Rex awoke from a light doze to the quasi-familiar sound of a brother's voice, turned up at the end like he was asking a question.

Not sensing immediate danger, he grumbled and shifted in his seat – his sheb had fallen asleep and was tingling something fierce – before reaching for the comm out of habit. His hand was halfway to the control panel when he matched the sound with its origin someplace behind him – a person, not a voice through the speaker.

"What is it, trooper?" he asked, feeling wakefulness slip back to him.

"Sorry sir, didn't mean to wake you," came the non-answer from the gunner stationed behind him – a vod'ika Rex had learned called himself Chatterbox.

"What's our ETA for the drop out of hyperspace?"

"Two minutes."

"Then there's no need to apologize for waking me up in a timely fashion," Rex said as kindly as he could. Two minutes of sleep wouldn't make a difference in what promised to be a long battle, but the rattle of the cruiser carrying his Y-wing exiting hyperspace would've woken him up anyway. "Now, repeat what you asked before."

"It's nothing, sir – just a nervous tic. I get jumpy before a big battle, more than my old batch and squad members ever did, and before I can stop myself I'm asking all these weird questions."

Rex had to smile at that. "After our buir'alor Jango Fett was killed in battle, the Kaminoans had to stretch what samples of his genetic material they had far to keep the army staffed, vod'ika. How old are you, ten?"

"Just turned twelve, sir."

"Young enough to be part of the generations when our brothers started coming out of their tanks with more quirks."

"You mean defects?"

"Nah. I saw a lot in the war, kid. I don't believe any brother comes out of his growth tank defective – just a little different," Rex said. "Being chatty isn't a defect. Besides, I've never known a brother who wasn't a little unsettled before a battle. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. Nerves are a part of sentient nature."

"In that case, sir," Chatterbox said, sounding heartened, "it's not my place, but I was wondering why you weren't wearing a vac helmet."

"Our gear is solid, vod'ika, but without the Republic to keep us armed and fed there's only so much to go around. Actually, the pair of us are lucky we still have all our original plate and haven't had to split it with anybody. I can make do with only a spare oxygen tank if it means giving a brother who could really use it a shot at a proper vac helmet."

It was half the truth – something like what one of his Jedi COs would've said when they wanted to soften bad news. Were Rex in the mood for full disclosure, he would've said too much time out of his bucket and plate made him antsy, and he'd had a lot of undercover missions in the last few months. It was part understanding that he knew all its strengths and drawbacks every bit as well as he knew his own body, and part fleeting superstition that all his past victories wearing it would protect him, somehow.

But he wasn't going to start a younger brother thinking that way if he could help it. He had memories of the glory days on the frontline when life had been tough, but with the backing of the Republic, most of the time there'd been enough supplies and tech and weaponry to go around. They'd all had to adapt since then, though, and these days a sensible clone didn't have the time for that kind of sentiment.

Adaptation. It all came back to that, in the end, didn't it?

The cruiser rumbled beneath them, and there was a faint stretching feeling to the air Rex had long ago learned to associate with a really big ship dropping out of hyperspace. Klaxons began to sound, the shrill wails an ear-splitting counterpoint to the voice of a brother up on the bridge beginning a one-minute countdown over the intercom. Rex and Chatterbox snapped into action, performing their preflight checks and testing the give on their harnesses.

When the countdown hit thirty seconds, Rex keyed up his Y-wing's comm system and opened a link with his squad. "This Captain Rex. All wings report in."

One by one, the twenty-four pilots under his command checked in – and in numerical order, no less. Rex smiled proudly. These brothers were young, if Chatterbox was the rule and not the exception, but they definitely weren't sloppy.

"Right. How's everybody feeling?" he asked.

The more boisterous pilots and gunners called out boasts and jeers against the enemy in Basic and Mando'a, but Rex heard a few too many nervous laughs in the mix for his liking. Nerves were sentient nature, but the more at ease he could get these vode'ika before they took off, the better.

"You boys who are laughing like you don't wanna be here, I hear you, and I understand," he said as the hangar doors open and the vanguard shot off through it. "I won't coddle you with lies and blind optimism; we're facing crazy odds today. A planet-killer in the dead center of a star system swarming with bugs? I'll be honest: any other day, I'd tell you to get out of town for making up stories.

