Hello and welcome to the final broadcast of Radio Liberty, I regret to inform our listeners that Jevia Cross was killed in an Imperial airstrike, carried out in retaliation for the joint Mandalorian/Republic invasion of Ilartsua.
Over 160,000 troops have stormed into Ilartsua. Leading the charge for the New Republic is Jedi Knight, Luke Skywalker. Skywalker and his forces have launched an assault on the planetary capital, sweeping around the enemy, and capturing the city in just 72 hours.
Not all is well, though. I can hear dozens of TIE bombers above me as I speak.
This is Radio Liberty, signing off for good.
—
Kiara Semphroch huddled behind the counter in the ruins of her caffhouse, wondering if she would die in the next instant. She'd been wondering that for hours, ever since the first Republic shells began falling on Notinihsaw.
Beside her, her daughter Edna wailed, "When will it stop, Mother? Will it ever stop?"
"Spirits help me, I don't know," the widow Semphroch answered. She had twice her daughter's twenty years; on her, bitter experience seamed the long, oval face they otherwise shared. "I just don't know. It wasn't like this when—"
A shell crashed down nearby. The ground quivered and jerked, as if in pain. Fragments sprayed through the blank square that had been the front window before it shattered early in the bombardment. Edna brushed dark blond curls—a brighter shade than Kiara's, which were streaked with gray —out of her eyes and repeated, despairingly, "Will it ever stop?"
"It wasn't like this when the Seperatists shelled us before," Kiara said, at last able to get in another complete sentence. "When I was a girl, they bombarded Notinihsaw, yes, but after an hour or so they were done. I was scared then, but only for a little while. That's why we didn't leave when—"
Now, instead of a shell, Edna interrupted her: "We should have, Mama. We should have gotten out while we could, along with everybody else."
"Not everybody left." Kiara said, her daughter's bitterness making her defensive. A great host of people had, though, as crisis in some distant part of the Galaxy became by the magic of far-flung alliances crisis in the Mid Rim, too.
While Notinihsaw remained the planet's capital, the Governor hadn't lived there since the Clone Wars: going about their business under Separatist guns had seemed intolerable. Before war was declared, an endless procession of vehicles jammed the roads leading north out of the capital, and every ship bringing in soldiers had been full of civilians on its outbound journey.
But Kiara and Edna had sat tight, selling caff to panicky bureaucrats and swaggering soldiers alike. They'd made a lot of money, and Kiara had been certain that, even if war broke out, the Rebels would not seek to destroy what had once been their capital, too. She'd been wrong. How wrong she'd been! They seemed intent on leaving no stone in the capital of Setats standing upon another. Once, just before sunrise, Kiara had gone to a well to draw a bucket of water—shelling had burst the pipes that carried water through the city. The Capitol's dome was smashed, the building itself burning. Not far away, the Governor's mansion had also become a pile of rubble, and the needle of the Valorum Monument no longer reached up to the sky.
More guns boomed, these not the Republic cannon across the river but Imperial guns replying from the high ground north of Notinihsaw. Shells made freight-train noises overhead, then thudded to the ground with roars like distant thunder.
"Kill all those Rebel bastards!" Edna shouted. "Blow their balls off, every fucking one of them!"
Kiara stared at her daughter. "Where ever did you learn such language?" she gasped. Absurdly, at that moment, her first impulse was to wash Edna's mouth out with soap. After a moment's reflection, though, she wished she let the words out more readily herself. She knew them—oh, she knew them. And when hell came up here on earth, what did a few bad words matter?
"I'm sorry, Mama," Edna said, but then her chin came up. "No, I'm not sorry, not a bit of it. I wish I knew worse to call the Republic. If I did, I would, and that's the truth."
"What you just said is pretty bad." Kiara had not led a sheltered life—far from it—but she'd seldom heard a lady curse as her daughter just had. Then again, she'd never been in a situation where tons of death fell randomly from the sky. As the judge said of the man who knifed a poker partner because he spotted an ace coming out of his sleeve, there were mitigating circumstances.
More space ship noises filled the air, these from the east and south: Rebel artillery, striking back at Imperial guns. Because the Republic was trying to hit the cannons, shells stopped falling on Notinihsaw itself and began smashing the hills that ringed the city.
Edna stood up. "Maybe we can get out of town now, Mama," she said hopefully.
"Maybe." Kiara rose, too. The air was thick with smoke and dust and a harsh odor she supposed came from explosives. Half the chairs and tables in the caffhouse lay on their sides or upside down. The fine linen tablecloths that gave the establishment a touch of class—and that Kiara was still paying for—were rags now, torn rags.
A shell fragment had ripped into the fancy brass caff grinder that gleamed out in front of the counter. Kiara wouldn't be grinding caff with it again, not any time soon. She shivered and had to grasp the counter for a moment. If a fragment had done that to sturdy, machined brass, what would it have done to flesh? A few feet to one side and she would have found out.
She walked toward what had been her front window and was now a square opening with a few jagged shards round the edges. Out in the street —which had suddenly acquired deep pocks, like the face of a man who'd never been vaccinated—a shattered delivery wagon sat on its side, the horses (yes, horses exist in Star Wars) that had drawn it gruesomely dead in the traces. Kiara gulped. She'd killed and plucked and gutted plenty of chickens, and even a few pigs, but artillery was a horrifyingly sloppy butcher. She hadn't imagined horses had that much blood in them, either. A scrawny stray dog came up and sniffed the pool. She shouted at it. It ran away. Behind the wagon, she could just see an outflung arm. No, the driver hadn't been luckier than his animals.
