I had doubts about Commander Zora. She was young and impulsive, only sixteen when her Jedi master died. But we had been through so much. That was why I accepted her command when her master fell while leading the charge on Myga Bridge. What happened to her was too much. What happened to her changed how I felt about training Jedi to fight from childhood.
He had led from the front many times before—how different could this be? It was practically the norm. Jedi did so because they could, with their lightsabers out, the Force protecting them. Guided by it, they could be strong leaders. They pumped morale through our battalion. They inspired us to get up and charge the droids head-on, against all the odds.
That was the problem. We were used to droids. The droids weren't the best shots. They weren't strong tactical thinkers. They didn't position themselves behind cover. They weren't particularly mobile or energetic. Though the Droid Army was devastating in its element, we knew its pressure points. On a bridge like this, connecting over a frozen river, with all the right conditions—artillery, jetpack troopers, heavy gun support, and droid poppers—for the 908th, this should have been no problem.
The enemy had several machine guns set up behind concrete barriers, gabions, and sandbags at the end of the bridge. They were also reinforced by armor. They held every advantage.
But there was no other way into the city. The UNSC had destroyed all the other bridges to Myga once we had broken through the Separatist air corridor. Even though we enjoyed air superiority, it was only for one day. We placed our troops in the regions least populated by battle droids and Marines—the outskirts of the city. Then, the enemy reactivated their radar and SAMs. They couldn't shoot down Acclamators, but our fighters and bombers were forced to stick to low-altitude, sea-skimming flights. Gunships were useless as troop transports and close air support.
So after the armored assault failed, we charged the front line on the bridge, with General Horace taking point, his bright green blade glowing hot in the frigid wind. I ran out, tightly gripping my blaster, and ran, skirting behind wrecked AT-TEs and armored speeders. Horace jumped one of the wrecks, flanked by two of his ARC troopers, and readied his blade to block incoming fire while they pushed.
Automatic slugs focused fire on him and his cluster, cutting them down in seconds. The lightsaber did nothing to stop bullets, only superheating them into molten lead with the same velocity into his body. I heard Zora's blood-curdling cries the moment it happened. She ran out, weapon ready, until I grabbed her shoulder and pulled her back. A wave of bullets crashed into the jagged durasteel in front of us, punching holes clean through—penetrating far more efficiently than blasters ever did.
The boys were better suited to taking gunfire, but not by much. The ARC troopers, famously unafraid of standing in the line of fire, were cut down quickly by the common Marine riflemen. The line held, and we faltered quickly. Machine gun fire cut down our ranks, breaking our momentum completely. Automatic compressed-air guns fired, raining forty-millimeter explosive shells down on us, which blew apart body parts and organs on near-direct hits, even if the shrapnel bounced off our armor plating.
Without the general, though, we lost our momentum. Squads halted, unable to continue to push through the fire. Men hunched over behind wrecks and debris, pinned down by automatic fire, decreasingly able to shoot back. Grenades exploded near them. One of the rocket launchers cooked off of a dead clone corpse, killing more around him. I gave the order and launched a red flare. "Fall back!" I yelled. We retreated.
The violence of bullets simply breaking the sound barrier—a distinct, loud crack—at high cycle rates made for very effective suppressive fire, confusing our teams until they learned to get used to it, to respond and listen for the direction of the weapon reports that followed. The cracks had a unique effect on the men, especially if they had lost their helmets. Some, despite their genetic resistance, were even kicked into tunnel vision when under accurate machine gun fire. Mechanized slughthrowers were simpler, but the galaxy often forgets their brutality was primal.
Zora wanted to go back, her weapon still hot. I held her arm. "We have to find another way to do this," I said. She looked at me, and then at her dead master, and nodded. We left his body on the highway.
I found her later on a crate, staring at the road, in the base we constructed along the outskirts. We had fortified a town square and the buildings surrounding it.
I didn't know what to say to her. I just stood next to her, my helmet at my side. We'd been through so much. I'd seen her mourn the troopers she befriended—sometimes suffering—but she would bounce back within the week. She felt she had been prepared for this kind of loss, this kind of failure. But I knew no one was. I stayed by her. I wasn't a Force user, but I could feel her absorbing our memories and how we saw her master. Respect. Glowing passion. Kindness—dearness that brought us to bear, to soften our edges, to remember to help people, not just scrap droids. She gave me comfort—the same comfort we gave her—without speaking a word.
