The last days of the war revealed the true colors of this new galaxy we stepped into. While battles raged on in the Outer Rim, Raxus was abnormally quiet. The Separatist high command had fled to Mustafar without so much as a notice of leave. The droid army functioned, briefly, without a command and control system, but for the people of Raxulon, and the loyal Separatist foot soldiers beside them, the writing was on the walls. The Separatist officials—fleet commanders, Techno Union and Trade Federation chief officers, and politicians—had abandoned them, if they weren't already dead.

With the news that Grievous was dead, a cadre of radical young officers in the Raxus planetary defense force mobilized and seized control of Raxulon in a military coup that unseated Senator Avi Singh from power, prolonging the conflict. Almost immediately, the CIS formally surrendered to the Republic, and a universal shutdown order disabled the Droid Army.

The Raxus Ultraseparatist National Restorationists dug in, inoculating their population with endless propaganda: that their foes were war criminals, that they were coming to eradicate the Raxulites, that the enemies of Raxulon would show no quarter. They turned out to be partially right, as the Empire rose from the ashes of democracy on Coruscant; a powerful but well-respected military was transformed into an engine for destruction and oppression overnight.

In the months running up to the Restorationist coup, the UNSC and GAR planned a joint invasion of Raxus to decapitate Separatist leadership and put a swift end to the war. The GAR had no expedient route to access Raxus without being intercepted, so it fought arduously through various worlds on the frontline to temporarily secure a hyperlane for a special task force that would invade alongside Battle Group Yankee. All the Republic had to do was keep the hyperspace route open for two days, while Battle Group Yankee met the Venators and Victories there via slipspace.

The maneuver was synchronized so both fleets would arrive simultaneously; the UNSC fleet was underway a week in advance under Vice Admiral Harper, and the Republic group—hastily assembled and commanded by Adjutant General Wilhuff Tarkin—departed from Coruscant as Singh was deposed. The plan was to smash through the Separatist blockade, seal off the planet, and attack the capital Raxulon.

The UNSC was well practiced in urban warfare due to its time fighting the Insurrection. Anticipating a similar fight, they brought far more Marines than typical for attacking a single city: over two hundred thousand for a single operation. However, the regime change on Raxulon was not the only abrupt and unexpected shift. The Republic's transition to the Galactic Empire was so immediate that even the clones even seemed to behave differently on the ground. The difference to some Marines, whom had fought alongside them on Anaxes and Kaller, and fought against them on Mygeeto and the northern hemisphere of Anaxes, experienced a sort of whiplash.

Despite the highs of a speedy victory and the tensions rising with our Imperial rivals, the Battle of Raxus was not very well reported. Even though it was one of the largest deployments in the history of the Navy, and it saw the greatest proportion of casualties in one short week of vicious, all-out urban warfare, the Colonies were fixated in horror on Coruscant and the political rise of fascism, the dwindling Republic home front. We were almost blind to the warning signs, complacent to leave them be and stick to our "spheres of influence," as Secretary Fairchild put it, for a few quiet months after the war. But those signs that something horrible and wicked was brewing, something coming our way, were right under our noses; right there on Raxus.

The postwar landscape was a grim galaxy for Solar humanity, especially after the Endwar. What Secretary-General Mwangi hoped to be a new collective war effort, an earnest, just cause to restore faith in the incumbent interplanetary government, quickly snowballed into an attempted war of extermination from Harvest all the way to New Mombasa. For many, the story begins on Raxus, the moment the clones, en masse, suddenly turned on their new allies.

Herein are firsthand accounts of the Galactic Republic's last battle—and the last combined military action of the Allied Powers.

Tarkin's Targets

MAJ Jenny Vasquez treads gingerly in the proving grounds of Fairchild Fields, watching the field test of Sabre IIs. The ground shakes as their two-stage boosters, for the first time, throttle them from titanium and concrete launch pads to the long night over Reach. Autumn leaves crunch under her boots as she takes a deep breath, absorbing crisp air misted with draws of engine smoke, and the roar of the boosters catch up with the distance, thundering over her with sharp bristles of wind. She holds her old unit patch, the embroidered seal of the 38th Tactical Fighter Squadron which participated in the Badger 5 airstrike over Raxulon, a finch wielding two bombs on its wings and a creased lightning bolt in its talons.

Oh, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was the worst day of my life. Not really because it was the most intense, or the most scary, but… I remember it as the first day of a new age. A new hell we had just stepped into, in which we could be neither victims nor saviors.

OK, OK, give me a sec.

The background? So it was pretty late in the war. We'd been fighting hard on Anaxes and Kaller together with the Republic, and Naval Intelligence had uncovered what looked like an unused hyperlane that connected Chi Ceti and Raxus. Chi Ceti is in Fleetcom Sector Two, not far from Reach. So our group, Battle Group Yankee, combined with a Republic fleet assembled and personally led by Adjutant General Tarkin, all the way from Coruscant.

Now, we were hot off the back of the Battle of Kaller, a massive overture I hadn't anything like since the Defense of Meridian where we absolutely stomped the Secessionist Union fleet. But the fleet we hit Raxus with was only about 150 ships strong. We were supplemented by Tarkin's fleet, roughly a hundred ships in the first wave. Thousands of fighters were deployed between us and the Venators that came with. Unlike Kaller, the UNSC jumped almost a week in advance, while the Republic's hyperspace jump only took a few days. When we came out of slipspace, we met the GAR at a jump vector and began the assault simultaneously.

I planned the air campaign with the Jedi commanders assigned to the mission, General Ry-Gaul and his apprentice Commander Veld. I flew with them and General Skywalker over Anaxes a couple times. They earned my respect—they flew real good, and they took care of us like we were their own.

I mean, I was dazzled by how Skywalker flew his Actis. I was over the moon when I heard we'd have two Jedi leading the assault on Raxus.

But when we arrived at Raxus, we exited the jump directly in the radius of a long-range Waypoint jammer aboard one of the Lucrehulks. We received a strange message on the UNSC E-Band from Ry-Gaul.

I only heard the message after the battle in a debriefing with ONI. He was vague; his voice was hurried. He told us not to trust Tarkin.

When the Republic fleet jumped in, they informed us that Ry-Gaul and his apprentice were detained and would not be participating in the battle. We had to carry on anyway. We were already in range of the Separatist fleet, and it looked like their ships were set up in a picket line, ready to engage.

I was going to lead the first push through the atmosphere; but when we launched our Sabres, my catapult suffered a problem.

I heard the launch director's voice in my ear. He said, "Go to micro," and I was rerouted to a microgravity launch bay. My bird disappeared up a lift into a passage lit by those red and gold klaxons, climbing to a launch bay on a higher deck. Then I was given clearance to take off fourth in the line, behind three Pelicans outfitted with semi-active radar homing missiles.

I had already heard the squadrons making first contact with the enemy when I launched. I was a little miffed about not being at the head of the charge, but I knew I could still command.

What my air wing found, however, was bizarre. We didn't have any energy signatures from the fleet. It was completely inert, just drifting in space. Even the droid fighters and Hyenas did nothing. We intercepted and took them out with ease, but it was too easy. They didn't mount any defense, fire back, or even power on. The first MAC volleys wiped out the blockade, leaving only cold wrecks in orbit.

