Author - I will try to write a chapter evert 2 or 3 days perhaps every 4 days If I am busy, hope you guys enjoy it I am enjoying writing this (again) and thank you all for support. Sorry for all the jumping between POV in this chapter I didn't know how to format it, I have re-made this chapter almost twice now.
One draft included Kael going on the boarding team himself or even killing the death trooper.
Other had a notable death but it felt... not right. Not right time at least, plus it involved paellon arriving as help but it just didn't fit. Especially since the battle was relatively quick and the time to assemble and fly a fleet big enough to Elyria from the core would be considerable.
Could I humbly ask for some power stones and if you could recommend this story to others thank you
Patreon /// Deluxee
**Kael POV**
The skyvan rattled like it was about to shake itself apart, but I kept both hands firmly on the controls and forced it through a side street that was never meant for this kind of need for speed, the damaged repulsors were screaming at me and everything around us every time we clipped uneven stone.
Doesn't help I never got my license for a car not to mention a repulsor van.
Blood from the cut above my brow kept trying to seal my right eye shut, making it annoying as hell but I could only keep on wiping it away with my sleeve.
I swallowed hard and tasted iron. Internal damage or did I just bite my cheek to hard, I sure do love surprises.
I took the next corner a bit too hard which resulted in everyone slamming back against the bay wall.
Oops, sorry.
"Still with us?" I called.
"Define with us," Elara muttered through clenched teeth. Her shoulder was a dark ruin of fabric and small trickle of blood probably nicked herself somewhere but otherwise she was upright
Behind us, Havenridge was burning in pieces, thankfully not the whole city.
Just small fires and scattered detonations, a municipal block two streets over was fully alight, orange light pulsing against low cloud while the high wail of sirens cut across each other in broken layers.
Somewhere from the south, blasterfire cracked in short bursts which was answered in kind.
Local police speeders flashed through intersections with floodlamps sweeping alleys and rooftops. One checkpoint tried to wave us down until the elite palace guard in the side bay leaned out in full armour and barked clearance hard enough that the officers almost dropped their blasters in haste to point them away from us.
At some point Rusty decided to hang his upper frame out the sunroof again, chassis scored and blackened.
"No immediate pursuit signatures on the death troopers, or other hostiles," he reported. "Probability high they redirected after losing line of sight. City mesh shows multiple secondary incidents in progress."
"Bombs?" Harlan asked, voice thin.
"Bombs, shooters, false alarms, and at least two warehouse fires that may be intentional," Rusty said. "The pattern is dispersal. Keep the response grid fractured."
Of course it was, I miss dealing with Idiot pirates, yes they are brutal but they usually have room temperature IQ.
I took another turn into a narrower lane between old storage fronts and finally risked dropping our speed enough that the van stopped sounding like a dying animal, my hands were still shaking from residual adrenaline and the slight bit of blood loss.
The museum sat somewhere west of us, five kilometres from the palace I could not stop thinking about it. All those careful public tours through preserved undercity passages, all those sealed grates and "historical interest only" signs.
Someone had used that civic pride as an opportunity into my house, an old city under the new one with buried streets along with service routes.
And someone inside my own administration had known exactly where the hidden exit was.
I pulled the van into the shadow of a half-collapsed loading canopy, killed the running lights, and left the repulsors on a low idle and breathed out a sigh of relief.
Then I opened an encrypted burst line on my personal channel and sent our position in a tight ping and a message with our: coordinates, status, wounded count, and a short flag that the palace exit route was compromised by possible internal betrayal.
Unless they have a force user but I doubt it, harbouring a force user is immediate death for you and your family depending on the severity, if you just happen to find someone with force abilities then maybe you will just get some beating, but if its a jedi master you and your family is cooked my guy, your neighbours and their dog possibly too.
The confirmation light blinked once, I sat there for a second, forehead against the control yoke, and listened to the city, my city.
Havenridge was hurt. Again.
Fires in the mid wards, security stretched thin. People shouting behind locked shutters.
But it was not as bad. The power grid was still up in most sectors, the main streets were only contested, not owned by the attackers.
The palace had been breached, yes, but the rest of the capital had not folded as a result of that breach like wet paper.
They had come to cut the head of the snake so that the rest of the body falls, well tough luck.
"Governor," one of the surviving palace elites said from the back. "We need a medic and a secure transfer. Commander Thorn is conscious, but that helmet hit scrambled him not to mention the other injuries, he has a dislocated shoulder and he got shot two more times once in the thigh and once in his lower stomach, thankfully the armour protected him but he still needs medical attention there appears to be some internal damage. Lady Elara needs proper attention on her shoulders, the rest requ-"
I lifted my hand up and just replied tiredly "I know."
I straightened and scanned the alley mouths ahead. "We wait for the first friendly contact. If we keep racing blind through a city full of chaos, we will run straight into the next ambush or cause an unfortunate accident."
Lira's voice was small from the bay. "Are they still coming?"
