(Vex POV)
I found the first guard after walking for several minutes in the hallway.
He was folded backward over an equipment locker with an angle to his spine that a body did not produce on its own, his helmet cracked open along the seam and his chest plate caved inward in a shape that looked less like an impact and more like something enormous had simply closed a hand around him.
The second guard was six meters past him and he told a different story entirely.
He had been cut nearly in half through the torso, the wound clean enough that the edges of his armor had a mirror polish to them where the plating had been sheared rather than melted or crushed. Behind him a support strut had taken the same cut, a neat pass straight through six centimeters of reinforced durasteel. I crouched beside it for a half second and ran a gloved finger along the cut edge. Cold. Whatever blade had done this had not been a vibroblade, hadn't been a lightsaber, hadn't been anything in my memory.
As I continued walking, the door at the end of the corridor was still standing open on a bent track. I put a hand on the door to keep it in place as I stepped through and stopped as I took in the scene.
The room smelled like blood and burnt hair and antiseptic but underneath all of it, the cloying sweetness of something chemical still hanging in the recycled air. A processing cart lay on its side with cables torn free of their sockets. An anchor point in the ceiling had been ripped out leaving a ragged socket with rebar hanging loose like exposed nerve endings.
The wall display was still on.
It took me a second to place what I was looking at, because it looked nothing like my own 'reeducation' video, I hadn't expected it to change so soon. The Bright colors, oversized eyes, the kind of thing used to please children.
I frowned picturing the scene of my daughter being subjected to this.
'I will have to talk to Darth Judas and see if I can IT stopped....he should agree.'
I looked away from the screen and towards the blood instead.
It pooled dark across the deck plating nearly directly under the broken anchor point, with more of it smeared across the overturned cart, more trailing toward the door in a dripping line. Under the room's harsh medical lighting it should have looked like any other blood. It didn't. There was a faint shimmer running through it, a color that shifted at the edges when the angle of my helmet changed. Subtle enough that a human eye alone might have missed it entirely.
I knew whose blood it was without taking out the scanner to confirm it for me.
"Vryss." My voice came out level. I made sure of that. "I'm in the interrogation room. Ember was held here, but she left under her own power and she left a trail. I'm following it. Get a squad moving toward the medical wing in support and get me anyone who's seen her moving through this level."
"Copy. Sending Second Squad your way now. You want backup on your position first?"
"No time. Give them my transponder to follow where I am."
The trail was easy enough to read once I knew what I was looking for — droplets first that were widely spaced, then closer together as whatever wound was bleeding worsened with movement. A smear appeared in one place where a hand or a shoulder had dragged along the wall for balance. I followed it past a maintenance junction, down a short flight of grated stairs, through a service corridor lined with electricity arcing out of a panel smoking in one of the walls.
The bodies kept happening. A trooper lay halfway out of a doorway, two more further on slumped against a bulkhead with their armor dented inward in multiple locations. As I shifted one of the bodies I was surprised to see the plating behind the body riddled with cracks from the body impact.
I made sure to keep my rifle ready no matter how quiet the hallway was and after four more minutes of walking I heard them. A voice carried ahead of the sound of boots sounding somewhat breathless and irritated.
"Come on, come on, she was sighted by the med bay ten minutes ago, Colonel wants a perimeter before she reaches the—"
They rounded the corner directly into my line of sight. Six troopers in a loose column, rifles held low and moving too fast, too focused on wherever they thought they were going to register me standing in the junction ahead of them until the lead trooper's head snapped at me and his weapon started to rise.
From the connecting corridor to my left three of my own came around the bend at a dead run. Renn in the lead with his heavy weapons stub-launcher already swinging up onto its target, and behind him Dael and one of the newer riflemen, Voss, spreading wide off his shoulder without needing to be told.
Renn fired first.
The concussive round left the stub-launcher with a flat, compressed thump and crossed the six meters between him and the nearest trooper before the man had finished turning. It caught him center mass and did not so much as wound but threw him into the bulkhead behind him hard enough that it thumped loudly before he slid down it unmoving.
Voss put his short rifle up and fired in a tight three round burst that caught the second trooper across the chest plate the first bolt dissipating against the armor before the next two punched through and found the man underneath it. He went down hard and did not get back up.
