Star Wars: Battlefront: Twilight Company Read Online Free PDF Page B

grateful—and carried the salve away.
    “Good start,” Thara’s uncle said. Thara smiled at him wryly and nearly caught him smiling back. One by one he pulled Thara’s donations from the bag—extra food credits, flu tablets, mask filters for the men working in the deepest ore processors—and, calling his customers to the table, meted out gift after gift. Some of the recipients clasped Thara’s hands, praised her and her family. Others refused to look at her.
    As her uncle continued sorting through the bag, she drifted away and studied the nozzles on the wall behind the bar. He uncle had been repairing them, she saw now—replacing a fluid valve. He’d left his tools on the floor. She picked them up and started working, the way she remembered doing as a teenager.
    “My son gave me a flyer the other day. Says he’s thinking about joining.”
    Thara was close enough to the holotable now that she could hear the older workers’ hushed voices. She didn’t want to hear. She hadn’t intended to eavesdrop. But she wasn’t going to leave, either.
    “After the accident with the magma release, he said maybe the Cobalt Front was right. Maybe we do need to stand up for ourselves.”
    “The Cobalt Laborers’ Reformation Front,” a second voice sneered, “is a band of terrorists. They probably caused the accident in the first place.”
    There was murmuring, reluctant agreement. “Protests are one thing. Riots are another.”
    Thara screwed the new valve into place. Cobalt Front members
were
terrorists according to Imperial decree. It was a pity; she thought they might have done some good if they’d stuck to talking about safety procedures and factory conditions.
    “Is it our fault?” the first voice asked. “I know I protected mine. I didn’t tell my son what we saw in the Clone Wars.”
    The third voice laughed. “Of course you didn’t. Your kids would’ve never slept.”
    The first man continued. “But they would’ve
known.
They’d see why even a hard peace is better than—better than the alternative.”
    “Just pray the Rebel Alliance never notices Sullust. You think things are rough now …”
    Thara tested the attached nozzle, caught a trickle of something green and sweet smelling in her palm.
    “
No
,” a new voice said in slow, ragged Sullustan, deliberately loud. Thara recognized the rasp of toxin-afflicted lungs; the condition was becoming increasingly common among the workers.
    Someone tried to shush the new speaker as Thara rose from behind the bar. The toxin-afflicted man—a withered Sullustan with drooping ears and jowls—kept going. “This is not
peace.
We are
all
slaves, every one of us, and the Emperor forges stronger chains every year.”
    Thara’s uncle was hurrying to the holotable. He squeezed the withered man’s arm as the Sullustan propped himself against the tabletop and continued to speak. “I don’t care who hears me,” the withered man snapped. “What Nunb said was true: We traded our lives to buy a thousand years of darkness. The Empire runs on the blood of our grandchildren!”
    Thara’s uncle forced the man back into his seat. Thara looked around the table. The workers were all staring at her, silent.
    “I’ll be back next week,” she said quietly. “If you need something, tell my uncle. I’ll try to help.”
    No one spoke as she left the cantina.
    She walked briskly down the street, as if she could pound her frustrations into the stone, sweat them out through the soles of her feet. She tried to put what she’d heard out of her mind, concentrate on the evening ahead. She was nearly late for her shift as it was; she couldn’t afford to go on duty distracted.
    She marched to the door of a sleek industrial building, looked into the mechanical eye of the scanner so that it could identify her. Past two more checkpoints and on to her locker, where she finally began to relax.
    Donning her uniform always calmed her. She’d learned to dress and attach its components in