The Resolute Dawn vibrated like a big feline with a bad attitude—engine harmonics thrumming through deck plates, making your teeth sing if you clamped them wrong. The hangar stank of ozone, coolant, gun oil, and the ghost of a hundred departures that never came back exactly the same.
"General on deck," someone called, more out of habit than reverence.
"Knock it off," I said. "Save the ceremony for people who like curtains."
Rift was already there, helmet tucked to his hip, the scar under his right eye making him look permanently unimpressed. Burner leaned on a crate of Z-6 components like it was a bar counter. Doc paced while reading vitals off three different troopers and pretending he wasn't doing it. Spark sat cross-legged with an open junction box and a handful of fiber, having a one-sided argument with my droid, R3-B3—Beeper—that involved more cursing than syntax. Frost was staring at nothing the way snipers do when they're measuring the world for bullet shapes. Brick headbutted his energy shield into activation just to feel it catch. Jackal sniffed the air, which would've been ridiculous if I hadn't seen him do it and then tell us there were three Separatist techs in a vent by the way the coolant smelled different.
Rift cocked his head toward the sim-bay doors. "Thought we'd start you in reality before reality starts you."
"I do love getting hazed by professionals," I said.
He smiled without his mouth. "Not hazing. Orientation."
The augmented-reality simulator took up the aft quadrant of the hangar deck: a glittering ring of emitters around a recessed floor lined with conductive mesh, racks of weapons all on training-stun, retractable cover plates, and a ceiling full of projectors and droptargets. In the center was an ugly metal pillar with kill-lights blooming up its spine like sick coral.
"Welcome to the Death Circle," Rift said. "General Skywalker uses a version of this training with the Togruta kid. We liked the idea. We made it meaner. His way of doing it was too rudimentary, and totally focused on the survival of the kid only."
"Meaning?"
Doc flicked a toggle; the pillar's lights went from amber to blood red. "Stun index set to maximum lethality without actual lethality. You go down, you feel like you got your soul unplugged and jammed back in upside down. Great for remembering you're mortal."
Burner clapped me on the shoulder. "You puke, try for the drain."
"Charming."
Rift tossed me a t-visor with a simplified HUD overlay: clone I/O, breath metering, ammo count, a heart-rate glyph that spiked just looking at it. "You run it as a trooper first. You will obey orders. You will keep formation. You will shut up and follow plan unless you have a better one, in which case you will say so and then probably shut up again until we tell you not to."
I clipped the visor on and it did that helmet-hush—sound getting intimate, like the world had moved closer without warning. Everything tunneled. My breathing became someone else's problem on the monitor. The HUD painted friendlies in blue, hostiles in red, maybes in yellow. The center of the ring ticked up a counter: 360.
"Three hundred and sixty what?" I asked.
"Seconds," Rift said, climbing the ring edge. "You live in here for six minutes, we start trusting you with our outsides."
A chime. The floor hummed under my boots. The first droptarget hit with a thwip and a red figure sprang up to my left—B1 silhouette, blaster indexed. I pivoted, reflex bringing my blue shoto up—
"Negative," Rift barked. "You don't have your fancy glow-sticks. DC-15 with a sand-choked feed and a Lieutenant yelling in your ear about sector arcs."
The rifle shoved into my hands was heavier than it had a right to be. The stock bit my collarbone like old training bruises. I sighted, fired. The droptarget dropped, a stun-bead spitting back at me anyway because these emitters were set to teach. The bead caught my thigh, and a white-hot charley horse detonated up the muscle.
"Welcome to our Tuesday," Brick said, drifting right to block a lane with his shield while I swore through my teeth and moved.
The circle came alive. Panels blew up out of the floor to block lines, then dropped to turn my cover into kill corridors. Turrets sprouted and spat blue-white. Droids popped in pairs to bait bad triggers. The HUD filled with orders: Cover left. Two-by-two advance. Jackal, nose. Spark, slice node 3. Burner, delay charge on my mark. Doc—don't let the general die stupid.
Rift's hand signs were poetry: a chop for hold, a sweep for surge, two-finger tap for buddy up. I learned the language by getting shocked for my accent.
We moved as a stack: Brick forward, shield up, the rest of us leapfrogging. My job was second, left angle, lanes one and five. The rifle's recoil found my shoulder, and the sight picture became lines and geometry—Soresu without the blades, Makashi without the romance. The Force is still there, but she's a quiet friend in the back row, not the soloist.
