Chapter Text
Hyperspace is one of the safest places for a starship to be. It’s moving too fast to be detectable on radar; the deflector shields can divert anything smaller than a medium-sized moon; and the ship’s AI prevents collision with the rest.
Movement in hyperspace is peaceful, imperceptible, and perfect for drafting logistics reports.
A movement out of hyperspace is not.
Without warning, the viewscreen blinks from the blazing white streaks of stars to the spackled black of sub-lightspeed, and the emergency durasteel shutters drop with a bone-rattling thud over the windows. The Vigilance lurches again within the sheer expanse of space, then lists, then shudders her way into a careening sideways spin. The men of the 212th scramble within her, staggering and stumbling into the durasteel floors and walls. Shouts join the chorus of creaking metal, alarms blare, and flashing lights add, soundlessly, to the noise. On her bridge, with strobing flashes of red layered over the pain on his face, Marshal Commander Cody climbs achingly back to his feet.
Sweat sprouts from the back of his neck. The cotton fabric of his grays cling to his damp, cold skin, and his heart beats a syncopated staccato against his ribs. The fear sluicing through his veins is a foreign enemy; this overwhelming kind of fear had been trained out of him before he had words to describe it.
Cody stares at the tremble of his hands and feels a secondary kind of fear at the extent of his reaction.
“Crys!” he shouts, shoving the fear back behind his ribcage. “What hit us?”
“I don’t know, sir!”
“Are our shields up?”
“I don’t know, sir!”
They haven’t seen Separatist activity in days, and they had taken this route specifically to avoid any chance of being caught out in the open like this. The battle on Cato Neimoidia had been a victory only by the barest technical margin, with severe casualties and equipment damage, Cody doesn’t like their chances of limping through another full assault.
The ship’s external cameras channel 32K images onto the shuttered windows above him, perfectly mimicking the space around them, but the images show empty space. There are no blips on their radar. All other visual displays show only the inky black of star-studded space.
Cody scowls up at the durasteel covers, wishing for actual windows, though he knows better than to raise it. Transparisteel is sturdy, but it isn’t durasteel. “Where are they?”
“I don’t know,” Crys repeats. He doesn’t turn around to answer. His fingers are moving so fast over his console that his hands blur. From this angle, Cody can see a line of blood dripping from his forehead down his cheek, splattering onto his bridge grays. It’s a stark line of color against his paling face. “Sir, we’re—”
Their artificial gravity vanishes then reasserts itself. Cody’s stomach swoops. Was that another attack? Or just a consequence of the first?
“To your stations,” he barks, and the navigation crew haul themselves back into their seats just in time for another hit to land on their starboard side.
Cody’s feet go out from under him. His knees slam into the unforgiving durasteel, and his fingers curl into claws as another wave of fear—that awful, telling, consuming fear—rushes through him. He chokes on his own spit, dry wind whistling through his throat, and his brain can’t focus on either orders or the order of events. He staggers—up to one knee—squinting through the alarm lights—he has to stay in control. He has to control himself, and he has to control his men. Sweat pools between his shoulder blades, sticky and cold. He hasn’t felt fear like this since he was six standard in the Killing House on Kamino, facing down live fire for the first time. He isn’t afraid of death, he thinks.
Then what is he afraid of?
He climbs to his feet near the center control console, and he brings up a list of potential warp trajectories.
“I don’t care where we end up,” he grinds out, selecting a planet at random and seeing the destination light up on the other navigation consoles. “Just get us out of—”
“Stop.”
He freezes. Whatever animal instincts had possessed him before are subsumed beneath a greater instinct still: trust Obi-Wan.
Obi-Wan sweeps onto the bridge, hair a riot of color and pillow lines pressed into his face, and he moves to the closest free console. His fingers, too, fly across the board, and Cody is close enough to see him order the gunnery to fire impulse shots off the bow. Cody blinks, confused. They were attacked from the starboard side, he thinks; their enemy can’t be in front of them. So what exactly is Obi-Wan trying to hit?
