The New Jedi Order: A Vision of Confluence

A World Like This

Fondor wasn't a pretty world under the best of times. Millenia of industry wrapped most of the world in urban sprawl, punctuated by arid deserts and abandoned, ragged wastelands of decaying and decrepit ruins. Waste and want; that was the motto of Fondor, though despite the abuse of the world - or because of it - it still made its mark on the galaxy. Gray-slab apartment complexes marched in laser-straight rows, each indistinguishable from the next, brutal in their simplicity and practical in their mass construction. Each block had 'space' for thousands of families, packed into spaces more aptly called a cubicle or a closet than rooms.

The irony was that unlike other worlds, Fondor's population was relatively light. A few billion sapients - compared to trillions of droids. More, even. Yet space was still at a premium, needed for pit mines or massive factories that measured on the scale of a landmass. So housing space remained at high demand, for each square foot of the world set aside for leisure and rest was a square foot not given over to smelting durasteel or assembling starships components.

Sergeant Sherin, formerly night patrol, of payband CC4, barely recognized the beats he once walked. For most of his adult life he strolled these streets, narrow like duracrete canyons, with his peaked cap, a stunstick and a stingblaster stuffed in a hip holster. He wasn't supposed to carry that last one, but some of the stim-addicts could get handsy and stabby and so most of the overseers turned a blind eye to packing a little bit more heat than something to crack heads with or introduce midnight interlopers to a bit too many ergs of electricity.

He'd rousted squatters, he'd sent those looking to pinch parts for black market resale packing, he'd put down a few riots. Tough work, but it had to be done.

It was all ruins now.

Multistory blocks were slumped piles of duracrete and rebar, steadily accumulating a dusting of ash. Incongruous remnants of ordinary lives mixed into the humped piles. Here: a navy blue couch, pristine, just sitting in the middle of the street, barely anything but a bit of dust and a few chips of transparisteel laying on its cushions. There: a stretched canvas painting of some kind, something a couple credits bought and brought a touch of life to drab walls. It poked out of grey duracrete, grey ash and the bright swirls of orange and indigo and violet were startling. A child's toy, floppy and knit, laying atop a chunk of roofing as big as a landspeeder, looking like it had just been placed aside. Sherin averted his eyes from that one.

The lads of the Tertius 57th, which over the past several days he'd learned was a company of a whole regiment, from some place called 'Lentia Tertius' which was in some region called 'Ultramar', which was no damn place Sherin'd ever heard of. They were all a strange bunch, in their longcoats and green enameled armor - chestplates and vambraces, with bucket helms that covered to the nose, slitted to see out of. Their guns were stranger, but by the stars, Sherin'd swear by them.

Lasrifles didn't have quite the punch of some types of blaster, that was for sure, and they didn't have the flexibility to switch modes, but they did one thing and one thing real well. If you could aim at something, you could hit it. Sherin wasn't a great shot - never needed to be and a stingblaster just had to clip a junkie to fry their nerves, but with these damned lasrifles, he felt like the hottest shot since the Mandalorian wars. Aim, shoot, hit.

Hard to miss when the bolt hit at the speed of light.

Helped that there was barely any recoil, too.

"Listen up, you sleepy shits," he growled, putting his all into it, like he'd smoked cigarra all his life. "Word's come from on high that we're gonna chuck the scarheads right back into that smoking crater they made. There's armor coming, there's walkers coming, and they're not gonna know what hit 'em."

His squad listened with dark-ringed eyes, dirty fingers with cracked nails clutched around lasrifle barrels. A couple were smoking, cigarras of some kind they'd begged, bartered or nicked from the 'Exile' soldiery. The first, probably, given how Sherin'd seen the amused chuckles from 'Tertius' infantry as they shook out sticks of the stimulant and offered lights from little clicking igniters.

