Volume II: Contingence
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Prologue
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The communique released by the Senate Select Committee for Refugees - SELCORE, as it was known for better or worse - is simple and direct. A new world has opened its borders for the displaced fleeing the Yuuzhan Vong advance, with stipulations. Only humans need bother apply. Naturalization into citizenship is expected. New Republic law has no purchase. Housing, food and work will be provided. Et cetera.
Suppose that such requirements already remove a majority of refugees from the pool. Humans only need apply, after all. Suppose at the start, a generous sixty-five percent of viable applicants are set aside immediately by fault of their species. Suppose then that the requirements of the 'Imperium Exsilius' seem foreign and strange and unpalatable. Suppose that the very idea of losing New Republic citizenship alone is enough to balk many desperate asylum seekers. Suppose this, then, slashes another conservative fifty percent from the estimates of potential applicants. In likelihood, it is more. It is likely a great deal more.
Consider then that the rigorous stipulations laid out weed further swathes of the population. Droids are banned. The world is a colonial world, and work is expected to be in construction, agriculture, urban development. The Imperium Exsilius prides itself on working hands and supports those that support themselves. Suppose this, then, sticks in the craw of those who recall the scandalous reports from Salliche Ag worlds and others who exploited the misfortunate to the tune of near-slavery.
Consider then another decent percentage cloven away.
What remains then is a single digit percentage, at most, of refugees fleeing ahead of the extra-galactic invader's advance. Six percent, perhaps four. Maybe three. Even less. These are those willing to accept SELCORE's offer of resettlement, willing to overlook that for once, SELCORE was asking, not assigning. Willing to overlook the oddities of the orientation package provided. Willing to be brave enough, or desperate enough, to throw themselves at a world of the Mid-rim, a world never heard of before, because they have no other choice.
A single digit. This is a generous estimate. It might even be fractional.
There are already hundreds of billions fleeing the invaders.
A single percent of that is still billions. A fraction of a percent of that is still tens of millions.
Eboracum local space lives like it has never lived before.
Mantallikes, whose engines may never light again, sits like a mothering hen amongst her brood. Her voids may be dead, half her reactors quiet, but her guns still live. Mass conveyors, little more than assemblages of cavernous chambers welded into chains kilometers long, married to warp engines and a tiny blister of a command deck, face their warden in a starburst formation. Once they held men and material, saved from the dying surface of Calth. Now that is all gone, long since sequestered on the cloudy world below, leaving their barracks decks echoing. One arrives, coasting slowly on altitude thrusters, nosing into its position in the many-rayed star of silent starships, attended by shuttles and wary starfighters. Within its belly are tens of thousands more human beings - men, women, children - of all ages, of all walks of life and profession.
They will leave this mass conveyor when it docks with Eboracum Orbital. The name is generous. Eboracum Orbital is a hodgepodge of skeletal frameworks, joined together to create berths and slipways, centered around a disc-shaped core. Months of round-the-clock construction by Mechanicum savants and remote servitor-drones assembled the nexus of the Orbital and picked clean the bones of surrendered mass conveyors. Touch of the Motive Force, enormous barque that it is, looms close at hand, ever active, ever productive. Now Mantallikes and Fourth Honor and the cruisers and destroyers bear decking, plating, more and sundry from these cannibalized haulers.
Eboracum Orbital bears cavernous hangars, filled with lighters and shuttles, both Republican design and Imperial, who fly endless loops between the Orbital and the world. Incoming refugees are processed through in rapid order, scanned for weaponry or hazardous materials before being packed aboard shuttles and sent onward.
Each day, Eboracum Orbital cycles forty thousand men and women. A week ago it could handle fifteen thousand. A month ago - a thousand. It grows, visibly. The core expands in fits and starts, heralded by actinic blooms of void-rated cutting and welding arrays. New expansions come online daily, flickering to life as the stolen reactors of six long-haul troop transports feed them energy.
