//------------------------------// // 16: The Rescue (II) // Story: Empire and Rebellion // by Snake Staff //------------------------------// “Celestia’s bloody arse!” Twilight swore as she saw an Imperial shuttle easing itself onto the damaged central landing pad. “What?” a man looked at her. “Nothing!” she said hastily, regretting her unguarded moment. Quickly, she gathered herself. “Get back!” she ordered the escapees. “Retreat!” Many of the humans were already doing so, running back the way they had come. Some were taking cover throughout the entrance hall, others were rushing about looking for some sort of weapon. The difference between those that were experienced fighters and the civilian sympathizers was immediately obvious. Their leader, thankfully, seemed to fall into the former category. “Everyone grab whatever you can find!” Sylkes was yelling over the whine of the shuttle’s engines and general pandemonium. “Henman, Yules, raid the lockers down the secondary access corridor and see if you can find any blasters! Raider, Ectra, head back down the detention block and get the shivs! Everyone else stay low and don’t give them a target!” Twilight grabbed his shoulder. “Can you shoot?” she asked the man. “You insulting me or something? Of course I can!” The alicorn took her spare DC-17 pistol from its holster and pressed it into his hands. “Then take this.” “Thanks,” he tested the thing’s weight. “There any more of you around here?” “No,” Twilight shook her head. “Just me and my little friend.” Sylkes blinked. “You mean you’re trying to mount a prison break from an Imperial facility with just you and a little lizard?!” “He’s not a lizard!” “Whatever,” he shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. Look: what is your plan for getting us out of here?” “Well I had a speeder parked in the south forest…” Twilight trailed off, remembering which way the strafing gunship had turned its guns. “Emphasis on “had”.” “You didn’t have any other means of escape?” he looked aghast. “Well… no,” she admitted. Sylkes sized her up. “You’re a civvy, aren’t you?” “You mean civilian?” “You’re a civvy,” he declared. “Figures. Only the romantic idiots go in without backup.” “Hey!” she bristled. “In case you’ve forgotten, I got you out of your prison.” “And right into Imperial guns!” he shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. Win or lose, I’m not going back to that cell.” “Well, I think-” “Rebel scum!” a loud, powerful voice interrupted the alicron. Peering carefully through the still-open door, Twilight could see a quartet of Imperial Stormtroopers in their signature white armor. They clutched their standard E-11 blaster rifles, aimed carefully into the open prison entrance. Standing in their center was another man in a dark uniform, with armor fixed over his chest and an open-faced helmet atop his head. That man held a strange weapon that Twilight couldn’t identify, though from his general appearance and demeanor she guessed that he was the Imperial Security Bureau man she had been expecting. “You are trapped!” the ISB Agent continued loudly. “Your vehicle is already destroyed, your escape plan in ashes! Even now there are hundreds of troopers and starfighters on their way to crush your attempted insurrection! Surrender yourselves now, and perhaps it will go better for you!” “Not happening, Imperial!” one man stuck his head out and shouted back. “You and your bucketheads can take your mercy and shove it up your-” There was loud blast, and the man toppled backwards, the blackened hole in his head mercifully obscured from Twilight, who still covered her mask’s mouthpiece as though she might vomit. Outside, the ISB man lowered his strange, still-smoking gun. “So be it,” he said, making an almost lazy gesture with two fingers. “Take them.” As one, the four Stormtroopers charged, firing wildly as they did. Red blaster bolts exploded throughout the prison’s entranceway, showering those who remained there in wild rains of painful sparks. Twilight even saw one man hastily patting his jumpsuit sleeve down to put out the fire that had ignited. She stuck her arm around the corner and fired her remaining pistol, but missed badly and ducked back to avoid their retaliation. At that moment, Twilight found herself wishing she had purchased some thermal detonators, even if they were really expensive. The powerful grenades would have come in handy right about then. Then the Stormtroopers flooded through the entranceway and all thought was forgotten. Twilight shot nearly point-blank at the first man to cross the threshold, but her aim was off and it was only a glancing hit on the back of his armor. The Stormtrooper fell forwards, losing his grip on his weapon as he did so. Twilight leveled her pistol at him, but the man twisted nimbly on the ground and caught her legs with his own. He shoved, and the alicorn came crashing down hard onto the durasteel floor. Her cushioned armor absorbed the worst of it, but the impact rattled Twilight long enough for the Stormtrooper to draw a knife from his belt and throw himself on top of her. She caught his arms in her own, though her pistol clattered to the floor in the process. It became a contest of strength, with the Imperial struggling to push the point of his knife down onto her heart and alicorn trying to throw him off. He was bigger than her, but she did have the benefits of magic boosting her strength. For some seconds it was a stalemate, the combatants appearing to almost be still as their locked arms quivered and strained against one another. In the end, the contest was never decided. A man in a jumpsuit