Chapter Text
“Commander,” Childers said, the base’s sterile bright lights reflecting unfavorably on his head, as if he was in the habit of polishing his bald pate, “have you heard?”
Kastas Koon looked up from the hologram screen before him. Reports of the day’s raids through Iziz’s narrow and sultry streets had occupied his field of view for so long, illusions of disjoint letters danced in it even as he started frowning at his deputy panting in the doorway. He made a gesture inviting the man to tell his tale.
“A bomb,” Childers declared, the statement so pregnant with meaning, Koon wondered if the man had been pissing his pants. He would dismiss him as he would other hysterical subordinates, if this hadn’t been Erine Childers before him. Kastas Koon had rarely met more brutal a man, and he was himself no stranger to callused hands and crooked noses.
Koon raised an eyebrow, suppressing the urge to cuss and shout the tale out of him. His training in “diplomatic conduct” was paying off, he would later reflect. When Childers still did not expand on that bomb of his, he added a hand gesture.
His deputy shook out of his stupor. “Sorry. Ran all the way from the cantina.” He wiped his forehead with his uniform’s gray sleeve. “Locals planted a bomb over in an outpost in the highlands. They couldn’t have known it, but we had men there. Thirteen dead, seven wounded.”
Koon smashed a fist on the table. He wanted to throw diplomatic conduct out of an airlock. An image flashed before his mind’s eye: an opponent in the boxing ring, any one of those he’d faced in his days, be they human, Twi’Lek, or even robotic, eating that fist. A deep breath had to follow. “How are Allian’s boys taking it?”
“Word is the highlands are burning.” Childers wrung his hands. “Can’t fault ’em, it’s—”
“It doesn’t matter,” Koon snapped, standing up. “Iziz is not burning tonight. This is my city, you understand? Nothing, not a single fucking thing, will get as much as an angry look from a soldier under my command in this city. No retribution tonight. Do you understand that?”
Childers frowned at him. A little slow at times, he seemed to digest the thought, it no doubt clashing with the almost already digested idea of terrorizing the city’s populace in revenge for the earlier killing. Then he remembered his concept of an order by a superior. “Yes, sir!” He saluted and turned on his heel.
Commander Koon looked back at the hologram screen. Today, they had confiscated more weapons on Onderon’s capital of Iziz than on any day previously. The ranks of the Partisans here were thinning, as was the patience of the civilian population to hide them and their weapons. The last thing he needed now was a surge in Partisan recruitment triggered by a stormtrooper massacre.
He fingered his blaster. Knowing Saw Gerrera, that was precisely the thing he wanted: his people suffering at the Empire’s hands, to wake them up. He made those kinds of sacrifices. Fairness and discipline—those were the qualities that needed to set the Empire’s Stormtroopers apart from Gerrera and his Partisans, if the populace was to choose them. Koon had learned early on in the assignment that they, the people, not a battle or the severed head of any one commander, decided the outcome of a guerilla conflict.
Thirteen dead soldiers, maybe sitting at table, maybe on their bunks… or in the yard… Koon closed his eyes. He had thought it through, and he didn’t need rage right now. He redirected it into the wall, and way too hard. So hard, he had to shake the electric pain out of his gloved hand. The wall, of course, didn’t show but a scratch. Such was the result of choosing too strong an enemy for a bout.
Rain whipped the dirt that had been dry the last three days into sloshy mud interspersed with deep puddles. Koon stomped across the yard, his coat thrown over his shoulders as an afterthought. A sudden flash of light drew his eyes up to a troop transporter taking off slowly from the starport.
“We’ll do it outside,” Koon screamed at Lieutenant Childers, the whirring of the ship’s takeoff and the millions of small beats against the planet by the rain were a tough match for a human voice; but he had training in shouting down others.
Childers confirmed the order, in turn commanding the soldiers behind him. He hadn’t bothered with the coat; the pissy light of the moon Dxun was reflecting in the water streaming down his bald head.
The back wall of the cafeteria was coming up, dim light shining on the huge trashcans along the length of it. Commander Koon pointed. “Up against that wall.”