“Get us stationary,” Obi-Wan says, diverting power from their shields to their thrusters. “Everyone, quickly, we have to stop our drift. Impulse fire and thrusters only. The ship needs to be completely still, understood?”
‘Understood’ is a stretch. It seems counter-intuitive; a still target is the easiest thing in the galaxy to hit, and they have no idea what they’re up against. If any other general had given the order, Cody would have pushed back, but. It’s Obi-Wan.
“Understood!”
With Obi-Wan on the bridge, that choking, slinking fear has been cut to manageable levels. Cody almost thinks he can feel Obi-Wan’s interference in how far away that fear feels: as if it’s on the other side of a glass wall, pulsing and pressing against Obi-Wan’s Force presence.
After a few seconds of anxious, anticipatory work, they get the Vigilance to a rocking halt with a mix of thrusters and impulse fire, and they wait.
And they wait.
And nothing happens.
Cody lets out a breath. To his left, Obi-Wan steps away from the control panel. He doesn’t get the feeling that they’re completely out of danger, but he thinks they might be safe for now.
That fear lingers at the back of his mind, steeping in the darkness, spilling against the bones of his skull.
“Sir?” Cody asks into the roiling silence.
“We should be okay so long as we stay still,” Obi-Wan says, and it’s no answer at all. “For now, we need to assess the damage. Commander?”
Cody snaps triage orders on autopilot. He sends Crys to their computing bank, Boil to engineering to assess the hyperdrive, and Waxer to the flight deck on Bay 4. The sensors are down on the starboard hull, so Scrapper and Trench ascend to get eyes on the damage. Bones is prepping sickbay for injuries, and Wooley starts to work through the barrage of alarms that were triggered in the first blow.
Noise on the bridge drops back down to the dull rhythm of productivity. It is almost possible to forget that they were recently under attack by something powerful enough to crack the Vigilance ’s hull like an aluminum can.
“Commander,” Obi-Wan says, reappearing. There’s a new smudge of grease on his sleeve and a new crease between his brows. “With me.”
The observation lounge is empty, but the space beyond the massive transparisteel window on the far side of the room is not.
Beyond the long clear pane stretches what Cody can only think of as a graveyard. The black is teeming with shattered starships still spilling their steel innards into the dimly lit space between the stars, some twinkling with the dying breaths of their electronics. The debris stretches on as far as Cody can see, as far as the light of the Vigilance ’s beacons can reach. Cody can make out a few familiar shapes—Separatist warbirds, Republic Venators, Caravassian bowriders, smuggler tins, scrappers, salvage cruisers, Mon Calamari frigates—but there are many he doesn’t recognize, ships so old and foreign and shattered that Cody can’t make bow from stern.
None of this had been on the radar or visuals.
“Is that,” he asks, wild-eyed, because they have camera feeds on the bridge, and they’d all been clear. “Is that what was hitting us?”
“What we were hitting, I believe,” Obi-Wan says. “Like a bull in a porceplast shop.”
He doesn’t say anything else, and Cody tries to process what he isn’t saying. If that debris is out there, truly out there, then it explains why Obi-Wan needed to get them stationary. In fact, if Cody had attempted to reach warp next to one of these old carcasses, he would have sheared off half the Vigilance on their way to hyperspace.
But it doesn’t explain how their ship managed to get in the middle of all of this in the first place. It doesn’t explain why these ships weren’t showing up on their visual displays or proximity sensors or how the Vigilance managed to get this close to them in the first place.
“Why weren’t they there before?” Cody asks, then corrects himself when Obi-Wan shakes his head. “No. Why can’t we see them through the ship's tech?”
It’s possible to spoof radar. Hell, it’s easy to spoof a Galactic Positioning System.
But it shouldn’t be possible to spoof light.
“I don’t know,” Obi-Wan admits.
Cody turns to him, concern rising like bile in his throat. He’d assumed that Obi-Wan had known what was happening, and he’s starting to realize that he never confirmed that assumption. “But you knew what was happening.”