Then an order came down to cease fire—to ignore the enemy fleet and fly right past. They had received a shutdown order while we were in slipspace. I hoped the shutdown meant taking the city would require less violence.

But there were two active ships—one shuttle and one hospital ship fleeing the formation. The UNSC quickly identified them as civilian vessels, and detected faint traces of a surrender signal, but we later learned that the Republic was using a precursor to the Interdictor, an experimental jammer ship that sloshed signals from emergency band calls to tractor beams. At this point, they had used the directional jammer on full blast to silence everything, including distress calls.

The civilians flashed Dadita lights to declare that they were Separatists fleeing the coup and request quarter. Tarkin denied them quarter and ordered Republic ships to open fire, while we refused the order.

I remember watching those Venators cut them down with their turbolasers. They became defenseless husks glowing in the night. It looked effortless. It looked like the clones did it without a second thought. I remember thinking it was both horrible and strange. Horrible for obvious reasons, but strange—I had never known the clones or Jedi to fight like this, so mercilessly, and to ignore obvious calls of surrender. But Tarkin said, on an open channel, no less: "A separatist is a separatist, Restorationist coup or not."

As the battle groups burned through what remained of the fleet, the air groups were recalled to the carrier for rearming. We were starting Badger 5 early, since the carrier was already entering atmosphere. The entire second phase of the invasion began during the beginning overture of the battle, a full day or two ahead of schedule.

So I landed my Sabre and waited twenty minutes to reload my pylons. Removed anti-ship missiles and Sidewinders for a rack of guided bomb units and two atmospheric air-to-air missiles. I also got an external fuel tank.

The Badger 5 airstrike involved ten squadrons total, about fifty birds. Our target was the aerodrome on the outskirts of the city, out of which most of their fighters would dispatch. With the change of situation, we anticipated much less resistance—there would be no Vulture intercepts or Hyenas to reinforce the blockade and attack our ships in orbit, so we took on a large formation to hit it and any straggling air defense network. It was the largest bombing pattern used by Sabres, ever.

Now, because the aerodrome was built out of the planetary spaceport in the city limits, we couldn't risk an orbital strike damaging civilian infrastructure. This wasn't a battle we had announced or given the civilians ample time to escape. Any casualties incurred in the city would be on us, and us alone—for triggering the attack, and for climbing into the nest before we could let anyone out. The element of surprise came with legal costs and a stricter set of rules of engagement. So we went for a precision bombing strike with Air Force exoatmospheric strike fighters, which fared slightly better in maneuverability than the Blackswords.

But we sort of had a bad doctrine. We were used to fighting the Republic and even the droids, who preferred to get up close and force the Blackswords out of their comfort zone. A more maneuverable airframe was useful for any plane, bomber, strike fighter, or interceptor against them. But our opponent on Raxus would have been perfectly suited to the Blacksword with our typical EA-709 Honeybee electromagnetic support planes backing them up.

Instead, we "raw-dogged" it, so to speak, with multiple Sabre flights, while the Blackswords covered us from low orbit and provided targets with their infrared gimballs.

Big picture, though? Tarkin was impatient with our tactics, and he basically gave us one chance to fight our way before he would fight it his way. He wanted an orbital strike. Vice Admiral Harper stopped him—I don't know what he said to the guy, but he must have put the moves on him or something. He had some kind of swagger to stay even Tarkin's hand. Tarkin gave the go-ahead for the Badger 5 strike, but if we failed, there wouldn't be a second air raid. They would glass it from orbit.

We really expected minimal resistance over Raxulon. The Republic and Separatists never showed interest in air defense systems, opting to simply use their air power as their doctrinal air defense; the fighters did the fighting, not supplemented by surface systems beyond wheeled anti-aircraft lasers and honest-to-God flak artillery.

Once we reached low enough altitude in atmosphere to use our GBUs, we were only forty miles from the target. We were flying right over the city. We fanned out in something like a World War Two "combat box" as we approached the target. But the formation didn't last long. Our AWACS [Note: "airborne early warning and control ship"] running support finally got data on the city and called out intense radar returns and signals lighting up across the place.

Black clouds blossomed into our formation. Shrapnel harmlessly pinged off our fighters' hulls, unable to penetrate the armor or cockpit glass. I felt them rattle my plane, shaking me. I felt it in my bones. Sometimes they'd hit so close you felt the shockwave, but not the hail of hot and jagged metal, and that would rattle you. But we didn't even flinch through the flak clouds.

From the front of the formation, I think I saw it first. White-hot glows and streaks of smoke lit up across the city, reaching up like those spaceplanes out there, angling toward us. I called out the SAMs and ordered my squadron to evade, burn downward at a perpendicular angle and waste their fuel. We switched on our ECM jammers and drowned each other's voices out with the slush and our busy minds.

I jettisoned my external fuel tank and one of my bombs, lightening the load on my Sabre.

I whipped my plane across the right, breaking out of the formation, as a missile screeched toward me, and my radar warning beeped in an increasingly rapid tone as it closed in. I could see the missile dragging toward me like a kite, but it was less responsive with the jammers on full blast. At the last second, I pulled hard on the stick and twirled. The missile crossed right by, missing me by a few feet. I couldn't help but yell as I saw it.

Then, uh, another one came. And two more. After I dodged those two, I lost a lot of fuel in the process. I burned my engines toward the surface, gasping heavy gulps of O2 through my mask. I looked up and saw a lot of my planes burning. Missiles struck one directly in the cockpit as she peeled away. It vaporized her immediately. Some others broke apart in formation. I only ever saw one chute that day.

I dodged three more missiles—really put my airframe to the limit. I messed up her wings bad by stressing them out.

By the time I was clear of six missiles, I was right on top of the spaceport. I called, "Lasers on," and the Blacksword squadron replied they had lasers on the targets. So I lined up my bombsight, targeting two facilities—a hangar and the control tower, which had been reinforced as a command post—and released.

Two other fighters declared, "Pickle!" and it was the most intense thing I'd heard on comms. They were stressed, dropping their bombs and turning hard to avoid incoming surface fire.

Then, almost immediately, my alarm blared as a SAM locked on and fired. I turned away, burning past the airfield and jinking eye-watering, ruby-red bolts of laser fire deployed by field guns. The last missile streaked right over my head, listing into the trees outside the city limits.

I just remember a voice, filled with dread, "Target was not destroyed," as we pulled back. I ordered my squadron to burn out of the enemy airspace, I saw that Tarkin wasted no time capitalizing on our failure. Dozens of turbolasers rained down from the sky with the firepower of one-thousand-pounders, just blasting it apart, like the hellfire that razed Sodom and Gomorrah to the ground. God help them.

God help them.

Those Restorationists fought to the bitter end, firing flak and lasers at us even in our retreat, expending nearly all of the day's missiles from the airbase. They took ten of my Sabres.

They took a couple ghettos with them, too.

I didn't see any briefings or hear any warnings prior to the Republic firebombing of Raxulon, but it started right after the Badger 5 airstrike. Tarkin took no extra time "softening" the landing zones by dropping daisy cutters and defoliants into the ghettos on the outskirts. Y-wings followed our flight, after we'd spent most of the enemy missile batteries trying to shoot us down, and it would take an hour to reload each launcher.

