Chapter Text
The difference between a shuttle and a transport ship like the Black Talon was that if something went wrong on a shuttle, there was nowhere to hide. No space to regroup, no defensible terrain, no distance with which to lose a pursuer and no crawlspaces or catacombs that could be turned to one’s advantage. It had been an easy decision, in theory.
Now, wading through a sea of Humans in Imperial military uniforms, most of them taller than her if you didn’t count her montrals, Zhosiavana was beginning to doubt her current situation was that much more favorable after all.
One day very soon, these people would be her prey, and just the mere, iconic sight of the angular, pincer-like markings framing her face, two dots one-above-the-other at the center of her forehead, would send them running. Unfortunately, at present, a deep-red-skinned, thin-blue-striped teenage Togruta girl on an Imperial ship was earning a very different and very unwelcome reaction.
With a meandering route conceptualized on the fly, matched instinctively to the timing of the many potential predators’ walking patterns, Zhosiavana carved her own path and kept herself moving. Subtle, worried glances kept Mako in her sights – she couldn’t afford to lose track of the Human girl for even a second. She was a target too, as now-familiar flashes of memory from Nem’ro’s palace wouldn’t ever let Zhosia forget.
Aside from the blasters at both their hips, and the light armor she’d managed to scrape together on the fleet – a fiberweave black undersuit, with reflective gold heavy plate over her upper torso and small bits of matching paneling on her shoulders and wrist-cylinders – they could have been a pair of escaped schoolchildren – and that being probably a far-too-generous assumed-assumption given that this was, after all, the Empire.
Finally, they paused for breath in a clearing where all those personages on its fringes seemed occupied with other priorities. Zhosiavana exhaled relief just at an extended sight of Mako’s face – the holonet implant with its metallic fingers spread out to her left temple and jawline, but giving way to a smooth, pale brown cheek with no sign of the horrid, burned marking her uncooperative brain kept trying to place there.
It still wasn’t a place to talk, so their eyes said everything. Fear, worry, skeptical but hopeful assurance. Determination to stay the course. Zhosia had returned to her previous search, for a possible route to get them farther into the ship and away from the crowd, when she saw it.
Just a momentary flash, between so many Imperial uniforms and Imperial droids moving about, of one pair of distinct and vibrant red lekku.
As they both moved in closer, seeking if not an ally, the least likely enemy, details resolved one at a time: the woman was indeed a Twi’lek, seated atop a generator node she was using as a bench. She wore a dark set of travelers’ robes, layered with wide bands of fabric that went over her shoulders and crossed at her waist, patterned in a bright red that complimented her Lethan skin. Her forearms were pinned into strange, blocky gauntlets with flat panels on the outer and inner faces, shaped to hexagons at her elbows and painted wholly over in red. There was a pair of small, red-and-blue rectangular lights on at least the more visible right vambrace, that one easier to see because the woman was facing away, talking to someone still obscured by the crowd, and had that arm up to scratch idly at the back of her neck.
A neck which, aside from some visible chafing, was an expanse of uncovered red skin. Lucky for her.
“Hey there,” Mako voiced to the stranger as the distance evaporated.
The woman turned around abruptly, and Zhosia felt herself freeze, at the same time she heard Mako gasp, doing the same.
The woman’s eyes were gone.
At least, it seemed very likely that was the case. A platinum-edged, black-screened visor, probably mistakeable for a blindfold at distance, curved around the front of the Twi’lek’s face from temple to temple, covering just the thin line of exactly where her eyes would be. The skin around it was burned, with visible roughness extending up over her brows, threadlike burns running down her cheeks, and a pair of oddly-exact rectangles proceeding up her forehead with only thin gaps in between. Zhosia already had her sad suspicions about the scars’ origins.
And there was a lightsaber at her hip – a longer-than-average, silver hilt with three-pronged claws around both ends, probably a double-blader. Zhosia probably should have noticed that earlier.
“Hi!” The Sith woman smiled immediately, her hand snapping up in an excited wave. “I’m Syndiari, and this is my new friend Khem!”
She gestured to someone beside her, and—GAH! Zhosia and Mako both flinched backward. There was some kind of… barbarian golem standing next to the Twi’lek, about three meters tall with a split-jawed, sharp-fanged mouth and grey skin that almost looked like stone. A wide-bladed vibrosword was fixed to the back of the creature’s right shoulder, possibly magnetized onto some of the small, circular red implants scattered about and interspersed with squares of Imperial dot-line-pattern tattoos in black ink.
“Don’t worry!” Syndiari assured, still bearing the same innocent grin beneath her expressionless visor. “He only eats people sometimes!”
In sync, Zhosia and Mako took slow, cautious steps backward. “It was… nice meeting you!” Mako offered nervously, doing her best to disappear into the crowd.
“Nice meeting you too!” Syndiari waved in earnest until she and Khem were out of sight.
Quickly, and with a stroke of luck they probably could’ve used earlier, Zhosia managed to guide Mako behind some storage crates and into a relatively dark and secluded corner bordered on another side by one of the ship’s sectional support braces. The larger of the crates was big enough to conceal them both as they rested their backs against it on the floor, breathing heavily.
After probably too long, she noticed Mako’s hand still in hers, but neither of them seemed particularly ready to let go.
“You think we can just hide back here the whole trip?” Mako said, half-seriously.
Zhosia gave the corner of a smile, then spent the silence thinking over the last few minutes with a slowly-gathering frown. “We probably could’ve been nicer.”
“What?”
“I mean, she was… just… being… friendly?” Zhosia tried, maybe not quite convinced.
Mako narrowed her eyes. “Call me crazy, but if you’re a Sith, you should have the courtesy to be creepy or friendly, not both.”
“Well…” Zhosia’s face fell. “An injury like that probably makes it tough, and… just cause we’ve never seen Khem’s species before…”
“…Oh, I…” Mako’s faced changed as she shook her head, spiraling too-quickly towards guilt and shame. “I guess—no, no, you’re right, that’s… am I the jerk here?”
“Hey,” Zhosia put her other hand over Mako’s, smiling insistently. “I was freaked out too, remember? It happens.”
Mako eased into calm, and brightened by a reassuring measure, though she was still clearly disappointed in herself.
“I just thought it was worth saying, that’s all,” Zhosia assured, and idly traced her thumb around Mako’s wrist. “You, uh… you kind of… inspire me, to be a better person,” she stuttered over, then fell momentarily somber and grim. “You know, as like a… a bright side, maybe, to the fact I kill people for a living.”
Mako looked like she’d almost choked on a laugh, managing a conspiratorial smirk. “So far, you fake people’s deaths for a living.”
“Shhh! Quiet!” Zhosia fake-slapped the air, widened her eyes, and looked over her shoulder in mock panic before smiling again. “Don’t let it get out that I’m a complete fraud at my one job!”
Mako stifled a louder giggle and batted Zhosia lightly on the arm, then… leaned forward into Zhosia’s shoulder, making the Togruta have to keep herself from shuddering.
That was… something. Zhosia kinda just wanted to stay like this, her hand deliberating over where to land on Mako’s upper arm as the other girl hugged her playfully around the waist.
She hadn’t expected this. Nowhere in her plan had there been room for someone else, and certainly not for… whatever the two of them were now. But then Tarro Blood had happened, and Mako didn’t have anyone left or anywhere to go – just the two of them seeing this through. Then Nem’ro’s palace had happened, and Zhosiavana wasn’t going to let this girl out of her sights ever again.
The mood between them had calmed, but neither of them really had. Mako sat up after a while, an uneasy expression on her face.
“You think we should try again?”
Zhosia sighed. “Well, I’d bet if we stick with them, no one’d bother us.”
“And the whole ‘eating people’ thing?”
Zhosia arched a brow. “Compared to what most of the Humans here would do?”
Mako winced. “…That is a good point.”
Syndiari and Khem had moved into the middle of the next room, generating a large amount of space around them via the entire Imperial crew giving them – specifically Khem – a wide berth.
“Hey, it’s us again.”
Syndiari beamed, head turning toward the voice immediately. “You’re back!”
Zhosia crossed her arms, putting up her best ‘aloof bounty hunter’ impression but adding the final touch of a friendly smirk. “Gonna be a long trip, we should chat. Name’s Zhosiavana, but that’s a mouthful without a last name to balance it out, so call me Zhosia.”
“And I’m Mako. Uh, no last name either.” Mako gave a little wave, was thoughtful for a moment, then did her best to copy Zhosia’s pose.
“Syndiari, but I… think I said that already?” the Twi’lek pondered on the spot, as if genuinely forgetful. She one-upped the other two by crossing her arms and leaning casually against the wall – except it wasn’t a wall, it was Khem, whose only reaction was to part his toothy maw a little and give the woman a strange look.
“So, Dromund Kaas…” Zhosia began, after failing to think of any topics that didn’t necessitate a slow, awkward caution. “Sith business, I guess?”
The Twi’lek’s response was an ambiguous shrug. “To be honest I was only half-paying attention, but hey, a big city or whatever? Sounds fun. Gotta be better than Korriban.”
“I just hope it’s better than Hutta.” Mako shook her head with a sad scowl. Zhosia tended to agree.
“So, you?” Syndiari asked, perking a curious brow and stretching some of her burns. “What’s the story here, if it’s not just getting off slug planet?”
Zhosia smirked again. “I’m out to join the Great Hunt. You’re looking at the future most famed, and feared bounty hunter in the whole galaxy, right here.”
Syndiari smiled, and almost laughed. “You’re a bounty hunter?”
Zhosiavana had many prepared responses to that question, most of which involved her fangs – or, if she was being realistic, making the fastest exit possible under the circumstances. Syndiari at least seemed sincere, though, in her interest.
So Zhosia just shrugged, and tried again to act like she didn’t care. “Galaxy doesn’t cut you a break just ‘cause you’re a kid. Never too early to start showing it who’s boss.”
It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world to read Syndiari’s expression around the visor, but something about that had gotten to her, by the way her smile seemed to minutely crack in place and become strained. She nodded along, but it felt empty.
Pretending for her sanity’s sake that she wasn’t also getting within arm’s reach of Khem, Zhosia stepped closer, making sure the measured show of solidarity in her eyes was obvious enough to be noticed. “It’s never too late either, y’know? Force powers must be a pretty good break.”
Syndiari subtly averted her visor-line from the contact and shrugged ambiguously, still putting up a smile. “Does make things more exciting, I guess…”
Mako’s quickly-met eyes shared the same urgent worry. They were losing her, and how had she made it this long before? There was only so much weakness anyone could get away with when there were several dozen Imperials wandering about and watching closely.
Zhosia turned back to Syndiari, and arched a mock-offended brow. “Have to say, I’m a little jealous, but these days a blaster and some ingenuity can get you pretty far too. Care to ditch the crowd and talk shop?”
She gestured further into the ship. Syndiari looked up long enough to process that and nodded emptily, but with a tiny flicker of gratitude. The collective group started walking as if with a destination in mind.
“…Hey, so, what species is Khem, exactly?”
“Something called a Dashade?” Syndiari looked to Khem as if expecting answers, but the Dashade remained stoic. “I’m not sure if they’re really a species or if they were made as Sith weapons or something, but it was a really long time ago either way. I think Khem might be the last one.”
Mako nodded along. “Makes two of us,” she said casually, but quieter.
“Makes three,” Zhosia added, even more quietly.
Syndiari’s “Makes four,” was almost inaudible.
Blocking their way, because of course nothing could ever be easy, was a Human woman in a neat Imperial uniform, her brown hair tied back in a bun. She was arguing with a broad-shouldered, armored Human man, wearing a backpack with an attached signal antenna, but he stepped away just as the larger group approached.
“That guy looks familiar…” Syndiari muttered to herself, suddenly appearing deep in thought.
“Good to have you aboard,” the Human woman said, turning to the group with three aliens in it and seeming to mean the words genuinely, which was suspicious. “I’m Lieutenant Sylas, second in command of the Black Talon. We’re your ride to Dromund Kaas.”
“Yeah, yeah, well met’n all that,” Zhosia grimaced impatiently. Kriffing damn it! They really, really needed to get Syndiari out of sight before she broke down in front of—
“Oh, I’d take a ride with you anywhere, Lieutenant.”
…Or she could inexplicably be an entirely different kind of problem now. Zhosia gave the beaming Twi’lek a playful shove and rolled her eyes, hoping that would be enough to smooth things over.
Sylas let slip something of a sterner expression, perhaps a scowl of disgust, but bit back on it as she made a vaguely-targeted pointing gesture. “There’s a droid in the conference room, and your names are two of the ones it mentioned. I take it it’s one of yours?”
“Yes, excellent,” Syndiari voiced with complete confidence.
“Then feel free to bother the crew if you need anything else. I’ll be on the bridge.”
Stopping to admonish a random soldier for… being in the wrong place, apparently, Lieutenant Sylas walked away, leaving the four of them alone.
“…I have no idea what she’s talking about,” Syndiari whispered conspiratorially at Zhosia’s montral.
They found the droid where Sylas had indicated, a silver protocol model that identified them on entry with a similar wrist-projected interface to the one Zhosia used.
“Identities: Confirmed,” the droid announced. “Good day, I’m advanced protocol unit NR-02. My functions are diplomacy, translation, manslaughter, and calumniation.”
“Wait, what does that last word mean?” Syndiari interrupted.
“Uh, I’m more concerned with the second-to-last?” countered Mako.
NR-02 held up a hand. “Time is limited. The others have already accepted the message. I will lead the way to the bridge. Once Captain Orzik is deposed and our hijacking is complete, we may proceed to the Brentaal Star.”
They watched the droid exit the room. Mako sharply narrowed her eyes.
“Did he just say hijacking?”
Zhosia took off after NR-02, following him into a hall that was cut-off halfway by a red-banded ray shield. She caught up to the droid and twisted it around by the shoulder, snarling.
“What the hells do you think you’re dragging us into?”
“Halt! This is a restricted area!” spoke the same armored man from before, at the front corner of a diamond-formation with three red-uniformed Imperial troopers.
“We must proceed to the bridge immediately,” NR-02 insisted emotionlessly, pulling out of Zhosia’s grasp but making no other moves.
Just being here seemed more than enough to aggravate the guards, provoking them quickly toward a confrontation – that was probably the droid’s plan all along. Zhosia put up her hands, backing away, but kept her wrist-launchers primed.
The lead guard, however, grew suddenly white in the face, as if he’d swallowed something sour. Zhosia narrowed her eyes, expecting he might break out in a sweat any moment, then spared a brief glance behind her to follow the path of his locked eyes.
Syndiari had her head titled, regarding the man with a quiver of the lip that was slowly pulled into a smirk. “It is you!”
The wide-eyed man tensed even further, causing his three helmeted companions to subtly glance about one another with confusion. “I’m… sure you’ve mistaken me for—”
“No, no, I remember now!” Syndiari greeted loudly with a persistent slow walk towards him. “You all started to look the same after a while…” She pointed at the side of her head in explanation. “Got jumbled a bit. So, how’ve you been?”
The breadth of her smile made the man shudder. Hells, it made Zhosia shudder. It was distinctly a faux-innocent I’m going to murder you in your sleep smile, that the Twi’lek Sith only made brighter as she wandered closer to the stuttering Human.
