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Cal sighs as he leans back in his chair, the support groaning ominously at the shift in weight . At this point, he is not sure what all he could do. It had taken far too much planning and maneuvering to get that astromech all the way from the worksite back to the apartments without the Guild finding out and making a fuss.
The problem is that, despite all the effort, he is not entirely certain he can even fix it. It is in awful shape from having spent years exposed to the elements on Bracca. Half of its shell is rusted, its power cell is corroded to the point that it would be easier to just replace both it and its connectors than to pry it out and clean it, and its sensors and scanners are utterly shot.
The only thing he really has to work with here is that its core is still intact, even if it is currently inert. He could possibly just find a different, intact droid that is compatible with the core, but he would really rather not go anywhere near that particular solution.
And he knows there are ways he could simply… hook it up to a holoterminal, if he wanted to see what data is in it, if he wanted to see if it really is still intact. It would defeat the point, really.
He is not here for the data. He’s not even here just to get a functional, free droid.
To be honest, Cal is still not sure why it struck him so deeply, seeing a lifeless droid still connected to a fighter that crashed so long ago. Why seeing this droid, specifically– abandoned, left to rot and rust in the rain– got to him.
Maybe it is just the fact that it was a Jedi ship, maybe it was just seeing that death sentence of a symbol looming over its head like a scythe.
Maybe it is not about the droid at all, but the way that Prauf telling him to find his destiny only reminded him all the more that the only fate he could ever possibly find in the Empire is execution.
So here he is, sitting in a room that he shares with three others, with nothing but a broken droid and the sound of Prauf’s snoring for company.
He will figure it out eventually. He will find all the parts he needs in one way or another– this is Bracca after all, and the scavengers have a rather thriving black market– and maybe then he could just… have someone to grieve with, he supposes.
To have someone that understands the jarring difference between the way things used to be and now.
(Lieutenant Bit gave him a knife, a long time ago. Told him to always carry it, that it’s better to never need it than to lose his only weapon. That it can be life or death.
It is the only thing he still carries from that life. It is the only weapon he still uses.
It has saved him more than once.)
There’s something hollow sitting in his chest. Cal wonders what it is supposed to be.
“Okay, here goes nothing,” Cal whispers.
There’s a handful of meaningless beeps– or, well, not technically meaningless, but some garbage sequence of characters output during the reboot. The astromech straightens itself with a faintly clicking whirr that is a bit concerning.
« Running internal diagnostics. Power level: 63%. Scanners: Partial Incompatibility detected. Sensors: Functional. Recalibrating. Memory Corruption detected. »
Cal leans back and waits for it to finish. He wonders if it was the crash or the years that followed that first damaged its sensors. If it was forced into service mode by its programming or if it stayed active until no energy was left.
The droid’s head turns.
« Query: current location? Query: allegiance? »
“We’re on Bracca. Sector… H-9 I think?” He knows approximately where on a starmap the system falls, but he can’t remember which block. It never mattered that much, and he's horrible at astronav anyways. “As for your second question, that’s… a tough one.”
The droid beeps impatiently.
« Annoyance: allegiance simple. Demand: answer now. »
Cal grimaces. Maybe he really should have just left the droid in the fighter when they called in that finder’s fee.
“You’ve been inactive for at least five years. Trust me, it’s gotten a lot more complicated in that time. It’s…”
How should he put it?
“Look. The Republic is gone. It’s been replaced with an Empire headed by the former Supreme Chancellor. The GAR is… I don’t even know how many of the original troopers are still around. As far as the galaxy’s concerned, the Order’s nothing but traitors. They decimated us.”
The astromech is silent except for the sound of their eye-lens refocusing.
« Query: allegiance? »
“13th Battalion,” Cal whispers even as he thinks of DC-15s aimed his way, “of the First Systems Army. The Jedi Order. Anyone that doesn’t want my people extinct. Take your pick.”
« Query: battalion location? »
“Dead. They betrayed us. Master… made sure they couldn’t follow.”
« Disbelief: impossible. Statement: troopers serve Jedi, not hurt them. »
“You didn’t see what happened,” he snaps. “They killed everyone. I… they weren’t themselves. I know that. But that doesn’t change what they did.”
