Chapter Text
~~~~ Conflict of Force ~~~~
XLVII
~~~~ Conflict of Force ~~~~
The command shelter had been quiet for an hour before Zela realized the quiet had a temperature.
It was the dense, close warmth of breath trapped under tarpaulin and patchwork plating, a heat made of bodies and machines, of soup steam gone cold in the corners and the low tick of a generator chewing through tri-fuel. Outside, the rain kept its steady work—less a fall now than a presence, like a creature lying across the roof and breathing. The lights were low, their cones shaded by dented mess lids and a fragment of starfighter wing someone had hoisted as a reflector; every movement put shadows into motion on the shelter walls, as if the field itself shifted in sleep.
Zela sat on a crate with her armor half off and her thighs bruised with the knowledge of it. The chestplate leaned against the leg of the table like a dog too tired to ask for attention. Her undersuit clung damp along the shoulders where the rain had found seams earlier and insisted on being a part of her. She had set her boots beneath the shelter’s lip to drip, and the small, constant sound of water hitting soaked earth had become a metronome she could not unhear.
The saber hilts lay across her thighs like a weight practice. Sea-green and emerald—colors that meant nothing to the cortosis that had tried to swallow them, everything to her because she had told herself they did. Mud had found the grooves of both hilts, settling into the knurling and the tiny recessed screws as if the weapon had been meant to hold soil. She took the square of lint from her kit and pressed it along the emitter ring of the left-hand hilt, working the grit out with careful circles. It came away brown, then gray, then only damp.
She’d had a Master once who’d told her to clean her saber the way she cleaned her thoughts. “Follow the line,” Runi Nima had said. “Don’t pick the whole thing up at once. The mind—like the metal—remembers where you last left it. Offer it a better place to rest.” That had been in a room that smelled like old wood and polish and a courtyard where rain had been something you watched from under a roof built to be gentle.
“Offer it a better place to rest,” she whispered now without meaning to, and the words felt thin in the kind of way that made you want to press down harder with your fingers. She let the lint find the seam under the activation stud and coaxed out another ribbon of grit. The blade emitter gave its infinitesimal click as mud let go and metal remembered to be itself. She did not power the blade. The light inside both hilts seemed smaller than it had a week ago, like a candle gutted by its own walls.
She set the left hilt down and drew the right across her thighs. The scratch along the shroud—fresh, ugly—caught her thumb’s pad like a confession. She worked the cloth into it, knowing the line would remain because it had to. You could buff scratches into a shine, make them smooth to the touch; you could not make them untrue.
“Have I left it too long?” she asked the quiet, the roof, the bright unblinking idea of what the Force would be if it were just a voice in a storm. She hadn’t known she was going to ask until the words were out and standing there like a child who has walked into the room and is certain they will be understood.
The answer was the rain making the same argument it had all day.
She let her head tip forward until the weight of her montrals changed the balance of her spine, and the movement eased a nerve at the base of her neck that she hadn’t noticed was shouting. She closed her eyes. The hum she had known since she could name sound—the low, constant music that was the Force under everything—remained. It had not left her. But it had taken itself a layer down, as if it were listening to her from across a river.
“Have I lost the way?” she asked, softer. “Or did it move?”
Silence can be a cruelty. The Jedi taught that it can also be a teacher. Tonight it was a mirror: flat, honest, refusing to be more than it was.
Footsteps approached the flap. Zela didn’t open her eyes; she knew the cadence. Dia’s step had a rhythm even Karthakk couldn’t take—precise not because she’d been taught to be, but because she had learned where to put her feet when there had been consequences for being wrong.
The flap lifted. Cool air slid in and with it the smell of wet cloth and the sweeter note of warmed ration fruit. Dia ducked under the low spar and into the light, damp hairline shining where lekku met skin. She’d stripped her outer plates too; the red of her skin was darker where the undersuit had rubbed, a color she wore differently than the paint and flags and warning lights around them. She carried a datapad against her hip like a shield held sideways.
“They called it a success,” she said, not quite in greeting. She kicked off clotted mud from a heel and it landed with a dull sound near Zela’s boots. “But not the names.”
Zela opened her eyes and the world came in with the soft shock of a room you didn’t expect to survive. Dia’s face was exhausted in the ways Zela knew—the small lines that came when she’d used up that day’s allotment of fury and was living on pragmatism, the careful way she held her shoulders to lie to her back about the weight she’d carried, the slant of her mouth that meant she was counting. The datapad’s screen was turned away, but Zela could see the reflection along the shelter wall: columns, tallies, the uncompassionate order of numbers.
“Show me,” Zela said.
Dia hesitated as if she could make the pad something else by waiting another breath. Then she turned it around and set it next to Zela’s knee. The light caught on water beading along the edge and made a little chain of jewels that did not belong here and therefore were sacred.
There were names. There were half names where the rest would be filled when someone had time to go look at a face and say, “He was loud,” and another would say, “No, that was his brother.” There were civilian marks, too—a line of descriptors that was a way of admitting you had failed to meet someone quickly enough to learn what their mother had hoped to call them. There were notes in the side column in different hands: “rescued by Thorn’s team,” “med-evaq pending,” “last seen at Marker Seven.”
Zela’s thumb brushed a name and then another. She had learned to do this without making a sound.
“Rose?” she asked, because between one name and the next she was allowed one that was selfish.
“Asleep, finally,” Dia said. “Neva drugged her with something that probably isn’t legal. She’ll be angry in the morning, which is frankly how I want her.”
Zela’s mouth twitched. “Angry is a sign of life.”
Dia’s hand went to the back of her neck, fingers pressing just above the join where the lekku’s weight nested. The gesture looked like someone pushing a door into staying open. “How’s your head?”
“Present.”
“That’s a start.”
Dia set the datapad down flat and slid onto the crate beside Zela. The crate creaked. The movement drew the smell of rain and Dia closer, and Zela realized she hadn’t noticed until now how the day had stripped the scent of oil and dust and ozone from everything and left only water and metal and the tang of blood. Dia smelled like water too, and the bitter-sweet of brewed caf, and the faint cinnamon-sour note of ration biscuits crushed by accident and then forgiven.