Tarkin's bombers were loaded up with napalm. I saw, even retreating, this… gold spiderweb, these glows of fire burning out and eating the city alive, consuming it in a young conflagrate that turned the sky red and black, like hell on earth. I'd seen photos from Mygeeto. This was just as bad. In person, it was somehow… worse. I could almost smell it from thirty thousand feet.

Yeah, we learned a lot of hard lessons that day—lost a lot of good men and women. It was the largest deployment of Sabres, ever, and the last time we did that—we put them on the backburner, basically just to escort Blackswords and Longswords. We focused much more on short, quick, precision strikes on single targets, rather than large bases or strike fields. And only after we had achieved air supremacy by the third day did we launch longer-loitering missions with Longswords, Hornets, Sparrowhawks, or Pelicans.

And we also learned that the agreement we had with the Republic? About playing nice with human adversaries? It only applied to us. They never had reservations about fighting dirty, and we should have known. I want to think it was just Tarkin. But I had friends deployed elsewhere—Kaller, Anaxes, Mygeeto. They were reporting the same stuff from the clones. They told us the Jedi were all dead. Ry-Gaul was dead. Veld was dead. They really all had been murdered.

I don't know. I was young, and I thought I really knew the clones. They couldn't be capable of that; they were ordinary, like you and me. But that's how it happens. Wars and genocides are done by ordinary people. I really shouldn't have just blamed Tarkin.

Rough Justice

SSGT Heather Vining flexes her prosthetic arm, squeezing her hand into a fist. The mechanical fingers and knuckles click and tap together as she opens and closes it. Her flesh and blood hand trembles, but her prosthetic is perfectly stable, enough so to tinker with her Jotun in the barn behind her homestead in Dry Creek.

Some things you just take with you. They come home with you and spend time with you every day. Like when you're washing the dishes or driving your kid to school. And then it comes back, something you saw out there. That's it for me. That's what I got.

It was the third day of the battle, and the city had this… ring of fire around it. It was really hot. Like having an oven on your back at all times. We landed near the outskirts and fought through it. I mean, it was rough. The enemy was really well hidden. They would set up field guns inside of buildings, in the stairs to the basements, and ambush our tanks.

So they'd wait for a Scorpion to cross deep into the ambush point. Fire, knock out its track or something. Then swarm it, climb on top of the tank, and kill an entire platoon by chucking grenades from upstairs and layering cones of machine gun fire. Rinse. Repeat.

It was quite hellish, to be honest. We lost thousands in the first day. The clones responded to similar losses by using artillery on "enemy buildings." They also committed reprisals against the civilians. We told them not to. We told them to stop. They didn't.

Pretty soon enough, we felt like we just had no control over the situation. Nobody had any control. We were grasping for bits… tendrils of something we could say we did. It broke us. It definitely broke a lot of us.

In one of the occupied zones, we interacted with some of the locals. We never announced the attack, so almost ninety percent of the civilians in Raxulon were still here. They were trapped by Tarkin's bombing campaign, encircling the entire city in fire so no one could escape. I get the feeling he had it out for them. The capital of the Separatist movement was the victim of one big reprisal. If I remember right, Vice Admiral Harper actually wanted to surround the city and lay a proper siege. He would force the city to surrender when it ran out of resources and food, and the people resisted the Restorationists' stubbornness, without causing too much bloodshed. But Tarkin disagreed. He was under "express orders" to end this conflict as swiftly and as violently as possible. He was thinking long-term: he wanted to eradicate their supply of fighting-age men, who otherwise might have been able to mount a resistance against the Empire. That's the only explanation I can think of to explain what he did. It's not a very good excuse, is it?

For a while, we were the only ones standing between this land and the rapes committed upon it by Tarkin and the clone battalions underneath him. Many times, the Marines would respond to blaster fire in a civilian district and route the clones out, grabbing and pushing and throwing things at them. Just as often, the clones couldn't say anything to us, because we didn't answer directly to them. But every now and then, they would cross the line.

But I don't know. Our boys started to abuse their power, you know?

There was one guy from Second Platoon in D-Company. Reservist. He had no idea what was going on. I thought he was a big softie, y'know, he was just really quiet, gentle, and stayed out of the way. Only one altercation in his history, and it was just someone yelling at him while he stared back. Goofy, and maybe awkward.

But something broke that private. It just clicked wrong in his head. He went into a house and grabbed a woman we had been helping, as she was routinely being harassed by clones—men who didn't seem to abuse civilians, not at all throughout the war, but… they seemed to have standing orders to bully the civilians.

So we brought her and her daughters food every day while on patrol, some extra humrats [Note: humanitarian rations] when the truck ran empty feeding the long lines in the outer ghetto district.

On the afternoon of the second day of helping her out, I broke off my patrol and went alone. Told my commander I'd just be a few minutes.

Lo and behold, I saw that dude there. Delta-Two Platoon's patrol was supposed to have cleared out an hour ago. Some of his gear was on the floor, and he was having his way with the woman.

It was almost like sleepwalking. I hardly remember it. But I just walked up to him with hardly any expression or reaction. I felt like a ghost.

I stabbed him forty-seven times. Left him bleeding on the floor of the house, handed the woman the humrats, and squeezed her daughters' hands tight.

I didn't say shit. I just stayed there a while. The woman slowly put her clothes back on, sat on the floor, and curled herself into a ball.

A minute later, the door rapped, and I had no response. I turned and a couple clones on patrol, coming to visit with some kind of accusation, I'm sure, were there. They opened the door and saw me, the bayonet, and the soldier bleeding on the floor. They ordered me to drop the knife at gunpoint, and they reported the situation to their superiors.

Then they received orders from General Tarkin, who had been apprised immediately. They grabbed me and offered a "non-judicial punishment," in exchange for silence: I would say nothing, and they would leave me be and report nothing to my superiors.

I said nothing.

They took me outside, kicked me to my knees, held me by my arms, and threw thermal detonators into her house. The explosions drowned out my screaming.

The clone officer got down on a knee, meeting my eyes, and whispered real low.

I ain't going to forget what he said. He said, "From now on, there will be no breaches in discipline; or the people will pay the price."

My platoon scrambled over to us, asking the clone what happened, while the house blazed and crumbled under the sprays of fire from its windows. The clone said Restorationists must have infiltrated the house and booby-trapped it.

The platoon leader didn't buy it for a second, but when he looked at me, I don't know what he saw. I couldn't speak anymore.

Gods, I can still smell it. I can smell his come and his dirty, dark red, dehydrated blood. Seventy-two hours of sweat and soot and death. I can smell the burnt bodies, ashes mixing with… sublimed fucking hemoglobin. And I can smell him, and it makes me almost want to gag now.

El-Tee must have asked me a thousand times what really happened there. I just couldn't tell him. He told me we could make it right. He told me we could stop the clones, if we just had evidence. I almost did. I almost spoke up and made it right.

But then… he said it wasn't my fault, whatever it was.

I felt, suddenly, as though it wasn't his place. He didn't have the right to absolve me.

It wasn't contempt. I was overcome with guilt and shame. I looked at myself in the reflection in puddles of mud on the street and saw something ugly. I mean, I would look into the flames and see myself, wholly there, wholly naked. I would regret everything, even being born. Sometimes we think we were born to do a specific thing. Do you ever feel that?