"Can we get out of town, do you think, Ma?" Edna repeated.
Kiara raised her eyes from the street to the high ground. For a moment, she did not understand what she was seeing, and thought a dust storm had suddenly been transplanted to those low, rolling hills. Dust there was aplenty, but no wind to raise it. Instead, it came from the carpet of shells the Republic was laying down. When she looked more closely, she spied the ugly red core of fire in each explosion. She wondered how anything could live under such bombardment, and if anything did.
Her question there was answered a moment later, for not all the flames came from landing shells. Some sprang from the muzzles of Imperial guns hurling death back at the enemy. To her amazement, she discovered she could briefly follow some of the big Imperial shells as they rose into the sky.
She turned her head toward the river. Smoke and buildings obscured most of her view there but, from what she could tell, the heights were taking as much of a pounding as those around Notinihsaw. Good, she thought savagely.
From behind her, Edna said, "Let's go, Ma."
Kiara waved her daughter up alongside her and pointed to the bombardment raining down outside of town.
"I don't think we'd better," she said. "Looking at that, we're safer where we're at." Edna bit her lip but nodded.
Across the street, something moved inside a battered cobbler's shop. Kiara's heart jumped into her mouth until she recognized old Mr. Jacobs, who ran the place. He waved to her, calling, "You are still alive, Widow Semphroch?"
"I think so, yes," Kiara answered, which brought a twisted smile to the cobbler's wizened face.
Before she could say anything more, the sound of many booted men running made her turn her head. A stream of gray-clad Imperial soldiers in matching forage caps pounded past the wrecked delivery van and dead horses.
"You civilians better get back under cover," one of them shouted. "The damn Rebs—beg your pardon, ma'am—they're liable to try coming across the river. They do, we're gonna give 'em what for. Ain't that right, boys?"
The soldiers made harsh, eager grunts unlike any Kiara had heard before. Not all of them were fuzz-bearded boys; some had to be close to thirty. Mobilization had scooped up a lot of men who'd done their two years a long time ago, and put them back in the Army.
A couple of the soldiers were trundling a machine gun along on its little wheeled carriage. When they came to shell holes in the street, they either maneuvered it around them or manhandled it over.
One of the blaster-cannon handlers stared at Edna and ran his tongue over his lips as if he were a cat that had just finished a saucer of cream. Kiara glanced over to her daughter, who was filthy, bedraggled, exhausted...but young, unmistakably young.
Men, Nellie thought, a one-word indictment of half the human race. Not long ago, or so it seemed, they'd looked at her that way, and she'd looked back. She'd done more than look back, in fact. That was the start of how Edna came to be, and why her name had changed from Houlihan to Semphroch in such a tearing hurry
She heard a fresh noise in the air, a sharp, quick whizz! A couple of soldiers looked up to see what that was. A couple of others, wiser or more experienced, threw themselves flat on the ground.
Only a couple of seconds after the whizz! first reached her ears, it was followed by a huge bang! at the head of the column. Men reeled away from the explosion, shrieking. There were more whizzes in the air now, too. The Republic had spotted the moving infantrymen, and decided to open up on them.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Shells struck up and down the length of the battalion. Kiara didn't see all the slaughter they worked. "Get down!" she screamed to Edna, even before the second whizzing shell fell and burst. To make sure Edna listened and didn't stare back at the machine gunner bold in his uniform, she dragged her daughter to the floor.
More fragments whined past overhead. The shells that went whizz-bang weren't very big; the front wall of the caffhouse stopped most of their fragments, though plenty screamed through what had been the window and scarred the plaster above the counter.
The barrage stopped as suddenly as it had begun. That didn't mean the street was silent; far from it. Cries and screams and moans and wails and sounds of pain for which Kiara had no descriptive words filled the air. She got to her feet and looked out. The street had been a sorry sight before. The slaughter now was worse than anything she'd ever imagined.
Men and pieces of men lay everywhere. The ones who were dead were less appalling than the ones who were wounded. A trooper tried to stuff spilled intestines back into his belly through a neat slit torn in his tunic. Another sat staring foolishly at his right arm, which he'd picked up off the pavement and was holding in his left hand. Quietly, without much fuss, he crumpled over and lay still.
"We have to help them, Ma," Edna said. "We have plenty of rags and things—"
Kiara hadn't noticed her daughter get up beside her. She nodded, though she knew what would happen if more shells caught them out in the open.
Stretcher bearers were taking charge of some of the wounded. They nodded gratefully, though, when they saw Kiara and Edna come out with old clothes in their hands.
The second man Kiara bandaged was the machine gunner who'd leered at Edna. Now his face was waxy pale instead of ruddy and alight with lust. Kiara had to force his hands—protectively cupped too late—away from the wound at the base of his belly before she could try to stanch the bleeding. If he lived, he wouldn't be doing much with the girls, not any more.
Off to the west, blaster fire rang out. You lived in the city, you heard guns every so often; you got to know what they sounded like. But, a moment later, Kiara heard a sound she'd never known before. It was something like blasterfire, something like a giant ripping a piece of canvas the size of a football field. It made the hair stand up at the back of her neck.
Mangled and in agony though he was, the machine gunner smiled a little. He knew what the sound was, though Kiara didn't. Seeing his knowledge made her understand, too.
"So that's the noise a blaster cannon makes," Kiara murmured. The pale-faced soldier nodded, a single short jerk of his head. "Good," Kiara told him. "That means the Rebs are catching it hot."
He nodded again.