Chapter 4 Luck and Skill
"Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster." Hunter Thompson
"A weed is a plant that has mastered every survival skill except for learning how to grow in rows." Doug Larson
The most immediate cover was the death pit, but Rex had not forgotten about the booby-traps.
"Echo!" he shouted, gripping the body of the man Echo had just killed. A wordless understanding arose between them, and Echo grabbed the man's feet. Together, they tossed him into the pit, turning away as the force of the explosion knocked them both to the ground.
Rex belly-crawled to the edge of the pit and slid down the side, surrounded by the results of his brilliant idea. He had not really thought about the aftermath of his actions when he had thrown the body into the pit; and he tried to ignore it now.
He could feel the thundering of footfalls moving through the woods in his direction, but his vision was obscured by the wall of smoke growing ever thicker around him. He peered over the lip of the pit and strained his eyes for any sign of movement. In the back of his mind, he was wondering where Echo had taken cover. He was tempted to call out to him, but that would give away his own position.
A ghostly image moved through the smoke in front of him. A few more steps brought the figure a bit closer to identification. Then, with movement faster than a Rishi eel, the figure jerked left and fired off a burst over the top of the pit.
Rex heard a man's voice, coming from behind him, raised in an abrupt cry of pain. The curses that followed were in Basic, and in a clone's voice. Rex raised his weapon.
The enemy was disappearing into the smoke again. It would not be a clear shot, but he took it anyway. An anguished scream let Rex know he had hit his mark. He climbed out of the pit and made his way to the injured trooper, one of Grommet's men, writhing and panting several yards away.
"Where are you hit?" Rex asked, coughing against the smoke and wondering what the hell had happened to his helmet.
"Shoulder," came the choked reply. "Can't breath—"
It was the smoke. Rex grabbed the soldier under the shoulders and began dragging him towards the pit, where the smoke was not quite as thick. As he moved, he caught a brief glance of another body, its details indistinguishable through the smoke, lying on the ground not too far from where the injured trooper had been lying.
Reaching the edge of the pit, he slid the clone down over the side and activated the filtering system in the trooper's helmet, seeing that the man was in too much pain to be thinking clearly enough to do it for himself.
Then he rushed back into the smoke which had grown so thick that he could not locate the other body until his foot made contact with it. Leaning down, he discovered that it was one of the enemy, and he felt angry that he had risked his life to come out for a dead militant. He got to his feet just as another figure, moving quickly and blindly in the smoke, came careening into him and knocking him flat on his back, the man's heavy weight crashing down on top of him.
He could make out, through the few inches of smoke between them, the surprised face of a man who was definitely not a clone, who was definitely a Pylottan, and who, in the next instant, had punched him twice in the face in rapid succession, before attempting to scramble to his feet.
Rex reached up, caught hold of the man's ankle and jerked him off his feet. The Pylottan fell face-first onto the ground directly beside him, and that's when Rex saw the smooth, round barrel of something automatic lying half-concealed under the man's prone body and pointed straight at him.
Rex rolled away blaster fire—strange, it didn't sound like a blaster-chewed up the ground where he'd been lying. Then, springing to his feet, he lunged at the man, pinning him underneath. Grabbing the Pyottan's head, he repeatedly slammed his face into the ground.
But the Pylottan was not easily subdued. Nor was he small or slightly built. Like all men of his species, he was tall and sound. Rex was 183 centimeters of uninterrupted muscle, a powerful fighter in hand-to-hand combat, fully aware of his own strengths and abilities. But he seemed to have come up against an enemy of whom the same could be said. He found himself being leveraged off his assailant's back by the man's sheer strength; and to his horror, he was being forced down onto the ground. If he stayed in close quarters, he would be pinned. He delivered a violent blow between the man's shoulders, scrabbled free and reached to draw his pistols.
Before he could get a single round off, his adversary rolled onto his side and fired off a blind shot that caught Rex in the left arm. Rex felt a white-hot pain shoot clear up to his shoulder. This was not the normal pain associated with blaster fire, but he had no time to contemplate it. The force of the impact spun him around, and both pistols went flying. It was only his desperation that gave him the presence of mind to realize he needed to get back into close contact to prevent any further use of the weapon. He waited until the man was directly over him, then he swept out his leg and brought his adversary crashing down on top of him. He wrapped his legs around the man's lower body.
For a moment, it seemed Rex's opponent had ceased struggling. Then, in the small space between their faces, the man held up a grenade. A perverse grin of triumphant evil gleamed in the Pylottan's eyes. The pin was out. Only his grip on the handle stopped them both from being torn into grotesque pieces. Once he released his hold, only five seconds would stand between life and death.
