Star Wars_ Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor - Matthew Woodring Stover [125]
And stopped.
The trooper wasn’t fighting back. He wasn’t struggling at all. He simply stood with his empty hands raised and waited to see if Fenn would slaughter him like a fattened grundill.
Fenn blinked, unable to believe what he was seeing. He was even less able to believe what he saw next, which was a black-armored stormtrooper stepping through the hatchway from which had come the surprise attack. He tensed and gathered himself, but the stormtrooper lifted an armored gauntlet, empty, palm forward.
“Ni dinu ner gaan naakyc, jorcu ni nu copaani kyr’a-mur ner vod,” the stormtrooper said.
Fenn Shysa could only stare in disbelief.
The guy’s inflections were kind of weird—he had a definite Coruscanti accent—but his meaning was absolutely clear, and his use of Mando’a was flawless.
Honor my offer of truce, for I would not willingly shed my brother’s blood.
“What?”
“Lord Mandalore. Emperor Skywalker sends his regards,” the stormtrooper said in Basic. He wore the rank flash of a group captain. “The situation has changed.”
Fenn’s mouth fell open. “Emperor … Skywalker?”
The situation has changed appeared to be the understatement of the decade.
“We have secured the surface-to-orbit emplacements,” the group captain said. “General Calrissian requests that you help us evacuate the civilians. Several thousand civilians, whom we were ordered by Emperor Skywalker to protect.”
And in the end, Fenn Shysa could only blink some more and wonder if maybe he’d taken a couple of shots to the head and just hadn’t noticed. Or something. But nonetheless he and the mercenary commander followed the group captain back through chamber after chamber choked with rubble and stinking of ozone and charred flesh, back to the scene of the battle at the twin redoubts that guarded the massive blast doors. The group captain clicked a brief code into the door panel, and the enormous slabs of durasteel began to grind open.
In the interior control room of the gravity gun, several dozen stormtroopers stood in ranks as orderly as if they were presenting for inspection, their hands clasped on top of their heads. Their rifles had been stacked with millimetric precision in the center of the room; on the deck beside them, their sidearms were arranged in a perfectly spaced grid. Behind the weapons stood a pyramid of gleaming black stormtrooper helmets, which reminded Fenn unpleasantly of the stacks of severed heads built by the Jaltiri tribals of Toskhowwl VI.
“I can’t—this is incredible,” he said. “We couldn’t even get close—we were tryin’ to cut through the walls and gettin’ nowhere—”
“That’s because you didn’t have the override codes for the blast doors,” the group captain said reasonably.
“And they just surrendered?”
“At my order.” The group captain sounded as though this sort of thing happened every day. “I am their superior officer. No stormtrooper would dream of disobedience.”
“If they had?”
“This might well have presented some difficulty, as I and my men have been instructed by Emperor Skywalker to minimize further bloodshed. I’m grateful that I didn’t have to make the decision.”
“Group Captain—”
“Air Marshal,” the stormtrooper corrected him with firm but quiet pride. “I have been honored with a battlefield promotion from the emperor himself.”
“Emperor Skywalker,” Fenn said slowly, struggling to beat this conversation into something resembling sense.
“The chosen heir of Palpatine the Great,” the fresh-minted air marshal said primly. “Haven’t you seen Luke Skywalker and the Jedi’s Revenge?”
“Um …”
“It’s a dramatization, of course.”
“Of course.”
“But it’s based on actual events.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s very powerful. A masterpiece,” the air marshal told him. “It changed my life.”
Fenn still couldn’t get his mind around it. “When a fella says a holodrama changed his life,” he said, “he’s usually just exaggeratin’.”
“I’m not