None of them looked like they'd slept, which was about how Sherin felt, except that Sherin had the pins of a Sergeant now, not to mention one of them strange longcoats and a laspistol. That meant that sleep didn't matter to him, because if the holodramas said anything it all, it was that it was the hardass sergeant that got his troops through. Recaf filled his canteen - another donation from the ever-helpful lads of the Tertius - and if his squad thought it was water, well, let that be a bit of mystique.

Speaking of - he slid his rebreather mask up, unscrewing the cap of his canteen and taking a draw. Cold as the grave and just as appealing, but he felt the hit of the weapons-grade caffe in seconds.

"Our favorite Major's ready to use us for more than just pot-shots and warning the biters away. You boys tired of sitting on this pile? I am! You boys itching to vape some scarheads? I am!"

There was a half-hearted mumble, as energetic as a reactant-starved hypermatter chamber and Sherin scowled.

"I'm sorry, were you bored of the sith-damned war going on? Let's reschedule it."

Ventif, whose eyes were still just as wide as they were when Sherin met him, years ago when this all started a couple days ago, cleared his throat, lifting his own 'breather and spitting a wad out.

"Hell no, Sergeant!"

"Thank you, Trooper Ventif. That there is a man who knows his duty. Did you see any others today, Venty? I thought we had a squad here! I said: you boys itching to vape some scarheads?"

Backs straightened, lasrifles were pulled closer, butts shuffled where they sat on duracrete and backless chairs and old road dividers.

"Yes, Sarge!"

"Blastin' right."

"Yessir!"

"Let's get 'em."

He met the eyes of each one of his squad, ten scuffed and dirty and exhausted Fondorians, human and Herglic and Twi'lek and even that one Mrlssi, who got the longlas that was double her height.

"Damned right. Check your rifles, check your batteries, we're moving in fifteen.

The day began beautifully.

The sight of AT-AT walkers, which had been a mainstay of Imperial terror, lifted his gnarled and grizzled old heart. They stalked down the rubble-strewn avenues, hidden from easy view despite their massive size by sprawling bulks of factories. The howling growl of old Juggernaut engines filled the air and overhead, Z-95 Headhunters and Clone Wars vintage V-Wings darted and dueled with rocks, spitting lasers like maniac holodisplays. Every now and then, a flash would light up the sky and down would spiral one of the starfighters, hard to say whose, down for a thumping smash into the cityscape elsewhere.

Once again, Sherin prayed to nothing he knew of that elsewhere continued to be elsewhere and nowhere near his squad.

They stuck tight to him, holding a motley collection of the Exile's lasrifles and Deeces, a couple E11s. A more poetic man might have something to say about that, the way it was all the recent eras of the Galaxy and a new one too, coming together, but Sherin'd never understood the way words worked like that. Instead he figured on the troops with lasrifles being reliable to hit faster bastards, the troops with blasters with a bit more of a punch to bother the scarheads. Oh, and the las was better at hosing down the biters, since the biters always came in their hundreds.

Sherin whistled and they hoofed it along, keeping pace along with another bunch of local. Big, steaming offworlder tanks crawled along at the front of the pack, nodding wide-mouthed cannons back and forth. They were uglier than a Hutt and smelled twice as bad - what did they run on, burning trash? - but the calibre of those guns, to a layman like Sherin, looked liable to ruin the day of any nasty creature the scarheads hoped to trot out.

That Major, Lev Torenus or something, had rustled up NCOs from the tumult of Fondor's sudden conscription, declaring that he was in charge now and you know? He was, because he brought tanks and he brought gunships and the Guild was providing something slightly less useful than 'point the bang part at the vong'.

Speaking of gunships: one of the blocky offworlder ones whirled low, engines thumping and Sherin whooped to watch it go, loving how many damned gunbarrels stuck out of the stubby craft. Down toward the end of the avenue, where it met another and made an open plaza, the gunship banked hard on its turbofans, killing momentum and he saw why. Plasma whirled past, bright enough to bring tears, just missing the blunt and small wings of the gunship. Gatling stubbers roared in reply and two vong gunship-analogues darted into view.