“They counted the haulers,” Dia said. “They counted the armor we burned. They counted the stair-stepped sections of the culvert like someone wanted to make art with a report. They have not counted the way a boy held a cup like it was a live animal.”
“They never do,” Zela said.
Dia rested her chin on the back of her fist and looked at Zela’s saber hilts. “Still cleaning.”
“Still thinking.”
“Same thing, some days.”
Zela looked back at the pad. “If they call it success, they’ll expect it again.”
“Yes.” Dia’s voice had no heat left to spend. “They’ll expect us to make miracles cheaper.”
“They will expect us to do it without the part where we take anyone out of the mines,” Zela said.
Dia’s mouth did that slant again—the shape that said the thought had teeth and she was letting it bite. “They can expect,” she said. “We’re not supplies.”
The flap stirred again. A draft pushed a tongue of chill through the shelter, and with it came Kia, her helm hanging from her fingertips by its brow ridge, her hair ringed with wet like a halo someone had hung wrong. She had a blanket slung around her shoulders and another over her arm; both were the sort of military-issue gray that never looked clean even when it was. She took in the two of them with one sweep of a gaze that had done that all day without letting either of them feel watched.
“Customs inspection,” she said. “Do we have contraband morale in here?”
Dia snorted and then gave up the pretense that snorting didn’t cost. “We have numbers.”
“Burn them for heat,” Kia said, and crossed the floor, the blanket’s edge whispering against her thigh plates. She draped one blanket around Dia’s shoulders with the tenderness of a woman teaching her own body to be gentle after hours of making it lethal. She tucked the fabric in behind Dia’s lekku where it would ride without tugging, and then gave the second blanket to Zela without fuss, as if she couldn’t see Zela already wrapped in a discipline older than either of these wars.
“Then we remember them,” she said simply. “That’s ours.”
Dia’s eyes went bright along the edges and then turned practical again. “There’s soup,” she said, jerking her chin to the corner where a pot had been lashed to a heat coil and forgotten by its own fervor. “It claims to be stew, which is a bold posture.”
Kia set her helm down on the table, grabbed three battered mugs and a ladle that had been bent at some earlier ill-advised moment, and poured. The stew was a brown that meant a ration bar met over-confidence, but it steamed, and the steam carried that comforting lie that all soups tell: you will be warmer if you put me inside you. Kia handed one mug to Zela, one to Dia, then sat on the floor in front of them, cross-legged, blanket around all three as if she were stitching a tent with her own arms.
Zela sipped and did not flinch. She had eaten worse, and the salt filled the hollow in her tongue where the day had pulled the words out. The three of them shared the exact sound of people swallowing in a room made of canvas and stubbornness.
“Orders?” Kia asked after a few mouthfuls. “Anything interesting in the bureaucratic tombola?”
“Hold,” Dia said. “Wait for debrief and tribunal. Don’t escalate. Evacuate civilians when orbit opens a lane. Write reports that will make someone’s career and end someone else’s.”
“Did anyone ask whether we wanted to attend their tribunal?” Kia’s voice was amused, which was the sort of knife that cuts better when it smiles.
“They expect us to come,” Zela said. “They think we still believe in doors you can walk through and come out cleaner.”
Kia tilted her head. The blanket edge slipped; she caught it with two fingers and tugged it back up around Zela’s shoulder like she had a right to do it. “We saved lives,” Zela added, and looked at her hands because they were the truest things she had left. “And they’ll call it insubordination.”
“Then they can write it down in the right column—the one that says ‘alive,’” Kia said, not bothering to make it pretty. “Columns are for accountants. We are in the business of breath.”
Dia’s breath hitched into something almost like a laugh. “You should embroider that on a tapestry.”
“I only embroider threats,” Kia said. “And recipes.”
Zela worked her thumb along the saber scratch again, then set the hilt aside and let the blanket take her elbows. The Force still hummed the way a good instrument does when you put your ear to it. She thought of the boy with the cup, of Rose’s mouth turned white with pain. Of the hauler settling, and the impossible weight in her grip, and the feeling of water taking three with a decision that had not been theirs.
“Did we…?” she began, and the question was too large. She tried again. “When I said it to him, I didn’t know I meant it.”
Dia’s shoulder touched hers under the blanket. “Said what?”
“That it’s a debt.” Zela swallowed. The stew didn’t taste like much anymore. “If they live, it’s a debt.”
Kia leaned back enough to see both their faces and then forward enough to draw them into her arms because words had started taking chunks out of the air and she was tired of fighting ghosts. She wrapped them—Dia’s shoulders under her left arm, Zela’s under her right—and pressed her mouth briefly to the top of Dia’s head before bumping her brow against Zela’s temple like a promise.
“Good,” she said into the space between their breaths. “Debts can be paid. That’s the point of them.”
Dia exhaled against Kia’s throat, and the warmth of it made Kia’s eyes soften. Zela let herself lean, the way she had allowed herself to in the burial field, and felt Kia’s arm tighten infinitesimally, that learned Mandalorian way of saying I am here without making a ceremony of it. Under her hand, the blanket’s weave was coarse and too familiar and therefore safe.
They ate like that for a while—awkwardly, with elbows negotiating spoon angles, with occasional muffled curses when a chunk slid off a spoon and burned a lip or a lap. The shelter creaked when the wind looked for purchase and found only tarps that had learned the art of giving. Outside, a trooper laughed, lower than earlier, and the sound didn’t ring so sharp; it settled into the mud and became a story seed.
Dia set her empty mug on the floor and pulled the datapad up onto her knees again. The lists glowed in their bureaucratic indifference.
“I hate this framing,” she said, not quite for the first time. “Losses. Casualties. We act like the word itself is a container that keeps the grief from spilling. It’s a colander.”
Kia’s mouth curved. “Then we stand under it with bowls.”
