Jakku ran. He ran as fast as he could—faster than he ever had before. Salty sweat flooded his eyes, making the already miserable visibility in these twisting corridors completely unbearable. He had dropped his DC-15S a few minutes ago—or had it been a few hours? Trapped in this metal tomb, he had completely lost his sense of time.
Clone CT-6534, better known as Jakku, took pride in being an ARC trooper. It was a good feeling to know that among billions of brothers who shared your face, your starting conditions, your basic training… it was you, and no one else, who was one of the best! Some would have called it needless bragging, but CT-6534 thought otherwise. What was so bad about taking pride in your accomplishments? Especially when his place among the commandos—and his rank of sergeant—had been earned with sweat and blood. Jakku had been lucky enough to survive several meat grinders and had proven himself in battle against tin cans.
The clones were bred as ideal soldiers who knew no fear and were ready to give their lives for a Republic they hardly even knew. At least, that was the outcome promised by the bioengineers of Kamino. As an ARC trooper, Jakku always raised the best traits of his brothers in himself to at least the second power. Right—fear was unknown to him. War had been hard, bloody battles against tin cans and Separatist militias had been hard, sometimes very hard, but clone soldier 6534 had not felt fear… So why had he just left what was left of his squad to be torn apart by that steel-clad monster and run for his life?!
He was gasping for air. His hands kept reaching to rip off the hated helmet and draw a breath of the stale air in here, but given the state of the alien "Star Destroyer's" hull, that was not the best idea. Jakku wanted to howl with pain and rage, wanted to tear out his hair in handfuls. He was a traitor. A traitor and a pathetic coward who had abandoned his brothers to a fate worse than death. The bitter realization of betrayal drilled into his mind like a laser bore, but there was something else, too… something that made the soldier who had covered himself in shame run without looking back.
Eyes burning with red lights, and the damned roar of an engine in the hands of the steel-clad monster. The creature had burst out at his men from the darkness, but the clone commandos had heard it long before. The sound of iron soles striking the metal deck, amplified by hollow echoes, had warned them of the enemy's approach well before visual contact. Jakku was a good soldier and, it had to be said, not the worst commander. With a series of short gestures he ordered his brothers to take up favourable firing positions, ready thermal detonators, and wait to receive their "guests."
The thing his helmet visor picked out of the dark, Jakku at first took for a massive but rather clumsy droid—like a B2, only on steroids. It was alone; its heavy armour was painted blood-red, leaving only the helm and pauldrons given over to black. At the time, the clone paid little mind to the practical purpose of such an unusual colour scheme. He even managed to smirk to himself at the stupid bucket of bolts that, upon spotting the enemy in the form of his brothers, chose to charge straight in instead of seeking cover, mindlessly relying on its size.
Jakku fully realized his mistake a few seconds later. The armoured foe screamed a battle-cry in an unknown language and lunged into the attack. What happened next, the clone's memory replayed only in fragments. Images… sounds… smells… every derivative of that unreal nightmare, the one Jakku wanted more than anything in his life to wake up from.
His brothers fired a volley from their blaster rifles. Something like that should not have disabled a massive droid. It should have slowed it, setting the stage for the thermal detonators. The enemy had no ranged weapon; in its hands it gripped only an elongated… chainsword?! Only the tibanna-gas bolts, heated to unimaginable temperatures, did no more damage to the giant than raindrops on the clone's homeworld of Kamino. And it gave the soldiers of the Grand Army of the Republic no chance to throw their grenades.
In the next instant, a massive steel whirlwind, accompanied by the hideous roar of its revving engine, crashed into the ranks of the clone commandos. In that moment, Jakku understood why the alien needed that paint scheme. On red, you can't see the blood of your enemies—until you've covered yourself in it from head to toe. The engine's scream, the crunch of armour yielding under relentless force, and the cries of his brothers as the creature gutted them right before the sergeant's eyes would become the stuff of nightmares for the rest of his days—a rest that, to be honest, would probably come very soon.
Jakku realized that the bestial cruelty with which the steel giant tore his men apart simply could not belong to a cold, unfeeling machine. This monster savoured every kill. It was definitely alive, and it was definitely intelligent, but… in that moment, Jakku broke and ran. Ran like the last coward. He did not know what happened to the rest of his men, did not know whether the steel-clad madman had given chase.