Cal remembers feeling the Lights of their presences flickering out across the ship in the same way Master Tapal was feeling a massacre across the entire galaxy. And he remembers how it felt to have every single pseudobond ripped out as the Albedo Brave exploded even when something in his mind was screaming that they were already gone.
So many he was connected to died that if anyone he still has a bond with is alive, he has no way to tell.
Especially if they blocked it, if they muted it and let it wither to give nothing away. It’s harder to find something muffled when everything around it is bleeding agony. That Cal can’t afford to meditate, to try to find a bond that isn’t torn–
If Cal had a choice, then even if it meant he was hunted he would have left the 13th alive.
« Doubt: GAR is too loyal. Query: Return Unit E1-1S to Unit’s battalion? »
Cal regrets ever deciding to repair the droid.
“I… can’t.”
He couldn’t even if he wanted to.
“You did wipe that thing’s memory, right?” S’thaira narrows his eyes.
The question makes Cal’s skin crawl, but– it’s a reasonable one. Even if he doesn’t like the idea that anyone’s memories could simply be taken from them.
(“I have eyes on the small padawan!”
Where’s my name? Cal wants to scream. Where’s my title?
They have never called him padawan before. He has only ever been their commander, even when he didn’t deserve it.)
“Yeah,” he says with a pained grimace. The lie is dark and oily in his mouth, and Cal wonders– take someone's memories, and who do they become?
E1-1S, for the second time in the last ten minutes, lets out a long string of filthy Binary swears that are best left in their original language.
Thank the Force that Prauf is out on an errand and isn’t here to hear this. The man already sounds a bit too much like a Jedi sympathizer for an Imperial citizen some days. No need to make it worse.
Krussai laughs nervously, feathers fluffing out. “If you keep insulting the Emperor like that, the stormtroopers will be coming down on all of us.”
“That thing clearly needs its personality module replaced,” S’thaira mutters. “And a new paintjob. Dank ferrik, are you sure it belonged to the Republic and not a pirate?”
If only.
Most members of the GAR had a limited knowledge of Binary, only enough to understand simple status reports. They didn’t need to understand droids on a fully conversational level, as far as Kamino was concerned. Linguistic skill was better served elsewhere.
Admittedly, most droids in the GAR itself had restraining bolts, unless they came from the Order itself. There were always a handful of Jedi or engineers or pilots who would remove those, though, and in those cases–
Well, it’s probably for the best that only a few troopers had the fluency to understand them. And that Master Tapal couldn’t speak Binary at all.
ExplorCorps droids are– were– probably the most foul-mouthed droids of them all. At least the ones Cal managed to meet back in the Temple tended to be so.
The instructors for his engineering class pretended to be scandalized, but they really couldn't hide their amusement.
“Well, it certainly didn’t come from a civilian shuttle,” Cal finally manages to say. “You know how military sorts go. They’re either really formal, or really crude.”
It all depends on who’s off-duty and how much they’ve seen.
Bracca isn’t exactly the most entertaining posting a stormtrooper can have. Those who aren’t on patrol tend to find their own entertainment. Especially the natborns– the ones he knows for certain were never part of the war.
“…You have a point about the paint, though.”
Ellas still has the paint it did when he first dragged them from the top of a venator all the way home.
Republic all the way through.
“Please, you have to stop insulting the Empire,” Cal begs.
The astromech lets out a scornful trill.
« Declaration: Empire = invalid. Statement: General could do better. Disdain: And with less lawbreaking. »
He doesn’t know if the disdain is for the Empire’s lawbreaking, or its general’s inclination not to. It could easily go either direction.
“Bracca has enough issues with Imperial pressure. Just… just stop.”
« Demand: Then return Unit E1-1S to battalion. »
“If you don’t stop insulting the Empire, you’ll be reprogrammed and the rest of us decommissioned and then nobody will kriffing return you to your battalion!” Cal snarls.
There’s silence.
He breathes.
It isn’t the droid’s fault. He thinks that if he hadn’t lived through the purge himself, if he hadn’t seen Commander Runi’s blaster turn on the General, if he hadn’t watched the others fire at him over and over and over again–
Cal wouldn’t have believed them either. Not without proof.
