(Vex POV)
The forward bay of the Imperial assault shuttle smelled like coolant, burnt bantha leather, and the specific ozone tang that came off a hundred energy weapons cycling their diagnostics in close quarters. Vex stood at the central spine of the bay with one gauntleted hand on the overhead rail and her helmet still tucked under her opposite arm as she watched her soldiers run their final equipment checks in the silent atmosphere.
There were eighteen of them in her shuttle and they were not the kind of soldiers the Imperial Naval Infantry produced.
The four heavy weapons specialists nearest the aft hatch carried Yolthra-pattern battle blasters across their armored chests — short heavy rifles in matte gunmetal with the distinctive bullpup magazine wells and the chunky underbarrel grenade launchers that opened bay doors. The newest ones had smart-link pickups in the optical sights that fed targeting data directly through the user's cortical jack to a heads-up overlay on the inside of their visors. Vex had paid for the smart-link mod on all of them. It had cost her a third of her last contract.
The six riflemen behind the heavies carried the lighter and modified service carbines, restocked and with longer suppressors than the manufacturers ever intended. Each marine had a B3-K2 sidearm holstered at the thigh as a backup. She liked using them as they were heavier than they looked, threw a hotter bolt than any other pistol in their price range and looked intimidating enough on a gunbelt that most fights ended before the trigger had to come back.
Five of the riflemen had cybernetic forearm limb augmentations visible at the joints — chrome arms with embedded fibers routing where the synthetic muscle bundles ran up under the armor seams. Two of them had subdermal mesh plating across their chests. One had a reflex-booster on their spine, an old Eriadu Industries piece that had been illegal across most of the civilized galaxy for fifteen years and was still the single best piece of combat hardware ever owned by a soldier who worked for her. Three of the riflemen had optical replacements with the small red telltale dots in the iris that marked military grade implants. One had both eyes done.
The four close-quarters specialists carried Czerka assault repeaters — heavy multi-barrel rotary blasters in dark gunmetal with the gold colored power couplings of the second-gen models, the kind of weapon that needed an augmented operator just to handle the recoil and the heatsink reloads. All four of those soldiers had full prosthetic arm replacements from the shoulder down, two of them had concealed mantis blade attachments folded along their forearms. Vex had hired the Corellian neurologist who installed those mods after the Empire had executed him for selling the design to a Hutt cartel. He had been very grateful for the second life until after the job was over.
And then there were the three in the robes.
They stood at the rear of the bay in a quiet triangle around the central support column, all three in long charcoal grey robes over dark leather body armor. The cowls pulled up and the faces covered, the only difference between them was that the last one was very small. Each carried a six-foot metal staff — the anooba'cur pattern, an obscure piece of weapon craft that combined a high frequency vibroblade core inside a resistant alloy housing, with capacitor banks running the length of the haft that allowed the bearer to deliver shock strikes as needed. The bearers were not in the technical sense soldiers. They had not been trained in the Imperial army and they did not answer to the Sith Empire. She had recruited them out of an Outer Rim sect that had spent two centuries hiding from both the Republic Jedi and the Sith Empire and had developed their own quiet traditions in the spaces between. They were the only Force users Vex had ever met who did not require introductions and did not give names.
She trusted them with her life. She trusted nothing else about them. They appeared to be content with the arrangement.
Vex's own armor was a tailored black and white plate set built around a high-mobility undersuit, the chest piece angled to accommodate her seven-foot frame and the shoulder pieces bulked outward in the swept back style that the Sith Empire had favored for senior intelligence operatives. The white striping along the chest and gauntlets had been added at her request by a armorer who had asked no questions and accepted payment in unmarked credits. A long-barreled marksman's rifle was clipped to her back across the shoulders being silver and teal in coloring with sleek style stock extended for her frame, the long-ventilated barrel designed for a high rate of heat dispersion. Her B3-K2 sidearm rode at her right hip.
She shifted her helmet under her arm and watched.