From the Orbital refugees set first foot on Imperial soil on the outskirts of Eboracum Civitas. The city is a grey line on the horizon, a wizard's mirage, blue sky shimmering between horizon and growing towers. Heat steams from a vast and infinite tarmac, kilometers and kilometers on a side. A grey patch, uniform, laser-flat (but for curvature of the world) and covering hundreds of kilometers square. It is so wide that it reaches the horizon. Some mass conveyors, filled with pre-cleared arrivals, land directly, and the thunder and roar of their engines as they struggle to overcome the universal punishment of gravity stifles all thought and leaves ears ringing for days.
It is orderly. The tarmac is divided cleanly into thousands and thousands of segments, painted out in clear and reflective yellow lines, crosshatches and hazard markings. Here is where the grand troopships, repurposed, may settle down, away from debarking zones and the largest crowds. Here is where local cruisers, on quiet repulsorlifts, are allowed to make landfall. Here is where those disembarking are formed into queues and shepherded along. Here are the checkpoints, there are the medical facilities for screenings, over there are cafeteria.
Rail trains run from the edges of the grand embarkation plain to the city proper. Thousands flow along those arteries every hour.
The Primarch Guilliman has bent his mind to the task of building a world in a way the Imperium rarely, if ever, had. Immigration, naturalization - these were not the ways of the Great Crusade. The Imperium did not need to settle new worlds, not when there were a million and more fallen from the purse of humanity waiting to be brought back into the fold.
Indeed, it was in the heady expansion of Ultramar, singular in the galaxy, that such concepts were able to be commonly entertained.
Guilliman remembers Calth and Saramanth and Sotha, the empire-that-is-not-an-empire-building. Yet for the similarities, glaring differences rear their heads and snarl. Within Ultramar, it was merely relocation. Imperial citizens to Imperial worlds.
So he attends this new practical with a gusto. That the refugees seeking safety at Eboracum must become Imperial citizens is a foregone conclusion. There is no argument able to be countenanced against it. To live on an Imperial world is to be Imperial. The Throne of Terra supersedes all. There is no question.
He must take humans from a million different cultures and a million different worlds with a million different histories, and he must make them Imperial. Normally, an Expeditionary Fleet only had to manage a single culture, a handful of worlds. Unified in their mien. Homogenous in their history. Standardized in their culture.
Guilliman studies reports daily, tabulated and processed and reflecting the constant ongoing naturalization of seventeen million human beings. At current rates, he expects by the close of the new month, for the population of Eboracum to triple.
He is balancing knives on each finger - power-blades, in fact, humming and edgeless and poised to cut. Too many at once and the myriad cultures of the Republic will bury the Imperial truth under their weight. The soldiers and sailors of the 4711th were the minority already, the moment Pirve became Eboracum. Now they are a vanishingly tiny fraction of the population.
Yet, too few, and Eboracum will stagnate and his goals, his plans, will gather dust.
Assignments into the new-built blocks of Eboracum Civitas are carefully randomized. Groups from the same planets are shattered apart, placed among neighbors calculated to be as alien and different as possible. Instructive Courses are diverse, ensuring that the central touchstone of these new neighbors is that of the Imperium.
A man from Comkin sits beside a woman from Irrasos. They speak Basic, and that is the extent of their familiarity. His customs are stiffy and strange. Her accent is harsh and hard to follow. Together they learn of their heritage and a world called Terra, they learn of the righteous conquest of a galaxy far, far away. They learn of the destiny of Mankind, taught by the Emperor, who is above all. They learn words and grammar and phrases in Low Gothic, the tongue strange but in some ways nostalgic.
When they share lunch together - provided, of course, as part of the Instructive Course curriculum, free of charge - there is little to speak about but the content of their morning lessons. When they depart in the afternoon to assigned labor, he goes to the waving green fields beyond Eboracum Civitas, where he guides a strange harvester, driven by manual hand and plastek tablets slotted with crystal, which each may run a single task. She goes to the civic offices and works to assign new positions to new arrivals.
