Truth and Reconciliation (Luka)

There was a lot to think about, and plenty of time to do it. Here, in this cargo bay, hidden away between boxes of cargo, but hardly forgotten. There were eyes everywhere. If he so much as moved from the spot he would be gunned down in a hail of fire. They were around, men and women of the Resistance, and they had taken one of the greatest risks of their entire lives by agreeing to take him on board. They knew who he was. Even if he had not introduced himself with his name, rank, and serial number, the chances were fairly high that at least one person out of the entire compound he had surrendered himself to would know who he was.

Jarvan Trask. Major. RK-441. They called him Tarkin's Hammer. He was the jack boot on the necks of the Rebel Alliance and New Republic. The hound that chased them into the depths. The wolf that stalked them to the ends of the galaxy. A bloody war hero. Once upon a time.

And it felt like a long time. So long ago had the real war taken place. When he was a fresh faced clone with no family to hold him down, a sense of duty in his heart, and an enemy to destroy. Life had been so much simpler than. No easy, mind you, but simple. You got up, put your plastech armor on one piece at a time, and went out and played war. The rebels didn't make it easy. They skulked in the shadows, hit you when you weren't looking, and ran back into the cowardly shadows before you could shoot back. Things got easier once they unified, got organized, and started playing properly. Then he really brought the pain. First it was Cerberus Squad, when his Sergeant Paldron was still fresh from the shelf. They were damn good at what they did, which was kicking down doors and shooting scum in the face. Then the promotions. More men placed under his control. Cerberus was forgotten, and in it's place the 221st; an entire legion of goddamn soldiers.

It was disappointing how the war ended. The Empire being slowly relegated back and then breaking down and joining the very people they had fought all this time. It felt like such a betrayal at the time, and that was why he joined the Pentastar Alignment, or the Imperial Remnant as some called it. They were the last, the only true Imperials left in the galaxy. The patriots and heroes. The rest were either deserters or dead. It had seemed like the right thing at the time. Looking back now, through a lens of so many years, it seemed quite foolish. They should have taken their defeat with grace, with pride in what they had accomplished. Still, he very much doubted there was a place in a peaceful galaxy for someone like him; a thing made for war. No other purpose.

A lust for war, though, was no excuse for what they became. The First Order was meant to be the herald of a new age for the Empire. A bright shining new flag to march under. However, instead they marched themselves straight to hell. It started small at first. A few bloody disputes. Misunderstandings or so it appeared. Then things got heated, and then Ossus happened. That's what he knew things had gone terribly wrong. The Jedi were a threat to the galaxy. That much is for certain, but that does not excuse what happened. You do not march an army onto a foreign planet and slaughter everyone in sight. The atrocities only mounted from there, and from the safety and comfort of his garrison on Bastion he could only watch the horror as it played out on the Holonet. And they applauded it. They ate it up. They screamed for more. It wasn't his Empire anymore. It was something else. A different beast. It wore a familiar face, but it's actions were terrible and cruel.

And that was why he was here, on board this ship, being ferried off to Palpatine knows where. He left Bastion. He pulled on his antique Storm Commando uniform, the classic black scout armor, and left. Not without taking as many weapons as he could fit in a shuttle of course. Then he went to designation Charley Delta Fiver, a Resistance base the Storm Commandos had discovered, but was never reported to higher command. No. They were his ticket back into this war. Stealing away he had gone to the base, sneaked in, and presented himself to them on a silver platter. They had half a mind to kill him right then and there, but he convinced them otherwise, and it had taken his entire cache of weapons and supplies to smooth it out. This base was small potatoes in the big run of things. They would never have the power to make a real effort in this war the Resistance was waging with the First Order. If he was going to make a difference he needed to get to where he could do the most good. That meant getting in contact with the Resistance Leaders. Whatever it took.

They didn't say where they were going. Just that they were taking him to meet the General.

Luka felt his back crunch as he rolled his shoulders. It didn't used to do that. He could sit for twenty hours straight in a cockpit in hyperspace, and hop out with no more ill effects than could be remedied with a swig from a hip flask and a handsy pair of Zeltron twins. Those had been the days. It wasn't so much the flying that he missed; though he did. It wasn't the women either, or the booze. It was the kind of person that a flight suit ushered you into being. Pilots didn't have time for second guessing. Pilots didn't have time to question orders, or question their instincts. Pilots did. Hesitate, and you're dead. Sure, there were times when your quick thinking was too quick, and you fluffed an objective, or crossed a line that made a superior cranky. There were times when quick thinking had robbed Jaden of comrades and squadmates who'd made the wrong call. But there were also moments when quick thinking kept people alive, and that vastly outweighed the alternative.

