The red indicator light on the central terminal panel had started to genuinely grate on me with its constant blinking, relentlessly showing three clusters of red dots marking Republic ships. I shifted my gaze to the tactical display, wanting to confirm the readings with my own eyes — only to watch the gray, wedge-shaped hulls of three Republic Venators completely dominate Raxus's upper atmosphere, already locked in combat with the planet's defense forces.
And I probably don't need to spell this out, but the freighter we'd gotten our hands on "through connections" had originally been designed for peaceful cargo hauling, not for punching through a Star Destroyer blockade. The "action-analysis algorithm" on our onboard computer, blinking away impassively on the secondary monitor, was spitting out some grim numbers: the ship's composite armor could withstand, at most, two direct hits from Venator-class main turbolaser batteries. Nobody was going to give us a third chance, and given the density of fire in the sector, we could easily catch those two hits within the next couple of minutes.
Meanwhile, one of the lead Republic ships, showing up on our sensors under the tactical designation Vigilant, had turned its full attention onto our lone freighter. A neat string of bright points detached from its hull — a wing of heavy ARC-170 interceptors. Almost immediately, the instrument panel let out an ugly beep: the Star Destroyer's targeting sensors had locked onto our coordinates, probably feeding a firing solution to its gun crews.
"Brutus, the jump corridor's blocked!" Elara shouted, not taking her eyes off the rapidly shifting nav grid. "We won't have time to spool up the drive for a hyperspace jump — if we head that way, they'll just shoot us down first. I'm giving that outcome ninety-nine percent, just so you're clear!"
I looked over the tactical map, taking stock of the sheer scale of the disaster unfolding around us. To the left, Republic cruisers were methodically, efficiently burning down the shields of a retreating CIS destroyer, which snapped back with the occasional scattered volley while already shedding pieces of its hull. Trying to swing around to the right wasn't promising either — a heavy gravity well from the local moon sat right there. In a ship this heavy and sluggish, we'd bleed off speed instantly from the planetary pull, and then the Vigilant would only need to switch on a tractor beam and calmly haul us into its hangar for inspection.
As it turned out, though, while we were still weighing our options, the Republic had already made the decision for us. The ARC-170s split into several attack trios, banked hard, and came at us from the rear. Our sensors immediately caught a sharp spike in thermal output — the fighters had launched their first wave of homing proton torpedoes, apparently aimed at our engines, but Elara somehow managed to shake them loose, popping a couple of decoy flares in the process. Still, that trick wasn't going to hold for long.
On top of that, the Ice-Pick — just to keep my nerves in top shape — pulled up a countdown showing exactly ninety seconds until the Vigilant's targeting systems finished calibrating and unleashed a full salvo on us.
Given the situation, we had exactly two options, and I hated both of them equally. The first, obviously, was to throw up our hands and surrender to the Republic. The Jedi commanding this fleet no doubt held to their code and wouldn't fire on a civilian Banking Clan transport that voluntarily cut its engines and raised a white flag. What awaited us instead would be a formal arrest, an escort to Coruscant, and a long, drawn-out trial at the end of it.
Granted, that might well have shifted our enemies' attention away from R.G.A. and onto me, buying them exactly the time they needed to finish their final preparations...
But I'd have preferred to avoid that path regardless, even though I had no doubt I could eventually break out of any prison. After all, we had Darth Maul and a half-reassembled Grievous sitting in the cargo hold. Exposing the fact that they were still alive — Maul especially — would seriously complicate my life, turning us into target number one for both the Jedi Order and Sidious, who'd throw every resource he had at eliminating the witnesses to his double game. Not to mention, I'd bet good money that all forty-two trillion credits Elara had just spent so much sweat and blood scattering across transit accounts would get frozen instantly and end up lining someone's already-bottomless pockets, if our Ice-Pick fell into the greedy hands of Republic politicians.
The second option, equally unremarkable in its own way, was to fight — using whatever meager resources happened to be within reach. A completely reckless option, bordering on outright madness... And yet... something deep down kept insisting: the harder, the better. So I went with the fight.
"Elara, hold our current heading and don't you dare ease off the throttle, no matter what happens outside," I ordered, doing my best to keep my voice level despite the cocktail of adrenaline churning inside me.
Then I immediately opened the secure line to the lower dock, where the repair droids were just finishing their calibration of our guest's servos.
"General, can you see the sector's overall tactical grid from your terminal?" I said quickly into the vocoder.
"I see three Republic fleets closing a vise around the Confederacy — and around us along with it, Sith," Grievous's rasping, broken bass came through the speaker, punctuated by metallic clanking. "If your goal was to die under clone fire, you couldn't have picked a better spot. My body isn't combat-ready yet, and this bucket won't survive one proper broadside."