Together, speechlessly, we remembered the games we used to play on General Horace. Practical jokes. She was still a kid, and I was not very mature. We'd send him on wild bantha chases—malfunctioning droids, something caught in a maintenance shaft, an argument in the mess deck—and string his gear up in different compartments of his Venator while he was distracted. He would come back annoyed, sometimes furious with the battalion, if we messed with his lightsaber; and then he would see the whimsical grin on her face, the way her olive skin curled into a smile of childish gid, and he would soften. He would tell me to get my men in order and straighten up, that a war was going on. I would say, "Sir, yes, sir," and do it all again the next week.
Our vigil was short.
We received messages from General Mundi. He was engaged on the northern flank covering the dam. They wouldn't advance until they could connect with Skywalker's infiltration unit and extract them.
At the next briefing, we restructured our assault. We couldn't soften the positions with artillery, which would risk destroying the bridge. Instead, we attempted an asymmetrical approach, mounting several units with jetpacks to cross the gap. Zora climbed the cables to get a height advantage, but she was spotted by snipers. She dodged fire and leaped down into the frigid water—nearly froze to death. I swooped down in my jetpack, lifting her, under continued fire.
The air assault failed. Armored vehicles with multi-barreled autocannons ripped our men apart in the air. With extreme precision and programming we had never seen before, the turrets could track the headings and speeds of our men no matter how fast or agile they were. Out of the air assault, I was the only survivor.
The third attempt was another armored push. We used armored speeders to break through the frontline. Scorpions intercepted us at the edge of the bridge. Now they had Scorpions pitched at the front behind the sandbags. I could see them using slat cages—thin metal grills that were exceedingly effective at prematurely detonating rockets, minimizing damage to the hull.
I could see in her eyes, the battle was hardening Zora. Nothing stuck. By the fourth week of the siege, I was stumped too. Things had quickly come to a stalemate.
After another two weeks, Zora became impatient. In the command center we set up in the townhouse—during a meeting over the dwindling supplies—she slammed her fists onto the holoprojector.
"At this rate," she growled, "they're sieging us. Not the other way around."
She was right: the UNSC had not completely retaken the air corridor over Myga—the Separatists, for some reason, segregated their operations—but it was contested. Reinforcements came with great struggle. The first Acclamator to land couldn't approach high altitude without entering railgun range from the enemy capital ships.
General Mundi replied on the comlink, "That front is yours to claim. Your responsibility."
I scowled at the remark. It wasn't appropriate. But you get a mixed bag with Jedi—while some were battle-hardened and had earned the respect of the clones, Zora and Horace among them, Mundi was a politician with a lightsaber. Out of all the Council members, he was the least flexible, yet the least likely to rock the boat. When we informed him that the invasion plan for Myga—drawn up in three days—was considerably sloppier than his corridor over the capital and Kenobi's own plans for Myga, and based on incomplete intelligence gathered by General Skywalker, who was still in the field, he simply said, "We shall trust the Force."
And when General Horace died, Zora's only mentor and friend, Mundi said, "Now is hardly the time to mourn."
It was my men who buried General Horace. It was my men who held the vigil. In lieu of the proper facilities for a Jedi rite and a belief in any kind of higher power among the clones, it was my men who asked a captured UNSC chaplain to hold a service.
It was my men who stood by her. To the end.
So when Mundi grilled her in the strategic conference over our front—our bridge—being the last base, and how the Republic was already stretched thinly over Mygeeto's surface and would be unable to rescue us from our predicament, I closed my hand in a fist and stifled what I wanted to say.
When the call ended, Zora looked at me. I saw a tear crawl down her cheek. I relaxed my fist and put my hand on her shoulder.
"It's going to be all right, kid," I said. I was starting to say that a lot.
"Captain," one of my lieutenants said, looking up from his sensors. "Enemy ships incoming. Two frigates are coming out of the storm—right on top of us."
I slipped my helmet on and grabbed my blaster. "Alert the assault ships! They're the first priority."
Zora and I ran to the courtyard as Sparrowhawks engaged in tight dogfights with Y-wings, which lifted off our staging area in the ice fields outside the outskirts.
I ordered the men to take cover in buildings, subways, and even under awnings to keep themselves out of view of enemy eyes. Zora ran to her starfighter, blasting off over the rooftops and chasing after the fighters.
