She kinda got a glow-up for the cover.

I have a few trades of the prior Dark Horse series, Empire, but I don't think I had read any of this one. So of course, let's hop in mid-stream! From 2007, Star Wars: Rebellion #9, "The Ahakista Gambit, part 4" Story by Brandon Badeaux and Rob Williams, script by Rob Williams, art by Michel Lacombe. Cover by Ryan Sook.

This issue is the point in the mission where everything goes wrong, but when the leader has a bomb in his head from a crime boss, you're already starting on the wrong foot. Their Imperial contact hasn't lowered the force field, as she managed to drop Vader's name and bluff her way past a brutish officer, who then follows up on sexually harassing her and holds up the works. (I wonder if there wasn't a disconnect somewhere, or someone was thinking of another character: the Imperial officer Bex is a modest brunette inside, and a blonde model on the cover?) While waiting for the field to drop, the two party members with lightsabers have turned on each other: one had killed the other's master, yet in a reversal of that usual trope, it's the bad guy trying to avenge his fallen master! The leader's love interest and gun girl admits she knows about the bomb in the leader's head--she put it there, she had been working for the crime boss for years, but was still trying to get him through this one.

But, chased by Vader and Stormtroopers, a local resistance leader manages to get off a shot with a rocket launcher. He stands up to Vader and is immediately killed, but might have turned the tide: the force field had dropped, and the lightsaber fight is interrupted as the fallen Jedi is forced to use the Force to keep from being crushed by a statue, and Vader senses that. Which might have just pointed him at all of them...

It's pretty obvious not all of the cast here was probably going to make it out alive, but the next issue might still have some surprises. I lucked into those other trades on the cheap, I'll have to see if I can get all of this one.