Chapter Six: From the Ashes

A lone woman stood among fallen titans—starships long since cast aside, the headstones in a graveyard of Valis' past life.

Each step through the valley of metal crunched underfoot, flakes of oxidized durasteel wafting the scent of rust through the air—it was so thick it seemed to coat the back of her tongue with each breath. Some ships, the freshest arrivals, had yet to be overtaken by the unrelenting creep of corrosion. Some had clearly sat amongst the junk pile so long they were hardly recognizable as former space vessels—they were like the wrecks of ancient sailing ships beneath the ocean black, the deepness of their rot transfiguring them into something alien.

The pirates called it the Scrapyard.

A literal mountain of starship husks extended out in all directions beneath Valis' feet—when she'd first laid eyes upon it, standing back in the space pirate sanctuary port of San Sestina, she had hardly believed the sheer scale of the metal pyre rising from the horizon. A few of the pirates told tales of the deepest recesses of the Scrapyard, of the ships that made up its foundation and the creatures that still lurked within them.

Most just used the place as a free source of spare parts.

Exhaling, Valis felt the smell of corrosion tickle her nose as the breath escaped her. That, she thought, was the thing she'd missed the most about working with pirates. No one was after the biggest slice of this quarter's profits, or the next promotion up the corporate ladder. Everyone got their fair share, and whatever remained after that was free for the taking.

A glance over her shoulder brought the port city into view. Ramshackle buildings rose from the rocky outcroppings that jutted up against the shoreline, the pavement of the streets chiseled out of the very stone that formed the town's foundation. Caves set into the jagged cliffs—some born naturally over centuries of erosion, others formed within minutes via the strategic placement of blasting caps—housed ships of all shapes and sizes. Waves lapped the shore; the water was a drab grey, and an oily sheen glistened out from between bits of floating scrap.

The city itself was alive that evening, fireworks blooming over the rooftops. The joyful notes of music echoed from the taverns, a drunken vocal accompaniment audible even at this distance. San Sestina remained one of the few places a space pirate could find refuge—to repair their ship, rest their head, and lick their wounds after another attempt at galactic wealth redistribution. Valis had chosen to recuse herself from these particular celebrations—though the pirates had certainly earned them, there was yet work to be done. Attacking Coruscant had only been the beginning.

Ducking beneath the spine of a rusted-out windskimmer, she ran her fingertips along the hull of the vessel beside her. Flecks of paint and ash came away as she pulled back her hand—the ship was far from the oldest vessel in the Scrapyard, but it certainly wasn't the newest arrival.

"Fractured Iris," said a voice that sounded not unlike the crunch of the rust beneath her boots.

The voice made her jump, if only slightly, and sent a hand rocketing down to the lightsaber hanging from her belt. She stopped the motion almost as quickly as she'd begun it, though, as her brain caught up with the sounds she'd just heard and reminded her who was speaking them.

Darth Maul stood just at the edge of her peripheral vision, perched atop the bow of a crumbling starship like a chimera carved into the wall of an ancient temple. Stepping forward from the ledge, the Zabrak drifted to the ground, his Force-assisted landing sending a puff of dust into the air. Lowering his hood as he strode toward her, Maul gestured to the Aurebesh text emblazoned on the side of the ship he'd caught her touching—the words he'd just spoken.

"The first pirate vessel you crewed," he hissed, crossing his arms and glaring at her. "Before you got your own command."

"Indeed it was," she said, denying him the question she was certain he wanted her to ask—how did you know that? It didn't matter, of course, and beyond that the answer was obvious. He had recruited her, pulled her out of a life of piracy. How could he not have known?

"Strange. Every vessel you command ends up crashed." Before she could respond to the bait, he asked, "Shall we take a look inside?"

At this her breathing stopped, if only for a moment. Valis was careful not to let her face betray the surprise she felt, and as she spoke again she forced herself to use a measured tone. "That's really not necessary—"

"I insist," Maul interrupted, moving to place a hand against the hull of the vessel. His palm met durasteel where the paint had faded differently, not from years of being beat down by the sun and rain but by the endless connecting and detaching of a docking tube, of the countless extensions and retractions of a boarding ramp.

