Live Through This

Chapter One: The Fourth Moon of Wrari

Rain falls in sheets over the jungle moon, and it's streaked with ash and smoke. It slicks the blackened stone, rinses blood from the charred dead. The capitol city usually smells of spices and engine oil, but tonight it smells of burning wood and blaster fire. Thunder rolls over the city and Konni Nafai rolls with it.

Her lightsaber illuminates her surroundings in green, rain clings to her lekku, drips down her face, mixes with the blood that’s not hers. Her robes are heavy, waterlogged, tattered from flame and shrapnel. She can’t see much around her, and the Force only helps so much because most of what she can feel through it is chaos. When they landed on the fourth moon Wrarí, they didn’t know they’d be walking into a slaughter. But they were now in the thick of it, and it was Konni’s responsibility to get them through it.

The battalion advances, mud rising nearly to their knees, armor smeared with blood and carbon scoring. Konni orders them forward, not even knowing if they can hear or see her in this rain. Somewhere to Konni’s right Starlight glides through the carnage like a wraith in the rain. Elegant, precise, too calm. Her blue blade dances in wide, brutal arcs, and it's all Konni can see of the child she brought into a warzone. Too young, Konni thinks. Too confident. Too fearless.

Just a teenager, and here she was, ankle-deep in corpses. She was still so innocent in so many ways. She clung to Konni like a child to a parent, looked up to her in all things that she did. And lately, that was warfare. And Konni was coming to realize that Starlight was a prodigy.

Konni’s gut twists.

She should’ve left her behind. On the cruiser. On Coruscant. Anywhere but here. But Starlight was a commander now under the GAR rules. No one was sitting this one out. No thought was given to the fact that Padawans were by and large children. In the eyes of the republic they, and all Jedi, were beyond mortal. And it sickened Konni to see Starlight living up to that reputation, a blur of blue light and glimpses of a skeletal face slicing through droids.

A blaster bolt snaps past Konni’s ear cone, searing the thought away.

She lifts a hand and catches the next barrage with the Force, bends it back toward the half-ruined towers ahead where the enemy is posted up. Droids fall like puppets cut loose. Their twisted metal limbs twitch in the rain like insects drowning. Konni, Starlight, and the 413th are within sight of taking the city. They’ve already been at this for six hours, as they navigated the flooded city streets from where they landed on the outskirts. She doesn’t know how much more of this they can take, but the end is finally within sight.

A groan cuts through the downpour.

From behind the bones of what was once a church in the center of town, an AAT tank emerges. Cannons swiveling, red optics cutting through the dark. Konni curses.

“Down!” She shouts, and the word isn't even out of her mouth before the guns fire and the street explodes around them. Mud, bodies, fire, all lifted skyward in a single monstrous blast. Konni hits the ground hard. A sharp ache blooms across her ribs. Smoke rolls in, thick and choking. She pushes herself up, takes stock of her surroundings. She can't see anything, but the force tells her that the tide just turned, and they are no longer close to taking this city. They hadn't expected or planned for the tank. They should have, but didn't. They were tired, starved, and their numbers severely diminished. She can already tell that the tank took out several more.

Her ears are ringing and she can barely make out what the person beside her is screaming about. As the smoke lifts, she sees that one of her troopers is pinned beneath rubble, his lungs flooding with rain. Commander Hops is begging for her help. General, please, you have to do something. She can hardly hear his words, but she can tell by the tone of his voice that this is a desperate plea.

Hops is a reserved man, usually. It's almost more unnerving to see him this way than it is to see the young trooper’s head thrashing about in the floodwaters. She draws on the force and pushes the rubble from his body and, oh gods, there's no hope for this man. His brothers pull him above the water but his chest is crushed. He has minutes left, and Konni decides to let him die in the company of his family rather than ordering them to abandon him and follow her.

She and Starlight can take out the tank.

She rises, leaps.

Rain and smoke part as the Force hurls her over the rubble, and she lands on top of a low building. Starlight is already in the thick of it, dancing through the rain with what looks like seven or eight troopers behind her, drawing fire away from the rest of the battalion. The tank is firing at her, and hitting only stone buildings, so far at least. Reckless girl, Konni thinks as she jumps down and activates her saber.

“I'm going to take that thing apart, Starlight!” Konni yells over the sound of thunder and blasterfire.

“Master?” Starlight shouts back.

“Just cover me!”

Konni moves. She lands on the tank’s hull, saber slicing through durasteel. She has no plan beyond destruction. This is day three of no sleep and a lot of stims, she too wired, too angry. She rips at the hull. The droid piloting the behemoth dies before it sees her. A hatch bursts open. A B2 battle droid lunges at her. It grabs her arm and she can feel metal fingers grinding bone. She twists in its grasp, aware that it's already broken her arm and if she isn't careful it will pull it all the way off. Luckily, it isn't her saber arm that it's crushing. She plunges her blade into the droid's face and screams through gritted teeth as the thing goes limp and she can pull her arm from its claw. She realizes as she catches her breath that the tank is no longer powered. Her wild cuts into the hull apparently worked.

