COUNT TO THREE

Breathe.

You remember how—you taught yourself when they rebuilt you the first time. Breathe in for a count of three, hold it, breathe out for a count of three, hold it, and then start over.

Remember the routine. Remember accepting the pain in your neck and your chest and your arms. A sign you’re alive—for now.

But only so long as the routine holds. So count, and breathe, or die—

#

Shen returned to consciousness lying on his back. Emergency lights turned the walls around him bright red and pitch black over and over. There was no sound. The blast had flung him against a bulkhead hard enough to leave a dent; Shen’s helmet, which usually functioned as his eyes and ears, must have been damaged.

Breathe. Orientate yourself.

What just happened?

The pieces slowly came back together. He was aboard the Imperial Quasar Fire-class carrier Exigent, temporarily assigned to a routine scouting mission ahead of the rest of Titan Squadron. Shen had been walking back from the galley after breakfast. He'd passed two young TIE pilots gossiping in the corridor, who fell silent as Shen approached, then whispered ferociously when they thought he was out of earshot.

The last thing Shen remembered after that was the incoming missile alarm.

Now those two young pilots lay dead on the floor nearby, blood running from their noses and ears. Not surprising. That impact had been close enough to kill an ordinary man with sheer concussive force.

But Shen was not an ordinary man. Not wholly; not after being reconstructed so thoroughly and so often. Most TIE pilots didn’t survive their first crash. Shen had survived them all. At a price.

Shen sat up, feeling the cybernetic servos in his once-broken neck come back to life, and keyed through his helmet channels. He felt no pain — he had trained himself out of that, eventually — but there was a strange tightness in his chest that was distracting.

“Getting old,” he told himself, but the joke didn’t help.

Static fizzed and popped in his helmet, and then the rest of the world came back in a rush. A blaring alarm. Steel girders groaning. The slow hiss of his breath—three, hold, three, hold—following the familiar routine. And then, as he switched to Titan Squadron’s local channel, loud and creative swearing.

“—you Hutt-licking nerf-snorting piece… of… crap—come on—!”

“Vonreg,” Shen said.

A scuffling, then: “Shen? You made it—no, of course you did. What happened?”

“Missile strike.”

Vonreg audibly ground her teeth. “Out here? This system was supposed to be safe!”

“I know.”

“We need to get to the bridge ASAP. I’m close, but the door to central access is jammed.” There was a clunk of a heavy combat boot slamming into a door.

Shen stood up and was about to reply when a tremor went through the deck plating. His cybernetic implants transmitted the tremor in exquisite detail; his experience painted a vivid picture of what was about to happen.

“No time,” he said. “Ship’s finished.”

“What?”

“Ship’s finished. We have to go.”

Vonreg never argued with Shen’s instincts. “All right, but looks like we lost the starboard hangars. Our TIE fighters are toast.”

“A reaper, then. Saw one in the far portside hangar.”

Something beeped. “Right… it looks like portside is still intact. If I could get past this blast door—”

“I’m coming,” Shen told her.

#

The interior of the Exigent was a horror of sparking conduits, electrical smoke, the cries of the injured, and officers screaming orders. Shen moved through it like you move through a nightmare: as fast as you can, yet never fast enough. He paused only long enough to punch the deck’s evacuation alarm. The flashing red lights flicked over to a rapid yellow, and evacuation lights lit up along the floor leading the way to the escape pods.

Shen ignored them. He knew where he was going.

The blast door to central access was going to be a problem. A girder had fallen across it and dented the door in its track. From the other side, Shen heard someone snarling in frustration like a caged nexu. “Vonreg?”

“Here!”

Shen put his shoulder to the girder, tested the weight, then shoved it easily aside; though the strange tightness in his chest got noticeably worse as he did so.

“Manual release?” he called.

“I pulled it already. No damn use.”

Shen studied the blast door and crouched, getting his fingers into the handholds at the edge. “Then we lift. On three.”

