Subject #2541-B.Untagged juvenile, approximately six years old. No identifying implants. Third-degree plasma scarring etched across the chest cavity. Surgical staples—non-sterile—suggest recent field intervention. Bled out. Alone.
Subject #23521. Civilian male, mid-thirties. Neurojack split clean at the base of the skull. Cause of death: kinetic trauma to the back of the head. No defensive wounds logged.
Summary: Multiple subjects displayed no visible trauma but registered high Force-resonance feedback across neural pathways. Burn patterns matched known ritual exposure. Ash detected in lungs.
Eencrypted files blurred from the morgue's network into the medic's datapad, one after another, dense with unread names and impossible injuries.
She'd had to go a less direct route.
Initially she'd knocked on the door and asked the mortician for access — same as she always did during these integration campaigns — but they denied her. They'd wanted her to
pay! How strange. And as part of her "Start-at-the-bottom" regime, she didn't have enough "Credits" to pass. She'd scrambled to explain she was a student on a temporary field assignment. He didn't argue. Or maybe he was too tired to. Or maybe not a
he at all. Sachi caught herself and remembered her programming. They would be references as their operation until she had enough evidence to assign gender to this unknown reptile-like species.
Even so, the mortician didn't buy it, and in a language that had to go through the translator looped around her ears, they said: "Hell of a time to start a research paper. Where did you say you were from?"
So she crouched outside, tampering with the data stream and
tsk'ing at the lazy infrastructure for public records that anyone with a slicer could access. She wasn't even using anything above standard grade codebreaking, but their encryptions were no match for the advanced algorithm the Outreach team was equipped with.
File after file downloaded and updated the summary at the top. She kept a wary eye on it, still crouched unseen.
After countless minutes of data ingestion, she pulled down her mask. The exhaust valves coughed out filtered breath, tinged with the sharp sting of coolant and antiseptic. She rubbed the pressure lines off her face, then pressed her thumb into a seam along her jacket collar—an old motion, unconscious. There, stitched just under the fabric, the faded insignia of her first Outreach cohort.
"Preserve life to the best of your ability," she incanted.
Subject #2231-B. Adult female.Skull intact. Eye sockets hollowed—extracted with ritual precision. Not trauma.
"Preserve life.." she bit her lip and watched another file update. Even though she knew nothing of this planet, these people, the distress marked in the files contained the very antithesis of the Eternal Machine's tenents.
Subject #2297-F. Juvenile, nine years old. Found beside two deactivated med-droids in a corridor marked for evac. Blunt force to the spine. Likely trampled during retreat.
"To the best.."
Subject #2310-J. Unknown species. Limbs removed with surgical accuracy. Symbols carved into the thoracic cavity by vibro-tool. Tissue glow confirmed under UV scan.
"Of your ability."
Subject #2304-G. Male, ~40s. Asphyxiation without obstruction. Airway remained clear, oxygen levels plummeted. Brainwave spike logged milliseconds before death.
If she continued to hunch over the steady influx of data, she could be here for hours, days, even. The recently logged bodies didn't seem to have an end, and while the planet's surface seemed to do a fine job of masquerading normalcy, the number of files within the last few rotations proved otherwise. Something devastating had happened here. And while the planet was still, Sachi now understood it was a stillness that happened in places where death didn't arrive by accident.
In a swift motion, she disconnected and queued the command to trace the location of her crewmates. Their coordinates replaced the summary on the display and she followed them, barely observing the streets and remained engrossed instead in data.
This world wasn't ready for reintegration. It barely qualified as
alive. And if her new crewmates thought otherwise, she'd have more to fight about than just their integration methods. And despite her recent reassignment, and being told to only
report, and opinions withheld..well. The AI put her here for a reason, right?
Salt and sweat filled her nose and she staggered back, shocked by the transition from the outdoors to the in. She'd been so entranced by the data on her pad that her environment and its shifts meant nothing. But she was here now. And there her crewmates were.
Two gruff folks, contentious, elbowed their way past her and out the door. She clamped down on her datapad and bee-lined for the only familiar faces in the room. They looked agitated.
Well good. So was Sachi!
"Dead tell no tales and don't start at the morgue, huh?" She muttered under her breath, but aimed very directly at her moustached overseer.
In her previous branch, she'd go directly to the Captain. And muscle memory already had her angling toward CPT. Wuilicailt, But Tavian had said that she was to report directly to
him. And here they were, all three of them, and protocol became murky. Especially with the urgency tingling through her bones with the contents in her hands.
"You should both see this." Instead of shoving her datapad into one person's hand versus the other, she pinched the screen and flicked it outward. The gesture sent the debrief compressed and auto-sorted to their personal devices to digest at the same time and draw their own conclusions.
Her nail tapped against the line that troubled her the most on her own file, and she manipulated their own screens to reflect what she read.
The phrase "SITH INVASION" is hard-coded into morgue terminals, grayed-out, non-editable— and their algorithms seemed to treat it like a placeholder for something it couldn't quantify.
☼ [IMPERIAL OUTREACH NODE: TRIAGE.ANALYTICS.VAN-17]
→ MORGUE RECORD PARSE: SLUIS VAN, POST-EVENT
→ STATUS: PARTIAL METADATA CORRUPTION / CROSS-ARCHIVE RESTORATION ENABLED
SUMMARY: Multiple death certificates list cause of death as "SITH INVASION" — used in lieu of clinical terminology. No universal parameters defined for the term "Sith."
47.3% of corpses exhibit neural failure without trauma.
32.9% show external signs of patterned mutilation.
18% demonstrate residual field distortion localized to the brainstem and solar plexus. No power source identified.
In several instances, corpses were positioned in ceremonial poses. No cultural match found.
INTERNAL ERROR FLAG:
This data set does not match known enemy behaviors.
This data set does not match known weapon archetypes.
No system failure logged. Emotional index exceeds death state norm. This does not compute.
Then, quieter, flatter, but urgent and verging on conspiratorial: "Do either of you know what a Sith is?"
Sky Wulicailt
