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Yesterday, 04:17 PM
CHAPTER II: Tarhan II
Tarhan's ears buzzed.
Not rang, not a clean sharp note after a blow, but buzzed in a low wet way, as if the whole world had been swallowed up by the seas, submerged beneath the water and he was being asked to hear it from the far side of a fishbowl. His eyes were open, he knew that much, but the sight that came through them was wrong somehow. Too distant, too flat, as though the person sitting on the narrow metal bench in the belly of the prison transport was not him at all, only some poor bastard he had been made to observe from a corner near the ceiling.
A pair of hands rested in the middle of his vision, bound together in front of him with iron-linked restraints that bit red into the skin and wrists. He stared at them for several long seconds with the dull, incurious and distant fascination of a concussed man watching somebody else's troubles. At least until the transport hit a rut in the road and lurched hard enough to throw him backwards into the durasteel hull.
The back of his skull struck metal with a crack that sent white through his vision. Pain arrived a heartbeat later, heavy and overpower, and with it the world suddenly lurched nearer as if he was thrown back into it.
He drew breath too quickly and coughed into the mask fixed over his nose and mouth. The thing had been strapped to his face with a stiff rubber harness that smelled of old breath and machine oil, its hose running from the side of the mask into a fee line built into the wall besides him. The air that came through it was thin and metallic and cold enough to sting his throat with frost burn with each breath. Only then did he realize that not only was he not alone in the belly of the transport, but that everyone else aboard wore such a mask. He looked left, then right, his neck stiff, and saw the others chained to the benches along either side of the narrow compartment. Twi'leks, Rodians, Togruta, Cathar, Humans and everything in-between. In front of him sat a gray-skinned Duros with one eye swollen shut, besides him two old Togruta women with their wrists bound together, binders fixed with short chains to the rings beneath their seats. Besides him sat a young human male as pale as candle wax who looked scarcely better off than the rest of them and kept staring at the floor as if he hoped to disappear into it.
On his left sat another Zabrak he didn't recognize, his head tipped back against the metal wall and his eyes closed. Perhaps sleeping, perhaps saving what little strength remained to him in a place where oxygen itself had to be fed through a tube.
At the front of the transport, behind a welded partition with an open center that let the guard watch them all, sat a correctional officer of the Nam'ta Security Forces. Tarhan recognized the uniform well from his father's colleagues, although only the cut of the old uniform and the familiar shape of its shoulders remained truely Nam'tees. The Insignia had changed. The Green crest that had once marked service to the Confederacy had been stripped off and replaced by the red Imperial Sigil on the mans breast and shoulder.
Even seated he held firmly onto his rifle with the possessiveness of a man whose authority depended on it
An Imperial Military Rebreather covered the man's lower face, its cannisters humming softly with each intake. Only his eyes were visible above it, bloodshot and bored and a little raw around the lids from the cold. Tarhan looked past him, to the small barred viewport set into the transport's Side and saw snow, rock and mountains.
Not the city slush of a bad winter day on nam'ta Prime, not the grat melt that fathered along the mag-rail tramlines and the gutter edges for a week before the rain washed it away, but real snow laid heavy upon the peaks beyond. Jagged mountains, coloured like dark iron where the wind had blown them bare andd white where the cold had settled into the seams. Lower down, black scars cut through the slopes in vast stepped wounds, terraces carved into the earth by Industrial appetire. Smoke rose from chimneys and stacks in long dirty columns that flattened beneath the sky. Conveyer towers marched over the ridges like unnatural, skeletal things. Somewhere out there, hidden by distance and haze, strip-mines clawed away at the bones of the moon.
And at once he knew where he was.
Nam'ta VI.
It shouldn't have been surprising. Of course it was Nam'ta VI. Where else would you send prisoners to die while keeping the books clean? Oxygen is scarce, temperatures among the jagged cliffs, strip-mines and sinkholes, and life on the moon is hard. No one except for the mining corporations would come here willingly. Even before the Empire came to Nam'ta, Tarhan remembered folk spoke of Nam'ta VI as though it were another country, the private property of the mining guilds and their strict hierarchy of things.
The transport rocked again, less violently this time, and Tarhan closed his eyes. As if to pin his thoughts into place. His last clear memory was not clear at all. The Diner. Derrek polishing the grill with the tenacity of a man who cannot scrub away the things truly bother him. The groaning of the ceiling fan. The song half stuck in Tarhan's throat as he walked home under the neon signs. The Holovid, of the soldiers turned to ash. The wet glow of the alleys... And smoke?... Screams?