The main hangar was a low-amber cathedral of motion. Nine other shuttles sat in staggered rows along the deck, each one's bay open with each one taking on its soldiers in the same coordinated rhythm she was watching in her own shuttle. Crew chiefs called numbers across the deck while Loadmasters confirmed seal pressures among numerous other bodies moving. Two hundred and thirty soldiers, give or take — two hundred regular infantry, thirty robed bearers of the anooba'cur — were boarding ten assault shuttles in the methodical chaos of an operation that had been planned and rehearsed and walked through enough times that most could do it with their eyes closed.
The overhead lighting above the deck pulsed red. Then amber. Then green.
"All right." My voice carried clean down the length of her shuttle's bay. "You know what that means, ye of the damned. Time to get to work."
A scattered series of acknowledgments came back. The heavy weapons specialists checked their barrel locks. The riflemen ran their charge packs through one more time. The close-quarters operators slung their repeaters across their backs and let their gauntleted hands rest on the secondary holsters at their hips.
I lifted my helmet and slid it down over my head. The seal engaged with the small soft hiss of pressurized atmosphere settling between her face and the inner liner, and the helmet's heads-up display resolved itself across her visor in pale red highlighting friendly tags on every soldier in her bay, channel indicators in the upper-right, a live feed from the shuttle's exterior cameras pulled into a corner panel, biometric readouts on every soldier she was responsible for tracking.
She tapped the pilot channel.
"Cockpit. Begin the jamming signal on my mark, I want every frequency the station's sensor net is sweeping put under static the moment the hangar door starts to open. They will see us coming. I do not want them to see clearly."
"Acknowledged, Captain. Jamming package standing by. We've got our nine sister shuttles on the same configuration — coordinated jamming wash, layered frequencies, full electronic countermeasure suite hot. They'll think they're looking at static and ghosts for the next five minutes."
"Mark."
"Jamming live."
The last two soldiers in her bay climbed into their drop seats along the bay's lateral racks and locked their restraints. The aft hatch of the shuttle cycled closed. The interior atmosphere indicator on the HUD ticked green. Across the wider hangar deck the same closing sequences were running on nine other shuttles.
As she moved the Shadowhawk's main hangar bay doors finished their open cycle and she braced one gauntleted hand against the cockpit frame and looked out through the forward viewport of her assault shuttle at the war that had been waiting for them.
Her destroyer was firing at the station.
I made my HUD pull in the overlapping feeds from the exterior cameras and resolved the engagement across her visor in clean amber overlays. The Shadowhawk was closing the gap to the station on a straight line and her turbolasers were already cycling. The station's primary turbolaser batteries, which had previously been concentrating their fire on the Mandalorian fleet, began to swing their barrels onto the new threat with the ponderous movement of massive batteries.
The first volley found a turbolaser battery on the station's lower rotation belt and turned it into a sphere of expanding dust and debris. While the second took out another.
But the station fired back, and her answering broadside slammed into the Shadowhawk's shielding in a sustained hammer that was felt through the bulkhead of the assault shuttle even from inside the hangar bay. The Shadowhawk absorbed the impact on her forward deflectors but the shield indicator ticked down to the final twelve percent in a single eye blink, and before the ship could move the next salvo from the station tore across her hull and gouged a long fluorescing wound where two compartments vented atmosphere into the dark.
Commander Raith would be furious with her about it later, but she would let him be.
"Pilot punch us out."
The lead shuttle was already clearing the hangar bay at full thrust. The shuttle I was in launched a half second later, the V-wings on the sides of the assault crafts unfolding from landing configuration into their full flight position as her drives took the load. Behind her, eight more Reaver-pattern shuttles spilled out of the hangar in coordinated launch sequence.
The station's anti-aircraft batteries opened up on them within four seconds.
The first red AA bolts came from the station and tracked across the closing distance in the strobing rapid-fire patterns that point defense systems used against fast moving targets. The pilot threw the shuttle into pattern Cresh — twenty-degree pitch port, sixty-meter altitude thrust down, then resumed forward thrust with a hard burn that pressed her armored chest against the cockpit frame. A cone of crimson AA fire streamed through the space where they had been a second before.
