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Archex jumped. The ship was little more than a two-person tug meant for small jobs but it was enough. It had a ramp. It could be flown in atmosphere. It would get him out of here, off of this road. He grabbed the edge of the ramp with both hands and the ship’s acceleration changed. He nearly lost his grip then pulled, hoisting himself onto the ramp.
He turned back to the Outpost and the road to see RX-3081 on his knees in the dust. Hands grabbed for weapons that wouldn’t make a difference or that he was unwilling to use. His scream echoed over the sound of the tug’s engines as Archex watched before retreating inside.
“You want to tell me what that was about?” Vi demanded.
“Not really,” Archex said as he dropped into the co-pilot’s seat.
“‘First order assassin’,” Vi said, repeating Archex’s own message to her in a flat, deadpanned tone. “‘If I’m not there in five minutes I’ll never make it.’ You’re not usually one for overstating a situation.”
Archex hadn’t overreacted and that made him feel worse. He sat back, letting Vi keep control of the ship as she flew out into the desert in the wrong direction. Once they were over the horizon he knew she’d turn around then loop back to the ruins and their small base north of Black Spire Outpost, flying low between the canyons the whole way. It wouldn’t shake off a proper sensor trace, nor would it fool an observer up in orbit, but he knew how the Expeditionary Squads worked. RX-3081 was alone. He probably didn’t even have a droid.
He wouldn’t have an extraction plan. Archex scowled at the scenery that rushed beneath them. They were as safe now as they had been before, and perhaps more in danger now than he’d been since Phasma. If the Expeditionary Squads had found him, the First Order wouldn’t be far behind. Or maybe RX-3081 would fail like the rest of them and the First Order would never know.
Dots of yellow-green broke the canyon walls, springs breaching the surface with plants clustering around the fresh water. Trickles cut into the canyon walls to merge with the river below. The river was low, the canyon drying out as the dry season reached its height. In a few short months the rainy season would start and these canyons would be scoured by flash floods that ripped up everything living at the bottom. Until then the climate would remain hot and dry and he missed this.
He would miss it whatever happened next, whether they had to flee Batuu or the rainy season began. Jakku had branded the desert into his very genes.
The tug climbed over the edge of the canyon, skimming the rocky ground beneath. Dust kicked up beneath, betraying their presence to anyone watching in the distance but by now Archex wasn’t sure it mattered. Either the First Order came for them or they didn’t.
What concerned him at the moment was the suspicious glance Vi gave him out of the corner of her eye as they crested the ridge and the Ruins stretched out before them.
The Resistance base wasn’t much. They had a half-dozen recruits and more sympathizers. Their ships consisted of a transport, a refurbished tug, and an old Civil-War era X-Wing with an engine problem and no navigational array. Solar arrays and knockoff GNK droids comprised their entire power situation. They had one single PK-Ultra worker droid for their heavy lifting, a long-range comm that didn’t even get visual, a couple of sentry turrets without ammunition, and little else.
At least the ruins provided shelter. Cover. A spring and well system built into the ruin complex provided most of their water, once the dry season ended there were rainwater cisterns that could be filled and then tapped as the need arose. Most of their recruits had jobs in and around the Outpost and could feed themselves.
The tug kicked up dust as it landed. Archex decidedly did not meet Vi’s eyes as she cut the engine and then fixed him with a look. It promised words later. It promised a lot of things, none of them good.
“Let’s get inside,” he said.
Vi raised an eyebrow and stayed where she sat.
“I’ll feel safer inside,” Archex said, finally looking at her.
All Stormtroopers of the First Order suffered a curse. The safety of their helms meant they didn’t have to hide their expressions and so they tended to forget how. Archex was no different and he could tell the moment Vi saw the uneasy fear in his eyes. She looked shocked for a moment before her own perfect mask of deadpanned command returned.
“Okay,” she allowed. “Let’s get inside. And then you’re telling me everything.”
Archex didn’t answer, instead looking away again. There were secrets he wasn’t sure he could tell.
This might be one of them.
Blaster shots broke the relative calm of Oga’s Cantina. Normally most patrons would glance up from their drinks then maybe try to catch a glimpse of the commotion causing such novel noises. But not today. Today the bar across the street had been shot up by some man in a cloak in a fight that spilled out into the street and then across most of Black Spire Outpost.
Zade Kalliday had figured something like that would happen. He’d been the one to tip off Vi and Sunny about the cloaked man with black eyes and the shiny gold implant in his neck. The man’s droid tipped him off, picking a fight with a Resistance crew looking for a good time while negotiating a supply run for the base out here.
