Trooper: Do you copy?

We’ve been down here for weeks. Memories disperse like plasma rifle vapor in the hot twin suns. I don’t recognize the troop leader. But I don’t recognize Unit 480 either, and he just keeps insisting there’s rebel garbage in the sulfur pits.

I’ve checked the sulfur pits.

They do occasionally crop up over the ridge yonder, star-side, bumbling like little heat wave Jawas, even lobbing a blaster volley in our direction.

Unit 480 and I haven’t seen the whites of eyes or the reds of wookies in longer than my own armor has seen polish or the white sheen, Emperor be damned.

He barely moves anymore, too, bacta tank sores on his legs spreading every day. Unit 480 doesn’t admit to pain. He’s taken to polishing his armor plates with the mercurous ash floating and eddying around us like it knew sheer effort could make it through our respirators.

Even a week ago—I don’t have the documentation, this permanent noon has broken both my spirit and my eyelids, it could have been years ago—Unit 480 would pop up like an offended senator and give them an entire coolant’s worth of fire, just spraying away like we were back on Endor and there was a freak’s worth of mad midgets after us with logs and hammers and boulders or whatnot.

I stare at him now and he babbles about the dark plates he has, the dark trooper he is, soaring he says, soaring high above this hell pit.

Command relays orders to rescue those jettisoned from orbit in the escape pods. Yet there is nothing to claim but ammo, explosives, nothing but tools of death and burning earth.

I’ve seen the greatest shots of my platoon destroyed by madness, starving hysterical frenzied, dragging themselves through the oil sands begging for a final fix, each escape pod promising an end to the quota —

But there is no relief and I know the scream that the boys down in the pits gave when another wave of orbital strikes rained death upon a dead planet.

Unit 480 knows too, even if his brain can’t comprehend it anymore, that’s why he doesn’t get up when the scum piddle on the ridge down further, that’s why he tells me about flying so high, but he knows.

I’m beginning to suspect the comms only go one way.

We’re obliged to serve the emperor, only death or insanity will free us, as the Oath says. No sane trooper would risk life and squad to recover a lifeless escape pod, but no insane trooper would have been permitted to deploy, to hold the lives of his Unit 480s in his gloved and oily fingers.

Another great fist pounds the ground on our flank. They’re firing again. I begin to crawl. Unit 480 screams for me.