Rex's eyes went momentarily wide with stark fear.
On top of him, the man spoke in perfect Basic. "I am ready to die. You will go with me."
Rex had no intention of waiting to see if the man would carry out his threat. The captain's left hand was trapped between their bodies, in a very good vantage point. He knew he would have only one moment to put some distance between himself and his enemy; he only hoped their anatomy was similar with similar weaknesses. He thrust his hand into the other man's crotch and found what he was looking for.
The man's scream was piercing and his hold on Rex slackened just enough for the captain to bring his right hand up and clamp down over the militant's hand around the grenade.
The man fought with the crazed frenzy of a cornered animal. With his free hand, he felt something tucked into the belt at his opponent's side. It was the knife Rex had taken from the man he'd felled.
Rex turned his head just in time to deflect a slice aimed for his face that would have taken out his eye. Instead, it nicked his temple at the eyebrow, the small cut springing a torrent of blood that threatened to blind him. Ignoring the searing pain in his left arm, Rex reached up and clenched his fingers around the wrist of the knife-wielding hand; but already he could tell the muscle in the arm was not going to last long.
"For kriff's sake! I need help!" He shouted. "Somebody help me!"
As if on cue, Rex became aware of a presence moving in from his right, crawling along the ground in a stealthy manner; and he was not sure whether to feel relief or dread, until he heard a familiar voice.
"I can't get a clean shot!" It was Echo.
"Do something! I can't hold him!"
Echo was close to panic, for Rex and his assailant were so intertwined that he could not make out where one began and the other ended. He could not take a shot without the risk of hitting his captain, nor could he stand by and watch him be killed. He crawled across the last few meters and took hold of the man's wrist, the one brandishing the knife which Rex was barely managing to hold at bay. As soon as Echo had control of that arm, Rex let go and used both hands now to clasp over the grenade. He forced the man's arm onto the ground next to his head and tried to pry the grenade loose from his fingers, while at the same time, making sure the handle remained depressed. The man was still fighting against them. One abrupt move, one miniscule burst of strength, and they would all three go up in pieces.
"Kill him!" Rex ordered. "Kill him!"
Echo pinned the man's wrist to the ground with his knee, drew his blaster, put it to the man's skull and pulled the trigger.
Rex remained still for several seconds, almost as if to make sure the man was really dead, then he carefully slid the grenade out of the corpse's hand. He got slowly to his feet. He could not throw the thing very far, for in the swirling smoke, there was no telling where his own friendly forces might be.
"Echo, stay down!" he ordered, and although Echo was already lying on the ground, he pressed himself as flat as possible.
Rex tossed the grenade across the pit. A few seconds later, a harmless detonation shook up a storm of debris.
He looked down at his injured arm, just above the elbow. The armor had done him no good. It was cracked, a large chunk of it blown away. The body glove beneath was torn and there was blood everywhere. He could still move the arm, which was good news; and although it was painful, that was a secondary consideration. He could still hear the sounds of combat in the woods around him.
"Echo! Into the pit!" he ordered.
Echo made no move to follow.
"Echo! Let's go," Rex repeated, offering his hand. "Are you alright?"
"No, Sir," came the trembling reply.
Rex suppressed a frown. He was mildly disappointed with Echo's answer, for he expected his soldiers to be much tougher than this. It had been a harrowing experience—for both of them—but certainly nothing to cause this kind of squeamish, weak-kneed behavior. He would not berate Echo, but nor would he coddle him.
"Come on, now. Pull yourself together. This isn't over yet," he said sternly.
"I'm injured, Sir," Echo replied through gritted teeth.
This announcement caught Rex by surprise. He hadn't realized that Echo had been injured. He reached out and gripped his arm, feeling some kind of contact was in order. "Where?"
"My right leg . . . back of the thigh . . . "
Rex looked and found a large hole in the armor and a mess of traumatized flesh beneath. But it did not look like a blaster injury.
"Oh, damn . . . " Rex swore under his breath.
"That's why I couldn't get to you quicker." Echo grimaced, and a muffled groan escaped his lips. "It hurts pretty badly, Sir. I don't think I can walk."
"No, don't try to walk. I'll help you."
Rex got Echo into the pit with the other wounded soldier. Now, Rex's role switched from combatant to medic. He had two seriously injured men to look after. He was beginning to wish he'd paid more attention in the battle-field first-aid courses.
He activated his comm.
"General Skywalker."
A long silence ensued before the general's voice came through, and his voice was clipped. "Rex. What's your status?"
"I'm pinned down with two injured troopers."
"How serious?"
"One has an impact wound to the shoulder. The other has an impact would to the leg."