The three duelling craft couldn't be more different. The offworlder gunship was a block of metal, painted white and deep blue, edged in gold, and it did the logical things like fly with jet engines and rockets and shoot stubbers and lasers. The invaders' gunships were silent in comparison, triangular like some holos Sherin'd seen of ocean-going critters, the kind that were shaped like a big kite (not that Fondor had oceans, of course, but the Holonet let a person be a bit more cultured and all). They were wedges of coral and muscle, with pitch-black mica canopies and at the very fore of them was a wide mouth that might've been used to scoop up prey but instead spat plasma and weird, corkscrewing missiles.

And couldn't forget the bugs.

Even from a distance, they could see from underneath the gunships a spray of bugs, looking more like a smokey cloud, spill out.

"You know," Sherin called, huffing as they jogged, "Those probably aren't the healthiest to let run around."

"Roast 'em, sarge?" called one of his troop. Sherin, if he'd been a good Sergeant, would know all their names. He knew Ventif, but the rest, well…he was trying. Give him a break, it had only been a couple of days. And there was a war on.

"Roast 'em," he confirmed.

His squad fanned out, dropping out of the jogging line behind the tanks to take knees and steady aims. The clouds of bugs spread, thinning out while the three gunships still pivoted and danced and clashed. A rocket spat out from the Exile one, punching up and then arcing down, hard, cracking into one of the vong creatures with a sharp report that didn't have much fire, but clearly crippled the beastie.

It started to slew and lose altitude, las fire from the lead tanks reaching up to greet it.

Sherin did his part, stabbing a couple shots at the cloud of bugs along with the las and blasterbolts of his troopers. Little puffs of fire showed where'd they'd hit a few, but it wasn't nearly enough.

"Shit," he cried. "Cease fire, cease fire."

Hopefully the tanks would attract the bulk of the swarm: he'd had enough of the damned thunkers and rippers.

Everyone had a name for the different breeds. Thud bugs, punch bugs, hammer beetles, thunkers. Razor bugs or slicers, rippers, shredder bugs. Didn't matter what you called them, they brought the pain.

The Exile gunship took a few splashes of plasma, scorching the paint and making it tremble, but it brought down the second vong flier shortly after, aided by splinters of sponson-fire from the trio of tanks. Then it whirled and vanished down a side-alley.

The bug swarm, though, didn't come closer. Sherin watched, frowning, as it spread out, going for the buildings right at the edges of the junction square and then started…moving. Dancing, almost, weaving back and forth, back and forth, about a hundred meters away.

"The frag is that?" Venty muttered, just loud enough to hear.

Something was starting to fill up the air and as they got closer, Sherin indulged in another inventive spree of invective in Huttese and Bocce. They were making a skitterweb. The kinds of crap you had to dust out of corners in old warehouses that got reactivated, but this time, so damned dense - the bugs kept weaving it - that it was starting to become opaque.

The lead tank, rolling closer, slowed for a second and then the engine roared, accelerating from a prowl to a sudden dash.

And, void-curse his eyes, Sherin saw the tank actually get stuck. The whole wall of web bowed out, like pushing a finger into cloth, but the roaring tank, spewing out think exhaust that reeked, revved and revved hard. The second tank in the line slewed to the side, just able to come up beside the lead in the avenue and added its own weight. Blasters started shooting up at the web, punching little burning holes into it but even lasrifles cracking and flaring just burst parts here and there and - damn! Dark shadows dashed on the far side of the web - the bugs were still adding more!

A sound like sackcloth tearing in the hands of a giant rent the air and the stressed web finally tore, the two tanks surging forward. Chunks of it came down, swinging out and draping over some troops that got too close. They became lumpen shapes, panicking and flailing and only binding themselves tighter while their comrades shouted for them to stay still. Utility knives came out and sawed and slashed.

The lead tanks both looked like they'd been stuffed with cotton, the frontal glacis entirely coated and where the web'd torn, it fell and draped back onto the turrets, gumming up the works.