“Time is limit—” NR-02 tried to interrupt, but Zhosia gave him a look. If the droid wanted these guys dead so badly, all he probably had to do was keep quiet for like… five more seconds, and he seemed to begrudgingly realize this.
With a keen eye and keener montrals, Zhosia caught the flicker of a moment when the panels on his smooth, metallic forearms hinged back together with a nearly inaudible sound of friction.
“Well, I’m a Sith now,” Syndiari continued toward the speechless guard with a shrug of nonchalance. “You know how it is.”
As if suddenly spurred into formality, the man lowered his rifle, and shakingly bowed his head in respect. “What… can I do for you, my lord?”
Syndiari’s posture shot up with excitement. “Oh, I know what you can do for me…”
She stepped closer, and the man looked up with true horror.
“You…”
She was well within saber-bisection range, and the man actually looked a lot like his life was preemptively leaving his body.
“…can…”
The man’s hands clenched oddly, his pupils darting about as he seemed to search for a silent prayer. Syndiari leaned in close, her lips only inches from his face.
“…pay me?”
The man flinched as if expecting his demise in that very moment, but looked up suddenly instead, eyes with no less fear but now distinctly dumbfounded. “O-o-of course, my lord!” He shouted, clinging to the offering like a lifeline as he scrambled to his datapad. One of the helmeted troopers suppressed a snicker as his superior hastily exchanged information with the Twi’lek.
“There’s a hefty late fee on that,” Syndiari warned, twirling an idle finger in the air.
“Of course, my lord!”
“Time is—”
“Always time for credits,” Zhosia hissed at the droid, prompting a giggle from Mako. That, more than anything, confirmed Mako hadn’t yet figured out the exact nature of the debt owed. Zhosia had, about a minute ago, and now could only watch the tram wreck in front of her, wide-eyed.
If there was one single aspect within the whole, broad concept of the Empire that Zhosiavana could take as any kind of example, it was non-human Sith. It wasn’t common, but when it happened, it meant something. Specifically, it meant you had a kind of power there was no arguing with.
Truth was, the rest of the galaxy could draw as many lines in the sand as it wanted between ‘people’ and those it was too uncomfortable to think about as such, but every once in a while, the Force shot up a reminder that even a ‘non-person’ could someday be literally allowed to kill you, and could do it with the flick of a wrist. The Force was ironic like that.
For mere mortals, though, a proving ground like the Great Hunt would have to do in its stead. Getting to the top of the food chain was the only surefire path out of the hellish free-for-all below, and it was the path Zhosia had long committed to.
A shame, it meant kicking down the ladder behind you.
She was brought back to her senses by a new and unsettling sound that slowly caught flinches from the others too. There was cackling laughter coming from up above, growing all the more emphatic with every second that passed.
Zhosia’s eyes glanced toward the offending point on the ceiling a fair distance away, but the troopers had to throw back their heads all the way vertical, just in time to see the sickly teal-green flicker of a deactivating stealth field generator directly above them.
A lithe, but muscled figure, dressed in a two-tone gray bodysuit with her identity concealed beneath its hood, dropped from the ceiling and into the middle of the guard formation, spiking a pair of forearm-length daggers into the right and left troopers’ exposed throats. On hitting the ground, she lowered herself and kicked backwards, sending the rearmost trooper right into the ray shield.
By then, the leader had turned around in alarm, but the woman just lunged ahead, pulling another dagger from seemingly nowhere and stabbing the man in his more lightly-armored midsection.
Zhosiavana watched more carefully the next time – the woman pulled a thin handle from one of the holsters at her hips – far narrower than a lightsaber hilt, but with a bulky, jagged end that bloomed open like a three-petaled flower, extending in parallel segments to form the hollow-centered, loosely conical, three-edged dagger that ended in a fork-like radial triple-point.
The mystery woman stuck the fourth knife right in next to the third, but this one sent out volts of electricity, causing the man to convulse in place while she ducked and rolled behind him. Twisting out of her evade, she extended another dagger to plunge into the man’s back, then another that she threw down into the back of his knee, then three more at once that she just threw in her target’s general direction, one ending up stuck in the back of his neck while another caught the other trooper behind him in the chest. The last one flew down the hallway, NR-02 having disabled the ray shield somewhere in the scuffle.
While the hooded woman rose with dramatic slowness, green blaster bolts swept over the troopers that were still standing, a Rattataki woman stepping out from the shadows to reveal her long-nosed blaster rifle as the cause. She was thinner than her knife-happy partner, the dark tattoos on her pale face splaying like crows’ feet out of the corners of her eyes while more ran down from her chin and left a single vertical stripe down the front of her neck. She wore a dark, velvety longcoat, with folds of bright magenta at the collar of the pocketed vest underneath.
Now that Zhosia got a better look at the other, hooded woman, she noted a strong technological integration comparable to her own armor. Her belt, likely the source of her stealth field, had a series of cyan-blue tech lights at the buckle and knife-holsters, her forearms were host to wide, red-and-white-lighted plates of black metal, possibly concealing even more collapsed knives beneath them, and even her mechanical-looking, black knee-high boots seemed to also grant her some sort of combat augmentation, displaying small red indicator lights just below the knees.
All this, Zhosia observed in the lingering moment the woman spent facing them, hood still low enough to obscure all of her face except her amused, sinister, teeth-baring smile. Her skin was a pinkish color that wasn’t quite red but got close, and like her partner, her face was marked with tattoos – dark splotches that angled down her cheeks to slip under the corners of her mouth and form a trident-like pattern below her bottom lip, the outer points connecting into thinner lines that traced the defined shape of her jawline underneath.
The grin was held calmer for just a moment, as she angled toward Syndiari without tilting her head any higher. “Apologies,” she spoke silkily, seductively, in an Imperial-accented voice that it would’ve been criminal to use for anything less than a triple-entendre. “I may have interposed, were you planning on doing that yourself?”
“Eh, I was indifferent.” Syndiari shrugged and put away her datapad, then looked the curves of the woman’s bodysuit up and down with a growing smile. “But speaking of doing things myself—"
The hooded woman grinned, turned around without a word, and from over her left shoulder drew a narrow-nosed blaster rifle of a similar profile to the one used by her Rattataki companion. Firing off twin volleys of green blaster bolts, performing synchronized x-crossing combat rolls, flickering in and out of sight with twin stealth field generators, and all the while, making the ship resound with both of their loud, obnoxious, and highly-entertained cackles, the pair made quick work of the remaining Imperials all the way to the bridge. Zhosia, Syndi, Mako, and Khem could only jog slightly behind them, confused and aghast, or delighted as the case may have been.
“…No threats found. The bridge is now secure.”
NR-02 deactivated his holoscreen, leaving Captain Orzik, Lieutenant Sylas, and the other bridge crew to look upon the several dead troopers now crowding their floor.
“Listen up… by order of Imperial Intelligence,” the hooded woman declared, baring teeth.
“What?”
Mako said what everyone else was thinking – except the Rattataki woman, who just crossed her arms and grinned.
“You’ll find me quite indisputably taking command of this bridge,” the agent continued, stalking closer to the captain with an intimidating swagger. “Kilran’s mistake, but who am I to criticize? Oh, and, before I forget… this is for disobeying said moff’s ridiculous and completely suicidal order.”
In a flash, the agent struck Captain Orzik across the face with her sidearm, then shot him dead on the floor of the bridge.
Zhosiavana continued her slow steps backward, a shoulder in front encouraging Mako to do the same. Syndiari fake-yawned and shrugged. The Rattataki woman looked especially pleased, catching a grinning aside-glance from her companion under the hood.
Sylas, meanwhile, had reeled back in shock, and at the same time, a younger woman rushed forward from her post at one of the circular station-islands on deck. She had vibrant, dark red jaw-length hair and eyeshadow as thick as Sylas’s, though by the time she looked up from checking Orzik’s pulse, it was already starting to run smudged down her face.
“The captain’s dead! The captain’s… dead…”
“Shut up!” Sylas scolded the younger ensign with a dismissive hand, then turned to address the agent. “You have our attention. What would you have us do?”
Building to a mad cackle, the agent started to count out on her fingers. “Do whatever I say, unless you fail, in which case, it was all your fault. Avoid an arbitrary series of mistakes – punishable by death, of course – that you’ll have no concept of until after you make them. Show no emotion whatsoever unless I, a tempestuous and petty tyrant guided by unknowable whims, happen to find it acceptable or at the very least, amusing… basically, the usual.”
In the meantime, NR-02 had rattled off some nonsense that apparently contained actual orders, since it prompted Sylas to rouse the crew into action. The light-streaks of hyperspace filled the viewscreen, followed by a cloudy-blue vortex, and then the sudden stop in the star-spotted black of normal-space.
One of those republic hammerhead warships drifted high above, immediately opening fire.
As the bridge shook from external impacts, Zhosia and Mako braced themselves against the railing and low wall alongside the bridge stairwell, looking on with a shared sense of dread as Sylas issued her battle commands. Almost immediately, there was some urgent problem being reported from engineering, and Zhosia rolled her eyes, knowing Kilran’s supposed chosen ones would inevitably be burdened with the task.
It was only half a relief when the agent shoved her aside, muttering something probably insulting about kids she was only half-paying attention to. It didn’t change the fact she and Mako were stuck on an Imperial ship in the middle of a heated battle with the Republic.
“…Shoulda’ taken the shuttle,” she muttered, shaking her head as she slid down the wall.
Mako sat beside her, a little higher up on the next step. “Guess this just isn’t our day.”
“Still waiting for one that is,” Zhosia breathed low through a sigh.
The sad twist on Mako’s face was her agreement.
Zhosia put her right gauntlet up across her knees, and pretended to be idly occupied with the green, rectangular holoscreen that projected over it. Better to appear rude and ignorant than weak. The Imperials scrambling around the bridge pointedly avoided them, and no small part of it seemed to be fear – not the kind Zhosiavana had hoped to earn, but a kind she’d gleaned purely by association with the murderous intelligence agent.
“Those two…” Mako began with a disapproving scowl, noticing the same trend. “They really scared the hells out of everyone, didn’t they?”
“Sylas is doing a pretty good job of that herself,” Zhosia remarked. The acting captain had shed the polite mask she’d presented initially, revealing the cold and cruel truth of someone wholeheartedly dedicated to the Imperial mindset.
“Yeah, well she’s just… indoctrinated.” Mako narrowed her eyes. “Those other two are like… complete sociopaths!”
“Even more vulnerable to the Empire’s manipulation,” Zhosia agreed with a sad shake of her head, staring off into space before twisting her lip. “At least I’d think so. I’m not an expert.”
There was silence, and when she glanced back up, Mako had a really weird look that it took a long while to decipher.
“Wait…” Zhosia inquired, puzzled. “Did you mean that as an insult?”
Then, Mako was looking at her like she’d completely lost her mind… but the sudden, further widening of her eyes thereafter was all panic and fear. “Kriff, is it not?”
Zhosia gave a sympathetic shrug. “I mean, I don’t think it’s really fair to apply our moral standards to anyone with a fundamental disadvantage. Seems pretty high-horse.”
Mako squinted at that. “Yeah, well… call me crazy, but I don’t think we should let evil mass murderers off the hook just because they have trouble playing by the rules.”
Zhosia shrugged again. “Maybe this is a bad example.”
Things had started to quiet on the bridge – at least the voices had. What replaced them was a series of heavy bootfalls that set Zhosia on edge. About thirty Imperial marines assembled on the lower part of the deck, standing in formation as Sylas addressed them from above. Being caught in between with Mako right there with her, Zhosia was more concerned with the rifles than the words, but voices of disagreement finally roused her attention.
“You were right here, you must know what she did to the captain!”
“Those corridors are filled with bodies. Our troops!”
“We can’t follow them, it’s suicide!”
Then everything fell to quiet, the disgruntled men having stepped forward with their glares thankfully directed only at Sylas.
Sylas stared them down without emotion. “Your concerns have been noted.” She made a gesture with her eyes to the rest of the marines.
Mako gasped, and rushed to stand. “Wait—”
Zhosia held her back with a stopping hand, catching Mako in a stern, locked gaze as the blasters rang out, followed by the sound of dropping bodies and the ensuing silence thereafter. “They’re Imperials,” she whispered darkly. “Not our fight.”
Mako relented, but looked shaken as her eyes wandered to the newly dead men on the floor. She wasn’t alone in that, even among the other Imperial personnel in the room. The younger man at the left bridge station allowed himself a tremble before returning to his work, but the read-headed woman at the right – Brukarra, Sylas had called her, remained in unchecked, fearful disbelief. She clearly didn’t understand what the Empire was or represented, and if Zhosia were to place bets, she’d have her credits on the poor girl winding up dead by the end of all this, too.
NR-02 had watched the whole thing with a calculating stare. That droid was plotting something, Zhosia was sure of it.
The victorious defenders returned with shared zeal – at least for three out of the four. The agent, the Rattataki, and Syndiari were smiling like they’d made a time of it, although if Zhosia had any faith in her ability to read Khem, the Dashade looked mildly disappointed.
She and Mako stood up for the return briefing – fairly standard, except for the increasingly murderous disposition Sylas was taking toward her own crew. The interesting part began when Brukarra intercepted a long-range transmission, and the group found themselves in the projected presence of Jedi Grand Master Satele Shan.
“…I am en route to your location with sixteen Republic vessels. I am asking you to retreat before more lives are lost.”
“And you expected the Empire to be reasonable,” the agent taunted with a smile, although… Zhosia swore she caught the hint of genuine anger behind it. “I’m pretty sure if we retreat now, we’ll all be executed, so… no thanks.”
Satele seemed to be at least somewhat taken aback.
She didn’t get the chance to voice it.
You talk of lost lives, Jedi?
All attention in the room was suddenly on… a figure so hidden in a set of dark, hooded robes that they looked like a shadow come to life. The agent and the Rattataki reeled suddenly to either side because the mystery guest was standing right between them, as if they’d always been a part of the ensemble. The figure stepped closer, robes swaying around them and hiding all but the faintest hint of a body’s movement underneath.
The strange words had been a deep, chilling echo – deafening in volume, but leaving their searing pain in Zhosia’s thoughts without a trace of discomfort in her montrals. Satele’s hologram had still heard them, apparently, and the Jedi narrowed her eyes as she regarded the being.
“The people aboard the Brentaal Star are under my protection. And as to whatever you’re implying—"
Your protection is worth nothing. Your order is only beginning its end, but it was never to be otherwise. The Sith destroy others, but the Jedi destroy themselves. So it has been, and so it will be, from your time to ours and back again.
“You believe what you say, I can tell, but I assure you your knowledge is flawed.” Satele put up an impressively convincing smile of offered warmth. “Let us speak, if that is what you wish, but first, let us end this conflict. There is no need for innocents to suffer.”
The cloaked figure wasn’t fooled, or wasn’t buying.
You won’t stop the destruction of that ship, nor any of the things you have promised to. It will take thousands of years, Satele Shan, descendant of Bastila Shan, but the Jedi will die. They will die, and be reborn in twisted shame. Your savior, your hero will rise to fix the mistakes of before and HE WILL BE A LIAR. No, it’s too late for your promises. Send your soldiers to their deaths, their fates we’ll not alter.
Satele looked disappointed, maybe in herself most of all. “I was hoping we could truly be reasonable, for a change. If you’re so concerned with the future of the Jedi, I suggest you prepare to face one.” Her scowl was suddenly fierce. “And you may want to consider what that means.”
