"Wake up."

If the words did not rouse Jin Rodi from his nap, the sharp jab to his ribs did the trick. Rodi woke with a start, his bunk quickly coming into focus around him, his eyes falling on Ferron standing over him. In a flash, the Imperial officer was on his feet, staring down the woman in his bunk with a cold glare, his eyes doing all the speaking for him; this intrusion had better be a good one.

"Come on, we haven't got a lot of time. Grab what you need."

"What?"

Rodi was bewildered. A quick glance to his desk told him it was 0230 hours. In thirty minutes, it would be Ferron's turn to suit up and go on patrol, which of course meant that she should have already begun pre-flight checks and checked in with the XO. What in blazes was she doing this far from the flight deck? More to the point, what was she doing in the company of a man who had made no secret of his disgust for her?

"I'll explain on the way, Rodi. Now get your ass in gear and let's g-"

Ferron was cut off by Rodi seizing her arm and slamming her against the bulkhead, pinning her. His strong, dark arm was laid across her chest, keeping her a few centimeters above the deck.

"No, Ferron. You'll explain right now."

After a few moments of grunting and trying to escape Rodi's hold on her, Ferron relented with a sigh.

"Jin...I've been thinking about Ryloth, and you're right. You're absolutely right. This plan, these things...this isn't what I signed up for either. I haven't been able to work. Or sleep. It just keeps coming back to me and I just…"

Ferron was genuinely on the verge of tears, but Rodi was having none of it.

"Get to the point, Alia."

"You're not the only one looking to get off the ship after what happened on Ryloth. I knew a few guys. Sympathizers. What happened got them to full-tilt defection. Tonight, they're loading up a cargo shuttle with as much as it'll carry and making a break for it."

Rodi loosened his hold on his teammate, allowing her to fall to the deck. This was entirely too good to be true. A cargo shuttle? Other people in the Empire as sickened by Ryloth as he was? Ferron, who had gleefully partaken in the slaughter, telling him all this? Everything about it screamed trap at the top of its lungs, and yet something about the way Alia was saying it kept nagging at the military pilot's mind. He knew Ferron, and more than as a fellow pilot; their nights together were few and far between, but more than intense enough to make up for lost time. And he knew that she - even Alia Ferron, whose rapid rise through the ranks would come to a quick halt if the brass got word of how many rules she'd broken with one Jin Rodi - would not be there if it was not of the utmost urgency.

Every ounce of common sense in his brain and every fiber in his body wanted to throw her out of the room and go back to sleep. But between his most earnest wish that she was telling the truth and the sheer oddness of her unannounced presence and sudden change of heart, something just wasn't adding up to the obvious conclusion that this was a sting operation that Candar had set up to root out any possible doubters. If that were the case, Candar could simply have his blonde bombshell of a private assassin pay him a visit at this hour and that would be that. He could simply throw Rodi in the brig and court martial him at a later date; Rodi knew that people had been executed for far less. Candar was a practical man, and this sort of operation belied any notion of practicality given the resources at his disposal and the blank check nature of his station.

"Fine," Rodi finally said, "let's say that I believe anything you just said. That still leaves the fact that a few fighters and one of the suits is going to be out on patrol. And if the launch hasn't been expressly cleared, each and every one of those units in the sky is going to be on the hangar like bugs on a fruit bucket. I'd give the pilots - at best - a few minutes before the shuttle is taken out."

"Who told you about this plan, Rodi?"

"You did, why?"

"Who's scheduled to suit up and take shift after Orion gets back?"

"Y-...oh."

"C'mon, hot shot. Wake up."

Rodi shot her another glare, silently telling her to back off. Even if she was telling the honest truth, even if she regretted every shot she fired on Ryloth, she had lost any right to joke with him anymore. Had Rodi not been as disgusted as he was, he would have had half a mind to turn her in then and there. And that feeling in his gut was exactly what had spurred him to action. If she was lying, he could turn it around and base his case on his suspicion of her, and at least he could prolong the court martial some. If she was being honest, however…

"Get up there."

