Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Seed or Star Wars. They belong to their respective copyright owners. This story is not created with commercial aim. I make no money from it.

=RK=

Interlude: A Master and his Apprentice I

=RK=

Time had no meaning in that place. It was a grey, fog chocked realm that constantly shifted and changed. One moment Aria stood on a sun backed desert, felt the oppressive heat and struggled under the suffocating presence of the Dark Side that seeped into everything. Then she walked through long, straight metal streets. Cold, efficient lights chased away the darkness, dancing like thousands shimmering stars as the skies tore asunder and tried to drown her with a downpour the likes of which the young Clone had never experienced. The place surrounding her shifted again and again. Aria didn't know how many worlds the illusion showed her, though there had to be scores of them. All different. Some pleasant, most not.

It took her a lot of tries and errors, stumbling blindly trying to guide the Force that didn't want to obey even if it was all around her, until she managed to stabilize the weird realm. Eventually it grew more tangible, the grey colours and mists pulled back, though never went away. Aria found herself walking though a tall corridor made of faded brown metal. The floor below her feet was marred by the scars of battles and scratched by the tracks of heavy machinery. With every step her confidence grew and the surrounding space became more real, less like a dream and more tangible if that made any sense.

Aria barely noticed reaching the end of the corridor, she was too preoccupied with trying to force this place to retain its shape and not jump to some other weird location. She was so self-absorbed in her self-imposed task that she didn't notice the bodies until she stumbled over one. It was a humanoid man wearing heavy armour that obscured his features and species. What was plain to see was the cause of death – a lightsaber had burned its way through the chest plate above the heart. The armour bore the scars of a heavy battle – parts of it were cracked, others bore the distinctive signs of a lightstaber that failed to penetrate as well as the tell-tale melting and ablating caused by blaster bolts.

Aria stiffened and looked carefully around. She was in a large warehouse or so it seemed. At least a platoon laid on the ground, torn apart by blade, blaster and explosive. She was sure she had never seen this place before and while the armours bore vague resemblance by what the GAR used, the designs looked bulkier, like something you could trust to keep you safe no matter what you faced. Nothing like the joke that was the Phase I and the aborted Phase Two armours that got thankfully replaced by the new gear.

What was this place?!

"Balmorra. A hidden spaceport used by the Resistance and the Republic to smuggle in people and gear during the Imperial occupation." The voice startled her.

"Master!" Aria exclaimed and turned around.

The Chiss woman stared at the man standing in front of her. Her master looked a few years older than the last time they met face to face and what he wore... She had seen him clad in various types of Republic armour, even Mandalorian one. This however – he wore dull grey armour with various pieces like the boots and gloves coloured so black that they gave the illusion of swallowing the light. An expensive looking cloak covered his shoulders and its hoot was slung back, showing short cropped greying dark hair. His eyes, which bore into Aria's very soul, shone with the power of the Dark Side.

"What is this? What is happening?"

"We are in one of my memories. The Force could bring them back to life in a way no ordinary human or most known species could recall." Veil waved a hand. "This is Balmorra, the moment when we broke the Resistance and exposed how the Republic infringed on the treaties that ended the war. We could hear the Senate howl, thousands of light years away."

Their position shifted and they suddenly were on the other end of the large warehouse, no it was in fact a hangar. The far wall was opened to the night outside showing itself to be little more than two huge sliding doors mounted on ramps wider than Aria was. She could see an old human in blood red armour similar yet more refined to what the dead soldiers behind them wore. Her master stood in front of the older human and had a crimson lightsaber in colour much deeper and richer than any she had ever seen, levelled at him.

"I won't surrender, Sith!" The old timer, despite his obvious bone-deep weariness and wounds – the armour might have been in a pristine condition once but now it was a cracked, broken ruin that leaked blood and hydraulic fluid. The motors driving its exoskeleton component sparkled broken, and wisps of smoke rose from various places upon the man.

