Enemies above the planet. Evacuation.

Raey pounded his fists on the console, jaw clenched in frustration. Surface level, all of it. Everything important - the communications of the officers and the orders of the Knights - was limited to channels he didn't have access to. Even with the coerced aid of the technician, there were simply too many systems that didn't even come through here, too much information he needed that could not be accessed from this low-priority control room.

He turned and hurried out of the room, not giving his injured prisoner a second glance. At this point, letting someone raise an alarm on him would only add to the cacophony of distractions, and he figured he wouldn't be a particularly high priority threat compared to whatever had the entire planet running around in a panic.

Not from their perspective, at any rate.

He sent a message to Ar'tak on the datapad he had taken from the technician, hoping the Jedi would get back to him with better news then he got. Wait for me, he insisted at the end. I have another idea.

The main control centers would be crowded with enemies, inaccessible, but there was the chance, the slim, absurd chance, that he wouldn't need the actual interface.

Miles of wires ran through these walls, managed and organized by hidden breakers, control panels, and power junctions. He had learned to find these junctions on destroyers, and though Star-Killer Base was like nothing he had ever torn apart, there had to be a certain logic to all Imperial-inspired tech that carried through whether the builders realized it or not.

He knew where the sector's primary control center was from the maps. He couldn't get anywhere close to it, but he could follow the veins out from that powerful heart of the system. He could get into the data-stream further down and, with a little help, he could manipulate it.

Hey, the Force, it would be really helpful if I just happened to run into BB-8 right about now. Any chance you could give events a little nudge in the right direction?

Raey could almost hear Ar'tak's little huff of incredulous indignation, the rant about how that wasn't how the Force worked, but there wasn't anyone there to give it. He was on his own, and there weren't even any handy droids wandering aimlessly down the hall...

There wasn't anyone wandering the halls.

Ships that had only recently landed were already fighting for the chance to take off again. That much information, Raey had gotten access to. Dozens of company ships, personnel transports, and cargo freighters packed with people were practically shoving each other out of the way to get take-off clearance.

Why do they want to take off in the middle of a space battle?

It was as if they were completely and utterly convinced the Resistance was going to win. As if they knew the planet was doomed. They were willing to risk getting shot down just to get away from Star-Killer Base.

.

Shuttle Diomediun landed in the middle of a mass-exodus. No one came to meet them, but a crowd of sweaty humans and aliens had packed so densely into the landing bay that even those who noticed the uniforms and black robes of LN's strike team could barely get out of their way due to the pressure of the people at their backs.

Jedi Thren took the lead, and people found ways to give him room. LN followed close on his heels, her blaster in hand.

But not quite ready for action.

She didn't know what to expect down here.

In a matter of hours, a quiet rescue mission had turned into a full planetary assault, and it left LN feeling strangely off-balance. Without meaning to, Raey's little plans had intersected with First Order and Resistance scheming none of them had known about, and one warning had been all they needed to jump straight into action.

And LN wasn't ready for action.

A pair of troopers stood guard at the landing bay entrance, arguing with with a belligerent ugnaught manager. One of them turned to give the group a glance as they left the bay, and LN tensed.

Don't engage, she pleaded silently, but her concerns weren't necessary. The trooper nodded at them respectfully and went back to arguing with the alien, and the strike team walked past the line of workers waiting impatiently to get into the landing bay without incident.

The Jedi muttered something to himself, too quiet for LN to catch. She picked up her pace to walk next to him.

"What's wrong?" she demanded, and Jedi Thren shot her a sideways glance.

"I don't know. And that worries me."

None of them knew the layout of the base, but it wasn't difficult to find the nearest information console. One of the New Alderaanians (an alien whose name LN had been told but had difficulty pronouncing even in the privacy of her own head) began "cracking into the system" with a similar kind of unaware self-satisfaction as RK-3297 when he had work to do on their fighters.

3297...

LN sidled up next to Thren again while they waited. "We can carry out this mission without making a ruckus," she said in an undertone. "If a stormtrooper seems about to question us about our presence, let me do the talking, okay?"

The look the Jedi shot her made her suddenly miss Ar'tak; younger, self-conscious, and easy to sway. "This is war, LN," Thren replied bluntly. "Stormtroopers are going to die. If not by my hand, or yours, then by the explosions caused when we drop the shields and allow Resistance bombers to turn the surface of this weapon into ash and slag."

She couldn't think of a response. She should have one, but his tone cut through her arguments before she could make them.

Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

This is war.

It was. And she was on the wrong side.

.

Raey's heart beat like a drum against his ribs, paranoia insisting that some horrifying Knight would round the corner at any moment and see him with his back turned, completely exposed. His jaw clenched, teeth digging into metal, but he forced himself to stay where he was - head-and-shoulders inside a maintenance panel.

The glow from his datapad flickered, the system insisting it didn't want to connect with the control center. He waited until it steadied, needing the light to see inside the dark wall (his own body blocked most of the light from the hall) then carefully took the fragile spike of metal and wires out from between his teeth.

It was one of the first things he had learned to make on Jakku - one-use computer spikes. Cannibalizing certain systems to try and gain access to other, more valuable ones was just one of the many facets of the risk and reward of scavenging.

"The only difference now is that the risk are a bunch of guys with guns and lightsabers, and the reward is being able to call down airstrikes on top of myself."

Raey had to pause and ponder that for a moment, then sighed and connected the spike anyway.

"One... two... three."

