A run-down house in the slums of Shul’hul’ab, capital city of Cal Tablaue. The Arkanisis star system. This place still feels like the arse-end of the galaxy, even after sitting just over the core from Coruscant for more than half a century. The house is ratty and dark. It looks old, looks older than those around it. Looks like a stiff wind or a strong arm would knock it over without much effort.

Julius charges the front door shoulder-first; puts his weight into it. It crumbles and he falls through. Chau watches, nervous. He didn’t expect it to go so easily. A quick look up the street to make sure no-one saw them, then he ducks inside and closes what’s left of the door on the chill night.

There’s not much to look at. They take off their masks, and neither speak as they explore the first floor, Julius with his Imperial-issue detection equipment, Chau his eyes, hands, nose and ears. He starts in the hallway:

Long. Dark. Damp smell, like there’s some hidden leak welling up behind the wallpaper. Chau reaches out and touches it, faded and half scraped off, and is surprised to find real wood underneath. He smiles and moves on.

Kitchen. A quick, easy walk from the front door. Not clean enough to eat out of, not very homey, but there’s another door leading into the living room from here. Chau sees Julius in there, checking the sofa for bugs:

“This place used to be a farmhouse?” Chau asks. He moves over to the sink and tries the tap. Nothing.

Julius comes through the door. “Long time ago. Record says it was abandoned back around the fall of the Zhao dynasty. Hell, they might even have been sympathisers.” He hadn’t even checked his fact sheets. Chau smirks. Just like his dad.

“Wouldn’t that be ironic.”

They finish in the kitchen and head upstairs together. Here there’s no wooden walls, just the faded marks showing where the roof was attached as a hasty extension. Creak creak, up the stairs together and into the bedrooms:

On the left of the landing is a small room, furnished for a girl. Chau looks in. The bed sheets are awry and covered in dust, children’s clothes strewn about the floor and the whole room flooded with moonlight from a broken window. Chau catches a glimpse of the street outside, backs out quickly and moves to the side of the door: “Julius.”

Julius comes around behind him slowly, peeks his head through the door, and glares meaningfully at the broken window. “Right.” He moves into the room with a purpose, pulls the bed sheets up rough, throws dust everywhere. Now there’s a stapling machine in his hand and he’s covering the broken window with the sheets, securing them round the frame, sealing them tight until he can find something better to take their place. Chau comes into the room and nods his satisfaction. He turns to continue searching the first floor, but Julius:

“You’re taking this whole thing very calmly ... sorry.” Chau stops and turns to look at him. “I’m your friend, you know that, not just your old buddy’s son (‘cause I know the kind of stock you leave off families). We can talk while we do this. Your brother was a good man, I knew him, I know this has got to hurt so ... ”

Chau stands in the doorway, one foot in and one out, thinking. A minute passes, then: “ ... Ok. Thanks for the sentiment, but I’ve got to think about this for a while. Just ... ”

“Ok, I understand.”

“I’m still in shock, I think. I just have to ... think. Come on, let’s finish,” Chau turns and leaves, Julius follows him and they check the rest of the first floor: master bedroom, bathroom, a cramped attic accessed from a small stairway off the landing. The beams press down on Chau from above as Julius checks for bugs. They find none. Retreat downstairs.

“You should get some rest,” Julius says, closing his eyes and slumping on the couch. Chau stands by the fireplace, looking into the dead black. Julius has closed all of the blinds, sealed, and now the only light comes from a small emergency bulb from a soldier’s survival kit, stood on a fold-out tripod in the middle of the bare floor. “God!” Julius opens his eyes, starts, gets to his feet:

“I’m sorry, almost fell asleep there. Wah. Feels like we’ve been running for all of a month. Can’t even keep track any more ... ” Chau smiles again at this.

“A month. Yea, I suppose it could be as long.” Chau checks his chrono. Paces up and down:

“Four hours fifteen minutes since we flew in to Shul. Seventeen hours, give or take a half, since we broke orbit.”

“You don’t have to say it.” Chau ignores him:

“Fifty-two hours since you charged into my house on Syvn and pulled me onto the emergency shuttle.” Julius winces in anticipation. “Fifty-three hours since the Zhao militia assassinated my brother and staged their fucking coup. Fifty ... ”

“I’ll allow you the melodrama because of the shock, but let’s keep our heads, eh?”