Luckily Archex was there to stop the hit before it happened. The running knife and blaster fight was an added bonus, especially after hearing the mystery man had been apprehended and would face Oga’s goons. Even better, Archex made it out alive.
Maybe Archex’s Stormtrooper past had some use after all. After all, a man didn’t become Captain Cardinal if he couldn’t hold his own in a fight.
But now blaster shots broke the conversation. Zade ducked behind the bar as the back room doors slammed open and the cloaked man shot into the crowd of patrons fleeing the cantina. Zade hid below the bar, heart pounding as he scowled. Pfassk it all, it was mid morning! His best day-drinkers were in danger, now he’d have to get new ones.
Then the cloaked man stormed out of the Cantina toward the spaceport.
He’s going to shoot his way out of Impound, Zade realized. He wondered why he’d never thought of doing the same but dismissed the idea. He didn’t like shooting people. Not like this bastard apparently did. Freak.
“You didn’t stop him!”
Zade scowled at the bouncer who glared down at him. “Neither did you,” he accused. To reinforce his point, Zade opened a bottle of the bottom shelf rum and toasted the bouncer with it before guzzling directly from the bottle.
“Oga will hear about this,” the bouncer snarled. “Resistance thugs shooting up her Cantina.”
“That thug was not Resistance,” Zade said. He took another swig.
“How do you know?”
“His targets were Resistance. That thug was something else entirely and I’m not sure I want to know what.”
The bouncer scowled as he watched the door. In the distance a T-85 shot its way out of the spaceport and took to the sky.
“I need the rest of the day off,” Zade said. He got to his feet, the bottle of rum still in one hand.
“For what, you’re not shot.”
“Because the Resistance needs to know someone’s out there using our stuff and making us look bad.” Zade knocked the bottle back, swallowing heavily and shaking his head. He capped the bottle and left it on the bar as he meandered past the scowling bouncer and the wrecked cantina.
Vi and Sunny needed to know about this. If they didn’t already.
Dust blew everywhere as Archex stepped out of the tug. He raised a hand to his eyes to block the worst of it as the wind whipped the sand around him. He wasn’t dressed for a sandstorm. He wasn’t dressed for a sniper. Nobody was ever dressed for a sniper. He ducked into the ruins without checking on Vi or the ship, the surest sign that something was terribly wrong.
“Archex,” Vi called after him. “Cardinal!”
Even that didn’t stop him as he put stone walls between himself and the open sky. Only then could he breathe again, the sharp pain in his right side betraying the missing lung lobe he lost to Phasma’s blade. He leaned against stone, his chest tight as he fought to catch his breath.
It didn’t take long before she found him. Vi scowled as she faced him down, her eyes hard like a disappointed cadre matron. “Cardinal,” she said, and her voice lingered on his former name like a threat. “What’s going on.”
It was not a question. It was a command.
Archex could follow commands. Right now that was all he wanted to do. Commands felt safe. “I was ‘debriefed’ by General Organa,” Archex said. “When you brought me in. There were some things…”
“Some things,” Vi prompted, her voice still dangerous.
“Some things I couldn’t say.”
Archex felt the hand at his throat. His eyes shot open as she held him there, fingers squeezing just enough to promise what she could do.
“You held back,” Vi accused. “After Phasma tried to kill you. After everything they did to you. After everything they took from you.”
Archex breathed slowly, mindful of the hand at his throat and the pressure it exerted. He knew how to keep his throat open while being strangled, a skill he taught some of his first Stormtroopers before, well, before. But he never imagined he’d be using that skill against Vi.
“I gave the codes I had,” Archex said. There was no point in resisting and he didn’t. He could pick her up, rip her hand from his neck, carry her to the cistern and toss her in, but he didn’t. She was his commanding officer, for all she denied it, and he wouldn’t act against her. Not like this. Not unless she deserved it. “The names, locations, and missions of every Star Destroyer in the fleet. But I couldn’t tell her about the Expeditionary Squads.”
“What are the Expeditionary Squads,” Vi demanded.
This was it. His greatest professional failure. He had allowed the Expeditionary Squads to take shape. He’d allowed the RX Cadre to get out of hand and so they became the first. Then Brendol found others. Cardinal’s greatest failures became Brendol’s personal project. Cardinal had been glad when Brendol picked up Phasma from her backwater hellhole because at least she distracted him from his projects.
Now he sometimes wished the Expeditionary Squads had kept Brendol’s attention. At least then Phasma and Armitage wouldn’t have turned his First Order into this.
“The Expeditionary Squads were a project of Brendol Hux,” Archex admitted, his voice flat as he tried and failed to pick his words carefully. “They were my own failures. Stormtroopers who resisted the training. They couldn’t be reconditioned. I couldn’t make them useful. And so Brendol did that to them.”
