Redemption
By Kudzu
"I am a ghost…"
Silas, The Da Vinci Code
The Mandalorian squadron, 212 strong, came into his rifle sights just as General Qu Rahn roared the words he had waited months to hear: "Engage the Mandalorians!"
He sprang into action - well, did not spring, but pulled the trigger that he should have pulled ten months ago, in a different place, in a different time. He saw the surprise of his most hated enemies not on their mask-covered faces, but in the frantic twisting of their armored bodies. Blaster bolts from his gun and the guns of others spattered them; the Mandalorian iron of the armor suits they wore defeated much of what was thrown at them, but with so much firepower facing them, some were simply overwhelmed or caught in weak spots where the armor did not protect.
He fired his rifle and watched the Mandalorians die.
They were hopelessly outmatched, his enemies; a team of Jedi unprecedented in size since the Battle of Geonosis had lain in wait with five CR20 transports' worth of the best clone troopers. 212 warriors, even Mandalorians, could not hope to compete. They had come here with the intention of capturing the influential young Senator Padmé Amidala. They had been betrayed on the highest, most classified level, and they had blundered straight into the trap.
The slippery, lying, dishonorable Mandalorian Protectors that had wreaked so much havoc upon the Republic against a vow made once to him, Alpha-01 "Cygnus", and unknown to any other being in the galaxy, had finally lost in this war.
The Jedi Knights came in, lightsabers swinging in what anyone but a Jedi would describe as "fury". Scores of the armored mercenaries fell before their scything energy blades. The embarrassment of the near-stalemate of Galidraan, long ago, whispered about as Dooku's finest moment on the side of the Jedi, was not to be repeated. This was not to be a battle, but a massacre. Even many of the Jedi had lost their reluctance for such things. This was war. The weak would be annihilated.
But they scattered, taking to the sky on rocketing jetpacks or diving and rolling behind boulders and ground cover. They poured their fire into the onslaught of Republic forces without hope, but with tenacity and gritty determination. This is not the way I want it to be, thought Cygnus. I want these di'kuts to die like animals for what they've done…what he's done.
He shot one of the Protectors down, shot his head straight off his shoulders; the body hovered in the air on the thrust power of its jetpacks even as the decapitated head clattered to the damp, grassy ground. Eventually, the fuel would deplete or a stray bolt would explode the jetpack, and the rest of that dead man would return to Norval II where it deserved to stay for all eternity.
Another crack shot took down another. He charged forward, still firing, and caught a glimpse of the hard face of the Antarian Ranger Nuelson, a soldier and agent for the Jedi, whom he had become acquainted with in recent months. He spared no time for pleasantries, for he knew many of these people fighting here. He kept running forward, lending no mercy to the Mandalorian Protectors that he hated. There was nothing that angered him so much as treachery did.
He felt rather than heard or saw the misdirected, spinning shell slam into the ground beside him. He felt rather than heard or saw himself tumbling helplessly through the air. And he did not feel, hear, or see as his head thudded hard against the side of a rock and he lost consciousness.
Captain Cygnus awoke to the sound of stillness, the feeling of quiet. He wondered if he was not dead, and this was not the afterworld. But he saw, raising himself from the ground, a dead, bloody battlefield.
It was littered with the corpses of men and women, clone and Jedi and Mandalorian alike. Smoke rose from innumerable craters. He could smell ozone in the air that came through the broken seal of his helmet. He could sense the dull ache in his head; he thought that perhaps he had suffered a concussion, and was immediately dizzy and had to lie back down.
He rose, again, after a few long, dark minutes passed. The field of death was still there, inglorious in its stark, brutal imagery. This was no dream.
He could see no living beings, no sign of organic movement anywhere, nor even mechanical movement. There was only the steady rise of smoke and the flicker of flames from the holes that explosive projectiles had punched in the ground of Norval II, the Folly of Mandalore the Resurrector.
Mandalore the Resurrector. The duty that he had furiously instilled in himself flooded back and filled him again, driving away the woozy illusions of afterlife and filling him with the fiery purpose that he had grown to associate with living itself. I will kill Mandalore the Resurrector.