Dia huffed and scraped the pad with a thumbnail until the screen obediently shifted to the annex. There, the notes—the messy, footnotes—waited for someone to turn them into something a senator could read without wrinkling a sleeve. Dia tapped one at random. “Listen: ‘ISP-02 pilot, designation Frost. Last seen at Marker Seven performing retrieval of civilians from flood via surface-skim technique. Vehicle lost. Body unrecovered. Witness: Vapour.’” She turned the pad so Zela could see the next lines, written in two hands. Voss’s first: “He kept promising to teach me that stupid trick.” Thorn’s beneath it: “He did, idiot.”
Zela smiled. It wasn’t humor. It was relief that the names had caught on something and wouldn’t slide.
Dia scrolled. “‘Cima’—no clan listed. Seven years. Twi’lek. Slipped at ramp. Mother says she liked painted stones. We took one from her pocket. It’s on the marker.” Dia’s voice faltered and then steadied again into the older music of Ryloth. “The wind will carry it. It will hit someone in the eye and make them swear and we will know she said hello.”
Kia tightened her arms. “We’ll go see it in the morning.”
“We’re supposed to be impartial in tribunal statements,” Zela said, and the irony tasted like old metal. “We’re supposed to stand in front of them with our hands folded and our mouths careful and tell them what happened as if the telling doesn’t change it.”
Dia leaned her head back against Kia’s shoulder and looked up at the underside of the tarpaulin, where the seams traced a map she could have learned in her sleep if there had been sleep. “We can be precise and unrepentant.”
“We will be,” Kia said. “We’ll give them the numbers. And then we will say ‘alive’ out loud, until the room understands that the air they’re breathing is because you disobeyed.”
Zela felt something in her chest move—a stubborn, aching thing that had tried to lodge itself crosswise and now found a better angle. She reached out, why she didn’t know, and laid two fingers lightly against Dia’s wrist where the skin thinned over tendon. The pulse there beat steady. Dia turned her hand, slow, and threaded her fingers through Zela’s in the way people do when they are writing a truth neither wants to carry alone.
“Do you hear it?” Dia asked after a while, voice gone soft with the kind of tired that makes honesty easy.
“The rain?”
“The Force.”
Zela listened. It was there, a floor under the floor, a breath under breath. Not answering. Not directing. The hum of what-is, and the invitation to choose.
“I hear us,” she said.
Dia nodded as if that was an answer she had wanted even if she hadn’t known to ask for it. “Good,” she murmured. “Then tomorrow will happen.”
Kia leaned back until her shoulders touched the crate behind her and the blanket pulled snug over all three. “Tomorrow always happens,” she said, more practical than fatalistic. “We just decide who gets it.”
The three of them sat like that until the stew cooled and the generator settled into a lower pitch and the rain softened yet again, as if it had the decency to grow bored. Zela’s eyes slid shut at intervals without her permission and opened again because the body is a loyal, foolish animal. Dia’s head grew heavier where it had found the hollow between Kia’s shoulder and collarbone; Kia’s breathing slowed into the hunter’s half-sleep that had become her compromise when real sleep meant dreams she couldn’t shake.
At some point, the flap shifted and a silhouette hesitated just outside the shelter’s light. It resolved into Neva, rain slicking his brow, the look of a man who had spent an evening being the hinge on which a dozen men’s exhaustion swung. He opened his mouth as if to ask for something and then shut it, his eyes catching the picture before him and making the merciful choice to pretend he’d seen a tent with three empty blankets and a pot.
He set a small parcel on the table instead—three dried fruit bars tied together with ration twine—and slid back into the rain without a word.
Dia smiled against Kia’s throat without moving. “He thinks we need dessert.”
“We do,” Kia murmured. “We deserve worse. We’ll settle for fruit.”
Zela made a sound that might, in another life, have been a laugh. She lifted her head, looked at the parcel, and made a note to remember that even now, people performed small, defiant kindnesses. It was as much rebellion as any order they would ignore tomorrow.
“We’ll sleep,” she said, and the sentence became an order because she couldn’t help herself. “One of us at least.”
“I’ll take first watch,” Kia said automatically.
“You’ve taken everyone’s first watch since Sarka,” Dia said, affectionate and accusatory. “Shut up and be held.”
Kia’s mouth curved against Dia’s hair. “Yes, ner riduur,” she said, and Zela felt the word drop into the space between them like a stone into a pool, rings moving outward, touching things they didn’t yet have time to name.
“Tomorrow,” Zela repeated, to the roof, to the rain, to the hum that had refused to answer her. “We’ll make it tell the truth.”
No one answered. No one had to. The rain stitched its small threadwork into the tarps; the stew went from warm to tolerable to a thing you ate because you were grateful to have it; a name or two added themselves in Dia’s head to the list she would refuse to let be only numbers. Kia’s arms did what they had done since the first time she’d found both of them in a hatchway with their backs to a door: they made a shelter out of a person.
They ate the fruit bars and pretended they were fancy. They made each other drink water because none of them wanted to get up to find the latrine in the rain later. They said nothing for long stretches, and in the silence was a quiet that did not accuse, not even when a distant artillery round coughed somewhere and both Zela and Dia tensed at the same time and then made themselves uncurl.
Outside, the field base breathed and shifted. Inside, three women decided, softly and without witnesses, what kind of people they would be in the morning. The rain filled the space between their breaths, and underneath it, quieter still, the Force hummed the note that said: choose.
~~
The rain had finally given up its argument with the planet by the time the tribunal convened. The field’s puddles lay flat and glassing the sky; the smoldering cortosis seams under their skins had cooled to dull bruises of green. The makeshift command shelter had been replaced for the occasion by something someone in orbit thought looked like dignity: a prefab frame dropped by shuttle, its polymer walls ribbed like a lung. Inside, the floor plates were new enough to smell faintly of resin. Someone had mopped them. Someone had thought that mattered.
