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The Strategist - Day 12, Part 7
"The hangar is on fire!"
The words crackled over the speakers, low and almost imperceptible. Hux felt himself freeze as their meaning crashed into him, mind going momentarily blank before it snapped back in place and he turned to face both his bridge and chaos like he had only ever seen on Starkiller.
"Dispatch emergency personnel to the main hangar," he ordered, speaking over the alarms and raised voices around him, attention focusing on the technician crouched over an open section of the bridge wall. "Close all security doors."
The man pulled a keyboard from behind the console's screen, fingers tapping line after line of code into the display.
"Commands are unresponsive, General."
"Change to emergency protocols."
"Unresponsive, Sir."
Hux frowned, rapidly reading the lines as the technician went through the wiring, pulling out two connections and trying again to make the Finalizer's system react. It was to no avail.
"Override order, officer identification 4WS-U19. Go into emergency lockdown."
The technician hit the commands, fingers going down the new strings appearing onscreen.
"Responding, Sir. Success reported on—"
The bridge lights went out, a loud explosion making both he and the technician jump backwards to avoid a tongue of fire bursting from inside the walls. All around them, officers were scrambling away, stumbling as they tried to avoid the flames.
"Put that out!" Hux shouted at them, leaning towards his personal communicator at the same time the technician jumped towards the console, trying to smother the flames with his jacket. "Captain."
A pause. A long silence before she answered.
"Sir?"
It sounded nothing like her. In fact, he had to double check the identification number at the hangar's terminal for confirmation before replying.
"The security doors must be closed manually, Captain. Gather your men."
"Acknowledged, Sir."
He turned away from the burning terminal, lips pursing in rage as the emergency lights gained intensity, painting the bridge red and orange. He knew what was happening. There was only one reason for this absurd sequence of events.
"Status."
The young man responsible for the starboard side's lower consoles turned his head up, one hand still grasping the closest officer's chair.
"Main generator went offline, General. Life support and shields rerouted to the secondary reactor. Instrumentation running on backup power."
Sabotage—someone had sabotaged his ship from the inside, and there was only a short list of suspects with an even shorter list of reasons for doing so.
"Sir, unauthorized launch reported."
Such as that.
"Destroy them," Hux ordered, eyes setting disdainfully on the 'unauthorized launch' warning lit on the officer's console, before flying over the radar and setting on the exterior to find—
What the…?
Whatever he had expected to find, that was not it. The idiot—
Idiots.
—had stolen not a TIE but an Atmospheric Assault Lander.
Now this is rich.
Not to say pure madness. In fact, he could hardly look away from it, marveling at the depths of stupidity he hadn't known existed, all the while expecting the coup de grace to befall the occupants of the stolen transport. It would be small compensation for the wreckage inside his ship, but he could live with the nominal satisfaction that seeing them blown to bits would bring. It was a question of time, anyway. The thing had no chance against a TIE's weapons or speed. It—
Hux frowned, thoughts grinding to a sudden halt as he approached the bridge observation windows, hands grasping one of the supports as he followed the assault transport's trajectory, expression growing darker and darker.
The thing—the thing was veering, dancing around the blasts shot by the TIEs, actually evading them. He had seen something like this before.
Where?
That manner of flying, those acrobatics—
Jakku. The Resistance pilot!
And not only that man. The X-Wing that had put his flagship in its present predicament, whoever was at its commands, flew like that too, evading blasts like he could guess not only their trajectory but the attackers' positions. Not even Special Forces could do that. No normal person could, except perhaps—
Hux turned brusquely, pale eyes going around the bridge, confirming every face, searching every dark corner, lips pursing in anger as he went. There was something missing, something whose absence he normally wouldn't mind, something that nevertheless should be there. Something that wasn't.
"Lieutenant," his voice dropped, rising only enough so that an officer passing by could hear him. "Scan that ship. Give me a headcount."
"Yes, General."
Would they dare? Would they even have the nerve to pull something like this?
A second set of footsteps stopped behind him, and he turned to face an absolutely terrified bridge officer.
"Sir! Engineering asks permission to run a full system manual restart."
If his mind had gone blank before, it was nothing to what it did now. The bridge had fallen so silent that he could almost hear the heads turning in his direction. He knew perfectly well what they were thinking, for his thoughts were going the exact same direction. If ever there was a set of circumstances and locale unsuitable to run a system restart on anything—least of all the Finalizer's central processing unit—the present was only slightly better than during an active engagement. In fact, considering the gravitational field surrounding them, it was in some ways worse than a battle.
We'll be running for the pods if this goes wrong.
Hux took a last hard glance to the runaway transport and then to the planet's mostly green face, expression going neutral.