Obi-Wan tucks his hands in the bells of his sleeves. His fingers wrap themselves around the points of his elbows, hidden beneath the folds of fabric.
“I guessed. I’ve heard stories from other Jedi, from the archives—from my home planet, moreso—about what to do when you find yourself in a place like this.”
“A place like what?”
“A place that rewrites physics, where light changes speed and direction and nothing is as it seems. A place that you enter suddenly, that drapes fear like a lead blanket over your mind, while all your sensors start lying to you.” He looks out the window. “A place with a vast graveyard of unmanned ships, threatening to make you one of them.”
The description sounds like something out of a children’s story or one of Wolffe’s science fiction novels, not like something in pieces outside their ship window. Cody grinds his back teeth and doesn’t let himself shift his feet an inch.
“Seems like the kind of thing you’d put on a map,” he says, aiming for aggrieved instead of nervous. He means it, though. It’s one thing to have mystical physics-defying death zones, but it’s another to not have them clearly marked.
When Obi-Wan laughs, there’s no humor in the sound. “A couple are. The Bermuda Tetrahedron doesn’t move much, and Tumnus’ Quartet is always in one of four reasonably precise places. But the others… drift. And I believe we’ve just found where one drifted to.”
They stare in silence at the fleet of carnage in front of them, the slow spin of sheared steel and scattered engines. Slivers of fear gather in Cody’s veins, slipping through his blood to gather in his heart. There are more ships beyond his window than exist in the GAR fleet, and all of them are torn to pieces.
But the Vigilance isn’t a typical GAR ship. And she doesn't have a typical crew.
“Alright, how do we fight it?” Cody asks, squaring his shoulders and adding steel to his spine. “You know as well as I do that our armory is unmatched by any modern warship. If there’s anything that can carve through whatever this is, then we’ve probably got two.”
In the dim light reflected off broken hulls and shattered transparisteel, Obi-Wan’s eyes are as clear and inscrutable as well water.
“Cody,” he says carefully, “this isn’t something you try to fight. This is something you try to survive.”
They have a few ensigns carry two holoprojectors, a wide desk, and a motley assortment of chairs into the open area of the Observation Deck, then call for their senior staff. The makeshift War Room doesn't have the amenities of the one on the fourth deck, but the ominous press of the broken ships just beyond their hull is the best battle map they’re going to get.
“Well,” Boil says, stopping in the doorway and staring out the window. “That looks promising.”
Waxer pushes past him into the room, sees the ships, and sighs.
“Bet this doesn’t happen to the 501st,” he says.
Boil laughs. “No bet.”
Crys filters in, then Longshot, then Scrapper and Trench. The men sharpen, lighthearted banter evaporating, when Obi-Wan and Cody take their places at the head of the table.
“Alright,” Cody says, looking at each of his men and nodding. "No way around it: we're in a bad situation. We don't know where we are, how we got here, or what's waiting for us. First though, let's look at what we have. Boil, how're the engines?"
“We’ve still got impulse, sir, but no warp.”
“Can we get it back online?”
“Yes, technically, but,” Boil hesitates. “The cores—the engineers don’t know what’s wrong. The cores are spinning, but the readings indicate that they’ve started spinning… backwards.”
Cody blinks. He took far more courses on command and strategy than hyperdrive engineering, but even he knows the hypermatter turbines work in one direction only. Something about electron spin. “But that’s impossible.”
Boil shrugs at him, and Cody knows what it means: either the sensors are wrong or their understanding of physics is, and they don’t know which.
“They’re slowing the cores down to run auxiliary diagnostics to figure it out. Once they’ve done that, if the cores are spinning backwards, they’ll have to stop them and begin Black Start procedures. So warp’s at least three days out.”
Cody sighs. Three days in Hell isn’t the worst hand he’s been dealt in the war; Skywalker outranks him, after all. “Thank you. Crys?”
Crys’ hair is frizzing away from his forehead, and the black roots beneath the blonde peek through. He hasn’t changed out of his blood-splattered greys.