Shoulder-to-Shoulder With the Enemy

CPL Nathan Stone produces a corncob pipe and asks for an exception. He sits under the studio lamp and wisps of smoke, exhaling a deep, charcoal vanilla, and reveals a photograph of his old Marine unit, a bleacher full of young men in duty uniforms and rifles, helmets that seem too big for their youthful heads. He tells the names of the ones who made it home and the fallen under the dramatic studio lighting, while ash dusts his suit. He shakes his head.

Don't pretend you've never seen this level of barbarism before. The Colonies have been watching every war from the Inner Colony Wars to Trebuchet. Don't pretend.

So I commanded a Marine fireteam during the ground war for Raxulon. We took part in the raid on the old Trade Federation headquarter office, a hundred-story building in the financial district. This was, like, the second to last day of the battle. Really late. We had pushed right up into the capital district in the heart of the city. Allied Forces surrounded the capital, so what remained of the Free State of Raxus was like a town square, the senate building, and the compound. It was just the Restorationist nerve center and a few radicals stranded behind our own lines, such as in the Trade Federation headquarters, who fought to the bitter end.

My fireteam was folded back into the platoon, which was incorporated into a battalion-strength force. This force was the first wave to enter the headquarters, knowing it was infested with radicalized troops, immune to the concept of giving up.

At the base of the building was the battalion HQ, which basically set up after surrounding the facility with machine gun nests and snipers, with weapons trained on almost every window up to the twelfth floor with thermal imaging—including automated Turtle turrets. On the south side was an ONI liaison post. Section I wanted intel from the building, because the Separatists had such close ties to the Trade Federation. ONI's presence was one thing, but they delivered us orders from Fleetcom to take the building intact. It didn't matter if the enemy would wipe their servers and data. It was just a golden opportunity, and we couldn't pass it up. We had cleared out all the other buildings in the sector—and even leveled anything taller than ten stories with artillery, if it wasn't a residential, religious, or community site of any kind—there was a heightened risk that civilians were sheltering in place at any of those places.

On the east side of the building, however, was the clone force posted up. We talked to them daily. Tarkin wasn't happy with our plan. He wanted to destroy the building, and he was very insistent; but they couldn't tell us no straight up. So the clone commander, frustrated enough with us, ferried comms back and forth until it escalated to Tarkin and Vice Admiral Harper directly. They compromised on a time limit: if we didn't clear the building and extract our intel in six hours, they would bombard the tower from orbit.

It was strange, especially, that they didn't want the intel for themselves. Our liaison, Commander Hawkins, had offered copies of everything we could scan in the building. The clone commander simply replied that there was nothing in there that they could ask for.

Six hours was an impossible time frame. But the intel was apparently so important to ONI that Fleetcom ordered the raid anyway.

So we got to work. My team went into the first floor and cleared it. It was pretty empty, so we expected traps on the stairwell. Sure enough, tripwires and thermal detonators tripped as soon as we went up, killing several Marines.

Without much noise or the reddening sky from hell to distract me, all I really picked up on was the smell of fresh death. As the fighting continued, our boys just kept decaying in front of us, even after their bodies were collected. The smell in those stairwells got worse. Hot, muggy, and moldy. Blood decomposes too.

I commanded the second fireteam climbing the stairs. You had eight MA5B flashlights beaming up the stairs in every direction as we walked up, so slowly we might as well have been crawling, until the point man basically walked into the muzzle of a blaster rifle. Lasers sprayed down the stairwell, wiping out the fireteam, until we ran back to the first floor swearing and yelling. I don't think I even heard what I was shouting. I was trying to swear, but my ears were just. Ringing. It was so loud, and in a confined space. A lot of us lost our hearing for a few minutes.

Another team went up, relieving us, and threw frag grenades. Explosions rattled the floor, and the blaster fire stopped.

It went on like this for a while. We'd go up, lose a few guys, throw frags, and then clear a room. Then we'd lose more, throw more frags, dead-check these guys, lose some more Marines, and throw more frags, and fight again.

The first hour had almost two dozen casualties for a whole floor. I lost one on my fireteam, bleeding on a stretcher out the lobby.

The second floor was rigged with high-explosive thermal detonators. A lot of our guys fanned out onto the floor, checking over the offices and computer stations, before they went off and ripped them apart. We carried body parts down from the third floor, not the wounded, not the dead.

On the fourth floor, we were more cautious. Our sappers, arriving late to the fight, had brought an ARGUS drone to detect mines and IEDs [Note: "improvised explosive device"]. This helped. They lit them up on our augmented-reality HMDs [Note: "helmet-mounted displays"], and we were able to disarm them. Then the enemy opened fire on us, and we were in for another tough fight. We lost another two dozen over the course of two hours, this time. The enemy typically only had five or six men on each floor, but the defensive advantage was horrendous. It was just like Luxor and Madrigal. The enemy just clung to the tower; it was so badly infested, like… leeches.

The more Marines we sent up, however, the easier it got. My team was relieved of front-facing duty, rotated out for at least twelve other squads. So actually, by the third hour, we had claimed ten floors.

By this point, we had spent so much time that ONI technicians went ahead and occupied the second floor and began running programs to bore through the computer network, while we kept fighting tirelessly upstairs. They found that most of the juicy intel was stored on a server on the 30th floor and ordered us back to the lobby.

We improvised an idea to secure only the twenty-eighth through the thirty-first floors in a blitz using the elevators and two Pelican escorts at the same level. There would be no way to fully secure each floor in sequence with the time we had left, but we could prep the building with armor and surrounding aircraft attached to the 178th MEU to minimize the possibility of a recovery team getting boxed in. Scorpions would fire 105mm HE and 105mm canister shots into each floor up to the twenty-eighth to soften them up. It would kill almost everyone inside instantly. The rest would be cleanup.

Then, a squad in the blood tray of each Pelican would attach to the higher level floor with Republic long blaster rifles equipped with magnetic ascension cables, simultaneously breaching the data center from the thirtieth floor. We would then switch to an extremely long belay system and abseil down the sides of the building. All in all, not a very original plan—but we knew it would work. We'd already heard about the embassy siege on Coruscant the week prior from our intelligence liaisons—the real siege, not what the papers say—and they knew the Coruscant Guard had tried something similar. The only thing we couldn't do was use CR gas—too flammable. Any kind of combustion would suck in air from outside—the breach in the windows to shoot in—and make this massive fireball that would have the intended effect of killing everyone inside; but it would also fry the servers. We also couldn't shoot HE or canisters at the floors the servers were on. Obviously.

We heard down the grapevine from Colonel Waters that ONI was suspicious of Tarkin's actions. They basically knew Tarkin was trying to deny us that intelligence. They were "building a case." They said what lay inside the Trade Federation headquarters was singularly the most important piece of intelligence of the war—or at least, the last surviving piece of it. I guess that case never came to fruition, because nobody said anything about it after the battle.

So we moved our troops quietly. I suppose the clone commander wised up to it, though, that we had located the intel and were making quick on the plan, three hours before the deadline.