And in the morning, when they share breakfast - simple and filling, provided, again, free of charge, but with allowances to purchase luxuries of fruit and sweetened bread with the new Imperial scrip they earn - what else might they speak of, but the work they do now, on this world?
And in time, when familiarity becomes comraderie becomes friendship becomes courtship, when the two from far-flung and disparate worlds lie together in a small, but clean and orderly apartment, assigned to them, with food on the table and the winking stars of mighty, mighty battleships far above, who might they thank for the chance to meet one another, to relieve them of the fear and stress and uncertainty of long weeks in crowded tramp haulers, sent hither and thither at the whim of the far distant and impersonal Senate on never-before-seen Coruscant?
The Imperium, of course.
This Guilliman judges as a microcosm of his intention. To build a culture anew, one demands particular factors. The fuel of culture is the citizen. The spark is purpose. The bellows that stoke the fire to new and searing heights, that illuminate the dark around, that toss back the shadows and brings forth the light - the bellows is the work, the labor, the shared and unified act, together, in birthing this dream into being.
His Father made this so on Terra. He took the warlords and mutants and rebels, he took the barbarians and the rad-waste bandits, he took the techno-feudal clans and he pointed them at the stars and he whispered the words that became the spark and he breathed the air that was the dream of the Crusade and in two centuries Mankind reclaimed their empire.
Roboute Guilliman is, as ever, his Father's son.
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It speaks to the sheer amount of beings passing through that the Imperial Exile clerk at the checkpoint barely gives her a second glance. There was always a possibility of discovery at this crucial point, which she argued was worth it to her partner, but it seemed their caution was misplaced.
"Ms. Xulum and Mr. Ken, out of Belderone." Clearly bored, clearly disinterested, the clerk, young enough to still be bare-faced, scratched at his nose and looked over his datapad. "Partners?"
Next to her, Ken squeezed her hand, tactile sensors funneling the sensation.
"Recently, yes."
The air stank of ozone and heated metal, filled with the ceaseless susurrus of ten thousand voices. The sun beat down from above, reflecting from the hard tarmac, rising heat shimmers and pounding sweat from brows. A blessed wind kept up, hot from thrusters and idling engines, but enough to cut the edge of the chewy animal reek of too many bodies cramped into too little space for too much time. Leaving the battered old YT freighter behind and stepping out into the din felt like escaping hell into heaven. A week pressed cheek-to-jowl was enough to put anyone's teeth on edge, let alone someone with a perfect kinesthetic sense of every micron of their body.
"Ms. Xulum, you were pre-certified as a mechanical engineer. Specializing in…" he squinted at the unfamiliar words and she felt his abstract confusion. Lack of understanding, coupled with a lack of desire to care. "...repulsorlifts. Alright. Mr. Ken, you were pre-certified as a data analyst."
"That's right," she said for the both of them, squeezing Ken's hand back with carefully measured pressure. Just right to look like two newlyweds. "We worked at the same company. It's how we met."
"Right. Congratulations." The clerk tugged out the datawafer they'd been assigned, handing it back. She let Ken take it and tuck it into the breast pocket of his jumpsuit. Like her, he wore a stained, slightly too-small tan jumpsuit, salt-ringed at the underarm, likely on the noticeable end of the spectrum of aromatic. No different from the throngs around them, lined up in muttering, shifting and seemingly infinite lines.
"Everything checks out. Step through, please." The clerk motioned toward a chunky archway, ribbed with thick cables and wire-wrapped lights. The moment of truth - she reached out to the clerk's mind, feeling his boredom, his daydreaming about dinner and the end of his shift, his thoughts of his girlfriend. She stepped through. Ken followed.
No alerts, no sirens, nothing. The clerk nodded absently, tapping at his datapad.