"Not now anyways but they might be" I said, there was no point lying. "But our reinforcements are already here"
Far above the rooftops, a pair of atmospheric fighters tore across the day in a low hard pass, engines howling.
I wiped more blood from my eye, checked the charge on my blaster, and kept the van ready.
****
The first friendly craft that came close to us was over the storage roofs, I stepped half out of the skyvan with my blaster raised until the underside markings resolved into local defence colours.
A second later a modified Scyk dropped past the wider avenue beyond the alley, banked hard, and came back around in a tight landing glide.
Atii hit the ground running before the skids had fully settled, she closed the distance in a straight line. For a moment she just looked at me blood down my face, ruined day uniform, the van full of wounded and the expression that crossed her features was sharp enough to cut.
"You're an idiot," she said.
Wait, what?
"Wait, what?"
I answered the first thing that came to mind without thinking.
She stopped just short of grabbing me, eyes flicking over the cut above my brow, then to Elara's shoulder, and others beside her, whatever else she wanted to say got buried under fury, whether directed at me for some reason or the enemies I don't know and I am scared to ask..
Behind her, more craft were already descending into the intersection: two armed shuttles, a patrol cutter, and a boarding transport still marked with void-scoring from the fleet fight above.
Boarding teams spilled out first, Mandalorians and Stormtrooper elements moving like people who had been pulled out of one war and dropped into another without time to change their hate. Medics came with them.
One look into the van was enough.
"Critical ones first, they are Elara, Thorn, anyone bleeding out. Get them on the shuttle and to the nearest safe hospital. No arguments."
Elara tried to protest and lost the fight the moment a medic pressed a seal over her shoulder and the pain made her vision tilt. Thorn was too battered to pretend he could keep commanding from a refuse-stained utility van.
Harlan remained at my shoulder out of sheer bureaucratic refusal to be elsewhere.
Atii jerked her chin at the Scyk. "I can put you on another fighter escort and pull you out of the city to the Mandalorian compound in the mountains."
"No, I need to go to town hall. Show my self still up and about and leading, somewhere where people see command still standing somewhere they recognize."
She hated that answer and I saw it but she accepted it anyway.
While the wounded were transferred, I split the incoming strength on the street while getting mechnosutures done hastily on myself by a medic. *(mechnosutures - star wars equivalent of stiches)*
"One team to the museum," I said. "They are to seal every undercity access they can find, If those tunnels fed the palace once, they can feed it again. I want that route buried even if you have to collapse the entire old sewer system."
A militia sergeant gave a short nod and started pulling bodies toward a cutter.
"The rest go to the palace," I continued. "Link with Nightfall units still inside and push room by room, watch out for highly elite Stormtrooper units known as Death Troopers. The chaf that is the freed prisoners can be mowed down, if they wanted to live they should have stayed in their cells, there are also mix of Imperial Army so watch out for that. Treat every quiet corridor as occupied."
Within minutes the intersection emptied of everything except my escort and the armoured transport assigned to move me. Atii did not ask whether to go with neither did Rusty, who took the rear bench. The difference being that Atii parked a starfighter in middle of the road so she just casually told one of the Mandalorian Warriors to go have fun in space but not to scratch it.
We finally pulled up a bit and Havenridge looked worse from the moving transport than it had from the van. Whole side streets were choked with emergency barriers.
Two buildings along the main tram line were still burning, fire crews working tirelessly to quell the fire while people watched from upper windows, faces pale in the glow.
Halfway to the town hall, Reza's channel lit up again.
"Governor," he said. "I have your position."
"Talk."
"The palace is still contested, but the hostiles are being driven back into the older service levels. Our interior units regained the main hall and east wing, casualties are high among the droids but minimal among the human guards, however most that are alive are injured with a sizable portion sporting heavy injuries, the remaining infiltrators are trying to break contact rather than push deeper, the escaped prisoners probably to hide out and lay low while the others to get to their exfil."
"Durak?"
"Still fighting, their armour made a hard push for the cannon lines, they broke through in some areas and disabled two before being stalled. It's grinding down into close quarters combat with their bigger vehicles like AT-ATs unable to get into the city proper."
"And the fleet?"
Reza paused just long enough for me to hear a distant detonation bleed through his bridge audio. "Nearly broken but not finished. The flagship and a few screening vessels remain. They're attempting to disengage."
Well at least that is some good news.
I stared through the transport's viewport as the town hall came into view ahead, its civic banners still hanging under emergency lighting, guards already forming a perimeter on the steps.
"Keep the pressure up, once we win in space the enemy forces on the ground will surrender in droves, n o need to push them back just hold the line." I said. "I'm establishing temporary command on the ground, send me every status you have live."
"Yes, Governor."
The channel closed, Atii glanced sideways at me. "You need a medic too.""
I already got the stiches, what else is to be done for me? Though a bit of bacta would be nice.
"I'm all good, thanks" I just gave her a thumbs up and she huffed and sat down.
A minute later the transport doors opened onto the town hall steps.