Whoever in your order stands against us, will suffer like the rest. We will delight in it.
Eyes pulled closed for a moment, Satele had drawn back a measure from her anger, speaking calmly but sadly. “There’s no need for such cruelty.”
The cloaked Sith – because what else could they be? – stepped closer, resolute as they gazed up at the holoimage.
Perhaps we want to be cruel.
Their right arm freed from the thick robes, they waved a dark-gloved hand, and… something changed on Satele’s face, though she tried to resist whatever it was. It was only a flicker and she seemed normal afterwards, but as she closed the holocall, her intent gaze was fixed on the agent, as if the woman was the only one to whom she’d been speaking.
The cloaked figure turned, then, their hood low enough to obscure their entire face even head-on. The same hand waved across the group, and—
“You know, it’s kinda rude to keep erasing yourself from our memories like that.”
It was Syndiari who’d spoken, and she smiled victory at the sudden flinch of surprise that struck the target of her criticism. The hand lowered, and the hood twisted, the figure’s gaze considering the Lethan Twi’lek.
Blinking wide eyes, Zhosia looked between the two. “How long has—”
“Since we boarded,” Syndiari answered with a light shrug, then addressed the stunned manipulator with a finger-tap to the side of her visor. “Nice work on the live feed, but you forgot the backups. Thanks, by the way. My life’s already six different horror movies, I sure did appreciate the last thirty minutes of found footage hell.”
After another pause, the guilty arm tried to move again, only for Syndiari to whip her head in a tilt, rolling her possibly-non-existent eyes as she put up her hands.
“Just join the kriffing squad already! Nobody here cares and I’m sure it’s a lot less effort!”
The arm lowered, disappearing back into dark robes, and the cavernous hood let out a faint, windlike sound that was unmistakably a resigned sigh.
No one seemed to be paying much attention to Zhosia’s presence or absence anymore, and so when given the option between relative peace on an Imperial ship and an active warzone on a Republic ship, she took the option with the more favorable variables.
The agent and her Rattataki accomplice took to violence against the enemy with a similar zeal to that they’d shown in violence against their own side. Khem, predictably, broadcast no hesitance whatsoever in slaughtering the Republic troops with his immense vibrosword, and Syndiari had worked herself up into a cackling frenzy that rivaled her two newer combat cohorts.
Earlier, dark promises aside, the mysterious cloaked Sith didn’t actually seem so willing to participate, or at least not actively enough to steal the thunder from the others. Mostly they just stood there menacingly, and more often than not, simply vanished when no one was looking and appeared in the next room instead of actively following along with the group’s progress.
It all worked quite well in Zhosiavana’s favor, as she and Mako were also quite content to hang back and relinquish their share of the potential bloodshed. The Republic wasn’t their enemy, and they were damn well going to do their best to keep it that way. They stayed out of sight as much as they could, following only when the coast was clear, but as Syndiari, the agent, and the Rattataki all visibly reveled in the violence, Zhosia couldn’t help the sinking feeling that those three had already learned something she hadn’t yet.
She was processing that thought when Mako hurried forward to stand beside her, bearing an unexplained, sudden and sullen expression of deep guilt and remorse. At Zhosia’s silent prodding, she tapped her implant – her connection to the holonet – with the light breath of a sigh.
“You were right.” Mako shook her head slowly, then turned a new, sympathetic glance toward the Intelligence duo. Her face contorted as she struggled with something, seeming at a loss. “How do we tell them we’re safe people?”
“Sincerest apologies, for this blatant treaty violation!” shouted the agent, who was currently stabbing a Republic medic in the abdomen with several of her daggers, while the Rattataki used a more traditional vibroknife to slit the same man’s throat from behind. “But we’re merely fulfilling the quota of the Empire’s unchecked bloodlust!”
Zhosia worried her brow. “I don’t think that’s really their primary concern at the moment.”
“No,” Mako insisted, moving into Zhosia’s view and catching her direct attention. “I mean look at this galaxy. Everyone really is out to get everyone else! How can we even expect anyone to adhere to a moral code, let alone—”
Grabbing Mako by the shoulder, Zhosia twisted them both behind a semicircular wall brace where, by short-sighted design, part of the large blast door hadn’t fully recessed. It was cover enough when the heavy, burning blasterfire from a GXR-7 sentinel droid started flying down the corridor.
“Existential revelations later,” Zhosia said worriedly, peeking out from behind the doorway to watch Khem make a run on the droid. “But for the record, I know violence is a symptom of the state of the galaxy, not a mark on anyone’s character. You think I want to be here right now?”
They made their way up the elevator to the transport deck, where they were greeted by a darkened, emergency-red-lit hallway and a group of severely agitated security personnel. With nowhere to hide, the smaller blue lights on Zhosia’s gold chestplate flared up, activating both her own energy shield and a duplicate projected around Mako. It was all highly experimental tech, and the blasterfire absorbed by the extra barrier guarding Mako caused surges of electrical feedback in Zhosia’s armor, but the Togruta toughed out the pain and kept them both moving. They needed to get out of the hallway’s bottleneck before the shields failed, but unfortunately, that set them running directly into the security room.
Her own shield flickered out just as she met more blasterfire coming from inside, and she ducked and rolled to evade, keeping herself low while Syndiari and Khem entered the room and took over the fight. Zhosia took cover against the base of the central platform, only for something heavy to close around her left wrist like a vice and yank her upward.
Something primal, wide-eyed, and venomous shuddered through her, in the desperation of the moment as she suddenly lost control of a whole arm and the security of contact with the ground. The future was a vague, shattered nightmare in flashes – from that old, familiar, inevitable part of her mind. A stage play of horrors shaped by stories she couldn’t remember, or that her thoughts had constructed all their own.
But now, of course, there was the musty, green dark of Nem’ro’s palace that would color her worst fears until the day she died.
And as always, the blurred grid-squares of the entwined straw, cast black by the contrast of the midday sun as the world ended.
With a screeched, guttural hiss that could’ve warded off a rancor, Zhosia writhed in the air, arching her right arm with a fist and her right leg with a jet-boot turned horizontal. Her scream reached its crescendo as the burst of propulsion twisted her into an accelerating spiral, one that met an abrupt stop only at the sharp impact of her fist and the accompanying sound of cracked bone.
A man nearly four times Zhosia’s mass stumbled backward, clutching at his collapsed chest cavity and gasping for a breath that wouldn’t come.
After narrowly landing on her feet, Zhosia almost dropped to her knees regardless.
The soldier was a Twi’lek. Yellow-green skin and marble-patterned lekku.
“I… I…” She felt sick, her own breathing failing her, and something deep within that had been outwardly building toward frantic guilt and sorrow on her stuttering lips snapped to scowling anger at the last moment. “You shouldn’t have—”
But by the look in the man’s eyes, he understood.
While a cacophony of blaster bolts and saber strikes filled the room around them, he looked up at her and understood her anger too. He reached up, one more time, and brushed the backs of his fingers against Zhosia’s. As if to say he was sorry.
Then his hand dropped, and his eyes rolled back into his skull.
She didn’t quite notice when Mako had started holding her hand, started pulling her frantically toward cover – She’d eventually given up on the second count, but only because the battle was over. Syndiari was at the security terminal, talking to a hologram of Ensign Brukarra.
The redheaded Human woman was still giving her reports through choked tears, tears for the dead Imperial captain. Zhosia didn’t care.
Continuing their fight down to the engine deck, the boarders made their way through the tram station in the munitions depot. They’d advanced exactly one room past it before the rate of incoming blasterfire exploded tenfold, raining down from the room-width, ascending ramp of the corridor beyond.
Flanked each by a pair of rifle-bearing defenders, an impressive number of Brentaal Star corporals had made a staggered line down the ramp, focusing fire from their heavy assault cannons.
Zhosia and Mako ducked right, taking cover in another wall brace. Syndiari waved from hers and Khem’s post behind the mirroring cover on the left, until the Rattataki woman moved up in front of them, her rifle at a downward slant toward the edge of the door even if she seemed to have no intention of actually advancing around it.
The hooded agent tried to sneak past the opening with her stealth field active, but there was just too much plasma in the air to avoid the stray bolt to the shoulder that broke her cloaking and took her down. She rolled left into cover just in time, crouching low at a knee behind the other three, and produced a kolto probe – that she spent a few moments nonchalantly reading about on a purple holoscreen before activating it and letting it do its work.
“Any other big ideas?” Zhosia called across the blasterfire, more hopeful than mocking. Trying a missile barrage from cover was a great way to get herself and Mako blown to bits, and her flamethrower didn’t have anywhere near the range she’d need.
Syndiari smiled, wormed her way to standing closer to the edge than the other three, and rolled out her right forearm, palm-up. The gauntlet on her arm shifted some panels on the underside, ejecting a spherical device from the hexagon near her elbow and feeding it down into her open hand. She gripped it with her fingers, braced herself, and threw the grenade around the door frame towards the corporals on the ramp.
One stream of assault cannon fire moved up to intercept, detonating the projectile into a bright burst of searing flame that would have consumed at least the majority of the soldiers had it actually reached its target.
“Damn, that was my only one!” Syndiari complained.
“I could take a look at that!” Mako offered quickly, genuinely enthused. “Get you some better storage capacity at the very least!”
“Thanks!” the Twi’lek called back, brightened.
The Rattataki rolled her eyes. “Well, unless you can do that in the next few minutes, with the supplies we have on hand, from over there… I think we need a different plan.”
Zhosia arched an eyebrow. “Can’t you do, like… lightning, or something?”
Syndiari looked mildly offended. “That’s so basic!”
“Well, I’m the bounty hunter here! Fire’s my thing already!”
“It better not be!”
“Girls! Girls! You can share!” Mako quieted, holding up what looked like a cobbled-together piece of scrap metal. “Look! I already got started!”
The Rattataki woman looked taken aback, then squinted. “Is that a grenade?”
Mako deflated a bit. “No… but it’s an assembly component I can use to make a grenade!”
“That is SO COOL!” Syndiari exclaimed, bubbling with excitement, before turning quickly to her own companion. “Khem! Knit me a sweater!”
“Right…” the agent muttered as she rose to her feet. Her wandering gaze found a point farther back in the room, and toward the center. “What about you? Finally planning on lending a hand?”
The darkly cloaked figure stood motionless, but at being both noticed and called out, turned their shrouded head noticeably toward the agent. By now, though, the corporals had noticed the figure standing blatantly outside of cover, and readjusted their fire. The blaster bolts went through, leaving no visible singes or burns.
“Neat!” Syndiari spoke up brightly. “Are you part ghost or something?”
There was a shift in the room – more noticeable to Zhosia and the others because, in their cover, they stood in a slight shade obscured from the range of the ceiling lights. A similar effect left bands across the floor just at the thresholds of the doorways, and those were shifted too.
The shadows had gotten darker.
The hooded figure stepped forward, slowly. Enough to make the corporals adjust their lines of fire and continue to observe no effective results. Something was emanating from the dark void of the hood, and it took until it rose above the sound of the blaster bolts until it could be identified.
Laughter, again.
A woman’s laugh, bright and airy. Mocking, and with an edge that, over time, slowly weighed it down. It was no laugh of joy, that became clearer and clearer, until the moment had passed and it ceased altogether. The last intake breath of the last exertion was modulated as a pained, wrathful grunt, as if teeth had been clenched, and the familiar dark voice broke the silence thereafter.
No innocents. Our pain unto all.
Serenely, she rolled out her right arm, an open palm flashing with a white-blue, ethereal light that snapped into the solid, metallic shape of a lightsaber hilt. She ignited the weapon to her side, producing a plasma blade of gleaming silver.
Her left arm was stranger, moving as if it were a dead and lifeless limb that, once freed from the cloak, needed to be externally, invisibly, pushed and adjusted into place. In the end, it held an arrangement that more-or-less mimicked a normal arm, although there was significant, unnatural waver in the shoulder. Another saber hilt appeared now in her left hand, this one’s blade igniting in a beam of deep, indigo blue.
When she lurched forward, it was sudden. If Zhosia blinked, she would have missed the change, when the concealing robes became a sleek, cape-like longcoat that was more-or-less an extension of the black bodysuit underneath. It wasn’t that she’d cast off a layer, or that the cloak had folded or compressed, so much as it had simply morphed, edged in lines of ethereal flame that had washed over her clothing and reshaped it into something new.
There was barely another fraction of a moment to process that the woman, now without her hood, was a Twi’lek – her skin a deep, cerulean blue – and even less time to realize her left lek was gone, severed to a long-ago cauterized stump around the height of her neck.
Her chilling scream, as she leapt into battle, silenced everything else.
She zigzagged, moving from trooper to trooper, as the assault cannons tracked her to no effect. Her first kills were the rifle-wielders, either dispatched at close range or knocked off with deflected bolts. The corporals were different, when she got to them.
She savored those. Crafted their deaths with a specificity that could have only been intent.
The first, she relieved of his weapon with an upward cross-slash that scattered it into four pieces. She stalked toward him, letting him know he was defenseless, before making a neat, diagonal slice from shoulder to hip that was deep enough to kill but not bisect.
The second, she stabbed through the heart.
The third, she knocked down with a concussive Force burst, making him roll partway up the ramp. She waited until he’d raised himself on his hands before idly flicking her wrist, snapping his neck.
The fourth, she caught in a whirlwind-like disturbance, just enough to wrench his cannon away and send him spinning a half-turn from its sudden departure. She caught the weapon in her own hands, holding it as if it were weightless, and shot his back full of holes.
The fifth, she beheaded.
The sixth man backed away in fear, over the top of the ramp and onto the flat ground of the upper hallway beyond. The Sith pursued, and after a shrugging, unnerved glance shared across the room, Zhosia and the others advanced slowly behind her.
She had the last corporal at her decidedly-not-mercy, in the hallway that turned right and led further toward their ultimate goal of the escape pods. With the Force, she wrenched the man off his feet, igniting her saber as he sailed towards her and driving the point into his arm as he passed. He screamed, standing at a stumble with a steaming burn from his left shoulder down to his elbow, the limb hanging useless.
She wasn’t done. More feinting saber-swipes drove him back, until she twisted one low, catching his left foot before he could step away and leaving only the heel. Off-balance, he started to fall, but she lifted him high in the air with an open hand that closed with fury. His torso armor imploded, driving broken shards into his chest and back and crushing his upper body beyond recognition.
As he died, she pulled a grenade from his belt, slapping it into his right palm as if shaking his hand. It exploded, leaving her unharmed but the corporal’s remaining arm blown off to the elbow. Her tendril-arm lashed out, catching around his throat. She held him there, floating on the snakelike limb, staring into his dying eyes before closing her fist in a Force-assisted crush.
The body dropped, and as if a switch was flipped, the rage had left her. Her arms fell to her sides, her head lowered, as she stood across from the recessed, sealed, circular door to the next chamber.
Footsteps were slow as the others gathered near her – but not too near, after the violent display and the subsequent, abrupt evaporation of rage that, openly shown by a Sith, might have been even more concerning. Most of the readable faces in the room displayed confusion, a few the allowance of fear, but silence reigned.
Enough that it was audible, when the woman began weeping.
