Star Wars - The Last Battle of Colonel Jace Malcom by Alexander Freed

The dying man’s armor dripped with sweat in the fog, beads of moisture—not water, never water on this planet—forming on the white plastoid chestplate and dripping onto the ground. The dying man himself was propped against a rock, and Sergeant Immel crouched above him as she fumbled to resecure his helmet. “He’s out, Colonel,” she said. “Autodoc pegs him at critical.”
    Jace Malcom watched the horizon. Through his helmet’s display filters, the fog seemed to dissolve before the yellow sky and rocky cliffs, then snapped back into place as the filter tech gave up with an electronic shrug. No further enemy presence. At least, nothing obvious.
    “Your call,” Jace said. “His tracer functional?”
    “It works. What about vultures?”
    “If the Empire has time to send vultures, it means we failed the mission.”
    Not true, of course. The black-suited troopers could flock to the battlefield at any time—death’s own heralds, following med tracers to find their victims. But Immel knew the odds, so Jace could afford the lie.
    “Why me?” Immel asked.
    “Special Forces is here to advise, and I’m glad to be an extra gun. But in the field, the game’s yours.”
    “You’re lowlife scum, Colonel Malcom.”
    “SpecForce is nothing but.”
    Jace watched Immel. Her armored shoulders rose and fell as she took a long breath, then, silent, leaned over her dying comrade and thumbed a device on his belt. Her voice crackled through Jace’s helmet comlink a moment later.
    “All teams, we’re pressing on.”
    Immel plucked her rifle out of the dust and started checking its readouts. Jace knelt beside the dying man and placed a hand on his shoulder.
    “Corporal Amden vor Keioidian. You did the Republic proud. You did all of us proud. And we’ll be back for you.”
    Jace stood, nodded to Immel, and they slunk off together into the fog, rifles cradled close. Immel didn’t look back, and Jace smiled bitterly, feeling the expression blunted by the scars on his face. She’d made the right call. She might end up a decent leader after all.
    Then again , he thought, she’d better. The troops were going to need someone to look up to, and he didn’t have much time left.

    The battlefield narrowed to a series of canyons, channeling the fog like a riverbed. Kalandis Seven’s gravity—low enough to make stone-tossing a sport at base, high enough to ensure that a fall was still painful—made the march easier, but no less tedious.
    Breaking the long silence came static-distorted cheering over Jace’s comlink. Children shrieked and fireworks popped, each accompanied by a blast of white noise. In one motion, not breaking stride as they traversed the barren landscape, Jace and Immel lowered the volume level on their helmet comms.
    The propaganda broadcast overrode all channels every hour, blared by Republic Strategic Information Service agents in orbit. This time, it was another news report on the Empire’s withdrawal from Corellia and the Core Worlds. A genuine, unadulterated victory for the Republic, but one very far away from the Kalandis system, and not the first apparent victory Jace had seen in his career.
    It was forty years now, he thought—kept thinking, every day at different times, when some private showed off her first scar in the mess hall or while reviewing specs for the hundredth variation of some starfighter—forty years since the Sith Empire had come to conquer the galaxy, and he’d been fighting ever since.
    He supposed he wouldn’t be fighting much longer.
    Immel’s voice cut through commentary on the Supreme Chancellor’s latest speech. “Target in sight.”
    They had emerged from the narrow mouth of a canyon onto a cracked plain, where the silhouettes of dark spires stretched skyward behind the fog. “We’ve reached the spaceport,” Immel continued, adjusting her comlink. “All teams, report in.”
    Jace listened to the crackling voices speak up, one
    by one, as he unslung a satchel and