Star Wars - Pax Empirica - Wookiee Annihilation Page 3

So I sat quietly hidden in my little thicket, and the first sign I had of trouble came from Strander. “Holy Sith!” he screamed. “They’ve broken our perimeter.” Suddenly my helmet came alive with desperate squawking. “Your right! There’re some to your right!” “Cover your flank!” “Behind you, soldier!”

  I jumped to my feet and started toward the outpost, but as soon as it came in sight, I could see that the battle was almost over. Five troopers fled the building in my direction. The labels in my goggles showed that Strander was among them.

  “Are you getting this, Wayson?” Strander called out. “Are you getting this? Do not approach camp. Repeat, do not attempt to rejoin the platoon.”

  “What’s going on down there?” I asked as I ducked back in some branches.

  Strepp’s voice broke in. “Maintain radio silence. Dower, hold your position.”

  I looked back. From this distance the Wookiees and stormtroopers looked like miniature statues only a few centimeters tall. Hundreds of Wookiees flooded the grounds around the outpost. Using optical enhancement, I saw that they had bowcasters. They clearly outnumbered my platoon, and the sheer abandon with which they attacked confused the stormtroopers. The furry beasts seemed unconcerned about blaster fire, and many of them attacked with their paws instead of their weapons.

  The Wookiees swarmed into the building from all sides, flushing Captain Janzor and a small band of 15 armed troopers out the eastern door. I could hear the Captain talking over my audio. “Stay tight. You, cover the flank. Fire! Fire! Fire!”

  Just as the brown sea of Wookiees seemed to close around the stormtroopers, six rapidly fired bolts made them retreat. A stormtrooper had climbed to the top of the outpost. My goggles identified the hero as First Sergeant Oswald Strepp. Huddled beside a beam just behind the ledge of the outpost, he fired several shots at the Wookiees, drew their attention, then sprinted to a new location and fired more.

  “If you can hear me, Dower,” Strepp shouted frantically, “return to the drop site. That goes for anyone who can hear me. Return to the drop site.”

  By this time, the Wookiees had regrouped. The small circle of troopers no longer had any chance of escape. Surrounded and pinned down, they tried to circle back for the shelter of the outpost; but Wookiees had overrun the building and fired on them from the doors and windows. As I watched him fight, Strepp bent down and pulled something up in his hand. Using my optical enhancer, I saw he held a thermal detonator.

  “Janzor,” Strepp called. “I am dropping a TD. On my count, hit the dirt, then run for open space.”

  I glanced quickly at the soldiers making a desperate stand. Three of the soldiers had fallen. Janzor stood at the head of the circle, firing wildly and still hitting targets.

  “Drop!” Strepp called. And at that moment, the outpost lit up in a huge fireball as long streams of fire exploded through the windows and doorways. For a moment it looked as if the outpost would remain standing. Badly shaken, but possibly still alive, Strepp lay on the roof with his left arm dangling over a beam. Then the thatching beneath him disintegrated in a column of smoke, and he toppled into the building. A moment later, the entire roof collapsed as the building turned into a well of flames.

  As the vapor cleared from the battleground, I saw the bodies of dozens of Wookiees lying crumpled. Some rolled around wounded, others lay perfectly still. I also saw the blackened armor of blasted and charred stormtroopers. Some limbs and helmets lay scattered, and a few bodies were blown naked; but clearly some of the troopers from Janzor’s last stand had made it to safety. Using the day-for-night lenses in their goggles, they might have been able to see through the smoke and fumes of the explosion. Using my goggles, however, I identified Janzor’s armor among the wreckage of those who had not escaped.

  “Wayson? Wayson? Are you out here? What happened?”

  “Strepp and Janzor are dead,” I answered. “Strepp tried to clear the area with a thermal detonator.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like this,” Strander gasped. “One moment we were resting, a moment later Wookiees began rushing through every door. I didn’t even have time to grab my blaster.”

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “I’ll transmit a beacon.”

  “No, don’t!” I said. “They have helmets now. If any of the helmets down there are still working, you’ll bring those hairy demons right to us.”

