Star Wars - A Blaze of Glory Read online

  “Every mercenary wants to be remembered.” Lex “Mad Vornskr” Kempo paused a moment as the jungle browns and greens of Gabredor III rose up toward their diving freighter. With a sardonic smirk, the spacer twisted around in the pilot’s seat and gazed at Brixe.

  “A mercenary doesn’t retire gracefully. There’s no such thing as an Old Mercs Home either. What a real mercenary wants is to go out … in a blaze of glory.”

  “Really?” Brixie Ergo shifted around nervously in one of the acceleration chairs situated behind the co-pilot’s station. Space was tight in the modified Corellian light freighter, especially up front. The craft rattled and shook as the vessel plunged deeper into the planet’s atmosphere. Kempo smiled a toothy, wicked grin.

  “Absolutely.”

  What sounded like a cross between an order and snarl came from the fur-covered being currently occupying the co-pilot’s seat beside Kempo.

  “Leave the rook alone.” Sully Tigereye was a Trunsk, a stout alien species well known for their fighting ability and equally legendary short temper. Bristly brown hairs covered the length of Tigereye’s body except for his face and the palms of his hands. As if emphasizing his displeasure with Kempo, two shiny, sharpened tusks protruded from his lower lip. Brixie recalled stories her parents had told her as a child, about Trunsks being the showpieces of many a carnival show as gladiators and ring fighters.

  If Sully Tigereye had ever been part of such a show in the past, he never let on. What she did know was that he had once been a highly-decorated member of an elite New Republic infiltrator unit. No longer with the New Republic military, he continued to serve with his former colonel in a band of mercenaries called the Red Moons. It was Tigereye who had been appointed as team leader for this mission, and it was Tigereye who had chosen Brixie to come along as combat medic, although it was for a mission that Brixie still did not quite understand. Just sitting close by Lex Kempo and Sully Tigereye made the former medical student uncomfortable, as if she was part of a group she did not truly belong to.

  The mercenaries’ target was a Karazak Slavers Guild operation lurking in the jungle swamps and dense foliage on Gabredor III. Like the few Red Moon operation files she had a chance to study during her training period, any further information on the exact target and their reason for assaulting it would not be explained in detail until they landed. That protected not only the Red Moons, but those who hired them. All of this secrecy just didn’t make any sense to Brixie. What could they hope to accomplish against an entire camp of slavers. Who thought up this brilliant strategy, anyway? Then again, she chided herself — joining a mercenary force like the Red Moons so she could find her parents was not exactly a brilliant strategy either.

  Tigereye continued to berate Lex Kempo. “I didn’t ask her to be part of this team to keep you entertained. Just fly this junk pile, if you don’t mind.”

  Unlike Sully Tigereye, who looked naturally forceful yet showed a surprising concern for others. “Mad Vornskr” Kempo easily looked like he had just fallen out of a grim entertainment holo. He claimed to have served with over a dozen different private armies and militias, even a brief stint in the Imperial Army as a scout, as evident from the customized suit of scout trooper armor he wore. The normally eggshell-white armor pieces had been carefully dulled and therma-painted with a camouflage scheme that matched Gabredor’s jungle environment. Extra holsters and pockets hid a variety of throwing blades, hold-out blasters, power packs, grenades, medpacs, glow rods and other necessities. With his closely-cropped hair, thin blaster scar on his right cheek and gray eyes, Kempo acted a lot like the intimidating walking arsenal he appeared to be. Still, Tigereye had touched a nerve. Kempo turned defensive as the ship shook again.

  “I’m just trying to let our combat medic in on the mysteries of the mere psyche, oh fearless leader.”

  Brixie sensed almost immediately that Tigereye simply hated that expression. The Trunsk settled for turning his baleful face on Kempo. Trunsks were not known for their cordiality, especially under stressful conditions.

  “Can we have a little less talking please?” The fourth member of their group spoke up in a whiny voice. Of all who called themselves members of the Red Moons. Hugo Cutter was the last person Brixie would probably think of as a mercenary. An escapee from a psychotrauma ward maybe, but never a soldier. Cutter’s hair was as wild and unpredictable as the stares that came from his eyes. Before the start of the mission, Lex Kempo had remarked to her that Hugo Cutter had once been enrolled in the prestigious Imperial Engineers Academy, only to be disbarred after he found it more interesting to blow things apart than put them together. Then again, Kempo always did have a knack for exaggeration. Especially when he talked about himself.