I stepped out into the air with blood drying on my face, Rusty at one shoulder, Atii at the other, and my home still burning in places.
**Sergeant Havel Renn Palace Guard POV**
Sergeant Havel Renn had fought through worse corridors than these, but never ones that smelled so strongly of burned wiring and dead bodies.
By the time reinforcements linked with the Nightfall units still inside the palace, the worst of the blackout traps had already done their work.
Shutters remained locked over the outer halls, they will need the generators back online, the broken light panels crunched under boots. All of these will need to be fixed quickly unless they want the palace to be dark most of the time.
In the deeper service routes the dark still favoured the defenders, and Havel moved through it with his visor filtered for motion and heat.
Friendly droids waited in alcoves like patient hunters while palace guards with the incoming reinforcements pushed room by room, calling identity codes before every turn, shooting anything that answered wrong or not at all.
The liberation of the palace was not clean, in the east wing they found a knot of freed prisoners still trying to hold a stairwell with scavenged rifles.
Nightfall units hit them from two floors at once.
Havel put three down himself and kept moving.
While near the old generator works, a pair of what has now been identified as Imperial Army Rangers tried to break contact through a maintenance crawl and were dragged out by droid claws and finished against the deck plating.
By the time the main hall was declared secure, the palace had stopped being a hunt and started becoming a tally of the dead.
Outside, under hard daylight and drifting smoke, the city was being taken back in pieces.
Havel's element was folded into a wider sweep after the interior push stabilized, palace guards were usually placed in leading roles of local police and garrison squads in no time they were already reclaiming major streets, throwing up checkpoints, dragging wounded out of danger.
Key nodes fell back into loyal hands in quick sequence first the central transit exchange, the civic relay station, the water works junction, then the outer approaches to the museum district.
Captured attackers and agitators were forced to their knees in lines along courtyard walls, pirates, hired muscle, a few men in nonstandard Imperial kit who refused to speak even with rifles in their faces.
Confirmation on the museum came through while Havel was still in process of resupplying, his rifle has sadly been rendered unusable after he had to use it to block an incoming vibroblade strike.
What came through was that the old undercity access had been used there is confirmation of fresh tool marks and new dug out entrances disguised with old grates taken from other areas.
Someone had walked those preserved ruins like a road, and for quite a while if the scouts word is to be believed.
I always told everyone that having people have unrestricted access to the undercity that runs throughout the entire area unsupervised is a bad idea, but no the redskins want to preserve their history.
Though there is a bit of good in it all, Kan owes me fifty credits for me being right that someone will sooner or later use these underground areas for something bad. I will probably spend those credits in that new bar that opened up, well that is if he lives and can actually pay me those credits.
I jumped into the gutter and moved when ordered anyway, no point in thinking of what happens in the future when I am still stuck in the present sifting through old shit while planting charges where the technicians tell me to.
The next contact came near a warehouse on the industrial fringe, a low structure marked with the signage of clan Yellow Sun, a relatively minor clan that used to be the hegemon of Elyria around two hundred years ago and still bitching about it to this day.
What I thought would be a quick sweep turned out to be anything but that, since that was where the remaining death troopers and their surviving support element had chosen to hide out.
I saw them as my squad pushed up through a lane of stacked ore crates and cargo mesh.
There were fewer than he expected but that did not make them less wrong to look at.
These freaks with an apt name of death troopers were taller than ordinary stormtroopers, bulkier in black plated armour that seemed to drink the daylight. Green visors tracked across the approach with almost mechanical precision, if not for the clear body suit underneath I'd question if they really are organics.
Around them, the last infiltrators held positions with disciplined spacing, there was also a ragtag group of freed prisoners, at least judging by how sloppy they look, one of them is even fucking sleeping on the floor.
I hate them all on principle alone, but I disliked the location more.
A native warehouse, of course it would be here. Why couldn't it be a nice and civilised Imperial built one with air conditioning and clean layout instead of this haphazard mess.
"Contact front," I said into the squad channel. "Elite hostiles, death troopers confirmed. Hold the line."
They should have broken under the first concentrated volley but the stubborn bastards, did not.
They were outnumbered and outgunned, but the bastards in black still made the area littered with bodies.
One of them fired from cover in short, perfect pairs and dropped two heavy duty police officers before anyone even identified the blaster angle.
Another moved only when he had to, each relocation followed by a shot that forced my people to stay pinned behind crates. The supporting enemies fought like men who understood exactly how little time they had left in the land of the living and meant to sell their lives expensively.
Return blaster fire cracked across the lane.
A droid went down hard.
Someone on my left fell down with a silent thud.
They were still holding when Commander Thorn's voice cut into the net.
"I see your feed, sergeant. I am patched through to all nearby units." His tone was rough, must have had it rough.
"All Nightfall droids in your grid will charge on my mark, once they do the rest of the units follow two seconds behind. Overwhelm. I want death troopers alive if possible."
I exhaled once waiting for the signal.