“ ... Shut up.”

They’re both silent for a while. After a time Julius sits back down, and soon sleeps.

Chau spends the next few hours cleaning the kitchen. He doesn’t know how long he’ll have to stay in the safe house. Imperial High Command should intervene soon, he tells himself. Imperial High Command will intervene soon, he tells himself. My brother is dead, he tells himself.

My brother is dead.

Chau scrubs the hard-to-reach place under the taps with a sponge, shifting decades worth of dirt and mould. Some of it comes off under his stubby fingernails, some stays. There’s a world of life down here, out of sunlight’s reach.

Then it hits him: My brother is dead. Tao is dead.

Chau looses his legs beside the kitchen sink; doesn’t cry.

Two: The Girl In The Holo

Chau and Julius have been living in the safe house for a week. They eat army rations that remind Chau of his first tour; long nights sleeping on a rain-soaked battlefield, in jungles on foreign worlds whose names seem just sweet nothings. They’ve taken to sleeping in the master bedroom, working in shifts to guard the house: Chau sleeps for nine hours; Julius sleeps for nine hours; they huddle round the heater together for nine hours talking about their fathers, and repeat.

On the third day Chau had woken to find a jerry-rigged holo set. Julius had been busy while he slept.

Chau watches the news. He cleans the kitchen until there are only immovable stains. He tries not to think about his brother.

Chau starts to feel his age catching up to him. He thinks about the feeling for a while, pacing, then realises that he never used to pace. Never used to need to. He talks to Julius about it on their shared shift:

“This place ... ”

“Huh?” Julius asks. He’s lying on the sofa, lost somewhere between dreaming and planning.

“This place makes me feel old.” Chau shakes out his arms, almost disgusted with himself for saying it.

“Well ... pardon me for saying it, but you kinda are.”

Chau looks at him askew:

“I’m only sixty-four, C-standard. I could live for another fifty, sixty years easily.”

“Yea, if you don’t die first. It’s a hard life, military service.”

“Not like I’m on the frontlines anymore.”

A chuckle, then: “Well you are now.”

Chau waits a moment. “Yea. And a whole lot of good we’re doing here.”

Julius swings his legs ‘round onto the floor and pats the sofa next to him. Chau sits.

“We’re not going through this again.” Julius.

“I know, I know, we go outside and we’re dead within a minute. I have been watching the news, you know. Not like there’s much else to do around here ... ” Chau hunches forward, wrings his hands. The skin stretches, feels rubbery and weak to his calloused fingertips.

Time passes. Half hour or so. Julius starts to fall asleep.

“We should try the basement again,” Chau says. Julius starts awake, blinks:

“Basement could be linked ... other houses. Risky.” It’s automatic. They’ve gone over it so many times.

A pause, then.

“Fuck it.” Chau gets up; sofa groans; he grabs a crowbar from the corner of the room. Flexes it in his ancient arms, feels the dirt fall away from his Imperial-green uniform, hasn’t seen suds in a week. “You coming or not?”

Julius doesn’t protest, just gets up and follows Chau to the hallway. The younger man checks out the front window to make sure no-one’s around, then gives Chau the thumbs-up.

They’d found the entrance to what they assumed to be the basement/cellar on the second day. It was jammed shut as if something heavy was pushed up against it; they’d hacked away the lock with the crowbar but the door still wouldn’t budge.

Chau touches the wood next to the door. He peels off a bit of the paint carefully, almost caressing the boards underneath. He taps, receives a thud in reply. Another tap. Thud. Tap. Thu-dum. Tap. Echo? Tap: echo. Chau takes aim at a spot of wood to the side of the door, almost swings –

“Wait! Should I ... ” Julius interjects, offering to take the crowbar from him: looks at him with a disdainful glare:

“Your dad and I were swinging battleaxes together before your mother had her first damn bleed, so just shut up and watch the door.” Chau swings.

The crowbar goes through; the old wood crumbles and falls to pieces around Chau’s feet. The two men work mute for a few minutes clearing a hole big enough for them to both fit through, then Julius brings his torch to spread light and they enter the basement:

There’s a rack of outdated computer equipment toppled over against the door.