jammed an improvised shiv into the weak spot near the rear of the trooper’s knee. He cried out in pain, and Twilight took advantage of the moment to throw him off. Seizing her pistol in one hand, she fired a blaze of shots directly into the Stormtrooper’s chest at point-blank range. His breastplate blackened and full of smoking holes, the Imperial slumped back against the wall. Panting from the effort, Twilight forced herself to sit up. The combat had mostly moved beyond the entrance hall, but she did see another Stormtrooper wrestling with one of the rebel women across the room. The man who had intervened to help the princess was already running across the room to join the fray, shiv in hand. Before he could arrive, the Imperial threw the woman to the ground and followed with two quick shots to her chest. The Stormtrooper had no chance to relish his victory, with the snarling escapee throwing himself onto the trooper’s side. He drove his shiv into the gap in the trooper’s shoulder joint, drawing blood and a brief grunt of pain. The Stormtrooper Corps were not known for accepting weaklings, however, and he immediately rallied. A white-armored fist swung around to punch the escapee about the face, audibly breaking the man’s nose. As the rebel staggered back, clutching his bleeding face, the Imperial brought up his blaster rifle with one hand. With characteristic precision, the Stormtrooper executed the former prisoner with three shots to the abdomen. The trooper made to aim his gun at Twilight as well, but before he had the chance she’d drawn a bead on him and fired. Five blaster shots took the man in the head and chest, and he too collapsed to the floor in a heap. Now sweating and flush with adrenaline, Twilight pushed her way back to her feet. The room around her was littered with corpses of rebel and Imperial alike, with nothing moving. Frantically she scanned the bodies, but to her immense relief she saw that Spike was not among them. Just the thought made her feel a little guilty, but she reasoned that it wasn’t a bad thing to value the lives of your friends especially. Further in, she could hear the sounds of blasterfire and muffled shouts, so she gripped her pistol tightly and moved to head back and support- “Hello there.” The alicorn jerked her head back around. Striding into the prison facility as casually as if it were a simple stroll through the park was the man in the ISB uniform. The strange rifle he carried had transformed somehow, becoming an elongated electrostraff. Yellow charge crackled on both ends, and he brandished it in front of himself with a confident smile. “You’re the one responsible for this, I take it?” he asked her. Twilight didn’t bother wasting time by responding. She brought up her DC-17 pistol in both hands and opened fire immediately. Blue blaster bolts soared through the air at the Imperial, promising death. But the man was fast: the moment she had begun to raise her weapon, he had moved. Crouched low as he ran, the blasterfire passed harmlessly over his helmeted head. He swung the staff at her, and though Twilight was backpedaling a section of its pole crashed into her pistol. The force of it tore the weapon from her grasp and sent it skittering across the floor. He followed up with a powerful kick to the alicorn’s chest that toppled her over backwards. “Yes, you’re a bold little pest to come here alone. Who are you beneath that mask, I wonder?” he held his staff out again and smirked. “We’ll find out soon enough, won’t we?” While he was blathering, Twilight took the opportunity to seize a smoke grenade from belt. While once again mourning her decision not to purchase expensive thermal detonators, she cast the small ovoid directly at her own feet. An enormous cloud of grey smoke seemed to spring into being all at once, obscuring everything. In less than a second even the ISB agent looming over here faded into nothing. Twilight immediately rolled backwards as best she could. She registered the sound of metal striking metal and the crackle of electricity the half a second later. In the haze she couldn’t see where her pistol had gone, but she vaguely remembered the location of one of Stormtroopers she had shot. She tried to rise, but stumbled almost immediately over one the corpses littering the ground and hit the floor with a pained grunt. The sound of footsteps became louder. Scrambling and crawling as best she could in the grey cloud – she swore that she would get a better helmet if she survived this, one with a full-spectrum visor in the eyepieces – Twilight made her way towards where she best recalled the trooper being. She could already see the smoke around her beginning to fade, swept away out the door or into the ventilation system. At last, she reached the white-armored corpse. The man’s E-11 blaster rifle was clutched firmly in his right hand in a literal death grip. Twilight grabbed it and pulled with all her strength. The dead trooper’s fingers made some very unpleasant crunching noises that the alicorn would have found quite nauseating had she the time to consider then. Instead, she brought the blaster rifle up to her chest, aimed, and fired at the vague silhouette that was becoming visible through the fog. The weapon felt oversized and clunky in her relatively small hands, being sized for a male human of larger build. Further, it lacked the enchantments that granted her own pistols an edge in accuracy. The three shots she fired went wide, with only one even slightly clipping the armor on the Imperial’s chest. That didn’t slow him down in the slightest. The ISB man was on her the moment she gave