The third shuttle in the formation took the first hit.
It was a glancing strike across her hull but enough force to slap the shuttle's flight controls badly off target. Her pilot fought the controls for almost three full seconds before he managed to regain attitude control, and during those three seconds the assault craft drifted nearly a hundred meters out of formation. A second AA volley caught her clean across her port engine cluster and her drives cut out entirely. She went adrift across the corridor on residual momentum, her crew alive but her shuttle dead in space. The lead pilot called the loss in a dispassionate clipped voice.
"Yaim-tracyn is adrift. Crew compartment intact. We will recover after the operation."
Then the Shadowhawk killed an AA gun as one of the turbolazers hit the battery and the detonation that took two of its sister guns with it. Three AA emplacements gone in one stroke. The volume of fire crossing the shuttle approach corridor dropped noticeably.
"Acknowledged on the gun kill" the lead pilot called. "We have a softer corridor through the lower sector now. Adjusting approach."
The shuttles began their final descent towards the hanger bay but as that happened one of the last guns caught a shuttle.
The fifth shuttle in the formation the Kote'la, took a direct hit through her port engine. The shuttle slewed hard off her approach vector and her pilot fighting for control, which made the only decision left to him. He angled toward the open hangar at the shallowest possible glide angle and rode his dying repulsorlifts down through the shield corridor on a trajectory that was less of a landing and more of an extended controlled crash.
"Kote'la is going in hot" her pilot reported. "She's still got crew but her drives are gone. She'll make the hangar but she's not going to make it pretty."
"Acknowledged. Tell her pilot to aim for clear deck."
"He says there is no clear deck, Captain. The hangar's full."
"Then tell him to aim for whatever's the least likely to explode before we get to them."
A moment later as the shuttle dove through the hangar's shield she saw the defenders in the moment her shuttle began its landing approach.
A full Imperial defensive emplacement had been built at the rear of the hangar near the inner blast doors that led deeper into the station. My HUD highlighted the layout in pale red threat-overlays: prefabricated military cover, durasteel barricades stacked four meters high in interlocking firing positions, ten heavy weapons mounts behind the front line, and at least two hundred soldiers in the dark layered armor of the Imperial military— visored helmets with the small red glowing telltales, segmented chest plates, the standard Imperial trooper kit she had spent fifteen years walking past in corridors of the Citadel without thinking about. Several of them carried the rectangular durasteel riot shields that station garrisons used for hangar defense — broad slabs of armor plating with viewing slits and the Imperial Crest stenciled across the face, designed to absorb light blaster fire while the bearer advanced behind cover.
A heavy weapons specialist behind the second line of barricades was bringing a shoulder-launched rocket to bear on the incoming shuttles.
"Rocket" the pilot called out already trying to dodge. "Brace."
The launcher fired. A pale white trail crossed the hangar interior in less than two seconds the warhead detonated against the hull of the fourth shuttle in the formation and visibly shook in the air. Smoke vented from a compartment along her side but stayed in the air as luckily the wings were intact. The damage report scrolled across her HUD in amber lines reporting a armor breach, no casualties, drives functional, fire suppression engaged.
As this happened the Kote'la came in across the middle of the hangar at an angle that could no longer be corrected and she plowed into the cluster of station maintenance craft that had been parked near the center of the deck along with a half-dozen patrol shuttles and a heavy cargo lifter, none of them with their power systems engaged. The Kote'la's nose drove through the closest patrol shuttle's hull and shoved it forward into the cargo lifter. Both craft folded inward under the impact. The Kote'la came to rest atop the wreckage at a thirty-degree pitch with the left of her hull scraped open and her wings snapped off during the crash, but her main troop bay was structurally intact.The boarding ramp dropped within four seconds and soldiers spilled out into the wreckage and immediately took up firing positions in the tangle of broken craft as a few blaster bolts started to fly across the hangar.