“Okay. One—two—”

On Vonreg’s ‘three’, Shen lifted. The door squealed in its tracks and that tightness in his chest cranked up another notch, but Shen ignored it, getting his six and a half feet of muscle and cybernetics and stubbornness underneath to force it up. A slender figure in a TIE pilot uniform slid through the gap; as soon as she was clear, Shen let the door fall with a rolling thud.

“Nice work,” said Havina Vonreg, standing and briskly dusting herself off. She was half Shen’s size, compact like a thermal detonator, with a scar running through her half-shaven dark hair. “We should—what the hell?”

She pointed. Shen looked down. Three inches of jagged durasteel stuck out just beneath his clavicle. A piece of debris must have punched through his armor in the blast. That explained the tension: the shadow of pain he wasn’t feeling.

“Forget it,” he said. “Evac first.”

Vonreg looked at the shard uneasily, but shook her head. “Lead the way.”

The port hangar was intact but a mess. The missile strike had shaken TIE fighters off the loading racks, leaving them smoking hulks on the deck. The TIE reaper — flat-profiled and large enough to carry a commando team — stood to one side, likely on the deck for maintenance. It had been clipped by a falling TIE’s wing, but it seemed to be intact.

As they ran toward it, Shen felt another tremor ripple through the deck. Worse than before. No time to find more survivors.

“Vonreg, hurry,” he told her.

Vonreg had only paused long enough to grab a helmet off the half-collapsed rack. “With you. How bad is it going to be?”

“Catastrophic.” Shen reached the reaper, uncoupled the fuel lines, and lowered the ramp. Vonreg sprinted inside; he followed her and strapped into the pilot’s seat, running preflight as fast as he could. Vonreg took co-pilot position and strapped down. “Check.”

“Hold on,” Shen warned.

He was used to compensating for the asymmetrical payload of a TIE bomber. This reaper was built for rapid troop deployment; it took off at a touch, scraping free of the TIE wing that had almost pinned it down, then shot through the hangar’s flickering magnetic shield.

The reaper powered towards safe distance, banking through a cloud of debris that fizzed against its shields. Soon the Exigent was a broad grey spearhead in the distance, scorched by missile fire, its starboard side crackling with electricity. Tiny motes moved away from it—escape pods, or other evacuating TIEs.

Vonreg craned forward in her seat. Her gloved fists clenched on the armrests. “Look at that.”

Shen started counting silently.

“And they told us Nuvar was a safe system! What’s Intelligence been doing since Endor — playing zinbiddle? When Captain Kerrill hears about this, sh—”

Thoooo-oooom—

Blinding blue-white light expanded ahead of them. Vonreg shielded her eyes; Shen let his helmet compensate. When the light cleared, the Exigent was in three slowly drifting pieces. Sections of burning hull peeled away.

“Reactor overload,” Shen said.

“There were two hundred people on that carrier,” said Vonreg. Her pale face was flushed with anger.

She started working at her console. Shen watched the Exigent burn, managing the reaper with a light touch. He had seen too many ships die since Endor.

“There,” said Vonreg. She brought up a chart of the Nuvar system. A plotted trajectory led to the moon of the second planet. “Looks like the missiles came from an orbiting defense station, here. An Imperial station.”

Shen craned over. “Ours?”

“So the records say. Apparently we captured it from rebel forces—or the ‘New Republic’, whatever they call themselves now—two months ago.”

“Hmm.”

“Right? What sense does that make? Why would our own station shoot down the Exigent?”

Vonreg stared out at the stars. “We have to deal with this. Get to the station, board it, figure out what happened. It could have been rebel sabotage, or a stowaway, or—”

“There’s survivors,” Shen nodded towards the wreckage, and the flickers of escape pods moving beyond it.

“And how long will they survive if that station starts firing missiles again?” Vonreg wanted to know. “Not to mention the rest of Titan Squadron. If they jump in now, they’ll get ambushed by another volley--we’d lose more people than we did at Var-Shaa.” She closed her fist. “No. Those survivors can wait while we handle this.”

“We’re not commandos.”

