And here
WE
Chapter 13: Asphyxiation
She was right; he did feel more like himself the next day. Especially since she was gracious enough to let him sleep in. He shouldn’t have; he should have been at his post at the same time as always, but she’d risen without waking him, and disabled the alarm on his chrono. He couldn’t say she didn’t take care of her crew. When he’d been her age, he would have been just fine on three hours of sleep, but now he was in his thirties, he appreciated it.
They returned to Vaiken to await further instruction from the Emperor’s Hand, and for him to send a transmission. While there, both canvassing the military personnel present and looking at comments on holonet articles reporting on Moff Broysc’s disappearance, he soon had confirmation that he had done the right thing for the good of the Empire. And that meant the right thing for his own peace of mind, even if he’d lost his precious self-control in doing so.
He reported it to Akuliina. “I’ve been fielding reports from across the Empire. Among the armed forces, there is universal relief that Moff Broysc is no more.”
“They should have acted instead of waiting passively for someone to take care of it,” she said scathingly. “It sickens me.”
“I should have acted sooner, myself. I am as guilty as the rest of them.”
The word struck him in the heart. Time was running out for one of them, and if things went as he thought they would, it was for her. He’d resolved his conflict with his nemesis… which meant there was nothing more to interfere with the conflict between his mind and heart.
She glanced at him, and luckily, misinterpreted whatever she sensed from him. “Come now, there wasn’t much you could do on Balmorra, was there? Not without risking more court-martials.”
“No… no, my lady.” He swallowed the feeling. “Is that a transmission from the Emperor’s Hand?” How convenient.
She went to the main hold to take the call. “Good morning. I have completed my mission on Voss.”
“Yes. We are once again aware of the Voice. Preparations are being made to secure a new host, but the rituals take time. You have done well, Wrath. The Emperor is pleased.”
“But time never pauses,” said Servant Two mystically.
“Events are progressing faster. With the help of Armageddon Battalion, Darth Vowrawn has gained a foothold in the battle for Corellia. Everything now hinges on Vowrawn’s survival. Baras needs him dead to be named the Voice of the Emperor. Assassins have been sent. Their missions must end in failure. We will learn more and brief you when you arrive on Corellia.”
“I understand.” The transmission ended.
He returned to the cockpit; she followed. “Make course for Corellia.”
He took a deep breath. This was it. “My lady, I’m afraid we cannot go to Corellia at this time. The Empire has enacted a martial law blockade of the entire system.”
Her face darkened. “I do not like being told no, Captain.”
Don’t I know it. “Believe me, I hate saying no, my lady. You see, the Imperial fleet has been equipped with special transponder signal emitters. Any ship without this emitter sticks out like a sore thumb.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Do I look like that bothers me, Captain? They will know who it is they are dealing with soon enough.”
“We’d be blown to pieces the instant we exited hyperspace, my lady. But I believe I have a solution to this.”
She smiled. “That’s what I love about you, Quinn. You always have an answer.”
He wasn’t sure what to say to that. “I intercepted a transmission granting Corellian access clearance to a class-A starship not far from here. We can board that vessel and take their signal emitter. By the time the fleet at Corellia realizes we’re not a destroyer, we should be on the ground.”
She folded her arms and tapped her foot. “If they’re operating under Darth Baras – as I assume they are, going to Corellia – they won’t be willing to part with it easily. How many of our own side will I be forced to kill? I’d like to keep Imperial casualties to a minimum.”
“I have a suggestion for that as well. As you know, my lord, I am familiar with all types of Imperial craft. I could accompany you on board and lead you directly to the transponder station, hopefully before security realizes what we are about.”
Her eyes gleamed as she smiled. “Sounds like a plan. Let’s go, Captain.”
They docked without incident, under the ‘guise’ of delivering cargo. While the Pierce and the ship’s droid masqueraded as deliverymen, he and Akuliina slipped out of another access hatch and ventured into the destroyer. They walked quickly, as if they were meant to be there, and none questioned them.
He led her to a large, empty circular chamber and his steps grew heavy. What am I doing?
