Rex II- The Clone Rebellion
Chapter 127: Watch for Traps
Fox had known General Vos for less than two days. In that time he'd been knocked unconscious by him, healed by him, (twice, actually), and watched him charm every guardsman he met with little or no effort. He'd seen him meditate with a stolen gauntlet pressed to bare skin and pull a vision out of the Force.
He had not, until about four minutes ago, seen him fight.
Fox had watched it happen from the rappel line, descending into the smoke. Vos had simply leapt from the gunship like it was something he did on a regular basis.
He'd seen the rocket fire arc toward the cockpit where Crash and Grip were holding the ship steady. He'd seen Vos twist through open air like the laws that governed everyone else simply didn't apply to him, bat the shot backward into the launcher itself, and crash down hard onto the rooftop with no apparent concern for the fact that he'd just thrown himself off a hovering gunship with nothing but the Force to catch him.
Fox had seen men die for less reckless choices than that.
Then he was up and running, full sprint, leaping the gap between rooftops like the twenty-meter drop beneath him was an inconvenience rather than a death sentence. He took out the rocket launcher and somehow just knew another was targeting the ships still unloading.
Fox filed it away in the place where he kept things that didn't fit his understanding of the galaxy. That file had been growing very fast since yesterday morning, when a Jedi had put his boots on Fox's desk and refused to be called General.
He didn't have time to think about it further. He had his own rooftop to survive.
Less than thirty seconds and he was already involved in a heavy firefight and try to pull injured shinies to safety.
"Medic!" Fox shouted into his comms, ducking behind his riot shield as a heavy volley slammed into his position.
The blaster fire was relentless. It felt like a solid curtain of superheated plasma from a hundred droid weapons tracking across the rooftop in sweeping arcs. The air smelled wrong: burning durasteel, scorched plastoid, something chemical and acrid from the fire eating through the ventilation housings along the far parapet.
Fox had been at Geonosis.
It had smelled like this. And, many, many troopers had died that day.
He checked on Sixes. The trooper had been shot on the way down and his helmet had come off when he crashed into the rooftop. He hadn't landed anywhere near Fox, and from how hard he'd hit, Fox was sure Sixes would never rise again. But, the young trooper proved him wrong. Fox saw the moment. He was moving his arm, likely trying to find where he'd dropped his blaster.
Fox didn't think. He just scrambled out to retrieve the injured trooper. Fifty meters of open rooftop. Every droid in the elevated superstructure had a clear line of sight. Fox didn't think about it. He just moved, ducking and shooting and trying to crouch as low behind his shield as he could.
He made it back. He was still not entirely sure how he did, dragging an injured trooper and neither of them taking another shot on the way.
Sixes hadn't moved since they'd gotten back. Fox felt for his belt pouch, grabbing out a stim. If there was one thing the guard was given in ample supply, it was stims. He jammed one into Sixes' neck and the trooper gasped and opened his eyes.
"Don't you die on me," Fox growled. "I'll make you clean freshers for a month."
The shinies eyes fluttered open. "Point… taken… Commander." A trickle of blood slowly dribbled from the corner of his mouth.
Fox bit his lip. All the other battalions always sent him their shinies. Sixes had originally been a Marine. Bacara said he was 'too soft for the field,' as if Coruscant were a rest posting and everything there was ceremonial and clean and safe. They had no idea what they were sending their brothers into. Fox did everything he could to keep these troopers alive. The other battalions might not want them before they were guardsmen now.
"Justice, report!" He heard the edge in his own voice and couldn't stop it.
"Little busy at the moment, Commander." Justice's calm crackled back through the static. Around Fox, the rooftop was coming apart piece by piece. A support strut gave way somewhere off to his left with a sound like a cannon shot, trailing sparks and a gout of orange flame that billowed thirty feet into the air before the wind took it. "Two shinies down over here, but they're still breathing. I've marked your coordinates. I'm trying to get them back on their feet."
Fox pressed his back to the shield and took a fast count of what he had left to work with. It wasn't enough. It was nowhere near enough.
Thorn's LAAT was gone. The wreckage still burned at the far edge of the landing pad, a gutted metal skeleton spitting flame, scattering glowing debris across the plastoid surface in trails that were slowly joining each other, spreading. The fire was moving. It would soon reach their position and when it did, it would find them exactly as they were now: pinned, ammunition low, no resupply, no air support, and CorSec refusing to send anyone after them.
