Chapter Text
Cody swept his night vision-aided gaze over the stretch of land he had been assigned to watch at steady intervals, looking for any movement at all. He had been at it for the whole night, had been looking out over the very same land for many of the previous nights and he could confidently say it was one of the most miserable stretches of mud he had ever had the displeasure of meeting. And he knew it didn’t look any better in the light of day, desolate moraines and icy hummocks covered in the wreckage of many a battle. It may have been beautiful before they arrived, but it certainly wasn’t any longer.
He shifted his stance, leaning briefly away from the sandbags that shored up the muddy, icy permafrost walls of the trenches they had dug to hold the mountain pass. He wiggled his fingers to keep them from freezing further against his rifle, sending a scattering of ice crystals raining to the ground, and leaned back against the wall. It was as much to keep himself awake as it was to keep himself from freezing.
All the while, he never stopped looking for the slightest twitch or something out of place.
He was as diligent as he could be after four months in the cold on low rations with no word of backup. But more than he watched he waited. He was watching for clankers to come to try to take the miserable pass, but he was waiting for the mess-vod who would come around every hour on the hour and hand out cups of hot water to the watch. And even more rarely, they would get a cup of tea barely worthy of the name.
Low rations meant that they didn’t have anything but synth caf and synth tea left, and while Cody could barely tell the difference between the synth caf and the supposedly real powdered stuff they usually had (Fox claimed that caf came from beans, which Cody had verified, and that making it directly from the beans was heavenly, which Cody had not verified), he had begun to gain some sense of tea from Kenobi and this stuff wasn’t it.
But they had run out of cocoa, the usual hot drink of choice in this kind of weather, before everything else, even with rationing, they had been short a shipment when they had landed, and so synth tea with too much sweetener was standard fare, and Cody’s stomach still growled at the thought.
They had done mountain warfare before, fast moving with hazards at every step, and they had done trench warfare with its never ending slog of mud.
Trench warfare in the mountains was its own new kind of hell.
Cody shifted against the rampart again and thanked the stars that he was not yet too tired to shiver. They hadn’t been equipped with cold-weather gear when they had landed, the valleys and plains they had been initially deployed to temperate in nature, and when the orders had come in to hold the pass, sent from on high, they had already been cut off from their ship by aggressive Seppie air cover and were unable to get cold-weather gear or any further supplies. But still they dug in, trenches to hold the pass and trenches to hold them on the off shift, and the longer they stayed there the colder and more miserable it became but still they hung on.
According to Cody’s chrono, the next drink round was about to arrive, and soon there was slight movement in the trench near Cody’s position. He glanced over to see Nada, one of the mess-vod arriving with the thermo-insulated jug. Cody was in the middle of the line, and Nada came to him before too long. Cody waved him along, and Nada nodded. He knew to come back to Cody at the end.
It wouldn’t take long. They were stretched thin over the line with too many casualties and not enough resources. Not enough vode.
As Nada trudged past Cody towards the other end of the trench, there was a flicker of movement out beyond the walls and Cody focussed on it quickly, his mind whirling to life.
For another second, nothing else moved and Cody hoped that it really was nothing.
Then there was a flash of light and a bang. Cody’s HUD was set to automatically dim lights to save his eyes in camp, and it protected him in that moment too. He blinked twice to clear the afterimage, shaking the ice off of his armour and trying to do the same to his brain.
A group of assassin droids had appeared over the ridge.
They rushed towards the line, not quite as fast or as coordinated as they were on flat terrain, and Cody’s men waited and waited until they had covered enough ground to be in useful range.
Useful range for them was also useful for the droids and another brilliant flash of light split the air, chewing up nearby earth and spitting it back out again.
Cody spotted one of them stumble, fall, and get back up again on the ice. Then he opened fire alongside his vode and the droids started to fall more permanently.
They had become more and more common on the battlefield Cody mused idly as he carefully calculated his shots. He was doing his best to conserve fire. Low supplies extended to power and thus blaster packs as well, and it took a double tap to keep an assassin droid down. One to the centre mass and one to the head. And in the dark, with only blaster fire and the flash and bang of grenades to see by, it was hard to tell which ones had been hit once already.