Dael didn't bother with his rifle at all.
He closed the distance to the third trooper in two long strides, ducked under a wild rifle swing aimed at his head, and drove something bright and edged laced across his knuckles into the man's jaw with the full weight of his shoulder behind it — a vibro-knuckler, the kind of close-quarters piece that traded range for a strike that could crack plating on contact. The trooper's head snapped sideways hard enough that I heard something give beneath the helmet, and he folded straight down where he stood.
The remaining three broke and scattered for cover that didn't exist in a bare service corridor, and it cost them exactly as much time as it sounds like it did.
I didn't fire. I didn't need to. I stood in the junction and watched my people finish it in under six seconds, the way I had trained them to be but felt the cold thing in my chest tighten another degree instead of easing.
"On me" I said, already turning back the way my people had come. "We're taking the express way to medical. Move."
Renn fell in on my left without question, his weapon slung back down across his chest. Dael wiped the vibro-knuckler off against his thigh plate and jogged up on my right, and Voss brought up the rear, rifle still tracking the empty corridor behind us out of habit more than expectation.
We fast walked through the corridor until we hit a bank of turbolifts. The car doors in front of us were sealed, a status light glowing a patient, useless green.
"Voss. Get that door open."
He crossed to the control panel beside the doors, popped the maintenance cover with the edge of a knife, and then proceeded to fiddle with the wires as his body covered what he was doing. The doors gave a hiss and parted on a dark shaft instead of a lift car, cool air rushing up out of the drop with the particular mechanical breath every turbolift shaft on every station shared, a smell of ozone and lubricant and old cabling.
Somewhere below us, maybe four decks down, I could hear the lift car itself humming along its rail, stopped mid-transit and waiting for a call that was never going to come.
"Captain" Renn said, glancing down into the black. "You want a line?"
"No need."
I planted my armored palm flat around the elevator cable and let the gauntlet's friction plating do what it had been built to do. The mag-dampened grip surface bit into the cable with a low resonant thrum, enough traction under a controlled drop that I didn't need a proper line for a four-deck descent. I stepped off the threshold and let gravity take me palm dragging a scraping arc down the steel cable to bleed speed with my boots finding the roof of the stalled lift car eight seconds later with a solid double thud.
The maintenance hatch was where it always was dead center, secured with a quarter-turn latch that had never once in the history of turbolift engineering been designed with intruders in mind. I popped it, dropped through into the empty car below and had my rifle already coming off my back by the time my boots hit the floor.
Above me, three lines dropped down around me using standard-issue drop rigs, the little clamp devices every one of my soldiers carried clipped to their belts. They came down in staggered order, boots landing soft, rigs disengaging with a click the moment their weight came off the cable.
I slung my rifle back across my shoulders and drew my vibroknife free of its thigh sheath into my left hand, the blade humming to life against my palm.
The lift doors were forced open, and I stepped out into a corridor that ran level and quiet, and it was there faint but unmistakable in the distance but I heard it.
Weapons fire. A lot of it, layered and constant, the kind of sustained volume that only came from a sizable engagement.
The station rocked.
It wasn't subtle. A shudder that traveled through the deck plating and into my boots, strong enough that Voss put a hand against the wall to steady himself. Overhead, the lighting strip flickered once before settling back to steady amber.
"Shadowhawk's earning her pay" I said, more to myself than to them. The space battle above us had clearly stopped being a polite exchange of opening volleys. I tapped my comm to the command channel that was for troops inside the space station.
"Vryss, I need bodies. Whatever you can spare, send them toward the medical sector entrance location converging on my position. We've got heavy contact somewhere ahead of us and I intend to be in the middle of it shortly."
"Copy, Captain. Diverting Third Squad your way now. ETA looks like ten minutes given the distance."
I started walking at a fast pace and the three of my soldiers fell into position matching my pace. As the distance closed it got easier to hear the flat crack of standard blaster carbines, the deeper stutter of a repeater, and underneath it all a sound I didn't have an immediate name for. A low cracking hum, like a live wire dragged across metal repeating in a rhythm that didn't match anything commonly issued.
By the time five minutes had passed more dead troopers appeared and I had to step over them without slowing my pace.
