: Welcome back, readers, to this week on Force Visions, where we go groundside for a sneaky action sequence. Rogue Gear Solid?
: In personal news, my evenings this week: Monday rehearsal; Tuesday and Wednesday, meetings at the album producer’s place for bug-finding and take-picking and strategic planning; Thursday and Friday, in the studio assisting post-production. While I finish writing one proposal, drawing one design, and start drafting a second proposal at my actual work. Which is why Will is taking the lead this week, and also why eeeeeeeeeeeeee
: Corran snaps awake to Something Being Wrong.
He checks Ooryl’s bunk, but the Gand is awake; and in one of several Weird Alien Biology moments that Mike Stackpole gives Ooryl, it seems that Gands both need a lot less sleep than humans, and can store excess sleep against future need.
You know what? Screw the Force, screw space travel, screw everything else–that is the single most desirable thing ever in a Star Wars property.
(Well no, probably not, but…you know?)
: No, no, it really is. The Force only brings problems, man, responsibility with power and dark side and all that. Space travel is… expensive. Yeah. That’s the ticket.
But needing less sleep and being able to store sleep ahead of time?! Sign everyone up.
(I did mention that this is a one-day-rehearsal, four-day-album-post-production week, right.)
: Anyway. Corran doesn’t know what “evolutionary pressures” led to this, and Ooryl isn’t telling, but whatever; it’s not that. Something Is Still Wrong. He has a knack for this sort of thing, during undercover work, or arrests, and his father taught him to trust his gut.
Ooh, very nice. Further, deponent sayeth not now.
: Yeah, nice catch.
: Anyway. Corran quickly dresses, his synthetic flightsuit chilly and ditto his boots, but he hurries. He crouches next to the doorway of the cottage he and Ooryl are rooming in, cursing himself for not having even a vibroblade. All his stuff is in the flight center.
: There’s a bit of “I’ve fallen so far from my Good Old Habits” there.
: The flight center is where Corran and Ooryl should have been sleeping too, but a tree smashed the wall of their bunkroom, so they’re in a cottage slightly offsite. Corran thinks to himself that this might mean that he goes unnoticed, unless someone is being thorough…and that’s when he hears a bootstep, and sees a gun muzzle poke into the cottage, and a leg in stormtrooper commando armor.
He body-slams the trooper into the doorway, spins him into the cottage and onto the ground on his back, then jumps onto his stomach. As the man vomits, Corran grabs at the holstered blaster pistol, jams the muzzle under the trooper’s neck, and blam. Scratch one trooper.
: And this is why we always poke into darkened buildings two by two, folks. As we’ll find out shortly this stormie did have a partner, but if the partner had been by his shoulder, the body-slamming would not have worked at all.
: Corran winces a bit, but:
He who carries a blaster set on kill dies by a blaster set on kill.
Awkward, but true.
: True.
Also that’s how it’s italicized.
: Sorry.
: I mean, seriously, what is with the italics. Anyway.
Corran strips the trooper of weapons and ammo, and sees the pouches on his belt…including the explosive charges. Some of which have clearly been set.
He hears a noise, spins, and sees another stormtrooper–and knows he’s dead. He can’t get the blaster in time…wait.
The trooper’s hands are empty, and his feet are two inches off the floor.
Ooryl tosses the body to the side, and apologizes for having left Corran alone; seems Ooryl was out walking when he saw the troopers. He’s seen four others, the Rogues’ sentries are gone, and Corran says that stormtroopers operate in squads of nine (…weird), so there are probably two dozen or so total, counting ship crew.
He gathers up the weapons of the one he killed, and Ooryl does the same. At Corran’s question he reveals the hole in the back of his killed trooper’s helmet–and Corran recognizes the shape of Ooryl’s fist.
Yes, Ooryl punched through a stormtrooper helmet.
Ow.
: “Diamond-shaped hole,” and Ooryl makes a fist to show that his fingers come together in that shape. Human hands become hammers. Gands’, apparently, become awls.
I’d like to second the “Ow.”
: Anyway. Corran can’t see as well as Ooryl in the dark, so he tells Ooryl to take the lead, and assume the target is the flight center. He considers raising an alarm, but there are no ground troops here, so that’ll just encourage every pilot to head to his or her ship–making them easy targets.
It’s stealth mission time, people. Get your cardboard box ready.
They head out, but Corran quickly gets overwhelmed by doubts. He’s up against a numerically and tactically superior foe, unarmored and underarmed. He’s toast.
For a moment he imagines himself as a hero for succeeding, then remembers that most Alliance heroes got to be heroes by dying.
But then, he has a different thought: well, if he’s dead meat anyway, at least he can do something good in his death, and protect his friends.
Ooryl points for Corran to aim in a direction, vanishes into the mist, and Corran waits. At a crunching sound, Corran walks forward, and sees that Ooryl has killed another trooper, this time with a downward blow to the skull.
Ow twice.
: So it’s still functional as an hammer, too.
: Ooryl hands Corran the dead trooper’s armor, saying now Corran can have an exoskeleton too. Corran quickly straps it on, and the two make their way into the flight center.
Via that hole the tree made in their old bunkroom. Clever.
