Trigger Warnings: This story deals with some very dark/disturbing issues and situations, some graphic violence is described, and sometimes the characters express very foul/offensive language & attitudes, so this is absolutely for mature readers only. As the playwright Marlowe once wrote to George Peele: don't like, don't read.

Also: expect loads of references to the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight saga, as well as other Legends games, books, etc. from the '90s and '00s.

May the Force be with you.

2 ABY

The Lambda-class shuttle looked rigid and tense as it sat on the flight deck with its wings upfolded. An Alliance Starbird decorated its central fin, ferocious red against the battered white hull like a fresh bloodstain on dirty snow. A lone humanoid figure was approaching the shuttle with a heavy, impatient stride, cutting between other parked vessels and pieces of equipment as he went. Without a glance to his left or right, he ducked under the avian-head cockpit and started up the extended loading ramp. It rattled with the clangor of his heavy cherfer hide shock boots.

"Okay, Connor, I'm back," he called, slapping the ramp control once he was inside the cabin. "Get me the hell out of here."

The shuttle hissed, clanked, and hummed as it sealed up and engines powered on. From the cockpit behind him, Connor's voice came over the noise, deep and thick with an alien accent. "Sure thing, boss. How'd it go?"

"What do you think? It went fine. I'm clear for my next job—whenever they have one."

"I hear things were pretty hot on Talus. I'm surprised even you would get out of that without a scratch."

"I didn't get out without a scratch," the man called over his shoulder. "Jan patched me up just fine. The only problem is Mon Mothma thinks she's my mother."

There was a guffaw. They'd more or less had this same conversation on the ride in. The passenger caught a glimpse of Connor's snouted, wild face (the pilot was a Yuzzem) through the hatch to the cockpit. "Yeah. She thinks she's everyone's mother. That partner of yours, though…"

The human arched a dark brow. "What about her?"

"You say she patched you up. Did she pull out the Korunnai brassvine thorn you sat on?"

"Kriff you, Connor."

Another laugh. Kyle Katarn tramped across the cabin and strapped himself into a jumpseat. His sharp brown eyes had been made for the scope of a blaster rifle. Their permanent scowl represented grim anticipation for the next job, the next shot. His thick nose—smashed in more brawls than he was able to remember—overlooked a frown that might as well have been chiseled in gratenite. There was enough conceit in that face for a carrier full of troops. Kyle was the best the Alliance had, and he knew it, all right.

Though not especially tall for a human, his still-young body was hard with well-toned muscle and a subtle but unmistakable grit. He wore a heavy, caf-brown blast jacket with extra padding and flex-armorply underlay. When on the job (which he wasn't at the moment), he added a smoke-gray betaplast vest—one grade above standard stormtrooper armor. With them, he looked like a juggernaut. Even without, he was still the best.

The shuttle left the flight deck like a bloodstained feather carried off by the breeze, its wings unfolding as it glided out of the hangar. In lieu of a viewport, the rear of the cabin had a vidscreen tied to an external camera. Hunched in his jumpseat, Kyle watched sourly as the medical frigate Redemption receded and became just another member of the ragtag Alliance fleet. It was one of many Nebulon frigates in formation with Dreadnaught and Neutron Star cruisers, Corellian corvettes, medium and smaller capital ships of more than a dozen types—and, of course, the mighty Mon Calamari warships, their hulls scintillating with turbolaser and ion cannon blisters. Somewhere up ahead in the heart of the fleet was the Rebel flagship, Independence, which made this tiny shuttle look like a blister bug next to a bantha.

Soon Kyle would be back aboard the Independence. There'd be enough time left in the day to grab a late dinner, and maybe find Jan Ors (his mission officer in Alliance Intelligence and occasional partner) and regale her with the harrowing tale of his medical evaluation in the Redemption's wards. Stupid waste of time. Kyle held the rank of commander in Special Operations, but that was only a formality. He was still really a mercenary, and usually he didn't have to deal with this kind of handholding, bureaucratic bantha snot. He was between jobs at the moment, but he'd still have found better things to do if he'd stayed aboard the Independence. If nothing else, he could have kept his score in the training rooms up.

Shaking his head, he took out his datapad and powered it on. It was plugged into Alliance Network News and the FleetNet. Aside from helping Rebel crewmen on different ships keep in touch, it was an easy way for High Command to give dispatches on the war, curate stories from the HoloNet, and distribute anything else that they thought would be beneficial for the whole fleet to see. There were more new memos and updates than Kyle could possibly read during a brief shuttle ride, but that meant nothing. He scrolled automatically, reflexively, intent on nothing except passing the time and keeping his eyes busy.

A few minutes in, the feed went blank and flickered as it updated itself. Grimacing, Kyle popped his knuckles and waited. When it was done refreshing, a dispatch from Alliance High Command was right at the top. Kyle's finger started to flick past it—

And froze.

