Cold

[Byl Laprovik]

The door to the motel room opened, and Byl staggered in, carrying a fifth of whiskey and a whore in each hand. She ran her hands along the contour of his crotch as he drank, until he'd had enough of the drink and of her, and pushed her backwards on the bed. She smiled cattily up at him as she began to undo his belt. He stood motionless, until his liquor-soaked ennui broke the silence and he poured whiskey down into her hair. She pulled him down to her level, and held the gun that had come out of his pants.

"You...policeman?" She asked in accented basic.

He jerked the gun from her hand and slung it onto the nightstand.

"I don't pay you to ask. Drink till you don't care."

He pushed the bottle into her grasp, and as she tilted it up, he fished a stim out of his pocket and lit it.

The spark. From the spark comes fire. Out of darkness comes light. In the slip of a finger, the world changed, and Byl was cold.


I'd been in the tundra for a week. The daylight hurt my eyes. What little reached Hoth lit up like a million suns on the snow and ice, throwing it back up into your face. Our faces, those of us who were left, were becoming less human as we endured in the cold, and the wind, and that damn sun. We wore masks of red leather, chapping in criss-crossing lines that would bleed if it wasn't so cold. You wrapped it up in bantha skin, with the wooly side in until you could sweat enough for it to freeze, then endured the frostbite while you waited for it to thaw.

We'd killed a few of the snowtroops, and policed up their armor and balaclavas, passing them off to the most frostbitten of us. My face burned like hell. All over I burned in pain. That was good. If I didn't feel, I was already dead flesh. Then you'd skin your own face off and not even blink until you pulled the lids off your eyeballs.

Going topside was dangerous. The Imperial fleet had long since split the system, but they left enough of a garrison to stamp out whatever fire the Rebellion still had left on Hoth. The stormtroopers, whose garish armor made them stick out on any other world, were at home here. On Hoth, the ice had eyes, a beating heart, and two trigger fingers.

Me and Prater lay still as corpses, covered in snow so that only our eyes were free to the air. You could blink and feel the frost snap on your lashes. A half dozen paces in front of us was a heap of picked lichen to bait the Tauntauns. Not to ride. Where would we ride to? Hell was here and hell was there. If you have the misfortune to anger God enough and end up there, then there's nothing to do but become a demon.

"Now!"

We sprung to life in a spray of powder, leaping from prone with glinting vibroblades fixed forward on our rifles. The tauntaun started, but we were on it. The blades hit their mark, and we were both rewarded in blood. Spurting, red, and warm. I opened my mouth to taste it and drink it like ambrosia, only to stop and look at Prater's red-stained face smiling back at me.

We cut from the beast our bounty. Warm fat, meat, and sinew still clinging to stinking wooly hide. We ate it raw, like some alien fruit, down to the rind. We ate until we were sick and heaved on the ice, our atrophied bellies not accustomed to the invasion of food. It was all worth it to feel warm on the inside.

There would be enough for another week easily. Nothing decays in this hard freeze, and we could all sate our hunger on frozen, raw meat, but this moment was singular.

Prater and I dragged the carcass back into the hole we'd carved into the tundra. Our quaint little cottage torn from the bowels of hell.


Byl started as she bit at the lobe of his ear, and he pushed her back to the mattress, continuing to disrobe his pleasurer.

[Byl Laprovik]

Byl continued his depravity, pressing the girl firm onto the bed as he pulled her hair. Her teeth clenched as she arched her back.


"Get inside get inside, go go go!"

The det charge had caused a cave-in, collapsing the ice sheet over part of the eastern barracks. We dropped through the haze of icy debris onto a sleep-eyed squad of troopers too suprised to make it to their weapons.

The lucky ones were crushed under the ice sheet. The four left alive were for us.

"Klaxon line's cut!" Pella shouted, tossing the wire shears onto a bunk.

"I don't frelling believe it." Prater growled, eyeballing each of our sacrifical lambs up and down. "These ain't templates, Cap. No test tube troops here. They're people like us."

Staring at enough dead and unmasked troopers, you can spot the clones from the jobbers. A face turns up one, two, a dozen times and it becomes about as human as ration loaf. These...kids....with their regulation close-crops, they weren't on the program. You can shoot a clone and not lose a minute of sleep over it. It's war material. Ordinance. Infrastructure.

The four in front of us were either believers, or stupid enough to be duped into it. Jobbers were human. They smelled like us, and their lower lips trembled like people with enough of a soul to realize they could lose it.

The rage of my losses began to manifest itself in my eyes. I looked at the closest one to me, and belted him across the face with the stock of my rifle. Like any man of flesh and blood, he fell to the ice floor, choking on his breath through the blood and adrenaline. I straddled across him, and recounted every squadmate who'd been burned out of that forward trench one week ago. I watched them die again, shouting over the din of the tromping AT-ATs, over the screeching blaster fire.

The trooper took another thumping, breaking his nose. He stared back at me with tears welling involuntarily at the corners of his eyes. The tears were an insult. They sloppily hid his ignorance. How a person could put that armor on after Alderaan was an equation my mind could not solve. No plea of mercy would stop me.

Again, and again, and again, I struck him. Red speckled white, and back again on my dirty face. I heard bone crunch as the buttstock shattered a cheekbone, but I continued. I didn't notice Prater run a bayonet through the adjacent trooper and split him belly to throat. The rest of my men took their frustrations out on another, pummeling him down with fists and feet. The screams were quiet, and all I could hear was the blood pumping in my own ears, as my victim's head transformed into a red smear beneath me.

Byl snarled, kissing at the prostitute's neck, biting down to her shoulder.