She glanced around, and back at the thick durasteel blast door that had closed on them, too thick for her to cut through easily. “I suppose this is one of Baras’s traps as well. Are you ready to-” She glanced at him, standing still and cold, hands clasped behind him in the at ease stance, and she grew very still herself.
He forced himself to speak through numb lips. “My lord. I regret that our paths must diverge here.”
She raised an eyebrow, took one last chance to tease him. One last chance for him to play it off as a joke, though he could already feel her anger. “Have you found someone else? If you say ‘it’s not you, it’s me’, I won’t be responsible for my actions.”
He could have laughed despairingly if he didn’t want to cry, and buried both emotions under a thick layer of ice. “It’s not me or you. It’s Darth Baras. I owe him more than you could imagine. This entire scenario is a ruse. There’s no martial law. There’s no special signal emitter.” He paused, turning to face her, though he almost couldn’t bear it. “Baras is my true master. He had me lure you here to have you killed. Out of respect, I wanted to be here to witness your fate.”
“Respect…?” she breathed, trembling fingers extending and curling into claws. “Respect!? You’ve lied to me! You – traitor!”
It hurt. And it was true. It hurt because it was true. “I act today with a heavy heart. But without Baras, I’d have no career.”
“Your career? What about your life? Baras tried to kill you, too! I’ve saved your life! You’ve saved my life!”
“Baras saved my life! And-” He couldn’t tell her that Baras would have killed him if he didn’t do this now.
“Baras is- Baras is a traitor to the Empire, and you know it!” she yelled. “And you, you’re a coward, a worthless sycophant! Deceitful hypocrite! Faithless, mindless bastard!”
“And what are you?” he shouted back. “An arrogant spoiled little girl bringing chaos wherever she goes? You have no control over yourself, you never listen, you expect every whim to be made law-”
“You know nothing! Nothing!” She shrieked wordlessly, and he staggered, but he managed to jam his thumb on the button that would call in his weapon.
The blast doors ahead of her ground open to reveal two massive wardroids. The War Trust on Taris had shown him that one wasn’t enough. “These war droids have been programmed specifically to combat you. I’ve calculated a near zero percent chance of their failure.” That was what his transmission on Vaiken had been, the program for these droids. After weeks of recording and observing, it was a piece of analytical art. He’d put off delivering it as long as he could, from fear… unfortunately, that had only improved it in the end.
“You idiot!” she screamed, and he felt it again. “You think so little of me!? I’ll kill you! I hate you! I hate you!!”
“I don’t hate you,” he said coldly, and raised his pistol. She is your enemy. Kill her, and you live. Fail, and you die. At her hands, or Baras’s hands. “I might even have loved you. But this is what I must do.”
She screamed and charged him, boots pounding on the grating. His shots should have struck her in the eye, in the leg, somewhere. But she deflected them all. He’d expected her to block most of them, but all of them? He was a marksman. Impossible!
“I hate you!!” She launched herself at him, and though he sidestepped, somehow she knew exactly where he was going to be. Her weight landed squarely in the middle of his chest, her legs locking around his neck, throwing him heavily to the floor. She stabbed his pistol and it exploded in his hand, burning through the glove, then jumped away again, higher than a normal human could ever hope to reach. As she darted away, the wardroids shot at her, lasers, grenades, rockets – nothing had been spared. But she seemed to float ahead of it all. Fast. Too fast. Faster than she’s ever been.
He snatched his datapad up again, tapped over to the droid program. Come on, come on. Just one hit and her speed would be reduced by approximately 12%. The next one would reduce her speed by 16%. Then they would have her, and she would… die.
Rage was exploding in her like never before, murderous, inextinguishable rage and pain and heartbreak. How dare he!? To side with her most hated enemy, after they were all betrayed together. How could anything give him loyalty to Baras, who was loyal to no one?
She wouldn’t kill him yet. After she defeated these droids, she would do it slowly, so he could feel every last drop of the pain he was putting her through. But first she needed to focus with all her strength. Her heartbeat shook her, pulsing behind her eyes, in her throat, in her fingertips. The Dark Side was fully at her command, lending her wings – and talons.