“-lo, an - - - ntha, li - - - nd my mummy’s name - - - ith her friend Techno Joe. She doesn’t lik - - - lling him that, but I think he’s a bit of a - - - ther day. So he gave me this and told me to ‘git outta it, scoundrel’ tee-hee! He’s such a poonta though. Uh. So yea. So this is my room. See, I’ve got all of my animals here with me - ”

A little girl stands in her room, it’s brightly lit and you can see the macracarpas blowing in a light summer’s breeze outside the window. There are stuffed animals all around her on the bed and floor but she doesn’t pay them any mind. Her voice is shrill; her hair falls in curls around her chubby face. She can’t be more than ten years old. And she’s smiling right at you, look, see! Such an angelic little smile. She’s talking about herself again now, endlessly bouncing about her room with the sheer joy of life, going on about how “Mr. Humphries the Humphalot needs a bath! So we gonna take him down to the well at the end of the road and wash him real, real good, so he’ll be clean and mummy and Techno Joe can have their ‘lone time together. So now I’ve gotta turn you off so you don’t get wet at the well, which would be a real shame. I wouldn’t want to loose you, my lovely new toy. Maybe later me and you and Mr. Humphries the Humphalot can go for an adventure down that way, on one of the long evenings before the summer ends. Oh well. See you soon! Don’t fret, I’ll only be a while!”

The little girl comes forward towards you, so exited she seems! She bounds around erratically with her toy Humphalot in tow, totally possessing the room that’s so obviously her’s. And with a reluctant sigh she reaches out towards you and switches the holorecorder off. Ta-ta for now!

Chau recognises the room instantly, and is momentarily confused. It’s the room from upstairs, the one they assumed to belong to a little girl. And here she was, standing in front of them in full colour and life.

“A holodiary.” Julius moves forward and picks it up, turning it over in his hands. Chau stands struck for a second. The girl had seemed so real, a life-sized image coming out of the small disc in Julius’ hands. It must just be the light down here, he tells himself. They move on.

The basement is larger than Chau had imagined. Large, and full of computers. Computers everywhere. And they’re all old. A brief scout ‘round the perimeter reveals no connecting passageways to other houses: Julius breathes relief, Chau starts looking at the equipment.

The centre of the basement is almost too dark to see in. Chau takes the light off Julius and searches through the stacks. They seem to all be facing a central desk, a nerve-centre from where all the computers can be accessed. Chau moves closer, squinting through the darkness. Something there, chair-shaped, in the middle. Chau moves closer still, trying to make it out.

Yes, there’s a chair. And sitting in the chair is a man.

They find three bodies in the basement.

One: the figure in the chair. A skeleton with loose tatters of clothing hanging off its bones, slumped sideways in the seat, hands gripping the arm rests too hard to pry off. Looks like a man by the height, human, young but not too young. Thirty, thirty-five? A broken leg fixed by a splint, snapped ribs entombed in a yellowing plaster cast.

“He didn’t die of these wounds,” Julius says, leaning over the body. “His skull’s intact, there’s no obvious physical trauma. Probably something else that did it.”

Chau says nothing. He swivels the chair around so it faces the dated monitors and looks up to the ceiling, idly wondering what happened here.

Julius: “Maybe he was hurt by something and couldn’t get out. It’s a fair bet he wouldn’t be able to move those computers that fell against the door, condition he’s in.”

“Let’s take another look at that fallen stack.”

Two: burnt to a near-crisp husk by the hole. Appears to have fallen against the computer stack closest to the door, causing it to topple and electrocute him, setting on fire. There are pools of a melted something on the ground.

“This guy was fat, look at all this ... ” Julius says. Chau looks, understands and then looks closer. The skeletal frame grips at its chest, clawing in a post-mortem frenzy at the layers of fat burnt, dripped off and pooled on the cold basement floor. Chau can almost imagine the smell of it, a mixed stench of human flesh and smouldering electronics.

“It’s a worry, this is,” Julius says.

“Mm?” Chau isn’t really listening now, thinking of burning flesh. Fire and death.