"No contraband. Do you have any droids to report in your baggage? Any logic processor above, uh-" his voice went flat as he read off the words. "'Vn-2 equivalent' must be reported. If you signified that you aren't in the possession of any on your intake forms and you are later found to be in possession of a logic processor of illegal capacity, you will face consequences of reconstructive labor and reduction of ration allotments. If you are found to possess logic processors of illegal capacity with the intent to distribute, you may face capital charges." The clerk sighed, glancing over toward a knot of red-robed figures, some meters away. They stood spindly and tall on telescopic legs, leaning rifles two meters in length against their shoulders. Green-glass lenses swept the crowd over grilled faceplates.
She could see the barest hints of wasted and pale flesh around the edges of their facial machinery.
"If you signified that you aren't in possession of proscribed material but you suddenly remember that you are after this point, until you arrive in Eboracum Civitas, you can inform any uniformed member of the Ministorum Imigratus without penalty."
The clerk, whose name was stenciled on his uniform in characters she'd never seen, and who had never offered a name, held out two wristbands, bright blue.
"Make sure to wear these. Welcome to Eboracum and the Imperium of Man. Follow the markings on the tarmac. Next!"
And just like that, they were through.
Keeping her fingers entwined in Ken's, if for no other reason than to prevent being separated in the thronging crowd, all now marked by the same blue wristbands, she kept her head on the swivel and eyes flicking everywhere.
Old GR-75s set alongside iconic YTs and chunky Action-series freighters, making a familiar foreground against the monolithic shapes of far larger craft on the horizon. Those were fundamentally shocking to look at and she found her attention constantly shifting back to them. None were on approach, the skies clear and blue aside from the nonstop descent and ascent of familiar transports, but those monsters still had to land in the first place. The nearest, like a wall of durasteel, she could measure as three kilometers in length. And just sitting on a planet. She couldn't decide if it was wasteful or impressive.
For all the constant traffic, she was grudgingly impressed by how orderly it all ran. Clear aurebesh markings directed them toward "INTAKE" and away from "PROCESSING", helpful markers pointing toward "REFRESHERS" and "MEDICAL". Uniformed locals patrolled along, wood-and-metal rifles slung over their shoulders, stopping now and then to cup a hand around an ear and then offer a pointed finger and directions.
It was a sight better than any SELCORE-managed facility she'd been to.
And Luxum, Iron Knight of the restored Jedi Order, had seen more than her share.
"Where to first?" her erstwhile partner asked, glancing to her, perpetual frown twisting otherwise handsome, if unremarkable features.
She chewed her lip, rubbery synthflesh worried between too-perfect teeth.
"Part of me says go straight to this 'Civitas', but I want to see whatever is going on over at 'Medical'."
Ken grimaced.
"I don't think they'd be that overt."
"They're blood supremacists. You really think they wouldn't weed out the undesirables before they could pollute their precious city?"
He looked away, but she felt his irritation and his turmoil. It was an old topic between them, since he'd sought out her assistance. When Luxum had heard news of Master Skywalker's newfound allies, she'd made sure to read the communique blasted out from the Jedi Headquarters. She made it a third of the way through before deleting it in disgust and hadn't given it a second thought.
Not until Ken knocked on her door and asked for advice. She was far better at blending in than he was.
A little bit of help from one Mirax Horn to spoof SELCORE records - relayed through Master Horn, who Ken had already met with - and here they were. In the nexu's den.
Perhaps it was absolute insanity to walk into the 'Imperium' riding the body of a humanoid synthdroid, but she didn't exactly have a choice. Nor was she going to give up this form. Never would she twine with a droid with a mind, not again. Not now that she couldn't ignore the consequences. Poor J-C941 would never be the same, even if he would love her until the end of time.
Besides, she scoffed, glancing back over her shoulder toward the checkpoint as a large family waited anxiously to be processed. These Imperial's own biases toward droids left them unable to imagine anything but things as clunky and obvious as a 'gonk.
"I just don't think it's the best idea to bring you anywhere near medical scanners. Given…ah. You know."