"Mark."
The droids went first as if in a frenzy, they poured from side alleys and warehouse shadows in a sudden terrifying wave, security frames, reactivated guard units, battered combat chassis with scorch marks from the palace still on them and others including protocol droids, astromechs and general utility droids.
They did not manoeuvre, only to dodge to the side or down but not one of them tried to take a step back, they simply closed ever closer.
The blaster fire tore into the first rank and dropped several, but the mass kept coming from all possible angles, one black-armoured figure vanished under seven machine bodies while another was forced to break position as a loader droid smashed through his cover.
"Now!" I barked out loudly.
I was moving before the word fully left my mouth, the lane became a crush of bodies, blaster flashes, and close violence.
I vaulted a broken crate, took a bolt across the outer thigh plate that burned like a motherfucker but thankfully the armour displaced the shot as best it could which allowed me to hit the nearest death trooper at full speed.
The impact was like tackling a moving bulkhead.
That... thing.
Went down together with me hard enough to knock the air from my lungs and I was the one on top, the trooper garbled something out and tried to bring a sidearm around.
I just smashed my helmet into the green visor once, twice, then again until the world narrowed to the struggle beneath him.
I am going to feel that tomorrow.
Not long after other hands arrived, a redskin seized one armoured arm while a palace guard drove a knee into the trooper's wrist and used his bulk to hold him down while someone shouted for restraints.
The death trooper nearly threw them all off until I got hold of my blaster, jammed the barrel against the seam under the chest plate, and triggered successive stun discharges at point-blank range.
The body jerked, fought, jerked again, and finally went heavy.
Across the area the rest of the resistance collapsed under the same brutal action.
One death trooper was pinned by droids and stunned until his limbs stopped answering.
While another was dragged down by sheer weight of numbers and beaten into stillness with rifle butts before the stun cuffs locked.
The surviving Imperial infiltrators tried to break for the warehouse interior and were cut off, a few surrendered. A few were too slow to be given the option.
When it all ended, I was still on my knees beside the captive, chest burning, thigh screaming, visor cracked.
I opened the command channel. "Commander Thorn. Targets down, death troopers in custody."
"Hold them," Thorn answered. "I don't want any 'accident' that look strangely like executions. I want them breathing."
I was still dragging air into his lungs when one of his subordinates called out from the warehouse threshold.
"Sergeant Havel. Look at this."
I forced myself upright and limped over, the man had cracked open a half-sealed crate near the loading wall.
Inside, packed clean and recent, were sealed ration cartons, water canisters, and medical kits.
Every visible mark carried the Yellow Suns clan stamp.
What the fuck?
It all looks Official and fresh to boot. Not the dust-caked surplus of forgotten storage,
I pointed to one of lieutenants. "You. Start scanning the crates, I want to know their entire god damn life from where they were made, who got hold of them and why the fuck are they here packed with provisions for the next two weeks!"
I then opened the next crate. Ammunition
Then the next. Sidearms.
Next one had a small tray of grenades that had the markings of the same ones that had gone missing a few weeks prior.
I picked one up and turned it in my glove, same make as several taken off the dead infiltrators in the palace.
Thorn's channel sounded off again. "Cordon the warehouse, your new task is to... Protect the new evidence until command retrieves it, if anyone tries to approach it or leave without permission you are to restrain them, if they prove aggressive you are permitted to shoot to stun, we need answers more than we need new fertilisers for the fields."
"Yes, sir." I spoke and sealed the crate again with more force than necessary.
Around me the area was full of smoke, captives, and the distant noise of a city.
None of it softened the taste in my mouth.
I stared at the clan markings on the supply lids and felt the old familiar heat rise under my ribs that I have tried to suppress once I have gotten into the Palace Guards.
Ungrateful red-skinned bastards.
Always smiling in council halls, always taking protection, always ready to sabotage the good men and women of the Imperium if it profited them.
Dustblood traitors with official stamps on their treachery.
Even when I was younger they always kept harassing us to 'go back' and not meddle with the affairs of their planet. Like its theirs to begin with, they themselves stated they came here as refugees long ago.
We also arrived to have better lives here, a lot of us were born here. But no instead of lending a helping hand they would rather preach about their history and how we are ruining it with our big cities.
But they are first to put their hand out for a handout from the ever merciful governor. I have half a mind...
No, lets not keep thinking of it, better I keep the words behind my teeth.
Then I posted the cordon and waited for someone higher up the chain to come explain what else to do.
**Kael POV**
Thirty minutes later I was in a sealed side chamber of the town hall with a bottle of cold water, a half-closed cut above my brow, and too many incoming reports for the size of the table.
Blood still crusted along my hairline, and every time I frowned the skin pulled wrong, but the room had stopped tilting at least.
Rusty stood against the wall trying to clean his "immaculate, perfect mechanical droid body", but his chassis was still blackened.
Atii meanwhile had refused a chair and remained near the door with her helmet under one arm, listening while pretending she was only on guard duty.
