Chapter Text
Hera Syndulla had long since trained herself not to recoil from the flicker of laser cannons out in the void, even if they were coming her way. A long military career had seen to that. Nor did she flinch when a nearby vessel took hits – in fact, it took a pretty brutal impact to her own ship to dent her composure. No hit had done so for a long time.
She could still wince at what these particular flickers and explosions signified, however. There weren’t enough of them, and that told her that Hux’s careful deployment had done its job.
Hera’s squadrons had attacked fiercely, assisted by long-range fire from a handful of her fleet’s ships. They had hit the haulers hard after they came into range, but the escort ships and an outsized swarm of TIEs had kept them from doing more than superficial damage. Hera’s squadrons had outclassed them - her pilots always did, though the power disparity between a modern X-Wing and TIE wasn’t what it had been when she flew the Ghost.
Hux had committed at least four wings to the fight, including Interceptors and the new Dagger variant. Unless Poe and his own units could intercept the mystery cargo in-atmosphere, Stolan was going to get his delivery.
Well, there was nothing Hera could do about it now without risking her own units. She tapped a button on the console before her, summoning the image of her son. “Jacen, break off now.”
“Falling back now,” he said. In the flickering holo he looked disappointed, but he covered it up quickly and promptly enacted her order, gathering up his questions before the Ghost led them all racing back. Hera felt a minor blush of pride at her son’s level head. He’d had time to cultivate it, of course. He was older than Kanan had been when-
No distractions. No old griefs just now. She muffled the thoughts and spoke again to Jacen, plus her other squadron leaders. “Report once you’re inside the shields. Keep those formations tight, don’t get tempted to go back.”
“Copy. Wouldn’t want to cheat Poe of his hunting.”
That earned a muted chuckle across the channel and around Hera, so she let it pass without any remark. Jacen knew the score, and was doing his best to leaven the mood. Everyone knew Poe and his squadrons would have a similarly hard time going up against those transports. Behind the humour, Jacen would be grinding his teeth, wishing he’d been able to do more to alleviate his friend’s struggle.
Hera knew the lure of such thoughts. She tried not to focus on things she couldn’t influence, instead monitoring her son’s return flight. Hux didn’t send much of a pursuit after the sortie, instead devoting his spare fighters to escort the transports, but in the circumstances that just fed her worries. He’s willing to spend an awful lot of TIEs to get these assets to the surface. She regarded the holo display grimly, noting the tally of kills her units had claimed. And two frigates beside.
Numa’s wavering image appeared in front of Hera. She already looked strained, and hands moved in and out of the picture, armouring the commander. No way that could be a good sign. “Hera, I’ve got your message; my people are relaying it to Commander Dameron. But there’s something else – can you see anything unusual around the First Order lines, or behind them?”
Frowning, Hera shook her head. “Not with this cloud cover, but we’ve had eyes on the siege lines all this time and there’s nothing unusual that we could see.” Hera’s brow furrowed in unease as she surveyed her opposite number. That made her expression a mirror of Numa’s. “What’s happened?”
“That’s the worst part of it,” Numa said, her voice low. She accepted a blaster rifle, clipping its lanyard to her chestplate with one hand. The other gripped the weapon tightly. “We don’t know yet.”
Deep down in the city’s underground levels it was cool, and normally Finn would have welcomed this reprieve from the surface humidity. Now, however, he felt uncomfortably enclosed.
Ki’rii’s golden eyes scanned the ceiling pensively. “And once again, we’re underground during a battle. This is becoming a bit too regular for me.” No doubt she was thinking back to Crait, among other tight scrapes. She glanced sidelong at Finn. “Are we sure this is the level? I mean, assuming we know what we’re looking for at all.”
“Does seem to be this level,” Rose said, eyeing a seismic scanner she’d borrowed. “Though I can’t be sure yet.”
“I just know it’s this one,” Finn said, not sure how he could be so certain. There was a tremor underfoot, but he couldn’t tell just how close it was. His certainty came from somewhere less tangible. Ki’rii shot him a look which he caught out of the corner of his eye, but she moved on in step with him.
Other soldiers were falling in, including some local engineers with datapads and more advanced scanners, who hastened to join him. A Rylothian NCO spoke for them.
“Sergeant Nethimil, Captain,” he said, saluting.
“What’s the word?” Finn asked.
“Scanners confirm something incoming. We think there are multiple objects,” the Twi’lek told him, lekku quivering as he shifted his weight. “Not sure what.”
Rose pressed him. “What seems likely to you, if not animal life?”
