He stepped down from the shuttle, trying not to look long at her, as if she were the sun. Yet he saw her, like the sun, even without looking.
She kept him still and held his beating heart with one gaze, feeding off of him. She was a succubus, beauti...
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Gunships roared across the widening battlefield, lasers blasting away, explosions erupting all about it, a scene of spectacular destruction and frenzy. On the snowy ground of Kaller, hundreds of clone troopers were locked in combat against the forces of the Separatist Droid Army.
One against one, a battle droid was nearly a match for a clone trooper, and a super battle droid even more than a match. But in groups and formations, the improvisation of the clone troopers, reacting to the fast-changing battlegrounds and following the relayed orders of their Jedi commanders, had quickly given them all of the best vantage points throughout the war, all the high ground and the most defensible positions.
In this instance, however, the battle had extended far overhead, as well, as HMP droid gunships engaged the Republic ships that had managed to get off-planet, and those that had not yet landed. Most of those ships, high in the atmosphere and immediately within the perimeter of the battle were troop carriers rather than battleships, and so the Separatists were fast gaining the upper hand there, as well.
Jedi General Depa Billaba crouched amidst a deep snowy trench with her Clone Captain Grey and their battalion of troopers. An explosion mushroomed behind them and Billada lifted an arm against the rain of dirt and debris.
"Not to be a pessimist, but if the commander isn't back soon with those reinforcements..." Captain Grey trailed off, unwilling to voice what would happen considering the severity of their current predicament.
"My Padawan will be here," General Billaba assured.
It was then that a shadow had passed over the sun as though one of the towering thunderheads on the horizon had caught a stray current in the hyperwinds and settled above the snowy mountainside of Kaller. But it wasn't a cloud. It was the Triumphant.
General Billaba and Captain Grey looked up as LAAT/i's streaked over the snow-covered ground and spiraled downward with all guns blazing, crabbing outward to keep their forward batteries raking on the mountainside, while at the edge, Jadthu-class armored landers hovered with bay doors wide, trailing sprays of polyplast cables like immense ice-white tassels that looped all the way to the ground that gaped at the level of the battle. Down those tassels, rappelling so fast they seemed to be simply falling, came endless streams of armored troopers, already firing on the combat droids that marched below to meet them.
Streamers of cables brushed the outer, snowy bank of the control center, and down them slid purple-armored troopers, each with one hand on his mechanized line-brake and the other full of DC-15 blaster rifle on full auto, spraying continuous chains of packeted particle beams. Droids wheeled and dropped and leapt into the air and burst into fragments. Surviving droids opened up on the new clones as though grateful for something to shoot at, blasting holes in armor, cooking flesh with superheated steam from deep-tissue hits, blowing some troopers entirely off their cables to tumble toward a messy final landing ten levels below.