Luxum pursed her lips, finding it hard to argue with that. Though whatever scanner they'd passed through hadn't picked up on her entirely synthetic body, she couldn't just assume that things would stay that way. Better not to tempt fate. A true HRD - human replica droid - might pull it off with cloned flesh and bio-organics, but that was not her.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
"Fine, to the city then."
They joined the flow of humanity, sandwiched between a throng of young men, probably draft-dodgers from some Outer Rim world and a group of robed monks with shaven heads, all carrying, oddly, compact shovels along with rucksacks on their backs. She let the wash of conversations in and through, focusing on nothing, only filling her memory banks. She'd check it all out later, but for now, she wanted the Force to guide her.
She felt fear, she felt hunger. She felt anger - wrath, even - she felt aching depths of depression and gut-wrenching loss. She felt hope and curiosity, she felt relief and wonder and the slow-steadying of hearts that now learned how to beat sedately. She felt nothing untoward, at least from her fellow 'refugees', and instead reached toward those Imperials.
They were an interesting bag of sensation. Passing by an older woman, who Luxum noted bore scars across half her face, curling her lips and pinching half-shut an eye, she felt the woman's maternal good cheer as she spoke to a young boy who hugged his father's leg. She felt the woman's surety and bursting pride as she assured the boy that the bad aliens wouldn't find them here, spoken in halting and accented Basic. That the Primarch and his Astartes would protect them all. She watched the woman reach into a pouch on her uniform and produce a foil-wrapped treat, passing it to the boy who smiled shyly, before shaking the hand of his father in a firm, sure grip.
There an Imperial swallowed irritation at yet another provincial unable to follow instructions. Sure, sure, ask me what to do, it's not like you were told, it's not like it was clear and obvious. Follow the markings on the ground, whatever that heathen language said. Just do as you're told and everything is simple. Why can't people do as they're told?
Here another Imperial, bored out of his skull, repeated the same instructions on how to reach the trains as he had for the past five hours. His thoughts were elsewhere, lingering on cool sheets and a ration of amasec waiting for him.
Then Luxum reached for the minds behind the metal masks, the beings wrapped in red robes who stood in knots scattered across the tarmac and she nearly tripped over her own feet. Ken caught her by the arm, subtle flex of telekinesis keeping her upright and not dragging him down with her from the mass of her body.
If she had to imagine the mind of a vong, it would be like those in red. Low levels of acid pain ate at the edges of their awareness, constantly. Permanently. A baseline of raw, nerve-tingling, nail-bed prodding aching that wrapped their cognition so tightly and so pervasively she truly did not think them aware of it. Emotions were muted and almost nonexistent, feeling almost hollow in the Force. What there was was inflexible purpose, pride and laser-bright focus. They were here to serve a great and just role, one sacred, one precious, and their lambent green eye-lenses swept the crowds, watching in thermal and ultraviolet and infrared as they enacted that task.
What task?
She prodded a mind, gentle, a caress.
What task?
ORDER PRIMARY: INTERDICTION OF ABOMINABLE INTELLIGENCE.
If she could have bled, her nose would drip crimson. Binary shouted into her skull, the Force almost trembling under the silent, mental shout from the…the creature.
Again, Ken braced her, wrapping fingers around her bare upper bicep, hard enough to dimple her dark-complected synthflesh.
"Lux- Xulum, not now. Don't make a scene, alright? We don't need to be hauled off for a checkup because they think you passed out-"
She ignored him.
And where do you take the abominable intelligences?
The man-creature told her, in another mental scream of binary.
Coordinates.
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Luxum was a beautiful woman. Ken had told her so, not in any way flirting, but as a sort of matter-of-fact statement, more touching on how she might stand out among the more destitute and desperate of the galaxy. It wasn't her fault that most synthdroids were for more…basic uses, after all. Her skin was dark, shining as if burnished, darker than natives of Haruun Kal. Her hair, doll-like and the least realistic looking, seemed more a wig than anything else, perched atop her head. Synthskin was one thing, but it was still hard to mimic living follicles. Her eyes caught attention the most, leading to her not infrequently opting for contact lenses when trying to avoid attention - at least, more attention than this body would draw. They were as blue as her lightsaber, bright and clear and a startling contrast to her skin.
