There are a hundred ways to make noise and only a few to make none. Bad Company lives in the few.
We drop into the asteroid's 'night' on a line as thin as a bad idea, mag-boots whispering onto pitted rock, suits trimmed for thermal signature discipline, visors dim. The station rides the spine of the asteroid like a tick—angles welded to angles until it looks deliberate from any direction you'd rather not approach. The belt turns slow around us, a cathedral of cold stone and broken light.
"Comms check. Whisper net," Rift says, voice flattened to a murmur that lands soft inside my ear.
"Two," Frost.
"Three," Burner, already caressing the remote on his chest like a vice he's learned to love.
"Four," Doc, bored on purpose.
"Five," Spark, the probe Beeper trailing behind him and muttering a low beeping-swear.
"Six," Brick, hefting the shield he swears he doesn't need.
"Seven," Jackal, voice gone thin in his throat like he's part predator, part air.
"Eight," I say.
"Bad Company eight is green," Rift replies. "First in."
We move. Modus operandi isn't on a chalkboard somewhere; it's in where your eyes go when nothing else is moving. It's pace—not fast, not slow, the speed of a decision you can still take back. It's angles—never give a corner your back, never love cover enough to marry it. It's the discipline to not shoot when your blood wants to, and the courage to start shooting when the plan says wait.
The outpost's skin is patched hull plates and lattice with frost caught in the seams. Rift picks a seam that looks too ugly to be important and is therefore vital. Spark's glove spider-walks a cable into a junction that shouldn't exist. He hums, glove vibrates. A light somewhere thinks about turning on and decides it would rather not.
"Outer grid is on maintenance pulse," Spark whispers. "We're a power fluctuation and a prayer."
"Take me to church," Burner mutters.
The hatch sighs open like it's ashamed. Inside, we're ghosts. Boot seals kiss deck grating with soft magnetic clicks. The air tastes like ozone and tired filters, the way stations do when no one in charge actually lives there. Frost goes long and low, rifle laid along his forearm, visor feeding range numbers like lullabies. Brick floats the shield, not fully up—just enough to steal angles from the corridor.
I don't light my green. I don't even wear the curved hilt on the belt where it calls attention like a stage whisper. Tonight I carry the shoto-pike—a compact staff with a visible single blue blade that can punch out like a needle and go away just as fast. The other end? It sleeps. Surprises deserve sleep. And, obviously, on my holster I carry a Westar-35 for emergencies, the Order is idiot to think about elegant weapons in the middle of a war.
We pass the first watch pair of B1s parceled into a junction alcove, the kind of guard you post when your sergeant hates you or your commander hates thinking. One turns its bucket head toward the other and says, "I am so bored," in that tinny whine that sounds like a child reporting a bad dream.
"Shh," the other says. "We're guarding."
"Guarding what? The hallway?"
"Roger, roger."
Rift signs: SOFT. Jackal slides forward, becomes shadow. A gloved hand over a vocoder, a vibroblade kisses a wire bundle just so, and one B1's head tilts like it remembered something it never knew. Doc is already behind the other with a stun cord. Ffft. The droid shudders, folds like an empty rack.
We stack and flow. The station's layout is a shrug of narrow maintenance runs that open into wider rooms that have no business being wider. Frost marks lanes with quiet clicks, a private morse code the squad has learned like song. Spark tags a camera and makes it think it blinked. Burner leaves a present behind a panel that needed to learn regret.
"General," Rift murmurs. "You're on blue. Nothing big, nothing bright. We're not here."
"I was never here," I whisper, and mean it.
The training that makes this look easy is neither pretty nor polite. Bad Company's school is minutiae with teeth. They spent the time before launch teaching me silence like a language—where to put weight on a ladder rung so the metal doesn't sing, how to clear a corner with the wall instead of off it, how to breathe so your visor doesn't haze when you need it most. In the sim-bay they made me run laps at a crouch until my thighs begged for a new batch of muscle fibers, then switch to a low creep where your shoulders do the work your knees can't. Brick taped my trigger finger to my palm and made me sweep rooms with my off-hand until the angles mattered more than comfort.