Mako hadn’t dared get as close as Zhosia was already standing, the Human’s wide eyes clearly marking her focus on the Togruta’s safety. Syndiari’s reaction, surprisingly, was the only one that appeared even more guttural. She hadn’t dropped her smile, but her posture was grimly uneasy, as she lingered behind the others and tried her best to avoid direct attention.
A severed lek, as Zhosiavana understood it in relevance to Twi’leks, was not generally considered a survivable injury. The few who suffered such and lived, according to conventional wisdom, became unstable and mentally deranged. They were to be shunned immediately from society to preserve the safety of others.
In Zhosia’s honest opinion, conventional wisdom tended to be a little closed-minded.
Her hands didn’t quite raise, but did drift a bit forward and to the sides, as she carefully circled around into the strange woman’s field of vision. “…Hey?” she began, delicately, her eyes wandering up toward the other woman’s in sympathy. “You good?”
The woman barely seemed to notice the approach. She just cried, and breathed, and drew slowly to a calm. She looked slightly older than Syndiari, but more toned from probable years of combat. Thin and defined brows adorned a shapely face with only the faintest traces of dark side veining. Her eyes, when they blinked open, bore irises of metallic gold, but with every slow breath the silhouettes of blunt crystals retreated inward, vibrant green filling in from the outer edges. Eventually, there was nothing even Sith about them.
She brought her arms forward, as if to catch unseen rain, and the fingertips of her gloves caught alight with that ethereal fire, burning away at the material until her sleeves had receded to near her elbows. For the first time, Zhosia saw the clear contrast in the limbs – the healthy, smooth blue skin of the right and the withered, dried and corpselike state of the left.
The woman appeared to concentrate, sadly, and without warning both bared limbs became dotted with severe burns. Zhosia tensed with concerned alarm at the hiss of smoke that rose from the marred spots in wisps of light, but the woman herself appeared to feel no pain at all. She simply watched, a tear falling from a closed eye, then directed her gaze toward the ceiling. Her arms dropped to her sides and the burns vanished, leaving no trace they were ever real.
Looking, as if in bleak promise, toward nothing, the woman smiled.
“She is here,” the woman spoke, shockingly, with a voice not loud and distorted but soft and youthful, like her laugh had been. “She is here, and we will find her.”
Still ignorant of Zhosia, the Twi’lek snapped herself back to attention on the blast doors. Gold seeped back into her eyes, from her pupils outward, but stopped halfway, leaving her irises a perfect blend of the two colors.
“Nothing will stand in our way.”
She drew back her gloved-again arms, then thrust them forward, the power of a near-effortless Force push blowing the sealed doors off their hinges.
“The escape pods aren’t far now. You can make it on your own, General.”
“And what about you?”
“I will face my destiny. Go now, my friend.”
Yadira Ban took a deep breath, guiding herself to the resolution that made up for what she lacked in confidence. In spite of everything, the sound of her own voice settled uncomfortably in her stomach, as it clearly had in the general’s. Like a child’s last goodbye to an old man – even the soldiers around her seemed to think it was wrong. A reversal that went against some natural order. The Jedi knew better. Yadira understood her duty, and that was enough.
Her head still hung low, her eyes still felt heavy, but she shook herself through the last of it as she removed the lightsaber from her belt, ignited the crackling green energy blade, and turned to face the blown-open corridor and the opponents that stepped forth. “Halt where you are! I am Yadira Ban, padawan of the Jedi Order. I was sent to—"
…That was a lot of people.
First through the doorway was, oddly enough, another Lethan Twi’lek woman but in Sith robes, her skin a darker, more vibrant red than the soft pink color of Yadira’s. Her orange saberstaff igniting with a flourish, the Sith’s broad, teeth-baring grin began to slowly falter with each step she made. Her once-nonchalant posture took on signs of an unexplained discomfort, a metamorphosis not shared by the tall, stone-grey… creature that accompanied her. A Rattataki woman with a blaster rifle burst out laughing the moment her eyes found the lone Jedi, but the indistinct, hooded woman who followed one step behind, appearing at first ready and eager to join her companion in the jovial display, flinched in a distinct pause and kept herself uneasily neutral. A Togruta and a human girl, carrying blasters instead of lightsabers but looking too young to be regular soldiers, both reacted as if suddenly wrought with sickness.
One enemy, six, or a hundred thousand, it mattered not while the Force was with her. Yadira Ban narrowed her eyes, and flourished her saber into a firm attack pose. “I was sent to protect the general, and you will not pass.”
The staunch words reverberated in the space made by the stunned, on some counts judging silence. Wide eyes blinked, but Yadira wouldn’t let that get to her. If the Empire’s killers were underestimating her, it would only be their mistake.
From where she was standing at the rightmost end of the enemy lineup, the human girl cast a wary glance over the rest of her companions, gulping down a shudder. “We’re not… really going to…”
The Togruta stopped the girl with a hand to the shoulder, warily inching them both backward. Her eyes were on Yadira’s, meeting them with an intensity that could only be… sadness? No, no, she must have read that one wrong.
At the far end, the red Twi’lek Sith threw her head back in sudden laughter, cackling toward the high ceiling before recovering in a forced, resigned smile. “Yeah, this is about what I deserve.”
Somewhere in the pull of attention, a seventh figure had joined the other six in the middle, a darker blue Twi’lek in a black bodysuit with an ankle-length coat. She had a Force presence, and Yadira felt a spike of mental pain just upon the act of trying to evaluate it. Her expression was unreadable, and there was something strange about her eyes…
“You are the Jedi we were told to fear?” The new apparition began, and just the act of tilting her head in a disappointed sigh revealed the lack of… anything where the rest of her left lek was supposed to be. Yadira felt queasy in unexpected sympathy. “Where are they now, then, while they leave you to be broken?”
Yadira scowled. “They’ve given me everything I need in this fight. And with the Force as my ally, I intend to drive you back, meter by meter, if need be. Just as the Republic pushed the Sith Empire into the dark of the galaxy!”
The grey-suited, hooded woman dared a few steps forward, hands clenched roughly on her rifle.
“The dark of the galaxy,” she spat with bared teeth, tattoos contorting on her pale red skin. “Where they, of course, continued on their merry way leaving a swath of destruction and endless suffering in the lives of billions. You and your precious Republic should have done a better job.” By the end, with the intensity of her words, she could have been shouting. It was a lowly taunt, of course it was, but for some reason she made it sound angry, even pained. Her outburst didn’t seem to be part of the plan, either, because the Togruta and the Human were now looking at her with a readable measure of surprise. For an Imperial strike team, they really were poorly coordinated.
“We know the Jedi,” the blue Twi’lek spoke again. “They’ve given up on you.”
There was no point drawing this out any longer.
That was how Yadira justified it to herself, as she threw herself forward with the Force, the tan longcoat of her robes trailing through the air as she uttered her battle cry. When she brought her saber down, her own green blade was crossed with one of gleaming silver, the blue Twi’lek resisting the full momentum of the attack and even pushing her a step backward.
As the woman’s second, indigo blue blade materialized and both moved in for counterattack, Yadira leapt again, twisting overhead and as she redirected horizontally and sparked her saber down an unprepared block from the red Twi’lek’s saberstaff. Again, she didn’t linger long enough for the riposte, backflipping the full length of the lineup and striking her blade upon the spherical curve of a shimmering blue energy barrier.
Inside the bubble, the young Togruta frantically tapped at the green holoscreen above her gauntlet, looking up from the effort only to meet Yadira’s eyes through the shield. Again, a flash of sympathy amid the focus of combat.
Blaster bolts hummed in from Yadira’s right, and she twirled aside her saber to deflect them one by one, taking steps back as the Human girl refused to lay off the trigger. The Force fired off a warning, and Yadira leapt high in another backflip, rotating in the air just as the arc of the large, grey creature’s equally large vibrosword passed beneath her. The split-rounded end of the weapon struck the floor where the Jedi had been standing, while Yadira herself landed behind the creature, spinning and scoring a shallow hit across the thing’s back with the tip of her lightsaber.
She caught the magmatic glow in her left peripheral as the saberstaff reentered play, but before she and the red Twi’lek could come to blows again, a solid wall of the Force slammed into Yadira, knocking her backward off her feet. Again missing only narrowly, the chopping arc of the huge creature’s vibrosword passed in front of her as she was pushed a distance of perhaps a dozen meters, flipping dexterously backward onto her feet at the far end.
The creature started running after her, but even in the ankle-length skirt of her dark robes, the red Twi’lek soundly outpaced it in a reverse wind tunnel of displaced air, a burst of Force speed carrying the staff-wielder into a series of quick jabs Yadira struggled to parry. When she rounded with the staff’s other end and began dueling in earnest, there was a current of orange lightning running along both blades, shooting off thick, blinding sparks with every thunderous clash.
After one particularly close strike, the sparks cleared. Yadira had her single blade aimed forward, in horizontal parallel with her shoulder, while the Sith was ducking under one arm, both of her gauntleted hands holding the double-blade in a defensive vertical.
“You may run,” Yadira insisted, “or you may stand your ground, but you’ll go no farther.”
Expecting the pointless deflection of a technically-minded comeback, she was surprised when the other woman screwed up her lips in sickened displeasure.
“I’m sorry,” she mouthed, almost voiceless, then subtly shook her head. “I don’t want this.”
Yadira narrowed her eyes. “You are the one who has chosen the darkness. It is the duty of the light to rise to meet it.”
“Choice?” her opponent taunted, quivering lips curling into a reluctant, yet fierce smile. “Why don’t you look a little closer!”
With the last word, she lunged, and Yadira barely managed a block, the two blades locking near the hilts and twisting into a wide V-shape. The Sith leaned in through the gap, her visor only centimeters from Yadira’s stunned eyes.
The rectangular burns on her forehead were made out of letters. Entire paragraphs of aurebesh lettering – a brand, and one applied carelessly enough it couldn’t even be properly read. Hints of more writing were visible around the edges of the metal visor, leaving no doubt of what had happened to inhibit her sight.
Yadira stumbled backwards, keeping pace with her opponent’s slow, advancing strides while the creature running in from behind her drew ever closer. “Then choose now!” she proposed on a whim, wide and hurried eyes attempting to find some bond with her scarcely readable opponent. “Join the light instead!”
There was consideration without hope, only seconds left before the unrepentant brute intercepted the pair. The Twi’lek Sith’s expression became durasteel all at once, distraught yet resolved.
“I can’t.” She shook her head. “Not with you.”
She whirled her saberstaff dramatically behind her before lunging into a cleave, the blade cutting only empty air as Yadira sailed overhead. Her leap carried her back to the center of the room, where the Togruta and the Human backed away and looked on warily.
The Togruta hesitated only briefly, but the moment Yadira raised her saber, those teal-blue eyes hardened. She ushered the human behind her with a thrown-back shoulder, then snapped back for a quick reprise, this time slinging her arm out. The burst of intense flame from her gauntlet skewed high, but was enough to ward Yadira a step backward into a defensive pose.
The girl brought her other arm out as well, both firing off exploding flak shells that sparked in loud bursts of shrapnel on the ground just in front of Yadira’s retreating feet. Finally, a pair of narrow, J-curving panels that ran up and over the backs of the Togruta’s shoulders popped away from the rest of the gilded carapace and slid out to the sides, revealing the blunted warheads of several tiny, compressed missiles. Shooting off her back like fireworks, the projectiles sailed high, curved sharply above her, and converged down at their target.
Yadira Ban remained calm, raising a pair of fingers in a parallel and securing her stance.
“You aren’t going to win this, I swear it.”
A whirlwind of small, but bright mini-barriers of neon blue Force energy coalesced around the Jedi, intercepting the missiles exactly and diverting any damage while Yadira didn’t so much as flinch. The grey creature had approached from her back-right, wailing on the defense screen with his vibrosword to no avail, and the red Twi’lek Sith was flanking, with speed, around from her back-left, saberstaff preparing for a lunge.
Yadira leapt high in the air, her green saber flailing behind her, then dropped fast.
The Force energy channeled through the strike of her feet stripped the durasteel floor of its top layer, crinkling it away in ripples like thin paper and churning up the lower layers of insulation, all while a powerful shockwave radiated out far and wide. The creature and the red Twi’lek were caught point-blank, thrown off their feet and tumbling in opposite directions.
The blue Twi’lek, the Togruta, and the Human were farther away. The Togruta had barely enough time to tap something on her projected screen, causing a pair of bubble shields to form around herself and the Human, but the moment the shockwave hit, she convulsed suddenly as if electrocuted, falling unconscious despite the bubble stopping her from being blown back. The Human let out a gasp, and a strangled cry of ‘Zozi!’ before rushing out of her disappearing bubble to the fallen girl’s side.
The blue Twi’lek stood without any barrier whatsoever, completely unaffected by the shockwave. It hadn’t even rippled her cloak.
“The Jedi have made you their weapon, and nothing more,” she spoke again, taking slow strides across the distance. “Whatever they haven’t yet stolen from you, they will in time.”
“No.” Yadira insisted, confidently, drawing her saber to a warding pose. “The Jedi are nothing of the sort. It is a privilege to serve the light. You’re thinking of the Sith.”
She lunged, her saber striking true.
Or, Yadira thought it had. The Sith woman made no move to block, and stepped aside at a moment she swore was too late, but when Yadira faced her again, there wasn’t a scratch on her.
“The Jedi lie, the Sith lie. And when they have no more use for you, you will wish you’d seen it.”
Yadira steeled herself, shaking through a mild shudder. “So, now you admit your untruth?”
Her green blade swung at the woman’s scowling face, she saw the plasma disappear into blue skin and phase through moving robes, but there was no sound except the saber reverberating through empty air and then, the taunting clicks of bootheels behind her.
“No, we were never a Sith,” the woman spoke, and Yadira turned to find a face strained, eyes enduring the pain of admission. “We were led astray by the dark, made a fool. We never meant for it to be so, we were not ourself, but that didn’t matter. Not to him, and not to those that followed him! The world still turned against us, as it will you. It doesn’t care about us. Any of us!”
Yadira watched the woman’s tension, how her expression became one of sadness, desperation, even pity, and processed it all with a suspicious glare. “I will never succumb to the dark side, so you don’t have to worry about that!”
Her attacking blade found several active blocks, her opponent defending with a renewed vigor as she was walked back with clashing sabers. “We did not think we would, either!” she called out over the noise. “It was war! It was war, and we lost everyone! Those we cared for, those it was our duty to protect, no one was spared! The light failed us!”
The woman finally countered. She lunged, they clashed, they whirled apart. Yadira leveled her saber, scowling across the distance.
Her opponent… dropped both of her sabers, only for them both to evaporate into some kind of ethereal, white-blue fire before they hit the ground, leaving her defenseless.
Somehow, that wasn’t as reassuring as it should have been.
“This path will leave you broken!” the woman snarled through… were those tears? “They will take your love, your spirit, your beauty, everything you are piece by piece until all that is left is a battered corpse no one will ever touch again, and if you’re lucky…”
The same ethereal fire caught all across her body, and in the flames, she began to lose her shape, as if suddenly buckling under her own weight. Her silhouette was hunched, and lopsided, and a gut-twisting horror struck Yadira to her very core at the sight left bare as the flames receded.
“…if you’re lucky, you’ll even be dead.”
Syndiari hadn’t the strength to move a muscle. If she’d still had eyes, she would’ve been too weak to open them, but her implanted visor was beaming images to her brain the moment the first notes of consciousness slipped back in.
