Star Wars_ X-Wing 04_ The Bacta War - Michael A. Stackpole [108]
Suddenly one of the troopers did stand. She brought her pistol around, but he leveled his blaster carbine at her and triggered a burst before she could shoot him. She saw a trio of sizzling scarlet energy darts fly at her and for a second considered it nothing short of miraculous that they had missed. Then she felt the tug on her left thigh. Her world whirled, and her chin dug into the moist loam at the base of a gloan tree. She snorted dirt from her nostrils and wondered what had happened, then the first wave of pain hit her.
Iella rolled onto her back and glanced down at her left thigh. Crusted black flesh surrounded a hole oozing blood. Biting back a scream, she unbuckled her blaster belt and pulled it off. She pressed the holster against the wound, then wrapped the belt around her leg and refastened it. Pulling it tight almost made her faint, but she struggled against the darkness nibbling at the edges of her sight.
She didn’t think she’d blacked out, but as the world lightened again she found herself looking up at a trooper standing over her. He was saying something, but she couldn’t focus on the words. All she could notice was that the armor seemed over-large on him, with the breastplate covering half his stomach and the helmet resting firmly on the armor’s collar.
The trooper gestured with his blaster carbine, but Iella still wasn’t able to understand him. She tried, but an odd whirring sound eclipsed his words. An angular shadow dropped down behind him. Iella heard a horrid snapping and crunching as the trooper began to telescope down toward the ground. He twisted around, his legs going limp, allowing Iella to see the ragged parallel wounds slashed down through the back of his armor.
Standing behind him, with claws dripping blood, a black Vratix warrior drew his arms in toward his thorax. His head bobbed once, then his powerful hind legs straightened, propelling him up and out of her sight. If not for the ravaged corpse of the soldier at her feet, she would have had no proof of his intervention.
Her mouth hung open as she looked at the trooper’s body. Those claws sliced through that armor with the ease of a wampa filleting a tauntaun. No way all the bacta on this world could close those wounds. She leaned back against the trunk of the gloan tree, somehow finding comfort in the roughness of its bark. She heard screams that sounded far distant, more whirring, and other crisper sounds she never wanted to identify.
“Iella!”
She looked up. “Sixtus! Have you found Elscol?”
The large man nodded, then bent and scooped her up in his arms. “She twisted her ankle and got pinned down. How are you?”
“Hurt, but I should live.”
“Good. I’ll get you clear.”
Iella tried to point back toward the troopers. “But they’re out there. Another group, flanking us.”
Sixtus shook his head. “The Black-claws got them all. It won’t make up for the Vratix dead here, but it should start making the Xucphrans scared.” His eyes narrowed. “When they find their people dead, they’ll have a hard time sleeping.”
Iella winced against the pain. “Wait.”
“No, the Ashern have a base camp with some makeshift bacta tanks.”
“No, not that.” She shook her head to clear it. “Look, don’t leave the bodies here. Take them away, far away. Just have the troopers disappear. Not knowing will be worse than knowing. Take our bodies, too, hide them. Don’t let Isard know how badly we were hurt.”
Sixtus smiled. “That’s odd.”
“What?”
“Your lips are moving, but I’m hearing the kind of things Elscol would say.” He stepped over a thick gloan branch and continued down a narrow jungle trail. “I’d not have thought you capable of thinking that kind of thing.”
“One thing I know, Sixtus, is that a high body count doesn’t mean victory, it just means a lot of folks died.” Iella tipped her head back toward the village. “A lot of people died there,