Harlan sorted datapads with the stiff concentration of a man trying not to think about how close he had come to dying in a trash court.
Outside the chamber, boots moved in constant pairs, the town hall had become temporary command, the first useful packet came from Thorn's channel.
A certain warehouse in the eastern district was cordoned off with the death troopers there taken prisoner under heavy restraint.
That was the good news, the bad news was the crates… those were already causing more damage than the firefight that found them.
I spread the images across the table. Yellow Sun Clan-stamped ration seals. Water lots with municipal transfer codes and medical kits registered through a minor native distribution line.
Ammunition and grenades matching several weapons recovered from the palace attackers matched those that were requisitioned for the clan use while others were presumed missing or destroyed.
The stamps were clean and recent.
Not some mouldy and mothballed forgotten supplies.
"Walk me through it," I said.
Harlan cleared his throat with a bit more force.
"The warehouse belongs to Yellow Sun, a secondary plains clan under provisional trade status. Small and useful for grain and labour contracts. They signed three internal movement requests over the last eleven days, on paper it was emergency relief positioning for possible civic disruption."
"Civic disruption they helped create," Atii said.
A second packet arrived from palace recovery teams which made my face darken.
Access logs.
Maintenance clearances.
A pair of old infrastructure accounts that should have been retired with the previous administration and somehow never were.
One belonged to a facilities clerk kept on after the transition because he "knew the old generator routes."
Another sat under a security liaison title with almost no active duties and perfect reason to drift through restricted corridors without drawing notice.
Then came the museum, fresh scoring on a sealed undercity gate with boot traffic through a section open to public tours only by guided schedule.
Someone had used the preserved ruins exactly as a highway to the Palace, with one sewer connecting to the detention centre while the other connected near the kitchen that itself was near a maintenance shaft that branched out to all over the palace.
I leaned on the table with both hands and let the pieces stitch themselves in front of me.
Some of it was local resentment, an old proud clan that had enough authority to move supplies and enough grievance to decide my government was an insult worth selling.
Some of it was rot left in the walls from before I arrived, people from the old administrative skeleton who had learned how to survive every change of banner by becoming useful to whoever held a knife or invisible and insignificant enough.
And some of it had come in from outside, layered under labor papers, contractor passes, technical transfers.
The death troopers were a mystery though, they kept all their original gear and there is no mention of any suspiciously tall humans entering Elyria in the past month with huge backpacks full of gear, unless they arrived with the enemy fleet in a stealth ship or worse were here longer than I would like to admit.
"Pull every active clearance tied to the old administration, everyone will be questioned and their work and their offices along with their residences searched."
I said while starting to compile a list of the most likely people to be the traitors.
"Start a surveillance of the Yellow Sun clan, all their branches and once we have enough forces surround their compounds and grounds and take their elders and leaders for questioning and those that are closest to them put under secret surveillance. I want the museum undercity under armed seal until a full map is reconstructed by people I trust. Any staff member who signed route access near the palace service tiers in the last month gets detained before nightfall for questioning."
Harlan hesitated. "Governor, if we move that broadly, the other clans will read it as collective punishment."
"Then the loyal ones can prove they are loyal by remaining calm, and obedient." I shot Harlan a dark look as I said that. "The disloyal already chose their side. I would rather have disgruntled but trustworthy people then traitors in our midst."
A runner entered, placed another slate on the table, and left without being asked to speak. On it was a partial internal message recovered from a damaged communicator near the collapsed palace exit.
Just a routing tag and a confirmation phrase that matched one of the old administration liaison accounts.
Enough to point in the right direction.
Not enough to show me the end of the road.
I straightened and felt the cut above my brow split again, a warm line starting down toward my eye.
God damn it.
I picked up a bacta plaster that a medical droid had put beside me some minutes ago along with a myriad of other medical supplies that frankly are not needed. I am not dying, neither am I missing a limb.
I still quietly put it on and sighed in relief at the cool sensation.
"Send what we have to Reza under encryption," I said. "Palace status, city status, the warehouse, the museum."
Atii finally took a step closer. "You need that wound closed properly, it is clearly deeper than the medic initially thought."
I sighed. "First I need my city to not be on fire, so I am playing firefighter and putting out the fires."
"They can both be done at the same time."
I chuckled quietly.
I looked down at the clan stamp on the nearest image and committed it to memory.
There would be more names and stamps before this was finished.
More rooms to open to the light and even more people to drag into its scorching light from the dark.
By the time this is all over there would be more executions to be made and broadcasted live.
**Karchlan Vex Stormtrooper Captain**
The first time the AT-AT came through the ore-stack line, I thought the whole ridge would go with it.
I was already deep into the fight by then, voice raw from shouting over channel noise, white plate blackened with dust and carbon. Durak's Hold had stopped looking like a mining settlement quit a while ago.
It was a broken industrial heap of collapsed gantries, burning conveyors, and cratered load yards where Imperial armour had decided terrain was only a suggestion not an obstacle.
