Star Wars: Reborn As A Sith Medical Droid Chapter 75 75 - The West Arm Breaks

Elliot POV

The west arm was already dying by the ti they reached it.

Not dead.

Dying.

There was a difference.

A dead place went still. A dying place accelerated.

Everything in the freight approaches had begun moving too quickly and for the wrong reasons. n who should have been unloading cargo were sealing hatches instead. Won carrying manifests had abandoned them on the floor and were dragging children by the wrist toward the inner corridors. A loader rig sat half turned across a transit lane with its engine still running, one pallet hanging crooked from the forks as if the operator had simply fled in the middle of the lift. Warning lights pulsed red against the tal ribs of the passage, staining faces and walls and deck-plating with the color of fresh wounds.

The siren gave another of its long, uncertain cries.

No command ca with it.

Only urgency.

Adam took them through the last of the narrow chapel accessways and into an upper service ledge overlooking the western freight district. From there Elliot saw the shape of the failure.

The west arm was not one chamber but a layered system of loading lanes, suspended catwalks, cargo lifts, fuel spines, customs gates, and open transfer floors spread around a half-circular docking throat that fed the sub-docks below. Under ordinary conditions it might have looked like ugly competence—hard labor, bad lighting, bad air, but still a functioning artery.

Now it looked like a wound under pressure.

A convoy had been hit.

Three flat cargo haulers sat broken across the central freight lane, one burning from the rear axle, another spilled open with ration crates split and strewn across the floor, the third pinned sideways against a loading crane whose arm had collapsed over it like a snapped bone. n in partial armor were moving between the wrecks behind stacked freight braces, firing in short disciplined bursts toward the customs barricade. So wore red cloth tied over the mouth and throat. So had wrapped their sleeves with patched strips marked in the colors of the belt rebels Elliot had heard about in the lower ring. Others wore nothing consistent at all beyond hunger and intent.

On the far side of the lane, station enforcers were returning fire from behind customs shields and cargo cages, but their lines were wrong—broken too quickly, officers shouting at different targets, so of them looking more concerned with protecting the bonded crates stacked behind them than the civilians trying to crawl clear.

And through it all moved bodies with no allegiance worth naming: porters trying to haul fuel tabs to safety, dock thieves sprinting toward the spilled rations, mothers dragging children under the catwalk shadows, scavengers stripping the dead while blaster fire still crossed over them.

It was not battle.

It was collapse organized by whoever reached it first.

Patch took one look over the ledge and said, "That's not a raid."

"No," Teren said. "It's three plans colliding."

Elliot looked down the lane. "Which side is ours?"

Teren's mouth flattened. "That question gets people killed faster than blaster fire."

Varis stood a little apart from them, black robes still, eyes unreadable as he watched the freight district below.

Then he said, without turning toward Elliot, "Do not draw the saber."

Elliot looked at him sharply. "If this turns—"

"When it turns," Varis said, "you still do not draw it unless the alternative is death already nad."

"You expect to fight blind?"

"I expect you to fight like a man who understands what being seen costs."

Elliot's hand went once, reflexively, toward the hilt at his side. Varis saw the motion without looking.

"The Jedi are not loved here," he said. "Not by the hungry. Not by the syndicates. Not by the n selling this station one corridor at a ti. And if there are Seresh watchers in the arm—and I would be a fool to assu there are not—you will have announced yourself to ears that do not distinguish kindly between Jedi, Sith, or whatever pathetic word n like are ant to beco after exile."

"Rogue Sith?" Teren said dryly.

Varis ignored him.

Below them, a group of civilians broke from cover and tried to run the near cargo lane. Two made it. One was shot in the back by soone Elliot could not imdiately identify—pirate, rebel, enforcer, it did not matter. The body slid across the deck and struck a crate stack hard enough to turn over.

Patch flinched.

Adam did not.

"What's the route?" Elliot asked.