“The computing bank is running at about 70% capacity, sir. Whatever controls the shields is gone, and the proximity sensors are still reading clean but clearly wrong. Our ship AI is still functioning within what it assured me are ‘acceptable parameters’.”
“So life support’s fine… in theory. Hmm.” Cody steeples his fingers on the table in front of him and glances back out the window. “We’re safe as long as we’re standing still, but we can stand still forever. How to move… even when warp’s back online, we can’t make the jump until we’re out of the debris field.”
“And impulse power is too unwieldy for maneuvering when all of our sensors are on the fritz and we have no shields.”
To Cody’s right, Obi-Wan pulls his hand over his beard, his eyes unfocusing as he drops into an almost meditative state, and the room descends into deceptive calm as each man considers and dismisses their options. Cody pictures the Vigilance from bow to stern and walks through their arsenal one by one, weighing the possibilities as he goes.
It’s a dilemma, but there’s a solution here. There’s always a solution.
After a minute, Boil laughs softly in defeat. A tinge of bitterness lies in the twist of his mouth. “Damn. It’s a shame we can’t just get out and push, huh?”
The rest of the group chuckles, but instead of laughing, Waxer straightens up.
“No,” he allows, “but we could get out and pull. Sir, the collisions caved in part of the flight deck, but the LAAT/is are unharmed. If we depressurize the deck and cut through the damage, we could get the ships out. If we repurpose the refueling harnesses—”
“We could strap the LAAT/is to the ship,” Cody says, latching onto Waxer’s train of thought. “The pilots would be looking out their windows and not at sensors, and they could use short-range comms to coordinate the full picture while they tug."
Waxer nods. "Exactly. The LAAT/is aren’t spaceworthy for long, but if we keep up a steady rotation of ships each tethered to the ship, we could move.”
Obi-Wan’s hand over his beard doesn’t hide his smile. “Slowly but surely, we could move. Brilliant thinking, Lieutenant.”
“Thank you, sir,” Waxer says, and Cody can tell he’s trying not to start beaming. “I’ll get a crew on the bay doors immediately.”
The lights in the Observation Deck look brighter already. The doors slide shut with a whisper behind Waxer as he leaves, and Cody turns to Obi-Wan.
"One problem down," he says. "General, what else can we expect?"
Obi-Wan's eyes crease at the corners, a second smile tucked in beside his eyes. It slides away as he shakes his head, as if he’s trying not to jinx them.
"All I have are old wives' tales and Stewjoni horror stories," he says. "Stories of rogue gravitational waves that hit with more force than a black hole, of tendriled monsters that swallow stars, and of places where time moves backwards, or faster, or not at all… I don’t know how much is true, but I do know that our best bet is to leave as fast as we possibly can.” He raises one eyebrow and lets hope creep into his voice. “If we move fast enough, we might be able to get out before anything else—"
Cody's wristcomm lights up red, an alarm tone ringing out as someone hails his emergency frequency. "Commander, we’ve got a problem!"
"—happens," Obi-Wan finishes.
Cody holds Obi-Wan’s gaze as he clicks his comm open. “What is it, Ensign?”
“It’s the right wing, sir,” the ensign stammers, static fritzing his syllables. “It’s—it’s gone.”
The right wing is gone.
And not destroyed or broken or shattered, but—
Gone.
It’s as if someone started to install an observation deck in the middle of the armory and forgot to add the window and the frame. Beyond the line of DC-17s on the walls, there’s only the broad expanse of debris-cluttered space.
There’s nothing where a quarter of their ship used to be.
Cody breathes in and out, measuring the expansion of his lungs and the easy rush of air.
“Air pressure is holding?” he asks, and it is, obviously it is, but he has to say it outloud.
“Yes, sir,” one of the technicians says, hovering close to the far door with a datapad clutched to his chest. “Don’t know how, sir.”
“Well. Let’s not rely on it staying that way. Close off this section of the ship,” he says. “Treat it like a breach. I want airtight seals and decompression chambers set up. Anyone working on this side of the containment needs to be in exo, got it?”