The center of the room was a square of holoprojectors set into a low dais. Cables ran like black veins from floor sockets to the emitters. The light that rose when the operators keyed them had the purity of manufactured blue. It staged the tribunal as a ring of presence that wasn’t, a circle of men and women and insignia in neat holographic tiles, each with the same cold, even glow. At the twelve o’clock position sat the scaled projection of Admiral Tarkin, hard angles and lacquered hair, a jaw shaped by a lifetime of swallowing dust and giving orders. The tag beneath his image read Oversight Board—Chair. Around him appeared smaller panes: Judicial Affairs, Strategic Operations, Ethics Committee, Procurement (because the Republic could always find a seat for procurement), and an empty placeholder labeled Closed Session. Admiral Rylla’s tile occupied one of the peripheral squares, her profile half-lit by a shipboard console, her dark jacket precise as ever.
Zela and Dia stood on a patch of clean plate that had been centered under the light. It threw their shadows long and obedient. Kia stood half a step behind them and to the right, the muscle where a courtly painting would have put a loyal squire. Her helm was on. The slit of her visor made the board’s light into a knife.
The operator announced them with the bland voice of someone reading a docket: “General Zela Taal, General Dia Olan, Advisor Kia Naasade—Karthakk Ground Command.” The last two words carried a faint incredulity, as if the combination were something a tongue found implausible.
“Generals,” Tarkin said, and he made the plural sound like a courtesy he was prepared to retract. “Advisor.” He did not nod. He did not need to. The board knew their places without choreography. “We appreciate your compliance. It has been a busy cycle.”
“We noticed,” Dia murmured.
Zela lifted her chin. The muscle at the hinge of her jaw jumped once and stilled. “We’re here.”
“Indeed,” Tarkin said. He flicked a glance aside to something off-slate—someone feeding him prompts, perhaps—and then back. “Let us begin by noting, for the official record, that the objectives on Karthakk were achieved. The primary extraction sites are denied to the Separatists. The enemy suffered substantial materiel losses. The corridor was established and—” A fractional pause, a glance at another pane. “—secured. This was achieved with tactical ingenuity and commendable resolve under extremely unfavorable conditions.”
He spoke “tactical ingenuity” as if he were praising a tool for performing its function. That he said it at all made the Ethics pane frown. The Procurement pane smiled like a man reading out the price of a contract.
“However,” Tarkin continued, voice lowering a tone, “the board has serious questions regarding the means by which these outcomes were achieved. We must inquire as to your… relationship with theater command directives. And the degree to which you consider yourself bound by them.”
“Bound,” Dia said, and the word floated in the room like a hook. “We take vows that bind. We break chains.”
Zela shot her a quick look. Dia’s profile was a blade, steady in its sheath. “We obeyed the spirit of our orders,” Zela said. “We degraded the enemy’s capacity to field cortosis-enhanced armor. We preserved the lives of noncombatants. We ensured the safe withdrawal of Republic forces.”
“By deviating from explicit instructions issued by Regional Command,” said a woman in the Judicial Affairs pane, her hair severe enough to be a regulation itself. “General Olan, you were ordered to conduct reconnaissance and sabotage and not to undertake—what was the phrase?—‘assets removal.’ Yet you converted your infiltration into a civilian evacuation under fire. Can you explain your rationale?”
Dia looked up into the net of light, and Zela saw how very still she had made herself—the trained stillness of a person who had learned long ago exactly how much motion the world permitted them. “Because the assets were people,” she said evenly. “Because they were enslaved. Because they would have died.”
Tarkin’s mouth thinned. “The Republic operates in theaters where mission profiles frequently require triage. Command cannot function if every unit on the ground is free to redefine the objective based on local sentiment.”
“Local sentiment,” Dia repeated softly, like the ground sampling the taste of a boot.
Rylla’s tile shifted. “Chair, with respect, Karthakk was not a matter of sentiment. The civilian presence in the extraction sites was confirmed. The probability of mass casualty events if we ignited the mines was not theoretical.”
“Thank you, Admiral,” the Ethics representative said, dry. “The board has your memorandum.”
“We have more than that,” Dia said, and her voice, when she chose to make it colder, could cut anodized durasteel. “We have faces. The mine catalogues lists of numbers. The camps wrote on walls. The children wore collars made from conduit because the guards broke the proper ones and didn’t care to replace them.”
Zela felt the Force in the room shift warily, as if a current had encountered a rock it didn’t expect. Tarkin’s gaze slid to her. He had the sort of eyes that catalogued people as quickly as they did fortifications. She could feel him weigh her—height, voice timbre, the relative paleness of her montrals, the measured pitch of a Jedi who still believed in the value of measured pitch.
“General Taal,” he said. “In the course of securing the corridor, you detonated infrastructure that resulted in civilian losses under your protection.”
Zela answered before the wastewater of bureaucratic euphemism could rise further. “We brought down two culvert towers to narrow the kill zone and prevent a flanking envelopment. We evacuated a disabled hauler under direct fire and lightning. We lost two in the flood. We also prevented a collapse that would have taken the entire convoy with it. I will not allow the physics of a planet to be pinned to a single hand.”
“Deflection,” the Judicial woman murmured.
“Precision,” Zela returned, Jedi calm like glass over a river.
The Strategic Operations pane leaned in, a man with the smile of someone who enjoyed board games. “General, the Republic needs sabers that will go where pointed. The complexity of this war encourages creativity, yes. But if obedience gives way to improvisation every time a unit commander encounters a tragic tableau, then theater coherence dissolves. And the Republ—”
“If obedience had been our only virtue,” Dia said, and the syllables were smoke after lightning, “there’d be no one left to save.”
The room—not a room; an arrangement of light and insistence—received the line like a blow muffled by distance. The Procurement man’s smile flattened. The Ethics representative’s eyes softened and then hardened again, moving back to the safety of policy. Tarkin’s face did not change, which was the change.
“General Olan,” he said. “Do you imagine yourself uniquely qualified to determine the Republic’s moral posture at the tactical level?”
“No,” Dia said. “I imagine myself qualified to decide whether a child burns when I can prevent it.”
“A laudable sentiment,” Tarkin returned, “and a dangerous precedent.”
“Precedent,” Dia echoed. “The first time someone told me I should do as I was told, I was a baby, and a man with a stick was the law. I am not inclined to build a Republic that rhymes with that sentence.”