At 298 seconds, a turret pivoted toward my face. "Shit," I said conversationally, and ducked while Brick tilted his shield and took the hit on the corner, energy washing and haloing. I popped up and double-tapped the emitter base. The stun bead that nailed my ribs told me I'd left my flank open to a droptarget that I'd marked yellow and then forgotten.
"Plan beats swagger," Rift said, almost kindly. "Reset."
We ran it again.
And again.
By the fourth round, my visor was fogged with my own breath, my shirt clung to my spine, and the gun felt like a person I was getting to know—stubborn, dependable, not interested in my ideas until I'd earned the right to have them. I learned to count the sim's pulse: a stuttering lull that meant the floor plates were about to shift; a high-pitched whine that meant a turret was spinning up; the half-second window you get when a B1 pops and its partner hesitates because somewhere in Separatist code, someone forgot to tell the second guy he doesn't have a union.
At 221 seconds, Spark yelled, "Left node, ten to det!," and I watched him throw a cable dart like a fisherman. It bit the pillar. His glove hummed, and the kill-lights flickered. Burner rolled a detonator under a rising plate and grinned when the plate stuttered like a bad knee. Doc hit me in the neck with a stimulant without asking; the world tightened like a belt and then came sharply back into focus.
"Breathe," Doc said. "In on four, out on six. Don't chew the air; it bites back."
Frost didn't talk. He sang with a DC-15x. Every time a turret lit, his rifle answered first, like he'd written the question ahead of time. Jackal ghosted. He smelled the heat plume from a panel and hissed "back," and I did, and the panel erupted where my knees had been. Rift didn't miss a beat. "Brick, wheel. General, shadow left. Spark, crash two. Burner, three on my burn." It was like dancing with a partner who leads by making room for you to choose right.
At 180, I took a stun full on the chest. The world tilted. My spine went hollow. For half a breath, my heart forgot. I went to one knee with a sound I'm not proud of and looked up through the visor at Brick's boots.
"Up," he said, catching my plate with two fingers and hauling. "You fall, we get shorter. Don't make us do short."
I stood. I wanted to be sick. I wasn't. We pushed.
At 90, Rift called, "General, two-step!" I didn't know what he meant. My body did. I stepped off-line, let the turret spit at where I'd been, felt the beat between beats—my harmonic—and moved into a hole that wasn't there until I chose it. A droptarget popped right in my blind cone. I felt Jackal breathe behind me. I didn't turn. He shot past my ear, dropped it. "Good boy," he muttered, and I didn't decide whether he meant me or himself.
At 0, the pillar's kill-lights died. The ring went quiet. My heart pounded against the straps like it wanted to desert.
Rift hopped down, visor under his arm. "Again," he said, not as punishment—as practice.
We ran it four more times, then flipped it: support op on a hot evac, breach-and-clear with armored droids in tight corridors, exfil under air denial. I failed loud, then failed less loud. On the eighth, I finally felt the rhythm: the clones' mind not as a hive but as a choir—different voices making a single sound on purpose.
Between rounds we talked. Not about grand strategy—about hands and feet and angles. About why clones stick to names like life rafts. About orders from people who don't bleed with you. About bad briefings, worse extractions, and the way some Jedi stand apart like altitude excuses distance.
"You're young, we are too, but our mental age is much ore older than yours," Rift said, not unkind, while I ripped a training stun pad off my chest and tried to rub the ache out. "Your youth ain't a sin. Ignorance is, if you had a chance to fix it and didn't."
"I'm here," I said.
"Yeah," Burner chimed in. "And you smell like you mean it."
Doc stuck a medpatch under my clavicle so hard I saw stars. "Look at that. Almost like you're people."
"Almost," Spark said. "Don't get cocky. I want to keep some illusions."
"Here's one," Frost said softly from his perch, eyes still not on us. "You can do everything right and somebody still doesn't come home."
We got quiet for a second. You learn not to argue with that kind of truth. You let it sit at the table with you and drink your water.
The mission brief came after chow: a listening station welded onto an asteroid's spine, spinning out in the belt like a bad thought someone tried to lose. Thin garrison of B1s, two droidekas, a triad of auto-turrets, and a data relay node that squirted intelligence into a shadow net whenever Republic traffic flashed nearby. Insertion under blackout. Six-minute window before their heartbeat checked in with mom.
"Straightforward," Burner said, which meant it wouldn't be.