As it came back to him it didn't come like a memory but like shards of broken glass catching the light. Fractured, broken and painful. he saw himself rushing toward the cordon at the end of the street, the lines of Imperial soldierss set before the housing blocks while their shuttles squatted nearby. He remembered how someone had seized him by the jacket from behind as he tried to run past. He remembered the hard, gloved fist bunched in the cloth cloth high on his shoulder... He remembered the choking wrench of it... But his jacket had been old and the seam had already gone once beneath the arm. And as he had twisted with panic's stupid strength, he left half the thing in the man's grip, stumbling free into smoke and shouting...
Everything else was a blur. Only flashes remained to him. Flashes of bodies on stairs, their faces unknown to him. Their apartment door open to the hall. The kitchen table half broken in two, a chair on its back, a cup broken near the wall... The legs of his mother.
How strangely her arm was trapped beneath her. Her hair had come loose and spilled over her face. In the memory the room had seemed so very quiet. Though he knew he had made some sound then...
Then came the shot from outside. A crack somewhere below and out in the courtyard, a child's voice cut short so suddenly that even now, sitting in the transport with the cold air hissing into his lungs, Tarhan felt his body lurch toward it. He remembered he had run back to the corridor and had seen Eolat there.. Lying still, as if he meant to rise again in the next second and simply had not yet managed it. He remembered flashes of uniforms, smoke, bodies scattered lifeless in the open square like dropped laundry. AN officer in black and red shouting at two soldiers down near the base of the stairs, his words carrying oddly in the enclosed space, hollow and echoing. Tarhan had not heard what was said, only the cadence of anger. Then the officer had looked up.
Had seen him.
A finger pointed. Hands reached. he remembered turning, slipping, trying to wrench free, still trying to get to the courtyard, to his brother because some witless part of him believed he might yet be in time to do something. To help his baby brother back up. To help him, help somebody, help anybody. Yet the merciless cold end of a rifle butt had stolen that sweet delusion from him just as it had stolen his consciousness.
What happened next didn't even survive in fragments. And even thinking about it, trying to remember, was difficult and painful. He could only remember the feeling of fear, a chamber somewhere too bright. The smell of industrial cleaning supplies. A magistrate or clerk or some other machine in human skin and Imperial uniform reciting charges in the droning voice of a woman reading off statistics on a computer screen. Association with the Rebellion. High treason against the Empire. Sedition. Material sympathy for armed insurrection. Failure to report rebel activity. Obstruction. Contempt. Each one of his neighbors, each one of the prisoners, charged with something or other.
The exact words for his own sentencing had all blended together, and Tarhan remembered only standing because his knees shook whenever he tried not to. Remembered hearing a voice answer questions. A voice from his own mouth in the flat obedient tone of someone drugged, concussed, dissociating, or all three at once.
The voice had pleaded guilty. Yes. Guilty. The word had lost all meaning to him. Not only because it was untrue, but because it had been made to mean whatever they need it to mean. The sentence was clear. Death.... By forced labor in the strip-mines of Nam'ta VI.
The transport shuddered again before coming to an abrupt stop. And Tarhan was instantly pulled back into the present. At first he thought it was merely another bump in the road, but then came a sound so large it seemed to shake the very foundation of the mountain. An explosion rolled through the chassis from somewhere ahead, flattening the air in the compartment for a heartbeat as the two Drivers died instantly, the correctional officer thrown into the window, cursing loudly. The whole crawler lurched sideways with a scream of abused metal. One of the old women cried out through her mask. Somebody on the bench opposite slammed shoulder-first into the side of the transport and began coughing blood into the rebreather, pink foam gathering at the edge where the seal sat badly against his cheek.
The guard at the front was on his feet at once, rifle up. Blasterfire crackled from outside. One burst, then several. Tarhan heard the thinner sharper report of rifles set against the heavy thump of something repeating from atop the transport. Another explosion boomed somewhere above, the guard cursed behind his rebreather and yanked open the hatch to the cab roof. Wind rushing in at once, bitter and thin, carrying powder snow and the stink of sulfur. he hailed himself halfway up through the opening, braced the rifle against his shoulder and began firing into the white glare. Then through the shooting, through the rattle of battle came a cry Tarhan knew before he fully understood it.
" FOR THE REPUBLIC! FOR NAM'TA! FREEDOM OR DEATH!" Was called from the distance, once then taken up by others.
