One Final Effort

A squadron of five stormtroopers, moving at a brisk, uniform jog, made their way down the corridor to the Death Star's bridge.

Two troopers were guarding the door, one holding up their hand as the squadron approached. "Halt. What is your purpose here?"

There was an awkward pause, then a response came from the leading trooper. "Intel for the Grand Moff. Is he in here?"

"Intel?" The guard tilted his head. "Why didn't you report by comm?"

"We couldn't, we…" another pause. The leader's voice was oddly mechanical, though not in the same way a droid's usually was. "We suspect the enemy is monitoring our comms. That's part of what we needed to report."

"Is there something wrong with your mic, trooper?" The guard stepped closer.

There was a subtle mumbling coming from the leader's helmet before he started to speak. "…It's just a bit frazzled. Is the Grand Moff inside?"

"Yes, he is. Are you…" The guard leaned closer. "Is your voice coming from behind your head?"

The lead trooper sighed. In English, he said, "Well, that was a boring conversation anyway—Now."

Buck pulled his silenced pistol from his holster, planted it into the guard's neck, and shot him. Behind him, Mickey pulled away the comm pad that had been running Cortana's translation program and readied his own blaster, but the Rookie had already put two rounds in the other guard's head.

"That was terrible," Romeo said, covering their six.

"You ever tried to bluff when you don't speak the language?" Buck snapped. "Shut up and move!"

They didn't have the time or the equipment for a proper breach-and-clear. Dutch slammed the control panel with one fist and the door opened, and Alpha-Nine stormed in.

The room contained four more stormtroopers, a number of officers in black uniforms, two people at computers in really stupid hats, and one old man in the centre of it all, staring at a big window in one wall. He wasn't staring for long. Buck started shooting the officers with his pistol, trusting the stormtroopers to those that had blaster rifles out. The room got loud, fast, everyone inside jolting into panic and falling quickly. The old man tried to draw a sleek blaster pistol from his hip, but the Rookie was already rushing in, smacking the weapon out of his hands and pinning the arm behind his back, forcing him to a kneel.

"Clear!" Mickey called when everyone else was dead, slamming the interior panel to close the door.

"Thank god. These helmets—" Romeo dropped his gun and started struggling to get the bucket off.

Buck did the same, glaring at the old man when his eyes were exposed. He whistled, and Mickey brought the translator over. "Grand Moff Tarkin, I presume?"

Tarkin was a tall, skinny man with cheekbones that could cut open a frigate and a stare that could kill anyone inside.

"Rebel scum," he hissed, which was a weird choice of insult. "How did you—"

"Not the conversation we're having right now." Buck pointed his pistol at Tarkin's head. "Call off the attack."

Tarkin's eyes narrowed. "No."

"Alright dracula, lemme be clear." Buck pressed the barrel of his gun into Tarkin's temple. "I just survived one home burning around me as beams from the sky turned it into glass, and I am not doing that again. So you are going to turn off your big gun and call for your station's surrender right now, or I swear I'll blow your goddamn brains out."

Sweat ran down Tarkin's forehead. "The Empire does not concede to threats from—"

"Rookie?" Buck prompted.

Still holding Tarkin down, the Rookie lowered his pistol and shot him in the back of the knee.

"GAAH, DAMN YOU!" Tarkin thrashed, but the Rookie kept him pinned. "They will not stand for this! All of you will burn!"

Buck grabbed his hair and pulled his head up. "Call off the attack!"

"Just kill me!" Tarkin snapped, with more backbone than Buck had expected. "Do you have any idea what the Emperor will do to me if he learns I've failed? What he'll do to you once he learns of this? We're both better off dead!"

Oh. Not backbone, then. Buck had known civilians during Covenant invasions that had provoked soldiers into shooting them, once the last civilian evac transports had gone. He'd known soldiers that had made it an offer.

Tarkin, unfortunately, didn't get that sort of mercy.

Buck whipped his pistol across Tarkin's temple, knocking him out cold, and turned around. Swore, running a hand through his hair. Half of the room's great window was filled with the sun, glowing red-gold and gently arcing. Buck was sure he could see the edge of Earth peeking out from around it, even though that was ridiculous.

"Boss…"

"Not now, Romeo." Buck grimaced. "Mickey, anything from Cortana or Keyes?"

Mickey had a finger held out, his ear to the pad. After a second, he said, "Yes, ma'am," and lowered it, looking up. "Good news. The Chief's gonna deal with it. Everyone's to exfil the station pronto."

Well, that simplifies things. "Can we get back to the ship in time?"

"If we hoof it, and don't wait in line for the elevators," Romeo said.

"Alright. Helmets back on. Dutch, put a sheet over His Entitledness." Buck glared at Tarkin's unconscious form. "We're taking him with us."

Over the course of the battle, the Death Star had launched almost every single fighter craft in its complement to attack the UNSC fleet. The only ships left were a few transport and freighter shuttles, most of which had been stolen by escaping crew.

…But there were also three combat craft that hadn't launched. Vader's personal TIE Advanced, and his two TIE fighter escorts.

"Time to prove how quick a study you are, Chief," Cortana said, as he dropped through the hatch into the black fighter. "I've retrofitted proton torpedos to the TIE and remapped the controls. Sending details to your HUD."