"Primary is the relay," Rift said. "Secondary is not dying. Tertiary is blowing something up that doesn't need it but would make Burner happy."
"I feel seen," Burner said.
"General," Spark said, "I can spoof their check-in ping for maybe two cycles, three if Beeper doesn't panic." The chaotic droid warbled something obscene and proud.
"Extraction?" I asked.
Rift's mouth tightened. "Creative."
I nodded. "Good. I hate it when it's easy."
We rehearsed breach angles in the sim until my forearms shook and my calves begged for different work. We practiced silent takedowns with stun sticks cranked to the top of the legal limit. We fought the Death Circle with the atonement dialed to blasphemy: I wanted to know what my men felt when a plan met reality and reality laughed.
"Again," I kept saying. "Again."
In one cycle I ran as Brick, holding the shield and feeling every hit like a drum inside my bones. In another I ran as Spark, trying to slice a node while the floor tried to murder me and my brain tried to solve a lock with a countdown in my left ear and a scream in my right. I ran as Frost and learned the pressure of watching everyone and touching nothing until it was time; as Doc, dragging a man and a kit and an attitude through a hole you swear wasn't big enough until it is; as Burner, doing math with fire; as Jackal, making choices by scent and sound, trusting instincts I don't have and borrowing his for a minute.
Every time the stun slammed me, I let it. On purpose. Not because I like pain—because I needed the memory under my skin when I issued orders with a voice that could put men in front of the worst kind of weather. I needed to know exactly how much it costs to do what I ask.
After the tenth run, Doc tossed me a hydration pack. "You passed."
"There was a test?"
"There's always a test." He squinted into my pupils with a penlight and snorted. "Still you in there. Disappointing. I was hoping for an upgrade."
We kitted up. The armory handed me a rebreather, a monofil tether, a set of overlays, and the respectful side-eye you give to someone who's about to learn a lesson in public. I looked at my robes—Temple-cut, field-modified, too clean—and at the rack across from me.
Clone armor. Recovered. Cleaned where it mattered and marked where it spoke the truth. A forearm plate with a burn mark that looked like a handprint. A collarbone and upper chest guard with a blaster mark at heart level. A shoulder pad painted a green that matched my Kyber too closely to be a coincidence.
I walked over, ran my hand over the bell, felt the tooling where the paint had been repaired in the field with a bored, careful hand. The quartermaster started to say something and then didn't.
Rift came up quiet beside me. "You don't have to."
"Yeah," I said. "I do."
He watched me lift the shoulder pad, fit it over my left side, feel the magnetic strap cut into the robe fabric and settle on the bone. The weight changed how I stood. I took the forearm next, buckled it, flexed my hand. The collarbone and upper chest after, adjusting the until it didn't make me unbalanced.
Brick grinned. "Look at that. Baby Jedi's got plates."
Spark tilted his head. "Matching's for funerals and parades. Stagger it; you'll look like you earned it."
Doc huffed. "At least I won't have to sew your whole arm back on."
Frost said nothing, but when I glanced up I found him looking, and he nodded once like a range flag in a steady wind.
Rift didn't smile, not really. He touched the edge of my not-so-new shoulder pad like he was checking a seal. "These were ours," he said. "They can be yours too, if you carry them right."
"I know," I said. "I'll carry them like they still belong to one of yours."
The gunship's engines wound up, a vibration that sent ripples down my spine, asking if I was serious. We filed toward the ramp. I felt the plates against my robes: someone else's story coursing through my bones. My curved hilt hung where it always was in my belt, my pike-shoto was slung across my lower back for quickdraw, a Westar-35 for ermegency in a thigh holster, and the clone armor there said: you don't separate; you join.
"Bad Company," I called over the rising whine. "First in."
"Last out," they answered, like a promise and like a dare.
I palmed the basket on my saber, felt it whisper open and shut, a habit against fear. Then I caught my reflection in the ramp's dull metal: a nineteen-year-old who looked like he'd crawled out of a scrapyard and decided to keep what fit.
"General," Rift said, stepping up beside me, helmet on now, voice tinny and intimate in the comm. "You ready to get treated like you're dispensable?"
I grinned, felt the plates shift, felt my heart answer. "I'm ready to prove we aren't."
The ramp dropped. The ship took the dark. And for the first time since the braid came off, I felt the weight on my shoulder and thought: good. Let the galaxy see what side I'm on.