  The ship dipped again. Cutter, sitting beside her, inhaled sharply. She reached out a hand to calm him. Cutter reacted by clutching the satchel bag in his lap even tighter.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  “I’m sorry,” she faltered out an apology. “I just thought …”

  “Thought what?” He began to laugh hysterically. “That I would need help from the likes of you?”

  “Don’t knock it,” Kempo murmured quietly with a twisted smile.

  “Quiet. All of you.” Tigereye warned as he checked the pocket navigator he carried in a special pouch as part of his weapons harness. Huge yellow eyes glanced up and caught the reflection of the Human with the unkempt hair in the forward cockpit screen. They locked on Cutter like targeters. “Especially you. Stop fidgeting. We’re almost down.” Cutter’s nervousness was wearing even his own patience thin. Their craft shook again. He closed his eyes tightly.

  “You know how much I hate insertions!”

  “Relax. You clutch those shaped charges any harder and you’re likely to set them off.”

  “Doubtful.” The freighter dipped sharply in the thickening atmosphere of Gabredor III. He gulped. “It takes a detonator firing at triple frequency intervals to properly set off a Mesonics focalized explosive.”

  “I’ll make a note,” the fur-covered Trunsk growled as he glanced over at Kempo. “How much longer ’till we reach the landing point?” Kempo checked the navigational readings as they flashed by almost too quickly for Brixie to keep up. “A few more minutes. Sensor masking is holding up so far. A Z-95 patrol upstairs didn’t even bother to sniff our contrail.”

  “I’ll feel better when we’re down. Brixie, get your gear ready to go.”

  “Right,” she tried to keep her voice steady as she unfastened her restraint harness. The freighter suddenly lost power and began a steep dive. Brixie was immediately thrown into a wailing Cutter, who was positively revolted by her close proximity. Kempo wrestled the controls back. Regaining her footing, Brixie tried to ignore Cutter’s expression and his tightly-closed eyes.

  “What was that?” Tigereye asked.

  Kempo shook his head. All business now, he was fighting to bring the ship back under control. Red lights broke out all over the engineering panels. Alarms hooted nosily. The freighter abruptly rolled right and pitched down hard. Tigereye began flipping switches — the ship’s starboard maneuvering thrusters were not responding.

  Kempo quietly cursed between clenched teeth. “Where did procurement pick up this piece of Corellian crud anyway? I’ve seen better hulks from Socorro!”

  “Can you land?”

  Kempo looked directly at Tigereye. “You want an honest opinion?”

  Brixie could tell that, this time, Kempo was no longer joking. Systems were failing all over the vessel. Beside her, she overheard Cutter whimpering. Some mercenary he made.

  Tigereye unsnapped his own seat belts. “All hands to the lifepod now! This is no drill!”

  The oth
ers spilled out of their chairs, rapidly grabbing equipment and supplies in emergency order and tossing them into the lifepod. For only a moment during the chaos, Brixie found herself watching Lex Kempo almost curiously. The Corellian pathfinder was still standing before the controls of the battered, falling freighter, gesturing with his hands locked together in an odd sort of way. Perhaps it was a ritual known only to spacers and their ships, she thought. The last thing she saw before the interior lights failed was him grinning at her as he usually did. Their fates and the ship’s were about to part ways in a most violent fashion.

  “Hope you signed up for the duration. Lady Brix. From now on. it gets nothing but interesting!”

  Ten thousand meters later. Straight down.

  “You know,” said Hugo Cutter. “If you were Han Solo or Wedge Antilles or any one of a hundred other pilots I know, we wouldn’t be here right now”

  “Shut up,” Lex Kempo snapped back. “I didn’t see you help land the pod.” Of course, it was difficult for the pathfinder to make an argument considering that the Red Moon assault team was dangling inside an escape pod caught in the thick canopy of Gabredor’s jungle.