"Don't show the room your habits," Rift said, tapping the back of my glove with two fingers until my hand found center. "Rooms learn."
They also taught me the clones' hand vocabulary: not just the standard GAR signs, but the shorthands Bad Company built. Two fingers curled tight is Hold. Same two fingers loose is Float—move like you're attached to them by thin string. A quick open-close is Noise—as in: tolerate it, don't make it. A hand with thumb extended and rocked is Dumb—B1s ahead, expect the kind of mistake that kills you if you don't expect it.
The B1s do not disappoint.
We slither across a catwalk where the station's fabricators have left coils of wire and half-eaten ration packs. Two droids clank by hauling a crate between them. One says, "This is heavy," and the other says, "Everything is heavy when you complain." They both stop, look at each other, and in unison: "Roger, roger." Then they keep walking, because the universe has a sense of humor that doesn't love us.
Jackal ghosts behind them and opens a panel. Spark snicks a bridge into the relay trunk. He doesn't smile. He breathes differently when he's doing this—small, tight breaths that match his hand movements, in-out, cut-splice, in-out, cheat a checksum and lie to a machine about who its friends are.
"Forty seconds of blind on camera three," he whispers. "Longer if Beeper can hold its bladder."
The probe chirps a complex filth and tries to look dignified while it hacks.
"General," Doc murmurs, eyes sliding to me, "your gait is loud."
"I could crawl."
"You could. Or you could learn." He taps my hip. "Weight's wrong. You're stepping like a Jedi. Try stepping like someone who doesn't trust the floor."
I do. The difference is embarrassing. The deck stops telling on me.
We hit the first choke: a T-junction that funnels into a room full of the worst kind of geometry. Frost calls two turrets by the muffled choke they make when they think they're quiet. Rift signs BREACH-QUIET. We line. Brick's shield floats a breath ahead of us. I see my reflection there—clone plates patched into Temple cloth, a shoulder bell that remembers hands I don't, a thigh plate with someone else's tallies like prayers.
Rift nods to me. "Blue in hand," he murmurs, which is his way of telling me: Show me you belong.
I thumb the shoto-pike alive. The blue comes out like a line drawn with conviction, short, clean, precise. It hisses, and then it doesn't; sound dampers wrap it in felt. The other end sleeps.
We slide. The first turret winks at us, motor whispering. Frost taps the pivot seam with a shot so quick I almost don't believe it happened. Brick angles the shield to throw the other turret's bead into the corner. I step past his hip, feel the beat between beats, let the blade kiss the turret's throat. The metal slumps like it remembered gravity in a hurry.
"Nice," Burner breathes. "You brought a needle to a gunfight."
"It's a very rude needle," I say.
We take a B1 pair with the blade backwards, hilt-first to the chest plates, under the vocoder. Thunk-thunk. They fold like cheap lawn furniture. Doc catches one before it clatters. Jackal peels a badge off another's neck chain with an absent tenderness that would seem creepy if you didn't know he catalogs enemy habits like a historian with a grudge.
Bad Company teaches economy. Every move is a question: is this movement necessary? If yes, is there a quieter way to do it? If no, why are you moving? They burn that into you until you stop telling yourself stories about how fast you are and start being correct instead.
Personalities bleed through the mask. Rift is a metronome—one that speeds up only when it's time and slows everyone else down when they want to panic. Burner hums under his breath, little melodic fragments that bloom into math when he's wiring a charge. Doc narrates vitals to himself like a gossip column: "You're pale, you're lying, you're overconfident—stop that." Spark has mercy for machines and contempt for lazy code. Frost loves silence like some men love prostitutes. Brick tells jokes with his body, shoulders flexing in a pantomime of invulnerability that somehow becomes real because he makes you believe it. Jackal is an instinct with a voice, and when he uses it, I listen.
We slip into the relay room like guilt. The node sits squat in the middle of a workpit, cables braided into the deck like veins. The air hums with low carrier waves. A pair of B1 technicians peck at a console with the tenacity of idiots who haven't been told they're idiots.