“This equipment’s old, older than most I’ve seen. It doesn’t even have any heat shielding, see,” says Julius. Bullets and fire and death. “What do you think?”

Snaps out of his reverie: “Yea, it’s hmm.” Chau takes a second, plays back what Julius has said, then: “You’re right, old. Probably not particularly well made. I’d say ... ”

Chau crouches down by the stack of computers, still with Julius’ lamp in his hand. “Looks like stuff from the old colonial period. See here,” Chau lifts up the charred hull of a comp stack, “Endrol Systems.”

“They were the key supplier back then, were they?”

“Close, I think they may have been second in the system. Our parents used to do a lot of work negotiating that stuff, which companies from the Empire would be allowed access to Arkanine markets and such.”

“Yea, well all that was sorted out before I was born and I’ve never seen anything on Endrol except in the archives. So this is what ... forty years ago? Fifty?”

Chau drops the hull dismissively: “Something like that.”

Three: a child huddled in the corner. The child, Chau realises, without even getting any closer than his crouch on the floor next to the fallen stack. The little girl from the holo.

“Over there,” Chau says, his voice suddenly hoarse, pointing with the lamp towards the corner nearest the hole. He gets up slowly, and Julius makes it to the girl’s corpse before Chau does, but still he feels closer to her.

Chau kneels down next to her body and it’s as if Julius doesn’t exist any more. She lies covered in a blanket up to her cheek. If it weren’t for the bare skull poking out the top she could almost be mistaken for a sleeping child. Chau reaches over and gently folds the blanket down to reveal her chest. There’s no sign of hurt.

Julius: “This girl died slow.” Chau is too moved to reply. Julius still has the holodiary, and Chau reminds himself to get it somehow diplomatic.

Julius stands up and turns around slowly in the dark. “We should probably check out the rest of the equipment. It looks pretty trashed, but there might be something in there we can use.”

Chau doesn’t respond, so Julius takes the light from his hand and starts checking the room. Chau sits in the dark for two hours, the girl’s body by his side, while Julius fumbles with the computers. He doesn’t find anything.

The little girl stands in her room, bright lights playing havoc with the displays on the walls all around. She’s dancing to a tune, and you feel compelled to get up off your grumpy old seat and join in. It’s nice, light music, bouncing all around the room like she is, like the light is. And she sings in such a sweet little voice that your heart feels like breaking, knowing that she’s dead.

“Take a look ar-o-und, this is what I see! Keep on praying, ‘cause I ain’t changing! You work, you work, you cry and cry, you watch your whole life pass you by! Yeah!” She’s shrill and out of tune but the music swells behind her, bubbles up in the air and floats her spirit along on the muddy breeze. The music-box sitting on her bedside table seems like such an insignificant thing, despite its importance to the flow of the room.

Suddenly, with so little warning that your skeleton almost jumps out of your mouth, the girl stops dancing and cowers into the corner of her room. A man bursts into the frame and he’s instantly dislikeable. He moves over to the girl and hits the music-box onto the floor. It doesn’t shatter as we might expect it to, but the music stops with a jolting jar. The girl whimpers, making you want to reach out and hold her in your arms, whispering sweet nothings into her hair until she falls asleep, safe and sound. But you can’t. The man stands over her, hands on his fat, grumpy old hips, and looks like he’s about to say something. But then he notices the holodiary. And then the holodiary is on the floor next to the music-box, and then it’s nothing.







I dream now.

My dream is a memory, brought back to me, I think, by the claustrophobia I feel, the inaction I am forced into. My dream is of a time long ago, when I performed as a lead actor in the drama of my life, a psychological rebellion against my current circumstances. Part of my sleeping mind welcomes this; part of it wishes I did not have to resort to this at all, and strives constantly to bring me back to consciousness, to plan for an escape that will not come.

In spite of all this, I dream.

The jungle was quiet. The screams from the soldiers, caught in the ambush several hours ago, had died down to whimpers, then to nothing, having been either sedated by medics or silenced by the void. A warm light shone through the canopy, brightening just enough for the platoon to make out the surrounding trees in the dusk.