  “Would it help if I did this?” Brixie’s voice called from deeper inside the pod. A secondary hatch blew off, slicing vines and branches. Without means of further support, the pod fell the remaining 40 meters until it landed in the thick bough of an ancient swamp tree. Tigereye scratched his bruised head as he and the others spilled out of the pod and hit the dirt.

  “No.”

  Kempo was the first to pick himself up off the jungle floor. He quickly checked the small arsenal of weapons he carried. Content, he turned and mock-saluted Sully Tigereye.

  “The Red Moons have landed.”

  “Thanks for the update, Brixie?”

  “Yes?” The rookie pulled herself over. She had joined the Red Moons only two months ago, training at a distant base with other recruits who were either disgruntled or disappointed with the New Republic’s efforts to liberate the remainder of the galaxy. Her parents, both dedicated to the medical sciences and the saving of lives, had been conscripted into military service with an Imperial faction which called itself the Pentastar Alignment. Brixie had signed on with the Red Moons as a medical technician, hoping to somehow put an end to her parents’ servitude. She was still struggling with the ill-fitting armored hat that had been issued to her earlier by the Red Moons’ procurement detail.

  “Did you pull that hatch lever?”

  She bit her lower lip. There were worse things one could do than to get a Trunsk angry. Uncomfortable, she resigned herself to her fate. “Yes sir, I did.”

  “And what did I tell you before?”

  She rolled her eyes a bit. “Don’t do anything unless you tell me to do it.”

  “Exactly.” Figuring that he really shouldn’t be angry with her, he snatched the helmet off her head and made several adjustments to the inner web straps. After a moment, the helmet fit her perfectly. “Now pay attention and stay close.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “And can that sir nonsense.”

  “Yes …” Catching herself, she shrunk back to help collect equipment from the lifepod.

  “Excuse me,” Kempo stretched his aching frame. “You know how I hate to interrupt your instruction of the troops but … ”

  At long last, Tigereye was finally irritated with his unamusing tirade.

  “What is it, Kempo?”

  “Can you please direct me to the bad guys so we can fry them and find a way off this lovely vacation spot?”

  “Wrong attitude. This is not some search and destroy job like the last one you botched on Dantooine. This is a search and rescue. Here are the particulars that need rescuing.”

  He handed Kempo a datapad. Images of two young faces appeared in full portrait and side view modes. A distinct frown formed on the pathfinder’s face as Brixie also looked at the datapad screen over his shoulder.

  “Kiddies. We bailed out on to this mudball just to save a couple of pups?” Kempo tossed the datapad back at Tigereye. “The colonel must have gone nuts.”

  “Hey!” Cutter spoke up. “Colonel Stormcaller is the last sane person left in the galaxy. I can personally vouch for that.”

  “All bow. The Pirate King of Corellia has spoken,” Kempo spat sarcastically as he affixed a grenade launcher underneath the muzzle of the “procured” stormtrooper blaster rifle he carried. “So the four of us are going up against a slaver camp to yank two kids out with no ship. I’d say we’re off to a famous running Red Moon start. Tigereye.”

  “Who are they? Why are they so important?” Brixie started to say “sir,” but managed to clip it off in time.

  “Don’t bother,” Kempo answered as he spun a DL-18 blaster pistol around on his index finger. “Our job is not to question why. That’s what diplomats and tax collectors are for. We’re soldiers. We paid to solve the problems their kind create. And I want you to know. Trunsk, that I intend to get paid very well for this little field trip.”

  Tigereye eyed him coldly as he handed the datapad to Brixie. “Study their faces and descriptions carefully. We need them alive. And intact.”

  “But we don’t have a ship. Shouldn’t we wait for a rescue pickup?” grixie started to say.

  “You’re the team medtech,” Tigereye’s gaze hardened to dynaglass. “Is anyone here injured?”

  She glanced at Kempo and the expressionless Hugo Cutter. So this was the life of the mercenary, she thought sullenly. Blindly taking orders. Crawling around on an unforgiving world, enemies all around them. No relief forces. No help. No remorse. She shook her head slowly.

  The shriek of a snubfighter engine high over the tree canopy suddenly broke the silence. After a tense moment, it finally passed. Creatures and other tree dwellers began to slowly hoot and call again through the dense foliage. Kempo’s expression turned grim.