The SBDs held the high ground on the roof superstructure. They were interspersed among an elevated lattice of exhaust towers and antenna housings. They had cover, although a number of them had come down to try to take them out up close. B1s poured through the access hatches in an unbroken stream, like water finding cracks. For every droid that went down, three more stepped over it. They had no reason to be careful, no reason to conserve, no reason to stop. They were machines. They didn't run out of nerve.
The Guard did not have that luxury.
Fox counted six brothers down in his line of sight, some moving, some not. He counted ammunition: two spares left on his belt, one rifle at half-charge, his sidearms. He didn't count what he didn't have. Droid poppers. Zero. Thermal detonators, zero. Heavy ordnance, zero. The Guard were police, not infantry. Their kits reflected it. Up here, against an entrenched droid army with elevated fire and a burning roof closing in on all sides, they were making do with the tools of crowd control against weapons of war.
And they were still fighting.
A blur of green light arrived from the direction of the neighboring rooftop, and Fox could just somehow feel that Vos was near.
Vos came in fast and low, robes still smoking faintly at the hem, and didn't so much enter the firefight as become the center of it. He was limping, favoring his left side, the same side that had taken the rocket blast, and it didn't slow him down by a fraction that Fox could detect. The green blade caught a SBD's heavy cannon burst and redirected it in a precise arc back into the droid's own sensor cluster. He stayed carefully out of the way of Fox's men, somehow able to sense where they were and not get himself shot by friendly fire. Fox had never seen anything like it.
Vos spun through a gap that shouldn't have existed and came out the other side already moving toward the next threat, like the rooftop itself was rearranging to let him through.
It was, Fox thought distantly, the single most extraordinary thing he had ever watched a living being do.
He realized he had stopped firing.
His rifle was still up, his stance was still correct, but his eyes had gone soft and wide behind his visor and he was simply watching, the way a shiny watched anything for the first time, slack-jawed and useless. Heat washed past his shoulder. A bolt he should have caught on his shield instead grazed close enough to scorch the plating, and that, finally, was what snapped him back into his own body.
He forced his eyes back to his own sector, back to the wall of advancing B1s that did not care in the slightest how impressive the General was, and put two bolts into the nearest droid with more force than strictly necessary, as if he could shoot the embarrassment out of his system along with the droid. He was the Fox. He'd started combat training by age two. He did not gawk at Jedi tricks in the middle of a firefight like some wide-eyed cadet fresh off the transport.
He was also, he noted with some private disgust at himself, going to need a moment later to examine exactly why it had been Vos, specifically, that had managed to pull his attention clean off a battlefield. Later. Not now.
Fox was so focused on taking down droids he somehow didn't notice Vos until he was almost on top of him. Then, the Jedi came down hard and fast from a high backward flip, dropping into the narrow cover of Fox's position and slamming his riot shield down to lock edges with Fox's own. The impact was solid. Purposeful. The shields locked perfectly, an instinct Vos shouldn't have had, like he'd always been training with the Coruscant Guard.
Up close, Fox could see what the rooftop hadn't let him see from a distance. Vos's robes were singed black along one shoulder. A line of blood tracked from his hairline. Fox wanted to ask if he was alright, but none of them were alright. They were on this inferno of a rooftop and they might all be dead in the next minute or two. So, he bit his tongue to hold the question back.
Vos looked down at Sixes. He closed his eyes in that particular way Fox was already learning meant he was taking some kind of reading. Fox wouldn't have dare ask this of the General, but he was already taking an interest in Sixes.
"Can you help him?" Fox hated how desperate his voice sounded. He hated more that he couldn't help it.
Vos nodded. "I'll try, Fox. I can maybe buy him a little time."
Fox nodded, not sure what to say when someone offered to use their unnatural gifts to save one of your brothers. So, he simply went back to his comfort zone, and focused on shooting droids.
He tracked the droids by threat level, not by count. Counting the droids was useless as there were always more. It was as if this factory had been churning out droids, and not speeders. There seemed to be an endless supply of them.
He worked the line in controlled bursts, conserving every shot. Two bolts for a B1, center mass. One for a droid that was already compromised by someone else's fire. He stretched his ammunition against an arithmetic that kept getting worse. Somewhere behind him a section of the roof gave a deep, structural groan. He'd heard that sound before, it was the the kind of sound that preceded collapse. He felt the vibration of it through the soles of his boots.
Very soon the rooftop beneath them would also be giving way. He did not look back. He could not afford to look back.
He shot. He moved. He held the line.
When he dared a glance down at Sixes, the trooper's color had already improved.
Justice slid in on the other side, adding his shield to the wall, completing the cover. "Sixes, you slacking off again?"