One of the squad leaders on the rooftops yelled down. "Scorpions incoming! They're crossing the bridge!"
I yelled back, "How are they getting through the wrecks?"
"A dozer!" the trooper shouted.
I opened up a command channel on my comlink. "Assault incoming from the bridge. Get rockets on the rooftops now!"
I ran for the main road, gathering a squad of troopers. Men scrambled for their gear, throwing it on as they ran into formation. We still had a few reserve armored speeders, but we kept them around intersections and behind cover.
Buildings split open from bomb strikes. Rocket barrages tore apart facades, nearly tearing them down on top of us. We dodged debris as much as shrapnel and concussive blasts—as much as one possibly could.
Rocket gunners fired from a rooftop down onto the plow tank as it reached the end of the bridge. One of its quad-tracks blew out, but it continued pushing wrecks out of the way.
A Scorpion rolled up past the plow, opening fire on the building. High-explosive shells ripped apart the superstructure, warping and blowing it to bits. The men inside were killed instantly.
More rocket fire consumed the Scorpions. Some exploded—some pressed through. Armored personnel carriers pushed into the area as well. Dozens of Marines climbed out of the APCs, fanning out and opening fire at my squads. The air warped as lead sifted through plastoid and man. Blue laser bolts from my line returned fire, filling the air with the stench of carbon and blood. Remote-controlled heavy machine guns mounted on the APCs pinned the boys down behind cover, sometimes penetrating the concrete and durasteel barricades and killing them.
"This isn't working," I said, turning to one of my ARC troopers. "We have to turn this around, or they'll chew us up."
I contacted Zora on my comlink. "Zora, we need air support. Enemy tanks have broken through. It's going to be close; they're pressing the rear line."
"Copy!" Zora called. "Hang on tight—I see them."
Her starfighter whipped around out of a furball between Y-wings, Hornets, and Sparrowhawks, soaring down with two wingmen.
"Get down!" I called.
Heavy lasers blasted up the road, blasting through the APCs and Scorpions. Heavy machine gun fire stopped. High-explosive cannon fire halted. The Marines scattered, retreating up the bridge and taking refuge behind smoldering wrecks.
I ordered my men to pursue them and cut them off.
Cresting over the hump of the bridge, more APCs opened fire with their machine guns, stopping our advance at the mouth of the bridge again.
"No, the—" I heard Zora say on the comlink, shocked.
A squadron of Longswords passed one of the Acclamators from behind, launching anti-ship missiles. With damaged engines, the Acclamator descended to land, leaving it vulnerable. As the UNSC frigate closed in, lining up its magnetic accelerator cannon, Zora broke out of our airspace with her Y-wings and gunned for it.
The Y-wings deployed proton torpedoes along the bow of the frigate, tearing open its hull. One volley hit its engines, tearing the hull open like a spring blossom and causing it to veer off. Its cannon spooled down, losing power, and the ship spun out of control into the city across the bridge. My men cheered. Smoke and ash devoured the sky—sick and irradiated, leaving an imprint of deuterium fires impossible to extinguish; and we could smell it from here.
The other frigate retreated. Marines fled as well, some of them cut off by my men at the foot of the bridge, forcing them to surrender. The enemy air wing left the airspace, chased down by our fighters, until ours were cut down by anti-aircraft fire.
When we returned to collect bodies and clear the road, we noticed the UNSC had retreated to the end of the bridge. They no longer extended into our territory, but they held firm where they started at the beginning of the invasion.
The next day, while medics worked overtime to treat the troops and prisoners of war, Zora called an emergency meeting with our staff—and not with the other Jedi commanders.
"They retreated just after losing one ship," one of my lieutenants said. "They might not have the spine to suffer incredible losses. This is our chance, Commander."
Zora shook her head. "They retreated because they realized they don't have to come to us. They can starve us out and force us to surrender—especially if they knock out our Acclamators, which are our supplies."
"We should take what we have now, while we still have it," I said. "Cross the bridge—in every way. We can use jetpacks at low altitudes to cross the waters, below the angles of their autocannons. They've been able to repel each type of assault in a vacuum. But all together, we can overwhelm them and break into their lines."
It was a plan General Horace would have taken in stride, perhaps even suggested himself. I tried to remind her of his style of command, his style of teaching; that just because he had died did not mean his lessons were gone.