I felt the shuttle settle onto the entry side hangar a few moments later. The boarding ramp dropped and her infantry poured down it in the practiced flow as the four heavy weapons specialists first exited first combat shields active around their guns, the six riflemen fanning out to either side of the shuttle to establish a perimeter combining with the others exiting from the ships along with the close-quarters operators sliding up to the parked Imperial fighters along the deck edge and taking cover behind them; the three robed bearers of the anooba'cur moving without apparent hurry to the spaces between the riflemen and the heavy weapons line, their staves held diagonally across their bodies.
As they got into position I exited and came down the ramp last. I started crossing the deck in three long strides and ducked behind the curved nose of a parked patrol shuttle just as a volley of blaster fire hissed the air above where I had been standing. Pale red bolts skipped off the deck around her feet. Two of them hit her shuttle's armor and scarred the plating in long black streaks.
Across the hangar perhaps eighty meters further than where the Kote'la crashed into the maintenance vessels the Imperial defensive line opened up in full.
The volume of incoming fire was overwhelming. As I peeked out to look, I couldn't help but roll my eyes at the heavy weapons spinning up and firing, and they had shield troopers advancing behind the riot barriers darting between ships and containers full of supplies. She opened and adjusted the settings for her notifications as she was informed of friendly biometric warnings as four of her riflemen took hits across their upper armor in the first three seconds of the exchange. None were kill shots but one complained of the burns.
Tapping the command channel, she issued one command.
"Commander Vryss the deck is yours."
Vryss came back on channel within a second. He was a wide shouldered Zabrak with twenty years of operations service behind him, and he had been running her ground force for the last four.
"Acknowledged, Captain. I have the deck."
He went straight to the unit-wide channel. "All teams. We have a control panel at the rear of the hangar on the defender side, it's the only thing that opens the inner blast doors and lets us out of this room. You see those doors behind their barricade line? That's where we're going. We are going to fight through two hundred Imperials to reach a wall panel. Squad leaders, push your positions forward by sections. Heavy weapons suppress those riot shields we can't let them get close! Punch holes in that line and keep them punched. Slicers, jack in and start working on their network. We need their hangar systems compromised before they can lock down the bay or call reinforcements down from the upper decks. Move."
A chorus of acknowledgments came back across the channel.
Two of the riflemen dropped back behind the deepest available cover at the rear of the deployment line and went still in the specific way that augmented operators went still when their bodies were in the room but their minds were not. Each of them carried a slim cyberdeck strapped along their forearms and each of them had just plugged a thin fiber cable behind their ear and pushed themselves out into the station's local network.
She did not envy the work. Cyberspace warfare against an Imperial military network was not something taken lightly. It was something stranger and more dangerous, and the operators who fought there did so against the station's own resident slicers and Intelligence-grade ICE in conditions that did not look anything like the physical world. The operators would be carving their way through firewalls and counter-intrusion programs with the same focused brutality her infantry were applying to the durasteel barricades, and any one of them could be killed by a piece of well-hidden security software that touched them at the wrong moment.
Her wrist mounted grappling hook — a modified Mandalorian piece that was a gift from Sera on their second wedding anniversary — fired with a soft hiss and the line snaked upward across the hangar's interior with the hook catching on the railing of a walkway fifteen meters above the deck.
I hit the retraction control and rode the grapple line up into the hangar's upper reaches in a single long ascent that left her boots planted on the walkway moments later. I unclipped the rifle from the magnetic plate across my shoulders making sure to push the rifle against my shoulder and dropped into a kneeling position behind one of the walkway support columns.
I put the targeting reticle on the Imperial heavy weapons specialist who had launched the rocket at her shuttle and saw that he was reloading. She watched him for a moment keeping the reticle on his neck as he moved and shifted trying to reload as fast as possible.
I breathed out and held as the last of my breath emptied before squeezing the trigger.
The soldier folded backward across his rocket launcher as her aim was already shifting but she had been on the walkway for nine seconds now and an exposed sniper was an obvious enemy and the Imperial defensive line had spotters whose job was to find exposed snipers.
Being spotted happened faster than she would have expected.