Kia shifted half a centimeter. It was minute enough that most of the board would have missed it; Zela felt it like a sound only montrals hear—the whisper of leather flexing under glove, the faint creak of a sling tightening as weight settled into readiness. Kia’s visor remained fixed on Tarkin. The rest of her body communicated a consideration of lines and fields of fire. It was not a threat. It didn’t need to be.
“General Taal,” the Ethics representative said, perhaps deciding that Dia’s fire should be met by Zela’s ice. “Do you teach your command that orders are conditional?”
Zela turned her palms up. She had cleaned the mud out from under her nails. She had not removed all of it. “I teach my command that the Republic exists to protect life,” she said. “Orders that betray that premise betray the Republic. When they do, a Jedi must know which vow they are breaking.”
“A pretty speech,” Tarkin said, “and catastrophically impractical. Wars are not won by epigrams.”
Zela lifted her eyes to him. “No,” she said. “They’re won by people who still recognize the difference between a person and a resource.”
“And yet,” Tarkin replied, “resources win wars.”
Silence settled, clinical as an instrument tray.
The Judicial Affairs woman flicked a finger along a slate. “We must address the clone losses,” she said, tone stepping carefully around pity so as not to trip it. “Your units suffered casualties in excess of projections. Oversight must ask: were those losses… necessary?”
“They volunteered to hold the line for civilians,” Zela said. She kept her voice level and felt how each word found a rung on a ladder that hung over a drop. “They understood the risk.”
Tarkin took the opening without visible relish. “And acceptable,” he said. “In service of the theater objective.”
Zela felt something in her chest give. She had thought there was nothing left in her that could still crack, only things that could bend further. She took a half step forward before she had told her feet to move. Her hands were empty because if they had not been, she would have broken something the tribunal would have called “evidence.”
“They had names,” she said. The words were not calm. They were a vibration in the air—low, dangerous, the sound of a beam under too much load. “Not designations. Names. I gave some of them myself when their brothers asked me to. You will not reduce them to arithmetic to justify a rulebook that burns children.”
Across the circle, Rylla’s gaze lifted. It softened—not with sympathy, but with recognition. Tarkin’s expression altered by the width of a razor. The Ethics representative did not drop her eyes. The man from Strategic looked suddenly, briefly human.
“General,” Tarkin said finally. He did not say Zela’s name. The omission was a choice. “Passion has its place. But not in policy. It is not the duty of a ground commander to retry the Senate’s decisions.”
“It is the duty of a being to know the difference between law and wrong,” Dia said. She was very still. Her lekku lay quiet along her shoulders, and Zela knew, with the intimacy of proximity, that the stillness cost. “We have fulfilled our duty to the Republic. We refuse to betray our duty to the living.”
Kia’s gauntleted hands rested at her hips now. She had not changed her stance by much; her body radiated a warning the way heat radiates from an engine. Not threat. Not quite. But the implicit reminder that morality and violence have always been cousins.
“Enough,” said the Judicial woman, and for a moment there was a crack of honesty in her voice. “We are not philosophers. We are auditors. The board will render its finding.”
Tarkin breathed in. It moved his shoulders in a way that reminded Zela this was not a statue. “The board notes the successful conclusion of the Karthakk operation,” he said formally. “It also notes multiple deviations from theater directives and a pattern of independent action that, if replicated, would undermine command coherence.” He glanced briefly at Procurement, as if to reassure it that the ledger would still balance. “We will not recommend charges at this time.”
The air in the shelter seemed to exhale without anyone choosing the moment. Zela did not step back. Dia did not drop her chin. Kia did not relax.
“However,” Tarkin continued, voice sharpening like a knife honed against stone, “let there be no misunderstanding. One more act of insubordination of this character, and you will face recall to Coruscant and a formal review of your commissions.” He let the word formal import its own gravity. He looked from Zela to Dia and then, with a flick that recognized her without naming her domain, to Kia. “You will return to the business of the war. You will do so within the lines drawn by theater command. Are we clear?”
Dia’s mouth pressed flat. “We hear your warning.”
“Clarity and agreement are separate accomplishments,” Tarkin said. He tapped a key; the holo flickered, adding a sheet of text that scrolled with the neat indifference of policy. “You will sign the preliminary statement of this finding and append your after-action reports. Admiral Rylla will coordinate the small matter of your evac. And you will remember that the measure of a Republic officer is not the warmth of his heart, but the steadiness of his hand.”
“Steady hands save lives,” Dia said evenly. “Even when they disobey.”
Kia’s visor tipped a degree. It was a single syllable of body language. It said: be careful.
“We are adjourned,” Tarkin said, cutting across her like a closing hatch. The tiles snapped dark one by one—Strategic, Procurement, Ethics, Judicial—until only Rylla’s pane remained.
For a second, without the board’s collective chill, she looked like a woman who hadn’t yet learned where to put her weariness. The shipboard lighting caught at her collar bone and made it seem more fragile than a rank pin had a right to be. She glanced aside and then back; the coded tell of someone making sure a corridor was clear before speaking.
“I cannot send what I want to send on this line,” she said, voice pitched low, the warmth she hid from the board permitted to show. “But I can send this: I saw what you did. You’ll get no thanks. But you’re not wrong.” The faintest of smiles—a winter light—touched and left her mouth. “I’ll buy you hours when I can. Use them.”
“Thank you,” Zela said, meaning a lattice of things.
Rylla cut the line before gratitude could turn into confession.
The shelter dimmed. The operators shut down the emitters with the same care a field medic uses to close a wound he knows will open again. The resin-smell of new plates rose and made Zela’s head ache in a very small, sentient way. Outside, someone called a readiness check in a voice that had learned to find people without raising itself to the point of panic.
For a moment, the three of them simply stood in that square of clean light gone dark, as if the room needed them to define it.
Dia let out a breath that had been living in the back of her chest since the word insubordination. “Well,” she said. “We are not arrested.”
“Yet,” Kia said, and now she removed her helm because leaving it on any longer would have felt like an admission. Her hair sprang in damp waves and fell into her eyes. She shoved it back with a gauntleted knuckle. “They’re good at doing one mercy to excuse three cruelties.”