Judging from her limited field of view, the shockwave had been near-universally devastating. Even Khem, who on Korriban had tanked all of Syndiari’s Force abilities like a pro, hadn’t gotten back up yet. Only two figures were left in the fight, and she slowly processed them as the Jedi herself, and the mysterious, blue-skinned Sith, locked in combat.
Or, what looked like combat at first. Yadira was swinging her saber with building frustration as the warrior danced around her with only half-hearted deflections against the neon green blade. Oddly enough, moment after moment, the light-red-skinned Jedi seemed to be scoring actual hits, only for the Sith to dodge cleanly away with no apparent damage to even her clothing.
She was saying something, the warrior, though Syndiari’s hearing hadn’t returned yet. Yadira’s replies seemed about as effective as her saber-work, and her confidence was slipping on both counts as much as she tried to hide it. She’d been in way over her head from the start – if the Sith wanted her dead, she would already be, and Syndiari found some faint, strange hope in that.
Finally, the fighting turned to a stalemate of sorts. Standing apart, Yadira held steady to her blade, lowering it towards her opponent. The Sith threw her sabers to the floor.
Or, towards the floor. The moment the weapons left her hands, they vanished into dispersing, pale wisps of that blue light from before – blades, hilts, and all. And then, in a brighter flash, the same thing happened to her clothes.
Syndiari might have turned away if she could physically move, although she was pretty sure she wouldn’t have been able to in any case. Before her was a woman with a body so broken she shouldn’t be standing, let alone fighting.
A set of bold, regularly-spaced pale white scars discolored the otherwise vibrant blue skin of her violently crushed and twisted torso. Her left foot was barely more than the stump of a heel, her stance suffering for it, and her left arm was almost skeletal, hanging limp off of a left shoulder that was, itself, hanging too low on her body. Her head needed to adjust awkwardly on her neck in order to look straight ahead, but her fiery glare had lost none of its intensity. She was a corpse, walking on most of two legs, yet for some unknown purpose, she was still determined.
And still hot, but like, in the same way Khem was hot. Intriguing, and a bit of a welcome challenge.
No, the unsettled, churning feeling that settled deep within Syndiari was something else. Obvious pain and torment, the utter disregard someone had had for her. It was what they were to people, and it wasn’t even a stretch to think that something like that might’ve—
Whatever conversation had happened in the meantime, it ended when the blue Twi’lek turned her head sharply up and to the side, her attention caught by something that didn’t seem obvious to anyone else. In another quick flash of fire, her skin was gone, or… something like that. What was actually left in her place was more of a bright neon blue, see-through, half-skeleton-with-a-wispy-tail thing, flying at an angle all the way up into the room’s high ceiling and phasing through it.
Huh. I guess she is part ghost.
That thought passed through Syndiari’s head like the unique and revelatory, but ultimately inexplorable and pointless observation it was – as if a k’lor’slug had uttered a sentence in perfect basic in the moments before it became the meal of a hungry hssiss.
Her smile, the one she kept up by flickering reserves alone as she rolled slowly onto a stable hand, was supported most comparably by the perfect chaos of crystal shards, the leftover fragments of a once-whole that balanced upon one another just so, in order to fill the hollow self the rest had vacated. This time, the pieces had shifted irreparably, a slow cascade failure restoring the truth of her emptiness as she pushed herself onto wavering feet.
In a few moments, the whole system would reset, and Syndiari would forget again, all those memories she didn’t deserve to. For now, she swayed listlessly back and forth on unsteady feet, her lekku brushing gently across her shoulders as they alone stayed vertical.
More observations passed on through, provoking only mild awareness. Khem was still out cold, and at the far end of the room, Mako was leant down over Zhosia, desperately trying to get the unconscious Togruta girl to wake up. At the exit that was now the nearer side, a group of Republic defenders lay dead, and the flickers of a pair of stealth field generators vanished over the horizon of the descending ramp that proceeded onwards.
So, that was where those two had gone. Using the battle as a distraction, and sneaking their way around to go after the target. Clever.
Probably for the best that they hadn’t gone up against Yadira. It’d been hard enough getting in the way of just Khem, and he was just a big brute, not a pair of coordinated assassins with rifles. She didn’t want to think about one of them getting a lucky shot in, but inevitably, she couldn’t—
One more observation. Yadira had just noticed the dead soldiers, and she was panicking now, her eyes wide and hurt as she screamed something and started rushing across the room.
That was…
That was…
Oh.
Her muscles almost didn’t comply. The power gathering around her could’ve just knocked her forward onto her face, but a flailing foot hit the ground and carried her through. Two hands braced on a saber hilt, she wound back over her left shoulder, and gave in to momentum.
With the crash of Syndiari’s full weight coming to a stop, the overhead strike of the rear blade smacked down Yadira’s from the side, and the reversing upswing of the fore caught it again from below, slowing the sprinting, now stumbling Jedi to a stop as the locked blades swung up between them. Syndiari spun into it, twirling around and jabbing with the reverse to ward Yadira back.
“Get out of the way!” Yadira cried, still panicked. “I don’t want to fight you!”
Syndiari bit down on a sneer, forcing the rage back through her body and into her clenched fists until orange volts of Force lightning radiated out along her saber blades. Her voice finally broke like the tears that couldn’t, a scream of vengeful torment as she lunged.
“Well, you SHOULD!”
With not a shot fired, only the hiss of knives and the on-off flicker of modulating stealth fields, the last in a short line of unfortunate bodies dropped to the floor. In the commotion of the clash of sabers stealthily left far behind, the brief, choking gasps had gone unheard, and such was the quiet end of the Republic troopers guarding the path to the escape pods.
“You can put aside your weapons,” grunted out the pitiful, heavily built man with cybernetics over his right eye and left brow, hunched and clutching his injured left flank. “I won’t try to run.”
“That’s not saying much,” a silk-smooth voice resounded like a whisper through the corridor, the observation’s end popping on the edge of teeth. “You wouldn’t make it five steps even if I wasn’t here to kill you.”
A dagger-hilt was drawn from the hooded speaker’s belt, twirled and snapped out to the side, and held steady to angle with each forward step. Slowly, a sickly-green glow began to spread down the three radial edges toward the trident point, the color piercing with its intensity in the half-dark of a blacked-out corridor dotted with small fires.
“That may be true,” Kilran’s aging, wounded target agreed with a tired, accepting nod. He breathed out a sigh, and shook his head, taking a moment to absorb the bodies on the ground and the distant sounds of the ship falling apart all around them. “I just wish it hadn’t had to come to this.”
The pair of assassins stopped in shadow, just on the threshold of the harsh emergency red that shone down on the General like a dramatic spotlight. “For what it’s worth,” the agent spoke, a twisted smile in the dark. “That Jedi girl will probably live. I’ve seen only one true kind of loyalty today, and it certainly doesn’t wear a uniform.”
Though confused, and deeply skeptical, the General seemed desperate enough to accept small relief from the words, yet resigned enough to shake his head gloomily. “As if any of it matters. It’s too late to stop what’s coming. Perhaps you’d understand, if you only knew. The weapons both sides are building… when the peace ends, they’ll be the death of us all.”
“That’s not exactly my concern,” the agent’s cool voice replied. Kaliyo stifled a giggle behind her.
The General looked up at her with a strange expression, both surprised and disappointed in himself that he had been. “You might think you’ll survive, but you won’t. None of us will. If not now, someday soon you’ll understand that.”
A furrowed, pitying laugh spread across the hooded woman’s hidden face. “No, no, you see… apocalypse is none of my concern, dear General, because half the people in the galaxy are begging for death, and for the other half, it’s only just.” Several idle fingers hooked around the edges of a hood, its wearer stepping out past the threshold of the shadow. “And as for me…”
The hood fell, and fiery light shone down upon a crown of sharpened horns, and the thick black markings that framed a pair of positively ravenous neon green eyes. The woman who’d once been Dyyrsa Tavryyl made a grin most vile, baring teeth.
“I’m dead already.”
Sabers clashed, this time a lonely dance of desperation on two sides.
“Please!” Yadira begged, with her green blade held at a raised-hilt diagonal in front of her, dodging the falling molten sparks as the red Twi’lek’s beam of crackling orange put pressure on from above. “Don’t do this! I need to save him!”
Her opponent wrinkled her nose in disgust, and drew her saber back only to slam it down harder “He’s not the one who needs saving!”
Yadira leapt back from the explosion of sparks, wincing at the sting as an orange volt traveled down her own saber and turned purple as it dispersed around her body. The dualsaber was pulsing and bright with the Sith woman’s deep hatred, as if set aflame, and against her will Yadira retreated backward as one would from a raging inferno. Her meager blocks were moves of desperation, often accompanied by painful shocks, against a weapon that shifted the light of the immense chamber by its sheer radiance alone.
“Fight me!” the woman demanded.
“No!” Yadira shouted back, surprising even herself.
Against everything she’d known without question only minutes ago, she was no longer able to see evil on a face so scarred. How could someone such as this woman not bear hatred? Her pain could be felt in the Force and beheld in her power. Was this how they made Sith? Break someone so completely their grasping hands caught only the dark side, as if tangled in an all-consuming web?
“Stand Aside! Please!”
At that, the woman sucked in a building hiss through grit teeth, and let loose a wail of seething anger. “You should HATE me!”
Her strikes carried on, building to a rapid flurry until the slight slowness of exhaustion catching up created a temporary pause.
“I’m a betrayer,” the Sith spat, as if it were the most horrid word she could think of, then cracked into a tensing scowl when she didn’t seem to get the reaction she wanted. “That should mean something! Or did they take that from you, too?”
Somehow, Yadira felt like she was missing something critical. Like this woman was looking straight into her soul, and to both of their shock, finding a hollow void instead.
She shuddered, and felt cold.
Dyyrsa watched with anticipation, as the General’s good eye absorbed her Zabrak features. He frowned, and shook his head.
“You think you can change it, don’t you?” he spoke, with sadness. “I’ve seen the story before. You hold on to the hope that if you play the part, you can better the Empire from within. But you’re only a fool if you think it’ll make any difference.”
At that moment, a distant, muffled detonation and a loud clang followed by several smaller ones heralded a squad of Imperial troopers blowing out a ceiling panel somewhere in the corridor behind, dropping to the floor and proceeding down the hallway. Six troopers, by the sound of their boots, forming up quietly behind the assassins and their target. About time you joined in the fun, Dyyrsa thought with an eyeroll.
If the General had been about to say anything more, he was quiet now, courteously and resignedly dropping the topic now that they had an audience.
“Change things?” Dyyrsa spoke candidly regardless, prompting a shocked expression from the man.
She stepped forward again, and leaned in, showing with her eyes just how much she didn’t care.
“You think I want to fix the Empire?” She twirled a glowing dagger, waving it idly as if in demonstration. “The Empire is an institution that believes pleasure slavery is a concept worth serious thought and implementation. That is not something you fix, that is something you burn to the fucking ground like Malak did Taris, but Before. I. Do. That…”
She watched the General’s bewildered fear, and paid her other senses to the increasing agitation of the soldiers behind her. She smiled, and drew back a moment, letting her dagger lean idly to the diagonal in the air beside her head.
“…someone needs to remind the people why this is exactly what they deserve.”
“She told me not to…” The Sith whispered, then growled back into a furious assault, blade meeting blade with sparking, coursing, painful electricity at each impact of her words. “But I was ANGRY! And I didn’t LISTEN!”
Yadira braced against each heavy attack, nearly faltering each time when the lightning shot through her muscles, but she held firm.
“My own FAMILY! My PARENTS! My BROTHER! We were FREE! We were free, and I LED THEM RIGHT TO US!”
She whirled her saber, and by the power of the lunge, Yadira half-expected it to throw a torrent of projectile lightning off the end of it. It was a narrow dodge, but the Sith snapped her head to the side and continued right into a series of quicker attacks. She was using her speed now, putting momentum behind every strike that Yadira struggled to match.
There was a moment’s space between them, and the Sith whirled her saber with the foreblade held high, bracing her feet and gathering the Force around her for a powerful diagonal cut. Yadira braced herself too, gathering power behind her overhead, cross-angled swing, focusing all her strength just on splitting the distance and matching the next attack with an effective block. The Sith lunged, and Yadira swung hard.
The Sith switched off her saber.
With a flick of her wrist, Dyyrsa sent the dagger backwards, the superheated edges spearing through a trooper’s helmet with ease. She ducked low and spun, sweeping the leg of another. The dagger in her left hand, subtly twirled into a reverse grip during the conversation, cut its forward blade across the man’s midsection as she brought it around in front of her, then sprung forward, the forked end catching on a raised blaster rifle and diverting its aim up into the ceiling.
Kaliyo’s vibroknife was stained in blood from the nearest trooper’s throat before the first body fell, and a cry rang out as she used it to stab another through an armor gap in the midsection. She twisted the knife with a smile, then reached back to pull her rifle over her shoulder, slamming the stock down on the man’s helmet and spinning it into proper grip just in time to deliver the killing shot to the trooper Dyyrsa had tripped and gutted.
Dyyrsa kicked out at the trooper in front of her, maneuvering her dagger to keep him from taking his rifle with him as he was slammed backward into the corridor wall. She quickly hurled said dagger forward, pinning it soundly through his torso and into the metal plate behind him.
She caught the harsh maneuvering and furious exertion behind her as the last trooper forewent aiming and attempted to bash her head in with his rifle, and ducked low, elbowing him in the midsection instead. She brought her arm up and slapped it down on his helmet, keeping him doubled over, and with a twisted smile slammed his head forward into the trooper she’d already pinned to the wall. His visor shattered and his scream was cut short as the protruding hilt-end of her dagger found a new home in his incoming eye socket.
Dyyrsa stepped back, and laughed.
Kaliyo joined her, as they both watched the body twitch and fall still. There were a few dying groans from the floor, and Kaliyo placed a grinning, unfeeling blaster bolt in the head of each man who might, by chance, still have been alive.
Dyyrsa made a show of taking it all in at a casual stroll, her amused grin later modified by only a playfully ached brow when she snapped back toward the General with her sidearm pointed squarely between his eyes.
“Dead people on two feet, is what you are,” she began again. “The Empire. The Republic. The Sith. The Jedi. The Hutts and the Syndicates all. By action or inaction, already complicit in the kinds of horrors there is no forgiveness for.”
She took a step closer, her aim not faltering.
“I’ll tell you a secret, General. I used to think I was the galaxy’s cruelest joke. But then I realized just how self-centered that is! Because the true joke of this sad, sad, cruel world… born to suffer, born to die, born to never be, while the rest of you delude yourselves into thinking absolutely anything at all is a worse problem… I’ll swear by it, it’s enough to drive a woman sane.”
Kaliyo giggled behind her, the sultry breath of her slow, pleased exhale only widening Dyyrsa’s grin.
“So what I am… is a monster. Because I choose to be. Because that’s. What. It takes. Because by what other standard are we to be judged? You’re all in my game now, you just don’t know it yet! In your veins, the venom that bides, a slow death you’ll come to realize was your own fault all along. Because the thing about jokes, you see, is they’re supposed to be funny…”
She let the moment build up, but when it was spent, switched off her cackling grin in an instant. Her face was for once, a cold and stern scowl as she stared down her blaster sights.
“…but this one’s just tokzic.”
