Lekku. LOG-009. Hired Blade.

LOG-009. Hired Blade.

Saleucami’s the kind of place that makes you itchy even before the blaster bolts start flying.

Big flat valleys. Cracked mesas. Fungal forests that rot while they’re still growing. Civilized enough to pretend it’s stable. Lawless enough that the pretending doesn’t last past local sundown.

My contract’s clean. On paper.

A mid level weapons trafficker named Marn Vesso, aligned with a corporate logistics cell bankrolled by Baktoid Armour Workshop. Officially, they’re still neutral. Unofficially, they’ve been stockpiling hypermatter and buying up a certain type of battle droid chassis like candy.

They want him extracted alive.

Why? Doesn’t matter. Someone wants him silenced, but they can’t move openly. So they pay someone like me to do it.

Naturally, I take the job.

—

The drop goes smooth, considering I’m using a borrowed shuttle.

My landing zone’s two klicks from Vesso’s last ping, a rented villa buried in the cliffs with built in jammers and perimeter drones.

He presumably thinks he’s invisible. He’s not.

I scout the place. Map the guards. Thirty seconds watching their patrol pattern is enough to clock half a dozen weak spots.

The problem is the turret.

It’s an old AA unit. Rewired to track movement, and with no clear path without triggering it. My jammer won’t override that kind of tech. I’ll need to get close.

So I do.

I scale the rock wall behind the villa using a climb line and a pair of magnetic grips. Wind kicks up. Dust gets in my visor. Doesn’t matter.

Halfway up, a sensor drone buzzes out of the ridge and turns toward me.

I don’t think.

I feel.

My left hand flicks out with a quick jab of intent, not thought, and the drone veers, slams into the stone, and promptly drops like a swatted fly.

I’m still breathing hard when I reach the ledge.

The Force.

It’s not subtle anymore.

—

Inside, things go loud.

Two guards see me before I want them to. Helmeted, armoured, shouting. I drop one with a knee to the throat and blast the other through his rectangular visor before he finishes his warning call.

The turret activates.

I duck into cover and roll a flash detonator across the hallway. It blinds the sensors long enough to sprint through.

Vesso’s panicking when I find him. He’s not a fighter. Just a fat man in a silk tunic with a datapad full of blackmail and a hand trembling toward a hidden blaster pistol.

He gets halfway through a sentence before my knee hits his sternum.

“Extraction.” I declare.

Then I cuff him and drag him to the ledge.

—

Getting out’s harder.

Baktoid’s goons track my shuttle as I head for orbit. They send two interceptors.

I outfly them.

Barely.

Get a few new scratches on my ride’s underbelly, but it all works out.

By the time I reach neutral space and hand Vesso off to the proxy handler, I’m exhausted and bruised from my left side. 

The payout clears. High tier. Clean.

A legend status on two merc boards ticks up by three points.

The handler says I did a job that should have taken at least five people.

I take the praise in stride.

Later, I sit in my bunk, cleaning the scorch marks off of my gauntlet, and think about the drone.

I didn’t aim. I didn’t calculate. I just moved. Just pushed.

It didn’t feel like cheating.

It felt like blinking.

Like breathing.

So what is it?

A weapon?

Or a crutch?

I don’t know yet.

But I can feel it waking up in me, slow and steady, like a dragon stretching under my ribs.

And kriffing hells if it doesn’t almost feel like it’s hungry.

—

The station floats at the edge of nowhere.

Neutral ground, or as close to it as the galaxy still allows. Three jump points, two fuel hubs, one rotating bar that’s always dim and smells like damp synth cushions and regret.

They don’t check your ID here. They don’t ask who you fought for, or what you’re running from. Just whether your creds clear.

Mine always do.

I dock the borrowed clan shuttle in a low traffic hangar, seal the hatch, and head for a terminal upstairs. Nothing fancy. I’m just here for information and a few hours of not being shot at.