Konni’s boots hit the churned, soaked mud as she lands, her injured arm throbs with every movement. She doesn’t have time to assess the damage. She tucks it against herself and illuminates her surroundings in the green light of her blade. The 413th had reformed their line behind the tank's smoking ruin, using its husk for cover.

“Move up! Suppressive fire!” barks Commander Hops from somewhere behind her.

Konni barely hears it over the thunder.

What remains of the battalion moves with practiced efficiency now, pushing through the eastern avenue toward the inner courtyard of the town center, just beyond the ruined church. The remaining B1s and B2s have dug in ahead, the last line of defense before the command spire. Konni limps to the forward line, adrenaline suppressing the pain long enough to lift her saber again.

Then the second tank rolls into view.

“New contact, grid mark Echo-Seven!” calls Hops, his voice hoarse. “Cover the Jedi!”

Konni swears. "Starlight!"

Already moving, the girl doesn’t respond. Her blade flashing in the near dark as she leaps onto a crumbled skybridge above the tank’s path. The 413th lays down suppressing fire, but the tank isn’t made of soft hide. Its sloped armor shrugs off their DC-15s like rain off a leaf. It advances, turret swiveling for a shot that would rip the front line apart.

“Hops! Get a squad to flank that thing!” Konni shouts over her shoulder.

“Negative, General,” Hops responds. “We’re cut off left. Alley’s collapsed. No way to circle.”

Konni looks to the rooftops. The angles are wrong. No climb, no clear jump, except the one Starlight's already made.

Starlight lands atop the tank like a lightning bolt, saber slicing straight into the upper blaster housing. Sparks shoot skyward. The main cannon jerks, its aim spoiled, the shot hitting empty air as the energy bleeds sideways in a blinding arc. All Konni can see now is the glow of Starlight’s blade as it cuts just as wildly as Konni had when she’d taken out the first tank. She’s filled with panic, thinking of the droid that has just broken her arm, and how risky that move was for her, a grown adult and a Jedi. She follows Starlight’s path, aiming to bypass the droids and jump down onto the thing, but before she gets there she sees a violent spray of sparks.

Konni feels the shift immediately. The droids beyond the tank falter, as if something’s momentarily off. Shots are going wide, all organization is lost, a mental ripple, a disturbance in the net of droid coordination.

The tactical droid.

Starlight’s blade goes out and she emerges from the dark, soaked in black oil and rain, her gaunt face dripping with blood. “It’s done!” she yells. “Tactical droid’s out!”

And just like that, the remaining B1s and B2s begin to hesitate. Their fire becomes staggered. A few B1s twitch oddly, some walking straight into walls or turning their heads at awkward angles as their network collapses into chaos. They aren’t anything without the tactical droid, especially in the rain and smoke and dark.

Konni exhales hard. Her arm throbs. Her ribs feel broken. But the battle is turning.

“Push forward!” she roars, voice raw. “Take the compound! Leave no comms intact. They do not call reinforcements!”

The 413th surges ahead, carving their way toward the shattered bones of the Separatist command. Behind them, the tanks smolder in the rain. It was over, but for the clean up. The remaining droids are falling with ease, and she tries to breathe as they clear the town square, but she still can’t. Her arm throbs, her heart skips. Their success means nothing right now, especially when she squints through the darkness and sees more broken armor on the ground than droid parts.

Someone gathers her from the flooded street and ushers her into what used to be the Separatist compound. It’s one of her troopers, but she doesn’t know which one. She realizes that this is her Jedi control faltering, she was drawing so heavily on her connection to the force to her through the battle, and now that it’s over she’s in a daze. She sits on a supply crate and it takes her a moment to realize that she’s out of the rain. Starlight is next to her, and Commander Hops sits across from them.

“The trooper–” She begins, before she even realizes she’s asking after him. Why is she doing that? “The one who was drowning?”

“Dead, Sir.” Hops says.

She nods. She knows she should be focused on what happens next, what the next move is. But she can’t forget the terror she heard in Hops’ voice as he begged her to help. He’s back to his even keel now. Most would probably never guess him to be someone who’d ever cried, felt fear, or mourned. But Konni can still feel that on him. He’s altered in a way that she wonders if he’ll ever heal from. “What was his name?” She asks.

“Bowie, Sir.” He says, “One of my batch.”

“I’m so sorry, Hops.” She says. She usually calls him Commander. He likes order and ceremony. Konni was never much for it, but she can respect his adherence most of the time. On this night though, she can’t be bothered. She doesn’t feel like a Jedi or a General right now. She feels like a wild animal caught in the headlights of an approaching landspeeder.

“Thank you,” he says, and she sees him falter a little bit.

Starlight curls around Konni’s good arm and rests her head on her shoulder. She leans into the girl and in a quiet voice she says to Hops, “I suppose we should work out what happens next,”

He nods, looking downward, exhausted. “Stims, bacta, and then we’ll worry about what happens next. I have men out securing the perimeter. We’re safe for the moment. When the storm breaks, we’ll work on securing the city.”

“Right, when the storm breaks,” Konni says, wondering if that will ever happen, or if the water will continue to rise until it swallows them whole.