501st: An Imperial Commando Novel

by Karen Traviss

  Rex heard his helmet sensors blipping before he felt the blast. He snatched it up and lowered it into place just as something crashed into the street behind them.

  Whoomp—whoomp. A massive explosion shook the ground, then another.

  “Incoming!” a voice yelled over the clatter of raining debris.

  Yeah, we noticed. Thanks.

  Rex grabbed his rifle and sprinted for the street. He didn’t look back at Coric or the injured trooper. The two Jedi generals—Kenobi and Skywalker—were already in the open, dodging blasterfire. When Rex got level with them, he could see a wall of droids, rank upon rank, marching toward them in that weird synchrony.

  It wasn’t the same as a well-drilled army of human beings. The precision was cold, unthinking, inexorable, as if the tinnies would keep marching right on over you and crush everything in their path. It was the SBDs, the super battle droids, that really got to him.

  He sighted up and aimed.

  It was the way they ran with their firing arms extended. And they had no visible heads. Any tinny could kill you, but at least the regular droids looked vaguely human.

  Do they think? Do they feel? Do I care?

  No.

  Us or them.

  Rex squeezed off a few rounds, smashing into the front rank. It wouldn’t do more than slow them down. It never did. The game was all about numbers, and the droids had them. Clone troopers, roused from brief sleep or caught while gulping down dry rations, took up defensive positions.

  Clone Commander Cody sprinted to Kenobi’s side. “Where the stang did they come from?”

  General Kenobi didn’t seem too pleased with his young general. “I told you they caved in too fast,” he said, swinging his lightsaber in an arc to deflect a volley of blaster bolts. It was hard to hear him over the blasterfire. “Some victory, Anakin …”

  “I wasn’t the one who decided to send the ship for supplies …” Skywalker stood his ground, lightsaber grasped two-handed. “Master.”

  “Neither of us is perfect, then, and let that be our lesson—second wave incoming, men. Stand to.”

  Anakin swung around. “Platoon, on me!” he barked, tapping the top of his head in the signal to form up. Skywalker even sounded like a soldier. He was an easy general to follow. “Rex, see that building? The energy sphere? Best position, I think.”

  Rex flicked the macrobinocular setting on his helmet to get a close-up view. “You want to go around behind.”

  “It’s risky, but we can make it.”

  “Okay, let’s go for it, sir.”

  Chunk-chunk-chunk. The battle droids marched like a single machine. Rex hated that noise. It just would not stop.

  Droids relied on numbers and keeping coming, and coming, and coming. Rapid reaction wasn’t their strong suit. They also preferred a nice level battlefield and wide open spaces. Rex signaled to the platoon, indicating that they should melt back into the deserted streets and alleyways of Crystal City, then transmitted the coordinates of the objective via his helmet comlink. A chart of the streets leading to the energy sphere appeared in the head-up display in every trooper’s helmet. Rex didn’t really need to use hand signals with that level of communications tech, but it was an instinctive thing to do—and if the HUD systems went down, they all had to fall back on good old-fashioned, nondigital soldiering.

  Coric grabbed his medical field kit. The FAS moved with the front line.

  General Skywalker darted for the entrance to a deserted office block, Rex at his heels, to pick through the rubble and passages of the city and make their way back behind the droid lines. The route ran parallel to the main street. Kenobi, Cody, and a company of troopers returned the heavy fire raining down on them from the advancing droids; Rex couldn’t see it, but he could hear it, and feel the shocks under his boots. Plumes of gray smoke bloomed into the air.

  Keep ’em occupied, Cody …

  Rex scrambled over a shattered fountain that was still gushing water from a broken conduit. This must have been a nice place to live, once; Rex tried to cast his mind back to just a few days earlier, when Crystal City had been a landscape that seemed carved out of glittering gems. The civilian population had already fled by the time ground troops had landed.

  It felt like a lifetime ago, and he’d still not seen a live Christophsian. Plenty of dead ones, though. Plenty of them. His nightvision filter kicked in as he ran down a sloping passage into darkness and shapes resolved in the green-lit image, a chaos of shattered transparisteel, permacrete, and cables.