Quinn had been clever. Rockets, grenades, not things she could easily fight against, not without stopping in her mad kiting flight around the chamber. She could push them back with the Force… if she managed to ground herself and not get hit by the fifty other things aimed at her. But he wasn’t clever enough, or he wouldn’t have given her this room to move in. Did he actually want to kill her, or just piss her off so she’d kill him?
‘Programmed specifically to combat you‘, he’d said. So they were designed to work well against her speed, and they’d certainly be able to outlast her in endurance. But moving more slowly was out of the question. She had to move faster. Faster than fast. There was no thinking anymore, just bloodthirsty instinct and reflex. She ran, and deflected, with pure emotion, with no strategy or plan, just the wind in her hair and the fire in her veins. Force! Obey me!
Danger! screamed her senses, and she whirled, batting aside a barrage of laser bolts, kicking away a rocket before it could explode. She needed to close with these wardroids to do any damage to them. She gritted her teeth with a growl and charged, flinging herself through the air towards the closest one. Kill it kill it kill it–
Danger! A giant metal claw reached out to smack her aside; she slashed at it – and a rocket exploded against her back. She slammed into the floor and bounced, rolling, screaming. It hadn’t broken her armour, not yet, but she couldn’t take another hit like that. She could hear the droid’s servos whining above her, angling its blasters, preparing to step on her-
NO! She flipped up, ignoring the protest in her back, her lightsabers carving scarlet tracks over the droid’s metal chassis. Something exploded and she jumped away. Caught sight of Quinn messing with his datapad, a look of concentration on his face. He backed away as she came at him again, then throwing himself backwards as a rocket followed her. She didn’t care, just yanked the datapad away from him and slashed it into quarters, then turned to run again as another volley of lasers came at her.
The one she’d slashed was limping. She shoved it with the Force, but it didn’t fall over. The other one was bearing down on her, firing grenades that she struggled to throw back instead of instinctively deflecting them with her sabers. Any that she managed to get close to it just bounced off its armour. She’d have to get more personal with it, and took another running leap forward. It hadn’t worked on the other droid, but now…
She landed on the undamaged droid and as it struggled to throw her off, she yanked the other one’s rocket arm towards them with the Force, and it fired.
She flipped backwards, dizzyingly high, as the droid beneath her exploded in a cloud of flame.
The other one was short work after that.
Quinn stumbled back in shock as she exploded first one droid, then the other. “Impossible- The analysis-” Every time she’d done a characteristic move, and the droids had reacted to it, she wasn’t there anymore, as if she could see it coming. She could see it coming. She’s a Sith. Emperor’s bones–
The droids gone, she turned on him with another horrible scream of rage and despair, flinging him through the air until he slammed against the wall of the chamber with a cry. She came after him like a thunderbolt, an iron grip locked around his neck, plastered helplessly against the wall. She raised both sabers over her head, ready to slash and tear. He didn’t struggle, only trying futilely to breathe as he felt his throat constricting implacably. Black spots were appearing before his eyes.
Kzzzzsshhhh! Two glowing rents appeared in the wall on either side of him, and she lowered her sabers, breathing hard with emotion. She released the grip on his throat as well, and he fell at her feet, gasping desperately for air, trembling with terror as he massaged his throat. She kicked him viciously, though her lightsabers fell silent. “Get up.”
He did, and she punched him with a shout so that he fell down again. How much would she torture him before she killed him? It was her right, as a betrayed Sith, and he didn’t expect any mercy.
She didn’t strike him again. “You idiotic fool! You thought a pair of droids could defeat me? You’re stupider than any foe I’ve fought yet, when you ought to know me best! Do you even know what the Force is?”
Apparently he did not. “N-no. My lord.”
“Droids could never defeat me because they can’t feel the Force. They could never out-fight me. You did this all wrong. Out of ‘respect’? You Force-damned fool. I hate you. I hate you with every fibre of my being.” The snarl on her face told him she wasn’t lying. “But you’re too useful to kill. Get back to the ship and prep her for departure. I’ll be along shortly.”
She… was letting him live? For now, at least? He climbed to his feet again. “Will you… will you tell the others?”
She gave a short, mirthless laugh. “Even if I said nothing, they’ll know something happened. No, not yet. But I will. They should know. Now get out.”
