BAKTOID ARMOUR WORKSHOP - ORD LITHONE
Tag - Direct:
Kelig Ward
|
Vireth
|
Ronhar Tane
Tag - Indirect:
Zuv Ralen
|
Caelan Valoren
l
Ines Pen-Ar-Lan
|
Keilara Kala'myr
Equipment:
Bōchōr | The Vow of Saud | The Helm of the One-Eyed Prophet | Korrûg Kuûr
At first, when he'd heard of his role in this campaign, he had scoffed.
He and his people were creatures of religion, of belief, they were the grandiose schism behind the sterile bright white, authoritarian bureaucracy the Empire used to shackle its galaxy into obedience, bound by endless loops of law, logs, and hierarchy.
Yet here it was, one of those hidden apparatuses in plain sight, a crown jewel in the Empire's polished, perfect, humming machine capable of bending the Church's will.
Imperial Intelligence.
He scoffed again. That darn
Ellayina L'lerim
.
After all they had accomplished, after they had quite literally rewritten the history of the galaxy, now this.
Da'Rzael was not a man of rank distinguished enough to grasp the sheer scale of the looming truth. But he had heard the whispers, the rank-and-file murmurs, the quiet disappearances in resource ledgers.
A shift had occurred, for all of them.
Project Stardust.
With time, he came to recognize it was not his place to scoff, neither at the polished façade of the Empire's regime, nor at the L'lerim family.
His frustration over this assignment, that he would not be scouring Sith relics on Arkania, nor defending his masters on Fondor, he would not discard. He would fester it into hatred. Then temper it, shape it, turn it to use.
Hate is, after all, nature's most perfect energy source, endlessly renewable. And perfectly lethal.
As the mission progressed, Da'Rzael began to take it as an object lesson, on doubt, on destiny, and most importantly, on faith, for he came to believe this was simply his task, his spool to spin.
This whole campaign, these next steps, their actions… strands of providence slowly turning, twisting, a spiral winding upon itself, around and round. All spun from a single thread, a lone line of fate, an outcome hand-crafted into reality. An endless spool made shape to an end.
And he would spin it. He would spin it as his God-Emperor demanded.
No matter how deeply he despised the task at hand, how he wrestled with the way his skills were used, or how fiercely he yearned to be in the fabled Veeshas Tuwan library.
He found refuge in those who accompanied him.
Vireth's golden orbs flickered synthetically, yet held a dark-side hue that gazed outward with an eerily organic beauty.
And then there was his Guardian Angel, Kelig. The two had not parted since Coruscant. A strange, silent bond had been struck.
The Devaronian thanked his lord for sending such capable and faithful believers with him. He prayed for them, for their success, and in his murmured invocations, he extended those prayers to the hundreds of thousands of agents serving the Empire's god across the stars in this very moment.
Before nightfall, they were boots on the ground.
Decades of hiding from Alliance space while spreading their gospel on pilgrimage had made the Church adept at vanishing in plain sight. The squad's communications were neither lavish nor complex, they relied on abbreviated chains and low-frequency pulse codes.
Signals that whilst on a spectrum, were nearly impossible to decode. Only the faithful knew their meaning.
Da'Rzael kept his comms device nestled deep within the fur-lined collar of his heavy black hooded cape, the garment draped like a shroud across his broad frame.
He trusted Kelig to keep both of them, and every entrance, exit, and flight deck, in his sights. Da'Rzael's sole focus was on Vireth. She alone had the hardware to splice into the labyrinth of data storage, bypass file locks and hierarchies, and infiltrate profile systems, to extract their secrets or seed them with virus-laden code.
It was the crux of the operation that she remain safe, and able to finish her task. This, was his task.
So far, Alliance interference had been minimal. From his perch in a security tower, once used to log incoming personnel, he kept watch.
Kelig's literal eye swept the perimeter.
Da'Rzael's gaze tunneled inward, into the facility's durasteel guts and synthetic sinews of cable and conduit. Like a spider seated in the heart of its web, he wove the strands together, snaring and sifting captured camera feeds, comm pings, blinking nodes, cycling doors, awakening terminals systems breathing in the dark.
One larger infiltration squad was already inside. He did not know the specifics of
Zuv Ralen
's operation, nor was he meant to. Their comms silence kept them beyond the reach of his gaze.
Then, at last,
Keilara Kala'myr
revealed herself, a single transmission sent deeper into the facility. He knew neither her allegiance nor the message's content, but pieced together enough context to understand one undeniable truth: the Empire's work had begun.
For now, all was according to plan.
As long as things stayed quiet, he would remain quiet as well.
But then the building stirred in strange ways, doors sealing, systems overheating, cameras going dark, long-dormant drones suddenly whirring to life. A silent game of tag between two operatives, perhaps? He pulsed a single warning across the link:
enemy activity, inside target. His team was to remain alert.
The true danger, however, had yet to present itself. The well-armed squad led by
Ronhar Tane
had slipped past his notice entirely, choosing a manual route inside. Their landing and breach executed in perfect darkness, the only trace, the silent swing of a door opening into the depths. A single grain of code, a sand-speck in the desert Da'Rzael scoured.