Teren crouched at the ledge, studying the geotry of the district. "If the west customs barricade holds another two minutes, we can cut behind fuel spine four and reach the sub-dock transfer locks. If it doesn't—"

A blast cracked through the air below. One section of the barricade blew outward in sparks and shrapnel. Two enforcers vanished behind the light.

Teren exhaled once.

"Then we don't."

Patch said, "There's a waste loader trench under the right lift."

Teren looked at him. "And?"

"And it runs beneath the lane until the old bonded cage."

"Why isn't everyone using it?"

"Because it floods half the ti and the third grate sticks shut."

Teren nodded once. "Good. That ans n with uniforms won't trust it."

Elliot said, "How do you know all that?"

Patch did not take his eyes off the fighting below. "Because I listen."

Adam spoke before Elliot could answer. "The trench is viable."

Teren glanced at him. "You're certain?"

"I have used it twice." A beat. "Not under fire."

"Encouraging."

Below, the n in rebel colors surged forward. But now Elliot saw the inconsistency more clearly. One cluster moved with the hard speed of trained raiders, cutting angles and covering advances like n who cared about cargo and control. Another moved with rage, firing too fast, too wide, screaming nas and grievances and curses about land, contracts, blood debt, and stolen seasons. The belt conflict had co here wearing multiple faces, and at least one of them was lying.

A ration crate burst open near the center lane.

People ran toward it.

People shot each other over the pieces.

Patch said, very quietly, "The real ones don't waste food like that."

No one answered.

Teren rose. "We move now. No heroics. No speeches. No sabers."

Elliot said, "You looked at on the last one."

"I look at you on all of them."

They dropped from the ledge into a lower service corridor and pushed toward the loader trench access. The passage was already filling with those who had guessed wrong and fled too late. Elliot had to shoulder through n hauling debt-books, won carrying bags too small to justify the desperation in their faces, a porter with a broken hand wrapped in dirty cloth, two adolescents dragging a wounded third by the armpits. Overhead, blaster fire hamred the beams. The whole corridor shook with the movent of the west arm failing toward so new balance of power.

At the trench hatch, two dock thieves were trying to wrench the grate open with a crowbar.

Patch shoved between them before Elliot could stop him.

"Move."

One of the thieves turned to curse him, saw Adam's silver face behind him, Elliot's robes, Teren's cold stare, Varis's silent presence, and decided against the argunt.

The second thief kept his grip on the bar.

Elliot hit him once in the ribs and took it.

Teren hauled the grate.

It stuck.

Above them the freight arm roared with another exchange of blaster fire and sobody scread in the sudden ugly high pitch of a person who had been set alight.

Patch dropped to one knee, reached through the seam, and slapped twice at a hidden latch point.

"Lift now."

They did.

The grate jerked open.

"Down," Teren said.

Adam went first, dropping into the trench with a control that seed almost inhuman even before one rembered that in so sense it was. Patch followed him, then Elliot, then Teren. Varis ca last and pulled the grate nearly shut behind them, leaving only a narrow line of light along the seam.

The trench slled of runoff, old coolant, and rusting water.

They moved in crouch-height darkness beneath the freight lane while the battle raged above their heads in distorted flashes of light and concussion. Each step splashed through shallow liquid or struck pipe-ribs slick with old residue. The station groaned around them. From sowhere overhead ca the heavy rolling impact of cargo containers shifting out of place.

Patch moved fast.

Too fast for Elliot's comfort, but not without purpose. He knew where the floor dipped. Knew which ribs could take weight. Knew where the first flooded section had to be crossed along the left wall because the center grating had rusted through. He kept one hand on Adam's robe half the ti, less for guidance Elliot thought than confirmation that the machine remained real in the dark.

Above them, boots thundered.

Then stopped.

Then multiplied.

Teren froze and raised one hand.

Everyone held.

Voices filtered down through the deck plates, muffled but angry.

"Not that crate, the bonded ones."

"Orders changed."

"Since when?"

"Since the port lost half the west arm, you idiot."

Then another voice, different.

Colder.