With a slow, solemn nod, Ferron opened the door and strode towards the turbolift that would take her to the flight deck. Rodi closed the door behind her and took one last look at the bunk beckoning him to ignore her and go back to bed before muttering a curse under his breath and moving towards his wardrobe.

"So you're telling me it's a...technical error."

The deck officer looked at the supply crew with no small amount of suspicion. It was not unheard of for sudden flights to be scheduled, especially given Candar's preference to run each portion of his ship right to the brink before restocking on whatever had finally been exhausted. But the deck officer knew full well that Candar had brought everything he would need to maintain the new combat platforms well into the forseeable future. Ammo supplies, purpose-built repair tools, and more tech manuals than the deck officer figured that there were for the entire ship's TIE squadron put together. So when the trio of technical engineers carted - among other things - the VTRP suit assigned to Lieutenant Colonel Rodi up towards the ramp of a waiting Lambda-class shuttle, she simply had to step in.

"I'll need to clear this with Grand Admiral Candar, given the nature of the cargo. Give me a moment."

"No need." said a voice from a dark-skinned man approaching the group, dressed in the light gray of an Imperial officer and carrying a large bag over his shoulder.

"Lieutenant Colonel," said the deck officer, "you're aware of this flight?"

"I am," Rodi said with a grimace, "very much so. I found a major software glitch in my suit's system and had First Lieutenant Ferron schedule an immediate departure to get it looked at. I tried working the glitch out myself and got nowhere."

"I understand, sir," the deck officer replied, "but our tech specialists have been briefed on the new equipment and should be able to-"

"Hold it right there. Stop. Just stop. Name and rank. Now."

"Niala Vetra. Ensign. Sir."

"Okay, Ensign Niala, trust me on this. The manuals for this thing are thicker than this ship's armor plating, and if the tech heads are anything like what I've already seen they've barely scratched the surface of that thing. We'll likely have been deployed three more times before they get around to fixing it, and to be perfectly frank I'd rather not risk my life and the lives of my team because someone decided to hold up an emergency repair trip. Get me?"

Ensign Niala was quiet for a moment. Glancing between Rodi and her datapad, she swiped a few times before looking to the Lieutenant Colonel again.

"Understood, sir. You're cleared to launch. I take it you'll be joining these men?"

"I will be. As you said, it's important cargo. If it eases your mind, this box isn't leaving my sight."

Rodi offered the ensign a warm smile and a nod before telling the men to keep loading the equipment. He remembered being where she was; fresh out of the Academy, as by-the-book as he could get, being told to search for a part that simply did not exist to get him out of the senior officers' hair...part of him yearned for that innocence again. Back then, he was just trying to serve the newly-minted Galactic Empire. And now, there he was, helping himself and some others betray it. The notion had already left a bitter taste in his mouth despite seeing first hand what the Empire was really all about, and seeing such a fresh-faced young woman doing her duty made that taste all the harsher.

In his peripheral vision, Rodi could see Ferron running the final flight checks on her armor. Unlike her compatriots, Ferron had chosen not to decorate her armor in the slightest, leaving it completely in the black and grey hues that it had arrived in. At first, Rodi would have noticed the comparison as a cold and soulless one; a merciless pilot without emotion or sympathy, flying a weapon that also displayed neither. But if his gut instinct was right, it could have also been a blank slate. A fresh start. Rodi likely would not have noticed it had he not caught the pair of jaig eyes he had painted onto his own armor's faceplate as it was loaded into the shuttle. It was a symbol he had prided himself on, and even though he had not fired one shot on Ryloth, it was still tainted by what had taken place there.

Now's not the time for sentiment, Rodi, the pilot thought to himself. Focus.

Rodi got about three seconds of focus before a loud roar came from the far side of the deck. Whipping around, Rodi saw Orion come in from his shift, inverting mid-flight and engaging the aft afterburners to flip himself over almost into a straight dive before slamming down on the deck, firing the stabilizers on each hand behind him to stop his momentum altogether. Disengaging the thrusters, Orion stood up, and he turned to face Ferron as she stepped away from the armor's assembly platform.

