Imperial Mining Outpost, Southern Spice-Fields, Lothal6 BBY (Eight Weeks After Circuit Establishment)
Intelligence arrived in fragments, pieces of a larger pattern that Ezra assembled over three days of careful observation and targeted questioning.
Governor Arihnda Pryce was moving resources. Not the usual bureaucratic shuffling that characterized Imperial administration, but a concentrated mobilization that suggested something significant enough to warrant her personal attention. Heavy transport convoys, mining machinery beyond standard operational requirements, doonium shipments that exceeded the factory's documented capacity.
The TIE Defender program was expanding.
Ezra crouched in the shadows of a derelict moisture vaporator, watching the mining outpost through macrobinoculars he'd acquired from a fence in Capital City.
Three days of surveillance had mapped patrol patterns, shift rotations, the rhythms of an operation designed more for volume than security. The Empire's fundamental arrogance worked in his favor here. They assumed their authority created safety, that fear alone would prevent interference with their operations.
That assumption would cost them tonight.
Behind him, concealed in the shallow depression that had served as their staging point, four others waited. Not the professionals Vizago would have assigned, but the operators Ezra had recruited through his circuit. Young, desperate, motivated by hatred of the Empire that transcended mere profit seeking.
Jari was nineteen, her family killed in the factory explosion that had taken Ezra's parents. She moved with the controlled violence of someone who'd been waiting years for an opportunity to strike back.
Brothers Kol and Tem, sixteen and seventeen respectively, had watched Imperial labor conscription take their father six months ago. He hadn't returned, and inquiries had been met with bureaucratic indifference that made his fate clear enough.
And Sella, barely fifteen, whose sister had been detained by ISB for speaking against Imperial policy in a school assignment. The sister's body had been returned three weeks later with the official cause of death listed as "resisting arrest."
They were children playing at insurgency, and Ezra was leading them into an operation that could get them all killed. The moral weight of that responsibility should have been paralyzing, but he'd discovered over the past months that paralyzing guilt was another luxury survival didn't permit.
"Convoy's loading now," Jari whispered, moving up beside him to peer through her own set of optics. "Four transports, looks like doubled guard complement from what we expected."
Ezra tracked the movement, eight guards visible, probably another four inside the transports themselves. Standard Imperial Army rather than Stormtroopers, which meant actual combat training instead of intimidation through uniform.
The target itself was almost absurdly valuable. Reinforced doonium crates destined for the factory complex, their contents critical to the expanded production capacity Pryce had been building. Destroying them wouldn't halt the Defender program, but it would create delays that rippled through supply chains and production schedules. More importantly, it would signal that Imperial operations on Lothal weren't as secure as Pryce presented to her superiors.
Failure here meant punishment for her. Success for Ezra meant one less competent Imperial administrator in position to oppose the Rebellion when it finally manifested.
"We hit them at the junction point," Ezra said, his voice pitched low enough that it wouldn't carry beyond their immediate position. "Tem and Kol disable the lead transport with the ion charges. Jari and Sella provide covering fire from the ridge positions. I'll handle the actual demolition once the convoy's stopped."
"You're going in alone?" Sella asked, her expression cycling between concern and something that might have been admiration.
"Alone means fast. Fast means we're gone before reinforcements arrive."
It was true, though incomplete. The real reason was that Ezra had capabilities he couldn't explain and didn't want witnessed. His Force abilities had been growing through constant use and meditation, developing from tentative awareness into something approaching reliable utility. He could sense threats before they materialized, move with speed and precision that exceeded normal human capacity, manipulate small objects through channels that defied physical explanation.
They moved into position as the convoy began its departure sequence, spreading out to predetermined locations that provided overlapping fields of fire and multiple escape routes. Ezra had learned from the canyon ambush that operations succeeded or failed based on how well you planned for things going wrong. Every contingency needed addressing, every failure mode required a response protocol.
The convoy pulled out right on schedule, following the route Ezra had predicted based on three days of pattern analysis. Four heavy transports moving in tight formation, guard speeders bracketing their position.
Ezra waited until the convoy reached the junction point, a narrow passage between two rock formations that limited maneuverability. His hand moved in the prearranged signal, and Tem triggered the ion charges they'd planted during the previous night's infiltration.
The electromagnetic pulse washed across the lead transport, frying its control systems and sending it lurching sideways into the rocks. The driver tried to compensate but without functioning repulsors the transport became dead weight governed by momentum and gravity. It crashed with spectacular violence, blocking the passage and forcing the following vehicles into emergency stops.
Guards poured out, training overriding confusion, taking defensive positions that would have been effective against conventional attack. But this wasn't conventional, and Ezra had planned for exactly this response.
Jari and Sella opened fire from their elevated positions, blaster bolts stitching red patterns through the growing darkness.
They weren't aiming to kill, just suppress, keep the guards focused on immediate threats while Ezra moved in from the blind side.
He sprinted across open ground that should have been fatal to cross, but the Force sang through his awareness and he could feel the trajectories of incoming fire, sense the attention patterns of soldiers whose focus remained fixed on the visible threats. His body moved through spaces between perception, exploiting gaps in awareness that lasted only fractions of seconds but created corridors of safety through lethal crossfire.