"No survivors in the customs lane. Valuable bodies to the lower transfer. Everything else stripped."

The words passed above them like a blade drawn slowly through cloth.

Patch looked back at Elliot, one eye bright in the dark.

"Pirates," he mouthed.

Or n with enough pirate logic inside them that the distinction no longer helped.

They moved again.

The trench widened briefly beneath a broken service hatch where light fell through in bars. Elliot saw Adam's silver hands clearly then. Not trembling. Not slick with panic. Ready. On the left wrist, where the robe had ridden back, fine old scoring marked the tal like healed mory. Adam followed Patch's route marks without question but remained attentive to every sound in a way Elliot found hard not to compare to Force-sensitivity.

Not intuition.

Pattern.

Ahead, the trench angled upward toward the bonded cage access.

Then the deck above them shook hard enough to drop rust and water in a sudden sheet.

The next sound was not blaster fire.

It was a cargo lift collapsing.

tal scread.

The trench wall buckled in one place and split hot liquid across Elliot's shoulder. Patch nearly went down. Adam caught him by the back of the collar before he hit the flooded floor. Teren slamd his hands against the right brace and forced them all into the narrow dry wedge between two pipe trunks as the ceiling above groaned like an animal deciding whether to kill.

Then the pressure shifted.

Sothing massive landed above.

n shouted.

Not station enforcers this ti.

The language was mixed—curse-words from the belts, pirate calls, syndicate shorthand.

Soone had reached the access above them.

Teren looked up once, then at Elliot.

"They know about the trench."

"How?"

"Because places like this do not keep routes secret. They only sell them late."

Patch said, "Third grate."

"What?"

"The third grate sticks. If we don't get there first, they box us."

They ran.

Now the trench felt smaller, filthier, more like a vein carrying them not away from violence but deeper into its body. Elliot scraped shoulder and prosthetic both on the pipe walls as they forced speed through the cramped angle. Above, footsteps tracked their line.

At the third grate, Patch slamd both palms against the latch seam.

Nothing.

He hit it again.

Still nothing.

Teren swore under his breath and dropped beside him. "Lift left corner first."

"It bites," Patch said.

"I know how hinges work."

"You don't know this one."

Adam knelt on the other side of the grate and slid two silver fingers into the rusted seam.

"On my count," he said.

There was no theatricality in the voice.

Only exactness.

"One."

Above them, the first shots started punching through the grate housing.

Not accurate yet. Suppressive. Testing.

"Two."

Elliot pressed himself over Patch instinctively as tal sparked against the trench wall.

"Three."

The grate tore upward with a shriek of rust and old resistance. Adam moved first through the gap, blade already in hand—not a lightsaber, not any weapon sanctified by old orders, but a narrow industrial cutter honed into sothing cleaner and more dangerous by private intention.

The first attacker at the opening ca down half-blind from the sparks and Adam opened his throat in one calm motion.

No flourish.

No rage.

Only correction.

Elliot saw the man fall and had just enough ti to understand that Adam fought the way he repaired: precisely, without waste.

Then the trench vomited them all into the side of the bonded loading chamber and everything dissolved into close violence.

The room had once held secured freight under ard customs oversight. Now it was a half-lit cage maze of crates, barriers, transfer scaffolds, and n using all of it badly. Three pirates—or rebel-marked raiders or so hybrid of the two—had already pushed through the upper grate line and were trying to angle shots into the trench mouth. A fourth stood over a dead customs man stripping his sidearm with practical greed.

Elliot took the nearest one in the sternum with a shoulder and drove him into the bars hard enough to crack teeth. The man tried to bring up a pistol. Elliot broke his wrist against the cage fra and ripped the weapon free. He fired once into the second attacker before the man could clear the angle on Adam.

Patch had gone low, exactly as a child raised around corridor violence would. He slid under a swinging crate chain, ca up behind the looter, and shot him in the lower back with a scavenged blaster so battered Elliot had not even seen him draw it. The bolt threw the man forward across the dead customs body.