"Ferron, did you see that? Tell me that wasn't a perfect landing right there, come on!"

"Relax, kid," Ferron replied, "get any more excited and you'll pop."

Rodi let them continue their exchange by going up the boarding ramp. While the young man was doubtlessly a natural talent, he was still by far - at least, with the exception of Commander Pronem - the least experienced pilot on the team. But after two sorties, he was either becoming dangerously competent or dangerously overconfident, neither of which boded well for those he would be set to go against. Rodi would not have attempted a showy landing like that without doing some serious math and even more serious practice, and even then only if it was a demonstration, and Orion had just gone and done it without a care. Despite the insane amount of required reading, the suits seemed to have a laughably easy learning curve, and they fostered in their users a sense of invincibility. Coupled with the lax approach to commanding that Grand Admiral Candar had for his new favorites, Orion was essentially growing up in a toxic environment, and it just served as one more reason for Rodi to leave.

"How soon before we're good to go?" Rodi asked as he reached the cockpit of the shuttle.

"Just a couple of minutes if we ignore the flight checks, sir."

"Good. Ignore them. And close the door for a second."

The young officer at the controls nodded to his copilot, who flipped a switch. The door to the cockpit slid behind Rodi, leaving the three of them in solitude.

"Now, for all that's good and holy," Rodi continued, "tell me we have a heading."

"We do, sir," the copilot said, bringing up the ship's nav chart, "our contact is waiting for us over Dantooine. We'll dock with them there, get our stuff over, and ditch the shuttle. They'll take us to the fleet from there."

Rodi opted to not voice his opinion. As plans go, it had its flaws, the biggest of which was that they would be performing a docking operation with unknown crew in a hostile environment while almost certainly being pursued, given the crate sitting in the middle of the main passenger area. But things had gone well so far. The three men he would be travelling with seemed to be on the level about their defection given that they had rolled with Rodi's story and Ensign Niala's confusion on the whole matter, and Ferron could keep fighters off their back at least until the hyperspace jump if things went sour. It was far from Rodi's strong suit, but after a moment's internal debate, he figured that much of this would have to be taken on faith.

What little he had of it, anyway.

"Seriously, though, how can you not tell me that wasn't an awesome touchdown?"

"Look over the sensor logs when you debrief. If not for those intertial dampeners, you could've blacked out."

Ferron was not actively trying to dampen Orion's spirits, but there was entirely too much at risk right now for her to play the part of encouraging older sister. Most of it had gone without a hitch; the supplies were on board, Rodi was on board (and even managed to save the game when the damned techs tried to bring his armor along), and so far nobody had raised any alarms. All she had to do now was see them off safely and the mission was accomplished. But now Orion was gushing, going on and on about how awesome of a pilot he was, and every second he was still in the suit was a second things could be monumentally more difficult for them.

"Seriously, Ferron, lighten up. I didn't die, nobody else died, it was a pointedly death-free landing. Gimme some credit here."

Her eye roll masked by the emotionless faceplate in front of her, Ferron turned to face her comrade, about to list all the things that could have gone wrong when the deck officer approached the pair of armored pilots.

"Excuse me, ma'am," Ensign Niala began, "but there's a problem with your scheduled itinerary I need to notify you about."

"What?" Ferron replied, her question punctuated by the sound of her metal boots clanging against the deck to meet this newcomer.

"Ma'am, I sent the all-clear to flight control, but they're saying you're not cleared for take-off. You neglected to get the Grand Admiral to sign off on Lieutenant Colonel Rodi's flight. I notified him and he'll be on his way down to complete the process, ma'am, it won't be but a moment."

Oh, Ferron thought to herself.

Oh, hell.