It took fifteen tense minutes to burn the webbing off the tanks and get it out of the gearing of their treads. All the while Sherin was jumpy, eyes on the move, head on the swivel, waiting for a follow-up ambush to appear. Something to capitalize on this stall-out. It was just a couple dozen troops, three tanks - tiny in the grand scheme of the counterpush, but nothing came.

The vong didn't do anything, but the stress wore at him all the same.

Sherin glared at his commlink pinned to his lapel, like it was to blame for everything wrong in the world. Every appointed 'Sergeant' got one and it was linked into the Exiles' 'vox' systems, which had to have some kind of translation going since it wasn't jabbering in their weird language and the speaking voices coming out were flat and emotionless.

"What in eight kinds of fragged stars is a worldeater?" he groused, as if the lump of circuitry and plastics could answer him back. It did not.

"Some kinda monster, knowing our luck," Venty offered. There were grunts of agreement.

Something roared - bellowed - in the distance, deep enough that loose duracrete and dust vibrated off surfaces. It his Sherin in his gut, in the diaphragm, lungs twitching and momentarily hard to breathe.

"Bitchfire," he swore. "I think that was a worldeater."

The tanks, which was what his squad and five others were tasked to follow, led them to a waste-processing facility. Five klicks on a side, open-air, a vast plaza that was dotted with closed ports where speeders and trucks could zoom up, dump out chem-barrels and junk-buckets into the hungry reclamation smelters underneath and whizz off again. Big exhaust pipes, as big around as a freighter climbed stories into the sky. Usually they pumped out smoke from the processors underneath, but everything 'round here was shut off either on purpose, or from all the grid interrupts. Instead, the waste-processing plaza was a maze of abandoned speeders, doors still left hanging open from when their drivers had beat feet away from the invaders, and piles of junk and refuse piled in bunches.

It reeked, even through the breather mask.

Orders were to hold this position, keep scarhead infantry from trying to sneak through here and the tanks were there to make the vong hesitate to bring their stompers and crawlers.

Explosions were ripping up the western and southern horizon, mushrooming high enough that they could be seen over the city skylines. Every few minutes a real one would go off and then a shockwave, muted, would thump past everyone, tugging at coats and dusting grit into eyes.

That's where the real fighting was and damned fine for it. He'd had his taste, before the Exiles came along and way Sherin saw it, he did his duty for Guild and world. He slotted some vong, he watched some folks die, he nearly melted to plasma and that was enough.

So again, he prayed to thing he didn't know that what was making those explosions would stay over there. Kadyin Memorial, if he was oriented right.

Poor bastards over there. At least they had all the heavy-

One of the tanks exploded.

Just like that. One minute it was sitting there, steaming, then the next -

He hit the dirt. Shrapnel whirled past.

What? The hell did -

The other two slammed into reverse. Gears spun, treads slapped. Turrets pivoted, tracked: boom, boom.

Venty hit the tarmac next to him, the kid propped up on his elbows, lasrifle cradled. He was mouthing something. Crack, crack, crack. Red bars, lasfire, right overheard. He didn't see anything. He couldn't see a damn thing. Where did that come from, where did -

Shrieks. Howls. Biters.

The world was flashes.

He's grabbing Venty by the scruff of his jumpsuit, hauling the kid to a pile of trash.

Three Twi'lek join them - matching jumpsuits, some old work crew? - and kneel and the five of them are shooting, shooting, at what? He hears biters howling but he can't see anything, the thumping shockwaves from the south-west keep raising dust and dirt and swirling ash so he shoots, he shoots to where the enemy should be -

Splat. There's a lekku on the ground, twitching. A Twi'lek reels, she's screaming - she's gurgling, her throat's cut, she's dead on the ground -

Boom and his guts shake as a tank fires again, right nearby, it rolled up, it's on the other side of this trash pile, bloody kark, his ears are ringing -