The egress hatch of the Fractured Iris swung inward, and Maul took his first steps inside the ship Valis had once called home. She was quick to follow behind him, and quicker still to make sure the hatch was shut and locked. One man had followed her up here—they didn't need any more on their tail.

Inside, the scent of stale air threatened to choke her—recycled starship atmosphere had a distinct enough scent when it was fresh, and this particular air had been festering inside the mothballed vessel for years upon years. Maul, she noticed, had moved a fair distance ahead of her within the corridors of the ship. He strode with purpose, as though he'd studied the deck plan of the ship—Perhaps, it occurred to Valis, he has. In her effort to keep up she barely had time to take in the sights, the memories of a life long past shrouded in the shadows of a windowless spaceship hall.

Scarcely a minute later, the pair emerged onto the old ship's bridge. It was brighter here, illumination afforded by the low sunlight streaming in from the other side of San Sestina, filtering through a bridge viewport that had become a canvas. It became brighter still when Maul jammed his thumb into a panel on the wall, and a handful of the overhead lighting panels flickered to life.

"The lights still work," Maul sneered, glancing at the glowing ceiling in mock surprise before resting his gaze on Valis. She said nothing in reply, merely gazing out the window.

The glass of the bridge viewport was covered in marker strokes of Aurebesh characters—the dutifully mechanical handwriting of Sephone Valis. It resembled typeface—set in perfectly spaced lines and columns, organized by category, inventorying ships and personnel and munitions, planning angles of attack across the Republic's systems. An entire half of the window sported a hand-drawn map of the galaxy, its various sectors shaded in a multitude of colors—the shadow it cast painted a chromatic spiral on the deck of the dormant vessel.

In the center sat the old captain's chair, its padding stained and faded, tattered into shreds along the arms. Beside the chair sat an immaculate stack of flimsiplast notebooks, and beside that stack stood Maul. He plucked the topmost notebook from the pile and began to thumb through its contents.

"Fascinating," he mused, flipping through the pages faster than anyone could possibly have read them. "I see why you hid this place from the pirates"—he paused, allowing the still-open notebook to tumble from his grip and land face down on the deck beside the organized pile of its counterparts—"but why hide it from me?"

"I wasn't hiding it from anyone," Valis answered, biting the inside of her cheek and trying her best not to look at the lone notebook laying askew on the floor. Her eyes instead wandered past the captain's chair, past Maul, to the cushion set into one corner of the bridge, its fabric clearly newer than anything else aboard the ship. "I needed a space to get away. To meditate." Her gaze moved back to the notebooks, then to the bridge window and the ink it bore upon its surface. "To plan next steps."

At this, something resembling a scoff escaped Maul's mouth. Hunching forward as though preparing to pounce on unsuspecting prey, the Zabrak stalked toward the bridge viewport and gazed outside it. "You had a place to do that. You had Korriban. When we told the galaxy you were dead, I sent you there." He made a sweeping gesture at one wall of the bridge—a bulkhead Valis had, until now, pointedly avoided looking at. Along this wall hung a row of mismatched metal cylinders; they glinted in the sun as a shaft of light sliced through the viewport. As Valis' eyes fell upon the collection of lightsabers, her stomach leapt.

"You trained there," Maul continued—with a twitch of his fingers, one of the sabers leapt from the wall and settled into his gloved palm. "Destroyed Jedi there." A silence lingered in the stale air before he spoke again—as he did, he turned to glare at Valis over his shoulder. "So why are we here?"

Ah, there it is, Valis thought—she'd been waiting for this moment to come. Maul had not set foot on San Sestina in the days leading up to the Coruscant attack; he'd been too busy preparing elsewhere throughout the galaxy. It had been her domain, and hers alone, until he'd arrived today. On more than one occasion it had crossed her mind that perhaps Maul wouldn't exactly take to the place.

"My mission was not to establish Korriban as a base of operations, Maul," she replied, clasping her hands behind her back and strolling forward to meet him where he stood. "My mission was to source a replacement for every single resource afforded to us by the Confederacy. Ships. Supplies. Soldiers—"

"Your soldiers are drunk, Valis. That is acceptable to you?" he interrupted, gesturing with his free hand out the bridge window and toward the port town and its cacophony of celebration.