As I rounded the corner and finally walked into the medical sector, I hummed as I took in the scene in front of me.
Two Imperial defenders were slumped against the wreckage of a reception desk just inside the entrance, propped against each other in a way that would have looked almost peaceful if their armor hadn't been ripped open.
The room beyond the desk had been a soft space filled with rows of chairs, a low table. Filled with the kind of gentle lighting meant to keep frightened children calm. None of that had survived. The chairs were scattered and cratered where blaster fire had chewed through their frames, and one whole partition wall had been knocked flat, hinges torn straight out of the frame. A scorched circle marked the deck where a grenade had gone off.
The sound is close now. Blaster fire in short disciplined bursts, answered by something heavier and less patient, and under it, a low electric snap hiss that could only belong to one weapon I've trained against. Somewhere in the noise, a grenade went off muffled, but close enough that the deck jumped under my boots.
"The second squad is converging from the south corridor" Vryss said in my ear. "Ninety seconds."
"We don't have ninety seconds." I dropped my voice to the three behind me. "Quiet from here. We go through the rooms, not the hall."
There was a bank of patient rooms running along the left side of the corridor ahead. Doors torn half off their tracks or standing open in darkness, and I ducked into the nearest one without waiting to see if it was clear. Inside was an empty gurney, an overturned instrument tray and finally a privacy curtain torn from its rail and pooled on the floor like something had used it to catch itself on the way down. Stepping back out I crossed the hall to the next room in four steps and eased my head past the frame of the connecting door into the next room.
An Imperial trooper stood with his back to me. His weight braced against the door frame that opened onto the waiting area proper, sighting down the barrel at something I couldn't see yet from this angle. His stance told me everything. Feet planted, shoulders locked, the particular stillness of a man about to take a killing shot he'd already decided on.
I didn't give him the chance to decide on anything else.
Stepping quietly across the tile I drove the vibroknife up under the base of his helmet where the plating gapped for the neck seal. The hum of the blade did the rest of the work my arm didn't have to. He didn't cry out. He didn't really do anything except stop being a threat all at once, the rifle slid out of dead hands as I caught him by the webbing on his chest and lowered him to the floor instead of letting him fall and announce us.
I crouched there for a second, hand still on him and looked through the doorway he'd been about to fire into.
The waiting area beyond had been gutted into something between an arena and a slaughterhouse. Bodies in Imperial armor were down along the base of the reception counter, sprawled across the wreckage of a fountain display, one folded backward over an overturned gurney. Blaster scoring marked the walls in long diagonal streaks. A support column near the center had been cracked clean through at head height chunks crumbled onto the deck below it. Whatever this fight had been, it had been going on for a while and it was hard to say who it was going worse for.
And in the middle of it was Ember.
She had her back close to a half collapsed nurses' station, which was the only reason she still had a back at all, and she was surrounded. I counted fast—eighteen, twenty, more men peeling in from side corridors even as I watched, some with rifles held at a cautious middle distance, some closing with vibro-edged polearms and riot shields raised in a loose overlapping wall, herding her rather than rushing her.
I could feel the pressure start to build behind my eyes before I breathed deeply and felt it get pushed back down.
She didn't look like the girl I remembered.
What appeared to be a detention uniform hung off her in shreds one sleeve torn away and appearing to be wrapped around her lower face. Dark stains soaked through fabric that had started out gray. A length of chain was still locked around one wrist, the manacle biting into raw skin, and she'd wound the excess around that hand and forearm in tight coils with the other manacle connected to it hanging down in something between a gauntlet and a flail, metal wrapped knuckles catching the light every time she swung.
I didn't have a word for what was on her other hand. The air around it didn't look right, folded and bent at the edges the way heat distortion warped the air and inside that distortion something curved and edged had taken shape, twin sickle points jutting off in front of her fist dark the way space looked late at night.
I looked back to her face and above the wrap her single working eye tracked the room with a flat, exhausted focus that didn't leave room for panic even as a trooper's polearm scraped past her ribs close enough to open a fresh line across her side.
She twisted away from it, chain-wrapped fist coming around into the man's jaw hard enough that I heard the crunch of the helmet from where I crouched, using the same rotation to bring the sickle-thing around into the haft of the next polearm in line and cut straight through it like it wasn't even trying to resist.
