Return to Ord Mantell

18

When all the prisoners, including Han Solo and the young Jedi Knights, had been separated by Elis and the miners, Anja slipped away.

She saw an opportunity too good to ignore. She also knew exactly the person who could best take advantage of the circumstances.

Protas, the younger brother of the mining leader, was a bitter and grim-faced youth, barely nineteen. He had a wispy, pale beard and dusty skin from spending most of his life inside the stone tunnels, working his fingers until they bled among the rocks. But the intense young man also made frequent unofficial excursions down to the forests and croplands, where he planted traps to do his part in the fight against the farming villagers.

Now, with Anja’s help, he could strike a blow the farmers would never forget.

When one of the mining crews took a break, Anja trotted down through the tunnels asking questions until she was finally directed to Elis’s younger brother. She gestured for him to join her in one of the shadowed rocky alcoves. “Protas, I need to speak to you.”

He raised his eyebrows. They had been children together, and if Anja had stayed on Anobis, they might well have gotten married. But she had slipped off to Ord Mantell to join some band of smugglers.

Because of their past, though, Anja knew Protas would listen to what she had to say.

“We now hold all of the farmers from one village captive inside the tunnels,” she said.

Protas grinned. “I know. What more could we ask for? You led them right to us. Thank you, Anja.”

“I’ll tell you what more you could ask for.” Anja smiled, moving closer to him. The skin under her leather headband itched, but she ignored it. Her voice was breathless as she spilled out her plan. “Their village is abandoned now. They left it completely unoccupied. We can go there tonight, slip in and burn everything down. Not only have we captured them, we can destroy everything they hold dear.”

Protas’s eyes gleamed, and he placed a conspiratorial hand on her shoulder. “We still have plenty of burrowing detonators, but we could never before get close enough to plant them right in the village. But now, we can rig explosives in all of their homes, make it so that the farmers destroy their own dwellings. Just by going home, they’ll bring about their own doom!”

Anja’s large, dark eyes twinkled. “That’s even better. This way, if any of the farmers survive, they can blame Han Solo and his companions for meddling. I knew I could count on you.”

Protas nodded to her. “I’ll get the weapons and bring some of my men. We’ll depart as soon as the sun sets.”

They did not share their plan with Elis or any of the other miners.

Anja, Protas, and four angry-faced commandos slipped out through one of the smaller tunnels, walking with sure feet on the smooth stone walkways.

Outside, careful but confident, they dashed down the mountain switchbacks, listening to loose rocks clatter behind them as they raced along.

The double moonlight provided but a pale silvery illumination and stole all colors from the landscape, marking the terrain with only lightness and shadow.

As they entered the thick forest, the sounds of night insects and small creatures rustling through the branches did not bother Anja. She had her lightsaber. And minutes before leaving the mountain village, she had gone alone into the Millennium Falcon and taken one of her precious doses of andris. With enhanced senses, she could experience the sharp edges of details around her. She would spot any traps waiting for them. Protas and his fighters had chosen a safe trail that avoided all of the deadly surprises they had themselves rigged.

Heading east, she wondered about the knaars that had swept through the ramshackle village and across the croplands. But that had been a full day and a half before; given slim pickings, the migratory herd’s surviving members would have gone in search of other villages or abandoned livestock left to graze by farmers who had been killed during the long civil war.

The group of commandos picked their way across the barren fields.

Protas consulted a diagram of where they had planted burrowing detonators. The tunneling robotic explosives could move about, but only within a certain radius of where they had been buried.

As she trotted along beside the young man, Anja saw blasted craters where detonators had exploded, some triggered by the heavy footsteps of the knaars, others by farmers bumbling into the wrong place.

The stark moonlight shone down, making the croplands look like a moonscape. None of the once-rich fields had been planted for many years. Perhaps, she thought, the miners could use their new captives as slaves to work the land again and provide food for the mountain villages. Or maybe that was just too much trouble.

She saw a shattered skeleton lying on the dirt, a femur and a hipbone, part of a rib cage. The knaars had stripped all the flesh from the bones of their victims, whether human or reptilian. Anja felt a small twinge of pity. Han Solo and his young companions had landed the Falcon here despite her protests. Though reluctant, she had eaten a meal with these people, had listened to their pathetic sob story of all the trials they’d endured.

The knaars were not part of this war. They had not been sent by the mountain miners, but were simply a vicious vagary of the natural world.