"You don't need to be on the front line to help us survive here, General — just your old access codes," I said, pulling up the readout of a CIS ship drifting three kilometers off our position on my datapad. "Dead ahead there's a damaged frigate, Generous-class. Crew's evacuated, but its main communication nodes and sublight engines are still functional. Obviously, there's total chaos right now across the CIS Senate and Raxus's defense towers, so Dooku physically couldn't have gotten around to revoking all your personal command protocols as Supreme Commander yet. Last time, the droids just received a signal with higher priority than yours — which means you're still, technically speaking, a Confederate general, even if not for much longer. So I'm asking you to try seizing control of that frigate."
Silence hung on the line for a couple of seconds, broken only by the hum of the freighter's life-support systems. Grievous was clearly weighing the technical feasibility of my plan.
"The Generous's automation runs through the standard central trunk line — one I personally configured before the campaign," the cyborg finally replied flatly, breaking into a cough. "I can bypass the local firewall through a Techno Union emergency security protocol. What exactly are you planning, Brutus?"
"Ram it into the Venator blocking our jump vector," I answered curtly. "Overload its reactors, squeeze everything you can out of its engines. If it works, the captain of that Vigilant is going to have a lot more to worry about than us."
"With pleasure," Grievous growled. "Let's begin a little reorganization of Confederate forces."
Fifteen seconds later, the tactical display registered a sudden change in status for the abandoned CIS frigate. The damaged Generous, trailing a plume of leaking fuel, suddenly sprang to life — its maneuvering thrusters fired a powerful directed burst, swinging the heavy eight-hundred-meter hull nose-first toward the Republic flagship. The ship's automation, now under Grievous's codes, bypassed every safety interlock, forcing the main reactor into a runaway thermal spike. The frigate, effectively turned into a massive kinetic torpedo, surged forward at full speed straight for the Vigilant's starboard side.
The Venator's enormous gray keel began a slow, ponderous turn. Through the viewport we had a clear view of the flagship's turbolaser batteries redirecting their bright, rapid-fire flashes onto the incoming Separatist ship. Dense defensive fire tore sheets of plating clean off the Generous, reducing its bow to a mangled wreck, but its accumulated mass and momentum kept the doomed frigate barreling forward. At the same time, the Republic ship's commander apparently gave the order to his fighters: every ARC-170 that had been closing on our tail for a torpedo run abruptly changed course and moved to intercept the kamikaze frigate, trying to help the gunners take out its engines before impact.
A temporary but perfectly real blind spot opened up in the Republic's defensive perimeter. By my calculations, we had no more than twenty seconds while the Vigilant's sensors and targeting crews were fully occupied dealing with this new critical threat.
"Elara, you're up!" I shouted, stepping forward to stand right behind her pilot's seat.
"Have you seen what's out there? Shrapnel and frigate debris flying everywhere!" Her usually calm voice was pitched an octave higher, her fingers frantically cycling through scan modes. "The autopilot's just throwing a critical error from the collision-probability calculation!"
Obviously, the freighter's not-exactly-cutting-edge computer physically couldn't chart a safe path through that chaos, and flying it manually... Well, maybe some ace pilot out there could've pulled it off, but we didn't have one of those handy. What I did have, though, was a different tool — far subtler and far more effective when it came to coordination.
I reached into my coat pocket and closed my fingers around the cool, smooth surface of my Force focuser, preparing to attempt a technique I'd never actually used before, but one I theoretically knew the mechanics of.
Closing my eyes, I used the focuser to extend my awareness across a small stretch of space, gently but insistently "linking in" to Elara's neural pathways. Naturally, I wasn't trying to override her will or seize control of her hands — that would only have added to the response lag. Instead, I acted as a powerful biological processor, taking on the burden of all that raw sensory noise, methodically stripping out of her perception the panic, the fear of death, the wail of the cockpit's warning sirens, the blinding flashes outside the window...
And just like that, all the extraneous clutter of feeling fell away, leaving only our two minds, touching. Through that connection in the Force, Elara "saw" what no computer could have calculated at that speed: the microscopic timing gaps between the incoming proton torpedoes, the scatter trajectories of shrapnel from the disintegrating frigate, and the exact boundary where the moon's gravity well ended.
An instant later, without the slightest hesitation, she hauled the left control stick toward herself, carving a turn so steep the heavy freighter had never been designed to handle it. The hull groaned under the strain, the gyros shrieked from the excess g-forces, but the trajectory was calculated to perfection. Our ship dove beneath the belly of the turning Venator, passing within some fifty meters of its lower hangar bay doors.
At that exact moment, the overloaded Generous finally met its end — the Republic's main guns punched through its reactor compartment, and the frigate tore itself apart in one final, colossal explosion. A wave of fire and hull fragments scattered in every direction, thoroughly blinding the Vigilant's sensors. Elara used that window to cut across the very outer edge of Raxus's thin upper atmosphere, where the gas density let us perform an extra gravitational maneuver and pick up the velocity we still needed.
