Lost once again in the Fortress halls, Cal wasn't sure where he was meant to be going.
Back to the laboratory would only have Cal distract the engineers from their work -he'd learned as much from overhearing the techs on the Star Destroyer. Going back to ask either Trilla or the Grand Inquisitor for guidance seemed like a fate worse than death, and Cal's pride refused to let him even consider it besides.
So that left him to wander the halls, searching for something -anything- that looked like a safe place to stop and hide away for a while.
Especially if it was someplace where he could try and hide from the troubled thoughts running through his head.
To kill a Jedi… Cal couldn't help but linger on the dark order, Of course. Not sure what else I should have expected.
He turned down an unfamiliar hall, noticing a pair of stormtroopers look at him before giving a wide berth.
I'm not going to do it. He hastily told himself.
An astromech unit whirred past him.
But if I don't… They could do anything to BD.
Not knowing how he might get to his companion from here grated on Cal almost as much as the rest of his predicament.
I'm not going to do it… He tried to tell himself, making every effort not to remember that he had made similar promises to himself about the mission to Kashyyyk, I'm probably not going to do it.
You know what? He stopped himself, Just don't think about it. Not right now. Just focus on not getting lost in this place.
An idea easier said than done as Cal restlessly walked down a hall, unsure if he had been through here once before.
Feeling a shift in the air that he couldn't be sure was either real or imagined, Cal came to a heavy set of blast doors. Taking his chances, he simply waved at the unlocked command panel.
Reacting slowly, the durasteel panels groaned and creaked as they pulled to the side, revealing a stomach sinkingly familiar place.
The prison hall extended as far as Cal could see, the red gleam of the holoshields illuminating the place in a deathly glare.
Of course. He dimly thought as he tentatively stepped into the ward.
How long ago was this? A month? Cal tried to remember how long it had been since he'd been locked away, Half a month?
It all seemed like a blur; Sharp moments of fear and adrenaline punctuating weeks of torture; The creeping, almost sentient, fog of the Dark Side that clung to the fortress. Apprehension, unease. The impossible to shake sense of being watched, of being examined or judged like the subject of some warped experiment.
All of it twisted together into an emotional mess that left Cal angry and afraid, and most troubling of all, ready to act on whatever impulse crossed his mind.
It didn't work. He tried to tell himself, They tried, and I'm still here.
Shaking his head as if it would do something to fling any doubts away, Cal continued through the prison ward.
Row upon row of abandoned cell watched him, the red glow of the holoshields solid and unflinching as he crossed the room. Letting the dark sense of fear and dread that clung to the space roll over him like oil over water, Cal was almost through the room before he was caught by a memory.
A window out of the room and to one of the twisting hallways sat against a wall.
What felt like oh-so-long ago, he'd watched Cere carve her way through a wave of troopers as she passed through. Swinging Trilla's old blade with practiced precision and firing a stolen blaster as she went, as if the half dozen men that came to stop her weren't even there.
Just cutting through the crowd. Cal couldn't help but think, seems like we're all pretty good at that.
Before he moved on, a small series of chirps and whirrs pulled Cal out of the memory.
"Hm?" quickly looking down, there was a fleeting moment where Cal thought he heard BD.
To his dismay, and utter lack of surprise, he found a mouse droid instead.
"Sorry, what?" Cal hadn't heard the first of what the droid was trying to tell him.
Beeping in one part annoyance of not being listened to, and one part surprise in being listened to at all, the little droid rocked back and forth, repeating its news of having a delivery before popping open its top to present a code calendar.
"Let me guess, they were too spooked to give it to me, so they sent you instead?" Cal muttered as the mouse droid explained that the local stormtroopers had sent it with the code cylinder.
The droid didn't know about that, but it did know which door the cylinder was keyed to, and it explained as much with a series of beeps.
Looking over his shoulder at the window in the wall, Cal decided that it might be better for him if he left this place behind, "Can you take me there?"
Barely sparing a second to say yes, the mouse droid wheeled around before hurrying off down the walkway.
Rushing to catch up and then briskly walking to stay that way, Cal followed the little droid into a turbolift. Getting a second's reprieve while they were taken to the right floor, it wasn't long until they were out of the lift and rushing down more crisscrossing halls. Wide things with transparasteel walls gave way to circular command rooms, gave way to narrow administrative areas, gave way to long stretches of hall flanked on either side by unlabeled doors.
