REVENGE
Kuat Orbital Shipyards
The last stormtrooper fell in two pieces before his boots even hit the deck.
Csariden stepped over him without breaking stride, the HF vibroblade humming at a pitch that set every metal surface in the corridor thrumming. His left arm's servo-locks hissed as he shook flecks of steaming green ichor from the blade’s edge. The air reeked of scorched plasteel, propellant, and alien blood.
Up ahead, a cargo lift rattled to a stop. He was on it before the doors could open, tearing them apart with a kick that dented the far bulkhead. The stormtroopers inside didn’t even have time to level their rifles—he was already past them in a silver-and-blue blur, severing limbs and weapons in the same stroke. The
clang of durasteel rifles hitting the floor trailed behind him like punctuation.
He
ran the walls through the next hangar bay, boots magnetizing only for the barest moments to redirect momentum. A wrist-mounted grapnel spat a monofilament tether into an overhead crane; he swung on it low, the vibroblade cutting through three security droids in a single flash of silver and static.
The Revenants were where he’d told them to be. Black-armored silhouettes shoving a
PLZ on a heavy dolly toward the station’s reactor access doors. One peeled off just long enough to lob a thermal detonator down an intersecting hall; the dull
whump of overpressure was their insurance policy.
“Clear path to the payload. Arm it.” His voice was flat over the comms, but the Revenants moved faster.
He dropped from the catwalk to meet them, boots hitting the deck in time with a final arc of the vibroblade that split an onrushing KX-series droid from collar to pelvis. Sparks fell like rain.
Across the hangar, the bulk form of
Whottoomuzz Chantin
loomed over a knot of shredded security drones, his E-Web still steaming. The Hutt’s arrival had gutted Dock 31 as surely as the torpedoes had, and the scorched air between them smelled like victory.
“Bomb’s in place. Clock starts now.” Csariden’s cybernetic eye whirred as it focused on the reactor doors.
“We’re burning time.”
Somewhere deep in the station, the reactor’s heartbeat thrummed through the deck. In less than ten minutes, if no one stopped them, the PLZ would rip through the shipyard’s spine—sending hundreds of meters of Imperial war-forging industry tumbling into Kuat’s gravity well.
He turned toward the nearest holocam—intact, by design.
“You’ve seen the headlines. You know what comes next.” The blade lifted, glinting cold light back into the lens.
“Kuat falls tonight. And this is only the first cut.”
They’d turn this wreckage into something useful. A place to stage more strikes. Right inside the heart of the Empire.
Closer to
him.
The hunt was still on.