Because there were no signs. There was no lead-up, no planning. Not even so much as a today is the day. There was no mutiny, not truly.
Just a brief comm and his world falling apart.
E1-1S can’t be blamed for that.
Especially not when Cal is the one that chose to fix them, so desperate for someone, anyone that remembers how things used to be before the betrayal and the Empire.
“Look… Ellas. I can try and look into what– what really happened when the war ended. I can try and find your battalion if you actually tell me who the kriff they are. But I can’t bring you back to them right now. Not when just breathing wrong could be a death sentence around here.”
« Grudging: Acceptable. Statement: Battalion not traitorous. Amended: Unit E1-1S is part of 35th Battalion. »
The 35th?
Cal wracks his brain, trying to recall any details about it. He thinks General Tapal might have mentioned it once, but– that’s it. They’ve never shared a mission before, and Cal isn’t sure they had ever even been in the same sector before. Maybe during a shore leave, once or twice, though he wouldn’t have been aware.
“Okay… I’ll try to find Echoes or rumors about what happened to them, if I can.” His psychometry doesn’t exactly work like that, but he can dig his metaphorical fingers in, if he tries. Can pull the thread and force out more information than was naturally, overtly stored in an Echo.
It might kill him if he tries it, with his connection to the Force in such tatters.
He breathes.
“Right. Next. If we want to keep the Empire from noticing you, you need a new look. I’d stick with grey or black and, if you want, whatever the 35th’s chosen color was.”
The Empire hardly cares whatever colors the troopers used to paint themselves before the takeover. Not now that the Jedi aren’t here to encourage it. Everything is exclusively white on black nowadays.
Because kark individuality, right?
(Cal went to Ilum earlier than most Initiates.
He remembers drumming in his ears and the flash of red that haunted his peripheral as he was hunted through a temple of ice and death.
There was no war, when he found his kyber with terror burning through him. That didn’t last long.)
« Grudging: Acceptable. Statement: The 35th used Tarisian Purple. »
Cal has no idea what kriffing color that is, but good enough. At least they’ll tolerate it.
The thing about Bracca is that almost every Venator that Cal has scrapped in the last several years has had an echo of the purge tucked away. He’s just avoided them as best he can.
It is never much, but sometimes a Jedi managed to hide for a while, and their fear and confusion and what-did-i-do-wrong lingers in the vents and maintenance halls like a stubborn stain. Some Jedi never had more than a flicker of confusion. And some– some were given the treatment of a prisoner instead.
Cal isn’t a skilled slicer, but he was a Jedi and a Commander of the GAR. It isn’t difficult to find his way into any systems or lost datapads that are still active after all this time.
The issue is that the only kriffing warning anyone had is a single comm call. The same transmission, every time. He’s found comms set to automatically record past calls– likely because of the trooper pastime of collecting blackmail on each other.
All the ones he has seen were identical. Like a pre-recorded video, or a priority notification.
And he doesn’t understand why.
Why did it only take three kriffing words?
What’s the significance of the speaker?
If that was specifically the order to kill Jedi, what did the dozens of orders before it entail?
How did the Kaminoans prime the Republic’s own army against its leadership?
Cal wishes he was older. He wishes he was anything other than a padawan. He wishes he knew more about what started the war in the first place, and not simply the statistics from Geonosis.
Kriff. Just a single month of living on the Albedo Brave left him with so, so many memories of how bad Kamino could be. And there wasn’t a single hint of… anything like this.
He knows he won’t find answers on Kamino. Cal remembers hearing about the destruction there. But the GAR has been all over the galaxy, and so has the CIS. And that– that is something he heard a lot of rumors about in the Temple, given the number of lightsabers held by enemy lines.
“Hey, Ellas…”
« Query: what does 13th commander need? »
“How would you feel about finally getting off Bracca?”
E1-1S makes a delighted beep.
« Query: battalion found? »
“No, not yet, but… I think I know where to start looking.”
He might need to call in some IOU’s that he’s been saving these last few years.
If he can’t find out what let the purge begin, then at least he might have a way to search out other survivors.