Her eyes, she often thought, were the feature she adored the most in this body. Eyes were the windows to the soul, it was said. A common quote from dozens of worlds, and dozens of species. Eyes were how a being interacted with the world.
Well, not every being. Some used electromagnetic senses, some used soundwaves. Others sensed gravitational distortions. But most looked out through eyes and beheld creation. Though the wavelengths might differ, though some saw into ultraviolet and others below the spectrum of color, eyes told stories. Eyes held emotion, they held the feelings of the being behind them.
If there was one thing Luxum regretted about her birth, it was that she never had eyes. She wondered what it would be like to look at her own core, her own crystal, with eyes. With living eyes. To see the light that played across the crystalline lattice of her being, of her 'brain', with every thought and feeling.
Her eyes, blue as the sky, flicked back and forth. She'd had to train herself to blink, when she first implanted herself into this new chassis. Before, when she and J-C941 had been one, she saw the world through the permanence of the Juggernaut chassis' ocular sensors. In this body, she had to blink - beings with eyes blinked and it unnerved them if someone didn't. So she learned to blink, rather than set up a subroutine in the body to automate it.
Luxum did not blink. Her bright blue eyes roved back and forth and she did not blink, because to blink was to, even for a nanosecond, look away.
Emotions came from the eyes too. It was an old trick for gamblers - watch the eyes. The mouth lies in smiles and frowns and smirks and licked lips. Hands trick with fidgets and twitches and scratches at wrists. But the eyes - emotions live in the eyes. That's where you see the bitter disappointment in a shifter gone wrong, a bad hand drawn. That's where you see the buried and sweet joy in a straight sabacc, waiting to be slapped down.
Eyes wept. Eyes welled with tears of happiness or sadness, frustration or anger. It didn't matter the species - even Mon Calamari, Quarren, adapted to live in water, still could shed tears.
Luxum's body could not. She had the shape of tearducts, at the corner of her eye, where the nasolacrimal duct should empty. She had eyelashes too, but her eyes were transparisteel and circuitry and they needed no lubrication. It was cosmetic, to look more alive, to look more real, to make sure the buyer did not fall into the uncanniest of valleys at the most inopportune of times.
Her bright blue eyes, the color of her lightsaber, could not weep.
Her eyes moved but her face did not. It was a mask, as false as the synthskin and fine-tuned musculature beneath. Her mouth was dry, because she did not and would never eat. Her heart did not beat, because she did not have a heart. She had lived a hundred years - a thousand - or more.
She had lived only a short time with her companions. Companions, she called them. Hosts, others call them, others partners, or friends. She lived in the minds and souls of a dozen droids and more, selflessly offered to allow her access to the galaxy. She always asked permission first. The moment of melding was precious and each time it was unique. The flood of memories from her companion, the unique tenor of their mind - what she called their soul, reaching out to greet her. A binary handshake, a confirmation, a welcome-how-do-you-do. She shared their all in a microsecond. They offered it without a shadow of doubt or a moment of hesitation or an ounce of arrogance. They welcomed her in and let her be in their body and live in their lives.
She felt more than a few companions die and she rode down with them into the dark. She was the last of them, removed from the chassis and placed into a new, bonded again, but she held their memories inside her, forever. She held their last moments.
What could any organic understand of droids, until they had died with them?
That pain, all of it, she carried inside, every day. The Force soothed it, gave it reason, but it never lingered. Luxum was Shard, which meant that memory never faded. She heard friends talk about how it got better, how memories would change and the bitter became bittersweet, but she never understood it.
Luxum's life was always in the now.
The now that her eyes took in.