A circle of stormtroopers walked past him. Comrades of theirs, but not recognizable as such for their lack of armor, trudged through the mud in the midst of the circle. They had been stripped to shirts and shorts, and tied together with a rope that bound each of the five arrestees by their wrists.
The circle of guards split into a half circle, and the chain of soaking men found their environment doubly renewed as they were suddenly faced with the side of a huge trashcan and guarded from the rain by the roof’s overhang.
Fear. Fear stared out from under the overhang, the moon’s piss-yellow light overpowered by the troopers’ blaster flashlights. Their eyes darted back and forth. Shuffling around, they pulled each other by the tight rope holding them together.
“Start the broadcast.”
On Koon’s command, every military hologram receiver in the city was overridden by a broadcast from Childers’s terminal camera. Koon stepped before it, holding his blaster in both hands before his torso.
“Men,” Commander Koon began, flicking back the hood of his coat. “My orders for tonight were clear: you don’t kill a single fucking jungle crawler, you don’t torch any of their huts, you don’t even leave base if you’ve got no bastard business outside!
“At least, I thought that was clear. You’re not morons, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. You don’t need to be a motherfucking genius to be in this army, but I thought they still taught you what an order is.”
Kastas Koon took a deep breath. “I’m sure most of you know. I used to be a stormtrooper. Served with a lot of good men. But no army is perfect, I guess.
“You see, these five men”—he pointed at the men by the trashcan and Childers swung his camera over to them—“developed in those magnificent thick skulls of theirs the idea to fuck me today.
“I told you when I came here that, yes, I am young. I’m newly promoted, basically fresh out the academy. And I told you not to test my patience. Don’t give me a reason to have to prove I mean what I say.”
Koon smiled, imagining the soldiers glued to his projection. “You’ll be holding your breaths. Don’t worry, nobody gets executed under my command except for traitors and deserters. These men pillaged some houses.
“But I gave explicit orders. If your plaque doesn’t have more squares than mine, you can’t countermand my orders. You can choose to ignore them, but you’re choosing a shitload of consequences with that, let me tell you.”
Koon glanced over at the soldiers at the wall. One of them was hyperventilating. Hopefully he still had enough of his brains with him to have registered he wasn’t actually going to be put to death by firing squad. “I don’t know where you did basic training, but my commander had something he called the ‘ratfucker treatment’. It’s been in use around here, as some of you know. Since you are now, at least temporarily, considered ratfuckers, this is what your days will look like from now on:
“You wake up. You take a shit. Then you help in the kitchens. To help with breakfast, that’s way early. When they’re done with you there, you clean toilets and other places until lunch, where you will help in the kitchen again. And repeat: clean up shit, help in the kitchen. After dinner, you’ve done enough useful work for the day. So I’ll have you run twenty laps around the court. Then you’ll go to sleep. Going by my experience, that’ll leave you with four to five hours in the sack.
“And yes, I’ve been a ratfucker, and I’ve gotten the ratfucker treatment. That’s why I know it works. After one weak on treatment, I never became a ratfucker again. I’ve still got to decide how long it’ll take to get it out of your systems.”
Kastas Koon stared into his deputy’s camera. “These men’s punishment will end. If they learn their lesson, they’ll be back among you. You’re not clones, and neither are you robots—you’ve got a thinking brain, and you can make decisions. That’s a strength, I think. If we do it right, we combine into an effective unit. That’s why one guy is put in front: it’s my task to think for all of you. But I can’t put one foot in front of the other for you. Thinking soldiers are a strength in my book.
“Thinking. It was a surprise for me, but time in the kitchen can build brain matter. It starts right now, boys. To the kitchen, double time! Work uniforms will be provided for you.”
The men stared uncertainly at their commander. The leftmost soldier, two seconds later, hesitantly started moving, pulling his comrades with him.
“DOUBLE TIME MEANS DOUBLE TIME!”
A bout of lightning seemed to go through the kitchen crew. Koon had often been told his voice could get as loud as the megaphones. Another great teaching tool.