The transport's rear door yielded to the plasma cutter he'd carried for exactly this purpose, its lock melting under directed heat. Inside, the doonium crates sat secured to cargo racks, their contents worth more than Ezra would see in years of smuggling operations.
He placed the charges and used the Force to guide placement in ways that would maximize destruction while minimizing the time required for setup. The timers got set to three minutes, enough for extraction but not enough for Imperial bomb disposal if they somehow identified the threat before detonation.
Blaster fire intensified outside, the guards having identified Sella's position and concentrating fire that would overwhelm her cover within seconds.
Ezra felt her fear spike through the Force, she was pinned down with no escape route.
His hand extended toward a boulder near the guards' position, and the Force surged through channels he'd been learning to access. The boulder shifted, moved and accelerated with force that had no physical origin. It crashed into the guard formation, scattering them and buying Sella the seconds she needed to reposition.
But that display had cost him. One of the guards, sharper than his companions or just lucky enough to be looking the right direction, saw Ezra standing at the transport's entrance. Their eyes met across the chaos, and in that moment Ezra saw recognition form. Not of his face or identity, but of what he was. What he'd done.
The guard's blaster came up.
Ezra threw himself sideways as the bolt seared past his head, rolled, came up with his own weapon clearing its holster. He fired twice, both shots hitting center mass, the guard dropping with that sudden limpness that defined transition from living person to corpse.
More guards were turning toward him now. Ezra ran, activating the charges' timers as he cleared the transport, trusting his team to provide covering fire while he crossed the kill zone between convoy and safety.
Tem's voice crackled through the comm unit. "Incoming speeders, multiple contacts, they must have had a patrol nearby!"
The timeline collapsed. What should have been a controlled extraction became desperate flight, all five of them scrambling toward escape routes while Imperial reinforcements closed from multiple vectors.
The charges detonated.
The explosion was massive, far larger than Ezra had anticipated.
The doonium crates had contained something volatile, some component that reacted catastrophically to the shaped plasma. The convoy simply ceased to exist in any meaningful sense, vaporized in an expanding sphere of superheated gas and shrapnel.
The shockwave hit Ezra like a physical blow, lifting him off his feet and sending him tumbling across ground that suddenly felt liquid. His ears rang, vision swimming, consciousness threatening to fragment into static and darkness.
But the Force kept him aware, kept him moving even when his body wanted to surrender to unconsciousness. He could feel his team scattered around him, feel Jari pulling herself upright, Kol helping his brother to his feet, Sella already running toward the extraction point they'd designated.
The Imperial speeders arrived to find a crater where the convoy had been and five figures disappearing into the mining tunnels that honeycombed the region. They gave chase, but the tunnels were Ezra's territory, mapped through months of exploration.
They lost the pursuit within twenty minutes, emerging from a different tunnel entrance three kilometers from the ambush site. Behind them, orange light painted the sky as secondary explosions continued consuming whatever the initial blast had left intact.
The extraction had been messier than planned, but successful by the only metric that ultimately mattered. They'd all survived, and the Empire had lost resources critical to their expanded operations.
They regrouped at a safe house in the outskirts of Jhothal, a abandoned farm building that Ezra had secured through his circuit connections. For several minutes they just sat there, breathing hard, letting adrenaline crash transform into exhaustion and delayed shock.
"T-That was insane," Kol finally said, voice shaking with the kind of manic energy that followed near-death experiences. "Did you see that explosion? It was like the whole world caught fire."
"We could have died," Tem countered, his pragmatism reasserting itself now that immediate danger had passed. "If those reinforcements had arrived thirty seconds earlier, we'd all be in Imperial detention right now."
"But they didn't," Jari said. Her expression carried something harder than triumph, closer to grim satisfaction. "We hurt them. Really hurt them. Everything they took from us, tonight we took something back."
Ezra listened to them process the operation, heard in their voices the transformation that violence created in people.
"What do we do next?" Sella asked, her eyes finding Ezra with the kind of expectation that came from recognizing leadership regardless of age.
"We wait," he said. "Let the Empire scramble, watch how they respond, identify the gaps their reaction creates. Then we exploit those gaps before they close."
It was the truth, though incomplete. What he didn't say was that this operation had been as much about testing his team as hurting the Empire. Seeing how they performed under pressure, whether they could follow orders when chaos transformed planning into improvisation, if they possessed the capability to become something more than desperate kids playing at rebellion.
They'd passed that test. Which meant the real work could begin.
Hours later, alone in his tower while Lothal's moons tracked across the sky, Ezra accessed the Imperial news feeds through his encrypted datapad. The official story was already forming. A terrorist attack on Imperial logistics, multiple casualties among loyal personnel, investigation ongoing with suspects identified.
But reading between the propaganda, he could detect the underlying panic. Governor Pryce's ambitious expansion had just hit a significant setback, the kind that made superiors question competence and reliability. She'd be scrambling now, trying to contain damage both physical and political.
Good. Let her scramble.