  “Are you alone?” I asked.

  “Two of us,” Strander answered.

  “And two more,” a voice I did not recognize added. They probably were members of Janzor’s group—the survivors of the captain’s last stand.

  “Okay, we can’t afford to risk more transmissions.” Something told me that these Wookiees were not nearly as primitive as we had been told. Somehow they had located our force and overwhelmed us before we could establish a beachhead. We had hoped to use surprise as a weapon, but they turned that weapon against us. “Do what Strepp said. Head for the drop zone and signal for help.”

  I hoped that I might run into Strander on the way. He could not have been more than a kilometer away to the east or the south, but in this dense forest, a kilometer could hide an entire army. In fact, on this grisly evening it had hidden an entire army of Wookiees. Now if it could just offer enough cover for us to hide.

  Moving slowly through the densest thickets, I started the long trek back to the drop zone. Branches slapped at my armor as I walked. Were it not for my armor, thorns would have stripped off my skin. But my armor kept me safe and cool. And if I could just stay hidden until evening, the day-for-night vision in my helmet would help me see when the Wookiees could not. I turned up the volume of my audio piece and filtered out the crack of the branches hitting my armor. Instead, I focused on birds screeching and insects buzzing and footfalls—the clattering footfalls of stormtroopers and the padded steps of Wookiees.

  It took me more than an hour to travel that first kilometer that my platoon had naively charged across on the way to the outpost. Now I fought my way through sticks and branches, pushing for every step. My armor cooled the air around me, but nothing could stop the burning in my leg muscles. My thighs had deep knots and my calves felt twisted. I hated this planet. Even as I paused to rest and watched an orange-and-blue bird light on a branch, I cursed this damned planet.

  Then I heard Wookiees. At first I thought about climbing up a tree and hiding in the branches. Then I realized that if they discovered me, they could corner me. I would have no escape. So, even though I would not be able to see them, I hid from the Wookiees by burrowing deep into a stand of trees. I lay among rotted, insect-infested logs and covered myself with bark and dirt. And as I lay there, I switched to infrared vision and saw the red shapes of legs moving swiftly. They had tracked something, probably not me. At least they did not stop and look in my direction. Instead they rushed on a few meters ahead. Six Wookiees—I counted their torsos as they streaked by; but I could not angle my head for a better view.

  I lay still for a few moments listening to their soft footsteps. From what I could hear, they seemed to have gathered around something. They started growling angrily, and I suspected that they had found their target. Fortunately it wasn’t me. Then I heard screaming so loud that I had to turn off my audio piece. Even with my audio off, I still heard the screaming through the walls of my helmet.

  The pack of Wookiees had found two stormtroopers hidden up in a tree. Apparently abandoning all trappings of civilization, the Wookiees poked at the soldiers with sticks instead of shooting them down. The cornered stormtroopers cowered helplessly, clinging to the tree limbs with all of their strength. I heard their screams and rose from my hiding place. Kneeling behind a knotted branch, I quietly aimed at one of the Wookiees. But as I prepared to fire, another group of Wookiees joined the first. Now there were at least 20 of them, angry, hulking, completely wild. As they knocked the first trooper from his perch, I lay back under my blanket of bark and closed my eyes. A few minutes later, the screaming was replaced by the
even scarier sound of total silence.

  There was nothing left to do but switch on my audio piece and listen for the chance to continue my escape. I lay alone, covered in bark, armed yet helpless. The damp bark blocked my sight. I tried all of my lenses, but all I could see was darkness. So I continued to lie still and hide, listening for clues. I heard nothing, nothing at all.

  At one point, as I lay waiting for some unknown signal to leave my hiding place, I felt the ground beneath me shake as if some force were trying to pry it open. Though it seemed a long shot, I switched my goggles to infrared vision and saw the most frightening thing yet. Unless I had lost my mind, which seemed likely, I saw the image of a frozen spidershaped creature perched directly below me. A solid floor of meter-thick branches separated us, but the monster’s heat signal registered through it—or should I say, its cold signal. The giant spider was so devoid of heat that its body signature registered blue. It was so cold that my infrared spotted it through otherwise impenetrable branches. I became completely fixated watching it scratch at the wood below me. It appeared to be the size of a TIE fighter.