Thoroughly lost in the maze-like fortress, Cal almost stepped past the mouse droid as it abruptly stopped at the foot of a door.
Always in a rush, the thing let out a brisk beep to say the had arrived.
Before Cal had time to thank the little droid for showing him the way, a small whir of a motor echoed down the hall.
Looking over his shoulder, Cal was just in time to see the mouse droid speed away.
"…Thanks. I think," he told the empty corridor.
Left in a predictable silence, Cal had nothing else to do besides turn to the door. Unlocking it with the code cylinder, Cal wasn't sure what he was expecting as the door whooshed open.
Revealing a simple bedroom, almost dorm-like, Cal half wondered if this was some sort of elaborate trap. Sensing nothing beyond the typical misery that lingered in the fortress, he reluctantly walked in.
The door sliding shut behind him, Cal was left with a familiar sinking feeling that came from the constant churn of moving from one place to the next.
A spartan place, a single bed was tucked into one corner. Opposite of that was a small nook with a refrigerator and reheater, a tiny counter and a small table filling in the rest of the space.
On the far right wall was a wardrobe, beside it stood a door to a private fresher.
"At least I don't have to share that anymore," Cal tried to look for some positive to the grim place.
But his words fell flat, leaving Cal alone with his thoughts, Not that there's anyone to share anything with.
Trying not to be alone and remembering the sort-of friend he had found in Jorge, Cal couldn't help but find an odd irony in the situation, "Guess we don't have to share clothes anymore, either. Huh?"
When nothing replied besides silence, the Grand Inquisitor's smooth voice picked at Cal's mind, "Dressing like a stormtrooper is beneath us."
Suddenly aware that he wasn't as nearly alone as he thought he was, Cal looked to the wardrobe.
"This is ridiculous." He muttered, crossing the room for the wardrobe and trying to vent a growing apprehension that had coiled itself into a heavy lump in his gut.
Stopping just short of the unremarkable thing, Cal braced himself for what he already knew was inside.
Wordless, he opened the wardrobe door.
Only to find identical rows of a familiar uniform.
.***.***.***.***.
Sunlight blistered and danced across the rippling ocean surface of Nur.
Far closer to the system's star than Cal had previously thought, sweat ran down his back as he decided that life was only possible on the scorching hot planet below the waves. Standing on the bare landing platform, he was left to feel the full daytime heat seeping through his new uniform as he waited for his transport.
Charcoal gray and accented with blood-red streaks down the arms and legs, Cal's new tunic and trousers would have been suffocating even without the unrelenting sun. A perfect recreation of what the temple on Bogano had shown him, it was made even worse by the occasional bit of glare that came from the blackened plastasteel shoulder guards. Not large or sustained enough to matter, the little glints of light served to occasionally draw Cal's attention to the stark white Imperial Gears that had been stamped onto the armor.
Because no one could tell that the Empire designed this outfit without those. Cal sourly thought.
As he did, a shadow passed over the landing platform. At first far above, but then rapidly descending to the mostly empty spot, a single lambda shuttle came to rest just a few meters away from Cal.
He hadn't been the one to arrange anything. Whether it was Trilla's doing or someone else's, Cal wasn't sure, but the morning after he met with the Grand Inquisitor, Cal had simply been informed that a transport would be waiting for him on platform nine.
The was no room for debate, no opportunity to protest, just a purgetrooper at his door with a datapad and a short order that he was to appear on the landing pad at ten o'clock.
No one shepherded him through the fortress, no one stopped him when he made a nervous visit to the repair shop to check on BD, and no one tried to force him out of the room when he waited until the last possible minute to leave fore the landing platform.
No one had been there to meet on the platform him either, and Cal wasn't sure if he was expected to bring along a group of purgetroopers, or if they would somehow appear wherever he was going.
Of course, he wasn't interested in any of those details as the lambda shuttle lowered its boarding ramp.
Looking over the bare ocean surface, he didn't have many choices to consider before walking onto the waiting ship.
Immediately cooler than the scorching outside, Cal found the inside of the ship to be dim as well. The already cramped space was made all the smaller as the loading ramp retracted, shutting firmly and becoming one of the transport's walls.