A shield trooper caught a stun round in the shoulder meant for her—friendly fire in a crowd that dense was inevitable—and staggered, and she drove that same curved edge into the seam of his side plating and he went down without a sound.
That was the moment the second pulse round found her.
I saw the shot leave a launcher that looked like another one of the boxy shoulder rigs, this one held by a trooper crouched behind the wreck of the fountain display, tracking her the way you'd track someone you'd already been burned by once and didn't intend to underestimate twice. The charge caught her square between the shoulder blades while she was still leaning into the follow through of the kill.
She went rigid midstride and took three steps maybe four, her balance chasing a center of gravity that wasn't answering her anymore, and then her legs simply stopped agreeing to hold her up. She hit the deck hard rolling once through the momentum and came to rest half propped against the base of the cracked support column with her chain-wrapped arm twitching in small, useless arcs.
And her skin lit up.
Thin lines traced themselves across what I could see of her exposed forearm and along the side of her neck where the collar of the torn uniform had slipped, pulsing outward from where the charge had hit her in slow waves that brightened and dimmed like something breathing under her skin.
The shield wall saw it too and they didn't hesitate. Four of them broke from the loose perimeter and closed fast, stun batons crackling electricity at the ends of two of them while the other pair lowered vibro-pikes.
I didn't wait to see if they were right.
"Renn. Dael. Voss." I already had my pistol out of its holster, the vibroknife still humming in my other hand. "We go in hot. Anyone between us and her, you put them down and you don't stop to admire it. Move."
We came out in a loose spread and I opened up on the nearest baton trooper before he'd covered half the distance to Ember, two rounds center mass that folded him backward over a toppled chair. Renn's stub-launcher took the second one off his feet entirely, the concussive round catching him just as he raised the baton, throwing him a column that the soldier was just starting to walk past.
Dael went in low and fast on the near pike-trooper, ducking the wild thrust the man had panicked into throwing, and put the vibro-knuckler through the gap under his ribs where the shield harness didn't quite meet the chest plate. Voss dropped to a knee and put three rounds into the last one at a range close enough that he could poke the soldier with the gun.
That was when I heard him.
"Kriff me."
The voice cut through the blaster fire from off to my right, and I didn't need to turn to know it, but I turned anyway because some habits you don't get to unlearn. James Mak'to'ran stood in the mouth of a side corridor near a half open door, an electro-whip coiled loose in his left hand, the segmented links ticking with small arcs of blue where the power coupling ran hot against the floor of the station and a blaster pistol held low and easy in his right. He wasn't moving toward the fight. He was watching it, and now he was watching me, and his expression had gone from irritated to something closer to genuinely put out.
"Of course it's you" he said, loud enough to carry.
"Keep going" I told the others, not looking away from him. "Get to Ember. I've got this one."
I didn't wait to hear Renn argue with me, because he would have, and I didn't have time to win that argument. I broke off from the line and cut straight for James, closing the gap between us at a dead run, and brought my pistol up on the move and put a bolt at him the second I had anything resembling a clean angle.
He was already moving. He rolled his shoulder and dropped a half step to the left unhurried in a way that told me exactly how many times someone had shot at him before and exactly how bored he'd gotten of it, and the bolt scorched a black streak across the bulkhead behind where his head had been a heartbeat earlier.
"Missed" he said and fired back.
I felt the round pass close enough to feel it warm my helmet slightly, and I used the miss as cover to close another five meters weaving through the wreckage of a fallen wall using it to dodge the following shots.
Firing again I forced him to give ground instead of pressing forward, and he obliged by backpedaling toward the open door he'd been standing beside. The whip uncoiling from his fist in an arc that ticked blue sparks off every piece of debris it grazed.
"You're slower than I remember" I said mostly to keep him talking.
"You're angrier than I remember." He snapped the whip out sideways, testing the range, and I felt the air crack past my shoulder close enough to pick up the buzzing of the whip. "Didn't figure that was possible."
I fired a third time and this one clipped him, a shallow line across the outside of his bicep that made him hiss and give ground another half step, and I used it closing the last of the distance in a hard sprint with the vibroknife coming up in my off hand. He saw it coming and brought the whip around in a full loop instead of a strike.