"Let me finish," she said, her voice as icy as the glare that accompanied it. "There is one more thing we needed. The fuel that turns the cogs of every war machine: money. Korriban couldn't offer that, but San Sestina? It had everything we needed.

"The pirates aren't clones; we can't work them the same way we did the old soldiers. But if the price is right, they will do whatever we ask. We need their numbers—Kamino is lost to us, and the clones we can grow on Wayland will never be enough." She paused to stare out the window as another pirate vessel sliced through the layer of clouds in the sky and settled down on a landing platform at the edge of the city. "You and I run this place now, and all the money that moves through it. That's how we defeat the Republic. That's how we win the war."

He did not turn to look at her—even his cloak hung perfectly still in the stagnant air of the mothballed pirate vessel. Maul simply raised a hand to indicate the multicolored map of the galaxy drawn on the window. "You call that winning?"

It was, a small part of Valis supposed, a fair question. Had she drawn it a week ago, the map would have featured a large swath of a singular color encompassing the entire territory of the CIS—nearly a quarter of the galaxy. That territory was now fractured and segmented, jagged cracks snaking through it like a shattered mirror, each fragment a different hue.

Just as she'd anticipated, the death of the Board had sent the Confederacy's leadership fleeing in every direction. Ship captains stealing their vessels and their still-loyal clone crews, carving out a chunk of territory for themselves in the Outer Rim. Each commanding officer may have only nabbed a planet or two, but it had reduced the unified might of the CIS to a hodgepodge remnant of its former glory.

It was precisely what they needed.

"I do," Valis answered. "If the Republic wishes to attack us, they will have to fight through that entire mess to get here. It's a distraction, and it's a defense." And besides, Mekosk had been right about one thing—the board's territories were never going to accept the two of them as their legitimate rulers. If they hadn't been tearing themselves apart now, she and Maul would have had to do it themselves sooner or later.

"The Senate met today." The words left Maul's mouth in an almost robotic manner, as if he weren't quite certain of what he was saying. "In the very same building we just crashed a warship into." At this moment he chose to turn and glare at her, his amber irises barely visible through narrowed eyelids. "We did not kill the chancellor. We did not destroy the Jedi. We accomplished nothing by attacking Coruscant."

"You know that isn't true, Maul." As she said it, a hint of defensiveness slipped into her voice. It was so tiring to go through these conversations time and time again. She would explain the principle of her strategy to the Zabrak, and he would grasp it, only for his primal urge for power to come roaring back the next day. It was all he understood, and trying to make him understand otherwise was more wearying, Valis suspected, than it could possibly be worth.

Taking a breath, she forced her frustration downward. Purged her voice of irritation. Explained calmly what she'd already tried to tell him when she made the decision to deorbit the ship. "Think of the fear we've caused. The damage to morale we've done. The symbolism of the Charybids slamming into the Senate dome will haunt them for the rest of the war."

"No!" he hissed, whirling to face her fully. "You still think like a tactician. But we are not fighting a tactician, we are fighting a Sith. You must think as he does. Every engagement must amass power. What power did we gain?"

Her eyes darted sideways, back to the map of the galaxy she'd drawn on the window.

"Sidious certainly has made the most of the situation," Maul continued without waiting for her to answer. "We must strike again, and quickly. Each day that passes will see him consolidate more power—"

"Good," Valis interrupted. "Let him."

Maul's face twitched as she spoke, the corner of his mouth showing the barest hint of fangs. "What?" The word left his mouth in a hoarse whisper.

"The more of their Republic rests on his shoulders, the easier it becomes for us to topple. Hell, if we play our cards right, we might be seen as saviors rescuing people from a ruthless tyrant." Deliberately, carefully, she made herself smirk—confidence was what she needed to present him with now, not a hint of the doubts that teemed through her own head. "That was the plan all along, wasn't it? The reason for the Confederacy. Liberate the people from their oppressors. This time, we just . . . mean it."

