Chapter Text
“Nicely handled. Now execute her!”
The mission is finished. The Imperial governor is no longer hostage, and Tawni Ames, leader of the supposed insurgent faction, has agreed to accept the Empire’s peace and order because she does not want bloodshed for her people. She does not need to die.
Governor Grotton, apparently, does not understand this.
“Sir,” Cody tries to argue, “I promised a peaceful—”
“You did—I didn’t! Now execute her!” the governor orders. He will not be swayed.
You must, insists a weakening voice that Cody once believed was a conscience. He’s a good soldier, and he has orders, and his word means nothing against that of his superiors. The Empire will bring peace to the galaxy, no matter what it takes.
Cody looks back to Ames, head of a planet that sees the Empire as a threat, Separatist who’d once tried to reach a compromise with the Republic and had been refused by Cody’s Emperor, woman who has just now allowed Cody to convince her to surrender because both of them want the fighting to end.
“So much for peace,” she says to Cody, smile faint and bitter. Resigned. She should not have to die; Cody has orders to kill her anyway.
You must. Why?
Tawni Ames doesn’t lift her blaster, and Cody doesn’t reach for his.
“That was a direct order!”
You must.
Cody doesn’t.
“Follow it, or face the consequences for diso—”
Crosshair does.
The Imperial governor leaves the room—Crosshair follows, at a look from Cody—presumably to go retrieve the other captured troopers and then establish the Empire’s control in the city. Cody has orders to deal with the corpse.
Put her body in the square. Let it be a warning to the rest of them.
Barbaric. Cody wishes he were surprised, but fear tactics are heavily favored by many of the new higher-ups.
When he finally manages to make his feet move, he approaches Ames’s body and crouches down. He first checks for a pulse, though there’s no point—Crosshair doesn’t miss, and it’s already clear from her vacant expression and lack of breath that she’s dead. A quick death is more merciful than some other fates, at least, but hers wasn’t necessary. She would have cooperated, given the chance.
Cody walks back to don his helmet and holster his blaster before returning to the body. He closes her eyes, knowing her face will be added to the many he sees in his nightmares, then gathers her up in his arms and carries her out of the building. He passes what remains of the strike team, and Digs wordlessly splits off as an escort while the rest continue securing the area. With the tactical droid down, they won’t have much problem taking care of any stragglers.
The city square is largely quiet, as most of the city’s residents hid themselves away during the fighting. But there’s a small group examining a pile of broken droid parts and glancing nervously at the main building; they notice Cody approaching, and their expressions morph from fear into anger and dismay and more fear when they recognize the body.
Stopping several feet away, Cody kneels down to lay Ames on the ground. Then he stands, backing up a couple of steps as he does.
“Resistance to the Empire will not be tolerated,” he informs them dully, not a threat but a statement of fact. “This will be your only warning.”
One woman’s face twists into a snarl of fury, but after a glance behind Cody to where Digs has his blaster at the ready, she aborts her step forward. “Monsters,” she still spits.
Cody’s not sure he could argue even if he wanted to.
Body and message delivered, he walks away.
Several squads of stormtroopers arrive to enforce security throughout the city. With the initial task force’s purpose here finished, Cody rounds up his troopers, including the injured left near the crash site—though there are a couple heads missing. He silently wishes them luck.
The dwindling remains of his squad and the stormtroopers who’d been held hostage board the transport back to Coruscant, and Cody watches as another ship lands with yet more Imperial forces. Governor Grotton catches him staring and offers only a disdainful look before turning to snap instructions.
Hostile occupation, Ames called it. That’s not how the admirals had phrased the situation to Cody, but she was entirely correct.
The return flight is largely quiet, save for one stormtrooper asking a couple of the clones questions about the droids. Most stormtrooper recruits have never fought one; even some of the clones are too young to have been deployed before the war ended and the shutdown command went out.
The newer troops don’t understand how different things used to be. The Republic had been helping people, had fought to free planets that didn’t want invading Separatist forces to put them under Dooku’s exploitative control. The GAR had been preserving liberty and democracy. And back then, many superior officers would call clones by name, would listen to them, would protect them and seek conflict resolutions that involved tactics aside from strong-arming and brute force—
And then the Jedi had been declared traitors and the clones had listened. Had killed them. Are still hunting down any remaining, many of whom are children.
Because they WERE traitors, ARE traitors, hisses that abominable little voice, and you must be a good soldier.
Cody grips the overhead handle tighter and breathes through the headache. Stress seems to be getting to him a lot, these days.
In the wake of the war, the Empire had promised peace. Its citizens embraced this wholeheartedly, tired of the fighting and the costs of keeping it up, and so did the clones—peace was the dream they’d been sacrificing everything for.
(Some had dreamed of freedom, too, but they’d never been promised that.)
With the war finished, being a soldier is supposed to mean safeguarding the peace and unity that has finally been achieved. This is what the brass claims it means, anyway, as they implement new rules and crack down on dissent and continue sending troopers to die because the fighting still isn’t done. It doesn’t help that the mission briefings contain precious little information; intel wasn’t always reliable during the war, either, but now it’s often actively misleading.