Blaster bolts came screaming past Cody’s bucket and he ducked back below the rampart.
As he raised his bucket again, a grenade rolled to a stop mere feet in front of him and he dove sideways just as it went off. Clumps of snow and dirt rained down around him as he lay on the cold hard ground.
Despite the imminent danger, it still took him a moment to convince himself to move limbs heavy with fatigue.
He crawled back to his feet, split sandbags pouring their contents down into the icy puddle that Cody hadn’t even noticed he had been standing in all night, his socks already wet from sweat and snow and Force only knew what else. He wasn’t even sure what it was a puddle of.
With no time to pause, he raised his blaster and his bucket back over the top of the rampart and took out another assassin droid.
They weren’t actually intended for frontal assault, and it was easy to tell. The part of Cody’s brain that wasn’t turned to the immediacy of the droids wondered if in this instance they were just better at climbing than B1s.
Because as the assassin droids fell, the telltale clank and chatter of B1 battle droids started to come over the ridge, only just audible over the whistle and whine of blaster fire and explosions.
They had learnt some as the war went on, not quite as easy to trick or as uncoordinated as they had been when Cody had first been deployed. But even those initial droids were deadly, and Cody saw little reason to underestimate them.
He scanned along the line approaching them, some small respite coming in the form of the distance between the almost entirely destroyed line of assassins and the line of B1s.
As they came up over the rise, Cody could see some dark shapes interspersed among their ranks.
“Potential for artillery.” He barked into his comm, unable to make out enough to see what kind it might be. He got some acknowledgements, disjointed and almost lost in the fury of noise that surrounded him, and then, for a moment, there was silence.
Or as near to it as they could get.
The last of the assassin droids stopped firing, and in that second between the rifle falling silent and the droid hitting the ground there was a beat of pure silence, as though the whole world had paused for a moment.
Then the B1s fired one of their artillery pieces. The round screamed through the air and Cody hunkered down in the trench and tried to follow the trajectory. The seconds felt like years as it plummeted towards them.
It hit the ground and the blast was deafening, well beyond the noise dampeners on their buckets.
Another mortar round whistled into the air somewhere off to the side.
Then the B1s were on them and blaster fire rained down thick and fast. Each time one of the mortars went off, it rattled Cody’s whole body until he felt like his skeleton would fall right out with the next jolt.
The next fell so close that something was knocked loose in Cody’s set-up and his long range comm went down, finally taken out after the ravages of months of battle that had sent his antennae marching away.
He pulled his blaster down off of the wall and ran.
He had scouts stationed along the trench. They were faster than most, and Cody needed to send a message.
None of their artillery, the four pieces they had managed to land, was firing, and he needed someone to change that.
Neither Waxer nor Boil were at their stations, so Cody continued on.
He scanned armour paint, barely visible for the dark and the mud as he scrambled past vode, most of them on their feet and firing, and most who weren’t were scrambling for blaster packs or waved him off when he slowed to check on them. Where their medic was, or if there even was a medic on the line was a total mystery.
There was a blast directly in front of him, right on the trench line and Cody stumbled sideways against the wall as the ground rocked.
He swore, barely stopping as he pushed himself back upright. They really needed to get those mortars out of commission.
Cody slowed as he reached the blast site, and still almost blew past Waxer and Boil, both of them crouched next to a cascade of sandbags.
He slid to a halt and crouched down next to them.
“You two alright?” He asked.
“Yessir.” Boil said. “What’s going on?”
“That’s what I want you to find out. Go get that artillery moving.”
“Yessir.” Waxer was breathing hard like he too had just run up and Cody clapped him gently on the shoulder. “See what we can do sir.”
Then they were off, racing back up the line to one of the points of ingress.
Cody turned back to the battlefield. The B1s didn’t move easily on the mountainside, their large feet failing to gain traction and sending them sliding backwards with every forward step.
Still, there were droids clanking in the direction of the crater Cody had become the guard of and so guard it he did.
He counted his bolts, and the clankers he downed as he fired.
