At the entrance to Sundari’s underground network, wind dragged grit across rusted pipe mouths, drawing out a low, keening whine.
Kurt crouched in the shadows, his visor filtering out the excess light, leaving only the blurred thermal shapes of his people.
Thirty of them.
Hearts beating to the same rhythm — tense, but committed.
There was no road back now.
“Last time through.” Kurt kept his voice pressed low, barely a murmur on the internal channel.
“Target: Sector B armory.
In through entrance three, out through seven.
Charges go on the support columns, the energy cell banks, and the main corridor junction.
Omen, take Red Team through the left flank.
I take the right.
Charges arm on a ten-minute countdown.
Keep it quiet as long as we can.
If we’re made—” He paused, fingers brushing his holstered pistol without thinking.
“Then we make it loud enough they never forget it.”
No one spoke.
Only heavy breathing and the small sounds of gear shifting answered him.
That was enough.
The duct swallowed them into deeper darkness, thick with the smell of engine oil, dust, and something metallic gone sour with heat.
In the green glow of night vision, the ductwork spread out ahead like a spider’s web.
They moved light-footed over years of accumulated grime — slick, sticky underfoot.
Kurt took point, pistol in hand, safety off, finger resting light against the guard.
The Force spread out ahead of him like a thin web, catching every shift in air current, every change in temperature, any stir of movement up ahead.
Luck was with them — or Death Watch’s patrols were simply lazy.
The first two-man team they found was leaning near a ventilation fan at a junction, visors half-raised, sharing an energy bar.
Kurt could hear the wet sound of chewing from where he crouched.
One gesture.
Two shadows slid past him from behind, beskar knives reversed in their grip, moving like cats — no wasted motion.
A hand over the mouth, a cut across the throat, both men down.
Clean.
The bodies were dragged into the shadow of a derelict pump room.
The whole thing took three seconds.
Five, maybe.
Only the faint tearing sound of a blade through a gorget, and the dull weight of two bodies hitting the floor.
Kurt moved up and picked up a fallen comm unit off one of the dead troopers, meaning to power it down.
The body’s arm had twisted at an awkward angle in the fall — and landed square on the unit’s emergency distress button.
“—static—B-7, sector—static—Skell?
Respond!
Static—come in!” The comm shrieked to life in the silence, distorted, electric, repeating.
Damn it.
Kurt’s hand moved before the thought finished — he crushed the unit in his fist.
Plastic and circuitry crumpled between his fingers.
Too late.
An alarm tore through the entire underground base without warning — not the long, wailing kind, but short, sharp, teeth-grinding pulses of sound.
Overhead, dim red emergency lights began spinning wildly, drowning the tunnel in a wash of blood-red light.
Then came the heavy grind of alloy blast doors slamming shut, and beyond it, the rapid drumbeat of boots closing in, armor plates clattering against each other in a rising wall of sound.
“We’re made!” Omen’s voice cracked over the channel, edged with real fear.
“Plan doesn’t change!
Charges!
Move!” Kurt snarled back.
Secrecy was gone.
All that mattered now was outrunning the clock.
“Red Team!
Left flank!
Hold them off!
Everyone else — scatter!
Plant your charges!
Go!”
He and his own group, a dozen kids on the right flank, plunged deeper into the duct network, the alarm lights chasing them like bloodshot eyes.
Through the Force, cold killing intent pressed in from every direction.
They were being boxed in.
“Boss!
Junction C!
Patrol — four of them!” A boy behind him shouted, voice shaking.
Kurt didn’t turn.
He fired both pistols backward without looking.
Bang bang!
The Westar-35s roared deafeningly in the confined space, and on his thermal display, two red shapes at the front of the patrol dropped instantly.
The other two ducked into cover, and blaster fire began pouring back like rain, sparks bursting bright off the metal walls.
“Don’t stop!
Plant the charges!” Kurt shouted, rolling, sprinting, using the duct’s bends and derelict equipment cabinets as cover, both pistols firing in controlled bursts to keep heads down, bolts screaming past his shoulder and over his head.
He could taste ozone from scorched air.
One of the kids threw himself against a heavy support column, fumbling to slap a charge onto the cold metal.
Another rushed a pile of dark green energy cell banks stacked in the corner, digging out a frag grenade to shove into the gap.
“Left!” A warning flared through the Force.
Kurt spun, catching a Death Watch trooper leaning out of a maintenance hatch overhead, wrist-flamer already aimed at the boy beside the cell bank.
“Down!” Kurt didn’t think — he threw himself forward, tackling the boy clear.
Scorching fire swept across his back plate, heat washing his vision white for an instant.
He fired back one-handed, and the bolt punched clean through the trooper’s visor, searing it black.
“Boss!” The boy he’d saved was pale as bone.