Jakku knew none of it. In the clone's head, in his ears, before his eyes, the chainsword kept roaring, and armour kept giving with a sickening crunch, spilling out the bloody-red insides of his brothers. Only his legs, as if they had gained a will of their own, carried him through the impenetrable darkness of endless corridors.
***
The disgraced Jedi General Taron Malicos made titanic efforts to think rationally. Right now he was sincerely grateful to the Force that he had, back in the day, still managed to master Battle Meditation. Without that technique, his soldiers would hardly have been capable of anything even remotely organized… and yet they were dying at a horrifying rate. Veterans of the Clone Wars, men who could fight alone against Separatist forces many times their number, were dying like flies now, torn to pieces by those monsters.
Now the Jedi understood perfectly that his premonition had not deceived him, but it had begun fairly well. The boarding party—one company of clone commandos reinforced by two companies of regular troops—had loaded into LAATs and landed on the damaged alien ship without any trouble. The steel monster was far too massive to roam in a single tight cluster, and so, by force of will, Taron Malicos ordered the boarding party split into three assault groups. Fortunately, there were no major issues getting inside; credit was due to the unknown benefactor who had so conveniently torn open the ship's hull for them.
Judging by the abundance of angel-like statues, skulls on the heraldry, decorations, and even the plating itself, this ship looked more like a temple. Or a cathedral… a cathedral of some death-obsessed cultists. Back when he had been a Jedi Knight, before the war, Taron had run into something similar in the Outer Rim. Of course, back then no one was talking about multi-kilometre vessels.
The 404th had to fuss a bit with thermal detonators, and Malicos himself was not averse to shaking off the rust and putting his lightsabers to work to get his people inside. Truth be told, Sheldon stubbornly refused to let the general go with the boarding team. The only final argument that swayed the responsible clone was the commander's threat to send the commander before a court-martial (which sounded, coming from a disgraced Jedi, at best unconvincing).
Inside, total ruin awaited Taron. Traces of a fierce fight were everywhere, and rotting corpses… human corpses cropped up more and more often as the clones pushed deeper into the steel giant's belly. The clothing on the dead was unfamiliar to the Jedi, which meant that most likely its owners were "locals" and had nothing to do with the nearby pirates.
"Comms are down," the comms trooper reported, worried.
Needless to say, that fact drove Malicos's already blaring sense of alarm to a whole different level. Before departure, Taron had ordered Sheldon that if anything went wrong, he was to have the ships open fire on this tub with every gun they had, without a second thought. Of course, the Jedi had no intention of dying here in some heroic gesture, taking the steel giant with him—he simply doubted that the Venator's turbolasers could crack open that tin can quickly enough.
"Force preserve us, what is that…" One of the clones up front sucked in a panicked breath, spotting a creature whose very sight made Taron's breakfast insistently try to come back up.
A dreadful hybrid of man and machine crawled slowly forward on its tracks, paying no attention whatsoever to the intruders standing ahead. For a moment, it seemed to the disgraced Jedi that he was staring at a character from a horror film he had once watched long ago, back when he had been a Padawan. The victim of a mad scientist…
"Re-eh-mo-o-o-o-o… uh-uh…" the thing muttered in a rasping voice.
The Jedi Master understood the creature's true purpose a few seconds later, when this "man," if such it could be called, turned toward sparking wiring and its crudely augmented arm began performing repair procedures.
"This… they replace repair droids with… that?!" the clone commando captain voiced the question on everyone's tongue. "Even the Separatists never…"
The nasty sight finally overflowed the disgraced general's patience. He had had enough vivid impressions for one day. To Sarlacc's maw with command, to Sarlacc's maw with the Chancellor and all his orders. He was not going to die here. It was time to get out. When the research team arrived, it would be their headache.
"Contact!" The Force warned Malicos of danger a second before the clones announced the enemy's appearance.
Lit only by dim emergency lights, the passageway exploded in blue flashes as the clones doused the foes who dared to show themselves in a lethal rain. A rain that did not do them any damage whatsoever. As if in slow motion, the Jedi watched a blaster bolt shatter against the steel armour of enormous three-metre monsters, leaving nothing but small scorch marks where, by all logic, a melted-through hole should have been.
