Inej kept her eyes on the lambda shuttle, squinting against the rain that coated her eyelashes. It swooped round the area twice - both times she flattened down against the duracrete and willed herself to look like rock - before it made for a landing pad on the opposite side of this vast facility. Inej gave chase, leaping from one building to the next. She didn't know who was in that shuttle, nor why they were arriving to the function at such a late hour, but something was off about this whole situation.
And that shuttle had something to do with it.
When they hit the first patrol, the Imps didn't even have enough time to shout for back up before Matthias unleashed a hail of blaster bolts at them. They dropped like stones.
Nina cast around for a room to shove their bodies in, and spotted a supply closet not far away. Huffing and grunting, she and Matthias dragged the three stormtroopers inside.
"Can you shoot a blaster?" she asked Kuwei. He nodded, and she snagged one off one of the troopers' belt to toss it to him.
"Can you shoot a blaster?" Matthias asked her, scepticism in his voice. "Weren't the Jedi supposed to be peacekeepers?"
"Some actions are born of necessity." She reached for her own blaster, compared it to the stormtroopers' and shrugged. No point in swapping; hers was a better make anyway. "And some Jedi were astounding shots with the blaster. The Force manifests itself in different ways - I'm good at feeling people's physical condition, wounds and the like, but Alina Starkiller was said to be the best starpilot in the galaxy."
Matthias glanced over at her. "Alina Starkiller?"
"The Chosen One of the Jedi, fated to destroy the Sith and bring balance to the Force, whatever that means," Nina said, somewhat bitterly. She ran a hand over the lightsaber at her hip; the familiar shape of it was reassuring. Grounding. "Naturally, she died. Along with all the other Jedi."
"Ah." Contrary to the measure she'd taken of Matthias during that first. . . discussion. . . on the Barrel several days ago, he was quiet. Through the Force he felt. . . sympathetic?
"My master trained her - I was Zoya's second padawan," Nina continued, still turning her lightsaber in her hand. "I think Senator Lantsov knew her as well. They were friends."
She shook her head. "Anyway, that's all in the past. Point is: yes, I can shoot a blaster. And we need to keep walking."
They picked up the pace. But, trailing behind him as he was, neither Nina nor Matthias noticed the peculiar expression that came across Kuwei's face.
The presentation turned out to be held in a large, semi-circular room overlooking a basin between two of the mountain peaks. Through a floor-to-ceiling window that wrapped round half the room, one could see into basin, where a small throng of people wearing the pale uniforms of Imperial scientists, stood clustered, beaten by the rain. They were surrounded by the grey and white entourage of Imperial officers and stormtroopers.
As miserable as they looked, Wylan envied them. At least they weren't forced to pretend to be something they weren't, or use the name of the father they loathed (and loved) to commit high treason. At least they didn't have to make small talk with bestial aristocrats who thought they owned the world.
There was a long table set up along the wall not taken up by the window, set with high calibre food Wylan recognised to have graced his father's table more than once over the years. A huge range of morsels were laid out for the attending aristocrats, from worlds that spanned the galaxy. Luxuries paid for by the blood of civilisations.
Wylan looked away. He had always hated decadence, but now it made him want to vomit.
"You won't be trying any of the delicacies, sir?" their escort inquired nervously. Wylan, not trusting himself to speak, shook his head.
In front of the large window, there were an array of chairs spread across the room in concentric half-circles. Some Imperials had already taken their seats, towards the front, and were peering eagerly down at the scientists.
"I have a bad feeling about this," Jesper murmured. Wylan had to agree.
"Citizens of our glorious Empire!" someone shouted. Everyone in the room turned to gaze at the man at the front of the room, tall, broad-shouldered, and clad in a grey officer's uniform. "I am General Retvenko, and we invite you all to witness the culmination of our efforts with the performance that will make the Death Star operational!"
Wylan's saliva dried in his throat. The Death Star. That was what it was called.
"Our first target is a planet that appears altruistic, appears to be peaceful, appears to be a home of art and wisdom, beauty and culture," there was something sneering in the officer's words as he listed the features, "but whose leaders are actually traitors to our glorious Empire! Who have aided the loathsome Rebellion, and been complicit in the deaths of thousands of sentients across the galaxy!
"Our first target," Retvenko finished, a savage glee in his voice, "is Alderaan."
There were gasps of surprise around the room, but Jesper's was the only one of horror. Wylan forced himself to keep his face blank.