The cantina sits half sunk into the hull, a viewport showing a sliver of starfield with distant debris tumbling slowly. I order a drink I won’t finish and pull up a private line.

Encrypted feeds. Scrubbed holonet. Proxies bounced across six dead servers. I don’t like being watched, and for damn good reason.

Regardless, I start reading.

The Jedi are moving more than they used to.

Diplomatic delegations rerouted through militarized zones.

Temple Masters being pulled from teaching assignments for ‘dispute resolution.’

Young Knights deployed without Padawan backup, which either means they're stretched thin, or someone wants plausible deniability.

One report catches my eye. Taris. A Jedi team intercepts a rogue weapons trader. No survivors. Mission publicly listed as ‘compromised.’

There’s no names. No footage.

Just a footnote about a target resisting apprehension.

I sit back, swirl the drink I’m not drinking, and stare at the words like they’ll explain themselves.

…Would they arrest me?

If they saw what I could do, if they felt it, while staring at my armour, would they draw blades?

Or offer a hand?

Would I take it?

…I don’t know.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

There’s no future with the Jedi. No past either. I’m not built for their rules. I don’t want robes or titles or peace.

But training?

Training’s different.

Training makes you deadlier.

And I’m starting to want that.

Eventually, I switch feeds.

Military contracts. Republic procurement reports. Backwater fleet assignments.

Most of it’s boring on purpose, presumably to obscure too much scrutiny from the public.

But if you know what to look for, if you’ve been in enough armories and listened to enough grunts talk about new models or lived a life in which an entire universe was fiction, you start to see the shape of something underneath the noise.

Old decommissioned yards reopening.

Logistics hubs expanding by ‘civilian support mandate.’

Medical units being deployed to Outer Rim systems with no official conflicts.

A slow, quiet stack of dominos.

All it’ll take is one push.

I finish the drink anyway.

It tastes like metal and antiseptic.

Like something trying to be safe.

I leave the glass where it is and start thinking about what kind of war the galaxy’s pretending not to build, and where I might fit in it.

—

The deal goes down at a shipyard no one brags about visiting.

Outer edge of a cracked moon, orbiting a gas giant that smells like ozone and failure. The local mechanic’s got one eye, three hands, and a distrust of haggling. He doesn’t recognize me, which is how I like it.

The credits hit his account in full. No counter offer. No snide remarks about my age, armour, or lekku.

I’d already picked the name after calling in a clan member to come pick up the shuttle.

Krayt’s Mercy.

It sounds like a joke. It isn’t.

She’s a YT-2000, Corellian bones but not stock. Sleeker than a 1300. Twin mandible hull with a smoothed prow, like someone shaved a blade into the frame.

Fast.

Fast enough to punch through patrol lanes or vanish into hyper before anyone can lock a target.

Twin turrets. Dorsal and ventral. Custom mounted with redundant fire control systems, because sometimes I’ll have to run her alone.

Interior reinforced with durasteel paneling, heavy enough to hold cargo.

Or prisoners.

Spacious cockpit. Modded nav. Sleeping quarters that don’t feel like coffin boxes. A med bay that works. A galley that doesn’t, but I’ll fix that.

I walk her once, end to end. My boots echo across the floor plating. No one's aboard but me.

But that’s the point.

Eventually, I reach the cockpit and sit down, letting my hands rest on the controls.

They’re cold at first. Then warmer.

Familiar.

Like they were always waiting for me.

I press a few systems online, just to hear the hum. The startup sequence rolls smoothly, cleaner than I expected.

The dash lights blink alive.

I breathe in.

Close my eyes.

And for the first time since I was a little girl lying on a rust stained bunk in a slave quarter, carefully remembering that the sky looked different beyond a cage…

I feel like an adult.

Not just a survivor.

Not just a weapon.

A person.

I open my eyes.

And smile, just a little.

Everything ahead of me is mine.

The thought is a glorious one.