It was the mission that, after a year's meticulous work, he had refused to complete ten months ago. He had not been able to kill him, for Mandalore the Resurrector was none other than Alpha-02 "Spar" - the man whom he had thought to be his brother. He had believed that the bonds of kinship were unbreakable. He had been wrong. In a distant history, perhaps Spar had been his brother. But that one thing that he believed to be forever, the power of that relation, was worth nothing. It was a lesson that he wished he had never learned. He wished that he had shot that traitor of traitors dead without that instant of hesitation that had cost tens of thousands of lives. He was as good as a traitor himself, the co-conspirator of Spar's prolonged existence here in this galaxy.
Even if Spar was dead now, having died as just some anonymous, faceless foot soldier of a galactic army - Spar's own words, echoing ironically in Cygnus's mind - he had to find him and confirm the death. Underscore the death. He had to destroy the one who had destroyed all of his conceptions and truths that he had held as self-evident and had spoken his silver-tongued lies to evade death from him once.
He had kept the Mandalorian helmet that his former brother had gifted to him ten months ago: to remember, aye! To remember what he had done, or rather had not done: he had shirked his duty on the whim of being able to trust a traitor, and he had not killed every part of the man who called himself Mandalore the Resurrector on that day. He would not repeat his mistake.
He would kill Mandalore the Resurrector.
Hours had passed since Alpha-01 "Cygnus" had pulled himself to his feet, abandoned and left for dead on the planet Norval II, set with a single objective: to kill Mandalore the Resurrector. He anticipated the spell of dizziness that dropped him back onto his knees as he stood up from checking the one-hundred-seventy-first Mandalorian body. It was of the rocket-man that he had blasted through the neck of half a day ago, and it was not a replica of Jango Fett in his death. It was not Spar. He hadn't expected it to be.
As the spell of dizziness passed and he rose again for the umpteenth time to his feet, he heard a familiar, dangerously cultured voice behind him: "Freeze and identify yourself. Don't turn around."
He swallowed hard, said through dry and cracked lips the words that he'd been repeating for years, but the words that he remembered most clearly having spoken in a foreign, trophy-decorated quarters ten months ago: "Alpha Zero-One, 'Cygnus', Advance Recon Commando of the Grand Army of the Republic. Rank of Captain."
"Alpha Zero-Two, 'Spar', leader of the Mandalorian clans. Rank of Mandalore," came the expected answer, as dry in humor as his mouth suddenly was in moisture, or rather in absence of moisture. Although this was only the second time - and last time, Cygnus thought furiously - that the mechanical sentences had been exchanged, it felt just like one more time of countless many. "How are you, Cygnus?"
"You di'kut!" he shouted at the vast expanse of the fallen before him, although he saw the face of Spar that remained nearly identical to his own in his mind's eye instead of the reality of the exhausted battlefield. "You aruetii!" You traitor!
Spar only laughed, but the sound was more weary than amused. Though the aruetii clone tried to make his laughter sound light and unconcerned, Cygnus could hear the weight of toil and exhaustion upon it. "Tat Cygnus, I have done something regrettable, but I have no mind to regret it."
"You swore! You swore by the love of free will that you would not attack the Republic!" he spat. Rage clouded his mind, and he saw Spar's face shattered in a million gruesome ways before him and loved the vision.
The real Spar, without helmet, but otherwise decked out in the full armor of a Mandalorian supercommando, stepped around in front of him, breaking the hallucination of the deaths he wanted to inflict upon this most devil-like of all beings. "I spoke empty words," he explained calmly. He held a blaster aimed squarely at Cygnus's head; he held the upper hand. "I didn't want them to be empty when I spoke them, although privately I acknowledged the possibility that they would be. You see, I intended to carry out those directives to the best of my ability. And, for a time, I did."
"What are you talking about?"