"You will, general. You will also publicly acknowledge that the Republic broke the treaty by sending you here and supplying your little army. Your gambit to retake Balmora failed. Your advanced force is either dead or trapped. Your army is about to enter a killing zone and there will be no escape. As we speak we have two Sector Fleets converging upon your navy in orbit. I am all that stand between your men and annihilation." Veil spoke in an intense yet reasonable tone.

"Damn you, Vael!" The Republic general spat. "I want terms!"

"Your people won't be mistreated. We'll handle them according to the Coruscant Accords." Her master smirked. "If they surrender now. Otherwise, I will leave them to the mercy of the local garrison. You and your friends made their lives hell for more than two decades now. They're hungry for payback."

Outside, hundreds of falling stars appeared in the sky. Streaks of light rose to meet them and one after another they began to blossom in multi coloured explosions.

The two humans stared at each other for long seconds, then the wounded general sagged in surrender. "I yield." The old man looked at his wrecked armour. "I need a communicator."

Veil removed a small device from a compartment on his armoured belt and used the Force to float it in front of the vanquished enemy. The old human snatched it, pressed a tiny button and began speaking.

The hangar dissolved around them into grey smoke.

"Welcome back apprentice. Welcome to my mind. I've been remiss in my duties as your Master. While you're stuck with me, we're about to do something about that. Do you know what lesson I learned that night?"

"When you made that old man surrender?" Aria blinked. "What do you mean we're in your mind?"

"Don't you remember?"

Aria shook her head and frowned. What was he talking about? And why did that man call him Vael?

"Lessons first. I'm not sure how much time I have available right now, though I'll be back as soon as I can. Mercy can have its own deadly edge, keener than any blade. When the enemy knows they will get no quarter, when surrendering is considered worse than dying, they will fight until their last dying breath. They will cost you lives, time, resources. However, when they know they will be treated fairly if they surrender... and that you will destroy them if they don't, many would choose survival..."

=RK=

Interlude: War Logs

=RK=

Sergeant Koril Vender

36th Orinda Regulars

"I don't know how the fighting went in other parts of the Republic. It's a big galaxy, ya know. Out here, on the Rim in the Galactic East? It was hell. We lost words, retook them only to lose them again the next week. Sometimes the same day even… Let me tell you about my personal piece of purgatory. Once upon a time, before the Seppies and their tin-cans came knocking, it might have been a beautiful city. The first time I ended up there, after the initial shock of the war and opening Seppie offensives petered off and the GAR counter-attacked, Athar was still somewhat attack. IT hadn't been subjected to five rounds of brutal street to street fighting yet. When we got kicked off from that rock for the last time, that city was little more than bombed and ground to gravel rubble, but then, when we retook it for the first time, no one knew how bad things were going to get. We were on the top of the world! We were Republic soldiers, full with pride, angry as all hell, and most importantly, we all knew in our bones, that the greatest superpower that the galaxy had ever seen had our backs. Heh. Just a few short years later we all knew better, damn the Jedi and those never sufficiently cursed Seppies!"

"You were about to tell us about your experiences on JanFathal, Sergeant Vender."

"I'm rambling a bit again, ain't I?"

"Just a bit. It's no issue. I have the time."

"Time? That was the one commodity the Republic ran out of. Do you know that if the Seppies unleashed their grand offensive just a few months later, if the Jedi delayed their Coup… if…" The old soldier sighed. "When Corellia fell and the Republic with it, we were so close to evening the odds. If that first major round of new naval construction was completed as planned, the galaxy would be a different place today. That, the Jedi Treason and Chancellor Palpatine's assassination broke something into the Republic. We felt the effects almost immediately – command and control got disrupted with Clone units going after any and all Jedi in the vicinity. The promised reinforcements the Navy depended on to stabilize and hold the line in space wouldn't come. We had to fall back again and again, units got broken up to bring others up to strength and Command threw us into the breach again and again in a desperate bid to keep any more vital industry from falling into enemy hands..."

