Gus Gungus
One Thousand Club
"Coming here was an intractable strategic error. Inform Vader this planet will be his tomb."
The flat, uncompromising chime of a Separatist droid could never truly be called sinister, in intent if not in effect; any more than a ship's navigational software, or the telltale beeps and whines of an astromech. It was, after all, the simple relaying of information, devoid of true malice or intent, strings of binary converted into logic and emitted in the language deemed most efficient for recipient biological lifeforms to understand. It was, comparatively speaking, clumsy and impractical, a feature implemented solely for the benefit of their makers, not a mode of communication droids valued.
General Kalani was an exception to that rule. The first super tactical droid to be commissioned at the heights of the Clone Wars had, for the better part of the last two decades, also been the last functional model in existence; a long string of unsung victories over the Republic had granted him more refined logic gates and developed neuro-synthetic pathways comparative to his peers, enough to deny the galaxy-wide shutdown order the droids were issued at the war's conclusion. Though he was only programmed to emit set vocal patterns, incapable of adjusting pitch or inflection, he knew all too well the effect the Confederacy army's monotonous speech could have on sentients to this day. The primal sense of dread and fear it could evoke. The value in that. To a droid, fear was nothing more than a nebulous, abstract concept; a theoretical blend of cortisol, adrenaline and self-preservation instincts.
To an organic, fear was a mind compromised. A battle lost. To them, fear was the enemy, and while a fleet could be vanquished or an army routed the enemy that dwelled in their mind was inescapable.
The droid commandant terminated the station's communications feed, letting the stark, neutral voice of the Separatist army do its work in the ravaged cockpit of the freighter the Sith erroneously believed he could sneak through the bedlam engulfing the planet's orbit, currently half-buried in a sand dune a mile above where he and his cohorts sat. The holographic projections of whoever gathered to receive the transmission were replaced by a live three-dimensional representation of the warring fleets, in which both sides appeared to be enduring heavy losses; the general watching in the closest thing his features could approximate to satisfaction as an Imperial star destroyer met its end at the hands of a flanking dreadnought.
Five other figures sat around the table, faces hidden in shadow save for what was dimly illuminated by the cerulean glow of the hologram before them, along with the occupied bacta tank to their rear. Of them, it was the old soldier who spoke first, a grizzled head of hair that was somehow both wild and thinning in equal measure framing hard eyes and features heavily scarred by the kind of war that couldn't be waged from behind the safety of a hologram slab.
"How's our new fleet holding up?"
"Allied ships outnumber current Imperial forces. My spy's transmissions indicate that only the 1st and 501st Legions have been deployed. They were unprepared to encounter this level of droid resistance."
"I'll bet," the man sneered, nose wrinkled in the type of unmitigated disdain that could only spawn from firsthand experience. "Any sign of reinforcements?"
"Negative. Scouts have reported no additional Imperial activity in this quadrant."
That tidbit had another at the table's breath hitch slightly, blue eyes widening under the shroud of her hood, but the soldier just grunted. "Another point in our favour. So how come I'm not hearing a 'we're winning'?"
That elicited a pause, a rare thing in a droid. Then, "I estimate a 76.4% probability of defeat in a sustained conflict."
"WHAT?!" The man barked, bolting to his feet and slamming his fist down on the table with a fervour that was quite frankly unhinged. "How is that possible?! You JUST SAID we outnumber them!"
As ever, Kalani was unperturbed. "That information was accurate, Saw Gerrera. My databanks indicate the 1st and 501st Legions are among the Empire's most organised and well-equipped, and if I may make an observation, have had fifteen years to learn from the Clone Wars. They are responding to Separatist formations and tactics quite effectively."
"Tried to tell you. They are Vader's right and left fist," drawled a woman at the far side of the table, whose scarlet dress and cosmopolitan haircut made it as clear she had little indulgence for these shadowy collective types' predilection for cowls and cloaks as her drumming fingers did for their militant bickering. Her attire, though immaculately tailored, bore the mark of the Crimson Dawn, perhaps the only organised crime syndicate left in the galaxy capable of standing up to the Hutts and the poorly-kept secret that was their Empire affiliation, and the tall, masked, heavily burned figure of the man next to her cracked his neck and snorted, though he said nothing. He wasn't being paid to.
"So you're telling me you droids can't get the job done?!"
Kalani didn't get the chance to retort; from the head of the table, with at least the span of an empty seat between him and everyone else, a far larger frame than any of the others quaked with the tremors of a harsh, guttural, derisive laugh.
"Careful, little rebel. You called to me and my armies through the darkness, and we came. Came to fight a war that is not ourss, all to defy what may beee. You would do well to be more cautious with your wordss."
"Don't pretend you're here for anything more than a shot at the galaxy's new tyrannical cybernetic butcher, you son of a b—"
"Enough!"