As my platoon boarded Pelicans at an improvised resupply point two blocks away, I glanced up to see vibrant blue flashes cut through the conflagrate above the city. Turbolasers came down from the sky, raining onto the structure's foundation until the Trade Federation headquarters imploded upon itself, swallowing the entire district in smoke. It was gone in seconds.

Chaos ensued. I was coughing; everyone was coughing. You couldn't see ten feet anymore. It just smelled like smoke and concrete. But I was angry. I found out that almost a hundred Marines died from the collapsing building around the block. All the ONI techies were gone. I made my way back and found that clone commander. Waters was dead; his command staffers were dead.

It would take a few weeks to dig up about 40 more Marines after the initial BDA [Note: "battle damage assessment"]. Thirty remained forever unaccounted for—just missing.

I mean, I was mad. I was seeing red. The Restorationists were one thing, but this? This guy—I was on a whole different warpath.

I yelled at the clone commander. I asked, "Did you order the orbital strike?"

The commander stared at me. Embers crawled between his helmet and my lens. Nothing more.

I asked again, "Did you order the strike, you piece of shit?" I flipped my weapon safety. My platoon leader caught up, standing behind me. Marines backed us up.

The commander finally said, "Tarkin ordered it. He will delay no longer. The front line has suffered without—"

I grabbed his breastplate like this, and I said: "Fuck. You."

And he shoved me off and said, "Step back!"

My entire platoon of Marines surrounded him and his goons, weapons raised. I aimed my MA5B right at his head, just like this. I swear I saw his soul right through his eye slits on his helmet. I didn't see much.

I just said, "You killed our boys." And he seemed completely unfazed. Psychopath.

The clones raised their weapons back at us, threatening to open fire.

We were calling them all sorts of names, taunting them. My PL said, "Try it, you bastard, just try it. Make us turn you to paste." And I felt that energy right through me. I was ready to make good on that as a promise rather than a threat.

Eventually, comms came through, and the guy above Colonel Waters—General Kerr—ordered us to stand down. The order had come straight from the top. The clones stopped, too. I took a deep breath of the smoke, ash, powderized concrete, and pure death. We wanted decades of blood for this.

Well, after that, we basically stopped fighting side-by-side. After this, I suddenly felt like all this time, we were shoulder-to-shoulder with the enemy; and we just didn't know it. We were back to square one. When the Republic finally raised the flag over the capitol building, there wasn't much of a city left to claim. It was kind of laughable, watching them do it, in the one building left intact surrounded by tons of rubble.

But, I mean, the battle lines were drawn. We weren't going to leave just yet. Neither was the Empire. They reinstated Avi Singh as the "governor" of East Raxulon—a puppet, no way around it.

And we set up our troops all along Main Street, splitting the city right down the middle. We spent billions rebuilding the city's ghettos and giving the refugees a place to live—and the Empire spent trillions on a massive, concrete wall coiled with C-wire and laser grids, making sure there would be no refugees to reach West Raxulon.

The Empire didn't grow to like Singh. He was out within a year. West Raxulon thrived for another year. It was like night and day, right across a twenty-meter street: an industrious, wealthy utopia next to… well, an Imperial city.

And then we left.

And then Raxulon fell.

A Lost Cause in a Lost World

Dira Ina picks up his son's toys in his childhood home while humid Raxulon spring drizzles streak down the window sill. He clears some space for the shrine. He lights a candle for a hologram of a young man in an old Separatist uniform and waves it over his head three times, planting it in the ash. The candlewick streaks in the dim house as he prays quietly, and he sets a sliced meiloorun with cups of something like jasmine tea. His son watches reverently, eventually asking when it will be his turn to do so; and Dira jokes that he must wait until he is tall enough to reach the shrine.

I still hear his voice sometimes, like a groan, or a small complaint about the food. Jara and I rarely talked about the politics. I mean—we knew that the war was over, and the droids were finished. We knew that Senator Singh, who had attempted to surrender to the Republic, was ousted by the Restorationists, and that the coup was funded partially by men in black coats from Earth. But what were we going to do about that? They were shooting us for deserting. Every now and then, you would see a soldier hanging with a sign: I was a coward.

As our soldiers hunkered down deeper in the city, and the siege got worse, I found myself on the rear lines. I was just a boy—seventeen years old, pressed into service, pulled off the street and given a tin hat and a blaster rifle. I knew nothing yet; not even what we were fighting for, but the Restorationists told us we were fighting for our lives.

They were right about that, huh. We were fighting for our lives. Every day was a new hell. I mean, we all knew it just wasn't going to get better. Every day, the sky looked worse, as the Republic firebombed the ghettos on the outskirts of Raxulon. A ring of fire had encircled the city. It continued to burn for months, even though we were defeated within the week. We were trapped inside the city. Smoke climbed into the sky and blotted out the sun. Hot, twisting winds rolled through the city as routine.

Jara and I had a routine. Get up, patrol the inner capital district. Report no activity. Check on several sensor beacons, and talk to the flower shop keeper Hikas. Then, against our instruction, we would make time to play with the kids from Northside, and talk to them for an hour. The Restorationists had co-opted the buses and trains to ferry conscripts, ammo, and supplies across the city, so the kids had to walk almost an hour to the fortified school. Then we'd eat.

I never really thought about how they kept everything open until the fighting was right on top of us. It might have been a morale thing. They were telling us, "We would must as though we are not already dead; we must resist in every way possible." The largest commerce guild members wanted to stay open, because they were hopelessly greedy, sure; but many small business owners wanted to close and let everybody shelter in place. The guild was fully nationalized by the Restorationists, so they ordered them to remain in operation until the frontline was less than a kilometer away, and the military had patrols like Jara and I to enforce it. Not that we ever did.

We had a spot in the building on the edge of the district where we could enjoy our rations without distraction—where the blasts from constant artillery didn't feel as harsh, and the distant gunfire was just a little softer. The building used to be an apartment complex, but the four floors under the damaged roof were still intact. The roof was damaged by a stray shell, but it held—however, the people evacuated after, and it had been abandoned ever since. We often used the kitchen in one of the apartments; although, without power or gas, it was a struggle.

I would complain to Jara. Tell him I didn't feel good. That I wanted to leave, but we would die if we did—either at the hands of the clones, or our own men.

He'd say, "We'll get through it, Dira. We've got each other. We can survive." He never talked about the war, or about duty. He was a bit older than me, and I suspected he could see right through the propaganda. He could even see through the war. Neither of us joined by choice.

We would then finish our patrol, report no activity, eat at the base—which doubled as the fortified capitol—and sleep three hours. It was a boring, exhausting routine. One of the only saving moments was playing with the kids and the cup of caf the storekeepers would give us.

Before the battle reached us, the school sector was reinforced with a couple squads of troops. They ended up embedding in the school right after the last session was called, and the kids were released to go home early.

We could smell it in the air. Cordite—the powder of choice used in Earthmade slugthrowers—had a unique, black stench, and an unkindly far reach. While playing with the kids, Jara stood tall, leaning back and sniffing it out. He frowned.

I said, "I smell it, too. The frontline's not far away."

I swore, putting away the next thought I had.

The ball flew right past him, scoring a goal on the other side. The players cheered and booed.

One of the kids asked us what was wrong. We smiled and said nothing. Smiled back and went back to the game, but they all knew we were lying.