Around the same stretch of time the palace later came under attack, we were still trying to keep four orbital cannons alive and pointed at the sky instead of our own fleet, the enemy had come down heavy.
Imperial army troopers in reinforced armour moved behind the machines in disciplined files, tan and grey battle kit marked with unit strips, heavy rifles and compact launchers cutting lanes through anything stupid enough to stand in the open.
Their armour was not parade polish, it was scuffed, sealed for dust, built for ground war.
Behind them came the weight: AT-ATs working the wider approaches like walking siege towers, Saber-class tanks sliding through the lower cuts with turret fire chewing ferrocrete into flying shards, AT-STs hunting side lanes and scaffold gaps, and some weird TIE looking thing on treads that later we came to know as TIE crawlers grinding over rubble where ordinary speeders would have broken their housings.
No juggernauts thank whatever god there is, those things are monstrous and while AT ATs are imposing juggernauts are quick, packed to the brim with blasters and launchers and have lower targetting profile so they can get behind more cover and are faster.
There were others like Occupiers or H1s.
But still, the AT-ATs were enough to make every open street feel like a death sentence, in particular since we dont really have a good answer for them, we tried to set up a chain trap for one of the AT ATs legs but the team was intercepted by a battalion of Imperial Army and had to withdraw.
We had already denied them three cannons at least, two we destroyed by us when the first armoured push got too close and we were unable to defend the line, the charges blew up the housings before they could be taken and turned against Reza's ships.
The third died when a burning troop transport lost control on descent and came down on it like a hammer, turning gun, crew, and bedrock into one fused crater.
That left four.
Four batteries still active on the upper industrial spine. Four reasons the Imperials kept coming even while their fleet died above them.
"Left stack is folding!" someone shouted on the militia channel.
"Then unfold it damn it!" I snapped.
"Stormtrooper elements, brace on marker three, clan teams hold the trench under the conveyor. Mandalorians, I want those walkers blinded or taken out of action if you get a shot."
The battlefield was one huge fucking mess.
Ore towers, processing sheds along with magnetic rail spines and narrow service roads between pits deep enough to swallow a squad whole.
Civilians had been evacuated early, and for once the evacuation order had mostly held, what remained in the combat grid was fighters, machines, and the dead and the occasional stubborn civilian now regretting their choices of hiding in their apartment thinking the battle will just go past them.
A Saber tank came around a ruined loader bay and put a bolt through our forward barricade hard enough to throw two militia off their feet, including someone's detached feet from what I have just seen flying.
I dragged one back by the harness while the other crawled, legs ruined and feet gone, he was screaming bloody murder.
Native clan warriors filled the gap with rifle fire and a scavenged launcher they got from somewhere, their reddish skin darkened by dust and soot, bead-wrapped braids tucked under makeshift helmets.
They fought like devils.
We did not have much armour of our own. That was the honest truth, only a handful of light assault tanks, two old infantry fighting vehicles, some armoured speeders with reinforced fronts, and a single captured pirate gun platform we had rebuilt enough to stop shaming itself.
Though the old Separatist tanks, AATs are a great relief, problem is we just dont have that many of them.
And I hate to admit it, they are not that great.
The rest of our armour are some old AT ST, Sabers and others but not in huge numbers either.
We used them like knives, not a wall.
Hit a flank, collapse a lane and pull back before an AT-AT turned the whole street into glass.
An AT-ST stalked through a scaffold corridor and opened up on a stormtrooper fireteam, one of my men came apart at the midsection while his left shoulder was completely gone.
Another fired back desperately from the ground after he was thrown at it by the close proximity shots that AT ST delivered.
The AT ST was about to finish the downed trooper when the walker's head jerked under a Mandalorian jet assisted dive from above, charges slapped under the sensor ring, detonation dropping the machine down.
The Mandalorian was already gone into the smoke before the secondary explosion finished cooking the cockpit.
"Cannon Ridge, status!" I called.
"Four still operational," came the reply. "But they're pushing hard up the central ramp. If an AT-AT gets clean line, we're done."
Thankfully the reinforcements from Elyria hit our rear routes in staggered waves: more stormtroopers, more militia with mismatched kit and too much courage, additional clan contingents and some spare Mandalorian teams who arrived, already arguing over the best way to kill a walker.
I threw them into the worst points without preamble.
There was no elegant battle map left, only dirty and bloody maze of areas and buildings some of which are contested with the only thing separating friend from foe being a single wall.
Close quarters in these scenarios was brutal, in a processing hall near the second remaining cannon, Imperial infantry breached through a side wall and the fight collapsed into deck-to-deck violence.
I put my rifle into a man's chest plate at near contact and fired until he fell while a clan warrior beside me drove a blade under an army trooper's helmet rim and ripped sideways.
One of our militia girls, no older than twenty, kept firing her blaster pistol into a trooper who had donned the standard issue vibrobayonet and stabbed her friend in the neck. The friend looked suspiciously a lot like her.