“‘That’,” Vi prompted.
Archex couldn’t say it. He wrapped a hand around Vi’s wrist and pulled her hand from his neck with such ease that she watched it in confusion before returning her gaze to him.
“I need you to tell me what’s going on,” Vi said, her voice changed to something more pleading. “What happened out there today. Are we safe on Batuu. What are the Expeditionary Squads. What couldn’t you tell Leia.”
Archex let go. He felt his leg spasm, the stress of today and the fight getting to him and he let himself slide down the wall to the floor. One hand went to his thigh, massaging the damaged muscle as pain pulsed through what felt like half his entire being. Pain made it hard to think, hard to find a reason not to comply, but then that was why the First Order had torturers. That was why the Resistance interrogators had withheld painkillers after removing half his lung and bombarding him with questions. But unlike that pain, this would never leave him alone. Phasma had made sure of it when she stabbed him.
“There were sixty of them at first,” Archex admitted. “Brendol found some new technology he wanted to try on some otherwise unusable washouts. The RX Cadre was accused of breaking into the droid repair bay on the Eclipse and… Well. The damage was repaired but I couldn’t risk chaos like that in the ranks. I recommended all of them for reconditioning. Anyone who couldn’t be repurposed for the good of the Order would be disposed of.”
This was what he was afraid of. Vi looked at him with barely concealed horror written in her face. As though it had never occurred to her that becoming a Stormtrooper Captain meant he’d been in charge of things. Before Phasma he’d been in charge of it all. Even after her, he’d still retained his post as Admiral Brooks’ dedicated Second on board the Absolution . Vi had no concept of why he’d begged her to kill him, of what she stole from him when she dragged him off the Absolution , and he’d hoped she never learned.
Today she would learn. A little bit.
“Every single one I couldn’t save was taken into Brendol’s project.” Archex spat the word ‘project’ as though it had personally insulted him. In a way it had. “They were all implanted with a Grysk control implant. By an expert.” He shuddered even as the look on Vi’s face told him she had no idea what that meant. Or why it was so horrible.
“The project stripped them all of what made them people,” Archex said, his own disgust leaking into his voice. “All sixty of them. I had to watch as the lot of them started to form a hive like a tiny enclave of Grysk Clients. And no one else noticed! No one but the ‘expert’ Brendol allowed into the First Order. He was a good man, Vi, I can’t imagine him watching what happened and allowing it! She hid it from him, she had to. But she couldn’t hide it from me.
“So I put a stop to it,” Archex finished, disgust giving way to vindication. “I put a stop to her. The only way I could. When Brendol died I was given command of the project. I wasn’t allowed to discontinue it so I split them up. I broke apart the hive, sent them to separate Star Destroyers in one and twos. Maybe that way they could keep whatever personalities they still had left. I couldn’t get rid of her, not with General Pryde watching, but I could ruin her work."
Vi watched him in silence, rubbing his bad leg and spitting in fury at a project she did not understand. She’d never heard of the Grysk and these ‘control implants’ sounded like little more than First Order programming. But there had to be a difference given how furious the whole project made Archex.
“What does that have to do with what happened today?” she asked.
Archex’s eyes looked wild, wide with pain and anger and something righteous that looked far too much like Captain Cardinal for her liking.
“Ones and twos,” Archex said. “That’s how their missions work. They leave in ones and twos. They have a mission. And they don’t come back.” He laughed and it sounded so much like a dark giggle that she shivered. “I don’t want them back. No extraction plan. Make your own way back, if you can. Because I don’t want you back here.”
She slapped him.
Archex gasped then gritted his teeth and bit down on the scream. He pressed into the muscle of his leg, desperate to massage out the spasm that lit his nerves on fire. He gasped through the pain, his right lung burning at the exertion.
“Thanks,” he gasped.
“So that assassin that came after you today,” Vi said, pointing in the vague direction of the Outpost. “That was someone from these Expeditionary Squads?”
Archex nodded. “His designation is RX-3081,” he admitted. “He’s a sniper. Not even qualified to carry an F-11 in the field.”
“Can’t be that good of a sniper, then,” Vi scoffed.
“He uses a railgun.”
“A railgun?” Vi asked. “What, mounted on a ship?”
“No, the rifle on his back. It was a railgun.”
“He carries a kriffing railgun?” Vi still couldn’t believe it. A railgun was a ship weapon. An archaic one, to be sure, and one banned by most civilized societies as a weapon of mass destruction. A railgun slug did not dissipate over distance. A railgun slug did not slow down in space. A railgun slug would travel until it hit something, whether that something was a ship or a planet or a space station. There were still rumors of ships lost in Mandalorian space to railgun slugs shot in wars thousands of years prior. The idea of a handheld railgun just didn’t make sense.