  Then something woke me from my trance. One moment I was staring at the hypnotic blue creature, the next I nearly fainted with fright when something wrenched the bark cover away from my hiding place. I rolled over, but my infrared vision was on and I could see no details in the daylight. I aimed my blaster blindly; but before I could fire, something knocked it out of my hand. “Wayson, it’s me,” Strander’s voice barely penetrated my helmet.

  Up to the moment that I heard Strander’s voice, every muscle in my body tensed and my lungs constricted my breathing. I heard him, and my fingers relaxed from my palms. “Milo,” I said, not knowing what to say next.

  “I saw you lying there and thought they had gotten to you, too,” Strander said as he helped me to my feet. A few meters behind him, I saw another trooper standing by the tree where the Wookiees had trapped their victims.

  I could barely hear anything. I tried switching my audio off and on several times, but it had malfunctioned. Giving up, I looked at Strander and asked, “How bad?”

  Strander sighed. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

  Had I known what I would see, I would not have gone to look. The sun had started to set, casting an eerie red light on the spot where the bodies lay in heaps. The Wookiees had used branches to smash through the stormtroopers’ armor. They had crushed their helmets and shattered their chest plates, and everything in them. Perhaps their outrage over our invasion had caused them to revert to an even more primitive state.

  “I wanted to help them,” I said quietly. “There was nothing I could do… too many of them. So I hid.”

  “Wayson, we are all running away now.” Strander said. “Nobody blames you.” I had to struggle to hear his words.

  We hid near the bodies for another few minutes as the sun set behind the trees. Strander told me how he had found me. Apparently his identifier showed my name over the thicket even though I was hidden from view. Thinking he might find my crushed helmet, Strander switched to infrared and saw the outline of my body under the bark. When I did not move, he suspected the Wookiees had buried me. But he did not want to leave a friend behind and decided to take a closer look.

  And in its cruel way, fate gave us faint aid. Strander and his companion. Private Sterns Yennich, had not grabbed weapons before fleeing the outpost. That alone may have saved their lives. They had been the only unarmed members in a group of five stormtroopers that fled the outpost. The Wookiees had picked off their three armed companions.

  As we waited for nightfall, Yennich noticed something dangling from the limbs above our heads. Strander helped him climb the tree, and they found blasters. With no other option, we did the ghoulish deed and claimed weapons left by fallen comrades. Then, under the cover of night, we continued toward the drop zone.

  Wookiees clearly had sharper senses than we did, but our helmets magnified our vision and let us see at night. Something had damaged my audio technology and I heard only sounds that were loud enough to penetrate my helmet. Strander had to shout for me to hear him, but I was lucky to be alive.

  After seeing the way they smashed the stormtroopers, armor and all, I felt relatively confident that the Wookiees did not plan to use our technology against us. Using our day-for-night vision, we could press on easily. Even if they heard or smelled us, assuming the Wookiees still pursued us, they would only have a vague idea of howto find us. We had to press that advantage. We had to run as fast as possible. Come daylight, the Wookiees would again be faster and smarter than us. According to my readout, we had less than eight kilometers to reach the drop zone.

  Glowing red and blue insects traced curling paths through the air ahead of us. I brushed past them, ignoring their brilliant light. I could not ignore the screeching animals below us, however. Those behemoths seemed at war with one another, and when I switched to infrared, I noticed that huge beast of a spider dangling upside down from the branches just below our feet. I did not have time to think about giant monsters. My legs and lungs burned, and we had only another hour to make it to the drop zone before daylight. And then what? What would happen once we arrived at the drop zone? How would the pilot of the transport know we were there?