Zela felt her hands wanting to tremble and made them do some use instead. She reached, picked up the stylus the operator had left for signatures, and set it on the table with care. “We didn’t lie,” she said. Her voice surprised her with how tired and clean it sounded. “We won’t.”
Dia’s anger had banked to coals. They glowed steady, ready. “I would do it again,” she said softly, as if answering someone who hadn’t asked yet.
Kia’s mouth quirked—not quite a smile, not anywhere near a frown. “I know,” she said. “We did not sign up for a Republic made of rooms like that one.”
“Rooms like this one are the Republic too,” Zela said, though the words tasted like metals that never should have met in a mouth. “We just have to decide whether we can stand in them without becoming them.”
Dia reached under the table and pulled out a tin of sealant the operator had left by accident. She popped it with a thumb and the sharp, clean smell of it cut through the resin. “We stand in them,” she said. “We bring the mud on our boots. We let it dry on their floors. We make it hard to forget where decisions land.”
Kia laughed, low and warm in her chest. “I’ll teach you to stitch that onto a banner.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Dia said. “I’ll hang it in the next tribunal and see if anyone notices the embroidery.”
The operator, realizing he was still present in a room where commanders were warming a rebellion on the edges of their tongues, cleared his throat theatrically. “Apologies, Generals. I’ll… leave you to it.” He unplugged the last of the cables with the reverent care of a man dismantling a stage no one had applauded. When he had gone, the shelter seemed larger, though nothing had moved.
Rain had started again, a fine, exhausted mist you could taste more than you could see. It hissed against the prefab’s roof, softened by the thin insulation; the sound made the walls seem farther away. Zela rolled her shoulders and felt the ache she had been bracketing come back into them now that there was nothing to lean against.
“They’ll watch us,” Kia said.
“They already do,” Dia replied. “We’ll give them something worth the time.”
Zela nodded. The vow resettled in her like a bone set properly after weeks of compensation. “We owe them days,” she said—meaning the living, meaning the dead, meaning the faces on the pad and the three syllables of a name called into rain. “We pay in truth and in disobedience when disobedience is mercy.”
Kia reached out and briefly palmed Zela’s shoulder, then Dia’s. The gesture was less comfort than confirmation, like stamping a seal on a document: witnessed.
Outside, the camp went on with the business of recovery and guarding and breathing. Inside, they stepped off the dais and back onto plates that had not been mopped. The resin smell was less oppressive now. Someone had opened a flap and let the better air in.
“Come on,” Dia said, with the stubborn gentleness of a woman deciding for herself what the next act of her day would mean. “There’s a child who likes painted stones and a marker that could use another. We’ll tell her mother what the board called us. Then we will say what we did.”
“And then?” Kia asked as they reached the flap and the fine rain dusted their faces.
Zela looked past the line of tents to the ridge, to the scar the corridor had left, to the places where the flood had written its brief, temporary script. The clouds were fraying. A seam of pale opened in the east. It was not sunrise, but it had chosen the color of one.
“And then,” she said, “we’ll get back to work.”
~~
The path up the ridge was no more than a crease in the land, a line where boots had found higher ground often enough that the mud had learned the idea of a step. The rain had stopped hours ago, and the silence it left behind felt like a held breath the planet had finally remembered to let go. Below, the base lay in a scatter of dull lights and tarpaulin shadows, a tired constellation stitched across the broken spine of the corridor. Above, the sky sulked in its heavy cloak—clouds massed like an army—but ragged rents showed where faint stars peered through, curious and unafraid.
Dia led. She hadn’t spoken much since the tribunal, and that not-speaking had a shape: not sulking, not wounded. Focus. She moved with the measured care of someone who had spent a lifetime training her body to be a promise she could keep. Mud clung and then loosened with each lift of her boots; the ground made a soft tear-sound when it let go, like cloth giving under a careful hand. The air smelled clean for the first time in weeks, the burned-metal tang of cortosis finally broken and washed thin until only the iron memory of rain and wet earth remained. Somewhere in the grasses that lined the path, insects tuned themselves like musicians in a pit testing a stage after a long closure—tentative at first, short brave notes, then answering trills, a small chorus reassembling the idea of night.
Zela followed a pace behind, letting Dia set not just the route but the speed. Her montrals tasted the air’s emptier hum; the storm had fallen back into the earth, leaving the Force low and steady like a stream under stone. She kept one hand hovering, a reflex she didn’t need and couldn’t disown, ready to steady without crowding. Kia came last, helmet clipped to her belt, the pale smear of starlight catching in her damp hair. She walked as she hunted: letting the ground tell her what it had decided to be, and blessing it for its honesty.
At the ridge’s crest the land opened, and with it, the night. The mud flattened into a field of shallow pans and dark plates that reflected the torn star-sky in a thousand fractured mirrors. Pools stitched a broken embroidery wherever shells had bitten and rain had stitched. The base below looked small from here, softened, its harsh edges turned to lines and smudges, its loud living reduced to a whisper the ridge wore like a shawl. Wind moved, clean and saltless, and in it was the faintest scent of something sweet—an aftertaste of the day’s ration fruit boiled for the wounded, a kindness the air had decided to remember.
Dia stopped where the ground rose into a knoll of tougher soil, a little shoulder of earth that hadn’t sunk under tread or flood. She shrugged her pack down, unhooked her small leather pouch from its inner clasp, and knelt. Her movements changed when she knelt: the stern economy of a commander softened into something older and more deliberate, the way a dancer changes step when she passes from parade to temple. She pulled the pouch’s drawstring and spilled what it held in a careful arc onto the ground.
Stones. Smooth ones and rough, some painted by small hands and some made bright only by water; slivers of metal cut from ruined plates; short lengths of cord; a disc of bone polished to a shine by someone’s thumb; a button that had once belonged to a coat someone had thought worth keeping; a strip of blue cloth. Tokens from graves, from the pockets of the saved, from the hands of clones who had said, “Take this. We put it on his marker; give him another.” They made a small, unsentimental wealth on the dark soil.