“Sir!”
As the tech goes scurrying off, Cody walks closer to the edge of the ship—to the brutal, dizzying drop from solid ground to empty nothing—and traces the cut with his eyes. It’s clean, even. Like some curious god cut a perfect cross-section into the Vigilance starship so their angels could watch everyone scurry about.
Boil comes up next to him. The toes of his boots halt an inch behind the line of Cody’s.
“How many men are missing?” Cody asks quietly, and though he isn’t looking at Boil’s face, he still sees him flinch.
“38, sir.”
Boil rarely uses the ‘sir’ these days, and Cody feels the weight of it settle heavy on his shoulders.
He straightens his shoulders and nods. “Okay. Have we had any sign of where they might be? Or any radio signal at all?”
“Nothing. We’ve been broadcasting on our open channels, but that wing didn’t—doesn’t—have any long-range comms capabilities.”
“Keep broadcasting,” Cody says. “Just in case.”
“Will do.”
When Boil steps back, Cody’s unsurprised to feel Obi-Wan step up to take his place. His brown leather soles bring him within grasping distance of the gaping maw at the edge of their ship, and Cody shudders. He doesn’t know why, but he thinks it feels… hungry.
He resists the urge to clench his fingers in the back of Obi-Wan’s robes and pull his general back from the ledge.
When Obi-Wan holds an ungloved hand up to the invisible line of atmosphere, resisting that urge gets an order of magnitude harder.
“They must be on the other side. Air is circulating across the boundary,” Obi-Wan says, and Cody only now notices the fine auburn hair pinched between two of his fingers. It’s fluttering very, very slightly. “You know, not everything in these zones is dangerous. This could be a simple teleportation field. There’s a chance that we might be able to step through unharmed.”
He says it as though such a thing were commonplace and not something the Republic’s scientists have dreamed of for millenia.
Cody’s gut swoops at the consideration in Obi-Wan’s words, at the very thought of Obi-Wan stepping forward. Stepping through. The gut-wrenching fear he’d felt on the bridge earlier pools in his spine, locking up his bones.
“You can’t,” he says with a certainty bordering on desperation. “Sir, you can’t.”
Obi-Wan looks back at him, his eyes as calm as a Naboo lake in winter. “They could be in trouble.”
“Or they could already be dead,” Cody snaps. “Don’t risk 7,000 for 38. General. We won’t make it out of here without you.”
The hardest lesson the war has taught him has been to stay back while his brothers rush forward, to learn that his life—singular—could make the difference between success and defeat. Cody knows he’s still learning it.
He doesn’t think Obi-Wan ever started.
Obi-Wan looks back at the wide expanse of space before them, equal parts knowing and stubborn, like he is well aware of this lesson and fully intends to keep ignoring it.
“Let’s send a droid through first,” he acquiesces, and Cody tries not to be too obvious about tucking away his sigh of relief.
A cadet arrives with crates of exo suits around the same time the astromech does. Everyone takes turns helping each other into the inelastic, thickly woven gray suits as Crys syncs his datapad to the droid and its camera.
Cody doesn’t recognize it, which is probably for the best. It’s the same model as Skywalker’s little blue menace but painted in reds and yellows, and it trills a salute when Crys pats it on the round dome of its head.
“Alright,” Cody says, flicking the seals on his helmet until the suit inflates with a hiss of pressurization. Behind him, the armory doors have been pressure-sealed, and the emergency airlocks across any section of the compromised wing have been triggered. He activates the magnetic locks on his boots and feels them hold his feet to the durasteel floor. “Everyone secured? Good. Crys, you’re clear to proceed. On my mark. Three, two, one, now.”
The little astromech rolls its way to the opening, and with a lack of hesitation that Cody can’t help but envy, it pushes past the edge of the ship. It disappears inch by inch, slice by slice, as if it is sinking sideways into a pool of black, star-studded water, until it’s completely gone.