"Vector's clear!" Her voice now sounded perfectly calm, almost mechanical, like a droid's. "Republic sensors lost our signature in the explosion's heat wash. Targeting's dropped."
Her right hand smoothly, deliberately, pushed the massive chrome hyperdrive lever all the way forward. Through our link, I felt her sheer exhilaration at pulling off a flight like that — a feeling I chose not to strip away, leaving it with her as a kind of trophy for a job well done. The nav computer, now working with clean data, stopped throwing errors. The starfield beyond the viewport instantly stretched into long, smooth white lines, and the Banking Clan freighter dropped into hyperspace with a characteristic dull thump, leaving behind the dying Confederate fleet and the advancing Republic armada.
I slowly released the technique, breaking the connection, and let out a deep breath, immediately wincing at the sharp jolt of pain in my chest. The focuser in my palm had noticeably heated up, leaving a small burn mark on my skin. Elara sagged back into her seat, drained, her shoulders visibly trembling, small beads of sweat standing out on her forehead — the neural strain from a battle-meditation stunt like that had apparently been substantial. But we were alive, and better still, forty-two trillion credits were flying along right there with us. All that was left now was reaching our destination — after taking a nicely roundabout route across the galaxy first, just to shake off anyone who might be following.
...
Dropping out of hyperspace came with a heavy, straining groan from the inertial compensators — our battered freighter tumbled back into realspace with a noticeable wobble along its axis of travel. The nav panel immediately flashed yellow, warning of decompression in two aft cargo holds and critical overheating in the thrust stabilizers. Even so, Elara managed to hold the ship steady at the designated coordinates. We'd come out right at the ragged edge of the Outer Rim, in a dead-end sector where the one trade route through it had been abandoned since the days of the Ruusan Reformation.
Waiting for us dead ahead was R.G.A.'s armada, assembled piece by piece by sentients pulled from every corner of the galaxy. The sheer physical sight of that force instantly made me forget the throbbing pain in my broken ribs. At the center of the formation sat the dreadnought Core Guardian, a monumental slab of an iron fist, and arrayed around it in tight defensive boxes were smaller warships and the bulky, bloated Confederate transports that had carried Mina Bonteri's faction senators away from Raxus earlier. This was, of course, only our rear-echelon fleet — most of our ships were out on assignments right now — but even so, I felt a certain swell of pride looking at what I'd built.
Our freighter, still trailing hydraulic fluid from its wrecked maneuvering thrusters, slowly closed in on the sector's centerpiece: the ancient, mothballed factory-station of the Reserve Guard of Automatons. To me — as someone who, let's put it delicately, draws his strength from pragmatic calculation and a solid grounding in the humanities rather than engineering — that station looked like a colossal monument to a bygone industrial age. This enormous mechanical construct of interlinked docking bays, factory floors, and massive energy storage cells appeared dead from the outside, but I knew that inside its steel depths, its cold-fusion reactors were already spinning up. Before long we were docked inside, magnetic clamps engaging with a deep, resonant thud.
"Well, we made it... The feeling from that little technique of yours was just... incredible. Still can't quite believe we got out of there alive." Elara let out a tired breath, releasing the control yoke and wiping the sweat off her forehead. "Station's life-support is running fine. Air's breathable, all that. Your crew did a solid job getting this place back in shape. If I'm reading this right, this station's a few thousand years old?"
"Yeah, I'm still in shock myself. Anyway, let's not stand around — Kem, grab the loading platforms. We need to get the General to the medical bay as fast as we can. His current condition's slowing down the rest of our plans. Hmm... though, actually, do we take him to medical, or to the repair techs? Philosophical question, that one..."
Kem answered with a low growl, expressing his usual level of enthusiasm for yet another mundane chore, but didn't argue the point. Ten minutes later, the massive Dashade was carefully — as carefully as his heavy, clawed hands allowed — hauling the armored capsule holding the half-disassembled Grievous down the station's maintenance corridor. I walked behind him, keeping an eye on things.
Even with a map, we ended up taking a few wrong turns — the place was that enormous. Most of the corridors were unlit and clearly overdue for further repair, but every critical issue had already been fixed by the droid-mechanic crews we passed along the way, working under the direction of the handful of people who watched our little procession go by with obvious curiosity.
After about twenty minutes wandering through the dim corridors, we finally reached the right section. The station's medical manipulators, responding to Elara's unseen remote control, immediately surrounded Grievous's platform.
Repair droids began installing new durasteel components salvaged from the base's storage, untouched since the station had been mothballed. Tools sliced with a whistling hiss through damaged titanium joints, replacing them with denser, reinforced parts made from a dark alloy. The moment the last servos clicked into place with a hydraulic snap, Grievous sat bolt upright on the operating table, pushed a hissing breath through his vocoder, and closed his new durasteel fingers into a heavy, massive fist.
