Author’s note: In the Star Wars universe, all you hear amongst the English accents is Received Pronunciation, the cultured intonation most fans associate with the actors Peter Cushing and Sir Alec Guinness, who played Grand Moff Tarkin and Obi Wan Kenobi, respectively. Since the 1980s, when I used to go to a friend’s house simply to listen to his dad’s wonderfully melodic Liverpool accent, I always wondered where the Scousers were. The working-class northerners of that galaxy far far away, the space opera equivalent of the British Army rankers who took me on a four-day drunken trek around Merseyside. We in the US talk about Southern hospitality, but Liverpudlians put American Southerners to shame. On a related note, I fear that the damage to my liver from the autumn of 1999 may be permanent. When I watched the film Solo, especially the last scene, I wondered who the guys in Lando’s corner were, egging him on during the sabacc game where he lost the Falcon, and the voices I heard were Scouse. My standard disclaimer for those who will inevitably find fault with some niggling detail in the story: it’s a story written by a casual Star Wars fan, not a concordance blessed by the high priests and priestesses of the SW canon. If you like this, I gladly take all credit; if not, I’ll know whom to blame.
I never got tired of hearing the story. Actually, no, let’s start again. I did get tired of the story itself, but I always tuned Aarle out after his fourth Corellian ale. There was never a shortage of willing listeners at the pub two decks below Numidian Prime’s spaceport. Not the posh first deck with its VIP lounge and sabacc parlour, where Captain Calrissian held court; no, the dodgy pub where ship fitters, longshoremen, deckhands, and smugglers would have a laugh and drink until they got blind. Aarle’s mates would ply him with another beer that smelt like rotting pine cones strained through dirty knickers, and he’d regale them with the oft-told tale of helping Lando smuggle weapons to insurrectionary Petrusian slaves.
Aarle and I ended up working for LC — that’s what we called Lando — because no one else would employ Imperial defectors, let alone former stormtroopers. Despite this setback, we’d done well for ourselves the last few years as LC’s subcontractors, for lack of a better word. In ancient times, we might’ve been called pikeys, but with nicer caravans. Do you need to run guns, seaweed drugs from Vainai, or contraband slaves past an Imperial blockade? Give LC a week, and he’ll get through to Aarle and Michu — or, if you really must be accurate for this holo-vid, the clones formerly known as AL-1489 and MC-3317. What we needed was one good filthy lucre that would allow us to buy our spouses from captivity, then retire to comfortable anonymity somewhere in the Outer Rim.
The translator on my wrist vibrated before I picked up on what the two-metre-tall bug was saying. “I’ve been told that if I were looking for something, you might be able to help.” A Mimbanese. Big smelly sods, with scarlet skin and enormous blue lidless eyes. Every time I ran into one, I shuddered. I also couldn’t help but admire their pugnacity, fighting the Empire’s invasion of their world with primitive weapons left over from the Clone Wars. Aarle and I would know, we’d been in the first wave and had witnessed the carnage on both sides firsthand.
I leaned back in my stool and crossed an ankle over a knee, hand on the ankle where I kept my social weapon, a small blaster inside my boot. “What seek,” I asked in my horrible Mimbanese, which I’d learnt from a prisoner. Humans can only mimic some of their sounds, which makes communicating without a translator difficult, but many at places like Numidian Prime, where hundreds of species passed through, tried their best.
The bug clicked and chirped, and my wrist translator said, “People all over this sector said that if I need weapons, I need only to talk to you, your friend, or your boss.”
This was a setup by the Imperial Security Bureau if I’d ever seen one. “Bollocks, mate. We’re crewmen on the Corellian freighter Millennium Falcon,” I said to the bug. “Captain Calrissian doesn’t haul anything without an Imperial seal on the bill of lading. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“More’s the pity,” the Mimbanese said. He or she almost looked disappointed. “You were also supposed to be greedy beyond belief, but that’s also obviously not the case.”
Aarle finally finished his story and started paying attention to the bug. “What else have you heard about us?”
The Mimbanese pulled up a stool and sat between us. “I’ve heard that Michu wears a mini blaster inside his right boot, and you carry your social weapon, as you call it, on a harness inside your right sleeve. That the two of you defected from the 501st Legion on my home world after killing your commander, and have a price of ten thousand credits on each of your heads.”
I leaned past the bug to shrug at Aarle. Any good ISB agent would’ve just shot or slotted us by now, rather than trying to show off how much they knew. “What seek,” I asked again in the bug’s language.
