Chapter 75 · Echoes of Stardust

The hangar lights dimmed after the guards left, leaving the Faded Glory in a half-lit cocoon of dust and engine fumes. Eli checked the chrono. Two hours. Then four. Then seven.

The crew outside had changed shifts twice. The bay stayed sealed, no new orders, no word from Rinna.

Stent remained at the sensor console, calm in that way only he could be. Eli, less so, paced between the cockpit and cargo hold until even he got tired of his own footsteps.

“You’d think they’d have said something by now,” Eli muttered.

“They are waiting for confirmation,” Stent said without looking up.

“Or deciding if we’re worth shooting.”

“That remains an option,” Stent said mildly.

Eli slumped into the co-pilot’s chair. “You’re not helping.”

“I am providing context.”

Outside the viewport, one of the guard teams passed again, their shadows sliding across the floor. Nothing else moved.

By the tenth hour, Eli had almost given up on sleep when the comm pinged. A single line of text appeared on the console:

CONFIRMED CONTACT. DOCKMASTER CLEARANCE PENDING. PREPARE FOR VISITOR.

Eli sat up straight. “That’s her.”

Stent turned toward him. “Or someone using her name.”

The outer door cycled open fifteen minutes later. Through the window, they watched Rinna step into the hangar, a little slower than last time, one arm bound in a brace, uniform jacket torn at the shoulder. She looked like she hadn’t slept since Tila’s Reach — and probably hadn’t.

She stopped at the foot of the Faded Glory’s ramp, speaking quietly with the guards before gesturing them away. Eli met her halfway down the ramp.

“You look better than I expected,” he said.

“That makes one of us.” Her voice was rough. “I ditched half the relays before they could trace them. The Empire’ll take weeks to sort the noise — if they bother.”

“Good work.”

She gave him a tired look. “Don’t thank me yet. They still want to know what you brought me.”

Eli hesitated. “You mean Tee.”

“I mean whatever’s still rattling around in that droid’s brain,” Rinna said. “Captain Marae wants it checked, but she’s not risking another broadcast. You’ll stay docked until she’s sure.”

Rinna’s clearance got them through the security gate and into the station proper — a tangle of converted mining tunnels, bulkheads lined with cables, walls patched with scrap plating. The deeper they went, the more the place smelled of oil and metal fatigue.

Captain Marae was waiting in what had once been a refinery control room. Her uniform was Rebel issue, though patched and re-dyed so many times it looked civilian.

“You brought trouble to one of my cells, Vale,” she said, voice cool but not unkind. “Let’s make sure it was worth it.”

Rinna nodded toward Eli and Stent. “They’re the reason I’m here. The data’s in their droid. Thought you’d want a look.”

Marae’s eyes shifted to Stent, taking in the blue skin, the posture, the quiet alertness that didn’t belong to any smuggler. “I imagine I do.”

She turned to Eli. “You’ll stay here while my techs pull the data. No uplinks, no power feeds. I want your droid isolated from every circuit on this base. We’ll dissect it if we have to.”

Eli stiffened. “You fry that core, and the data’s gone.”

“Then I suggest you help us recover it without setting off another Imperial homing beacon.”

Rinna added quietly, “They’ll keep the main power off. Manual extraction only.”

Marae gestured to two techs nearby. “Bay Six. Strip the panels, pull the memory banks. I want every subroutine mapped before we even think about turning it back on.”

The team moved out. Eli hesitated, then followed.

Rinna caught his arm as he passed. “If you’re wondering whether this is a good idea, it’s not. But it’s the only one we’ve got.”

Eli nodded once. “Story of my life.”

The workshop in Bay Six looked more like a battlefield surgery ward than a lab. A single overhead lamp burned white against the dark; everything else was shadows, cables, and the sharp smell of metal dust.

Tee stood on a wide plattform, panels already removed. His dome sat to one side, empty eye dark, a faint trace of scorched circuitry at the edge of his socket.

Two technicians worked in silence, tools clicking in precise rhythm. Each memory core they removed went into a sealed housing, tagged and disconnected from every power source.

Eli stood just inside the doorway, hands clasped behind his back, watching.

“You’ve done this before,” Marae said from across the room.

Eli nodded once. “I used to manage Imperial data audits. Encryption flow, fleet movement records, logistics compartmentalization.”