The hooded woman rose, finally tearing her pensive stare from the hologram projection long enough to contribute. Her tone was composed, even, but stern, as was the firm glare she swept over everyone at the table.
"None of us like each other. We get it. None of us have, and none of us will. Believe me, a year ago I didn't foresee myself sitting around a table with an extremist, two Separatist generals and a crime lord, either."
"Lady."
"Pardon?"
The Crimson Dawn affiliate smiled, pleasant and prim in spite of the correction, taking no visible offence to the mistake. "Jabba the Hutt is a crime lord. I'm a crime lady."
"Duly noted. What I'm saying is we haven't liked each other from the start; This alliance could never exist if the six of us didn't know what we know. But we're closer than we've ever been, and each and every one of us is here because we know this is bigger than us."
None of those seated around the table objected to that, though the burned warrior standing by the Crimson Dawn representative coughed and put his hand up.
"Speak for yours-"
"Not you. Could the criminals in the room stop interrupting? Look, my point is—" She pointed at the holograms. "This is working. It's going to work. Do you know what the 1st and 501st Legions have in common?"
A beat passed, then the woman in crimson spoke, eyes narrowed, shrewd and patient as the dawn itself. "They answer directly to Vader."
"Right. Which means he took the bait. Which means... the Emperor doesn't know. We're not up against the Empire here. It's Vader! Vader and the most discreet invasion force he was able to muster." She looked around the table expectantly, though none shared her zeal and she appeared to have lost one or two of them.
"...Which means..."
She grimaced, turning away from the table, and stepped over to the bacta tank that served as a more recent addition to the command centre constructed in the heart of the temple ruins, listlessly gazing at the silhouette of the figure floating within.
"It means Vader's interested enough in what we've been doing here that he wants it for himself. Not the Empire. For him. It means..." She huffed, entertaining the notion that she was getting ahead of herself for the first time as she crossed her arms and let her gaze drift to the floor. "Maybe I don't know what it means yet. But get me in a room with him and I'm willing to bet we won't have to win the battle of ships. Not if I make him understand."
At that moment an alert sounded from one of the nearby monitors, and Gerrera swore, bringing up the report with the grave bearing of a man who had lost one too many friends to the threat they were about to face.
"That might not be a matter of choice. He's heading for the main supply tunnel."
That prompted a reaction, for better or worse. Six pairs of eyes stared back at him in varying states of shock, consternation, and—in one particular case—savage glee.
"Already?"
"Alone?"
"Ahhhh. At last."
"Rerouting all available droid units."
"Droids aren't gonna be enough," Gerrera grunted, furiously typing out a stationwide missive for his own troops. "I'll have my men provide covering fire where they can, but I'm not putting 'em in a confined space with that monster. And I'm not risking the last Jedi ally we have until we're sure he's contained. Not after what happened to Kota and Vos."
He affixed the hooded woman with an uncompromising stare, but she didn't press the issue; on the contrary, she seemed lost in thought, still focused on the bacta tank with lips pursed. After a short pause, Gerrera joined her, letting the rest man battle stations or make whatever preparations they needed to as he cupped his hands and peered into the tank with more scrutiny.
"What do you think? Should we wake her? You told me you'd never felt a connection to the Force like hers before. If anyone stands a chance of stopping Vader..."
The words jolted the woman from her thoughts, and she peered up at him from under her hood with a thin smile.
"After what happened to Kota and Vos?" She shook her head. "No. Droid armies and cyborgs were one thing, but bringing through fully formed organic life, a force-wielder at that... it's a major step forward. But we need to be careful. Something was off about this place when we found it, but ever since her... it's as if something..."
She trailed off, glancing off towards one of the dark corners of the ruined caverns the facility was built into. Gerrera simply grunted his affirmation, content to leave Jedi stuff to the Jedi, though he couldn't pretend he didn't know what she was talking about. Some of the stuff his guys had been saying lately... voices in the dark, recurring nightmares in combat vets of 30 years... sometimes it made him wonder if what they were doing was worth it.
He never wondered long. Because if it meant wiping out the Empire, anything was worth it. Even shaking hands with old enemies.
"Kalani. Your spy reported Vader was bringing a personal entourage."
"That is correct. Our agent's projections and my own analysis of Lord Vader's unorthodox methodology suggests a strike team has been dispatched to infiltrate the Jedi catacombs while he divides our forces with a direct assault on the facility."
That drew a more visible reaction from the woman next to him than Gerrera himself, a sharp intake of breath followed by an immediate whirl.
"This is more than just a Jedi temple; the whole planet is a nexus point. If he sent those two Inquisitors down there..." Her jaw clenched. "They're dangerous, but giving them access to secrets not even the Jedi knew how to untangle is like giving a rancor a blaster rifle. There's no telling what kind of damage they might do."