"I may be Mandalore," the man who was once an ARC trooper told him with the hint of a sad but unsympathetic smile, "but I answer to the Mandalorian government. They give the orders. I execute them and am allowed considerable autonomous power as Mandalore." He indicated the dead of the battleground with a sweep of his arm. "Clearly, no longer..." He laughed softly again, but there was no humor in it - there was only the despair of failure that Cygnus loved for him to feel, for all the sins he had committed.
Cygnus smiled, though his former brother could not see it behind the helmet that made him something much better than what Spar had become. Spar had failed. Mandalore the Resurrector could not resurrect these corpses or the deadened ashes of a once-mighty warrior race that Cygnus himself had looked up to in his "father", Jango Fett. Spar was only a man, an evil man, a man who had betrayed himself and all others and sold his life away for burnt-out dreams and legacies that would only make his forefathers furious that a worm such as he could have taken their name.
Spar looked at him intently. "Tat Cygnus," he said quietly, "I did what I had to do."
"Do not call me that," he ordered. "No longer."
"Am I not still your brother?" The look on his face was indecipherable even to one who was once of his same mind.
"No longer," Cygnus repeated.
Spar frowned, looked puzzled. "Oh," he said. "Oh, well." And he continued as if nothing had happened: "I've always still felt kinship with you and the rest of my brothers -"
"You are not our brother!" Cygnus almost screamed.
He looked unfazed. "No? Well, I've still felt that kinship, always, even if what you say is true. That depends on your point of view."
"Can a worm, belly so low to the ground, have a point of view at all?" he sneered, deliberately trying to bait this despicable ex-clone trooper who now held a gun to his head, unsure of what he wanted but knowing that it was action and not the words that could never make him forgive or understand Alpha-02 "Spar".
"I'm not sure," Spar said, seeming either to ignore or not understand the diatribe. "Anyway, I didn't want to break that promise I made to you. But war is war, and it's understood that its players need to do what must be done, even if it feels like betrayal or deception. Isn't that the game of some of us, the clones? Betrayal and deception?"
Cygnus snapped, "Stop trying for this rapport! You are not one of us. You are not my brother. There is no 'we' for you and I."
"There once was," he said quietly.
"No longer," he answered again, with the same cold firmness. Why did it seem that Spar was the one asking forgiveness even though he was the one holding the blaster? Because he is insane, he told himself, finally accepting it after ten months spent in denial because of Spar's own mad words. It doesn't make his crimes acceptable, and it doesn't mean that he doesn't deserve the most painful death possible. But Spar, Alpha-02, Mandalore the Resurrector, is insane.
Again, Spar frowned oddly. "But please, sir, answer the question."
"Sir?" Cygnus repeated, disgusted.
He smiled tightly, again without a trace of the merry, defiant humor that had danced like a flame within his…his soul, Cygnus tried not to think…on their last encounter. "Since you want to feel superior," he said, bitterness lacing his tone. Was it manufactured? Was it real? The truest sign that Spar was no longer of Cygnus's kind was that Cygnus could not tell anymore.
He wished that his helmet was off so that he could spit in his former brother's face. Instead, he only answered Spar's previous question: "We may deceive. But we never betray."
"Then I deceived," said Spar. He looked at Cygnus colorlessly. "How does it feel to be on the receiving end of a lie that devastating?"
"You overestimate yourself," he lied, knowing as he spoke that it was mere bravado: Spar and his Mandalorian Protectors had killed thousands and cost countless billions of credits in damages, all because Cygnus had allowed him to continue living, convinced by his meaningless words and promises. Else, he would not have made it his life's mission to complete what he'd been ordered to begin. He would kill Mandalore the Resurrector.
Spar knew it, too. His eyes still pierced through armor, flesh, and bone. They still could see whatever it was that they saw, and whether it was mind or soul or something else entirely, he neither knew nor cared. He whispered, "Then why do you stand here, daring me to shoot you down?"
