Slaves Of The Empire {1}

Prologue | The Day I Lost Him

Dodging and weaving between sniper blasts with practiced ease, she drew the Force to her to heighten her senses and make every shot count. In the past few weeks the 501st had had so many of its better supply lines cut they'd resorted to buying second-grade power packs – and stars knew those never lasted long enough to make a difference in actual combat. At least today, on this front, the enemy had inferior numbers and only one heavy cannon. If she took the advantage of the high ground away from them, those were odds she could work with.

Bidding the Force use her body, Ahsoka reached out and slowly clenched her fingers into a fist. The snipers' rifles crumpled in their hands. Though a voice in the back of her mind reminded her she wasn't fighting battle droids in the Clone Wars anymore, Ahsoka didn't even flinch as she gunned them all down.

She put on a burst of speed and made it to the small rock face the snipers had been using as cover in all of five minutes. Though she could feel no sentient life aside from her troops in the vicinity, the wounded would slow their progress. Once she left, there would be a long window for someone to get to the heavy cannons and start firing before the clones made it past.

She was not about to let that happen. Their losses were already far too steep.

Taking out the cannon was simple: one snap of the Force to crush the nozzle, and the shells would ricochet back into the machine. This done, she activated the controls to fire, and before long it was a smoldering ruin of metal and plastic.

"Rex," she murmured into her wrist comm, stretching to get a few last kinks out of her spine before the long run ahead, "next klick and a half is clear of unfriendlies and the heavy cannon is out of commission. Move out."

"Sir, yes, sir."

Brightly colored trees and flowers flashed in and out of Ahsoka's line of sight as she darted past them, her feet pounding a steady rhythm into the peaty ground. The Force gave her more energy, but as careful as she was to monitor her breathing and keep her battle-weary limbs relaxed, she could feel herself tiring.

After so many months shipboard, she was out of practice, but she gritted her teeth and summoned the strength to push on. The sooner she finished scouting, the sooner she could get back to her troops and see them to the landing zone safely.

But that was when she smelled the smoke from cooking fires up ahead.

Flattening herself against a blue tree trunk that curled upward like a fern, she shut her eyes and stretched her senses further out than she usually dared. Cooking fires, although rare when it was protocol for a battalion to be supplied with enough ration bars to feed itself twice over, were a sure sign of a camp nearby.

Her sensitive Togruta nose was already picking up the heady smell of sizzling meat – probably some native game – and she nearly whined in hunger. It had been a long time since she'd had any protein that wasn't a powdered supplement.

And yet, while her corporeal senses were delighted, Ahsoka still couldn't find any sentient life forms in the Force nearby. Had something been left to cook while the enemy went out in search of the fleeing Jedi and clones? That was unlikely. The scanners would have spotted the heat signatures before they landed.

She shook her head to herself, ready to brush it away as hunger talking. But then the smell of burning plasticoid – the same thing her troops' armor was made of – joined it. With a flash of fear, she broke into a run again, following her nose.

She didn't have far to go. The woods cleared into a small meadow just ahead, where dozens of bodies lay in heaps – blackened, burnt, burning still in slowly dying fires. Almost all wore the earth-toned robes of Jedi younglings and Padawans.