Anja was glad the attack had happened here, rather than in her own village. The knaars had unwittingly helped the miners’ fight, removing some of their enemies.

When they reached the abandoned village, she could see the silhouettes of the dark, leaning houses, uninhabited now that the farmers had fled.

Their usually well-guarded homes now had no defenses whatsoever. If the miners had come at any other time, the farmers would have put up a fierce resistance—but not this night.

“The village is ours,” Protas said. “Nothing can stop us from destroying everything.” The men gave a husky cheer.

They opened their packs to remove the burrowing detonators.

Anja’s fingers tingled in an afterwash of spice. She reached into her sack and took out one of the small mechanical bombs. It was an oblong hemisphere, segmented and flexible like a pillbug. Claws and scoops moved on articulated joints so the device could tunnel beneath the soft dirt, implant itself, and wait for an unsuspecting footstep.

With a smile, Anja decided that she would plant one of the detonators directly on the doorstep of Ynos, the village leader. She could claim that small victory for herself … if the one-legged farmer ever managed to get free of his captivity in the mines.

Anja bent down, cradling the device. She peered into the hollow shell of the home where Ynos lived. The hut was windowless, its walls patched and repaired. A slight evening breeze whispered through, like the breath of a sleeping man in the midst of a nightmare. She had not seen him with a wife or any family. Maybe they had died in earlier battles. The place seemed so lonely, so empty, so… sad.

Anja shook her head, gritting her teeth until her jaw hurt. She couldn’t think of things like that now. They had a mission to accomplish.

She pushed the activation button and set the small burrower on the ground. Its metallic joints whirred, digging in. The blunt nose of the roving mine tunneled underneath the surface like a robotic mole and covered itself, shifting the topsoil so that it left no sign of its presence.

She backed away carefully, knowing that the land mine now lay in wait for Ynos when he came back to cross the threshold of his abandoned home.

Satisfied, she jogged to a new building and planted her second detonator. Then she circled behind the scattered village and found one of Protas’s men inspecting the nearly empty grain storage warehouse.

He stepped toward the silo, igniter in hand, ready to set fire to the building.

He looked at Anja, his eyes gleaming. “I want to see something burn this night.”

“Fine,” she said, “but take the grain out first. Our own villagers need it. We’ll take turns carrying it back to the mines.”

The young man nodded, went into the silo, and salvaged all that he found: three limp sacks containing barely enough for a single meal, though the farmers had hoarded it as if it were gold. Then Anja stood back to watch as the man set his thermal igniter in one of the corners.

The flame blazed white-hot, and the silo caught fire immediately.

Flames trickled up the walls to the rooftop, and soon the entire structure was engulfed.

The fire crackled and hissed, and the smoke smelled sharp and satisfying in Anja’s nostrils. The other commandos shouted that they were finished, and Anja came back around to the front of the cluster of wellings.

“Let’s go,” she said. “We have to get back before daybreak.”

“Wait,” Protas said. “I’ve got one last burrower to plant.” He held it high, grinning through his wispy blond beard. Then, to Anja’s horror, he ran straight toward the village leader’s house. “I’m going to give Ynos a real surprise if ever he comes home.”

“No!” she shouted. “Wait, I already—” But before he could stop, Protas stepped directly on the spot where Anja had planted her detonator.

The explosion ripped the night, throwing Protas high in the air, his clothes in flames, his body mangled. The front walls of Ynos’s house collapsed into rubble. The young man’s scream was swallowed in the echoes of the blast.

Anja pressed her hands to her mouth in horror. The other young men stood in shock, staring at where the young brother of their village leader had been only moments before. As rocks, clods of dirt, and other debris began to patter down like a small meteor storm, Anja suddenly broke through her stunned immobility and raced forward.

“Protas!” she shouted, knowing in the pit of her stomach that there was nothing she could do. She found the young man’s body lying broken and bent in odd places, as if someone had folded him up and swatted him like a bothersome insect. His skin was burned, his open wounds bled, but his heart no longer pumped. Breath no longer filled his lungs.

She looked up in bleak despair, her dark eyes burning as she blinked and blinked. Her throat constricted painfully. Heedless of the blood that stained her hands, she touched the young man’s shoulder, ran her fingers along the wispy blond strands of his beard that now would never grow to bushy fullness like his older brother’s.

The commandos stared speechless at what they had inadvertently done.

Anja’s heart felt like a lead weight in her chest. She knew that she herself, and no one else, would have to tell Elis.