Imperial Collaborative Fiction: Jailbreak!
"Our Emperor who art in Coruscant, Hallowed be thy Name... Thy Empire Come, Thy Will Be Done..."
Not exactly the words you want to hear from your fellow Stormtrooper when the Rebels are holding you prisoner. If your fellow trooper is saying his prayers, it probably means he thinks you don't have a chance.
I'm sorry, I didn't properly introduce us. I'm Thomas Motirr, better known by my Stormtrooper corps number of HVC-2214. My friend, the praying one, is Alexander Ylosh. His number is HVC-2230. We were at the Imperial Academy together.
The Academy seems like a very long time ago, but it was less than a year ago that we graduated and entered into Imperial Service. Our first posting was among the most mundane you could imagine. Guarding a supply depot on a world deep in Imperial territory. In all our days there, the most excitement we saw was a Colonel with his access codes revoked arguing with the procurement director, a Captain, about how he should be allowed access and how he outranked the Captain and he would have the Captain scrubbing the supply boxes with a toothbrush...
We were both itching for the chance to go to a new assignment. And we finally got our chance. Posted to a Nebulon-B frigate attached to the Imperial Navy's Systems Force I as part of the standard complement of troops aboard. However, it didn't last long. Shortly thereafter, we were needed to replace some troops who had been killed in action out on the fringes of the Outer Sectors by Rebels. A full third of the troops aboard the frigate were reassigned to the planet. The most junior third. That meant us.
We saw combat three times in as many weeks. And in the third week, we were both selected to go with the scouting party into the forest outside our emplacement to try to determine how many Rebels were out there. I will spare you all the details, but the short version is: The Rebels took us by surprise.
There were four of us in the scouting party. The other two troopers - NGG-1252 and VLQ-9801 were killed in action. However, the Rebels, for reasons unknown to us, took us prisoner. We woke up on a shuttle, without our blasters and equipment, and not long thereafter, the shuttle landed.
We were transferred at gunpoint through the halls of what is obviously a Rebel prison. Fortunately, the Rebels have put Alex and myself in as cellmates in a two person cell. Things are pretty primitive here. The walls are ferrocrete and the doors are metal. I thought these kinds of places only existed in holonovels. The only thing that reveals this is a more high tech place than a dead lump of ferrocrete is the force fields reinforcing the metal doors of the cells.
We've only been here about ten minutes, but the wheels in our heads are already turning. We need a plan. An escape plan.