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The smoke was the first thing they noticed. It wasn’t blasterfire smoke — that dissipated clean and left a taste like hot copper. This was structural smoke, thick and black and greasy, rolling out of what used to be a Separatist supply depot and was now best described as a moderately successful bonfire.
The second thing they noticed was the singing.
"Is that—" Gauge held up a fist, halting the squad at the tree line. His head tilted, tracking the sound.
"It's definitely someone singing," Hotfix confirmed. He adjusted his helmet's audio filter. "Badly."
"Badly," Ditto agreed.
Gauge's jaw tightened. The 17th had been running patrol sweeps on the depot's perimeter for three days, waiting for General Vey's signal to begin the actual assault. Instead, an hour ago, the depot had simply... exploded. Comms were jammed. Air support couldn't raise the General. And now someone was singing in the wreckage.
"Spread out," Gauge said. "Scar, you're on me. Hotfix, take Ditto, circle east. If it's a trap, fall back to the rally point."
It was not a trap.
It was Pebble.
He was sitting on what appeared to be a super battle droid torso, with his helmet off and his legs swinging. His armor was covered in something purple that Gauge's HUD couldn't identify. There was a canteen in his hand that was clearly not standard issue, because standard issue canteens did not have ornate brass fittings and a cork stopper.
He had stopped singing when he heard them approach, and was now beaming at them, radiant goodwill pouring off him like heat from a blown reactor.
"Gauge!" Pebble called, as though they hadn't seen each other in years rather than the past hour. "Gauge, you — you have got to hear this."
"Pebble." Gauge lowered his rifle as he approached. "Are you injured?”
"What? No. Well." Pebble looked down at himself, seemed to notice the purple substance for the first time, and shrugged. "I don’t think this is mine."
"Let me see," Scar said, already crossing the debris field. Nothing surprised Scar. He grabbed Pebble's chin and turned his head, checking his pupils. "Track my finger. Pebble. My finger, not the — what is that, a bird?"
There was, in fact, a bird. It was sitting on a broken antenna three meters away, watching them, entirely unbothered.
"That's Gerald," Pebble said unhelpfully.
Scar looked at the bird. The bird looked at Scar. Scar looked back at Pebble.
"His pupils are responsive," Scar reported. "He's not concussed."
"He's drunk," Gauge said flatly.
"I am not — okay, I might be a little bit drunk." Pebble held up his canteen like his honor was at stake. "But in my defense, the cellar was already on fire, and it seemed wasteful."
"There was a cellar," Gauge said.
"Under the depot, yeah. Full of — I think it's wine? It might be paint thinner. It's hard to tell, it's got kind of a — " Pebble made a gesture that conveyed absolutely nothing. "But that's not important."
"Copy," Gauge said. He was already composing the after-action report in his head.
"What is important," Pebble continued, pointing at the smoking remains of the depot, solemn as a battlefield historian, "is what happened."
Hotfix and Ditto emerged from the eastern tree line. Hotfix took one look at the scene, lifted his helmet off, and sat down on a chunk of collapsed wall like he was settling in for a show.
"What happened, Pebble?" he asked.
"I'm so glad you asked."
Part One: The Bugs
"Okay, so it started with the bugs."
"The bugs," Gauge repeated.
"The bugs. Those little… the purple ones? The ones that have been getting into the ration packs?"
Gauge stared at him.
"The bugs, Gauge. Come on. You yelled at one yesterday."
"I did not yell at a bug."
"He did yell at a bug," Hotfix confirmed quietly.
"I disciplined a — that's not — " Gauge stopped himself, visibly recalibrated, and pointed at the burning depot. "Pebble. That. Explain that."
"That's what I'm doing! It starts with the bugs. The General noticed the bugs were moving in a straight line. Like, perfectly straight. She said insects don't do that on this planet unless they're following a chemical gradient, and the only thing on this continent that produces — uh, I don't remember the compound name. Something with a Z. She said it was used in Separatist signal relays as a coolant."
Gauge blinked. This was, against every instinct currently screaming at him, a coherent observation.
"So the General followed the bugs." Pebble shrugged.
"Alone?"
"Well, I was with her."
"Just you."
"I was the closest." Pebble smiled with what he clearly hoped was reassuring competence. "She said, 'Pebble, I need someone who can keep up and keep quiet,' and I said, 'I can definitely do one of those,' and she laughed and said that was good enough."
Scar made a sound that might have been a cough.
"So we followed the bugs," Pebble said, "and they led us right to a drainage grate on the north side of the depot. And the General crouched down and she sort of... talked to it?"