Corran sees that the hall lights are on, and knows that means the troopers aren’t here (they’d have killed the lights). They head to Shiel and Gavin’s room and wake them up quietly. They quickly take weapons (Shiel knows how to use a blaster carbine: “death marks don’t come with the rain”; Gavin can fire but doesn’t know if he’ll hit anything, and Corran says it’s point and shoot. “And shoot. And shoot”), and Corran tells the two aliens to go back outside, making their way around to the hangar, using their natural camouflage.
That’s when the hall lights go out.
Well, crap.
: I actually love the timing of this one. A lot of this is rather cinematic, which is true for most of Stackpole’s action scenes frankly.
: Corran tells Ooryl and Shiel to go out the window, and heads to the door, listening. He hears a creak of hinges, then pops out, fires twice, and catches one trooper in the chest, knocking him into a second. Corran dives to avoid return fire, and knows that there is at least one more trooper in there–and at least one dead pilot in the room the troopers are in.
Corran catches a second trooper, but Gavin and the third hit the hallway at the same time, and Gavin gets off only one shot–the trooper gets off a bunch, nailing Gavin. Corran fires again, taking out the third trooper, and the rest of the doors open. Nawara appears, and Corran says Gavin is injured, the place is rigged to blow, get everyone out. Meantime he heads down the hall toward the hangar.
(Nawara asks how the Imperials found them, but Corran doesn’t know either.)
: Any bets on whether the Invisible Pink Unicorn situation is going to come into play?
: Corran arrives at the hangar with its plastic-curtained door, and hears and sees a bunch of fire directed outward–Ooryl and Shiel’s flanking attack. He grabs a grenade-equivalent, finds the largest group of troopers (six), and slides the explosive into their midst.
Boom. And while the troopers react, Corran takes out the two troopers who had been on either side of the door.
He reflects that his emotional detachment from admitting he’s a dead man walking is useful, and also, that being outnumbered means that he can fire any which way and hit something, much like the 30-on-12 dogfight.
: There’s a bit more–all throughout the sequence, his mood is described as distant from fear, and calm. Insistently.
…now what does that remind me of?
: That doesn’t last–he takes out another trooper, watching his body fall in an almost graceful way. Until he hits the ground splat.
And then Corran takes a chest shot.
He slams into a wall of crates, his head smacking against them, and he hears the sounds of wood and glass breaking, and gurgling liquid. He hopes it isn’t his blood leaking, but he knows he’s a goner now. He smells his own burned flesh…and Corellian whiskey, which he knows well. He’s reminded of all the rounds he drank at his father’s wake.
Ah, hallucinations, he thinks, but he feels a jolt of pain and that clears his senses for a moment. He tries to aim his blaster carbine, but he can’t feel it; then he tries to draw his pistol. No dice either. And that’s when he sees a stormtrooper coming up to him.
Corran can’t vanish, can’t stand up (he self-diagnoses a collapsed lung), and the stormtrooper comes over and tells him that it’s over, “Rebel scum.”
: Can we have one villain that won’t stupidly boast
Okay, okay, maybe not when they’re threatening the main character, but anyway
: You too, Corran says, holding up one of the explosives. Dead-man’s switch.
The trooper shakes his head, saying Corran’s holding it upside down.
: I laughed.
: The whine of blaster bolts cuts through the room, and Corran flinches. He thinks for a second that’s a bad way to die, then realizes, there are no good ways anyway, and the dead don’t care.
Then he sees the stormtrooper fall, and Wedge runs up to him.
Wedge asks how Corran is.
“Parts of me don’t hurt that much.”
: Okay, that was a good line too.
: Wedge smiles and calls a medic. The troopers are withdrawing, they’re finding the bombs, Gavin’s hurt badly too, and the Rogues are evacuating.
Corran says, leave me, I’m a goner, “I’m so far gone I can smell Corellian whiskey.”
And that’s when Wedge says, no, you’re actually lying in a pool of Whyren’s Reserve whiskey. That’s what was in the crate you smashed into.
Corran’s beyond confused–why is there high-end whiskey in their top secret base and how did it get there–and Wedge says, consider figuring that out your assignment while you recover.
And we’re out.
Well, that was different. It moved at a pretty steady clip, though, and for whatever reason the ground combat didn’t lead itself to as much elision as [PILOTING].
And while it relied a bit too much on Weird Alien Biology Stuff, I did like the slight hints at things to come, especially viz Corran’s intuition. And Corran’s zen-like acceptance of his own death is appropriate, though I feel like his glory-hounding moments are a bit out of place for a former cop; he should have gotten over that a while back.
Still, I guess there’s a difference.
Anyway. Rising action to kick Act II into high gear–no complaints from me!
Z?
: I loved this chapter, frankly. High quality action, tiny bit of life and death philosophies scattered throughout; nice hooks (we’re now waiting to find out what will happen to Corran and Gavin, which pilot it was who got murdered in their bed, and how Loor and Isard are going to react to their midnight raid becoming a debacle and Rogue Squadron going into ground again); nice flow and pacing. I wish I could have taken the lead, frankly.
Next week we get to see what some of those hooks pull up. Until then, may the Force be with you.
Force Visions 