“The Kika’lekki teach that spirits cling to memory until we offer it back to the stars,” Dia murmured, and even if Zela had not known the language, she would have known it by the way Dia’s voice set the words down; Ryl was sand and the wind over it, a tongue built to be carried in a mouth that knew thirst.
She began to arrange the tokens in a spiral. Not a neat one—a spiral that accepted the stubbornness of irregular things and made space for them; a spiral that widened and tightened as her hand wanted; a spiral where the first curl held a cartridge case and the last a bead of glass from a shattered cockpit light. There was no partition: trooper beside child, woman beside sergeant, a father’s ring beside the piece of plate that had once written CT- and now held only a scuff and the curve of a letter. The spiral did not differentiate loss or salvation. It said: this is the same story told by many mouths.
From the pack’s inner pocket, Dia drew a candle. It was small and blunt, the wax honey-pale in the starlit dark. The wick had been braided in the old way, not the factory twist, and the base was stamped with the faint impression of a temple’s maker-mark: a little spiral impressed in a circle—a Kiva’s hand sign to those who knew. Zela knew; she had learned to know. When Dia struck the little flint and the wick took, the flame rose straight, as if glad to be told what to do. A thread of incense unspooled into the night, warm and familiar—the resinous comfort of temples on Ryloth where the air always held a sweetness no sand could sour. It smelled of amber and char, of desert herbs crushed between two palms; it smelled of candles lit in shadowed courtyards while storms walked the dunes outside and women sang.
Dia set the candle in the spiral’s center and cupped her hand around it just long enough to command the flame to stay. The light bled outward, turning the metal slivers to low embers and calling shallow starlight out of the black beads. She set a small fire to one side—not for heat, but because fire is an animal you invite when you mean to talk to the night. Kia had brought a fistful of dry scrap from under the corroded belly of a collapsed culvert, and Zela’s striker coaxed it into life. The flames sat in a tidy crouch, bright but not loud, a heart that understood the body it was beating in.
Dia unclasped her right vambrace and set it aside. Zela saw the intent and shifted without comment, making the ground kinder by a sweep of her palm, smoothing the grit away with a move that was not the Force and also was. Dia unlatched the couplings at her elbow with the same steady care she used on detonators and broken hearts. She had worn the cybernetic without rest since the first day of the campaign, because sometimes a woman is her own garrison. Now she rolled the sleeve back, took the leather wrap from her pack, and laid it out on the ground beside the spiral. The arm came off with a soft hydraulic sigh, the contacts glowing faintly before they dimmed. She set it on the leather and folded the end over fittings to keep them clean. Her right shoulder looked suddenly lighter, the line of it more honest; the scar at the socket was pale in the firelight, a constellation of healed punctures where the new had learned the old.
Zela felt the shift in the air that always came when Dia removed the arm—the loosening of a wire strung too tight for too long. The first time Dia had taken it off with Zela present, it had felt like being trusted with someone’s mouth when they were sleeping; now, it felt like hearing the quiet clock inside a room you had thought was silent.
Dia pressed her left palm to the ground and lowered her head. She didn’t bow as a soldier or as a supplicant, but as a daughter of a world that had made worship out of restraint and survival. When she spoke, she spoke to the dust and the air and the fire—the three elements that all Twi’leks call by their oldest names.
“Kika’lekki,” she murmured in Ryl, and the vowels carried for a breath over the ridge before lying themselves down again. “Walkers of the wind and keepers of the breath, guide the weary.” Her voice did not shake. It caught in one place, then smoothed. “Let those who fell walk the long dunes, and let the storms sing their names.”
The words unspooled, not bargaining, not pleading. They named. She named the mine by its old family-name, the one the enslaved had whispered to each other when the guards called it “Unit Six.” She named the culvert with the soldier’s joke-name and the child with the Sabacc card token and the pilot who had insisted he could skim a hauler across a flood “one last time” and had been right until he wasn’t. She named the clones who had held until the word hold had become the only syllable left in their mouths. She named two Kivas she would never meet again and the boy with the cup and the woman with the flinch who had later sent Dia a folded square of cloth with a pattern stitched on it in shipwire thread—two eyes, a half-moon, a jagged star.
“Carry them,” Dia whispered, palm warm against the damp ground. “Carry us when our feet lose the count. Carry our anger until it remembers it is love.”
The Way of Ryloth is sand and wind and the knowledge that both will take you apart if you do not learn their songs. To speak Ryl prayers on Karthakk, mud beneath your hand and water in the air, was an act of rebellion more exact than any shot across a bow. Dia’s voice made a desert where there was none, and by naming, she made it hold.
When her words ran out, they did not tumble and fall; they laid themselves down, careful as a sleeping child.
Zela let a breath go. The night took it without question. She had been taught not to collapse one faith into another; to add a voice, you do not drown the one before. She waited until the flame steadied after its little dance in the wake of Dia’s last word, then lifted her own face to the plain sky.
Togruta are not a people of long prayers; the wild takes you if you talk too much. Zela’s voice, when it came, had the measure of the grass sound she remembered from childhood: a hush full of movement. She spoke in her mother-tongue, the vowels rounded, the consonants soft enough to carry in brush and between trunks.
“To the hunters who rest beneath every tree,” she said, and the words were not metaphors but names—her people remember their dead in the shade. “To the herds that cross the sky.” The old story, told under canopy and in storms: the stars are the great herds, always moving, always returning; we find our way by their backs. “Hear us. The hunt is not done, but we will walk with open eyes.”
She did not ask for victory. She did not ask for courage; courage is what is left when you have eaten all the other food. She asked for balance. For the kind of luck that keeps a hunter humble. For sharp teeth and a soft mouth. For the wisdom to know when prey is a story you are telling yourself to avoid the word person. She called the names of her own—those who had fallen under her command, those who had given themselves in places where she had failed to arrive, those who had died before she ever wore a saber. Two names sat behind her teeth that she had never before said in the company of anyone not of her world; she said them now, and the night accepted them the way soil accepts seed, not demanding bloom, only offering a bed.
She paused, then added in Basic—not to translate, but to thread. “I don’t believe the way you do,” she said, looking at Dia, and the confession didn’t carry apology. “But I learned your prayers because they remind me why we fight. The spirits hear many languages.”