The trooper's eyes opened. "The commander is..." the young trooper grimaced, "... gonna' make me... scrub the... freshers."
Justice snorted, and then was back to all business, running a scanner over the wound with practiced efficiency. He sprayed it with antiseptic without pausing to warn the trooper. Sixes moaned. Justice didn't look up. "You give him any painkillers yet?"
Fox shook his head. "I don't have any to give. I gave him a stim when he started drifting. It brought him back."
Justice nodded. "Good call." He pulled a hypo from his belt and checked the dosage. "I don't have a lot of these, so I must really think you're going to live, Sixes." He injected him and the trooper's expression eased. Justice turned to Fox. "I think we can get him back on his feet. We're trying to get all the wounded walking again." He gestured around to the intense firefight and then to the wreckage of Thorn's ship. "There's no way we can evac yet. So, some wounded we may have to carry."
"I can walk," Sixes said, with more conviction than evidence.
"Book!" Justice signaled without looking up, and the Guard trooper fired his way sideways across the gap, shield up, staying low. He slotted himself into place.
For just a moment, Book registered that his brother was down. His shoulders dropped a fraction. Then they were back up. "I'll get him out."
Justice finished his work and was already moving. "I'll sort you properly in medbay. Don't get shot again." And he was gone, back into the firefight, moving toward the next downed brother with the calm urgency of someone who had already decided the math of this situation wasn't going to beat him today.
Sixes pushed himself upright, jaw set, and slotted in beside Book.
Book gave him a look up and down. "Sixes, brother, where's your helmet and shield?" He asked it like they were discussing the food in the mess. Calm.
Sixes looked toward the wall of droids. "Over there."
Book didn't miss a beat. "Right, then, they can keep it. You'll stay behind my shield, alright?"
They held. The line held. But, the rooftop would not hold. The structure would be coming down soon.
Vos leaned in close. Fox noticed now that the Jedi's breathing was pained. He so badly wanted to ask: Are you alright? And, he couldn't even begin to explain why he was obsessed with the Jedi's welfare. Vos, to his credit, seemed less concerned with his own welfare. "If we can breach that recessed stairwell," he pointed with his chin toward a reinforced doorway set back into the base of the superstructure,"we can access the lower manufacturing floors. Thorn isn't here. He has to be down there." He assessed the spreading fire with a glance. "We have maybe four minutes before this entire rooftop lose integrity and comes down."
Four minutes. Sections of it wouldn't even last that long. "We need a diversion."
"That would be me." Vos' tone brokered no argument.
"Alright, I'll leave a squad with-" "Just me." Vos stared into Fox's eyes, with a look that said: I'll make it an order if I have to.
Fox looked at the Jedi with a lightsaber and a riot shield and the unreasonable, bone-deep calm of someone who had already run the numbers on his own odds and decided they were acceptable.
Fox was not a man who trusted easily. He was the Fox. The cleverest of his brothers, the one who survived by never, ever taking anything on faith. Every time he'd trusted the wrong thing, brothers had died.
But he'd watched this one fly off a gunship into open air for men he'd known less than a day. He'd watched him come back instead of staying safe.
"Alright," he said.
"Watch for traps." Vos said it quietly, directly. Not a general warning. Something specific. Then he launched himself upward.
There was no other word for it. He went up and out from cover like gravity was a suggestion, the green blade blazing wide, cutting across the entire elevated sightline of the droid superstructure in a single sweeping arc that drew every photoreceptor on the rooftop. The droids tracked him with mechanical unanimity, every weapon swinging to the single brightest, fastest, most kinetic target available. They were machines. They prioritized threat.
Fox turned his back, swallowed something that felt uncomfortably close to dread on the General's behalf, and barked into the squad channels: "Move out! Secure the stairwell!"
He charged across the rooftop, leading the way.
They pushed through the smoke, through the heat, through the sick orange glow of burning sections of roof reflecting off visors, and they made the door.
Book had Sixes upright and somehow kept up with him. They were right behind him.
The stairwell was dark, unaccountably so, but they encountered no resistance. They charged down, weapons drawn, and Fox didn't stop to count his men until he reached the bottom. They'd lost two guardsmen on the rooftop, and the rest were with them as walking wounded, or being carried by their brothers.
It was almost too easy.
The thought arrived cold and immediate. He stood in the dim of the lower manufacturing floor, surrounded by his brothers, the silence sudden after the roar of battle, and he felt it. It was the specific, tactical wrongness of a situation that had resolved itself without the cost it should have demanded.
Watch for traps.
Fox raised a fist. The Guard stopped.
In the dark ahead, something moved.