He or she started answering before I finished. “Five hundred E22 rifles with at least ten plasma magazines per weapon, one thousand proton grenades, two hundred autonomous thermal detonators, one hundred M35 machine guns with two pre-loaded rucksacks of ammo capsules each, and two ion cannons that can be broken down and transported by three beings each.” The Mimbanese seemed to smile at us. “That would be a good start.”
“A good start,” Aarle almost yelled, then I reached across to put a calming hand on his arm. “Where the bloody hell would we find anything like that, much less get that cargo on a ship that’s able to break the imperial blockade, then deliver everything to a swamp planet patrolled by a squadron of TIE bombers and half the 224th Division?”
“Your problem, boyo, not mine.” Do Mimbanese smirk? Because he or she certainly seemed to enjoy this. “You have the Falcon, which just did the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs, if you believe the tall tales here. Shouldn’t be a problem.” The barman put up a glass of rotted fruit, the smell of which made Aarle gag, but which the bug threw back with gusto.
“Oi, mate. We” — I gestured at myself and Aarle — “don’t have the Falcon. She belongs to Captain Calrissian. We only work on her.”
The bug leaned closer to me. “What if I were to say that a Reserve Fleet supply ship had been hijacked right here in the Numidia system, and that we only have two days before the Empire throws everything at this planet like it recently did to mine, just to find out what happened?”
Aarle answered for me. “Then I’d say you’re buggered, aren’t you, mate?”
“As are the two of you,” the Mimbanese said. “Your forged IDs and badly covered Legion neck tattoos won’t get you past the most inept ISB agent in the galaxy, let alone a higher ranking officer searching for defectors.” Neither of us said anything for a moment, then we both asked “how much” in different languages. The big egg layer was smiling now. “We will need a pilot.”
“Captain Calrissian would never go for something like that,” I said. “You’d have to make it well worth his while to risk his ship on a suicide run like Mimban.”
“My stormtrooper friend, why don’t you scan this credit chip?” The Mimbanese reached into his wrinkled red cloak to produce the chip, which Aarle plugged into his wristband, and — holy Sith!
“Half directed tomorrow to an anonymous account on Tatooine that most of the galaxy knows belongs to Calrissian. Half upon completion, if you live that long. Will this amount suffice?” The bug rose and turned for the door. “I will be at rest in terminal four, please let me know before moonrise tonight.”
———-
“That’s the stupidest Imperial Security Bureau setup I ever heard of,” LC said aboard Falcon two hours later. Then we showed him the credit chip’s value, and a smile slowly split his face in half. “Well, there’s stupid, and then there’s stupid. This, however,” he said, waving the chip at us, “is the most delicious kind of stupid. We could retire on this kind of money. When and where, gents?” Aarle had a rare bright idea, so we told him.
It took ages for just four of us to transfer all the cargo from the supply ship, winding our way past blaster scorch marks on the bulkheads and the already rotting corpses of her crew. We stored half the cargo under Falcon’s deck, the rest lashed onto every available horizontal surface, including inside LC’s cabin. LC sent the supply ship onto a direct course for the Numidian sun, then immediately un-docked and jumped to hyperspace. The bug, a female we now knew as Droch, sat in the jump seat behind LC whilst stars and nebulae and planets spun around in the cockpit windows. Aarle and I manned the turrets and tried our best to not get spacesick while LC manoeuvered Falcon like she was a speeder bike. Normally we’d have hired a copilot from one of the freelancers on Numidian Prime, but we had a hold full of hijacked weaponry and scant time to figure out who was sober enough to man the nav console.
No one talked about the recent loss of L3. Abso-bloody-lutely no-one.
We exited hyperspace just outside the Mimban system and slowly followed the spaceway, the Navy-approved track, to a high orbit above Mimban. LC had to constantly adjust our orbit to avoid ore carriers and military transports coming and going, a constant parade of lookalike rectangular metal boxes. Mimban looked hot and wet and uninviting from three hundred kilometres up. From where I sat in the ventral turret, not much had changed. Staccato explosions in the the southern hemisphere flashed through Mimban’s perpetual cloud cover. Someone was having a shit day, and I was just happy it wasn’t me. The first Imperial signal woke me up, and I flipped switches to scan my sector.