Some lay, some slept, some sat hugging their knees and crying. All waited patiently. Two menacing mountains pressed down on us from either side of the valley, out of sight behind the trees, adding weight to the oppressive heat that still lay like a blanket over our spirits.

The men waited and watched, and I watched them in turn.

I’d seated myself at the top of the column, and as the clouds passed overhead, blocking out what little light we had to see by, I bent over my datapad and resumed my study of the area and its surrounds. The enemy – the royal Zhao forces, I should say – had us corned in the head of the valley, and would hopefully, if the strategies we had initiated progressed as my commanders and I hoped, be at that moment in the process of staging an assault on our position. I held the datapad in my young hands, remarking more on how light and flimsy it was – this thing that held, amid its densely-packed memory core, all our present desires, doubts and aspirations – than on the precise and delicate nature of those hopes. It must be said that I still possessed a wonder for Imperial technology, even though I had spent the last half-dozen years or so training with it at the Academy. I think it would have been the introduction of that technology onto my homeworld, a place which for me held no associations with Imperial form or function, that fascinated me the most – the juxtaposition of the dense Syvn jungle with our colonisers’ produce, the sign of the times in which I now lived, held my attention with a firmer grasp than the mission at hand, which may account somewhat for what was about to transpire.

“Captain Ming!” the grunt entreated, approaching me at a gait. He was a man of medium build, but the Imperial outfit made him seem almost dwarfish in stature, so much so for being designed for an athletic, pre-packaged clone trooper. My father had expressly forbidden the Imperial standard’s involvement in the civil war, and I believed our new sector Moff was all the happier to simply lend us equipment and let us place our own lives in front of Zhao’s cannons.

“Captain Ming!” he was closer now, his helmet removed for the heat and the sweat, his face lost to me in the haze of memory. I feel angry with him for making himself so exposed.

“Private, stop right there in your godsdamn tracks!” I hissed at him. He stumbled to a halt on the uneven forest floor. “Put your helmet on! This is a war zone, don’t you know!”

“Sorry, sorry your high- I mean, Captain Ming,” he stammered, fumbling with the bulky headpiece.

“And for the love of Imperial Commerce, secure that ‘highness’ and ‘Ming’ bullshit! I am your Captain, and will be thusly addressed when in the field!”

The man made no response but to salute. His forgettable face was hidden behind the all too familiar stormtrooper visage, his personality erased from existence. I smiled, and I smile.

“Now, report.”

“Captain,” he began, his voice monotone behind the stormtrooper microphone, “Sergeant May has failed to return from his patrol to the south. He’s been overdue ten minutes now, and hasn’t checked in for twenty-five.”

I had been startled by this. May was a reliable man; followed orders but had an adaptable streak, which made him perfect for these guerrilla assignments. If we had lost him it would have been a major blow to my unit.

Fortunately May hadn’t been taken. He was running late, having been waylaid by a swift river over the ridge, and would return to the camp in ten minutes. Unbeknownst to him, the site would be a carrion graveyard by then.

“Is that all, Captain?” the grunt asked. He was already on the back foot, anticipating my order of dismissal, preparing to go back to his post; to die.

I wanted to reach out to him then. I wanted to call him back, to tell him not to worry, that Sergeant May had simply been delayed and would be returning soon. That if we broke camp and moved out to meet him now there might be a chance for us to survive. That the plan had gone wrong somewhere far above our heads, and most of us were about to die. But I couldn’t.

“Is that all, Captain?”

A sudden wave of frustration broke over me. The heat that had been burning down on us all day was dissipating in the growing twilight, and as my body cooled and strove towards sleep I had to consciously fight it, to stay awake and focussed, to see through the haze to what was really there.

“Is that all, Captain?”

I feel like I have felt countless times before when in a dream; when I know the truth of something but am carried forward by events, my silent protestations counting for nothing.

“Is that all, Captain?”

Once, when I was a child, I dreamt that I was in a darkened room in my parents’ house. I did not know which room it was; this feature was unimportant. What mattered was at the centre of the room.

Standing on a plinth of pure white light, in the exact centre of the room, is a small wooden box. It is just the right size to fit comfortably in my childlike hands. It is of an unremarkable design, but made of a beautifully lacquered dark brown wood, looking to my eyes as if it were made specifically for me to touch and keep safe.