Bolts struck the hull with flat hammer blows and the guard only fired three more shots in ragged succession before he was blasted in the shoulder, with a curse he buttoned the hatch back up and slipped back inside. Boots slamming onto the floor as he stood with his back to the prisoners, breathing hard into his rebreathing, rifle hanging in his hands as if it had gone from a tool of strength to a heavy burden and accusation of guilt. Then came the heavy clank against the doors were blew inward with a concussive pop and a rush of white light. Figures filled the breach at once, silhouettes of men in patched cold-weather gear and mixed armor and weapons at the ready.
"Wait stop!" the guard cried out suddenly, voice muffled behind his mask as he dropped his rifle. "I surrender! I surrender! Stop Plea-" The correctional officer shouted as he raised his empty right hand, before the first rebel through the door put a bolt through his mouth that exited the back of his skull and impacted harmlessly with the wall behind him.
The man's body dropping as if all the tension had gone out of his muscles with the snap of a finger.
The man who had fired stepped over it without looking at it ever again and forced his way into the transport. He was large in the way laborers were large. Built not for vanity but for purpose. he wore a mismatched shell of gear, white plastoid plate of the Republic army over a quilted coat marked with a green armband. Snow melting on his boots. His face red from the cold, and his beard crusted with ice. He looked from bench to bench, counting what the transport held and nodded once to himself.
Behind him the other rebels appeared, some in scavenged armor, some in miners' gear with rifles in their hands, one with a medic's satchel slung beneath his arm. A twi'lek insurgent in a stripped down republic helmet ducked inside and set to work at the chains immediately, passing fresh military rebreathes from a canvas sack as if this were a chore done many times before as the big man planted his boot on the dead guard's seat and looked squarely at the prisoners.
"Well now... Isn't this is your lucky day?" He said with his voice lined with the undertones of the low wards of Nam'ta Secundus rather than the mountain tones of Nam'ta VI. His chin jerked toward the open door and the blasterfire still sounding farther across the convoy route. "Imps were taking you lot to die in a hole digging for -their- ore... We got other plans. If you wan't to live, if you want to FIGHT, you come with us. If you'd rather sit here chained and freeze to death, or be blasted for your troubles when the next patrol comes through... Be my guest, I won't waste time arguing. But you have a choice to make, and make it quickly."
A pause, brief and hard.
"Freedom or death."
Tarhan's ears buzzed.
Not rang, not a clean sharp note after a blow, but buzzed in a low wet way, as if the whole world had been swallowed up by the seas, submerged beneath the water and he was being asked to hear it from the far side of a fishbowl. His eyes were open, he knew that much, but the sight that came through them was wrong somehow. Too distant, too flat, as though the person sitting on the narrow metal bench in the belly of the prison transport was not him at all, only some poor bastard he had been made to observe from a corner near the ceiling.
A pair of hands rested in the middle of his vision, bound together in front of him with iron-linked restraints that bit red into the skin and wrists. He stared at them for several long seconds with the dull, incurious and distant fascination of a concussed man watching somebody else's troubles. At least until the transport hit a rut in the road and lurched hard enough to throw him backwards into the durasteel hull.
The back of his skull struck metal with a crack that sent white through his vision. Pain arrived a heartbeat later, heavy and overpower, and with it the world suddenly lurched nearer as if he was thrown back into it.
He drew breath too quickly and coughed into the mask fixed over his nose and mouth. The thing had been strapped to his face with a stiff rubber harness that smelled of old breath and machine oil, its hose running from the side of the mask into a fee line built into the wall besides him. The air that came through it was thin and metallic and cold enough to sting his throat with frost burn with each breath. Only then did he realize that not only was he not alone in the belly of the transport, but that everyone else aboard wore such a mask. He looked left, then right, his neck stiff, and saw the others chained to the benches along either side of the narrow compartment. Twi'leks, Rodians, Togruta, Cathar, Humans and everything in-between. In front of him sat a gray-skinned Duros with one eye swollen shut, besides him two old Togruta women with their wrists bound together, binders fixed with short chains to the rings beneath their seats. Besides him sat a young human male as pale as candle wax who looked scarcely better off than the rest of them and kept staring at the floor as if he hoped to disappear into it.
On his left sat another Zabrak he didn't recognize, his head tipped back against the metal wall and his eyes closed. Perhaps sleeping, perhaps saving what little strength remained to him in a place where oxygen itself had to be fed through a tube.
