Matthias turned the comlink on, and a holographic image of a stormtrooper came up, the helmet removed to reveal the face of a boy about the same age as Wylan, with limp hair and a pointed face.
"Who are you?" he demanded, detaching himself from the others' embrace. "How did you get this frequency? What do you want?"
"My name's Mikhail," he said in a quivering voice, his accent intrinsically familiar to Matthias. Mandalorian. "And you're Matthias Helvar."
"Yes," he said. "What do you want?"
Mikhail took a shuddering breath. "Do you have the darksaber?"
Frowning, Matthias unclipped it from his belt and lit it, confident that the boy would see it in the hologram.
He did. A tension that Matthias hadn't even noticed seeped from his shoulders.
"I saw you on the holos," he said quietly. "All of us on Mandalore did. Did you hear about the uprising?"
Matthias nodded, vaguely remembering Kaz mention it.
"My brother was part of that," Mikhail said. "He told me that you represented everything a true Mandalorian should be. The Empire are cowards, and Brum along with them - this Death Star is just proof of it. You were right to reject Brum's message of might being preached as strength. It helped the rest of us see the difference.
"I heard that Brum died in the uprising," he continued softly. "My brother was killed as well. And my parents, most of my clan, for association. I was still young, so I was sent here to serve as a stormtrooper as penance."
Matthias didn't know what to say to that, so he just repeated one of his earlier questions. "How did you get this frequency?"
"I found a dead Rebel with it built into her comlink." He smiled sadly. "I don't know why I'm sending you this, but I guess I wanted. . ." He took a breath. "When you go back to Mandalore, please, spread the word about this Death Star, and the cowardice it represents. Killing millions of people - civilians - at once, instead of facing them honourably in combat." He scoffed briefly, then his face became pensive again. "Finish what you've started with all those propaganda reels, and make it clear what a true Mandalorian is."
He took another deep breath, then continued. "I know you failed to destroy the generator - that destroying the control room didn't do anything, and now the path to the reactor is blocked. But I'm in here, in the reactor. I can destroy it, and then your fleet can wipe this monstrosity from the galaxy."
"But you'll die."
Mikhail almost smiled at that. "I know." He took a deep breath. "But that is the Mandalorian way."
"Blasters won't damage the reactors," Matthias warned. "You'll need some other sort of weapon."
"Your Jedi dropped his lightsaber. Will that do?"
Jesper jerked his head up. "Wait what?"
"It's ironic, really. The Jedi and Mandalorians fought so many wars, and now, at the end, we work together."
He took another deep breath. "But I'm wasting time - time your fleet doesn't have. I don't know why I commed, I guess. . . I just wanted to tell you. . . Keep doing what you're doing. Free Mandalore."
Mikhail clicked off the comm, but not before he ignited the lightsaber, and the humming of the blade sounded like crickets heralding the new dawn.
There was silence in the glade again, but it was a different silence to the one from before.
"Do you think it'll work?" Wylan asked tentatively.
Matthias shook his head. "Let's not hang around long enough to find out. When that thing explodes. . ."
Jesper nodded. "Let's get to the speeder bikes."
The bikes weren't too far off, so in a few moments they were zipping away from the generator, and this couldn't be safe because they'd had to cram three people on each bike and they definitely weren't going at the top speeds they could, but it didn't matter because they were going fast enough.
Fast enough that when they heard the boom of the reactors overloading, the energy released scorched everything in a several mile radius, they weren't close enough to be hurt.
"I," Zenik spat, "am no Jedi."
They were the same words she'd said on Hoth, weeks and weeks ago, Koroleva noted. That entire confrontation was burned into her brain, from the Jedi's unexpected declaration, to the scream she'd given when her padawan had died, to the hot humiliation of being ordered to retreat.
Had it really been only a year or so since Eadu? she wondered. On the one hand, that confrontation seemed so long ago, but on the other hand, so many events she'd had to deal with recently were tied to this not-a-Jedi and her Rebel friends that there was no way Eadu could be so different.
Morozova seemed unimpressed by Zenik's declaration, though he did smile slightly. Koroleva wondered if he was considering what his mother would say if she heard Zenik renouncing the Order like that. Grandmaster Baghra would lose her shit for sure.
But the amusement was fleeting, and within a moment he was looking at Koroleva again. "Kill her."
Zenik had dragged herself onto her knees now. She looked up at both of them, somehow trying to meet Koroleva's eyes through the helmet, even if she couldn't see the eyes she was looking into.
Her position imitated memories that were. . . bitter. Unending, unfathomable grief. A loss, an unending feeling of being completely and utterly alone. The subsequent desperate decision that arose from that. The pose was eerily similar.
Herself, kneeling in front of Morozova and swearing to follow his teachings.
Zenik, kneeling before Morozova and preparing to meet her end.
Both times it had led to a sort of death for the person kneeling. Zenik's head would roll, here and now, and she would never see her friend, the Wraith, again, or fully train that pirate to use the Force, while Starkiller had chosen to become who she was today, leading to not only the death of most of the Jedi, but her personality, and the Republic itself.
"Stop being so dramatic, Alina," the Emperor said now, faintly irritated. The use of her name was probably meant to shake her, undermine her, but she felt nothing. Alina Starkiller was dead - nearly every trace of her had been swept from the galaxy. "You can savour the moment later. Just kill her."
Zenik lifted her chin tears running down her face. Her jaw was set and proud.
Koroleva didn't turn her head, but her eyes flicked to Tamar's corpse.