His blaster pack ran out just as the artillery rumbled to life behind him and started to fire. He ducked below the wall and fumbled another one into place, almost dropping it when his gloves and hands didn’t move the way he wanted them to, trying to stay wrapped around the blaster and the trigger.
He got it into place, and was firing again as Waxer and Boil slid in next to him against the wall.
“It was something to do with the weather?” Boil said, in answer to Cody’s unasked question. Cody turned that over in his mind. The night was clear and full of stars, a nice balmy negative twenty seven out, not remotely prohibitive to the firing of artillery. “Arrow said he’d have a report for you.”
“Good.” A clankers tried to climb down into the shell crater that had caved in the trench and Cody shot it. It fell, sparking. “Any sandbags nearby?”
“Probably.” Boil said. “I’ll go check.”
“Both of you go.” Cody said. “I’ll guard the hole.”
And so off they went, and Cody was alone again, standing guard over a piece of land that meant nothing to anyone except that if the Seppies breached the trench they could get to Cody’s vode, and if they got through Cody’s vode and down into the valley, then someone might care. And the longer they stayed there, precariously perched in that blood stained pass, the more Cody didn’t care about the valley.
It didn’t take long for the Seppie mortars to fall silent after the 212th’s heavy artillery fired up, flattening artillery pieces and battle droids alike.
Still, there were swarms of them, and as the last mortar blew up, Cody noticed a droid pointing out the hole in the trench to its fellows.
He shot it the moment he saw it, but it was too late. Several of them started to move towards him with intent.
started to climb down into the crater despite Cody’s near constant firing, and he narrowed his focus to the crater exclusively.
As each one fell, it made it more difficult for the clankers to get to Cody. They clambered over the pile of B1s that was starting to grow in front of Cody to try to get into the trench, clattering and complaining even as they singed bolts across Codys armour. He was quite sure how they kept missing, except that they were loosing their footing with every other step.
“Looks like you’re already doing a good job filling the hole sir.” Waxer quipped, tugging Cody sideways by the shoulder right before he took a bolt to the bucket. Both Waxer and Boil started firing as Cody recovered himself, and Cody could breathe a little easier.
They didn’t speak any further, taking turns darting forward to slam sandbags into place in brief lulls in the firing.
Cody ran down another blaster pack before the hail of bolts wizzing above their buckets became a smattering.
They all seemed to breath a sigh of relief as the last of the B1s fell, sparking and smoking into the heap with its compatriots. Cody sent Waxer and Boil to find more sandbags and for a moment, Cody just stood and took it in. The newly downed droids added to the piles of wreckage like ship crash victims or so many skeletons piled in mass graves. Dawn had crept over the horizon while they had fought, and now it was spreading fingers of pink and gold over the blues and whites of ice and snow and Seppies.
Still holding his rifle at the ready, Cody began to actually examine the section of the trench he had been guarding for so long.
The crater wasn’t so deep as the trench was. It had mostly filed back up with destroyed clankers, and they had managed to fill part of the sandbag wall. Some of the sandbags that had been there had just been knocked out of the wall, while others had gained holes and emptied.
Cody scrambled up to balance on the wall and started to shift some of the sandbags from the ground back into their positions, something he probably shouldn’t be doing without someone to watch his six and a sure sign that he was too tired to think straight. He had only managed to move a few when Nada appeared out of nowhere.
“Commander.” He called, and Cody turned to face him. He was holding his blaster, thermo-insulated jug slung on a strap over his shoulder. “It won’t be as hot, but you should still have your water sir.”
“Thank you Nada.” Cody placed the sandbag he was holding down and clambered back down into the trench. He fumbled for his cup with frigid fingers as Nada slung his rifle onto his back and cracked open the jug.
A rush of steam filled the air around them, fogging up their visors. It immediately froze, and Cody scraped his vision clear again with his hand armour.
When he could see again, Nada held out the jug.
Cody accepted his measure of hot water into his cup with gratitude, as he did every time, letting the warmth of it sink through the soaked fabric of his iced over gloves for a moment before drinking it down as fast as he was able. It wouldn’t do to let it freeze over too.
“Thank you Nada.” Cody said again when he was done, and Nada threw up a salute.