"Without armor, that's suicide," Zora said. "Five thousand men dead in a month, with no resupply, with no reinforcements. That's half our assault force. We've never suffered losses like this. Not this quickly."
From the bags and veins of blood under her eyes, I could tell her mind clung to the sounds of death and bullets cracking in the air. She was trapped, as if in a closed loop, reliving the decimation of our unit—and it killed her in her sleep every night.
"With respect," I said, "do you want to die here, or there?"
She looked at me and crossed her arms. "I don't know," she said. "I don't particularly want to die at all. Least of all, watch you all waste away in conflict."
I turned to her. "Don't worry, Commander," I said. "It's what we were born to do."
"You were born to win! " she cried. "Win, or live to fight—and win—another day."
I looked over Zora, gazing into her deep brown eyes. She wasn't weak or broken—but she was close to breaking. Her composure was held together thinly, quietly, but I could tell she would snap at any time. Every defeat, in her mind, was her fault. Everything she was being told by her superiors thrust the responsibility onto her. Every death was on her hands.
It wasn't really. But her grief shut her down and took her to avoid risks. Risk that General Horace would have run headlong into, and—most of the time—seized a victory from. This was not the time nor place to succumb to risk paralysis—not for a military commander and especially not for a Jedi. But at the end of the day, she was just a kid. Processing death was one thing, something she was no stranger to throughout this war. But, privileged with our unit and our general, she rarely suffered a crushing loss—and never had she been asked to wield the charge of an army alone.
But we had our orders now. Hold the line. I told the boys, hopefully, we were waiting for an opening: a sign that the defenders had become overconfident, a misstep, one last offensive that might space a gap in their defenses we could exploit. I told them to hold fast.
Our worst fears were confirmed the next day as a lone Marine crossed the bridge waving a white flag. I met him halfway. He informed me that his leaders, Major General Norton and Rear Admiral Keats, wanted to discuss a conditional surrender for my men—offering to allow us to evacuate what remained of our force—nearly twenty percent of what entered this air corridor—with full honors, escort our ships out, back to the enemy return line.
Zora agreed. A ceasefire was called while the UNSC troops evacuated our wounded to hospitals. Five thousand Marines stood at parade rest while the negotiations began.
For me, it was the end. But for Zora, blast… it was an opportunity, one she shouldn't have taken.
She came to me late that night with renewed energy. I thought it was good to see her in high spirits. Her olive skin seemed to glow, relieved at the end in sight.
"I have a plan," she whispered. "Do you trust me?"
"Yes, Commander," I said.
"Completely?" she asked. She came closer, whispering under the new silence. Around the outskirts, there was no more sniper fire. There were no more artillery blasts and mortar shells. There were no more sporadic airstrikes.
I took a deep breath of the still air, processing it for the first time. It didn't feel as cold.
"Completely, ma'am," I said. And that sealed it.
I got my ARC troopers and jump troopers—a hundred of our most loyal team leaders—together for a secret briefing. 1,400 of us got to work, packed our gear, and crossed the ravine under the cover of night. We used the thick, milky fog as concealment and then dropped our jump jets as far as possible, tumbling onto the docks. We knew most of the guard troops had pulled back and left a skeleton crew to hold the frontline. Many were assisting in evacuations already. The running engines of minesweepers and trucks masked our jetpacks.
We climbed the docks and slipped through the cargo district and into the city.
Anti-aircraft defenses, perched on the rooftops, were our first targets. We free-climbed up pipes, vents, and window sills in between alleys. At the edges of the roofs, there would be crews guarding them. Instead of confronting them, we stuck thermal charges onto the sides of the buildings—they would collapse in on themselves, rendering the weapons useless.
We sent up buoy droids that watched patrols and troop movements, feeding squad leaders data to avoid certain routes and locations. Over several hours, we had found the firebases and facilities converted to UNSC command & control centers—and planted charges on each. By six hours into the operation, crossing midnight, we had fully infiltrated Myga.
The rest was waiting. We set up E-Webs and sniper nests in empty buildings around major transit routes. Rocket crews slipped into buildings just beneath Marine crews, the Marines none the wiser. My men were ready to go—and poised to strike, backed up by the rest of our troops on the other side of the river.
I heard some of the men in the streets take to drinking and singing. At the moment, all I thought was that they suspected nothing. But now, I still hear their voices.
