Cal’s hand, trembling for the first time since the war, recoiled from the droid’s chestplate. The order to silence it, to bury the past, fought with a new, unfamiliar impulse. He had followed thousands of commands. This one, born of static and broken circuits, felt different. It wasn't a command to destroy, but a map to a tomb he helped fill.
“...Compliance is mandatory… Vault Designation 7… Coronet Sector…”
The droid’s looping monotone grated on his nerves. He turned from it, his movements suddenly sharp, and strode toward a heavy, padlocked footlocker tucked under his workbench.
“Cal, you’re scaring me,” Zia said, her voice small. “What is all this? Who is Warlord Krayn?”
“He’s the reason you don’t go scavenging after dark,” Cal answered, his back to her. He keyed in a four-digit code, the clicks echoing in the tense silence. “He runs this whole sector. Takes what he wants.”
The lock hissed open. Cal lifted the heavy lid. Inside, nestled in yellowed foam padding, was not a set of mechanic’s tools, but a military-grade slicing kit and a battered, blocky datapad. He pulled the datapad out, its casing scarred from plasma burns he remembered earning on Felucia.
“So the bounty… it’s real?” Zia pressed, taking a hesitant step closer. “People are looking for this droid?”
“They’re looking for what it knows,” Cal corrected, plugging a thick data-tether into the datapad. He powered it on. The screen flickered to life, displaying a stark, text-based operating system he’d written himself. “Krayn wants to sell the contents. The Empire wants to incinerate them.”
“Contents? You mean the… Jedi stuff?” She said the word as if it were fragile.
Cal didn’t answer. He jacked the other end of the tether into a port under RA-7X’s jaw. The droid flinched, its head twitching violently.
“Unauthorized system access detected!” it squawked. “Securing primary directive. Purge… Purge… *Ksssshhhh*. Sanitize.”
“Shut up,” Cal growled, his fingers flying across the datapad’s archaic keyboard.
Lines of Imperial code, corrupted and fragmented, scrolled past on the screen. He was digging through the wreckage of the droid’s mind, trying to find the source of the broadcast loop. He didn’t want to erase it, not yet. He just needed to muzzle it.
Red warning text flooded the display. He bypassed a security firewall, then another. Zia watched over his shoulder, her eyes wide. Flashes of data were visible between the scrolling lines: convoy manifests, fuel requisitions, and strings of designations. *CTs. RCs. J G. Kenobi. J Secura. Redacted.* Names and numbers from a ghost army. His army.
“I’m in,” he muttered. He isolated the corrupted audio file. It was locked in a repeating playback command, triggered by his repair. Before he could sever the command, a new file blinked into existence on the screen. A proximity alert protocol.
“Threat assessment active,” RA-7X announced, its voice suddenly clear. “Local syndicate lifeforms approaching. Designation: Crimson Syndicate enforcers. Two individuals. Armed.”
Cal looked up from the datapad. “Zia. The door.”
Her head whipped toward the workshop entrance. “What?”
“The mag-lock switch. Under the bench. Hit it. Now.”
Zia scrambled for the switch just as a heavy fist hammered against the durasteel door. *BOOM. BOOM.* The metal shuddered in its frame.
“Hey! Mechanic!” a rough voice called from outside. “We know you’re in there. A little bird told us you bought some high-value junk off a scavenger whelp today.”
Zia’s face went pale. She flicked the switch, and a heavy *thump* confirmed the magnetic clamps had engaged.
“Got nothing for you,” Cal called out, his voice dangerously even. He unplugged the tether from the datapad and stood up, placing the datapad carefully on the bench. His movements were fluid, stripped of fifteen years of rust.
“Don’t make this difficult, old man!” the voice shouted. “Krayn’s put a finder’s fee on an Imperial droid. We’re just here to collect.”
A high-energy crackle sizzled through the air, and a glowing orange circle began to form on the center of the door as someone started cutting through with a plasma torch.