A rotary blaster opens up somewhere, blue darts spitting out and it sounds like nails on transparisteel with an electronic zing and then there's bodies falling in the ash, in the dust and the grit and the dirt -

Plasma flashes, sun-bright, sun-yellow, right past him. Singes his damned eyebrows off, Venty is yelling, there's a shape of a Twi'lek in ash and then they drift away - could've been him, could've been him -

Bugs thump down like rain. Splat, splat. They burst on the duracrete, arcing in - he hasn't seen them splat like that, usually when they miss they fly away - because they're moving too fast, they're blurs, faster than he's seen, fast enough that one hits a Muugari and folds them in half, drops them skidding.

He sees them now, he sees them loping, darting, dashing from cover to cover - when did they get smart, when did they -

The taller shapes step out, plasma shines and burps from their hands and splatters, splashes, Venty screams, he grabs the kid and pulls him back and Venty is screaming, he slaps him, Venty's fine, it's just a flashburn, no worse than when a machine backfires, get over it -

Roar, again, in the distance, so loud, so damned loud, everyone pauses, everything pauses, can't help but look to the west, toward Kadyin: the sky glows red, something is falling, something like a comet, plunging through the clouds -

No time to gawk, no time, scarhead coming, bastard is tall, huge, huge like a tank, broad shouldered, wide body, armor is freakishly cheerful, pastels, marked in red, dark red, dried red - blood red, the bastards are painting themselves in our blood, in our blood, he'll kill them, he'll kill them all -

Crack and red light punches an eyeslot, right through the helmet and fire bursts out of the other eye slot and the vong goes down and Sherin's heart soars, got one, got one -

Explosions, closer, in the yard. Junk is flying, trash is punched up, burst like bubbles, there's a fruit ring on his shoulder and he gawps at it, because it's so incongruous -

Something blurs overhead, huge and delta-shaped, dark and ominous but it roars with the sound of rockets so its one of ours, not theirs and things thump down, thud.

Inexorable force pushes Sherin aside. He stumbles, tumbled, falls on his ass over Ventif.

There's a man there. He's huge. He's beyond huge. Sherin, on his ass, looks up. And up. And up. And up. Man's as tall as an AT-AT. His helmet is in the clouds. He sees red lenses. They look down at him and he can't breathe, can only look -

The man's gone. Gone. Faster than any man should be, faster than any wardroid, he's gone and he leaves an afterimage in the smoke and the dust and the grit, he moves so fast the air doesn't have time to fill in and swirls instead and Sherin hauls up his lasrifle, which is clicked to thermal for the scope, he sets it to his shoulder and looks -

The man's among the vong. He's kicking biters aside, so hard they fly. Scarhead warriors come at him. Thud. Thud. Whatever the man's shooting, it crumps like a grenade. Warriors topple.

He's fast. Too fast. No one is that fast.

Sherin's bowels loosen a little. His stomach twists. He can't look away, but he doesn't want to watch. Another giant joins the first. There's just two and they rip into the vong that had been working up through the junkyard. Warriors don't get close. Las flickers, helping them, blasterbolts whizz and hiss and clobber biters - do they even need the help?

Plasma flares. One man, one man-shape, because there's no men in that armor, goes to one knee. Plasma flares again. The man-shape half-spins, catching on one arm, the other still outstretched, still shooting a big, boxy gun. Sherin can only see their thermal shapes, white-hot.

More reinforcements sweep in. Other conscript squads. A half-dozen hovertanks. They dart in, joining him, joining Venty (who is still moaning, but it's like sunburn, he'll be fine), helping the two man-shapes that are drawing all attention. One is still down, shaky, kneeling, now in partial cover. Plasma whickers, flashes, trying to pick them out, trying to kill them, but one lets a pile of junk bear the brunt, the other dodges. So fast. Too damned fast.

With the reinforcements are Exiles, a tough squad of them, with full helmets.

"Keep moving," one shouts, in accented Basic. His grammar is awful. "Keep moving. Push to Kadyin. Go!"