Zora contacted me—knowing the UNSC, having broken our encryption in the first week, was listening in. "Commander, is it ready?" her voice crackled through my comlink.
"Yes, ma'am," I responded. "Everyone is in position."
"It's time," she said.
It didn't matter if they were clued in. They didn't have time to react.
I nodded to my second-in-command, and he squeezed his detonator.
The building next to us crumbled in a series of explosions. Our building shook from the pressure waves. We climbed the stairs to the roof and killed all the men above us, starting with the man on watch, and the rest, who were sleeping.
I unlatched my flare gun from my belt and coated the sky green, signaling the rest of the squads—the ones who hadn't already touched off their bombs in response to my own—to initiate.
Thunderous pops squeezed the city. Smoke rose from almost every corner. Gunfire filled the streets as heavy blasters ripped apart the enemy. The Marines were slow to respond.
An ammunition dump exploded—right after the motor pool on opposite sides of the waterfront. Smoke billowed into the darkness, giant pillars of ash and destruction.
Then the sirens wailed.
Our airworthy Acclamator ascended, distantly blasting to high altitude, as Y-wings made their way out as well, bombarding the city. The Acclamator provided support for Y-wings, destroying fighters and engaging with the UNSC frigates. It disappeared behind the cloud layer quickly, cutting off the UNSC supports.
I engaged my jetpack, flying in free skies, to the nearest E-Web emplacement. Marines were still scattering eight stories below under fire, unable to identify where the blaster was. They opened fire on the wrong building, then the wrong floor, then the wrong windows. Then they were silenced.
Power generators blew out. The city was engulfed in partial darkness—but the building fires that raged on created pockets of daylight.
From here on, the city would reek of cordite, chemical fire, carbon, and dead bodies.
I don't know much about what was happening on the other side—but I knew that Major General Norton first met with Commander Zora at the beginning of the night on the bridge, where they shook hands and negotiated the cease-fire. He gave her twelve hours to meet his terms—achieve total disarmament and final preparations to leave Myga—which she said were reasonable enough.
Norton noted that she seemed awfully young for a military officer. In fact, he felt uncomfortable when she told him she was only sixteen years old. He expressed before his death that he was glad to see this part of the conflict was over, and that she lived to see another day off this world. He confided in Lieutenant Colonel Watts his belief: Jedi or not, Zora deserved better than to die on the battlefield.
Norton joined a conference call three hours later between himself, Rear Admiral Keats, and Zora. The continued negotiations went on for several hours, before finally, the explosions rocked the city. Before Norton could say anything, a thermal detonator blew up his head-shed, killing him and his general staff instantly.
"What happened?" Keats asked as Norton flickered out of the call.
Zora smiled. "We will be resuming hostilities momentarily, Admiral," she said.
"You agreed to a cease-fire," Keats protested. "You surrendered. I will not stand for this. The United Nations will not stand for this. Tell your men to stand down, and surrender yourself and your command staff."
"That's not going to happen," Zora said. "I'm keen on taking Myga. I'm not too keen on limits."
The transcript says that Keats frowned, but I know there was intensity behind it. He had watched thousands of his men die outside of lawful combat. He sighed in a tone that demanded blood for blood.
"Do you understand what you are doing today?" Keats said, his voice colder than ever.
"I'm winning," Zora said.
Keats' voice came lower, his tone deliberate, every word measured. "Consider this a courtesy call. You are no longer a lawful combatant," he said. "And we aren't going to treat you as one.
"I'll show you a war without limits," he growled, killing the feed.
It was too early for sunrise, but the entire city lit up as though in broad daylight. The E-Web gunner and I looked up, watching the clouds glow. Our helmets automatically dimmed. The center of the sky burned bright enough to injure unassisted eyes.
Then it was dark again.
"Commander Zora," I said into my comlink, "are you seeing this?"
There was only static—a wash of overlapping communications from every frequency. We were being jammed. I couldn't contact anyone, not on short range nor long range.
The sky lit up again, but not as bright as before. The Acclamator descended, roaring in flames, in many pieces. It was such a wreck that it was not immediately recognizable. The pieces crashed into the city like meteors, making shockwaves that shattered glass windows and blew us off our feet. Pressure blasts rocked the city now, not discriminating between clone and Marine. A third of the city disappeared under the shockwave and smoke and ash, and it was gone forever—millions of people's domiciles, businesses, hospitals, schools, and communities were razed in a heartbeat. Buildings collapsed and imploded by the block, blowing a fog of dust into the air.