I ducked under it. Barely. I felt the charge crackle past close enough that a few arcs from the whip struck my neck making my head tense to the side but came up inside his reach with the knife already moving for his ribs.
He twisted catching the strike on the vambrace of his forearm instead of his side the edge screaming against plating and drove his blaster hand up toward my jaw in the same motion. I got my own forearm up in time to take the blow on bone instead of my face, the impact rattling my arm through the armor.
We broke apart, both of us breathing harder now, both of us circling instead of closing each looking for the angle the other hadn't accounted for yet.
He grinned easy and unbothered, like the blaster he was holding wasn't a serious problem for me and mine wasn't a serious problem for him. "You've gotten slower, by the way. Or maybe I've gotten better. Hard to tell from —"
I fired at him mid-sentence not waiting for him to finish being clever, and he slid right just enough that the bolt found nothing but the bulkhead behind him, scorching a black smear into paneling that had already taken more damage tonight than it had in its entire service record.
"Told you" He said. "Slower."
I didn't answer him. I threw the pistol at his head instead.
It wasn't a graceful move and it wasn't meant to be. He'd relaxed half a degree assuming I'd try to line up another shot, and the sudden change in what was coming at him cost him a second of hesitation, one arm coming up on reflex to bat the pistol out of the air instead of catching it. In the half second that bought me my free hand had already found the grenade clipped to my belt, thumb rolling across the arming stud in the same motion.
I didn't throw it at him. I threw it past him, low and flat. The same wrist snap I'd use skipping a stone across still water, sending it skittering along the deck to bounce once off a fallen chair leg and roll to a stop somewhere behind his heels.
A moment after he lashed the whip out toward my knife hand in the same breath, the electrified length snapping around my wrist and forearm in a tight loop before I could pull back out of range.
The burn of the current lit up every muscle in my arm at once. My fingers wanted to open. I made them close instead, curling tighter around the vibroknife's grip out of pure stubbornness.
The grenade went off half a second later.
It wasn't a big detonation—fragmentation charges never were—but it didn't need to be big.
A spray of shrapnel tore through the air behind James at knee height, and I watched three separate fragments punch into the meat of his left calf and thigh in quick succession, each one drawing a spray of dark blood that spattered the deck plating in an arc.
His leg buckled. Not clean, not a fall, just a sudden refusal from muscle and tendon that no longer wanted to hold weight, and he dropped hard onto that knee with a grunt that had real pain in it for the first time since this fight had started.
I didn't give him time to decide what to do about it.
I closed the gap in three fast steps, my wrist still numb and tingling and drove my knee up into his face with everything my legs had left in them. The impact snapped his head back, blood already starting from his nose, and I felt myself smiling as the sound of my knee armor impacting him was a sound I would remember for years.
At almost the same instant, I felt a small mechanical pop against my shoulder—the capacitor plate built into my armor there, the one designed to bleed off exactly the kind of overcharge a shock weapon dumped into a person, finally hitting its limit and venting the excess it had been soaking out of my nervous system since the whip first wrapped my arm. A thin curl of smoke lifted off the housing, and the plate itself ejected clean off its mount and clattered somewhere behind me, spent and useless now but it had done its job.
James went down hard landing on his back but even falling he was still fast in the ways that had kept him alive this long. His blaster came up as his finger already tightened on the trigger before his shoulders had finished hitting the deck.
The bolt caught me along the outside of my hip. A glancing hit rather than a clean one, enough to sear through the plating there and leave a line of heat that I knew was going to hurt considerably more once the adrenaline stopped. I planted my weight and drove the vibroknife down through the armor into his shoulder joint. As the blade sank I felt more than heard the joint go slack under my hand. The whole arm from the shoulder down loosened all at once as I pulled out the knife, and the blaster tumbled from his fingers clattering on the ground.
Laying flat on his back, his ruined shoulder held rigid against his chest and the sound that came out of him wasn't the smirking drawl from a minute ago. It was low and involuntary, a hiss dragged out between clenched teeth, his good hand clawing up to grip the joint like he could hold the pieces together through sheer will.