Cygnus reacted before he'd even thought to think. His hand shot up; the back of his gauntlet knocked the blaster pistol from Spar's hand. He whirled, fought hard against the by-now-familiar surge of disorientation from the suspected concussion, and remained upright in a crouch, his own weapon seeming to leap out of its holster and into his waiting hand of its own accord. He was raising it, aiming it at the man who dared still to designate himself with the numerical identity of an ARC trooper named Spar -
Blasterfire lanced like a solid, piercing spear into his gut. Only the rigorous discipline of an Advance Recon Commando that he had received through hard years of tough training kept the scream he held down within him from ripping out of his mouth from his raw throat.
The blurry image before him resolved into the vision, more horrifying than the detonation of a planet or the poisoning of a civilization, of Mandalore the Resurrector holding a smoking blaster rifle aimed straight at him. Cygnus stumbled, fell backwards onto the body of someone who was not his most vile nemesis, but another who had died because of the two of them, the first two of the ARC troopers, the first two of the true soldiers of the Grand Army of the Republic.
Both of them had broken themselves into being something less and far bleaker than that. They had been the first two heralds of a white-armored age that, through their conspiracies and weaknesses, they had badly sullied. Now a Mandalore stood before him, a look of contorted agony on his face; one that he knew that he must be mirroring, as he gasped and hissed from the pain and the fire in his belly.
Nothing could change this: they were both images of a greater man than either of them could ever have hoped to become; a man who had died ignobly, and a man who through this unremarkable passing and undeniable greatness had destined them to less bright lives and even deaths than he had gone through.
They were both clones of Jango Fett.
They had both failed.
"Wh-why?" Cygnus gasped as Mandalore the Resurrector stepped closer to his mortally wounded body. "Why, Spar? Why?"
He did not respond at once. He stared past the dying ARC trooper into nothingness for a long time before saying, "There are no answers for what has already been done. There are no explanations for the events that have already taken place."
Cygnus clamped down on a cry of pain as the agony he felt in his abdomen seemed to flare, explode at once. He lay there, gasping and bleeding, for a few minutes that were longer than any other time he had spent in the galaxy. His murderer stood above him, a look of distant pain and puzzlement mingling on his face. At last, Cygnus summoned the breath to hiss, "Kill yourself."
"Why?" The word might have been mocking; Cygnus could not tell. He looked down upon him, his expression intensifying and twisting further. "What would that solve?"
If he had the time, the energy, the air to answer, he would have. He wanted to convince this man to blot out his own life, end his voyage, just as he had convinced Cygnus to pull back from not adding that metaphorical period to terminate the sentence of his life ten months ago, when it all should have ended before it could begin. The fires on Kamino as faceless Mandalorian Protectors and BL-series battle droids hosed down this dark being's own kin - no longer! he tried to remind himself - flashed before him. Pieces of recovered armor from the bloodbath of New Bornalex thrown into a furnace. The final communication from Commander Wyik, broadcast throughout the galaxy as what was supposed to be a morale-boosting rallying cry, a show of defiance; instead, it was disheartening, as if it demonstrated that even the most courageous, most death-defiant warriors could be shattered as easily as any other beings.
The light faded from the world, and a vision of what his enemy had meant with the affirmation, "I will not condone nor order any remonstrations against the Republic while it stands as the Republic," seemed to flicker before him as he saw a galaxy betraying its promises and principles, and one eternal torch, the light of a quasar, being eclipsed by the massive wedge of an ominous warship.
It was in this agony that Alpha-01 "Cygnus", Advance Recon Commando of the Grand Army of the Republic, rank of Captain, passed on from the mortal plane of existence.
A man who had once been an ARC trooper and no longer pretended to know the true meaning of the empty word "nobility" stood gazing down at the lifeless body of a former comrade that he had killed, a final Republic casualty of the Mandalorians' resurgence that he had prophesied not quite one year ago, now crushed into a fragile remnant that had only a shadow's chance of arising once again under some new Resurrector. He stared down upon the man who had perhaps been the other half of his being, thinking things that were impossible and dreaming dreams that were without reason, and said, quietly, in Mandalorian, "What good does death do me, brother? What virtue will come with my embrace of the ever-present night? As you are dead, as these men are dead…I am a ghost. And in death or in life - for you and I, there can be no redemption."