The fighting intensified for hours after, with the snow and ash mixing into a thick fog. Confusion reigned for everyone—UNSC, GAR, it didn't matter. One of my squad leaders reported to me in our building, which we had turned into a mobile command center as clone reinforcements crossed the bridge, and reported that an order came down from the Marine Colonel Jackson, the only survivor of Norton's general staff, to shoot every clone on sight, and not to take prisoners—in fact, to assume surrenders were false. The Marines were following it enthusiastically. Their "rules of engagement" had changed to ignore surrendering combatants.
"Can't really blame them," I said.
I saw Zora walking down the middle of the bridge with a battalion marching behind her. Marching. In formation. When she made it to us, I met with her.
Her eyes looked different. Hotter, more intense. I thought it was just the darkness, the fog, and the flames. She looked rigid.
"They destroyed our ship," she said. "They used nuclear weapons. Just one did all that. We're trapped here. So let's drag them down with us."
A company of Marines, barely reorganized, rounded one of the corners and ambushed us. They poured out of the alleys and opened fire from the windows.
She walked out into the center of the street.
"Zora, wait—" I called.
With the flick of one hand, she ripped two hundred weapons out of their hands, clattering on the ground. The street fell eerily silent.
She ripped down the facades of the buildings, killing dozens. She pulled the men out of the streets and suffocated them in front of our legion. We watched them die in seconds. Holding her arms up and squeezing her hands, Zora didn't so much as twist her body.
She turned to me as the last man collapsed onto a heap of himself.
"All clear," she said.
I walked out between the gulf of carnage. "I… don't believe it," I said. I wasn't sure how else to respond.
"Spread out," Zora said. "Keep moving troops through the bridge and cleanse this cursed city."
The other clones enthusiastically agreed, deploying deeper into the city.
Despite our best efforts, the skies were still contested. I heard a distant roar—Longswords. They descended below the layer of black clouds, crossed us, and dropped 30,000-pound bombs onto the bridge and the outskirts across the river—and the grounded Acclamator. The bombs cut apart the structures so loudly that we heard only sharp blasts. Zora covered her ears and dropped as the pressure waves slammed into us.
She rose slowly as a firestorm brewed. Incendiary bombs glowed the outskirts hot. Our base, the outskirts, and two thousand men were razed from fire. She turned to me, and I saw sadness overtaken by rage. Something searing hot stirred within her. I could feel it. It projected outward and could melt steel. She no longer shed tears, but instead narrowed her eyes.
We kept fighting.
As the Marines retreated from street block to street block, they set the buildings on fire, denying us cover, food, and facilities for our troops. They laid traps and mines in the civil infrastructure. They collapsed and flooded tunnels with freezing water. They produced rudimentary nerve agents and mustard gas and unleashed it on positions as we claimed them. Our men marched through, even as mortar crews deployed white phosphorus, burning through our men's armor and skin.
We eventually cornered the Marines through four hours and six thousand bodies, at their command center. Zora was a force multiplier that began to worry me. She would shake the ground with her boots and crumple Scorpions with her hands. She would lift tanks and throw them at the enemy.
We took over the base. I saw men execute Marines in retaliation when they gave up. I saw Marines fight to the bitter end, knowing what was coming. I saw soldiers detonate grenades on their armor as my brothers ambushed their buildings, taking out as many as thirty of my own for one of theirs.
One of the Marines, sacrificing himself, detonated the structure containing the jammer—killing twenty-five men—and returned our surface communication capabilities.
Zora had disarmed and apprehended Colonel Jackson, holding him by his collar, as we hailed General Mundi.
"Master Mundi," Zora said. "I have brought you Myga City."
Mundi seemed distracted. "Strong work, young knight. You are behind schedule. Will you make the rendezvous at the capital—"
"I am victorious," she said, her voice low. She ignored his question.
Mundi looked her and Jackson over. It was like he sensed Jackson's fear and contempt—the otherworldly horror, anger, and shock; the trauma.
"Zora," Mundi said, slowly, "what have you done?"
Something like anger and shame overtook her. She switched off the device, dissipating Mundi into the air, and dragged Jackson like a ragdoll.