“The grenade!” Kurt hauled him up, pointing at the cell bank.
“Arm it!
Go!”
Hands shaking, the boy shoved the frag grenade into the gap between cells and hit the trigger.
BOOM—!
A massive explosion tore through the left corridor.
Omen’s team.
Alongside it, the heavy roar of Saber-class tank cannons.
The ground shook, dust sifting down from above — the frontal assault had begun.
The blast seemed to act as a signal — the entire underground armory descended into chaos.
More footsteps poured in, blaster fire thickened, and Kurt’s group got scattered, fighting in scattered twos and threes.
“Countdown!
Seven minutes!” Omen’s voice tore across the channel, gunfire roaring behind him.
Kurt leaned against a massive pressure tank, chest heaving.
On his helmet display, icons marking each charge point ticked from red to green, one by one.
Two left.
His own assigned junction sat just ahead, but Death Watch fire had the passage sealed tight.
He caught sight of two of his people pinned behind a stack of crates, one bleeding from the shoulder, smoke rising, three Death Watch troopers advancing in alternating cover, closing in step by step.
No time to wait.
Kurt sucked in a breath.
The Force.
What Qui-Gon taught him. This story is hosted at g.com.
Feel the flow.
Anticipate.
He closed his eyes — half a second was all he needed.
In his mind, the three troopers’ movement seemed to slow, edged in a faint blur of light.
Then he moved.
Not away from the gunfire.
Into it.
His body twisted through the gaps between bolts like sand scattered by wind, both pistols rising — not at the men, but at the floor beneath their feet, and the metal support beside them.
Bang bang bang!
The floor cracked open, a support strut buckled and fell.
Two troopers, caught off guard, were driven back by falling debris and ricocheting shrapnel.
The third reacted a fraction faster, already raising his weapon—
Kurt was already there.
The cold muzzle of a Westar-35 pressed directly against his visor.
Bang.
Kurt didn’t spare the body a second look, already sprinting for the junction, pulling out his last timed charge and slapping it hard onto the alloy hub supporting the massive duct network.
He hit the trigger.
Five seconds.
He didn’t look back, already running for the nearest exfil route.
“Fall back!
Everyone!
Stick to the exit routes!
Move!” he roared over the channel.
Explosions rippled through the tunnels one after another.
Red Team’s rearguard threw their last shock grenades to buy distance from the pursuit, and the kids half-dragged, half-carried their wounded, sprinting for the narrow duct at entrance seven like a nest of desert rats scattered by fire, Death Watch’s furious shouting closing in behind them, and the countdown ticking down like a death sentence.
Kurt was the last one through entrance seven.
He glanced back once at the hellscape deep in the armory, then slammed a hidden switch on the duct’s inner wall.
THOOM.
A heavy alloy blast door crashed down, kicking up a wall of dust, sealing the passage behind them — for the moment.
The instant the door sealed shut—
BOOOOOM—!!!
Not one explosion.
Countless explosions, layered into a single earth-splitting roar.
A blinding wall of white light bloomed from the direction of Sector B, swallowing every red emergency light whole.
The tunnel beneath their feet buckled and screamed as though struck by a giant’s hammer.
A shockwave of superheated air and shrapnel surged through every passage like a tsunami.
The blast door screeched, metal tearing, caving inward under the pressure.
Superheated air and sparks jetted through the widening gap.
“Run!” Kurt got out one word, shoving the person in front of him forward.
He didn’t need to say more.
Everyone was already running flat out, the tunnel shaking around them, debris and cable raining from the ceiling, the roar of secondary explosions never letting up, each one punching against their chests like a second heartbeat.
They ran, not sure how long, until finally the exit appeared ahead — and the Kom’rk fighters waiting anxiously outside for extraction.
The instant they burst out of the tunnel, the ground behind them convulsed violently, splitting open in ragged fissures, smoke and fire erupting skyward like a volcano from the entrance they’d just fled and from a dozen other cracks in the earth.
Death Watch’s entire Sector B armory, and a wide swath of ground above it, collapsed into a churning sea of fire and twisted steel.
Mission complete.
Kurt pulled off his helmet, gulping down air thick with smoke and grit, sweat streaking his face.
He scanned his exhausted, shell-shocked team — a few wounded, but every one of them alive.
His eyes drifted toward Sundari in the distance, where the fighting still raged, Saber-class cannons spitting fire, Vikings and Kom’rk fighters screaming overhead, pouring missiles down onto Death Watch’s positions.
He grinned — silent, teeth flashing white, firelight painting his sweat-soaked face.
“Let’s go home.” He pulled his helmet back on, something clear-eyed and steady settling over him, the particular clarity that only comes after cheating death.
“Then we go back and clean up what’s left of them.”