Southern Canyon Approach, Lothal6 BBY
The canyon walls rose like broken teeth against a sky turning the color of old bruises.
Ezra crouched behind a boulder formation, fingers tracing the rough stone while his mind calculated angles and trajectories. Three others spread out along the ambush zone: Jace, a former Imperial logistics officer who'd deserted after watching his unit execute civilians; Mira, a Twi'lek demolitionist whose lekku bore scars from interrogation droids; and Keth, a Rodian whose sniper rifle had accounted for more Imperial deaths than anyone cared to count officially.
Vizago's team. Experienced, professional, expensive.
And utterly unprepared for what was about to happen.
The plan had seemed straightforward during the briefing. Wait for the convoy to enter the narrow passage where maneuvering became impossible, disable the lead vehicle with precisely placed charges, extract the cargo while the guards scrambled to respond, vanish into the mining tunnels that honeycombed the canyon's eastern wall. Clean. Efficient. The kind of operation that succeeded through timing rather than firepower.
Except Ezra had felt something wrong since they'd arrived at the staging point two hours before dusk. A wrongness that didn't announce itself through rational observation but through the subtle dissonance that had become his early warning system. The Force, whispering caution in a language he was still learning to interpret.
He'd mentioned it to Jace, who'd dismissed it as pre-mission nerves. Kid stuff. Never mind that the kid in question had survived situations that killed adults with decades more experience.
Now, watching the convoy approach through the scope he'd borrowed from Keth, Ezra understood what his instincts had been screaming about. The manifest had listed six guards. He counted eight visible, plus the convoy driver, plus at least two more inside the transport itself based on how the vehicle sat low on its repulsors.
Eleven, minimum. Nearly double the expected resistance.
And there, at the rear of the formation, a speeder bike that hadn't been mentioned in any briefing. The rider wore armor that reflected the failing light in ways standard trooper gear didn't. Scout trooper, probably, which meant enhanced sensors and direct communication with Imperial response teams.
This wasn't a transport. It was bait.
The realization crystallized with absolute certainty, and in that moment Ezra faced a choice that would define everything that followed. Abort the mission, walk away, survive to fight another day. Or adapt, improvise, trust in capabilities he'd barely begun to develop.
The convoy entered the kill zone.
Mira triggered the charges.
The explosion tore through the lead speeder's engine block, sending the vehicle careening into the canyon wall in a shower of sparks and twisted metal. Guards scattered, training overriding surprise, taking cover positions that suggested significant combat experience. Not the half-trained conscripts that usually pulled convoy duty, but hardened veterans.
Definitely a trap. Shit...
Jace opened fire from his position, blaster bolts stitching red lines through the gathering darkness. Two guards went down, but the others returned fire, suppressing Jace's position while others moved to flank. Keth's rifle barked once, the scout trooper's helmet exploding in a mist of plastoid and bone.
And then everything went to hell.
The transport's rear door blasted open, not from inside but from shaped charges planted on the exterior. Four figures emerged, not Imperial guards but something else. Civilians in mismatched armor, carrying weapons that looked cobbled together from scavenged parts.
Traitors. From within Vizago's organization, had to be. The wrongness Ezra had sensed wasn't Imperial preparation but internal betrayal, someone selling them out for credits or leverage or whatever currency motivated treachery these days.
Mira never saw the shot that killed her. One moment she was moving toward the transport, the next her body crumpled like a puppet with cut strings. The plasma bolt had punched through her chest, superheating organs and bone in the microsecond before her nervous system registered pain.
Ezra's vision narrowed, time seeming to dilate in that peculiar way it did when adrenaline met something deeper. He felt rather than saw Jace take three rounds to center mass, watched him stagger backward off the ridge where he'd positioned himself. Keth was screaming something in Rodian, his voice pitched high with panic that experience couldn't quite suppress.
The Force surged through Ezra like electricity through water, every nerve suddenly hyperaware. He could feel the trajectory of incoming fire, sense the positions of enemies he couldn't see, taste the fear and aggression saturating the air like ozone before a storm.
His hand moved without conscious direction, grabbing a fist-sized rock from the scree beside him. He threw it, not at a person but at a point in space where instinct insisted something important existed. The rock sailed through the darkness, and Ezra felt the moment it connected with the traitor's skull through some impossible sensory channel that defied explanation. The man went down hard, weapon clattering against stone.
