What is left
UNDISCLOSED
LOCATION - Death Star III
Michael, Gabriel,
Azrael, Sariel, Raphael, Jeremiel, Connel,
Raguel
[Any text in brackets signifies comm-link usage and not face to face conversation]
The tram sang through the bones of the station. Matsu was a bright note inside that noise — a pinprick of warmth and ridiculous song. Below, the metal still hissed where the armory had gone white. That smell of hot plastoid and scorched wiring had a way of following you like a warning.
Connel busily cupped the stolen comm-link to and over his ear. It still chattered with static and the clipped cadences of terrified men. He’d found it on a console, one trooper’s lifeline turned into a toy. It was dirty, simple, but useful. Useful was an aphrodisiac in war.
“—Voss to Fyre Group, status?” a voice spat.
“Two squads behind us. Coupler went white. Something’s eating our sensors,” another answered. Short breaths, a bead of fear in the syllables. “We can’t see past the main conduit. Isard, we’re sitting ducks.”
Names, positions, vectors — the comms handed the Shadow a map that he could hear. He then fed it into his head like putting a key into a lock: routes, choke points, where they’d push if they panicked. The Empire’s tongues were plain. Panic narrows the brain.
Azrael’s voice bubbled with static on my private channel — three words and an oath.
[Alpha pattern ready.] An explosive design sent to his datapad to which he glanced over. He then thumbed the bandolier, fingers finding the grenade he’d kissed with a fingertip earlier. No flourish. No show. Just work.
“Voss says they’re pulling to the Isard spa levels,” the trooper-link hissed. “Emperor squad—possible heavy—call signs: Sovereign, Hammer. Repeat, Sovereign, Hammer—moving to intercept at tram splice. All units prepare for—”
That’s when Connel smiled, very small, inside the mask. Names are anchors. You grab an anchor and you move the ship.
He keyed the comm-link with the trooper’s ID and fed a reply in a voice close-mimic, flat and bureaucratic. “—Command to all units: fall back to Fyre staging, grid delta. Secure the rear splice. Repeat, fall back.” The voice was wrong-edged enough to be believable, the cadence bureaucratic. It was also a lie.
They obeyed. Discipline clamps on panic. Men who fear more fear the lash of disobedience. The corridor emptied into the trap I’d set.
Down below, my e-web hummed quietly, its auto fire primed, tracer lined to the corridor mouth. A cluster of blast-lenses waited in the conduit bundles he’d laced with a throw-knife and a damped charge. When the tram coupler went white from his first planted explosive, the pursuing squads saw only a flash and then darkness; what they didn’t know was the corridor was about to be a sieve.
He remembered the sound of the Houk’s hammer — how the deck had cried. That memory sharpened my hands. Connel slid a blade between two vents and breathed the metal. The Force was a whisper down there. Matsu’s hum came like confirmation: she’d moved, the tram had shifted tracks. Her small thought threaded to mine:
Go.
Vanagor answered with a single motion. His thumb brushed the grenade’s pin. He thought a breath, nudged the throwing arc with the Force, and let it fly. It found the tram coupler access with a soft chink and tucked itself into the cryo-coils like a seed. The coupler flared and went white. Sparks licked. The tram shuddered. Men shouted. He didn’t watch.
The first of the pursuers ran straight into the e-web’s teeth. Its tracers bit into composite armor and sprayed molten slag. One trooper tried to radio, voice cracking, “We’re—” then silence. The comm-link told him where they’d pushed; Connel redirected another false command — a “regroup” — and watched them collapse into the wrong hallway, into the path where the conduit knife would burn them.
Noise is a map. Silence is a trap. Connel gave them both.
Someone keyed a panicked report: “Sovereign—hammer—down the splice! He saw— he saw the Jedi!” Their voices shredded like paper. He clipped their channel and bled it back a looped artificial feed: footsteps, radios, the lullaby of normal duty. They heard what made them comfortable and moved into the thing that would make it stop.
The corridor became opera, and he was the stagehand pulling ropes. He felt the shockwave from his grenade bloom down the tram throat, then the e-web sang a wet electronic bark as it vented into armored chests. Bodies collapsed in a scatter of white and black. Connel felt the Force tug at the edges of those deaths — tiny tears that pinched the living weave. Quick. Small. Repairable, if you didn’t stand in the hole.
A cry snapped across the comms: “Target sighted — Sovereign Protector active near splice two — repeat Target in splice two!”
Connel’s shoulders tightened. He tasted the same metallic tang he’d felt in the ducts with the Houk. He’d been ugly, but the Protector was the prelude. Someone bigger was moving.
He ran my hand along the shielding on the e-web and flicked a contact to Azrael’s design pattern he fed into Connel’s datapad. He answered immediately, gruff and delighted.
[See? Told you. Make ’em dance, Ariel.]
Alpha now, I said. The word dropped like a stone.
For a heartbeat Connel let the dark listen. Let them think there was still control. Then Matsu’s tram cleared the splice. He felt her joy as a flare. She was laughing, a bubble in the Force. He felt her trajectory: straight to the crystal vaults. The station breathed in, and Connel prepared the exhale.
He left the duct like a shadow folding into itself, landing behind a twisted column where a pair of troopers had crouched to reload. They looked up with the wide eyes of men who’d been taught to believe in armor. Vanagor removed that belief in a measured sweep: one a cut low to the tendon, the other a throat-hold that left no alarm but a slack hand. No screams; the others didn’t notice. Not yet.
Before he climbed toward Matsu’s path, Connel keyed the com-link one more time and injected a short clip — his voice, low, clipped:
All units: report casualties, hold position. Repeat, hold. It was enough. It was poison. It kept them from thinking to turn back.
He felt the presence even before he saw the shape — heavier, older, the scent of old wars braided into its armor. Another Dark Side Elite. Someone had said it on the net and now it was true.
Through the mask, Connel let the smallest of smiles curve, not for show but because something in him wanted it. “Night” and “Day” hung like promises at his hips. Behind him, the blast in the vault still smoked. Ahead, the crystals called.
He threaded my way up toward the tram’s roofline, cutting through maintenance grates, blades dark, channels alive with intercepted shouts and wrong orders. The Empire had thought to chase the light with men and guns. They had not counted on what answers in the shadow.
He then tapped Matsu with a thought as light as breath: ~”
Route clear. Crystals ahead. I’ll take point if you want.”~
He didn’t wait for an answer. Connel stepped into the next corridor, and the station waited to see which of them would break it first.
Darth Avida
palm opened, with Krasskorr feeling the pure backlash of Dark Side energy she had been hoarding. It was not lightning nor a gentle telekinetic shove to push him away. It was raw concentrated kinetic power bursting from her hand, slamming into his armored chest with the force of a concussion missile fired from a battlecruiser.