Adam moved through the chamber like a silver intention wrapped in cloth. He took a slash across the robe from a vibroknife, turned inside it, and drove the industrial blade cleanly under the attacker's arm where the armor gap widened on the strike. Blood hit the crate edge in a dark sheet.

Teren, behind them, had acquired a pistol from sowhere Elliot had not seen and was firing with cold efficiency, not trying to kill the room, only carve them a path toward the rear transfer doors.

And Varis—

Varis was watching.

Not idly. Not helplessly. But asuring.

He stood in the violence with that sa intolerable stillness Elliot had begun to hate, reading the chamber as if it were a board laid out too neatly to rush.

"Move!" Teren snapped. "Rear door!"

Elliot fired again, covering Adam and Patch as they broke toward the transfer arch. More bodies were pushing into the chamber now from the upper catwalk. n shouting orders. n shouting over orders. Soone had realized the trench had disgorged sothing valuable.

A bolt smashed the door controls.

The rear arch stayed shut.

Teren swore.

Patch said, "There's a manual chain lock."

"Where?"

"Above the latch box!"

"Can you reach it?"

Patch answered by holstering the battered pistol and jumping for the side rail.

Elliot saw what would happen a half second before it did.

A pirate on the upper catwalk brought his rifle down toward the child.

Elliot moved.

No lightsaber. No open display. Just raw instinct and the speed the Force still made possible even when he tried to hide it. He slamd into Patch mid-leap and threw both of them behind a bonded crate as the bolt burned a line through the air where the boy's throat had been.

Patch twisted under him like a furious animal. "I had it."

"You had a death wish."

"I had a chain."

Adam stepped in front of the crate without waiting to be asked and turned the next shot with the flat of the industrial blade just enough to spoil its aim. The tal spat molten sparks. He should not have been able to do that with sothing so crude. Yet he had.

More n were entering now.

Too many.

Not all ard alike. Not all even on the sa side. That was the worst of it. Two station guards fired into the chamber from the far side and hit one pirate, one looter, and a man trying only to crawl away. A rebel-marked fighter shot one of the guards and then turned to seize a ration crate from the dead. The chamber had stopped being tactical. It was simply where converging forms of greed and desperation now t.

Teren grabbed Elliot by the shoulder and shoved him behind the next line of crates.

"This is the trap," he said. "They're herding the valuable bodies to the lower transfer."

"I noticed."

"No—you didn't. Not fast enough."

That struck because it was true.

Patch scrambled up again. Elliot caught his sleeve and this ti the boy snarled at him.

"Let go."

"Not unless you intend to stop dying."

"I know where the chain is."

"And they know where you are."

Patch tore his arm back and looked, for one brief naked mont, like the child he still was beneath all the corridor hardness—furious not because he did not understand danger, but because understanding it had never once in his life exempted him from it.

Then the crate beside Elliot exploded inward.

Not from a blaster. From brute force.

A loader hook crashed through the side sh, ripping the cage fra open. Soone outside was using the freight machinery to peel their cover apart.

Teren saw it first. "Down!"

They hit the floor as the whole bonded cage wall tore out in a screaming shower of tal.

Through the rupture ca more ard n and, behind them, the open line toward the lower transfer locks where bodies were already being shoved, bound, and sorted like freight.

This was no raid now.

This was collection.

Elliot felt sothing in him give way.

Not courage.

Restraint.

For the first ti since the west arm broke, he reached deeply inward, toward that place where reflex beca more than reflex, where if he let it he could stop pretending to be rely a fast, angry man with a weapon and a damaged arm.

His hand touched the saber hilt.

Varis's warning flashed through him.

Do not draw it.

Then Patch cried out.

Not wounded. Caught.

A pirate had seized the back of the boy's jacket and was dragging him across the torn deck toward the transfer line. Adam turned with terrible speed, blade lifting—

—and a stun net hit him full in the chest.

He went down hard, robe and silver limbs convulsing under the crackle.