“I understand. I swear it, if you let me stay, I’ll serve you faithfully for-”
“Get OUT!” she shrieked at him, and he was shocked to see tears in her eyes. But she’d lit her lightsabers again and he stumbled backwards in his haste to get away from her. Not that distance helped.
Vette was hanging around at the bottom of the Fury’s ramp in her borrowed Imperial uniform disguise. When she saw him, her eyes widened in horror, at his disheveled appearance, the bruises, the disturbed shock in his demeanour that no amount of ice could cover up. “Wh-what happened? Where is she?” She glared at him suddenly. “You didn’t leave her behind, did you?”
“No… no. She’s fine… physically. She’ll… be back soon.”
“What happened?”
“That’s not for me to tell,” he said, and made swiftly for the cockpit.
She was still screaming, even though her throat was raw, slashing the remnants of the wardroids to smaller and smaller pieces. She brought both arms over her head and threw them down again, blasting the metal shards to the far reaches of the room with an agonized howl.
And then she fell to her knees. Her fists, raised to attack again, slowly lowered and covered her face as she dropped her lightsabers, and she began to cry, to weep, to sob, as she’d never cried in her life before.
Quinn was supposed to be different. He had been different. But now he was just like the rest of them. She’d never had a lover who hadn’t betrayed her. Except the first one, and he was a one-night stand who ended up dead the next day. Every one of them had used her, tried to kill her, left her. She’d killed most of them. But Quinn was supposed to be different. She was never indulging in that emotion again.
Then why had she spared him?
She felt the soft tremour of footsteps through the grating, rapidly approaching, and then felt slim arms wrapping around her. “If I hadn’t sensed that was you, Vette, you would be dead right now.”
“I know. I’m sorry, Lina. What happened?”
She sobbed a bitter laugh. “What didn’t happen? Nothing happened. This was all a waste of time. There was nothing for us here in the first place.”
“Oookay… Did you guys break up?”
“Yes. …I don’t know.” More hot tears ran down her face. “It doesn’t matter. This is good. I was becoming too weak and soft. Now I can focus on what is really important.”
“No, you’re still Death Destroyer of Worlds and all, but it’s okay to be in love, too, right? I heard you and Jaesa talking about it once…”
She snorted. “No. Yes, Sith are allowed to love more than the apathetic Jedi, but do you think Darth Malgus worries about his wife? Even has a wife? Do you think Darth Ravage concerns himself with his heart when there’s an Empire to run? Love is an indulgence that interferes with power. No. It’s time to excise this flaw from my life. I am strong; I will be stronger. I don’t need anyone, only obedient subordinates. Alone, I will be truly undefeatable.”
“Yeah, you are,” Vette said, comforting without really believing it. Akuliina could tell. But she meant well. “But that sounds so lonely. I’ll be with you, okay?” She squeezed Akuliina.
“He was the last person I expected to betray me,” she murmured. “I would sooner have thought you would; Jaesa or Pierce much sooner. Not him. Not him.” She felt her face crumple again and she turned to put her arms around Vette and cling to her for comfort; inexcusably weak, horrifyingly weak, after everything she’d just said. But everything just wouldn’t stop hurting…
Vette barged into the cockpit. “What did you do!?”
“It’s not for me to say,” he said numbly, staring out the viewport without seeing it.
He heard the slide of metal on leather and glanced over to see Vette pointing her own pistol at him. “She cried! She never cries! It’s- it’s just so wrong! What did you do!?”
“She… cried…?” Emperor doom him.
“Yes! You’re a terrible person, you know that?”
“I know,” he said softly.
Still pouting ferociously, Vette sheathed her blaster again. “Well, Captain, she says to go to Corellia now ’cause we’ve wasted enough time. Also don’t bother her until we arrive.”
“I’ll never bother her again.”
He slept in the cockpit that night rather than return to the crew quarters. At some point, he woke to see brown eyes staring balefully at him out of the darkness. “I know what you did. And if you ever do anything like it again, I’m not waiting for her permission to kill you.”
Jaesa left, and he didn’t sleep anymore that night.
Chapter 14: The Wrath of the Wrath
This whole fic was worth it just for this chapter. Rage, Lina, rage!