One of his fallen crewmates, Jace, had dropped a blaster when he'd tumbled from the ridge. Ezra sprinted for it, legs pumping, lungs burning, that strange temporal dilation making every step feel simultaneously too slow and impossibly fast. Blaster fire chewed the ground around him, superheated stone fragments peppering his exposed skin.
He dove, rolled, came up with the weapon in a two-handed grip.
His first shot took a traitor through the throat, the second and third stitching across another's chest before the man could adjust his aim.
Something massive moved in his peripheral vision. A boulder, half a meter across, perched on the canyon rim directly above another traitor who was lining up a shot on Keth's position. Ezra didn't think, he just acted. He reached out with that indefinable sense that connected him to everything around him and pushed.
The boulder shifted, tipped, began its lethal descent. The traitor looked up too late, managed half a scream before two hundred kilos of stone erased him from existence. Blood and worse sprayed across the canyon floor, dark and viscous in the failing light.
Ezra felt nothing. There wasn't time for that, all that mattered was making it out alive.
He was moving again before conscious thought caught up, sprinting toward the transport where the cargo waited. The remaining traitor emerged from behind the vehicle, weapon tracking Ezra's movement.
Shit...
Ezra felt the shot coming before the trigger pull, dove left as the plasma bolt seared air where his head had been. He hit the ground hard, breath exploding from his lungs, but kept the blaster up and fired blind. Luck or the Force or some combination sent the bolt through the traitor's knee, dropping him with a shriek of agony.
Ezra was on him before the scream finished, pressing the blaster's muzzle against the man's chest. Their eyes met, the traitor's wide with pain and fear and the sudden realization that death had arrived wearing a thirteen-year-old's face.
"Please," the man gasped. "Please, I have a family, I didn't want to do this, they made me, they said they'd kill my kids if I didn't—"
Ezra pulled the trigger.
The silence that followed felt louder than the gunfire had been. Somewhere, Keth was still alive, calling out in that liquid Rodian dialect.
He moved to the transport on legs that trembled with adrenaline crash. The cargo bay door hung open, revealing crates marked with Imperial designations. The reactor components and weapons systems Vizago wanted, sitting there like prizes in a game where the entry fee was measured in bodies.
Keth appeared at his shoulder, antenna twitching with agitation. "We need to move. Imperial response teams will have detected the firefight, we've got maybe ten minutes before this place is crawling with troops."
Ezra nodded, unable to trust his voice. Together they hauled the critical crates from the transport, loaded them onto the speeder that had survived the initial ambush. The weight made the vehicle ride low, handling sluggish, but it would do.
They rigged explosives on everything they couldn't carry, crude incendiary charges that would reduce the remaining cargo to slag and obscure exactly what had been taken.
The ride across Lothal's desert plains happened in fragmented impressions rather than continuous memory. Wind against his face, the speeder's engine whining protest at the load, Keth navigating by starlight and topographic memory. Behind them, orange light bloomed against the canyon walls as the charges detonated, covering their escape in fire and confusion.
They ditched the speeder in an abandoned quarry, transferred the cargo to a waiting ground transport. Keth offered to handle delivery to Vizago's warehouse, and Ezra agreed without argument. He needed to be alone, needed space to process what had happened...
The walk back to his tower took hours, but Ezra barely noticed the distance. His mind replayed the firefight in recursive loops, analyzing every decision, every shot, every moment where choice had determined who lived and who died. He'd killed four people tonight. Five if he counted the guard whose speeder had crashed from the initial explosion.
He internally recoiled from the accounting, the part of him that had lived a peaceful life on Earth and never imagined violence beyond movie screens. But this new life, honed by months of survival on Lothal's streets, recognized the necessity without flinching from it.
.....
...
..
Dawn found him sitting on the tower's observation platform, watching pink light creep across the industrial zone. His hands were clean now, scrubbed raw in the portable shower until no trace of blood remained. But he could still feel it, phantom sensation that persisted despite evidence to the contrary.
The datapad chimed. Transfer confirmed: fifty thousand credits deposited to the anonymous account he'd established through Vizago's network. Enough to live on for half a year, enough to upgrade equipment, enough to expand operations into something resembling an actual organization.