Flash Fiction

 Hyperspace. 19 BBY

    Vos knew he was dreaming. But that didn’t make the moment any less real. Fingertips gently caressing his shoulder. He rolled over in the freighter’s tiny berth and smiled before he opened his eyes. Asajj.

    “It’s time to wake up, my love.” By the Force, how he’d missed her voice. 

    “I don’t want to wake up.” It was true. In the months since he’d lost her, the waking world was little more than war and death. He had carried on as before, going where he was sent, doing his duty for the Jedi and Republic. Though nothing ever diminished the guilt that sat heavy in his gut. The anguish over his mistakes. The pain of losing her. 

    The Council knew all this, of course. But blind eyes were being turned everywhere. He could feel it. The whole Republic was walking a path toward something terrible and inevitable. An end. Even here, in his dreams, that hung over him. The touch of her lips and her breath on his ear brought him back to the moment.

    “If I wake up, you’ll be gone.” he murmured.

    “But you must.” She sat up suddenly, gripping him by both arms. Her eyes pleaded. “You must!” Vos sat up too, his hands reaching to cup her cheeks. She clasped both of his hands to her chest and looked around, as if listening to something far off. “Promise me!” she pleaded, turning to him. Before Vos could say anything, she gasped, her eyes wide. “It’s happening.”

    Vos stared in horror. Tendrils of green mist leaked from her eyes. Her face drooped, jaw falling open wide, unhinged. The skin of her cheek stretched and tore. From that gruesome maw came a single word, a shriek that tore through the very Force within him.

    “RRRRRRUUUUUUNNNNNNN!”

    Instantly awake, Vos leapt from the small berth and called his lightsaber to his hand, drenched in sweat, panting. Listening.

    Around him, the small freighter hummed softly. He checked over the rudimentary instrumentation in the cramped crew quarters, noted they were still in hyperspace, and grabbed the comm unit from his belt.

    “Longshot, Barrel, report.” No response. The clone commando and Republic intelligence officer often worked with Vos on his undercover missions. The duo, partners in more than their work, had been due to rotate back to Coruscant for special assignment when Master Windu privately summoned Vos back to Coruscant after the last war room holobriefing. Windu wouldn’t – or couldn’t - say why. So Vos had left his detachment of clones at Bos Pity and hitched a ride with the two operatives on their commandeered freighter. 

    “Longshot, Barrel, come in.” Nothing. Something was wrong. The Force felt… out of balance. Perhaps it was the lingering disorientation of the dream. The image of Asajj’s ruined face screaming flashed into his mind. Centring himself, he focussed instead on the truth. Asajj’s beautiful face, at peace, as it slipped beneath the Waters of Life on Dathomir.

    Reaching out with his senses he probed the passages and spaces of the ship, searching for any sign of his companions. The ripples in the Force made it hard to focus, but he sensed tension. Fear and coiled aggression. He had a direction. Aft.

Slowly and steadily, Vos stalked the ship. In the galley an overturned mug, caf pooling and dripping from the counter. Overturned chairs. Nothing that his psychometric powers could glean anything from. In the passage leading to the cargo bay and escape pod, the lights were out. A smear that looked like blood stained the floor.

    The swirl of hyperspace played on his face as he passed under transparisteel windows in the ceiling of the passage. Something with a blinking red light lay on floor in the dark at the end of the corridor. Wary of a trap, Vos reached out his hand and his senses. Not a bomb. With more effort than it should have taken, the object flew through the air to his hand. A comm.

    He looked up from the device in his hand and into the face of Asajj Ventress, finger pressed to her lips conspiratorially. Vos’s heart thundered. And then she was gone, leaving him in darkness.

    Before he could process what he’d seen, he was flooded by images from the object in his hand. Even his psychometric gift was out of balance and hard to control. He reached into it, searching. Then staggered as he felt it. A cold fury. Directed at him, Vos. At all Jedi. The comm dropped from his hand and activated, replaying the last message received. 

    A hooded figure with a rasping voice.

    “Execute Order 66.”