As if cued by Ferron's freezing up, the alarm blared across the hangar, with low, looped whooping alerting the entire hangar - if not the entire ship - to the problem. Across the open gap that led to space, Ferron's visual sensors zoomed in on the ship's brigade of stormtroopers, somehow already prepared to respond. Orion looked around, taken aback by the sudden noise, clearly having never heard the alarms before. Both Ferron and Orion, however, instinctively reached for their ears when the comms on their suits suddenly screeched to life.

"Attention," came the voice of Grand Admiral Candar, practically dripping with venom, "attention all hands. Lieutenant Colonel Jin Rodi is attempting to steal one of our new prototypes to sell to the Rebellion. Stop Rodi from leaving at all costs. Repeat: do not let Rodi leave this ship alive."

The jig was up. Orion looked towards the shuttle, its engines already starting to glow blue, ready for take-off. Across the bay, stormtroopers had already started taking haphazard potshots at the shuttle, endangering the rapidly-moving crews more than Rodi and the other defectors.

"Ferron," Orion finally asked, "did you kn-"

Orion was interrupted by Ferron launching herself at him and throwing him to the ground. Stamping on his chest with one foot and wrecking Orion's central thruster, the rotary cannon on her back slid into firing position, the barrels on either forearm locked into place, and Alia Ferron unleashed hell.

"Welp, party's started, boys! Shields up!"

The pilot of the shuttle started to move the shuttle off of the deck as Ferron's barrage laid waste to the shuttle bay. Sitting right behind the pilot in the operations chair, Rodi furiously worked through the systems, aiming to kill the shuttle's transponder. Doing so would go a long way to keeping them from being followed; Candar could likely calculate their first destination based on their hyperspace trajectory, but he would be completely blind to them after that first jump. Even if the switch over Dantooine went without fail, it was a good safety to have.

Next to him, one row behind the copilot, the third defector finally joined the party with Rodi and his two new companions, readying the shuttle's forward guns and opening fire on the stormtroopers in the landing bay across from them. He was having much more success than they were. For a shuttle, the Lambda series was rather well-armed and armored. Even with the targeting systems not recognizing the white-clad soldiers, the computer-assisted aiming and the vastly higher caliber of the guns was making short work of their former comrades. But none of that would matter if they didn't get out of the Star Destroyer post-haste.

"Whenever you're ready, Lillen! Get this damn thing moving!"

"Calm down," shouted the pilot, "she's a lady, gotta ask her permission! Rodi, how's that transponder coming?"

"Well enough," Rodi replied, "I've almost got it."

"Good!" barked the pilot, "get on the IFF when we're done with that, make sure we can target these bastards if Ferron can't cover our asses!"

"Right!"

For people he had never met before, Rodi was shocked by how well they were all already working together. Of course, Imperial military training covered how people were to work with one another, but there was still some level of awkwardness despite the overall uniformity. Here, already under fire and under threat of death should they fail, the unit cohesion was firm and immediate. Compared to the inflating egos of the VTRP squadron, the ragtag group in the shuttle was already a better group to work with.

"Steady as she goes, guys," the pilot chimed in, "here goes nothing!"

The shuttle lifted up and moved toward the bay at long last, raising its landing gear and lowering its angled wings as it passed the threshold. Behind it, what was once a hangar bay was a wasteland of parts and personnel reduced to scraps in mere seconds, and standing in the middle of it all was Alia Ferron, still firing away at any ships or parts still intact, completely overtaken by her rage.

She wasn't entirely sure what she was angry at. She knew she was angry at the Grand Admiral for lying to her about Ryloth. She knew she was angry at Rodi for giving her the cold shoulder. She knew she was angry that she would have to kill Orion as well. And she was angry that her promising career would be remembered for its violent and treacherous end. But whatever the ultimate cause was, Ferron had completely succumbed to her fury. She was deafened not by the guns on her body, but by the blood surging through her head. She was blind not in sight, but in sense; be it a fighter or a crate, an ensign or a commander, anything and everything that fell in her line of sight (or even behind it, as the suit's radar often alerted her to) was a target.