This was all that remained of Alina Starkiller's legacy. Zoya was dead, Tamar was dead, Tolya was dead. Nikolai was in the battle that suddenly seemed very distant, its shots and explosions illuminating the viewport behind the Emperor in flashes, and would soon perish as well. All that remained was to kill this ex-Jedi, her master's second padawan, and then Alina Starkiller's legacy would be dead, and the last dregs of her personality gone from Koroleva forever.
She lit her lightsaber, Zenik unable to suppress a flinch at the sudden snap-hiss of the blade, but she didn't move to strike her down.
Why was she hesitating? She'd been working towards the death of Alina Starkiller for eighteen years; now it was within her grasp, she should be jumping at the chance.
But all she was aware of was the limp corpse of her friend, and the fact that Alina Starkiller's legacy was Tamar's legacy as well.
She had terrorised the galaxy for nearly two decades as Koroleva. She would be the first to admit that. Why? Why had she done it? What had been wrong with the galaxy before that it had needed such radical restructuring?
War, she told herself. The Republic failed. They couldn't prevent war. The Empire could.
Except it hadn't. . .
Tamar had argued with her until the end.
She got the urge to shake her head.
Tamar was always the voice of reason in the Soldat Sol. She had to wonder: if her friend had been on Coruscant in the last days of the Republic, when Mal had died, when she'd made that fateful pledge, would the outcome have been different? Would her friend have talked her out of it?
She'd never know. Instead, she'd made her choice, and the state of the galaxy had become ten times worse, for her own personal gain.
Except. . . had she really gained? What did she have now that she hadn't had before? What had she sacrificed friendships and morals and an entire kriffing government for?
You are no longer entitled to your previous autonomy, your previous power; now, you are an extension of my will. A cog in the machine of the Empire.
It sure as hell wasn't freedom.
A cog in the machine of the Empire.
That was all she was. All she'd been reduced to. She'd been a cog in the machine of the Republic before, their poster Jedi for war propaganda, their Chosen One, their spy, their warrior, their servant, but she been. . .
Not happy, necessarily, but happier than she was now.
She'd had her battalion.
She'd had her friends.
She'd had Mal - at least, the knowledge that he was alive somewhere, out of her reach.
Now she just had the Emperor, who treated her as inferior.
And this young woman, this ex-Jedi who'd left the Jedi behind not out of anger, but out of a deep understanding of what they'd done wrong. . . She was everything Starkiller could've been. Should've been. Because she'd had the same bigoted teacher, the same traumatic childhood, but she'd still chosen to fight for a regime that didn't enslave people who dared to disagree with it.
The Empire was wrong. Koroleva had known that for a while now; her excuse that she was maintaining order barely held up under her own scrutiny, let alone others'.
"You are nothing," she said softly, not even knowing if she was talking to Zenik or to herself. "You never amounted to anything you should have amounted to, and now you're lost in the dark. You failed your friends. You failed your master." The words tasted like poison on her lips. "Zoya would be ashamed."
Tears fell thicker and faster down Zenik's cheeks, and Koroleva sensed that the words cut deep. That they were, perhaps, the words Zenik - Nina - told herself at night.
Behind her, the Emperor laughed, too arrogant to sense his apprentice's confliction, too proud to consider that everyone he'd worked to build could be torn away in a heartbeat. Koroleva knew that it could. Nina did too. Otherwise she wouldn't be fighting.
The Emperor, however, didn't.
He was smart, but, as Nina had said, his arrogance was his weakness. Despite all his pokes and jabs about Starkiller and the past, he truly believed Starkiller was dead. That Starkiller was dead and gone, and now only Koroleva remained.
She thought of one of the things Nikolai had said to her after Mal died. No one is ever truly gone.
Koroleva reached up with one hand to pull off her helmet. She threw it off to the side, its clanking against the floor loud in the silence. Zenik's eyes widened as she took in the face of Alina Starkiller, the shorn white hair - and as she took in what the Emperor, sitting behind her as he was, could not.
Her eyes were brown.
"The truth hurts, doesn't it?" she continued, the speech somehow more menacing now that it came from an actual person's voice instead of a vocoder. She tightened her grip on her lightsaber, its humming a soothing, familiar sound to her ears. "This is what the Dark Side taught me. Find my enemy's weakness. Exploit it. And today. . ." She turned so she was facing the Emperor. So he could see her in her full glory, her eyes not containing so much as a speck of gold. "I'm yours."
Then she dropped the lightsaber.
In its place, she reached for Nina's satchel, still sitting innocuously next to the Emperor's throne from where Dunyasha had brought it in. More specifically, she reached for the two crystals she felt singing inside it as two Shoto lightsabers flew out, fitting into the contours of her hands perfectly. Hello, old friends.
Then she lit them, two bright, brilliant blades, and swung.
The shock transformed his face - his mouth sagged open, his yellow eyes going wide - but it didn't slow down his reaction. He brought up his hands and unleashed the full force of his lightning on her, the cortosis in her armour directing some of the energy away but enough of it skimming through her blood and bones, to her heart, which jerked in unnatural palpitations. Her sensory neurones burned with it but she bore through, and kept swinging.
There was a sickening thud as Morozova's head hit the ground, then a clang as she dropped her lightsabers with it.
Her heart still beat irregularly. That lightning had overpowered her organs; they'd shut down soon. She would die.
But Nina would live.
The Rebellion, and the rest of her friends' legacy, would live.
So she turned to meet Nina's eyes without shame. The woman had scrambled to her feet and was watching her carefully, green eyes narrowed, but Alina didn't have time for her suspicions. What was done was done, and she was going to die anyway.
Her gaze was still locked with hers when she found she couldn't stand under the weight of it all, and crashed to the ground.
