[Originally written by Foln]
Imperial Army Chronicles: Defiance
Chapter 1
“Let’s make this quick and by the books. I don’t care much for this planet.” Just inside the main airlock of a small Republic Transport stand four figures, two male and two female, all clad in the white laminate armor of the Republic military. Bright glowpanels light the interior almost too well and, considering that their armor is remarkably well polished, it is easy to distinguish the orange insignias of the 207th “Wardogs” Infantry Regiment emblazoned on their shoulders and their helmets. Each of them carries a standard-issue blaster rifle slung over their shoulder. “And lock it down this time, Defiance Two,” comes the same voice as before, from the man in the front-left of the four-person formation as he nods to the woman in the front-right. His prim Imperial dialect still manages to convey a sense of propriety and elegance of speech even as it is significantly modulated by the helmet transceiver. Turning to the whole squad, he says, “And move with a purpose. We’re already running behind schedule.” “Sir, yes sir,” reply the other three, in regimented unison. The four brace themselves against the walls of the airlock as the ship shifts and spins during its landing descent. Soon they hear the clank of the landing gear on the pad and the status light on the wall switches from red to green. The four bodies jolt slightly as the floor underneath them begins to descend below the vessel. The four clean hydraulic pistons on the lift’s corners barely make any noise of their own as it slowly lowers the squad onto the landing pad, and soon the lift stops gingerly on the surface below. Over the squad’s helmet comm, the same voice quietly orders, “Forward… March.” The formation steps off in unison, left foot first as is militarily proper. Their cadence, though unspoken, is congruent as they make their way down the length of one of several parallel catwalks leading from as many transport pads toward a long building with an equal number of ray shielded warehouse bays. After marching the length of the catwalk, the man in front-left orders, “Squad… Halt.” A Mon Calamari dock official in Republic Military field dress approaches the unit, flanked by a pair of lightly armored Corellian Security personnel. “You’re late,” he says condescendingly, the irritation in his voice practically palpable. He motions to the datapad in the hand of the man on the front-left. “Let me see that authorization. The sooner you’re out of here, the better. We’ve got three freighters waiting on you right now. What took you so long?!” “We had a systems malfunction upon exiting hyperspace,” replies the man on the front-left with the Imperial accent. “Procedure maintained that we power down main engines for troubleshooting. Took us a while to isolate the power fluctuations to the hydrillic converter coils.” The Mon Cal eyes the trooper suspiciously upon hearing the Imperial dialect. The speaking trooper on the front-left stands perfectly still, his eyes front for what seems to be longer than the few moments that actually passed. As the pause drags on, the trooper turns his head to look at the dock official and asks, quite irritated, “Is there a problem, sir?” Just as the dock official opens his large, fish-like mouth to respond, the datapad beeps and flashes in an approving manner, begging the Mon Cal’s attention. He studies the message on the pad for the briefest of seconds before he returns the device to the trooper. “No, not at all. Everything checks out. Hurry up and load the shipment, then get out of here. We’re very busy, you know.” “Trust me. We’ll be out of your hair in no time,” the trooper jabs, much to the Mon Cal’s disdain. The four jog over to the cargo bay as the ray shield disengages. A large sheet with the 207th insignia covers a number of cargo crates in the middle of the front of this bay of the incomprehensibly large warehouse. Behind the covered pile stands row after row and stack after stack of containers, crates, and loose items on endless shelves and racks. The trooper who had been on the front-left pulled the sheet off the pile to reveal two dozen crates underneath. “You know, Defiance One, perhaps next time we try *not* pissing off the dock workers?” asks the other female in the group, who also sports an imperial accent and had been standing in the back-left. “I thought the point here was to be forgettable.” “What, you mean that bit about hair? He’ll get over it,” replies the trooper from the front-left. “We have to make it believable, Defiance Three. Now cut the chatter and get this stuff loaded. The clock is ticking.” The four of them set about the task of loading the crates onto the transport. The small repulsorlifts on each crate make the work simple, but the long catwalk meant a long turnaround time. Overhead, three cargo freighters hover impatiently before a fourth joins them. Upon its arrival, it attempts to slide in front of the other three in the queue. Whether this was on purpose or not is undetermined, but after what was assuredly an intense exchange of some rather vulgar comm chatter between the four pilots above, the newly arrived freighter withdrew to fall in line behind the others. Several minutes pass as the armor-clad group of four move quickly to load the crates. They manage to load fourteen of the twenty-four containers aboard the transport, with two more on the catwalk, before a new voice comes over the squad’s helmet comm. “Hey, Defiance One, this is Five… You might wanna hurry this up, the babes are waking.” “What?!” replies one, incredulous. “They should’ve been down for two hours!” A blue-faced female Chiss stands casually, her shoulder leaned up against a bulkhead. Her blue hair gelled into a mohawk and her black duster’s tall collar nearly completely concealing her neck from all but a frontal angle, she looks through a viewport into an escape pod that held two men and two women inside, all bound and gagged and out cold. Though their eyes were shut, the chiss could see some reflexive twitching in their fingers that forewarned their imminent return to consciousness. The Chiss nonchalantly reaches up to her wrist comm and activates the transceiver. “Well, you say that, but I’d say this