Ferron looked to the left and to the right. She looked up. But she had, in all of her vengeful fury, neglected to look down.

The woman was blown off of her feet and sent flying by a blast from beneath her, and further propelled by another. Ferron came down to the deck in a heap, her suit already alerting her to the damage; the first blast had knocked her off her feet and damn near knocked out her shields, and the second had wiped out whatever shielding she had, barely preventing the shot from puncturing the alusteel shell. Fortunately, by the time Ferron hit the deck her shields were already recharging, but whatever progress had been made was halted by a strong tackle.

Orion returned the gesture Ferron had opened the fight with and kept going, scraping Ferron across the deck and letting loose with a trail of sparks as they rocketed into the space separating the two landing bays in the Star Destroyer's ventral bay.

"Whoa!"

Rodi's eyes shot to the viewport as he locked on to what had caused the copilot's alarm; Ferron and Orion were locked together, haphazardly flying around, trading punches with each other as they went. Their flight pattern, if one could be generous enough to call it that, was moving this way and that, completely impossible to predict. Everyone on the shuttle was aware of the danger such a fight presented; while the suits themselves would pose little danger if they smashed into the shuttle, such an impact would almost certainly detonate both suits' considerable payloads, which would vaporize the shuttle almost completely.

"That's our cover?" asked the gunner, suddenly in fear for their success.

"You best believe it, pal," replied the copilot, "just sit back and let her do her thing."

While the pilot maneuvered downward and immediately began evasive maneuvers, Rodi kept his eyes on Ferron for as long as he could. He had figured her completely wrong, and she had thrown away a stellar career as an Imperial pilot to get him and a few others out of the Empire's clutches. Even now, she fought tooth and nail just so that four men could live with themselves.

And Rodi knew that he would never be able to apologize in time.

"How long 'til we're ready, Silas?"

"Just one more minute," said the pilot to his copilot, "sit tight!"

Rodi's train of thought was interrupted as his eyes darted to the now-screeching screen beside him.

"Two bogeys," Rodi stated, running through the script he had followed since his academy days, "bearing on us at 100 megalights on our four, coming up from above us."

"You heard the man, Lillen," the pilot replied, "go to town!"

Lillen opened fire, not needing to be told twice as the TIE's cannons already started to rock their shields.

On the opposite side of the vessel, the tangled mess of armor and people continued their haphazard flight, laying into each other as hard as they could.

Ferron's suit was critically damaged. She had laid into Orion fairly well, but her fury had robbed her of her senses. By comparison, Orion had gotten only a few shots in, having focused mostly on not crashing. But he had made his few opportunities count; between the suit's own strength and durability and a liberal application of firepower, many of Ferron's systems had been shut down. Orion had destroyed her tibanna gas supply, rendering most of her weapons useless. A few good shots to her helmet had taken out most of her controls, leaving him to lead their aerial dance of death. And with his last swing, Orion had finally punctured Ferron's armor, and air would slowly start to leak out from the opening in the armor's abdomen. If nothing else, the traitorous bitch would freeze and suffocate.

But even then, Ferron refused to relent, continuing to bash her opponent into submission. And with every blow, she came closer to succeeding; Orion was walking away from this - if he was walking away from this - with no small amount of head trauma. One more solid punch sent the pair spiraling towards the Star Destroyer's command tower, barely missing the port shield generator in the process. Ferron kicked her suit's thrusters into high gear and shot the pair downward, hoping to throw Orion into one of the ship's massive engines before she suffered a critical system failure. The pair rocketed across the stern of the massive vessel, quickly closing the distance to their mutual incineration. But Ferron's sensors picked up the heat and alerted her to the danger. And if that was the case…

Ferron's hopes were dashed as Orion got the same warning, reorienting himself and firing his dorsal thrusters to move them away from the fatal exhaust, missing their doom by mere meters. In seconds, the pair were clear of the ship entirely, coming up on its ventral side. Between the punches, Ferron could see TIEs and the shuttle trading fire near the ship's bow, her line of sight occasionally interrupted by further blows to the head.