A Commander's uniform; a General's uniform; they'd changed things. You couldn't lounge around and get comfortable in an officer's get-up. It wasn't as free and as mutable to your actions as a flight suit was. Rank pins, medals, regulations, lapels - they all dug in, they all jabbed at you, they all served as a constant remember of what was you were wearing. Gone were the carefree days of getting away with it because you were a pilot. Hello scrutiny. Hello accountability.

Hello paperwork.

The General sighed, a stylus tucked between his fingers like a deathstick as he pinched the bridge of his nose. He'd been here at this cargo dropsite for two weeks now, signing off on supply manifests, ordnance forms, transfer papers. It was worse than it had ever been with the Rebellion. Back then, almost everyone had been weekend soldiers; the professionals were few and far between. They'd been playing at war, muddling along with whatever resources and protocols they could cobble together for as long as they could. Eventually they'd evolved towards structure and formality, but it had been done with reluctance: a desperate desire to evade the rigid shackles that the Galactic Empire so loved to slap on people's wrists.

The Resistance was an entirely different beast. She wrapped herself up in military attire and called herself a General, but Taataani Meorrrei was still a businesswoman to the core. That was a critique more than a criticism: the same ruthless focus and inventive determination that she brought to the corporate and political worlds made her one heck of a strategist. She knew her limitations, too: knew where her knowledge was lacking, and knew the kind of advisor or specialist to hire or appoint to the task. As the helmsman of their fight against the First Order, there weren't many with her brand of diverse qualifications. But as the architect of a military? Republic requisition papers had been one thing, but the corporate invoices that Luka was currently set his pen to were a whole new circle of hell.

It would be worth it though, that's what he told himself. His incarceration and torment here would still be over. For the logistics infrastructure of the Resistance, Cargo Dropsite Five was just a staging point, a locale for freighters and transports to deposit their cargo for collection, minimising the amount of star traffic flowing into and out of the Resistance headquarters. In a few days, Phoenix and her flotilla of rust buckets would swing by and ferry the crates of food rations, blaster packs, and spare parts off to D'Qar. But for General Luka, this bleak, desolate, and otherwise utterly unimportant world was something else.

The Resistance techs called it the Anchorage. It wasn't an official designation, but it was a descriptive one. Scattered throughout various orbits in the sky above the grubby old Clone War bunker that Luka currently nestled in were many of the starships that the Resistance had managed to beg, borrow, or steal for their cause. Most of them were old, obsolete, and barely functional; a factoid that made Luka wonder if he fit in here a little too well. But there was one in particular who broke that mould: a two-kilometre arrowhead of Old Republic durasteel braced with as much modern ingenuity as the Resistance engineers could muster. To the Republic that had built her, the Empire that had inherited her, and the private sector militia that had bundled her in mothballs and left her to gather dust when the New Republic had formed, she was a Secutor-class Star Destroyer whose name and history was utterly unimportant. To Jaden Luka however she was the Challenger II: his new home.

Or would be, when he was done filling in these blasted forms to requisition the parts needed to make her battle-ready. The piercing shrill whistle from Jaden's comlink earned a grunt of exasperated frustration, his hand discarding the stylus into a clattering impact with the desk, a scowl forming across his brow as he jabbed a finger into the comm controls.

"What?"

He didn't bother to sugar-coat his annoyance, and for a brief moment it seemed almost like he might have scared his would-be harasser into silence. A few seconds passed however, and a tremblingly unsure voice finally replied.

"Uh, General? We, uh, we need you to come down here. Right away, sir."

He was herded off the ship like a madman or a serial killer. Hands firmly clasped in stuncuffs, connected to the shock collar around his neck. Surrounded by enough armed men that a wrong move could reduce him to paste. They took no chance, and he could hardly blame then, even when they invasively searched him again. No weapons. No tracking devices. Nothing. With his armor and weapons striped away before the trip even began, all he had on now was his First Order issued black body sock.

Satisfied that he was still not a thread, they pushed him down the loading ramp. The space beyond was foreign and alien to him. A staging and landing area outside a bunker style structure. Looking up he could see starships flying around in the shadow of a large Destroyer class ship. It was quite the busy little beehive, with personnel on the ground matching the business in the sky. Everywhere people were moving with a purpose. Unloading cargo or loading it into outgoing vessels. The Resistance was much more organized that he would have assumed.