"I think the checksum is wrong," one says.
"What's a checksum?" the other asks.
"It's the thing you check."
"Well check it then."
"Roger, roger."
Spark's already there. He pats the node. "Hey ugly," he whispers, glove pins out. "Let's make some bad decisions together."
Rift slices the room into zones with a thought. Brick posts at door one, shield half-grown. Frost dims his world to the sight and the breath. Doc makes a triage station out of a coil of cable and a lie about how things will go. Burner takes out a detonator and then puts it away, like a man setting down his favorite drink because it's not that kind of party.
I flow to Jackal. "Talk to me," I breathe.
He sniffs. His eyes unfocus. He points with his chin. "Coolant. Burnt servo. Someone's been here too long. Someone didn't want to be." He tilts his head. "And… something's wrong with the air."
"What kind of wrong?"
"The kind that remembers fear."
He gives me a look that says stop asking for poetry, we don't have time. I nod. "Copy."
We're thirty seconds into Spark's seduction when the station decides to notice us. Not because Spark makes a mistake—he doesn't—but because one of the B1s finally says, "Hey, why is camera three staring at a sticker?"
"Maybe the sticker is important," the other replies.
"Is it?"
"I don't know. No one tells me anything."
"Roger, roger."
Rift signs SLEEP. I move. The blue hisses long enough to give me a distraction, then I kill it and let the dark swallow the light. I'm on the first B1's back, hand on vocoder, the shoto's blade hissed into life at the cranial seam. Pop. It hiss. Doc catches the other with vibroblade. Spark doesn't even glance up. Beeper spits a filth that would get it written up if it were flesh.
"General," Spark whispers, "we have a problem that looks like an opportunity. Relay node is mirroring to a shadow bus. There's a side-line going somewhere that isn't the Confederacy and isn't us."
"Define 'isn't us,'" Rift says, voice turning mild enough to be dangerous.
"Not GAR. Not CIS. It's… central. Core passphrases. Smells like someone taught a provincial outpost a Coruscant dance."
Doc makes a sound that means this is above his pay grade and he hates that. Frost's jaw tightens. Burner whispers, "Oh, let me blow a secret up." Jackal's nose wrinkles. Brick flexes the shield like he wants to punch a backchannel.
"Hold," I say, too soft to be confidence, just soft enough to be intent. "We take the node. We bottle the shadow without scaring it. Spark, can you spoof and snare?"
"I can make it think it's still talking while we're reading its diary," Spark says, fingers already moving. "But if its owner is awake, they'll feel the lag. I need clean edges. Give me silence."
Rift looks at me over the lip of the pit. He doesn't say orders?. He doesn't need to. I'm the one who talks, but this is a choir.
"Brick, door discipline. Frost, windows. Jackal, smell me a patrol before it exists. Doc, if anyone sees stars, make them see less. Burner, no fireworks unless it buys us time or truth. Spark, trap the ghost and log every whisper. Rift—"
"I'm with Spark," he says. "Because if he lies to you, he's lying to me."
"I never lie," Spark mutters. "I edit."
"General," Doc says, voice dry, "you're running your blue?"
"Only one sting tonight," I say. "We keep the other end asleep."
"You're learning," he says, like it tastes bad but he'll eat it.
We set the hook. Spark's code wraps the shadow bus like a soft net, and Beeper makes a sound so filthy it parses as joy. Frost calls two knocks in the ductwork: patrol's cadence on cheap boots. Brick leans his shield into a wedge that makes their first shot useless if they get stupid. Jackal breathes and tilts his head and points to where the patrol will appear three seconds before it does.
The first B1 steps into the doorway and says, "Halt, who goes—" and then sees Brick. It pauses. "Oh no."
"Roger—" says the second, and then Fire happens in blue and quiet. Stun beads walk the doorway like raindrops. They fall. Doc kicks a leg aside so it won't trigger a pressure plate. Burner sighs, denied. Rift's fingers tap Spark's shoulder twice, code for steady.