"...oh, droyk. Got good news and bad news, boys."

Rodi's heart sank. The gunner had been managing to hold the TIEs at bay, but a Lambda shuttle was far from capable of outmaneuvering a pair of agile fighters, let alone turbolaster fire. And with Ferron tied up with Orion, they were completely without cover. His calculations were placing their odds of survival lower and lower, and now something had come up that caused the pilot to speak up.

"Good news is, we're locked and ready to get out of here! Bad news is...well, bad news is our escape vector's gonna put us right smack in line with the ship's bow, which as you all know by now is the very last place we wanna be.

"Buckle up."

The pilot yanked the control yoke, sending their shuttle into a climb and giving the thrusters full power. Rodi caught a glance of the radar and his heart sank even further; the TIEs had already broken pursuit, which would allow the gunners on the Star Destroyer to open fire. Almost immediately, the space around them was filled with green light lancing this way and that, each shot threatening to put an end to their joyride. One more hard turn later, and the view that had been dominated by laser fire and white durasteel was replaced with stars, darkness, and even more laser fire. The ship began rumbling fiercely, and Rodi routed as much power to the shields as he could manage, praying to every deity he had ever heard of that they could last just a few more seconds.

Then, as black gave way to green, he felt it happen.

Gravity seemed to simply stop as an unseen force gently pushed him back into the seat. The air in the cockpit began to get eerily quiet as the hyperdrive rose from a soft purr to a deafening, triumphant howl. The innumerable stars streaked outwards, leaving a dark hole in the center of their viewport that showed them their destination. And with a loud and violent lunge, the defectors were launched into hyperspace.

At first, Ferron had been terrified. The Star Destroyer had opened fire with what looked like every gun it had, filling the space around with so much laser fire it was a miracle she and Orion weren't destroyed. No longer putting up any more than a token effort at self-defense, Ferron's eyes stayed glued to her radar display, watching as best she could the one red triangle that marked the shuttle that flight control had properly deemed an enemy.

Then just like that, it was gone. All at once the skies were only filled with friendlies. At least, that's what the suit's computers told her. Rodi had made his escape.

Now it was time for Alia Ferron to make her own.

By now, her suit was barely holding together. The shields were still functional and had prevented the worst of the damage when Orion decided to finally open fire at point-blank range, but that was one of maybe four systems that were still functioning. Ferron could already feel her body starting to freeze and could feel herself fighting for each breath. The only weapons available to her were the two high-powered missiles. And through it all, Orion continued his attack.

"Hey...Orion...you remember Ryloth, right?"

"What about it?" Orion replied, his voice shaking with anger.

"Thought you'd remember this little notification…"

At once, both of their HUDs lit up with the warning that both of Ferron's Parting Gift missiles had been armed and were priming. Orion froze for just a moment as he finally realized what Ferron's plan was, and that one act gave Ferron all the opening she needed. Punching her afterburners, Ferron sent the tangled pair right back towards the Star Destroyer's ventral docking bay. She allowed herself to finally regain her combat senses, breaking Orion's hold on her with a well-placed strike to his elbow joint and a powerful control thrust from her chest-mounted thruster, giving the pair some much-needed distance.

Against her training, Ferron kept her eyes squarely on the Destroyer, glancing at her radar only once, seeing that Orion had opted to keep his distance rather than pursue. Defending fire was light; each shot had a chance at hitting the junior VTRP pilot, and the few that did manage to hit her had come not from the ship's turbolaser batteries but from the docking bay's internal defense turrets, easily absorbed by her suit's shields. Ferron held her breath; air was running dangerously low, and she could no longer feel any of her limbs. But as the distance closed between her and the ship, her discomfort mattered less and less. With a flick of her eyes, she managed to access her suit's comlink, and broadcasted on an open channel as she rocketed towards the hangar.

She drew closer.

And closer.

Close enough that pulling up was no longer an option.

Finally, with an explosion that could have drawn comparisons to a star, Alia Ferron made her escape.