"Granted. Alert the crew."
An all new set of alarms began blearing, echoing up the corridors alongside a robotic warning.
"Prepare for system restart. Repeat. Prepare for system restart. All crew to its posts."
"Initiating countdown," a voice warned, coming from the lower consoles. "Sixty seconds."
Hux snapped two supports out of the floor, putting his feet through them, one hand holding to the nearest console as its operator, and most of the bridge, strapped in around him.
"All crew to its posts. Repeat," the warning kept saying. "Prepare for system restart."
"Thirty seconds."
"Gravity simulator going offline!"
The downwards pull ceased and the omnipresent hum that filled the ship disappeared entirely as the line of officers to his left rose a few centimeters off their chairs.
"Ten seconds."
"All systems off!"
Immediately, a sequence of low clicks echoed, the unmistakable sounds of electrical instruments going off as the many screens went blank, and then silence descended. There was nothing beyond that profound silence that was only found in space.
"Reactor successfully restarted." Silence, then a hum coming up the walls, rising. "Systems coming back online."
The crew looked around, most eyes setting expectantly on the ceiling lights. Someone to his left was repeating something in a low voice. It sounded like a prayer. If it was, it went unanswered. The electrical system choked.
"Take the strain off of the initialization process," Hux ordered, voice projecting across the bridge. "Prepare to run instrumentation off the secondary reactor."
"The reactor won't be able to support instrumentation and sustain both life support and shields at the same time, Sir."
The bow was turning to port, both the TIEs and the assault transport disappearing from view as the green faced planet filled the observational windows.
Would he truly have to point out what was already abundantly obvious?
"The strain on power production—"
He would.
"Prioritize in accordance to the gravitational field to our port side, Lieutenant," he said, his voice so collected he could have been running that scenario from inside a simulator. "Keep this ship in orbit."
"Systems rebooting."
His fingers clasped the console, their hold growing tighter as the second attempt failed. To his left, close to the door, the same technician that had tried to override the controls was floating next to the still open wall console, now coated in flame retardant foam. Even from this distance, Hux could see his hands diving among the wiring, rapidly pulling connection after connection out.
"Systems going back online."
The hum was rising, trembling. The technician tore the last wires out of the wall, pulling something out from somewhere behind them. The instant he did so the lights flickered, then stabilized.
What the hell?
"Prepare for gravitational pull."
It was as uncomfortable as it sounded, but Hux was already halfway across the bridge, eyes glued to the device in the technician's hand before his body even had time to readjust.
This is impossible.
It looked crude and handmade—the exact opposite of everything that belonged on his bridge and yet it was clearly some sort of storage device. One that, unless he was very much mistaken, he knew the owners of. That left only the question of how. How could anyone even plant that on the bridge without anyone, including him, having noticed?
"Review the security logs," he ordered, grabbing the device and turning to see the group of TIEs fly over the observational window. "The ship?"
"Entered hyperspace, Sir."
Time for a different approach, then.
Hux took to the communicator again.
"Captain." No response. "Captain."
Again silence.
"Locate Captain Phasma. Get her and a stormtrooper squad to the Officer's Quarters, immediately."
"The Captain is being moved to the Medical Bay, Sir."
To the Medical—Was there any other setback he needed to be informed of?
His eyes snapped to the closest stormtrooper officer.
"Get your men."
The Officer's Quarters were empty, silence pressing against the dark walls as he joined the stormtroopers waiting in line in front of the door to the Visitor's Quarters.
Thin ice. He was stepping on very thin ice. Even so—
"Tear it down."
The battering ram slammed against the door, metal twisting under the impact as it was thrown and crashed into the door's locking mechanism.
His controlled expression momentarily turned to fury as Hux observed as the metal bent, unmistakable snapping sounds echoing from inside the door as the battering ram fell against the lock. Throwing it aside, the soldier's hands dove into the hole opened in the bent metal, forcing it to slide into the wall as the cylindrical object that had once been the lock collided with the impeccably polished floor and rolled, stopping only as it hit Hux's boots. The soldiers waiting at his side, buzzing with aggression, burst inside before the door was fully open, weapons raised, shouts of 'go, go, go!' echoing in the otherwise silent Officer's Quarters.
There were no shots fire. In less than a minute, one of the soldiers had come back out, stopping in front of him.
"Three confirmed fatalities, Sir."
Hux stepped over the battering ram, moving past the broken door and the soldiers until he stood next to the circular sofa, eyes coldly assessing the room and stopping at the sight of the three corpses, propped up on the sofa, dressed as Knights.
His eyes flashed with fury.
"Search the ship. Find them."
Notes:
Next up - Hux again, because this sub-plot needs tying up.
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