  A light winked on a console torn from the wall; he hadn’t realized there was still a functioning power supply in this complex. Not a booby trap. No HUD sensor warning. Just a light. Rex ran on. Skywalker’s robes flapped, blotting out the faint lights beyond like a black cloud.

  Rex glanced at the HUD icons set to one side of the main display to check for stragglers, counting the transponder blips and ID numbers of the platoon. Sergeant Coric was right behind him—and the injured trooper. He must have been tanked up on painkillers. The trooper’s bodysuit had lost some integrity, too. Rex hoped he didn’t get into a situation where he needed it to be airtight.

  “You could sit this one out, Ged,” Rex said.

  “I get lonely, sir.”

  “We’ll keep you company, then …”

  It took maybe ten minutes to skirt around the droid lines, staying close to the canyon-like walls and covering as much ground as possible under cover to avoid aerial detection.

  Skywalker leaped ahead—it would have been very handy to bound clear over obstacles like that, Rex thought—and was already on the roof of the energy sphere building by the time Rex pushed through the doors.

  They edged to the parapet around the sphere. Troopers positioned themselves and sighted up, snapping anti-armor attachments onto their rifles. On the ground floor, the rest of the platoon hid in the lobby, ready to give the droids a street-level surprise from the rear.

  Skywalker seemed to be sizing up for a jump. Two stories beneath them, three octuptarra droids marched forward in that three-legged staccato gait, each one a sphere supported by thin arching legs, spitting a stream of cannon fire.

  “What’s the plan, then, sir?” Ged asked, as if he didn’t know. There was one surefire way to take a droid like that. But their narrow profile and relatively small spherical bodies made them a hard target to hit.

  The general seemed to be focused on one of the droids. “Follow me.”

  “Right you are, sir …”

  Rex secured his rappel line on the edge of the roof and signaled to the men behind. Skywalker didn’t need anything fancy like that.

  He just jumped.

  STREET LEVEL, CRYSTAL CITY

  Anakin landed on the back of the octuptarra droid just hard enough to balance on the flat section on top of its spherical body without tipping both of them over.

  And the droid couldn’t do a thing about it.

  It spun and flailed as he rammed his lightsaber deep into its top panel. One of its comrades swiveled its cannon and fired. Anakin batted the bolts away with his lightsaber as Rex and the rest of the clone troopers opened fire and took down the two remaining octuptarras, running over the wreckage to engage the rear rank of battle droids, which had now realized they were facing a rearguard action as well.

  Anakin knew he wasn’t actually thinking at this point. An odd moment of mental separation left him able to run on some buried instinct at the same time as part of him took a step back and observed it all, both fascinated and appalled. His body had bypassed his higher brain functions, moving him around the battlefield without his consent. He was aware of the position of every droid, every clone trooper, but not consciously; he could see Kenobi’s blue lightsaber blade, flashing intermittently through a smoky forest of battle droids. The noise was deafening—screaming, ripping metal, explosions so loud that they felt like a punch high in the chest—but he wasn’t sure he was hearing or even listening. It was … a kind of blindness where he could sti
ll somehow see.

  Images flared and vanished in front of him like flash-frames. He was swinging his lightsaber into a group of Tusken Raiders. You killed my mother. Now it’s your turn. It was a memory; he’d done exactly that. For a split second, he wasn’t sure if he was looking at droids or Sand People. He simply spun around the droid lines, swinging and slashing, buoyed up on a wave of reflexes. Metal fragments flashed past his face. Some veered away at angles, deflected not by his lightsaber but an instinctive and unthinking Force push. One moment he was rising explosively from a squat into the looming shadow of an SBD, thrusting his lightsaber through its chest, the next he was leaping onto the back of a battle droid and ripping off its head with a Force-assisted stranglehold.

  And he could still glimpse Tuskens he didn’t want to see, solid ghosts, running for cover in the forest of falling droids as white armored troopers charged, fired, and even vibrobladed them. He sprinted after one: but Rex now stood right in front of him, smashing the butt of his DC-15 rifle hard down on a battle droid’s fragile neck as it lay struggling to get up. Rex was almost casual. The clone hammered the droid right-handed as he reached into his belt pouch with his left hand to grab a reload. He barely paused as he snapped the new energy pack into its housing and started firing again. Another droid turned on him—perhaps to aid its fallen comrade, perhaps not—and got a faceful of blasterfire.