Marae leaned on the rail. “So you can read this language.”

“Better than most.”

She hesitated, then motioned toward the terminal. “All right, trader. Prove it.”

They cleared a section of the table. Eli slid into the seat, pulling the first of the isolated memory cores toward him. One of the technicians ran a low-voltage bypass from the analyzer to a portable screen — no network, no uplink, no risk of broadcast.

Lines of code rolled past, slow and orderly. The data looked like Imperial fleet redeployment logs — identical formatting to the ones he’d reviewed years ago for Thrawn. Ship designations, supply chains, convoy movements.

“Looks familiar,” Marae said, reading over his shoulder.

“It should,” Eli murmured. “These are standard logistics overlays — half of them fake. See this?” He pointed at a set of overlapping routes, annotated in Imperial shorthand. “These were used to mask classified resource transfers.”

Marae’s brow furrowed. “Masking for what?”

Eli hesitated. “Back then, we thought it was for advanced weapons research. The codenames kept changing. ‘Celestial’, ‘Ecliptic’, ‘Stardust’…”

He stopped, blinking at the screen. The line of data repeated that last name several times. Stardust.

Marae’s voice was sharp. “What did you just say?”

Eli looked up. “Project Stardust. I saw the freight assignments myself — massive shipments of kyber, precision components, half a dozen systems funneling resources to one sector.”

Marae stared at him. “You’re telling me you were shipping parts for the Death Star.”

Eli’s stomach sank. “What?”

“Stardust was the Empire’s superweapon,” Marae said, each word clipped. “It was destroyed months ago at Yavin. The plans were stolen at Scarif, half the Navy went down trying to stop it. You didn’t hear?”

Eli shook his head slowly. “We were off the grid. Deep border space. Communication blackouts were routine.”

Marae folded her arms. “So you’ve been wandering around for months and didn’t know the Empire lost its crown jewel.”

“Apparently not.”

Rinna, standing near the wall, said quietly, “Explains the old code stamps on the data. This isn’t new intelligence — it’s archival. Left behind.”

Eli nodded. “Harvest was built out of scraps of old fleet records — part truth, part lure. Whoever compiled it wasn’t after information. They were after whoever recognized it.”

Marae’s gaze narrowed. “Which would be you.”

“Maybe,” Eli said. “But I’m still breathing. So whoever set the trap hasn’t finished their work.”

Marae didn’t answer right away. She studied him as though deciding which part of his story to believe. The room hummed with the quiet of the machines cooling down, the last of Tee’s memory cores sealed and tagged.

Finally she said, “You know how to read this mess. You might as well keep doing it.”

Eli glanced up, wary. “I thought you didn’t trust me.”

“I don’t,” she said plainly. “But if this data’s poison, I want someone who can tell me where the bite is.”

“Fair enough,” Eli said.

“Rinna,” Marae continued, “make sure he’s logged in only to this station. No power feeds, no external connections. If any signal goes out, I want to know before it finishes the first syllable.”

Rinna nodded, stepping to the terminal beside him. “Don’t make me regret this.”

Eli gave her a small, lopsided smile. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

He worked through the data for the next few hours, piecing together fragments that felt more like ghosts than records — empty ship numbers, project tags that led nowhere, fleet movements that never happened. The more he saw, the clearer it became: Project Harvest wasn’t a leak. It was a mirror.

By the time the last data block finished parsing, Stent was standing behind him, silent as ever. Eli didn’t have to look to know the expression on his face.

“You’re thinking I’m too comfortable here,” Eli said quietly.

“I am thinking you remember your part too well,” Stent replied.

Eli leaned back in the chair, rubbing a hand over his eyes. “Someone has to know what we’re looking at.”

“And someone must remember why we left it,” Stent said.

Before Eli could answer, the door hissed open and Marae stepped in again, fatigue in her eyes but her voice sharp as ever.

“Anything useful?”

“Some,” Eli said. “Nothing current. Just pieces of old projects. Enough to know this was built from real archives.”

“Then whoever wrote it had clearance,” she said. “That’s what I needed to confirm.”

“Meaning?”

Marae crossed her arms. “Meaning if someone’s rebuilding Imperial infrastructure, they’re pulling from command-level files. We need to find where those files live — and you’re going to help.”

Stent’s head tilted slightly. “To what end?”

“To survive,” Marae said flatly. “Same as you.”