Like today. The group of insurgents that had supposedly seized the city on Desix were the planet’s own people refusing to accept the Empire’s new governor. Maybe Ames hadn’t told the full truth; it’s possible that there actually had been a coup. But Cody is good at reading people, and he doesn’t think she lied. None of the city’s residents had been happy to see the troopers.
Cody and his strike team came in to eliminate the droids and rescue the Imperial governor and stormtrooper hostages. Then the Imperial governor ordered the death of a woman who’d already surrendered, and more troops came to seize the city. The latter events were made possible because Cody and his squad were good little soldiers who followed orders and completed their mission. Cody didn’t shoot Ames, no, but he also didn’t ensure safety for her or her people. And this isn’t the first time his actions have paved the way for the Empire’s heavy-handed control—just one of the more blatant.
Cody is sick of being a good soldier. He misses the days he could believe he was a good man.
The shuttle drops the troopers off at the GAR headquarters, and Cody stops to look up at the memorial from Geonosis, full of thousands upon thousands of names that make up only a fraction of the loyal vode sacrificed for the birth of the Empire.
Stars, he misses Rex. Rex never would have stood for this.
“Tell me something, Crosshair,” Cody says. “This new Empire… are we making the galaxy better?” He knows where he stands. Has for a while, if he’s being honest, but he needs to know where Crosshair does.
“We’re soldiers,” Crosshair replies. “We do what needs to be done."
Cody finds himself unable to help his disappointment. “Well, you know what makes us different from battle droids?” he asks as he turns to keep walking. “We make our own decisions. Our own choices.”
Rex would be furious with Cody for his.
Guilt leaden across his shoulders, Cody passes Crosshair and adds, “And we have to live with them, too.”
It’s long past time for him to leave.
Late in the night cycle, Cody lifts his mattress and sticks his hand through the slit along the bottom seam, feeling around until he’s withdrawn the credits, code cylinders, and datachips stashed inside.
He’s been considering this seriously for a couple months, really. But he’s been loath to leave his siblings, especially with things being run the way they are, and when he heard Crosshair had been recovered from Kamino solo, Cody wanted to figure out what that situation had been and see if there was something he could do. Most clones still with the Empire at least have their fellows, but the Batch had always had trouble getting along with the rest—Crosshair most of all, with his prickly and antagonistic tendencies.
The other members of Clone Force 99 were reported dead with the destruction of Kamino. Cody’s not sure if he believes it—surviving difficult odds had been a point of pride for them—but whatever the circumstances, Crosshair is on his own right now. Modified or not, no clone does well alone. And the Batch had been Cody’s, at least a little bit.
But Crosshair is in too deep with the Empire’s philosophy, and Cody doesn’t have time to try and convince him otherwise. Governor Grotton’s report, once read, will throw too much scrutiny his way. He might be able to withstand it for a time, having years of practice putting on all the right faces for the admirals, but he’s been toeing some lines as it is. He can’t stomach any more, anyway.
So he gathers his things—not much, not more than he can slip into his belt pouches—and heads for the hangar.
He stops by the group barracks first.
“Digs,” Cody whispers, settling lightly on the edge of one of the bunks. The trooper in question immediately rolls over and sits up; he must not have been asleep yet.
“Commander?”
“Just wanted to talk for a moment.” Cody keeps his voice low, mindful not to wake anyone else, though several of the neighboring bunks are unoccupied anyway. “How are you holding up?”
“...Fine. As much as any of us are.”
Digs lost one batchmate in the shuttle crash and has another in the infirmary. “How’s Milo?”
“He’ll pull through,” Digs replies with a small sigh of relief. “I mean it, Commander. We’ll manage.”
Cody nods. “Good.”
“Sorry about Wyler and Nova.”
Wyler had been shiny enough to have only just picked a name, and Nova had come from Ghost Company. But Cody’s long been breathing through lungs full of grief, so he doesn’t falter.
“I’ll manage,” he echoes. “I needed to talk to you for a reason, though. I’m being reassigned.”
Digs is silent for a moment. “Tonight?”
“Yeah. I’d ask if you want to come, but…”
“I’m not going anywhere without Milo. Maybe we can join you when he’s healed.”
“That’s what I figured. Here.” Cody presses one of the code cylinders and a datachip into Digs’s hand. “Take care of each other.”
Digs nods. “We will. Stay alive out there.”
With a final squeeze of Digs’s shoulder, Cody rises again and leaves.
It’s embarrassingly easy to slice into a terminal and forge himself an offworld summons. Cody decides to make it from Tarkin, because a) Tarkin does actually pull this kind of karkery on short notice and b) Cody dislikes him on principle. The farce only needs to last long enough to get him past the hangar officers anyway, and it does; soon enough, he’s piloting a small vessel out into the air lanes, and then out of atmo, and then into hyperspace.
He doesn’t look back.