"Talked to the grate."
"You know how she talks to things. She was like, 'All right, let's see what you're hiding,' and she popped the cover off and there was this whole tunnel system underneath, and I said, 'Should we call this in?' and she said yes, absolutely, call it in, and that's when we found out comms were jammed."
"Jammed by what?" Gauge asked.
"The thing in the basement."
"What thing in the basement?"
"I'm getting to that."
"Get to it faster."
Pebble took a long drink from the canteen. Gerald the bird ruffled his feathers.
"Okay," Pebble said, smacking his lips. "So, the tunnel."
Part Two: The Tunnel
"The tunnel was not great."
"Define 'not great,'" Scar said.
"Well, it was full of droids."
Gauge's hand went to his rifle. "How full."
"At the time? Very full. They're not — I mean, they're done now. That's what the fire is about. Partly. But at the time there were — okay, you know how in the briefings they said the depot was lightly defended? A skeleton crew of B1s?"
"Yes."
"That was wrong."
"How wrong."
Pebble scrunched his face into his doing math face. "You know how many droids a standard garrison has?"
"Roughly a hundred and forty-four," Gauge said.
"Think bigger."
"Two hundred."
"Keep going."
"Pebble."
"There were a lot of droids, Gauge. Like, a lot a lot. They were stacked in the basement in shipping containers. Powered down. Hundreds. Maybe… I want to say a thousand? It might have been eight hundred. They were in rows."
Silence.
"And the comms jammer was in the middle of the rows," Pebble added, as if this detail was helpful.
"So you and the General," Gauge said slowly, "followed bugs into a tunnel, discovered a hidden droid army, found out you couldn't call for backup, and then — "
"And then," Pebble said, leaning forward, gleaming, because this was clearly the good part, "the General said something really cool."
Everyone waited.
"She said: 'Well. This changes the math.'"
"That's what she said," Gauge said. "Looking at a thousand droids."
"Yeah! And then she sat down right there in the tunnel and she was quiet for like... a really long time. Like, long enough that I thought maybe she was meditating? Or having a stroke? And I was about to ask if she was okay, and then she looked at me and she said, 'Pebble, how do you feel about improvisation?'"
"And you said?"
"I said, 'I'm from a vat, sir, my entire life is improvisation,' and she laughed so hard she had to put her hand over her mouth so the droids wouldn't hear."
Hotfix grinned.
"And that," Pebble said, holding up a wobbly finger, "is when she told me about the coolant."
Part Three: The Coolant
"So the same compound the bugs were following — the Z stuff — "
"Zytherene," Scar supplied.
"Thank you. That's the one. It's in the droid signal relays, right? But the General said it's also extremely flammable at high concentrations, and the fact that the bugs could smell it from outside meant the ventilation system was circulating it through the whole basement level."
"She wanted to ignite the coolant," Gauge guessed. "From inside the facility."
"With us in it," Pebble confirmed happily.
"That's insane."
"Yeah, Gauge, it kind of was!" Pebble agreed, gesturing expansively with the canteen and sloshing something that smelled like industrial solvent onto his own leg. "But she had a plan. She always has a plan. This one just happened to involve — okay. So. In order to ignite the coolant, she needed to overload the ventilation system so the concentration would hit combustion threshold, which meant she needed access to the environmental controls, which were on the other side of the droid storage bay, past the roughly one thousand powered-down droids."
"How did she get past them?" Hotfix asked.
"Carefully."
"Carefully," Ditto echoed.
"Like, so carefully. She could feel them in the — in the Force? Through the Force? She said they weren't active but they had standby charge, and if anything tripped the proximity sensors the whole lot would boot up at once. So she walked through them. Like, between them. In the dark. For… I don't know how long. A while. I was watching from the tunnel entrance and I couldn't see her, I could just hear her boots sometimes."
"And you just waited."
"She told me to wait! She said, 'Pebble, stay here, count to six hundred, and if I'm not back, run.' And I said 'Yes sir,' and I started counting, and I got to about four hundred and that's when the screaming started."
The entire squad went still.
"What screaming?" Gauge demanded.
"It wasn't— it wasn't her screaming. It was the droids. They woke up."
"You said she was being careful."
"She was being careful! She made it all the way to the environmental controls. The problem was the environmental controls were also the alarm controls, and she couldn't separate them because the Separatist engineer who designed the panel had — her words — 'the organizational instincts of a drunken Hutt.'"
"She said that."