It didn't come naturally to him, but he'd gotten into trouble for not doing it as a child that he'd made it come naturally to him.
"Jesper," Wylan said under his breath, "contact Kaz. Tell him to create a distraction in some distant wing of the facility. We need to delay this somehow, come up with a way of stopping it." A viewscreen began to roll down from the ceiling, obscuring the view out the window. "Now."
Inej continued her trek across the rooftops, but she'd long given up the chase of that shuttle. It seemed pointless - it was going to land at one of the landing pads anyway, and something a lot more. . . irregular. . . was happening in the wing of the building up ahead.
A room jutted out from the main body of the facility; light shone out into the darkened sky from the window that wrapped halfway around it. Inej crept onto the roof of the room carefully - it was subtly sloped towards the basin below - and peered over the edge at the congregation of people standing on a platform down there.
Here. This was where everything was happening.
She swept her gaze down the wall she was meant to scale down. Several metres of it was smooth transparisteel due to the window, and she doubted she could scale that with her bare hands. She'd need to use her grappling hook. Which was fine, except she needed to avoid being caught. And scaling the side of a window, in full view of a room full of people, didn't seem like the way to do that.
She frowned as she considered her options - she could backtrack and scale the duracrete where the window ended, but the way the building curved round meant that if she did so she'd still be visible from the window. But she couldn't just climb and hope she got lucky. . .
She stiffened, back straight.
They were rolling down a viewscreen in the room. Covering a large chunk of the window. If she could shimmy down with her grappling hook while the screen was up, then she might be able to get past with no one noticing her. . .
She sprang into action, tugging the collapsed hook out of the pouch at her waist and unfolding it into shape. It lodged nicely into duracrete and Inej unwound the cord quickly, tossing it over the side and watching the end fall into the flashing rain. It landed, pooling at the bottom on a small shelf just below the platform the congregation stood on, but her descent would be blocked from sight by a stack of crates and the driving rain.
She hoped.
She crouched down, gripped the deceptively thin cord in her left hand, then placed her right hand underneath it. Her foot teetered on the edge of the roof, then it tilted and was pressed against the wall, and then the only thing keeping her from falling into the darkness was her firm grip.
She moved her left foot to below her right against the wall, then again, until she was eyelevel with the roof. And thus she began her descent.
When Kaz's comm pinged with an alert from Jesper, he jumped out of his seat.
Not that he would ever admit to it.
He scowled at his own jumpiness - being this tense over his companions was not something he was accustomed to, and he didn't like it - but marched over to pick up the comlink. It had to be Jesper who'd sent it; only two people knew his comm frequency, and while the odds of Inej contacting him had significantly increased in the past week or so, considering where she was right now, the odds of it being her weren't great.
So he didn't bother to conceal his distaste - it wasn't like there was anyone else on the ship to see it, anyway - as he stalked over, but the scowl faded when he read Jesper's terse and to-the-point message.
We need a distraction. Important.
Kaz scoffed for a moment, wondering what these crazy Rebels he'd thrown his lot in with had done now, before the implications of that statement hit him.
Jesper and Inej were in there.
They could be in danger.
Almost without his permission, his head swivelled to look at the smuggling compartments he was meant to be hiding in.
Hadn't Nina or someone mentioned something about thermal detonators?
Inej was in peak physical condition, and made sure she did exercises like this regularly to keep up her endurance. Nevertheless, her hands shook and her shoulders burned as she shimmied down the cable.
It got worse when she came level with the room and the window, because now the rough, gripping surface she'd done well on was gone, replaced with a rain-slick, smooth transparisteel.
She gritted her teeth and kept going, excruciatingly careful. Even if the limited sunlight getting through Eadu's cloud cover was inadequate, the light shining from either side of the viewscreen was enough to see by. She felt her palms grow sweaty with strain; the cord slipped in her grasp and she jerked to a sudden stop when she tightened her grip reflexively. She took a deep breath, and moved her right foot downwards-
Only for a stray wind to collide with her side, shoving her off balance. She couldn't entirely contain her cry as her foot slipped and her shoulder rammed into the transparisteel, her fingers clutching at the cord for dear life-
The breath expelled from her body, she sucked in air, then blew it out again. Grunting when she shifted on her bruised shoulder, she rolled so her stomach was against the transparisteel again, the cord taut under her hands.
Then, praying that no one had heard her cry, she continued her descent.
Jesper nodded at Wylan after he sent the message. Wylan, face stiff, gave an almost imperceptible smile. It soon disappeared; the General wasn't finished speaking yet.