"And then half our mission is accomplished," he spat, jabbing in her direction with the lightsaber hilt he still held in his palm. "Or have you forgotten the Jedi." His fingers curled open, and the lightsaber hilt tumbled to the floor.

Valis never saw it hit the deck of the bridge. Instead her mind carried her elsewhere—to a cave on Korriban, where the desert heat and icy winds of darkness converged, and the stone floor was forever stained with Jedi blood. There the hilt landed, kicking up a puff of dust as it came to rest at her feet—and within reach of a captured Jedi.

It had become utterly predictable in her two years on Korriban. Every handful of weeks Maul's ship would appear in the ash-choked sky, the Lord of the Sith arriving with yet another captured Jedi. Each had failed in their mission to destroy him—and were thus destined to be destroyed by Darth Valis.

For over a year, every single one of them had put up a noble fight. No underhanded tricks of the Force, no dirty swordplay. Paragons of virtue to the bitter end.

Then one day, her quarry refused to take up arms. Their saber lay before them in the dust and dried blood as they sat on their knees, not even looking Valis in the eye. Maul had grown impatient, and she had grown frustrated, and she'd slaughtered the Jedi just as she'd slaughtered the rest of them.

It was different after that. More refused to fight, as if they'd somehow learned of their predecessor's principled last stand. Still she'd had no choice—they were Jedi, she was Sith. They had to die.

She'd told herself it didn't bother her. Why should it? Her end had required worse means—cities toppled, civilians slain, loyalties betrayed. And the Jedi had brought this on themselves—had helped the Republic turn her home into an alien world when she was still a child.

And yet, whenever her mind wandered back to that first cold-blooded execution, part of her . . . flinched. The Board had deserved it—they'd died the panicked animals they were, unable to see anything beyond their own self-interest. But that one, that one had been . . .

"They will die, Maul," she said aloud, turning her eyes from the fallen Jedi's lightsaber as it rolled gently back and forth on the floor. "What is it you like to say? Cut one, the other bleeds? The Jedi will fall as the Republic does."

"We shall see." He brushed past her and strolled toward the ruined command consoles at the rear of the bridge, deeper into the shadow of the wrecked vessel. When the black of his cloak had nearly become one with the darkness, he turned to glare at her over his shoulder. "I'll leave you to it. You must have next steps to plan."

She ignored the jab, hoping her silence would drive him out of the room. Then, as he was nearly to the threshold of the bridge, a wave of fear washed over her. The one doubt she dared not keep to herself. "Wait."

He froze in place but did not turn to look at her. "Yes?"

"There is one thing that worries me. His apprentice."

Maul said nothing for several seconds. Then: "Is that a question?"

"He spoke of a new apprentice. One who would destroy us." Her voice wavered as the words crossed her lips. "Should we be worried?"

"Empty threats," Maul replied, a gloved hand offering a dismissive wave. "A week ago he had no need for another student; he believed I was on his side. He cannot possibly train a new apprentice on such short notice."

"What if he already is?" she asked, the question carrying her forward several steps in Maul's direction. "He trained you in secret while he had another apprentice. He made you kill that apprentice." She left the next thought unspoken: He could do it again.

The Zabrak seemed to consider this for the briefest of moments before turning to look back at Valis. "Yes. That he did." With that, he disappeared through the bridge door.

Once again, Valis stood alone in the graveyard.

Republic Archives: Lawless Worlds

Well beyond the borders of any civilized spacefaring government, systems which do not respect or recognize intergalactic transit law offer a safe port of call to the galaxy's criminal population. Though often colloquially known as pirate havens, the Republic officially designates such planets, moons, and outposts as Lawless Worlds.

The Republic maintains a database of known Lawless Worlds, though it is regarded among seasoned space travelers as incomplete at best. Past attempts by the Republic to bring these Lawless Worlds under their own jurisdiction—and, subsequently, prosecution—have ranged from moderately successful to outright disastrous.

No Chancellor's administration has dared touch the issue since the early 1040s, when Chancellor Vamni Ubon secretly hired mercenaries to strike against a Lawless World at the edge of the Mid Rim. The brutal war that followed is credited with exacerbating space piracy in the region for the next several decades and ending Ubon's political career.