"She talks to machines, Gauge. She said it to the panel. She said, 'Who wired you like this, you absolute disaster,' and then something beeped and that was when the droids turned on."
"All of them?"
"All of them."
Gauge sat down.
Part Four: The Part Where It Gets Complicated
"Okay, so this is where it gets a little complicated."
"It gets more complicated?" Scar asked incredulously.
"So the droids are waking up, right? And they're all booting in sequence, like — row by row, clicking on, and the General is standing at the environmental panel with her lightsaber out, and she yells — she yells, across this whole basement full of waking-up droids — she yells: 'PEBBLE, NEW PLAN.'"
"What was the new plan?"
"I don't know, she didn't tell me the new plan. She told me to find the cellar."
"The wine cellar."
"She said it would be underneath the environmental level, one more floor down, and she said to find it and find the oldest bottles. Not the wine — she didn't care about the wine — she wanted the bottles because old bottles on this planet are sealed with takkian bark stoppers, which are — "
"Organic accelerants," Hotfix said suddenly, sitting up straight. "Takkian bark is a natural fire-starter. You grind it and it's basically solid fuel."
"Yes! That's what she said! She said if I could get her enough bark stoppers, she could start the fire manually without overloading the ventilation, which meant she didn't need the panel anymore, which was good because by this point the droids had shot the panel."
"The droids shot their own panel," Gauge said flatly.
"They're not great shots, Gauge. We've been over this."
"So she sent you to find a wine cellar. During a firefight. In a building that was about to explode."
"She sent me to find cork," Pebble corrected, as if this distinction mattered. "And I found it. I found the cellar, and I found the bottles, and I started pulling out the stoppers, and that's — " He paused. "That's where the thing with the bird happened."
Everyone looked at Gerald.
Gerald looked back.
"Not Gerald," Pebble said. "Gerald came later. This was a different bird."
Part Five: The Bird (Not Gerald)
"So there were birds in the cellar."
"Why were there birds in the cellar?" Scar asked. Patient. Measured. He'd chosen his profession voluntarily, and sometimes he remembered that.
"Because of the bugs, Scar. Keep up. The bugs were following the chemical, and the birds eat the bugs, so the birds had gotten into the cellar through… I think there was a vent? Anyway. There were about thirty birds in the cellar. Big ones. The purple ones."
"The bugs were purple," Hotfix noted. "Is this why you're purple?"
Pebble looked down at himself again. "Oh. No. That happened later. The birds are purple. Everything on this planet is purple. It's very on-brand."
"Stay on target," Gauge growled.
"Right. So. I'm pulling corks. And the birds are watching me. And they're getting upset, because I'm making noise and there's blasterfire coming through the ceiling because the General is fighting approximately one thousand droids directly above me, and one of the birds — the biggest one — decides I'm a threat."
"It attacked you?"
"It attacked the corks. It grabbed the bag of corks and it flew off with them. Through the vent."
Silence.
"It flew outside," Gauge clarified. "With the fire-starting material."
"With about forty corks, yeah."
"What did you do?"
"I chased it."
"You chased a bird."
"I chased a bird! Out of the cellar, through the vent, out the side of the building, across— there was a kind of yard? With containers? And the bird was fast, Gauge, these birds are surprisingly fast, and it was dodging between containers and I was climbing over things and at one point I jumped off a stack of crates and I almost had it, but I landed on a different bird — "
"You landed on a bird?"
"Not on on. Near on. Close enough that it screamed and then they all screamed and suddenly there were thirty birds and one of me and they were very angry and very purple and that's where the purple came from." Pebble gestured at his stained armor. "Bird juice."
"Bird juice," Ditto said faintly.
"It's not — it's like a defense mechanism. They spray. From their — " Pebble gestured at his neck. "Neck glands."
"So to be clear," Gauge said, and his voice had gone brittle, "the General is alone, fighting a thousand droids, waiting for fire-starting material that was stolen by a bird, and you are outside the building, covered in bird spray, chasing a different bird."
"The same bird. The one with the corks."
"I'm going to have an aneurysm," Gauge said.
Part Six: The Miracle
"So I'm outside, right? Covered in bird juice. No corks. The building is making noises that buildings should not make. And I can hear the General's lightsaber — you know the sound it makes when she's really going? That high buzzing? — and I'm thinking, okay, Pebble, think. She needs fire-starting material. What else burns?"
"What did you use?" Hotfix asked, genuinely leaning forward.