Nethimil gestured to another local soldier, this one an engineer. “Well, there are mining sites in the general area.” The Twi’lek was nervous, evidently thinking hard. Finn had the sense he was resisting the urge for his eyes to dart everywhere. He visibly gathered himself, and addressed Finn again. “In theory you could retrofit some mining craft to act as weapons, even transports. Perhaps the enemy found some that we missed, or brought here without us seeing. But sir, I just can’t be sure-”
He was right, as it turned out. But from the way it started, it seemed to Finn like the enemy had sent some sort of burrowing missile to them. The houses, offices, shops or whatever else they were, built into the outer wall, burst apart. The rear walls shattered, bringing down the ceilings which then exploded outwards too. People vanished in the storm of fragments, their cries lost to the roar – not just a roar of debris, but a roar of engines, topped off with a shrill chorus of shrieking from drills and rock-saws.
Finn rocked back on his heels, throwing up an arm to cover his face as the wave of dust swept out to either side of him and debris pattered off his armour. He grabbed Rose with the other, and felt the other Scrappers bunch up either side of them, LM stepping in front to put his armoured bulk between them and the onslaught. Finn looked out from behind the droid, risking a peek into the clouds of dust. That was when he saw the first machine surge out of the gloom.
At first, all he caught was a thicket of spinning blades and drills, still spitting chunks of rock and ferrocrete and spraying dust. Then its full length came into view, a cylinder of heavy armour plating. Seven more followed, all of them tearing and gouging explosively into the city at intervals.
Some of the machines kept coming, smashing into other buildings. People vanished beneath rubble, or under the armoured tracks, with hideous screams cut horribly short. There were sprays of blood, metres long, left on walls. Dust was everywhere, blinding, choking.
But most horrifying of all was the realisation which now sank in. This section of interior wall, over a hundred metres across and a hundred below ground, had just become a second front in the battle. Finn stumbled back, trying to call the nearby units together, to get any civilians back behind the line he was trying to form. He could just about hear others, in amongst the cacophony, bellowing the same orders.
It did little good. The Resistance troops were still reeling when blast panels levered open with the growling of servos, and Stormtroopers leapt out. Then the real killing started.
Rey knew that something had gone wrong, without any help from the comm. It hit her like the shockwave from an explosion. Without any warning, there was suddenly terror boiling up from the depths of the city, so sudden and so potent that she recoiled, the Falcon faltering in its manoeuvre as she flinched.
Next to her, Chewbacca growled sharply as a TIE Dagger nearly got too close. Impacts on the the Falcon’s shields juddered both Rey and her copilot in their seats. A curse from Tannel also hissed in her ear.
“Sorry,” Rey breathed to them both, struggling to get the words around the hammering pulse in her throat. She fought to regain her focus, unloading with the prow cannons as she tried to get free. The Falcon slewed to one side, giving Tannel his shot from the belly turret. The Dagger’s triangular wings spiralled earthward, but Rey felt little relief. Kriff kriff kriff. Breaths issued through her gritted teeth like steam leaving some kind of overworked machine. None of this was very Jedilike, but she needed to get clear long enough to think and speak.
Unsurprisingly, Poe was already on the comm. “Captain, what’s going on? Comm’s blowing up here, something going on under the city. I haven’t got time for-”
“Poe,” Rey interrupted, forgetting rank in her urgency. Something had clarified for her, amid the tumult far below. “I need to get down there. It’s Phasma.”
Poe didn’t hesitate, but she heard the frustration in his barked retort. “Permission granted. Go!”
Ducking into cover, Finn had a moment to take in the situation. He didn’t find much to like.
Just to start with, he couldn’t see much. Many of the lights had gone out when the First Order had broken in, and even as Finn stared up at the vaulted ceiling, beyond the roofs of buildings, more went out. The emergency lights which ostensibly replaced the mains gave only spotty coverage, often flickering; the enemy were probably severing power conduits as they came on. Worse, smoke was rising to blot out even those.
Poor as the visibility was, the state of the troops around Finn worried him. The Scrappers had escaped serious harm, but it looked like everyone but Rose had cuts and bruises under their coat of dust. Nyzar and LM’s heavy armour was scorched, and Ki’rii’s helmet had been winged by a plasma bolt, a smoking trench running along one cheek guard.
Plenty of the Resistance troops around them had been less lucky. The regular soldiers must have been easier to identify in the murk, because the Stormtroopers had targeted them first. Finn could see bodies from the alleyway where he’d taken shelter. He didn’t know how many soldiers had died so far, but he’d guess several dozen at least. He wasn’t ready to think about civilian casualties.
Where the hell had these machines come from? How had they made their way so far under the plain and avoided detection? What had been missed? The Resistance hadn't seen the First Order ferry anything down except for soldiers and standard military vehicles, and Yendor hadn’t reported any mining machines out in the wilderness.