“Unidentified freighter, this is the Imperial Star Destroyer Conqueror. Please authenticate chi sigma.” An alert popped up on my screen, then a huge shadow as the star destroyer’s arrowhead form blocked the suns from my viewport. I swallowed, because every cannon on her bow seemed to be aimed at us. Did we come out of hyperspace too close to the planet? Did we not have our transponder on, which let Imperial vessels know we were friends? Did some two faced muppet grass on us for a hundred more credits than what we paid him?
Aarle had gotten a hold of an unexpired code book, and LC took up the façade. “Conqueror,” LC said, “we are the Bakuran freighter Millennium, heading to Camp Dominion on a resupply run. Mission number one five zero dash two four.” That was, or had been, the mission number of the hijacked vessel. “We authenticate upsilon.”
We waited three heartbeats longer than usual for a response, and I started to sweat. If that Sullustan had turned us in, I thought, I’d run back to Numidian and kill him again, feed what was left of him to the shacklaws. The destroyer let me off the hook. “Millennium, this is Conqueror. Best approach to Dominion is from the north, to avoid heavy resistance from bugs to its south and east. Sending your nav system the authorised tracks now. Safe flying. Conqueror, out.” That bloody enormous shadow moved to a higher orbit, and I was able to breathe again whilst LC took an incongruously gentle descent to the surface. Honestly, we weren’t used to that sort of thing from him. Riding an LC-piloted anything where he made the descent more comfortable than a thousand-tonne spaceliner boggled the mind.
The 224th Division had built Camp Dominion atop the only piece of dry high ground on the entire southern continent. It looked like a two-kilometre-wide spider from above, but with ion-cannon battlements instead of legs, and a climate controlled dome in the centre, where troopers could dry out after tabbing in wet muck for weeks. Below the marshes surrounding the camp lived a billion Mimbanese, who hadn’t even left their home system until the Empire decided to strip mine Mimban’s minerals.
When we first landed here, Aarle and I commanded infantry platoons equipped with sensor packs that sought out air vents for Mimbanese underground hives. Some of them were large enough, with enough industry, to comprise small cities, up to two kilometres below the surface. Once we found them, however, we’d call for TIE bombers to not just incinerate the suspected hive, but to gas the tunnels under the still-smoking craters. We would wait on the periphery to shoot anyone trying to escape to the surface. Males, females, hatchlings, eggs. It never mattered, they might be sentient bipeds, but they were still bugs. It was nothing more or less than murder. After a year, neither Aarle nor I could stomach it any longer. Now that we were back, I was just happy that the first Mimbanese we defected to hadn’t shot us straightaway.
LC checked in with Camp Dominion, but the reply gutted me. I knew this voice. “Millennium, this is Kappa Control. I hold you east of the authorised track. Please authenticate lambda theta and re-state your mission number, over.”
I hit the intercom button to speak to Aarle. “Is that who I think it is?”
“You would’ve thought he’d be off this planet by now, unless he pissed off the wrong officer.”
LC gave Kappa an answer that seemed to mollify him, then asked us, “What the hell are you two talking about?”
“It’s Jost, our old warrant officer, used to be the sergeant major of the entire garrison here,” Aarle said. “Michu shot him when we defected, but apparently his aim wasn’t good enough.”
“I put three blasts in the center of his chest plate! Now you take the piss?” Aarle and I had been on patrol with the major who commanded our company, Sergeant Major Jost, and a dozen other troopers, searching yet another muddy field for Mimbanese hives’ air vents. Aarle drove one hovertank whist I piloted the other. He passed one vent and didn’t report it, but when the major confronted him about it, Aarle simply shot him. Before anyone could say another word, much less think, I stopped my tank, threw two proton grenades into the troop compartment, and jumped out. Jost fired at me but missed – yes, I know all the tired jokes about stormtroopers’ aim – and I hit his chest plate with three quick blasts. Apparently, Jost had paid for our defection by being marooned here ever since.
Under the perpetual rain clouds, LC darted between higher elevations of marshland and the above-ground ruins of Mimbanese cities, which looked like ten-metre-high anthills. Below the surface, thanks to Aarle, me, and our Legion, some of those cities were nothing but crypts. “We’re low,” LC said, “so they can’t see us right now, but we need a place to offload. Droch, your people better show up soon.” A trio TIE fighters patrolled above the clouds, waiting for infrequent calls for close air support, and likely didn’t hold us on their sensors.
