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The Kuat Orbital Ringdrifted in near-silence, its circumference spanning a world.
From every angle, ships were being born: Star Destroyers, escort frigates, bulk transports, military luxury. Forge-frames bristled with cranes and energy tethers, and orbital drydocks pulsed with light as kilometer-long hulls were plated in real time.
To the Empire, it was a symbol of strength.
To him, it was a scar across the sky.
Orbital Array 7 reported a brief power dip. Just a spike. Crew assumed it was a voltage reroute.
Slipway Theta-9 registered a coolant imbalance. A tech clipped it to the maintenance backlog.
But by the time the alarms started cycling, it was too late.
A shaped object had been burned into the underside of Drydock 44. Atmo seals were compromised. Blood misted across zero-G trusses. And in the corridors—
This is a public rebel strike on the Kuat Drive Yards — a coordinated incursion by the scattered enemies of Empire, vengeance-bent Chiss, and rogue saboteurs from the Outer Rim to the Core. Anyone can join the Chaos™
The security checkpoint at Dock 44 shattered in a burst of crimson gore and shrieking metal. Csariden didn’t pause to confirm the kills. He advanced like a scalpel—white hair streaked back, blue skin lacquered in drydock dust, his high-frequency vibroblade whining with lethal oscillation.
By the time the first alarm klaxons wailed, he’d already carved through the console crew.
A burst of gunfire lanced toward him. Reflexes did the rest. The cybernetic eye tracked the trajectory, the prosthetic jaw clenched, and his off-hand caught the bolt on the edge of the vibroblade, redirecting it into a fuel valve.
Flames bloomed behind him.
Let them see.
Holocams flickered as the automated coverage drone pivoted toward the main office tower—a smooth, plastiglass cube suspended over the assembly floor like an executive gallows.
Inside, Director Ulger Mayn stumbled backward. He tried to seal the doors.
Too late.
The Chiss crashed through the transparisteel wall in a flurry of glass shards and plummeting reports. His blade sheared through the man’s sidearm, then opened his chest in a single upstroke that nearly cleaved him in two.
Blood painted the interior lens of the hovering camera.
Mayn slumped over his desk, still twitching.
Csariden stood over him, angled into frame, white hair glowing like the corona of a dying star beneath the ruined lights.
He looked into the camera.
Raised his sword.
"For Csilla. For every cry beneath the snow they never heard."
He turned the blade slightly. A high-frequency scream vibrated through the feed.
She leaned against the wall near a half-dead terminal, arms crossed, no weapons to be seen. The Kuati foreman two steps ahead of her was sweating bullets trying to explain why their new "fail-safe" lockdown system had a 4.3 second lag between tripped alarm and seal.
Madalena didn't care. She wasn't here for seals.
She was here because someone was paying her to be, and she'd long ago learned the value of pretending to care. At first it had been in the Confederacy, where she pulled mission after mission successfully, leading troops to whatever it was the bigwigs on top wanted to. Then with the Agents of Chaos, she had been the leader of all the combatants, and give something she'd actually cared about. That had been nice while it lasted.
That was also four decades ago by the count of most of the galaxy. And now that both she and her sister were back, she wanted to have her own money again. Money was always a good thing to have. So she'd taken an actual job as a security consultant. It was… Okay.
Her gaze drifted past the stressed engineer to the viewport. Kuat spun below, green and blue and way too peaceful for a place that spent most of its orbital life giving birth to warships. There was always something eerie about that contrast. Maybe that's why she hadn't slept well since landing.
A flicker on the edge of vision.
Then another.
And then the floor shuddered as detonations were heard. Screams. A wrench hit the deck. Emergency lighting stuttered as red pulses filled the corridor.
"Dock 44 just went dark!" someone shouted behind her.
The wall beside her buckled inward with the concussive force of a secondary blast. Air whistled. Gravity cracked. A technician screamed as part of the hull peeled like paper, exposing a glimpse of the drydock outside and the fire blooming up its side.
Madalena didn't scream. She just moved as though this was the most natural thing in the 'verse. To her, it was.
The magnetic clips released with a hiss. The scars on her face gave light, but she bid them quiet. It wasn't time to rip through reality again. Not yet. She stepped through the smoke, exhaled once through her nose, and muttered in various languages under her breath.
The Kajidic’s Pride emerged from hyperspace in a wide-angled spiral, hull glinting with retrofitted turbolaser nests and old Separatist ventral cannons. She didn't decloak — she didn't care to.
Six plasma torpedoes punched across the void like molten nails.
They struck Drydock 31 — a fueling bay for Star Destroyer keels — just as the first screams echoed from Dock 44. A kilometer-long support gantry ruptured in a burst of white flame and hull plating. Fuel cells cracked. Workers screamed into the vacuum.
And above the chaos, the Kajidic’s Pride loomed — silent, smug, and monstrous — as her launch hangar irised open.
The armor of the Chantin Kajidic struck the plating of the ring station like the landing of a siege engine, seismic dampeners groaning under its impact. Jets flared, stabilizers rotated, and with the hiss of rising hydraulics, a Hutt climbed free of the scorched crater he'd made with his own arrival.