"My feelings exactly." That was when the Crimson Dawn woman made herself known once more, having exchanged a few hushed words with the burned man and dismissed him with a nod before approaching the two from behind with an elegance unbecoming of her underworld ties. "Which is why it's being taken care of, courtesy of my associate and his men. This is why you sought us out, no? Let the Crimson Dawn handle Vader's choice of assassins and bounty hunters. If your spy's descriptions were accurate, most have been on our payroll at one point or another."
"Great. And knowing your 'associate' and his friends they'll do even more damage than the Inquisitors," she snapped, pivoting on her heel to make for the same tunnel the man left through as their criminal liaison shrugged in noncommittal fashion. "I'm going after them. Kalani, keep Vader occupied as long as you can. Clearing a path through that many droids takes time, even for him."
"There will be no path cleared."
So proclaimed the mechanical monstrosity at the head of the table, his first contribution in a while. His cloak barely touched the floor behind him, each heel generating a fierce clang of metal against metal as he rose to his full height.
"For I will—"
"Negative, general." A voice more synthetic than his own interrupted, Kalani's gyroscopic optical processors whirring as they focused on him. "You remain our most valuable asset. An enemy our adversaries cannot possibly anticipate. We must be selective in your deployment."
"Pah. Irritating droid." The cyborg did, however, sink back down to a seated position. Slowly. Gerrera scowled at him, but knew better than to push his luck.
"You'll get the fight you're looking for, monster. Make no mistake of that. But don't forget why we're doing this; that goes for everyone." He turned, taking a moment away from repositioning his troops to issue each and every member of their cabal with a stern, lengthy stare, hollow and tinged with regret. "To reclaim what was lost."
Two reptilian slits for eyes narrowed at him, practically the last bastion of visible organic flesh on the abomination's body; eventually, however, he gave his verbal, if scornful, assent. "To reclaim what was lossst."
"To reclaim what was lost," the syndicate representative echoed quietly, thoughtful as ever as she squinted into the depths of the bacta tank.
"To reclaim what was lost."
The robed woman paused, one foot over the threshold of the door, and with a deep breath and determination in her eyes unmatched by the others dropped her hands to her sides; where a pair of lightsaber hilts flew from the depths of her cloak into her waiting grip.
"To reclaim what was lost."
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"Coming here was an intractable strategic error. Inform Vader this planet will be his tomb."
Elsewhere, a good two thousand meters above the sinister message's point of origin, one of its beneficiaries gave an uneven laugh as she sank back into the leather upholstery of the pilot's seat, somehow about the only thing in the cockpit that wasn't ruined.
"Yeah. We're all dead." Captain Unus Greer, proud owner of the destroyed pile of scrap that had once been the Silicon Condor, opened up a bottle of something strong with her teeth and brought it to her lips, downing at least three swigs' worth in one.
"None dead. Except for thisssz fleshling," hissed the tall, slavering form of Borkh, the ship's residential muscle, weapons expert and chef, though not a lot of people knew about that last one. None of those skills were helping Borkh in its effort to pry the mangled, limp, very much dead form of bounty hunter Wulfgar Rom from its prized ceremonial weapon rack, however, a matter complicated by the ridiculous set of armor he wore.
"Did you see 'em? Haven't seen a fleet like that since I was a kid. Not supposed to be that many droids left in the entire galaxy. We're dead. So dead. Past tense, you 'n me."
"Hsssssssk." Borkh continued trying to disentangle the dead mercenary from its blades, which still had a shot at salvation.
"C'mon, guy, anything?" She gave up with a frustrated scowl in the barabel's direction, her efforts to get someone to dote on her after the demise of her ship clearly wasted. "Lookin' for a little sympathy here."
"Cannot make sssympathy. Not know recipe."
"Wonder if that wookie's still taking jobs."
That was when a pair of clangs rang out across the ship in unison, the modified frame of the droid known only as the Judge dropping from the ceiling like a bat courtesy of magnetic functionality in his heels as his head gradually swivelled over the rest of the crew.
"Observation: Vader's direct approach has left us at a strategic disadvantage. I do not believe we are intended to survive this mission."
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Hooo-pah. Hooo-pah.
Vader rose from his kneeling position by the only functional entrance to the temple they'd crash-landed amid the ruins of, letting the handful of sand he'd gathered slip through his fingers as smoke rose from the crater of their crashed ship. Vrogas Vas had been a fertile world once, a Force nexus teeming with life and agriculture that had drawn the eye of Jedi and Sith of aeons past alike; but, like so many other such worlds discovered during the heights of the ancient Sith Wars, it now lay barren and torn, the site of some forgotten calamity purged from galactic records long before the reign of the Empire.