"Well, first I tried ration pack wrappers, but they just kind of melted. Then I tried droid lubricant from the yard, but it was the wrong kind, non-flammable. And then I looked down at myself and I thought... bird juice."
"No," Scar said.
"Bird juice, Scar! The neck spray! It's flammable! The birds evolved on a volcanic continent, the spray is a sulfur compound, it's — the General told me about it earlier, actually, when we were on patrol. She said the indigenous fauna had volcanic adaptations. I didn't think it was going to be relevant."
"The bird spray is flammable," Gauge said.
"Extremely flammable. I figured that out when one of them sprayed a sparking power cable and the cable caught fire."
"So what did you do?"
"I collected the bird spray."
"How?"
"I made the birds mad."
Hotfix put his face in his hands. His shoulders were shaking.
"It wasn't hard!" Pebble said defensively. "They were already mad! I just had to stay near them and they kept spraying, and I was catching it in the canteen — not this canteen, a different canteen — and once I had enough I ran back inside and found the General."
"In the middle of a thousand-droid firefight."
"Well, by that point it was more like... four hundred? Three-fifty? She'd been busy."
"She'd destroyed six hundred droids," Gauge said skeptically.
"Gauge, I'm telling you. She was — " The drunk glow faded. Pebble's face went quiet, young, genuinely awed. "She was incredible. When I came back through the tunnel she was using pieces of droids as shields against other droids, and she'd collapsed part of the ceiling to create a bottleneck so they could only come at her from two directions, and she had them funneled — Gauge, you would have loved it, the geometry was beautiful — "
"Stay on target."
"Right. So I showed up with the canteen of bird juice and I yelled, 'General, I have an alternative accelerant!' and she yelled back something I couldn't hear because a droid was exploding, and I threw her the canteen, and she caught it — with the Force, she just reached out and it flew right into her hand — and she looked at the canteen, and she looked at me, and she looked at the canteen again, and she said..."
Pebble paused for dramatic effect.
"She said, 'Pebble, why does this smell like a bird?'"
Part Seven: The Fire (And The Thing After The Fire)
"So she rigged the accelerant."
"She rigged the bird juice," Gauge corrected, because apparently this was his life now.
"She rigged the bird juice into the ventilation intake, set a charge on a three-minute delay, and told me to run. And I ran. And I was almost to the tunnel when I remembered — "
"What."
"The wine."
"Pebble."
"Gauge, it was just sitting there! In a cellar that was about to explode! And I thought, the General just fought a thousand droids for us, the least I can do is save her a bottle."
"You went back?"
"I went back. I grabbed a bottle — I grabbed two bottles, one for the General and one for morale — and I ran, and I made it out the tunnel about fifteen seconds before the whole thing went up." He gestured grandly at the burning depot. "And that... is what happened."
Silence.
The depot burned. Gerald adjusted his position on the antenna.
Gauge looked at the fire. He looked at Pebble. He looked at the canteen of alien wine in Pebble's hand, then at the bird, then at Pebble's purple-stained armor, then at the fire again.
"And the General?" he asked.
"She's fine."
"Where is she?"
"She went around the back. Something about the secondary comms jammer being on a separate circuit. She said she was going to get comms back up so she could call in the all-clear." He took another drink. "She told me to wait here."
Gauge processed this.
"You're telling me," he said, "that General Vey, alone, with one shiny, followed insects to a hidden droid army, fought her way through a thousand battle droids, improvised an incendiary weapon out of bird secretions, destroyed a Separatist supply depot, and is now calmly restoring our communications network."
"Yeah," Pebble said. "Oh! And she found the intelligence cache."
"The what?"
"The intelligence cache. On the command level. She grabbed it on her way through. She said it looked like fleet movement projections for the whole sector." He frowned. "Or maybe she said 'sector fleet movement projections.' I don't remember which way around it was."
"When was this?" Scar asked. "When did she have time to grab an intelligence cache?"
"Between the ceiling collapse and the bird juice. I think."
Hotfix was lying flat on his back on the chunk of wall, staring at the sky. He was making small, helpless sounds.
"None of this happened," Gauge said firmly.
"All of it happened!"
"You're telling me the General improvised a fire accelerant from bird gland secretions."
"Neck glands."
"I'm going to write this report," Gauge said, "and Command is going to think I'm the drunk one."
"You want some?" Pebble offered the canteen. "It's actually not bad once you get past the— "
"No."
Epilogue: The Part Where It All Gets Worse
"He's lying," Gauge told Jet when the Commander's patrol arrived ten minutes later.
