Star Wars_ The Dark Lord Trilogy - James Luceno [421]
Nick remembered it somewhat differently; he remembered days and nights of screaming chaos, repeated times when only the intervention of more troops, or blind luck, had yanked their jiffies from the smelter at the last minute. But then, that was as good a definition of warring as any he’d come across. And they’d performed the same service for other divisions, so it all seemed to level out.
Even so, even despite the deprivation, the hardship, the extreme conditions, and the general bowel-loosening fear that was war, Nick considered himself fortunate. He’d been one of the youngest commissioned officers in the Republic, and he knew that, if he survived the various conflicts, he could look forward to a career of peacetime military service—followed, in all probability, by a comfortable retirement pension, a family and a conapt, perhaps in the Arak Dunes district or a similar upscale locale, and eventually fat grandchildren to bounce on his knee. He was good with that. Maybe it wasn’t the most illustrious or distinctive life in the galaxy, but it was light-years better than what he’d have gotten back on Haruun Kal, which, if he’d been very lucky, would have been a marked grave instead of an anonymous mound of dirt.
But that wasn’t quite the way things had turned out. Instead, nearly three years after Iolu had shown him the color of his own innards, Nick Rostu found himself a member of a nascent group of revolutionaries dedicated to resisting the new regime.
Back on Haruun Kal, the people of Nick’s ghôsh had a saying: Don’t mess with the akk dog. It was good advice, especially in those troubled times. He’d been planetside on the capital world when the coup went down, and overnight, it seemed, everything had changed—even the planet’s name, from Coruscant to Imperial Center, although no one Nick knew called it that. Suddenly there was a new oligarchy in town, with Palpatine at its apex. Suddenly the Army of the Republic was the Army of the Empire, and it was obvious that it would go hard indeed on anyone who didn’t know which way to salute. Suddenly Major Rostu was given a choice: swear allegiance to the new regime, or face a blasting squad.
He was offered this ultimatum on the same day that he’d learned the fate of Mace Windu. Supposedly the Jedi Master—his adviser, his benefactor, his friend—had attempted to assassinate the Chancellor, and had been killed during the traitorous action. Nick had a problem believing that. Knowing Mace as he had, and judging by Emperor Palpatine’s ruthless pogrom against the Jedi, Nick was pretty sure there’d been nothing traitorous about it, at least as far as Mace had seen it.
He liked to think that he would have made the right choice anyway. There was no denying, however, that the news of Mace’s death made the decision considerably easier. He’d faced the Empire’s representative, flanked by two stormtroopers armed with blasters, and told him—respectfully, of course, the man had been a superior officer under the previous regime, after all—to go frip himself. Then he’d grabbed one of the blasters, shot both troopers and the representative, blown a hole through the big transparisteel window of the conference chamber, and leapt through it as the rest of the troopers in the room unleashed a barrage in his direction.
They missed—probably because they were momentarily immobilized by the shock of seeing a man voluntarily leap from a 210th-story window. Nick wasn’t crazy about the idea, either, but he didn’t see a lot of alternatives, other