Settling onto a bench, Cal tried to ignore the occasional half-hidden glances and persistent ripples of apprehension that came from the shuttle pilot.
Instead of addressing the other person on the ship, Cal looked down at the datapad that the stormtrooper had handed him. Smaller than most, it was preloaded with a single file; a mission brief.
There were no conditions, no threats about what fate Cal would meet if he failed. None in writing at least. Cal didn't have to think hard about what would happen to BD if he returned a failure. Really, it was very short and very simple:
Go to Bracca. Find and kill the Jedi that lived there. Colonel Aldo at the Sector 28B customs house would have information about their lead.
Cal's stomach sank.
Bracca? You can't be serious. Who even… Who are they? Did I ever meet them? I never noticed them, but did they know who I was?
Huffing, he read and reread the scant description of his target:
Human. Short. Slight build.
That could be anyone, Cal griped as he thought back to the scores of scrappers he had worked with over the years.
Some of them trusted coworkers, some casual acquaintances, others still untrustworthy scoundrels, Cal didn't think that he had sensed anything from anyone on the planet.
Not like I was looking, he noted while trying to ignore the long years he'd spent in fear.
Fear that he thought he had defeated. A fear of being found by the empire, a fear of being abandoned, a fear of so many dark things that had -by some cruel twists of fate- come to pass.
A bitter realization, twisted into something that might have sounded reassuring, occurred to Cal, There's nothing to be afraid of anymore.
But there were so many things to be angry at. Angry at being abandoned. Angry at the Empire. Angry at whatever damned fool decision the Jedi had made to bring about Order 66. Angry that he had been swept up in the middle of it because of some misguided and hopelessly idealistic pipedream of reviving the Jedi Order.
Everything terrible has already happened. Cal couldn't help but wonder, Now what?
Unwelcome memories of how he got here picked at Cal. A dashing rescue from Bracca, a supposedly noble quest.
...looking for that holocron, what was I thinking?
Visiting one planet after another, carving a path through whoever stood in his way, usually stormtroopers, sometimes local tribesmen. He'd seen firsthand what sort of madness gripped a Jedi when they went mad with power.
He was an idiot, Cal remembered Malicos' dirty and dried features, but he was right about one thing.
"The Jedi fell long before the purge" he had said, just moments before the fight that sealed his fate.
Just before I killed him, Cal made a mental note.
Cal's hand itched. The weight of his overlong saber pulled at him even though he was sitting down. I killed a lot of people, he wasn't special.
"We could build something different, something better" The mad man had pleaded.
And I told him no. Cal remembered, might have been the only smart thing I said during that whole year.
Cal had been against Malicos' plan, vehemently so. But only because he had believed that the Jedi Order should rise again, not because he believed it should be built back differently.
Now he wasn't sure that it should exist at all.
What did the Order do? Cal sourly thought, sit back to watch the Clone Wars unfold? Pretend to be peacekeepers while commanding warships? What was the point of it all? What did it matter if it could all be wiped away in a night?
Sharp memories of his final moments aboard the Albedo Brave cut through Cal.
Training with his master one moment, cutting through wave after wave of his supposed allies the next. Killing so as not to be killed.
And now what am I doing? Cal sat perfectly still, silently staring at the datapad in his hand, the red underside of his glove too perfect a metaphor, the same thing, I guess.
I don't even know this person. This Jedi.
They could be anyone. They could be like Malicos. They could be like Master Topal.
They could be like me.
Cal wasn't sure what any of those options entailed, only that they would all end in the same fate.
What are they going to say? What are they going to do?
Do I even really care? It's them or BD, that choice is obvious.
"So long as it's the one the Empire wants you to make…" Trilla's comment echoed through Cal's head.
Except this time, he wasn't stuck in some moral quandy.
Sorry. It's nothing personal. Cal tried to apologize for what he was about to do, knowing perfectly well that the regret unsaid wasn't worth anything at all.
Even more horrifying was his revelation on Kashyyyk, the realization that ending one more life, whoever they might be, was trivial. A task that he had done time and time again without a second thought.
So what's one more? A cold thought rolled through Cal's mind.
Before he had his answer, the transport jostled as it landed. In the same moment, the passenger door hissed open and a loading ramp unfolded.
Protecting his sanity, Cal tabled the thought, leaving for the main ship before it picked at him again.