Jet looked at Pebble, who had gotten comfortable on his droid torso again and was feeding crumbled ration bar to Gerald. His gaze moved to the burning depot, then back to Pebble's purple armor and the canteen.
"Which part?" Jet asked.
"All of it. He's drunk and he's confabulating. There's no scenario in which a thousand droids were hidden in that depot. Intelligence would have flagged the thermal signatures."
"Uh huh." Jet pulled up his datapad and turned it so Gauge could see the screen.
It was a scan from orbit. Taken three hours ago, before whatever had happened here. A deep-penetrating thermal overlay.
The basement level of the depot was a solid block of yellow.
"Intelligence did flag it," Jet said. "This came through ten minutes ago when we got comms back."
Gauge stared at the scan.
"The bug thing?" he asked faintly.
"She mentioned insects in her pre-action log, yeah."
"The— the hidden tunnel."
"Drainage infrastructure. She pulled the original colony engineering records three days ago. I watched her do it."
"The bird juice."
Jet's expression didn't change, which was its own kind of answer.
"Sir," Gauge said, pointing at Pebble in outrage. "Are you telling me that every single thing he just said— "
From the far side of the depot, a figure emerged through the smoke.
General Serra Vey was walking like she'd just finished a moderately taxing chore. Her lightsaber was clipped at her belt, unlit. Her hair had come loose from its tie and was hanging in her face. Her armor were scorched in three places, there was droid lubricant splashed across her boots and pants, and she was carrying a data core under one arm like a sack of groceries.
There was also a bird on her shoulder.
Not Gerald. A different bird. A big purple one with ruffled feathers and an air of tremendous personal satisfaction.
"Oh! That's the one who stole the corks," Pebble said, pointing.
Vey reached the group, looked at Pebble on his droid-throne with his canteen and his bird, looked at Gauge's expression, and appeared to do a quick mental reconstruction of the last twenty minutes. Amusement flickered across her face, with a thin edge of guilt.
"Sergeant Gauge," she said. "I see Pebble's briefed you."
"Sir." Gauge's voice was perfectly controlled. "Did you improvise an incendiary weapon from avian biological secretions?"
The General considered this for a moment. The bird on her shoulder preened.
"Technically," she said, "Pebble improvised it. I just deployed it."
"She said I improvised it," Pebble whispered to Hotfix, radiant.
"I heard," Hotfix whispered back.
Vey looked at Pebble's canteen. "Is that the wine from the cellar?"
"I saved you a bottle, sir." He held up a second canteen, this one also non-standard-issue, like he was presenting a battlefield commendation. "For morale."
General Vey looked at the bottle. She looked at the depot, still burning. She looked at her data core full of Separatist fleet projections, and her stolen bird, and her drunk shiny, and her sergeant who was clearly contemplating whether it was possible to resign from a position one had been genetically engineered for.
She took the bottle.
"Thank you, Pebble," she said. She uncorked it with her teeth, sniffed it, and made a face that suggested Pebble's paint thinner theory had not been entirely wrong. She took a drink anyway.
The bird on her shoulder made a soft, satisfied sound.
"Sir," Gauge said. "With respect. I need you to understand that I am going to write this report exactly as it happened, and no one in the entire Grand Army of the Republic is going to believe a single word of it."
General Vey handed him the bottle.
"Then I suggest you leave out the part about the bird juice, Sergeant."
"There is no part of this that isn't about the bird juice, sir."
"Gerald!" Pebble called to the bird on the antenna. "She's got your friend! Gerald, look!"
Gerald did not look. Gerald was asleep.
"Write it up however you want, Gauge," Jet said, already walking toward the comm tower. "I'm listing it as 'asset denial via unconventional means' and moving on with my life."
The General sat down on a piece of debris next to Pebble. The bird hopped from her shoulder to her knee. Pebble leaned over, conspiratorial and beaming, and said: "I told them about the ceiling collapse, sir. The geometry."
"Did they appreciate the geometry?"
"Gauge would have loved the geometry."
Vey looked over at Gauge, who was reading Jet's datapad now — cross-referencing a drunk shiny's combat narrative against orbital reconnaissance data and discovering, with increasing horror, that they matched.
"I think he might need a minute," she murmured.
Somewhere in the wreckage, the depot's last standing wall gave up and collapsed with a long, slow groan. Gerald didn't wake up. The other bird — the cork thief — settled more comfortably on the General's knee and closed its eyes.
Pebble took another drink.
"This is the best day of my life," he declared.
Nobody argued.