She kept pulling the trigger long after his chest was a melted slag, only stopping when another person tackled her out of the way of a blaster bolt flying towards her.
A TIE crawler, an ugly fucking thing forced its hull through the far loading door, tracks screaming, and tried to turn everyone in the hall into past tense when a Mandalorian pair disabled one track and our light tank put repeated fire into the exposed under-joint until the machine died.
Outside, an AT-AT finally cleared the lower yard and started the climb, every weapon we still had shifted toward it.
Launchers.
Tank fire.
Mandalorians on jetpacks trying to go for the neck.
The walker fired once from his twin MS1 Laser Cannons and erased a whole barricade section, men and ferrocrete disappearing in the same flash of heat and force.
Dust slammed through the street hard enough to blind anyone without a helmet on, I ran through it, dragged a wounded stormtrooper out of the open, and forced a clan squad to re-anchor on the next wall line.
"Hold!" I shouted, voice breaking across the channel.
"Hold the fucking ridge! Navy is gutting their fleet and they are assuming retreat position! The moment those ships are finished, these bastards have nowhere to go. Make them spend everything for the next fifty meters!"
A TX-225 "Occupier" Combat Assault Tank broke through on our right and was swarmed by militia with charges, one of them dying under its fire before the detonation cracked its side open.
While its friend a 1-H Imperial-class Repulsor Tank tried to exploit the gap and took a direct hit into its already flickering repulsor sled from our gun platform which caused it to spin hard it into a support pillar.
Imperial infantry kept pushing behind every machine, professional and relentless, using the armour's shadow as moving cover.
We killed them in doorways, under conveyors, across catwalks, in the narrow dark between storage silos where rifles became clubs once the distance vanished.
They seem less eager but more weary and tired, it's clear they do not believe they are going to win but keep charging anyway, believing that their fleet can win the battle and swing the momentum in their favour.
If only I had a speaker loud enough to communicate it to them that their fleet is positioning as if trying to retreat, but even then they'd probably refuse to believe.
This battle has gone on for so long my shoulder plate was cracked, my left calf was wet inside the armour from the time I fell from a scaffolding while grappling with an enemy officer.
I could not remember where exactly I dropped my lucky blaster pistol either, hopefully it is not damaged or stolen.
Above the Hold, through gaps in the smoke, I could still see flashes of void combat still flickered up high, that was the only clock that mattered.
If Reza finished the fleet, the army below would lose its reason and its rescue, that time can't come soon enough.
Until then that fucking AT-AT and others will keep walking towards us.
A runner slammed into cover beside me, helmet gone, face grey with dust. "Captain Vex! Lieutenant Marlo has instructed me to come find you to tell you that the central ramp is failing!" We tried to reach you sir but you were not picking up your communicator.
I checked the charge on my rifle first then looked at my communicator, noticing its cracked and smoke rising up from it.
Fuck, I had that cute militia girls contact saved on it, hopefully the techies can salvage it later.
I forced myself back to my feet. "Go to Commander Lila in the main command centre and tell her to inform Reza my communicator is destroyed and to relay everything to her from now on until I can get a replacement, now I will go to the ramp, ask Lila to send me a spare communicator tuned in to the command channel."
I then started jogging towards the central ramp with a few others.
**Kael POV**
By the time Reza brought me into the channel, the naval battle was already decided.
I was still in the town hall command room, bandage tight over my brow courtesy of Atii who heavily insisted on it even though I had a bacta applied on the wound already.
I was watching the orbital battle update in real time, the Imperial line had collapsed into a few surviving hulls around the flagship. Escape routes that had looked not so long ago were gone, sealed by the swarm of fighter screens, bombers and our heavier ships moving into blocking positions.
Every time one of the smaller Imperial vessels tried to push out of the engagement area, something was already waiting in that lane.
They had tried to run but they had nowhere left to run to.
"Flagship engines just died," Reza said over the link. "Boarding team is inside in force and making their way to the bridge by foot, they have disabled the elevators and sealed all the doors towards it."
I opened the visual feed he sent through, The Unyielding Writ was a wounded giant.
Most of her visible cannon banks were dark, either destroyed outright or offline from earlier strikes and internal sabotage. Whole sections of the outer hull still glowed from sustained fire.
The ship's once-clean formation screen was reduced to a couple of damaged escorts and drifting wreckage, the other two destroyers already disabled by boarding teams.
By the feed and pings from the boarding team on the flagship they were deep inside and on multiple decks at once, now all converging to take the bridge.
That part had been bought in blood earlier.
Mira Bevin's team had not survived their bridge attempt, but the holes they tore in security, sensors, and internal response had left the ship softer than it should have been.
Add to that the troopers Orlan had already spent on Durak's Hold from the ship, the ones killed in explosions during the fleet action, and the ones lost holding compartments against the first boarding waves, and the flagship's remaining infantry net was thin, almost non-existant.
The larger team moving through her now was using that weakness without mercy, advancing compartment by compartment toward command.