  Anakin struggled to shut out the memory of the Tusken Raiders. They vanished. But in the melee he saw a tall gold figure with long black claws; a Blood Carver called Ke Daiv. He’d killed him, too, years ago.

  It’s not darkness.

  I’m not dark.

  This isn’t anger—

  It was okay; they’d always told him so. He was fighting to save his men, and if he did terrible things out of compassion, out of love, then he wasn’t turning to the dark side. That was the Jedi way.

  For my mother. For my men. For Padmé.

  His body carried on anyway. He swung his blade through metal bodies as easily as if he were cutting grass. Rex and the clone troopers fought as hard as he did, as pumped with adrenaline as he was, too desperate to feel their own natural fear—and yet at that moment they felt unlike him in the Force, devoid only of that singular crazed frenzy, that throat-closing … rage.

  I’m not turning dark.

  This has to be done.

  Don’t stop to think: it’ll get you killed.

  Anakin shook off the doubt, but it scared him more than death. He charged past Rex into the next rank of droids, almost choking on smoke and flying dust. The thing within swept him along the way it had when he wiped out the Tusken village for his mother’s murder, a strangely cold frenzy, equally consuming, equally animal in its intensity.

  He went on killing. Somehow it didn’t matter that those who fell before his lightsaber this time were droids. It was all the same to him. He leaped from octuptarra to octuptarra, driving his blade deep into each droid’s sphere as he went. He felt that he could keep going for eternity, never running out of this—

  Not rage. Not rage.

  Whatever it was, he had to let it out.

  The droids were crushed against one another, unable to maneuver. Clones pressed in on them, firing point-blank into their weak points. Shrapnel flew, peppering noisily against clone armor.

  “Anakin!” Obi-Wan yelled. He whirled his lightsaber around his head and took out two battle droids in one sweep, cut in half at the waist joint. “Come on!”

  Anakin suddenly ran out of droids. The cacophony of battle noise stopped. He was now face-to-face with Kenobi, and they were standing on a carpet of dismembered and shattered droids. A sudden silence descended on the battlefield, the kind that left Anakin’s ears ringing.

  “Are you okay, Anakin?” Kenobi was staring into his face as if he’d seen something.

  Anakin took a deep, steadying breath. For a moment, Tuskens, Blood Carvers, and enemy droids were all gone. “Yes, Master.” He turned to check how many of his men were wounded. “Rex? Let’s evac as many as we can while we—”

  But it was just a lull in the storm. The sound carried from farther up the road, that chunk-chunk-chunk again.

  Another wave of droids.

  “We’re going to need reinforcements, fast,” Anakin said.

  Kenobi looked up as if he expected a ship to appear on demand. “I still can’t get a comlink signal through to the admiral. Must be atmospheric conditions.”

  “Let’s get these guys out, anyway,” Rex said wearily. A trooper was calling for a medic; two men picked their way through the droid debris to a fallen man Anakin could see only as a tangle of limbs. There were at least a dozen troopers down. “Come on—I said, let’s get these guys clear! Move it!”

  The clones had been heavily outnumbered, but they were human—agile, motivated, and smart. The droids were just machines. They fell victim to their sheer numbers and inflexibility in every sense. Stick them in a tight spot, and they couldn’t avoid one another’s arc of fire, or even move. They had no room to fight the way they were programmed to. They couldn’t use a rifle as a club like Rex would, or drop a grenade into a hatch and jump clear like Sergeant Coric, or care enough about their brothers’ lives to fight like crazy men, or even think. They were machines. Just dumb machines.

  I just destroyed machines. I didn’t kill.

  Anakin felt as if he were sobering up after a drinking spree, but he’d never been drunk. The moment left him disoriented and embarrassed in a way he didn’t understand. He shook himself out of it. More droids were coming, and there were wounded men to evacuate. He rushed to check the casualties with Kenobi and Rex, helping those he could, moving those he couldn’t.