“Of course sir. That’s the last one for the watch, so I’ll see you back at the mess tent.” He gave a jaunty little wave and headed back the way he had come.
Cody checked his chrono. The watch was almost over, and the end of Cody’s watch was supposed to come with hoosh, a term the General called the cold-weather rations that had been picked up in general usage. It was a strange combination of rehydrated meat, powdered milk, and biscuits all stewed together. Strange though it was, it was hot and filling, and Cody was looking forward to it.
But that wasn’t what he got.
He was considering the sandbags once more, wondering if Waxer and Boil managed to find anymore when he got a tingling up the back of his spine. He looked up sharply, and it only took another second before he actually felt the rumbling.
“Avalanche!” Someone bellowed and Cody turned towards the noise a second before it hit him.
He slammed back against the trench rampart, the breath punched out of his lungs, and was carried sideways along with loose sandbags and clanker bits. For a moment, his head was still above it, and then the wall of snow picked up speed and Cody was drowning in it. He tumbled about, trying to curl himself small in standard armour that had basically iced into a standing position, trying to protect his limbs and neck. His armour was a danger in itself. It was tightened as much as it could be, and yet it was loosened by hunger and bruised and rattled against his body.
His HUD was flashing up numbers and warnings so fast, adding to the nausea that was rolling in Cody’s stomach, but he would not throw up in his bucket. He had done it once before, and like anyone else who ever had, he had vowed to never do it again.
As he tumbled, as carelessly tossed as blacks in a drier, the snow flashed in and out of his vision, white, blue, black, grey, little flecks of colour sparkling in brief glimmers, before his HUD blinked out and plunged him into darkness.
When the snow finally stopped moving, Cody was totally disoriented. He was dizzy, he didn’t know whether or not he had stayed conscious the whole time, and up from down was as foreign a concept as a dry day on Kamino, distant, fleeting, and vaguely confusing.
He took a moment to catch his breath. The emergency rebreather had turned on at some point, and the hiss and rattle of it, the rasp of his own breath, was loud in his ears.
He was crunched in an uncomfortable position, back contorted, but nothing felt broken and he had somehow managed to keep ahold of his rifle.
With a couple of blinks, his HUD come back to life, which was good, but didn’t connect to anything, which wasn’t. He set off his emergency beacon anyways. It wasn’t even totally dark around him, some small glow of the sun through the snow getting picked up by the HUD’s light sensors and Cody’s eyes.
As he did his best to navigate his way to the long turned off directional-orienter function, fixing various things and turning on his helmet light as he went, he started to try to move his limbs.
It wasn’t easy, buried as he was. And he was lucky he hadn’t frozen solid before being swept away, unlike poor Cherry. They had had to peel him off of his watchpost two nights past, his armour frozen solid. While he was the first, it likely wouldn’t be the last time that happened. It had started to warm up again earlier that day and they had blessed the warmer weather when it had come, but Cody suspected the sudden temperature shift had been the cause of the avalanche. Or perhaps, he thought, his mind slowly churning away at the events of the watch, the artillery had something to do with it.
Eventually Cody got his HUD to tell him which way the core of the planet wasn’t (thankfully the same direction he was facing), and began to carefully try to dig himself out. He didn’t have much space for movement and he suspected it would be futile, but staying still seemed worse. He had no idea how much oxygen the rebreather would be able to scrape out of his little hole, his O2 metre clearly on the fritz, but hypothermia would probably still get him first.
Once he was able to get both of his hands on it, he used his rifle as a makeshift digging tool, scraping at the snow in front of his bucket with the barrel.
It cascaded down on him in tiny snowfalls as he moved, obscuring his already limited vision.
He managed to make his little bubble big enough that he could wipe the snow off of his visor, and turning his head found that he seemed to have fallen into a crevasse, a solid wall of blue ice reflecting his helmet light back at him.
“Fuck.” Cody breathed. In a crevasse he might never be recovered. He had no way of knowing how deep he was, or really where he was, and even if he did, his long range comms weren’t working, so he had no way of telling anyone that information.
He wouldn’t be Cody if he gave up that easily though, so he started to dig once more.