Five Imperial troopers in the second line of the defensive emplacement broke from their firing positions and rotated their barrels upward in a single coordinated movement. I saw the muzzle movement in the peripheral of my vision an instant before pulling the rifle down dropping flat against the walkway grating before the first bolts hit where she was.
Red blaster fire flew above her head causing sparks to erupt from where the bolts impacted. The support brace behind her took a sustained burst that gouged a long hole across its surface and showered her with molten slag, and the walkway itself shuddered as one of the bolts found a tension cable somewhere along its length and parted it with a sharp metallic snap.
She started crawling her helmet's chin guard scraping against the floor with every meter she covered. The Imperial squad below her had no clean firing line through the walkway floor but they had the volume of fire, and any one of those bolts that found a gap in the structure was going to end her.
Below her, on the deck the firefight was developing. Commander Vryss had her infantry advancing in the textbook section-bound pattern that the Imperial Black Operations Manual recommended for hangar clearing: one squad laid down suppressive fire from cover while another squad moved forward to the next available cover position, then the squads alternated in sequence. It was slow but it was the only way to cross an open hangar deck against dug-in defenders without losing your entire force.
She watched as one of her heavy weapons specialists took a concentrated burst of Imperial repeater fire across his cover position. The cover absorbed most of it but two bolts carved through the metal and hit him through the upper chest plate and the abdomen. His biometric indicator dropped from green to amber to red within two seconds. He fell backward behind the curve of the patrol shuttle next to what he had been using as cover.
The Imperial side took a grenade.
One of her close-quarters operators — Tian, the Mirialan woman with the mantis-blade attachments and a record for grenade work that had earned her a Hutt cartel bounty before she had defected to my payroll — had thrown a fragmentation grenade across the deck. It landed behind the third riot shield position from the left and detonated against the barricade in a flash that took down two shield bearers and a heavy weapons trooper causing fire from that section to drop noticeably.
A second grenade flew back across the deck and landed three meters from her downed heavy weapons specialist. It detonated in a concussive wave that scattered the nearest two of her riflemen and slammed the body two meters across the deck into a shipping container.
Then one of the robed soldiers moved.
It crossed twelve meters of contested deck from behind a parked patrol craft to the body's downed position at a slow walking pace that ignored the blaster fire entirely. Two bolts that should have hit center mass turned aside in midflight and a third struck the staff across the shaft and dispersed in a small bright flash. It then reached the body, planted the staff upright in the deck plating, and knelt without ceremony.
Still crawling across the walkway I couldn't help but keep my head angled enough to watch.
The healer placed a gloved hand on the upper chest directly across the smoking edge of the bolt wound through his chest plate while the other hand went to his forehead. There was no light, no sound. There was no visible energy of any kind only a long quiet moment in which the robes rose and fell in a slow measured rhythm and the air around the kneeling figure seemed to thin.
She looked finding the soldiers climbing biometrics with the name Korso next to it.
It climbed in the slow steady fashion that she had seen exactly three times before in her career, always under the hands of the robed bearers, and it had never once stopped being unsettling. Red to amber to pale amber. The Twi'lek's chest began to rise and fall on its own. The wound through the upper chest plate did not close, I had been told by the smallest of the bearers once, in a rare quiet hour that they did not knit flesh. Instead the internal damage that was killing the man rolled back to something his body could survive long enough to keep fighting. After perhaps eight seconds, the healer pulled the gloved hand away from Korso's chest grabbing his staff and stood.
Korso stood with the healer.
He came back upright with seemingly dazed movements retrieving his blaster from the deck, and shouldered it back into firing position without saying anything firing and starting to get into position. The healer was already walking back across the deck through fire that continued to refuse to find them, returning to the rear support position to wait for the next casualty.
Two squads down the line, the smallest healer was doing the same work for one of the riflemen who had taken a bolt through the thigh. Three meters from that position the third robed individual was crouched beside Tian who had caught fragmentation from a grenade's residual blast and was bleeding from the side of her neck.
I didn't know what the three robed figures were exactly. They had told her once, in an odd dialect, that they were carers of the wound that should have been a death. It was the closest thing to a job title she had ever gotten out of them and she had stopped asking.