  “They found the crash. We better start moving.”

  Tigereye immediately agreed.

  “I can re-triangulate the coordinates of the slaver camp from our position here. I’ll take the point. Kempo, you take the rear. Make sure you have your survival kits and critter repellents. The slavers chose this moss rock for a reason, and that’s probably because these jungle worlds can be downright hostile. All right. Move out!”

  The slave master Greezim Trentacal relaxed in his chair aboard the transport freighter Atron’s Mistress, fanning his face with the elaborately decorated hide of a lexiaus beast. His darkened quarters aboard the large freighter were filled with decorations and trinkets from a hundred different worlds. Trentacal sighed, letting his jowled complexion rest on his palm as he propped his head up with an elbow. A lithe, sparsely dressed Human girl moved around him, her gestures as light as the spice-laced air. She offered him a cup of wine. Annoyed, he brushed her offering away as he looked to the shadow hiding there in the darkness.

  “Just how long is this going to take, Vex? You know how I hate sitting here in this humid jungle.”

  In reply, a voice slithered back. “We await another shipment of slaves from the last expedition near the Rim. By dawn tomorrow, the ship should be completely filled.”

  “Good,” Trentacal yawned. Details. Minor little details. The slaves down in the cargo holds of his ship were just tiny portions of merchandise compared to the credits he could be making. It was one the problems of doing business with the Pentastar Alignment.

  To suggest that the Pentastar Alignment was just another Imperial warlord faction, just another pale pretender to the mighty former Empire, was a foolish assumption. The Alignment perceived itself as the Empire reborn. Led by a Grand Moff named Ardus Kaine, the Alignment had ignored Grand Admiral Thrawn’s attempt to consolidate Imperial forces, carefully waiting until it could mount its own campaign against the New Republic.

  Unlike other warlords, the Alignment was extremely organized and well-equipped thanks to the corporates, powerful companies formerly allied with the Empire. Now that one of
these corporates, specifically the PowerOn Conglomerate from Cantras Gola, was secretly threatening to bolt and join the New Republic, the Pentastar Alignment was doing everything it could to prevent it. So the Alignment had turned to the Karazak Slavers Guild to solve its New Republic problem.

  How completely ironic, Trentacal mused, that the children of the Cantras Gola ambassador had been kidnapped by his slavers. The note left in their place made the ambassador’s situation quite clear. As long the ambassador held off any further talks with the New Republic, the children would remain alive. The delay would be long enough for agents from the Alignment to completely sever the ties between Cantras Gola and the New Republic. In the end, Cantras Gola would remain loyal to the Pentastar Alignment and, in turn, the Karazak Slavers Guild would continue to conduct its operations on Gabredor III unhindered.

  There were some benefits to this type of business arrangement — Trentacal had decided to keep the children as payment for his work. The Alignment had no opinion on the matter; the ambassador himself would be experiencing a most unfortunate accident and be quietly replaced … with a more reliable Alignment official.

  The slave master glanced sideways at the ambassador’s children chained to the cabin’s far wall and admitted that they would make fine additions to his household. Still, everything had its price. What, he wondered, would be the price for keeping these two?

  Trentacal motioned to the slave girl at his side and took the cup of wine from her delicate hands. His thick palms caressed her expressionless cheek. The girl had been mute since a child. She had been among the first of the slaves he had kept for his own. He cupped his fingers under her chin and turned her head so that she could see the frightened children.

  “Soon you will have others to instruct in the fine art of caring for me.”

  The shadow stepped forward, barely discernible in the darkness of Trentacal’s private cabin. Trentacal watched his bodyguard and confidant, a Defel, as he stood before the stateroom’s viewports. Vex’s thick body was completely covered in layers of rippling black fur that absorbed all surrounding light. In his right hand he held a comlink close to an attentive ear, his head bobbing slightly as he listened to what sounded like little more than static. Outside the viewports lurked the tangled jungle growth of Gabredor III and the surrounding clearing that comprised the staging camp. Lookout towers armed with heavy repeating blasters rose from the jungle floor. On either side of the bulbous freighter, slaves were being led into the ship under the scrutiny of Karazak thugs. It was a fabulously efficient operation, Trentacal assured himself. After all, it was his.