Chapter Text
He woke to an empty, silent room.
That wasn’t right. Where were the others?
He rose unsteadily to his feet. The room was phasing in and out of focus, and his head throbbed. Even his helmet hadn’t been enough to protect him from… whatever it was that had hit his head. A vague image of a boot, seen out of the corner of his eye just moments before he lost consciousness, flicked into memory. That must’ve been it.
He shook his head to clear his vision, leaning against one of the machines for support. An electrospear was embedded deep into the metal casing of the machine, just above where he’d been lying. That had been close. A little lower, and it might have gotten him. Faint tendrils of smoke still curled from the now-exposed bowels of the machine, which meant he hadn’t been out long.
His vision now cleared, he took stock of the situation. His rifle lay on the floor beside him. He picked it up, then walked to the gaping hole in the wall where the rogue clone had tackled his fellow operative through the transparisteel and sent them both crashing to the training floor below. A quick glance down revealed the other four members of his squad—all dead—as well as numerous other clones, also dead.
None of them were the ones he was after. Another memory flashed into his mind, that of Hemlock grabbing the control brace from his arm, as well as his RK-3 blaster. “We’re leaving” Hemlock had said. If they were leaving, then the closest way out would be the walkways used to service the communications equipment near the top of the mountain.
Rifle in hand, he turned and ran out of the room and down the corridor.
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He burst out of the airlock doors and into pouring rain, just in time to see Doctor Hemlock fall off the walkway, five blaster holes burned in his chest; Commander Scorch was nowhere to be seen. Twin columns of smoke rose from behind the communications equipment at the far end of the walkway—from his own ship, most likely. The child was at the far end of the platform, cowering down with her arms over her head. And in front of him, about thirty meters away, the two other rogue clones knelt with their backs to him.
He opened fire.
In the moment before his finger squeezed the trigger, the clone on the left half-turned, as if sensing his presence, and rolled to the side, dodging his blasts. Then the second rogue clone spun around and opened fire, and he had to roll to the side to avoid the return blaster fire, as the doorway offered him no columns to take cover behind. He fired again, the clone fired back, he dodged again, and then it happened.
Two blaster bolts slammed into his chest. All the breath left his lungs. He stumbled, lost his balance, fell—and kept falling.
The air was a rush, the ground appearing too suddenly. He had only a moment to feel a cold spike of fear before he struck something and the world went dark.
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For the second time, he awoke to silence. The rain had stopped, but the sky was still dark. He let out a soft moan and shook his head as he slowly retraced his memories leading up to where they’d last cut off. Ugh. He really needed to stop falling from high places and getting knocked out. It was starting to become a bad habit.
Hold on.
Falling. He’d fallen. Off the walkway. A very, very long way down. Why wasn’t he… his heart skipped a beat as a terrible thought occurred to him… was he dead?
No.
No, he couldn’t be. His head wouldn’t be hurting this much if he was dead… would it?
He rolled over to try to get up—and felt nothing but empty air beneath him. Too late, he threw an arm out to check his fall. His stomach lurched. His only conscious thought in the first moment as the gravitational forces of freefall took over was oddly not of fear, but of frustration: Not again.
He’d already fallen to his death once. Wasn’t that enough?
He landed on his back with a breathless gasp at the base of a tree—which he belatedly realized was what he had just fallen from. He gritted his teeth. Definitely still alive, then. He would have been more grateful that he was still alive, however, if being alive weren’t so excruciatingly painful right now.
His entire body was an explosion of agony. His side and chest burned with pain, and his left leg was being stabbed by a million fiery daggers. It took him a while to get his breathing under control before he could assess his injuries. Then, carefully, he raised his head just enough to take a look at the rest of his broken body.
His chestplate had two blaster holes in it, which explained the burning agony. Needles of pain lanced his every breath, indicating several fractured or at least cracked ribs, and his lower left leg ached to the very core of his bone. Also likely fractured.
Overall, not good.
Gingerly, he tried rolling onto his right side again, and this time felt a new agony blossom in his right forearm as he tried to put weight on it. He ignored it. Pain was irrelevant. The base was under attack. He needed to get up—now.