“There,” Droch said, and I rotated the turret to two o’clock. A hundred-square-metre mud and rock outcropping disappeared, replaced by a rectangular maw that revealed a line of Mimbanese waiting to offload the cargo. LC set Falcon down, but just barely, keeping enough power up in case we needed to run, then lowered the starboard ramp.
I unbuckled and began lifting the deck plates that hid our cargo. Aarle maintained his scans of the sky above us and kept us informed of every passing fighter. I turned towards the ramp and collided with the biggest damn Mimbanese I’d ever seen, almost three metres tall and probably weighing twenty-five stone. He gave me a look that might have been hate or pity, and spat something multilegged on my boots before hurling crates to the bug behind him.
The big bug spoke as he worked his way through the cargo hold. “You probably don’t remember me, as I wasn’t fully mature at the time.” When he paused to look up at me, I shook my head. “My hive’s queen was ready to put two blasts in your skull when you defected to us. I thought at that moment, if she doesn’t, I’ll take the gun from her and do it myself.”
“Why didn’t you?”
The big bug threw another hundred-kilo crate down the ramp like it was a ball. “The queen wanted to first see if your intentions were genuine.” We’d proved that soon after we defected, arranging an L-shaped ambush that killed several dozen of our former comrades and wounded a hundred more. It was one of those “rebellious acts” that might get a dismissive mention in a news holo-vid, but one that trebled the price on our heads within a week.
“Time to go, folks,” LC said.
“Almost done, boss,” I said.
“Forget the rest,” LC said, “I’m pulling pitch in three seconds. We have two drop ships approaching from the south.”
Aarle piped up. “Those TIE fighters just turned towards us!”
“Droch,” LC said, “it was a pleasure doing business with you.”
I started to say something, but Aarle’s dorsal turret started firing at the approaching TIE fighters. I felt the deck rumbling under my feet, which meant LC was adding power. I helped the big male bug with one last crate when an explosion on the starboard quarter threw me, the bug, and the crate off the ramp to the mud below. Falcon‘s engines revved, and she was gone in a blink.
With my face buried in black muck, I heard blasters from TIE fighters, Falcon, Mimbanese, and what had to be advancing soldiers. The firing stopped as soon as it started. I wiped mud from my eyes to see bugs holding smoking weapons, behind the cover of their outcropping. I looked right and traced two pyres to wreckage of the drop ships halfway to the horizon. In front of me, bits and bobs of charred gray mud trooper armour, but no sign of intact soldiers who might yet advance on our position.
And because the boss was the best pilot in the galaxy, no sign of Falcon. The bug who’d almost killed me years ago pulled me upright with one hand, the other holding a brand new E22 blaster he’d pulled from a weapons crate. “We have two minutes at most until half your Legion is here,” he said, and dragged me underground. A hundred drone males made the stormtroopers’ bodies disappear inside the cavern, cleaned up the battlefield, and replaced the earthen dome of the hive. Another hundred drones picked up the crates and followed us down. The tunnel wasn’t lit because Mimbanese can see in the dark, but one of the drones handed me a small torch so my face wouldn’t keep colliding with the tunnel wall. I bumped into Droch, who grabbed the back of my neck and pushed me further along, clicking to nearby Mimbanese so quickly that my translator couldn’t keep up. One word that did repeat was “trust,” so I reckoned I was safe for a bit.
“We are here,” Droch said, and we finally stopped after three hours of nonstop movement, from one tunnel to the next. My senses of time and direction were worthless without visual cues like suns and moons, so I trusted that she knew where our lot were headed. I had to work harder than them to keep up, and completely knackered. The younger male, Shask, told me we were under Camp Dominion.
“Are you kidding me, mate? Under the camp? Might as well bring me topside so that wanker Jost can collect on the bounty on me.”
“Are you always such a gobshite before you’ve heard someone out?” Shask had me there. “If you and your species would shut up now and again, you might learn something,” he said, and pointed upwards. I could see a few shafts of light, with fast shadows that could be anything from an unarmed drop ship to a TIE bomber loaded with thermal munitions for hives like this. The very thought of that made me want to shit meself, but somehow I didn’t.
Droch stopped under the air vent and looked up. Standing next to her, I could hear helmet-less stormtroopers going about their business, bantering as if there weren’t five hundred newly armed Mimbanese who could hear which trooper missed what dish from back home. Shask put a blaster in my hand and a bandolier over my shoulder. “You will need to lead us.”
“To do what?”
“Erase this blight on our planet,” Shask said, confirming that this had been their plan all along.
Appa For Two 