"Those bastards," she hissed. "I lose the battle, it's my fault. I win the battle, and it's not good enough for them? Does it not matter that we won? It was my responsibility, and we won!"
She threw Jackson down and raised her lightsaber, igniting it. A deep, blood-red blade erupted out, volatile and sizzling. Jackson pleaded for his life, babbling and crying.
"Commander!" I cried.
She froze, turning to me slowly. I drew my blaster.
"This has got to stop," I said. "Look at what we're doing. We've killed, and killed, and killed. This isn't even a battle anymore. What are we becoming?"
"Not you, too," she said. "No, no, no…"
"Listen to me!" I cried. "There's still time to stop this. It's wrong. We were not born to do this. To kill senselessly."
"Weren't you?" she asked. "This is war. Look at the savagery they've committed. They used nuclear weapons. Butchered our men."
I shook my head and pulled my helmet off. "We did it first," I said. "We broke a cease-fire. We broke their trust. Listen to me, Zora. We've been through a lot. We've known each other a long time. There's still time to end this, to do the right thing."
A gust of frigid wind whipped, scratching my ears and burning my eyes. The easterly sun glowed faintly through the skyline, glaring on my armor.
My clones backed me up, surrounding her.
"Don't do this, Commander," I whispered. "Please."
"I thought—" she started.
"I do," I said. "But this… has gone too far."
To set my blaster to stun would have taken so little effort—it would have been so easy. But she was even faster than that. She would react to it. She would kill Jackson, or attack us. I didn't know. I suppressed my instinct to set it to stun; I didn't want to provoke her. But now, it dawned on me that I couldn't save her.
"Just don't do it," I said. "Don't do it."
But she swung at Jackson, and I fired.
Jackson's eyes were transfixed on the weapon as it crumbled from her hand. He watched as I grabbed her, holding her for the last few seconds as the light in her eyes blew out like candles.
"I can't feel anything," she whispered between labored breaths, squeezing my arm. Then she was gone.
"Neither can I," I whispered, closing her eyes. My throat felt hot.
There was an emptiness that lived in me for the years following. I would turn to my side to gauge her reaction, and she wouldn't be there. I would smile thinking, Wait until Zora hears this, and then I would remember I could not tell her anymore. I would hear from General Kenobi that my pain from her absence is a testament to my memory of her—not how she was as she died, but as she lived and fought next to us, as our general, as our hero. We remember the Zora before the fall; we remember how preventable it was. But I carry the broken half of a sacred bond, a baptism by fire made incomplete. I must live in sacrilege.
The men stumbled around me, arresting Jackson, blasters ready to fire.
"Stop," I choked, standing, her body slumped over my shoulder. "We've done enough killing."
I asked Jackson to retract the order to ignore surrenders. I apologized to him for the assault—there was nothing more to say.
But he agreed, and he got on the channel. He sent out a call to his squad leaders. His squad leaders refused. He turned to me, his eyes dim and quiet, his voice hollow.
"I don't know what you expected," he said.
So I asked him to get on the horn with Admiral Keats. He tried, using Norton's access codes and clearances. The channel was blocked. I thanked him for trying and let him sit in on my meeting with the strategists.
I reported to the generals as morning came in full swing. Kenobi, Skywalker, and Mundi appeared on the holotable in our new command center.
"Why have you permitted an enemy commander to sit in here?" Mundi asked.
"I suspect he will be asked to testify," I said.
"About what?" Mundi asked.
I hesitated, looking at him directly. "General, may I request a different Jedi collect her body?"
"I don't see why," Mundi said. "The others are preoccupied. Who did you have in mind?"
"Anyone but you," I said. I stiffened my posture. "Sir."
The three of them exchanged worried glances.
"Very well," General Kenobi answered. "I will collect Zora's body."
I ended the debriefing and turned to Colonel Jackson. I read him his rights as a prisoner of war, and informed him loosely of what I expected would happen once we were able to extract wounded and prisoners.
He nodded. "Until then," he said, "there are over a thousand Marines still in this city alone. Most are scattered now. Fighting street to street. They won't surrender, and they won't treat you like lawful combatants. What are you going to do?"
Until the Marines answered to someone they believed to be a credible authority long after the battle had been won, and long after Myga was firebombed to ash—leaving us nothing to win—we kept fighting.