I crouched and closed my hand around the blaster pistol he'd dropped and rose with it held low at my side. For a second I just watched him breathe through the pain chest hitching, sweat starting along his hairline despite the recycled chill of the station air. Whatever else he was, whatever he'd cost me, watching him hurt felt satisfying as I'd always imagined it would in the quiet moments when his name surfaced in my head uninvited.
That was when the noise behind me changed.
It had been steady this whole fight, a wall of sound I'd learned to filter into background but now I started hearing something new. A deep mechanical spin up and then the sound that followed that was a flat hammering roar, faster than any repeater I'd trained against, so continuous it didn't register as individual shots so much as a single unbroken wall of noise.
I looked over my shoulder.
One of mine had come through the side passage at a dead run decked in heavy armor, his stance widened and locked to eat the recoil of the six-barreled cannon braced with his arms and shoulder locked. The barrels were already a blur and where he swept it across the loose ring of Imperials still pressing toward Ember's position, men simply stopped being men. Riot shields folded like tin under that volume of fire, armor plating opening in ragged lines faster than the eye could track a single impact. Three of them went down in the same breath. A fourth tried to break for cover behind the cracked support column and didn't make it halfway before the stream caught him across the back.
Behind the gunner more poured in through the passage. Second Squad finally caught up, spreading wide to mop up what the cannon hadn't already finished, rifles up and moving with the same economical brutality I'd trained into all of them. The remaining Imperials, the ones who still had legs working and sense enough to use them broke formation entirely. A few ran. Most didn't get far.
One of my soldiers had gone down on one knee at Ember's side, hands moving fast and careful, checking the chain still wound around her wrist, pressing something to the pulse point at her throat, saying something I couldn't hear over the gunfire —
The scrape of boots on tile behind me was the only warning I got.
I turned back in time to see James roll hard onto his good shoulder and drag his leg under him just enough to reach the boot on his wounded side. His hand came out of it with a narrow vibroknife no longer than my forearm. The blade already humming as he threw it before I'd fully registered what I was looking at.
I dropped my weight and twisted the blade passing close enough that I felt the edge cut the air where my throat had been a half second earlier, and it buried itself with a metallic thunk in the wreckage behind me.
I put a bolt through his right knee before he could get any further off the ground, and a second through the left before the first scream had finished leaving him. Both legs went out from under him at once and he hit the deck a second time. Harder than the first, the good arm no longer enough to brace the fall.
I crossed the distance at a walk with no need to hurry anymore.
I leveled the pistol on his face.
"Any last words?"
"What" he coughed and there was blood in it now, dark against his teeth. "Expect me to beg?"
"No." I meant it. I'd known him too long to expect that from him, whatever else had changed between us. "I know you better than that."
I pulled the trigger.
The bolt took him center of the forehead, and his head tipped back against the deck plating and he simply stopped being a issue.
I opened my hand and let the pistol drop. It clattered against the tile beside his boot, and I didn't look back at it.
A shrug rolled through my shoulders more reflex than anything, working loose some of the tension the fight had wound into them, and I turned away from what was left of him without another word.
The walk back across the wreckage of the waiting area felt longer than it had crossing it the first time, even though the gunfire had thinned to sporadic single shots now, mop-up rather than battle. The medic looked up as I approached one hand still braced against Ember's shoulder steadying more than restraining. "Pulse is strong. Some serious major damage and major wounds that will need proper attention for a month or so but nothing that won't heal."
I crouch crouched in front of her for another moment after Mira's report, running my thumb once along the edge of the manacle at Ember's wrist. Checking the metal hadn't cut deeper than it looked. Behind me the last of the fighting was thinning into silence with a final burst of rifle fire somewhere down the south corridor then nothing but the settling creak of a station that had taken more damage in the last hour than it probably had in its entire service history.
I reached up and unsealed my helmet.
The catches released with a soft hydraulic hiss and I pulled it free and let it hang from my off hand, the recycled cool of the medical bay's air hitting my face for the first time in hours.
I smiled. I felt it happen before I decided to let it, the way it sometimes still surprised me that my face could do that after everything and I crouched down properly in front of her, bringing myself level instead of looming over her the way the armor always made me loom over everyone whether I meant it to or not.
"It's good to have you back" I said. "Let's get you somewhere safe daughter."