Gritting his teeth, he struggled to his hands and knees, then staggered to his feet, gasping with pain. Taking a moment to catch his breath, he glanced at his surroundings. Through the thick canopy of jungle leaves above him, he could just barely make out the walkway he had fallen from, a darker black ribbon against the indigo night sky. Looking up at it from beneath, it didn’t seem that high up, but he guessed he had fallen at least fifteen meters, maybe more. The tree had prevented him from falling the full distance all at once, however, which was probably the only reason he was still alive.
That would make getting back up to the airlock doors difficult, though. He would have to climb. But that was his only option. The communications towers were located above the upper concentric ring of hangars encircling the mountain. Going down would eventually end in a drop of at least seventy meters from the top of the ring to the platform below, and he’d fallen enough for one day.
First, however, he needed to retrieve his weapon. He looked around, but his sniper rifle was nowhere to be seen. A quick scan on his rangefinder revealed nothing, either. It would likely be downhill from his position then, since falling things rolled down hills, not up.
He found his rifle not far from where he’d fallen, and on the ground, thankfully. He picked it up, then limped back up the hill, his injured leg protesting every step. When he reached the base of the pillars supporting the airlock entrance, he stopped. The walkway was still at least ten meters above his head at this point, and the only climbable surfaces were the square support pillars on either side of the airlock entrance. Not an easy climb with a likely-fractured leg. But he could do it. Unfortunately, he couldn’t use his grapple. The support pillars were too smooth-sided for his grapple to get any purchase on them, and the walkway railings were just as hopeless, as there was nothing but empty air beneath—and he was not hauling himself up the grappling line hand-by-hand. Securing his rifle to his backpack, he began the ascent.
It was torture. The metal panels were still slick from the recent rain, and the gaps between them that he could use as hand- and footholds were impossibly far apart. On several occasions, he had to push off and jump just to reach the next handhold above him. Every bone in his broken body was screaming for him to stop, and he wasn’t even halfway up. But he couldn’t stop. If he stopped now, he wouldn’t be able to start again. He had to keep going. Keep going. Momentum.
Find a handhold. Then a higher foothold. Push up. Reach, find another handhold. Repeat.
Ignore the pain. Ignore the pain. Ignore the pain—
Seven more meters.
Five. Three.
One.
His head was level with the walkway now. All he had to do was climb about two meters sideways, across the inside of a ninety-degree corner, and he’d make it.
Carefully now. Just slide sideways. One hand, one foot, then the other set.
Almost there. Almost there…
Finally.
He grabbed the side railing of the walkway, hauled himself over the edge, and collapsed onto his hands and knees, breathing hard. Everything hurt. The walkway was clear, though, so he took a couple moments to catch his breath, then stood. He wasn’t done yet. He still had a mission to complete.
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The airlock doors wouldn’t open.
He tried prying the control panel off to hotwire doors, but they wouldn’t respond. Shooting the control panel, then, also wouldn’t work. He’d have to pry the doors open manually. They weren’t heavy, but it still took him a minute to shove them open enough for him to squeeze through.
The corridor he stepped into was dark and empty. Not surprising, given the nonfunctioning state of the airlock doors. Something was very wrong. He trotted soft-footed down the corridor, rifle at the ready, and headed back into the training room.
That was also empty. The bodies had been removed, both of his fellow operatives and the clone prisoners, but none of the damage had been repaired, and all the machines were powered off. Everything, in fact, was unpowered. All the interior doors had been in the same state as the airlock doors, and he’d had to stop and pry them open one by one, further straining his already on-fire ribs. He hadn’t run into a single trooper yet, either.
What was going on? Where was everyone?
He needed to get to a centralized location. Find a working terminal—or person. Assess the situation. Figure out what happened. Go from there. Course of action decided, he left the training room and headed for the command center. If anything was still working, it would be that.
Despite taking a shortcut to avoid as many of the sealed corridor doors as possible, it still took him far longer than he would’ve liked to reach the command center. And he still hadn’t run into a single person along the way. The sinister suspicion that had been lurking at the edge of his consciousness now crept into mind:
The base had been abandoned.
Not a comforting thought. But it made sense. The location had been compromised, and the research destroyed, from what Commander Scorch had said when he’d burst into the training room. But he would need more proof than just empty corridors to convince him of that.
He got his proof when the command center doors also refused to open. Prying them apart, he slipped inside and saw that all the screens were dark. He tapped a button. Nothing. All the systems were down.
So. It really was true.
The base had been decommissioned. No one would be coming back.
He was alone.