Vonreg rounded on him. “My brothers died in a strike just like this one,” she snarled. “One spread of rebel torpedoes, and half my family was gone, like that!” She snapped her fingers. “The hell with mission protocol. I’ll tear that station open with my bare hands before I lose one more pilot that way!” Vonreg set her jaw. “Are you my wingmate or not?”

Shen studied her. He was used to Vonreg’s unbridled battle fury. This was something else. “Okay.”

“ ‘Okay’?”

“Okay. I’m in.”

Vonreg settled, her chin still raised. “Well, good. Glad to hear it.”

Her eyes flicked down to his chest where that durasteel shard jutted out. “But first, we need to do something about that.”

Shen shrugged. “Needs a med bay—or a mechanic. It can wait.”

Vonreg shook her head, unstrapped her restraints, and went into the reaper’s troop compartment, returning with a medpac. “At least take some antibiotics, for crying out loud.”

They switched seats. Shen methodically injected himself with the three stims he found in the medpac, and wiped off the worst of the blood while Vonreg put the reaper on course. She kept glancing his way.

“You’re acting like that doesn’t even hurt,” she said.

“It doesn’t.”

“Come on. How can it not hurt?”

“Practice.” Shen tossed the empty stim injectors away and accessed the co-pilot’s controls. He could already feel his systems, organic and otherwise, coming back into equilibrium.

Vonreg snorted. “We’ve got that in common. Don’t feel—fight. That’s probably why we get along.”

Shen checked their course and speed.

Eventually Vonreg said: “My younger brother, Hedrian. He wasn’t killed outright by those rebel torpedoes. He made it back to his hangar—what was left of him—before…” Her hands moved with practiced care over the controls, but her eyes were focused beyond them, on some clearly-remembered horror. “It was a bad way to go. Too many people on the Exigent would have gone the same way.”

Shen said simply: “But you don’t feel.”

They travelled a long way in silence before Vonreg replied. “If you’re the sensitive type—if—you can only take so much before you overload. And when that happens, if you want to keep going, you find something—even if it’s just a target. Whatever gets you moving forward. Everything else has to be noise. To survive.”

Vonreg threw him a look over her shoulder. “You tell anyone I said that…”

“Why would I?”

“Right.” She squared herself up. “Let’s fix this.”

Shen agreed.

* * *

They were closing in on the station—a small grey shadow high above the dust-rose crescent of its moon — when an alert went off. It rapidly became a rising whine that both of them recognized immediately.

“Station’s getting a missile lock,” said Shen. He pushed the reaper into an evasive maneuver.

Vonreg frowned at the reaper’s weapon systems. “Maintenance must have been interrupted in the attack—we’ve got no countermeasures installed on this barge. Just the laser cannons.”

“You’ve got it?”

Vonreg studied the sensors; Shen waited, knowing she had a gunner’s eye. The alert blipped again, a warning this time. Missile locking on.

“Yeah.” Vonreg looked up. “I’ve got it. If you can give me the shot. Bring us in hard to confuse its targeting, and I’ll need a bank to starboard.”

“Just say when.”

Shen put them on course directly for the station and throttled up. His helmet systems could already pick out the missile streaking towards them, sketching a faint white line across the stars. Vonreg’s eyes were fixed on the sensors, her thumb hovering over the firing trigger.

The missile was clearly visible now, at fifty klicks. Whatever warhead it carried was enough to punch through a carrier’s hull.

Thirty klicks.

A single TIE would be blasted to glittering dust in one hit. Not even Shen would come back from that.

Fifteen.

“Now!”

Shen banked the TIE reaper hard to starboard. As a rule, troop carriers aren’t designed to bank as sharply as a bomber; he felt the superstructure of the ship groan, but he didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer, feeling the reaper’s limits and pushing right to their brink. A second later the laser cannons blasted a tight green volley that shredded the missile apart.

“They’re trying for a second missile lock,” Vonreg reported.

Shen judged their trajectory. The station’s hangar was a faint bluish rectangle up ahead.

“Shen?”

“We can hit the hangar before it locks. Max the engines.”

Vonreg transferred full power to propulsion. Shen throttled the reaper to its maximum speed and then hit the boost thrusters hard enough to pin them in their seats. The ship’s hull rattled around them; the station and the hangar’s blue magnetic shield grew up ahead alarmingly fast.