That sense of now, the clarity of memory she carried, could be startling. Even as long-lived as she was - though she did not feel such, but that was how organics saw her - she had never felt quite this way before.
She investigated the feeling. Almost clinically, distantly, turning it over in ephemeral hands like a puzzle-box. Trying to determine how to get in, to define it, to crack the case and prize out the nugget within. She thought she knew what betrayal felt like. It was a stringing ripple, starting somewhere inside. It swelled and blossomed and washed away anger, it made her run cold.
She felt betrayal when her safehouse's location was leaked by those she thought friends. She fled Stormtroopers and too many friends didn't make it.
She tasted backstabbing when she served with Master Skywalker's Jedi through the clashes of the Reborn Empire and the Second Imperium. When friends turned their backs and allies chased power.
And in the past year, she had felt the most bitter sting of faithlessness when she watched world after world bend the knee to the invader. She'd never imagined her life would be saving shipfuls of droids from bonfires and feverish outbreaks of orgiastic violence. Droids that served their masters unflinchingly and faultlessly from the moments they rolled out of factory lines. All to buy a moment more time before the vong came calling. All to placate monsters who cut their flesh to blood-drenched superstition and flung living beings into stars.
Luxum had seen this over and over. She fought the Red Knights of Life on Osarion with her mother and Master. She clashed with Denizens of the Galaxy, she hunted down terrorists sworn to the Peace Brigade and broke open warehouses full of skittish protocol droids and terrorized astromechs.
She thought she was inured to the feeling.
Her eyes, her bright blue eyes, the color of her lightsaber, saw in the visual spectrum and beyond. Thermal blooms of superheated metal painted broad strokes on the canvas. Scorched and blackened char formed the base. Highlights of color - shining silver of ripped metal, markings of arterial red, deep blue, forest green - provided interest.
She had seen burnpits before. It shouldn't have been anything new.
Two of the spindly machine-men approached the pit from the far side, hauling a supine protocol droid. Its shell was silver, catching the sunlight. An ugly restraining bolt sat in the center of its chest. Together they heaved it in, sending it down to crash atop a pile of mutilated, shattered husks. One of the machine men lowered his long, long rifle. A single shot rang out, a crack of electricity and she tasted ozone and the head of the protocol droid vanished in a clatter of debris.
She had seen this all before, too many times to count, though she remembered every single one.
She had never seen this with the sanction of the Jedi.
Master Skywalker spoke highly of the Imperium. Master Skywalker willingly met with their leader. Master Skywalker entrusted the safety and life of his nephew to the Imperium. Master Skywalker vouched for them before the Senate.
"Luxum," Ken whispered, next to her, his use of her name startling her out of her reverie. "We gotta go." He had a hand on her shoulder and for a moment the touch, relayed through dense tactile-underweave, made her want to scream. Made her want to draw her 'saber and cleave his hand from his wrist. Part of her recognized she was breaking down and part of her did not care. Understanding an urge did not take away its power and for a moment she saw herself cutting down the fool trying to pull her away from this - not injustice, that was too simple, too clean - this infamy and leaping across the pit to rend heads from bodies before turning outward.
She would find each one of the red-robed machine-men and she would cut them down and silence their mockery of life.
The hand on her shoulder jostled her again and she felt Ken's urgency and-
She bit down on her fury, she banked the fires and breathed out. False lungs gushed out unnecessary air through hollow mouth and the sensation, mimic though it was, centered her on her body.
It wasn't his fault. He was Ken - just Ken, never gave her a surname. Perhaps he had one and abandoned it, or just never had one at all - no one seemed to know. He came and went from the Praxeum and he and Master Skywalker had a history never spoken of. Luxum tore her eyes from the pit and looked up at the man, at his face, at the haunted echo of her own feelings deep within his grey eyes. She felt little of his emotions through the Force, but what leaked out - maybe he'd left his surname behind, it suggested. Maybe she wasn't the only one with a past that rang through her every day.
