, and we'll have to pay through the nose for good tobacco and whatever else they've got."
"Won't be much of that stuff left," Sabine said. "They weren't quite eating their boots when they gave up, but they weren't far from it, either."
Ezra grunted, more in annoyance than anything else. His fiance saw something he'd missed. It was supposed to be the other way around. Most of the time, it was—most of the time, but not always. "Well, Sabine, you're right," Ezra said.
"You're a strange man, Ezra," Sabine said.
"Me, my love? How come?" Ezra thought himself normal enough, or as normal as anyone could be after all the hardships he had been through.
"Well, for starters, you just say, 'Well, you're right,' " Sabine answered. "Most people would want to argue and fuss."
"What's the point?" Ezra said, genuinely puzzled.
"You are right. I said something silly, and you called me on it. You should have. If I tried to tell you it wasn't silly, I'd just make a bigger fool of myself."
Clinging to a position that was bound to fall seemed as senseless to him as Sheev Palpatine's failure to pull his troops out of Kroywen while he still had the chance. Being stubborn just cost you more in the long run.
At last, the stream of Imperials slowed up. There were bound to be stragglers heading west and south, hoping to link up with other units in gray or simply to get away. But for them, though, Kroywen was clear of Imperials. And if half of what people said on the wireless was true, Imperial control in Oiho was crumbling, too.
"He's not going to win, not anymore," Ezra said, thinking aloud.
"I'm sorry, Ezra," Sabine said. "What was that?"
"Sheev Palpatine," Ezra answered. "He's not going to win the war. I don't see how he can now. Only question left is, can he still get a draw?"
"Nice to know you've got it all worked out," Sabine said dryly. "Takes a lot of the strain off Sundari."
Ezra laughed. "Good shot, Sabine. But I still think it's true."
"Well, I hope you're right," his fiance said. "With this damn war, though, you never can tell. They've done some awfully surprising things. And so have we, now. The move that pinched off Kroywen was as pretty as you'd ever want to see."
"Gen Morr knows what's what," Ezra said.
Sabine started to rise to that, then caught herself. "No, wait. You were his personal gunner for a while. How did that stop?"
"He got wounded, Sabine," Ezra answered, remembering Morr's weight on his back when he carried the armor commander general to cover after an Imperial sniper hit him. "They didn't think I deserved that long a vacation."
"And so now you're stuck with me," Sabine said, her voice still dry.
"You've got a pretty good idea of what you're doing, Sabine."
His fiance snorted. Ezra went on, "I hope we get a vacation after this. We're way, way overdue for rest and refit."
"I know," Sabine said. "I haven't got any more say over that than you do, though. We'll go where they tell us to go and we'll do what they tell us to do."
"Anybody would think we were warriors or something," Ezra said.
"Wonder why that is." Sabine grew intense. "Here come their big shots."
Ezra peered through the gunsight. A few days earlier, he would have loved to put a couple of rounds of HE—or, better yet, shrapnel—on that group of eight or ten Imperial officers. All the men had red and blue squares on their rank insignia plaques.
All but two or three had four red and four blue squares, which meant they were generals, not colonels. They all looked to be in their late thirties or early forties, younger than most Rebel officers of similar grade.
And they all looked as if they'd just watched a bulldozer run over their Loth-kitten. "They really didn't think this could happen to them," Ezra said. "They've been whipping us for a year and a half. They figured it would go on forever."
"Too damn bad," Sabine said.
One of the Mandalorians guarding the high-ranking Imperial officers carried a blaster-rifle, another a captured Imp blaster-cannon. Ezra wondered whether the colonels and generals in gray appreciated the compliment. He was inclined to doubt it.
"They get off easy," Sabine said. "They stay in a camp away from the fighting for the rest of the war, and the Mandalorian government pays their salary. The rest of us still have to go on out here."
Some of the Imp officers looked as if they would rather be dead. If they were smart, though, they wouldn't say anything about that to the men in armor who herded them along. The Mandalorians might oblige them.
"If we get a refit, where do you suppose we'll go next?" Ezra asked.
Sabine ducked down into the turret, her wry grin hidden by her helmet. "I said that before, Ezra. I thought you'd have a better idea than I did."
"Not me, not now." Ezra shook his head. "Gen Morr would tell me what was up sometimes. Far as everybody else is concerned, I'm just a damn noncom." He spoke without heat.
"Can't imagine why that would be," Sabine said, and Ezra chuckled. His fiance went on, "Well, all I can tell you is, we'll go wherever they need us most once we get our refit—if we get our refit."
"Sounds about right." Ezra pictured a map. He pictured what was likely to happen over the next few weeks. "Ainigriv or Oiho," he said.
"Whichever heats up fastest, I guess."
"I wouldn't bet against either one of them," Ezra said. "I hope it's Oiho, to tell you the truth."
"Me, too—we have a better chance of hurting them bad there, I think," Sabine said. "But wherever it is, by the Force, we'll get the job done."