"What are your coordinates?"
Rex read off the coordinates from his GPS.
"Captain Grommet's company should be in your area."
"They are in my area! They're being shot at! It's one of their men who's injured!" Rex temporarily lost his radio discipline.
A pause, then, "Roger, that. Stay in place."
Rex snorted to himself, muttering under his breath. "Stay in place? Where in hell would I go with two injured men?"
For the next twenty minutes, Rex did the best he could with the materials at his disposal. Using make-shift bandages torn from the clothes of the dead enemy, he bound up his soldiers' wounds, then spent the rest of the time trying to make them more comfortable. At last, as the sounds of the fighting moved away, he received a hail on his comm.
Medical help was on the way.
And five minutes later, it arrived in the form of two field medics, one of them Kix, and a handful of stretcher-bearers.
Climbing out of the pit, Rex saw that the wounded men he'd been tending were not the only ones in need of assistance. At least half a dozen other soldiers were being examined and categorized by the severity of their injuries.
Rex did not call out to Kix, who was busily engaged over the body of a wounded 212th soldier who, judging from the spasms and unnatural movements of his limbs, might be beyond help but whose situation definitely preceded that of Rex's two injured men.
"Captain!"
Rex looked towards the sound of the voice and saw Jesse and Moog coming towards him.
"Jesse? Moog? What are you doing out here?"
"Captain?! By the Force, what's all this blood?" Jesse gasped, seeing the thick coat of red covering one side of his captain's face.
"Oh, it's just from a nick here . . . just a little thing. Nothing serious. Now, what are you two doing here?" Even blood-spattered and caked with dirt and ash, Rex rode his authority.
Jesse and Moog eyed their captain doubtfully, for he certainly looked worse than he was saying. But the only one who could ever prevail upon the captain was General Skywalker . . . and maybe Kix . . .
"We were back at the command post and heard you had run into some trouble. So we asked permission to come out with the medical crew. Where's Echo?" This from Jesse.
Rex motioned over his shoulder towards the pit directly behind him. "Down here. He's been hit in the leg. One of Grommet's men got hit in the shoulder. I've been watching over them."
Jesse and Moog jumped down into the pit.
"How you lads holding up?" Jesse asked, hunkering down and lightly patting first Echo's cheek, then repeating the action with the other trooper. It was a gesture of comfort, but he was also checking for signs of shock.
"We're okay, Jesse," Echo replied, sounding anything but okay as Grommet's trooper nodded his concurrence.
"Help is coming," Moog assured them.
"Have we taken the airfield?" Grommet's man asked in a voice that was little more than a whisper.
"They're still at it, but it won't be long," Jesse replied. "No more talking now. Save your strength, both of you."
When Kix appeared at the rim of the pit, Jesse cleared the way while Moog stayed to assist.
Both Rex and Jesse stood at the edge of the pit, watching Kix work. Neither one of them could fail to be impressed by the medic's acumen. Kix was an interesting character. Chronologically, he was the same age as Rex, but he had an unusual youthfulness and blitheness that was uncommon in his fellow clones. Quiet, unassuming, and absolutely professional, he was brilliant when it came to taking care of injured or ill soldiers. He examined, assessed, diagnosed, and made initial treatment at a pace that would dizzy most military practitioners. He could prescribe a treatment for athletes' foot one moment and apply a tourniquet the next. And he could guide a layman like Moog through complicated procedures without missing a beat. Everyone in the 501st realized how fortunate they were to have him as part of the battalion.
It was while Rex was admiring his medic's work that Jesse remarked, "Your arm looks bad, Sir. Are you alright?"
Rex glanced down at his arm and shrugged. "Eh, I think it's just a graze. I can still move it," Rex replied. "It smarts like hell." He changed gears. "Where's the rest of our advance team?"
"They're all back at the command post," Jesse replied, "Except for Fives and Pitch. They went out with Commander Tano's company. They were headed for the military base."
Rex nodded then opened a comm channel. "General Skywalker, this is Captain Rex."
After a brief pause, the general's voice came through, and he definitely sounded like he was in the thick of things. "Skywalker here."
"Friendlies have arrived at our position," Rex reported. "Do you require assistance?"
"Report back to the command post," came the harried response; and although it wasn't what Rex wanted to hear, he would not question his commanding officer's orders.
"Yes, Sir." Rex turned to cast a concerned glance down into the pit. "Kix?"
The medic looked up at the sound of his captain's voice. "Yes, Sir."
"Will they be alright?"
"Yes, Sir. They're in good hands. We'll take care of them."
"Make sure you do."
With that, he turned to Jesse. "Let's go."