Cal looked at Zia, who was huddled by the workbench, her eyes locked on the melting metal. He pointed to the footlocker he’d just opened.
“Inside. There’s a pistol. A DC-17,” he said, his voice low and firm. “Do you know how to use one?”
Zia shook her head, her whole body trembling.
“Good,” Cal said. “Don’t touch it.”
He reached under the main workbench, his fingers finding the hidden latches of a false panel. He pulled it away, revealing a compartment. From it, he drew a single object: his own DC-17 sidearm, its metal finish worn smooth with time. It felt like a missing part of his own hand. He checked the power cell. Still at ninety percent. He hadn’t touched it in a decade, but a good soldier always maintained his gear.
The circle on the door was nearly complete.
“Zia,” he said, not taking his eyes off the door. “When that piece of metal falls, get behind the smelter and don’t make a sound. Understand?”
She just nodded, scrambling to take cover behind the hulking furnace in the corner.
With a final hiss and a groan, the circular section of the door fell inward with a deafening clang, kicking up a cloud of dust. Two figures, big and brutish in scuffed durasteer armor, stepped through the opening. The leader held the plasma torch, the other a nasty-looking vibro-ax.
“Now, see?” the first one said, a cruel grin on his face. “Was that so hard?”
He took another step into the workshop and saw Cal standing there, the blaster pistol held loosely at his side. The thug’s grin faltered. He hadn't expected resistance.
“Give us the droid, old-timer. And maybe we won’t have to tear your little shop apart.”
Cal raised the pistol, aiming it not at the man’s head, but at his knee. CT-7719 had always been precise.
“Final Warning,” Cal stated. The words were not his own; they were from a forgotten training manual, a reflex. His voice was no longer the gravelly rasp of a tired mechanic. It was the flat, authoritative tone of a clone sergeant.
The thug laughed, a short, ugly bark. He raised his torch. “You and what…”
Cal fired.
The bolt of blue energy struck the plasma torch. The device exploded in the man’s hand with a concussive *WHUMP*, sending him staggering back with a scream, clutching his mangled fingers.
His partner hesitated for a split second, his eyes wide with shock. It was all the time Ledger needed. Cal closed the distance in three long strides, moving with a speed that defied his age. He didn’t fire again. He slammed the heavy butt of the pistol into the side of the second thug’s helmet. The man crumpled to the floor without a sound.
The first enforcer was still groaning, trying to scramble back through the hole in the door. Cal grabbed him by the collar of his armor and hauled him to his feet.
“Go back to Krayn,” Cal said, his face inches from the man’s. “You tell him the droid is gone. You tell him there is nothing for him here.”
He shoved the man backward through the hole. The thug stumbled and fled into the blinding light of the twin suns.
Silence descended on the workshop, broken only by the hum of the lights and the faint, endless loop from the protocol droid.
“...Coronet Sector… Grid Reference: Nine-Zero-Four Epsilon…”
Cal stood over the unconscious body on the floor, the DC-17 still hot in his hand. The smell of ozone from the blaster fire was a perfume from another lifetime. His heart was hammering in his chest, not with fear, but with a grim, familiar rhythm he thought he had forgotten.
Slowly, Zia peeked out from behind the smelter. She stared at the hole in the door, at the man on the ground, and finally at Cal. She wasn't looking at a simple mechanic anymore. She was looking at a soldier.
“They’ll be back,” she whispered.
“Yes,” Cal said, lowering the pistol. He looked at the droid, then at the datapad on his bench, its screen still displaying the coordinates. “With more men.”
The choice was gone. Krayn knew. The Empire was already searching. Staying here was a death sentence. The quiet life Cal had built for himself had just been burned away, leaving a smoking hole where the door used to be. All that was left was the mission.
He looked at Zia, whose fear was slowly being replaced by a hard, resolute defiance.
“This ledger just got a new entry,” he said, more to himself than to her. He had a debt to the Jedi he had helped destroy. Maybe this was how he started to pay it.