The twin suns of Xylos beat down on the durasteel roof of the workshop, baking the dust that coated every surface. Inside, the air was still and thick with the scent of ozone and hot metal. A man known only as Cal methodically wiped down a hydrospanner, its chrome finish glinting in the slivers of light that pierced the gloom. His movements were economical, precise. Every tool had its place, hung on the wall in a perfect, unspoken order. He was old, but not by the galaxy’s counting. The lines on his face were etched deeper than his years, and his gray-streaked hair was cropped in a severe, military cut he’d never bothered to change.
His real name, his only true name, was CT-7719. His brothers had called him Ledger, back when he had brothers. He’d kept count of every battle, every loss, every single numbered directive from High Command. He stopped counting fifteen years ago.
A metallic scrape from outside broke the silence. Cal’s hand paused over the hydrospanner. He didn’t look up. The heavy durasteel door slid open with a groan of protest, admitting a wedge of blinding white light and a small, wiry silhouette.
“Cal! Got something special today.”
The voice belonged to Zia, a girl no older than fourteen, with goggles pushed up on her forehead and an impressive amount of engine grease smeared on one cheek. She was dragging a heavy canvas sack behind her.
“The yard’s out back, Zia,” Cal rumbled, not turning. His voice was a low gravel, worn down by disuse. “Leave the scrap there. I’ll weigh it at sundown.”
“Not scrap,” she grunted, heaving the sack onto his workbench with a deafening clang. A few loose bolts skittered across the surface. “This one’s… unique.”
Cal finally turned, his expression unreadable. He looked at the sack, then at the girl, whose hopeful eyes shone in the dim light. With a sigh that seemed to carry the weight of a decade, he untied the knot. He peeled back the canvas.
Staring up at him was the skeletal, insectoid head of an RA-7 protocol droid. One of its red photoreceptors was cracked. Its silver plating was scorched and pitted, but the Imperial cog stamped on its chestplate was unmistakable. Cal’s jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. He’d seen droids like this before, stalking the halls of Venators and Star Destroyers, their very presence a whisper of surveillance.
“Where did you find this?” he asked. His tone was flat, but a new sharpness honed its edge.
“Crashed shuttle. Out past the Glass Spires,” Zia said, leaning forward eagerly. “Looks like it went down a long time ago. This was the only thing inside that wasn’t melted into a puddle. Think you can fix him?”
Cal ran a gloved finger over the droid’s damaged casing. His touch was diagnostic, tracing circuitry paths he hadn’t thought about in years. He wasn’t a slicer, but he’d serviced more military hardware than most people had seen. It was muscle memory, buried deep.
“It’s an Imperial servant droid. Obsolete,” he said. “Worth more as spare parts. I’ll give you twenty scrip for the lot.”
“Thirty,” Zia countered instantly. “And you have to try and fix him first. Proper fix, not just gutting him for his processors.”
Cal’s gaze lingered on the droid. He should have said no. He should have sent the girl and her dangerous junk on their way. But his fingers had already found the release for the droid’s main power cell. A flicker of something—curiosity, or maybe just boredom—stirred in the quiet emptiness of his life.
“Twenty-five,” he said. “And I make no promises.”
Zia grinned, a flash of white in the grime. “Deal.”
She hopped onto a tall stool to watch, swinging her legs. Cal ignored her, his focus shrinking to encompass only the droid on his bench. He retrieved a diagnostic scanner and a set of precision drivers. His hands, which sometimes betrayed a faint tremor when idle, were now rock-steady. He worked in silence, his movements a symphony of forgotten training. He bypassed the damaged photoreceptor, rerouted primary power through a secondary capacitor, and cleaned the grit from the droid’s main vocal output.
He found the source of the main malfunction: a shard of shrapnel had pierced the casing right above the droid’s logic center, corrupting a string of memory banks. Meddling with it was risky. It could wipe the droid completely, or worse, trigger some buried security protocol. Another man might have stopped. Ledger, the trooper who checked every variable, would have followed procedure and decommissioned it.
But Cal was just a mechanic on a dusty rock, and there were no procedures here. He carefully extracted the shrapnel with a pair of magnetic forceps. Then, using a micro-soldering iron, he began to painstakingly bridge the broken connections on the circuit board, guided by nothing more than instinct and the ghost of a Republic training manual.