Every so often he would stop and clear his vision once again, hoping to get himself enough space to begin to climb the ice wall next to him as he dug. He could see time ticking away at the corner of his display. Minutes turned into hours, the time elapsed between before the avalanche and when he had gotten his HUD back online indicating that he had been thrown some way down the mountainside.
Cody took another break, and pushed himself up into sitting position. What he was doing was very dangerous, if he broke enough of the snow, everything that was above him could come loose and crush him. The fact that he had even survived was miraculous.
He wedged himself back against the ice wall. He didn’t think it was possible to get any colder, and yet the cold radiating out from the ice wall managed to find a way to sink into him, through his armour and into his bones.
He kept digging, his arms cramping up from muscle fatigue and his head beginning to pound. Whether it was exhaustion or oxygen deprivation or dehydration or some combination of the three he didn’t know.
Eventually he began to hear the sound of something other than himself crunching in the snow above him and he dug harder.
When the blade of the shovel finally punched into Cody’s little bubble, his short-range comm connected.
“Sit tight Commander, we’ll have you out in no time.” Kenobi’s maniacal cheer, the kind that made Cody simultaneously want to strangle him and wrap him in enough blankets to protect him from the galaxy, was still clear even through the static-fuzzed connection.
“I’m not going anywhere.” Cody quipped back.
When the hole was wide enough a hand, Kenobi’s, reached down and helped Cody haul himself out.
It took a great big heave and they tumbled over one another into a snow bank.
“Good to see you Commander.” Kenobi said, reaching around and patting Cody on the shoulder.
“You too General.” Cody rolled off of him and sat up.
Before he could get too far, Kenobi reached over and grabbed ahold of him once more.
“Hold on to me, they’ll get us out of here in no time.”
“Yes sir.” Cody wrapped his arms around Kenobi, hooking uncooperative fingers into his belt. Kenobi reached up and pressed Cody’s bucket into his chest plate and kept his hand there, cradling Cody’s head as there was a tug and then they began to move upwards.
Kenobi might have been climbing, or they might have just been lifted, Cody couldn’t tell.
When they got to the top of the hole, a foil blanket was immediately wrapped around his shoulders as vode scrambled around them, medics and sappers among them, helping the General to his feet, and heading off further down the mountainside. When Cody looked up, he could see the remains of what had once been the forward trench.
Nada, who must have made it back to the rear sometime between the Seppie sortie and the avalanche, appeared with his thermo-insulated jug once again.
Automatically Cody fumbled for his belt and pulled out his cup. A measure of synth tea was poured out and Cody gulped it down without even waiting to try to defrost his fingers. It sat warm in his chest for only a moment, but even that brief glimpse of warmth was helpful.
Nada very graciously poured Cody a second cup, another jug hung over his other shoulder, and then hurried after Kenobi and the rescue crew.
Cody savoured that one just a little bit more and then got to his feet and surveyed the landscape. A line extended up from where Cody was standing to where he could only assume the trench had once been, and then down from Cody to where Kenobi was being used as the closest thing they had to a scent hound. The entirety of their forward trench was gone, buried under the avalanche.
Still, Cody could see a heartening number of figures wrapped in foil blankets sat in clumps above the snow along the line, a medic moving among them.
He stamped his feet and knocked them against one another to try to get a little bit of feeling back into them, and then clipped himself on to the line. He would gather his vode as he climbed and start to send them back to camp, aware that sitting in the snow was just courting hypothermia, but getting moving again was hard. Especially if they had all been tossed about as much as Cody had been.
It wasn’t until Cody started walking that he realized his whole body ached. His armour pushed against new and old bruises. Everything that had become background noise to the cold and exhaustion had once again been pulled to the forefront.
He put one foot in front of the other. He climbed and clambered, sometimes slowing to a crawl, foil blanket still clutched around his shoulders until he reached the first clump of vode. He encouraged them to their feet after checking they were all good to move with reminders of the hot cup of hoosh waiting for them back at camp, and followed at the end of the group as they straggled up the mountainside from clump to clump.
It didn’t take long for vode to start moving before Cody ever reached them, helped by those ahead of him, and soon the line was strung with vode like twinkling lights, the sun reflecting off of the foil blankets.