  Chunk-chunk-chunk.

  “Patience, clankers,” Rex muttered, hauling a trooper by his shoulders into the shelter of a doorway. Anakin took the man’s legs. “I’ll get back to you soon.”

  And then the metallic marching stopped. Anakin strained to listen; the close explosions must have affected his hearing. But he wasn’t imagining it. He could see them now, a line of metal statues seeming to wait for orders.

  The droid advance had ground to a halt.

  “Let’s hope that doesn’t mean they’re moving long-range artillery into position,” Kenobi said. He wiped the back of his glove across his mouth, smearing dust and droid oil across his beard. The wretched things scattered debris and fluids for meters when hit. “We can’t take much more of this.”

  Anakin heard it even before he felt it. It was a very distinctive sound, pure music. He looked up at the same moment Rex did, and what he saw was possibly even more wonderful than it sounded. It was so arresting that he almost missed the droids up ahead doing a sudden, crisp about-turn and marching away again.

  An armed Republic shuttle banked above the street and veered off toward the plaza.

  “That’s more like it,” Rex said. His shoulders sagged slightly, a blend of relief and fatigue. “They don’t like the odds now.”

  Anakin turned to Kenobi, trying to look unmoved. He wanted to cheer. But it wasn’t a very Jedi thing to do. “They’re pulling back, Master. Looks like the reinforcements have made them see sense. Come on, Rex, let’s give them a proper welcome.”

  “Where’s the cruiser?” Rex asked, tapping his finger against the side of his helmet as if having comm problems. “I’m not picking up anything within landing range.”

  “It’ll be here,” Kenobi said, exuding energy. As always, he seemed—felt—invigorated by a fight. Anakin wondered if he had those frenzied killing moments too. Kenobi hooked his lightsaber to his belt and jogged toward the plaza, where they’d set up a landing area. “Time for reinforcements, supplies, and perhaps my new Padawan.”

  Anakin’s stomach sank a little. Dead weight. It distracted him from his brush with darkness—not darkness, no—and he seized it. A change of problem really was as good as a rest. “This isn’t the time or the place to train a Padawan, Master. They’re a liability.”

  “Oh,
I don’t know.” Kenobi picked up speed. He broke into a steady run and pulled ahead. “You weren’t. Most of the time, anyway …”

  “Most?”

  “The best way to learn is on the job, after all. You should ask Master Yoda for your own Padawan, Anakin. You have a lot to teach. I really think you should.”

  “No, thanks.” Anakin glanced at Rex and raised an eyebrow to Kenobi’s back. The captain shrugged. “I’ll teach when I think I’ve got experience worth passing on. And a learner would slow me down. We don’t have the luxury of time at the moment.”

  Anakin could have sworn Rex was amused. He couldn’t see his face behind that T-shaped visor, but he noticed a slight dip of the chin and felt his mood in the Force. Then the man gave him a discreet thumbs-up.

  Anakin winked. Thanks, Rex.

  The gunship touched down between two cannon emplacements, and the ramp went down. But no fresh clone troopers disembarked, or even supply droids steering fully-laden repulsors and ammunition crates.

  A little female Togruta stepped onto the plaza instead. A tiny girl. A child.

  Kenobi stood transfixed. “What’s that youngling doing here? Where’s the ship? Where’s Hunter?”

  The little Togruta drew herself up to her full height—which wasn’t saying much—and craned her neck to look up at Kenobi. “Master Yoda was worried that you hadn’t reported in, and he couldn’t reach you, so he sent me with a message.”

  “Sent you?” Kenobi said. “So where’s the cruiser? Where are our reinforcements? Our support?”

  “The ship dropped me off. Master Yoda wants you to return to the Temple right away. There’s an emergency.”

  “Funny, we’ve got one of those too, in case you hadn’t noticed.” Anakin gestured over his shoulder at the palls of smoke still rising into the air. He didn’t dare look at Rex in case the dismay rising in his throat was contagious. After the blissful relief of the droid retreat, the realization that they were still under siege slapped him back hard. There was no end in sight, no resupply, no comm to Padmé to let her know he was fine. “Are you telling me they never got our signals asking for help?”