"But you were chosen for this mission because your squads are the best of the best," he went on. "The best of the best don't need to be coddled; they can handle even the craziest odds and still come through on top. The Rebellion is counting on us to protect Spike's team while they get those plans, so what're we gonna do?"

"See the mission through!" a brother yelled – the pilot with the Y-wing tattoo he'd spoken with at the briefing. Rex wished now that he'd gotten the man's name.

"Show those di'kute bugs how it's done!" someone added in a holler.

Chatterbox pounded the frame of the canopy with the side of his fists a few times in agreement. "Blow those Imp bastards into space dust!" he screamed.

There was a roar of approval underscored by the revving of engines. Any other day, Rex would've snapped at them for wasting precious fuel, but they needed this. I need this, too, he thought, and revved his engine with a howl of his own.

The comm flashed. Smacking the back of Chatterbox's dashboard to quiet him, Rex left his squad to work each other into a frenzy unassisted and rerouted the new channel's output directly to his HUD. "Wing leaders, Extraction Team is ready for liftoff," came Commander Spike's voice.

"Blue Escort Leader ready to lift off on your mark," Rex said.

"Gold Escort Leader ready to lift off on your mark," Jattson echoed.

Spike's ship rose into the air, and the two Y-wings making up his personal guard for defense in close quarters followed. "Gold Escort Leader, you are a go."

A moment later, Jattson's squad slipped through the ray shields keeping the berths pressurized and rose smoothly out of the cruiser. Taking a deep breath, Rex toggled the comm back to the cheers of his still-celebrating squad.

"All right, cut the chatter!" he barked, channeling their eagerness back into something usable. "This is it, boys. Pull your punches to save ammo, and take as few chances as possible when confronting enemy fighters. We're not here to be heroes."

"Blue Escort Leader, you are a go," Spike said in Rex's ear.

"Lift off!" Rex ordered, and fired the antigrav, along with a gentle kick of fuel to propel his Y-wing through the ray shields and into the vacuum. His unit followed, and seconds later, they had left the safety of the cruiser – and were rocketing away into the unspeakable hell lying in wait for them.

Silence. A wide, empty space emptied further by the cold embrace of hard vacuum. Consciousness was a distant roar limited to the planets far beneath and the odd Imperial dreadnought slinking through the system on patrol.

It was the kind of peace that could only come from absolute nothingness – and the only peace short of absolute victory a Sith Lord could ever achieve. Vader wasn't entirely certain how long he'd been drifting there, his presence dimmer than a guttering flame, half-meditating and half-sleeping, until the space above him was suddenly crowded with–

People.

Vader clapped his hands to his head, trying to throw his walls up and muffle the cacophony of tens of thousands of auras pressing down on him. He winced when his gloves hit durasteel with a hollow clang, but the solidity of his helmet was the tether he needed to pull himself out. Breathing deeply, he let go of his connection to the Force bit by bit, and slipped back to the present.

The proximity alarm built into his TIE fighter's scanners, the one system he'd left on, was blaring. Vader moved a sluggish hand to the controls and called up the scanners' findings. His eyes narrowed as he studied the screen. Twenty Venators and twice that many corvettes, all fully staffed – save for the foot soldiers needed in a ground assault, if Vader had to guess from the number of life signs – had just exited hyperspace not far beyond the system's outermost planet. To be deeply modest, it was an impressively large fleet – perhaps even large enough to pose a problem.

TIE fighters and Geonosian solar sailors whizzed past the scrap heap where Vader had hidden his ship, eerily silent in the vacuum. Most shipboard life support systems – particularly those in vessels that saw combat – were equipped with simulators that replicated the sounds of other ships flying in atmosphere and played them back to the pilot from tiny speakers. They were integral in a pilot's reaction times, and for average flyers Vader saw the appeal. After all, most people didn't have the Force to warn them of incoming threats.

Vader did, and as the battle erupted without the slightest flicker of a Jedi's aura behind enemy lines, he decided that was what would turn the tide today.

His hands fluttered over the controls without pressing anything, itching to power up the fighter's engines and switch on his targeting computer. But still, the Force whispered for him to wait. There was something worth seeing here that he was going to miss if he acted too quickly.