At the front of the transport, behind a welded partition with an open center that let the guard watch them all, sat a correctional officer of the Nam'ta Security Forces. Tarhan recognized the uniform well from his father's colleagues, although only the cut of the old uniform and the familiar shape of its shoulders remained truely Nam'tees. The Insignia had changed. The Green crest that had once marked service to the Confederacy had been stripped off and replaced by the red Imperial Sigil on the mans breast and shoulder.
Even seated he held firmly onto his rifle with the possessiveness of a man whose authority depended on it
An Imperial Military Rebreather covered the man's lower face, its cannisters humming softly with each intake. Only his eyes were visible above it, bloodshot and bored and a little raw around the lids from the cold. Tarhan looked past him, to the small barred viewport set into the transport's Side and saw snow, rock and mountains.
Not the city slush of a bad winter day on nam'ta Prime, not the grat melt that fathered along the mag-rail tramlines and the gutter edges for a week before the rain washed it away, but real snow laid heavy upon the peaks beyond. Jagged mountains, coloured like dark iron where the wind had blown them bare andd white where the cold had settled into the seams. Lower down, black scars cut through the slopes in vast stepped wounds, terraces carved into the earth by Industrial appetire. Smoke rose from chimneys and stacks in long dirty columns that flattened beneath the sky. Conveyer towers marched over the ridges like unnatural, skeletal things. Somewhere out there, hidden by distance and haze, strip-mines clawed away at the bones of the moon.
And at once he knew where he was.
Nam'ta VI.
It shouldn't have been surprising. Of course it was Nam'ta VI. Where else would you send prisoners to die while keeping the books clean? Oxygen is scarce, temperatures among the jagged cliffs, strip-mines and sinkholes, and life on the moon is hard. No one except for the mining corporations would come here willingly. Even before the Empire came to Nam'ta, Tarhan remembered folk spoke of Nam'ta VI as though it were another country, the private property of the mining guilds and their strict hierarchy of things.
The transport rocked again, less violently this time, and Tarhan closed his eyes. As if to pin his thoughts into place. His last clear memory was not clear at all. The Diner. Derrek polishing the grill with the tenacity of a man who cannot scrub away the things truly bother him. The groaning of the ceiling fan. The song half stuck in Tarhan's throat as he walked home under the neon signs. The Holovid, of the soldiers turned to ash. The wet glow of the alleys... And smoke?... Screams?
As it came back to him it didn't come like a memory but like shards of broken glass catching the light. Fractured, broken and painful. he saw himself rushing toward the cordon at the end of the street, the lines of Imperial soldierss set before the housing blocks while their shuttles squatted nearby. He remembered how someone had seized him by the jacket from behind as he tried to run past. He remembered the hard, gloved fist bunched in the cloth cloth high on his shoulder... He remembered the choking wrench of it... But his jacket had been old and the seam had already gone once beneath the arm. And as he had twisted with panic's stupid strength, he left half the thing in the man's grip, stumbling free into smoke and shouting...
Everything else was a blur. Only flashes remained to him. Flashes of bodies on stairs, their faces unknown to him. Their apartment door open to the hall. The kitchen table half broken in two, a chair on its back, a cup broken near the wall... The legs of his mother.
How strangely her arm was trapped beneath her. Her hair had come loose and spilled over her face. In the memory the room had seemed so very quiet. Though he knew he had made some sound then...
Then came the shot from outside. A crack somewhere below and out in the courtyard, a child's voice cut short so suddenly that even now, sitting in the transport with the cold air hissing into his lungs, Tarhan felt his body lurch toward it. He remembered he had run back to the corridor and had seen Eolat there.. Lying still, as if he meant to rise again in the next second and simply had not yet managed it. He remembered flashes of uniforms, smoke, bodies scattered lifeless in the open square like dropped laundry. AN officer in black and red shouting at two soldiers down near the base of the stairs, his words carrying oddly in the enclosed space, hollow and echoing. Tarhan had not heard what was said, only the cadence of anger. Then the officer had looked up.
Had seen him.
A finger pointed. Hands reached. he remembered turning, slipping, trying to wrench free, still trying to get to the courtyard, to his brother because some witless part of him believed he might yet be in time to do something. To help his baby brother back up. To help him, help somebody, help anybody. Yet the merciless cold end of a rifle butt had stolen that sweet delusion from him just as it had stolen his consciousness.