“With his armor fully integrated through his Grysk implants he has a range of five kilometers with that railgun,” Archex said. He looked away, unable to meet her eyes. “I taught him that. Maybe he’s improved it, I don’t know. The weapon’s disguised as a Tusken cycler but he always did enjoy tinkering with it. Said it made him feel ‘closer’.” He shuddered at the word, like it meant more than it sounded.
And maybe it did.
“We can’t maintain a perimeter of five kilometers,” Vi whispered.
Archex shook his head. “I know.”
“So what do we do about this?”
Archex opened his mouth to answer when he heard someone calling Vi’s name. Archex sighed and scowled as Zade Kalliday ran up.
“Been looking all over for you,” Zade said. “Bit of a scuffle in the market today, hmm?”
“First Order assassin,” Vi said dismissively, not taking her eyes off of Archex.
“You sure?” Zade asked. “He seemed suspicious, sure, but not First Order. Too inventive. Not enough armor.”
Archex scoffed.
“One of yours, then?” Zade asked.
Archex could hear the mocking tone under Zade’s voice and wanted to hurt him for it. But all it would do was give Zade the satisfaction of being right. “I trained him,” he admitted. “Where is he now?”
“Took off in a T-85,” Zade reported. “Why, is he going to be a problem? I don’t see how; he lost in a fair fight with our Stormtrooper. Just bring a knife next time, I’ll sell tickets. Of course, Oga will want her cut.”
Archex growled.
“He’s a sniper,” Vi said. “He uses a railgun. That rifle on his back was a railgun.”
“A kriffing railgun?” Zade whistled. “He’s stronger than I thought. How’d he lose to you?”
Archex kept growling as he tried to push himself to his feet. The wall behind him helped but as soon as he took a step his leg refused to bear weight and he went down. His knees hit the floor and he stayed there, kneeling and hissing through gritted teeth as his hands balled into fists.
“Oh, it’s bad this time,” Zade realized.
“Zade, kriff off,” Vi said. She knelt down and pulled one of Archex’s arms over her shoulders. She lifted as he tried to stand, the two of them getting his feet under him. Together they limped further into the ruins.
“So what do we do about this?” Vi asked once she was reasonably sure Zade had wandered off.
“Nothing,” Archex said. “We pretend this didn’t happen.”
“Oh, no, Emergency Brake,” Vi warned. “You’re not getting out of this one. What do we do about this.”
“Tell Sunny, then,” Archex snapped. “RX-3081 was ordered to bring me in alive. Otherwise I’d be dead. We’d both be dead. Vi, he followed us that night. That had to be him. He could have killed us both a dozen times over. Our only protection right now is the First Order wants us alive. Otherwise there’s no place in the galaxy we can hide.”
“I’ll contact General Organa,” Vi said.
Archex grumbled some reply but even he wasn’t sure what it meant. Instead he felt himself unceremoniously hitting his bunk and the stab of something in his thigh that made the world fuzzy around the edges as everything began to fade.
Vi stared at the comm as it fell silent.
Normally a call to General Organa left her feeling comforted. Hopeful. It gave her a sense of security to know that General Organa trusted her with this, even if she hadn’t appreciated the mission before.
But now…
General Organa agreed with Archex on this matter. She had different reasons, surely, but the end result was the same.
They would stay here.
Batuu would receive no help from the Resistance on this matter. But they would be expected to maintain the facade of a fully functioning Resistance base.
Black Spire Outpost wasn’t a bolthole for the Resistance any longer. The First Order knew they were here. They knew their disgraced Captain Cardinal was here.
They were a decoy. They were bait. They were the consolation prize. With any luck the First Order would spend its wrath against Batuu and spare the rest of the galaxy.
For the good of the Resistance.
Vi left the comm room and trudged her way to the bunks. She found Archex awake, his bad leg raised as he rubbed at the muscle there. She sat down on his bunk and refused to look at him.
“What do Stormtroopers say?” she asked. “Pune tee disy chout hin chaylo?”
“Punitue disê choutue Hinchalo,” Archex said. “It means ‘for the good of the Order’ in a common language of the Chaos. Sometimes a mission requires sacrifice of its soldiers in order to save the group.”
“General Organa agrees with you,” Vi said. “We’re not leaving.”
“I see.”
Vi sighed, still not looking at him. She reached out with one hand, laying it on his.
“Punitue disê choutue Hinchalo,” Cardinal whispered. He squeezed her hand, a silent promise.