The first wave of Rebel starfighters – Z-95s and Y-wings, mostly – slammed through the outer defenses of Geonosian solar sailors. Vader had foreseen this turn of events. The Geonosians were a tenacious lot, but from two large-scale invasions of the planet and countless smaller skirmishes, the Republic had more than enough experience fighting them to give them trouble.

Then the nearly unbroken lines of Rebel starfighters reached the first wave of TIEs dispatched from advance bases and watchtowers deeper into the system. Memories of his vision days or weeks ago slid smoothly over the scene unfolding through the viewport, and Vader's breath caught in his throat.

This was it. This was the moment the Rebels' plan would begin to reveal itself. Vader watched his screen anxiously as the scanners refreshed the visual with new information. He needed only wait for–

There. Vader calibrated the scanners to focus on the lead cruiser as a trio of Y-wings left its hangar. A pair of squadrons of twelve led by a single lead fighter took to the air a few seconds later, splitting back into two units to cover the trio's sides. Another two squadrons followed to cover the three ships' vulnerable canopies and undersides, completing what would be, from afar, an impenetrable escort. The two squad leaders zipped to the front of the convoy, and then, as one, the group of fifty-three began their attack run into the system.

Even making their approach at full power, the convoy had a long way to come to reach the thick of the fighting. The group was much too far from the Death Star and the scrap heap he hovered in for Vader's eyes to pick them out unassisted, and they would be for some time still, but the Force and his fighter's scanners told him everything he needed to know: the two escort leaders weren't taking any chances.

Every knot of skirmishing ships the convoy drew near to, it circumvented. Even as they fought, the Rebel craft under siege maneuvered their ships between their attackers and the convoy, defending it to the bitter, explosive end.

"The convoy is the key to this entire assault," Vader murmured, remembering only belatedly that he had to keep silent to conserve his dwindling oxygen supply. Not that it mattered, now. He didn't yet know what the convoy's goal was, but its success was a nexus in the Force – and many roads leading away from it ended in a catastrophic blow to the Empire.

This attack was well thought out; the TIE fighters and solar sailors had been deceived by the pawns the Rebellion had sent ahead of the real offensive. That left Vader, which was just the way he liked it. Grinning maniacally beneath his helmet, he powered up his ship and shot forward to meet the enemy head-on.

Rex was no fool who charged straight into a mission without reviewing every relevant report; what little information the Rebellion had on the Death Star, he'd read and reread until he knew them all by heart. He'd expected a feat of engineering, a weapon of exceptional size and make. But the skeletal space station surrounded by construction modules – construction modules he'd seen often enough to know just how big they were in their own right – gave the word colossal a whole new meaning.

And it wasn't even completed yet.

"By all our brothers living and gone to the Force..." one of the pilots under his command murmured over the comm.

"Ninety-five klicks in circumference? That is insane," someone else added.

"Keep the channel clear," Rex reprimanded them, but there was no heart in it. This... this was almost outside the realm of understanding. For a second, he felt his years slip away from him, leaving him alone in a child's training fatigues before the great enormity of the galaxy just beyond Kamino's atmosphere.

Then he shook the feeling off. This was the same as any other mission to an outpost in enemy territory. It didn't matter that the surface of the Death Star was bristling with guns, or that the big radar dish in the station's upper hemisphere was gaping at his squad like an open mouth. All Rex had to worry about was his end goal: reaching the polar comm tower, and getting Spike back to the cruiser in one piece.

Rex studied the battle with a close eye. Spike's escort was still operating at full strength; they'd barely even had to use any ammo to keep the enemy forces off their tails. Part of Rex could almost believe the offensive was going off without a hitch, and that there were no variables Command hadn't accounted for.

The rest of him knew that was impossible. Unless they'd somehow caught the Empire with its pants too far down to grab in a hurry, this was just dumb luck.

A squadron of TIEs down two members but otherwise undaunted blinked to life on his scopes. "TIES, incoming!" he warned his men, activating his helmet comm at the last second to give the message to Spike and Jattson at the same time.

"Confirmed," Jattson agreed, his voice smooth and seemingly unworried. "My boys'll handle them. Rex, tighten formation on my mark."

"Copy that," Rex said, then relayed the order to his men.

"Tighten formation," Jattson barked. As his group sprayed outward, giving chase before the attackers could get close enough to strike at the mission leader, Rex's squadrons shrank down around the three ships.

Two explosions almost directly aft rocked Rex's ship a heartbeat later. "What the–?" he began. He felt the blood drain from his face beneath his helmet when the scanners came back with an empty space where Spike's bodyguards had been. "Blue Escort, defend Commander Spike!" he yelled. "Blue Escort Six through Twelve, get above and below him, now!"

"Commander Spike! What is your situation?" came Jattson's voice over the private channel that now branched between three ships instead of five. There was a long silence, and when Jattson tried again, he was considerably more panicked. "Are you in one piece, man?"

Spike groaned. "Got a little seared and that kook jostled me around pretty good, but I think I'm okay. My... vision's just a little blurry. It'll pass."

"Can you fly?" Rex asked urgently.

"Yeah... yeah, I can fly." Another groan, this one significantly more pained. Rex's breath caught in his throat when Spike's ship wavered. "Oh, hell. I think I've got a concussion."

Rex swore violently.

"Just keep flying as straight as you can for now, you hear me, ori'vod? I'll be right there," Jattson said. "I've just gotta–"

He broke off in a bloodcurdling scream, and there was a burst of static on the comm. Rex's hands tightened around the yoke, and he shot a glance at the feed from the scanners; another five ships gone in a single flyby. Rex forced himself to loosen his fingers before he changed course.

"Gold Escort," he said, opening a channel to what remained of Jattson's two squadrons, "this is Blue Escort Leader. From now on, you report to me. Deal with those Imperial mongrels and get back in formation on the double!"

Two ships took damage in the firefight and were summarily picked off from above, just as the others had been. Another three disappeared in explosions of fuel and debris before they'd made it back into formation.

For the first time, the enemy craft – a lone TIE fighter – dipped close enough to trigger Rex's proximity sensors and show up on the grid before it disappeared out of range again. How the hell was this guy making those shots from so far away? Even a targeting computer wouldn't be able to manage it; was that an Elite in the cockpit?

"Gold Escort, get up there and smoke that guy out!" Rex yelled. "Blue Escort, kill your rear deflectors and reroute all the power you can to defend your canopies!"

"Rex," Spike rasped in Rex's ear. "My gunner isn't responding, and my eyesight's going dark. At this rate we'll be dead before we make the rendezvous."

"Come on, Spike, don't say–"

"Rex."

Rex blew out a breath. "Right."

"Get to these coordinates," Spike said. Rex's comm pinged with a text-only message, and he fed it directly into the navicomputer. "There's no passcode. Just get there and initialize the transfer, and fly like hell back to the cruiser."

Rex's throat knotted in on itself, and he swallowed thickly. "It was an honor serving with you, Commander Spike."

"The honor was mine, Captain Rex. Now go on – see the mission through."

Rex took a deep breath and programmed his comm system to broadcast a priority signal to every friendly craft within range. "All squadrons, this is Blue Escort Leader Captain Rex, code CC-7567. I'm taking control of the extraction team. If anyone has any objections, say so now and I will add them to my mission report upon the fleet's return to base."

Silence.

Taking that as endorsement, Rex toggled the comm back to the thirty-six – thirty, now, he realized with a sinking feeling as he counted them – Y-wings under his command. "Gold Escort, what's your status?"

"This guy is–" a grunt and the whine of engines split a brother's sentence in half, "–sir, he's like a one-man squadron. He's picking us off one by one!"

Rex checked his navicomputer. He was close enough to start his run for the comm tower. "All fighters, get up there and hold him off," he said. "I'm going in."

"But, sir," someone began.

"Do it! Nothing we've thrown at him so far seems able to hold him, and if he takes me out, it's all over for us!" Calming himself down as best he could, Rex added, "Chatterbox will watch my back."

"You can count on me, sir," Chatterbox said, for Rex's benefit as much as the listening squad members.

"Right. It's been an honor–"

Rex didn't get the chance to finish speaking before an explosion thundered in his ears, much, much closer than when Spike's two guards had been hit. The fighter kicked around him, throwing him to the side and forward over the controls with force enough to bruise flesh and break bones. His harness strained against his armor, fighting to keep him in place, and it was only once he shook his head clear that he realized he'd been hit.

Again Rex spotted the enemy TIE before its pilot swooped up out of sight, and he swallowed a curse. Bastard's trying to take out the leadership, he thought. Ice shot down his spine despite the sweat sticking his bodysuit to his back. He knows we're the crux of the offensive. Somehow, he knows. He's an Elite. He has to be.

Rex shook his head again, wooziness from the blow and adrenaline from the pieces he'd just put together clashing awkwardly. At least he wasn't concussed; he wasn't nauseous or blurry-eyed, and the disorientation was quickly wearing off. A pilot's bucket was designed to protect them vacuum. Rex's Phase II armor was designed to reinforce his skull against hard knocks.

He became aware of a cacophony of brothers' voices asking for his status, if he was all right. "Affirmative. I'm in one piece. Carry out my orders," he said, and switched the comm off to call behind him for Chatterbox.

No answer.

"Chatterbox," he tried again, louder, and decided to risk a glance back at him. Chatterbox was hanging limp against the harness, and it took Rex too long to realize the respirator on the pilot's helmet was eerily silent, and his chest wasn't moving.

He wasn't breathing, and on the battlefield, when the medics were too far away to call for help, that only ever meant one thing.

"May the Force be with you, brother." Rex turned to study the damage report on the screens in front of him. His rear deflector screens were shot, and it wouldn't take an enemy craft long to figure that out. Without a gunner to compensate, he had to move fast. "Hey, Chatterbox? It's probably an insensitive thing to ask you so soon after you died, but be with me through this, all right? I need all the help I can get."

Rex let a few breaths of stale recycled oxygen whistle out from between his teeth before hitting the accelerator and slamming the yoke forward, sending his ship rocketing toward the comm tower as fast as it could go. He kept an eye on the display mapping the Y-wing's trajectory to the polar regions of the station, and an ear open for the whine of a proximity alert.

A TIE fighter whipped past him so fast the proximity alarm didn't even wail. Rex watched it arced up and away – preparing to come in for an attack from above, he expected – and tore his thoughts away from Blue and Gold Escort. Rex knew in his gut that this was the same pilot they'd faced before, and if the enemy craft was here and his forces weren't, that said all that needed saying.

Rex spun the sturdy little ship into the slickest evasive maneuvers he knew, barrel rolling down and away from the TIE pilot's first volley. It reminded him more than a little of flight simulations with General Skywalker on the stints they'd spent shipboard between missions, and Rex settled into a rhythm quickly: fly, observe, predict, dodge, predict, fire.

Rex was calm, in control, in the zone. It was only eight hundred klicks, seven fifty to the rendezvous, now; he could do this. He could–

The Elite swung down again, and Rex avoided five laser blasts out of seven on the second pass. The first struck the deflector screen overhead, and the energy was absorbed and dissolved without harming his ship. But the second shot landed further back – too far back.

"No, no, no, no! Kark it, no!" Rex snarled as a warning began to blare, and a screen lit up with a life feed of information on the status of the Y-wing's ailing shield generator. In desperation Rex shunted power from the life support – he didn't need any ambient oxygen as long as he was wearing the tank strapped to his back – to the generator's compromised battery packs.

Nothing.

Rex shut his eyes beneath his helmet. This was it. There would be no getting out of here alive without deflector screens; Rex just wasn't enough of a pilot. One enemy fighter, he could predict enough to evade, even one with the Force. But the hundreds – even thousands – that lay between him and the safety of the cruisers?

At least he'd been able to spend the last three weeks with one of his Jedi only a comm call away. For that long, things had made sense, and Rex had felt like his old self again. That was enough for him to greet death grinning from ear to ear.

And that's exactly what I'll do, he thought. But first, he'd see the information safely into Rebel hands. Ahsoka's transmitter would never support the sheer file size of the plans, and he couldn't speak for Senator Organa's tech, either; none of this had been part of the plan, and if Spike had had any fallbacks, Rex didn't know them. But a spunky little Astromech he was acquainted with might just make the cut.

Cody and General Kenobi were in deep cover on some secret business, but if they'd been able to contact him, they could contact other old allies in the Rebellion. More than that, he trusted them to see it through where he could not.

Rex put on a burst of speed, pushing the engines until the sheer force of the acceleration pressed him back in his seat. Six hundred klicks. Five. Four.

The TIE was faster than the bulky Y-wing. Rex jerked the yoke to the side, weaving around another volley as best he could, but he couldn't avoid them all. His starboard engine and stabilizers took the bulk of the damage, sending him into a gut-churning tailspin. Fighting to right the ship before it sank close enough for the gravity of the Death Star or Geonosis or one of its moons to trap him, he nearly missed it when the navicomputer display flashed green.

He was within range.

The transmitter lit up, informing him in a scrawl of glowing text that there was an active EF-4 link just shy of three hundred klicks away – a server with a single massive folder available to download. Muttering prayers of thanks to deities he only half-believed in, Rex opened another link to Cody and programmed the transmitter to use his ship like a subspace transceiver, bouncing the information on to a second recipient without saving any of it.

The surface of the planet-killer loomed closer with his starfighter's every dizzying spiral, and Rex could no longer generate the lift to fly himself to safety. Its weapon of mass destruction wasn't complete yet, but it seemed to Rex the Death Star was about to claim its first Rebel victim. With luck, he'd be its last.

His display blinked as a screen was updated with new information. Rex let his gaze slide over to meet it. The transfer was complete, and the plans themselves were long gone, travelling EF-4's securest channels into the memory system of a little Astromech droid far, far away.

TIE fighter engines roared in Rex's ears, and the next laser bolts found and ignited one of his fuel cells. Rex silenced the warnings to evacuate with the press of a button; ejecting from the floundering ship would only place him and all his secrets, all the people who were alive but thought dead, into the enemy pilot's hands. If his pursuer even let him live.

The Jedi considered burning their dead on a pyre a great honor – a symbolic mirroring of the person's life energy and consciousness rejoining the Force. There was no wood for him, but he hoped tibanna gas would make an adequate substitute.

"You still with me, Chatterbox?" he asked as the fuel cell ruptured. Heat licked at his back, and a horrible, boiling pressure was building somewhere below him, but in the midst of it all, he could've sworn he felt a whisper of assent.

"Good," he murmured. "That's good. Looks like I'll be with you real soon, but what can I say? It's easier for this old soldier to talk a little than to go quietly. Ahsoka – hey, that's Commander Tano, to you – has a friend on Onderon who's gotten her through some major poodoo. I just hope he can help her through this, too. In fact–"

The explosion built to the breaking point, smashing outward, and Rex shut his eyes without finishing the sentence. The next thing he knew was emptiness – blissful, calming emptiness, where no flames or enemies could harm him.

In a shocking turn of events, as the Rebellion tried to catch the Empire off-guard, it itself was lured into a trap of a Sith Lord's making. With Rex's fate uncertain and one more pillar of her already scant support system gone, how will Ahsoka react? How much can she afford to confide in Lux when he knows so little of her past? Even more pressing, what will Vader do once he realizes what did to his old captain? Only time will tell...

THE DRAMATIC IRONYYYYY IN THIS CHAPTER AAAAAAAAA

Some of you may remember this chapter from the last version of this story. In that case, my response to the reaction last time will be the same now:

But not before a quick author's note on a few points! A fine new addition to our Mando'a collection– I MEANT DICTIONARY is the term buir'alor, which means, essentially, parent-leader. I always headcanoned the clones had some kind of name or title for Jango as the man from whom they were created, which is where the sentiment stems from.

Something worth noting too is that the Rebellion DID catch the Empire with its pants down, as Rex thought and then dismissed – or as close as it comes to it. If not for Vader's vision, the mission might've gone as planned. However, it's never as interesting if things go exactly as they're expected to is it? Hehe... he... he...

PLEASE DON'T KILL ME YET GUYS THE NEXT THREE CHAPTERS ARE LITERALLY BANGER

KINDA ANGSTY THO

BUT STILL BANGER

A final PSA: I'm leaving on a trip in mid-August, and updates will probably slow down again around that time as I get ready and once I'm aw ay. In fact, I'm considering a hiatus for the entire month of August to replenish my stock of chapters before school starts up again. I'll keep you guys posted either way!

Next chapter, Lux will make some startling connections between schemes that have been tightening the noose around him and Ahsoka will receive some grave news. Talk to you all then!