What happened next didn't even survive in fragments. And even thinking about it, trying to remember, was difficult and painful. He could only remember the feeling of fear, a chamber somewhere too bright. The smell of industrial cleaning supplies. A magistrate or clerk or some other machine in human skin and Imperial uniform reciting charges in the droning voice of a woman reading off statistics on a computer screen. Association with the Rebellion. High treason against the Empire. Sedition. Material sympathy for armed insurrection. Failure to report rebel activity. Obstruction. Contempt. Each one of his neighbors, each one of the prisoners, charged with something or other.
The exact words for his own sentencing had all blended together, and Tarhan remembered only standing because his knees shook whenever he tried not to. Remembered hearing a voice answer questions. A voice from his own mouth in the flat obedient tone of someone drugged, concussed, dissociating, or all three at once.
The voice had pleaded guilty. Yes. Guilty. The word had lost all meaning to him. Not only because it was untrue, but because it had been made to mean whatever they need it to mean. The sentence was clear. Death.... By forced labor in the strip-mines of Nam'ta VI.
The transport shuddered again before coming to an abrupt stop. And Tarhan was instantly pulled back into the present. At first he thought it was merely another bump in the road, but then came a sound so large it seemed to shake the very foundation of the mountain. An explosion rolled through the chassis from somewhere ahead, flattening the air in the compartment for a heartbeat as the two Drivers died instantly, the correctional officer thrown into the window, cursing loudly. The whole crawler lurched sideways with a scream of abused metal. One of the old women cried out through her mask. Somebody on the bench opposite slammed shoulder-first into the side of the transport and began coughing blood into the rebreather, pink foam gathering at the edge where the seal sat badly against his cheek.
The guard at the front was on his feet at once, rifle up. Blasterfire crackled from outside. One burst, then several. Tarhan heard the thinner sharper report of rifles set against the heavy thump of something repeating from atop the transport. Another explosion boomed somewhere above, the guard cursed behind his rebreather and yanked open the hatch to the cab roof. Wind rushing in at once, bitter and thin, carrying powder snow and the stink of sulfur. he hailed himself halfway up through the opening, braced the rifle against his shoulder and began firing into the white glare. Then through the shooting, through the rattle of battle came a cry Tarhan knew before he fully understood it.
" FOR THE REPUBLIC! FOR NAM'TA! FREEDOM OR DEATH!" Was called from the distance, once then taken up by others.
Bolts struck the hull with flat hammer blows and the guard only fired three more shots in ragged succession before he was blasted in the shoulder, with a curse he buttoned the hatch back up and slipped back inside. Boots slamming onto the floor as he stood with his back to the prisoners, breathing hard into his rebreathing, rifle hanging in his hands as if it had gone from a tool of strength to a heavy burden and accusation of guilt. Then came the heavy clank against the doors were blew inward with a concussive pop and a rush of white light. Figures filled the breach at once, silhouettes of men in patched cold-weather gear and mixed armor and weapons at the ready.
"Wait stop!" the guard cried out suddenly, voice muffled behind his mask as he dropped his rifle. "I surrender! I surrender! Stop Plea-" The correctional officer shouted as he raised his empty right hand, before the first rebel through the door put a bolt through his mouth that exited the back of his skull and impacted harmlessly with the wall behind him.
The man's body dropping as if all the tension had gone out of his muscles with the snap of a finger.
The man who had fired stepped over it without looking at it ever again and forced his way into the transport. He was large in the way laborers were large. Built not for vanity but for purpose. he wore a mismatched shell of gear, white plastoid plate of the Republic army over a quilted coat marked with a green armband. Snow melting on his boots. His face red from the cold, and his beard crusted with ice. He looked from bench to bench, counting what the transport held and nodded once to himself.
Behind him the other rebels appeared, some in scavenged armor, some in miners' gear with rifles in their hands, one with a medic's satchel slung beneath his arm. A twi'lek insurgent in a stripped down republic helmet ducked inside and set to work at the chains immediately, passing fresh military rebreathes from a canvas sack as if this were a chore done many times before as the big man planted his boot on the dead guard's seat and looked squarely at the prisoners.
"Well now... Isn't this is your lucky day?" He said with his voice lined with the undertones of the low wards of Nam'ta Secundus rather than the mountain tones of Nam'ta VI. His chin jerked toward the open door and the blasterfire still sounding farther across the convoy route. "Imps were taking you lot to die in a hole digging for -their- ore... We got other plans. If you wan't to live, if you want to FIGHT, you come with us. If you'd rather sit here chained and freeze to death, or be blasted for your troubles when the next patrol comes through... Be my guest, I won't waste time arguing. But you have a choice to make, and make it quickly."
A pause, brief and hard.
"Freedom or death."