Elliot moved toward them.

Too late.

A second net fired.

Teren shot one of the operators through the eye before the shot fully cleared, but the web still struck Elliot across the torso and left arm. His prosthetic spasd violently. Pain burst bright and electrical up into his shoulder.

He tore one side free.

Not enough.

Soone hit him across the temple with a rifle stock and the chamber lurched sideways.

Through the blur he saw Varis at last.

Still untouched.

Still upright.

Still choosing.

Rage cut through the stun haze.

"Now?" Elliot spat.

Varis's face gave away nothing.

Then, finally, he moved.

Not with a saber.

Not with spectacle.

With the Force alone.

A pirate at the transfer gate lifted from the floor as though yanked by an invisible hook and slamd backward into the bulkhead hard enough to cave the panel. Another had his pistol torn out of his hand, the weapon reversing in the air and firing through his throat before it finished turning. A third reached for Patch and Varis simply closed his fingers.

The man collapsed choking on a crushed windpipe.

It happened in three seconds.

Too clean.

Too late.

Because the chamber was already lost.

Because Adam was still netted on the ground trying to force movent through his locked limbs. Because Teren had two n on him and a third circling wide. Because Patch had been recovered by another captor and now had a gun at the base of his skull. Because Elliot's own arm was still spasming from the net and blood had started to crawl warm down the side of his face from where the stock blow had landed.

Varis killed three n and bought them nothing except the truth.

He had chosen the mont.

Not the people.

Elliot saw it and hated him with a clarity so sharp it steadied him.

He tried to rise.

The world narrowed.

A stun bolt hit him square in the chest.

For one impossible instant he remained standing in it, body rigid, vision white at the edges.

Then the deck ca up and struck him.

Sound beca a tunnel.

Boots. Shouting. Cargo chain. Sobody laughing. Sobody vomiting. Patch struggling and being hit. Adam's tal limbs making a dry desperate scrape against the floor. Teren still cursing with enough coherence to insult at least two bloodlines.

Hands rolled Elliot onto his back.

A voice said, "Not him. That one alive."

Another: "Machine too. Mark the old one. Boy if there's room."

Room.

As if they were freight deciding itself.

Elliot forced one eye open.

They were being stripped, bound, and dragged toward the lower transfer cage beneath the west arm. The chamber looked different from the floor. Larger. Dirtier. Less like a battle and more like the underside of a machine designed to turn people into cargo.

Varis was on his knees now with binders on his wrists and blood at one corner of his mouth.

Still calm.

Elliot wanted to kill him for it.

Adam had been shackled through the elbows and neck with current-laced restraints clearly ant for heavier machinery. He was not moving now beyond small involuntary spasms. Patch, white-faced with fury, was half bent under the hand of a pirate whose grip looked too large for the child's shoulder. Teren had a split lip and both hands bound behind him, but his eyes were still awake, still counting exits that no longer existed.

The group had failed.

Not by bad luck.

Not by lack of courage.

By terrain. By timing. By too many lies wearing too many flags. By the station itself, already broken enough that every corridor could be turned against the people moving through it.

A man in patched command leathers crouched in front of Elliot and lifted his chin with the barrel of a pistol.

"This one looked expensive," he said to soone behind him.

Elliot spat blood at his boot.

The man smiled without warmth. "Good. Keep that. Buyers like spirit more than begging."

He rose and signaled the transfer crew.

The lower gate opened.

Beyond it waited not execution, not rescue, but transport—the next stage of being moved through the stolen-belt war as leverage, cargo, or offering.

As they hauled him toward it, Elliot twisted once, searching through the blur for the western freight district above.

The west arm still burned.

Civilians still ran under crossfire for spilled food. n in rebel cloth and pirate masks still fought over crates while station guards died protecting bonded goods. The whole port had beco exactly what Teren warned it would beco: not a battlefield, but a market of collapse.

And sowhere inside that collapse, their road had been bought.

Then the gate swallowed them, and the chamber above vanished behind steel.

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