"HUD's damaged," John warned, clipping himself in and trying to ignore the glitching and static atop Cortana's waypoints. "I'll be relying on audio guidance."

"Joysticks make the vroom vroom, triggers go kapow."

John rolled his eyes. "Thank you."

He flicked the buttons and switches she verbally directed him to, the TIE thrumming to life around him. Once she was sure he knew the basics, she disconnected the crane holding it in place, and he tilted the sticks forward.

He clipped the hangar doors on the way out, but other than that, stayed in control. He was flying out into the trench with three minutes until the Earth would be in view.

"We're on your five and seven, Chief." Linda's voice came through the radio. "Most of the remaining fighters are peeling off the In Amber Clad to come after us. I think someone's worked out what we're up to."

"Anti-air?" John asked, piling on the speed.

"There was," Cortana said. Her statement was punctuated by a flash of light ahead, and then an explosion miles down the trench. "I've tasked surviving MACs in the fleet to target anything in our way. Might make it a bumpy flight, though!"

"We'll make it."

"Don't get cocky, Chief—incoming!"

Flashes of green streaked past. Behind him, Linda and Fred hung back to return fire against the attackers. John jerked on the controls, throwing his TIE into erratic evasive manoeuvres to keep them off him. This ship was the nippiest, most hair-trigger thing he'd ever driven, and he was a Spartan—Vader must have been one hell of a pilot.

He dove into the cloud of rubble from the MAC rounds, squinting his eyes and swerving past still falling debris. It turned the trench into a no-man's land, which was appropriate given all the shots firing over John's head. Some of the blasts hit his ship, shuddering it, but this TIE at least had shields—for now.

"Pressure's hot, Chief!" Linda warned. "My wing's clipped—too many TIEs, we can't cut them all down!"

Another voice crackled into the comm.

"If it's too hot, how about we give you some shade?"

The glare shining down through John's window darkened.

A shadow stretched across the trench ahead of him as the In Amber Clad roared above, its hull blocking the sun that made up most of the Death Star's 'sky'. The ship was scorched, burning, and missing whole chunks of itself, but it could fly.

"Covering your run, Chief!" Miranda said. "You got ninety seconds to hit that target before I abort to ram the firing dish."

"Yes, ma'am." John focused forwards. The frigate was actually flying 'upside down', he noticed, to allow more of its anti-air batteries to fire at his pursuers. Machine gun fire flashed down and tore up the surface just barely behind him as he flew.

"Approaching the strike zone, Chief!" Cortana said. "You're after an opening two metres wide. Putting a targeting solution up now."

"My HUD—"

"I know, it's a hardware problem, I can't fix it here. Trying to compensate."

A countdown appeared on the top of his visor, along with a visualiser of the distance and the approach. At least, it tried to. The images jittered all over each other, lagging and overlapping. He could just about make sense of it all, but doing so was a nightmare, and it pulled his attention away from the trench.

It was a distraction.

"Cut my HUD," he ordered.

"Chief?"

"I'll eyeball it. Count me down."

It was a testament to Cortana's trust that she didn't share any more doubts. The HUD flicked off—even his ammo count and shield indicator—and he was left with nothing but the trench ahead of him.

"Ten," Cortana said in his ear, calm and even, "Nine, eight—"

John closed his eyes and took a deep breath.

"—seven, six, five—"

His eyes snapped back open, fixing on the trench ahead. A wall was approaching at a rapid pace, one he'd crash into if he overflew by a tenth of a second.

"—four, three—"

His fingers tightened on the controls—

"—two, one—"

See, pull, jerk, and he was gone, arcing up towards the sun, a flash of pink the only indication he'd even pulled the trigger. The lack of an explosion, however—

"Shot on target!" Cortana confirmed. "All forces, get away from the space station! Everyone, whatever your affiliation: the Death Star is about to explode! Evacuate now!"

The In Amber Clad dragged itself up out of the station's gravity, and John flew out with it, swinging around its hull and blasting a belligerent TIE for good measure. Ships were fleeing the Death Star like bees escaping a hive, trying to put as much distance as possible between it and them as Cortana rattled off the expected detonation time if the shot had landed at all. As John squinted, he could just about see the curve of Earth peeking out from behind the sun's fires—

And there was a BOOM, a great almighty blast that John was sure he could hear even through the vacuum of space, and a flash from behind that briefly outshone their star, and then a ring of fire and superheated metal expanding outwards faster than they could fly and tearing ahead, dissipating into the emptiness.

Everyone's guns, blaster and kinetic, stopped firing almost at once. It was obvious that the battle was over. A scattering of fighters couldn't take on a planet.

John sat back, breathing out. "Blue team, call in?"

"Here, Chief," said Fred.

"We're intact," Linda.

Which was as all John needed to know. He released the joysticks, and reached up to his helmet, taking it off.

"I'm fielding dozens of individual surrenders," Cortana said. "It looks like it's over."

"Maybe," John said, staring out at Earth. "But we know that there are more of them."

And with that, the battle is over.

A short chapter, to end it, but I wrote it as one big homogenised mass and then had to cut it up, so hey ho. At the end of the day, I just couldn't help myself, I had to make Chief do the trench run. As some people have pointed out, the laser may have been unfirable due to all the damage they dealt to the dish. The technicians might not have tried to shoot it without Tarkin to give the order. But none of our protagonists wanted to take that risk.

Epilogue: Friday