"Actuator power's up twelve percent," he rasped, rotating one arm on its joints. "This alloy's heavier than the standard, but the balance is perfect. Where's the droid-control terminal?"
I pointed to the massive console at the center of the room. "Per our arrangement, the base's storage is entirely at your disposal, General — assuming you've decided to join us. As far as I know, there are millions of mothballed combat units down there, though I honestly don't know what kind of shape most of them are in after all this time. Still, I suspect you understand all that far better than I do."
Grievous walked to the console, his heavy metal feet striking the composite floor with a ringing clang. All the combat units were tied into the shared network and had been reflashed, so I wasn't worried about him turning on us.
Meanwhile, at my humble request, Elara was waging her own private war back at the central command post — an information war, hooking up portable computing nodes to the station's main core, pushing the ancient processors to the very edge of their physical limits.
"I've synced our relays with the HoloNet's subspace network," she reported over comm. "There's some genuinely astonishing tech buried in this old hardware. They really knew how to build things back then. We'll spot any fleet movement long before it gets within scanning range of us. And this location's honestly perfect for a base — surprising nobody else has claimed it already."
I wished her luck sourcing all the equipment we still needed with our "expropriated" funds, cut the comm, and headed for the station's lower decks to check on phase three of our deployment. My footsteps echoed through the half-empty corridors. Coming down onto the observation gallery overlooking the station's enormous training range, I found Darth Maul.
The Zabrak stood on the raised platform, arms crossed over his chest, coldly watching what was unfolding below. On my orders, every available unit of the "Automaton" HK-50s — heavy combat droids dating back to the days of the Old Republic — had been pulled out of storage. There weren't all that many of them, and fewer still were fully intact and actually operational, but even what we had should be enough for the time being. These machines were considerably larger and heavier than the standard B-1 tin cans; their frames carried thick armor, and their hydraulics could absorb enormous mechanical stress.
Maul was already putting their combat capabilities through their paces.
Down below, a training exercise was underway — a platoon of droids against holographic dummies simulating Jedi. The tactics Maul was employing were built around stripping the enemy entirely of its usual advantages: the front rank of Automatons had deployed heavy tower shields, coated in some cleverly engineered alloy that, the moment a holographic lightsaber tried to strike it, shorted the blade out on contact. Though, from what I could see, it didn't work every single time, so I'm guessing the coating layer was pretty thin. I wanted to ask Maul what exactly it was made of, but somehow the moment felt awkward, so I filed it away for later.
At the same time, the rear ranks of droids raised heavy sonic cannons in unison. A focused, high-frequency pulse swept the area, making the holographic opponents shudder — a sound wave can't be deflected by a lightsaber, and its intensity disrupted the concentration Jedi need for telekinesis or other Force techniques. I'm sure real, living opponents would find a way around a tactic like that eventually, but for training purposes it looked solid. Right after that, the remaining Automatons opened dense, coordinated blaster fire along crossing lines, eliminating any blind spots in their defense.
My appreciation of what I assumed were extremely expensive pieces of hardware that had landed in our lap for free was cut short by a comlink signal from Elara. Her voice, usually so composed and calm, now carried an unfamiliar edge of tension.
"Brutus, you need to get back to command, now. We've got... something strange coming in on the long-range frequencies."
I forced myself to hurry back to the command center. When I walked in, Elara was standing at the main holographic projector, on which a single isolated audio-visual track pulsed, cut off from all the surrounding noise.
"What is it?" I asked, stepping closer. "Republic's found our coordinates? Dooku's spies?"
"Worse. Or better — I honestly can't tell yet." She pulled up a complex decryption matrix on the screen. "While calibrating our long-range antennas, we triggered the Core Guardian's standard search pulse. Pure automation, built into the dreadnought's systems from the start. And a response just came back to that pulse."
"From where?" I leaned in toward the galactic map, where a single point blinked far beyond the edge of known space.
"From deep within the Unknown Regions," Elara said, her fingers flying across the console, scrubbing static out of the signal. "This definitely isn't the Confederacy, and it isn't the Republic — it's a closed, heavily encrypted subspace communication protocol. My programs never would have cracked it if the Core Guardian's archives hadn't happened to hold the matching response key. This code... belongs to an active, functioning combat asset from the era of the True Sith Empire."
The scale of what we'd just stumbled onto stole the breath right out of me. According to every document, scholarly work, and HoloNet record I'd ever had access to, that sector was supposed to be completely empty — I'd personally checked and double-checked it myself, hunting for any leftover relics of the past. And yet the transmitter on the screen kept broadcasting its clear, steady signal, confirming that somewhere out in the darkness of the Unknown Regions, something was active right now — something that had been patiently waiting for our dreadnought to wake up...