A distant pop—missile streaks—soared overhead. A Sabre fighter roared low, turning and burning its thrusters hard. The missile connected, tearing off the right nacelle of the Sabre and dropping it below the buildings near our district—within Jara and my patrol range. The spaceplane crashed into several building roofs before disappearing behind a plume of smoke a few blocks away.

I saw smoke and dust, but no flames. I speculated that the pilot might have survived.

Jara said, "Let's hope not."

Jara called, "Let's go!" whipping out his blaster. We ran the four blocks.

I asked Jara what we would do if the pilot survived. He said we would have to arrest him and take him in.

We knew that we had orders not to take prisoners. We knew we would be disciplined for taking one—and the prisoner would be summarily executed. We knew that already—I mean, we were kids, but we weren't blind. We knew what kind of regime had replaced Singh. But in some ways, we—collectively—figured we were paying it back. Tarkin had given his clones orders not to take prisoners, and to make "examples" of the civilians who might rebel immediately after being conquered. There's a famous thing he's quoted of saying, after reading this six hundred-year-old book from Earth literature: "There will be no flypaper this time."

I started to really dread getting to the Sabre.

As we got closer, we could see debris. Wisps of smoke and heat simmered from the cobblestone, steel, and jagged titanium. It smelled awful, like burnt carbon and scorched kerosene. But at least we didn't smell blood.

I asked, "What are we going to do when we get to the pilot?"

Jara stopped. He looked up and down the street, making sure we were the only ones here. He got on the comms and reported no activity.

He said, "If he's dead, we'll report he's dead."

I asked, "And if he's alive?"

Without skipping a beat, Jara said, "We'll report he's dead."

I nodded and said, "OK." I was ready.

The Sabre had crashed into the fourth floor of half a building. The rear facade of it had been rubblized by a stray GBU earlier in the week, but the second half seemed intact. The Sabre was there, on a skeleton of a floor, half of its chassis teetering over an edge on the next street. The cockpit was already open. We saw the pilot trying to climb out. She pried off her harness, helmet, and mask, and left it on the floor, reaching for her gun and ripping a small go-bag out of the cockpit. When she slung it over her back and dismounted to the damaged structure's jagged floor, she saw us and opened fire.

I ducked, pulling up my blaster and firing back, missing multiple shots. She slipped, falling and tumbling down the rubbled facade and landing before me, her rolling body sweeping me off my feet. I fell over, face up to the hellish, red and black sky, marked with streaks of tracers, blasters, flak, and missiles. When I got up, she was sitting there, her gun pointed at me.

I heard something gurgling, even as dazed as I was.

I looked to my left and saw Jara in the street, choking on a wound in his neck. I instinctively reached for Jara instead of my blaster.

The pilot looked fierce. Her leg was bleeding. Her weapon clicked as she tried to shoot me. She looked at it, seeing a casing crammed in the slide, locking the weapon open and rendering it unable to fire.

She passed out.

I reached for my blaster, but my fall had taken a lot of the fight out of me. I collapsed, laying back, and watching the sky for a while. I wanted to go to sleep. I wanted Jara to wake me up and help me stay up. I wanted him to say, "Stay focused. Let's get some caf." I wanted him to get up from where he was on the street and save me.

But I got up instead, slowly, and picked up my blaster. I pointed it at the unconscious pilot's head, waiting for her to wake up so I could take my revenge.

But I just couldn't do it.

I went to help Jara. He was limp on the street. I wrapped his neck in bandages and checked his pulse. Then I performed CPR for ten minutes until my arms gave out and I collapsed over on top of him, exhausted, too exhausted even to cry. He was already gone when I finally stood. He was already gone the moment she took that first shot.

Her wound was getting bad. Must have hurt the shin. I took Jara's long rifle and some bandages, and cut the pants leg to expose up to the knee. The shin was bruised, but not too bad—not broken. Her knee was sprained. She was bleeding superficially, enough to stain her pants here and there—visibly so. I cleaned and bandaged them wounds and wrapped some tourniquets from her SERE kit to the long rifle and her leg, giving her a splint of sorts.

I couldn't do any more for her, so I left her be. I considered shooting her again, but I just couldn't. I don't know what else to say.

I reported no activity and went on. I took Jara's body to his parents. They offered tea and a blanket. I said, "We'll talk later," and went back on my routine. I went to the kitchen and heated two rations. I ate one and left the other. I walked down the streets alone on my patrol, even as the stray shells landed closer to our blocks than ever, sometimes raining debris down on me from a few streets over. I was still bored, but now I was bored and depressed.

I neglected to report in at the end of my patrol, simply continuing to walk the streets. They might have sent someone for me. He might not have survived the trip on the way to me. When I woke up in the kitchen, it was to gunfire. The sun was coming up. I had slept through a battle—a battle that had come and passed. I didn't know where the frontline was anymore.

When I walked back to the Sabre crash site, the pilot was gone. There were only two blood splotches on the ground. The Sabre had teetered off and crashed into the street behind the building. It lay flat like timber.

The playground was gone. There was only a crater and a pile of bodies. I saw Hikas, uh, dismembered and shot, utterly lifeless in the eyes. Locked wide open. I smelled less cordite than carbon scoring. I wondered if everyone else was hiding in the homes along the street, or if they were dead. I wondered if they could still see me.

I felt a cold steel muzzle pinch my back and froze.

A gruff, aggressive voice ordered me to drop my weapon, so I did. I turned around to see a pair of clones. They hit me and knocked me over, then they reported me to their commander over the comlink. The commander ordered them to execute me.

The patrol, without a second thought, raised their blasters to me. Before they could fire, though, two blaster bolts rained down from the temple across from the school. It killed the man about to execute me. The other called out the gunfire, then fired up at the window on the minaret, until he was hit and died next to me.

I was still on the ground for a few seconds, in shock, as blaster smoke filled the air. I slowly got up, greeted by the pilot at the front door to the temple. She waved me over, using Jara's long rifle as a crutch.

I ran to her, sealing the double doors behind us and moving into the chapel.

I asked her why she helped me.

She shook her head, speaking staggered Basic. "Surrender to the UNSC. They're attacking from the west. They will treat you nicely."

"They betrayed us," I said. "They're betraying us still. What makes you think—?"

I heard footfalls outside the chapel, and we went for the back door. I kicked the door open and helped her hobble out, scurrying across the street and disappearing into the alleys. She handed me her pistol—the same one that she killed Jara with.

"Let's go," she said.

As clone patrols ran past our alley, looking for us, we slowly made our way over. I suppose she realized I was going to help her walk much, much faster. Maybe she felt some kind of sympathy or compassion for me. In retrospect, I don't even know if she was aware she had killed Jara. It all happened so fast, probably for both of us. She wanted to help me because I helped her. Maybe she had no idea how I felt, or how I would continue feeling.

She tried to say, "It's going to be OK." It was laughable, almost like a Sorgan frog attempting to croak in Basic, but I knew what she was saying.

Eventually, the sounds of blaster fire got quieter, and the thunderous cracks of Earth artillery rolled through the streets and hurt my ears. Rocket artillery vapors streaked across the sky from far away, rolling out of the enemy's rear line and crossing the front. We rounded a street and found a command post embedded within a community recreation center.