After an hour, he was done. He clipped a fresh power cell into the droid’s chest cavity and sealed the panel.
“Alright,” he muttered, more to himself than to Zia. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
He pressed the droid’s main activation stud. For a moment, nothing happened. Then, the single intact photoreceptor flickered to life, casting a baleful red glow across the workbench. The droid’s head swiveled with a pneumatic hiss.
“Unit RA-7X activated,” it stated, its voice a perfect, clipped monotone of Imperial regulation. “Stand by for primary directive assessment.”
Zia gasped. “It works! You did it, Cal!”
Cal held up a hand for silence. Something was wrong. The droid wasn’t running its standard introductory protocols. It stood rigid, its head tilted as if listening to a signal only it could hear.
“Compliance is mandatory,” the droid suddenly announced. “Receiving fragmented transmission. Priority… one.”
“Transmission?” Zia asked, sliding off her stool. “From who?”
The droid’s head twitched. Static crackled from its vocalizer before the words sharpened again. “Archive Protocol… 7… initiated under Order… Kssshhht… Sixty-Six… contingency.”
Cal froze. The soldering iron dropped from his hand and clattered onto the floor.
Order 66.
The numbers echoed in the silent workshop, a ghost from a past he had buried under fifteen years of dust and solitude. He felt a cold dread snake up his spine, a phantom sensation he hadn't felt since the moment the order had come through his own helmet comm.
“Cal? What’s wrong?” Zia’s voice sounded far away.
He couldn’t answer. He was staring at the droid, at the red eye that seemed to see right through him, right into the marrow of his bones where his designation number was still branded.
The droid continued, its voice a chillingly calm cascade of corrupted data. “Designation: The Ossuary. Contents: Jedi artifacts. Lightsabers. Holocrons. Personal effects of… Kssshhhk… traitors designated for termination.”
The word hung in the air, sharp and deadly as a vibroblade. *Jedi.*
He hadn't heard that word spoken aloud since Kamino. It was a forbidden thing, a relic like the droid itself, something that belonged to the war. To the Purge.
“Threat assessment active,” RA-7X droned on. “Imperial fleet command orders vault location sanitized. Contents to be purged. Warlord Krayn of the Crimson Syndicate offers bounty for contents. Conflicting directives.”
The droid’s head snapped towards Cal. The red eye seemed to brighten.
“Coronet Sector. Grid Reference: Nine-Zero… Ksshhht… Epsilon. Obey directive. Compliance is…”
The droid’s vocalizer sputtered, and a new, broken loop began, a repeating stream of static and coordinates.
“…Vault Designation 7… Coronet Sector… Grid Reference: Nine-Zero-Four Epsilon… Jedi artifacts… Compliance is mandatory… Vault Designation 7…”
Zia looked from the droid to Cal’s pale, sweat-slicked face. “A vault? With Jedi stuff? What’s a Jedi?” she asked, her voice a mix of awe and confusion. “Is that… valuable?”
Cal didn’t hear her. He was hearing a different voice, the cold, calm tone of Chancellor Palpatine echoing across the decades. *Execute Order 66.* He had followed that order. He had raised his rifle alongside his brothers, his mind cleared of all doubt by the chip in his head. He had followed every order that came after, until the war was over and the galaxy had no more use for him. He had been a good soldier.
He reached out a trembling hand, his first instinct to hit the deactivation switch, to silence the ghost in the machine and bury the past for good.
But his hand stopped, hovering over the droid’s chestplate. The coordinates repeated, a siren song from a life he’d tried to forget. An order, wrapped in static. The Empire wanted this piece of the past erased. A warlord wanted to exploit it. And the vault… the vault held the last vestiges of the people he had been ordered to destroy. The lightsabers of generals he had respected. The last words of friends he had been forced to betray.
CT-7719, the loyal trooper, the follower of orders, felt a sensation he hadn’t experienced in fifty years of life.
Doubt.
The man who kept the ledger, who counted every directive he ever followed, had just been given a new one. And for the first time, he had to decide whether to obey.