away her location, jabbing with one electrified end of his staff weapon. It scraped along the armor of Twilight’s right forearm, releasing thousands of volts into the limb. Her nerves went wild and her grip went slack, the E-11 going as easily as it had. Not one to be deterred so easily, the princess slugged him in the gut as hard as she could with her left hand, eliciting a pained groan. Almost simultaneously, she headbutted the agent with her armored skull. Two helmeted heads meet with a painful-sounding crack, and both combatants stumbled backwards in a daze. The trained military man recovered first. The Imperial slammed the blunt center section of his staff into Twilight face with enough force to crack her mask and smash a good deal of the cartilage in her nose. Before she had any chance to recover, he lashed out with a low, sweeping kick that took the alicorn’s legs out from under her. He didn’t even wait for her to hit the ground before following up, jamming one crackling end of the staff hard into her abdomen. Tens of thousands of volts of electricity flowed freely throughout the princess’ body. Her limbs and body went into wild spasms as her nervous system was overloaded. Twilight could neither move nor even think properly. Her body was going haywire around her, and she hadn’t even the concentration to summon up some magic that might save her. No coherent thought could take shape in her mind during those few seconds, but her grey matter was functional enough to flood her fuddled brain with one disturbing concept: failure. And then there was a loud noise, a red flash overhead, and the flow electricity halted as suddenly as it had begun. The princess, addled and limp as she was, had enough left in her that her eyes could follow the ISB man as he abruptly ceased his attack on her and ducked low. Red blasts of energy passed over him. Twilight could hear noises from both the Imperial and the direction the blaster bolts were coming from, but in her semi-conscious state could not make any sense of them. The Imperial quickly rolled backwards and was soon after lost to her sight. Spike, breathing heavily from unaccustomed exertion that came with piling onto a pair of Imperial Stormtroopers with little more than his own claws and teeth for weapons, rushed forward as quickly as he could manage. Twilight was laying there, sprawled out on the floor and visibly smoking in some spaces, and the dragon feared the worst. Mouthing a silent prayer to all the gods and spirits he could think of, he placed two clawed fingers across her neck. To his infinite relief, he almost immediately felt a wild and powerful pulse surging through his friend’s body. “Hey!” he called back to the humans who had chased away the ISB agent with their stolen blasters. “She’s still alive!” There were only five humans left now of the original fourteen escapees. Imperial Stormtroopers, even outnumbered and in close confines, were quite deadly. Four were men and one, clinging to a partner with blaster wound through her thigh, was a woman. “Give her here,” said the man called Sylkes. He slipped one arm underneath Twilight’s gut and, with a heave, managed to throw the princess’ limp form over his shoulders. “Careful with her!” Spike protested as the human stumbled slightly under her weight. “Just move!” he practically shouted back. “We take that shuttle now or we’re all dead!” That, Spike decided as he and all the other burst out into the courtyard at a breakneck pace, was a very good point. The whine of the Lambda’s engines grew louder almost as soon as the rebel escapees emerged from the prison building. With an energy born of desperation and adrenaline, the six raced headlong across the damaged landing pad towards the ship. Spike was even on all fours, deeply ingrained dragon instincts driving him to this desperate measure. The still-open boarding ramp tempting them with the prospect of escape, they neglected to pay as much attention to their surroundings as perhaps might have been prudent. There was yet another loud noise, and the man at the rear of their party screamed and fell, a hole burned through his back. A quick glance told Spike the Imperial was now crouched behind the corner of one building, his strange weapon a rifle again. He fired another shot, but it went wide this time and exploded against the permacrete behind them. The four remaining humans returned fire with stolen Stormtrooper rifles and the pistol Twilight had given Sylkes. Their shots were clumsy and ill-aimed, but they did force the man to put his head back down for the moment. The first of the rebels reached shuttle’s boarding ramp just as it was beginning to retract. That man was lucky and unburdened by the weight of others, racing up the closing thing easily enough. For Sylkes and the other man supporting an injured comrade, their entrance was a much closer thing. Spike, the smallest and slowest of the survivors, had to make a flying leap. He just barely caught the ramp’s edge, his claws alone saving him from falling right back off. Adrenaline-fueled saw him hoisted up and inside at the very last second. For a moment, Spike simply sat there, panting. He could see Twilight, rather carelessly depositing on the passenger bay’s floor, being inexpertly tended to by the other injured woman. The three remaining men could not be seen, but the sound of a blaster shot and a body hitting the floor from the direction of the cockpit answered that question. “If you want to live, you’ll drive this shuttle and drive it right the kriffing hell now!’ Very shortly thereafter, Spike felt the spacecraft lift off underneath him.