The shaft spat her out after Aiden, boots skidding on the slick metal until she steadied herself against the wall. The air was thick with heat and coolant stench, cloying enough to sting the back of her throat with it’s unpleasant after taste. For an instant she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t do anything but look upon the rows of cells, the pale faces within, the cruel flicker of collars locked against raw skin.
Her stomach twisted. For all the lessons about balance, about composure, nothing softened the shock of seeing people broken down to pieces of machinery.
Aiden’s nod drew her eyes to the relay dais, the choke point of their hope, the lynchpin of the collars’ hold. Freedom was right there, packaged into a tangle of wires and cruel Imperial design.
Then the moment shattered.
Shouts rose. Stormtroopers turned, rifles swinging. Bastila felt Aiden surge forward, his saber a clean line of gold that cut the dark like lightning. He stepped into the path of the first volley, his blade catching the bolts with flawless economy, sending energy crackling into the walls. Prisoners flinched and scrambled, chains clattering as fear turned to chaos.
And Bastila moved fast.
The saber hissed to life in her hands, purple fire spilling light across the coolant-slick floor. She pivoted, blade snapping up to swat aside a bolt before it reached a cowering worker in the nearest cell. The shot scorched the wall, harmless now, but the heat of it stoked her pulse.
Her voice carried, low but sharp enough to cut through the din:
“Stay down! Don’t give them an excuse to fire at you!”
A trooper lunged from the side, shock baton crackling as he swung for her ribs. Bastila twisted, her blade slicing the weapon in half before her elbow drove into his chest plate. He went down hard, breathless and dazed.
Every instinct screamed to charge for the dais, to tear the relays apart and free the prisoners, but the guards were too thick around it. She risked a glance towards Aiden who was still holding the line, cutting through the press with methodical, punishing precision. The Force thrummed through him, steady as a heartbeat, anchoring them both in the storm.
Bastila forced her breathing level, her blade a wheel of violet light as she caught another bolt and sent it crashing back into the trooper who fired it.
Measured. Sharp. No waste.
Still, the odds pressed in like a vice. The consoles were a dozen meters away, guarded by four troopers dug in behind cover. The prisoners had no chance unless those relays came down. Plus these were not the prisoners they were here to free, these were the prisoners who would die if they didn’t think this through.
Her mind raced. A straight rush would mean death. But stealth was gone, and time was bleeding out with every shot.
She ducked behind a strut, sparks raining down from Aiden’s last parry, and hissed through clenched teeth:
“We need the consoles disabled. Now. You hold them, like you…” she risked a glance, a smirk flashing despite the danger,
“...Are already very confidently doing.”
Without waiting for an answer, she pushed off the strut, purple light cutting a searing arc as she dashed for the guard’s taking cover at the relay dais.
She hit the first guard with a planted, twisting strike that sent him spinning off the catwalk and slamming into the coolant trough. No theatrics, just clean and efficient combat. The second tried to raise his rifle; Bastila stepped inside its arc, the saber’s tip finding the barrel with a single precise cut. Sparks, a curse, then a dead weight. The third came in harder, a belt-fed weapon swinging; she met it with a backwards heel, wrapped her arm through its line and turned, the momentum of his own shot knocking him dumb as he tumbled into his fallen comrades. The fourth tried to flank, knife flashing under his glove, she caught his wrist, twisted, and the blade skittered into the gutter. He went down with a fragile whimper, more surprised than hurt.
Adrenaline made her fingers shake when she finally let the blade gutter to idle. Bodies lay like discarded toys around her boots. This was the part of Bastila few had seen, the unspoken truth of her isolation on Jakku, the cause of the resentment. She had been trained as a weapon for the Jedi, if she had wanted to or not.
The relay dais was only a few meters away now, ringed by the crackle of still-live circuitry and a spray of sentinel lights. Overhead, a klaxon began to wail, one thin, pulsating note that promised reinforcements within heartbeats. Time, she thought, was a currency the Empire spent like blood.
She dove for the nearest console with the speed of someone who had rehearsed this in her head a thousand times and never once found it easy. The access panel resisted; bolts, encrypted seals, an Imperial signature humming in rigid, arrogant lines. Her palms were slick with sweat as she wrenched aside the shielding to expose a nest of data blocks and a whining power core. The console’s diagnostics blinked murderous red. Somewhere inside the tangle, the collar control protocols lived.
“I’ve got this,” she rasped without looking up. Even with the saber resting in its retreat back at her belt she didn't trust the rest of the room to be quiet. The hum of Aiden’s breath at her shoulder steadied her; he was a presence like a stone through the storm.
Fingers faster than thought traced the circuit arrays, her training with old pre-High Republic systems sparking memories; a syntax here, a checksum quirk there. The relay’s security was clever: an interleaved authority that expected a local heartbeat and a remote key from the tower outside. Cut the local feed and the collars would default to a failsafe pulse; it was a brutal shock to discourage tampering. Cut the remote key and the gate emplacements would flag them as saboteurs and open fire. Either choice might kill the prisoners they were trying to save.
Her jaw set. Bastila breathed in, felt the Force braid tight and sharp against her skin, and pushed. She didn’t try to brute-force the kill-switch. Instead she threaded a soft loop between the local heartbeat and the relay, a small simulated rhythm that would hold the collars in stasis. It was delicate work: too slow and the safety would trip, too quick and the system would detect an anomaly and raise the alarm. She ran the loop, humming its cadence in her head like a lullaby for code.
A green light flickered. Then another. The red ebbed to orange and finally she allowed her chest to unclench a fraction.
The next stage would be the records, the real reason they had been sent here. If the collars weren’t screaming, she had seconds to scour the logs before someone outside noticed the diversion. Her gloved hand danced over the holo-screen, dragging through user hashes, transfer manifests, detainee intake records. Names scrolled like the bones of a city, a never ending display catalogued as “labor resources.”
She hunted for one name she’d been given before they had left Naboo:
Halden Rys.
The database was layered behind compartmentalized permissions, but Bastila had managed to pry it open enough to find the secrets. She peeled back a transport manifest from four nights prior, matched biometric hashes in a locked archive, snipped a timestamp and a storage tag. There!
A flagged entry buried in a maintenance log: RYS, HALDEN — solitary intake, Block C-7, Cell 3. Entry timestamp: 0300 local, three nights ago. Notes:
Resistance contact suspected; Potential New Jedi Order; high Force signature; containment protocol: reinforced collar, remote suppression.
She dug deeper, hunting for the thing that would make rescue possible: the collar control key. The entry had a maintenance handshake routed through Gate Emplacement 2’s relay. The same emplacement that would shred anyone trying to take the front gates. The same emplacement whose fail-safes would fry a cell block if it detected tampering.
Bastila felt the edge of panic; a small, hot flame licking at the trained calm. She forced it down with the same discipline that guided her saber strokes, cleaned and cold. Decisions sat like weights in her hands. This was starting to get more and more difficult.
“Aiden,” she said, voice thin with something like steel.
“Halden Rys is here; Block C-7, Cell 3. The collars are tied into Gate Emplacement 2, the collars have a failsafe that’ll purge if tampered with. I’ve ghosted a heartbeat loop to hold them… for now.” She looked up at him, violet eyes bright in the console glow. The klaxon’s keening had sharpened; boots were pounding on the catwalk above them; reinforcements, faster than she liked.
“I can keep the loop steady for maybe two minutes if you give me cover,” she finished.
“Long enough to get Halden's collar free; if nothing goes wrong. If it does… we run I guess?”
The corridor ahead tasted of oil and possibility and the small, dangerous hope that something could still be saved. Either way they would have to split up for now.
Aiden Porte