She finished her crawl behind the support column and rolled into a kneeling firing position with her back against the durasteel. The Imperial squad that had been firing on her walkway position twenty meters back was still firing, but they were now firing at empty space, and they would need a spotter call to relocate her before they could resume effective fire.
She had perhaps four seconds.
She used three of them to put rounds into Imperial positions.
The first shot took a squad leader through the helmet and dropped him like a sack. The second hit the heavy weapons specialist who had launched the grenade at Korso's position through where the chest plate met the belt. The third was one of the spotters who was raising his binoculars to call out her new position. The spotter dropped backward across the barricade with a clean entry wound through the gap right below his helmet.
She came up off the walkway grating scrambling along at a low angle and fired one more shot in through the gap between two riot shields and dropped fifteen meters down the catwalk without looking if it connected. I then took a few steps to a junction where a maintenance ladder ran down to a small maintenance section positioned above the deck. She caught the ladder rail in one hand, swung off the catwalk in the rolling drop that her old Imperial Intelligence trainers had drilled into her until it became muscle memory making sure to keep her rifle clutched against her chest.
I made sure to sprint the last distance and took cover behind a control panel that was for one of the secondary stations that monitored the hangar's environmental systems. As soon as I crouched behind the station a crack sounded as the bolt struck the upper edge of the control panel six inches from her helmet sending sparks across her visor. Then the second from a different angle. Then the third blaster bolt against the deck near her boot.
"Vryss." Making sure to steady my voice before speaking on the command channel. "I have at least two snipers on me possibly three. I need a fix on them before I can move."
She was crouched low with the rifle held across her chest and her back against the cool metal of the unit's surface. The fire continued to hit against the panel every two to three seconds stalling her movement.
But moments later the fire against the control panel dropped off in the slow uneven way but she didn't move yet. It was not uncommon to ease their suppressive fire deliberately, waiting for the target to break cover under the assumption that the pressure was off and then put the shot through her the moment she rose. Holding her breath she held her position behind the panel and listened.
Two bolts cracked off the panel from the east. A pause. Three more bolts, this time tracking lower against the deck near her right boot. Another pause. Then a different kind of fire opened up sounding heavier. The familiar deep rolling rhythm of a battle blaster on full sustained automatic, the bolts hammering into the upper gallery support framework somewhere west of her position.
The fire on Vex's panel cut entirely.
"Captain, the west and east arcs are suppressed" Vryss called across the command channel. "Korso has them pinned. The third sniper has not yet shown himself. Move when you can."
"Acknowledged."
She used the seconds to lift her helmet's fractionally above the edge of the control panel and look down at the deck.
The infantry had pushed forward to within fourty meters of the barricade line. Vryss had moved up to a forward position behind the crumpled hull of the Kote'la, directing the section bounds from the wreckage. Two of the riflemen were down on the deck and not moving and would not get back up. The biometric indicators as she highlighted them had gone hard red and stayed there with none of the robed bearers approaching their bodies. Three more of her people had been hit but were back on their feet.
A new heavy weapons specialist had taken up the rocket position behind the central barricades with no helmet strangely. This one a Chiss man with the unmistakable practiced stance of an Imperial elite. As he was raising the launcher to his shoulder, he leaned in looking through the launcher's optics. The rocket fired the moment he settled and flew across the deck toward the leading infantry section.
It did not arrive.
The tall, robed bearer stepped out from behind a parked patrol shuttle and raised an open gloved hand.
The rocket stopped in mid-flight short of its impact point, the flame still burning trying to make it move but the warhead held motionless in space as if it had encountered a wall. The bearer held the hand up for perhaps half a second, then the gloved hand pushed forward.
The rocket reversed course.
It accelerated back across the deck in the same direction it came and it hit the central barricade position dead center. The detonation took out the one who fired the rocket along with three of the troopers around him, and the riot shield bearer who had been positioned to cover them. A section of the barricade peeled outward in flaring sheets of metal.