  It became harder to ignore the spider as I realized that it was following us. I switched to infrared and looked down again. What I saw sent a chill down my spine. The dark outline of that spider still clung to the branches below us. It moved gracefully along the bottoms of the branches, stopping when we stopped, moving when we moved, and constantly prodding the wood between us with its legs in search of weak spots. Our blasters would have little effect on such a beast.

  But the spider lived in a world of perpetual darkness under two thick canopies of foliage. I suspected it was blind or at least sensitive to light. All of the monsters at the base of the trees would either be blind or ultra-sensitive to light. That was the only way animals could survive in a perpetually dark world. Lucky for the Wookiees, too. If that creature could tolerate light, nothing would stop it from burrowing through the branch barrier and making a new home on this level. Soon the first rays of sunlight would show over the tops of the trees. I was not sure whether I would feel safe from the spider or more fearful of the Wookiees.

  As Strander and I pushed our way through thick overgrowth, Yennich ran toward a clearing with no branches or outcrops. I tried to signal to him, but my audio did not work. When he stepped into the clearing, a silver-blue leg slashed through the logs beneath him. I was instantly paralyzed with fear.

  Seeing the danger, Yennich tried to leap to safety, but he landed deeper in that same clearing. A second razor-like leg carved through a crack, tripping Yennich and gashing his leg. He howled with pain at its icy touch and fell to the ground but had the presence of mind to immediately spring back to his feet. The spider broke through his armor and blood ran down his calf. Yennich’s badly cut leg could not support him, and the wounded trooper could not possibly fight off the spider.

  Two mandibles sliced through the ground and clamped around his waist. I could hear the muffled screams through my helmet as Yennich struggled to aim his blaster at the beast. For a moment it looked as if he might shoot his way to safety, then the spider’s fangs pierced through his armor just below his chest. Instantly paralyzed or destroyed, the private curled into a lifeless ball and offered no resistance as the spider pulled him down through the trees.

  Watching this, I began hyperventilating. “Too much!” I said, and my voice echoed in my helmet. I fought back nausea, as I turned from the clearing and forced myself to take another step. Strander stared at me. He wanted to talk, but I could not hear him. Before I could stop myself, I pulled my helmet from my head and stood staring into the helmet’s black eyes. With its audio piece damaged, the helmet rendered me deaf.

  Warm, fresh air filled my lungs as my head exploded with a hundred new sensations. The smell of rotting foliage and the wet heat in the air se
emed to slow my brain. Then I did something I never imagined a stormtrooper could do: I tossed my helmet away. In the mounting sunlight, the infrared and day-for-night lenses offered me no protection, and the lack of hearing practically sentenced me to death.

  “What are you doing?” Strander asked.

  “I couldn’t hear anything,” I said, taking a deep breath and trying to compose myself. I had trouble breathing in the thick forest air. “I tracked that thing all night,” I nodded toward the clearing. “It followed us for hours.”

  “The sun’s coming up,” Strander said. “We need to get to the drop zone.”

  “And what are we going to do there?” I asked. “Shout for a transport?”

  “We’ve got to do something,” Strander said as he pulled off his helmet. “We can’t just sit here and wait for the Wookiees.”

  I took a deep breath of warm air, felt actual sunlight on my skin, and looked around at the maze of green vegetation that surrounded us. Trees as tall as towers formed solid walls that outlined the sky. Under other circumstances, I would have paid money to visit such a world. One day, under the guiding hand of Pax Empirica, others would come and safely tour these woods. The Empire would win, it was an unstoppable force.

  “Soldier… Soldier? Do you read me?” A voice came from Strander’s helmet.

  He and I looked at each other, then he picked the helmet up and fitted it back over his head. I could hear his voice as he spoke, but the soft tones sounded mumbled. Then I saw them—the three scouts on speeder bikes who had accompanied our invasion.

  “We’ve been looking for you all night,” one said as he floated to a stop beside me.

  Ambushing my platoon gave the Wookiees only the tiniest of victories.

  Janzor and the sergeants went into battle with a secret. They knew that a second invasion force landed on Kashyyyk a few hours after us, a much larger force with Arakyd XR-85 tank droids, TIE crawlers, and AT-ST scouts.