One red eye glared through a baroque engraved helm. His lower jaw was a brutal prosthetic of slag-welded droidcarapace. Power lines fed into his armored spine.
"No bata tu murishani koo ba wermo Empire. Jee hatkocanh killee mi."**
The Black Sun had a history of favoring empires of the past. He certainly suspected they played a part with this new empire. It was an agreeable enough job to for the Hutt.
He pried open a blast door, depressurizing an airlock long enough to slip inside before emergency bulkheads dropped.
The E-Web cannon on his shoulder rotated with a shriek of servos. The barrel glowed orange from preheating coils. He raised one massive hand and crushed a nearby security drone in his grip.
A section of the ring bulkhead had already begun to creak from internal pressure. He gave it a nudge with the haft of his electrostaff. The wall tore open into a pressurized hangar bay, its defenders scrambling to raise shields.
Too slow.
He advanced, a hovertank in slug form his voice booming through external speakers.
"Let your warriors come." '"Peedunkee uba see wata."
“Hostiles inbound—eastern corridor breach—unknown number—markings unknown.”
The shipyard PA screamed to life as klaxons echoed through durasteel-plated corridors. Csariden was already moving.
His boots sparked against the gantry as he ran. To the uncareful observer, he simply vanished.
“Target is—ghhkkk—!”
A blade sang through plastoid.
A silver-blue blur cut through the smoke.
By the time the first stormtrooper squad rounded the corner, half of them had already been bisected mid-stride.
The high frequency Vibroblade was a sliver of annihilation, humming almost like a purr when blade met armor. He pivoted low, metal heels scraping, then lunged; his spin twisted into a double cleave that sent clean-sliced helmets clattering.
Blasterfire lit the corridor behind him, milliseconds too late to strike true. Csariden was already running sideways along the wall, twisting mid-stride to fling a monomolecular dagger into a trooper’s visor.
The corpse flopped, and Csariden dropped back down, sliding under a burst of turret blaster fire before launching upward in a crackling burst of leg-mounted jets.
Two steps across the ceiling before dropping.
A kinetic dive straight into the turret mount, piercing it with the vibroblade and ripping the conduit out with his off-hand claw.
He landed in a crouch. Steam hissed from his back vents.
"Csariden,"voice crackled."Stormtroopers deploying blast shutters—two more squads inbound."
The second wave advanced in formation, motion sensors tracking movement, only to see nothing but sparks where Csariden had just been. A red blur. Limbs. Screams. Armor plates shattering.
He spun through them like a razorblade tempest. One soldier’s blaster was ripped free and hurled like a javelin into a power relay. Sparks erupted.
Only one remained. The trooper ran.
He didn’t get far.
A micro-harpoon line from Csariden’s wrist embedded itself in his backplate, retracting violently as Csariden closed the distance with an aerial knee to the spine, ending him in a dull crack.
Sudden stillness.
The cybernetic chiss moved to a nearby control alcove, fingers tapping rapidly as he interfaced with the deck terminal, ported in a dataspike, then opened his comms.
“Revenants. Status on the package.”
•••
“Brace it. Tilt left. No — my left, you half-cooked di'kut!”
A dolly creaked under the weight of the PLZ-class explosive. It was shaped like an overgrown fusion core with multiple stabilization claws and a blinking core running hot. An angry red.
The two Revenant zealots flanking it wore mismatched armor — old CEDF, parts of Chiss infiltration gear, and makeshift sigils scrawled on one shoulder pad in blood-red ink.
The lead commando sawed open a security gate with a handheld plasma cutter. The second shot a ceiling turret with an ion pistol.
“ETA three minutes to reactor core. Minimal resistance. We keep the cart moving.”
They ducked under piping as smoke filled the hallway, stepping over a fallen Kuati officer who’d been trying to barricade the entrance with a desk and two chairs.
He was still breathing.
They left him.
Behind them, the dolly beeped steadily.
The warhead was charging.
The lights flickered overhead as she stepped deeper into Dock 44, heels clicking softly against scorched plating. Bodies littered the corridor. Some were slumped where they'd been struck, others carved apart while they were moving. The air stank of ozone, burned plastoid, and blood. The bulkhead walls still vibrated with the echo of blasterfire and something sharper, faster.
The former head of the Wild Hunt walked through it like she was touring an art gallery.
No fear. No urgency. Only the occasional tilt of her head as she studied an angle of a cut, the placement of a wound. It was too clean to be rage. Too fast to be protocol. Too familiar not to be intentional. Her gaze caught on a set of helmet fragments, still warm, still smoking. One half had landed perfectly upright, visor angled toward her like a question.
She stopped in front of it.
Madalena Antares knew this scene, perhaps too well. How many times had she been the one to cause it? How many planets had quaked in fear knowing she was coming, whether with the Wild Hunt or those she had been with before? Forty years had passed for the galaxy, but scenes such as this were absolutely timeless. It made something inside of her sing in ways nothing had in far too long.
A breeze moved through the corridor as pressure change from another blast door giving way somewhere nearby. Her eyes had sharpened now. Focused. There was someone ahead of her. Madalena let her senses brush forward before her as she tried to understand what she was feeling. This wasn't… This was…
She followed the trail without rush. Sooner or later, she would find her prey.
Melee Weapons