The blaster shot filled the corridor like a crescendo, starting off the General’s choking gasps as the hole in his throat sizzled. He fell to the floor, and Dyyrsa smiled again, drawing another dagger as she loomed over his dying body.
“Give me your secrets, General…” she whispered as she crouched low, a dagger-point closing in on his intact ocular implants, “…and when Kaas City burns, they will see the fires from Coruscant.”
Yadira gasped, stumbled, and jumped back, her saber falling to a roll on the floor as her hands shot up to cover her mouth. Sickness welled in her stomach, her eyes wide and stung by acrid smoke.
The red Twi’lek was on her knees, hissing out her pain as she clutched at the deignited saberstaff in her grasp. The grisly, still-glowing, glancing burn began at her right temple and trailed off halfway down the lek where the contact with the blade had finally stopped.
Then, the Sith’s whimpering turned to a laugh, although one still marked by the very real pain she was experiencing. She shook herself through it, forcing a smile. “Perfect,” she whispered through an excruciating shudder.
Choking down the guilt, the sympathy pain, and her urge to vomit, Yadira finally found her voice. “Why!? Why would you—”
“I just said it, that should be enough.”
Breathing quickly, Yadira knelt down, her hands hovering tense in the air. Healing had never been her training’s focus, but if she could just get in close enough, maybe she could at least—
“You could’ve been my sister,” the Sith carried on, voice low and shaky. “If I had a sister. I guess… I should be glad I didn’t, she would’ve just… when I…” She started shaking more violently.
Yadira felt more unease, more worry strangling her chest, and spoke softly. “How old were you?”
“F-five…”
Yadira reached for the girl’s shoulder, felt her try to pull away, and grasped maybe-too-tightly. “You were a child. It isn’t right to punish yourself like this, and I don’t hate you.”
The Sith looked up, a lame smile beneath her visor. “That’s just cause you don’t really know what it’s like. To be one of us.”
Any thought in response to that didn’t get far, before a commotion on the other side of the room drew both their attention. The… creature was getting back up, growling hatred as it pushed itself to its feet. It took one look at the two women, snarled with its gnarly maw, hefted the massive vibrosword and began charging directly toward them.
Before Yadira could think to grab her saber, the Twi’lek Sith had sprung to her feet, her staff ignited again but held horizontally behind her. Her free hand was held forward, a halting palm.
“Khem, stop.”
The creature – ‘Khem’ – slowed pace, but grunted and clenched his fists in irritation. His wrathful, hungry gaze focused in on Yadira, and he spoke in an unknown tongue that made the Jedi shiver.
“I owe a debt, Khem!” The Twi’lek Sith all but screamed in return, her words scorching like fire and, strangely, catching Khem’s startled and undivided interest. “A debt to my people! I acted without honor. Do you understand?”
Khem appeared begrudging – was that a sigh? – but he lowered his weapon, more of that strange language filling the space after.
Yadira eyed them both cautiously, approaching from the other Twi’lek’s injured side. “Hey, umm… what’s your name?”
“Syndiari.” The girl almost managed a convincing smile.
“Syndiari… if sparing me is paying your debt, then that’s how you can pay it, alright?” Yadira held up her hands toward the burn. “But this… let me try to heal this, if I can. Okay?”
Khem turned his head at the words, and started walking slowly around the pair. She wasn’t at all sure where it had come from, but Yadira was struck with the sudden fear that at the sight of Syndiari’s injury, the creature would go back on his apparent word and kill her after all. Instead, however, he breathed out more of the strange language, reaching out his own hands with their massive talons splayed and warding her out of the vicinity.
What sprung from those talons was… it looked like a softer version of Force lightning, if that made sense. Wisps of purplish energy, connecting to the wound and stitching skin back together. From the violent motions with which the flesh repaired itself, it appeared to be a much more painful process than Jedi Force healing, and by the clench in Syndiari’s jaw, that was probably an accurate assessment, but the end result was the same as if a far more skilled healer than Yadira had been at work – there was no sign at all that an injury had ever been present.
Yadira exhaled with relief, though a voice in the dark of her thoughts was already convincing her it would be short-lived.
“Zozi? Zozi wake up!”
“Please…”
She woke up dazed, a shadowy silhouette hanging over her. She tensed and shuddered immediately, alarmed and struggling to shake off the ghost of contact that had just left the skin of her face.
Her fists clenched, the panic setting in. She tried to resolve the silhouette, her vision focusing…
Mako.
No, no, she… she trusted Mako. It was okay.
She exhaled, took another deep breath and slowly calmed. “What was that?!?” Mako was demanding all the while. “Was that the shield thing?”
Zhosia nodded slowly.
“Don’t you ever do that again!” Mako was shouting, and it sounded… off. There were tears in her eyes, her voice choked.
She had a point. If one of them needed to be incapacitated, it would be easier for Zhosia to carry Mako to safety than the other way around. Why had she forgotten that? Where even were they, now? The room still looked like…
Weakly, Zhosia sat up, with Mako helping lift her by the shoulder. They were still in the room where they’d been fighting Yadira, and when she scanned it again for any danger, Mako seemed just as surprised by the unexpected sight at its center.
Syndiari, Khem, and Yadira all standing together, weapons put away.
“Oh, good, we’re friends now,” she grumbled as she worked at standing, relaxing her shoulder against Mako with the knowledge she wouldn’t have to fight right away. The three others seemed to notice them now, too, making way for the apparently peaceful gathering to expand to five.
No one seemed suspicious of their motives, which Zhosia probably should have taken offense to, but she was too sore to care.
Of course, the second the Jedi had a moment to relax her guard, her face slowly fell to sunken horror, and she bolted off toward the doorway, where… wait, were those bodies? Zhosia’s strength was nearly back enough to give chase, but it didn’t matter. She and Mako both jumped a bit at the arms that settled across their lower backs, and Syndiari’s burst of speed brought them all forward.
“No, no, no… NO!” Yadira cried, running through the mess of both Republic and Imperial corpses before stopping at the body of an older and more broadly-built man, smoke still rising from the blaster burn on his neck.
Yadira shook, clenched her fists, and hardened her face into a scowl. She was running again, overtaken with a wounded, desperate and distraught fire that continued through the awkward, close-quarters elevator ride they all had to take down to the port hangar. When the lift doors opened, it was a straight-shot down the corridor toward a red-lit room, where two figures stood with their backs exposed as they fussed over an apparently non-functional holoterminal.
The agent had her hood down – she was Zabrak, it turned out, leaving Zhosia to wonder how her hood didn’t get holes in it. Yadira’s only concern, however, was… something distinctly un-Jedi-like, if Zhosia knew what she thought she knew.
“Hello?” the agent continued to remark, amusedly, at the terminal. Upon closer inspection, it was, in fact, working, it was just currently projecting a space with nothing in it. A shrug of the shoulders marked the woman’s causal turn to face her aggressor, a smile on bared teeth and the poisonous green of her tattoo-shadowed eyes. “Looks like we might have two ships to ourselves. For however much longer this one lasts, that is.”
A distant explosion reverberating through the hull necessitated and punctuated the addendum.
Yadira snarled through the musings, warning the agent down with her saber but, with strained difficulty, stopping herself short of actually striking. “Why!?” her contorting face asked in a shout, instead. “Why did you do it?”
The Rattataki woman snorted, and moved up to the agent’s left, rifle held loose but a clear threat. The agent herself held up her hands in mock-surrender. “Why did I do my job? Really? That’s the part you’re having troub—” she stopped, squinted at the ceiling, and held up a finger. “You know, that’s actually sort of legitimate, now that I—”
“You killed him!” Yadira broke in furiously. “He was unarmed! He couldn’t hurt anyone, what is wrong with you?”
The agent grinned.
It was the scary kind.
“What’s wrong with me,” she intoned deviously, half in sing-song, “is that I’m the incorrigible, intrepid sort that’s inclined to invest, incomparable to those tempestuous insects that infest the Empire with their incessant self-centeredness… relatively speaking.”
Stopping short of taking Yadira condescendingly by the shoulder, which for a moment, it almost appeared she might, the agent took a step closer to the Twi’lek Jedi.
“And what’s wrong with you isn’t quite that you’re incapable, so much that you’re still letting others decide in whom and for what reason.” She arched a brow and pointed back down the hallway they’d all arrived from. “Was that truly the kind of man you’d give your life protecting? One who faithfully served the Empire for decades, assisting in the slaughter of millions, then had a change of heart at the end of his life because billions was too much?”
The agent, whose face had momentarily contorted in a sharp grimace to almost match Yadira’s, false-acquiesced with a smirk and arms shrugging wide. The back of her descending left hand landed on the barrel of the Rattataki’s rifle and pushed it lower by a fraction.
“Yes, yes, I know, an old man’s regrets, but if you ask me, I’d prefer a young man’s regrets and an old man’s peace at having atoned. What are the chances, you think, in all his years, that your precious ‘General’ never partook in his own culture’s excesses? Tell me, when he looked at you, did you see guilt in those eyes?”
“That’s enough!” a burning-eyed Yadira lunged forward – not an attack, but a threat. Zhosia jumped, moving to direct herself and Mako backward, while Syndiari flinched deep in indecision.
All the Zabrak woman did was clench her hand around the barrel of the Rattataki’s weapon, keeping it pointed at the floor.
“Fine then,” she replied curtly with a drawl, rolling her eyes before breaking her gaze and moving it across Zhosia, Mako, Syndiari, and Khem in turn. More distant explosions rocked the silence, and her eyes narrowed. “As for the rest of you, you’ve acted quite in credit to your inclinations, but it’s your dedication that needs be put on trial, and personally, I’m suspect.”
With the quiet snarl of sensing a threat, Syndiari stepped up beside Yadira, the snap-hiss of her lightsaber acting as her immediate response. At that, Khem gripped fingers around his sword’s hilt, and even Mako drew her blaster pistol. Zhosia looked on without moving, sensing something wasn’t quite so straightforward.
The agent took a clenching hold on the quickly-reacting rifle of her companion, passing the woman a reassuring glance before steadying her grin. “The operative prerequisite is are you willing to follow through, because you haven’t saved her life yet.”
Something closer to understanding passed over the others, then. Weapons stayed ready, but a few sets of eyes drew to evaluating squints.
The agent breathed through the standoff, smile widening and eyes darkening as the corridor was struck by reverberation. “A little treason between friends isn’t beyond my consideration, far from it, but as pertains to our momentary escape and what must happen after… what I’m looking for is the knowledge as to which, if any of you, qualify as witnesses.”
Syndiari huffed an impatient sigh. “Pretty sure we’re on the same page.”
Mako slowly lowered her pistol. “Ugh, fine. So, what’s your big plan, then?”
Yadira, however, now that she’d finally processed the contents of the discussion, wasn’t so agreeable as she stared down the agent yet again. “What are you talking about? I’m not going anywhere with you, murderer!”
And just like that, things were escalating again. Yadira wasn’t letting go, and the agent’s attempted warnings about the Brentaal Star’s imminent demise were needlessly provoking her. It was noise, noise and threats, as the ship continued to fall apart. They were getting nowhere, tangled in cords they couldn’t cut, dragging not just themselves, but everyone else down along with them.
Zhosia barely heard her own growl, her own scream. Before she really knew what she was doing, she was standing between them, hands outstretched in front of and behind her, and facing Yadira with bared teeth.
From their faces, Mako was scared, Syndiari was surprised, and Yadira was shocked into silence.
“You can choose ONE. THING.” Zhosia hissed through her fangs. “One thing in this kriffed-up galaxy to never compromise, and for everything else, you just have to live with the consequences. So, what’s it gonna be? Do you want revenge or do you want to get off this ship, alive?”
With the shaking around them becoming more violent, Yadira wavered. Her eyes were searching deep into Zhosia’s, as if looking for an answer she was too scared to look for in herself. In the end, it was Syndiari she glanced at uncomfortably, before nodding weakly and deactivating her saber. Zhosia didn’t know what had happened between them before, but it was apparently enough to get her to stand down now.
After a collective breath, there was silent agreement to make haste, the Zabrak and the Rattataki taking the lead as they rushed on. There were more Imperial troopers in the space between the blast doors and the shuttle, all running for the ship as explosions rocked the hangar. Neon green blaster bolts took each one in the back, their bodies becoming prone obstacles for the increasingly-more-intricate leaps their cackling killers performed over each one. A swath of the agent’s thrown daggers skewered the crowd of men that had gathered near the shuttle ramp, killing them all with a hiss of acidic poison.
“That’s the price,” the agent smiled at a clearly uncomfortable Yadira as they both stepped up the ramp aside of the body rolling down it. “If you’re going to live, anyone who poses a threat to you must die.”
The Rattataki woman was grinning dangerously as they all took their seats, she and her companion placing themselves closest to the front of the shuttle. She gestured forward with her pale grey eyes, a question on her lips as the ship drifted out of the landing bay and into open space.
“What about the pilot?”
The agent returned the grin. “I’m a pilot.”
Before anyone could react, she’d thrust a dagger with glowing green edges through the back of the pilot’s chair, its occupant choking out his last, strangled breath on the other side. She retracted it with a loud snicker as the Rattataki climbed forward and tipped the body onto the floor, settling into the copilot’s chair while the agent herself took the seat most recently vacated.
Zhosiavana knew something wasn’t quite right the moment she stepped off the shuttle.
She’d seen a lot of Imperials die today, likely the larger share of the Black Talon’s personnel, but she’d still been bracing to meet some sort of opposition upon landing. Instead, the hangar was dead quiet, and a wave of discomfort seemed to pass over the group. Zhosia had a vague memory of the agent’s unanswered holocall to the bridge, a detail quickly lost to issues that, at the time, had been more pressing.
Now, it seemed an ominous portent.
It wasn’t long before bodies started showing up – blaster burns, all of them. Precise shots with little sign of a struggle. Someone had taken them by surprise, and the several protocol droids standing oblivious amidst the carnage offered no answers.
They took the elevator up to the bridge, and found it in a similar state. Sylas and the bridge crew had been shot dead on the main deck, some with pistols drawn and others looking as if they’d taken rounds to the back as they tried to flee. In the center of it all, the shining silver halves of NR-02 were resting a few meters apart on the ground, the evidence pointing to a clean, vertical lightsaber cut having split him neatly down the middle. On each half, the droid’s inert forearm had its vambrace panels split open, concealable blaster cannons visible where they must have been hidden prior.
The holocall projector above the left-side station was active, and just like the call the agent had been attempting from the Brentaal Star, this one also revealed a depiction of empty space. Empty except for the small rendering of… something, lingering at near floor-level and cut off by the range of the call. It looked almost like the toe of a boot, but the angle was wrong.
The agent stepped forward and shut off the call. In was unclear what the rest of her plan might have been, because at that moment, the uncomfortable silence was broken by a faint, pained whimper that hadn’t come from anyone in the group.
Zhosia blinked, conceding her earlier wager at the sight that greeted her next, and some small, unused corner of her tired heart found compassion enough to let out a soft breath of relief.
Ensign Brukarra was alive, slumped up against one of the forward consoles and clutching at a severely blaster-burned left shoulder. It took Mako’s concerned shout for some semblance of awareness to hit the redheaded woman’s wide, horror-stricken eyes, and she seemed able to do nothing but silently sob as the others started crowding around her.