His observation was short lived as he was pushed to the door of the bunker. Dialogue passed between his handlers and the guards, and the he changed hands while someone commed ahead. It was a quick march to the brig. He kept a mental note of the corridors, mesmerizing twists and turns. He had no intention to break and run, but it was hard to turn it off. After being deposited into a cell he sat down on the only bench and waited. His eyes, sharp as ever, watched from their place in his wrinkled face. Age had caught up to him, but in this moment, in this dangerous and unknown scenario, he had never felt younger.

"Do we know who he is?"

The guard merely handed a datapad to Jaden, whose eyebrows climbed as he began to skim across the details. Jarvan Trask. Empire's finest, to all intents and purposes. Distinguished career. Distinguished service. A good, loyal soldier.

A good loyal soldier who'd chosen to hitch a ride on a Resistance transport, and cruise casually into a supposedly secret base. It was a ballsy play, that was for sure. If it was some attempt at infiltration it seemed like a flawed one: he'd been swept meticulously for trackers and tracers, and had been more than compliant with the Resistance's security demands. He wanted to be here, for some reason, and there was absolutely nothing to indicate a malicious intent. That was troubling. Jaden wasn't averse to the concept of defection; of growing a conscience; of coming to understand that the Imperial way wasn't the best way. The Rebellion had been filled with such people; Jaden had been one of them, of a sort; close and trusted friends had been others. But it didn't track. Trask's service dates showed that he'd stuck with the Empire throughout the Galactic Civil War. He'd scurried off to the far corner of the Outer Rim with the rest of the Imperial Remnant. He was a hard-liner. A loyalist. So if he bore them no ill will, what brought a man like that into the nexu's den like this; and why now, not before.

"Thank you, Sergeant," Jaden dismissed with a nod, his grip shifting on the glassware he'd brought with him, waiting for the door to grant him access into the cell block, and then the cell itself. He tried to moderate his initial reaction, trying not to give anything away as he sized up the man. He looked calm and unphased; like the way that Jedi got when they were being all annoying and stoically patient. To Jaden's credit, he managed to maintain his face in some state of neutrality: not friendly by any stretch, but not straying into the scowl either that his face had become so used to wearing.

Stepping into the cell itself, and hearing the door settle closed behind him, he took a moment of pause before he crossed to the same lone bench that Trask occupied, settling himself beside him. In the space between - a respectful distance, but not a fearful one - he set down the glass tumblers he'd brought, and calmly uncorked the bottle that came with them. He hoped the label was visible, the deliberate choice there to be seen by the Major. Alderaanian brandy. Well, New Alderaan brandy, at any rate - Jaden didn't have enough kidneys to sell on the black market to afford the real stuff, but a few decades had given the Alderaanian refugee colony out in the Ash Worlds enough time to start cultivating and brewing up a decently passable approximation. It had been so long, he doubted anyone remembered what the real stuff tasted like, anyway.

Pouring out a double for each of them, he picked up one glass, and nudged the other across the bench in Trask's direction. He wasted no time assuaging any poison paranoia, allowing himself a sip, letting the creeping warm feeling bring focus to his thoughts.

"You're not where you're supposed to be, Major," he stated calmly; almost disinterested. "I'm hoping there's an explanation for that."

Jaden Luka. General. Trask recognized him the moment he walked into the brig. His face was one of many on the black dossiers given to the Storm Commandos. That meant he was worth dying to kill. That was years ago, when Luka was still a soldier of the Republic. The two of them had occupied many a battlefield together, although he had never had the pleasure of meeting him in the field. A field that became far more distant with time for the both of them, Trask would wager. As medals weighed them down like anchors, grinding their bones to dust and muscles to paste, until at last the only place fit for them was behind a desk directing soldiers where to go. Where to die.

he would have been more comfortable if Meorrrei herself had stepped into the room. A politician he could stand. He'd been putting up with them his entire. Bunch of wankers always getting in the way. Luka on the other hand was a decorated war hero and a peer. Someone more likely to carry a grudge and put him in the ground instead of giving him the chance to speak his bit. Because of that it was surprising when the man entered the cell carrying not a blaster but a drink. Trask didn't move. Sudden movement might be unwise. The lads on the other side of the bars seemed a bit twitchy. Instead he kept his position; leaning forward, elbows on knees, hands clasped together. It wasn't until the clinking of glasses and sloshing of fluid ebbed and the calm voice of the General filled the awkward silence that he finally risked leaning back against the wall.