The node's lights go from busy to busy-with-a-secret. Spark's HUD starts to scroll: packets, hashes, phrases that shouldn't live out here in the stone. Coruscant fingerprints in a Separatist knuckle.
"Got you," Spark whispers, and for a second he sounds like a man holding a snake right behind its head.
I breathe—in on four, out on six. The saber dead in my hand, asleep, the blue tucked away. My plates squeak against cloth and then don't when I remember to own the weight. The room holds its breath with us.
Respect doesn't happen in a ceremony. It accretes. It forms in the moments between stupid and brave, in how you step when the floor decides it hates you, in how you don't ask men to do things you won't do and then do them first when it's your turn. It forms when you pick up a fallen trooper's shoulder armor and wear it like a promise instead of a trophy. It forms when Frost's silence answers your own, when Brick lets you tuck a shoulder behind his shield and pretends he didn't notice, when Burner hands you a charge and trusts you not to be romantic with it, when Doc jokes about your pulse to keep it from becoming a problem, when Jackal says "left" and you go left without needing to know why, when Rift looks and you understand that leadership in this squad is a verb.
The relay node clicks. Spark grins—a flash of teeth behind his helmet, in a face that's usually busy. "We own the post," he murmurs. "And the ghost is in a jar."
Rift raises two fingers. "We move to phase two," he says, calm like a surgeon. "Lock down, call it in, prep for exfil creative."
"General," Doc says, "you wanted your first report as a Knight to sound important? You're about to earn it."
"Lucky me," I say, dry as bone. The humor tastes good; it keeps the nerves from chewing through.
We fan out to clean the rooms we haven't yet, to gag the alarms that haven't decided how loud they want to be. Brick wedges a door with his shoulder because sometimes wedge is a man. Frost climbs a ladder without moving the ladder. Jackal finds a maintenance bay where someone kept a shrine—not religious, just personal: a collection of patches, a photo of a Neimoidian technician with a kid who looks like a balloon on a stick. The war always remembers to be complicated.
Rift touches his wrist and pulls up a tightbeam. His voice goes professional in a way that isn't cold: "This is Captain CC-190 to High Council channels and Office of the Chancellor, priority Delta. Listening outpost neutralized. Relay node secured. CIS outpost exposed and snared. Awaiting tasking. Package to follow."
He looks at me. "Your call, General."
I nod, throat dry. "Transmit the packet to the Council first," I say. "Then the Chancellor. Copy the NavInt liaisons. Label the shadow as unknown Core sig, suspected third-party, transmit this just to the Jedi Council, recommend immediate analysis with no outward reaction until we know who's playing with our wires."
Spark's fingers blur. "On your mark."
I flick the blue alive in my hand for a second—just a beat of color in a room that forgot what color was. It paints the plates on my arm, the scuffs that used to be someone else's. I kill it. I breathe.
"Mark," I say.
The node sings—a thin, spiteful little sound—and the burst goes out into the belt, into the emptiness between stones, toward Coruscant and people who will read this and decide whether we get more men or less, more truth or none. The light on Spark's HUD goes green.
Frost lifts his head like a wolf that just heard something only wolves hear. "Footfalls," he whispers. "Not droids."
Jackal's nostrils flare. "Organic. Sweaty. Scared."
Rift's visor turns toward the corridor we came in. His hand makes a shape I haven't seen before. It means change.
"Bad Company," he says, voice gentle in my ear. "We've got company."
I slide the shoto-pike half-open, one blade alive, the other end still quiet as a promise I haven't cashed. Brick's shield blooms. Burner smiles like a man who hears music. Spark pats the node like it's a dog you're leaving alone for longer than you meant to. Doc pulls a patch off with his teeth. Jackal bares his, just a little. Frost's sight breathes.
"General," Rift says. "Time to be first in again."
"And last out," I answer, and the deck under us hums like it agrees.
Outside, in the black between stars, the message runs hot toward the High Council and the Chancellor. Inside, in the hum and the breath and the metal that pretends it isn't listening, we turn to face whatever thought it could walk in here and find us unready.