A machine gun nest on the third floor pointed us out, shouting us down. The pilot let me go, standing tall and waving. Marines came out and approached us. She spoke to them at length while they sized me up.

Eventually, the Marine team leader nodded and turned to me, beckoning me over. They put me in binders and walked me through the gate, a comforting hand guiding my shoulder. They read me prisoner-of-war rights in Basic, and told me I would be treated fairly in accordance with their laws of war, something called the United Nations Mortal Dictata: I had the right to refuse questioning, the right to the same rations as their frontline troops, the right to UNSC medical services, and the right to appeal abuses; they told me they would be especially lax for the soldiers of Raxulon, knowing we were conscripts, that deserters were threatened with execution, and that Tarkin was refusing surrenders.

However, the Republic was unhappy with the friendly fire incident. They brought two squads to the gates of the command post, arriving right behind me. The clone commander stood before the Major of the command post, who refused to hand over the pilot—Captain Vasquez. The clones threatened to attack, resulting in a long stalemate.

In English, one of the Marines asked if they should just give up Vasquez and me. Another shook his head. He said, "We won't sacrifice anyone for ourselves. Not an officer and not a prisoner."

The first one just grunted. "Oorah," he said.

The major of the base wasn't getting through to the clone commander. I heard later from these Marines that the clones were acting erratic—that they were no longer predictable, sensible soldiers. They instead followed their orders to a tee and would execute anyone who disobeyed. They were acting like droids.

But against an allied commander, who they had no right to assault for insubordination, the clone simply stood there, unable to respond coherently. Even to me, he looked like a droid that had short-circuited. He offered the same tired responses and demands to the major, until the major took it up with his commander, and the clone did vice versa.

After ten minutes, they received their orders. Both sides backed down and retreated into the base, the Marines gripping Vasquez and I tightly. When the gate was sealed, we sighed in relief.

The major asked Vasquez if what the clone commander had accused her of was true.

She said, "Yes. This boy helped me survive and escape." She pointed to me. She said, "The clones found him and were planning to execute him after he surrendered."

"Had he retaliated? Killed any of them first?"

She said, "No. I saw the whole thing. He was aimlessly wandering the streets—shellshocked, it looked like. Then they jumped him. Looked like they wanted to have their fun with killing him."

The major said, under his breath, "Jesus." Then, "That settles it, then. I just got off the horn with Vice Admiral Harper. This shit's been happening theater wide. There's no negotiating with the clones, but he got an agreement with Tarkin. They can't touch us, so long as we don't fire at them. And they can't touch anyone we claim as a prisoner of war."

Vasquez said, "You better capture the whole Goddamn capital tomorrow, then. Or there won't be shit all to take prisoner."

The major said, "That's the plan."

He came to me and squeezed my shoulder. He said, in his best Basic, "You're going to be all right. We're going to send you to medical first."

There were a lot more like me at the camp they sent me to. We spent a lot of time bored, between times spent eating, watching HoloNet reels, and sleeping. I never got the sound of the gunfire and artillery out of my head. I never got the taste of black caf out of my head, nor the stench of cordite and boiled blood. I never got Jara's face, his confident, life-assuring smile just minutes before he died, out of my head.

Cohen Satla was the chief editor at New York Times since 2512 and a journalist since 2490. He had covered interplanetary conflicts from the Callisto Incident to the Black Friday Massacre, the Mygeeto Genocide, and the numerous massacres on Duro; a New York native, he was committed to bringing light upon the truth and telling the stories of those we forget. He was a gifted investigator and dedicated father. There were two more extraordinary survivors he planned to interview. Their stories, like millions of others on Raxus, remain untold.

Thanks to Anna Marie Sentzke and Benjamin Giraud for compiling this article and finishing what Cohen started.

Unveiling

This is Lieutenant Junior Grade Ilya Grim, code name Argonaut, 01912-221980-IG. I'm testifying for the events of March 14, 2526—the last day of the Battle of Kaller, the end of the war and end of the Galactic Republic, and the first day of the Battle of Raxus. This is a report on the state of the crew of UNSC Vanishing Point and AAG-5 "Cobalt" following Operation Switchback, the Jedi genocide, and the encounter at Rally Point Zeta.

I pulled my ship out of the Kaller system after the controversial "Order 66" was triggered, causing a noticeable, abrupt shift in Republic tactics. The clones stopped communicating with us suddenly and opened fire on their Jedi commanders. After jumping to Rally Point Zeta aboard UNSC Vanishing Point to break out of a comms dead zone, we intercepted a message on the UNSC E-Band—a copy of a distress call sent out on secret Jedi channels by General Kenobi warning other Jedi to stay away from Coruscant and the temple, that it had fallen.

We traced the signal to a nearby sector fearing the worst. It was only a one-hour jump with our advanced FTL drive. I left a message to Admiral Parangosky that I had to respond to this immediately, and that there were no other UNSC forces in the Kaller system that could hear their message. At this stage in the Jedi purge, it could have been anything: a wayward Jedi who'd escaped and knew a way to discreetly contact the UNSC forces, or a Republic—an Imperial trap. It could have been a blue force, as well. I was the only commander with ears up to five parsecs, so I felt a responsibility to either identify a threat or help a local friendly unit.

We exited slipspace ten kilometers from the exact location of the broadcast into a debris field. There was debris from a Republic attack cruiser drifting in space over an uninhabited moon, but we picked up only one bogey. It turned out to be a Y-wing flying the colors of the 501st Legion.

I hailed them on an open channel but received no response. We saw flashes from the cockpit—they were communicating in Dadita, which Enoch was able to translate. You can find the exact transcript in the immediate after-action report; but they surrendered, asked to dock with our ship, and said communications were not safe on open channels.

We had them land in our launch bay next to our exoatmospheric spy plane Starry Night, and detained them for questioning. They identified themselves as Captain Rex and former Jedi Commander Ahsoka Tano.

Tano requested we depart immediately—jump to two random vectors before heading where we needed to with them in tow. The Empire was hunting them down. I obliged them and jumped firstly to a sector we knew was uninhabited, then to deep space between Kaller and Chi Ceti IV, and then to the Signal Corps orbital listening post in Republic space two lightyears Victoria.

The listening post was on high alert, but Commander Weeks accepted our request to orbit and use their systems as early warning for potential threats—in case anyone followed us.

Tano had been injured and slept for two days during transit. I oversaw some of her assessments personally before deferring her to the chief medical officer. Rex, who also overslept, was able to brief us on what had transpired over the last seventy-two hours. Everything he told me is now highly classified information, including the connection between the Sith plot of the war and Emperor Palpatine, the "inhibitor chips" within the clones which, when triggered by a code-phrase, activated a behavioral control that made them suggestible to orders and kill anyone—including their Jedi commanders and comrades—without a second thought.

Rex spoke to me after I left the sick bay. He said, "Thank you for tending to Commander Tano's wounds." We shook hands, building good rapport immediately between them and my crew.

I asked him why he still calls her Commander, even though she was no longer part of the Jedi or the Republic military. He said it was out of respect.

Rex recounted the last seventy-two hours. After invading and conducting an extraordinary rendition of the former Sith lord Maul from Mandalore, the clones unexpectedly received an order to eliminate the Jedi. Rex was unable to resist the influence of the inhibitor chip without removal with the help of Tano. Given the information revealed to him during the operation, he learned the true identity of Lord Sidious at the moment the order was triggered.