The Zabrak agent was strangely focused and professional as she set up a kolto probe to tend to the burn. The oddity of the situation was enough to draw a weak sneer of disgust from Brukarra, but Mako quicky pulled her attention on the other side, kneeling down to hold the woman’s hand while Zhosia stayed lingering back at a few meters’ distance. Yadira moved in and hovered beside Mako, her very obvious Jedi robes only making the Imperial even more confused, but it was the collective, assuring warmth offered by them both that seemed to finally pull her out of her shock.
“It was Kilran,” Brukarra managed to choke out after several unsuccessful attempts, almost spitting the grand moff’s name. “His droid started… started… it just started shooting everyone!”
She was deep in tears, her smudged eyeliner quickly becoming even more of a mess. Zhosia stepped closer and cautiously knelt down as well, and Syndiari joined her soon after, sitting with her gauntlets crossed over her skirt-wrapped knees and frowning with sympathetic attentiveness. That left only Khem and the Rattataki woman wisely on the periphery, both showing clear disapproval and disinterest but neither making a scene of it.
Zhosia looked between Brukarra and the pieces of NR-02’s body, then focused in on the ensign. “Who stopped him,” she asked, already suspecting the logical, yet vastly improbable answer.
Brukarra regained her composure enough to look Zhosia in the eyes, a surprisingly soft gesture for a Human. “The Sith.” She passed a glance at Syndiari. “The… other one. Everyone was dying… I was running, and then I was hit, and I was on the ground… I looked back… I thought I was going to die too, but then she just, sort of, appeared in between us, swinging a lightsaber up behind her like it was nothing. That silver blade…”
She took a long breath, her eyes having drifted over the scene and up to the console where the call had been open.
“Kilran’s dead too. He called on the holo, and she…”
Zhosia blinked surprise, but Syndiari perked up with a sudden grin. “Wait, did she do the Force-choke-through-the-holocall thing? I so wanna learn how to do that!”
Brukarra shook her head, wincing. “No, it was… it was like she was hurting herself, but it happened to him instead. It was horrible…”
Zhosia decided it was a good thing that mystery woman seemed to, more or less, be on their side.
Brukarra didn’t look like she had anything else to say, and for a moment, there was a collective, dreadful suspicion directed toward the agent. To the relief of most, the Zabrak simply finished tending to the wound and stepped away, exchanging a look with the Rattataki that ended with them both wandering off to somewhere else on the ship. It was only then Zhosia noticed that Syndiari had somehow disappeared from right beside her, and Khem was gone too.
With a look, and a sigh, Zhosia settled herself in closer to the others. She put a hand on Brukarra’s knee, and with her eyes, met the Human halfway.
There was something, at least. Something she chose to believe meant Brukarra was beginning to understand. The sympathy and yet judgement, the temporary truce, the walls she still wasn’t going to let down regardless of what her heart wanted in that moment or any moment. The trust that was too broken to ever be repaired.
By the sadness in Yadira’s eyes, maybe she was just starting to understand too.
Syndiari could hear the hum of the hyperdrive.
She’d worked her way deep into the ship, through maintenance corridors and into what looked like a rarely-used crawlspace. The lights were dim and what intensity they had was focused elsewhere, blocked by corners and distance and rendering the soft edges of her body a moonlit silhouette within a shadow. On the chance anyone was looking for her, they would hopefully have a very, very hard time finding her here.
Or okay, there probably wasn’t any stopping that half-ghost woman from showing up if she decided to make another appearance, but everyone else would have to struggle through the same maze of too-small entrances that still had Khem tripped up on a corner a few rooms back.
Really, she just hadn’t a clue what she would’ve wanted to say.
It wasn’t usually like this. Whenever she broke down, it was because she’d remembered again all the lives she’d stolen and all the different horrors they could have become. But this time her head was pounding fierce, her body weighed down, with the echoes of her own screams and of all the times she’d wanted to. She hadn’t had this kind in a while, the kind that was even worse because the guilt was still there, but now it was just about her selfishness.
Wrapped up tight in the warming fabric of her robes, she held her knees to her chin and tried to find a good resting spot up against the wall. She fell over a couple times, unable to do anything calmly or carefully. Her movements were too sharp, and impatient. She ended up curled on the floor, breathing and waiting for the shivering to stop.
By the vibrations, Khem had finally figured out his way around that corner and was jogging to catch up. His footfalls slowed as he approached, but then… nothing. No ancient language, no annoyed growling, no sharp breath.
Syndiari didn’t really care what he thought of her. She didn’t have enough self-preservation left to be afraid, even with the constant not-so-subtle threats. He was bound to serve her, or whatever, and he obviously wasn’t happy about that, but his complaints had never been as biting as they could’ve been. He used to work for some really, really evil guy who did a lot of horrible things to a lot of people. He knew what a slave was, but didn’t seem to think it was worth bringing up. He wasn’t going to call her out, but it wasn’t like he’d understand either.
Not that she expected anyone to understand, with the way she acted. You flirt with everything that moves, or you have trauma, pick one. She rolled the eyes she didn’t have. Maybe that was why she was avoiding people.
She had the strength of spite to push herself back up to a sitting position, but not much else. The crystal lattice was regrowing, but only slowly, a few pieces falling out again every time she had a self-validating thought. There was no winning here, just forgetting for a while.
There was a shift in the air, and in the shadows, and Khem was sat down next to her. They didn’t look at each other, and neither of them spoke. Syndiari huddled into his side and worked through the rest of her shivering.
A few minutes later, she was gazing at the dark ceiling with her elbows out and her hands tucked behind her lekku. She arched her back with a smiling exhale, and tilted her head until she could see Khem’s face from upside-down. She held the pose for a long, quiet moment, grinning all the while.
“…Come on, aren’t you at least a little tempted?”
Khem gave her the look, accompanied by a quiet snarl-sigh.
Syndiari laughed it off and returned to her not-stargazing, sliding her body around with particular intent as she got comfortable. “One of these days, Khem. One of these days…”
Dyyrsa Tavryyl was artfully cleaning her knives when the door hissed open. She barely looked up, and gave the hint of a smile at the Human woman’s pointed scowl.
Clearly, Ensign Brukarra disapproved of hers and Kaliyo’s excessive use of the Officers’ lounge. Her eyes followed the line of half-empty bottles on the counter all the way to the Rattataki woman herself, currently passed out and slumped onto the edge.
“…Care for a drink?” Dyyrsa taunted, baring just a hint of teeth.
The Human shook her head, the tiredly unkempt ends of her ruby-red hair swaying out of place. “I want you to answer me,” she voiced instead, mustering more courage in that tiny, broken voice than Dyyrsa had given her credit for. “Tell me why you did it.”
Dyyrsa grinned perhaps-prematurely at the in. “Oh, I’ve done a lot of—”
“The captain,” the ensign spat, the rush of anger overworking her tear-stained face until it collapsed back into something more suited to the eyeliner smeared down her cheeks. “Why did you kill Captain Orzik?”
“Because I’m an Imperial,” Dyyrsa gave simply. “We kill each other… for the smallest things, really: disloyalty, outliving one’s usefulness… daring to be even a half-decent person. Your captain acted with reasonable, rational judgement, and that simply can’t be allowed here. If you haven’t figured this all out by now, you’re blind and naïve and it’s only by the grace of ghastly, Force-magic apparitions that you’re somehow not dead yet.”
Brukarra didn’t look convinced. “You’re lying.”
Dyyrsa brightened her eyes. “How could you tell? Was it the seething, dripping hypocrisy your entire culture is infested with to its core? It’s all true, I promise you yet, but you’re correct, dear ensign. That’s not the reason. I killed Captain Orzik because he was an Imperial.”
The eyes on her were somewhere between confused and jadedly skeptical.
“A group of six aliens, and one obvious sympathizer,” Dyyrsa pondered mockingly. “I suppose Kilran’s luck truly ran out when that was all that was available. Not so difficult to guess they all hate the Empire as much as I do, funny how you keep thinking you can get us all to play nice. You may have thought your captain was innocent, but he’s just as much a part everything we’ve suffered as those who favor their cruelty openly.”
“That’s not true!” Brukarra insisted, fists clenched. “He was a kind man, he never—”
“He was the captain of a starship. If they liked him that much, he played the game too.”
“What would you have him do, then?” Brukarra demanded. “Speak out against slavery? Hire aliens on the crew?”
Dyyrsa laughed. She cackled high into the ceiling, until it echoed out around the walls and even caused Kaliyo to shift with a light groan in her unconsciousness.
“No, dear ensign,” she smiled. “Unless he did it loud enough for the Imps to kill him on sight. If he’d smuggled escapees along with his passengers, he’d be a wobbler prone to charity. If he’d defected to the Republic, he’d be a self-assured coward.”
Dyyrsa stood up, her horns glinting in the light and casting filtered shadows down her tattooed face. Ensign Brukarra flinched, but that was only the beginning of her horror.
“Now, if the good captain had simply turned his ship around and crashed it into the Imperial Citadel, then maybe, maybe there’d be a case for saving his mortal soul. Proportional suffering… well, in this case, I’m afraid it demands a level of action quite unheard of in your small, deluded minds. Worlds must burn for this, and I won’t shed a tear. Any Imperial who hasn’t already died for their defiance, deserves to for their complicity.”
Brukarra stood aghast for just long enough to be amusing, but she was smarter than she looked.
“Then don’t I deserve to die too?”
Dyyrsa half-smiled her resigned congratulations. “Ah,” she admitted, as she sat back down, arms crossed evenly on the counter’s edge.
Brukarra kept up her catlike sneer. “Why’d you save me,” she muttered, getting the words out without the decency of making them a proper question.
“Because you’re the one who didn’t fit,” Dyyrsa teased. “Not in my plan, and perhaps not in anyone else’s plans, either. Or should I say worldviews. The fact, I imagine, is that you care, more than we were ready for. Enough that maybe someday, you’d start caring about the right things. But I’d hurry up if I were you. Your Human-girl tears got you in the door, but they won’t get you far.”
Ensign Brukarra stared, and as much as she worked to hide the minute movements of her eyes, considered. Her distaste never faded, but something had changed.
“None of it’s true, is it?” she asked.
Dyyrsa hummed. “Please, I can see you’re smarter than that.”
“I meant you,” the ensign clarified, pressing further. “You believe all those things, but they’re not your reasons, are they?”
Dyyrsa let her eyes darken, as she sighed.
Shaking in her anger, maybe frustration too by now, Brukarra made herself unclench her fists, and met the darkened gaze.
“Tell me the truth.”
“Oh, you don’t want that,” Dyyrsa began, letting it stand just long enough to watch the ensign’s rage build again. “But… I concede.”
In the relative calm, the few quiet seconds in the desolate lounge, Dyyrsa’s eyes tracked toward the still, slumped form of Kaliyo.
“Look at her,” she directed with a gesturing hand. “What do you see? I’ll tell you what. This woman is a vile and sadistic opportunist. She drinks to excess, parties like no tomorrow, kills for fun, and laughs in the face of tragedy. She cares only for herself, and her own enjoyment, and she’s falling.”
Her glare met Brukarra’s confused eyes.
“Would you catch her?”
The room was silent again, Dyyrsa’s words not quite clicking.
“Would you catch her?” she repeated. “Or is she just as disposable to everyone else as she is to Imperial Intelligence? Are you all just waiting patiently for her to self-destruct so you can finally be rid of her? Rest easy, though, it’s a moot point. She’s stubborn, and set on the path she’s chosen. She’ll never let anyone catch her, only fall with her.”
She grimaced, but hummed back into a poisonous smile.
“Does that satisfy your curiosity? That I killed your captain because I needed to kill someone? That while I may be as twisted as she is, I must keep up the charade that I’m as heartless? That underneath it all, it’s her game I’m playing while you’re all playing mine? How horribly you must think of us both, then. But what is the question, really? Is she a monster because she feels too little? Am I, because I feel too much? Take a look at that Twi’lek, Syndiari – an Imperial brand across her face that took her eyes – and you’ll see it doesn’t matter, because in a time and a place like this one, there is yet need of monsters.”
Ensign Brukarra looked small, discomforted, sinking into herself. Maybe not everything had gotten though, but Dyyrsa would place her bets that enough had.
Maybe there was saving this one after all.
“We’re going to tell them the whole crew died,” Dyyrsa began slowly, with a faint and faded grin. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be conspicuous enough to contradict that.”
The ensign gulped, but was at least processing her options. Finally, she closed her eyes and breathed, then wrinkled her nose in disgust. “Don’t suppose you’re planning on being of any help?”
Dyyra grinned dangerously. “No, I’m staying right here.”
Brukarra breathed out her frustration through a scowl. “Course you’ve got to be difficult…” she muttered to herself, pausing for only a moment of sad, angry contemplation before stepping up toward the counter.
Her hand and Dyyrsa’s met on the neck of a half-empty bottle.
“Not that one,” the Zabrak hissed against the Human’s still-furious glare.
Brukarra huffed, but relented, pulling her fingers out from under Dyyrsa’s grasp. She chose an unopened bottle, decompressing the stopper as she made her wordless exit.
Dyyrsa’s face fell, letting her guilt pass while the woman’s back was turned. “Feel free, of course, to seek comfort from someone who isn’t me.”
The door to the lounge hissed closed, and all was quiet.
Dyyrsa waited a few minutes, then put her knives away, clearing room on the counter for her kolto probe, diagnostic scanner, and toxin scanner – while the labels on the lined-up bottles and the visible record of their remaining contents presented a theoretical summary of everything Kaliyo had ingested, there was no telling what she might’ve snuck in from her personal stash.
“Only fall with her,” whispered Dyyrsa, injecting herself in the thigh with a stimulant and resisting the urge to cackle from the high. She set up a projection of the instruction manuals for the new medical equipment and ran a hand down Kaliyo’s wrist, stretched idle on the counter as it was, until she found the passed-out Rattataki woman’s so-far steady pulse.
Each beat brought a calm to the rush of awareness that was dispersing itself through Dyyrsa’s body. She settled in, half-leaning on the counter, attuning herself to the steady rhythm and refreshing herself on the knowledge she’d need in case it slipped.
It was going to be a long night.
Zhosia took one slightly-less deep breath when Mako’s slicing finally sealed the door.
They were still on an Imperial ship, and there were probably dozens of ways anyone who was determined enough could kill them without even entering the room. But it was somewhat of an illusion of safety, and a solid barrier against any direct threat.
“Kinda feel guilty for doing this, but…”
Zhosia nodded in reply, secretly thankful Mako echoed her paranoia enough to make the decision for her. They’d kept Brukarra and Yadira company for long enough – and just Yadira for a few minutes after Brukarra wandered off – but the bounty-hunting pair hadn’t slept since Hutta and they weren’t planning on drifting off out in the open.
It wasn’t like anyone was using the barracks anyway. Without a crew, it was just an empty room with a few racks for stored blaster rifles and three sets of bunk beds in the back left corner. Zhosia started unfastening the clasps on her outer armor as she crossed the floor and sat down on the lower bunk farthest from the door.
Mako sat on the middle bunk and faced her, the Human girl seeming unsure of herself. She didn’t have any paneling to take off, but she had her hands clasped nervously, waiting for something.
Zhosia exhaled, and looked to the floor. “I didn’t mean you.”
“Huh?”
“That stuff I said before, about revenge.” She turned an eye up at Mako, deadly serious. “I didn’t mean you. I’m still on board with this.”