past hour and a half is all that we’re gonna get on this lot.” “Blast!” curses Defiance One as he steps up the pace to get back to the warehouse for another crate. As another of his squad snags a crate and heads off toward the ship, he counts the remaining seven containers. “We’ll have to dump the pod early, One. Launch it across the city,” comes the assertive female voice of Defiance Two over the comm. “Even if we leave now, we won’t make it through the atmosphere before they’re awake.” “I say we kill them,” came a previously unheard male on the comm. His voice sounds more regally Imperial than the others, but carries a note of crude pragmatism with it. “Just have Five put a bolt through their skulls and we’ll jettison the pod later.” “Negative on that, Four!” yells One. Quieting down so as not to draw attention from any warehousemen or droids in earshot, he explains “Leaving them alive implicates any of a number of benign outlaw relief efforts within Corellia or even the Republic. Killing them will only direct blame closer towards us.” He barely pauses long enough to inhale before he commands, “Defiance Five: If you see any of their eyes even crack open, you send that pod straight into the heart of Coronet City, understood?” The Chiss woman on the transport depresses the button on her wrist comm as she affirms “Understood, One.” Defiance One continues, his Imperial dialect thickening with the tension, “Defiance Two, Three, and Four: when you hear that pod launch, get back to the transport as soon as you can. And remember, if it comes to it, BLASTERS ONLY.” Defiance Two mutters under her breath, “Blow our cover once and Nasho never lets you hear the end of it…” They hurry and manage to get another three crates on board. As One, Three, and Four hastily push three more crates across the catwalk and Two rushes back for the last crate, the chiss’ eyes narrow as she struggles to get a closer look through the plastiglass on the escape pod. Her hand hovers over the ejection control. One of the bound males in the pod had barely twitched an eyelid before she hit the button. Defiance Two stopped suddenly as a wave of premonition washed over her. “Oh, no…” she said as she turns around, her widened eyes concealed by the heavy white helmet. A hiss nearly immediately preempts a loud detonation that can be heard and even felt across the catwalks and landing pads. It surprises everyone. The four armored individuals rushing with their crates, the other landed crews, the handful of dock workers, the myriad of loading droids and even the freighter captains overhead all jump a little at the sound. Perhaps the most surprised of all is the fourth freighter pilot in the queue, as his vessel had hovered a bit lower than the others, and on the same side of the grounded transport from which the pod was launched. The chiss woman on the transport had just the shortest of moments between the pod launching and the containment bulkhead sealing the transport’s exterior layer to witness the pod ricochet off the freighter’s aft section and sail skyward. Defiance Three was loading her last crate and couldn’t see the fireball, but One, Two, and Four all had front-row seats. The entire aft of the stricken fourth freighter swings away and explodes in brilliant, chaotic glory as its port side dips from the force of deflecting the pod upward. The pilot, whose total obliviousness to the cause of the emergency offered no bliss nor solace, frantically and reflexively slams the thruster controls to all-ahead full. With the port thruster completely annihilated and the ship already turned halfway toward the transport on the pad, this action only succeeds in launching the vessel on a crash course with the catwalk that Defiance One and Four were pushing crates across. Defiance Two watched the explosion with alarmed apprehension. Sensing the impending collision with the catwalk that would spell certain doom for One and Four, she gathers herself and releases a powerful force wave along the catwalk toward the transport, sweeping her two compatriots and their crates down the walkway just in time to avoid obliteration by the freighter. Defiance Four manages to land feet-first on the ship’s lift, but Defiance One’s chest strikes hard against one of the hydraulic pistons of the ship’s loading platform, which only deflects his flying body into another of the pistons. He strikes the second piston squarely with his back and falls limp, his form a motionless collection of laminate armor now hanging off both sides of that corner of the platform. The catwalk erupts into a shower of sparks and shredded durasteel as the freighter erases it from existence and disappears below the floating warehouse platform in a trail of billowing black smoke. Defiance Two looks on as the group’s transport and its pad give way, now unsupported by the catwalk, and begin their inevitable plummet toward the surface. Amid shrieks of horror and panicked cries coming from all around, she turns around and sprints towards the warehouse, setting her eyes and her resolve on that last and final crate. -- Inside the ship, Defiance Five had narrowly managed to get to the cockpit before the freighter destroyed the catwalk holding up the landing platform. At that moment, the transport pitches forward as it begins its gravity-fueled descent to the surface of Corellia. The sudden shift causes the woman to lose her footing and she is thrown face-first onto the forward viewport. -- With one hand, Three holds desperately onto one of the loading ramp’s pistons. Her other hand relentlessly clutches the wrist of the unconscious Defiance One as the pad falls away from the vessel and the ship itself rolls forward. Defiance Four’s helmet came loose from the Force blast and now falls away to the surface of the world, revealing a deep red skin on his snake-like pureblooded sith face. Himself nearly weightless and his feet only precariously planted on the plunging ship’s lift, he summons his focus, embracing the chaos of the moment. The commotion of residual explosions and the howling wind serve to light his eyes ablaze and, in their ferocity, they turn downwards to see the two crates almost hanging, but falling slightly faster below him. The red-skinned male reaches out wi