It was coloured differently, in extra-large font, and tagged with the seals of High Command, Intelligence, and nearly half a dozen other Alliance divisions. Whenever a node screamed for attention like this, it meant something bad had happened—really bad, a major loss of Rebel lives, ships, or equipment. Just under a standard year ago, there had been a similarly marked node about Tak Base on the planet Talay, when it was decimated by the Empire. Kyle had skimmed it right before his briefing with Mon Mothma, before she sent him there to pick up the trail of Rom Mohc and his deadly dark trooper project.

Funny thing, though: this one wasn't reporting a battle at all. It seemed that a Rebel officer was…

We hereby notify all departments, divisions, and commands of the Rebel Alliance that former Major General Crix Madine has been charged with multiple violations of the Alliance Armed Forces Galactic Code.

"Madine." The name passed from Kyle's lips in a hoarse whisper. In the humming passenger cabin of that shuttle, it sounded like a word he was encountering for the first time, something from a long-dead alien language that he couldn't hope to understand.

But he understood it perfectly. Crix Madine was a defector from the Empire, a strategist and operative of legendary caliber. In fact, Kyle largely owed his success against General Mohc to him. Madine had provided vital intelligence on the dark trooper project, and after he'd been discovered, Kyle and Jan had saved him from an Imperial detention facility on Orinackra. Later, after Mohc's death, Kyle had spent a week or two with Crix in the Vergesso system, helping to set up a Rebel SpecForce training facility. That was the last he'd heard of the man.

He read on.

The charges include forcible sodomy, wrongful sexual conduct, sexual relations with a being under the age of assent, possession of sexually exhibitive materials depicting beings under the age of assent…

Kyle stopped, wondering if something was wrong with the screen, or with his eyes. He started over, read it again, kept reading. Abruptly, inexplicably, his datapad seemed to grow heavier, larger and more cumbersome, into a machine of unknown design and function.

…inappropriate relationships, misuse of Alliance Military equipment against regulations…

The charges were a paragraph in themselves, but the first few ones yanked at Kyle's eyes with the strength of a tractor beam. His grip on the datapad loosened, then tightened in the same way he would tighten it around an Imperial's throat, as if he could choke what he had just read out of existence.

What the hell was this?

What. The hell. Was this?

As of now, Madine has been relieved of his command as major general, as well as removed from his posts on the Alliance Advisory Council and the Advisory Council to High Command. He has been detained and is being held by Alliance Security Task Force personnel for questioning, pending a full investigation.

Due to the serious and ongoing nature of these proceedings, we are not prepared to comment any further at this time.

This couldn't be real, Kyle thought as the datapad's casing creaked under the pressure of his death-grip. Somebody had hacked into the FleetNet and put this up. Privately, he suspected a Twi'lek—Intel had just recruited a bunch of them from some colony on Klatooine, and they were a rowdy bunch. Vulgar. Most of the females in the unit they'd been added to had transferred out after the first week or so. Kyle couldn't be sure, obviously, but he wouldn't put it past one of them to pull a sick, disgusting, revolting kind of joke like this. More importantly, it was easier to believe than the alternative.

The alternative...

The alternative was too disturbing, too massive, too destructive to accept. An entire cluster of supernovas—hundreds, thousands of implications, interlinked connections of if this then that, each one releasing shockwaves and stormfronts of cosmic heat and radiation that would annihilate everything within range, leaving death and silence behind.

Forcing calm into his tension-knotted hands, Kyle stabbed the datapad's power stud with his thumb. As he tried to stuff it back into his blast jacket, the shuttle lurched without warning. The datapad flipped out of his hand, hitting the deck on its edge and clattering away.

"CONNOR!" Kyle roared.

"Sorry! Sorry, not my fault!" called the Yuzzem from the cockpit. "It's the Independence— Fraggin' tractor beam op's playing a little rough with us today. Didn't think she was into that! Uh, we'll be touching down in about twenty seconds…"

The pilot trailed off. He sounded embarrassed, even hurt. Kyle's hands clutched the edges of his jumpseat, trying to contain the thundering in his heart and the electric charge pulsing in his muscles. He wanted to rip his crash webbing to pieces. The cabin subtly tilted back and forth as the tractor beam carried the shuttle into the hangar bay's artificial gravity field. Kyle fought down a wave of nausea.

It wasn't true. It wasn't.

With a deep and final clunk, the shuttle came to rest on its landing struts. "Uh, Commander…" Connor's voice was sheepish and stammering. "You okay back there? I didn't mean to jostle you that way. Like I said, the gal with the tractor beam..."

"I'm fine, Connor," Kyle said tightly, wrestling out of his restraints. "Just fine. It— It's nothing." Reaching his fallen datapad and then the ramp control was surprisingly difficult. He felt like he was walking uphill, or his shock boots had suddenly gained ten kilos each.

The pilot did not sound entirely convinced. "Oh! Well, okay, glad to hear it. Listen, it's good to see you… I know getting stuck with the fleet's got you a little stir crazy. I hope you can get into some action soon. I know that's what you're best at!"

The ramp fell with a clang so loud that it left Kyle's ears ringing. Muttering a farewell that couldn't possibly have reached the cockpit, he thundered down into the hangar and left the shuttle behind.