Star Wars_ X-Wing 08_ Isard's Revenge - Michael A. Stackpole [56]
He decided against killing them for a couple of very good reasons. First and foremost, he didn’t need to kill them. He knew of other New Republic soldiers who wouldn’t have blinked an eye at killing helpless stormtroopers, but he considered doing that murder. As he’d learned in CorSec, no matter how much a criminal might deserve killing, it wasn’t necessarily his place to pull the trigger.
Second, and more important, the two downed stormtroopers were intelligence resources. While forensics might allow a dead man to tell some sort of tale—like Urlor—interrogating live stormies would be a lot more productive. Since no one in New Republic Intelligence even knew the installation near the dam existed, he assumed these men would have a wealth of information General Cracken would be very grateful for.
Corran stripped his flight suit down to his waist and pulled on one of the stormtrooper’s torso armor. He managed to get the flight suit on over the bulky armor, and zipped the flight suit back up nearly all the way, but not quickly enough to avoid getting chilled. He knew he looked ridiculous, but having something that would slow down blaster bolts meant he could live with his embarrassment and laugh about it later.
He pulled the comlinks from the stormtroopers’ helmets. Lowering the volume and input gain on one, he listened for a bit to the chatter going back and forth. He couldn’t make much sense of the call signs, but he heard a number of people reporting on that comm channel. Station checks seemed to come on a regular schedule, but he had no idea when the two guards he’d put down would be seen as missing.
He shut the comlinks off, then looked at them and smiled. Using a last bit of the stormtroopers’ cord, he swapped one of the comlinks end for end, putting the mike near the speaker on each, turned the volume and gain up to full on both, then tied them tightly together. With a nod he hefted the remaining blaster carbine, took it off safe, and started north again.
Not the best plan in the world, but one that will work. He got to the edge of the ravine and found himself twenty meters from the doors, at the top of a ten-meter-high scree slope from which the snow had long since melted. The quartet of stormtroopers he’d have to take out were another ten meters beyond the doors, putting them a fair distance away as far as a blaster shot went. Not going to be easy at all.
He took a deep breath and let it flow out, taking his anxiety with it. In the calm clarity that followed, he realized two things. First, by taking down all the stormtroopers he could and causing as much trouble as he could, he would cut down the odds of another New Republic soldier getting killed. Second, he knew it was his responsibility to take care of the site. No one else was in position to take care of it—no one else knows it’s even here—and hitting the Imperials before they prepared for any New Republic ground action was vital.
With his right hand firmly around the blaster carbine’s grip, he flicked the comlinks on with his left thumb. Because of the way they’d been tied together, an earsplitting feedback loop immediately built and injected itself into the comm channel. The four stormtroopers below clapped hands to their helmets and wrestled to pull them off as Corran ran, slid, and leaped down the scree slope.
Once he hit the area outside the doors, he sprayed red blaster bolts over the distracted stormtroopers. His first shot took one man through the stomach, folding him up and pitching him back into a second man. Another shot spun a third man around, having caught him in a hip. A subsequent shot snapped his head back. The fourth stormtrooper tried to return fire, but before