His datapad shut down and restarted automatically, making the switch to the new system it had access to. Raey immediately checked for warnings about his infiltration, but found nothing. If something had triggered, it was somewhere he didn't know to look for it.

"Move fast, just in case," he muttered to himself, and wriggled back out of the hole in the wall. His datapad came with him and he settled down crosslegged against the wall, holding the pad carefully to keep his delicate system of wires from tugging loose.

"Shields, shields, shields..."

It was not a control console, with internal systems neatly organized and easily maneuvered through because of the set-up. He quarantined the raw data he had gained access to to one side of the pad where he could keep half an eye on it, then began wrestling with the datapad's limited software. He didn't have to get around passwords, but he also had no tools to sort through the data.

A name appeared, briefly, in the lines of reports being sent to and from central control. He only caught a few letters, the general length of the word, but that was enough to catch his attention. He isolated the report and copied it over so he could look at it without fear of it vanishing back into the flood of data.

Bay A2-5 arrival. Imperial Shuttle - Diomediun. One Black Acolyte, name unknown; one officer, designation unknown; five troopers, designations unknown. Bay overcapacity. Advice.

It was a repeated request, possibly automated. No one had responded.

Raey hesitated, conflicted. On the one hand, the idea that allies had come with his beautiful shuttle to help was encouraging, but on the other... he wished they hadn't. If they were allies at all. How anyone else could possible have his shuttle, he couldn't guess, but the possibility was always there.

He sorted out records, limited to ones to and from that sector and only after the landing. Most of it was nothing, just a lot of noise, but one progression stood out. A data-transfer request, denied, accessed without a repeated request.

"Not very First Order of you..."

He found the origin of the request and narrowed in. The data console was still active.

Risks and rewards.

.

The New Alderaanian stopped mid-sentence, looked up abruptly from his hacked console.

"LN? I think the computer knows you."

She leaned in over his shoulder. An error, threatening lock-out, dominated the screen, and the only explanation was a pair of letters and a question mark. Her letters.

That is not a coincidence.

Two options - confirm and cancel action. Without consulting the New Alderaanians, she pushed confirm.

The system locked them out.

"Great," grumbled the cracker, shooting LN a vaguely irritated look. "Now we've got to find somewhere else to get our information."

"Raey and Ar'tak got here long before us," LN retorted. "Give them a chance."

The rest of the strike team stirred, impatient, but Jedi Thren did not move and his steadiness helped keep the others from arguing. A large group of workers hauling cargo hurried past them while they waited, a hundred or more all wearing greasy grey outfits with name tags and safety gear. A few glanced at Thren, then hastily averted their gazes and moved on with a quickened step.

The console came alive again, a new transfer requesting datapad access. The cracker hesitated, looked at LN, then reluctantly plugged in his personal datapad.

Then handed it to LN when a message popped up with the transfer.

"LN," it read, "plans changed. Sending primary shield generator location to you; take it out. Ar'tak and I split up - he went to get Dameron in detention cells - has not returned or sent word. I'm going to communications to send info to fleet. Knights on planet. Something is wrong, but don't know what. Be careful."

"Got it," muttered LN, briefly scanning the series of attached directions before handing the datapad back to its owner. "He's given us all we need."

.

They were stopped at the tram station. An officer, flanked by troopers, looked too closely. He demanded more then LN had answers for.

And the Jedi tore through them like their body armor had been made of paper. The lives of stormtroopers were cheap indeed.

LN stopped for a moment while Jedi Thren stepped over the corpses and the rest of the team followed. She didn't do anything, didn't try to identify them in any way because she knew it wouldn't matter, but she did pause. Then she swallowed the lump in her throat and banished the morbid thought that imagined her squadmates' faces beneath those helmets, and she followed Thren.

The tightness in her chest remained.

.

Raey had seen and poked around in hundreds of systems on a single ruined star destroyer, all of which had to be running and maintained in order to keep the ship stable. A weapon this large, this powerful, required even more.

He loaded the best, most accessible weak points he could find in the blueprints into his datapad, his next move already plotted out. He had access to a lot, but the main communication array was beyond his reach, running on its own circuit. If he could get there and upload his information on a loop, every ship in the system would hear the message, would know just where to hit once the shields went down. A dozen different targets, a dozen chances for the Star-Killer to be crippled... and one or two that might destroy it outright.

Alert

Raey hesitated, his hand on the spike to disconnect.

Warning

He followed it backwards, to the system sending the warning. To the gun.

It wasn't finished. Everything he had seen in the schematics suggested it wasn't even close to operational, and yet they were almost done charging it. Solar energy, drawn by modified tractor beam technology, funneled into the shielded core of the planet...

Warning

The planet-base needed constant power just to stay functional. Elaborate vent systems, designed to cool those generators required to power the massive city-sized complexes across the surface of the planet, were pouring heat backwards, dumping it into the power core. And there was something else in there. An anomalous mass, right in the center of the planet...

The solar-draw was too far along. They must have begun almost right after Raey and Ar'tak landed... the warning now was because, purposefully or not, they had let the core shield fail.

It was the most efficient realization of one of Raey's proposed weakpoints, but someone was ahead of him.

Someone, he realized - and a chill ran through him - who had begun evacuating personnel before he and Ar'tak even reached the planet's surface.

He didn't even bother disconnecting - if they noticed the intrusion, so be it. He grabbed his datapad and sprinted down the hall, towards the trams.

Towards the communication array.