"We need to go," he said again and this time she let him guide her. Let him, because in this body, with the Force, she could rip a hovertank apart with her bare hands. She let him guide her back, ignoring the markings in aurebesh that pointed toward the pit, the markings that read 'DISPOSAL'.
The Imperium and the New Republic signed their treaty a month ago on Coruscant. SELCORE began sending refugees this way only days later. A month ago. Luxum saw the crowds, filling the tarmac beyond sight. She knew the numbers, from Mirax.
Master Skywalker sanctioned this. He had to know. How could he not?
Ken was talking, muttering, not quite to her but not quite not, either.
"This can't stand," he said over and over. Then something about microchips.
They rejoined the main thoroughfares and Luxum moved by rote. Her feet fell one in front of the next and she and Ken filtered through queues and lines. Ken was passed bottles of water by a smiling Imperial and Luxum nearly crushed the woman's throat then and there. They were handed stamped flimsy flyers that extolled the 'Civitas' in bright phrases and full-color photographs. They passed by preachers standing at podiums who gestured and pontificated and exhorted everyone nearby to listen to the Imperial Truth.
They boarded a train and sat on thin cushioned seats, shoulder to shoulder. The landing tarmac fell away behind them as it accelerated, rumbling and jostling and Luxum looked at the empty optics of J-C941 across from her, the weighty Juggernaut carefully folded into the seat opposite, judging her silently. Silent as the droid always was, after they split, silent but never beyond her shadow. Loyal till death.
Till a death the Imperium would celebrate. She blinked, false lids over false eyes and J-C941 was gone and the thin-faced young man opposite her glanced away suddenly, cheeks flushing.
The train ran past endless fields of tall, waving grain attended to by swept-wing rolling harvesters, gnashing blades threshing and cleaving. It sped past orderly roads, already paved, with vacant lots sitting empty but for intention. It hissed to a halt in a massive station, airy, with vaulted ceilings, marked all over with twin-headed avioids and repeated ornate U emblems.
The train emptied as orderly as it filled, each car unlocked and opened by a uniformed footman, so that there was no great crush. Luxum rose and followed Ken as they stepped down metal-grate stairs to hop a short distance to smooth duracrete.
Their car had been the last to empty, she noticed. She hadn't been paying attention.
Uniformed Exiles - a lot of uniformed Exiles - were corralling the rest of the crowds away from their car. She felt it then, just as Ken did, as he reacted just as she did. She pulled the Force to herself as three enormous figures emerged from the crowd, unerringly walking toward Luxum and Ken and the three dozen other passengers from their car.
Imperial Astartes, she knew, after Ken made her read the rest of the communique. The same beings that slaughtered Yuuzhan Vong and had apparently saved the life of Mei Taral. She felt their presence, the space they occupied in the world. She felt the blade-sharp clarity of their thoughts. She felt their focused attention, the target-lock of a proton torpedo.
"Disperse the rest," the lead Astartes ordered. The other two raised, incredibly, blasters. "You have falsified records and entered Eboracum Civitas illegally. Surrender, and no harm will come to either of you."
Luxum saw the burn pits. Ken did too.
The two Jedi exchanged a look. Neither had a lightsaber - too risky to carry, too obvious.
But they had the Force, and around them it sang.
"I repeat: you will not be harmed. You will be detained until you can be discharged to Republican custody. Stand down, in the name of Terra and the Primarch. I will not ask again."
Wide-eyed faces watched, a theatre audience, captive, held back in a semicircle by stern Imperials with stern faces and shouldered rifles. A crowd of humanity, rapt and silent. But Luxum saw the burnpits and knew their words as lies.
"They won't take you," Ken murmured.
"Or you," she affirmed. The lead Astartes, the one who had spoken, shifted and she saw what he held in one hand, tiny and dwarfed by his fist. A restraining bolt.
Luxum reached out a hand, grabbed the Force by the throat, and everything went to hell.