My parents stand on either side of the plinth, their stern faces glaring down at me. They tell me that the box contains all the secrets of our family, and that I must guard them and not let them escape. Then they leave.

A part of me knows what is in the box, and yet something compels me to open it anyway. I know that doing so will destroy my family, but I cannot stop myself, even though the last thing I want is for them to be brought low.

I step up to the plinth. The light seems to come from everywhere. The box takes up my entire vision, and becomes my world.

I reach out and touch it.

Flames. Fire under my skin. Death. The dream is always the same.

“Is that all, Captain?”

I look behind the grunt, about twenty metres or so, and see a grouping of particularly thick trees. There is just enough light left to tell that they are slightly different from all the others around them, but since scouting through them when we made our camp my men have largely ignored them. I try to form enough words in my dry mouth to tell the grunt that there are Zhao forces hidden behind those trees. There are other hiding places dotted around our camp, of course, but that patch of trees are where the first shouts came from, and I don’t remember where the others lie.

The words will not come. The dream must continue. Most of these men will die, for the thousandth time.

“Is that all, Captain?”

He’s stuck on repeat, I realise. My memory has been feeding him the same line, over and over.

No matter; the jungle explodes.

There are shouts of alarm, but only a few of confusion. We had been expecting this, it was all part of the plan. We were the distraction, after all.

The details of the beginning of the firefight escape me, but my memory supplies some heroic fantasies for me to plug myself into. What before had been a seemingly downtrodden column of wounded - yet highly visible - stormtroopers bedded down in a valley now became a vicious, active fighting unit, literally bursting at the seams with hidden weapons. The jungle was filled with light and sound, dusk forgotten in the brouhaha.

I moved without thinking. In an instant I was on my feet, blaster in my hand, diving for cover. The grunt fell before me, his ill-fitting helmet masking the surprise I imagined his eyes to show.

I didn’t have time to feel sorry for him. A rapport of blaster fire for his attacker was all the eulogy I gave, then I was up and running.

I needed to gain control. In the mists of darkness and memory there seemed to be more of the enemy than we had anticipated. Had I been distracted? Had I got it wrong? The scrub tripped my running feet. I kept going. My aim was the group of fighters that I had first seen. I needed to flank them, or lead a flanking attack. I can’t remember. Pain comes to me over the distance; I think I may have been shot here.

I come upon the attackers after some time had passed. I am leading a small group, my side bloodied, my breaths quick and desperate. I have a feeling that one of them is dear to me, or will be. His name is Pullman. Is this where we meet? The dream is reaching its conclusion, and my impending consciousness blurs the memories like a smudged painting. It’s hard to see where things stop and start.

Yes, Pullman is there. I’m shot. My mind descends into abstracts. I remember a retreat; I remember being carried. I remember Pullman holding me, and the wait for the transport.

The transport will not come.

The jungle is quiet. My screams of pain have died down to whimpers. I will die here. I will wake soon. My mind clears enough to realise that it has lost control of itself, then, sensing that nothing is to be done about the situation, floods my body with natural painkillers. I give up.

Then, suddenly, respite! The rescue transport! Out of nowhere, over the horizon, it swoops down into the clearing that we’re bordering (I don’t know how we reached the clearing). And then we’re in it, and a strong voice is shouting above me. Aspen Jin’s voice, the Imperial liason. Julius’ father. The half-conscious part of me looks over at Julius, standing by the window in the house in Shul’hul’ab, and I smile. I try to thank him.

The words will not come. The dream must continue. Pullman kneels on the unsteady shuttle deck, my broken body clutched close to his, for the thousandth time.

We flew away together into the dawn, and I retreat once more into abstracts.

Why did we fail so miserably? Why did we loose so many men, when the operation had been planned so perfectly, according to the training of the Imperial Academy, and to my own instincts? Why did the transport take so long to get here?

And why was Aspen Jin sent with it?

The answers to all these questions are known to me. They weigh on me constantly, burning within me with a dim persistency as the emergency lightbulb burns now, bringing me slowly to consciousness. I know these answers. I know what must be done. I know why I am here.

But I cannot face it this night.