"From almost everyone I've interviewed so far, there's a pattern emerging – despite lost ground in the initial stages of the Separatist Grand Offensive, many in GAR no matter if Navy or troopers alike, knew that those setbacks were temporarily – you only had to hold on for a few more months and then new construction along with newly raised army groups meant to augment local forces and the Clone Armies were supposed to turn the tide."

"We could almost taste it you know, victory. When General Veil became Supreme Commander of all combat forces, he shook up things. Command, when at all possible, put preserving our lives as a top priority, right behind achieving the objective. It wasn't like when some wet behind the ears green boys and girls gave the orders or worse, certain Jedi… We knew for a fact that if we were going to die in battle from that moment on, it would be because that was the best way to get the job done. When politics got in the way after Geonosis, General Kenobi did a fine job as well. Things were getting better. We got a constant stream of reinforcements, upgraded ships, new weapons and armour, there were rumours about new vehicles too being in development. All we had to do was buy enough time and the tide would soon turn."

"Then the Coup happened. The issues deadlocking the Senate for a month..."

"Bah! Don't remind me about those pampered Core pansies! How many of them gleefully abandoned us to fight and die alone and unsupported? How many of them caused trouble and forced Command to divert ships and troops to watch them instead of reinforcing the front lines?! That's how Orinda fell! Our small defence fleet had a single cruiser battle group from the GAR in support when the Separatists hit! Do you know where the rest of their fleet was? In the Core, keeping a close eye upon traitors!"

"…Now that you've calmed down, sergeant, let us get back to your experiences on the Eastern Front. Your record is extensive. You saw your first deployment just six months after the war began and by the time the Battle for Mandalore happened, you had seen action upon eleven worlds, many times on the same ones multiple times."

"Where should I start? How I was a dumb kid when we retook Athar the first time? How rotten I felt when it turned out we simply couldn't hold the planet, much less the capital and had to pull off? The worst was how the locals looked at us, no matter if we were Clones or regular folks… They were stunned that the Republic couldn't protect them. Many disbelieved that we had to really retreat and abandon their world under Seppie control. We came back of course, again and again. By the time we lost control of that world for the last time, there were no civies left in the capital, in fact there were none I saw, besides as corpses, during that last campaign. Just wave after wave of steel, ordnance and blaster fire. When we retreated that time, the fleet gutted what used to be Athar from orbit and a clanker army with it... and there was no one left to care. After that came Orinda… You know, I was on the last transport off JanFathal. I was on the last one that successfully left Orinda after Command attempted to salvage whatever it could before pulling out and consolidating all the way back to Ord Mantell. We gave the clankers one hell of a fight, yet my home was a burning ruin when my unit got ordered to retreat. A week later, we became one of the so called Ghost Brigades – units on secondment to GAR from worlds fallen to the Confed bastards. While we didn't hurt for equipment, there were issues with replacements. By then it was known far and wide that Kamino was gone, most new recruits sent our way went to the units from their own worlds and in the Core, those still loyal either had to watch their neighbours, were busy training new units of their own or well, they were tapped for the expected offensive to retake Corellia. To put it bluntly, the 36th was left to die on the vine. Once we suffered enough casualties to be no longer combat effective, we would be broken to reinforce other units, but that's not why you're here. Not really. Mandalore. You want to know what happened there, don't you? From someone who was on the ground and met the General, right?"

"Well, that too, however I didn't lie. I'll hear first about how you get there. From the start. I have about a week here and just a handful more veterans to interview besides yourself."

"Fine." The Sergeant closed his eyes. "Something more memorable than just another fire-fight at a street that has been a glassed crater for more than two decades now. Hmm, I think I know just the thing. Do you know how we re-took Athar the third time? We made an orbital drop, a whole division worth of people, right in the middle of the city to capture and neutralize vital enemy positions… It was glorious or so I thought as a much younger fire-eater. Nowadays, I know better. Or it just might be my bad knee..."