Those were questions which could haunt Finn for the rest of his life, but if he didn’t focus now, that life would be measured in seconds. He clipped a torch to his blaster, then looked to his squad, hardening his expression. “On my mark.” He counted off three seconds with the fingers gripping the barrel of his blaster, then lunged back toward the enemy.
Rounding the corner meant that suddenly, the sounds of gunfire and screaming were much sharper.
It took him a moment to realise just who he was shooting at. Definitely the enemy – the stark white armour made that clear despite the poor light – but after the first target went down, another came forward, raising a thick betaplast shield. Finn’s next shot took a chunk out of it, as did Ki’rii’s, but neither the man behind the shield, who raised his own gun.
Time seemed to slow. That weapon didn’t have the typical round barrel of a blaster rifle. It wasn’t a single barrel of any shape. Instead, it was a cluster of serried rectangular openings.
Recognition flashed through Finn’s mind. He seized Ki’rii and pulled her back into cover, thudding into Nyzar and LM-276 as the enemy pulled his trigger. There was a crack and rasping scream from the gun, and a blizzard of razor-sharp metal, glowing electric blue, sang through the air where they’d just been.
“Karking flechettes?!” Ki’riii exclaimed, her blue face paler than usual. Her pupils were huge amid the red of her eyes, fixed on the marks scored in the stone. Some gleamed, marking where the metal shards had become embedded.
Finn knew what that meant, and the shields. Now, glancing out from behind the wall, he saw a subtly different pattern of armour in the front ranks to the regular Stormtroopers behind them, the plating heavier and marked with navy blue. “First Order Marines,” he breathed. These were assault specialists, trained and equipped to both lead and repel boarding actions in space battles, and armed with those horrific flechette launchers for close-quarters fighting. Trust Phasma to repurpose them with this kind of cruel cunning.
They were coming up fast, readying grenades to throw. Finn roared to LM-276, who ducked out of cover first, his heavy repeater roaring to life and spraying left to right. Finn followed its arc with his blaster, mowing down Marines who’d been knocked off-balance. Nyzar did the same, while Ki’rii and Rose sent their own grenades sailing overhead, detonating among the enemy ranks and hurling them away.
The Scrappers were out in the relative open again, but the Stormtroopers were already regrouping, and within seconds they were withdrawing, pursued by the sinister flight of flechette rounds. They found more of the Resistance, hunkered down behind any useable cover.
“The hell do we do, captain?” one sergeant asked, teeth bared in a desperate grimace.
Finn ejected a spent power pack. “We get everyone back,” he said. Reflexively he returned the pack to his belt, to be recharged later on. “Civilians to the stairwells. Get them the hell out of here.” He slammed a new pack into place. “Everyone with a blaster digs in. Is there a store here? If so, bring up the repeater cannons!”
“We’ve got them!” came an unexpected voice, not just over the comm but close by, behind Finn.
He turned. “Commander?”
Numa was coming towards him, surrounded by Rylothian soldiers. “Archex is disentangling himself from the fighting up top, Rey’s coming back down from the air battle.” That didn’t sound ideal, but right now, Finn wasn’t going to argue. “Until then, I thought I’d step in.”
Numa’s soldiers advanced past Finn, going steadily, confidently. The repeater turrets were brought up as promised, engineers setting them in place. The sight of them did a lot to steady Finn’s nerves; those weapons picked a ferocious punch, enough to knock any infantry unit he knew of right off their feet.
He took stock, feeling the tension in his chest ease a little. The Scrappers, along with the other survivors of the initial attack, were drawing a breath, replacing spent power packs and grabbing new weapons.
“They made a good show,” Numa growled, “but unless they’ve got something very special up their sleeve then-”
A triple-flicker of heavy repeater beams speared out of the murk, punched through several soldiers in front of Numa and hurled the Twi’lek nearest her screaming into a wall.
Everyone dropped to their knees, firing bursts but not seeming to hit anything in the murk. The enemy returned their fire tenfold, and Finn’s world shrank as the Resistance positions were swallowed up by explosions of dust.
“Hold!” Numa called. Undaunted, she kept firing, inspiring those around her to hold their ground.
Sighting along his blaster, Finn saw a bright light. Something luminous. No, he realised, that wasn’t right. That wasn’t glowing; instead it gleamed amid the smoke, incredibly reflective. Now he could see it moving, and it was advancing at a steady pace. A march, confirmed by the heavy tramping which rose out of the gloom now.
“Dark Troopers!” came a yell from ahead of him.
“Shit,” Ki’rii spat, and even as the Resistance repeaters opened up, Finn realised that there the enemy had one infantry unit whose resilience he hadn’t considered. Red light erupted out of the smog, tearing into the newly placed turrets even as those started to fire, and everything went to hell.