I couldn't help but watch as my soldiers charged forward and took the gap.
Three of her riflemen and two of her close-quarters operators sprinted the ten meters from their position, droping into the smoking wreckage of the cover and immediately opened up on the Imperial second line at point blank range. Two Imperial squads had to break from their forward firing positions to address the new threat and during that change the main line pushed forward across the open deck.
She pulled a toxic grenade from her belt — an aerosol dispersal device, Czerka-pattern, loaded with a neurotoxic compound that was selected for its range and speed. The chosen compounds were not lethal if you got the antidote within ninety seconds.
Activating the grenade I leaned over the control panel just long enough to throw the grenade into the cluster of troopers reorganizing behind a barricade and dropped back behind cover.
The grenade detonated with a soft hiss. A pale green vapor cloud bloomed outward across the area crawling along the deck and into every gap between every piece of armor worn.
Faintly the screams echoing out from the helmets of the soldiers caught in the cloud could be heard.
Five troopers staggered out of the cloud with their helmets ripped off, hands at their throats, eyes streaming. Two more fell where they had been standing. The riot shield bearers in that section broke formation entirely as they tried to clear the vapor from their squad's positions. In that same time a different section of her infantry bounded forward and took another set of barricades.
Tapping the control on her left gauntlet she activated the cloak built onto her armor. The unit had been built for her to test by a research engineer who had defected from the Republic R&D division four years ago to the Empire. It was a prototype as the engineer had not been able to fully solve the heat-dispersion problem and the projector cells along her gauntlets and shoulders were somewhat visible as well as it being a power hungry system that would only sustain itself for ninety seconds before her armor's cells needed to recharge.
She came out from behind the control panel at a crouch running and ran along the deck toward the ladder. The cloak shimmered visibly across her left shoulder for a full half-second as she crossed the open ground. A bolt from a sniper tracked toward where her shimmer had been and missed her by a wide margin.
I hit the ladder swung over the railing, and dropped back to the hangar deck in a roll that made her come back up at a run. The cloak glitched again at her right hip as she came back upright — a brief patch of black where the projection field caught against her sidearm holster — but it seemed like she was safe as no more blaster fire appeared around her.
She did not run in a straight line instead curving around a set parked patrol craft that was moved by the hulks of the maintenance vessels the Kote'la had crushed as well as her own infantry had been running through the area. The cloak glitched twice more during the run, once across her chest plate and the other at her left calf.
I killed the cloak and started sweating as I ducked into the wreckage. The system disengaged with a low whine, the field collapsing back into her armor,and the heat indicators began flashing a bright orange in her view as they finally stabilized.
Inside the troop bay six soldiers had taken up firing positions in the wreckage. Some of them were wounded. Two were unconscious but stable. One was dead. The body had been laid out along the bay's central area, the helmet removed, the chest plate cracked open from the hit that had killed him.
One of the robed bearers was standing over the body. The person had drawn their staff along the length of the dead bodies chest coated in blood from the pool slowly expanding from the body. Slowly the person lowered the staff to the deck and began to write.
Doing her best not to look at the words she looked down at her rifle and thumbed the selector.
The ammunition selector at the side of the receiver had three positions. Standard energy bolt which was what she had been firing. Penetrator slugs which was a ballistic option she enjoyed using against jedi. Last but not least Corrosive bolt — a chemical cartridge that delivered a acid compound to the impact site along with a heat-shaped energy bolt, designed to eat through armor and metal in the seconds after impact in the way that standard blaster bolts simply did not.
She pressed the selector to the third position.
The receiver gave its quiet mechanical acknowledgment as the chamber cycled and the new ammunition feed engaged. Shouldering the rifle I leaned around the curved edge of the broken hull and put the scope back on the barricade line.
She found an Imperial trooper crouched behind one of the riot shields with the Imperial Crest stenciled across its face, firing a heavy repeater through the gun rest next to the vision slit.