Orlan Jerjerrod then decided to probably do the smartest thing since accepting his brothers command.
He called us.
He appeared on the shared channel a moment later, he looked worse for wear.
Bloodshot eyes, a fresh cut along his hairline and a bruise darkening one cheek, the kind you got from being thrown into a console when a capital ship took a bad hit.
Behind him the bridge was a ruin of emergency lighting and sparking panels. The main doors were simply gone, blown outward into the approach corridor.
There was no sealed last stand available, only a command deck open to whatever came up the hall.
He tried to hold himself like a captain anyway.
"This is Captain Orlan Jerjerrod of the Unyielding Writ," he said, and the formality cracked almost immediately under the strain.
"I am offering terms. If you guarantee my life and that of my wife and children, I will give you my brother and with it all he had, all of it. The false intelligence he fed me, the political cover, the payment routes, the people in sector administration who protected him. I will testify that Moff Darnis Jerjerrod ordered this campaign under lies and used Imperial forces for a private purge that went against Imperial interests. Spare me and I will hand you every dirty secret I have on him."
Damn, Jerjerrod family is full of loyal and trust worthy people aren't they.
We did not answer immediately, instead Reza routed the channel wider and my end joined fully, camera included.
Orlan's eyes flicked when he saw me, recognition and calculation moving together. "Governor Voss," he said.
Ew, reminded me when his brother called me with his fat chin all jiggling.
"You want the Moff, you want my cunt of a brother who gave me false intelligence to possibly get rid of me. I can give him to you on a silver platter, kill me here and you get a dead captain. Nothing else."
He was nervous and clearly desperate.
I let him stew in his fear and anxiety a second longer than was comfortable.
"First, you will broadcast a full system-wide surrender order, including to those ships that were left behind in the other system." I said.
"All remaining Imperial units in this system stand down. Ships, ground forces, scattered detachments. Immediate, then you will remain on this channel until boarding officers take the bridge and confirm custody."
Reza's voice followed, flat and precise. "Do that and your request for life will be accepted pending transfer and interrogation."
Orlan swallowed once for a moment I thought he might still try some last scrap of pride.
Then a distant internal blast shuddered through his bridge audio, and the pride went straight out of him.
He turned to his remaining communications officer with a hand that was not entirely steady. "Open system-wide to all frequencies."
Orlan leaned into the pickup. "This is Captain Orlan Jerjerrod aboard the Star Destroyer Unyielding Writ. All Imperial naval and ground units operating in the Elyria system and beyond are ordered to stand down immediately. Cease fire and power down all weapons, do not resist boarding or detention forces. This engagement is over. Repeat: all Imperial forces in-system, surrender and stand down now."
We watched him while the message went out, on the side displays, the last resistance markers began changing state. The damaged escorts killed their batteries.
From Durak's Hold, delayed ground reports started showing Imperial army units hesitating as the surrender order reached them, but most of them are standing down.
On the flagship feed, our boarding team finally reached the open bridge approach.
Bodies moved into frame with weapons raised.
Orlan lifted his hands without being asked.
The remaining bridge officers and stormtroopers followed.
Restraints went on and command codes were pulled. One of the boarding captains looked into the camera pickup and gave Reza a hard nod. "Bridge secure. Target in custody."
"Transfer him to Iron Reaver, we are still unsure if saboteurs are still present on the planet," Reza said.
At that Orlan looked confused, but that was only for a second before he was getting dragged out by two troopers.
Did he not know about the saboteurs?
With that the flagship channel closed and for a second the town hall room was quiet except for the low hum of the emitter and the distant city noise outside.
Reza remained on my private link, his image steady above the table he looked as worn as I felt, void-burn reflected in the eyes, the kind of exhaustion that came after too many hours of deciding which losses were acceptable.
We stared at each other across the connection.
We both knew that Orlan's bargain was a sacred contract written in pure charity, he had bought time and a chance to talk.
That was all either of us intended to honour until the talking was done, if he is placed on a trial at a later date, filled with people that want him dead and a judge who just lost his son on Durak hold who conveniently then orders a death sentence then that is not on us.
Reza's mouth moved slightly, almost a grimace.
I answered with the flattest look I had left in me.
Then I ended the call, sat back in the borrowed town-hall chair which was no-where near as comfortable as the new one I brought from Couruscant.
I hope that chair is fine.
WAIT.
My room was in the wing that slightly collapsed, if my brand new fucking super comfort bed is broken along with the sheets and pillows I am going to try to wrap my hands against Jerjerrod and attempt to strangle him through his three chins.
*Post author note - I tried to showcase with Havel that life between natives (red skinned) and non native residents is not as butterfly and rainbows. With people like Havel who dislike/mistrust Elyrians while there are Elyrians who despise the 'sky people' for not respecting their culture and history and taking their land etc.
Also I am not sure if to keep Orlen alive for future plot or just kill him. If you want him alive you can tell me in the comments and give suggestion what you would like me to do with him.