They push.

The world comes back to normal. Time resumed itself.

Sherin held onto a hovertank, adrenaline still trembling through him. Between the man-shapes, which he learned were Astartes, Ultramarines, and the reinforcements, the junkyard was kept. When he checked his chrono, after, it had been two minutes. Two minutes.

They continued south-west, toward Kadyin. Toward the strobes and flares and gut-rattling howls that shook the sky. Something was over there fighting. Something was over there and it sounds like the end of the damned world, and that's where they had to be.

Sherin only caught the very end.

Before Kadyin Memorial, there was only flattened ruin. He didn't know the area well, but he'd been around and it used to be relatively upscale. A decent-er part of Fondor, where a little bit of civilization was indulged. There was a small biodome, nice and green, some more luxury apartments. Some commercial areas.

It was all flattened. A huge expanse of nearly flattened plain, dotted with craters, scattered with hulks of destroyed vehicles and dead biots. He saw AT-ATs, toppled and burning from within. Juggernauts flipped and smashed. Hovertanks dismantled. There were so many dead battle droids that their bodies were like a boneyard.

He knew the worst of it had been here, at the center of the line, where the Exiles set up their command and where the brunt of the vong had pushed.

But this was apocalyptic. A wasteland. A slaughterfield.

And he, along with his squad, along with likely thousands, tens of thousands of others, all within sight range, stopped. Watched.

He learned what a worldeater was that day. He learned because two were slain. Their bodies were so massive, he mistook them for heaps of wreckage, for hills. When his eyes adjusted, when his sense of scale adjusted, it stole his breath.

Two were alive. In the center of the slaughterfield, kilometers away from him but somehow still massive, was a metal man. A monster in the shape of a man. Enormous, taller than any AT-AT, taller than any walker he'd ever seen, so tall it's shoulders would scrape the ceilings of some of the factories. It felt bigger. Each step it took he would swear until his dying day he could feel, even at a distance. Two worldeaters circled it.

One opened its mouth and exhaled annihilation.

It was blinding. His exposed skin prickled. Even through squeezed-shut eyes, his vision danced with blue-white ferocity until he had to turn away, tugging up the collar of his loaned longcoat, like he was blocking rain. What he was really blocking was hell-on-Fondor.

That thing was going to kill the whole world. Not even that giant walker, that mech, that…titan would stand a chance. It would melt, and then the worldeater would turn that burning exhale on everyone, everything. It was so bright. So bright. They could surely see it in orbit.

When it faded, when the glow was spent and Sherin cautiously, cautiously turned -

The titan still stood. It steamed, it steamed and that steam was metal, it was vaporized, phase-shifted, gaseous metal wafting from its form. Heat haze filled the air and even at this distance, the baking intensity of it dried the sweat from Sherin's forehead. Venty, next to him, was just as speechless.

Together they watched as the titan slew a monster with a single blinding spindle of light. Compared to the blue-white, bone-aching, skin-prickling exhalation, that piercing needle was purity. Righteousness. Clean. It left a red-black afterimage he blinked away, but Sherin had to see. He had to watch the worldeater slump down, watch the titan stumble.

He had to hear horns howl out in triumph.

He had to hug Venty, sweeping the red-faced kid up in an embrace, up off the ground.

"We lived!" he shouted and cheers were erupting, loud enough to match the mournful, trailing horn of the distant titan. "Son of a rotten bitch, we lived, kid!"

He put Venty back down on his feet, yanking off his own peaked cap and slapping it on the kid's own dome. Venty's helmet was lost somewhere, probably back at the junkyard.

Longest damn week of his life.

One thing was for certain: when the Exiles were leaving, Sherin was damned well leaving with them. Looking again over the slaughter of the worldeaters, he decided that, on the balance, he'd rather be with the lunatics that did that, rather than on a world that looked like…he took in the black clouds, the ash, the fires that burned all along the horizon…that looked like this.