The atmospheric readouts on Cody’s HUD still show standard temperature and pressure, so at least the astromech didn’t pop some sort of magical air bubble when it went through.
“Crys, any data?” he asks, and he frowns when Crys shakes his head.
“We had a huge burst of signal when the mech first hit the barrier, but nothing’s coming through now. I’ll try to boost the output.”
He jacks into one of the portable generators stocked in the armory for on-planet temporary bases while everyone watches and wonders what else they could try. There are worse places for this than the armory, Cody thinks, cataloging what’s been left on this side of the divide. Plenty of weapons and heavy armor, sure, but other materiel is here, too. Energy generators, water supply systems, and comms relays… Surely there’s something here that would help.
A huge burst of signal, Crys said. Could the barrier have functioned as an EMP and fried the mech’s higher functions as it passed through? If it is a transporter, it would require a colossal amount of energy. But if air particles are making it through, other things could, too?
Obi-Wan’s footsteps are harder to hear through the exo-suit helmet, even with its sound amplification system, but Cody doesn’t miss them. He turns as Obi-Wan walks up, hands laced together in front of his suit.
“Commander,” he says, and he leaves it at that. He doesn’t have to say anything else; Cody knows that Plan B is Obi-Wan walking through himself.
The urge to grab him, to put him somewhere far from this terrible unknown, is almost overwhelming, but Obi-Wan is Obi-Wan. Cody can hardly love him any less for being willing to risk everything for a platoon of Cody’s brothers.
“I know,” Cody says. “Let me try one more thing.”
He walks over to the comms systems wall, pulls two of the portable short-wave radios from their holsters, and syncs them to the same frequency as his helmet system.
And then, with a short exhale, he lobs one of them through the barrier.
It vanishes.
Cody clicks on the radio in his hand and turns up his speakers. “212th, do you read? 212th, come in, over.”
Static answers, crackling and even.
He clicks it on again. “212th, come in, over.”
Silence again, then static, and then—
It happens so quickly that, if Cody hadn’t been staring so intently at the yawning portal on the edge of their ship, he would have missed it.
But he doesn’t. He sees a small white-ish gray dome appear at head-height in the middle of the void, and he watches with wide eyes as that dome grows in the familiar shape of a Phase 2 bucket’s top. A golden downward triangle appears as the front half of the helm comes into existence, line by line, as if it were being 3D-printed in real time. A right-hand gauntlet appears over the stretch of trooper blacks, followed by the aerators of the helmet, the front edge of orange pauldrons, and then the top of a chest plate.
Cody stares, hope rising into his throat, as more pieces of familiar plastoid materialize.
When the shin guards appear, the entire helmet finishes its slow materialization. The helmet rocks slightly then tilts forward, as if its owner were nodding.
And then, in the silence, in the distance, it topples, and it then falls to the ground with a crack like thunder. It bounces once, twice, and rolls across the durasteel floor to settle, visor-up, at Cody’s feet.
Empty.
The suit of armor starts to follow the helmet to the ground in a slow collapse as it, too, finishes materializing. The cuisses fall, the vambraces. The chest plate and the greaves.
It rattles until it settles and stills: a full set of trooper armor without its trooper, connected by the silky sheen of nylon blacks.
It’s all empty. Completely, perfectly empty.
“That’s—that’s Scrapper’s armor,” Boil stammers. “Where’s Scrapper?”
They wait as if expecting the void beyond them to answer. Seconds pass that dwarf minutes. They stand still, paralyzed by fear and indecision, until a small gray box hurtles through the air to land with a dull crunch on the floor between Cody and Obi-Wan.
Cody bends down and finds the radio he had tossed in earlier, avoiding looking into Scrapper’s blank visor as he does. The radio is off, screen dark, and it doesn’t respond when Cody twists the frequency dial.
Next to him, Cody sees Obi-Wan pale through the transparisteel of his suit’s helm.
“Cody,” he murmurs, and Cody follows his line of sight and flips the radio over.
On its back, on the sheath that covers the battery casing, a vibroblade has melted through the casing to cut four distinct letters:
