Arc Ten: "R.G.A."
My ribs still ached a little, even after all this time. Pushing through the discomfort, I signed off on the last document on the terminal screen with a steady stroke. Order 814-C: the immediate imposition of an emergency administrative quarantine and a full lockdown of the Techno Union's central distribution warehouses within the capital's boundaries. I'd done my best to make the official justification sound convincing: "Prevention of a large-scale data leak to Galactic Republic intelligence services."
Leaning back in the tall chair in my office, I turned over the recent events in my mind. Dooku and Sidious no doubt already suspected me of playing both sides — they were probably fairly sure by now that Grievous had been sent after me specifically, and that I was the one who'd picked up Maul. But my official standing as Special Commissioner on Raxus Secundus was still valid in the planetary network, and that was the main vulnerability I intended to exploit for everything it was worth.
No question, the moment word of what I was doing here reached the Count, he'd shut it all down instantly — and his enforcers were probably already flying in, if they hadn't landed already. Which was exactly why I hadn't fled somewhere safe to lick my wounds, and had instead marched right into the enemy's den.
Say what you like, but the Confederacy of Independent Systems' bureaucratic machine was every bit as sluggish as the Republic's. Revoking the authority of an official at my rank required verification through three separate offices, sign-off from the legal department on Geonosis, and a personal signature from someone on the Separatist Council. While that chain of signals crawled through encrypted channels toward its recipients, while everyone up there hashed it out, I could grab everything that wasn't nailed down. What was nailed down properly, I wouldn't have time to pry loose — well, so be it.
My little parting gift to Dooku, the one I'd just signed into effect, was guaranteed to tie up local security forces. Bases cut off from supply and terminals locked down would force them to burn precious hours chasing explanations through courts and command staffs, drawing attention away from us, keeping every troublesome eye pointed somewhere else while I worked.
Honestly, the fact that I'd managed to sneak onto Raxus at all, I owe entirely to our "not at all a hostage," Baron Aurelius.
When our infiltrator got stuck in the asteroid field with a fried hyperdrive and a barely-functional Grievous — the whole reason we were in this mess in the first place — we'd had to find someone willing to selflessly help people (and not just people) caught in such a... delicate situation.
And wouldn't you know it, luck smiled on us! I happened to have a hosta— ahem, a strategic partner, who quite voluntarily (and absolutely not under threat of exposing our little arrangement) sent us a heavy automated freighter belonging to the Intergalactic Banking Clan, one with "top commercial priority," whatever that actually meant. He'd said it with such gravity that surely it had to be worth something. Right?
And so this unremarkable little ship arrived at the asteroid field, swallowed our battered infiltrator into its hold, and set course for the Separatist capital. Raxus's orbital scanners didn't even bother checking the ship's internal manifests, since Aurelius's commercial codes granted it full customs immunity. The freighter touched down without incident in the underground, radar-shielded dock beneath my modest quarters. Grievous was down there now, on the lower level, and he'd have to sit tight there a while longer. The local droids, for what it's worth, promised to patch up the ship in a couple of hours.
Sighing, I glanced out the window, taking in the deceptive calm of the view, while somewhere in the corner of the office, at the hidden backup comm terminal, came the steady, rapid clatter of keys. Elara had been working nonstop for two hours now, coordinating the final phase of our financial operation. I didn't even try to interfere with her work, freely admitting my total incompetence when it came to end-to-end encryption and cracking banking networks (she wasn't working alone, by the way — she'd remotely brought in every available specialist R.G.A. had). My job was the overall planning of the operation, and handing out instructions to people better qualified in their respective fields.
From the bits and pieces she'd explained to me, Elara was using Aurelius's archived files, his personal digital signatures, and the hidden debt obligations of various high-ranking CIS officials, and bulldozing her way through the Intergalactic Banking Clan's internal firewalls with mixed but steady success. Right at that moment, for instance, another sweeping transfer of enormous volumes of liquid assets was underway, drawn from a pile of various hidden accounts. All the money pulled this way was funneling into dozens of anonymous shell-company accounts scattered across the Mid Rim. That money was going to let R.G.A. expand and deepen production of its own army.
The silence of the office was broken by a sharp, high-pitched alert tone. The projector at the center of the room flickered, and the navigational map of Raxus gave way to a tactical grid rapidly filling with warning-orange light.
"Brutus, we've got a problem." Elara didn't even turn her head; her fingers kept flying across the input panel. "The Banking Clan's central AI on Muunilinst has flagged a critical volume of simultaneous withdrawals. They've identified Aurelius's codes as compromised and triggered a hardware-level trace-back protocol. That's bad news, in case it wasn't obvious — we're probably about to be found."
"How much time do we have?" I asked, trying to sound calm, though the sharp movement made my ribs flare up again — not severe, but damn unpleasant.
"I don't know, maybe twelve minutes," Elara said, frowning. "In about twelve minutes, at the outside, their defense systems will remotely fry the physical boards on the terminal I'm using and lock down every transaction we haven't managed to confirm. We need to hold this connection open no matter what, or more than half the funds will get stuck in the buffer zones..."
Before I could finish processing that, the tactical panel threw up a new warning. The bottom indicator, tied to the building's external life-support systems, lit up a steady red.
"External power to the private landing platform's been cut," Elara reported flatly, finally looking up from the screen at me. "The backup cable lines have been severed from outside. The ground security sensors around the villa's perimeter have stopped transmitting. No attack reports or distress calls have come in from the patrol droids, but their signals just... disappeared. Looks like they got taken out too fast to report anything."
I walked over to the holographic display and pulled up the feed from the passive thermal sensors, which were running on internal battery. At the far edge of the landing pad, right by the entrance to the residential block, seven distinct silhouettes were clearly visible. One moved ahead of the others with a grace no ordinary person could match, while the remaining four advanced in jerky, distinctly mechanical movements, heavy weapons held plainly in view.
BX-series commando droids. Elite tactical units, programmed to eliminate high-value targets. And leading them, judging by the figure out front, was Count Dooku's personal assassin — Asajj Ventress. That it was specifically her who'd shown up, I could only call luck — though thinking about it rationally, there weren't exactly many other candidates close enough to send.
There wasn't time for lengthy deliberation. The strike team was already thirty meters from the office's front door, and I wasn't exactly in fighting shape at the moment.
In theory, if we cut the transactions and cleared out fast, we could make it without much trouble through the villa's underground maintenance tunnel to Aurelius's automated freighter. But doing that would cost us an enormous sum of money — without which the whole organization would remain equipped at roughly the level of some middling Outer Rim pirates. So really, there wasn't much of a choice to make.
"I'll go stretch my legs," I sighed glumly. "Ignore their protocols — let them burn whatever they want to burn, just squeeze as much as you can out of them before they do."
She only gave a brief nod, not even turning around, and the speed of her fingers on the keys picked up even more. I activated the secure comm channel on my wrist plate, calling down to the apartment's lower repair dock.
"General, can you hear me?" I said quietly.
A heavy, broken metallic cough came through the speaker, giving way to Grievous's rasping, rumbling bass. "I hear you, Sith. My servos are locked down by your repair system, but that doesn't mean I'm useless. What do you want?"
"We've got a CIS strike team on the grounds, led by Ventress. You can't... ah, physically fight right now, but you can help another way." I tried to sound as friendly as possible — we were allies, after all. "Patch into the internal surveillance system of my quarters through the dock terminal. I need you to intercept the local combat frequency the BX droids are using, the second they cross the threshold of the office."
"The tin cans run on standard Techno Union encrypted protocols," the cyborg replied after a brief pause. "There's genuinely something I can do about that. You're right to ask."
"Good. Wait for my signal." I cut the connection and turned toward the door.
Darth Maul was already standing at the entrance, his back against the durasteel doorframe, deep in the shadow of the doorway. His yellow organic eyes glowed faintly in the dim light of the corridor, and in one hand he was tossing the cut-down hilt of what had once been his double-bladed lightsaber — a weapon he'd apparently been keeping on him this whole time. His brother must have given it back to him at some point, though the Zabrak had never mentioned it, and we hadn't seen it on him before. Probably some kind of backup plan, or something like that — didn't matter right now. Over the past while, we'd fitted him with proper prosthetic legs to replace the horror-show he'd originally had, so he looked a good deal more... compact, let's say.
"The witch will come in first," Maul said calmly, not looking at me. "I've studied what's available on her. She's overconfident, used to her targets flinching at the mere sight of her — she'll walk right into our hands."
"No doubt. Your job is to take her charge and lock her into close combat. I'll deal with her escort." I opened the internal comm to the lower technical level. "Kem, they're coming through the central corridor. Three BX droids are guaranteed to end up right over the maintenance hatch under the office floor. Wait for my signal, and quit growling — I can hear you from here! There's about to be a fight, understood?"
The only reply from the speaker was a heavy, agreeable grunt from the Dashade.
For once, I actually had a real advantage in raw power — a nice change from facing "the Chosen One, his apprentice, and his master" more or less alone, with only Kem for backup.
Finally, after some stretch of time — I deliberately avoided checking the clock — the office's armored durasteel door shuddered under a powerful, focused blow as its magnetic locks disengaged. A second later came the deafening crack of a thermal detonator planted at the seams of the frame. A blinding flash momentarily dazzled anyone who hadn't thought to shield their eyes, and the room was instantly swallowed in thick, gray-blue smoke mixed with shredded insulation and hull debris.
Ventress leapt into the room, clearly using the Force to accelerate her movement. Both her curved lightsabers ignited with their characteristic dry snap-hiss, bathing the smoke in a steady red glow. She was aiming straight for the depths of the office, expecting to reach me at the desk in an instant — but her calculations were off.
From the blind spot right behind the doorframe, utterly silent, Darth Maul surged out to meet her. His blade sliced through the air with a whistling arc, aimed squarely at her neck.
Ventress reacted — purely on Force instinct, it seemed. At the last possible instant she shifted her trajectory, throwing up a rigid cross-block with her two sabers. A deafening crack of clashing plasma rang out, red sparks scattering in every direction. Maul's attack folded into a hard, fast clinch, and he began methodically forcing his attacker back toward the panoramic window.
At that same moment, the commando droids poured through the shattered doorway at a speed no ordinary mind could match. Their gray metal frames leaned slightly forward, their long E-5s blaster barrels already rising to open crossfire into Maul's back while he was locked in the duel.
"Your turn, 'General'!" I said with a grin, taking a step back.
Grievous's triumphant chuckle came through the central terminal's speakers, and an instant later the droids' photoreceptors flickered erratically, their limbs freezing mid-step, weapon barrels swinging off-target.
I stretched my right hand out, focuser in hand. Every mental effort sent a dull throb through my chest, but I gritted through it and pulled together every bit of strength I could still muster — not yet fully recovered from healing — and decided on a plain shove rather than my usual lightning, worried about frying something important in the electronics.
I wasn't aiming for the droids themselves — their heavy gyros and reinforced composite plating could easily shrug off a direct telekinetic push, and I couldn't afford to burn precious energy on a drawn-out standoff. Instead, my Force strike went straight for the seams in the durasteel decking directly beneath their heavy metal feet.
The focused impulse hit the structural mounts under the decorative flooring.
A deafening, grinding screech of tearing metal rang out. The support beams holding that section of floor above the level below snapped under the sudden overload of physical pressure. The metal plate dropped away, and all four disoriented BX droids tumbled through the two-meter gap with a heavy metallic crash, falling straight down onto the lower technical deck.
An instant later, Kem's low, guttural growl rose up from the darkness of the maintenance shaft below. From beneath came the unmistakable screech of tearing plating, the dry crunch of servos and hydraulics giving way. Our slightly feral friend was clearly having entirely too much fun down there, methodically reducing elite commando droids to twisted scrap, popping heads and shattering actuators with precise blows from his weapon.
Ventress, meanwhile, had lost quite a bit of her earlier self-assurance and confidence in an easy win, but there was nothing she could do about it. Maul kept up his heavy, chopping strikes, forcing her to burn all her concentration just holding a defense. The attackers' tactical advantage had been completely wiped out in a matter of seconds — and then...
The trap snapped fully shut when another silhouette appeared in the ruined doorway: Varja, stepping smoothly over the smoking wreckage of a droid, cutting off Ventress's last escape route through the corridor. She looked over Dooku's cornered lieutenant, pinned against the window, and her expression settled into open, cold contempt. Two daughters of Dathomir meeting in an official office on Raxus — and this reunion clearly wasn't going to be a pleasant one for the bald witch.
"Well, well. Asajj Ventress herself. Still running errands for a decrepit old count, still mopping up his messes across the galaxy? Pathetic. All this time, and you never found a way to free yourself? You traded your pride for a slave collar..."
Ventress bared her teeth in a vicious snarl, breathing hard, barely managing to parry another of Maul's chopping strikes. Red sparks from the clashing blades briefly lit up her contorted face.
"You know nothing about my goals!" she said, with something like buried sorrow in her voice, ducking away from a diagonal cut from the Zabrak. "Leave, Sister, or... I don't want to hurt you, but I've been ordered to kill this idiot."
"Oh, so you're only here for me, and for this little rendezvous of ours you won't even spare a word for your 'sister'? How sweet — but my answer's still the same. Grow your hair back first." I said it dryly, sidestepping just enough to keep her in view, until suddenly both witches turned identically disapproving looks in my direction. Ah, there it is — that famous solidarity among women.
Ventress attempted a sharp feint, hoping to slip past Maul toward the exit, but we weren't about to let this turn into some noble one-on-one duel for the crowd's entertainment. Varja's hands snapped up instantly, gathering the Force for a strike. I raised my own hand with the focuser too. Maul, catching our shared intent, disengaged in perfect sync and added his own mental pressure to the combined effort. Before the fight, I'd asked the Zabrak, quite seriously, not to kill the poor witch if it really did come down to her being sent to finish me off — not that I'd developed some sudden warmth for her, just that, knowing her backstory and what was waiting for her, I felt for her.
A triple concentrated pulse of the Force slammed into Ventress almost simultaneously. Not even a trained Dark Side assassin can hold a block in a confined space against that much directed kinetic force.
The Force blow sent Ventress flying backward. If we'd hit with everything we had, I doubt she'd have survived it, but as it was, the witch managed at the very last instant to partially redirect the impulse with her own body, slamming full-force into one of the office's massive panoramic windows just to the right of the door. The thick glass shattered with a deafening ring into thousands of tiny fragments, and Ventress, tumbling through the air, was flung out into open space beyond.
I lowered my hand, exhaling hard through clenched teeth. Maul extinguished his lightsaber with a quiet hiss and clipped it back to his belt, while Varja brushed a bit of settled dust off her sleeve with obvious distaste, taking stock of the damage.
"Done," Elara said, breaking the awkward silence that had settled over the room, slamming her palm onto the backup terminal's panel hard enough to switch the orange interface grid over to steady green text. "The Banking Clan's AI would've fried this node in another forty seconds, but I got the data packets sealed in time. Transaction's ninety-eight percent complete. Forty-two trillion credits are now scattered across transit accounts throughout the Mid Rim."
I didn't bother wasting time walking over to the shattered window to check where Ventress had ended up. She wasn't a child; she'd manage on her own. Our plan called for moving straight to phase two before Dooku could cut through all the bureaucracy with a couple of well-placed orders — something he was more than capable of doing, thankfully, only once he actually understood the scale of the mess I'd left him.
"Elara, upload my 'trojan,'" I ordered, leaning heavily on the edge of the one surviving desk. "All the decrypted files on General Grievous's case, with my commentary and additional notes, straight into the central network trunk."
I'd always freely admitted my weakness when it came to programming and network protocols, preferring to leave the technical work to specialists, but I knew the structure and vulnerabilities of the local media system quite well. Back when I'd studied the archived logistics data for Raxus Secundus, I'd noted that the capital's entire information network ran through three main HoloNet relay towers, which distributed signals to the government districts and residential sectors. Legally, as Special Commissioner, I held a priority access code to those nodes for emergency public broadcasts. The planet's local AI accepted our files without the usual moderation checks.
The data package held two key pieces. First, everything I'd managed to dig up on Count Dooku's negotiations with representatives of the Intergalactic Banking Clan, where they'd discussed eliminating Grievous and having the Confederacy wipe out his personal flagship. Second, the binary system-command logs bearing Darth Sidious's master codes, the ones that had forced CIS droids to open fire on their own Supreme Commander. And all of it was seasoned with a bit of my own... let's call them interpretations, which subtly shifted how the public would understand the material.
"The feed's live," Elara said, glancing over at the general network monitors. "The signal's duplicating across all three channels at full power. I'd bet they can't shut it down for at least fifteen, twenty minutes."
I pulled up the CIS Senate's open channels on my datapad. The live broadcast from the main assembly hall cut off mid-speech from some corporate delegate. In place of his face, millions of terminals across the planet began looping recordings of the conspiracy and technical reports on the "betrayal of high command" against their own General — who had, supposedly, uncovered some corruption scheme and wanted to expose it to the public. Very convenient, really, that right after that he'd been shipped off to some junk-heap planet to hunt down some mysterious "enemy" that turned out not to exist, and then his flagship got hacked, and then Republic ships showed up and blew him out of the sky.
On the street screens of the government district, visible through the hole torn in the wall, the usual news bulletins had already switched over. The information attack had completely paralyzed the Senate — senators from civilian sectors, kept in the dark about Dooku's secret plans, were now demanding immediate answers from the Techno Union and Banking Clan representatives.
I activated a hidden encrypted comm channel to Mina Bonteri. Our small faction, the Dawn, had been waiting for exactly this moment.
"Mina, the code's live," I said into the vocoder. "CIS leadership is completely discredited. The civilian split has started. You've got exactly ten minutes to get the people out."
"We're already moving, Brutus," her voice came through steady, without excess emotion, like someone well-practiced at handling a crisis. "Faction coordinators are directing loyal senators to the southern hangars. Heavy transports are warming up their reactors."
"Good. Take the third sublinear route — it's clear right now thanks to my lockdown on the Techno Union warehouses. We'll meet at the designated point."
I switched off the datapad and turned to Maul. "We're heading down. Time to collect the General."
...
We went down the maintenance stairs to the underground dock. Kem was already waiting for us by the boarding ramp of the automated freighter. The Dashade's massive body was covered in dark stains of hydraulic fluid from the BX droids he'd taken apart, and his right hand still gripped a heavy vibro-axe (his choice for variety this time), its blade warped from repeated impacts. Kem gave a short growl, baring his fangs — sometimes I genuinely wonder if our "hospitable" Dashade has some Warhammer ork genes buried in there somewhere. Maybe he caught some kind of fungus back on his home planet? The man honestly gets off on every single fight.
Inside the cargo hold, on the repair cradle, lay Grievous. His life-support systems were getting just enough power to function; his organic eyes, visible through the slits in his mask, darted around wildly, tracking our every movement, but he still couldn't move.
"Loading's complete," Elara reported, hurrying past me toward the pilot's seat. "I've synced the freighter's navigation computer with our flight plans. The ship will run on an automated vector, using Aurelius's commercial transponder."
I settled into the copilot's seat, well aware that if the automatics failed, my help would be minimal at best — manual control of a heavy freighter through dense atmosphere had never been one of my strong points. The underground dock's heavy doors ground open. The freighter lifted smoothly off its support cradles, fired its reverse thrusters, and shot at full speed into the ventilation shaft leading up to the planet's surface.
Raxus Secundus fell away behind us, wrapped in a web of panicked alerts and the wail of civil defense sirens. We climbed to an altitude of thirty kilometers, preparing to reach low orbit for the jump to hyperspace.
Suddenly, the freighter's entire instrument panel flooded with rapid, pulsing crimson light. The warning buzzer for detected missile threats and large space objects screamed at maximum frequency.
"Brutus, look at the mass sensors!" Elara shouted, her fingers rapidly rerouting power to our ship's deflector shields. "Massive gravitational disturbances just registered in sector three-oh-two. That's not CIS forces."
I looked at the tactical radar. Directly along our flight path, in flagrant violation of every navigational safety rule, heavy gray silhouettes were beginning to appear, dropping out of hyperspace dangerously close to Raxus's upper atmosphere. One after another, massive ships with their distinctive wedge-shaped hulls and red hull markings emerged from the fold in space.
Venator-class Star Destroyers. Three full Galactic Republic strike fleets.
It seemed Republic intelligence had reacted far faster than expected to the total chaos now flooding Separatist communications and the sudden paralysis of their defense coordination network, caused by the leaked master codes. Confederacy space was collapsing in real time, and Coruscant hadn't let the opportunity slip by. The lead Republic ships, led by Jedi, opened up immediately with everything they had, all main batteries blazing, against the CIS's orbital defense stations — which hadn't even had time to raise their shields.
"Yeah, no — there's no way I'm trusting this tin can's autopilot brain with a situation like this." Elara swore under her breath, switching to manual control, wrestling with the freighter's heavy yoke as it began shaking violently from the surrounding shockwaves. "Our path to the hyperspace jump point is completely blocked by crossfire. We're going to have to punch straight through the middle of the fleet engagement!"
Ahead of us, in the black void of space, a massive battle was unfolding, and our lumbering cargo shuttle had ended up squeezed right between the dying CIS stations and the advancing Republic Venators.
"Well. This is... a situation," I said wearily, utterly at a loss, since it was the only thing that came to mind.