Dia’s mouth made that small, fierce curve that was her smile when she wanted her face to stay still. The incense smoke rose and drifted, then curled back, caught by a trick of the ridge’s wind. The candle flame fluttered and settled again, stubborn and happy.
Kia had stood without fidget, helmet by her boot, watching the flames and the faces they painted with equal interest. She did not kneel. She stepped forward, set her gauntlet—just the right, the one she tightened before fights—into the mud beside the fire, fingers down, as if she were signing the ground. Then she bowed her head.
Her voice wore fewer rituals than either of theirs. It had sand in it—but not Dia’s dunes; grit from long marches, from bivouacs in half-shelters, from hours spent under a ship belly tightening plates while the clock said the enemy could be ten minutes away if they ran.
“Ni su’cuyi, gar kyr’adyc, ni partayli, gar darasuum,” she said in Mando’a, and the night seemed to know those words; they had been spoken under so many skies they had learned every path a wind might take. I’m still alive; you are dead; I remember you; so you are eternal. There was no tremor and no attempt at softness. She said what she meant and entrusted meaning to the listener. She pressed her other palm to the bone pommel of her knife and then, not loudly, added the Vharu’kel phrase that sat in her mouth like the taste of a river stone warmed by sun.
“May the hunt be long, and the shade kind.”
It was a soldier’s prayer. But it belonged. It landed beside Dia’s wind and Zela’s herd like a third leg under a table. You could have eaten anything on that surface and it would have held.
Silence braided itself through the three of them. Not absence—an active making-space. The fire’s light rose and fell, throwing small orange geometries across their armor and faces, picking out the dings they’d carried into the tribunal and the new scratches no one there had bothered to notice. The spiral of tokens glowed as if lit from within, the candle giving a patient sun to a tiny galaxy. The incense threaded grief into comfort, comfort into fire, fire into breath, until everything seemed to be speaking a handful of the same words in different tunes. Below them, the base kept its appointments: the clink of a mug on a mess table, a medic’s sigh, a muffled curse when someone forgot the tent flap hook and caught it with an ear. Above them, the torn sky showed more stars as the clouds drew themselves apart like tired curtains. The insects down-slope settled into a phrase they would sing again tomorrow.
“Different tongues,” Kia said quietly, not taking her eyes off the little flame, “same sky.”
Zela looked up; the faint band of a cluster cut a pale wound in the cloud, the kind of light you only noticed when you needed it. “Same debt,” she said.
Dia’s shoulders loosened under the simple wrap she had taken from her pack and thrown about them all, more ritual than warmth. She smiled, the frown-marks of the tribunal lifting as if remembering where they’d been anchored and choosing to leave. “Same promise.”
They did not make oaths. Not here. Not words a tribunal could demand and twist. They sat. Dia leaned so her bare right shoulder brushed Zela’s arm; Kia’s knee touched Zela’s boot; Zela tilted until the three of them made a small triangle that any hunter would recognize as safety. They let the small fire speak everything they chose not to, which is what small fires have always done for tired people who refuse to be done.
Time changed its gait. The night didn’t hurry, and the women let themselves be caught by that pace for once. When the candle burned low enough to lap the stamped mark of the Kiva’s finger, Dia lifted it, cupped it in both hands like a bird, and lowered it into the spiral’s exact center as if returning a heart to a chest. Zela reached with a twig and coaxed the little fire into a bow at the end of a song; Kia banked it with two scoops of earth so it would remember and not sulk.
“Ready?” Dia asked, not for the next fight; for the act that was this prayer’s last line.
“Always,” Zela said, making of the word again the promise it had to be.
Kia nodded once, and the movement caught starlight at the edge of her hair. “Do it.”
They leaned in together and pressed their hands into the warm ash that held the fire’s memory. Dia’s left, Zela’s right, Kia’s both because she would not be left out. The ash took their prints and for a second their fingers glowed faintly ember-red under the gray. They lifted and set their palms down in the center, overlapping so that if anyone came later and saw only the marks, they would not be able to tell where one woman’s hand ended and the other’s began.
They stood. The night wind lifted, kind, and carried the scent of rain’s aftermath, iron, and faint ash across the ridge. Below, a sentry laughed at something a comrade said and the sound came up like a good rumor and disappeared into the grass. Above, the clouds parted enough to open a thousand pricks of light—the kind that refuse to be silenced by weather or war or any room where someone in a clean jacket says acceptable.
For a moment the three of them simply stood in the dark, looking at a sky that had not asked for their names and had taken them anyway. They stood in the overlap of hands cooling, incense fading, mud firming, insects sounding. They stood with the field’s ghosts at their backs and the tribunal’s echo behind their teeth.
Three faiths. One promise: never to let the living be forgotten.
They did not say it aloud. They did not need to. The ridge heard. The wind took it and filed it among the other necessary lies that keep a world turning—the kind of lies that are truer than truth because they make people stand up when the morning comes.
The candle let out a last brave sigh and gave itself to the wick’s black. Dia gathered the tokens into the spiral’s curve and left them there, not tidied away, not ordered into a box; the dead would know where to find them. Zela shouldered her pack and took Dia’s arm—the flesh one—habit and affection and a hunter’s care. Kia slipped her helm back over her hair and let the visor hide her eyes; when she spoke, the vocoder softened the edges of her voice into something almost gentle.
“Come on,” she said. “We’ve got hours to buy tomorrow. Best start counting.”
They descended the ridge with the fire’s warmth still in their palms and the candle’s ghost clinging to their clothes, down toward the base that had arranged itself into sleep, and past that, toward the morning the galaxy would make whether it deserved it or not. The mudfield held the stars until their boots broke the mirrors and turned them back into sky. The insects sang them down. The night kept its promise and did not rain.
Behind them, the small ash-print cooled in the shape of three hands that had chosen each other. The breeze moved, a little, and smudged the edges, blending them. The spiral held. The ridge remembered. And above, the long herds traveled, unconcerned with tribunals, unconcerned with orders; a map written for those with the patience to look up and the courage to keep walking.