In his story, told to the crew in debriefings and personal conversations, he described in detail the process of fighting his comrades under the influence of the chips to the death, that he feels directly responsible for their deaths, having killed a few with his pistols. Tano would also tell me a little about what she felt. I couldn't exactly empathize with them, not about the order and fighting your own. But I understood the feeling of loss, and feeling when someone was already dead… before they were deceased. I know… that regret. Very well. I…

Uh, he told me, "Palpatine is Lord Sidious. He has orchestrated the entire war. I don't believe for one second that the council attacked him without good reason."

I remarked that it was doubtful the council attacked the chancellor at all. At this point in time, it was unclear if it was a real event, or if it was a fabrication to justify Palpatine's coup—a framing tactic as old as military coups themselves. However, the clones were accusing the Jedi of treason long before it was publicly known that there was an attempt on the Sith lord's life. The Jedi attempt to overthrow the chancellor and the galaxy-wide retaliation were preprogrammed as invasive logic bombs within the clones' flesh-and-blood brains over a decade ago.

Now I had the clearance to know about Eochaid Creagh, my predecessor, and the mission Operation Silent Spear on Mygeeto, so I couldn't help but make a parallel to the droid Achadh Zero protocol; and, knowing that the Separatists were manipulated by the same man as the Republic, that there was a connection. Tano nodded, but understandably offered little sympathy for the Separatists.

Before reaching the final jump point, Rex was permitted limited access to the ship's halls and rooms, with the exception to maintenance spaces, the bridge and combat information center, data offices, crew sleeping quarters, and computer terminals. He interacted with almost all of the crew recreationally, playing physical games and exercising in the rec center, participating in card games in the wardroom, and sharing meals with us. For most of us, this was not our first time interacting with a clone; but it was our first time seeing a Jedi, and some expressed discomfort with Tano's youthfulness. It was also upsetting to see how the war had forced her to mature so quickly. She spoke like an adult and walked like an officer.

Tano told me shortly before the final conference call about General Skywalker. She "sensed something with the Force—something terrible, involving Anakin and the chancellor." Whatever the chancellor had planned for General Skywalker must have not panned out. Tano reported she could no longer sense him. He was dead. I could tell she was shocked, and she would spend time grieving; I offered to help her, as I knew the feeling. Tano declined reluctantly, telling me this was a path she needed to walk by herself. She would be splitting off from Rex soon enough, as well. But the crew had a sixth sense for her dismay.

During my remote meeting with Admiral Parangosky, Commander Locke, Lieutenant Junior Grade Osman, Lieutenant Junior Grade Smith, and Commander Alton—a meeting also attended by a hundred lower-level ONI officers—I reported my findings, and that the Empire had effective mind control over nearly one hundred percent of its military to conduct heinous acts with impunity. This matched up with the battle reports of Raxus, during which Marines and aviators were complaining that the clones blindly followed Adjutant General Tarkin's orders to commit severe violations of the Yavin Code and the remainder of the former Republic's laws of war: firing on surrendering hospital ships, conducting orbital bombardments and airstrikes on civilian residential areas, executing surrendering enemies, and massacring civilians in the streets of Raxulon.

At the suggestion of Ensign Parnetto and Warrant Officer Vickers in the wardroom, I offered to testify before Sydney with Tano and Rex.

Parangosky asked, "About the Sith lord?"

I said, "Yes, ma'am."

And she shot back, "How do you think that will go, Lieutenant?"

The crew saw me hesitate, taking a moment to think. I was not sure how to answer her question in a satisfying way—but it was a rhetorical question.

So the admiral said, "There will be no mention of the Sith lord. To present the ages-long conflict of the Jedi and the Sith, and to accuse Palpatine of being an avatar of evil for an ancient folkloric boogeyman… we would be laughed out of the chamber, and ONI would utterly fall out of favor as mystics and hack pseudoscientists. As far as Earth is concerned, the Sith do not exist, and the Jedi are a superstitious cultural institution—nothing more."

Tano stepped forward, her fists tightening. She said, "So you're just going to let it happen? Let them kill thousands more of the Jedi, just to save face? They're killing all of them—there are children in the temple. There were children in the temple."

Parangosky didn't so much as blink. She said, "Think about what I am saying. The Empire is accusing them of treason, yes?"

I said, "Yes, but—"

And Parangosky said, "Children are rarely capable of such high charges. There are thousands of Jedi unaffiliated with the war, who remained in the temple or otherwise in the stars. There are thousands more Jedi who were not part of the council. The council is who you go after, whether they plotted against the chancellor or not. To put it bluntly, the charges against the Jedi are obviously full of shit."

I glanced over at Captain Greene, who was beginning to catch Parangosky's drift. Greene seemed relieved—or, at least, her eyes reflected some sort of recognition.

She said, "It would be very easy, within the Unified Earth Government's legal architecture, to declare the Jedi purge a genocide. It's an open-and-shut case."

Tano asked, "What will they do for us?"

Parangosky pursed her lips. She spoke bluntly, said, "Not much. Best bet is you'll be granted asylum—protection from the Republic military. It's not an intervention, but it's your best bet at survival."

Tano seemed to chew on Parangosky's words for a second, draining out the anger from in her and trying again. She said, "I appreciate this at least, so long as it pans out. But very few Jedi—if there are many left—will go to your side of the galaxy."

I turned to her. I asked why.

Tano said, "Because they will be needed where they are. As will I."

I turned to Rex and asked, "What about you?"

He leaned back, scratching the back of his neck, and said, "Well… Being dead in the eyes of the Empire has its advantages. And the rest of my brothers still need me. I can't go with you to Earth."

We released him and classified any and all documents regarding Captain Rex and Commander Tano, so as to preserve the discretion of their survival, under orders of Admiral Parangosky. The captain of Vanishing Point and I agreed to offer them some provisions—a week's worth of LRP rations for two, two MA2Bs and ten magazines, and two SERE kits. The crew shook hands with them, having gotten to know them quite well since their arrival, and we sent them along their way.

The crew took the encounter quite well. I believe they were relieved to see Parangosky's prediction come true when the UEG declared the Jedi purge a genocide and, following the Security Council laws left over from the UN transition, automatically granted a no-questions-asked asylum policy to Jedi across the galaxy. However, the vote toward a unilateral humanitarian intervention was vetoed by the president. The secretary of state commented later, to our disheartment, that the Empire is far too strong, and we are in no shape to face off against them—not just yet. An intervention would not be a temporary act of war.

Morale is not low. It's not high, either. The field agents in AAG-5 "Cobalt" are antsy from the shift with the clones, and they and the crew of Vanishing Point are not happy with the gag order about the Sith and inhibitor chips with the clones. Nobody wants to leave this as it is, leave the Empire in the state it is in. However, they seem to understand well enough that we cannot present this information without also losing all credibility.

My crew is a tight ship. We know and trust each other. I think spirits are a little higher now that we've met the Jedi, and we've given them a little bit of hope. Tano has given us a little hope, too. Inspired us. These Jedi are something else. They're spectacular. A resilient folk. The men and women under my command believe, wholeheartedly, that they deserve our protection.