Mako visibly deflated, finally getting it. “I mean, you did make some good points… It’s just…”
She whimpered, starting to tear up. Zhosia allowed her that, feeling a bit guilty for bringing it up.
Mako and Braden had been close… whatever their relationship had been. Zhosia had passed on her one opportunity to ask, and now, well… she had enough tact to know it was a bit too late to ask the grieving girl whether she was mourning her father or her lover. Mako kept name-dropping the former, but did she seem a little too quick to say that? She didn’t look… hurt, by him, at least, and that was as far as Zhosia would make it her business.
“Hey, Zozi?”
Zhosia looked up. She didn’t know when Mako had started using that nickname, but responding to it was weirdly automatic. If anyone else had ever used it, she couldn’t remember.
“There’s… uh, something I’ve been meaning to ask you, and…”
Now Mako was very nervous, her sadness almost forgotten in the way she looked across at Zhosia with caution and fear in her eyes. And then she stayed like that, for way too long.
“…Well?” Zhosia prodded with an encouraging smile. “What was it?”
“Uh…” Mako winced, squinting one eye. “Well, it’s just… I mean… It’s just something I’ve heard, so if I’m way off base here, if it’s some dumb stereotype or made up or—”
“Mako.”
“—and when you woke up before it kinda felt like it was the wrong move so—”
“Mako.”
She blinked, finally. “Whuh?”
Zhosia smiled, snickering internally. “Mako, please, just say it before you break yourself.”
Slumping her shoulders, Mako took a calming breath, but still looked cautious and small. “It’s just… you’re a Togruta, and it seems like you’ve been alone for a while, and I don’t know if the… the… er, the uhm, physical contact thing…”
Zhosia went still, awkwardness having taken over her staring eyes. The hands that had been taking off her armor stopped suddenly, refusing to go an inch farther in their task.
Mako noticed and winced. “That’s not a thing, is it?”
Zhosia stopped blinking enough to answer. “No, it… it’s real, it’s just…”
“…needs to be another Togruta, or…?”
“Well no, not… not necessarily…”
Mako let the slow moment pass, silence easing the tension in the air. Her face and her voice were sad and honest. “Would you let me?”
Zhosia deflated, closed her eyes, breathed, and nodded without looking. She fished removing her armor with the torso piece, closing up the back panel that hinged out to cover her rear lek before setting it next to the rest, within reach on the floor. She felt the gentle shift when Mako settled next to her on the bed, and the hammering of her heart in anticipation was brought to quiet by the first soft, experimental intrusions into her space as she drew back the cheap military covers and shifted herself across to the farther edge.
She paused, halfway through instinctively curling in on herself, when Mako started to occupy that space instead. She let her legs relax for the first time in a while, successfully convincing herself to straighten them back out. Unexpectedly, Mako started out half-rolled over her, with a leg arched up over Zhosia’s midsection. A shudder of discomfort was thankfully enough to discourage her back to lying in parallel, and Zhosia pulled their bodies close, face to face, so that they’d shield each other, before wrapping them both up in the covers and settling to stillness in the shade of the upper bunk and the warmth of Mako’s arms.
“What did you choose?”
Zhosia made a confused noise at Mako’s sleepy question.
“You said you could choose one thing,” Mako clarified. “What did you choose?”
Zhosia took in a breath. Mako’s cheek was lightly rested on her right lek, forehead tucked under her chin while Zhosia kept her eyes on the door. Zhosia’s body shuddered minutely as she processed the words, but it was enough for Mako to tighten her protective grip in response.
“You don’t have to tell m—”
“I chose being free,” Zhosia whispered quickly. Blinking wetness out of her eyes.
Another quiet moment passed. Where Mako’s hands were planted on her shoulder blades, the touch of fingertips became soothing.
“I was… stuck under a fucking fruit basket,” Zhosia tried to laugh through, before drifting steadily toward deadpan. “Like something out of a lame holomovie. No one ever saw me, not… not when the blasters started going off, speeders circling the village. They shot my parents. Dragged my sisters out of the house, started… evaluating.”
She felt Mako’s shaking now, the tightness of her embrace pressing down like a vice. “Zozi…” she murmured desperately, in tears.
“I saw the looks on their faces,” Zhosia hissed, finally cracking a dark smile that could’ve rivaled Syndiari’s or the agent’s. “Burned into my brain. I could barely walk and I already knew exactly what the galaxy wanted from me.” The tension in her body boiled over, only stopped from becoming a writhe by Mako’s secure grip – a silent, weeping dedication that exhausted her fury to pain and her fear to a rocky calm.
Zhosia bared her fangs in a snarl, but took in slow breaths, her body rising and falling as tears pooled around her tightly-closed eyes.
“So, when I win this… when I’m the champion, no one will ever mess with me. And I can’t let anything get in my way. That’s what I meant by… the consequences.”
She took one deep breath, and held Mako tighter, as if to never let her go. She could feel the way Mako responded, that she knew this was something else now. Zhosia let the long silence pass, becoming only sadness and regret in the arms that kept her from falling to pieces.
“When I was in Nem’ro’s palace, he had… these two girls chained up, in those horrible outfits. A Twi’lek, and… this Human girl, with a brand under her eye. And I keep thinking… that could’ve been us. That WAS someone like us, sitting there exposed with faces like they’d forgotten how to speak because there wasn’t a point to being a person anymore. And I will never forgive myself for leaving them there. For… for working for that monster!”
“Zozi… I’m sorry,” Mako choked out as she rubbed Zhosia’s back.
“Not your fault, I signed up for it,” Zhosia muttered. “It was what I had to do. It’s always going to be what I have to do. Doesn’t mean it won’t kill me inside. Maybe it already did.”
Yet somehow, it all felt like a weight gone, and the quiet that passed next was bereft of even tension. Just the distant, ambient churning of a ship in space and the two heartbeats reverberating through entwined bodies.
“M’still here,” Mako mumbled, the backs of her fingers so-softly brushing the side of Zhosia’s rear lek as the tips dug a soothing massage between the rigid bones of her back. “Thanks… for telling me. I wanna understand. I wanna be here for you.”
Zhosia was crying again. Tears of a different kind. That was it, she was still here, holding Zhosia only more and more fiercely. She hadn’t been scared off, hadn’t—
“And it’s a little debatable that you worked for him.”
A choked exhale audibly changed in pitch from the smile that formed around it halfway through. Bleak laughter existed for just a moment, but it was there.
Yadira Ban looked in the mirror, and frowned.
The Imperial uniform fit her tighter than her robes had, not quite constricting but well enough a metaphor for what it symbolized. Brukarra had suggested a hasty backstory of a newly-titled Sith flaunting her standing in the Empire, but neither of them had much confidence it would be convincing. Still, anything was better than showing up on Dromund Kaas in Jedi robes.
It was something else about the visual that had her stuck in thought, however. Something subtle in the Force, harmonic, although she couldn’t possibly imagine how that could be.
She shrugged it off and strolled back out onto the empty bridge. She’d been the only one who seemed to care enough to move the bodies, more out of concern for Brukarra than anyone. The ensign was now back from wherever she’d wandered off to, and sitting at the main control station, in one of the chairs Yadira had found in storage and placed there – why weren’t there more chairs on the bridge anyway?
Brukarra was half-slumped over the computer, her elbow resting in one of the only spots on the dashboard without lighted buttons. She reached toward the trapezoidal shelf in front of the proximity scanner, seemingly the only level surface on the otherwise consistently-sloped console, and set down a tall bottle.
That… probably wasn’t good.
Yadira stepped around into the chair on the left, hands folded in her lap as she carefully looked over the distressed ensign. Brukarra’s eyeshadow made long, dark lines past the corners of her lips, her eyes open and staring blankly down at the console lights. It wasn’t a long delay, though, and it only took her a few seconds to acknowledge Yadira’s presence and look up at her.
But then she seemed to get stuck again, a few blinks leading to a long stare. Something about her face started to look softer, but then she flinched and looked away quickly, shaking her head as she started sobbing. “I swear I’ve never…”
Confused but concerned, Yadira brought a hand up on instinct, but it wavered in the air.
“If anything, I’m the one who doesn’t know how to say no politely,” Brukarra remarked through pouring tears with a resigned laugh. “At least Hetter was nice about it. Still felt sick after…” She shook her head more roughly. “No, you’ve got enough problems, don’t need to hear about mine.”
Brukarra reached for the bottle again, and Yadira put her hand on the woman’s arm, just below the elbow. It wasn’t forceful enough to really stop her, but somehow it worked anyway, ending with Brukarra slowly drawing back her arm and nervously retreating away from Yadira’s touch.
Yadira took a breath, getting a clearer picture that made her uneasy. She turned toward Brukarra, nervous herself as she waited for their hesitant pairs of eyes to sort out an agreement.
“I was… always raised more as a Jedi than as a Twi’lek,” she admitted. “I mean, I know it’s a stereotype, and that sure, some people with dark hearts think of us that way. But with how everyone here was looking at me… is it really that bad?”
When Brukarra gave her a similar look, she guessed that was answer enough.
“It’s the first thing I’d think of, probably any Imperial,” Brukarra spoke, unable to meet Yadira’s eyes. “Twi’leks are a slave species, the more alluring women for entertainment and pleasure. And all I’ve done all my life is… is feel a twist in my gut and walk on by.”
She clenched her fists, and looked up as if she were forcing herself to. Looked at Yadira across the uncomfortable silence, holding her gaze even as it broke.
“God… you’re people!”
Brukarra looked like she might have collapsed, if Yadira hadn’t caught her by the upper arms and kept her steady. It was her duty to comfort those in need that had her holding the sobbing woman against her shoulder moments later, only slightly awkward across the gap between the chairs.
“Don’t…” Brukarra put up a weak resistance that couldn’t properly be called a struggle. “Shouldn’t even touch you…”
“I know you won’t hurt me,” Yadira assured.
After a pause, Brukarra broke a louder sob, her voice choked up. “You’re right.” She shook her head, red hair brushing softly along Yadira’s jawline. “She’s right. I don’t know how I ever lasted this long… I suppose they’ll have to execute us both.”
Yadira pulled back enough to give the Human a concerned look.
“The others don’t seem to have much of a plan,” Brukarra explained sadly, and definitely a bit annoyedly, but she let the latter disperse. “And… neither do we. We’ll be killed as soon as we land… if it’s not worse than that.”
Frowning at Brukarra’s guilty and fearful shudder, Yadira quickly took one of her hands, squeezed reassuringly, and looked deep into her somewhat startled grey-blue eyes.
“Today, I said I was ready to face my destiny,” she began, building to an admission, “and deep down, I think I was pretty sure I knew what that meant. But somehow, I’m still here, and I have to trust that it’s for a reason. So, as the Force guides me, I will guide you.”
Brukarra seemed skeptical, but was too stricken in staring to reply. Yadira gave her a soft smile.
Finally, after the silence passed, Brukarra broke it with a confused sigh, and broke away. “I guess… I don’t have many other things left to have faith in…” She was still retreating from Yadira’s touch – not only guilty, but shy and scared as well.
That would have to wait for later, seeing as Yadira was starting to feel another presence nearby. A dark, swallowing depth of rage and grief that gave her a light headache when she tried to probe further into it.
“You’re back.”
Brukarra jumped in shock upon noticing the apparition, but Yadira held tight to her hand. The blue Twi’lek woman was suddenly standing farther to their left, her coat gone and leaving only a black bodysuit without gloves. Yadira could only see her right side, and the hand placed on the console in front of her seemed to be acting as a brace, an applied pressure up her arm that kept her standing more-or-less upright.
“We’re… sorry,” she said, staring out the window into hyperspace. “It was wrong of us…”
“You did save both our lives,” Yadira countered, smile tentatively friendly. “So, I believe it’s only fair to call a truce… if you tell me what you want. Why are you here, if you’re really not a Sith?”
The woman hesitated, but relented. “A Sith Lord, a fool of a man, we have deceived. The Force guides us now, along the path meant for his apprentice, but our true goal…” Across the long pause, she sighed. “There is… one who has been spared this time, but she laments one she has left here. She has… reminded us, of ourself. In ways, they all have. And having been cast back this far, given this chance, we cannot waste it.”
She brought her left arm up into view, and Yadira’s eyes saddened again at the withered state of her hand. She looked down at the limb, and… something started building around it, like the fire that surrounded her when she altered her clothing or weapons. This time, it was a lasso of blue energy, looping several times and at several angles around the limb. Like a slithering snake, it was moving, a length of it always passing across her palm. Shapes resolved in it – sections that were wider than others – and as the light faded, it began to more-closely, even identically resemble a physical object. Blocks of reddish-brown wood, with various symbols carved and painted, strung together on a woven cord. The sad woman finally turned her head, meeting Yadira’s eyes.
Yadira frowned apologetically. “I… get the feeling I’m supposed to know what that is, but I don’t.”
The woman only nodded, and turned forward again. “A Kalikori. A story-chain. A record of family, of ones lost.” Some of the cord’s loops started to unwind, as the end of the chain followed after the rest. It slowed, just as the last few blocks were drawn up into her palm. When she brought her thumb down on one of them, the second to last, it was a stuttered action, like the operation of a machine. She didn’t have natural control of that limb, but was using the Force on it.
She gasped, tears running down her cheeks as she sobbed. She didn’t let it last quite so long, moving her eyes toward the ceiling and taking a slow breath.
“Our sister… died in our arms. And in our pain, we had forgotten her. Though in all our travels, we have never seen a doorway to our own past, in our rage, we did not even look for her.” She bid her hand to hold tight to the story-chain, then let it fade to vanishing flame. “But… what we could not do for ourself, we may yet do for another. Her sister might still live, though from all she has told us… it is not our place to say which fate is worse. Perhaps, if we can do this now…”
“I understand,” Yadira said with a nod.
And she did, maybe more than this woman herself could admit. She might be in this… time, whatever that meant, for her singular purpose and nothing more, but enough was clear already.
She wouldn’t stop at one.
Yadira saw a future in the Force, not even needing a vision to see it. A storm upon the galaxy, a warrior beyond death. A woman whose pain, as it had in Yadira, would be reflected in soul upon soul that stood along her path. She would stop at nothing to save them too, and not the wealthiest Hutt nor the strongest Sith could make her. But the fear she wrought would terrify them all – not just her enemies, but those she wished to help, as well. A change was coming, a fundamental shift in everything, but it would be one of brutality, of fear, and many would be lost in the chaos, unless…
“Let me go with you.”
Both the Twi’lek and Brukarra were shocked by the words. Yadira squeezed the Human woman’s hand, but stood to attention. Surprisingly enough, after a moment Brukarra stood too. It was right. Something in the Force made her sure of it.
Maybe even someone.
Yadira ventured closer, watching as the woman tensed and lowered her withered arm. There was fear, regret, shame in her green eyes, but above all, loneliness.
“We’ll help you find her,” Yadira assured. “It’s the least we can do, and I can see, whatever power you wield, your cause is just. Where you go, will you let us follow?”
After a long, disbelieving look, the woman slowly nodded.
Yadira put a hand on her good shoulder, finding it solid and feeling it ease. “So, who are you, really? Or what should I call you?”
“…Our name is Alema,” the woman said, and Yadira smiled. She still didn’t know as much as she should about her own culture, about her own language, but she knew that name.
It meant protector.