"That Alderaan has for so long kept up its facade of innocence, of morality, is an offence," he went. "And soon, the galaxy will know what it means to oppose the righteous Empire! If they will not obey us through love, as they should, they will obey us through fear. With the unveiling of this superweapon you have all helped to build, no star system will dare oppose the Empire now-"
There was a thump, and a quiet cry.
The excited murmuring in the room immediately hushed as the patrons glanced at each other, wide-eyed. What was that? he could practically hear them thinking. Their sudden fear was as tangible as the chairs they sat on. Jesper's mind whirred.
That cry had sounded a lot like Inej.
And if they launched a search for the intruder, if they found her, found them all-
Jesper didn't think. He just stomped his foot on the ground, slapping his knee, and cried, "Hear, hear!"
Everyone turned to look at him; Jesper felt nauseous.
Even pretending to agree with the Imperial turned his stomach, but it had done the trick. The noise of his foot against the floor was similar enough to the thump from earlier and the autocrats, their curiosity assuaged, turned back to the General, who glared at Jesper for interrupting him, but launched back into his speech.
Wylan nudged his foot. "Quick thinking."
Jesper bit his lip to keep from smiling. "Smuggler, remember?"
The feeling of solid ground under her feet was possibly the best thing Inej had ever felt when she finally landed, heart hammering in her throat. She yanked at the cable, tugging it this way and that, expecting it to come tumbling down as it usually did. It didn't budge.
A cold feeling sank in Inej's gut. If she couldn't get her grappling hook down, then for one thing she wouldn't have it with her later, and would have to pick up another at some point. But the other point was that if she couldn't remove it, then the hook and cord would remain there, hanging in plain sight for whenever the viewscreen rolled back up and the people in the room went back to their business.
But there was nothing for it.
She clutched the cord for one more indecisive second, then let go to keep moving.
The path she was on ran just below the platform the people were congregated on. Along the edge of the platform ran stacks of crates, tall enough that if she crouched they would conceal her completely. There was a small area for her to perch behind them, so she clambered up and did so, pulling out her blaster and peering round the side.
The congregation was smaller than she'd originally thought: about half a dozen human men in the uniforms of Imperial scientists standing facing a single officer in white. She crept closer to hear what was being said, but half of the man's words were stolen away by the wind.
She was just in the midst of leaning in closer when everyone stopped muttering to themselves and stood to attention, the man's in white's face turning the same colour as his uniform.
From her angle, Inej couldn't see who was approaching, but the air suddenly seemed colder and the footsteps that approaching were. . . Well, clanking wasn't quite the right word; the noise the armour against armour made was more like a crashing, a fatal speeder collision, the death toll of a bell, the breaking of stormy seas against the prow of a boat.
Inej thought she might know who that was, but she prayed she was wrong.
Please, let me be wrong.
No such luck.
"Director," a smooth, near-melodic voice greeted, somewhat mockingly. Inej squeezed her eyes shut and threw up those mental shields Nina had so painstakingly taught her to construct. Because although Inej had - thankfully - never heard that voice in person, it was familiar enough from holoclips in debriefings, even without the faintest electric tinge to it, and there was no mistaking who it belonged to.
So that was who was on that shuttle.
Inej opened her eyes again and squinted. From her vantage point, she could just see a glint of silver armour, curved like the hard shell of some ostentatious yobcrab.
"Lady Koroleva," the director said after a moment, confirming Inej's suspicions like a punch to the gut. Lady Koroleva, also known as Darth Koroleva, the Sith Lord responsible for the Jedi Purges - the reason that Nina was the last of her kind. Why she was called a Sith Lord, Inej didn't know, but what she did know was this:
Lady Koroleva was the right hand of Aleksander Morozova himself; the Emperor's fist; slavishly devoted to keeping the galaxy under his reign. She was a one-woman army. When Rebels went up against her, they died.
Even Nina's Jedi Master hadn't stood a chance.
Inej willed herself not to move, not to breathe, not to think. Not while she was so close.
"My lady," the director was saying, "to what do we owe the pleasure of your presence?"
Despite herself, Inej had to smile at his obsequiousness; everyone knew that the one thing Koroleva despised was flattery.
Evidently the director's comrade knew that too, a she leaned in to murmur, "Ivan. . ."
Ivan waved her off, nerves quickening his hand motions. "It's fine. My lady?"
Koroleva said simply, "I came to investigate a tremor in the Force." Inej's heart skipped a beat - Nina. No. Oh no. "Feel no need to suspend your operation; you may fire when ready. I am simply here on my own terms." There was a pause, then a sinister, "I trust you find that adequate?"
She had a peculiar way of speaking, like she was trying to sound posh - for mockery or for authenticity, Inej didn't know - but it didn't come naturally to her.
"Of course, my lady."
Koroleva had already turned to leave, her footsteps rhythmic and easy to track by hearing alone. But they stopped shortly after - too close to Inej's hiding spot for her liking.
Then they continued, and she released the breath she hadn't even realised she was holding.
"And now," finished the General, "we shall finally give to traitors what traitors are due." To the other officers milling about the room, he declared, "Send the command to fire!"
All at once, the viewscreen lit up. It showed Alderaan, a blue and green orb suspended among clusters and clusters of stars. It looked deceptively peaceful.
And then, into the holo - no doubt being shot from a Star Destroyer or other Imperial ship - crept a moon.
No, Wylan realised, ice spreading in his chest. That's no moon.
That's a space station.
Spherical, grey, with was looked like a large crater on what side; it certainly looked like a moon. But the armoured defences? The smoothness of the crater, which now appeared to be more like a focusing dish? The trench running round its equator?
It's too big to be a space station, Wylan couldn't help but think, even as he knew that it wasn't. That this - this - was the planet-killer they'd been looking for.
It was certainly worthy of the name.
Because before Wylan's aghast stare, green light coalesced in the focusing dish, and shot out from the Death Star with a single minded intensity that struck the peaceful planet of Alderaan like someone had taken a hammer to a glass bauble. The planet exploded, chunks of it littering the air in clashes of fire and ash and brimstone and the blood of a civilisation screaming in agony-
Although he knew they were too far away to feel any of the immediate gravitational ramifications of what they'd just witnessed - the destruction of a planet - Wylan imagined he felt something shift. Like the galaxy had tilted in its spin, and now everything was thrown off course.
The Empire wasn't just evil. Not anymore.
It was an abomination.
Joost had often been told by his friends and family that, despite having consumed disproportionate amounts of poetry growing up in solitude as a child, his attempts at flirting were, to be quite frank, bantha fodder. And that regrettable character trait was once again rearing its ugly head right now; his tongue was tied in knows and his hands were flapping wildly in over-dramatic gestures, all in a vain attempt to get Anya to like him.
He'd tried complimenting her eyes, but all of the meaningful natural imagery in fiction had to do with the colours blue - blue sands, blue skies, blue seas - and Anya's eyes were brown.
A beautiful, earthy brown, but he couldn't say that her eyes looked like mud, could he?
Fortunately, she seemed to find his awkwardness more amusing than repulsive, but it was humiliating all the same. He took a stab at preserving his dignity with a rambling, "Your skin is like moonlight," to which she only raised an eyebrow.
"We're on Alderaan, Joost," she pointed out. "Not only am I used to much better similes, what with living on a multi-cultural hub, but we don't have any moons."
"Wait, what?" he asked, taking a step back. They were having an ordinary conversation in the street for once, rather than at the house where they both worked, so he was perfectly able to tilt his head up and point to the grey, spherical object hanging in the sky. "Then what's that?"
"It's funny really," Anya was still saying, "how we have an entire lullaby describing a 'mirror-bright moon' when we don't actually have- what the kriff is that?" She was openly gaping at the satellite in orbit around the planet; her confusion only befuddled Joost more.
"You haven't noticed that? It's been there since I got here a few days ago," he said, feeling peculiarly out of his depth at her wide eyes and open mouth. "I figured it was a moon."
She shook her head, and shifted her eyes back to the sky. "It's never been there before. Oh," she said, head tilting to the side. Joost glanced up again. There seemed to be a sort of green light gathering next to it, sparkling through the haze of the atmosphere. "Look at it."
"It's. . . beautiful," he agreed, a soft smile wreathing his lips as he watched the way it hung there, glittering like a bauble draped in coloured lights.
Then the green light got closer. . . and closer. . . and closer. . . and closer and closer and closer-
"Oh, Shiraya's word," Anya breathed, something akin to terror stretching her voice thin. The saying was a Nubian one, he knew, and he opened his mouth to ask if she'd ever been to Naboo but suddenly it didn't matter because that green light was entering the atmosphere and he automatically stepped between Anya and that terrifying light but in the end it didn't matter.
In the end, they both died anyway.