"There is." He replied, his think accent hard to place from any particular planet or system. His hand slowly crept out and accepted the glass, raising it just before his mouth. "Not quite sure I know what it is." Finally he drank. It was a savory delight and not something he often enjoyed. Alcohol, cigarras, and junk food had no place in his pallet. His battlefield days may he long behind him, but he had kept himself in the best shape he could and despite his age he was quite fit. He wouldn't pull the ears off a gundark anytime soon but he might stand a chance to outrun it. "Would you believe me if I said it was because of the officer caps? Damn silly things with the little wings on th'sides." A rare moment of mirth for the Major, and one that quickly faded like the smile on his face. Drowned in another sip.

"When the galaxy unified I thought I was doing the right thing by sticking with the Empire. It felt wrong to abandon the cause just because we lost. I didn't mind living in the armpit of the galaxy. I was fighting the good fight. Preparing to make war one day someday. Then things started to change." His brow furrowed as he dug deep for those old, dusty memories. "It was small things at first. Policies. Programs. Training. Then things started to get weird. Raising soldiers from birth. Conditioned. They weren't patriots fighting for their leaders or even lads chasing a check. They were raised to be soldiers. They knew nothing different. It felt wrong, but I went with it. I thought I could train them up to be proper lads. I thought I succeeded, and then Malagus. Jebin IV. Ossus. The moment those lads left my wing they became heartless machines. I blamed myself, I blamed them, but in the end I know it was the Empire that failed us all. The First Order isn't it's finest hour. It is it's worst. I couldn't stand by and watch them wear our faces and take everything we fought for and twist it into nightmares."

Turning his head he looked the General in the eye, over the top of his glass. "The Empire dead." and then he drank the rest of the cup.

The Empire's dead. Long live the Empire.

That odd little phrase that Jaden had picked up from Force knows where was supposed to refer to monarchs, but it seemed particularly fitting. The First Order was like the Empire's son and heir: more than a passing resemblance to it's father, but a whole different personality, a whole new generation of terrible acts. Like a child, it respected it's father, but at the same time pushed to exist beyond that paternal shadow: to prove the differences, to exceed what had come before. The New Republic and the Resistance were the same, in many ways: taught lessons by the Republic and the Rebellion, but forced to alter and adapt by differing peers and a different era.

Jaden sat in silence, the glass tumbler twisted idly back and forth between his fingers before he too knocked back the last of it. What Trask had said was not something that Jaden hadn't heard already. Even before he'd become part of the Resistance, similar stories had found their way to his ears, passed along through smugglers and traders, circulated around in hushed tones by technicians and yeoman as part of the shipboard scuttlebutt; and corroborated by Captains and Commanders every time a handful of Republic starships found themselves in the same port at the same time. But hearing it from Trask made it more real, somehow. Perhaps the similarity to the rumours should have been a red flag, a potential infiltrator spouting the exact story that the Resistance expected to hear. Jaden didn't buy that. He'd leave that kind of paranoia to others.

The validity of the story didn't change much, though. One of the Empire's most fearsome weapons was sitting here in a Resistance cell, and they somehow had to work out what to do with them. Defectors were not unknown. The backbone of the Alliance had been built from them, and the First Order seemed even more worthy of defection than the Empire and it's atrocities had. Even the idea of a Storm Commando defecting wasn't a stretch; the likes of Crix Madine and John Glayde had blazed that trail long before. Their morals though were not in question. They had turned against the Empire; they had acknowledged it's sins and theirs, and acted to try and rebalance the scales of their karma. Trask lacked that remorse. His loyalties had not turned away from the Empire the way that theirs had: there simply was no longer an Empire for him to be loyal to. He was not here because he had come to share the Resistance's ideology: he was here because they now shared a common foe. The enemy of my enemy. How did one place their trust in a man like that?

Jaden tried to think back to the days of the Alliance-Imperial Treaty; the days of Jovan Station, and the Novgorod; of the first times the Alliance and the Empire had begun to work together. He remembered how strange it had felt when the governments had merged to finally restore the Republic, and former Imperial officers had begun filtering their way into his crew. There'd been tension. Animosity. Distrust. Everyone might have been Republic on the surface, but the blood in their veins was still Alliance, or Imperial. Jaden wondered if that sentiment had ever stopped, or if the ones who had adhered to it had simply grown old and died out. That seemed to be the way that change propagated through the galaxy these days: no one's opinion or attitude was ever altered; people just took those attitudes to their graves, and the new generation arose with it's own entirely new set of principles and prejudices.