The missile lock alert reached a high whine.

Shen cut power seconds before they punched through the shield. The TIE reaper coasted into the hangar, scraped against the deck plating with a high-pitched squeal, scattered a stack of crates, skidded around, and came to rest at the far end.

Vonreg let out a long breath. “We actually made it.” Her hand slapped down into Shen’s outstretched palm. “Nice landing.”

“Thanks. Now what?”

Vonreg smiled nastily. “Now we find whoever’s shooting at us, and get some payback.” She went to the reaper’s munitions locker, getting them a blaster each. “It’s a tiny station. There’s probably not more than a half-dozen crew.”

Shen considered the blaster, then shoved it into his belt. “More than us. Stay sharp.”

They headed down the loading ramp. The hangar was a mess of spilling crates; the reaper had left a deep groove in the deck. Apart from the tick of its cooling engines, all was quiet.

As he approached the hangar access elevator, Shen snapped his fingers and pointed Vonreg towards the lit-up access panel. She glanced at it and made an urgent gesture: it’s coming down.

They took up position on either side. Moments later, the elevator sighed to a halt. The doors opened.

Two figures stepped out, dressed in grey and white uniforms. They wandered out towards the steaming TIE reaper and glanced at each other. “At least the sensors weren’t glitched too. But what t—”

Vonreg’s blaster shot took the left-hand figure in the back of the leg. He screamed and fell, clutching his hamstring. As the other whipped around, scrabbling for the pistol on his hip, he met Shen’s punch coming the other way like a battering ram. The blow sent the second figure reeling three feet back before he collapsed on the deck, stunned.

Vonreg strode over to her target. “When you try to kill Imperials,” she told him, “make sure you finish the job.”

“Wait! Agh—wait, please, we—”

Shen went to the second figure and hoisted him up easily by the collar. He had expected a hardened New Republic commando. The dazed young face before him—olive-skinned, with a badly-trimmed bristle of dark hair—looked barely old enough to shave.

Behind him, Vonreg swore violently. “Shen…”

“Hmm?”

She showed him the insignia on the shoulder of the wincing youngster at her feet. An Imperial insignia.

“They’re cadets.” Vonreg said the word like she’d just scraped it off her boot. “Our cadets.”

Shen tilted his head.

“Ensigns,” wheezed the one in Shen’s grasp. “Ensign Nicobar—that’s Ensign Werrens—”

“I don’t care.” Vonreg got in Nicobar’s face. “Who’s in command here? Why did you shoot down a friendly carrier?”

“We don’t know!” gasped Werrens, clutching his leg.

“You’re not off to a good start,” warned Vonreg.

“The control tower—”

Shen let Nicobar down and tossed him into the elevator. “Show us. Now.”

#

They rode the elevator up to the control tower, where three other Imperial cadets were crewing the stations. As the doors opened the cadets stared, shocked, at the limping Werrens; then backed off rapidly from Vonreg as she strode towards the central console and accessed the main computer.

“Who are y—” one of the cadets began to ask, then her eyes widened at the bloody durasteel sticking out of Shen’s chest.

Shen studied her and the other cadets as Vonreg worked. Their uniforms were disheveled; their faces were pinched with fear. No sign of a senior officer anywhere. These cadets were a little younger than those two TIE pilots he had seen on the Exigent just before the missiles hit: full of life and gossiping one moment, and dead the next.

Vonreg slammed a fist onto the central console, making the cadets jump in unison, then leaned against it as if carrying a heavy weight on her shoulders. “Unbelievable.” She turned to Shen. “These idiots got assigned to a captured rebel station, but never cleared the profiles out of the missile targeting system. It’s still calibrated to shoot anything Imperial that comes into range.”

Protests went up around the room.

“—had no idea the system was even calibrated that way!”

“Our commanding officer left to get reinforcements!”

