Commodore Helix
Disintegrations done dirt cheap.
Objective: Knight Light
Tags:
Nathan Bloodscrawl
Equipment: E-4H Blaster Carbine, Horror Matrix, Electrostaff
Helix was pleased. The enemy front was disintegrating on all sides. Pockets of isolated resistance remained here and there, but it seemed to be over. His vast consciousness' attention flickered over to one H4X model, 897-4. The droid's transmitter must have been damaged. It was firing over and over, transmitting binary gibberish.Tags:
Nathan Bloodscrawl
Equipment: E-4H Blaster Carbine, Horror Matrix, Electrostaff
-4, or "Quad" had been around a long time, upgraded from a Clone Wars era BX model into a newer, deadlier, smarter body. He'd killed many clones in his time, and countless soldiers in the centuries of battle after. Helix watched through his eyes as he dueled and was disabled by one of the Clone officers. A wretched ending for a machine with so lengthy a history.
He didn't have long to think about it as the enemy fighters began tearing what remained of his column apart. "Spread out!" He commanded. "Hit their lines hard! We cannot get bogged down here!" The AA rocket fire by this time had thinned considerably as munitions began to run low, and even his finest interceptor craft seemed incapable of halting the vessels. Still, they were only two ships. The damage they could do was significant, but it wasn't his biggest worry.
His biggest worry was the rumble underneath him as an enormous gorge opened up, and great pillars of flame sprayed into the air. A massive fraction of his forces vanished from his consciousness immediately, and the shock of the data loss to his sensors made him reel. Once again, his transport plunged, but this time there were no walls to catch it.
He fell for what seemed like hours, but what his internal chronometer informed him was in fact only around fourteen seconds, before his entire body was shaken by the impact of the vehicle on rock. Successive other impacts informed him he was now buried under a massive amount of rubble. Briefly, he lost consciousness as the impacts jostled his processors.
When he came to, he checked his chronometer again. Forty-three seconds of inoperability. He took stock of what was left. Not much. As far as he could tell, his forces and the enemy's had all but obliterated each other. Some troops did still remain, but he suspected not enough to take the temple. Vehicle losses had been bad, but not total. He ran the numbers, and confirmed. Not enough to take the temple without unprofitable losses. He was done. No wretched religious site was worth this.
"All units, full retreat." He said, noticing in the dim, flickering internal lighting that his lower left photoreceptor had been smashed in the impact. "Gather the fallen if you can, at least any intact enough to repair. We're finished here. I'll meet up with you shortly."
Up top, the droids would begin falling back, climbing onto the few remaining vehicles or hitching rides on fresh gunships that came to search for intact units.
He took stock of what remained. The Avalanche had survived the fall and the battering of rubble relatively intact. The troops inside all responded when he checked them. They filed out into a small underground space created when the vehicle had been buried. This would be a problem. It would take time to dig out of this, but thankfully, he had all the time in the world.
He registered a gunship unit flying above, and signaled it. With luck, it could blast them out... or bury them. Either way, they couldn't stay here waiting to be forgotten or captured. Explosions rocked the small cavern, and rubble fell, crushing one of the infiltrator droids. Some of the others hauled out a mostly-functional upper torso, and one was assigned to carry it. Finally, a small light appeared above, and Helix was the first to pull himself out. They climbed, and this time, no fire came in answer.
The swamp was a ruin, a blasted, flaming series of radiotoxin-choked canyons that would likely never support life again. It was hard to believe it was even the same place. Their battle had rent the very earth asunder, and transformed a lush swampland into something more resembling the surface of an asteroid. Once again, he'd been lucky. Some of the gorges now created seemed to go down forever.
He stared out at the endless miles of blazing wasteland, and gave a small shake of his head. He'd underestimated his enemy's resolve. They'd destroyed this place utterly rather than let him take it. Some kind of charges had been placed under the area of his approach, and detonated underground gas pockets, many of which were still spewing fire into the air. He'd just have to inform his client that the mission had been a failure. Still, it hadn't been all bad. His enemy had exposed a number of flaws in his units, and tactical situations he lacked the proper droids to fill. The data, if nothing else, would be valuable.
"Sir, there are still a few scattered survivors." Came a report from the remnants of one of the surviving B1H squads. "Should we pursue?"
"Negative, Sergeant." He responded. "No point. If there are any left, ignore them. Any yet alive have more than earned their survival, I think. Continue the withdrawal and leave them be. Do not engage unless fired upon."
The tactical droid shook his head again and turned to go, only to not make it far before he felt something grasping at his ankle. He looked down to see a clone, a pilot by the looks of his armor, that had seized his leg. The clone was trapped under the corpse of a fallen Linebreaker droid, and was raising a blaster pistol towards Helix's head with an unsteady hand. Defiant to the last.
Helix kicked the weapon away, sending it flying, and reached down to lift the droid corpse away. He then hauled the enemy soldier upright, before the droids seized and restrained him. Helix knelt down, to eye level with the clone. His battle-scarred, three-eyed gaze met the equally unreadable T-visored helmet. "Enjoy your victory, such as it is. And give my congratulations to your master, since he does not see fit to speak himself. It is seldom I have faced such battlefield viciousness. You have made it unprofitable to continue this venture. My troops are standing down, and we are leaving. I have no more business with your kind."
"Only one choice remains, for you personally. Relay this message to your brothers, save what few remain, treat your injuries, and live. I have no interest in killing you any longer. Or, pick up that pistol when we let you go, and take one final futile shot before you are cut down. Enough clones have died today for my tastes. The choice is yours, trooper." He stood, and nodded to the droids, who released the clone none-too-gently onto the ground.
Without bothering to wait for a response, he turned and left, bringing his pair of Knightslayers and the dwindling squad of Infiltrators with him. One of the saber-wielding droids spoke up. "A query." It intoned. He nodded, as if to tell it to go on. "Why do we not chase and eradicate the remnants of the clone forces? Send a message? They were defeated, reduced to shattered remnants."
Helix shook his head. "Because the battle is lost. Our objective was to take the temple, eliminate any personnel we found, secure any valuables inside, and report to our clients for further instructions. Their objective was simply to prevent this, and they succeeded. It matters not if we killed them to a man, and expending further munitions and droids to kill more, now that victory is out of reach, is wasteful. The day is theirs. They may enjoy it, with what little time Carnifex leaves them."
He cast one final look back at the battlefield. His clients wouldn't be pleased. He'd have a hard time explaining that ghosts from the past had returned to relive old hatreds, and denied him the prize. The treasures inside were Carnifex's now. What remained was to find out who owned these clones, on his own time. If they were back, and on the side of his clients' enemies, that could become a serious snag in their larger plans...
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