For the sake of the future though, and for the sake of the Resistance, Jaden could not afford to be one of those who did not change. The Resistance needed leaders for this era, for this fight; not relics from the eras and battles before, carrying with them old grudges and old mindsets. There was no such thing as Alliance and Imperial any more. Jaden needed to learn to stop thinking in such terms.

"I was a scout trooper on Naboo," he said quietly; not some sombre revelation, merely a casual fact offered into the cell's recycled air. "I picked up a few too many misdemeanour charges in my youth; it was either service, or jail time."

He fell silent, taking a moment to refill both their glasses with another charge.

"How about you? How'd you wind up in the Corps?"

"Clone." Trask replied without hesitation. He never denied what he was, and had a record to prove that it didn't make a goddamn difference where he came from. His rivals had tried and failed to make it an issue. That he wasn't a real person who deserved the accolades heaped upon him, that somehow being created in a lab made him unfit to carry the ribbons and medals on his chest. "From the last of the cloning programs the Empire ran before shutting the whole thing down. No growth accelerators. No conditioning. Grew up with the rest of my batch until we were old enough for school. We got split up in the Academy. The Corps became my new family. You could say I never had a choice in the matter, but I wouldn't trade it for all the stars in the void."

Another sip from the glass. This time pacing himself. No sense wasting such a fine luxury. "I got a lot of lads like you in my squad. Cerberus was full of the unwanted detritus of the military machine. Runaways, petty criminals, deadbeats. We took those turds and polished them up until they sparkled. A lot of good lads that just needed a little discipline, and someone who cared about them. I miss those days. Being a Sergeant. Everything was simpler. Just you and the lads. Sure, you had the mission, but it was more about keeping each other alive at the end of the day. That kind of comradery doesn't exist anymore. The First Order stole that too.

Do you miss those days General? Being the little guy?"

The General wasn't sure if the comparison with the other deadbeats in Trask's unit was supposed to be an insult, or just merely objective. Jaden didn't react to it either way. His background had been far from rare when he joined the Empire; unlike Trask's.

Jaden hadn't - as far as he could remember - ever knowingly met a clone, but he had crossed paths with an assortment of people who had forced him to reconsider his understanding of what it meant to be a person, and alive. Replica droids so perfect that they were indistinguishable from the genuine article. Astromechs and androids so nuanced and quirk-filled that you didn't doubt for a second that they were alive, regardless of the fact that you knew they weren't. Nothing phased or shocked him about it; mild curiosity at best was all the information provoked.

That question though? That provoked a whole plethora of things. Nostalgic remorse - or was it remorseful nostalgia? - for one thing. It seemed like missing those days was all that General Luka did lately. The Resistance; his reasons for parting ways with the Republic; the inspirations he tried to draw upon for command; looking backwards as more metal was pinned to his uniform by the powers that be. There had come a point in his life where instead of looking forward, instead of aspiring, instead of trying to navigate through life to get to where he was going, everything had inverted so that he only contemplated how he had made it to where he found himself. He'd spent his life as a pilot, he sometimes joked; but in his autumn years he'd become a tail gunner, content to sit back, look behind, and let someone else do all the flying.

"Nah," he lied, shrugging it off. "Nostalgia is for men who are too old to do anything useful. I'm not there yet; and I don't think you'd be here unless you aren't, either."

"I suppose your right." Was his brief reply that was immediately lost as he slipped into his drink again. That was why he was here. Because he felt old, worthless, and incapable of doing anything to stem the tide of darkness that had befallen his beloved Empire. This was the only thing he could do, other than sticking to his guns and choosing the stubborn option once again. Then it would have been a life of sitting safely away from the battles while directing his soldiers to their deaths or continuing shadows operations removing powerful Resistance fighters from their posts. Even that latter option left his old body sitting behind a desk reading dossiers and reports before passing them on to the younger men to take care of. It was the inevitable bleak existence of the career soldier.

"I would be lying if I said I wasn't feeling old. Not sure how much use these old bones can be, but one thing is for sure; I couldn't sit back in my garrison and watch the goddamn galaxy go to pot. So here's me, doing my part. I brought plenty of datacards filled up with everything imaginable. Troop placements. Base layouts. Weapon schematics. Anything I could get my hands on. So what's the plan? Lock me away only to pull me out when you need to know something? I hope it's somewhere secret and secure, because trust me my own Storm Commandoes are damn fine soldiers and they will be coming for me. Poor lads."