All that remained here was ghosts; and those who would chase them.
"Do not disappoint me, Inquisitors. You each know the price of failure."
He whirled, giving the Jedi structure his back and carrying out the beginnings of a stride through the Inquisitors' ranks where they stood at alert on either side, ready to receive his bidding. Before he was clear of them, however, he stopped, and the more tenured of the two found herself the subject of a hauntingly focused stare from the dark lord as he turned to loom over her specifically; one that had her breath halt in her chest and her shoulders hunch defensively from their normally proud stance as her eyes flickered towards him with ambivalence, a subdued green in place of their usual striking yellow.
"If you are in need of a reminder, there is no more fitting an example than the fate of the last to bear the name 'Second Sister'."
And then he was away, a purposeful march across the desert in the direction of the supply tunnel he'd indicated before, leaving the current Second Sister to finally exorcise her built-up tension in the form of a ragged shudder that morphed into a growl before it was through. When she threw him one last look over her shoulder a few moments later it was with eyes that burned gold with the power of the dark once more, and spite twisted her lips into a furious snarl as she jerked her lightwhip out to its full length, coil igniting crimson, turning the sand it touched to glass.
"How generous our lord has grown with his little 'reminders' of late. One wonders whether his devotion is to the dark or to the past."
The venom in her tone rendered the words a malicious hiss through her teeth, though not directed at her fellow Inquisitor. Never one to mince words, the Second Sister's tongue had grown undeniably lax since the news of the Grand Inquisitor's death in recent months, what had once been a god-fearing docility towards Vader and his bidding having shifted to a sort of simmering mockery the moment he was out of earshot. The dark lord was aware, if his recent scrutiny of her was any indication, though she didn't seem to care; Inquisitors—particularly those with her seniority—were a dwindling commodity near two decades into the Empire's reign, and the Second Sister had spent much of that duration as a loyal and ferocious warrior in their service, one whose talent for bending the Force to her will only grew by the year even as her brethren stalled and met their ceilings. It had won her no love among the ranks of the Inquisitorius, most of whom attributed her uncommon knowledge to prior tutelage as a witch of Dathomir, one of few sects in the galaxy who had plumbed the depths of the dark side to similar extents as the Sith they served.
Only Seike Alvors knew better. Although true that the Second Sister's preconceived understanding of the dark had given her a leg up over her peers during training, the source of her ability to outpace their growth all this time later was much simpler.
Hate.
Few things were more effective a conduit for the dark side, and fewer still sentient beings in the galaxy could hate harder, hold a grudge longer, had a greater capacity for loathing than the Second Sister.
She just happened to be exceptionally proficient at masking it. Her intricate tattoos and chalk-white complexion betrayed her heritage, but she spoke with the clipped, haughty dialect of a Core Worlds aristocrat, whatever tribal savagery the Empire expected from a swamp-dwelling Dathomirian long since bred out of her until the situation called for violence. Once it did... Some things were better left unspoken. Her glare persisted a moment longer on the fading view of their master's back, a singular black mote against a landscape of rocks and dust, and then she sighed, the charged feeling of pressure she exuded receding for now.
"These Sith do love to exaggerate their own importance in the cosmos, don't they? A thousand years from now this Empire will be gone, as will its successor, and the one after that. Yet the mountains will still be mountains, and the sky the sky. We're constructing ruins for someone to one day pick through, no different from the Jedi who once dwelled here."
She also had a special penchant for complaining, though that was neither here nor there. She held up a hand towards the temple demonstratively, fingers splayed, brow furrowing in concentration and a faraway look in her eyes as they probed the shadowy depths of the looming entrance before them.
"I only hope we have the decency to be quieter in death. All is not as it should be within; dark mingles with light, and what was once sacred has been defiled. Perhaps..." She hesitated, an intrigued smirk playing on her lips as her eyes narrowed in silent acceptance of whatever challenge lay before her.
"—Perhaps, dear sister, your talents would be best served in remaining... here?" Her lower lip curled into a pout, voice adopting a doubtful, patronising inflection not entirely unlike the one she used when Seike was young and she wanted to needle her, which was as irritating then as it was now. "You've always been more attuned to such things than I. Gaze into the past deeply enough for long enough and something may see fit to gaze back; it would so pain me to see you bite off more than you can chew. Again."
Despite the baiting, there was a ring of truth to the warning; perhaps the most accurate term for what the Second Sister could perceive was a chorus of echoes, reverberation after reverberation in the Force emanating from somewhere deep within, all overlapping to form something akin to a soft, continuous whisper. But Seike had been born with the sight—the sought-after ability to innately sense the force echoes of those who came before, a rare gift that could only be inherited, not attained, one that eluded even the likes of their Sith overlords.
And to her, it felt like a scream.
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