“Right! They said it would be temporary—”

“We tried to send a comm! No one answered, or the system was damaged—”

“It’s not our fault!” Werrens limped forward. “They sent us here right out of the academy! They said that after Endor they needed every Imperial officer they could get! We hadn’t finished our final tests yet, but they said not to question, we were ready, they needed us…”

Shen and Vonreg exchanged a look. It summed up the unspoken paradox of Imperial loyalty after Endor: that while their Empire was, of course, infallible, sometimes it was less infallible than they would like.

“We’re sorry,” whispered Nicobar.

“Sorry?” echoed Vonreg. “A carrier is destroyed, hundreds of loyal crew lost over a mistake that should have been drilled out of you on day one, and you’re sorry? Why not wipe your backside on that Imperial uniform while you’re at it?”

“But we—”

“Shut your mouth!” Vonreg’s voice lashed through the room. “You know how many families are going to get that holocall today because of you? So soon after Endor, and Var-Shaa, and--” She put a hand on her blaster. “Damn it, we should make an example of the lot of you. We’d save the rebels the trouble!”

The cadets huddled together. Shen stepped between her and them. “Vonreg. Take a breath. Count to three.”

Her eyes glared into his; or seemed to. He knew that from her perspective, his face was a dusty, often-repaired TIE helmet. “You’re not going to defend these screwups?”

“They’re our screwups,” he told her.

“Look what they did to the Exigent. To you!”

“They didn’t kill your brother,” said Shen.

He felt the cadets stir with confusion behind him.

Vonreg said: “You think I’m too far gone to know that?”

“You know it,” said Shen. “Time to feel it.”

Annoyance hissed between her teeth. “So what, then? They just get away with this?”

“No,” Shen said. “They live with the burden. Every day.” He tapped his chest. “Like we live with ours.”

Vonreg’s hard glare softened. “I hate it when you talk sense."

Her hand fell from her blaster. The whole room seemed to exhale as she marched for the elevator. Shen followed.

“I cleared the targeting profiles,” Vonreg called over her shoulder. “Try not to mess it up before we can send someone with a microbe of common sense out here to take charge.”

“Wait—” Nicobar stepped out timidly. “Who are you? What squadron are you with?”

Shen and Vonreg paused in the doorway. For a moment Shen could imagine the two of them through the cadets’ eyes: a scarred fury, and a faceless, bloodied giant.

“We’re Titan Squadron,” Vonreg told them. “You wouldn’t make the cut.”

"But you’ll learn," Shen added as the doors closed.

* * *

Two hours later, the Star Destroyer Overseer arrived in-system, leading the rest of Titan Squadron. Vonreg joined the search for survivors from the Exigent. After reporting in, Shen’s squadron leader, Grey, took one look at him and ordered Shen off-duty.

The Overseer’s chief medic rolled his eyes as Shen strode into the med bay. “You? Again?”

“Me. Again.”

“Lie down. I’ll get the surgery droids online.” The chief medic studied the durasteel shard in Shen's chest. “Your torso’s systems are overdue for a full refit anyway. But even taking your armor off is going to hurt. Try to breathe through it.”

Shen nodded. “The old routine…”

“Not so ‘routine’ if we keep on taking losses.” The chief medic began suiting up and reached for the bacta spray. “Even if you can take it, our medical resources can’t--whatever the propaganda broadcasts keep chanting. So, you know. Be mindful.”

Shen sat on the edge of the bed, absorbing this. Not just ships, then. Those rookie cadets from the station--and other Imperial cadets across the galaxy--were being called to defend an Empire whose cupboards were increasingly bare.

“Save the supplies for later,” he said. “Just patch me up. No refit.”

The chief medic smiled ruefully. “Luckily for you, the new orders say we need every pilot we have. I’m obligated to get you back to full readiness. Now lie down.”

Shen lay back.

Breathe to survive. So you can feel enough to live.

The Empire is learning what you learned. Anger and guilt and pain all burn out. When they’re gone, you find out how the fire has refined you. You learn who you are now, after the worst has happened. You learn if there’s enough left of you to keep going.

And if there isn’t enough—you learn what can rebuild you.

The surgery droids closed in. Shen shut his eyes, and breathed deep.

END