More than a hundred soldiers followed Malicos, and the enemy—barely visible even to the Jedi's eye and armed only with melee weapons—slammed into the crowd like a krayt dragon deciding to devour a lone bantha.
"Fire! Fire, you sons of—shoot!" the captain screamed himself hoarse.
Malicos bitterly regretted not ordering a few RPS-6 launchers brought along, bulky as they were and insane as the very thought of using rocket launchers inside a ship might be. But the blasters, frankly speaking, were not up to cracking open the tin cans these… people? wore. The Force whispered to Taron that his men were being gutted by humans.
"Don't sleep, brothers! Drop the bastards with grenades!"
Malicos could see that, before this new terror of an enemy, his soldiers—veterans of countless battles—were utterly helpless. They were being cut down with impunity like ripe grain, several men per single swing. A steel giant with a chainsword effortlessly tore apart a clone who was hysterically firing a blaster into it. The killer removed his helmet, revealing to the Jedi a face that was human, if heavily augmented. To the end of his life, Taron would never forget how that monster greedily drank the blood spraying from the clone it had flayed.
"Get back, monster!" Gathering all his rage and pain, Taron Malicos poured it into a Force push of devastating power.
Steel-clad but helmetless, the madman about to finish the commando captain took the hate-charged blow to the chest and was hurled back a good ten meters. A normal man would have been turned into bloody paste against the nearest wall—or at least had every rib ground to splinters. This "killing machine" merely spat a bloody clot onto the deck, revved the chainsword, and lunged at the Jedi like a blood-hungry predator.
"We'll see how you handle this," Malicos hissed, igniting his blue lightsabers.
With the Force, the Jedi pushed his reflexes and speed to a level unreachable for an ordinary human, until his movements left only a blur behind. Taron did not bear the title of Master for nothing; in lightsaber combat, he could make even Obi-Wan Kenobi sweat. The form he practiced was his own interpretation of Jar'Kai, and credit where it was due—Taron was good at it.
He evaded the opponent's first few strikes thanks to foresight. Even with the Force on his side, Taron barely managed to slip away from the chainsword's teeth thirsting to bite into his flesh, while his enemy adjusted deftly on the move, leaving no window for a counterattack.
Over the course of the brief, lethal dance, Malicos realized two important facts about his opponent. First: the inhuman strength and power that Taron achieved through the Force was the steel giant's natural state. It did not matter whether he had gained it by some unknown means or had been born that way. Second: the mad warrior's combat experience clearly surpassed the Jedi Master's, but…
"Now you're mine!" Taron hissed, baring his teeth.
Malicos had to take a risk. Letting the chainsword pass dangerously close to his head, the Jedi spun sharply, putting every ounce of skill, luck, and rage into the strike. With a hollow clang, the severed piece of the roaring weapon crashed to the deck, and the giant's breastplate was now marked by an orange stripe of molten metal.
"Damn…" The idea had been to reach his head with the second saber.
In the next instant, Malicos's world flipped upside down. In the fading echoes of consciousness, he felt his feet lift from the deck despite the artificial gravity, and he himself flew away from the enemy with the speed of a respectable projectile. The Jedi's face, without any doubt, turned into bloody mush. The disarmed opponent did not hesitate and immediately smashed Taron in the face with an iron-clad fist.
The Force had warned the light-side knight of such an outcome, and he had already begun to dodge, but his body failed him. It was only a glancing hit, yet the brute still caught Taron—though it felt as if he had been hit by a truck.
"Evacuate the general! Cover his withdrawal! Detonate the charges!"
What followed was no more than brief flashes of consciousness for the Jedi Master. He would never know how the clones, at the cost of their lives, dragged his body to the LAAT just before their own bodies were torn to pieces by grenade-like shells; he would not see the Venator's futile attempts to avenge the lost brothers.
A bright beam of terrifying power erupted from one of the awakened colossus's guns that had been dormant before. It had enough force to instantly drain the shield and shear off most of the pride of the Republic fleet's engines. The corvettes, not expecting such a turn, tried to make the jump to hyperspace, but were shot down by the aliens' "corvettes," after which boarding torpedoes slammed into the immobilized Venator…
***
"This is research team Delta-84. We have arrived in the assigned grid. The cordon fleet has been completely destroyed. Repeat: completely destroyed. We have located a survivor. Identity pending…"