by Timothy Zahn
“What are you talking about?” Doriana asked, frowning. “Weren’t you listening back there? You can’t fight in here.” Roshton swiveled his head to look at him. “I thought you just said that to get Binalie off our backs.”
“Absolutely not,” Doriana said. “My position was exactly as stated. We can’t allow the techs to fall into Separatist hands - they know too much about our technology. But neither can we allow the plant to be damaged.”
“So what you’re saying is that I should move out into the open?” Roshton demanded bluntly. “That I should stand there and watch my troops get slaughtered just to buy Binalie time to evac the techs?”
“I’m sorry,” Doriana said in a low, sincere voice. “I know that puts you in an impossible position. But I’m afraid we have no choice.”
“We blasted well do have a choice,” Roshton snapped. “And if you think- ” He paused. “What? All right, put him on.”
“What is it?” Doriana asked.
“Your Jedi’s arrived, along with Binalie’s son,” Roshton said briefly. “Master Tories? Yes, this is Roshton.”
For perhaps half a minute he listened, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. Then, surprisingly, he smiled. “Understood,” he said. “We’ll give it a try. Lieutenant?”
“I’m on it, sir,” the clone trooper said.
Roshton turned back to Doriana. “Maybe we do have a choice,” he said. “Defense line, configure for inverse hailstorm; target on my command. And get these doors open.”
With a ponderous rumble, the heavy doors began to slide slowly to the sides. “Time to get to cover, Doriana,” Roshton said, gesturing to the side. “This way.”
A few seconds later they were crouched behind a large cargo truck parked along the side wall. “What’s going on?” Doriana asked, trying to keep his sudden misgivings out of his voice. This was suddenly not going the way he’d planned. “Won’t this open us up to a full-scale assault?”
“It might,” Roshton agreed. “Or it might let us come up with a different ending for this game.”
That sounded distinctly ominous. “Is this what the Jedi said to do?” Doriana probed carefully.
“No, this part was my idea,” Roshton said. “Master Tories simply reminded me of another of our objectives.” He craned his neck. “There they go.”
Doriana eased an eye around the truck’s push plate. Outside, the C-9979’s heavy clamshell deployment doors were swinging open, the foot ramp starting to slide down toward the ground. In the relative darkness behind the doors, he could see the slightly bulbous nose and blaster cannon of a MTT armored droid transport waiting in the landing pedestal. “Stand by,” Roshton ordered calmly. “Target is starboard laser capacitor.”
Doriana frowned; but before he could ask, the MTT gave a brief snort of cooling system ground vents and began to slide forward toward the ramp.
“Fire,” Roshton said calmly.
And with a thunder of weaponry that echoed deafeningly through the huge room, the clone troopers opened fire.
Doriana squinted into the glare as the hundreds of energy weapons focused their fury on the thick armor behind the MTT’s leftmost blaster cannon ball turret, wincing at the noise and the waves of heat that rolled over him. The MTT’s armor was incredibly thick, he knew, but the transport’s designers could never have anticipated a situation where so much firepower would be focused on such a small spot. The sun-bright glare around the power capacitor began to diffuse outward as the casehardened metal alloy vaporized into superheated plasma-
And barely two seconds into the assault, the Republic weapons burned through the armor to the high-energy capacitor behind it.
The entire left front of the MTT vanished in a gigantic fireball that writhed its way upward to billow across the leading edge of the C-9979’s forward wing. A series of smaller blasts erupted from behind the first as secondary systems went up in a chain reaction. A few seconds later, with an earsplitting scream, the repulsorlifts disintegrated, and the blackened shell that had once been a fully loaded MTT collapsed onto the ramp.
Completely blocking the vehicles waiting behind it.
“That’s it!” Roshton shouted over the pandemonium, a savage grin on his face. “All units withdraw!” He grabbed Doriana’s arm. “Come on, Doriana.”
They didn’t stop running until they were two assembly areas into the plant and the noise outside had faded to a dull roar. “Clever,” Doriana said, breathing hard as Roshton slowed them down to a fast jog. “You block the exit ramp, and they’re stymied until they can clear out the wreckage. But what exactly did it gain you?”
“Options, of course,” Roshton told him, glancing back over his shoulder. Doriana looked, too, to see the clone troopers following in an orderly retreat. “Before we did that, there would have been no way to retreat without bringing the battle into the plant, which you had forbidden us to do. We would have had to stand and die.”
He gestured ahead of them with his blaster. “Now, we should have time to get through that tunnel of Binalie’s and go to ground.” Doriana felt his lip twist. Nine hundred clone troopers, ready and waiting to harass the Separatist army. This was not how it was supposed to have gone. “So what exactly did Tories tell you?”
Roshton threw him a smile. “You’ll see. Come on, and save your breath for running.”
They stood on the hill at the edge of the Binalie estate: Tories, Binalie himself, Doriana, and Commander Roshton, the latter now disguised in civilian clothing. “So that’s it, is it?” Binalie asked.
“For now, yes,” Tories told him, gazing across the grassy strip that lay between them and Spaarti Creations as the pinks and yellows of sunset began to fade from the western sky.
And the shadows from the smoldering hulks of half a dozen AAT battle tanks stretched across the forbidden grassland. “My compliments to your gunners,” he added.
“It wasn’t hard,” Roshton said grimly. “Standard Trade Federation attack procedure always includes throwing a cordon around the target zone. All we had to do was set our ambush and make sure we dropped the ones in the place that would irritate the Cranscoc the most.”
“Yes,” Tories murmured, feeling a twinge of guilt. It had been his idea, and it had been necessary. But he still didn’t much like the fact that he’d deliberately caused distress and discomfort to sentient beings. Especially sentient beings who had nothing to do with the chaos now swirling around them.
“I just hope it works,” Doriana murmured.
“It will,” Tories assured him. “The twillers aren’t even going to be able to relax until those hulks are removed, let alone retool the plant for anything the Separatists want to build in there.”
Roshton grunted. “Let’s hope they don’t figure it out until our reinforcements get here,” he said. “Then we’ll see how good they are.”
“As long as you don’t destroy the plant in the process,” Binalie warned.
“We’ll do what we can,” Roshton promised. “But that’s up to the Separatists now.”
Tories felt his throat tighten, the fading light in the sky mirroring his own darkening mood. Because even if Spaarti survived, the thing he’d feared for so long had already happened.
The war had come to Cartao.
To Be Continued...
From Star Wars Insider 68 (06/07-2003)
11.6.18.15.14.5-1