The corrosive bolt punched through the riot shield's vision slit with a soft hiss and the soldier dropped without quite understanding why his vision had gone wet at the same time the riot shield itself began to dissolve across a six-inch radius around the entry hole. The metal started to soft then started sagging, then running like dark wax down the face of the shield in slow viscous trails. The Imperial Crest stenciled across the shield's outer face warped and twisted as the acid worked. Within four seconds the shield had a fist sized hole eaten clean through it.
Deciding the moment after I climbed up onto the Kote'la's crumpled dorsal hull as I fired the second shot making sure my boots planted on the assault shuttle's scorched armor plating, the rifle braced against her shoulder along with her body angled so that the curve of the Kote'la's command compartment housing kept all but her firing arm and head in hard cover.
The second target was a heavily armored soldier further down the line. The bolt entered through the upper edge of their shoulder and the acid worked its way down through the layered armor over two seconds, by which time the bearer was already dropping to the ground.
She killed three more targets, one was another heavy weapons operator. The next was a squad sergeant directing one of defensive sections, the last was an officer who had emerged from a hidden corner to coordinate a fallback that was no longer going to happen.
From behind her three grenades flew over her shoulder crossed the gap in less than two seconds and detonated against the heavily armored wall in the back of the defensive action. It had absorbed blaster fire and rocket blasts the entire engagement but when they went off a large section of the wall was scattered along with a section of defenders.
The Imperial defensive line broke right after.
Three Imperial squad leaders on the southern flank raised their hands above the barricades in coordinated synchronization along with broadcasting their intentions of surrender outload their speakers on max volume.
The volume of fire dropped to zero in the span of about eight seconds.
She climbed down off the hull and crossed the deck toward the Imperial line at a brisk walking pace.
Commander Vryss was already moving forward to take the surrender. Her infantry had stopped firing and were holding their positions at the leading edge of the advance, weapons trained on the Imperial cover but no longer engaging. The squad leaders had stepped out from behind their barricades with their hands held above their heads in the careful slow motion of professionals who knew exactly how many augmented gun barrels were pointed at them.
"You have the deck commander" Vex said as she passed Vryss in the wreckage. "Process them quickly. Lock down their weapons, get them into the maintenance bay at the rear of the hangar and make sure none of them have hardlines to the station's network. I will be inside."
"Acknowledged, Captain. Where are you going?"
"To do what I came for."
She did not slow as she crossed the last distance to the blast door at the rear of the hangar.
The control panel beside the doors was a standard Imperial-spec console. A tall unit set into the wall with a touch interface across surface and a small access port at hip height that was technically designed for maintenance but was actually designed for exactly what she was about to do.
I pressed the release tab on the compartment along her left thigh and the cover plate slid back to reveal the data spike. The spike was slim perhaps thirty centimeters long, the lower section was worn black with a dark tan leather binding where her fingers fell, the upper section a tapered titanium probe that ended in a fine multi-pin contact head.
She slotted the spike into the console's access port.
The pin alignment took half a second to confirm then the spike's onboard slicer suite went hot.
The status indicator at the bottom of the spike flickered from red to green then red again, cycling through the brute force authentication routines that any Imperial console required even when the console was owned privately. Fifteen seconds was the published cycle time for the standard Imperial military access port. An obscene amount of credits was paid for a slicer suite that did it in ten.
The screen above the access port lit up. The Sith empire seal materialized briefly before fading and was replaced by an authorization prompt that did not actually require authorization because the prompt itself was already a lie the spike had told the system. Six seconds elapsed. Then seven. Then eight.
The blast door starting retracting into the bulkhead with the soft hydraulic hiss and I pressed the activation key for a reflex stim that her armor injected through the small bio-port at the base of her neck.
The stim flowed into her in the way cold water flowed down a thirsty throat.
She felt it move through her bloodstream in the slow blooming way that combat drugs always moved — a tightening behind her eyes, a sharpening of color saturation across her visor, the slow expansion of the perceived time interval between her own heartbeats. The world around her became slightly more precise. The bass of her boot impacts against the deck became slightly more clear.
She ducked under the rising blast door before it had fully retracted and stepped into the corridor beyond.